Religions, Cults and Power

Between the Gregorian reform of the 1070s and the Renaissance, the Roman see turned from a client of emperors into a sovereign power. It deposed kings, ran a continental legal system, held territory and raised armies. The library’s sources read…

The crusade was born where the two lines of the previous chapters met. A Byzantine emperor asked the West for help against the Seljuks, and a reforming papacy had recently claimed the right to decide which wars were holy. The…

Between the eighth and the fourteenth centuries the eastern and western churches faced a run of movements that taught that the visible world was the work of an evil or lesser power, not of the good God. The Byzantine and…

The end of the Cathars (Chapter 61) left the Latin Church with a permanent machinery for detecting heresy. For nearly five centuries that machinery took several forms: the medieval papal Inquisition after 1231, the Spanish Inquisition set up at the…

Between the Black Death and the printing press, two university reformers raised most of the objections that Martin Luther would bring against Rome a century later. John Wycliffe of Oxford and Jan Hus of Prague attacked clerical wealth, the claims…

Few figures on the library’s shelves are drawn in such opposite colours as Martin Luther. To the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica he is the professor whose Theses struck “sledge-hammer blows” at the worst abuse of his age. To Monsignor Patrick O’Hare,…

The Lutheran settlement described in the previous chapter was only one current of the Reformation. Two others ran beside it. The Reformed churches of the Swiss city-republics, led first by Zwingli in Zurich and then by Calvin in Geneva, carried…

Within a generation of Luther, the Reformation had become a matter of state policy and of war. Kings decided the confession of their realms, confiscated church property, and fought one another and their own subjects for faith and for power…

Between the opening of the Council of Trent in 1545 and the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the Roman Catholic Church defined itself twice: first against the Protestant Reformation, then against, or towards, the modern world. The…

When Constantinople fell in 1453, the Orthodox world lost the imperial centre it had had for a thousand years. Moscow claimed the succession. The following centuries saw a church bound closely to the throne, a schism over ritual, a Petrine…

The magisterial Reformation put Scripture and doctrine in place of priest and sacrament. A second Protestant current then put experience in the place of doctrine. It runs from Puritanism and continental Pietism through Wesley’s and Whitefield’s revivals and the American…

Islam did not arise in a vacuum. In the early seventh century Arabia lay between two exhausted empires, Sasanian Iran and Byzantium, each with an imperial church and each watching an apocalyptic horizon. Inside Arabia, a commercial boom at Mecca…

The prophet who began as a “warner” to his own tribe died as the head of a confederacy covering almost all of Arabia. The library tells his story in sharply different registers: Karen Armstrong’s sympathetic history, Deepak Chopra’s novel, A.…

Islam rests on two textual pillars: the Quran, held to be the literal Word of God recited by Muhammad, and the sunna, the Prophet’s words and deeds transmitted as hadith. How each took shape, and how far either can serve…

Muhammad died in 632 without a successor who was also a prophet. The thirty years that followed (the age of the four rashidun, the “rightly guided” caliphs) were a time of conquest abroad and civil war at home. In Karen…

The Shiat Ali, the “party of Ali”, began as a political faction in the civil wars described in the previous chapter. It became a religious tradition with its own sacred history, its own theory of authority and its own expectation…

Between 661 and 1258 the caliphate went from a tribal chieftaincy in Damascus to a Sasanian-style monarchy in Baghdad, and then to a symbolic office over a mosaic of Turkish, Iranian and Arab military states. The library’s sources agree that…

Between the Abbasid revolution of 750 and the tenth century, Sunni Islam acquired the intellectual architecture it still has today: four recognised schools of law, a dominant theological method (Ash’arism), a philosophical tradition (falsafa) that was pushed out of the…

Twelver Shi’ism withdrew from politics to wait for a Hidden Imam. The “Sevener” line did the opposite. It produced a secret missionary network, a counter-caliphate in Cairo, a mountain state in Iran whose ruler abolished the religious law, a new…

Sufism (tasawwuf) appears in the library’s sources in two forms at once. It is an interior discipline aimed at the annihilation of the ego in God, and it is a social institution of lodges, masters and orders that held Islamic…

Between 1500 and 1700 three Muslim states used firearms and centralised bureaucracies to rule more tightly than any earlier Islamic polity. Karen Armstrong calls the period “Imperial Islam (1500-1700)”. She argues that these empires, unlike the Abbasid court, “all had…

From the eighteenth century onward, Islamic reform movements became political projects: a desert kingdom, a mass brotherhood, a clerical republic and a transnational jihad. The sources for this history differ in kind. Karen Armstrong writes a sympathetic scholarly survey. Kim…

Qur’an 33:40 calls Muhammad khatam an-nabiyyin, the “seal of the prophets”. Most Muslims read the verse as closing revelation. Every movement in this chapter reopened that question in some way: by announcing a “gate” to a hidden Imam, a new…

Part 9 begins on the Indus plain. An urban civilisation flourished and vanished there, and a body of orally transmitted hymns later appeared that became Hinduism’s oldest scripture. How the two relate is among the most politically charged questions in…

The Vedic hymns were not freestanding poetry. They were the spoken part of a sacrificial system, and the people who controlled that system came to hold a position in Indian society that no other priesthood has kept so long. This…

The Upanishads close the Vedic canon. Van Voorst notes that they are “also known as the Vedanta (End of the Veda)” [Van Voorst, Anthology of World Scriptures, #63227, “Overview of Structure”]. In them the outward sacrifice gives way to inquiry…

No institution of the Indian subcontinent has been argued over as much as caste. For its defenders it is a frame of duty (dharma) inherited from the Vedas, a division of labour that gives every person a place. For its…

Of the śramaṇa (“striver”) movements that challenged Brahmanical ritualism in the Ganges valley in the middle of the first millennium BCE, Jainism took renunciation to its furthest point. It holds that the soul (jiva) is bound by a subtle karmic…

Siddhartha Gautama, the “awakened one” (Buddha) of the Shakya clan, belongs to the same śramaṇa ferment as Mahavira (Chapter 86). His solution differed from Mahavira’s. He rejected both sensual indulgence and the self-torment of the Jains, he denied the permanent…

The third Maurya emperor, Ashoka (reigned c. 268–232 BCE), is the first ruler in the library’s sources to turn a śramaṇa ethic into a programme of government. His rock and pillar edicts are the oldest readable Indian documents, his missions…