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.

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

  1620s, they learned of its rediscovery (on a site now unknown, but very possibly that of the identifiable Ta Qin monastery in Zhouzhi (see Plate 7). Dated 781, surmounted by dragons and a cross and bearing inscriptions in Chinese and Estrangela, it is a silkily expressed commemoration of imperial favour shown towards the Christians since 635, culminating in their present protector, General Guo Ziyi. Besides its detailed if inevitably politically selective account of that history, it boldly recites a statement of Christian faith in Chinese, commendations of the faith, and poetry in praise of the triune God and of Christ ‘divided in nature’, with allusions to imperial literature which stake a bold claim for Christianity as the best expression of the universe’s underlying principle, the Tao. With the stele’s proud enunciation of various ecclesiastical dignitaries alongside emperors and imperial officials, there could be no better symbol of the integration of the Dyophysite Christian community into imperial life. The first and last visual impression that it leaves in its present setting in Xi’an’s ‘Forest of Stelae’ is just how alike are all the other monuments around it.27 There are many more traces of the Church of the East’s real attempt to explain the Christian message in terms which would make sense to people in this alien culture. From their first arrival in China, Christians seemed to have realized that it would be a good strategy to use language familiar to Chinese from Taoism, as the stele from 781 now at Xi’an witnessed. Taoism, after all, had a vision of the original goodness of human nature which was congenial to Dyophysites emphasizing the whole humanity of Christ’s separate human nature alongside his divinity. Yet Dyophysite Christians were also ready to model themselves on another faith which the Chinese recognized as having come from beyond their borders, but which was by now well established and widely respected: Buddhism. So Alopen and his successors presented their faith in the form of sutras, discourses in Buddhist style, and they had no inhibitions in presenting Buddhism as a form of truth, albeit one which needed extending. So Alopen, drawing on the specialized titles of honour of the Buddhists, had written in his Jesus Messiah Sutra: All the buddhas as well as kinnaras and the superintending-devas and arhans can see the Lord of Heaven. No human being, however, has ever seen the Lord of Heaven … All the buddhas flow and flux by virtue of this very wind, while in this world, there is no place where the wind does not reach. Here, there seems to be a real attempt to suggest that the teachings of Buddhism are in a literal sense inspired by the Holy Spirit. Elsewhere in his Discourse on the oneness of the Ruler of the Universe, Alopen observed that, thanks to the Devil, ‘[i]t has become impossible for a human being to understand the truth and attain “liberation from sorrow”’ – the latter phrase simply being a

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

  Yet that tangled history does not render totally absurd Orthodoxy’s pride in its uniformity of doctrine. Schism is not the same as heresy. The doctrinal disagreements and affirmations from the time of Justinian to the Triumph of Orthodoxy have (partly by dint of a good deal of selective writing of Church history) produced a profound sense of common identity across cultures. They are bound together by the memory of the worship in the Great Church in Constantinople, by a common heritage in the theology of such exponents of theosis as Maximus the Confessor, and by the final crushing of iconoclasm in 843. As we have noted, that common heritage goes so far as to provide the worshipping congregation with corporate ways of ceremonially denouncing Christians who do not accept it: the ninth century, the era of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, was probably the time at which the Orthodox hymns of hate first entered the performance of the liturgy.83 There is here a significant contrast with the Latin West. The sixteenth-century Reformation in the Western Church destroyed not merely the universality of Latin liturgy, a universality of language which did not exist in the East, and which indeed may have contributed to the frustrations behind the Reformation. It also ruptured the broad theological consensus in Western Christianity. By the time of that sixteenth-century explosion of dissent, the Byzantine Empire had perished, partly because of the inept and often malicious intervention of Western Latin Christians, which helped to destroy the institution so notably revived in the time of Photios and the Macedonian emperors.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Toward the end of the sixteenth century, some Jews were permitted to leave the Iberian Peninsula. A Marrano diaspora had already formed in some of the Spanish colonies, as well as in southern France, but here Jews were still not allowed to practice their faith. However, during the seventeenth century, Judaizing Marranos migrated to such cities as Venice, Hamburg, and—later—London, where they could openly return to Judaism. Above all, the Iberian refugees from the Inquisition poured into Amsterdam, which became their new Jerusalem. The Netherlands was the most tolerant country in Europe. It was a republic, with a thriving commercial empire which, during its struggle for independence from Spain, had created a liberal identity as a contrast to Iberian values. Jews became full citizens of the republic in 1657; they were not confined to enclosed ghettoes, as they were in most European cities. The Dutch appreciated the Jews’ commercial expertise, and Jews became prominent businessmen, mingling freely with gentiles. They had a vigorous social life, an excellent educational system, and a flourishing publishing industry. Many Jews undoubtedly came to Amsterdam for its social and economic opportunities, but a significant number were eager to return to the full practice of Judaism. This was not easy, however. The “New Jews,” who had come from Iberia, had to be reeducated in a faith about which they were largely ignorant. The rabbis had the challenging task of guiding them back, making allowances for their real difficulties without compromising the tradition. It is a tribute to them that most Jews were able to make the transition; despite some initial tension, they found that they enjoyed their return to the ancestral faith.30 A notable example was Orobio de Castro, a doctor and professor of metaphysics, who had lived in Spain as a secret Judaizer for years. He had been arrested and tortured by the Inquisition, had recanted, and taught medicine in Toulouse as a fake Christian. Finally, weary of deception and a double life, he had arrived in Amsterdam in the 1650s to become a forceful apologist for Judaism and an instructor of other returning Marranos.31 Orobio, however, described a whole class of people who found it very difficult to adjust to the laws and customs of traditional Judaism, which seemed senseless and burdensome to them. They had studied modern sciences in Iberia, such as logic, physics, mathematics, and medicine, as Orobio himself had done. But, Orobio reported impatiently, “they are full of vanity, pride and arrogance, confident that they are thoroughly learned in all subjects.” They think they will lose credit as erudite men if they consent to learn from those who are indeed educated in the sacred laws, and so they feign great science by contradicting what they do not understand.32

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

  attributed to Gudit through their indestructibility. It is said that King Lalibela conceived the idea of recreating Jerusalem in his capital after a visit to the Holy Land, in an effort to compensate for the renewed fall of the Holy City to Muslim armies in 1187 (see p. 385). As so often in Ethiopian history, it is impossible to know whether centuries of subsequent meditation, wishful thinking and purposeful political rebranding have overlaid whatever original scheme was intended at Lalibela, to produce its present rich skein of associations with Jerusalem – the Church of Golgotha now includes two tombs designated respectively for Jesus Christ and King Lalibela, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre lies at the heart of the Lalibela complex.51 What is clear is that this wave of new monuments to Ethiopian Christian confidence was followed by a major expansion of Christian life in a renewal of monasticism. Monks founded their communities for the first time in the central highlands, usually deliberately seizing pre-Christian holy sites, and they displayed all the heroic feats of ascetic self-denial which had been pioneered in Syria and Egypt. They were at the heart of two centuries and more which were another golden age of Ethiopian Christianity, as well as one of its greatest periods of contention and struggle.52 At the end of the thirteenth century, another dynasty supplanted the Zagwe, and between its founder, Yekuno Amlak (reigned 1270–85), and his grandson Amdä Seyon (reigned 1314–44), it came to restore the military might of Ethiopia. It appears that the Egyptian Coptic Church was affronted at the usurpation and refused to supply an abun, so for some considerable time the Ethiopians had to resort to bishops from Syria to preserve their episcopal succession.53 Such internationally expressed doubts needed addressing and a sustained campaign began to plug the dynasty into ancient history, with the aid of King Solomon: Amdä Seyon’s name (‘Pillar of Zion’) was no casual reference. It may thus be that this was the stage at which the Ethiopian Church’s identification with Israel really began to become distinctive. The existence of the Kebra Nagast may have been the inspiration for this stratagem, and it is likely that its present literary form dates largely to around 1300.54 Later tradition represents a vital element in Negus Yekuno’s support as his understanding with the chief activist in the expansion of monasteries, the monk from Däbra Damo, Iyäsus Mo’a (‘Jesus has prevailed’). It is a plausible but also a convenient story, since the monks were to prove a constant source of difficulty for the ‘Solomonic’ dynasty, through their independent charismatic authority and individual opinions. The chief disciple of Iyäsus Mo’a, Täklä Haymanot (‘Plant of Faith’), was a formidable ascetic, said to have spent a considerable proportion of his life standing on one leg in his monastic cell, feeding on one seed brought by a bird once a year. When the other leg atrophied away, God rewarded the

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

  Byzantium, and it was only at the end of the twentieth century that the last monarch of an Orthodox country was sent packing from his throne – the King of Greece, who happened to bear the name of both the first ‘Orthodox’ monarch and the last Byzantine monarch, Constantine. In post-Communist Orthodox cultures there are still rulers who aspire to something of the same role. Orthodoxy has to a remarkable extent been moulded round one single church building, far more influential than even those crucial Western sacred places, the Basilica of St Peter in Rome and the Abbey Church of Cluny. This is the Cathedral of the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) in Constantinople, whose fabric has fared better than Cluny’s, but whose fate as a church converted to a mosque encapsulates the traumas of Orthodox history (see Plate 5). It owes its present form to the partnership of a Latin-speaking boy from the Balkans and a former circus artist of dauntingly gymnastic sexual prowess: the Emperor Justinian I and his consort, Theodora.5 We have already encountered this heroic if unlikely imperial couple as we have visited the stories both of the Western Church and of the Churches which rejected the Christological formula of Chalcedon after 451. Even before Justinian succeeded his Balkan-born soldier-uncle Justin in 527, they were contemplating the reuniting of the old empire through a twofold strategy of theological negotiation with Miaphysite enemies of Chalcedon and military conquests in East and West. Justinian and Theodora were the last Christian monarchs before the nineteenth-century British Queen Victoria to wield an influence throughout all sections of the Christian world in their age, and their influence was far more personal and less purely symbolic than hers. It was Justinian who presided over the fifth Council of Constantinople in 553 when it condemned the theological tradition of Origen, sought to intensify the Church’s rejection of the Dyophysites and in the process humiliated Pope Vigilius (see pp. 209–10 and 326–7); it was Theodora who provided patronage for those who secretly built up a Miaphysite Church hierarchy to challenge the Chalcedonians (see pp. 235–6). One would not realize how colourful their lives had been from the mosaic portraits of the pair as majestic and universal rulers, breaking iconographical convention to stand in pious harmony with their clergy and attendants in the very sanctuary of the imperial church of San Vitale in Ravenna (see Plate 27). The colour is revealed through the unusually triangulated writings of the Court historian Procopius (or Procopios). To balance his eloquent celebration of the Emperor’s public achievements and buildings, Procopius vented his frustrations at his own courtliness by furtively penning a poisonous denunciation of Justinian and Theodora in a gossipy account of the same events, The Secret History, whose rediscovery by the pope’s Vatican librarian in the seventeenth century much

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  It was the last cause—the weakening of religion—which, in the view of the religious members of the Gush, was crucial. Divorced from Judaism, Zionism, they believed, could make no sense. At the same time as the Kookists sought to conquer the occupied territories from the Arabs, they were also engaged in a war against secular Israel. 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.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In 1950, the Rebbe died and was succeeded by his son-in-law, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1904–94). This was an astonishing development, which must reflect the Habad’s willingness to embrace the secular world in an attempt to convert it. The Seventh Rebbe had not been educated in a yeshiva, but had received a modern education. He had studied Jewish philosophy in Berlin and marine engineering at the Sorbonne. When he arrived in the United States in 1941, he had worked for the Navy, but had also assisted in his father-in-law’s mission. Here was a Rebbe who was a product of the modern world, and able to mobilize his Hasidim in a vastly efficient media campaign to redeem Jews all over the world. Now it was not only the yeshiva students who were to be soldiers in the Rebbe’s army but every single Habad Jew. The Rebbe carefully prepared his campaign, and in the 1970s launched an immense counteroffensive against secularization and assimilation. Thousands of young Lubavitch, male and female, would be dispatched to found Habad houses in distant cities, where Jews were either wholly secularized or in a minority. The house would be a “drop-in” center which provided information about Judaism, hosted Sabbath and festival ceremonies, and held lectures and classes. Other young Hasidim would be sent out onto the campuses and streets of America, where they would accost passing Jews and persuade them to perform one of the commandments in public, such as putting on tefillin and reciting a prayer. The idea was that the rite would touch the divine “spark” lodged in the soul of every Jew and awaken his or her essential holiness.38

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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. In 1938, members were divided into “battalions,” each consisting of three groups—one for workers, one for students, and one for businessmen and civil servants. The groups met once a week to spend the night together in prayer and spiritual instruction. By 1943, when this system had not brought in the harvest of recruits that had been hoped for, the “battalions” were replaced by “families,” each of which had ten members and was a unit, responsible for its actions. The family members would meet once a week, and keep each other up to the mark, ensuring that everybody observed the “pillars,” and kept clear of gambling, alcohol, usury, and adultery. The family system stressed the bonding of Muslims at a time when Egyptian society was fragmenting under the pressures of modernization. Each family belonged to a larger “battalion,” which kept it in touch with headquarters. 71 A Christian reform movement at this time tended to pinpoint doctrine; this was partly due to the rationalism of modern Western culture, which had come to see faith as adherence to a set of beliefs. The Society, however, was run according to the conservative piety of the Shariah, which helped Muslims to build the Muhammadan archetype within themselves by living in a certain way. But this old-style piety was promoted in a modern guise. The rites, prayers, and ethical disciplines were designed to create an interior orientation to God, similar to the Prophet’s own. Only in this spiritual context, Banna believed, could modern institutions and reforms make sense to a Muslim people. In 1945, at a packed meeting, Banna decided that it was time to establish a social and welfare program that was desperately needed, but which no government had addressed effectively. The Brothers had always built schools for boys and girls beside the mosque, as soon as they established a new branch.

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

  13 Faith in a New Rome (451-900) A CHURCH TO SHAPE ORTHODOXY: HAGIA SOPHIA The charisma of the Bishops of Rome is twofold, springing from the tomb of St Peter and from Europe’s equally long-standing fascination with Roman power and civilization. Gradually, in the series of accidents which we have followed from the first century to the thirteenth, Peter’s successors revived the aspirations of Roman emperors to rule the world, and they managed to prevent the successors of the Emperor Charlemagne from gaining a monopoly on this monarchical role in the Christianity of the West. In Constantinople the balance was different. The newly promoted bishop of the city took advantage of a favourable conjunction of politics at the first Council of Constantinople in 381 (see pp. 218–20) to get himself ‘the primacy of honour after the Bishop of Rome, because Constantinople is the new Rome’,1 while his Church did its best to trump Rome in apostolicity by declaring that it had been founded by the first- recruited among Christ’s Apostles, Andrew. Even by early Christian standards, this was an implausible shot, and Andrew never really achieved much for his putative episcopal successors, the Patriarchs of Constantinople. Instead, the Byzantine emperors and the ideal of Christian governance which they represented became the vital distinguishing force in the Churches later known as Orthodox, long after the last emperor had died defending Constantinople in 1453. Orthodox Christianity prides itself on its faithfulness to tradition: its majestic round of worship, woven into a texture of ancient music, sustained with carefully considered gesture and choreography amid a setting of painting following prescribed artistic convention, can be seen as reflecting the timelessness of Heaven. Its history has customarily been written with that self-image in mind, and in telling the Orthodox story there is a real problem in recovering the reality of personalities or events which at particular moments provided alternative routes to the future, and who have accordingly won a negative presentation from later Orthodox historians. It is a peculiarity of the Orthodox tradition of public

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

  Sicily to Muslim rule. The self-confidence and practicality of the Macedonian emperors allowed them to make allies of people whom Chalcedonian Christians thought of as heretics: as they pushed eastwards into territories much depopulated in Cilicia and Armenia, they peopled them with Miaphysite Christian settlers and were happy to see them establish their own bishoprics, not subject to the patriarch in Constantinople. Leading Byzantine churchmen were furious at this move, unprecedented in imperial Christianity, but it was a useful balance for Muslims living on the frontiers, and it was a way of giving the deviant newcomers a good reason to invest in the future security of Byzantine rule.2 The recovery of nerve in society was nevertheless expressed in a vigorous affirmation of the institutions which had contributed to the Triumph of Orthodoxy and which now permanently shaped Byzantine religion. There was great attention to recording the ceremonial used at Court and in church. The definitive account of the formal life of the Byzantine Court was written as a guide for his heir by an exceptionally learned and reflective emperor, Constantine VII (reigned 945–59). He was known as Porphyrogennētos – ‘born into the Purple’ – to emphasize his legitimate imperial birth and status after his father’s theologically controversial fourth marriage, and it was probably the contentious nature of his birth which made him give such attention to the proper order for formal ceremonies. By now Court ceremonial could not be separated from that of the Church, since all Church festivals of any significance needed the imperial presence, in procession, in the liturgy and afterwards as principal guest in a formal feast with the patriarch. Nearly all the earliest surviving manuscripts of the Byzantine liturgy date from the tenth century, even though they are copying much earlier texts: clearly there was an intense urge now to establish norms behind all these new texts.3 At the end of the tenth century, the Emperor Basil II sponsored Symeon Metaphrastes (‘the Translator’) to lead a team of scholars in compiling a monthly catalogue or Menologion of saints’ lives, which kept a peculiar authority among later compilations of saints, and around the same time an enthusiast for Constantinople’s past collected all sorts of older materials to weld into an antiquarian guide to the city’s monuments and treasures.4 The assertion of uniform values within the Orthodox Church and the new wealth in the tenth and eleventh centuries also led to a great investment in the institutions which had defended (or invented) the tradition so successfully in the years of conflict: the monasteries. Naturally much of this investment went into ancient well-established foundations, many of which were in the capital or in great cities, but as a result, the restlessness of the monastic spirit led to

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

  14 Orthodoxy: More Than an Empire (900-1700) CRISES AND CRUSADERS (900-1200) Around the millennium, Constantinople was the biggest city in the world that Europeans knew, with around 600,000 inhabitants. It surpassed Islam’s greatest city, Baghdad, and dwarfed the Latin West’s best attempts at urban life such as Rome or Venice, which at best might each muster a tenth of such numbers.1 The scale of the area comprehended by the ancient and medieval walls still has the power to astonish as one walks across it: in societies which were overwhelmingly rural, the first experience of ‘the City’ must have been like a moon landing. The Byzantine Empire was strong and well defended; the emperor was the guarantor of an imperial gold coinage which astonishingly had remained the same in weight and fineness since the time of Constantine the Great, and which was the only gold currency then known in Europe – its name both in Greek and Latin spoke of strength and reliability, nomisma (‘established’), solidus (‘immovable’). In Western European heraldry, this coin survives symbolized by a golden disc, and in the macaronic Norman-French language of heralds, it is termed a ‘bezant’. The Macedonian emperors, who had been in power since 867, were very ready to employ mercenary soldiers who brought new tactics in warfare and helped Byzantium claw back territories long lost, as far east as Cyprus and Antioch of Syria. The Church of Constantinople was likewise expanding and self-confident. In the 960s and 970s the Macedonian dynasty won another great military success on the western front, annexing Bulgaria and for two centuries putting an end to the independence of its archbishop along with its monarchy. The Byzantine victory also brought defeat and death for Sviatoslav, the ruler of a pagan monarchy far to the north in Kiev, who had his own designs on Bulgaria. Through the conversion to Christianity of Sviatoslav’s son Vladimir in 988, Orthodox Christianity was established in another new region, with momentous consequences for its future (see Chapter 15). In the far west, the Byzantines still controlled southern Italy, although 962 saw them lose their last stronghold in

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Falwell was creating an alternative society to undercut secular humanism. From the start, he wanted Liberty College to become a world-class university; it was to be what Notre Dame was to the Roman Catholics, or Brigham Young to the Mormons. Fundamentalism had changed since Bob Jones had founded his university in the 1920s. Separation from society was no longer enough. Like other fundamentalist educators, Falwell was creating a cadre for the future, “a spiritual army of young people who are pro-life, pro-moral, and pro-America.”126 Where Bob Jones had turned away from the secular world to prepare teachers for Christian schools, Falwell wanted to take on the secularist establishment. Liberty would train students for all walks of life and the major professions. They would “save” society. But that meant that they had to submit to the fundamentalist ethos: the faculty must subscribe to the articles of faith; all students had to complete a “Christian service assignment” in the parish each semester; there was to be no drinking or smoking; students must wear Sunday-best clothes at all times, and attend services at Thomas Road thrice weekly. Unlike Bob Jones, Falwell sought academic accreditation and was thus able to attract nonfundamentalist students, whose parents approved of the sobriety of the campus and its good academic standards. Falwell had charted a middle course. Liberty provided an alternative to the permissive liberal arts colleges of the sixties and seventies, on the one hand, and to the mediocre standard of some of the old Bible colleges on the other. Despite its doctrinal emphasis, the campus was open to serious debate of intellectual and social issues; this would enable students to engage with the secular world on its own terms, and initiate its reconquista.127 Falwell was planning an offensive, and was doing so in modern terms. His industrious regime in the college, church, and radio station was an attempt to reach out to a lost and dying world. There were no gimmicks and no wild antics on his station; the Old Time Gospel Hour eschewed the extravagances of Roberts, Swaggart, and the Bakkers. A literalist as a broadcaster as in theology, he had his services screened and recorded exactly as performed, with no concessions to the camera and its love of spectacle. Lynchburg stood for restraint, capitalism, and the Calvinist work ethic. Falwell modeled his empire on the new shopping malls, which offered a combination of services. As Elmer Towns, his chief theological adviser, explained, Falwell believed that he could win souls with similar entrepreneurial expertise. Business, Falwell judged, was at the cutting edge of innovation, and “the Thomas Road Baptist Church believed that the combined ministeries of several agencies in one church can not only attract the masses to the Gospel, but can better minister to each individual who comes.”128 During the 1960S and 1970S, Thomas Road seemed to prove the Godly viability of capitalism, adding one ministry after another, with continued growth and expansion. When secular power brokers were looking around for somebody to lead a right-wing resurgence in the 1980s, Falwell was their man. He clearly understood the dynamic of modern capitalist society and would be able to engage with it as an equal.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Zionists, who often hated religion, instinctively spoke of their movement in Orthodox terminology. Aliyah, the Hebrew word they used for “immigration,” was originally a term used to describe an ascent to a higher state of being. They called immigrants olim (“those who ascend,” or “pilgrims”). A “pioneer” who joined one of the new agricultural settlements was called a chalutz, a word with strong religious connotations of salvation, liberation, and rescue.54 When they arrived at the port of Jaffa, Zionists would often kiss the ground; they experienced their immigration as a new birth, and, like the biblical patriarchs, sometimes changed their names to express their sense of empowerment. The spirituality of Labor Zionism was most eloquently and powerfully expressed by Aharon David Gordon (1856–1922), who arrived in Palestine in 1904 and worked in the new cooperative settlement in Degania in the Galilee. There he experienced what religious Jews would have called an experience of the Shekhinah. Gordon was an Orthodox Jew and Kabbalist, but he was also a student of Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, and Tolstoy. He had come to believe that modern industrialized society exiled men and women from themselves. They had developed a one-sided and overrational approach to life. To counteract this, they must cultivate chavayah, an immediate, mystical experience of the sacred, by immersing themselves as fully as possible in the life of the natural landscape, because that was where the Infinite revealed itself to humanity. For Jews, that landscape must be in Palestine. “The soul of the Jew,” Gordon insisted, “is the offspring of the natural environment of the Land of Israel.” Only there could a Jew experience what Kabbalists had called “clarity, the depth of an infinitely clear sky, a clear perspective, mists of purity.”55 By means of labor (avodah) a pioneer would experience “the divine unknown,” and would re-create himself, as the mystics had done in the course of their spiritual exercises. By working on the land, “the unnatural, defective, splintered person” that he had become in the Diaspora would be “changed into a natural, wholesome human being who is true to himself.”56 For Gordon it was no accident that avodah, the word for “labor” or “service,” had once applied to the liturgy in the Temple. For the Zionist, holiness and wholeness were no longer to be found in conventional religious practices, but in their hard labor in the hills and farms of Galilee.

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

  At issue was how far the Ethiopian Church was prepared to travel in its own direction and ignore what links it had with the wider world: monks of the House of Ewostatewos rejected ordination by the abun, and it is possible that they might have ended up as separate from their parent Christianity as that other independent-minded Ethiopian movement, the Falasha (see pp. 243–4). The triumph of the Sabbath was sealed by devoted advocacy from one of Ethiopia’s most remarkable monarchs, Zar’a Ya’qob (reigned 1434–68), who combined military success with intense piety, himself writing works of Christian instruction for his subjects. Thanks to Zar’a Ya’qob, Ethiopia’s effective rule extended once more to the coast of the Red Sea, and despite the Negus’s pride in the special character of Ethiopian devotion, he was intensely aware of his links with a wider world; he took the regnal name Constantine. There was a great sensation in Europe when a delegation of two monks from the Ethiopian monastery in Jerusalem arrived in 1441 at the Pope’s council at Florence (see pp. 492–3) and uttered the name of their far-distant monarch – this was the same council which also received representations from the beleaguered Copts. Zar’a Ya’qob also derived great spiritual comfort from an unlikely source, a short popular work of devotion called The Miracles of Mary, which seems to have been compiled for use in Marian shrines in France in the twelfth century; having gained great popularity in western Europe, it had been translated into Arabic and then into Ethiopic. The Negus made it a mandatory work of devotion for his clergy: a strange stray from an alien world which he nevertheless found a useful tool in moulding his people to a single style of faith, and Marian devotion was hugely reinforced in the Ethiopian Church.59 Less indebted to French devotional style was Zar’a Ya’qob’s decree that all his subjects should be tattooed on their foreheads with the words ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’ and on their right and left hands respectively ‘I deny the Devil’ and ‘I am a servant of Mary’. Ethiopian Christian tattooing still characteristically features a cross in blue on the chin or the forehead.60 Zar’a Ya’qob was determined that religious divisions should not undermine his newly extended empire, and key to this was a full understanding between the Solomonic monarchy and the awkward monks of the House of Ewostatewos. This was achieved at a major council of the Ethiopian Church summoned to the Negus’s newly founded monastery of Däbra Mitmaq in 1449, at which the main agreement was that both the Sabbath and Sunday should henceforth be observed. In return, monks of the House of Ewostatewos agreed to be reconciled to the abun and accept ordination at his hands; so the forces of Ethiopian particularism were not terminally separated from the Church’s link to the wider Christian world. It was an important moment for the future of Ethiopian Christianity, a

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

  prayer, both for themselves and for those who died. They naturally looked to monks as the experts in prayer, and over the next two centuries at least a hundred monasteries were founded in the newly colonized lands, with the principal monks drawn from the noble families who were the natural leaders of frontier society.23 But alongside this steady growth in the importance of monastic life, one great historic Christian city far to the north did survive the general wreck, and remained independent – Novgorod. Novgorod could not ignore the new political configuration and paid tribute to the Tatars, but it came through the 1240s unscathed, simply because, for reasons of their own, the Tatars decided to abandon their attack northwards. It continued to prosper mightily on trade, particularly its control of fur-trapping, and it built up its own northern empire with a reach from the Baltic to the Ural Mountains. In the twelfth century it had ejected its Kievan princes: the constitution which it then created was a republic of merchant families in which the bishop had more say than the nominal princes, and in which ordinary people might feel that they also played a part in at least commenting at public assemblies on policy. Because of this broad distribution of responsibility, the citizens of Novgorod valued literacy far more than anywhere else in the region, and a rich haul of birch-bark texts dating over four centuries has been rediscovered to testify to how widespread was literacy in city society. This remarkable urban organization was unique in Rus’. The city was in close contact with the German merchant confederation of towns and cities known as the Hanseatic League, whose constitutions were developing in the same fashion, with their overlord a Holy Roman Emperor whose authority was increasingly distant. Novgorod was so proudly conscious of its republican status that in the fifteenth century it even minted coins whose designs imitated those of Venice, that other great aristocratic republic so far away.24

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

  The fact that Novgorod did not shape the destiny of Russia was ultimately thanks to the rulers of a modest settlement called Moscow, hundreds of miles to its south-east. Hitherto little noticed in the affairs of Rus’, in the later thirteenth century the ambitious rulers of Moscow began to make the most of their remoteness from Tatar interest or interference. They assiduously cultivated the Kipchak Khan, regularly visiting him and leaving their sons as hostages; right into the fifteenth century they paid tribute to the khan and customarily maintained prayers for him in the Church’s liturgy. Similarly in the late fourteenth century, when Moscow started minting its own coinage, many of its coins bore Arabic inscriptions dutifully praying for long life for the khan.27 Unsurprisingly, the princes of Moscow modelled many of their political institutions on those of Mongol society, but they also paraded their devotion to the Church traditions of Constantinople. By the fourteenth century, as their territories and influence expanded, the Tatars allowed them to take the title of Grand Prince, and across Europe rulers began hearing of this distant realm called Muscovy. Novgorod soon uncomfortably felt the rivalry of the Muscovite grand princes, while Muscovy among its various confrontations with neighbouring principalities, also fell into increasing tension with a growing power to the west, the grand princes of Lithuania.28 Of all the various powers in the Baltic region and the east to the Urals, an informed observer of east-central Europe in the late fourteenth century would have pointed to Lithuania as the most likely to emerge as supreme. The grand princes of Lithuania were the last major rulers in Europe to resist making a choice between the three great monotheisms, proudly keeping to their ancestral animist faith. They were vigorous and effective warlords who in the wake of the Mongol invasion preyed on the various shattered communities of the region, and over the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries they extended their power to command the eastern European plains and mountain chains, from the Baltic eventually as far as the Black Sea. They proved as tolerant of Christians in their dominions as the Kipchak Khans had been, and the nobles (boyars) of Rus’ were as happy to accept their overlordship as they had been that of the animist or Islamic khans. The Grand Prince of Lithuania was anxious to unite as many traditions as possible in his vast domains. To his Latin-speaking elites he presented himself as ‘dux magnus Litvanorum Russiaeque dominus et haeres naturalis’ – Grand Prince of the Lithuanians and Lord and Natural Successor of the Rus’. Yet his bureaucrats spoke a ‘Ruthenian’ form of Slavonic which reflected their familiarity with the liturgy of the Orthodox Church; some of his family looked to Orthodox Christianity to sustain them, and not only many of his boyars but most

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Society’s enemies always accused Banna of having created a “state within a state.” He had indeed built a massively successful counterculture which highlighted the deficiencies of the government in a way that was clearly threatening.76 It called attention to the government’s neglect of education and labor conditions; the fact that the Society alone was able to appeal to the fellahin was also disturbing. But, more important, all the Society’s institutions had a distinctly Muslim identity. Its factories all had mosques and gave the workers time to make the required prayers; in accordance with the social message of the Koran, working conditions and pay were good; workers had health insurance and decent holidays; disputes were arbitrated fairly. The extraordinary success of the Society was a dramatic demonstration of the fact that, whatever the intellectuals and pundits claimed, most of the Egyptian people wanted to be religious. It also showed that Islam could be progressive. There was no slavish return to the practices of the seventh century. The Brothers were extremely critical of the new Wahhabi Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and condemned its literalistic interpretations of Islamic law, such as cutting off the hands of thieves or stoning adulterers.77 The Brothers had no definite notions about the kind of polity the future Islamic state should have, but they insisted that to be faithful to the spirit of the Koran and Sunnah, there must be a fairer distribution of wealth than there was in the Saudi Kingdom. Their general ideas were certainly in tune with the times: rulers should be elected (as in the early Muslim period), and, as the rashidun (“righteous”) caliphs had urged, a ruler must be accountable to the people and must not rule dictatorially. But Banna always felt that precise discussions about a possible Islamic state were premature, because there was still much basic preparation to be done.78 Banna simply asked that Egypt be allowed to make its state Islamic; the Soviets had chosen communism, and the West democracy; countries where the population was predominantly Muslim should have the right to construct their polity on an Islamic basis, if and when they so wished.79

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  He heaved the duffel into the room, closed the door, and walked over to me. “I’m Chip Martin,” he announced in a deep voice, the voice of a radio deejay. Before I could respond, he added, “I’d shake your hand, but I think you should hold on damn tight to that towel till you can get some clothes on.” I laughed and nodded my head at him (that’s cool, right? the nod?) and said, “I’m Miles Halter. Nice to meet you.” “Miles, as in ‘to go before I sleep’?” he asked me. “Huh?” “It’s a Robert Frost poem. You’ve never read him?” I shook my head no. “Consider yourself lucky.” He smiled. I grabbed some clean underwear, a pair of blue Adidas soccer shorts, and a white T-shirt, mumbled that I’d be back in a second, and ducked back into the bathroom. So much for a good first impression. “So where are your parents?” I asked from the bathroom. “My parents? The father’s in California right now. Maybe sitting in his La- Z-Boy. Maybe driving his truck. Either way, he’s drinking. My mother is probably just now turning off campus.” “Oh,” I said, dressed now, not sure how to respond to such personal information. I shouldn’t have asked, I guess, if I didn’t want to know. Chip grabbed some sheets and tossed them onto the top bunk. “I’m a top bunk man. Hope that doesn’t bother you.” “Uh, no. Whatever is fine.” “I see you’ve decorated the place,” he said, gesturing toward the world map. “I like it.” And then he started naming countries. He spoke in a monotone, as if he’d done it a thousand times before. Afghanistan. Albania. Algeria. American Samoa. Andorra. And so on. He got through the A’s before looking up and noticing my incredulous stare. “I could do the rest, but it’d probably bore you. Something I learned over the summer. God, you can’t imagine how boring New Hope, Alabama, is in the summertime. Like watching soybeans grow. Where are you from, by the way?” “Florida,” I said. “Never been.” “That’s pretty amazing, the countries thing,” I said. “Yeah, everybody’s got a talent. I can memorize things. And you can...?” “Um, I know a lot of people’s last words.” It was an indulgence, learning last words. Other people had chocolate; I had dying declarations. “Example?” “I like Henrik Ibsen’s. He was a playwright.” I knew a lot about Ibsen, but I’d never read any of his plays. I didn’t like reading plays. I liked reading biographies. “Yeah, I know who he was,” said Chip. “Right, well, he’d been sick for a while and his nurse said to him, ‘You seem to be feeling better this morning,’ and Ibsen looked at her and said, ‘On the contrary,’ and then he died.”

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

  constructively melded in syncretist fashion with memories of other spiritualities came a variety of new religion with various identities: among much overlap were the Vodou (voodoo) of French Haiti, the Candomblé of Portuguese Brazil, the Santería of Spanish Cuba. In turn the syntheses in America fertilized and reinvigorated African religion back in Africa: part of a continuous traffic across the Atlantic.53 That name Santería is itself instructive because, as with so many other Christian labels, it began as an insult or term of condescension — an English coinage equivalent to this Spanish word might well be ‘saintery’ — but it is now a label of pride for a form of religion constructed, like so much Iberian-African syncretism, with practical good sense. Santería is probably the variety of these syncretist religions closest to Catholicism, so that in Cuban Catholicism it is difficult to separate much Catholic practice in the parish churches from Santería, and it is really impossible to put statistics on the number of its practitioners, so all-pervasive is its influence. The great advantage of the panoply of saints which the enslaved might encounter in their confraternities was that the saints could stand in for the hierarchy of divinities who in West Africa were offered devotion in the place of the supreme creator god Olurun (who was himself too powerful to be concerned with the affairs of feeble humans). Below the creator god were also orishas, subordinate divinities in African religion connected with the whole range of human activities. Every person born might have a connection to an orisha, and it was also perfectly acceptable in Catholic practice for everyone to choose a personal patron saint; it was only natural to look for compatible attributes between sacred figures from the two worlds. The Virgin Mary could hardly be ignored in Catholicism and in the interiors of churches, and it was not a problem to identify her omnipresent image with the Taino goddess Atabey or the Yoruba orishas Oshun and Yemaya. In Cuba, Mary has never had any competitor as the national patron saint.54 Without such doubling, it would be difficult to account for the popularity of St Barbara among the altars and paintings of Cuban churches. Traditionally, Barbara had a particular concern for thunder, and latterly for gunpowder. She could thus stand in for the orisha Shangô; he duplicated her powers over thunder, and despite being male and a notorious womanizer, he had conveniently once escaped from the wrath of his cuckolded brother Ogun disguised as Ogun’s wife Oya (one can imagine the humour of the situation appealing to devotees as they lit their candles under the approving eyes of some missionary priest). In other settings, less riskily, Barbara could be identified directly with Oya.55 Equally surprising is to find St Patrick so prominent in many Vodou shrines (see Plate 61), until one remembers that he too had been a slave who had twice

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

  in the Western Church. Diocesan bureaucracies were both symptom and cause of this. Kings and noblemen in Europe saw the usefulness of competent bishops to improve their own administration and drafted them into their own governments. Often this might take a bishop away from his duties in his diocese, so his administration might have to carry on without him. Usually it did so quite successfully, but an efficient office system is rarely spiritually inspiring. Even though they generally tried to be real fathers-in-God for their dioceses, bishops were increasingly trapped in a world of fixed routine – faced with demands from pope and lay rulers, and remote figures to their flocks. In the long term, it was not a healthy development, and it bred a constant succession of tensions between clergy and people with which episcopal systems have continued to struggle – most damagingly for the Western Church in the sixteenth-century Reformation. Nevertheless, this age of growing episcopal power also left a staggering heritage of architectural beauty: the cathedrals of medieval Catholic Europe. The grandest church buildings of the Carolingian era were, as we have seen, virtually all built for the round of worship in monasteries. Given that the bishop and his diocese now had a new significance in the devotional lives of the faithful, the mother church of the diocese needed to be an outward and visible expression of that role. Very often, cathedrals were sited or resited in the expanding towns which were products of Europe’s economic growth in the period. As a result, between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the cathedrals of Latin Europe were rebuilt on a huge scale, to the extent that one celebrated French historian, Georges Duby, dubbed this ‘the age of the Cathedrals’.28 It was by no means the case that great monasteries stopped building and rebuilding their great churches, but now they had rivals; on the whole, the accidents of European history, both in destruction and in well-intentioned rebuilding, have favoured the survival of medieval cathedrals rather than the most prodigious abbey churches. The archetypal specimens are in the region covered by France, although scarcely less splendid cathedrals are also to be found in England, where after 1066 Norman invaders did their best both to make a distinctive mark on the landscape and to pay off a debt of gratitude to the papacy for blessing their conquest of the realm (see pp. 382–3). Symptomatic of that Anglo-French connection is the fact that the germ of a new architectural style for both cathedrals and monasteries, eventually spreading throughout Europe, is simultaneously to be found in major churches widely separated in this once-united cultural zone: Durham Cathedral, far to the north of England, and a rebuilt royal Abbey of St-Denis to the north of Paris, both under construction in the first half of the twelfth century. In these two enormous churches and then in many others, architects began tackling the technical