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.

Page 65 of 216 · 20 per page

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Two related movements developed in Germany, both of which had their roots in the Jewish Enlightenment. The Maskilim believed that they could act as a bridge from the ghetto to the modern world. They could speak good German and had gentile friends, and in public seemed perfectly attuned to the European way of life. Now some of them decided to reform the religion of Judaism itself, to make it fit more easily into the modern world. This Reform Judaism began as an almost wholly pragmatic movement and, as such, was guided entirely according to the principles of logos. Its aim, indeed, was to abolish the mythos of Judaism. Israel Jacobson (1768–1828) believed that if Judaism appeared less outlandish to the German people, this would improve the chances of emancipation. A layman and philanthropist, he established a school in Seesen, near the Garz mountains, where students studied secular as well as Jewish subjects. He also opened a synagogue where worship appeared to be more Protestant than Jewish. Prayers were said in the vernacular instead of Hebrew; there was German choral singing, a mixed choir, and a sermon in German, which was much more central to the service than before. The traditional rites were drastically reduced. In 1815, Jacobson and other laymen brought this modernized worship to Berlin, where they opened what they called private “temples” to distinguish them from the regular synagogues. In 1817, Edward Kley founded a new temple in Hamburg, where the reforms were even more revolutionary. Prayers pleading for the coming of the Messiah and the return to Zion were replaced by a prayer celebrating the brotherhood of all humanity: how could Jews pray for the restoration of a messianic state in Palestine when they wanted to become German citizens? By 1822, confirmation services, on the Protestant model, were held for girls and boys; the separate seating of men and women at services was also abandoned. The rabbis of Hamburg condemned this reform movement and even managed, by appealing to the Prussian government, to get the Berlin temples closed down. 21 During the following years, therefore, many young Jews who might have found this reformed Judaism congenial, converted to Christianity. But the Hamburg temple remained open and new ones were established in Leipzig, Vienna, and Denmark. In America, the playwright Isaac Harby founded a reformed temple in Charleston. Reform would become very popular among American Jews, and, by 1870, a substantial proportion of the two hundred synagogues in the United States had adopted at least some Reform practices.

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

  This complex of stories after 1204 amounts to a reconfiguration of Orthodoxy. Certainly the emperors restored to Byzantium in 1261 kept an immense prestige despite their increasing powerlessness, right down to their dismal last years in the fifteenth century. Paradoxically, this was especially so among Melchite (that is, ‘imperial’) Christians living under Islamic rule and thus beyond Constantinople’s control: for them, the emperor was a symbol of an overarching timeless authority, as they believed that God had greater plans for his creation than seemed possible in the present situation.28 Nevertheless, Orthodox identity was no longer so closely tied to the survival of a political empire, and it was increasingly a matter for the Church to sustain. The Oecumenical Patriarch had been responsible for lending the princely claimant from Nicaea enough legitimacy to claim the imperial throne; that same patriarch had been the source of sacred guarantee for the new ecclesiastical independence of Bulgaria and Serbia, and the patriarch continued to provide his seal of approval to new Christian dioceses expanding far to the north of the imperial borders along the Volga, around the Black Sea and in the Caucasus. By the end of the fourteenth century, Patriarch Philotheos could write to the princes of Russia in terms which would have made Pope Innocent III blanch, although it is unlikely that his words came to the ears of anyone in Rome: ‘Since God has appointed Our Humility as leader of all Christians found anywhere on the inhabited earth, as solicitor and guardian of their souls, all of them depend on me, the father and teacher of them all.’29 This was a strange reversal of fortunes for patriarch and emperor. The patriarch was bolstered by financial support from rulers beyond the old imperial frontiers who were impressed at least by the resonance of such claims. The magnificence and busy activity of the patriarchal household and the Great Church in Constantinople looked a good deal less threadbare than the increasingly curtailed ceremonial and financial embarrassment of the imperial Court next door.30 Churches were lavishly redecorated or rebuilt, and they were hospitable to an adventurous renaissance in Byzantine art. Some of the most moving survivals are to be found in the church of Istanbul’s Church of the Holy Redeemer in Chora, an exquisite monastic building lovingly restored from ruin after the expulsion of the Latins in 1261. Now its mosaics are exposed once more after their oblivion in the church’s days as a mosque. Most are from the fourteenth century, and they bring a new quest to explore their subjects as human beings of passion and compassion; even Christ and his mother are softened from the imperial figures of earlier Byzantine convention (see Plate 22). We glimpse at the Holy Redeemer in Chora how Byzantine artists might have continued to explore some of the directions which an artistic and cultural renaissance began to

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Karen Armstrong, one of the foremost commentators on religious affairs, is the bestselling author of A History of God (1993), The Battle for God (2000), Islam: A Short History (2000), and Buddha (2001), among many other books. Having spent seven years as a Roman Catholic nun, she left her order in 1969 and took a B. Litt. at Oxford, taught modern literature at the University of London, and headed the English department of a public girls’ school. She became a freelance writer and broadcaster in 1982, and in 1983 she worked in the Middle East on a six-part documentary television series on the life and works of St. Paul. Her other television work has included “Varieties of Religious Experience” (1984) and “Tongues of Fire” (1985); the latter resulted in an anthology by that name on religious and poetic expression. In 1996 she participated in Bill Moyers’s television series “Genesis.” She teaches at the Leo Baeck College for the Study of Judaism and the Training of Rabbis and Teachers and was awarded the 1999 Muslim Public Affairs Council Media Award. She regularly contributes reviews and articles to newspapers and journals. Read on for an excerpt from Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life by Karen Armstrong Wish for a Better World In November 2007, I heard that I had won a prize. Each year TED (the acronym for Technology, Entertainment, Design), a private nonprofit organization best known for its superb conferences on “ideas worth spreading,” gives awards to people whom they think have made a difference but who, with their help, could make even more of an impact. Other winners have included former U.S. president Bill Clinton, the scientist E. O. Wilson, and the British chef Jamie Oliver. The recipient is given $100,000 but, more important, is granted a wish for a better world. I knew immediately what I wanted. One of the chief tasks of our time must surely be to build a global community in which all peoples can live together in mutual respect; yet religion, which should be making a major contribution, is seen as part of the problem. All faiths insist that compassion is the test of true spirituality and that it brings us into relation with the transcendence we call God, Brahman, Nirvana, or Dao. Each has formulated its own version of what is sometimes called the Golden Rule, “Do not treat others as you would not like them to treat you,” or in its positive form, “Always treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself.” Further, they all insist that you cannot confine your benevolence to your own group; you must have concern for everybody—even your enemies.

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

  The Mongols’ rise among the various peoples of the steppes was comparatively sudden at the end of the twelfth century. They had their own religious system, which described the way in which sky and earth combined in cosmic consciousness, as do male and female; they also believed that souls animated both people and animals, and survived after death. Given their nomadic lifestyle close to one of the world’s greatest trade routes, they had nevertheless long been familiar with and genially interested in a wide spectrum of other people’s religious beliefs, and they were inclined to give an ear to any religious ideas which took their fancy – Chinese Taoism and Confucianism, Islam, Buddhism and Dyophysite Christianity were the principal wares on offer.29 When in 1007 Christianity gained its first success among the Mongols, it was thanks to the long-dead Syrian St Sergius – a tribute to how this hugely popular military saint had impressed himself on imaginations far away from the site of his Roman martyrdom seven centuries before (see pp. 237–8). Sergius had power, and the Mongols became increasingly interested in power. Perhaps also these warriors who relied for their success on their close bonding found Sergius’s intimate relationship with his soldier-companion Bacchus a good model for their own warfare. It was indeed to one of the most powerful rulers among the Mongols that Sergius appeared in a vision. In or around 1007, the Mongol Khan of the Keraits, adrift in a snowstorm, became convinced that he would die lost and alone, but the saint promised deliverance in return for conversion, and deliverance from the blizzard duly arrived. The Dyophysite clergy who then received the large numbers of Keraits trooping into baptism in the wake of their hugely relieved khan were, with characteristic flexibility, creative in their tolerance of existing Mongol religious beliefs. They were happy to preside over the solemn corporate drinking of mares’ milk blessed on their altar by the Khan himself. Amid the immensity of the Central and East Asian steppes, with few clergy of any persuasion to badger their beliefs into tidiness, Mongols preserved a comfortable mixture of Christianity and tradition. It is clear from archaeological finds that they enjoyed wearing Christian crosses, though they might enliven these with such symbols as the Indian swastika which Buddhists had brought them. Some of their rulers took Christian names; the greatest Mongol ruler of them all, Temüjin, who in 1206 was proclaimed ‘Genghis Khan’ (‘Ruler of the Ocean’), had been the vassal of a Christian Kerait khan and married his overlord’s Christian niece.30 It was through Temüjin’s leadership that, in the space of a few decades, the Mongols became a world power to terrify people from the Mediterranean to the China Sea. His successors were convinced that they had been destined for world supremacy, and for a while it looked as if they were

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  He was this poet. And his last words were ‘I go to seek a Great Perhaps.’ That’s why I’m going. So I don’t have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.” And that quieted them. I was after a Great Perhaps, and they knew as well as I did that I wasn’t going to find it with the likes of Will and Marie. I sat back down on the couch, between my mom and my dad, and my dad put his arm around me, and we stayed there like that, quiet on the couch together, for a long time, until it seemed okay to turn on the TV, and then we ate artichoke dip for dinner and watched the History Channel, and as going-away parties go, it certainly could have been worse. one hundred twenty-eight days before FLORIDA WAS PLENTY HOT, certainly, and humid, too. Hot enough that your clothes stuck to you like Scotch tape, and sweat dripped like tears from your forehead into your eyes. But it was only hot outside, and generally I only went outside to walk from one air-conditioned location to another. This did not prepare me for the unique sort of heat that one encounters fifteen miles south of Birmingham, Alabama, at Culver Creek Preparatory School. My parents’ SUV was parked in the grass just a few feet outside my dorm room, Room 43. But each time I took those few steps to and from the car to unload what now seemed like far too much stuff, the sun burned through my clothes and into my skin with a vicious ferocity that made me genuinely fear hellfire. Between Mom and Dad and me, it only took a few minutes to unload the car, but my unair-conditioned dorm room, although blessedly out of the sunshine, was only modestly cooler. The room surprised me: I’d pictured plush carpet, wood-paneled walls, Victorian furniture. Aside from one luxury—a private bathroom—I got a box. With cinder-block walls coated thick with layers of white paint and a green-and-white-checkered linoleum floor, the place looked more like a hospital than the dorm room of my fantasies. A bunk bed of unfinished wood with vinyl mattresses was pushed against the room’s back window. The desks and dressers and bookshelves were all attached to the walls in order to prevent creative floor planning. And no air-conditioning. I sat on the lower bunk while Mom opened the trunk, grabbed a stack of the biographies my dad had agreed to part with, and placed them on the bookshelves. “I can unpack, Mom,” I said. My dad stood. He was ready to go. “Let me at least make your bed,” Mom said. “No, really. I can do it. It’s okay.”

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  We have to try to make the huge imaginative effort to put ourselves in the shoes of the fundamentalists because they threaten our values just as we threaten theirs. If we understand a bit more clearly what the fundamentalists really mean, if we learn to read the imagery of fundamentalism, we take the first step in learning about and understanding each other. You can make war in a minute, but peace takes a long time. I called my book The Battle for God not just because it was a snappy title but because I saw a society that is so polarized that the two sides are not yet ready to come to the table. Both sides are cowering in their corners and looking out at the same world but they don’t see the same thing. We’ve got to learn to listen. One of the things I am trying to do in my book is to decode some of the fundamentalist imagery so that we can see what lies at the root of what they’re trying to say—the myths and dreams, the fears and anxieties. Instead of dismissing fundamentalists as a bunch of loons and crazies, we must listen to what they have to say. Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion 1. Have you or someone close to you ever adhered to a religious group that Karen Armstrong would define as fundamentalist? Does her view of fundamentalism “ring true” for you? 2. Karen Armstrong uses the terms mythos and logos to describe “two ways of thinking, speaking, and acquiring knowledge.” Mythos is concerned with “the eternal and the universal,” she writes, and logos is concerned with “rational, pragmatic, and scientific thought.” How do these terms apply to your own experience of religious and secular life? 3. Armstrong points out that the first Grand Inquisitor, whose mission was to stamp out Judaism in Spain, was himself a Jew who converted to Catholicism. Do you believe that a convert is more likely to be zealous in his or her new faith than someone who was born into the same faith? 4. Were you surprised to learn that Islam treated Christians and Jews as a “protected minority” (dhimmi)? Did Armstrong’s description of the history of Islam change the way you view the Islamic world as it is depicted in news media and popular entertainment today? 5. According to Armstrong, the events in Spain of 1492—the expulsion of Jews and Muslims—marked the beginning of “a new order” in world history. She also finds history-changing significance in the rise of Napoleon, the industrial revolution, and World War I.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In June and July, the shah made some concessions, promising free elections and the restoration of the multiparty system. During these months, the demonstrations were quieter. There seemed to be a lull, and the Western-educated secularists and intellectuals, who had hitherto taken no part in the mourning processions but had supported the demonstrators by making purely verbal protests against the regime, assumed that the battle had been won. But on August 19, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the restoration of the Pahlavi monarchy in 1953, an arson attack on the Rex Cinema in Abadan killed four hundred people. This was immediately attributed to SAVAK, and ten thousand mourners attended the funeral, chanting “Death to the shah! Burn him!”70 Iranian students organized big demonstrations against the regime in Washington, Los Angeles, and The Hague. The shah made more concessions: the Majlis debates became freer, orderly demonstrations were permitted, some of the casinos were closed, and the Islamic calendar was restored.71 But it was too late. During the last week of Ramadan, when Muslims usually keep vigil in the mosques, there were demonstrations in fourteen Iranian cities, in which between fifty and one hundred people died. On September 4, the last day of Ramadan, there was a massive peaceful demonstration in Tehran. The crowds prostrated themselves in prayer in the streets, and handed out flowers to the soldiers. For the first time, the army and the police did not open fire, and on this occasion—a highly significant development—the middle classes began to join in. A small group of marchers processed through the streets of some of the residential districts, shouting: “Independence! Freedom! and Islamic Government!” On September 7, a huge parade marched from North Tehran down to the Parliament building, carrying large pictures of Khomeini and Shariati, and calling for an end to Pahlavi rule and for an Islamic government.72 Lay thinkers such as Shariati, Bazargan, and Bani Sadr had prepared the Western-educated elite for the possibility of modern Islamic rule. Even though their views were different from those of Khomeini, the middle-class liberals could see that he had grassroots support that they could never command, and were willing to join forces with him to get rid of the shah. Secularist rule had been a disaster in Iran, and they were ready to try something different.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  None of these developments seemed conclusive in itself, but, taken together, their effect was radical. By 1600, innovations were occurring on such a scale in Europe that progress seemed irreversible. A discovery in one field would often spark findings in another. The process acquired an unstoppable momentum. Instead of seeing the world as governed by fundamental and unalterable laws, Europeans were discovering that they could explore and manipulate nature to staggering effect. They could manage their environment and satisfy their material wants as never before. But as people became accustomed to this rationalization of their lives, logos became ascendant and myth was discredited. People felt more assured about the future. They could institutionalize change without fearful consequences. The wealthy were, for example, now prepared systematically to reinvest capital on the basis of continuing innovation and in the firm expectation that trade would continue to improve. This capitalist economy enabled the West to replace its resources indefinitely, so that it became impervious to the limitations of the old agrarian-based societies. By the time this rationalization and technicalization of society had resulted in the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, Westerners were so confident of ceaseless progress that they no longer looked back to the past for inspiration, but saw life as a fearless march forward to ever-greater achievement in the future. The process involved social change. It needed an increasing number of people to take part in the modernization process at quite a humble level. Ordinary folk became printers, machinists, and factory workers, and they too had to acquire, to a degree, modern standards of efficiency. A modicum of education would be required of more and more people. An increasing number of workers became literate, and once that happened they would inevitably demand a greater share in the decision-making processes of their society. A more democratic form of government would be essential. If a nation wanted to use all its human resources to modernize and enhance its productivity, it would be necessary to bring hitherto segregated and marginalized groups, such as the Jews, into mainstream culture. The newly educated working classes would no longer submit to the old hierarchies. The ideals of democracy, toleration, and universal human rights, which have become sacred values in Western secular culture, emerged as part of the intricate modernizing process. They were not simply beautiful ideals dreamed up by statesmen and political scientists, but were, at least in part, dictated by the needs of the modern state. In early modern Europe, social, political, economic, and intellectual change were part of an interlocking process; each element depended upon the others.2 Democracy was found to be the most efficient and productive way of organizing a modernized society, as became evident when the eastern European states, which did not adopt democratic norms and employed more draconian methods of bringing out-groups into the mainstream, fell behind in the march of progress.3

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  By this date, the Iraqi government, responding to pressure from Tehran, had expelled Khomeini from Najaf and he had taken up residence in Paris. Here he was visited by a delegation from the recently revived National Front, who issued a statement that both they and Khomeini were committed to restoring the 1906 constitution. On December 2, as Muharram approached, Khomeini gave orders that instead of holding the usual passion plays, rawdahs, and processions in honor of the martyrdom of Husain, the people should demonstrate against the regime. The radical potential of these pious ceremonies had reached its apotheosis. On the first three nights of Muharram, men put on white shrouds to symbolize their readiness for martyrdom, and ran through the streets, defying the government curfew. Others shouted anti-shah slogans through loudspeakers from the rooftops. The BBC claimed that seven hundred people were killed by the police and army in these few days alone.76 On December 8, six thousand people gathered at the Behest-e Zahra cemetery in south Tehran, where many of the revolutionary martyrs were buried, crying “Death to the shah!” In Isfahan, twenty thousand people marched through the streets, and then attacked banks, cinemas, and a block of flats inhabited by American technicians. On December 9, on the eve of Ashura, Ayatollah Taleqani, who had just been released from prison, led a magnificent peaceful march, which wound through the streets of Tehran for six hours; between 300,000 and a million and a half people took part, walking quietly, four abreast. There were other peaceful demonstrations in Tabriz, Qum, Isfahan, and Mashhad.77 On Ashura itself, there was an even bigger march in Tehran, lasting eight hours, in which almost two million people participated. The demonstrators carried green, red, and black flags (symbolizing, respectively, Islam, martyrdom, and the Shiah) interspersed with banners reading “We will kill Iran’s dictator!” and “We will destroy Yankee power in Iran!” There was growing confidence that, united as never before, the people of Iran would really manage to get rid of the Pahlavi state.78 Many felt as though Imam Husain himself was leading them into battle that Ashura, and that Khomeini was directing them from afar, like the Hidden Imam.79 At the end of the demonstration, a resolution was passed: Khomeini was invited to become the new leader of Iran, and Iranians were urged to band together until the shah was overthrown.80

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

  (that is, non-Lutheran) Protestants.64 Back in the Mediterranean, in 1601 Lucaris was elected Patriarch of the small Melchite (Chalcedonian) Orthodox Church of Alexandria, an honour which a cousin of his had held before him, and in 1612 he was elected Oecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople, a tenure which was destined to be much interrupted and then brutally ended for political reasons. He became acquainted with a cultivated Dutch Reformed merchant and diplomat, Cornelius van Haga, and entered correspondence with one of the most respected leaders of international Reformed Protestantism, the Englishman George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury, whose family was much involved in the growing English trade with the Ottoman Empire. The two archbishops so far apart in geography and background saw a common interest: the fight against Roman Catholicism. They even considered the possibility of a Church reunited against the common enemy. Abbot brought Lucaris to the attention of his king, James VI and I of Scotland and England, who with some justification regarded himself as an international Protestant statesman. King James was keenly interested in the reunion of Christendom, and back in his youth he had written and eventually published an epic poem celebrating the Christian naval victory over the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.65 With James’s enthusiastic backing, the English government actually paid for a couple of Greek scholars to come and study in England, and one of them, Nathaniel Konopios, a fellow Cretan of Lucaris and future Metropolitan of Smyrna, is said to have drunk the first cup of coffee ever witnessed in the University of Oxford.66 Such was Lucaris’s sympathy for Reformed Protestant theologians, among whom John Calvin has often been taken as a representative figure, that he was soon to be known, in no complimentary spirit, as the ‘Calvinist patriarch’.67 That cup of coffee which Konopios drank in Oxford – precedent for the huge intellectual liveliness of London coffee houses over the next century and a half – was alas one of the few lasting legacies of Lucaris’s patriarchate, apart from a great deal of ill-will. Lucaris was a deeply pastorally minded bishop, distressed by what he saw as the ignorance and superstition of his flock, and by the obvious decline of his own Church. In 1627 he reopened the moribund Academy in Constantinople, providing it with a printing press staffed by a Greek printer trained in London. Within a few months Catholic missionaries of the Society of Jesus organized a mob to sack the printing office, but Lucaris persisted, sponsoring a translation of the New Testament into modern Greek. In 1629, in an effort to produce a point of instruction for the Greek Orthodox faithful and to introduce them to what he saw as the treasures of Western theology in a synthesis with Orthodox tradition, Lucaris published a Confession of Faith,

• 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