Humiliation

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 Martin Luther (2016)

  The events of Kaiser’s martyrdom followed closely upon Luther’s breakdown. On July 18 he was taken to Passau and again given an opportunity to recant. When he refused, he was ritually defrocked in a ceremony carried out in front of a large crowd, which included Eck. Piece by piece, his priest’s robes were stripped from his body by the bishop of Passau, and he was shaved. Then he was dressed in nothing but a smock, or Kittel, a black slashed beret was put on his head, and, now an ordinary layman, he was handed over to the city judge. This ritual was not the end of his humiliation, however. Kaiser was kept in the castle dungeon for yet another month, and then paraded in chains around the town, before being taken to his home town of Schärding, where he was executed on August 16. Kaiser died true to his Lutheran faith. The original anonymous pamphlet account of his death insisted that his body miraculously refused to burn, but Luther rejected this spurious miracle.46 Instead, in December he composed a pamphlet including a full account of the trial, several letters, Kaiser’s will, and a precise account of the execution sent to him by his friend Michael Stifel: “Thereupon the fire was lit, and several times he shouted loudly: ‘Jesus, I am thine, save me!’ After which his hands, feet and head burnt off and the fire died down. The executioner took a pole and turned the body, then put more wood on the fire, and afterwards he hewed a hole in the body, stabbed it with a sword, stuck a pole in it and put it back on the scaffold and so burnt it.” All this Luther republished in detail, as if determined not to shrink from the full horror of martyrdom.47 And he concluded the pamphlet with a very personal meditation: “Oh Lord God, I wish that I were worthy or might yet be worthy of such a confession and death. What am I? What am I doing? How ashamed I am, when I read this story that I have not long since…been worthy to suffer the same. But my God, if it should be so, let it be so, your will be done.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In 1539 he produced the Monachopornomachia ( The War of the Monk’s Whores ), a play that owes much to Cochlaeus’s Tragedy of Johann Hus but is far cruder and less psychologically shrewd. 53 Its schoolboy humor derides Luther for being forced into marriage with Katharina von Bora, who everyone knows is a whore. But Luther, suffering from gout and the stone, cannot travel, so she is permanently under his watchful eye and does not get enough time with her young lover. Her friends, the wives of Spalatin and Jonas, recount the wonderful sex they enjoyed while their husbands were away at Augsburg at the Diet. At times Luther is presented as virile, foolishly enslaved to his lusts, but in another scene he begs Katharina to stroke his member and help it stand. Spalatin’s wife explains how she manages to satisfy both her husband and her lover without having two vaginas: She “raises her bottom” for her beau. Lemnius and Cochlaeus let their imaginations run riot about the private lives of Luther and the reformers, and their obsession sprang from what was still so shocking in Luther’s theology: His marriage to a nun and his surprisingly positive attitude toward sexuality. Lemnius could not bear it. In his eyes a cabal of old, ill, and impotent men dominated Wittenberg with their sex-obsessed wives and did not appreciate his talent. But in his writings, the Wittenberg of university students also emerges, a town crammed with girls only too eager to find a student lover, and once again with its own brothels even though they had been closed in 1522 as part of Karlstadt’s moral reformation. 54 Lemnius described his aristocratic friends spending their time in clubs like the Cyclops, all too easily getting into fights and duels. Their worth was measured by their ability to socialize within the right circles, bear weapons, flaunt lovers, and display wit. This was a new generation, and its values were very different from those of the reformers. Gone forever was the world of German humanism, and Lemnius mourned its loss. The generational change that Lemnius represented also meant that Luther was no longer universally revered, even in Wittenberg. For much of the 1530s he had had to deal with fawning adulation; in 1536 the mayor of Basle told him that he treated the letter he had sent him as a “costly jewel.” 55 People treasured his signature and he had to sign and dedicate copies of his Bible translation. His image was everywhere in paintings and prints. In 1542, however, he was even attacked by an angry crowd, who invaded his house and swore and blasphemed; it is not clear what had enraged them, but their actions reveal diminishing respect. 56 Within Wittenberg and beyond, Luther had made enemies who alleged that he had too much power.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  He can often appear to be the ultimate spokesman of patriarchy, and it is easy to plunder his works for sexist aphorisms. His table talk was peppered with sexist banter, which was part of sociability at table where largely men were present, yet where Katharina was visible and perhaps within earshot. These were men who after all had been socialized in the all-male cultures of school, monastery, and university. For most of the years when Luther’s table talk was recorded, Katharina was pregnant or caring for small infants. “Let them bear children to death” is often cited to suggest that Luther saw women as nothing but baby machines. But he was insisting that the pains of childbirth were natural and pleasing to God, and he was arguing against a widespread belief that a woman giving birth was under the sway of the Devil, and that if she were to die before being churched, she could not be buried in the churchyard. Luther lived in a society where women ran household workshops, looked after apprentices and journeymen, and even engaged in the production processes. Women could incur debts, invest, and in some areas do business on their own account. Yet his comments assumed a sharp division of labor that simply did not accord with most people’s lives in the sixteenth century. Instead they reflected academic life, where a radically gendered division of labor made it possible for a man like Luther to write and read undisturbed while Katharina provisioned the household, saw to the accounts, and organized the student lodgers, who were a major source of income. 34 Katharina and the servants thus provided the invisible labor that allowed Luther to devote himself to study. As part of her responsibilities Katharina purchased land at Zülsdorf near Wittenberg to grow produce, in addition to the garden the family owned just outside the town walls close to the pig market. She was famed for her beer brewing, a necessity in a period when water was not safe to drink. 35 The marriage infuriated his opponents beyond measure. They soon turned their fire on Katharina herself, and in 1528 two young graduates from Leipzig wrote a couple of scurrilous pamphlets. Johann Hasenberg’s letter-cum-dialogue, addressed to “Martin Luther disturber of the peace and of piety,” called on him repeatedly to “convert, revert,” and was twinned with an offering by Joachim von der Heyde. His pamphlet called on Katharina to leave her “damned and shameful life,” and insulted her as a nun who had donned lay clothes and tripped off to the university at Wittenberg like a “dance girl.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther still did not trust him, however. While he lived under Luther’s roof, Karlstadt was compelled to write a full recantation of his views on the Last Supper, again printed at Wittenberg and once more prefaced by Luther.36 Luther conceded that Karlstadt’s treatises on the subject had been presented as theses, matters for discussion, not as statements of truth; but like others, Luther said, he had forgotten the form in which they had been issued and taken them to be statements of his real views. Turning Karlstadt’s emphasis on the spirit against him, Luther insisted that it was clear that his views were not “of the spirit,” because the spirit made people certain and bold; Karlstadt and his ilk, on the other hand, spoke only out of craziness and human darkness, and therefore everyone should be warned against his views. This was humiliating enough, but in early September, Karlstadt was writing to Luther as Luther’s “slave,” apologizing for disturbing his “sweet dream” and begging him to get the Elector to permit him to live in Saxony, preferably in Kemberg. He knew, he groveled to “your reverend lordship,” that it lay in Luther’s “might, not to say, power” to have his exile lifted.37 Luther duly wrote to the Elector but, possibly on Spalatin’s advice, the Elector refused to permit Karlstadt to reside in Kemberg, because it was on the road to Leipzig and thus “suspicious” travelers might pass through and spread his message. He was to live only in “villages and hamlets” within three miles of Wittenberg, securely marooned in the country and away from the town and the university, but still under the authorities’ watchful eye.38 The wellsprings of Karlstadt’s intellectual life—colleagues and students, a printer and a pulpit—were all denied him. It seems that he was now condemned to work as a farmer.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  They are part of the body politic and by no means negligible or to be regarded solely with derision as ‘lunatic fringe.’ ” 32 This was undoubtedly true, but unfortunately Bryan was not able to articulate these inchoate and ill-informed anxieties adequately at the trial. Where Darrow was able to argue brilliantly for the freedom that science must have to express itself and advance, Bryan, the Presbyterian and Baconian, insisted that, in the absence of definite proof, people had a right to reject an “unsupported hypothesis” such as Darwinism because of its immoral effects. Where Scopes himself treated the whole trial as a farce, Darrow and Bryan were in deadly earnest, and fighting for values that each considered sacred and inviolable. 33 But when Darrow put Bryan on the stand, his merciless cross-examination exposed the muddle-headed and simplistic nature of Bryan’s views. Cornered, Bryan was forced by Darrow to concede that the world was far more than six thousand years old, as a literal reading of the Bible implied, that the six “days” of creation mentioned in Genesis were each longer than twenty-four hours, that he had never read any critical account of the origins of the biblical text, that he had no interest in any other faith, and that, finally, “I do not think about things I don’t think about” and only thought about the things he did think about “sometimes.” 34 It was a rout. Darrow emerged from the trial as the hero of clear rational thought, and the elderly Bryan was discredited as bumbling, incompetent, and obscurantist; he died a few days after the trial, as a result of his exertions. Scopes was convicted, but the ACLU paid his fine, and Darrow and modern science were the undoubted victors at Dayton. The press gleefully exposed Bryan and his supporters as hopeless anachronisms. In particular, the journalist H. L. Mencken denounced the fundamentalists as the scourge of the nation. It was, he crowed, appropriate that Bryan had ended his days in a “one-horse, Tennessee village,” because he loved all country people, including the “gaping primates of the upland valleys.” Fundamentalists were everywhere. They are thick in the mean streets behind the gas-works. They are everywhere learning is too heavy a burden for mortal minds to carry, even the vague, pathetic learning on tap in the little red schoolhouses. 35 Fundamentalists belonged to the past; they were the enemies of science and intellectual liberty, and could take no legitimate part in the modern world. As Maynard Shipley argued in The War on Modern Science (1927), if the fundamentalists managed to seize power in the denominations and impose their strictures on the people by law, Americans would lose the best part of their culture and be dragged back to the Dark Ages. Liberal secularists felt threatened, and hit back. A culture is always a contested matter, with different groups striving to make their visions prevail.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  It was at this moment that the United States, which had hitherto been seen as a benevolent power, lost its political innocence in Iran. By 1953, Musaddiq’s support was on the wane. He had never commanded the full allegiance of the army, but now the oil embargo was causing a grave economic crisis, and the bazaaris deserted him. So did the ulema, including Kashani: Musaddiq was an avowed secularist, and was determined to relegate religion to the private sector. He had also felt strong enough to dismiss the Majlis, which made the Shii clergy nervous of tyranny. But just as these old allies abandoned Musaddiq, Tudeh, the socialist party, swung to his support. This alarmed the U.S. government under President Dwight Eisenhower, who feared a pro-communist coup. He therefore approved United States participation in Operation Ajax, a coup engineered by British intelligence and the CIA to depose Musaddiq. In August 1953, however, Musaddiq got wind of the plot and, as agreed in case of discovery, the shah and the queen left the country, only to return under the aegis of CIA agents, who, three days later, orchestrated the dissaffected Iranians and key men in the military in an uprising which unseated Musaddiq. He was later tried by a military court, defended himself brilliantly, and escaped the death penalty, though he spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The 1953 coup could not have succeeded had there not been considerable disaffection in the country, but it is also true that it would not have taken place without foreign intervention. Iranians felt betrayed and humiliated by the United States, which they had previously considered a friend. America was now following in the footsteps of the Russians and the British, who had cynically manipulated events in Iran for their own gain. This seemed clear in 1954, when a new oil treaty was made which returned the control of oil production, its marketing, and fifty percent of the profits to the world cartel companies. 106 This sickened the more thoughtful Iranians. They had tried to take control of their own wealth, with the backing of the international court, but this had not been respected. Ayatollah Kashani was appalled. American aid to Iran benefited only a few people, he protested, and did not reach a hundredth of what the United States took from Iran in petrodollars. “For the hundreds of millions of dollars that the American colonialist imperialists will gain in oil,” he predicted, “the oppressed nation will lose all hope of liberty and will have a negative opinion about all the Western world.” 107 In this, at least, Kashani was a true prophet. When Iranians looked back on Operation Ajax, they would forget the defection of their own people from Musaddiq, and believe implicitly that the United States had single-handedly imposed the shah’s dictatorship upon them, for its own interests.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The riots also disturbed London and Washington, who wanted Musaddiq out. Ayatollah Kashani played a leading role in these demonstrations, rushing through the streets in a shroud to declare his willingness to die in the holy war against tyranny. After only two days, the shah was forced to reinstate Musaddiq. It was at this moment that the United States, which had hitherto been seen as a benevolent power, lost its political innocence in Iran. By 1953, Musaddiq’s support was on the wane. He had never commanded the full allegiance of the army, but now the oil embargo was causing a grave economic crisis, and the bazaaris deserted him. So did the ulema , including Kashani: Musaddiq was an avowed secularist, and was determined to relegate religion to the private sector. He had also felt strong enough to dismiss the Majlis, which made the Shii clergy nervous of tyranny. But just as these old allies abandoned Musaddiq, Tudeh, the socialist party, swung to his support. This alarmed the U.S. government under President Dwight Eisenhower, who feared a pro-communist coup. He therefore approved United States participation in Operation Ajax, a coup engineered by British intelligence and the CIA to depose Musaddiq. In August 1953, however, Musaddiq got wind of the plot and, as agreed in case of discovery, the shah and the queen left the country, only to return under the aegis of CIA agents, who, three days later, orchestrated the dissaffected Iranians and key men in the military in an uprising which unseated Musaddiq. He was later tried by a military court, defended himself brilliantly, and escaped the death penalty, though he spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The 1953 coup could not have succeeded had there not been considerable disaffection in the country, but it is also true that it would not have taken place without foreign intervention. Iranians felt betrayed and humiliated by the United States, which they had previously considered a friend. America was now following in the footsteps of the Russians and the British, who had cynically manipulated events in Iran for their own gain. This seemed clear in 1954, when a new oil treaty was made which returned the control of oil production, its marketing, and fifty percent of the profits to the world cartel companies. 106 This sickened the more thoughtful Iranians. They had tried to take control of their own wealth, with the backing of the international court, but this had not been respected. Ayatollah Kashani was appalled.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Finally, however, the Brotherhood itself played into Nasser’s hands on October 26, 1954, when Abd al-Latif, a member of the Society, shot Nasser during a rally. Nasser survived the attack, and his courage and insouciance under fire did wonders for his popularity. He was now free to destroy the Society completely. By the end of November 1954, over one thousand Brothers had been arrested and brought to trial. Innumerable others, however, many of whom had been guilty of nothing more inflammatory than distributing leaflets, never appeared in court, were subjected to mental and physical torture, and languished in Nasser’s prisons and concentration camps for the next fifteen years. Hudaybi was sentenced to life imprisonment, but six other leaders of the Society were executed. 90 Nasser seemed to have broken the Brotherhood, and to have stopped the only progressive Islamic movement in Egypt in its tracks. Secularism appeared to be victorious, especially after Nasser became the hero of the Arab world two years later after the Suez Crisis, in which he not only successfully defied the West but inflicted a crushing humiliation on the British. But his triumph over the Brotherhood proved in the end to be a Pyrrhic victory. The Brothers who spent the rest of Nasser’s life in the camps had experienced the onslaught of secularism at its most aggressive. We shall see that it was in the camps that some of the Brothers abandoned Banna’s reformist vision and created a new and potentially violent Sunni fundamentalism. Iranians were also experiencing a vicious secularist assault. Reza Shah’s modernization program was even more accelerated than that undergone by either Egypt or Turkey, because when he came to power, Iran had scarcely begun to modernize. 91 Reza was ruthless. Opponents were simply eliminated; one of the first to go was Ayatollah Mudarris, who had opposed the shah in the Majlis; he was imprisoned in 1927, and murdered in 1937. 92 Reza managed to centralize the country for the first time, but only by the most brutal means, quashing uprisings and impoverishing the nomadic tribes, who had hitherto been virtually autonomous. 93 Reza reformed the judiciary; three new secular law codes—civil, commercial, and criminal—replaced the Shariah. 94 He also tried to industrialize the country and bring it modern amenities. By the late 1930s, most cities had electricity and power plants. But government controls stifled the development of a truly aggressive capitalist economy, wages were low, and exploitation rife. These draconian methods proved to be fruitless; Iran was unable to achieve economic independence. Britain still owned the booming oil industry, which contributed almost nothing to the economy, and Iran was forced to rely on foreign loans and investment. Reza’s program was inevitably superficial. It simply imposed modern institutions on old agrarian structures, an approach that had failed in Egypt and would fail here.

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

  compromise. Although it talked of the Union of Two Natures, and took care to give explicit mention of Theotokos, it largely followed Nestorius’s viewpoint about ‘two natures’, ‘the distinction of natures being in no way abolished because of the union’.90 Meanwhile, to satisfy his enemies, the unhappy former Bishop of Constantinople was condemned once more: an ecclesiastical stitch-up, dictated by imperial power. Nestorius was already completely isolated from public affairs, in a remote Egyptian location (which the Egyptian government still uses for a high-security prison); he endured his humiliation at the hands of his enemies with stoicism. He is reputed to have died the day before a message arrived inviting him to participate in the Council of Chalcedon; regardless of this impulse to reconciliation, the Emperor then ordered Nestorius’s writings burned, and children bearing his name were rebaptized and renamed. His last and most extensive work, written in prison, a dignified defence of all that he had done, was only rediscovered in a manuscript in 1889, in the library of the East Syrian Patriarch, whose Church’s separate status originated in its unhappiness with the results of Chalcedon.91 The Chalcedonian Definition certainly proved to have staying power, unlike the Homoean compromise solution to the Arian dispute at Ariminum in 359, but it still won much less acceptance than the credal formula of Constantinople from 381. In the manner of many politically inspired middle-of-the-road settlements, it left bitter discontents on either side in the Eastern Churches. On the one hand were those who adhered to a more robust affirmation of two natures in Christ and who felt that Nestorius had been treated with outrageous injustice. These protestors were labelled Nestorians by their opponents, and the Churches which they eventually formed have habitually been so styled by outsiders ever since. It would be truer to their origins, and more considerate to their self-esteem, to call them Theodoreans, since Theodore of Mopsuestia was the prime source of their theological stance and Nestorius hardly figured in their minds as a founding father. In view of their insistence on two (dyo) natures in Christ, they could with justice be called ‘Dyophysites’, and we will trace their subsequent history primarily as ‘the Church of the East’ using this label. By contrast, on the other side the history of the winners has likewise given those who treasure the memory of Cyril and his campaign against Nestorius a label which they still resent: ‘Monophysites’ (monos and physis=single nature). This latter group of Churches has always been insistent on claiming that title prized among Eastern Churches: ‘Orthodox’. In an age where both Churches of the Greek, Romanian and Slavic Orthodox traditions and the various Catholic and Protestant heirs of the Western Latin Church have increasingly sought to end ancient bitterness, these sensitivities have been respected, and the label

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

  church, butchered him and six of his clergy, and paraded the bleeding corpses round the city: all in the name of the mia physis of Jesus Christ.3 The emperor’s authority in Egypt never fully recovered from this appalling incident: increasingly a majority in the Egyptian Church as well as other strongholds of Miaphysitism denounced Chalcedonian Christians as ‘Dyophysites’ and sneered at them as ‘the emperor’s people’ – Melchites.4 The word ‘Melchite’ has had a complicated later history, and now various Churches of Orthodox tradition in communion with the pope in Rome are happy to use it to label themselves, but it thus started life as a term of abuse as poisonous as ‘collaborator’ in the aftermath of Nazi occupation in the Europe of the 1940s. From now on Egyptian Christianity increasingly worshipped God in the native language of Egypt, Coptic. The Church had long been ready to use various Coptic dialects, liberally seeded with loanwords from Greek, and already in the third century Coptic was being written in a version of Greek script, developed specifically for translating the Christian scriptures. The prestige of Antony, Pachomius and the ascetic movement sealed the respectability of Coptic in Christian life and worship, and it developed a considerable literature both of translated and original devotional texts, both mainstream Christian and unorthodox.5 Now Coptic language and distinctive culture were becoming badges of difference from the Greek Christianity of the Church in Constantinople. There was a tendency all round the eastern Mediterranean for ‘Melchites’ to be concentrated in urban, affluent outposts of Greek society, while anti-Chalcedonian views on either side increasingly found strength in other communities. The leaders of the Miaphysite cause across the empire still loudly proclaimed their loyalty to the imperial throne, and there is no reason to doubt that most were sincere. Their loyalty was certainly worth trying to secure. For two centuries and more a succession of emperors in Constantinople desperately tried to devise ever more intricate theological formulae which would reconcile the Miaphysites to the imperial Church, preferably but not necessarily preserving the essence of the Chalcedonian settlement. In doing so, they constantly imperilled their relations with the Western Latin Church. It was only natural that the Eastern emperors had shifted their political priorities away from the western half of the old empire as that disintegrated. In 410 had come the sack of Rome itself by barbarian armies: a deep humiliation for Romans proud of their history, even if the city had long ceased to be the capital for the emperors. In 451 there had still been an emperor in the West – more or less – but in 476 the barbarian rulers who were taking over so much of the former western territories of Rome allowed the last emperor to reign for no more than a few months of his teenage years

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The 1953 coup could not have succeeded had there not been considerable disaffection in the country, but it is also true that it would not have taken place without foreign intervention. Iranians felt betrayed and humiliated by the United States, which they had previously considered a friend. America was now following in the footsteps of the Russians and the British, who had cynically manipulated events in Iran for their own gain. This seemed clear in 1954, when a new oil treaty was made which returned the control of oil production, its marketing, and fifty percent of the profits to the world cartel companies.106 This sickened the more thoughtful Iranians. They had tried to take control of their own wealth, with the backing of the international court, but this had not been respected. Ayatollah Kashani was appalled. American aid to Iran benefited only a few people, he protested, and did not reach a hundredth of what the United States took from Iran in petrodollars. “For the hundreds of millions of dollars that the American colonialist imperialists will gain in oil,” he predicted, “the oppressed nation will lose all hope of liberty and will have a negative opinion about all the Western world.”107 In this, at least, Kashani was a true prophet. When Iranians looked back on Operation Ajax, they would forget the defection of their own people from Musaddiq, and believe implicitly that the United States had single-handedly imposed the shah’s dictatorship upon them, for its own interests. Bitterness increased in the early 1960s, when the shah’s rule became more autocratic and cruel. There seemed to be a double standard. America proudly proclaimed its belief in freedom and democracy, but warmly supported a shah who permitted no opposition to his rule, and denied Iranians fundamental human rights. After 1953, Iran became a privileged American ally. As a major oil-producing country, Iran was a prime market for the sale of American services and technology. Americans looked upon Iran as an economic goldmine, and, over the years, the United States repeated the old political patterns used by the British: strong-arm tactics in the oil market, undue influence over the monarch, demands for diplomatic immunity, business and trade concessions, and a condescending attitude toward the Iranians themselves. American businessmen and consultants poured into the country and made a great deal of money. There was a glaring discrepancy between their lifestyle and that of most Iranians; they lived isolated from the people, and since most worked under contracts associated with the throne, they became fatally associated with the regime. It was a shortsighted, self-interested policy that would eventually cast the United States in a demonic light.

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

  The pope who drew together all the strands of papal self-assertion in the eleventh century was Gregory VII (reigned 1073–85). Born Hildebrand, an Italian who became a monk, he was in papal service from the 1040s, so he was another major voice in the circle of Pope Leo IX alongside the Cluniac Humbert. Once pope, Gregory was free to pursue the programme of Church reform which now had all Europe as its canvas, and which, in a series of formal statements entered into his administrative register, was centred on a definition of the pope as universal monarch in a world where the Church would reign over all the rulers of the earth.18 This one man’s vision can be compared in its consequences over centuries with the vision of Karl Marx eight hundred years later; indeed, all the signs are that it will prove far longer-lasting in its effects. Popes had never before made such revolutionary universal claims. Not even the Donation of Constantine (see p. 351) would satisfy Gregory’s agenda: it still represented a gift from a secular ruler to a pope, and that was the wrong way round, at a time when popes were increasingly bitterly clashing with successive emperors. Twice Gregory went so far as to excommunicate the king and future Emperor Henry IV in the course of an ‘Investiture Controversy’, a dispute which continued to rage through the twelfth century as to whether monarchs could present senior bishops with symbols of sacred office when they were appointed. This was a straightforward struggle about who was going to exercise control in the Church. Famously in the first of their clashes, the Pope kept the excommunicate Henry waiting in penitential garb, allegedly barefoot, for three days in winter snow, at the castle of Canossa in northern Italy, before granting him absolution. Gregory’s successors took a new title, more comprehensive than ‘Vicar of Peter’, more accurately to express his ideas: ‘Vicar of Christ’. Not merely the successor of Peter, the pope was Christ’s ambassador and representative on earth. His duty was to lead the task of making the world and the Church holy.19 Gregory’s humiliation of Henry was soon to be reversed, and the investiture controversy itself ended inconclusively in the early twelfth century, but similar issues flared up repeatedly later. In confrontations which sometimes became military campaigns, popes were able to wound the empire without effectively dominating it. As a result, Western Europe was not destined to become a single sacred state like the early Muslim caliphate, under either emperor or pope, but a constellation of jurisdictions, some of which threw off papal obedience in the sixteenth century. One of the most poisonous confrontations between the Church’s persistent claims and one of these monarchs was a dispute between King Henry II of England and his former Chancellor the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket, about whether the King’s newly developing royal legal system could

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

  was at Manzikert in Asia Minor in 1071, at which the reigning Emperor Romanus was not only crushingly defeated, but suffered the humiliation of being taken prisoner. Even though he was treated graciously and released on the payment of a large ransom, there were major consequences. Asia Minor was increasingly undermined by Seljuk raids, and more and more territory passed out of Byzantine control. Most of the holy mountains which had become so important within Byzantine monasticism suffered badly in these invasions, with monks fleeing or being enslaved, and now Mount Athos, far away in secure Macedonia, was left gradually to emerge as the most significant among them. In 1081 the most successful of the imperial generals, Alexios Komnenos, seized power and established his dynasty on the throne, fighting on all fronts to save the empire from disintegration. As emperor, Alexios found that neither his family nor his army could be fully trusted in his struggles, and it may have been this insecurity which made him look beyond his frontiers for allies.7 He repeatedly appealed to Western leaders for help against various enemies, and in 1095 for the first time he was given a serious hearing. It was this request which led Urban II to launch the publicity campaign which triggered the First Crusade (see pp. 383–4). The Crusades proved a long-term disaster for the empire, despite the competence of Alexios and his Komnenian successors, who did their best to restore the fortunes of the Byzantine imperial machine during the twelfth century. If the gradual drifting apart of East and West had led to mutual incomprehension and hostility, their newly intimate contact frequently made relations even more tense. Even during the success of the First Crusade, the arrival of large armies from the West in Byzantine territory was alarming and disruptive, while Latins rapidly began fomenting a self-justifying tale back home that the Byzantines were treacherously sabotaging their own heroic efforts. That mutual ill-will strengthened as the Second Crusade from 1147 to 1149 failed to achieve its objectives in Palestine and Damascus. The whole miserable expedition was characterized by acute suspicion between Latins and Greeks and major indiscipline among crusader armies, whose remnants struggled back from the Holy Land to Western Europe taking their resentments with them. Some might have noted the contrast between this fiasco and Portuguese Christians’ simultaneous capture of Lisbon from the Muslims with the help of another group of crusaders, operating as far from the Byzantines as it was possible to be in southern Europe. The worse the Latins behaved – and there was much worse to come – the more they peddled the notion that Byzantines were devious, effeminate and corrupt, and really deserved any unpleasantness that was done to them.

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

  (Pope 1294–1303). In order to become pope, Boniface had summarily displaced and brutally imprisoned a disastrously unworldly hermit-partisan of their movement who had been unwisely elected pope as Celestine V.15 Boniface went on to claim jurisdiction for the papacy throughout the world in a bull of 1302, Unam Sanctam (‘One Holy [Church]’). This was a culminating moment in the universal pretensions of the papacy, but the Pope’s aspirations were curtailed by his imprisonment and humiliation at the hands of King Philip the Fair of France. A French successor-pope then chose to live in the city of Avignon, a small papal enclave in southern France. There were many good reasons why Pope Clement V should choose Avignon in 1309: it saved him encountering the constant infighting in Rome, and since the papal court was now a bureaucratic centre affecting all Europe, it made sense to find a more accessible place from which it could operate. Nevertheless, the move brought the papacy closely under French influence, and it caused great indignation in Italy, where the great poet Petrarch described it as a ‘Babylonian captivity’. It showed how far the pope had moved from the intimate association with the body of St Peter which had brought him his power in the Church. Pope John XXII made further vocal enemies when after first crushing the Spiritual Franciscans, he further infuriated the ‘Conventual’ wing of the order which had made careful arrangements to avoid holding property while still establishing a regular life in convents. In 1321 John reversed earlier papal pronouncements supporting Franciscan poverty, and repudiated previous papal trusteeship of their goods, restoring ownership to the Franciscans themselves, a far from welcome gift. Pope John’s canonization of Francis the following year by no means mollified the Franciscans: new identifications of the Pope with Antichrist outdid all previous efforts in shrillness, and some Franciscans accused John of heresy for repudiating the pronouncements of his predecessors. That lent an urgent topicality to earlier rather theoretical discussions about how to deal with a pope who was a heretic. One of the most distinguished of Franciscan philosopher-theologians, the Englishman William of Ockham, was among those leading the campaign. He had no hesitation in declaring Pope John a heretic to whom no obedience was due: ‘Our faith is not formed by the wisdom of the Pope. For no one is bound to believe the Pope in matters which are of the faith, unless he can demonstrate the reasonableness of what he says by the rule of faith.’16 Ockham survived John XXII’s condemnation for this opinion, and his nominalist approach to philosophy flourished, becoming one of the most influential modes of philosophical and theological argument in late medieval Europe. Ockham was naturally supported in his attacks by Imperialists, and they had

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Banna organized a few of his friends to hold impromptu “sermons” in the mosques and coffeehouses.63 He told his audience that the impact of the West and the recent political changes had knocked them off balance, and that they no longer understood their religion. Islam was not a Western-style ideology, or a set of creeds. It was a total way of life and, if lived wholeheartedly, would bring back that dynamism and energy that Muslims had had long ago, before they had been colonized by foreigners. To make the ummah strong again, they must rediscover their Muslim souls.64 Even though he was only in his early twenties, Banna made an impression. He was strong-minded, charismatic, and could make people follow him. One evening, in March 1928, six of the local workers in Ismailiyyah came and asked him to take action: We know not the practical way to reach the glory of Islam and to serve the welfare of the Muslims. We are weary of this life of humiliation and restriction. So we see that the Arabs and the Muslims have no status and no dignity. They are not more than mere hirelings belonging to foreigners. We possess nothing but this blood … and these souls … and these few coins. We are unable to perceive the road to action as you perceive it, or to know the path to the service of the fatherland, the religion and the ummah as you know it.65 Banna was moved by this appeal. Together, he and his visitors made an oath to be “troops [jund] for the message of Islam.” That night the Society of Muslim Brothers was born. From this tiny beginning, it spread. By the time of Banna’s death in 1949, there were 2000 branches of the Society throughout Egypt, each branch representing between 300,000 and 600,000 Brothers and Sisters. It was the only organization in Egypt to represent every group in society, including civil servants, students, and the potentially powerful urban workers and peasants.66 By the Second World War, the Society had become one of the most powerful contestants on the Egyptian political scene.

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

  church, butchered him and six of his clergy, and paraded the bleeding corpses round the city: all in the name of the mia physis of Jesus Christ.3 The emperor’s authority in Egypt never fully recovered from this appalling incident: increasingly a majority in the Egyptian Church as well as other strongholds of Miaphysitism denounced Chalcedonian Christians as ‘Dyophysites’ and sneered at them as ‘the emperor’s people’ – Melchites.4 The word ‘Melchite’ has had a complicated later history, and now various Churches of Orthodox tradition in communion with the pope in Rome are happy to use it to label themselves, but it thus started life as a term of abuse as poisonous as ‘collaborator’ in the aftermath of Nazi occupation in the Europe of the 1940s. From now on Egyptian Christianity increasingly worshipped God in the native language of Egypt, Coptic. The Church had long been ready to use various Coptic dialects, liberally seeded with loanwords from Greek, and already in the third century Coptic was being written in a version of Greek script, developed specifically for translating the Christian scriptures. The prestige of Antony, Pachomius and the ascetic movement sealed the respectability of Coptic in Christian life and worship, and it developed a considerable literature both of translated and original devotional texts, both mainstream Christian and unorthodox.5 Now Coptic language and distinctive culture were becoming badges of difference from the Greek Christianity of the Church in Constantinople. There was a tendency all round the eastern Mediterranean for ‘Melchites’ to be concentrated in urban, affluent outposts of Greek society, while anti-Chalcedonian views on either side increasingly found strength in other communities. The leaders of the Miaphysite cause across the empire still loudly proclaimed their loyalty to the imperial throne, and there is no reason to doubt that most were sincere. Their loyalty was certainly worth trying to secure. For two centuries and more a succession of emperors in Constantinople desperately tried to devise ever more intricate theological formulae which would reconcile the Miaphysites to the imperial Church, preferably but not necessarily preserving the essence of the Chalcedonian settlement. In doing so, they constantly imperilled their relations with the Western Latin Church. It was only natural that the Eastern emperors had shifted their political priorities away from the western half of the old empire as that disintegrated. In 410 had come the sack of Rome itself by barbarian armies: a deep humiliation for Romans proud of their history, even if the city had long ceased to be the capital for the emperors. In 451 there had still been an emperor in the West – more or less – but in 476 the barbarian rulers who were taking over so much of the former western territories of Rome allowed the last emperor to reign for no more than a few months of his teenage years

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

  who disagreed with them and whom they styled heretics. This is not how they talked about Zoroastrianism, or the defeated cults of the old Roman Empire.15 Whether Christians found themselves oppressed in the new situation depended on the personality and outlook of the Muslim authorities. At various times discrimination was deliberately burdensome: so under a number of governors and caliphs of the Umayyad dynasty, who were the first conquerors and who ruled from Damascus in the seventh and eighth centuries, Christians faced the destruction of churches and the strict enforcement of a host of petty humiliations and restrictions, while under the last great Abbasid Caliph Al-Mutawakkil (reigned 847–61) they were forced to wear distinctive clothing in yellow – an anticipation of a measure which, in later centuries, Christian societies would take against their Jewish minorities in Europe.16 At other times under rulers of wider sympathies, second-class status might mean as much privilege and flexibility as it had done under the Sassanians. Some of the Umayyads found themselves charmed by the cultures which they had conquered, so that archaeologists in Palestine and Syria have revealed an astonishing flourishing of Christian-style figural art under their rule. Even in Umayyad palaces the mosaic floors may luxuriate in satyrs and cupids, and, contrary to any picture of consistent destruction, there was an outburst of church-building complete with rich figural mosaics datable to after the Arab invasions.17 One Dyophysite bishop wrote in 649, soon after the Muslim conquest, that ‘these Arabs fight not against our Christian religion; nay, rather they defend our faith, they revere our priests and Saints, and they make gifts to our churches and monasteries’.18 Monasteries were nevertheless going to have a hard time surviving in this new world, particularly in the cities, and in the long term the more remote monasteries stood the best chance of survival. Muslims were torn between the general cultural respect for ascetic holy men in the Middle East, attested in the Qur’an itself, and other pronouncements of the Qur’an which condemn monks as dangerous charlatans.19 One device for protection against negative opinions was to create stories which provided a comfortingly warm picture of relationships between monks and the Prophet. This was possible because around the text of the Qur’an there grew a great range of traditional stories (known as a hadīth) which deal with matters on which the Qur’an is not sufficiently explict. So it was supposed to have been a Miaphysite monk, Bahīrā, who recognized Muhammad’s special destiny in his youth, long before he had received any revelations.20 One famous monastery below Mount Sinai refounded by Justinian and later dedicated to St Catherine of Alexandria reinforced the security created by its isolation and inaccessibility by adroitly injecting into Islamic tradition a

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

  was more certainly placed in the city, Paul of Tarsus. But that change was part of a momentous shift in the story of Christianity. From being the poor relation of the Greek- and Semitic-speaking Churches of the East, Latin Christianity survived largely unscathed the eruption of Islam, and embarked on adventures which turned it into the first world faith. It should not be forgotten how unpredictable this outcome was. Peter’s charisma was the most useful resource at the disposal of Roman bishops as, from the third century, they increasingly claimed to be arbiters of doctrine in the wider Church. No pope before mid-fifth-century Leo the Great at the time of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and virtually none after him, could claim the authority of being a major theologian, nor did the city prove to be a centre of lively theological discussion or controversy. It is significant that the one exception to this rule, the disputes over Monarchian views of Christ (see pp. 145–7), had occurred in the late second century while the Church in Rome’s predominant language was still Greek and links to the East were still strong. After that, the two outstanding theologians writing in Latin up to the fifth century, Tertullian and Augustine, were both natives not of Italy but of North Africa. The pope’s claim to a special place in the life of the universal Church came rather from the tombs of the Apostles, and from the end of the third century it was reinforced by a further accident of history. The Emperor Diocletian’s reorganization of the whole empire would not have seemed particularly relevant to the popes in Rome when it took place in the 290s; he was after all about to become one of the Church’s most dangerous enemies. Nevertheless, it had a major and permanent effect on the city. Diocletian removed the real centre of imperial government to four other capitals more strategically placed for emperors to deal with the problematic northern and eastern frontiers of the empire – Nicomedia in Asia Minor, Sirmium in what is now Serbia, Mediolanum, the modern Milan, and Augusta Trevorum, the modern Trier. Emperors never again returned to Rome for extended residence. Once the Church became the ally and beneficiary of emperors rather than the victim of their persecution, that vacuum in secular power in the ancient capital meant that the Christian bishop was given an opportunity to expand his power and position. By the end of the fourth century this combination of advantages made it worthwhile for Greek Christians in their various intractable disputes to appeal to popes for support, the most outstanding example being the place of Pope Leo I’s Tome at Chalcedon. Constantine I mightily helped the process along when he gave Christianity official status. In Rome he nevertheless had a handicap: he was working within the restrictions of a city whose heritage of monuments and temples reflected the

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

  the first of the Roman emperors, with a succession which lasted until 1453. This was the title that mattered: it signified his control of the army, which had traditionally bestowed the honour by acclamation, the real basis for imperial power from now on. The virtually perpetual warfare which so dominated the Roman past meant that the best justification for holding power in the Republic had been a track record of military success: hence the importance of the imperator title. Augustus made sure that his various publicists magnified a personal record as a military commander which was in reality decidedly unimpressive.35 Ordinary people raised few objections to Augustus’s new role as imperator; they had little nostalgia for the Roman Republic, which had done nothing for seven decades but produce misery. As far as they were concerned, the old forms had been a sham anyway, so what difference would it make if Augustus elaborated the pretence through traditional titles and institutions? He paid particular attention to beautifying Rome. Central to various symbols of his achievements was a monumental ‘Altar of Peace’ (Ara pacis) voted him by a grateful (or at least politically realistic) Senate, which can still be admired in Rome, albeit now on a new site chosen by that latter-day failed Augustus, Benito Mussolini. The theme of peace was well chosen: most Romans were more interested in the fact that Augustus brought them peace and prosperity than they were in the Republic. For all that his own military prowess was dubious, Augustus and his successors tore down political frontiers all round the Mediterranean, and by controlling piracy, they made it comparatively safe and easy to travel from one end of the sea to the other. The first great exponent of a worldwide Christianity, the Apostle Paul, made the most of this, and so would the Christian faith as a whole. Without the general peace brought by Roman power, Christianity’s westward spread would have been far more unlikely. Yet the new order of politics was deeply depressing for the battered remains of the old Roman upper classes. They were no more taken in than anyone else by the Emperor’s Republican window-dressing. They had done well out of the old Republic, and they had the sense to see that they could do well out of Augustus’s regime, but they felt the humiliation deeply. Worst of all was the increasing reverence paid to Augustus. He did not actually claim divine honours, but he raised no objection to a system of honours in which offerings and sacrifices were made to his genius, the sacred force or guardian spirit which guided his personality and actions; Roman religion had already accommodated the habit of paying divine honours to such abstractions.36 After Augustus’s death, his successors in any case did declare him a god, and subsequent emperors saw the usefulness of this: the consecration of a predecessor as divine gave the living

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Hyde had already done this three times, kicking kids out of class for not paying attention or writing notes to one another. “Um, I was just looking outside at the, uh, at the hill and thinking about, um, the trees and the forest, like you were saying earlier, about the way—” The Old Man, who obviously did not tolerate vocalized rambling, cut me off. “I’m going to ask you to leave class, Mr. Halter, so that you can go out there and discover the relationship between the um-trees and the uh-forest. And tomorrow, when you’re ready to take this class seriously, I will welcome you back.” I sat still, my pen resting in my hand, my notebook open, my face flushed and my jaw jutting out into an underbite, an old trick I had to keep from looking sad or scared. Two rows behind me, I heard a chair move and turned around to see Alaska standing up, slinging her backpack over one arm. “I’m sorry, but that’s bullshit. You can’t just throw him out of class. You drone on and on for an hour every day, and we’re not allowed to glance out the window?” The Old Man stared back at Alaska like a bull at a matador, then raised a hand to his sagging face and slowly rubbed the white stubble on his cheek. “For fifty minutes a day, five days a week, you abide by my rules. Or you fail. The choice is yours. Both of you leave.” I stuffed my notebook into my backpack and walked out, humiliated. As the door shut behind me, I felt a tap on my left shoulder. I turned, but there was no one there. Then I turned the other way, and Alaska was smiling at me, the skin between her eyes and temple crinkled into a starburst. “The oldest trick in the book,” she said, “but everybody falls for it.” I tried a smile, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Dr. Hyde. It was worse than the Duct Tape Incident, because I always knew that the Kevin Richmans of the world didn’t like me. But my teachers had always been card-carrying members of the Miles Halter Fan Club. “I told you he was an asshole,” she said. “I still think he’s a genius. He’s right. I wasn’t listening.” “Right, but he didn’t need to be a jerk about it. Like he needs to prove his power by humiliating you?! Anyway,” she said, “the only real geniuses are artists: Yeats, Picasso, García Márquez: geniuses. Dr.