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 Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  political benefits from their Monothelete compromise in the face of Arab military successes led them into brutal measures, not merely against Maximus but against Pope Martin (see p. 345); that did more to harm than help the Monothelete cause. Maximus did not live to see the final condemnation of Monotheletism at the sixth Council of Constantinople in 680–81. The successful assertion of Christ’s human will is a theme which gives a human immediacy to the sufferings of the Saviour – so much greater than those of the believer, but not separated in kind from them. That conviction has strengthened many in the varied sufferings of Orthodoxy in later centuries.34 SMASHING IMAGES: THE ICONOCLASTIC CONTROVERSY (726- 843) When the Monotheletes were defeated in 681, they pointed grimly to a new setback for the empire as a sign of God’s disapproval: a move southwards by the Bulgars, another in that long sequence of peoples who had drifted westwards from central Asia to seek a home in Europe. In 680 Bulgars defeated Byzantine frontier forces and set up a new headquarters at Pliska, in territory which forms part of the modern Bulgaria. In the centuries afterwards, the Bulgars remained one of the more uncomfortable recurrent problems for Byzantine emperors. But the wrath of God on the empire seemed even more concentrated in the menace of Islam, which despite the repulse of Arab armies from the walls of Constantinople in 678 continued to threaten the imperial territories in Asia Minor. It was natural to wonder whether elements in the faith and practice of such successful warriors represented God’s will for the Christian Church; and this became the conviction of a military commander whose grim persistence in the unending slog of protecting Byzantine frontiers earned him the imperial throne in 717 as Leo III. Leo was known as ‘the Isaurian’ from his origins in a frontier province of Asia Minor, and it may be that already here, in close proximity to Islamic territories, he had become impressed with one aspect of Muslim austerity, the consistent rejection of pictorial representations of the divine. That contrasted significantly with a growing feature of devotion in Byzantine religion: the importance and indeed divine power attributed to images or icons. Islamic iconophobia, hatred of images, confronted Byzantine iconophilia, and Islam seemed to be winning. God’s message was particularly emphatically conveyed in a spectacular episode of the volcanic and seismic activity so characteristic of the eastern Mediterranean. In 726 a massive eruption devastated the Santorini

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Religious Zionists had thus carved out for themselves a distinctive way of life, but during the early years of the state, some suffered a crisis of identity. They seemed to fall between two worlds: they were not Zionist enough for the secularists, and their achievements could not compete with the triumph of the secular pioneers, who had brought the state into being. In the same way, they were not Orthodox enough for the Haredim, and knew that they could not match their expertise in Torah. This crisis led, during the early 1950S, to yet another youth rebellion. A small circle of about a dozen fourteen-year-old boys, who were pupils at Kfar Haro’eh, one of the yeshiva high schools, began to live more stringently religious lives, in much the same way as the Haredim. They insisted upon modest dress and the segregation of the sexes, banned frivolous conversations and trivial recreations, and supervised one another’s lives in a system involving public confession and trials for miscreants. They called themselves Gahelet (“glowing embers”), linking their Haredi rigor with an intense nationalism. They dreamed of building a kibbutz with a yeshiva in the center, where the men would study Talmud day and night, like Haredim, while the women, relegated, ultra-Orthodox style, to the inferior but complementary sphere of logos, supported them and farmed the land. The Gahelet became an elite group in religious Zionist circles, but they felt that their Orthodoxy would not be complete until, like the Hasidim and Misnagdim, they found a rabbi to bless and guide them. In the late 1950s they fell under the spell of the ageing Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the son of Rabbi Abraham Yitzhak Kook, whose work we considered in Chapter Six.81 By the time the Gahelet discovered Rabbi Zvi Yehuda, he was almost seventy years old, and was generally considered to be not half the man his father had been. He was the principal of the Merkaz Harav Yeshiva in north Jerusalem, which had been founded by his father but was now dwindling, with only twenty students. But Kook the Younger’s ideas appealed immediately to the Gahelet, because he went much further than Abraham Yitzhak and yet, at the same time, had so simplified the elder Kook’s complex dialectical vision that it had the streamlined form of a modern ideology. Where Kook the Elder had seen a divine purpose in secular Zionism, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda believed that the secular State of Israel was the Kingdom of God tout court; every clod of its earth was holy: Every Jew who comes to Eretz Yisrael, every tree that is planted in the soil of Israel, every soldier added to the army of Israel, constitutes another spiritual stage, literally; another stage in the process of redemption.82

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But Princeton was not typical. Where the Hodges and Warfield were beginning to define faith as correct belief and putting great emphasis upon doctrinal orthodoxy, other Protestants, such as the veteran abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87), were taking a more liberal line.21 Dogma, in Beecher’s view, was of secondary importance, and it was unchristian to penalize others for holding different theological opinions. Liberals were open to such modern scientific enterprises as Darwinism or the Higher Criticism of the Bible. For Beecher, God was not a distant, separate reality but was present in natural processes here below, so evolution could be seen as evidence of God’s ceaseless concern for his creation. More important than doctrinal correctness was the practice of Christian love. Liberal Protestants continued to emphasize the importance of social work in the slums and cities, convinced that they could, by their dedicated philanthropy, establish God’s Kingdom of justice in this world. It was an optimistic theology that appealed to the prosperous middle classes who were in a position to enjoy the fruits of modernity. By the 1880s, this New Theology was taught in many of the main Protestant schools in the northern states. Theologians such as John Bescon in Evolution and Religion (1897) and John Fiske in Through Nature to God (1899) were convinced that there could be no enmity between science and faith. Both spoke of the divine as immanent in the world; every throb in the pulsing life of the universe revealed God’s presence. Throughout history, the spiritual perceptions of human beings had been evolving, and now humanity was on the brink of a new world, in which men and women would finally realize that there was no distinction between the so-called “supernatural” and the mundane. They would realize their profound affinity with God and live in peace with one another.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Besides engaging in the intellectual life of the Enlightenment, some of these Jewish maskilim (“enlightened ones”) began to study their own heritage from a more secular standpoint. Some of them, as we shall see, would undertake a modern, scientific exploration of Jewish history; others began to study and to write in Hebrew, the sacred tongue which among Orthodox Jews was reserved for prayer and works of devotion. Now Maskilim began to create a new Hebrew literature, secularizing this holy language. They were trying to find a modern way of being Jewish, to shed what they regarded as the superstitions of the past and to make Judaism acceptable to enlightened society. Their ability to take part in the life of the mainstream culture, however, was seriously limited by externally imposed restrictions: Jews were given no legal recognition by the state, could not participate in political life, and were still officially a race apart. But the Maskilim had great hopes of the Enlightenment. They noted that after the American Revolution, Jews had been granted citizenship in the secular polity of the United States. When Napoleon Bonaparte, a ruler imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment, came to power in France and began to build a mighty empire, it seemed for a while that after centuries of persecution Jews would finally be granted equality and respect in Europe as well. Liberty had been the battle cry of the French Revolution, and was the watchword of Napoleon’s government in France. To the incredulous joy of those Jews who longed to escape the ghetto, Napoleon announced that the Jews of France would become full citizens of the republic. On July 29, 1806, Jewish businessmen, bankers, and rabbis were summoned to the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, where they swore fealty to the state. A few weeks later, Napoleon convened a body of Jewish notables he called the “Great Sanhedrin”—the Sanhedrin being the Jewish governing council which had not sat since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. The mandate of this body was to give religious sanction to the resolutions of the previous assembly. Jews were ecstatic. Rabbis declared that the French Revolution was the “second law from Mount Sinai,” “our exodus from Egypt, our modern Pesach”; “the Messianic age has arrived with this new society of liberté, egalité, fraternité.”15 As Napoleon’s armies swept through Europe, he introduced these egalitarian principles into every country he occupied: the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Prussia. One principality after another was forced to emancipate its Jews.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  When he returned to Egypt and became director of the new Bureau of Translation, which made European works available to Egyptians, Tahtawi insisted that the people of Egypt must learn from the West. The “gates of ijtihad” (“independent reasoning”) must be opened, the ulema must move with the times, and the Shariah adapt to the modern world. Doctors, engineers, and scientists should have the same status as Muslim religious scholars. Modern science could be no threat to Islam; Europeans had originally learned their science from the Muslims of Spain, so when they studied Western sciences the Arabs would simply be taking back what had originally belonged to them. The government must not stamp down on progress and innovation, but lead the way forward, since change was now the law of life. Education was the key; the common people should be educated as they were in France, girls to the same standard as boys.51 Tahtawi believed that Egypt stood on the brink of a glorious future. He was intoxicated by the promise of modernity; he wrote a poem in praise of the steam engine, and saw the Suez Canal and the transcontinental railways of the United States as engineering feats that would bring the far-flung peoples of the earth together in brotherhood and peace. Let French and British scientists and engineers come and settle in Egypt! This could only accelerate the rate of progress.52 During the 1870s, a new group of writers from what is now Lebanon and Syria came and settled in Cairo.53 Most of them were Christians who had been educated in the French and American missionary schools and thus had access to Western culture. They were practitioners of the new journalism and found that they had more freedom in Khedive Ismail’s Cairo than in the Ottoman territories. They established new journals, which published articles on medicine, philosophy, politics, geography, history, industry, agriculture, ethics, and sociology, bringing crucial modern ideas to the general Arab reader. Their influence was enormous. In particular, these Christian Arabs were keen that the Muslim states should become secular, and insisted that science alone and not religion was the basis of civilization. Like Tahtawi they were in love with the West, and communicated this enthusiasm to the people of Egypt.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  He hoped that when he arrived in India, he would establish a Christian base there for the military conquest of Jerusalem. 2 The people of Europe had started their journey to modernity, but they were not yet fully modern in our sense. For them, the myths of Christianity still gave meaning to their rational and scientific explorations. Nevertheless, Christianity was changing. Spaniards would become leaders of the Counter-Reformation initiated by the Council of Trent (1545–63), which was a modernizing movement that brought the old Catholicism into line with the streamlined efficiency of the new Europe. The Church, like the modern state, became a more centralized body. The Council reinforced the power of the Pope and the bishops; for the first time a catechism was issued to all the faithful, to ensure doctrinal conformity. The clergy were to be educated to a higher standard, so that they could preach more effectively. The liturgy and devotional practices of the laity were rationalized, and rituals that had been meaningful a century earlier but no longer worked in the new era, were jettisoned. Many Spanish Catholics were inspired by the writings of the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), who wanted to revitalize Christianity by returning to fundamentals. His slogan was Ad fontes: “back to the wellsprings!” Erasmus believed that the authentic Christian faith of the early church had been buried under a mound of lifeless medieval theology. By stripping away these later accretions and going back to the sources—the Bible and the Fathers of the Church—Christians would recover the living kernel of the Gospels and experience new birth. The chief Spanish contribution to the Counter-Reformation was mystical. The mystics of Iberia became explorers of the spiritual world, in rather the same way as the great navigators were discovering new regions of the physical world. Mysticism belonged to the realm of mythos; it functioned in the domain of the unconscious which was inaccessible to the rational faculty and has to be experienced by means of other techniques. Nevertheless, the mystical reformers of Spain wanted to make this form of spirituality less haphazard, and eccentric, less dependent upon the whims of inadequate advisers. John of the Cross (1552–91) weeded out the more dubious and superstitious devotions, and made the mystical process more systematic. The mystics of the new age should know what to expect when they progressed from one stage to another; they must learn how to deal with pitfalls and dangers of the interior life, and husband their spiritual energies productively . More modern, however, and a sign of things to come was the Society of Jesus, founded by the former soldier Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1555), which embodied the efficiency and effectiveness that would become the hallmark of the modern West.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The second messianic movement of the period was also rooted in the conservative spirit, but it was also open to some of the new Western values. Its founder, Sayyid Ali Muhammad (1819–50), had been involved in the Shaykhi movement in Najaf and Kerbala, but in 1844 he declared that he was the “gate” (bab) to the divine which the ulema declared to have been closed at the time of the Occultation of the Hidden Imam.63 He attracted ulema, notables, and wealthy merchants in Isfahan, Tehran, and Khurasan into his movement. In Kerbala, his brilliant woman disciple Qurrat al-Ain (1814–52) drew huge crowds; his chief male disciples, Mulla Sadiq (known as Muqaddas) and Mirza Muhammad Ali Barfurushi, who was given the title of Quddus (d. 1849), preached what was virtually a new religion: the Bab’s name was now mentioned in the call to prayer, and worshippers were instructed to pray facing the direction of his house in Shiraz. When the Bab made the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca that year, he stood beside the Kabah and declared that he was the incarnation of the Hidden Imam. Fifteen months later, like Joseph Smith, the Bab produced a newly inspired scripture, the Bayan. All the old holy books had been abrogated. He was the Perfect Man of the age, embodying in his person all the great prophets of the past. Humanity was now approaching perfection and the old faiths would no longer suffice. Like the Book of Mormon, the Bayan called for a new and more just social order, and endorsed the bourgeois values of modernity: it placed a high value on productive work, called for free trade, the reduction of taxes, guarantees for personal property, and an improvement in the position of women. Above all, the Bab had imbibed the nineteenth-century belief that this was the only world we had. Shiis had traditionally focused on tragedies of the past and on the messianic future. The Bab concentrated on the here-and-now. There would be no Last Judgment, no afterlife. Paradise would be found in this world. Instead of waiting passively for redemption, the Bab told the Shiis of Iran, they must work for a better society on earth and seek to achieve salvation in their own lives.64

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  False and superstitious ideas had only crept into the world because priests had used cruel and tyrannical methods, such as the Inquisition, to force the people to accept their orthodoxy. For the sake of true religion, therefore, the state must tolerate all manner of beliefs, and must concern itself solely with the practical administration and government of the community. Church and state must be separate, and neither must interfere in the business of the other. This was the Age of Reason, and for the first time in human history, Locke believed, men and women would be free, and, therefore, able to perceive the truth. 20 This benign vision set the tone for the Enlightenment and the inspiring ideal of the modern, secular, tolerant state. The French and German Enlightenment philosophers also subscribed to the rational religion of deism, and saw the old mythical, revealed religions as outmoded. Since reason was the sole criterion of truth, the older faiths, based on a fictitious notion of “revelation,” had simply been naive versions of this natural religion and should be rejected. Faith had to be rational, argued the radical British theologian Matthew Tindal (1655–1733) and the Irish Roman-Catholic-turned-deist John Toland (1670–1722). Our natural reason was the only reliable way to arrive at sacred truth, and Christianity must be purged of the mysterious, the supernatural, and the miraculous. Revelation was unnecessary because it was quite possible for any human being to arrive at the truth by means of his or her unaided reasoning powers. 21 As Newton had pointed out, reflection on the design of the physical universe provided irrefutable evidence for a Creator and First Cause. On the continent, the German historian Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) argued that Jesus had never claimed to be divine, and that his ambitions had been entirely political. Jesus should simply be revered as a great teacher, the founder of a “remarkable, simple, exalted and practical religion.” 22 The old truths of mythos were now being interpreted as though they were logoi , an entirely new development that was, eventually, doomed to disappoint. For at the same time as these theologians, philosophers, and historians proclaimed the supremacy of reason, the German rationalist Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) undercut the entire Enlightenment project. On the one hand, Kant issued yet another of the early modern declarations of independence.

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

  of the already declining Abbasid dynasty; their leader in this was Il-Khan (‘Subordinate Khan’) Hülagü, whose principal wife belonged to the Church of the East. That was a happy circumstance for the Christians of Baghdad, who were the only community whom the Mongols spared massacre when the city fell in 1258; indeed the Mongols gave the Catholicos one of the caliphs’ palaces in which to establish his headquarters and cathedral complex.34 Now the Il-Khan established a new Mongol dynasty in Iran. It was not just the Dyophysites who had real expectations of a new Christian empire based on the dubious authority of these spectacularly brutal warriors. Hope flared up among Western Latin Christians, whose Middle Eastern Crusades against Muslim powers were looking increasingly hopeless (see pp. 384–6). The results were some epic Christian ventures into unknown territories to investigate the new diplomatic possibilities, led by a formidable set of missionaries from an innovative Latin organization, the Order of Franciscan Friars (see pp. 402–4).35 In the early 1250s, the great Crusader-king of France, Louis IX, was inspired to send William of Rubruck, a sharp-eyed Franciscan, as an emissary to the Great Khan Möngke in Central Asia. William recorded his travels in an absorbingly interesting journal of one of the most remarkable diplomatic exploits in this unprecedented episode of Western exploration.36 Just as enterprising and exotic visitors in the other direction, in 1285 and 1287–8, were successive envoys of the Il-Khan Arghun: first a Chinese Christian official of Kublai Khan and then a Dyophysite monk of Mongol descent called Rabban Sauma, who successively travelled to Constantinople, to the pope in Rome and then westwards all the way to the kings of England and France. In turn, Sauma’s visit inspired fresh Franciscan efforts to penetrate Central Asia in the name of Chalcedonian Christianity. One result was the erection in the 1290s of a Gothic- style cathedral of the Western Latin rite in the improbable setting of Inner Mongolia, where its foundations have been excavated at the site of the city of Olon Sume. The Franciscan friar responsible travelled on to China, where he spent most of his time pestering Dyophysite Christians to become Chalcedonians.37 By that time, optimism on either side was running out. It was becoming clear that the Mongols were not going to fulfil the hopes which Christian strategists placed in them – that might have been obvious from the beginning, if their ghastly toll of millions of people and even animals massacred on an industrial scale had been taken into account. The Mongols were unimpressed by their increasing acquaintance with Christian rivalries, which had not previously been apparent in Mongol homelands in Dyophysite Central Asia, and, as always, they had their own priorities. William of Rubruck commented with rueful humour after his meeting with the Great Khan Möngke on the

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

  or his successors might well have decided to make the sort of turnaround to Christianity which had seized Trdat, Constantine and Ezana. The new reign proved to be brief, as Shah Kavad died only a few months after his coup, but significant goodwill gestures to Christians and their advance into the centre of action in the empire continued. Kavad had quickly ordered that a new Catholicos should be chosen for the Church, ending a hiatus of twenty years in which Shah Khusrau had prevented the office being filled. The man singled out, Ishoyahb II, proved an outstanding diplomat of wide vision who gave official encouragement to those taking Christianity into China. He sent a delegation to the Chinese Tang emperor led by a bishop whom the Chinese called Alopen. Alopen was well received on his arrival in 635. The occasion was long remembered and celebrated by Chinese Christians, for it led to the foundation of the first of several monasteries in China, with official encouragement, and in no less a setting than the then Chinese imperial capital, Chang’an (now Xi’an). The library pagoda on the site of one once-celebrated monastery rebuilt a century or so later still survives in Zhouzhi, forty-five miles south-west of Xi’an (see Plate 6). Despite the site’s centuries of later use by Taoists and then Buddhists, the building still bears the Chinese name which signified both Christianity and the world of the eastern Mediterranean, Ta Qin, and although local people had always remembered its Christian origins through the centuries, their significance was not more widely recognized until the 1930s. The pagoda stands proudly on a hillside; remarkably and surely significantly, it is within easy sight of the next hill, on which stands the famous Taoist Louguan Temple, much favoured as a centre of higher education by the early Tang emperors in those years when the Church of the East flourished here. Here is a tangible link to the Chinese community of the Church of the East, which although long lost now was destined to persist over seven centuries. In the former Japanese capital of Kyoto, recent investigations suggest that there too one surviving ancient temple started life as a building of the Church of the East. Mongolia is yielding parallel finds. These unexpected rediscoveries may not be the last.51 There were equally promising moves for the Church of the East towards the west and Byzantium. One of Khusrau II’s most significant trophies in his campaigns against the Byzantines had been not territory but a prime Christian relic: no less an object than the True Cross, which had somehow appeared in Jerusalem in the fourth century during the city’s self-promotion as a holy place (see pp. 193–4). To the fury and humiliation of the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, the Shah seized the Cross from Jerusalem when he sacked the city in 614. Yet Khusrau treated it with respect, entrusting it to his Christian wife; it

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

  of his subjects were Orthodox Christians.29 Soon it was natural for the Orthodox of the region to start looking to the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, rather than the sad remnants of past magnificence at Kiev, which the metropolitan bishop now hardly ever visited; from 1363 Kiev itself was in the hands of the Lithuanians. Yet from the late thirteenth century the metropolitan based himself either in Moscow or Vladimir-on-the-Kliazma, which was also in Muscovite territory, and it became the ambition of the Muscovites to make this arrangement permanent. Throughout the fourteenth century, a contest took place between Muscovy and Lithuania as to who would host this key figure in the Christianity of Rus’ – in effect, who really would be the ‘Natural Successor of the Rus”. The Oecumenical Patriarch and emperor in Constantinople enjoyed the position of referees. That was a welcome boost to their fragile position, and a far cry from the condescension with which the Byzantines had greeted Vladimir of Kiev’s conversion back in 988. The consequences of this century of manoeuvring are among the most important in the history of Russian Orthodoxy. In the contest of Lithuania and Muscovy, the referees in Byzantium weighed the growing power of Lithuania against the fact that, by contrast with the ostentatious Orthodox piety of the grand princes in Moscow, the Lithuanian ruler was a non-Christian. The rhetorical advantage was with the Muscovites, and they exploited it fully. Metropolitan Peter of Kiev and all Rus’ died in 1326 soon after taking up residence in Moscow. A cult of the ‘miracle worker’ rapidly grew up around him and he was declared a saint. This was a useful asset for Grand Prince Ivan Kalita when he persuaded Metropolitan Feognost, Peter’s successor, likewise to settle in Moscow rather than in Vladimir-on-the-Kliazma. It did not do Moscow any harm that Metropolitan Peter had been treated badly in the Principality of Tver, a further rival to Muscovy, before his gratifyingly warm reception in Moscow, a point which Muscovite chroniclers laboured in their hagiography.30 When the dome of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople partially collapsed in 1346, Grand Prince Semen (Simon) of Muscovy was quick to send money for the restoration fund to demonstrate his international position within the Orthodox world; likewise money flowed from the Grand Prince’s dominions towards the monasteries of Mount Athos.31 In 1371 Grand Prince Dmitrii Donskoi gave one of his sons the Christian name which the converted Vladimir of Kiev had taken at his baptism in 988, and in 1389 this boy became the first grand prince to bear the name Basil or Vasilii. By contrast, Grand Prince Olgerd of Lithuania did not help his case when, in the late 1340s, he executed three Lithuanian Christians in Vilnius for refusing to eat meat during a period of Christian fasting. In outrage, Constantinople made sure that the dead men became the focus of a cult, since they were obvious

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

  housing in a specially built Orthodox church in the saint’s home city, Thessalonica or Thessaloniki. Cyril’s visit to Rome was a moment which suggested a more generous future for a Church in central Europe, leaving behind the ill-will between Nicholas and Photios. Pope Hadrian had his reasons for favouring three-way diplomacy, for he was aware that Frankish rulers had their own agendas which might not include all that much consideration for the interests of the papacy. He made Methodios his legate in central Europe, and even authorized the use of Slavonic vernacular in the liturgy, although he did ask that the scripture lessons should be read over first in Latin. The atmosphere of reconciliation did not last. Frankish rivals to Methodios’s clergy were not forgiving and they forced the Byzantine missionaries eastwards until they took refuge in Bulgaria. From the Church’s Bulgarian centre in Ohrid (now in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia), missionaries travelled west once more to reinforce Orthodox missions in a newly emerging kingdom, Serbia, and they took their grievances against Latin Westerners with them. Further west than Serbia, the Orthodox presence in the region between the Alps and the Carpathian mountains gradually weakened, although it was in Hungary that one crucial piece of cultural transmission took place, when the writings of John of Damascus were translated from Greek into Latin, spreading their influence permanently into the Western Church, and to Thomas Aquinas in particular (see p. 447).82 In the long struggle between Orthodox and Catholic in central Europe, the line of cultural differentiation between Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, which has so recently poisoned their relationship despite their common language, has ended up as not so different from that division of the empire originally set by Diocletian. The great contribution to the Orthodox future from Cyril and Methodios (and, behind them, their patron Photios) was to establish the principle that the Greek language did not have a monopoly on Orthodox liturgy. So, from the late ninth century, Churches of Orthodoxy have diversified through a remarkable variety of language families and the cultures which those languages have shaped; in fact it is the Church’s liturgy which has been the major force in deciding which languages should dominate cultures in various parts of the Orthodox world. Not all of these cultures are Slavonic: one of the largest Orthodox Churches has come to be that of Romania, which, as its name implies and the forms of its language make clear, cherishes a Latin past. It is not surprising that across such a tangle of different peoples and societies, Orthodox Churches have shown a considerable relish for quarrels over jurisdiction and consequent separations or schisms.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Iranian Revolution was the event that first drew the attention of the world to the fundamentalist potential, but it was not the first movement to make a successful venture into the world of politics. We have seen that after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the Kookists in Israel had been convinced that the Jewish people were engaged in a war against the forces of evil. The war had been a warning; redemption was under way, but if the government was determined to promote policies that would impede the messianic process, they themselves must take the initiative. Somewhat to their surprise, they had found secularist allies, who did not share the vision of Rabbi Kook, but who were equally determined to hold on to every inch of occupied territory. People who were neither Kookists nor observant Jews, such as the army chief of staff, Rafael Eitan, or the nuclear physicist and ultranationalist Yuval Ne’eman, were willing to work with the religious Zionists to secure the occupied territories for Israel. In February 1974, a group of rabbis, hawkish young secularists, Kookists and other religious Zionists who had served in the IDF and fought in Israel’s wars formed a group which they called Gush Emunim, the “Bloc of the Faithful.” Shortly afterward, they put together a position paper outlining their objectives. The Gush would not be a political party, competing for seats in the Knesset, but a pressure group, working to bring about “a great awakening of the Jewish people towards full implementation of the Zionist vision, realizing that this vision originates in Israel’s Jewish heritage, and that its objective is the full redemption of Israel and the entire world.”1 Where the early Zionists had cast religion aside, the Gush insisted on rooting their movement in Judaism. Where secular members of the Gush could interpret the word “redemption” in a looser, more political sense, the religious activists who had adopted Rabbi Kook’s holistic vision were convinced that messianic redemption had already begun, and that unless the Jewish people were settled in the whole of Eretz Israel there would be no peace for the rest of the world. From the start, Gush Emunim posed a challenge to secular Israel. The position paper emphasized the failure of the old Zionism. Even though Jews were engaged in a fierce struggle for survival in their land, we are witnessing a process of decline and retreat from the realization of the Zionist ideal, in word and deed. Four related factors are responsible for this crisis: mental weariness and frustration induced by the extended conflict; the lack of challenge; preference for selfish goals; the attenuation of Jewish faith.2

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

  the Ukrainian monk Paisii Velichkovskii produced the first Slavonic translation of this work which became standard in the Orthodox world, and which was a major force in reuniting Orthodox spirituality after the stresses and divisions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the same time, the expanding Russian Empire gained an international vision for its version of Orthodoxy. It maintained its contacts with Mount Athos, supporting monastic life on the Holy Mountain with a generosity which saw a great flowering of Russian communities there in the nineteenth century. But there was much more to the tsars’ intervention in the Ottoman Empire, as it became apparent that the hold of the Turkish sultan on his territories was beginning to weaken. During the eighteenth century, throughout the Orthodox world still ruled by Muslims in the Balkans and the East, Churches began looking with increasing hope to this great power in the north which proclaimed its protection over them, whose Church still announced itself to be the Third Rome, and which pushed its armies ever further into the lands so long languishing in the hands of the Grandsons of Hagar. Soon in its efforts to fulfil its ambitions at the expense of the decaying Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire would clash with heirs of the Western Reformation, with consequences disastrous for all those drawn into the contest. It is to the West that we now return, to trace the story which led Christendom to the events of 1914.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Eventually Shabbetai’s behavior became too much for the Jews of Smyrna, and he had to leave the city in 1650. He then began a fifteen-year period, which he later called his “dark years,” during which he wandered through the provinces of the Ottoman empire, going from one city to another. He told nobody about his messianic vocation and may have abandoned the very idea of a special mission. By 1665 he was longing to free himself of his demons and become a rabbi.48 He had heard about a gifted young Kabbalist in Gaza who had set himself up as a healer, and set off to visit him. This Rabbi Nathan had already heard about Shabbetai, probably when both men, then unknown to each other, had lived in Jerusalem at the same time. Something about Shabbetai’s “strange acts” must have lodged in Nathan’s imagination, because, shortly before the arrival of his visitor, he had received a revelation about him. He had recently been initiated into Lurianic Kabbalah, and had made a retreat just before Purim, locking himself away, fasting, weeping, and reciting the Psalms. During this vigil, he had seen a vision of Shabbetai and heard his own voice crying aloud in prophecy: “Thus saith the Lord! Behold your Savior cometh. Shabbetai Zevi is his name. He shall cry, yea, roar, he shall prevail against my enemies.”49 When Shabbetai actually turned up on his own doorstep, Nathan could only see this as a miraculous confirmation of his prophetic vision. How could Nathan, a brilliant thinker, have imagined that this sad, troubled man was his Redeemer? According to Lurianic Kabbalah, the soul of the Messiah had been trapped in the Godless realm created in the original act of Zimzum; from the very beginning, therefore, the Messiah had been forced to struggle with the evil powers of the “other side,” but now, Nathan believed, thanks to the penitential disciplines of the Kabbalists, these demonic forces were beginning to lose their hold on the Messiah. From time to time, his soul soared free and he revealed the New Law of the messianic age. But victory was still incomplete, and from time to time the Messiah fell prey once more to the darkness.50 All this seemed to fit perfectly with Shabbetai’s personality and experience. When he arrived, Nathan told him that the End was nigh. Soon his victory over the forces of evil would be complete and he would bring redemption to the Jewish people. The old law would be abrogated, and actions that had once been forbidden and sinful would become holy.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The prevailing mood of dissatisfaction made it relatively easy for a small group, under the leadership of Seyyid Zia ad-Din Tabatabai, a civilian, and Reza Khan (1877–1944), the commander of the shah’s Cossack brigade, to overthrow the government. In February 1921, Zia ad-Din became prime minister, with Reza Khan as his minister of war. The British acquiesced because Zia ad-Din was known to be pro-British, and they hoped that his election would further their plans for a protectorate, which they had not abandoned entirely. But Reza Khan was the stronger of the two leaders, and he was soon able to force Zia ad-Din into exile, form a new cabinet, and become sole ruler. Reza at once began to modernize the country, and, because the people were so frustrated and ready for any change, he was able to succeed where his predecessors had failed. Reza had no interest in social reform and no concern for the poor. His objective was simply to centralize the country, strengthen the army and the bureaucracy, and make Iran function more effectively. Any opposition was ruthlessly cut down. From the very beginning, Reza courted Soviet Russia and the United States in order to rid the country of the British, granting an oil concession to the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey in return for American technical advice and investment. In 1925, Reza was in a strong enough position to force the last Qajar shah to abdicate. His original intention was to establish a republic, but the ulema objected. In the Majlis, Ayatollah Muddaris declared that a republic was un-Islamic. It was tainted by its association with Atatürk, and the clergy had no wish to see Iran go the same way as Turkey. Reza had no objection to becoming shah, and was still anxious to court the clergy. He promised them that his government would honor Islam and that its legislation would not conflict with the Shariah. That done, a packed Majlis endorsed the foundation of the Pahlavi dynasty. But it would not be long before Shah Reza Pahlavi would feel able to break his promise to the ulema and not only equal but even surpass Atatürk’s ruthless secularization. By the end of the third decade of the twentieth century, secularism seemed to be winning the day. There was plenty of religious activity, though the more radical movements had been cut down to size and posed no threat to the secularist leadership. But the seeds that had been sown during these years would take root when some of the limitations of this modern secularist experiment became apparent. 7. Counterculture (1925–60)

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  64 His followers were engaged in a war against all religious rules: “I say to you that all who would be warriors must be without religion, which means that they must reach freedom under their own power.” 65 Like many radical secularists today, Frank regarded all religion as harmful. As the movement progressed, Frankists turned to politics, dreaming of a great revolution that would sweep away the past and save the world. They saw the French Revolution as a sign that their vision was true and that God had intervened on their behalf. 66 Jews had anticipated many of the postures of the modern period. Their painful brush with the aggressively modernizing society of Europe had led them into secularism, skepticism, atheism, rationalism, nihilism, pluralism, and the privatization of faith. For most Jews, the path to the new world that was developing in the West led through religion, but this religion was very different from the kind of faith we are used to in the twentieth century. It was more mythically based; it did not read the Scriptures literally, and was perfectly prepared to come up with new solutions, some of which seemed shocking in their search for something fresh. To understand the role of religion in premodern society we should turn to the Muslim world, which was undergoing its own upheavals during this early modern period and evolving different forms of spirituality that would continue to influence Muslims well into the modern period. 2. M uslims: T he C onservative S pirit ( 1492–1799 ) I N 1492 the Jews had been one of the first casualties of the new order that was slowly coming to birth in the West. The other victims of that momentous year had been the Muslims of Spain, who had lost their last foothold in Europe. But Islam was by no means a spent force. During the sixteenth century it was still the greatest global power. Even though the Sung dynasty (960–1260) had raised China to a far higher degree of social complexity and might than Islamdom, and the Italian Renaissance had initiated a cultural florescence that would eventually enable the West to pull ahead, the Muslims were at first easily able to contain these challenges and they remained at a political and economic peak. Muslims comprised only about a third of the planet’s population, but they were so widely and strategically located throughout the Middle East, Asia, and Africa that at this moment, Islamdom could be seen as a microcosm of world history, expressing the preoccupations of most areas of the civilized world in the early modern period.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  For Jacob Rosenheim (1870–1965), the founding of Agudat was not simply a slightly regrettable necessity, as it was for the eastern Jews, but a cosmic event. For the first time since 70 CE, Jews had “a unified and will-determining centre.”75 Agudat symbolized God’s rule over Israel and should become the central organization of the Jewish world. Nevertheless, Rosenheim still felt slightly queasy about politics, and wanted Agudat to confine its activities to maintaining Jewish schools and protecting Jews’ economic rights. Younger members were more radical, and were closer in spirit to Protestant fundamentalists. Isaac Breuer (1883–1946) wanted Agudat to take the initiative and start a campaign for the reform and sacralization of Jewish society. Like the premillennialists, he could see “signs” of God’s activity in the world. The Great War and the Balfour Declaration were the “footsteps of the Messiah.” Jews must reject the corrupt values of bourgeois society, cease to cooperate with the governments of Europe, and create their own sacred enclave in the Holy Land, where they would build a theocratic, Torah-based state. Jewish history had gone awry; Jews had defected from sacred tradition; it was now time to put Jewish history back on track and, if Jews took the first step, made the exodus from the corrupt Diaspora, and returned to their original values, living according to the Torah in their Land, God would send the Messiah.76 The Jewish scholar Alan L. Mittelman notes that the early experience of Agudat shows the way fundamentalism works. It is not an immediate, knee-jerk response to modern secular society but only develops when the modernization process is fairly advanced. At first, traditionalists—like the eastern European members of Agudat—try simply to find ways of adapting their faith to the new challenge. They adopt some modern ideas and institutions, and attempt to prove that these are not alien to tradition, that the faith is strong enough to absorb these changes. But once society has become more completely secular and rational, some find its innovations unacceptable. They begin to realize that the whole thrust of secular modernity is diametrically opposed to the rhythms of conservative premodern religion, and that it threatens essential values. They begin to formulate a “fundamentalist” solution that returns to first principles and plans a counteroffensive.77 THE MUSLIMS we are considering had not yet reached this stage. Modernization was far from complete in Egypt, and had not really begun in Iran. Muslims were still either trying to absorb the new ideas in an Islamic context or adopting a secularist ideology. Fundamentalism would not appear in the Islamic world until these early stratagems had, in the eyes of some Muslims, proved to be inadequate. They would see secularism as an attempt to destroy Islam, and, indeed, in the Middle East, where Western modernity was being implemented in a foreign context, it often appeared very aggressive indeed.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  This seemed clear on May 23, 1997, when Hojjat ol-Islam Seyyed Khatami came to the presidency in a landslide victory, gaining 22 million out of a possible 30 million votes. He immediately made it clear that he wanted to achieve a more positive relationship with the Western world, and in September 1998, he dissociated his government from the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. This was later endorsed by the Faqih, Ayatollah Khameini. Khatami still finds his reforms impeded by the Council of Guardians, but his election signaled the deep desire of a large segment of the population for greater pluralism, a gentler interpretation of Islamic law, economic protection for the “downtrodden,” and more progressive policies for women.* There is no retreat from Islam. Iranians still seem to want their polity to be contained within a Shii package, which seems to have made modern values more acceptable than when they were regarded as a foreign import. It could be that if a radical religious movement is allowed its head, works through its aggressions and resentment, it can learn to interact creatively with other traditions, eschew the violence of the more recent past, and make peace with former foes. Religion becomes most violent when suppressed. This had become clear in Egypt in 1981, when the Western world was grieved to hear of the assassination of President Anwar Sadat by Sunni fundamentalists. Sadat had been officiating on October 6 at the parade celebrating the achievements of the 1973 war against Israel. Suddenly, one of the trucks in the parade pulled out of line just in front of the presidential stand, and when Sadat saw First Lieutenant Khaled Islambouli jump out and run toward him, he stood up, assuming that the officer wanted to salute him. But instead there was a volley of machine-gun fire. Islambouli shot round after round into the body of Sadat, even after he had himself been wounded in the stomach, shouting, “Give me that dog, that infidel!” The attack lasted only fifty seconds, but seven people besides Sadat were killed, and twenty-eight others injured. Westerners were shocked by the ferocity of the assault. They had liked Sadat. Unlike Khomeini, Sadat was a Muslim ruler they could understand. He seemed devout without being a “fanatic”; Westerners admired his peace initiative with Israel and his Open Door policy. A bevy of American and European princes, politicians, and presidents attended Sadat’s funeral. No Arab leaders came, however, and there were no crowds lining the streets. On the night of Sadat’s death, the streets of Cairo were eerily quiet. The Egyptian people did not weep for Sadat, nor did they mass, grief-stricken, around his coffin as the Iranians would later mob the corpse of Khomeini. Once again, the modern West and the more traditional societies of the Middle East were poles apart and could not share each other’s vision of events.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  At first, Shabbetai wanted nothing to do with Nathan’s fantasy, but gradually he was won over by the power of the young rabbi’s eloquence, which, at least, gave him some explanation for his peculiarities. On May 28, 1665, Shabbetai declared himself to be the Messiah, and Nathan immediately dispatched letters to Egypt, Aleppo, and Smyrna announcing that the Redeemer would soon defeat the Ottoman sultan, end the exile of the Jews, and lead them back to the Holy Land. All the gentile nations would submit to his rule.51 The news spread like wildfire, and by 1666, the messianic ferment had taken root in almost every Jewish community in Europe, the Ottoman empire, and Iran. There were frenzied scenes. Jews started to sell their possessions in preparation for the voyage to Palestine, and business came to a standstill. Periodically, they would hear that the Messiah had abolished one of the traditional fast days, and there would be dancing and processions in the street. Nathan had given orders that Jews were to hasten the End by performing the penitential rituals of Safed, and in Europe, Egypt, Iran, the Balkans, Italy, Amsterdam, Poland, and France Jews fasted, kept vigil, immersed themselves in icy water, rolled in nettles, and gave alms to the poor. It was one of the first of many Great Awakenings of early modernity, when people instinctively sensed the coming of major change. Few people knew much about Shabbetai himself and fewer still were conversant with Nathan’s abstruse kabbalistic vision; it was enough that the Messiah had come and that at long last hope was at hand.52 During these ecstatic months, Jews experienced such hope and vitality that the harsh, constricted world of the ghetto seemed to melt away. They had a taste of something entirely different, and life for many of them would never be the same again. They glimpsed new possibilities, which seemed almost within their grasp. Because they felt free, many Jews were convinced that the old life was over for good.53 Those Jews who came under the direct influence of either Shabbetai or Nathan showed that they were ready to jettison the Torah, even though that would mean the end of religious life as they knew it. When Shabbetai visited a synagogue wearing the royal robes of the Messiah, and abolished a fast, uttered the forbidden name of God, ate nonkosher food, or called women to read the Scriptures in the synagogue, people were enraptured. Not everybody succumbed, of course—in each community, there were rabbis and laymen who were appalled by these developments. But people of all classes, rich and poor, accepted Shabbetai and seemed to welcome his antinomianism. The Law had not saved the Jews and seemed unable to do so; Jews were still persecuted, still in exile; people were ready for new freedom.54