Resentment

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 The Battle for God (2000)

  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.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The day after the kidnapping, Shukri published a communiqué in three Egyptian newspapers, as well as in several other Muslim countries, New York, Paris, and London. He demanded the immediate release of his disciples, insisted on a public apology for the negative press the Society had received in the media, and requested the setting up of a committee to investigate the legal system and intelligence services of the regime. There was no chance that Sadat would permit any discussion of the methods of his secret police: Shukri clearly did not understand the nature of the state that he had defied. When Dhahabi’s body was discovered a few days later, Shukri and hundreds of his disciples were arrested. After a swift trial, Shukri himself and five of the leading members of the Society were executed. The press called the sect Takfir wal Hijrah (“Excommunication and Migration”), because of its rejectionist and condemnatory ideology. 36 Like so much fundamentalist theology, it sprang from the experience of rage and marginalization, but Shukri’s story reminds us that it is not always accurate to condemn such a movement as merely lunatic. Unbalanced and tragically mistaken as he was, Shukri had created a counterculture that mirrored the darker side of Sadat’s new Egypt, which was being hailed with such enthusiasm in the West. It revealed in a distorted, exaggerated form what was really going on, and expressed the alienation experienced by so many young Egyptians in a country which they no longer felt to be their own. Just as revealing, but more successful and enduring, were the jamaat al-islamiyyah , the Islamist student associations which dominated the university campuses during the presidency of Sadat. Like Shukri’s Society, the jamaat saw themselves as Qutb’s vanguard; however, they did not practice a radical withdrawal from the mainstream, but tried to create an Islamic space for themselves in a society that seemed oblivious to their needs. Egyptian universities were not like Oxford, Harvard, or the Sorbonne. They were huge, heartless, mass institutions with lamentably poor facilities. Between 1970 and 1977, the number of students rose from about 200,000 to half a million. As a result, there was appalling overcrowding. Two or three students would have to share a seat, and the lecture halls and laboratories were so packed that it was virtually impossible to hear the teacher’s voice, especially since the microphones were often broken.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Albert Camus (1913–60) believed that rejecting God would enable men and women to concentrate all their attention and love upon humankind. Others put their faith in the ideals of the Enlightenment, looking forward to a future in which human beings will become more rational and tolerant; they venerate the sacred liberty of the individual instead of a distant, imaginary God. They have created secularist forms of spirituality, which bring them insight, transcendence, and ecstasy, and which have developed their own disciplines of mind and heart. Nevertheless, a large number of people still want to be religious and have tried to evolve new forms of faith. Fundamentalism is just one of these modern religious experiments, and, as we have seen, it has enjoyed a certain success in putting religion squarely back on the international agenda, but it has often lost sight of some of the most sacred values of the confessional faiths. Fundamentalists have turned the mythos of their religion into logos , either by insisting that their dogmas are scientifically true, or by transforming their complex mythology into a streamlined ideology. They have thus conflated two complementary sources and styles of knowledge which the people in the premodern world had usually decided it was wise to keep separate. The fundamentalist experience shows the truth of this conservative insight. By insisting that the truths of Christianity are factual and scientifically demonstrable, American Protestant fundamentalists have created a caricature of both religion and science. Those Jews and Muslims who have presented their faith in a reasoned, systematic way to compete with other secular ideologies have also distorted their tradition, narrowing it down to a single point by a process of ruthless selection. As a result, all have neglected the more tolerant, inclusive, and compassionate teachings and have cultivated theologies of rage, resentment, and revenge. On occasion, this has even led a small minority to pervert religion by using it to sanction murder. Even the vast majority of fundamentalists, who are opposed to such acts of terror, tend to be exclusive and condemnatory of those who do not share their views. But fundamentalist fury reminds us that our modern culture imposes extremely difficult demands on human beings. It has certainly empowered us, opened new worlds, broadened our horizons, and enabled many of us to live happier, healthier lives. Yet it has often dented our self-esteem.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Like so many other fundamentalists, Faraj was a literalist. He read the words of scripture as though they were factually true in every detail, and could be applied, simply and directly, to everyday life. This showed yet another danger of using the mythos of scripture as a blueprint for practical action. The old ideal had been to keep mythos and logos separate: political action was the preserve of reason. In their revolt against the hegemony of scientific rationalism, these Sunni fundamentalists were abandoning reason and had to learn the bitter truth that even though the assassins of Sadat had, as they thought, obeyed God to the letter, God did not intervene and establish an Islamic state. After Sadat’s death, Hosni Mubarak became president with the minimum of fuss, and the secularist regime remains in place to this day. It appears that the ideas outlined in The Neglected Duty were not confined to a tiny group of extremists, but were more widespread in Egyptian society than observers believed at the time.59 Few Egyptians would have wanted actually to kill Sadat and most were shocked by the assassination, but their composure after his death was marked and chilling. The Shaykhs of al-Azhar, for example, condemned the assassination, but they did not seem to be heartbroken to have lost Sadat. In the first issue of the Azhari magazine immediately after the murder, there was no photograph of Sadat, and the killing was only obliquely mentioned on the second page. The one member of the religious establishment to come out strongly and unambiguously against The Neglected Duty was the Mufti, who gave a detailed answer to Faraj’s treatise. He declared that it was forbidden to call another practicing Muslim an apostate. The practice of takfir (excommunication) had never been common in Islam, since nobody but God could read a person’s heart. He discussed the Verses of the Sword in their historical context, showing them to have arisen in response to the particular circumstances of seventh-century Medina; they could not be applied verbatim to conditions in twentieth-century Egypt. Yet in an article in the Journal of Islamic Mysticism, the main Sufi periodical, in December 1981, the Mufti took it for granted that his readers would be familiar with the teachings of Faraj, even though The Neglected Duty had only just been published and they could not possibly all have read it yet. The ideas had probably percolated through devout circles and become common coin.60 The vast majority of Egyptians regarded the assassination as a great sin, but many felt ambivalent about Sadat. Times had changed since Nasser’s death; Egyptians now wanted to see genuine Islamic qualities in their leaders, and were turning away from the secularist ethos.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Abdu had been involved in the Urubi revolt and was exiled after the British victory. He joined Afghani in Paris. The two men had much in common. Abdu had been initially drawn into Afghani’s circle by his love of mystical religion (irfan), which, he used to say, was “the key to his happiness.”71 But Afghani had also introduced Abdu to the Western sciences and, later, Abdu read Guizot, Tolstoy, Renan, Strauss, and Herbert Spencer. Abdu felt quite at home in Europe and enjoyed the company of Europeans. Like Afghani, he was convinced that Islam was compatible with modernity and argued that it was an eminently rational faith, and that the habit of taqlid was corrupting and inauthentic. But, also like Afghani, Abdu was committed to rational thinking from within a mystical perspective. It was not as yet emancipated from the spirituality of the old world. Eventually, Abdu quarreled with Afghani about politics. He believed that Egypt needed reform more than revolution. He was a deeper thinker than his master, and could see that there could be no shortcut to modernization and independence. Instead of joining Afghani in his dangerous, pointless schemes, he wanted to rectify some of Egypt’s immense problems by means of education, and in 1888 he was allowed to return. He became one of the most beloved men in the country, remained on good terms with both Egyptians and British, and became a personal friend of both Lord Cromer and the khedive. By this time there was considerable frustration in the country. At first, many educated Egyptians had been forced to admit that, unwelcome as the British occupation undoubtedly was, Lord Cromer ruled the country far more efficiently than Khedive Ismail had done. But by the 1890s, relations with the British had deteriorated. The British officials were often of lower caliber than before and made less effort to cement relations with the Egyptians. They created their own privileged colonial enclave in the Gezira district. Egyptian civil servants found that their promotions were blocked by young Britons, and there was resentment of the privileges accorded the British and other foreigners by the Capitulations, which exempted them from the law of the land.72 More and more people listened to the fiery rhetoric of the nationalist Mustafa Kamil (1874–1908), who called for the immediate evacuation of the British. Abdu regarded Kamil as an empty demagogue. He could see that before Egyptians were able to run a modern independent state, they would have to deal with some serious social problems, which had been exacerbated by the occupation.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  They were proud of Arafat, but his secularist ethos only made perfect sense to an elite who had the benefit of a modern Western education. 100 Quite different was the ideology of Islamic Jihad, an underground network of cells similar to the Jihad organization in Egypt. Islamic Jihad applied the ideology of Sayyid Qutb to the Palestinian tragedy, which they interpreted in religious terms. At present, they believed, Palestinian secular society was jahili . Members of Islamic Jihad saw themselves as a vanguard, fighting a battle “against the forces of arrogance—against the colonial enemy all over the world,” explained their ideologue, Sheikh Auda. They were fighting a battle for the future of the entire ummah . Unlike Mujamah, Islamic Jihad was interested in armed struggle against Israel, and its targets were religious. In October 1985, for example, activists threw hand grenades into a crowd of soldiers and civilians at an IDF induction ceremony at the Western Wall, killing the father of one of the new recruits. By this date the organization had spread from Gaza to the West Bank. 101 On December 9, 1987, the popular Palestinian uprising known as the intifadah broke out in Gaza and spread to East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Since 1967, a whole generation of Palestinians had grown up in these territories under Israeli occupation; they were impatient with the old PLO leadership, which had not managed to achieve Palestinian independence, and frustrated by the daily humiliations and hardships of living under what they perceived as an oppressive, alien power. The Israelis had hoped that the Arabs in the occupied territories would become resigned to their rule in time, but resentment against Israel had reached boiling point by 1987, and the desire for a Palestinian state had become intense. The young leadership of this new revolt concentrated on undermining the occupation; they encouraged every single Palestinian to take part, so women and children threw stones at the Israeli soldiers, braving their guns and superior strength. The intifadah impressed both the rest of the Arab world and the international community; it also strengthened the hand of the Israeli peace movement, since it powerfully demonstrated the Palestinians’ determination to achieve independence and liberation from Israeli hegemony at all costs. The intifadah also made an impression upon such relative hard-liners as Yitzhak Rabin, who as a soldier now appreciated the impossibility of using the IDF to batter women and children into submission. When he became prime minister in 1992, Rabin was prepared to enter into negotiations with the PLO, and, the following year, Israel and the PLO signed the Oslo Accords.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The extreme religious Zionists and members of Gush Emunim were also ready for a fight. They were rebels, mounting what they saw as a revolution against secular nationalism on the one hand, and Orthodoxy on the other. Life had changed drastically for Jews. They felt that there was no need for Jews to be constricted by the traditions belonging to the Diaspora, because the messianic age had begun. This was the first major outbreak of Jewish messianism since Shabbetai Zevi. At that time, too, Jews had felt in transition and believed that they were about to experience unprecedented change. But where Shabbateans had rebelled against the restrictions of the ghetto, Gush members felt territorially circumscribed. They were as obsessed with boundaries as the Shabbateans, and though they focused chiefly on the frontiers of Eretz Israel, they were also fighting a battle to define the limits and borders of Judaism. They wanted to break down the barriers between secular and religious Jews.77 Kookists were convinced that, whatever the Haredim thought, it was possible to be at once fully Orthodox and Zionist; they also insisted, against the secularists, that without a religious dimension, Zionism was incomplete. But these were difficult years. Kookists felt betrayed by the Likud government, which had expelled them from Yamit, and, by making peace with the Arabs, had stalled the redemptive process. This seemed clearer than ever when the Palestinian uprising known as the intifadah (an Arabic term meaning “a shaking off”) broke out in 1987, and eventually impelled the Labor government to sign a peace treaty which, in Kookist eyes, was even more unacceptable than Camp David, because it promised to surrender parts of the holy land of the West Bank. Increasingly, Kookists felt that they were surrounded—rather as Jews had been in the Diaspora—by a hostile gentile world, but also by their fellow Jews, who were holding them back from the fulfillment they felt to be within their grasp.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  They’d never cared about her, and now they were carrying on as if she were a sister. But I guess I didn’t know her completely, either. If I had, I’d have known what she’d meant by “To be continued?” And if I had cared about her as I should have, as I thought I did, how could I have let her go? So they didn’t bother me, really. But next to me, the Colonel breathed slowly and deeply through his nose like a bull about to charge. He actually rolled his eyes when Weekday Warrior Brooke Blakely, whose parents had received a progress report courtesy of Alaska, said, “I’m just sad I never told her I loved her. I just don’t understand why.” — “That’s such bullshit,” the Colonel said as we walked to lunch. “As if Brooke Blakely gives two shits about Alaska.” “If Brooke Blakely died, wouldn’t you be sad?” I asked. “I guess, but I wouldn’t bemoan the fact I never told her I loved her. I don’t love her. She’s an idiot.” I thought everyone else had a better excuse to grieve than we did—after all, they hadn’t killed her—but I knew better than to try to talk to the Colonel when he was mad. nine days after “I’VE GOT A THEORY,” the Colonel said as I walked in the door after a miserable day of classes. The cold had begun to let up, but word had not spread to whoever ran the furnaces, so the classrooms were all stuffy and overheated, and I just wanted to crawl into bed and sleep until the time came to do it all over again. “Missed you in class today,” I noted as I sat down on my bed. The Colonel sat at his desk, hunched over a notebook. I lay down on my back and pulled the covers up over my head, but the Colonel was undiscouraged. “Right, well, I was busy coming up with the theory, which isn’t terribly likely, admittedly, but it’s plausible. So, listen. She kisses you. That night, someone calls. Jake, I imagine. They have a fight—about cheating or about something else—who knows. So she’s upset, and she wants to go see him. She comes back to the room crying, and she tells us to help her get off campus. And she’s freaked out, because, I don’t know, let’s say because if she can’t go visit him, Jake will break up with her. That’s just a hypothetical reason.

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

  East, they showed an enterprising interest in alliance with the Church of Rome, despite the problems caused by memories of Chalcedon, and this produced some lasting results, despite the intense divisions which it also created among Armenian Christians. Pope John XXII, an energetic though not uncontroversial pontiff (reigned 1316–34), showed particular interest in the plight of the Armenians and the prospect of bringing them into the Catholic fold. He sustained the missions of friars (both Franciscans and Dominicans) into Central Asia which had begun in the thirteenth century. Some of the warmest contacts which the friars made were with migrant Armenian communities in Iran and on the steppes; the earliest translations of recent Latin theologians like the Dominican Thomas Aquinas (see pp. 412–15) into any other language were into Armenian. One group of Armenian monks in Asia actually remodelled their monastic life on Dominican lines and accepted Roman obedience, taking a Latin name which also proclaimed their pride in their Armenian heritage as the Fratres Unitores of the congregation of St Gregory the Illuminator (see pp. 186–7). Similar Church unions took place in eastern Europe in the fifteenth century, in which Armenian congregations kept their liturgy and distinctive devotional practices, while acknowledging papal primacy as ‘Uniates’. These unions provided the model for later similar arrangements which Rome made with many other groups in the Counter-Reformation (see pp. 533–5). Not everyone was delighted by these moves to unity on Rome’s terms: the Armenian hierarchy clinging on in the Armenian heartland furiously opposed union with the papacy and the word ‘Uniate’ has often carried an abusive flavour. A Miaphysite Catholicate continued in very difficult circumstances to sustain the independent life of the Church from the cathedral in the former Armenian capital city of Ējmiacin or Vałaršapat.41 In the same period, the Dyophysite Church of the East developed its own strategies for survival. In a move of pragmatic desperation, it diverged from the universal tradition of Eastern Christianity and increasingly abandoned artistic representations of sacred subjects, especially in paintings or statues; they were likely to attract vandalism from Muslims. The Dyophysites had in any case always rejected crucifixes, which suggested to them a confusion of the natures of Jesus making God suffer on the Cross; so their crosses were bare to symbolize the resurrected Christ (ironically, the Miaphysite Armenians favoured the same bare cross, for their own opposite theological reasons). Friar William of Rubruck had been scandalized in the 1250s when a Dyophysite Christian in Central Asia saw a silver crucifix ‘in the French style’ and wrenched the figure of Christ off it.42 When Protestant missionaries arrived in the Ottoman Empire in the

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But in fact the fundamentalists had not gone away. Indeed, after the trial their views became more extreme. They felt embittered and nursed a deep grievance against mainstream culture. At Dayton, they had tried—badly—to fight the view of the more radical secularists that religion was an archaic irrelevance, and that only science was important. They could not express this point of view effectively and chose the wrong forum in which to do it. Bryan’s anti-German phobia was paranoid, and his demonizing of Darwin inaccurate. But the moral and spiritual imperatives of religion are important for humanity and should not be relegated unthinkingly to the scrap heap of history in the interests of an unfettered rationalism. The relationship between science and ethics has continued to be an issue of pressing concern. But the fundamentalists lost their case at Dayton, and it seemed to them that they had been treated with contempt and pushed to the margins of society. Fifty years earlier, the New Lights had constituted a majority in America; after the Scopes trial, they had become outsiders. But the ridicule of such secularist crusaders as Mencken was counterproductive. Fundamentalist faith was rooted in deep fear and anxiety that could not be assuaged by a purely rational argument. After Dayton, they became more extreme.36 Before the trial, evolution had not been an important issue for them, and even such literalists as Charles Hodge had accepted that the age of the world was more than six thousand years, whatever it said in the Bible. Few fundamentalists had believed in the so-called “creation science,” which argued that Genesis was scientifically sound in every detail. But after Dayton, fundamentalists closed their minds even more, and Creationism and an unswerving biblical literalism became central to the fundamentalist mind-set. They also drifted to the far right of the political spectrum. Before the war, fundamentalists like Riley and John R. Straton (1875–1929) had been willing to work for social reform and with people on the left. Now the Social Gospel was tainted by its association with the liberals who had defeated them in the denominations. This will be a constant theme in our story. Fundamentalism exists in a symbiotic relationship with an aggressive liberalism or secularism, and, under attack, invariably becomes more extreme, bitter, and excessive.

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

  and Bulgarian-speakers, who resented the continuing favour shown to Greeks by the Oecumenical Patriarch. Matters came to a head in 1860 when one leading bishop announced the creation of an independent Bulgarian Church. The Ottoman authorities were only too happy to encourage Christian divisions: ten years later they formally recognized a Bulgarian exarch (a bishop whose authority over other bishops was similar to that of the six ancient patriarchates). It took until 1961 for the Oecumenical Patriarch to recognize the exarch’s successors. The struggle between the exarchate and the Phanar was unusually bitter, and it produced a notable assertion of principle from the Oecumenical Patriarch. Faced with a situation where congregations and whole dioceses were declaring for the exarch on the basis of their common Bulgarian language and culture, in 1872 the Patriarch led a synod in Constantinople that condemned this as ‘ethnophyletism’, declaring it a heresy. The argument ran that there was no justification for an independent Church in Bulgaria, since it was still a territory under Ottoman suzerainty and with no other sovereign, unlike the Churches in the independent states of Serbia and Greece. The denunciation of ‘ethnophyletism’ was a commitment to a vision of Orthodoxy which affirmed that it must never simply be an expression of nationalism or even of a single national culture. Despite the fact that from its first expansion into the Balkans, Orthodoxy has often become precisely such particular expressions, the affirmation of 1872 is likely to prove of great importance to Orthodoxy in the future. In practical and immediate terms, it did not prevent either the continuing de facto independence of the Bulgarian exarchate or the eventual development of a kingdom of Bulgaria which reflected the exarchate’s boundaries. This was an unusually intimate melding of nationalism with the Church, which was treated by the monarchy rather in the fashion of Tsar Peter the Great and his successors in Russia (indeed, from 1908 until 1944, the monarchs of Bulgaria also styled themselves tsars). Ultimately this led to a routine politicization of Bulgarian Church leadership which antagonized many laypeople, and that has been seen as one of the reasons for the eventual weakening of Bulgarian Orthodox practice in the twentieth century. Despite the Church’s crucial role in creating modern Bulgaria, the post- Communist republic now has one of the lowest rates of participation in Church life of any Orthodox country in Eastern Europe.86 As the Ottoman authorities suffered humiliating losses of territory to new Christian polities which justified independence precisely by their Christian identity, it was not surprising that sultans were increasingly inclined to see their remaining Christian subjects as a threat to their survival, and emphasize their authority with reference to their Muslim identity. Since their sixteenth-century

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  his fault: my mother’s abandonment of my brother and me, the sadness at the center of her life. Then there was the secret of my sisters’ existence. The way they met their daddy in a roadside park after a tent service, so they could hug him through the car window. And there was the loss of that high-school boyfriend, a small grief that grew larger as I tallied the offenses. I tried to discuss my doubts and resentments with my mother, but I couldn’t get past her defense of Brother Terrell. Jesus had said that the poor would always be with us. It wasn’t his fault that he had to keep his family (her and my sisters) a secret. It was the fault of his enemies, who would use the information to destroy the ministry. Couldn’t I see that? When she wasn’t defending Brother Terrell, she was calling to tell me how depressed she was. “Sometimes, I just wish the Lord would take me.” It seemed to me that my mother saw death as the only way out. After nine months of trying to be a good Terrellite, I quit. I lacked whatever it took to live right, which in my mind was to abide by Terrellite doctrine. I also lacked the ability to stay married. My husband and I divorced, and I spent the next three years careening between sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and the increasingly paranoid reality of the Terrellites. With their big egos, infidelities, and cash transactions, these worlds were surprisingly alike. All I had to do was change clothes and I felt at home. Despite Mama and Brother Terrell’s attempts to keep the whereabouts of her ranch a secret, IRS agents showed up in the small town close to where she and my sisters lived. This scared Brother Terrell. He stopped visiting my mother’s house and bought another ranch about an hour and a half away. No one, including my mother, knew where it was located. There was just one problem: getting my mother and sisters to the ranch without revealing its whereabouts. I wasn’t along for these outings, but my sisters recount the experience from time to time at family gatherings: Brother Terrell is behind the wheel of his dark green Mercedes with Mama beside him in the passenger seat. My sisters are in back. They rock along some gravel farm-to-market road with Brother Terrell hitting the brake and the gas pedal, the brake and the gas pedal. They pass some rancher poking along in the opposite direction, raising his hand at every vehicle that passes, howdy-howdy (pronounced “hidy” in Texas). The sun in his eye

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

  emperor prestige and legitimacy as well as glorifying the dead. Some of Augustus’s successors explicitly assumed the role of a god in their lifetimes, and although this was politically risky at first, by the late third century it had become routine for emperors to claim divine status. Aristocratic Romans resented worshipping a man who had once been a colleague. A note of regret for the past, of merely grudging respect for the emperor, runs through much literature of the early empire, particularly in the surviving work of the first-century-CE historian Tacitus. It was no coincidence that, as in Hellenistic culture, Stoicism became one of the most influential philosophical stances in Rome. As long as the western part of the Roman Empire lasted, this regret never wholly left the old aristocracy – or the newly rich, who were anxious to take on aristocratic manners and attitudes. So, over the next two centuries and more, divine honours were paid to a political leader whose position in the empire often came from a nakedly brutal seizure of power. This divine leader attached himself to the traditional gods of Rome (a pantheon rather like that of the Greeks). For many aristocratic Romans there would now be a complex of emotions associated with this amalgam of the political and the divine. Traditional duty demanded that they take their part in ancient cults: the worship of the pantheon and the priesthoods associated with it were inseparable from Roman identity, and pride in that identity might trump any quasi-Republican distaste for the honours accorded the emperor. Beyond the elite, there was no reason why enthusiasm for the old gods should die among the mass of ordinary Romans.37 The imperial cult itself is testimony to the continuing appeal of the Roman pantheon, as otherwise it would not have been worth the investment. But the powerful were now well advised to keep an eye on how the emperor treated the many religions of his subjects. Whatever religion any individual emperor chose to favour would arouse the same set of associations between politics and the world beyond as the imperial cult encouraged by Augustus. There were plenty of unofficial competitors to the Roman pantheon, now that gods of all names and descriptions were able to take holiday trips along the sailing routes of a Mediterranean Sea united by Roman military might. Fertility cults in plenty arrived from the East, or more reflective religions like Iranian Mithraism, which described life as a great struggle between light and darkness, good and evil. Among the contenders for the notice of emperors and the Roman people, few people at first noticed or took seriously a newly emerged eccentric little Jewish sect on the fringes of the synagogues.

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

  – this, not surprisingly, caused violent resentment among fellow citizens who did not share their obsessions.16 Most philosophers would not take such risks, and saw their calling as to offer comment on and analysis of the society around them, as part of a wider exploration of humanity and its environment. Much of their comment was openly critical. Patterns were provided by three philosophers who taught in Athens: Socrates (c. 469–399 BCE), Plato (428/7–348/7 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE). This trio are foundational to the Western philosophical tradition, first Greek, then Roman. Christians inherited Graeco-Roman culture and thought, and when they have talked about questions of faith or morals or have tried to make sense of their sacred books, it has taken an extraordinary effort of will and original imagination to avoid doing so in ways already created by the Greeks. It was particularly difficult in the early centuries, when Christianity was so much dominated by the Classical thought-world around it, at the very time when it was having to do a great deal of hard thinking as to what it actually believed. Socrates wrote nothing himself and we hear his voice mediated through writings of his pupil and admirer Plato, mostly in dialogue form. While he was teaching in Athens, his was an insistently and infuriatingly questioning voice, embodying the conviction that questions can never cease to be asked if human beings are to battle with any success against the constant affliction of public and private problems. At Socrates’s trial, Plato portrays the philosopher as insisting in his speech of defence that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’.17 It was Socrates’s questioning of the half-century-old Athenian democracy which was a major cause of his trial and execution; his trial is the central event around which Plato’s dialogues are focused, making it as much a trial of Athenian society and thought as it was of Socrates. The grotesque absurdity of killing a man who was arguably Athens’s greatest citizen on charges of blasphemy and immorality impelled Plato to see a discussion of politics as one facet of discussions of justice, the nature of morality and divine purpose – in fact to see the two discussions as interchangeable. Western religion and philosophy have remained in the shadow of those exchanges: Western culture has borrowed the insistence of Socrates that priority should be given over received wisdom to logical argument and rational procession of thought, and the Western version of the Christian tradition is especially prone to this Socratic principle. Yet he was also to find his most mischievous disciple in a nineteenth-century Danish Lutheran who overturned even the systematic pursuit of rationality: S㸡ren Kierkegaard (see pp. 833–5). Plato’s influence on Christianity was equally profound in two other directions. First, his view of reality and authenticity propelled one basic impulse in

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

  weaken the Christian empire of the East. In 1204 a crusade which had begun with the aim of attacking Muslim Egypt turned instead to Constantinople, had no hesitation in sacking it and then set up a ‘Latin’ empire there. This catastrophe led to deep bitterness among the Greeks against Westerners, which ruined the chances for any scheme of religious reunion before the final destruction of Byzantine power in 1453 (see pp. 475–7). One of the effects of the Crusades was to establish an extraordinary new variant on the monastic ideal. The hugely popular military saints of the early Church – Sergius, Martin, George – had gained their sanctity when they renounced earthly warfare; now the very act of being a soldier could create holiness. The mood is expressed in a fresco that can still be seen in the crypt of Auxerre Cathedral: here the Bishop of Auxerre, a protégé of Pope Urban II and himself active in the First Crusade, commissioned a picture of the end of time in which Christ himself was portrayed as a warrior on horseback. It was an image impossible to imagine in the early Church, and at the time it was still alien to the Greek East; at much the same time, a Greek visiting Spain was offended when he heard St James of Compostela referred to as a ‘knight of Christ’.42 It was against such a background of changed assumptions that in the wake of the First Crusade there emerged monastic orders of warriors dedicated to fighting on behalf of Christianity, principally the Knights Templar and Knights Hospitaller. Their names reveal their agenda: the Hospitallers were named from their Hospital headquarters in Jerusalem, and the Templars from the Temple. The Templars built churches in the circular plan of what they thought was Herod’s Temple, puzzlingly ignoring the fact that it had been destroyed by the Romans, and not realizing that the building that they were imitating was actually the Muslim Dome of the Rock (with an equally puzzling triumph of wishful thinking, they confidently identified the Al-Aqsa Mosque, standing beside the Dome of the Rock, as Solomon’s Temple). Western architects were anxious to reproduce Herod’s Temple, but could not or would not build the dome which was its whole architectural point. Such circular buildings can be seen all the way into northern Europe, notably as the lawyers’ twelfth-century Temple Church in London – for the military orders gained extensive lands and local administrative houses (preceptories) right across the continent to finance their work. Between 1307 and 1312, the entire Templar Order was suppressed, once it was clear that the Templars had no chance of contributing to a reconquest of the Holy Land. It was an understandable reaction both to their failure and to the apparent lack of purpose of their continuing wealth and power in estates which extended not merely through the eastern Mediterranean but as far west in Europe as Dublin. Admiring eleventh- and twelfth-century monarchs and noblemen had

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

  history who took the long view, recommended that the Pope should authorize a married priesthood for Africa, but the obvious parallel in the married clergy of the Greek Catholic Churches of eastern Europe did not impress the Curia.49 When Churches took a hard line on such matters of sexuality, they might well find their flocks and even their clergy voting with their feet, as when, in 1917, sixty-five Yoruba ministers were expelled from the Nigerian Methodist Church for polygamy. Yorubaland, a cultural frontier where the contest between Islam, Christianity and traditional religion led people to a questioning spirit in religious matters, was not a country to breed meekness to external authority. The expelled ministers went on to found a United African Methodist Church whose ‘united’ character, like that of a previous ‘United’ Methodist Church created back in England, consisted in a sturdily united refusal to be bossed around by Wesleyan Methodists.50 By that period, there was a vigorous movement through most of Africa to found Churches independent of European interference: Colenso, indeed, had retained a loyal Zulu following when deposed by the Metropolitan Bishop of Cape Town, and it was half a century after his death before most of the remaining Colensoites were persuaded back into mainstream Anglicanism.51 The movement to create African-initiated Churches further fragmented African Christianity, but it might be regarded as a logical end result from the thinking of the more imaginative early missionaries. Among them had been an outstanding leader back in London, Henry Venn, grandson of one of the original ‘Clapham Sect’ and for more than thirty years from 1841 General Secretary of the Church Missionary Society. He was one of the first to enunciate a policy easier for Protestants than Catholics to envisage: an African Church based on a ‘three-self’ principle – self-supporting, self-governing, self-propagating. Naturally, for the Anglican Venn, this was not meant to involve ecclesiastical separation, but it demanded that local leadership should be established as soon as possible. A disastrous missionary venture of 1841 in West Africa prompted the CMS into acting on his strategy: a hugely ambitious expedition in the River Niger basin, during which fever struck down 130 of 145 Europeans and killed forty of them. The Niger catastrophe seemed to show that Africans were better suited to withstand local conditions. Among its survivors was an African clearly endowed with leadership qualities, and who during visits to England had become a personal friend of Venn: Samuel Ajayi Crowther (his English baptismal names commemorated the Samuel Crowther who was a leading figure in the CMS). Crowther was another Yoruba – indeed, through his writings, he was the main agent in popularizing this proud self-ascription for his people.52 The British Navy had freed him from a slave ship bound for the Americas, and he then

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  However, Slayton had made Anders the backup command module pilot for Apollo 11, which meant Anders would be the one who stayed with the orbiting spacecraft while his two crewmates flew the lunar module to the Moon’s surface and back. To Anders, the writing was on the wall just as he expected; he’d mastered the spacecraft so beautifully on Apollo 8 that no one would ever let him leave it. In late January, President Nixon sent Borman and his family on an eight-country goodwill tour of Europe. At each stop, Borman was greeted as a hero, and people listened with rapt attention as he described his adventure around the Moon. In Rome, he and his family met the Pope and stood on the same piece of ground where Galileo had been condemned for heresy in 1633 for advocating Copernicus’s argument that the Earth travels around the Sun. Of the crew’s reading from Genesis, Pope Paul VI said, “For that particular moment of time, the world was at peace.” Flush with confidence and shot full of momentum from the success of Apollo 8, NASA entered its final push to land men on the Moon. It would require two flights—Apollo 9 and Apollo 10—to prepare for a landing mission sometime in the summer of 1969, but after Apollo 8, the space agency believed there was virtually nothing it couldn’t do. It was around this time that NASA asked Borman to talk about the space program and Apollo 8 at American colleges. Some welcomed him. Many more did not. Often, he was shouted down by protesters who resented the presence of a military man on campus. At Columbia University in New York, he was pelted by marshmallows, then overrun onstage by students dressed in gorilla costumes. In Boston, a helicopter had to deliver him past the mobs that blocked access to his speech. But the worst experience came at Cornell University, where astronomy professor Carl Sagan invited Borman and Susan to his home for a roundtable with students. The Bormans accepted, then were treated to an evening of attacks on America and its conduct in Vietnam, all of it encouraged by Sagan, whom Borman would never forgive for the treatment. After Apollo 9 and Apollo 10 flew successful missions in March and May 1969, Borman and his family boarded a plane for another goodwill trip, this one to Russia. The Soviet ambassador to Washington had extended the invitation, and President Nixon thought it a positive step toward easing tensions between the two nations. With the president’s permission, Borman and Susan brought their sons. As the first astronaut ever to visit Russia, Borman was given first-class treatment and shown some of the Soviet Union’s proudest sites. He was given a tour of the highly secret “Star City” near Moscow, where cosmonauts lived and trained; laid wreaths at the resting places of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin and cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin; sampled wines in Yalta; and met with a top Soviet physicist.

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

  remedies for some of the greater absurdities in the government of the Protestant Church of Ireland, which perpetuated a ghostly institutional structure inherited from the pre-Reformation Irish Church while serving only a fraction of the modern population. It was a sign of a serious identity crisis in British Anglicanism that an Oxford sermon of 1833 protesting against this eminently sensible measure became a national sensation. A local High Church clergyman, John Keble, had been invited to give this customary sermon for the opening of the Oxford Assizes, the biannual session of the judges from Westminster. He seized the chance to alarm the assize judges and a large audience of university and local worthies with an attack on ‘National Apostasy’. Keble saw the suppression of a crop of Irish Anglican bishoprics as a deliberate attack on the Church by the State, breaking the unity they had formerly enjoyed. The Whig government’s disregard for Irish bishops was no less than ‘enmity to Him who gave them their commission at first’.54 Clearly many of Keble’s fellow clergy agreed. Keble was enthusiastically supported by the vicar of the University Church, John Henry Newman, who had jettisoned the Evangelicalism in which he had been raised and was now embracing Anglican High Church-manship with the zeal of a convert, to the point of rapidly rethinking its nature, in ways which only gradually became apparent. Newman was himself a preacher of unusual charisma, whose sermons packed his stately church with young admirers. The power of his oratory can still be felt through the very considerable quantities of resonant prose which he produced in his long life.55 Throughout the rest of the 1830s, Keble, Newman and a number of friends mostly associated with Oxford University put forward a new vision of the Church of England in a series of Tracts for the Times (hence the activity they inspired has been called either the Oxford Movement or Tractarianism). Their project was to minimize the Church of England’s debt to the Reformation which had actually created it as a State Church; to restore a sense of Catholicity to it and to its worldwide offshoots, emphasizing its apostolic succession of bishops across the Reformation divide, its distinctive spirituality and the sacramental beauty of its liturgy. It was thanks to the Tractarians in the 1830s that the word ‘Anglican’, that casual and unflattering coinage of King James VI (see p. 648), gained its first real currency. ‘Anglicanism’ had a pleasing echo of that French variant on Catholic identity, ‘Gallicanism’, and thus suggested a Church which combined a truly Catholic character with a national focus, and which might – just might – acknowledge the primacy of a properly ordered papacy. Tractarians also tried out a new coinage, calling themselves ‘Anglo-Catholics’. Much of what the Tractarians were saying amounted to a restatement of the

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

  African reactions to a political situation transformed in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. A complete partition of Africa by European powers, through the Congress of Berlin in 1884–5, resulted in the destruction of a vast number of local power structures. The only lands left governing themselves were Ethiopia and Liberia, the latter a dubious exception. In King Leopold of Belgium’s new so-called Congo Free State, a vast and scandalously misgoverned personal fiefdom, there was a sad symbolism of changed times when, in the 1890s, Baptist missionaries had no compunction in quarrying the ruins of Kongo’s once-splendid royal and Catholic Cathedral of São Salvador to build a new church for themselves.63 Christian missionary organizations largely welcomed the new situation, although colonial administrators, mindful of the disaster of the Great Indian Rebellion of 1857–8 (see pp. 893–4), were generally careful to respect the large areas of Africa which were now Islamic – to the annoyance of many aspiring evangelists. Still Christians had advantages. Now that colonial governments were demanding the regular collection of taxes and the filling in of forms, Western- style education was at a premium and only the Churches could offer it. In South Africa, the Xhosa word for Christians became ‘School’.64 Some Churches became alarmingly identified with the new imperialism. Catholics, Anglicans, Scots Presbyterians, Methodists, Dutch Reformed, even the Salvation Army, all accepted large grants of land from colonial promoters in ‘Rhodesia’ (now Zimbabwe/Zambia) and Kenya, which provoked widespread resentment against their missions.65 Now it was possible to conceive of Christianity spanning the continent just as the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes envisaged a British-owned Cape to Cairo railway. Despite the unfortunate connotations of the image, it became common to talk about a ‘chain’ of missions across Africa, all belonging to some particular organization or Church. This generally European vision was to be fulfilled in a rather different fashion by African-initiated Churches.

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

  look like imposing modern châteaux. Its greater churches resounded to splendid brand-new organs, tailor-made for the distinctive style of French organ and choral music, their splendid cases major features of lavishly redesigned church interiors, from which medieval furnishings had been banished in favour of opening up sweeping vistas highlighting the drama of the Counter-Reformation High Mass.59 Beyond this liturgical magnificence, the Church in France was bitterly divided by disputes looking back to the Reformation years. Throughout the civil wars of the sixteenth century, a great polarity remained among French Catholics. On one extreme were those prepared to compromise with Protestants for the sake of preserving France in its sacred trust of being the Catholic Church for French people: a ‘Gallican’ version of Catholicism, sneeringly styled ‘politique’ by its enemies. On the other were those anxious to cement France in its commitment to Counter-Reformation, and to an allegiance to the papacy which might run counter to the priorities of the monarchy. Running through this was yet another theological dispute which involved the ways in which that multifaceted theologian Augustine of Hippo might be used to explore the problems which agitated Western Christianity through the Reformation. Although Protestants from Martin Luther onwards took up Augustine’s theology of God’s grace, some theologians who stayed loyal to Rome were also compelled by his pessimistic account of the human condition unaided by grace. A new Augustinianism surfaced in the University of Leuven in the Spanish Netherlands, in particular in the thought of Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638), who as an exile from the Protestant northern provinces of the Netherlands had particular reason to be conscious of the power in Reformed accounts of salvation based on Augustine. Jansen, who became Bishop of Ypres, clashed bitterly with Jesuit theologians attempting their own finessing of Augustine’s thought in order to defend human free will. Jansen ensured that his exposition of a predestinarian theology as thoroughgoing as anything that Calvin wrote was published by his executors when he was safely dead; it was a treatise aggressively titled Augustinus. A condemnation of Augustinus secured from the Pope by the Jesuits in 1641 did not stop leading French theologians reading it with fascination. ‘Jansenist’ theology became a rallying point for those who had diverse grievances against the Jesuits: these ranged from their encouragement of Catholic extremism during the civil wars of the previous century, through their scandalous love of theatre and dance as an educational tool, to their shocking tolerance of aspects of Chinese and Indian religion (see pp. 705–7). Jansenism was a call to seriousness. From the mid-seventeenth century, therefore, disputes about Jansenism turned