Hope

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 Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  In literary terms, a semicolon is used when an author could’ve chosen to end their sentence but chose not to. It is used to pause—to take a breath—but another phrase always follows, one that can stand alone and independent of the first. For Parrie, and many more, that punctuation mark has become a symbol of the fight to continue writing their story with anxiety or any other mental health issue. She talks about a daily struggle to overcome the duality of her carefully crafted outward appearance of success versus her inward battle against perceived failure. Today, the semicolon has become one of the most popular tattoos in ink shops from Peoria to Paris. It symbolizes the concept of “before and after.” For those who suffer from anxiety overload, and for those leaders who watch over teams of human beings, the semicolon might symbolize a next step in all our progression. We aren’t suggesting any of us run to the closest ink shop and roll up our sleeves, but we are hoping that we all consider what entrenched behaviors we might be holding on to as leaders that are negatively affecting us, and those around us; then, we should take a breath and consider a new path using a few of the ideas we’ve shared in this book. In the world before , discussing subjects like anxiety was taboo, including and accommodating those who didn’t fit the mold too much work, biases and judgment all too common. In the world after , individualism will be valued; needless, harmful anxiety lessened; and those who struggle accepted with compassion. We hope you agree that it’s time to punctuate. AcknowledgmentsWe thank our agent Jim Levine, who grasped how important this topic could be and supported us from day one. Similarly, we were touched by the enthusiasm for the work of our editors Hollis Heimbouch and Rebecca Raskin of Harper Business. We owe a debt of gratitude to our critical reader Emily Loose, and we thank Christy Lawrence, who arranged many of the interviews and spent countless hours transcribing. Appreciation goes to our team at FindMojo.com: Paul Yoachum, Lance Garvin, Brianna Bateman, Bryce Morgan, Tanner Smith, Asher Gunsay, Garrett Elton, Mark Durham, and Jaren Durham. We thank Mark Fortier and Norbert Beatty, our publicists, and Brian Perrin and his team at Harper Business marketing. And we appreciate all those who are quoted herein; we were enriched by your wisdom.

• From A History of God (1993)

  He had tried, as it were, to confine God to his essence and say that it was impossible for him to be present outside it in his “energies.” But that was to think about God as though he were any other phenomenon and was based on purely human notions of what was or was not possible. Palamas insisted that the vision of God was a mutual ecstasy: men and women transcend themselves but God also underwent the ecstasy of transcendence by going beyond “himself” in order to make himself known to his creatures: “God also comes out of himself and becomes united with our minds by condescension.” 67 The victory of Palamas, whose theology remained normative in Orthodox Christianity, over the Greek rationalists of the fourteenth century represents a wider triumph for mysticism in all three monotheistic religions. Since the eleventh century, Muslim philosophers had come to the conclusion that reason—which was indispensable for such studies as medicine or science—was quite inadequate when it came to the study of God. To rely on reason alone was like attempting to eat soup with a fork. The God of the Sufis had gained ascendency over the God of the philosophers in most parts of the Islamic empire. In the next chapter we shall see that the God of the Kabbalists became dominant in Jewish spirituality during the sixteenth century. Mysticism was able to penetrate the mind more deeply than the more cerebral or legalistic types of religion. Its God could address more primitive hopes, fears and anxieties before which the remote God of the philosophers was impotent. By the fourteenth century the West had launched its own mystical religion and made a very promising start. But mysticism in the West would never become as widespread as in the other traditions. In England, Germany and the Lowlands, which had produced such distinguished mystics, the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century decried this unbiblical spirituality. In the Roman Catholic Church, leading mystics like St. Teresa of Avila were often threatened by the Inquisition of the Counter-Reformation. As a result of the Reformation, Europe began to see God in still more rationalistic terms. 9 Enlightenment B Y THE END of the sixteenth century, the West had embarked on a process of technicalization that would produce an entirely different kind of society and a new ideal of humanity. Inevitably this would affect the Western perception of the role and nature of God. The achievements of the newly industrialized and efficient West also changed the course of world history. The other countries of the Oikumene found it increasingly difficult to ignore the Western world, as in the past when it had lagged behind the other major civilizations, or to come to terms with it.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Less than three weeks later, while Luther was in the midst of the horrors of the Peasants’ War, making his way home, he wrote his letter to Johannes Rühel, in which he advised him not to dissuade Count Albrecht from wiping out the rebellion. But in that letter, written on May 4, he slipped in a single bright line that fairly leaps from the surrounding bleak landscape of the letter: “If I can manage it, before I die I will still marry my Kathie to spite the devil, should I hear that the peasants continue.”7 Obviously, for him to write it so offhandedly in the midst of an otherwise grim and serious letter indicates that Rühel and Luther and others were well acquainted with this person and with the possibility of Luther’s marriage to her. That he should call her “my Kathie” is the most startling, because clearly things have been going on of which no other surviving letters give us any idea. But almost certainly, the one thing that would have focused his mind on marriage—such that he blurts this out in a letter about the “murdering hordes”—was his recent visit to his parents. Visiting them had been part of his recent trip, and if mentioning “my Kathie” in his letter to Rühel is any indication, he certainly mentioned her to his parents. For all we know, he visited them specifically to mention her to them. There is no doubt that they heartily approved the idea of their son’s at long last marrying and having children. Luther was now nearly forty-two. There were two other reasons that might have made marriage seem less difficult to Luther now. One we already know, and that is the death of Frederick. His views on priests and monks marrying were more traditional than not, and surely Luther was conscious that if he were to marry, it would trouble the man he so respected and who had done so much to protect him. But Staupitz had died recently too, and his death might have been even more important in clearing the way for Luther to marry. He knew full well that it would have greatly bothered Staupitz to know that his former protégé and spiritual son had married, and that he had married a nun would have seemed dramatically worse.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Anthony is passionate about raising awareness of mental health issues. We Thrive TogetherAdrian, Chester, and Anthony have created the We Thrive Together community, which brings together passionate working adults and leaders to eliminate the stigma of anxiety at work and create positive mental health in the workplace. There is no charge to join or be a member of Thrive, and the site contains a wealth of resources and peer support. Find a link to the community at GostickandElton.com. Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com . More Praise for Anxiety at Work“Few things can paralyze the progress of any team or organization like anxiety. After decades of working with CEOs and business owners, I’ve noticed many have a negative mind-set when it comes to dealing with stress—a mindset that needs to be changed. Anxiety at Work offers practical ideas to help leaders develop healthier mindsets and healthier teams. This is a smartly written, step-by-step guide to creating a work culture that will attract and retain great people.” —John C. Maxwell, #1 New York Times bestselling author and world-renowned leadership expert “I’ve personally known anxiety—the struggle just to get out of bed every morning. Overcoming these feelings in myself, and helping others face their challenges, has been my life’s work for the past decade. I’m so grateful Gostick and Elton have turned their attention to helping in the working world, where tens of millions of employees feel overwhelmed and overanxious. In this fabulous new book, leaders will learn how to identify anxiety in their team members, understand the triggers of anxiety, and provide the right support. Anxiety at Work is the tool that businesses have been waiting for.” —Mel Robbins, daytime talk show host, CNN on-air analyst, and #1 bestselling author of The 5 Second Rule “When our team members feel too much anxiety, they attack change; they become combative or controlling as they try to ease the pain they feel. This makes organizational change difficult, even impossible. In this brilliant new book, Gostick and Elton help leaders build resilience with practical tools culled from decades coaching leaders to improve their organizational cultures.” —Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, world’s #1 leadership thinker and author of What Got You Here Won’t Get You There “Anxiety at Work is brimming with practical ideas on how to create a safe, productive place to work—from the globally recognized thought-leaders in culture and employee engagement. This desperately needed guide will become an instant classic.” —Dr. Tasha Eurich, New York Times bestselling author of Insight and Bankable Leadership “Savoring this book feels like snuggling up in a warm comforter on a cold day. The enormous demands of our world are mitigated by using the insights offered. The ideas, stories, and tools will help anyone tame apprehensions and turn anxiety into assurance.” —Dr.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In 1644, in the midst of the English Civil War, John Milton published Areopagitica, his landmark defense of the freedom of expression. In 1689, England decided that it would tolerate religions other than the established Church of England. In the first years of that century, those men and women we today call the Pilgrims were being persecuted by King James in England. But emboldened by their faith, they would flee first to Holland and then in a famous ship cross the Atlantic to what is today Massachusetts. Hard on their heels were John Winthrop and what came to be called the Massachusetts Bay Colony in Boston. Religious tolerance certainly was not yet enshrined in their way of thinking. The stories of Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams are two infamous examples. But in part because in the American colonies different faiths found themselves living cheek by jowl, tolerance of other views became a growing trend. During the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century, George Whitefield preached the Gospel up and down the thirteen American colonies so often that by the time of his death in 1770 not less than 80 percent of all Americans had heard him preach in person at least once. What he preached was a kind of ecumenical Christianity that underscored the profoundly Lutheran idea that conscience and fealty to God preceded fealty to any church or government. It therefore followed that those who did violence to the teachings of Jesus must be disobeyed. This played a huge role in emboldening the American colonists to move toward self-government. When England forced their hand, as Rome had forced Luther’s, they would vote with their feet and rebel against their mother country, just as Luther had rebelled against Mother Church. The new nation in 1776 enshrined the idea of religious liberty in its laws, such that every citizen must be free to follow his own conscience and his own religion. This stands as another of the high-water marks of Luther’s legacy. The government of the new country was specifically forbidden to establish a religion in any state or throughout the country and was obliged to trust the free market of ideas—regulated by the democratic government of the people—to make such decisions as the people themselves thought best. It is this so-called wall of separation that allowed the genius of the free market of ideas to flourish.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  We are thinking about how we make sure our managers are equipped to recognize the situation, where they may be contributing to the problem, and how best to address the issues with empathy and care. We haven’t completely cracked that nut yet, but we have started the conversation.” The hopeful news this book offers is that leaders of teams can adopt a set of eight simple practices we’ve identified that can greatly reduce the anxiety their people are feeling. Using these practices and the lessons throughout the book will help any leader convey that they genuinely care about those they are privileged to lead—sending them home each night feeling a little more valued, listened to, and included. The examples from leaders we’ve worked with will show the results can be profound. As we all adjust to a world deeply affected by the coronavirus pandemic, with heightened sensitivity that even the most successful organizations with solid growth plans and seemingly secure markets may face sudden upheaval at any time, these methods for nurturing employee resilience are needed now more than ever. Eight Strategies We have spent twenty years coaching individual managers and their teams about how to improve the work experience and organizational culture. Our research partners have helped us survey more than one million employees over the last decade, and we’ve seen powerful effects can be achieved by making easily implemented adjustments in how leaders manage. To assist specifically with the pressing challenges of rising anxiety levels, we’ve taken a deep dive into the science of what provokes anxiety in order to identify the management practices that have the greatest capacity to relieve it. From Adrian: My passion for this project has been fueled by my son, Anthony, who has helped write this book, investing it with rich perspective from one who has struggled intensely with the problem. Tony has suffered from severe anxiety since he was a child, but he was nonetheless able to graduate with honors from university as a biotechnology major. He excelled in tough classes like organic chemistry, physics, and bioinformatics, all while working part-time in an NIH-funded genetics lab and as a teaching assistant. We had many conversations throughout his undergraduate years about times when he felt he had become disconnected from his job or classes, despite his passion for the subjects and the experiments being conducted. Notwithstanding many late nights of studying and a passion to work for months at a time with no weekends off, he would now and then talk about how he felt he was going nowhere. In retrospect, these conversations screamed the duck syndrome. Many of our talks became reference points that showed up all too often in the stories told to us by workers who have recounted their anxiety.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  He left the meeting and over the next few hours confronted each person we’d quoted. Each recanted like a prisoner on the Spanish Inquisition rack. They agreed that, yes, he was a terrific collaborator, and, yes, we must have misinterpreted what they’d said. Our employee gladly returned to his delusions. We recognize that there is a small percentage of the human population who will never accept coaching. They want validation, not growth. Leaders can continue to patiently try to enroll these folks in the coaching process, but at some point we have to decide if they are the right fit for their roles. In this case, our uncollaborative worker was eventually “remixed” after team member complaints grew too loud to ignore (by then we had a new CEO). Yet despite the uncoachable out there, we must persist in helping our people excel and thrive. Feedback—both positive and constructive—is necessary to developing mental toughness and resilience in team members. Constructive feedback is vital because it clarifies expectations, builds confidence that people can improve, and helps team members learn from and recover from mistakes (which we all make). It’s also worth noting that with time, these conversations become less uncomfortable. When it’s the norm in a team, people don’t take correction as personally. It’s just a part of the way the group runs, which is why these one-on-ones should be positive and genuinely constructive, not intense or awkward. Putting the Methods TogetherDoria Camaraza is senior vice president and general manager of the American Express Service Centers in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Mexico City, Mexico; and Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has led a very large team of thousands of call center professionals through more than a decade of perpetual change and uncertainty. One of the best leaders we have worked with, Camaraza attempts to be transparent about situations facing the volatile credit card industry and commits to her people that she’ll inform them as soon as she knows something may be changing. A few of the formal values she encourages her leadership team to live by include: “We communicate openly, honestly, and candidly”; “We seek solutions and not blame”; and “We try to involve people in decisions that affect them.” Camaraza shares tough news, but also gives an ample amount of hope. She explains to her employees why the company maintains a proprietary operation rather than outsourcing to a third-party call center. She lets them know what they need to maintain in terms of timeliness, accuracy, and cost. Leaders often shy away from discussing hard truths. They fear that such a discussion might dishearten their workers or cause them to bolt. And yet, there’s something exhilarating for employees about facing facts head-on.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Another valuable medicine was tried, but Luther said, “I am traveling hence, I will relinquish my spirit.” Again he repeated three times very quickly, in Latin, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit, You have redeemed me, God of Truth,” after which he fell silent. Jonas and Coelius now asked him, “Reverend Father, will you die faithful to Christ and to the doctrine you have preached?” “Yes,” Luther replied clearly, so that all those around could hear him. He fell asleep again and, after a quarter of an hour, he gave up his spirit “in stillness and great patience.” Jonas and Coelius, who wrote the account, noted that “no one could discern (to this we bear witnesses before God on our consciences) any unrest or discomfort of his body, or pains of death.”19 Luther died, as he had lived, in public. The reason his last moments were watched and chronicled in such detail was that, according to medieval belief, a good death, especially one without pain, was a sure sign that the person had lived well and would go to heaven; a bad death would have suggested that he was a heretic. Luther’s last moments therefore became a final proof, for if he had died in agony, or despaired in his final hour, the Protestant movement itself would have been put into question. Everyone dreaded a sudden, unexpected end that left the individual unable to receive the last rites. In Lutheranism there was no such sacrament and no ritual framework for dying and so the death itself became its own testament. Lutherans themselves had made much capital out of the unhappy deaths of their enemies in the past.20 Zwingli’s death on the battlefield at Kappel had been deeply shocking, and for Luther it proved God’s judgment, not just on Zwingli but on the sacramentarian movement as a whole. In 1536 it was the turn of his old enemy Erasmus, who died in Basle without the presence of a priest and without having made confession. He had gone straight to hell, Luther believed, adding acidly that although it was said that Erasmus called on Christ to have mercy on his soul, this was probably an invention. For himself, Luther hoped that he would have a minister of the Word with him when he died.21 [image "SKD250674 Martin Luther (1483-1546) on his Deathbed, c.1546 (oil on panel) by Cranach, Lucas the Younger (1515-86) (studio of); 64x50.5 cm; Gemaeldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, Germany; (add.info.: auf dem Sterbebett;); © Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; German, out of copyright" file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_081_r1.jpg] [image "SKD250674 Martin Luther (1483-1546) on his Deathbed, c.1546 (oil on panel) by Cranach, Lucas the Younger (1515-86) (studio of); 64x50.5 cm; Gemaeldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, Germany; (add.info.: auf dem Sterbebett;); © Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; German, out of copyright" file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_081_r1.jpg] 68. Workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder, Luther on His Deathbed. Many copies were made of this image.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Southgate’s success puts a spotlight on the new type of leaders the modern world is demanding. His style combines vulnerability with care for the individual. A student of leadership, the new manager brought in a psychologist/culture coach to work with the players. He even shared with his team his own personal experience of missing a penalty shot in Euro 96 that kept England from advancing to the championship. His willingness to discuss his setbacks and how anxiety affected him in the game has been a revolutionary concept in team management. It has liberated his players and staff to enjoy the challenge of competition rather than worry about the fear of failure and the “what if it all goes wrong” catastrophizing. Players say they now approach national team games with an excitement about showing off their skills to the world versus a fear of what might go wrong. Mental health had never been considered as important as technical excellence in sports, or in business for that matter, but teams are finding it is the mental game that is offering the greatest competitive advantage. Southgate was the first coach at a high level willing to talk about the anxiety that professional players face, and to help his team members by sitting down in frequent one-on-one and small-group discussions to talk through their life experiences and anxiety with compassion. That kind of leadership is incredibly inspiring for everyone, especially for those who struggle with anxiety. And leaders need to understand how important the anxious are to the success of any organization. We find society functions because of the worrywarts in it, not despite them. Indeed, observations of our animal cousins in the wild by the famous primatologist Dian Fossey revealed that anxious chimps were pivotal to the survival of groups. They were the light sleepers, the ones who sensed danger first and sounded the alarm; they constituted a chimpanzee early warning system. In one experiment, Fossey decided to move a group’s anxious chimps to another location, and when she returned a few months later she found the other apes had perished. It seems that group survival had hinged on having anxious individuals in the pack to alert the others to impending danger. It’s Beyond My Purview. Right?It’s easy to assume that some employees arrive at the workplace more able to bounce back from stressful situations than others, whether by nature or upbringing, and that there’s nothing much a leader can do to build up a person’s resilience. Admittedly, certain folks do seem to keep going, no matter what life throws at them, and there’s fascinating science attempting to identify why some of us humans are more naturally resilient than others. For instance, although nearly everyone suffers negative events over a lifetime—job loss, divorce, hospitalization, and so on—people respond to traumas very differently.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Many of these sects were Messianic in tone and proclaimed the imminent arrival of a wholly new world. There had been an outbreak of apocalyptic excitement in England under the Puritan government of Oliver Cromwell, especially after the execution of King Charles I in 1649. The Puritan authorities had found it difficult to control the religious fervor that erupted in the army and among the ordinary people, many of whom believed that the Day of the Lord was at hand. God would pour his Spirit on all his people, as promised in the Bible, and establish his Kingdom definitively in England. Cromwell himself seems to have entertained similar hopes, as had those Puritans who had settled in New England during the 1620s. In 1649 Gerard Winstanley had founded his community of “Diggers” near Cobham in Surrey, determined to restore mankind to its original state when Adam had tilled the Garden of Eden: in this new society, private property, class distinction and human authority would wither away. The first Quakers—George Fox and James Naylor and their disciples—preached that all men and women could approach God directly. There was an Inner Light within each individual, and once it had been discovered and nurtured, everybody, irrespective of class or status, could achieve salvation here on earth. Fox himself preached pacifism, nonviolence and a radical egalitarianism for his Society of Friends. Hope for liberty, equality and fraternity had surfaced in England some 140 years before the people of Paris stormed the Bastille. The most extreme examples of this new religious spirit had much in common with the late medieval heretics known as the Brethren of the Free Spirit. As the British historian Norman Cohn explains in The Pursuit of the Millennium, Revolutionary Millennarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, the Brethren were accused by their enemies of pantheism. They “did not hesitate to say: ‘God is all that is,’ ‘God is in every stone and in each limb of the human body as surely as in the Eucharistic bread.’ ‘Every created thing is divine.’ ” 35 It was a reinterpretation of Plotinus’s vision. The eternal essence of all things, which had emanated from the One, was divine. Everything that existed yearned to return to its Divine Source and would eventually be reabsorbed into God: even the three Persons of the Trinity would finally be submerged into the primal Unity. Salvation was achieved by the recognition of one’s own divine nature here on earth. A treatise by one of the Brethren, found in a hermit’s cell near the Rhine, explained: “The divine essence is my essence and my essence is the divine essence.” The Brethren repeatedly asserted: “Every rational creature is in its nature blessed.” 36 It was not a philosophical creed so much as a passionate longing to transcend the limits of humanity. As the Bishop of Strasbourg said, the Brethren “say they are God by nature, without any distinction.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Again, this is said to have achieved astonishing results. As Abulafia explained, it brings to light hidden mental processes and liberated the Kabbalist from “the prison of the natural spheres and leads [him] to the boundaries of the divine sphere.” 57 In this way, the “seals” of the soul were unlocked and the initiate discovered resources of psychic power that enlightened his mind and assuaged the pain of his heart. In rather the same way as a psychoanalytic patient needs the guidance of his therapist, Abulafia insisted that the mystical journey into the mind could only be undertaken under the supervision of a master of Kabbalah. He was well aware of the dangers because he himself had suffered from a devastating religious experience in his youth which had almost caused him to despair. Today patients will often internalize the person of the analyst in order to appropriate the strength and health that he or she represents. Similarly Abulafia wrote that the Kabbalist would often “see” and “hear” the person of his spiritual director, who became “the mover from inside, who opens the closed doors within him.” He felt a new surge of power and an inner transformation that was so overwhelming that it seemed to issue from a divine source. A disciple of Abulafia gave another interpretation of the ecstasy: the mystic, he said, became his own Messiah. In ecstasy he was confronted with a vision of his own liberated and enlightened self: Know that the complete spirit of prophecy consists for the prophet in that he suddenly sees the shape of his self standing before him and he forgets his self and it is disengaged from him ... and of this secret our teachers said [in the Talmud]: “Great is the strength of the prophets, who compare the form of Him who formed it” [that is, “who compare men to God”]. 58 Jewish mystics were always reluctant to claim union with God. Abulafia and his disciples would only say that by experiencing union with a spiritual director or by realizing a personal liberation the Kabbalist had been touched by God indirectly. There are obvious differences between medieval mysticism and modern psychotherapy, but both disciplines have evolved similar techniques to achieve healing and personal integration. In the West Christians were slower to develop a mystical tradition. They had fallen behind the monotheists in the Byzantine and Islamic empires and were perhaps not ready for this new development. During the fourteenth century, however, there was a veritable explosion of mystical religion, especially in Northern Europe. Germany in particular produced a flock of mystics: Meister Eckhart (1260–? 1327), Johannes Tauler (1300–61), Gertrude the Great (1256–1302) and Henry Suso (ca. 1295–1306). England also made a significant contribution to this Western development and produced four great mystics who quickly attracted a following on the Continent as well as in their own country: Richard Rolle of Hampole (1290–1349), the unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Walter Hilton (d.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Today, we generally see science and philosophy as antagonistic to religion, but the Faylasufs were usually devout men and saw themselves as loyal sons of the Prophet. As good Muslims, they were politically aware, despised the luxury of the court and wanted to reform their society according to the dictates of reason. Their venture was important: since their scientific and philosophic studies were dominated by Greek thought, it was imperative to find a link between their faith and this more rationalistic, objective outlook. It can be most unhealthy to relegate God to a separate intellectual category and to see faith in isolation from other human concerns. The Faylasufs had no intention of abolishing religion, but wanted to purify it of what they regarded as primitive and parochial elements. They had no doubt that God existed—indeed they regarded his existence as self-evident—but felt that it was important to prove this logically in order to show that al-Lah was compatible with their rationalist ideal. There were problems, however. We have seen that the God of the Greek philosophers was very different from the God of revelation: the Supreme Deity of Aristotle or Plotinus was timeless and impassible; he took no notice of mundane events, did not reveal himself in history, had not created the world and would not judge it at the end of time. Indeed history, the major theophany of the monotheistic faiths, had been dismissed by Aristotle as inferior to philosophy. It had no beginning, middle or end, since the cosmos emanated eternally from God. The Faylasufs wanted to get beyond history, which was a mere illusion, to glimpse the changeless, ideal world of the divine. Despite the emphasis on rationality, Falsafah demanded a faith of its own. It took great courage to believe that the cosmos, where chaos and pain seemed more in evidence than a purposeful order, was really ruled by the principle of reason. They too had to cultivate a sense of an ultimate meaning amid the frequently disastrous and botched events of the world around them. There was a nobility in Falsafah, a search for objectivity and a timeless vision. They wanted a universal religion, which was not limited to a particular manifestation of God or rooted in a definite time and place; they believed that it was their duty to translate the revelation of the Koran into the more advanced idiom developed through the ages by the best and noblest minds in all cultures. Instead of seeing God as a mystery, the Faylasufs believed that he was reason itself.

• From A History of God (1993)

  When Muhammad began to preach in Mecca, he had only a modest conception of his role. He did not believe that he was founding a new universal religion but saw himself bringing the old religion of the one God to the Quraysh, At first he did not even think that he should preach to the other Arab tribes but only to the people of Mecca and its environs. 9 He had no dreams of founding a theocracy and would probably not have known what a theocracy was: he himself should have no political function in the city but was simply its nadhir , the Warner. 10 Al-Lah had sent him to warn the Quraysh of the perils of their situation. His early message was not doom-laden, however. It was a joyful message of hope. Muhammad did not have to prove the existence of God to the Quraysh. They all believed implicitly in al-Lah, who was the creator of heaven and earth, and most believed him to be the God worshipped by the Jews and Christians. His existence was taken for granted. As God says to Muhammad in an early sura of the Koran: And thus it is [with most people]: if thou ask them, “Who is it that has created the heavens and the earth and made the sun and moon subservient [to his laws]?”—they will surely answer al-Lah. And thus it is, if thou ask them, “Who is it that sends down water from the skies, giving life thereby to the earth after it had been lifeless?” they will surely answer “al-Lah.” 11 The trouble was that the Quraysh were not thinking through the implications of this belief. God had created each one of them from a drop of semen, as the very first revelation had made clear; they depended upon God for their food and sustenance, and yet they still regarded themselves as the center of the universe in an unrealistic presumption ( yatqa ) and self-sufficiency ( istaqa ) 12 that took no account of their responsibilities as members of a decent Arab society. Consequently the early verses of the Koran all encourage the Quraysh to become aware of God’s benevolence, which they can see wherever they look. They will then realize how many things they still owe to him, despite their new success, and appreciate their utter dependency upon the Creator of the natural order: [Only too often] man destroys himself: how stubbornly does he deny the truth! [Does man ever consider] out of what substance [God] creates him? Out of a drop of sperm he creates him, and then determines his nature and then makes it easy for him to go through life; and in the end he causes him to die and brings him to the grave; and then, if it be his will, he shall raise him again to life.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  To be sure, some Catholic traditionalists continue to see Martin Luther as an implacable foe, as the man who ruined the world forever and fractured things into the splintered pile of cultural rubble in which we have ever since strained to exist. But most Catholics wittingly or unwittingly enjoy many of the reforms that over time have come into the church and that have mirrored the very reforms Luther was advocating. For example, the ideas that the congregation ought to be more involved in worship and that the Mass might be performed in a language the people understood must be traced back to the persona non grata named Martin Luther. It was the church council called Vatican II that incorporated many of these reforms. Luther’s Larger Legacy and the Advent of the FutureThe far-reaching results of Martin Luther’s life and work are unprecedented, touching nearly every aspect of modern life in the West, and these values continue to grow beyond the West. The world of Luther’s youth was a single reality, an unyielding plinth of Western Christendom, in which hairline cracks were neither permitted nor existent. And then that changed forever. The world after Luther was a world of variegated pluralism—of dissent, of religious wars, of the advent of religious freedom, of egalitarianism, and then of democracy and self-government and liberty, and of much else. And all of these things are still with us today as history dances along the horizon toward its unknown telos. Therefore many see Luther’s legendary hammer blows upon the door of the Schlosskirche as the prime movers in creating the complicated and free future in which we live. Those first concussions pushed the world beyond its medieval stasis and set us on our current course. But the first place to begin in considering Luther’s legacy is with the simple idea of pluralism. The Roman Catholic Church before Luther had nearly infinite power and authority, and after Luther that changed. Luther opened the door to innumerable possibilities counter to the Roman church. Of course this was never his intention. His idée fixe was simply to mend what was broken, to save the foundering ship of the church, to steer it from the rocks ahead, and to be used by God as a savior and reformer of the institution that Luther loved and had served as faithfully as any before him. But we know this was not to be and that in his zeal to do this one thing he instead unintentionally did quite another.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Once they had gone beyond this egotism, the Hasid would realize that there was no reality but God. Like the Sufi who had experienced ’fana, the Hasid would achieve ecstasy. Baer explained that he would get beyond himself: “his whole being is so absorbed that nothing remains and he has no self-consciousness whatsoever.” 65 The disciplines of Habad made Kabbalah a tool of psychological analysis and self-knowledge, teaching the Hasid to descend, sphere by sphere, ever more deeply into his inner world until he reached the center of himself. There he discovered the God that was the only true reality. The mind could discover God by the exercise of reason and imagination, but this would not be the objective God of the philosophes and such scientists as Newton, but a profoundly subjective reality inseparable from the self. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been a period of painful extremity and excitement of spirit which had mirrored the revolutionary turbulence of the political and social world. There had been nothing comparable in the Muslim world at this time, although this is difficult for a Western person to ascertain because eighteenth-century Islamic thought has not been much studied. It has generally been too easily dismissed by Western scholars as an uninteresting period, and it has been held that while Europe had an Enlightenment, Islam went into decline. Recently, however, this perspective has been challenged as being too simplistic. Even though the British had achieved control of India in 1767, the Muslim world was not yet fully aware of the unprecedented nature of the Western challenge. The Indian Sufi Shah Walli-Ullah of Delhi (1703–62) was perhaps the first to sense the new spirit. He was an impressive thinker who was suspicious of cultural universalism but believed that Muslims should unite to preserve their heritage. Even though he did not like the Shiah, he believed that Sunnis and Shiis should find common ground. He tried to reform the Shariah to make it more relevant to the new conditions of India. Walli-Ullah seemed to have had a presentiment of the consequences of colonialism: his son would lead a jihad against the British. His religious thought was more conservative, heavily dependent upon Ibn al-Arabi: man could not develop his full potential without God. Muslims were still happy to draw on the riches of the past in religious matters, and Walli-Ullah is an example of the power that Sufism could still inspire. In many parts of the world, however, Sufism had become somewhat decadent, and a new reforming movement in Arabia presaged the swing away from mysticism that would characterize the Muslim perception of God during the nineteenth century and the Islamic response to the challenge of the West. Like the Christian reformers of the sixteenth century, Muhammad ibn al-Wahhab (d.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Second Isaiah wasted no time denouncing the gods of the goyim, who, since the catastrophe, could have been seen as victorious. He calmly assumed that Yahweh—not Marduk or Baal—had performed the great mythical deeds that brought the world into being. For the first time, the Israelites became seriously interested in Yahweh’s role in creation, perhaps because of renewed contact with the cosmological myths of Babylon. They were not, of course, attempting a scientific account of the physical origins of the universe but were trying to find comfort in the harsh world of the present. If Yahweh had defeated the monsters of chaos in primordial time, it would be a simple matter for him to redeem the exiled Israelites. Seeing the similarity between the Exodus myth and the pagan tales of victory over watery chaos at the beginning of time, Second Isaiah urged his people to look forward confidently to a new show of divine strength. Here, for example, he refers to the victory of Baal over Lotan, the sea-monster of Canaanite creation mythology, who was also called Rahab, the Crocodile (tannīn) and the Abyss (tehōm): Awake, awake! clothe yourself in strength, arm of Yahweh, Awake, as in the past, in times of generations long ago. Did you not split Rahab in two, and pierce the Dragon (tannīn) through? Did you not dry up the sea, the waters of the great Abyss (tehōm), to make the seabed a road for the redeemed to cross?57 Yahweh had finally absorbed his rivals in the religious imagination of Israel; in exile, the lure of paganism had lost its attraction and the religion of Judaism had been born. At a time when the cult of Yahweh might reasonably have been expected to perish, he became the means that enabled people to find hope in impossible circumstances. Yahweh, therefore, had become the one and only God. There was no attempt to justify his claim philosophically. As always, the new theology succeeded not because it could be demonstrated rationally but because it was effective in preventing despair and inspiring hope. Dislocated and displaced as they were, the Jews no longer found the discontinuity of the cult of Yahweh alien and disturbing. It spoke profoundly to their condition. Yet there was nothing cozy about Second Isaiah’s image of God. He remained beyond the grasp of the human mind: For my thoughts are not your thoughts, my ways not your ways—it is Yahweh who speaks. Yes, the heavens are as high above earth as my ways are above your ways, my thoughts above your thoughts.58

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  So when Luther himself got the upper hand—theologically speaking and in terms of governmental power too—how would he deal with dissent? We see that Luther still had one foot in the medieval world, because when writing on the subject of the Jews in 1543, he was not arguing that they should be able to live freely, even with their (to him) flawed ideas. He feared greatly that they would be able to convince Christians of the falseness of the Christian view, and rather than be willing to deal with the consequences of this, he argued that their dissent must be crushed, which is precisely what he had experienced himself from the powers at Rome in his own dissent. But the willingness to tolerate dissent, which is the true nature of freedom and of love, like the good leaven of which Jesus spoke, could not be stopped in spreading throughout the whole lump of Western civilization, despite Luther’s late-in-life abrogation of what he had set in motion. Luther virtually single-handedly had put the leaven into history’s dough, and his most grievous sins had little effect on the process of the eventual rising of the whole. In the past, we lived in a world where might actually made right, where truth was the power of the sword. Or where there was no actual right, so that the appearance that might made right held sway completely. The Catholic church was in those days the Christian church, and in those days the church much like the Turks and the Ottoman caliphate battled with guns, not with competing truth claims. So just as today radical Islamists may believe there is no truth but the sword—that they can enforce their views through torture and death—the church once did this too. But today we live in a world where even if someone can do that, there are voices that will rise up and say that it is wrong. We live in a world where even though someone might be right and know he is right, he also knows that to try to force his views is as bad as holding the wrong views. That is the revolution that is the father and mother of all other revolutions. Democracy and FreedomThus, despite his grievous failings and contradictions, once Luther sided with a view of the Bible that was different from Rome’s, our modern idea of freedom had been born. What follows is, in a word, everything. First there was a plurality of churches. The Reformation spread beyond Germany to England and to many other countries. But then this phenomenon metastasized as aspects of this new way of seeing things raised their heads even against these newly established Protestant churches. Still more churches broke out everywhere, but not without skirmishes and horrible bloodshed. But hope had been born, and from that point on the momentum once and for all lay with the thing with feathers that Luther had hatched.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In Poland and Lithuania there were public processions in his honor. In the Ottoman empire, prophets wandered through the streets describing visions in which they had seen Shabbetai seated upon a throne. All business ceased; ominously, the Jews of Turkey dropped the name of the sultan from the Sabbath prayers and put in Shabbetai’s name instead. Eventually, when Shabbetai arrived in Istanbul in January 1666, he was arrested as a rebel and imprisoned in Gallipoli. After centuries of persecution, exile and humiliation, there was hope. All over the world, Jews had experienced an inner freedom and liberation that seemed similar to the ecstasy that the Kabbalists had experienced for a few moments when they contemplated the mysterious world of the sefiroth . Now this experience of salvation was no longer simply the preserve of a privileged few but seemed common property. For the first time, Jews felt that their lives had value; redemption was no longer a vague hope for the future but was real and full of meaning in the present. Salvation had come! This sudden reversal made an indelible impression. The eyes of the whole Jewish world were fixed on Gallipoli, where Shabbetai had even made an impression on his captors. The Turkish vizier housed him in considerable comfort. Shabbetai began to sign his letters: “I am the Lord your God, Shabbetai Zevi.” But when he was brought back to Istanbul for his trial, he had fallen once again into a depression. The sultan gave him the choice of conversion to Islam or death: Shabbetai chose Islam and was immediately released. He was given an imperial pension and died as an apparently loyal Muslim on September 17, 1676. Naturally the appalling news devastated his supporters, many of whom instantly lost their faith. The Rabbis attempted to erase his memory from the earth: they destroyed all the letters, pamphlets and tracts about Shabbetai they could find. To this day, many Jews are embarrassed by this Messianic debacle and find it hard to deal with. Rabbis and rationalists alike have downplayed its significance. Recently, however, scholars have followed the late Gershom Scholem in trying to understand the meaning of this strange episode and its more significant aftermath. 48 Astonishing as it may seem, many Jews remained loyal to their Messiah, despite the scandal of his apostasy. The experience of redemption had been so profound that they could not believe that God had allowed them to be deluded. It is one of the most striking instances of the religious experience of salvation taking precedence over mere facts and reason.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Indeed, such institutions as the Royal Society in London were dedicated to the collection of new knowledge to replace the old. Specialists in the various sciences were encouraged to pool their findings to aid this process. Instead of keeping their discoveries secret, the new scientific institutions wanted to disseminate knowledge in order to advance future growth in their own and other fields. The old conservative spirit of the Oikumene, therefore, had been replaced in the West by a desire for change and a belief that continual development was practicable. Instead of fearing that the younger generation was going to the dogs, as in former times, the older generation expected their children to live better than they. The study of history was dominated by a new myth: that of Progress. It achieved great things, but now that damage to the environment has made us realize that this way of life is as vulnerable as the old, we are, perhaps, beginning to grasp that it is as fictitious as most of the other mythologies that have inspired humanity over the centuries. While the pooling of resources and discoveries drew people together, the new specialization inevitably pulled them apart in other ways. Hitherto it had been possible for an intellectual to keep abreast of knowledge on all fronts. The Muslim Faylasufs, for example, had been proficient in medicine, philosophy and aesthetics. Indeed, Falsafah had offered its disciples a coherent and inclusive account of what was believed to be the whole of reality. By the seventeenth century, the process of specialization that would become so marked a feature of Western society was beginning to make itself felt. The various disciplines of astronomy, chemistry and geometry were beginning to become independent and autonomous. Ultimately in our own day it would be impossible for an expert in one field to feel any competence whatever in another. It followed that every major intellectual saw himself less as a conserver of tradition than as a pioneer. He was an explorer, like the navigators who had penetrated to new parts of the globe. He was venturing into hitherto uncharted realms for the sake of his society. The innovator who made such an effort of imagination to break new ground and, in the process, overthrow old sanctities, became a cultural hero. There was new optimism about humanity as control over the natural world, which had once held mankind in thrall, appeared to advance in leaps and bounds. People began to believe that better education and improved laws could bring light to the human spirit.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Even philosophy begins with wonder, which is the experience of the not-knowing, the not-yet. Socialism also looks forward to a utopia, but, despite the Marxist rejection of faith, where there is hope there is also religion. Like Feuerbach, Bloch saw God as the human ideal that has not yet come to be, but instead of seeing this as alienating he found it essential to the human condition. Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), the German social theorist of the Frankfurt school, also saw “God” as an important ideal in a way that was reminiscent of the prophets. Whether he existed or not or whether we “believe in him” is superfluous. Without the idea of God there is no absolute meaning, truth or morality: ethics becomes simply a question of taste, a mood or a whim. Unless politics and morality somehow include the idea of “God,” they will remain pragmatic and shrewd rather than wise. If there is no absolute, there is no reason that we should not hate or that war is worse than peace. Religion is essentially an inner feeling that there is a God. One of our earliest dreams is a longing for justice (how frequently we hear children complain: “It’s not fair!”). Religion records the aspirations and accusations of innumerable human beings in the face of suffering and wrong. It makes us aware of our finite nature; we all hope that the injustice of the world will not be the last word. The fact that people who have no conventional religious beliefs should keep returning to central themes that we have discovered in the history of God indicates that the idea is not as alien as many of us assume. Yet during the second half of the twentieth century, there has been a move away from the idea of a personal God who behaves like a larger version of us. There is nothing new about this. As we have seen, the Jewish scriptures, which Christians call their “Old” Testament, show a similar process; the Koran saw al-Lah in less personal terms than the Judeo-Christian tradition from the very beginning. Doctrines such as the Trinity and the mythology and symbolism of the mystical systems all strove to suggest that God was beyond personality. Yet this does not seem to have been made clear to many of the faithful. When John Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, published Honest to God in 1963, stating that he could no longer subscribe to the old personal God “out there,” there was uproar in Britain. A similar furor has greeted various remarks by David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham, even though these ideas are commonplace in academic circles.