Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis (3 page)

Manichean dualism entered into Gnosticism, which despite being persecuted by Christianity reappeared in many different guises right up to modern times. Gnosticism is a tradition of forbidding complexity, but its central vision of a dark world governed by demonic forces had a profound impact on the history of religion. In the first two or three centuries after the death of Jesus there was a Gnostic current within Christianity, distinguished from others by its assertion that only those who shared in the secret teachings passed on by Jesus could be saved. The term Gnosticism comes from the Greek word
gnosis
, which means ‘knowledge’, and in the turbulent world of early Christianity, when nearly every aspect of Christian belief was intensely contested, Gnostics embodied the belief that salvation comes to those – perhaps only a few – who possess a type of esoteric spiritual insight and consists not in physical immortality in this world but in liberation from the human body and the material world. Though this set of beliefs had little in common with those of Jesus and was condemned by the early Church, it remained a strand in Christianity. Too little remains of their texts to be certain, but a type of Gnosticism seems to have resurfaced among the Cathars, who flourished in twelfth-century France until Pope Innocent III launched a crusade against them and (after a forty-year war in which around half a million people were killed) nearly erased them from history. However, Gnosticism was not destroyed. It survived and reinvented itself, appearing in many unexpected guises, including – according to Hans Jonas, author of a masterly study of Gnostic traditions – the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.
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Yet it was not Gnosticism that re-emerged in the repeated outbreaks of millenarianism that occurred throughout the history of
Christianity. It was the belief in a cosmic war between good and evil, a belief that had animated Jesus and his disciples, and which echoed the dualistic world-view of Zoroaster. Through its formative influence on western monotheism – of which Islam and modern political religions are integral parts – Zoroaster’s view of the world shaped much of western thought and politics. When Nietzsche declared that good and evil are an invention of Zarathustra he may have been exaggerating, but he was not entirely wrong.

Christianity injected eschatology into the heart of western civilization, and despite Augustine it has reappeared time and again. Between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, movements inspired by millenarian beliefs developed in England and Bohemia, France and Italy, Germany and Spain and many other parts of Europe. Whether the people they attracted were affected by war, plague or economic hardship, these movements thrived among groups who found themselves in a society they could no longer recognize or identify with. The most extraordinary was the Brethren of the Free Spirit, a network of adepts and disciples that extended across large areas of Europe for several centuries.
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The Free Spirit may not have been only a Christian heresy. The Beghards, or holy beggars, as followers of the Free Spirit were sometimes known, wore robes similar to those of Sufis, who preached similar heterodox beliefs in twelfth-century Spain and elsewhere, and the Free Spirit may also have imbibed inspiration from surviving Gnostic traditions, which were never only Christian. In any event, before they were anything else – Christian or Muslim – the Brethren of the Free Spirit were mystics who believed they had access to a type of experience beyond ordinary understanding. This illumination was not, as the Church believed, a rare episode in the life of the believer granted by God as an act of grace. Those who had known this state became incapable of sin and could no longer be distinguished – in their own eyes – from God. Released from the moral ties that restrain ordinary humanity they could do as they willed. This sense of being divinely privileged was expressed in a condemnation of all established institutions – not only the Church but also the family and private property – as fetters on spiritual liberty.

It might be thought that mystical beliefs of this sort could not have much practical impact. In fact, interacting with millenarian beliefs
about a coming End-Time, they helped fuel peasant revolts in several parts of late medieval Europe. In the town of Münster in north-west Germany this volatile mix gave birth to an experiment in communism. By the early part of the sixteenth century the Reformation that unseated the Catholic Church in parts of Europe was producing sects more radical than anything envisaged by Luther, whose theology pointed towards obedience to the emerging modern state, or by Calvin, who insisted on strict institutions of church governance. Chief among these sects were the Anabaptists, a movement aiming to recover the teachings of early Christianity. The sects who made up this movement encouraged the practice of rebaptism as a symbol of the believer’s rejection of the Church and the prevailing social order. In early 1534, after converting large numbers of preachers, nuns and laypeople, the Anabaptists carried out their first armed uprising and seized control of Münster’s town hall and marketplace. The city became an Anabaptist stronghold, with Lutherans fleeing while Anabaptists from nearby towns flocked in. It was announced that the rest of the Earth would be destroyed before Easter, but Münster would be saved to become the New Jerusalem.

Catholics and Lutherans were expelled while those who remained were rebaptised in the town square. The cathedral was sacked and its books burnt. Later, all books apart from the Bible were banned. The first steps to common ownership were taken. All money, gold and silver had to be handed over. The doors of houses had to be left open at all times. Under the leadership of a former apprentice tailor Jan Bockelson (otherwise known as John of Leyden) these measures were taken further. Private ownership was forbidden and direction of labour introduced along with capital punishment for a wide range of offences. Wives who refused to obey their husbands could be put to death – as could adulterers, who included anyone who married outside the Anabaptist community. This puritanical regime did not last. A form of polygamy was introduced under which it became a capital offence for a woman to remain unmarried. This did not last either –some women refused to comply and were executed. After that, easy divorce was allowed, leading to a version of free love.

In the autumn of 1534 Bockelson proclaimed himself king of Münster. He saw himself not as a worldly ruler but as a Messiah
presiding over the world’s last days. In an innovation that would be followed by the Jacobins he gave new names to streets and buildings and instituted a new calendar. Within days of the new order executions began, with women being prominent among those put to death. By now the town was under heavy siege from forces loyal to the Church, and the population was starving. Bockelson ordered spectacular celebrations for the distraction of his famished subjects –races, dances and theatrical performances. At the same time he banned unauthorized meetings. The famine continued, and in June 1535 the town’s defences were penetrated. Bockelson was captured. After months of public humiliation he was tortured to death with red-hot irons in the town square.

The theocratic-communist regime John of Leyden installed in Münster bears all the marks of millenarianism. Norman Cohn identifies millenarian sects and movements as holding to an idea of salvation that has five distinctive features: it is
collective
, in that it is enjoyed by the community of the faithful;
terrestrial
, in that it is realized on earth rather than in heaven or in an after-life;
imminent
, in that it is bound to come soon and suddenly;
total
, in that it will not just improve life on earth but transform and perfect it; and
miraculous
, in that its coming is achieved or assisted by divine agency.
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Modern revolutionaries from the Jacobins onwards share these beliefs, but whereas the millenarians believed that only God could remake the world, modern revolutionaries imagined it could be reshaped by humanity alone. This is a notion as far-fetched as anything believed in medieval times. Perhaps for that reason it has always been presented as having the authority of science. Modern politics has been driven by the belief that humanity can be delivered from immemorial evils by the power of knowledge. In its most radical forms this belief underpinned the experiments in revolutionary utopianism that defined the last two centuries.

Utopia has not always been a revolutionary idea or even one that is overtly political. In many cultures and throughout most of history, humanity has been haunted by the thought of a perfect society; but it has interpreted this asa memory of a lost paradise rather than a glimpse of an achievable future. Plato placed his ideal republic in a Golden Age before history, and until around two hundred years ago perfect societies were imagined as being situated in an irrecoverable past or else in distant places not recorded on any map. Sir Thomas More, author of
Utopia
(1515) – a term he coined, meaning both ‘a good place’ and ‘nowhere’ – set his imagined community in a far-off land. Even when the idea of Utopia has been used as a tool of social reform it has not always been revolutionary. Many utopians have aimed not to overturn society but to create an ideal community that society could use as a model. Utopianism was a movement of withdrawal from the world before it was an attempt to remake the world by force.

In the nineteenth century, utopian communities were established by a number of religious reformers and ethical socialists. John Humphrey Noyes (1811–86)– an ordained minister who believed he had reached a condition of sinless union with God – set up the Oneida community in upstate New York in 1848 to embody the principles of ‘Christian
perfectionism’, ‘Bible communism’ and ‘complex marriage’. In 1825 the British industrialist and socialist Robert Owen (1771–1858) purchased the town of Harmonie, Indiana, and set up New Harmony to embody of the idea of communal living. Charles Fourier (1772–1837) – a French utopian socialist who looked forward to the appearance of new species, ‘anti-lions’ and ‘anti-whales’ that would exist solely to serve humans, and who (according to Nathaniel Hawthorne in his novel
The Blithedale Romance)
believed that a time would come in the progress of humanity when the sea would acquire the flavour of lemonade – advocated the establishment of ‘phalansteres’, communes whose members would practise a form of free love.

While they had an impact on radical thought, these utopian communities had very little influence on the societies that surrounded them. Opposed to common human inclinations and infected with the eccentricities of their founders, most of them failed in a generation or less. One might think that the disappearance of these communities is enough to establish their utopian character. But what is it that makes a community or a project utopian? There have been many attempts to define utopianism, and no single formula can cover all its varieties. Isaiah Berlin has written:

All the Utopias known to us are based on the discoverability and harmony of objectively true ends, true for all men, at all times and places. This holds of every ideal city, from Plato’s Republic and his Laws, and Zeno’s anarchist world, and the City of the Sun of Iambulus, to the Utopias of Thomas More and Campanella, Bacon and Harrington and Fénelon. The communist societies of Mably and Morelly, the state capitalism of Saint-Simon, the Phalansteres of Fourier, the various combinations of anarchism and collectivism of Owen and Godwin, Cabet, William Morris and Chernyshevsky, Bellamy, Hertzka and others (there is no lack of them in the nineteenth century) rest on three pillars of social optimism in the West … that the central problems of men are, in the end, the same throughout history; that they are in principle soluble; and that the solutions form a harmonious whole … this is common ground to the many varieties of reformist and revolutionary optimism, from Bacon to Condorcet, from the Communist Manifesto to modern technocrats, communists, anarchists and seekers after alternative societies.
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Contrary to Berlin, utopianism does not always involve a claim to objective knowledge of human needs. The history of religion contains many examples of communities aiming to embody an ideal of perfection that has come to them as a divine revelation. Such communities are based on faith rather than any claim to knowledge, but to the extent that their ideal of perfection is at odds with basic human traits they are still utopian. The theocratic-communist city-state set up by John of Leyden was one such religious utopia.

Berlin is right that a core feature of all utopias is a dream of ultimate harmony. Whether human ends are believed to be unchanging, as in Plato, or evolving, as in Marx, whether the nature of these ends is known through the scientific discovery of natural laws or accepted as a matter of faith, the normal conflicts of human life are left behind. Clashes of interest among individuals and social groups, antagonism between and within ideals of the good life, choices among evils –these conflicts, which are endemic in every society, are reduced to insignificance.

The pursuit of a condition of harmony defines utopian thought and discloses its basic unreality. Conflict is a universal feature of human life. It seems to be natural for human beings to want incompatible things – excitement and a quiet life, freedom and security, truth and a picture of the world that flatters their sense of self-importance. A conflict-free existence is impossible for humans, and wherever it is attempted the result is intolerable to them. If human dreams were achieved, the result would be worse than any aborted Utopia. Luckily, visions of an ideal world are never realized. At the same time, the prospect of a life without conflict has a powerful appeal. In effect it is the idea of perfection attributed in some traditions to God. In religion the idea of perfection answers a need for individual salvation. In politics it expresses a similar yearning, but it soon runs up against other human needs. Utopias are dreams of collective deliverance that in waking life are found to be nightmares.