The Case for God (29 page)

On January 2, 1492, Columbus had been present at the conquest of Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in Europe, by the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella. On March 31, the monarchs signed the Edict of Expulsion that forced the Jews of al-Andalus to choose between baptism
and deportation; in 1499, the Muslim inhabitants of Spain would be given the same choice. Many of the Spanish Jews were so attached to their homeland that they converted to Christianity, but about eighty thousand crossed the border into Portugal and another fifty thousand fled to the new Ottoman Empire.
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Modernity had its own intransigence. Some would find the modern age liberating and enthralling; but for others it would be experienced as coercive, invasive, and destructive. Ferdinand and Isabella were creating the kind of absolute government that was essential to the economy of early modern Europe. They could no longer tolerate such autonomous, self-governing institutions as the guild, the corporation, or the Jewish community, so the victory of Granada was followed by an act of ethnic cleansing.

As part of their unification of kingdoms that had hitherto been independent and had their own unique ethos, Ferdinand and Isabella had established the Spanish Inquisition in 1483. Its aim was to enforce ideological conformity as a base for the new Spanish identity. In a pattern that would be repeated in later secular states, inquisitors sought out dissidents and forced them to abjure their “heresy,” a word deriving from the Greek
airesis
, “to go one’s own way.” The Spanish Inquisition was not an archaic attempt to preserve a bygone religious world; it was a modernizing institution devised by the monarchs to create national unity.
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Its chief victims were the Jewish and Muslim conversos, who had opted for baptism rather than deportation and were suspected of backsliding. Many conversos became committed Catholics, but there were rumors of an underground movement of dissidents who practiced their old faith in secret. The inquisitors were instructed to torture anybody who lit candles on Friday night or refused to eat pork, in order to force them to recant and to name other renegades. Not surprisingly, some of these “new Christians” were not only alienated from Catholicism but became skeptical about religion itself.

The Jews who had fled to Portugal were tougher; they had preferred exile rather than abjuring their faith. Initially, they were welcomed by King João II, but when Manuel I succeeded to the throne in 1495, Ferdinand and Isabella, his parents-in-law, forced him to baptize all the Jews in Portugal. Manuel compromised by granting them immunity from the Inquisition for fifty years. Known as Marranos
(“pigs”), a term of abuse that Portuguese Jews adopted as a badge of pride, they had time to organize a successful Jewish underground. For generations, closet Jews tried to practice their faith to the best of their ability, but they labored under huge difficulties. Cut off from the rest of the Jewish world, they had no access to Jewish literature and no synagogues and were able to perform only a few of the major rituals. Because they had received a Catholic education, their minds were filled with Christian symbols and doctrines, so inevitably, as the years passed, their faith was neither authentically Jewish nor truly Christian.
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Others, as we shall see, would become the first atheists and freethinkers in modern Europe. Deprived of the observances that made the Torah a living reality, Marrano religion became distorted. In the Portuguese universities, the Marranos had studied logic, physics, medicine, and mathematics, but they had no expertise in the more intuitive disciplines of Jewish practice. Relying perforce on reason alone, their theology bore no relation to traditional Judaism.
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Their God was the First Cause of all being, who did not intervene directly in human affairs; there was no need for the Torah, because the laws of nature were accessible to everybody. This is the kind of God that, left to itself, human reason tends to create, but in the past Jews had found the rational God of the philosophers religiously empty. Like many modern people—and for many of the same reasons—some of the Marranos would find this God alien and incredible.

The Jews who migrated to the Ottoman Empire had an entirely different experience. Their exile, a spiritual as well as a physical dislocation, had inflicted a deep psychic wound; everything seemed to be in the wrong place.
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Some Spanish Jews settled in Safed in Palestine, where they met Isaac Luria (1534–72), a frail northern European Jew who had developed a form of Kabbalah that spoke directly to their predicament. Kabbalists had always felt at liberty to interpret the first chapters of Genesis allegorically, transforming them into an esoteric account of the inner life of God. In this tradition, Luria had created an entirely new creation myth that bore no resemblance to the orderly cosmogony of Genesis and that began with an act of
kenosis
. Because God was omnipresent, there was no space for the world, no place where God was not. So En Sof, the inscrutable and unknowable Godhead, as it were, shrank into itself in a voluntary
zimzum
(“withdrawal”),
a self-diminishment that made itself less. The creation continued in a series of cosmic accidents, primal explosions, and false starts, which seemed a more accurate depiction of the arbitrary world that Jews now inhabited. Sparks of divine light had fallen into the Godless abyss created by
zimzum
. Everything was exiled from its rightful place, and the Shekhinah wandered through the world, yearning to be reunited with the Godhead.
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Nobody understood this strange story literally; like any creation myth, it was primarily therapeutic, speaking figuratively of a timeless rather than a historical reality. It became authoritative because it was such a telling description of the exiles’ experience, at the same time showing them that their tragedy was not unique but was in tune with fundamental laws of existence. Instead of being outcasts, Jews were central actors in the process that would redeem the universe, because their careful observance of Torah could end this universal displacement and effect the “restoration”
(tikkun
) of the Shekhinah to the Godhead, the Jews to the Promised Land, and the rest of the world to its rightful state.
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By 1650, Lurianic Kabbalah had become a mass movement in the Jewish world from Poland to Iran, the only Jewish theology at this time to win such wide acceptance.
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Without the special rituals devised by Luria, this myth would have remained a senseless fiction. Weeping and rubbing their faces in the dust, Kabbalists made night vigils in order to confront their sorrow; they lay awake all night, calling out to God in their abandonment, and took long hikes in the Galilean countryside to act out their sense of homelessness. But there was no wallowing: Kabbalists were required to work through their pain in a disciplined, stylized manner until it gave way to a measure of joy. Vigils always finished at dawn with a meditation on the end of humanity’s estrangement from the divine. Kabbalists practiced disciplines of concentration
(kawwanoth
) that evoked from the farthest reaches of the psyche a wonder and delight that they had not known they possessed. Compassion was a crucial Lurianic virtue, and there were severe penances for faults that injured others: Jews who had suffered so much themselves must not increase the sum of grief in the world.
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After the disaster of 1492, many Jews had retreated from the
falsafah
that had been so popular in Spain and found that the new
mythos
and its rituals enabled them to make contact with the deeper roots of their grief and to discover a
source of healing.
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But in the new world that was coming into being in Europe, this type of creative
mythos
would soon be a thing of the past.

Other European countries were in the throes of the same transformation as Spain, even though at this early stage few were aware of its magnitude. By the sixteenth century, the people of the West had started to create an entirely new and unprecedented type of civilization that depended on a radical change in the economic base of society. Instead of relying, like every premodern economy, on a surplus of agricultural produce with which they could trade in order to fund their cultural achievements, the modern economy rested on the technological replication of resources and the constant reinvestment of capital, which provided a source of wealth that could be renewed indefinitely. This freed it from many of the constraints of premodern societies, where the economy could not expand beyond a certain point and eventually outran its resources. Consequently, these agrarian societies tended to be conservative, because they simply could not afford the constant replication of the infrastructure that has come to characterize modernity. Original thought was not encouraged, because it could lead to frustration and social unrest, since fresh ideas could rarely be implemented and projects that required too large a financial outlay were usually shelved. It seemed preferable, therefore, to concentrate on preserving what had already been achieved.
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Now, however, Western people were gradually acquiring the confidence to look to the future instead of the past. Where the older cultures had taught men and women to remain within carefully defined limits, pioneers such as Columbus were encouraging them to venture beyond the confines of the known world, where they discovered that, thanks to their modern technology, they not only survived but prospered.

By the sixteenth century, therefore, a complex process was at work in Europe that was slowly changing the way people thought and experienced the world. Inventions were occurring simultaneously in many different fields; none seemed particularly momentous at the time, but their cumulative effect would be decisive.
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Specialists in one discipline found that they benefited from discoveries made
in others. Scientists and explorers, for example, both relied on the increased efficiency of instrument makers. By 1600, innovations were occurring on such a scale and in so many areas at once that progress seemed irreversible and set to continue indefinitely. But in the early sixteenth century, the Great Western Transformation was only in its infancy. Spain may have been the most advanced country in Europe, but it was not the sole model of a modern state. In the course of their struggle against Spanish hegemony, the Netherlands deliberately developed a more liberal ideology to counter Spanish autocracy. There were thus two rival versions of modernity: one open and tolerant, the other exclusive and coercive.

And as society altered to accommodate these developments, religion would also have to change. At this point, faith still pervaded the whole of life and had not yet been confined to a distinct sphere. But secularization was beginning. A centralized state was crucial to productivity and, like Ferdinand and Isabella, rulers all over Europe began the difficult process of welding separate kingdoms into modern nation-states. Princes, such as Henry VII of England (1457–1509) and Francis I of France (1494–1547), adopted policies designed to reduce the influence of the Church and subordinate it to their own political goals. The increasing role of banks, stock companies, and stock exchanges, over which the Church had no control, also eroded its power. This steadily unstoppable trend, which pushed religion into a separate, marginal place in society, would be felt in all kinds of obscure ways that were never fully articulated. Secularization would be accelerated by three crucial and formative sixteenth-century movements: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. These were not disconnected or rival projects. They influenced one another in the same way as the other innovations of the period; all three reflected the emerging early modern Zeitgeist and were pervaded by the religious ethos.

The reduced role of the Church did not mean that people were becoming disenchanted with their faith; on the contrary, they were probably more religious than they had been in the medieval period. Religion was involved in the modernization process at every level and would affect and be affected by the escalating spiral of social, political, and scientific change. The humanism of the Renaissance, for example, was deeply religious. The Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus
(1466–1536) wanted to read the scriptures in the original languages and translate them into a more elegant Latin, and his textual work was of immense importance to the reformers. Renaissance art benefited from the anatomical drawings of Andreas Vesalius (1515–64). Other painters exploited the new mathematical understanding of space: in their own field, they were striving for a vision that was as rational as the dawning scientific ethos. The technical inventions of the period helped artists achieve an empirical accuracy and fidelity to nature that was unprecedented, based on the depiction of objects viewed from a single, objective perspective and placed in relation to one another in a unified space.
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But this “objectivity” did not mean an abandonment of the transcendent: this “scientific art” achieved a numinous vision, just as early modern scientists sought a solution that was elegant, aesthetic, and redolent of the divine.
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Renaissance religion recoiled from the arid theology of the late scholastics and had absorbed the personalized emphasis of much fourteenth-century spirituality. Lorenzo Valla (1405–57) had already stressed the futility of mixing sacred truth with “tricks of dialectics” and “metaphysical quibbles.”
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The humanists wanted the kind of emotive religion described by the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch (1304–74), who had argued that “theology is actually poetry, poetry concerning God,” effective not because it “proved” anything but because it reached the heart.
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The humanists’ textual study of the New Testament was part of their attempt to return, like any premodern reformers,
ad fontes
, to the “wellsprings” of their tradition, shaking off the medieval legacy in order to rediscover the gospels and the fathers of the Church. They were particularly drawn to the affective spirituality of Paul and Augustine, whom they revered not as doctrinal authorities, but as individuals like themselves, who had embarked on a highly personal and emotional quest. The humanists were largely responsible for creating the concept of the individual that would be crucial to the modern ethos. Only a person free of communal, social, or dogmatic shibboleths could innovate freely, experiment boldly, reject established authority, and risk the possibility of error. The hero of the early modern period was the explorer, who could penetrate new realms of thought and experience independently but was ready to cooperate with others.