Longing

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From A History of God (1993)

  Not surprisingly, most Israelites declined the prophet’s invitation to enter into a dialogue with Yahweh. They preferred a less demanding religion of cultic observance either in the Jerusalem Temple or in the old fertility cults of Canaan. This continues to be the case: the religion of compassion is followed only by a minority; most religious people are content with decorous worship in synagogue, church, temple and mosque. The ancient Canaanite religions were still flourishing in Israel. In the tenth century, King Jeroboam I had set up two cultic bulls at the sanctuaries of Dan and Beth-El. Two hundred years later, the Israelites were still taking part in fertility rites and sacred sex there, as we see in the oracles of the prophet Hosea, Amos’s contemporary.20 Some Israelites appear to have thought that Yahweh had a wife, like the other gods: archaeologists have recently unearthed inscriptions dedicated “To Yahweh and his Asherah.” Hosea was particularly disturbed by the fact that Israel was breaking the terms of the covenant by worshipping other gods, such as Baal. Like all of the new prophets, he was concerned with the inner meaning of religion. As he makes Yahweh say: “What I want is love (hesed), not sacrifice; knowledge of God (daath Elohim), not holocausts.”21 He did not mean theological knowledge: the word daath comes from the Hebrew verb yada: to know, which has sexual connotations. Thus J says that Adam “knew” his wife, Eve.22 In the Old Canaanite religion, Baal had married the soil and the people had celebrated this with ritual orgies, but Hosea insisted that since the covenant, Yahweh had taken the place of Baal and had wedded the people of Israel. They had to understand that it was Yahweh, not Baal, who would bring fertility to the soil.23 He was still wooing Israel like a lover, determined to lure her back from the Baals who had seduced her: When that day comes—it is Yahweh who speaks— she will call me, “My husband,” no longer will she call me, “My Baal.” I will take the names of the Baals off her lips, their names shall never be uttered again.24 Where Amos attacked social wickedness, Hosea dwelt on the lack of inwardness in Israelite religion: the “knowledge” of God was related to “hesed,” implying an interior appropriation and attachment to Yahweh that must supersede exterior observance.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But Shiis also had a different political outlook from other Muslims. Where the rituals and disciplines of Sunni spirituality helped Sunni Muslims to accept life as it was and to conform to archetypal norms, Shii mysticism expressed a divine discontent. The early traditions that developed shortly after the announcement of the doctrine of the Occultation reveal the frustration and impotence felt by many Shiis during the tenth century. 33 This has been called “the Shii century” because many of the local commanders in the Islamic empire who wielded effective power in a given region had Shii sympathies, but this turned out to make no appreciable difference. For the majority, life was still unjust and inequitable, despite the clear teaching of the Koran. Indeed, the Imams had all been victims of rulers whom Shiis regarded as corrupt and illegitimate: tradition had it that every single one of the Imams after Husain had been poisoned by the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs. In their longing for a more just and benevolent social order, Shiis developed an eschatology centering on the final appearance (zuhur) of the Hidden Imam during the Last Days, when he would return, battle with the forces of evil, and establish a Golden Age of justice and peace before the Final Judgment. But this yearning for the End did not mean that the Shiis had abandoned the conservative ethos and become future-oriented. They were so strongly aware of the archetypal ideal, the way things ought to be, that they found ordinary political life intolerable. The Hidden Imam would not bring something new into the world; he would simply correct human history to make human affairs finally conform to the fundamental principles of existence. Similarly, the Imam’s “appearance” would in a profound sense simply make manifest something that had been there all along, for the Hidden Imam is a constant presence in the life of Shiis; he represents the elusive light of God in a dark, tyrannical world and the only source of hope. The Occultation completed the mythologization of Shii history which had begun when the Sixth Imam gave up political activism and separated religion from politics. Myth does not provide a blueprint for pragmatic political action but supplies the faithful with a way of looking at their society and developing their interior lives. The myth of Occultation depoliticized the Shiah once and for all. There was no sense in Shiis taking useless risks by pitting themselves against the might of temporal rulers. The image of an Imam, a just political leader who could not exist in the world as it was but had to go into hiding, expressed the Shiis’ alienation from their society.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Khidr was also important to the Ismailis. Despite the fact that Ibn al-Arabi was a Sunni, his teachings were very close to Ismailism and were subsequently incorporated into their theology—yet another instance of mystical religion being able to transcend sectarian divisions. Like the Ismailis, Ibn al-Arabi stressed the pathos of God, which was in sharp contrast to the apatheia of the God of the philosophers. The God of the mystics yearned to be known by his creatures. The Ismailis believed that the noun ilah (god) sprang from the Arabic root WLH: to be sad, to sigh for.46 As the Sacred Hadith had made God say: “I was a hidden treasure and I yearned to be known. Then I created creatures in order to be known by them.” There is no rational proof of God’s sadness; we know it only by our own longing for something to fulfill our deepest desires and to explain the tragedy and pain of life. Since we are created in God’s image, we must reflect God, the supreme archetype. Our yearning for the reality that we call “God” must, therefore, mirror a sympathy with the pathos of God. Ibn al-Arabi imagined the solitary God sighing with longing, but this sigh (nafas rahmani) was not an expression of maudlin self-pity. It had an active, creative force which brought the whole of our cosmos into existence; it also exhaled human beings, who became logoi, words that express God to himself. It follows that each human being is a unique epiphany of the Hidden God, manifesting him in a particular and unrepeatable manner.

• From A History of God (1993)

  She was usually one of the most powerful of the gods, certainly more powerful than the Sky God, who remained a rather shadowy figure. She was called Inana in ancient Sumeria, Ishtar in Babylon, Anat in Canaan, Isis in Egypt and Aphrodite in Greece, and remarkably similar stories were devised in all these cultures to express her role in the spiritual lives of the people. These myths were not intended to be taken literally, but were metaphorical attempts to describe a reality that was too complex and elusive to express in any other way. These dramatic and evocative stories of gods and goddesses helped people to articulate their sense of the powerful but unseen forces that surrounded them. Indeed, it seems that in the ancient world people believed that it was only by participating in this divine life that they would become truly human. Earthly life was obviously fragile and overshadowed by mortality, but if men and women imitated the actions of the gods they would share to some degree their greater power and effectiveness. Thus it was said that the gods had shown men how to build their cities and temples, which were mere copies of their own homes in the divine realm. The sacred world of the gods—as recounted in myth—was not just an ideal toward which men and women should aspire, but was the prototype of human existence; it was the original pattern or the archetype on which our life here below had been modeled. Everything on earth was thus believed to be a replica of something in the divine world, a perception that informed the mythology, ritual and social organization of most of the cultures of antiquity and continues to influence more traditional societies in our own day. 1 In ancient Iran, for example, every single person or object in the mundane world (getik) was held to have its counterpart in the archetypal world of sacred reality (menok). This is a perspective that is difficult for us to appreciate in the modern world, since we see autonomy and independence as supreme human values. Yet the famous tag post coitum omne animal tristis est still expresses a common experience: after an intense and eagerly anticipated moment, we often feel that we have missed something greater that remains just beyond our grasp.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The early Christians had thought of Jesus the man in a similar way: Something which has existed since the beginning, that we have heard, and we have seen with our own eyes; that we have watched and touched with our hands; the Word, who is life— this is our subject. 37 The exact status of Jesus, the Word, had greatly exercised Christians. Now Muslims would begin to debate the nature of the Koran: in what sense was the Arabic text really the Word of God? Some Muslims found this elevation of the Koran as blasphemous as those Christians who had been scandalized by the idea that Jesus had been the incarnate Logos. The Shiah, however, gradually evolved ideas that seemed even closer to Christian Incarnation. After the tragic death of Husayn, Shiis became convinced that only the descendants of his father, Ali ibn Abi Talib, should lead the ummah, and they became a distinctive sect within Islam. As his cousin and son-in-law, Ali had a double blood tie with Muhammad. Since none of the Prophet’s sons had survived infancy, Ali was his chief male relative. In the Koran, prophets often ask God to bless their descendants. The Shiis extended this notion of divine blessing and came to believe that only members of Muhammad’s family through the house of Ali had true knowledge (ilm) of God. They alone could provide the ummah with divine guidance. If a descendant of Ali came to power, Muslims could look forward to a golden age of justice, and the ummah would be led according to God’s will. The enthusiasm for the person of Ali would develop in some surprising ways. Some of the more radical Shii groups would elevate Ali and his descendants to a position above that of Muhammad himself and give them near-divine status. They were drawing on ancient Persian tradition of a chosen god-begotten family which transmitted the divine glory from one generation to another. By the end of the Ummayad period, some Shiis had come to believe that the authoritative ilm was retained in one particular line of Ali’s descendants. Muslims would only find the person designated by God as the true Imam (leader) of the ummah in this family. Whether he was in power or not, his guidance was absolutely necessary, so every Muslim had a duty to look for him and accept his leadership. Since these Imams were seen as a focus of disaffection, the caliphs regarded them as enemies of state: according to Shii tradition, several of the Imams were poisoned and some had to go into hiding. When each Imam died, he would choose one of his relatives to inherit the ilm.

• From A History of God (1993)

  For the first time Muhammad learned the exact chronology of the prophets, about which he had previously been somewhat hazy. He could now see that it was very important that Abraham had lived before either Moses or Jesus. Hitherto Muhammad probably thought that Jews and Christians both belonged to one religion, but now he learned that they had serious disagreements with one another. To outsiders like the Arabs there seemed little to choose between the two positions, and it seemed logical to imagine that the followers of the Torah and the Gospel had introduced inauthentic elements into the hanifiyyah, the pure religion of Abraham, such as the Oral Law elaborated by the Rabbis and the blasphemous doctrine of the Trinity. Muhammad also learned that in their own scriptures the Jews were called a faithless people, who had turned to idolatry to worship the Golden Calf. The polemic against the Jews in the Koran is well developed and shows how threatened the Muslims must have felt by the Jewish rejection, even though the Koran still insists that not all “the people of earlier revelation” 32 have fallen into error and that essentially all religions are one. From the friendly Jews of Medina, Muhammad also learned the story of Ishmael, Abraham’s elder son. In the Bible, Abraham had had a son by his concubine Hagar, but when Sarah had borne Isaac she had become jealous and demanded that he get rid of Hagar and Ishmael. To comfort Abraham, God promised that Ishmael would also be the father of a great nation. The Arabian Jews had added some local legends of their own, saying that Abraham had left Hagar and Ishmael in the valley of Mecca, where God had taken care of them, revealing the sacred spring of Zamzam when the child was dying of thirst. Later Abraham had visited Ishmael and together father and son had built the Kabah, the first temple of the one God. Ishmael had become the father of the Arabs, so, like the Jews, they too were sons of Abraham. This must have been music to Muhammad’s ears: he was bringing the Arabs their own scripture and now he could root their faith in the piety of their ancestors. In January 624, when it was clear that the hostility of the Medinan Jews was permanent, the new religion of al-Lah declared its independence. Muhammad commanded the Muslims to pray facing Mecca instead of Jerusalem. This changing of the direction of prayer (qibla) has been called Muhammad’s most creative religious gesture.

• From A History of God (1993)

  But Baal undergoes a reverse: he dies and has to descend to the world of Mot, the god of death and sterility. When he hears of his son’s fate, the High God El comes down from his throne, puts on sackcloth and gashes his cheeks, but he cannot redeem his son. It is Anat, Baal’s lover and sister, who leaves the divine realm and goes in search of her twin soul, “desiring him as a cow her calf or a ewe her lamb.”5 When she finds his body, she makes a funeral feast in his honor, seizes Mot, cleaves him with her sword, winnows, burns and grinds him like corn before sowing him in the ground. Similar stories are told about the other great goddesses—Inana, Ishtar and Isis—who search for the dead god and bring new life to the soil. The victory of Anat, however, must be perpetuated year after year in ritual celebration. Later—we are not sure how, since our sources are incomplete—Baal is brought back to life and restored to Anat. This apotheosis of wholeness and harmony, symbolized by the union of the sexes, was celebrated by means of ritual sex in ancient Canaan. By imitating the gods in this way, men and women would share their struggle against sterility and ensure the creativity and fertility of the world. The death of a god, the quest of the goddess and the triumphant return to the divine sphere were constant religious themes in many cultures and would recur in the very different religion of the One God worshipped by Jews, Christians and Muslims. This religion is attributed in the Bible to Abraham, who left Ur and eventually settled in Canaan some time between the twentieth and nineteenth centuries BCE. We have no contemporary record of Abraham, but scholars think that he may have been one of the wandering chieftains who had led their people from Mesopotamia toward the Mediterranean at the end of the third millennium BCE. These wanderers, some of whom are called Abiru, Apiru or Habiru in Mesopotamian and Egyptian sources, spoke West Semitic languages, of which Hebrew is one. They were not regular desert nomads like the Bedouin, who migrated with their flocks according to the cycle of the seasons, but were more difficult to classify and, as such, were frequently in conflict with the conservative authorities. Their cultural status was usually superior to that of the desert folk. Some served as mercenaries, others became government employees, others worked as merchants, servants or tinkers. Some became rich and might then try to acquire land and settle down. The stories about Abraham in the Book of Genesis show him serving the King of Sodom as a mercenary and describe his frequent conflicts with the authorities of Canaan and its environs. Eventually, when his wife, Sarah, died, Abraham bought land in Hebron, now on the West Bank.

• From A History of God (1993)

  But they were not seeking a political solution, nor did they envisage a more widespread return of the Jews to the Promised Land. They settled in Safed in Galilee and initiated a remarkable mystical revival which discovered a profound significance in their experience of homelessness. Hitherto Kabbalah had appealed only to an elite, but after the disaster Jews all over the world turned eagerly to a more mystical spirituality. The consolations of philosophy now seemed hollow: Aristotle sounded arid and his God distant and inaccessible. Indeed, many blamed Falsafah for the catastrophe, claiming that it had weakened Judaism and diluted the sense of Israel’s special vocation. Its universality and accommodation of Gentile philosophy had persuaded too many Jews to accept baptism. Never again would Falsafah be an important spirituality within Judaism. People longed for a more direct experience of God. In Safed this yearning acquired an almost erotic intensity. Kabbalists used to wander through the hills of Palestine and lie on the graves of the great Talmudists, seeking, as it were, to absorb their vision into their own troubled lives. They used to stay awake all night, sleepless as frustrated lovers, singing love songs to God and calling him fond names. They found that the mythology and disciplines of Kabbalah broke down their reserves and touched the pain in their souls in a way that metaphysics or the study of Talmud no longer could. But because their condition was so different from that of Moses of Leon, the author of The Zohar, the Spanish exiles needed to adapt his vision so that it could speak to their particular circumstances. They came up with an extraordinarily imaginative solution which equated absolute homelessness with absolute Godliness. The exile of the Jews symbolized the radical dislocation at the heart of all existence. Not only was the whole of creation no longer in its proper place, but God was in exile from himself. The new Kabbalah of Safed achieved almost overnight popularity and became a mass movement that not only inspired the Sephardim but also gave new hope to the Ashkenazim of Europe, who had discovered that they had no abiding city in Christendom. This extraordinary success shows that the strange and—to an outsider—bewildering myths of Safed had the power to speak to the condition of the Jews. It was the last Jewish movement to be accepted by almost everybody and wrought a profound change in the religious consciousness of world Jewry. The special disciplines of Kabbalah were only for an initiated elite, but its ideas—and its conception of God—became a standard expression of Jewish piety.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Needless to say, he did not mean cerebral, rational knowledge alone: in his ascent to God the mystic had to travel through the alam al-mithal , the realm of vision and imagination. God is not a reality that can be known objectively, but will be found within the image-making faculty of each individual Muslim. When the Koran or the hadith speak of Paradise, Hell or the throne of God, they are not referring to a reality that was in a separate location but to an inner world, hidden beneath the veils of sensible phenomena: Everything to which man aspires, everything he desires, is instantaneously present to him, or rather one should say: to picture his desire is itself to experience the real presence of its object. But the sweetness and delight are the expression of Paradise and Hell, good and evil, all that can reach man of what constitutes his retribution in the world beyond, have no other source than the essential “I” of man himself, formed as it is by his intentions and projects, his innermost beliefs, his conduct. 3 Like Ibn al-Arabi, whom he greatly revered, Mulla Sadra did not envisage God sitting in another world, an external, objective heaven to which all the faithful would repair after death. Heaven and the divine sphere were to be discovered within the self, in the personal alam al-mithal which was the inalienable possession of every single human being. No two people would have exactly the same heaven or the same God. Mulla Sadra, who venerated Sunni, Sufi and Greek philosophers as well as the Shiite Imams, reminds us that Iranian Shiism was not always exclusive and fanatical. In India, many of the Muslims had cultivated a similar tolerance toward other traditions. Although Islam predominated culturally in Moghul India, Hinduism remained vital and creative, and some Muslims and Hindus cooperated in the arts and in intellectual projects. The subcontinent had long been free of religious intolerance, and during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the most creative forms of Hinduism stressed the unity of religious aspiration: all paths were valid, provided that they emphasized an interior love for the One God. This clearly resonated with both Sufism and Falsafah, which were the most dominant Islamic moods in India. Some Muslims and Hindus formed interfaith societies, the most important of which became Sikhism, founded by Guru Namak during the fifteenth century. This new form of monotheism believed that al-Lah was identical with the God of Hinduism. On the Muslim side, the Iranian scholar Mir Abu al-Qasim Findiriski (d. 1641), the contemporary of Mir Damad and Mulla Sadra, taught the works of Ibn Sina in Isfahan but also spent a good deal of time in India studying Hinduism and Yoga.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Bach’s Chorales, however, evened out their dance-like rhythms, creating a measured and sombre style; Luther’s hymns were anything but dirge-like.” In his St John Passion and St Matthew Passion, which drew heavily on the tradition of Lutheran music, Bach dramatised Christ’s death in a highly emotional manner. In the St Matthew Passion the angular melodic line spares the listener nothing of the viciousness of the Jews’ shouts of ‘Lass ihn kreuzigen’ (‘Let him be crucified’), and follows this with heartfelt individual meditations on Christ’s suffering; the implicit anti- Semitism of the glorious music can be hard to take. Yet Bach's legacy shaped German music for centuries, as composers like Mozart, MARTIN LUTHER 75. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Law and Grace, 1529. Beethoven and Mendelssohn also turned to this profoundly Lutheran musician for inspiration. Lutheranism was also part of the background to the greatest literary work of the sixteenth century: the story of Dr Faustus, the scholar THE CHARIOTEER OF ISRAEL who sold his soul to the Devil. This had circulated as a folk tale, but the printed version of 1587 situated the doctor firmly in Wittenberg — and there were real life parallels. In 1538 when Valerius Glockner, a wayward Wittenberg student, had confessed to making a pact with 416 MARTIN LUTHER the Devil, Luther persuaded him to forswear Satan, saving him from a secular trial that might well have ended in his death. The fictional Faust, however, did not escape the Devil, and the work included swipes at the Pope and at Catholic clergy, illustrating the combination of anti-papal aggression and devotional intensity that was becoming the trademark of Luther’s legacy. In England, Marlowe took the tale and transformed it into a searing tragedy within five years of the Faustbuch being printed. In the hands of Goethe, it would become the classic of German literature, a metaphor for the Enlightenment struggle that altogether transcended its confessional origins. It is impossible to conceive of German culture apart from Lutheranism, and its echoes have pervaded artistic production of all kinds up to the present day. * People from every walk of life were touched by Luther’s message, and it changed their lives forever. Just three examples give a flavour of how he inspired very different individuals. Although Germany’s leading artist Albrecht Diirer never met Luther, he longed to paint ‘the pious man’. When Luther disappeared from public view after the Diet of Worms, Diirer anxiously followed every rumour, convinced that he had been murdered by the Pope’s minions.“ But how did Luther transform Diirer’s faith?

• From A History of God (1993)

  The most famous of the Sufi orders was the Mawlawiyyah, whose members are known in the West as the “whirling dervishes.” Their stately and dignified dance was a method of concentration. As he spun around and around, the Sufi felt the boundaries of selfhood dissolve as he melted into his dance, giving him a foretaste of the annihilation of Jana. The founder of the order was Jalal ad-Din Rumi (ca. 1207–73), known to his disciples as Mawlana, our Master. He had been born in Khurusan in Central Asia but had fled to Konya in modern Turkey before the advancing Mongol armies. His mysticism can be seen as a Muslim response to this scourge, which might have caused many to lose faith in al-Lah. Rumi’s ideas are similar to those of his contemporary Ibn al-Arabi, but his poem the Masnawi, known as the Sufi Bible, had a more popular appeal and helped to disseminate the God of the mystics among ordinary Muslims who were not Sufis. In 1244 Rumi had come under the spell of the wandering dervish Shams ad-Din, whom he saw as the Perfect Man of his generation. Indeed, Shams ad-Din believed that he was a reincarnation of the Prophet and insisted upon being addressed as “Muhammad.” He had a dubious reputation and was known not to observe the Shariah, the Holy Law of Islam, thinking himself above such trivialities. Rumi’s disciples were understandably worried by their Master’s evident infatuation. When Shams was killed in a riot, Rumi was inconsolable and devoted still more time to mystical music and dancing. He was able to transform his grief imaginatively into a symbol of the love of God—of God’s yearning for humanity and humanity’s longing for al-Lah. Whether knowingly or not, everybody was searching for the absent God, obscurely aware that he or she was separated from the Source of being. Listen to the reed, how it tells a tale, complaining of separateness. Ever since I was parted from the reed-bed, my lament has caused men and women to moan. I want a bosom torn by severance, that I may unfold [to such a person] the power of love-desire: everyone who is left far from his source wishes back the time when he was united to it.51 The Perfect Man was believed to inspire more ordinary mortals to seek God: Shams ad-Din had unlocked in Rumi the poetry of the Masnawi, which recounted the agonies of this separation.

• From A History of God (1993)

  They had evolved rational proofs of God’s existence to articulate their religious faith with their scientific studies and to link it with other more ordinary experiences. They did not personally doubt God’s existence, and many were well aware of the limitations of their achievement. These proofs were not designed to convince unbelievers, since there were as yet no atheists in our modern sense. This natural theology was, therefore, not a prelude to religious experience but an accompaniment: the Faylasufs did not believe that you had to convince yourself of God’s existence rationally before you could have a mystical experience. If anything, it was the other way around. In the Jewish, Muslim and Greek Orthodox worlds, the God of the philosophers was being rapidly overtaken by the God of the mystics. J 7 The God of the Mystics UDAISM, CHRISTIANITY and—to a lesser extent—Islam have all developed the idea of a personal God, so we tend to think that this ideal represents religion at its best. The personal God has helped monotheists to value the sacred and inalienable rights of the individual and to cultivate an appreciation of human personality. The Judeo-Christian tradition has thus helped the West to acquire the liberal humanism it values so highly. These values were originally enshrined in a personal God who does everything that a human being does: he loves, judges, punishes, sees, hears, creates and destroys as we do. Yahweh began as a highly personalized deity with passionate human likes and dislikes. Later he became a symbol of transcendence, whose thoughts were not our thoughts and whose ways soared above our own as the heavens tower above the earth. The personal God reflects an important religious insight: that no supreme value can be less than human. Thus personalism has been an important and—for many—an indispensable stage of religious and moral development. The prophets of Israel attributed their own emotions and passions to God; Buddhists and Hindus had to include a personal devotion to avatars of the supreme reality. Christianity made a human person the center of the religious life in a way that was unique in the history of religion: it took the personalism inherent in Judaism to an extreme. It may be that without some degree of this kind of identification and empathy, religion cannot take root. Yet a personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs, fears and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend them.

• From A History of God (1993)

  They were often called the banat al-Lah, the Daughters of God, but this does not necessarily imply a fully developed pantheon. The Arabs used such kinship terms to denote an abstract relationship: thus banat al-dahr (literally, “daughters of fate”) simply meant misfortunes or vicissitudes. The term banat al-Lah may simply have signified “divine beings.” These deities were not represented by realistic statues in their shrines but by large standing stones, similar to those in use among the ancient Canaanites, which the Arabs worshipped not in any crudely simplistic way but as a focus of divinity. Like Mecca with its Kabah, the shrines at Taif, Nakhlah and Qudayd had become essential spiritual landmarks in the emotional landscape of the Arabs. Their forefathers had worshipped there from time immemorial, and this gave a healing sense of continuity. The story of the Satanic Verses is not mentioned either in the Koran or in any of the early oral or written sources. It is not included in Ibn Ishaq’s Sira, the most authoritative biography of the Prophet, but only in the work of the tenth-century historian Abu Jafar at-Tabari (d. 923). He tells us that Muhammad was distressed by the rift that had developed between him and most of his tribe after he had forbidden the cult of the goddesses and so, inspired by “Satan,” he uttered some rogue verses which allowed the banat al-Lah to be venerated as intercessors, like the angels. In these so-called “Satanic” verses, the three goddesses were not on a par with al-Lah but were lesser spiritual beings who could intercede with him on behalf of mankind. Later, however, Tabari says that Gabriel told the Prophet that these verses were of “Satanic” origin and should be excised from the Koran to be replaced by these lines which declared that the banat al-Lah were mere projections and figments of the imagination: Have you, then, ever considered [what you are worshipping in] al-Lat, al-Uzza, as well as [in] Manat, the third and last [of this triad]?... These [allegedly divine beings] are nothing but empty names which you have invented—you and your forefathers—[and] for which God has bestowed no warrant from on high. They [who worship them] follow nothing but surmise and their own wishful thinking—although right guidance has now indeed come unto them from their Sustainer. 21 This was the most radical of all the Koranic condemnations of the ancestral pagan gods, and after these verses had been included in the Koran there was no chance of a reconciliation with the Quraysh. From this point, Muhammad became a jealous monotheist, and shirk (idolatry; literally, associating other beings with al-Lah) became the greatest sin of Islam.

• From Satyricon (1)

  At rest on my pallet, night’s silence had scarce settled down To soothe me, and eyes heavy-laden with slumber to lull When torturing Amor laid hold of me, seizing my hair And dragging me, wounding me, ordered a vigil till dawn. ‘Oh heart of stone, how canst thou lie here alone?’ said the God, ‘Thou joy of a thousand sweet mistresses, how, oh my slave?’ In disarrayed nightrobe I leap to bare feet and essay To follow all paths; but a road can discover by none. One moment I hasten; the next it is torture to move, It irks me again to turn back, shame forbids me to halt And stand in the midst of the road. Lo! the voices of men, The roar of the streets, and the songs of the birds, and the bark Of vigilant watch-dogs are hushed! Alone, I of all Society dread both my slumber and couch, and obey Great Lord of the Passions, thy mandate which on me was laid.” CHAPTER THE ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-NINTH. (Such thoughts as these, of lovely Circe’s charms so wrought upon my mind that) I disordered my bed by embracing the image, as it were, of my mistress, (but my efforts were all wasted.) This obstinate (affliction finally wore out my patience, and I cursed the hostile deity by whom I was bewitched. I soon recovered my composure, however, and, deriving some consolation from thinking of the heroes of old, who had been persecuted by the anger of the gods, I broke out in these lines:) Hostile gods and implacable Fate not me alone pursue; Herakles once suffered the weight of heaven’s displeasure too Driven from the Inachian coast: Laomedon of old Sated two of the heavenly host: in Pelias, behold Juno’s power to avenge an affront; and Telephus took arms Knowing not he must bear the brunt; Ulysses feared the storms Angry Neptune decreed as his due. Now, me to overwhelm Outraged Priapus ever pursues on land and Nereus’ realm.

• From Satyricon (1)

  (Nevertheless, I found it very difficult to stifle my longing for revenge, and after tossing half the night in anxiety, I arose at dawn and, in the hope of mitigating my mental sufferings and of forgetting my wrongs, I took a walk through all the public arcades and) entered a picture-gallery, which contained a wonderful collection of pictures in various styles. I beheld works from the hand of Zeuxis, still undimmed by the passage of the years, and contemplated, not without a certain awe, the crude drawings of Protogenes, which equalled the reality of nature herself; but when I stood before the work of Apelles, the kind which the Greeks call “Monochromatic,” verily, I almost worshipped, for the outlines of the figures were drawn with such subtlety of touch, and were so life-like in their precision, that you would have thought their very souls were depicted. Here, an eagle was soaring into the sky bearing the shepherd of Mount Ida to heaven; there, the comely Hylas was struggling to escape from the embrace of the lascivious Naiad. Here, too, was Apollo, cursing his murderous hand and adorning his unstrung lyre with the flower just created. Standing among these lovers, which were only painted, “It seems that even the gods are wracked by love,” I cried aloud, as if I were in a wilderness. “Jupiter could find none to his taste, even in his own heaven, so he had to sin on earth, but no one was betrayed by him! The nymph who ravished Hylas would have controlled her passion had she thought Hercules was coming to forbid it. Apollo recalled the spirit of a boy in the form of a flower, and all the lovers of Fable enjoyed Love’s embraces without a rival, but I took as a comrade a friend more cruel than Lycurgus!” But at that very instant, as I was telling my troubles to the winds, a white-haired old man entered the picture-gallery; his face was care-worn, and he seemed, I know not why, to give promise of something great, although he bestowed so little care upon his dress that it was easily apparent that he belonged to that class of literati which the wealthy hold in contempt. “I am a poet,” he remarked, when he had approached me and stood at my side, “and one of no mean ability, I hope, that is, if anything is to be inferred from the crowns which gratitude can place even upon the heads of the unworthy! Then why, you demand, are you dressed so shabbily? For that very reason; love or art never yet made anyone rich.” The trader trusts his fortune to the sea and takes his gains, The warrior, for his deeds, is girt with gold; The wily sycophant lies drunk on purple counterpanes, Young wives must pay debauchees or they’re cold. But solitary, shivering, in tatters Genius stands Invoking a neglected art, for succor at its hands. CHAPTER THE EIGHTY-FOURTH.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  He discovered the trembling sensibility under the arm, at the nascence of the breasts, the vibrations that ran between the nipples and the sex, and between the sex mouth and the lips, all the mysterious links that roused and stirred places other than the one being kissed, currents running from the roots of the hair to the roots of the spine. Each place he kissed he worshiped with adoring words, observing the dimples at the end of her back, the firmness of her buttocks, the extreme arch of her back, which threw her buttocks outwards—“like a colored woman’s,” he said. He encircled her ankles with his fingers, lingered over her feet, which were perfect like her hands, stroked over and over again the smooth statuesque lines of her neck, lost himself in her long heavy hair. Her eyes were long and narrow like those of a Japanese woman, her mouth full, always half-open. Her breasts heaved as he kissed her and marked her shoulder’s sloping line with his teeth. And then as she moaned, he left her, closing the white netting around her carefully, encasing her like a treasure, leaving her with the moisture welling up between her legs. One night, as usual, she could not sleep. She sat up in her clouded bed, naked. As she rose to look for her kimono and slippers a tiny drop of honey fell from her sex, rolled down her leg, stained the white rug. Fay was baffled at Albert’s control, his reserve. How could he subdue his desire and sleep after these kisses and caresses? He had not even completely undressed. She had not seen his body. She decided to leave her room and walk until she could become calm again. Her entire body was throbbing. She walked slowly down the wide staircase and out into the garden. The perfume of the flowers almost stunned her. The branches fell languidly over her and the mossy paths made her footsteps absolutely silent. She had the feeling that she was dreaming. She walked aimlessly for a long while. And then a sound startled her. It was a moan, a rhythmic moan like a woman’s complaining. The light from the moon fell there between the branches and exposed a colored woman lying naked on the moss and Albert over her. Her moans were moans of pleasure. Albert was crouching like a wild animal and pounding against her. He, too, was uttering confused cries; and Fay saw them convulsed under her very eyes by the violent joys.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Bucer—the sly “fox,” as his Lutheran opponents had dubbed him—went into exile in England after the Interim and worked with Thomas Cranmer on revising the Book of Common Prayer. He lived out the rest of his life in the damp cold of Cambridge, hankering after his warm German stove back in Strasbourg.36 If he had failed to accomplish the union between Lutherans and sacramentarians for which he had worked so hard, he left a lasting legacy in shaping the Anglican Church. As for Karlstadt, Luther’s old opponent, no church commemorated him as its founder, and only one crude woodcut image of him has survived. But his influence lived on, both in the Swiss sacramentarian tradition and within Anabaptism, where his adoption and development of the old mystical stance of Gelassenheit inspired a skeptical attitude to secular power, and a separatist tradition of devotion as well as commitment to martyrdom. Indeed, in the first half of the seventeenth century, the new religious stirrings that would eventually give rise to Pietism began to recover elements of religion that had been lost within Luther’s mature theology. There was a new vogue for the Theologia deutsch and the mystical works of Johannes Tauler, and in 1605, Staupitz’s treatises on the love of God were republished by Johann Arndt, one of the leading Pietists.37 The spiritual tradition that Luther had shared with his mother, and that had been so important to Karlstadt, was rediscovered and became part of Lutheran devotional life once again, even if Karlstadt himself would never be rehabilitated. —IN the years after Luther’s death, a Lutheran culture began to take shape. As he came to be remembered in sermon and print, images of the reformer remained as important as they had been in his life. Lutheran hymns were printed with a full-length portrait on the title page, standing foursquare for truth. Life-size (and larger than life-size) paintings of Luther were produced by the Cranach workshop, creating the new iconography of an individual who was not a saint, but whose physical presence was evoked by these realistic images. They were also available as woodcuts that could be assembled from eleven sheets to make a cheap life-size pinup, complete with printed “frame.” Every Lutheran church now had to have its Luther portrait. Some were twinned with a portrait of the area’s local evangelical reformer, showing his conformity to the Lutheran “brand.” The volumes of Luther’s works that now rolled off the presses featured a title page with an image of the Elector on one side, Luther on the other, and a crucifix in the middle, deliberately setting the reformer apart from Karlstadt and the Zwinglian iconophobes. It also yoked the truth of Lutheranism to the political identity of Saxony: The man who had called for a reformation of all Christendom inspired a cult of local patriotism.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther was, in any case, reconsidering his position about the Diet; the alarm of Baumgartner and the Nurembergers that negotiations with the Catholics risked losing “God’s favor, without winning the emperor’s,” made him think that he had let Melanchthon go too far.79 Toward the end, he suddenly started to argue that negotiations had been a complete mistake all along, and in the months after they collapsed, he began to position Melanchthon as the man who wanted to make peace with the Catholics, Luther conveniently ignoring how far he had gone along with it.80 Melanchthon’s role at Augsburg cemented the double leadership of the Reformation, but it also underlined the differences between the two men. In subsequent years double portraits of the pair went on sale, designed to scotch rumors of divisions, yet they created a strange visual impression. Rather than radiating concord and harmony, the bulky Luther steals most of the picture space; the double portrait was also oddly reminiscent of the marriage portrait with Katharina von Bora, Melanchthon now taking her place on the distaff side. —AFTER months of hectic bargaining, the negotiations collapsed; on September 23 the emperor closed the Diet. Both sides had shown willingness to compromise and in the end the differences between them scarcely seemed big enough to justify the schism that resulted from the failure. But what finally kept the two sides apart was the absence of trust—on marriage, the sacraments, and other issues, the evangelicals simply did not believe that the Catholics meant what they said, or that they would keep their word. They feared that concessions would lead to their being crushed at a Church council that would be held outside Germany and set up to defeat them.81 The result was not inevitable, but rather a narrowly missed opportunity to prevent the splitting of the Catholic Church. This was why negotiations continued for so long, with one committee succeeding another, and why Charles had been willing to countenance ever more attempts to reach agreement. Had it been left to Melanchthon—who was an irenicist, not a conservative like Luther—a deal might have been done. In early October 1530, Luther finally arrived back in Wittenberg, having spent half a year in the “desert” of Coburg, surrounded by the cawing of the jackdaws. He longed to see his companions: “Just come home!” he had written to the Augsburg delegation in mid-July.82 He brushed off rumors of illness, and to prove his point he upbraided Katharina: “you can see for yourself the books that I’m writing.”83 [image "55. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon, 1543." file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_065_r1.jpg] [image "55. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon, 1543." file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_065_r1.jpg] 55. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon, 1543.

• From Satyricon (1)

  (Nevertheless, I found it very difficult to stifle my longing for revenge, and after tossing half the night in anxiety, I arose at dawn and, in the hope of mitigating my mental sufferings and of forgetting my wrongs, I took a walk through all the public arcades and) entered a picture-gallery, which contained a wonderful collection of pictures in various styles. I beheld works from the hand of Zeuxis, still undimmed by the passage of the years, and contemplated, not without a certain awe, the crude drawings of Protogenes, which equalled the reality of nature herself; but when I stood before the work of Apelles, the kind which the Greeks call “Monochromatic,” verily, I almost worshipped, for the outlines of the figures were drawn with such subtlety of touch, and were so life-like in their precision, that you would have thought their very souls were depicted. Here, an eagle was soaring into the sky bearing the shepherd of Mount Ida to heaven; there, the comely Hylas was struggling to escape from the embrace of the lascivious Naiad. Here, too, was Apollo, cursing his murderous hand and adorning his unstrung lyre with the flower just created. Standing among these lovers, which were only painted, “It seems that even the gods are wracked by love,” I cried aloud, as if I were in a wilderness. “Jupiter could find none to his taste, even in his own heaven, so he had to sin on earth, but no one was betrayed by him! The nymph who ravished Hylas would have controlled her passion had she thought Hercules was coming to forbid it. Apollo recalled the spirit of a boy in the form of a flower, and all the lovers of Fable enjoyed Love’s embraces without a rival, but I took as a comrade a friend more cruel than Lycurgus!” But at that very instant, as I was telling my troubles to the winds, a white-haired old man entered the picture-gallery; his face was care-worn, and he seemed, I know not why, to give promise of something great, although he bestowed so little care upon his dress that it was easily apparent that he belonged to that class of literati which the wealthy hold in contempt. “I am a poet,” he remarked, when he had approached me and stood at my side, “and one of no mean ability, I hope, that is, if anything is to be inferred from the crowns which gratitude can place even upon the heads of the unworthy! Then why, you demand, are you dressed so shabbily? For that very reason; love or art never yet made anyone rich.” The trader trusts his fortune to the sea and takes his gains, The warrior, for his deeds, is girt with gold; The wily sycophant lies drunk on purple counterpanes, Young wives must pay debauchees or they’re cold. But solitary, shivering, in tatters Genius stands Invoking a neglected art, for succor at its hands. CHAPTER THE EIGHTY-FOURTH.

• From Satyricon (1)

  But, according to Homer, the great interpreter of truth--‘One man is meaner than another in looks, but God crowns his words with beauty, and his hearers gaze upon him with delight, while he speaks unfalteringly with winning modesty, and is conspicuous amongst the assembled folk, who look upon him as a God when he walks through the city.’ And again he says: ‘Your beauteous form is destitute of intelligence; the wise Ulysses is praised more highly than the handsome Nireus.’ How then comes it that the love of wisdom, justice, and the other virtues, which are the heritage of the full-grown man, possess no attraction for you, while the beauty of boys excites the most vehement passion! What! should one love Phoedrus, remembering Lysias, whom he betrayed? Could one love the beauty of Alcibiades, who mutilated the statues of the Gods, and, in the midst of a debauch, betrayed the mysteries of the rites of Eleusis? Who would venture to declare himself his admirer, after Athens was abandoned, and Decelea fortified by the enemy--the admirer of one whose sole aim in life was tyranny? But, as the divine Plato says, as long as his chin was beardless, he was beloved by all; but, when he passed from boyhood to manhood, when his imperfect intelligence had reached its maturity, he was hated by all. Why, then, giving modest names to immodest sentiments, do men call personal beauty virtue, being in reality lovers of youth rather than lovers of wisdom? However, it is not my intention to speak evil of distinguished men. But, to descend from graver topics to the mere question of enjoyment, I will prove that connection with women is far more enjoyable than connection with boys. In the first place, the longer enjoyment lasts, the more delight it affords; too rapid pleasure passes quickly away, and it is over before it is thoroughly appreciated; but, if it lasts, it is thereby enhanced. Would to heaven that grudging Destiny had allotted us a longer lease of life, and that we could enjoy perpetual health without any sorrow to spoil our pleasure; then would our life be one continual feast. But, since jealous Fortune has grudged us greater blessings, those enjoyments that last the longest are the sweetest. Again, a woman, from puberty to middle age, until the last wrinkles furrow her face, is worth embracing and fit for intercourse; and, even though the prime of her beauty be past, her experience can speak more eloquently than the love of boys.