3 In the Shadow of God

3 In the Shadow of God
WITHOUT warning you are seized and brought before a judge. Did
you create a thunderstorm and destroy the village harvest ? Did you
kill your neighbor with the evil eye? Do you doubt that Christ is
bodily present in the Eucharist? You will soon learn that questions
of this sort admit of no exculpatory reply.
You are not told the names of your accusers. But their identities
are of little account, for even if, at this late hour, they were to recant
their charges against you, they would merely be punished as false
witnesses, while their original accusations would retain their full
weight as evidence of your guilt. The machinery of justice has been
so well oiled by faith that it can no longer be influenced.
But you have a choice, of sorts: you can concede your guilt and
name your accomplices. Yes, you must have had accomplices. No
confession will be accepted unless other men and women can be
implicated in your crimes. Perhaps you and three acquaintances of
your choosing did change into hares and consort with the devil himself.
The sight of iron boots designed to crush your feet seems to
refresh your memory. Yes, Friedrich, Arthur, and Otto are sorcerers
too. Their wives? Witches all.
You now face punishment proportionate to the severity of your
crimes: flogging, a pilgrimage on foot to the Holy Land, forfeiture of
property, or, more likely, a period of long imprisonment, probably
for life. Your "accomplices" will soon be rounded up for torture.
Or you can maintain your innocence, which is almost certainly the
truth (after all, it is the rare person who can create a thunderstorm).
In response, your jailers will be happy to lead you to the furthest
reaches of human suffering, before burning you at the stake. You may
be imprisoned in total darkness for months or years at a time, repeatedly
beaten and starved, or stretched upon the rack. Thumbscrews
may be applied, or toe screws, or a pear-shaped vise may be inserted
into your mouth, vagina, or anus, and forced open until your misery
admits of no possible increase. You may be hoisted to the ceiling on a
strappado (with your arms bound behind your back and attached to
a pulley, and weights tied to your feet), dislocating your shoulders. To
this torment squassation might be added, which, being often sufficient
to cause your death, may yet spare you the agony of the stake.1
If you are unlucky enough to be in Spain, where judicial torture has
achieved a transcendent level of cruelty, you may be placed in the
"Spanish chair": a throne of iron, complete with iron stocks to secure
your neck and limbs. In the interest of saving your soul, a coal brazier
will be placed beneath your bare feet, slowly roasting them. Because
the stain of heresy runs deep, your flesh will be continually larded
with fat to keep it from burning too quickly. Or you may be bound to
a bench, with a cauldron filled with mice placed upside-down upon
your bare abdomen. With the requisite application of heat to the iron,
the mice will begin to burrow into your belly in search of an exit.2
Should you, while in extremis, admit to your torturers that you
are indeed a heretic, a sorcerer, or a witch, you will be made to confirm
your story before a judge—and any attempt to recant, to claim
that your confession has been coerced through torture, will deliver
you either to your tormentors once again or directly to the stake. If,
once condemned, you repent of your sins, these compassionate and
learned men—whose concern for the fate of your eternal soul really
knows no bounds—will do you the kindness of strangling you
before lighting your pyre.3
THE medieval church was quick to observe that the Good Book was
good enough to suggest a variety of means for eradicating heresy,
ranging from a communal volley of stones to cremation while alive.4
A literal reading of the Old Testament not only permits but requires
heretics to be put to death. As it turns out, it was never difficult to
find a mob willing to perform this holy office, and to do so purely
on the authority of the Church—since it was still a capital offense to
possess a Bible in any of the vernacular languages of Europe.5 In
fact, scripture was not to become generally accessible to the common
man until the sixteenth century. As we noted earlier, Deuteronomy
was the preeminent text in every inquisitor's canon, for it explicitly
enjoins the faithful to murder anyone in their midst, even members
of their own families, who profess a sympathy for foreign gods.
Showing a genius for totalitarianism that few mortals have ever
fully implemented, the author of this document demands that anyone
too squeamish to take part in such religious killing must be
killed as well (Deuteronomy 17:12-13).6 Anyone who imagines that
no justification for the Inquisition can be found in scripture need
only consult the Bible to have his view of the matter clarified:
If you hear that in one of the towns which Yahweh your God has
given you for a home, there are men, scoundrels from your own
stock, who have led their fellow-citizens astray, saying, "Let us go
and serve other gods," hitherto unknown to you, it is your duty
to look into the matter, examine it, and inquire most carefully. If
it is proved and confirmed that such a hateful thing has taken
place among you, you must put the inhabitants of that town to
the sword; you must lay it under the curse of destruction—the
town and everything in it. You must pile up all its loot in the public
square and burn the town and all its loot, offering it all to
Yahweh your God. It is to be a ruin for all time and never rebuilt.
(Deuteronomy 13:12-16).
For obvious reasons, the church tended to ignore the final edict: the
destruction of heretic property.
In addition to demanding that we fulfill every "jot" and "tittle"
of Old Testament law,7 Jesus seems to have suggested, in John 15:6,
further refinements to the practice of killing heretics and unbelievers:
"If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is
withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they
are burned." Whether we want to interpret Jesus metaphorically is,
of course, our business. The problem with scripture, however, is that
many of its possible interpretations (including most of the literal
ones) can be used to justify atrocities in defense of the faith.
The Holy Inquisition formally began in 1184 under Pope Lucius
III, to crush the popular movement of Catharism. The Cathars (from
the Greek katharoi, "the pure ones") had fashioned their own brand
of Manicheanism (Mani himself was flayed alive at the behest of
Zoroastrian priests in 276 CE), which held that the material world
had been created by Satan and was therefore inherently evil. The
Cathars were divided by a schism of their own and within each of
their sects by the distinction between the renunciate perfecti and the
lay credentes ("the believers") who revered them. The perfecti ate
no meat, eggs, cheese, or fat, fasted for days at a time, maintained
strict celibacy, and abjured all personal wealth. The life of the perfecti
was so austere that most credentes only joined their ranks once
they were safely on their deathbeds, so that, having lived as they
pleased, they might yet go to God in holiness. Saint Bernard, who
had tried in vain to combat this austere doctrine with that of the
church, noted the reasons for his failure: "As to [the Cathars'] conversation,
nothing can be less reprehensible . . . and what they speak,
they prove by deeds. As for the morals of the heretic, he cheats no
one, he oppresses no one, he strikes no one; his cheeks are pale with
fasting, . . . his hands labor for his livelihood."8
There seems, in fact, to have been nothing wrong with these people
apart from their attachment to certain unorthodox beliefs about
the creation of the world. But heresy is heresy. Any person who
believes that the Bible contains the infallible word of God will
understand why these people had to be put to death.
The Inquisition took rather genteel steps at first (the use of
torture to extract confessions was not "officially" sanctioned until
1215, at the Fourth Lateran Council), but two developments conspired
to lengthen its strides. The first came in 1199 when Pope
Innocent III decreed that all property belonging to a convicted
heretic would be forfeited to the church; the church then shared it
both with local officials and with the victim's accusers, as a reward
for their candor. The second was the rise of the Dominican order.9
Saint Dominic himself, displaying the conviction of every good
Catholic of the day, announced to the Cathars, "For many years I
have exhorted you in vain, with gentleness, preaching, praying,
weeping. But according to the proverb of my country, 'where blessing
can accomplish nothing, blows may avail.' We shall rouse against
you princes and prelates, who, alas, will arm nations and kingdoms
against this land. . . ."10 It would appear that sainthood comes in a
variety of flavors. With the founding of Dominic's holy order of
mendicant friars, the Inquisition was ready to begin its work in
earnest. It is important to remember, lest the general barbarity of
time inure us to the horror of these historical accounts, that the perpetrators
of the Inquisition—the torturers, informers, and those
who commanded their actions—were ecclesiastics of one rank or
another. They were men of God—popes, bishops, friars, and priests.
They were men who had devoted their lives, in word if not in deed,
to Christ as we find him in the New Testament, healing the sick and
challenging those without sin to cast the first stone:
In 1234, the canonization of Saint Dominic was finally proclaimed
in Toulouse, and Bishop Raymond du Fauga was washing
his hands in preparation for dinner when he heard the rumor
that a fever-ridden old woman in a nearby house was about to
undergo the Cathar ritual. The bishop hurried to her bedside and
managed to convince her that he was a friend, then interrogated
her on her beliefs, then denounced her as a heretic. He called on
her to recant. She refused. The bishop thereupon had her bed carried
out into a field, and there she was burned. "And after the
bishop and the friars and their companions had seen the business
completed," Brother Guillaume wrote, "they returned to the
refectory and, giving thanks to God and the Blessed Dominic, ate
with rejoicing what had been prepared for them."11
The question of how the church managed to transform Jesus'
principal message of loving one's neighbor and turning the other
cheek into a doctrine of murder and rapine seems to promise a harrowing
mystery; but it is no mystery at all. Apart from the Bible's
heterogeneity and outright self-contradiction, allowing it to justify
diverse and irreconcilable aims,12 the culprit is clearly the doctrine of
faith itself. Whenever a man imagines that he need only believe the
truth of a proposition, without evidence—that unbelievers will go to
hell, that Jews drink the blood of infants—he becomes capable of
anything.
The practice for which the Inquisition is duly infamous, and the
innovation that secured it a steady stream of both suspects and
guilty verdicts, was its use of torture to extract confessions from the
accused, to force witnesses to testify, and to persuade a confessing
heretic to name those with whom he had collaborated in sin. The
justification for this behavior came straight from Saint Augustine,
who reasoned that if torture was appropriate for those who broke
the laws of men, it was even more fitting for those who broke the
laws of God.13 As practiced by medieval Christians, judicial torture
was merely a final, mad inflection of their faith. That anyone imagined
that facts were being elicited by such a lunatic procedure seems
a miracle in itself. As Voltaire wrote in 1764, "There is something
divine here, for it is incomprehensible that men should have
patiently borne this yoke."14
A contemporaneous account of the Spanish auto-da-fe (the public
spectacle at which heretics were sentenced and often burned) will
serve to complete our picture. The Spanish Inquisition did not cease
its persecution of heretics until 1834 (the last auto-da-fe took place
in Mexico in 1850), about the time Charles Darwin set sail on the
Beagle and Michael Faraday discovered the relationship between
electricity and magnetism.
The condemned are then immediately carried to the Riberia, the
place of execution, where there are as many stakes set up as there
are prisoners to be burnt. The negative and relapsed being first
strangled and then burnt; the professed mount their stakes by a
ladder, and the Jesuits, after several repeated exhortations to be
reconciled to the church, consign them to eternal destruction, and
then leave them to the fiend, who they tell them stands at their
elbow to carry them into torments. On this a great shout is raised,
and the cry is, "Let the dogs' beards be made"; which is done by
thrusting flaming bunches of furze, fastened to long poles,
against their beards, till their faces are burnt black, the surrounding
populace rending the air with the loudest acclamations of joy.
At last fire is set to the furze at the bottom of the stake, over
which the victims are chained, so high that the flame seldom
reaches higher than the seat they sit on, and thus they are rather
roasted than burnt. Although there cannot be a more lamentable
spectacle and the sufferers continually cry out as long as they are
able, "Pity for the love of God!" yet it is beheld by persons of all
ages and both sexes with transports of joy and satisfaction.15
And while Protestant reformers broke with Rome on a variety of
counts, their treatment of their fellow human beings was no less disgraceful.
Public executions were more popular than ever: heretics
were still reduced to ash, scholars were tortured and killed for
impertinent displays of reason, and fornicators were murdered
without a qualm.16 The basic lesson to be drawn from all this was
summed up nicely by Will Durant: "Intolerance is the natural concomitant
of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses
certainty; certainty is murderous."17
There really seems to be very little to perplex us here. Burning
people who are destined to burn for all time seems a small price to
pay to protect the people you love from the same fate. Clearly, the
common law marriage between reason and faith—wherein otherwise
reasonable men and women can be motivated by the content of
unreasonable beliefs—places society upon a slippery slope, with
confusion and hypocrisy at its heights, and the torments of the
inquisitor waiting below.
Witch and Jew
Historically, there have been two groups targeted by the church that
deserve special mention. Witches are of particular interest in this
context because their persecution required an extraordinary degree
of credulity to get underway, for the simple reason that a confederacy
of witches in medieval Europe seems never to have existed.
There were no covens of pagan dissidents, meeting in secret,
betrothed to Satan, abandoning themselves to the pleasures of group
sex, cannibalism, and the casting of spells upon neighbors, crops, and
cattle. It seems that such notions were the product of folklore, vivid
dreams, and sheer confabulation—and confirmed by confessions
elicited under the most gruesome torture. Anti-Semitism is of interest
here, both for the scale of the injustice that it has wrought and
for its explicitly theological roots. From the perspective of Christian
teaching, Jews are even worse than run-of-the-mill heretics; they
are heretics who explicitly repudiate the divinity of Jesus Christ.
While the stigmas applied to witches and Jews throughout Christendom
shared curious similarities—both were often accused of the
lively and improbable offense of murdering Christian infants and
drinking their blood18—their cases remain quite distinct. Witches, in
all likelihood, did not even exist, and those murdered in their stead
numbered perhaps 40,000 to 50,000 over three hundred years of
persecution;19 Jews have lived side by side with Christians for nearly
two millennia, fathered their religion, and for reasons that are no
more substantial than those underlying the belief in the Resurrec
tion have been the objects of murderous intolerance since the first
centuries after Christ.
THE accounts of witch hunts resemble, in most respects, the more
widespread persecution of heretics throughout the Inquisition:
imprisonment on the basis of accusations alone, torture to extract
confession, confessions deemed unacceptable until accomplices were
named, death by slow fire, and the rounding up of the freshly
accused. The following anecdote is typical:
In 1595, an old woman residing in a village near Constance, angry
at not being invited to share the sports of the country people on
a day of public rejoicing, was heard to mutter something to herself,
and was afterwards seen to proceed through the fields
towards a hill, where she was lost sight of. A violent thunderstorm
arose about two hours afterwards, which wet the dancers to
the skin, and did considerable damage to the plantations. This
woman, suspected before of witchcraft, was seized and imprisoned,
and accused of having raised the storm, by filling a hole
with wine, and stirring it about with a stick. She was tortured till
she confessed, and burned alive the next evening.20
Though it is difficult to generalize about the many factors that
conspired to make villagers rise up against their neighbors, it is obvious
that belief in the existence of witches was the sine qua non of
the phenomenon. But what was it, precisely, that people believed?
They appear to have believed that their neighbors were having sex
with the devil, enjoying nocturnal flights upon broomsticks, changing
into cats and hares, and eating the flesh of other human beings.
More important, they believed utterly in maleficium—that is, in the
efficacy of harming others by occult means. Among the many disasters
that could befall a person over the course of a short and difficult
life, medieval Christians seemed especially concerned that a neigh
bor might cast a spell and thereby undermine their health or good
fortune. Only the advent of science could successfully undercut such
an idea, along with the fantastical displays of cruelty to which it gave
rise. We must remember that it was not until the mid-nineteenth
century that the germ theory of disease emerged, laying to rest
much superstition about the causes of illness.
Occult beliefs of this sort are clearly an inheritance from our
primitive, magic-minded ancestors. The Fore people of New Guinea,
for instance, besides being enthusiastic cannibals, exacted a gruesome
revenge upon suspected sorcerers:
Besides attending public meetings, Fore men also hunted down
men they believed to be sorcerers and killed them in reprisal. The
hunters used a specialized attack called tukabu against sorcerers:
they ruptured their kidneys, crushed their genitals and broke
their thigh bones with stone axes, bit into their necks and tore
out their tracheas, jammed bamboo splinters into their veins to
bleed them.21
No doubt each of these gestures held metaphysical significance. This
behavior seems to have been commonplace among the Fore at least
until the 1960s. The horrible comedy of human ignorance achieves
a rare moment of transparency here: the Fore were merely responding
to an epidemic of kuru—a fatal spongiform infection of the
brain—brought on not by sorcerers in their midst but by their own
religious observance of eating the bodies and brains of their dead.22
Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was perfectly
apparent that disease could be inflicted by demons and black
magic. There are accounts of frail, old women charged with killing
able-bodied men and breaking the necks of their horses—actions
which they were made to confess under torture—and few people, it
seems, found such accusations implausible. Even the relentless torture
of the accused was given a perverse rationale: the devil, it was
believed, made his charges insensible to pain, despite their cries for
mercy. And so it was that, for centuries, men and women who were
guilty of little more than being ugly, old, widowed, or mentally ill
were convicted of impossible crimes and then murdered for God's
sake.
After nearly four hundred years some ecclesiastics began to
appreciate how insane all this was. Consider the epiphany of Frederick
Spee: "Torture fills our Germany with witches and unheard-of
wickedness, and not only Germany but any nation that attempts
it. . . . If all of us have not confessed ourselves witches, that is only
because we have not all been tortured."23 But Spee was led to this
reasonable surmise only after a skeptical friend, the duke of
Brunswick, had a woman suspected of witchcraft artfully tortured
and interrogated in his presence. This poor woman testified that she
has seen Spee himself on the Brocken, shape-shifting into a wolf, a
goat, and other beasts and fathering numerous children by the
assembled witches born with the heads of toads and the legs of spiders.
Spee, lucky indeed to be in the company of a friend, and certain
of his own innocence, immediately set to work on his Cautio Criminalis
(1631), which detailed the injustice of witch trials.24
Bertrand Russell observed, however, that not all reasonable men
were as fortunate as Spee:
Some few bold rationalists ventured, even while the persecution
was at its height, to doubt whether tempests, hail-storms, thunder
and lightning were really caused by the machinations of
women. Such men were shown no mercy. Thus towards the end
of the sixteenth century Flade, Rector of the University of Treves,
and Chief Judge of the Electoral Court, after condemning countless
witches, began to think that perhaps their confessions were
due to the desire to escape from the tortures of the rack, with the
result that he showed unwillingness to convict. He was accused of
having sold himself to Satan, and was subjected to the same tortures
as he had inflicted upon others. Like them, he confessed his
guilt, and in 1589 he was strangled and then burnt.25
As late as 1718 (just as the inoculation against smallpox was
being introduced to England and the English mathematician Brook
Taylor was making refinements to the calculus), we find the madness
of the witch hunt still a potent social force. Charles Mackay
relates an incident in Caithness (northeast Scotland):
A silly fellow, named William Montgomery, a carpenter, had a
mortal antipathy to cats; and somehow or other these animals
generally chose his back-yard as the scene of their catterwaulings.
He puzzled his brains for a long time to know why he, above all
his neighbors, should be so pestered. At last he came to the sage
conclusion that his tormentors were no cats, but witches. In this
opinion he was supported by his maid-servant, who swore a
round oath that she had often heard the aforesaid cats talking
together in human voices. The next time the unlucky tabbies
assembled in his back-yard, the valiant carpenter was on the alert.
Arming himself with an axe, a dirk, and a broadsword, he rushed
out among them. One of them he wounded in the back, a second
in the hip, and the leg of a third he maimed with his axe; but he
could not capture any of them. A few days afterwards, two old
women of the parish died; and it was said, that when their bodies
were laid out, there appeared upon the back of one the mark as of
a recent wound, and a similar scar upon the hip of the other. The
carpenter and his maid were convinced that they were the very
cats, and the whole county repeated the same story. Every one
was upon the look-out for proofs corroborative; a very remarkable
one was soon discovered. Nancy Gilbert, a wretched old creature
upwards of seventy years of age, was found in bed with her
leg broken. As she was ugly enough for a witch, it was asserted
that she also was one of the cats that had fared so ill at the hands
of the carpenter. The latter, when informed of the popular suspicion,
asserted that he distinctly remembered to have struck one of
the cats a blow with the back of his broadsword, which ought to
have broken her leg. Nancy was immediately dragged from her
bed and thrown into prison. Before she was put to the torture, she
explained in a very natural and intelligible manner how she had
broken her limb; but this account did not give satisfaction. The
professional persuasions of the torturer made her tell a different
tale, and she confessed that she was indeed a witch, and had been
wounded by Montgomery on the night stated; that the two old
women recently deceased were witches also, besides about a score
of others whom she named. The poor creature suffered so much
by the removal from her own home, and the tortures inflicted
upon her, that she died the next day in prison.26
Apart from observing, yet again, the astonishing consequences of
certain beliefs, we should take note of the reasonable way these
witch-hunters attempted to confirm their suspicions. They looked
for correlations that held apparent significance: not any old woman
would do; they needed one who had suffered a wound similar to the
one inflicted upon the cat. Once you accept the premise that old
women can shape-shift into cats and back again, the rest is practically
science.
The church did not officially condemn the use of torture until the
bull of Pope Pius VII in 1816.
ANTI-SEMITISM2 7 is as integral to church doctrine as the flying
buttress is to a Gothic cathedral, and this terrible truth has been
published in Jewish blood since the first centuries of the common
era. Like that of the Inquisition, the history of anti-Semitism can
scarcely be given sufficient treatment in the context of this book. I
raise the subject, however briefly, because the irrational hatred of
Jews has produced a spectrum of effects that have been most acutely
felt in our own time. Anti-Semitism is intrinsic to both Christianity
and Islam; both traditions consider the Jews to be bunglers of God's
initial revelation. Christians generally also believe that the Jews
murdered Christ, and their continued existence as Jews constitutes a
perverse denial of his status as the Messiah. Whatever the context,
the hatred of Jews remains a product of faith: Christian, Muslim, as
well as Jewish.
Contemporary Muslim anti-Semitism is heavily indebted to its
Christian counterpart. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian
anti-Semitic forgery that is the source of most conspiracy theories
relating to the Jews, is now considered an authoritative text in the
Arab-speaking world.28 A recent contribution to Al-Akhbar, one of
Cairo's mainstream newspapers, suggests that the problem of Muslim
anti-Semitism is now deeper than any handshake in the White
House Rose Garden can remedy: "Thanks to Hitler, of blessed memory,
who on behalf of the Palestinians took revenge in advance,
against the most vile criminals on the face of the Earth.... Although
we do have a complaint against him, for his revenge was not
enough."29 This is from moderate Cairo, where Muslims drink alcohol,
go to the movies, and watch belly dancing—and where the government
actively represses fundamentalism. Clearly, hatred of the
Jews is white-hot in the Muslim world.
The gravity of Jewish suffering over the ages, culminating in the
Holocaust, makes it almost impossible to entertain any suggestion
that Jews might have brought their troubles upon themselves. This
is, however, in a rather narrow sense, the truth. Prior to the rise of
the church, Jews became the objects of suspicion and occasional persecution
for their refusal to assimilate, for the insularity and professed
superiority of their religious culture—that is, for the content
of their own unreasonable, sectarian beliefs. The dogma of a "chosen
people," while at least implicit in most faiths, achieved a stridence in
Judaism that was unknown in the ancient world. Among cultures
that worshiped a plurality of Gods, the later monotheism of the Jews
proved indigestible. And while their explicit demonization as a people
required the mad work of the Christian church, the ideology of
Judaism remains a lightning rod for intolerance to this day. As a
system of beliefs, it appears among the least suited to survive in a
theological state of nature. Christianity and Islam both acknowledge
the sanctity of the Old Testament and offer easy conversion to their
faiths. Islam honors Abraham, Moses, and Jesus as forerunners of
Muhammad. Hinduism embraces almost anything in sight with its
manifold arms (many Hindus, for instance, consider Jesus an avatar
of Vishnu). Judaism alone finds itself surrounded by unmitigated
errors. It seems little wonder, therefore, that it has drawn so much
sectarian fire. Jews, insofar as they are religious, believe that they are
bearers of a unique covenant with God. As a consequence, they have
spent the last two thousand years collaborating with those who see
them as different by seeing themselves as irretrievably so. Judaism
is as intrinsically divisive, as ridiculous in its literalism, and as at
odds with the civilizing insights of modernity as any other religion.
Jewish settlers, by exercising their "freedom of belief" on contested
land, are now one of the principal obstacles to peace in the Middle
East. They will be a direct cause of war between Islam and the West
should one ever erupt over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.30
THE problem for first-century Christians was simple: they belonged
to a sect of Jews that had recognized Jesus as the messiah (Greek
christos), while the majority of their coreligionists had not. Jesus
was a Jew, of course, and his mother a Jewess. His apostles, to the last
man, were also Jews. There is no evidence whatsoever, apart from the
tendentious writings of the later church, that Jesus ever conceived of
himself as anything other than a Jew among Jews, seeking the fulfillment
of Judaism—and, likely, the return of Jewish sovereignty in
a Roman world. As many authors have observed, the numerous
strands of Hebrew prophecy that were made to coincide with Jesus'
ministry betray the apologetics, and often poor scholarship, of the
gospel writers.
The writers of Luke and Matthew, for instance, in seeking to
make the life of Jesus conform to Old Testament prophecy, insist
that Mary conceived as a virgin (Greek parthenos), harking to the
Greek rendering of Isaiah 7:14. Unfortunately for fanciers of
Mary's virginity, the Hebrew word alma (for which parthenos is an
erroneous translation) simply means "young woman," without any
implication of virginity. It seems all but certain that the Christian
dogma of the virgin birth, and much of the church's resulting
anxiety about sex, was the result of a mistranslation from the
Hebrew.31
Another strike against the doctrine of the virgin birth is that the
other evangelists, Mark and John, seem to know nothing about it—
though both appear troubled by accusations of Jesus' illegitimacy.32
Paul apparently thinks that Jesus is the son of Joseph and Mary. He
refers to Jesus as being "born of the seed of David according to the
flesh" (Romans 1:3—meaning Joseph was his father), and "born of
woman" (Galatians 4:4—meaning that Jesus was really human),
with no reference to Mary's virginity.33
Mary's virginity has always been suggestive of God's attitude
toward sex: it is intrinsically sinful, being the mechanism through
which original sin was bequeathed to the generations after Adam. It
would appear that Western civilization has endured two millennia of
consecrated sexual neurosis simply because the authors of Matthew
and Luke could not read Hebrew. For the Jews, the true descendants
of Jesus and the apostles, the dogma of the virgin birth has served as
a perennial justification for their persecution, because it has been
one of the principal pieces of "evidence" demonstrating the divinity
of Jesus.
We should note that the emphasis on miracles in the New Testament,
along with the attempts to make the life of Jesus conform to
Old Testament prophecy, reveal the first Christians' commitment,
however faltering, to making their faith seem rational. Given the
obvious significance of any miracle, and the widespread acceptance
of prophecy, it would have been only reasonable to have considered
these purported events to be evidence for Christ's divinity. Augustine,
for his part, came right out and said it: "I should not be a
Christian but for the miracles." A millennium later, Blaise Pascal—
mathematical prodigy, philosopher, and physicist—was so impressed
by Christ's confirmation of prophecy that he devoted the last years
of his short life to defending Christian doctrine in writing:
Through Jesus we know God. All those who have claimed to know
God and prove his existence without Jesus Christ have only had
futile proofs to offer. But to prove Christ we have the prophecies
which are solid and palpable proofs. By being fulfilled and proved
true by the event, these prophecies show that these truths are
certain and thus prove that Jesus is divine.34
"Solid and palpable"? That so nimble a mind could be led to labor
under such dogma was surely one of the great wonders of the age.35
Even today, the apparent confirmation of prophecy detailed in
the New Testament is offered as the chief reason to accept Jesus as
the messiah. The "leap of faith" is really a fiction. No Christians,
not even those of the first century, have ever been content to rely
upon it.
WHILE God had made his covenant with Israel, and delivered his
Son in the guise of a Jew, the earliest Christians were increasingly
gentile, and as the doctrine spread, the newly baptized began to see
the Jews' denial of Jesus' divinity as the consummate evil. This sectarian
ethos is already well established by the time of Paul:
For ye, brethren, became followers of the churches of God which
in Judaea are in Christ Jesus: for ye also like things of your own
countrymen, even as they have of the Jews: Who both killed the
Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and
they please not God, and are contrary to all men: Forbidding us to
speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to fill up their sins
alway: for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost. (Thessalonians
2:14-16)
The explicit demonization of the Jews appears in the Gospel of John:
Jesus said unto them [the Jews], If God were your Father, ye
would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither
came I of myself, but he sent me. Why do ye not understand my
speech? Even because ye cannot hear my word. Ye are of your
father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a
murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because
there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of
his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it. And because I tell you
the truth, ye believe me not. (John 8:41-45)
With the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, Christians—gentile
and Jew alike—felt that they were witnessing the fulfillment of
prophecy, imagining that the Roman legions were meting out God's
punishment to the betrayers of Christ. Anti-Semitism soon
acquired a triumphal smugness, and with the ascension of Christianity
as the state religion in 312 CE, with the conversion of
Constantine, Christians began openly to relish and engineer the
degradation of world Jewry.36 Laws were passed that revoked many
of the civic privileges previously granted to Jews. Jews were
excluded from the military and from holding high office and were
forbidden to proselytize or to have sexual relations with Christian
women (both under penalty of death). The Justinian Code, in the
sixth century, essentially declared the legal status of the Jews null
and void—outlawing the Mishnah (the codification of Jewish
oral law) and making disbelief in the Resurrection and the Last
Judgment a capital offense.37 Augustine, ever the ready sectarian,
rejoiced at the subjugation of the Jews and took special pleasure in
the knowledge that they were doomed to wander the earth bearing
witness to the truth of scripture and the salvation of the gentiles.
The suffering and servitude of the Jews was proof that Christ had
been the messiah after all.38
Like witches, the Jews of Europe were often accused of incredible
crimes, the most prevalent of which has come to be known as the
"blood libel"—born of the belief that Jews require the blood of
Christians (generally newborn) for use in a variety of rituals.
Throughout the Middle Ages, Jews were regularly accused of murdering
Christian infants, a crime for which they were duly despised.
It was well known that all Jews menstruated, male and female alike,
and required the blood of a Christian to replenish their lost stores.
They also suffered from terrible hemorrhoids and oozing sores as a
punishment for the murder of Christ—and as a retort to their
improbable boast before the "innocent" Pontius Pilate (Matthew
27:25), "His blood be on us and on our children." It should come as
no surprise that Jews were in the habit of applying Christian blood
as a salve upon these indignities. Christian blood was also said to
ease the labor pains of any Jewess fortunate enough to have it
spread upon pieces of parchment and placed into her clenched fists.
It was common knowledge, too, that all Jews were born blind and
that, when smeared upon their eyes, Christian blood granted them
the faculty of sight. Jewish boys were frequently born with their
fingers attached to their foreheads, and only the blood of a Christian
could allow this pensive gesture to be broken without risk to
the child.
Once born, a Jew's desire for Christian blood could scarcely be
slaked. During the rite of circumcision it took the place of consecrated
oil (crissam, an exclusively Christian commodity); and later
in life, Jewish children of both sexes had their genitalia smeared with
the blood of some poor, pious man—waylaid upon the road and
strangled in a ditch—to make them fertile. Medieval Christians
believed that Jews used their blood for everything from a rouge to a
love philter and as a prophylactic against leprosy. Given this state of
affairs, who could doubt that Jews of all ages would be fond of sucking
blood out of Christian children "with quills and small reeds," for
later use by their elders during wedding feasts? Finally, with a mind
to covering all their bases, Jews smeared their dying brethren with
the blood of an innocent Christian babe (recently baptized and then
suffocated), saying, "If the Messiah promised by the prophets has
really come, and he be Jesus, may this innocent blood ensure for you
eternal life!"39
The blood libel totters on shoulders of other giant misconceptions,
of course, especially the notion, widely accepted at the time,
that the various constituents of the human body possess magical and
medicinal power. This explains the acceptance of similar accusations
leveled at witches, such as the belief that candles made from human
fat could render a man invisible while lighting up his surroundings.
40 One wonders just how many a thief was caught striding
through his neighbor's foyer in search of plunder, bearing a malodorous
candle confidently aloft, before these miraculous tools of
subterfuge fell out of fashion.
But for sheer gothic absurdity nothing surpasses the medieval
concern over host desecration, the punishment of which preoccupied
pious Christians for centuries. The doctrine of transubstantiation
was formally established in 1215 at the Fourth Lateran Council (the
same one that sanctioned the use of torture by inquisitors and prohibited
Jews from owning land or embarking upon civil or military
careers), and thereafter became the centerpiece of the Christian
(now Catholic) faith. (The relevant passage from The Profession of
Faith of the Roman Catholic was cited in chapter 2.) Henceforth, it
was an indisputable fact of this world that the communion host is
actually transformed at the Mass into the living body of Jesus
Christ. After this incredible dogma had been established, by mere
reiteration, to the satisfaction of everyone, Christians began to
worry that these living wafers might be subjected to all manner of
mistreatment, and even physical torture, at the hands of heretics and
Jews. (One might wonder why eating the body of Jesus would be
any less of a torment to him.) Could there be any doubt that the
Jews would seek to harm the Son of God again, knowing that his
body was now readily accessible in the form of defenseless crackers?
Historical accounts suggest that as many as three thousand Jews
were murdered in response to a single allegation of this imaginary
crime. The crime of host desecration was punished throughout
Europe for centuries.41
It is out of this history of theologically mandated persecution that
secular anti-Semitism emerged. Even explicitly anti-Christian
movements, as in the cases of German Nazism and Russian socialism,
managed to inherit and enact the doctrinal intolerance of the
church. Astonishingly, ideas as spurious as the blood libel are still
very much with us, having found a large cult of believers in the
Muslim world.42
The Holocaust
The National Socialism of all of us is anchored in uncritical loyalty,
in the surrender to the Führer that does not ask for the why
in individual cases, in the silent execution of his orders. We
believe that the Führer is obeying a higher call to fashion German
history. There can be no criticism of this belief.
Rudolf Hess, in a speech, June 1934.43
The rise of Nazism in Germany required much in the way of
"uncritical loyalty." Beyond the abject (and religious) loyalty to
Hitler, the Holocaust emerged out of people's acceptance of some
very implausible ideas.
Heinrich Himmler thought the SS should have leeks and mineral
water for breakfast. He thought people could be made to confess
by telepathy. Following King Arthur and the round table, he
would have only twelve people to dinner. He believed that Aryans
had not evolved from monkeys and apes like other races, but had
come down to earth from the heavens, where they had been preserved
in ice from the beginning of time. He established a meteorology
division which was given the task of proving this cosmic
ice theory. He also thought he was a reincarnation of Heinrich the
IN THE SHADOW OF GOD 101
First. Himmler was an extreme case: the picture is perhaps one of
someone quite mad. But one of his characteristics was much more
widely shared—his mind had not been encouraged to grow. Filled
with information and opinion, he had no critical powers.44
At the heart of every totalitarian enterprise, one sees outlandish
dogmas, poorly arranged, but working ineluctably like gears in some
ludicrous instrument of death. Nazism evolved out of a variety of
economic and political factors, of course, but it was held together by
a belief in the racial purity and superiority of the German people.
The obverse of this fascination with race was the certainty that all
impure elements—homosexuals, invalids, Gypsies, and, above all,
Jews—posed a threat to the fatherland. And while the hatred of Jews
in Germany expressed itself in a predominately secular way, it was
a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, religious
Germans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics
and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among
the faithful. Daniel Goldhagen has traced the rise of the German
conception of the Jews as a "race" and a "nation," which culminated
in an explicitly nationalistic formulation of this ancient Christian
animus.45 Of course, the religious demonization of the Jews was also
a contemporary phenomenon. (Indeed, the Vatican itself perpetuated
the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914.)46 Ironically, the
very fact that Jews had been mistreated in Germany (and elsewhere)
since time immemorial—by being confined to ghettos and deprived
of civic status—gave rise to the modern, secular strand of anti-
Semitism, for it was not until the emancipation efforts of the early
nineteenth century that the hatred of the Jews acquired an explicitly
racial inflection. Even the self-proclaimed "friends of the Jews" who
sought the admission of Jews into German society with the full privileges
of citizenship did so only on the assumption that the Jews
could be reformed thereby and rendered pure by sustained association
with the German race.47 Thus, the voices of liberal tolerance
within Germany were often as anti-Semitic as their conservative
opponents, for they differed only in the belief that the Jew was capable
of moral regeneration. By the end of the nineteenth century,
after the liberal experiment had failed to dissolve the Jews in the
pristine solvent of German tolerance, the erstwhile "friends of the
Jews" came to regard these strangers in their midst with the same
loathing that their less idealistic contemporaries had nurtured all
along. An analysis of prominent anti-Semitic writers and publications
from 1861 to 1895 reveals just how murderous the German
anti-Semites were inclined to be: fully two-thirds of those that
purported to offer "solutions" to the "Jewish problem" openly advocated
the physical extermination of the Jews—and this, as Goldhagen
points out, was several decades before the rise of Hitler. Indeed,
the possibility of exterminating a whole people was considered
before "genocide" was even a proper concept, and long before killing
on such a massive scale had been shown to be practically feasible in
the First and Second World Wars.
While Goldhagen's controversial charge that the Germans were
Hitler's "willing executioners" seems generally fair, it is true that
the people of other nations were equally willing. Genocidal anti-
Semitism had been in the air for some time, particularly in Eastern
Europe. In the year 1919, for instance, sixty-thousand Jews were
murdered in Ukraine alone.48 Once the Third Reich began its overt
persecution of Jews, anti-Semitic pogroms erupted in Poland, Rumania,
Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Croatia, and elsewhere.49
With passage of the Nuremberg laws in 1935 the transformation
of German anti-Semitism was complete. The Jews were to be considered
a race, one that was inimical to a healthy Germany in principle.
As such, they were fundamentally irredeemable, for while one
can cast away one's religious ideology, and even accept baptism into
the church, one cannot cease to be what one is. And it is here that
we encounter the overt complicity of the church in the attempted
murder of an entire people. German Catholics showed themselves
remarkably acquiescent to a racist creed that was at cross-purposes
with at least one of their core beliefs: for if baptism truly had the
power to redeem, then Jewish converts should have been considered
saved without residue in the eyes of the church. But, as we have
seen, coherence in any system of beliefs is never perfect—and the
German churches, in order to maintain order during their services,
were finally obliged to print leaflets admonishing their flock not to
attack Jewish converts during times of worship. That a person's race
could not be rescinded was underscored as early as 1880, in a
Vatican-approved paper: "Oh how wrong and deluded are those who
think Judaism is just a religion, like Catholicism, Paganism, Protestantism,
and not in fact a race, a people, and a nation! . . . For the Jews
are not only Jews because of their religion . . . they are Jews also and
especially because of their race."50 The German Catholic episcopate
issued its own guidelines in 1936: "Race, soil, blood and people are
precious natural values, which God the Lord has created and the care
of which he has entrusted to us Germans."51
But the truly sinister complicity of the church came in its willingness
to open its genealogical records to the Nazis and thereby
enable them to trace the extent of a person's Jewish ancestry. A
historian of the Catholic Church, Guenther Lewy, has written:
The very question of whether the [Catholic] Church should lend
its help to the Nazi state in sorting out people of Jewish descent
was never debated. On the contrary. "We have always unselfishly
worked for the people without regard to gratitude or ingratitude,"
a priest wrote in Klerusblatt in September 1934. "We shall also do
our best to help in this service to the people." And the cooperation
of the Church in this matter continued right through
the war years, when the price of being Jewish was no longer dismissal
from a government job and loss of livelihood, but deportation
and outright physical destruction.52
All of this, despite the fact that the Catholic Church was in very real
opposition to much of the Nazi platform, which was bent upon
curtailing its power. Goldhagen also reminds us that not a single
German Catholic was excommunicated before, during, or after the
war, "after committing crimes as great as any in human history."
This is really an extraordinary fact. Throughout this period, the
church continued to excommunicate theologians and scholars in
droves for holding unorthodox views and to proscribe books by the
hundreds, and yet not a single perpetrator of genocide—of whom
there were countless examples—succeeded in furrowing Pope Pius
XII's censorious brow.
This astonishing situation merits a slight digression. At the end of
the nineteenth century, the Vatican attempted to combat the
unorthodox conclusions of modern Bible commentators with its own
rigorous scholarship. Catholic scholars were urged to adopt the techniques
of modern criticism, to demonstrate that the results of a
meticulous and dispassionate study of the Bible could be compatible
with church doctrine. The movement was known as "modernism,"
and soon occasioned considerable embarrassment, as many of the
finest Catholic scholars found that they, too, were becoming skeptical
about the literal truth of scripture. In 1893 Pope Leo XIII announced,
All those books . . . which the church regards as sacred and canonical
were written with all their parts under the inspiration of the
Holy Spirit. Now, far from admitting the coexistence of error,
Divine inspiration by itself excludes all error, and that also of
necessity, since God, the Supreme Truth, must be incapable of
teaching error.53
In 1907, Pope Pius X declared modernism a heresy, had its exponents
within the church excommunicated, and put all critical studies
of the Bible on the Index of proscribed books. Authors similarly distinguished
include Descartes (selected works), Montaigne (Essais),
Locke (Essay on Human Understanding), Swift (Tale of a Tub), Swedenborg
(Principia), Voltaire (Lettres philosophiques), Diderot
(Encyclopedic), Rousseau (Du contrat social), Gibbon (The Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire), Paine (The Rights of Man), Sterne
(A Sentimental Journey), Kant (Critique of Pure Reason), Flaubert
(Madame Bovary), and Darwin (On the Origin of Species). As a censorious
afterthought, Descartes' Meditations was added to the Index
in 1948. With all that had occurred earlier in the decade, one might
have thought that the Holy See could have found greater offenses
with which to concern itself. Although not a single leader of the
Third Reich—not even Hitler himself—was ever excommunicated,
Galileo was not absolved of heresy until 1992.
In the words of the present pope, John Paul II, we can see how the
matter now stands: "This Revelation is definitive; one can only
accept it or reject it. One can accept it, professing belief in God, the
Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ,
the Son, of the same substance as the Father and the Holy Spirit,
who is Lord and the Giver of life. Or one can reject all of this."54
While the rise and fall of modernism in the church can hardly be
considered a victory for the forces of rationality, it illustrates an
important point: wanting to know how the world is leaves one vulnerable
to new evidence. It is no accident that religious doctrine and
honest inquiry are so rarely juxtaposed in our world.
When we consider that so few generations had passed since the
church left off disemboweling innocent men before the eyes of their
families, burning old women alive in public squares, and torturing
scholars to the point of madness for merely speculating about the
nature of the stars, it is perhaps little wonder that it failed to think
anything had gone terribly amiss in Germany during the war years.
Indeed, it is also well known that certain Vatican officials (the most
notorious of whom was Bishop Alois Hudal) helped members of the
SS like Adolf Eichmann, Martin Bormann, Heinrich Mueller, Franz
Stangl, and hundreds of others escape to South America and the
Middle East in the aftermath of the war.55 In this context, one is
often reminded that others in the Vatican helped Jews escape as well.
This is true. It is also true, however, that Vatican aid was often contingent
upon whether or not the Jews in question had been previously baptized.
There were, no doubt, innumerable instances in which European
Christians risked their lives to protect the Jews in their
midst, and did so because of their Christianity.57 But they were
not innumerable enough. The fact that people are sometimes
inspired to heroic acts of kindness by the teaching of Christ says
nothing about the wisdom or necessity of believing that he, exclusively,
was the Son of God. Indeed, we will find that we need not
believe anything on insufficient evidence to feel compassion for
the suffering of others. Our common humanity is reason enough
to protect our fellow human beings from coming to harm. Genocidal
intolerance, on the other hand, must inevitably find its inspiration
elsewhere. Whenever you hear that people have begun
killing noncombatants intentionally and indiscriminately, ask
yourself what dogma stands at their backs. What do these freshly
minted killers believe? You will find that it is always—always—
preposterous.
MY PURPOSE in this chapter has been to intimate, in as concise a
manner as possible, some of the terrible consequences that have
arisen, logically and inevitably, out of Christian faith. Unfortunately,
this catalog of horrors could be elaborated upon indefinitely.
Auschwitz, the Cathar heresy, the witch hunts—these
phrases signify depths of human depravity and human suffering
that would surely elude description were a writer to set himself
no other task. As I have cast a very wide net in the present chapter,
I can only urge readers who may feel they have just been
driven past a roadside accident at full throttle to consult the literature
on these subjects. Such extracurricular studies will reveal
that the history of Christianity is principally a story of
mankind's misery and ignorance rather than of its requited love
of God.
While Christianity has few living inquisitors today, Islam has
many. In the next chapter we will see that in our opposition to the
worldview of Islam, we confront a civilization with an arrested history.
It is as though a portal in time has opened, and fourteenthcentury
hordes are pouring into our world. Unfortunately, they are
now armed with twenty-first-century weapons.