Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (35 page)

The scholars in these protouniversities came to realize that most would-be students didn’t know enough to even begin studying, so they developed a set of standard courses designed to get students ready to begin, courses in rhetoric, grammar, logic, and arithmetic, for example, that were designed to teach students merely how to read, write, and think. Students who successfully completed this basic course were called baccalaureates, Latin for “beginners”; now they could
begin
to learn some actual
subject such as theology, philosophy, medicine, or law. Today, of course, the baccalaureate is the degree one gets for graduating from a four-year liberal arts college.

As wealth accumulated in Europe, a few people were able to spend all their time studying, reading, writing, and making art. With Greek thought back in the mix, a set of new ideas filtered into the imagination of learned Europeans. The Greeks had said, “Man is the measure of all things,” and their pagan pantheon had represented “God” as a collection of deities with human personalities who interacted with one another and with humanity in dramatic ways. The Greeks had taken a penetrating interest in the natural world and the human here-and-now. They had made great strides in discerning
patterns among natural events as a first step toward explaining them. People who read and discussed the ancient Greek texts got interested, therefore, in unraveling the mysteries of life on earth, an orientation quite at odds with the attitudes fostered by the church since the fall of Rome, for in the Christendom of the Middle Ages, the prevailing doctrine declared the material world to be evil. The only point of being here was to get out of here, and so the only subject worth studying was the hereafter and the only texts worth consulting were the scriptures and scriptural commentaries. The new humanis
ts did not think of themselves as competing with Christianity; they were hardly godless atheists; but Church officials saw a threat in the new forms of thought. They could feel where all this was going.

Christianity grew within the framework of a dying Rome. It developed a hierarchy that resembled and shadowed the administrative hierarchy of Rome. As the imperial structure crumbled, the Christian structure took its place by default, becoming the framework that continued to support civilized life. The Byzantine emperor, always the head of the imperial hierarchy, automatically evolved into the head of this Christian hierarchy. The various bishops were subservient to him as the head of the Church, just as the governors had been (and were still) subservient to him as the head of the e
mpire. The doctrines of the Christian religion were formulated by bishops at councils convened by the emperor and updated periodically at similar councils, with the emperor always having the final say.

So closely did Christianity intertwine with Rome that when the empire split in two, the church divided too. In the east, the emperor remained the head of the church. In the west, the very title of “emperor” dropped out
of existence. Politically, the continent fragmented into small realms ruled, essentially, by warlords. In this context, the Church emerged as the single source of cultural coherence and unity in western Europe, the cultural medium through which people who spoke different languages and served different sovereigns could still interact or travel through one another’s realms. To serve this function, the doctrines of the Church had to be uniform, universally understood, and universally accepted, so the Church developed a ferocious propensity for spotting and stamping out heresies.

By the time of the Crusades, church officials in western Europe were regularly executing heretics—anyone whose publicly stated convictions departed from the prevailing doctrine—by tying them to stakes and lighting bonfires under them.

As the Church tightened its grip on daily life, the bishop of Rome became the preeminent figure in western Europe. People called him
il pape,
the pope, because they considered him the “father” of the Christian community. In the east, the patriarch of Constantinople was the leading religious figure, but there were many patriarchs and he was only the first among equals. In the west, the pope acquired an authority transcending that of all other bishops. Around the time of the Crusades, Catholics began to propound the doctrine that the pope was infallible.

Meanwhile, the church was extending its reach across the continent and down into every cranny. Every rural village, every town, every neighborhood in every city had its parish priest and its local church and every priest was administering exactly the same rites in the same way and in the same language. The hierarchy became fully rationalized and embedded: every priest answered to a higher bishop, every bishop to an archbishop, archbishops to cardinals, and cardinals to the pope.

But then, as the Crusades died away, this hegemony began to crack. Here and there, reformers began to question the authority of the church. In the late fourteenth century, an Oxford professor named John Wycliffe shocked church officials by translating the Bible into that most vulgar of languages, common English. And why? So that common, ordinary folks could read and understand what the Bible said for themselves. Church officials couldn’t fathom why ordinary folks would need to understand the Bible for themselves when they had priests to do the understanding for them.

Wycliffe went further. He suggested that clerics should all be poor, like the apostles, and that land should be taken away from churches and monasteries and put to secular uses, which offended the church deeply. Wycliffe had powerful political protectors, so he managed to live out his natural life span, but four decades after his death, a pope had his bones dug up, crushed into powder, and scattered over a river: the rage, it seemed, persisted.

It persisted in part because Wycliffe’s ideas would not die out. In the generation after his, for example, the Bohemian priest Johann Huss embraced Wycliffe’s idea that all people had a right to a Bible in their own language. He commenced a great translation project. When church officials quoted canon law at him to show that his actions were wrong, he quoted scripture back at them and declared that the Bible trumped church councils. This was too much. The church arrested Huss and burnt him at the stake in a fire fueled with copies of the vulgate Bibles he had been promoting. In short, Christi
anity did to its first reformers what Islam had done to the proto-Sufi Hallaj.

Killing reformers, however, could not kill the hunger for reform. Wycliffe, Huss, and others of their ilk had scratched through to something smoldering dangerously among the people: an unrequited desire for real religious experience.

The bureaucratization of religion had made the church powerful and given Europe cultural unity, but the religious bureaucracy eventually couldn’t deliver the core experience that was its raison d’etre. German theology professor Martin Luther put his finger most precisely on the dysfunction. Luther was a man tormented by guilt. No matter what he did, he felt like a sinner headed for hell. The Christian rites were supposed to alleviate this guilt by washing him clean of sin, but for Luther the rites weren’t working. He tried everything—fasting, self-flagellation, daily communion, end
less penances, but at the end of it all, when the priest told him he was pure now, Luther didn’t believe him. He had only to look into his heart to see that he was still impure. He knew because he still felt the guilt.

Then one day, a great insight hit Luther. He could not have salvation until he believed himself saved. If he lacked this belief, it didn’t matter what the priest said or did. If he had this belief, it didn’t matter what the priest said or did. Which raised a big, big question: of what use was the priest? Why was he even in the mix?

In fact, the conviction gripped Luther that salvation could not be earned, like a pension. It was a gift, which could only be received, and then only through faith, an inner process, never through “works,” external deeds and doings.

Armed with this insight, Luther looked around and saw a world full of people pursuing salvation through “works,” and to make it all worse, works prescribed by a vast, wealthy, well-organized bureaucracy, the Church of Rome. It filled him with horror, for if his insight was true, all these “works” were for naught!

Of all the “works” prescribed by the Church, the one that most alarmed and offended Luther was the granting of indulgences. An indulgence was a remission of punishment for certain sins, which the Church proclaimed itself empowered to give, in exchange for good and valuable considerations. The practice went back to the Crusades, when the pope offered indulgences to those who signed up to fight the heathen Turk. Later, as crusading opportunities faded out, the Church began to grant indulgences in exchange for cash contributions. Given the petty corruption that inevitably infests any far-flung
bureaucratic system, some clerics here and there—let’s face it—probably handed out indulgences in exchange for cash contributions to, well, themselves. Any way you look at it, by Martin Luther’s time, the whole practice of granting indulgences had come to mean that people could supposedly buy their way out of purgatory and fast-track their way into heaven.

Making people pay to get into heaven was bad enough. But to Luther the practice smacked of something worse. If salvation was a direct, personal interaction between each individual and God, then the Church was extorting bribes to let people through a gate
they had no actual power to open or keep shut.
It wasn’t just corruption. It was thievery and deception of the worst sort!

On Halloween night, 1517, Luther nailed an inflammatory document to the door of a church in Wittenberg in which he set forth ninety-five “theses,” ninety-five objections to the Church and its doings. Luther’s paper was an overnight sensation, and it sparked the Protestant Reformation.

The Protestant Reformation was no single thing. Once Luther opened the gates, the passion spread in numerous directions with numerous reformers launching separate movements and many new sec
ts springing up, each with its own idiosyncratic creed; but generally they had four tenets in common:

In some ways, the Protestant Reformation came out of the same sorts of dissatisfactions and hungers that had given birth to Sufism. In the West, however, no Ghazali appeared to synthesize orthodox dogmas with the quest for personal religious breakthrough.

In other regards, the Protestant Reformation resembled the movements of Ibn Hanbal and Ibn Taymiyah—the exact opposite of Sufism. Like those Muslim theologians, Protestant reformers sought to delegitimize all later accretions of doctrine and go back to the original source: the Bible. The Book.

But ultimately, the Protestant Reformation was nothing like anything that had happened in Islam. Protestant Reformers rebelled against the Church and the pope, but in Islam, there was no church or pope to rebel against. In the West, the religious reformers who broke the hegemony of the Catholic Church didn’t do so to raise up some monolithic new church but to empower the individual. Such a quest in no way pitted them against Christianity itself, because Christianity was inherently about the individual: a plan for the salvation of each person. Islam, however, was a plan for ho
w a community should work; any reform movement that sought to secure for each individual the right to practice the religion as he or she thought best would inherently go up against the core doctrines of Islam itself.

By empowering the individual, the Protestant Reformation had consequences that went far beyond religion. At some level, breaking the hold of “the Church” amounted to breaking the hold of
any
church. It’s true that the Protestant reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth century were talking only about religious strivings, and it’s true that each sect had a pretty definite and limited idea of a person’s proper relationship
to God. Probably none of the reformers thought they were encouraging people to think outside the box on matters of faith. And yet, calling the quest for salvation the province of the individual legitimized the authority of each individual to think what he or she wanted about God, no matter what the reformers intended. And legitimizing the authority of individuals to think what they wanted about God implicitly legitimized their authority to think what they wanted about
anything
.

It was this aspect of the Reformation that cross-fertilized with the European rediscovery of ancient Greek thought, the renewal of interest in pagan Latin writers, and the trickling influence of Arab thinkers. Individuals who felt they could seek salvation on their own terms were naturally going to speculate freely on the nature of God and the world and with all these interesting ideas floating around, some people inevitably were going to start playing with new ways to put together the pieces of the puzzle they saw around them.

If the Church had still been ubiquitous and all-powerful, every idea would have required that an addendum be accounted for: how does it relate to the faith? If one were thinking, “I wonder why everything falls down instead of up,” the voice of the church inside one’s conscience would immediately ask, “and how will the explanation help me to be a better Christian?” There’s only so far and so fast a mind can roam if it’s dragging around this baggage all the time.

Liberated from this baggage, Copernicus could posit that the Earth went around the sun. This simple and daring hypothesis explained everything about the motion of the stars and planets except for why God would make the universe revolve around something other than His most precious creation. If you didn’t have to deal with that second part, you could much more easily work out an answer to the first part. A lot of nature’s puzzles were like that: they became much easier to explain if you didn’t have to square your explanation with the dictates of the faith.