Not in God's Name (6 page)

No civilisational order like this has ever appeared before, and we can only understand it in the light of the traumatic failure of the three substitutes for religion: nationalism, communism and race. We are now living through the discontents of individualism and have been since the 1970s. Identity has returned. The tribes are back and fighting more fiercely than ever. The old sources of conflict, religion and ethnicity, are claiming new victims. The anti-modern radicals have learned that you can use the products of modernity without going through the process that produced them, namely Westernisation. Meanwhile the energy of the West has been sapped by the decay of the very things religion once energised: marriage, families, communities, a shared moral code, the ability to defer the gratification of instinct, the covenant that linked rich and poor in a bond of mutual responsibility, and a vision of the universe that gave rise to the social virtue of hope.

The tendency of humans to form groups, of which religion is the most effective agent, is a source of violence and war. But the alternative – humanity without groups or identities – is impossible because unbearable. The thinker who saw this most clearly was French sociologist Émile Durkheim. In 1897 he published a remarkable book entitled
Suicide
. Intuitively we think that the choice of ‘to be or not to be’ is the most intensely personal decision of all. It has everything to do with mind and mood, and little to do with the world outside.

Durkheim argued otherwise. He said that in a society undergoing
anomie –
the loss of a shared moral code – more people will commit suicide. We cannot bear the absence of public meanings and collective moral identity. Faced with the prospect, vulnerable individuals will choose death rather than life. Though Durkheim could not have foreseen it, a variant of this is happening in our time. It is the reason why seemingly normal, well-educated and adjusted people with careers and families ahead of them become jihadists and suicide bombers, choosing death rather than life.

Vast research since the events of 11 September 2001 has shown that jihadists and suicide bombers are not for the most part people driven by poverty or social exclusion. They have no recognisable psychological profile. They are not psychopathic, nor are they driven by religious extremism as such. Many of them did not have a religious education. As children, they did not attend madrassahs. Some of them know very little about Islam.

If they are suffering from anything, it is from what they see as the emptiness, meaninglessness, materialism and narcissism of the contemporary West and the corruption of secular regimes in the Islamic world. As Eric Hoffer noted in
The True Believer
(1951) and as Scott Atran has shown in his study of suicide bombers,
Talking to the Enemy
, individuals join radical movements to alleviate the isolation of the lonely crowd and become, however briefly, part of an intense community engaged in the pursuit of something larger than the self.
⁹
They are motivated by genuine ideals. They feel the suffering, the pain and the humiliation of their fellow believers. They seek to dedicate and if need be sacrifice their lives to end what they see as the injustice of the world and to honour the memory of those they see as its victims. As Michael Ignatieff wrote in
The Warrior’s Honor
, the book he wrote in response to the Balkan wars, ‘Political terror is tenacious because it is an ethical practice. It is a cult of the dead, a dire and absolute expression of respect.’
¹⁰
Holy warriors are altruists, and what they commit is altruistic evil.

We have seen in this chapter how altruism leads us to make sacrifices for the sake of the group, while at the same time leading us
to commit acts of violence against perceived threats to the group. Good and bad, altruism and aggression, peace and violence, love and hate, are born together as the twin consequences of our need to define ourselves as an Us in opposition to a Them. But we have a way further to go. Something more than simple identity is needed for good people to commit truly evil deeds.

Exaggerate each feature until man is

Metamorphosized into beast, vermin, insect.

Fill in the background with malignant

Figures from ancient nightmares – devils,

Demons, myrmidons of evil.

When your icon of the enemy is complete

You will be able to kill without guilt,

Slaughter without shame.

Sam Keen
, Faces of the Enemy
(1986)
¹

One day between November 1946 and February 1947, a young Bedouin shepherd, Muhammed edh-Dhib, in the company of a cousin and a friend, discovered a number of ancient decaying leather scrolls in a cave in Qumran, amid the mountains that border the Dead Sea. The story Muhammed told was that he was tending his animals when he noticed that one had strayed from the flock. He idly tossed a stone into the small opening of a cave and became frightened when it made an unusual noise, as if it had hit not the bottom of the cave but a jar inside. Unnerved, he fled, but later returned with his two companions, climbed into the cave, retrieved the scrolls and brought them back to his family. After drying them, his father took them to some local dealers. One declared them worthless. A second bought three for low prices. A further scroll came into the possession of the Syrian archbishop of Jerusalem, who showed them to a scholar who realised their value and significance.

This prompted a dramatic search for other caves and scrolls against the background of Israel’s War of Independence. It
continued under Jordanian auspices until 1956. Eventually eleven caves were found to contain documents, yielding a vast library of 981 different texts. Among them were by far the oldest manuscripts of biblical texts then known, dating from the third or second century
BCE
(subsequently even older fragments dating to the sixth century
BCE
were discovered at Ketef Hinom), together with other previously unknown ancient documents.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are one of the great discoveries of modern times. Most believe that they were the work of a small community of separatists who had taken the decision, sometime in the second pre-Christian century, to leave Jerusalem and live in seclusion until the day when Israel’s enemies and its own corrupt religious establishment would be overthrown and the reign of righteousness restored. Some believe they were a branch of the Essenes, others that they were a dissident group of Sadducees, yet others that they were a group in their own right, one of many in those turbulent, fissiparous times.

Less well known is another major manuscript discovery some two years earlier near Nag Hammadi, a settlement in upper Egypt. It was there in December 1945 that Muhammad Ali al-Samman and his brothers had gone to dig in Jabal al-Tarif, a mountain honeycombed with caves, for the soft soil they used to fertilise their crops. As they were digging, their spades hit a red earthenware jar containing thirteen papyrus books bound in leather. From there on the story becomes obscure. The brothers had been involved in a blood feud and were afraid that the police, investigating murder, would find the manuscripts and confiscate them. Eventually the manuscripts found their way onto the black market, but as news of their existence leaked out, the Egyptian government eventually tracked most of them down and deposited them in the Coptic Museum in Cairo.

Part of one of the codices was smuggled out of Egypt and placed for sale, attracting the attention of a Dutch scholar, Gilles Quispel, who pieced the fragments together, deciphered one of the texts and realised that it was an edition of a text hidden for many
centuries, the
Gospel of Thomas
. Altogether the Nag Hammadi manuscripts represent Coptic versions of fifty-two early Christian texts, many of them hitherto unknown, including the
Gospel of Truth
, the
Gospel to the Egyptians
, the
Secret Book of James
, the
Apocalypse of Paul
and the
Apocalypse of Peter
.

Written in Coptic, they were translations, dated between 350 and 400
CE
, of originals written in Greek and dating back to the second century. The reason they had been hidden soon became clear. They embody a theology radically at odds with the beliefs that became mainstream Christianity. Indeed, many of the newly discovered texts had been denounced as heretical by Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, around the year 180.

These two libraries, hidden for centuries, belong to two quite different religious traditions, one Jewish, the other Christian. But they have one very unusual feature in common – one of the reasons that they were hidden in the first place. Judaism and Christianity are both monotheisms, but the Qumran sectarians and those of Nag Hammadi were
dualists
. They believed not in one power governing the universe, but in two.

Among the Qumran scrolls is one describing a war between the Children of Light (the Israelites or such of them as remained after their various defeats and exiles) and the Children of Darkness, the Ammonites, Moabites, Amalekites, Philistines and their allies. The Children of Light would be victorious, darkness would be vanquished, and peace would reign for ever.

The Nag Hammadi gospels are more radical, turning the conventional world of the Bible upside down. In them, the creator of the physical universe was not God but a demiurge, a secondary power, a fallen angel who had got out of hand. It was he who made the material world with its disease and death, violence and pain. The true God had nothing to do with the physical universe but lived in heaven in a realm beyond time, death and change. For the Nag Hammadi sectarians the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament Gospels are, in significant ways, completely false. The real hero of the Garden of Eden was the serpent. It was he
who opened Adam’s and Eve’s eyes to the truth. As for the New Testament, the
Gospel of Thomas
offers the startling revelation that the only disciple who truly understood Jesus was Judas, seen in the canonical Gospels as the traitor who betrayed him.

Where did these strange ideas come from? They are clearly not indigenous to Judaism or Christianity, because dualism is not monotheism. Jews first encountered them during the period of Persian rule in the form of Zoroastrianism. This ancient faith divided the supernatural powers into two, Ahura Mazda, the god of light, and Ahriman, the god of darkness, ‘the accursed destructive Spirit who is all wickedness and full of death’.
²
Aided by an army of demons and seven archfiends, Ahriman wages war against the light, changing his form into anything he chooses, from lion to lizard to handsome youth. As time proceeds and Ahriman senses his inevitable defeat, he gathers his strength for a final confrontation, during which the sun and moon will pale in the heavens and the stars will be shaken from the sky. Eventually, exhausted, he is vanquished, never to return.

The other source of dualism, more evident in Nag Hammadi than Qumran, is ancient Greece, especially Orphism. Here the division is not between good and evil but between the soul and the body, the spiritual and the physical. Orphic myth tells the story of the Titans’ clash with Dionysus, son of Zeus, whom they murder and eat. Zeus burns them in his anger, and from the ash, humans are born, containing elements of both: Dionysus in the form of the soul, the Titans in the form of the body. The soul is imprisoned within the body but lives on after it and is reincarnated. Elements of this doctrine persist in the philosophy of Plato, who distinguished between the world as we encounter it through the physical senses and as we truly know it through the soul.

The sects that produced the manuscripts at Qumran and Nag Hammadi disappeared, but dualism lived on. In Persia it became known as Manichaeism (after the Iranian thinker Mani, c. 216–76
CE
). In Greece it was called Gnosticism. The Nag Hammadi texts are known as the Gnostic Gospels.

It might seem strange to turn to two ancient and marginal sects to understand the connection between religion and violence, but they contain a clue that is an essential piece of the puzzle. The last chapter argued that violence is born of the need for identity and the formation of groups. These lead to conflict and war. But war is normal. Altruistic evil is not normal. Suicide bombings, the targeting of civilians and the murder of schoolchildren are not normal. Violence may be possible wherever there is an Us and a Them. But radical violence emerges only when we see the Us as all-good and the Them as all-evil, heralding a war between the children of light and the forces of darkness. That is when altruistic evil is born.

Why would even sectarian members of Judaism and Christianity be tempted by an idea that is clearly incompatible with their faith in a single God?
Dualism is what happens when cognitive dissonance becomes unbearable, when the world as it is, is simply too unlike the world as we believed it ought to be
. In the words of historian Jeffrey Russell, dualism ‘denied the unity and omnipotence of God in order to preserve his perfect goodness’.
³

The God of Abraham is, among other things, the Lord of history who redeemed his people from slavery in Egypt. Yet for the Jews of the second century
BCE
, the great prophetic visions had not come true. Israel had been defeated by Nebuchadnezzar. The Temple had been destroyed. The people had gone into exile in Babylon. Some had returned, but not all. The lost ten tribes for the most part stayed lost. The Second Temple was a pale shadow of Solomon’s. The nation was not truly independent. Persian rule was succeeded by the Alexandrian Empire, eventually to be followed by Rome. Many Jews had become Hellenised, including the Hasmonean kings and high priests. It was at this point, probably around 125
BCE
, that a priestly group decided to leave Jerusalem, live in purity in the lonely wastes of the Dead Sea, and
wait for the end of history, when God would fight a cosmic battle and defeat the forces of evil.

Among the early Christians, the cognitive dissonance was even greater. The first Christians were Jews who believed that the Messiah had come. But the Messiah in mainstream Judaism is not a supernatural being with the power to transform the human condition. He is simply an anointed king (the word
messiah
means ‘anointed’) in the line of David who will fight Israel’s battles, restore its independence, unite the people and usher in a reign of peace.

Manifestly that had not happened. After the death of Jesus the fate of the faithful became worse, not better. The Romans were ruthless. Religious liberty was curtailed. Jews rose in revolt but suffered devastating defeat. It became easier, particularly for some Gentile Christians, to think in dualistic terms borrowed from Greece. The physical arena with its wars and destruction was neither real nor the work of God. It was, as Plato said, a play of shadows cast on the wall of our senses by an artificial light. The real world is that of the forms, of eternity and the soul. This is where God lives. What the Messiah had done was not to change history. Rather, he had brought his disciples the truth about the other world, the realm of the spirit that lies within us if we only have the knowledge, the
gnosis
, the secret key that unlocks the door.

Dualism entered Judaism and Christianity when it became easier to attribute the sufferings of the world to an evil force rather than to the work of God.

The Qumran and Nag Hammadi sects disappeared. The mainstream in both Judaism and Christianity rejected dualism. Within Judaism, the group that survived were the rabbis. In some respects their teachings were close to those of the first Christians. They believed in the primacy of love and forgiveness. They subscribed to the morality taught in the Sermon on the Mount. They called it
lifnim mi-shurat ha-din
, going beyond the letter of the law. They saw themselves as heirs to the prophets, and believed, as did the early Christians, in the goodness of ordinary people.

They also discovered a powerful way of excluding heretical beliefs. They did not codify doctrine as the Church eventually did at the Council of Nicea in 325. Instead they fought the battle of ideas through the prayer book. The way they defeated dualism – they called it
shtei reshuyot
, ‘two domains’ – was elegant and effective. They chose the single most emphatic rejection of dualism in the Bible, Isaiah’s statement, ‘I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil’ (Isa. 45:7). Out of delicacy they substituted ‘all things’ for ‘evil’. They then set these words as the opening line of the communal daily Morning Prayer, where they stand to this day. So whoever prayed in the synagogue denied dualism. It soon disappeared from the Jewish mainstream, surfacing from time to time only in esoteric mystical texts.

Christianity likewise rejected the Gnostic Gospels. The most significant dualistic challenge came from Marcion of Sinope in the mid-second century. He believed that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New were two quite different deities. Like the Gnostics he believed that the Jewish God, Creator of the physical universe, was a different and lower being than the God of Christianity, who was spiritual, not physical, practising love and forgiveness rather than justice and retribution. The two religions had nothing to do with one another, so the Hebrew Bible, the ‘Old Testament’, had no place within the Christian canon. Marcion’s views were rejected as heresy. Dualism reappeared in the eleventh century in the form of the Cathars, against whom Pope Innocent III launched the Albigensian Crusade (1209–29). Some say that suspicion of lingering dualism was one of the reasons the Inquisition was started in 1234.

Unfortunately, a mild form of dualism has a habit of reappearing. Hardly a week goes by without someone in an article or book drawing a contrast between the Old Testament God of revenge and the New Testament God of forgiveness. The well-known atheist Richard Dawkins began the second chapter of
The God Delusion
with the words, ‘The God of the Old Testament
is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction.’
⁴
He was surprised and angry when, in conversation, I told him that those words showed that he was a Christian atheist, not a Jewish atheist. He could not understand this, but it is quite simple. The words ‘the God of the Old Testament’ are only spoken by Christians. Outside Christianity, there is no Old Testament. There is the Hebrew Bible.