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)

  It was a symbolic moment, which marked a split between mind and heart. In the Trinitarianism of Augustine, heart and mind had been inseparable. Muslim Faylasufs such as Ibn Sina and al-Ghazzali may have decided that the intellect alone could not find God, but they had both eventually envisaged a philosophy which was informed by the ideal of love and by the disciplines of mysticism. We shall see that during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the major thinkers of the Islamic world attempted to fuse mind and heart and saw philosophy as inseparable from the spirituality of love and imagination promoted by the Sufis. Bernard, however, seemed afraid of the intellect and wanted to keep it separate from the more emotional, intuitive parts of the mind. This was dangerous: it could lead to an unhealthy dissociation of sensibility that was in its own way just as worrying as an arid rationalism. The Crusade preached by Bernard was a disaster partly because it relied on an idealism that was untempered by common sense and was in flagrant denial of the Christian ethos of compassion.34 Thus Bernard’s treatment of Abelard was conspicuously lacking in charity, and he had urged the Crusaders to show their love for Christ by killing the infidels, and driving them out of the Holy Land. Bernard was right to fear a rationalism that attempted to explain the mystery of God and threatened to dilute the religious sense of awe and wonder, but unbridled subjectivity that fails to examine its prejudices critically can lead to the worst excesses of religion. What was required was an informed and intelligent subjectivity, not an emotionalism of “love,” which represses the intellect violently and abandons the compassion which was supposed to be the hallmark of the religion of God.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The Christians of the West had always seemed to find that God was something of a strain and the Reformers, who had sought to allay these religious anxieties, seem ultimately to have made matters worse. The God of the West, who was believed to predestine millions of human beings to everlasting damnation, had become even more frightening than the harsh deity envisaged by Tertullian or Augustine in his darker moments. Could it be that a deliberately imaginative conception of God, based on mythology and mysticism, is more effective as a means of giving his people courage to survive tragedy and distress than a God whose myths are interpreted literally? Indeed, by the end of the sixteenth century, many people in Europe felt that religion had been gravely discredited. They were disgusted by the killing of Catholics by Protestants and Protestants by Catholics. Hundreds of people had died as martyrs for holding views that it was impossible to prove one way or the other. Sects preaching a bewildering variety of doctrines that were deemed essential for salvation had proliferated alarmingly. There was now too much theological choice: many felt paralyzed and distressed by the variety of religious interpretations on offer. Some may have felt that faith was becoming harder to achieve than ever. It was, therefore, significant that at this point in the history of the Western God, people started spotting “atheists,” who seemed to be as numerous as the “witches,” the old enemies of God and allies of the devil. It was said that these “atheists” had denied the existence of God, were acquiring converts to their sect and undermining the fabric of society. Yet in fact a full-blown atheism in the sense that we use the word today was impossible. As Lucien Febvre has shown in his classic book The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, the conceptual difficulties in the way of a complete denial of God’s existence at this time were so great as to be insurmountable. From birth and baptism to death and burial in the churchyard, religion dominated the life of every single man and woman. Every activity of the day, which was punctuated with church bells summoning the faithful to prayer, was saturated with religious beliefs and institutions: they dominated professional and public life—even the guilds and the universities were religious organizations. As Febvre points out, God and religion were so ubiquitous that nobody at this stage thought to say: “So our life, the whole of our life, is dominated by Christianity!

• From A History of God (1993)

  Since the Reformation and the new enthusiasm for Aristotelianism among Protestants and Catholics, they were beginning to discuss God as though he were any other objective fact. This would ultimately enable the new “atheists” of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to get rid of God altogether. Thus Leonard Lessius (1554–1623), the highly influential Jesuit theologian of Louvain, seems to give his allegiance to the God of the philosophers in his treatise The Divine Providence. The existence of this God can be demonstrated scientifically like any of the other facts of life. The design of the universe, which could not have happened by chance, points to the existence of a Prime Mover and Sustainer. There is nothing specifically Christian about Lessius’s God, however: he is a scientific fact who can be discovered by any rational human being. Lessius scarcely mentions Jesus. He gives the impression that the existence of God could be deduced from ordinary observation, philosophy, the study of comparative religion and common sense. God had become just another being, like the host of other objects that scientists and philosophers were beginning to explore in the West. The Faylasufs had not doubted the validity of their proofs for the existence of God, but their coreligionists had finally decided that this God of the philosophers had little religious value. Thomas Aquinas may have given the impression that God was just another item—albeit the highest—in the chain of being, but he had personally been convinced that these philosophical arguments bore no relation to the mystical God he had experienced in prayer. But by the beginning of the seventeenth century, leading theologians and churchmen continued to argue the existence of God on entirely rational grounds. Many have continued to do so to the present day. When the arguments were disproved by the new science, the existence of God himself came under attack. Instead of seeing the idea of God as a symbol of a reality which had no existence in the usual sense of the word and which could only be discovered by the imaginative disciplines of prayer and contemplation, it was increasingly assumed that God was simply a fact of life like any other. In a theologian such as Lessius we can see that as Europe approached modernity, the theologians themselves were handing the future atheists the ammunition for their rejection of a God who had little religious value and who filled many people with fear rather than with hope and faith. Like the philosophers and scientists, post-Reformation Christians had effectively abandoned the imaginative God of the mystics and sought enlightenment from the God of reason. B 9 Enlightenment Y THE END of the sixteenth century, the West had embarked on a process of technicalization that would produce an entirely different kind of society and a new ideal of humanity. Inevitably this would affect the Western perception of the role and nature of God. The achievements of the newly industrialized and efficient West also changed the course of world history.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The theses did not contain a full theological programme; rather, Luther was radicalised by the opposition he encountered, and the arguments and attacks of others made him develop his theology and pursue his ideas further. The Reformation emerged through a series of disputations and arguments with his antagonists at Heidelberg, Augsburg and Leipzig. Luther knew that the penalty for heresy would be burning at the stake, and that if he was imprisoned and tried by the Church he was likely to lose his life. This meant that his theology was formed under the double pressure of increasingly aggressive argument from his opponents and the threat of martyrdom. In 1521 Luther, now known throughout Germany, was called upon to answer to the emperor at the Diet of Worms in front of the assem- bled estates of the entire empire. Many thought he would not take the risk of attending, but as he said, nothing would stop him, even if he had known that there were ‘as many devils as . . . tiles on the roofs’. The courage he showed at Worms was breathtaking. For a commoner to stand up to the emperor and the most powerful princes in the empire, and to resist the might of the Church, was as extraor- dinary as it was unforgettable. A defining event, it probably did more to win people over to the Reformation, and shape their hopes and expectations, than did his theology. Like any revolutionary movement, Luther’s ideas were magnified and refracted through what people heard in the street or in sermons, or through news of what he did. The Diet concluded with the emperor’s emphatic condemnation. On the way back from Worms, Luther, now in mortal danger, was 8 MARTIN LUTHER kidnapped on the instructions of his ruler and protector Friedrich the Wise, and taken for his safety to the Wartburg Castle, where he spent the next ten months in isolation, writing furiously and translating the New Testament. In the meantime, the Reformation at Wittenberg proceeded apace without him and, under the guidance of Andreas Karlstadt, became increasingly radical, addressing issues of poor relief and morality. When Luther returned to Wittenberg in March 1522, he immediately called for the reforms to be reversed because they had happened too fast. He also broke decisively with Karlstadt, who had begun to take a different line on the Lord’s Supper, arguing that Christ was not actually present in the bread and wine, a view Luther passion- ately rejected. This split presaged the future, for people applied his theology, as they perceived it, to their own experience — a process Luther might oppose, but which was beyond his control.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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 Moses alone went up to the summit and received the tablets of the Law. Instead of experiencing the principles of order, harmony and justice in the very nature of things, as in the pagan vision, the Law is now handed down from on high. The God of history can inspire a greater attention to the mundane world, which is the theater of his operations, but there is also the potential for a profound alienation from it. In the final text of Exodus, edited in the fifth century BCE, God is said to have made a covenant with Moses on Mount Sinai (an event which is supposed to have happened around 1200). There has been a scholarly debate about this: some critics believe that the covenant did not become important in Israel until the seventh century BCE. But whatever its date, the idea of the covenant tells us that the Israelites were not yet monotheists, since it only made sense in a polytheistic setting. The Israelites did not believe that Yahweh, the God of Sinai, was the only God but promised, in their covenant, that they would ignore all the other deities and worship him alone. It is very difficult to find a single monotheistic statement in the whole of the Pentateuch. Even the Ten Commandments delivered on Mount Sinai take the existence of other gods for granted: “There shall be no strange gods for you before my face.” 21 The worship of a single deity was an almost unprecedented step: the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaton had attempted to worship the Sun God and to ignore the other traditional deities of Egypt, but his policies were immediately reversed by his successor. To ignore a potential source of mana seemed frankly foolhardy, and the subsequent history of the Israelites shows that they were very reluctant to neglect the cult of the other gods.

• From A History of God (1993)

  1515–1588) and Faustus Socinus (1539–1604)—who had both fled to Geneva but discovered that their theology was too radical for the Swiss Reformation; they did not even adhere to the traditional Western view of the atonement. They did not believe that men and women were justified by Christ’s death but simply by their “faith” or trust in God. In his book Christ the Savior, Socinus repudiated the so-called orthodoxy of Nicaea: the term “Son of God” was not a statement about Jesus’ divine nature but simply meant that he was specially loved by God. He had not died to atone for our sins but was simply a teacher who “showed and taught the way of salvation.” As for the doctrine of the Trinity, that was simply a “monstrosity,” an imaginary fiction that was “repugnant to reason” and actually encouraged the faithful to believe in three separate gods. 33 After the execution of Servetus, Blandrata and Socinus both fled to Poland and Transylvania, taking their “Unitarian” religion with them. Zwingli and Calvin relied on more conventional ideas of God and, like Luther, they emphasized his absolute sovereignty. This was not simply an intellectual conviction but the result of an intensely personal experience. In August 1519, shortly after he had begun his ministry in Zurich, Zwingli contracted the plague that eventually wiped out twenty-five percent of the population of the city. He felt completely helpless, realizing that there was absolutely nothing he could do to save himself. It did not occur to him to pray to the saints for help or ask the Church to intercede for him. Instead he threw himself on God’s mercy. He composed this short prayer: Do as you will for I lack nothing. I am your vessel to be restored or destroyed. 34 His surrender was similar to the ideal of islam: like Jews and Muslims at a comparable stage of their development, Western Christians were no longer willing to accept mediators but were evolving a sense of their inalienable responsibility before God. Calvin also based his reformed religion on God’s absolute rule. He has not left us with a full account of his conversion experience. In his Commentary on the Psalms, he simply tells us that it was entirely the work of God. He had been completely enthralled by the institutional Church and “the superstitions of the papacy.” He was both unable and unwilling to break free, and it had taken an act of God to shift him: “At last God turned my course in a different direction by the hidden bridle of his providence....

• From A History of God (1993)

  Thus Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) still seemed preoccupied with the metaphysical anti-Semitism of Kant and Hegel. Concerned above all with the accusation that Judaism was a servile faith, Cohen denied that God was an external reality that imposes obedience from on high. God was simply an idea formed by the human mind, a symbol of the ethical ideal. Discussing the biblical story of the Burning Bush, when God had defined himself to Moses as “I am what I am,” Cohen argued that this was a primitive expression of the fact that what we call “God” is simply being itself. It is quite distinct from the mere beings that we experience, which can only participate in this essential existence. In The Religion of Reason Drawn from the Sources of Judaism (published posthumously in 1919), Cohen still insisted that God was simply a human idea. Yet he had also come to appreciate the emotional role of religion in human life. A mere ethical idea— such as “God”—cannot console us. Religion teaches us to love our neighbor, so it is possible to say that the God of religion—as opposed to the God of ethics and philosophy—was that affective love. These ideas were developed out of all recognition by Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), who evolved an entirely different conception of Judaism which set him apart from his contemporaries. Not only was he one of the first existentialists, but he also formulated ideas that were close to the oriental religions. His independence can perhaps be explained by the fact that he had left Judaism as a young man, become an agnostic and then considered converting to Christianity before finally returning to Orthodox Judaism. Rosenzweig passionately denied that the observance of the Torah encouraged a slavish, abject dependence upon a tyrannical God. Religion was not simply about morality but was essentially a meeting with the divine. How was it possible for mere human beings to encounter the transcendent God? Rosenzweig never tells us what this meeting was like—this is a weakness in his philosophy. He distrusted Hegel’s attempt to merge the Spirit with man and nature: if we simply see our human consciousness as an aspect of the World Soul, we are no longer truly individuals. A true existentialist, Rosenzweig emphasized the absolute isolation of every single human being. Each one of us is alone, lost and terrified in the vast crowd of humanity. It is only when God turns to us that we are redeemed from this anonymity and fear. God does not reduce our individuality, therefore, but enables us to attain full self-consciousness. It is impossible for us to meet God in any anthropomorphic way. God is the Ground of being, so bound up with our own existence that we cannot possibly talk to him, as though he were simply another person like ourselves. There are no words or ideas that describe God.

• From A History of God (1993)

  They claimed that some of those attributes which enabled the transcendent God to relate to the world—such as power, knowledge, will, hearing, sight and speech, which are all attributed to al-Lah in the Koran—had existed with him from all eternity in much the same way as the uncreated Koran. They were distinct from God’s unknowable essence, which would always elude our understanding. Just as Jews had imagined that God’s Wisdom or the Torah had existed with God from before the beginning of time, Muslims were now developing a similar idea to account for the personality of God and to remind Muslims that he could not be wholly contained by the human mind. Had not the Caliph al-Mamum (813–832) sided with the Mutazilis and attempted to make their ideas official Muslim doctrine, this abstruse argument would probably have affected a mere handful of people. But when the caliph began to torture the Traditionists in order to impose the Mutazili belief, the ordinary folk were horrified by this un-Islamic behavior. Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780– 855), a leading Traditionist who narrowly escaped death in al-Mamun’s inquisition, became a popular hero. His sanctity and charisma—he had prayed for his torturers—challenged the caliphate, and his belief in the uncreated Koran became the watchword of a populist revolt against the rationalism of the Mutazilah. Ibn Hanbal refused to countenance any kind of rational discussion about God. Thus when the moderate Mutazili al-Huayan al-Karabisi (d. 859) put forward a compromise solution—that the Koran considered as God’s speech was indeed uncreated but that when it was put into human words it became a created thing—Ibn Hanbal condemned the doctrine. Al-Karabisi was quite ready to modify his view again, and declared that the written and spoken Arabic of the Koran was uncreated in so far as it partook of God’s eternal speech. Ibn Hanbal, however, declared that this was unlawful too because it was useless and dangerous to speculate about the origin of the Koran in this rationalistic way. Reason was not an appropriate tool for exploring the unutterable God. He accused the Mutazilis of draining God of all mystery and making him an abstract formula that had no religious value. When the Koran used anthropomorphic terms to describe God’s activity in the world or when it said that God “speaks” and “sees” and “sits upon his throne,” Ibn Hanbal insisted that it be interpreted literally but “without asking how” (bila kayf). He can perhaps be compared to radical Christians like Athanasius, who insisted on an extreme interpretation of the doctrine of Incarnation against the more rational heretics. Ibn Hanbal was stressing the essential ineffability of the divine, which lay beyond the reach of all logic and conceptual analysis. Yet the Koran constantly emphasizes the importance of intelligence and understanding, and Ibn Hanbal’s position was somewhat simpleminded. Many Muslims found it perverse and obscurantist. A compromise was found by Abu al-Hasan ibn Ismail al-Ashari (878–941).

• From A History of God (1993)

  11 Does God Have a Future?AS WE APPROACH the end of the second millennium, it seems likely that the world we know is passing away. For decades we have lived with the knowledge that we have created weapons that could wipe out human life on the planet. The Cold War may have ended, but the new world order seems no less frightening than the old. We are facing the possibility of ecological disaster. The AIDS virus threatens to bring a plague of unmanageable proportions. Within two or three generations, the population will become too great for the planet to support. Thousands are dying of famine and drought. Generations before our own have felt that the end of the world is nigh, yet it does seem that we are facing a future that is unimaginable. How will the idea of God survive in the years to come? For 4000 years it has constantly adapted to meet the demands of the present, but in our own century, more and more people have found that it no longer works for them, and when religious ideas cease to be effective they fade away. Maybe God really is an idea of the past. The American scholar Peter Berger notes that we often have a double standard when we compare the past with our own time. Where the past is analyzed and made relative, the present is rendered immune to this process and our current position becomes an absolute: thus “the New Testament writers are seen as afflicted with a false consciousness rooted in their time, but the analyst takes the consciousness of his time as an unmixed intellectual blessing.”1 Secularists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw atheism as the irreversible condition of humanity in the scientific age.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The new insights of the Renaissance could not address deeper fears that, like God, lay beyond the reach of reason. Not long after Nicholas’s death, a particularly noxious phobia erupted in his native Germany and spread throughout northern Europe. In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII published the Bull Summa Desiderantes, which marked the beginning of the great witch craze that raged sporadically throughout Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, afflicting Protestant and Catholic communities equally. It revealed the dark underside of the Western spirit. During this hideous persecution, thousands of men and women were cruelly tortured until they confessed to astonishing crimes. They said that they had had sexual intercourse with demons, had flown hundreds of miles through the air to take part in orgies where Satan was worshipped instead of God in an obscene Mass. We now know that there were no witches but that the craze represented a vast collective fantasy, shared by the learned Inquisitors and many of their victims, who had dreamed these things and were easily persuaded that they actually happened. The fantasy was linked with anti-Semitism and a deep sexual fear. Satan had emerged as the shadow of an impossibly good and powerful God. 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

• From A History of God (1993)

  Where Ignatius had seen the world as full of God and had encouraged Jesuits to cultivate a sense of the divine omnipresence and omnipotence, Pascal and the Jansenists found the world to be bleak and empty, bereft of divinity. Despite his revelation, Pascal’s God remains “a hidden God” who cannot be discovered by means of rational proof. The Pensées, Pascal’s jottings on religious matters, which were published posthumously in 1669, are rooted in a profound pessimism about the human condition. Human “vileness” is a constant theme; it cannot even be alleviated by Christ, “who will be in agony until the end of the world.”2 The sense of desolation and of God’s terrifying absence characterizes much of the spirituality of the new Europe. The continuing popularity of the Pensées shows that Pascal’s darker spirituality and his hidden God appealed to something vital in the Western religious consciousness. Pascal’s scientific achievements, therefore, did not give him much confidence in the human condition. When he contemplated the immensity of the universe, he was scared stiff: When I see the blind and wretched state of man, when I survey the whole universe in its dumbness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.3 This is a salutary reminder that we should not generalize about the buoyant optimism of the scientific age. Pascal could envisage the full horror of a world that seemed empty of ultimate meaning or significance. The terror of waking up in an alien world, which had always haunted humanity, has rarely been more eloquently expressed. Pascal was brutally honest with himself; unlike most of his contemporaries, he was convinced that there was no way of proving the existence of God. When he imagined himself arguing with somebody who was constitutionally unable to believe, Pascal could find no arguments to convince him. This was a new development in the history of monotheism. Hitherto nobody had seriously questioned the existence of God. Pascal was the first person to concede that, in this brave new world, belief in God could only be a matter of personal choice. In this, he was the first modern.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The outlines of his biography are simply told. His childhood was unremarkable, except in one respect: He came from a mining area. The economy of mining was very different from the world of craft workshops and small enterprises that characterized most sixteenth-century towns, the environment that formed so many humanists and scholars. Luther’s family invested in their son’s education and destined him for the law, a profession that would have helped protect the family’s mining enterprise. But in 1505, to his father’s dismay, the young man gave up his legal studies and entered the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt. There he came under the influence of Johann von Staupitz, a leading Augustinian instrumental in establishing the new University of Wittenberg, who persuaded the young monk to move to higher studies in theology and obtain a doctorate. Progressing steadily up the rungs of the order, Luther eventually succeeded to Staupitz’s university position and became active in reforming the university. Then, in 1517, the Ninety-five Theses burst upon the world. The theses did not contain a full theological program; rather, Luther was radicalized by the opposition he encountered, and the arguments and attacks of others made him develop his theology and pursue his ideas further. The Reformation emerged through a series of disputations and arguments with his antagonists at Heidelberg, Augsburg, and Leipzig. Luther knew that the penalty for heresy would be burning at the stake, and that if he was imprisoned and tried by the Church he was likely to lose his life. This meant that his theology was formed under the double pressure of increasingly aggressive argument from his opponents and the threat of martyrdom. In 1521 Luther, now known throughout Germany, was called upon to answer to the emperor at the Diet of Worms in front of the assembled estates of the entire empire. Many thought he would not take the risk of attending, but as he said, nothing would stop him, even if he had known that there were “as many devils as…tiles on the roofs.” The courage he showed at Worms was breathtaking. For a commoner to stand up to the emperor and the most powerful princes in the empire, and to resist the might of the Church, was as extraordinary as it was unforgettable. A defining event, it probably did more to win people over to the Reformation, and shape their hopes and expectations, than did his theology. As in any revolutionary movement, Luther’s ideas were magnified and refracted through what people heard in the street or in sermons, or through news of what he did.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It resulted in an extreme coldness and ringing in the ears, which the doctors treated by giving him plenty of warmed cushions. Luther distinguished between the bodily illness, which his friends thought very severe, and the attacks of the Devil, which continued for a long time afterwards. He certainly expected to die, and summoned his wife and young son. He told them that he had no money except the coins they had been given at their wedding, and commended them both to God, ‘the judge of the widow’. He had already made his confession to Bugenhagen earlier that day, because he had planned to receive Communion the next day. In line with his beliefs, he did not ask for extreme unction. It is hard to know exactly what these ‘attacks of the Devil’ were. Luther spoke of fearing that he would lose his faith, and yet all his letters radiate certainty, alongside the conviction that those who took a different line from him were led by the Devil. He prayed the seven Penitential Psalms. Always aware of his own sinfulness, this time he worried only that he had been too harsh in his polemic and that he had sometimes used ‘careless’ words — neither very severe sins.” He knew he was bitter in polemic, and although he had apologised for this fault at Worms in 1521, he had not really modified his tone. Equally striking was what Luther did not regret. He did not worry about his attack on the papacy, feel guilt about his marriage, or show concern about his conflict with Karlstadt. Rather, he seemed gripped by the fear that he might lose his faith. Thus these Anfechtungen were as serious as anything he had suffered when he was a monk and when he had needed Staupitz’s reassurance; indeed, he would later claim that they were the worst he had ever experienced. He had thought that, once he had passed the first years of marriage unmolested, the temptations had disappeared forever. They clearly had not. Writing to Spalatin a few days later, on 10 July, Luther made light of the attack. Spalatin too had been ill, so Luther began by comforting 314 MARTIN LUTHER him before turning to his own illness. He had thought he would die, Luther wrote, but God had quickly made him recover.” In fact, it took months before he was well again; as late as November he was still complaining that he could not write or work as he usually did because of his illness and Satan’s attacks (although he was actually steadily translating the Old Testament).” The attack of 1527 was a major collapse and was followed by periods of extreme exhaustion. What caused it? Perhaps it was not coincidental that the biblical text for preaching on the day of his breakdown was Luke 15, the parable of the prodigal son.”

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I could hear Sam crank the dead VW back up to a stunted idle, its ragged engine coughing. I scrambled up the gravel incline, losing a flip-flop in the process, hollering as if somebody at the light might take notice. I raised my head and bawled for some driver to see me, hear me. He was calling my name, looking like a guy ditched by his prom date—sweaty and short and like his feelings were hurt. The light changed. Horns. I sprinted across the yellow line before oncoming traffic to the other side of the road. Sam hollered over, Hey, you forgot your pocketbook. I was sprinting so shards of rock got embedded in one foot. Even then I was doubting my instincts. Maybe he was harmless. By the time the shakes hit, I was speed-walking with a single flip-flop along the road’s shoulder, a kind of inner earthquake starting in my middle—a shaking that spread outward and nearly buckled me. At a fish joint famous for not letting the beach-weary use its facilities, I rushed past counter traffic to the bathroom. Soon as I locked the door, I hunched over the sink, washing my unstable limbs with brown paper towels and pink soap as if they belonged to some patient I was paid to tend. The shaking receded like a tide. Sometime after that—maybe even the next day—I stopped smoking pot, stopped going to the beach. Sam had spooked from me the notion that the hippies I’d once revered were benevolent characters identifiable by roach clips and tie dye. Plus, the crash pad my friends and I had rented had gotten too raggedy for any girl to stand. The sink stayed piled with scabby dishes from when I’d cooked everybody spaghetti a month before. When you hit the light switch at night, the roaches didn’t even run anymore. Yet night after night the guys lazed around puffing weed and telling dick jokes. When they headed to the beach, I’d lose myself down the valley of a book or scribble longhand on loose pages that I stashed under my sleeping bag. College was the thing. I’d scammed my way into that small midwestern school too good for me, but then I’d put it on hold as too square. Now it looked like an escape from flagging down another satanic hobo, or it was suddenly an excuse to read nonstop. I longed for its library walled with books, a desk with gooseneck lamp, a bulletin board. Taking my collect call, Mother agreed—her life’s goal being college for perpetuity. She phoned the school’s financial officer, who promised as much in work and loans as I needed. I was sweltering inside the open accordion door of a phone booth. You’ve tried it your daddy’s way, Mother said. How is this Daddy’s way? Daddy wants me to stay home and hone my pool game. Yeah, but the T-shirt factory job, the whole working-class-hero pose. Who knows, maybe you’ll meet some suave intellectual….

• From A History of God (1993)

  Yet the German philosopher and churchman Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64) was more confident about our ability to understand God. He was extremely interested in the new science, which he thought could help us to comprehend the mystery of the Trinity. Mathematics, for example, which dealt only with pure abstractions, could supply a certainty that was impossible in other disciplines. Thus the mathematical idea of “the maximum” and “the minimum” were apparently opposites but in fact could logically be seen as identical. This “coincidence of opposites” contained the idea of God: the idea of “the maximum” includes everything; it implies notions of unity and necessity which point directly to God. Further, the maximum line was not a triangle, a circle or a sphere, but all three combined: the unity of opposites was also a Trinity. Yet Nicholas’s clever demonstration has little religious meaning. It seems to reduce the idea of God to a logical conundrum. But his conviction that “God embraces everything, even contradictions” 14 was close to the Greek Orthodox perception that all true theology must be paradoxical. When he was writing as a spiritual teacher, rather than as a philosopher and mathematician, Nicholas was aware that the Christian must “leave everything behind” when he sought to approach God, and “even transcend one’s intellect” going beyond all sense and reason. The face of God will remain shrouded in “a secret and mystic silence.” 15 The new insights of the Renaissance could not address deeper fears that, like God, lay beyond the reach of reason. Not long after Nicholas’s death, a particularly noxious phobia erupted in his native Germany and spread throughout northern Europe. In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII published the Bull Summa Desiderantes, which marked the beginning of the great witch craze that raged sporadically throughout Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, afflicting Protestant and Catholic communities equally. It revealed the dark underside of the Western spirit. During this hideous persecution, thousands of men and women were cruelly tortured until they confessed to astonishing crimes. They said that they had had sexual intercourse with demons, had flown hundreds of miles through the air to take part in orgies where Satan was worshipped instead of God in an obscene Mass. We now know that there were no witches but that the craze represented a vast collective fantasy, shared by the learned Inquisitors and many of their victims, who had dreamed these things and were easily persuaded that they actually happened. The fantasy was linked with anti-Semitism and a deep sexual fear. Satan had emerged as the shadow of an impossibly good and powerful God.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The Israelites called Yahweh “the God of our fathers,” yet it seems that he may have been quite a different deity from El, the Canaanite High God worshipped by the patriarchs. He may have been the god of other people before he became the God of Israel. In all his early appearances to Moses, Yahweh insists repeatedly and at some length that he is indeed the God of Abraham, even though he had originally been called El Shaddai. This insistence may preserve the distant echoes of a very early debate about the identity of the God of Moses. It has been suggested that Yahweh was originally a warrior god, a god of volcanoes, a god worshipped in Midian, in what is now Jordan.17 We shall never know where the Israelites discovered Yahweh, if indeed he really was a completely new deity. Again, this would be a very important question for us today, but it was not so crucial for the biblical writers. In pagan antiquity, gods were often merged and amalgamated, or the gods of one locality accepted as identical with the god of another people. All we can be sure of is that, whatever his provenance, the events of the Exodus made Yahweh the definitive God of Israel and that Moses was able to convince the Israelites that he really was one and the same as El, the God beloved by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The so-called “Midianite Theory”—that Yahweh was originally a god of the people of Midian—is usually discredited today, but it was in Midian that Moses had his first vision of Yahweh. It will be recalled that Moses had been forced to flee Egypt for killing an Egyptian who was ill-treating an Israelite slave. He had taken refuge in Midian, married there, and it was while he was tending his father-in-law’s sheep that he had seen a strange sight: a bush that burned without being consumed. When he went closer to investigate, Yahweh had called to him by name and Moses had cried: “Here I am!” (hineni!), the response of every prophet of Israel when he encountered the God who demanded total attention and loyalty: “Come no nearer” [God] said, “Take off your shoes for the place on which you stand is holy ground. I am the god of your father,” he said, “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” At that Moses covered his face, afraid to look at God.18

• From A History of God (1993)

  By this time tragedy had also helped the Jews of Europe to form a new conception of God. The crusading anti-Semitism of the West was making life intolerable for the Jewish communities, and many wanted a more immediate, personal God than the remote deity experienced by the Throne Mystics. During the ninth century, the Kalonymos family had emigrated from southern Italy to Germany and had brought some mystical literature with them. But by the twelfth century, persecution had introduced a new pessimism into Ashkenazic piety, and this was expressed in the writings of three members of the Kalonymos clan: Rabbi Samuel the Elder, who wrote the short treatise Sefer ha-Yirah (The Book of the Fear of God) in about 1150; Rabbi Judah the Pietist, author of Sefer Hasidim (The Book of the Pietists), and his cousin Rabbi Eliezar ben Judah of Worms (d. 1230), who edited a number of treatises and mystical texts. They were not philosophers or systematic thinkers, and their work shows that they had borrowed their ideas from a number of sources that might seem incompatible. They had been greatly impressed by the dry Faylasuf Saadia ibn Joseph, whose books had been translated into Hebrew, and by such Christian mystics as Francis of Assisi. From this strange amalgam of sources, they managed to create a spirituality which remained important to the Jews of France and Germany until the seventeenth century. The Rabbis, it will be recalled, had declared it sinful to deny oneself pleasure created by God. But the German Pietists preached a renunciation that resembled Christian asceticism. A Jew would only see the Shekinah in the next world if he turned his back on pleasure and gave up such pastimes as keeping pets or playing with children. Jews should cultivate an apatheia like God’s, remaining impervious to scorn and insults. But God could be addressed as Friend. No Throne Mystic would have dreamt of calling God “Thou,” as Eliezar did. This familiarity crept into the liturgy, depicting a God who was immanent and intimately present at the same time as he was transcendent: Everything is in Thee and Thou art in everything; Thou fillest everything and dost encompass it; when everything was created, Thou was in everything; before everything was created, Thou wast everything. 53 They qualified this immanence by showing that nobody could approach God himself but only God as he manifested himself to mankind in his “glory” ( kavod ) or in “the great radiance called Shekinah.” The Pietists were not worried by the apparent inconsistency. They concentrated on practical matters rather than theological niceties, teaching their fellow Jews methods of concentration ( kawwanah ) and gestures that would enhance their sense of God’s presence. Silence was essential; a Pietist should close his eyes tightly, cover his head with a prayer shawl to avoid distraction, pull in his stomach and grind his teeth. They devised special ways of “drawing out prayer,” which was found to encourage this sense of Presence.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Nor was Luder the only person to shape his son: his mother was profoundly important, as were his siblings. Nonetheless, Luther’s revolt would inevitably bring him up against authorities, including the Pope and the emperor, which at the time were understood as forms of paternal authority. His ability to speak out against such figures had to come from within, and the first step was the rebellion against his father. . bebe e -<5 pesky > %o ) re Beaweys at, Gotti a > <cAit & — = 37 2 ties Sen 3 tape, » Titaaty : 2 ie aa. a : cr cs? : nian ihn ai Tere enor alae ae ee ee ere : seit Gi @ei os padre Ser ace h:4 w@ is — ss, 7 Ps “946 ~ : vad * Pewee Woes ew es & amt ef : ©. > : >< ad 5 we ach ae < iu iaiat «ee or o< fs : i ae ae = 6 = 264 err eo" tee PR 24 hen ar fer Et OK oN gore: re bane ts a nae ee ee uit F- 2s a? eee oe Ce ofr etat tt aupay dae Mog @ . . \ Sas ee “= ORO » Mere ns achz oe) ad t ie wei oC cme oy @ ly ees ew ated @ a ee =~ sreskb inoedte ee ee) cae 0 eee rel ay nie, 1 ad nies - qhotony a “moi pad . oie" Avia 22=RE yey io te ‘tng al co ars a» at wiry er nai — on ae nig o. ¢ «= -.. ate 9 - asahaaniial 2 Slane 22) jaa pe? © 1! > yy ine *@ eee 0 Oe AS ihewr ae Fee SPSihy ‘hte kor ogs CHANDA reattach seem se y Sides > taaies'© arkaguuincy wa {it Gevhlgatin onl ler peinten: male ‘ye o waar oe we etalon . vee Bo ; aii # ie 2 See how aoe - eae ¢ Ss ners, ~ ee ah panera: te 13 Cae lop as pat ket pk : Ps — a | oles: err Ra af) 1) — A Som ghee ‘pai 24 ol Ge ae tee ted taped Sree itts hye GaN we arena ee | —aaele & Saox ston Ve ted (wets i ‘ aivee gweet * a bahieos a 3 The Monastery When Luther became a novice, he had to kneel before the high altar, by the tomb of Andreas Zacharias, the Erfurt monastery’s most famous son. Doing so would have given the supplicant a sense both of physical abasement and of spiritual connection as his body felt the cold of the stone.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Arius, Alexander and Athanasius, for example, had come to believe a doctrine that would have startled any Platonist: they considered that God had created the world out of nothing (ex nihilo), basing their opinion on scripture. In fact, Genesis had not made this claim. The Priestly author had implied that God had created the world out of the primordial chaos, and the notion that God had summoned the whole universe from an absolute vacuum was entirely new. It was alien to Greek thought and had not been taught by such theologians as Clement and Origen, who had held to the Platonic scheme of emanation. But by the fourth century, Christians shared the Gnostic view of the world as inherently fragile and imperfect, separated from God by a vast chasm. The new doctrine of creation ex nihilo emphasized this view of the cosmos as quintessentially frail and utterly dependent upon God for being and life. God and humanity were no longer akin, as in Greek thought. God had summoned every single being from an abysmal nothingness, and at any moment he could withdraw his sustaining hand. There was no longer a great chain of being emanating eternally from God; there was no longer an intermediate world of spiritual beings who transmitted the divine mana to the world. Men and women could no longer ascend the chain of being to God by their own efforts. Only the God who had drawn them from nothingness in the first place and kept them perpetually in being could ensure their eternal salvation. Christians knew that Jesus Christ had saved them by his death and resurrection; they had been redeemed from extinction and would one day share the existence of God, who was Being and Life itself. Somehow Christ had enabled them to cross the gulf that separated God from humanity. The question was how had he done it? On which side of the Great Divide was he? There was now no longer a Pleroma, a Place of Fullness of intermediaries and aeons. Either Christ, the Word, belonged to the divine realm (which was now the domain of God alone) or he belonged to the fragile created order. Arius and Athanasius put him on opposite sides of the gulf: Athanasius in the divine world and Arius in the created order. Arius wanted to emphasize the essential difference between the unique God and all his creatures. As he wrote to Bishop Alexander, God was “the only unbegotten, the only eternal, the only one without beginning, the only true, the only one who has immortality, the only wise, the only good, the only potentate.”

• From A History of God (1993)

  In the old days, Yahweh had been prepared to accept them as elohim , the sons of El Elyon (“God Most High”), 30 but now the gods had proved that they were obsolete. They would wither away like mortal men. Not only did the psalmist depict Yahweh condemning his fellow gods to death, but in doing so he had usurped the traditional prerogative of El, who, it would seem, still had his champions in Israel. Despite the bad press it has in the Bible, there is nothing wrong with idolatry per se: it becomes objectionable or naive only if the image of God, which has been constructed with such loving care, is confused with the ineffable reality to which it refers. We shall see that later in the history of God, some Jews, Christians and Muslims worked on this early image of the absolute reality and arrived at a conception that was closer to the Hindu or Buddhist visions. Others, however, never quite managed to take this step, but assumed that their conception of God was identical with the ultimate mystery. The dangers of an “idolatrous” religiosity became clear in about 622 BCE during the reign of King Josiah of Judah. He was anxious to reverse the syncretist policies of his predecessors, King Manasseh (687–42) and King Amon (642–40), who had encouraged their people to worship the gods of Canaan alongside Yahweh. Manasseh had actually put up an effigy to Asherah in the Temple, where there was a flourishing fertility cult. Since most Israelites were devoted to Asherah and some thought that she was Yahweh’s wife, only the strictest Yahwists would have considered this blasphemous. Determined to promote the cult of Yahweh, however, Josiah had decided to make extensive repairs in the Temple. While the workmen were turning everything upside down, the High Priest Hilkiah is said to have discovered an ancient manuscript which purported to be an account of Moses’ last sermon to the children of Israel. He gave it to Josiah’s secretary, Shapan, who read it aloud in the king’s presence. When he heard it, the young king tore his garments in horror: no wonder Yahweh had been so angry with his ancestors! They had totally failed to obey his strict instructions to Moses. 31 It is almost certain that the “Book of the Law” discovered by Hilkiah was the core of the text that we now know as Deuteronomy. There have been various theories about its timely “discovery” by the reforming party. Some have even suggested that it had been secretly written by Hilkiah and Shapan themselves with the assistance of the prophetess Huldah, whom Josiah immediately consulted. We shall never know for certain, but the book certainly reflected an entirely new intransigence in Israel, which reflects a seventh-century perspective. In his last sermon, Moses is made to give a new centrality to the covenant and the idea of the special election of Israel.