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Over the centuries, Arianism has become a byword for heresy but at the time there was no officially orthodox position and nobody knew whether Arius or Athanasius was right.11 Arius was anxious to safeguard the transcendence of God. God was unique, “the only unbegotten, the only eternal, the only one without beginning, the only true, the only one who has immortality, the only wise, the only good.”12 His power was so overwhelming that it had to be mediated through the Logos at the creation, because frail creatures “could not endure to be made by the absolute hand of the Unoriginate.”13 The
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Eastern and Western Christians would understand the incarnation very differently. Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) defined the doctrine of atonement that became normative in the West: God became man in order to expiate the sin of Adam. Orthodox Christians have never accepted this. The Orthodox view of Jesus was defined by Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662), who believed that the Word would have become flesh even if Adam had not sinned. Jesus was the first human being to be wholly “deified,” entirely possessed and permeated by the divine, and we could all be like him, even in this life.
The Trinity reminded Christians not to think about God as a simple personality and that what we call “God” was inaccessible to rational analysis.40 It was a meditative device to counter the idolatrous tendency of people like Arius, who had seen God as a mere being.
Trinity was not unlike a mandala, the icon of concentric circles that Buddhists visualize in meditation to find within themselves an ineffable “center” that pulls the scattered aspects of their being into harmony. Trinity was an activity rather than an abstract metaphysical doctrine.
Augustine was a complex man, and neither he nor his theology was flawless. He could be intolerant, misogynist, and depressive— this last tendency exacerbated by the fact that he witnessed the collapse of the western provinces of the Roman Empire, a calamity that was like a huge environmental disaster.
A deep sadness pervades Augustine’s later work.
This is the context of Augustine’s doctrine of Original Sin, one of his less positive contributions to Western theology. He produced an entirely novel exegesis of the second and third chapters of Genesis, which claimed that the sin of Adam had condemned all his descendants to eternal damnation.
Jewish exegetes had never seen the sin of Adam in this catastrophic light, and the Greek Christians, who were not affected by the barbarian scourge, have never accepted the doctrine of Original Sin. Born in grief and fear, this doctrine has left Western Christians with a difficult legacy that linked sexuality indissolubly with sin and helped to alienate men and women from their humanity.
God is not Mind in any sense that we can understand; God is not Greatness, Power, Light, Life, Truth, Imagination, Conviction, Understanding, Goodness—or even Divinity.74 We cannot even say that God “exists” because our experience of existence is based solely on individual, finite beings whose mode of being bears no relation to being itself:
Crusading made anti-Semitism an incurable disease in Europe and would indelibly scar relations between Islam and the West.
One of the most famous Europeans of the period was Francis of Assisi (1181–1226). His life and career show us that while some Europeans were engaged in scholarly rationalism, others like Francis had no time for theology of any kind and were far more literal-minded than the apophatic Anselm.
Francis emulated the absolute poverty of Christ in his own life; he and the Franciscan friars who followed him begged for their food, went barefoot, owned no property, and slept rough. He even reproduced the wounds of Christ in his own body. And yet this gentle saint seems to have approved of the Crusades and accompanied the Fifth Crusade to Egypt, though he did not take part in the fighting but preached to the sultan.
But the theology of Scotus and Ockham was incomprehensible to all but a few experts. The theology of unknowing had encouraged humility; the new speculations of the schoolmen seemed to inflate their conceit and could be imparted to anybody who had the intelligence to follow it, regardless of his moral stature.
On March 31, the monarchs signed the Edict of Expulsion that forced the Jews of al-Andalus to choose between baptism and deportation; in 1499, the Muslim inhabitants of Spain would be given the same choice.
Ferdinand and Isabella had established the Spanish Inquisition in 1483. Its aim was to enforce ideological conformity as a base for the new Spanish identity.
Instead of relying, like every premodern economy, on a surplus of agricultural produce with which they could trade in order to fund their cultural achievements, the modern economy rested on the technological replication of resources and the constant reinvestment of capital, which provided a source of wealth that could be renewed indefinitely. This freed it from many of the constraints of premodern societies, where the economy could not expand beyond a certain point and eventually outran its resources.
Henry VII of England (1457–1509) and Francis I of France (1494–1547), adopted policies designed to reduce the influence of the Church and subordinate it to their own political goals. The increasing role of banks, stock companies, and stock exchanges, over which the Church had no control, also eroded its power.
Secularization would be accelerated by three crucial and formative sixteenth-century movements: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution.
The humanists were convinced they were on the side of progress, and they were right.
It did not follow, however, that the medieval approach to art, literature, or religion had been entirely misguided; it had just reflected a different world. In religious matters, the modern tendency to wipe the slate clean to begin again, while understandable, would ultimately be detrimental.
The three great Protestant reformers, Martin Luther (1483–1546), Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), and John Calvin (1509–64), all exemplified this vehement rejection of the immediate past. Like the Renaissance humanists, they had no time for the natural theology of the late scholastics and wanted a more personal and immediate faith.
The young Calvin had felt so in thrall to the institutional Church that he was both unwilling and unable to break free, and it had taken what seemed a divine initiative to shift him: “At last God turned my course in a different direction by the hidden bridle of his providence … by a sudden conversion to docility, he tamed a mind too stubborn for its years.”33
But despite its religious motivation, this deliberate desacralization of the cosmos was a secularizing idea that would encourage scientists to approach the world independently of the divine.
Printing helped to secularize the relationship of the reader to the truth that he was trying to acquire.41 In the past, the Church had—to an extent—been able to supervise the flow of ideas and information, but the proliferation of books and pamphlets after the middle of the sixteenth century made this censorship far more difficult. As the printed book began to replace oral methods of communication, the information it provided was depersonalized and, perhaps, became more fixed and less flexible than in the old days, when truth had developed in dynamic relation between master and pupil.
From the 1520s, the reformers started to issue “catechisms,” dialogues of stereotyped questions and answers, to ensure that their congregations accepted a particular interpretation of the creed.
The Protestant reliance on “scripture alone” dispensed with the Catholic notion of “tradition” that saw each generation deepening its understanding of the sacred text in a cumulative “bricolage.”
The Spaniards, still in the vanguard of modernization, took the lead in the Catholic reformation initiated by the Council of Trent (1545–63), which made the Church a more centralized body on the model of the absolute monarchy. The Council reinforced the power of pope and hierarchy, issued a catechism to ensure doctrinal conformity, ensured that the clergy were educated to a higher standard, and rationalized liturgical and devotional practices, jettisoning those that were either corrupt or no longer effective.
In 1530, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473— 1543), the Polish-born canon of the cathedral of Frauenburg in Prussia, completed De revolutionibus, a thesis that argued that the sun was the center of the universe.
Since the twelfth century, Europeans had adopted a cosmology based on Aristotelian physics and popularized by the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy (c. 90–168).46 The Earth was firmly at the center of the universe, encased like an onion in eight spherical shells composed of an invisible substance called ether. These spheres revolved in a uniform manner around the Earth, and embedded in the ether of each of the first seven spheres was one of the heavenly bodies: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The fixed stars occupied the eighth sphere at the outermost rim of the universe and
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Looking back ad fontes to classical antiquity, he found that in the third century BCE, Aristarchus of Samos had suggested that the planets revolved around the sun and that the Earth revolved on its own axis. He discovered that the Pythagoreans believed that mathematics rather than physics was the key to any understanding of the natural world, and that Philolaus, one of Pythagoras’s pupils, thought that the Earth, planets, and sun all revolved around a central, cosmic fire.
They still followed Augustine’s principle of accommodation, which had ruled that a scriptural text should be reinterpreted if it clashed with science.
Intrigued by Copernicus’s hypothesis, some scientists tried to develop his ideas. In his observatory on the island of Hveen in the Swedish Sound, the Danish astronomer, mathematician, and imperial astrologer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) corrected outstanding inaccuracies in the astronomical table and discovered a new star in Cassiopeia.
Arguably the most brilliant of these pioneering scientists was the German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630),54 who had corresponded with Brahe, helped him in his work, and succeeded him in the post of imperial astrologer. Like Copernicus, Kepler was convinced that mathematics was the key to understanding the cosmos and that the scientist’s task was to test his mathematical theories against rigorous empirical observation. In 1609, he published Mysterium cosmographicum, the first public attempt to justify and refine Copernicus’s heliocentric theory, which had been unnecessarily complicated
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It was in this grim political climate that the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) announced that he had proved Copernicus right. Unlike Kepler and Bruno, Galileo had no interest in the occult; instead of seeing the universe as a numinous reflection of the divine mystery, he described it as a cosmic mechanism ruled by mathematical laws. By observing the oscillation of a swinging lamp in the cathedral of Pisa, he had inferred the value of a pendulum for the exact measurement of time.
He was especially concerned about the “atomists”—Democritus, Epicurus, and the Roman poet Lucretius (c. 95–55 BCE)—who had believed that the universe had come into being by chance. Democritus had imagined innumerable particles, so tiny that they were “indivisible” (atomos), careering round empty space, colliding periodically to form the material bodies of our world.
Descartes’ philosophy was marked by the horror of his time. He had been present when the heart of Henry IV, martyr of tolerance, had been enshrined in the cathedral at La Flèche. Throughout his life, he was convinced that both Catholics and Protestants could hope for heaven. His goal was to find a truth on which everybody—Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, deists, and “atheists”—could agree so that all people of good will could live together in peace.
Remarking that this truth, “I think, therefore I am”
Platonic epistemology: “I think, therefore there is that which I think.”
Pascal was one of the first people to see that atheism—meaning a radical denial of God’s existence—would soon become a serious option.33 A person who had not engaged himself with the rituals, exercises, and practices of religion would not be convinced by the arguments of the philosophers; for such a person, faith could only be a wager, a leap in the dark.
The Peace of Westphalia (1648) had brought the Thirty Years’ War to an end and set up a system of sovereign nation-states, but this new polity could not be established overnight. As the modern market economy developed, it became essential to change the political structures of society.
A regular member of these discussion groups was the young Isaac Newton (1642–1727).40 Like Descartes, Newton aspired to create a universal science capable of interpreting the whole of human experience.
educated Americans were able to participate in the philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment. In both Europe and the American colonies, an elite group of intellectuals was convinced that humanity was beginning to leave superstition behind and was on the brink of a glorious new era. Science gave them greater control over nature than had ever been achieved before; people were living longer and felt more confident about the future.
There was considerable opposition to Newtonian theology among the “Tory” or “country” wing of the Church of England, which may have been more widespread than historians have appreciated.
Vico had put his finger on an important point. The scientific method has dealt brilliantly with objects but is less cogent when applied to people or the arts. It is not competent to assess religion, which is inseparable from the complex human beings who practice it and, like the arts, cultivates a perception based on imagination and empathy. A scientist will first form a theory and then seek to prove it experimentally; religion works the other way around, and its insights come from practical experience. Where science is concerned with facts, religious truth is symbolic and its symbols will
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On the frontiers, nearly 40 percent of Americans felt slighted by the aristocratic republican government, which did not share their hardships but taxed them as heavily as the British and bought land for investment without any intention of leaving the comforts of the eastern seaboard.
During the 1820s, Evangelicals threw themselves into moral crusades to hasten the coming of the Kingdom, campaigning against slavery, urban poverty, exploitation, and liquor, and fighting for penal reform, the education of the poor, and the emancipation of women. There was an emphasis on the worth of each human being, egalitarianism, and the ideal of inalienable human rights. These Christian reform groups were among the first to channel the efficiency, energy, and bureaucratic skills of capitalism into nonprofit enterprises, teaching people to plan, organize, and pursue a clearly defined
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It was in this climate that Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72), pupil of Schleiermacher and Hegel, published The Essence of Christianity (1841), which was avidly read, not simply as a theological statement but as a revolutionary tract. Feuerbach had taken Hegel’s call for a God and religion of this world to its logical conclusion.17 If the idea of a remote, external God was so alienating, why not get rid of him altogether? God, Feuerbach argued, was simply an oppressive human construct. People had projected their own human qualities onto an imaginary being that was merely a reflection of themselves.
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In 1830, Charles Lyell (1797–1875) had published the first volume of his Principles of Geology, which argued that the earth’s crust was far older than the six thousand years suggested in the Bible; moreover, it had not been shaped directly by God but was formed by the slow, incremental effects of wind and water.26
The British biologist Thomas H. Huxley (1825–95) felt that outright atheism was too dogmatic, because it made metaphysical claims about God’s nonexistence on insufficient physical evidence.60 It was probably Huxley who coined the term “agnostic” (a word based on the Latin agnosco: “I do not know”) sometime in the 1860s. For Huxley, agnosticism was not a belief but a method. Its requirement was simple: “In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated and demonstrable.”
Observing the similarity between religious rites and the obsessive rituals of some of his patients, Freud concluded that religion was a neurosis that bordered on insanity. The desire for God sprang from the infant’s experience of helplessness and his yearning for a protector; it reflected the child’s passion for justice and fairness and his longing for life to continue forever.
