Grief

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 The Battle for God (2000)

  In 1843, the French writer Gérard de Nerval visited Cairo and noted ironically that French bourgeois values were being imposed on the Islamic city. Muhammad Ali’s new palaces were built like barracks and furnished with mahogany armchairs and oil portraits of the pasha’s sons in their new army uniforms. The exotic, oriental Cairo of Nerval’s imagination lies under dust and ashes; the modern spirit and its exigencies have triumphed over it like death. In ten years’ time, European streets will have cut the dusty and drab old town at right angles.… What glitters and expands is the quarter of the Franks, the town of the English, the Maltese and the Marseilles French. 51 The buildings of the new Cairo, built by Muhammad Ali and Ismail, represented an architecture of domination. This would become even more obvious during the British occupation, as the embassies, banks, villas, and monuments built in parts of Cairo expressed European investment in this Middle Eastern country, exhibiting a jumble of styles, periods, and functions that would have been deemed incoherent in Europe. For, as the British anthropologist Michael Gilsenan points out, Cairo “was not passing through the same stages of a unilinear sequence of development that Europe had already passed through on the way to capitalism.” It was not becoming an industrial center, not moving purposefully from tradition to modernity, or acquiring a new urban coherence: Rather, it was being made into a dependent local metropolis through which a society might be administered and dominated. The spatial forms grew out of a relationship based on force and a world economic order in which in this case Britain played the crucial role. 52 The whole experience of modernization was crucially different in the Middle East: it was not one of empowerment, autonomy, and innovation, as it had been in Europe, but a process of deprivation, dependence, and patchy, imperfect imitation . For the vast majority of the people, who were not involved in the process, it was also an experience of alienation. A “modern” city, such as Muhammad Ali’s Cairo, was built on entirely different principles from those that gave meaning to the indigenous towns of Egypt. As Gilsenan points out, tourists, colonialists, and travelers have often found Oriental cities confusing and even frightening: the unnamed and unnumbered streets and twisting passages seem to have no order or orientation; Westerners get lost and can make no sense of their surroundings. For most of the colonized peoples of the Middle East and North Africa, the new Westernized cities were equally incomprehensible, and bore no relation to their instinctive sense of what a city should be. They frequently felt lost in their own country. Many of these superimposed Westernized cities surrounded the “old town,” which, in comparison, looked dark, threatening, and outside the rationally ordered modern world.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The shahs tried to counter these objections by appealing to the popular religion of the masses, especially by associating themselves with the mourning ceremonies for Husain. They had their own rawda-khans, who recited the epic accounts of the Kerbala tragedy every day; they built a royal stage in Tehran for the performance of the annual passion play (taziyeh) commemorating Husain’s death, which took place on five consecutive nights during the sacred month of Muharram in the great court of the royal palace. The battle between Husain and Yazid was enacted, the deaths of the Imam and his sons depicted, and, on the night of the fast-day of Ashura, the anniversary of the Kerbala disaster, there was a grand procession, in which effigies of the martyrs (complete with lifesize representations of their shrines and whole choirs of children) were carried through the streets, while the common people followed, beating their breasts. Throughout Muharram, all the mosques were festooned in black drapery, and in the public squares, booths were erected for the rawda-khans, who chanted the dirge mournfully and loudly. By this date, there were a number of celebrated rawda-khans in the country who competed with one another for preeminence.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  the Yemeni city of Najrān (now in south-west Saudi Arabia), attracted by an existing Christian community, and the city became a major centre for Miaphysite Christianity. In 523 or 524 its population suffered a horrific massacre at the hands of their overlord, Yusuf as’ar Yath’ar of the Yemeni kingdom of Himyar; in the previous century, his family had converted to Judaism and his campaigns were expressions of his own militant zeal for recreating Israel in Arabia. King Kaleb of Ethiopia, already provoked by Yusuf’s killing of Ethiopian soldiers, forcefully intervened across the Red Sea after this outrage and defeated and killed Yusuf.34 With Ethiopian backing, a local Miaphysite ruler, Abraha, now came to establish a kingdom in southern Arabia which had Miaphysite Christianity as its state religion. This might have become the future of the Arabian peninsula, had it not been for a major disaster of engineering: in the 570s, the ancient and famous Marib dam, on which the agricultural prosperity of the region depended, and which had undergone thorough repair under King Abraha, nevertheless suffered a catastrophic failure. After more than a thousand years of existence, it was never rebuilt until modern times. A complex and wealthy society which had flourished on the irrigation provided by the dam was ruined for ever, and with the collapsing dam must have perished much of the credibility of Christianity throughout Arabia. Five hundred miles to the north, in the same decade that the dam failed, there was born an Arab destined to be a new prophet: Muhammad (see pp. 255–9). The memory of the end of the Marib dam, when Sheba’s gardens were replaced ‘with others that yielded bitter fruit’, was still traumatic enough to win a mention in Muhammad’s revelations in the Qur’an, where the disaster was described as a punishment from God for Sheba’s faithlessness.35 But before we meet the new prophet and the impact of his faith on the world, we must turn to the other dissidence against Chalcedon: the Church of the East, the Dyophysite heirs of Theodore of Mopsuestia. THE CHURCH OF THE EAST (451–622) At the time of the Council of Chalcedon, with Nestorius declared a non-person despite the council’s quiet acceptance of much of his theology, matters looked dire for defiant Dyophysites. They had no power base in the Byzantine Empire comparable to Miaphysite Alexandria, and even eastwards beyond the imperial frontier there was no secure refuge for them among Syrian Christians in the Sassanian Empire. The mid-fifth century saw renewed pogroms of Christians by the Zoroastrian authorities. In the worst sequence under Shah Yazdgerd II, what

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  The final collapse of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 had an ambiguous resonance in Moscow. To lose the holy places of Constantinople was a bitter blow, but the catastrophe did leave a useful vacuum in Orthodox leadership, for which the Muscovite leadership had been preparing over the previous century. Church and Court cooperated very closely in an increasingly autocratic system which presented the Grand Prince as the embodiment of God’s will for the people of Rus’. The Grand Prince was effective in disposing of competitors: in 1478 he annexed the city-state of Novgorod, which had the effect of eliminating the model of a merchant republic from Russian society. The Hanseatic League regarded this annexation as a watershed in its relations with the East: it permanently withdrew the credit facilities which it had long extended to Novgorod and Pskov, for it did not trust the arbitrary rulers of Muscovy to be reliable financial partners. In a land where resources were perpetually scarce and the urge of the monarch to expand his dominions and power was consistently strong, the grand princes sought to gain as much control as they could over exploitable assets of manpower and finance. The Church hierarchy aided them by preaching the holiness of obedience to the prince with a thoroughness and zest which had little precedent in Byzantium, let alone Western Latin Christendom; but bishops and abbots did not forget that the Church had its own view of its destiny and purpose. The tension between these two agendas had a long future within Russian Orthodox Christianity. The growing power of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra and the immense reverence paid to Sergei in the pilgrimage cult which began very shortly after his death in 1392 were not unconnected with the close ties which Sergei had developed to the Grand Prince of Muscovy, ties which were later strategically magnified by his hagiographers. It was said that he had blessed Grand Prince Dmitrii Donskoi when the Prince decided to attack his Tatar overlord; a victory in battle followed for Muscovy at Kulikovo in 1380. The reality of the blessing is dubious, and the victory was not such a turning point as it looked in subsequent Muscovite chronicles, but such doubts do not diminish the part that the narrative of the events played in constructing a new history for the Muscovite principality. During the fifteenth century, narratives of great saints of the Church lent their subjects’ authority to the growing concentration of power in the hands of the grand princes.41 Moscow’s subservience to the Tatars was quietly forgotten: gone were the prayers for a Tatar khan which Muscovite coins had once borne, and in a wholesale rewriting of history, Muscovy’s clerical chroniclers recast the Tatars as perpetual enemies of Muscovy. Two years after the annexation of Novgorod, Grand Prince Ivan III formally announced an end to the tribute which he and his predecessors had paid to the khans for two centuries. This was part of

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The police did shoot and there were more martyrs. The confrontation was especially violent in Tabriz, where as many as one hundred mourners may have died, and six hundred people were arrested. Young men broke away from the procession to attack the cinemas, banks, and liquor stores (symbols of the Great Satan), but no people were assaulted. 66 Forty days later, on March 30, the mourners turned out onto the streets once again, this time to weep for the martyrs of Tabriz. On this occasion, about a hundred demonstrators were shot in Yazd, as they left the mosques. On May 8, there were new processions to honor the martyrs of Yazd. 67 The jails were crammed with political prisoners, and the number of dead revealed the naked aggression of a regime that had turned against its own people. This was the ultimate passion play. Demonstrators carried placards reading “Everywhere is Kerbala, and every day is Ashura.” 68 The word for martyr, shaheed , meant “witness,” as in Christianity. The demonstrators who died were bearing witness to the duty to fight tyranny, as Imam Husain had done, and to defend the values of the Unseen spiritual world, which the regime seemed determined to violate. People spoke of the Revolution as a transforming and purifying experience; they felt that they were purging themselves and their society of a poison that had debilitated them and that, in the struggle, they were returning to themselves. This was not a revolution that was simply using religion for political ends. It was the Shii mythology that gave it meaning and direction, especially among the poor and uneducated, who would have been quite unmoved by a more strictly secularist ideology. 69 In June and July, the shah made some concessions, promising free elections and the restoration of the multiparty system. During these months, the demonstrations were quieter. There seemed to be a lull, and the Western-educated secularists and intellectuals, who had hitherto taken no part in the mourning processions but had supported the demonstrators by making purely verbal protests against the regime, assumed that the battle had been won. But on August 19, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the restoration of the Pahlavi monarchy in 1953, an arson attack on the Rex Cinema in Abadan killed four hundred people. This was immediately attributed to SAVAK, and ten thousand mourners attended the funeral, chanting “Death to the shah! Burn him!” 70 Iranian students organized big demonstrations against the regime in Washington, Los Angeles, and The Hague. The shah made more concessions: the Majlis debates became freer, orderly demonstrations were permitted, some of the casinos were closed, and the Islamic calendar was restored. 71 But it was too late. During the last week of Ramadan, when Muslims usually keep vigil in the mosques, there were demonstrations in fourteen Iranian cities, in which between fifty and one hundred people died.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  And in that moment, as in the first night when I held her, I felt myself pass beyond childhood, a woman connecting with other women in an intricate, complex, and ever-widening network of exchanging strengths. “Goodbye, Eudora.” When I arrived back in Cuernavaca just before the rains—tired, dirty, and exhilarated—I headed for Frieda’s house and my clean clothes. She and Tammy had just come in from the farm in Tepotzlán. “How’s Eudora?” I asked Frieda, as Tammy fetched us cool drinks from the kitchen. “She’s left town, moved up to the District, finally. I hear she’s reporting for a new daily up there.” Gone. “Where’s she living?” I asked dully. “Nobody has her address,” Frieda said, quickly. “I understand there was one hell of a brawl up at the compound between her and La Señora. But evidently they must have gotten their business settled, because Eudora left soon afterwards. It all happened right after you left.” Frieda sipped her fresca slowly. Glancing at me, she took some change from her pocket and sent Tammy to the market for bread. I carefully kept what I hoped was an impassive expression on my face as I toyed with my fruit drink, screaming inside. But Frieda put her drink down, leaned forward, and patted me on the arm reassuringly. “Now don’t worry about her,” she said kindly. “That was the best thing in the world Eudora could have done for herself, getting out of this fishbowl. If I wasn’t afraid of losing Tammy to her father in the states, I think I’d leave tomorrow.” She settled back in her chair, and fixed me with her level, open gaze. “Anyway, you’re going back home next week, aren’t you?” “Yes,” I said, knowing what she was saying and that she was quite right. “But I hope to come back some day.” I thought of the ruins at Chichen-Itzá, of the Olmec heads in Tabasco, and Eudora’s excited running commentaries. “I’m sure you will, then,” Frieda said, encouragingly. I returned to New York on the night of July 4th. The humid heat was oppressive after the dry hot climate of Mexico. As I got out of the taxi on Seventh Street, the sound of firecrackers was everywhere. They sounded thinner and higher than the fireworks in Mexico. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography 23 I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell. There were no mothers, no sisters, no heroes. We had to do it alone, like our sister Amazons, the riders on the loneliest outposts of the kingdom of Dahomey.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  reversal until his death in 1658, but after two years of increasing disorder, maypoles, Christmas and King Charles II were all summoned back from exile.80 The Church of England which Charles restored, episcopal and ceremonial, complete with expensively refurbished cathedrals, had gained new martyrs for its cause, for the first time since the reign of Queen Mary Tudor. Newly aggressive against Puritanism after their sufferings, the clergy who dominated it were much more obviously out of step with the continent-wide Reformed ethos than they had been before the war, and the Church Settlement of 1662, with a revamped version of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, excluded many Protestants who before the civil wars would have found a home within the national Church; now they were labelled Dissenters, whether they liked it or not. So, in the twenty-year civil wars of the Atlantic Isles, a new identity was born for the Churches of England and Ireland, which was occasionally at the time called Anglican, a term which came to be much more widely used in the nineteenth century. Alongside Anglicanism was a strong and irrepressible Protestant Dissent.81 Anglicanism is a religious outlook which has kept its distance from the rest of the Reformation, but also from Rome, and is prepared to live with the ambiguous consequences. It took time for this conscious middle ground to develop; those in charge in the Church to begin with after 1660 tended to remember their sufferings and emphasize what made their new Church exclusive in its identity. Those who regretted that outlook, while also deploring the extremes of ‘Puritanism’ which were its mirror-opposite, were soon abusively known as ‘Latitudinarians’; and their hour had not come.82 Between Anglicanism and Dissent, in concert with the allied but contrasting story of Scottish Protestantism, anglophone Protestantism gained a religious profile which has reproduced its peculiarity across the world, as we will discover in tracing the fortunes of British imperial adventures in Chapters 19 and 20. In tracing the fortunes of Protestantism, we have been neglecting half a Reformation: that which remained loyal to Rome. There is still much argument about what to call this other movement: ‘Counter-Reformation’ has long been popular, but narrowly ties it to a reaction to the Protestant Reformation, particularly that within the Holy Roman Empire, about which the expression (in German, Gegenreformation) was first used. One distinguished modern scholar of the subject has suggested a broader usage, ‘Early Modern Catholicism’, but that seems too wide and shapeless.83 Probably the best formulation, which suggests the internal dynamism of what happened, is ‘Catholic Reformation’. That is a reminder that if Luther was the heir of the reformist neuroses of 1500, so were popes, and that it was also popes who oversaw an expansion of Western Christianity over two centuries from 1500 which took it to every continent of the

• From The Greatest Controversies of Early Christian History (2013)

  41 to tell the disciples that Jesus will meet them in Galilee. But according to the last lines of Mark’s gospel, the women are so afraid that they tell no one. o This ending must have seemed abrupt to the other gospel writers. In Matthew and Luke, the women go to the tomb, learn that Jesus was raised, and tell the disciples.  In all three of these gospels, Mary is one of the women who goes to the tomb, but in the Gospel of John, she goes by herself (John 20). When she discovers the tomb is empty, she runs and tells Simon Peter and another disciple. As Mary stands outside the tomb, Jesus appears to her and asks why she is weeping. At fi rst, she doesn’t recognize him, but when she does, she addresses him as Rabboni, “teacher.” Jesus instructs her to tell the disciples that he has been raised, which she does.  Was it Mary Magdalene who discovered that the tomb was empty, and was it she who fi rst proclaimed that Jesus was raised from the dead? If that’s the case and if Christianity is the belief that Jesus was raised from the dead, one could argue that Mary Magdalene was the one who started Christianity. That would make her incredibly important to Christianity, but it would not mean that she was Jesus’s closest disciple during his lifetime; there’s a signi fi cant difference between the two propositions. o In one case—possibly the historical scenario—Mary is the one who begins the proclamation of Jesus’s resurrection. In the other case, she’s one who accompanies Jesus during his entire ministry and is his closest disciple, but we have no evidence for this. o Jesus’s male disciples are quite prominent in his public ministry. All the gospels and Paul tell us that Jesus called the 12 disciples. The gospels fi rmly attest that Jesus proclaimed his 12 disciples would sit on 12 thrones in the future kingdom of God, ruling the 12 tribes of Israel. The rulers of the future kingdom would be men, not women, not Mary Magdalene.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  And in thinking about these founder figures, I believe we must finally conclude that each brought a message of radical hope. To seventh-century Arabia, Muhammad brought the promise that anyone could find fulfillment and everlasting life through allegiance to the one true God. The Buddha held out hope that suffering could be transcended. Jesus brought the message that the last shall be first, that even the tax collectors and lepers—the outcasts—had cause for hope. And so that is the question I leave you with in this final: What is your cause for hope?” — Back at Room 43, the Colonel was smoking in the room. Even though I still had one evening left of washing dishes in the cafeteria to work off my smoking conviction, we didn’t much fear the Eagle. We had fifteen days left, and if we got caught, we’d just have to start senior year with some work hours. “So how will we ever get out of this labyrinth, Colonel?” I asked. “If only I knew,” he said. “That’s probably not gonna get you an A.” “Also it doesn’t do much to put my soul to rest.” “Or hers,” I said. “Right. I’d forgotten about her.” He shook his head. “That keeps happening.” “Well, you have to write something,” I argued. “After all this time, it still seems to me like straight and fast is the only way out—but I choose the labyrinth. The labyrinth blows, but I choose it.” one hundred thirty-six days after TWO WEEKS LATER, I still hadn’t finished my final for the Old Man, and the semester was just twenty-four hours from ending. I was walking home from my final test, a difficult but ultimately (I hoped) successful battle with precalculus that would win me the B-minus I so richly desired. It was genuinely hot out again, warm like she was. And I felt okay. Tomorrow, my parents would come and load up my stuff, and we’d watch graduation and then go back to Florida. The Colonel was going home to his mother to spend the summer watching the soybeans grow, but I could call him long-distance, so we’d be in touch plenty. Takumi was going to Japan for the summer, and Lara was again to be driven home via green limo. I was just thinking that it was all right not to know quite where Alaska was and quite where she was going that night, when I opened the door to my room and noticed a folded slip of paper on the linoleum floor. It was a single piece of lime green stationery. At the top, it read in calligraphy: From the Desk of...Takumi Hikohito Pudge/Colonel: I am sorry that I have not talked to you before. I am not staying for graduation. I leave for Japan tomorrow morning. For a long time, I was mad at you. The way you cut me out of everything hurt me, and so I kept what I knew to myself.

• From The Greatest Controversies of Early Christian History (2013)

  74 Lecture 11: Was Jesus Raised from the Dead?  People frequently have visions of loved ones after their deaths. These visions occur more often when people feel deep agony over a person’s death, personal guilt, or anger. Often, these visions are taken to be veridical by the person experiencing them. o There are innumerable documented instances of people speaking to and touching dead loved ones in their visions, but normally, those who experience visions do not think that their loved ones have been physically raised from the dead. o The early followers of Jesus, however, did not share our common view of the afterlife, in which a person dies and goes to heaven. Jesus’s early followers were apocalypticists who believed that at the end of the age, all dead people would be physically raised. o When these people had visions of Jesus, possibly induced from agony over his death, guilt, or anger, they naturally believed that he had been physically raised from the dead. And this led to two immediate conclusions: First, God had raised Jesus and made him his son, and second, the resurrection had started. Those who had experienced visions concluded that because Jesus had been raised, the general resurrection of all people was soon to come. For this reason, these followers of Jesus concluded that they were living in the last days. o The early followers were wrong, of course; time has continued to march on. But the belief in Jesus’s resurrection has marched on, as well, and became the basis of the Christian faith held by some 1 billion people in the world today. The fi rst followers of Jesus came to believe in it because they had visions of Jesus after his death. Allison, Resurrecting Jesus. Brown, The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus. Lüdemann, The Resurrection of Christ. Suggested Reading 75 1. Do you think historians can marshal historical proof for a miracle, such as the resurrection of Jesus? 2. What do you see as the historical plausibility of both the existence of an empty tomb of Jesus and the claim that his followers had visions of him after his death? Questions to Consider

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  World. It says a good deal about the legacy of Wilhelm von Humboldt (see pp. 830–31) that German professors could take themselves that seriously.4 Some Anglican bishops could be heard making equally remarkable statements. The Bishop of London, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, in one sermon in Advent 1915 called on the British Army ‘to kill the good as well as the bad, to kill the young men as well as the old’. At least Herbert Asquith, British Prime Minister, did not share the Kaiser’s enthusiasm for bellicose sentiments from scholars and clerics, and styled Winnington-Ingram with elegant distaste ‘an intensely silly bishop’. But the killing on all sides was as thorough as the Bishop of London had prescribed.5 The four years of slaughter revealed where the power lay between nationalism and religion. When Pope Benedict XV used his studied neutrality to seek a negotiated peace in 1917, both sides ignored him, despite his outstanding record as a diplomat.6 Just as symbolic were the desperate demands by the increasingly beleaguered German government to churches to sacrifice treasured items for the war effort. German parishioners watched in misery as their bells were carried away after being rung for the last time – the very bells which had rung out so cheerfully for the outbreak of war.7 Then in 1917 came the first fall of a Christian empire, the seat of the Russian Orthodox Church which had so long styled itself the Third Rome. Tsar Nicholas II was amiable, pious and well intentioned, but dull-wittedly autocratic – James Joyce neatly described Nicholas even before his downfall as having ‘the face of a besotted Christ’.8 The Tsar made the mistake of appointing himself as commander-in-chief in a war which he increasingly mismanaged, thus associating the Romanov dynasty intimately with the catastrophe into which Russia descended. At the centre of the empire, the Tsarina Alexandra was prominent in home government, to equally disastrous effect. Public outrage at the sense of drift focused on the faith-healing holy man Grigorii Rasputin, who had gained a hold over the Tsar and Tsarina because of his apparent ability to control the haemophilia of the heir to the imperial throne. Rasputin has been an object of much sensationalist fascination, not least because of the Grand Guignol ghastliness of his assassination by furious aristocrats in 1916, but it is as well to appreciate his ambiguity: pilgrim on foot from Siberia to Mount Athos, contemptuous of social hierarchy, treated with sympathy and respect by some senior churchmen (others loathed him). Even in his drunkenness and promiscuity, Rasputin looks remarkably like the Holy Fools whom we have met repeatedly in their long journey from the eastern Mediterranean – and so his many admirers saw him. Russian folk religion was returning to take its revenge on the autocracy which had shackled its Church in Peter the Great’s Holy Synod.9

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  even possess a working seminary for the training of his clergy. This near-death of Orthodox Christianity in the Second Rome is a direct result of the First World War, just as was the martyrdom of the Third Rome.20 The only substantial Christian refuge to be created in the 1923 peace settlements at Lausanne owed its existence to the Third French Republic, which might seem a paradox until one remembers the Republicans’ instrumental attitude to the Church in French colonies as an agent of French cultural hegemony.21 France was anxious to maintain its traditional strong influence in the Middle East, which dated back to the seventeenth century, when the French Crown arrogated to itself the role of protector of Levantine Christians. Accordingly it secured the creation of a French mandate over a coastal and mountainous region described as the Lebanon, whose boundaries closely followed the strength of the population of Maronite Christians – an indigenous Church of the area, originally Monothelete in its views on the nature of Christ (see pp. 441–2), but in union with Roman Catholicism since the twelfth century. When the Lebanon later gained its independence in 1943, seizing on a moment of French disarray in the Second World War, the new republic formulated a constitution carefully designed to balance the interests of Christians against other confessional groups. It succeeded for some three decades, before unravelling in civil war; the consequences of that breakdown are still unfolding.22 25. The Middle East and Turkey after 1923 On the eastern frontier of the new Turkish Republic, the shattered remnants of Christianity were also wretchedly caught up in international politics. Virtually all remaining Armenians fled, leaving eloquent ruins of Christian churches behind them, and the Dyophysites of the Church of the East were soon mostly in Iraq. In 1924 the Miaphysite or Syriac Orthodox people of Urfa (Edessa) faced the consequences of a successful Turkish counter-attack against French invading armies. Some stayed within the new Turkish Republic, around the holy mountains of Tūr ‘Abdīn, where their monasteries still do their best to guard the life of prayer dating back more than fifteen centuries. Urfa itself, cradle of Christianity’s alliance with monarchy, now has virtually no Christians left. Most Urfalese Syriac Orthodox fled over the new border into what was now the French mandated territory of Syria, and there in the city of Aleppo they painfully constructed a new life and preserved as much as they could from the past, including their ancient and unique musical tradition, probably the oldest in the Christian world.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I might be like, “So I was driving down the street and then BOOM a deer jumps out of the woods and almost hits my car, and I almost peed my pants.” That’s a grammatically disastrous sentence, but the reason I switch tenses there is because when describing the moment of crisis—the deer jumping out into the street—I feel as if it is still happening, and I want to express to you that it was so intense that on some level the experience is not over. We like to be very rigid in the way we imagine tense—some things are happening, other things have happened, etc. But one of the reasons we’ve created SO MANY tenses in English is that the way we actually experience time is quite complicated. When Pudge is talking about Alaska’s death, he is telling you a story that for him is still happening, a story that he hasn’t processed and put behind him. For me at least, that’s how trauma works. As Faulkner famously put it, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” Do you know what Alaska’s last words were? No, I don’t know her last words. From the moment I began to think about the story, I knew I’d never be inside the car with her that night, and that my readers wouldn’t be, either. I wanted Pudge to believe in the value of dying declarations as a way of closing the book on a human life, but then to be denied that closure when it comes to the death of someone he loves. He has to live with not knowing—not knowing her last words, and more importantly not knowing whether she committed suicide. I wanted the story to explore whether it is possible to live a hopeful life when you so often do not get answers to questions that deserve answers. Why did you decide to use the word ‘disintegrating’ to describe the school after the Eagle told everyone of Alaska’s death? Julie and I actually talked a fair bit about that word choice before arriving at disintegrating, so I’m happy to be asked the question! What I like about disintegration in that moment is that it implies there had been up until then an integration. Pudge had assimilated into the culture of Culver Creek, and although certainly not all the students like each other, there is a feeling of balance and unity and integration with the Culver Creek bubble: Almost everything that has occurred so far in the story has been either about people living on that campus or visiting it. There are no outside events at Culver Creek. You only see Jake when he visits.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Some unlikely figures became victims of the Inquisition’s implementation of the policy. The Society of Jesus was still as much an object of suspicion as the young Iñigo de Loyola, and the nobleman who had pioneered Jesuit general education projects, no less a figure than Francisco de Borja, Duke of Gandía, former Viceroy of Catalonia now turned Jesuit, was hounded out of the country before becoming an outstanding Superior-General for the Society.23 The Inquisition even ruined the career of Bartolome Carranza, Archbishop of Spain’s primatial see of Toledo, and a distinguished Dominican theologian. He had been an important assistant to Cardinal Pole in the English Marian experiment, but he had made the mistake of learning too much about Protestant heresy during his conscientious efforts to refute it. As a result Carranza spent nearly seventeen years in prison deprived even of attendance at Mass, and although briefly rehabilitated, he died a broken man when he might have been an ideal Counter- Reformation leader for Spain. Moreover, Carranza’s arrest had been triggered by the Inquisition’s alarm at the content of the Catechism which he had drafted for use in Marian England, and which was eventually to appear as a banned book in the Indexes issued by both the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions. Carranza’s Catechism was nevertheless taken up to form the basis for the Tridentine Catechism authorized by the Pope after the Council of Trent, a final touch of black comedy in this dismal affair.24 Also troubled by Spanish officialdom were two religious later to become among the most famous personalities in the history of Christian mysticism, Teresa of Ávila and Juan de Yepes (John of the Cross). In the Inquisition’s terms, both were automatically suspect by the fact that their families were conversos, and they might be seen as emerging from that maelstrom of religious energy released by the religious realignment of Spain in the 1490s (see pp. 584–91). They both joined the Carmelite Order (and their close personal relationship also attracted official worries); Teresa sought to bring the Carmelites to realize more intensely the significance of their origins in the wilderness by a refoundation of the order in which the men and women of the Reform would walk barefoot (Discalced). She struggled to persuade the Church authorities to make a leap of imagination, to allow the women who joined her to engage in a Carmelite balance of contemplation and activism. The journeyings of the soul characteristic of the mystic in every century would be paralleled by journeyings through the physical world, as and when necessary. Through many troubles and setbacks, Teresa developed what one of her admirers has called ‘a gift for making men give her the orders she wanted to obey’.25 Teresa is often remembered now in the dramatic and highly sexualized statue of her ecstasy which Gianlorenzo Bernini sculpted for the Church of Our Lady

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Get to the Cape as quick as you can; you’ve been appointed to the investigative committee.” The news stunned Borman, who considered Ed White the brother he’d never had. And it devastated Borman’s wife, Susan, who counted Pat White among her best friends. Borman told Slayton he’d fly to Florida right away but first needed to stop at the Whites’ home in Houston. When he and Susan arrived, Pat was hysterical. She was the mother of two children, ages ten and thirteen, who suddenly had no father. Even in her raw grief, just hours after receiving the news, a Washington bureaucrat had informed her that despite Ed’s wishes to be buried at West Point, the three fallen astronauts would all be laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery. “Give me the guy’s name,” Borman said. He had the man on the phone a minute later. “It’s already been decided in Washington,” the man insisted. “I don’t give a good goddamn what’s been decided,” Borman said. “Ed wanted to be buried at West Point and that’s what’s going to happen, and I’ll go all the way to President Johnson to make sure it happens, so you better fucking well do it.” Four days later, White was buried at West Point. Borman and Lovell were among the pallbearers. Anders also attended. After the funeral, Borman began his work on the investigative committee convened by NASA. He was the only astronaut on the panel, a sign that NASA considered him to be among its best. His first job was to help supervise the disassembly of the Apollo 1 spacecraft at Cape Kennedy in order to determine the cause of the fire. Days later, he became the first astronaut to enter the cabin. He found a burned-out nightmare. Rows of equipment and panels had been charred and covered in soot, debris was scattered everywhere. Hoses connecting the astronauts to their life support systems were melted. No matter where he looked, Borman could see no color, only grays and blacks. That night, he joined Slayton and others at a restaurant in Cocoa Beach called The Mousetrap, a NASA haunt. Borman seldom drank to excess, but the smell of the scorched spacecraft needed bleaching, and he started in early. He raised toasts to his fallen brothers, then threw his glass into the fireplace. White was among the straightest arrows Borman had ever known—honest to a fault, a true patriot, and a man who didn’t mess around with the sports cars or fast women so readily available to astronauts. For both men, family came first. The Bormans and Whites often shared a house on a lake near Houston for fishing trips. Borman couldn’t remember missing someone as much as he missed Ed White that night. Borman spent the next two months inside the burned spacecraft, studying the design, searching for flaws, making fixes in his mind. In April 1967, Congress held hearings into the cause of the fire, and Borman was called to testify.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  variety of Orthodoxy far to the north began revealing its potential as leader among the Orthodox: I outline the development of Russian Christianity. The Western Latin story resumes with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which tore the Western Church into fragments, but which also launched Christianity as the first world faith. From 1700, the three stories converge once more, as the world was united by the expansion of Western Christian empires. Despite their present variety, modern Christianities are more closely in touch than they have been since the first generations of Christians in the first-century Middle East. I seek to give due weight in these narratives to the tangled and often tragic story of the relations between Christianity and its mother-monotheism, Judaism, as well as with its monotheistic younger cousin, Islam. For most of its existence, Christianity has been the most intolerant of world faiths, doing its best to eliminate all competitors, with Judaism a qualified exception, for which (thanks to some thoughts from Augustine of Hippo) it found space to serve its own theological and social purposes. Even now, by no means all sections of the Christian world have undergone the mutation of believing unequivocally in tolerating or accepting any partnership with other belief systems. In particular I highlight the huge consequences when the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century monarchs of the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal) reinvented their multi- faith society as a Christian monopoly and then exported that single-minded form of Christianity to other parts of the world. I develop the theme which became (rather to my surprise) a ground-bass of the narrative in my previous book, Reformation: the destruction of Spanish Judaism and Islam after 1492 had a major role in developing new forms of Christianity which challenged much of the early Church’s package of ideas, and also in fostering the mindset which led in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the Enlightenment in Western culture. Here I examine the role of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European Christian empires in creating a reaction of fundamentalist intolerance within other modern world faiths, principally Islam, Judaism and Hinduism. Deeply embedded in Christian tradition is a vocabulary of ‘repentance’ and ‘conversion’, both words which mean ‘turning around’. So this book describes some of the ways in which individuals were turned around by Christianity, but also the ways in which they could turn around what Christianity meant. We will meet Paul of Tarsus, suddenly struck down by what he heard as a universal message for all human beings, who then quarrelled fiercely with other disciples of Jesus who saw their Lord as a Messiah sent only to the Jews. There is Augustine of Hippo, the brilliant teacher whose life was turned around by reading Paul, and who, more than a thousand years later, deeply influenced

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  activities; the funds raised by the head of the Church in Armenia went to pay for two tank divisions in the Red Army.71 After the war was over, this institutional toleration continued. In 1946 Stalin allowed the formal extinction of the languishing rival Russian Church organization which the Soviet government had encouraged, the ‘Renovationist’ Church. This had started life as a genuine attempt by radical clergy to produce a reforming version of Orthodoxy during the abortive revolution of 1905 (see p. 851), but it had turned into little more than a means of disrupting Orthodox activity and parroting Communist propaganda. Stalin realized that he was better served by a subservient Orthodox leadership which would have some credibility with other worldwide Christian leaders. That is how his successors used the Moscow Patriarchate, even while they resumed vicious attempts to end any popular religious life in that same Church.72 When the Soviets swept back into Ukraine, Stalin abruptly terminated the official life of the Greek Catholic Church, which had flourished in the wake of the Red Army’s retreat before the Nazis. In 1946 a puppet synod in Ukraine declared void the Union of Brest of 1596, and the Church disappeared into a forcible union with the Orthodox Church in Moscow for nearly half a century.73 As Soviet armies inexorably followed up the Western Allies’ uncomfortable acceptance that Stalin would make Eastern Europe a Soviet sphere of influence, the various national Orthodox Churches apart from Greece followed the Moscow Patriarchate into an unhappy combination of collaboration and persecution at the hands of Communist satellite regimes. Catholics and Protestants had more external contacts to sustain them, but for that reason, they were generally more likely to be regarded as enemies of the new ‘Peoples’ Democracies’. WORLD CHRISTIANITY REALIGNED: ECUMENICAL BEGINNINGS In 1945, Europe was a continent of ruins, in the throes of the largest population movements in its recorded history, as displaced peoples sought their homes again or sought to escape assorted retributions, while others trudged wretchedly through the devastation to conform to new political boundaries created by the victorious Allies’ power deals. A number of subsidiary wars still raged in the Balkans and on the plains of Eastern Europe. A horrified consciousness was dawning, although slow to find public expression for some decades, that several million people, mostly Jews, but also Roma, homosexuals, Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others who did not conform to Nazi requirements, had disappeared, not in warfare, but cold-bloodedly herded into human abattoirs for

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  When one slapped one’s child in anger the recoil in the heart reverberated through heaven and became part of the pain of the universe. And when the children were hungry and sullen and distrustful and one watched them, daily, growing wilder, and further away, and running headlong into danger, it was the Lord who knew what the charged heart endured as the strap was laid to the backside; the Lord alone who knew what one would have said if one had had, like the Lord, the gift of the living word. It was the Lord who knew of the impossibility every parent in that room faced: how to prepare the child for the day when the child would be despised and how to create in the child—by what means?—a stronger antidote to this poison than one had found for oneself. The avenues, side streets, bars, billiard halls, hospitals, police stations, and even the playgrounds of Harlem—not to mention the houses of correction, the jails, and the morgue—testified to the potency of the poison while remaining silent as to the efficacy of whatever antidote, irresistibly raising the question of whether or not such an antidote existed; raising, which was worse, the question of whether or not an antidote was desirable; perhaps poison should be fought with poison. With these several schisms in the mind and with more terrors in the heart than could be named, it was better not to judge the man who had gone down under an impossible burden. It was better to remember: Thou knowest this man’s fall; but thou knowest not his wrassling. While the preacher talked and I watched the children—years of changing their diapers, scrubbing them, slapping them, taking them to school, and scolding them had had the perhaps inevitable result of making me love them, though I am not sure I knew this then—my mind was busily breaking out with a rash of disconnected impressions. Snatches of popular songs, indecent jokes, bits of books I had read, movie sequences, faces, voices, political issues—I thought I was going mad; all these impressions suspended, as it were, in the solution of the faint nausea produced in me by the heat and liquor. For a moment I had the impression that my alcoholic breath, inefficiently disguised with chewing gum, filled the entire chapel. Then someone began singing one of my father’s favorite songs and, abruptly, I was with him, sitting on his knee, in the hot, enormous, crowded church which was the first church we attended. It was the Abyssinia Baptist Church on 138th Street. We had not gone there long.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Thus, the myth of the hero shows that it is psychologically damaging to live in the wasteland. If you slavishly follow somebody else’s ideas, you will be impoverished and impaired. I had certainly found this to be the case in my own life. Blind obedience and unthinking acceptance of authority figures may make an institution work more smoothly, but the people who live under such a regime will remain in an infantile, dependent state. It is a great pity that religious institutions often insist on this type of conformity, which is far from the spirit of their founders, who all, in one way or another, rebelled against the status quo. The heroes of myth and religion do not preach unbridled individualism, of course. There are, as I would discover, checks and restraints. But unless you act upon this heroic myth and allow it to change your behavior, it will remain opaque and incredible. But back in 1989, when I started to research A History of God, I didn’t know any of this. For me, religion was still essentially about belief. Because I did not accept the orthodox doctrines, I considered myself an agnostic—even an atheist. But by unwittingly putting into practice two of the essential principles of religion, I had already, without realizing it, embarked on a spiritual quest. First, I had set off by myself on my own path. Second, I had at last been able to acknowledge my own pain and feel it fully. I was gradually, imperceptibly being transformed. All the world faiths put suffering at the top of their agenda, because it is an inescapable fact of human life, and unless you see things as they really are, you cannot live correctly. But even more important, if we deny our own pain, it is all too easy to dismiss the suffering of others. Every single one of the major traditions—Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as well as the monotheisms—teaches a spirituality of empathy, by means of which you relate your own suffering to that of others. Hyam had quoted Hillel’s Golden Rule, which tells you to look into your own heart, find out what distresses you, and then refrain from inflicting similar pain on other people. That, Hillel had insisted, was the Torah, and everything else was commentary. This, I was to discover, was the essence of the religious life.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  One by one, over and over, again and again, my new Buddhist friends rejoiced at my great sadness . . . until the tears finally stopped. They just ran right out. There was a young Englishman, also attending the retreat, who was staying at my B&B in the nearby town. Every morning at breakfast, he would smile at me as we ate poached eggs on toast at opposite ends of the communal table. Eventually we talked. He had been a devout Buddhist for eight years already, although he was only twenty-four years old. He even lived at a Buddhist center in northern England, where he was finishing his university education. Tall, with clear white skin, full red lips, and long curly black hair, he was handsome as hell; he reminded me of John the Baptist, whom Salome so loved. He was also kinder than kind, paler than pale, and sweeter than honey. And, I assumed, monklike—given his Buddhist devotion. After all, the one thing I thought would never happen at a Buddhist retreat was hedonistic sex. But, oh no, those naughty, wonderful Buddhists, sex is A-okay with them—so long as no one is getting hurt, and all karmas are properly aligned. Clearly more experienced in this than me, he began our alignment. When I told him that I was leaving the next day, he suggested meeting up, after the evening meditation. I can’t remember exactly how the proposition was phrased—it wasn’t dinner or a movie or even a date—but he ended up in my cozy room with the Laura Ashley curtains, two narrow single beds, tea bags, and an electric water heater. Outside, needless to say, it was raining. This beautiful Byronic Buddhist not only fucked me royally on the last evening of the retreat, but also performed a particular kind of surgery I had only vaguely considered being of any possible use. He became the second man to fuck my ass in my whole life—gently, wildly, eagerly, Buddhistically. It was amazing. The sex, yes, he was so able, so young, so ready . . . and then ready again. But more amazing was that it happened at all, that I allowed it when others had tried to no avail. But when he asked, I looked into his saintly sexy eyes and saw that he could be the one. The one kind enough. It was like being vaccinated against the very illness I had so long been afflicted with. A-Man was the FirstMan, was the BestMan, but he was no longer the OnlyMan. The spell was broken. Buddha had found his way into my backyard. To think that God, that sly devil, had sent me a Buddhist John the Baptist to show me the way out of hell.