Pride

Passages

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

Page 35 of 174 · 20 per page

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  People were not just reading the theses, but acting on them. By March 1518, Luther was already writing preemptively to Lang in Erfurt in case rumors reached him that Tetzel’s Positiones (his defense of indulgences) had been publicly burned by students in Wittenberg’s market square. He himself, Luther claimed, had nothing to do with this, and he deeply regretted the offense caused to the poor salesman, whose works had in part been bought, in part simply seized and then thrown on the flames. All of which would have been more persuasive had not Luther enclosed with the letter a copy of Tetzel’s work, “seized from the flames,” so that Lang could see how the papists were raging against him.63 The first book burnings, which were to become such a feature of the Reformation, were thus instigated not by the Roman Church but by Luther’s supporters, and it was clear where they might lead. Tetzel was already threatening that Luther himself would be burned and that he “would go to heaven in his bath shirt” within two weeks. —IT is not difficult to understand why the Ninety-five Theses caused such uproar. The indulgences question was linked with the assault on scholasticism and was part of a general impatience with old ways of doing things. Humanists could see in them an attack on the established authorities, who clung to their philosophy instead of returning to the sources and reading texts anew and critically. The theses also reflected a lay devotional piety that sought true repentance and aimed at mystical union with Christ: Indulgences were anathema to this spiritual sensibility. Indeed, that questioning was probably more important than anything else. So far as Luther himself was concerned, the theses marked a profound shift in his own understanding of himself, for around the time of their posting, he changed his name. He no longer signed himself “Luder,” his father’s name, but took on the new Greek name “Eleutherius”—the freed one—which he continued to use for several months. “Luder” was a somewhat unfortunate name to inherit because in German it has associations with looseness and immorality. Even when he stopped signing himself as Eleutherius, he kept the kernel of the name and from then on called himself “Luther.”64

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  —EVERY monastery is a living as well as a devotional community, involving practical organization and labor within a clear system of hierarchy. Despite his apparent difficulties with paternal authority, this was an environment in which Luther thrived, rapidly moving up the monastic ladder. He quickly became a subdeacon, and then a deacon; in 1508–9 he was sent briefly to the University of Wittenberg, where he taught philosophy and continued studies in theology. Erfurt was a prosperous monastery, and it had many properties to administer. Luther learned how to ensure that debts were paid, annual dues delivered, and the monastery provisioned. Listing his various duties in 1516 (by which time he had left Erfurt and was back in Wittenberg), he wrote, “I am a preacher at the monastery, I am a reader during mealtimes, I am asked daily to preach in the city church, I have to supervise the study [of novices and friars], I am vicar (and that means I am eleven times prior), I am caretaker of the fish [pond] at Lietzkau, I represent the people of Herzberg at the court in Torgau, I lecture on Paul, and I am assembling [material for] a commentary on the Psalms.” But mostly, he complained, “my time is filled with the job of letter writing”—so many that he often forgot what he had already written, asking his friend and fellow Augustinian Johannes Lang to tell him if he was repeating himself. All that—and then, he went on, “there are my own struggles with the flesh, the world, and the Devil. See what a lazy man I am!”34 Luther might gripe about the administrative burdens, but he clearly relished the intellectual work, and he was evidently good at managing people and organizing, skills he may have picked up from his father. He could be firm, too. He admonished Lang to send a disobedient monk for punishment to the monastery at Sangerhausen and he ordered the prior in Mainz to send back a runaway.35 All this administrative experience, especially his judgment of people, would stand him in good stead when he began to build his own church. His talents began to be recognized from his early years within the Erfurt monastery and more widely in the order. In an attempt to end the long-running struggle over the future direction of the order, Staupitz tried to unite the Augustinians, but seven monasteries, including Erfurt, suspected that his attempts would dilute the values of the observants and therefore tried to secure an exemption. Despite Luther’s close relationship with Staupitz, Erfurt chose Luther and his former teacher Johannes Nathin to put their case, first to the bishop of Magdeburg. The mission was unsuccessful, and so that same year the monastery decided to send a delegation, which included Luther, to appeal to the Pope.36

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The local Lutheran Urbanus Rhegius preached to barely two hundred listeners, but Michael Keller, the Zwinglian whom Jonas thought both uneducated and a gossip, regularly attracted crowds of six thousand to his rousing sermons in the huge Church of St. Ulrich. When Agricola dared to preach vigorously against the Zwinglians, he stirred up a “wasps’ nest” of criticism in return. 23 When Charles finally did arrive on June 15, the Feast of the Ascension, he entered Augsburg in a stunning pageant, which heightened expectations after all the weeks of waiting. The procession lasted until eight in the evening and Jonas described it in loving detail to Luther, even though he knew how little store “you set by such things.” The emperor, who had been crowned by the Pope in Bologna just a few months before, was dressed in gold, carried a golden sword, and sat astride a bejeweled white horse under a golden canopy. The Elector of Saxony rode close by, followed by Charles’s brother, King Ferdinand. The papal legate Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio, Jonas noted gleefully, at least did not precede the emperor, entering the city by his side. 24 For the Lutherans, the extravaganza would have driven home the sheer power of the forces lined up against them. For many years Charles had been preoccupied with affairs in Italy, so it had been possible almost to forget just how strong imperial might was. Now it was on show, for all to see. And yet this spectacle, designed to parade the magnificence of the empire, also displayed its divisions. On his arrival, Charles spoke to the Catholic and Lutheran princes separately, and lost no time in warning the evangelicals that he would not tolerate their preaching. 25 The day after his formal entry, he celebrated the feast of Corpus Christi, during which a procession ceremonially circled the boundaries of the city, with the Host held high. Charles had deliberately timed his arrival for the feast, and the ritual honoring of Christ’s body was intended to celebrate the unity of the empire as the princes, cardinals, and bishops all processed as one, showing secular and religious authorities in harmony. But the evangelical princes and most of the townsfolk ostentatiously declined to take part; what had been planned as a display of unity and reconciliation in fact highlighted the existence of separate factions, as the Catholics paraded through sullen crowds of Augsburgers and the evangelicals went straight to their lodgings.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther’s celebration would not have been in the same league, but the invitation to the Erfurt monks begins with the usual pieties, although it also opens with an unconventional excusing of his failure to make the customary statements about his unworthiness since this “would make him seem to be taking pride in or seeking praise for his humility.” He continues that “God knows, and my conscience also knows, how worthy and how suitable I am for this display of fame and honor,” by which he meant that God and his conscience knew how unworthy and unsuitable he truly was. Of course the remark can also be read literally to express his pride in what he himself described as his occasion of “pomp.” 51 Staupitz had joked that getting a doctorate would give Luther work to do—a comment that was wonderfully ambiguous in German between “will give you a real job to do” and “will really cause you bother”—and he turned out to be right. 52 The “real bother” was that several Erfurt Augustinians had been offended that he had pursued his studies at Wittenberg, and not Erfurt, where he had first matriculated. They tried to get the doctorate declared void and have him fined, on the grounds that he had broken the oath taken when he became a student at Erfurt that he would follow no other university. Luther replied that he had not actually sworn such an oath—it had been overlooked—but the damage had been done. What should have been a joyous occasion was marred by the envious attacks of men who had once been his teachers. Luther was particularly irritated by the fact that the assault was headed by Johannes Nathin, the man who had probably been his companion to Rome; this bitter betrayal may be another reason why his memories of Rome became so dark. Two years after the doctoral celebration, he was still complaining about his treatment, and objected in a letter to the Erfurt monastery to a new missive from Nathin, composed “as if in the name of you all,” that accused him of being a shameful perjurer. Luther insisted that he was neither a perjurer nor oath-breaker, and had good reason to be angry at the attack. But just as he had received undeserved blessings from the Lord, so now he wanted to set aside the bitterness his opponents deserved and accord them cordiality. 53 The incident was deeply wounding, but may have had more to do with the politics of the order than the location of Luther’s studies. He had undertaken the doctorate because of Staupitz, whose more conciliatory line within the Augustinians Nathin had opposed. He may have seen Luther as a turncoat, which would explain the depths of resentment and the refusal to come to the celebration. 54 Luther had been caught up in a fight over different visions of the order’s future.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  fans cheer and jeer at me. Some people also think I’m mean. But I’m not. Our fans boo. I apologize and Romaine taps my fists with his. We’re both on our feet now. My nose is dripping when the whistle blows. I fake a lockup and dive for a leg. Romaine is ready. I don’t get much of a hold and he comes with a cross-face that bends my head back and makes me release the leg and go back to my feet. Blood’s all down my top and onto my tights. Romaine hesitates and looks at the ref. He blows his whistle and motions to our bench. The L.C. crowd has flipped out. They’re jumping up and down and pounding each other on the back. Our crowd is pretty quiet. I could lose my first match in two and a half years if my platelets don’t start promoting some coagulation. I’m aware of it, but I’m not self-conscious or scared. I’m wrestling the best I can. Coach puts the pressure on my nose again. “Get him to lock up, then take your fireman’s carry,” he says. “Okay.” I nod. The pressure on my nose feels good. I breathe deep and slow through my mouth. Our bench and crowd yell me a lot of support when I walk back to the circle. L.C. is screaming for Romaine. I get a little look at Carla, calm and smiling. I don’t really hear the whistle. Romaine starts for me slowly and I just wait. He reaches for an arm, but I pull away. I look up at the clock. There’s a minute left in the round and I think about stalling it out. I move forward and Romaine moves to meet me. We lock up loosely. I back away a bit, then blast forward, hooking his arm and dropping for the leg. I pull him over my shoulders and slam him down, maybe too hard. But there’s no whistle. I go for the half nelson and crotch as Romaine tries to roll on his side. I cinch up good on the half nelson and keep him on his back. I kick my legs out wide and get up on my toes to be just as heavy on his chest as I can. I lift on his head and crotch and press down with my chest. His jersey is covered with blood. I can’t hear a thing the crowd is so loud. I close my eyes and sink the half nelson deeper and cinch up with all I’ve got. A tremendous cheer bursts from somewhere. A hand taps my back and I let loose and roll off Romaine and onto my back, swallowing blood. The ref motions for me to get up. Romaine and I shake hands and then the ref raises my arm. I turn toward the bench and see the clock with just six seconds left. Everybody’s waiting for me at the edge of the mat.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. By prostrating themselves in the direction of the Kabah, which was independent of the two older revelations, Muslims were tacitly declaring that they belonged to no established religion but were surrendering themselves to God alone. They were not joining a sect that impiously divided the religion of the one God into warring groups. Instead they were returning to the primordial religion of Abraham, who had been the first muslim to surrender to God and who had built his holy house: And they say, “Be Jews”—or “Christians”—“and you shall be on the right path.” Say: “nay, but [ours is] the creed of Abraham, who turned away from all that is false and was not of those who ascribe divinity to aught beside God.” Say: “We believe in God and in that which had been bestowed from on high upon us, and in that which has been bestowed upon Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and their descendants, and that which has been vouchsafed to Moses and Jesus, and that which has been vouchsafed to all the [other] prophets by their Sustainer: we make no distinction between any of them. And it is unto him that we surrender ourselves.”33 It was, surely, idolatry to prefer a merely human interpretation of the truth to God himself.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  This was a dig at Luther’s intellectualism, for scholastics liked to evade arguments by using devices like the ‘horns’ of a dilemma. Luther’s reply now was ‘neither horned nor toothed’: ‘Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the Pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.’ In contrast to the previous speech, this was directness itself. According to the official transcript of the proceedings, this was all he said; according to the account his supporters published at Wittenberg, Luther concluded with the words ‘I cannot do otherwise, here I stand, may God help me. Amen.’ If he did not say these words, this was the phrase that soon became famous. It certainly encapsulated the spirit of his appearance.” After Luther’s speech, discussions continued, but by now darkness had fallen, and the Diet soon broke up. As the report from Luther’s circle put it in another self-conscious reference to Christ’s Passion, when Luther departed, ‘a large group of Spaniards followed Luther, the man of God, with jeers, derisive gestures, and much loud noise’. They were heard to shout ‘Burn him! Burn him!” * What had Luther meant by this appeal to ‘conscience’? It has a modern resonance, suggestive of freedom of thought and of the right of all individuals to decide for themselves. But this was not what Luther meant. The German term he often used, Gewissen, is closely connected to words like ‘knowing’ and ‘certainty’; in Latin, the root of consci- entia — another word he used regularly — means ‘with-knowing’. Luther was of course writing long before Freud formulated his three-part model of the mind, where conscience is identified with the superego, the part of the mind which imposes external norms and moral 184 MARTIN LUTHER prohibitions. Nor did he mean an inner voice containing the authentic individual. For Luther, the Word of God is absolutely clear and plain in its meaning, and ‘conscience’ is the individual’s internal knowledge of that objective meaning of God’s Word. This is what he meant by his insistence that his conscience was ‘captive to the Word of God’.” Moreover, for Luther the conscience is not just an intellectual faculty but is also strongly linked to a complex palette of emotions. A conscience can be sad, burdened, clouded, joyous, happy or peaceful. It can be weak or strong, or even courageous. It may be paired with the heart, another seat of emotions, and with faith. And it has a special relationship to God, with whom it communicates directly. ‘Conscience’ had a long history with Luther.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The reformers tended to argue more like medieval Faylasufs than modern philosophers. They all promoted the ideal of a constitutional government that would limit the powers of the shahs, and by opening this debate in Iran, they had made an important contribution. But they were as elitist as any premodern philosopher. They certainly did not envisage a government based on the will of the majority. Mulkum Khan’s vision was more like the old Falsafah ideal of a philosopher-king guiding the ignorant masses than the democratic vision of a modern political scientist. Talibzada was unable to see the point of a multiparty system; in his view, the role of the opposition was simply to censure the ruling party and to wait in the wings, ready to take over in a crisis. 46 It had taken Western people centuries of economic, political, industrial, and social change to evolve their democratic ideal, so, again, it was not surprising that the reformers had not grasped it fully. They were—and could only be—transitional figures, pointing their people in the direction of change, but unable yet to articulate modernity fully. Intellectuals like Kirmani and Mulkum Khan would continue to play an important part in the development of Iran, and they would often find themselves in conflict with the ulema. But toward the end of the century, the clergy showed that they were not always immersed in old texts but were prepared to intervene in politics if they felt that the shahs had put the people’s welfare in jeopardy. In 1891, Nasir ad-Din Shah (1829–96) gave a British company the monopoly on the production and sale of tobacco in Iran. The Qajar shahs had been granting such concessions for years, but hitherto only in areas where Iranians were not involved. But tobacco was a popular crop in Iran, and provided thousands of landowners, shopkeepers, and exporters with their major source of income. There were huge protests all over the country, led by the bazaaris and the local ulema. But in December, Hajj Mirza Hasan Shirazi, the leading mujtahid in Najaf, issued a fatwa that banned the sale and use of tobacco in Iran. It was a brilliant move. Everybody stopped smoking, even the non-Muslim Iranians and the shah’s wives. The government was forced to climb down and rescind the concession. 47 It was a prophetic moment, and showed the potential power of the Iranian ulema, who, as the sole spokesmen of the Hidden Imam, could even command the obedience of the shahs. The fatwa was rational, pragmatic, and effective, but made sense only in the old mythical context, deriving as it did from the Imam’s authority.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Moreover, it hardly seemed likely that one monk could be right and centuries of learned theologians could be wrong. He concluded that Luther and his adherents must therefore be excommunicated and ‘eradicated’. It was a clear decision for the Church and for tradition. For the imperial side, the issue at stake was who had the authority to interpret Scripture. As the imperial orator cautioned, Luther should not claim that ‘you are the one and only man who has knowledge of the Bible’. The chancellor of Baden, Dr Vehus, took this line in discussions with Luther after the Diet too, but also addressed his appeal to conscience. Luther’s conscience, like that of every Christian, he argued, should have taught him three things. First, not to rely on his own understanding, for ‘if he went into his own conscience he could easily judge for himself, whether it would be better for him to THE DIET OF WORMS 187 follow the understanding of others out of humility in matters which are not against the command of God’. Scholars should keep humility and obedience always in front of their eyes so that they will not be seduced by their self-willed understanding and pride. Second, conscience should warn him to flee scandal and offence. And third, his conscience should tell him that he had written many good works, and brought many abuses to light; yet if he did not recant, he would imperil all the good things he had done. Vehus was a jurist and a politician, not a theologian, and his admonition gives a rare view of how others understood conscience. For Vehus it was an inner faculty that policed behaviour, and it had to be the same for every Christian. The nub of the matter was that Luther, trusting in his own intelligence, was guilty of the sin of pride.* None of this would have convinced Luther or his supporters. Luther could not show humility in matters which, as he saw it, were against the command of God: conscience did not permit him to do so. Like many of Luther’s opponents, Vehus refused to engage with Luther's actual arguments, insisting that it was unlikely that Luther could be right and the Church Fathers wrong. Conscience should be about obedience, not about one man’s interpretation of Scripture. In fact, constantly urging Luther to show ‘humility’ was only likely to inflame the situation. By moving the debate into the realm of moral theology and targeting his character, it only served to increase the focus on Luther the man. For the humanist Johannes Cochlaeus it was not so much the ques- tion of conscience as the authority to interpret Scripture that was key.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The man who railed against sedition and insisted on obedience to princes believed in his own authority as a prophet, and he thundered against the rulers from the sidelines. THE CHARIOTEER OF ISRAEL 421 Perhaps Luther’s most lasting achievement was the German Bible. After the fevered translation of the New Testament in 1522, he worked with colleagues to produce the full Bible of 1534, illustrated with memorable images by Cranach.” It was not just that his prose shaped the German language, creating the modern vernacular as we know it.* Each book of the Bible was prefaced with a short and brilliantly clear introductory exegesis, so that the reader encountered the text through Luther’s understanding of it. And because his authorship was not clearly indicated, his explanation appeared indistinguishable from Scripture itself. Luther always maintained that the Word of God was absolutely plain and did not need interpretation, thus avoiding the question his very first opponents had raised: how do you decide between rival interpretations of biblical passages, and should not Church tradition therefore be the guide? His conviction that the Word of God was clear prompted ordinary people for centuries to come to read the Bible for themselves — even if Luther would not have always agreed with what they took from it. At the same time, his insistence on aligning his own authority with God’s Word helped give rise to a church of pastors who were theologically trained, academics whose authority rested on their intellectual command of religion, demon- strated in their sermons. At the heart of Luther’s theology lay his insistence that Christ was truly present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. This is one aspect of his thinking which is difficult for many Protestants and non-believers to understand today, and where the gulf that separates our world from his seems at its greatest. In this book I have tried to show why it mattered. Luther’s theological legacy was a view of human nature that escaped the split between flesh and spirit that has dogged so much of the history of Christianity, and has given rise to a profound suspicion of sexuality and an unbending moralism. Not so with Luther: whatever else he was, he was no killjoy. He saw sexuality as sinful but only in the way that all our actions are sinful, and this perspective freed him to be remarkably positive about the body and physical experience. His religiosity had nothing saccharine about it. His relationship with God was not that of a believer cheerfully confident of having been ‘saved’: it was wrested from his Anfechtungen and it engaged all his intellectual and emotional capacities.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In fact Islam was still the greatest world power during this period, and the West was fearfully aware that it was now on the very threshold of Europe. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, three new Muslim empires were founded: by the Ottoman Turks in Asia Minor and Eastern Europe, by the Safavids in Iran and by the Moghuls in India. These new ventures show that the Islamic spirit was by no means moribund but could still provide Muslims with the inspiration to rise again to new success after catastrophe and disintegration. Each of the empires achieved its own remarkable cultural florescence: the Safavid renaissance in Iran and Central Asia was interestingly similar to the Italian Renaissance: both expressed themselves preeminently in painting and felt that they were returning creatively to the pagan roots of their culture. Despite the power and magnificence of these three empires, however, what has been called the conservative spirit still prevailed. Where earlier mystics and philosophers like al-Farabi and Ibn al-Arabi had been conscious of breaking new ground, this period saw a subtle and delicate restatement of old themes. This makes it more difficult for Westerners to appreciate, because our own scholars have ignored these more modern Islamic ventures for too long, and also because the philosophers and poets expect the minds of their readers to be stocked with the images and ideas of the past.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Muhammad was a man of exceptional genius. When he died in 632, he had managed to bring nearly all the tribes of Arabia into a new united community, or ummah. He had brought the Arabs a spirituality that was uniquely suited to their own traditions and which unlocked such reserves of power that within a hundred years they had established their own great empire, which stretched from the Himalayas to the Pyrenees, and founded a unique civilization. Yet as Muhammad sat in prayer in the tiny cave at the summit of Mount Hira during his Ramadan retreat of 610, he could not have envisaged such phenomenal success. Like many of the Arabs, Muhammad had come to believe that al-Lah, the High God of the ancient Arabian pantheon, whose name simply meant “the God,” was identical to the God worshipped by the Jews and the Christians. He also believed that only a prophet of this God could solve the problems of his people, but he never believed for one moment that he was going to be that prophet. Indeed, the Arabs were unhappily aware that al-Lah had never sent them a prophet or a scripture of their own, even though they had had his shrine in their midst from time immemorial. By the seventh century, most Arabs had come to believe that the Kabah, the massive cube-shaped shrine in the heart of Mecca, which was clearly of great antiquity, had originally been dedicated to al-Lah, even though at present the Nabatean deity Hubal presided there. All Meccans were fiercely proud of the Kabah, which was the most important holy place in Arabia. Each year Arabs from all over the peninsula made the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, performing the traditional rites over a period of several days. All violence was forbidden in the sanctuary, the sacred area around the Kabah, so that in Mecca the Arabs could trade with one another peacefully, knowing that old tribal hostilities were temporarily in abeyance. The Quraysh knew that without the sanctuary they could never have achieved their mercantile success and that a great deal of their prestige among the other tribes depended upon their guardianship of the Kabah and upon their preservation of its ancient sanctities. Yet though al-Lah had clearly singled the Quraysh out for his special favor, he had never sent them a messenger like Abraham, Moses or Jesus, and the Arabs had no scripture in their own language.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  How are the gentlemen? Fine.’* On 25 June, ten days after Charles’s arrival, the confession was formally handed to him. The evangelicals had wanted it read in full session of the Diet, but then news arrived of yet another planned attack by the Turks on Vienna from where they had been driven away in 1529, and Ferdinand, the emperor's brother, succeeded in getting the issue of religion shelved while this important matter was discussed. Instead it was presented to the Catholic princes and the emperor in the chapel of the bishop's palace. For Spalatin, the confession’s compre- hensive and systematic presentation of the Lutheran faith — setting out ‘all articles of faith, next to what is taught, preached and thought’ — was one of ‘the greatest achievements that had ever happened on earth’.” The plan had been to read out the confession in both Latin and German, but in the event it was presented only in German, and even that took a full two hours.” Jonas reported that the emperor looked attentive as he listened, although he could not understand a word of AUGSBURG 331 German, as Jonas well knew. Forcing Charles to listen to the Saxon chancellor Christian Beyer read aloud a complex theological text in a language he could not understand was hardly politically wise, but for Luther, it was the high point of the Diet. He praised the reading through which the princes themselves ‘preach unhindered before [His] Imperial Majesty and the whole empire, right under our opponents’ noses, so that they have to listen to it and are unable to say anything against it’.” It was finally a positive contrast to his appearance at Worms, where Luther had not been able to give a full and compre- hensive statement of his theology. Luther was only sent the confession after it had been presented to the emperor, however, and he complained that if he had written it, he would not have made so many concessions. He dashed off a letter which started by congratulating Melanchthon but then objected that he was going against Holy Scripture because Christ is the stone which the builders cast aside, that is, he should expect to be despised and cast aside. There was little else he could now do. He saw himself as an unrecognised war hero, like the commanders at Vienna the year before, who got ‘no credit’ for driving off the Turks. “Yet I am pleased and comforted that in the meantime this, my Vienna, has been defended by others.” Presenting the confession was just the beginning, however, as Charles immediately commissioned a refutation from Catholic theo- logians. Chief amongst them was Johannes Eck, Luther’s old adversary at Leipzig and the man responsible for the martyrdom of Leonhard Kaiser.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  One reminded him, “When you shall stand before kings, do not think about what you are saying, for it will be given to you in that hour’, and a bystander shouted, “Blessed is the womb that bore you’ — all quotations from the Gospels which once more likened Luther’s appearance at Worms to Christ’s Passion.* Luther's strategy was to insist that the arguments be heard, and he succeeded in subverting the imperial side’s attempts to force him either to retract or be silent. In summoning him before the Diet, they had given Luther the best possible stage to voice his ideas. The papal nuncio himself, Aleander, had warned of this danger from the outset.” The Diet was occupied with other business too, and Luther was not called until the late afternoon of 18 April, and then had to wait another two hours before he was heard. This time he was conducted to a yet larger hall that was still so overcrowded that even some of the princes had to stand. Luther remembered the scene as dark, lit only by burning torches. The imperial orator repeated the questions he had asked the day before. Again, Luther replied in a modest voice, first in Latin, then in German, styling himself as ‘a man accustomed not to courts but to the cells of monks’. Formally addressing the emperor and the Electors, he begged pardon if he accorded anyone 182 MARTIN LUTHER a less honourable title than they merited — a rhetorical breach of protocol which allowed him to try to create a more level playing field. He acknowledged that he had written the books but they were not all of the same kind. In some he had preached God’s Word simply and clearly. In others he had attacked the false teachings of the Roman Church.

• From A History of God (1993)

  He had stood alone in the presence of God in total command of himself. Such a man will find God in every aspect of life. God, the Master of the Universe, has arranged the world to help us to attain this inner freedom, and each individual is educated to this end by none other than God himself. Judaism was not the servile faith that Gentiles imagined. It had always been a more advanced religion than, for example, Christianity, which had turned its back on its Jewish roots and reverted to the irrationality and superstitions of paganism. Nachman Krochmal (1785–1840), whose Guide for the Perplexed of Our Time was published posthumously in 1841, did not recoil from mysticism like his colleagues. He liked to call “God” or the “Spirit” “Nothing,” like the Kabbalists, and to use the Kabbalistic metaphor of emanation to describe God’s unfolding revelation of himself. He argued that the achievements of the Jews were not the result of an abject dependence upon God, but of the workings of the collective consciousness. Over the centuries, the Jews had gradually refined their conception of God. Thus at the time of the Exodus God had had to reveal his presence in miracles. By the time of the return from Babylon, however, the Jews had attained a more advanced perception of the divine and signs and wonders were no longer necessary. The Jewish conception of the worship of God was not the slavish dependence that the goyim imagined, but corresponded almost exactly to the philosophic ideal. The only difference between religion and philosophy was that the latter expressed itself in concepts, while religion used representational language, as Hegel had pointed out. Yet this type of symbolic language was appropriate, since God exceeds all our ideas about him. Indeed, we cannot even say that he exists, since our experience of existence is so partial and limited. The new confidence brought by emancipation was dealt a harsh blow with the outbreak of a vicious anti-Semitism in Russia and Eastern Europe under Tsar Alexander III in 1881. This spread to Western Europe. In France, the first country to emancipate the Jews, there was an hysterical surge of anti-Semitism when the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of treason in 1894. That same year, Karl Lueger, a notable anti-Semite, was elected Mayor of Vienna. Yet in Germany before Adolf Hitler came to power, Jews still imagined that they were safe.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther began to discover a talent for mocking polemic. When the bishop of Meissen banned his Sermon on the Sacrament of the Body of Christ, he at once sat down and dashed off a reply in German. When the papal nuncio Karl von Miltitz read it, hot off the press and in the company of the bishop, he could not stop laughing — although the bishop did not join in. The author of the notice, Luther wrote, surely could not be the bishop of Meissen: someone in his chancellery at Stolpen must have misused his seal. Playing on the word ‘tolpisch’, or ‘stupid’, he joked that the note will be viewed as more ‘tolpisch’ than ‘stolpisch’ (that is, from Stolpen), and advised the author to write in the ‘sober morning’ and not when he’s ‘lost his brain up the Ketzberg mountain [vineyards] — when he was drunk. The whole matter had been sparked by ‘Mr Envy’, and what a shame it would have been had the ‘note’ appeared at any time but carnival. But for all the jesting, Luther was serious: for the bishop himself must admit ‘that the whole sacrament consists in both kinds’. Catholic theology, Luther allowed, maintained that he who received only the bread ‘receives the whole Christ’. But, even so, Luther triumphantly con- cluded, he ‘receives only one part of the whole sacrament, that is, only one form of the two’.* Once again Luther had pulled a fast one. He had not informed Spalatin before printing the sermon in 1519, although he was perfectly aware of the dynamite it contained. When he cheerily sent a copy to Spalatin, Luther knew it was too late for the courtier to ban it. Now, as he responded publicly to the bishop of Meissen, he did not bother to check with Spalatin either, who was furious when he read it. Luther reacted with splenetic indignation to Spalatin’s rebuke. [ have written to you before, that you should not think this matter was conceived or done according to your or my understanding or indeed that of any man; for if it is of God, it will be accomplished far beyond, against, outside, above and below your and my comprehension . . . 154 MARTIN LUTHER 26. This title-page woodcut of a book by Johannes Agricola, a supporter of Luther's, from 1522 features caricatures of six Roman Catholics: Johannes Eck (with fool’s cap), Jerome Aleander (as lion), Augustin von Alveld (as donkey), Dam (as pig), Thomas Murner (as cat) and Hieronymus Emser (as goat). I beg you, if you understand the gospel rightly, don’t think that the matter can be done without revolt, offence and unrest.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Whether Luther used a nail or a pot of glue will probably never be known for sure, but it is certain that he sent the theses to Archbishop Albrecht, the most important churchman in all Germany, on October 31. The accompanying letter had a tone of remarkable self-confidence, even of arrogance. After an obsequious opening, it roundly condemned the archbishop’s lack of care for his flock and threatened that if Albrecht did not take action, then “someone may rise and, by means of publications, silence those preachers” who were selling indulgences that promised the buyers time off Purgatory.5 Luther wrote a similar letter to his immediate superior, the bishop of Brandenburg, and, more than the posting of the theses in a backwater like Wittenberg, these letters were the provocation that ensured a response. One of Luther’s talents, evident even then, was his ability to stage an event, to do something spectacular that would get him noticed. Luther’s Reformation sundered the unity of the Catholic Church forever, and can even be credited with starting the process of secularization in the West, as Catholicism lost its monopoly in large parts of Europe. Yet it all began in a most unlikely place. The tiny new University of Wittenberg was struggling to make its name; the town itself was a building site of “muddy houses, unclean lanes, every path, step and street full of mud.” It was situated at the end of the earth, as southern humanists scoffed, far away from grand imperial cities like Strasbourg, Nuremberg, or Augsburg, with their connections to fashionable Italy. Even Luther remarked that it was so distant from civilization that “a little further, and it would be in barbarian country.”6 And the man himself was an unlikely revolutionary. Just short of his thirty-fourth birthday, Luther had been a monk for twelve years, working his way up through the Augustinian order and becoming a trusted administrator and university professor. He had published almost nothing, and his experience of public writing was restricted largely to theses for disputation, works of exegesis, and ghostwriting sermons for lazy colleagues. Although the Church was slow to respond, the Ninety-five Theses took Germany by storm. There was a huge readership for them, lay as well as clerical. In just two months they were known all over Germany, and soon beyond it.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Hence the outrage throughout the Muslim world during the hajj of 1987, when Iranian pilgrims instigated a riot in which 402 people were killed and 649 injured. Muhammad died unexpectedly after a short illness in June 632. After his death, some of the Bedouin tried to break away from the ummah , but the political unity of Arabia held firm. Eventually the recalcitrant tribes also accepted the religion of the one God: Muhammad’s astonishing success had shown the Arabs that the paganism which had served them well for centuries no longer worked in the modern world. The religion of al-Lah introduced the compassionate ethos which was the hallmark of the more advanced religions: brotherhood and social justice were its crucial virtues. A strong egalitarianism would continue to characterize the Islamic ideal. During Muhammad’s lifetime, this had included the equality of the sexes. Today it is common in the West to depict Islam as an inherently misogynistic religion, but, like Christianity, the religion of al-Lah was originally positive for women. During the jahiliyyah , the pre-Islamic period, Arabia had preserved the attitudes toward women which had prevailed before the Axial Age. Polygamy, for example, was common, and wives remained in their father’s households. Elite women enjoyed considerable power and prestige—Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, for example, was a successful merchant—but the majority were on a par with slaves; they had no political or human rights, and female infanticide was common. Women had been among Muhammad’s earliest converts, and their emancipation was a project that was dear to his heart. The Koran strictly forbade the killing of female children and rebuked the Arabs for their dismay when a girl was born. It also gave women legal rights of inheritance and divorce: most Western women had nothing comparable until the nineteenth century. Muhammad encouraged women to play an active role in the affairs of the ummah , and they expressed their views forthrightly, confident that they would be heard. On one occasion, for example, the women of Medina had complained to the Prophet that the men were outstripping them in the study of the Koran and asked him to help them catch up. This Muhammad did. One of their most important questions was why the Koran addressed men only when women had also made their surrender to God. The result was a revelation that addressed women as well as men and emphasized the absolute moral and spiritual equality of the sexes. 35 Thereafter the Koran quite frequently addressed women explicitly, something that rarely happens in either the Jewish or Christian scriptures.

• From A History of God (1993)

  3 Arius knew the scriptures well, and he produced an armory of texts to support his claim that Christ the Word could only be a creature like ourselves. A key passage was the description of the divine Wisdom in Proverbs, which stated explicitly that God had created Wisdom at the very beginning. 4 This text also stated that Wisdom had been the agent of creation, an idea repeated in the Prologue of St. John’s Gospel. The Word had been with God in the beginning: Through him all things came to be, not one thing had its being but through him. 5 The Logos had been the instrument used by God to call other creatures into existence. It was, therefore, entirely different from all other beings and of exceptionally high status, but because it had been created by God, the Logos was essentially different and distinct from God himself. St. John made it clear that Jesus was the Logos; he also said that the Logos was God. 6 Yet he was not God by nature, Arius insisted, but had been promoted by God to divine status. He was different from the rest of us, because God had created him directly but all other things through him. God had foreseen that when the Logos became man he would obey him perfectly and had, so to speak, conferred divinity upon Jesus in advance. But Jesus’ divinity was not natural to him: it was only a reward or gift. Again, Arius could produce many texts that seemed to support his view. The very fact that Jesus had called God his “Father” implied a distinction; paternity by its very nature involves prior existence and a certain superiority over the son. Arius also emphasized the biblical passages that stressed the humility and vulnerability of Christ. Arius had no intention of denigrating Jesus, as his enemies claimed. He had a lofty notion of Christ’s virtue and obedience unto death, which had ensured our salvation. Arius’s God was close to the God of the Greek philosophers, remote and utterly transcending the world; so too he adhered to a Greek concept of salvation. The Stoics, for example, had always taught that it was possible for a virtuous human being to become divine; this had also been essential to the Platonic view. Arius passionately believed that Christians had been saved and made divine, sharers in the nature of God. This was only possible because Jesus had blazed a trail for us. He had lived a perfect human life; he had obeyed God even unto the death of the Cross; as St. Paul said, it was because of this obedience unto death that God had raised him up to a specially exalted status and given him the divine title of Lord (kyrios).

• From Satyricon (1)

  “Habinnas, you were there, I think, I’ll leave it to you; didn’t he say --‘You took your wife out of a whore-house’? you’re as lucky in your friends, too, no one ever repays your favor with another, you own broad estates, you nourish a viper under your wing, and--why shouldn’t I tell it--I still have thirty years, four months, and two days to live! I’ll also come into another bequest shortly. That’s what my horoscope tells me. If I can extend my boundaries so as to join Apulia, I’ll think I’ve amounted to something in this life! I built this house with Mercury on the job, anyhow; it was a hovel, as you know, it’s a palace now! Four dining-rooms, twenty bed-rooms, two marble colonnades, a store-room upstairs, a bed-room where I sleep myself, a sitting-room for this viper, a very good room for the porter, a guest-chamber for visitors. As a matter of fact, Scaurus, when he was here, would stay nowhere else, although he has a family place on the seashore. I’ll show you many other things, too, in a jiffy; believe me, if you have an as, you’ll be rated at what you have. So your humble servant, who was a frog, is now a king. Stychus, bring out my funereal vestments while we wait, the ones I’ll be carried out in, some perfume, too, and a draught of the wine in that jar, I mean the kind I intend to have my bones washed in.” CHAPTER THE SEVENTY-EIGHTH.