Some of Paul’s fellow-apostles disapproved of a doctrine that apparently exonerated Christians from doing good. St James – a contender for leadership in the early Church whom contemporaries or near-contemporaries hailed as ‘the Just’ and ‘the brother’ of Christ – issued what modern spin doctors would call a clarification. He (or someone using his name) insisted that to love your neighbour as yourself was an ineluctable rule and that ‘faith without deeds is useless’. A long controversy divided those who saw grace as a collaborative venture, in which the individual has an active role, from others, who refused to diminish God’s omnipotence and love by conceding any initiative to the sinner. At the Reformation, the latter group dropped out of the Church, citing St Paul in support of their views. Further problems remained. Christ came to redeem sinners at a particular moment in time: so why then? And what about the sinners who missed out by living and dying previously? Even more perplexingly, if God is omniscient, he must know what we are going to do ahead of when we do it. So what becomes of the free will which is supposed to be one of God’s precious gifts to us? And if he knew from before time began, as St Paul put it, who was bound for heaven, what about everyone else? How could God be just and righteous if the damned had no real chance of salvation? ‘How can He ever blame anyone’, St Paul imagined his correspondents asking, ‘since no one can oppose His will?’ The saint’s own answer was chillingly logical: since everyone is sinful, justice demands damnation for all. God shows commendable forbearance by exempting the elect.
Christians who prized God for mercy, not justice, found this solution, which St Augustine approved, forbidding and unloving. A better answer arose by the way, from Augustine’s efforts to solve the problem of time. At the end of the fourth century he wrote a remarkable dialogue with his own mind, in the course of which he confessed that he thought he knew what time was ‘until anyone asks me’. He never ceased to be tentative on the point, but after much reflection he concluded ‘that time is nothing else but a stretching out in length; but of what I know not and I marvel if it be not of the very mind’.20 Time, Augustine said in effect, was not part of the real world, but what we should now call a mental construct: a way we devise for organizing experience. To understand it, think of a journey: travelling along the ground, you feel as if Washington, DC, or Moscow precedes, say, Kansas City or Berlin, which in turn precedes Austin and LA, or Amsterdam and Paris. From a godlike height, however, where you see the world as it really is, all these destinations appear simultaneously. In Amadeus, his play about the life of Mozart, Peter Shaffer imagined God hearing music in a similar fashion: ‘millions of sounds ascending at once and mixing in His ear to become an unending music, unimaginable to us’. To God, time is like that: events are not arrayed in sequence. A couple of generations after Augustine, the philosopher Boethius, an old-fashioned Roman senator and bureaucrat in the service of a barbarian king, used the saint’s insight to propose a solution to the problem of predestination, while he was in prison, waiting for his employer to put him to death on suspicion of plotting to restore the Roman Empire. God, Boethius appreciated, can see you, on what you think of as today, while you make a free choice on what you think of as tomorrow.
Other efforts at solving the problem have concentrated on separating foreknowledge from predestination. God knows in advance what your free will shall induce you to do. In Paradise Lost, John Milton’s mid-seventeenth-century attempt ‘to justify the ways of God to man’, the poet puts into God’s mouth a divine explanation of how Adam and Eve’s fall was foreseeable, but not foreordained. ‘If I foreknew,’ says God, ‘foreknowledge had no influence on their fault.’ Milton’s formula seems just about intelligible. In any case, it seems unnecessary to see human freedom as an infringement of God’s omnipotence: free will could be a concession he chooses to make but has the power to revoke, like a police chief issuing a ‘gun amnesty’ or a general authorizing a ceasefire.
Thanks to such mental balancing acts, Christian thinking has always managed to keep free will and predestination in equilibrium between, on the one hand, an idealistic vision of human nature unpolluted by original sin, and, on the other, doom-fraught resignation in the face of inescapable damnation. Even so, extremists on one side or the other are always dropping out of communion with fellow-Christians: the Calvinists split with the Catholics in the sixteenth century and, in the seventeenth, the Arminians with the Calvinists over the scope of free will. Untold controversy over the same problem has riven Islam. As well as echoing all the Christian controversialists who have found ways to fit free will into a world regulated by an omniscient and omnipotent God, Shiites developed the fiercely contested idea of Bada’ – the claim that God can change his judgement in favour of a repentant sinner.21
Christianity, meanwhile, faced a further high-minded challenge from thinkers intolerant of the world’s imperfections. On balance, in the struggle of good and evil, creation seems to be on the Devil’s side. When Plato looked on the world, he saw perfection’s imperfect shadow. Some of his readers extended the thought beyond its logical conclusion and inferred that the world is bad. Zoroaster, Laozi, and many lesser thinkers of the first millennium bce thought they could detect good and evil teetering in uneasy, all-encompassing balance across the cosmos – in which case, the sordid, sorrowful world must surely be on the evil side of the scale. Matter is, at best, corruptible; the body is prone to pollution and pain. The Prince of Darkness, in a tradition Jews, Christians, and Muslims shared, made the world his realm by invading Eden and inveigling humankind. It makes sense to see the world, the flesh, and the Devil as an immorally intimate threesome or a nastily discordant triad.22
People who thought so around the turn of the first millennium called their belief gnosis – literally, ‘knowledge’. Christians tried and failed to twist it into the Church, or to chop at the Church to make a niche for gnosis. It was incompatible with the doctrine of the incarnation: the Devil might take flesh, but not God. Bloody, messy extrusion from a womb at one end of life, and coarse, crude crucifixion at the other, were undivine indignities. Just to be in the world was derogation for a pure, spiritual God. ‘If any acknowledge the crucified Christ’, in words St Irenaeus attributed to the Gnostic leader Basilides, ‘he is a slave and subject to the demons who made our bodies.’23 Gnostics engaged in impressive mental agility to dodge or duck the difficulties: Christ’s body was an illusion; he only seemed to be crucified; he did not really suffer on the cross but substituted a scapegoat or a simulacrum. For extreme Gnostics, God could not have created anything as wicked as the world: a ‘demiurge’ or rival god must have made it. But if God was not a universal creator, he was not himself. If he did not wholly embrace human nature, including the burdens of the body and the strains and sufferings of flesh, Christianity was pointless.
But the Church, while rejecting Gnosticism, retained some Gnostic influence. Catholic tradition has always been fastidious about the body. Ascetic Christians have hated their bodies to the point of mistreating them: punishing them with dirt, scourging them with the lash, starving them with fasting, and irritating them with hair shirts, not just for reasons of discipline but in real revulsion from the flesh. The early Church, which might have encouraged procreation to boost numbers, nourished a surprising prejudice in favour of celibacy, which remains a requirement for a formally religious life. Throughout the Middle Ages, heretics perpetuated the influence of Gnosticism by reviving the prejudice and making it a precept: don’t acknowledge the urgings of the flesh; don’t engender recruits for the Devil. The cult of martyrdom also seems indebted to Gnostic distaste for the world as a burden and the body a cell for the soul. As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, ‘Man’s mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells.’ Martyrdom is an escape from a prison in which Satan is the warder.
In reaction, mainstream Catholic Christianity emphasized the perception of the body as a temple, of nature as lovely, of sex as selectively sanctified, of martyrdom as unwelcome sacrifice, of celibacy as
restricted to the religious life. This surely helps to explain the stunning appeal of a religion that gradually became the most popular in the world.
Nonetheless, an equivocal attitude to sex lingered in Christian tradition. People are equivocal about sex for many reasons: it is best kept private and functional; it activates anxieties about hygiene, health, mess, morals, and social control. But why are some people’s objections religious? Fertility obsessions dominate many cults and it is tempting to assert that most religions recommend sex. Some celebrate it, as in Tantric exhortations to supposedly sanctifying copulation or Hindu instructions maximizing the pleasures and varieties of karma, or the Taoist tradition of fang-chungshu, in which ‘arts of the inner chamber’ confer immortality. Christianity is among religions that condone and even commend physical love under licence as, for instance, a metaphor for the mutual love of God and creation or Christ and the Church. Almost all religions prescribe conventions for regulating sexual conduct in ways supposedly favourable to the community: this accounts for why so many religions condemn particular sexual practices; masturbation and homosexuality, for instance, attract objections because they are infertile; incest is antisocial; promiscuity and sexual infidelity are objectionable because they subvert institutions, such as marriage, that are designed for the nurture of the young. Conversely, celibacy and virginity may be valued for positive qualities, as sacrifices made to God, rather than in recoil from sex. St Augustine introduced – or at least, clearly formulated – a new objection to sex as such on the grounds that we cannot control our sex urges, which therefore infringe the free will God gave us. So the Devil must be to blame. A modern way of putting it might be to say that because sex is instinctive, and therefore animal, we enhance our humanity when we resist its temptations. In his youth, before his conversion to Catholic Christianity, Augustine had been a Manichaean – a follower of the teaching that all matter is evil. Manichaeans despised reproduction as a means of perpetuating diabolic power and had a correspondingly negative estimation of sex. ‘Out of the squalid yearnings of my flesh’, reads one of his self-reproaches, ‘bubbled up the clouds and scum of puberty … so that I could not tell the serenity of love from the swamp of lust.’24 This may be why Western morality has been so heavily preoccupied with sex ever since. It is possible that the Church would in any case have adopted a highly interventionist attitude to people’s sex lives: it is, after all, a matter of great importance to most people and therefore of great power to anyone who can control it. The struggle between churches and states in the modern West over who should have the right to license and register marriages might well have happened even if Augustine had never turned his mind to the problem of sex.25
In moral thinking, as in most respects, Islam, which literally means something like ‘submission’ or ‘resignation’, produced simpler, more practical formulations than Christianity. Christ invited individuals to respond to grace, but Muhammad, more straightforwardly, called them to obey God’s laws. He was a ruler as well as a prophet and produced a blueprint for a state as well as a religion. One consequence was that where Christ had proclaimed a sharp distinction between the secular and the spiritual, Muslims acknowledged no difference. Islam was both a way of worship and a way of life. The responsibilities of the caliph – literally, the ‘successor’ of Muhammad – covered both. Whereas Moses legislated for a chosen people and Christ for an other-worldly kingdom, Muhammad aimed at a universal code of behaviour covering every department of life: the sharia – literally, ‘the camel’s way to water’. ‘We gave you a sharia in religion’, he said. ‘So follow it and do not follow the passions of those who do not know.’ He failed, however, to leave a code that was anything like comprehensive. Schools of jurisprudence, founded by masters of the eighth and ninth centuries, set out to fill in the gaps, starting with such utterances as Muhammad was said to have made in his lifetime, and generalizing from them, with help, in some cases from reason, common sense, or custom. The masters differed, but the followers of each treated his interpretations as divinely guided and therefore immutable. Trainees in each tradition guarded, as zealously as any genealogist, the record of the succession of masters through whom the teachings of the founder were preserved – back, for instance, to Abu Hanifa, who tried to incorporate reason, or bin Malik, who blended in ancient customary law, or Ibn Hanbal, who tried to purge both influences and get to the root of what Muhammad wanted.
The practical problems were as great as in Christendom, but different. Rival approaches had to be reconciled; the opportunities of development that arose in consequence led to hundreds of schisms and sub-divisions. Incompatible methods of electing the caliph cleft Islam between claimants. The rift that opened within a generation of Muhammad’s death never healed. Schisms widened and multiplied. Eventually, in most of Islam, rulers or states arrogated caliphal or quasi-caliphal authority to themselves. Whenever they lapsed in observance of the sharia by self-serving practices or, in recent times, by ‘modernizing’ or ‘westernizing tendencies’, revolutionaries – with increasing frequency – could impugn ‘apostate’ rulers by waving the Prophet’s mantle as a flag and his book as a weapon.26 Like any system, sharia has to adapt to changes in social context and consensus – not least today, in an increasingly interconnected world, where common understanding of human rights owes much to Christian and humanist influence. But even Muslims who see the need to reinterpret sharia cannot agree on who should do the job. Theocrats gain power in states that prioritize Islam in making and enforcing laws; Islamist movements or terrorist fanatics menace modernizers.
Aesthetic Reflections by Christian and Muslim Thinkers
Christians and Muslims inherited revulsion from ‘graven images’ along with the rest of Jewish law. They differed about how to respond. Codes the Bible dated to the time of Moses proscribed religious imagery on the grounds that God is too holy or too remote from what is knowable even to be named, let alone represented. Idolatry, moreover, in some minds, is incompatible with the unity of God: even if he alone is represented, the worship of several images of him compromises his unique status. This may be one of the reasons why Jews, who have been eminent in so many learned and aesthetic accomplishments, are less well represented in visual arts than in music or letters.
If sayings ascribed to him after his death can be trusted, part of what Muhammad took from Jewish teachers was a perception of statues as abominable. Supposedly, he threatened image makers with reckoning on the Day of Judgement. Early Islam did not, however, oppose all representational art. Realistic pictures adorn an early caliph’s hunting lodge, where you can still see the somewhat lubricious scenes of naked women that entertained Walid I in his bath.27 In the tenth century, Abu ‘Ali al-Farisi turned back to the unglossed Qur’an to interpret Muhammad’s supposed strictures accurately, as prohibiting images of deities in order to forestall idolatry, not to ban all depictions of the natural world and its creatures. In some medieval Muslim art, notably in surviving fourteenth-century paintings from Iran, Muhammad appears in person in scenes of his life, including his birth, unmistakably modelled on the Christian iconography of the nativity of Christ. In a manuscript of Rashid al-Din’s Universal History, made in Tabriz in 1307, the angels croon over little Muhammad, while magi bow and Joseph hovers discreetly in his place.28 Most Muslims, however, acknowledged realism as sacrilege; Muslim artists, in consequence, have tended to stick to nonrepresentational subjects.
Christians might have taken the same line: indeed, sometimes, in some places, they did so. In Byzantium in 726 the emperor Leo III, who still claimed nominal authority throughout Christendom, banned images of Christ and the Virgin and ordered existing examples to be destroyed – perhaps in literal-minded response to biblical prohibitions, perhaps in order to protect worshippers from the heresy that Christ’s human person could be depicted apart from his divine nature. In the twelfth century in the West, rival monastic orders bickered over whether artworks were a good use of the Church’s money. In the sixteenth and se
venteenth centuries, some Protestants destroyed or defaced every image they could reach, while others merely outlawed practices they linked with ‘that most detestable offence of idolatry’ – such as kissing images or offering them candles or ex-votos. Most Christians, however, have been content with common sense: images are useful, as long as they do not become idols. Pictures function as aids to devotion in a way similar to that of relics. They can even be relics. The most precious relic of the medieval cathedral of Constantinople was a portrait of the Virgin ‘not made with human hands’ but painted by an angel for St Luke while he rested.29 Under-educated congregations in Western churches could remedy illiteracy by looking at paintings on the walls – the ‘books of the unlettered’, which made the deeds of the inhabitants of heaven memorable. Because ‘the honour paid to the image passes to the original’, worshippers could, without idolatry, channel adoration and reverence through pictures and sculptures.30 The argument anticipated by Plotinus, the third-century philosopher who seems to have revered Plato more than Christ, was unanswerable: ‘Those who look on art … are deeply stirred by recognizing the presentation of what lies in the idea, and so are called to recognition of the truth – the very experience out of which Love rises.’31
Such thinking made the Church the biggest patron of art in Christendom – almost the only source for much of the time. Medieval artists took part, in a small way, in the nature of priests and saints, for they brought people to a sense of what heaven was like and of how its inhabitants enhanced the Earth. No work of St Relindis of Maaseik survives, but the embroideries she made in the eighth century were inspired enough for sanctity. The tombstone of Petrus Petri, the chief architect of the cathedral of Toledo, assures onlookers that ‘thanks to the admirable building he made, he will not feel God’s wrath’. St Catherine of Bologna and Blessed James Grissinger were subjects of popular devotion long before their formal elevation. When Franciscan artists began to paint landscape in the thirteenth century, devotion, not romanticism, inspired them. To glorify God by depicting creation was a purpose almost inconceivable to a Muslim or Jew.
Out of Our Minds Page 22
