THE CHAIN REACTION OF THE CHAIN REACTION

 Christopher Nolan’s new “chillingly brilliant” movie, Oppenheimer (2023), provides the opportunity to reconsider the Doomsday Machine on the 78th anniversary of Hiroshima. A plea in the name of Islam and of Sufism.

 

 

For our earlier articles on the subject, see here, here and here.

 

... the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

—J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1947

 

There are no ifs, ands or buts, no question about it: Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), and more specifically (thermo)nuclear weapons, will put an end to all life on the third planet from the star called Sol. Anyone with enough information, plus the sense God gave a cockroach, can see this clear as day. The only hope is the abolition of all WMDs.

Christopher Nolan considers Julius Robert Oppenheimer the most important human being who ever lived. And at least in terms of Doomsday, he may be absolutely right. Though there’s a long list of names appended to that. Here is another vindication of the fact that abstract thoughts have consequences in real life: when you look at the equation E = mc², can you see Hiroshima and Nagasaki inside? You can’t, but nevertheless it’s there. And so is Doomsday itself.

 

What Rough Beast Slouches Towards Los Alamos...

Based on the in-depth study by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin in American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), Nolan traces the career of his subject from the early days through to the first atomic bomb explosion and beyond. The tension keeps building, never refusing to let up until the Trinity test. The partly fictionalized TV Series Manhattan (2014–2015) took a closer look at the goings-on at Los Alamos during that gestation period. Later on, Oppenheimer would summarize how the scientists got caught up in the heady rush, the exhilaration, of discovery: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

Oppenheimer finally finds himself in the unenviable position of Dr. Frankenstein: he discovers he has midwifed a monster into existence that cannot be destroyed. He feels both pride and regret about his brainchild. That, and what came next, was his tragedy. For opposing the hydrogen bomb, which is a thousand times worse than the atomic bomb, he was hauled before a government committee and crucified. The names of the petty actors are known but irrelevant: what counts is that they wanted to make an example of him. His ostracization and the revoking of his security clearance sent a warning from the military-political juggernaut to all scientists: that their peace efforts to bring the atomic genie under control would not be tolerated. After that, all the moral qualms of the scientific community were stifled, and any dissent could be couched only in terms of technical reservations. The greed of the Base Self for quasi-godlike power was insatiable, even as it was hidden under the excuse of “if the enemy is going to have it, we have to have it too,” and hydrogen bombs were being churned out by the dozen like sausages from a meat factory.

 

Perhaps the most important revelation from Ellsberg’s book is that it explodes the myth that the President of the USA will be the one and only person to decide the launch of nuclear weapons. The problem here is the “decapitation strike:” what if all the central decision-makers have been obliterated? The solution is to delegate responsibility downwards, to the theater commanders, but by the sheer force of the logic, it devolves all the way down to individual bomber pilots or ICBM launch lieutenants. And the same goes for the Russians: their “Dead Hand” response has been known for years, in which an automated retaliation can be activated even if there’s no one left to decide.The Aftermath

Fred Kaplan’s The Bomb (2020) chronicles the major players of that period and its aftermath: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War, as the subtitle has it. According to one review: “Overall, the book provides a devastating portrayal of the insanity of the nuclear targeting process. In one case, 69 warheads were targeted on a single Soviet anti-ballistic missile site.” Ultimately, no civilian administration, no matter how opposed to the use of nuclear weapons, ever managed to dig itself out of the quandary they posed.

In The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (2017), the late Daniel Ellsberg outlined the thinking going on in the minds of those who plan such things. A Doomsday Machine, of which there are at least two on Earth, is defined by Ellsberg as a “system of men, machines, electronics, communications, institutions, plans, [bombs, missiles, submarines, etc., which would] bring about the global destruction of civilization and of nearly all human life on earth” (p339). Working at RAND Corp. during the critical years when the thermonuclear weapons industry was mushrooming, Ellsberg had a front-row seat into the mental machinations of his colleagues.



When Ellsberg learned that the Joint Chiefs of Staff projected a death toll of 600 million (when the Earth’s population was 3 billion), he was incredulous. To him, this meant 100 Holocausts, and it didn’t include numbers for the enemy’s retaliation, either. He thought, “This is the most evil plan that has ever existed. It’s insane.” What’s more, even the explosion of 100 nuclear weapons would be enough to hurl the planet into a nuclear winter, as the dust and debris lifted into the atmosphere blotted out the sun. Most ominously, it emerges that all the efforts of civilian nuclear planners have had scant effect on military plans. Ellsberg also says that the nuclear powers used their weapons passively, for blackmail and bullying other nations into submission: it was like placing a loaded gun on the table without saying anything.

 

The Pitiless Generation

Master Kayhan said, in effect: “A generation will come that is devoid of mercy. After that, a human’s life will not be worth a cat’s. That is the generation that will do it.”

What will happen? Well, you’ve probably heard how a chain reaction takes place: one neutron gives rise to two neutrons, two give rise to four, four to eight, and so on, until by a certain number of generations, presto! you have an explosion. And in the same way, behold: I give you the chain reaction of the chain reaction. One nation will bomb another, two or three nations will strike back, perhaps five will retaliate, more will counter-retaliate, until in a small number of steps, the whole earth will be engulfed in the conflagration. Nuclear escalation will proceed to its inevitable conclusion. There will be no escape. The only escape is now, by dismantling this infernal contraption while we still can.

The initial impact of thermo/nuclear weapons was so great that human minds recoiled in horror, preferring to forget rather than face the reality squarely and take the necessary precautions. Because T/N bombs confer godlike power on their owner, they are Tolkien’s Ring of Sauron, the Ring of Power, the allure of which no human leader can resist. Yet that allure must be resisted and must be overcome.


 

Just Abolish Them

Today, we have become inured to the effects of T/N weapons. Familiarity breeds contempt. But we only delude ourselves. To anchor this article to current debates, people are acting as if thermonuclear war is merely an extension of conventional warfare. It is not. Check out the tone of this ad: “If a Bomb falls near you, stay at home. Wait for government announcements on TV.” Really! If a Bomb falls near you, you, your home, your TV, and most probably the government will all have been vaporized already. People who foster such thinking have no idea whatsoever of the gravity of the situation.

One of the ways T/N weapons kill is setting living beings spontaneously on fire. Here, all I can do is recall the words of the Prophet: “Don’t kill any living thing by burning it.”

So, to put a little perspective on this, a stick of dynamite is to a firecracker as a bomb is to a stick of dynamite, a bomb is to a stick of dynamite as an atomic bomb is to a bomb, and an atomic bomb is to a bomb as a hydrogen bomb is to an atomic bomb. You can assume a factor of 1,000 in each case. They don’t describe the brightness of an atomic explosion as “many times that of the noonday sun” for nothing.

The greatest secret of the atomic bomb—or the hydrogen bomb—was not this or that technical hurdle, or fine theoretical points of high-tech physics. It was the knowledge that it can be done. Once the first Bomb was exploded, the secret was out. After that, well, human ingenuity didn’t, and doesn’t, end with the people who made the first discovery. Other minds were equally capable of building a bomb. And that’s where we have been ever since. Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, once the nuclear genie is out of the bottle, you can’t put it back in again. All efforts to limit the Nuclear Club will fail, for the simple reason that no one will feel safe until they have the Bomb too. It’s really elementary: Japan, which didn’t have the Bomb, got nuked; North Korea, which does have the Bomb, doesn’t. What would you conclude from that? For self-preservation if for no other reason, everyone who can get the Bomb, will. And so, the sooner we abolish WMDs the better, for the process will become increasingly more unstoppable.

What kind of mentality can wish for the destruction of all life? We may pretend that this is due to indifference. But that indifference is only a mask for repressed hate and rage. God’s command to us is to “Love one another.” If we do not succeed in doing that, all our lives will be forfeit.  

 

Cartoons by Herbert J. Block (“Herblock”).

FROM UTOPIA TO DYSTOPIA — AND THE WAY OUT

 

 

“Utopias now appear much more realizable than one used to think. We are
now faced with a different new worry: How to prevent their realization.”

— Nikolai Berdyaev, The Philosophy of Freedom (1911).

“Don’t turn your rose garden into a briar patch.”

— Niyazi Misri (Turkish Sufi poet).

At first glance, the concept of utopias, of paradise on Earth, appears irresistible. Who can deny the allure of such a vision? The trouble is that one man’s paradise can be another man’s hell. In the early 20th century, at the dawn of the communist “utopia,” Nikolai Berdyaev wrote the following:

“We used to pay too little attention to utopias, or even disregarded them altogether, saying with regret that they were impossible of realization. Now, [however, it seems they can] be brought about far more easily than we supposed, and we are actually faced by an agonizing problem of quite [a different] kind: how can we prevent their final realization? ... towards utopias we are moving. But it is possible that a new age is already beginning, in which cultured and intelligent people will dream of ways to avoid ideal states and to get back to a society that is less ‘perfect’ and more free.” [1]

Berdyaev was writing during the initial phases of the Russian Revolution. Its advocates believed that a new society would give rise to a new human being. After his disillusionment with communism, the writer Arthur Koestler observed that it had failed because an economic, external, change had not been enough; it needed to be complemented by a psychological, inner, change, which of course did not happen.

One of the main concerns of those who think about utopias has been: what is the ideal size for a utopia?

 

What is the carrying capacity of Spaceship Earth?

 
As the human population has increased in recent decades, there has been growing concern that the finite resources of our planet will not suffice for all. For example, it has been calculated that it would take up to 10 Earths to sustain humanity at the consumption level of contemporary North Americans.

 
This has naturally led to worries that the Earth will not hold up an increasing population for long. One of the first to voice such concerns was Thomas Malthus, who is famous for his claim that the human population increases geometrically (exponentially), whereas the amount of food increases only arithmetically (linearly), so that human population cannot be sustained beyond a certain limit. Malthus predicted that this tipping point would be reached somewhere around 1890. It was about a century before that when he made that prediction. He was also one of the first to encourage biological warfare against humanity for the purpose of depopulation. In his “Essay on the Principle of Population” (1799), Malthus wrote that nature should be facilitated and not impeded in producing mortality:

In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague.

Needless to say, 1890 is long gone, and we have not yet reached Malthus’s tipping point. Nevertheless, some people have continued to be concerned about a burgeoning population. In more recent times, this has been expressed within the framework of ecology. In 1968, biologist Garrett Hardin explored the issue of human overpopulation in his article “The Tragedy of the Commons”, which was published in the journal Science [2]. There, he claimed that the “Freedom To Breed Is Intolerable”; that coercion should be applied to prevent human beings from breeding, which, as he himself pointed out, ran directly counter to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In brief, his argument was as follows: cattle would overgraze a land held in common, because their owners would not limit their numbers due to greedy self-interest. The commons—a metaphor for our planet—would be destroyed. “The population problem,” he said, “has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality.” As Hardin observed in an update to his article:

If all decision makers were unselfish and idealistic calculators, a distribution governed by the rule “to each according to his needs” might work. But such is not our world. As James Madison said in 1788, “If men were angels, no Government would be necessary” (Federalist, no. 51). That is, if all men were angels. But in a world in which all resources are limited, a single nonangel in the commons spoils the environment for all. ... An unmanaged commons in a world of limited material wealth and unlimited desires inevitably ends in ruin. [3]

Hardin correctly pinpointed the problem as being one of morality. Which leads us directly into the realm of Sufism. Master Ahmet Kayhan told us that the carrying capacity of Spaceship Earth is 100 billion (that’s right: a hundred, not ten, billion). But he also said: “If they listen to us.” For example, the Koran says: “Eat, drink, but do not waste” (7:31), or, to paraphrase the Prophet, even if you’re standing beside a vast ocean, use only as much water as necessary. Which leads on to the Sufic precept: “Eat, drink, and sleep sparingly.” We have the right to use as much as we need, but not the right to squander the resources of the planet.

Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb was also published in 1968. A few years later, a study took the world by storm: The Limits to Growth (1972) by Dennis Meadows and his group, sponsored by the Club of Rome, a society of wealthy individuals. Based on an MIT computer model developed by Jay Forrester, Limits was to become a best-seller in many languages. All scenarios investigated resulted in the eventual failure of the planet’s resources to support humanity.

It is certainly all right to desire the well-being of the planet. But starting from the right premises, it is still possible to reach a wrong conclusion. Hardin seriously advocated nuking foreign countries in order to reduce their population (“the worst thing we can do is send food ... Atomic bombs would be kinder”). The most important, perhaps the only important moral law, the Golden Rule (“Do as you would be done by”) is thrown in the trash can. In a 1991 report of the Club of Rome, the authors conclude:

The real enemy, then, is humanity itself. [4]

One must beware of thinking such things. Those who declare that humanity is the enemy must thereby themselves become enemies of humanity. In the movie The Matrix (1999), Agent Smith, the avatar of the Artificial Intelligence, tells Neo what he regards humankind as: “A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague and we are the cure.” And in Stranger Things, S04E07 (2022), Henry Creel/Peter Ballard/One/Vecna, the personification of evil, says “humans are a unique type of pest,” while he intends to restore balance to the world/ecosystem and fancies himself a predator “for good”. (He is then banished to the Upside-Down World, a version of Hell.)

But this is nothing less than to side with Satan, the enemy of humankind. God has declared: “Children of Adam, do not worship Satan, for he is a clear enemy to you” (36:60). God also tells human beings: “I created the universe for you, and you I created for myself” [5]—so that humans can believe in, worship, and gradually come to know and love God. If God has valued humans so much, it is against His will to bear enmity toward them. Taken to its logical conclusion, this path would lead to the eradication of entire humanity from the face of the Earth—which is precisely what Satan wants.

 Human beings are part of nature, part of this world. If we wish to preserve nature, then we must wish to preserve human beings along with it. The remedy is to bring humanity into balance with nature, and this can be achieved by following God’s instructions. If everyone without exception abides by these, the problems we observe and the outcomes we fear will cease. But if those who cause the problems declare themselves exempt from these guidelines, nothing will change and things will get even worse. “You would reform the world? Begin with yourself, brother!” For if man is corrupted, the whole world becomes corrupted.

 Moreover, the human population of the earth appears to be leveling off. As a recent article has pointed out:

... extrapolating the high birth rates and falling death rates of the 1960s led to predictions of global famine.

As death rates declined and women’s educational and economics prospects brightened, birth rates fell, a trend that now encompasses most of the world.

Now the problem is a shrinking working-age population that will be unable to support the financial and healthcare promises made to the retired generations. [6]

 China’s population freeze has been attributed to its enforced one-child policy—but its population had already declined greatly, even before the start of that program. And now, Beijing’s efforts to boost fertility are making the decline worse, which suggests that messing with population can be like playing with fire. In fact, quite contrary to the Population Bombers, a recent demographic study in the medical journal Lancet concludes that global human population will peak at 9.73 billion within several decades, and then start to decline in a collapse that “will probably continue inexorably.”

 

The Population Problem

 One of the traits that humans share with other species is that having many offspring is a survival mechanism. For instance, some species lay 2 or 3 million eggs, but only a very few of these survive to adulthood. In a similar way, adverse living conditions cause humans to have many children. Poverty and ignorance are chief among these. Poverty means that proper health care will not be provided to children, so that most will die off before they reach puberty. Here, the survival instinct of the species kicks in. Also, parents want the assurance that at least one or two children will still be around to look after them in their old age.

Conversely, one tried and true method of curbing population growth is to raise the level of affluence and education of people. Wherever these two goals have been achieved, populations have stabilized and even begun to shrink. Affluence removes the poverty stressor that triggers the survival instinct. And a better education means that you can plan your family more consciously, as raising a child is no easy matter. In fact, population levels have decreased in recent years in many countries, down from the 2.1-children-per-family replacement rate.

 Suppose, then, that you decide to reduce human populations by some other means: say, by starting a war or releasing a pathogen. This will have exactly the opposite result of what was intended. Faced with the imminent threat of extinction, people will try to compensate and protect the survival of the human species by having more children, not less (remember the “baby boomers” after the Second World War).

 All the current (2022) population of the earth could be accomodated in Texas (or in Turkey, which is slightly larger) with nearly 1000 square feet/100 square meters per person, enough to build a one-story townhouse for every single human being (a second story being unnecessary). As Master Kayhan also pointed out, vast tracts of the Earth’s livable land mass remain uninhabited. So the physical space problem is a nonproblem.

Up to this point, we have been discussing possibilities under the condition of finite resources. What, however, if our resources were limitless? What would happen then?

 

Enter John Calhoun

The Malthusians were concerned that as the human population increased, we would eventually run out of resources. Starting from the 1940s, ethologist (animal behaviorist) John B. Calhoun investigated a different situation: what the outcome would be if there were plenty for all, if all our needs were met for the foreseeable future.

For a quarter century, Calhoun conducted experiments with rats and mice. It all began in 1947, when Calhoun placed five pregnant rats within a quarter-acre/1000 square meter pen. The rodent population increased and levelled off around 150, never exceeding 200. This meant that each animal had at least 50 square feet/five square meters of living space. (Area conversions are being rounded.) This sparked Calhoun’s interest, because he had expected a much larger number, based on his conviction that the area of a lab cage would be enough for each rodent.

So Calhoun began investigating the effects of overcrowding on behavior. He altered the parameters of his experiments to study population density. He conducted various experiments that led to similar outcomes, all highly disconcerting. As one study has put it:

Dominant males became aggressive, some moving in groups, attacking females and the young. Mating behaviors were disrupted. Some became exclusively homosexual. Others became pansexual and hypersexual, attempting to mount [rape] any rat [male, female or infant] they encountered. Mothers neglected their infants, first failing to construct proper nests, and then carelessly abandoning and even attacking their pups. In certain sections of the pens, infant mortality rose as high as 96%, the dead cannibalized by adults. Subordinate animals withdrew psychologically, surviving in a physical sense but at an immense psychological cost. They were the majority in the late phases of growth, existing as a vacant, huddled mass in the centre of the pens.

 Unable to breed, the population plummeted and did not recover. The crowded rodents had lost the ability to co-exist harmoniously, even after the population numbers once again fell to low levels. At a certain density, they had ceased to act like rats and mice, and the change was permanent. [7]

 

One of Calhoun’s series of experiments, the one that made him famous. Click to
enlarge and to read the caption. (From Scientific American, February 1962.)

Mousetopia: Universe 25

 His series of experiments on “rodent universes” led to Calhoun’s most famous—and notorious—experiment, which he called “Universe 25.”

 In 1968, Calhoun took eight healthy mice, four male and four female, and placed them in a huge box outfitted with ample living quarters. He provided an abundant stock of food and water, a perfect temperature for mice, and protection against disease. A true mouse utopia. Then he sat back and let them breed.

What happened next was sobering. The population exploded: it first overshot, then dwindled to zero.

The mice started to reproduce with alacrity after day 194, the population doubling every 55 days. The population growth slowed after day 315, and stopped entirely after 18 months at a peak of 2200 mice. After day 600, there were few pregnancies, and no surviving young. The last survivor died on day 1644, 4.5 years after the beginning of the experiment.

What had gone wrong?

 Like human beings, mice are social creatures. By the end of the initial phase of the experiment, there were three times as many mice as existing social groups could accommodate. This threw the entire mouse population out of kilter. Female conception declined, maternal behavior degenerated, miscarriages increased, mothers abandoned their offspring. The new generations began to grow up without learning normal mouse behavior, which would have required a normal society instead of hundreds of mice crammed together. The normal behaviors of courtship, mating, mothering and socialization were completely disrupted. The mice could no longer reproduce. Sexual deviation was normalized, some mice became aggressive while others withdrew and retired from mouse society. Sartre’s saying, “Hell is other people,” became a reality for the rodents—their initial utopia turned into a dystopia, their paradise into a hell.

Calhoun has sometimes been conflated with the Malthusians, but that is not the case. For the Malthusians start from an assumption of increasing scarcity, whereas Calhoun’s starting point is a situation of endless abundance. He may be considered a Malthusian only in terms of the scarcity of living space. He was also optimistic that human ingenuity would find a way out of impasses, in the same way that some rodents in his experiments displayed the intelligence to alter their behavior and survive their difficulties.

[Sidebar]

 

Utopia and the Metaverse

 Mark Zuckerberg’s “Metaverse”: Plato’s Cave today. Now the Cave in Plato’s conception actually corresponds to what we think of as the so-called “real” world, which is why the Prophet said, “My Lord, show us the reality of things.” He also said: “Human beings are asleep—they wake up when they die.” Hence, what we have here is nested Plato’s Caves—a Cave within a Cave—and thus, a blindfold on top of a blindfold, a more intrusive version of philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra. The Metaverse will become the opium of the masses: the reverie of a drug addict, a dream within a dream.

Of Mice and Men

At the time, Calhoun’s results were interpreted as a metaphor for human overcrowding in the core of large cities, sometimes called “the concrete jungle.” More recently, interpretations have shifted to the unequal distribution of living space. The clue seems to lie in the curious fact that almost half the living space remained unused, even at the peak of the population. Given that the only restriction was on space, territorially aggressive mice monopolized easily defensible quarters, giving rise to overcrowding at the center. Hence it was not physical space itself, but social interactions, that really sealed the fate of Universe 25.

According to Sufism, animals are imbued with an “Animal Self” (nafs al-haywani) and an “Animal Spirit” (ruh al-haywani). The human self in its unevolved condition, which is called the Base Self (see below), shares most of the traits of the Animal Self. Hence, it makes sense to say that mice too have an ego, and will act egotistically.

In his Tragedy in Mouse Utopia (2006), limnologist and ecologist John R. Vallentyne posed the question: “Do mice have egos?” ([8], p. 42.) His answer was “yes.” Vallentyne looked back on Calhoun’s experiments to see what lessons could be derived from them. He feared that those experiments were now being replicated—in human society, and on a planetary scale.

What are the factors that influence the environment? Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren came up with the following equation: I = PAT, where I stands for environmental impact, P for population, A for affluence, and T for technology. Since affluence is the fruit of technology to a large extent in our day, Vallentyne simplified this to population and technology.

“The cause of social disruptions common to both Mouse Utopia and Human Utopia,” writes Vallentyne, “is a runaway cycle of technology and population, jointly.” (43) For the plenitude enjoyed by the mice was due only to the benefits of technology, which would never have been available otherwise.

The illusion that the intertwined growth of human technology and population can go on indefinitely shows that humanity is on a suicidal course. It is a dangerous fantasy to see yourself as separate from nature. lt is ecological madness, pure and simple. The subversive influences, conscious and unconscious, at work behind this madness are the cravings that lead to The Seven Deadly Sins. (74)

He goes on to say that St. Gregory the Great categorized The Seven Deadly Sins in the sixth century A.D. as: lust, gluttony, avarice (covetousness, greed), sloth (idleness, waste of time), wrath (anger, hate), envy (jealousy), and pride (vanity).

Vallentyne chalks impending ecological disaster down to the Seven Deadly Sins. We are now definitely in the domain of religion. These have their counterparts in Sufism: the Seven Gates of Hell.

 1. Pride. 2. Covetousness (Greed). 3. Envy. 4. Discord (Divisiveness). 5. Backbiting (Gossip). 6. Lust. 7. Anger (Wrath).

 He continues:

 Now, by the stroke of a pen, I identify the mastermind that controls the[se] demons as the Sorcerer. Identifying the Sorcerer as the mastermind behind the cravings could be key to controlling the sins. (75)

Precisely!

With the stroke of a pen, Vallentyne has just rediscovered a cardinal concept of Sufism: the Base Self (al-nafs al-ammara), the self that “commands to evil” (ammaratun bi al-sui). (As Joseph says, “I don’t exonerate my Base Self, for it always commands to evil” (12:53).) Only, he calls it “the Sorcerer.”

This is remarkable. To my knowledge, with the exception of psychologist Carl Gustav Jung and his conception of “the shadow,” this is the first time a scientist in the West, with no apparent knowledge of Sufism, has deduced the importance of the Base Self. Even if there have been others, however, he is probably the first to link ecological disaster with this entity.

(If evil is external to you, it is called the devil. If it is internal, it is called the Base Self.)

Vallentyne defines the Sorcerer as “a life-force at work within us” (69). And the cover blurb of the book informs us that “the Sorcerer lurks within.” He goes on to tell us that we are all “the Sorcerer’s apprentices”—that is, slaves to our Base Self.

Giving in for a moment or a lifetime to the urges, cravings and other excesses brought on by the Sorcerer is far more crippling than doubts. The opposites of the Seven Deadly Sins are the Seven Cardinal Virtues: humility, meekness, charity, chastity, moderation, zeal and generosity. The question is: Can the Virtues overcome the Sins? (75)

The Virtues also have their counterparts in Sufism, except the latter goes one better, by describing the Eight Gates of Heaven:

1. Compassion, kindness and affection. 2. Righteousness (Honesty, truthfulness, uprightness). 3. Loyalty. 4. Generosity. 5. Patience. 6. Discretion (Keeping secrets). 7. Knowing one’s poverty and weakness (Humility). 8. Giving thanks to God (Gratitude).

In a later chapter, Vallentyne fleshes out his conception of the Sorcerer. His examples are stock characteristics of the Base Self:

If you have ever had the craving to run your hand along the polished fender of a new car in a showroom, to reach for yet another candy bar to rot your teeth, or to gobble hamburgers and french fries at your favorite fast-food restaurant when you are already overweight, you know the spell of the Sorcerer. If you have a room-mate or close friend who has become addicted to hard drugs or gambling, you know the soul-destroying effects of the Sorcerer. Mothers who, under the spell of the Sorcerer, force-feed alcohol to fetuses in their wombs cripple their children mentally for life.

In early phases of population growth the Sorcerer reinforces our primitive Ego-System desires in the interest of personal survival and survival of the species. (120)

In fact, at one point Vallentyne intended to use The Ego-System and the Ecosystem as title for Tragedy in Mouse Utopia, contrasting the two systems and—needless to say—favoring the Ecosystem.

All this leads us to the following conclusion: If it is necessary to tame the Base Self, to curb its desires, even in the situation of unlimited resources, it is all the more necessary under the condition of finite resources, on a vast but still not infinite planet.

The Journey from self to Self

According to the famous Sufi Ahmad Sirhindi:

The self (nafs) in its state of impulsiveness (ammara) always strives to be superior. . . . It refuses to acknowledge its dependence on and debt to others. This is nothing but a claim to divinity. . . . Indeed, [such a] self will not settle even for partnership with God, but desires to subjugate even Him, to enslave all that exists. It is for this reason that aiding and abetting this self, the enemy of God, . . . is the greatest of follies and disasters. [9]

 

In the space-horror TV series “Raised by Wolves” (S02E05), Marcus descends in a cage to an underground cavern (the underworld), where he discovers and destroys a monster. Symbolically, this is the equivalent of Theseus entering the labyrinth and slaying the Minotaur in Greek mythology. Both the monster and the Minotaur are symbols for the Base Self. The Minotaur is a creature with a human body and the head of a bull. In Mithraism, too, which is Marcus’ religion, the main scene is that of Mithras killing a bull, from which its name tauroctony (“bull killing”) derives. It’s all about conquering the beast that is the Base Self.

Note that we are not supposed to physically kill the Base Self, for this would be suicide. Rather, what is necessary is to tame and subdue the Base Self. The Prophet said: “Die before you die.” This points to a psychospiritual transformation in which a person undergoes metamorphosis: a death-rebirth experience where one is reborn as a transformed being—a Perfect Human or Friend of God. The Central Asian Sufi sage Ahmad Yassawi speaks of opening “the second notebook” (in Jonathan Trapman’s translation [10], “the Second Book”) in a few of his wisdom sayings. This implies the existence of a “first notebook,” which is now closed, and likely refers to the “notebook of deeds”—in which the deeds of a lifetime are recorded—belonging to his earlier (first) life. His second life (and hence the second notebook) has now begun, as a totally transformed individual.

 

The Magic Mountain

The mythical World Mountain, known as Mount Meru in Hinduism, has its counterpart in Turkic-Altai mythology as Iron Mountain—sometimes also described as an Iron Pillar, which would correspond to the Axis of the Universe. Another variant of the same trope divides the Mountain into three parts: Golden Mountain in Heaven, Iron Mountain in this world (the physical universe), and Copper Mountain in the Underworld. The Turkic word for pillar, terek (from which the Turkish direk is derived) also means “tree,” so we are also speaking about the World Tree.

Now the Mountain not only symbolizes the universe, but also the Self—and in a certain context, the Base Self. The title of a self-help book says it all —The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery.

In a Middle Eastern Romeo-and-Juliet romance, Farhad and Shereen (or Khosrow/Husrav and Shereen), Farhad has to bore through an Iron Mountain in order to be united with his beloved, Shereen. In one variant of the tale, the tunnel thus formed also delivers life-giving water (or milk) to the nearby city, which means that Farhad’s labor results in a boon for all humanity. In another version, Farhad has to carve a staircase into the mountain—which calls to mind the Prophet’s Ascension (miraj, lit. “staircase”) to the top of (and beyond) the “mountain” that is the universe. (The tree at the mountaintop in the picture symbolizes the Lote-Tree of the Boundary.)

Now in Sufism, love between the sexes has been considered a metaphor for divine love, and hence has been called “metaphorical love,” whereas the love of God has been termed “true love.” And the mountain to be overcome in order to attain the True Beloved is the Base Self. The latter is the real obstacle to reaching one’s goal. Overcoming the Base Self is as hard as piercing a mountain made of iron.

The Two Seals

So how do we tame the Base Self? Vallentyne himself suggests “using the healing power of mind over body” (121), and gives biofeedback therapy, the Alexander Technique (due to Matthias Alexander), and shamanism as examples. There have been many such attempts throughout history. As Gustav Meyrink wrote in The Green Face (1916):

The Brahmans’ icy baths, the sleepless nights of the disciples of Buddha and the Christian ascetics, the self-inflicted tortures of the Hindu fakirs are nothing other than the ossified rites which indicate that it was here that the temple of those who strove to stay awake originally stood. [11]

(The “green face” itself is the face of Khidr, the “Green One” (KHaDRa), the patron saint of Sufi dervishes of the Uwaysi branch.)

I’m reminded of a feat described by Alexandra David-Neel, who had visited Tibet: drying a wet towel on one’s back and shoulders—in the Himalayas. A sure-fire way to die for almost all of us.

The basic approach seems to have been to tame the body. But the body is not the enemy—the enemy is the Base Self. Or rather, it is the Baseness of the Base Self: hence, that self needs to be purified. “God loves those who purify their selves,” says the Koran (2:222, 9:108); those are the ones who succeed and prosper (87:14). “Gardens of lasting bliss graced with flowing streams [are] the reward of those who purify their selves” (20:76). “For the Friends of God, no fear shall come upon them, neither shall they sorrow” (10:62; also in 2:38, 2:177, 2:262, 3:170 ...).

The Sufis, however, have been able to identify the really crucial points in purifying the Base Self. You have to seal two doors shut: Put an end to 1. Illicit Wealth (Forbidden gain) and 2. Illicit Lust (Forbidden sex). This is not to say that once these are reined in, you will not need to restrain the Base Self further. You will. It means, rather, that the Base Self is completely beyond control without these two.

Let me end by relating what Master Ahmet Kayhan said about this on one occasion.

How to Tame the Base Self

Master Kayhan began by talking about the cave on Mount Hira, where the Prophet practised asceticism and received his prophethood. It was also known as “the mountain of light,” because in ancient times, a fire was lit by night on its peak to serve as a beacon for distant travelers. As for caves, they have been the refuge of ascetics from time immemorial.

The Master continued:

In one part of Sufism, the people of Sufism consider this body a cave. They consider this body, this head, a cave. You can enter those [external] caves, but before you do, [pointing to his heart] build up this cave.

So, this body is the cave of the spirit. Let’s know the value of this cave. This is the cave of the spirit/life. Those are caves of stone. Once we train the self within this cave... you can go to those caves, but it’s all in this cave.

This cave is where the Real [God] sits. Where the Koran sits. Where the Prophet of God sits. The cave where the spirit functions. And if we perform the training of this cave with the command of God, of the Prophet of God, it’s done, Godwilling.

And how do we do that? I’m always telling you, above here [the neck], stop the Forbidden. Whether it’s hearing, or sight, or food and drink, or scent. Above here, quit completely. Below [the belly], lust, Illicit Lust. Quit Illicit Lust. Whoever is not Permitted is our mother, our sister. Let’s train in this cave.

You can’t find these words anywhere. These words are the meaning of the Verses of the Glorious Koran.

There’s something here:

One day the Grand Saint Abdulqader Geylani comes in from outside, [the disciples] are talking. He greets them, they all stand up respectfully.

“What were you discussing, children?” he says. Speaking of children, they’re all 20-30 years old. One of them answers: “Sir, our subject was Ibrahim Adham.”

Ibrahim ibn Adham, one of the early Sufis (8th century CE), was born in Balkh (then in Khorasan, now in Afghanistan) as king of the region, but he abandoned his crown and his throne and a life of luxury to become an ascetic. Abdulqader Geylani (fl. 12th century CE), one of the greatest Sufi Masters, was born in Gilan, Iran, and reconciled the mystical nature of Sufism with the precepts of Islamic Law. He was a descendant of the Prophet on both his father’s and his mother’s side.

Among the Friends of God, Ibrahim Adham was the one who suffered the greatest hardships. So that he could train.

“Well?” he said. “We all wept,” he said. “Did you feel sorry for him? ” “We all did.”

“Shall I tell you something?” he said.—Pay attention! —“If he had been trained in my time,” he said, “if he had been in my time, or I had been in his, I would have enlightened him [on his throne], among all that silk and down feathers.”

The Master then posed a question to those present:

What is this? What is he saying? Speak up, don’t hesitate. Among all that gold, because he was the king of Khorasan. “I would have trained him without any of those hardships.” Tell me how, come on.

After a few replies, none of which proved satisfactory, Master Kayhan continued:

You know what it was? What I’m telling you here evvery day. Above here [the neck], stop [the Forbidden]. If he does that, he will be enlightened in that bed [of down feathers]. When you dispose of these [two obstacles], when you throw them away, you train in that bed. You win in that cave. [12]

On other occasions, he explained that illustrious Sufi saints such as Rumi or Hadji Bayram became saints only after mastering these two points.

This can be found nowhere in print, except in some books and articles about Ahmet Kayhan. That knowledge, that advice, was, is, and will remain the greatest gift of the Master to humanity.

 

 

Conclusion

John Calhoun tried to play God over his mouse communities, with disastrous results. And the same fate will befall anyone who tries to do it over human communities. For God does not give His Godhood to anybody. Or, as an unbeliever might say, nature—or in this case, human nature—has the last laugh.

The problem stems from the metaphysical assumption that living things, and humans among them, have evolved randomly. In that case, it could make sense that humanity should take its further evolution into its own hands, to improve itself—if this were true.

But it is not true. God created human beings in His own image, as the Prophet of God also stated—and more than that, as His viceroy on Earth. This design cannot be improved upon.¹ Humankind was created in the image of perfection. Any attempt to deviate from that will only result in something worse. And all one has to do is follow God's instructions to actualize that perfection within oneself.

“Fearfully and wonderfully am I made” (Psalm 139:14), “and designed for nobler ends and uses than for a few days to eat, and drink, and sleep, and talk, and die” (John Flavel). This is the exact opposite of Vecna’s message in the abovementioned Stranger Things episode: “Wake up, eat, work, sleep, reproduce, and die. Everyone is just waiting—waiting for it all to be over.” God has made us for grander things than this. Master Kayhan said: “The universe has an owner. His name is God. Let’s eat, drink, have children, suffer their worries and get out of here. Is this all we came here for? We came to seek the owner of the universe.”

“We created the human in the fairest stature, then We reduced him to the lowest of the low” (95:4-5). Follow God's instructions, and you will regain that fairest stature. So it behooves us, not to play God, but to heed God's advice. That is how we will get out of this, not by messing with our own biology or sociology. As John Vallentyne rightly intuited, the Base Self is at the root of all our sins and the sum of all our problems.

Like many other peoples who followed the way of holism and synergy, the native North Americans lived in harmony with nature. We have to find a way to bring our technology back to that harmony.² Wasting less is a good start. If we could eliminate waste, whether intentional or unintentional, we would be well on the way to re-establishing a balanced relationship with our planet. The Base Self, left unchecked, will squander all resources. This is why we have to rein it in. Consume less. Don't have three cars; have one. Don't eat three servings, one is enough. Go back to car pooling. And so on.

But this cannot be forced. It has to be voluntary. Otherwise, it will be coercion, and nothing good will come of that. It is incumbent on every human being to restrict the Base Self out of their own free will. If we can do this, if we can find it within ourselves to achieve this, better days will surely be ours.

 

 

Postscript: Long before Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), the Persian Sufi Hakim Sanai (d. 1180 AD) mentioned the “City of God” in his celebrated long poem The Walled Garden of Truth (Hadiqat al Haqiqa, aka the Ilahinâma). As in Augustine’s City of God, only the chosen ones live there. It cannot be reached unless one becomes a Perfect Human (insan al-kâmil). [13] Later, another Sufi, Shahabuddin Suhrawardi, introduced the same concept as the mystical Earth of Hurqalya, which Henry Corbin discussed in his Spiritual Body, Celestial Earth (1977). While a utopian society cannot be reached unless all human beings curb their Base Selves, the utopia of the Sufis can be reached if one succeeds in doing this as an individual. Utopia, then, is achievable individually, even if not collectively.

 

Notes

* Details from Majeed Beenteha, Pricklywomen.

¹ Unless an obvious genetic defect is being remedied. Otherwise, any supposed “enhancement” will actually be an abnormality from the God’s-eye point of view. The human constitution was optimised for God-knowledge, beside which all other aspirations pale.

² Much of our technology is fundamentally at odds with nature. As ecologist Barry Commoner pointed out decades ago, frugality or population reduction will not be enough if we keep on using environmentally harmful technologies. Zero carbon emissions and carbon taxes do not really address the question of switching to ecologically constructive technologies. And we have barely scratched the surface of designing such technologies, for private profit—again, in service of the Base Self—takes precedence over social and environmental costs.

   [1]   Nikolai Berdyaev, The End of Our Time (1919), pp. 187-188. Aldous Huxley used the part of this passage preceding the ellipsis (in French translation) as the epigraph to his Brave New World.

  [2]  http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~avis/courses/566/commons.html

  [3]  https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/TragedyoftheCommons.html

  [4]   Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider, The First Global Revolution, A Report by the Council of the Club of Rome (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), p. 115.

  [5]  Henry Bayman, The Teachings of a Perfect Master (Oxford, UK: Anqa Publishing, 2012), p. 53.

  [6]   https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/demographics-financial-doom

  [7]  Edmund Ramsden & Jon Adams, “Escaping the Laboratory: The Rodent Experiments of John B. Calhoun & Their Cultural Influence,” Journal of Social History Vol. 42, No. 3 (Spring, 2009), pp. 761-792: https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/22514/1/2308Ramadams.pdf p. 4.

  [8]  John R. Vallentyne, Tragedy in Mouse Utopia (Victoria, BC: Trafford Publishing, 2006).

  [9]  Mektubat (“Letters”), 52nd Letter, quoted in Bayman, Station of No Station (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2001), pp. 56-7.

[10]  Hoja Ahmed Yassawi, Divine Wisdom (Diwani Hikmet), Jonathan and Virve Trapman (trs.) (Somerset, UK: Living Zen Books, 2018) http://online.pubhtml5.com/fvrz/ntvm/#p=34

[11]  http://www.geocities.ws/integral_tradition/green.html

[12]  Abridged, translated and edited for clarity from https://ia902300.us.archive.org/30/items/AhmetKayhan-Sohbet/hak06MAR98-1_512kb.mp4

[13] Sana Mahmoudi & Fatemeh Azizmouhamdi, “A Study of the Concept of Utopia in Hakim Sanai’s The Walled Garden of Truth and Thomas More’s Utopia”, International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature, Vol. 2 No. 6 (November 2013) pp. 161-168.

 

 

 

 

REFORMATION OF THE REFORMATION

 

 

BOOK REVIEW

The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture.
by Christian Smith
Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2012. xiv + 240 pp.

Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World.
by Brad S. Gregory
New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2017. x + 310 pp.

The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society.
by Brad S. Gregory
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. vii + 574 pp.

 

Having recently written about the “Protestantization” of Islam as displayed in Salafism, I’ve decided to try my hand at a take on Protestantization in Christianity. The reason? Some parts of the New Testament are steeped in Sufism and Sufi concepts. (Some serious researchers ought to devote their not inconsiderable energies to the impartial exploration of this fact.) Ever since the Council of Nicaea (325 CE/AD), however, church doctrine has evolved in directions that preclude the proper appreciation of the Sufic truth that is to be found in the New Testament (NT). The result is a highly distorted vision of mystical truth. Because this river has become polluted too close to the source, the distortion has spread all across its branches.

A second reason why I propose to write on this subject is that Jesus is considered a prophet of Islam, along with all the rest of the prophets, and not necessarily excluding Confucius, the Buddha, or Lao Tzu (Lao Zi), all of whom I’ve written about before (in The Black Pearl). Not being a phone book, the Koran doesn’t list all the prophets’ names, but they’re implied.

For example, there has always been doubt about who, exactly, one of the prophets in the Koran is: Dhul-Kifl, “of Kifl.” Now there is no letter “p” in Arabic, so the letter “f” substitutes for it, which is why Plato is referred to as “Aflatun” or “Falatun.” Hence, if one substitutes p for the f in Kifl, one gets Kipl, which some have taken as shorthand for Kapilavastu—the hometown of the Buddha. 

A treatment of the specifically Sufic aspects of the NT lies beyond the scope of this article. Here I will try to concentrate on the impact of the Reformation and the conclusions it leads me to reach. A fresh point of view, seldom if ever attempted before, may hopefully help to shed some light on the issues involved.

Lately I’ve been reading three books about the Reformation, and thus this article is at once a book review, an extended commentary, and a meditation. (At times, I shall supplement the authors’ discussions with my own.) Of course, I cannot hope to do justice to these books in a short article like this, so I must content myself with pointing out some main takeaways.

 

Lost in Wonderland

Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible would be better titled Biblicism Made Impossible, since that is how he refers to his main subject numerous times in the book. Here is how he defines it:

By “biblicism” I mean a theory about the Bible that emphasizes
together its exclusive authority, infallibility, perspicuity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability. (p. viii)

His more detailed treatment roughly corresponds to the doctrine of “the Bible alone,” Sola Scriptura (see Sidebar 1), although it appears to be more general. (In fact, Sola Scriptura is explicitly listed as one of the defining themes of biblicism.)

The problem with biblicism, Smith asserts, is that it gives rise to “pervasive interpretive pluralism.” In his Introduction, he summarizes the reasons for this as follows:

... the Bible contains a variety of texts that are problematic in different ways and that biblicist (among other) readers rarely know how to handle. Some are texts that frankly almost no reader is going to live by, however committed in theory they may be to biblicism. Others are texts that need explaining away by appeals to cultural relativity (although no principled guidelines exist about when that explanation should and should not be applied). Some are passages that are simply strange. And some are texts that seem to be incompatible with other texts. (xi)

Smith uses a quote from the British romantic poet William Blake to state the problem in a nutshell (I paraphrase):

Both read the Bible day and night,
But you read black where I read white. (20)

Smith also quotes Vern Poythress: “On most matters of significance concerning Christian doctrine, salvation, church life, practice, and morality, different Christians—including different biblicist Christians—insist that the Bible teaches positions that are divergent and often incompatible with one another.” (22)

Nor is this a problem that started with the Reformation. It goes all the way back to the early origins of Christianity. The reason is that the Bible does not speak with one voice. Scholars have identified at least four authors (abbreviated as J, D, E and P) for the Old Testament (OT). As for the New Testament, there are four gospels, all by different authors, the numerous letters of Paul, the epistles of James, Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Barnabas ...  According to a source quoted by Smith (p. 7), the 66 books of the Bible (39 OT plus 27 NT) were written by more than 40 men, not all of whom agree on all subjects with each other. Further, not only is the Bible multivocal, it is also polysemic: multiple possible meanings for a word or phrase can coexist.

Add to this the effects of translation—or rather, mistranslation. For example:

God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself. (2 Cor. 5:19, KJV)

Which should actually read:

In Christ, God was reconciling the world to Himself. (RSV, NRSV)

Factors such as these led Vincent of Lérins, as far back as the early fifth century, to write: “Owing to the depth of Holy Scripture, all do not accept it in one and the same sense, but one understands its words in one way, another in another, so that it seems capable of as many interpretations as there are interpreters.” Or as Luther put it, “I can easily prove from Scripture that beer is better than wine.”

The result is an uncontrolled—and uncontrollable—proliferation of “many thousands of different denominations, conventions, associations, quasidenominational groups, and independent congregations.” (189) And this is not a recent outcome—it was built into the Bible right from the start.

The Christian church today exists in the fragmented form of literally untold thousands of denominations, dioceses, conventions, and individual congregations. Baptists alone are comprised of hundreds of denominations and groupings. (28)

Just how many denominations are there? Of one thing I am sure: with the exception of God, nobody knows for sure. It also depends on how “denomination” is defined. The World Christian Encyclopedia (WCE) of 2001, a standard reference work, listed the following approximate numbers:

Catholics: 242
Orthodox: 781
Protestants: 9000
Anglicans: 168
Marginals: 1600
Independents: 22,000 [1]

To obtain the impact of the Reformation, we need to exclude the Catholics and the Orthodox, while including all Reformation and post-Reformation churches. This gives 32,768, or 97% of the grand total. Further, the number of denominations is estimated to increase at the rate of 5 per week (or one every weekday), so the figure is constantly incrementing. The latest rate I have (as of end-2016) is that 2.4 new denominations are forming every day. The source gives 45,000 denominations for that date. [2] A website that automatically calculates the total Christian denominations count gives 51,564 as of March 30, 2021 [3]. 97% of that exceeds 50,000. Of course, this still excludes the nondenominationals or “nones.” In sum, there should be more than 50 thousand (and counting) Christian denominations worldwide that can be ascribed to the impact of the Reformation. 

Which path are you going to choose?

But the theoretical limit is actually worse than even this. Smith cites a popular evangelical book [4] comparing two-, three-, or four-alternative, Bible-based evangelical views:

each of seventeen theological concerns about which contemporary evangelicals disagree—in theory creat[e] more than five million unique, potential theological belief positions that any given person might espouse, composed of possible combinations of the alternative views.  [Total 17 cases, 2^10 x 3^4 x 4^3 = 5,308,416. Emphasis in the original.] (23)

And this is just for 17 points.

Hence, says Smith, “not only are Christians divided about essential matters of doctrine and faithful practice; they are also sometimes divided on what even counts as essential.” (25)

As has often been noted, the descriptions of God in the OT and the NT are fundamentally at odds in some important respects. The former is a wrathful God, the latter a God of love. Within the NT itself, the four Gospels alone frequently contradict or are at variance with each other. These points are so well-known that I feel no need to belabor them here.

Even the question of Jesus’ divinity is far from settled. Jaroslav Pelikan has identified at least four sets of biblical passages dealing with this issue: passages of adoption (Sonship), identity, distinction, and derivation—not all of which are mutually compatible. [5] In other words, the Bible doesn’t resolve it at all. (Only one of these versions can be true, and that is the one where Jesus says: “Why do you call me good? Only God is good” (Mark 10:18, Luke 18:19) and “My Father is greater than I” (John 14:28). Note that he says the latter in John, which is supposed to be the gospel that most implies divinity.)

Smith’s conclusion?

... on important matters the Bible apparently is not clear, consistent, and univocal enough to enable the best-intentioned, most highly skilled, believing readers to come to agreement as to what it teaches. That is an empirical, historical, undeniable, and ever-present reality. It is, in fact, the single reality that has most shaped the organizational and cultural life of the Christian church, which now, particularly in the United States, exists in a state of massive fragmentation. [Emphasis in the original.] (25)

 

How did things get to this point?

Ideally, one would have to begin at the beginning, with the first centuries of Christianity, and deal with the great schism of 1054—the split of the Eastern Orthodox Church—along the way. But none of this will suffice to explain the tens of thousands of splinters. For this, we have to focus on the Reformation itself.

 

A Guide for the Perplexed

Brad Gregory is both a professor of history and a moralist. In Rebel In The Ranks (henceforth Rebel), he provides a concise and immensely readable account of Luther and the Reformation. The book was published in 2017, the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, which started when Luther proverbially nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Church. Despite the fact that it was published after Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation (henceforth UR), it also serves as a fine introduction to that book, since the latter is built on knowledge provided in Rebel and is very densely argued. For those new to such matters, Rebel is definitely the first book to read.

As Gregory makes clear in the early pages of Rebel, medieval Christianity was “religion as more-than-religion.” By this, he means that religion has come to mean a restricted thing in our day, confined to private beliefs and worship. At that time, however, it encompassed and informed all domains of human life: social, political, economic, cultural, philosophical, legal, and so on. The Reformation era, however, put an end to all that. As Gregory had concluded in an earlier work, “Because the prospects for peaceful coexistence among Christians were tenuous at best, ... only nonreligious values could serve as the basis of stable social and political life.” [6] And so, secularization and modernity became inevitable.

The Unintended Reformation is also a passionate cry—or at least, as impassioned as a staid university professor might allow himself to be. By “Unintended,” Gregory means that the actions of the reformers had outcomes that they never consciously aimed at. The effects were indirect: they were not caused by the teachings of the reformers, but—as Gregory puts it—by “the doctrinal disagreements and religio-political conflicts” of the Reformation era, which gave rise in due time to modernity, secularism, and the world we live in today. This, however, had never been the intention of the reformers; they had simply desired a world where they could live their religion better. (“Reform demanded that everyone be a real, 100 percent Christian.”—Charles Taylor.)

In both books, Gregory presents a picture of pre-Reformation Christianity as a backdrop. All across Europe, there is at that time a shared world of values. Christian (that is, Catholic) ethics informs all aspects of life: economic, political, social, cultural. Compared to what comes afterward, the conditions are almost idyllic.

Perhaps the weakest point of both books is Gregory’s answer to the question: if things were so great, why did the Reformation take place at all? Why was an obscure monk in a negligible German village able to shake Western history and culture to their foundations, with tremors that still continue to reverberate today?

Gregory does acknowledge the faults of the Roman Church. He points to the “chasm” between theory (or ideals) and practice (or reality). He also suggests that life in “late medieval Europe” meant “a frequently harsh human world embedded within a constantly harsh material one.” (UR 195) Hundreds of years of clerical misdeeds, though, had already prepared the groundwork, and the situation was ripe for the picking, as it were. Also, Luther arrived on the scene at exactly the right moment, when the historical and political situation allowed events to unfold as they did. Gregory, however, is much more interested in the aftermath.


The Reformation in a Nutshell

To summarize in a few words the events that have filled many bookshelves, Luther objects to the papal practice of Indulgences, a way of extracting money from credulous believers. Rome objects, Luther stands his ground. It is a case of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object.

In a manner quite reminiscent of Islam, Luther comes to rebel against the Mass, against images, against the ordained and celibate clergy (a “two-tiered” society comprising clergy versus the laity), and against the church without which there is no salvation. Under different circumstances, in another time and/or place, Luther would have been burnt at the stake. What saved him was—besides divine Providence—a unique combination of historical conditions.

Relationships and invective quickly turn acrimonious. Luther starts launching broadsides, enabled by the relatively recent invention of the printing press. His ideas begin to spread like wildfire, first in Germany and then all across Europe. Excommunicated by Rome, he wins support from German princes, who soon will battle other princes who remain Catholic. Luther’s ideas inspire rebellion elsewhere, but other than that common cause, not all rebels agree with Luther’s views. Political authorities get involved. Peasant revolts are bloodily suppressed. Then come the wars, starting from 1523—not just between Catholics and Protestants, but also between Protestants and Protestants. The Peasants’ War. The 30 Years War. The 80 Years War. By the time the Treaty of Westphalia is signed in 1648, Europe is drained and exhausted. One estimate of the death toll places it at more than 5 million (at a time when the continent was much less populated than it is today). The 30 Years War alone may have killed as much as 40 percent of the German population. The Catholic Church emerges shaken from the ordeal, its power and authority vastly diminished.

The survivors came to regard endlessly fighting each other as a terrible fate: “they considered grudging coexistence better than disruptive hostility, let alone war.” (Rebel 214) They came to the conclusion that religious tolerance was an absolute necessity. Almost everything else followed from that.

That, in brief, is the short version. Gregory maintains, however, that things didn’t end there—that the repercussions have shaped, and are still shaping, events in our day. Moreover, he claims, many of the results we see around us were never intended at all by Luther or the ensuing Reform movement. If Luther were to rise from his grave today, he would be chastened and crestfallen (more probably, enraged) by the world we live in.

In what follows, I propose to do a chapter-by-chapter review of UR.

[Sidebar 1]

The Five Solae: Basics of Protestantism

Protestantism, initiated by Martin Luther in the 16th century, is based on five principles—the five Solae (“Alones”), as they are called. Of these, Luther emphasized the first three. The last two were mentioned over the centuries, but they were all brought together in the 20th century (in 1965).

Luther’s main opponent is the Roman church, and it was his intention to do away with its authority. In Catholicism, the populace is divided into two classes: the clergy, or priests of the church, and the laity (lay persons of all kinds). In opposing the Roman church, Lutherans posited the “priesthood of all believers.” The personal, existential crisis that Luther was living through intersected with some longstanding problems of the Catholic church, and from that intersection the Reformation was born. Protestants have since argued that if the church had responded to Luther with charity instead of coercion, a split might not have been necessary. However that may be, Luther’s stand (“Here I stand ...”) was based on some fundamental differences in doctrine which could not easily be resolved. The Reformists, one and all, accused the Catholic church of teaching false doctrine. It was not simply a matter of the difference between good theory versus bad practice (not practicing what one rightly preached), but a question of bad theory (doctrine), as well.


Sola Scriptura: Scripture (the Bible) Alone

In addition to the Bible, the church had, over the centuries, developed a body of guidelines called “tradition.” The teachings of Jesus and his Apostles were preserved not only in the scriptures, but also had been transmitted by word of mouth. “Apostolic transmission” meant that the teachings of the Apostles were handed down faithfully via the church Fathers from one generation to the next, up to the present day. This oral tradition was not committed definitively to writing and could vary from place to place. The first attempt to fix it in print was in 1566, after the Council of Trent. The final form was given to it in the “Catechism (approx. “Echo”) of the Catholic Church” as recently as 1992.

Luther and the other Reformers repudiated this tradition. In their view, only the Bible could be considered authentic, and anything at variance with it had to be discarded. The Bible’s meanings were clear, and the Bible was the best interpreter of itself. Many spurious things had crept into tradition. God’s word was freely accessible to anyone of average intelligence without the interpretation of priests, and did not require any special education. Therefore, all authority claimed by the Roman church on the basis of tradition was null and void.

Comparison. During his Farewell Sermon, the Prophet said: “I leave you two things: the Koran and my Way (sunna: the words and deeds of the Prophet). As long as you follow these two, you will never go astray.” (Hakim, Mustadrak and Bayhaqi, Sunan Kubra.) The Way of the Prophet is preserved in his Sayings or “Traditions” (hadith). The Traditions explicate and support the Koran: they are essential for the proper implementation of worship and conduct. Because there is no church in Islam, Luther’s objections do not apply. There is no priestly class, and hence no distinction between clergy and laity. Any believer can serve as Prayer-leader (imam).

Sola Fide: Faith Alone

This was the central doctrine for Martin Luther and the other reformers, to the extent that Luther called it the “doctrine by which the church stands or falls.”

For Luther, an issue of prime importance was how a believer is justified. “Just-ification” here means being declared just by God, considered righteous, or being approved by God. It is based on St. Paul, who wrote: “The just shall live by faith” (Romans 1:17). Luther’s spiritual crisis led him to the belief that the deeds or works of a believer—or the intercession of any church—counted as nothing in terms of justification, and only one’s faith was essential. This ran counter to the teaching of the Catholic church, which held that faith and good works were both necessary. This found expression in James 2:17—“Faith without good works is dead.” (“Dead” (Gk. nekra) has been variously translated as naught, useless, or worthless.) James 2:24 is even clearer: “a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.” This was so diametrically opposed to what Luther was saying that he regarded the epistle of James as a spurious book, at times calling it the “epistle of straw”—which, however, ran against his principle of Sola Scriptura. Luther considered it among “disputed books” (along with Hebrews, Jude, and Revelation), and placed these separately at the end of his NT translation as appendices.

It was not that Lutherans and Reformed (Calvinist) Christians dismissed good works entirely. Rather, they believed that if one has true faith, good works would follow of themselves. Thus Luther: “Faith cannot help doing good works constantly.” However, de-emphasizing good works in this way, when coupled with the confession of sins and their absolution by faith in Christ (a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card), has its consequences. “Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong, but let your trust in Christ be stronger,” Luther wrote. (So if I believe my trust in Christ is strong enough, I can do anything?)

Comparison. The Prophet accepted that the Declaration of Faith (“I bear witness that there is no god but God, and I bear witness that Mohammed is the servant and Messenger of God”) is enough for a person to enter the religion. But as soon as one does so, one is obliged to carry out the requisite ethical and devotional actions (the remaining four of the Five Pillars of Islam).



Sola Gratia: Grace Alone

This principle again ties in with good works. The doctrine of the Catholic church was that a believer can cooperate with God’s grace to earn merits, or to “merit” greater graces. According to “grace alone,” on the other hand, no meritorious action done by a person can contribute to one’s salvation. Salvation can come about only by God’s grace, or unmerited favor, not as something that a sinner merits. It is an unearned gift from God.

Some have combined “faith alone” and “grace alone” to come up with “Salvation through faith alone,” which directly contradicts the “salvation is only within the church” of Catholicism.

This begs the question: salvation from what? The short answer is: salvation from sin, where sin is defined as violating or failing to obey God’s law. But there is something deeper involved here. The doctrine of Original Sin states that humanity is in a fallen state and in need of redemption. Because Adam and Eve ate the Forbidden Fruit (often identified with sexual intercourse in Christianity), they were expelled from Paradise. Ever since, every newborn baby is genetically tainted with that sin, which can only be neutralized (that is, a person can be “saved”) by belief in Christ and not by any meritorious deed whatsoever. As Luther put it, “God has ordained that man should be saved not by the law but by Christ.” He too believed that Adamic guilt is a hereditary genetic defect, and that human beings are in a state of sin from the moment they are conceived.

This doctrine is actually unbiblical. It was due largely to St. Augustine (admired and studied by Luther), who could not read the Old and New Testaments in their original languages. Seeking a reason for the baptism of infants, he hit upon a mistranslation of Romans 5:12. Ambrosiaster, a contemporary of Ambrose, had substituted “in him [Adam] all sinned” for “because all sinned”. Augustine used this to develop his teaching of Original Sin in its entirety. Instead of viewing infant baptism as a simple ceremony for entry into Christianity, he built an elaborate theory around it. Every human being was born crippled, and needed a crutch. That crutch was to be the church, composed of clergy who are more “elevated” and able to speak in the name of God. (“You are damaged and only we can repair you.”) As first expressed by Cyprian, “there is no salvation outside the church” (extra ecclesiam nulla salus). Luther held and all subsequent churches still hold this to be true. While Luther believed in “salvation by grace alone,” it appears he thought that a church (though not the Catholic one) was still necessary.

Since no deed can help us to earn salvation, the importance of good works is further diminished in “grace alone.” Together with “faith alone,” this inadvertent double attenuation serves as a disincentive for carrying out good deeds.

Comparison. The doctrine of Original Sin does not exist in Islam (or in Judaism), and hence neither does salvation in the Augustinian sense. Therefore, a church is not needed. “No soul bears the burden (sin) of another” (53:38). The Bible concurs: “Each person shall bear their own burden ... A person reaps what s/he sows” (Galatians 6:5, 7). Nobody bears the sin of Adam, and Jesus bears the sin of no one. The human tendency to evil is not due to any original sin, but to the Base Self, which therefore needs to be tamed and purified. One is free (indeed, encouraged) to accumulate as much merit as one can, through the avoidance of sin and performance of good works. God’s grace is a freely given gift for all believers. Only if one regards one’s deeds with pride instead of humility may that grace be revoked and one’s gains from a deed nullified.

We can summarize the results for the first three Solae in the following table. From the Sufic point of view, the Islamic equivalents of tradition (Sunna), works (amal) and merit (sawâb/thawâb) cannot be ditched and would need to be retained:

Solus Christus: Christ Alone

Christ is the only mediator between God and man. This is specifically aimed at excluding the church and clergy. It denies that the Pope is Christ’s representative head of the church on earth. It does away with priests and the church as mediating entities between the believer and God. Further, the priestly class is not necessary for administering the Christian sacraments. Salvation cannot be obtained without Christ. Luther eliminated the middleman; one can confess directly to God, as in Islam, without a priest. When Luther says: “My Christianity is something between God and myself,” he is giving voice to an Islamic precept.

Comparison. There is no church, and hence no intermediary between God and a believer. The Prophet, who loves and cares for his community, is granted the right to intercede in favor of believers on Judgment Day. Any saints or holies deputized by God and His Prophet for this purpose may also be empowered to do so.

Soli Deo Gloria: Glory of God Alone

This is to praise God alone. It opposes the veneration of Mary the mother of Jesus (“Mariolatry”), the saints, or angels, which is said to be practised in the Catholic church. This is again a postulate designed to exclude the church. Human beings (even saints of the Catholic church, the popes, and the clerical hierarchy) are not worthy of any glory accorded them. On the other hand, Catholics see veneration, not as praying to the saints or the Virgin Mary, but as praying through them.

Comparison. Praise belongs to God alone. After each of the Five Daily Prayers, “Glory to God” (Subhan Allah: “Glorified is God,” or “God is above all things”) is recited 33 times prior to personal petitions. “The Glorious” (al-Mâjid) is also one of the Divine Names. Regarding the veneration and petitioning of saints, the fulfillment of wishes is not sought from a saint, but from God by means of a saint.

 

Sola Fide and Ethics

The problem with “faith alone” is that no virtue can contribute to your salvation. And worse, no avoidance of any sin can contribute to it, either. The Book of Deeds—of which everyone has their own copy—is, as it were, closed and sealed forever. If you do good deeds, it means you’re already saved, while if you do bad, you’re damned anyway (the doctrine of double predestination). This is a tremendous disincentive to act according to an ethics of virtue. If it doesn’t matter what you do, why bother? It is also a denial of free will.

Morality and religion were thus separated, however inadvertently: what you did was inconsequential, what you believed was everything. Whereas belief is, or ought to be, merely the starting point for right action. Ethics was sundered from fate, even though your thoughts and actions are what determine your ultimate destiny (personal responsibility).

The answer to double predestination is: Although God knows who is cursed and who blessed, we as mortals with limited knowledge don’t, so it is incumbent on us to act as required by God no matter what our fate (essentially Leibniz’ argument). And who knows, depending on our performance, God may decide to save us after all. The Prophet gave the example of a woman of ill repute who was saved because she used her shoe to draw water from a well to give drink to a thirsty dog. If double predestination had stood in the way of redemption, he wouldn’t have told it. So we shouldn’t give up striving, until our dying breath.

Another such Tradition is: “If you know [for a mathematical certainty] that Doomsday is tomorrow, don’t hesitate to plant a tree today.” This is, above all, a message of hope.

It is not that Luther ever intended that morality should be thus set adrift. It is that Sola Fide/Sciptura left a loophole through which the Base Self (I’m always writing about the Base Self) is able to drive a container truck.

From Theism to Nontheism

In Chapter 1 of UR, “Excluding God,” Gregory identifies “univocity” as a prime cause that led to the Reformation and its aftermath. Now what does he mean by that?

As conceived by Thomas Aquinas, and many Christian thinkers before him, God is “wholly other:” He is utterly distinct from the universe, beyond space and time, wholly transcendent, and incomparable to anything at all. But this renders God, who is already unobservable to the senses, also incomprehensible to human reason.

According to John Duns Scotus, however, this view was deficient. God had at least one characteristic that He shared with all other beings: that of being. This is what Gregory means by “univocal:” God exists in the same sense as everything else. Scotus himself used the term “univocity” (univocationem). (The opposite of this would be that God’s being is not of the same kind as the being of creatures, but only analogous, or similar, to theirs.)

But this has unforeseen and undesirable implications. It lowers the status of God: although He may be superior to all other things in every way, He is still a being among all other beings. This is precisely what Heidegger, in the 20th century, objected against: even if God is the highest being, or the first among beings, he is still a being, which is to reduce the Creator to the status of the created. “God, the first of beings, is degraded to the highest value” (Heidegger). Gregory calls it the “domestication of God’s transcendence.”

This, however, is also to situate God within space and time, to ascribe limit and finitude to Him. Once this point is reached, there is no turning back: reason and science, being unable to find any trace of such a God within nature, will, by the power of Occam’s Razor, exclude God as a “hypothesis” (to use Laplace’s term). This leads inevitably to secularization and the disenchantment of the world.

What can Sufism say about this?

According to the great Sufi saint Ibn Arabi, God is not a being among other beings, but Being Itself (also, though not only, in the Heideggerian sense), and Being is One. God is not a specific “thing,” but is immanent in the entire universe. Whatever you find is not God, but a manifestation (zuhur), a self-disclosure (tajalli) of God. (This has incorrectly been called panentheism, “all in God.” A better term has been coined for it: theo-en-panism, “God in all.”)

Moreover, Ibn Arabi is careful to point out that God’s immanence (similarity: tashbih) or God’s transcendence (incomparability: tanzih), taken alone and exclusive of each other, would lead to insoluble problems. If you think of God only as transcendent, you will argue Him out of existence, because He is totally hidden and incomprehensible (which is why Duns Scotus said what he did). On the other hand, if you think of God as solely immanent, you will end up in pantheism (which is to collapse God onto the universe), or in worshiping a human being (“Immanuel”).

The correct approach, according to Ibn Arabi, is to take these two together: God is both immanent and transcendent, both similar to other beings and incomparable to any of them. Hence he is fond of quoting a Koranic Verse: “There is nothing whatever like Him, He is the All-hearing, the All-seeing” (42:11). Here, in one Verse, similarity and incomparability are mentioned in the same breath. From this, we arrive at the Positive Attributes of God, such as Hearing, Sight, Knowledge, and Life, and the Negative Attributes, such as Infinity, Immortality, and Independent Self-existence (existence by His Self alone, without being dependent on anything else).


A Starburst of Doctrines

Chapter 2 of UR, “Relativizing Doctrines,” deals with the consequences of Sola Scriptura. What Smith calls “pervasive interpretive pluralism”, Gregory refers to in a more general sense as “contemporary Western hyperpluralism”, which has resulted from the endlessly divisive tendencies of the Reformers.

No sooner does Luther raise his banner of rebellion against the Church, stating that he will interpret Scripture on his own, than others follow in his wake. They too raise their banner, only not just against the Church, but also against Luther, and indeed, against each other—in a Hobbesian “war of all against all”.

At first, it seems as if inspiration by the Holy Spirit might provide a solution. But as soon as one claims recourse to the Holy Spirit, all the others, not to be outdone, do so as well. “What am I to do,” Erasmus complains in 1524, “when many persons allege different interpretations, each one of whom swears to have the Spirit?” (UR p. 98) Thus, the field of Bible interpretation is soon flooded with a multitude of contradictory truth claims, each asserting exclusive access to the Holy Spirit. Here, for example, is one exchange:

whereas Zwingli wrote, “I know for certain that God teaches me, because I have experienced it,” Luther countered, “Beware of Zwingli and avoid his books as the hellish poison of Satan [hellischen Satans gifft], for the man is completely perverted [gantz verkeret] and has completely lost Christ.” (UR 98)

 

[Sidebar 2]

Martin Luther and the Trinity

Although Luther inaugurated significant reforms in Christianity, he left the Trinity untouched.

The early Christians knew nothing of the Trinity. They only knew the One God, whom they called “the Father” [7]. It started off as a Binity, when the Byzantine emperor Constantine imposed the term homoousios (“of the same substance/essence”) on the participants of the Council of Nicaea (325 CE/AD)—a term that had already been condemned in the Synods of Antioch in 269. The Holy Spirit was later added to form the Trinity at the First Council of Constantinople (381), after which it became canonical church doctrine. Sometime in the early 3rd century, the church father Tertullian had been the first to advance a notion of a holy triad, but his version was not a triune God but more akin to the emanationism of Plotinus. [8]

The doctrine of the Trinity, however, in turn gave rise to a spate of problems that took a series of church councils to contain. The church itself has declared it to be a mystery, and it was never fully resolved.

How did the doctrine become consolidated? Although Athanasius laid the groundwork, it was the 4th-century Cappadocian Fathers (Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Basil of Caesarea) who really established the Trinity. Striving to spread the gospel in Anatolia, they felt that Christianity was in danger of becoming absorbed back into monotheistic Judaism on the one hand, and of being torn apart by polytheistic paganism on the other. Hence, they used unity as a shield against paganism and trinity as protection against Judaism. Gregory of Nyssa wrote:

Truth passes in the mean between these two conceptions, destroying each heresy, and yet accepting what is useful to it from each. The Jewish dogma is destroyed by the acceptance of the Logos [Word/Son] and by the belief in the Spirit, while the polytheistic error of the Greek school is made to vanish by the Unity of the [divine] nature abrogating this notion of plurality. Yet again, of the Jewish conception, let the Unity of the nature stand, and of the Greek, only the distinction as to persons. It is as if the number of the Trinity were a remedy in the case of those who are in error as to the One, and the assertion of the unity for those whose beliefs are dispersed among a number of divinities. [9]

This compromise between monotheism and polytheism was to have far-reaching consequences. As the Nyssan notes above, monotheism “is destroyed.”

The Trinitarian doctrine has often been accused of tritheism, but this is not quite accurate. Rather, to coin a new term, it is tripartheism—a theism that is tripartite. The early Fathers succeeded in doing something no one had done before: they divided God in three. As the Indian poet Akbar Illahabadi recognized, the doctrine “cuts up God himself into three pieces.” Though it is claimed that each Person is fully God and not one-third of God, this makes no sense. To paraphrase Master Ahmet Kayhan: God is immanent in every particle, but nevertheless every particle is not God. (TPM 193) At bottom, the Trinity appears to be an attempt to trisect God. (It would have been better if they had stuck with Tertullian.)

The Johannine Comma

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states it clearly: “The New Testament contains no explicit trinitarian doctrine.” However, it has been argued that the doctrine is implicitly present. It is part of the church tradition that Luther repudiated.

The most clearly Trinitarian verse in the Bible is found in 1 John 5:7. Luther translated it as follows (1545):

7 Denn drei sind, die da zeugen im Himmel: der Vater, das Wort und der Heilige Geist; und diese drei sind eins. 8 Und drei sind, die da zeugen auf Erden: der Geist und das Wasser und das Blut; und die drei sind beisammen.

The King James Version (KJV, 1611) translation matches Luther’s:

7 For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. 8 And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the Water, and the Blood, and these three agree in one.

The part that is bolded is known as the “Johannine Comma”. But when we go to modern translations, that is not what we find:

7 For there are three that testify: 8 the Spirit, the water and the blood; and the three agree/are in agreement. (e.g. NIV, NRSV)

Further, the earliest version of the Latin Vulgate Bible, Jerome’s translation (405), supports the modern versions. Likewise, the earliest and most reliable Greek texts do not contain the Comma. No Greek manuscript includes it before the 10th century. And the Trinitarian Greek Fathers, in their many polemics, never once quoted such a passage.

A likely explanation (due to Bruce Metzger) is that a scribe “interpreted the original 1 John 5.7-8 in a Trinitarian way and wrote the Comma in the margin as an explanatory note, which then was copied into the main body of 1 John by a later scribe.” [10] Thus, what was merely a comment became incorporated into the main text. Sean Finnegan concludes: “Mainstream Bibles ... have eliminated the forgery.”

Now, it may be argued that Luther did not know that the Trinity was nonbiblical, and therefore could not have factored this truth into his thinking about “Scripture alone”. But we do know that. And hence, we are faced with the necessity of another Reformation—the “Reformation of the Reformation.”

Lutheran Religion and Politics

Chapter 3, “Controlling the Churches,” explains how some Protestant churches became institutions sanctioned by the state.

In Germany the Lutheran church, in Switzerland Calvinism, and in England, the Church of England (Anglicanism) became state-supported institutions. Gregory calls these “magisterial,” which he contrasts with “radical” Protestantism, which did not enjoy such support. Consequently, the former thrived while the latter did not. According to Gregory, however, both need to be taken into account when assessing the impact of the Reformation.

Luther had distinguished between the inner man, the soul who was bound by religion, and the outer man, the body, that had to be obedient to the political authorities (in his time, the German Princes). Once the authority of the Pope in Rome was revoked, every prince became a “Pope in his own country.” Now every sovereign had already been enjoying secular authority. By giving them the authority previously enjoyed by the Pope, Luther was unwittingly investing them with power none had had until then. Henceforth, by supporting and controlling the churches, secular authorities would interfere in the religious field as well. Because the modern state was the successor of the princes, it came directly into an inheritance of enhanced power. This wasn’t exactly the “divine right” of kings, but it came pretty close.

In the early 20th century, the Protestant theologian and religious philosopher Ernst Troeltsch took note of this development: “by its renunciation of ecclesiastical independence, by its deification of the Government and its loyal passivity, [Lutheranism] provided a most favourable setting for the development of the territorial State, which was then engaged in the process of self-development. It smoothed the way for territorial absolutism”. Troeltsch also notes separately: “To this extent the State is something really Divine.” [11]

This would in due course lead to the Third Reich in Germany, and to authoritarian as well as totalitarian regimes elsewhere.

The Ethics of Virtue

Before going on to the next chapter, we need to take a closer look at virtue ethics. Gregory does not deal with this topic at great length, but we need to do that here. We shall take a comparative approach, comparing the teachings of Jesus with those of Sufism. The first thing to note is that Gregory describes the ethics of virtue as “teleological,” or goal-oriented. In other words, your actions determine—or help determine—a certain outcome: there is a causal relationship. We shall examine virtue ethics under three headings: (a) brotherly love, (b) the Golden Rule, and (c) the seven virtues and seven sins.

Love

The first requirement of Jesus was that of love: to love God, but also and further, to “love one another” (Jn 15:12; 1 Pt 1:22, 4:8; 1 Jn 3:11, 18).

We find the same thing in Sufism. The Prophet said: “You cannot enter Paradise unless you have faith, and you cannot have faith unless you love one another.” (Muslim) And God says in a Holy Tradition: “My Love shall be bestowed upon those who love one another for My sake.” (Muwatta, Musnad)

Here are some selections of what Master Kayhan said concerning love. They are the very marrow of Koranic Verses and the Sayings of the Prophet:

Does God love man more, or does man love God more? God loves man so much that He gave man everything, then He couldn’t stand it, couldn’t resist it and gave even Himself. There, we just said the highest.

Don’t bring darkness to mind, say ‘There is light, I am light.’ Don’t think of pessimism and despair. Love life, be in love with life.

God loves you, so love God. Try to love God.

Love, love one another. Love one another for God. There is no other salvation.

God loved human beings very much. ‘Search, find’ – for this, in order to make Himself loved, He sent prophets and holy books.

‘Because I love human beings, I serve man by the hand of man.’ So the one who serves the most is God.

Love one another. Where does love come from? Again, it comes from religion. ‘Hatred does not cease by hatred, hatred ceases by love’ [Dhammapada] – this is the meaning of Verse and Saying. ‘The heart of all religion is love’ [Desiderata II] – this, too, is the meaning of Verse and Saying.

Love one another, and God will love you.

We’re human. We’re all brethren. All human beings aren’t relatives, they’re brothers and sisters. From one father and one mother. We’re not going to say ‘Go over there’ to non-Muslims. We’re going to love them, too. They’re brethren even if they don’t accept us.

God says: ‘Love a stone for My sake. Love a flower for Me. Love your friends and relatives for Me.’ Let us love an ant, a flower.

I love the cosmos. I love the universe with its animals, its plants, with all its particles. Down to an ant, down to a blade of grass, they’re all my life and soul.

God says: ‘I love you very much, love Me in return. Invoke My name.’

God created the eighteen thousand worlds. But He’s not in love with the worlds, He’s in love with man.

[God says:] ‘I created you, I love you very much. Try to love Me deeply in return.’

Love one another. For God. Whether native or out-of-town, love one another, one and all.

Love one another for God. ... If you love one another for God, you won’t break apart. ... If you’re friends of the spirit, it will go on forever. Because we have no friendship with the spirit, we’re unaware of the spirit. [12]

 

The Golden Rule

The second requirement of Jesus is the Golden Rule:

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you (Matthew 7:12; see also Luke 6:31).

Several versions of the Golden Rule have been related from the Prophet, such as:

That which you want for yourself, seek for humankind.

The most righteous person is the one who consents for other people what he consents for himself, and who dislikes for them what he dislikes for himself.

None of you has faith until he wishes for [others] what he wishes for himself. [13]
 

Seven Virtues, Seven Sins

The next requirement of Jesus is ethics, neatly summarized in the Seven Holy Virtues and the Seven Deadly (or Cardinal) Sins. However, the seven virtues/sins are not mentioned in the Bible. They had pre-Christian Greek and Roman precedents, notably in Aristotle (in his Nicomachean Ethics). They were adapted by the 4th-century Desert Fathers, and later became fundamental to Catholicism.

The seven deadly sins are the seven behaviors or feelings that inspire further sin. They are typically listed as: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth.

The seven virtues became identified as chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility.

It may be instructive to compare these Christian virtues and sins with those of Sufism, for Master Kayhan described a similar set of vices and virtues. He referred to the latter as “the eight gates of Heaven” (mentioned in a Tradition). I have augmented the list to include closely related concepts so as not to lose them in translation:

1. Compassion, kindness and affection. 2. Righteousness (Honesty, truthfulness, uprightness). 3. Loyalty. 4. Generosity. 5. Patience. 6. Discretion (Keeping secrets). 7. Knowing one’s poverty and weakness (Humility). 8. Giving thanks to God (Gratitude).

Without these, there is no peace, happiness or Paradise in either world. As for the seven circles of Hell, the following are the traits that open their gates:

1. Pride. 2. Covetousness (Greed). 3. Envy. 4. Discord (Divisiveness). 5. Backbiting (Gossip). 6. Lust. 7. Anger (Wrath). [14]

Notice that there are more gates of heaven than of hell, in line with the Holy Tradition: “My mercy encompasses (exceeds) My wrath.”

For easy comparison, the two sets of vices and virtues are tabulated below. Items that are common to both have been shaded:

Inspection of this table reveals that the two vice/virtue sets overlap. They are not identical—similar, but different. Gluttony and sloth do not exist in the Master’s list, which certainly does not disqualify them from being vices. Gluttony is covered by the Verse: “Eat, drink, but do not waste” (7:31)—which implies all kinds of resources as well. The Sufi saying: “Eat little, drink little, sleep little, speak little” is a further guideline. And sloth is dealt with in the Verse: “A person can have nothing but what s/he has labored for” (53:39, about the same as 2 Thess. 3:10). Another point to note is that while the vices and virtues of Christianity are polar opposites of each other, not every vice or virtue in the Master’s list has its opposite listed. For example, Lust is not the opposite of Compassion. Another thing about Lust is that only Illicit Lust, that is, the extramarital kind, is considered sinful. With a little stretch, Discord can be considered the opposite of Loyalty, and Gossip of Discretion.

We now resume our review.

From Virtue to “Rights”

Chapter 4, “Subjectivizing Morality,” details how the ethics of virtue became supplanted by a state-supported ethics of rights.

Because virtues, despite all the efforts of pre-Reformation Christianity, were not being implemented properly, rights had to be instituted to shield people from the vices of others. Before the Reformation, human rights had come to be regarded as natural rights. These, in turn, were grounded in the perception that God made man in His own image (Genesis 1:27). This is echoed by two Sayings of the Prophet: “God made the human in His own likeness” [15] and “God created Adam in the image of the Compassionate (al-Rahman, a Divine Name of God).” [16] This is why the human was—all human beings were—considered to possess inviolable natural rights.


Rights and the Modern Conception of Nature

Just as, in the Soviet Union, those who wished to stay away from politics and had the necessary aptitude took refuge in mathematics, those who wished to avoid corrosive religious disputes during and after the Reformation took refuge in science. Instead of the Bible, they turned to the study of that other book of God: the Book of Nature. No matter what your religious belief, experiments gave the same results. As one UR reviewer observed, Newton’s apple fell at the same speed for Catholic and Protestant alike. Here was a field of enquiry where all reasonable people could agree upon without getting bogged down in fruitless arguments. As science became the driving force behind technology, and the latter gave birth to products that immensely improved the living conditions of humanity and hence the common good, these two came to supplant religion in the minds of the multitudes. And yet, neither science nor technology could be a proper substitute for religion, because they were not normative and dealt solely with the material world. They had nothing to say about ethics or spirituality.

The rejection of virtue ethics, writes Gregory, stemmed primarily “from its continuing association with Roman Catholicism” (UR 185). Besides, it was unbiblical. (Luther railed against Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as “worse than any other book”.) With the ethics of virtue on the way out, some Christians tried to ground human well-being in “natural rights.” But as nature comes to be increasingly defined (and circumscribed) by science, the ground for such rights begins to wither away. Science recognizes only matter and energy, it deals only with measurable entities such as mass, length (Descartes’ res extensa) and time. With God—whose image humans are created in—out of the picture, there is nothing in science from which “rights”, or even meaning, can be derived.

Gregory is careful to distinguish between “methodological naturalism,” which is the method of the physical sciences investigating “natural regularities,” and “metaphysical naturalism,” which says that the world accessible by the five physical senses is all there is. The first has proven immensely productive; the second, being metaphysical, can only be an assumption. As Charles Taylor has observed, science is the study of matter (energy, too, is a “mode” of matter—E=mc^2). It is a leap of faith to jump from this to the conclusion that nothing but matter exists. The latter also engenders a mechanistic view of nature, with everything being viewed as mechanical and the human being ending up as a machine.

Nobel physicist Steven Weinberg says: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” Though he backpedals on that statement later, he gives voice to a very cogent point. In the field of biology, Darwinian evolution and neo-Darwinism lead to Richard Dawkins’ worldview, which has been summarized as “we are biological robots living in a meaningless universe” [17]—the very peak of nihilism.

In this view, the human, which in practice means the human body, is made up of protons, electrons and neutrons—entities completely devoid of psychological or spiritual qualities. The founding fathers of quantum physics, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, once came to the conclusion in a discussion that there is nothing in quantum physics which can explain life and consciousness.

Heisenberg: “There can be no doubt that ‘consciousness’ does not occur in physics and chemistry, and I cannot see how it could possibly result from quantum mechanics.” Bohr agreed. [18]

If protons, electrons and neutrons (plus an assortment of other elementary particles) are all that exist, there is no basis for human rights, natural or otherwise. Swarms of particles, which Gregory calls “biological matter-energy,” don’t have—can’t have—“rights.”

Finally, the ethics of virtue becomes supplanted by the ethics of rights (though without any rational basis for the latter). Note, however, that virtue ethics were for individual human beings to carry out. The ethics of rights, on the other hand, are for the state to implement. And if Macchiavelli and Hobbes are correct, those rights exist solely at the discretion and sufferance of the state. What the state grants, it can also revoke—the state giveth, and the state taketh away. Why even call this “ethics”, when ethics is supposed to guide the conduct of human persons? All the while, there is no sign of a return to the ethics incumbent on individuals. (For an ethics of rights in Islam, see Sidebar 3.)
 
The switch from personal virtues to state-defined rights led to the following result. In Protestantism, according to Gregory, the pursuit of holiness, the imitation of Christ (the carrot), was replaced by avoidance of punishment (the stick) (UR 210). Love, in other words, was replaced by fear. (This picture, however, seems to leave out an elephant in the room: the Inquisition.)


The U.S.A. and the Secularization of the World

The story of the post-Reformation era continues with the United States. Whereas the Dutch had shown toleration towards various Reformist movements, the US was the first country to enshrine it in its constitution. Other countries would follow in its wake. It began with Thomas Jefferson’s famous words in the Declaration of Independence: “we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Jefferson’s precepts are, at first glance, wonderfully benign. The problem begins when we realize that life, liberty and happiness are left undefined. Which is also a good thing on the surface of it: let everyone define it for themselves. But it so happens that one man’s happiness can be another’s despair. Inadvertently, the Declaration has made no provision for this possibility. Perhaps, when it was written, most people understood the same thing, which presupposes a shared ground of ethics. But what happens when that ground evaporates? These principles can work within society only if there is widespread agreement on what they consist of. But what if there is no such agreement, if your happiness entails my suffering?

Jefferson and his friend, James Madison, thought they had found the answer to this conundrum in the separation of church and state. Politics and religion were to be divorced. Simultaneously, the life of the individual was to be divided into two areas: the public sphere and the private sphere. The public sphere was to be regulated by the state, based on the rights granted to citizens. The private sphere was to be a person’s own, inviolable area, where one was free to believe and worship as one wished. It was this private sphere that religion was to be confined to. “The religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man,” Madison wrote in 1785. And “Jefferson thinks it doesn’t matter what you believe so long as it isn’t publicly disruptive or damaging.” (Rebel 239) Religion, which in the pre-Reformation era had informed everything from politics to economy to law, was to be restricted to the private sphere alone. This was a culmination of “Luther’s sharp two-kingdom distinctions between faith and politics, the inner man and the outer man, the freedom of a Christian and obedience to secular authorities” (UR 270).
 
Of course there is a problem here, for as Gregory says: “Private life and public life are inseparable in real life.” (UR 186) What you do in private will have a subtle but nonzero effect on your public life and, as a consequence, on the public life of others. As an example, this is one of the reasons why marriage is such an important social institution.

Only Scripture could be the final judge and arbiter of a person’s conscience. But since Luther’s Sola Scriptura made the interpretation of Scripture a free-for-all, everyone was at liberty to decide as they please. In Thomas Paine’s words, “My own mind is my own church.” This, says Gregory, is “the unintended road to the elimination of any shared notion of the good” (UR 216):

The unprecedentedly formal, substantively empty, and baldly asserted claims about self-evident truths and inalienable rights in the founding documents of the United States were socially viable because American Christians continued to hold so much in common despite their differences.  . . . Overwhelmingly, through [the Protestant churches] and their families they learned their moral values and behaviors. (UR 218)

For a surprisingly long time, things worked. Thus, when Alexis de Tocqueville visited the USA in the early 1830s, he noted: “There is an innumerable multitude of sects in the United States. They are all different in the worship they offer to the Creator”—yet “all agree concerning the duties of men to one another” and “all preach the same morality in the name of God.” And this common Christian morality, regardless of doctrinal belief, served to put the “united” in the United States for a long while.

But there was a ticking time-bomb hidden in this state-supported ethics of rights. For “my own mind is my own church” meant that eventually, the common morality that held things together would follow in the footsteps of belief—it would erode. The seams would burst, morality would become relativized, and the path that led to a church of atheism or even a church of satanism would be opened (just Google them).

Once it became obvious that the common ground provided by religion had been lost, hopes were pinned for a while on the philosophers. Perhaps moral philosophy, aided solely by reason, would succeed where religion had failed. Unfortunately, just as the Reformers had been unable to agree on anything substantial, the philosophers too failed to come to an agreement even in defining the most basic terms “good” and “evil.” And the truth is, no basis for morality can be found without recourse to the Divine Lawgiver, who happens to be God. So that, too, proved to be a dead end.

As Gregory puts it,

What [the founding fathers] could not have foreseen was what would happen to an ethics of rights when large numbers of people came to reject the shared beliefs that made it intellectually viable and socially workable. (UR 218; emphasis in the original.)

People are demanded to recognize ever more preposterous “rights,” to show them ever more toleration, while the state, says Gregory, becomes ever more oppressive and suppressive in enforcing those demands once they are enshrined in law. Already its surveillance has become all-invasive. And today, Christians cannot agree even on what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what evil—whether torture (sugar-coated with euphemisms such as “enhanced interrogation”) and assassinations are good things, whether suicide should be assisted or is tantamount to murder, whether or not greed, extramarital sex, same-sex marriages, draining the Earth’s resources, and hard-heartedness toward the poor are bad. Hello heartache, goodbye morality.

According to an outside observer, the anthropologist Akbar Ahmad, the USA is stuck in a dichotomy between two figures: Darwin and Jesus. (What Ahmad says has nothing to do with biology or the theory of evolution: its concern is solely ethical.) “Darwin represents adaptability and survival, Jesus compassion and universal love.” [19] In terms of human affairs, the first stands for amorality (if not outright immorality), the second for morality. These two are so antithetical that no reconciliation is possible. The tension this creates leads to a schizophrenic state—to insecurity, engendering fear and anger. And to the extent that the world has become Americanized, the same situation is replicated in other places as well.

So today, like Alice, we stand at a crossroads where we don’t know which way to go. There are too many signposts pointing in too many directions. We need a solid base on which to build a notion of common good, but lack it. Without a shared morality, the center cannot hold. This is our predicament today.

Here is the problem in a nutshell: We have lost the common moral ground, and we need to regain that. Minority views can survive as long as majority consensus holds. Otherwise, the ship goes down with everyone on board. We have lost a morality that is socially shared, and we need to recover it.

The Goods Life

In Chapter 5, “Manufacturing the Goods Life,” Gregory points to acquisitiveness as a prime factor in modern economies. The good life is the “goods life” in an endless cycle of acquire-discard-repeat, which is the essence of consumerism. According to Gregory, it all began with the Dutch, who preferred shopping to theological controversy. As one UR reviewer noted, “avarice not only increased rapidly among the public but was itself transformed into a cultural virtue... material prosperity became a sign of God’s providence.” [20]  

Conflating prosperity with providence and opting for
acquisitiveness as the lesser of two evils until greed was
rechristened as benign self-interest, modern Christians have in
effect been engaged in a centuries-long attempt to prove Jesus
wrong. “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.” Yes we
can. (UR 288)

As Gordon Gekko says in the 1987 movie Wall Street, “Greed ... is good.” But it had already been said, and much more authoritatively, in 1970 by the economist Milton Friedman, who titled an article for the New York Times Magazine “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”.

If Christianity is among other things a discipline of selflessness in
charitable service to others, then the United States’ legally
protected ethos of self-regarding acquisitiveness, culturally
reinforced at every turn, would seem to be its antithesis. The
latter says “satisfy your own desires”; the former, “you must deny
your very self.” (UR 294)

Hence in the economic field, greed becomes enthroned, with the result that the rich get richer and the poor, poorer without any compassion for the downtrodden.

Let us take a closer look at “Greed is good.” This means that non-greed is evil. That is, charity or generosity is evil. This is basically Ayn Rand’s philosophy, which George Monbiot summarized as follows: “Selfishness is good, altruism evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor deserve to die”. This is to stand traditional ethics on its head: it is anti-ethics. It is not moral, nor even amoral, but anti-moral. (It is no coincidence that Rand was an atheist.) Such people are reduced to the position of Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol.” As noted above, “greed was rechristened as benign self-interest” (UR 288). “Not ascetic self-restraint but acquisitive self-seeking is the key to improving society.” (Rebel 247)

But this is only the beginning. Once evil gets a foothold, it doesn’t stop there. It begins to encroach on other virtues as well. There is a spillover effect. The next step can be gluttony. One can be a glutton, not for food, but for goods. And this is precisely what we see in consumerism, although most people are not on the serving but the receiving end of this process. We are being forced to consume more and ever more commodities, to buy and accumulate possessions we don’t really need, like Strasbourg geese that are being force-fed. And this is why Gregory says “the good life” has become “the goods life”: “To be is to buy” (UR 239). The meaning of life is to squander one’s money in frivolous spending. Meanwhile, since the Earth is a finite-resource planet, many others are forced to go without whatever we remove from circulation. (The best solution is to recirculate—to give in charity.) A man of knowledge once said it well: “Touch your world lightly.” So did the Prophet: Even if you’re standing beside a vast sea, you should still use only as much water as necessary.

The goal of evil is always the center of the chessboard: Illicit Lust and Illicit Wealth. Once these two fortresses are conquered, evil has won and good has permanently lost.

Sooner or later, this process will lead to pride and arrogance, or hubris. The Greeks knew something about hubris. In Greek tragedies, hubris is always followed by nemesis, just as a positive charge is sure to attract a negative charge. There is no escape. It may not happen immediately, but it surely will, sooner or later.

To exchange humility for pride, generosity for greed, chastity for Illicit Lust, is not just a bad deal—it is a terrible deal, which will inevitably end in bitter remorse.


The Fragmentation of Knowledge

Chapter 6, “Secularizing Knowledge,” deals with the transformation of higher education into a secularistic endeavor.

In this final chapter, Gregory traces how higher education has evolved. In his view, the interrelatedness of knowledge has been lost: “if all types of knowledge are really knowledge, they [should] cohere… But no academics are trained to inquire about the incompatible assumptions and claims made by scholars and scientists in various disciplines” (UR 301).

Truth cannot be self-contradictory. As the expression of truth, knowledge must also obey the principle of noncontradiction. The various disciplines in higher education, however, lack harmony: being based on contradictory assumptions, they give rise to incompatible claims. It is as if they are dealing with entirely separate realities, instead of separate parts of the same reality. Perhaps one could even call this “polytheism,” if theism had anything to do with any of it.

The universities, Gregory explains, were indispensable to the rulers because of defense reasons. But as religious wars progressed, rulers were forced to regulate the universities. Emphasis shifted toward teaching rather than research. Since science in the modern sense was also starting to take off, intellectuals began to take their research outside the university, to palaces and royal courts, or even their own homes. Gradually, universities became places to which religious knowledge was confined. Because religious knowledge thus became divorced from scientific knowlege, theologians were progressively less able to keep track of new developments, or even to address problems that the new science was throwing up. Finally, the University of Berlin, founded in 1809, became the prototype of modern-day educational institutions—science moved back in with a vengeance.

What was lost in the emerging multidisciplinary enterprise was a unifying vision that could integrate all branches of knowledge, a whole that could not be regained merely by interdisciplinary approaches. Today, the various disciplines in the sciences, arts, humanities, and religious studies exist as dismembered parts of an organism that have been brought together again in an effort to breathe life back into it, rather like the case of a certain infamous doctor in literature who was trying to create a living human being by stitching body parts together.

Gregory sums everything up in his Conclusion:

“medieval Christendom failed, the Reformation failed, confessionalized Europe failed, and Western modernity is failing” (UR 365).

[Sidebar 3]

Sufism and the Reformation: Some Thoughts

The Reformation and Sufism

Though Gregory does not explicitly say this, a literal approach to the Bible also meant that whatever spirituality and esoterism/esotericism that may have been present in pre-Reformation Christianity was all bleached out, and a dry rational reading of the Bible was left. This paved the way for Rosicrucianism, plus alchemy, early Freemasonry and Hermetism/Hermeticism, to fill the void, and to provide a bridge between Protestantism and Catholic esoterism.

One source on Protestant mysticism defines the centerpoint of mysticism as follows: “the conscious self has to be ‘annihilated’ in order for a believer to experience union” [21]. This is a good way of expressing the fana (annihilation, extinction) and wahda (union) concepts of Sufism.

For a long time, Protestantism was regarded as being more or less opposed to mysticism. Adolph von Harnack wrote, “a [Christian] Mystic who does not become a Catholic is a dilettante.” (1905) Evelyn Underhill was of the opinion that “mysticism has never been really at home in the Lutheran—still less in the Calvinistic—branch of the Church.” (1925) And Walter T. Stace (himself a Protestant) concluded that “there are no Protestant mystics” (1963). Now these are all scholars with deep theoretical (if not practical) knowledge of mysticism, and their opinion is not to be lightly dismissed.

More recent scholarship has sought to find some connection, however tenuous, between the Reformation and mysticism. Bernard McGinn points out that “Luther read the mystics selectively for the purpose of finding support for his own theology”—his approach was one of “both appropriation and rejection.” [22] Although he paid attention to mysticism, he was a theologian rather than a mystic. Calvin was even less inclined to mysticism. Jacob Boehme, perhaps the most well-known Protestant mystic, was attacked as a heretic. Nevertheless, McGinn’s research has succeeded in establishing “Protestant mysticism” as a respectable academic category.  
 

Self-Purification

One clear difference of Sufism (or Islam) from other spiritual activities is in the performance of the Prayer.

Before proceeding with the Daily Prayers, one has to reach a state of ritual purification. The Koran says: “God loves those who turn to Him constantly and He loves those who keep themselves pure and clean” (2:222). This is achieved by the Ablution. According to the Koran, the state of outer—bodily—purification, the Ablution, is to be followed by inner—spiritual—purification, which is to perform the Prayer. “God loves those who purify themselves” (9:108). We may not be painted black, but we all come in various shades of gray. God wishes us to be white as snow. The king won’t enter the palace before its construction is complete.

The Prophet said, “Prayer is the Ascension of the faithful.” This spiritual elevation takes place in the realm of the unconscious, in the Unobservable (or Unseen) world. You may feel a state of peace, or sakina—the indwelling presence of God—descend upon you during Prayer, but not be aware of any elevation as such. Nevertheless, it occurs.

Think of a hospital, an unconscious patient on a gurney, assisted by two nurses. Suppose they’re taking the patient from the ground floor up to the seventh floor. They enter the elevator and press the button. The patient, being unconscious, will not feel a thing, but the nurses will, and when the doors open, they will all find themselves on the upper floor. Prayer is just like that.

 

Secularity in Islam

It is amazing that in all the discussions of Islam, the toleration and secularity inherent in it are downplayed so much: “To you your religion, to me, mine” (109:6); “There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256) (the first was revealed in the Meccan and the second, in the Medinan period). These are simple and clear Verses that require little interpretation, if any. A main principle of modernity, reached only after the religious wars of the Reformation era, is present in the Koran itself. And a Prophetic Saying states: “There is no clergy/monasticism in religion.” The nonexistence of a church or monasticism in Islam makes it simultaneously a religion of laity and one in which every believer can serve as Prayer-leader.

Islam is a world religion, not a tribal or provincial one. This means it can be lived by all people everywhere and everywhen. Hence, it can be adapted to life in modern secular societies also, and that is why secularity is inherent in Islam. We need to set aside our cultural prejudices (on both sides) and look at it with fresh eyes.

 

Consider the Ottomans

The Ottoman society was ruled by the millet system, where many faiths and nations could coexist peacefully. (Millet, pronounced “mill-let,” meant “nation,” but in the sense of a religious community—such as the “nation” of Christians.) Each faith was allowed to rule within its own boundaries. Moslems were judged by the rules of Islam, Christians by those of Christianity, and the Jewish people by Judaic law—and each by their own independent authorities.

Yet around the middle of the 19th century, the Ottomans instituted far-reaching legal and social reforms. Why did they do this?

Within their own spheres of influence, Moslem, Christian and Judaic rulings were quite sufficient—if the parties concerned were co-religionists. The problem arose when they were not. For instance, suppose there was litigation between a Moslem and a Christian or a Christian and a Jew. How was a judge to decide between people of different faiths? Thus the need arose to define a concept of members of society without reference to their religion, and to set forth a law that could act as mutual ground (a greatest common denominator) for all, no matter what their convictions were.

We thus see that in multiethnic, multireligious and multicultural communities—which is pretty much what the whole world is today—there is need for a “secular” law that can address the needs of all concerned. This becomes possible if you don’t insist on rule by sharia (the Islamic divine law) for everybody—an impossibility in multicultural societies. The Ottomans were able to achieve this peacefully with the codification of the Majalla (Trk. Mecelle: codex), at least in part thanks to the—unacknowledged, and largely even unknown—secularity inherent in Islam.

The Mecelle was the late Ottoman period civil code, applied in secular (nizamiye) courts. Although still based on Islamic law, it accomodated the participation of Jews and Christians. Especially notable is its introductory section, outlining general principles which, regardless of religion, no reasonable person would find objectionable.

An Islamic Ethics of Rights

An ethics of rights also exists in Islam, but it is of a different kind. Here, the responsibility for observing the rights of others is placed squarely on the individual, instead of being defined, delineated, and enforced by the state. And it includes not only human rights, but also animal rights—even the rights of inanimate matter. Since God is accepted as immanent in everything, all members of the three (nonhuman) kingdoms—animal, vegetable and mineral—are assumed to be imbued with spirit, each with their own distinctive kind. (The spirit of “dead” objects, for instance, is of a more static nature, as attested by psychics who see their “auras.” [23]) The message is: If you have any sense, don’t even kick a stone needlessly.   

The term for this is “the rights of (God’s) servants.” If you’ve seen either of the Flatliners movies (1990, reboot in 2017), they give a pretty good idea of what is involved. A group of medical students experiment with stopping the heart, thus “flatlining” their ECGs and inducing a quasi-after-death state. In that state, their previous infractions of others’ rights come back to haunt them. This is a good description of what will happen in real post-mortem conditions.

In the Koran, the rights of servants are implicit in the concept of justice (adl), as opposed to injustice (zulm). Zulm is etymologically associated with darkness, which is a fitting expression for oppresion and cruelty. Thus “God will not forgive those who have ... committed injustice” (4:168). The “bankruptcy” Tradition of the Prophet unpacks this:

 The Prophet once asked his Companions, “Do you know who is bankrupt?”

They said, “A bankrupt person is one who has no money or possessions.”

The Prophet said,

“The bankrupt in my community is one who comes on the Day of Judgment with Prayers, fasting, and charity; but who has insulted one person, slandered another, wrongfully consumed others’ wealth, shed the blood of this person, and beat that one.

“Each one of the oppressed will be given portions of the wrongdoer’s good deeds.
 

“If that person’s good deeds run out before justice is fulfilled, this time their sins will be taken from their accounts and added to that person’s account.” [24]
 

In sum: God will forgive sins committed against God, but forgiveness has to be obtained in this life from the “servants” themselves, for infringements committed against servants.

The Reformation Needs a Reformation

We have seen that the Reformers, despite all their good intentions, did an uneven job. In some things they did too much, in others they didn’t do enough. In eliminating works and merit, they went too far.

On the other hand, for all his opposition to the Roman church, Luther did not go far enough. Original sin is unbiblical; he did not abandon original sin (see Sidebar 1). The Trinity is unscriptural; he did not abandon the Trinity (see Sidebar 2). Having denounced the Catholic Church, he could not bring himself to let go of the concept of a church. And so on. Which brings us to a very important point.

As some who lived in that era were already recognizing, what is needed is a new reformation: a Reformation of the Reformation—this time, a nonviolent one. It will gradually dawn on people that this is necessary, indeed unavoidable.

Imagine what would have happened if Jesus had dictated the Revelation given him by God (19:30) directly to his followers—for example, the Disciples. If this had been almost hermetically preserved. If he had left behind a book that was consistent, coherent, and unencumbered by multiple authorship. If Jesus had explained and supported Revelation with further logia (sayings) of his own, in answer to questions from his followers.

In such a case, there would have been a single, irreproachable text, and a single, master interpreter, one best placed to explicate what was not understood. Perhaps, as time went on, there would still have been differences of opinion among his followers, leading gradually to a variety of schools, sects, and mystical fraternities. But divergences would have been on a vastly diminished order and scale. Most of all, people would be agreed at least on the essentials and on the ethics, which is all-important.

Well, these things did in fact happen. Only, not with Jesus. With the Prophet Mohammed. The Prophet finished the task started by Jesus, whose career was interrupted in mid-course.

Jesus, of course, knew what was coming, and he tried to inform his followers that someone else would be sent to finish the task he started. Today we know this person as the Paraclete, mentioned in the Gospel of John. The Paraclete is thought to be the Holy Spirit. But John 16:13 declares: “As he hears, so he will speak.” In Greek, akouei corresponds to “he hears” and lalesei to “he will speak”. As Maurice Bucaille noted, “The two Greek [root] verbs akouô and laleô ... can only be applied to a being with hearing and speech organs. It is consequently impossible to apply them to the Holy Spirit.” These facts leave no doubt that this is a human being, and correspond exactly to how the Koran was dictated. [25] (I have written more about this in Science, Knowledge, and Sufism.)

The Bible, being the work of many hands, is at best divinely inspired (in parts). What is God’s very Word is the Koran—and it confirms that Jesus was God’s Word, as well as His messenger (4:171, 3:45).

The Prophet’s morality was the Koran, and this is confirmed by the Koran itself: “Surely you are upon a mighty morality” (33:21). Furthermore: “Nobody can interpret the Quran according to their own lights.” (TPM 209) It has to be in the light of the Prophetic Traditions.

Luther’s Reformation was not the first Reformation; it was actually the second (or even third, if you count the Orthodox split of 1054). And it did not go far enough. Furthermore, part of the baby was also thrown out with the bathwater. The solution? We have to go back to what Professor Norman O. Brown called “the first Protestant Reformation.” For things were already beyond repair by the seventh century AD, and it was not without reason that God sent new Revelation and a new (Final) Testament to remedy matters.

What emerges from this study and my last one (“Salafism and Sufism”) is that only God can “reform” religion—by sending another prophet. (Human intervention doesn’t end well.) And since no further prophets will be forthcoming (except false ones)...

Of course, Sufism has had its own variety of schools, sects and cults. I can only vouch for the version taught and practiced by Master Ahmet Kayhan, the details of which I have outlined in The Teachings of a Perfect Master (2012) (TPM) and in various other writings.

Jesus, Christians believe, is the Word of God. Moslems believe that the Koran is the Word of God. In the first case, the Word of God is manifested as a person, in the second as a book. Moreover, the Koran, which is the Word of God, bears witness that Jesus is the Word of God (3:39, 45; 4:171). (He is also a messenger of God, the son of the Virgin Mary, and the Christ or Messiah—all according to the Koran.)

Here we encounter a problem. The first Word of God is no longer directly available to us. His deeds are pretty clear, but his words are not always easy to understand—they are complicated. After two millennia, we can apprehend him only “as through a glass, darkly.” Whither to turn to, to reach a better understanding?

However, the second Word of God, the Book, is at hand...

 

---

Notes

 [1]  https://www.ncregister.com/blog/we-need-to-stop-saying-that-there-are-33-000-protestant-denominations

 [2]  https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2017/january-february/division-is-not-always-scandal.html

 [3]  http://www.philvaz.com/apologetics/a120.htm (Scroll to the bottom for the count of the day.)

 [4]  Gregory Boyd and Paul Eddy, Across the Spectrum: Understanding Issues in Evangelical Theology (2009).

 [5]  Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition 100-600 AD (1971), p. 175.

 [6]  Brad Gregory, Salvation At Stake (1999), p. 349.

 [7]  Dale Tuggy, “The Unfinished Business of the Reformation”, in Herausforderungen und Modifikationen des klassischen Theismus, Band 1: Trinität, T. Marschler and T. Schärtl (eds.), Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2019, pp. 199–227.

 [8]  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “History of Trinitarian Doctrines”.

 [9]  Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Orations, quoted in Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition 100-600 AD (1971), pp. 66-67.

[10]  https://restitutio.org/2015/12/08/the-story-behind-the-comma-johanneum-1-john-5-7/

[11]  Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (1912, Eng. tr. 1931), pp. 572, 548. See also pp. 519-20.

[12]  H. Bayman, The Teachings of a Perfect Master (2012) (TPM), pp. 50-60, 87, 138.

[13]  Nawawi, Forty Hadith; Ahmad Ibn Hanbal, Musnad (for the last one).

[14]  H. Bayman, The Secret of Islam (2003), pp.86-88.

[15]  Bukhari 6227, Muslim 2841.

[16]  For more details, see Christopher Melchert, “‘God Created Adam in His Image’”, Journal of Qur’anic Studies 13.1 (2011): 113–124.

[17]  Due to Alex Tsakiris.

[18]  Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond (1971), p. 114.

[19]  Akbar Ahmad, Journey Into America (2010), pp. 25-28.

[20]  https://hansmoscicke.wordpress.com/2016/06/28/the-unintended-reformation-overview-of-chap-5/

[21]  Sara Poor and Nigel Smith (eds.), Mysticism and Reform (2015), p. 11.

[22]  Bernard McGinn, “Mysticism and the Reformation: A Brief Survey,” Acta Theologica, vol. 35 n. 2 (2015), pp. 50-65.

[23]  See e.g. Shafica Karagulla, Breakthrough to Creativity (1967), Chapter 5.

[24]  Muslim, Sahih, 2581.

[25]  M. Bucaille, The Bible, the Qur’an and Science (tr. Alastair D. Pannell and M. Bucaille), Paris: Seghers, 1976, p. 114.