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In ancient Greece, the story had been told of a robber named Procrustes, who, after inviting a guest to lie down on a bed, would then rack his limbs or amputate them, as required to ensure a trim fit. It was in a very similar spirit that British scholars, confronted by all the manifold riches, complexities and ambivalences of Indian civilisation, set to shaping out of them something that might be recognisable as a religion.
The most urgent need was to decide who ‘Hindoos’ actually were: people from India or people who practised the ‘Hindoo religion’? Increasingly, since talk of ‘Hindoo Muslims’ or ‘Hindoo Christians’ risked obvious confusion, the British found themselves opting for the second definition.
Hindus who used words such as religion, or secular, or Hinduism were not merely displaying their fluency in English. They were also adopting a new and alien perspective on their country, and turning it to their advantage.
The British conviction that there existed in India a religion named Hinduism, comparable to Christianity, complete with orthodoxies and ancient scriptures, provided Hindus fluent in English with the perfect opportunity to shape what this religion should look like. Brahmins, because of their reputation for learning, enjoyed a particular advantage.
The burning of widows on pyres, Roy assured the British, was a purely secular phenomenon. That there were Brahmins who officiated at such rituals was due solely to their ignorance of Hindu scripture. There was authentic Hinduism, and then there was a Hinduism that had been corrupted by the greed and superstition of malevolent priests.
‘Christianity spreads in two ways,’ an Indian historian has written: ‘through conversion and through secularisation.’12 Missionaries who dreamed of reaping a great harvest of Indian souls were destined to be disappointed.
In 1857, indeed, these would trigger an uprising so explosive that briefly, for a few blood-soaked months, the entire future of Britain’s empire in India would be left hanging by a thread. The shock of it would never be forgotten by the imperial authorities. Their determination not to risk the promotion of Christianity in India was left even more rock-solid.
In time, indeed – when, after two centuries, Britain’s rule was brought at last to an end, and India emerged to independence – it would do so as a self-proclaimed secular nation. A country did not need to become Christian, it turned out, to start seeing itself through Christian eyes.
Humiliated by Napoleon, who had occupied its capital, Berlin, and sought to neuter it for good, Prussia had ended up playing a key role in his defeat. It was a Prussian army that had forced him from his throne in 1814, and a Prussian army that had sealed his fate at Waterloo. Napoleon’s empire, though, was not alone in having been ended.
On 6 August 1806, barely noticed amid all the storm-tides of revolution and war, the line of Caesars founded by Otto the Great had been formally terminated. An empire that for almost a millennium had prided itself on being both holy and Roman was no more. Even with Napoleon’s defeat, there had been no bringing it back from the dead.
The highlight of the young crown prince’s journey had been a visit to Cologne. The city – unlike Berlin, an upstart capital far removed from the traditional heartlands of Christendom – was an ancient one. Its foundations reached back to the time of Augustus.
Even within living memory his presence in Cologne would have been illegal. For almost four hundred years, Jews had been banned from the devoutly Catholic city. Only in 1798, following its occupation by the French, and the abolition of its ancient privileges, had they been allowed to settle there again. Oppenheim’s
Although, in the event, the insurrectionary mood was pacified, and the tottering Prussian monarchy stabilised, concessions offered by Friedrich Wilhelm would prove enduring. His kingdom emerged from the great crisis of 1848 as – for the first time – a state with a written constitution. The vast majority of its male inhabitants were now entitled to vote for a parliament. Among them, enrolled at last as equal citizens, were Prussia’s Jews.
The days of an independent Jewish state were long gone. In place of Israel, Jews now had Judaism. This word – Christian invention that it was – was one that they had never thought to use until the prospect of emancipation began to glimmer before them. Pressed by Protestant theologians to accept a status for Jewish law as something merely private and ceremonial, they were being pressed to accept something more: that they belonged not to a nation, but to a religion.
Yet this was a conceit. Secularism was not a neutral concept. The very word came trailing incense clouds of meaning that were irrevocably and venerably Christian.
In Europe as in India, then, the process by which peoples who were not Christian came to be identified with a religion was inevitably a Procrustean one.
For almost two and a half millennia, one of the inscriptions commissioned by Darius to justify his rule of the world – written in three distinct languages, and featuring a particularly imperious portrait of the king himself – had been preserved on the side of a mountain by the name of Bisitun. Carved into a cliff some two hundred feet above the road that led from the Iranian plateau to Iraq, its survival had been ensured by its sheer inaccessibility.
Missions by British abolitionists continued to be swatted aside. In 1844, the governor of an island off the Moroccan coast flatly informed one of them that any ban on slavery would be ‘against our religion’.29 Such bluntness was hardly surprising.
In 1863, barely twenty years after the sultan of Morocco had declared slavery an institution approved since the dawn of time, the mayor of Tunis wrote a letter to the American consul-general, citing justifications drawn from Islamic scripture for its abolition.
the Sioux. Only a few weeks previously, a seasoned general and veteran of the Unionist victory in the recent civil war, George Armstrong Custer, had been defeated by their warbands on the banks of the Little Bighorn River.
In 1822, when William Buckland, another clergyman, published a paper demonstrating that life on earth, let alone the deposition of rocks, was infinitely older than Noah’s flood, it was his dating of the fossils he had found in a Yorkshire cave that enabled him to demonstrate his point. Two years later, he wrote the first full account of a dinosaur.
Darwin, when he contemplated the natural world, found in it too many examples of cruelty to believe that they might ever have been the result of conscious design. One more than any other haunted him: a species of parasitic wasp.
Nervousness at the idea that humanity might have evolved from another species was not bred merely of a snobbery towards monkeys. Something much more was at stake. To believe that God had become man and suffered the death of a slave was to believe that there might be strength in weakness, and victory in defeat. Darwin’s theory, more radically than anything that previously had emerged from Christian civilisation, challenged that assumption.
Darwin himself, the grandson of two prominent abolitionists, knew full well the impulse from which these sprang. The great cause of social reform was Christian through and through. ‘We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment.’
But what did Huxley mean by ‘Science’? The answer was not at all obvious. Branches of knowledge ranging from grammar to music had all traditionally ranked as sciences. Theology had long reigned as their queen. At Oxford, ‘science’ still, even in the 1850s, meant ‘attainment in Aristotle’.
Science, precisely because it was cast as religion’s doppelgänger, inevitably bore the ghostly stamp of Europe’s Christian past.
Darwin’s wife, a Christian to the end of her days, voiced the dread of many at what this seemed to portend. Writing to her son shortly after Darwin’s death, she confessed that ‘your father’s opinion that all morality has grown up by evolution is painful to me’.
The functioning of natural selection depended on reproduction. The mating habits of humans were no less legitimate a field of study than those of the birds or the bees. This – in countries less embarrassed by sex than Darwin’s own – provided a licence for scientists to investigate the detail and variety of sexual behaviour on a scale that might have impressed even Sade himself.
One word in particular, a portmanteau of Greek and Latin, stuck out. Homosexualität had originally been coined in 1869, to provide the writer of a pamphlet on Prussian morality laws with a shorthand for sexual relations between people of the same gender.
In 1772, for instance, when Sade was found guilty of having anal sex with women, it was as a sodomite that he had been legally convicted.
Why – in seeming defiance of Darwin’s theory – did men or women choose to sleep with people of their own sex? The traditional explanation, that such people were lustful predators whose failure to control their appetites had led them to weary of what God had ordained as natural, was starting to seem inadequate to psychiatrists.
Homosexuals, he argued, were the creatures of their proclivities. As such – Christian concern for the unfortunate being what it was – they deserved to be treated with generosity and compassion. Most Christians were unpersuaded. The challenge that Krafft-Ebing’s researches presented to their understanding of sexual morality was twofold.
Carnegie had no interest in roaming badlands panning for fragments of Mesozoic tooth. He wanted fossils on a scale appropriate to his gargantuan wealth. When his workmen excavated the skeleton of an eighty-foot dinosaur, he made sure to trumpet his ownership of the find by having it named Diplodocus carnegii. It was, his publicists screamed, the ‘most colossal animal ever on earth’.35
London’s museum of natural history, an immense pile complete with soaring pillars and gargoyles, had the decided ambience of a cathedral. This was no accident. Its founder, Richard Owen – the naturalist who had coined the word ‘dinosaur’ – had consciously intended it. Science, he had once claimed, existed to ‘return good for evil’.42
One day before the unveiling of the Diplodocus, a Russian named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov – Lenin, as he called himself – had also visited the city’s museum of natural history. No less than Carnegie, he was a proponent of putting the lessons taught by evolution to practical effect. Unlike Carnegie, however, he did not believe that human happiness was best served by giving free rein to capital.
For two weeks, Lenin and thirty-seven others had been in London to debate how this coming revolution in the affairs of the world might best be expedited – but that the laws of evolution made it inevitable none of them doubted. This was why, as though to a shrine, Lenin had led his fellow delegates to the museum.
Marx, the grandson of a rabbi and the son of a Lutheran convert, dismissed both Judaism and Christianity as ‘stages in the development of the human mind – different snake skins cast off by history, and man as the snake who cast them off’.47 An exile from the Rhineland, expelled from a succession of European capitals for mocking the religiosity of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, he had arrived in London with personal experience of the uses to which religion might be put by autocrats.
The Kaiser, as the war dragged on and on, and a naval blockade of Germany began to bite, grew ever more convinced that the British were in league with the Devil. Patriotic Britons, for their part, had been saying much the same about Germany since the start of the war. Bishops joined with newspaper editors in hammering the message home.
‘Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? – for even gods putrefy! God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.’8 To read these words beside the Somme, amid a landscape turned to mud and ash, and littered with the mangled bodies of men, was to shiver before the possibility that there might not be, after all, any redemption in sacrifice. Nietzsche had written them back in 1882:
Helping and caring for others, being of use to others, constantly excites a sense of power.’13 Charity, in Christendom, had become a means to dominate. Yet Christianity, by taking the side of everything ill-constituted, and weak, and feeble, had made all of humanity sick.
Much as Sade had done, Nietzsche valued the ancients for the pleasure they had taken in inflicting suffering; for knowing that punishment might be festive; for demonstrating that, ‘in the days before mankind grew ashamed of its cruelty, before pessimists existed, life on earth was more cheerful than it is now’.
As the war ground on, and 1916 turned to 1917, so the end times seemed to be drawing near. In Portugal, in the village of Fatima, the Virgin made repeated appearances, until at last, before huge crowds, the sun danced, as though in fulfilment of the prophecy recorded in Revelation that a great and wondrous sign would appear in heaven: ‘a woman clothed with the sun’.19 In Palestine, the British won a crushing victory at Armageddon, and took Jerusalem from the Turks.
So huge was Russia that it accounted for almost a quarter of the world’s Christians. Scorning the pretensions of Rome, its monarchy had claimed a line of descent from Byzantium, and the title of ‘Orthodox’ for its church.
‘In practice, no less than in theory, communism is incompatible with religious faith.’21 The clergy had to go. In 1918, their churches had been nationalised. Bishops had been variously shot, crucified upside down, or imprisoned. Then, in 1926, the conversion of a particularly venerable monastery into a labour camp had enabled two birds to be killed with one stone.
Yet their very indignation pointed to an irony that Nietzsche had noted decades before. To insist that a church funeral might be a kind of blasphemy was less a repudiation of Christianity than an inadvertent acknowledgement of kinship with it.
The name derived from the palmy days of ancient Rome. The fasces, a bundle of scourging rods, had served the guards appointed to elected magistrates as emblems of their authority.
Benito Mussolini, an erstwhile socialist whose reading of Nietzsche had led him, by the end of the Great War, to dream of forming a new breed of man, an elite worthy of a fascist state, cast himself both as Caesar and as the face of a gleaming future.
‘Apes massacre all fringe elements as alien to their community.’ Hitler did not hesitate to draw the logical conclusion. ‘What is valid for monkeys must be all the more valid for humans.’
By 1937, then, Hitler had begun to envisage the elimination of Christianity once and for all. The objections of church leaders to the state’s ongoing sterilisation of idiots and cripples infuriated him.
Heinrich Himmler, the commander of the SS, plotted a fifty-year programme that he trusted would see the religion utterly erased. Otherwise, Christianity might once again prove the bane of the blond beast.
