Formations of Belief: Historical Approaches to Religion and the Secular 0691190755, 9780691190754

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Religious Pluralism and the
Origins of the Secular
Past Belief: The Fall and Rise of Ecclesiastical History in Early Modern Europe
Jacob Sasportas and
Jewish Messianism
Doubt and Unbelief in the Early Modern Era: Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and the Spanish Tradition
Exeuntes de corpore qui sumus? “Out of the Body, Who Are We?”: Augustine, the Care of the Dead, and a Clash of Representations
In the Church and at Home: Approaches to Saints in Colonial Mexico
Part II: Secularism and
Its Discontents
An Ordinary Soviet Death: Scientific Atheism, Socialist Rituals, and Life’s Final Question
True Believers in the
Modern Middle East
The Reformation Era and the
Secularization of Knowledge
Contesting Secularization: The Idea of a Normative Deficit of Modernity After Max Weber
Religious Minorities and the Anxieties
of an Islamic Identity in Pakistan
Afterword: Belief in Science? On the
Neuroscience of Religion
Notes
List of Contributors
Index

Citation preview

For m at ions of Be l i e f

P u bl ic at ions i n Pa r t n e r s h i p w i t h t h e S h e l b y C u l l om Dav i s C e n t e r at P r i nc e t on U n i v e r s i t y The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics, and Everyday Life, edited by Gyan Prakash and Kevin M. Kruse Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City, edited by Gyan Prakash Facing Fear: The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective, edited by Michael Laffan and Max Weiss Cultures in Motion, edited by Daniel T. Rodgers, Bhavani Raman, and Helmut Reimitz Formations of Belief: Historical Approaches to Religion and the Secular, edited by Philip Nord, Katja Guenther, and Max Weiss

Formations of Belief H istor ic a l A pproach e s to R e l igion a n d t h e Se c u l a r

E di t e d by Ph i l i p Nor d, K at ja Gu e n t h e r , & M a x W e is s

Pr i nceton U n i v e r sit y Pr e ss Pr i nceton & Ox for d

Copyright © 2019 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved ISBN 978-­0-­691-­19075-­4 British Library Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data is available Editorial: Eric Crahan & Pamela Weidman Production Editorial: Ali Parrington Jacket Design: Layla Mac Rory Jacket/Cover Credit: Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (1606–1669). Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, ca. 1659–1660. Oil on canvas, 140.1 x 120.0 cm. Inv. 828. Gemaeldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Photo: Christoph Schmidt / Art Resource, NY Production: Merli Guerra Publicity: Alyssa Sanford & Julia Hall This book has been composed in Arno Pro Printed on acid-­free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

C on t e n t s

Acknowledgments  vii Introduction  1 Philip Nord

Part I. R eligious Plur alism and the Origins of the Secular 1 Past Belief: The Fall and Rise of Ecclesiastical History in Early Modern Europe Anthony Grafton 2 Jacob Sasportas and Jewish Messianism Yaacob Dweck

13 41

3 Doubt and Unbelief in the Early Modern Era: Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and the Spanish Tradition Stefania Pastore

67

4 Exeuntes de corpore qui sumus? “Out of the Body, Who Are We?” Augustine, the Care of the Dead, and a Clash of Representations Peter Brown

85

5 In the Church and at Home: Approaches to Saints in Colonial Mexico Caterina Pizzigoni

106

Part II. Secularism and Its Discontents 6 An Ordinary Soviet Death: Scientific Atheism, Socialist Rituals, and Life’s Final Question Victoria Smolkin v

127

vi  C o n t e n t s

7 True Believers in the Modern Middle East Max Weiss

150

8 The Reformation Era and the Secularization of Knowledge Brad S. Gregory

163

9 Contesting Secularization: The Idea of a Normative Deficit of Modernity after Max Weber Peter E. Gordon

184

10 Religious Minorities and the Anxieties of an Islamic Identity in Pakistan Muhammad Qasim Zaman

202

Afterword Belief in Science? On the Neuroscience of Religion Katja Guenther

235

Notes  243 List of Contributors  309 Index  313

Ac k now l e d g m e n t s

This volume grew out of a seminar series held under the auspices of Princeton University’s Davis Center for Historical Studies. The series itself was organized around the theme of “Belief and Unbelief.” Once upon a time, such a theme might have seemed out of date. Wasn’t it settled wisdom after all that religion was a thing of the past and that the secular order, risen to take its place, was here to stay? None of this seems so settled any longer, and it was these questions—the place of religion in public life and the now uncertain prospects of secularism—that the seminar reverted to time and again. Central to the seminar’s activities was the work of its resident fellows. The “Belief and Unbelief ” series spanned two academic years, 2012–13 and 2013–14. During this period, fourteen fellows in all were welcomed to Princeton. They presented seminar papers of their own as well as taking an active role in the seminar discussions. Once a week, the fellows met, just among themselves, to hash over issues of common concern. The work of four of the fellows—Peter Gordon, Stefania Pastore, Caterina Pizzigoni, and Victoria Smolkin—is represented in this collection. The others are owed an expression of heartfelt thanks for all that they did to make the Davis Center a lively place to work and to think in these years. They are: Simeon Evstatiev, Dagmar Herzog, Brandi Hughes, Benedict Kiernan, Sophie Lunn-­Rockliffe, Katherine Luongo, Jarod Roll, Moshe Sluhovsky, Julia Smith, and Louis Warren. We’ve learned much from them all, and it’s an honor and a pleasure to count them as colleagues and friends. The Davis Center would not work as well as it does without the caring presence of its manager, Jennifer Houle Goldman. We are grateful to her. And, of course, this volume would never have seen the light of day without the help of the editorial staff at Princeton University Press, who stuck with the project throughout, despite ups and downs. It is a pleasure in this connection to express my thanks to Brigitta van Rheinberg, Amanda Peery, and Eric Crahan. Princeton University Press has collaborated with the Davis Center on many projects, not just this one, and the Center is thankful for the Press’s staunch and public-­spirited collaboration. Philip Nord, Katja Guenther, Max Weiss vii

For m at ions of Be l i e f

Introduction Philip Nord

Secularizers are no longer as self-­assured as they once were. In years gone by, it might have seemed that religion was destined to die out as the world, in Max Weber’s phrasing, grew “disenchanted,” the advances of science and reason sweeping away the outworn creeds of yesteryear. Yet religion has made a comeback in recent decades, perhaps not in Western Europe but elsewhere: in Poland where the Catholic Church teamed up with the Solidarity movement in the overthrow of communism, in the United States and Latin America where Evangelicals and Pentecostals have posed fundamental challenges to mainline faiths, and in the Islamic world, which is still roiling in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution of 1979.1 It’s not hard to think of explanations for such a sea change. The great secular faiths came in for a beating in the 1970s and 1980s. The oil shocks of the 1970s and the great recession that attended them dealt body blows to the welfare state, whether in its liberal or social-­democratic incarnation. Communist regimes fared even worse, proving no match at all for the challenges of the Third Industrial Revolution, and most have wound up on the ash heap of history. As for Third World nationalism, on which so many hopes had once been pinned, it lost its way, as postcolonial states stumbled into authoritarianism, dysfunction, and new forms of dependence. The globalizing world proved a tough environment for secularism but less so for border-­ hopping religions, which promised salvation in another life (and maybe in this one too). The coming of this brave new world has prompted scholars—social scientists and specialists in religious studies—to call into question once confident secularization narratives that predicted religion’s inevitable demise. That questioning has taken a variety of tacks. The first and most profound makes the case that secularism itself is a variety of belief, one that posits its own triumph 1

2 I n t r odu c t ion

in the form of a self-­fulfilling prophecy, a prophecy, however, that has now proven false.2 A second line of critique blames present-­day religious conflict on a secularism all too militant, which has excluded religion from the public sphere, causing it in certain of its forms to radicalize. And a third bemoans the spiritless character of contemporary life in secular societies (think Western Europe), which seem to lack the capacity to resonate to their citizens’ deepest emotional needs. Yet, how is it that secularity, for all such obvious limitations, got as far as it did, projecting an image of inevitability that persuaded so many for so long? The new literature on secularism has an answer to this question as well. Reformed Christianity and the Enlightenment are often pointed to as the main culprits, promoting individual autonomy and a critical-­minded rationalism, which were the building blocks of secularist thought. Imperialism also has a part to play. It exported secular forms to foreign lands, to North America and to India, for example, which embraced and adapted them to make possible life in common in settings of religious multiplicity. The secularizing juggernaut— so certain of itself, so tempting, so imposing—thus globalized, breaking down all resistance, or so it seemed, until not too long ago.3 The present volume of essays will revisit these two issues: the origins and crisis of secular forms. The authors are all historians, and the subjects dealt with range across time and space, from the late antique to the modern day, from colonial Latin America to the contemporary Middle East. Taken together, they suggest a different, more complex understanding of the origins question: Protestants and philosophes were not the sole vessels of a reason-­ based worldview; religious multiplicity did not always favor secularist solutions. As for the crisis of secularism, the essays will demonstrate that it’s real enough, but they will also suggest that abandonment of secularist principle courts a different set of dangers, not least of them, militant sectarianism.

Religious Pluralism and the Origins of the Secular According to received wisdom, the origins of religious studies date back to the sixteenth century. Protestant reformers wanted to purify Christianity, to return to the pristine faith of the Church fathers, and such efforts revealed how much that faith had been encrusted over the centuries by invented rituals and textual forgeries. Freethinkers joined in the questioning of orthodoxy, tallying an impressive list of Christianity’s contradictions and concluding in consequence that skepticism about all things religious was the appropriate stance. The Enlightenment consolidated such second thoughts, recasting faith not as a living and all-­pervading phenomenon but as an object of reflection, compartmentalizing it. And the nineteenth-­century university

P h i l i p N or d   3

in turn gave that compartmentalization institutional form, consigning the study of faith, once the university’s overarching raison d’être, to departments of religion. This story has come in for a rewrite in recent decades. It was not just the Reformation and Renaissance that propelled the narrative forward but Europe’s ever more intimate dealings with the world. It was encounters with New World religion that triggered the Enlightenment’s critique of Christian belief and practice. The intense preoccupation of nineteenth-­century scholars with Eastern, pre-­biblical religions was fueled by a wish, not always subliminal, to minimize the Jewish contribution to Christianity. Over the course of the century, moreover, as European empires gobbled up ever more territory, apostles of comparative religion reinvented Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism in Christianity’s image, the better to make comparison possible but the better also to highlight Christianity’s relative sophistication and high-­mindedness.4 Three of the contributions to this volume address the issue of the genealogy of religious studies but launch into it from a fresh angle. Anthony Grafton’s points to the centrality of early modern ecclesiastical history, written by Catholics as well as Protestants, in the refinement of research techniques and practices anticipatory of modern scholarship. To Christians of all varieties, getting the Church’s early history right mattered. Eusebius’s fourth-­century history of the Church opened a royal road into the subject, but he made mistakes, and it was important to be able to ferret them out. Saint Augustine was recognized as a sure-­footed guide to the truth about the Church’s original and bedrock beliefs, but some of the Saint’s writings were spurious, and it was important to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. To distinguish true belief from false, teams of religious gathered documents; the documents in turn were subjected to skeptical scrutiny and philological critique; and sources were compared and cited. The practices of humanistic scholarship, it turns out, came from within the Catholic Church itself as it examined its own past. Jews too played a part in this story, as Yaacob Dweck’s essay demonstrates. The burst of Sabbatian fervor that swept over the seventeenth-­century Jewish world did not make believers of one and all. The Hamburg-­based rabbi Jacob Sasportas, for one, remained skeptical. Documents, not enthusiasm, were what counted to him, and, according to the Jewish textual tradition, Sabbetai Zevi was not behaving as a messiah should. When the Sabbatians answered back citing sources of their own, Sasportas took a closer, critical look and proved them fabricated. In Stefania Pastore’s essay, freethinkers do stand front and center, but the interest here is how they came to their freethinking. Sixteenth-­century Spain is Pastore’s setting, and the principals are humanist scholars, like the diplomat

4  I n t r odu c t ion

and man of letters Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. It was an encounter with ancient texts and the work of Sextus Empiricus in particular that turned Mendoza into a skeptic in matters of religion, but what caused him to be so susceptible to Pyrrhonist argument in the first place, Pastore argues, was the Granada milieu he grew up in, a world of religious encounter where Muslim and Jewish writings alongside Christian ones circulated in challenging profusion. From an early modern perspective, the pathways to a humanistic understanding of religion prove to have been more complicated than sometimes thought. Catholics often get short shrift in the discussion, and yet there was the Spaniard Mendoza, a Catholic by birth, whose sympathetic immersion in Muslim and Jewish textual traditions persuaded him of the necessity of toleration. As for the study of religion as a scholarly enterprise, it was in part the achievement of reformers and freethinkers, but it was also the work of believers arguing among themselves, of Catholics and Jews as well as Protestants, who were engaged in a critical and competitive examination of their own faiths. Émile Durkheim posited long ago that science had religious origins, and so it may not come as much surprise that the secular study of religion has religious origins as well.5 All of this would seem to point to an obvious conclusion: that it’s in circumstances of pluralistic competition that openings are created for the kind of critical-­minded thinking that feeds into humanist practices and, in the long run, to secularization. Two of the essays, however, suggest that such a conclusion needs to be nuanced: those by Peter Brown and Caterina Pizzigoni. Brown’s chapter maps an epochal change in how life beyond the grave was imagined as the Mediterranean world Christianized in the late antique period. Heaven was a dwelling place not just for the great and good, who after death found a place for themselves as stars in the firmament. It was, rather, a testing ground for all souls, striving to purge themselves of sin and to draw closer to God. The living were in a position to speed that journey along, reciting prayers for the dead and giving alms. From this perspective, it behooved one and all, and not just the mighty, to be generous, and so alms giving entered into the habits of the everyday, ritual practice, thus evolving in response to changing notions about the afterlife. Pizzigoni’s essay on colonial Mexico is also about ritual change. The arrival of the Spaniards, as she recounts it, catalyzed the transformation. They brought with them a new faith and a matching package of ritual practices, not least among them the veneration of saints. Indigenous populations themselves had strong beliefs about the right layout of the home and the place of sacred objects within it. They absorbed the cult of the saints into their own frame of

P h i l i p N or d   5

understanding, welcoming images of Jesus and Mary into the household first and then more personalized figures over time. All the while, Spanish officials policed how the images were fabricated and made use of in order to ensure that there was no straying from orthodox belief. From this encounter, sometimes repressive though not always so, a “new cult” was formed, the absorption of imported rituals over time enfolding indigenous peoples into a new system of belief, Christianity. These essays prompt a double set of reflections. The first has to do with the role of ritual in religious life. There are plenty of scholars who insist on the overarching importance of ritual practices,6 persuaded that an up-­close anthropological approach to such behaviors affords a deeper understanding of religion than hair-­splitting analyses of doctrinal difference. Not only that, it is asked: isn’t there a Western-­centric bias built into approaches homed in on matters of doctrine, given that Western religions after all are the very ones that make the most fuss over theological matters? This position has not gone unchallenged in the field, and it is in fact from students of Islam that the most telling replies have come. Salat or prayer, it has been observed, is an act of self-­formation, generative of “intentions, emotions, and desires in accord with orthodox standards of Islamic piety.” Those standards in turn are the products of teachings, which are themselves embedded in doctrinal tradition.7 Doctrine, in a word, is constitutive of practice, and that’s just what Brown’s and Pizzigoni’s essays demonstrate. There are moments when ritual change, bubbling up from below, prompts theologians to readjust doctrine. But the causal arrow can also point in the opposite direction, a new doctrine constraining believers to alter how they practice their faith. Just how central doctrine is in making ritual meaningful becomes most apparent in moments of transition. For an individual whose faith is flagging, ritual becomes a pointless exercise, a set of empty gestures. In a society burned over by a new creed or under pressure from a new faith transported in the van of empire, traditional ritual practice does not endure unscathed. This observation is a reminder of what a difference inequalities in power can make. Religious pluralism may at times promote doubt and critical reflection, loosening the bonds of orthodoxy in the process. But where empire is involved, where one side and one faith have superior firepower to back them up, the weaker party may find religious accommodation the more prudent or at least the more inescapable path. The end result is not pluralism but the crystallization of a new orthodoxy. And the picture grows yet more complex when an imperial power has more than one formation of belief to export. Recall how Western imperialism in its heyday dispatched not just administrators but also missionaries to the four

6  I n t r odu c t ion

corners of the earth. The administrators brought enlightenment, the missionaries faith, and both imports left a legacy behind that outlasted formal empire itself. Christianity became the world’s largest religion and secularism a problem that non-­Western societies now had to deal with, whether they liked it or not. The secularism in question, moreover, was not always of the tolerant, live-­and-­let-­live variety. Taken on board and adapted by Third World nationalisms, it could also become a form of orthodoxy in its own right, persecuting believers as troublemaking retrogrades standing in the way of projects of national development and rebirth. Here then is one more complexification of the pluralism leads to secularism narrative: secularism itself is not always pluralist.

Secularism and Its Discontents That, of course, is one of the main charges against secularism in the current literature on the subject: that it masks an authoritarian impulse of its own behind its promises of emancipation.8 Two of the essays provide grist for this line of critique, Victoria Smolkin’s and Max Weiss’s, although in each there is an interesting twist. The interest of Smolkin’s contribution lies in part in what it has to say about the timing and motivations of the USSR’s promotion of atheist doctrine. At the outset, it seems, the Soviets expected Orthodoxy to wither away, invalidated by rational argument and the regime’s own record of socialist achievement. This didn’t happen, but Soviet officialdom did not take full cognizance of the fact until the 1950s and 1960s at the height of the Cold War. Then it was that the Soviet Union’s confrontation with the West came to be recast in religious terms as an epic battle between atheist communism on the one hand and on the other that self-­styled standard-­bearer of the Judeo-­Christian tradition, the United States. So, here indeed, in Soviet atheism, we have a secular church militant—doctrinally armed, fortified by the awesome, concentrated power of the modern state, and, as many believed, with the wind of history at its back. It speaks the language of liberation, but what it delivers is something much darker. The interesting twist in Smolkin’s essay has to do with the place of ritual in the Soviet secularist project. The Soviets came up with an explanation for why atheist doctrine had failed to sweep all before it. People needed rituals to make belief real, to make it intimate and consoling at life-­cycle moments—birth, marriage, and, above all, death—when intimacy and consolation were most needed, and so the regime set about devising practices, socialist ones, to fill in a ritual void that it had been compelled to acknowledge. Secularism, even in its most militant form, can’t manage without borrowing from religion. The

P h i l i p N or d   7

relationship between the two forms of belief turns out not to be antipodal, as received wisdom might have it, but more complex with religious habits of mind creeping back in even in cases, like the Soviet Union, where secularism comes clad in the garb of revolutionary atheism. Weiss’s contribution points to a similar set of observations. Weiss zeroes in on the experience of two contemporary Middle Eastern thinkers—Sadiq Jalal al-­ʿAzm and Nasir Hamid Abu Zayd. The former, writing in the aftermath of the Arab-­Israeli War of 1967, penned a critique of Islam, alleging that its blinkered repressiveness had set the Arab world up for defeat. The latter, writing in the 1990s, sought to fashion a modern, enlightened Islam and, in pursuit of that end, subjected Islam’s most sacred text, the Qurʾan, to critical philological scrutiny (in much the same spirit as early modern Christian and Jewish reformers had approached the New Testament and Hebrew Bible). Both men paid a price for their heterodoxy: al-­ʿAzm lost his job at the American University in Beirut and was tried (and acquitted) for incitement of religious discord; Abu Zayd was denied promotion at Cairo University and also subjected to public prosecution. The interest in the present context is that in both instances the prosecuting agency was the so-­called secular state, whether Lebanese or Egyptian, and it acted, as Weiss demonstrates, in response to the prodding of mobilized religious constituencies, thus transforming itself, though secular, into an accomplice of sectarianism. Postcolonial Arab nationalisms, as had Soviet communism before them, held out the promise of liberation, but liberation, once again, turned out to be a mixed blessing. The secular state did not set itself up in opposition to faith but catered to believers, enhancing its own power by giving satisfaction to the repressive impulses of religious orthodoxy. The current literature on secularism is pockmarked with debate and disagreement, but on one point there is a virtual consensus: secularism comes in more than one variety, and so it makes more sense to speak of it in the plural.9 Secularism as emancipation, from this perspective, is just one option among many. It’s also possible to think of secularism as something less militant that builds a wall between the public sphere and the private, consigning religion to the latter, so that it will be easier for one and all to live in peace. The idea is not to extirpate religion, just to keep it in its place. But is such watered-­down secularism adequate to human needs? Charles Taylor has long been vocal on this very point, evoking a kind of experience, a sense of “plenitude” as he calls it, unavailable to people lacking a sense of the sacred.10 Brad Gregory’s contribution to this volume pushes the argument a giant step further. The Reformation fractured a world of unitary Catholic faith, as Gregory sees it, and this splintering in turn opened the way to a pluralism that in the long run has proved debilitating. Indeed, secularism has turned out

8 I n t r odu c t ion

to be a source not just of experiential depletion but of outright spiritual damage. It promotes a cacophonous state of being, “hyperpluralism,” that corrodes the moral consensus essential to a nourishing life in common with others, and nowhere is such fracturing and the loss of moral compass attendant upon it more evident than in the modern university.11 We cannot live without religion, and the disorienting spiritual anarchy that engulfs us today is an emphatic confirmation of the point. As Peter Gordon’s contribution reveals, even secular-­minded thinkers like Max Weber and Jürgen Habermas were or are now sensitive to such claims. Weber understood secularization as an inevitable by-­product of modernity, but he was aware that modernization came at a price and a steep one. The diminishment and privatization of religion entailed a loss that Weber acknowledged with ambivalence and melancholy. Once religion was consigned to its corner, he anguished, what remained to guide human beings through life but “the steel hard cage” of economic rationality? Habermas, once a firm secularizer, has come to a similar realization: that the “communicative rationality” so central to his vision might, in its rejection of final truths, create an enervating “normative deficit.” So, what is to be done? Secularism in its most militant forms turns out to be less emancipatory than it presents itself, imposing new orthodoxies of its own and, even as it does so, borrowing from religion’s fund of ritual practices or mobilizing the energies of believers, the better to pursue statist ends. In secular Western Europe, religion has indeed been confined to the private domain, but there it has languished, leaving behind moral chaos and a spiritual void. Why not then abandon the secularizing cause and let religion back in? Sectarianism is a familiar concept to students of Western religion. The ­Reformation broke open the world of Latin Christendom, and the fracturing, once begun, continued apace, as the Protestant churches born of reform splintered into denominations and then into yet smaller groups, sects, which pullulated on the fringes of religious life, striving to maintain purity in isolation but always at risk of themselves hardening into new denominations.12 Work on colonial Lebanon has generated a different understanding of sect formation. The story can be told from above. Nineteenth-­century Ottoman reformers shook up status hierarchies, creating space for new kinds of identities to emerge. The Druze massacre of Christians in 1860 prompted French intervention, and the new colonial overlords proceeded to sort out local populations by religious affiliation in order to rule them, a process that wound up working to the advantage of local Christians. It was the combination of Ottoman reform and French policy that summoned up sectarian attitudes.13 The question, however, can also be addressed from below, with the accent fixed on subaltern agency. In colonial-­era Lebanon, Shiʿites maintained a distinctive

P h i l i p N or d   9

court system; they practiced a distinctive set of burial rites; and these, the courts and the rites, set them apart, a sense of separateness that congealed into more sectarian form when Shiʿites entered the public domain, seeking redress from a French-­crafted political order designed with the interests of others in mind.14 Yet both accounts, however different, do share a critical feature in common: they underline the role of politics in sect making, a perspective forcefully confirmed by Qasim Zaman’s contribution. Zaman’s point of entry into the discussion is contemporary Pakistan, now entangled in sectarian strife, though, as Zaman demonstrates, this was not always so. There were religious minorities, the Ahmadis and Shiʿites. The former were heterodox many times over: they did not believe in jihad, and they did believe in a post-­Muhammad prophet, Ghulam Ahmad. They were also a successful minority, self-­styled modernizers who had carved out for themselves an outsized place in public life in the early postcolonial years. The Shi’ites too had enjoyed success as great landlords in the Punjab and as senior officers in the military. They were, moreover, a minority that did not hesitate to stand up for themselves, protesting when the state treated members as second-­class citizens and proudly proclaiming their difference at Muharram festival processions. Ahmadis and Shiʿites may have been resented in certain quarters, but overall, they remained a significant and self-­assured public presence in the postcolonial order. It was the Iranian revolution and General Zia’s Islamization campaign of 1979 that turned this situation around. Once tolerated minorities were now stigmatized and targeted by blasphemy laws, comparative tolerance giving way to the politics of sectarianism. So, there it is again, the state—this time not colonial but postcolonial—converting difference into discrimination, if not outright persecution. In some places, the ebbing of faith may have left a spiritual deficit in its wake, but it is worth remembering at the same time that the return of religion to public life doesn’t everywhere mean the filling up of an aching void. It can also mean the recrudescence of sectarianism and intolerance. Is there then a middle way? Hans Blumenberg has made the argument that secular modernity is generative of an ethic of its own, that it is not the spiritual dead end it is sometimes made out to be.15 A normative deficit may well exist, but the hole is not so great as all that. Think also of contemporary varieties of patriotism that draw on religious forms to channel the moral élan of religion into a commitment to the commonweal.16 Think, that is, of the ceremonial deism of American public life or of the foi républicaine of the French, and the spiritual hole may appear that much less gaping. Habermas has yet another thought on the subject, understanding that religious belief and its persistence constitute an invaluable sacred reserve (see Gordon’s essay). This reserve,

10  I n t r odu c t ion

tapped into, energizes citizens who then bring a centering moral rigor into public life, doing so, however, not in the name of this or that creed but of values common to believers coming from many horizons of faith. Specialists in the field have come up with a name for this formation of belief: “ethical secularism,” which is a way of thinking that does not cold-­shoulder religion but acknowledges it, all the while maintaining a “respectful distance.”17 It is not a question of erecting an impermeable barrier between the private and the public but of managing the flow between the two. Note, however, the demands such an arrangement makes on believers of all kinds. Secularism is called on to stand down from its more militant postures and the same goes for orthodox believers who are called on, as they enter into the public forum, to frame their claims in an idiom meaningful to the non-­orthodox. Hard-­core secularizers will not like the sound of this, of course. For apostles of the true faith, whatever that might be, such thinking still relegates religion to its proper place, valuing it not as the path to Truth and salvation but for what it contributes to life in common. It is secularism, albeit dressed up in sheep’s clothing, to which the most fitting response might be, to quote from the Book of Revelation: “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth” (3:16). But what are the alternatives? Orthodoxies, whether secular or religious, that make life in common, le vivre-­ensemble as the French call it, an impossibility? The return of religion to public life has had an impact on science, as Katja Guenther’s afterword demonstrates. Faith itself has become an object of physiological study, with researchers deploying brain scans to identify a “God spot,” the supposed seat of a wired-­in human spirituality. Science has not found it. At the same time, Charles Taylor tells us that secularism, in one form or another, has become “the immanent frame” in which most of us now live.18 Contemporary life is non-­transcendental in so many ways that even religious believers find themselves willy-­nilly caught up in the mesh of this-­worldliness. Talal Asad, as sharp a critic of secularism as he is, speaks of “the modern secular condition we all inhabit.”19 Religion cannot be wished away or boiled down to a simple brain function. Secularism is here to stay. There is no choice but to find a way to live together.

Pa r t I

Religious Pluralism and the Origins of the Secular

1 Past Belief T h e Fa l l a n d R i s e of E c c l e s i a s t ic a l H i s t or y i n E a r ly Mode r n E u r op e

Anthony Grafton Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-­selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-­honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul. . . . —K a r l M a r x, T h e E igh t e e n t h Bru m a i r e of Lou is Bona pa rt e

Davos sum, non Oedipus: A Swiss Confrontation Once upon a time, snarky teenagers knew their ecclesiastical history, and had fun when they found a chance to put their knowledge to work. Early in the sixteenth century, Thomas Platter and five of his friends stopped on the way from Zurich to St. Gallen, to hear mass. One of the priests called them heretics, since they came from a city that rejected papal supremacy. Platter asked the priest why the pope was head of the church. The priest answered: “For this reason, that St. Peter was the pope at Rome, and has there given the papacy over to his successors.” “St. Peter,” the boy replied, “has never once been in 13

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Rome.” He pulled his New Testament from his rucksack and “showed him how in the Epistle to the Romans, St. Paul sends greetings to so many, and does not think of mentioning St. Peter, who according to his own speech, was yet above them all.” But, the priest replied, when Christ had met Peter outside Rome, and asked where he was going, Peter had answered, “To Rome, to allow myself to be crucified.” When the boy asked where he had read this, the priest answered that his grandmother had told him the story. Platter’s response was caustic: “So I perceive truly that your grandmother is your Bible.”1 It would be hard to stage a more clear-­cut and dramatic confrontation. On the one hand, we have the priest: a transmitter of traditions, as much oral as written. On the other hand, we have the young humanist, Thomas Platter, who would eventually print Calvin’s Institutes: a critic with a sharp-­edged method. The priest passes on an inherited conglomerate of doctrines and stories— a complex, overgrown mass, in which the stone of original texts has disappeared under the clinging, interlaced ivy of tradition. When he describes Christ’s exchange with Peter, he draws not on the New Testament but on the Acts of Peter, a second-­century text—and not even directly but indirectly, from oral tradition. The humanist demands to know if the traditions correspond with the evidence of the sacred text, identified as authoritative and critically treated. He reads Paul’s letter against its grain, using the text to reconstruct not the doctrines of the Apostle but the membership of the early urban church in Rome, and caustically rejects the story of Christ’s confrontation with Peter. Scissors cut paper: the young scholar who knows how to reverse-­engineer a social network from scattered references in a text designed for other purposes puts the priest, tightly bound by the spiderwebbed traditions of his own family and social networks, to flight. It is not easy to know how to read this story. On the surface, modernity and victory seem to lie on the side of humanism and print. Platter’s account has the clarity of caricature: he represents Catholic willingness to embrace traditions as well as texts as openness to legends and superstition. But the Catholics never acknowledged defeat, at his hands or anyone else’s. In 1601, Annibale Carracci depicted Christ’s meeting with Peter in an unforgettable painting, for which his patron, Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, rewarded him with a gold chain and large medal of Our Lord, between them worth a stately 200 scudi.2 Earlier painters had rarely illustrated this scene, dramatic though it was. Like Platter, Carracci took part in a distinctive effort to re-­create the early church, one that emphasized the human drama of its story rather than the prosaic dealings of its social networks.3 This Catholic project dominated much of Roman scholarship and art in the years around and after 1600, and left rich deposits of texts, images, and buildings, as early churches were restored, the Catacombs were opened, and early customs became the object not only of

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debate among scholars but also of depiction by artists. Did Platter’s side really win out? Perhaps Platter’s story should not be taken literally. Old scholars are not on their oath when they reminisce about the debates they won in their youth. In this case, moreover, Platter introduced a puzzle into his story, perhaps by mistake, or perhaps as a deliberate effort to call attention to the fact that he too was generating a kind of apocryphal story. In the Acts of Peter and in the Carracci painting that it inspired, Peter asks the question “Domine, quo vadis?” and Christ replies that he is going to be crucified. In Platter’s telling, their roles are reversed: Christ asks and Peter answers. Did Platter mean to signal the confusion that necessarily ensued when traditions were transmitted orally, from grandmother to child? Or did his own aging memory slip? We will never know. In all its complexity, Platter’s encounter with the priest can serve as a milestone—perhaps a third of the way along the long story that I hope to tell: that of how Renaissance scholars and others came to envision early Christianity in new ways. This story begins in April and May 1440, when Lorenzo Valla composed his attack on the Donation of Constantine—the document according to which Constantine, grateful to Pope Sylvester I for curing him of leprosy, transferred the western Roman empire to the church.4 Valla deftly wielded the tools of rhetoric to show that the Donation swarmed with inconsistencies— especially linguistic ones. He also proved, by composing the speeches that all involved would have delivered if Constantine really had tried to give away half of his empire, that he could have produced much more convincing forgeries if he had wished to.5 Valla did not limit his criticism to the Donation. Like a stern Protestant tourist staring at the hologram Jesus in a contemporary Roman shop window, he denounced the painted images of spurious stories about the origins of Christianity that were displayed at Ara Coeli and elsewhere, and the texts that justified such embroidery on history and the Gospels: “These stories do more to overturn faith, because they are false, than to strengthen it, because they are miraculous.”6 Something like a program comes into view with Valla. The end point of the story is harder to fix. But one contender might be June 1686, when Jean Mabillon visited the monastery of Bobbio in Emilia-­Romagna. Among the treasures that he found in the library was what he described as “a manuscript of the highest quality, written in capital letters.”7 Mabillon cracked—and even took a facsimile of—the difficult script, transcribed and edited the text, and identified it as a liturgy used in Merovingian Gaul.8 In making this precise, and still powerful, diagnosis, he wielded a bagful of tools that neither Valla nor Platter would have known. Mabillon himself had ­assembled, by 1681, the De re diplomatica. This magnificent treatise on Latin

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writing, a masterpiece in the material history of the book, dealt with everything from the instruments used in writing and the spaces where documents were produced to the multiple families of Latin script. The book broke new ground in a number of areas. Most important, it included large, precisely engraved plates in which samples of related scripts were reproduced; broken down, letter by letter; named; and discussed in detailed captions.9 To obtain these, Mabillon mobilized friends—and friends of friends—across the Republic of Letters. Scholars and librarians carefully unfolded the pieces of paper made transparent by oil or pork fat or animal membranes that they were sent, spread them painstakingly across the manuscripts or documents, not allowing them to slip, and traced samples of ancient scripts.10 Less well known—but no less foundational—was the work of generations of liturgists like Mabillon’s correspondent Giovanni Bona, whose detailed history of Catholic ritual practices made clear how much they had varied in time and space and offered hints for localizing new witnesses.11 Mabillon’s analysis of the text spurred plenty of controversy. But it was the product of a new age. Mabillon and his fellow Benedictines agreed with the Jesuits on one point only: both groups preferred learned English Protestants like John Marsham to the members of the rival Catholic order. Accordingly, disagreements were no longer purely theological in motivation. Ecclesiastical scholarship—Catholic and Protestant, Reformed and Anglican—still served the task of building confessional identities. But its practitioners had attained consensus on many points. Their compilations would provide the underpinning for much of the work of Edward Gibbon, whose references to them regularly mingled irony with respect.12

Genealogies of Modern Scholarship Since the middle of the twentieth century, one form of historical research, as reconstructed in one majestic journal article, has dominated accounts of the origins of modernity in scholarship. In 1950, Arnaldo Momigliano argued that antiquarians—scholars who specialized in the use of material evidence and in the creation of synthetic accounts of ancient constitutions, rituals, and practices—created a distinctive kind of history. They also saved the standard, narrative kind, since they provided evidentiary foundations that could withstand the attacks of philosophical skeptics.13 Modern historiography took shape, he argued, when Edward Gibbon fused the erudite methods of the antiquaries with the reflective form of large-­scale narrative created by the philosophical wing of eighteenth-­century historians.14 Since Momigliano wrote, scholars have shed a flood of light on the practices of the antiquaries. We have learned how they copied, interpreted—and sometimes faked—inscriptions; how they identified and published sculp-

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tures; how they devised new ways to write the history of constitutions and of religion.15 Some segments of Momigliano’s argument have come in for sharp criticism.16 Markus Völkel, for example, has argued that the methods of the antiquaries took shape before, not after, the rise of historical skepticism and had little to do with the resolution of that crisis.17 Others have shown that antiquaries often worked at least as much from texts as from material remains.18 Yet a consensus exists on the central point: the rise of antiquarianism caused a seismic shift in the practices of early modern historians. Sixteenth-­century historians and observers already said as much. Francesco Patrizi, for example, did work of high originality on both the theory of historical writing and the development of the Roman military order. He described antiquarianism as a set of new forms of historical writing, concerned with structures and customs rather than narratives and built on material as well as textual evidence: “Some historians have not so much described events as customs, ways of life and laws. . . . And there is another sort, those who, especially in our day, write in another way about the clothing of the Romans and Greeks, the forms of armament they used, their ways of making camp, and their ships, their buildings, and other things of this sort, which are necessary for life.”19 As Patrizi suggested, this new history could be as practical as it was exciting: Justus Lipsius’s reconstruction of the Militia Romana underpinned the new military order created by Maurice of Nassau. Nothing was of more practical importance, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, than decisions about theology and liturgy. In an age of religious war, these were matters of life and death. And over time, as Owen Chadwick wrote, “The center of theological gravity was shifting from theology into the field of ecclesiastical history”—the field that could supply the charter, of one sort or another, that every church claimed to possess for its doctrines and its practices alike.20 Powerful men took a passionate interest in these questions. Matthew Parker—the first Elizabethan archbishop of Canterbury— spent much of his life dealing with practical questions about everything from clerics who refused to wear traditional ecclesiastical vestments to radicals who insisted on adult baptism for their children.21 Like Donald Rumsfeld, he seems to have scattered “snowflakes”—short memoranda on particular problems and policies—all about him.22 Still, throughout his time in office, he devoted a massive amount of energy and resources to the study of English ecclesiastical history. The relationship between past and present was dialectical. Contemporary concerns and debates spurred research, which in turn yielded historical information that mattered, here and now. No wonder, then, that those who plowed this field did their best, like the military men, to master the new historical methods. Antonio Bosio, the “Columbus of the Catacombs,” led his colleagues into the underground tombs

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outside Rome when these were publicly opened up in 1588 and after. His associates mapped the tunnels in the tufa as an earlier generation had mapped the ancient city of Rome. Gradually they assembled a vast corpus of evidence about early Christian art and practice, which Giovanni Severano finally saw into print. They made mistakes of every kind. Their illustrations misrepresented the narrow, dank tunnels as broad, regular underground roads, and they saw instruments of martyrdom in paintings that contained none.23 Yet the material and information that they brought to light transformed scholars’ understanding of the visual world of the early Christians. Thanks to them, when the Vatican librarian Lucas Holstenius recovered and edited the Passio Perpetuae, with its extraordinary core text by a female Christian martyr, he could explain the nature of the imprisonment that she and her companions underwent and establish that the symbolism of her visions matched the Christian art of her period.24 Other results of the scholars’ spelunking were less ethereal. A profitable export industry took shape, as bones were wired together or skeletons were reproduced in wood, identified as those particular martyrs and sold to Bavarian and Swiss believers, who swathed them in rich costumes and gleaming jewels.25 The new, material form of history thus paid dividends of more than one kind. Jan Marco Sawilla argues in his study of the Bollandists that their epoch-­making critical approach to the lives of saints amounted to a form of applied antiquarianism.26 Yet Momigliano himself saw the story of ecclesiastical scholarship in different terms. In an essay published in 1963, he identified a second millennial tradition of erudite historiography. The early Christian bishop and scholar Eusebius, he pointed out, had been a dynamic and successful historian. Eusebius created a new genre as he composed a clutch of related works: the Chronicle, which laid out all of history in tabular form as the story of the triumph of Christianity; the Ecclesiastical History, which told the story of the church; and the Life of Constantine, which gave the same cast and drama to the history of Rome.27 Borrowing from the Jewish historian Josephus, Eusebius turned history into the story of a righteous nation persecuted by unbelievers. Like Josephus, too, he gave his narratives credibility and impact by filling them with original documents, quoted in full. After the great disruptions of the third century, both the Empire and the Church fell into the hands of new elites, with new needs. The drowned, both Roman aristocrats and Christian clerics, had known more or less what they needed to about the societies they served and the rituals and institutions that they carried on. The saved did not know: but the new historiography gave them basic information. At the same time, it offered charters for beliefs and practices, in the form of the multiple documents that studded it like plums in a pudding.28 No wonder, then, that ecclesiastical history flourished, in different ways, for centuries to come. After Eusebius’s first continuators, to be sure, the genre

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changed in scope. The ecclesiastical historiography of the medieval West narrowed its focus from Christianity as a whole to the story of individual nations, as in Bede, or individual religious institutions. More and more political history entered the mix. So, occasionally, did jokes. Adam of Bremen noted that the Danish king believed everything his archbishop told him from the Scriptures, except that he must give up gluttony and women, “which vices are inborn in that people.”29 At last, however, in the sixteenth century, when the Reformation challenged the primacy and hierarchy of the Roman Church, the Protestant Flacius Illyricus and the Catholic Cesare Baronio revived a full-­blown form of Eusebian historiography and transformed it in a last, crucial way. Like Eusebius, both men wrote church history on the universal scale and both stuffed their work with documents. Unlike Eusebius, though, they both showed a new “care for minute analysis of the evidence”: they passed from primitive accumulation to something more like intellectual capitalism.30 And here was Momigliano’s second new framing of the story. Ecclesiastical historians used documents critically because they engaged in controversy. It was no coincidence that Tillemont—originally an ecclesiastical historian—revolutionized the methods of political history. He was carrying out a translatio studii from one discipline to the other. “We may well wonder,” Momigliano wrote, “whether modern political historiography would ever have changed from rhetoric and pragmatism to footnotes and appendixes without the example of ecclesiastical history.”31 Momigliano’s new story revised the history of modern historiography as radically as his article on antiquarianism did. As a former student of mine once put it, “The idea of Christian scholarship—of any religious scholarship—flies in the face of our own ideas of objectivity and professionalism.”32 And yet it turns out, if Momigliano was right, that methodological protocols fundamental to the pursuit of historical objectivity and professionalism crystallized not in the modern, non-­sectarian university but in the premodern and radically sectarian worlds of Protestant printing houses and Catholic monasteries. Ecclesiastical histories are long, and life is short. Nonetheless, in the last half century, many scholars have followed Momigliano’s lead. Bruno Neveu, Simon Ditchfield, and Jean-­Louis Quantin have devoted classic studies to ecclesiastical historians and philologists.33 Arresting monographs have traced the origins of everything from Enlightenment criticism to ethnography to the ecclesiastical scholarship of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.34 In his Sather Lectures, finally, Momigliano recast the history of ecclesiastical history as a double helix, one strand of which he reconstructed more elaborately than the other. He continued to tell the story of an integral discipline, created by Eusebius. But he also traced a separate tradition of ecclesiastical antiquarianism, which took shape in late antiquity and survived, in learned

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cathedral chapters, through the Middle Ages and after. Unfortunately, some of the scholars who emphasize the role of antiquarianism in the ecclesiastical field have never come to terms with these arguments. Central questions, accordingly, remain open. Did the revival of Eusebius— like the revival of Tacitus—play a central role in provoking the creation of new forms of historical research and writing? Did the new antiquarianism transform ecclesiastical scholarship? What became of the older form that Momigliano identified? Are there still other ways in which we can usefully tell the story that goes from Valla to Mabillon? This essay takes a first look.

Handy-­dandy, Which Is the Justice, Which Is the Thief? Early Forms of Ecclesiastical Antiquarianism On March 31, 1499, all hell broke loose at the Mass in the old basilica of Saint Peter. A madman had been confined inside the iron railing that surrounded one of the twisting pillars before the altar—the one farthest to the Gospel side. He climbed the metal railing and crossed the beam that the columns supported. When the Swiss guards provoked him, he began throwing down small pieces of marble. No one was hurt, but the pope and those in the choir were thrown into panic, and rumors that the pope had been captured or the church destroyed bounced and echoed down Rome’s many whispering galleries. As usual, nothing serious happened, and the pope eventually managed to give communion to those who wanted it.35 Ecclesiastical antiquarianism helped bring the madman to his pillar. Maffeo Vegio—the fifteenth-­century scholar who wrote a detailed history of the old Vatican basilica—explained that God had endowed this column with so much power that it could free such wretched sufferers from their misery. Research confirmed this: “I have now established this with many great and certain examples.”36 Another cleric of antiquarian interests offered an explanation. In 1438, Cardinal Giordano Orsini installed a marble plaque. Its inscription recorded that Jesus had leaned on this pillar when he preached in the temple. Orsini also identified the temple as that of Solomon, from which the pillars had been brought, “triumphantly,” to the Roman basilica. Hence the power of the Santa Colonna, as it is still known, to expel demons. Like other powerful antiquaries, Orsini acted on his research: he built a balustrade around the pillar, probably designed to make dealing with demoniacs more orderly. This may well have been the enclosure from which the madman escaped in 1499.37 Neither Orsini nor anyone else ever explained why these men decided that the pillars had come from Solomon’s Temple—destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar II after the fall of Jerusalem, early in the sixth century BCE—rather than from the much more recent, if also ruined, temple of Herod, which Jesus actually

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would have known. But their views nicely illustrate the way in which, in great old churches, individual structures and even building elements became charged with layers of historical meaning, every bit as much as Roman ruins— and how these in turn organized and shaped religious practices, and were reframed and reinterpreted by them.38 Ecclesiastical antiquarians also used their eyes. When Vegio recorded the inscription from the great triumphal arch in the old basilica, which celebrated Constantine as its founder, he emulated earlier compilers.39 But he not only quoted the text but also examined its script, and used the alien form of its capital letters to date it to the period it recorded: “The characters, which are very old and practically ruinous, seem to show clearly that this was written precisely in the time of Constantine.” Vegio even took the time to record a few words from another, less legible inscription.40 Like his contemporary, the Bristol antiquary William Worcester, who showed a keen interest in the development of the sculptural styles used in effigies of the dead, Vegio already possessed the “skilled eyes” that would, in the seventeenth century, become a hallmark of the skilled antiquarian.41 Unlike later forms of antiquarianism, however, the early variety was not necessarily intended to challenge contemporary forms of religious life. By comparison with their successors, many early antiquaries found it hard to imagine a past material world radically different from what they saw in front of them. Some particularly daring scholars made these leaps of the historical imagination. One of the many errors that annoyed Valla in the Donation was the passage in which Constantine awarded property to what he described as existing churches. “You miserable dog,” Valla wrote, “did Rome have churches, or rather temples, dedicated to Peter and Paul? Who built them? Who would have dared to build them?” History tells us (historia ait), he argued, using the language of Lucky Jim’s Professor Welch, that early Christians had worshipped in “little shrines, not buildings; chapels, not temples; places of prayer in private dwellings, not public places of worship.”42 Evidently Valla, the expert on the New Testament, had drawn a vivid personal vision of early Christian places of worship from the references to house churches in Acts and the Pauline epistles. Leon Battista Alberti applied his imagination, similarly, to the first large Christian basilica—perhaps inspired by Augustine’s account of Ambrose’s church in Milan. He argued, in his pioneering treatise on architecture, that these had been simple, austere buildings, with only one altar each, and he contrasted them to the costlier—and less Christian—churches of his own day.43 The Morgan Library possesses a splendidly illustrated copy of Alberti’s book, in which a late fifteenth-­century artist of antiquarian tastes entered many diagrams of machines, buildings, and architectural elements—including

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some drawn from the Lateran and other Roman buildings.44 Confronted by Alberti’s description of the ancient Christian altar, the artist drew one.45 But when he turned the page and read Alberti’s tribute to the simplicity of ancient Christian churches and the services held in them, he left the margin blank.46 Visions of early Christian life like Valla’s and Alberti’s, drawn from textual evidence, were too radical to be given precise visual form, even by someone who specialized in imagining or reproducing ancient objects and buildings. Evidently, then, the telling of tales, transmitted orally rather than by documents, and the scrutiny of material objects went together, as joint features of ecclesiastical antiquarianism. Some of the combinations of arguments that took shape can seem dizzying now. The encyclopedist Raffaele Maffei, for example, drew on Vegio’s work to shed light on what Constantine had done in Rome: “Few notice in Saint Peter’s that above the arch in the center of the church, verses like this in the form of ancient mosaics are still legible.”47 He rejected the story of Constantine’s miraculous cure from leprosy as absurd.48 But he also rejected the views of Antoninus of Florence—and, though he did not say so, of Lorenzo Valla. They argued that since no contemporary author had mentioned the Donation, it could not have taken place. Maffei pointed out that Isidore of Seville, “a serious and holy author who lived almost 800 years ago, says openly in his history that Constantine gave way to the pope in the city.”49 Yet he never explained why the account of the Spaniard Isidore, written several hundred years after the event, should outweigh the contemporary one of Eusebius. From our anachronistic standpoint, someone like Maffei seems to be carrying out a strange sort of dance, one step forward, one step back. From his own point of view, however, he was collecting every tradition he could—textual and oral as well as epigraphic—that might il­ luminate the origins and customs of the structure he inhabited and the re­ ligious community he belonged to. That too, of course, is a definition of antiquarianism.

Vertigo In other provinces of ecclesiastical scholarship, however, powerful tremors threatened to break the cake of custom—or at least to call received ideas about the past into question. Consider the world of ancient texts, and the humanists who corrected and translated them, first for the great manuscript libraries of the fifteenth century and then for the printers. Traditional accounts of “the revival of classical antiquity” emphasized the humanists’ passion for the texts of pagan Greece and Rome. Yet even the self-­consciously revisionist Petrarch included the works of Augustine, along with the classics, in his list of his favorite books. As Carol Quillen has shown, he devoted his most passionate and

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engaged moments as a reader to Augustine.50 In the next century, George of Trebizond translated Cyril of Alexandria, Eusebius, and John Chrysostom as well as Aristotle and Ptolemy.51 The Bible, the Fathers, and even the lives of the saints weighed down many humanists’ bookshelves.52 The textual record of early Christianity, in other words, expanded enormously in these years. But the expansion may have induced more vertigo than clarity. Many of the new texts were not what the archives yielded to patient exploration but what the punters wanted to find there. Late medieval Christians, as Lucien Febvre and Johan Huizinga taught us long ago, had a passion for vivid, familiar details about Jesus and his family. One text well designed to satisfy this need was the letter of Lentulus, a detailed description of Jesus’ physical appearance that came into widespread circulation at the beginning of the fifteenth century. A hundred years later, learned humanists like Willibald Pirckheimer were still collecting manuscripts of this text, passing it on to printers and meditating on it. Pirckheimer’s friend Albrecht Durer read the letter carefully. It helped him to frame not only his images of Jesus but also his most famous effort at self-­portraiture.53 Valla, who always appreciated a skillful forgery, remarked that “I wish that Lentulus’ letter about the image of Christ were . . . authentic.” In reality, though, he had to condemn it: “it was no less knavishly forged than the grant that we have refuted.”54 The Roman Valla had reason to worry about this particular fake. Roman learned circles—circles we have already met—gave this text the push that made it popular. One of the manuscripts of “Lentulus” identifies it as “the letter of Jacopo, in the year 1421, found in the annals of Rome, in a very ancient book in the Capitol.”55 The Colonna, of course, were the sworn enemies of the Orsini—who, as we saw, did their best to popularize the idea that the Santa Colonna came from ancient Jerusalem. It seems quite possible that their conflict extended from the bravos insulting each other in the streets to the families’ more scholarly members, who concocted rival imagined Christian pasts in their studies. The early Christian world, as the scholars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries looked back to it, must have seemed to them to pop into clear visibility, like a slide covered with tiny organisms, viewed through a microscope as it is being focused. But the apparently hard-­edged precision of these new views was as often the result of bold invention or untrammeled nostalgia as it was of exacting philology. The creators of the Magdeburg Centuries, for example, knew from the start that they had to detect and expose the spurious texts that clogged the record. François Baudouin, the erudite jurist who served as their consultant on historical method, warned them that the Fathers themselves had complained about the prevalence of forgeries. In modern times, many new “trifles” had been composed and ascribed to “apostolic men,” and

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even learned humanists patched together their pictures of the early church “from these stinking rags.”56 The Magdeburg scholars cast doubt on such problematic texts as some of the letters ascribed to the very early Christian writer Ignatius of Antioch.57 But when they described the life and works of Jesus, they included what they called “texts recorded by illustrious authors”—in fact, a comprehensive series of spurious texts that began with the ancient (but spurious) correspondence of Jesus with Abgar of Edessa, preserved by Eusebius; continued through the testimonium Flavianum, the ancient (but spurious) passage on Jesus preserved in the Jewish Antiquities of Josephus, and the late antique (but spurious) letter of Pontius Pilate to the Roman emperor; and wound up with the latest of them all, the letter of Lentulus.58 It was a spectacle to annoy the critical, like poor Baudouin, and to bemuse anyone who hoped to arrive at clarity.

Waiting for Godot: Ecclesiastical Scholarship before Flacius and Baronio Well before new histories of the church on the grand scale began to be written, well-­informed humanists and scholastics knew that something was rotten in the kingdom of ecclesiastical scholarship. Juan Luis Vives lamented that “a license for lying” had established itself “where holy things are concerned.” He listed apocryphal stories and texts, starting with Constantine’s leprosy, and denounced them: “we shriek and bark at lesser errors and wink at these— which, if they fall into the hands of the impious, will make our most holy and profound religion look absurd to them.”59 Melchior Cano, the Dominican who rethought the Catholic tradition from end to end in the years running up to the Council of Trent, complained about the incompetence of ecclesiastical historians. He agreed that it was not a good thing to introduce historical errors into the liturgy and denounced those who found it necessary to exaggerate the piety and courage of the saints. But he also suspected that scandal might do the church more harm than minor error. Accordingly, he wrote with obvious ambivalence—at one point acknowledging the service that Erasmus had done by correcting errors, at another denouncing him for accusing the greats of the Christian church of lying.60 What was to be done?

Back to the Future: The Eusebian Tradition and the Use of Documents in History Did a revival of Eusebian history provide the answer to these problems? If so, how did it all happen? Like reviving Galenic anatomy or Plinian natural history, bringing Eusebius back to full textual life was a complicated project.

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Church histories entered libraries, in this period, not single spies but in battalions. The Ecclesiastical History was read in the Latin translation and adaptation by Rufinus, through the Latin Middle Ages and after. So was the Chronicle, in the Latin adaptation by Jerome. Both texts were also continued, imitated and brought up to date, as Momigliano noted, and some of the adaptors followed or even extended Eusebius’s practices. In the ninth century, when the Venerable Bede compiled his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, he actually named some of his sources and assistants—for example, Nothhelm, later archbishop of Canterbury, who went to Rome and “with leave of the present Pope Gregory, searched into the archives of the holy Roman Church, found there some epistles of the blessed Pope Gregory, and other popes and returning home, by the advice of the aforesaid most reverend father Albinus, brought them to me, to be inserted in my history”—perhaps the first explicit thanks ever offered by a historian for research assistance in an archive.61 In parts of Bede’s history, especially the first book, documents pop up as thickly as mushrooms on a forest floor. As documentary culture developed in medieval Britain and elsewhere, citations in chronicles became even more profuse and their character more self-­ conscious. The eleventh-­century abbot of Crowland Abbey in Lincolnshire, Ingulf, wrote a history of his house in which many facts and claims rested on charters, which he cited in full. He made clear in his commentary that these documents were written in Anglo-­Saxon script, and that he had taken special pains to preserve them and maintain their accessibility, in a Norman world that saw Old English writing as barbaric. Happily, his precautions worked when tested by a calamitous fire: A few years before [the great fire of 1091] however, I had, of my own accord, taken from our muniment-­room several charters written in Saxon characters, and as we had duplicates of them, and in some instances triplicates, I had put them in the hands of our chauntor, the lord Fulmar, to be kept in the cloisters, in order to instruct the juniors in the knowledge of the Saxon characters; as this kind of writing had for a long time, on account of the Normans, been utterly neglected, and was now understood by only a few of the more aged men. In so doing, my object was that the juniors, being instructed in the art of reading these characters, might, in their old age, be the better enabled to cite the sources for their monastery against their adversaries. These charters having been deposited in an ancient press, which was kept in the cloisters, and surrounded on every side by the wall of the church, were the only ones that were saved and preserved from the fire. These now form our principal and especial muniments, after having been long considered as of secondary value and thrown aside, neglected and

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despised, in consequence of the barbarous characters in which they were written.62 Both the chronicle and the documents were forged, sad to say, by the monks of fourteenth-­century Crowland Abbey. Yet even they were outdone in ingenuity by the fifteenth-­century Cambridge scholar—traditionally identified, on weak evidence, as Nicholas Cantilupe—who included a charter granted by King Arthur, as well as similar companion pieces, in his short history of Cambridge University.63 When the same authors composed political and ecclesiastical chronicles, practices moved from one genre to the other. The Benedictine Joannes Trithemius included a fair number of quotations from sources in his massive history of the Abbey of Hirsau in Baden-­Württemberg—which he represented as playing an even more glorious role than it actually had in the Cluniac reform movement. But he really made play with charters in his brief history of the Franks—as he did with summaries of his glorious and imaginary Frankish historians, Marcomir and Hunnibald. Trithemius even printed a charter that he condemned as spurious, drawing critical arguments from its dating and its physical condition.64 Joannes Vergenhans, known to his fellow humanists as Nauclerus, was a doctor of canon and civil law. He drew up a massive history of state and church, which was posthumously completed and printed in two volumes, with no small splendor, in 1516.65 The Augsburg humanist Konrad Peutinger—an expert on Roman inscriptions and other forms of historical evidence—took care to identify the charters that Nauclerus quoted, since the printed text did not use special characters or line breaks to set them apart. He even added passages that Nauclerus omitted, and at least one rough facsimile of a seal, from his own collection of documents, copied from originals in the ancient Benedictine Abbey at Reichenau. Like some of the documents used by Eusebius and Bede, these were spurious. Yet it is clear that author and reader alike saw it as normal, by the early sixteenth century, to include original documents in the text of an ecclesiastical history.66 What made Eusebius seem special, in the sixteenth century, was not, then, the presence of documents, which readers would have felt every reason to expect in any work on the history of the church (or indeed of a church). Eusebius’s book had a special character: it was an attractive textual nuisance. Readers of many different kinds noticed that his text was neither the sort of seamless narrative tapestry that most pagan historians had woven nor a normal medieval chronicle punctuated by documentary quotations but a mosaic. And for all the differences in their approach to the text, few could restrain themselves from starting to examine individual stones and test the firmness of their settings. Thomas Cranmer, for example, was not a historical scholar by

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training or inclination, though he made extensive use of documents to argue for Henry VIII’s side in the King’s Great Matter.67 But as he read the 1544 first edition of the Greek text of Eusebius’s church history, with its constant references to earlier sources, he noted again and again that Eusebius had quoted the words of an earlier writer, such as the Jewish Neo-­Platonist Philo or the Christian scholar Julius Africanus.68 More elaborate notes identified “the letter of the church of Smyrna on the martyrdom of Saint Polycarp” and the “letter of the Christians living at Vienne and Lyons.”69 At least once Cranmer allowed himself a touch of donnish humor. Eusebius quoted a letter from Dionysius of Corinth, which evoked the traditional generosity of the Roman church, always ready to send help to brethren and churches elsewhere. “An ancient tradition of the Roman church, which has fallen out of use nowadays,” Cranmer drily remarked.70 John Jewel, bishop of Salisbury and master of controversy, read his copy of the text in a similar way, repeatedly noting the presence of texts by others in Eusebius’s work.71 Cranmer noticed other, more distinctive points as well. More than once he recorded Eusebius’s remark that he had compiled a whole collection of Christian martyrdoms, evidently as part of the preparation for writing the Ecclesiastical History.72 It was not necessary to be a professional scholar like Cranmer to notice that Eusebius had done extensive research—or to realize that it was difficult to verify his references. Mary Roper Clarke Bassett, daughter of Margaret More Roper, dedicated a translation of the first five books of the Ecclesiastical History to Mary Tudor. Among the practices that made Eusebius hard to read and translate, she explained in her dedication, was the fact that he “doth . . . alledge many authorytyes owt of sundry Greke authores, which were in hys tyme abrode in mennys hande, but syns have been loste, and are nowe therfoure to owr knowledge, no where to comme by, by reason whereof who so studyeth or redyth that storye ys fayne many tymes to passe over some poincte thereof not fully and wholly satysfyed therein, for that such allegacions, being here and there brought in by small patches and peycys, do for ye moste parte necessarily requyre ye knowledge of the sentence in the wryters whence they be alledged, both foregoing and after folowyng.”73 Meredith Hanmer, who translated the full Greek text of Eusebius into English, inferred from the same set of inconsistencies and glitches that the transmitted text was unfinished, the provisional result of a long process of compilation, which he could reconstruct in part: he that is acquainted with Eusebius will confesse: that oftentimes in many places he repeateth one thinge, though not vpon the selfe same occasion, neither in the selfe same order, neither with the same words, he hath made mention of his bookes of martyrs and of the bokes he wrote of the life of

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Phamphilus almost in every booke, he reporteth the selfe same martyrdomes in diverse bookes and sundry places. As for the placing no marvell at all though he be out of order, Eusebius published not his own history but left it with his familiars.74 The Ecclesiastical History, in other words, offered many strings to pull and buttons to push. What else, a careful reader had to ask himself, had been omitted, what else could be reconstructed? Eusebius, moreover, for all his antiquity, did not enjoy anything like unchallenged authority. True, the first humanist scholars to concern themselves with the history of the early church preferred Eusebius to later writers. Nicolas of Cusa used the fact that he did not mention the Donation of Constantine as powerful evidence that it had never taken place.75 Lorenzo Valla cited Eusebius with respect, as an authoritative witness to the fact that Constantine converted to Christianity before Sylvester became pope.76 Maffeo Vegio argued bitterly in his treatise on the Basilica of Saint Peter that while most people accepted that they needed training and qualifications to practice an art, every stable-­boy, druggist, and “little woman” seemed eager to offer prescriptions, and every sailor, barber, and “talkative old lady” to tell historical tales. That was how the legend had grown that images of Peter and Paul had appeared to Constantine in his sleep and converted him. In fact, though, Eusebius, “the most learned and honorable author of ecclesiastical history,” told the true story of Constantine’s vision of the cross and subsequent conversion.77 In most cases, these scholars were judging the value of Eusebius’s work in the traditional way that testimony had always been judged: the qualities of the witness determined the value of the testimony. Yet some made the case in different terms. Erasmus’s friend Beatus Rhenanus noted that he and his contemporaries would have had no access to many early Christian writers had Eusebius “not provided us with some fragments from their books.”78 For him, Eusebius deserved respect not for who he was but for what he preserved. Yet questions always seemed to arise. Beatus Rhenanus admitted that the fifth-­century pope Gelasius had criticized Eusebius as an Arian heretic in his Decretum, a list of accepted and prohibited books, biblical and non-­biblical, which is no longer attributed to Gelasius. Yet he insisted that a second passage, in which Gelasius declared the whole Ecclesiastical History “an apocryphal work,” “was added by some ass.”79 Melchior Cano argued that the theologian must know history, since it played so prominent a role in the theological debates between Catholics and Protestants. He lamented the condition of the history of the church: “I say in sorrow, rather than in slander, that Diogenes Laertius has written the lives of the philosophers more rigorously than Chris-

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tians have written the lives of the saints.” But he dismissed Rhenanus’s criticisms of the condemnation of Eusebius in the Decretum as “rude, crude and ignorant.” After all, he insisted, Eusebius had twisted facts and documents to make his story support the Arian heresy, to which Eusebius himself had adhered.80 Evidently, by the middle of the sixteenth century, the pedestal on which Eusebius stood was wobbling. Many scholars were uncertain of his good faith—and pretty much everyone agreed that his use of documents was anything but exemplary. Yet the fact that Eusebius did not provide an exact and trustworthy matrix, a set of protocols and practices that others could simply apply, may have been what made his presence so provocative. “Error can sometimes be fertile”—so A. J. P. Taylor liked to say—“but perfection is always sterile.” In the Renaissance, ancient writers who made visible errors proved very fertile indeed. Galen offered anatomists both a model of direct study through dissection and results that dissection of humans did not confirm. Ptolemy offered astronomers both a complex Aristotelian system of cosmology and models of motion that violated Aristotelian proposals. These inconsistencies provoked creative responses. So too, Eusebius’s history was fascinating above all where cracks opened and bits fell off. He provided primary documents. But some of the most vivid ones, the letters between Abgar of Edessa and Jesus, were already condemned as apocryphal in the Decretum ascribed to Gelasius, as Melchior Cano pointed out.81 Eusebius not only cited sources but also offered models of philological analysis to justify relying on them. In book II, for example, he quoted, from the Jewish writer Philo, descriptions of a group of Egyptian ascetics known as Therapeutae. Eusebius decided that they were early Christians converted by Mark. He also recorded a tradition that Philo met Peter. And he argued that it was not improbable that Philo had known and praised Christians, “for the work of which we have spoken, and which was composed by him some years later, clearly contains those rules of the Church which are even to this day observed among us” (HE 2.17.1). This argument actually raised new problems. True, it was traditional, in much Christian writing, to treat Philo as if he had almost been a Christian.82 Jerome, who learned much from Eusebius, described Philo, like Josephus and Seneca, as ecclesiastical writers. But Erasmus, who had a cultivated historical sensibility and no love of Jews, ancient or modern, found this surprising, and he said so in his edition. Jewel noted the observation with interest.83 No doubt many others did as well. When the Magdeburg Centuries were being planned, the authors wrote to Baudouin to confirm their view that Philo had not been describing Christian ascetics. “I warmly agree,” he replied, “that Philo was describing not so much Christian as Jewish

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monks.”84 The question of the Therapeutae remained controversial for decades. J. J. Grynaeus, a Basel scholar whose lectures on political and ecclesiastical history packed in large audiences, published a commentary on Eusebius in 1570. He noted with apparent approval that “Eusebius affirms that these ascetics were Christians.”85 Scaliger disagreed—and treated Eusebius’s mistake as cardinal evidence of his untrustworthiness.86 One point was clear: one could not follow Eusebius, either as a model or as a source, without sailing into philological Bermuda triangles. The modern ecclesiastical scholar had to engage with Eusebius as he had engaged with his sources: to do what he himself had done, on the much larger scale required by the long history of the church and the vast range of documentation now available, and with a more sophisticated method.

Modern Eusebians, I: Big History In a lecture of 1958 on Jean Mabillon and Italy, Momigliano surveyed not individual scholars and their visions of the past but the institutions of learning that they inhabited: “There was nothing in Italy comparable with the Abbey of Saint Germain des Prés to which both Mabillon and [Bernard de] Montfaucon belonged. There was perhaps nothing comparable in any part of the world. . . . The monks were working co-­operatively. Their team spirit became a legend. The healthy and the sick, the young and the old were made to contribute to the work of the house; and proof-­reading was the most usual occupational therapy. The Abbey functioned as an Academy.”87 Subsequent studies have confirmed this picture of high systematization: when the Maurists set out to edit the works of Augustine, uniform red pencils were distributed to all those involved in collating manuscripts in any of the order’s houses.88 Students of the history of historical thought and work have traditionally seen the seventeenth century, as Momigliano did, as a special time— the time that saw the rise of large collaborative projects, in both the Catholic and the Protestant worlds. It was an age of academies, after all—an age in which imaginary societies of Rosicrucians and alchemists and real societies of Italian and British, French and German natural philosophers met to devise new programs of experiment and observation. No wonder, then, that it also saw the rise of the Maurists, who edited vast series of documents and lives and created the new sciences of diplomatics and paleography; of the great Jesuit dream team in Antwerp, the Bollandists, who devoted themselves to combing the spurious saints out of the underbrush of the Christian calendar; and of Protestant counterparts like the network of antiquaries, centering on William Dugdale, who created the magnificent Latin guide to England’s medieval monastic heritage, the Monasticon Anglicanum.89

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Grand though these projects—and some of the teams that created them— were, they were less novel than Momigliano and others have suggested. Consider Flacius. At first he set out on a lone voyage across Europe to gather the sources of church history, from church histories to Waldensian liturgies and the trials of supposed heretics—the voyage on which he was accused, perhaps justly, of using the culter Flacianus to harvest texts that librarians would not let him copy.90 Soon, however, he realized that one scholar, working alone in the traditional manner of the secular political historian, could not possibly master and deploy all the materials for a church history. Accordingly, he floated a scheme before possible patrons and advisors—perhaps the world’s first historical grant proposal. In 1554 Flacius told the bookish Count Ottheinrich of Palatinate-­Neuburg that he needed a stock of books so large that he could not list all their titles. He also wanted to create a team of four to work through these texts, breaking them down into excerpts that could in turn be stored under topical headings and worked up into a history: two researchers to find material, a “nice stylist” to write up their findings, and a secretary.91 Did he have in mind the model of those collaborative teams that Amerbach and Froben had assembled to create their big editions? When scholarship becomes collaborative, projects expand. Grant-­ supported projects expand infinitely. Flacius himself, rather like a modern senior life scientist, exalted as a spokesman but exiled from the bench and criticized by his collaborators, withdrew from the active composition of the history, relinquishing day-­by-­day control to Caspar von Nidbruck and other colleagues. The team grew almost as quickly as the leadership. By 1558 von Nidbruck and three colleagues had hired seven students to make excerpts from the sources, two MAs to assess the material and work it up into coherent form, five “inspectors” to allot the texts to be excerpted and help write and polish the final drafts, and a scribe to make fair copies, and the numbers continued to rise.92 Money was always short—perhaps the first cost overruns in the history of collaborative research. Still, critics materialized almost at once, not only in Rome but also in Wittenberg. Catholic scholars accused Flacius of stealing the money contributed by his patrons. Lutheran scholars did something even worse: they ridiculed him. Flacius and his friends described their students as carrying out public anatomies of their sources (a metaphor that Flacius himself liked to use when trying to describe rigorous textual interpretation).93 Melanchthon’s followers immediately replied that Flacius had carried out all too many literal anatomies of books. They devised an ugly set of anatomical metaphors, based on the processes of digestion, with which to describe the production of the Centuries.94 In fact, however, Flacius and his followers collected, collated, and copied plenty of manuscripts. Von Nidbruck, for example, discovered the Codex

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Carolinus, a massive collection of the correspondence of the popes with Pippin and Charlemagne, in the library of Cologne Cathedral (it is now Österreichische Nationalbibliothek MS 449). He had a copy made. Flacius himself prepared this for use, correcting lemmata and entering notes to explain what he had done (Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek 27.9. Aug. fol.). Flacius’s collections of documents included such now-­famous texts as the Capitulare de villis, the great set of rules for the conduct of Carolingian manors.95 Collaborative scholarship based on teamwork and supported by grants— and its evil twin, furious criticism from those not in receipt of such largesse— thus began to figure in historical research as early as the sixteenth century.96 The Benedictines praised so beautifully by Momigliano knew better than Flacius how to direct their revenues to scholarly ends. In substance, however, they brilliantly used the institutions of their monastic order to expand an existing pattern of collaborative research—and to take over such tasks as the production of patristic Opera omnia from the independent publishers who had once dominated that field. Over time, ecclesiastical historians also developed formidable arrays of tools and became formidably skilled at wielding them. Matthew Parker amassed manuscripts on a scale never seen before. He hoped to prove that the Anglican church he was helping to create was not a new institution but a restoration of the pure Christianity founded in England by Joseph of Arimathea, preserved in large part by the Anglo-­Saxon churches but gradually corrupted over time, first by Augustine’s mission and then by the imposition of the Norman church. Inspired in part by John Bale, in part by the Centuriators, he organized a team of scholars to publish editions of sources and compile a history of the English church and collective biography of the archbishops of Canterbury, the De antiquitate ecclesiae Britannicae, which appeared in 1572.97 With the help of his fellow bishops and others—including the Privy Council, which gave official sanction to his hunt for sources—Parker assembled a magnificent collection of medieval manuscripts. Hundreds of them, bequeathed under strict terms to Corpus Christi College Cambridge, remain there and have been made accessible around the world by a splendid digitization project based at Stanford.98 Yet the Parker Library on the Web is not the original Parker Library. Dozens of other manuscripts that Parker and his group assembled and annotated remain in other repositories, from Cambridge University Library and other college libraries and the Bodleian, to the British Library, to the Scheide Library in Princeton, which possesses a Parkerian copy of William of Malmesbury.99 Parker and his men did their best to date and identify each manuscript that came into their purview—as well as to paginate them and, sometimes, to move illustrations and bits of prose from one text to another.100 They did not

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always do this with the claims of strict accuracy foremost in their minds. Early in the Reformation, Protestant scholars seized upon a text, written in response to the Gregorian reform, which defended clerical marriage. Written by Ulricus, bishop of Augsburg, it was dedicated to Pope Nicholas I. Catholic scholars noticed with delight that this was impossible, since Nicholas had died in 867, while Ulricus held the see of Augsburg from 924 to 973.101 Parker frantically compiled bibliographical information in the hope of finding a more appropriate author.102 Eventually, he came upon a manuscript that ascribed the work to a different author, one Volusianus. He made this point known to friends and associates and printed the text with a preface that asserted the new theory of its authorship.103 The manuscript that Parker used is now part of a miscellany in the library of Gonville and Caius College. He had a copy made, which remains in his collection in Corpus, and he used this for his edition.104 But he told friends and informed readers that his source for the edition had been—as John Jewel put it—“written in old vellum, of very ancient record”; or, as John Foxe relayed Parker’s account, “of an old and auncient writing, bothe by the forme of the characters and by the wearing of the Parchment almost consumed by length of years and tyme.”105 It takes only the shortest of looks at the actual text in the library of Gonville and Caius College to see that it was a perfectly legible manuscript of the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, excellently preserved. In this case Parker used all his resources of descriptive rhetoric to give a false impression of his source. Still, the coin has another side. Parker carefully distinguished between his Anglo-­Saxon manuscripts—which he did not put into the hands of his printers—and his Anglo-­Norman ones, which he did.106 His secretaries— above all John Joscelyn—did work of extraordinary depth and precision as they worked through these new texts. Joscelyn, for example, scrutinized the D text of the Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle down to minute details, noting where it departed from its Latin sources: when the author had Caesar keep his legions in Scotland, Joscelyn explained, he was misreading his Latin source, which had them sent into winter quarters (hyberna, not Hybernia).107 More remarkably, Joscelyn supplemented this version of the Chronicle, which has a large gap early on, so skillfully that his work was printed in a scholarly edition of the text as recently as 1926.108 Gradually Parker and his men came to appreciate Anglo-­Norman authors. Parker or his spokesman wrote appreciatively, in the preface to his edition of Matthew Paris, of Matthew’s qualities as a bookman: He was extremely skillful at his very elegant and shapely script, of the form called Textualis, and at the exquisite depiction of events in their true form

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and in perfect proportion. . . . He left a fine specimen of his artistry in the first copy of his history, written with his own hand, in which he often depicted for the eye the very stories that he had told in words, giving a neat and lively image of the things he mentioned.109 Parker promised that “We will preserve all of this diligently, to give the contents of this work greater authority.” He also praised Matthew for adding “the heraldic insignia of the various princes, in their proper forms and colors”—a practice that he emulated in his own account of the antiquity of the British church.110 Parker had the presentation copies of his books that he destined for the good and the great illuminated in varied ways. The surviving ones represent a fascinating effort to endow printed books with something of the visual appeal that he and his assistants had learned to appreciate in medieval manuscripts. Flowers, fish, and a very lifelike shrimp—labeled “A shrimpe 1573”—in a presentation copy of one of Parker’s editions reveal that Parker liked the Flemish trompe l’oeil style of illumination as much as Matthew Paris’s elephant.111 Parker and his men must have discussed and classified many different scripts, on many occasions. Even when they engaged in practices that now look shady, they displayed a considerable knowledge of and a well-­developed sensibility for the varieties of writing, the ways in which they changed over time, and the aesthetic principles that regulated a good Gothic Textualis every bit as much as they did humanist minuscule. Most striking of all is Parker’s fourteenth-­century manuscript of Gervase of Tilbury. Facing the first recto, one of his men has supplied a transcription of the heavily abbreviated text. Its title reads: “For the benefit of those who have not had practice with abbreviations like these, which the ancients used.”112 Long before Mabillon, ecclesiastical scholars were experimenting with the forms of presentation and exposition that the Maurists brought into the public realm of print. Similar experimentation was going on elsewhere: from England, where Henry Spelman tried to work out the history of Latin scripts a generation after Parker, to the Escorial, where Spanish scholars planned—but did not carry out—to create a dossier of datable manuscripts and use their scripts to re-­create the history and chronology of writing.113 To view Mabillon and Montfaucon in the light of these earlier experiments is to see that their work derived in part from the older world of ecclesiastical scholarship. The effort to emulate and replace Eusebius led naturally both to the collaborative forms of scholarship that the Bollandists and Maurists also practiced and to their efforts to turn the history of manuscripts into a formal art. There is some further irony here. Twentieth-­century scholarship has stressed the fact that Eusebius himself practiced big scholarship, for his day.114

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An impresario of scribes and a builder of archives, he assembled an impressive team of skillful artisans. When Constantine needed fifty large pandect bibles for the new churches of Constantinople, he turned to Eusebius to produce them—even though that meant he had to send the necessary skins all the way to Caesarea, by the cursus publicus, and have the books sent back. Neither Flacius nor Mabillon, nor those between, had any reason to realize that when they built their teams and networks, Eusebius was their model, as he was when they collected and assessed documents. Yet he was present, in spirit.

Eusebian Dreams Matthew Parker made clear that he was a dedicated follower of Eusebius when he suggested to the Magdeburg Centuriators that they should be more consistent about printing entire primary sources, rather than sometimes offering only references.115 But he also found inspirations in Eusebius that moderns might not. In 1566 Parker printed the Easter sermon of the erudite tenth-­ century cleric Aelfric, in the original Anglo-­Saxon, with a facing English translation. He hoped to show that Aelfric had denied transubstantiation and accepted clerical marriage—and thus confirmed a major Anglican doctrine and practice. Only a few scholarly adepts, some of whom worked for Parker, could actually judge this edition and translation. In order to guarantee its accuracy, Parker held a conference with his bishops, went through the whole text and translation, and had them sign an attestation of their correctness. His edition included his name, that of the Archbishop of York, and those of thirteen bishops. It has long been known that this operation involved a certain pathos. For Parker silently omitted the names of two of the original signatories.116 So much for Parker’s effort to use the new medium of print to provide a new form of proof that no critic could deny. More important, for our purposes, is that Parker here revived an ancient practice of authentication described by Eusebius. Eusebius tells us that Serapion, bishop of Antioch, wrote a letter to Caricus and Pontius, denouncing the Phrygian heresy. In the same letter of Serapion the signatures of several bishops are found, one of whom subscribes himself as follows: I, Aurelius Cyrenius, a witness, pray for you to be well. And another in this manner: Ælius Publius Julius, bishop of Debeltum, a colony of Thrace. As God lives in the heavens, the blessed Sotas in Anchialus wished to cast the demon out of Priscilla, but the hypocrites did not permit him. And the autograph signatures of many other bishops who agreed with them are contained in the letter, which has been exhibited. So much for these persons. (HE 5.19.3–4)

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Though Parker never said so, he emulated Eusebius when he created his own list of signatures to substantiate a polemical statement—as opposed to the charters that appeared with long lists of signatories in medieval chronicles, and the canons of ancient church councils, which also came equipped with stately lists of those who had passed them.117

New Wine in Old Bottles? Tradition, Irritation, and Inspiration Eusebius, perhaps, was never more suggestive than when his readers did not see that he was leading them. Flacius had little good to say about Eusebius. He complained from the start, in fact, that existing church historians were inadequate because they concentrated on sentimental portraits of individual holy men and women: “The ecclesiastical histories that now exist concern themselves chiefly with describing and praising individuals. They tell us what sort of person, and how holy, someone was, what a marvelous life he led, how much he fasted and prayed, what miracles he carried out alive or dead.” By contrast, he pointed out, “they show hardly any interest in doctrine”—which, for Flacius, had to be the center of any proper history of the church.118 He made clear—first, in 1554, to his potential patron Ottheinrich, and then to all the readers of the first volume of the history he had organized—that the chief target of his criticism was Eusebius.119 Cesare Baronio agreed with Flacius about very little: his Annales, which began to appear in 1588, were regarded by many—even many Protestants—as a largely successful effort to crush the Protestant church history under the weight of the vast accumulation of documents preserved in the Vatican Library and other Catholic repositories. But he too dismissed Eusebius—not for discussing the wrong issues but simply because “he lied” in order to support the Arian heresy he adhered to and to please his Arian patron, Constantius.120 One aspect of the new church history, moreover, seems at first sight particularly distant from Eusebius. The study of the Christian past—as it took shape in the sixteenth century—bore on every aspect of Christian practice in the present, from the vestments priests wore to the liturgies that they performed. Sources that do not now read as eminently historical supplied rich information on these questions. The massive thirteenth-­century Rationale divinorum officiorum of Guillaume Durand, bishop of Mende in Languedoc, for example, offered detailed accounts of every aspect of church architecture and ritual. In 1499 the Italian humanist Polydore Vergil had issued a neat little work in three books on the inventors of everything from religion and obelisks to printing—a subject that fascinated his contemporaries, keen to work out whether possessing the compass, gun­powder, and the printing press really

A n t h o n y G r a f t on   37

made them superior to the ancients. More than two decades later, he added five new books. In these he traced the history of Christianity, feature by feature. Church and mass, liturgy and vestments all found places in his work, and Durand and other ecclesiastical sources provided much of his core evidence. Polydore’s compilation fascinated readers—especially Protestant readers, anxious to show that the church had introduced innovations without biblical sanction into worship and religious life. In the 1540s, controversy spread about how far Protestants could accept traditional observances. Philipp Melanchthon argued that many points of practice were “adiaphora,” “things indifferent,” and supported the 1548 Augsburg Interim, an effort at religious peace-­ making that would have required Protestant ministers to restore a large number of Catholic observances. Flacius—who violently rejected Melanchthon’s views and became the leader of the “Gnesio-­Lutheran” or “genuine Lutheran” party—responded by translating Polydore’s treatment of the Mass into German and printing it with commentary. He noted that Catholics could hardly refuse to accept the testimony of one of their own that the Mass was a late creation.121 Through the 1540s Thomas Cranmer was struggling to reform the English church order against the opposition of Stephen Gardiner and others. He had his secretaries copy the Latin original of Polydore’s chapter into one of the Great Commonplace Books that he compiled in the 1540s.122 Cranmer also studied Polydore’s sources. Durand traced a story of the evolution of the Mass, from primitive variety to mature uniformity: “In the early church, different men sang different things, each as he liked, so long as they sang only things that pertained to the praise of God.” From the start, all services included the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s Creed. Over time, however, the rise of heresies made it necessary for the papacy to impose uniformity on the Mass, and Ambrose, Gelasius, and Gregory gradually filled it out. Cranmer read this passage with close attention, underlining parts of it and jotting down key terms in the margin.123 He certainly did not approve of all features of Durand’s text. A dramatic account of how God guided the decision to use the Gregorian Mass throughout the world but retain the Ambrosian in Milan sparked a sharply critical remark: “ffabula de officio Gregoriano & Ambrosiano” (an invention about the Gregorian and Ambrosian office).124 But he learned, probably from Polydore, how to read Durand’s work against the grain and draw on it for his own liturgical purposes. So did others with whom he disagreed sharply. In 1550, when John Hooper refused to be consecrated a bishop if he would have to wear the traditional “Aaronic” vestments based not on Scripture but on the practices of Jewish priests, he cited the evidence assembled by Polydore Vergil to support his position.125 When the Vestiarian Debate revived in the 1560s, both opponents and supporters of traditional vestments would continue to cite the evidence compiled by Polydore and

38  Pa s t B e l i e f

­Durand.126 Research about the early church, in other words, took shape in a constant dialectical interplay with the development of modern churches: each shaped the other. Some—including Cranmer—did their best to draw information about the customs of the early church from Eusebius. In book 5, he described how one Natalius, bishop of a heretical group, was scourged by angels overnight and repented. In the morning, he covered himself in sackcloth and ashes and prostrated himself before an orthodox bishop. “This,” Cranmer wrote in his copy, “is the form of confession and penitence that the ancients used.”127 Hanmer told readers of Eusebius that he would show them “the Bishops hovve they governed, Ministers hovv they taught, Synodes vvhat they decreed, Ceremonies hovv they crept into the Church, Heresies hovv they rise and were rooted out.”128 Hanmer’s vision of these changing rituals was chiefly critical. But Grynaeus seemingly showed a little more sympathy when he noted that Eusebius described the “life, customs, studies, homes, meetings and scriptural interpretations” of the ascetic Therapeutae.129 Perhaps, Flacius and Cranmer really learned from reading Eusebius, as well as from reading Polydore Vergil, to see that the Christian past had been a different country. Yet they needed far more and richer materials than Eusebius had collected in these realms—if they were to bring the early church back to life in a form vivid and three-­dimensional enough to serve as a pattern for their own churches. Flacius insisted, when his friend and ally Caspar von Nidbruck opposed him, that the new history had to describe not only doctrines, lives, and works but also something more: “You write that ceremonies and church music are irrelevant to us. But we definitely want to show not only what doctrines existed in the church, but also what ceremonies and songs, though briefly, for all of these things were connected with one another.”130 He had his way. As the Magdeburg history took shape, the excerpts from sources collected for each century were laid out under systematic headings. One of these was “ceremonies.” Over time, to be sure, the continuators of Flacius’s own enterprise did relatively little to pursue this segment of his interests. Once they fell out with him and extruded him from the enterprise entirely, they drafted a massive argument in favor of sticking to some of the very traditions he had denounced. Flacius himself, however, kept on collecting evidence of many kinds. He did pioneering work on the history of the liturgy, collecting many texts of the Mass, one of which he published, and setting himself in dialogue with the irenic Catholic George Cassander (whose own anthology of early texts of the Mass began, strikingly, with the Jewish Passover ritual).131 Like Matthew Parker, he also gathered and published evidence that proved that vernacular Bible had been in use long before the Reformation.132 The forms of research

A n t h o n y G r a f t on   39

that Flacius developed—and that Catholic scholars would push much farther than he did in the next century—represented a fundamental departure from anything Eusebius had envisioned.

A Question of Quality How well did the modern ecclesiastical historians practice their craft? Well enough to entertain contradictory ideas and still function. Consider, once again, Matthew Parker. In the 1560s, he argued vehemently that the church had been at its simple best in its early centuries. Over time, however, as we have seen, he collected, studied, and issued editions of a number of Norman Latin sources. And as he read them, his sympathies shifted, in part. When Parker began to study the past, he disliked the great monasteries, which he saw as centers for the diffusion of the corrupt traditions that had entered the land with the Normans and grew floridly thereafter in both power and wealth. Reading through his manuscripts, moreover, he found what he saw as evidence that monastic scholars had deliberately corrupted texts in order to falsify the history of the church. His copy of Rabanus Maurus’s work De universo, for example, skipped a key passage at the point where the author treated the sacraments (V.11). A marginal note stated that “there is material missing here, apparently by the deliberate action of the scribe.” One of Parker’s men entered the relevant passage in the margin.133 In the works of the erudite twelfth-­century scholar and chronicler William of Malmesbury, Parker found what he took as further evidence that the change was intentional. The passage from William was copied in the margin of Parker’s Rabanus manuscript as well.134 In 1570, in the preface to one of his editions of medieval historical texts, Parker (or one of his servants) described these changes at length and interpreted them as evidence of a massive Catholic effort to poison the wells of history.135 Yet Parker also came to appreciate the sturdy independence of Matthew Paris and other monastic writers—as well as the visual appeal of their books. More important, perhaps, he underwent criticism, as Flacius did, for the vast sums he spent, in part on having other people do scholarly work.136 As Parker went on looking through his manuscripts, he came to see the monastic culture of Norman England, in which they had come into being, in a much more positive light. The monks, after all, had been learned men who produced, collected, and guarded manuscripts. They had also written serious histories. In his manuscript of the fifteenth-­century Scotichronicon by Walter Bower, he read that every British monastery—especially that of St. Albans—had systematically compiled historical notes, woven these into chronicles, and preserved them in their archives—rather as if they had been so many Matthew

40  Pa s t B e l i e f

Parkers.137 In his 1571 edition of Matthew Paris, Parker laid out this material, in as much detail as he had told the story of Rabanus Maurus—as if to show readers as vividly as possible that judging the monastic world of Norman England was not a simple task.138 Evidently, Parker could see the past from multiple angles. Early modern ecclesiastical scholarship, though less centered on Eusebius himself than Momigliano believed, was as independent of other traditions and as inventive as he argued.

2 Jacob Sasportas and Jewish Messianism Yaacob Dweck

The rabbis have had a vexed relationship with the Messiah and messianic movements since antiquity. In a wide-­ranging study that has generated considerable scholarly debate, Gerson D. Cohen distinguished between the messianic posture of Ashkenazi Jews, those whose predominant cultural influence was Franco-­Germany in the Middle Ages and Poland-­Lithuania in the early modern period, and that of Sephardic Jews, those whose predominant cultural influence was Babylonia and the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages and the Ottoman Empire and western Europe in the early modern period. Cohen characterized Ashkenazi Jews as quietist, passive, and given to heroic acts of martyrdom, in contrast to Sephardic Jews, who were politically activist, intellectually dynamic, and revolutionary.1 In a response to Cohen’s framework, Elisheva Carlebach has written, “The grand role in Jewish messianism of Sephardic rabbinic conservatism, from the Geonim [of Babylonia] to Maimonides through Jacob Sasportas simply did not enter into Cohen’s neat typology.”2 The list of Sephardic conservative thinkers identified by Carlebach and others runs variously from Maimonides and Nahmanides in medieval Spain and Egypt through Isaac Abravanel and Solomon Beit ha-­Levi in the Ottoman Empire after the expulsion up through Moses Hagiz and Hakham Zvi Ashkenazi in the Western Sephardic diaspora in the aftermath of Sabbetai Zevi.3 The contours of Sephardic rabbinic conservatism involve a complex mix of philosophical rationalism, emphasis on the law, and, with the death of Maimonides in 1204, a pronounced struggle over the proper interpretation of his discussion of the messianic age in his code of law, the Mishneh Torah, and 41

42  J a c ob S a s p or t a s

his “Epistle to Yemen.”4 Scholars agree that Jacob Sasportas constituted an important link in this chain but have yet to explain how these elements were adumbrated in the pages of his work Zizath novel zvi (Heb. Fading Flower of the Zvi). A rabbi in the Western Sephardic diaspora, Sasportas emerged in 1665 as one of the few opponents to the Jewish Messiah named Sabbetai Zevi. Jews everywhere from the eastern fringes of the Ottoman Empire to the European edges of the Atlantic Ocean greeted the news of redemption with uncritical enthusiasm. For the better part of the next year, until the Messiah converted to Islam at the behest of Sultan Mehmed IV in September 1666, throngs of believers abjured the laws of Judaism and adhered to new norms established by the Messiah and his prophet, Nathan of Gaza.5 In his response to Sabbatianism, Sasportas held up a series of texts as sources of authority to counter the immediate religious experience of the Sabbatians. He repeatedly emphasized an imperative to doubt and beseeched the recipients of his letters to question the certainty of their messianic sensibility. Behind both the authority of these written works and his demand for skepticism was the law as the fundamental point of departure for all thinking about the Messiah. This stress on the law, which Sasportas held himself up as uniquely capable of interpreting and from which he excluded almost anything but the written word as a possible source, went hand in hand with a deep-­ seated fear of the crowd. His appeal to legal expertise and pietist sensibility evolved in reaction to the expressions of mass enthusiasm and the public celebration of the Messiah’s arrival. In his invocation of the authority of the written word and in his denunciation of the Jewish crowd, Sasportas articulated a distinction between the lettered versus the unlettered that had a long afterlife in the early modern period. Sasportas developed this position—the imperative to doubt popular sentiment, the authority of the written word, the denigration of experience as a source of religious truth, and his fear of the crowd—only in response to the Sabbatian theology articulated by Nathan of Gaza and other Sabbatian prophets. In a series of letters by Nathan of Gaza before the apostasy of Sabbetai Zevi and by a number of other figures such as Abraham Miguel Cardozo subsequent to the Messiah’s conversion to Islam, Sabbatian prophets espoused a new conception of time. With the revelation of the Messiah in the form of Sabbetai Zevi, the redemption had begun. What exactly this redemption meant was the subject of fierce internecine dispute among the Sabbatians, particularly in the period after Sabbetai Zevi’s conversion. For some believers, this new sense of time was reflected in their approach to the calendar.6 Their letters bore the date of the first or the second year since the arrival of the Messiah; they addressed one another as if they were living in a new era. Yet for figures such as Raphael Supino, a preacher and printer in Livorno who cor-

Y a a c ob D w e c k   43

responded with Sasportas, this new sense of time did not impinge upon his observance of the law. Supino and many believers like him continued to observe the commandments as they had done before the arrival of the Messiah. For others, however, this new sense of time was accompanied by a radical reevaluation and restructuring of the legal norms that governed Jewish observance. This reordering took a number of forms and developed gradually over the course of the roughly sixteen months between Nathan’s declaration of Sabbetai Zevi as the Messiah and the latter’s conversion to Islam. It took on even more radical forms in the immediate aftermath of the conversion, but the fundamental point of the enterprise was the same. In the period of redemption, the law lost much of its former social power. Sabbatians jettisoned significant legal norms as a result of their experience of redemption. For the masses of Jews swept up by the charismatic authority of the leaders of their movement, the Sabbatian prophet replaced the Talmudist as the source of communal authority. These prophets embraced a form of antinomianism that involved the reinterpretation of a celebrated rabbinic saying, “a transgression committed for its own sake is greater than a commandment not committed for its own sake,” which they construed as “the abrogation of the law is its fulfillment.”7 In light of the experience of redemption, days of mourning for the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, traditionally observed with ascetic restraint and fasting, became days of joy celebrated with food, drink, and general merriment. Sabbetai Zevi reintroduced the ritual slaughter of animals on Passover, a practice abolished with the invention of rabbinic Judaism in the wake of the Temple’s destruction in the first century CE. Sabbatians did not confine their innovations to the abrogation of the law; they introduced new liturgies into the daily service and transformed obscure rituals, such as the fourth meal at the conclusion of the Sabbath, into prolonged celebrations of their Messiah.8 At the same time, they engaged in a series of provocative sexual practices, including the suspension of Jewish laws governing conjugal relations and the demand for sexual abstinence. This was the ultimate form of antinomianism as it threatened the primary unit of all social discipline: the family.9 If Sabbatian prophets and their followers drew on their ecstatic physical experience of redemption as the source of legitimacy for their suspension of the law and their introduction of new rituals, Sasportas turned to the bookshelf in order to reinstitute textual discipline. Against the authenticity of their revelations, Sasportas held up written norms as the sole source of authority. Trained in a tradition that placed emphasis on erudition at the expense of local custom or individual experience, Sasportas took pride in his mastery over the entirety of Jewish law from the Mishnah and the Talmud of antiquity through the codes and commentaries of the Middle Ages up through the most recent

44  J a c ob S a s p or t a s

responsa. His saturation in rabbinic literature was so thorough that when a Sephardic merchant who lived in Frankfurt named David Mercado claimed to have derived the ability of the Sabbatians to establish their own laws from a passage in the Mishnah, the compendium of Jewish law attributed to Judah the Prince at the close of the second century, Sasportas retorted: ‫משנתך זאת המפורשת אצלך אינה משנה אלא בדותא היא ולא נודע מקומה‬ ‫ ולפי דעתי גם אתה לא ראית אותה כי אם שמע מפי אחרים ובדו אותה‬.‫איו‬ ‫ איך בהיותי שוקד‬.‫מלבם וראויים הם לעונש זולת חרפתם ובשתם לפני חכמים‬ ‫על דלתות המשנה מנוערי ועד היום אני מתעסק בה ובפירושה לעשות חיבור‬ ‫נאה ומתקבל בלשון צח וקצר אם יגזור ה’ בחיים לא באה לידי המשנה הזאת‬ ?‫המפורשת לך‬ This explicit Mishnah of yours does not exist; rather it is imagined and its location is entirely unknown. In my opinion you yourself have not even seen it but you heard about it from others who made it up and should be punished for the shame and embarrassment that they have caused the sages. In my vigilant study of the Mishnah, from my youth up until today . . . how have I never seen this explicit passage?10 In a dazzling display of learning, Sasportas had earlier raised two possible texts in the Mishnah and dismissed them as potential sources for Mercado’s claim before accusing him of inventing the passage out of whole cloth. Sasportas manifested here what Amnon Raz-­Krakotzkin has called “a new mishnaic consciousness” that was a unique feature of the early modern period.11 Sasportas drew most frequently on medieval rabbinic literature, rather than the Mishnah and the Talmud of antiquity. At the center of his anti-­messianism and at the core of his account stood the Mishneh Torah, the legal code of Moses Maimonides (d. 1204). Sasportas repeatedly drew upon the fourteen books of Maimonides’ code, especially his treatment of the messianic age in the laws of kings at the conclusion of the code’s final volume, the Book of Judges. His dispute with the Sabbatians, however, was not merely about this celebrated discussion of the Messiah in Maimonides’ writing. Throughout Zizath novel zvi, Sasportas reverted to passages scattered all over the code, including those concerning the laws of evidence, the laws of repentance, and the laws of prayer. And even as he accused Mercado of inventing new sources, he appears to have quoted Maimonides from memory and on one occasion remembered a passage in the law code that did not actually exist.12 At the very beginning of the outbreak of Sabbatian enthusiasm, Sasportas wrote an open letter to the rabbinate of Amsterdam in general and to its leader, Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, in particular.13 In this letter, he outlined the reasons for his skepticism and drew upon Maimonides’ code.

Y a a c ob D w e c k   45

‫ואם בעד כתבים הראשונים הייתי כמספק עכשיו בכתבים שניים המגדילים‬ ‫ ואסכים‬. . . ‫יתר אמונתכם וכמעט שמחזיקים הענין לודאי קרוב באתי כשואל‬ ‫ וכל אלו הדברים וכיוצא בהן‬:‫לדברי הרמב”ם ז”ל בסוף הלכות מלכים שכתב‬ ‫ ולעולם לא יתעסק אדם בדברי אגדות ולא‬. . . ‫לא ידע אדם איך יהיו עד שיהיו‬ ‫יארך במדרשים האמורות בענינים אלו וכיוצא בהן ולא ישימם עיקר וכו’ אלא‬ ‫ ולא בעבור זאת אפגע באמונתי ח”ו או אטיל‬.‫יחכה ויאמין בכלל הדבר וכו’ ע”כ‬ ‫ ונראה לי שיותר טוב‬,‫ אדרבא אני מקיים אותה בשאלתי לדעת האמת‬,‫ספק בה‬ .‫ספקי מודאי‬ When I received the first letters, I had doubted; with the recent arrival of the second letters that increase your belief and practically establish the matter as something definite that will occur shortly, I have come as one who questions . . . and I shall agree to the words of Maimonides at the conclusion of his laws of kings, who wrote, “but no one is in a position to know the details of this and similar things until they have come to pass . . . no one should ever occupy himself with the legendary themes or spend much time on Midrashic statements bearing on this and like subjects. He should not deem them of prime importance . . . one should wait (for his coming) and accept in principle this article of faith.” Here end his words. For this [belief in Sabbetai Zevi], I shall not impinge my faith, heaven forefend, or cast doubt upon it; on the contrary, I uphold it [my faith] in my questioning to ascertain the truth, and it appears to me that doubt is more appropriate than certainty.14 A few lines later, Sasportas rejected the claims of the believers who declared him to be a sinner for not having believed in Sabbetai Zevi and Nathan of Gaza. He again pointed to Maimonides’ code as the source of his doubt: ‫ואעפ”י שאם לא הייתי מאמין בזה האיש למלך המשיח לא הייתי חוטא כל עוד‬ ‫ ואם יעמוד‬:‫שלא ראיתי חזקתו כדברי הרמב”ם ז”ל בסוף הלכות מלכים וז”ל‬ ‫מלך מבית דוד הוגה בתורה ועוסק במצוות כדוד אביו כפי תורה שבכתב‬ ‫ושבעפ”ה ויכוף כל ישראל לילך בה ולחזק בדקה וילחם מלחמות ה’ הרי זה‬ ‫בחזקת שהו משיח ואם עשה והצליח ובנה מקדש במקומו וקבץ נדחי ישראל‬ .‫הרי זה משיח בודאי עכ”ל‬ Even though I have not believed in this man [Sabbetai Zevi] as the king Messiah, I have not sinned as long as I have not seen his claims established according to the [standard] in Maimonides at the conclusion of the laws of Kings: “If there arise a king from the House of David who meditates on the Torah, occupies himself with the commandments, as did his ancestor David, observes the precepts prescribed in the written and Oral law, prevails upon Israel to walk in the way of the Torah and to repair its breaches, and fights the battles of the Lord, it may be assumed that he is the Messiah.

46  J a c ob S a s p or t a s

If he does these things and succeeds, rebuilds the sanctuary on its site, and gathers the dispersed of Israel, he beyond all doubt is the Messiah.” Here end his words.15 To his colleagues in the Amsterdam rabbinate, Sasportas insisted that “skepticism is not a mark of disbelief in the coming of the Messiah, but rather the foremost duty of the learned,” in the succinct articulation of Amos Funkenstein.16 One may even push Funkenstein’s formulation further. Skepticism regarding the Messiah was not only incumbent upon the learned; it was a legal obligation. Repeatedly throughout Zizath novel zvi, Sasportas clung to his doubt in the face of Sabbatian certainty. The Sabbatians pointed to experience, revelation, and prophecy as evidence of the Messiah. Sasportas countered with an authoritative law code that in his reading provided a clear series of necessary stipulations as the prerequisites for the proclamation of the Messiah. Following Maimonides, Sasportas subjected the doctrine of the Messiah to the demands of skepticism and to the rigors of the law. Another letter to the rabbinate in Amsterdam written by Sasportas about six months later provides some indication of how central Maimonides was to his demand for skepticism: ‫האם ראיתם בשום ספר שמחייב להאמין למשיח מי שאומר על עצמו משיחא‬ ‫אנא או אומרים עליו שזה מלך הכבוד קודם עשותו מעשה משיח כדברי‬ ‫ ואעפ”י שיתן כמה אותות ומופתים אחרים האם כדאים‬,‫הרמב”ם בהל’ מלכים‬ ‫ אבל משיח במעשיו הדבר תלוי ללחום מלחמת ה’ ולבנות‬. . . ‫להחזיקו למשיח‬ ‫ שאם לא כן כל הרוצה ליטול שם משיח יבא ויטול אם‬,‫מקדש ולקבץ גלות‬ .‫חסידותו מוכחת עליו וכפי החסידים ירבו המשיחים‬ Have you seen in a single book that one must believe in a Messiah about someone who says about himself, “I am the Messiah,” or about whom they say, “this is the honored king,” before he performs the deeds of the Messiah according to the formulation of Maimonides in the laws of kings; even if he provides several other signs and wonders, are these sufficient to establish him as the Messiah? . . . The Messiah’s deeds are dependent upon him fighting the war of the Lord, the construction of the Temple, and the gathering of exile. For if this were not the case, anyone who wanted to take the name Messiah, would simply come and take it, as long as his piety served as proof. And there would be as many Messiahs as there were pietists.17 Like a good Maimonidean, Sasportas saw a legal imperative to believe in the Messiah—but none whatsoever to believe in Sabbetai Zevi. For Sasportas following in the footsteps of Maimonides, the messianic age would involve

Y a a c ob D w e c k   47

no dramatic change in the observance of the law. In fact, the antinomianism of the Sabbatians was proof positive that the Messiah had not yet arrived. What was more, once Maimonides’ code had been abandoned, Sasportas seemed to say, the way to messianic anarchy was open to all. If the Sabbatians could subvert the power of the written word according to the conduct of their Messiah and their prophet, what was there to stop any Jew who behaved in a particularly pious manner from claiming to be the Messiah? If the code of Maimonides was the primary point of departure for Sasportas’s response to Sabbatianism, he drew on a number of other works by Maimonides to buttress his arguments. He engaged in a protracted dispute with the Sabbatians and their moderate supporters such as Isaac Aboab da Fonseca as to whether the “Epistle to Yemen” justified their belief or his skepticism. He obliquely referred to The Guide of the Perplexed in his definition of belief and explicitly invoked it as a means to limit the scope of prophecy and to exclude Nathan of Gaza and other Sabbatians entirely from that category.18 In his reading, The Guide of the Perplexed offered a stinging rebuttal of all the would-­be prophets who claimed direct communication with the divine rather than authorization to engage in prophetic speculation. He drew on The Book of Commandments in a protracted legal dispute about the recitation of the priestly blessing in the public synagogue service of the Jews of Amsterdam.19 From this array of sources, Sasportas conjured up a Maimonides who was sober, rational, and definitive. The law more than any other aspect of Judaism was the point of departure and the telos for all thinking about the Messiah. Sasportas’s Maimonides had counseled patience to the Jews of Yemen and sought to attenuate their false expectations of the advent of the Messiah in the middle of the twelfth century.20 In his legal code, Maimonides had formulated a set of criteria that all but ensured that the laws of Judaism would continue to be authoritative in the messianic age. To return to Funkenstein’s reading of Maimonides once again, “the Messiah will not change an iota of the law. An antinomian attitude is the clearest indication of an impostor.”21 But the Sabbatians were no less willing than Sasportas to give up on the authority of Maimonides. Isaac Nahar, a rabbi in Amsterdam who was swept up in the enthusiasm to such a degree that he made his way to Livorno on an intended pilgrimage to greet the new Messiah, invoked nothing less than Maimonides’ law code in an attempt to convince Sasportas to keep quiet: ‫ואתה האדון לא ידעתי למה לא שמר הדברים בלבו ולמה פרסם הדברים בפני‬ ‫ כן בעיננו ראינו במקום‬. . . ‫המון העם ההולכים בתמים ומחזיקים באומנתם‬ ‫זה וכן בכל המקומות ששמענו שמעם לשמע שמועות אלו כלם שבים אל ה’ בכל‬ .‫ והוא אצלי א’ מסימני הגאולה כמו שכתב רמב”ם בהלכות תשובה‬,‫לבם‬

48  J a c ob S a s p or t a s

I do not know why you have not remained silent. Why have you publicized your opinion among the people who walk innocently and uphold their faith. . . . For in all of the places where we have heard these rumors, people are returning to God with all their heart, and to me, this is one of the signs of redemption as Maimonides wrote in the laws of repentance.22 Sasportas was all for repentance, as he made clear in his response, but these seizures of penitential behavior were not indicative of the redemption or the correct interpretation of Maimonides. In a letter written to a believer, no less a Sabbatian authority than Nathan of Gaza invoked the very passage in Maimonides’ laws of kings that Sasportas had cited in his rebuke of the Amsterdam rabbinate: ‫ואף כי לא מצאנו רמז בפשטי התורה דבר זה כבר ראינו דברי חז”ל בענינים‬ ‫ כמו‬,‫אלה כמה תמוהים ולא יכולנו להשיג סוף דעתם בשום דבר מדבריהם‬ ‫ ולא יובנו דבריהם כי אם‬,‫שהעיד ג”כ על דבר זה המאור הגדול הרמב”ם ז”ל‬ .‫בשעת מעשה בע”ה‬ For although nothing of the kind is indicated in the plain sense of Scripture, yet we have seen that the sayings of the ancient rabbis on these [eschatological] matters are obscure and utterly inexplicable, and we have the testimony of the great luminary Maimonides [who declared] that the rabbinic dicta would become intelligible only after the event.23 What Sasportas had read as an authorization of his doubt and an imperative for skepticism, Nathan of Gaza embraced as the basis for the esoteric nature of his prophecies. For Sabbatians of all stripes, from an enthusiast such as Isaac Nahar to the very architect of the movement such as Nathan of Gaza, Maimonides had authorized their belief in Sabbetai Zevi as the fulfillment of their messianic hopes. In a certain sense, part of the dispute concerning the messianic claims of Sabbetai Zevi and his prophet Nathan of Gaza depended upon how one read Maimonides.24 Sasportas went to great lengths to convince his readers in the Western Sephardic diaspora that they had misconstrued Maimonides. He also sought to construct an anti-­messianic tradition out of a number of medieval sources. As he had written to the Amsterdam rabbinate, “Have you seen in a single book that one must believe in a Messiah about someone who says about himself ‘I am the Messiah’?” Sasportas seemed to prefer any book to the experiential evidence of the Sabbatians. In a long letter to Raphael Supino in Livorno that marked the first sustained articulation of his opposition to Sabbetai Zevi, Sasportas drew upon a passage in Sefer Hasidim, a work composed by the German pietists of the Rhineland and attributed to Judah the Pious (d. 1217). He

Y a a c ob D w e c k   49

advised Supino to turn to passage 206, which espoused a messianic pacifism at odds with the active campaigning of the Sabbatians and their allies: ‫אם תראה שמתנבא אדם על משיח דע כי היו עוסקים במעשה כשפים או‬ ‫במעשה שדים או במעשה המפורש ובשביל שהם מטריחים את המלאכים‬ ‫ ולבסוף‬.‫אומרים לו על משיח כדי שיתגלה לעולם על שהטריחו את המלאכים‬ ‫ או השדים באים‬.‫יהיה לבושה ולחרפה לכל העולם על שהטריחו המלאכים‬ .‫ולומדים לו חשבונות וסודות לבושתו ולבושת המאמינים בדבריו‬ If you see a man prophesizing about the Messiah, know that he is engaged in witchcraft or evil spirits as with the Ineffable Name. Angels will tell him [false things] about the Messiah so that he could be exposed to the world as [a fraud]. . . . In the end, it shall be shame and embarrassment to the entire world that he has disturbed the angels. Or the demons will come and instruct him in calculations and secrets that will redound to his shame and to the shame of those who believe in his words.25 It would be hard to imagine a medieval Jewish book further from Maimonides’ code than Sefer Hasidim. Where Maimonides sought to compose a code that would represent the Oral Torah in its entirety, Sefer Hasidim sought to codify the will of the creator in a way that would define for the pietist precisely how to submit to the divine yoke.26 If Maimonides’ code argued that the advent of the messianic age would involve no change in the law, Sefer Hasidim argued that the pietist was in need of constant guidance that the traditional corpus of Jewish law could not provide; the messianic state of perfection was a moral imperative that was, perforce, unobtainable. Maimonides produced a normative legal guide for a lay readership; the German pietists wrote a work that taught the aspiring pietist how to transcend the law. Sasportas mentioned this particular passage of Sefer Hasidim on no fewer than five occasions in Zizath novel zvi.27 Any source, no matter how far from his own intellectual universe, was preferable to the experiential claims made by the Sabbatians about the arrival of redemption. He would choose messianic pacifism in any guise, even that of the supernatural, as long as it appeared in a written work that he could hold up as authoritative. Furthermore, it is conceivable that Sasportas identified a conservative tendency in the world of the pietists that was the antithesis of Sabbatian enthusiasm. As Haym Soloveitchik has shown, the pietists were fighting a rearguard—conservative—action against the rise of the dialectical method of Talmud study that came of age in twelfth-­century France, which prized intellectual speculation at the expense of legal or moral adjudication.28 The German pietist had to contend with a revolution in intellectual Jewish life that redefined the study of the Talmud, and he responded with a novel form of piety that went far beyond the bounds

50  J a c ob S a s p or t a s

of the law. Sasportas faced a very different type of revolution in Jewish life, a mass messianic movement, and he responded with a novel form of criticism that far exceeded the norms of rabbinic writing. For all of the differences between Sefer Hasidim and the writings of Maimonides, Sasportas may have been attuned to affinities between these sources that have eluded modern scholarship. Both the pietists of Sefer Hasidim and Maimonides were unabashed elitists. Both placed enormous emphasis on the importance of the written word. Their elitism may have had different sources: Maimonides valued a certain type of philosophical contemplation completely foreign to the supernatural world of the German pietists. He put the spiritual use of reason at the center of his universe rather than the will of the creator. The pietists, by contrast, idealized the model of a spiritual superman and emphasized the rigors of physical discipline and penance. But both the pietist in Sefer Hasidim and Maimonides set themselves apart from their respective environments as morally corrupt and, perhaps, rendered degenerate by wrong-­ headed popular opinion. Sasportas too cultivated the posture of the critic and set himself apart from his addressees, whom he held to have betrayed the Sephardic learned ideal in the name of which he now spoke. If Maimonides and Sefer Hasidim anchored Sasportas’ anti-­messianism in the Jewish textual tradition, he turned to a third source to justify his skepticism of Sabbatian prophecy: a legal responsum of the Iberian jurist Solomon ibn Adret (d. 1310). As Matt Goldish has shown, the possibility of reviving prophecy underlay many of the claims to authority made by the Sabbatians.29 Nathan of Gaza and his fellow prophets invoked divine revelation as proof of their authority and sought to transform the charisma of learning that had long served to cement the alliance between the rabbinate and the lay oligarchy within Jewish communities. In a retort that paralleled his appeal to Maimonides in terms of his unbelief in the Messiah, Sasportas turned to a medieval legal discussion of prophecy to justify his unbelief in the Messiah’s prophet. Writing to Joseph Halevi in Livorno, a preacher to the community of Sephardic Jews who was one of the few allies Sasportas had in his opposition, he pointedly invoked Ibn Adret: ‫מי שמע כזאת שבעד דברים תלויים ברפיון נניח דברי תורה וקבלה ונחוש‬ ‫ ולא‬.‫לדברי האומר כה אמר ה’ לחייבני מיתה על העדר אמנונתי בו ה’ לא צוה‬ ‫ידע נתן המתנבא שבמנעו אות ומופת פטר את חלושי אמונתו וחייב את עצמו‬ ‫ ואם יאמר אומר שזמנו מוכיח עליו ובבוא דברו יודע‬.‫אם לא תתקיים נבואתו‬ .‫ גם אני אודהו אבל יודה לי מיהת דעדיין לא חל עליו שם נביא‬,‫כי נביא הוא‬ .‫והנה מה טוב ומה נעים דברי הרשב”א בס’ תקמ”ח על אותו נביא די אבילה‬ Whoever heard of such a thing, that while matters were still unclear we should set aside the words of Torah and Kabbalah and concern ourselves

Y a a c ob D w e c k   51

with the words of one who says “thus sayeth the Lord,” to compel me to the punishment of death for my lack of faith in him. But God has not commanded. And does Nathan who prophesizes not know that his refusal to offer a sign and a wonder has justified those who are weak in their faith, and he has made himself liable, if his prophecy is unfulfilled. But should you say that time will justify him, and when his words are fulfilled it shall be known that he is a prophet—I too concede this. But you must concede to me that he has not yet attained the status of a prophet. How good and how pleasing are the words of Rabbi Solomon ibn Adret, responsum 548 about that prophet from Avila.30 Sasportas continued to cite Ibn Adret as justification for his skepticism of Nathan’s claims to prophecy and directed his addressee to examine the passage himself. In the responsum, Ibn Adret had skeptically addressed claims about a possible prophet in Avila. He informed his reader that while prophecy was a theoretical possibility, it could only happen to someone who was particularly pious and living in Palestine. Ibn Adret was doubtful that the particular man in question was the prophet that he claimed to be: “But this shocked me, that a man who was neither a sage nor knowledgeable about books nor a servant to the sages should be who they said he was.”31 Like Sasportas several hundred years later, Ibn Adret held up knowledge of written texts as a requirement for the attainment of a certain rank within the religious hierarchy, in this case a prophet rather than the Messiah. Elsewhere in his writings, both in Zizath novel zvi and in his collection of responsa Ohel Ya’akov, Sasportas turned to Ibn Adret as a legal precedent in his rulings.32 What is more, Sasportas felt an almost filial connection to him, as Ibn Adret had been a student of his ancestor Nahmanides. At one point in the midst of a vituperative exchange with Isaac Nahar, Sasportas pointedly invoked the protective merit of Nahmanides and Ibn Adret in the very same breath.33 Solomon ibn Adret can hardly be construed as a late medieval Maimonidean or as a German pietist. He belonged to a tradition of Sephardic juris­ prudence that was adamantly opposed to the philosophical rationalism of The Guide of the Perplexed as well as the exegetical supernaturalism of Sefer Hasidim. On a number of occasions in the second controversy surrounding the writings of Maimonides that dominated Jewish intellectual life in Provence and Catalonia at the turn of the thirteenth century, Ibn Adret had scathing things to say about The Guide of the Perplexed.34 Moreover, he appears to have been completely unaware of Sefer Hasidim, as recent scholarship has suggested that the work made few if any inroads into the Iberian Peninsula in the late Middle Ages.35 In addressing the Sabbatians and their supporters, Sasportas thus constructed a textual anti-­messianic tradition out of sources that sat awkwardly

52  J a c ob S a s p or t a s

next to one another on his imagined bookshelf. Nonetheless, he used them to draw out a number of points that he sought to impress upon his correspondents. First, he turned to the stipulations for the Messiah’s arrival in Maimonides’ code to caution his readers about their certainty. Second, he drew upon both Maimonides and the German pietists to ask his readers to imagine the anarchy and disorder that would arise from a proliferation of Messiahs. Finally, he drew upon Maimonides and Ibn Adret to define prophecy in such a manner that would pointedly exclude Nathan of Gaza and his colleagues from that category. Important as each of these individual claims was, the total impact of Sasportas’s argument amounted to a demand for provisional skepticism in the face of experiential certainty. Authority manifested itself in a text, whether it was a law code, a pietist manual, or a responsum, and in those who were invested with the power of interpreting those texts. Experience, feeling, spirituality should not enter into consideration when assessing the advent of the Messiah. Yet it would severely limit the extent and scope of the disputes over Sabbatianism were one to reduce the conflict entirely into one of the written word as opposed to the experience of revelation. Sabbatian prophets and pamphleteers proved equally adept at invoking the authority of texts. We have already seen how central a role Maimonides played in the prophecy of Nathan of Gaza; as even the most avid Sabbatian knew, however, Maimonides’ law code was hardly the ideal source upon which to build a robust messianic theology. The passages on the Messiah were too brief and too ambiguous to serve as the basis for a theory of an antinomian Messiah. Nathan of Gaza and other Sabbatian prophets understood that Maimonides’ authority was such that he could not be circumvented; but he was not the easiest route to a Sabbatian theology. Over and above Maimonides’ law code and its passages concerning the Messiah, the Sabbatians employed two strategies to invoke the authority of the written word. First, they turned to a work titled The Book of Zerubbabel as a prophetic description of the events they had witnessed. Second, they discovered hitherto unknown prophecies that predicted the advent of Sabbetai Zevi. Behind both strategies was the same intellectual impulse: an appeal to ancient texts, or those that purported to be ancient, as a justification for the conduct of their Messiah. Let us examine the Sabbatian invocation of The Book of Zerubbabel, an early medieval Hebrew apocalypse in which God reveals secrets to the Persian governor Zerubbabel mentioned in the biblical prophecies of Haggai, Zechariah, and Ezekiel.36 Echoing a rabbinic tradition that appeared in the Babylonian Talmud, The Book of Zerubbabel develops the notion of two Messiahs, the Messiah son of Joseph and the Messiah son of Judah.37 At the end of days, the Messiah son of Joseph would gather all of Israel in Jerusalem and offer sacrifices to the Lord. Armilos the son of Satan would come to rule the world and

Y a a c ob D w e c k   53

kill the Messiah son of Joseph.38 The Messiah son of Judah would then announce his arrival only to be mocked by the remaining sages of Israel. Nevertheless, the Messiah son of Judah would vanquish Armilos, raise the dead including the Messiah son of Joseph, and usher in the redemption. The Book of Zerubbabel survives in a number of different versions, many of which differ significantly from one another, and circulated among medieval Hebrew poets who cited it in their liturgical poetry.39 Beginning with Israël Lévi in the early twentieth century, scholars have dated the work to the early seventh century prior to the Islamic conquest.40 For our purposes, however, the crucial point has to do with how the Sabbatians related to it: they treated it as an ancient rabbinic text that formed part of the canon of rabbinic literature from antiquity. The Sabbatians had ample grounds for doing so, as the first and only early modern edition of the work had appeared as part of a collection of rabbinic midrashim printed in Constantinople in 1519 titled Likutim Shonim.41 One of the first instances in which a Sabbatian appealed to the authority of The Book of Zerubbabel appeared in a letter written by Hosea Nantawa from Alexandria to Livorno in the summer of 1666 prior to the conversion of the Messiah to Islam.42 A fervent believer and skilled writer, Nantawa sought to justify the imprisonment of Sabbetai Zevi in Gallipoli to the faithful across the Mediterranean. At the end of a long letter that laid out an elaborate justification for the antinomian behavior of Sabbetai Zevi and his followers, Nantawa appealed to The Book of Zerubbabel, which he referred to as a prophecy rather than a book: ‫ הלא ענין זה של התפיסה היא כתובה בנבואת‬,‫מה אומר ובכן תדעו על ענין זה‬ ‫ שאומרת שגדולי וחכמי ישראל יכפרו במלך המשיח‬,‫ הלא היא אצלנו‬,‫זרובבל‬ .‫ויבזו אותו ויכו אותו ויהיה תפוס בתפיסה כאשר יראה הרואה שם‬ What shall I say? Indeed you should know about this. Behold the entire episode of his imprisonment is written down in the prophecy of Zerubbabel, which we have with us here. It states that the eminences and sages of Israel shall deny the Messiah, subject him to shame, and strike him down. He shall be taken prisoner, as anyone can see who looks there.43 For Nantawa, this ancient text offered a prophetic and authoritative account of contemporary events. Both the imprisonment of Sabbetai Zevi and his rejection by the rabbinate had a written precedent available to anyone who wanted to see it. Sasportas, of course, would have none of this. In a direct response to Nantawa’s letter, he exclaimed: ‫והראיה על זה כי מעת לכתו לאיזמיר וחטאתו מלפפתו והולכת לפניו עד‬ ‫ כי נבואת זרובבל שאמרת שמדברת עליו אינה‬,‫שהושם בבית הסוהר דיליה‬ .‫בעולם ולא נמצאת ומכ”ש פירושה‬

54  J a c ob S a s p or t a s

And concerning your proof about this—that from the moment he [Sabbetai Zevi] went to Izmir enveloped in the sin that preceded him to the point that he was placed in their prison—the prophecy of Zerubbabel about which you spoke is nowhere to be found and does not exist, all the more so such an explanation to it.44 When confronted by an ostensibly authoritative and ancient text, Sasportas reverted to a powerful and nearly irrefutable strategy: he denied its existence and implied that it was a forgery. Such a strategy could only work, however, if Sasportas understood himself and was understood by others to be a master of the textual tradition that he claimed to represent. In an earlier comment to Joseph Halevi in Livorno, Sasportas had dismissed Nantawa’s proof from The Book of Zerubbabel but added a telling aside: ‫ועוד אמר הנוטה מדרך השכל כי תפיסה זאת כתובה בנבואת זרובבל הלא‬ ‫היא אצלו האומרת שגדולי וחכמי ישראל יכפרו במלך המשיח ויבוזו אותו‬ ‫ ושקר ענה ולא נמצא זה בשום ספר ובזוהר איתא בר”מ‬,’‫ויהיה תפוס וכו‬ ‫מענין זה אבל לא על מי שעדיין לא עשה מעשה משיח ולא סימנים הנראים‬ .‫ומוכיחים עליו‬ He who strays from the path of his intellect [Nantawa] further said: that this approach was written in the prophecy of Zerubbabel, which according to him, states that the sages and scholars of Israel shall deny the king Messiah, embarrass him, and put him into chains. . . .45 He responded with a lie. One cannot find this in any book. There is a passage like this in the Zohar, but it does not concern someone who has not yet performed the deeds of the Messiah and the given signs that offer proof.46 Over and above his response to Nantawa, where he denied the very existence of The Book of Zerubbabel, here he denied that the theory of the fallen Messiah could be substantiated by any written text. In order to further buttress his argument, Sasportas mentioned a possible passage in the Zohar only to dismiss it as irrelevant to Sabbetai Zevi as a Messiah who had yet to substantiate his messianic pretensions. Sasportas’s reaction to the invocation of The Book of Zerubbabel was to deny its existence. This was patently false, as Gershom Scholem gleefully exclaimed as early as 1942: “The words of Rabbi Jacob Sasportas are incorrect!”47 The Book of Zerubbabel had appeared in print nearly a century and a half earlier and had been cited by liturgical poets nearly a millennium earlier. The Sabbatians were almost certainly not the only Jews in the seventeenth century who attributed the work to rabbinic antiquity. Sasportas’s error, however, may have been an honest one; that is, he may have been unaware of the book’s existence or of its citation in the liturgical hymns. In any

Y a a c ob D w e c k   55

event, his strategy was quite clear: to repudiate its existence entirely. A text that does not exist cannot be authoritative. Sasportas need not have responded this way. A Yiddish chronicle of Sabbatianism by Leyb ben Ozer, Bashraybung fun Shabsai Tsvi (Yid. The Story of Sabbetai Zevi), offers a valuable counterpoint to his denial.48 Written by the sexton of the Ashkenazi congregation in Amsterdam in 1718, Bashraybung fun Shabsai Tsvi recounts a series of conversations and stories that the author had heard about the Sabbatian movement.49 Sasportas and Leyb ben Ozer both discussed a somewhat shadowy figure named Nehemiah Hacohen, an Ashkenazi prophet who, as far as scholars have been able to ascertain, left no written works.50 The two accounts agree that Nehemiah traveled from Poland on behalf of his coreligionists to the Ottoman Empire in the summer of 1666 with the express intention of interviewing Sabbetai Zevi and ascertaining whether he was the Messiah. Both agree that he spent three days in interviews with Sabbetai Zevi before departing in haste. Although he referred to Nehemiah on a number of occasions and repeatedly mentioned his series of conversations with Sabbetai Zevi, Sasportas gave little indication as to the content of their discussions.51 Much of this may be the result of Sasportas’s prejudice against him: at various points, he referred to him as a madman and a false prophet.52 By contrast, Leyb ben Ozer described him as a learned man and a kabbalist unlike any other in all of Poland.53 Unlike Sasportas, who appears to have learned of Nehemiah from the reports of others, Leyb ben Ozer had met the Polish prophet and had hosted him for fourteen weeks in Amsterdam in 1690.54 He recounted the contents of Nehemiah’s conversations with Sabbetai Zevi in relative detail: ‫דען אנדרן טאג קומן בייא ש”צ אונ’ מיט אים בגונן מפלפל צו זיין אויש ספרי‬ ‫ וויא זאגשטו דז דוא בישט משיח בן דוד דר גואל‬:‫הקבלה אונ’ צו אים גזאגט‬ ‫פון ישראל? פאלגנש אל אונזר ספרי הקבלה קאנשטו קיין משיח בן דוד זיין דען‬ ‫לפי דבריהם מוז משיח בן יוסף ערשטן קומן אונ’ מלחמה האלטן מיט גוג ומגוג‬ ‫אונ’ דיא ערשטי מלחמה ווער משיח בן אפירו גווינן אונ’ צום צווייטן מול‬ ‫ווערט ער ווידר מלחמה מיט זיא הלטן זא ווערט משיח בן אפרים נהרג ווערן‬ .‫אין די פפורטן פון ירושלים‬ On the second day, he [Nehemiah] returned to Sabbetai Zevi and began to engage with him in the dialectical study of kabbalistic books. He said to him: how can you say that you are the Messiah son of David, the redeemer of Israel? According to all our kabbalistic books, you cannot be the Messiah son of David, because they stipulate that the Messiah son of Joseph must precede him and wage war with Gog and Magog. In the first war, the Messiah son of Ephraim shall win; but in the second, he shall fight with them

56  J a c ob S a s p or t a s

again and the Messiah son of Ephraim shall be slaughtered at the gates of Jerusalem.55 Leyb ben Ozer continued to recount the destruction of the Jews in the wake of the Messiah son of Ephraim’s death and the redemption that would come only with the arrival of the Messiah son of David. In his account, Leyb ben Ozer referred alternatively to the Messiah son of Joseph or to the Messiah son of Ephraim without discriminating between them.56 Nehemiah’s crucial point as filtered through Leyb ben Ozer was quite clear: according to kabbalistic books the redemption would necessarily entail the coming of two, not one, Messiahs. Sabbetai Zevi and his followers were not sticking to the script, and, therefore, he was not the genuine Messiah. Sabbetai Zevi attempted to rebut Nehemiah’s queries by claiming that one of his students had been Messiah son of Ephraim and had been killed, but Nehemiah remained unconvinced. Leyb ben Ozer did not mention the titles of any of the kabbalistic books discussed by Sabbetai Zevi and Nehemiah.57 Furthermore, the report of the conversation did not contain any mention of the sages mocking the Messiah son of David or of his subsequent imprisonment. Nevertheless, Scholem’s assertion that Nehemiah was referring to The Book of Zerubbabel appears quite reasonable.58 If Nehemiah was indeed referring to the work in his conversation with Sabbetai Zevi, he came to a very different conclusion about it than Sasportas. The Sephardic rabbi rejected the invocation of The Book of Zerubbabel as an authoritative text; the Polish prophet accepted its authority but argued that the events it described did not correspond to the events he was witnessing. Leyb ben Ozer leaves little doubt as to the centrality of the written word in the exchanges between Sabbetai Zevi and Nehemiah: ‫זא דז דיזי צווייא גר שטארק קיגן אננדר ווארן אונ’ איר פלפול אונ’ טושיפ‬ ‫האט גדייארט דרייא טאג אונ’ דרייא נאכט דז זיא אין דיא זעלביגי דרייא‬ ‫נאכט גר ווינג גשלאפן האבן אונ’ אנדרשט ניקש גטאן אז איין ספר קבלה פור‬ ‫אונ’ זד אנדרי דר נאך אפור גנומן‬ Thus the two of them disputed fiercely with one another and their dialectic and dispute continued for three days and three nights, and they slept very little those three nights. They did nothing except take out kabbalistic books, one after the other, each man against the other.59 For three days Sabbetai Zevi and Nehemiah disputed the correct interpretation of a particular text, but neither one doubted that authority lay with the written word. In fact, their disputes took place in the presence of and concerning the contents of written books. In all three accounts of Nehemiah Hacohen’s visit to Gallipoli, his abrupt departure precipitated the interrogation of Sabbetai Zevi by the Ottoman sultan and the Messiah’s conversion to Islam. In order to escape the throng of

Y a a c ob D w e c k   57

believers surrounding the prison, Nehemiah hastily converted to Islam, informed upon Sabbetai Zevi to the Ottoman authorities, and returned to Poland where he reverted to Judaism. Nehemiah’s visit may have triggered a moment of crisis within the Sabbatian movement, but the repeated invocations of The Book of Zerubbabel did not disappear. Quite the opposite: no less a figure than Nathan of Gaza appealed to the work to justify the Messiah’s subsequent conversion to Islam. This conversion posed a profound problem for Nathan’s career as a prophet.60 The empirical fact of the Messiah as a Muslim appeared to contradict all of his earlier prophecies. But Nathan of Gaza worked hard to ensure that the contradiction was only apparent. One of his primary strategies for doing so was to seek textual precedents that spoke of a Messiah’s conversion. Nathan of Gaza amassed a mélange of texts, some that referred to a Messiah’s conversion to Islam, such as the diary of the sixteenth-­ century Sephardic Rabbi Joseph Taitazack, while others to a Messiah’s conversion without specifying a religion. Nathan of Gaza then proceeded to apply these texts to Sabbetai Zevi. Among these he wrote: ‫ וכן‬.‫ועוד שנמצא בנבואת זרובבל שאומ’ בפ’ שלמלך המשיח יקראו משומד‬ ‫בספרי מהר”י לווא רבו של תוספת י”ט נושא ונותן הרבה בספריו ענין מ”ה‬ .‫שיהיה אדוק וקשור באומת ישמעאל‬ Furthermore it is found in the prophecy of Zerubbabel, which said explicitly that they shall call the King Messiah an apostate, and so too the books of Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, the teacher of Yomtob Lippman Heller, dealt extensively with the issue of the King Messiah who shall be bound and tied to the Ishmaelite nation.61 As Chaim Wirszubski noted, none of the extant versions of The Book of Zerubbabel contain a discussion of an apostate Messiah. Yet this may not have mattered to Nathan of Gaza. What was significant was the mere existence of a text such as The Book of Zerubbabel that he could invoke as authoritative. With this textual hodgepodge—the diary of a Spanish exile living in the Ottoman Empire (Taitazack), the theological treatises of a sixteenth-­century Ashkenazi rabbi in Prague ( Judah Loew), and a medieval apocalypse that had no apparent author (The Book of Zerubbabel)—Nathan hoped to fix upon any text as a source of authority. In this instance, unlike Hosea Nantawa’s earlier invocation, the issue was not so much the antiquity of The Book of Zerubbabel but the mere fact of its existence. As long as Nathan of Gaza could construe the work as a possible source for Sabbetai Zevi’s imprisonment and conversion, he could add it to a list of books. Sasportas was apparently unaware of this fragment of Nathan of Gaza’s writing, but one can easily imagine his response to it. The Book of Zerubbabel made one further and significant appearance in Zizath novel zvi. In 1669,

58  J a c ob S a s p or t a s

s­ everal years after Sabbetai Zevi’s conversion, Sasportas corresponded with Jacob ibn Sa’adun of Salé, a town on the Atlantic coast of North Africa where Sasportas himself had lived a decade earlier.62 Ibn Sa’adun defended the Jews of Salé who persisted in their belief in Sabbetai Zevi and cited Nantawa’s correspondence with the Jews of Livorno as proof: ‫ועוד כי בא הכתב השלישית והכריעה לכף זכות והיא עמוד חזק שראוי לסמוך‬ ,‫עליה שנמצאת בבית גנזיו של החכם השלם כמה”ר שאול סירירו נ”ע בפי”ס‬ ‫והיא נבואת זרובבל שהעיד שהיה מדבר עם מטטרון שר הפנים כאשר ידבר‬ ‫ ונוסח הנבואה הזאת ג”כ כמו שמצאנו כתוב בה אות באות תיבה‬,‫איש לרעהו‬ ‫בתיבה ככה באו שני נוסחת הנבואה ההיא א’ מארץ ישראל ונסח אחר‬ ‫ ונראה שגם החכם אשר השיב לו תלמידך גם הוא שלח לכם נסחה‬,‫ממצרים‬ ‫שהרי השיב על זה בהגהה ואמר כי נבואת זרובבל שאמרת שמדברת עליו אינה‬ ‫ וכללות נבואתו‬.‫ נמצא ששלח לכם נסחה‬,‫בעולם ולא נמצאת ומכ”ש פירושה‬ ‫ כי האיש אשר יצא שמעו בכל‬,‫ודבריו שנתן לו סימן מטטרון ש”ה לזרובבל‬ ‫העולם ואחר כך יוציאו עליו דבה שנשתמד ויוציאו עליו כל תועבות אשר שנא‬ ‫ ובעון החכמים והרבנים שהוציאו עליו דבה רעה‬,‫ה’ הוא הוא הגואל האמיתי‬ .‫ישאר שמנה שנים מצומצמות במאסר לכפר על עונם‬ Furthermore a third letter arrived and offered decisive evidence. It is a strong pillar that is certainly reliable, for it was found among the archives of the sage, Rabbi Saul Siriro of Fez, may he rest in paradise. It is the prophecy of Zerubbabel, which states that Zerubbabel spoke with Metatron, the ministering angel, just as someone would speak with his fellow man. The text of this prophecy was exactly the same, word for word, letter for letter. Two identical versions of the prophecy arrived, one from the land of Israel and one from Egypt. Apparently the sage [Nantawa], to whom your student [ Joseph Halevi] responded, had also sent you a version of it. You [Sasportas] appended a note to it saying that the prophecy of Zerubbabel, which he [Nantawa] claimed spoke about him [Sabbetai Zevi], did not exist, all the more so with such an explanation. Apparently, he [Nantawa] had sent you [Sasportas] a copy of it. The principles of the prophecy and the things which Metatron the ministering angel told Zerubbabel are thus: the man whose name has gone out throughout the world and is pursued by the subsequent slander of apostasy, and who has received all the abominations hated by God, that man is the true redeemer. But because of the sins of the rabbis and the scholars who slandered him, he shall remain imprisoned for eight years in order to atone for their sins.63 Ibn Sa’adun claimed to have discovered a copy of the prophecy of Zerubbabel in the archives of a rabbi from Fez that made a similar prediction as the letter sent by Nantawa to Livorno. In his rendering, the prophecy of Zerubbabel

Y a a c ob D w e c k   59

foretold not only that the Messiah would be subject to the mockery of the sages but also that he would be imprisoned for a period of eight years. This held out the possibility that Sabbetai Zevi, who was still very much alive in 1669, was still the Messiah. Ibn Sa’adun thus returned to The Book of Zerubbabel, which had been held authoritative both prior to the Messiah’s conversion by Hosea Nantawa and subsequent to his conversion by Nathan of Gaza, as a source of still further hope for another five years. Sasportas held his ground and insisted that The Book of Zerubbabel was a falsification. He then proceeded to identify inconsistencies between its supposed prediction of eight years’ imprisonment and one of Nathan of Gaza’s subsequent prophecies identifying the year 1670 as the year of redemption: ‫וראה נבואת זרובבל השקריית איך הכחישה דברי נת”ן כי הוא אמר שנת הת”ל‬ ‫ ושניהם מוכחשים ומוזמים כי‬,‫והאחרת אומרת לאחר שמונה שנים למאסרו‬ ‫נת”ן בתחילה לא דיבר כלום מהמרתו ולא ממאסרו ולא נבואת זרובבל דיברה‬ ‫ אם לא שנאמר על מאסר‬,‫כלום מהמרתו וגם לא היה במאסר כל כך שנים‬ .‫הנפש ולסוף הכרת תכרת עונה בה‬ Look at the false prophecy of Zerubbabel, how it contradicts the words of Nathan: for he [Nathan] claimed that the year 1670 and the other [The Book Zerubbabel cited by Ibn Sa’adun] claimed after eight years of imprisonment [the redemption would come]. Both of them contradict each other and are completely false. For in the beginning, Nathan said nothing about his conversion or his imprisonment, and the prophecy of Zerubbabel said nothing about his conversion or his imprisonment for so many years. Unless you are referring to the imprisonment of his soul, and in the end “that soul shall be utterly cut off: his iniquity shall be upon him.”64 (Num. 15:31) In this instance, Sasportas appeared to have anticipated Scholem’s remark that not all references to The Book of Zerubbabel in the Sabbatian literature referred to the same text.65 Ibn Sa’adun may have indeed possessed a prophecy that Sabbetai Zevi would be released after eight years of imprisonment and attached it to the tradition of the scorned Messiah associated with The Book of Zerubbabel. If this had occurred, Sasportas dismissed Ibn Sa’adun’s invocation of The Book of Zerubbabel as inconsistent with the Sabbatians’ own evidence. Sasportas, however, was not finished. Ibn Sa’adun had impugned the name of a North African rabbinic luminary, Saul Siriro, and he could not let this pass unnoticed: ‫וחלילה לי להאמין כי נמצאת בבית גנזיו של האב”ד כמהו”ר שאול סירירו ז”ל‬ ‫כי אם אחד מחבירך בעלי אמונתך זו בדאה והמציאה ותלאה באילן גדול‬ .‫אחרי מותו‬

60  J a c ob S a s p or t a s

Heaven forefend that I should believe that it was found in the archive of the judge, our holy rabbi, Saul Siriro, of blessed memory; rather, one of your friends who subscribes to this faith of yours invented it and attributed it to the great figure after his death.66 Saul Siriro had served as a rabbi and judge in Fes for over half a century until his death in 1654.67 His nephew and successor Emmanuel Siriro had consulted Sasportas on a question concerning Jewish marriage law some five years after his uncle’s death when Sasportas was resident in Salé. Siriro and his colleague had asked Sasportas about a Jewish man who had pursued a woman to the point that he had betrothed her but did not want to marry her. Sasportas responded in no uncertain terms that the court should compel the man to marry her, lest the daughters of Israel be turned into concubines. To judge from the remaining half of the correspondence that appeared in Sasportas’s responsa, the exchange had been sharp. At one point Sasportas exploded, “you are not a bath and I am not Aphrodite,” alluding to a celebrated passage in the Mishnah (Avodah Zarah 3:4) about a pagan philosopher and Rabban Gamliel in Aphrodite’s bath.68 For all the vitriol between Sasportas and Emmanuel Siriro, however, they were fighting over a matter of Jewish law. Ibn Sa’adun had invoked the memory of Saul Siriro as an accessory to Sabbatian messianism, something Sasportas contemptuously referred to as “this faith of yours.” This may be an allusion to the fact that elsewhere in Zizath novel zvi, Sasportas had gone to great lengths to distinguish between Sabbatianism as a new faith and a new Torah and consequently separate from Judaism. “This faith” of the Sabbatians was built upon a different corpus of texts than the Oral and Written Torah held up as authoritative by Sasportas. The disputes over The Book of Zerubbabel point to the importance of an early medieval Hebrew book in the period before and after the conversion of Sabbetai Zevi to Islam. They are of far greater interest, however, for what they indicate about the role of textual authority in this episode of early modern messianism. Three different attitudes toward The Book of Zerubbabel appear in the Sabbatian controversies: the Sabbatians, Nehemiah Hacohen as recounted by Leyb ben Ozer, and Sasportas. To the Sabbatians, The Book of Zerubbabel was an authoritative text, full stop. It contained a relatively detailed picture of the advent of the Messiah as represented by Sabbetai Zevi. In addition, the book derived its authority for some of the Sabbatians from its antiquity. None of the Sabbatians offer a full-­fledged theory of its authorship, but both Hosea Nantawa and Jacob ibn Sa’adun implied the work was ancient. Nathan of Gaza made no such claim, and he mentioned it in the same breath as two sixteenth-­century works. He did not appear to be troubled or interested in the work’s age. For all of

Y a a c ob D w e c k   61

them, though, The Book of Zerubbabel served to authorize Sabbetai Zevi as the Messiah. Nehemiah Hacohen agreed with the Sabbatians on one crucial point: the authority of The Book of Zerubbabel. In his interrogation of Sabbetai Zevi, ­Nehemiah confronted him with the doctrine of the two Messiahs as it appeared in “our kabbalistic books.” Nehemiah did not mention their antiquity, but this seems a reasonable inference from the way in which he referred to them. If Nehemiah agreed with the Sabbatians about the authority of these kabbalistic books, he parted company with them concerning their interpretation, which he rejected in no uncertain terms. Their dispute focused on the correct exegesis of what they both agreed was an authoritative text. Nehemiah found the lack of a previous Messiah son of Joseph particularly damning; the Sabbatians found the story of a scorned Messiah particularly useful. If the divide between Nehemiah and the Sabbatians focused on exegesis, the distinction between their position and that of Sasportas was epistemological. Sasportas was completely underwhelmed by the dispute over the correct interpretation of The Book of Zerubbabel; he claimed that the work was not an authoritative source and was the product of the Sabbatian imagination. Sasportas was wrong on the last account, as the Sabbatians had clearly not invented the book out of whole cloth.69 But his error offers a crucial window into one of the tensions that undergirded the entire Sabbatian controversies. Sasportas and Nathan of Gaza argued over many things: the nature of prophecy, the doctrine of the Messiah, and the validity of the law, to name only a few. Their argument over The Book of Zerubbabel points to a conflict between two competing bodies of knowledge. For Sasportas, the corpus of rabbinic literature was authoritative. This corpus, which can roughly be identified with the Sephardic legacy he held so dear, was wide and variegated. It included the Mishnah and the Talmud, both Babylonian and Palestinian, Maimonides and the Zohar, Nahmanides and Solomon ibn Adret. It even went so far as to include Sefer Hasidim, a work of medieval German piety seemingly quite far from the learned Sephardic elite. But this corpus was not so porous as to include a book he had never heard of that posited a messianic doctrine that contradicted his own reading of the Talmud and Maimonides. The Sabbatians, by contrast, had opened up the corpus of the Oral Torah and treated The Book of Zerubbabel as if it were just as authoritative as Talmud and Maimonides. They were more than happy to draw upon The Book of Zerubbabel and were perfectly capable of explaining or explaining away any passage from Maimonides invoked by Sasportas or any other critic. Medieval rabbinic literature served as the point of departure for Sasportas’s reasoning. In his sobering anti-­messianism he reacted with caustic erudition

62  J a c ob S a s p or t a s

to the anarchic enthusiasm of Sabbetai Zevi and his followers. At one point he rebuked the Sabbatians for using “the joy of redemption” as the ill-­founded basis for verifying their prophecies.70 Happiness, Sasportas seemed to say, was not a normative Jewish value. The law, as represented in the writing of prior rabbinic scholars rather than the ecstatic experience of contemporary prophets and their followers, was the standard by which events should be assessed. Sasportas had a manual, the law code of Maimonides and the totality of medieval rabbinic literature, and the experience of the Sabbatians did not correspond to the written description of the messianic age within these texts. Zizath novel zvi constituted an elaborate justification for his reading of these sources and his response to contemporary events. Sasportas’s confidence in the textual traditions of rabbinic literature equipped him with a certain suspicion toward experience. This social hostility toward untutored sensibility emerged in his pronounced fear of the Jewish crowds that gathered to celebrate the news of the Messiah. News of redemption spread throughout the Jewish world by way of the mail. Jewish communities in closer proximity to the Messiah in the Ottoman Empire sent letters to their coreligionists throughout Europe and North Africa. The network of Sephardic merchants that was such a central conduit for early modern commerce was quickly transformed into a messianic news corps. When letters from the Ottoman Empire or one of the intermediary ports of call such as Livorno arrived in Amsterdam or Hamburg, they were declaimed in public before a crowd eagerly awaiting news of redemption. In her memoirs Glickl bas Judah-­Leib recalled the arrival of news in Hamburg: ‫דיא שמחה וואז גיוועזין ווען מאן כתבי’ האט גיקראגין דאז איזט ניט זו‬ ‫ זוא‬,‫ האבין דיא ספרדיי’ ביקומן‬,‫ דיא מיינשטי כתבי’ דיא קומן זיין‬.‫בישרייבן‬ ‫ זענין‬.‫זענין זיא אלי צייט מיט אין איר בית הכנסת גנגין אונ’ לשם גילייאיט‬ ‫ אונ’ דער פורטיגיזין יונגי‬.‫ אך אין איר בית הכנסת גנגין‬,‫ יונג אונ’ אלט‬,‫טייטשי‬ .‫האט זיך איין גרינין בראטין זיידין באנד און אום זיך גיבונדין‬ The joy each time the letters were received is impossible to describe. Most of the letters that arrived were sent to the Sephardim; each time, they took them to their synagogue and read them aloud. Ashkenazim, young and old, also went along to their synagogue. Portuguese youth dressed up in their finest clothing.71 Upon hearing news of the Messiah, Glickl’s own father-­in-­law sold his possessions and packed up in preparation for his emigration to Palestine. Glickl expressed considerable empathy for those who believed in the news of the redemption but regretted the loss of property, foodstuffs, and, on an entirely different scale, hope caused by the eventual demise of the Sabbatian

Y a a c ob D w e c k   63

movement. Sasportas, who witnessed similar scenes of jubilation in Hamburg, perhaps even the very same ones, drew a rather different and less empathetic conclusion: ‫ וקצת מבעלי תורה‬,‫וכל אלו הדברים נכנסו באזני ההמון בלתי חקירה ודרישה‬ ‫עמם מחזיקים ידיהם בלתי מטילים ספק בענין אף אם הם דברים רחוקים‬ ‫ לפי שהיו אומרים כל המספק בזה הוא כופר ואין לו חלק באלק”י‬,‫מהשכל‬ .‫ישראל‬ All these prophecies entered the ears of the masses without any examination or investigation, and even some of the learned men among them accepted it as well, without casting any doubt on the rumors, even if they were things exceedingly difficult for the intellect to accept. They said whoever casts doubt on this is a heretic and has no portion with the God of Israel.72 Here and elsewhere in Zizath novel zvi Sasportas objected to the gullibility of the crowds, their willingness to accept the reports of redemption without thorough and careful consideration of what was actually contained in them. They failed to subject the news either to the critical rigors of their own intellects or, more importantly, to the sources of their tradition. Even worse, this enthusiasm of the crowd was infectious. Time and again, Sasportas lamented that the rabbinic elite, or those with knowledge of tradition, were caught up in the same enthusiasm. In this instance, the learned men of the Portuguese Jewish community in Hamburg went so far as to declare as heretics anyone who doubted the veracity of the Messiah. To Sasportas, the denial of doubt led to a confusion of categories on the part of the believers: they redefined those who upheld Mosaic Law as heretics. The public celebration of the arrival of the Messiah in the synagogue and on the street, however, had consequences far beyond the Ashkenazic and Sephardic communities in places such as Hamburg and Amsterdam. The crowd not only swept up the rabbinic elite in their enthusiasm, it made a mockery of the Jewish community in the eyes of the gentiles: ‫ הגדילו השמחה בתופים‬,‫ותהום כל עיר אמסטרדאם ותהי לחרדת אלקי”ם‬ ‫ובמחולות בשוקים וברחובות ובבית הכנסת ריקוד ומחול וספרי תורה כולם‬ ‫מוציאים להכיל בתכשיטין נאים בלתי שים על לב הסכנה של קנאת ושנאת‬ ‫ ואדרבא היו מכריזים בפומבי ומגלים לאומות כל הנשמע ולשחוק היו‬.‫האומות‬ .‫בעיניהם‬ The entire city of Amsterdam shook with fright and they were terrified of the Lord. They increased their celebration with great joy in the markets and the streets. They danced joyously in the synagogue and carried out the

64  J a c ob S a s p or t a s

Torah scrolls adorned with beautiful jewels without paying any attention to the jealousy and the hatred of the nations. To the contrary, they called out in public and announced it to everyone, and whoever heard about it, thought it was ridiculous.73 Sasportas continued to describe a similar although even more jubilant response in Hamburg upon the arrival of the news from Amsterdam. The gentiles, or this “jealousy and hatred of the nations,” played an important role in Sasportas’s criticism of the Sabbatians. Sasportas’s sole concern with the gentiles, whom he elsewhere referred to as “our enemies,” was what they would think about the public display of Jewish enthusiasm. Shame and embarrassment mark his discussion of the Jews in the eyes of foreign observers. He saw the public display of joy and celebration of the new Messiah as an invitation for the gentiles to mock Jewish gullibility and as a possible threat to Jewish safety, lest the declaration of a new Jewish king engender charges of rebellion against the Jews. The anxiety about the effect of Jewish crowds upon gentile opinion stands out in terms of Sasportas’s own intellectual trajectory within the early modern Sephardic diaspora. Sasportas was deeply concerned about the effects of Sabbatian enthusiasm on the gentile perception of the Jews; he thought his contemporaries were making fools out of themselves in public. At best, they would simply be the object of scorn and derision; at worst, they would generate anger and resentment that might jeopardize their all too tenuous position within host societies throughout western Europe and beyond. Sasportas betrayed no concern for the knowledge or the methods used in the contemporary European republic of letters. Not once throughout Zizath novel zvi did he indulge in that parade of erudition so central to the image of the hakham kolel, an attempt by his Jewish contemporaries to translate the notion of the universal man into a rabbinic idiom.74 As his discussion of Maimonides, Sefer Hasidim, and Solomon ibn Adret indicated, Sasportas was quite confident that the Jewish tradition itself had the intellectual resources with which to handle the challenges of a messianic movement. If only his contemporaries could read Maimonides and other sources with the proper care and attention they deserved, then Sabbetai Zevi and Nathan of Gaza would be relegated to their proper place in the hierarchy of the Jewish community, those very margins that Sasportas chafed at occupying. In this lack of concern for alien wisdom, either the content of European learning or the methods of historical criticism, and his nearly obsessive focus on the impact of Jewish crowds upon the image of the Jew in the eyes of the gentiles, Sasportas stood in marked contrast to other rabbinic intellectuals in his own milieu such as Menasseh Ben Israel, Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, and

Y a a c ob D w e c k   65

Joseph Solomon Delmedigo. Sasportas knew the former two quite well and cited the third at one point in Zizath novel zvi. To varying degrees, all these figures engaged with the world of European learning around them. Menasseh Ben Israel composed works in the vernacular as well as in Latin and devoted one of his most important books, Conciliador, to the reconciliation of discrepancies in the Hebrew Scriptures, a burning question in the European republic of letters.75 Isaac Aboab da Fonseca translated Abraham Cohen de Herrera’s kabbalistic treatise El Puerto del Cielo from Spanish into Hebrew and amassed an impressive library of which Judaica was only a small fraction.76 In his wanderings throughout Europe and the Ottoman Empire, Joseph Solomon Delmedigo sought to translate Kabbalah into the terms of Neo-­Platonism and expressed sustained interest in the new science of the seventeenth century.77 By contrast, Sasportas did not adduce a single non-­Jewish source throughout the pages of Zizath novel zvi. He had neither desire nor claim to be current with the latest developments in European learning. Prior to the outbreak of Sabbatian enthusiasm, one of his few forays into print had been an index to the sources of the Palestinian Talmud, a learned and forbidding work that did little to establish him as a household name in the communities of European learning. Rather than the image of the heresy hunter favored by prior scholars of Sabbatianism, Matt Goldish has suggested that the more accurate analogue for Sasportas was the contemporary critic of enthusiasm, intellectuals such as Henry More and Meric Casaubon studied by Michael Heyd.78 Like Sasportas, a considerable part of their criticism was what Heyd has called a theological criticism. Yet even this analogue has limits: if More and Casaubon turned to Seneca via Justus Lipsius and the newly issued editions of the Church Fathers, Sasportas drew upon Maimonides seemingly without any cognizance of them or their sources. Sasportas differentiated himself from a number of distinct but sometimes overlapping groups. He rejected the Sabbatians and the Sabbatian prophets in no uncertain terms; he stood apart from his educated colleagues in the Sephardic diaspora; and he distanced himself from his would-­be constituents, the lay members of the Jewish community that he contemptuously referred to as the crowd (Heb. Hamon) and the masses (Heb. Hedyotot). In Zizath novel zvi he sought to invent a normative Jewish textual tradition that would regulate both the lives of laypeople and the intellectual habits of the elite. The Jewish laity he found guilty of indiscriminate enthusiasm. They seized every piece of news as cause for celebration and made fools out of themselves before gentile witnesses who were at best indifferent to their joy and at worst extremely suspicious of such public gatherings by a questionably useful minority population. The elites, those rabbis who by his account should have served as his allies in his campaign to defer the Messiah, had forgotten their training. Instead

66  J a c ob S a s p or t a s

of studying Maimonides and Sefer Hasidim and Solomon ibn Adret, they had drunk deeply from the wells of European learning. In a period of peace and security, Sasportas would not have had any problem with such wide reading and diverse interests, as one can discern from his enduring friendship with the Portuguese poet Miguel Levi de Barrios. But the middle of the 1660s were not normal times. The intellectual promiscuity of his colleagues had left them woefully unprepared to counter the claims of redemption with skepticism and doubt, which Sasportas saw as the principal obligation of a Jewish intellectual in the service of the Jewish textual tradition and the law. Instead of turning to the sources, they had abandoned their learning and joined with the crowd. The behavior of his colleagues was a particularly damning symptom of the decline in the authority of the rabbinate, of the expanding power of ignorant but often wealthy laypeople, and of the decreasing emphasis on a core set of Jewish texts that Sasportas deemed authoritative. Sasportas’s embattled and competitive relationship with the Sephardic intellectual elite points to a central paradox of Zizath novel zvi. In his criticism, Sasportas was relentlessly elitist and relentlessly egalitarian at one and the same time. He wrote an appallingly difficult Hebrew whose allusive learning has exhausted readers from Graetz to Scholem. The level of training required to understand his prose all but assumed a thorough and grueling rabbinic education. His message, however, was fundamentally anti-­plutocratic. Every Jew, rabbi or lay, elite or common, had an obligation to turn to the sources of the medieval past and draw upon them in the affirmation of doubt, because textual mastery was the summum bonum of Judaism. All Jews were equally subordinate to the hegemony of the text. The sources, for all of their disparity, would allow his colleagues and his constituents to combat the gullibility of the masses, to face down the testimony of experience with the authority of the written word.

3 Doubt and Unbelief in the Early Modern Era Di e g o H u r ta d o de M e n d o z a a n d t h e S pa n i s h T r a di t ion

Stefania Pastore

A Pyrrhonian Revolution In 1562 the famous French printer Henri Estienne published the first Latin edition of Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism, thereby placing at the disposal of a wider readership a text that had so far circulated only in manuscript and (moreover) in Greek. A man of wide knowledge and deep erudition, Estienne on this occasion also displayed a considerable business flair. The work, a miscellany of texts and sentences from the non-­Academic skeptic tradition, turned out to be highly successful and would from then on become a book no good library could afford to be without. Most importantly, however, it would come to represent a watershed in the history of European culture, contributing to redesigning the contours of French philosophical thought and to laying the foundations of European skepticism. In a France torn apart by wars of religion Empiricus’s work supplied a veritable arsenal of antidogmatic ideas, which eroded certainties and truth by reflecting on the frailty of human knowledge and of perceived forms. To a divided country, where Catholics and Huguenots slaughtered each other in their endeavor to assert their own truths of faith, it became an instrument of conciliation and tolerance, insinuating the balm of doubt into a war of certainties. Thus, at least, the Outlines would be perceived by the great philosopher Michel de Montaigne, who would draw from it sentences from the classical skeptical tradition, the most significant of which he would also order to be transcribed onto the beams of his tower library.1 Montaigne would repeatedly 67

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return to Sextus Empiricus as he compiled his Essais, freely borrowing from the text published by Estienne for the book-­within-­a-­book that was his Apologie de Raymond Sebond, as well as for some of his most famous pages inviting Europeans to reflect upon the brittleness of identity and doctrinal conflicts, and to put aside dogmatic obsessions and religious beliefs. In these passages Montaigne underscored how central the Outlines, which he had read avidly from 1576 onward, had been to his formation. As Richard Popkin explained in the introduction to his final revision of The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle, the Outlines of Pyrrhonism contributed to disseminate a selection of passages and sentences from the classical tradition, thereby inaugurating that important season of reflection on the appearance of forms and on doubt, which goes from Montaigne to Charron to the Sanchez of Quod nihil scitur right down to the more famous cogitations of René Descartes.2 The reading of Sextus Empiricus by Montaigne and by the French tradition had been, however, neither the first nor the only one in the history of the text’s circulation. As Popkin himself pointed out, it had already been rediscovered and used by certain Catholic theologians to demonstrate, from a fideistic perspective, the power and inscrutability of God as compared to the fragility and uncertainty of all rational knowledge. It was Savonarola who, from the convent of San Marco, ordered it to be transcribed for the first time, while Giovanfrancesco Pico, the nephew of the more famous Pico della Mirandola, reproduced large portions of it in his De vanitate.3 It was from this same anti-­rationalist standpoint that Hervé Gentian’s 1569 edition of the Adversus Mathematicos emerged. This reading of the text may be seen as opposite, indeed specular, to that which took place in France in the second half of the sixteenth century. But it was Estienne’s edition, in the specific context of the wars of religion in France and of the doctrinal conflicts that divided Europe, which would impose itself as the livre de chevet of the following generations. As Luciano Floridi has reminded us, in that enthusiastic welcoming of the skeptical challenge we may read not so much (or at least not exclusively) an epistemological component, which would assert itself later on, following Descartes’ introduction of the methodical doubt, but rather an ethical interpretation of skepticism, the search for a change in mental attitude.4 In those same years, again in France, Jean Bodin would envisage that very doubt which had by then become part and parcel of the intellectual of a generation, as a demon, thereby making yet more explicit the link between doubt and the plurality of faiths. This demon—which Bodin states came to a friend of his—though Bodin himself may be hiding behind the figure of this “friend”—entered his room in the early hours of the morning and insinuated

S t e fa n i a Pa s t or e   69

doubt into his mind, by forcing him to “open the Bible to find which, of all the debated religions, is the true one.”5

Spain and the Space of Doubt I have chosen to begin by quoting the experiences of Montaigne and Bodin because they contain all the ingredients that are traditionally connected to the development of modernity and of the modern conscience in Europe, according to a now classical account that sees Luther’s schism and the fragmentation of Western Christianity, the wars of religion in Europe, and the progressive erosion of all doctrinal certainty as the starting point for an antidogmatic reflection on the concept of tolerance. According to this narrative, doubt, the doubt of faith but also epistemological doubt, unbelief, and the ability to question dogmas and certainties connected to one’s religious identity become the fertile ground in which modern and tolerant proposals such as those of Montaigne, based on a cognitive and moral relativism, flowered. The question at the basis of my research, which I shall try in this essay to at least partially answer is: What is the place of Spain in all of this? We would be hard put to find an answer to this question if we looked at the traditional reconstructions that have repeatedly foregrounded a Counter-­Reformist post-­ Tridentine Spain, the grim-­faced champion of Catholic orthodoxy in Europe. The paths of doubt—and with it of a certain way of thinking about modernity and secularization—rarely wind their way through Spain and the Spanish Empire. This is true if we think of the classic accounts of the modern history of Western philosophy, or even of the history of tolerance, and of the routes of that radical thought which culminated in Baruch Spinoza and in a long stream of radical enlightenment.6 Whether we turn to Paul Hazard’s classic account of the crisis of European conscience and the birth of a new critical conscience unhampered by dogmas and confessionalisms,7 or to the great master-­narratives of European tolerance, from Richard Popkin’s history of European skepticism,8 to Guy Stroumsa’s effort to spotlight the birth of religious comparativism, it is always France, Holland, and England that take center stage in historical speculation on this subject.9 Spain, at the most, may figure in these narratives as the place from whence the pathways of doubt and the routes of modernity hurriedly departed or fled, as with Yirmiyahou Yovel’s Marranos, with their “split iden­tities” and their modernity, biologically defined, as it were, by their Converso DNA.10 In these studies on Marranism, and even more so in those on the history of the idea of religious tolerance, Spain and Europe were systematically portrayed as having parallel but distant histories; it is almost as if Spain had

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r­ emained crystallized in everyone’s mind exclusively as the Spain of the Inquisition, of intolerance and obscurantism, as if the identity myths and the topoi of the Spanish Black Legend in Europe had actually succeeded in erasing all trace of conflict, every last gasp of resistance. At the basis of my research lie two considerations. First of all, I believe it is extremely important to direct this investigation of the persistence of doubt to the very heart of the Spanish world: a violent and difficult world but one where, more than anywhere else, during the Middle Ages, diversity and doubt, the many—too many one might say—certainties of faiths were experienced. The second, though no less central, objective is to try to rethink the cultural and intellectual history of Spain from within a European dynamic. It is for these reasons that I have tried, in the pages that follow, to evoke the liveliness of the multicultural and multireligious Spanish environment between the last decades of the fifteenth century and the first part of the sixteenth century. Within this unique society the religious sphere suddenly came to occupy a central place, the doubts of faith and the comparison between religions and dogmas becoming a central argument in everyday life. Following this brief reconstruction, I will focus my attention on an extraordinary character and on his truly unique choices in political culture, a man who was the ideal offspring, as it were, of that open and multicultural Spain whose contours I will attempt to trace and Charles V’s political representative in Europe: Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. It is through Mendoza that I hope to convey the eccentricity of the legacy of medieval Spain within a European perspective and finally trace a possible Spanish contribution to the great Pyrrhonian and skeptical French tradition, in a context that was extremely close to that experienced by Montaigne and Bodin.

Too Many Truths: Spain, Comparativism, and Unbelief A great deal has been written on the Golden Age of Spain’s Middle Ages and on the more or less pacific “convivencia” that subtended the coexistence of three faiths and three religions in the Iberian Peninsula. Less focus has instead been placed on how, in Spain, the mixed and multireligious atmosphere, which gave rise to encounters, clashes, and polemics between the three revealed religions, had engendered a particularly attentive and receptive environment in which religious doubt had become an integral part of a tendency toward interreligious polemics and comparative thought.11 Throughout the 1400s a great number of rabbis, in condemning the Castilian community’s lack of adherence to Judaism, identified the cause as this mixed environment where conversions and transitions from one faith to another had shaken the certainties of one and all. These rabbis saw this particu-

S t e fa n i a Pa s t or e   71

lar situation as something that led many to try to overcome the logical incongruence between the two opposing faiths—both of which claimed to be the sole truth—through the juxtaposition and rational analysis of their foundational texts.12 This is not the place for a detailed analysis of the forms of heterodoxy in fifteenth-­century Spain and the numerous groups that seem to have been drawn to doubts concerning the truths of faith. Nevertheless, it is important to highlight the common element that ties them together and plainly sets them apart from what was to take place in Europe or in the Italian Peninsula: these were multiconfessional communities where contact and comparison with the other revealed religions of the Iberian Peninsula was an essential force encouraging doubt and criticism with regard to one’s own confession. Thus the so-­called Durango heretical movement, which contained elements reminiscent of the European heresies of Wycliffe and Hus, seems to have evolved in Spain through a practice of careful comparison with Islam and the forms of revelation associated with it. Indeed, many followers ended up crossing over into Granada and converting to Islam, and were well received in the Nazrid kingdom.13 Doubt arising from the habit of polemics seems to have also motivated one of the most intriguing radical movements in fifteenth-­century Spain. Denounced by the Franciscan Alfonso de Espina as a community of “Sadducees,” this movement emerged from a mixed and strongly intellectual environment where Christians and Jews compared each other’s truths and finally arrived at a form of religious skepticism bordering on materialism.14 This syncretistic vision, halfway between Judaism and Christianity, combined with magical and astrological elements, held that the texts of the Scriptures were profoundly corrupted. It decried Christian “fides” as a “hoax” (a term closely echoing the word used in the medieval tradition of the three impostors),15 and it had a strong impact on public opinion due to the mixed Jewish-­Christian rituals practiced by part of the community. A further reference to this may be found in Solomon Ibn Verga’s famous Shevet Yehuda, which in pondering the bitter trials and tribulations of the Spanish Jewry provided what is considered one of the first and most detailed accounts, after Boccaccio, of the parable of the three rings.16 Despite the sudden shutdown imposed in the late fifteenth century with the expulsion of the Jews (1492), the creation of the Inquisition (1480), and the choice of a single mono-­confessional identity, this world of doubt persisted. It is important not to forget how deeply traumatic the transition that led to the twin birth of the Inquisition and of a mono-­confessional Spain was and to try to convey the incredulous reaction of those who had to live through it, to know what they read and what proposals were discussed but did not

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leave a trace. Very often these proposals were attempts to reconcile new certainties with old, and this frequently led to syncretic solutions that incorporated elements of the old Law and the new, building bridges between Judaism and Christianity and between Christianity and Islam, stressing the elements of continuity between the two—sometimes even between the three—revealed Religions. Interpretations reflecting this aspect of continuity often led to emphasis being placed on mutual affinities, while disputes and differences were set aside: the controversial doctrine of the Trinity, which alienated Jews and Muslims and made any type of rational acceptance of Christian doctrine more difficult, was usually the first element to be abandoned. The path to Biblicism, to Hebrew philology, and to comparativism had been opened up by the long disputes on medieval faith and the bitter confutations of converted former Talmudists. Forced to come to terms with its Jewish origins and to compare doctrines and revelations, not in far-­off Constantinople but in the Aragon of the Morisco lords, a part of Spain characterized by its attempts to assimilate the two ethnic minorities, a very particular and unique part of heterodox Spanish thinking came extremely close to certain deistic standpoints that subsequently, in late sixteenth-­century France and seventeenth-­century Holland, found more ample expression.17 This did not mean that the drive toward syncretism was necessarily the most common outcome. Many, after due reflection and comparative consideration, opted for a radical form of unbelief, which resulted in the denial of the immortality of the soul and of the validity of all religious precepts, echoing the centuries-­old tales of the three rings, or the theories of the three impostors.18 But hiding behind the ritual syncretism exhibited by many Spanish Conversos often lay conscious positions that, eschewing doctrinal barriers, hinged on the idea that each individual human being was guaranteed salvation, regardless of doctrinal conflict. The forced coexistence of three religions, therefore, caused strife and violence but also engendered a strange system of syncretic beliefs, which intermingled all three monotheisms. This occurred throughout the fifteenth century but became particularly evident after 1492, when in Spanish society there remained only new converts and, officially, there were no longer any Jews. The Spanish archives are brimming with the depositions of people who tried to explain to the inquisitor their belief that the three rival religions could exist, each with its own prescriptions and laws, notwithstanding the fact that each individual remained convinced that the law he or she followed was the true law. Many of these people simply accepted that all three religions were true and that everyone could be saved by following the law into which they were born. The way this belief was often expressed was by stating that there were three revelations and three prophets, but one equivalent truth. In 1480, for example,

S t e fa n i a Pa s t or e   73

one Converso man from Zaragoza explained to the inquisitors that he believed in Christ, Moses, and Muḥammad but that “he had less regard for Muḥammad than for the others [menos tenía a Mahoma que lo de los otros],” while a Granada Morisco woman in 1556, Catalina de Quesada, explained during her inquisitorial trial that there is only one God and one law, and the difference was due to the fact that God gave the law to the Christians with his right hand and to the Jews and Muslims with his left. This fact, she explained, made a difference only in the way of writing (from left to right for Christians, from right to left for Muslims and Jews), nothing more.19 Whatever the case, doubt had made deep inroads into the Castilian communities; joined with a habit for comparing and questioning, it animated cohabitation in the villages and, later on, filled the inquisitors’ papers with accusations. Spain, long before other countries in Europe, became a place where the problem of belief and religious belonging, in a multiconfessional society, came to be the problem par excellence. It is not by chance, then, that the stereotypes that were employed in the first half of the sixteenth century to brand the Spaniards outside of Spain should focus so intently on the ambiguous nature of their religious identity. Consequently, if the Spanish Jews who settled in Italy after their expulsion in 1492 or the Conversos fleeing from the Inquisition who often reverted to the Jewish religion once they had arrived in Italy were labeled as “Marrani,” Marrani were also, by extension, and with strongly derogatory implications, all Spaniards. The term therefore underwent an extremely significant semantic slippage, gradually shedding its original ethnic-­religious connotations, with their racist implication, and eventually becoming an allusion to the Spaniards’ unbelief.20 Next to the heavy accusation of “Marrano,” literary texts and comedies often quote a joke about the Spanish, involving their mixed origin and their tendency to not believe in any God. This was what the Italians ironically called the “peccadiglio di Spagna,” the little Spanish sin. It appeared for the first time in Ariosto,21 who makes explicit reference to the Spanish anti-­Trinitarian heresy, but the phrase soon entered everyday usage to the point that it was Italianized into the contemporary term “peccadiglio.” Implicitly, it came to hint at that exquisitely Spanish mixture of hypocrisy and dissimulation, heresy and unbelief, and by the 1540s it had become an accusation of unbelief, if not of atheism. I quote from a dialogue by Annibal Caro from 1538, but many other examples may be found: E parmi che abbia fatto come quello spagnuolo che, quando si fu confessato di tutti i suoi peccati, ritornò al confessore a dire che s’era dimenticato d’uno peccadiglio, e questo era di non credere a Dio.

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(And it seems to me that he behaved like that Spaniard, who, when he had confessed all his sins, returned to the confessor to say that he had forgotten one little sin, and that was that he did not believe in God.)22

Granada’s Legacy This was the Spain of doubt, where the problem of pluriconfessionalism had become central—a country that Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, on whose extraordinary figure the last part of my essay will focus, felt he proudly belonged to and represented. Known as one of the most brilliant humanists of Spain’s Golden Age, a Petrarchan poet, the author of one of the classics of Spanish historiography, The War of Granada, and occasionally suspected of having penned the most famous work of Spanish literature, the Lazarillo de Tormes, Mendoza was also a voracious collector of books and codices. Last but not least, he was the Spanish ambassador in Italy and played a fundamental role on both the Italian and European stage.23 Diego was born around 1503 to one of Spain’s most illustrious families, the Mendozas.24 He was the youngest son of Iñigo López de Mendoza. His father was an ambassador and a humanist but also the hero of the war in Granada. In 1492, when the city was conquered and then handed over from the last Nazrid Muslim dynasty to the Catholic kings of Spain, Mendoza’s father was named governor of the city and of the reign. He imposed on the old citizens a series of agreements, the Capitolaciones, that allowed the Muslims to keep their own religion and habits.25 The Count of Tendilla and Hernando de Talavera, royal confessor to Queen Isabella, had been put in charge of supervising the amalgamation, within the territories of the last frontier of Granada, between the local Muslim residents and the conquering “cristianos viejos” (the old Christians), the Conversos of Toledo in flight from the new Inquisition, and those who had newly converted from Islamism, and help them build a path of peaceful coexistence of the basis of shared assumptions. Tendilla had undertaken the job with enthusiasm, adopting an energetically personal approach and avoiding the new rules of the Catholic kings and the new Consejos of monarchy: when Ferdinand’s “officials,” who had been dispatched from Granada to oversee the actions of Talavera and Tendilla, had broken the Capitulation agreements, thereby triggering the first great revolt of the Muslim populations, Tendilla had repaired the rift by seeking a personal settlement with the rebels and even offering them, as a guarantee of his honest intentions, his wife and children as hostages.26 At the time Diego had not been born, or was perhaps but an infant in his swaddling clothes, and was certainly not aware of the true importance of this event; he presumably had no memory of the months he passed in a noble

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Moor’s palace in the Albaicín quarter, but he had surely heard the story told a thousand times, as it was part of a family anecdotal tradition that celebrated the mythical “caballero” Tendilla, his loyalty and his chivalric skills in dealing with the Moors, which had by then found their way into many Spanish stories. The bond with the Muslim and Morisco world had deep roots in Diego’s family; it was a tie his father tried to defend against the undue interferences on the part of the Court, when it tried to break the Capitulation agreements, and one that his firstborn heirs also tried to protect as much as possible against the extremist zeal of the Spanish Inquisition and the Church. The Tendillas, much as the Morisco Lords of Aragon were doing, requested and obtained Edicts of Grace that would shelter the Moriscos of Granada from the control of the Inquisition and that defended, against an increasingly restrictive set of rules, their right to wear traditional clothes and headwear and to maintain a nucleus of domestic traditions and rituals that set them apart from Christians.27 The lively and multicultural Granada that his father had contributed to creating, the last stronghold of tolerance in a country that was on the way to becoming entirely isolated, left a significant legacy: Diego had breathed deeply of that cultural air, had made it his own, and remembered it often in his writings. The Granada of the early years of the Capitulations emerged from the limpid prose of his War of Granada as the highest example of a world that no longer existed, a relic of an age at equal removes from the rigid dictates of Trent and the bureaucracy of the “rey papelero” Philip II.28 As a much younger man, Diego had also brought his love of the last Nazrid kingdom to Italy. The Granada his father had idealized would fill the stories he told Italian humanists and courtiers. It was perhaps in Granada, or perhaps more plausibly in Salamanca, that the young Diego took up the study of Arabic, which would turn out to be the key to access a faraway world, as culturally important to his formation as the classical tradition of Greek and Roman antiquity. Mendoza’s good knowledge of Arabic would be attested to not only by Paolo Manuzio and Ambrosio de Morales but by his marginal notes to his Arabic manuscripts, now in the Escorial. This knowledge was an unusual accomplishment for the time, and it caused much astonishment among the Italian humanists, within whose circles there grew much admiration for Mendoza’s “cultura estraña.”29 His passion for Arab history and philosophy had already started in 1535, when, following the emperor in his famous expedition to Tunis, he was one of the group of Spanish “philosophers” who took part in the dispute on Averroes with Muley Hacen, the king of Tunis. And it was to Mendoza, probably the most interested, as well as the most informed, member of this select group, that the dethroned monarch also left—or, more plausibly,

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was forced to leave—some precious codices, saved from the fire that had almost entirely destroyed his library during the siege of Charles V.30 His passion for collecting, and his constant interest in what was different, distant, other, would stay with him throughout his life and would encourage him to explore ever new roads, from Spain, to the empire, to Venice, from North Africa to Turkey, in search of new manuscripts, codices, and texts. His ability to ferret out ancient texts and give them circulation would become proverbial, as would his outstanding collection of Greek codices, one of the largest in Europe in those years.31 Indeed, his activity as a collector ran parallel to that of man of arms and courtier.

The Venice Ambassador Diego was appointed ambassador to Venice in 1539, with the thankless task of bringing the republic, traditionally distant and always more inclined to friendship with France, closer to Spain.32 The card he chose to play was that of culture and patronage. His house became a constant point of reference for Italian writers, humanists, and artists, including Aretino, Bembo, Giovio, Titian, Sansovino, Beccadelli, and the Florentine protonotary Pietro Carnesecchi (the Duke of Florence Cosimo de Medici’s right-­hand man in Florence, condemned to death for heresy in 1567). During his years in Italy he was the dedicatee of numerous works that the Inquisition would later brand as heretical and include in the Italian and Spanish Indexes of forbidden books.33 His politics in Italy were of a very special and unique brand. Firmly convinced that Charles V needed to find an agreement with the Lutherans, he was the major representative of an anti-­Roman and anti-­curial policy in Italy. Neither Mendoza nor his entourage refused contact or avoided encounters with the world of the Reformation—to the contrary, they appeared to present themselves, at that strategic moment, as one of the most important and most authoritative points of contact. Later on, during his trial for heresy, Pietro Carnesecchi recalled that exciting world, teeming with ideas and heresies. He talked about “a Flemish man of letters”—possibly Mendoza’s librarian, Arnoldus Arlenius—whose ideas, Carnesecchi believed, smacked of heresy; Alfonso de Ulloa, Diego’s private secretary, a free spirit who was tried by the Inquisition in 1558; Diego de Enzinas, author of a famous letter to Luther, who was burned in Rome in 1558; and a certain Ramírez, whose position Carnesecchi found hard to explain: “More an atheist than anything else, like a man who participated of the Marrano, considering his nationality, and of the Lutheran, considering his conversation.”34 In those years the Spanish ambassador’s salon became an important cultural crossroads, open both northward to Protestants and eastward to Greek

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scholars and the precious codices they brought from Greece and Constantinople; it also became a significant point of contact between Venice and the New World (Diego’s brother Antonio de Mendoza, another lover of books and of curiosities, which he frequently sent to Venice, was the first viceroy of Mexico). There were Protestant Greek scholars working in Mendoza’s library, which, according to Conrad Gessner, was one of the five largest in Italy, including the Vatican and the Marciana Library in Venice. It was on the basis of Mendoza’s codices that his librarian, Arnoldus Arlenius, published the editio princeps of Flavius Josephus (which was dedicated to Mendoza) and that of Polybius, with the Basel-­based printer Froben.35 From Zwingli’s Zurich, Arlenius also invited Gessner to join him in Venice, where he started working on his Bibliotheca Universalis from Mendoza’s library. In this work, which would become the cornerstone text for the systematization of European knowledge,36 the erudite Protestant publicly recognized his debt toward Mendoza, the friend and patron who had been his host, generously allowing him free range of his codices and books. Two examples will suffice to give an idea of the importance of Mendoza’s cultural practice: the rediscovery of Photius—and his remarkable catalogue of Greek works37—and the acquisition of Sextus Empiricus’s codex of the Outlines of Pyrrhonism and the Adversus mathematicos, which Juan Páez de Castro began to translate into Latin in 1545.38

An Averroist in Trent The discovery of ancient codices went hand in hand with Mendoza’s long-­ standing passion for Averroes. During his years as Venetian ambassador, Mendoza maintained close ties with the world of Italian Averroism and with the Padua scholars.39 He invited them to his Venetian salon, he started a Castilian translation of Aristotle’s Mechanics,40 and he prepared his Paraphrasis totius Aristotelis; when he was summoned to Trent as the representative of the emperor during the second phase of the Council, he first spent two months in Padua, the cradle of Aristotelian rationalism, gathering material to take to the Council. In Trent, he put his rich library at the disposal of the Fathers of the Council and set up an “Aristotelian Academy,” gathering together numerous humanists and experienced Greek scholars.41 Mendoza’s political letters from Trent tell of the Council’s exhaustingly slow discussions and of his impatience with the friars and their theological subtleties, which were the cause, in his view, of the failure to reach any agreement with the Lutherans. He repeatedly proclaimed himself an Averroist, rather an astonishing fact considering he was acting as the emperor’s representative in the most important ecclesiastical Council of the modern age. In his way of thinking—as he explained in the letter he wrote to the Court to defend himself against the first accusation leveled

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against him—to support Averroes was also a way of escaping from the Thomistic rigidity of the friars as well as from a world that was too closely tied to the authority of the pope and of Rome: que el confesor [Domingo de Soto] no esta bien comygo porque defendi un doctor Herrera en Trento, a quien el deshonestamente tractava mal de palabras, llamandole en presençia de muchos obispos erege, y porque no le ayude ha imprimir a mi costa un comentario sobre la fisica de Aristotile, y porque en las disputas tenia siempre la parte de Averroe, el que no hiziera si penssara que havia de ser confessor, y porque se mas filosofia que él. (that the confessor [Domingo de Soto] is not happy with me because I defended one Doctor Herrera in Trent, whom he falsely maligned, calling him a heretic in front of many bishops, and because I did not help him to print, at my own cost, a commentary on the Physics of Aristotle, and because in the disputes I always took Averroes’s part, which I would not have done if I had known that he would become a confessor, and because I know more philosophy than he does.)42 Diego was a voracious reader of Machiavelli, and Averroes must have represented for him not so much a philosophical system as the key of access to a political religion, proudly opposed to what Machiavelli had called “the republic of clogs” (“la repubblica de’ zoccoli”),43 more closely attuned to doubt than to Counter-­Reformation certainties. Thus, his widely proclaimed Averroism was translated into an actual political position during the period of his embassy in Trent. In later years, during the Siena war, when Mendoza’s time of glory had passed, Italian pasquinades customarily projected the image of him as a Marrano, an arch-­Marrano, a “faithless” non-­believer, word-­playing on his physiognomy by calling him a “white Moor” (“un moro bianco”) or joking that he was an “uncircumcised Jew.” However, rather surprisingly, well before that time Mendoza himself had decided to poke fun at this prejudice of the Italians, and at their habit of equating Spaniards-­Marranos-­Unbelievers. The joke on the Spanish peccadillo was particularly familiar among the literati and intellectuals of Mendoza’s circle, as was the equation of Marrano as unbeliever.44 Mendoza mocked the prejudices of the Italians, glorying in his Marrano image and exploiting his Spanish origins with all their implications. As in the case of Averroism, the fact of being a Marrano and proclaiming himself a Marrano became a way of thinking, a way of behaving, and reflected a precise political position, in which the dialogue with Protestantism and the distance from Rome, from the pope, and from the conservative wing of Spanish Catholicism played an essential part. This is the only case in which the disparaging term of “Marrano” became an intellectual category. For Mendoza

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both terms, “Marrano” and “Averroist,” have the same meaning, that of skeptical, unbeliever; essentially, they indicate a person who believes that religious conflict has to be tackled in an instrumental and political way.

“As a Moor, a Philosopher, a Marrano” Mendoza continued to build up this image into a complex portrait, which held together his personal history and attitude of mind, and underscored his devotion to Averroes and his Spanish origins, his father’s Granada, and all the lessons that the intolerant Spain of the Inquisition had taught him. Diego was convinced that Charles V needed to bypass the Roman authorities and reposition the issue of the confessional divide on a purely political level. In March 1548 the formulation of the Interim was complete and ready to be signed by the Germans. In mid-­June, Charles’s boldness and enterprise went even further, when he prepared a Formula Reformationis that also applied to the Catholic clergy—with it the emperor obliged the entire ecclesiastical body to carry out the long-­awaited moral reforms. The reform of the Church and the agreement with the Protestants were at hand. But Rome’s resistance was very strong. Diego was constantly in contact with the great architect of the Interim, Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, the master of contemporary imperial politics. Diego expressed all his anger against the “friars” who “destroy us”45 and, exasperated by the papal legates’ continued obstruction tactics, presented a clear account of his position. Rome’s firm will to control everyone’s conscience, to extend its power even over people’s thoughts, was a resounding failure. The example of how little had been achieved by the Inquisition’s policy of repression in Spain proved to everyone how difficult and useless it was to “force the conscience of individuals” (“forçar a los yndividuos”) in their private thoughts. He could but deplore the obstinacy with which people accused of crimes of opinion were prosecuted: [Rome] does not concede us the faculty to grant a general pardon but only an individual pardon, person by person, for those who wish to confess their error and receive pardon from the papal representatives; but it is impossible to force individuals one by one and if I were one of them and did not wish to go to the house of the papal legate, and neither did the others, it is inconceivable that the policeman himself should go from house to house forcing someone to do so; thus, the emperor may give general dispositions and the pope may forgive but he cannot force consciences nor can he in a thousand years act so with an individual’s conscience; and this I say as a philosopher, as a Moor of Granada and as a Marrano, that today the Spanish Inquisition has even more work than it had the day it was created.46

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At this point Mendoza’s personal experiences and his intellectual world crystallized into a strong decisive stance in favor of a particular brand of tolerance that stemmed from his philosophical preferences—Averroism and Sextus Empiricus—but also from his Spanish roots. And as a “philosopher,” as a “Marrano,” and even as a “Moor of Granada,” he was convinced by what he had seen in Granada, in Spain, and in the war-­torn empire that what was needed now was a purely political solution, a radical change, that is, from Spanish confessional politics. The Inquisition had not been, nor could be, a solution because the conscience of the individual could not be subjected to any form of control and had nothing to do with loyalty or political stance.

Against Quarrelers: A Spanish Contribution to Pyrrhonism It is perhaps useful to bear all this in mind as we return once more to the codex of Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism that belonged to the “Marrano, moro y filosofo” Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. Mendoza had a copy in Greek in his own library in Venice, and it was this copy that, surprisingly, he decided to take with him to Trent. We also know that Juan Páez de Castro discussed the Outlines in a letter sent to Zurita from Trent.47 So, right in the middle of the Council of Trent, during the hectic days of the De iustificatione decree, Juan Páez de Castro and Mendoza were reading and discussing Sextus Empiricus’s skeptical miscellany. It is, moreover, possible that, precisely at that time, they were planning a Latin translation. We know from a letter from Páez de Castro to Zurita that in 1549 the Latin translation was almost finished and ready to publish. Castro explained that they would use it to achieve great things for religion to ward off “vitiligatores”: Haré una prefación en que pondré grandes cosas de lo que toca a esta disciplina y del útil para nuestra religion, et effugiam vitiligatores. (I will write a preface in which I will put great things about this discipline and how useful it is for our religion, and effugiam vitiligatores [I will scare away the quarrellers].)48 I believe that the reference to the “vitiligatores,” the quarrelers, undoubtedly links the first translation of Sextus Empiricus to Mendoza’s milieu and to his repeated efforts to find a political route toward a mediation with the Protestants. It is important, I think, to reflect on what Mendoza’s decision to translate Sextus Empiricus may have meant. He was a keen bibliophile and was on the front line of imperial politics: what might Sextus Empiricus represent at this delicate historical moment in which imperial Spain and Europe were lacerated by religious conflict? And why would its translation and dissemination

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be considered by Mendoza to be so important as to assign this preeminent task to none other than his personal secretary, Juan Páez de Castro, in such crucial and complex years as those of the Council of Trent and the Interim? Could it have been that reflecting on the mere appearance of all principles of truth, on the human inability to establish the veridicity of one truth instead of and above another, might serve to overcome, in an exquisitely political manner, the religious conflict tearing apart the empire of Charles V, where one theological truth confronted another in an endless series of debates and polemics? Could it have been part of a specific political program that Mendoza shared with part of the imperial entourage, and most certainly with the key man in the imperial politics of those years, Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle? Páez de Castro’s edition never actually saw the light of day. It remained a complete but unpublished Latin edition. We do not know if Henri Estienne knew of this Spanish interlude. Floridi has argued that the French edition derived from another Italian copy, but, in 1555, while he was in Venice, Estienne worked together with Giorgio Trifone, one of Mendoza’s copyists. We cannot, however, but note how Juan Páez de Castro’s edition, far from emerging, as has been said more than once, from a Catholic fideistic tradition, was instead engendered by an antidogmatic and tolerant intention. Indeed, it emerged from a context that was very close to that which produced the 1562 French edition. This was the first Latin translation of a text that, as Popkin has pointed out, would revolutionize not only the history of philosophy but also the history of religious tolerance in Europe, opening up new paths for the advancement of religious relativism.

Unhappy Ending Mendoza’s good fortune in Italy was destined to wane rapidly. Appointed ambassador to Rome, he did not betray his reputation for “andar al pelo con los Papas [scuffling with the popes].”49 His first audience with Pope Paul III, dressed “de capa y espada,” in layman’s garb and with a sword at his side, caused a furor and was interpreted by the cardinals as a sign of defiance of the papacy. Mendoza defended it as an open act of defiance, continuing to dress in this manner, as portrayed by Titian, throughout his years as ambassador.50 However, Italian politics and the alliances of Charles V quickly turned in other directions. Mendoza’s last move was to try to prevent the rise of the Inquisitorial party of Cardinal Gianpietro Carafa, the future Paul IV, and of the axis formed by Álvarez de Toledo and Cosimo de Medici in Italy. Appointed governor of Siena, and now deprived of aid and support, Mendoza was unable to handle the anti-­Spanish revolt. He was abruptly called home by Charles V and relieved of all his duties in 1552. He left Rome in the dead of

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night, causing as much furor as when he had first arrived by splitting the nose of Julius II’s personal servant. And while the Roman Inquisition quickly devoured the lively Venetian world, condemning Mendoza’s former protégés one after the other for heresy (the last of these, his Florentine secretary, Pietro Carnesecchi, burned as a Lutheran in 1567, after the Inquisition trial that caused more clamor than any other in Italy), Mendoza languished in the shade. In 1568, after yet another fit of anger that led to a duel in the anteroom of the dying Don Carlos, he was exiled from court. Philip II exiled him to his hometown of Granada. His status as a “Marrano, a Moor, and a philosopher,” as a critical witness of the politics of the times, only worsened matters. His last battle was in favor of the Moriscos of Granada, who in 1568 rebelled against the cultural and religious restrictions imposed by Philip II and started a bloody civil war, which lasted two years, in the heart of Spain. In somewhat puzzled terms that expressed his sense of alienation, Mendoza described Philip II’s “sucia guerrilla [this dirty little war],” giving voice to that “nación . . . vencida, rendida, sacada de su tierra, y desposeída de sus casas y bienes [nation . . . defeated, surrendered, and removed from their land and dispossessed from their homes and assets]” to the Moriscos, “gente sin lengua y sin favor [men without voice and favor],” who with the coming of the letrados had seen their lands confiscated and redistributed, making them pose the question that delegitimized years of political repression: why “each nation, each profession and each state has its own specific dress, and all are Christians; and we are considered Muslims, because we dress according to the Morisco fashion, as if we carry the law in our clothes and not in our heart.”51 This Spain was far removed from the Granada and the Spain of his childhood and from that country whose power he had dreamed of imposing over Europe; this was a country he no longer recognized. The awareness that his ambitious and radical cultural policy was no longer workable, indeed that it had become both difficult and dangerous, was a heavy burden that Mendoza would have to bear throughout the second part of his life. His later years were to a great extent spent erasing the traces of the sort of challenges and readings that had become inadvisable in Spain (and in Italy), now that the countries had wholeheartedly embraced the road of the Counter-­ Reformation. Even the only work that was explicitly published in his name, the Guerra de Granada, from which my last quotation comes, did not see the light during his lifetime but only in 1610. To open it, as if to justify the impossibility of publishing it, Mendoza had chosen a bitter passage from the letters of Seneca to Lucilius: “very rarely are the virtue, truth, and greatness of a wise man recognised during his lifetime; but thousands of years and generations

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later they will re-­emerge out of the darkness where it was buried by the envy and malice of his contemporaries.”52 Mendoza’s workshop in Venice had been an amazing cultural laboratory; his passions and his interests, however, were destined to germinate elsewhere. His zeal as a bibliophile, the obsession with systematization and completeness that had led him to both carefully peruse and compile catalogues and collections of books ancient and modern, in the attempt to establish the most thorough bibliography possible of all the works of the classical, Jewish, and Western world, would ideally continue in the Basel of Froben and the Zurich of Conrad Gessner.53 Mendoza had ignored confessional boundaries in the name of a Republic of Letters free of all borders. As a matter of fact, his contribution to the construction of the Republic of Letters in Europe would be fully acknowledged in the editio princeps of another monumental text of the early modern age, that of the works of Flavius Iosephus, a sort of meeting point between Protestant and Jewish culture. In its preface, the philologist Arlenius, writing from Basel, would remind his readers of Mendoza’s nobility, and of his talent for “unearthing codices as if they were treasures,” thereby allowing them to be used by the entire respublica litterarum. Conrad Gessner himself, who had dedicated his Lexicon graecolatinum to Mendoza, underscored the everlasting fame acquired by the Spanish nobleman through the edition of Iosephus, which had been possible thanks to his generosity “tuo beneficio”: he also pointed out the incredible number of texts from Greek antiquity that he had discovered in his library, many of which he had seen and perused there for the very first time. He had tried to mention them all in his Bibliotheca Universalis—where at least 150 entries are flanked by captions such as “consulted in Venice in the library of Diego Hurtado de Mendoza”54—so that this would not be forgotten. Gessner profoundly believed that the publication and diffusion of such works would hugely contribute to the advancement of knowledge in the European scientific community. This was a “treasure,” Gessner wrote, using the same metaphor and indeed almost the very same words his friend Arlenius had chosen, which Mendoza had begun to uncover with great generosity, and a treasure he hoped to be able to resort to whenever he felt the need to do so.55 Also in the entry explicitly dedicated to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza in his Bibliotheca Universalis, after praising his nobility, his generosity, and his unbounded erudition, Gessner pointed out that Froben’s elegant Basel edition had been made possible through Mendoza, and once again expressed his hope that he might be able to count on the same type of generosity in the future,

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whenever he asked for a copy of a manuscript “in usum reipublicae litterariae publicandum” (in order to publish it as it is used in the Republic of Letters).56 Conrad Gessner’s Bibliotheca Universalis, a monumental catalogue of Greek, Latin, and Jewish writers, and the first attempt at compiling a universal bibliography in modern history, was destined to become a landmark in European scholarship and in the rediscovery of the ancient classical tradition. It is extremely probable that the idea of entrusting a Latin edition of Sextus Empiricus to Páez de Castro aimed to make a fundamental text available to the whole Republic of Letters. For Mendoza, however, it had not simply been a matter of discovering and cataloguing, as he had proved capable of doing in his patient and obsessive search for the Bibliotheca of Photius, nor was it a question of ordering and naming the “multitude of books”57 that since antiquity had lay forgotten, as Conrad Gessner would do, employing Mendoza’s library and catalogues. Mendoza’s achievement was, first and foremost, to render accessible the great works of classical antiquity, so that they might work as soothing balms and much-­needed answers in the present times. Working from his Venetian palace, surrounded by Greek Orthodox, Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic erudites, he attempted to recapture a past that might serve to illuminate new pathways, and guide the uncertain present, by means of an extraordinary awareness of the public use of history, which, I believe, is an entirely unique trait. It was precisely that public use of history, however, that marked the end of Mendoza’s particular cultural politics. His rediscovery of classics tragically ended up intersecting with an imperial political strategy that would ultimately fail. This was the reason why that very text which had been so assiduously searched for and then read, discussed, and translated, between Venice and Trent, ended up buried at the bottom of a drawer, swept away by the change in the course of events and possibly (but this hypothesis is yet to be substantiated) recovered by the expert hands of Henri Estienne. Estienne’s Latin edition, published in Lyons in 1562, would mark the rebirth of Pyrrhonism in France, opening up the path toward doubt and relativism that would, through Michel de Montaigne and Pierre Charron, lead on to Descartes. The unpublished Latin edition by Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and Páez de Castro, on the other hand, helps illuminate the failure of a political and cultural project as well as of an often-­forgotten portion of the history of doubt and skepticism in Europe.

4 Exeuntes de corpore qui sumus? “Out of the Body, Who Are We?” Aug u s t i n e , t h e C a r e of t h e De a d, a n d a C l a s h of R e p r e s e n tat ions

Peter Brown

This essay forms part of a short book titled The Ransom of the Soul.1 The book sketches out the manner in which the expenditure of money was held to affect the destiny of the soul after death in Christian circles in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, from the Rome of the catacombs, in around 250 AD, to the great monasteries of post-­imperial northern Europe, in around 650 AD. To write such a book is easier said than done. Of all the changes of belief that took place in late antiquity, those concerning death, the care of the dead, and the fate of the dead beyond the grave are the most challenging to trace and to interpret. In the first place, we are dealing with a phenomenon in which change occurs at very different speeds at different levels. In most societies, burial practices and beliefs about the dead are notoriously slow to change. Even when change occurs, it is difficult to isolate the agent of change.2 The world of the grave is strangely impervious to ideology. Major changes in practice can occur without changes in belief. For instance: the late antique period was preceded, in the Roman West, by a massive change in burial customs from cremation to inhumation, in the course of the first and second centuries AD. This change amounted to “the biggest single event in ancient burial.”3 Yet it was apparently unrelated to any change of belief. In the same way, distinctive customs were 85

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maintained without occasioning any reflection. The Jewish practice of secondary burial (the eventual placing of the bones of the dead in ossuary containers) passed unnoticed in rabbinical literature.4 One of the most refreshing surprises in the historiography of early Christianity is the realization of the extent to which Christian burial practices and the commemoration of the dead, far from signaling a new departure brought about by a distinctive Christian ideology, evolved at the same slow pace as that of non-­Christians and in constant osmosis with them.5 Last but not least, the dead were everywhere, but only very few are visible to us. Nothing reveals more harshly the stratified nature of ancient societies than the utter silence of the vast majority of the dead. Romans prized memory and valued expressions of grief. Brent Shaw has calculated that out of some 300,000 inscriptions that survive from the Roman West, over 75 percent were tombstones.6 But these tombstones ringed a vast black hole. Out of 875,000 graves in the Roman catacombs, only 27,688 had named plaques.7 In one catacomb (the catacomb of Priscilla) only 40 graves out of 40,000 were decorated with frescoes.8 If we turn to the recent excavations of burial areas in Carthage in the generations that followed the death of Augustine, we realize what this means. In the well-­to-­do cemetery area of Bir el-­Knissia, the dead are still part of society: their graves are well-­organized; they speak to the living through inscriptions and through floor mosaics placed in a great basilica. Outside the city wall, by contrast, the dead huddle in rows beneath roughly stacked tiles: there were no recognizable paths between graves, few monuments and markers, and no evidence for ritual activity . . . disturbance of earlier graves by later ones was routine.9 Altogether, the dead now speak to us only because of the money provided by the bereaved. We meet them as members of the “chattering classes” who, for centuries, had filled the cities of the Mediterranean with written stones. Hence this part of my subtitle: “A Clash of Representations.” I will concentrate on moments when burial practices and beliefs about the dead and the other world sparked debates among the “chattering classes” and their advisors in spiritual matters—in this case, I will concentrate on Augustine (bishop of Hippo—Annaba, Algeria—from 397 to 430) and on those who pressed in around him in search of answers. I have deliberately chosen to speak of a clash of “representations” rather than a clash of beliefs. I do this for a reason that would have been obvious to educated persons in late antiquity. Ever since the sixth century BC, thoughtful Greeks and their Roman equivalents had been aware that, in matters of religion, representation and reality did not coincide. What you saw was not necessarily what you got. To a remarkable degree we are dealing with a society in

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which, among religious thinkers, “the innocence of direct representation . . . was lost.”10 The gods and the other world existed. But could our representations ever do justice to them? Human representations seemed to bear as little relation to the immense reality of the divine as the neat figures of atoms and molecules in modern science textbooks bear a relation to the vast energies of the universe. The religious crisis of the third century AD arose, in large part, from a fierce wish to make representation and reality come closer together. It was marked less by a sudden upswing of belief as by the effort to make belief itself more explicit, more securely grounded in invisible realities that human custom had obscured by incomplete and unworthy representations. In the words of Aline Rousselle, in an outstanding characterization of the religious climate of the third century, this was an age dominated by a drive toward what she called l’explicitation du croire—by a need to explain belief.11 Every religious group was involved. The Mishnah (as later, the Talmud) subjected Jewish custom to unrelenting legal scrutiny. Christians came to present their beliefs in terms of consequential theologies. Pagans also strove to reduce the clash between representation and reality. The result was the first fully worked-­out theory of sacrifice (the work of Jamblichus, On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, of around 300 AD) to appear in the Greek world—a mere 800 years after the Brahmanical sages of India had saturated their traditional sacrificial system with explanation.12 Among the religious leaders of the third century, the most radical and articulate was the prophet Mani. Mani was born in southern Mesopotamia in 216. He preached extensively until his execution by the king of kings of Persia in 277. He was the founder of a religious movement whose followers—the Manichees or Manichaeans—would dog the Christian churches of the Near East and the Mediterranean throughout late antiquity.13 They did so largely because they claimed to offer a more consequential and altogether more “authentic” rendering of Christianity than did the mainline churches. Through direct revelation, Mani had penetrated beyond mere representations to the reality of a towering universe, in which every religious ritual associated with his religion made perfect sense. And one of the practices the devotees of Mani—the catechumens of his church (many of whom came from Christian backgrounds)—wished to be most certain about was the effect in the other world of the traditional rituals that they performed, in this world, in memory of the dead and for the good of their souls. Bluntly: did such rituals work?14 What we should notice is that the rituals that were discussed in Manichaean texts were exactly the same as those practiced by ordinary Christians all over the Roman world. These were: the giving of alms (mñtnae, in

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the C ­ optic documents associated with the teachings of Mani); the giving of an oblation in church (the prosphora or, in Latin, the oblatio); the celebration of a “love feast” (the agape: the equivalent of the Latin refrigerium, the “feast of refreshment” for the departed soul and for the bereaved); and the “making of memory” (prpmeue) on the occasion of the “going of the soul out of the body.”15 The questions the Manichaean rank and file—the catechumens—posed to Mani were very much what any Christians would have posed of the rituals of their own church: The Catechumen asks the Apostle [Mani]: will Rest [matnes] come about for Someone who has come out of the Body, if the Saints [the Elect] pray for him and make an alms-­offering [nser oumñtnae] for him?16 The question touched on the very essence of the relation between the living and the dead: So now I beseech you, my Teacher, that you may instruct me about this matter, whether it is true. For it [that is, almsgiving for the dead] is [a practice] very great and honored among the people.17 To which the Teacher replied, in effect, “Make My Day.” He reassured his questioner that, when performed in the Holy Church of Mani, such practices worked. He told the catechumens exactly why and how they worked, in terms of a grandiose and consequential vision of the cosmos. Every follower of Mani could be certain that alms on his behalf and a remembrance on his behalf [of the one who has died], for his brother, for his father, or his mother or his son, or else his daughter or his relative who shall come out from the body. . . . [If] he has made alms . . . He did not lack his hope.18 Newly discovered Manichaean documents from Kellis, a town recently excavated in the Dakhlah oasis of the Western Desert in southern Egypt, show both how important these rituals were for Manichaeans and how much they were indistinguishable from those of other Christians.19 The letters and even the account books of Kellis are scattered with references to the agape offered for the souls of the dead.20 It was a matter of sadness, among the Manichees of Kellis, that one old lady should have died without the consolation of such rites: We are remembering her very much and I am distressed that she died when we were not with her and that she died without finding the Brotherhood gathered around her.21

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Altogether, what we have found in Manichaean documents preserved in the bone-­dry sands of Egypt is our very first sighting of Christians worrying about the care of the dead—and especially about the nature and effectiveness of the measures that they took on behalf of the souls of the departed. The worries continued. Let us now leave Mani and move forward in time for one century, to the days of the old Augustine. We find that the problems Mani had been called upon to answer had not gone away. In 421, Augustine came to write an Enchiridion (a Ready-­to-­Hand Book of Christian Doctrine). In it he addressed questions posed by a layman, Laurentius. Laurentius was a well-­educated resident of Rome and the brother of an important officer serving in Africa (who also posed similar questions to Augustine).22 Many of these concerned the other world. Laurentius’s uncertainties turned out to be exactly the same as those addressed to Mani by similar laypersons—the catechumens of the Manichaean church: Did rituals for the souls of the dead work, and, if so, how did they work? But Augustine’s answer was the opposite of Mani’s. While Mani expatiated in great detail on the cosmic processes that made rituals for the Manichaean dead efficacious, Augustine was pointedly reticent on how the Catholic rituals for the dead were supposed to work. His answer was, basically, “God only knows and He is not telling.” He limited himself to saying that oblations for the souls of the dead were a custom handed down from the Apostles. For this reason, Catholic Christians were to maintain them. But, when we ask how these oblations work in particular, and for what particular categories of persons, we are met, in Augustine’s case, by the immense silence of God. The answers may be different; but it is the convergence of concerns between the two men that we should note. Both were aware of a major lacuna in their own system. Clear on the otherworldly destinies of saints and of great sinners, neither could make sense of an ever more pressing phenomenon: the average sinner. For Mani, the lacuna was particularly blatant. On one occasion, he had drawn a complete picture of the universe as this had been revealed to him. But his disciples pointed out to him that, on this cosmic map, he had found no place for those of “the Middle Way”: Why did he not depict the Middle Way of the catechumens? Why did he not show how the catechumen [rather than the saintly Elect] goes out of the body and how he is brought before the Judge?23 Augustine found himself confronted by exactly the same question. In order to reassure Laurentius, he took refuge in a trenchant formula. He offered what can best be called a Van Ness Diagram of the Other World. In this diagram, it was only in the area of overlap that ritual action performed by the living might

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affect the fate of the dead. The prayers and oblations of the faithful were not relevant to the valde boni—the extremely good: for they could be assumed to have reached heaven with no difficulty. Nor were they relevant to the valde mali—the extremely bad: for they could be assumed to be either in Hell or surely destined for Hell. As in Manichaeism, so in the Catholicism of Augustine, the friction point of Christian eschatology and of Christian pastoral care was the fate of the non valdes—the non valde mali and the non valde boni: the “not altogether bad” and the “not altogether good.” For there is a certain manner of living, neither good enough to dispense with the need for these after death, nor bad enough to preclude their being of advantage to them after death.24 The lapidary phrases of the Enchiridion—which laid out this threefold division of the faithful—achieved an almost gnomic authority in later centuries. They have been hailed as the first systematic hierarchization of sins that formed the basis for the threefold division of the other world into heaven, purgatory, and hell, which characterized the Catholicism of medieval western Europe.25 But at the time, behind the rock-­like opacity of Augustine’s answer to Laurentius, we can sense the building of a dam—a dam intended to hold back (rather than to satisfy) the mute pressure of the non valdes of the Christian communities. Like the catechumens who questioned Mani, average Catholic Christians wanted considerably more circumstantial and, if possible, more reassuring answers about the fate of souls after death and the efficacy of rituals performed on their behalf. Augustine was not prepared to give them such answers. It is the reticences of Augustine that this essay seeks to explain. It is easy to overlook the significance of these reticences. We tend to dismiss the questions of laymen such as Laurentius as fussy, even superstitious. We also tend to take Augustine’s answer to these questions for granted. We assume that his reluctance to meddle with the details of the other world was a matter of common sense and of clerical prudence. As he explained in the City of God (written at the same time as the Enchiridion): it would be most perilous to define what those sins are which in themselves prevent attainment of the kingdom of God, while admitting of pardon through the merits of holy friends. I myself, at least, have given much thought to the question without being able to reach a conclusion. And it may well be that the answer is kept a secret for fear that knowledge might blunt one’s zeal to make progress towards the avoidance of all kinds of sin.26 But we should not be disarmed by this display of candor. The historian has to go for the other side of the story—the views of the questioners. Each time that

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Augustine laid pen to paper or preached on issues such as the care of the dead and the souls of the departed, he did so in response to specific questioners who had, in turn, been provoked by specific situations. It is these questioners and the varied backgrounds from which they came that should hold the attention of the historian. In many ways, Augustine himself is less central than we might think. He is not laying down the law. He is reacting to the anxieties of others. He is like a large, balloon frame building standing in the middle of a storm. The varied strengths and the differing directions of strong gusts are registered, from within the house, through the creaking of its different walls. Seemingly reticent statements, heavy with caution, such as Laurentius received in the Enchiridion, are a measure of the strength of the gusts. And their direction—that is, which wall begins to creak—hints often at a wider world, from which the gusts of questioning gather force. Very often a seemingly formal answer to a question takes us far beyond the circles of the clergy, and even beyond the bright lives of the chattering classes, to wider landscapes caught in the obscure travail of religious movements. Let us begin with this last issue. To what extent was it possible for the living to have direct contact with the other world, and especially with the souls of the recently departed? At some time around 420 AD, a series of small, poignant events took place in the little North African town of Uzalis, forty miles north of Carthage. A young man, the notarius—the stenographer—of bishop Evodius of Uzalis, died suddenly. As ripples of grief spread throughout the small world of the clergy and friends of the clergy, the boy either appeared directly in dreams or was the subject of dreams.27 What matters for this essay is that Evodius immediately approached Augustine to ask him for his opinion on the dreams. What did they reveal about the nature of the soul and about the other world? Put bluntly, these phenomena raised for Evodius the basic problem of identity after death: Exeuntes de corpore . . . qui sumus? “Coming out of the body who are we?”28 Augustine’s answer to his friend’s letter was quite remarkably discouraging. He brushed Evodius’s questions aside. Dreams were dreams. There was no reason to assume that any dream was any more privileged than any other. In his providence, God might form the imagery of a dream so as to communicate a message. This had been the case with the visions of the prophets of the Old Testament.29 But what happened in the Holy Scriptures was not likely to happen in small-­town Uzalis. There was no way to know what distinguishes the visions of those who are deluded by error or impiety, as many events are described in them that are the same as those seen by pious and holy people.30

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Evodius should be careful. The problem of image formation alone—not to mention the problem of whether humans were able to discern the hand of God in some but not in other dreams—was a “wild wood.”31 Augustine had no intention of entering that wood. To read the exchange of letters between Augustine and his friend on the visions at Uzalis is to witness the closing of a door between this world and the next. But Africa had been a land of visions. The notion that religious actions took place at the prompting of God or the gods through dreams and waking visions was shared by pagans and Christians alike.32 It was certainly shared by the two rival churches of Africa. Simply for the sake of convenience, I will call these Donatists and Catholics. What matters is that each church saw itself as the true Catholic church of Africa because it, and it alone, possessed the Holy Spirit and, with the Holy Spirit, the gift of dreams.33 For many Donatists, their church was true because they had seen it to be true: For this our brother and this our sister have had a vision to that effect, whether at a vigil or in a dream while asleep.34 But this trust in visions was no mere “folkloristic” curiosity, restricted only to the Donatists. As late as 410, Catholic bishops were legislating against altars to hitherto unknown martyrs that had been set up by Catholics “all over the countryside and along the roads,” as a result of “dreams and empty so-­called revelations.” To destroy such shrines was a violent undertaking, carried out in the face of strong popular opinion.35 Altogether, we are looking at a somewhat eerie confrontation of visionary powers (accepted by some and rejected by others as demonic) that may have gathered momentum in the desperate aftermath of the official suppression of Donatism in 411.36 In the course of his meditation on visions, Augustine had assessed a remarkable number of such experiences, news of which had circulated in the countryside and in the small towns of Africa. Many were full-­blown visions of Heaven and Hell. Some of these even included views of the future punishment of living sinners (in the manner of Dante’s Inferno).37 These stories looked straight toward the Middle Ages. They could have come from the works of Gregory of Tours. (And for most students of the Early Church—though not for myself—this is not a compliment!) But Augustine refused to look that way. Such visions were epistemologically improbable. They might even be the work of demons. In any case, they were best left alone. Unlike the inspired Mani, for whom all things were clear, the chill hiatus between representation and reality, which he had inherited from centuries of Greek and Roman philosophy, still held firm in the back of Augustine’s mind. But the problem of the relation between the living and the dead would not go away. Only a few years later, at some time between 420 and 424, Augustine

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had to write to his good friend Paulinus of Nola on a related topic: What benefits did the souls of the departed derive from the actions of the living? In particular, did any benefit whatsoever come from placing the dead beside the tombs of saints, so as to enjoy their imagined protection at the time of the Resurrection? Paulinus had approached Augustine on this topic in response to a concrete situation. Cynegius, the son of Flora, a well-­to-­do widow who resided in Africa, had died in Italy.38 At Flora’s urging, Paulinus had buried Cynegius beside the tomb of Saint Felix, the famous miracle-­working saint of Nola. Paulinus even wrote the epitaph for the young man. It has survived to this day. It spoke of Cynegius in euphoric terms. He had been welcomed as a guest to the house of Felix. Placed close to the tomb of Felix, the young man could feel safe when “the terrible sound of the trumpet [of the Last Judgment] shook the whole world.”39 We must remember that, ever since his conversion in 394, Paulinus had poured vast wealth into rebuilding the shrine of Felix. This was the way in which he had chosen to place his treasure in heaven. But no one entering the splendid new building would have doubted for a moment that some of that imagined treasure had, as it were, dripped back to earth. With its shimmering, multicolored marbles, its blaze of candelabra, and a gilded roof that rippled like an ocean in the flickering light of innumerable scented lamps, it was a little bit of heaven set in Campania, amid the villas of the Roman aristocracy.40 Altogether, the shrine was an advertisement to the power of religious giving, now practiced by a formidably wealthy Christian aristocracy. Cynegius’s privileged burial at such a shrine revealed what the discreet weight of wealth could do to mold Christian views of the afterlife.41 Paulinus’s inscription seemed to have guaranteed in advance the safety of the soul of Cynegius at the Last Judgment. But this was not Augustine’s view of the matter. The treatise that he wrote to Paulinus, de cura pro mortuis gerenda (What Care should be taken for the Dead), was discreet, firm, and deeply discouraging. If Paulinus had wished for ratification from Augustine of his permission to bury Cynegius at the shrine of Felix, and if Flora had wished to be consoled by the thought that her son’s proximity to Felix would help him in the Last Days, neither of them got any reassurance from the bishop of Hippo. The excellent study of Paula Rose, Augustine and the Relations between the Living and the Dead: A Discourse-­Linguistic Commentary on the de cura pro mortuis gerenda makes plain the skill with which every word of Augustine’s answer to Paulinus was weighted toward a negative judgment.42 Burial beside the saints did nothing whatsoever to aid the soul. All that such prominent burial did was to jog the memory of the bereaved, by reminding them to resort with yet greater fervor to the traditional means of

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helping the departed—prayers to the saints, almsgiving, mention of the dead at the Eucharist.43 In challenging his good friend Paulinus on this issue, Augustine challenged a baroque piety, focused on the newly developed cult of the saints, that had been fostered by a remarkable group of converted aristocrats in Italy, Gaul, and Spain. He did so in the name of traditional African commemorative practice. Memoria, memory, was what the Christian dead of Africa were guaranteed.44 They could have this without proximity to the saints. Rather (as Ann Marie Yasin has pointed out), their funerary basilicas were filled with names. And these were not always the names of the great. Prayer, almsgiving, and offering at the Eucharist did not require great outlays. They could be made by relatively humble persons on behalf of their dead.45 We often forget how deeply committed Augustine was to this traditional ritual structure. It comes as a surprise to realize that the vivid description of the passing of his mother, Monica, at Ostia, at the end of Book Nine of the Confessions, was not about her death at all. It was about the proper performance of the rituals associated with her memory.46 Augustine describes no dramatic passing of the soul, accompanied by unearthly light and sweet perfume, as would be the case in later centuries. Rather there is a plea that she and her husband, Patricius, should continue to be remembered at the altar and in the prayers of those to whom Augustine had described their lives in the Confessions. Careful to preserve her memory for such prayers, this was the only time that Augustine mentions his mother by her name—Monnica (the old African spelling with a double n).47 For to be remembered in that way was all that her soul required. She had previously surrendered her wish to join her husband in the family tomb in Africa. Memory at the altar was enough for her.48 But this was also because memory at the altar was still needed. Monica was not presented as a saint. Far from it: she was presented as Everywoman, as a classic case of the non valde: I do not dare to say that, since the day that You [God] regenerated her by baptism, no word came from her mouth contrary to your precept. So now I pray for her sins. Forgive her, if there is any debt of sin that she carries after so many years since she passed the saving waters.49 Ten years after her death, Monica still lived, somehow, in the other world, all too close to a dread shadow that needed to be kept at bay by the prayers of the living: Let none wrest her from Your protection. Let not the lion or the dragon block her way, by force or by some craft.50

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It is one of the very few times that the Devil makes an appearance in the Confessions.51 The hint of that malevolent presence is all the more disturbing for being nameless. Augustine wrote about Monica in around 397. In the subsequent decades, the cloud of disquiet that had been no more than the size of a fist when he wrote the Confessions had come to cover his whole sky. Why did this happen? The short answer, of course, is—Pelagius. For the Pelagian controversy was far more than a conflict of ideas. It was a clash between two Christian landscapes—the landscape of Christian Rome (where Pelagius had taught and where he had found his principal supporters) and the landscape of Christian Africa. What were at stake were not only issues of grace and free will. The issue of the nature and purpose of religious giving soon came to the fore. For Augustine placed the distinctive mark of his own sharp preoccupation with sin upon traditional (and, until then, largely inexplicit) notions concerning the expiatory value of almsgiving.52 In order to understand why he did so with such force, we must step back a decade and look, for a moment, at the nature of giving in the secular world. Roman North Africa (and especially the region best known to Augustine: Carthage and the cities of the Medjerda valley) was one of the last provinces of the western empire to maintain a high standard of civic life. Throughout the fourth century, buildings were renewed, theaters were repaired, great circus games were performed.53 Behind this activity lay the ancient ideology of what has come to be called “civic euergetism.” In the late 1970s, the brilliant monographs of Paul Veyne, Le pain et le cirque and of Evelyne Patlagean, Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance, 4e–7e siècles, drew attention to the tenacity and to the sharp particularity of this phenomenon.54 It was based on a strictly civic (one might almost say a political) model of society. The wealthy were expected to spend their money on their city and on the comfort and entertainment of their fellow citizens—and on these only. It was a model that tended to look through the economic structuring of society. Poverty, in itself, gave no entitlement. Those who received benefits from the wealthy did so not because they were poor but because they were citizens. Thus, to preach almsgiving was to do far more than stir the wealthy to occasional acts of charity and compassion. It was to upset an entire traditional model of society. Civic notables were challenged to abandon the notion of citizen entitlement. They were urged to look beyond their fellow citizens, and to switch their giving habits toward the gray immensity of poverty in their city and in the countryside around them. A series of sermons by Augustine on this topic have only recently been discovered in the cathedral library of Erfurt. They show that Augustine had planned entire campaigns of preaching on the topic of almsgiving. He urged

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his clergy to preach against the games. Rich members of the congregation who supported the games were to be “condemned, rebuked and changed for the better.” The only use of these wild displays of generosity was to challenge Christians to engage with equal enthusiasm in giving to the poor: lazy members of our churches are to be challenged to action, seeing that they barely break a single loaf of bread to feed the starving Christ [in the poor], while those who lavish wealth on the theater [spend so heavily that they] leave hardly a loaf of bread for their own sons.55 Augustine had long preached in this way against the games and in favor of almsgiving.56 This is how we find him, in 410, at the moment when Pelagius and many of his upper-­class patrons arrived in Carthage as refugees from the Gothic sack of Rome. Their arrival did not only bring what Augustine considered to be dangerous theological novelties on sin and on free will. They threatened to upset the patterns of religious giving in Africa. Why was this so? When he preached on almsgiving and the circus, Augustine had wished to create among the elites of Africa and among the rank and file of the African churches a habit of steady giving. As he made clear to his clergy, in the Erfurt sermons, and in his preaching as a whole, the notion of “alms” came to embrace three pious causes—care of the poor, support for the clergy, and the building and maintenance of churches.57 This was an essentially low-­profile program, common to Christian leaders all over the Mediterranean. It aimed to maintain a steady flow of funds to the poor and to the church through the insistent schooling of all members of the congregation—both the rich and those of modest means—in the proper, Christian use of wealth.58 By contrast, what the refugees from Rome brought with them to Carthage came from another world—from a Roman Christian landscape where wealth itself had been problematized. Pelagius had addressed circles of men and women who suffered from a vertigo of riches. He was close to Paulinus of Nola, and also to the senatorial heiress Melania the Younger and her husband, Pinianus.59 Only five years previously this young couple had shocked Roman society by selling up their fortune. On one occasion, they had been comforted by a dramatic dream: One night we went to sleep, greatly upset, and saw ourselves, both of us, passing through a very narrow crack in the wall. We were gripped with panic by the cramped space, so that it seemed as if we were about to die. When we came through the pain of that place, we found huge relief and joy unspeakable.60 Here were two young persons who had felt the pain of passing through the eye of a needle in in order to enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 19:24). Yet,

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when they arrived as refugees in Africa, they emerged—much as Paulinus had emerged at Nola—as patrons on a grand scale, endowing churches and founding large monasteries. Far from being delighted, the bishops were made uneasy. Augustine and his colleagues approached Melania to tell her, in effect, to cool it: The money that you now furnish to monasteries [they told her] will be used up in a short time. If you wish to have a memorial for ever in heaven and earth, give one estate and its income to each monastery.61 At the same time, radical Pelagian tracts, such as the de divitiis—the relentlessly argued “Treatise on Riches”—had advocated the total renunciation of property.62 The author of this tract extended his plea for total renunciation to include a consequential denunciation of the existence of wealth in the first place: Tolle divitem et pauperem non invenies (“Get rid of the rich and you will find no poor”) was one of his many provocative slogans.63 The de divitiis made plain that the only way for rich Christians (such as Melania and Pinianus) to reach heaven was through the total renunciation of their wealth. News of the thrust of the treatise was immediately passed on to Augustine, from Syracuse to Hippo: A rich man who remains in his riches will not enter the Kingdom of God unless he sells all that he has: nor will those be of any use to him [in securing salvation] even if he uses them to fulfill the commandments [that is, by giving alms].64 Augustine instantly understood the implied threat that such radicalism posed to traditional habits of religious giving. It was not so much that the rich should not exist. It was that they could not be saved. Unless they gave away everything, their regular almsgiving would be of no avail. It was this which determined Augustine to take his stand against Pelagian ideas on wealth. Almsgiving was not only a way to support the poor and to show the financial muscle of the church in competition with the urban elites and their ideal of civic euergetism. Almsgiving had a supernatural dimension, which Augustine emphasized now more strongly. He insisted that almsgiving was an obligatory pious practice. And it was obligatory because it had an expiatory function. Alms atoned for sins. The command of the prophet Daniel to king Nebuchadnezzar was a command to every Christian: Redeem your sins with alms and your injustices by compassion on the poor.65 In effect, Augustine performed a remarkable feat of intellectual “splicing,” by which ancient practices were harnessed to brand-­new thought. He grafted his

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own, distinctive notion of sin and penance onto the widely accepted notion of the expiatory nature of almsgiving and of similar good works. There is little need to linger on Augustine’s notion of sin. He had long been convinced that the life of a Christian was a life of continual penance.66 The pious Christian was a human hedgehog. He or she was covered from head to foot with the tiny, sharp spines of daily, barely conscious peccata minutissima—with tiny little sins.67 It was to expunge these tiny sins that the Christian should pray every day Dimitte nobis debita nostra: Forgive us our sins (Matthew 6:12). To Augustine, these words in the Lord’s Prayer—Forgive us our sins—provided the answer to Pelagius’s doctrine of the freedom of the will. Pelagius had offered a freedom to be perfect. Augustine countered this perfectionist message with the argument that the Lord’s Prayer itself denied the possibility of perfection in this life. No one could claim to be perfect. Still less could they claim to have gained this perfection through the exercise of their will alone. The Lord’s Prayer was a daily reminder of a daily state of sinfulness, which cried out for daily forgiveness. To deny this was to strike at the very heart of his religion.68 By the 420s, Augustine’s view of the future of Christianity was remarkably simple. It consisted of the prospect of ever more churches filled with the thunderous sound of chest-­beating as the congregation prayed the crucial prayer: Forgive us our sins.69 But there was a concrete, financial corollary to this insistence on daily penance for sin. Like all other Christian preachers of his generation, Augustine never doubted that prayer for forgiveness should be accompanied by almsgiving. Almsgiving provided the “wings” that brought the Dimitte nobis of the Lord’s Prayer up to heaven. Without such wings, no prayer could fly.70 This meant, in effect, that perpetual giving was the counterpart of perpetual sin. Challenged by the perfectionism of Pelagius, Augustine expanded the traditional notion of almsgiving as a remedy for sin to the notion of the need for the daily expiation of sins. The human condition demanded this. The soul was a leaking vessel on the high seas. Little trickles of daily sins constantly seeped through the timbers, silently filling the bilge with water that might yet sink the ship if it were not pumped out. And to man the bilge-­pump was both to pray and to give alms: And we should not only pray, but also give alms. . . . Those who work the bilge-­pump lest the boat go down. They do so [chanting sea shanties] with their voices and working with their hands. . . . Let the hands go round and round. . . . Let them give, let them do good works.71 Religious giving was part of daily life, because daily life itself was defined by sin. It took place against the noise of the steady creak of the bilge-­pump of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.

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The congregations of Africa—rich and poor alike—heard this message with a certain relief. Augustine’s preaching fitted in very well with the realities of their social condition. Even if they were good Christians and wealthy, none of them suffered from the vertigo of wealth that had swept through Christian Roman families of the super-­rich. They had no wish to be told to renounce their wealth in its entirety, as the author of the de divitiis urged that they should do. Rather, rich and poor alike were encouraged to save their souls, on a regular basis, by forms of giving that were as regular as the repetition of the Dimitte nobis of the Lord’s Prayer. This attitude had social repercussions. Augustine never discouraged heavy giving by the rich. But his insistence on the expiatory nature of giving ensured that the rich did not see themselves as special. Their giving was associated with penitential habits that they shared, as fellow sinners, with all other members of the congregation. One did not give to the church (as one had given to the city) to show one’s own the glory and that of one’s family. One gave “for the remission of sins.” Augustine received some quite substantial legacies for the church of Hippo. But he always insisted that they had been given because the donor was “mindful of the eternal safety of his soul.”72 There was room in such a view for relatively humble donors. Everybody could be a sinner, and, so, everybody could give. Such was Umbrius Felix, a schoolteacher in the little town of Mina (modern Ighil Izane, Algeria), far to the west of Hippo, on the inland road that crossed Caesarean Mauretania. In an inscription carved between two rosettes, he wrote in 408 AD: from the Gifts of God and Christ, Umbrius Felix, the magister, made this. He has repaid his vow to God. Let prayer be made for him and may he have salvation from his sins.73 Thus Augustine gave his Christian contemporaries a doctrine for the long haul. Driven as it was by the perpetual motion of the need to expiate sin, religious giving was there to stay. Sin was permanent. For that reason, religious giving also had to be permanent, regular and devoted, above all, to the expiation of sin. But how was the zest with which Augustine propounded this ideal of religious giving consonant with his notable reluctance to commit himself to a clear view of the destiny of the soul after death? Here again I think that we should look at the challenge posed to him and to many of his contemporaries by the rigorism of Pelagius and his followers. For the exhortations of the Pelagians had shown zero tolerance for sin. To be entirely free was to be free to abandon all sin as abruptly as one was supposed to abandon all wealth. Those who failed to do so were not simply weak. They were rebels. They were impii—impious persons. They were as far from the mercy of God as were out and out pagans. Confronting Pelagius in the

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Holy Land (to which Pelagius had come in 416), Jerome professed to be horrified by this doctrine. Only unbaptized non-­Christians could be called impii. By contrast, the baptized Christian had the rare privilege of being a “sinner.”74 As a mere “sinner,” he or she could hope for the mercy of God right up to and perhaps even beyond the Last Judgment.75 They would always receive “judgment tempered with mercy.” In the warm words of Brian Daley: “It is Jerome at his most generous.”76 Along with Jerome, Augustine insisted that average Christians were not impii. They were merely peccatores, for whom he had sketched out an entire lifetime of penance, prayer, and almsgiving. They were also the non valde mali or the non valde boni for whom the prayers and almsgiving of the faithful might also be effective in the other world. He and Jerome may well have caricatured Pelagius’s real position on sin. But Augustine did it in order to find ample room in the church for those of “the Middle Way.” He offered a glimpse of the members of the average Christian congregation in his own days and for centuries to come: Who indulge in their sexual appetites, although within the decorous bounds of marriage. Who hold on to their possessions. Who give alms, if not very lavishly. But who, through all this, see themselves as small and God as glorious.77 But how far would God’s mercy for sin extend? Could Christian souls as heavily laden with small, almost subliminal sins (as Augustine had presented them in his sermons against Pelagius) ever hope to expiate all such sins in this life? Would the process of expiation have to extend beyond death, so as to admit some form of purgation in the afterlife? Augustine was increasingly driven by Pelagius to face this problem. He had to peer, once again, into the world beyond the grave. Among the letters of Augustine discovered by Johannes Divjak, there is one written to none other than Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria, in 417.78 In this letter, we see Augustine from an unusual angle. The bishop of Hippo is hardly known to us as one who favored sin. And yet, in this letter, he presented himself as having been accused by the followers of Pelagius of being soft on sin. They accused Augustine of believing that “not all sinners are punished by the eternal fire.”79 Augustine accepted the accusation. He insisted that those who had sinned lightly would not go straight to Hell. They even had a chance to change in the other world—in the uncharted period between their death and the Last Judgment. To prove this, he cited from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 3:14–15):

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A fire will test the quality of each person’s work. If the work of one who is built on the foundation [of Christ] survives, they will receive their reward. And if the work of one is burned up, they will suffer loss. But the person will be saved, as if by passing through fire. But these words of the Apostle [he added] are to be understood as not referring to the fires of the Last Judgment [which would be eternal] but of some fire that precedes the judgment, whether in this life or after death. But, however that may be [that is, purgation in this life or in the next] at any price we must avoid the error of thinking that all sinners are destined to go to eternal fire if they have not lived on earth a life totally exempt from sin.80 This letter, addressed to a distant and formidable prelate, shows that Augustine was prepared to envision some form of purgation beyond death. But that was about as far as he was prepared to go. His statements on the nature of the “purging fire” hinted at by Saint Paul are marked by heavy caution. He is like a modern scientist who realizes that he has made a discovery that might be used to create a devastating weapon. We see this in a long sermon he preached at Carthage at this time—the Enarratio on Psalm 80. In this Enarratio, he took his audience carefully through the passage of Saint Paul. A sharp note of anxiety hangs over the whole sermon. He wanted the congregation to know that a mistaken reading of Paul’s words might lead the average Christian to slacken his or her efforts in the hope of some easy purging in the never-­never land of the other world. He insisted that, beyond the possible, somewhat minor scenario of some form of otherworldly purging, there still lay the immovable, undoubted fire of the Last Judgment. That fire would not go away. Brothers, I wish to be more than usually fearful. It is better not to give you false security. I will not pass on to you what I do not receive. Struck with fear, I have to terrify you. I would willingly make you feel safe if I myself felt safe. The eternal fire is still there. That is what I must still fear.81 Ten years later, in 430, Augustine faced death. He was not a man to cut his corners. Possidius of Calama, his biographer, describes Augustine’s last days: He often told us in intimate conversation that the reception of baptism did not absolve Christians, and especially priests, from the duty of doing fitting and adequate penance before departing from this life. And he acted on this himself in his last and fatal illness. For he ordered those Psalms of David which are specially penitential to be copied out and, when he was very weak, used to lie in bed, facing the wall where the written sheets were put

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up, gazing at them and reading them, and copiously and continuously weeping as he read.82 So where does this leave us? If we think in terms of a triumphal highway, that leads smoothly from the ancient to the medieval world, then the answer is: not as far as we think. Augustine left much unfinished business. Parts of his great oeuvre struck a successive generation as distinctly odd. Take, for instance, Augustine’s notion of the soul. From an early time, he had committed himself to an austerely “immaterialist” view of the soul, such as had been propounded by Plotinus. We tend to applaud this choice. But we do not consider the difficulties such a choice posed to ancient persons. So absolute a view of the immateriality of the soul left Augustine with no easy way to explain the relation between the soul and the world of matter.83 In his letter to Augustine, Evodius had spotted this weak point. Evodius suggested that, even when out of the body, the soul was accompanied by some material “vehicle” in the form of an envelope of infinitely fine matter.84 Augustine dismissed this view out of hand. The soul must be totally immaterial. To speak of some sheath made up of “spiritual matter” was to commit a category mistake. Modern commentators dismiss the notion of the “vehicle” of the soul as a “bizarre” notion.85 In fact, Evodius’s suggestion showed him to be a state-­ of-­the-­art Neo-­Platonist. In the generations after Plotinus, Neo-­Platonists had attempted to temper his austere “immaterialism” by positing some mediating body (spirit at its lowest and matter at its height of subtlety) that linked the soul, in an unbroken chain of being, to the universe and, by unbroken stages, to the human body.86 As his frequent meditations on the resurrection of the body showed, Augustine did his homework on this issue. He wrestled to find some inner bonding between body and soul. He came to think that even the saints felt incomplete until they were united with their bodies at the Resurrection.87 But these efforts did not convince later readers in fifth-­century Gaul. To a theologian and pastor such as Faustus (who became bishop of Riez in 460), the prospect of a totally immaterial soul was scary. Such a soul was unlocalizable. It was like Oakland as described by Gertrude Stein: “There is no there there.” How could so ethereal, so teflon a view of the soul do justice to the heavy presence of the saints in their shrines and to the need for justice to fall in the other world on the precise, bounded bodies of notorious sinners—often cruel men of power whom Faustus, as a bishop, was called upon to bridle?88 Such considerations alter our view of the intellectual history of the early Middle Ages as a whole. It was not a world characterized by “Doctrinal Stagnation and the Riot of Imagination” (to cite a pungent chapter heading in Jacques Le Goff ’s The Birth of Purgatory).89 Far from it. For instance, the remarkable

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book of Matthew dal Santo, Debating the Saints’ Cult in the Age of Gregory the Great, has shown that Gregory the Great was no credulous collector of folktales with which to regale an intellectually stagnant West. Rather, his famous Dialogues show a thinker engaged in serious debates concerning the localizability and activity of the souls of the saints and of the departed that the high immaterialism of Augustine had failed to resolve.90 Altogether, those who tacitly disagreed with Augustine (as did Faustus) or who brought his system up to date (as did Gregory the Great) did not do so because they were boneheads and barbarians (alas, the two categories are all too often confused by modern historians!). They did so because they were as smart as Augustine but happened to think that he was wrong or inconclusive. If we want to measure the full importance of Augustine’s contribution to discussions on the care and fate of the dead, we should not look toward the early Middle Ages. We should look backward. For here we find that he played a crucial role in giving words to a tectonic shift in the religious imagination that was almost too big to be seen. He helped to say good-­bye to the ancient notion of the cosmos. To understand this, it is best to turn to a masterwork of synthesis, the ­Afterlife in Roman Paganism of Franz Cumont. Cumont conjures up with rare serenity the thrill of the ancient vision of the universe. Here was a world where what you saw was what you eventually might hope to get. It was a manageable world: when men raised their eyes to the constellations of the firmament, they thought they perceived its end. The depths of the sky were not for them unfathomable.91 And, in this coherent and carefully graded world, top souls reached top places as if by some law of cosmic physics. The souls of the blessed lived in the Milky Way or just beyond it. The moral structure of the other world coincided entirely with its physical structure. For the one was a perfect representation of the other. This view was by no means limited to pagans. We need only read the funerary inscriptions of the Christian aristocracy of Rome and of their descendants, the upper-­class bishops of Gaul, to appreciate this. Their souls were declared to be lodged among the stars as firmly as were the souls of any of their pagan peers.92 This image of the cosmos had already begun to weaken in Christian circles. No matter how hard the poets who composed the tombstones for the Christian great might try, Paradise—a Near Eastern garden replete with God’s blessing—could never be quite the same as the Milky Way. In around 200 AD, Tertullian already knew this.

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Shall we have to sleep high up in the ether along with Plato and the boy-­ chasing Worthies [of Greece]?93 Tertullian got the point. The Milky Way was not for the anonymous. It was for worthies. Its heavy clusters validated the fame achieved on earth by acclaimed leaders of society. As Cumont reminds us, in such a worldview people only got as much immortality they had striven for—or were granted—on earth. Immortality, as we conceive it, follows on the very nature of the soul. It is generally supposed to be absolute, eternal, universal. For the ancients, on the other hand, immortality was no more than conditional: it might not be perpetual and it might not belong to all men.94 Only the great remained great forever. Given a widespread belief in the transmigration of souls, the great might even come back again, after millennia, to take up their role as rulers on earth. This view was supported by the famous description of the encounter of Aeneas with the souls of great Romans about to plunge back into their bodies in book six of the Aeneid. As Augustine pointed out, this incident was widely known from representations in the theater. It had become part of a folk-­classicism that reached far beyond literate circles.95 In such a view, cosmos and social stratification co-­inhered. We need only follow Augustine’s pen, as he answered questions concerning death and the other world, to appreciate the extent to which, consciously or unconsciously, a chasm had opened up in his mind between himself and the ancient majesty of the cosmos. He turned his back on the order of the cosmos, which had graded even the nature of souls. To him, all souls were equal, because all souls were immortal. All souls, also, were potential saints or sinners. The notion of eternal punishment might seem grim to us. But at least it posited something indestructible to punish. Immortality was not “precarious and conditional.”96 No soul vanished into thin air, as it joined a vast majority of inglorious spirits, to merge forever into the clammy, dim world beneath the moon. Right down to his defense of traditional commemorative practices against the upper-­class nouvelle vague of burial beside the saints, Augustine upheld a somber democracy of death. There were other points at which Augustine had chipped away at ancient hierarchies. His examination of the mechanisms of dreams was single-­ mindedly devoted to denying that there was any part of the soul that was, as it were, drawn from the higher reaches of the cosmos. No soul could claim to be endowed with a “natural” gift for divination.97 Visions might happen. Some might even be mighty visions, heavy with true truth—as were the visions of the prophets of Israel and of the Apostles. But this was not because of any innate kinship with the divine. It was because God and His angels had manipu-

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lated the seer’s imagination to produce a “virtual reality” effect. And God did so on a strictly “Need to Know” basis. Apart from what God wished humans to know, the other world remained impenetrable to human eyes.98 Augustine’s answers to Evodius and Paulinus on this issue had been startlingly trenchant. But this was because Augustine had come to see the entire universe as penetrated by the will of God. He pointedly withheld his assent from any representation of the other world that threatened to diminish the universal reach of God’s will. For that, and that only, was what the other world was all about: human merits and human sins, the product of human wills, weighed by the will of God. The only hierarchy that mattered was no longer the great staircase of being, which rose from earth to the glory of the stars. It was the tripartite hierarchy created by the human will alone. This was a hierarchy made up by the valde boni, the valde mali, and the ever-­interesting “Middle Way” of the non valdes— the average Christians, on whom so much energy of thought and ritual action would be expended in future centuries. As far as Augustine was concerned, this was the only significant ordering in the universe. The cosmos did not vanish. But, in the back of his mind, it became a mere backdrop, as pale as a daylight moon. In order to watch the waning of the cosmos we should return to our Christian tombstones. Up to the middle of the sixth century (and beyond, in the case of northern Italy), the stones of southern Gaul, Mediterranean Spain, and Italy maintained a proud cosmic language with which to talk of the good and the great. Then the ancient tombstones fell silent. When they revived, about a century later, we hear a very different voice. No longer do we hear the voice of the living, declaring that their dead were in the stars. Instead, we hear a voice from the grave. Gradually, region by region (from Ireland to Rome), we begin to hear the dead themselves asking for the prayers of the living. One of the first examples comes from seventh-­century Gothic Septimania (in what is now the French side of the Pyrenees). Crudely carved along the frame of a great stone, decorated with three large, protective crosses, it is the dead man who speaks: In the name of Christ, all men pray for Trasemir.99 When the bond between the living and the dead, constantly cemented by the rituals of the church, becomes a cosmos all of its own—a subject of deep preoccupation, the stuff of visions and the object of regular prayers and donations—then we can say, around the year 650 AD, that the ancient world has truly died in western Europe.

5 In the Church and at Home A pp r oac h e s t o S a i n t s i n C ol on i a l M e x ic o

Caterina Pizzigoni

A statue on a church altar, a print in a prayer book, a painting hanging in an oratory: these are some forms in which representations of Christian saints can still be found today. But what happens when saints move from the space of the church to the intimate realm of the home? Does the church lose control over them? Do people interact differently with them? And do the saints themselves change? Behind such questions are the images of individuals deemed holy through formal church approval or through informal shared belief; these are the protagonists of this chapter, with colonial Latin America as the setting.1 Saints were invoked as protectors against disease and disaster, intercessors for health and wealth, or aids in instruction and evangelization.2 They condensed prayers and beliefs and became a powerful symbol of the sacred in colonial society. Hence, they are essential to understand the process of conversion as well as the new traits of a Catholicism that emerged from the encounter of different traditions. The topic is vast, so boundaries are in order. Here the focus is on Mexico from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, although literature on other areas and times is brought in to draw parallels and differences. Moreover, the analysis encompasses both Spanish and indigenous societies; on the indigenous side it centers on the Nahuas and documents produced in their language, Nahuatl. The aim of this chapter is to map the two domains where saints can be found: in the public eye and within the household, shifting the discussion from the former to the latter, as well as to the material aspects of the cult. In early Latin America, saints were commonly in the public eye, in the actual sense of images in churches and processions, and in the less material sense 106

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of sermons and hagiographies. Scholarship has concentrated on the same realm, as summarized in the second part of the chapter, after a brief discussion of context and vocabulary, covering aspects of the cult of saints such as their lives, miracles, celebrations, and role in death and dying. Their presence in the rather different realm of the household has been at times mentioned or acknowledged in the literature but not explored in any detail. The third part of the chapter breaks new ground precisely by moving the analysis to saints in the household, intended as a living space made of buildings and people. It lays out paths of current and future research in terms of the chronology of the cult, the typology of images, and the place dedicated to them, all stemming from a study of the Toluca Valley as well as other cases across central Mexico.3 Finally, the fourth part of the chapter shifts attention from the ritual to the material aspects of the cult of saints. After all, household images are objects as well as spiritual entities and can be studied from the perspective of their appearance, manufacture, and interactions with people, enhancing our understanding of their role and worship as complex and multilayered. This chapter is thus rooted both in historiography and primary sources: while the second part seeks to reconstruct the topics already tackled by the field, the third and fourth parts introduce preliminary results of ongoing research. Studying saints through the Spanish and indigenous household opens new insights on processes of colonization and conversion beyond institutional levels or choices. What images people lived with or passed down to their heirs was a matter of personal decision as much as it was influenced by clerics, officials, or communities. And the Latin American context, especially the Mexican case, provides a particularly rich setting for such processes, with two distinct traditions of deities and beliefs clashing, mixing, and coexisting. Such a study also allows us to consider a much broader spectrum of religious practices than those sanctioned by the church or displayed in public, enriching our understanding of religion and the supernatural in people’s lives. Finally, the focus on household saints as objects moves us into an exploration of the ritual and the material, and the myriad ways in which they connect.

Context and Vocabulary Before delving into the three-­part discussion of saints in the public eye, in the household, and as material entities, some facts and vocabulary about the presence of saints in Latin America are necessary. The push to adopt them came, quite obviously, from Europe, where the much-­studied cult of saints had been present since the earliest days of Christianity, often paralleling devotion to ancient pagan gods and spirits. It became key to the religious experience of the Middle Ages, when the initiative of the Church met with an enthusiastic

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popular response, to the extent that by the end of the thirteenth century the papacy introduced stricter rules for the path to sainthood to control the proliferation of local variants of the cult. This century also witnessed a veritable explosion of the devotion for the Virgin Mary, as well as a greater array of representations of the sacred propelled by the Venetian sack of Constantinople and the subsequent dissemination of its relics, both of which resulted in an abundance of images.4 Nonetheless, in the context of this chapter the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries make sense as a point of departure. As part of the measures adopted by the Counter-­Reformation, the saints gained tremendous popularity as intercessors and advocates for protection against calamities and disease or for special favors, and images spread in churches and chapels, as well as in prayers and conversations. In Spain, particularly relevant for our discussion, the earlier devotion of relics of local saints was by then accompanied by the more general cult of the Virgin, along with various images of specialist saints for all kinds of needs. And veneration of Christ, especially under the form of a crucifix, was growing by the late sixteenth century.5 With very similar functions the saints accompanied the Spaniards to Latin America, playing a key role in the conquest and conversion of the indigenous populations. Armed with the experience accumulated through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, together with other Mendicant orders in the pastoral use of images for preaching, the Franciscans became the protagonist in the expansion of the cult. The saints displayed powerful didactic features, although they also required a good measure of caution, given the potential for confusion with native practices among the indigenous neophytes.6 Yet the artists who painted or sculpted church images were indigenous, as were the elders and elite members who participated in the replacement of each settlement’s god with a Catholic patron saint after whom the main church and the settlement itself were named.7 The development of printing helped disseminate the cult and use of images, as it did in Europe. In the first decades of the conquest, printing efforts were directed toward materials for the conversion of indigenous people, essentially bilingual catechisms, confessionals, grammars, and dictionaries. However, later in the sixteenth century hagiographies began to circulate, and with them small prints and reproductions of saints. Moreover, through other means such as sermons, prayers, and religious chronicles, as well as sacred art, broader sectors of society became acquainted with the names and lives of those deemed to be holy persons. While the phenomenon spread everywhere, it was particularly evident among urban groups, even more so among those in possession of basic literacy. Indeed, cities and towns were central in the import and advance of new devotions, helped by the relatively high presence of clergy, while the countryside remained less permeable and definitely more indige-

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nous.8 And as in Europe before, saints were also symbols of local organizations, settlements, religious communities, and confraternities, reinforcing the sense of belonging to a particular group. The link with confraternities has a quite complex development, given that the earliest and primary ones were usually based on religious concepts like the Holy Sacrament, the Souls of Purgatory, or the Blood of Christ, not on saints. The confraternities that show connections with a local entity or settlement, thus fostering local identity, were those dedicated to actual saints, popular from the seventeenth century on. They were founded precisely to encourage the worship of specific images, with processions, special celebrations, and adornments.9 On both sides of the Atlantic ecclesiastical authorities from the outset tried to control what they considered to be excesses in the cult of saints. Indeed, the Council of Trent in 1545–63 and the First Mexican Council in 1555 issued ordinances on the proper making and appearance of sacred images. This was without much success, or so it seems, considering that similar warnings were issued throughout the colonial period. However, the fact that during the seventeenth century images of saints populated churches, squares, and people’s lives must have pleased the clergy, especially the Jesuits, the new champions of the cult. Under this impetus, news of miracles and visions multiplied, and the production of images moved from the improvisation of the Franciscans, with the key help of indigenous hands, to professional painters, often arriving from Europe, and guilds with rules and ordinances. In a way, images became the product of an ever more complex and heterogeneous colonial society.10 Spanish saints mixed with the indigenous concepts of sacred beings and their representations, overlapping to the point that differences between notions and terminology, already hard to define, blurred. Both Spanish and indigenous people used terms for image, imagen on one side and ixiptlatl on the other.11 The Spanish term for image meant a representation of a holy person that combined the material aspect of being a painting, statue, or engraving with the spiritual value of the saint it stood for. The Nahuatl term also referred, among other things, to a representation of something sacred, a replacement in a way. In precolonial times it meant a living representation of gods to be sacrificed, whereas its use for saints after the conquest was the result of Spanish influence. It is curious that in its Hispanic meaning the term ixiptlatl was widespread only in the early period, while by the 1650s and through the eighteenth century the Spanish term santo, for saint, was the common expression used. The concept of image implied a sort of difference between the representation and the entity represented. Yet when indigenous people mentioned saints in their documents they often referred to them as if they were the actual holy individuals, not a replacement; thus santo could convey this meaning better than any of the previous terms.12

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In fact, with time the term santo and its feminine santa became current among Spaniards too. In addition, if we move away from church orthodoxy and on to Spanish local religion, practices, and debates based on interactions with saints as living beings, the idea of imagen/image and representation becomes problematic to say the least, as William Christian Jr. and Felipe Pereda show in their excellent studies of religion in Spain.13 André Vauchez deals with the consequences of collapsing the sacred and its representations already in the Middle Ages, putting it poetically: “the same movement that attempted to bring heaven closer to earth by multiplying the mediations, also risked losing the sense of the infinite distance that separates God from his creatures.”14 In the end, Spanish and indigenous views may not have been that dissimilar where religious practices are concerned. I shall now move to the second part of the chapter, reviewing some historiographical background on saints in colonial Mexico.

Saints in the Public Eye The historical literature on early Latin American religion has emphasized the public aspects of the cult of saints, meaning the accounts of saints’ lives or miracles directed at audiences of sermons and participants of ceremonies but also shared through the circulation of hagiographies. In a word, we see saints in places and ways in which people come together to pray, listen, or read; granted, hagiographies could also be read in solitude in the withdrawn space of the house or convent, but not by the great majority of people at that time. And the Latin American case is not unique. The vast and varied European historiography on saints from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century has covered myriad topics from the 1980s until recently, exploiting different sources and often attempting to integrate hagiography with the social aspects of religious phenomena. Themes span from the study of particular saints, popular cults, miracles, and ecclesiastical procedures and interventions to the role of images in visions and mysticism, and the ways to identify their followers, in the city as well as the countryside.15 But never, or almost never, in the household: what happened when the cult of saints crossed the front door is hardly discussed.16 For colonial Latin America, this is the result of the effort to reconstruct the dynamics of conversion, as well as of the sources that support such an endeavor: materials produced by the clergy operating on the ground. Thus scholarly attention has been on “holy lives and representations of saintliness”:17 what makes a saint, in the sense of life events and miracles, along with the canonization procedure, and the iconography and worship that go with specific images, mainly in the public eye. This is the case, for example, for Antonio

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Rubial García’s La santidad controvertida, which reconstructs the life and career of five candidates for beatification in colonial Mexico, and for Ronald J. Morgan’s Spanish American Saints, which focuses on the hagiographic discourse around five Peruvian and Mexican protagonists.18 Some works cover the development of the cult in broad terms, such as Pierre Ragon’s treatment of “the most committed groups in the spread of Christianity” in Mexico, that is, the clergy and urban dwellers, mainly Hispanic and mestizos. Or again, La guerre des images by Serge Gruzinski, which takes us through “the programs and the politics of the image,” in the sense of the roles and actions connected to saints in Mexican multiethnic society. They tend to focus on the clash of the indigenous and Spanish conceptions, the process of conversion, and the mélange produced through the Baroque image well into the eighteenth century. And again with an emphasis on dynamics happening predominantly in the public eye.19 Such scholarship is for the most part deeply connected to a specific topic as well, that of a community’s sense of identity built through the emergence of more general figures of saints across areas or regions.20 Although already developing during the seventeenth century, this phenomenon became widespread in the eighteenth century. By then across Latin America certain saints were effective tools in the construction of an identity distinct from the Spanish or Portuguese one, although still Christian. Good examples are the renowned cults of the Virgen de Guadalupe across Mexico and Santa Rosa de Lima, but also Santa Mariana de Jesús in the region of Quito, Santa Ana in Mexico, and San Antonio between Portugal and colonial Brazil.21 The list could be much longer; scholars have written on many other saints. These works and the ones mentioned thus far are based on hagiographic literature, saints’ lives, beatification trials, sermons, and chroniclers, as well as various types of devotional texts. Some also examine treatises on the manufacture and representation of images, paintings, and statues, especially when canonical church writings are lacking. This body of literature has made the analysis of the public cult of saints possible, in the sense of a focus on the ritual and its multiple meanings in churches, chapels, and squares. At its core we find church action and popular reaction, often in an urban setting. Many of the regional images have attracted scholarly attention because of a particular trait: they were miraculous, that is, they were believed to show signs of life, such as bleeding or crying, or power over nature. Thus their shrine turned into a site of pilgrimage, or a specific shrine was built as a consequence of apparitions and miracles. In a genre that follows a tradition of the European historiography, William Taylor’s Shrines and Miraculous Images and Marvels & Miracles have contributed substantially to our knowledge.22 They combine the sources mentioned earlier with lawsuits involving religious authorities and

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individuals, be they Spanish, indigenous, or mestizo. Taylor highlights the particularities of Mexico and discusses quite a few examples, not only the Virgen de Guadalupe but also Our Lady of Intercession, Our Lady of the Walnut Tree, and the case of the Cristo Renovado of Ixmiquilpan (western Hidalgo). Through his analysis, it becomes clear that by the eighteenth century, saints, their miracles, and their shrines had grown into a quintessential aspect of Catholicism in Mexico and in Latin America.23 Another reason for images to be at the center of scholarly attention is because of processions and saint’s day celebrations. A famous example of the latter is the festivity for the Virgen de los Remedios, protector against epidemics, famines, and droughts, which was taken on procession in Mexico City on her day as well as in moments of special need.24 But probably the most illustrious and studied procession for colonial Latin America is the one of Corpus Christi, honoring the transubstantiation of the host every year in late May or early June, depending on where Easter falls. There are a variety of works that address this festival, from chapters and sections in books, such as Linda Curcio-­Nagy’s The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico City and Edward Osowski’s Indigenous Miracles, to Carolyn Dean’s monograph dedicated to the indigenous interpretation of the festivity in Cuzco. Scholars have used chroniclers and written and painted accounts of the procession found in municipal and religious archives as well as in museums and churches. Through them we know that, while the host was the protagonist, images of saints were also present as statues or banners, representing a parish, neighborhood, confraternity, or other religious or lay local organization. Moreover, they could also be seen on allegorical carts or through the performance of actors representing the lives of saints.25 Most of the literature on festivities examines urban settings, involving Spanish and indigenous people alike, together with mestizos, mulattoes, and blacks.26 Some scholars have also found similar phenomena in the overwhelmingly indigenous countryside: images were processed through a settlement, or from neighborhoods to the parish church on special holidays (Corpus Christi included), or again to the fields at significant times in the agricultural cycle. Crosses, statues, and paintings also left their churches and traveled to collect alms for their own worship, under a license provided by the priest of the original place. Such studies have focused on the later eighteenth century, when church authorities protested against the improper treatment of images during these processions, and drunkenness and misbehavior alongside them, hence leaving a trail of sources.27 To be sure, church authorities complained about excesses and misrepresentation of images early on, as we have seen, and as David Tavárez illustrates exhaustively as part of his book on indigenous devotions and extirpation cam-

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paigns in central Mexico and Oaxaca.28 However, beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, reports, appeals, and decrees multiply, as demonstrated, for example, by the 1771 decree of the Fourth Mexican Council, ordering the destruction of inappropriate images. This type of document has provided another set of primary sources for the study of saints and focused attention on explanations for the apparently increased concern. Perhaps archbishops and other religious authorities carried out more thorough inspections in the countryside (or more detailed reports were produced from these inspections). And checks and restrictions could be linked to the general penchant for control and rationalization typical of the Bourbon period, which in turn provoked reactions and pushbacks, such as more frequent tours for alms collection. This literature is part of a broader wave in recent scholarship that examines Enlightenment reforms and related changes in religious practices, such as Pamela Voekel’s Alone before God and Brian Larkin’s The Very Nature of God.29 Overall, whether dealing with processions in cities or festivities in the indigenous countryside, the lens of the analysis remains focused on the institutional church, religious and lay authorities, and public spaces. Lastly, the literature has highlighted a special moment in the life of individuals and communities when images of saints acquire a particular role: death and funeral rites, which are at the center of a vast and varied scholarship. Verónica Zárate Toscano, in Los nobles antes la muerte, concentrates on saints as intercessors in testaments, mentioned by name, such as San Pedro and San Pablo, San Antonio de Padua, Santa Catarina, or Santa Gertrudis, or by general expressions such as “the saints of my name and devotion.” This does not necessarily indicate that an individual possessed or referred to an actual image, a painting, or a statue but only that he or she had a particular devotion to appeal to. At times such devotion was channeled through a confraternity, founded to promote the cult of a specific saint and ensure burial under his or her protection, together with the prayers and support of its members, as shown by Voekel and Larkin.30 The two authors also studied cases in which testators referred to actual images, for instance, when they left gifts such as candles, wax, oil, clothing, jewelry, and money to specific saints in churches and chapels, or when they indicated the statue or painting of a saint close to which they wished to be buried in a church or convent, which was customary at the time. In fact, the location inside the church and closeness to a specific saint depended on the offering that the deceased was ready to make, and we can easily imagine a re-­creation of the social hierarchy of the world of the living.31 In contrast to the works previously cited, these authors use testaments as sources to get to funeral rites, while still considering images in public or open spaces and concentrating heavily on urban settings (Mexico City most of all) and Spanish elite groups.

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There is another way in which actual saints are relevant at the time of dying: when testators dispose of the images they have at home, sending them to a church or bequeathing them to their heirs. This topic has been only briefly mentioned in the existing literature on the Spanish realm.32 On the indigenous side, however, the situation is quite different. Scholars have been making profitable use of testaments in Nahuatl to address topics similar to those discussed earlier, approaching from the inside a complex and layered reality too often viewed only from sources in Spanish. From the general treatment of saints illustrated by James Lockhart in The Nahuas after the Conquest to the detailed analysis of the Toluca Valley case by Stephanie Wood in “Adopted Saints” and by the author in Testaments of Toluca, we can see that invocations for intercession, offerings to church images, and burial close to them were largely similar to the Spanish practices.33 Such works have also started to investigate the images that indigenous people had in their dwellings, and it is precisely the household dimension that has begun to reveal fascinating and unknown aspects of the cult of saints.34

Saints in the Household While the emphasis in the literature has been on hagiography, processions, and miracles, in a predominantly Spanish and urban realm, the domain of the household remains to be fully explored.35 What happens in people’s houses appears only in passing, through references to the fact that Spanish and indigenous people alike held small statues or paintings. However, saints played an equally important role at home. On the Spanish side, a thorough analysis of the saints that people of all levels of society kept in their houses is yet to be done, and it would be invaluable in grounding religious practices in the reality of daily life, as well as in understanding how they changed through colonization. Scholarship based on indigenous sources has gone further, examining, for instance, the existence of a special place for saints in the house, the various types of images, their worship, and disparities between men and women in terms of possession.36 Thus we can draw on this literature for ideas and methods to tease out those aspects of the cult that can be explored in much greater depth for both the indigenous and the Spanish sides. A good place to start the exploration is the case of the Toluca Valley, for which an extensive study of the indigenous household in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is available.37 The first key aspect to consider is a complex chronology of the cult of saints. The presence of images in indigenous households has often been taken for granted from the very beginning of the colonial experience, developing along with saints parading the streets in processions and entering churches. But was it really this way? References to patron saints of churches and settle-

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ments appeared quickly in documents of all sorts, showing how certain images were readily adopted as community symbols. At the same time, the sources that best depict the household dimension, testaments, remained silent on this question, apart from some mentions of crucifixes. We have no early testaments for the Toluca Valley, but sixteenth-­century Nahuatl testaments from Culhuacan and Mexico City, that is, the Valley of Mexico just to the east of Toluca, show no sign of images of saints and only a few crucifixes. The first available testaments for Toluca, in the early seventeenth century, present the same pattern, and in the 1650s a few testators listed images in their houses, although without details about their worship or inheritance. But by the 1680s and 1690s saints had become an essential component of the indigenous household, indeed one of its three constituent parts, together with the buildings and the land. This was happening in a period (the late seventeenth century) of demographic and economic growth for central Mexico, with increasing numbers of indigenous people (as well as of Spaniards and mixed groups), a more flexible labor market, and an ever-­expanding production and circulation of goods, to mention just some of the key factors that may have played a role in the proliferation of images. So far only the Toluca Valley has been thoroughly analyzed from the perspective of this chronology, but general comparisons with settlements in the Valley of Mexico show a similar development.38 A systematic study of the available material and comparative analysis with works on other parts of central Mexico is essential in reconstructing broader patterns of temporal evolution. Thus the cult of household saints developed relatively slowly among the indigenous people of central Mexico and was a phenomenon of the mature period of colonial society, rather than the conquest phase. In a way we may expect the opposite among the Spaniards, given that they first traveled with such images across the Atlantic. Indeed, there are examples from very early on, such as the testament of María Pérez, issued in 1576 in Mexico City, in which images of Jesus Christ, Calvary, and San Andrés are recorded.39 There are also examples from the period right before saints established themselves in the indigenous household, such as Miguel de Elisondo from Veracruz, who in 1677 had an image of San Francisco Xavier, another one of the Virgen de Guadalupe, and a Niño Dios of ivory in his home.40 However, a clear chronology for the Spaniards has yet to be established, and a better understanding of the cult among them and the Hispanized sectors more broadly is of key importance. It will help assess the similarities and differences in relation to the indigenous side—whether the two were part of a common development of the household images, and who took the initiative. After chronology, the second key aspect to consider is a typology of the saints. In the Toluca Valley, images of the Virgin Mary were the most popular, in a variety of versions: Guadalupe, Concepción, Dolores, and Asunción, to

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name just a few. Christ was also very common, considered a saint like the others from the indigenous point of view and called a santo as Ecce Homo, Jesús Nazareno, Jesús Cristo, and Jesús Niño. In fact, the Virgin was overwhelming in a way, since just a few female saints were mentioned in addition to her: Santa María Magdalena, Santa Gertrudis, and Santa Ana. For the male saints the situation was quite different, and some images were almost as popular as Christ, in particular San Antonio de Padua, San Diego, San Miguel, San Juan, San Pedro, and San José, among others.41 Was it the same among indigenous people in other areas of central Mexico and among the Spaniards? General mentions in the literature point in the direction of the predominance of the Virgin and Christ across the board.42 Beyond them, specific references list, for example, San Juan Nepomuceno, San José, San Pedro Nolasco, San Francisco de Sales, San Antonio de Padua, San Cristóbal, San Francisco Xavier, and Santa Genoveva as popular in Spanish noble houses in Mexico City, but apart from the examples here, references to other saints are few and vague.43 A first, basic search through the Spanish realm confirms the special position of Christ and the Virgin Mary, with an even broader selection of devotions than the one displayed by the indigenous people. Beyond the typical Guadalupe and Dolores, for instance, we find Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, de Loreto, and de Belem, while Christ is also addressed as Señor de la Columna or Nuestro Señor del Socorro. A truly striking difference, however, lies in the fact that Spanish houses displayed not only images of the Virgin and Christ per se but also paintings and representations of episodes in their lives, such as Mary’s visitation and wedding, the flight to Egypt, Jesus’ birth and baptism, and his agony in the garden. Moreover, great variety is also characteristic of other male and female saints, adding to those popular among indigenous people names such as San Francisco, San Felipe Neri, San Ildefonso, San Antonio Abad, San Juan de Dios, Santa Rosa, Santa Barbara, and Santa Catarina, as well as the pair San Joachin and Santa Ana, and the angels.44 These findings show already a much higher level of complexity among the Spaniards; it is as if the indigenous people adopted a stripped-­down version of the cult, focused on some essential figures, and later in time, as we have seen. Choices about what saints to worship at home may depend on the place, on whether an individual is Spanish or indigenous, and ultimately on personal or family preferences. Thus trends and patterns may not be very linear or easy to identify, and much is still unknown, but among the elements that have emerged for the Toluca Valley one is clear and rather unexpected. Given that patron saints and images in churches and chapels were the first to become popular, and facilitated conversion as well as created a sense of corporate belonging, we would assume that they also had an influential role inside indigenous houses. However, the reality is quite different, for the most cherished

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household images were usually not those of parish or community saints, although they may have featured. Other images, close to personal devotion and the circumstances of individuals and families, were the preferred ones. For example, María de la Concepción from San Mateo Texcalyacac, in the Te­ nango del Valle area, had quite a few saints listed in her testament, ranging from San Antonio and San Juan to the Virgen de Guadalupe and her favorite, the Virgen de la Concepción. But the settlement saint, San Mateo, was nowhere to be found.45 So in the indigenous realm the two levels of the cult of saints, the household and the community, were quite separate or independent, even though they were connected. The Toluca Valley offers one important case; whether the situation was the same in other parts of central Mexico, and among the Spaniards, needs to be investigated thoroughly, given that it may challenge our understanding of the spread of beliefs. Yet another aspect of the cult of household saints to consider is the place in which they were kept. Here the literature tells us that the Spaniards put images in an oratorio, or oratory, usually a room in the house where family members worshipped paintings and small statues. From the Council of Trent to the various Mexican Provincial Councils, the Church required oratories to be licensed.46 Granted, oratories of this type were likely to be found only among the wealthy or relatively well-­off. Indeed, only a few individuals mentioned an oratory in their testaments and inventories, such as Antonio de Candia and his wife Lucía de Sariñana in Mexico City, who owned more than forty images; Francisco Pérez Osorio, who had a house worth over 10,000 pesos also in Mexico City; and the hacendada widow María Rosa Yáñez de Vera in Puebla.47 Poor Spaniards were often not in the position to afford a separate space fully dedicated to the saints. In such cases, it was more probable to find an altar, that is, a table with some prints or simple images in the corner of a room. Moreover, we can imagine that quite a few individuals set up their places in an informal way, without licenses or permits. On the indigenous side, we know that before the conquest, the populations of central Mexico often had a separate building within a house complex to keep figurines and representations of deities and animals. Once the cult of Catholic saints spread among them, these images entered the same building, which was then called santocalli, or house of the saints. Thus the indigenous household was made up of buildings around a central patio, one for the original couple, others for the children who married and stayed in the household, and one for the saints, as if they were members on the same grounds.48 By the early eighteenth century, however, something was changing, as shown by documents from the Toluca Valley. Testators referred to their house as a main residential building in which everybody lived, and at times called it ichantzinco Dios, or the home of God, because the saints were in there as well, a defining

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characteristic of the dwelling. Hence the house complex in the valley had moved from various separate structures around a patio to one building for all the household members, images included. It was, in effect, more similar to the Spanish residence model.49 Assessing the extent to which this kind of transformation happened across central Mexico allows a step forward not only in the study of the cult of saints but also in our knowledge of indigenous spaces and the effects of interactions in colonial society at the level of daily life. Issues of chronology, typology, and space are then at the center of the cult of household saints. Many questions remain for the Spanish and the indigenous realms alike, and a close study of both sides would make comparisons more meaningful and questions of convergence, divergence, and influence more sophisticated. Undeniably, moving the analysis to the household level can be difficult, but a shift in the sources normally used for saints can open more than one path in this exploration. The field has relied heavily on chronicles, sermons, reports, and texts for religious instruction written by the clergy, as well as Inquisition records and at times lawsuits. Now we need to examine systematically the so-­called mundane documents, such as testaments, inventories, and records of purchase and sale, or more broadly notarial records. Indeed, there we find images owned and bequeathed, bought and sold, as well as details about the contexts, places, and time. Stephanie Wood showed the way with her article some time ago, and a few scholars have used testaments to get to religiosity and beliefs, although not in the realm of household saints.50 By shifting in this direction, the full potential of the household dimension can emerge and reveal fascinating dynamics in terms of relations with the supernatural, religion in the context of colonization, and the building of a new society, as well as the links between materiality and belief.

From the Ritual to the Material Ultimately, there is another shift broader than the one in sources, although necessarily related to mundane documents, which is helpful in moving the study of the cult of saints into the household realm. The analysis can open onto a wider set of registers by focusing not only on the theological or spiritual dimensions of the cult but also on the more tangible ones, or, in other words, by adding the material component to the emphasis of the existing literature on the ritual. After all, a study of the various aspects of the cult mentioned so far concerns not only the worship and ritual but also the physical aspects, such as buildings and altars. When considering sacred images, matter may embody the spiritual or, as Caroline Bynum has it, “in their insistent materiality, images do more than comment on, refer to, provide signs of, or gesture toward the divine. They lift matter toward God and reveal God through matter.”51 The

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material side is the one we should emphasize in colonial Latin American history. As seen in the works on material culture produced in various fields, from archaeology, anthropology, and art history to sociology and the history of science, images of saints are actual objects in people’s daily life.52 And we can gain insights on methodologies and approaches to specific sources such as inventories, for example, with their practices and often ambiguous terminology.53 Images as objects are artifacts in themselves, with their own life cycle in a way, from manufacture to use and repair when they get old; thus it is possible to reconstruct a sort of biography for them through similar questions to those asked of people: Where does a sacred image come from? Who made it? What functions does it serve? What happens to it over time?54 They also embody knowledge about craft and practices, as well as meanings and usages that accumulate over time, creating a sort of lineage or ancestry.55 At the same time they are used by people, they are in interaction with individuals, communities, and environments. In a sense, relations, actions, and social contexts give meanings to an object, and the object carries around these meanings while at the same time contributes to re-­creating and modifying the meanings themselves.56 As objects, sacred images are living matter; they are often taken to be what they represent and this makes them alive. Or, put another way, relations with them are modeled on human experience and bonds between individuals. In this way, they become like people and can be conceived as social actors, as having agency; or at times they are seen as having a changing nature, a hybrid between persons and things, similar to medieval relics, for instance.57 Thinking of images as artifacts opens the possibility of concentrating on their appearance as paintings, statues, prints, or engravings, as well as on the craft behind them. Canvases, called lienzos in Spanish, were very popular in the inventories and houses of Spaniards. They varied greatly in size, from three varas58 in height and two and a half in width to very small ones; they could range in value from the common 3 to 6 pesos, to as little as a few reales or 1 peso, also very common, and the exceptional 18 to 20 pesos. They could come with a gilded or wooden frame, which affected the price; for example, if the frame was made of ebony instead of common wood, it would have a higher price. Laminas were quite as ordinary as lienzos, and measurements, framing, and prices were very similar; at times there was some indication of the material of which they were made, such as “oja de lata,” or of the fact that they were covered with a glass.59 Small statues were also widespread, again with measurements comparable to small lienzos; they were called de bulto and were commonly of wood, more rarely of stone, wax, chalk, or even ivory, and dimensions and materials played a key role in their values, which were similar to those indicated for lienzos and laminas. Moreover, if the statue displayed

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clothing and jewelry the value increased: the image of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción that belonged to Lucía de Sariñana, with a silver crown, clothing, and a gilded base, was valued at 15 pesos. Finally, some images were described as “tabletas,” or tablets, usually of little value, while the least costly of all were estampas, or prints, available for just a few reales. And the value of an image decreased if it was old or in bad condition. Overall, the most expensive images for the Spaniards were always those of the Virgin and Christ, especially if the latter appeared on a crucifix, given that it could be made of a precious wood or ivory, with silver for the crown and the four angles of the cross, and a canopy, like the one of Francisco Pérez Osorio, valued at 25 pesos.60 As for the indigenous people, in the Toluca Valley, for example, images were usually small paintings on wood, or small stone or wooden statues, far less frequently canvases; they could vary a great deal in size or have additional embellishments such as a gilded frame. And the price was never mentioned, at least in testaments, apart from the one of Pascuala de la Cruz, an indigenous woman from Calimaya, stating that she bought an image of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe for 6 pesos in 1739.61 On the whole, the types of saints appear more humble than those the Spaniards possessed. With images as objects, questions arise about how they were manufactured and by whom, how images circulated, and the extent of home production. At times documents reveal noteworthy details about artisans involved in the crafting of saints. Take, for example, the agreement between José María Cri­ stóbal Porto and José Pío Hernández, in Mexico City, to form a “compañía,” or company, to produce lienzos: the latter, José Pío, contributed to the company by providing the house where the workshop would be set up, maintenance (food and basics) for José María, and 1 peso each day; José María was responsible for teaching José Pío how to prepare the colors and putting 200 pesos in the enterprise.62 Or a promise of payment signed by Ginés de Cárdenas from Puebla for the merchant Francisco Espino, who procured him various goods, among which there was “an handicraft of an image of Nuestra Señora for 38 pesos.”63 These cases say something about how saints could be acquired, although the two Josés may have crafted lienzos for confraternities and churches, as well as households; Ginés must have bought Nuestra Señora in a similar context, or he must have been a very wealthy man to pay for it all by himself. Moreover, focusing on the forms of saints allows us to put the complaints and ordinances of lay and church authorities about the appearance of saints into the reality of daily life. The reasons behind the increasing battles against unorthodox representations of household saints in the latter part of the eighteenth century are grounded in the kinds of images people were making, purchasing, or bequeathing.

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Altar saints were not the only types present in people’s homes and lives, though. Quite predictably, there are many references to reliquaries made of wood, gold, or silver with images of Christ, the Virgin, or saints as decoration and to rosaries with small crosses. The value of these objects was normally just a few pesos, while crosses were also used as jewelry, with precious stones, pearls, gold, and silver, and prices could rise to as much as 30 pesos. In the inventory of José Mariano de Ávila we even find rare mention of a medal of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe of silver, valued at 4 reales, and “a miracle of silver” of 1 peso and 4 reales, that is, one of the small objects that can be found in churches accompanying images of saints, used to ask for intervention or to give thanks for having received it.64 Much more unexpectedly, documents attest to the presence of images on tobacco containers, buttons, fans, housewares, knives, and other everyday objects, and even on people’s bodies as tattoos. Despite their ubiquitous presence in people’s lives, such types of images have received little or anecdotal mention. In his extensive treatment of images in Mexico, Gruzinski addresses saints as and on everyday objects, although not in relation to the household space and its members or in terms of their appearance, manufacture, and circulation.65 A thorough analysis of all the varied forms in which saints enter the house is the key to understanding their role and their relationship with individuals. And a relationship it certainly was, given that people interacted with saints in a variety of ways and contexts. The most obvious one was worship, already mentioned here and often examined in the literature, although usually more in the context of church ceremonies and festivities. In general, Spanish and indigenous people alike placed offerings on the altars—flowers and candles were common, while jewels, oil, and copal incense varied depending on one’s ethnicity; indigenous people also swept the floor, following an ancient tradition.66 The switch to a different type of primary source reveals new aspects of the worship, however. Consider, for instance, the testament of don Baltasar de los Reyes, from a tlaxilacalli close to the city of Toluca, who left a piece of land whose proceeds would go to support two images he entrusted to his sons, a clear illustration of the resources behind the offerings, as well as of the essential link between land and saints. Moreover, mundane sources help uncover the language used to describe the cult. For instance, for Nahua testators, to worship saints meant “serving” or “taking good care of ” them, and a thorough study of the terms used by the Spaniards may reveal interesting parallels. Certainly, this brings us a step closer to understanding people’s perceptions and beliefs.67 Household saints were not always the objects of good or proper treatment, however. Images were beaten, broken, turned upside down, or thrown out of

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a window when they disappointed the owner in some way. It could happen to anybody, from the modest Spanish Diego Díaz in Puebla, who hit an image of a saint with his shoe in the middle of a family dispute, to Cristóbal Vicente de Rivera, procurador of the audiencia of Mexico City (lawyer of the high court), who threw out on the patio two images of Nuestra Señora belonging to his wife. Anger caused by tense relationships was behind the acts, and the images became a way to vent one’s frustration, as Diego put it in addressing the women of his house: “In taxing my patience, you will turn me against God.” In both cases, relatives who witnessed the scene felt that they needed to report the men to the Inquisition to ease their conscience.68 From his words, it appears Diego was aware that he did something wrong, that his act could be seen as a challenge to God or colonial authorities, and surely it was interpreted as such by the relatives who denounced him. An exploration of who accused and who abused in similar incidents, as well as the reasons behind such acts, certainly adds to our understanding of the complicated relationship with household images and what they meant to an individual, whether indigenous or Spanish.69 There is another kind of interaction to examine as well: one among individuals concerning images rather than with the images themselves. The focal point is inheritance, since testators bequeathed paintings, statues, and prints to their heirs as part of their movable property. On the indigenous side, the Toluca Valley provides the most systematic study of inheritance strategies and patterns; the saints were not only transferable possessions but also one of the constituent three parts of the house complex, along with buildings and land. They gave the household its identity, symbolically directing it, and through them the heirs took part of the original entity with them when they moved away to establish their own household. This came to be even more significant during the eighteenth century, when the house complex was made up of only one main residential building and parcels of residential land were more difficult to divide. By then saints had become the only easily partible property.70 The challenge is now to determine whether indigenous individuals in other parts of central Mexico related to saints in this way, as well as to study inheritance practices among the Spaniards much more closely and systematically. A comprehensive and comparative study of patterns of inheritance for Spanish and indigenous people will answer questions about what types of heirs and images are involved, about differences between indigenous and Spanish practices, and ultimately about the meaning of images in people’s lives. Finally, another aspect of the material lens of analysis is that of the saints’ changing nature and hybridity. As symbols of the indigenous household, saints were sort of objects-­spirits on the altar and at the same time members in their own right, thus assuming a hybrid nature, both things and persons.

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The case of María Hernández, who lived near the city of Toluca, depicts it very effectively, since she called her saints “residents” of the house; other testators referred to their saints as presiding or being in charge.71 An even more powerful sign of the saints’ status as household members is that they were also proprietors in the indigenous realm. When a testator distributed his or her possessions among heirs, household images were often considered as entitled to a share; thus they ended up owning part of a family’s land or its valuable maguey plants. In practice, this meant that an heir was put in charge of cultivating the parcel or the magueys and extracting the resources necessary to provide the saint with anything required for a proper offering. The above-­mentioned example of don Baltasar de los Reyes is a case in point, given that his sons would have to cultivate a piece of land designated as the inheritance of the images of Santa María de la Asunción and the Virgen de Guadalupe. This is only one aspect of the hybrid nature of household saints; more remain to be discovered, and indigenous vocabulary and practices can suggest fruitful areas of research for the Spanish realm as well. Ultimately, a study of the materials, techniques, and interactions of the saints reveals the complicated relations and meanings they generate. In turn, such relations and meanings make the value of the images tangible, opening new perspectives onto the economy of the household and its social networks, as well as the role of the sacred in the intimate space of the home. ——— The work done thus far on saints in the history of colonial Latin America has been extensive and valuable. It has re-­created and examined the cult of saints in churches and streets, focusing on processions, miracles, and saints’ life accounts, as well as on how saints were part of funeral rites or contributed in building a sense of corporate identity. And it has done so exploiting a range of sources, from hagiographies, chronicles, treatises and devotional texts to lawsuits and, at times, testaments. This chapter suggests bringing the analysis to the level of the household and expanding it to include the material dimension, which opens new possibilities in the study of sacred images, including the use of sources thus far rarely considered for this topic. The household focus has already begun with such sources on the indigenous side, above all Nahuatl testaments. We need to expand such research across central Mexico through comparative studies, and especially on the Spanish realm, to consider the indigenous and the Spanish worlds together. Household saints are in and of themselves scarcely studied, but they promise to enlarge our knowledge in multiple ways. First, through them we can study indigenous and Spanish interactions in matters of religion from a new

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angle, clarifying the contributions of each side as well as the dynamics that brought about the creation of a new cult. And we can do this at the level of individuals and homes, not merely through primarily ecclesiastical and institutional sources. Second, they facilitate an exploration of how rituals can be interpreted through the material and the tangible, grounding them in daily life practices and activities. Third, by focusing on rites and beliefs often considered outside of the church-­sanctioned domain, we can reflect upon the alternative religious forms created by the encounter of two traditions. Some of these forms have survived until today and color the special relationship that Mexicans have with saints; others have been suppressed by the authorities or left behind over time. Studying them through the colonial period will help us understand more contemporary religious practices as seen in anthropological works, be they community saints and celebrations, indigenous ancestral traditions, or home altars.72 The origins and evolution of the household saints will contribute to our knowledge of what such practices have gained or lost through time, depending on the point of view. In the end, focusing on the household and its materiality helps turn the sacred into something palpable, in the footsteps of what indigenous people and Spaniards alike did centuries ago. It is also a way, I hope, to answer Peter Brown’s call in his lucid and compelling new preface to his iconic book to create “a more three-­dimensional, ‘dialogic’ model, appropriate to a Christianity caught in a wide variety of religious languages and committed to a wide range of social constituencies.”73

Pa r t I I

Secularism and Its Discontents

6 An Ordinary Soviet Death S c i e n t i f ic At h e i s m , S o c i a l i s t R i t ua l s , a n d L i f e ’s F i n a l Qu e s t ion

Victoria Smolkin

In 1965—at an atheist conference gathered to take stock of the Soviet state’s most recent antireligious campaign (1958–64)—an atheist shared a story with his colleagues.1 Not long before, a factory worker had died in a small village north of Leningrad, and the factory’s managers, Communist Party cell leaders, and trade union representatives were charged with organizing his funeral. Since the worker was an atheist, the funeral committee agreed that there would be a civil ceremony. However, on the day of the funeral, when the factory collective arrived at the cemetery, they found the local priest already performing a religious service over the worker’s grave. Faced with this unexpected scene—the atheist continued—the factory collective had no choice but to wait for the service to conclude, but then, when it did, they began to “bicker” about who would give a speech about their deceased comrade. As the factory collective continued to argue, the priest defused the situation and himself gave the eulogy, “displaying how well he had mastered what he had been taught at the theological academy.”2 Unlike the worker’s factory comrades, the priest, it turned out, knew the deceased intimately— not just as a worker but as a family man and member of the community. He listed his children by name, talked about how well he kept his small garden and how he had been a good neighbor. When it was time to speak about the man’s life as a laborer, the priest said only that if the deceased had not been a good worker, so many people would not have gathered for his funeral. After a speech like this—the atheist concluded—“neither the party comrades, nor the trade union committee, nor the factory directors—no one dared to open his mouth.”3 127

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For the Soviet atheist recounting the tale of an ordinary worker’s funeral, the story was not just about the failure of the Soviet collective to effectively speak about and ritualize the passing of their comrade but also about the silence of Soviet Communism on life’s final question. The fact that, decades after the October Revolution, an ordinary Soviet worker remained in religion’s embrace revealed that the revolution had not penetrated the Soviet home, the Soviet family, or the Soviet soul. Indeed, as the atheist suggested to his colleagues, Marxist theory had proven inadequate for understanding the social reality that they encountered on the ground. Religion, rather than a static bastion of tradition, was a dynamic and modernizing phenomenon that “fought to keep believers in the church.” It achieved this with rituals that gave meaning to human life and, of course, death. The atheist noted that while “the art of preaching is meticulously taught in the theological academy,” Soviet atheists lacked the training to address spiritual concerns.4 When they found themselves called upon to address them, they responded with an awkward silence, or worse yet, unseemly bickering. Whereas religion offered robust answers to life’s questions and trained clergy to satisfy spiritual needs, Soviet atheism remained silent when faced with ordinary life—and ordinary death.5 Communism was imagined as a world without religion. The Soviet experiment was the first attempt to turn this vision into reality. When the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917, they promised to liberate the people from the old world—to overcome exploitation with justice, conflict with harmony, superstition with reason, and religion with atheism. In their effort to remove religion from Soviet life, they renounced the institutions, theologies, and life-­ worlds of traditional religions. In their place, they offered the Communist Party and Marxism-­Leninism: a party that claimed a monopoly on power and truth, and an ideology that promised to transform the world and give new meaning to collective and individual life. For the Bolsheviks, religion was, above all, an obstacle to their monopoly on political, ideological, and spiritual authority, and atheism was a measure of Soviet citizens’ ideological “consciousness.” Once in power, the Bolsheviks used different strategies to turn their vision into reality, from legal and administrative reforms and political repression, to education, enlightenment, and cultural transformation. But behind the veneer of godlessness created by antireligious sloganeering, the reality was that the party had neither a systematic approach to managing religion nor a clear sense of the role that atheism would play in the Soviet project. Despite the institutional secularization of the state, the party’s commitment to atheism, and several aggressive antireligious campaigns—most prominently during Joseph Stalin’s Cultural Revolution (1928– 32) and Nikita Khrushchev’s project of “building Communism” (1956–64)—

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Soviet Communism never managed to overcome religion.6 Indeed, religion remained a problem for Soviet Communism until the end. This essay suggests that ultimately, the failure of Soviet atheism to overcome and replace religion had to do with its failure to address the narratives and practices associated with death—especially the death of ordinary people, like the factory worker in whose name the Bolsheviks had made a revolution.

From Church to State: The Secularization of Soviet Life One of modernity’s central stories is that the work of caring for the people shifts from the church to the state.7 How individuals experience rites of passage underscores this transformation. In the Soviet case, this process was more swift and radical than elsewhere in Europe.8 Whereas before 1917, religious institutions and clergy oversaw both the administrative and ritual aspects of life-­cycle transitions, after the revolution, the Bolsheviks’ creation of a government bureaucracy to register changes in civil status placed birth, marriage, and death under the jurisdiction of the state.9 This transfer was a critical component of the party’s secularization program. Indeed, one of the new regime’s first acts was to remove religion from government and education. Issued on January 23, 1918, the decree “On the separation of church from state and school from church” nationalized religious property; took religious education out of the schools; and created the ZAGS, a secular institution to take over the registration of births, marriages, deaths, and divorces (all now constituted as civil acts).10 In addition to removing religion from education and government, the 1918 decree took the administration of religious affairs out of the hands of the clergy and created a new bond between Soviet citizens and the state. These Bolshevik policies created a secular framework that dramatically reduced the autonomy of religious institutions and made the state the final authority over religious life. The creation of a state bureaucracy to register civil acts was a central part of the Bolshevik program to construct a modern secular state, but it was also a powerful antireligious weapon. As the Bolshevik leader Lev Trotsky put it, “The worker’s state has rejected church ceremony, and informed its citizens that they have the right to be born, marry, and die without the mysterious gestures and exhortations of persons clad in cassocks, gowns, and other ecclesiastical vestments.”11 The new 1918 legal code declared that “marriages conducted through religious rites and with the participation of spiritual figures give no rights or obligations if they are not registered in the prescribed way,” and only civil acts registered by the ZAGS would be legally recognized.12 By

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taking over the management of birth, marriage, and death from religious institutions, the Bolsheviks sought to undermine religion’s symbolic power and marginalize it in social life. Indeed, this goal was made explicit by Deputy Justice Commissar Nikolai Krylenko, who described the new legislation as a weapon whose “spearhead is pointed against church marriage in order to destroy its authority in the eyes of the masses.”13 Above all, the Bolsheviks sought to remove religion from public life. The 1918 decree stipulated that the activities of government and social organizations were no longer to be accompanied by public religious rituals or ceremonies, and private rituals could be performed only “in as much as they do not disturb the social order and are not accompanied by infringements on the rights of citizens of the Soviet republic.”14 Atheism, however, had no restrictions on its entry into the public sphere. Religion thus became something that happened on the margins—an individual affair to be practiced in private, in a distinct time and space—whereas atheism was cast as the norm at the center of the new Soviet cosmos. At the same time, as an instrument of secularization, the ZAGS was more destructive than constructive. It remained, above all, a bureaucratic organ that simply recorded changes in civil status—a fact that is poignantly captured in Dziga Vertov’s film Man with a Movie Camera (1929), which shows a procession of people at the ZAGS office registering marriages, births, divorces, and deaths in quick succession. The initial goal of the ZAGS was to enforce Soviet legal norms, not solemnify rites of passage or endow life with meaning. Whether Soviet Communism would, or even should, provide its own rites of passage remained an open question. Debates about the place and meaning of rituals in the new communist world had begun even before the revolution.15 Some within the socialist camp, like the historian of religion and long-­time Bolshevik Vladimir Bonch-­ Bruevich, saw the development of secular rites as the natural outcome of secularization. After the revolution, Bonch-­Bruevich wrote, Soviet people would have the option to mark these transitions either “in the civic way” or “in the old way, with the clergy.”16 Others remained ambivalent about whether the revolution should have its own rituals or, indeed, whether rituals had any place in communist society. In fact, these debates had begun before 1917. On one end were those who saw rituals as inherently primitive and backward, and sought to eradicate religious holidays, rituals, rites, and even military oaths. Their vision was of a society devoid of senseless ritual acts and freed from the base craving for spectacle. As the godfather of Soviet atheism, Emelian Iaroslavskii, recounted at the first congress of the League of the Godless in 1925, one fervent materialist, in his war against what he called “Communist double-­ belief [dvoeverie],” even willed his corpse to a factory to be made into soap.17

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Others pointed to the existence of rituals in different cultures across time in order to suggest that rituals were not inherently retrograde but a universal human phenomenon. Given the transformative potential of ritual experience, they argued, it was in the party’s best interests to offer the people new socialist rituals.18 Others saw rituals as a vestige of the old way of life out of which the masses would eventually mature, and maintained that the party should satisfy the popular need for ritual as a transitional measure. In the meantime, it was better that these be “our” socialist rituals, cleansed of mystical and supernatural elements, than “their” religious ones. Indeed, even as Trotsky welcomed the “liberation” of the Soviet people from the church and its rituals, he also argued that if the Bolsheviks hoped to build a new world without religion, they had to address the ritual question. He cautioned against ignoring the significance of ritual in the revolution’s battle with religion, arguing that religion is most tenacious in the sphere of everyday life. “How is marriage to be celebrated, or the birth of a child in the family? How is one to pay the tribute of affection to the beloved dead?” Trotsky asked. “It is on this need of marking the principal signposts along the road of life that church ritual depends.” In his writing, Trotsky pointed to the emotional power of rituals and underscored the political stakes of leaving this space empty. “It is much easier for the state to do without rituals, than for everyday life,” Trotsky argued, and those who saw the new world without rituals were going to extremes. “In the battle with the old [way of life],” Trotsky warned, they “would break their forehead, nose, and other most essential organs.”19 While the Bolsheviks debated the contours of the new Communist way of life, Soviet people continued to fall in love and get married, to form families and have children, and, inevitably, to die. Yet even as they denounced the old way of life along with the institutions, beliefs, and practices that ordered it, the Bolsheviks were not quick to offer meaningful replacements—in large part because they believed that the Soviet people of the future would have no need for such meaningless frivolity.20 As a 1928 painting titled V Volostnom ZAGSe (In the District ZAGS) illustrates, the early Soviet vision of the Communist way of life was ascetic and unadorned. Saturated in a deep red hue, the painting depicts a rural couple—the groom still in his Red Army uniform—merrily registering their union in a dark ZAGS office as their comrades looked on.21 Inasmuch as there were efforts to introduce socialist rituals in the early Soviet period, they were the work of a small number of ritual enthusiasts who experimented with socialist baptisms (“octoberings”), weddings, and funerals. These “red rituals” were coordinated through local soviets and party and Komsomol cells, and usually took place in the factory or collective farm where the individual worked. The rituals themselves were stripped of ornate elements

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and often became a platform for antireligious propaganda rather than a commemoration of a rite of passage in a person’s life. Moreover, even as the party propagandized early socialist rituals in the press, their awkward implementation often made them the object of satire rather than a model for emulation. In a 1935 Pravda article, for example, the popular writers Il’ia Il’f and Evgenii Petrov parodied a socialist birth ceremony, describing how the head of the local soviet presented each newborn with a red satin blanket, for which he would “exact payment” by “standing above the crib of the infant, [and] read[ing] a two-­hour report on the international situation,” while the “adults smoked dejectedly.” Then, when the report was finished, “everyone, with a feeling of awkwardness, went home,” where “of course, everything went back to normal. . . . But the feeling of dissatisfaction remained for a long time.”22 Stories like this highlighted the disparity between the lofty ideological aims of socialist rituals and the ways in which their execution fell short. In the early Soviet period, then, the Bolsheviks created a litany of political rituals that shaped the symbolic organization of public life yet made little effort to provide socialist alternatives to the religious rites and traditions that shaped private worlds and communal experience. Despite revolutionary dreams of remaking society and human nature, their sporadic attempts to introduce socialist rites into everyday life were largely unsuccessful, and the question of how to transform religious rites and beliefs into socialist rituals and convictions remained unanswered. As the writer Kornei Chukovskii observed in 1921, “The revolution confiscated former rituals and decorum and did not provide her own. [During funerals] [a]ll wear their hat, smoke, and speak about the corpses as they would of dogs.”23 In place of religion, the revolution left a vacuum that threatened to empty death, and consequently life, of meaning. By the end of the 1930s, as Stalin turned away from militant atheism toward a more pragmatic position on religion, even such episodic efforts to create socialist rituals disappeared. With the consolidation of Stalinist culture, public festivals were promoted as the authentic expression of Soviet identity, whereas private rites were depicted as a holdover of religious backwardness and bourgeois sentimentality. This sentiment is captured in a 1939 antireligious poster that shows the world split in half between religion (on the left, in darkness) and socialism (on the right, in light). On the left, a priest kneels on the ground next to a price list for weddings, baptisms, and funerals; on the right, a young Soviet couple (now dressed in neat middle-­class fashion rather than army uniforms) looks down at the priest with benevolent condescension as young people dance in front of the cultural club in the background. Below, the slogan reads, “You are waiting in vain at the church door, priest. We live wonderfully without icons and God!”24 Of course, behind the propaganda, many Soviet

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people remained connected to religion, whereas socialist rituals and the new Communist way of life remained something they encountered in propaganda posters rather than experienced in their everyday lives. After the war, however, the profile of the ZAGS bureaucracy began to change. A 1946 government decree instructed the ZAGS to make the registration of civil acts into a solemn ceremony by beautifying ZAGS spaces and training ZAGS workers. In part, these reforms reflected the party’s mission to regenerate Soviet society after the trauma of war by strengthening the Soviet family, the foundations of which had been shaken as spouses died, children were orphaned, and new unions were formed without old ones being broken.25 By transforming the ZAGS from a purely administrative into an “educational” organ, the party sought to connect each small Soviet family to the big Soviet family of the state.26 Despite these postwar initiatives, little changed in the work of the ZAGS, and it was only after Stalin’s death, with the rise to power of Nikita Khrushchev, that reforms began to be implemented. In 1956, the ZAGS was transferred from the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to the executive committees of the local soviets. ZAGS offices were moved out of police stations, and the education and training requirements for ZAGS employees were raised. The ZAGS also worked to improve the “solemnity” of civil acts, starting with such basic changes as scheduling separate hours for the registration of joyous occasions like birth and marriage and less happy ones like divorce and death.27 Finally, with the start of Khrushchev’s antireligious campaign in the late 1950s, the ZAGS was integrated into the ideological establishment. It became the site of the party’s resurrected initiative to produce and inculcate socialist rituals as part of the atheist project. In the forty years since the revolution, the profile and mission of the ZAGS had transformed: if in the early Soviet period the party used the ZAGS as a tool for secularization, by the Khrushchev era, it deployed the ZAGS for the sacralization of Soviet life.

Distracting the People from Religion: Socialist Rituals as Atheist Weapons In the wake of the political and ideological destabilization created by Stalin’s death, Khrushchev tried to place the Soviet project on new foundations. For Khrushchev, political de-­Stalinization, economic modernization, and ideological mobilization were part of the broader effort to return revolutionary vitality to Marxist-­Leninist ideology by “building Communism.” Communism’s arrival, Khrushchev proclaimed, was imminent: the “grandchildren” of the revolution—the youth of the 1960s—would live to see it.

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However, religion continued to remain a stain on Soviet modernity, an alien ideology within Soviet borders. Since religion remained a fact of Soviet life, and since Khrushchev, a true Communist believer, imagined Communism as a world without religion, atheism returned to Soviet politics. Under Khrushchev, the state mobilized the most extensive antireligious campaign in Soviet history, closing nearly half of the country’s religious spaces, instituting severe and repressive constraints on the autonomy of religious organizations and clergy, and investing unprecedented resources into creating a centralized atheist apparatus made up of specialized atheist institutions and professional atheist cadres. Rituals went from being considered a meaningless “survival” of a former way of life to becoming the impetus for the creation of new ritual spaces, services, and material attributes; ritual art and songs; specialized methodologies and trained professionals; and, of course, rituals themselves. For the state, the ritual project was a way to address the major demographic, social, and cultural transformations taking place in Soviet society as a result of rapid urbanization, the growth of private housing, and the impact of de-­ Stalinization.28 The Komsomol played a central role in resurrecting the ritual question under Khrushchev, much as it had in the early Soviet period, when it was on the front lines of the Cultural Revolution. At the XIII Komsomol Congress, held on April 15–18, 1958, the leader of the Komsomol, Aleksandr Shelepin—a Khrushchev protégé and an active member of the team mobilizing Khrushchev’s antireligious campaign—spoke extensively about the need for new socialist rites of passage to accompany important milestones in the lives of Soviet youth. For thousands of years the people created a wedding ritual, but now everything has been far too simplified. We need to introduce our own good wedding rituals. The wedding should always remain in young people’s memories. Maybe the couple should give solemn oaths to honestly carry out their spousal duties? Maybe we should wear wedding rings? There is nothing religious in this, it is just a commemoration and a sign for others that a person is married. And marriage certificates should be beautiful, commemorative. ZAGS buildings should be well maintained and well furnished. . . . Everyone knows that young people get their passports when they are sixteen. We should introduce a traditional ceremony to give them the passport, and it would be good if communists and exemplary workers [came to this ceremony] to wish them well. We should also commemorate such significant milestones in a young person’s life as school graduation, the assignment of a professional specialization, the birth of a child, and leaving for military service.29 Discussions about new rituals that followed the Komsomol congress touched on a number of ideological tropes then circulating in Soviet public

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life: marriage, the family, and morality; improvements in the standards of living and the culture of Soviet everyday life; the revived interest in folk and ethnic traditions; and, of course, the battle against religion. But there was also a more prosaic element to the call for socialist rituals, evident in the Komsomol’s attention to the need not just for ideologically correct ceremonies but also for dignified ritual spaces, available goods, and well-­trained specialists. In his congress speech, Shelepin argued that there was no reason why Soviet youth should be denied the pleasure of material comfort and the celebration of private happiness. He even wrote to Kliment Voroshilov, the head of the Supreme Soviet, requesting a three-­day paid vacation to be granted to newlyweds.30 As Soviet youngsters moved into their own apartments, the state tried to follow them into their new private domestic spaces with various efforts to discipline Communist morality.31 The Komsomol drew attention to the importance of morality in marriage and the family, issuing reports like, “The Problem of Regulating Marital and Familial Relations (Marriage Is a Serious Affair).”32 Beginning married life with a solemn ceremony, the report argued, underscored the importance that the state placed on the institution of marriage. Shortly after the central Komsomol congress, Leningrad’s Komsomol organization began to work with the local ZAGS organs to establish the first Soviet Wedding Palace, which opened its doors on December 1, 1959. Soon after, two more Wedding Palaces were opened in Moscow (the first at the end of 1960, the second in 1962), and dozens more were established across the USSR over the next three decades.33 Komsomol, party, and cultural organizations invented new traditions, with model scenarios for the new Soviet wedding even taking into account such factors as the local ethnic and cultural context, and whether the wedding would take place in a village, provincial town, or major city.34 Socialist rituals also began to appear in the press, with some presenting them as a weapon in the battle against religion, and others returning to the question of whether Soviet people needed rituals at all. In the summer of 1959, the Leningrad Komsomol newspaper Smena published a series of articles that presented socialist rituals as a way to instill Communist morality and “deal a blow to religion.”35 Meanwhile, on October 3, 1959, the central state newspaper, Izvestiia published an article that asked “Are Soviet Rituals Needed?” initiating a debate that continued across several issues.36 But, by the end of the 1950s, with the antireligious campaign underway, the debate was no longer about whether or not rituals should exist in Soviet society but instead about how rituals might better serve both the party’s ideological goals and society’s spiritual needs: Who would create them? How would they be inculcated? Was the process to be spontaneous or directed from above? What values should they embody? And what needed to be done for them to become an organic part of Soviet life?

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While the ritual project was introduced to the public through various Komsomol publications and initiatives, socialist rituals themselves were developed behind closed doors. In academic research institutes and cultural enlightenment organizations, professional ethnographers, historians, and folklorists, as well as amateur enthusiasts and ZAGS workers, worked out proposals for new Soviet rituals to accompany public holidays, calendar festivals, feats of labor, and, of course, rites of passage. But from the outset, it was the antireligious campaign that gave the socialist ritual project the necessary political momentum. The paltry results of Khrushchev’s antireligious efforts revealed that religion could not be overcome by either force or argument. Rituals, on the other hand, were seen as a synthesis of reason and emotion, and therefore the most effective channel through which to affect the spiritual conversion of Soviet citizens to Communism. Rituals were also increasingly important to atheist work because they were central to how the party understood religion, seeing in ritual observance the best measure of religious vitality, as well as one of the most significant sources of church revenue. The socialist ritual project, therefore, had two aims: to weaken the church and religion by undermining religious rites, and to buttress the party and Communism. This cast socialist rituals as Soviet atheism’s strongest weapon. To weaken Russian Orthodoxy, the state, through its Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church (CAROC), put pressure on the church to implement internal reforms, which it did in 1961. CAROC made sure that the initiative had the appearance of coming from the church itself, so as to uphold the fiction of the separation of church and state. As the chair of CAROC, Vladimir Kuroedov, explained in his report to the party’s Central Committee, he had “convinced Patriarch Aleksii to give a directive to the church administration to transfer the clergy to salary under the pretext that this would put an end to various misunderstandings between the clergy and local finance organs about taxation.”37 Under the guidance of CAROC, the Orthodox Church made the clergy into salaried employees—a deliberate strategy to decrease religious ritual observance, ostensibly by removing the clergy’s “material incentive” to officiate rites. The new policy also required individuals who turned to the church for baptisms, marriages, and funerals to register their personal information with the parish administration to create disincentives for those who did not want an official record of their religious observance. Moreover, the permission of both parents was now required to baptize a child, and baptizing a child without parental permission was categorized as an infringement on the conscience of atheist parents. What this meant, in practice, was that it became much more difficult for grandmothers to baptize grandchildren in secret, although often the supposed secrecy was a way to give parents deniability in order to protect them from potential repercussions. As one CAROC

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plenipotentiary noted, requiring documentation allowed one city soviet to find out about eleven Communists who had baptized their children, and even though four of them initially denied that they had given permission for the baptism, their signatures on the receipts proved their complicity.38 Introducing the above measures also gave the council information about believers who could then be targeted more effectively for “educational work.”39 To illustrate the reforms’ economic impact on the church, Kuroedov explained that whereas before the fees for rites were paid to the priest, creating a “material interest in performing as many rituals as possible,” the reforms would “paralyze the material stimulus for increasing rituals.” He noted that, before the reforms, each of the four priests of the Smolensk Church in Leningrad earned eleven hundred to thirteen hundred rubles each month—adding that this amount did not include undeclared income and was about ten times higher than the average Soviet salary—but that now the church set clerical salaries at one hundred to five hundred rubles in major cities, and eighty to two hundred rubles in rural areas. Kuroedov also reviewed the clergy’s responses to the reforms, reporting that while most had reacted “loyally” to the new state of affairs, those who had a “longer view” understood that the reforms weakened the church. He reported that, in a letter to the patriarch, the metropolitan of Krasnodar wrote that “the transfer of the clergy to salaries will undermine the initiative of the clergy in performing their spiritual duties, which will become a real help to atheist work, which is being conducted in all directions. All of this will lead to the decline of the church, and I can see no measures that would prevent this.” A Leningrad priest, meanwhile, was reported to have said, “Now I have no need to try and conduct as many rituals as possible and stress my health. If before we had an interest in holding daily services, now the less there are the better.” Another priest maintained that if he “could have foreseen that he would be earning 150 to 200 rubles per month, of which 100 to 130 remain after taxes,” he would have never entered the seminary.40 However, CAROC soon learned that even these restrictions were not insurmountable obstacles. Over the course of 1962, the council met to discuss the reasons for the “tenacity of religious rites” and why administrative measures did not lead to “a significant decline in religious vitality.”41 Noting the ineffectiveness of both church reforms and antireligious measures, CAROC now proposed that the reason religious rites did not disappear under the pressure of administrative restrictions was because there were no attractive socialist alternatives: Almost everywhere, religious rituals are not opposed with captivating, emotionally saturated civic rituals. The registration of births and marriages

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in most cases takes place prosaically, formalistically, in inappropriate spaces, which does not reflect either the importance or solemnity of these events. It is no coincidence that certain citizens perform religious rituals after registering marriage and birth at the ZAGS, even though they are in essence unbelieving people. Our composers, writers, and artists still have not created songs, pictures, and scenarios connected with Soviet civic rituals.42 To address these issues, CAROC recommended that local party organs “systematically work on the inculcation of rituals into the registration of civil acts, executing this work with ethnic and local specificities and traditions in mind.” More specifically, the council proposed that local organs adopt the Leningrad model and create ritual commissions—comprised of representatives from party, soviet, Komsomol, trade union, and social and cultural organizations— to assist the ZAGS in improving civil registrations.43 In January 1963, CAROC brought together representatives from the council, party, Ministry of Culture, Znanie, and Ministry of Justice (which oversaw the ZAGS) to discuss “work on distracting the population from taking part in religious rites by inculcating Socialist rituals.”44 To be sure, CAROC’s claim that religion persisted because “religious rituals are not opposed with beautiful Soviet rituals” was convenient because it shifted the blame away from the council itself.45 But it also underscored the bigger lesson that Soviet atheism was ultimately inadequate to the task of ideological conversion. This gave the socialist ritual project a particular urgency and, by the end of the Khrushchev era, placed it prominently on the party’s agenda, which speaks to the significant transformations taking place within Soviet ideology under Khrushchev.

From State to Church: The Sacralization of Soviet Life In the history of the Soviet Communist Party’s engagement with religion, there was a moment when it began to understand both religion and atheism differently. This moment began in 1963, when the party’s Central Committee convened two plenums—in June and November—devoted to ideological questions and, more specifically, to the role of atheism in the system of Communist upbringing. The Central Committee’s June Plenum, held on June 18– 24, 1963, was convened to work out the positive definition of the scientific atheist worldview and underscored that during the new phase of the transition from socialism to Communism—when the Soviet Union, a country that began by “lag[ging] behind in every respect,” had climbed to “the heights of socioeconomic progress”—the war between the two dominant world systems

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had become concentrated in the sphere of ideology.46 Following the June Plenum, the party’s Ideological Commission met in the fall of 1963 to discuss why religion remained part of Soviet life while atheism struggled to make inroads into Soviet society. Even though there was anxiety about atheist prospects, there was still optimism that with the necessary political will and resources, former misconceptions and approaches could be corrected, and the atheist project would succeed. Socialist rituals were central to this calculation. While various initiatives to “distract” the population from religious rites and produce socialist rituals had been discussed since the late 1950s, it was not until the political establishment began to appreciate the stakes of the competition with the church that the ritual project got the political will and resources to be implemented on a grand scale. In November 1963, socialist rituals were the main item on the Ideological Commission’s agenda, and Leonid Il’ichev, the chair of the commission, invited officials from around the country to report on progress. The secretary of the Leningrad party committee, Iurii Lavrikov, shared that in 1959, around 25 percent of marriages and 30 percent of births were accompanied by a religious ceremony, and the number of religious funerals was “very high.” When Leningrad officials tried to understand the reality behind the numbers, they found that the statistics were high because of “people who observe religious rituals but, as a rule, do not believe.” To address “this category of people,” party cadres believed only one measure would work: “to oppose religious rites with our Soviet rituals.”47 Since socialist rituals were already being introduced in the city—the first Wedding Palace had opened in 1959, followed by another in 1962, and the construction of the “Maliutka” (Baby) palace for birth registration ceremonies was already under way—Lavrikov also shared how socialist rituals had changed the city’s patterns of religious observance. He reported that after the opening of the wedding palaces, the number of religious weddings declined from 25 to 0.24 percent, so that “in essence the religious ritual was brought to naught.”48 These statistics made an impression. They suggested that the socialist wedding was an unqualified success, and socialist rituals could, indeed, be a powerful atheist weapon. The audience showered Lavrikov with questions: How many wedding palaces were already open, and could they accommodate the demand? What about the birth registration ritual? What did the ritual specialist say to the parents? What did they give to the parents in honor of the newborn? How much did it all cost? In response, Lavrikov shared that socialist birth registration rituals were also destined for success. To illustrate, Lavrikov described the birth certificates handed out during the registration ritual as well as the medals awarded to newborns, which showed a monument to Lenin at the Finland Station on the front and had a space for the child’s

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name under the text “Born in Leningrad” on the back.49 Lavrikov also addressed the question of cost, informing his audience that the birth registration ceremony cost one ruble and six kopeks, and included the medal and a greeting card. Il’ichev wanted to know if the state covered the cost or if the parents had to pay, to which Lavrikov answered that the parents paid, and “happily.” Il’ichev’s r­ esponse—that this is “correct”—elicited protest among the audience. Yet Lavrikov pointed out that “the baptism ritual costs three to five rubles, without the candle and other attributes, so in essence it can sometimes cost ten rubles, which is to say that [the clergy] siphon significant sums just for the ritual.” In comparison, the socialist birth registration was “reasonable, not too expensive, and very important for the atheist education of workers.”50 On the whole, Lavrikov explained, Leningrad ritual specialists “tr[ied] to create a ritual that could elevate people aesthetically in this solemn moment— that is, a ritual that could completely counter that splendor that parents encounter when they show up at the church with their children.”51 Once the Baby Palace opened, the number of religious baptisms declined sharply. There was even an incident like this: we get a call from the Leningrad ZAGS headquarters and they ask us, “What’s going on, why has the birth rate suddenly declined?” But this could be explained very easily. People, knowing that in a few days registrations will be marked [with a socialist ritual], with a medal, waited to register the birth of their child.52 But Lavrikov nonetheless admitted that the ritual was still “far from complete.” Leningrad party cadres continued to strive to make the rituals “correspond to the spirit of our age,” but they were also frustrated by the lack of central guidance. Lavrikov proposed that “since this work is being carried out in many cities in the Soviet Union, the time has come to synthesize [it] on the state level, to select all the best practices, the most interesting and beautiful aspects, . . . in order to recommend for inculcation on a government scale a ritual that could successfully counter the church.”53 In order for socialist rituals to successfully “distract” Soviet people from religion, they had to be coordinated from the center and have support from the highest organs of power. Il’ichev agreed that socialist rituals were still in the early stages of development. They were being introduced episodically in diverse locations and lacked a shared theoretical foundation. For example, while in Leningrad newborns were being awarded medals with “Born in Leningrad” stamped on the back, in Krasnodar, “they do not give medals but a letter that congratulates the newborn and lists all the principles of the Moral Code of the Builders of Communism.”54 This idea—of newborns receiving letters with the principles of the Communist Moral Code—solicited laughter among the ideological elite in

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the conference hall, leading Il’ichev to remind them of the high political stakes of the atheist project. Indeed, the simple fact that party bureaucrats should convene to discuss, in the minutest detail, how to commemorate the birth of a child in an appropriate socialist fashion is noteworthy. The Soviet ideological establishment was beginning to see the danger of losing the competition with religion. As Aleksei Puzin (1904–87), chair of the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults—the organ charged with managing the Soviet Union’s non-­Orthodox religious organizations—put it, “The question of children is the question of the life and death of the church. The church will die if it is unable to capture the souls of the next generation.”55 The reverse, of course, was also true, raising the question of what the failure of socialist rituals would mean for Soviet atheism, and for Soviet Communism. The socialist ritual complex, born from discussions within the party’s Ideological Commission, was institutionalized with two decrees that came out shortly thereafter, the first from the party’s Central Committee, and the second from the state’s Council of Ministers. The first—the January 2, 1964, Central Committee decree, “On Measures for Strengthening the Atheist Education of the Population”—cast rituals as critical to improving atheist work. The second—the February 18, 1964, RSFSR Council of Ministers decree, “On the Inculcation of New Civic Rituals into Soviet Everyday Life”—established the Council for the Development and Inculcation of New Civic Rituals into Everyday Life, a central organ to oversee the socialist ritual project.56 The goals articulated in the ritual decree as well as the establishment of the council speak to the scope envisioned for the project. Formed under the auspices of the RSFSR Ministry of Justice (which oversaw the work of the ZAGS), the council was chaired by Aleksei Kruglov, chair of the Juridical Commission of the RSFSR Council of Ministers, and Nikolai Belyk, the supervisor of the Juridical Commission’s ZAGS department.57 It also gathered an impressive array of representatives from government, party, and cultural institutions, including the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Municipal Affairs, as well as the Writers’ Union, Composers’ Union, Artists’ Union, All-­ Russian Theatrical Society, and Council of Ministers State Committee on Cinematography.58 The decree instructed local government officials to establish volunteer commissions to assist in the dissemination of socialist rituals and to “activate” the work of existing volunteer commissions for “controlling the observance of laws on religious cults.” Municipal authorities were instructed to allocate “well-­furnished” ritual spaces for ZAGS offices, such as Palaces of Culture, clubs, and conference halls, and to include the construction of wedding palaces in their urban planning. The Ministry of Trade was

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instructed to create “specialized stores” to sell goods intended for newlyweds, such as wedding dresses, suits, and wedding rings, and the Economic Council was to increase the production of such goods. The Ministry for the Preservation of Social Order was instructed to develop the passport ceremony. The State Planning Committee (Gosplan) was instructed to issue 55.9 tons of paper for the production of ceremonial registry books. Finally, the decree also instructed municipal authorities to clean up cemeteries and “improve the organization of civic funerals.” The Ministry of Municipal Affairs was ordered to work with the State Committee for Construction (Gosstroi) on producing models for “mourning pavilions” and with Gosplan on “preparing objects necessary for the funerary ritual.” The Committee on Cinematography was instructed to produce three short films on rituals in the coming year and to “regularly show solemn civic rituals in cine-­journals.”59 The Russian Ministry of Culture featured prominently in the initial phases of the socialist ritual project, and its role was to “ensure the active participation of cultural institutions in the organization and putting on of folk holidays and inculcation of contemporary rituals,” cover ritual efforts in its journals Kul’turno-­prosvetitel’naia rabota (Cultural Enlightenment Work) and Bibliotekar’ (Librarian), and participate in the creation of a ritual “repertoire” alongside the Composers’ Union and the Writers’ Union. The Ministry of Culture also organized the first all-­union conference on socialist rituals, held in Moscow in May 1964. This conference, chaired by Vladimir Stepakov (1912– 87)—one of the Central Committee’s “curators” of religion and atheism— gathered specialists from across the country to present the socialist ritual project to the Soviet public.60 It also ignited a flurry of activity: the creation of amateur and professional arts groups to produce rituals; the formation of councils and volunteer groups to disseminate them; and the establishment of commissions of professional atheists, sociologists, and ethnographers to analyze their successes and failures. As is typical of Soviet campaigns, once the party signaled that socialist rituals were a political priority, they were suddenly everywhere. One of the more remarkable aspects of the party’s mobilization to “expel all survivals of the past from Soviet everyday life and family relations” was its ambition. This was evident not just in the envisioned scope of socialist rituals and the scale of resources mobilized but also in the fact that the Council of Ministers decree initially instructed the ritual commission to present its proposals for socialist rituals just three months after it was formed. The ultimate aim of the socialist ritual project was to create an emotional bond with each Soviet person from the cradle to the grave.61 The scope of public rituals was expanded as state, professional, and calendar holidays became an even more pronounced part of Soviet life. The first and most devel-

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oped category, state rituals, was already a central part of Soviet culture, with celebrations of the anniversary of the October Revolution and May Day among the most important events of the Soviet calendar. In the 1960s, these mass holidays were joined by new celebrations of critical moments in the patriotic narrative—most prominently the commemoration of Soviet victory in World War II on May 9.62 The second category of public ritual, those connected to labor, also became more common, with celebrations created to mark every stage of professional life—from induction into the working class, to professional achievements, to the celebration of family “labor dynasties” (when multiple generations of one family worked in one enterprise), to retirement. Special days were devoted to celebrate different professions (from teachers and doctors to coal miners and cosmonauts), and factories regularly participated in “socialist competitions” to earn glory for the enterprise and privileges for their employees. Indeed, in the late Soviet period, professional holidays were intended to weave labor even more intimately into individual life as a central marker of identity—a goal underscored by another new phenomenon: the commemoration of professional identity in Soviet cemeteries. In the 1970s, it was common for gravestones to depict not just the heroic labor of military leaders in uniform or cosmonauts in their helmets but also the labor of more prosaic professions—scientists with their instruments, doctors in their lab coats, geologists with their field gear, and professional sports coaches with hockey sticks crisscrossing their grave. The third category of public ritual, those centered around the seasonal calendar, were intended to replace religious holidays (such as Christmas, Easter, and the Trinity) with rituals that celebrated the changing of seasons and harvest cycle, placing stress on the pagan origins and folk elements of seasonal holidays as well as the sacred value of rural agriculture. But the most dramatic innovation was the spread of Soviet rites of passage to accompany every significant moment in individual and family life. The registration of newborns was to be accompanied by elaborate ceremonies that symbolically incorporated the infant into the Soviet community. Numerous coming-­of-­age rituals would mark young people’s lives. These would begin with the holiday of the “first bell” to mark the start of school, continue with induction into Communist youth organizations like the Octoberists and Komsomol, and conclude with the passport ceremony, when young people would be recognized as full citizens of the Soviet state. Soviet couples could be married with a new socialist ceremony, which might take place in a new kind of space invented for the occasion, the Wedding Palace or Palace of Happiness. There, couples would be reminded about the seriousness of their union by a ZAGS official dressed in a special ceremonial costume and trained as a ritual specialist in order to give the event the requisite solemnity. After the

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ZAGS official’s speech, the couple would exchange rings, kiss, and sign their names in an official civil registry book—an act that marked the legal recognition of their union by the state. Following the official ceremony, the ritual continued with the couple’s tour of the city’s most important historic and patriotic sites, such as the Lenin monument, Eternal Flame, and Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. When the union lasted, the couple celebrated important milestones, like silver and gold wedding anniversaries. In 1964, at the outset of the ritual campaign, the ideological establishment’s optimism that socialist rituals could solve ideological problems, including religion, bordered on audacity. A year later, when the commission gathered for a weeklong conference to evaluate progress, the mood was more somber. In the year since it was established, Belyk reported, the council had created 148 ritual commissions across Russia, from which it received reports and through which it could introduce and coordinate new initiatives. It had also produced proposals for socialist birth, wedding, and passport ceremonies and had begun work on the socialist funeral. With Gosstroi, it had worked out architectural plans for Palaces of Happiness that could be built across the country and used for “all events in the personal life of the Soviet person.”63 The municipal authorities were cleaning up cemeteries and had begun work on socialist funerary pavilions, and Gosplan had allocated a hundred buses to be used for funerals. The council also reviewed the material attributes of socialist rituals, such as the design of marriage certificates and the uniform to be worn by ritual officiants. To “create a solemn atmosphere” during socialist rituals, the council proposed that officiants wear a state symbol, like the emblem of their republic, on a “heraldic chain.”64 But Belyk also noted difficulties with the material side of ritual production. In order to produce beautiful marriage certificates, for instance, artists had to participate in the project and the state needed to allocate more resources (six hundred thousand rubles extra each year) to the ZAGS to cover expenses. Moreover, Belyk noted, it was difficult to create “a government document that would satisfy the creative unions and at the same time answer those demands that are placed on government documents.”65 In general, Belyk repeatedly drew attention to the fact that the creative intelligentsia was not participating in the ritual project and that socialist rituals had a “weak emotional intensity” as a result.66 Film studios were not making enough films on rituals, and the most “venerable” composers avoided taking part in ritual production. The council had sent two letters to the Composers’ Union asking for help in creating music for the socialist funeral, but its letters went unanswered. “We, of course, understand that creative work is a subtle and very difficult affair,” Belyk complained. “But it appears that there are Com-

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munists in the administration of the Composers’ Union who need to understand that it is difficult for us without them, that without well-­qualified people [we cannot] create a good [socialist] funeral ceremony.”67 To address this deficit of creative power, the council asked the Ministry of Culture to organize contests for the best new socialist rituals. But ultimately, Belyk insisted, it would take party pressure: “It is absolutely essential that party organs issue directives to creative unions in order to force . . . writers, composers, and artists to work more actively on ritual themes.” Without the creative intelligentsia, he warned, it would be difficult to create effective rituals and train ritual specialists with the necessary “oratory mastery.”68 The issue with cadres was a problem not just of quality but of quantity. ZAGS administrators complained that they did not have the “strength” to register births with a socialist ceremony, since many district ZAGS offices had only one employee, and even where there were more officials, they were unprepared to conduct new socialist rituals since they had “never been taught how.”69 The varied results of the initial efforts to introduce socialist rituals reveal that the project’s goals were interpreted differently by various parties. They also reveal that results depended on the enthusiasm and competence of local cadres, as well as on how these mapped onto local culture. For example, in the city of Iaroslavl’, a region known for its high religiosity and dense network of churches, the high rates of ritual observance (in 1960, 60 percent of newborns were baptized, with some districts as high as 78 to 84 percent) declined after local activists introduced socialist rituals. As a Iaroslavl’ party official shared with the ritual commission, “Reporting to the patriarchate at the end of 1964, the new archbishop of Iaroslav-­Rostov, Sergii, had to constitute the following, and I quote: ‘Unfortunately, I must note that irreligiosity is developing intensively in the eparchy. This can be confirmed by the decline in the sacraments of marriage and baptism, and especially baptism.’ ”70 An atheist from Krasnodar named Sidorov reported that local atheists had created a socialist ritual council in 1963, and as a result of their work, “most towns and villages have begun to celebrate the registration of newborns, marriage, days of commemorating the fallen and the dead, the first paycheck, [and] induction into the working class” with the new socialist ritual. In order to “inflict the most harm to the defenders of religion,” the council had focused on the birth registration ceremony, “since the positions of the church are especially strong in this department.”71 Since the council began its work, Sidorov continued, “baptisms and church weddings have almost disappeared,” and the earnings of the Krasnodar eparchy fell by 21 percent.72 Sidorov also explained that the council’s work did not stop at the official registration but instead continued in the efforts of local atheists to “influence the entire wedding celebration” so that there would be no “ancient traditions, habits, rooted in the Kuban

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[region], which offend the dignity of the Soviet person.”73 It was “no secret,” Sidorov observed, that sometimes “we have the [socialist] marriage registration ceremony, but the newlyweds are met at home by old men and women with icons, and everything goes in the old way.” Then, according to custom locals would “climb on the roof and sit on the chimney while the food for the wedding is being prepared in the oven (forcing the parents to pay a bribe in vodka), dress like gypsies and shoot at chickens on the third day of the wedding, or bathe the parents of the newlyweds in puddles or roll them around in the snow [until] they pay a bribe.” To root out these “savage customs,” the atheist council would meet with the couple and their parents before the wedding to discuss the socialist ritual, and if they refused to “exclude these outdated traditions,” the council would inform them that “there cannot be a [new socialist] wedding.”74 While some atheists sought to incorporate “folk customs” into socialist rituals to make them more “authentic,” others—as in the Krasnodar example—saw socialist rituals as a disciplinary instrument to expel the backward customs of the “old way.” The most striking aspect of the socialist ritual project was that the ideological establishment explicitly discussed it as a competition between “us” (the party, atheist apparatus, and atheists) and “them” (religious institutions, clergy, and believers). As one atheist put it, Look how well thought out everything is in the Christian religion! If you take rituals: a person is born, they baptize him; he goes to school, another ritual; lives some more, wedding, again a ritual; [then] confession, funeral—meaning, a person is constantly under the influence of religion. And what is our influence over our people, how do we deal with this? Since I am myself an atheist, I can say that . . . we do not have a unified system. Why not? If a person is born, we have to do something nice, give him some sort of program that would guide him later on, so that this young person would grow up and see that someone wrote him a letter and he should not forget about it. And when this young man grows up, comes of age and goes to receive his passport, then during the passport ceremony he will be reminded that he fulfilled this program. And then we will again meet him during his wedding. Then our influence will be from a person’s birth to the end of his life.75 Whereas everything in Christianity had been “worked out over the course of years,” atheist work happened in “fits and starts” and lacked a “system that would correctly influence the formation of the scientific atheist worldview.”76 While atheists were struggling to produce socialist rituals, “the church is taking measures to actualize its own rituals, improves the makeup of the choirs,

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modernizes the baptism and wedding ritual, [and] introduces services for the dead that can be observed in absentia.”77 In the Kursk region, 50 percent of newborns were baptized, while only 19.5 percent had a socialist birth ceremony. In Iaroslavl’, where the churches were “working very intensively,” one district had a baptism rate of 118.8 percent—which meant that local clergy were baptizing not just local newborns but also newborns from other districts as well as local children who had not been baptized as newborns.78 Not all reports were so grim. Nevertheless, as the ritual project became institutionalized over the course of the 1960s, the ideological establishment became increasingly doubtful that socialist rituals could achieve atheist goals.

Soviet Death as an Ideological Problem In part, this had to do with the persistent failure to address death. Indeed, within the broader project of creating socialist rituals, death posed a particular problem. The materialist foundation of Marxism-­Leninism excluded transcendent meaning or the possibility of an afterlife, which left the party to figure out how to manage death and address its philosophical and emotional meaning. In some ways, then, death was a blind spot for Soviet Communism. 79 To be sure, Soviet Communism had a narrative for some forms of death and invested a great deal into burying and commemorating revolutionary martyrs and Soviet heroes, in this way writing their lives into the Soviet pantheon. Yet the question of how to frame the death of an ordinary person—a common, unheroic individual, someone who had not made any great contribution to history or culture, someone whose death did not matter to anyone beyond their immediate community—remained unanswered. Indeed, until the problem was posed within the framework of the socialist ritual project in the 1960s–1970s, it remained unasked. But Soviet Communism did not just lack an ideological narrative for an ordinary Soviet death. It also lacked an adequate infrastructure for managing the material reality of death. Cemeteries were in a state of disorder, there was often no transportation to move the body of the deceased, no centralized production of coffins and tombstones. There were also no socialist experts to manage the process and experience of death either logistically or emotionally. This meant that in the hour of death, ordinary Soviet people were left to somehow make do and fend for themselves. It also meant that they continued to turn to religion. Even in the 1960s, in many regions the overwhelming majority of funerals were religious—a fact all the more remarkable given the Soviet state’s concerted efforts to marginalize religion through aggressive atheist campaigns and closing of religious spaces. This made cemeteries and death rituals powerful subversive spaces and practices, a fact repeatedly noted by the

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party. It also meant that in death, people remained outside Communism’s ideological universe, caught between the discredited symbolic order of the old religious world and the incomplete symbolic order of the new Communist world. The party read the persistence of religion in part as the result of its own failure to provide a compelling alternative to religious meanings, practices, and spaces. As one party activist put it, “The struggle between the old and the new takes place not only on the barricades, not only in the economic and political field, but also in the resting places of the dead.”80 This, then, was the situation that compelled the party to finally take death—even the death of an ordinary factory worker—seriously.

Conclusion During the Khrushchev era, the Soviet Union mobilized tremendous resources and expertise to ritualize every sphere of Soviet life. A state that had, for decades, questioned whether Soviet people had any need for rituals at all ended up producing a ritual system that sought to embrace the totality of human experience. By the end of the Soviet period, many socialist rituals had become important parts of Soviet life—so much so that it is now difficult to imagine Soviet life without them. Yet the adoption of socialist rituals, and their eventual ubiquity in Soviet life, hides the story of their peculiar origins. Socialist rituals were a state project, created by specific individuals in committees that were established to disseminate them to a large and diverse population. And as a state project, socialist rituals were intended to fulfill concrete ideological objectives: to exorcize religion in order to produce a Soviet community with a distinct and shared way of life.81 Soviet atheists initially saw socialist rituals as the best solution to the problem of religion, which the party had not been able to solve through political repression, administrative restrictions, or scientific enlightenment. But Soviet atheists did not just see rituals as an instrument in political socialization; rather, many came to consider rituals a phenomenon that performed an important social and spiritual function that had been inadequately addressed by Soviet Communism. In their struggle to overcome religion, they learned that what keeps people connected to religion is not only belief but also the aesthetic, psychological, emotional, communal, and moral components of religious experience. As a result, atheists came to see the transformative experience of rituals as central to creating an atheist worldview and socialist way of life. The story of the socialist ritual project speaks to the larger connection between the specific struggles of Soviet atheism and the broader struggles of Marxism-­Leninism—especially as the ideology moved from theory to prac-

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tice. Socialist rituals never lived up to the many expectations that atheists had placed on them. It was clear that even when they succeeded as rituals—that is, when they were widely adopted, as in the case of the socialist wedding— they still failed as atheist weapons. Rather than produce atheist conviction, they revealed Soviet people’s ideological flexibility. Even with the widespread adoption of many socialist rituals, atheists continued to believe that they were losing the battle against religion. Religion had institutions, trained cadres, a coherent ideology, aesthetic appeal, and established traditions, whereas atheists were just beginning the experiment. The main advantage of the church was that it was—already—a church.

7 True Believers in the Modern Middle East Max Weiss

For David Hume, “belief is something felt by the mind, which distinguishes the idea of the judgment from the fictions of the imagination.”1 Building upon this understanding in a strikingly expansive way, William James proposes that belief “will mean every degree of assurance, including the highest possible certainty and conviction.”2 Over time, different scholarly disciplines have approached the matter of belief in various ways, and how such diffuse and subjective criteria as “certainty” and “conviction” ought to be understood and evaluated has varied accordingly. “Belief and will,” James concludes, “are thus inseparable functions.”3 But there is no room in this orientation toward belief for engagement with certain religious traditions—say, Islam or Christianity—in which will is not always or exclusively limited to humans, where divine will can also be discerned in the progress of mankind or the very construction of reality itself. A similar albeit distinct caution might also be raised in relation to social or political movements—secular nationalist, Marxist or Marxisant, even fascism—that have promoted analogous understandings of belief in history that are not exclusively animated by the will, be it individual or collective.4 Whether it is framed in terms of belief in God, loyalty to a particular religious tradition or sectarian community, or commitment to a given political cause (from Arab nationalism and anti-­imperialist mobilization to the struggle for Palestinian liberation), therefore, belief—broadly construed—occupies a thorny location in the religious, intellectual, and political histories of the modern Middle East. Methodologically speaking, Middle East studies has engaged with a complement of problems that articulates at the interface—or, perhaps through the mutual constitution—of the secular and the religious, of religion 150

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and secularity. This development can be understood in tandem with broader shifts in the academic and popular study of the religious and the political. Put otherwise, even if scholars have struggled over the terms most appropriate for entering and exiting such debates, belief, believing, and believers have been central to the making of the modern Middle East. Scholars of the modern and contemporary Middle East, in particular, continue to grapple with the manifold crisis in Arab intellectual life that resulted from the crushing defeat of Arab armies by Israel during the 1967 war, typically referred to as, in an aggressively hopeful posture, “the setback” (al-­naksa). Arab intellectual and cultural life was sharply redefined in the wide-­ranging and contentious arguments that followed over the meaning and significance of keywords such as “heritage” (turath), collective identity, and cultural authenticity.5 Drawing upon a body of historical and critical scholarship on the subject, but also working with and against William James’s reading of belief introduced above, this brief essay is concerned with two moments in what could be called the crisis of belief in the modern Arab world, one that reflects the epistemological confusion born of the broader “culture of defeat” that emerged in the post-­1967 period. The first has to do with the increasingly conflictual relationship between, crudely put, the secular nationalist left—perhaps the prevailing intellectual force in the mid-­twentieth-­century Arab world—and the beliefs, practices, and sensibilities of religious believers in the postcolonial age of constant conflict, authoritarian rule, and ideological radicalization. Two seminal books by the Syrian intellectual Sadiq Jalal al-­ʿAzm represent a convenient point of entry for exploring the dilemmas confronting a Janus-­faced Arab radical subject(ivity) in the aftermath of the Arab defeat in the 1967 Six-­Day War. Much more so than his better-­known Self-­Criticism after the Defeat (al-­Naqd al-­dhati baʿda al-­hazima), al-­ʿAzm’s Critique of Religious Reason (Naqd al-­fikr al-­dini) indexes a moment of veritable crisis in the (re) formation of a secular Arab nationalist and leftist subjectivity. The second event concerns the persecution and eventual religious excommunication during the 1990s of Nasir Hamid Abu Zayd, the Egyptian scholar of Qurʾanic studies who was blackballed from university positions and prosecuted in the public domain for his endorsement of literary, phenomenological, and hermeneutical approaches to the Qurʾan and “religious discourse” more broadly. The case has been widely discussed as an instance of political seizure by Islamist forces in the legal and administrative domain as well as a test case of the possibilities of reconciling “traditional” Islamic legal principles and beliefs with modern methodologies and sensibilities. Insofar as al-­ʿAzm and Abu Zayd are typically represented as “Arab liberals,” these two case studies would seem to be reflective of an endemic and eternal struggle between secularists and religious believers in the Arab Middle

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East. While both al-­ʿAzm and Abu Zayd are indeed critical of religious certainty as such, their respective critiques can be disentangled in order to reveal a different kind of relationship to the religious and, hence, to the secular; indeed, of differing albeit comparable epistemological standpoints. Whereas al-­ʿAzm directs withering criticism at the “superstition” of traditional believers in the Arab world during the mid-­twentieth century, Abu Zayd pushes back against literalist interpretations of the Qurʾan in order to promote a more pluralistic and “enlightened” (nahdawi) discourse on religion. Many have plausibly argued, by contrast, that the case of Abu Zayd is better explained in terms of the anxiety among exponents of the Islamic revival (al-­sahwa al-­ islamiyya) during the late twentieth century but also their concomitant empowerment as they successfully defined and policed new boundaries of the religious as such (here in relation to Islam). What I am calling a crisis of belief turns out to be legible in al-­ʿAzm’s criticism of a moribund and outmoded religiosity at a moment of secular Arab nationalist malaise as well as a clarion call to confront the rise of Islamist political and cultural forces. In this view, the liberatory potential for a secular leftist nationalist project would turn upon the rejection of religious belief as an archaic relic of a “medieval” worldview. On the other hand, the case of Abu Zayd’s “apostasy” would require the adoption of a “modern” interpretation of the role of the state and the public order in order for belief itself to be regulated, not only in but in relation to the religious sphere.6

The Crisis of Secular Nationalist Belief: Naqd al-­fikr al-­dini and Its Critics In Self-­Criticism after the Defeat (al-­Naqd al-­dhati baʿda al-­hazima) (1968), al-­ʿAzm draws attention to a moment of profound crisis, expressed primarily in relation to the failed (or, at least, failing) postcolonial secular nationalist project of modernization, social justice, and cultural renewal.7 In his lesser-­ known Critique of Religious Reason (Naqd al-­fikr al-­dini) (1969), he unleashes a searing critique of believers and the religious in a manner that would only become more radical for him and other muscular secularists with the rise of the Islamic revival. But the argument also draws attention to some of the limitations of this staunchly secularist critique.8 The book ushered in a broad debate that remains productive and unresolved, one that often appears to be irreconcilable.9 During the late 1960s, al-­ʿAzm was still a devout Marxist; over time, his doctrinaire stance on religion and politics moderated toward a kind of Marxisant socialism, increasingly disillusioned with the collective ethos of Arab nationalism and orthodox Marxism, although no less critical of religious (primarily Islamic) engagements with the political. Fadi Bardawil points out

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that Self-­Criticism after the Defeat “safely stands as the metonymic sign of the post-­1967 critical literature.”10 Both al-­ʿAzm and Yasin al-­Hafiz, the Syrian Marxist whose writing and viewpoints most strongly influenced al-­ʿAzm and his generation of leftist intellectuals, were significant in terms of what Bardawil calls the “inward turn” taken by disaffected Arab intellectuals as they became more and more uncertain about the future of their societies in the wake of the Six-­Day War. Indeed, the opening epigraph for Critique of Religious Reason comes from Yasin al-­Hafiz, who argued, “critique of all dimensions and traditions of contemporary Arab society . . . is a fundamental obligation of the revolutionary socialist vanguard movements in the Arab world.” Only this kind of critique can help rectify “negative” and “debilitating” and “repressive” aspects of “our societal inheritance.”11 The publication of Critique of Religious Reason caused a scandal, and al-­ʿAzm was brought to trial in Beirut on charges of inciting religious discord (fitna). Although he was eventually acquitted, this led to his brief incarceration as well as the loss of his faculty position at the American University of Beirut. Al-­ʿAzm defines “religious thought” as “conscious and purposeful intellectual production in the sphere of religion.” In orthodox Marxist fashion, religious thought for al-­ʿAzm is reducible to the “conscious superstructure” that towers over the “undefined, comprehensive and gelatinous mass of ideas and conceptions and beliefs [muʿtaqidat] as well as the goals and habits” that make up what is variously termed “the religious mentality” or “the metaphysical ideology” or “the salafi spiritual mentality.”12 Even if the 1967 defeat led many Arab intellectuals to call into question “intellectual and traditional-­ social” truths, al-­ʿAzm complains, this did not extend into the realms of “thought, culture, law, [or] unspoken metaphysical ideology.”13 As if it weren’t bad enough that “religious ideology” served as the “fundamental theoretical weapon” in the arsenal of Arab reactionaries in their war against revolutionary and progressive forces after 1967, the progressive, soi-­disant revolutionary regimes also used religion as a “bludgeon” (ʿukaz) in order to “tame the Arab masses.” In other words, religious thought was responsible for “falsifying the truth of the relationship between the Islamic religion—for example—and modern science, falsifying the truth of the relationship between religion and the political system, of whatever type (socialist-­Arab nationalist-­Islamic­scientific-­believing-­revolutionary).”14 In his refutation of the “mechanistic” understanding of Marxist theory that was then so widespread among Arab Marxists and leftists, al-­ʿAzm pushes back against the fixation on economic and social transformation—that is, on the “base” (al-­bunya al-­tahtiyya)—when there is no appreciation of its dialectical relationship with the “superstructure” (al-­bunya al-­fawqiyya).15 Suzanne Kassab affirms that, in al-­ʿAzm’s conception of the natural progression of

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secular history, “scientific thinking was to replace metaphysical-­religious thinking.”16 Given the Arab revolutionary tradition’s concern with “protecting the traditions, values, art, religion and morals of the people, the cultural struggle [juhd],” it is ironic that Arab radicalism should have wound up “crafting a metaphysical ideology” of its own.17 With relative equanimity, al-­ʿAzm seems to prefigure the approach to the religious followed by Talal Asad and some of his students, claiming that his intention is neither to offend nor to even discuss the basis conceptions of “religion” and “belief ” but rather to think through the implications of conceptual modes of engagement with religion in an age when the hegemonic explanations of religious belief and practice appear to have stopped making sense.18 Questioning whether he ought to accept “inherited beliefs” that are incompatible with his own conscience, al-­ ʿAzm invokes the work of none other than William James on The Will to Believe (1907).19 Although there might be space in his analysis to explore the boundaries and limitations of religious belief generally, al-­ʿAzm is specifically interested in the contemporary condition of the Islamic world. Because the authority of Islam turns on the Qurʾan and the Sunna, that is, the divinely revealed sacred text as well as the sayings of the Prophet and the interpretation of both, al-­ʿAzm points out that “the intellectual history of religion is always comprised of interpretations and commentaries [shuruh], and commentaries on commentaries on commentaries.” Despite the potential for various interpretive strategies that one might assume given the hermeneutical tradition invoked here, al-­ ʿAzm concludes that “Islam” has become the “official ideology” of the most reactionary forces in the Arab world and beyond, a reality that would haunt Nasir Hamid Abu Zayd, the subject of the next section.20 The fundamental question al-­ʿAzm takes up in the remainder of the book can be summarized in the following terms: Are Muslims living in the second half of the twentieth century expected to believe that God literally created man out of clay, that all of the angels bowed before Him, every single one except Iblis (Satan), that is, or should these beliefs be taken instead as “myths” (asatir)? By the same token, are figures such as jinn and angels and mermaids and the like supposed to be understood as real beings or “mythical creatures”?21 As a way to critically read “Satan’s ordeal” (mihnat Iblis), al-­ʿAzm uses the analogies of Greek tragedies such as Oedipus the King and Antigone as well as the biblical tale of God testing Ibrahim (Abraham, the patriarch), taking detours through the philosophical thought of Søren Kierkegaard and a few other Western thinkers along the way, in order to shed light on an allegorical and impossible demand directed toward humankind, one that pulls apart “the command” (al-­amr) from “the will” (al-­irada). For al-­ʿAzm, the “ordeal” Ibra-

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him was put through was worse than the one faced by Antigone because her challenge was limited to balancing the relative value of the law of the gods against the command of temporal authority, whereas, for Ibrahim, both sides of the “contradiction” he confronted “return in the end to one source: God.” In other words, “when Ibrahim obeyed his Lord from the religious perspective, he was forced to disobey Him from the moral perspective.”22 Therefore, al-­ʿAzm comes to the stunning conclusion that the trial or ordeal of Iblis turns out to be more difficult—perhaps more compelling—than that of Ibrahim, rising to the level of “tragedy” (maʾsa), in fact, inasmuch as Iblis confronted the problem of obeying two divine yet contradictory commandments.23 Al-­ ʿAzm concludes his argument as follows: If I were writing about Prince Hamlet, for example, none of you would believe that this name has a referent [musamma] outside of the context of the literary heritage left to us by Shakespeare. By the same token, when we say, “Hamlet killed his uncle,” we do not believe that such an event actually took place in the history of Denmark. Furthermore, when we say, “God expelled Iblis from heaven,” we must not think that this event happened in the history of this universe because the sense and meaning of this phrase reside in its [own] universe, as a symbol, not as a description of events that actually took place.24 In this reading of Iblis (Satan) and his symbolization in modern Islamic thought, al-­ʿAzm articulates his defense of de-­mystification, calling for nothing less than the total secularization of religious thought in the Islamic tradition. In this sense, what I have identified as a moment in the “crisis of belief ” in the modern Middle East might also be understood comparatively in terms of the multiple modalities and narratives of secularization. Furthermore, such an analysis may shed new light on the paradoxical arguments that are elaborated in order to justify the epistemological axioms of contemporary secularity. A disinterested yet hardly dispassionate reading of the intended meaning and formal symbolism of religious discourse is central to al-­ʿAzm’s rationalist and unapologetically secularist outlook. Be that as it may, al-­ʿAzm does throw some bones to believers. “This does not mean that I wish to eliminate [naskh] from existence religious sentiment in human experience,” al-­ʿAzm insists, “but I see it necessary to distinguish between religion and religious sentiment [al-­shuʿur al-­dini].” Although this distinction is coherent to some—indeed, the same argument would be made in analogous terms by Nasir Hamid Abu Zayd, as will be discussed—it might seem to be a distinction without much of a difference for religious believers. “That sentiment is crushed,” al-­ʿAzm

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laments, “under the burden of petrified, traditional religious beliefs, beneath the weight of unchanging rituals and practices. This [religious] sentiment must be liberated from its prison in order for it to flourish and to express itself through ways and means that are adequate to the conditions of twentieth-­ century civilization in which we live. . . . Moreover, it seems unnecessary to me for religious sentiment to depend upon metaphysical beings, invisible presences, or mysterious forces.” If his argument up until this point could (potentially, at least) be understood in terms of the notion of “renewal” (tajdid) of religious thought, al-­ʿAzm then pivots in a more radical direction of aestheticizing religion and belief as such, in a manner that comes across as more dismissive than constructive. “In that sense,” he continues, “religious sentiment might be situated in the position of the artist vis-­à-­vis beauty, or in the position of the scholar vis-­à-­vis the search for truth, or in the position of the struggler vis-­à-­vis the aims he works to accomplish, or in the position of the ordinary person vis-­à-­vis the carrying out of his daily life tasks.”25 But such a disinterested conceptualization of what might be called la religion pour la religion is part of the reason why militant secularists in the Arab world and beyond have little to say (or to hear) from religious believers. As Saba Mahmood reminds us, secularism “refers both to an analytical standpoint and a political field of intervention.”26 Secularists in the modern Middle East, for Mahmood, “do not abandon the religious text but resituate it. The question is, once metaphysical intention is separated from the text, how is this text to be read and what would its significance be for the secularized believer?”27 Sadiq Jalal al-­ʿAzm is part of a generation of Arab revolutionaries and secularists who have pitted themselves against the authoritarian regimes of the postcolonial period but also increasingly find themselves in conflict with the ascendant Islamist elements in the late twentieth-­and early twenty-­first-­century Middle East.

Unbelief in the Age of the Secular Modern: The Ordeal of Nasir Hamid Abu Zayd It might go without saying, of course, that secularists and “non-­believers” aren’t the only people to have held narrowly defined notions of belief. Samuli Schielke has done fascinating ethnographic work on the life-­worlds of contemporary Egyptian atheists, nonbelievers, and other “nontraditional” Egyptians. Schielke notes, “Although some atheist critics of religion may claim otherwise, many possible paths exist aside from either adhering to or overthrowing conservative religious standards.”28 This approach opens up a different, more expansive line of inquiry than certain theories of the secular currently en vogue in Middle East studies, one that would be willing to con-

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sider that “being secular is never only a form of civic discipline but also a subjective way of being in the world that contains the possibility of nonbelief.”29 In the late 1990s and early 2000s a somewhat different crisis than the one initiated by the “setback” of 1967 and the critique of the religious launched by Sadiq Jalal al-­ʿAzm broke out, even if this moment can be understood in terms of the cultural, political, and epistemological aspects of the post-­1967 condition in the region. New interpreters of Islamic religious tradition— many inspired by phenomenological hermeneutics—called into question the certainties and certitude of political Islamists and salafis from Egypt to Algeria and beyond. The avatar of this moment was the Islamic studies scholar Nasir Hamid Abu Zayd (d. 2010), who was denied promotion in the Department of Arabic Studies at Cairo University in 1992 for his unorthodox methodology, namely, literary and hermeneutical approaches to studying the Qurʾan.30 Abu Zayd would be subjected to a criminal inquest stirred up by colleagues in the field as well as Islamic public intellectuals who put into motion a method of prosecution, known as hisba, that was more or less unprecedented in modern Egyptian history. Hisba is a method of adjudication employed in order to “command right and forbid wrong” (al-­amr bi-­l-­maʿruf wa-­l-­nahy ʿan al-­ munkar), as well as to govern the activities of the market inspector (al-­ muhtasib). In this revitalized form, though, hisba served as a method for the Egyptian state, prodded by Islamist lawyers and activists, to regulate the public order according to more stringently defined Islamic legal principles.31 As a consequence, in addition to being fired from his university position, Abu Zayd would eventually wind up branded an apostate and, consequently, forcibly divorced from his wife.32 In 1993 Islamist lawyers petitioned the Cour de Premier Instance in Giza to divorce Abu Zayd from his wife, Professor Ibtihal Yunis, a legal action typically taken in response to a marriage involving an individual who has ceased to be considered a Muslim. Although the Giza court dismissed that petition in January 1994, on June 14, 1995, the Cairo Court of Appeals dismissed the Giza court decision, upholding the demand. In announcing the court’s decision, the judge read directly from Abu Zayd’s Naqd al-­Khitab al-­Dini (Critique of Religious Discourse), one of the key texts at issue in establishing his apostasy.33 Even though Article 46 of the Egyptian constitution (adopted in 1971 under Gamal Abdel Nasser, amended in 1980 by President Anwar al-­Sadat) guarantees freedom of belief, and Article 49 specifies “freedom of scientific, literary, artistic and academic creativity,” neither was sufficient to prevent the enactment of the hudud (punishment). Muhammad ʿImara, an Islamist public intellectual, for his part “rejected the view that apostasy is one of the hudud . . . [and he] also disagreed with the notion that either the Qurʾan or the hadith

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(the sayings of the Prophet) provides for a worldly punishment for apostasy.”34 Abu Zayd fled into exile in 1995, spending the better part of his life in Western Europe before returning to Egypt shortly before he died, in 2010. In a reflection piece published posthumously, Abu Zayd opens a window onto his understanding of the genesis and generation of meaning in the Qurʾan by way of his own religious education, from the kuttab to his embrace of the approach of his mentor Amin al-­Khuli, who had also been expelled from the Egyptian university for his heterodox methodology.35 Two touchstones for Abu Zayd in his intellectual formation were Taha Husayn’s (d. 1973) iconoclastic account of pre-­Islamic poetry and Muhammad Khalafallah’s (d. 1991) 1947 dissertation on the literary aspects of Qurʾanic stories.36 After returning to Egypt in 1981, Abu Zayd held a nonteaching position in the Ministry of Social Affairs, offering courses in Cairo and Khartoum all the while, inspired by al-­Khuli and Khalafallah. It was during this period that he developed his notion of mafhum al-­nass (textual criticism, lit. understanding the text), which was also how he first came into conflict with political Islamists who held quite distinct positions.37 Abu Zayd also wrote fondly about the four years he spent teaching in Japan, which was where he wrote both Mafhum al-­nass: Dirasa fi ʿulum al-­Qurʾan (Understanding the Text: A Study in the Qurʾanic Sciences) and Naqd al-­khitab al-­dini (Critique of Religious Discourse).38 Scholars have differed in their interpretations of the case, its causes, and its consequences. Hussein Ali Agrama wishes to understand “the styles of reasoning and the characteristic concepts by which aspects deemed central to Islam were argued in an important, influential arena of social life.”39 Fauzi Najjar takes a more aggressive stance on the matter, expressing dissatisfaction with the injustice done to Abu Zayd, who had no problem “with religion, but with the religious thought propagated by the Islamists.”40 Kilian Bälz goes even further, arguing, “the courts have clearly transgressed the ordinary boundaries of legal discourse, which is normally concerned with outwardly manifested actions rather than spiritual affairs, and with legal questions rather than religious or moral considerations. . . . In an unprecedented manner, therefore, the Abū Zayd case testifies to a lack of tolerance in religious and political discourse in contemporary Egypt.”41 Few of those scholars closely read or analyzed the substantive arguments Abu Zayd actually makes in the works that attracted this witch hunt in the first place. In Critique of Religious Discourse, Abu Zayd moves beyond an understanding of religious discourse that is limited to texts or ritual practices. Part one is a broadside against “the Islamic revival” and its purportedly pure intellectual methods; part two engages with the work of Egyptian “Islamist leftist” Hasan Hanafi;42 and part three sets forth an “exploratory” reading of the varieties of meaning in religious texts. Abu Zayd is interested in what he calls the intel-

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lectual “points of departure” and “mechanisms” from and through which this religious discourse becomes operationalized. Those mechanisms include: “unity of thought and religion”; “the return of appearances to a single principle”; “the reliance upon the authority of ‘heritage’ [turath] and ‘the ancestors’ [al-­salaf]”; “cognitive certainty and intellectual rigidity”; and “the evacuation of the historical dimension.” This argument departs from the premise that there is little meaningful difference between “moderate” and “extremist” religious discourse, as they share common epistemological ground, in particular with respect to their understanding of “the text” (al-­nass), “divine sovereignty” (al-­hakimiyya), and “excommunication” (al-­takfir), even if their particular interpretations and derivative calls for action may vary in kind and extent. Moreover, Abu Zayd identifies how “secondary texts” such as Qurʾanic exegesis (taʾwil) and the sayings of the Prophet may turn out to be as significant as “foundational texts,” that is, the Qurʾan itself. The stakes of belief in Abu Zayd’s account, therefore, extend deep into the realm of the political. He rails against religious scholars and political Islamist activists who saw the 1967 defeat as cause for celebration, not alarm or despair, since the Communists and nationalist leadership in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere in the Arab world were “atheists” (al-malahida), and any “believer” (muʾmin) would be delighted to see them vanquished, no matter who the enemy who did so happened to be.43 The concomitant assault on literary texts that were said to “stir up basic instincts” and “address the senses” by the Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz and Syrian novelist Haydar Haydar, for example, should also be understood in such terms.44 The “exploratory” reading of meaning in religious texts performed in part three of Critique of Religious Discourse hardly seems radical or antireligious by proposing that “religious thought” (al-­fikr al-­dini) should not be immune from the “laws” that govern the development of “human reason” (al-­fikr al-­bashari). Abu Zayd is careful to distinguish between “religion” (al-­din) as such and “religious thought” (al-­fikr al-­dini) precisely because he believes that religion enjoys a special quality of “sacredness” (qadasa) and “liberation” (itlaq). The point about historicizing religious studies, or situating belief and religious texts within the framework of an interpretive grid, is to relocate the subject of historical change from God to “the human” (al-­insan).45 Turning to Ferdinand de Saussure, Abu Zayd argues for the fundamentally linguistic nature of religious texts, not inasmuch as they are created by human beings, although that is certainly a topic of some hermeneutical consequence for religious studies, but insofar as they can only be interpreted and understood through discourse, which requires an interpretive theory of language. If there is no way for humans to act as interpreters of the religious text, by contrast, then one has no choice but to conclude that these texts are closed, meaning there is no way to

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crack the code (al-­shafra), that they are simply instances of God addressing Himself rather than addressing mankind.46

Iterations of Belief “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum,” Nietzsche caustically remarked, “shows that faith does not prove anything.” But proving faith or establishing belief is not necessarily the most important task for those interested in revealing the history of the religious and the secular—and the evolving relationships between the two—in the modern Middle East. Understanding how or when or why intellectuals and religious scholars and believers of different backgrounds choose or are enjoined to believe, to have faith, is a more fruitful approach to understanding the epistemological struggles that underpin processes of secularization as well as its discontents in diverse world-­historical contexts, a theme taken up in Peter Gordon’s essay in this volume on the secularization narrative put forward by Max Weber in the early twentieth-­century Euro-­American sociological tradition. The task instead, then, might be to demonstrate the complicated ways in which belief and its others, from unbelief and atheism to doubt and skepticism, are historically contingent and have been produced and refashioned over time in wide-­ranging geographical and temporal situations. This was precisely the challenge taken up by the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies during the academic years 2012–13 and 2013–14. Indeed, several chapters in this volume are concerned with intellectual, scholarly, and political struggles—both among and between communities of discourse, which often adhere to various norms and conventions of authority, as in the pieces by Anthony Grafton and Muhammad Qasim Zaman—that rhyme with the contentious encounters discussed in this chapter concerning how to believe in the context of the secular modern Middle East. “According to a modern argument,” Talal Asad notes, “belief should not be coerced because that affronts the dignity of the individual person.”47 Both the methodological styles and political trials of al-­ʿAzm and Abu Zayd offer different refractions of the light shed by Asad’s argument regarding coercion and belief and, inversely, freedom and/of belief. There are at least two types of freedom of belief that would be relevant here: first, the freedom to believe, whether in miracles or secular rationality or whatever; and, second, the freedom from belief, that is, the beliefs of others insofar as they impinge on one’s own life in the private and public domains. To be sure, these two versions of freedoms of belief are modeled explicitly on the template attributed to Isaiah Berlin, but in his own reference to a “modern argument,” it would seem that Talal Asad here is primarily concerned with critiquing liberal conceptions of belief, the individual person, and coercion (and, hence, freedom or liberty).48

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Insofar as these two liberal concepts of freedom (of belief) differ in multiple ways, though, there is also substantial variation in the types of freedom that were at stake in the cases of al-­ʿAzm and Abu Zayd discussed in this chapter. While they employ particular techniques with which to critique religious belief—Marxist criticism, in the case of al-­ʿAzm, and philological hermeneutics, in the case of Abu Zayd—both treat sacred texts as worldly documents that are worthy of scrutiny and (re)interpretation. Would al-­ʿAzm’s intervention appear differently, though, if it were situated within the political-­ institutional history of the secular modernizing postcolonial states in, say, Syria or Iraq? Given the habit of those regimes to demonize and even ban outright certain expressions of the religious during the mid-­to late twentieth century, it is unlikely that the ruling regimes and their administrative apparatuses would find much to disagree with in al-­ʿAzm’s analysis. Indeed, despite the purported radicalism of his critique, al-­ʿAzm’s argument does not appear to pose any epistemological or political challenge to the contemporary Baʿthist regime in Syria. Meanwhile, the postcolonial secular state in Egypt restricts the scope of critical skepticism, and both the regime and other political forces have been willing to use the courts or else to allow the courts to be used in order to constrain questioners and freethinkers, as it were. It is significant for the social and cultural history of modern Egypt that the (secular) state called in the public prosecutor (al-­niyaba al-­ʿamma) in order to pick up where the attack by private individuals on Abu Zayd left off.49 In both of these cases, the limits of the secular are defined not only through its simple opposition to the religious but also by way of the particular modalities of power—institutional, intellectual, social—that structure and form the very conditions of possibility for a reconfigured relation between the secular and the religious as such. Although some may agree with the notion that “hisba . . . represents the power by which the aspirations of secularism’s political concepts—religious freedom and tolerance—are attained . . . it undermines the democratic sensibility and attitudes of open generosity normally thought to come with them.”50 In a secular age, hisba and other forms of religious expression that are asserted against “non-­believers” or nonbelievers may appear confusing: such practices may be viewed as an expression of religious freedom run amok; else, one may identify a dearth of religious freedom in terms of the freedom of some (not) to believe as they see fit; or, yet again, this may be a simple expression of outright intolerance. As Middle East studies continues to grapple with the contours and horizons of belief, therefore, scholars need an interpretive lens through which to better understand and historically situate parameters for both the thought and action of “true believers” as those boundaries are delimited and redrawn by “the secular modern” and “secularity.” Of course, secular modernity in the Middle East means and has meant a variety of things

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to various people at different times and places and in differing conceptual frameworks, including but not limited to: the challenges presented by al-­ʿAzm and Abu Zayd, as well as others who are willing to subject sacred texts to critical scrutiny; opposition to the intellectual and political underpinnings of authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq; pressure experienced by religious believers as well as those religious social and political movements that have been repressed; and the broader epistemic shift that would restrict critiques of religion to privatized, ostensibly autonomous spaces of belief and practice. Secularism in the modern Middle East cannot simply be reduced to a critical intellectual stance or a particular model of political organization. Rather, both of these aspects must be integrated into an understanding of the secular modern as generative of multiple, broader, more elastic forms of religiosity and faces of secularity. An adequate analytical approach to these issues would be attentive to how “secularity” may turn out, counterintuitively, to be accommodating and even amenable toward secularists or Islamists or anyone else who does not ultimately respect freedom of belief, however that is defined. Even if a single interpretive lens or epistemological foundation were universally accepted, moreover, the particular means by which to protect the rights to both the freedom to (not) believe and the freedom from the (non)belief of others would remain as thorny as ever. Perhaps the most confounding notion in all of this is that liberal democracy and modern democratic sensibilities do not always appear to be as neutral as they claim to be when it comes to matters of religiosity and secularity.

8 The Reformation Era and the Secularization of Knowledge Brad S. Gregory

This essay compresses further an already tightly argued account of the secularization of knowledge from my recent book on the long-­term influences of the Reformation era.1 The Unintended Reformation analyzes multiple ways in which the Reformation era’s unresolved religious disagreements continue to influence human life today, whether through the many unintended changes that they set in motion or through their transformation of late medieval trends. One of the book’s overarching arguments is that the histories of human desires, beliefs, ideas, practices, and institutions cannot be isolated from one another if we hope to explain long-­term changes in Western Europe and North America over the past half millennium. It verges on the banal to suggest to fellow historians that we all know this intuitively; in no era or culture is human life lived in discrete compartments called “political power,” “individual commitments,” “philosophical ideas,” “economic behaviors,” and so forth. But what to do with this basic truth presents major challenges if we want to explain how we have arrived at the situation in which we find ourselves today with respect to issues of belief and unbelief:2 in societies with liberal political institutions that legally protect a staggering variety of rival religious and secular truth claims about matters of human meaning, morality, values, and priorities—ones that, perhaps above all in the United States, are diversely arrayed and frequently expressed in our increasingly uncivil public sphere and the angry present partisanship that passes for a political process. Many of the phenomena addressed in my book—such as contemporary consumerism, the modern state’s monopoly on public political power, and conceptions of individual rights—might seem to have little to do with each other and to be far removed from the Reformation or religion per se. But they 163

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tend to be seen this way because “religion,” as a result of the intractable intra-­ Christian disagreements and recurrent religiopolitical conflicts in the Reformation era, was incrementally disembedded from the “rest of life” and theorized as something separable from it.3 Nearly all domains of human life were affected by the disputes and disruptions of the Reformation era, because late medieval Christianity was in all its diversity and with all its difficulties an institutionalized worldview, not a discrete part of life separate from economic, political, social, or cultural realities. For better or worse it was meant to inform everything, not to be simply a part within the whole. As part of this institutionalized worldview, the Latin church’s truth claims about reality were no more separable from the pursuit or transmission of knowledge at the outset of the sixteenth century than they had been in medieval monasteries since the sixth century or in universities since the thirteenth. In contrast, the pursuit and transmission of knowledge today in research universities assumes that it is and must be secular, in principle separate and separable from any substantive religious claims. In the words of James Turner, “The decidedly nontheistic, secular understanding of knowledge characteristic of modern universities will not accommodate belief in God as a working principle.”4 Or as Alasdair MacIntyre has put it, “The irrelevance of theology to the secular disciplines is a taken-­for-­granted dogma.”5 How are we to explain the change from Christian theology regarded as the most important of the faculties and the “queen of the sciences” in medieval universities such as Paris and Oxford to our present situation, in which not only theology as a discipline but also any and all religious truth claims are excluded from consideration on their own terms in research universities? In short, how were higher education and the pursuit and transmission of knowledge secularized? The outstanding studies of the secularization of American universities in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by George Marsden, Julie Reuben, Jon Roberts and James Turner, Christian Smith, and other scholars are relevant to this question, but they belong to a late chapter in a much longer story.6 Moreover, the still widely believed and frequently reinforced narrative about earlier influences on the secularization of knowledge—that it was the unavoidable result of the Enlightened, rational interpretation of the evidence associated with the rise of science, the recognition of historicism, and the burgeoning awareness of religious pluralism in the early modern period—will not stand up to scrutiny. The present-­day articulation of sophisticated theology, philosophy of religion, and critical but non-­skeptical biblical scholarship demonstrates the continuing intellectual viability of many traditional religious truth claims, including belief in the reality of a transcendent creator-­God and the possibility of divinely worked miracles; this scholarship is available to all who wish to become familiar with it.7 Despite theology’s exile from the secu-

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larized academy, the very existence of such intellectual work casts doubt on any neo-­Enlightenment belief that the truth claims of revealed religion per se were somehow rendered untenable by the advances of modern knowledge itself. The main lines of the received narrative are well known. With respect to science, after the empirical investigation and mathematization of natural regularities reached such an impressive first culmination with Newton at the end of the seventeenth century, the universe conceived as a vast mechanism of efficient causes left no room for God’s putative actions in history, including alleged miracles such as those reported in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. As David Hume argued in the mid-­eighteenth century, a “wise man” “proportions his belief to the evidence,” and the evidence for exceptionless natural regularities always outweighs testimony about putative miracles.8 The seventeenth-­century revolution in physics was followed by the nineteenth-­ century Darwinian revolution in biology, which undercut the biblical idea of deliberate design and loving creation by God. It made of Homo sapiens just another animal species that happened randomly to evolve by the blind processes of natural selection, for which Watson and Crick later supplied the mechanism in their research on DNA.9 Since then, extraordinary advances in evolutionary biology have confirmed the “disenchantment of the world” asserted by Max Weber and left us, in the words of the philosopher John Searle, with “like it or not” simply “the world view we have”: one without God, and without any place for religious truth claims such as those characteristic of the traditional Christianity that modern science superseded.10 Therefore knowledge, its pursuit, and its transmission—as opposed to mythology, subjective belief, naïve wishful thinking, uninformed opinion, or superstitious ignorance—are and must be secular. A parallel but distinct contribution to the secularization of knowledge, so the story continues, came from humanistic scholarship. The advent of historicism and critical philology among Renaissance humanists such as Valla, Poliziano, and Erasmus, radicalized by biblical critics such as Spinoza and Richard Simon in the late seventeenth century, came in the hands of unflinching critics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to show (among other things) the extraordinary contingency of the formation and textual transmission of the Jewish and Christian scriptures. This led to what Hans Frei called “the eclipse of biblical narrative” and what Michael Legaspi has termed “the death of scripture.”11 Relatedly, ancient peoples lived lives utterly different from latter-­day Westerners, based on radically different worldviews, and the first task of any scholar seeking to understand them was (and remains) to grasp this first principle of historicism, the unbridgeable difference between “us” and “them.” In 1777 Lessing pronounced himself unable to cross the

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“broad and ugly ditch” between historical claims on the one hand and moral and metaphysical claims on the other, making of modern historicism no less a barrier to the foundational claims of Judaism or Christianity than is disenchantment allegedly born of modern science.12 Anyone who wants a place in the modern research university must follow Lessing—and F. H. Bradley, Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, Rudolf Bultmann, and others—and acknowledge that historicism precludes the consideration of any religious truth claims derived from ancient cultures as if they might actually be true.13 So too, historical research beginning especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries disclosed a vast array of other ancient peoples with their respective beliefs in gods and supernatural powers, among whom the Israelites and later the earliest Christians were only two. The burgeoning early modern contact with non-­ Christian peoples and cultures around the world confirmed the same thing about the present. Knowledge was thus further secularized by the relativizing recognition that Christianity’s exclusivist truth claims were merely one set among a great many rivals. Despite being widely believed and reinforced through repetition, this narrative about the secularization of knowledge is flawed—not because any findings of the natural sciences are somehow untrustworthy or suspect, nor because historicism is dispensable as a safeguard against anachronism, nor because there are not in fact many rival and incompatible religious traditions past and present. It is problematic rather because of the inferences to which these recognitions have typically led. In short, there is no intrinsic or logical connection between scientific findings, historicism, or religious pluralism and the ways in which conclusions usually drawn from them have become institutionalized in the secularization of knowledge. The findings of the natural sciences do not preclude the possibility that a transcendent creator-­God is real and acts in history, including actions outside the course of natural regularities; the contrary belief is based rather on the intellectual alchemy whereby the fruitfully legitimate methodological precept of naturalism in the sciences is transmuted into a metaphysical dogma about reality—as if God is a fiction because the sciences do not discover empirical evidence in space and time of what is by definition neither spatial nor temporal.14 So too, for example, the complexities of the biblical accounts about Jesus of Nazareth do not preclude the possibility that the gist of what they claim actually happened, nor does the fact that extraordinary things are alleged to have happened long ago among peoples with different worldviews entail that they could not have occurred. In both instances, whether the exclusion of God based on science or the rejection of miracles based on historicism, the intellectual work is being done by logically unrelated (and usually unacknowledged) dogmatic assumptions of metaphysical naturalism or its equivalent, a thoroughgoing skepticism about

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all claims of revealed religion.15 Finally, relativism is neither an unavoidable nor even an obvious inference to be drawn from the fact of religious (and more broadly, ideological) pluralism. Perhaps no other early modern group, for example, collectively encountered as many contemporary and ancient non-­Christian peoples as did the globetrotting members of the Society of Jesus, yet they did not thereby infer that Catholicism was simply one relativized religion among others (nor did the Second Vatican Council in 1965).16 The historical processes through which knowledge was eventually secularized were more convoluted and more paradoxical than the entrenched, endlessly repeated narrative would have us believe. It was neither science nor critical humanistic scholarship but rather the Protestant Reformation, by unintentionally introducing an unprecedentedly enduring doctrinal pluralism within Latin Christianity, that laid the foundations for the eventual secularization of knowledge in the Western world. But only after centuries, and only after a long interlude in which theology became more rather than less important in the confessional universities, academies, and seminaries of early modern Europe. Besides the introduction and institutionalization of persistent doctrinal pluralism, it was ironically the political protection of theology that substantially insulated it from knowledge-­making in the large majority of early modern universities, thus setting theologians up for a fall from which institutionally they have never recovered—regardless of the intellectual viability today, as noted, of some theologies in relationship to all the findings (and indeed, all the possible findings) of the natural sciences.17 The eventual secularization of knowledge happened as a long-­term, unintended result of the Reformation era’s doctrinal contestation and the privileging of theology in the confessionally divided higher educational institutions of early modern Europe. So much for the thesis; now for the condensed narrative. Circa 1510, knowledge in Latin Christendom was not secular. It included Christian truth claims about God’s actions in history, most importantly in the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Qualitatively different kinds of knowledge—of natural regularities, the historical past, ancient texts, and the firsthand experience of Christian life—were interrelated within Christendom’s diverse, vibrant, and sometimes contentious intellectual culture (dramatically visible in the clashes between scholastic theologians and humanists, for example, in northern universities such as Paris, Louvain, and Cologne in the 1510s).18 Neither social practices, nor morality, nor the uses to which knowledge was put were separated from knowledge as such. This was part of late medieval Christianity as an institutionalized worldview that in all its diversity and with all its problems variously informed and was meant to inform all domains of human life.

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The seed for the eventual secularization of knowledge was planted by enduring doctrinal disagreement and unintended Western Christian pluralism. This was not simply a matter of “Protestantism” versus “Roman Catholicism,” as though “Protestantism” referred to something with discernibly coherent doctrines, practices, and institutions analogous to Catholicism, rather than being an umbrella term designating an open-­ended range of competing anti-­ Roman reformers, groups, and views. Reformation historians have tended to separate the magisterial Reformation from the radical Reformation, just as they have tended tacitly to conflate the interpretation of the Bible with the exercise of political power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This has had two unfortunate and distorting consequences. First, it has tended to conceal what in fact the shared commitment to the principle of sola scriptura, supplemented by claims about the authenticating testimony of the Holy Spirit, actually produced. Second, it has led many scholars to identify the claims of the only two anti-­Roman traditions that secured lasting political support (namely, the Lutheran and Reformed) with normative Protestantism, as though the exercise of power and determination of doctrine were intrinsically related. But the Reformation as a whole produced not even a rough consensus about what God’s Word meant or implied; a wide range of radical Protestants made clear that sola scriptura led neither obviously nor necessarily to justification by faith alone or salvation by grace alone, as Lutherans and Reformed Protestants asserted. Despite their many and vehement assertions of biblical perspicuity, rival anti-­Roman Christians demonstrated through their actions how separable was the reading and interpretation of scripture as such from any given set of doctrines or related practices. With respect to the transmission of knowledge in universities, however, the implications of Protestant heterogeneity would long remain muted, because so few Reformation-­era forms of Protestantism won political backing from secular authorities. As a result, there were no Swiss Brethren, Hutterite, Mennonite, Spiritualist, Familist, Socinian, or Quaker universities in the Reformation era. In fact, until the establishment of the dissenter academies in Restoration England, no European institutions of higher education were affiliated with radical Protestants.19 On the doctrinal issues about which Reformation-­era Christians disagreed, it was logically impossible for all of them actually to have been correct, and therefore impossible for them all to have had the knowledge of God’s teachings that they claimed to have. Theological controversialists of every stripe understood this, well aware of the principle of non-­contradiction. Hence, they engaged in ongoing doctrinal controversy in literally tens of thousands of publications from the 1520s through the seventeenth century and beyond. To little avail: socially divisive doctrinal disagreement became and has remained a

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fundamental feature of Western Christianity since the early 1520s. As we shall see, by the late nineteenth century this unresolved disagreement would foster the exclusion of all substantive religious truth claims from research universities. For especially in modern contexts of politically protected, individual religious freedom that produced so many conflicting doctrinal claims, how could one arbitrate among them? Doctrinal contestation and disagreement continued to mark the 1880s no less than they had the 1580s. In combination with unresolved doctrinal disagreement, another—deeply ironic—factor that laid the foundation for the eventual secularization of knowledge derived from early modern states’ control of churches. This was the privileging of theology in the confessionalized universities of the Reformation era among Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed Protestants (including the Church of England). In contrast to the treatment of the many marginalized radical Protestant groups, only Catholic and magisterial Protestant churches were protected—and overseen—by secular authorities in their respective confessional regimes. For good reason, according to such authorities: the Peasants’ War of 1524–26 showed dramatically what could happen when “the Gospel” was let loose among the “common man.” And the immediate origins of the Reformation itself—in a seemingly innocuous proposal for academic theologians in a provincial university to debate ninety-­five propositions about the misunderstanding of indulgences—demonstrated that universities could be explosive places. Higher education was dangerous because some ideas could inspire the subversion of political order, God’s truth, or both, on which the salvation of subjects and God’s providential favor were believed to depend. Yet universities and similar institutions that proliferated in the sixteenth century were indispensable to rulers. There was no institutional alternative for training the lawyers, jurists, secretaries, diplomats, physicians, pastors, and educators needed to staff growing governmental bureaucracies and dutifully to maintain good order. The only way forward was clear: just as biblical interpretation had to be corralled and churches had to be controlled, universities, academies, and colleges had to be regulated. Higher education had to be enlisted to serve God’s truth. Just as sovereigns relied on ecclesiastical authorities as partners in confessionalization, so they relied on theologians to articulate Christian truth and to establish parameters for the pursuit of knowledge in other university faculties.20 Accordingly, in concert with the desires of secular authorities, theology remained in the sixteenth century the preeminent and privileged subject in virtually all universities no less than it had been in universities with theology faculties before the Reformation. Rulers’ concerns with doctrine linked to the social virtue of obedience in an era of religious division dictated that universities had to be socially, morally, and intellectually stabilizing and conservative

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institutions. The curricula in the faculties of nearly all Reformation-­era universities were therefore circumscribed by confessional criteria and directed principally toward teaching rather than “research.”21 Although universities were far from intellectually moribund, the resources of various sorts of knowledge—humanistic, scholastic, and scientific—were employed in the service of doctrinal truth claims in ways meant to be consistent with the confessionalizing ambitions of Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed Protestant authorities. By privileging theology in universities, protecting orthodoxy from serious scholarly challenges, and policing intellectual inquiry, authorities restricted the interactions between a regime’s religious truth claims and other domains of human knowledge. Wittingly or not, the large majority of early modern universities thus fostered complacency among those who taught in their theology and arts faculties by prohibiting, or strongly curtailing, the pursuit of doctrinally sensitive sorts of inquiry—whether this meant philological and historical questions about the relationship between extant biblical manuscripts and the formation of the canonical text, for example, or asking in sustained ways how Christian doctrines were related to new discoveries about the natural world. So too, the time invested by so many theologians on doctrinal controversy was time not spent keeping abreast of new knowledge or seeking to understand God in relation to all things, the broadest inherited intellectual ambition of Christian theology. All human decisions, including those by scholars, have their opportunity costs. Meanwhile, intellectual inquiry did not stand still in the early modern period; far from it. But it increasingly migrated outside universities—and this too, in significant ways, at the behest of the same rulers who maintained oversight of their confessional universities. On the “demand side” of knowledge-­ making in the Reformation era, rulers provided its most important sites outside universities just as they relied on universities to transmit knowledge and train professionals in ways they hoped would foster the maintenance of order within their confessionalizing regimes. This was no contradiction; it simply meant that universities did not satisfy all the ambitions of early modern rulers. So, they fashioned a knowledge-­making symbiosis between intellectually inquisitive and socially striving men who were drawn to the rewards of patronage, and rulers who gained new knowledge from them to serve their desires in running their lives and their confessional states.22 It was hardly the late twentieth century’s military-­industrial complex, but we can see here a distant ancestor of the modern relationship between knowledge-­making and state power. In early modern Europe, the most important sites for this symbiosis were rulers’ courts and, especially from the second half of the seventeenth century, scientific academies.

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The courts of sovereigns and nobles had existed throughout the Middle Ages, but the sixteenth century brought new responsibilities and opportunities. The religious divisions opened by the Reformation entailed new necessities of military defense and new prospects for war. The stakes were hardly academic: matters as seemingly abstract as the mathematization of motion and neo-­Stoic philosophy, for example, could respectively influence the prosperity of states through the applications of ballistics and better disciplined armies.23 The discovery of the New World entailed a constantly growing flow of new knowledge to early modern courts about hitherto unknown peoples, fauna, and flora from hitherto unknown continents.24 Rulers’ money funded commercial and missionary expeditions that brought back the new data and physical specimens—and the prospects of exploitable mineral resources, medicinally valuable plants, and slave labor.25 With the training of useful professionals and the conservative transmission of knowledge being addressed by confessionalized universities, Reformation-­era rulers made their respective courts the site for the production of new knowledge that could differently serve their desires for prestige, power, and obedience to God. They sought to make the stabilizing function of higher education safeguarded by orthodoxy coexist with the creation of new knowledge pried away from curricular constraints and authoritative texts. For the latter, rulers could assemble and monitor the intellectual talent, libraries, botanical gardens, observatories, natural-­historical collections, and laboratory facilities right in their own palace complexes— which is just what they did.26 This explains why “technical expertise, novel procedures, and the critique of ancient traditions stand out prominently within court environments, in contrast with universities, as means appropriate for acquiring knowledge of nature.”27 It also explains why early modern courts figured importantly in the careers of so many men central to the emergent new science, including Galileo, for example, who left a position at the University of Padua as a teacher of mathematics for a prime post as the Medicis’ court philosopher and mathematician in Florence in 1610, and the astronomers Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), who worked at Rudolf II’s remarkable court in Prague.28 Perhaps more telling is the pantheon of major contributors to the new science who never taught as university professors: not only Brahe and Kepler but also Copernicus, Descartes, Bacon, Mersenne, Hobbes, Pascal, Boyle, Leibniz, Christiaan Huygens, and Leeuwenhoek. Indeed, Pascal, Boyle, and Leeuwenhoek never formally attended a university.29 The new mechanistic model of nature arose almost completely outside of universities; Gassendi was its only first-­generation advocate with a university professorship (at ­Aix-­en-­Provence), before the spread of Cartesianism.30 Aristotelian natural

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philosophy in universities did not generate new knowledge that rulers could use, in contrast to the hands-­on, descriptive, experimental methods and information gathering being pursued at their courts. The longer that rulers backed competing doctrines in their universities and shielded theologians, the less prepared would the latter eventually be to answer questions about how their respective Christian truth claims might be related to the ever-­burgeoning mass of new knowledge being made elsewhere. By the mid-­seventeenth century, things looked unpromising for the epistemological status of theology. More than a century of ongoing controversies among university-­trained protagonists had brought doctrinal disagreements no closer to resolution than they had been in the 1520s. Quite the contrary: unfettered anew during the English Revolution, Protestantism demonstrated the same sort of open-­ended doctrinal contentiousness that had characterized the early German Reformation, among, say, the Reformed Protestant framers of the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), the General Baptist leader Henry Denne, the Digger Gerrard Winstanley, and the Quaker James Nayler.31 As their respective protagonists well knew, the principle of non-­contradiction meant that not all of the competing claims could be correct; therefore not all of them could belong to knowledge. Nor was it apparent how the disagreements could be resolved so long as each Protestant protagonist functioned as a de facto hermeneutic authority. Enduring Reformation-­era Christian pluralism prompted some observers to draw skeptical conclusions about religion per se, which dovetailed with the robust revival of Pyrrhonism in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.32 Nor is it surprising that thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Wilkins, and John Locke began in diverse ways to distinguish disjunctively between what was merely believed as a matter of faith and opinion from what could be known on the basis of observation and reason.33 Moreover, by the mid-­seventeenth century it was clear that in contrast to the character of endlessly contested Christian doctrinal claims, the knowledge gained through dissections in anatomy theaters, experiments in alchemical laboratories, and observations in botanical gardens was different. The latter sort of knowledge did not depend on one’s interpretation of Pauline theology or the Lord’s Supper. It looked to be the same in Protestant Scotland as in Catholic Italy. It was universal and useful. It could be concretely applied to serve the desires of rulers and subjects alike, “able,” in Bacon’s words, “to produce worthy effects, and to endow the life of man with infinite new commodities.”34 And regardless of one’s religious views, there were prospects for resolving disagreements about it through shared, empirical attention to the matters at hand.

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By the end of the Thirty Years War and English Revolution, the religiopolitical conflicts of the Reformation era had proven tremendously expensive, massively destructive, and conspicuously inconclusive. What had they accomplished? God’s providence had frustrated ruler after ruler, all of whom, regardless of their convictions or devotion, had failed to achieve their principal objectives. The concrete devastation and disruption understandably quelled enthusiasm for further ventures of military engagement intertwined to whatever extent with religious commitments. It understandably fostered interest in forms of knowledge that would be less troublesome, ones geared toward goals about which antagonistic Christians were more likely to concur, such as the pleasures and comforts that accompanied the acquisition of more and better possessions in what Jan de Vries has analyzed as “the industrious revolution.”35 Although theology throughout the eighteenth century would remain firmly ensconced in most universities, which rulers still needed for the training of clergy and other officials to serve their confessional states, its privileged position was no longer a given. By the mid-­seventeenth century, what had theologians done for rulers lately? Theologians’ continuing shelter rendered most of them ever less likely to be able to cope in intellectual terms with the knowledge-­making that proceeded ever more outside universities. The most important new institutions for the pursuit of new knowledge in the later seventeenth century were the Royal Society of London (chartered in 1662) and the Académie Royale des Sciences of Paris (1666), the first of a wave of such institutions established over the next century in many European cities; both maintained a self-­conscious distinction between confessional theology and scientific knowledge.36 In expounding orthodoxy, safeguarding souls, battling opponents, and essentially abandoning theology’s medieval aspiration to integrate any and all truth about God and creation, Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic theologians had been living in an ever more vulnerable refuge. In their respective ways, the theological protagonists of long-­insulated confessional orthodoxies lacked the ability to see how their respective doctrinal claims might fit with the profusion of new knowledge. Moreover, the universities that fared best in accommodating new knowledge were those with the fewest confessional strictures: Leiden in the seventeenth century, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Halle, and Göttingen in the eighteenth.37 Their early modern predecessors having long been shielded in confessional universities from the wider world of knowledge-­making, few eighteenth-­ century theologians were in a position to respond to rationalist philosophical criticisms of their respective assertions or of revealed religion in general. Most theologians lacked the intellectual capacity to see how, for example, their

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r­ espective doctrinal truth claims might cohere with Newtonian physics or the existence of peoples who long antedated the Genesis creation accounts. Nor were they in a position to distinguish the indisputable empirical gains of the new knowledge from the tendentious metaphysical, moral, and historical beliefs with which Enlightened protagonists almost always combined and advanced them, under the ideologically conflationary banner of “reason.” Later in the century, Johann Georg Hamann’s assessment of Immanuel Kant would critique the latter’s Critique of Pure Reason on this score.38 Martin Gerbert (1720–1793), the learned abbot of St. Blasien in the Black Forest, recognized the need for a self-­critical renewal of Catholic scholastic theology that incorporated the gains of new knowledge, but without adopting the Lockean, Wolffian, or Kantian philosophical ideas embraced by some of his German Benedictine confrères.39 Yet such insight among contemporaries was rare, just as in the mid-­seventeenth century Pascal had been rare among leading intellectuals in repudiating the rationalist “God of the philosophers.” Still less were most theologians intellectually prepared to recognize the assumptions embedded in domestications of Christian truth claims by those Protestant scholars, such as faculty members at Göttingen, who were fashioning new alternatives. One had to know a great deal to engage leading intellectuals on their turf, and few theologians or other Christian intellectuals knew enough, despite exceptions such as New England’s Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), the Italian polymath and priest Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750), and the Jesuit scientist Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711–1787).40 Eighteenth-­century Catholic theologians familiar with novel philosophical ideas more commonly tended to make doctrinal claims subservient to them, as did many of their Protestant counterparts.41 Moreover, new Protestant truth claims at Göttingen were being used in tandem with new commitments and for new purposes—most consequentially, those that served the Hanoverian state. When biblical scholars such as Johann Salomo Semler (1725–1791), Johann David Michaelis (1717–1791), and Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1753– 1827) published challenging ideas about the complex formation and character of the biblical text as the cultural product of “a deep and dead past,” very few theologians had the erudition and analytical ability necessary to distinguish philological achievement from philosophical assumption.42 Theologians were more vulnerable than ever after Newtonianism had triumphed even in most continental universities by the 1750s. The “leading figures of the Enlightenment, Newtonians to a man,” were undiscriminating despisers of Aristotle and scholasticism.43 Yet confessional theologians could not articulate in intellectually persuasive ways why it was so wrongheaded to try to explain human morality, politics, and social life on the basis of empirical observation and efficient causality alone. They could not see clearly (as

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contemporary thinkers such as Peter Winch and Alasdair MacIntyre have) that once intentionality and linguistically mediated meanings are bracketed from human actions they simply cease to be intelligible at all as human actions, and thus cannot in principle be understood on the model of the natural sciences.44 Yet almost certainly the anti-­Aristotelian pioneers would not have been persuaded even if such critiques had been forthcoming and they had attended to them. Theorists such as David Hume and Adam Smith seem to have been happily oblivious of the difference between historically constructed desires and putatively universal “human nature.” Consequently, they imagined themselves advancing Enlightened reason when in fact they were legitimating acquisitive ideologies on the basis of introspection and the observation of northwestern Europeans shaped by the industrious revolution.45 Very few confessional theologians, however, had a basis to make substantive critiques, their protected place in universities having long provided safe harbor from the turbulent waters of early modern knowledge-­making. They had been spared serious questions about how so much new knowledge might fit together with their respective doctrinal truth claims. Instead, they were mocked by Voltaire, jeered by the Encyclopédistes, and ridiculed by almost everyone who was anyone in the Enlightened world of European learning. Nothing symbolizes the rejection of Christian theology better than the sequential exclusion of the Jesuits—the religious order that for more than two centuries had epitomized Catholic erudition and teaching—from Europe’s Catholic countries beginning with Pombal’s Portugal in 1759 and concluding with Pope Clement XIV’s suppression of the order in 1773.46 The rejection of theology was also symbolized in the anti-­Catholic destruction wrought by the French Revolution and in the suppression of universities and confiscatory seizure of monasteries by political leaders in France and elsewhere in Catholic Europe.47 The French Revolution and Napoleonic era devastated European higher education: where there had been 143 universities in 1789, there were only 83 in 1815.48 These years signal a major rupture in the relationship between universities and religious truth claims, theology, knowledge-­making, the state, and individual human desires, even though all the major elements in the subsequent secularization of knowledge were already present before 1800. Their interactions unfolded in a wide range of contingent ways in the particular institutions of different European countries and in North America. With the exception of Catholic universities, which followed suit later, by the early twentieth century universities in both Europe and North America had arrived at largely the same position, with religious truth claims excluded in principle from the pursuit and transmission of knowledge in the secularized academy.

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Despite its indebtedness to Halle, Göttingen, and the philosophical idealists at Jena in the 1790s, the founding of the University of Berlin in 1809–10 is widely regarded as inaugurating the era of the modern research university. It brought knowledge-­making definitively back into the university setting. Berlin became the most influential model for the reform of existing and the establishment of new universities in Germany, and German research universities in turn, adapted in diverse ways, became from the second half of the nineteenth century the most important model for universities in other countries in Europe, in North America, and eventually around the world.49 But Berlin in the 1810s was as different from what research universities a century later would become as it was from the confessional universities of early modern Europe. The “new Romantic university” at Berlin in its early years intensified certain institutional structures and ideological emphases that would endure; their transformation, in combination with other historical realities, would produce the secularization of knowledge that is largely taken for granted today.50 The most consequential among these structures and emphases were the sequestration of theology, a commitment to research, an emphasis on the self, and a reliance on the state. Berlin differed most obviously from confessional universities in the definitive dethroning of theology from its place of privilege. Extending a pattern pioneered by Leiden and Göttingen, theology retained its own faculty but had no influence on other academic subjects in the philosophy faculty (the ancestor of modern university schools of arts and sciences). This quarantining of theology institutionalized Kant’s argument in his Conflict of the Faculties (1798) that philosophy—as the expression of autonomous reason and human freedom—should be liberated from the confining constraints of theology.51 In the long term, this move contributed importantly to the secularization of knowledge by allowing other disciplines to ignore religious questions entirely in their respective inquiries. Emancipated from Christian dogmas, the aim of the Romantic research university was not knowledge for knowledge’s sake, nor the pursuit of discoveries that would augment the sum total of knowledge, nor the Baconian pursuit of useful scientific knowledge but rather Wissenschaft oriented to Bildung: the full self-­development of the individual student’s interests, capacities, and personality as the subjective realization of his unfettered freedom and autonomy.52 Research in the Romantic university meant not the pursuit of specialized knowledge within a discipline but rather concerned “the inculcation of unified principles of scientific inquiry” that retained a commitment to the unity of all knowledge in a manner formally analogous to the same in medieval Christianity.53 Yet this enterprise resembled medieval Christian theology as little as the Romantic cult of the self-­directing individual concerned habituation in Chris-

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tian virtues within a socially shared way of life. In the Romantic research university, the unity of knowledge did not mean Christian theology as the relationship of God to all things. It meant the subjective vision of the autonomous individual within the sublime whole of the cosmos conceived as Naturphilosophie in the manner of Schelling. Men such as Wilhelm von Humboldt and his brother Alexander, the naturalist explorer, had replaced creation understood in traditional Christian terms with the natural world conceived along these lines.54 Like Romanticism as a worldview, the Romantic research university disappeared from Germany during the nineteenth century, but important aspects of it were adopted in the United States, where they were enthusiastically hybridized with Emersonian individualism and transcendentalism.55 By the end of the nineteenth century, the principal purpose of research had changed dramatically, evident in the transplantation and adaptation of universities inspired by the German model in countries on both sides of the North Atlantic. No longer focused on the self-­realization of the individual student, the aim of research had become the increase of new knowledge per se as the defining, prestige-­garnering activity of professionalizing scientists and scholars. Beginning in the 1870s, that American adaptation of the German system, the “graduate school,” deliberately dedicated to the pursuit of specialized knowledge, was either grafted onto “undergraduate” colleges in the case of existing institutions such as Harvard under Charles Eliot or made the centerpiece of new institutions such as Johns Hopkins under Daniel Coit Gilman.56 Greater specialization was reflected in the creation of increasingly distinct academic disciplines, including many familiar now in the tripartite division of the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities.57 After Justus von Liebig (1803–1873) demonstrated the pedagogical utility and real-­life applicability of laboratory chemistry in a university setting at Giessen in 1824, universities began increasingly to emphasize the natural sciences and medicine. Within a few decades these disciplines overshadowed the philology and philosophy that had inspired the Romantic research university.58 By the end of the nineteenth century, the cumulative character of new natural-­scientific knowledge and its demonstrably successful applications had secured the dominance of the natural sciences (including engineering and medicine) in research universities that they have held ever since, never more than in STEM disciplines today. Engineering and technology applied the scientific discoveries that supported capitalist production, augmented state military power, promoted agricultural yields, and stoked consumer acquisitiveness during the second industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century. Through observation, measurement, quantification, and experiment, natural scientists sought data that could be used to formulate theories in the quest to discover the laws characteristic of natural regularities, which could be used to

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make predictions capable of verification. Then their findings could be applied through instrumental rationality in the service of human desires. The sciences worked and were transformatively powerful; in the end, this rendered irrelevant all abstruse questions about their epistemological status.59 They worked regardless of what their practitioners thought about God or whether they thought about God at all. Indeed, they worked regardless of their practitioners’ religious, moral, or political commitments, whatever they happened to be. The natural sciences demonstrated that methodological naturalism was a fruitful assumption and evidentiary empiricism the necessary method in the attempt to understand natural regularities, whether in Pasteur’s microbiology or Helmholtz’s physics. Because the natural sciences were so successful, pioneers in the nascent social sciences looked to them longingly as models for imitation. In his famous address in 1896, “Princeton in the Nation’s Service,” Woodrow Wilson said of natural scientists that “their work has been so stupendous that all other men of all other studies have been set staring at their methods, imitating their ways of thought, ogling their results.”60 If the social sciences were to make similar progress, their practitioners reasoned, they should adopt the same methodological naturalism and empiricism, so as to seek to discover the objective, universal laws that govern human behavior, social life, political relations, and economic activity. Thus might they realize the Enlightenment aspiration to apply Newtonianism to human life, albeit with what they took to be a rigorous empiricism, the fulfillment of what Auguste Comte called a “social physics.” As one of sociology’s founding figures, Émile Durkheim, put it, society “is part of nature and nature’s highest expression. The social realm is a natural realm that differs from others only in its greater complexity.”61 The implications of new social sciences such as sociology and psychology were far from purely theoretical, because if their practitioners could discover invariable laws, human behavior could be accurately predicted and closely managed.62 Who knew what might then be possible? By the end of the nineteenth century, the success of the natural sciences had made their epistemology the paradigm for knowledge as such. Whatever was to count as knowledge had to be universal, objective, and independent of the divergent, personal, individual beliefs of its pursuers and purveyors. This contrasted dramatically with Protestantism as an empirical, social reality, as indeed had been true since the early 1520s. But the intellectual implications of Protestant heterogeneity had been minimized in early modern Europe because only Lutheran and Reformed Protestant regimes, including the Church of England, had universities. The confessional character of magisterial Protestant universities had permitted politically privileged theologians within a given regime largely to ignore the fact of doctrinal pluralism that followed

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from the Reformation’s foundational principle. The confrontation was thus deferred between theology and most of the early modern knowledge-­making that went on outside universities. By design and from the time of its founding the United States was never a confessional country, but before the Civil War the widespread adoption of Scottish Common Sense philosophy in divergently Protestant American colleges not only served as a shared intellectual scaffolding analogous to Aristotelianism in the Reformation era but also functioned in those colleges in quasi-­confessional ways. It veiled the implications of Protestant doctrinal disagreements. Despite the vast proliferation of different Protestant groups and claims during the first half of the nineteenth century, Protestant professors at American colleges continued to rely on inductive, fact-­gathering, Baconian science filtered through Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy and epistemology to sustain their commitment to the unity of knowledge.63 After 1870 or so, however, their epistemological mirage was exposed: American Protestant theologians were as ill-­equipped to handle the intellectual challenges of Darwinism, German biblical criticism, and historicism as Aristotelian natural philosophers had been unprepared to accommodate Newtonianism in the eighteenth century.64 More fundamentally, they had no answer when confronted with the principle of non-­contradiction concerning their respective, rival doctrinal claims, beyond either stridently reasserting the correctness of their own views (which only underscored the problem)65 or attempting to determine, as some sort of lowest common denominator, what it was that all Protestants shared in common and then to promote it. Those in higher education, public life, and industry who desired the secularization of knowledge seized their opportunity. Through deliberate, self-­conscious efforts from the 1870s through the 1920s they changed (although not all at once) the status quo of higher education in what Christian Smith has called “the secular revolution.”66 In the end, knowledge and teaching in leading American universities were secularized because the diversity and individualism of Protestant truth claims could not be reconciled with science’s epistemological demands for universality and objectivity. In this sense knowledge did not merely happen to be secularized because American Protestant theologians lacked the capacity to handle new intellectual challenges; it had to be secularized because of the unintended and unwanted consequences of the Reformation itself. Despite centuries of claims about scripture’s perspicuity, there had never been anything close to a consensus about what the Bible said. The United States’ institutionalization of individual religious freedom both protected and revealed what the Reformation as such produced, without the power of political authorities standing behind hermeneutic authorities: the aggregate of whatever

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individuals happened to prefer. This fit snugly with the ideology of American individualism that so struck Tocqueville and other nineteenth-­century European visitors to the United States. But it clashed irreconcilably with the criteria for knowledge, once research on the German model with the natural sciences as the epistemological standard became the aspiration for American universities. As a result, knowledge had to be secularized and religious truth claims excluded from universities just as religious convictions had to be privatized, indeed regarded as subjective beliefs and opinions regardless of their content or the religious tradition to which they belonged. Those Protestant theologians and skeptical biblical scholars who hitched their intellectual wagon to post-­Kantian philosophy found its payload progressively lightened until it was unclear how their Christianity could consist of anything more than post-­Schleiermacherian pious sentiments. If natural scientists studied the material world from which miracles had been extruded, history covered the ancient Near East along with the rest of the human past, psychology analyzed human interiority and behavior, and anthropology explained rituals and their functions, what was left for theologians to do? In the past two centuries, the secularization of knowledge has been overwhelmingly a phenomenon born of Protestantism, from the Romantic research university to the American institutions that, after the damage inflicted on German universities from the Great War through Hitler’s Reich, have become the world’s leading institutions of higher education. The secularization of Catholic higher education followed a different path, one not determined by the incompatibility between rival doctrinal claims and the epistemological demands of universality characteristic of scientific knowledge. Instead, the overriding curricular weakness of Catholic theology from post-­Revolutionary ultramontanism to the Second Vatican Council was institutional and differently intellectual: its isolation in seminaries, and its narrow focus on philosophical issues at the expense of attempting to understand Catholic doctrines in relationship to the exponential increase in new knowledge. The neo-­ Thomism institutionalized in Catholic higher education especially after Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris (1879) downplayed knowledge-­making in other disciplines and, essentially continuing the early modern pattern discussed above, kept research in them at a distance from the Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophical categories that underpinned the theology. This distancing was reinforced by papal encyclicals such as Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907) and Humani Generis (1950), which, as a symptom of Catholic theology’s long-­standing insulation from the wider world of knowledge-­making, cripplingly combined many-­stranded and complex intellectual issues under conflationary labels such as “Modernism.”67 Partly for this reason, with the possible exception of Louvain in Belgium, no Catholic institutions were among the world’s leading

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research universities in the early or mid-­twentieth century.68 This fact helped to make Catholicism’s truth claims seem all the more vacuous to non-­ Catholics, who were likely to concur with George Bernard Shaw’s dictum that a lack of academic freedom and ideological restrictions made the idea of a Catholic university a contradiction in terms. If Protestantism enriched by the Scottish or German Enlightenments could not handle historicist scholarship, critical philosophy, and the findings of science, how could intellectually retrograde, papally controlled, superstitious Catholicism possibly hope to? The neo-­Thomist curriculum of American Catholic higher education evaporated within a decade beginning in the 1960s. This was not simply because Catholics were eager to “embrace the modern world” following Vatican II’s aggiornamento but because of the papally reinforced gap between what Catholicism purported to be, on the one hand, and the cutting-­edge pursuit of knowledge in leading research universities on the other.69 Beginning in the 1960s understandably self-­critical Catholic universities had a daunting amount of intellectual catching-­up to do in the midst of dramatic social changes and political turmoil. But in “accepting modernity” with scarcely less eagerness than preceding popes had denounced it, their leaders tended uncritically to embrace many tangled, hidden assumptions embedded in the history of the secularized institutions whose structures and practices they adopted.70 Even when refracted through certain Catholic lenses, these assumptions unwittingly fostered the secularization of knowledge. If a particular (and quite common mis)reading of Aquinas on faith and reason, for example, was thought to model the institutional relationship between theology and all other disciplines—theology is to faith, revelation, and supernatural grace as all other disciplines are to knowledge, reason, and the natural world—then one essentially divorced Catholic truth claims from the rest of knowledge in a manner similar to theology’s demotion in the nineteenth-­century Romantic research university, but in a different idiom. Theology’s integrative potential would be stillborn if it was regarded simply as another discipline among others, even among institutions that eschewed the inherently relativizing and secularizing move of replacing theology with religious studies departments. The same was true of philosophy, if it was thought that the solution to the problem of intellectually stale neo-­Thomism was simply the imitation of philosophy as it was done in secular universities. With so many contestable modern moral and metaphysical assumptions in social scientific and humanistic disciplines interwoven with academic research, much of knowledge-­making was bound to conflict with Catholic truth claims. But this was also likely to go unrecognized, at least initially. In a rush to “make up for lost time” and to narrow the embarrassing gap between the level of research in Catholic institutions and in leading universities, university

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leaders unwittingly invited in an intellectual Trojan horse bearing a load of subversive assumptions. No wonder American Catholic universities have ever since been in a perpetual state of hand-­wringing and endless debates about “Catholic identity.” Most Catholic institutions rapidly secularized the “academic part” of their universities in the 1960s and 1970s—as if it were separable from the other parts, like nature was supposedly separable from grace—and then were puzzled when everything else changed, too. Ironies abound in the history of the secularization of knowledge no less than in the intersection of the contemporary intellectual and institutional realities to which it has led. We are unlikely to attend much to either so long as we continue to believe that increasingly powerful scientific explanations of natural regularities, burgeoning historical knowledge, and/or the fact of religious and ideological pluralism per se account for the secularization of knowledge. Despite the reality of intellectually sophisticated theology and philosophy of religion today, their virtual exile from research universities means that relatively few scholars or scientists know that some religious thinkers not only have addressed the intellectual weaknesses of their predecessors but have articulated insightful criticisms of modern philosophical assumptions that despite multiple postmodern turns are still widely taken for granted. Conversely, the failure of modern philosophical foundationalism to deliver on its centuries-­long ambition of answering in anything like a consensually persuasive, rational way questions about human morality, meaning, and purpose—in short, to provide an ideologically neutral and rationally justifiable replacement for religion—has left considerable skeptical detritus in its post-­ Enlightened wake. (Montaigne redivivus, only now without any recourse to custom.) Reason alone, deliberately divorced from any resort to authority or tradition, has led not to anything remotely approaching agreement about what is true, right, or good, what people should care about or how they should live. It has produced an open-­ended range of conflicting truth claims that, judging from the history of modern philosophy and the current state of philosophy, are apparently irresolvable. What follows? At the very least, we should stop uncritically repeating versions of a nineteenth-­century story about how science supposedly superseded superstition and reason reputedly replaced religion—one sadly still repeated by ostensible “thought leaders” and believed by far too many unwitting readers unequipped to know better.71 In intellectual, institutional, and social terms the story is false. What has long been considered an intellectual inevitability was in fact a highly contingent process born of the Reformation era, the institutionalization of which is more accurately regarded as the imposition of an ideological imperialism. Correlatively, if the academy is consistent with its

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own commitments to academic freedom, the open pursuit of intellectual inquiry without ideological restrictions, critical rationality, the importance of rethinking and reconsidering, and the questioning of assumptions, then it should become less ideologically narrow and permit a wider range of beliefs for consideration on their own terms. It should unsecularize itself.

9 Contesting Secularization T h e I de a of a Nor m at i v e De f ic i t of Mode r n i t y A f t e r M a x W e b e r

Peter E. Gordon

From the age of Enlightenment until their recent defection, most intellectuals who identified with the political left, whether liberal or revolutionary, cleaved to a normative program of secularization. It was the commonplace view that social progress and freedom required the dissolution of the sacred, clearing the ground for the construction of a modern order that would rest on nothing but its own self-­created supports. Crucially, the paradigm of secularization was both descriptive and prescriptive. Secularization served as a generic name for an objective, historical process of legally sanctioned separation between church and state, alongside statistical trends of declining institutional affiliation and self-­reported belief. But this panoramic view of the historical past also had strongly normative implications for the present and the future. Following Kant’s definition of Enlightenment as a collective release from the subordinate status of Unmündigkeit, or “immaturity,” intellectuals saw in the secular ideal the terminus ad quem not only for individual philosophers but for all societies around the globe that aspired to principles of justice and enlightenment beyond religious strife. Consider, for example, Max Weber, who arguably deserves greatest credit for the orthodox thesis, which saw in the emergence of modernity an inevitable differentiation of value spheres, a rationalization of practical conduct, and the consequent disenchantment of the world. The classical paradigm of secularization as articulated in Weber’s sociology presupposed that the comprehensive metaphysical and normative authority of religion could not long survive once it stood exposed to the disarticulating processes of instrumental reason: magic and miracle would yield to mundane procedure, charisma 184

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would dissolve into bureaucratic routine, and the social whole would shatter into a new “polytheism” (the agonistic disarray of incommensurable value-­ spheres). Traditional religion would thereby suffer a terrific demotion in social prestige: having abandoned its sovereign role as the organizing scheme of the social whole, it would retreat from public life into the interior sphere of mysticism and mere affect. In “The Economic Ethics of the World Religions” (the famous methodological prolegomenon for his collected essays in the sociology of religion) Weber concluded that the trial of rationalization would end with religion’s shift “into the realm of the irrational.”1 Weber believed this process was a fate to be embraced by all except those too timid to bear the fate of the times. But Weber’s praise for the achievements of modernity never lacked ambivalence. As I will explain later on, his vision of secular life remained tinged with melancholy and it prepared the way for its own undoing. Still, his sociological narrative of religious transformation served as the more or less uncontested groundwork for a classical theory of secularization that would survive well into the 1960s. With evidentiary support from sociologists like David Martin and theoretical refinements from Peter Berger, the endurance and plausibility of the theory seemed assured. No doubt its prestige among Cold War social scientists was due in part to its integral explanatory role in the then-­dominant paradigm of modernization theory. Martin’s A General Theory of Secularization (1978) characterized it as a kind of “universal process” that would take hold in all modern settings. According to Martin, the decline of religion was correlated with industrialization, urbanization, the gradual and increasing geographical and social mobility of populations, the intensifying denominationalism of religious forms, and the consequent cognitive strains of intercultural contact—all processes he subsumed under the broad-­scale term of “differentiation.” The general trend of modern society was to unravel what Peter Berger called the “sacred canopy” that had once protected all spheres of life.2 An increased pluralization of institutional structures would separate out specific norms and practices into different domains (education, welfare, law, the state, and so forth). Church institutions themselves would undergo the same differentiation of authority. Isolated from the other spheres of life and no longer serving as the primary custodians of social conduct, they would become merely voluntary societies, intensifying the Reformationist model of privatized faith. David Martin hastened to note that such a process was not inevitable: it was not that they must happen but that “they tend to occur other things being equal.” Martin admitted, of course, that all things were not equal: the general theory was not actually general, since it drew its primary evidence chiefly from the recent history of Christianity in Europe and North America, while it remained largely indifferent to developments elsewhere in the world. Advocates of the secularization paradigm

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tended to assume that their theory could at least accommodate patterns of immigration from other parts of the world: acculturation, it was said, would eventually rob the newcomers of their traditionalist faith. The universal prestige of the paradigm remained undisturbed.3 Over the past quarter of a century, however, confidence in this Weberian narrative has been shattered. To be sure, some sociologists such as Steve Bruce remain steadfast in their commitment to the classical paradigm.4 But the empirical counterevidence will strike even the most casual readers of the daily news as hard to ignore.5 Signs that the world is not growing more secular are everywhere—from the terrorists inspired by a militant Islam to the settlers of Jewish ultra-­orthodoxy, from the ideologues of Hindu nationalism to the astonishing vigor of evangelical Christians not only in sub-­Saharan Africa but in the mega-­churches that provide spiritual solace to suburban populations across the United States. These days secularization theory appears ready for its last rites. In fact, academics have taken some delight in the paradox that secularization demands a religious burial. Rodney Stark, for example, concludes his 1999 essay with the proposal that the theory should be laid to rest with a Latinate blessing: requiescat in pace (rest in peace).6 Meanwhile, responding to this new post-­secular climate, sociologists such as Grace Davie and José Casanova have developed sophisticated new models to explain the vigor of public religions in the West. Anthropologists such as Talal Asad explain how the very category of religion as imagined in secularization theory misconstrues the more holistic and integrated character of religious practice in the East and especially in Islam. Philosophers, too, have joined the chorus of voices who condemn secularization theory as both descriptively inaccurate and normatively undesirable. In his monumental work, A Secular Age, Charles Taylor has proposed an alternative to what he calls the “subtraction” model: we cannot merely assume that the historical emergence of secular society entails the falling-­away of religion since this already presupposes the secularist standpoint. A genuinely pluralist view of the secular West, Taylor says, should at least hold open the possibility of transcendent religiosity beyond what he calls the “immanent frame” of non-­theistic experience.7 Historians, too, are now keen to criticize the secularization paradigm, especially for its unwarranted confidence in historical teleology, and for the ahistorical and anti-­pluralist view that all human cultures are treading the same path of Enlightenment. It is a curious fact that the critique of the seculari­ zation paradigm proceeds apace even while some of the statistical indicators suggest that secularization remains a marked empirical trend: since the 1960s, nearly all surveys in Europe confirm a decline in institutional affiliation and its subjective correlates (of professed belief). Steve Bruce, for example, cites the Mannheim Eurobarometer for rates of church attendance: during the pe-

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riod 1970–2000 the rates declined in France from 23 percent to 5 percent, in Germany from 30 percent to 15 percent, and even in Ireland (a country whose national identification with Catholicism remains atypically high) from 90 percent to 60 percent. Religious militancy, meanwhile, does not belie this overall trend. It simply reminds us that spectacular (and occasionally violent) exceptions draw popular or media attention far more than quotidian trends charted across the longue durée.8 In this chapter, I will not address the empirical (but no less controversial) question as to whether secularization has or has not happened. My attention will be confined instead to the way that the idea of secularization has been constructed and contested among philosophers and social theorists. It would be wrong to dismiss such theoretical questions as irrelevant to empirical research: a strong relation obtains between empirical studies and social theories, since the latter furnish the requisite frameworks and hypothetical models through which statistical indicators gain their significance. In what follows, however, I will focus only on certain internal features of the theoretical controversy itself, with special attention to the emergent trend in “post-­secular” theory that challenges the classical thesis. It is worth noting that the “post-­secular” turn knows no political distinction: secularization theory has been dismantled by both the left and the right, albeit for different reasons, and we should be permitted to ask what explains their unlikely convergence. Joan Scott, joined by other historians and social theorists who draw inspiration from Foucault’s critique of Enlightenment reason, has directed a suspicious hermeneutic at the French principle of laïcité and its exclusionary effects, especially with regard to women who adhere to the Muslim practice of hijab, which, especially in France over the most recent decades, has become for overdetermined reasons the privileged object of cultural anxiety and governmental regulation.9 But the critique of secular reason has also come from the right, notably from Brad Gregory, an accomplished historian of early modern religion whose 2012 book, The Unintended Reformation, sets out to show that the Protestant challenge to Catholicism was only one step in a grand process of normative disintegration that has ended in what he calls “hyperpluralism.” Modernity, he claims, has ended in failure, because it cannot provide a single and all-­embracing answer to the “life questions” that concern us all. To the astonishment of some critics, Gregory has also urged historians to “take religion seriously,” which is to say that they must approach religion without the commonplace secularist bias of the modern research university and with an epistemic readiness to entertain the possibility that theism may be true.10 Of course, these historians and social theorists are hardly a unified group. They do not share the same methodologies and they do not share the same

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religious convictions (if they have religious convictions at all). Today critical investment in the post-­secular turn remains so pronounced that it hardly seems permissible to dissent from the theoretical vogue to pose the genealogical and historical question as to why this has happened and what accounts for the striking convergence of critics from both the left and the right. Notwithstanding their differences, the recent defection clearly marks a new phase in the debate over secularization insofar as it contests both the inevitabilism of the classical thesis and the correlative aspiration to bring about the secular world it forecasts. The rise of muscular piety around the globe has surely encouraged this rebellion even if it does not exhaust its meaning. Its true significance, I would argue, is not reactive but prescriptive: The most striking thing about the new trend in post-­secular social thought is the place it imagines for religion in the public sphere. Even if they disagree on many particulars, a great many intellectuals seem to agree on this point: they wish to carve out a space for a persistent and public kind of religion that may offer an alternative to what they consider the normatively impoverished discourse of secular modernity. Even Jürgen Habermas now appears ready to modify at least certain dogmatic elements of the classical paradigm. But he is not alone. Charles Taylor, for example, has observed that today many citizens in Europe and North America try their very best to content themselves with a flattened and this-­worldly experience of life within the confines of thoroughgoing immanence. Deaf to the appeals of transcendence, their humanism is exclusive, he claims, because they seek no meaning higher than the meaning of human flourishing. But Taylor thinks that the exclusive humanists are vulnerable to the seductions of exclusive anti-­humanism. Once religion is vanquished, he claims, no obligations remain that can prevent human beings from turning upon one another in orgies of self-­gratification and violence. José Casanova, meanwhile, suggests that a modernity without religion may suffer from a normative deficit, and it is in response to this predicament that he proposes a solution: in many modern societies, Casanova hopes, the public sphere might open its arms once again to religion, bringing religious insight to modern politics. The public sphere will thereby undergo what Casanova calls a “renormativization.”11 At issue, then, is a widespread complaint concerning the alleged normative poverty of rationalized modernity, which is said to suffer a lack in those moral-­ political resources that are deemed necessary for its survival. I shall call this critical perspective “the normative deficit of modernity.” An emergent claim in the new sociological and philosophical literature is that modernity as a whole suffers from a fatal deficit in normative resources. This complaint is grafted onto an analytically distinct and typically apologetic view that only religion can furnish the requisite instruction.12 To be sure, the notion of a modern deficit in rationalized society has many sources, and it is sufficiently

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labile that it has appealed to social theorists for different reasons and has been deployed in different ways. One might even suppose that the idea is as old as reason itself and emerged at the very moment that human beings began to press the gods for an explanation concerning our fate: Job learned after endless trials that the meaning of human life surpasses understanding, though he found comfort in the thought that God instructs where reason cannot. In recent years not only the conventional apologists for religion but also social theorists on the left have embraced this claim, with a zeal that their antireligious antecedents in the era of the secularizing eighteenth-­century Enlightenment would have found surprising. The new critics, it would seem, have grown as suspicious of mere reason as the philosophes were of the institutional Church. They believe that modernity if left to its own rational instruments will prove morally deficient and that we must therefore harken to the voice from the whirlwind. At the very least, they would suggest that we should strive to recall sources of moral instruction that lie beyond reason’s ken. Whatever its deeper origins, however, the idea of a normative deficit in secular modernity achieved a special sophistication and theoretical density in the stream of modern European thought that flows from Max Weber and that has retained its authority across the twentieth century. In this essay, I would like to mark only two moments in this complex and highly ironic tale, taking the unusual strategy of a backward reconstruction, beginning with the present and moving in reverse chronology toward one of the sources of the idea.

Habermas and Religion Perhaps the most surprising sign of a modification in the classical thesis is found in the recent work of the German social theorist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Esteemed as a theorist of modernity and an exponent of reason as the necessary framework for public discourse, Habermas would strike most readers as an improbable candidate for the new post-­secularization trend. Although he is now passing his ninetieth birthday, he remains an unflagging critic of German conservatism and there is nothing in his work that betrays nostalgia for the religious past. A geopolitical positioning system would locate him on a well-­traveled Autobahn of democratic socialism; he has never strayed onto more exotic roads. Amid the crowd of Continental philosophers who have championed poststructuralism and Maoism and post-­Heideggerian utopia, his readiness to condemn peers on the radical left for what he called “left fascism” guaranteed his permanent rupture with populist militancy, while his admiration for American-­style liberal theorists such as John Rawls has distinguished him as an incorrigible moderate. His major works bespeak a sensibility of post-Enlightenment critical rationalism that remains unmoved

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by hymns to a Christian civilization or “Leitkultur” that have long inspired his Christian-­Democratic contemporaries. In 1959, when the Social Democrats displaced their solidarity from the proletariat to an undifferentiated populace, they discovered, surprisingly, that even democratic socialism had deep roots in “Christian ethics.” Although Habermas readily granted this historical genealogy, in his own theories it remained largely without consequence. As an individual and as a theorist he has always been—to use Max Weber’s phrase— “unmusical religiously.”13 Over the last decade, however, we have witnessed a subtle but significant metamorphosis. In the fall of 2001, in his acceptance speech for the Frankfurt Bookseller’s Peace Prize, Habermas delivered a short address titled “Glauben und Wissen” (Faith and Knowledge), a theme that spoke to the bewilderment of his audience and readers not only in Germany but across Europe and North America in the weeks following the terrorist attacks of September 11. Although one could glimpse an interest in religion as early as the 1988 essay collection Nachmetaphysisches Denken, it is really only with the 2001 Peace Prize speech that Habermas turned decisively to religion as a crucial theme for reflection. Since that time, he has not ceased to comment on religion and—here is the truly noteworthy change—he now readily accepts its longevity and its validity within the framework of modern democratic society. In 2004 he met at the Catholic Academy in Bavaria with then-­cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (eventually named Benedict the Sixteenth) for a discussion concerning the character and consequences of secularization.14 The following year he published his newest and most expansive volume of essays under the title Between Naturalism and Religion.15 In 2007 he met in Munich with a group of Jesuit scholars for a conversation published under the title, An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-­Secular Age.16 And, more recently, he met in New York with Charles Taylor, Judith Butler, and Cornel West for a public colloquy, the transcript of which was published just a few years ago as The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere.17 He has also been writing a new and major work on religion, of which he has introduced small portions in various workshops with colleagues in both Europe and North America. And yet nobody would nominate Habermas as a candidate for religious awakening. Despite various modifications in his theoretical system, he has remained faithful over the last fifty years to his guiding thought, that humanity bears within itself a capacity for a certain kind of discursive logic that he calls “communicative rationality.” Embedded in all social discourse is what he has called a pragmatic (or quasi-­transcendental) presupposition of unforced understanding: every act of communication aims toward a mutual intelligibility that exposes all claims to critical scrutiny. Discourse, in other words, generates through its very own practice an intersubjective rationality that is oriented

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pragmatically toward the regulative idea of consensus. But the theory of communicative reason also dispenses with the foundationalist guarantee of a final truth. Older groundworks of theological or metaphysical certitude must be cast aside. Because there is no Weltgeist to ground our absolute agreement, Habermas insists that his philosophy has made a turn into “post-­metaphysical thinking.”18 Now, this thesis made its debut in the 1980s, at a stage when Habermas had not yet surrendered the inevitabilist commitments of secularization theory. The basic claim at this point was that religion belongs to that rich stock of cultural norms that have sedimented historically into the taken-­for-­granted background of any given Lebenswelt, or life-­world. Although such norms belong to the wellspring of moral insights from which a culture can always draw instruction, Habermas assumed that human history was on the path toward a full rationalization of the life-­world—a process that would ultimately deplete the sacred reservoir and leave nothing behind. The compulsory character of their sacred norms, which once served to bind society into a whole, would be retained but only as the binding character of the better argument. In the second volume of The Theory of Communicative Action Habermas called this process die Versprachlichung des Sakralen, or “the linguistification of the sacred.”19 It is this early theory that may enhance our surprise when we are confronted with Habermas’s most recent comments on the need for religion in modern society. In the 2001 Peace Prize address he appealed to “those moral feelings which only religious language has as yet been able to give a sufficiently differentiated expression,” and he expressed hope that such feelings might “find universal resonance” once they were furnished with a “salvaging formulation” to capture “something almost forgotten.”20 That Habermas would like to find a universalizing language for moral insights is not uncharacteristic: the aspiration contains a familiar bid for the universalization of social norms in a linguistic medium. More intriguing, however, is the thought that such social norms are to be found in religious language alone. On this point Habermas cleaves to a phrasing of great temporal dexterity and uncertainty: “only religious language has as yet” captured the requisite moral sentiments. He also suggests that the problem for religious language is that it may lack the right sort of lucidity in articulation: the normative contents of religion require a “sufficiently differentiated expression.” Still, the general drift was to suggest that modern society still needs religion and may very well need it for a long time to come.21 A glimmer of this idea appeared as early as the 1988 essay “Themes in Postmetaphysical Thinking,” where Habermas wrote that “philosophy, even in its postmetaphysical form, will be able neither to replace nor to repress religion as

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long as religious language is the bearer of a semantic content that is inspiring and even indispensable.” He went on to suggest that we would be wrong to expect that secular social theory could generate such content on its own. For this content, he claimed, still eludes—if only for the time being—“the explanatory force of philosophical language,” and “even after centuries of enlightenment” it “continues to resist translation into reasoning discourses.”22 Variations on this theme appear in a great many of Habermas’s interventions over the last two decades, and especially since the events of September 11. Modern society, he claims, does and must rely upon the rational species of critical discourse that was born out of the institutional-­philosophical practices of the public sphere. But as thinkers in a post-­metaphysical age, dogmatic atheism is no more respectable than its theistic other. We cannot be certain, he claims, that this sort of critical-­rational discourse carries its own substantive ethico-­political content or that this content is sufficiently robust. It may be that even a rationalized society will continue to rely upon the substantive ethico-­political insights that are preserved for us in religious tradition. These insights must be linguistified—they must take a discursive form susceptible to rational scrutiny. Borrowing from the Rawlsian idea of a “translation proviso,” Habermas insists that such a translation is a prerequisite for any post-­ traditional society that has accepted the fact of religious pluralism and the relativization of metaphysical worldviews. But we have little grounds for thinking that the translation can ever be complete. It would be wrong to exaggerate the significance of this argument, which marks not a dramatic turning point but only a subtle shift in philosophical emphasis.23 Although Habermas is celebrated as a theorist of rational modernity, he is now ready to entertain the thought that the rationalized life-­world may suffer a marked deficit in normative substance if it does not turn to religion for instruction. The question we should ask ourselves is how Habermas reached such a conclusion and modified his commitment to the ideal of a fully enlightened public sphere that subsists upon its very own rational supports. How, in other words, did Habermas slacken his confidence in reason’s freestanding authority and come to embrace what was, ironically, a cherished theme of religious apologetics, a theme which used to be the exclusive possession of an anti-­modernist or nostalgic conservatism? Needless to say, we should direct this question not just to Habermas but to all social theorists and historians who have lost confidence in the classical paradigm of secularization. In the remaining portion of this chapter, I would like to propose an unusual explanation as to why the paradigm has lost its prestige. The problem, I will suggest, lies not with the triumphalist idea of secularization itself; it is chiefly due to the hidden theory of religious normativity that has long accompanied the secularization thesis like its own shadow.

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Max Weber and the Dialectics of Disenchantment To grasp this point, we must turn back to Max Weber’s sociology of religion and the methodological reflections that accompanied his work. We should remember that although he is seen as primarily a theorist of modernity, Weber devoted the greater share of his attention especially in the last decade of his life to the comparative study of world religion. In a 1975 comment the German sociologist Friedrich Tenbruck (originally a student of Martin Heidegger and later an assistant to Max Horkheimer) described Weber’s Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion, especially the “Economic Ethics of World Religions,” as the “dominant” or vital center of his oeuvre.24 But discerning their purpose or argumentative unity is indeed a challenge. Especially the Collected Essays exhibit an astonishing breadth of comparative religious research. They include: (1) the well-­known study The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism (originally published in two installments in 1904 and 1905); (2) the later study of the same phenomenon, “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism” (published in shorter form in 1906; in complete form only in 1920); and (3) the collection of essays written between 1915 and 1919 under the general title The Economic Ethic of World Religions (originally published in series in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik). This latter collection contains comparative and world-­historical studies of great diversity. The introduction, “The Social Psychology of World Religions” (1915), lays out a general methodology; then comes the study of Confucianism and Taoism (1915); the so-­called Zwischenbetrachtung, or “Intermediary Reflection,” known in English as “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions” (1915); a study of “Hinduism and Buddhism” (1916–17); and, finally, the late study Ancient Judaism (drafted between 1917 and 1919). These volumes in comparative religious sociology were meant to conclude with a volume on Islam. But at the time of the author’s death in June 1920 this study remained unwritten.25 Notwithstanding the intrinsic interest of these various works, Weber indicated in his prefatory remarks (the “Vorbemerkung,” written during the final months of his life in 1920) that the essays should not be misread as contributions to a comparative religious history. He recognized that ethnographic specialists (especially of Asiatic religion) would find the essays shamefully impressionistic, and he cautioned the reader that his conclusions were provisional even while he tried to avoid the appearance of superficiality: “Dilettantism as a principle of scholarship,” he noted dryly, “would be the end of things.”26 The essays made no pretense of ethnographic expertise, but their author still hoped they might shed light on problems of “universal-­historical” significance. Most of all he wished to inquire after the origins and distinctive character of

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what he termed occidental rationalism. This was not a specialist’s devotion to each world religion but instead a comparativist’s fascination with the problem of the West’s ostensibly unique character. In Weber’s words, the Collected Essays would scrutinize diverse realms of world culture only to emphasize “what stands then and now in contrast to occidental cultural development.”27 Behind each study—of Judaism, Confucianism, Taoism, and so forth—there lurked a single and overriding aim: to understand “a specific form of ‘Rationalism’ in occidental culture [einen spezifisch gearteten ‘Rationalismus’ der okzidentalen Kultur].”28 Consider, for example, the 1915 study of Confucianism. Where Protestantism ultimately found salvation through world mastery, Confucianism deemed this the best of all possible worlds and simultaneously extolled the human capacity for ethical perfection. It counseled not transformative action but “adjustment to the eternal and supra-­divine orders of the world.” Education and self-­control were paramount but the ultimate ethos was that of “pious conformism to the fixed order of worldly powers.”29 Unlike the disenchanting labor of ascetic Protestantism, Confucianism directed its teaching toward preserving the world as what Weber called an “enchanted garden” (Zaubergarten).30 Throughout his comparative religious sociology, Protestantism remains the chief point of comparison, and this may explain why it was especially in his study of the Protestant ethic that his widow, Marianne Weber, found “the deepest roots of his personality.” Despite its grim conclusion on the fate of religious motivation in modern society, it was for Weber a monument to the Protestant heritage he could not personally sustain. Sublimated into a scholarly passion (Marianne wrote), “the general religiosity of his maternal family lived on in him.”31 The Protestant Ethic was therefore a paradoxical work: in the mode of historical sociology it consigned religion to the irrevocable past. But in the author’s own consciousness it bespoke what Marianne Weber called “a permanent concern.”32 Weber’s study of Protestantism ranks today among the greatest models for the sociology of religion, and its argument is well known. The early protagonists of entrepreneurial capitalism practiced a characteristic ethic of self-­ abnegation that verged on the irrational. Largely indifferent to gains in worldly power or immediate gratification, they embraced accumulation as a methodical and rationalized practice without hedonistic reward. For Weber, the emergence of this seemingly non-­rational ethic of this-­worldly asceticism at the very inception of economic rationalization in the early-modern West was a historical puzzle of far-­reaching significance. To explain the rise of this ethic would demand an inquiry into the ideational motives or forms of self-­ understanding that animated their conduct.

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Protestantism alone furnished the requisite spiritual meaning. In reconstructing the characteristic attitudes of Western Christian sects toward capitalist accumulation, Weber noted that Catholicism persisted in condemning any passion for economic gain as cupiditas, while Lutheranism remained similarly bound to a pre-­Reformation (and specifically Augustinian) stance of hostility toward the market. Calvinism alone managed to reconcile its religious teaching with economic gain. The clue to this reconciliation lay in the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. The believer’s preordained status as damned or redeemed was utterly unknown and unknowable, as it was the sovereign decision of the deus absconditus—a wholly transcendent and inscrutable God. But to Calvin’s fellowship this doctrine proved intolerable, and over the course of several generations, lay preachers would inject a subtle modification in the founder’s doctrine. One could not hope to increase one’s chances for salvation through works; but it was nonetheless possible to regard worldly success as a sign of one’s prior election. With this subtle amendment, even the most pious Protestants found that economic achievement could afford a powerfully religious consolation. When the doctrinally sanctioned anti-­sensualistic disposition was applied to economic gain their union furnished a spiritual incentive to capitalist success. One’s economic behavior had to obey the properly Calvinist strictures of “this-­worldly asceticism.” A Protestant merchant whose behavior was either profligate or indolent was vulnerable to censure for having violated the ascetic principles of his faith. But a merchant who applied himself with methodical energy and restraint in his trade could believe himself redeemed. It was this union—between “irrational” religious motives and instrumental-­rational economic behavior—that explained the distinctive ethic of “worldly asceticism” that began to spread over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries throughout the capitalist stratum of Protestant society in the Netherlands, England, and North America. Now, Weber hastened to note that the apparent bond between Protestant teaching and capitalist behavior was not a unidirectional causality—it was an “elective affinity” or Wahlverwandtschaft (a term he borrowed from Goethe’s 1809 novel in which romantic liaison appears as a process of chemical bonding). Like lovers who discover their soulmates, merchants found in Protestant teaching a higher consolation for their worldly behavior, while Protestants found in capitalist practice a material satisfaction for their religious need. The genius of Weber’s sociological interpretation was to suggest that this largely subjective affinity served as the objective groundwork for a flourishing modern economy. In the book’s denouement, however, Weber adopted a far more sobering tone, as he explained how the very strength of modern technical and scientific

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reason gradually acquired an independent life and dispensed with the religious habitus that had once distinguished the heroes of early modern capitalism. With the gradual rationalization of economy and society, capitalism turned against its own irrational supports and began to work on its own with machine-­like indifference to its original spiritual meaning. In the twentieth century, the Protestant ethic had dissolved, replacing the “thin cloak” of religious motivation with an experience of senseless compulsion that Weber likened to a “shell hard as steel [stahlhartes Gehäuse].”33 The general logic of this argument was dialectical: although an irrational ethic of religious motivation had once helped to drive entrepreneurial capitalism, the world economic system had achieved such strength that it could operate on its own. Capitalism was now a mechanism and its protagonists no longer found spiritual solace in the machine they served. In its final phases capitalism dissolved the last remnants of religion from which it had grown: the result was a bureaucratic-­capitalist world that took its directives almost exclusively from the immanent systems as spawned by instrumental reason. As Weber would explain more than a decade later in his Munich address, the supremacy of the modern sciences marked not just the death of religion but the death of meaning itself. The very idea of the “meaning” of the universe, he declared, threatened to “die out at its very roots.”34 I have rehearsed this narrative mainly because it illustrates Weber’s general habit of interpretation. Needless to say, the argument retains its integrity only because Weber remained so alive to both the textual details and the psychological consequences of specific religious teachings. The consolation that worldly gain might stand as a sign of otherworldly redemption only came into view because congregants found the original concept of predestination intolerable. More generally, the narrative reminds us that Weber’s historical sociology of religion typically involves a dialectic between two principles, which for convenience we might call rationalist fatalism and religious plenitude. The denouement of social rationalization brings a destruction of meaning. But meaning is ascribed exclusively to the fullness of a religious normativity that has been destroyed. The question we must ask ourselves is why Weber placed rationalization on one side and religious meaning on the other. To answer this question, we should recall his 1913 essay on the basic categories of interpretative sociology, where Weber suggests that for all sociological and historical explanation the rational character of human conduct must serve as a founding hypothesis. It is reason that provides the standard or “ideal type” for any meaningful conduct, even conduct that is deemed irrational.35 All human action, Weber writes, is susceptible to explanation if it is reconstructed according to the logic of instrumental rationality as “intelligible behavior toward objects,” and this is so for behavior of any kind. “Buddhist contemplation

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and Christian asceticism are, for the actors, subjectively related to inner objects,” Weber claims. “The rational economic transaction of a person with material goods is related to ‘outer’ objects.”36 Crucially, Weber does not consider instrumental rationality a late arrival in human history. It describes a ubiquitous feature of social practice across time and space. This point was made quite well by Friedrich Tenbruck, who observed that Weber’s entire sociological project is founded on the premise of instrumental rationality as the “original” and even “natural” relation between human being and world.37 It characterizes even the most rudimentary forms of magical and religious practice even when the logical bond between means and end would strike the social scientist as implausible. “Rubbing will elicit sparks from pieces of wood,” Weber writes, just as “the mimetical actions of a magician will evoke rains from the heavens.”38 This is a founding premise of Weberian method. Any and all conduct that conforms to “rules of experience” can be explained in terms of instrumental reason.39 Such conduct is said to exhibit a certain “freedom” because it does not follow mere tradition or feeling, and because it understands itself as conduct undertaken with some purpose. Rites of magic and ceremonies to placate a god are therefore examples of instrumental-­rational conduct. But according to Weber there is an important way in which religious and magical conduct and modern technological conduct remain distinct: when a religious person such as a magician or prophet orients himself with certain purposes in view, he does so in accordance with a larger and coherent understanding of reality as a unified whole. Thus, we find that in the late study of Antike Judentum, Weber suggests that monotheism awakens the very possibility of asking after the “meaning” of the world.40 Here the term “Sinn” (or “Meaning”) acquires for Weber an exclusive connection with the history of religion. In the posthumous writings Weber writes that it is specifically intellectuals who conceive of the world as “a problem of meaning” (or “Sinn” problem). Intellectuals first emerge within religious traditions as virtuosos of meaning, but according to Weber they are also inclined to rationalize their own religion by eliminating magical impurities. This happens in ancient Judaism and in Protestantism, such that “the world’s processes become ‘disenchanted’ [entzaubert].” Worldly events “lose their magical significance, and henceforth simply ‘are’ and ‘happen’ but no longer signify anything [aber nichts mehr ‘bedeuten’]. As a consequence, there is a growing demand that the world and the total pattern of life be subject to an order that is significant and meaningful [bedeutungshaft und ‘sinnvoll’].”41 According to Weber this results in a conflict—between the religious demand for meaning and the rational requirement of conducting one’s life in accordance with the world’s “empirical realities.” One characteristic response of the intellectual when faced with this dilemma was “flight from the

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world.”42 The later response would be to turn against religion itself. The notion of unified social meaning was therefore born with prophecy, but, when prophecy declined, social meaning was destined to dissolve. The prophetic disenchantment of religion set in motion a process of world rationalization that ultimately turned against religion and left nothing in its wake besides the original mode of instrumental-­rational conduct that was present at the beginning. The methodological presupposition of Weber’s religious sociology therefore yields what one is tempted to call a predetermined outcome: because disenchantment stripped from human action all magical and redemptive meaning it was inevitable that the final portrait of modernity would leave in place only the instrumental-­rational creature who was presumed from the start. The plenitude of religious normativity dissolved. What was at the beginning of the Weberian narrative ostensibly no more than an assumption of method became at the end a generalized predicament for humanity. Instrumental reason was at first an explanatory tool for sociology; but it ultimately returned as the tragic denouement of the modern world.

Conclusions As a founding chapter in the theory of secularization, Weber’s work faced two directions. On the one hand, it confirms disenchantment with the grim language of inevitability. Although one might have thought that fate would be an exclusively religious category destined to extinction in an irreligious age, Weber’s rhetoric in The Protestant Ethic as in his lecture “Science as a Vocation” implies a non-­theistic fatalism that, ironically, bears some resemblance to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination that saw some congregants as irrevocably damned. But, on the other hand, the argument presupposes that only religion once served as the organizing and holistic framework of normative consolation. After all, the very claim that capitalism without religion will suffer a spiritual deficit only goes through if one has already granted Weber’s implicit premise that religion was the only true source of social meaning. This premise accounts for the ironic fact that Weber’s sociology of religion stands as the common source of two tributaries in modern social thought. First, and most obviously, its inevitabilist theory of world rationalization bequeathed its considerable prestige to both the classical paradigm of secularization and its explanatory twin, modernization theory. But second, its nostalgic and apologetic conception of religion as the singular force of social normativity nourished a dissatisfaction with secular modernity that eventually moved theorists to dismantle the secularization paradigm altogether. If the first thesis inspired the younger Habermas in his early mood of modernist self-­

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confidence, the second could be taken to justify theorists such as Habermas in his later turn to religion as a rare if not unique source of normativity. To be sure, Weber is typically seen as a theorist of inevitable secularization, with all of the historical processes attending this script: the routinization of religious and personalistic charisma and the rise of de-­individualized styles of legalistic and bureaucratic administration.43 On the other hand, he devoted a great share of his labor to the study of religion, and especially in late works such as the famous lecture “Politics as a Vocation,” he implied that the charismatic leader could serve as a modern legatee to the religious prophet, and he insisted that such leadership would prove an absolute necessity if democracy were not to harden into a leaderless machine. Most of all, he feared that a fully disenchanted modernity would bring “a polar night of icy darkness,” if it submitted to “the rule of professional politicians without a calling, without the inner charismatic qualities that make a leader.”44 In Germany and elsewhere, the best hope for the political future would therefore entail a striking union of machine and charisma.45 Only a charismatic leader could animate the machine from within and ward off the nightmare of a society without normative compass. It is hardly surprising, then, that at the 1964 Weber Centenary in Heidelberg, Habermas would call Carl Schmitt “the legitimate pupil” of Max Weber.46 This ambivalence goes to the very core of Weber’s thought, where we find, on the one hand, a manifold theory of rationalized modernity in which religion is consigned to the irrational past, and, on the other hand, a theory of meaning that assigns to religion alone a distinctive role in the generation of social norms. Borrowing from Freud’s famous essay from 1917, we might say that secularization exhibits more melancholy than mourning.47 Refusing to work through its traumatic history, it remains bound by a powerful cathexis with the religious past: it represses all ambivalence until religion becomes an idealized object of lost plenitude. But it turns this very refusal into narcissistic pride: only the social scientist, Weber said, is strong enough to bear the fate of the times. The tension between these two postures exemplifies what Wolfgang Mommsen once called the “antinomical” character of Weber’s work.48 This tension helps explain just how his theory of secularization could also contain the seeds of its own dialectical reversal and prepared the way for a new “post-­secular” démarche that has become dominant in the social-­scientific literature in recent years. On the right and the left, the new discourse on secularization follows the example laid down by Weber over a hundred years ago. In an apologetic mood, it ascribes to religion a privileged or even exclusive role in the generation of social norms. In a skeptical mood, it sees in reason merely a practice of instrumental mastery lacking all normative substance. To religion it grants too

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much; to reason too little. The melancholic effect of this attitude was especially apparent in the secularization debates that came to the fore in Germany after its midcentury catastrophe. In his 1949 book, Meaning in History, the German-­born philosopher Karl Löwith offered a fierce indictment of the idea of historical progress, in which he discerned an illicit borrowing from religion.49 Because his polemic seemed to rob the secular age of any right to the idea of collective betterment, Löwith provoked a vigorous response from the philosopher Hans Blumenberg, whose 1966 work, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, represents a departure from the pattern I’ve described.50 Where Löwith saw an illicit borrowing, Blumenberg saw radical discontinuity: modernity bore no debt in normative substance to the religious past; it was a distinctive and self-­supporting system that had subscribed to its own self-­ generated norms of naturalistic knowledge and humanist self-­assertion. And yet, the very radicalism of this counterthesis betrayed its weakness: insisting on the impossibility of all continuity only erased the past without lingering over the more complex and conflictual process of working through its possible meanings. The secularization debate in postwar Germany was therefore, one might say, symptomatic of a social complex that, in 1967, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich diagnosed as “the inability to mourn.”51 In this essay, I have focused chiefly on the archive of German social thought. Whether specific legacies in German intellectual history may have intensified the patterns described here remains an open question: one might ask, for example, whether the persistence of religion in the German Enlightenment (as documented by David Sorkin, for example) prepared for a Sonderweg in German intellectual history that made social theorists especially susceptible to a regressive longing for religious and political-­theological solutions. But the general patterns are hardly unique to Germany. The burden of my remarks has been to trace out the lineaments of a certain idea which, while not originating with Weber, nonetheless came to special prominence in his work and remained a guiding conceit in the debates over secularization throughout the twentieth century. The idea is that modernity suffers from a normative deficit for which only religion proffers a sufficiently effective remedy. It is no small irony that this idea emerged internal to the classical theory of secularization itself. But more ironic still is the impression that the theories that now advertise themselves as “post-­secular” have only intensified its hold, inverting but not complicating the stark distinction between religious plenitude and rationalist fatalism that once structured Weber’s work. The worrisome thing, in my view, is that in today’s political atmosphere a beneficial skepticism about secularism as a modern dogma has also encouraged a certain refusal to ask the more difficult questions about the pathologies that now afflict religious consciousness as well. Critics of secularism do not often trouble themselves with

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the self-­reflexive question as to whether their own critical practices are not conditioned by or even dependent on the historical emergence of secularized forms of consciousness that only now have the epistemic privilege of turning back in skepticism upon their own pre-­history. The new critics of secularism are themselves, whether they care to admit it or not, children of the Enlightenment. To forget this dependency is to deflect critique from the religious structures that once inhibited criticism’s demystifying efforts. The critique of secularism, in other words, builds up in its wake, whether by accident or intent, a kind of melancholy that forbids us from thinking through religion as a historical form with its own distinctive patterns of domination and occlusion. The more we prosecute the dialectic of enlightenment, the more religion appears as its ghostly precipitate. We find ourselves once again with Job, and religion, which was for so long denigrated as reason’s other, now returns in a cloak of mystery that forbids rational criticism.

10 Religious Minorities and the Anxieties of an Islamic Identity in Pakistan Muhammad Qasim Zaman

A country professing to have come into being in order to enable the Muslim minority of South Asia to live in accordance with its religious norms might have been expected to be especially sensitive to the insecurities of minorities. Yet majorities can have their own insecurities, never more so than on becoming a majority. In his very first speech, on August 11, 1947, as the governor-­ general of the new state, Mohammad Ali Jinnah (d. 1948), the founding father of Pakistan, had gone out of his way to reassure religious minorities that they would be safe in Pakistan.1 The country’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan (d. 1951),2 was likewise keen to affirm the government’s liberal commitments, which he saw as compatible with his idea of an Islamic state. As the Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, reported in 1950, after a series of meetings with his Pakistani counterpart, “Liaquat Ali was at pains to point out that all that was meant by the Islamic State was that Muslims should have their personal law etc. In no sense should they or could they have special privileges. His State was an ordinary democratic State like England. He was prepared to make this perfectly clear at any time. . . . But he could not denounce the Islamic State phrase for obvious reasons, as this would give a handle to the reactionary elements in Pakistan.”3 This essay seeks to uncover and to understand some of the anxieties that the “reactionary elements” have had vis-­à-­vis the religious minorities in Pakistan. The population of Pakistan, which stood at 207.77 million in 2017, is, and has always been, overwhelmingly Muslim. According to the 1951 census, Hindus had comprised about 13 percent of the country’s population,4 but their numbers declined sharply after the province of East Pakistan, where they accounted for 22 percent of the population in 1951, seceded to become Bangla202

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desh in 1971. Official estimates for 1998, the year of the last complete census prior to the one conducted in the spring and summer of 2017, put the Hindus at less than 2 percent of the total population. The Christians, for their part, comprise a little over 1.5 percent of the country’s population.5 Though Jinnah had referred in his aforementioned speech to minorities within the ranks of Muslims as well, it was non-­Muslim minorities that he and Liaquat Ali Khan had sought primarily to reassure. The “reactionary elements” have been particularly interested, however, in Muslim minorities, and it is on two of these— the Ahmadis and the Shiʿa—that I will focus here. A close-­knit and well-­educated community, the Ahmadis comprise a very small group—reckoned in 1953 to be only about 200,000 people in a country of 34 million, though subsequent Ahmadi estimates of their numerical size are considerably higher.6 The Ahmadis regard themselves as Muslims, but their belief that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (d. 1908), the founder of their community, was a prophet puts them at odds with the Muslim doctrine that Muhammad was the last of God’s prophets. Ghulam Ahmad did not dispute Muhammad’s prophethood, or the revelation to him that took the form of the Qurʾan, or the authority of the religious law that Muhammad had brought forth. But his own claims—that though a “shadow” of Muhammad’s more perfect prophethood and while belonging to the community Muhammad had founded, he too was a prophet—are seen by others as leaving no room for the Ahmadis within the Muslim fold. The Punjab saw serious anti-­Ahmadi riots in 1953, followed by the imposition of a martial law in Lahore, the provincial capital. And there was a countrywide agitation in 1974 that culminated in a constitutional amendment declaring the Ahmadis to be non-­Muslims. There are those among the Sunnis who view the Shiʿa with grave misgivings, too. And though there is a long history of Shiʿi-­Sunni hostility, in and outside South Asia, Pakistan has witnessed especially intense sectarian violence since the mid-­1980s as well as concomitant calls upon the government to declare the Shiʿa, like the Ahmadis, a non-­Muslim minority. This essay does not seek to narrate the history of these Muslim minorities in Pakistan or even to document instances of their persecution. Nor is it my concern here to examine how members of these minority communities see themselves in relation to the Sunni majority. My purpose is instead to explore some of what may underlie the hostile attitudes of the traditionally educated religious scholars, the ʿulama, as well as of Islamist ideologues and activists toward these minority communities. I will also touch upon instances of the conflicted ways in which Muslim modernists have viewed the Ahmadis.7 Needless to say, the point of exploring these attitudes and the anxieties that underlie them is not to try to explain away the manner in which these minorities have been treated in the country. It is instead to better understand some

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of the uncertainties, ambiguities, and conflicts that have continued to characterize definitions of an Islamic identity in Pakistan. What exactly is the nature of the challenge that a tiny community, the Ahmadis, has posed to conservative Sunnis in Pakistan, apart from what their doctrines represent? How did this Ahmadi challenge become implicated in wider contestations on Islam in Pakistan? What anxieties have the Shiʿa—comprising 10–15 percent of the country’s population8—provoked in particular Sunni circles, again apart from the perceived incompatibility of some of their doctrines with those of the Sunnis? And how do the anxieties that each minority community provokes compare with those generated by the other? These are among the questions I address in this essay.

The Ahmadi Question Though I argue in what follows that we need to go beyond doctrinal issues in understanding the severity of the conservative Sunni response to the Ahmadis, it is important nonetheless to begin with some key doctrinal matters. For we would understand little of the scope and depth of the anti-­Ahmadi sentiment in Pakistan or of the ability of the ʿulama and the Islamists to harness it to particular goals if we do not recognize the significance of the challenge the Ahmadis have posed to mainstream Muslim beliefs. That Muhammad was the last of God’s prophets is a cardinal Muslim belief, as noted earlier; and the Ahmadis are seen by other Muslims as contravening it.9 This threatens to unsettle the long-­established ways in which Muslims have viewed the authority of their prophet and the theological edifice that rests on that authority. And to those who revere the person of the Prophet and seek to guard his “honor” more ardently than even that of God, it is an affront to the holiest of all people.10 Though Sunni Muslims, too, accept the idea that “renewers” (mujaddidun) of the faith would continue to arise in the Muslim community in order to reform wayward practices and return the community to its pristine norms, Ghulam Ahmad’s claims for himself were larger and thus more difficult to accommodate into this genealogy of renewers. To those unfavorably disposed to them, these claims also implied that the Islam of Muhammad was not good for all times to come but needed rather to be continually adapted to new conditions, at the hands of prophetical figures like Ghulam Ahmad. This is a point the influential modernist poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938) had made in some hard-­hitting polemics against the Ahmadis toward the end of his life.11 The Ahmadis also question the obligatoriness of jihad, a position that the ʿulama see as contravening explicit Islamic injunctions. There was also

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the attendant suspicion that such views were tailored to the interests of British colonial rule and, by extension, that the Ahmadi movement was little more than a child of the colonial effort to divide and weaken Islam. Then there was the nagging suspicion that the Ahmadis did not consider other Muslims as properly Muslim at all and wished to have nothing to do with them in religious and social matters. As Iqbal had put it, “Any religious society historically arising from the bosom of Islam, which claims a new prophethood for its basis, and declares all Muslims who do not recognize the truth of its alleged revelation as kafirs [unbelievers] must . . . be regarded by every Muslim as a serious danger to the solidarity of Islam.”12 He had proposed that the colonial government “declare the Qadianis [Ahmadis] a separate community . . . and the Indian Muslim will tolerate them just as he tolerates the other religions.”13 The severity of the Ahmadi challenge on these and other scores would lead one to think that no one would ever consider them as fellow Muslims. Influential voices had, indeed, been raised against them, as in case of Iqbal. In 1924, Shabbir Ahmad ʿUthmani (d. 1949) had published a short tract in which he had sought to show that the Ahmadis were apostates and thus merited the death penalty that the Afghan government had meted out to one of them.14 ʿUthmani was a noted religious scholar belonging to the Deobandi orientation, one of the major subdivisions of South Asian Sunnism since the late nineteenth century.15 In 1932, Anwarshah Kashmiri (d. 1933), another Deobandi luminary, had testified, along with several other scholars, in favor of a female plaintiff who wanted her marriage dissolved on grounds that her husband had become an Ahmadi. Kashmiri argued at length on this occasion to show that Ahmadi beliefs constituted apostasy from Islam, which entailed the dissolution of a marriage.16 Yet part of the reason why the ʿulama were so vehement in having the Ahmadis declared non-­Muslims was precisely that not everyone viewed them as such. Early in his career, Iqbal himself had had “hopes of good results following from this movement,” as he would acknowledge with some discomfort later.17 And he had once referred to the founder of the Ahmadi community, while the latter was still alive, as “probably the profoundest theologian among modern Indian Muhammadans.”18 In a 1923 fatwa published in the Lahore newspaper Zamindar, Abul-­Kalam Azad (d. 1958), late colonial India’s most visible Muslim leader of the secular but Hindu-­dominated Indian National Congress, had characterized Ahmadi beliefs as severely misguided but had held that the Ahmadis could not be considered unbelievers, or excluded from the Muslim community, or subjected to a social boycott.19 ʿAbd al-­Majid Daryabadi (d. 1977), a journalist who for years received spiritual guidance from the influential Deobandi scholar and Sufi Ashraf ʿAli Thanawi (d. 1943)

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and wrote Qurʾan commentaries in both English and Urdu that were deeply influenced by Thanawi, likewise thought that the Ahmadis were best characterized as wayward Muslims rather than as outright infidels.20 In part at least, Iqbal had come to take a hostile view of the Ahmadis on account of the pressure exerted on him by a rabidly anti-­Ahmadi group, the Punjab-­based Majlis-­i Ahrar-­i Islam. The Ahrar did their best to make other modernists fall in line, too. They wanted candidates standing for election to the Punjab legislative assembly on the ticket of the Muslim League—the party that would spearhead the demand for Pakistan in the 1940s—to pledge that they would work toward excluding the Ahmadis from the Muslim fold. Though the parliamentary board of the Muslim League did make an announcement to this effect,21 Jinnah had continued to block any such move, which was obviously bad for his effort toward forging a united Muslim front against the Congress.22 In his famous 1940 address as the president of the Muslim League, Jinnah gave no inkling that the Muslim “nation” had any divisions within it or that anyone claiming to be a Muslim was in fact not so.23 Asked in 1944 by an Ahmadi if there was any bar to their becoming members of the Muslim League, Jinnah, who had previously given an Ahmadi leader private assurances to this effect, responded with a lawyer’s answer. He directed the questioner to the League’s constitution, according to which “every candidate for membership of a primary branch of the All India Muslim League must be a Musalman [Muslim].”24 This left unresolved the question of whether the Ahmadis were Muslims. But it was enough to continue allowing the Ahmadis to associate with the League. Its most high-­profile Ahmadi was Sir Muhammad Zafrulla Khan (d. 1985), a member of the viceroy’s executive council and subsequently Pakistan’s first foreign minister. The demand for the removal of Zafrulla Khan from the latter position would be at the heart of the anti-­ Ahmadi agitation in the Punjab in 1953. The Punjab disturbances had a political context, and this needs a brief detour into the early constitutional history of Pakistan.25 In 1950, the Basic Principles Committee appointed by the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan had submitted initial recommendations for how the provinces were to be represented at the center. It had proposed that the country would have two houses of parliament, with the upper house giving an equal number of seats to the five provinces—Punjab, Sindh, North-­west Frontier, and Baluchistan, in the country’s western wing, and East Bengal (later East Pakistan); membership of the lower house was to be based on adult franchise. The two houses were envisioned as having equal powers. The Bengalis, whose province was the most populous in the country, saw this as nullifying their majority and objected strenuously to this arrangement. The religious groups had their own grievances, seeing the interim report as inattentive to their vision of an Islamic

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state. Having been forced back to the drawing board by the hostility that had greeted this report, the Basic Principles Committee submitted a revised set of recommendations toward the end of 1952. The report was now premised on the principle of parity between Pakistan’s western and eastern wings. Each was to have an equal number of representatives in both the lower and the upper houses of the parliament, though the upper house lacked any effective power this time around. Within West Pakistan, however, the smaller provinces would have greater representation than their population warranted, and a number of other small units were envisaged as well. All this was meant as a way of preventing the much-­feared domination of the Punjab—the largest of the West Pakistani provinces—over the smaller units but also over the country as a whole. The Punjabis, led by their chief minister, Mian Mumtaz Daultana (d. 1995), predictably saw it as denying his province its legitimate voice at the center. The religious groups again disliked the lack of attention to their demands for making Pakistan a properly Islamic state. With relations between the center and the Punjab chief minister becoming increasingly unhappy over the shape of the future constitution, Daultana found in the Ahmadi issue a potent means of undermining the federal government. The Ahrar had long agitated for a formal declaration that the Ahmadis were not members of the Muslim community, and the Oxford-­educated Daultana now offered tacit—and, before long, explicit—support for this position. To those making these and other demands, including the removal of Zafrulla Khan from his position as foreign minister, he argued that the demands bore on constitutional issues and that they needed to be referred to the federal government and resolved by the Constituent Assembly. The prime minister, Khawaja Nazimuddin (who had succeeded Liaquat Ali Khan on his assassination in 1951), was known for personal piety and for good relations with the ʿulama. But the demands of the religious groups were too extreme even for him, let alone for the Westernizing bureaucratic and political elite at the center. When the ʿulama presented him with an ultimatum, Nazimuddin refused to give in. This was followed by rioting in the Punjab in late February and early March 1953, which in turn led to the imposition of martial law in Lahore. Some months later, Iskandar Mirza, the bureaucrat-­turned governor-­ general of Pakistan, dismissed the Nazimuddin government to appoint a new prime minister. There was more, however, to the Punjab disturbances than the machinations of the provincial government, the demagoguery of the Ahrar, or even the food shortages that some parts of the country had been experiencing. From the perspective of the ʿulama, and not just from that of the Ahrar, there was something deeply troubling about the fact that the government of what was meant to be an Islamic state had a non-­Muslim, Zafrulla Khan, for one of its

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most visible members. This was as clear an indication as any that the modernizing governing elite were not sincere about anchoring the state in Islamic norms or, what to them was the same thing, about following the ʿulama’s counsel in matters relating to Islam. That the foreign minister was held in high regard in Western capitals made matters worse, for it suggested that the government was more keen to cultivate its ties with the West than it was to fulfill its Islamic commitments.26 The challenge that Zafrulla Khan posed to the religiopolitical groups as an Ahmadi was more serious than if he had been a Hindu or a Christian. These groups knew that he was not a Muslim, but many others either did not know or did not care. As Sayyid Abul-­Aʿla Maududi (d. 1979), the founder of the Jamaʿat-­i Islami and one of the most influential Islamist ideologues of the twentieth century, had observed in elucidating the “Qadiani [i.e., Ahmadi] problem” in 1953, “even the masses . . . have failed to realize fully the gravity of the problem.”27 Zafrulla Khan saw himself as a Muslim, of course, and it was in that capacity that he had sought, ironically, to reassure the representatives of the non-­Muslim minorities, in a speech in the Constituent Assembly in 1949, that they had nothing to fear from a state in which Islamic teachings were the guiding principles.28 It was bad enough that one of the highest officials of a government busy articulating its vision of Islam should be a non-­Muslim. It was much worse that he was masquerading as a Muslim, thereby unsettling some of the boundaries that the new state was meant to guard. Then there was the fact that Zafrulla Khan did not merely happen to be an Ahmadi but was rather a committed and active member of this community. Indeed, the 1953 agitation was precipitated by his decision to speak at a public gathering organized by the Ahmadi Association (Anjuman-­i Ahmadiyya) in Karachi, Pakistan’s capital at the time. The prime minister had advised him against attending this event, but he had refused and threatened to resign as foreign minister if he was prevented from speaking at the event.29 From its inception, the Ahmadi community has been active in proselytism. As Zafrulla Khan would himself note in a book on Islam published in 1962, the Ahmadis were “the most active missionary movement in Islam.”30 To opponents of the Ahmadis, this proselytism seeks to promote the interests not of Islam but rather of the Ahmadi cause. Ahmadi proselytism serves, on this view, to strengthen this heretical community at the expense of Islam; more insidiously, it brings unsuspecting people to Ahmadism under the façade of converting them to Islam. Once again, the specter of a high-­ranking government official advancing the cause of his wayward religious orientation was disquieting to his opponents. Three other things are also worth noting in regard to Zafrulla Khan. First, to many ʿulama, he would have typified not just Ahmadism but also Muslim modernism. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad had been a bitter polemicist against the

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Sunni ʿulama, and the modernists were no friends of the ʿulama either. For instance, even as he had sought to reassure non-­Muslim minorities, Zafrulla Khan was clearly thinking of the ʿulama and the Islamists when he had cautioned, in his aforementioned speech in March 1949, against those who might “substitut[e] tinsel imitations and narrow bigotries” for Islam’s higher ideals.31 For their part, many non-­Ahmadi modernists were openly contemptuous of conservative demands with regard to the Ahmadis. A. K. Brohi (d. 1987), the advocate general of the province of Sindh, a prominent modernist intellectual, and later the country’s law minister, put it this way in 1952 in speaking of the still elusive Pakistani constitution, less than six months before the anti-­ Ahmadi agitation flared up in the Punjab: Lately we have brought before us a very unusual and senseless question of declaring the Ahmadis to be a minority community and it has been pressed by a section of our countrymen in Pakistan not only that we do declare this position but also to incorporate this declaration into the Constitution of Pakistan. I, for one, cannot see how anybody except a court of law can give a declaration of status. I cannot see the wisdom of the suggestion that such a trivial matter should be included in the future Constitution of Pakistan, which document . . . ought only to deal with very important and fundamental questions.32 This was far from being a senseless question, a trivial matter, of course, for the ʿulama, the Islamists, and those receptive to their discourses. But such words would surely have alerted them, not that they needed any reminder, that Muslim modernists were themselves an impediment to the resolution of the Ahmadi issue. Second, Zafrulla Khan was considerably better versed in Islam than many of his modernist peers. He could quote the Qurʾan freely and in the original Arabic33 and, over the course of his long life, he would write a number of books on Islam. The contrast with the more meager intellectual resources of many other modernists was probably not lost on the ʿulama. Zafrulla Khan irked the ʿulama and the Islamists not only because he—the foreign minister of a state created in the name of Islam—was a heretic but because he was an articulate and very literate heretic. The fact that he was also a modernist made things worse, as I have suggested, though, in the end, it was not Ahmadi modernism as such that provoked the conservative opposition so much as the manner in which the Ahmadi issue had become implicated in the ʿulama’s dim view of Islamic modernism as a whole.34 We will observe instances of this point as we proceed. The third thing to note here is the persistent allegation that Ahmadis like Zafrulla Khan were more loyal to the head of their own religious community than they were to the government or the country. After the partition of India

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had left their previous center, Qadian, on the other side of the border, the Ahmadis had founded a new town, Rabwah, in Pakistani Punjab, and their spiritual head, their “caliph,” would reside there until 1984, when he relocated to London. It was often suggested that the Ahmadis had carved out a “state within a state,” or that they wanted to do so,35 and that orders received from Rabwah trumped all other commitments.36 Such allegations are far from unusual when it comes to minorities anywhere. Yet, once again, there may have been more to it than the charge, with all its subversive implications, that the Ahmadis thought themselves accountable to an authority different from everyone else in the state. There are traces here of some resentment toward the modernists, too: whereas the modernist governing elite were busy forcing Islam upon the procrustean bed of Pakistani nationalism, the Ahmadis allegedly deferred to no authority higher than that of their false religion. Adherents of the true religion should be expected to do at least as much. The leaders of the anti-­Ahmadi movement had considerable street power at their disposal and, in early March 1953, they were able to create significant unrest in the Punjab. The military, however, soon put down the agitation with a heavy hand, with no concessions to the demands of the agitators. If anything, the official response to this series of events was a major show of strength by the modernizing governing elite and, of course, the military. Maududi was sentenced to death for his role in the agitation, though the verdict was soon commuted to some years in prison. And the judicial report that was produced by the court of inquiry looking into the causes and course of the agitation remains unsurpassed as a modernist indictment of the follies of the conservative religious leadership. But the Ahmadi question had not gone away. By the time the issue reemerged two decades later, Pakistan had a very different look to it. In 1971, the country had split, with East Pakistan emerging as the independent state of Bangladesh. This was the culmination of a quarter century of Bengali grievances about West Pakistan, in particular the Punjab, dominating the civil administration, the military, and the economy. The immediate catalyst was the East Pakistan–based Awami League’s victory in the general elections; they had won a clear majority but the military regime procrastinated in handing over power to a party that had campaigned on a plainly separatist platform. The result was civil war, accompanied by a Pakistani military operation against the separatists, with horrendous costs in terms of human suffering. This precipitated a war with India, where large numbers of refugees from East Pakistan had been fleeing; Bangladesh emerged in December 1971, with Indian military assistance and on the heels of Pakistan’s defeat in the war. In what remained of Pakistan, power was soon transferred by General Yahya Khan (1969–71) to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1971–77), whose socialist People’s

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Party had emerged in the general elections as the second largest after the Awami League. Bhutto took office under a thick cloud. He had opposed the transfer of power to the Awami League, and his political opponents were not reticent about holding him at least partly responsible for the breakup of Pakistan. Though some religious scholars had endorsed ideas of social justice during the election campaign, many others were bitterly opposed to any reference to socialism, even when presented as Islamic socialism; in 1970, more than a hundred ʿulama had put their names to a fatwa that declared socialism as unbelief. In response, Bhutto felt he needed to shore up his Islamic credentials. His lifestyle was not conducive to it, and though, in the end, the effort did not bear much fruit, Islam did come to have a prominent place in the rhetoric of his government. The new constitution, whose drafting he oversaw and which he promulgated in 1973, had substantial Islamic content. He went on, in spring 1974, to also convene a meeting of the pan-­Islamic Organization of Islamic Conference, which had been founded in 1969 in the wake of an arson attack at the revered Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.37 The conference, taking place in the aftermath not only of the breakup of Pakistan but also of the Arab-­Israeli war of 1973 and the Arab oil embargo against several Western countries for their support of Israel, brought to the country a significant number of Muslim leaders, including King Faysal of Saudi Arabia, Zayed bin Sultan al-­Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates, Anwar Sadat of Egypt, Hafiz al-­A sad of Syria, Muʿammar Qaddafi of Libya, and Yasir ʿArafat of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The pan-­Islamic fervor generated by the conference gave Bhutto the political cover he needed to officially recognize Bangladesh as a sovereign state even as it signaled that Pakistan had a continuing desire to play a prominent role in the Muslim world.38 It did not, however, contribute anything toward effective governance. That year, 1974, was in fact a particularly bad one for the Bhutto government. Significant rifts had emerged by then within the ruling party. University teachers went on a countrywide strike in May 1974 to press their demands for a standardized system of salaries;39 so did schoolteachers in Sindh,40 and educational institutions in the Punjab had to be closed prematurely for the summer that year, with the exams canceled.41 There were shortages of flour and cooking oil in the Punjab,42 and 600,000 transit workers were threatening a strike.43 On top of everything else, India undertook its first ever nuclear test on May 18, causing great anxiety in Pakistan, which now found itself staring at a new level of vulnerability vis-­à-­v is its archrival.44 There were also reports of Hindu-­Muslim riots in Delhi around this time, which always made headline news in Pakistan. Then, on May 30, the newspapers reported that a group of medical college students returning to Multan, in the Punjab, from a vacation in the Frontier province had been

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severely beaten by a mob while their train was passing through the Ahmadi town of Rabwah.45 The students had apparently said derisive things about the Ahmadis while en route to the Frontier, and the Ahmadi mob was waiting for them on their return. The Ahmadis may have overreacted on this occasion, though hardly without reason. They had overreached before. In the mid-­1930s, they had gone toe-­to-­toe in their conflict with the aforementioned Ahrar and had tried, as some government officials saw it, “to goad the Ahrars into attacking them so that Government [would] have to defend the Ahmadis and so make the matter a war between the Ahrars and Government instead of between the Ahrars and Ahmadis.”46 Around the same time, they had provoked Sikh villagers by claiming that Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh community, had in fact been a Muslim.47 The result, as a police report had put it in early 1935, was that “the increase of feeling against the Ahmadis has been very marked and is not confined to any one community.”48 Yet, for all “the latent hostility towards the sect . . . among the great majority of the orthodox Muslims,”49 few could have expected that the response to the Rabwah incident of 1974 would assume the proportions it did. The incident acquired nationwide significance almost as soon as it had occurred, with much outpouring of public anger. There were well-­coordinated general strikes in major cities, incidents of arson directed at Ahmadi homes and businesses, and a number of deaths.50 The government appointed a commission, headed by K. M. A. Samdani, a judge of the Lahore High Court, to investigate what had transpired at Rabwah. Though the testimony of those called before the commission received extensive coverage in the press, the murkiness of the events surrounding the “Rabwah incident” would remain unrelieved, not least because the commission’s report to the Punjab government has never been made public. In view of the foregoing catalog of troubles Bhutto was having early in his administration, it is not unreasonable to think that he would have looked favorably upon something like the Rabwah incident to draw people’s attention away from more pressing issues. Some did claim to see the ruling party’s hand in staging the event, among them the head of the Ahmadi community.51 Yet it is unlikely that Bhutto had a role in it. Having the Ahmadis declared non-­ Muslims was an old demand of the ʿulama, after all, and a similar recommendation in April 1974 at a conference of the World Muslim League, a pan-­Islamic body sponsored by Saudi Arabia, had given it added force.52 Though the decision by the Pakistani parliament to follow suit and to classify the Ahmadis as a non-­Muslim minority won some momentary praise for Bhutto from conservative circles, it was only under intense pressure from them that the government had acted. And the whole episode may have weakened Bhutto vis-­à-­vis

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the ʿulama and the Islamists, who would spearhead a mass movement against him on charges of rigged elections less than three years later. The Bhutto era had, in fact, begun auspiciously for the Ahmadis, and this returns us to some of the anxieties people have had about them. There were reports that the Ahmadis had contributed generously to Bhutto’s political campaign in order to ensure his government’s favorable disposition toward them. And as the British ambassador to Islamabad reported in a confidential note, “when Bhutto on coming to power sacked the chiefs of the three Armed Services and appointed two reputed Ahmadis to head the air force and navy, with Ahmadis in command of at least two of the five army corps . . . , they seemed to be reaping their reward.”53 In the wake of the Rabwah incident, the names of high-­ranking military officials who were Ahmadis would appear in some magazines, reflecting and reinforcing concerns about an influential Ahmadi presence in the most powerful of Pakistan’s institutions. There was much uncertainty and innuendo about who was or was not an Ahmadi now; the days when the Pakistani foreign minister could embrace his Ahmadi identity at public gatherings were long gone. But the uncertainty created even more unease about how many of the “key positions” of the state—and not just in the military—were in fact occupied by members of this tiny community.54 Even as the Ahmadis continued to be accused in 1974, as they were in 1953, of running a state within a state, it was easy to play upon fears that they could—might even be plotting to—take over Pakistan itself.55 For a country that had lived for many years under martial law or other forms of authoritarian rule, it would not have taken much imagination to conjure up such fears. And those paying attention to international developments would have known that Hafiz al-­Asad, the Syrian strongman who had risen to power just a few years earlier in 1970, came not from that country’s Sunni majority but rather from what was widely seen as a heretical minority. As the anti-­Ahmadi movement took shape in 1974, it was repeatedly mentioned that there was an “Ahmadi mission” working in Israel. The Ahmadis asked about it by the Samdani commission clarified that this Ahmadi presence in Haifa predated the partition of India56 and that the proselytizing center in question was run by local Arabs.57 Even so, in the immediate aftermath of the Arab-­Israeli war of 1973, the mere suggestion that the Ahmadis had a presence in Israel would have sufficed for many to confirm their worst suspicions about an Ahmadi conspiracy against Islam and Pakistan. There also were insinuations that Ahmadis were working for a reunited India, since their original center, Qadian, was now in India. Mawlana Yusuf Bannuri (d. 1977), a respected religious scholar of the Deobandi orientation and the convener of

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the anti-­Ahmadi alliance, had little doubt that the Ahmadis were working in both Israeli and Indian interests.58 Questions about loyalty could, however, cut other ways, too, and some of the ʿulama were themselves vulnerable on this score. In his testimony before the Samdani commission, Mawlana Ghulam Ghaus Hazarawi, a leader of the Deobandi religiopolitical organization, the Jamʿiyyat al-­ʿUlama-­i Islam, acknowledged, for instance, that he had been opposed to the establishment of Pakistan. But, he explained, once Pakistan had come into existence, he and likeminded ʿulama had decided that working against its interests would be wrong.59 Yusuf Bannuri had belonged to the same camp. He was a student of the aforementioned Deobandi scholar Anwarshah Kashmiri, and he had taught for many years at the madrasa Kashmiri had established in Gujarat, in western India, in the late 1920s. He was originally from the Frontier province, though it had taken him some years after the partition of India to come to Pakistan. This was not unusual in the early years of partition. It had not been clear to everyone that the borders would eventually become virtually impassable or on which side one wanted to reside permanently. Things looked decidedly different a quarter century after partition, however. Even as Bannuri led the charge against the Ahmadis, front-­page advertisements were published in several national newspapers in early July 1974, questioning his credentials as a loyal citizen of Pakistan. Taking the form of queries addressed to him, these advertisements asked whether it was true that Bannuri had continued to live as an Indian citizen even after Pakistan had come into being, that he had once been the provincial president of the anti-­Pakistan Jamʿiyyat al-­ʿUlama-­i Hind, that he had maintained ties with India even after coming to Pakistan. There were also rhetorical questions about whether his entry into politics on the Ahmadi issue was at India’s bidding, in order to create chaos (fitna), even foment a civil war, in Pakistan and whether he was not getting a “purely religious issue” entangled into politics and thereby making it more difficult to resolve. The advertisements were sponsored by “Members of the Association of Devotees of the Prophet [Muhammad],” a hitherto unknown group.60 That the Ahmadis were behind these advertisements might have been a natural inference, though the leading opposition lawyer involved in cross-­examining those testifying before the Samdani commission thought that it was rather the government that had sponsored them, not least because they were published in newspapers then controlled by it.61 Whether or not the government was complicit in these advertisements, it would have benefited from this effort to discredit a politically influential religious scholar. Nor would it have taken much imagination on the part of the ʿulama to see this, or to interpret it as yet another instance of a modernist governing elite trying to derail the people’s religious aspirations. Since coming

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to power, Bhutto government officials had made a number of statements that revealed that they were no friends of the ʿulama. At almost exactly the time the Rabwah incident took place, a federal minister whose portfolios included the regulation of religious endowments had stated that the government was planning to introduce legislation that would prohibit the use of mosques for political purposes.62 To the ʿulama, let alone the Islamists, there are no sharp distinctions to be made between “religious” and “political” purposes, so far as mosques go. What such statements meant to them was simply that the government expected them to endorse its policies or at least to stay clear of views critical of it. Some weeks later, the Punjab’s minister of education had declared that the People’s Party–controlled provincial government was preparing legislation to take over the madrasas.63 To the ʿulama, these are some of the last “bastions of Islam,” and they have often equated their ability to resist governmental regulation of these institutions with the autonomy and integrity of their prized religious tradition. Khurshid Hasan Mir, a federal minister with strong leftist leanings, was among the most combative. “Now that the Ahmadi question is under consideration by the National Assembly,” the lower house of the Pakistani parliament, he said in late August 1974, “the mullas need not make all this noise. . . . These so-­called ʿulama are using mosques for political ends. If they don’t put an end to their charges and allegations [against the government], their tongues will be pulled out.”64 Even without such intemperate language, there was no mistaking the challenge the Bhutto government and many of its policies represented to the ʿulama. From their perspective, any backing down on the Ahmadi issue would be a victory not only for that community but also for a government intent on undermining the ʿulama. Such anxieties may not have triggered the anti-­Ahmadi agitation, but they surely underlay some of the ʿulama’s determination to see it through to success. One further node of possible anxiety is also worth considering, and this concerns the students of the medical college who had been beaten up at the Rabwah train station. Some of those testifying before the Samdani commission had vaguely suggested that the violence at the train station may have had something to do with bad behavior toward local women.65 Ahmadi or not, rural and small-­town Punjabis are often especially conservative when it comes to gender norms, and matters of honor have long been important in people’s sense of self-­worth. It would not be surprising if some Punjabi Ahmadis had reacted violently in defense of their women. Some reports suggested that a student of the medical college had gone so far as to expose himself at the station.66 If true, this could not but have provoked deep anger in the local community, indeed more than anti-­Ahmadi slogans by themselves would. Members of the anti-­Ahmadi campaign put their own spin on such embarrassing reports. Apart from denials that anyone had misbehaved with women,67 it was

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alleged that the Ahmadi administration in Rabwah had “reared some girls” specifically for the purpose of being able to accuse unwanted people of harassment and to have them punished accordingly.68 This may have sufficed for those who would put nothing past the Ahmadis. Yet, it is not hard to imagine that at least some among the ʿulama would have been deeply troubled by the alleged behavior of the medical college students. There is a long history of suspicion, even hostility, between the products of modern education and those schooled in madrasas. Where the “English-­ educated” often view the madrasa trained, that is, the ʿulama, as utterly at a loss in the modern world, the ʿulama have tended to see college and university graduates as having been divested by their Western education of any proper Islamic moorings. A generation before the Rabwah incident, current and former college students had been at the helm of the movement for Pakistan, and the ʿulama opposing the demand for Pakistan had come in for some vitriolic attacks by them. The words of one religious scholar bitterly lamenting to another the hooliganism he had witnessed at a pro-­Congress rally led by the Deobandi scholar Husayn Ahmad Madani (d. 1957) in late 1945 are worth quoting here: It felt like all the people [disrupting Madani’s speech] had not just bid farewell to their religiosity and morals but had also turned from human beings into demons and animals. . . . They hurled filthy curses [at Madani] and shamelessly displayed a bestial and satanic behavior. . . . Then they resorted to mercilessly showering the gathering with rocks, which injured fifty or more people, some of whom remained unconscious all night. . . . Those engaging in such acts were no mere ignorant commoners. They were led by people educated at [English] colleges and universities who, at present, are the moving spirit and the lifeblood of the Muslim League.69 As ʿulama like Bannuri, the convener and head of the anti-­Ahmadi coalition, faced embarrassing reminders about having been on the wrong side of the movement for Pakistan, they would have recalled as well the vitriol of those earlier years. For all its contribution toward bringing the Ahmadi issue to the very center of national attention, the alleged behavior of the medical students could scarcely have done much to put to rest the ʿulama’s caricatures of people of this ilk. By early September 1974, a constitutional amendment had declared the Ahmadis a non-­Muslim minority. This had followed an in-­camera session of the National Assembly during the entire month of August.70 It would be another decade before the Ahmadis came back into the spotlight. On this occasion, the issue had to do with whether, being non-­Muslims, the Ahmadis could refer to themselves as Muslims, their places of worship as mosques, their

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call to prayers as adhan, and so forth. The answer was no, and in 1984, the president, General Muhammad Zia al-­Haqq (1977–88), issued an ordinance amending the Pakistan Penal Code and making it an offense for Ahmadis to “pose” as Muslims or to employ terms commonly used for the early caliphs and for the companions of the Prophet Muhammad to refer to associates or successors of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the founder of the Ahmadi community. Such Ahmadi usage “outrage[d] the religious feelings of Muslims” and it was henceforth subject to criminal prosecution.71 These regulations—sections 298B and 298C—of the Pakistan Penal Code are part of what are commonly known as the blasphemy laws, which have been repeatedly invoked to target all perceived sacrilege, by Ahmadis as well as others.72 As early as 1952, the governor of Sind had suggested to the prime minister that the government invoke the relevant provisions of the penal code in order to prevent the Ahmadis from propagating their belief in the prophethood of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, “which necessarily wounds the religious feelings of the rest of the believers in Islam who constitute the bulk of the population.” The governor’s point was that the freedom of conscience and expression were necessarily subservient to the law, and to apply the laws in question to the Ahmadis would therefore not jeopardize the government’s liberal credentials.73 In explaining the decision to declare the Ahmadis a non-­Muslim minority, Bhutto, too, had been concerned to present it as an expression of the democratic will of the people.74 Zia al-­Haqq was perturbed by no such worries in 1984. But the draconian 1984 ordinance points to anxieties of its own, principally that the 1974 constitutional amendment had failed to effectively exclude the Ahmadis from the fold of the Muslim community, that in passing themselves off as Muslims they were continuing to undermine Islam from within while injuring Muslim sensibilities. However, no nationwide anti-­Ahmadi movement had preceded the 1984 ordinance, as had been the case with the 1974 amendment. It was preceded instead by the recommendation of the Council of Islamic Ideology, an official body mandated by the constitution to advise the government on Islamic matters, that the Ahmadis should not be allowed to call their places of worship mosques or their calls to prayer as adhan, for these were “Muslim symbols.”75 Islamic modernism was by this time in full retreat in Pakistan. Already in 1979, General Zia al-­Haqq’s martial law regime had promulgated the Hudood (Arabic: hudud) ordinances mandating severe punishments for theft, brigandage, and unlawful sex. Unlike generations of Muslim modernists, including Muhammad Iqbal, who had seen the hudud punishments mentioned in Islam’s foundational texts as subject to reinterpretation in changing times,76 General Zia al-­Haqq’s Hudood ordinances had sought to preserve their putatively original Islamic authenticity. Other markers of a conservative Islamic identity would continue to be proposed and

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sometimes put into effect in subsequent years. Around the same time that the Council of Islamic Ideology had suggested new restrictions on the Ahmadis, it had also recommended, inter alia, that men not attending the Friday congregational prayers should be fined, that women should be required to cover themselves in public, and that female athletes not be allowed to participate in events abroad.77 As with the 1953 anti-­Ahmadi agitation in the Punjab and the 1974 countrywide movement, the 1984 ordinance should also be seen against a wider political context, again without reducing it to that context. Things were not going well for General Zia al-­Haqq. Since coming to power in 1977, he had promised several times to hold general elections and had put them off each time. Eleven political parties had come together in 1981 to organize the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD), a powerful challenge to the regime, and even some of the religiopolitical parties that had initially been excited by the military regime’s program of Islamization had begun to grow weary of Zia al-­ Haqq’s promises. The Islamist Jamaʿat-­i Islami had given valuable support to the regime in its early years, but not everyone in the party was happy about this. In 1983, the regime banned student organizations, of which the Jamaʿat-­ affiliated Islami Jamʿiyyat-­i Talaba was among the most powerful. This led to new, internal, pressure on the party’s leadership to adopt a less accommodating course toward the government.78 Though the ʿulama, for their part, had benefited much from the patronage that came with Zia al-­Haqq’s Islamization, they, too, had misgivings about what this Islamization entailed in terms of greater governmental regulation of the religious sphere.79 Many among them applauded the anti-­Ahmadi ordinance. But it did little in the long run to shore up the regime’s religious credentials, let alone its legitimacy. Nor did it put to rest anxieties about religious minorities.

The Shiʿa From the perspective of the Sunni ʿulama, few things “outrage the religious feelings of Muslims”—to use the language of the 1984 ordinance—more than ritualized expressions of Shiʿi hostility toward some key companions (sahaba) of the Prophet Muhammad.80 To the Sunnis, the companions are paragons of virtue and piety and enjoy a standing second only to that of the Prophet himself. Indeed, the community’s knowledge of the teachings of the Prophet depends on the good credentials of these companions, the people who transmitted those teachings to subsequent generations. The Shiʿa take a dim view of many of these companions for their alleged complicity in preventing Muhammad’s cousin and son-­in-­law, ʿAli ibn Abi Talib, from immediately succeeding to the religious and political headship of the Muslim community, as God and

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the Prophet had intended. While the Sunnis consider Muhammad’s first four successors—Abu Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿUthman, and ʿAli—to be the “rightly guided” (rashidun) caliphs, the Shiʿa see the first three of them as little better than usurpers and hypocrites, out to undermine the nascent faith as soon as the Prophet had died. And where the Sunnis venerate the wives of the Prophet as the “mothers of the believers,” the Shiʿa have traditionally heaped scorn on ʿAʾisha, the Prophet’s youngest widow, who would later go to war against ʿAli. From the perspective of many Sunnis, Shiʿi imprecations against ʿAʾisha or against ʿUmar, the second caliph, are at least as offensive as (if not more offensive than) the Ahmadi practice of referring to the head of their own community as a caliph, or his associates as companions, or his wife as the mother of the believers. That some of their most revered figures are publicly reviled by the Shiʿa, especially in Muharram, the first month of the Muslim calendar when the Shiʿa commemorate the martyrdom of their third imam, Husayn (d. 680), has long caused deep anguish among the Sunnis. And Muharram processions have often provided flashpoints for riots between the Shiʿa and the Sunnis. The Sunnis have sometimes responded with rival commemorations of the Prophet’s companions. In late colonial India, this had precipitated severe sectarian conflict in Lucknow—a city ruled by a Shiʿi dynasty till the mid-­nineteenth century and one of the major intellectual and cultural centers of Shiʿism in India—with the Sunnis insisting on their right to publicly praise the companions of Muhammad (madh-­i sahaba) and the Shiʿis resisting it as a challenge to their own long-­established religious practices.81 In Pakistan, with a population that is overwhelmingly Sunni, the Sunni ʿulama have often demanded restrictions on Shiʿi Muharram rituals. As a religious scholar observed at a national conference of the ʿulama convened by General Zia al-­Haqq in August 1980, “if, today, anyone publishes insulting literature about the government, the president, or some other high official, he is immediately prosecuted for it. The only person who is not prosecuted is the one who insults God and His Prophet, the noble companions, the pure members of the [Prophet’s] household, and the Rashidun caliphs. There is no provision in the law to bring such a person to court.”82 This would change later that year. Significantly, the first of General Zia al-­ Haqq’s blasphemy laws was directed not against the Ahmadis but rather against the Shiʿa. The legislation did not mention any group in particular, in marked contrast with the 1984 ordinance, which did refer explicitly to the Ahmadis. But there could be little doubt that, in making any insult to the companions and family of the Prophet a criminal offense (section 298-­A of the Pakistan Penal Code), the intended target was Shiʿi ritual imprecations against figures revered by the Sunnis.83 It was also a way of settling scores with

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a community whose leadership had publicly challenged the regime earlier that year, as we will observe. A deeper anxiety had to do, as it did in case of the Ahmadis, with the perceived outsized influence of the Shiʿi minority in political life and the public sphere. Jinnah, the founder of the state, was a Shiʿi. For the most part, he was keen to stay clear of sectarian entanglements, which would have been fatal to his aspiration to be recognized, by the British, the Indian National Congress, and, of course, by the Muslims, as the “sole spokesman” of a unified Muslim community.84 In 1938, he did briefly attend the annual session of the All India Shiʿa Conference,85 but such involvements were not characteristic of his politics. As he put it a year later, the sectarian conflict in Lucknow was nothing less than “the surreptitious machinations of the enemies of the Musalmans [to] create and exploit the differences between them.”86 Jinnah kept his Muslim League firmly out of any engagement with the conflict in Lucknow. Indeed, as the governor of the United Provinces reported to the viceroy in May 1939, “Jinnah had threatened excommunication to any Muslim Leaguer who should try to intervene.”87 Jinnah’s critics among the Sunni ʿulama thought nonetheless that if nothing else disqualified him from establishing a Muslim homeland, his Shiʿism sufficed to do so. His nemesis, Husayn Ahmad Madani, the Congress-­allied principal of the traditionalist Deoband madrasa, was most blunt on this score. He had been a key figure on the Sunni side in the sectarian conflict in Lucknow, and he could never get past the fact that Jinnah was a Shiʿi.88 Using a derogatory term for the Shiʿa in a letter written weeks after the establishment of Pakistan, Madani referred to Jinnah as a “self-­described Rafidi” and observed that his new state was ruled by “heretics and apostates.” One could hardly pray for such a state, though its Sunni inhabitants did merit one’s sympathy.89 The letter went on to quote Raja Muhammad Amir Ahmad Khan of Mahmudabad (d. 1973), a prominent Shiʿi with a princely lineage, as telling a Shiʿi gathering some years earlier: “Our great leader [ Jinnah] is fortunately a true Shiʿi. The history of Islam is undergoing change. Today, all the Sunnis of India have bowed their head in obedience to a descendant of the [first Shiʿi] imam and they are willing to lay down their lives at his command.”90 It is taken for granted here that any self-­respecting Sunni would be disturbed by such words. Besides Jinnah, two Pakistani heads of the state—Iskandar Mirza (1955–58) and Yahya Khan (1969–71)—were Shiʿis. Neither is remembered kindly in the country, though this has nothing to do with their Shiʿism. Iskandar Mirza, the last governor-­general of the country and, with the adoption of the constitution in 1956, its first president, was the person who imposed martial law in 1958 before being forced to relinquish power to General Ayub Khan (1958–69). It

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was to General Yahya Khan that Ayub Khan would, in turn, hand over the reins of the government. Yahya Khan declared another martial law, and it was under his watch that the province of East Pakistan seceded to become Bangladesh. General Muhammad Musa, Ayub Khan’s commander-­in-­chief and subsequently his governor of West Pakistan, was also a Shiʿi.91 So was Nusrat, the wife of prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. More recently, Yusuf Reza Gilani, prime minister from 2008 to 2012, was a Shiʿi. Though most estimates put the Shiʿa at less than 15 percent of the country’s Muslim population, Nusrat and Benazir Bhutto—the future prime minister—were reported in 1980 to believe that the Shiʿa accounted for as much as 40 percent of the armed forces.92 There are clear parallels here with some of the anxieties provoked by insinuations about Ahmadi influence on the government and their disproportionately large presence in the military. It is also worth noting that Pakistan’s highest military honor, the Nishan-­i Haydar, evokes the gallantry in battle not of Abu Bakr, ʿUmar, or ʿUthman, all revered companions of Muhammad, but rather of ʿAli, the first Shiʿi imam. In the Punjab, many people in the rural countryside have observed the nexus of Shiʿism and political power not in the person of an occasional president, prime minister, or a military official, however, but in that of the local landlord. (As the case of Yusuf Riza Gilani suggests, these are not mutually exclusive positions.) A number of the “feudal” magnates in southern Punjab are Shiʿi. In the decades following the establishment of Pakistan, much of the leadership of the Shiʿa came from these Shiʿi landowners, who also provided financial backing to the country’s Shiʿi organizations.93 The peasantry, by contrast, has tended to be largely Sunni. Though rioting between the Sunnis and the Shiʿa has remained endemic to their sometimes tense relations, it was only in 1985 that a militant Sunni organization, the Sipah-­i Sahaba (The Army of the Companions [of the Prophet]), emerged on the scene in the Punjab. And it is no accident that it was founded in Jhang, a midsized town in the southern Punjab district of the same name, long dominated by Shiʿi landowners who have also wielded considerable political influence. While sectarianism in Pakistan is a largely urban phenomenon, with the urban bourgeoisie providing much of the financial and moral support to the Sipah-­i Sahaba, this urban support base itself has deep roots in the rural hinterland. Haqq Nawaz Jhangawi (d. 1990), the founder of the organization, was born to a poor rural household in the district of Jhang, though it was as a preacher in one of the town’s mosques that he would make his career as a sectarian firebrand and community organizer. A biography of Jhangawi by a close associate provides an illuminating glimpse into the worldview of this organization and, indeed, of others of the same ilk:

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Jhang was a backward district dominated by feudal lords [jagirdars]. . . . They found license in Shiʿism for the life of pleasure and libertinism they desired, and so the rural gentry had become Shiʿi. Under their influence, the peasants and other members of the lower castes also went over to Shiʿism. But even those who didn’t had remained neither Shiʿi nor Sunni, and had no sense of shame at being devoid of a religious identity. Sunk in ignorance, they retained some of their traditional customs in the name of Sunnism [sunniyyat], while in other respects they had become assimilated with the Shiʿa. They knew nothing of their beliefs, nor of their religious orientation; they did not practice their faith, nor were they bothered about not practicing it. All they had were certain rites of ignorance and nothing else. In all matters of happiness and grief in life, they were as one. . . . If anyone tried to reform this situation and to indicate to them the differences between the Shiʿa and the Sunnis, he was accused of fomenting discord, of being a sectarian; he would be deemed undesirable, and would no longer be allowed in the area. . . . Mawlana Haqq Nawaz, after he became convinced of what the truth was, began preaching; and he was defiant in the face of all opposition.94 Even as this passage evokes the image of a Shiʿi domination of the rural hinterland, it reveals other anxieties as well. The rural peasants were not only at the mercy of the Shiʿi magnates’ economic and political power, they were also helpless in resisting the religious and cultural influence of Shiʿism on their lives. They needed to be made aware of their “religious identity”—of true Sunnism—which, we are given to understand, would also empower them politically against the Shiʿi elite. This would be the project of the Sipah-­i Sahaba. Since the mid-­1980s, this organization and others that emerged either as splinter groups or as new organizations after its predecessors were banned, have led the charge against the Shiʿa, not just in Jhang or in southern Punjab but in many other parts of the country as well. The Shiʿa have had their own militant organizations, and both sides have paid a heavy price in terms of lost lives.95 As the sectarian Sunni groups see things, it is not just that ordinary rural or, for that matter, urban Sunnis have often been too ignorant, too poor, and too much under the thrall of influential Shiʿis to be able to attend much to the preservation or rediscovery of their Sunni identity. It is also that, like the Ahmadis, the Shiʿa have had an active interest in proselytizing for their faith. Shiʿi ʿulama and Shiʿi madrasas are known, by their own acknowledgment, to be active proselytes.96 And while in case of the Ahmadis, this has often meant proselyting to non-­Muslims, in the Shiʿi instance, a good deal of the target audience of the preachers has comprised fellow Muslims. Many Shiʿi preachers no doubt see this audience as people who really are Shiʿis in some sense,

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and they seek to reawaken and inform their sense of a proper, text-­based Shiʿi identity.97 In this respect, there would be little to differentiate Shiʿi proselytism from that of the Sunnis. From the perspective of Sunni sectarians, however, such preaching seeks to target unsuspecting and vulnerable Sunnis. In the years following the Iranian revolution of 1979, it is often alleged to be carried out with the financial resources poured into such endeavors by an oil-­rich neighbor. Before I turn to the question of how the Iranian revolution has fueled Sunni misgivings in Pakistan in some unprecedented ways, Sunni anxieties about the lure of Shiʿism need some further explication. Though the ritual commemoration of the martyrdom of Husayn, the third Shiʿi imam, has sometimes led to sectarian conflict because of what the Shiʿa might say on such occasions about revered Sunni figures, Shiʿi processions in Muharram have long attracted Sunni participation as well. Indeed, in Lucknow in the early twentieth century, the issue was not so much Sunni rejection of commemorative processions in honor of Husayn as it was their opposition to invectives against the companions of the Prophet on such occasions and their insistence on the right to also sing the praises of the companions reviled by the Shiʿa.98 For all their ritualized expressions of grief at the martyrdom of Husayn, these are colorful events, offering food and much carnivalesque entertainment to people. The closest some Sunnis come to rivaling such events is when they commemorate the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad or the death anniversaries of some Sufi saints. But the Shiʿis, too, celebrate the birthday of the Prophet and not a few of the Shiʿi rural magnates double as hereditary guardians of some major Sufi shrines. For their part, many Sunnis, notably of the Deobandi and the Ahl-­i Hadith orientations, frown upon devotional practices associated with the Prophet’s birthday or the saints’ shrines, leaving their common fellow travelers exposed to the appeal of Shiʿi commemorations. At a time when the electronic media was largely controlled by the government, as it was in Pakistan till the early years of the twenty-­first century, there were added anxieties about Shiʿism being relayed to the people through state-­ owned radio and television. This brings us back, of course, to concerns about a disproportionate Shiʿi presence in influential places. Special programming was scheduled on radio and television in Muharram, and as the ʿAshura—the tenth day of the month, on which Husayn was martyred—approached, the state television bore a strikingly somber look, complete with telecasts of Shiʿi ritual gatherings (majalis) at which the travails of Husayn and his family were recounted to great emotional effect. While many Sunnis watched such programs with interest, for they too venerate the memory of Husayn, some Sunni groups worried that the Shiʿa were receiving an unjustified amount of airtime. A public appeal to the prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in January

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1977 on behalf of a number of Sunni associations of Karachi reflects such sentiments: In this democratic age, institutions of the media are people’s institutions. They are supported through taxes by the entire populace, the majority and the minority. A particular way of thinking cannot therefore be foisted upon them. . . . Discussing historical events and religious beliefs without taking care to present them in their proper perspective has deleterious effects. . . . The month of Muharram is worthy of our respect in every way. Two great instances of martyrdom took place that month [the second being that of ʿUmar, the second successor of Muhammad]. In honoring the practice of Moses, the Prophet [Muhammad] fasted on the tenth day of this month. . . . Khadija, the mother of the believers, got married this month. Noah’s ark came to rest at Mt. Judi this month and God chose Abraham as his “friend” this month. Jacob saw his beloved son Joseph after forty years this month, David was forgiven [by God], Solomon’s kingdom was restored to him, Job’s travails came to an end, Jonah emerged unharmed from the belly of the fish, the Pharaoh drowned in the Nile, and Jesus was born—all in this month. It was in this month that the [caliphate’s] Islamic secretariat [sic, in Urdu transliteration] was inaugurated during the caliphate of ʿUmar, and [his successor] ʿUthman’s great caliphate began this month. To ignore such momentous events in the media’s programming is to forget one’s historical heritage, which leads to the destruction of nations.99 The question of whether everything mentioned in this passage did indeed take place in the month of Muharram is best set aside as unanswerable and not particularly interesting. What is relevant for our purposes is the rhetorically powerful point that one single event—the martyrdom of Husayn—had come to completely overshadow the sacred history, and pre-­history, of Islam and even that one event was being presented by the national media in ways that were both factually inaccurate and inflammatory. In other words, a Shiʿi view of history was being relayed through radio and television, and it was not just people in local neighborhoods that were exposed to the lure of Shiʿi beliefs and practices but the nation at large. Then there was the question of how to teach Islam in schools. The Shiʿa had long demanded that their distinctive doctrines be presented separately in textbooks of Islamic Studies (Islamiyyat)—a required subject in the public school system. The Ayub Khan regime had conceded this demand in principle in late 1968, but it was not until 1975 that separate textbooks of Islamic Studies were instituted for Shiʿi students by the government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.100 These textbooks, which were later discontinued,101 had a shared section, for

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Sunni and Shiʿi students, on the Qurʾan, the life and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, and ethics (akhlaqiyyat); but other sections were tailored to the separate needs of students, with Shiʿi textbooks detailing matters of ritual according to Shiʿi law and outlining the lives of the Shiʿi imams. The Sunni ʿulama had resisted this Shiʿi demand bitterly. In August 1973, on the very day the new constitution of Pakistan was promulgated, a number of ʿulama had addressed an appeal to the prime minister, of which the first item was a call upon the government to reject this Shiʿi demand. The Shiʿa could have their own syllabus in their denominational schools, the statement said, since the constitution guaranteed religious freedom to all people inhabiting the country. But to allow them a separate representation on the public school curriculum meant that “the minority Shiʿi sect was being placed on par with the predominant Sunni majority.” And if this was being done for the Shiʿa, the signatories of the statement asked rhetorically, what was to prevent the teachings of the Ahmadis, the Christians, and the Hindus from also being included in the syllabus?102 They went on to demand restrictions on Shiʿi ritual practices and on Shiʿi programming on radio and television and sought, as a preview of what was to come the following year, to have the Ahmadis declared a non-­Muslim minority. Worries that a minority was standing in the way of the majority’s ability to realize its aspirations would arise most forcefully when General Zia al-­Haqq began his campaign of Islamization in 1979. Among its highlights was the state’s collection of zakat, which Muslims of means are required by the shariʿa to pay annually on their wealth and property. Though zakat has sometimes been collected by the state—the first caliph, Abu Bakr, had gone to war against Arab tribes that had refused to send the proceeds of zakat to the central government following the death of the Prophet—Muslims, for the most part, have tended to informally disburse it among the needy in their local circles. Zia al-­Haqq’s implementation of zakat laws was a departure from that practice. It was also based on the norms of the Hanafi school of Sunni law, to which most Sunnis in South Asia have long adhered. The implementation of zakat laws was an extension of state power in a new direction, presided over by a martial law regime that had only recently executed the former prime minister. It immediately invited challenges. There were many among the Sunnis who complained bitterly about being deprived by state-­owned banks of a portion of their hard-­earned savings in the name of zakat. But it was from the Shiʿi quarter that the most organized challenge to these laws came. Shiʿi leaders argued that their religious law had its own specifications about zakat and they contested the government’s right to collect it according to religious norms they did not recognize. Emboldened by the example of the street power that

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had helped topple the Iranian monarchy the previous year, the Shiʿa held massive sit-­ins in the capital, Islamabad, in mid-­1980 to press for their demands. It was not long before the government—a martial law administration, no less— was forced to capitulate. The Shiʿa were to be subject to their own laws, as administered by their own religious authorities, when it came to zakat. This was an embarrassing moment for the government, but it was also an uncomfortable time for those Sunnis who had long had misgivings about unwanted Shiʿi influence. Issues much larger than the immediate controversy over zakat were at stake here. To the extent that people believed that General Zia al-­Haqq was really trying to implement Islamic law in Pakistan, rather than to justify and prolong his rule by invoking Islam, the Shiʿi challenge to him raised the specter of a small minority once again thwarting the will of the predominantly Sunni majority. From the time of Pakistan’s inception, ʿulama and Islamists had been trying to counter modernist objections that a state whose inhabitants belonged to many different Islamic orientations could not possibly implement Islamic law in a way that would satisfy them all. Their usual response had been that, while people were free to follow their legal norms in matters of personal status (notably marriage, divorce, and inheritance), Islamic public law had to be guided by the school of law followed by the majority of the country’s population.103 It was to that idea that the Shiʿa now represented a challenge. The Shiʿa wanted full recognition of their separate religious law in all respects. As Mufti Jaʿfar Husayn (d. 1983), the most influential leader of the Shiʿi community at the time, put it in a defiant speech at an ʿulama convention presided over by General Zia al-­Haqq in 1980, “No one can eliminate juridical disagreements. They are a reality and one should not shut one’s eyes to them. Instead, we should acknowledge their existence and give people the liberty to act according to their various juridical orientations. This is what justice demands and only in this way can we succeed in the implementation of Islamic law. If, on the other hand, the views of one school of thought are imposed upon others, success [in implementing Islamic law] would not be possible for us.”104 Such statements hinted darkly at the Shiʿa’s ability to derail Islamization. In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, Shiʿi groups would, indeed, be very vocal opponents of the various “shariʿat bills” that promised to bring Pakistan closer to its elusive Islamic ideals. Represented at this time by the Movement for the Implementation of Jaʿfari [i.e., Twelver Shiʿi] Law (Tahrik-­i nifaz-­i fiqh-­i Jaʿfariyya or TNFJ), the Shiʿa were not alone in such opposition. Yet the loud Shiʿi challenge to such initiatives would have done nothing to assuage anxieties that it bore some responsibility for preventing the implementation of Islamic law in Pakistan. The TNFJ’s very name created suspicion that the only law the Shiʿa wanted to see implemented was their own.105

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Though the Shiʿa of Pakistan had been mobilizing with unusual intensity since the late 1960s,106 the new ring of defiance in their collective voice had much to do with the success of the Iranian revolution. This was not lost on their Sunni rivals. As with the Ahmadis, there were anxieties that the Pakistani Shiʿa were more loyal to their own religious guides—in this case, Ayatollah Khomeini—than they were to Pakistan. As it happened, neither the Shiʿi leadership in Pakistan nor the revolutionaries in Iran did much to allay such fears. Shiʿi leaders in Pakistan were sometimes caught saying that they would “take orders only from Ayatollah Khomeini.”107 And they urged their countrymen to see Khomeini as the leader and the “hero” not just of the Shiʿa but of all Muslims.108 Iran, for its part, made no bones about its desire to see its revolution exported to other regions of the Muslim world. ʿAli Khameneʾi, the president of Iran, was quoted by Pakistani newspapers as saying in 1984 that “Iran’s Islamic revolution had spread in every direction and no power could succeed in stopping it.”109 Such statements were not designed to bring much comfort to Arab capitals or, for that matter, to Sunni religious circles in Pakistan. It was not uncommon for the Iranian embassy and cultural centers to also sponsor cultural and religious events in Pakistan, again creating considerable discontent in some Sunni circles. There were at least two other ways in which the case of Iran raised uncomfortable questions in Pakistan. First, though there is a Sunni minority in Iran, it has never enjoyed the sort of recognition in terms of state law that the Shiʿa of Pakistan were claiming for themselves from the Zia al-­Haqq regime. This was brought home pointedly after the revolution of 1979, when the Iranian regime took it upon itself to implement Islamic law in its Twelver Shiʿi form. Prominent Sunnis were not slow, sometimes tongue in cheek, to point to the example of Iran as something Pakistan ought to emulate. At the ʿulama convention of 1980, Zafar Ahmad Ansari, who was associated with the Islamist Jamaʿat-­i Islami and had played a key role in the parliamentary proceedings on the Ahmadi issue in the summer of 1974, referred to the recently ratified Iranian constitution as a beacon for other countries. The Iranians have decided, he said, that the state religion will be Islam and the [official] school of law is that of the Twelvers, which is the school adhered to by the vast majority of Iran’s Muslims. The [majoritarian] argument on the basis of which they have made the Twelver school the official school [of the state] is just, reasonable, realistic and practical. Different sorts of dispute would have arisen if they had allowed any form of ambiguity here. With this decision, they have shut the door to any such conflict. . . . They have also provided that other schools of Islamic law—the Hanafi, the Shafiʿi, . . . the Maliki, the Hanbali, the

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Zaydi—will be entitled to full respect and that their adherents would be free to perform their [personal] religious rites according to their own laws.110 In other words, the Twelver Shiʿis of Iran had made it clear to their non-­Shiʿi compatriots that, while enjoying their rights, they would have to live as a religious minority. The implication, left unstated by Zafar Ahmad Ansari but frequently enunciated by many others, was that the Shiʿa of Pakistan were overstepping acceptable limits in demanding more than Iran, to which they looked up for guidance, was willing to give to its own Muslim minorities. And Iran was guilty of double standards in implicitly supporting Pakistani Shiʿi demands. Second, in the years following the revolution, Iranian authorities did not flinch when it came to the implementation of Islamic criminal law, the hudud—by far, the starkest marker, so far as the Islamists and many ʿulama are concerned, of a state’s Islamic identity. Hands were amputated for theft and people were stoned to death for unlawful sexual intercourse.111 Though Saudi Arabia had long implemented such punishments, their incidence was considerably less frequent there than it was in Iran in the 1980s.112 The real contrast was with Pakistan, however. In February 1979, it would be recalled, the Zia al-­Haqq regime had promulgated the Hudood ordinances for the implementation of Islamic criminal law. As the headline of one national newspaper had giddily announced on the occasion, “the thief ’s hand will be chopped off, the person committing adultery will be publicly stoned to death.”113 Yet, until the end of Zia al-­Haqq’s rule in 1988, or in subsequent years for that matter, no thieves had their hands cut off and no adulterers were stoned to death. Flogging was the closest the state came to maintaining the symbolism of hudud, but it did so more to intimidate political opponents than to meet any traditional juridical specifications. Idiosyncratic punishments in the name of hudud were already too much for human rights activists at home and abroad. They were too little for many Islamists and ʿulama, however, for they could hardly mistake them for the real thing. Here is what Ihsan Ilahi Zahir (d. 1987), a religious scholar of the Ahl-­i Hadith orientation and a politician, had to say in 1980 about the non-­ implementation of the hudud, with General Zia al-­Haqq in attendance: With apologies to those convinced of gradualism [in the implementation of Islamic law] . . . this process of gradualism has remained unfinished for thirty-­two years since the inception of Pakistan. . . . A [real] beginning does have to be made one day. When it is, it will have to be marked with the cutting off of the thief ’s hand and with the stoning of the adulterer to death

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and with the flogging of the person who drinks. Some people say that Islamic laws ought to be implemented only after the society has reformed itself [literally: has become good]. But once the society has reformed itself, are we to flog [our fellow scholar] Mawlana ʿAbd al-­R ahman! . . . After all, it is to reform society that people are flogged. It is to eliminate people who rob others of virtue that they are stoned to death. It is the hands of those plundering the property of others that are cut off. . . . Mr. President, with respect, we do not doubt your intentions. But as one says [in such situations], there are things that are done with good intention but without enthusiasm. I don’t want it to be said about the chief of the Pakistani military that he did something listlessly. We want [to be able] to say that the military chief has taken a step with the same determination that has always been characteristic of the Pakistani military and of which the nation is proud. There is nothing to be ashamed of here.114 In view of this mock deference of Zahir toward General Zia al-­Haqq, it is not particularly surprising that he eventually became one of the military ruler’s more ardent critics, not only in the name of democracy but also in that of Islam, which he took Zia al-­Haqq to be cynically manipulating for his own ends.115 Yet the contrast with Iran would have perturbed even those less critical of Zia al-­Haqq. Pakistani Shiʿi ʿulama played up such contrasts. In an article written shortly after the Iranian revolution, Safdar Husayn Najafi (d. 1989), an influential leader of the Pakistani Shiʿa and the translator into Urdu of some of Khomeini’s key works, commented approvingly on the desire of many Pakistani ʿulama and intellectuals to revive the practice of ijtihad—here understood as the effort to articulate new legal norms in light of the foundational texts—in readying Islamic law for implementation by the modern state. But since ijtihad had been defunct for centuries in the Sunni world, it would take a long time for the Sunnis to develop the requisite ability for it. The Shiʿa, on the other hand, had had a continuous tradition of ijtihad, and Pakistan ought to seek the guidance of scholars from Iran and Iraq. He continued: If you really want to see the establishment of an Islamic system in Pakistan, you ought to request Grand Ayatollah Khomeini to send one or more mujtahids [i.e., scholars capable of ijtihad] to Pakistan. All issues, individual or collective, political, economic or social, should be placed before them and they should look into them. Lawyers, judges, and ʿulama should also benefit from these [mujtahids], so that a purely Islamic system can be established here. For otherwise, the laws that are enacted in the name of Islam by the non-­mujtahids and by those who are not ʿulama [of the requisite

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standard] will have nothing to do with Islam. For God’s sake, consider this matter with a cool head! If you like this advice, then don’t let sectarian prejudice or a false ego prevent you from acting upon it.116 Such swipes simultaneously at Pakistani nationalism—only by looking to the scholars of Iran and Iraq could Pakistan hope to establish a properly Islamic system at home—and at traditions of Sunni scholarship reveal much about Shiʿi self-­confidence during these years in Pakistan. They could not have endeared the Shiʿi leadership to increasingly jittery Sunnis.

Conclusion The sort of anxieties the Ahmadis and the Shiʿa have provoked in at least some Sunni circles have tended to revolve around rather different issues. In some ways, the difference is obvious, of course. Despite Ahmadi professions to the contrary, they are taken by the Sunnis to deny a fundamental tenet of the Muslim faith—the finality of Muhammad’s prophethood—whereas the Shiʿa are not; and it would be safe to say that far more Muslims have come to consider the Ahmadis as beyond the pale of Islam than have ever held a similar view with regard to the Shiʿa. Yet the fact remains that many among the ʿulama consider the Shiʿa to be unbelievers, too. It was not clear even to Jawaharlal Nehru, as he had put it in commenting on a statement on the Ahmadis by Muhammad Iqbal, why the Ahmadis should have had greater trouble being accommodated into the community of Muslims than the Shiʿa.117 Nehru was referring to the Ismaʿili Shiʿa, who, as he saw it, “ascribe certain divine or semi-­ divine attributes”118 to their imam, rather than to the more restrained Twelvers; but many Sunni scholars see even Twelver views of their imams as grievously trespassing on attributes that properly belong only to God and to His Prophet. In 1952, not long before the anti-­Ahmadi agitation in the Punjab, the prominent Pakistani modernist Khalifa ʿAbd al-­Hakim (d. 1959) had warned ominously about what awaited the Shiʿa at the hands of the Sunni religious leadership: The vice chancellor of a Pakistani university recently told me that he asked a leading religious scholar, who . . . had migrated from India to Pakistan some time ago, about an Islamic sect. He gave the fatwa that the extremists [ghali] among them are liable to the death penalty and the non-­extremists are subject to other punishments. Asked about another sect, whose members included many millionaires, he said that they were all liable to capital punishment. . . . Another prominent religious scholar remarked that for now we have declared jihad against one sect, but, God willing, we shall deal with the others after we have succeeded in this [venture].119

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What then might be said to be different, apart from matters of doctrine, about the Ahmadi and the Shiʿi challenges to conservative Sunni sensibilities in Pakistan?120 Misgivings about modernism have loomed especially large among the kinds of anxiety the Ahmadis have aroused in conservative Sunni circles. This is not only because the Ahmadis themselves hold certain distinctively modernist positions, notably a rejection of jihad as a means of enlarging the sphere of Islam and a critique of the ʿulama. The Islamists and the ʿulama have also seen the failure of successive Pakistani regimes to remove the Ahmadis from “key positions” in what professes to be an Islamic state as a stark illustration of the modernists’ unwillingness to live up to their Islamic commitments. And the anti-­Ahmadi agitation has tended to flare up in Pakistan at times of especially intense confrontation between the modernists, on the one hand, and the ʿulama and the Islamists, on the other.121 The Shiʿa, too, have always been well represented among the modernists, both in colonial India and after the establishment of Pakistan, but they have not called up the specter of modernism in anything like the way the case of Ahmadism did. Put differently, Shiʿism has never been intertwined with modernism the way Ahmadism has been; and the leadership of the Shiʿa has tended to be in the hands of traditionally educated religious scholars rather than of modernists. Yet, substantial though they were, the anxieties generated by the Ahmadis among the ʿulama and the Islamists seem to be outweighed in the end by those provoked in particular circles by the Shiʿa.122 This is not especially surprising since Ahmadi prophetology is so directly at odds with mainstream Islamic beliefs that it has been a relatively simpler matter to exclude the Ahmadis from the fold of the Muslim community. That they were not formally excluded for so long is, as the ʿulama and the Islamists see it, an indictment of modernist insincerity in matters Islamic. The Shiʿa are harder to exclude, and this makes for greater unease among their foes. The Shiʿi belief in, inter alia, the sinlessness and the legitimist claims of their imams is anathema to many Sunni ʿulama, but Sunnis, too, venerate Shiʿi figures from early Islam. They decidedly do not revere Mirza Ghulam Ahmad and his successors. The devotional practices of the Barelawis, a major doctrinal orientation among South Asian Sunnis, echo Shiʿi practices, and vice versa, leading many Deobandi reformists and Sunni sectarians to see Shiʿism as pervading the ranks of unsuspecting Sunnis. By contrast, there is little indication of Ahmadi beliefs having become pervasive among people. If anything, the Ahmadis have often been castigated, as they were by Iqbal, precisely for setting themselves apart from the larger Muslim community. There is likewise little to suggest any Ahmadi effort to use the national media to broadcast their own religious views. Though there were allegations, during the 1974 agitation, that influential

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­ hmadis in the ministry of information were trying to control how the agitaA tion was being reported, this was a quite different matter than the anxiety that Shiʿi norms were being actively disseminated through the media. Then there is the fact that the Shiʿis are much more numerous than the Ahmadis and that they have been willing and able to respond in kind to violent Sunni attacks on them. In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, radical Shiʿi organizations were no less active than those of the Sunnis, and it is not just leaders of militant Sunni groups but also some prominent Sunni scholars who were assassinated, often as a prelude to cycles of further violence on both sides. Although individual Ahmadis and their places of worship continue occasionally to be targeted by militants and vigilantes, anxieties about Ahmadism appear largely to have receded into the past. This may be a function of the fact that there is little left to do to this harassed community. Modernism, much weakened as an intellectual force from what it was in the 1950s and the 1960s, continues to provoke conservative anxieties, but no longer in relation to the question of Ahmadism. Instead, anxieties about modernism have largely migrated in recent decades to other issues, such as the question of blasphemy. Just as it was not Ahmadi modernism but rather the indifference of the governing elite to the menace of the Ahmadis that had agitated the ʿulama and the Islamists, it is not so much the modernists’ blaspheming Islam—though a case could be made for it, if one were so inclined—as the modernists’ indifference to the problem of blasphemy that is at issue here. Liberal lawyers, human rights advocates, and modernist intellectuals have often critiqued the country’s blasphemy laws and the governing elite have sought to dismantle them. For their part, religiopolitical groups have firmly opposed such efforts even as they have continued to lament the failure of the state to properly safeguard the honor of Islam’s holiest personages. Whatever else it might be—a supposed conflict between Western ideals of free speech and Muslim sensitivities about their faith; a legacy of colonial legislation; the bitter fruit of Zia al-­Haqq’s Islamization; the persecution of minorities in ever new ways—the question of blasphemy is also a facet, as the anti-­Ahmadi agitation once was, of the contest between Islamic modernism and its conservative nemesis. Blasphemy retains its link with the Ahmadis. The blasphemy laws enacted as part of Zia al-­Haqq’s Islamization were directed at both the Shiʿa and the Ahmadis; and though accusations of blasphemy cast a wide net, the Ahmadis, too, have been victims of it. In fall 2017, a government effort to amend a form that had hitherto required electoral candidates to affirm that Muhammad was the last of God’s prophets again evoked that link. That effort led to a sit-­in by religiopolitical activists at one of the main entrances to the federal capital, causing violence and a severe disruption of civic life in Islamabad for about

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three weeks, and it eventually forced the government to give in to the agitators’ demands. Those participating in the sit-­in had alleged that the omission of the requirement to affirm the finality of Muhammad’s prophethood was a backdoor effort to return the Ahmadis to the Islamic fold. It is telling, however, that even this apparent foregrounding of anti-­Ahmadi sentiment had less to do with the Ahmadis than it did with the question of blasphemy—with the allegation, in this instance, that those in the government who had tried to surreptitiously remove the clause about Muhammad being the final prophet of God had blasphemed him.123 And the leader of this agitation, one Khadim Hussain Rizvi, had begun his religiopolitical career as a defender of the country’s blasphemy laws, widely seen by conservative religious groups as in danger of being undone under Western pressure.124 Though the question of blasphemy is not reducible to conservative anxieties about Islamic modernism, any more than is the Ahmadi question itself, both have had a good deal to do with those anxieties. The Shiʿa, for their part, represent both a larger and a more immediate challenge to militant Sunni groups than do the Ahmadis. There is no better, or grimmer, indication of this than the continuing targeting of ordinary Shiʿis in various parts of the country, notably, in recent years, in the restive Balochistan province bordering Iran. The persistence of Sunni anxiety vis-­à-­vis the Shiʿa relates not just to Iran’s alleged role in bolstering Pakistani Shiʿism, however, but also to the Pakistani Shiʿi minority’s perceived refusal to accept the terms of its minority condition. As a Shiʿi leader had himself acknowledged during the Zia al-­Haqq years in expressing this sentiment, in what was meant as a criticism of other Shiʿi leaders, “the Shiʿa are a minority but they think like a majority.”125 Broader issues are, once again, at stake here. A large segment of the Muslims of colonial India had once also refused to live like a minority, and though the Shiʿa are not separatists—their geographical distribution in Pakistan makes this largely impossible—it is hard to miss this uncomfortable parallel with the ideological justification for the establishment of the state. A good deal of this ideological justification has always been articulated in terms of the desire, indeed the divine imperative, as the Islamists would have it, to implement God’s law through the agency of the state. That has remained elusive, however. And while the ʿulama and the Islamists routinely lay much of the blame for the failure to implement Islamic law at the doorstep of the modernizing governing elite, it is Shiʿi political agitation that had most conspicuously thwarted progress on that path at a time when, in the early years of General Zia al-­Haqq, the country had apparently come closest to it than it ever has. That wound has not healed. What makes it worse is the mostly unacknowledged but very real anxiety that, even in the absence of the Shiʿa or even if they

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learned to live like a minority, there would be no grand consensus on how to define or implement Islamic law, no great unity within the ranks of the Muslim community. Such anxieties are deeper than those evoked by the Ahmadis, for they go to the very heart of unresolved—some would say, irresolvable—issues of Islamic identity in Pakistan.

A f t e rwor d

Belief in Science? On the Neuroscience of Religion Katja Guenther

It is 2006 in Montreal. A Carmelite nun is lying down with her eyes closed, shutting out the world in order to relive “the most intense mystical experience ever felt in [her] life,” a “sense of union with God.” The scene would not seem particularly remarkable, were it not for its location. For the nun is not in a church or in her cloister but rather in a research hospital, fully encircled by a roaring machine, which is generating a magnetic field about fifty thousand times stronger than that produced by the earth’s core. She is there for an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) experiment designed by Mario Beauregard and his student Vincent Paquette to reveal the “neural underpinnings of religious/spiritual/mystical experiences (RSMEs).”1 One in a long line of studies that have informed the growing field of “neurotheology,” Beauregard and Paquette’s experiment is an attempt to provide a neurological account of religious and mystical experience.2 Over the past fifteen years, neurotheology has reached beyond the confines of the laboratory and scientific journal to enter the public sphere. The debates have been carried out in the popular press and in paperbacks with catchy titles such as The Spiritual Brain and Why God Won’t Go Away, which explore the implications of neurotheological research for everyday believers.3 The ability of neurotheology to impact popular understandings of science and religion has also caught the attention of funding organizations like the John Templeton Foundation, the Fetzer Institute, and the Mind and Life Institute, whose goals are to foster dialogue between theologians, religious practitioners, and scientists.4 Neurotheology has been invested with such high hopes because it promises to sidestep old and heated theological debates and lead discussion to the 235

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seemingly less contentious realm of brain biology. Rather than asking whether God exists and contemplating His divine nature, it seeks to ascertain whether religious experience is a normal product of brain function or the result of neural pathology. Here at least, the argument goes, reasonable people might be able to agree. A brain scan seems, after all, to be a neutral and incontrovertible piece of evidence. The reality has, however, not lived up to the hype. As we shall see, far from overcoming theological stalemate, neurotheology has merely refought old battles on new terrain. Both believers and skeptics have been able to draw on neuroscientific results to shore up their positions, and debates have returned as vigorous and apparently intractable as before. In fact, rather than being a refuge from polemic, neurotheology provides evidence that debate over theological questions might not admit final resolution. Whatever its claims, neurotheology’s most important lesson might be that we are better advised to respect religious differences than to try to overcome them. ——— For many, neurotheological research has profoundly undermined the truth claims of religion. In their arguments, religious skeptics have not so much sought to prove the nonexistence of God as to demonstrate that religion should be understood as a form of neural malfunction. Religion for them is linked to unhealthy behaviors: religiously determined fasting is nothing more than anorexia and celibacy nothing but hyposexuality. So too they often associate spiritual experience with abnormally functioning temporal lobes, caused, for in­stance, by a brain tumor.5 Take the example of Michael A. Persinger, working at Laurentian University in Ontario, who has related neurological findings about religious states to the experience of patients suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy. In a series of papers in the 1980s, Persinger conducted correlation analyses indicating that “people who reported greater numbers of different types of paranormal experiences also reported greater numbers of temporal lobe signs,” such as sensory hallucinations or déjà-­vu experiences.6 This idea informed Persinger’s most famous work on the “God helmet.” He placed healthy volunteers—male and female undergraduate students—in a weakly illuminated acoustic chamber to minimize sensory input. He then exposed his subjects to pulsed magnetic fields, applied to the temporal lobes via a modified motorcycle helmet fitted with pairs of helical coils. Persinger found that he could elicit a “sense of a presence” in the subjects.7 Compared to a group of sham field controls, the subjects reported “enhanced vestibular, depersonalization and imagining experiences,” including the feeling of detachment.8 For Persinger, these findings suggested that religious experience could

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be understood as part of a broader “spectrum” of sensory delusions. There was, he argued, a “continuum of temporal lobe stability,” with temporal lobe epileptics located at the extreme (pathological) end and religious believers situated somewhere in the middle.9 Normal religiosity could thus be seen as an attenuated form of epilepsy. Persinger’s argument depends upon the comparison of brain activity during religious experience to that which is more uncontroversially recognized as pathological (in this case, epilepsy). But, even if we accept the idea of a “continuum,” it is not clear why religious experience should be defined by its relationship to the pathological pole. Couldn’t it be understood rather in relation to the normal one? Indeed, this is how religious believers in the neurotheological community have framed their findings. For neuroscientist Andrew Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania and the late Eugene d’Aquili, the best point of comparison for assessing the neural correlates of religious experience is normal function. As they write, “If you were to dismiss spiritual experience as ‘mere’ neurological activities, you would also have to distrust all of your own brain’s perceptions of the material world.”10 In an experiment using SPECT (single-­photon emission computed tomography), Newberg and d’Aquili measured the regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) in the brains of a group of meditating Tibetan Buddhists. The meditating monks were injected with a radioisotope and then their rCBF, indicating brain activity, was measured, during both a non-­meditative and a meditative state. The focus of their argument is the orientation association area (OAA) in the posterior superior parietal lobe, which locates the body in space. Never inactive, the OAA depends on an incoming stream of sensory information. With the help of this information, it constantly works out what the authors call the “limits of the self,” the boundaries of one’s own body in space. During meditation, however, the sensory stream is shut down, due to the activity of the attention association area (AAA) in the frontal lobes.11 The researchers found, among other things, that during meditation there was increased rCBF in the AAA, as well as decreased blood flow in the OAA.12 In their scientific paper, Newberg and d’Aquili give a relatively modest interpretation of their results: the “two findings may be attributable to the increased attention of subjects [related to the increase of activity in the AAA] and the experience of alterations of the sense of space [the decrease of OAA activity].”13 But in their popular book Why God Won’t Go Away (cowritten with the journalist Vince Rause), they use the same evidence to draw more far-­reaching conclusions about the neurobiology of religion. As they argue, during meditation the OAA has nothing to work on (which in the brain scan appears as inactivity, “dark blotches of cool greens and blues”). As a result, no boundaries are made out, which triggers the perception that “the self is

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endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything.”14 The degree of “blockage” of incoming signals determines the intensity of the resulting mental states. Like Persinger, the scientists refer to the idea of a continuum of “unitary states.” But they, in contrast, interpret their results through the normal pole. As they point out, the “arc of this continuum links the most profound experiences of the mystics with the smaller transcendent moments most of us experience every day, and shows that, in neurological terms, the two are different essentially by degree.”15 In other words, mystical occurrences are merely more extreme forms of normal human experience, such as the “transforming intoxication of romantic love.”16 As they conclude, in such meditation, the OAA is “working unusually but not improperly.”17 In fact, drawing on a sort of neuroscientific analog to the ontological proof, Newberg and d’Aquili suggest that religious experience might have more validity than normal sensory perception. Because the experience of mystical states is often described as a heightened reality, and “logic suggests that what is less real must be contained by what is more real . . . the self and the world must be contained within, and perhaps created by, the reality of Absolute Unitary Being.” For Newberg, the SPECT scan of a meditating monk’s left posterior superior parietal lobe thus comes close to being a “photograph of God.”18 We see similar arguments made by many in the neurotheological research community, for instance in the work of Beauregard and Paquette, the scientists whose Carmelite nun experiment I presented at the beginning of this essay. They compared blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal changes in the fMRI scans of fifteen contemplative Carmelite nuns reliving moments of intense union with God (mystical condition) and moments of intense union with other people (control condition). The scientists found that a number of brain regions, including the right medial orbitofrontal cortex, the right middle temporal cortex, and the right inferior and superior parietal lobules, among others,19 were activated in the mystical condition but not the control condition. They thus argued that religious experience was “mediated by several regions and systems.” The crucial point was that this complexity discounted the idea that there was a single “God spot”20 located in the temporal lobes, which could be manipulated by the “God helmet,” for instance, or whose malfunction could explain religious experience.21 Moreover, “a complex pattern,” they insisted, was “not compatible with a simple explanation. To the extent that spiritual experiences are experiences in which we contact the reality of our universe, we should expect them to be complex.”22 In essence in both the mystical and control conditions, the brain was working in a highly organized way, and in both cases this seemed more compatible with proper function than pathology.

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On both sides of the neurotheological divide, the argument is built upon comparison with normal or pathological states—Persinger drew out the similarities between the brains of believers and brains of epileptics, Newberg and d’Aquili compared them to the brains of people in love. They thus rely on guilt (or innocence) by association, and this has allowed the scientists to take such varied and seemingly opposing positions. Of course, this approach is not the norm in neuroscientific research. In most cases, where there is no obvious sign of brain trauma, a particular cerebral activity can be diagnosed as pathological because it is correlated with a patently pathological behavior. But the neurotheologians denied themselves this strategy. For it was the very difficulty of determining whether religion was or was not a delusion (whether it was pathological) that led them to their fMRI studies in the first place. They were thus compelled to engage in comparative study, examining brain activity patterns associated with religious experience with those definitively determined as normal and pathological, and trying to draw conclusions from any similarities. As the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran has argued, the difficulty of determining whether the “unusual” or “rare” was normal or pathological means that the same neuroscientific data could be used to argue both for and against the existence of God.23 Neurotheologists often assert a form of epistemic modesty.24 They can tell us about brain structure and activity, but anything beyond that, about the nature of the world or of the universe, is merely a matter of inference. The flip side of this modesty is the confidence with which they can make assertions within these limits. Such is the attraction of neurotheology: it hopes to neutralize theological polemic by shifting attention to a less divisive and more scientific realm. But as we have seen, in focusing on brain biology, the neurotheologists have ended up reproducing the same theological divisions they hoped to evade. In fact, as I have attempted to show, it is precisely because they sought to avoid assessing religion on its own terms that they have had such difficulty in determining whether it is associated with pathological brain activity. Neurotheology turns out to be not so much an escape from the dilemmas of theological debate as an encounter with those dilemmas in different guise. ——— Neurotheology is perhaps just a fad, a sign that neuroscience has asserted itself as the new prima philosophia with the right to contribute to, or even dominate, conversations in all other academic fields.25 Despite its gleaming modernity, however, neurotheology participates in a far longer intellectual tradition. In 1902, William James criticized a “medical materialism” that “finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the

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occipital cortex, he being an epileptic.”26 In fact, believers and skeptics alike have identified epilepsy as a “sacred disease,” at least since ancient Greek medicine. Moreover, the basic intellectual strategy of neurotheology—transposing theological debates onto supposedly less contentious ground—has been adopted in a range of temporally and geographically distant locales, as many of the chapters in this volume show. The most common shift away from doctrine is that to utility, which is tracked in both Victoria Smolkin’s and Peter Gordon’s essays. As Smolkin shows, Soviet authorities wondered whether the persistence of religious practices among the general population showed that religion addressed people’s spiritual concerns more effectively than Soviet institutions. Similarly, Peter Gordon shows how a certain strand of secularization theory in the twentieth century has claimed that secularism is beset by normative deficits, and thus religion plays a necessary social role, whether or not it is true in any meaningful sense. Yaacob Dweck’s and Anthony Grafton’s chapters address a different shift away from religious doxa. Like the neurotheologists, their actors focused on the vehicles of belief—the brain of the faithful or a religious tradition—in order to identify a very human corruption of the supposedly divine truth. Dweck shows how Jacob Sasportas leveled his criticism of the Sabbatians not just at the content of their theology but also and perhaps primarily at their philology. He aimed to delegitimize their messianism by showing either that they did not draw on textual authority or that they did so without sufficient scholarly care. Grafton shows how the desire to find firmer ground to debate differences between Protestants and Catholics informed the revival of ecclesiastical history in the sixteenth century. As he writes, the “methodological protocols fundamental to the pursuit of historical objectivity and professionalism crystallized not in the modern, non-­sectarian university but in the premodern and radically sectarian worlds of Protestant printing houses and Catholic monasteries.” In a slightly different way, Stefania Pastore shows how Diego Hurtado de Mendoza came to his views about religion through his experience in the pluriconfessional context of early modern Spain. Here understanding did not arise primarily through the examination of doctrinal claims but rather through the experience of living together with Jews, Protestants, and Muslims. But, as in the neurotheology case, we can also see that the shifting away from claims about falsity or truth does little to resolve the debate. Smolkin’s essay shows how the persistence of religious ritual, as an indication of its “utility,” did not lead the Soviet authorities to abandon their atheistic project but rather encouraged them to develop new atheistic rituals that would more effectively take its place. And in his critical evaluation of secularization theory,

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Gordon shows that one can diagnose a normative deficit in secular modernity only on the basis of a particular theory of modernity. With a different understanding of, for example, secular science as generative of norms, secularism would not seem so inadequate. In Dweck’s case, we see but glimpses of the Sabbatians’ response, but when we do, it suggests that this wasn’t an open-­and-­ shut case; they argued that they too read Maimonides and that he legitimized their views. We can well imagine that they wouldn’t have been stumped for an answer for his other claims about either the provenance of their sources or the logic of their arguments. So too, as Grafton shows, though ecclesiastical scholarship allowed consensus between Catholics and Protestants “on many points,” it “still served the task of building confessional identities.” Indeed, these examples along with the case of neurotheology make one wonder whether it is possible to sidestep vexed and contentious questions at all, to leave the realm of religious polemic and to find surer ground in more “scientific” fields. The response to this problem might be then to return to truth claims about religion, to duke it out in theological debate. But perhaps Mendoza in Pastore’s chapter models a better alternative. For here by treating religion in terms of its effects, how Muslims, Jews, and Christians interacted and how they treated each other, Mendoza did not come to relocate the pitched doctrinal battles of theology on the realm of social utility and justify one faith over the others. Rather it led him to question the value of such battles and to embrace a form of tolerance. So too, perhaps, we should respond to the indeterminacy of the debate over neurotheology less with the desire to settle religious questions, once and for all, than with the recognition that some debates might not have a final resolution and that it is more important to live with those who disagree with us than it is to convince them that they are wrong.

No t e s

Introduction 1. José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, 1994). 2. The most forceful exponent of this point of view is Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, 2003). 3. Tam T. T. Ngo and Justine B. Quijada, “Introduction: Atheist Secularism and Its Discontents,” in Atheist Secularism and Its Discontents, ed. Ngo and Quijada (New York, 2015), 4; Arvind-­Pal S. Mandair and Markus Dressler, “Modernity, Religion-­Making, and the Postsecular,” in Secularism and Religion-­Making, ed. Dressler and Mandair (New York, 2011), 7, 16; Janet R. Jakobsen and Anne Pellegrini, “Times Like These,” in Secularisms, ed. Jakobsen and Pellegrini (Durham, NC, 2008), 3, 7. 4. Guy G. Stroumsa, A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, MA, 2010); Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge, 2009); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, 2005). 5. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman (Oxford, 2001). 6. Jack Miles, “General Introduction: Art, Play, and the Comparative Study of Religion,” in The Norton Anthology of World Religions, ed. Miles (New York, 2015), 1:7. 7. Saba Mahmood, “Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual: Disciplines of ‘Salat,’ ” American Ethnologist 28 (November 2001): 828; Talal Asad, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam, Occasional Paper Series, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University (Washington, DC, 1986). 8. On the violent face of secularism, see Peter van der Veer, “Smash Temples, Burn Books: Comparing Secularist Projects in India and China,” in Rethinking Secularism, ed. Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York, 2011), 270–81. 9. See Jakobsen and Pellegrini, Secularisms; Marian Burchardt, Monika Wohlrab-­Sahr, and Matthias Middell, eds., Multiple Secularities beyond the West (Boston, 2015). The argument for plurality is built into these volumes’ very titles. 10. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, 2007). 11. Gregory develops this line of argument in more detail in The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA, 2012). 12. Martin E. Marty, “Sects and Cults,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 332 (November 1960): 125–34. 243

244  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 1 13. Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-­Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley, 2000). 14. Max Weiss, In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shiʿism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon (Cambridge, MA, 2010). 15. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA, 1983). 16. See, for example, David Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 2003). 17. The most eloquent exponent of this position is Rajeev Bhargava, “What Is Secularism For?” in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Bhargava (Oxford, 1998), 486–542. In the United States, there is a way of thinking, “common ground secularism,” that understands secularism not as a repudiation of faith but as an outgrowth of Christian values, as a form of attenuated Protestantism. For common ground secularism, see Linnell E. Cady, “Rethinking Secularism through a Theological Lens,” in Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age, ed. Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (New York, 2010), 248. 18. Charles Taylor, “Western Secularity,” in Rethinking Secularism, ed. Calhoun, Juergensmeyer, and VanAntwerpen, 31–53. 19. Talal Asad, “Freedom of Speech and Religious Limitation,” in Rethinking Secularism, ed. Calhoun, Juergensmeyer, and VanAntwerpen, 282.

Chapter 1 This is a first map—and one of far lower than Google quality—of a vast and rough terrain. References, as will be obvious, have been held to a minimum. For guidance to recent scholarship, see Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World, ed. Katherine van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan (Oxford, 2012). Warm thanks to the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, for the award of a senior research fellowship in 2015 and 2016; to my teachers, Eric Cochrane and Arnaldo Momigliano; and to Adam Beaver, Harald Bollbuck, Simon Ditchfield, Nick Hardy, Bertram Lesser, Dmitri Levitin, Greg Lyon, Madeline McMahon, Scott Mandelbrote, Katrina Olds, Nick Popper, Richard Serjeantson, and Joanna Weinberg for advice and criticism. 1. Thomas Platter, Autobiography, in Paul Monroe, Thomas Platter and the Educational Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1904), 138; Thomas und Felix Platter: Zur Sittengeschichte des XVI. Jahrhunderts, ed. Heinrich Boos (Leipzig, 1878), 39–40. Platter refers to the salutations in Romans 16. 2. Silvia Ginzburg Carignani, Annibale Carracci a Roma: Gli affreschi di Palazzo Farnese (Rome, 2000), 111–15. 3. See esp. Helge Gamrath, Roma Sancta Renovata: Studi sull’urbanistica di Roma nella seconda metà del sec. XVI con particolare riferimento al pontificato di Sisto V (1585–1590) (Rome, 1987); Carmelo Occhipinti, Pirro Ligorio e la storia Cristiana di Roma: Da Costantino all’umanesimo (Pisa, 2007); Ingo Herklotz, La Roma degli antiquari: Cultura e erudizione tra Cinquecento e Settecento (Rome, 2012) and Apes urbanae: Eruditi, mecenati ed artisti nella Roma del Seicento (Città di Castello, 2017); Herklotz’s essays in John Osborne and Amanda Claridge, Early Christian and Medieval Antiquities, vol. 2, Mosaics and Wallpaintings in Roman Churches,

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 1   245 Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo, series A, 1 (London, 1996) and in Ingo Herklotz and Amanda Claridge, Classical Manuscript Illumination, Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo, series A, 6 (London, 2012). 4. See the exemplary edition in the I Tatti Renaissance Library: Lorenzo Valla, On the Donation of Constantine, trans. G. W. Bowersock (Cambridge, MA, 2007), with bibliography. For Valla’s interest in the history of Christianity, see esp. Salvatore Camporeale, Christianity, Latinity and Culture: Two Studies on Lorenzo Valla, trans. Patrick Baker, ed. Patrick Baker and Christopher Celenza (Leiden, 2014). 5. See Glenn Most, “Rhetorik und Hermeneutik: Zur Konstitution der Neuzeitlichkeit,” Antike und Abendland 30 (1984): 62–79; Carlo Ginzburg, History, Rhetoric and Proof (Hanover, NH, 1999); and, more generally, Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception (New Haven, 1997). 6. Valla, On the Donation, trans. Bowersock, 118–19; see in general 118–33. Valla argues that the pagan Romans were less given to inventing miraculous stories than were Christians. 7. Jean Mabillon and Michel Germain, “Iter Italicum,” in Museum Italicum, 2 vols. (Paris, 1724), 1:217. 8. “Sacramentarium Gallicanum,” in Museum Italicum, 2 vols. (Paris, 1724), 1:273–97. See The Bobbio Missal: Liturgy and Religious Culture in Merovingian Gaul, ed. Yitzhak Hen and Rob Meens (Cambridge, 2004), esp. Hen, “Introduction: The Bobbio Missal—from Mabillon Onwards,” 1–18. 9. Jean Mabillon, De re diplomatica libri VI (Paris, 1681). For an expert recent discussion, see Alfred Hiatt, “Diplomatic Arts: Hickes against Mabillon in the Republic of Letters,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 3 ( July 2009): 351–73. 10. See the documents printed by Leonard Doucette, Emery Bigot: Seventeenth-­Century French Humanist (Toronto, 1970), 94–95. 11. Giovanni Bona, De rebus liturgicis (Rome, 1671). For Mabillon’s fascinating exchanges with him—which involved much reflection on the nature and limits of historical evidence—see Mabillon, Dissertatio de pane eucharistico, azymo ac fermentato, ad Eminentiss. Cardinalem Bona, in Vetera analecta, new ed. (Paris, 1723), and their letters in Jean Mabillon and Thierry Ruinart, Ouvrages posthumes, 3 vols. (Paris, 1724; repr. Farnborough, 1967), vol. 1. 12. See Owen Chadwick, “Gibbon and the Church Historians,” Daedalus 105, no. 3 (Summer 1976): 111–23. For the prominence of ecclesiastical scholarship in his source base, see also I. W. J. Machin, “Gibbon’s Debt to Contemporary Scholarship,” Review of English Studies 15, no. 57 ( January 1939): 84–88. 13. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13 (1950): 285–315, repr. in Contributo alla storia degli studi classici (Rome, 1955), 67–106. 14. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Gibbon’s Contribution to Historical Method,” Historia 2 (1954): 450–63, repr. in Momigliano, Studies in Historiography (London, 1966), 40–55. 15. Some of the most important studies include: Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1995); Jean-­Louis Ferrary, Onofrio Panvinio et les antiquités romaines (Rome, 1996); Ingo Herklotz, Cassiano Dal Pozzo und die Archäologie des 17. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1999); Peter Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, 2000); Miller, Peiresc’s Orient: Antiquarianism as Cultural History

246  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 1 in the Seventeenth Century (Farnham, 2012); William Stenhouse, Reading Inscriptions and Writing Ancient History: Historical Scholarship in the Late Renaissance (London, 2005); and Angus Vine, In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2010). 16. See Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences, ed. Peter Miller (Toronto, 2007). 17. Markus Völkel, “Pyrrhonismus historicus” und “fides historica”: Die Entwicklung der deutschen historischen Methodologie unter dem Gesichtspunkt der historischen Skepsis (Frankfurt, 1987), and “Historischer Pyrrhonismus und Antiquarismus-­Konzeption bei Arnaldo Momigliano,” Das Achtzehnte Jahrhundert 31, no. 2 (Sonderheft Historischer Pyrrhonismus) (2007): 179–90. Carlo Ginzburg rebutted the latter article in a public lecture on Momigliano at the Primo Levi Center, New York, on December 8, 2016. 18. Kelsey Jackson Williams, “Antiquarianism: A Reinterpretation,” Erudition and the Republic of Letters 2 (2017): 56–96. 19. Quoted by Anthony Grafton, What Was History? (Cambridge, 2007), 131. 20. Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newton, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1987), 4. 21. See Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.n. “Parker, Matthew,” by David Crankshaw and Alexandra Gillespie. 22. For an example, see Morgan Library, Literary and Historical Manuscripts—Bound, MA 674: a note from Parker to the bishop of Norwich (“as for the Anabaptiste if he suffers his children to be christined and will recant before his owne people and becum a true man yow maie release him: and order him as yow see cause”). 23. Simon Ditchfield, “Text before Trowel: Antonio Bosio’s Roma Sotteranea Revisited,” Studies in Church History 33 (1997): 343–60; “Reading Rome as a Sacred Landscape ca. 1586– 1635,” in Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, ed. Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (Cambridge, 2005), 167–92; Herklotz, La Roma degli antiquari; Madeline McMahon, “Representing Material Evidence: The Catacombs in Print,” https://jhiblog.org/2016/03/28/representing​-material​ -evidence-the-catacombs-in-print/. 24. Passio sanctarum martyrum Perpetuae et Felicitatis, ed. Lucas Holstenius (Rome, 1663). 25. Trevor Johnson, “Holy Fabrications: The Catacomb Saints and the Counter-­Reformation in Bavaria,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 47 (1996): 274–97; Paul Koudounaris, Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures & Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs (New York, 2013); Noria Litaker, “Embodied Faith: Whole-­Body Catacomb Saints in the Duchy of Bavaria, 1598–1803” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2017). 26. Jan Marco Sawilla, Antiquarianismus, Hagiographie und Historie im 17. Jahrhundert: Zum Werk der Bollandisten: Ein wissenschaftshistorischer Versuch (Tübingen, 2009). 27. The fullest and most enlightening study of Eusebius’s work and thought remains T. D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA, 1984). 28. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Pagan and Christian Historiography in the Fourth Century A.D.,” in The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, ed. A. Momigliano (Oxford, 1963), 79–99, repr. in Terzo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, 2 vols. (Rome, 1966), 1:87–109. For the development of Momigliano’s work in this area, see Anthony Grafton, “Arnaldo Momigliano and the Tradition of Ecclesiastical History,” in The Legacy of Arnaldo Momigliano, ed. Tim Cornell and Oswyn Murray (London, 2014), 53–76. And for a more detailed treatment of the Renaissance revival of Eusebius, see Anthony Grafton, “Mixed Mes-

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 1   247 sages: The Early Modern Reception of Eusebius as a Church Historian,” to appear in International Journal of the Classical Tradition. 29. Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley, 1990), 148. 30. Momigliano, “Pagan and Christian Historiography,” 101. 31. Ibid. 32. Tamara Griggs, private communication with the author. 33. Bruno Neveu, Un historien à l’école de Port-­Royal: Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont, 1637– 1698 (The Hague, 1966), and Érudition et religion aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1994); Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity, and History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular (Cambridge, 1995); Jean-­Louis Quantin, Le catholicisme classique et les pères de l’Eglise: Un retour aux sources (1669–1713) (Paris, 1999), and The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century (Oxford, 2009). 34. See esp. Dmitri Levitin, “From Sacred History to the History of Religion: Paganism, Judaism and Christianity in European Historiography from Reformation to ‘Enlightenment,’ ” Historical Journal 55, no. 4 (2012): 1117–60; Levitin, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science: Histories of Philosophy in England, c. 1640–1700 (Cambridge, 2015); and William Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment: Orientalism, Religion and Politics in England and Its Empire, 1648–1715 (Cambridge, 2015). 35. Johannes Burchardus, Diarium, ed. L. Thuasne, vol. 2, (1492–1499) (Paris, 1884), 521–22. 36. Maffeo Vegio, De rebus antiquis memorabilibus Basilicae S. Petri Romae, II.3 (Vat. lat. 3750, 26 recto, printed in Acta sanctorum for June VII): “tantam Deus virtutem præstitit, ut qui a dæmonibus arrepti sint, apud eam divinis habitis supplicationibus liberentur: quod multis iam certis magnisque exemplis compertum habemus.” On Vegio and his work, see Fabio Della Schiava, “ ‘Sicuti traditum est a maioribus’: Maffeo Vegio antiquario tra fonti classiche e medievali,” Aevum 84, no. 3 (2010): 617–39. 37. Printed by Michele Cerrati, in his commentary on Tiberio Alfarano, De Basilicae Vaticanae antiquissima et nova structura, ed. Cerrati (Rome, 1914), 56. 38. See esp. Lex Bosman, The Power of Tradition: Spolia in the Architecture of St. Peter’s in the Vatican (Hilversum, 2004). 39. E.g., the Carolingian Einsiedeln Itinerary, MS Einsiedeln 346 (1076). 40. Vegio I.1, Vat. lat. 3750, 2 verso: “Quorum characteres longe vetusti, peneque dixerim decrepiti, nullum etiam aliud, quam Constantini tempus, quo ibi conscripti sint, manifeste arguere videntur. Sunt & in alio arcu absidæ super altare maius aliæ litteræ, quæ negligentius habitæ, maiore ex parte corruerunt; sed ex paucis earum, quæ vix adhuc legi possunt, deprehenduntur, licet non integra, verba hæc, Constantini expiata hostili incursione.” 41. T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London, 1950); see the recent study by Tina Meganck, Erudite Eyes: Friendship, Art and Erudition in the Network of Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598) (Leiden, 2017). 42. Valla, On the Donation, trans. Bowersock, 76–79. 43. Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria VII.13 (Florence, 1485), sig. [r v recto–verso]. 44. Morgan Library, PML 44056 ChL 1108b. 45. Ibid., sig. [r v recto]. 46. Ibid., sig. [r v verso].

248  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 1 47. Raphael Volaterranus, Commentariorum urbanorum . . . octo et triginta libri (Basel, 1559), 539: “In basilica Petri quod pauci animadvertunt, supra arcum qui est in medio fere templo, huiuscemodi versus antiquissimo in opere museo adhuc leguntur: Quod duce te mundus surrexit in astra triumphans, Hanc Constantinus victor tibi condidit aulam.” 48. Ibid.: “Libellus autem apocryphus de elephantia, deque sanguine puerorum, & Sylvestri baptismate, quum manifeste a nostrorum doctorum quos adlegavi authoritate dissentiat, omnino reijciendus.” 49. Ibid.: “De dono eius, aut concessione, apud nullos extat authores, praeterquam in libro Decretorum: idque in antiquis voluminib. minime contineri, author est Antoninus praesul Florentinus in chronicis. Quod valde miror, quum Isidorus qui fuit abhinc annos prope DCCC. gravis author & plane sanctus: in historia sua aperte dicat eum urbe Roma pontifici cessisse, ornamentisque omnibus imperialibus, diademate videlicet, habituque & albo equo quo vectetur.” 50. Carol Quillen, Rereading the Renaissance: Petrarch, Augustine, and the Language of Humanism (Ann Arbor, 1998). 51. John Monfasani, George of Trebizond: A Biography and a Study of His Rhetoric and Logic (Leiden, 1976), 71–74. 52. On saints’ lives, see Alison Frazier, Possible Lives: Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy (New York, 2005). 53. Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-­Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago, 1993), 116. 54. Valla, On the Donation, trans. Bowersock, 120–21. 55. Cora Lutz, “The Letter of Lentulus Describing Christ,” Yale University Library Gazette 50, no. 2 (October 1975): 91–97, at 93. 56. Baudouin to the Centuriators, Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, MS Guelf. 11.20 Aug. 2°, fols. 138 recto–verso, reiterated in summary form in the “Regulae Balduini,” ibid., MS Guelf. 11.20 Aug. 2°, fol. 39 verso. Both texts are available, like a vast amount of further material, in an indispensable digital resource, “Historical Method and Working Techniques of the Magdeburg Centuriators,” compiled by Harald Bollbuck with Carsten Nahrendorf and Inga Hanna Ralle, at the Herzog August Bibliothek (http://diglib.hab.de/edoc/ed000086/start.html). 57. Hugh de Quehen, “Politics and Scholarship in the Ignatian Controversy,” Seventeenth Century 13 (1998): 69–84. 58. Ecclesiastica historia I (Basel, 1560), 353–54. 59. Juan Luis Vives, De causis corruptarum artium II, in De disciplinis libri xx (Cologne, 1536), 97–99. 60. Melchior Cano, Loci theologici XI.6, in Opera, ed. Hyacinthus Serry (Padua, 1762), 287– 304. For Erasmus, see 297, 299. 61. Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, praefatio, 2–3; V.24.2. For Bede’s sources and his use of them, see André Crépin, introduction, in Bede, Histoire ecclésiastique du peuple anglais (Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum), ed. Michael Lapidge, trans. Pierre Monat and Philippe Robin, I (Paris, 2005), 38–41. On Nothhelm, see Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Nothhelm,” by William Hunt, revised by Henry Mayr-­Harting. 62. Ingulf, Chronicle of the Abbey of Croyland, trans. Henry Riley (London, 1908), 201 (slightly altered); original text in Rerum Anglicarum scriptorum veterum tom. I (Oxford, 1684),

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 1   249 97–98, at 98: “Praecedentibus autem paucis annis gratiose assumens de Cartaria quaedam Chirographa manu Saxonica exarata, eo quod eadem duplicata et quaedam triplicata habumus, tradideram ea Cantori nostro Domino Fulmaro in Claustro conservanda, pro juniorum doctrina ad manum Saxonicam addiscendam, quoniam talis litera a longo tempore, causa Normannorum jam neglecta viluerat, et jam nisi paucis senioribus erat agnita: ut juniores instructi legere hanc literam, in suo senio fierent aptiores ad monumenta sui Monasterii contra suos adversarios alleganda. Quae Chirographa quoniam in Claustro in quodam veteri scrinio per Ecclesiae parietem circumcluso fuerant reposita, solummodo salvata sunt et ab incendio conservata. Haec jam principalia sunt et praecipua nostra monumenta, quae quondam secundaria et seposita, causa barbarae literae fuerant jam a longo levipensa et despecta.” On the forgeries in the Croyland Chronicle, see Alfred Hiatt, The Making of Medieval Forgeries: False Documents in Fifteenth-­Century England (London, 2004), chap. 3. 63. Ibid., chap. 4. 64. Johannes Trithemius, Tomus I [–II] Annalium Hirsaugiensium, 2 vols. (Saint Gallen, 1690); Compendium sive breviarium primi voluminis annalium sive historiarum de origine regum et gentis Francorum (Paris, 1539). In the latter work, see esp. 111: “Et quia nunc assertionem hanc nostram magis cognovimus esse veram, ex confictis et ineptissimis literis quas in praedicto Monasterio Erphurdiano vidimus nullo munitas sigillo cuiuscunque et legimus sub nomine Dagoberti et rescripsimus, ne quis falsitatis nos argueret, operae precium fore duximus, si earundem litterarum exemplar cum aliis rationibus nostrae assertioni coniungamus.” The text appears on 111–13, and Trithemius’s technical arguments for its spuriousness on 113–14. He notes, for example, that the original of the document in Erfurt had no seal, “licet foramen appareat in charta quasi prae antiquitate nimia sigillum decidisset” (113). On Trithemius as a scholar, see Anthony Grafton, Worlds Made by Words (Cambridge, MA, 2009), 56–78. 65. Ioannes Nauclerus [and N. Baselius], Memorabilium omnis aetatis et omnium gentium chronici commentarii, 2 vols. (Tübingen, 1516). 66. Peutinger’s copy is in the New York Society Library, shelf-­mark Z-­Fl N2894 C3. For detailed notes on a charter, see I, fol. CXXV recto–verso, and for a full account, see Anthony Grafton, “Reading History: Konrad Peutinger and the Chronicle of Nauclerus,” in Gesammeltes Gedächtnis: Konrad Peutinger und die kulturelle Überlieferung im 16. Jahrhundert, ed. Reinhard Laube and Helmut Zäh (Luzern, 2016), 18–25. 67. For Cranmer’s books, see David Selwyn, The Library of Thomas Cranmer (Oxford, 1996). On his ways as a reader, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven, 1996), 26–31. 68. Thomas Cranmer, notes in Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica with De vita Constantini, Socrates, Theodoret, Sozomen, and Evagrius, 2 pts. (Paris, 1544), British Library C.79.g.4, I, fol. 6 recto–verso; fol. 16 recto–verso. 69. Ibid., fols. 37 recto, 44 verso. 70. Ibid., fol. 41 verso, on 4.23.10: “Vetustissima Romanae ecclesiae traditio, quae hodie obsolevit.” 71. Jewel’s copy of the 1544 Greek Eusebius is in Magdalen College Oxford, Old Library e.8.1. For source notes see, e.g., on 1.18.2.2.: “τὰ τοῦ φίλωνος συγγράμματα”; on 2.25.8: “διονύσιος ὁ Κορινθίων ἐπίσκο.”

250  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 1 72. Cranmer, notes in his 1544 Eusebius, I, fols. 39 verso: “liber Eusebii de antiquis martyribus”; 44 recto: “significare videtur Eusebius opus suum de antiquis martyribus, cuius ante etiam meminit.” 73. British Library MS Harley 1860, fol. 5r-­v. The text of Bassett’s preface has been edited by Jaime Goodrich, “The Dedicatory Preface to Mary Roper Clarke Bassett’s Translation of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History [with text],” English Literary Renaissance 40 (2010): 301–28; for this passage see 324–35. On this version, see Eugenio Olivares Merino, “Mary Roper Clarke Bassett and Meredith Hanmer’s Honorable Ladie of the Lande,” Sederi 17 (2007): 75–91; and Sarah Ross, The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England (Cambridge, MA, 2009), 161–66. 74. The Auncient Ecclesiasticall Histories of the First Six Hundred Yeares after Christ, trans. Meredith Hanmer (London, 1577), 157. 75. Riccardo Fubini, “Humanism and Truth: Valla Writes against the Donation of Constantine,” Journal of the History of Ideas 57 (1996): 79–86. 76. Valla, On the Donation, trans. Bowersock, 54–55. 77. Vegio, De rebus antiquis memorabilibus Basilicae S. Petri Romae I.1, Vat. lat. 3750, 6 recto–verso. 78. Autores historiae ecclesiasticae, ed. Beatus Rhenanus (Basel, 1528), sig. aa 2 recto. 79. Ibid., sig. aa2 verso. See Das Decretum Gelasianum de libris recipiendis et non recipiendis, ed. Ernst von Dobschütz (Leipzig, 1912), 46, 55. 80. Cano, Loci theologici, 258, 302–3. 81. Ibid., 302. 82. See Joanna Weinberg, “The Quest for Philo in Sixteenth-­Century Jewish Historiography,” in Jewish History: Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky, ed. Ada Rapoport-­Albert and Steven Zipperstein (London, 1988), 163–87; and Jan Machielsen, “Sacrificing Josephus to Save Philo: Cesare Baronio and the Jewish Origins of Christian Monasticism,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 23, no. 3 (2016): 239–45. 83. Magdalen College Oxford, e.12.10, I, 307. Erasmus wrote: “Nonnihil demiror, quid Hieronymus hic senserit, cum Philonem ponere non sit veritus Iudaeum non Christianum, et item Iosephum, et nonnullos haeresiarchas. Cur vocat catalogum sanctorum?” Jewel commented: “Philo sanctus . . . En Iosephus sanctus . . . Seneca sanctus.” 84. Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, MS Guelf. 11.20 Aug. 2°, fol. 145 verso. 85. J. J. Grynaeus, Ecclesiastica historia (Basel, 1570), prooemium and commentary on II.17, 25: “Hos ascetas Christianos fuisse astruit Eusebius.” 86. Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1983–93), 2:299–301. For a fuller study of this mind-­bendingly complex story, see Jan Machielsen, Martin Delrio: Scholarship and Demonology in the Counter-­Reformation (Oxford, 2015), 335–40, and “Sacrificing Josephus to Save Philo.” 87. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Mabillon’s Italian Disciples,” Terzo contributo, 1:135–36. 88. See the studies collected in Troisième centenaire de l‘édition Mauriste de Saint Augustin: Communications présentées au colloque des 19 et 20 avril 1990 (Paris, 1990). 89. For brief but rewarding treatments of the first two of these groups, see David Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises: Problems in Monastic History (London, 1963), as well as the immense and richly informative work of Sawilla; for the third, see Alexandra Walsham, The Refor-

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 1   251 mation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2011), chaps. 1–4. 90. On Flacius, see, most recently, Martina Hartmann, Humanismus und Kirchenkritik: Matthias Flacius Illyricus als Erforscher des Mittelalters (Stuttgart, 2001); Oliver Olson, Matthias Flacius and the Survival of Luther’s Reform (Wiesbaden, 2002); and, above all, Harald Bollbuck, Wahrheitszeugnis, Gottes Auftrag und Zeitkritik: Die Kirchengeschichte der Magdeburger Zenturien und ihre Arbeitstechniken (Wiesbaden, 2014). Bertram Lesser has found new evidence that Flacius retained stolen manuscripts in the course of recataloguing the Helmstedt MSS of the Herzog August Bibliothek. 91. Flacius, “Consultatio de conscribenda historia ecclesiae,” in Karl Schottenloher, Pfalzgraf Ottheinrich und das Buch: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der evangelischen Publizistik (Münster in Westf., 1927), 154. 92. See the description in De ecclesiastica historia quae Magdeburgi contexitur narratio (Wittenberg, 1558), [A iiij verso]–B recto. 93. Flacius, De ratione cognoscendi sacras literas, ed. and trans. Lutz Geldsetzer (Düsseldorf, 1968), 98–101. 94. Narratio, F recto–verso. 95. See Hartmann, Humanismus und Kirchenkritik; and Martina Hartmann and Arno Mentzel-­Reuters, Die “Magdeburger Centurien” und die Anfänge der quellenbezogenen Geschichtsforschung: Eine Ausstellung der Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Katalog (Munich, 2005). 96. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA, 1997); Gregory Lyon, “Baudouin, Flacius, and the Plan for the Magdeburg Centuries,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003): 253–72; Grafton, Worlds Made by Words, 98–113. 97. See, in general, Timothy Graham and Andrew Watson, The Recovery of the Past in Early Elizabethan England: Documents by John Bale and John Joscelyn from the Circle of Matthew Parker (Cambridge, 1998); Graham, “Matthew Parker’s Manuscripts: An Elizabethan Library and Its Uses,” in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2006), vol. 2; and Madeline McMahon, “Matthew Parker and the Practice of Church History,” to appear in Erudition and Confessionalism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Nicholas Hardy and Dmitri Levitin (Oxford, forthcoming). 98. See the Parker Library on the Web, http://parkerweb.stanford.edu/parker/actions​ /page.do?forward=home. 99. Scheide Library, Princeton, MS 159. 100. R. I. Page, Matthew Parker and His Books (Kalamazoo, MI, 1993). 101. See Erwin Frauenknecht, Die Verteidigung der Priesterehe in der Reformzeit (Hannover, 1997); Catherine Hall, “The One-­Way Trail: Some Observations on CCC MS 101 and G&CC MS 427,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 11, no. 3 (1998): 272–85; and Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern England: The Making of John Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs” (Cambridge, 2011), 150–52. 102. Gonville and Caius College Cambridge MS 427/427, 98–99. 103. See Parker’s note, ibid., 99, where he underlines the words “sancti Odalrici” and writes: “volusiani carthaginensis / ut in antiquo codice manuscripto. ut postea”; and Parker’s publication: Epistolae duae d. Volusiani Episcopi Carthaginensis (London, 1569). 104. Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 101.

252  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 1 105. In his preface, Parker writes: “Ita nos ex codice (antiquissimi exemplaris) manuscripto, adiuti, et diligenti perscrutatione hac in re usi, malo dolo substitutum hunc Huldericum amovimus, et hoc scriptum Volusiano Episcopo Carthaginensi, vero et indubitato authori rursus ascripsimus. Nam et temporum ratio, et ipsius Volusiani verba, exemplari nostro (ante scripto, quam Guilielmus primus huius regni tenuit gubernacula) idipsum postulare videntur” (aij verso). For Foxe, see Evenden and Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern England; for Jewel, see his Works, ed. J. W. Jelf, IV, London 1862, 615–16; VI, 255. 106. McMahon, “Matthew Parker and the Practice of Church History.” 107. British Library MS Cotton Tiberius B IV, fol. 3 verso: “Quae continentur in hoc folio sunt omnia ad verbum translata e primis duobus capitibus ecclesiasticae historiae Bedae. sed autor primus, quisquis fuit, huius historiae, minime videtur intellexisse hunc apud Bedam latine loquendi modum, scilicet legiones in Hyberna dimisit. nam haec verba in hunc modum facit anglica. ¶ þa he forlet his here gebidan mid Scottum, id est, tum autem permisit ut suae copiae vel suus exercitus remaneret apud scottos, hoc est in Hybernia, cuius incollae sunt Scotti. Similitudo horum verborum Hybernia et Hyberna decepit hominem.” Joscelyn did not raise the question whether the author’s text of Bede’s history, 1.2, might have read “Hybernia.” 108. An Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle, ed. E. Classen and F. E. Harmer (Manchester, 1926); see Angelika Lutz, “Das Studium der angelsächsischen Chronik im 16. Jahrhundert: Nowell und Joscelyn,” Anglia 100 (1982): 301–56. 109. Matthew Paris, Historia maior (London, 1571), sig. † iij recto. 110. Ibid. 111. Morgan Library PML 2972. 112. Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 414: Madeline McMahon, “Ancient Letters and Old Paper: Archbishop Matthew Parker’s Investigation into the History of Medieval Manuscripts, 1559–1575,” forthcoming. 113. For Spelman, see the versions of his Archaismus graphicus in British Library MS Stowe 1059 (reference and text generously supplied by Aaron Shapiro) and Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 238; for the Escorial, see Charles Graux, Essai sur les origines du fonds grec de l’Escurial, Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études, 46 (Paris, 1880), 313–14, and Juan-­Baptista Cardona, De regia S. Laurentii bibliotheca. De pontificia Vaticana. De expungendis haereticor. propriis nominibus. De diptychis (Tarragona, 1587), 4–6. 114. See Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book (Cambridge, MA, 2006). 115. Matthew Parker, Correspondence, ed. John Bruce and Thomas Thomason Perowne (Cambridge, 1853), 238. 116. The list of signatures is preserved in British Library MS Add. 18160, a copy of Parker’s Testimonie with marginalia and manuscript additions. The two signatories omitted in the printed version were the bishops of Chester and St. Asaph. 117. For the signature lists for early councils, see, e.g., Canones Apostolorum, Veterum Conciliorum Constitutiones, Decreta Pontificum Antiquiora, De Primatu Romanae Ecclesiae, ex tribus vetustissimis exemplaribus transcripta omnia, ed. Johannes Cochlaeus (Mainz, 1525). For the signatures on the Accord of Winchester, which was reproduced in Parker’s De antiquitate as it had been in William of Malmesbury’s histories of the English monarchy and church, see McMahon, “Matthew Parker and the Practice of Church History.” 118. Flacius, “Consultatio,” 147.

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 1   253 119. Ibid., 151. 120. Cesare Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici I (Mainz, 1601), Praefatio, sig. )( )( iiij verso. 121. [Flacius Illyricus], Zwei Capitel (ca. 1550); see Catherine Atkinson, Inventing Inventors in Renaissance Europe: Polydore Vergil’s De inventoribus rerum (Tübingen, 2007); and Anthony Grafton, “Christianity’s Jewish Origins Rediscovered: The Roles of Comparison in Early Modern Ecclesiastical Scholarship,” Erudition and the Republic of Letters 1, no. 1 (2016): 13–42. 122. British Library MS Royal 7B.XII, fols. 75r–77r. 123. Guillaume Durand, Rationale divinorum officiorum (Lyon, 1508), British Library C.77.d.17, fol. lxxxixr. 124. Ibid., col. 2. 125. Constantine Hopf, “Bishop Hooper’s ‘Notes’ to the King’s Council, 3 October 1550,” Journal of Theological Studies 44, no. 175/176 ( July/October 1943): 194–99, at 198–99. 126. See, in general, Constantin Hopf, Martin Bucer and the English Reformation (Oxford, 1946), 131–70, and Judith Anderson, Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamics of Cultural Change in Tudor-­Stuart England (New York, 2005), 78–111, 243–51. 127. Cranmer, note in his copy of the 1544 Eusebius, I, 56 verso on 5.28.12: “Poenitendi confitendique forma apud veteres.” 128. Eusebius, trans. Hanmer, sig. [* v verso]. 129. Ecclesiastica historia, ed. Grynaeus, 25: “Recenset Eusebius ex Philone τῶν ἀσκητῶν, qui statim post Christum in coelos assumtum, in Aegypto et alibi floruerunt, vitam, mores, studia, sedes, synodos, et de scripturae divinae interpretatione iudicium.” 130. Flacius to von Nidbruck, September 9, 1555, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 9737b, fols. 14 verso–15 recto. 131. In addition to his Missa Latina (Strasbourg, 1557), an edition of the so-­called Missa Flaciana preserved in what is now Herzog August Bibliothek MS 1151 Helmst., Flacius started to prepare but did not complete a remarkable anthology of versions of the Mass: Herzog August Bibliothek 332 8o Helmst. (1–3). For the Missa Flaciana, see Oliver Olson, “Flacius Illyricus als Liturgiker,” Jahrbuch für Liturgie und Hymnologie 12 (1967 [1968]): 45–69. 132. See Ernst Hellgardt, “ ’der alten Teutschen spraach und gottsforcht zu erlernen’: Über Voraussetzungen und Ziele der Otfridausgabe des Matthias Flacius lllyricus,” in Festchrift Walther Haug und Burghart Wachinger, 2 vols. (Tübingen, 1992), 1:267–86; John Considine, Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Heritage (Cambridge, 2008), 122–23; and Ralf Georg Czapla, Das Bibelepos in der Frühen Neuzeit: Zur deutschen Geschichte einer europäischer Gattung (Berlin, 2013), 108–19. 133. Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 11 (twelfth century), fol. 45 verso, col. 1: “hic desunt. ex industria ut videtur. scriptoris.” 134. Ibid., fol. 45 recto, bottom margin. There is also a reference to Bullinger in the side margin. 135. Ps. Matthew of Westminster, Flores historiarum (London, 1570), Praefatio, esp. sig. a2 recto–verso. Later, at sig. [¶ verso], Parker quotes another passage to support this argument from the first part of the Speculum historiale of Vincent of Beauvais. The start of the relevant passage is underlined in Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 8, fol. 1 recto, col. 1. 136. See, e.g., the defensive note in Lambeth Palace Library MS 959, fol. [332] recto, preceding a list of Parker’s expenses in London, 1559–63: “This written by ArchBp Parker hym self Who best knew what hym self did.”

254  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 2 137. Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 171B, fol. 353 recto, where parts of the passage quoted by Parker are underlined in red. 138. Matthew Paris, Historia maior, Praefatio, sigs. † iii verso–† iiii recto.

Chapter 2 1. Gerson D. Cohen, “Messianic Postures of Ashkenazim and Sephardim,” in Studies in the Variety of Rabbinic Cultures (Philadelphia, 1991), 271–97. 2. Elisheva Carlebach, “The Sabbatian Posture of German Jewry,” in The Sabbatian Movement and Its Aftermath: Messianism, Sabbatianism and Frankism, ed. Rachel Elior ( Jerusalem, 2001), 2:6. See also Carlebach, “Between History and Hope: Jewish Messianism in Ashkenaz and Sepharad,” Third Annual Lecture of the Victor J. Selmanowitz Chair of Jewish History (New York, 1998). On this debate, see David Berger, “Sephardic and Ashkenazic Messianism in the Middle Ages: An Assessment of the Historiographical Controversy,” (Hebrew) in Rishonim ve-­Ahronim: Mehkarim be-­Toledot Yisrael Mugashim le-­Avraham Grossman, ed. Joseph Hacker, B. Z. Kedar, and Yosef Kaplan ( Jerusalem, 2010), 11–28. While Berger significantly qualifies Carlebach’s revision of Cohen’s thesis, it seems that he agrees with this identification of Sephardic rabbinic conservatism underplayed by Cohen. See his discussion of Sasportas on 14 and 20. 3. On Maimonides and Nahmanides, see below. On Solomon Beit ha-­Levi, see Leon Wieseltier, “A Passion for Waiting: Liberal Notes on Messianism and the Jews,” in For Daniel Bell, ed. Wieseltier and Mark Lilla (n.p., 2005), 141–42; for mention of Sasportas, see 133. On Hagiz, see Elisheva Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy: Rabbi Moses Hagiz and the Sabbatian Controversies (New York, 1990). On Hakham Zvi Ashkenazi, who was not Sephardic but ministered to a Sephardic congregation for a time, see Jacob J. Schacter, “Motivations for Radical Anti-­ Sabbatianism: The Case of Hakham Zevi Ashkenazi,” in The Sabbatian Movement and Its Aftermath, ed. Elior, 2:31–49. For mention of Sasportas, see 34–35n5. 4. See Joel L. Kraemer, “On Maimonides’ Messianic Postures,” in Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, vol. 2, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 109–42. David Berger, “Some Ironic Consequences of Maimonides’ Rationalist Approach to the Messianic Age,” (Hebrew) Maimonidean Studies 2 (1991): 1–8, reprinted and translated in his Cultures in Collision and Conversation: Essays in the Intellectual History of the Jews (Boston, 2011), 278–88; for mention of Sasportas, see 282–84. Israel J. Yuval, “Moses Redivivus: Maimonides as the Messiah’s Helper,” (Hebrew) Zion 72 (2007): 161–88. 5. Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, trans. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky (Princeton, 1973). 6. Ibid., 262, 528, and passim. 7. Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Nazir, 23b. See Gershom Scholem, “Redemption through Sin,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York, 1971), 110. 8. See Gershom Scholem, “Tradition and New Creation in the Ritual of the Kabbalists,” in On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York, 1965), 144–45. 9. Allegations of sexual improprieties surfaced in the period of peak Sabbatian enthusiasm between 1665 and 1666; however, it turned into a leitmotif in the anti-­Sabbatian literature of the eighteenth century. See Ada Rapoport-­Albert, Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai, Zevi 1666–1816 (Oxford, 2011); and Paweł Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755–1816 (Philadelphia, 2011).

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 2   255 10. Jacob Sasportas, Zizath novel zvi, ed. Isaiah Tishby ( Jerusalem, 1954), 229. Hereafter cited as Sasportas, ZNZ. On Mercado, see Scholem, Sabbetai Sevi, 784. 11. Amnon Raz-­Krakotzkin, “Persecution and the Art of Printing: Hebrew Books in Italy in the 1550s,” in Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of David B. Ruderman, ed. Richard I. Cohen et al. (Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, 2014), 102; Aaron Ahrend, “The Study of the Mishnah and Mishnah Circles in the Modern Period,” (Hebrew) JSIJ 3 (2004): 19–53. On the Mishnah in the Sephardic diaspora, see Yosef Kaplan, “Jews and Judaism in the Hartlib Circle,” in Studia Rosenthaliana 38–39 (2006): 197–200. 12. Sasportas, ZNZ, 144n4. 13. On the rabbinate in Amsterdam and Sabbatianism, see Yosef Kaplan, “The Attitude of the Sephardi Leadership in Amsterdam to the Sabbatian Movement, 1665–1671,” in An Alternative Path to Modernity (Leiden, 2000), 211–33, discussion of Sasportas on 211, of Sasportas and Da Fonseca on 220–21. On Da Fonseca, see Kaplan, “The Libraries of Three Sephardi Rabbis in Early Modern Western Europe,” (Hebrew) in Sifriyot ve-­osfe Sefarim, ed. Moshe Sluhovsky and Yosef Kaplan ( Jerusalem, 2006), 225–60, discussion of Da Fonseca on 229–36; on his attitude toward the Herem in a text written in 1680, see Anne Oravetz Albert, “The Rabbi and the Rebels: A Pamphlet on the Herem by Rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca,” Jewish Quarterly Review 104 (2014): 171–91. 14. Sasportas, ZNZ, 18. The ellipses in the quotation from Maimonides are those of Sasportas. For the source of the citation, see Maimonides, Book of Judges, Laws of Kings, 12:2. 15. Sasportas, ZNZ, 18–19. Maimonides, Book of Judges, Laws of Kings, 11:4. 16. Amos Funkenstein, “Maimonides: Political Theory and Realistic Messianism,” in Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley, 1993), 135; for mention of Sasportas, see note 11. 17. Sasportas, ZNZ, 102. 18. For the oblique references, see Sasportas, ZNZ, 51, 82, 92, 342; for the explicit citation, where Sasportas referred to The Guide of the Perplexed as “his [Maimonides’] book,” see Sasportas, ZNZ, 364. 19. Sasportas, ZNZ, 217. 20. For the text, see Moses Maimonides, Igeret Teman, ed. Abraham S. Halkin (New York, 1952). On this work, see Mordechai Akiva Friedman, Ha-­Rambam, ha-­Mashiah be Teman veha-­ shemad ( Jerusalem, 2002). Prior to Sabbetai Zevi, the “Epistle to Yemen” had appeared in print on two occasions, the first as part of Joseph Solomon Delmedigo, Ta’alumot Hokhmah (Hanau, 1629–31) and second as an appendix to Maimonides, Sefer ha-­Mitzvot (Amsterdam, 1660). On the latter, see L. Fuks and R. G. Fuks-­Mansfeld, Hebrew Typography in the Northern Netherlands, 1585–1815: Historical Evaluation and Descriptive Bibliography (Leiden, 1984–87), entry 379, 2:309–10. 21. Funkenstein, “Maimonides: Political Theory and Realistic Messianism,” 136. 22. Sasportas, ZNZ, 25. 23. Ibid., 260. As translated by Werblowsky in Scholem, Sabbetai Sevi, 741. For further discussion of this passage, see Berger, “Some Ironic Consequences of Maimonides’ Rationalist Approach to the Messianic Age,” 284. 24. Nathan of Gaza and Isaac Nahar were hardly the only Sabbatians to invoke Maimonides. For repeated discussion of Maimonides in a letter justifying the conversion of Sabbetai Zevi, see “The Letter Magen Avraham from the land of the West,” (Hebrew) in Gershom Scholem, Mehkere Shabtaut, ed. Yehuda Liebes (Tel Aviv, 1991), 146–81. The author of the letter invokes

256  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 2 Maimonides’ commentary to the Mishnah (149) as well as his epistle to Yemen (155). In an appendix to Scholem’s article (179–81), Yehuda Liebes concludes that the author of this letter was Abraham Perez. Furthermore, Abraham Miguel Cardozo discusses Maimonides at considerable length in a letter written in 1669. See “A Letter from Abraham Miguel Cardozo to the Judges in Izmir,” in Gershom Scholem, Mehkarim u-­mekorot le-­toledot ha-­Shabtaut ve-­gilguleha ( Jerusalem, 1974), 298–331. 25. Sefer Hasidim (Bologna, 1538), par. 206, 30b; Sasportas, ZNZ, 81, 94. A version of this passage appears in the Parma edition. See Sefer Hasidim, ed. Jehuda Wistinetzki, with an introduction and index by Jacob Freimann (Frankfurt, 1924), par. 212, 76–77. On the complicated textual history of this work, see Haym Soloveitchik, “Piety, Pietism and German Pietism: ‘Sefer Hasidim I’ and the Influence of Hasidei Ashkenaz,” Jewish Quarterly Review 92 (2002): 455–93. See also the Sefer Hasidim database available at https://etc.princeton.edu/sefer_hasidim/. Sasportas was apparently unaware of Sefer Hasidim, ed. Wistinetzki, par. 1543, 378. For discussion of this passage, see Ephraim Kanarfogel, “Medieval Rabbinic Conceptions of the Messianic Age: The View of the Tosafists,” in Mea’ah She‘arim: Studies in Medieval Jewish Spiritual Life in Memory of Isadore Twersky, ed. Ezra Fleischer et al. ( Jerusalem, 2001), 156n17. 26. On the code, see Moshe Halbertal, “What Is the Mishneh Torah? On Codification and Its Ambivalence,” in Maimonides after 800 Years: Essays on Maimonides and His Influence, ed. Jay M. Harris (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 81–111. On the will of the creator as a central issue in Sefer Hasidim, see Haym Soloveitchik, “Three Themes in the Sefer Hasidim,” AJS Review 1 (1976): 311–25. 27. Sasportas, ZNZ, 81, 94 (letter to Supino), 113 (letter to the Venetian rabbinate), 115 (letter to the Viennese rabbinate), 298 (response to Cardozo). His emphasis on this passage may have served as a precedent for Moses Hagiz, who scolded Moses Hayim Luzzatto while invoking this very passage. Hagiz advised Luzzatto to study this passage, and the preceding one, as a form of therapy for his messianic pretensions. See the letters from Hagiz to Luzzatto and from Isaiah Bassan (Luzzatto’s teacher) to his student, both in R. Moshe Hayim Luzzatto u-­venei doro, ed. Simon Ginzburg (Tel Aviv, 1937), 79, 86. As cited and discussed in Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy, 326–27n45; on Hagiz’s pregnant silence about Sasportas, see ibid., 150 and Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude, 46. 28. Soloveitchik, “Three Themes in the Sefer Hasidim,” 352. 29. Matt Goldish, The Sabbatean Prophets (Cambridge, MA, 2004). 30. Sasportas, ZNZ, 145–46. On Levi, see Scholem, Sabbetai Sevi, 486. 31. Solomon ibn Adret, She’elot u-­Teshuvot (Venice, 1545–46), no. 548, 89b–90a. For other invocations of this responsum by Sasportas, see his letter to Aaron Zarfati of Amsterdam, ZNZ, 31–33 and his letter to Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, ZNZ, 46. For Samuel Aboab’s, see Meir Benayahu, “News from Italy and Holland on the Beginning of Sabbatianism,” (Hebrew) Erez Yisrael 4 (1956): 198. On Ibn Adret’s response in the early modern period, see Simcha Emanuel, “Manuscripts of the Responsa by Ibn Adret in the Writings of Scholars between the Fifteenth through Nineteenth Centuries,” (Hebrew) JSIJ 13 (2015): 1–46. 32. Sasportas, Ohel Ya’akov, 14b, responsum 11; 14b, responsum 12, where in an issue of Jewish marriage law, Sasportas sides with Ibn Adret and Jacob ben Asher against Nahmanides. 33. Sasportas, ZNZ, 51. 34. On Ibn Adret and Maimonides, see David Berger, “Judaism and General Culture in

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 2   257 Medieval and Early Modern Times,” in his Cultures in Collision, 70–78 and the literature cited there. On his criticism of Maimonides’ code, see Michael A. Shmidman, “Rashba as Halakhic Critic of Maimonides,” in Turim: Studies in Jewish History and Literature Presented to Dr. Bernard Lander, ed. Michael A. Shmidman (New York, 2007), 257–73. 35. For the possibility, see Israel M. Ta-­Shma, “German Pietism in Sepharad: Rabbi Jonah Gerondi, the Man and His Work,” (Hebrew) in Keneset Mehkarim Iyunim be-­Sifrut ha-­Rabanit be-­yeme ha-­benayim: Sepharad ( Jerusalem, 2004), 2:109–48. For a rebuttal, see Soloveitchik, “Piety, Pietism and German Pietism,” 473–79. 36. For editions of the Hebrew text, see Solomon Wertheimer, Batei Midrashot ( Jerusalem, 1954); Israël Lévi, Le Ravissement du Messie à sa naissance et autres essais, ed. Evelyne Patlagean (Paris, 1994), 173–227; a reprint of “L’Apocalypse de Zorobabel et le roi de Perse Siroès,” REJ 68 (1914): 129–60; 69 (1919): 108–21; 71 (1920): 57–65; and Yehudah Even-­Shmuel, Midreshe Geulah (Tel Aviv, 1943), 53–88, 353–70, 379–89. For an annotated English translation, see Martha Himmelfarb, “Sefer Zerubbabel,” in Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical Hebrew Literature, ed. David Stern and Mark J. Mirsky (New Haven, 1990), 67–90. 37. For the passage in the Talmud, see BT Sukkah 52a. For discussion of whether the Book of Zerubbabel was dependent upon the Talmud for this tradition or both derived it from a third source, see Martha Himmelfarb, “Sefer Zerubbabel and Popular Religion,” in A Teacher for All Generations: Essays in Honor of James C. VanderKam, ed. Eric F. Mason et al. (Leiden, 2012), 2:621–34. On the Messiah son of Joseph, see Martha Himmelfarb, “The Messiah Son of Joseph in Ancient Judaism,” in Envisioning Judaism: Studies in Honor of Peter Schäfer on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Ra’anan S. Boustan et al. (Tübingen, 2013), 2:771–90; and Israel Knohl, Be-­ikvot ha-­Mashiah (Tel Aviv, 2000), 68–80. 38. On the spelling of Armilos versus Armilus, see Himmelfarb, “Sefer Zerubbabel,” 81n3. On the identification of this figure, see David Berger, “Three Typological Themes in Early Jewish Messianism: Messiah Son of Joseph, Rabbinic Calculations, and the Figure of Armilus,” in his Cultures in Collision, 253–77. The essay first appeared in AJS Review 10 (1985): 141–64. 39. For a number of the variants, see Even-­Shmuel, Midreshe Geulah. For some of the challenges posed by Even-­Shmuel’s edition, see Himmelfarb, “Sefer Zerubbabel,” 82n15. For citations of the work in liturgical poetry, see Lévi, Le Ravissement du Messie, 215–26; for its impact in the Middle Ages, see Joseph Dan, Ha-­Sippur ha-­Ivri bi-­Yemei ha-­Beinayim ( Jerusalem, 1974), 43–46. 40. For an attempt to place it a century earlier, see Hillel Newman, “Dating Sefer Zerubavel: Dehistoricizing and Rehistoricizing a Jewish Apocalypse of Late Antiquity,” Admantius 19 (2013): 324–36. 41. On the scarcity of this edition, see Even-­Shmuel, Midreshe Geulah, 67n71. 42. Scholem, Sabbetai Sevi, 490. 43. Sasportas, ZNZ, 157. 44. Ibid., 182. 45. Ellipses in the original. 46. Sasportas, ZNZ, 154. 47. Gershom Scholem, “New Sabbatian Documents from the Book To’ei Ruah,” (Hebrew) Zion 7 (1942): 184; reprinted in Mehkere Shabtaut, 43. 48. For the Yiddish text and a Hebrew translation, see Leyb ben Ozer, Sippur Ma’asei

258  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 2 Shabbtai Sevi: Bashraybung fun Shabsai Tsvi, trans. Zalman Shazar and ed. Shlomo Zucker and Rivka Plesser ( Jerusalem, 1978). On the significance of this work and the challenges posed by the edition, see the review by Chava Turniansky, Kiryath Sefer 54 (1979): 161–67. For a French translation, see La beauté du diable: Portrait de Sabbataï Zevi, ed. and trans. Nathan Weinstock (Paris, 2011). The work is currently the subject of a master’s thesis being completed by Irrit Shapira at the Hebrew University. 49. Paul Ira Radensky, “Leyb ben Ozer’s Bashraybung fun Shabsai Tsvi: An Ashkenazic Appropriation of Sabbatianism,” Jewish Quarterly Review 88 (1997): 43–56. 50. Scholem, Sabbetai Sevi, 658–68; Scholem, “The Sabbatian Movement in Poland,” (Hebrew) in Mehkarim, 74–76; for a powerful challenge to Scholem’s reconstruction of Nehemiah and Sabbetai Zevi, see Isaiah Sonne, “Sabbatian Matters in the Notebook of R. Abraham Rovigo,” (Hebrew) Sefunot 3–4 (1960): 62–67. 51. Sasportas, ZNZ, 77, 172, 174, 345. 52. Ibid., 174: “He had never been a prophet, but in Poland he was crazy and spoke utter madness.” 53. On Nehemiah’s sojourn with Leyb ben Ozer in Amsterdam, see L. Fuks, “Sabatianisme in Amsterdam in het Begin van de 18 Eeuw: Enkele Beschouwingen over Reb Leib Oizers en zijn Werk,” SR 14 (1980): 24. For skepticism about Nehemiah’s capabilities as a kabbalist, see Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 658. 54. Leyb ben Ozer, Sippur Ma’asei Shabbtai Sevi, 165. Sasportas was in Amsterdam at the time and could have met either or both of them; however, I have found no trace of any such meeting. 55. Leyb ben Ozer, Sippur Ma’asei Shabbtai Sevi, 96–97. 56. See the discussion in Berger, “Three Typological Themes,” and Himmelfarb, “Sefer Zerubbabel and Popular Religion,” as well as Joseph Heinemann, “The Messiah of Ephraim and the Premature Exodus of the Tribe of Ephraim,” Harvard Theological Review 68 (1975): 1–15. 57. In the third account of the exchange between Nehemiah Hacohen and Sabbetai Zevi, Barukh of Arezzo described Sabbetai Zevi as sitting with tractate Hullin of the Babylonian Talmud and the Zohar. See Barukh of Arezzo, “Memorial to the Children of Israel,” (Hebrew) in Inyene Shabetai Tsevi, ed. Aron Freimann (Berlin, 1912), 53. An English translation appears in David J. Halperin, Sabbatai Zevi: Testimonies to a Fallen Messiah (Oxford, 2007), 48. 58. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 661. Scholem also includes Othoth Mashiah, a text not mentioned by Sasportas or his correspondents. 59. Leyb ben Ozer, Sippur Ma’asei Shabbtai Sevi, 98. 60. Chaim Wirszubski, “The Sabbatian Ideology of the Messiah’s Conversion,” (Hebrew) in Ben ha-­Shitin ( Jerusalem, 1990), 126; the article first appeared in Zion 3 (1938): 220. 61. Ibid., 138–39. Scholem republished the text as “Nathan of Gaza’s Letter on Sabbetai Zevi and His Conversion,” (Hebrew) Kovez al Yad 14 (1966): 419–56. The article was reprinted in Scholem, Mehkarim. Quotation on 245. 62. On the Jews of this community during the period of Sasportas’s residence, see Jonathan I. Israel, “Piracy, Trade and Religion: The Jewish Role in the Rise of the Muslim Corsair Republic of Saleh (1624–1666),” in Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora (Leiden, 2002), 291–311. 63. Sasportas, ZNZ, 333. 64. Ibid., 357.

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 3   259 65. Scholem, “New Sabbatian Documents from the Book To’ei Ruah,” 187, reprinted in Mehkere Shabtaut, 47. 66. Sasportas, ZNZ, 357. 67. Haim Bentov, “The Siriro Family,” (Hebrew) in Fes ve-­arim aherot be-­moroko, ed. Moshe Bar-­Asher, Moshe Amar, and Shimon Sharvit (Ramat Gan, 2013), 337–38. 68. Sasportas, Ohel Ya’akov, 5b. On the passage in the Mishnah, see Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Princeton, 2001), chap. 5; and Azzan Yadin, “Rabban Gamliel, Aphrodite’s Bath, and the Question of Pagan Monotheism,” Jewish Quarterly Review 96 (2006): 149–79. 69. See the references to Lévi, Le Ravissement du Messie and Himmelfarb, “Sefer Zerubbabel.” 70. Sasportas, ZNZ, 350. 71. Glickl, Zikhronos 1691–1719, ed. and trans. Chava Turniansky ( Jerusalem, 2006), 152–5, as cited by Tishby in Sasportas, ZNZ, 17n3 with reference to Die Memorien der Glueckel von Hameln (1645–1719), ed. David Kaufmann (Frankfurt, 1896). On this passage, see Elisheva Carlebach, “Die messianische Haltung der deutschen Juden im Spiegel von Glikls ‘Zikhroynes,’ ” in Die Hamburger Kauffrau Glikl: Jüdische Existenz in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Monika Richarz (Hamburg, 2001), 238–53; and Carlebach, “The Sabbatian Posture of German Jewry,” 26–27. 72. Sasportas, ZNZ, 17. 73. Ibid. 74. On the hakham kolel, see David B. Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton, 2010), 120, 200 and the literature cited there. 75. See the studies in Menasseh Ben Israel and His World, ed. Yosef Kaplan, Henry Méchoulan, and Richard H. Popkin (Leiden, 1989). 76. See Kaplan, “The Libraries of Three Sephardi Rabbis in Early Modern Western Europe.” 77. For Sasportas on Delmedigo, see ZNZ, 147. On Delmedigo, see David B. Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (New Haven, 1995), chap. 4. 78. Goldish, The Sabbatean Prophets, 149; Michael Heyd, “Be Sober and Reasonable”: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden, 1995).

Chapter 3 1. L. Floridi, Sextus Empiricus: The Transmission and Recovery of Pyrrhonism (Oxford, 2002), 38–48, and more recently M. Bermúdez Vázquez, The Skepticism of Michel de Montaigne (Berlin, 2014). 2. Popkin would give this skeptical sylloge a progressively prominent position, increasingly underscoring its centrality to the development of Western doubt and skepticism, until in his final edition of his history of skepticism, he would discuss Estienne’s Empiricus in the introduction itself. R. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford, 2003). 3. See W. Cavini, “Appunti sulla prima diffusione in Occidente delle opere di Sesto Empirico,” Medioevo 7 (1977): 1–20; G. M. Cao, “Savonarola e Sesto Empirico,” in Pico, Poliziano e l’umanesimo di fine Quattrocento, ed. P. Viti (Florence, 1994) and his Scepticism and Orthodoxy: Gianfrancesco Pico as a Reader of Sextus Empiricus. With a Facing Text of Pico’s Quotations from

260  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 3 Sextus (Pisa, 2007); L. Floridi, “The Diffusion of Sextus Empiricus’s Works in the Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (1995): 63–85, in particular 66–70, and Floridi, Sextus Empiricus, 70–72. Floridi’s study is still the most complete account of the transmission of Sextus Empiricus, though it contains a number of small slips, which I shall point out further on, that are nevertheless rather relevant to the present reconstruction. 4. I am referring here to the closing remarks in L. Floridi, “The Grafted Branches of the Sceptical Tree,” Nouvelles de la Répubblique des lettres 4 (1992): 162. 5. “Lire la Bible pour trouver laquelle de toutes les religions debatues de tous costez estoit la vraye.” J. Bodin, Démonomanie des sorciers (Paris, 1587 [1580]), 11v; there is an abridged English translation: On the Demon-­Mania of Witches (Toronto, 1995). On this episode, see C. Baxter, “Jean Bodin’s Daemon and His Conversion to Judaism,” in Jean Bodin: Verhandlungen der Internationalen Bodin Tagung in München, ed. Horst Denzer (Munich, 1973), 1–21; and Paul L. Rose, Jean Bodin and the Great God of Nature: The Moral and Religious Universe of a Judaiser (Geneva, 1980). 6. J. Israel, Radical Enlightenment Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001). 7. P. Hazard, La crise de la conscience européenne, 1680–1715 (Paris, 1935). 8. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle. 9. G. Stroumsa, A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, MA, 2010). 10. Much has been written in recent years on Marranism, and the Iberian cultural background of the Dutch diaspora has been increasingly viewed as a fertile land for radical cultural tolerance. This may be seen in the pioneering works of Richard Popkin, who was surprised to discover the Iberian Jewish, or rather Marran, origins of many of the “skeptics” he studied, adding new insight, also present in Révah’s work, on the Hebrew-­Marran circles revolving around Spinoza; more recently, Yosef Kaplan’s and Yovel’s work open up a perspective in which Marranism, together with the much-­debated concept of tolerance, appears as a driving force of modernity. See, for example, Y. Kaplan, An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Jews of Amsterdam in Early Modern Times (Leiden, 2010); and Y. Yovel, The Other Within: The Marranos; Split Identity and Emerging Modernity (Princeton, 2009). For the “Marrano” turn in Richard Popkin’s perspective, see Y. Kaplan, “Richard Popkin’s Marrano Problem,” in The Legacies of Richard Popkin, ed. J. Popkin (Dordrecht, 2008), 198–212. For a global discussion that places the Iberian reality at the center, see the historiographical revision by M. García Arenal, “Creating Conversos: Genealogy and Identity as Historiographical Problems (after a recent book by Ángel Alcalá),” Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies 38, no. 1 (2013): 1–19. 11. I discuss this issue at greater length in “Doubt in XVth Century Iberia,” in After Conversion: Iberia and the Emergence of Modernity, ed. M. García Arenal (Leiden, 2016), 283–303. 12. Y. Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain (Philadelphia, 1978), 2:253. 13. D. Cabanelas Rodríguez, “Un franciscano heterodoxo en la Granada nasrí: Fray Alonso de Mella,” Al–Andalus 25 (1950): 233–50, and also, with a perspective I myself do not share, I. Bazán Díaz, Los herejes de Durango y la búsqueda de la Edad del Espíritu Santo en el siglo XV (Durango, 2007). 14. Alfonso de Espina, Fortalitium fidei contra Iudeos, Sarracenos, aliosque Christiane fidei in-

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 3   261 imicos (Nuremberg, 1485). On this episode, see M. Esposito, “Une secte d’héretiques à Medina del Campo,” Révue d’histoire ecclésiastique 32 (1936): 350–60. 15. “Sexto quod fides catholica erat quedam truffa, et quod nihil aliud erat in hac vita nisi nasci et mori”; Esposito, “Une secte d’héretiques,” 356. 16. I am citing from the Spanish translation, Šelomoh Ibn Verga, La vara de Yehudah: Sefer Šebeṭ Yehudah, ed. M. J. Cano (Barcelona, 1991); see the introductory pages of Y. Baer in Sefer Shebet Yehuda ( Jerusalem, 1957), 12–15. For a global discussion focusing on the multicultural heritage of medieval Spain, see Friederich Niewöhner, “Are the Founders of Religions Impostors?” in Maimonides and Philosophy: Papers Presented at the Sixth Jerusalem Philosophical Encounter, ed. Sh. Pines and Y. Yovel (Dordrecht, 1986), 233–45, wherein the chapter becomes a response to Maimonides. 17. In addition to the more widely known example of Miguel Servet, I would like to mention just one other, almost unknown, case, culled from Inquisitorial documents, to reinforce this statement, that of the Greek scholar Juan del Castillo. Burned at the stake as an alumbrado in 1537, Castillo had developed an eclectic theory of salvation in which he mixed Origen’s apocathastasis with Lutheran and alumbrado ideas. He believed in a double revelation, both for Christians and Muslims, that would cancel all differences of faith and grant everyone salvation. The general idea that “All will be saved” was supported by a complex theory that mixed sophisticated arguments and popular beliefs, combining Origen with the Moriscos’ idea of two prophets and a single God. The example of Castillo is particularly relevant to my argument, because it proposes an intellectual rereading of a popular idea, typically Spanish at first, with his need to compare different Laws, and widely European in its later development. I have dealt with this subject at greater length in Una herejía española: Conversos, alumbrados e Inquisición (1449–1559) (Madrid, 2010), 198–223, 228–37. 18. A lot has been written on the parable of the three rings and on the tradition—in some ways opposite and complementary—of the three impostors. For a long-­term perspective on the parable from Boccaccio all the way to Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, see F. Niewöhner, Veritas sive varietas: Lessings Toleranzparabel und das Buch Von den drei Betrügern (Heidelberg, 1988). For a historiographical revision that also focuses on non-­European traditions, see I. Shagrir, “The Parable of the Three Rings: A Revision of Its History,” Journal of Medieval History 23 (1997): 163–77. On the tradition of the three impostors and on the legendary book that appeared at the end of the sixteenth century, see G. Minois, The Atheist’s Bible: The Most Dangerous Book That Never Existed (Chicago, 2011); G. Ernst, “Campanella e il ‘De tribus impostoribus,’ ” Nouvelles de la République des lettres 2 (1986): 144–70; and S. Landucci, “Il punto sul ‘De tribus impostoribus,’ ” Rivista storica italiana 112 (2000): 1036–71. 19. “que Dios era criador de todas las cosas y que avia repartido la ley a los christianos y a los moros y a los judios. A los christianos con la mano izquierda y a los otros con la derecha. Y por eso unos escriben hazia delante y los otros hazia tras.” Catalina de Quesada, Morisca de Granada, 1556, Archivo Histórico Nacional, Inquisición, leg. 4519-­3, exp. 13. 20. On the semantic slippage between Marrani and unbelievers, see S. Pastore, “From Marranos to Unbelievers: The Spanish Peccadillo in Sixteenth-­Century Italy,” in Dissimulation and Deceit in Early Modern Europe, ed. M. Eliav-­Feldon and Tamar Herzig (Basingstoke, 2015), 79–93. 21. In a satire dedicated to Bembo, we find: “Et oltra questa nota, il peccadiglio / di Spagna

262  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 3 gli danno anco, che non creda / in unità del Spirto, il Padre e il Figlio” (And beyond this blemish, they also attribute to him the Spanish peccadillo, which does not concede belief in the unity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost). Ariosto, Satire, ed. G. Davico Bonino (Milan, 1990), 6:34–36. 22. A. Caro, Commento di ser Agresto da Ficaruolo sopra la prima ficata del padre Siceo (Bologna, 1538) (anastatic reprint Bologna, 1969), 81. 23. On Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, see Á. González Palencia and E. Mele, Vida y obras de don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (Madrid, 1941–43); E. Spivakovsky, Son of the Alhambra: Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (Houston, 1970); D. H. Darst, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (Boston, 1987); and I. Rada, “Un cadet de grande famille à l’epoque de la Renaissance: Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza,” in Autour des parentés en Espagne aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles: Histoire, mythe et littérature, ed. A. Redondo (Paris, 1987), 31–42. On Mendoza’s collections and on his library, see A. Hobson, Renaissance Book Collecting: Jean Grolier and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Their Books and Bindings (Cambridge, 1999); on his Italian period as ambassador, see S. Pastore, “Una Spagna anti-­papale: Gli anni italiani di Diego Hurtado de Mendoza,” Roma moderna e contemporanea 15 (2007): 63–94. On his possible authorship of Lazarillo, see M. Agulló, A vuelta con el autor del “Lazarillo” (Madrid, 2010). 24. An excellent synthesis on the Mendoza family is still H. Nader, The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance, 1350–1550 (New Brunswick, 1979); Nader also edited a miscellaneous volume on the women of the Mendoza household, Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain: Eight Women of the Mendoza Family (Urbana, 2004). But I should also like to remind the reader of F. Layna Serrano’s Historia de Guadalajara y sus Mendozas durante los siglos XV y XVI, 3 vols. (Guadalajara, 1993–95). 25. D. Coleman, Creating Christian Granada: Society and Religious Culture in an Old-­World Frontier City, 1492–1600 (Ithaca, 2003). 26. It is one of the most famous episodes of the war of Granada. See M. Á. Ladero Quesada, Los mudéjares de Castilla en tiempo de Isabel I (Valladolid, 1969); A. Domínguez Ortiz and B. Vincent, Historia de los moriscos, vida y tragedia de una minoría (Madrid, 1978), 18–23; and J. Meseguer Fernández, “Fernando de Talavera, Cisneros y la Inquisición en Granada,” in La Inquisición española: Nueva visión, nuevos horizontes, ed. J. Pérez Villanueva (Madrid, 1980), 371– 400, esp. 393–99. 27. On the morisco policies of the Mendozas in Granada, see Domínguez Ortiz and Vincent, Historia de los moriscos; R. Benítez Sánchez Blanco, Heroïcas decisions: La Monarquía Católica y los moriscos valencianos (Valencia, 2001); and Francisco Núñez Muley, A Memorandum for the President of the Royal Audiencia and Chancery of the City and Kingdom of Granada, ed. V. Barletta (Chicago, 2007). 28. Famous and often quoted is his opinion of the exasperated bureaucratization, for which ambitious “letrados” corrupted an ancient and carefully balanced system, rupturing that noble original equilibrium on which the government so strongly depended during the Capitulations: “Gobernábase la ciudad y reino, como entre pobladores y compañeros, con una forma de justicia arbitraria, unidos los pensamientos, las resoluciones encaminadas en común al bien público: esto se acabó con la vida de los viejos. Entraron los celos; la división sobre causas livianas entre los ministros de justicia y de guerra; las concordias en escrito confirmadas por cédulas; traído el entendimiento dellas por cada una de las partes a su opinión; la ambición de querer

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 3   263 la una no sufrir igual, y la otra conservar la superioridad, tratada con más disimulación que modestia.” D. Hurtado de Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, ed. B. Blanco-­González (Madrid, 1996), 100. 29. Diego stated that he knew Arabic and could read it fluently; this is confirmed by Paolo Manuzio and Ambrosio de Morales in two epistles’ dedications, which allow us to more or less reconstruct the early years of the life of Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. They are reprinted in the appendix to González Palencia and Mele’s Vida y obras, 3:271–75, 470–74. On the study and dissemination of Arabic in Spain, see M. García-­Arenal and F. Rodríguez Mediano, The Orient in Spain: Converted Muslims, the Forged Lead Books of Granada and the Rise of Orientalism (Leiden, 2013). 30. The episode is narrated in P. Giovio, Historiarum sui temporis, ed. D. Visconti (Rome, 1964), vol. 2, chap. 34. See Spivakovski, Son of the Alhambra, 55 and “Lo de la Goleta,” Hispania 23 (1963): 366–79. On the “supposed” donation of books, see Hurtado de Mendoza, Guerra de Granada, 96. 31. The catalogue of the library of Hurtado de Mendoza and the list of the Greek codices that he bought during his Venetian years may be found in Hobson, Renaissance Book Collecting and Ch. Graulx, Essai sur les origines du Fonds grec de l’Escorial (Paris, 1880). 32. His official correspondence as Spanish ambassador in Venice is in Archivo General de Simancas, Estado, I-­65–66. On his politics in Italy, see M. Levin, Agents of Empire: Spanish Ambassadors in Sixteenth Century Italy (Ithaca, 2006), esp. 19–26 and 53–63. 33. On this aspect, see Pastore, “Una Spagna anti-­papale,” 69–73. 34. “più presto atheo che altrimenti, come quello che haveva participatione di marano per natione et di lutherano per conversatione.” M. Firpo and D. Marcatto, I processi inquisitoriali di Pietro Carnesecchi (1557–1567), 3 vols. (Città del Vaticano, 1998–2000), 2:1038. 35. Flavius Iosephus, Opera (Basileae, 1544). On Arlenius’s activity in Basel, see B. R. Jenny, “Arlenius in Basel,” Basler Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Alterthumskunde 64 (1964): 5–45. On the reception of Flavius Iosephus in the early modern period an ongoing project exists, directed by Joanna Weinberg and Martin Goodman at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. See also the special issue of the International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 23, no. 3 (2016), The Reception of Flavius Iosephus in the Early Modern Period, ed. J. Weinberg and M. Goodman, at the moment only available online, and A Companion to Josephus, ed. H. H. Chapman and Z. Rodgers (Hoboken, NJ, 2016). 36. A. Serrai, Conrad Gesner, ed. M. Cochetti (Rome, 1991) and the more recent F. Sabba Serrai, La “Bibliotheca Universalis” di Conrad Gesner, monumento della cultura europea (Rome, 2012); H. Zedelmeir, Bibliotheca Universalis und Bibliotheca selecta: Das Problem des Ordnung des gelehrten Wissens in der frühen Neuzeit (Köln, 1992). On how crucial the Bibliotheca Universalis was for the systematization of knowledge in Europe, see A. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, 2010), esp. 56 and ff. I was unable to consult U. B. Leu’s new biography, published for the 2016 cinquecentenary, Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) (Zürich, 2016). 37. See L. Canfora, Il Fozio ritrovato (Bari, 2001), esp. 9–28, and Canfora, Convertire Casaubon (Milan, 2002). The catalogue of books in Hurtado de Mendoza’s library and the Greek codices acquired in the Greek years may be found in Hobson, Renaissance Book Collecting. 38. For a detailed description of the circulating codices of the works of Sextus Empiricus

264  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 3 before the 1562 Latin edition, see Floridi, Sextus Empiricus; for an account of the Latin translation by Páez de Castro, see 70–72. Floridi, however, confuses Diego Hurtado de Mendoza with the Cardinal of Burgos, Francisco de Mendoza, who was Diego’s cousin and also a famous collector. 39. E. Spivakovsky, “Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and Averroism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 26 (1965): 307–26. 40. It was finished in 1545 and titled Mechanica de Aristotelis. There is a modern edition published by Foulché-­Delbosc, Révue Hispanique 5 (1898): 365–405. 41. See Juan Páez de Castro to Jerónimo Zurita, August 1, 1545, in González Palencia and Mele, Vida y obras, 1:315–17. 42. Diego Hurtado de Mendoza a Granvelle, May 6, 1549, in Algunas cartas de don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza escritas 1538–1552, ed. A. Vázquez and R. Selden Rose (New Haven, 1935), 124. 43. The phrase was used for the first time by Francesco Guicciardini in a letter from Modena, dated May 18, 1521, in which he sarcastically commented on the fact that Machiavelli had been officially instructed to go to the general chapter of the Friars in Carpi in order to discuss matters of little importance. See N. Machiavelli, Opere, 3 vols., ed. C. Vivanti, vol. 2, Lettere legazioni e commissarie (Turin, 1999), 377; the phrase was then reemployed by Machiavelli in his answer to Guicciardini, ivi, 379. 44. On the image, see Pastore, “From Marranos to Unbelievers.” 45. Diego Hurtado de Mendoza to Granvelle, Rome, May 23, 1548, in A. Paz y Melia, “Cartas de don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza al cardenal Granvela (1548–1551),” Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y museos 3 (1899): 612–22. 46. “no dan facultad para dispensar generalmente sino en particular per individuo, con cada uno de aquellos que quisieren confessar el error y yr a tomar penitençia y dispensacion de los dichos legados. Y es ynposible forçar a los yndividuos, porque si yo que soy un particular, no quiero yr a casa del legado y el otro y otro, no ha de andar el alguazil de casa en casa a forçarme que lo haga; asi que el Emperador puede disponer en el general y el Papa dispensar; pero no puede forçar, ni es posible en millares de años dispensar con los yndividuos desta generalidad. Y esto hablo como philosopho, o como moro de Granada, o como marrano, que aun oy tiene la Ynquisiçion mas que hazer en Spaña que el primer dia.” Diego Hurtado de Mendoza to Granvelle, September 1, 1548, in Algunas cartas, 119–20. 47. The manuscript is in the hand of Páez de Castro, with many corrections, addenda, and notes in the margins. It was first described by O. Kristeller, who saw it in H. P. Kraus’s private collection, in his Iter Italicum 5, 359. See also Floridi, Sextus Empiricus, 70–72 and A. Domingo Malvadi, Bibliofilia humanista en tiempos de Felipe II: La Biblioteca de Juan Páez de Castro (Salamanca, 2011), 298–99. In 2002, when Luciano Floridi wrote his book, the manuscript was up for sale, and in 2003 part of it was auctioned at Sotheby’s. My attempts to locate it have so far been fruitless. Part of the unbound volume is now in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of University of Pennsylvania Library; another part was auctioned by Maggs Bros in 2014. 48. Juan Páez de Castro to Jerónimo Zurita, September 1, 1549. Floridi’s transcription, taken from Dormer’s Anales de Aragón (Zaragoza, 1697), is slightly different. I quote the letter from the more reliable edition of Domingo Malvadi, Bibliofilia humanista, 386. 49. Diego Hurtado de Mendoza to Granvelle, December 14, 1549, in Algunas cartas, 145.

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 4   265 50. Titian, portrait of Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (1540), Pitti Gallery, Florence. 51. Hurtado de Mendoza, Guerra de Granada: “cada nación, cada profesión y cada estado usa su manera de vestido, y todos son cristianos; y nosotros moros, porque vestimos a la morisca, como si trujésemos la ley en el vestido, y no en el corazón.” It was a very similar position (and it is a fact of great importance) to that of Núñez Muley, recently translated and edited by V. Barletta; see F. Núñez Muley, A Memorandum for the President. According to J. Irigoyen García, Moors Dressed as Moors: Clothing, Social Distinction and Ethnicity in Early Modern Iberia (Toronto, 2017), 117–18, behind the Memorial there was not the voice of a downtrodden minority—the Moriscos—but that of the Marquis of Mondéjar. I thank Trevor Dadson for drawing my attention to this book. 52. L. A. Seneca, Letters on Ethics: To Lucilius, ed. M. Graver and A. A. Long (Chicago, 2015), lett. 79. 53. On the erudite milieu of Zurich and on Gessner, see Blair, Too Much to Know. 54. For a precise count, including general references to Venetian libraries, or for those texts for which no explicit mention is made of the places in which they were consulted (which greatly increases the number of entries that may be traced back to Mendoza in the Bibliotheca Universalis), see F. Sabba Serrai, “La Biblioteca di Diego Hurtado de Mendoza nella Bibliotheca Universalis di Conrad Gesner,” Bibliotheca 6 (2007): 93–112. 55. C. Gessner, Lexicon graecolatinum (Basileae, 1545), praefatio, fols. 2–3. 56. C. Gessner, Bibliotheca Universalis, fol. 205. On Gessner’s dedications, see A. Blair, “The Dedication Strategies of Conrad Gessner,” in Professors, Physicians and Practices in the History of Medicine: Essays in Honor of Nancy Siraisi, ed. G. Manning and C. Klestinec (Cham, 2017), 197–238; Mendoza is cited on p. 214. 57. A. Blair, “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload, ca. 1550–1700,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003): 11.

Chapter 4 1. This has now been published as The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity (Cambridge, MA, 2015). 2. F. Cumont, Afterlife in Roman Paganism (New Haven, 1922), 196. 3. I. Morris, Death Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge, 1922), 31. 4. U. Volp, Tod und Ritual in den christlichen Gemeinden der Antike, supplements to Vigiliae Christianae (Leiden, 2002), 41; D. Green, “Sweet Spices in the Tomb,” in Commemorating the Dead: Texts and Artifacts in Context. Studies in Roman, Jewish and Christian Burials, ed. L. Brink and D. Green (Berlin, 2008), 145–73, at 147. 5. From an abundant literature, I have learned most from J. Elsner, “Archaeologies and Agendas: Reflections on Late Antique Jewish Art and Early Christian Art,” Journal of Roman Studies 93 (2003): 114–28; and E. Rebillard, The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity (Ithaca, 2009). 6. B. Shaw, “The Cultural Meaning of Death: Age and Gender in the Roman Family,” in The Family in Italy from Antiquity to the Present, ed. D. Kertzer and R. P. Saller (New Haven, 1991), 66–90, at 67. 7.  J. Dresken-­Weiland, Sarkofagbestattungen des 4.-­6. Jahrhunderts im Westen des römischen Reiches, Römische Quartalschrift Supplementband 55 (Rome, 2003), 14.

266  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 4 8. Volp, Tod und Ritual, 112. 9. S. T. Stevens, “Commemorating the Dead in the Communal Cemeteries of Carthage,” in Commemorating the Dead, ed. Brink and Green, 70–103, at 86, 94. 10. A. Besançon, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, trans. J. M. Todd (Chicago, 2000), 18. 11. A. Rousselle in J.-­M. Carrié and A. Rousselle, L’empire romain en mutation des Sévères à Constantin (Paris, 1999), 436. 12. G. Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Jamblichus (University Park, PA, 1995). Cf. Sylvain Lévi, La doctrine du sacrifice dans les Brahmanas (1896), reedited by L. Renou, with a postscript by C. Malamoud (Turnhout, 2003). 13. P. Brown, “The Diffusion of Manichaeism in the Roman Empire,” Journal of Roman Studies 59 (1969): 92–103. From an abundant literature, see now esp. N. J. Brian-­Baker, Manichaeism: An Ancient Faith Rediscovered (Edinburgh, 2011); and J. Be Duhn, The Manichaean Body: In Discipline and Ritual (Baltimore, 2000), with Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma, 1: Conversion and Apostasy, 373–388 CE (Philadelphia, 2010) and Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma, 2: Making a “Catholic” Self, 388–401 CE (Philadelphia, 2013). 14. P. Brown, “Alms and the Afterlife: A Manichaean View of Early Christian Practice,” in East and West: Essays in Ancient History Presented to Glen W. Bowersock, ed. T. C. Brennan and H. I. Flower (Cambridge, MA, 2008), 145–58. 15. S. G. Richter, Die Auftiegspsalmen des Herakleides: Untersuchungen zum Seelenaufstieg und zur Seelenmesse bei den Manichäern (Wiesbaden, 1997), 61–67. 16. Kephalaion 115, ed. A. Böhlig, Kephalaia. Teil 1. Zweite Hälfte: Lieferung 11/12 (Stuttgart, 1966), 270.26–30, trans. I. Gardner, The Kephalaia of the Master (Leiden, 1995), 276. 17. Kephalaion 115, ed. Böhlig, 271.10–12, trans. Gardner, 277. 18. Kephalaion 115, ed. Böhlig, 277.21 and 280.12, trans. Gardner, 282, 283–84. 19. I. Gardner and S. N. C. Lieu, “From Narmouthis (Medinat Madi) to Kellis (Ismant al-­ Kharab),” Journal of Roman Studies 86 (1996): 146–69. Much of this material is translated in I. Gardner and S. N. C. Lieu, Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire (Cambridge, 2004). 20. The Kellis Agricultural Account Book, ed. R. S. Bagnall (Oxford, 1997), 82–84. 21. P. Kell. Copt. 21.51–56, ed. I. Gardner, A. Alcock, and W.-­P. Funk, Coptic Documentary Texts from Kellis (Oxford, 1999), 188–89. 22. s.v. “Laurentius 8,” Prosopographie chrétienne du Bas-­Empire 2: Italie, ed. C. Pietri and L. Pietri (Rome, 2000), 2:1236; s.v. “Dulcitius 2,” Prosopographie chrétienne du Bas-­Empire 1: Afrique (Paris, 1982), 330–33. 23. Kephalaion 92, ed. Böhlig, 235.2–11, trans. Gardner, 241–42. 24. Augustine, Enchiridion 29.110. 25. P.-­A . Février, “La mort chrétienne,” in Segni e riti nella chiesa nel alto medioevale: Settimane di Studi 33 (Spoleto, 1987), 881–942, at 932. 26. Augustine, de civitate Dei 21.2.187, ed. B. Dombart and A. Kolb, Corpus Christianorum 48 (Turnhout, 1955), 804, trans. H. Bettenson, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans (Harmondsworth, 1972), 1020. 27. Augustine, Letter 158.2–3 and 11 [from Evodius]. See esp. V. Zangara, Exeuntes de corpore: Discussioni sulle apparizioni dei morti in epoca agostiniana (Florence, 1990). On the content and

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 4   267 symbolism of the dreams, see M. Dulaey, Le rêve dans la vie et la pensée de saint Augustin (Paris, 1973), 217–23. 28. Augustine [Evodius], Letter 158.4. 29. Augustine, de Genesi ad litteram 12.18.39. 30. Augustine, Letter 159.5. 31. Augustine, Letter 159.2. This was the case already in 390: Letter 7.2: in hac tota imaginum silva. 32. W. H. C. Frend, The Donatist Church (Oxford, 1952), 79n7, 105n4. See in general J. Amat, Songes et visions: L’au delà dans la littérature latine tardive (Paris, 1985), 25–158. 33. B. Shaw, Sacred Violence: African Christianity and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine (Cambridge, 2011); P. Brown, “Through the Eye of a Needle”: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton, 2012), 328–36. 34. Augustine, de unitate ecclesiae 19.49. 35. Council of Carthage IV (410), canon 14, ed. C. Garcia Goldaraz, Los Concilios de Cartago de un codice Soriense, Biblioteca de la Escuela Española de Roma, 13 (Rome, 1960), 113. 36. Shaw, Sacred Violence, 721–70; on Donatist dreams, see Dulaey, Le rêve, 41. 37. Augustine, de cura pro mortuis gerenda 12.14; see Dulaey, Le rêve, 205–10. 38. s.v. “Cynegius,” Prosopographie chrétienne: Italie, 1:512; Y. Duval, “Flora était-­elle africaine?” Revue des etudes augustiniennes 34 (1988): 70–77. 39. E. Diehl, Inscriptiones christianae latinae veteres (Dublin/Zurich, 1970), no. 3482.7. 40. Brown, “Through the Eye of a Needle,” 224–40. 41. P. Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago, 1981), 34–38. See now “Through the Eye of a Needle,” 281–82, on the criticism of the cult of the saints by Vigilantius, who may have been provoked by the splendid buildings of Paulinus. 42. P. Rose, Augustine and the Relations between the Living and the Dead: A Discourse-­Linguistic Commentary on the de cura pro mortuis gerenda (Amsterdam, 2011), 154–259, 283–97. 43. Augustine, de cura pro mortuis gerenda 4.6, 18.22. 44. H. Kotila, Memoria mortuorum: Commemoration of the Dead in Augustine, Studia Ephermeridis Augustinianum 38 (Rome, 1992). 45. Ann Marie Yasin, Saints and Churches: Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean: Architecture, Cult and Community (Cambridge, 2009), 71–91, 221. See M. A. Handley, Death, Society and Culture: Inscriptions and Epitaphs in Gaul and Spain, AD 300–750, British Archaeological Reports, International Series 1135 (Oxford, 2003), 17: “Certain formulae are more common in Africa than elsewhere. In particular, fidelis [baptized] in pace and memoria are very common.” 46. Augustine, Confessions 9.13.35–37. See C. Carozzi, Le voyage de l’âme dans l’au delà d’après la littérature latine (ve–xiiie siècle), Collection de l’École française de Rome 189 (Rome, 1994), 16: “inquiétude inattendue.” 47. Augustine, Confessions 9.13.37: see J. J. O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions. Commentary (Oxford, 1992), 3:148. 48. Augustine, Confessions 9.11.28, 9.13.36. 49. Augustine, Confessions 9.13.34. 50. Augustine, Confessions 9.13.36. 51. Augustine, Confessions 7.21.27 is the only other time. Significantly, it is when Augustine is speaking of the false attempts of the pagan Platonists to reach heaven.

268  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 4 52. Brown, “Through the Eye of a Needle,” 361–62. 53. Ibid., 61–68. 54. P. Veyne, Le pain et le cirque (Paris, 1976), 44–183, trans. B. Pierce, Bread and Circuses (London, 1990), 16–69; E. Patlagean, Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance, 4e–7e siècles (Paris, 1977), 17–35, 181–96, 423–32. 55. Augustine, Erfurt Sermons 4.6, ed. I. Schiller, D. Weber, and C. Weidmann, “Sechs neue Augustinuspredigten: Teil 2 2 mit Edition dreier Sermones zum Thema Almosen,” Wiener Studien 122 (2009): 171–213, at 211. 56. Brown, “Through the Eye of a Needle,” 347–58. See now R. Lim, “Augustine and Roman Public Spectacles,” in A Companion to Augustine, ed. M. Vessey (Oxford, 2012), 138–51. 57. Brown, “Through the Eye of a Needle,” 355–56; Erfurt Sermon 3.4, Wiener Studien 122 (2009): 197–98. 58. See esp. R. Finn, Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire: Christian Promotion and Practice, 313–450 (Oxford, 2006). 59. Brown, “Through the Eye of a Needle,” 287–88. 60. Gerontius, Life of Melania 16, Greek version ed. D. Gorce, Vie de Sainte Mélanie, Sources chrétiennes 90 (Paris, 1962), trans. E. A. Clark, Life of Melania the Younger (New York, 1984), 39. 61. Gerontius, Life of Melania 20, Gorce, 170, trans. Clark, 43. 62. Brown, “Through the Eye of a Needle,” 308–21. 63. De divitiis 12.2, ed. A. Kessler, Reichstumskritik und Pelagianismus: Die pelagianische Diatribe de divitiis, Paradosis 43 (Fribourg-­en-­Suisse, 1999), 292, trans. B. R. Rees, The Letters of Pelagius and His Followers (Woodbridge, UK, 1991), 194. 64. Augustine, Letter 156; see also Letter 157.4.23. 65. Daniel 4:26: see Mekilta Israel, trans. J. Lauterbach, Mekilta de-­Rabbi Ishmael (Philadelphia, 1935), 3:86–87: “Come and see how merciful He is to flesh and blood. For a man can redeem himself from the heavenly judgment by paying money, as it is said: O King . . . redeem yourself with alms.” See now Gary Anderson, Sin: A History (New Haven, 2009), 143. 66. É. Rebillard, In hora mortis: Évolution de la pastorale de la mort aux ive et ve siècles dans l’Occident latin, Bibliothèque de l’École française d’Athènes et de Rome 282 (Rome, 1994), 148–67. 67. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 103, sermon 3.18. 68. This was conclusively shown by A.-­M. La Bonnardière, “Les commentaires simultanés de Mat.6.12 et 1 Jo.1.18 dans l’oeuvre de saint Augustin,” Revue des études augustiniennes 1 (1955): 129–47. 69. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 140.18. E.g., O. Plassmann, Die Almosen bei Johannes Chrysostomus (Münster, 1961). 70. Augustine, Sermon 58.9.10. 71. Augustine, Sermon 56.7.11. 72. Possidius, Life of Augustine 24.4. 73. Diehl, Inscriptiones christianae latinae veteres, no. 1915. 74. Jerome, Dialogus contra Pelagianos 1.28. 75. Jerome, in Isaiam 18.66.24. 76. B. Daley, The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology (Cambridge, 1991), 104.

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 5   269 77. Augustine, Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum 3.5.14. See A. Thier, Kirche bei Pelagius, Patristische Texte und Studien 50 (Berlin, 1999). 78. Augustine, New Letter 4*, ed. Bibliothèque augustinienne 46 B (Paris, 1987), see 430–42 on the background. 79. Augustine, New Letter 4*.4, 112. 80. Ibid. 81. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 80.8. 82. Possidius, Life of Augustine 31.1–2. 83. G. Smith, “Physics and Metaphysics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, ed. Scott Johnson (Oxford, 2012), 513–561, at 539. 84. Augustine, [Evodius], Letter 158.5, 6, and 11. 85. Dulaey, Le rêve, 77; Smith, “Physics and Metaphysics,” 530, 538 is less dismissive. 86. W. Baltes, “Platonisches Gedankengut im Brief des Evodius an Augustin (Ep. 158),” Vigiliae Christianae 40 (1986): 251–60. 87. S. Byers, “Augustine and the Philosophers,” in Companion to Augustine, ed. Vessey, 175– 87, at 176–80. 88. E. L. Fortin, Christianisme et culture philosophique au cinquième siècle: La querelle de l’âme en Occident (Paris, 1959); R. Barcellona, Fausto di Riez interprete del suo tempo: Un vescovo tardoantico dentro le crisi dell’impero (Soveria Mannelli, 2006). 89. J. Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. A. Goldhammer (Chicago, 1984), 96. 90. M. Dal Santo, Debating the Saints’ Cult in the Age of Gregory the Great (Cambridge, 2012), 21–148. 91. Cumont, Afterlife, 29. 92. J. Fontaine, “Les images virgiliennes de l’ascension céleste dans la poésie latine chrétienne,” in Jenseitsvorstellungen in Antike und Christentum: Gedenkschrift für A. Stuiber, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum: Ergänzungsband 9 (Münster, 1982), 55–67; R. Lattimore, Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs (Urbana, 1962). 93. Tertullian, de anima 55. 94. Cumont, Afterlife, 110. 95. Augustine, Sermon 241.5.5; see esp. S. MacCormack, Shadows of Poetry: Virgil in the Mind of Augustine (Berkeley, 1998), 111; and A. Settaioli, La vicenda dell’anima nel commento di Servio su Virgilio (Frankfurt am Main, 1995), 123. 96. Cumont, Afterlife, 128. 97. Augustine, de Genesi ad litteram 12.13; see Dulaey, Le rêve, 113. 98. E.g., Augustine, de cura pro mortuis gerenda 13.6. 99. G. Ripoll López and I. Velázquez Soriano, “El epitafio de Trasemirus (Mandourle, Villeséque de Corbières, Aude),” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma 3 (1990): 273–87.

Chapter 5 I am very grateful to the fellows of the Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University, for the academic year we shared in 2013–14, and in particular to its director, Philip Nord. This chapter is the result of our collaborative thinking about “Belief and Disbelief,” and it benefited greatly from the invaluable comments of our group. I am also thankful for the conversations with Peter Brown, Susan Naquin, and other members of the History Department at

270  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 5 Princeton. My friends and colleagues in our writing group, Pablo Piccato, Nara Milanich, Amy Chazkel, and Federico Finchelstein, as well as Rhiannon Stephens made this chapter infinitely better. Finally, I appreciate all the insights I received from the participants of the Columbia Latin American History Workshop and the Americas South Seminar at Columbia. 1. Notice that “image” and “saint” are used as synonyms in this chapter, following the terminology found in the sources, where the Spanish santo/san/santa for “saint” gradually incorporates “image,” as explained in the following section. Further, by “colonial Mexico” or “colonial Latin America” I mean the period between the early sixteenth and the end of the eighteenth century; “colonial” and “early” are used interchangeably in this chapter. 2. On the functions of saints, see the by now classics William Christian Jr., Local Religion in Sixteenth-­Century Spain (Princeton, 1981), esp. 27–28; and Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago, 1981). See also Caroline W. Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York, 2011), 50–52, 59; William B. Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico before the Reforma (Albuquerque, 2010), 19–20; and Antonio Rubial García, La santidad controvertida: Hagiografía y conciencia criolla alrededor de los venerables no canonizados de Nueva España (Mexico DF, 1999), 17–44. 3. Caterina Pizzigoni, The Life Within: Local Indigenous Society in Mexico’s Toluca Valley, 1650–1800 (Stanford, 2012). For a discussion of the concept of household, see 7–10, 22–23. 4. On the ancient cult of saints, see Brown, Cult of the Saints. On the Middle Ages the literature is vast; in particular, André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1997, original in French, 1981), 137–40, 415–19, is a compelling portrait of the development of the cult (also going back to late antiquity), and Bynum’s study and interpretations in Christian Materiality have been an inspiration for this chapter. See also Genoveffa Palumbo, “Immagini e devo­ zione: Gli antichi modelli delle immagini di devozione tra predicazione e missione,” in Santità, culti, agiografia: Temi e prospettive, ed. Sofia Boesch Gajano (Rome, 1997), 184–89, 200–201. 5. Christian, Local Religion, 21–22, establishes the valuable distinction of three layers of devotion in Spain: relics and local saints, Marian devotions, and specialist saints, as well as the beginning of the cult of Christ. Vauchez, Sainthood, 128–35, states that in Spain by the fourteenth century the cult of saints had spread in different ways; a devotion based on the role of the laity and the pastoral mission of the Mendicant orders, what he calls the Mediterranean area model, took hold principally in Aragon, thus making it more similar to the center of the phenomenon, Italy, than Castile, where the Mendicant presence was less important, which he explains through a relative distance from the main trade routes and a more rural society. More recently, Felipe Pereda, Las imágenes de la discordia: Política y poética de la imagen sagrada en la España del 400 (Madrid, 2007), has tackled the fundamental yet hitherto unexplored issues around sacred images in the debate between the Catholic monarchy and the Jewish and Muslim communities in fifteenth-­century Spain. Pereda’s work has also been inspirational to developing this topic. See also Palumbo, “Immagini,” 200–201, and “L’uso delle immagini e la diffusione delle idee religiose dopo il Concilio di Trento,” in Trento—I tempi del Concilio: Società, religione e cultura agli inizi dell’Europa moderna: Trento 27–30 ottobre 1994: atti (Trento, 1995), 155–71; and Sofia Boesch Gajano, “Reliques et pouvoir,” in Les reliques: Objets, cultes, symboles, ed. Edina Bozoky and Anne-­Marie Helvétius (Turnhout, 1999), 255–56. 6. Serge Gruzinski, La guerre des images: De Christophe Colomb à “Bladerunner” (Paris, 1990) deals with the approach of the Franciscans and cites the fact that they did not use the body of

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 5   271 Christ on the cross, for example, to avoid connections with human sacrifice (106). On the Mendicant orders and the use of images in Europe, see Vauchez, Sainthood, 113, 116–27, 421–22, 530–33, as well as references in note 5 in this chapter. 7. The main Nahuatl term for an indigenous settlement is altepetl, or local ethnic state, divided in tlaxilacalli, its constituent parts or districts. On these terms and the altepetl patron saint, see James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest (Stanford, 1992), 14–16, 235–37. 8. Ronald J. Morgan, Spanish American Saints and the Rhetoric of Identity, 1600–1810 (Tucson, 2002), 19–20; Antonio Rubial García, Profetisas y solitarios: Espacios y mensajes de una religión dirigida por ermitaños y beatas laicos en las ciudades de Nueva España (Mexico DF, 2006), 165, and “Icons of Devotion: The Appropriation and Use of Saints in New Spain,” in Local Religion in Colonial Mexico, ed. Martin A. Nesvig (Albuquerque, 2006), 39; Gruzinski, La guerre des images, 116. As for references to the European historiography on saints, see Palumbo, “Immagini,” 200–201, and “L’uso delle immagini,” 155–71, and Pereda, Las imágenes, 43, 263–80, on printing and conversion of Muslims through sacred images; on the role of cities and countryside, see Vauchez, Sainthood, 147–56; the excellent essay by Adriano Prosperi, “Madonne di città e Madonne di campagna: Per un’inchiesta sulle dinamiche del sacro nell’Italia post-­tridentina,” in Culto dei santi, istituzioni e classi sociali in età preindustriale, ed. Sofia Boesch Gajano and Lucia Sebastiani (Rome, 1984), in particular 617–23; and Paolo Golinelli, Città e culto dei santi nel medioevo ita­liano (Bologna, 1996). 9. Morgan, Spanish American Saints, 3­–4; Brian Larkin, The Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and Religious Reform in Bourbon Mexico City (Albuquerque, 2010), 112; the essays by Albert Meyers, “Religious Sodalities in Latin America: A Sketch of Two Peruvian Case Studies,” and Asunción Lavrin, “Diversity and Disparity: Rural and Urban Confraternities in Eighteenth Century Mexico,” in Manipulating the Saints: Religious Brotherhoods and Social Integration in Postconquest Latin America, ed. Albert Meyers and Diane Elizabeth Hopkins (Hamburg, 1988), 1–21, 67–100. On indigenous sodalities doing the same, see Lockhart, The Nahuas, 219–20. 10. On the Council of Trent and the First Mexican Council, see Bynum, Christian Materiality, 82, 272; Palumbo, “L’uso delle immagini,” 155–71; Morgan, Spanish American Saints, 29; and Gruzinski, La guerre des images, 157–59; Larkin, Very Nature of God, 33–37, also comments on the measures of the Third Mexican Council of 1585. On ordinances and legislation on proper sacred images in fifteenth-­century Spain, see Pereda, Las imágenes, 27–31, 87. On images in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Gruzinski, La guerre des images, 151–52, 165–66, 171, 174–76, 214–17, 241; see Prosperi, “Madonne,” 619–23, for a European perspective and the role of the Jesuits in the same period. 11. The Spanish form was usually “imagen de un santo,” for image of a saint. Ixiptlatl is the Nahuatl for substitute, representative. As mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, here I consider only documents written in Nahuatl, not in other indigenous languages of Mexico, although a thorough study of the terminology across the board would be fascinating. 12. To get to these changes and nuances research with Nahuatl materials is essential, the same materials that play a substantial role in the third and fourth sections of this chapter. Nahuatl terminology is treated in Lockhart, The Nahuas, 237–38, and Pizzigoni, The Life Within, 39–40. Besides ixiptlatl there is also xayacatl for face, mask, but much less common, and santos yhuan santas, rather different from the Spanish usage. See also David Tavárez, The Invisible War:

272  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 5 Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, 2011), 40–43. Gruzinski, La guerre des images, 79–81, 86–87, deals with ixiptlatl from the point of view of its treatment in the works of Alfredo López Austin; he maintains that ixiptlatl implies equivalence between divine essence and physical object. More research needs to be done on all these concepts. 13. See Christian, Local Religion, 3, 20; and Pereda, Las imágenes, especially 54–121. Here I use the concept of local or popular religion as the level of particular sacred places and images, rather than the level of the universal church and liturgy, as proposed by Christian (3, 8). However, I follow Brown in his awareness of the problems hidden in “popular” religion, which can be seen as “a diminution, a misconception or a contamination” of elite religion, as well as being considered as static, unchanging (Cult of the Saints, 15–22). See also Rubial, “Icons of Devotion,” 52–53. 14. André Vauchez, Saints, prophètes et visionnaires: Le pouvoir surnaturel au Moyen Age (Paris, 1999), 88–91, at 91, original in French: “un même mouvement qui tendait à rapprocher le ciel de la terre en multipliant les mediations, au risque de perdre le sens de la distance infinite qui sépare Dieu de ses creatures” (my translation). 15. These topics as well as the following works serve as examples, while many others could be added to the list: Gajano and Sebastiani, Culto dei santi (in particular, the essays by Frugoni and Prosperi); André Vauchez, Les laics au moyen age: Pratiques et experiences religieuses (Paris, 1987); Gabriella Zarri, ed., Finzione e santità tra medioevo ed età moderna (Turin, 1991); Sofia Boesch Gajano and Marilena Modica, eds., Miracoli: Dai segni alla storia (Rome, 1999); Gajano, Santità; Golinelli, Il pubblico dei santi (especially the essay by Klaniczay); and Umberto Longo, La santità medievale (Rome, 2006). For the most part these works include essays by various scholars and the Italian, French, and English historiographies are well represented, less so German and central European studies, while there are just some references to works on the Orthodox Church and Islam. Admittedly this is a selection, but it gives a sense of the broad range of research and of the absence of studies on the household saints. See also the references in note 5 of this chapter. 16. There is no specific category for household saints in Longo, Santità medievale, for example, while the book includes lists of primary and secondary sources for the study of saints, divided by topics. Some works refer briefly to the “privatization” of the cult of saints and the presence of altars in homes and convent cells: Chiara Frugoni, “Il linguaggio dell’iconografia e delle visioni,” in Culto dei santi, ed. Gajano and Sebastiani, 532–33; Palumbo, “Immagini,” 184– 85. Pereda, Las imágenes, stands out with a discussion of household images as expressions of a true Christian identity (44–54) and references to the domestic cult of saints throughout the book. A very promising exception is the project titled Domestic Devotions: The Place of Piety in the Italian Renaissance Home, 1400–1600 at Cambridge, at http://domesticdevotions.lib.cam .ac.uk/. It lists various forthcoming publications relevant to the arguments made here, as well as the essay by Mary Laven, “Devotional Objects,” in Treasured Possessions from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. Victoria Avery, Melissa Calaresu, and Mary Laven (London, 2015), 238–45, and the catalog of the exhibition Madonnas & Miracles: The Holy Home in Renaissance Italy, ed. Maya Corry, Deborah Howard, and Mary Laven (London, 2017). 17. The quotation comes from Greer’s preface in Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff, eds., Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, 1500–1800 (New York, 2003), ix. 18. Rubial’s work is a point of reference in the field of history of religion in colonial Latin

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 5   273 America: see Santidad controvertida, as well as Profetisas and numerous articles; Morgan, Spanish American Saints. Both Rubial and Morgan have helpful chapters with general treatment of the cult of saints and hagiographic genre. 19. Pierre Ragon, Les saints et les images du Mexique (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris, 2003), especially chaps. 3 and 4; and Gruzinski, La guerre des images. Translations of the quotes from French are mine; the originals are the following: Ragon, “des groupes les plus engagés dans la diffusion du christianisme” (9); Gruzinski, “de programmes et des politiques de l’image” (15). 20. This is the central theme of Morgan’s Spanish American Saints, in particular 3–6, 20, 33– 38, but it is present also in the other works cited so far. On this point, see also Bilinkoff ’s introduction in Greer and Bilinkoff, Colonial Saints, xvii–xviii, xxi. 21. In fact, the cult of many of these saints had its origin in Spain and Portugal. On the Virgen de Guadalupe there is an extensive literature; here I consider William B. Taylor, “Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe in the Seventeenth Century: Hagiography and Beyond,” in Colonial Saints, ed. Greer and Bilinkoff, 277–98, and his article “The Virgin of Guadalupe in New Spain: An Inquiry into the Social History of Marian Devotion,” American Ethnologist 14, no. 1 (1987): 9–43; Stafford Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531–1797 (Tucson, 1995); David Brading, Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries (Cambridge, 2001); and Lisa Sousa, Stafford Poole, and James Lockhart, The Story of Guadalupe (Stanford, 1998) for an analysis of the Nahuatl sources. On Santa Rosa, see, e.g., Kathleen Ann Myers, “Redeemer of America: Rosa de Lima (1586–1617), the Dynamics of Identity, and Canonization,” in Colonial Saints, ed. Greer and Bilinkoff, 251–75, and Morgan, Spanish American Saints, chap. 4, while chap. 5 deals with Mariana de Jesús. Finally, on San Antonio, see Ronaldo Vainfas, “St. Anthony in Portuguese America: Saint of the Restoration,” and on Santa Ana, see Charlene Villaseñor Black, “St. Anne Imagery and Maternal Archetypes in Spain and Mexico,” both in Colonial Saints, ed. Greer and Bilinkoff, 99–111, 3–29. 22. For a general treatment of miraculous images in Mexico, see Taylor, Shrines, 3–5, 25–29; see also Lockhart, The Nahuas, 244–51. Studies of apparitions in Europe are copious; here I have benefited especially from William A. Christian Jr., Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain (Princeton, 1981). 23. As for the various images, Cristo Renovado is discussed in Taylor, Shrines, 65–68, and more broadly through chap. 2; the book also contains two chapters on the Virgen de Guadalupe. Our Lady of Intercession and Our Lady of the Walnut Tree are analyzed in William B. Taylor, Marvels & Miracles in Late Colonial Mexico: Three Texts in Context (Albuquerque, 2011). 24. The story goes that the Virgen de los Remedios was originally a small statue brought by a conquistador and hidden, then found by an indigenous cacique in 1535; a small chapel was built in Mexico City in 1550, followed by a church in 1574–76. See Linda A. Curcio-­Nagy, The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico City: Performing Power and Identity (Albuquerque, 2004), 30–31, and her article “Native Icon to City Protectress to Royal Patroness: Ritual, Political Symbolism and the Virgin of Remedies,” The Americas 52, no. 3 (1996): 367–91. Gruzinski, La guerre des images, 201; and Ragon, Les saints, 324–25, 330–32, also deal with this image. 25.  Curcio-­Nagy, Great Festivals, 28, 113–17, and “Giants and Gypsies: Corpus Christi in Colonial Mexico City,” in Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico, ed. William H. Beezley, Cheryl English Martin, and William E. French (Wilmington, 1994), 1–26; Edward Osowski, Indigenous Miracles: Nahua Authority in Colonial Mexico

274  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 5 (Tucson, 2010), chap. 5; Carolyn Dean, Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru (Durham, 1999), in particular 7–9, 11. See also Jaime Lara, Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico (Notre Dame, 2008), chap. 7; and Clara García Ayluardo, “A World of Images: Cult, Ritual, and Society in Colonial Mexico City,” in Rituals of Rule, ed. Beezley, Martin, and French, 77–94. 26. For those not familiar with early Latin American history, “black” was used to designate an individual of African origin or descent, “mulatto” referred to the offspring of Spanish and black mixing, and “mestizo” to one of Spanish and indigenous mixing. 27. On authorities’ reaction in the eighteenth century, see Taylor, Shrines, 35–41; and Gruzinski, La guerre des images, 310–17. On alms collection in eighteenth-­century central Mexico, see Osowski, Indigenous Miracles, in particular chaps. 3 and 4; the origins and early stage of this practice await further research. 28. Tavárez, The Invisible War, contains many examples of misrepresentation and misuse of images, as well as of survival of images from the preconquest indigenous past; for just a few, see 38–41, 105–6, 214–15, 245, and 254. 29. Pamela Voekel, Alone before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico (Durham, 2002), 9, 51–56, and chap. 2 more in general. Larkin, Very Nature of God, discusses the move from Baroque to reformed Catholicism in the eighteenth century. There are surely other examples in the literature, and mentions of the phenomenon can be found in various works cited elsewhere in this chapter. 30. Here I do not engage with scholarship on death and dying in general terms but only with the analysis of the role of images of saints in it. Verónica Zárate Toscano, Los nobles ante la muerte en México: Actitudes, ceremonias y memoria (1750–1850) (Mexico DF, 2000), chap. 4, original Spanish of the expression “los santos de mi nombre y devoción”; Voekel, Alone before God, 29–30, 33–35; Larkin, Very Nature of God, 109–11, 113–15. Larkin also adds that in the late eighteenth century confraternities moved from an emphasis on spiritual help in facing death to one that emphasized monetary support, and generally they were part of the attempt at regulation and control of church authorities; see 149–51, 202–10. See also Martina Will de Chaparro, Death and Dying in New Mexico (Albuquerque, 2007), 33–36, 43, 47–54. 31. Larkin, Very Nature of God, 38–49; Voekel, Alone before God, 36–42. 32. Larkin, Very Nature of God, 71, 84–87, mentions images that are sent to churches, while there is no analysis of images in households and how they were bequeathed. Ragon, Les saints, 345, mentions engravings and statues in urban dwellings, as well as high demand for prints. The catalog of the exhibition Behind Closed Doors: Art in the Spanish American Home, 1492–1898, ed. Richard Aste (New York, 2013) has references to images of saints in Spanish and indigenous elite homes; see in particular the essay by Suzanne L. Stratton-­Pruitt, “Paintings in the Home in Spanish Colonial America,” 105–29, with examples of inventories of elite households. For a general article on oratories in Mexican eighteenth-­century houses, see Gabriela Sánchez Reyes, “Oratorios domésticos: Piedad y oración privada,” in Historia de la vida cotidiana en México, vol. 3, El siglo XVIII: Entre tradición y cambio, ed. Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru (Mexico DF, 2005), 531–51. 33. See Lockhart, The Nahuas, 235–51 for a general treatment, 232–33 on offerings, and 251–53 on invocations. On the Toluca Valley, for invocations, offerings, and burial, see Stephanie Wood, “Adopted Saints: Christian Images in Nahua Testaments of Late Colonial Toluca,” The

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 5   275 Americas 47, no. 3 (1991): 264–70; and Caterina Pizzigoni, ed., Testaments of Toluca (Stanford, 2007), 9–11, 15–18. S. L. Cline, Colonial Culhuacan, 1580–1600: A Social History of an Aztec Town (Albuquerque, 1986), has just a few references on pages 24, 27–28, which is to be expected given that it deals with the 1580s, too early for a full development of the cult of saints. On the role of saints in funeral ritual for other indigenous groups, see, for example, Matthew Restall, The Maya World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550–1850 (Stanford, 1997), 152–53, 210, based on sources in the Mayan language; Kevin Terraciano, The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca (Stanford, 2001), some mentions through chap. 8, based on sources in Mixtec; and Gabriela Ramos, Death and Conversion in the Andes: Lima and Cuzco, 1532–1670 (Notre Dame, 2010), chaps. 5 and 6, based on indigenous testaments in Spanish (on invocations, see 123, and on offerings to saints, 210–12). 34. Wood, “Adopted Saints,” is an excellent reference point, especially 270–78; Lockhart, The Nahuas, 235–51 presents very useful ideas, which are general given the scope of the work; Pizzigoni, Testaments, 22–25, has some general points, while a thorough treatment is in The Life Within, mentioned in the following section. Works dealing with indigenous people through sources in Spanish have very general references to saints in the household, for instance, Gruzinski, La guerre des images, 272–73, 285–86; or for Peru, Ramos, Death and Conversion, 210–12. 35. Within the literature discussed in the previous section, I acknowledge the fact that Taylor, Shrines and Gruzinski, La guerre des images both deal with Spanish and indigenous participation in the cult at the same time and that Osowski, Indigenous Miracles concentrates on the indigenous realm. Stratton-­Pruitt, “Paintings in the Home,” also refers to sacred images in Spanish and indigenous elite households. 36. See again Lockhart, The Nahuas, and Wood, “Adopted Saints.” 37. For some introductory ideas, see Pizzigoni, Testaments, 22–25, while a thorough analysis can be found in Pizzigoni, The Life Within, 36–45, 52–54, 167–77. 38. On the chronology of the cult, see Pizzigoni, The Life Within, 36–38, and the comparison made there with the Valley of Mexico. For the latter, two collections of published testaments have been used: S. L. Cline and Miguel León-­Portilla, eds., Testaments of Culhuacan (Los Angeles, 1984); and Luis Reyes García et al., eds., Documentos nauas de la Ciudad de México del siglo XVI (Mexico DF, 1996). See also Wood, “Adopted Saints,” 289–93 for more on the chronology and the idea of a decline in the cult in the later eighteenth century. 39. Archivo General de Notarías, Mexico City (hereafter AGdN), Not. no. 8, Martín Alonso, libro/legajo 1, fols. 351–358v. 40. Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (hereafter AGN), Bienes de Difuntos, 10:2, fols. 53–64v, “Los capitanes de Licona y Fermín de Lasoeta, albaceas, herederos del capitán Miguel de Elisondo, difunto, dan poder a Juan de Miner para recibir y cobrar los bienes de este.” 41. Pizzigoni, The Life Within, 41–43; Wood, “Adopted Saints,” 272, 278. Here I consider images of the Virgin, Christ, and others as part of the same cult of saints, since they were seen as such by the testators, while other scholars treat the Virgin and Christ as somehow different; for example, see Ragon, Les saints, 264–65, 363. 42. On the predominance of the Virgin and Christ among the Spaniards, see Zárate Toscano, Los nobles, 168, and Ragon, Les saints, 363, where it states that they were the most popular among Spaniards and mestizos in terms of community or public cult. Osowski, Indigenous Miracles, 92–93, says that images of the Virgin and Christ were the ones usually taken for alms collection among the indigenous communities of central Mexico; and Gruzinski, La guerre des

276  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 5 images, 285–86, has a general statement about images of the Virgin and Christ in indigenous houses. 43. On the specific example of noble households, see Zárate Toscano, Los nobles, 168. Sánchez, “Oratorios domésticos,” 546, cites a case with San Francisco, San Nicolás, and Santa Rosa, among other saints, without further details. Other literature has general statements about popular images in community worship, not household; see Ragon, Les saints, 365–66, with references to San Antonio de Padua, San Nicolás de Tolentino, Santa Clara, San Vicente Ferrer, and San Francisco Xavier, among others, around urban Mexico. 44. These ideas come from a survey of documents in various archives; for examples, see AGN Civil 24:1, 1680, “Autos testamentarios, inventarios y aprecio de los bienes que quedaron por muerte de Antonio de Candia y su esposa Lucía de Sariñana”; Civil 134:2, 1699, “Inventario de los bienes de José Díez Ortuño”; Civil 6:2, 1732, “Testamento, inventarios y aprecio de los bienes que quedaron por muerte de Teresa de Chávez”; Civil 257:4, 1735, “Autos civiles de inventarios de los bienes que quedaron por fallecimiento de Nicolás Hernández”; Civil 42:1, 1796, “Diligencias sobre concurso de acreedores y cesión de bienes hecha por don José Mariano de Ávila”; Civil 61:2, 1793, “Inventario de los bienes en mercancía que quedaron por fallecimiento de doña Antonia Ramírez de Andrade viuda de don Antonio Ortíz de Benavides”; Civil 23:1, 1709, “Juicio testamentario, inventarios y aprecio de los bienes que quedaron por muerte de Pedro Sáenz de Rosas”; Civil 223:1, 1716, “Inventarios y aprecios de los bienes que quedaron por muerte de Ursula del Pozo, a pedimento de don Jacinto José Romeo, hijo legítimo”; AGN Bie­ nes de Difuntos 13:unico, fols. 1–389, “Autos de inventario de los bienes de Francisco Losada, alcalde mayor de la provincia de Xicayan”; Bienes de Difuntos 14:1, fols. 1–50v, “Autos de inventario de los bienes que quedaron por muerte del intestado Gregorio Soto”; AGdN, Not. no. 11, Juan de Lerín Caballero, libro/legajo 1, fols. 184v–87v, 274v–277v, 221–222v; Archivo Histórico del Arzobispado de México (hereafter AHAM) 80:50, fol. 14, “Fondo episcopal, Testamento de doña Guadalupe Valdés, y de Cipriano de Aguilera”; AHAM 117:36, fol. 28, “Fondo cabildo, Borradores de los aprecios que se hicieron en los inventarios de don Domingo Rodríguez”; and AHAM 186:12, fol. 99, “Fondo cabildo, Inventarios y aprecios con cuenta de partición, división de los bienes que quedaron por fin y muerte de Palacios maestro de tirador de oro.” 45. AGN Civil 1003:4, Testament of María de la Concepción, 1761. On this point, see Pizzigoni, The Life Within, 170–71; and Wood, “Adopted Saints,” 278–79. 46. For general ideas about oratories, see Sánchez, “Oratorios domésticos,” 533, 539, 541; and again, Ragon, Les saints, 345, regarding engravings and statues in urban houses, also citing the case of wealthy families in Puebla having thirty images at home. 47. AGN Civil 24:1, 1680, “Autos testamentarios, inventarios y aprecio de los bienes que quedaron por muerte de Antonio de Candia y su esposa Lucía de Sariñana”; Civil 134:2, 1699, “Inventario de los bienes de José Díez Ortuño”; Civil 178:1, 1719, “Testamentaria e inventario de bienes de María Rosa Yáñez de Vera, viuda de don Pedro Mendoza y Escalante.” 48. On the house complex before the conquest, see Susan Evans, “Aztec Household Organization and Village Administration,” and Michael E. Smith, “Houses and the Settlement Hierarchy in Late Postclassic Morelos: A Comparison of Archaeology and Ethnohistory,” both in Prehispanic Domestic Units in Western Mesoamerica: Studies of Household, Compound, and Residence, ed. Robert S. Santley and Kenneth G. Hirth (Boca Raton, 1993), 173–89, 191–206. On preconquest figurines, see Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions That

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 5   277 Today Live among the Indians Native to This New Spain, 1629, trans. J. Richard Andrews and Ross Hassig (Norman, 1984), 50–51, 53, 60–61. On colonial house complexes and santocalli, see Lockhart, The Nahuas, 59–72, and for a full treatment of the house structure and its literature, Pizzigoni, The Life Within, 22–36. 49. On the indigenous house complex and its transformation over time, see Pizzigoni, The Life Within, 22–29. Notice that ichantzinco Dios is used particularly in the area around the settlement of Toluca, at the center of the valley. 50. Wood, “Adopted Saints”; scholars using testaments: Voekel, Alone before God; Larkin, Very Nature of God; Ramos, Death and Conversion. It is important to notice how already in 1981 Christian had called for the use of sources other than Inquisition records to “investigate everyday Catholics and everyday behavior” in Spain; he based his book on questionnaires sent to the towns and villages of New Castile in 1575–80 (Local Religion, 4). 51. Bynum, Christian Materiality, 32–33, quote on 35. Bynum is primarily interested in how medieval objects functioned and what they meant religiously, in the power of the material within religiosity, an approach that I find very fruitful when thinking of early Latin America. 52. Moreover, works on household material culture in historical perspective can be very useful, for example, the essays by Raffaella Sarti and Martine Segalen on material conditions of family life, the former for the early modern period, the latter for 1789–1913, both in The History of the European Family, ed. David I. Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli (New Haven, 2001–3). 53. Inventories are widely used in the art history scholarship; see, e.g., Chriscinda Henry, “What Makes a Picture? Evidence from Sixteenth-­Century Venetian Property Inventories,” Journal of the History of Collections 23, no. 2 (2011): 253–65; and for Latin America, Stratton-­ Pruitt, “Paintings in the Home.” 54. See Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986), chap. 1, esp. 5, 9–17, and in the same volume the essay by Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in particular 64–67, for the idea of reconstructing a biography of objects. For attention to manufacture and the materials objects are made of, see Robert Friedel, “Some Matters of Substance,” in History from Things: Essays on Material Culture, ed. Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery (Washington, DC, 1993), 41–50. 55. On objects as embodiment of knowledge about craft, see Pamela Smith, “In a Sixteenth-­ Century Goldsmith’s Workshop,” in The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialization, ed. Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear (Amsterdam, 2007), 33–57. On lineage or ancestry, see Jessica Rawson, “The Ancestry of Chinese Bronze Vessels,” in History from Things, ed. Lubar and Kingery, 51–73. 56. For these ideas I am indebted to Graves-­Brown’s introduction in P. M. Graves-­Brown, ed., Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture (London, 2000), 1–9, and to Bruno Latour, “The Berlin Key or How to Do Words with Things,” in the same volume, 10–21. See also Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth Phillips, Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture (Oxford, 2006), in particular 1–12, for a discussion of objects as perceived through the senses, or the sensory approach. See Jacques Maquet, “Objects as Instruments, Objects as Signs,” in History from Things, ed. Lubar and Kingery, esp. 34–36, for ideas about the cultural meanings of objects. 57. On the idea of living matter, see Bynum, Christian Materiality, 121–22, 125; on the model of human relations, see Brown, Cult of the Saints, 50–51, 55–62; on images being like people, see

278  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 5 Christian, Local Religion, 197–99, or similar to relics, Patrick Geary, “Sacred Commodities: The Circulation of Medieval Relics,” in Social Life of Things, ed. Appadurai, 169–91; Brown, Cult of the Saints, chap. 5, also deals with relics. Finally, Latour, “The Berlin Key,” and more in general his actor-­network theory provide insights on object-­human relations. See Pizzigoni, The Life Within, 39, 85–86, for concrete examples of saints being treated as persons in colonial Mexico. I am conscious that these references span from antiquity and the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century and beyond, but at the same time they address similar ways of relating to or conceiving the saints. 58. A vara is a Spanish measurement corresponding to a little less than an English yard. 59. Sebastián de Covarrubias’s Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, the 1611 Spanish dictionary, defines lamina as “la plancha de algun metal,” so likely it is a metal sheet on which an image is painted or drawn; “oja de lata” is a sheet made of tin. 60. The following documents helped in determining the different kinds of images: AGN Civil 61:2, 1793, “Inventario de los bienes en mercancía que quedaron por fallecimiento de doña Antonia Ramírez de Andrade viuda de don Antonio Ortíz de Benavides”; Civil 134:2, 1699, “Inventario de los bienes de José Díez Ortuño,” from which comes also the example of the crucifix; Civil 223:1, 1716, “Inventarios y aprecios de los bienes que quedaron por muerte de Ursula del Pozo, a pedimento de don Jacinto José Romeo, hijo legítimo”; Civil 42:1, 1796, “Diligencias sobre concurso de acreedores y cesión de bienes hecha por don José Mariano de Ávila,” in particular for tabletas, laminas, and estampas; Civil 24:1, 1680, “Autos testamentarios, inventarios y aprecio de los bienes que quedaron por muerte de Antonio de Candia y su esposa Lucía de Sariñana,” for estampas and for the example of Lucía de Sariñana; and Civil 23:1, 1709, “Juicio testamentario, inventarios y aprecio de los bienes que quedaron por muerte de Pedro Sáenz de Rosas” for oja de lata. 61. Testament of Pascuala de la Cruz, Newberry Library, Ayer Ms 1477B[2]. See Pizzigoni, The Life Within, 38. On the forms and prices, see Wood, “Adopted Saints,” 270–71; she calculates that 6 pesos were the equivalent of four to eight weeks’ pay in the area. 62. AGdN, Fondo Antiguo, Not. José Miguel de Prenda y García, 1789. Pereda, Las imágenes, has an illuminating section on artisans and workshops for image production, with comments on materials, sizes, and prices; see esp. 292–321. The art history scholarship on painters, workshops, genres, and markets in Latin America is vast; for reference, see a recent book, Luisa Elena Alcalá and Jonathan Brown, eds., Painting in Latin America, 1550–1820 (New Haven, 2014), esp. chap. 1. 63. AGdN, Not. no. 10, Luis de Basurto, libro/legajo 1, Mexico, 26 enero 1589, quotation in Spanish: “una hechura de una imagen de Nuestra Señora en 38 pesos.” 64. AGN Civil 6:2, 1732, “Testamento, inventarios y aprecio de los bienes que quedaron por muerte de Teresa de Chávez”; Civil 42:1, 1796, “Diligencias sobre concurso de acreedores y cesión de bienes hecha por don José Mariano de Ávila,” quotation in Spanish: “un milagro de plata.” 65. See Gruzinski, La guerre des images, 244–49 in particular; his ideas about saints on everyday objects and tattoos are based on Inquisition records. 66. On sweeping, see Louise Burkhart, “Mexica Women on the Home Front: Housework and Religion in Aztec Mexico,” in Indian Women of Early Mexico, ed. Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett (Norman, 1997), 33–41; on indigenous ancient rituals, see

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 6   279 ­ lfredo López Austin, Hombre-­Dios: Religión y política en el mundo náhuatl (Mexico DF, 1998), A 47–77. See also Pizzigoni, The Life Within, chap. 1. On the Spanish side, Christian, Local Religion, 55–59, 105–25, comments on general aspects of saint worship. Finally, flowers in Mexico may have been influenced by the indigenous flower industry. 67. AHAM 65:39, testament of don Baltasar de los Reyes, and examples of the language used for the saints can be found in AHAM 65:39, testament of Antonio de Santiago, and AGN Civil 664:2, testament of Marcela María, and many more. See also Pizzigoni, The Life Within, chap. 1. 68. AGN Inquisición 435:177, fol. 334, 1650, “Denuncia contra Diego Díaz porque impacientado tiro un zapato y dio con el a una imagen,” quotation in Spanish: “En haciendome vosotras perder la paciencia me hareis volver contra Dios”; Inquisición 976:27, fols. 101–5, 1675, “El Sr. Fiscal del Santo Oficio contra Cristóbal Vicente de Rivera, procurador de la Real Audiencia de esta ciudad por haber arrojado desde un corredor al patio unas imágenes de Nra Señora.” 69. The sources for these cases are lawsuits, usually presented in front of the Inquisition. Gruzinski, La guerre des images, deals with this topic in chapter 5, especially 250–62, treating the images from the point of view of those who consume or use them and stressing how mistreatment reinforced the sacrality of the image. I aim at analyzing similar cases in the context and framework of the household. For an example of similar practices in Europe, citing cases from Germany, Bavaria, and Florence, see Robert W. Scribner, “Cosmic Order and Daily Life: Sacred and Secular in Pre-­Industrial German Society,” in his Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London, 1987), 13–14. 70. Pizzigoni, The Life Within, 52–54. 71. AHAM 54:1, testament of María Hernández. See the discussion of these terms and examples in Pizzigoni, The Life Within, 38–40. 72. See Frank Graziano, Cultures of Devotion: Folk Saints of Spanish America (Oxford, 2007) and his recent Miraculous Images and Votive Offerings in Mexico (Oxford, 2015); Yolanda Lastra, Adoring the Saints: Fiestas in Central Mexico (Austin, 2009); Hugo G. Nutini, Todos Santos in Rural Tlaxcala: A Syncretic, Expressive, and Symbolic Analysis of the Cult of the Dead (Princeton, 1988); Alan Sandstrom, Traditional Paper Making and Paper Cult Figures of Mexico (Norman, 1986), and Corn Is Our Blood: Culture and Ethnic Identity in a Contemporary Aztec Indian Village (Norman, 1991). On home altars I have found just a few examples: Dana Salvo, Home Altars of Mexico (Albuquerque, 1997), and some essays in Douglas Sharon, ed., Mesas and Cosmologies in Mesoamerica (San Diego, 2003). 73. Brown, Cult of the Saints, xxiii; see, on xxiii–xxiv, his comments on recent publications on the Christian household in late antiquity.

Chapter 6 This essay is reworked based on content previously published in Victoria Smolkin, A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism (Princeton, 2018), and “The Problem with the ‘Ordinary’ Soviet Death: The Material and the Spiritual in Atheist Cosmology [Problema ‘obyknovennoi’ sovetskoi smerti: Material’noe i dukhovnoe v ateisticheskoi kosmologii],” State, Religion, and Church in Russia and Abroad [Gosudarstvo, religiia i tserkov’ v Rossii i za rubezhom] 3–4, no. 30 (2012): 429–62. 

280  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 6 1. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-­politicheskoi istorii [hereafter RGASPI], f. 606, op. 4, d. 37, ll. 76–77. 2. Ibid., 76. 3. Ibid., 77. 4. Ibid. 5. On death in Russian and Soviet culture, see Irene Masing-­Delic, Abolishing Death: A Salvation Myth of Russian Twentieth-­Century Literature (Stanford, 1992); Nikolai Krementsov, Revolutionary Experiments: The Quest for Immortality in Bolshevik Science and Fiction (Oxford, 2013); Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!: The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1997); and Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth Century Russia (New York, 2000). 6. On Soviet antireligious policy and atheist propaganda, see John Anderson, Religion, State and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States (Cambridge, 1994), David E. Powell, Antireligious Propaganda in the Soviet Union: A Study in Mass Persuasion (Cambridge, MA, 1975); James Thrower, Marxist-­Leninist “Scientific Atheism” and the Study of Religion and Atheism in the USSR (Berlin, 1983); Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford, 1988); Glennys Young, Power and the Sacred in Revolutionary Russia: Religious Activists in the Village (University Park, PA, 1997); Daniel Peris, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless (Ithaca, 1998); William B. Husband, “Godless Communists”: Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (DeKalb, IL, 2000); Arto Luukkanen, The Religious Policy of the Stalinist State: A Case Study: The Central Standing Commission on Religious Questions, 1929–1938 (Helsinki, 1997); Arto Luukkanen, The Party of Unbelief: The Religious Policy of the Bolshevik Party, 1917–1929 (Helsinki, 1994); Valerii Alekseev, “Shturm nebes” otmeniaetsia?: Kriticheskie ocherki po istorii bor’by s religiei v SSSR (Moscow, 1992); Dimitry Pospielovsky, A History of Marxist-­Leninist Atheism and Soviet Antireligious Policies (New York, 1997); and most recently, Paul Froese, The Plot to Kill God: Findings from the Soviet Experiment in Secularization (Berkeley, 2008). On the Khrushchev-­era antireligious campaign, see Tatiana Chumachenko, Church and State in Soviet Russia: Russian Orthodoxy from World War II to the Khrushchev Years, trans. and ed. Edward E. Roslof (Armonk, NY, 2002); Mikhail Shkarovsky, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ v XX veke (Moscow, 2010) and Shkarovsky, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’pri Staline i Khrushcheve (Moscow, 1999); and Ulrike Huhn, Glaube und Eigensinn: Volksfrömmigkeit zwischen orthodoxer Kirche und Sowjetischem Staat, 1941 bis 1960 (Wiesbaden, 2014). On the late Soviet period, see Sonja Luehrmann, Secularism Soviet Style: Teaching Atheism and Religion in a Volga Republic (Bloomington, 2011) and Sonja Luehrmann, Religion in Secular Archives: Soviet Atheism and Historical Knowledge (New York, 2015), as well as Catherine Wanner, ed., State Secularism and Lived Religion in Soviet Russia and Ukraine (Oxford, 2012) and Tam Ngo and Justine B. Quijada, eds., Atheist Secularism and Its Discontents (Basingstoke, 2015). 7. Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, 2015) chronicles this story, relating it in particular to the management of death. See especially 305–9. 8. Paul W. Werth, “In the State’s Embrace? Civil Acts in an Imperial Order,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7, no. 3 (2006): 440. As Werth notes, the adoption of civil registration in Europe “typically involved political struggles” (France with the revolution, En-

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 6   281 gland in 1836, and Germany in 1875, where it was part of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church). By the late nineteenth century, civil registration had been adopted in most of Europe, “rendering Russia’s strongly confessional system increasingly exceptional.” 9. Record keeping in the Russian Empire began as part of Peter the Great’s modernization program in 1722, when Peter decreed that the Orthodox Church had to keep records of the Orthodox population. Requirements of other confessions followed later, with Catholics in 1826, Muslims in 1828, Lutherans in 1832, Jews in 1835, and Old Believers in 1874. See Werth, “In the State’s Embrace?” 433–58. 10. ZAGS is an acronym for Zapis’ aktov grazhdanskogo sostoianiia (Registration of Acts of Civil Status). 11. Lev Trotsky, “Sem’ia i obriadnost,’ ” Pravda, no. 156 ( July 14, 1923). 12. “Kodeks zakonov ob aktakh grazhdanskogo sostoianiia,” SU, 1918, 76/77–118, par. 52, as cited in Elizabeth A. Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington, 1997), 51n17. 13. Nikolai V. Krylenko, Proekt kodeksa o brake i sem’e (Moscow, 1926), 6, cited in Wood, The Baba and the Comrade, 52n18. 14. “Dekret Soveta Narodnykh Komissarov: Ob otdelenii tserkvi ot gosudarstva i shkoly ot tserkvi,” in Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii pravitel’stva za 1917–1918 gg: Upravlenie Sovnarkoma SSSR (Moscow, 1942), 286–87. 15. Vladimir I. Brudnyi, Obriady vchera i segodnia (Moscow, 1968), 65–70. 16. Vladimir D. Bonch-­Bruevich, “Otdelenie tserkvi ot gosudarstva,” in Deiateli Oktiabria o religii i tserkvi (Moscow, 1968), 13, cited in Anna D. Sokolova, “Transformatsiia pokhoronnoi obriadnosti u russkikh v XX–XXI vv (Na materialakh Vladimirskoi oblasti)” (PhD diss., Institute of Ethnography and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2013), 53. 17. The term dvoeverie was typically used in a disparaging fashion to refer to the syncretic religiosity of ordinary people, which combined Christian precepts with folk customs. Emelian Iaroslavskii, “Kak vesti antireligioznuiu propaganda. Doklad, prochitannyi 20-­go aprelia na 1-­m Vsesoiuznom s’ezde korrespondentov gaz. ‘Bezbozhnik’ i Obshchestva druzei gazety ‘Bezbozhnik’ ” (Moscow, 1925), 21, cited in Sokolova, “Transformatsiia pokhoronnoi obriadnosti,” 57. 18. For an example of this debate, see Vikentii V. Veresaev, Ob obriadakh starykh i novykh (k khudozhestvennomu oformleniiu byta) (Moscow, 1926). For a criticism of Veresaev’s position, see Lev N. Voitolovskii, “O krasnykh obriadakh (Po povodu stat’i V. Veresaeva ‘K khudozhestvennomu oformleniiu byta,’ ” Krasnaia nov’ (March 1926): 174–82. 19. Lev Trotsky, “O zadachakh derevencskoi molodezhi,” in O novom byte (Moscow, 1924), 14–15. 20. Irina Gutkin, The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, 1890–1934 (Evanston, IL, 1999), 95. For scholarship on rituals in the early Soviet period, see Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York, 1989), 109–12; James Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–1920 (Berkeley, 1993); Daniel Peris, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless (Ithaca, 1998), 86–92; Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1995); Karen Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington, 2000); and Malte Rolf, Soviet Mass Festivals, 1917–1991 (Pittsburgh, 2013). On the post-­Stalin period, see Christel Lane, The Rites of Rulers: Ritual in Industrial Society—The Soviet Case (New York, 1981);

282  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 6 Christopher Binns, “The Changing Face of Power: Revolution and Accommodation in the Soviet Ceremonial System, Part I,” Man 14, no. 4 (December 1979): 585–606; Binns, “The Changing Face of Power: Revolution and Accommodation in the Soviet Ceremonial System, Part II,” Man 15, no. 1 (March 1980): 170–87; Vladimir V. Glebkin, Ritual v sovetskoi kul’ture (Moscow, 1998); and Elena Zhidkova, “Sovetskaia obriadnost’ kak al’ternativa obriadnosti religizonoi,” Gosudarstvo, Religiia i Tserkov’ v Rossii i za Rubezhom, nos. 3–4 (2012): 408–29. On the broader European context of ritual production, see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (New York, 1984). 21. Aleksandr V. Moravov (1878–1951), V Volostnom ZAGSe, 1928, State Tretiakov Gallery. 22. Il’ia Il’f and Evgenii Petrov, The Twelve Chairs, trans. John H. C. Richardson (Evanston, IL, 1997); Il’ia Il’f and Evgenii Petrov, “Mat’” (1935), in Sobranie Sochinenii (Moscow, 1961), 3:382–88. 23. Kornei Chukovskii, Dnevnik (1900–1929) (Moscow, 1991), 153. 24. Mikhail M. Cheremnykh, “You Are Waiting in Vain at the Church Door, Priest—We Live Wonderfully without Icons and God!” (U tserkovnogo poroga zhdesh’ pop, naprasno; bez ikon i boga my zhivem prekrasno), Moscow-­Leningrad, Izd-­vo “Isskustvo,” 1939. 25. On postwar pronatalist campaigns and efforts to rebuild the Soviet family, see Mie Nakachi, “Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union, 1944– 1955” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2008); Mie Nakachi, “Gender, Marriage, and Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union,” in Writing the Stalin Era: Sheila Fitzpatrick and Soviet Historiography, ed. Golfo Alexopoulos, Julie Hessler, and Kiril Tomoff (Basingstoke, 2011), 101–16; and Edward D. Cohn, “Sex and the Married Communist: Family Troubles, Marital Infidelity, and Party Discipline in the Postwar USSR, 1945–64,” Russian Review 68, no. 3 (2009): 429–50. 26. See January 8, 1946, RSFSR Council of People’s Commissars decree “On Measures for the Regularization of Acts of Civil Status” (O meropriiatiiakh po uporiadocheniiu registratsii aktov grazhdanskogo sostoianiia). 27. By the late 1960s, ZAGS organs were understood as administrative bureaucracies that also “perform[ed] a significant educational and prophylactic [vospitatel’nuiu i profilakticheskuiu] role among the population,” which included consultations about the significance of marriage and the inculcation of new rituals into the byt of Soviet people. See K. L. Emel’ianova, “Nekotorye voprosy sovershenstvovaniia deiatel’nosti organov ZAGS,” Pravovedeniie 4 (1968): 101–3. 28. On Khrushchev-­era housing reforms and their effect on Soviet everyday life and society, see Steve E. Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Baltimore, 2013); Christine Varga-­Harris, Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years (Ithaca, NY, 2015). 29. RGASPI-m, f. 1, op. 32, d. 959; Aleksandr N. Shelepin, Otchetnyi doklad Tsentral’nogo Komiteta Vsesoiuznogo leninskogo kommunisticheskogo soiuza molodezhi XIII s’’ezdu komsomola (15 aprelia 1958 g.) (Moscow, 1958), 37–38. 30. RGASPI-­m, f. 1, op. 32, d. 940, l. 30. 31. Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia (Berkeley, 1999); Deborah A. Field, Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia (New York, 2007). 32. RGASPI-­m, f. 1, op. 32, d. 940, ll. 37–92.

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 6   283 33. The first Moscow Wedding Palace was opened on December 15, 1960. See Tsentral’nyi Arkhiv Goroda Moskvy, f. 2511, op. 1. 34. On reports of ZAGS work “on distracting the population from taking part in religious rituals by way of inculcating civic rituals,” see RGASPI-­m, f. 1, op. 32, d. 940, ll. 118–37, 150–69, and RGASPI-­m, f. 1, op. 32, d. 1040, ll. 98–104. 35. A. Kamaev and A. Kulikov, “O trekh momentakh,” Smena, August 26, 1959, 3. See also the discussion of new socialist rituals in Smena, August 13, 1959; and Smena, September 11, 1959. 36. Aleksandr Usakovskii, “Nuzhny li sovetskie obriady?” Izvestiia, October 3, 1959, 6; Evgenii Kriger, “Spor prodolzhaetsia,” Izvestiia, December 5, 1959, 2. In November 1959, the Herzen Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad also had an organized dispute about the place of rituals in Soviet society under the rubric “Soviet Traditions and Rituals Must Help Us Educate the Person of the Future.” See Petr P. Kampars and Nikolai M. Zakovich, Sovetskaia grazhdanskaia obriadnost’ (Moscow, 1967), 33. 37. Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (hereafter GARF), f. 6991, op. 1, d. 1942, l. 12, cited in Tatiana A. Chumachenko, “Sovet po delam Russkoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi pri SNK (SM) SSSR: 1954–1965 gg” (PhD diss., Lomonosov Moscow State University, 2011), 424–26. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Noveishei Istorii (hereafter RGANI), f. 5, op. 35, d. 215, l. 136. 41. Ibid., 137. 42. Ibid., 135. 43. GARF, f. 6991, op. 1, d. 2038, ll. 22–94, cited in Chumachenko, “Sovet po delam Russkoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi,” 426. 44. Ibid. 45. GARF, f. 6991, op. 1, d. 1942. 46. Plenum Tsentral’nogo Komiteta Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza, 18–21 June 1963: Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1964), 6–8. 47. RGANI, f. 72, op. 1, d. 9, ll. 134–35. 48. Ibid., 135. 49. Ibid., 138. 50. Ibid., 138–40. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 136–37. 53. Ibid. 54. RGANI, f. 72, op. 1, d. 15, ll. 121–22. 55. Ibid., 197–99. 56. RGASPI, f. 556, op. 25, d. 191, ll. 26–36; GARF, f. A-­259, op. 1, d. 1952, ll. 118–22. 57. Shortly before being appointed to the council, Belyk had published a letter to the editor in Komsomol’skaia Pravda on the topic of socialist rituals. See Nikolai Belyk, “V etot torzhestvennyi den’ . . . : Pis’mo v redaktsiiu,” Komsomol’skaia Pravda, July 31, 1963, 2. 58. Council members included the deputy minister of culture (V. V. Gordeev), deputy of the Ministry for the Preservation of Social Order (A. Ia. Kudriavtsev), deputy head of the

284  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 6 ­Ministry of Municipal Affairs (L. N. Shakunov), first deputy director of the Council of Ministers State Committee on Cinematography (Mikhail A. Solov’ev), first deputy director of the Council of Ministers State Committee on Print (V. K. Grudinin), secretary of the Moscow city ispolkom (Anatolii M. Pegov), secretary of the Leningrad city council (N. D. Khristoforov), first deputy chair of the Soviet Writers’ Union (Sergei V. Sartakov), secretary of the Composers’ Union (Anatolii G. Novikov), secretary of the Artists’ Union (Boris K. Smirnov), and a member of the Presidium of the All-­Russian Theatrical Society (Nikolai V. Petrov). 59. GARF, f. A-­259, op. 1, d. 1952, ll. 118–22. 60. Vladimir I. Stepakov, Novye prazdniki i obriady—v narodnyi byt (Moscow, 1964). In his pamphlet, Stepakov notes that the church has no access to the public sphere, so if religion was continuing to be reproduced, it was in the home and through rituals. He cites the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate characterization of rituals as “the door to religion” (5). 61. Lane’s The Rites of Rulers remains the most comprehensive treatment of the various kinds of rituals introduced in the Soviet period. 62. Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York, 1994). 63. RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 38, l. 99. 64. Ibid., 97. 65. Ibid., 99. 66. Ibid., 102. 67. Ibid., 107. 68. Ibid., 102, 105–6. 69. Ibid., 103, 107. 70. Ibid., 67. 71. Ibid., 40–41. 72. Ibid., 45. 73. Ibid., 42–44. 74. Ibid., 44. 75. Ibid., 12–14. 76. Ibid., 14. 77. Ibid., 102. On the Orthodox Church’s response to Soviet ritual efforts as well as its own work to modernize rituals, see Natalia Shlikhta, “ ‘Ot traditsii k sovremennosti’: Pravoslavnaia obriadnost’ i prazdniki v usloviiakh antireligioznoi bor’by (na materialakh USSR, 1950-­e–1960-­e gg.),” Gosudarstvo, Religiia i Tserkov’ v Rossii i za Rubezhom, nos. 3–4 (2012): 380–407. 78. RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 38, l. 103. 79. On the Lenin cult, see Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!; and Alexei Yurchak, “Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty,” Representations 129, no. 1 (2015): 116–57. 80. As cited in Merridale, Night of Stone, 278n29; and Lane, Rites of Rulers, 83. 81. For comparative cases of the socialist ritual project in Eastern Europe, see Heléna Tóth, “Shades of Grey: Secular Burial Rites in East Germany,” in Changing European Death Ways, ed. Eric Venbrux, Thomas Quartier, Claudia Venhorst, and Brenda Mathijssen (Münster, 2013), 141–64; Heléna Tóth, “Writing Rituals: The Sources of Socialist Rites of Passage in Hungary, 1958–1970,” in Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe, ed. Paul Betts and Stephen

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 7   285 A. Smith (Basingstoke, 2016), 179–203; and Zsuzsanna Magdo, “The Socialist Sacred: Atheism, Religion, and Mass Culture in Romania, 1948–1989” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-­Champaign, 2016).

Chapter 7 1. David Hume, Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section v, part 2, cited in William James, “The Psychology of Belief,” Mind 14, no. 55 ( July 1889): 331. 2. James, “The Psychology of Belief,” 321. 3. Ibid., 352. 4. This is a rather different argument than Brad S. Gregory’s claim that interpretive territory must be voluntarily given over to the epistemological demands of religious belief and faith-­ based scholarship. Gregory, “The Other Confessional History: On Secular Bias in the Study of Religion,” History and Theory 45 (December 2006): 132–49. My thinking about these questions has been influenced by the work of Sara Ahmed, in particular, her Willful Subjects (Durham, NC, 2014). 5. Ibrahim Abu Rabiʿ, Contemporary Arab Thought: Studies in Post-­1967 Intellectual History (London, 2004); Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective (New York, 2010); Meir Hatina and Christoph Schumann, eds., Arab Liberal Thought after 1967: Old Dilemmas, New Perceptions (New York, 2015). 6. Rudolph Peters and Gert J. J. De Vries, “Apostasy in Islam,” Die Welt des Islams 17, no. 1/4 (1976–77): 1–25; Yohanan Friedmann, “Classification of Unbelievers in Sunnī Muslim Law and Tradition,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 22 (1998): 163–95; Baber Johansen, “Apostasy as Objective and Depersonalized Fact: Two Recent Egyptian Court Judgments,” Social Research 70, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 687–710; Susanne Olsson, “Apostasy in Egypt: Contemporary Cases of Hisbah,” Muslim World 98 (2008): 95–115. 7. Sadiq Jalal al-­ʿAzm, al-­Naqd al-­dhati baʿda al-­hazima (Beirut, 1968). 8. Sadiq Jalal al-­ʿAzm, Naqd al-­fikr al-­dini (Beirut, 1969). Despite the book’s significance at the time of its release, and its recent appearance in English, there has been strikingly little engagement with the substantive arguments in the book; it hardly seems coincidental that the first English-­language translation of Critique of Religious Thought appeared in 2015, in the context of the worst state of secular-­religious tensions and sectarian rancor that the Middle East has seen in its modern history. Al-­ʿAzm, Critique of Religious Thought, trans. George Stergios and Mansour Ajami (Berlin, 2015). 9. Jabir Hamza Farraj, al-­Burhan al-­yaqini li-­l-­radd ʿala kitab “Naqd al-­fikr al-­dini” (Beirut, 1970); Muhammad ʿIzzat Nasrallah, al-­Radd ʿala Sadiq al-­ʿAzm (Beirut, 1970); ʿUthman ibn ʿAbd al-­Qadir Safi, ʿAla Hamish “Naqd al-­fikr al-­dini” (Beirut, 1970); Muhammad Hasan Al Yasin, Hawamish ʿala kitab “Naqd al-­fikr al-­dini” (Beirut, 1971); ʿAbdallah Khurshid Birri, Naqd al-­fikr al-­maddi wa-­l-­dini: Dirasa hawla Allah wa-­l-­madda (Beirut, 1973); ʿAbd al-­R ahman Habbanakah Maydani, Siraʿ maʿa al-­malahida hatta al-­ʿazm (Damascus, 1974); Khalis Jalabi Kanju, Fi naqd al-­fikr al-­dini: Al-­naqd al-­tarikhi (Casablanca, 2014); al-­Sayyid Yasin, Naqd al-­fikr al-­dini (Cairo, 2016). 10. Fadi Bardawil, “The Inward Turn and Its Vicissitudes: Culture, Society, and Politics in

286  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 7 Post-­1967 Arab Leftist Critiques,” in Local Politics and Contemporary Transformations in the Arab World: Governance Beyond the Center, ed. Malika Bouziane, Cilja Harders, and Anja Hoffmann (New York, 2013), 92. 11. Al-­ʿAzm, Naqd al-­fikr al-­dini, 5. I have relied upon the second edition of Naqd al-­fikr al-­ dini; all translations are my own. For an incisive analysis of Yasin al-­Hafiz’s intellectual positions, see Samer Frangie, “Historicism, Socialism and Liberalism after the Defeat: On the Political Thought of Yasin Al-­Hafiz,” Modern Intellectual History 12, no. 2 (August 2015): 325–52. 12. Al-­ʿAzm, Naqd al-­fikr al-­dini, 7. 13. Ibid., 8. 14. Ibid., 9. 15. Ibid., 12–13. 16. Kassab, Contemporary Arab Thought, 75. 17. Al-­ʿAzm, Naqd al-­fikr al-­dini, 13. 18. Ibid., 17. 19. Ibid., 18. 20. Ibid., 23. 21. Ibid., 36–37. 22. Ibid., 102. 23. Ibid., 102–3. 24. Ibid., 86. 25. Ibid., 78. 26. Saba Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” Public Culture 18, no. 2 (2006): 335. 27. Ibid., 339. 28. Samuli Schielke, “Being a Nonbeliever in a Time of Islamic Revival: Trajectories of Doubt and Certainty in Contemporary Egypt,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 44, no. 2 (May 2012): 302. 29. Ibid., 315. 30. To be sure, other writers and public intellectuals (Naguib Mahfouz, Haydar Haydar, and Farag Foda spring to mind) became targets of Islamist ire for their positions concerning the place of the religious in light of Islamic radicalization. 31. This argument, among others, is made in Hussein Ali Agrama, Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt (Chicago, 2012). 32. In his rejection of Abu Zayd’s appeal, ʿAbd al-­Sabbur Shahin, professor at Dar al-­ʿUlum and preacher at ʿAmr Ibn al-­ʿAs mosque, accused Abu Zayd of “ridiculing al-­ʿaql al-­ghaybi (belief in the supernatural), ‘which is the basis of faith’, as the realm of fables and myths, while claiming that secularism is the true interpretation and scientific understanding of religion.” Fauzi M. Najjar, “Islamic Fundamentalism and the Intellectuals: The Case of Naṣr Ḥ āmid Abū Zayd,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 27, no. 2 (2000): 180. See also ʿAbd al-­Sabur Shahin, Qissat “Abu Zayd” wa-­inhisar al-­ʿilmaniyya fi Jamiʿat al-­Qahira (Riyadh, 1990); and Rifʿat Fawzi ʿAbd al-­Muttalib, Naqd kitab Nasr Abu Zayd wa-­dahd shubhatih (Cairo, 1996). 33. Nasir Hamid Abu Zayd, Naqd al-­khitab al-­dini (Cairo, 1992). 34. George N. Sfeir, “Basic Freedoms in a Fractured Legal Culture: Egypt and the Case of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd,” Middle East Journal 52, no. 3 (Summer 1998): 410.

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 8   287 35. Nasir Hamid Abu Zayd, “Towards Understanding the Qurʾān’s Worldview: An Autobiographical Reflection,” in New Perspectives on the Qurʾan: The Qurʾan in Its Historical Context 2, ed. Gabriel Said Reynolds (London, 2011), 50–55. 36. Ibid., 52. Taha Husayn’s Fi al-­adab al-­jahili (Cairo, 1929) was not exclusively an exercise in poetry criticism but an engagement with what he perceived to be flawed and corrupt sources of belief and religious authority as well; Muhammad Ahmad Khalafallah, Al-­Fann al-­qassasi fi al-­Qurʾan al-­karim (Cairo, 1972 [1949]). 37. Abu Zayd, “Towards Understanding the Qurʾān’s Worldview,” 67–68. 38. Ibid., 68–69. Abu Zayd, Mafhum al-­nass: Dirasa fi ʿulum al-­Qurʾan (Cairo, 1990), and Abu Zayd, Naqd al-­khitab al-­dini. 39. Agrama, Questioning Secularism, 19. 40. Najjar, “Islamic Fundamentalism and the Intellectuals,” 184. 41. Kilian Bälz, “Submitting Faith to Judicial Scrutiny through the Family Trial: The ‘Abu Zayd Case,’ ” Die Welt des Islams 37, no. 2 ( July 1997): 155. 42. On Hanafi, see Yasmeen Daifallah, “Turath as Critique: Hassan Hanafi’s Critique of the Modern Arab Subject,” in Arabic Thought against the Authoritarian Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Present, ed. Jens Hanssen and Max Weiss (Cambridge, 2018), 285–310. 43. Abu Zayd, Naqd al-­khitab al-­dini, 19–21. 44. Ibid., 22–23. 45. Ibid., 189–90. 46. Ibid., 197. 47. Talal Asad, “Thinking about Religion, Belief, and Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, ed. Robert Orsi (Cambridge, 2011), 43. 48. Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford, on 31 October 1958 (Oxford, 1959). 49. Hussein Ali Agrama, “Secularism, Sovereignty, Indeterminacy: Is Egypt a Secular or a Religious State? Comparative Studies in Society and History 52, no. 3 ( July 2010): 1–29. 50. Agrama, Questioning Secularism, 104.

Chapter 8 1. Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA, 2012), with chap. 6, “Secularizing Knowledge,” at 298–364. 2. “Belief and unbelief ” can of course be construed in different ways. For the purposes of this chapter I take them to refer, respectively, to monotheistic religious beliefs and the absence or repudiation thereof. It seems to me more accurate and more analytically neutral to refer to “secular belief ” rather than “unbelief,” since non-­religious beliefs are never a mere absence of belief or a matter of acknowledging (self-­)evident truths. Analytically, the issue is never whether but always what some individual or group believes. 3. The seminal work about this distinctly modern and Western conceptualization of religion was Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York, 1962); see also Peter Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1990); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, 2005); William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence:

288  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 8 Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (New York, 2009), 57–122; and Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, 2013). More recently, Peter Harrison has discussed the implication of this analysis for the “science and religion debate” in The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago, 2015). 4. James Turner, “Catholicism and Modern Knowledge: A Historical Sketch,” in Turner, Language, Religion, Knowledge: Past and Present (Notre Dame, 2003), 120. 5. Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition (Lanham, MD, 2009), 135. 6. George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (Oxford, 1994); Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformations and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago, 1996); Jon H. Roberts and James Turner, The Sacred and the Secular University, intro. John F. Wilson (Princeton, 2000); Christian Smith, “Secularizing American Higher Education: The Case of Early American Sociology,” in The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life, ed. Smith (Berkeley, 2003), 97–159. 7. For a few examples of such intellectual work that bear especially on Christianity, see David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI, 2003), and Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven, 2013); Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology (Washington, DC, 1982); John M. Rist, Real Ethics: Rethinking the Foundations of Morality (Cambridge, 2002); the entire oeuvre of Alvin Plantinga, including Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (New York, 2011); C. Stephen Evans, The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith: The Incarnational Narrative as History (Oxford, 1996); and the monumental (and ongoing) study by John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, 5 vols. (New York, 1991–2016). 8. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding [1748], ed. Stephen Buckle (Cambridge, 2007), section ten, “Of Miracles,” 97. For a few philosophical critiques of Hume’s argument against miracles, see J. Houston, Reported Miracles: A Critique of Hume (Cambridge, 1994), esp. 121–207; Evans, Historical Christ and Jesus of Faith, esp. 153–56; David Johnson, Hume, Holism, and Miracles (Ithaca, 1999); and John Earman, Hume’s Abject Failure: The Argument against Miracles (New York, 2000). 9. See, e.g., Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York, 1996). For a superb account of the discovery of the mechanism of genetic inheritance, see James Schwartz, In Pursuit of the Gene: From Darwin to DNA (Cambridge, MA, 2008). 10. John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 90. 11. Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, 1974); Michael C. Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies (Oxford, 2010). See also Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, 2005). 12. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power” [1777], in Philosophical and Theological Writings, ed. and trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, 2005), 87. 13. See F. H. Bradley, “The Presuppositions of Critical History” [1874], in The Presuppositions of Critical History, and Aphorisms, ed. Guy Stock (Bristol, UK, 1993); Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation” [1919], in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C.

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 8   289 Wright Mills (New York, 1946), 129–56; Rudolf Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, ed. and trans. Reginald H. Fuller (1953; New York, 1961); and Van Harvey, The Historian and the Believer: The Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief (1966; Urbana, 1996), which is heavily indebted to Bradley and Troeltsch. 14. See Brad S. Gregory, “No Room for God? History, Science, Metaphysics, and the Study of Religion,” History and Theory 47 (2008): 495–519; Gregory, “Science versus Religion? The Insights and Oversights of the ‘New Atheists,’ ” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 12, no. 4 (Fall 2009): 17–55. 15. On the exclusion of God in modern science based on univocal metaphysical assumptions, Occam’s razor applied to the relationship between natural and supernatural causality, and the deadlocked theological controversies of the Reformation era, see Gregory, Unintended Reformation, 25–73, with the conflation of historicism and metaphysical naturalism analyzed at 413–14n116 and 527n164. 16. For two important collections of articles indicative of the wide-­ranging interests and multicultural contacts among early modern Jesuits, see The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley et al. (Toronto, 1999), and The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. O’Malley et al. (Toronto, 2006). For the Second Vatican Council on the relationship of Roman Catholicism to other religious traditions, see “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-­Christian Religions” [Nostra aetate], in Documents of Vatican II, ed. Austin P. Flannery (Grand Rapids, MI, 1975), 738–42. The document was issued officially on October 18, 1965. 17. On the latter point, see Gregory, “No Room for God?” 508–10, 514, and Gregory, Unintended Reformation, 28, 384, 477–78n152. 18. See, e.g., Erika Rummel, The Humanist-­Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation (Cambridge, MA, 1995). 19. In the absence of a recent monograph, see David L. Wykes, “The Contribution of the Dissenting Academy to the Emergence of Rational Dissent,” in Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-­Century Britain, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, 1996), 99– 139, as well as older scholarship by J. W. Ashley Smith, The Birth of Modern Education: The Contribution of the Dissenting Academies, 1660–1800 (London, 1954); Herbert McLachlan, English Education under the Test Acts: Being the History of the Nonconformist Academies, 1662–1820 (Manchester, 1931); and Irene Parker, Dissenting Academies in England: Their Rise and Progress and Their Place among the Educational Systems of the Country (Cambridge, 1914). 20. On confessional control of higher education in the Reformation era, see Notker Hammerstein, “Relations with Authorities,” in A History of Universities in Europe [hereafter HUE], vol. 2, Early Modern Universities (1500–1800), ed. Hilde de Ridder-­Symoens (Cambridge, 1996), 117–21, 125–29, 130–31, 132–33, 134–37, 139, 140, 143, 147–48, 150–51; Peter A. Vandermeersch, “Teachers,” in ibid., 226–27; Rosa di Simone, “Admission,” in ibid., 293; Hilde de Ridder-­ Symoens, “Mobility,” in ibid., 419–21, 424–25, 429, 446; and Olaf Pedersen, “Tradition and Innovation,” in ibid., 478–80. 21. Indeed, for most universities this concern extended throughout the early modern period; see Laurence Brockliss, “Curricula,” in HUE, vol. 2, ed. de Ridder-­Symoens, 586. 22. Those who sought such patronage and served rulers in this way were overwhelmingly male, but for mention of female alchemical adepts in the Holy Roman Empire, see Tara

290  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 8 Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (Chicago, 2007), 2, 18, as well as Nummedal, Anna Zieglerin and the Lion’s Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany (Philadelphia, 2019); in England, Lady Grace Mildmay (1552–1620) is an example of a noblewoman who turned rooms in her house into a de facto pharmaceutical distillery. See Alix Cooper, “Homes and Households,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge, 2006), 227. 23. See Pedersen, “Tradition and Innovation,” 468–69; Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 114, 115, 129–30, 236; Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, ed. Brigitta Oestreich and H. G. Koenigsberger, trans. David McLintock (Cambridge, 1982), 77–79; and Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1988), 18–23. 24. Anthony Grafton with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA, 1992); Klaus A. Vogel, “European Expansion and Self-­Definition,” in Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, ed. Park and Daston, 818–39. 25. Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, 2007); Steven J. Harris, “Networks of Travel, Correspondence, and Exchange,” in Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, ed. Park and Daston, 341–62. 26. See the diverse case studies in Patronage and Institutions: Science, Technology, and Medicine at the European Court, 1500–1750, ed. Bruce T. Moran (Woodbridge, UK, 1991). 27. Bruce T. Moran, “Courts and Academies,” in Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, ed. Park and Daston, 271. 28. On Galileo, see Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Age of Absolutism (Chicago, 1993); on Brahe and Kepler, see R. J. W. Evans, Rudolf II and His World: A Study in Intellectual History, 1576–1612 (Oxford, 1973), 136–38, 152–53, 187–90, 245–47, 279–80; on the “exodus of the scientists” from early modern universities, see Pedersen, “Tradition and Innovation,” 470–74. 29. Steven Shapin, “The Man of Science,” in Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, ed. Park and Daston, 181–83; for Leibniz, see Maria Rossa Antognazza, Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge, 2008), 67, 80. 30. Brockliss, “Curricula,” 583. 31. See The humble advice of the Assembly of Divines, now by authority of Parliament sitting at Westminster, concerning a confession of faith . . . (London, 1647); T. L. Underwood, “Denne, Henry (1605/6?–1666),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford, 2004), online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008, http://www​ .oxforddnb.com/view/article/7497; The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 2 vols., ed. Thomas N. Corn, Ann Hughes, and David Loewenstein (Oxford, 2009); and Leo Damrosch, The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit (Cambridge, MA, 1996). 32. Richard Popkin, The History of Skepticism from Savonarola to Bayle, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 2003); Zachary Sayre Schiffman, On the Threshold of Modernity: Relativism in the French Renaissance (Baltimore, 1991). For some seventeenth-­century English examples of religious skepticism

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 8   291 born of interpretative individualism and doctrinal pluralism, see Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-­Century Revolution (London, 1993), 225–38. 33. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan [1651], ed. Richard Tuck, rev. student ed. (Cambridge, 1996), 1.7, pp. 47–49, and 3.33, p. 267; for Wilkins, see Barbara Shapiro, John Wilkins, 1614–1672: An Intellectual Biography (Berkeley, 1969), 228–34; John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [1689], ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), 4.1–3, 4.16–18, pp. 525–62, 657–96. 34. Francis Bacon, “Of Tribute; or, Giving That Which is Due” [c. 1592], in Bacon, Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford, 1996), 34. 35. Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge, 2008). 36. With its close ties to the French crown, the Paris Académie in particular served as a model for national and regional scientific academies established in subsequent decades, including those in Berlin (1700), St. Petersburg (1724), Stockholm (1739), and Göttingen (1751). See James McClellan III, “Scientific Institutions and the Organization of Science,” in Cambridge History of Science, vol. 4, Eighteenth-­Century Science, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge, 2003), 90. 37. On Leiden, see Karin Maag, Seminary or University? The Genevan Academy and Reformed Higher Education, 1560–1620 (Aldershot, UK, 1995), 174–82; Anthony Grafton, “Civic Humanism and Scientific Scholarship at Leiden,” in Grafton, Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 118–37. On Halle and Göttingen, see Charles E. McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 1700–1914 (Cambridge, 1980), 35–57; Thomas Albert Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (Oxford, 2006), 87–121; Ian Hunter, “Multiple Enlightenments: Rival Aufklärer at the University of Halle, 1690–1730,” in The Enlightenment World, ed. Martin Fitzpatrick et al. (London, 2007), 576–95; and Legaspi, Death of Scripture, 27–51. Neither eighteenth-­century Glasgow nor Edinburgh required a profession of faith in the Church of Scotland; see de Ridder-­Symoens, “Mobility,” 438. 38. John R. Betz, After Enlightenment: Hamann as Post-­Secular Visionary (Malden, MA, 2009), 230–57. 39. Ulrich L. Lehner, Enlightened Monks: The German Benedictines, 1740–1803 (Oxford, 2011), 175–225, with discussion of Gerbert at 205–7. 40. The combination of Enlightened and Reformed Protestant ideas in Edwards’s thought is a theme that runs throughout the magisterial biography by George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven, 2003), but see esp. 59–81. Mark Noll notes the paradox of Edwards having promoted the evangelical revivalism that “led to a decline of theology” because it “set up a style of faith with scant use for patient, comprehensive Christian thinking about the world and life as a whole.” Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, MI, 1994), 80. On Muratori, see Alphonse Dupront, L. A. Muratori et la société européene des pré-­Lumières (Florence, 1976); and Mario Rosa, “The Catholic Aufklärung in Italy,” in A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe, ed. Ulrich L. Lehner and Michael Printy (Leiden, 2010), 218–22. On Boscovich, see Marcus Hellyer, Catholic Physics: Jesuit Natural Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Notre Dame, 2005), 177–78, 229–32; and Ugo Baldini, “The Reception of a Theory: A Provisional Syllabus of Boscovich Literature, 1746–1800,” in Jesuits II, ed. O’Malley et al., 405–50. 41. For examples of French Jesuits doing this in the 1730s and 1740s with ideas from Malebranche and Locke, see Jeffrey D. Burson, “The Catholic Enlightenment in France from the Fin

292  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 8 de Siècle Crisis of Consciousness to the Revolution, 1650–1789,” in Companion to Catholic Enlightenment, ed. Lehner and Printy, 79–91; for examples of German Benedictines doing likewise in the 1770s and 1780s, influenced by Locke, Wolff, or Kant, see Lehner, Enlightened Monks, 183–84, 189–91, 199–203, 208–9, 212–15. 42. For the quotation, see Legaspi, Death of Scripture, xi. 43. On the triumph of Newtonianism in university arts faculties, see Brockliss, “Curricula,” 586–87, at 587; Roy Porter, “Scientific Revolution and Universities,” in HUE, vol. 2, ed. de Ridder-­Symoens, 538–39; and Laurence Brockliss, “Science, Universities, and Other Public Spaces: Teaching Science in Europe and the Americas,” in Cambridge History of Science, vol. 4, ed. Porter, 60–68. 44. For two examples of arguments that human behavior cannot in principle be understood on the model of the natural sciences, which explains the social sciences’ “absence of the discovery of any law-­like generalizations whatsoever,” see Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (1958; London, 1984); and Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, 2006), 79–108, at 88. See also Christian Smith, What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up (Chicago, 2010). 45. See Gregory, Unintended Reformation, 285–87. 46. In the absence of a comprehensive modern monograph, see the brief overview in Jonathan Wright, “The Suppression and Restoration,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, ed. Thomas Worcester (Cambridge, 2008), 263–72, as well as the relevant articles in part 6 of Jesuits II, ed. O’Malley et al. 47. See Derek Beales, Prosperity and Plunder: European Catholic Monasteries in the Age of Revolution, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, 2003); Lehner, Enlightened Monks, 227–28. 48. Walter Rüegg, “Themes,” in HUE, vol. 3, Universities in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (1800–1945), ed. Rüegg (Cambridge, 2004), 3. 49. On Berlin’s founding, primacy, and influence, see McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 101–49; Howard, Protestant Theology; Rüegg, “Themes,” 5, 13–23; and Theodore Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and Its Institutions (Princeton, 1990), 286–308. On the far from straightforward influence of the “German model” on American universities with particular reference to the University of Michigan from the 1850s into the 1890s, see James Turner and Paul Bernard, “The ‘German Model’ and the Graduate School: The University of Michigan and the Origin Myth of the American University,” in Turner, Language, Religion, Knowledge, 69–94. For the adoption of the Western research university model and assumptions around the world in the twentieth century, see David John Frank and Jay Gabler, Reconstructing the University: Worldwide Shifts in Academia in the 20th Century (Stanford, 2006). 50. The quoted phrase is Ziolkowski’s, in German Romanticism, 293. 51. In this work, Kant devoted more attention to the relationship between philosophy and the theology faculty than to the relationship between philosophy and the law and medical faculties combined. Immanuel Kant, Der Streit der Fakultäten [1798], in Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. 7 (Berlin, 1917), [13]–116. See also Howard’s well-­contextualized discussion of the work in Protestant Theology, 121–29, as well as the broader context of German university reform initiatives at Jena in the 1790s in Ziolkowski, German Romanticism, 237–52.

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 8   293 52. McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 104, 110, 111–12, 118, 124–25; Howard, Protestant Theology, 131, 138, 141, 174, 181. 53. For the quotation, see McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 132; on the importance of the unity of Wissenschaft in the Romantic university, see Ziolkowski, German Romanticism, 239–40, 247–49, 251–52, 253–54, 288. 54. Richard G. Olson, Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-­Century Europe (Urbana, 2008), 87–121; Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy, 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge, 2002), 178–83; Christophe Charle, “Patterns,” in HUE, vol. 3, ed. Rüegg, 47–49. 55. “Emerson provided an American version of the German idealist celebration of the self and creativity.” Marsden, Soul, 187. 56. “The Germans invented the research ideal. The Americans invented an institution to house and perpetuate it. . . . The ever narrowing gyre of specialization was no accidental spinoff from the modern fragmentation of knowledge, but the flight plan of the graduate school from its launching.” Turner and Bernard, “German Model,” in Turner, Language, Religion, Knowledge, 94. On Gilman and the research emphasis at Johns Hopkins, see Marsden, Soul, 153–56. 57. For Europe, see Konrad H. Jarausch, “Graduation and Careers,” in HUE, vol. 3, ed. Rüegg, 363–89. For the United States, see Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, 1991); Roberts and Turner, Sacred and Secular University; Thomas L. Haskell, The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-­Century Crisis of Authority (1977; Baltimore, 2000); and Christian Smith, “Sociology,” in Secular Revolution, ed. Smith, 97–159. 58. On Liebig, see William H. Brock, Justus von Liebig: The Chemical Gatekeeper (Cambridge, 1997). 59. This remains no less true today. Regardless of the character of their arguments, or how sophisticated their questioning of the relationship between natural-­scientific truth claims and reality, philosophers and historians of science have no influence on the application of scientific findings by engineers, corporations, and governments. What matters for human beings’ transformation of the world based on scientific findings is not the specification of their epistemological status but simply that they work in their applications regardless of what that status might be. 60. Woodrow Wilson, “Princeton in the Nation’s Service,” October 21, 1896, in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 10, 1896–1898, ed. Arthur S. Link (Princeton, 1971), 29. 61. On Comte set in a broad intellectual context, see Olson, Science and Scientism, 62–84; and Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life [1913], trans. Karen E. Fields (New York, 1995), 17. On the pervasive influence of Comte’s positivism and the reception of his starkly supersessionist conception of history in the United States beginning in the 1850s, see Christian Smith, “Introduction: Rethinking the Secularization of American Public Life,” in Secular Revolution, ed. Smith, 54–55. 62. Christian Smith, “Sociology,” in Secular Revolution, ed. Smith, esp. 121–26, 147–49; see also MacIntyre, After Virtue, 79–87, 106–8. 63. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, 1989); Marsden, Soul, 90–93; Reuben, Making, 19–23. 64. See especially Noll, Scandal. “When [Protestant] Christians turned to their intellectual resources for dealing with these matters, they found that the cupboard was nearly bare” (106). 65. The same dynamic played out in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the first decade of the twentieth century, “one has the phenomenon in Germany

294  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 9 of a series of competing religious groups, each claiming to overcome the fragmentation and division of which they were in fact symptoms.” George S. Williamson, “A Religious Sonderweg? Reflections on the Sacred and the Secular in the Historiography of Modern Germany,” Church History 75, no. 1 (2006): 152. On the tendency of many Protestant colleges (including those run by Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians) to emphasize their denominational distinctiveness after the mid-­nineteenth century, see David B. Potts, “American Colleges in the Nineteenth Century: From Localism to Denominationalism,” History of Education Quarterly 11 (1971): 363–80. 66. Smith, “Introduction,” 75. 67. On the central importance of neo-­Thomism to American Catholic higher education in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Philip Gleason, Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1995), with discussion of Pascendi Dominici Gregis and Humani Generis at 13–17 and 280–81, respectively. 68. Although the Catholic University of America was among the fourteen charter members of the Association of American Universities in 1900, it “failed to fulfill its promise of providing a national locus for advanced scholarship with a distinctive Catholic perspective.” John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore, 2004), 110–12, at 112. 69. Kathleen A. Mahoney, Catholic Higher Education in Protestant America: The Jesuits and Harvard in the Age of the University (Baltimore, 2003), 243–47; on some of the internal intellectual and pedagogical reasons for the demise of neo-­scholasticism, see Gleason, Contending, 297–304. 70. The quoted phrase is Gleason’s, in Contending, 318. 71. For one recent, unfortunate example of what can happen when an ideologically blinkered cognitive psychologist plays at intellectual history, see Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York, 2018).

Chapter 9 This chapter is a revised and abbreviated version of a pre-­circulated essay first presented to the Davis Seminar for Historical Studies in Princeton, New Jersey (2012–13); a revised version was presented to the Department of History at the University of California at Berkeley (March 16, 2015). For their many comments and suggestions, I am grateful to those who attended the presentations in both Princeton and Berkeley. I am especially grateful to the editors of this volume: Katja Guenther, Philip Nord, and Max Weiss. 1. Max Weber, “The Social Psychology of the World Religions,” originally published between 1915 and 1919 as “Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen,” in serial form in the Jafféschen Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft, published in full in the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Tübingen, 1922–23), 1:237–68. 2. Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (Garden City, NY, 1967). 3. David Martin, A General Theory of Secularization (New York, 1978), 2–5; in recent years Martin has modified his stance. See, e.g., Martin, On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory (Ashgate, 2005). 4. Steve Bruce, Religion and Modernization (Oxford, 1992). 5. Steve Bruce, God Is Dead: Secularization in the West (New York, 2002).

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 9   295 6. Rodney Stark, “Secularization, R.I.P.,” Sociology of Religion 60, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 249–73, at 270. 7. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, 2007). 8. These statistics can be found in Bruce, God Is Dead, 120 and passim. 9. Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, 2010); and, more recently, Scott, Sex and Secularism (Princeton, 2017). 10. Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Alister Chapman, John Coffey, and Brad Gregory, eds., Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion (Notre Dame, 2009). 11. José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, 1994). 12. For a more analytical treatment of this theme, see my essay, “Critical Theory between the Sacred and the Profane,” Constellations 23, no. 4 (December 2016): 466–81. 13. Quoted from a letter dated February 19, 1909: “It is true that I am absolutely unmusical religiously and have no need or ability to erect any psychic edifices of a religious character within me. But a thorough self-­examination has told me that I am neither anti-­religious nor irreligious.” In Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1975), 324, originally published as Max Weber, ein Lebensbild (Tübingen, 1926). 14. Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, Dialektik der Säkularisierung: Über Vernunft und Religion (Freiburg, 2005). In English as The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion, trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco, 2006); Habermas’s essay, “Pre-­political Foundations of the Democratic Constitutional State?”; Ratzinger’s essay, “That Which Holds the World Together: The Pre-­political Moral Foundations of a Free State.” 15. Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Malden, MA, 2008); originally in German as Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion (Frankfurt, 2005). 16. Michael Reder, ed., Ein Bewußtsein von dem, was fehlt: Eine Diskussion mit Jürgen Habermas (Berlin, 2008), in English as Habermas et al., An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-­Secular Age, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Malden, MA, 2010). 17. Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West, The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, edited and with an introduction by Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Vanantwerpen, afterword by Craig Calhoun (New York, 2011). 18. Jürgen Habermas, “Themes in Post-­Metaphysical Thinking,” in Post-­Metaphysical Thinking (Cambridge, MA, 1993). 19. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Boston, 1985), esp. chap. 5, section 3: “The Rational Structure of the Linguistification of the Sacred.” In the most lucid presentation of this idea, Habermas explains the historical emergence of communicative action as the “hypothesis that the socially integrative and expressive functions that were at first fulfilled by the ritual practice pass over to communicative action; the authority of the holy is gradually replaced by the authority of an achieved consensus. This means a freeing of communicative action from sacrally protected normative contexts. The disenchantment and disempowering of the domain of the sacred takes place by way of a linguistification of the ritually secured, basic normative agreement; going along with this is a release of the rationality potential in communicative action. The aura of rapture and terror that emanates from the sacred, the spellbinding power of the holy, is

296  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 9 sublimated into the binding/bonding force of criticizable validity claims and that the same time turned into an everyday occurrence” (77). It is interesting to note that Habermas sees this process of disenchantment as carried even further in modern philosophy itself: a crucial theme in Habermas’s social theory is that the earlier (Kantian-­Hegelian) conception of transcendental reason has given way to a post-­transcendental and merely pragmatic conception of reason as the mundane and fallibilistic medium of public debate. Reason itself has been secularized. On this point, see Habermas’s rejoinder to Apel’s idea of the “transcendental” in Habermas, “What Is Universal Pragmatics?” (1976), in Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Communication, ed. Maeve Cooke (Cambridge, MA, 2000). For a comment, see, inter alia, Eduardo Mendieta, “Rationalization, Modernity, and Secularization,” in Habermas: Key Concepts, ed. Barbara Fultner (Durham, UK, 2011); and Johannes Berger, “The Linguistification of the Sacred and the Delinguistification of the Economy,” in Communicative Action, ed. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 165–80. 20. Jürgen Habermas, “Faith and Knowledge,” originally published in The Future of Human Nature, trans. Hella Beister and William Rehg (Cambridge, 2003), reprinted in Eduardo Mendieta, ed., The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers (New York, 2005), 336, my emphasis on “only.” 21. My assessment of a marked change in Habermas’s theoretical orientation toward religion is not uncontroversial. See, e.g., the strong rejoinder by Richard J. Bernstein, “Replik auf Peter E. Gordon,” in WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 13, no. 1 (2016): 157–66. 22. Jürgen Habermas, “Themes in Postmetaphysical Thinking,” in Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge, MA, 1993), originally published in German as Nachmetaphysisches Denken: Philosophische Aufsätze (Berlin, 1988), 51, my emphasis. 23. Peter E. Gordon, “What Hope Remains?” The New Republic, December 11, 2011. 24. See Friedrich H. Tenbruck, “Das Werk Max Webers,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 27 (1975): 663–702, translated and abridged as Tenbruck, “The Problem of Thematic Unity in the Works of Max Weber,” British Journal of Sociology 31, no. 3 (September 1980): 316–51; quote from the English version, 330. 25. See Toby E. Huff and Wolfgang Schluchter, eds., Max Weber and Islam (New Brunswick, NJ, 1999). 26. Max Weber, “Vorbemerkung,” Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, band 1 (Tübingen, 1920), 14. 27. Ibid., 13. 28. Ibid., 11. 29. Max Weber, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, ed. Hans H. Gerth (New York, 1951), 228; translation modified. 30. Ibid., 227. 31. Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, 335. 32. Ibid., my emphasis. 33. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (New York, 2002), 121. 34. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures, ed. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong (Indianapolis, 2004), 1–31.

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 9   297 35. Weber writes that “instrumentally rational action serves as an ideal type, enabling us to assess the significance of the irrational action.” “Some Categories of Interpretative Sociology,” Sociological Quarterly 22, no. 2 (Spring 1981): 151–80, at 153–54. 36. Weber, “Some Categories of Interpretative Sociology,” 152. 37. This corroborates the summary by Friedrich Tenbruck: “Weber holds that the original and, in a certain sense, natural relation of man to the world is, subjectively, purposive-­rational; because of this man conceives of reality as a multiplicity of disconnected facts and isolated situations. The effects [sic] of this for the individual was that, reality being so splintered, action itself could be only fragmented and situational. Religious development, therefore, is a rationalization, because it systematizes facts (and explanations) and unifies standpoints of action, but always under the spur of ‘charismatic’ needs, and so leads to further questions of theodicies. Under the pressure of this rationalization religions are forced to provide comprehensive images of the world and articulated theodicies, which present the most consistent forms of rationalizations of the world from the viewpoint of a comprehensive explanation of these specifically meaningless aspects of reality and according to the viewpoint of supramundane salvation.” Tenbruck, “The Problem of Thematic Unity in the Works of Max Weber,” British Journal of Sociology 31, no. 3 (September 1980): 316–51, at 341; my emphasis in the first sentence. 38. Max Weber, Economy and Society (New York, 1968), 399–400. 39. For a subtle reconstruction, see Jon Elster, “Rationality, Economy, and Society,” in The Cambridge Companion to Max Weber, ed. Stephen P. Turner (Cambridge, 2000), 21–41. 40. “Die Fähigkeit des Erstaunens über den Gang der Welt ist Voraussetzung der Möglichkeit des Fragens nach ihrem Sinn.” Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie. III. Antike Judentum, 2nd ed. (Tübingen, 1923), 221. 41. Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (Boston, 1963), 125. 42. “The salvation sought by the intellectual is always based on inner need, and hence it is at once more remote from life, more theoretical, and more systematic than salvation from external distress, the quest for which is characteristic of nonprivileged strata. The intellectual seeks in various ways, the casuistry of which extends into infinity, to endow his life with a pervasive meaning, and thus to find unity with himself, with his fellow man, and with the cosmos. It is the intellectual who conceives of the ‘world’ as a problem of meaning [‘Sinn’ problem]. As intellectualism suppresses belief in magic, the world’s processes become disenchanted [‘entzaubert’—quotation marks in original, PG], lose their magical significance, and henceforth simply “are” and “happen” but no longer signify anything [aber nichts mehr ‘bedeuten’]. As a consequence, there is a growing demand that the world and the total pattern of life be subject to an order that is significant and meaningful [bedeutungshaft und ‘sinnvoll’]. The conflict of this requirement of meaningfulness with the empirical realities of the world and its institutions, and with the possibilities of conducting one’s life in the empirical world, are responsible for the intellectual’s characteristic flight from the world.” Economy and Society, 506; German edition Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, chap. V, “Typen religiöser Vergemeinschaftung (Religionssoziologie),” 245–381, at 307–8. 43. It should be noted that some scholars would dispute my claim that Weber was in any explicit sense a theorist of secularization. Peter Ghosh, for example, has argued that “secularization” was a term about which Weber had “reservations” and which he “abandoned in his re­ ligious writings after 1912.” See, e.g., Peter Ghosh, Max Weber and the Protestant Ethic: Twin

298  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 10 Histories (Oxford, 2014), 270. Against Ghosh, however, it may suffice to consult the posthumously published Economy and Society, in which Weber deploys the concept of secularization seemingly without reservations, in both the restricted legal sense, as the state’s expropriation of church lands, and the more expansive sense, as a modification in cognitive and normative schemes. See, e.g., Weber’s remark that military conflict ranks among “the most important factors which effected the secularization of thinking [die Säkularisierung des Denkens] as to what should be valid as a norm [über das Geltensollende]” and war has thus helped further “the emancipation of social thought from magically guaranteed traditions [speziell seine Emanzipation von der magisch garantierten Tradition].” Quoted from Economy and Society, 771; German edition, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 409. This is only one among several examples that would seem to suggest that Weber used the term in a sense familiar to us today. 44. Max Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften, ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Tübingen, 1988), 544. 45. During the actual deliberations over the structure of the Weimar constitution Weber remained adamant as to the need for a “plebiscitary Reich president” whose role he described in one rather notorious passage as a “dictatorship” (Diktatur). See Weber, “Der Reichspräsident” (originally published in the Berliner Börsenzeitung, February 25, 1919), reprinted in Weber, Politische Schriften, 498–501. On this essay and its political significance, see Wolfgang Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 1890–1920 (Chicago, 1985), esp. 364–65. 46. See Jürgen Habermas, Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften (Frankfurt, 1982), 85. The claim aroused considerable controversy; see, e.g., Dana R. Villa, “The Legacy of Max Weber in Weimar Political and Social Theory,” in Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy, ed. Peter E. Gordon and John McCormick (Princeton, 2013), 73–100. Also see Catherine Colliot-­Thélène, “Carl Schmitt versus Max Weber: Juridical Rationality and Economic Rationality,” in The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, ed. Chantal Mouffe (New York, 1999), 138–54. 47. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 14, 1914–1916 (London, 1963), 243–58. 48. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber: Collected Essays (Oxford, 1989), 24-­43. 49. Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (1949; Chicago, 1957). 50. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (Cambridge, MA, 1985); and see Gordon, “Secularization, Genealogy, and the Legitimacy of the Modern Age: Remarks on the Löwith-Blumenberg Debate,” Journal of the History of Ideas 80, no. 1 ( January 2019): 147–70. 51. Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior (New York, 1975).

Chapter 10 This essay is based on content previously published in Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Islam in Pakistan: A History (Princeton, 2018).

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 10   299 1. Constituent Assembly of Pakistan Debates (Karachi, 1947–54 [hereafter CAPD]), 1/2 (August 11, 1947), 18–21, esp. 19–20. 2. Proper names are usually spelled the way they were by those discussed here. Thus Liaquat Ali Khan rather than Liyaqat ʿAli Khan, Ayub Khan rather than Ayyub Khan, and so forth. 3. Jawaharlal Nehru to B. C. Roy, April 4, 1950, in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, 2nd ser. (New Delhi, 1984–), 14/1: 170–73, at 171. 4. Census of Pakistan: Population According to Religion (Table 6) (Karachi, 1951), 1. 5. The figures from the 1998 census are available at www.census.gov.pk/Religion.htm. For the figures from the 2017 census, which had not been fully reported at the time of this writing, see Khaleeq Kiani, “Country’s Population Surges to Nearly 208m,” Dawn (Karachi), August 26, 2017. 6. Report of the Court of Inquiry Constituted under Punjab Act II of 1954 to Enquire into the Punjab Disturbances of 1953 (Lahore, 1954), 10. Two decades later, in hearings at a closed session of the National Assembly, the lower house of the Pakistani parliament, Mirza Nasir Ahmad, the head of the Ahmadi community, gave a significantly higher figure, 3.5 to 4 million, as the size of his community in Pakistan at that time. Proceedings of the Special Committee of the Whole House Held in Camera to Consider the Qadiani Issue, 21 parts, August 5–September 7, 1974 (Islamabad, [2011]), #1 (August 5, 1974), 29 (accessed at http://archive.org/details/1974-na-committee​ -ahmadiyya). Also see Nawa-­i waqt (Lahore), August 1, 1974. 7. By the ʿulama, I mean those educated in institutions of traditional Islamic learning and basing their claims to religious authority on a sustained engagement with the centuries-­old Islamic scholarly tradition. Those I refer to as modernists are characterized above all by the desire to rethink and adapt Muslim practices, institutions, and norms in light of the imperatives of modernity, as they understand them. The Islamists share much with the modernists in their intellectual backgrounds and in their critique of the ʿulama and their scholarly tradition, but it is their single-­minded concern with the public implementation of Islamic norms that sets them apart from the modernists. While it is analytically useful to distinguish these competing strands, they should not be seen as internally cohesive camps or, by the same token, as necessarily irreconcilable with rival orientations on particular issues. For instance, Pakistani Islamists and the Sunni ʿulama have usually stood together in their opposition to the Ahmadis, and I therefore speak of them together in much of this essay. 8. Andreas Rieck, The Shias of Pakistan: An Assertive and Beleaguered Minority (New York, 2015), xi. 9. There is in fact a significant difference of opinion on this question between two groups of Ahmadis. The larger of the two is often referred to by opponents as Qadianis—with reference to Qadian, the birthplace of the community’s founder—and is best known for the belief that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was a prophet. Yet they consider him to be a prophet within Muhammad’s community (ummati nabi), which, in their view, preserves the status of Muhammad as the last of God’s full-­fledged prophets. The other group, called the Lahoris with reference to their base in Lahore, views Ghulam Ahmad as a reformer but not a prophet. Though the Ahmadis themselves are keenly aware of the difference, their opponents have tended to view both as almost equally unacceptable and both were declared non-­Muslims in 1974. Unless otherwise noted, the following discussion is concerned with those who consider Mirza Ghulam Ahmad as a prophet of some sort.

300  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 10 10. Cf. Yohanan Friedmann, Prophecy Continuous: Aspects of Ahmadi Religious Thought and Its Medieval Background (Berkeley, 1989), 183. My account of Ahmadi doctrines is much indebted to this important work. 11. Speeches and Statements of Iqbal, compiled by “Shamloo,” 2nd ed. (Lahore, 1948), 120– 21, 239. 12. Ibid., 94. 13. Ibid., 100. 14. Shabbir Ahmad ʿUthmani, Al-­Shahab, yaʿni Mirzaʾiyyon ke irtidad ka thubut awr qatl-­i murtadd ke sharʿi dalaʾil (Karachi, 1974); Friedmann, Prophecy Continuous, 29. 15. The others are the Barelawis and the Ahl-­i Hadith. The Deobandis and the Barelawis are both adherents of the Hanafi school of law, which originated in Iraq in the late eighth and early ninth centuries CE. In this regard, they differ from the Ahl-­i Hadith (often also known, especially outside South Asia, as the Salafis), who deny the authority of the medieval schools of law and seek instead to base their religious belief and practice directly on the Islamic foundational texts—the Qurʾan and the normative teachings of the Prophet Muhammad (hadith). What distinguishes the Barelawis from the Deobandis is the former’s devotional piety, based in veneration not just of the Prophet but also of Sufi saints. The Deobandis strongly disapprove of many such practices, and the Ahl-­i Hadith go much further in condemning them. 16. See Bayanat-­i ʿulama-­i rabbani bar irtidad-­i firqa-­i qadiyyani (Deoband, 1989). The case was decided in favor of the plaintiff. 17. Shamloo, Speeches and Statements of Iqbal, 103. 18. Mohammad Iqbal, “The Doctrine of Absolute Unity as Expounded by Abdul Karim al-­ Jilani,” Indian Antiquary (Bombay), 29 (1900), reprinted in Syed Abdul Vahid, ed., Thoughts and Reflections of Iqbal (Lahore, 1964), 3–27, at 9. That this essay by Iqbal could still be reprinted in Pakistan in the 1960s is a telling indication that attitudes toward the Ahmadis were not uniformly hostile even by that late date. 19. “Kiya Mirza Ghulam Ahmad Sahib Qadiyani ke pairaw kafir hain? Imam al-­Hind Mawlana Abul-­Kalam Azad ka fatwa,” Zamindar (Lahore), November 18, 1923. I am grateful to Rajarshi Ghose for drawing my attention to this fatwa. 20. Cf. ʿAbd al-­Majid Daryabadi, Hakim al-­ummat, nuqush wa taʾaththurat (Allahabad, 1990), 260. 21. S. Zainulabadin to Liaquat Ali Khan, May 19, 1940, in Z. H. Zaidi et al., eds. Quaid-­i-­A zam Mohammad Ali Jinnah Papers (Islamabad, 1993–2009), 3rd ser., 15:340. Zainulabadin was an officeholder in the Ahmadi community. 22. See Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (London, 2000), 375, 442, 447. On Iqbal, see ibid., 294–97, 364–69. 23. For Jinnah’s address as president of the Muslim League, delivered on March 22, 1940, see Jamil-­ud-­Din Ahmad, ed., Speeches and Writings of Mr. Jinnah, 2 vols. (Lahore, 1960–64), 1:143–63. 24. Jinnah to S. Zainulabadin, May 5, 1944, in Jinnah Papers, 2nd ser., 10:338–39. For the query to which this was a response, see Zainulabadin to Jinnah, April 30, 1944, ibid., 329. 25. For overviews of this history, on which I draw here, see M. Rafique Afzal, Pakistan: History and Politics, 1947–1971 (Karachi, 2001), 64–70, 102–9; and Leonard Binder, Religion and Politics in Pakistan (Berkeley, 1963), 183–296. The most detailed study of the Punjab distur-

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 10   301 bances of 1953 and of the constitutional amendment of 1974 whereby the Ahmadis were declared a non-­Muslim minority in Pakistan is Ali Usman Qasmi, The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan (London, 2014). 26. The British high commissioner and the American ambassador in Karachi were unwilling to see Zafrulla Khan resign in the face of the pressure on him. Gilbert Laithwaite, the UK high commissioner, to Percivale Liesching, Commonwealth Relations Office (CRO), London, July 23, 1952, DO35/3185, National Archives, Kew, UK. Also see the UK high commissioner’s telegram to CRO, April 11, 1953, DO35/5370: 65, National Archives, Kew, UK. For his part, the Pakistani prime minister had reportedly told a group of religious scholars visiting him in January 1953 that the country would get no wheat from the United States to relieve its food shortages if Zafrulla Khan were removed from the cabinet. See Qasmi, The Ahmadis, 94. 27. S. Abul Aʿla Maududi, The Qadiani Problem (Lahore, 1979), 1–2. This work was first published in the Urdu language in 1953. 28. CAPD, 5/5, March 12, 1949 (Sir Muhammad Zafrulla Khan), 65–72. 29. Report of the Court of Inquiry, 75. 30. Muhammad Zafrulla Khan, Islam: Its Meaning for Modern Man (London, 1962), 14. 31. CAPD, 5/5, March 12, 1949, 69. 32. A. K. Brohi, “Thoughts on the Future Constitution of Pakistan,” Dawn, August 24, 1952 (emphasis mine). 33. See, for instance, CAPD, 5/5, March 12, 1949, 65–66, 68–69. 34. Ahmadi modernism, it is worth noting, has had its limits. Unlike other modernists, the Ahmadis have tended to defend polygyny rather than reinterpret the Qurʾan in such a way as, in effect, to do away with this institution. See Friedmann, Prophecy Continuous, 184. And where generations of Muslim modernists have sought to explain away the miracles attributed to the Prophet in naturalistic terms, the Ahmadis have remained unperturbed by them. 35. For instance, Maududi, Qadiani Problem, 23–24. 36. Report of the Court of Inquiry, 47–48. 37. Jacob M. Landau, The Politics of Pan-­Islam: Ideology and Organization (Oxford, 1990), 287–88. 38. On this event, see Report on Islamic Summit 1974 Pakistan, Lahore February 22–24, 1974 (Islamabad, n.d. [1974]). 39. See Nawa-­i Waqt (Lahore), May 14, 1974, and news reports for the days that followed. 40. See Jang (Karachi), June 2, 1974. 41. Nawa-­i waqt, May 31, 1974. 42. Ibid., May 19, 1974. 43. Ibid., May 23, 1974. 44. Dawn (Karachi), May 19, 1974, and press coverage of this event on the following days. 45. See, for instance, Nawa-­i waqt, May 30, 1974; Dawn, May 30, 1974. 46. Alan Mitchell, Commissioner, Lahore Division, to C. C. Garrett, Chief Secretary to Government of the Punjab, January 27, 1935, L/PJ/7/751: 206 (“Ahrar-­Ahmadiya Dispute at Qadian, Punjab”), India Office Records, British Library (hereafter BL). 47. Ibid., 203. 48. Copy of D.O. Letter no. C16(1), S.B., from the Government of the Punjab to the Government of India, Home Department, January 21–23, 1935, L/PJ/7/751: 241, BL.

302  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 10 49. Ibid., 243. 50. Nawa-­i waqt, May 31, 1974, June 1, 1974, June 15, 1974, August 17, 1974. 51. See the statement by the head of the Ahmadi community before the Samdani commission: Nawa-­i waqt, August 1, 1974. Cf. ibid., July 16, 1974. 52. For the text of this resolution, see Proceedings of the Special Committee, #15 (August 30, 1974), 1971–74. 53. Laurence Pumphrey, “The Ahmadiya Issue,” September 24, 1974, FCO 37/1501, p. 3 of the note, Foreign Office Files for India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, 1972–1980 (Electronic Resource), http://www.archivesdirect.amdigital.co.uk/Introduction/FO_India/default.aspx (hereafter FO Electronic Resource). Ahmadi contributions to Bhutto’s election campaign are mentioned in the confidential note by A. A. Halliday, British Embassy Islamabad, February 15, 1973, FCO 37/1338: 28, FO Electronic Resource. 54. Demands to have the Ahmadis removed from key positions followed the Rabwah incident almost immediately. See, for instance, Nawa-­i waqt, May 31, 1974, June 15, 1974, June 18, 1974; Jang, June 22, 1974. 55. On the Ahmadis’ alleged military ambitions, see also Nawa-­i waqt, June 22, 1974. For other statements to this effect, see ibid., June 25, 1974. 56. Ibid., June 28, 1974. 57. Ibid., June 18, 1974. The leader of the Ahmadi community was also questioned about the Ahmadi mission in Israel during the in-­camera session of the National Assembly. See Proceedings of the Special Committee, #8 (August 21, 1974), 1007–15. Also see ibid., #15 (August 30, 1974), 2048–56. 58. Jang, June 28, 1974. 59. Nawa-­i waqt, July 11, 1974. 60. For these advertisements, see Jang, July 5, 7, and 8, 1974; ibid., July 8, 1974, for a defense on Bannuri’s behalf. Also see Dawn, July 4, 6, and 8, 1974. 61. Nawa-­i waqt, July 11, 1974. 62. Jang, June 1, 1974 (speech by Kausar Niazi, the minister of information and of religious endowments). 63. Nawa-­i waqt, June 27, 1974. 64. Jang, August 27, 1974. Mir also took the opportunity in this statement to deny that he was an Ahmadi. 65. Ibid., June 20, 1974; Nawa-­i waqt, July 18, 1974. 66. Nawa-­i waqt, July 11, 1974. 67. Ibid., June 26, 1974. 68. Ibid., June 29, 1974. Also see ibid., July 4, 1974; Jang, June 30, 1974. 69. Muhammad Manzur Nuʿmani to Shabbir Ahmad ʿUthmani, November 26, 1945, in Anwar al-­Hasan Sherkoti, ed., Anwar-­i ʿUthmani (Karachi, n.d.), 149–51. 70. It was only in late 2011 that the proceedings of this in-­camera session were quietly released to the public. The proceedings comprise a little over three thousand pages in print. I am grateful to Ali Usman Qasmi for drawing my attention to this work. 71. For the text of this ordinance, see Promulgation of New Ordinance: Qadianis’ Anti-­Islamic Activities (Islamabad, n.d. [1984]); quotation at p. 3 (introduction). 72. For the full range of blasphemy laws, see M. Mahmood, The Pakistan Penal Code, 1860,

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 10   303 as Amended up to Date (Lahore, 2009), 867–92. For an ethnographic account of these laws and their colonial origins, see Asad Ali Ahmed, “Specters of Macaulay: Blasphemy, the Indian Penal Code, and Pakistan’s Postcolonial Predicament,” in Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction, ed. Raminder Kaur and William Mazzarella (Bloomington, 2009), 172–205. The blasphemy laws also include sections 295 (on defiling holy places), 295-­A and 298 (insulting religious sensibilities), 295-­B (desecrating the Qurʾan), 298-­A (insulting holy personages), and 295-­C (insulting the Prophet Muhammad). 73. Din Mohammad, Governor of Sind, to Khwaja Nazimuddin, the Prime Minister, August 10, 1952, enclosing an untitled note marked “top secret.” File 3(20)-­PMS/52 (Correspondence with the Hon’ble Minister for Refugees and Rehabilitation), 87–91, at 89, National Documentation Center, Cabinet Division, Islamabad. Cf. Qasmi, The Ahmadis, 133; the tension between the state’s Islamic and liberal aspirations is a key theme of Qasmi’s study. 74. See Bhutto’s speech at the National Assembly on the passage of the constitutional amendment regarding the Ahmadis, National Assembly of Pakistan Debates 5, no. 39 (Karachi, n.d. [1974]), 565–70. 75. See Jang, January 6, 1984 (speech by Justice Tanzil al-­R ahman, the chairman of the Council of Islamic Ideology, at a convention of the ʿulama). 76. Mohammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (London, 1934), 163. 77. Jang, January 6, 1984. 78. Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jamaʿat-­i Islami of Pakistan (Berkeley, 1994), 195–96. 79. For the ʿulama’s opposition to the regulation of their madrasas in the Zia al-­Haqq era, see Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton, 2002), 78–83. 80. The Shiʿa have their own sects, but the overwhelming majority of the Shiʿa, in the Muslim world and in Pakistan, are the “Twelvers,” who believe in twelve divinely designated imams, the last of whom went into hiding in the late ninth century. Unless otherwise noted, by the Shiʿa I will mean the Twelvers here. 81. Justin Jones, Shiʿa Islam in Colonial India (Cambridge, 2012), 186–221. 82. Karam Haydari, ed., Taqarir wa tajawiz-­i ʿulama convention (Islamabad, n.d. [1980]), 31. The scholar quoted here is Sayyid Mahmud Ahmad Rizwi, a Sunni belonging to the Barelawi orientation. The reference to “the pure members of the Prophet’s household” (ahl-­i bayt) is worth clarifying here. To the Twelver Shiʿa, the phrase refers to Muhammad, his daughter Fatima, her husband ʿAli, and their children and descendants. This pointedly excludes other members of Muhammad’s family, such as his wife ʿAʾisha or Muhammad’s uncle, al-­ʿAbbas, whose descendants would later go on to found the ʿAbbasid dynasty (r. 750–1258) under which several of the Shiʿi imams lived difficult lives. To the Sunnis, the Prophet’s household carries an expansive meaning. And Mahmud Ahmad Rizwi’s invocation of it here is intended as an appeal to defend the honor of those the Shiʿa typically leave out of their reckoning. 83. Cf. A. P. Fabian to R. D. Lavers, British Embassy, Islamabad, September 15, 1980, FCO 37/2358: 89, FO Electronic Resource. 84. The phrase comes from Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge, 1985). 85. Rudad-­i ijlas-­i bist o nuhum-­i All India Shiʿa Conference, Patna, December 29–31, 1938

304  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 10 (Lucknow, n.d.), 8–9. For the proceedings of this and other years, preserved on microfilm, see Annual Proceedings of the All India Shia Conference, 1907–41, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi, R-­12261–8. 86. The Leader (Allahabad), May 10, 1939, quoted in Jones, Shiʿa Islam, 201. 87. Sir Harry Haig to Lord Linlithgow, May 9, 1939, L/PJ/5/267: 86, United Provinces Governor’s Reports, BL. 88. On Madani’s leadership role in the madh-­i sahaba controversy, see Haig to Linlithgow, April 18, 1939, with Haig’s note on “The Lucknow Madhe Sahaba Controversy,” L/PJ/7/2587: 38 (“The Sunni-­Shia Controversy in Lucknow [Madhe Sahaba]”). Also, Haig to Linlithgow, October 24, 1938, Eur. Mss. F125/101: 95, BL. 89. Madani to Muhammad ʿAbd al-­R ahman, September 8, 1947, in Maktubat-­i Shaykh al-­ Islam, ed. Najm al-­din Islahi, 4 vols. (Deoband, 1963), 2:288. 90. Ibid., quoting Madina (Bijnor), December 1, 1945. 91. Musa belonged to the predominantly Shiʿi Hazara ethnicity. In recent years, members of this community have borne the brunt of Sunni militancy in the Balochistan province. 92. A. P. Fabian to Graham Archer, September 7, 1980, British Embassy, Islamabad, FCO 37/2358: 85, FO Electronic Resource. As this report makes clear, however, British diplomats in Islamabad were skeptical that the figure was quite so high, and so were the Indian consular officials. 93. Andreas Rieck, “The Struggle for Equal Rights as a Minority: Shia Communal Organizations in Pakistan, 1948–1968,” in The Twelver Shia in Modern Times, ed. Rainer Brunner and Werner Ende (Leiden, 2001), 274, 276, 276n38. 94. Muhammad Ilyas Balakoti, Amir-­i ʿazimat: Hazrat Mawlana Haqq Nawaz Jhangawi ( Jhang, n.d. [1990]), 20–23 (abbreviated in translation). The “life of pleasure and libertinism” refers to the Shiʿi institution of temporary marriage (mutʿa), which allows a man and a woman to enter into a sexual relationship for a fixed period of time and for a clearly stipulated sum of money that is paid to the woman. The Sunnis have tended to see this practice as indistinguishable from prostitution. 95. Zaman, The Ulama, 114–31. 96. Ibid., 117, 233–4n37. Also see Sayyid Muhammad Thaqalayn Kazimi, Imamiyya dini madaris-­i Pakistan: Taʾrikh wa taʿaruf (Lahore, 2004), 5, 53, 99, 128, 198, 205, 226, 246, 395, 439, 441, 451, 458, 466, 555, 581, 583, 613, 625, 629. 97. There has been considerable contestation within the ranks of the Shiʿa in Pakistan on the reform of particular Shiʿi beliefs and practices. For some aspects of this contestation, which falls outside the purview of my discussion here, see Syed Hussain Arif Naqvi, “The Controversy about the Shaikhiyya Tendency among Shia ʿUlama in Pakistan,” in The Twelver Shia in Modern Times, ed. Brunner and Ende, 135–49; and Simon Wolfgang Fuchs, “Relocating the Centers of Shiʿi Islam: Religious Authority, Sectarianism, and the Limits of the Transnational in Colonial India and Pakistan” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2015), chap. 2. 98. Jones, Shiʿa Islam, 100–105. 99. Advertisement in Jang, January 1, 1977. 100. Rieck, Shias of Pakistan, 75–78, 138–42, 162–71. Also see Mohammad Musa, Jawan to General: Recollections of a Pakistani Soldier (Karachi, 1984), 198–204.

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 10   305 101. Rieck, Shias of Pakistan, 199. 102. Sawad-­i aʿzam ke mulki wa milli huquq ke tahaffuz ke-­liye ahamm Sunni mutalabat (Lahore, n.d. [1973]), 7, 9. 103. See, for instance, Sayyid Abul Aʿla Maududi, The Islamic Law and Constitution (Lahore, 1960), 68–70. 104. Haydari, Taqarir, 163–64, at 163. 105. On the TNFJ, see Zaman, The Ulama, 114–18. For its leaders’ opposition to the “shariʿat bills” of the late 1980s, consider the following sampling of banner headlines in the party newspaper, Rizakar (Lahore): “Passage of the Shariʿat Bill Would Strengthen Sectarianism” ( July 16, 1986, 1); “Shariʿat Bill a Conspiracy to Deprive Muslims of Their Fundamental Rights” ( July 24, 1986, 1); “We Are Opposed Not to the Implementation of the Shariʿat but Rather to a Particular Way of Thinking [about It]” (November 8–16, 1986, 1); “Shariʿat Bill Opposed to Popular Aspirations” (December 16, 1986, 1); “We Will Not Accept the Shariʿat Bill at Any Cost” (May 8, 1987, 1); “Proposed Shariʿat Bill Not Acceptable to All Schools of Thought” (March 24, 1987, 1); “We Will Not Permit a Controversial Shariʿat Bill to Be Implemented” (August 1–8, 1989, 1); “Realities Not Taken into Consideration in Preparing the Shariʿat Bill” (September 24–30, 1989, 1); “Shariʿat Bill Undermines the Stability of Pakistan” ( January 24, 1990, 1). 106. Rieck, Shias of Pakistan, 133–45. 107. A. P. Fabian to R. D. Lavers, March 5, 1979, 3, British Embassy, Islamabad, FCO 37/2188: 11, FO Electronic Resource. The Shiʿi leader quoted in this document is not named. 108. Sayyid Safdar Husayn Najafi, “Har sadi ke mujaddid ʿulama,” in Mabadiyyat-­i hukumat-­i Islami (Lahore, 1981), 35–42, at 41. 109. Jang, February 2, 1984. 110. Haydari, Taqarir, 50–51, at 51. Ansari is here referring to article 12 of the Iranian constitution. See Qanun-­i asasi-­yi jumhuri-­yi Islami-­yi Iran (Tehran, 1989), 31. 111. Rudolph Peters, Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law (Cambridge, 2005), 162–63. 112. Ibid., 163. 113. Nawa-­i waqt, February 11, 1979. 114. Haydari, Taqarir, 113–14. For Zahir’s full speech on this occasion, see ibid., 108–21. 115. See Jawid Jamal Daskawi, Ihsan Ilahi Zahir (Lahore, 1990). 116. Sayyid Safdar Husayn Najafi, “Islami tarz-­i hukumat Shiʿa [sic] nuqta-­i nazar se,” in Mabadiyyat-­i hukumat-­i Islami, 43–65, esp. 62–65, at 65. The article is undated, but internal evidence suggests that it was written in late 1979. On Najafi, see Sayyid Husayn ʿArif Naqwi, Tadhkira-­i ʿulama-­i Imamiyya-­i Pakistan (Islamabad, 1984), 140–44. 117. Jawaharlal Nehru, “His Highness the Aga Khan,” in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, 7:470–74 (first published in Modern Review, November 1935). 118. Ibid., 7:472. 119. Khalifa ʿAbd al-­Hakim, Iqbal awr mulla, 8th printing (Lahore, 1952), 19. The first sect mentioned in this passage is the Twelvers while the one “with many millionaires” refers to the affluent Ismaʿilis. Those mentioned last are of course the Ahmadis. 120. How the response of Shiʿi religious scholars and activists toward the Ahmadis has differed from that of the Sunnis is a question also worth exploring. I leave it aside here, except to note that, in taking a position against the Ahmadis, the Shiʿis have not lost sight of the possibil-

306  N o t e s t o A f t e r w or d ity that some such fate could be visited upon them as well. While the anti-­Ahmadi agitation raged in summer 1974, a group of fifty Shiʿi ʿulama affirmed their commitment to the doctrine of the finality of Muhammad’s prophethood even as they distanced themselves from the social boycott of the Ahmadis then being practiced in some circles. See Jang, August 2, 1974. Shiʿi concerns were not misplaced. Some of those active in the anti-­Ahmadi agitation in 1974 would emerge as the leaders of anti-­Shiʿi sectarianism in the 1980s (Zaman, Ulama, 114), and a social boycott of the Shiʿis has also been attempted on occasion. See Rizakar, October 8, 1986, 2; ibid., February 24, 1989, 4. 121. The year 1984 might seem to be an exception but, as noted, there was no countrywide agitation on this issue then, only a regime’s effort to shore up its credentials. 122. My interpretation here differs from Qasmi’s, who sees putative similarities between the Pakistani Sunnis and the Ahmadis, beyond the question of the finality of Muhammad’s prophethood, as fueling Sunni anxieties toward them. The Shiʿa, for their part, are seen, as some Shiʿis do themselves, as more clearly distinguishable from both communities. See Qasmi, The Ahmadis, 224–26. 123. On this agitation, which received wide coverage in the national press, see, for instance, Nawa-­i waqt, October 5, 2017, October 7, 2017, December 11, 2017; and Amir Wasim and Munawer Azeem, “Faizabad Sit-­in Ends as Army Brokers Deal,” Dawn, November 28, 2017. 124. Kalbe Ali, “Who Is Khadim Hussain Rizvi?” Dawn, December 12, 2017. 125. Talib Jawhari, a Shiʿi scholar prominent among those annually delivering sermons in Muharram, quoted in ʿAli Akbar Shah, Jalti masjiden (Karachi, 1983), 159.

Afterword I would like to thank Edward Baring, Erika Milam, and Phil Nord for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. 1. Mario Beauregard and Vincent Paquette, “Neural Correlates of a Mystical Experience in Carmelite Nuns,” Neuroscience Letters 405 (2006): 186–90, at 187, 186. 2. For a lay of the land of the field of “neurotheology,” see Uffe Schjoedt, “The Religions Brain: A General Introduction to the Experimental Neuroscience of Religion,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 21, no. 3 (2009): 310–39. See also Nicolas Langlitz, Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain (Berkeley, 2012), esp. 47–49. 3. Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul (New York, 2007); Andrew Newberg, Eugene d’Aquili, and Vince Rause, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (New York, 2002). See also Lynne Blumberg, “What Happens to the Brain during Spiritual Experiences?” Atlantic, June 5, 2014; David Biello, “Search for God in the Brain,” Scientific American Mind (October/November 2007): 39–45; and Jerome Groopman, “God on the Brain: The Curious Coupling of Science and Religion,” New Yorker, September 17, 2001. 4. The historical and anthropological literature on neuroscience and religion has often focused on Tibetan Buddhism; see esp. Anne Harrington and Arthur Zajonc, eds., The Dalai Lama at MIT (Cambridge, MA, 2006); Harrington and Richard Davidson, eds., Visions of Compassion: Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature (Oxford, 2003); and

N o t e s t o A f t e r w or d   307 John Tresch, “Experimental Ethics and the Meditating Brain,” in Neurocultures: Glimpses into an Expanding Universe, ed. Francisco Ortega and Fernando Vidal (Frankfurt am Main, 2011), 49–68. 5. Sarah Birge, “Brainhood, Selfhood, or ‘Meat with a Point of View’: The Value of Fiction for Neuroscientific Research and Neurological Medicine,” in Neuroscientific Turn: Transdisciplinarity in the Age of the Brain, ed. Melissa Littlefield and Jenell Johnson (Ann Arbor, 2012): 89– 104, at 95. 6. M. A. Persinger, “Propensity to Report Paranormal Experiences Is Correlated with Temporal Lobe Signs,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 59 (1984): 583–86, at 583. 7. L. A. Ruttan, M. A. Persinger, and S. Koren, “Enhancement of Temporal Lobe-­Related Experiences during Brief Exposures to MilliGauss Intensity Extremely Low Frequency Magnetic Fields,” Journal of Bioelectricity 9, no. 1 (1990): 33–54, at 47. In the study reported in this article, Persinger and colleagues induced other states as well, such as other forms of depersonalization, vestibular feelings, or “imaginings” (e.g., scenes from childhood). In a later (2010) article, only mystical and altered states, of two kinds, are discussed: that of a “sensed presence” and that of an “out of body experience,” which the authors connect to religious experience: M. A. Persinger, K. S. Saroka, S. Koren, and L. S. St-­Pierre, “The Electromagnetic Induction of Mystical and Altered States within the Laboratory,” Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research 1, no. 7 (October 2010): 808–30. 8. Ruttan, Persinger, and Koren, “Enhancement of Temporal Lobe-­Related Experiences,” 33; M. A. Persinger, Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs (New York, 1987). 9. M. A. Persinger, “Religious and Mystical Experiences as Artifacts of Temporal Lobe Function: A General Hypothesis,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 57 (1983): 1255–62, at 1255; see also Persinger, Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs, 17, 18. 10. Newberg, d’Aquili, and Rause, Why God Won’t Go Away, 146–47. 11. As the scientists point out in their book, the AAA could either “shield the mind from the intrusion of sensory, as well as cognitive, input” (the “passive approach”) or “focus intensely upon some thought or object of attention” (the “active approach”), such as chanting a mantra or picturing the symbol of the cross. Both approaches had the effect of isolating the OAA from incoming stimuli, what the scientists call “blinding.” Newberg, d’Aquili, and Rause, Why God Won’t Go Away. 12. Andrew Newberg, Abass Alavi, Michael Baime, Michael Pourdehnad, Jill Santanna, and Eugene d’Aquili, “The Measurement of Regional Cerebral Blood Flow during the Complex Cognitive Task of Meditation: A Preliminary SPECT Study,” Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging Section 106 (2001): 113–22. 13. Ibid., 121. In their scientific paper, Newberg et al. refer to the OAA and AAA by their usual anatomical names. 14. Newberg, d’Aquili, and Rause, Why God Won’t Go Away, 9, 133, 60, 6. 15. Ibid., 115. 16. Ibid., 116. 17. Ibid., 9. 18. Ibid., 140, 155, chap. 1. The authors title their first chapter suggestively “A Photograph of God?” and note: “While we realize that it is much more complex than simply ‘taking a picture,’

308  N o t e s t o A f t e r w or d this is the gist of what is being done . . . it . . . seems possible to begin to unravel the brain mechanisms that underlie the process of meditation and obtain a clear view into the fantastic workings of the brain, during these practices” (183n6). 19. Beauregard and Paquette, “Neural Correlates,” 186; Beauregard and O’Leary, The Spiritual Brain. In response to earlier studies that had identified a “God spot” on the brain, the scientists suggested a more complex neural apparatus. See Beauregard and O’Leary, The Spiritual Brain for a presentation of their arguments. 20. The term “God spot” is from Ramachandran, as Beauregard and O’Leary suggest (The Spiritual Brain, 35). 21. Beauregard and O’Leary, The Spiritual Brain, 274. 22. Ibid., 276. 23. V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (New York, 1998), 185. 24. Especially in their more narrowly scientific publications. As we have seen, their claims in the book versions of their arguments tend to be more far-­reaching. 25. For recent scholarly critiques of the neurosciences and their claims, see Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega, Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject (New York, 2017); Suparna Choudhury and Jan Slaby, eds., Critical Neuroscience: A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience (Chichester, 2012); Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega, eds., Neurocultures: Glimpses into an Expanding Universe (Frankfurt, 2011); Nikolas Rose and Joelle Abi-­ Rached, Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind (Princeton, 2013); Melissa Littlefield and Jenell Johnson, eds., The Neuroscientific Turn: Transdisciplinarity in the Age of the Brain (Ann Arbor, 2012); and Steve Fuller et al., “Neurohistory and History of Science,” Isis Focus Section, Isis 105, no. 1 (2014): 110–54. 26. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901–1902 (New York, 1902), 14.

L i s t of C on t r i bu t or s

E ditor s Katja Guenther is Associate Professor in the History of Science at Princeton University. Her first book, Localization and Its Discontents: A Genealogy of Psychoanalysis and the Neuro Disciplines (2015), explores the shared but divergent practices and theoretical assumptions within the science and medicine of mind and brain. She is currently completing a book on the history of mirror self-­recognition in the human sciences. Philip Nord is the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University. He is the author of several books on the history of modern France, including most recently France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era (2010) and France 1940: Defending the Republic (2015). Max Weiss is Associate Professor of History and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shiʿism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon (2010); coeditor with Jens Hanssen of Arabic Thought against the Authoritarian Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Present (2018); and translator from the Arabic, most recently, of Dunya Mikhail, The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq (2018). Ch a p t e r Con t r i bu tor s

Peter Brown is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He has written a dozen books that, starting with Augustine of Hippo (1967), have defined the religious, cultural, and social dimensions of the Late Antique world. His most recent books are: Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (2012) and Treasure in Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early Christianity (2016).

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310  L i s t of C on t r i b u t or s

Yaacob Dweck is Associate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of The Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice (2011). Peter E. Gordon is the Amabel B. James Professor of History and a Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. Among his most recent books are Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (2010); Adorno and Existence (2016); and Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory (2018), coauthored with Max Pensky and Wendy Brown. He is also the editor of several published volumes, including The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School (2018), coedited with Espen Hammer and Axel Honneth. He was a fellow at Princeton University’s Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies in 2012–13. Anthony Grafton, the Henry Putnam University Professor of History, teaches the history of early modern Europe at Princeton University. He has concentrated on the history of scholarly and scientific practices. His books include Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship (1983– 1993), The Footnote: A Curious History (1997), and The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe (2011). Brad S. Gregory is Professor of History and Dorothy G. Griffin Collegiate Chair at the University of Notre Dame. He is also Director of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. Gregory, a leading scholar of the Reformation era and of its long-­term impact, is the author of Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (1999) and The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, both of which won multiple prizes. Stefania Pastore is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. She works on the cultural and religious history of late medieval and early modern Iberia and is the author of Il vangelo e la spada: L’Inquizisione di Castiglia e i suoi critici (2003) and Une herejía Española: Conversos, alumbrados e Inquisición (2010). She was a fellow at Princeton University’s Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies in 2013–14. Caterina Pizzigoni is Associate Professor of History at Columbia University. She is a historian of colonial Latin America who studies the indigenous people of Central Mexico, using Nahuatl sources. Pizzigoni has authored two books: Testaments of Toluca (2007) and The Life Within: Local Indigenous Society in Mexico’s Toluca Valley, 1650–1800 (2012). She is now at

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work on a book-­length manuscript dealing with the images of saints in indigenous and Spanish households, 1600–1800. In 2013–14, Pizzigoni was a fellow at Princeton University’s Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. Victoria Smolkin is Associate Professor of History and Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at Wesleyan University. Her research focuses on ideology, religion, and secularism in Russia and the former Soviet Union. Smolkin’s most recent book, A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism (2018), explores the meaning of atheism for Soviet religious life, ideology, and politics. She is currently at work on a project titled The Crusade against Godlessness: Religion, Communism, and the Cold War. Smolkin was a fellow at Princeton University’s Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies in 2013–14. Muhammad Qasim Zaman is Niehaus Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Religion at Princeton University. He is historian of Islamic religious and political thought in South Asia and the Middle East. His books include Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age (2012) and Islam in Pakistan: A History (2018).

I n de x

Ahmadi question in Pakistan, 204–18 passim; beating of students by Ahmadis in Rabwah, 212–13, 215–16; blasphemy laws directed against, 219–20, 232–33; as carving out a “state within a state” for themselves, 210; charge against as having an “Ahmadi mission” in Israel, 213–14; classification of as a non-Muslim minority in in Pakistan, 212–13, 216; development of the anti-Ahmadi movement (1974), 213; hostile opinion by the ‫ޏ‬ulama of Ahmadis as apostates or non-Muslims, 205–6; opinion of the Ahmadis that other Muslims are not properly Muslim, 205; ordinance issued by Zia al-Haqq making it an offense for Ahmadis to “pose” as Muslims, 216–18; and the Qadianis, 205, 299n9; questioning of obligatory jihad by, 204–5; street power of the anti-Ahmadi movement, 210; troubles of with the Majlis-i Ahrar-i Islam group, 206, 207–8, 212 Alberti, Leon Battista, 21–22 Albinus, 25 Aldobrandini, Pietro, 14 All India Muslim League, 206, 220 almsgiving, 87–88; in the secular world, 95. See also Pelagius/the Pelagian controversy Alone before God (Voekel), 113 Ambrose, 37 Amsterdam, 63–64 Annales (Baronio), 36 Ansari, Zafar Ahmad, 227

Abbey of St. Germain des Prés, 30 ‫ޏ‬Abd al-Hakim, Khalifa, 230 Abgar of Edessa, 24, 29 Abravanel, Isaac, 41 Abu Zayd, Nasir Hamid, 7, 151, 160, 161, 286n32; as an Arab “liberal,” 151–52; branding of as an apostate, 157–58; differing interpretations of the case against, 158–59; forced divorce of, 157; on the genesis and meaning of the Qur‫ގ‬an, 158; hisba method of prosecution used against, 157; ordeal of, 156–60; promotion of an “enlightened” discourse on religion by, 152; writings of while in Japan, 158 Académie Royale des Sciences of Paris, 173, 291n36 Acts of Peter, 14, 15 Adam of Bremen, 19 “Adopted Saints” (Wood), 114 Adversus Mathematicos (Empiricus), 68 Aeneid (Virgil), 104 Africa: numerous accounts of spiritual visions in, 92; and the Pelagian controversy, 95–100; Roman North Africa and “civic euergetism,” 95 Africanus, Julius, 27 Afterlife in Roman Paganism (Cumont), 103 Ahmad, Ghulam, 9, 204, 208–9, 217, 231 Ahmad, Muhammad Amir, 220 Ahmadi Association, 208 Ahmadis, 9, 203–4, 227, 230, 305–6n120; Ahmadi modernism, 209, 301n34; the 313

314 antiquarianism: applied, 18; early forms of ecclesiastical antiquarianism, 20–22; rise of, 17. See also ecclesiastical history antiquaries, genealogies of modern scholarship concerning the practices of, 16–20 Antonius of Florence, 22 Apologie de Raymond Sebond (Montaigne), 68 Arab-Israeli War (1967), 7 Aragon, 72 Aristotle, 23, 29, 77; anti-Aristotelians, 174–75 Arlenius, Arnoldus, 76, 77, 83 Armilos (son of Satan), 52–53 Asad, Talal, 10, 154, 160, 186 Ashkenazi, Hakham Zvi, 41 Ashkenazi Jews, 63; cultural influences on, 41 atheism, 73, 160, 192; in Egypt, 156; in the Soviet Union, 6–7, 128–29, 130, 132, 134, 138–39, 141, 142, 149 Augustine and the Relations between the Living and the Dead (Rose), 93 Augustine of Hippo (St. Augustine), 3, 22, 23, 30, 86; answer to Evodius concerning dreams and visions, 91–92, 104–5; answer to Laurentius as to whether rituals for souls of the dead actually worked and how, 89–91; answer to Paulinus as to whether the dead receive any benefits from the living, 93–94; commitment to traditional rituals concerning the dead, 94; contribution of to discussions concerning the care and fate of the dead, 103; dismantling of ancient hierarchies by, 104–5; last days of, 101–2; notions concerning the soul, 102, 104; on the passing of his mother, Monica, 94–95; response of to the Pelagian controversy, 95–100; on the resurrection of the body, 102; on the tripartite hierarchy of the universe as created by human will, 105; view of sin, 98, 100–101 Averroes, 75, 77, 78, 79

I n de x Averroism, 77–79, 80 Awami League, 210, 211 Awareness of What Is Missing, An: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age (Habermas), 190 Ayatollah Khomeini, 227 Azad, Abul-Kalam, 205 al-‫ޏ‬Azm, Sadiq Jalal, 7, 151, 157, 160, 161; as an Arab “liberal,” 151–52; charges of inciting religious discord brought against, 153; critical reading of “Satan’s Ordeal” (mihnat Iblis) by, 154–55; definition of religious thought, 153; disillusionment of with the ethos of Marxism and Arab nationalism, 152–53; on distinguishing between religion and religious sentiment, 155–56; refutation of the “mechanistic” understanding of Marxist theory, 153–54; specific interest of in the contemporary condition of the Arab world, 154 Bälz, Kilian, 158 Bangladesh, 210–11, 221 Bannuri, Yusuf, 213, 214, 216 Bardawil, Fadi, 152–53; on the “inward” turn taken by Arab intellectuals, 153 Barelawis, the, 231, 300n15 Baronio, Cesare, 19, 36 Barrios, Miguel Levi de, 66 Bashraybung fun Shabasi Tsvi (ben Ozer), 55 Bassett, Mary Roper Clarke, 27 Baudouin, François, 23, 29–30 Beauregard, Mario, 235, 238 Bede (the Venerable Bede), 19, 25, 26 Beit ha-Levi, Solomon, 41 belief: differing approaches to, 150–51, 160– 62, 285n4; belief and unbelief, 287n2; “secular belief,” 287n2. See also crisis of belief, in the modern Arab world; faith/ religious belief Belyk, Nikolai, 141, 144–45; on Christian rituals, 146–47 Ben Israel, Menasseh, 64, 65

I n de x ben Ozer, Leyb, 55, 56 Berger, Peter, 185 Berlin, Isaiah, 160 Between Naturalism and Religion (Habermas), 190 Bhutto, Benazir, 221 Bhutto, Nusrat, 221 Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, 210–11, 215, 217, 221, 223, 224; challenges faced by, 211–13 Bible, the: biblical perspicuity, 168; interpretation of, 168, 169 Bibliotheca of Photius, 84 Bibliotheca Universalis (Gessner), 77, 83–84 Blumenberg, Hans, 9, 200 Bodin, Jean, 68–69, 70 Bollandists, the, 18, 30, 34 Bolsheviks, 128, 129, 131; creation of a government bureaucracy to record changes in civil status, 129, 281n9; program of to construct a modern secular state, 129–30 Bonch-Bruevich, Vladimir, 130 Book of Commandments, The (intro. by Maimonides), 47 Book of Zerubbabel, The, 52–53, 56, 57, 59, 60–61; authority of, 61; denial of the existence of by Sasportas, 54–55 Boscovich, Roger Joseph, 174 Bosio, Antonio, 17–18 Bower, Walter, 39 Bradley, F. H., 166 Brahe, Tycho, 171 Brohi, A. K., 209 Brown, Peter, 4, 5 Bruce, Steve, 186–87 Buddhism, 3, 193 Bultmann, Rudolf, 166 burial practices: in the cemetery area of Bir el-Knissia, 86; changes in previous to late antiquity, 85–86; evolution of early Christian burial practices at the same pace as non-Christian practices, 86; the Jewish practice of secondary burial, 86. See also Christians, specific burial rituals

315 of; dead, the, burial practices and beliefs concerning in late antiquity Butler, Judith, 190 Bynum, Caroline, 118 Calvin, John, 195 Calvinism, and economic gain, 195 Cano, Melchior, 24, 28–29 Cantilupe, Nicholas, 26 capitalism, 198; entrepreneurial, 194, 196; intellectual, 19 Capitulare de villis, 32 Carafa, Gianpietro, 81 Cárdenas, Ginés de, 120 Cardozo, Miguel, 42 Carlebach, Elisheva, 41 Carnesecchi, Pietro, 76, 82 Caro, Annibal, 73–74 Carracci, Annibale, 14 Casanova, José, 186; on modernity without religion, 188 Casaubon, Meric, 65 Cassander, George, 38 Castillo, Juan del, 261n17 Castro, Juan Páez de, 77, 80–81, 84, 264n47 catacombs, 17–18; catacomb of Priscilla, 86; small number of plaques naming the dead person in, 86 Catholics/Catholicism, 3, 106, 167, 187, 240, 241, 274n29; in Africa, 92; division of the world into heaven, purgatory, and hell by, 90; domination of Roman scholarship and art after 1600, 14–15 Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor), 70, 76, 81; issuing of the Augsburg Interim, 79; preparation of the Formula Reformationis by, 79 Charron, Pierre, 84 Christian, William, Jr., 110 Christianity, 5, 6, 71, 72, 86, 124, 146, 150, 166; eschatology of, 90; fragmentation of, 69; image of the cosmos in, 103–4; Jewish contribution to, 3; medieval, 164, 167; and pastoral care, 90; reformed, 2;

316 Christianity (cont.) reinvention of Christianity’s image, 3; and science, 165; spread of in Mexico, 111. See also Christianity, early Christianity, early: and the cult of saints, 107–8; envisioning of in new ways by Renaissance scholars, 15–16; and the study of Roman catacombs, 17–18 Christians, 3, 73, 87, 105, 166, 241; Druze massacre of (1860), 8; evangelical, 186; in Pakistan, 203. See also Christians, specific burial rituals of Christians, specific burial rituals of: the celebration of a “love feast,” 88; the feast of refreshment, 88; the giving of alms, 87– 88; the giving of an oblation in church, 88; the making of memory as the soul leaves the body, 88 Chronicle (Eusebius), 18, 25 Chrysostom, John, 23 City of God (Augustine), 90 Clement XIV (pope), 175 Codex Carolinus, 31–32 Cohen, Gerson D., 41 Cold War, the, 6, 185 Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion (Weber), 193, 194 Communism, 130, 131; as a world without religion, 128 Comte, Auguste, 178 Concepción, María de la, 117 Conciliador (Ben Israel), 65 Confessions (Augustine), 94; appearance of the Devil in, 95, 267n51 Conflict of the Faculties (Kant), 176, 292n51 Confucianism, 194 Constantine, 15, 21, 28 Conversos. See Spanish Conversos Corpus Christi procession, 112 Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church (CAROC), 136–38 Council of Trent (1545–1563), 75, 80, 81, 109, 117 Count of Tendilla, 74

I n de x Counter-Reformation, the, 78, 108 Cranmer, Thomas, 26–27, 37, 38 crisis of belief, in the modern Arab world, 151–52, 153 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 174 Critique of Religious Reason (Naqd al-fikr aldini [al-‫ޏ‬Azm]), 151, 152–56, 158–59, 285n8; “exploratory” reading of the meaning of religious texts in, 159–60; scandalous reaction to the publication of, 153 Crowland Abbey, 25, 26 Cumont, Franz, 103, 104 Curcio-Nagy, Linda, 112 Cynegius, 93 Cyril of Alexandria, 23 d’Aquili, Eugene, 237–38, 239 Daryabadi, ‫ޏ‬Abd al-Majid, 205 Daultana, Mian Mumtaz, 207 Davie, Grace, 186 De antiquitate ecclesiae Britannicae, 32 de cura pro mortuis gerenda (Augustine), 93 De re diplomatica (Mabillon), 15–16 De universo (Maurus), 39 De vanitate (Pico), 68 dead, the, burial practices and beliefs concerning in late antiquity: belief that only the great in life remained great in death, 104; Christian and Manichaean views on the fate of the non valde mali and the non valde boni, 90; and the clash of “representations,” concerning, 86–87; as impervious to ideology, 85; inability of the dead to be visible or speak to us directly, 86; money provided by the bereaved as the only way the dead can speak to us today, 86; pagan view of, 103; and the question of whether the dead receive any benefits from the living, 93–94; and the question of whether the living can have direct contact with the dead, 91–92; similarity of Manichaean burial rituals to those of early Christians, 87–88; slow changes in

I n de x burial practices, 85; specific questions raised concerning the fate of the dead by followers of Mani and Augustine, 90–91. See also Augustine, contribution of to discussions concerning the care and fate of the dead; catacombs; Christians, specific burial rituals of Dean, Carolyn, 112 Debating the Saints’ Cult in the Age of Gregory the Great (dal Santo), 103 Decretum (Gelasius I), 29 Delmedigo, Joseph Solomon, 65 Denne, Henry, 172 Deobandis, the, 205, 213, 214, 216, 223, 231, 300n15 Descartes, René, 68, 84, 171 Dialogues (Gregory the Great), 103 Dionysius of Corinth, 27 Ditchfield, Simon, 19 doctrine: as constitutive of practice, 5; Western-centric bias built into approaches to the study of, 5 Donation of Constantine, 15, 21, 28 Donatists/Donatism: in Africa, 92; suppression of, 92 doubt. See skepticism/doubt Druze. See Christians, Druze massacre of (1860) Dugdale, William, 30 Durand, Guillaume, 36; on the evolution of the Mass, 37–38 Durer, Albrecht, 23 Durkheim, Émile, 4, 178 Dweck, Yaacob, 3, 240 ecclesiastical history, 17–18, 39–40, 240; change in the scope of, 18–19; and the customs of the early church, 38; ecclesiastical scholarship before Flacius and Baronio, 24; the Eusebian tradition and the use of documents in, 24–30; and the issue of forgeries, 23–24, 26; questioning of received ideas concerning, 22–24; and the work of modern Eusebians, 30–35

317 Ecclesiastical History (Eusebius), 18, 26, 27–28 Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation (Bede), 25 “Economic Ethics of World Religions, The” (Weber), 185 Edwards, Jonathan, 174, 291n40 Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried, 174 Eliot, Charles, 177 Elisondo, Miguel de, 115 El Puerto del Cielo (Herrera), 65 Enarratio on Psalm 80 (Augustine), 101 Enchiridion (Augustine), 89, 91; on the threefold division of the faithful, 90 England, 69 Enlightenment, the, 2, 113; encounters of with New World religion, 3; Kant’s definition of, 183 Enzinas, Diego de, 76 “Epistle to Yemen” (Maimonides), 42, 47 Erasmus, 24, 28, 165 Espino, Francisco, 120 Essais (Montaigne), 68 Estienne, Henri, 67, 81, 84 Eusebius, 3, 18, 22, 23, 24, 38; Flacius’s criticism of, 36; Parker’s emulation of, 35–36; revival of, 20, 24–30 Evodius, 91, 92, 102 faith/religious belief, 9–10; formation of as “ethical secularism,” 10 Faustus, 102, 103 Febvre, Lucien, 23 First Mexican Council (1555), 109 Flacius Illyricus, 19, 31, 32, 35, 253n131; criticism of Eusebius by, 36; as leader of the “Gnesio-Lutheran” party, 37; pioneering work of on the liturgy and use of the vernacular Bible, 38–39 Flora, 93 Floridi, Luciano, 68, 81, 259–60n3 Fonseca, Isaac Aboab da, 44, 47, 64, 65 Foucault, Michel, 187 Fourth Mexican Council (1771), 113

318 Foxe, John, 33 France, 49, 69, 72, 76, 187; rebirth of Pyrrhonism in, 84; wars of religion in, 67, 68 Frei, Hans, 165 French Revolution, the, devastation of higher education under, 175 Freud, Sigmund, 199 Froben, Johann, 31, 77, 83 Funkenstein, Amos, 46, 47 Gamliel, Rabban, 60 Garcia, Antonio Rubial, 110–11 Gelasius I (pope), 28, 37 General Theory of Secularization, A (Martin), 185 General Zia. See Zia-ul-Haq Gentian, Hervé, 68 George of Trebizond, 23 Gervase of Tilbury, 34 Gessner, Conrad, 77; tribute of to Mendoza, 83–84 Gibbon, Edward, 16 Gilani, Yusuf Reza, 221 Gilman, Daniel Coit, 177 “Glauben und Wissen” (Faith and Knowledge [Habermas]), 190 God, 68, 189, 236; exclusion of in modern science, 289n15; and the “virtual reality” effect, 104–5; the will of God as penetrating the entire universe, 105 Goldish, Matt, 50, 65 Gordon, Peter, 8, 160, 240, 241 Grafton, Anthony, 3, 160, 240, 241 Granada, 71; during the years of the Capitulations, 75, 262–63n28; legacy of, 74–76; Moriscos of, 75 Granvelle, Antoine Perrenot de, 81 Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico, The (Curcio-Nagy), 112 Gregory I (pope [Gregory the Great]), 103 Gregory II (pope), 25, 37 Gregory, Brad, 7, 163–64, 187, 285n4 Gruzinski, Serge, 111, 121 Grynaeus, J. J., 30

I n de x Guenther, Katja, 10 Guerra de Granada (Mendoza), 74, 82–83 Guide of the Perplexed, The (Maimonides), 47; criticism of by Ibn Adret, 51 Habermas, Jürgen, 8, 188, 198–99; condemnation of “left fascism,” 189; on the historical emergence of communicative action, 295–96n19; on modern society, 192; on the persistence of religious belief as a sacred reserve, 9–10; on rational and irrational action, 297n35; views on religion, 189–92 Hacen, Muley, 75 Hacohen, Nehemiah, 55–57, 61 al-Hafiz, Yasin, 153 hagiographies, 110 Hagiz, Moses, 41, 256n27 Halevi, Joseph, 50 Hamann, Johann Georg, 174 Hamburg, 3, 64 Hanmer, Meredith, 27–28, 38 Hazarawi, Mawlana Ghulam Ghaus, 214 heaven, as imagined in the late antique period, 4 Henry VIII (king of England), and the “King’s Great Matter,” 27 Hernández, María, 123 Herrera, Abraham Cohen de, 65 Heyd, Michael, 65 Hinduism, 3 History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (Popkin), 68 Hobbes, Thomas, 171, 172 Holland, 69, 72 Holstenius, Lucas, 18 Hooper, John, 37 Horkheimer, Max, 193 Huizinga, Johan, 23 humanism, 14, 188 Hume, David, 150, 165, 175 Hunnibald, 26 Hus, Jan, 71 Husayn, ibn Ali, martyrdom of, 223

I n de x Husayn, Ja‫ޏ‬far, 226 Husayn, Taha, 158, 287n36 Iaroslavl’, 145, 147 Iaroslavskii, Emelian, attack of on “Communist double-belief (dvoeverie),” 130, 281n17 Ibn Adret, Solomon, 50, 61, 64, 66; criticism of The Guide of the Perplexed by, 51 Ibn Sa‫ގ‬adun, Jacob, 58–59 Ibn Verga, Solomon, 71 Ignatius of Antioch, 24 Il’f, Il’ia, 132 Il’ichev, Leonid, 139, 140–41 ‫ޏ‬Imara, Muhammad, 157–58 imperialism, 2; ideological, 182; Western, 5–6 India, 2, 87, 213; colonial, 205, 219, 231, 233; partition of, 209–10, 214; war of with Pakistan, 210–11 Indigenous Miracles (Osowski), 112 Ingulf, 25–26 Inquisition (Roman), the, 82 Inquisition (Spanish), the, 70, 71, 75, 76, 79, 80, 118, 122, 279n69; creation of, 71; flight of Conversos from, 73, 74; records of, 277n50, 278n65 Institutes of the Christian Religion (Calvin), 14 Iqbal, Muhammad, 204, 205, 206, 230, 231 Iranian revolution, influence of on Sunni and Shi‫ޏ‬a Muslims, 223, 227–28 Isidore of Seville, 22 Islam, 7, 71, 72, 150, 186, 204. See also crisis of belief, in the modern Arab world Islamization, 9, 218, 225, 226, 232 Israel (ancient), 45–46, 52–53, 54, 58 Israel (modern), 211, 213 Italy, movement of Spanish Jews (the “Marrani”) to, 73 James, William, 150, 151, 154, 239–40 Jam‫ޏ‬iyyat al-‫ޏ‬Ulama-I Islam, 214 Jerome, 25, 29, 100

319 Jesuits (Society of Jesus), 109, 167, 175 Jesus Christ, 20, 24, 166; images of, 5, 23, 116; meeting of with Peter, 14; resurrection of, 167; as a saint, 116; special position of in the Spanish realm, 116; veneration of, 108 Jewel, John, 27, 33 Jewish Antiquities ( Josephus), 24 Jews, 43, 241; effect of the news of redemption and the coming Messiah on, 62–64; expulsion of from Spain, 71; Spanish Jews that settled in Italy, 73; ultra-Orthodox, 186; in Yemen, 47. See also Ashkenazi Jews; Sephardic Jews Jhangawi, haqq Nawaz, 221–22 Jinnah, Mohammad Ali, 202, 203, 206, 220 Joscelyn, John, 33 Joseph of Arimathea, 32 Josephus, Titus Flavius, 18, 77, 83, 263n35 Judah the Pious, 48–49 Judah-Leib, Glickl bas, 62–63 Judaism, 42, 66, 166; lack of adherence to in the Castilian community, 70–71 Judas the Pious, 48–49 Julius II (pope), 82 Kabbalah, the, 65 Kant, Immanuel, 174, 176, 184 Kashmiri, Anwarshah, 205, 214 Kassab, Suzanne, 153–54 Kepler, Johannes, 171 Khalafallah, Muhammad, 158 Khan, Ayub, 220–21 Khan, Liaquat Ali, 202, 203, 207 Khan, Muhammad Zafrulla, 206, 207–9, 301n26 Khan, Yahya, 210, 220, 221 Khrushchev, Nikita, 133; “building Communism” project of, 128, 133–34 al-Khuli, Amin, 158 knowledge: different types of, 167; frailty of, 67; rational, 68. See also knowledge, secularization of during and after the Reformation era

320 knowledge, secularization of during and after the Reformation era, 163–83 passim; and American individualism, 179–80; condensed narrative of, 167; contribution of humanistic scholarship to, 165– 66; and the “demand side” of knowledge-making, 170; and the development of the “graduate school,” 177, 293n56; and the emphasis of medicine and the natural sciences in universities, 177–79; flawed narrative of, 166–67; and the founding of the University of Berlin, 176–77; historical processes of, 167; influence of doctrinal disagreements and Christian pluralism on, 168–69, 172–73; influence of the early modern states’ control of churches on, 169; as a phenomenon born of Protestantism, 180–81; privileging of theology in sixteenthcentury universities, 169–70; role of noble courts in, 170, 171–72, 289–90n22; and the scientific narrative, 165; and the triumph of Newtonianism, 174–75; and the vulnerability of university theologians, 173–75 Komsomol Congress (XIII [1958]), 134–35 Komsomol organization, 135 Krasnodar, 145–46 Kruglov, Aleksei, 141 Krylenko, Nikolai, 130 Kuroedov, Vladimir, 136, 137 Laertius, Diogenes, 28–29 La guerre des images (Gruzinski), 111 Larkin, Brian, 113, 274n30 La santidad controvertida (Garcia), 111 Latin America, 1, 112, 123, 270n1, 277n51; colonial, 2, 106. See also Mexico, colonial, approaches to saints in Laurentius, 89, 90, 91 Lavrikov, Iurii, 139, 140 Lazarillo de Tormes (Mendoza), 74 Lebanon, colonial, sect formation in, 8–9 Legaspi, Michael, 165

I n de x Legitimacy of the Modern Age, The (Blumenberg), 200 Lentulus, 23, 24 Le pain et le cirque (Veyne), 95 Lessing, Gotthold, 165–66 Lévi, Israël, 53 Lexicon graecolatinum (Gessner), 83 Life of Constantine (Eusebius), 18 Likutim Shonim, 53 Lipsius, Justus, 65; reconstruction of the Militia Romana by, 17 Locke, John, 172 Lockhart, James, 114 Loew, Judah, 57 Los nobles antes la muerte (Toscano), 113 Löwith, Karl, 200 Luther, Martin, 69, 76 Luzzatto, Moses Hayim, 256n27 Mabillon, Jean, 15–16, 30, 35 Machiavelli, Niccolò, on the “republic of clogs,” 78, 264n43 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 164 Madani, Husayn Ahmad, 216, 220 Maffei, Raffaele, 22 Magdeburg Centuries, 23, 24, 29, 31 Maimonides, 41–42, 44, 48, 50, 61, 65, 255– 56n24; authority of, 52; central role of in the prophecy of Nathan of Gaza, 52; law code of, 47, 52, 62 Majlis-i Ahrar-i Islam, 206, 207–8, 212 Mani, 87, 88; on the question of whether rituals for the souls of the dead actually worked, 89 Manichees/Manichaeans, 87; importance of burial rituals to, 88–89; as offering a more “authentic” rendering of Christianity, 87; rituals of concerning burial practices similar to those practiced by early Christians, 87–88 Manuzio, Paolo, 75 Man with a Movie Camera (1929), 130 Marcomir, 26 María, José, 120

I n de x Marranism, 69, 260n10 Marranos, Yirmiyahou Yovel, 69, 78 Marsden, George, 164, 291n40 Martin, David, 185 Marvels & Miracles (W. Taylor), 111–12 Marx, Karl, 13 Mary: explosion of devotion to in the thirteenth century, 108; images of, 5, 115–16; special position of in the Spanish realm, 116 Mary Tudor, 27 Maududi, Sayyid Abul-A‫ޏ‬la, 208 Maurice of Nassau, 17 Maurists, the, 30, 34 Maurus, Rabanus, 39, 40 Meaning in History (Löwith), 200 Mechanics (Aristotle), Castilian translation of, 77, 264n40 Medici, Cosimo de, 81 Mehmed IV (sultan), 42 Melanchthon, Philipp, 31, 37 Melania the Younger, 96–97 Mendoza, Diego Hurtado de, 4, 70, 74–76, 80–81, 240, 241; achievement of, 84; admiration for Machiavelli, 78; as ambassador to Rome, 81; as ambassador to Venice, 76–77; declining political influence and exile of, 81–84; family life and upbringing of, 74–75; Gessner’s tribute to, 83–84; as governor of Sienna, 81; knowledge of Arabic, 75, 263n29; library of, 77; love of the Nazrid kingdom, 75; as a Marrano, 78–79, 80; passion for Arab history and philosophy, 75–76; passion for Averroes, 77–79; passion for book collecting, 74, 76, 83; political letters of, 77–78; workshop of in Venice, 83 Mercado, David, 44 Messiah (son of David), 55, 56 Messiah (son of Joseph), 52, 53, 55, 56 Messiah (son of Judah), 52, 53 Mexico, colonial, approaches to saints in, 106; choices concerning what saints to worship, 116–17; common expression

321 (santo) used for a saint in Latin America and Mexico, 109–10; complex chronology of the cult of saints in Mexican households, 114–15; context and vocabulary concerning, 107–10; and the dynamics of conversion, 110; introduction of saints to Latin America by Spaniards and Franciscans, 108; as material entities, 107; placement of household saints in oratories, 117–18; processions and saint’s day celebrations in, 112; saints within the household, 106, 107, 114–18, 123–24, 272n16 (see also saints/cult of saints, images and representations of); saints in the public eye, 106–7, 110–14; scholarly approaches to “holy lives and representations of saintliness,” 110–13; specific household saints, 116; typology of saints in households, 115–17 Michaelis, Johann David, 174 Middle Ages, 20, 51, 70, 92, 110, 171; early Middle Ages, 85, 102–3; influence of on Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, 41; Latin Middle Ages, 25. See also saints, cult of, as key to the religious experience of the Middle Ages Mir, Khurshid Hasan, 215 Mirandola, Pico della, 68 Mirza, Iskandar, 220 Mishnah, the, 43, 44, 60, 61, 87 Mishneh Torah (Maimonides), 41–42, 44 missionaries, 5–6 modernism, Islamic, 209, 217, 231, 232, 301n34 modernity, 8, 9, 14, 181, 199, 239; failure of, 187; normative poverty of rationalized modernity, 188–89; secular modernity, 188, 240 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 16–17, 19, 25, 30, 32, 40; influence of on modern historiography, 19; Sather Lectures of, 19–20; on the second millennial tradition of historiography, 18 monotheism, 72, 197, 287n2

322

I n de x

Montaigne, Michel de, 67–68, 69, 70, 84 Montfaucon, Bernard de, 30 Morales, Ambrosio de, 75 More, Henry, 65 Moriscos, 72, 75, 82, 261n17, 265n51 Mosaic Law, 63 Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD), 218 Muhammad the Prophet, 73, 204, 217, 223, 233; companions (sahaba) and successors of, 218–19 Muratori, Ludovico Antonio, 174 Musa, Muhammad, 221 Muslim League, 206, 216 Muslims, 73, 217, 241; of colonial India, 233; hijab practice of, 187. See also Ahmadis; Shi‫ޏ‬a Muslims; Sunni Muslims

Neveu, Bruno, 19 Newberg, Andrew, 237–38, 239 Nicholas I (pope), 33 Nicolas of Cusa, 28 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 160 Nothhelm, 25

Nachmetaphysisches Denken (Habermas), 190 Nahar, Isaac, 47–48 Nahmanides, 41, 51, 61, 256n32 Nahuas After the Conquest, The (Lockhart), 114 Nahuas people, 106 Nahuatl language, 106, 271n7, 271–72n12; term of (ixiptlatl) for an image, 109; testaments of, 114, 115 Najafi, Safdar Husayn, on the practice of ijtihad, 229–30 Najjar, Fauzi, 158 Nantawa, Hosea, 53, 57, 59, 60; Sasportas’s response to, 53–54 Nathan of Gaza, 42, 43, 48, 51, 52, 60, 61, 64; on the Messiah’s conversion to Islam, 57 nationalism: Arab, 150, 152; Hindu, 186; Pakistani, 210, 230; Third World, 1 Nauclerus, 26 Nayler, James, 172 Nazimuddin, Khawaja, 207 Nazrid kingdom, 71 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 202, 230 Neo-Platonists/Neo-Platonism, 65, 102 neo-Thomism, 180, 181

Pakistan, 9, 214; Christian population of, 203; collection of zakat as part of the Islamization program in, 225–26; demand of the Shi‫ޏ‬i for recognition of their separate religious law in, 226; disturbances in the Punjab region of, 206–8, 210; emergence of independent East Pakistan as Bangladesh, 202, 206, 210–11, 221; Hindu population of, 203; implementation of Hudood (hudud) laws in, 217–18, 228–29; influence of the Iranian revolution on, 227–28; overall population of, 202–3; perceived outsized influence of Shi‫ޏ‬i in the political and public life of, 220–24; and the question of how to teach Islam in the schools of, 224–25; state control of the media in, 223–24; urban and rural roots of sectarianism in, 221–23; war of with India, 210–11. See also Ahmadis; Shi‫ޏ‬a Muslims; Sunni Muslims pan-Islamic Organization Conference (1974), 211 papal encyclicals: Aeterni Patris (1879), 180; Humani Generis (1950), 180; Pascendi Dominici (1907), 180 Paquette, Vincent, 235, 238

Ohel YaҴakov (Sasportas), 51 On the Mysteries of the Egyptians ( Jamblichus), 87 Orsini, Giordano, 20 Osorio, Francisco Pérez, 117, 120 Osowski, Edward, 112 Ottheinrich of Palatinate-Neuburg, 31, 36 Ottoman Empire, 41–42, 55, 56–57, 62, 65 Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Sextus Empiricus), 67–68, 77, 80, 264n47

I n de x Paraphrasis totius Aristotelis (Mendoza), 77 Paris, Matthew, 39–40 Parker, Matthew, 17, 38, 39–40, 246n22; medieval manuscript collection of, 32–34; use of Eusebius’s authentication practices by, 35–36 Passio Perpetuae, 18 Pastore, Stefania, 3–4, 240, 241 Patlagean, Evelyne, 95 Patrizi, Francesco, 17 Paul III (pope), 81 Paulinus of Nola, 93, 96; and the burial of Cynegius, 93; monetary support of for the shrine of Felix, 93; question for Augustine on whether the dead receive any benefits from the living, 93 Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance, 4e–7e siècles (Patlagean), 95 Peasants’ War (1524–26), 169 Pelagius/the Pelagian controversy, 95–100 Pereda, Felipe, 110 Pérez, María, 115 Persinger, Michael A., 236–37, 239, 307n7 Petrarch, 22 Petrov, Evgenii, 132 Peutinger, Konrad, 26 Phamphilus, 28 Philip II (king of Spain), 82 Philo, 27, 29–30 Photius, 77 Pico, Giovanfrancesco, 68 piety: baroque, 94; Islamic, 5; Jewish, 49–50 Pinianus, 96–97 Pío, José, 120 Pirckheimer, Willibald, 23 Pizzigoni, Caterina, 4–5 Platter, Thomas, 13–14, 15 Plotinus, 102 pluralism, 7–8; “hyperpluralism,” 8, 187; pluralistic competition, 4; religious pluralism and the origins of the secular, 2–6 “Politics as a Vocation” (Weber), 199 Poliziano, Angelo, 165 Polybius, 77

323 Polycarp, 27 polytheism, 185 Pontius Pilate, 24 Popkin, Richard, 68, 69, 81, 259n2 Possidius of Calama, 101–2 Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, The (Habermas), 190 Protestant Ethic, The (Weber), 194, 198 Protestants/Protestantism, 3, 78, 168, 187, 194, 240, 241; doctrinal disputes concerning, 172; and economic achievement, 195–96; inability of Protestant theologians to challenge Darwinism, German biblical criticism, and historicism, 179; and the secularization of knowledge, 180–81 Ptolemy, 23, 29 Punjab, 207, 210, 221. See also Pakistan, disturbances in the Punjab region of Puzin, Aleksei, 141 Pyrrhonism, 172; contribution of Spain to, 80–81; rebirth of in France, 84 Qadian, 210, 213, 299n9 Quantin, Jean-Louis, 19 Quesada, Catalina de, 73 Quillen, Carol, 22–23 Quod nihil scitur (Sanchez), 68 Qur‫ގ‬an, the, 7, 151, 154, 158 Rabwah incident, 212–13, 215–16 Ragon, Pierre, 111 Ransom of the Soul (Brown), 85 Rationale divinorum officiorum (Durand), 36 Ratzinger, Joseph, 190 Rawls, John, 189 Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon, 44 Reformation, the, 3, 19, 171; and the fracturing of the unitary Catholic faith leading to pluralism, 7–8. See also knowledge, secularization of during the Reformation era reformers, Ottoman, 8

324 religion, 185, 186, 200; competing religious groups in Germany, 293–94n65; crisis of in the third century AD, 87; local religion in Spain, 110, 272n13; prediction of its demise, 1–2; privatization of, 8; religious climate in the third century AD, 87; religious comparativism, 69; religious militancy, 187; the return of to public life, 9–10; role of ritual in religious life, 5; secular study of, 4; Weber’s historical sociology of, 196–97, 198–99. See also religion, neurotheology of; representation/reality dilemma, as inherent to religion religion, neurotheology of, 235–36; assessment of the neural correlates of religious experience using SPECT technology, 237–38; and the attention association area (AAA) of the brain, 237, 307n11; and the Carmelite nun experiment, 235, 238; and the “God spot,” 10, 238, 308nn19–20; intellectual tradition of, 239–40; neurotheological research as undermining the truth claims of religion, 236; and the orientation association area (OAA) of the brain, 237–38; and Persinger’s “God helmet” experiments, 236–37, 239; and the shift from doctrine to utility, 240–41 religious studies: origins of, 2–3; role of the nineteenth-century universities in, 2–3 Renaissance, the, 3, 15, 29, 165 representation/reality dilemma: as inherent to religion, 86–87; pagan efforts to reduce the clash between representation and reality, 87 Reuben, Julie, 164 Reyes, Baltasar de los, 123 Rhenanus, Beatus, 28 ritual. See burial practices; Christians, specific burial rituals of; religion, role of ritual in religious life; Soviet Union, socialist rituals of Rizvi, Khadim Hussain, 233 Rizwi, Sayyid Mahmud Ahmad, 303n82 Roberts, Jon, 164

I n de x Romanticism, 177 Rose, Paula, 93 Rousselle, Aline, 87 Royal Society of London, 173 Russian Soviet Federative of Socialist Republic (RSFSR), 144; Council of Ministers, 141, 283–84n58; Ministry of Culture of, 142; Ministry of Municipal Affairs of, 142; “On the Inculcation of New Civic Rituals into Soviet Everyday Life” decree of, 142–42; ritual commissions of, 144 Sabbatians/Sabbatianism, 3; on the authority of texts, 52; jettisoning of legal norms by, 43; prophecies of concerning the advent of Sabbetai Zevi, 52; Sasportas’s response to Sabbatian theology, 42–43; sexual practices of, 43, 254n9 sacrifice: origin of the theory of, 87; traditional system of in ancient India, 87 saints/cult of saints, 4–5, 94; and the construction of community identity, 111; ecclesiastical authorities’ attempts to control the excesses in the cult of saints, 109; European historiography of, 110; Franciscans as central to the expansion of the cult, 108, 270–71n6; Jesuits as champions of the cult, 109; as key to the religious experience of the Middle Ages, 107–8; Latin American historiography of, 110; link of with confraternities, 109, 113, 274n30; popularity of during the Counter-Reformation, 108; relevancy of to the dying, 114; in Spain, 108, 270n5; specific cults, 111, 112; spread of the cult through the development of printing, 108; use of as symbols for local organizations, 109. See also Mexico, colonial, approaches to saints in; saints/cult of saints, images and representations of saints/cult of saints, images and representations of, 108–9, 110, 111–12, 270n1; altar saints, 121; and the change from ritual to the material in images of saints, 118–23;

I n de x complaints of church authorities concerning excesses and misrepresentation of images, 112–13; considered as objectspirits, 122–23; improper treatment of in households, 121–22; interactions of people with saint images in the household, 121–22; manufacture of, 120; materiality of as objects or artifacts, 118–20; presence of images on common household items, 121; specific roles of saint images, 113; types of household images, 119–20, 121 salat, as an act of self-formation, 5 salvation, 1, 10, 72, 261n17, 297n42; by grace, 168, 169; and Protestantism, 194; supramundane, 297n37; through works, 195 Sanchez, Francisco, 68 Santa Colonna, 23 Santo, Matthew dal, 103 Sasportas, Jacob, 3, 41, 42, 55; antimessianism of, 44, 61–62; contrast of with other rabbinic intellectuals, 64–65; denial of the existence of The Book of Zerubbabel and the theory of the fallen Messiah, 54–55, 61; differentiation of from other contemporary groups, 65–66; on the effect of Jewish crowds upon gentile opinions, 64; on the messianic age and observance of the law, 46–47; novel form of criticism utilized by, 49–50; reinstitution of textual discipline by, 43–44; response of to Nantawa, 53–54; response of to Sabbatianism, 42–43; on Sephardic misconstruing of Maimonides, 48–49; skepticism of concerning Sabbatian prophecy, 44–48, 50–52; view of Maimonides, 47 Savonarola, Girolamo, 68 Sawilla, Jan Marco, 18 Scaliger, Joseph, 30 Schielke, Samuli, 156 Schmitt, Carl, 199 scholasticism, 174; demise of neoscholasticism, 294n69 science, 293n59; and Christianity, 165; emer-

325 gence of new science in the sixteenth century, 171–72; and the exclusion of God in modern science, 289n15 “Science as a Vocation” (Weber), 198 Scott, Joan, 187 Scottish Enlightenment, 179, 181 Searle, John, 165 sects/sectarianism, 8–9; in colonial India, 219; in Pakistan, 221–23; and the role of politics in sect making, 9 Secular Age, A (C. Taylor), 186 secularism, 7–8, 10, 240–41; authoritarian impulse of, 6; blame for present-day religious conflict on, 2; borrowing of from religion, 6–7; “common ground secularism,” 244n17; critics of, 200–201; current literature concerning, 7; and its discontents, 6–10; “ethical secularism,” 10; militant forms of, 8; origin and crisis of, 2; post-secularism, 187, 188; as a problem for non-Western societies, 6; varieties of, 1–2, 7; “watered-down” secularism, 7. See also pluralism, religious, and the origins of the secular; secularization, of American universities secularization, of American universities, 164; as a by-product of modernity, 8; dismantling of secularization theory by both the left and right, 187; secularization of knowledge in, 164–65; Weber’s classical paradigm of, 184–87, 192 Sefer Hasidim (attributed to Judas the Pious), 48–50, 51, 61, 66 Self-Criticism after the Defeat (al-Naqd aldhati ba ҵda al-hazima [al-‫ޏ‬Azm]), 151, 152, 153 Semler, Johann Salomo, 174 Seneca, 65 Sephardic Jews, 63; conservatism of, 41–24; cultural influences on, 41 Servet, Miguel, 261n17 Severano, Giovanni, 18 Sextus Empiricus, 67, 68, 77, 80, 259–60n3 Shahin, ‫ޏ‬Abd al-Sabbur, 286n32

326 Shaw, Brent, 86 Shelepin, Aleksandr, 134, 135 Shevet Yehuda (Ibn Verga), 71 Shi‫ޏ‬a Muslims, 8–9, 203, 304n94; blasphemy laws directed against, 219–20, 232–33; demand of for recognition of their separate religious law in Pakistan, 226; disparaging view of Muhammad’s companions (sahaba) and successors by, 218–19; influence of the Iranian revolution on, 227; perceived outsized influence of in the political and public life of Pakistan, 220–24; and the question of how to teach Islam in the schools, 224–25; response of to the Ahmadis, 305–6n120; and sectarianism, 221–23. See also zakat, collection of Shrines and Miraculous Images (W. Taylor), 111–12 Simon, Richard, 165 sin: Augustine’s view of, 98, 100–101; and the debate concerning impii (impious persons), 99–100; Jerome’s view of, 100; Pelagius’s view of, 99–100 Siriro, Emmanuel, 60 Siriro, Saul, 59–60 Six-Day War (1967), crisis in Arab intellectual life following Israel’s victory in, 151 skepticism/doubt, 68; methodical doubt, 68; and the plurality of faiths, 68–69. See also skepticism/doubt, in Spain skepticism/doubt, in Spain: comparativism and unbelief in Spain, 70–74; and the Durango heretical movement, 71; and the legacy of Granada, 74–76; and multiconfessional communities, 71; persistence of doubt at the heart of the Spanish world, 70; and the space of doubt, 69–70; the Spanish contribution to Pyrrhonism, 80–81 Smith, Adam, 175 Smith, Christian, 164 Smolkin, Victoria, 6–7, 240

I n de x socialism, 132, 138; democratic, 189–90; Islamic, 211; Marxist, 152 Soloveitchik, Haym, 49 Sorkin, David, 200 Soviet Union: atheism in, 6–7, 127–29, 130, 132, 134, 138–39, 141, 142, 149; death as an ideological problem in, 147–48; details of the secularization of Soviet life in, 129– 33; transition of from socialism to Communism, 138–39. See also Bolsheviks; Soviet Union, socialist rituals of Soviet Union, socialist rituals of, 148–49, 240, 283n36; appearance of socialist rituals in the press, 135; contests for the best new socialist rituals, 145; creation of socialist ritual council (1963), 145–46; development of, 136, 141–42; development of Soviet rites of passage for the individual and family, 143–44; difficulty in the material side of ritual production, 144– 45; expansion of through public holidays, 142–43; the place of ritual in the secularist project of, 6–7, 131–33; and the sacralization of Soviet life, 138–47; use of socialist rituals as atheist weapons, 133–38; and weddings, 139–40. See also Russian Soviet Federative of Socialist Republic (RSFSR) Spain, 3; coexistence of three major religions in, 72–73; Counter-Reformist postTridentine Spain, 69; cultural and intellectual history of within a European dynamic, 70; devotion to saints in, 108, 270n5; expulsion of the Jews from, 71. See also skepticism/doubt, in Spain Spanish American Saints (Morgan), 111 Spanish Black Legend, 70 Spanish Conversos, 72; flight of from the Spanish Inquisition, 73, 74; of Toledo, 74 Spelman, Henry, 34 Spinoza, Baruch, 69, 165 St. Paul, 101, 239–40 St. Peter, meeting of with Christ, 14

I n de x Stalin, Joseph, 128–29, 132; Cultural Revolution of (1928–32), 128 Stark, Rodney, 186 Stepakov, Vladimir, 142, 284n60 Stroumsa, Guy, 69 Sunna, the, 154 Sunni Muslims, 203, 204; admiration of for the companions (sahaba) and successors of Muhammad, 218–19; anxiety of concerning the Ahmadis, 215, 220, 231–32; anxiety of concerning the Shi‫ޏ‬a, 233–34; influence of the Iranian revolution on, 223; and sectarianism, 221–23; warnings concerning the animosity of Sunnis toward Shi‫ޏ‬a Muslims and Ahmadis, 230– 31. See also zakat, collection of Supino, Raphael, 42–43, 48 Sylvester I (pope), 15, 28 Tacitus, 20 Taitazack, Joseph, 57 Talavera, Hernando de, 74 Talib, ‫ޏ‬Ali ibn Abi, 218–19 Talmud, the, 43, 44, 61, 87; dialectical method for the study of, 49; the Palestinian Talmud, 65 Tavárez, David, 112–13 Taylor, A. J. P., 29 Taylor, Charles, 7, 10, 186, 188, 190 Taylor, William, 111–12 Tenbruck, Friedrich, 193, 197 Tertullian, 103–4 Testaments of Toluca, 114 textual traditions, Jewish, 3, 4 Thanawi, Sufi Ashraf ‫ޏ‬Ali, 205–6 “Themes in Post-metaphysical Thinking” (Habermas), 191–92 theology, 175; Christian, 176–77; debates concerning in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, 17; privileging of in sixteenth-century universities, 169–70. See also religion, neurotheology of Theory of Communicative Action, The (Habermas), 191

327 Third Industrial Revolution, 1 three rings, parable of, 71, 72, 261n18 Tillemont, Louis-Sébastien, 19 Toledo, Álvarez de, 81 tolerance, 67, 69, 75, 80, 161, 241; comparative, 9; cultural, 260n10; religious, 69–70, 81, 158 Toluca Valley: available study of indigenous households in, 114–15; available testaments concerning, 115; chronology of the cult of saints in, 115; typology of saints in, 115–16 Toscano, Verónica Zárate, 113 “Treatise on Riches,” 97 Trifone, Giorgio, 81 Trinity, doctrine of, 72 Trithemius, Joannes, 26 Troeltsch, Ernst, 166 Trotsky, Leon, 131 Turner, James, 164 Twelvers, the, 227, 230, 303n80, 305n119 ‫ޏ‬ulama, the, 214, 215, 219, 229, 231, 233, 299n7;

hostile opinion of the Ahmadis by members of, 205–6; views of concerning a university education versus those schooled in madrasas, 216 Ulloa, Alfonso de, 76 Ulricus, 33 Unintended Reformation, The (Gregory), 163–64, 187 United States, 6; “common ground secularism” in, 244n17 University of Berlin, as a Romantic research university, 176–77 ‫ޏ‬Uthmani, Shabbir Ahmad, 205 Valla, Lorenzo, 23, 28, 165; attack on the Donation of Constantine by, 15, 21, 22 Vatican II, 181 Vauchez, André, 110 Vegio, Maffeo, 20, 21, 22, 28 Vergenhans, Joannes, 26 Vergil, Polydore, 36–37

328 Vertov, Dziga, 130 Very Nature of God, The (Larkin), 113 Vestiarian Debate, 37 Veyne, Paul, 95 Virgen de los Remedios, 112, 273n24 Vives, Juan Luis, 24 Voekel, Pamela, 113 Völkel, Markus, 17 Voltaire, 175 Volusianus, 33 von Humboldt, Alexander, 177 von Humboldt, Wilhelm, 177 von Liebig, Justus, 177 von Nidbruck, Caspar, 31–32, 38 Voroshilov, Kliment, 135 V Volostnom ZAGSe (1928), 131–32 Weber, Marianne, 194 Weber, Max, 1, 8, 160, 165, 166, 199, 295n13, 298n45; on the classical paradigm of secularization, 184–87, 198, 297–98n43; on conduct and the “rules of experience,” 197; and the dialectics of disenchantment, 193–98; sociological project of founded on the premise of instrumental rationality, 196–97, 197–98, 297n37; on the sociology of religion, 198–99 Weiss, Max, 6, 7 West, Cornel, 190 Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), 172 Why God Won’t Go Away (Newberg, d’Aquili, and Rause), 235, 237 Wilkins, John, 172 will, human and divine, 150 William of Malmesbury, 39

I n de x Wilson, Woodrow, 178 Winstanley, Gerrard, 172 Wirszubski, Chaim, 57 Wood, Stephanie, 114 Worcester, William, 21 Wycliffe, John, 71 Yunis, Ibtihal, 157 ZAGS, 129–30, 131–32, 141, 145, 281n10, 282n27; changing profile of, 133; work of with the central Komsomol congress, 135 Zahir, Ihsan Ilahi, 228–29 zakat, collection of, 225–26 Zaman, Qasim, 9, 160 Zevi, Sabbetai, 3, 42–43, 48, 62, 64, 258n57; on The Book of Zerubbabel as a falsification, 59; correspondence of with Jacob ibn Sa‫ގ‬adun, 58–59; imprisonment of, 53, 57; interrogation of, 56–57, 61; as a Messiah, 54, 55–56, 61; on Saul Siriro, 59–60 Zia-ul-Haq, Muhammad: blasphemy laws of directed against the Ahmadis and the Shi‫ޏ‬a, 219–20, 232–33; Hudood (hudud) laws of, 217–18, 228–29; implementation of zakat laws by, 225–26; Islamization campaign of, 9, 225; ordinance of forbidding Ahmadis to “pose” as Muslims, 216–18 Zizath novel zvi (Sasportas), 42, 44, 46, 49, 51, 57, 62, 64, 65–66; central paradox of, 66 Zoroastrianism, 3 Zurita, Jerónimo, 80

A NO T E ON T H E T Y P E

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