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 Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  The rusty old clerk who came to rescue me had a dowager’s hump that kept him bent over at ninety degrees. He kept glancing over his shoulder at the ballplayers arrayed behind as he said, We’re full tonight. I can’t move your room. Then he turned on his heel and hightailed it through the gauntlet of giants back to the elevator, which two looming guys were holding open. Against the hotel door, the tennis ball occasionally whams, shaking the door earthquakelike on its hinges. If they could bust in, they’d throw me on a bonfire and torch me, I know it. They must sense the pitiful failure I’m mired in: turning thirty, far from home and family, making it up as I go. Worst of all, I’ve failed to publish a book, which means my ancient fantasy of being a writer has abraded off like the name on a wind-worn tombstone. I unscrew the tiny bottle of vodka’s red lid and suck a few drops. Every asshole I know has published a book. Over six years, I’ve collected rejections for my manuscript, sometimes the occasional nice note for second place. So a sheaf of dog-eared pages curling at the edges lies on my desk like drying roadkill, though every dang poem in it has come out in some literary mag, which is—as Warren points out—not nothing. But unless a book publisher stitches them into a volume, I’ll never land the teaching job that’ll let me shed snakeskinlike the business suit I wear like an unwilling drag queen. It’s an old dream. Age about seven, I started posing for the jacket photo in the bathroom shaving mirror. When my sister caught me wearing the baleful, heavy-lidded pout I figured would look snappy, she’d cackle like a magpie, then holler to Mother I’d stolen her beret again. My response? I’d pinch my index finger and thumb together over and over and go psss psss psss like a puff adder. Somehow I’d figured out that this gesture drove her batshit. By age thirty, I’m not writing squat, which I blame on my ramped-up consulting schedule, knowing full well my favorite poet was a full-time insurance exec. Warren keeps urging me to deal with my complicated family on the page, but that seems too damp-eyed, though even I know the crap I crank out referring to Homer and Virgil is pretentious before Warren carefully pens pretentious on page bottom. The bathtub I’m lying in feels like a stone island I’ve shipwrecked myself on. My pantyhose have twisted around, and the black unwashed soles gross me out. I’m a hack, a hired ghostwriter who gins out reports on Swedish telecommunications companies, or phone technology, or packet switching and deregulation. Oh, and reviews of assholes who’ve actually published poetry collections, in a magazine my husband edits. Which, if he didn’t revise my prose with a hacksaw, I probably wouldn’t get in to.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Yet “God” was vulnerable to the Marxist critique, since he had often been used by the establishment to approve a social order in which the rich man sat in his palace while the poor man sat at its gate. This was not true of the whole of monotheistic religion, however. A God who condoned social injustice would have appalled Amos, Isaiah or Muhammad, who had used the idea of God to quite different ends that were quite close to the Marxist ideal. Similarly, the literal understanding of God and scripture made the faith of many Christians vulnerable to the scientific discoveries of the period. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33), which revealed the vast perspectives of geological time, and Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859), which put forward the evolutionary hypothesis, seemed to contradict the biblical account of creation in Genesis. Since Newton, creation had been central to much Western understanding of God, and people had lost sight of the fact that the biblical story had never been intended as a literal account of the physical origins of the universe. Indeed, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo had long been problematic and had entered Judaism and Christianity relatively late; in Islam the creation of the world by al-Lah is taken for granted, but there is no detailed discussion of how this happened. Like all other Koranic speech about God, the doctrine of creation is only a “parable,” a sign or a symbol. Monotheists in all three religions had regarded the creation as a myth, in the most positive sense of the word: it was a symbolic account which helped men and women to cultivate a particular religious attitude. Some Jews and Muslims had deliberately created imaginative interpretations of the creation story that departed radically from any literal sense. But in the West there had been a tendency to regard the Bible as factually true in every detail. Many people had come to see God as literally and physically responsible for everything that happens on earth, in rather the same way as we ourselves make things or set events in motion. There were, however, a significant number of Christians who saw immediately that Darwin’s discoveries were by no means fatal to the idea of God. In the main, Christianity has been able to adapt to the evolutionary theory, and Jews and Muslims have never been as seriously disturbed by the new scientific discoveries about the origins of life: their worries about God have, generally speaking, sprung from quite a different source, as we shall see. It is true, however, that as Western secularism has spread, it has inevitably affected members of other faiths. The literalistic view of God is still prevalent, and many people in the Western world—of all persuasions—take it for granted that modern cosmology has dealt a deathblow to the idea of God.

• From A History of God (1993)

  As the incense filled the sanctuary before the Holy of Holies and the place reeked with the blood of the sacrificial animals, he may have feared that the religion of Israel had lost its integrity and inner meaning. Suddenly he seemed to see Yahweh himself sitting on his throne in heaven directly above the Temple, which was the replica of his celestial court on earth. Yahweh’s train filled the sanctuary and he was attended by two seraphs, who covered their faces with their wings lest they look upon his face. They cried out to one another antiphonally: “Holy! holy! holy is Yahweh Sabaoth. His glory fills the whole earth.” 1 At the sound of their voices, the whole Temple seemed to shake on its foundations and was filled with smoke, enveloping Yahweh in an impenetrable cloud, similar to the cloud and smoke that had hidden him from Moses on Mount Sinai. When we use the word “holy” today, we usually refer to a state of moral excellence. The Hebrew kaddosh, however, has nothing to do with morality as such but means “otherness,” a radical separation. The apparition of Yahweh on Mount Sinai had emphasized the immense gulf that had suddenly yawned between man and the divine world. Now the seraphs were crying: “Yahweh is other! other! other!” Isaiah had experienced that sense of the numinous which has periodically descended upon men and women and filled them with fascination and dread. In his classic book The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto described this fearful experience of transcendent reality as mysterium terribile et fascinans: it is terribile because it comes as a profound shock that severs us from the consolations of normality and fascinans because, paradoxically, it exerts an irresistible attraction. There is nothing rational about this overpowering experience, which Otto compares to that of music or the erotic: the emotions it engenders cannot adequately be expressed in words or concepts. Indeed, this sense of the Wholly Other cannot even be said to “exist” because it has no place in our normal scheme of reality. 2 The new Yahweh of the Axial Age was still “the god of the armies” (sabaoth) but was no longer a mere god of war. Nor was he simply a tribal deity, who was passionately biased in favor of Israel: his glory was no longer confined to the Promised Land but filled the whole earth. Isaiah was no Buddha experiencing an enlightenment that brought tranquillity and bliss. He had not become the perfected teacher of men. Instead he was filled with mortal terror, crying aloud: What a wretched state I am in! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have looked at the King, Yahweh Sabaoth.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The new born-again Christianity that was beginning to appear in the West during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was frequently unhealthy and characterized by violent and sometimes dangerous emotions and reversals. We can see this in the wave of religious fervor known as the Great Awakening that swept New England during the 1730s. It had been inspired by the evangelical preaching of George Whitfield, a disciple and colleague of the Wesleys, and the hellfire sermons of the Yale graduate Jonathan Edwards (1703–58). Edwards describes this Awakening in his essay “A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in Northampton, Connecticut.” He describes his parishioners there as nothing out of the ordinary: they were sober, orderly and good but lacking in religious fervor. They were no better or worse than men and women in any of the other colonies. But in 1734 two young people died shockingly sudden deaths, and this (backed up, it would appear, by some fearful words by Edwards himself) plunged the town into a frenzy of religious fervor. People could talk of nothing but religion; they stopped work and spent the whole day reading the Bible. In about six months, there had been about three hundred born-again conversions from all classes of society: sometimes there would be as many as five a week. Edwards saw this craze as the direct work of God himself: he meant this quite literally, it was not a mere pious façon de parler. As he repeatedly said, “God seemed to have gone out of his usual way” of behaving in New England and was moving the people in a marvelous and miraculous manner. It must be said, however, that the Holy Spirit sometimes manifested himself in some rather hysterical symptoms. Sometimes, Edwards tells us, they were quite “broken” by the fear of God and “sunk into an abyss, under a sense of guilt that they were ready to think was beyond the mercy of God.” This would be succeeded by an equally extreme elation, when they felt suddenly saved. They used “to break forth into laughter, tears often at the same time issuing like a flood, and intermingling a loud weeping. Sometimes they have not been able to forbear crying out with a loud voice, expressing their great admiration.”42 We are clearly far from the calm control that mystics in all the major religious traditions have believed to be the hallmark of true enlightenment.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Even after emancipation, they continued to live as though the ghetto walls were still in place. They immersed themselves totally in the study of Torah and Talmud, and insisted that modernity was to be shunned. gentile studies were, they believed, incompatible with Judaism. One of their leading spokesmen was Rabbi Moses Sofer of Pressburg (1763–1839). He was opposed to any change or accommodation to modernity—God, after all, did not change; he forbade his children to read Mendelssohn’s books and refused to allow them a secular education or to participate in modern society in any way. 26 His instinctive response, in sum, was to retreat. But other traditionalists felt it necessary to take a more creative stand against the danger of secularizing, rationalizing influences. In 1803, Rabbi Hayyim Volozhiner, a disciple of the Gaon of Vilna, took a decisive step that would transform traditional Jewish spirituality, when he founded the Etz Hayyim yeshiva in Volozhin, Lithuania. Other new yeshivot were founded in the course of the century in other parts of eastern Europe: in Mir, Telz, Slobodka, Lomza, and Novogrudok. In the past, a yeshiva (a word that derives from the Hebrew for “to sit”) had simply been a series of small rooms behind the synagogue where students studied Torah and Talmud. It had usually been administered by the local community. Volozhin, however, was something entirely different. Here, hundreds of gifted students came from all over Europe to study with internationally famous experts. The curriculum was demanding, the hours were long, and admission to the yeshiva far from easy. Rabbi Hayyim taught Talmud according to the method he had learned from the Gaon, analyzing the text and stressing the importance of logical consistency, but in a way that yielded a spiritual encounter with the divine. It was not simply a matter of learning about the Talmud; the process of rote learning, preparation, and lively discussion was just as important as any final conclusion reached in class, because it was a form of prayer, a ritual that gave the students a sense of the sacred. It was an intense existence. The young men were isolated in a quasi-monastic community, their spiritual and intellectual lives entirely shaped by the yeshiva. They were separated from their families and friends and immersed wholly in the world of Jewish scholarship. Some of the students were permitted to spend a little time on modern philosophy or mathematics, but such secular subjects were secondary, regarded as stealing time from the Torah. 27 The purpose of the new yeshivot had been to counter the threat of Hasidism; the yeshivot were distinctively Misnagdic enterprises, designed to reinstate the rigorous study of Torah.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Muslim establishment seemed to be putting itself out of business and demonstrating its incompatibility with the modern world. In both Egypt and Syria during the 1960 S , “Nasserist” historians reinforced the new secularist ideology. Islam had become the cause of the nations’ ills; it was made to fill the role of the “out group” which must be eliminated if the Arab countries were to progress. The Syrian scholar Zaki al-Arsuzi believed that instead of dwelling on the fact that the Arabs had given Islam to the world, historians should stress their contribution to material culture (their transformation of the alphabet from hieroglyphics to letters, for example). It was their concentration upon religion that had put Arabs behind the Europeans, who had focused on the physical world instead of the spiritual, and created modern science, industry, and technology. Shibli al-Aysami argued that it was deplorable that the pre-Islamic Arabian civilization should be dismissed by Muslim historians as jahiliyyah (“the Age of Ignorance”), since its cultural achievements in the ancient Yemen had been considerable. Yasin al-Hafiz cast doubt on the reliability of the Islamic historical sources which had simply reflected the views of the ruling classes. It was pointless and impossible to build a modern ideology on inaccurate memories of a dead and distant past. Historians must construct a more scientific and dialectical historiography, “one of the battle fronts one ought to join in order to destroy all the superstructures of the old society.” 3 Religion was responsible for the “false consciousness” that held the Arabs back. It must, therefore, be eliminated like all other impediments to rational and scientific progress. As with any ideology, the arguments were selective; the portrayal of religion simplistic and inaccurate. It was also unrealistic. Whatever the place religion would have in the modern world (and that was still to be decided), it is always impossible to obliterate the past, which continues to live on in the minds of the people who make up a nation, even if old institutions and their personnel have been removed. In response, the new religious ideologues were just as simplistic and aggressive. They believed that they were fighting for their lives. In 1951, the work of the Pakistani journalist and politician Abul Ala Mawdudi (1903–79) began to be published in Egypt. 4 Mawdudi feared that Islam was about to be destroyed. He saw the mighty power of the West gathering its forces together to crush Islam and grind it into oblivion. This was a moment of grave crisis, and Mawdudi believed that devout Muslims could not retire from the world and leave politics to others.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Many Christians today—Protestant as well as Catholic—will recognize this syndrome, which the Reformation could not entirely abolish. Luther’s God was characterized by his wrath. None of the saints, prophets or psalmists had been able to endure this divine anger. It was no good simply trying “to do one’s best.” Because God was eternal and omnipotent, “his fury or wrath toward self-satisfied sinners is also immeasurable and infinite.”18 His will was past finding out. Observance of the Law of God or the rules of a religious order could not save us. Indeed, the Law could only bring accusation and terror, because it showed us the measure of our inadequacy. Instead of bringing a message of hope, the Law revealed “the wrath of God, sin, death and damnation in the sight of God.”19 Luther’s personal breakthrough came about when he formulated his doctrine of justification. Man could not save himself. God provides everything necessary for “justification,” the restoration of a relationship between the sinner and God. God is active and humans only passive. Our “good works” and observance of the Law are not the cause of our justification but only the result. We are able to observe the precepts of religion simply because God has saved us. This was what St. Paul had meant by the phrase “justification by faith.” There was nothing new about Luther’s theory: it had been current in Europe since the early fourteenth century. But once Luther had grasped it and made it his own, he felt his anxieties fall away. The revelation that ensued “made me feel as though I had been born again, and as though I had entered through open gates into paradise itself.”20

• From A History of God (1993)

  The social ideal of the prophets had been implicit in the cult of Yahweh since Sinai: the story of the Exodus had stressed that God was on the side of the weak and oppressed. The difference was that now Israelites themselves were castigated as oppressors. At the time of Isaiah’s prophetic vision, two prophets were already preaching a similar message in the chaotic northern kingdom. The first was Amos, who was no aristocrat like Isaiah but a shepherd who had originally lived in Tekoa in the southern kingdom. In about 752, Amos had also been overwhelmed by a sudden imperative that had swept him to the kingdom of Israel in the north. He had burst into the ancient shrine of Beth-El and shattered the ceremonial there with a prophecy of doom. Amaziah, the priest of Beth-El, had tried to send him away. We can hear the superior voice of the establishment in his pompous rebuke to the uncouth herdsman. He naturally imagined that Amos belonged to one of the guilds of soothsayers, who wandered around in groups telling fortunes for a living. “Go away, seer!” he said disdainfully. “Get back to the land of Judah; earn your bread there, do your prophesying there. We want no more prophesying in Beth-El; this is the royal sanctuary, the national temple.” Unabashed, Amos drew himself to his full height and replied scornfully that he was no guild prophet but had a direct mandate from Yahweh: “I was no prophet, neither did I belong to any of the brotherhoods of prophets. I was a shepherd and looking after sycamores: but it was Yahweh who took me from herding the flock and Yahweh who said: ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’ ” 15 So the people of Beth-El did not want to hear Yahweh’s message? Very well, he had another oracle for them: their wives would be forced onto the streets, their children slaughtered, and they themselves would die in exile, far from the land of Israel. It was of the essence of the prophet to be solitary. A figure like Amos was on his own; he had broken with the rhythms and duties of his past. This was not something he had chosen but something that had happened to him. It seemed as though he had been jerked out of the normal patterns of consciousness and could no longer operate the usual controls. He was forced to prophesy, whether he wanted to or not. As Amos put it: The lion roars; who can help feeling afraid? The Lord Yahweh speaks: who can refuse to prophesy?

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I’ve dreaded telling her because I think she might stop taking my calls. On the phone, I blurt out, Warren and I got the separate apartment. We’re gonna try it for a few months this summer. Dev will stay at home. We’ll go back and forth. I don’t recommend— —I know, that I make any changes before I’ve been sober awhile. At least a year, Joan says. Before you make any major decision, take a year for a cold look at all you’ve done wrong in it. Just chronicle the resentments that are really chewing you up. Get it down on paper. I’ve been looking at myself in therapy off and on since age nineteen, I say. A lot of therapy is looking through a child’s eyes, she says. This is looking through an adult’s. You have some nutty ongoing resentments about loads of people. Like about my writing group? I say, for I’d told her at some point I feared my writing group looked at me like I was stupid. Any chance that’s from your head alone? Joan asks.

• From Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  The second alternative is a possible derivation from the first one. The underprivileged may decide to juggle the various areas of compromise, on the assumption that the moral quality of compromise operates in an ascending-descending scale. According to this argument, not all issues are equal in significance nor in consequence; it may be that some compromises take on the aspect of inevitability because of circumstances over which the individual has no control. It is true that we are often bound by a network of social relations that operate upon us without being particularly affected by us. We are all affected by forces, social and natural, that in some measure determine our behavior without our being able to bring to bear upon them our private will, however great or righteous it may be. All over the world there are millions of people who are condemned by the powerful in their society to live in ghettos. The choice seems to be the ghetto or suicide. But such a conclusion may be hasty and ill-advised; it may be the counsel of the kind of fear we discussed previously, or it may be the decision of cowardice. For all practical purposes there are great numbers of people who have decided to live , and to compromise on the matter of place and conditions. Further, we may say that those who have power know that the decision will be to live, and have counted on it. They are prepared to deal ruthlessly with any form of effective protest, because effective protest upsets the status quo. Life, then, becomes a grim game of wits, and the stakes are one’s physical existence. The term “compromise” then takes on a very special and highly differentiated meaning. It is less positive than ordinary deception, which may be regarded as deliberate strategy. If the assumption is that survival with some measure of freedom is at stake, then compromise is defined in terms of the actions which involve one’s life continuation. It is a matter of behavior patterns. Many obvious interferences with freedom are ignored completely. Many insults are cast aside as of no consequence. One does battle only when not to do battle is to be vanquished without the recognition that comes from doing battle. To the morally sensitive person the whole business is sordid and degrading. It is safe to say that the common attitude taken toward these deceptions that have to do with survival is that they are amoral. The moral question is never raised. To raise such a question is regarded as sheer stupidity. The behavior involved is in the same category as seeking and getting food or providing shelter for oneself. It belongs in the general classification of simple survival behavior. Obviously this is the reason why it is so difficult to make a moral appeal, either to the dominant group or to the disinherited, in order to bring about a change in the basic relation between them.

• From A History of God (1993)

  From such Western philosophers as Nietzsche, Iqbal had imbibed the importance of individualism. The whole universe represented an Absolute which was the highest form of individuation and which men had called “God.” In order to realize their own unique nature, all human beings must become more like God. That meant that each must become more individual, more creative and must express this creativity in action. The passivity and craven self-effacement (which Iqbal put down to Persian influence) of the Muslims of India must be laid aside. The Muslim principle of ijtihad (independent judgment) should encourage them to be receptive to new ideas: the Koran itself demanded constant revision and self-examination. Like al-Afghani and Abduh, Iqbal tried to show that the empirical attitude, which was the key to progress, had originated in Islam and passed to the West via Muslim science and mathematics during the Middle Ages. Before the arrival of the great confessional religions during the Axial Age, the progress of humanity had been haphazard, dependent as it was upon gifted and inspired individuals. Muhammad’s prophecy was the culmination of these intuitive efforts and rendered any further revelation unnecessary. Henceforth people could rely on reason and science. Unfortunately individualism had become a new form of idolatry in the West, since it was now an end in itself. People had forgotten that all true individuality derived from God. The genius of the individual could be used to dangerous effect if allowed absolutely free rein. A breed of Supermen who regarded themselves as Gods, as envisaged by Nietzsche, was a frightening prospect: people needed the challenge of a norm that transcended the whims and notions of the moment. It was the mission of Islam to uphold the nature of true individualism against the Western corruption of the ideal. They had their Sufi ideal of the Perfect Man, the end of creation and the purpose of its existence. Unlike the Superman who saw himself as supreme and despised the rabble, the Perfect Man was characterized by his total receptivity to the Absolute and would carry the masses along with him. The present state of the world meant that progress depended upon the gifts of an elite, who could see beyond the present and carry humanity forward into the future. Eventually everybody would achieve perfect individuality in God. Iqbal’s view of the role of Islam was partial, but it was more sophisticated than many current Western attempts to vindicate Christianity at the expense of Islam. His misgivings about the Superman ideal were amply justified by events in Germany during the last years of his life.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  By the time we pulled in to the Minneapolis Holiday Inn, my voice was a croak. In the room, I got puking drunk for the third night in a row. Hair of the dog, Mother said. The first screwdriver had smoothed me right out. However expert I was at drugs, I remained an amateur imbiber, yet drink was all I had that night to blind me to the presence growing slurry in the next bed. Maybe any seventeen-year-old girl recoils a little at the sight of her mother, but mine held captive in her body so many ghost mothers to be blotted out. If my eyelids closed, I could see the drunk platinum-blond Mother in a mohair sweater who’d divorced Daddy for a few months and fled with us to Colorado to buy a bar. Or the more ancient Mother in pedal pushers might rise up to shake the last drops from the gasoline can over a pile of our toys before a thrown match made flames go whump , and as the dolls’ faces imploded so the wires showed through, the very air molecules would shift with the smoke-blackened sky, so the world I occupied would never again be fully safe. I had to sit up and breathe deep and make my stinging eyes wide so all the shimmery-edged versions dispersed, and she once again lay in filmy underpants and a huge T-shirt with jagged writing on it announcing HERE COMES TROUBLE . She said, You can’t go now. I’m not done with you yet. Sob sob sob . She had on one of the derby hats she’d bought each of us in Houston the day we left—pimp hats, they were, trailing long peacock feathers in their brims . Later, Mother patted my back as I threw up into the toilet. I remember the smell of Jergen’s lotion from her hands, and how the tenderness of her gesture repelled me even as part of me hungered for it. I passed out sending prayers up at machine-gun speed, like a soldier in a foxhole to a god not believed in, Don’t let me be her, don’t let me be her . For however she’d pulled herself together for this trip, she could blow at any second. In the morning when I stirred, my eyes lasered on to her supine form in the next bed. She was nearly done with Hundred Years of Solitude . She still had her hat on, pushed back on her head to give her the wondering expression of Charlie Chaplin. My hat had a hole in it, which I didn’t remember incurring. My first blackout. When I pulled up to the green lawn of my college where dogs caught Frisbees in their chops, I decided to reinvent myself for that leafy place. I’d probably gotten in by wheedling a reference from the only professor back home I’d known well enough to bother.

• From Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  For the most part, Negroes assume that there are no basic citizenship rights, no fundamental protection, guaranteed to them by the state, because their status as citizens has never been clearly defined. There has been for them little protection from the dominant controllers of society and even less protection from the unrestrained elements within their own group. The result has been a tendency to be their own protectors, to bulwark themselves against careless and deliberate aggression. The Negro has felt, with some justification, that the peace officer of the community provides no defense against the offending or offensive white man; and for an entirely different set of reasons the peace officer gives no protection against the offending Negro. Thus the Negro feels that he must be prepared, at a moment’s notice, to protect his own life and take the consequence therefor. Such a predicament has made it natural for some of them to use weapons as a defense and to have recourse to premeditated or precipitate violence. Living in a climate of deep insecurity, Jesus, faced with so narrow a margin of civil guarantees, had to find some other basis upon which to establish a sense of well-being. He knew that the goals of religion as he understood them could never be worked out within the then-established order. Deep from within that order he projected a dream, the logic of which would give to all the needful security. There would be room for all, and no man would be a threat to his brother. “The kingdom of God is within.” “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor.” The basic principles of his way of life cut straight through to the despair of his fellows and found it groundless. By inference he says, “You must abandon your fear of each other and fear only God. You must not indulge in any deception and dishonesty, even to save your lives. Your words must be Yea—Nay; anything else is evil. Hatred is destructive to hated and hater alike. Love your enemy, that you may be children of your Father who is in heaven.” 1 Heinrich Weinel and Alban G. Widgery, Jesus in the Nineteenth Century and After, p. 405. 2 Pp. 10–11. Copyright 1921, 1937, 1947 by The Macmillan Co. and used with their permission. 3 Toward the Understanding of Jesus, pp. 60–61. Copyright 1921, 1937, 1947 by The Macmillan Co. and used with their permission. CHAPTER TWOFearF EAR is one of the persistent hounds of hell that dog the footsteps of the poor, the dispossessed, the disinherited. There is nothing new or recent about fear—it is doubtless as old as the life of man on the planet. Fears are of many kinds—fear of objects, fear of people, fear of the future, fear of nature, fear of the unknown, fear of old age, fear of disease, and fear of life itself.

• From A History of God (1993)

  This meant that science could only reveal the God who could be discerned in all the activities of his creatures—natural, civil, physical and spiritual—even in those activities which seemed fortuitous. In some respects, the Calvinists were more adventurous in their thinking than the Liberals, who opposed their revivalism and preferred simple faith to the “speculative, perplexing notions” that disturbed them in the preaching of revivalists like Whitfield and Edwards. Alan Heimart argues that the origins of antiintellectualism in American society might not lie with the Calvinists and evangelicals but with the more rational Bostonians like Charles Chauncey or Samuel Quincey, who preferred ideas about God that were “more plain and obvious.” 47 There had been some remarkably similar developments within Judaism which would also prepare the way for the spread of rationalist ideals among Jews and would enable many to assimilate with the Gentile population in Europe. In the apocalyptic year of 1666, a Jewish Messiah declared that redemption was at hand and was accepted ecstatically by Jews all over the world. Shabbetai Zevi had been born on the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple in 1626 to a family of wealthy Sephardic Jews in Smyrna in Asia Minor. As he grew up he developed strange tendencies which we would perhaps diagnose today as manic-depressive. He had periods of deep despair, when he used to withdraw from his family and live in seclusion. These were succeeded by an elation that bordered on ecstasy. During these “manic” periods, he would sometimes deliberately and spectacularly break the Law of Moses: he would publicly eat forbidden foods, utter the sacred Name of God and claim that he had been inspired to do so by a special revelation. He believed that he was the long-awaited Messiah. Eventually the Rabbis could bear it no longer and in 1656 they expelled Shabbetai from the city. He became a wanderer among the Jewish communities of the Ottoman empire. During a manic spell in Istanbul, he announced that the Torah had been abrogated, crying aloud: “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, Who permits the forbidden!” In Cairo he caused scandal by marrying a woman who had fled the murderous pogroms in Poland in 1648 and now lived as a prostitute. In 1662 Shabbetai set off for Jerusalem: at this point he was in a depressive phase and believed that he must be possessed by demons. In Palestine he heard about a young, learned Rabbi called Nathan who was a skilled exorcist, so he set out to find him in his home in Gaza. Like Shabbetai, Nathan had studied the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria. When he met the troubled Jew from Smyrna, he told him that he was not possessed: his dark despair proved that he was indeed the Messiah. When he descended to these depths, he was fighting against the evil powers of the Other Side, releasing the divine sparks in the realm of the kelipoth which could only be redeemed by the Messiah himself.

• 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.