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 51 of 174 · 20 per page

• From Shunned (2018)

  I knew I wanted to be with Harper—not for a lifetime, but for now. We’d been training together over the summer, and he’d kept me and my girlfriends looked after and entertained when he joined us on the first Wisconsin ride. The Michigan ride was also behind me now, and I was filled with a growing sense of accomplishment. My last hurrah would be the Hilly Hundred Century in late October. As summer turned to fall, Harper was the last person still committed to doing the ride, and I was glad for his company on the drive to southern Indiana. He was handsome and easy company, and I’d grown quite fond of him. My decision set, I brought the other entanglements to an end and was happy with my choice. When it was time for us to make the drive to Indiana for our century ride there, we stuffed Harper’s Subaru with riding and camping gear. After months of training and preparation, we were off. The next day, we joined thousands of riders from all over the country, covering the first fifty miles, pedaling past acres of freshly tilled earth where cornfields had stood. The weather cooperated beautifully both days, with dewy October mornings followed by sunny afternoons, red leaves flashing against a bright blue sky. I was in the best physical shape of my life. Volunteers waved flags and cheered us on as we approached the ninety-mile mark. Inside my head, I could hear my gym trainer’s mantra as he pushed me through a difficult series of weights. This is you, Linda, commanding your body to perform. This is you, exceeding your own limitations. Come on, now—send oxygen to those muscles. I knew I would finish as long as I kept breathing and refused to listen to the barking pain in my legs and rear. We crossed over a series of railroad tracks, and the houses started getting closer together. After a sweeping downward turn, we passed more volunteers, cheering us home. We’d reentered Bloomington, and the route flattened out. “We’re almost there!” Harper shouted. “I can almost taste the cold beer.” We crossed the line and raised our arms overhead, as if we’d just won the yellow jersey at the Tour de France. I was completely worn out and elated, both proud to have followed through on my goal and relieved this century season was over. I thought about calling my parents and sharing the moment with them but pushed the idea aside. That wasn’t what we did with each other anymore, and they would not have welcomed a call from me. Instead, I accepted a hug and a cold beer from Harper and partied with my fellow bikers. Chapter 19 [image "Images" file=Image00000.jpg] I want to stand as close to the edge as I can. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  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. Whatever really happened on October 31, 1517, there is no doubting the significance of the theses themselves: The Reformation truly was sparked by a single text. Theses were sets of numbered propositions designed for an academic debate, although in this case that debate never occurred and Luther probably never intended it to.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Rather, it was integral to his thought; his insistence that the true Christians—that is, the evangelicals—had become the chosen people and had displaced the Jews would become fundamental to Protestant identity. It was the central plank of his understanding of the Lutherans’ providential role in history, and to secure it the Jews had to be pushed aside, discredited, and, if necessary, eliminated. They are the better Jews. As he had argued in On the Jews and Their Lies, “We foolish Gentiles, who were not God’s people, are now God’s people. That drives the Jews to distraction and stupidity, and over this they became Not-God’s-people, who were once his people and really should still be.” 43 The Lutherans understand the Old Testament better and their exegesis is superior, Luther claims. Having lost their status as the chosen people and therefore no longer truly “Jews,” the Jews are “even changed into another people altogether, with nothing [of the original] left but a lazy remnant” of foreign rascals or gypsies. 44 I N EARLY A PRIL 1518, Luther set out for Heidelberg, a journey of nearly 250 miles as the crow flies. Staupitz had called a meeting of the Augustinian order for April 25, at which one of Luther’s students, Leonhard Beyer, was to defend forty theses composed by his teacher. Many had advised Luther not to travel: He wrote to Lang that he had been warned that preachers were condemning him from their pulpits and “the people” would try to burn him, but he nonetheless insisted on walking all the way with Beyer and with Urban, the monastery’s messenger. It seems that, at this juncture, he did not anticipate much popular support for his cause. But he was in high spirits. Writing to Spalatin on April 15, six days into the journey, he reported that they had reached Coburg, one of the Elector’s castles. Ever resourceful, and traveling as a mendicant without money, Luther had managed to get the Elector’s man Degenhart Pfeffinger—who had unwisely joined them at an inn—to pay for all the brothers’ meals: As Luther quipped to Spalatin, he always enjoyed separating a rich man from his cash. 1 He hoped to get the castellan to pay for their stay at Coburg as well. But the footsore monk had also realized the error of his ways, and resorted to traveling by wagon: He had sinned, he joked, “since I determined to go on foot” and had failed, but as he had repented, he had no need to purchase an indulgence. 2 It would be a good year for wine, he added, as he passed through the premium vineyards of southern Germany. At Würzburg, Lang joined the travelers for the leg to Heidelberg. 3 The Heidelberg Debate offered Luther a chance to make his theology more widely known within the Augustinians. But Staupitz was playing a dangerous game.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  58. WB 1, 58, [Feb. 13, 1518]. He said the same to Scheurl; see Volz, Thesenanschlag, 82–83, n.64; WB 1, 63, March 11, 1518. See also the preface to Luther’s collected Latin Writings, where Luther explains that he wrote to both Albrecht of Mainz and the bishop of Brandenburg, WS 54, 179–87. 59. WT 1, 1206, 601:18–19. 60. WT 3, 3722, 564:16–17. 61. Soden and Knaake, eds., Scheurls Brief buch, letter 176, Nov. 2, 1518, Scheurl to Ulrich von Dinstedt, Otto Beckmann, and Georg Spalatin (trans. Melinda Letts). Scheurl acted as leader, and Albrecht Dürer was one of the members. Scheurl also sent a copy to the important civic secretary Conrad Peutinger in Augsburg: König, Peutingers Briefwechsel, 299, Jan. 5, 1518. 62. WB 1, 33, 86:4; 11–15. 63. WB 1, 64, March 21, 1518, 155:40–41. As Luther correctly guessed, the theses were in fact composed by Conrad Wimpina, to be defended by Tetzel. 64. See Leppin, Luther, 117–26. There are a number of interesting variations on Luther’s name: A letter from 1507 has him as Luder, but in another from the same year he styles himself as Lutherus (WB 1, 4, and 5), but these are not originals; the oldest original letter of Luther’s (9) has no surname. A letter of 1514 has Luder and one of 1516, Luter; but Luther/Lutherus alternates with Luder until Nov. 1517 (17, 19, 21, 22, 27, 30, 33, 37, 38, 46, 51 Luder), and Scheurl addressed him as Luder, writing in early 1517 (32). As Leppin has shown, about the time of the composition of the Ninety-five Theses, Luther began to refer to himself as Eleutherius, the freed one, when writing to close friends—Lang, Spalatin, Staupitz. After autumn 1517, he hardly ever used Luder again, even when writing to his parents. He also played with the signature, sometimes styling himself Martinus Lutherus, sometimes Martinus Luther, usually including “F” or “Frater.” Sometimes he included “Doctor” or “D” when he signed off, sometimes not; and throughout his life, he also frequently (but not always) wrote the concluding “R” as an emphatic capital. Interestingly, toward the very end of his life, he employed “Luder” on two unusual occasions: once when writing to the counts of Mansfeld (WB 11, 4157, Oct. 7, 1545), and once in one of his final letters to his wife, in which he addressed her jokingly as “Katherin Ludherin, Doctorin, Sewmarckterin” (WB 11, 4201, Feb. 7, 1546). He referred to members of his original family, however, as “Luder.” 65. WT 2, 1681; and see Oberman, Luther, 154–56, for a brilliant interpretation. Recently the cloaca tower has been identified: Stefan Laube, “Klosett oder Klosterzelle?,” FAZ, April 4, 2015, Feuilleton, 13. 66. LW 34, 337; 1545; WS 54, 179–87; 186:3–16. 67.

• From Shunned (2018)

  Vince put his glasses back on and then pulled out his wallet, removing a business card from its back flap. He handed me the card and said something about “Jehovah’s flock.” The card read CONGREGATION OF JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES above a printed phone number. At the bottom was a second phone number, written in by hand. “The Society has approved a new arrangement for people like you who may wish to get reinstated.” This caught me off guard, and I blanked out for a moment. The boisterous sounds around me dropped to a low din as I descended into a hazy mental tunnel. My throat clenched. “The handwritten number is my cell phone,” Vince said, “if you’d ever like to discuss the new process.” I should have seen this coming. What made me think I could be in a room with all these Witnesses, half of whom are congregation elders, and not get preached to? Damn my naïveté. Attempting to get my bearings, I set my empty wineglass down on the kitchen counter but continued to hold the business card. Everyone else was staying at a distance, leaving Vince and me to our private conversation. How many people are in on this? I folded my arms and then thought better of it. It felt too shut off, too guarded. Don’t blank out now. This is an important moment, a time to take a stand. Whatever I say next will be repeated, along with a precise description of my manner. Can I keep my heart open to this person and appreciate his intent, even as I reject the offer? “Vince,” I said, mindfully breathing and deliberately standing up straight, enormously grateful for the height of those black boots, how tall they made me, how Vince had to look up into my eyes. Sounds were resonating around me again, as I came out the other side of the tunnel. “I appreciate your telling me this, and I will keep your card. But”—and I paused here for emphasis—“I can’t imagine ever, ever calling you about reinstatement.” “Really?” Vince said, his eyes drooping at the corners as he stood gaping. His expression jogged loose a faded memory of that same expression from years earlier, when we sat in that back room of the Kingdom Hall with Ross and Jerry, just before Vince pulled out his Bible and condemned me with Scripture. It was a look that seemed to say, How could anyone with half a brain be so foolish? Armageddon is coming . “Really.” I felt a smile sprouting up from the clarity and strength I had to voice my feelings without being strident or offended. “If you were to follow me around for a few days, Vince, you might see that I am happy. My life is filled with love, fulfilling work, interesting conversations, beauty, and adventure. I feel a connection to the divine. It’s not perfect; I have my struggles like everyone else. But there is nothing to fix. I’m very happy.” Yes.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The little Saxon party must have been conspicuous on the road. Sturm and his servant rode out in front, the herald sporting the imperial eagle on his sleeve, followed by the open wagon with its famous occupant and his companions. Luther was now a celebrity. Crowds thronged to meet him and see the “miracle-man who was so brave as to oppose the Pope and all the world, who held the Pope to be a God against Christ.” Disconcertingly, Myconius tells us, many of those who came to see the monk also assured him that he would be burned as a heretic.20 Luther received a rapturous reception by the University of Erfurt, where sixty horsemen and the rector rode out to meet him. This must have given Luther immense personal satisfaction, particularly after the bitter conflicts over his doctorate. Even at Leipzig, where his passing stirred less interest, the council at least honored him with a drink of wine.21 The journey, which lasted ten days, was the opposite of the ignominious progress of the papal bull: It was a triumphal procession. It also created its own mythology. In Erfurt, the church where Luther preached was so full that the gallery creaked ominously and people were about to jump out the windows into the churchyard. As a witness recalled, Luther calmed them by saying that “they should stand quietly, the Devil might do his tricks, they should just stand quietly and nothing bad would happen,” and “indeed no accident occurred.” The sermon, recorded by someone in the congregation, was immediately printed.22 After Luther preached another sermon in the Augustinian monastery at Gotha, “the Devil ripped some stones off the church tower…they had lain there firmly for two hundred years,” and Myconius, the chronicler who told the story in 1541, added “until today it has not been rebuilt.” For Myconius, this was proof that the Devil was fighting Luther with all his might.23

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The next day, his Appellation to the Pope was posted on the door of Augsburg Cathedral, an event almost certainly arranged by Luther to give his appeal legal force and make it public. It also ensured that Cajetan now had no choice but to pass on his appeal to Leo; it was no longer a matter that could be dealt with through private reconciliation. An incomplete version of the appeal also somehow reached Johann Froben, one of the leading printers of the day, in Basle, and before long it flew all over Europe. 43 Once again, Luther had proved master of the dramatic act. He was also emphatically burning his bridges. — T HE “tournament” at Augsburg had a long afterlife, both in personal letters and in print. In the intervals between his meetings with Cajetan, Luther wrote a series of letters to Spalatin, Karlstadt, and the Elector, explaining and justifying his behavior but also setting out the events as a drama. He chose Karlstadt as his confidant, asking him to circulate the letters to Melanchthon, Nikolaus von Amsdorf, Luther’s colleague Otto Beckmann, and “our theologians.” 44 The letters, with their detailed narrative and quotation, were designed to be read aloud, to entertain, to keep the Elector on side, and, crucially, to contradict Cajetan’s version of the encounter. 45 A month after the meeting, when the cardinal presented his own account of events to Friedrich, Luther had already given his side of the story. He then set out to rebut Cajetan’s version point for point. And whereas the cardinal’s letter consisted of ten neat paragraphs and a postscript, composed in precise, classic Latin, Luther’s response, five times as long, was written in verbose, emotional prose. 46 Luther had another important card to play. He, and not his opponent, had the discussions at Augsburg recorded by a notary. This, he knew, was a time bomb. On October 31, 1518—exactly one year after the posting of his Ninety-five Theses—he arrived back in Wittenberg and soon after sent this record to the printer, where it was printed as the Acta Augustana . When the Elector tried to stop publication, Luther explained to Spalatin that, since the first sheets had already been sold, it hardly seemed sensible to stop the remainder.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  —ON December 10, 1520, the sixty days Luther had been given to recant by the bull Exsurge Domine ran out. When he had finished the morning lecture at the university, he went out through the Elster Gate to the Chapel of Holy Cross, near the hospital, accompanied by his students. Here, probably at the place where the hospital rags were burned, one of the masters of theology lit a fire, and Luther cast the papal decretals, the canon law, and the bull onto the flames, proclaiming in Latin: “Because you saddened the holiness of the Lord, so may the eternal fire destroy you.” Then he returned to the university. It was a carefully staged act.56 Melanchthon had composed a formal announcement of what was to happen, and had nailed it up on the door of the parish church, inviting all those who “were lovers of evangelical truth” to convene at the allocated place at 9 A.M. Spalatin knew what was afoot a week earlier: He had warned the Elector that Luther intended to burn the bull as soon as he knew for certain that his books had been burned at Leipzig.57 Luther had chosen the time and place to make the boldest statement possible. He was condemning the books and the bull to death, giving them a mock execution. The meaning was clear to those who had gathered to witness the spectacle: He was breaking not only with the authority of the Pope, but also with the entire tradition of canon law, built up over centuries to cover all kinds of religious issues. Once again, Luther had staged a “happening,” a public act that conveyed his theological convictions irrevocably and memorably. He proudly wrote about it to Staupitz, telling the old man just how final his break with Rome was: “I have burned the books of the Pope and the bull, at first with trembling and praying; but now I am more pleased with this than with any other action of my life for [these books] are worse than I had thought.”58 The spectacle was followed by a student festival of antipapal activity. With Karlstadt, Melanchthon, and Luther having left, the students staged a play based on their initiation ritual, the Beanus rite. A trumpeter in tow, several hundred students mocked the bull, cut it up and turned it into flags, stuck one on a sword, and processed around with it, then stuffed others into a giant barrel, which they drove about on a wagon. To great laughter they read aloud from the works of Eck and Hieronymus Düngersheim von Ochsenfahrt as well as from the bull, and then they too built a fire, on which they burned bull, books, and barrel. They picked up the ashes like trophies, and in the afternoon they wandered about the town with their trumpets and sang funeral Masses for the bull.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It was also me to whom God first revealed to preach these his words.” He concluded the first sermon imagining “how would it be, if I had brought my people to the ‘Plan’ [that is, field of combat] and I (I who was the first to persuade them to come) wanted to flee death and not wait joyfully: how the poor flock would have been led astray!” Those who make radical changes in religion, he argued, forget that you have to raise children first with milk, then pap, then eggs and soft food. The radicals are like brothers who, when they have sucked their fill, “cut off the teat,” when they should let their brother “suck, as you have sucked.” 54 Luther rested his claim for leadership on a paradox. Because he fought with the Devil, and because those whom “Death and the Devil constantly attack” have the strongest faith, his election was proven. Here Luther developed an insight originally taken from Staupitz, but now the intensity of his inner battles with the Devil had become the overwhelming proof of his own rightness. “You don’t yet know what it costs to fight with the Devil and overcome him,” Luther proclaimed. “I know it well, because I have eaten a piece of salt or two with him; I know him well, and he knows me well too.” 55 Other preachers might insult their opponents as creatures of Satan, or denigrate the Catholic Mass as “devilish,” but this was not the same as telling the congregation about one’s own encounters with the Devil. It was a risky undertaking: Those who met with the Devil were regarded as possessed or witches. Indeed, Cochlaeus, who had become one of Luther’s fiercest antagonists after their meeting at Worms, thought his encounters with Satan were the surest proof that he was a heretic. None of the other reformers made such a claim—indeed, the Wittenberg prophets had claimed the opposite, namely that they spoke with God. The events in Wittenberg reveal what became a pattern in Luther’s life: Time and again, though he might rail against them and insult them with surprising impudence, Luther would in the end always align himself with the authorities. The account first propagated by the Catholic side—that Zwilling and Karlstadt had engaged in subversive preaching, which had caused armed sedition in the town—Luther now adopted as the official narrative of what had happened in Wittenberg. It was a convenient fiction for all sides, because it minimized the extent to which the council, leading reformers, and others had been actively involved in introducing the Reformation. In fact, until January, Melanchthon had taken a far more radical line than Karlstadt, but once the imperial mandate made the Elector reject the Eilenburg deal, someone had to be blamed. As we have seen, for some time Luther had been uncomfortable with Karlstadt.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  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. Whatever really happened on October 31, 1517, there is no doubting the significance of the theses themselves: The Reformation truly was sparked by a single text. Theses were sets of numbered propositions designed for an academic debate, although in this case that debate never occurred and Luther probably never intended it to.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther had another important card to play. He, and not his opponent, had the discussions at Augsburg recorded by a notary. This, he knew, was a time bomb. On October 31, 1518—exactly one year after the posting of his Ninety-five Theses—he arrived back in Wittenberg and soon after sent this record to the printer, where it was printed as the Acta Augustana. When the Elector tried to stop publication, Luther explained to Spalatin that, since the first sheets had already been sold, it hardly seemed sensible to stop the remainder. The Elector relented but insisted that the first paragraph of Luther’s “Reflections,” which insinuated that the papal breve condemning his work was a forgery, was blacked out. This was not the first time that Luther had acted quickly, before the authorities could intervene. Just a few months earlier, when the bishop of Brandenburg had stepped in to stop the publication of Luther’s Sermon on Indulgences and Grace, his first work in German for a wide popular audience, Luther ensured that it was already on sale; by 1520 there would be twenty-five printings in all major cities in Germany.47 Now he disingenuously explained to Spalatin that he had arranged for the Appellation to Leo to be printed, but had then agreed with the printer to buy up all the stock so as to stop publication, but that when he turned up with the money the copies had all been sold.48 With his every action, therefore, Luther was driving the conflict with Rome forward. His use of print was tactically brilliant: He knew exactly how to forestall censorship and protect his ideas by spreading them as widely as possible, each new work marking yet another radical advance delivered to an audience that was hungry for more. The logic of the market and its craving for novelty was part of what propelled Luther’s cause. Published largely in Latin, his writings were still mainly directed at a clerical, intellectual elite, but they were now also being translated. No one had previously used print to such devastating effect.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther used the enforced solitude to work on translating the Old Testament prophets and to write. First he penned his Exhortation to All Clergy, of which five hundred copies were printed in Wittenberg and sent to Augsburg, where they sold out. This hard-hitting pamphlet began with Luther’s devastating false modesty—people would be asking, he pretended, “Who needs you? Who ever demanded your exhortation or writing? There are so many learned and pious people here who can give better advice than a fool like you,” but he went on to list all the accomplishments of the evangelical movement, the abuses that had been swept away, the indulgence traffic, the ridiculous saints’ cults, pilgrimages, monkdom itself—these were feats the bishops hadn’t managed in years, but Luther had done it. If he was not allowed to be there in person, he would be there in spirit and “in writing with this mute and weak message of mine.”14 Although his hiding place was meant to be a secret, a steady stream of visitors arrived, including Hans Reinicke, his old childhood friend from Mansfeld. His visit must have brought back many memories, but then, just a few days later at the end of May, Reinicke wrote to Luther to tell him that Luther’s father Hans had died; Reinicke had heard the news even before reaching Mansfeld.15 When Luther had first been informed in February that his father had fallen ill, he had written that he could not visit him because “you know in what favor I stand with lords and peasants.” It was not safe for him to travel, and the older man was too weak to undertake the journey to Wittenberg. It was a letter of farewell. It seems that Luther knew that he would not see his father again. In an effort to comfort his father, he apologized for the travails his father had endured on his account, but gave them spiritual significance: God has “sealed” true doctrine and teaching in you and given you a “sign” or “mark,” “for my name’s sake.”16 It was not the first time Luther had compared himself to Christ, but the identification was now deeper and more abstract than when he had gone to Worms in 1521. It had been strengthened by his recovery from the crisis he had undergone in 1527, for he had suffered many attacks from the Devil, proving that he was doing God’s work. This conviction now underpinned all his thinking.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  54 Throughout the tract Luther uses seemingly simple but powerful words—freedom, faith, honor. The directness of the language allows them to resonate, but they could be understood in a variety of different ways. His use of “freedom,” alongside the idea that the Christian is both lord and servant, was dynamite. By addressing all Christians as equals, be they princes or commoners, and by insisting on their freedom, he broke with social deference. Addressing his reader repeatedly with the informal du, he speaks to “alle” (“all”) and “yderman” (“everyone”). Moreover, he argues that “everyone” is entitled to make up their own mind on spiritual matters: “From what has been said, everyone can pass a safe judgment on all works and laws and make a trustworthy distinction between them and know who are the blind and ignorant pastors and who are the good and true.” 55 This gave ordinary Christians the ability to decide who was preaching true Christian doctrine, rather than blindly accepting the word of the priest set over them. Scripture was clear, Luther argued, and its meaning apparent to all. — O N December 10, 1520, the sixty days Luther had been given to recant by the bull Exsurge Domine ran out. When he had finished the morning lecture at the university, he went out through the Elster Gate to the Chapel of Holy Cross, near the hospital, accompanied by his students. Here, probably at the place where the hospital rags were burned, one of the masters of theology lit a fire, and Luther cast the papal decretals, the canon law, and the bull onto the flames, proclaiming in Latin: “Because you saddened the holiness of the Lord, so may the eternal fire destroy you.” Then he returned to the university. It was a carefully staged act. 56 Melanchthon had composed a formal announcement of what was to happen, and had nailed it up on the door of the parish church, inviting all those who “were lovers of evangelical truth” to convene at the allocated place at 9 A.M . Spalatin knew what was afoot a week earlier: He had warned the Elector that Luther intended to burn the bull as soon as he knew for certain that his books had been burned at Leipzig. 57 Luther had chosen the time and place to make the boldest statement possible. He was condemning the books and the bull to death, giving them a mock execution.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  On these same grounds, Jan Hus’s imperial safe conduct had been breached and he had been executed in 1415 at the Council of Constance. Fortunately for Luther, this was not the line Charles V took. The emperor kept his promise and granted Luther a safe conduct back home. 69 The simple friar who proclaimed the Word of God had become a hero. A pamphlet that appeared not long after the Diet depicted the events as a replay of Christ’s Passion: In 1521 Luther crossed the Rhine at Frankfurt to continue on to Worms. He and his disciples assembled for the evening meal where they broke bread together. Luther warned them that one of their number would betray him, and they all denied that they would. But the very next day, Saxo, 70 who had been firmest in his protestations, denied him three times. The Romanists howled for Luther’s blood, worst amongst them, the bishops of Mainz and Merseburg. Luther, in the house of Caiaphas, remained calm. The bishop of Trier considered what to do: Luther was a pious Christian and he could see no reason to condemn him. But the priests yelled “Burn him!” So they took Luther’s writings and put them on a pyre with the image of his face on top of the books. To the left of him they put Hutten’s writings and to the right, Karlstadt’s. Yet although the fires burnt the books to ashes, the portrait of Luther refused to burn. The author of The Passion of the Blessed Martin Luther, or His Sufferings was the humanist Hermann Busche, who named himself Marcellus after the man who had buried the martyred St. Peter. 71 The equation of Christ and Luther seems blasphemous. Yet the pamphlet, which enjoyed huge success, was in line with much of Luther’s own understanding of Worms: Luther himself saw it as a passion, and believed he was imitating Christ. In his account of events at Augsburg in 1518, he had compared himself to Christ in the house of Caiaphas, and he had been prepared to see his arrival at Erfurt on the way to Rome as his “Palm Sunday.”

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  They were not content with individual conversions, like the preachers of the First Great Awakening, but wanted to change society. They were able to mobilize the population in nationwide mass movements, using popular music and the new communications media to skilled effect. Instead of trying to impose the modern ethos from above, like the Founding Fathers, they built from the ground up and led what amounted to a grassroots rebellion against the rational establishment. They were highly successful. The sects founded by Elias Smith, O’Kelly, Campbell, and Stone, for example, amalgamated to form the Disciples of Christ. By 1860, the Disciples had some 200,000 members and had become the fifth-largest Protestant denomination in the United States. 75 Like the Mormons, the Disciples had institutionalized a popular discontent that the establishment could not ignore. But this radical Christian rebellion against the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment had a still more profound effect. The Second Great Awakening managed to lead many Americans away from the classical republicanism of the Founders to the more vulgar democracy and rugged individualism that characterize much American culture today. They had contested the ruling elite and won a substantial victory. There is a strain in the American spirit that is closer to the populism and anti-intellectualism of the nineteenth-century prophets than to the cool ethos of the Age of Reason. The noisy, spectacular revivals of the Second Great Awakening made a permanent impression on the distinctive political style of the United States, whose mass rallies, unabashed sentiment, and showy charisma are so bewildering to many Europeans. Like many fundamentalist movements today, these prophets of the Second Great Awakening gave people who felt disenfranchised and exploited in the new states a means of making their views and voices heard by the more privileged elite. Their movements gave the people what Martin Luther King called “a sense of somebodiness,” 76 in much the same way as the fundamentalist groups do today. Like the fundamentalist movements, these new sects all looked back to a primitive order, and determined to rebuild the original faith; all relied in an entirely new way upon Scripture, which they interpreted literally and often reductively. All also tended to be dictatorial. It was a paradox in early- nineteenth-century America, as in late-twentieth-century fundamentalist movements, that a desire for independence, autonomy, and equality should lead large numbers of people to obey religious demagogues implicitly. For all his talk about enfranchisement, Joseph Smith created what was virtually a religious dictatorship, and, despite his praise of the egalitarian and communal ideals of the Primitive Church, Alexander Campbell became the richest man in West Virginia, and ruled his flock with a rod of iron. The Second Great Awakening shows the sort of solutions that many people find attractive when their society is going through the wrenching upheaval of modernization. Like modern fundamentalists, the prophets of the Second Great Awakening mounted a rebellion against the learned rationalism of the ruling classes and insisted on a more religious identity.

• 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.