Surprise

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 Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  39 God Shopping Lord, You may not recognize me speaking for someone else. I have a son. He is so little, so ignorant. He likes to stand at the screen door, calling oggie, oggie, entering language, and sometimes a dog will stop and come up the walk, perhaps accidentally. May he believe this is not an accident? At the screen, welcoming each beast in love’s name, Your emissary. —Louise Glück, “The Gift” If you’d told me even a year before I start taking Dev to church regular that I’d wind up whispering my sins in the confessional or on my knees saying the rosary, I would’ve laughed myself cockeyed. More likely pastime? Pole dancer. International spy. Drug mule. Assassin. One Sunday I’m eating a bagel with a smear and reading the paper when Dev, age eight, intensely blue-eyed in his Power Ranger pajamas, announces he wants to go to church. I barely look up. Despite my prayer life, organized religion still strikes me as bogus. Though Mother had pored over sacred texts of every kind, she was —as I’ve said before—no more able to commit to a faith than to a husband. She quoted Marx calling religion the opiate of the masses. So I’m suspect of the hierarchies. Idly asking Dev why he wants to go to church, I’m confident that no sentence he utters will rouse me from my Sunday loll. But he says: to see if God’s there. The phrase straightens my slouchy spine. Some native faith lets him stare out the window at the aluminum sky and see a scrim before heaven. Okay, I say, and I ring up a sober Episcopalian (an oxymoron, he alleges in the car), the only guy I know who goes to church. If I’d had a pal attending a mosque or temple or zendo, we’d have gone there. So disinterested am I, so devoid of curiosity, that I climb into my friend’s car toting a paperback, like the one I carry to soccer fields stiff with frost, to pass time. It’s a capital-C Church, with gray stones right out of some horror-movie castle. It sits amid red maples between the university on one side and housing projects on the other. Soon as the engine dies, Dev bolts for the huge oak doors, his loafers slapping up the leaf-strewn walk. He has on a hand-me-down sport coat. With his green clip-on bow tie, he looks like some refugee from a 1950s wedding. Going in makes me a little watery. In the foyer, I expect to find some Ozzie and Harriet episode in progress, the women in pillbox hats and white gloves and ear bobs, the men in lizard- green jackets and wing tips, everybody in that old fluorescent light the color of cucumber that makes white people look so seedy. But this parish is half black, with people wearing jeans and khakis. Even the ancient blue-haired ladies have pants on.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  What we’re seeing in nonconcordance is the difference between learning and liking, from chapter 3. Genital response is the automatic, trained response to something that’s sex-related. Pavlov’s dogs salivated when a bell rang, not because they wanted to eat the bell but because their learning system had linked the bell with food. Similarly, your emotional One Ring has learned what’s sex-related (remember the rats in jackets?), and your learning system activates physiological responses to whatever it has learned is sex-related. Women vary from each other, but different women seem fairly consistent in their level of concordance.8 Precisely how a woman’s genitals respond to sex-related stimuli seems to vary depending on the sensitivity of her brakes and accelerator. Low-sensitivity brakes and high-sensitivity accelerator leads to more blood flow, and high-sensitivity brakes and high sensitivity accelerator actually leads to less blood flow, compared with other women.9 And women who are attracted to women tend to be more concordant than straight women… mostly. But it’s complicated.10 Yet again, we’re all made of the same parts, organized in different ways. What happens when a man takes erectile dysfunction medication? It increases blood flow to the genitals during sexual stimulation. What happens when a woman takes erectile dysfunction medication? Same thing. And what happens when you increase blood flow to a woman’s genitals? Not a lot. Because: nonconcordance. Olivia and Patrick tried it. They took an ED pill together as an experiment in flipping the chasing dynamic—and also because why not? (NB: “Why not?” includes no known medical benefit and unknown medical risk. Taking a prescription medication without a doctor’s supervision is always risky. But let’s be real here. People do it. But don’t. It doesn’t do what you want it to do, as we’ll see.) Olivia’s lips—the lips on her face, that is—turned dark, dark red, so that she looked like she was wearing lipstick. Other than that, she didn’t notice any particular effect. For once, Olivia’s experience was typical of most women’s. Patrick, on the other hand, felt like he’d taken an aphrodisiac. Olivia looked irresistibly beautiful, and his skin felt like the volume had been turned up on his nerve endings, so that every sensation was amplified, magnified. They went out for ice cream after they took the drug, for something to do while they waited for it to kick in, and they had to turn right back around because Patrick couldn’t wait to get Olivia naked. Erectile dysfunction drugs don’t do any of this; all they do is increase blood flow to the genitals. Such is the power of placebo. The same thing happened occasionally when Patrick would drink at weddings and Olivia was the designated driver.

• From A History of God (1993)

  When Paul and John spoke about Jesus as though he had some kind of preexistent life, they were not suggesting that he was a second divine “person” in the later Trinitarian sense. They were indicating that Jesus had transcended temporal and individual modes of existence. Because the “power” and “wisdom” that he represented were activities that derived from God, he had in some way expressed “what was there from the beginning.” 25 These ideas were comprehensible in a strictly Jewish context, though later Christians with a Greek background would interpret them differently. In the Acts of the Apostles, written as late as 100 CE, we can see that the first Christians still had an entirely Jewish conception of God. On the feast of Pentecost, when hundreds of Jews had congregated in Jerusalem from all over the diaspora to celebrate the gift of the Torah on Sinai, the Holy Spirit had descended upon Jesus’ companions. They heard “what sounded like a powerful wind from heaven ... and something appeared to them that seemed like tongues of fire.” 26 The Holy Spirit had manifested itself to these first Jewish Christians as it had to their contemporaries, the tannaim. Immediately the disciples rushed outside and began preaching to the crowds of Jews and Godfearers from “Mesopotamia, Judaea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya around Cyrene.” 27 To their amazement, everybody heard the disciples preaching in his own language. When Peter rose to address the crowd, he presented this phenomenon as the apogee of Judaism. The prophets had foretold the day when God would pour out his Spirit upon mankind so that even women and slaves would have visions and dream dreams. 28 This day would inaugurate the Messianic Kingdom, when God would live on earth with his people. Peter did not claim that Jesus of Nazareth was God. He “was a man, commended to you by God by the miracles and portents and signs that God worked through him when he was among you.” After his cruel death, God had raised him to life and had exalted him to a specially high status “by God’s right hand.” The prophets and Psalmists had all foretold these events; thus the “whole House of Israel” could be certain that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah. 29 This speech appears to have been the message (kerygma) of the earliest Christians. By the end of the fourth century, Christianity had become strong in precisely the places listed above by the author of Acts: it took root among Jewish synagogues in the diaspora which had attracted a large number of Godfearers or proselytes. Paul’s reformed Judaism appeared to address many of their dilemmas.

• From A History of God (1993)

  What St. Paul had called the scandal of the cross was every bit as shocking as the scandal of an apostate Messiah. In both cases, the disciples proclaimed the birth of a new form of Judaism which had replaced the old; they embraced a paradoxical creed. Christian belief that there was new life in the defeat of the Cross was similar to the Sabbatarians’ conviction that apostasy was a sacred mystery. Both groups believed that the grain of wheat had to rot in the earth in order to bear fruit; they believed that the old Torah was dead and had been replaced by the new law of the Spirit. Both developed Trinitarian and Incarnational conceptions of God. Like many Christians during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Sabbatarians believed that they were standing on the threshold of a new world. Kabbalists had repeatedly argued that in the Last Days the true mysteries of God, which had been obscured during the exile, would be revealed. Sabbatarians who believed that they were living in the Messianic era felt free to break away from traditional ideas about God, even if that meant accepting an apparently blasphemous theology. Thus Abraham Cardazo (d. 1706), who had been born a Marrano and had started by studying Christian theology, believed that because of their sins all Jews had been destined to become apostates. This was to have been their punishment. But God had saved his people from this terrible fate by allowing the Messiah to make the supreme sacrifice on their behalf. He came to the frightening conclusion that during their time in exile, the Jews had lost all true knowledge of God. Like the Christians and Deists of the Enlightenment, Cardazo was attempting to peel away what he saw as inauthentic accretions from his religion and to return to the pure faith of the Bible. It will be recalled that during the second century, some Christian Gnostics had evolved a kind of metaphysical anti-Semitism by distinguishing the Hidden God of Jesus Christ from the cruel God of the Jews, who was responsible for the creation of the world. Now Cardazo unconsciously revived this old idea but completely reversed it. He also taught that there were two Gods: one who was the God who had revealed himself to Israel and another who was common knowledge. In every civilization people had proved the existence of a First Cause: this was the God of Aristotle, who had been worshipped by the whole pagan world. This deity had no religious significance: he had not created the world and had no interest whatever in humanity; he had, therefore, not revealed himself in the Bible, which never mentions him.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  On his way to this assignment, Miltitz was loaded for bear. He had with him letters speaking very clearly and harshly about Luther, calling him a “child of Satan, son of perdition, scrofulous sheep, and tare in the vineyard,” and so on.14 But a strange thing happened as Miltitz made his way to Saxony with his arsenal of papal brèves and the fabled Golden Rose. Everywhere he stopped along the way, he saw that the public sentiment in Germany was disturbingly, was overwhelmingly for Luther. When he arrived in Nuremberg on December 18, Miltitz met with Scheurl, who confirmed this unpleasant development, and Scheurl used this information to influence Miltitz to take a somehow more conciliatory approach. Scheurl then put himself forth as a mediator, informing Spalatin that Luther should accept Miltitz’s requests in a friendly way. Scheurl clearly felt this was the only way forward that could avoid the disaster of Luther’s being sent to Rome and branded a heretic, while at the same time it would not require Luther to recant, which anyone who understood him knew he clearly would never do. We see in Scheurl’s meeting with Miltitz how much more complicated the situation was than we might be inclined to believe. Miltitz explained to Scheurl that Rome was in fact highly displeased with Tetzel’s indulgence sermons, which had caused the whole mess. Miltitz went so far as to declare Tetzel a Schweinehund (literally “pig dog”). Miltitz even said that the highly vaunted Prierias had himself been dressed down by Rome for his hastily written response to Luther’s writing. And he explained that it was mostly Luther’s widely disseminated Sermon on Indulgences and Grace that had everyone up in arms, for it had been widely circulated in German, and had therefore greatly damaged the church in the eyes of the faithful. In this, we observe how this thing that would come to be called the Reformation progressed due to forces beyond the control of the principal players. The new technology of printing and the subsequent hunger for printed works catapulted many of Luther’s writings to distances and into places he had no intention of their going. When he had his Sermon on Indulgences and Grace printed, he had no idea it would get the traction that it did and spread his ideas far and wide without any context, and end up injuring the church. We can never know if the way such things happened harmed the cause of reformation or whether without such things happening the Reformation itself would ever have taken place at all.

• From A History of God (1993)

  By the time of Jesus’ death in about 30 CE, the Jews were passionate monotheists, so nobody expected the Messiah to be a divine figure: he would simply be an ordinary, if privileged, human being. Some of the Rabbis suggested that his name and identity were known to God from all eternity. In that sense, therefore, the Messiah could be said to have been “with God” from before the beginning of time in the same symbolic way as the figure of divine Wisdom in Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus. Jews expected the Messiah, the anointed one, to be a descendant of King David, who, as king and spiritual leader, had founded the first independent Jewish kingdom in Jerusalem. The Psalms sometimes called David or the Messiah “the Son of God,” but that was simply a way of expressing his intimacy with Yahweh. Nobody since the return from Babylon had imagined that Yahweh actually had a son, like the abominable deities of the goyim. Mark’s Gospel, which as the earliest is usually regarded as the most reliable, presents Jesus as a perfectly normal man, with a family that included brothers and sisters. No angels announced his birth or sang over his crib. He had not been marked out during his infancy or adolescence as remarkable in any way. When he began to teach, his townsmen in Nazareth were astonished that the son of the local carpenter should have turned out to be such a prodigy. Mark begins his narrative with Jesus’ career. It seems that he may originally have been the disciple of one John the Baptist, a wandering ascetic who had probably been an Essene: John had regarded the Jerusalem establishment as hopelessly corrupt and preached excoriating sermons against it. He urged the populace to repent and to accept the Essene rite of purification by baptism in the River Jordan. Luke suggests that Jesus and John were actually related. Jesus had made the long journey from Nazareth to Judaea to be baptized by John. As Mark tells us: “No sooner had he come out of the water than he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit, like a dove, descending on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; my favor rests upon you.’ ”1 John the Baptist had immediately recognized Jesus as the Messiah. The next thing we hear about Jesus is that he began to preach in all the towns and villages of Galilee, announcing: “The Kingdom of God has arrived!”2

• From A History of God (1993)

  The experience of Umar and the other Muslims who were converted by the Koran can perhaps be compared to the experience of art described by George Steiner in his book Real Presences: Is there anything in what we say? He speaks of what he calls “the indiscretion of serious art, literature and music” which “queries the last privacies of our existence.” It is an invasion or an annunciation, which breaks into “the small house of our cautionary being” and commands us “change your life!” After such a summons, the house “is no longer habitable in quite the same way as it was before.”20 Muslims like Umar seem to have experienced a similar unsettling of sensibility, an awakening and a disturbing sense of significance which enabled them to make the painful break with the traditional past. Even those Qurayshis who refused to accept Islam were disturbed by the Koran and found that it lay outside all their familiar categories: it was nothing like the inspiration of the kahin or the poet; nor was it like the incantations of a magician. Some stories show powerful Qurayshis who remained steadfastly with the opposition being visibly shaken when they listened to a sura. It is as though Muhammad had created an entirely new literary form that some people were not ready for but which thrilled others. Without this experience of the Koran, it is extremely unlikely that Islam would have taken root. We have seen that it took the ancient Israelites some 700 years to break with their old religious allegiances and accept monotheism, but Muhammad managed to help the Arabs achieve this difficult transition in a mere 23 years. Muhammad as poet and prophet and the Koran as text and theophany are surely an unusually striking instance of the deep congruence that exists between art and religion.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  I am grateful for what Argula writes about my wedding plans; I am not surprised about such gossip, since so many other bits of gossip are around concerning me. Nevertheless give her my thanks and tell her I am in God’s hand as a creature whose heart God may change and rechange, kill and revive again, at any moment. Nevertheless, the way I feel now, and have felt thus far, I will not marry. It is not that I do not feel my flesh or sex, since I am neither wood nor stone, but my mind is far removed from marriage, since I daily expect death and the punishment due to a heretic. Therefore I shall not limit God’s work in me, nor shall I rely on my own heart. Yet I hope God does not let me live long.5 It seems that the detachment from this world that looked like sheer morbidity under the pear tree with Staupitz in 1505 had not changed much and that Luther was still fully expecting to meet his Maker via unnatural means, and even welcomed it. It is obvious he was not in 1524 looking forward to any future involving a wife and children, nor did this attitude seem to change throughout that winter. On April 16, 1525, however, just before he left Wittenberg for Eisleben, where he wrote his famous Admonition to Peace, and before he saw with his own eyes the extent of what was happening, he wrote to Spalatin, still protesting strongly against marriage. At the same time, however, he seemed to hint that this protestation was not the whole story: Incidentally, regarding what you are writing about my marrying [let me say the following]: I do not want you to wonder that a famous lover like me does not marry. It is rather strange that I, who so often write about matrimony and get mixed up with women, have not yet turned into a woman, to say nothing of not having married one. . . . But you are a sluggish lover who does not dare to become the husband of even one woman. Watch out that I, who have no thought of marriage at all, do not some day overtake you too eager suitors—just as God usually does those things which are least expected. I am saying this seriously to urge you to do what you are intending.6

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  To Luther, who worried endlessly about whether he had said the words with true feeling, the insouciance was profoundly shocking. They even joked about it over their supper, boasting how at the elevation they had said, “Bread you are and bread you will remain.” Luther later recalled their ridicule when the Real Presence of Christ in the sacrament became the keystone of his theology, important enough to split with the followers of the leading Swiss theologian Huldrych Zwingli, who denied the Real Presence. As he used the episode to illustrate the abuses of the papal Mass, his listeners would have been aware of the parallel. 43 Luther’s other memory concerned a visit to the Scala Sancta in St. John Lateran, the “Pilate stairs” that Christ had mounted on his way to his trial and which supposedly had been brought by St. Helen from Jerusalem. Here the pious believer had to climb the steps on his knees, reciting an “Our Father” on each step to gain remission from Purgatory. Luther, who wanted to save the soul of his paternal grandfather, Heine Luder, mounted the steps but, overcome with tiredness, began to wonder whether the prayers would work. This was a story he repeated later in life in sermons as well as at table, its interpretation shifting with time. When his eleven-year-old son, Paul, heard it in 1544, it had become part of the story of how Luther had broken with Rome. As Luther now recalled, when he climbed the steps he suddenly remembered the phrase of the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk, repeated in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, that “the just shall live by faith alone,” importing into the episode his later theological understanding. 44 9. and 10. Something of what Luther was trying to convey in the 1530s to a generation that had grown up with the Reformation can be grasped from a pamphlet printed in Nuremberg in 1515. It provided a handy tourist guide to the indulgences the devout could obtain in the Eternal City, listed through the year with the precise numbers of days’ remission. The calculations are dizzying. A special symbol marks the days when the pious pilgrim could get significant fractions of remittance from Purgatory, with “p” indicating full indulgence. For convenience, the guide supplies a list of all seven pilgrimage churches and the remissions on offer, with a brief description of the highlights, such as the Jerusalem Chapel, which women could enter only on one day every year. The pamphlet also provides a haunting woodcut of Christ’s face on the Veronica cloth for meditation, and a final image of Christ on the Cross surrounded by a ring of Hosts. Focused on salvation, it would have reflected the devotional state of mind of Luther and many others as they approached Rome.

• From A History of God (1993)

  His disciples believed that he would soon return to inaugurate the Messianic Kingdom of God, and, since there was nothing heretical about such a belief, their sect was accepted as authentically Jewish by no less a person than Rabbi Gamaliel, the grandson of Hillel and one of the greatest of the tannaim . His followers worshipped in the Temple every day as fully observant Jews. Ultimately, however, the New Israel, inspired by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, would become a Gentile faith, which would evolve its own distinctive conception of God. By the time of Jesus’ death in about 30 CE , the Jews were passionate monotheists, so nobody expected the Messiah to be a divine figure: he would simply be an ordinary, if privileged, human being. Some of the Rabbis suggested that his name and identity were known to God from all eternity. In that sense, therefore, the Messiah could be said to have been “with God” from before the beginning of time in the same symbolic way as the figure of divine Wisdom in Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus. Jews expected the Messiah, the anointed one, to be a descendant of King David, who, as king and spiritual leader, had founded the first independent Jewish kingdom in Jerusalem. The Psalms sometimes called David or the Messiah “the Son of God,” but that was simply a way of expressing his intimacy with Yahweh. Nobody since the return from Babylon had imagined that Yahweh actually had a son, like the abominable deities of the goyim . Mark’s Gospel, which as the earliest is usually regarded as the most reliable, presents Jesus as a perfectly normal man, with a family that included brothers and sisters. No angels announced his birth or sang over his crib. He had not been marked out during his infancy or adolescence as remarkable in any way. When he began to teach, his townsmen in Nazareth were astonished that the son of the local carpenter should have turned out to be such a prodigy. Mark begins his narrative with Jesus’ career. It seems that he may originally have been the disciple of one John the Baptist, a wandering ascetic who had probably been an Essene: John had regarded the Jerusalem establishment as hopelessly corrupt and preached excoriating sermons against it. He urged the populace to repent and to accept the Essene rite of purification by baptism in the River Jordan. Luke suggests that Jesus and John were actually related. Jesus had made the long journey from Nazareth to Judaea to be baptized by John. As Mark tells us: “No sooner had he come out of the water than he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit, like a dove, descending on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; my favor rests upon you.’ ” 1 John the Baptist had immediately recognized Jesus as the Messiah.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  For the young Luther, a papal loyalist, Rome was a trove of religious benefits. “We ran to Rome…” he wrote in 1535, “and the Pope gave indulgence for it, this is all forgotten now, but those who were stuck in it will not forget it.”42 His monthlong visit to the “seat of the Devil” became the source for many later anecdotes over dinner. Two in particular stand out. Luther was astonished how fast the priests would say Mass, reciting six or seven Masses for payment before he had even got to the end of his first. One cleric shoved him out of the way, telling him to hurry up and “send her son back home to Our Lady”—that is, to clear things up so they would be ready for the next Mass. To Luther, who worried endlessly about whether he had said the words with true feeling, the insouciance was profoundly shocking. They even joked about it over their supper, boasting how at the elevation they had said, “Bread you are and bread you will remain.” Luther later recalled their ridicule when the Real Presence of Christ in the sacrament became the keystone of his theology, important enough to split with the followers of the leading Swiss theologian Huldrych Zwingli, who denied the Real Presence. As he used the episode to illustrate the abuses of the papal Mass, his listeners would have been aware of the parallel.43 Luther’s other memory concerned a visit to the Scala Sancta in St. John Lateran, the “Pilate stairs” that Christ had mounted on his way to his trial and which supposedly had been brought by St. Helen from Jerusalem. Here the pious believer had to climb the steps on his knees, reciting an “Our Father” on each step to gain remission from Purgatory. Luther, who wanted to save the soul of his paternal grandfather, Heine Luder, mounted the steps but, overcome with tiredness, began to wonder whether the prayers would work. This was a story he repeated later in life in sermons as well as at table, its interpretation shifting with time. When his eleven-year-old son, Paul, heard it in 1544, it had become part of the story of how Luther had broken with Rome. As Luther now recalled, when he climbed the steps he suddenly remembered the phrase of the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk, repeated in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, that “the just shall live by faith alone,” importing into the episode his later theological understanding.44

• From A History of God (1993)

  Jews expected the Messiah, the anointed one, to be a descendant of King David, who, as king and spiritual leader, had founded the first independent Jewish kingdom in Jerusalem. The Psalms sometimes called David or the Messiah “the Son of God,” but that was simply a way of expressing his intimacy with Yahweh. Nobody since the return from Babylon had imagined that Yahweh actually had a son, like the abominable deities of the goyim. Mark’s Gospel, which as the earliest is usually regarded as the most reliable, presents Jesus as a perfectly normal man, with a family that included brothers and sisters. No angels announced his birth or sang over his crib. He had not been marked out during his infancy or adolescence as remarkable in any way. When he began to teach, his townsmen in Nazareth were astonished that the son of the local carpenter should have turned out to be such a prodigy. Mark begins his narrative with Jesus’ career. It seems that he may originally have been the disciple of one John the Baptist, a wandering ascetic who had probably been an Essene: John had regarded the Jerusalem establishment as hopelessly corrupt and preached excoriating sermons against it. He urged the populace to repent and to accept the Essene rite of purification by baptism in the River Jordan. Luke suggests that Jesus and John were actually related. Jesus had made the long journey from Nazareth to Judaea to be baptized by John. As Mark tells us: “No sooner had he come out of the water than he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit, like a dove, descending on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; my favor rests upon you.’ ” 1 John the Baptist had immediately recognized Jesus as the Messiah. The next thing we hear about Jesus is that he began to preach in all the towns and villages of Galilee, announcing: “The Kingdom of God has arrived!” 2 There has been much speculation about the exact nature of Jesus’ mission. Very few of his actual words seem to have been recorded in the Gospels, and much of their material has been affected by later developments in the churches that were founded by St. Paul after his death. Nevertheless, there are clues that point to the essentially Jewish nature of his career. It has been pointed out that faith healers were familiar religious figures in Galilee: like Jesus, they were mendicants, who preached, healed the sick and exorcised demons.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The early biographers of Muhammad constantly describe the wonder and shock felt by the Arabs when they heard the Koran for the first time. Many were converted on the spot, believing that God alone could account for the extraordinary beauty of the language. Frequently a convert would describe the experience as a divine invasion that tapped buried yearnings and released a flood of feelings. Thus the young Qurayshi Umar ibn al-Khattab had been a virulent opponent of Muhammad; he had been devoted to the old paganism and ready to assassinate the Prophet. But this Muslim Saul of Tarsus was converted not by a vision of Jesus the Word but by the Koran. There are two versions of his conversion story, both worthy of note. The first has Umar discovering his sister, who had secretly become a Muslim, listening to a recitation of a new sura. “What was that balderdash?” he had roared angrily as he strode into the house, knocking poor Fatimah to the ground. But when he saw that she was bleeding, he probably felt ashamed because his face changed. He picked up the manuscript, which the visiting Koran reciter had dropped in the commotion, and, being one of the few Qurayshis who were literate, he started to read. Umar was an acknowledged authority on Arabic oral poetry and was consulted by poets as to the precise significance of the language, but he had never come across anything like the Koran. “How fine and noble is this speech!” he said wonderingly, and was instantly converted to the new religion of al-Lah.18 The beauty of the words had reached through his reserves of hatred and prejudice to a core of receptivity that he had not been conscious of. We have all had a similar experience, when a poem touches a chord of recognition that lies at a level deeper than the rational. In the other version of Umar’s conversation, he encountered Muhammad one night at the Kabah, reciting the Koran quietly to himself before the shrine. Thinking that he would like to listen to the words, Umar crept under the damask cloth that covered the huge granite cube and edged his way around until he was standing directly in front of the Prophet. As he said, “There was nothing between us but the cover of the Kabah”—all his defenses but one were down. Then the magic of the Arabic did its work: “When I heard the Koran, my heart was softened and I wept and Islam entered into me.”19 It was the Koran which prevented God from being a mighty reality “out there” and brought him into the mind, heart and being of each believer.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Atheistic philosophers have also been attracted by the idea of God during the second half of the twentieth century. In Being and Time (1927) Martin Heidegger (1899–1976) saw Being in rather the same way as Tillich, though he would have denied that it was “God” in the Christian sense: it was distinct from particular beings and quite separate from the normal categories of thought. Some Christians have been inspired by Heidegger’s work, even though its moral value is called into question by his association with the Nazi regime. In What Is Metaphysics?, his inaugural lecture at Freiburg, Heidegger developed a number of ideas that had already surfaced in the work of Plotinus, Denys and Erigena. Since Being is “Wholly Other,” it is in fact Nothing—no thing, neither an object nor a particular being. Yet it is what makes all other existence possible. The ancients had believed that nothing came from nothing, but Heidegger reversed this maxim: ex nihilo omne qua ens fit. He ended his lecture by posing a question asked by Leibniz: “Why are there beings at all, rather than just nothing?” It is a question that evokes the shock of surprise and wonder that has been a constant in the human response to the world: why should anything exist at all? In his Introduction to Metaphysics (1953), Heidegger began by asking the same question. Theology believed that it had the answer and traced everything back to Something Else, to God. But this God was just another being rather than something that was wholly other. Heidegger had a somewhat reductive idea of the God of religion—though one shared by many religious people—but he often spoke in mystical terms about Being. He speaks of it as a great paradox; describes the thinking process as a waiting or listening to Being and seems to experience a return and withdrawal of Being, rather as mystics feel the absence of God. There is nothing that human beings can do to think Being into existence. Since the Greeks, people in the Western world have tended to forget Being and have concentrated on beings instead, a process that has resulted in its modern technological success. In the article written toward the end of his life titled “Only a God Can Save Us,” Heidegger suggested that the experience of God’s absence in our time could liberate us from preoccupation with beings. But there was nothing we could do to bring Being back into the present. We could only hope for a new advent in the future.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Atheistic philosophers have also been attracted by the idea of God during the second half of the twentieth century. In Being and Time (1927) Martin Heidegger (1899–1976) saw Being in rather the same way as Tillich, though he would have denied that it was “God” in the Christian sense: it was distinct from particular beings and quite separate from the normal categories of thought. Some Christians have been inspired by Heidegger’s work, even though its moral value is called into question by his association with the Nazi regime. In What Is Metaphysics?, his inaugural lecture at Freiburg, Heidegger developed a number of ideas that had already surfaced in the work of Plotinus, Denys and Erigena. Since Being is “Wholly Other,” it is in fact Nothing—no thing, neither an object nor a particular being. Yet it is what makes all other existence possible. The ancients had believed that nothing came from nothing, but Heidegger reversed this maxim: ex nihilo omne qua ens fit. He ended his lecture by posing a question asked by Leibniz: “Why are there beings at all, rather than just nothing?” It is a question that evokes the shock of surprise and wonder that has been a constant in the human response to the world: why should anything exist at all? In his Introduction to Metaphysics (1953), Heidegger began by asking the same question. Theology believed that it had the answer and traced everything back to Something Else, to God. But this God was just another being rather than something that was wholly other. Heidegger had a somewhat reductive idea of the God of religion—though one shared by many religious people—but he often spoke in mystical terms about Being. He speaks of it as a great paradox; describes the thinking process as a waiting or listening to Being and seems to experience a return and withdrawal of Being, rather as mystics feel the absence of God. There is nothing that human beings can do to think Being into existence. Since the Greeks, people in the Western world have tended to forget Being and have concentrated on beings instead, a process that has resulted in its modern technological success. In the article written toward the end of his life titled “Only a God Can Save Us,” Heidegger suggested that the experience of God’s absence in our time could liberate us from preoccupation with beings. But there was nothing we could do to bring Being back into the present. We could only hope for a new advent in the future. The Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) saw the idea of God as natural to humanity.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Georg was deeply shocked: he shook his head, placed his hands on his hips and shouted ‘A plague on it.** However one interpreted Luther’s remarks, though, it was clear that he was begin- ning to build on the ideas developed at Augsburg: that Scripture was superior to the authority of popes, Councils and Church Fathers. Eck considered other things Luther said to be ‘senseless’ and ‘offensive’ as well, such as his insistence that the existence of Purgatory could not be proved from Scripture. And if the Pope were head of the Church solely according to human law, then who, Eck asked, had given Luther his monastic habit, his power to preach or to hear confession? Luther retorted that he wished that there were no mendicant orders. Criti- cism of the mendicants was not unusual at the time, but coming from an Augustinian monk, it was hardly likely to commend him to his brethren.” The debate concluded with a series of exchanges between Eck and Karlstadt, with the latter insisting again that all human action is sinful. Even the saints do evil, Karlstadt proclaimed, that is, ‘they feel evil desires in nature’, and these will not cease so long as we are clothed in mortality; only when death is swallowed in victory will it be possible to have a pure, good will without evil desire. Good works, he went so far as to say, were utterly ‘impure’, like the ‘filth’ that pours out of women’s bodies — menstrual blood being the most shocking and revolting comparison he could think of. Eck retorted that if all good works were evil, confession itself would be pointless and humans 136 MARTIN LUTHER would not need to do anything to ensure their own salvation — they could eat, drink and be merry, leaving it all to God. This was a crude travesty of Karlstadt’s position. But it revealed how uncomfortable the new ideas could be, and how difficult it was to accommodate them to familiar views of human nature.” The idea of the sinfulness of all human action had by now become central to early Reformation thinking. It is a difficult concept to grasp, but it is evidently an idea that a man like Karlstadt found liberating. It could lead to a very negative conception of humanity, and to hostility to the flesh, as it did in Karlstadt’s case. Not so in Luther’s, for whom it led to a surprisingly positive attitude towards physicality. Behind it lies the idea, familiar too from psychoanalytic thinking now, that all our actions, even the ones we think stem from the most laudable of motives and of which we feel most proud, are tainted with sin — or as we might put it today, can involve quite murky psychic drives, such as anger, pride or envy.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  WS 11, 387-400, published as a pamphlet Ursach und Antwort, dass Jungfrauen Kloester goettlich verlassen moegen. Versions also appeared in Low German. Luther emphasises particularly the sexual dimension: young inexperienced girls are forced into convents where they have to struggle with the problems of chastity, adding ‘For a woman is not created to be a virgin, but to bear children’, 398:4. Luther concludes by publicly naming all the women who left, starting with Staupitz’s sister — which may have been quite humiliating for Staupitz. See also Posset, Front-runner, 341. In 1524, Luther published the testimony of a Lutheran nun from Mansfeld, prefacing it with a letter: WS 15, 79-94 (she describes being imprisoned for writing to Luther and being forced to sit on the floor at meals wearing a humiliating straw wreath, a sign of lost virginity). In 1525, Luther was at it again, this time taking in a group of nuns from Seusslitz in Saxony; as before he turned to Koppe again to try to get other nuns out, possibly from Grimma; WB 3, 894, 17 June 1525. WB 3, 766, 6 Aug. 1524, 327:2I-4. WB 2, 426, 6 Aug. 1521 (to Spalatin), 377:4-5; in 1532, he still remembered how unlikely it seemed that he would marry, saying at table that if anyone had told him back at the time of the Diet of Worms that in five years he would be a husband with a wife and child he would have laughed at them: WT 3, 3177. StadtA Witt, Kammereirechnungen 1524, 144: the council paid for a new ‘Rock, hosen vnd Wammes’, for Luther, providing six ells of fustian. II. I2. 13. NOTES TO PAGES 273-277 493 LW Letters, II, 105; WB 3, 857, 16 April 1525, 475:14-23. A wife on one’s left hand was a morganatic wife, that is, not a full spouse but a wife of unequal social status whose children did not inherit their father’s social status. Morganatic marriages could also work the other way around as in this case, since Luther was of lower status than Katharina: the joke was somewhat heavy-handed. Hieronymus Baumgartner of the prominent patrician family in Nuremberg had originally been proposed as Katharina’s husband back in 1524 (Baumgartner waited until after the wedding before marrying someone else: Stjerna, Women and the Reformation, 55). Barely three weeks after this letter, Luther was writing to Johann Riihel of his intention to marry ‘meine Kathe’: WB 3, 860, 4 (5?) May 1525, 482:81. Melanchthons Briefwechsel — Regesten online, 408, 16 June 1525: the wedding took place in the presence of Bugenhagen, Cranach and Johannes Apel. WB 3, 886, Io June 1525, 525—6:14. WB 3, 860 4 (5?) May 1525, 481:64-6. Glatz’s willingness to take the poisoned chalice of the post at Orlamiinde had not perhaps been entirely selfless.

• From Satyricon (1)

  We were all dumb with astonishment, when “I take your story for granted,” said Trimalchio, “and if you’ll believe me, my hair stood on end, and all the more, because I know that Niceros never talks nonsense: he’s always level-headed, not a bit gossipy. And now I’ll tell you a hair-raiser myself, though I’m like a jackass on a slippery pavement compared to him. When I was a long-haired boy, for I lived a Chian life from my youth up, my master’s minion died. He was a jewel, so hear me Hercules, he was, perfect in every facet. While his sorrow-stricken mother was bewailing his loss, and the rest of us were lamenting with her, the witches suddenly commenced to screech so loud that you would have thought a hare was being run down by the hounds! At that time, we had a Cappadocian slave, tall, very bold, and he had muscle too; he could hold a mad bull in the air! He wrapped a mantle around his left arm, boldly rushed out of doors with drawn sword, and ran a woman through the middle about here, no harm to what I touch. We heard a scream, but as a matter of fact, for I won’t lie to you, we didn’t catch sight of the witches themselves. Our simpleton came back presently, and threw himself upon the bed. His whole body was black and blue, as if he had been flogged with whips, and of course the reason of that was she had touched him with her evil hand! We shut the door and returned to our business, but when the mother put her arms around the body of her son, it turned out that it was only a straw bolster, no heart, no guts, nothing! Of course the witches had swooped down upon the lad and put the straw changeling in his place! Believe me or not, suit yourselves, but I say that there are women that know too much, and night-hags, too, and they turn everything upside down! And as for the long-haired booby, he never got back his own natural color and he died, raving mad, a few days later.” CHAPTER THE SIXTY-FOURTH.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  As everyone at the table knew, Satan could easily trick the believer into thinking an apparition was divine when it was in reality demonic. There could hardly have been any comment more calculated to rattle a young man’s sense of spiritual vocation and certainty, and Luther’s shock was still evident in the way he told the story years later, stressing that the comment was made in front of the other guests at the table.* Luther recalled in a letter to Melanch- thon in 1521 that it ‘took such deep root in my heart that I have never heard anything from his mouth which I remembered more persis- tently’. Luther’s antagonists too, first Cochlaeus and later Johannes Nas, would see the importance of trying to query the role of the storm. The thunder, Nas mocked, was not divine sanction. It was proof of God’s anger.® The Luther biographer and psychologist Erik Erikson was no doubt right when he argued that Luther’s difficult relationship with his father was reflected in his theology: God became Luther’s father, far more powerful than Hans Luder could ever be.*®* But there was more to it than this. Luther’s understanding of God grasped the distance that separates humans from Him, stressing the essential unknowability of God, and his hiddenness in suffering on the Cross. He emphasised the whole gamut of the fatherly aspects of God’s nature; not for him THE SCHOLAR 49 the cosy evangelical view of Jesus as one’s friend. Luther’s notions of manhood and fathers were forged by the rough world of Mansfeld as well as in his relationship with his father.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  39 God Shopping Lord, You may not recognize me speaking for someone else. I have a son. He is so little, so ignorant. He likes to stand at the screen door, calling oggie, oggie, entering language, and sometimes a dog will stop and come up the walk, perhaps accidentally. May he believe this is not an accident? At the screen, welcoming each beast in love’s name, Your emissary. —Louise Glück, “The Gift” I f you’d told me even a year before I start taking Dev to church regular that I’d wind up whispering my sins in the confessional or on my knees saying the rosary, I would’ve laughed myself cockeyed. More likely pastime? Pole dancer. International spy. Drug mule. Assassin . One Sunday I’m eating a bagel with a smear and reading the paper when Dev, age eight, intensely blue-eyed in his Power Ranger pajamas, announces he wants to go to church. I barely look up. Despite my prayer life, organized religion still strikes me as bogus. Though Mother had pored over sacred texts of every kind, she was—as I’ve said before—no more able to commit to a faith than to a husband. She quoted Marx calling religion the opiate of the masses. So I’m suspect of the hierarchies. Idly asking Dev why he wants to go to church, I’m confident that no sentence he utters will rouse me from my Sunday loll. But he says: to see if God’s there . The phrase straightens my slouchy spine. Some native faith lets him stare out the window at the aluminum sky and see a scrim before heaven. Okay, I say, and I ring up a sober Episcopalian (an oxymoron, he alleges in the car), the only guy I know who goes to church. If I’d had a pal attending a mosque or temple or zendo, we’d have gone there. So disinterested am I, so devoid of curiosity, that I climb into my friend’s car toting a paperback, like the one I carry to soccer fields stiff with frost, to pass time. It’s a capital-C Church, with gray stones right out of some horror-movie castle. It sits amid red maples between the university on one side and housing projects on the other. Soon as the engine dies, Dev bolts for the huge oak doors, his loafers slapping up the leaf-strewn walk. He has on a hand-me-down sport coat. With his green clip-on bow tie, he looks like some refugee from a 1950s wedding. Going in makes me a little watery. In the foyer, I expect to find some Ozzie and Harriet episode in progress, the women in pillbox hats and white gloves and ear bobs, the men in lizard-green jackets and wing tips, everybody in that old fluorescent light the color of cucumber that makes white people look so seedy. But this parish is half black, with people wearing jeans and khakis. Even the ancient blue-haired ladies have pants on .