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.

Page 37 of 263 · 20 per page

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  I blame Charles Dickens. Take Mrs. Cratchit from A Christmas Carol. Her son, Tiny Tim, dies, and she tells her other children that she’s crying because the color of her sewing hurts her eyes, and she “wouldn’t want to show weak eyes” to her husband. When I was little, I used to think, as Dickens wanted me to, Mrs. Cratchit is so brave. But now that I know about the stress response cycle, I want to yell, “Lady, your child died! It’s not ‘weak’ to cry! And your other kids deserve to know that it’s normal to grieve!” Being with the tribe doesn’t replace the Feels built into completing the cycle. We need to discharge the stress response, complete the cycle, before our bodies can move on. “Home” is the place—physical and emotional—where we can discharge stress without being judged or shamed or told we just need to relax or forget about it. “Home” is where we receive our partner’s “loving presence.” People who listen with a loving presence are calm, attentive, and warmly attuned to the other person. In the very best relationships, we’re allowed to experience all forms of stress—anger, fear, shutdown—and receive the loving presence of our partner as they sit still and quietly through the storm. Every culture has rules about how much of which kinds of emotions are appropriate in what circumstances. But our culture has constructed a social world where there is almost nowhere that we can connect with others while experiencing the full range of our emotional intensity. For a lot of us, there are times when we more readily share a loving presence through spiritual practice or with our pets than with our partners, who are mired in their own stress. God and your dog never judge or blame you for having Feels—but neither of them can make love with you. Sex is an adult attachment behavior. When your attachment is threatened or when you and your partner share a stressor together, sex can be a powerful, pleasurable way to connect in the face of the “I’m lost” signals, so that you can find your way home. Together. But this feels pleasurable only if you can give each other time and space for Feels. the water of lifeI am at risk/I am safe. I am broken/I am whole. I am lost/I am home. As you progress through these biological processes, your mental state changes, and that, in turn, changes whether and how your brain responds to contexts as sex-related or to sensations as sexually pleasurable. Stress hits the brakes for most people, but it activates the accelerator for others—people vary. But for everyone, stress changes the context in which you experience sexual response, which changes your perception of sexual sensations. The key to managing stress so that it doesn’t interfere with sexual pleasure is learning to complete the cycle—unlock freeze, escape the predator, conquer the enemy. Celebrate, like glitter settling in a snow globe.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But 1527 brought other difficulties. In early April, Luther’s friend Georg Winkler, a pastor in the nearby city of Halle, was murdered. Halle was under the authority of Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, and therefore still officially Catholic, but Winkler nonetheless had been bravely preaching there along evangelical lines. He also began serving Communion in both kinds to his parishioners, and it was these departures from Catholic practice that made him a marked man. He was summoned to Mainz to give an account of himself, and it was believed that on his way home he was murdered at the archbishop’s behest. When Luther learned of this, he wrote a letter of consolation to Winkler’s parishioners. In it, he imagines what Winkler would be saying to them from his heavenly perspective. It’s obvious that Luther’s own gloomy views of the spiritually dark world they all inhabited colored the words he put in Winkler’s mouth, but he meant them as encouragement, saying that we are here together in this vale of tears and we should earnestly wish to join our martyred brother in the place where there are no tears and where sorrows and dying have passed away: If you loved me, then you would indeed rejoice that in this way I have passed from death to life. For what is certain in this life? Today someone stands erect, tomorrow he lies there; today someone has the right kind of faith, tomorrow he falls into error; today someone hopes, tomorrow he despairs. How many splendid people are now falling daily in the errors of the fanatics; how many are yet to fall because of these same and other [sects] still to come?3 To know that Luther’s friends were being murdered for their beliefs helps us understand Luther’s apocalyptic views. For him, the world was approaching its last spasms of violence and historical drama, in which the Antichrist was revealing himself, raging and raging the more at the advance of the true light of the Gospel. “It is a sure sign,” Luther wrote, “that a great disaster is at hand, which will engulf the world, from which God will snatch his own beforehand, so that they be not seized and perhaps fall and be lost among the godless.” Who can doubt that living through this would have been extraordinarily stressful, especially for the man who had helped bring it all about and therefore felt a deep responsibility for all of it?

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The persecution of the Antwerp brethren continued in the story of Luther’s friend Henry von Zütphen, who settled for a time in Bremen, where he preached regularly, despite opposition. Luther was grateful to know that God’s Word was being preached far beyond Wittenberg, and in the fall of 1524 he wrote to Zütphen, simply wanting to maintain their connection. That God’s Word was courageously being preached in Bremen was greatly encouraging to Luther. But shortly after Zütphen received Luther’s letter, he was called to come and preach in the village of Meldorf, in distant Dithmarschen. The brethren in Bremen opposed his leaving, feeling that his work with them was not yet finished, but Henry believed that if he was called to preach—especially in a place where such preaching had never been done—he must go, because it was a call from God. The poor souls in Meldorf deserved to hear God’s Word. He promised the Bremeners that after the Word had been established in Meldorf, he would return to Bremen. So Zütphen traveled the hundred miles north to distant Meldorf and preached there on December 4 and twice again two days later. But the local Dominicans were so outraged to hear him and to know that the Reformation had invaded their distant country that they contrived to have him captured and killed without a trial. The subsequent story of what happened to Luther’s friend is a horrific one, and we only know the details of his brutal treatment and murder because Luther himself wrote them in his heartbreaking essay “The Burning of Brother Henry.” Luther described the cruelty of the drunken, murderous mob that had been incited by the twin authorities of church and state to kidnap, brutalize, and then murder Henry von Zütphen for the same reason that he wrote the hymn telling the story of the burning of Esch and Vos. He knew that publicizing such things would strengthen and encourage the faithful to continue their efforts, and he also knew that the public shaming of those who had done these monstrous things was a measure of justice and truth that would have its own ramifications. He wrote that once again “in our day the pattern of true Christian life has reappeared, terrible in the world’s eyes, since it means suffering and persecution, but precious and priceless in God’s sight.”8

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  On the twenty-first, the procession traveled to Bitterfeld, where the local dignitaries came to pay their respects and then accompanied the procession for the next twenty miles to Kemberg. And then on the morning of the twenty-second, at around 9:00, the procession reached Wittenberg. At the Elster gate, it was welcomed by a great host of Wittenbergers, who formed a procession and went through the city toward the Castle Church. At the head of the procession were schoolboys and the clergy. Behind them were Elector John Frederick’s representatives as well as two of the Mansfeld counts and sixty-five horsemen. Next came the wagon that bore the coffin. It was drawn by four horses and covered with a black cloth upon which a cross of white had been embroidered. Just behind this wagon was a smaller, lower wagon carrying Kathie Luther and her daughter Margaret, as well as some other local women. And walking behind this wagon were Luther’s three boys and their uncle Jakob, as well as Luther’s sister’s sons and other family members. Next were the university rector and a number of Wittenberg students from the ranks of the nobility. Then came the university chancellor, and then Jonas, Bugenhagen, and Melanchthon. And with them Hieronymus Schurff and some other doctors of the university. Behind them were more doctors and some masters of the university too. Finally, there was the city council of Wittenberg and then the University of Wittenberg students, followed by the many male citizens of Wittenberg and then many more women and children of the city. The coffin was carried into the Schlosskirche and placed in the aisle, perpendicular to the chancel. A grave had been dug, aptly almost underneath the pulpit from which Luther had so many times preached the Gospel. That day Bugenhagen preached the sermon but because of his emotions had great difficulty in delivering it. The text was 1 Thessalonians 4:13–14 (“Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him”). And then Melanchthon gave the eulogy, lifting Luther up as one of the greatest figures in history: Luther brought to light the true and necessary doctrine. He showed what true repentance is, and what is the refuge and the sure comfort of the soul which quails under the sense of the wrath of God. He expounded Paul’s doctrine, which says that man is justified by faith. . . . Many of us witnessed the struggles through which he passed in establishing the principle that by faith are we received and heard of God. Hence throughout eternity pious souls will magnify the benefits which God has bestowed on the Church through Luther. But even now, Melanchthon did not shy from mentioning Luther’s shortcomings:

• From A History of God (1993)

  The Muslims of Spain had given Jews the best home they had ever had in the diaspora, so the annihilation of Spanish Jewry was mourned by Jews throughout the world as the greatest disaster to have befallen their people since the destruction of the Temple in CE 70. The experience of exile entered more deeply into Jewish religious consciousness than ever before: it led to a new form of Kabbalah and the evolution of a new conception of God. These were also complex years for Muslims in other parts of the world. The centuries which had succeeded the Mongol invasions led—perhaps inevitably—to a new conservatism, as people tried to recover what had been lost. In the fifteenth century, the Sunni ulema of the madrasas , the schools of Islamic studies, decreed that “the gates of ijtihad (independent reasoning) had been closed.” Henceforth Muslims should practice “emulation” ( taqlid ) of the great luminaries of the past, especially in the study of Shariah, the Holy Law. It was unlikely that there would be innovative ideas about God in this conservative climate or, indeed, about anything else. Yet it would be mistaken to date this period as the beginning of a decadence in Islam, as Western Europeans have often suggested. As Marshall G. S. Hodgson points out in The Venture of Islam, Conscience and History in a World Civilisation , we simply do not know enough about this period to make such sweeping generalizations. It would be wrong, for example, to assume that there was a slackening in Muslim science at this time, as we have insufficient evidence, one way or the other. The conservative tendency had surfaced during the fourteenth century in champions of the Shariah like Ahmad ibn Taymiyah of Damascus (d. 1328) and his pupil Ibn al-Qayin al-Jawziyah. Ibn Taymiyah, who was dearly loved by the people, wanted to extend the Shariah to enable it to apply to all the circumstances in which Muslims were likely to find themselves. This was not meant to be a repressive discipline: he wanted to shed obsolete rules to make the Shariah more relevant and to assuage the anxiety of Muslims during these difficult times. The Shariah should provide them with a clear, logical answer to their practical religious problems. But in his zeal for Shariah, Ibn Taymiyah attacked Kalam, Falsafah and even Asherism. Like any reformer, he wanted to go back to the sources—to the Koran and the hadith (on which the Shariah had been based)—and to shed all later accretions: “I have examined all the theological and philosophical methods and found them incapable of curing any ills or of quenching any thirst. For me the best method is that of the Koran.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Hoc Est Corpus LutherumThose around him knew that the man who lay before them had many years ago made it clear that the last rites practiced by the Catholics were not in his eyes a sacrament, so he was not given those rites, nor now anointed with oil. At 4:00 a.m., people who had received word of his death began arriving to view the body. For five hours, many citizens of the town came to view it, and many of them sobbed to see him there, dead but a few yards from the very spot where he had come into the world sixty-two years before. Jonas early that morning dispatched word to Elector John Frederick and Melanchthon of his death. At some point that morning, Luther was dressed in a white “Swabian smock,” much like the smocks worn by the farmers of that time, and moved from his bed into a pewter coffin. There visited many noble persons who had known him and many ordinary townspeople too. Some had known him his whole life. Early on the morning of the nineteenth in Wittenberg, a messenger rode into the town with the news of Luther’s death. The funeral procession bearing Luther’s body would not arrive for three more days. Philip Melanchthon was at that early hour about to lecture his students on Saint Paul’s epistle to the Romans. But when the messenger gave him Justus Jonas’s letter, he was overcome. When he stood behind the lectern at 9:00 a.m., he was not able to speak on the subject of Romans. He explained to his students that he would not be able to discharge his duties in speaking on that subject because “I have this day received a sad letter which troubles me so much that I doubt whether I shall be able in the future to discharge my duties in the University. What this is I will now relate to you so that you may not believe other persons who may circulate false reports in regard to the matter.”9 And he then related the details of Luther’s death, as described by Jonas. Toward the end of his speech, he said, “Alas, obiit auriga et currus Israel!”—meaning “The charioteer of Israel has fallen!” It was a paraphrase of the words Elisha speaks after the death of Elijah from 2 Kings 2:12.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther’s FamilyBecause of the Schmalkaldic War and the battles following, Kathie and her children were twice forced to abandon Wittenberg, and when they returned, the Black Cloister and much that was theirs had been laid waste. Even livestock had been stolen or simply killed. Her late husband’s refusal to take payment for his voluminous writings had left the family essentially bereft and at the mercy of the elector and others, who were not as kind to Kathie as her husband would have hoped. In 1552, the plague again returned to Wittenberg, forcing the “Mother of the Reformation” and her youngest children to flee to Torgau. But at the very gates of that city, her wagon crashed, hurling her into a ditch filled with icy water. The fall and the cold would be the death of her. Three months later, at age fifty-three, she breathed her last and was buried at Torgau, where her remains lie today. Her final words are supposed to have been “I will stick to Christ as a burr sticks to a topcoat.” In 1564, Martin and Kathie’s grown children sold the Black Cloister back to the university. Hans, the eldest, went into the study of law and came to be an adviser to the elector. Martin, like his father and namesake, studied theology, although he never found a pastorate and died at age thirty-three. The third son, Paul, became a renowned doctor. The male line of the family continued until 1759, but through the line of Luther’s surviving daughter, Margaret, who married a nobleman, the family line continues to the present day. In fact, the German national hero President Paul von Hindenburg proudly claimed to be a direct descendant of Martin Luther. Alas, Hitler made great use of this in co-opting Hindenburg and Luther to his own diabolical purposes, something that has stained Luther’s legacy more than anything else. The People’s Hero and the Vox PopuliWhen one considers Luther’s legacy, his encouragement of the budding democratic movements of his time takes an important place. No one before him had given voice to the concerns of the working classes in the way that he had. Previous figures who might have done this lived before the printing press existed, so even if someone had possessed his outsized talents as a communicator, there was simply no medium in which to express oneself and find a wide audience. Luther had an uncanny and unparalleled ear for communicating with those of other social castes. He was able to write to emperors and popes with perfect fluency and to argue academic points in Latin with Erasmus and others, but he was unmatched in speaking directly to those whose knowledge of their own German language was primitive. In this capacity, he was able with ease to run blurred circles around less capable opponents.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Some have complained that Luther displayed too much severity. I will not deny this. But I answer in the language of Erasmus: “Because of the magnitude of the disorders, God gave this age a violent physician.” . . . I do not deny that the more ardent characters sometimes make mistakes, for amid the weakness of human nature no one is without fault. But we may say of such a one, “rough indeed, but worthy of all praise!” If he was severe, it was the severity of zeal for the truth, not the love of strife, or of harshness. . . . God was his anchor, and faith never failed him.10 Kathie was devastated by her husband’s death. She grieved that she had been unable to care for him in his final hours and to be there for her sons, who must have suffered to see their father dying. A few weeks after Luther’s death, Kathie wrote to her sister-in-law, Christina von Bora: For who would not be sad and afflicted at the loss of such a precious man as my dear lord was? He did great things not just for a city or a single land, but for the whole world. Therefore I am truly so deeply grieved that I cannot tell a single person of the great pain that is in my heart. And I do not understand how I can cope with this. I cannot eat or drink, nor can I sleep. And if I had had a principality or an empire and lost it, it would not have been as painful as it is now that the dear Lord God has taken from me this precious and beloved man, and not from me alone, but from the whole world.11 Final WordsThe day Luther died, a piece of paper was found in his pocket with the following written upon it: Nobody can understand Vergil in his Bucolics and Georgics unless he has first been a shepherd or a farmer for five years. Nobody understands Cicero in his letters unless he has been engaged in public affairs of some consequence for twenty years. Let nobody suppose that he has tasted the Holy Scriptures sufficiently unless he has ruled over the churches with the prophets for a hundred years. Therefore there is something wonderful, first about John the Baptist; second, about Christ, third, about the apostles. “Lay not your hand on this divine Aeneid, but bow in reverence before its footprints!”*12 And below this were what must be his last written words, aptly macaronic and profound: “Wir sind Pettler. Hoc est verum.”*

• From A History of God (1993)

  By the disastrous year 70, the Pharisees had become the most respected and important sect of Palestinian Judaism; they had already shown their people that they did not need a Temple to worship God, as this famous story shows: Once as Rabbi Yohannan ben Zakkai was coming forth from Jerusalem, Rabbi Joshua followed after him and beheld the Temple in ruins. “Woe unto us!” Rabbi Joshua said, “that this, the place where the iniquities of Israel were atoned for, is laid waste!” “My son,” Rabbi Yohannan said, “be not grieved. We have another atonement as effective as this. And what is it? It is acts of loving kindness, as it is said: ‘For I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ ”78 It is said that after the conquest of Jerusalem, Rabbi Yohannan had been smuggled out of the burning city in a coffin. He had been opposed to the Jewish revolt and thought that the Jews would be better off without a state. The Romans allowed him to found a self-governing Pharisaic community at Jabneh, to the west of Jerusalem. Similar communities were founded in Palestine and Babylonia, which maintained close links. These communities produced the scholars known as the tannaim, including rabbinic heroes like Rabbi Yohannan himself, Rabbi Akiva the mystic and Rabbi Ishmael: they compiled the Mishnah, the codification of an oral law which brought the Mosaic law up to date. Next a new set of scholars, known as the amoraim, began a commentary on the Mishnah and produced the treatises known collectively as the Talmud. In fact two Talmuds had been compiled; the Jerusalem Talmud, which was completed by the end of the fourth century, and the Babylonian Talmud, which is considered the more authoritative and which was not completed until the end of the fifth century. The process continued as each generation of scholars began to comment in their turn on the Talmud and the exegesis of their predecessors. This legal contemplation is not as desiccated as outsiders tend to imagine. It was an endless meditation on the Word of God, the new Holy of Holies; each layer of exegesis represented the walls and courts of a new Temple, enshrining the presence of God among his people.

• From A History of God (1993)

  He himself was convinced that the deity conceived as a God of History had died forever in Auschwitz. Yet Rubenstein did not feel that Jews could jettison religion. After the near- extinction of European Jewry, they must not cut themselves off from their past. The nice, moral God of liberal Judaism was no good, however. It was too antiseptic; it ignored the tragedy of life and assumed that the world would improve. Rubenstein himself preferred the God of the Jewish mystics. He was moved by Isaac Luria’s doctrine of tsimtsum, God’s voluntary act of self-estrangement which brought the created world into being. All mystics had seen God as a Nothingness from which we came and to which we will return. Rubenstein agreed with Sartre that life is empty; he saw the God of the mystics as an imaginative way of entering this human experience of nothingness. 6 Other Jewish theologians have also found comfort in Lurianic Kabbalah. Hans Jonas believes that after Auschwitz we can no longer believe in the omnipotence of God. When God created the world, he voluntarily limited himself and shared the weakness of human beings. He could do no more now, and human beings must restore wholeness to the Godhead and the world by prayer and Torah. The British theologian Louis Jacobs, however, dislikes this idea, finding the image of tsimtsum coarse and anthropomorphic: it encourages us to ask how God created the world in too literal a manner. God does not limit himself, holding his breath, as it were, before exhaling. An impotent God is useless and cannot be the meaning of human existence. It is better to return to the classic explanation that God is greater than human beings and his thought and ways are not ours. God may be incomprehensible, but people have the option of trusting this ineffable God and affirming a meaning, even in the midst of meaninglessness. The Roman Catholic theologian Hans Kung agrees with Jacobs, preferring a more reasonable explanation for tragedy than the fanciful myth of tsimtsum. He notes that human beings cannot have faith in a weak God but in the living God who made people strong enough to pray in Auschwitz. Some people still find it possible to find meaning in the idea of God. The Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968) set his face against the Liberal Protestantism of Schleiermacher, with its emphasis on religious experience. But he was also a leading opponent of natural theology. It was, he thought, a radical error to seek to explain God in rational terms not simply because of the limitations of the human mind but also because humanity has been corrupted by the Fall.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Often these reforming maskilim had ideas that were a strange amalgam of old and new. Thus Joseph Wehte of Prague, who was writing in about 1800, said that his heroes were Moses Mendelssohn, Immanuel Kant, Shabbetai Zevi and Isaac Luria. Not everybody could make his way into modernity via the difficult paths of science and philosophy: the mystical creeds of radical Christians and Jews enabled them to work toward a secularism that they would once have found abhorrent by addressing the deeper, more primitive regions of the psyche. Some adopted new and blasphemous ideas of God that would enable their children to abandon him altogether. At the same time as Jacob Frank was evolving his nihilistic gospel, other Polish Jews had found a very different Messiah. Since the pogroms of 1648, Polish Jewry had undergone a trauma of dislocation and demoralization that was as intense as the exile of the Sephardim from Spain. Many of the most learned and spiritual Jewish families of Poland had either been killed or had migrated to the comparative safety of Western Europe. Tens of thousands of Jews had been displaced and many had become wanderers, roaming from town to town, barred from permanent settlement. The Rabbis who remained were often of low caliber and had allowed the house of study to shield them from the grim reality of the world outside. Wandering Kabbalists spoke of the demonic darkness of the world of the achra sitra , the Other Side, which was separated from God. The Shabbetai Zevi disaster had also contributed to the general disillusion and anomie. Some Jews of the Ukraine had been affected by the Christian Pietist movements, which had also sprung up in the Russian Orthodox Church. The Jews had started to produce a similar kind of charismatic religion. There were reports of Jews falling into ecstasy, breaking into song and clapping their hands during prayer. During the 1730s one of these ecstatics emerged as the undisputed leader of this Jewish religion of the heart and founded the school known as Hasidism. Israel ben Eliezer was not a scholar. He preferred to walk in the woods, singing songs and telling stories to children, to studying the Talmud. He and his wife lived in abject poverty in southern Poland in a hut in the Carpathian Mountains. For a time he dug lime and sold it to the people of the nearby town. Then he and his wife became innkeepers. Finally, when he was about thirty-six years old, he announced that he had become a faith healer and an exorcist. He journeyed through the villages of Poland, healing the illnesses of the peasants and townsfolk with herbal remedies, amulets and prayers. There were many healers at this time, who claimed to cure the afflicted in the Name of the Lord. Israel had thus now become a Baal Shem Tov, a Master of the Good Name.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Your blood be on your own head! We are and want to be innocent of your blood and damnation, since we pointed out to you sufficiently your wrongs, faithfully admonished to repentance, prayed sincerely, and offered to the uttermost all that could serve the cause of peace, seeking and desiring nothing else than the one comfort for our souls, the free, pure gospel. Therefore we may boast with a good conscience that the fault has not been ours. But may the God of peace and comfort give you his Spirit, to direct and lead you to all truth through our Lord Jesus Christ.16 One night while at the Coburg, Luther had a powerful dream in which he lost a tooth, but the size of the tooth filled him with amazement. Such dreams were generally taken as portents of an impending death, and indeed two days later Luther was staggered to receive word of his own father’s death. The letter informing him arrived on June 5 and was from his lifelong Mansfeld friend Hans Reinecke. According to Veit Dietrich, who was staying with him at the Coburg, as soon as he read it, he took his Psalter, went into his bedchamber, and “crie[d] so much that he could not think clearly the next day.”17 Luther wrote to Melanchthon: Even though it comforts me that my father, strong in faith in Christ, fell gently asleep, yet sadness of heart and the memory of the most loving dealings with him have shaken me in the innermost parts of my being, so that seldom if ever have I despised death as much as I do now. . . . Since I am now too sad, I am writing no more, for it is right and God-pleasing for me as a son to mourn such a father, from whom the Father of mercies has brought me forth and through whose sweat [the Creator] has fed and raised me to whatever I am. I rejoice that he has lived until now so that he could see the light of truth.18 Not long thereafter, Luther wrote a letter to his four-year-old son, Hänschen. Luther had deputized Hieronymus Weller, one of the students living with them at the Black Cloister, to be the boy’s tutor, and when Weller let Luther know that Hans had been doing well, Luther felt moved to write him:

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Only Luther’s arrival could “let the cat out of the bag” and allow Charles V to hear the true gospel. 13 Luther used the enforced solitude to work on translating the Old Testament prophets and to write. First he penned his Exhortation to All Clergy, of which five hundred copies were printed in Wittenberg and sent to Augsburg, where they sold out. This hard-hitting pamphlet began with Luther’s devastating false modesty—people would be asking, he pretended, “Who needs you? Who ever demanded your exhortation or writing? There are so many learned and pious people here who can give better advice than a fool like you,” but he went on to list all the accomplishments of the evangelical movement, the abuses that had been swept away, the indulgence traffic, the ridiculous saints’ cults, pilgrimages, monkdom itself—these were feats the bishops hadn’t managed in years, but Luther had done it. If he was not allowed to be there in person, he would be there in spirit and “in writing with this mute and weak message of mine.” 14 Although his hiding place was meant to be a secret, a steady stream of visitors arrived, including Hans Reinicke, his old childhood friend from Mansfeld. His visit must have brought back many memories, but then, just a few days later at the end of May, Reinicke wrote to Luther to tell him that Luther’s father Hans had died; Reinicke had heard the news even before reaching Mansfeld. 15 When Luther had first been informed in February that his father had fallen ill, he had written that he could not visit him because “you know in what favor I stand with lords and peasants.” It was not safe for him to travel, and the older man was too weak to undertake the journey to Wittenberg. It was a letter of farewell. It seems that Luther knew that he would not see his father again. In an effort to comfort his father, he apologized for the travails his father had endured on his account, but gave them spiritual significance: God has “sealed” true doctrine and teaching in you and given you a “sign” or “mark,” “for my name’s sake.” 16 It was not the first time Luther had compared himself to Christ, but the identification was now deeper and more abstract than when he had gone to Worms in 1521. It had been strengthened by his recovery from the crisis he had undergone in 1527, for he had suffered many attacks from the Devil, proving that he was doing God’s work.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Unfortunately, as in Christianity, the religion was later hijacked by the men, who interpreted texts in a way that was negative for Muslim women. The Koran does not prescribe the veil for all women but only for Muhammad’s wives, as a mark of their status. Once Islam had taken its place in the civilized world, however, Muslims adopted those customs of the Oikumene which relegated women to second-class status. They adopted the customs of veiling women and secluding them in harems from Persia and Christian Byzantium, where women had long been marginalized in this way. By the time of the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258), the position of Muslim women was as bad as that of their sisters in Jewish and Christian society. Today Muslim feminists urge their menfolk to return to the original spirit of the Koran. This reminds us that, like any other faith, Islam could be interpreted in a number of different ways; consequently it evolved its own sects and divisions. The first of these—that between the Sunnah and Shiah—was prefigured in the struggle for the leadership after Muhammad’s sudden death. Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s close friend, was elected by the majority, but some believed that he would have wanted Ali ibn Abi Talib, his cousin and son-in-law, to be his successor ( kalipha ). Ali himself accepted Abu Bakr’s leadership, but during the next few years he seems to have been the focus of the loyalty of dissidents who disapproved of the policies of the first three caliphs: Abu Bakr, Umar ibn al-Khattab and Uthman ibn Affan. Finally Ali became the fourth caliph in 656: the Shiah would eventually call him the first Imam or Leader of the ummah . Concerned with the leadership, the split between Sunnis and Shiis was political rather than doctrinal, and this heralded the importance of politics in Muslim religion, including its conception of God. The Shiah-i-Ali (the Partisans of Ali) remained a minority and would develop a piety of protest, typified by the tragic figure of Muhammad’s grandson Husayn ibn Ali, who refused to accept the Ummayads (who had seized the caliphate after the death of his father Ali) and was killed with his small band of supporters by the Ummayad Caliph Yazid in 680 on the plain of Karbala, near Kufa in modern Iraq. All Muslims regard the immoral slaughter of Husayn with horror, but he has become a particular hero of the Shiah, a reminder that it is sometimes necessary to fight tyranny to the death. By this time, the Muslims had begun to establish their empire. The first four caliphs had been concerned only to spread Islam among the Arabs of the Byzantine and Persian empires, which were both in a state of decline.

• From A History of God (1993)

  By the first century CE, Judaism was in a very strong position in the Roman empire. One-tenth of the whole empire was Jewish: in Philo’s Alexandria, forty percent of the population were Jews. People in the Roman empire were searching for new religious solutions; monotheistic ideas were in the air, and local gods were increasingly seen as mere manifestations of a more encompassing divinity. The Romans were drawn to the high moral character of Judaism. Those who were understandably reluctant to be circumcised and observe the whole Torah often became honorary members of the synagogues, known as the “Godfearers.” They were on the increase: it has even been suggested that one of the Flavian emperors might have converted to Judaism, as Constantine would later convert to Christianity. In Palestine, however, a group of political zealots fiercely opposed Roman rule. In 66 CE they orchestrated a rebellion against Rome and, incredibly, managed to hold the Roman armies at bay for four years. The authorities feared that the rebellion would spread to the Jews of the diaspora and were forced to crush it mercilessly. In 70 CE the armies of the new emperor Vespasian finally conquered Jerusalem, burned the Temple to the ground and made the city a Roman city called Aelia Capitolana. Yet again the Jews were forced into exile. The loss of the Temple, which had been the inspiration of the new Judaism, was a great grief, but with hindsight it seems that the Jews of Palestine, who were often more conservative than the Hellenized Jews of the diaspora, had already prepared themselves for the catastrophe. Various sects had sprung up in the Holy Land which had in different ways dissociated themselves from the Jerusalem Temple. The Essenes and the Qumran sect believed that the Temple had become venal and corrupt; they had withdrawn to live in separate communities, such as the monastic-style community beside the Dead Sea. They believed that they were building a new Temple, not made with hands. Theirs would be a Temple of the Spirit; instead of the old animal sacrifices, they purified themselves and sought forgiveness of sins by baptismal ceremonies and communal meals. God would live in a loving brotherhood, not in a stone temple. The most progressive of all the Jews of Palestine were the Pharisees, who found the solution of the Essenes too elitist. In the New Testament, the Pharisees are depicted as whited sepulchres and blatant hypocrites. This is due to the distortions of first-century polemic. The Pharisees were passionately spiritual Jews. They believed that the whole of Israel was called to be a holy nation of priests. God could be present in the humblest home as well as in the Temple. Consequently, they lived like the official priestly caste, observing the special laws of purity that applied only to the Temple in their own homes.

• From A History of God (1993)

  This new form of Kabbalism probably originated in the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman empire, where many of the Sephardim had established communities. The tragedy of 1492 seems to have caused a widespread yearning for the redemption of Israel foretold by the prophets. Some Jews led by Joseph Karo and Solomon Alkabaz migrated from Greece to Palestine, the homeland of Israel. Their spirituality sought to heal the humiliation that the expulsion had inflicted upon the Jews and their God. They wanted, they said, “to raise the Shekinah from the dust.” But they were not seeking a political solution, nor did they envisage a more widespread return of the Jews to the Promised Land. They settled in Safed in Galilee and initiated a remarkable mystical revival which discovered a profound significance in their experience of homelessness. Hitherto Kabbalah had appealed only to an elite, but after the disaster Jews all over the world turned eagerly to a more mystical spirituality. The consolations of philosophy now seemed hollow: Aristotle sounded arid and his God distant and inaccessible. Indeed, many blamed Falsafah for the catastrophe, claiming that it had weakened Judaism and diluted the sense of Israel’s special vocation. Its universality and accommodation of Gentile philosophy had persuaded too many Jews to accept baptism. Never again would Falsafah be an important spirituality within Judaism.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The third reason this was important to Luther had to do with Aristotle, whom he despised. And he blamed the church for importing Aristotle’s unchristian philosophy into places where it had no business existing. The church had tried to explain via Aristotelian “reason” how the bread and the wine actually became the body and blood of Christ while still looking like bread and wine. It said that the thing in “essence” became the body and blood of Christ while retaining the “accidents” of bread-ness and wine-ness. For Luther, this was pure sophistry and far worse than nonsense, because it implied that Christ could not come into our world and redeem it but must really replace it with something “spiritual”—in this case, himself in full transubstantiated actuality. The church had been maintaining and teaching that Christ replaced the bread and the wine with himself, so that the bread and the wine looked like bread and wine but were actually not bread and wine, but were the actual body and blood of Christ. But Luther maintained and taught that Christ was present in the bread and the wine but did not replace them. Both were still there. For Luther, the Catholic church taught that the physical was being not redeemed but shoved away and simply replaced with something fully “spiritual.” For him, Christ was actually present in the bread and the wine, without the bread and the wine being somehow “transformed” in the way that Aristotle or rather Aquinas explained via his unconscionably smuggled-in Aristotelian thinking. Oecolampadius rather simplemindedly and over-literally could not understand how Christ could have been bodily resurrected and then could have bodily ascended to sit at the right hand of the Father and yet simultaneously be physically also present in the elements of Communion. Luther impatiently swatted this away as “mere physics,” writing, The Word says first of all that Christ has a body, and this I believe. Secondly, that this same body rose to heaven and sits at the right hand of God; this too I believe. It says further that this same body is in the Lord’s Supper and is given to us to eat. Likewise I believe this, for my Lord Jesus Christ can easily do what he wishes, and that he wishes to do this is attested by his own words.11 At times, this controversy grew ugly, with Zwingli’s camp mocking Luther’s view of things, saying that he and those of his party were “cannibals” who worshipped “a baked God.” In 1528, Luther wrote,

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Dear God, what misery I beheld! The ordinary person, especially in the villages, knows absolutely nothing about the Christian faith, and unfortunately many pastors are completely unskilled and incompetent teachers. Yet supposedly they all bear the name Christian, are baptized, and receive the holy sacrament, even though they do not know the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, or the Ten Commandments! As a result they live like simple cattle or irrational pigs and, despite the fact that the gospel has returned, have mastered the fine art of misusing all their freedom.10 It is hardly a surprise that after decades and even centuries of being taught nothing and living in their syncretistic world of medieval superstition and the barest bones of Catholic faith, many of the villagers knew nothing of the true Christian faith. A few years under a nominally evangelical preacher couldn’t have cured that. The worship of Mary and other saints was still deeply ingrained, as was the religious “works” mentality that is the sine qua non of almost every religion around the world. Everyone knew he was guilty of something, that there was a gulf between him and some impossible standard, and the medieval system of guilt here and there assuaged by some rituals had sufficed—in its insufficient way—since time immemorial. What could be done? It would be a long road, but Luther would help things along by writing a catechism. Luther knew that for centuries no one had known the Bible nor what was in it. They had been a captive audience every week, and their own priests themselves usually knew nothing of the Bible or what was in it either. So the faith simply was not passed on in any measure. When Luther visited these villages and towns and saw the tremendous ignorance born of these dark ages, he was grieved, but his grief led him to write what is one of his greatest works, called The Large Catechism. It was Luther’s way of promulgating the faith widely and it was published in 1529. It dealt with the basics of the faith: the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, holy baptism, and the Eucharist. It was written in a question-and-answer format so that it could be easily taught, and Luther knew that it would aid many pastors who themselves were not acquainted with the basics of the faith and who therefore didn’t know how to teach it to their flocks. Luther also published The Small Catechism, intended for simple folk and for children too. These works were not merely meant to be memorized, although they were certainly intended for memorization; Luther wanted the actual ideas to make their way into the hearts and minds of those who read them. For example, he began his exposition of the First Commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” with the following extraordinary formulation:

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  As Luther wrote to a friend, ‘Karlstadt always was miserably afraid of death’, referring to his fear of martyrdom in the 1520s when Luther had courageously faced the prospect of his own death. It was partly because the Lutherans had played the card of the ‘evil death’ in Karlstadt’s case, and had exploited it to the full, that they now knew they had to present Luther’s own death in the most careful manner. What made it difficult, however, was that the cause of death was obscure. Luther had been away from home, and without the advice of his usual doctors: the two local physicians who attended him did not know his medical history. They also disagreed on the diagnosis, one blaming apoplexy, the other, more senior, ascribing it to weakness of the heart. But his doctor in Wittenberg, Matthadus Ratzeberger, surmised it was the result of the closing over of the ‘fontanelle’ in his leg, which had driven the moist humours, unable to escape, up to his chest and so constricted his heart; Luther had forgotten to take his corrosive with him to keep the wound open while he stayed in Eisleben.® Melanchthon was adamant that Luther had died of neither and instead insisted that Luther had been fully conscious throughout his final hours, and had therefore died well.” Luther’s Catholic opponents, however, did their utmost to exploit rumours that one side of his body had gone black and his mouth was distorted, all indicative of a stroke. Cochlaeus’s biography, completed in 1549, included a long account of his last days, alleging that Luther had ‘lolled’ about on a sofa, eating and drinking to excess. He claimed to have got the details from a pharmacist at Eisleben who 404 MARTIN LUTHER had sent a report to the anti-Lutheran pastor Georg Witzel.” Just before he died, the apothecary had been asked to apply a clyster to his rectum. The balloon had expanded because of all the rich food and drink he had consumed. He had died of apoplexy, the Catholics insisted, the sudden death that was God’s judgement on the wicked.* For Catholics and Lutherans alike, Luther’s body itself held the truth of his message.” From 4 a.m. to 9 a.m. on 18 February, Luther’s body was viewed by many ‘honourable citizens’, sobbing ‘hot tears’. Then he was laid out in a tin coffin, dressed in a white shirt. Hundreds came to view the body, among them ‘many nobles, most of whom knew him person- ally’, but also a great number of ordinary folk. The next day the body was taken to the Church of St Andreas in Eisleben, where it was placed in the choir and Justus Jonas preached a sermon.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  What is it to have a god? What is God? Answer: A god is that to which we look for all good and in which we find refuge in every time of need. To have a god is nothing else than to trust and believe him with our whole heart. As I have often said, the trust and faith of the heart alone make both God and an idol. If your faith and trust are right, then your God is the true God. On the other hand, if your trust is false and wrong, then you have not the true God. For these two belong together, faith and God. That to which your heart clings and entrusts itself is, I say, really your God.11 Great sadnesses continued among Luther and his Wittenberg friends. Three months into 1528, Bugenhagen and his wife lost their little Johannes. And that August, Luther and Kathie lost their daughter, Elisabeth, just eight months old. Luther’s love for this tiny girl made his grief over her loss quite overwhelming: “It is amazing what a grieving, almost womanly heart she has bequeathed me, so much has grief for her overcome me. Never would I have believed that a father’s heart could feel so tenderly for his child.”12 It was therefore the more a blessing that in the following year, Kathie gave birth to a second daughter named Magdalena, who was born on May 4. It must have been around the happy time of Magdalena’s birth that Luther’s parents paid another visit to Wittenberg, because in 1529 Lucas Cranach painted his portraits of both of them. His portrait of Luther’s father, Hans, suggests a man fatigued and perhaps somewhat vexed by life, or perhaps he was simply impatient with his portraitist. Hans’s wife Margarethe’s portrait suggests a somewhat dour woman, perhaps also fatigued by life and its difficulties, and perhaps resigned to the fact that she must sit still while the painter goes through his everlasting motions. What joy could it have been to be immortalized at this stage of life? But the fact that Cranach painted them at all says much. Why he painted them as he did is another mystery. CHAPTER TWENTYThe Reformation Comes of AgeBetter be ten times dead than that our consciences should be burdened with the insufferable weight of such disaster and that our gospel should be the cause of bloodshed. —Martin Luther