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 40 of 174 · 20 per page

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  120 One of the factors that had made fundamentalists hold aloof from politics had been their premillennialism: since the world was doomed, there was no point attempting to reform it. But even here there was a change. In 1970, Hal Lindsey published his extremely successful book The Late Great Planet Earth, which had sold 28 million copies by 1990. It rehashed the old premillennial ideas in racy, trendy prose. Lindsey saw no special role for America in the Last Days, and implied that Christians should content themselves with spotting “signs” of the approaching End in current events. But by the end of the 1970s, he, like Tim LaHaye, had changed his mind. In The 1980s, Countdown to Armageddon, he argued that, if America came to its senses, it could remain a world power right through the millennium. But that means that we must actively take on the responsibility of being a citizen and a member of God’s family. We need to get active, electing officials who will not only reflect the Bible’s morality in government, but will shape domestic and foreign policies to protect our country and our way of life. 121 Fundamentalists were ready. They had an enemy to fight, a vision of what America should be that was very different from that of the liberal mainstream, and they now believed, despite all their fears, that they were powerful enough to succeed in their crusade. By the late 1970s, Protestant fundamentalists in the United States had achieved a much higher profile and a greater self-confidence. This was the third reason for their mobilization in the early 1980s. They were no longer the impoverished backwoodsmen who had scuttled away from the Scopes trial. The affluence that had made the permissive society a possibility had affected them too. The new prominence of the South and the rise of fundamentalism there made many feel that it was now possible for them to challenge the establishment. They knew that membership in the liberal mainstream denominations had dropped during the 1960s, whereas the evangelical churches had increased at an average five-year rate of 8 percent. 122 Televangelism had also become more adept at packaging and marketing Christianity. It seemed to make the God who was being banished from so much of the public sphere a dramatic and tangible presence. When they watched the Pentecostalist preacher Oral Roberts apparently healing sick and disabled people on the air, they could see the divine power at work.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The religious Zionists were very conscious of being rebels. When they established their own youth movement, Bnei Akiva (“Sons of Akiva”), in 1929, these youngsters took as their role model Rabbi Akiva, the great mystic and scholar of the second century CE, who had supported a Jewish revolt against Rome. The secular Zionists had also been rebels, but against religious Judaism. Now the Bnei Akiva felt that they “must call for a rebellion against the rebellion, against the views of the [secular] youth which is opposed to Judaism and to Jewish tradition.” 79 They were fighting a battle for God. Instead of wanting to marginalize and exclude the divine from political and cultural life, they wanted religion to suffuse their existence “all the time and in every area.” They refused to allow the secularists to “own” Zionism completely. Tiny minority though they were, they were staging a mini-revolution against what they regarded as the illegitimate domination of the secularists’ wholly rational ideology. They needed their own schools and institutions. During the 1940s, Rav Moshe Zvi Neria founded a series of elite boarding schools for religious Zionist boys and girls. In these yeshiva high schools, academic standards were high; students studied secular subjects alongside Torah. Unlike the Haredim, these neo-Orthodox religious Zionists did not feel that they should cut themselves off from major currents of modern life. This would betray their holistic vision; they believed that Judaism was quite large enough to accommodate these gentile sciences, but they also took Torah study very seriously indeed, and employed graduates from the Haredi yeshivot to teach them Torah and Talmud. In the yeshiva high schools, mythos and logos were still seen as complementary. Torah provided a mystical encounter with the divine and gave meaning to the whole, even though it had no practical utility. As Rabbi Yehoshua Yogel, the principal of Midrashiat Noam, explained, students did not study Torah to make a living or “as a means for economic, military, and political existence.” Rather, Torah must be studied “for its own sake”; unlike the logoi of the secular subjects, it had no practical use, but was simply the whole “purpose of man.” 80 Study, however, was not enough for the young religious Zionists after the foundation of the State of Israel. In the 1950s, yeshivot were established for older students which had a special “arrangement” (hesder) with the new Israeli government, giving religious youth a way of combining their national service in the IDF with Torah study. Religious Zionists had thus carved out for themselves a distinctive way of life, but during the early years of the state, some suffered a crisis of identity.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  By the time of Banna’s death in 1949, there were 2000 branches of the Society throughout Egypt, each branch representing between 300,000 and 600,000 Brothers and Sisters. It was the only organization in Egypt to represent every group in society, including civil servants, students, and the potentially powerful urban workers and peasants. 66 By the Second World War, the Society had become one of the most powerful contestants on the Egyptian political scene. Despite the militant imagery that characterized the Society from the first night of its existence, Banna always insisted that he had no intention of staging a coup or seizing power. The Society’s chief aim was education. He believed that when the people had absorbed the message of Islam and allowed it to transform them, the nation would become Muslim without a violent takeover. At the very beginning, Banna formulated a six-point program, which revealed his debt to Afghani, Abdu, and Rida’s salafiyyah reform movements: (1) the interpretation of the Koran in the spirit of the age, (2) the unity of Islamic nations, (3) raising the standard of living and achievement of social justice and order, (4) a struggle against illiteracy and poverty, (5) the emancipation of Muslim lands from foreign dominance, and (6) the promotion of Islamic peace and fraternity throughout the world. 67 Banna did not intend his Society to be violent or radical, but was principally concerned with the fundamental reform of Muslim society, which had been undermined by the colonial experience and cut off from its roots. 68 Egyptians had become accustomed to thinking themselves inferior to Europeans, but there was no need for this. They had fine cultural traditions too that would serve them better than any imported ideologies. 69 They should not have to copy the French or Russian revolutions, because the Prophet Muhammad had already proclaimed the need for liberty, equality, fraternity, and social justice 1300 years before. 69 The Shariah suited the Middle Eastern environment in a way no foreign law code could. As long as Muslims imitated other people, they would remain “cultural mongrels.” 70 But first the Brothers and Sisters had to reacquaint themselves with Islam. There was no shortcut to freedom and dignity; Muslims would have to rebuild themselves and their society from the ground up. Over the years, Banna evolved an efficient, modern system, constantly subject to review and self- appraisal, to achieve this.

• From The Lover (1984)

  She’s the housekeeper who will never leave my mother even when she goes back to France, even when my elder brother tries to rape her in the house that goes with my mother’s job in Sadec, even when her wages stop being paid. Dô was brought up by the nuns, she can embroider and do pleats, she can sew by hand as people haven’t sewed by hand for centuries, with hair-fine needles. As she can embroider, my mother has her embroider sheets. As she can do pleats, my mother has her make me dresses with pleats, dresses with flounces, I wear them as if they were sacks, they’re frumpish, childish, two sets of pleats in front and a Peter Pan collar, with a gored skirt or panels cut on the bias to make them look “professional.” I wear these dresses as if they were sacks, with belts that take away their shape and make them timeless. Fifteen and a half. The body is thin, undersized almost, childish breasts still, red and pale-pink make-up. And then the clothes, the clothes that might make people laugh, but don’t. I can see it’s all there. All there, but nothing yet done. I can see it in the eyes, all there already in the eyes. I want to write. I’ve already told my mother: That’s what I want to do—write. No answer the first time. Then she asks, Write what? I say, Books, novels. She says grimly, When you’ve got your math degree you can write if you like, it won’t be anything to do with me then. She’s against it, it’s not worthy, it’s not real work, it’s nonsense. Later she said, A childish idea. The girl in the felt hat is in the muddy light of the river, alone on the deck of the ferry, leaning on the rails. The hat makes the whole scene pink. It’s the only color. In the misty sun of the river, the sun of the hot season, the banks have faded away, the river seems to reach to the horizon. It flows quietly, without a sound, like the blood in the body. No wind but that in the water. The engine of the ferry is the only sound, a rickety old engine with burned-out rods. From time to time, in faint bursts, the sound of voices. And the barking of dogs, coming from all directions, from beyond the mist, from all the villages. The girl has known the ferryman since she was a child. He smiles at her and asks after her mother the headmistress, Madame la Directrice. He says he often sees her cross over at night, says she often goes to the property in Cambodia. Her mother is well, says the girl.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  They called their settlement Elon Moreh, one of the city’s other biblical names, and tried to turn their railway depot into a yeshiva for the study of sacred texts. They also agreed to join Gush Emunim. The government tried to dislodge the settlers, since the garin was illegal, but the Gush felt no need to comply with the declarations of the United Nations that demanded Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories, since Jews were not bound by the laws of other peoples. The settlers won considerable support in Israel, while the government seemed feeble and hesitant. In April 1975, Moshe Levinger led a march of twenty thousand Jews into the West Bank. From his tent in Elon Moreh, which he called his “war situation room,” he negotiated with Israeli defense minister Shimon Peres. There was a battle with soldiers of the IDF: no shots were fired, but rocks were hurled and rifle butts used. Eventually, Peres was flown in by helicopter, confronted Levinger in his tent, and after the meeting, the rabbi stormed out, tearing his white shirt in the traditional sign of mourning. As elections were looming and Peres feared to lose the religious vote, he finally caved in and in December 1975, he agreed to accommodate thirty of the Elon Moreh settlers in a nearby army camp. Levinger was carried in a triumphal procession on the shoulders of cheering youths. 8 A thin, balding man, with a straggling beard, thick glasses, and a gun perpetually slung over his shoulder, Levinger had become a new kind of Jewish hero. For some, the Settler was beginning to rank alongside the Zaddik, the Torah scholar, and the Hasid. He also won the support of secularists. “Levinger symbolizes the return of Zionism,” maintained the veteran and self- confessed terrorist Geula Cohen. “He is standing like a candle in Judea and Samaria [the Biblical names for the West Bank]. He is the leader of the Zionist revolution.” 9 Elon Moreh, now renamed Kedamim, was finally established during the season of Hanukkah, the festival that celebrates the liberation of Jerusalem by the Maccabees from the Seleucids in 164 BCE and the rededication of the Temple. In the mythology of Gush Emunim, the garin became a new Hanukkah, a divine breakthrough, and a victory for God. It was a formative moment: the tide seemed to have turned; secular Zionism had been forced to submit to the divine will. Levinger had put history back on track. The years 1974–77 marked the golden age of the Gush. Members toured the country, giving lectures and recruiting young men and women, secularists as well as religious, who were prepared to settle in the territories.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  They were determined to replace the old socialist and nationalist discourse with the language of the Bible. Where Labor Zionists had sought to normalize Jewish life and make Jews “like all the other nations,” the Gush Emunim emphasized the “uniqueness” of the people of Israel; 3 because Jews had been chosen by God, they were essentially different from all other nations and were not bound by the same rules. The Bible made it clear that as a “holy” people, Israel was set apart, in a category of its own. 4 Where Labor Zionism had tried to incorporate the liberal humanism of the modern West, Gush Emunim believed that Judaism and Western culture were antithetical. There was, therefore, for Kookists, no way that secular Zionism could ever have worked. 5 Their task was to reclaim Zionism for religion, correct the mistakes of the past, and make history right again. The near-disaster of the Yom Kippur War had shown that it was essential to act immediately in order to hasten the redemptive process, which the policies of the “false” secular Zionism had retarded. It would take over a year for the Gush Emunim to develop fully, but eventually it provided its members with a total way of life. There would be a Gush style of dress, music, decor, books, and choice of children’s names, and even a particular style of speech. 6 Over the years, the Gush created a counterculture that enabled members to withdraw, in time-honored fundamentalist style, from secular Israel. There was a certain aggression, however, in the way religious members of the Gush flaunted their piety and Torah observance. In the early years of the state, secular Israelis had ridiculed Jews who wore traditional skullcaps; now these pious activists sported the knitted kipa, which became an item of radical religious chic. 7 The cadres of the Gush saw themselves as more authentically Jewish and Zionist than the Laborites, linking themselves not only with such holy warriors of ancient times as Joshua, David, and the Maccabees, but also with such Zionist heroes as Theodor Herzl, Ben-Gurion, and the early pioneers, who were also possessed by a mystical vision of sorts, and had sometimes been regarded as madmen in their own day. While the secular and religious members of the Gush had been occupied in the establishment of their organization, a group of Kookists, with the help of the veteran settler Moshe Levinger, attempted to create a garin (a “seed,” or nucleus, for a small settlement) in a railway depot near the Arab town of Nablus on the West Bank. This was a sacred area for Jews: Nablus occupied the site of the biblical city of Shechem, associated with Jacob and Joshua. The settlers were attempting to re-sacralize land which, in their view, was profaned by the Palestinians.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Many of the Millerites had been involved in temperance, abolitionist, and feminist organizations. 83 There was certainly an element of social control in all this. There was also an unpleasantly nativist motivation in the emphasis on the Protestant virtues of thrift, sobriety, and clean living. Protestants were greatly disturbed by the massive flood of Catholic immigrants into the United States. At the time of the Revolution, America had been a Protestant country, with Catholics comprising only about one percent of the total population. But by the 1840s, there were over 2.5 million Catholics in America, and Roman Catholicism was the largest Christian denomination in the United States. 84 This was an alarming development in a nation that had long regarded the Pope as Antichrist. Some of the evangelical reform effort was an obvious attempt to counter this Catholic influence. Temperance, for example, was promoted to oppose the drinking habits of the new Polish, Irish, and Italian Americans. 85 Nevertheless, these evangelical reform movements were also positive and modernizing. There was an emphasis on the worth of each human being. They actively promoted an egalitarianism that would help to make slavery, for example, intolerable in the northern states, though not in the South, which remained virtually untouched by the Second Great Awakening, and which retained a premodern, elitist social structure until long after the Civil War. 86 The reform movements helped people to accommodate the modern ideal of inalienable human rights in a Christian package, at least in the North. The movements for feminism and for penal and educational reform, which were spearheaded by evangelical Christians, were also progressive. The reform groups themselves also helped people to acquire the modern spirit. Members made a conscious, voluntary decision to join an association, and learned how to plan, organize, and pursue a clearly defined objective in a modern, rational way. Eventually evangelical Christians would form the backbone of the Whig party (to which the later Republican party was in large measure the successor), while their opponents (the Old Lights and the Catholics) tended to gravitate to the Democratic party. The Whigs/Republicans wanted to create a “righteous empire” in America, based on Godly rather than Enlightenment virtues . By the middle of the nineteenth century, therefore, the evangelicals were no longer marginalized and disenfranchised. They had challenged the secularist establishment and made their voices heard. They were now engaged in a Christian reconquista of American society, which they were determined to return to a strictly Protestant ethos. They felt proud of their achievement. They had made an indelible impression upon American culture, which, despite the secular Constitution of the United States, was now more Christian than it had ever been before. Between 1780 and 1860, there was a spectacular rise in the number of Christian congregations in the United States, which far outstripped the national rate of population growth.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  85 Nevertheless, these evangelical reform movements were also positive and modernizing. There was an emphasis on the worth of each human being. They actively promoted an egalitarianism that would help to make slavery, for example, intolerable in the northern states, though not in the South, which remained virtually untouched by the Second Great Awakening, and which retained a premodern, elitist social structure until long after the Civil War. 86 The reform movements helped people to accommodate the modern ideal of inalienable human rights in a Christian package, at least in the North. The movements for feminism and for penal and educational reform, which were spearheaded by evangelical Christians, were also progressive. The reform groups themselves also helped people to acquire the modern spirit. Members made a conscious, voluntary decision to join an association, and learned how to plan, organize, and pursue a clearly defined objective in a modern, rational way. Eventually evangelical Christians would form the backbone of the Whig party (to which the later Republican party was in large measure the successor), while their opponents (the Old Lights and the Catholics) tended to gravitate to the Democratic party. The Whigs/Republicans wanted to create a “righteous empire” in America, based on Godly rather than Enlightenment virtues. By the middle of the nineteenth century, therefore, the evangelicals were no longer marginalized and disenfranchised. They had challenged the secularist establishment and made their voices heard. They were now engaged in a Christian reconquista of American society, which they were determined to return to a strictly Protestant ethos. They felt proud of their achievement. They had made an indelible impression upon American culture, which, despite the secular Constitution of the United States, was now more Christian than it had ever been before. Between 1780 and 1860, there was a spectacular rise in the number of Christian congregations in the United States, which far outstripped the national rate of population growth. In 1780, there were only about 2,500 congregations; by 1820 there were 11,000, and by 1860 a phenomenal 52,000—an almost 21-fold increase. In comparison, the population of the United States rose from about four million in 1780 to ten million in 1820, and 31 million in 1860—a less-than-eightfold increase. 87 In Europe, religion was becoming increasingly identified with the establishment, and ordinary people were turning to alternative ideologies, but in America, Protestantism empowered the people against the establishment, and this tendency has continued, so that it is difficult to find a popular movement in America today that is not associated with religion in some way. By the 1850s, Christianity in America was vibrant, and seemed poised for future triumphs. It was a very different story in Europe.

• From The Lover (1984)

  What I want to seem I do seem, beautiful too if that’s what people want me to be. Beautiful or pretty, pretty for the family for example, for the family no more than that. I can become anything anyone wants me to be. And believe it. Believe I’m charming too. And when I believe it, and it becomes true for anyone seeing me who wants me to be according to his taste, I know that too. And so I can be deliberately charming even though I’m haunted by the killing of my brother. In that death, just one accomplice, my mother. I use the word charming as people used to use it in relation to me, in relation to children. I already know a thing or two. I know it’s not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction or costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don’t know where. I only know it isn’t where women think. I look at the women in the streets of Saigon, and upcountry. Some of them are very beautiful, very white, they take enormous care of their beauty here, especially upcountry. They don’t do anything, just save themselves up, save themselves up for Europe, for lovers, holidays in Italy, the long six-months leaves every three years, when at last they’ll be able to talk about what it’s like here, this peculiar colonial existence, the marvelous domestic service provided by the houseboys, the vegetation, the dances, the white villas, big enough to get lost in, occupied by officials in distant outposts. They wait, these women. They dress just for the sake of dressing. They look at themselves. In the shade of their villas, they look at themselves for later on, they dream of romance, they already have huge wardrobes full of more dresses than they know what to do with, added to one by one like time, like the long days of waiting. Some of them go mad. Some are deserted for a young maid who keeps her mouth shut. Ditched. You can hear the word hit them, hear the sound of the blow. Some kill themselves. This self-betrayal of women always struck me as a mistake, an error. You didn’t have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn’t exist. Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been. It was instant knowledge of sexual relationship or it was nothing. That too I knew before I experienced it. Hélène Lagonelle was the only one who escaped the law of error. She was backward, a child still. • • • For a long time I’ve had no dresses of my own. My dresses are all a sort of sack, made out of old dresses of my mother’s which themselves are all a sort of sack. Except for those my mother has made for me by Dô.

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

  beyond, and its sense of community. We have no definite witness to Christianity in Britain before the early fourth century, and not much from the far end of the Mediterranean in Spain, but from the late second and early third centuries there is evidence elsewhere of well-established communities, invariably with an episcopal organization which had been in existence for some time. This is true, for instance, in North Africa around Carthage, in Alexandria and in the south of France at Lyons. Fragments preserved from letters of the late-second-century Bishop Dionysius of Corinth shed sudden shafts of light on Christian Churches in Athens, Crete and Pontus (a section of the southern coast of the Black Sea).21 The largest cities of the empire produced the largest and most important Christian communities – Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, Carthage – and while Rome pointed back to an authentic presence of the Apostles Peter and Paul in its early past, others which had not had an episcopal organization or were founded later on are likely to have confected lists in which a line of bishops could be traced back to Apostles of the first generation. Athens, for instance, pointed to Paul’s convert Dionysius the Areopagite (usefully mentioned in Acts 17.34), while Alexandria claimed foundation by the evangelist Mark himself. The genuineness of such claims is less important than the witness they give to the way in which apostolic succession had now established itself as a vital idea in the thinking of the Church, and to the self-confidence which these communities could feel in the ownership of a common tradition which involved many others. In what may be the earliest datable Christian sculpted inscription, a self- composed epitaph from before 216, Abercius, Bishop of Phrygian Hierapolis, in the next generation from Bishop Apollinaris, proudly describes his Mediterranean adventures in terms of the travels of Paul of Tarsus. It is notable that among the places he describes, Judaea and Jerusalem do not figure. The Catholic Church had already rewritten the history of its past and there was no longer much need for Jerusalem to play an active role in it.22 By the late second century, intelligent non-Christians had started to realize the significance of this self-confidence. Christianity was beginning to offer a complete alternative to the culture and assumptions of the Roman establishment, an establishment which had never felt thus threatened by the teeming ancient cults of the provinces, or even by Judaism. Christianity had no national base; it was as open to those who wished to work hard to enter it as Roman citizenship itself. It talked much of new covenant, new law, amid all its selective annexation of a Jewish past. Was it really trying to create a new citizenship for its own purposes, to create an empire within an empire? This was certainly the opinion of one well-educated late-second-century traditionalist called Celsus, who wrote a bitter attack on Christianity, probably somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  They set up a minibus service for women students, to spare them the harassment they frequently suffered on public transport. They insisted on the segregation of the sexes in separate rows in the lecture halls for the same reason, and also advocated the wearing of Islamic dress for both men and women. The long, concealing robes were more practical in a traditional society, which did not look kindly upon Western-style dating, and where (since marriage, for economic reasons, was not an option) sexual frustration was a major problem for Egyptian youth. The jamaat also organized revision sessions in the mosques, where students could study quietly in a way that was impossible in the noisy, overcrowded halls of residence. These policies were effective. A student might wear traditional dress or join a segregated row in a lecture hall simply to avoid embarrassment, in the first instance, but at the same time she would become aware that the regime was less concerned for her well-being than the cadre of jamaat. By leaving his turbulent dormitory to study in a mosque, a student had made a small, symbolic hijrah, and learned that an Islamic setting worked far better for him. 40 Many of the students had come from rural backgrounds and a traditional, premodern society. Not only did they experience modernity in the university as alien, impersonal, and bewildering, but they were given no other intellectual tools to enable them to criticize the regime in the course of their mediocre education. Many would find that in this world, only Islam made sense. Western observers were particularly dismayed by the spectacle of women returning to the veil, which they had seen as a symbol of Islamic backwardness and patriarchy since the days of Lord Cromer. But it was not experienced in this way by those Muslim women who voluntarily assumed Islamic dress for practical reasons and also as a way of casting off an alien Western identity. Donning a veil, a scarf, and a long dress could be a symbol of that “return to the self” which Islamists were attempting with such difficulty in the postcolonial period. There is, after all, nothing sacred about Western dress per se. The desire to see all women wearing it has been construed by Islamists as a sign of that tendency to regard “the West” as the norm to which “the rest” are obliged to conform. The veiled woman has, over the years, become a symbol of Islamic self-assertion and a rejection of Western cultural hegemony.

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

  will establish their bishops in righteousness and their deacons in faith.’53 This is the first surviving formulation of an idea of apostolic succession in Christian ministry. The Corinthians listened and restored their old leaders, so it was also the first known occasion that a Roman cleric had successfully influenced the life of another Church: a moment with much significance for the future of Christianity generally. Clement actually took as given the twofold order of bishop/presbyter, which can also be seen in the Didachē, even though most sources are agreed in regarding him as Bishop in Rome. Another tract from Rome, not much later than the time of Clement, the book by Hermas known as the Shepherd, also talks of a collegiate ministry of presbyter-bishops, even though the final version of the Shepherd was written when Hermas’s brother Pius was Bishop of Rome. This suggests that a twofold and threefold view of ministry could coexist; yet the elevation of one leading bishop figure above other presbyters was virtually complete by the end of the second century. One powerful force in this development was the prestige enjoyed in all parts of the Church by the seven letters written to various Churches and to Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna by Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch. They relate to his journey from Antioch to Rome following his arrest just after 100 CE and were written in the certain expectation (indeed joyful hope) that he would die as a martyr.54 In these letters Ignatius spoke much of his concern at what are recognizable as forms of gnostic belief, including docetic views of Christ’s Passion. To combat this, he emphasized the reality of both Christ’s divinity and his humanity, which he saw best expressed in the Church’s continuing celebration of the Eucharist. But how could this doctrine be guaranteed? Ignatius pointed to what he saw as a standard of doctrine set by the beliefs affirmed by the Church in Rome, which he knew would be the city of his martyrdom; it is worth noting that he made no mention of the Bishop of Rome, simply of the Church. He linked with this the role in each community of the bishop, who should be the one person in every place responsible for handing on the faith and guarding against deviation. The bishop, after all, presided at the Eucharist and should be the automatic source of authority: ‘You must all follow the bishop as Jesus Christ [followed] the Father … Let no one do anything apart from the bishop that has to do with the Church. Let that be regarded as a valid Eucharist which is held under the bishop or to whomever he entrusts it. Wherever the bishop appears, there let the congregation be; just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the whole [katholikē] Church.’55 The cynical might say that it was easy for Ignatius to take this line, since there was already one bishop in Antioch and his name was Ignatius. Noticeably, a letter written by his correspondent and fellow martyr Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna

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

  centuries by its rugged geography from much direct interference from its powerful neighbours. Although its dominant cultural influences had long been from Iran, it had also over the centuries reached a comfortable understanding with the Romans, allowing them to believe that it was a Roman client state, to the extent that some of the coins of the Emperor Augustus could proclaim the propaganda message ‘Armenia has been captured’.75 The Romans, reluctant to take on the expense of governing such a difficult and remote area, were happy not to interfere too much. The early stages of Christian contact with the kingdom are obscure, but there are plausible stories of Syrian missions to it during the second and third centuries.76 These predate the more widely circulated story of the founding bishop, Gregory the Illuminator (or ‘Enlightener’), which describes a dramatic turnaround for Christianity as a result of the conflicted relationship between the saint, a minor member of the royal family brought up a Christian in exile in the Roman province of Cappadocia in Asia Minor, and his distant cousin Trdat. Trdat, known to the Romans as Tiridates, became king of Armenia in the 280s or 290s with the support of the Emperor Diocletian, and at first he followed Diocletian’s increasingly hostile policies towards Christianity. In the conversion story, it was after suffering acute mental disorder that the new king turned to Gregory for counsel, having previously subjected him to savage torture. The King then ordered his people, including the priesthood of the old religion, to convert en masse to Christianity, in a year which is uncertain but most calculations place in the decade before the Roman Emperor Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge in 312. Trdat reputedly went further than Constantine’s new favour shown to the Church, ordering his people to become Christian en masse.77 Such wholesale conversion cannot have been as straightforward as the story implies, but it did represent the beginning of a passionate melding of Christianity and Armenian identity. Members of Gregory’s family succeeded him in the newly established bishopric, which received its succession from the Church of Cappadocia, in which he had grown up. A century after the conversion, a new Armenian alphabetic script was devised by a scholar-monk, Mesrop Maštoc‘. Within a few decades there was a complete Bible in Armenian, adding one or two more books than those accepted into the canon of the imperial Church. It was a foundation document for Armenian literary culture, even more than Homer was for the Greeks.78 When it looked beyond its frontiers, the Armenian Church began by cherishing its links with Cappadocia and the Roman Empire. Christianity was a force pulling Armenia out of its previous careful balance between Rome and the Eastern powers. While Roman emperors had now taken the same action as

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

  borrowed their form not from the temples of the Classical world, which were not designed for large congregations, and which in any case had inappropriate associations with sacrifice to idols, but instead from the secular world of administration. The model chosen was the audience hall of a secular ruler, called from its royal associations a basilica. Conventionally it was a rectangular chamber big enough to hold large numbers, with an entrance through one of the long sides to face the chair of the presiding magistrate or ruler, often housed in a semicircular apse in the other long wall. Interestingly, although the new Christian basilicas took this architectural form, they made two radical modifications to it. One of the earliest examples of this major re-envisioning of the basilican plan can still be seen in Rome at Constantine’s church now dedicated to St John Lateran, and it is splendidly instanced in the slightly later pair of basilicas dedicated to Sant’ Apollinare in Ravenna (see Plate 4), but there are countless others. The plan was applied in a remarkably uniform fashion throughout the imperial Church, and indeed beyond its borders as far away as the Church in Ethiopia in its early years. The first Christian innovation was, wherever possible, to ‘orient’ the building: that is, to lay out its long axis west to east, with an apsidal end at the east to contain the eucharistic table or altar with the bishop’s chair behind it. There are a host of biblical justifications for east–west orientation, from the eastern entrance of the Garden of Eden leading to the Tree of Life (Genesis 3.24) to the angel of Revelation 7.2 who rises from the east and gives safe passage to the chosen – but one feels that none of them would have had a decisive architectural effect without the plain fact that the sun rises in the east, regardless of the Bible and its preoccupations. Second, instead of an entrance in a long side wall, the west gable of a Christian basilica now housed the entrance. So those coming into the building had their gaze directed throughout its length, both to the bishop’s chair and to the altar in front of it, which increasingly frequently contained or stood over the remains of some Christian martyr from the heroic era of persecution. The purpose of this replanning was to turn the basilica into a pathway towards all that was most holy and authoritative in Christian life: the pure worship of God. If it is in the fourth century that we first get substantial numbers of surviving Christian church buildings, it is also from this period that we first have substantial evidence about the worship for which they had been designed as theatres. Despite the efforts of much liturgical scholarship, it is remarkably difficult to get a coherent picture of what Christian worship looked like or felt like before the time of Constantine; throughout the Christian world, probably only the present-day liturgy of the Syriac Churches is anything like a form which

• From The Lover (1984)

  No woman, no girl wore a man’s fedora in that colony then. No native woman, either. What must have happened is: I try it on just for fun, look at myself in the shopkeeper’s glass, and see that there, beneath the man’s hat, the thin awkward shape, the inadequacy of childhood, has turned into something else. Has ceased to be a harsh, inescapable imposition of nature. Has become, on the contrary, a provoking choice of nature, a choice of the mind. Suddenly it’s deliberate. Suddenly I see myself as another, as another would be seen, outside myself, available to all, available to all eyes, in circulation for cities, journeys, desire. I take the hat, and am never parted from it. Having got it, this hat that all by itself makes me whole, I wear it all the time. With the shoes it must have been much the same, but after the hat. They contradict the hat, as the hat contradicts the puny body, so they’re right for me. I wear them all the time too, go overywhere in these shoes, this hat, out of doors, in all weathers, on every occasion. And to town. I found a photograph of my son when he was twenty. He’s in California with his friends, Erika and Elizabeth Lennard. He’s thin, so thin you’d think he was a white Ugandan too. His smile strikes me as arrogant, derisive. He’s trying to assume the warped image of a young drifter. That’s how he likes to see himself, poor, with that poor boy’s look, that attitude of someone young and thin. It’s this photograph that comes closest to the one never taken of the girl on the ferry. The one who bought the flat-brimmed pink hat with the broad black ribbon was her, the woman in another photograph, my mother. I recognize her better in that than in more recent photos. It’s the courtyard of a house by the Small Lake in Hanoi. We’re together, she and us, her children. I’m four years old. My mother’s in the middle of the picture. I recognize the awkward way she holds herself, the way she doesn’t smile, the way she waits for the photo to be over and done with. By her drawn face, by a certain untidiness in her dress, by her drowsy expression, I can tell that it’s hot, that she’s tired, that she’s bored.

• From The Lover (1984)

  But the police will. At noon, by the time the tourist boats arrive, there will be nothing left, the square will be empty. • • • My mother said to the head of the boarding school, It doesn’t matter, all that’s of no importance. Haven’t you noticed how they suit her, those little old frocks, that pink hat, and the gold shoes? My mother’s drunk with delight when she speaks of her children, and that makes her more charming than ever. The young teachers at the boarding school listen to her with passionate attention. All of them, says my mother, they all hang around her, all the men in the place, married or single, they hang around, hanker after the girl, after something not really definite yet, look, she’s still a child. Do people talk of disgrace? I say, how can innocence be disgraced? My mother rattles on. She speaks of blatant prostitution and laughs, at the scandal, the buffoonery, the funny hat, the sublime elegance of the child who crossed the river. And she laughs at what is irresistible here in the French colonies: I mean, she says, this little white tart, this child hidden till then in outposts upcountry and suddenly emerging into the daylight and shacking up in front of everyone with this millionaire Chinese scum, with a diamond on her finger just as if she were a banker’s wife. And she weeps. When she saw the diamond she said in a small voice, It reminds me of the little solitaire I had when I got engaged to my first husband. I say: Mr. Dark. We laugh. That was his name, she says, it really was. We looked at each other for some time, then she gave a sweet, slightly mocking smile, full of so deep a knowledge of her children and what awaited them later on that I almost told her about Cholon. But I didn’t. I never did. She waited a long while before she spoke again, then she said, very lovingly, You do know it’s all over, don’t you? That you’ll never be able, now, to get married here in the colony? I shrug my shoulders, smile. I say, I can get married anywhere, when I want to. My mother shakes her head. No. She says, Here everything gets known, here you can’t, now. She looks at me and says some unforgettable things: They find you attractive? I answer, Yes; they find me attractive in spite of everything. It’s then she says, And also because of what you are yourself. She goes on: Is it only for the money you see him? I hesitate, then say it is only for the money.

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

  Most striking of all Constantine’s symbolic associations with the new religion was his founding of a new capital for his empire. He had no emotional investment in the city of Rome. It is likely that he had hardly if ever visited it before his victory at the Milvian Bridge, and he found the city problematic. Its ruling class was unsympathetic to his new faith and clung to their ancient temples, and it was difficult to change the face of the city itself with monumental building for his new-found friends.9 Instead he looked to the eastern part of the empire to create a city which would be peculiarly his own, and would also mark his victory over the former ruler in the East, Licinius.10 He had considered refounding the city of Troy, original home of Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome, as his New Rome, but this association with pre-Christian Roman origins did not prove enough of an incentive.11 The site Constantine chose was an ancient city enjoying a superb strategic site at the entrance to the Black Sea and the command of trade routes east and west: Byzantion. He renamed the city after himself, as previous emperors had done in imitation of Alexander’s precedent: Constantinople. The old name persisted, eventually modified in academic Latin to Byzantium. It was destined to provide a new identity for the Eastern Roman state, whose capital it remained over the next millennium, in what has commonly become known in history as the Byzantine Empire.12 But for countless numbers of people of the eastern Mediterranean over that millennium and beyond, Constantinople would simply be ‘the City’, the dominant presence in their society, their religious practice and their hopes for the future. Constantine quadrupled Byzantium in size, and although virtually none of the buildings which he provided survive, the Great Palace of the emperors remained on the same site from its first completion in 330 until the death of the last emperor in 1453. This new Rome reflected the new situation of tolerance for all, but with Christianity more equal than others. Traditional religion was put in a subordinate place: the core centres of worship were Christian churches of great magnificence. They included a church in which Constantine proposed to gather the bodies of all twelve Apostles to accompany his own corpse: a mark of how he now saw his role in the Christian story, although the coffins alongside his own had to remain mainly symbolic in default of enough relics of the Twelve.13 For the most part the city churches were not exactly congregational or parish churches. They were designed like the contemporary temples of non-Christians with specific dedications or commemorations in mind, to concentrate on a particular saint or aspect of the Christian holiness. One of the greatest, close to the Imperial Palace, was dedicated to Holy Peace (Hagia Eirēnē). It was soon outclassed when Constantine’s son put up an even greater church right beside it dedicated to the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia), whose successor building was to

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

  times seven; he was a God of Battles. Constantine himself told Eusebius of Caesarea that one of the crucial experiences in his Milvian Bridge victory had been a vision of ‘a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and an inscription, CONQUER BY THIS’.4 The association of the sun and the Cross was no accident. A military leader and a ruthless politician rather than an abstract thinker, Constantine was probably not very clear about the difference between a universal sun cult and the Christian God – at least to start with. As he began showering privileges on the Christian clergy, it is unlikely that many of them considered whether the Emperor should be given a theological cross- examination before they accepted their unexpected gifts. What interested Constantine was the Christian God rather than the Christians. It would hardly have been worth his while from a political point of view to court favour from Christians, for, however one calculates their numbers, they were still a decided minority in the empire, and noticeably weak in those crucial power blocs, the army and the Western aristocracy. A simple grant of toleration would have been enough to delight the battered Church. Constantine went much further than that. There is no doubt that he came to a deeply personal if rather capricious involvement in the Christian faith; according to Eusebius, he regularly delivered sermons to his no doubt slightly embarrassed courtiers.5 Over his reign, he gave the Church an equal place alongside the traditional official cults and lavished wealth on it. Christianity could now embark on its long intoxication with architecture, previously a necessarily restricted passion. Among his many other donations were fifty monumental copies of the Bible commissioned from Bishop Eusebius’s specialist scriptorium in Caesarea: an extraordinary expenditure on creating de luxe written texts, for which the parchment alone would have required the death of around five thousand cows (so much for Christian disapproval of animal sacrifice). It is possible that two splendidly written Bibles of very early date, now called respectively the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus after their historic homes, are survivors from this gift.6 The Emperor favoured Christians in senior positions and went as far as being baptized just before his death. There were hesitations: the designs on imperial coinage were always a barometer of official policy and propaganda preoccupations because they were frequently changed, and some mints were still producing coins with non-Christian sacred subjects as late in his reign as 323.7 Traditionalists in Italy would have been pleased by Constantine building a new temple dedicated to the imperial cult, but the lion’s share of imperial patronage was now going to the Christians, and at the same time many temples were being stripped of precious metals at imperial command.8

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  They were determined to replace the old socialist and nationalist discourse with the language of the Bible. Where Labor Zionists had sought to normalize Jewish life and make Jews “like all the other nations,” the Gush Emunim emphasized the “uniqueness” of the people of Israel; 3 because Jews had been chosen by God, they were essentially different from all other nations and were not bound by the same rules. The Bible made it clear that as a “holy” people, Israel was set apart, in a category of its own. 4 Where Labor Zionism had tried to incorporate the liberal humanism of the modern West, Gush Emunim believed that Judaism and Western culture were antithetical. There was, therefore, for Kookists, no way that secular Zionism could ever have worked. 5 Their task was to reclaim Zionism for religion, correct the mistakes of the past, and make history right again. The near-disaster of the Yom Kippur War had shown that it was essential to act immediately in order to hasten the redemptive process, which the policies of the “false” secular Zionism had retarded. It would take over a year for the Gush Emunim to develop fully, but eventually it provided its members with a total way of life. There would be a Gush style of dress, music, decor, books, and choice of children’s names, and even a particular style of speech. 6 Over the years, the Gush created a counterculture that enabled members to withdraw, in time-honored fundamentalist style, from secular Israel. There was a certain aggression, however, in the way religious members of the Gush flaunted their piety and Torah observance. In the early years of the state, secular Israelis had ridiculed Jews who wore traditional skullcaps; now these pious activists sported the knitted kipa , which became an item of radical religious chic. 7 The cadres of the Gush saw themselves as more authentically Jewish and Zionist than the Laborites, linking themselves not only with such holy warriors of ancient times as Joshua, David, and the Maccabees, but also with such Zionist heroes as Theodor Herzl, Ben-Gurion, and the early pioneers, who were also possessed by a mystical vision of sorts, and had sometimes been regarded as madmen in their own day. While the secular and religious members of the Gush had been occupied in the establishment of their organization, a group of Kookists, with the help of the veteran settler Moshe Levinger, attempted to create a garin (a “seed,” or nucleus, for a small settlement) in a railway depot near the Arab town of Nablus on the West Bank. This was a sacred area for Jews: Nablus occupied the site of the biblical city of Shechem, associated with Jacob and Joshua. The settlers were attempting to re-sacralize land which, in their view, was profaned by the Palestinians.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  A few months after the victory, rabbis and students held an impromptu conference at Merkaz Harav to find ways of foiling the plan of the Labor government to relinquish some of these newly occupied territories in exchange for peace with their Arab neighbors. For Kookists, the return of even one inch of the sacred land would be a victory for the forces of evil. And they found, to their surprise, that they had secular allies. Shortly after the war, a group of distinguished Israeli poets, professors, retired politicians, and army officers had formed the Land of Israel Movement to prevent the government from making any territorial concessions. Over the years, the Movement helped the Kookists to formulate their ideology in a way that would appeal to the public, and gave them financial and moral support. Gradually, the Kookists were being drawn into the mainstream. In April 1968, Moshe Levinger led a small group of Kookists and their families to celebrate Passover in Hebron, the city where Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are thought to be buried. Since Muslims also venerate these Jewish patriarchs as great prophets, Hebron was a holy city for them too. For centuries, Palestinians had called Hebron al-Khalil, because of its sacred associations with Abraham, the “friend” of God. But Hebron also evoked darker memories. On August 24, 1929, during a period of great tension between Arabs and Zionists in Palestine, fifty-nine Jewish men, women, and children had been massacred in Hebron. Levinger and his party checked into the Park Hotel, pretending to be Swiss tourists, but when Passover was over they refused to leave and stayed on as squatters. This was embarrassing for the Israeli government, since the Geneva conventions forbade any settlement in territory occupied during hostilities, and the United Nations was demanding that Israel withdraw from the land they had conquered. But the chutzpa of the Kookists reminded Laborites of their own pioneers in their Golden Age, and the government was, therefore, reluctant to evict them.92