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 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 A History of God (1993)

  His was the God of the philosophers, not the God of the Bible. Inevitably a reaction set in. Some Jews turned to mysticism and developed the esoteric discipline of Kabbalah, as we shall see. Others recoiled from philosophy when tragedy struck, finding that the remote God of Falsafah was unable to console them. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Christian Wars of Reconquest began to push back the frontiers of Islam in Spain and brought the anti-Semitism of Western Europe to the peninsula. Eventually this would culminate in the destruction of Spanish Jewry, and during the sixteenth century the Jews turned away from Falsafah and developed an entirely new conception of God that was inspired by mythology rather than scientific logic. The crusading religion of Western Christendom had separated it from the other monotheistic traditions. The First Crusade of 1096–99 had been the first cooperative act of the new West, a sign that Europe was beginning to recover from the long period of barbarism known as the Dark Ages. The new Rome, backed by the Christian nations of Northern Europe, was fighting its way back onto the international scene. But the Christianity of the Angles, the Saxons and the Franks was rudimentary. They were aggressive and martial people and they wanted an aggressive religion. During the eleventh century, the Benedictine monks of the Abbey of Cluny and its affiliated houses had tried to tether their martial spirit to the church and teach them true Christian values by means of such devotional practices as the pilgrimage. The first Crusaders had seen their expedition to the Near East as a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but they still had a very primitive conception of God and of religion. Soldier saints like St. George, St. Mercury and St. Demetrius figured more than God in their piety and, in practice, differed little from pagan deities. Jesus was seen as the feudal lord of the Crusaders rather than as the incarnate Logos: he had summoned his knights to recover his patrimony—the Holy Land—from the infidel. As they began their journey, some of the Crusaders resolved to avenge his death by slaughtering the Jewish communities along the Rhine Valley. This had not been part of Pope Urban II’s original idea when he had summoned the Crusade, but it seemed simply perverse to many of the Crusaders to march 3,000 miles to fight the Muslims, about whom they knew next to nothing, when the people who had—or so they thought—actually killed Christ were alive and well on their very doorsteps.

• From A History of God (1993)

  He had a dubious reputation and was known not to observe the Shariah, the Holy Law of Islam, thinking himself above such trivialities. Rumi’s disciples were understandably worried by their Master’s evident infatuation. When Shams was killed in a riot, Rumi was inconsolable and devoted still more time to mystical music and dancing. He was able to transform his grief imaginatively into a symbol of the love of God—of God’s yearning for humanity and humanity’s longing for al-Lah. Whether knowingly or not, everybody was searching for the absent God, obscurely aware that he or she was separated from the Source of being. Listen to the reed, how it tells a tale, complaining of separateness. Ever since I was parted from the reed-bed, my lament has caused men and women to moan. I want a bosom torn by severance, that I may unfold [to such a person] the power of love-desire: everyone who is left far from his source wishes back the time when he was united to it. 51 The Perfect Man was believed to inspire more ordinary mortals to seek God: Shams ad-Din had unlocked in Rumi the poetry of the Masnawi, which recounted the agonies of this separation. Like other Sufis, Rumi saw the universe as a theophany of God’s myriad Names. Some of these revealed God’s wrath or severity, while others expressed those qualities of mercy which were intrinsic to the divine nature. The mystic was engaged in a ceaseless struggle (jihad) to distinguish the compassion, love and beauty of God in all things and to strip away everything else. The Masnawi challenged the Muslim to find the transcendent dimension in human life and to see through appearances to the hidden reality within. It is the ego which blinds us to the inner mystery of all things, but once we have got beyond that we are not isolated, separate beings but one with the Ground of all existence. Again, Rumi emphasized that God could only be a subjective experience. He tells the humorous tale of Moses and the Shepherd to illustrate the respect we must show to other people’s conceptions of the divine. One day Moses overheard a shepherd talking familiarly to God: he wanted to help God, wherever he was—to wash his clothes, pick the lice off, kiss his hands and feet at bedtime. “All I can say, remembering You,” the prayer concluded, “is ayyyy and ahhhhhhhh.” Moses was horrified. Who on earth did the shepherd imagine he was talking to? The Creator of heaven and earth? It sounded as though he were talking to his uncle! The shepherd repented and wandered disconsolately off into the desert, but God rebuked Moses. He did not want orthodox words but burning love and humility. There were no correct ways of talking about God: What seems wrong to you is right for him What is poison to one is honey to someone else.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. They insisted on eating their meals in a state of ritual purity because they believed that the table of every single Jew was like God’s altar in the Temple. They cultivated a sense of God’s presence in the smallest detail of daily life. Jews could now approach him directly without the mediation of a priestly caste and an elaborate ritual. They could atone for their sins by acts of loving-kindness to their neighbor; charity was the most important mitzvah in the Torah; when two or three Jews studied the Torah together, God was in their midst. During the early years of the century, two rival schools had emerged: one led by Shammai the Elder, which was more rigorous, and the other led by the great Rabbi Hillel the Elder, which became by far the most popular Pharisaic party. There is a story that one day a pagan had approached Hillel and told him that he would be willing to convert to Judaism if the Master could recite the whole of the Torah to him while he stood on one leg. Hillel replied: “Do not do unto others as you would not have done unto you. That is the whole of the Torah: go and learn it.”77

• From A History of God (1993)

  Although it is clearly culturally conditioned, this kind of “ascent” seems an incontrovertible fact of life. However we choose to interpret it, people all over the world and in all phases of history have had this type of contemplative experience. Monotheists have called the climactic insight a “vision of God”; Plotinus had assumed that it was the experience of the One; Buddhists would call it an intimation of nirvana. The point is that this is something that human beings who have a certain spiritual talent have always wanted to do. The mystical experience of God has certain characteristics that are common to all faiths. It is a subjective experience that involves an interior journey, not a perception of an objective fact outside the self; it is undertaken through the image-making part of the mind—often called the imagination—rather than through the more cerebral, logical faculty. Finally, it is something that the mystic creates in himself or herself deliberately: certain physical or mental exercises yield the final vision; it does not always come upon them unawares. Augustine seems to have imagined that privileged human beings were sometimes able to see God in this life: he cited Moses and St. Paul as examples. Pope Gregory the Great (540–604), who was an acknowledged master of the spiritual life as well as being a powerful pontiff, disagreed. He was not an intellectual and, as a typical Roman, had a more pragmatic view of spirituality. He used the metaphors of cloud, fog or darkness to suggest the obscurity of all human knowledge of the divine. His God remained hidden from human beings in an impenetrable darkness that was far more painful than the cloud of unknowing experienced by such Greek Christians as Gregory of Nyssa and Denys. God was a distressing experience for Gregory. He insisted that God was difficult of access. There was certainly no way we could talk about him familiarly, as though we had something in common. We knew nothing at all about God. We could make no predictions about his behavior on the basis of our knowledge of people: “Then only is there truth in what we know concerning God, when we are made sensible that we cannot fully know anything about him.”14 Frequently Gregory dwells upon the pain and effort of the approach to God. The joy and peace of contemplation could only be attained for a few moments after a mighty struggle. Before tasting God’s sweetness, the soul has to fight its way out of the darkness that is its natural element: It cannot fix its mind’s eyes on that which it has with hasty glance seen within itself, because it is compelled by its own habits to sink downwards. It meanwhile pants and struggles and endeavors to go above itself but sinks back, overpowered with weariness, into its own familiar darkness.15

• From A History of God (1993)

  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.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Adulating Luther, the movement also saddled itself with a model of preacherly authority that encouraged each local pastor to counter anything he considered a deviation in doctrine as though it would open the door to the Devil — a recipe for acerbic, public argument. Luther’s personal network had enabled him to place ‘his’ men in parishes all over north and central Germany, and even as far as Denmark, Bohemia and Poland, and had given him the ear of many rulers and princes; but this network died with the personal authority which had generated it. The next generation saw a church that was riven with factions, as Gnesio-Lutherans (so-called ‘genuine’ Lutherans, also known as Flacians after the prominent theologian Matthias Flacius), and Philippists (followers of Melanchthon and supporters of a more moderate Lutheranism), all claimed Luther’s mantle. Yet these divisions, life-and-death matters as they were to those involved in them, did not destroy Lutheranism. The heated polemical rhetoric could not drown out the common adherence which they all shared. In any case, the intricacies of doctrinal dispute would have meant little to those outside the ministry. Despite the catastrophic defeat of the Schmalkaldic League, Luther- anism survived, albeit in disarray. Moritz eventually fell out with the emperor when he attempted to reintroduce Catholicism into Lutheran areas; allying himself with France, Moritz campaigned with great success. The Peace of Passau, signed in 1552, accorded recognition to the Lutherans, and the former Elector Johann Friedrich and Philip of Hesse were both released from captivity. At the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, the emperor formally accepted that there were two denominations in his empire and allowed the ruler of a territory to determine the official religion of his subjects. It did not, however, include the sacra- mentarians in its provisions, and the exclusion of the new movement that would become Calvinism meant that the Peace of Augsburg would eventually prove unable to contain religious diversity; and in 1618, the Thirty Years War broke out, that would leave German lands devastated. The old world of Wittenberg died with Luther. In the midst of the Schmalkaldic War, Katharina von Bora herself had to flee Wittenberg, THE CHARIOTEER OF ISRAEL 4II the fate her husband had always feared for her. She returned and started to rebuild her properties, damaged by war, and to take in student lodgers. But times were hard and she died in 1552, from injuries she sustained after falling from a wagon which was taking her away yet again from the plague-stricken town. She was fifty-three years old.

• From A History of God (1993)

  27 Where the Greeks approached God by considering the three hypostases, refusing to analyze his single, unrevealed essence, Augustine himself and Western Christians after him have begun with the divine unity and then proceeded to discuss its three manifestations. Greek Christians venerated Augustine, seeing him as one of the great Fathers of the Church, but they were mistrustful of his Trinitarian theology, which they felt made God seem too rational and anthropomorphic. Augustine’s approach was not metaphysical, like the Greeks’, but psychological and highly personal. Augustine can be called the founder of the Western spirit. No other theologian, apart from St. Paul, has been more influential in the West. We know him more intimately than any other thinker of late antiquity, largely because of his Confessions, the eloquent and passionate account of his discovery of God. From his earliest years, Augustine had sought a theistic religion. He saw God as essential to humanity: “Thou hast made us for thyself,” he tells God at the beginning of the Confessions, “and our hearts are restless till they rest in thee!” 28 While teaching rhetoric in Carthage, he was converted to Manicheism, a Mesopotamian form of Gnosticism, but eventually he abandoned it because he found its cosmology unsatisfactory. He found the notion of the Incarnation offensive, a defilement of the idea of God, but while he was in Italy, Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, was able to convince him that Christianity was not incompatible with Plato and Plotinus. Yet Augustine was reluctant to take the final step and accept baptism. He felt that for him Christianity entailed celibacy and he was loath to take that step: “Lord, give me chastity,” he used to pray, “but not yet.” 29 His final conversion was an affair of Sturm und Drang, a violent wrench from his past life and a painful rebirth, which has been characteristic of Western religious experience. One day, while he was sitting with his friend Alypius in their garden at Milan, the struggle came to a head: From a hidden depth a profound self-examination had dredged up a heap of all my misery and set it “in the sight of my heart” (Psalm 18:15). That precipitated a vast storm bearing a massive downpour of tears. To pour it all out with the accompanying groans, I got up from beside Alypius (solitude seemed to me more appropriate for the business of weeping).... I threw myself down somehow under a certain fig tree and let my tears flow freely. Rivers streamed from my eyes, a sacrifice acceptable to you (Psalm 50:19), and—though not in these words, yet in this sense—I repeatedly said to you, “How long, O Lord, how long will you be angry to the uttermost?” (Psalm 6:4) 30 God has not always come easily to us in the West.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  Soon after, he went to Paris to meet Dorothy. She continued to see Donald, too. Then she and Robert went on a trip. That week together, they thought they were going to go crazy. Robert’s caresses put Dorothy in such a state that she begged “Take me!” He would pretend to refuse, just to see her rolling in exquisite torture, on the verge of an orgasm and needing him only to touch her with the tip of his penis. Then she learned to tease him, too, to leave him when he was about to come. She would pretend to fall asleep. And he would lie there, tortured by the desire to be touched again, afraid to awaken her. He would edge close to her, place his penis against her ass, trying to move against it, to come just by touching her, but he couldn’t, and then she would awaken and begin touching him and sucking him again. They did it so often that it became a torture. Her face was swollen from the kissing, and she had marks of his teeth on her body, and yet they could not touch each other in the street, even while walking, without jumping again with desire. They decided to get married. Robert wrote to Edna. On the day of the wedding, Edna came to Paris. Why? It was as if she wanted to see everything with her own eyes, to suffer the very last drop of bitterness. In a few days she had become an old woman. A month before she was glowing, enchanting, her voice like a song, like an aureole around her, her walk light, her smile inundating one. And now she wore a mask. Over this mask she had spread powder. There was no glow of life under it. Her hair was lifeless. The glaze in her eyes was like that of a dying person. Dorothy was faint when she saw her. She cried out to her. Edna did not answer. She merely stared. The wedding was ghostly. Donald burst in in the middle of it and behaved like a madman, threatening Dorothy for deceiving him, threatening to commit suicide. When it was over, Dorothy fainted. Edna stood there carrying flowers, a figure of death.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Yahweh was experienced as an external, transcendent reality. He needed to be humanized in some way to make him appear less alien. The political situation was deteriorating: the Babylonians invaded Judah and carried the king and the first batch of Israelites off into exile; finally Jerusalem itself was besieged. As conditions got worse, Jeremiah continued the tradition of ascribing human emotions to Yahweh: he makes God lament his own homelessness, affliction and desolation; Yahweh felt as stunned, offended and abandoned as his people; like them he seemed bemused, alienated and paralyzed. The anger that Jeremiah felt welling up in his own heart was not his own but the wrath of Yahweh. 45 When the prophets thought about “man,” they automatically also thought “God,” whose presence in the world seems inextricably bound up with his people. Indeed, God is dependent upon man when he wants to act in the world—an idea that would become very important in the Jewish conception of the divine. There are even hints that human beings can discern the activity of God in their own emotions and experiences, that Yahweh is part of the human condition. As long as the enemy stood at the gate, Jeremiah raged at his people in God’s name (though, before God, he pleaded on their behalf). Once Jerusalem had been conquered by the Babylonians in 587, the oracles from Yahweh became more comforting: he promised to save his people, now that they had learned their lesson, and bring them home. Jeremiah had been allowed by the Babylonian authorities to stay behind in Judah, and to express his confidence in the future, he bought some real estate: “For Yahweh Sabaoth says this: ‘People will buy fields and vineyards in this land again.’ ” 46 Not surprisingly, some people blamed Yahweh for the catastrophe. During a visit to Egypt, Jeremiah encountered a group of Jews who had fled to the Delta area and had no time at all for Yahweh. Their women claimed that everything had been fine as long as they had performed the traditional rites in honor of Ishtar, Queen of Heaven, but as soon as they stopped them, at the behest of the likes of Jeremiah, disaster, defeat and penury had followed. Yet the tragedy seemed to deepen Jeremiah’s own insight. 47 After the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, he began to realize that such external trappings of religion were simply symbols of an internal, subjective state. In the future, the covenant with Israel would be quite different: “Deep within them I will plant my Law, writing it in their hearts.”

• From A History of God (1993)

  Relations between Jews and Romans were usually good even in Palestine, where foreign rule was accepted less easily. 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.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Nikolaus Hausmann, another friend from Luther's generation, remained a lifelong bachelor and his death in 1538 from a stroke, which he suffered when he gave his first sermon as superintendent in Freiberg, was a bitter blow. WB 8, 3400, 6 Nov. 1539, 586:23-4. The situation was further complicated by the tensions generated in the friendship with Melanchthon and the need to show loyalty both to Luther and Melanchthon, not always on the same side. For example, Veit Amer- bach was forced to leave Wittenberg in 1543 after a dispute with Melanch- thon; WB 10, 3838, 13 Jan. 1543; 3943, 3 Dec. 1543; 3967, 9 Feb. 1544. WB 4, 1017, 8 June 1526: he asked Johann Riihel to let Agricola know, adding ‘for he must be thinking about this time of year what it means to have sons’ (87:10-11). On Agricola, see Kawerau, Agricola. See, for example, WB 4, 1009, 11 May 1526. WB 4, 1111, [10 June 1527]; 1119 [early July 1527]. WB 4, 1322, 11 Sept. 1528, 558:10—11; 1325, second half Sept. 1528; WB 5, 1378, I Feb. 1529. WB 5, 9 Sept. 1529 (Graf Albrecht of Mansfeld), 9 Sept. 1529 (Agricola); Kawerau, Agricola, 110-15: Passavant dedicated his attack to the Mansfeld counts. WB 5, 1473, 9 Sept. 1529, I51:12-18. Ratzeberger, Die handschriftliche Geschichte, 97. Kawerau, Agricola, 168-71: he left behind a letter to Count Albrecht of Mansfeld, to whom he owed his position in Eisleben, in which he poured out his frustration at his ‘low’ salary. The count responded in kind, accusing him of drunkenness, failure to perform his teaching duties, and preaching more against his colleagues than against the papists. Kawerau, Agricola, 172-3; see WT 4, 4043 (1538). He later moved to the house of Melanchthon’s mother-in-law. Férstemann, Urkundenbuch, I, 298; see also Ernst Koch, ““Deutschlands Prophet, Seher und Vater”. Johann Agricola und Martin Luther. Von den Enttauschungen einer Freundschaft’ in Peter Freybe, ed., Luther und seine Freunde, 63. WB 8, 3175, 2 Sept. 1537, 122:6-11. German translation in Koch, ‘Deutschlands Prophet’, 66. WB 8, 3254, Aug. 1538, 279:20. The letter suggested that Luther’s writ- ings contained two different views on sin and forgiveness. Agricola later noted on his draft copy that the letter “which I wrote out of pure simplicity’ had ‘set the Rhine on fire’. Next, Agricola wrote a letter of total prostration to Luther promising never to deviate in the slightest 40. 41. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. SI. NOTES TO PAGES 368-374 527 from Luther's teaching (WB 8, 3284, 26 Dec. 1538(?), 342-3). On the attempted reconciliation in the Church, 342. Koch argues that Agricola’s position was more in line with Luther's earlier views, and that Luther’s emphasis on law now followed Melanchthon’s position.

• From A History of God (1993)

  There had been a catastrophe, a primal fall, which the Gnostics described in various ways. Some said that Sophia (Wisdom), the last of the emanations, fell from grace because she aspired to a forbidden knowledge of the inaccessible Godhead. Because of her overweening presumption, she had fallen from the Pleroma and her grief and distress had formed the world of matter. Exiled and lost, Sophia had wandered through the cosmos, yearning to return to her divine Source. This amalgam of oriental and pagan ideas expressed the Gnostics’ profound sense that our world was in some sense a perversion of the celestial, born of ignorance and dislocation. Other Gnostics taught that “God” had not created the material world, since he could have had nothing to do with base matter. This had been the work of one of the aeons, which they called the demiourgos or Creator. He had become envious of “God” and aspired to be the center of the Pleroma. Consequently he fell and had created the world in a fit of defiance. As Valentinus explained, he had “made heaven without knowledge; he formed man in ignorance of man; he brought earth to light without understanding earth.”35 But the Logos, another of the aeons, had come to the rescue and descended to earth, assuming the physical appearance of Jesus in order to teach men and women the way back to God. Eventually this type of Christianity would be suppressed, but we shall see that centuries later Jews, Christians and Muslims would return to this type of mythology, finding that it expressed their religious experience of “God” more accurately than orthodox theology. These myths were never intended as literal accounts of creation and salvation; they were symbolic expressions of an inner truth. “God” and the Pleroma were not external realities “out there” but were to be found within: Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you makes everything his own and says, My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body. Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate. Learn how it happens that one watches without willing, loves without willing. If you carefully investigate these matters, you will find him in yourself.36 The Pleroma represented a map of the soul. The divine light could be discerned even in this dark world, if the Gnostic knew where to look: during the Primal Fall—of either Sophia or the Demiurge—some divine sparks had also fallen from the Pleroma and been trapped in matter. The Gnostic could find a divine spark in his own soul, could become aware of a divine element within himself which would help him to find his way home.

• From Satyricon (1)

  Nevertheless, I did not indulge myself very long in tears, being afraid that Menelaus, the tutor, might drop in upon me all alone in the lodging-house, and catch me in the midst of my troubles, so I collected my baggage and, with a heavy heart, sneaked off to an obscure quarter near the seashore. There, I kept to my room for three days. My mind was continually haunted by my loneliness and desertion, and I beat my breast, already sore from blows. “Why could not the earth have opened and swallowed me,” I wailed aloud, between the many deep-drawn groans, “or the sea, which rages even against the guiltless? Did I flee from justice, murder my ghost, and cheat the arena, in order that, after so many proofs of courage, I might be left lying here deserted, a beggar and an exile, in a lodging-house in a Greek town? And who condemned me to this desolation’? A boy stained by every form of vice, who, by his own confession, ought to be exiled: free, through vice, expert in vice, whose favors came through a throw of the dice, who hired himself out as a girl to those who knew him to be a boy! And as to the other, what about him? In place of the manly toga, he donned the woman’s stola when he reached the age of puberty: he resolved, even from his mother’s womb, never to become a man; in the slave’s prison he took the woman’s part in the sexual act, he changed the instrument of his lechery when he double-crossed me, abandoned the ties of a long-standing friendship, and, shame upon him, sold everything for a single night’s dalliance, like any other street-walker! Now the lovers lie whole nights, locked in each other’s arms, and I suppose they make a mockery of my desolation when they are resting up from the exhaustion caused by their mutual excesses. But not with impunity! If I don’t avenge the wrong they have done me in their guilty blood, I’m no free man!” CHAPTER THE EIGHTY-SECOND.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The tensions between the two men may not, however, just have concerned Melanchthon and the other Witten- bergers’ failure to tell him of the progress of the work on the confes- sion. Luther wrote to Melanchthon on 5 June 1530 and in the final paragraph, he told him of his father’s death (WB 5, 1584). Two days later, he wrote again, enclosing a letter about his father from Michael Coelius, preacher at Mansfeld (WB 5, 1586); but Melanchthon did not write between 22 May and 13 June 1530 (WB 5, 1589), and said nothing about Luther’s father either in that letter or in letters of 19 and 25 June (WB 5, 1596, 1600), though Jonas did allude to it (WB 5, 1588, 13 June 1530). Luther did not mention Melanchthon’s failure to refer to his father’s death, so it may be that he considered it to be a private matter (in which case, why send Coelius’s letter?), or they may have communicated in some other way (some letters are missing), or the omission may have rankled with Luther, and may explain some of his irritation. On 26 June, Melanchthon wrote begging Luther to write to them again: Veit Dietrich had told him Luther had determined not to write any more. There were certainly problems in getting messengers to take the letters, and it was expensive: WB 5, 1601 25 June 1530: Jonas had been forced to pay 4 guilders. Now rattled, Melanchthon even resorted to sending his own messengers; 1604, 26 June 1530, 397:19-20; and he wrote an extra letter for Wolf Hornung, a friend, to take with him, not missing the chance to be sure of getting another letter there; 1607, 27 June 1530. WB 5, 1604, 26 June 1530, 397:8—-13; 1607, 27 June 1530, 403:16—-17; 9-12. WB 5, 1602, 25 June 1530, 392:44. LW Letters, II, 327-8; WB 5, 1609, 29 June 1530, 405:3-9. WB 5, 1609, 29 June 1530. WB 5, 1611, 30 June 1530, 412:30—1. WB 5, 1611, 30 June 1530, 411:1-8. WB 5, 1610, 29? June 1530; 1614, 30 June 1530; and see also 1613, 30 June 1530 (to Agricola). WB 5, 1614, 30 June 1530, 418:16—18. WB 5, 1631, 8 July 1530 (Brenz to Luther). WB 5, 1716, 11 Sept. 1530, 618:25-7. He also began to cite Staupitz, and some of his sayings, such as “When God wants to blind someone, he shuts their eyes first’ (WB 5, 1659, 27 July 1530, 498:3—-4); and he used the same expression, which he owed to ‘meus Staupitz’ in a letter to Agricola, 1662, 27 July 1530; and WB 5, 1670, (?) July 1530. He recalled how Staupitz 57: 58. 59. 60. 6l. 62. 63. 64. NOTES TO PAES 331—336 513 had said that Luther’s attacks of melancholy were necessary trials sent by God, destining him for service to the Church: Luther now understood this in prophetic terms. : WB 5, 1716, 11 Sept.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  On 27 May 1525 Thomas Miintzer and his fellow preacher Heinrich Pfeiffer were executed and their heads and bodies displayed on pike- staffs. Miintzer had recanted on 17 May, reconciling himself to the Catholic faith, probably as a result of torture. But his final letter to the people of Miihlhausen, written on the same day, does not revoke anything. Instead he told them that he awaited martyrdom and saw his death as a sign: ‘Since it is God’s good pleasure that I should depart hence with an authentic knowledge of the divine name, and in recom- pense for certain abuses which the people embraced, not under- standing me properly — for they sought only their own interests and the divine truth was defeated as a result — I, too, am heartily content that God has ordained things in this way . . . Do not allow my death, therefore, to be a stumbling block to you, for it has come to pass for the benefit of the good and the uncomprehending.’® Luther refused to believe that Miintzer had recanted — he grumpily insisted that his interrogators had asked him the wrong questions. His con- fession, Luther said, was ‘nothing other than a devilish, hardened ? +16 obstinacy in his undertaking’: Crows and ravens were reported to have flown over the roofs of the Mansfeld castles, attacking each other and screaming. Many fell dead to the ground — a portent, it was later believed, of the coming Peas- ants’ War.” Fear that the miners would rebel and down their tools drove the counts of Mansfeld to call on Luther for help. They were 266 MARTIN LUTHER right to be worried. The miners of Heldrungen and Stolberg, where Miintzer had first preached, proved some of his most fervent supporters and in 1524 seem to have responded to the energy and violence of his apocalyptic language, though they did not join the peasants at Frank- enhausen. So in mid-April and early May 1525, Luther undertook short preaching tours, at the invitation of Count Albrecht of Mansfeld. He and Melanchthon went to Eisleben via Bitterfeld and Seeburg, and Luther preached at Stolberg, Nordhausen and Wallhausen near Allstedt.* It was a courageous itinerary, with peasants and miners rebelling throughout the region, although it carefully avoided Muhl- hausen.

• From Satyricon (1)

  “There was a certain married lady at Ephesus, once upon a time, so noted for her chastity that she even drew women from the neighboring states to come to gaze upon her! When she carried out her husband she was by no means content to comply with the conventional custom and follow the funeral cortege with her hair down, beating her naked breast in sight of the onlookers! She followed the corpse, even into the tomb; and when the body had been placed in the vault, in accordance with the Greek custom, she began to stand vigil over it, weeping day and night! Neither parents nor relations could divert her from punishing herself in this manner and from bringing on death by starvation. The magistrates, the last resort, were rebuffed and went away, and the lady, mourned by all as an unusual example, dragged through the fifth day without nourishment. A most faithful maid was in attendance upon the poor woman; she either wept in company with the afflicted one or replenished the lamp which was placed in the vault, as the occasion required. Throughout the whole city there was but one opinion, men of every calling agreed that here shone the one solitary example of chastity and of love! In the meantime the governor of the province had ordered some robbers crucified near the little vault in which the lady was bewailing her recent loss. On the following night, a soldier who was standing guard over the crosses for fear someone might drag down one of the bodies for burial, saw a light shining brightly among the tombs, and heard the sobs of someone grieving. A weakness common to mankind made him curious to know who was there and what was going on, so he descended into the tomb and, catching sight of a most beautiful woman, he stood still, afraid at first that it was some apparition or spirit from the infernal regions; but he finally comprehended the true state of affairs as his eye took in the corpse lying there, and as he noted the tears and the face lacerated by the finger-nails, he understood that the lady was unable to endure the loss of the dear departed. He then brought his own scanty ration into the vault and exhorted the sobbing mourner not to persevere in useless grief, or rend her bosom with unavailing sobs; the same end awaited us all, the same last resting place: and other platitudes by which anguished minds are recalled to sanity. But oblivious to sympathy, she beat and lacerated her bosom more vehemently than before and, tearing out her hair, she strewed it upon the breast of the corpse. Notwithstanding this, the soldier would not leave off, but persisted in exhorting the unfortunate lady to eat, until the maid, seduced by the smell of the wine, I suppose, was herself overcome and stretched out her hand to receive the bounty of their host. Refreshed by food and drink, she then began to attack the obstinacy of her mistress. ‘What good will it do you to die of hunger?’ she asked, ‘or to bury yourself alive’? Or to surrender an uncondemned spirit before the fates demand it? ‘Think you the ashes or sepultured dead can feel aught of thy woe! Would you recall the dead from the reluctant fates? Why not shake off this womanish weakness and enjoy the blessings of light while you can? The very corpse lying there ought to convince you that your duty is to live!’ When pressed to eat or to live, no one listens unwillingly, and the lady, thirsty after an abstinence of several days, finally permitted her obstinacy to be overcome; nor did she take her fill of nourishment with less avidity than had the maid who had surrendered first.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  After which his hands, feet and head burnt off and the fire died down. The executioner took a pole and turned the body, then put more wood on the fire, and afterwards he hewed a hole in the body, stabbed it with a sword, stuck a pole in it and put it back on the scaffold and so burnt it.’ All this Luther republished in detail, as if determined not to shrink from the full horror of martyrdom.” And he concluded the pamphlet with a very personal meditation: ‘Oh Lord God, I wish that I were worthy or might yet be worthy of such a confession and death. What am I? What am I doing? How ashamed I am, when I read this story that I have not long since . . . been worthy to suffer the same. But my God, if it should be so, let it be so, your will be done.’ In August, the plague had struck Wittenberg, and Jonas and Melanchthon both left with their families. But instead of departing with the rest of the university to Jena as the Elector had ordered Luther to do, and despite suffering from what we would call depres- sion (which lasted for many months), he determined to stay and nurse the sick. The monastery became a kind of hospital. Initially Luther made light of it, insisting that the plague was not as bad as people said. The first death was that of the wife of the town councillor Tilo Dhen: Luther was holding her in his arms shortly before she died. Then the pregnant wife of Georg Rorer, Luther's secretary, gave birth in dreadful pain and the baby was still-born. Exhausted by the birth 318 MARTIN LUTHER 51. Title page of Luther's pamphlet on Leonhard Kaiser’s martyrdom, Von herr Lenhard Keiser in Beyern vmb des Euangelij willen verbrant, ein selige geschicht, Nuremberg, 1528. and ‘more poisoned by the plague’, as Luther put it, she too died. Months went past and the plague continued to claim its victims. Only Bugenhagen and he had remained behind, Luther wrote to Hausmann; in fact, two chaplains, Johannes Mantel and Georg RGrer, and Luther’s wife and son remained by his side as well.*? Luther's decision to remain in Wittenberg was bold, but also revealed a reckless disregard for his own safety and that of his family. It may have been a residue of his wish for martyrdom, or, perhaps, another example of the remarkable courage that enabled him not to shirk what he felt to be his pastoral responsibility to his flock.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The trusted Spalatin had been beginning to think of leaving the Elector’s service, and wrote to Luther for advice on behalf of a ‘friend’, who was tempted by sexual thoughts. Luther got the message, and warned Spalatin to forget about marrying and to remain with the Elector, not leaving him while he was ‘perhaps so close to the grave’, for if he were to leave him now, he would be eternally sorry.” And so it proved. At the height of the Peasants’ War, in early May, Spalatin and other councillors were with the Elector at Lochau. As Spalatin described the scene later in his chronicle, the castle was completely deserted, with Duke Johann and all the men away fighting the peasants. Only the court marshal, the secretary and the doctor were present alongside Spalatin, and the Elector was on his deathbed. Spalatin had rushed to his bedside, having already sent written words of comfort in case he could not reach him in time. Friedrich, who had relied for so many years on Spalatin to read his correspondence, had reached for his glasses and read the letter himself. When Spalatin arrived, the Elector summoned him to read aloud, until Friedrich announced: ‘I can’t any more.’ Spalatin waited a little, and then asked: ‘My most gracious Lord, have you any trouble?’, to which the Elector 272 MARTIN LUTHER replied, ‘Nothing but the pains.’ He seems to have died in his sleep, while Spalatin read to him from Hebrews.” Messengers arrived from the princes on the battlefield, calling desperately for reinforcements against the peasants, but their shouts echoed through the empty halls. The man who had been such a powerful prince of the empire died on 5 May, not knowing whether the lords would prevail over the peas- ants. Yet as Spalatin noted, at the very moment Friedrich breathed his last, the first peasants were being slaughtered by Count Albrecht of Mansfeld.#* Nothing better conveys the uncertainty and turmoil of the Peasants’ War. 13 Marriage and the Flesh Both Miintzer and Luther interpreted the events of the Peasants’ War as a sacred drama and drew upon apocalyptic rhetoric: the Devil was raging, presaging the Last Days. But whereas Miintzer believed that the Last Days were imminent and must be ushered in with the sword, Luther never predicted a specific date. His apocalyptic language was more of a rhetorical intensifier than a literal prediction. He imbued his own times with significance as he identified the Pope as the Anti- christ, but such language paradoxically also helped make the present seem less important compared with the divine drama of the coming end of the world. It never, however, led Luther to retreat from engage- ment with the present, nor did it lead him to attempt to overthrow the existing order.’ Equally, while Miintzer, at least at first, seems to have believed that the seriousness of these exceptional times demanded sexual abstinence from the godly and complete dedication to the divine, Luther drew the opposite conclusion.

• From Satyricon (1)

  When he had repeated these words, Trimalchio began to weep copiously, Fortunata was crying already, and so was Habinnas, and at last, the whole household filled the dining-room with their lamentations, just as if they were taking part in a funeral. Even I was beginning to sniffle, when Trimalchio said, “Let’s live while we can, since we know we’ve all got to die. I’d rather see you all happy, anyhow, so let’s take a plunge in the bath. You’ll never regret it. I’ll bet my life on that, it’s as hot as a furnace!” “Fine business,” seconded Habinnas, “there’s nothing suits me better than making two days out of one,” and he got up in his bare feet to follow Trimalchio, who was clapping his hands. I looked at Ascyltos. “What do you think about this?” I asked. “The very sight of a bath will be the death of me.” “Let’s fall in with his suggestion,” he replied, “and while they are hunting for the bath we will escape in the crowd.” Giton led us out through the porch, when we had reached this understanding, and we came to a door, where a dog on a chain startled us so with his barking that Ascyltos immediately fell into the fish-pond. As for myself, I was tipsy and had been badly frightened by a dog that was only a painting, and when I tried to haul the swimmer out, I was dragged into the pool myself. The porter finally came to our rescue, quieted the dog by his appearance, and pulled us, shivering, to dry land. Giton had ransomed himself by a very cunning scheme, for what we had saved for him, from dinner, he threw to the barking brute, which then calmed its fury and became engrossed with the food. But when, with chattering teeth, we besought the porter to let us out at the door, “If you think you can leave by the same door you came in at,” he replied, “you’re mistaken: no guest is ever allowed to go out through the same door he came in at; some are for entrance, others for exit.” CHAPTER THE SEVENTY-THIRD.