A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

But the lesson of the assassins goes beyond the mere question of ends and means and allows us to
grasp the basic question of the nature of criminality. Hasan was, by any definition, a Right Man.
His religious sincerity is not in question; but he placed his grimly obsessed ego at the service of his
religion. He was personally convinced that he was right; everything else followed. Those who
opposed him were wrong and deserved to die. It is a moot point whether it made the slightest
difference whether Nizar or his younger brother became Caliph; it is even a moot point whether it
makes the slightest difference that a believer refers to his deity as Jehovah, Allah or Ahura Mazda.
But even this is not the issue. The issue is that man is capable of reaching out towards a freedom
that transcends his everyday limitations, and that saints and prophets, poets and artists, scientists
and philosophers, all share this aim to a greater or lesser degree. The greatest enemy of this
transcendence is the ego with its petty aims and convictions. It is true that we cannot live without
the ego; a person without an ego would be little more than an idiot. Another name for ego is
personality, and in artists, saints and philosophers, the personality is a most valuable tool. Neither
St Francis nor Beethoven nor Plato would have achieved much impact without their personalities.
But the personality is a dangerous servant, for it has a perpetual hankering to become the master.
Every time we are carried away by irritation or indignation, personality has mastered us.
And this, we can see, is the basic theme of history, its most constant pattern. Civilisation was the
outcome of man’s religious urge - for the first cities grew up around temples. Religion has
continued to be perhaps the most dominant theme in human history. Yet practically every major
religious movement has changed its nature as its followers have fought amongst themselves. Why
could those early city-dwellers not have lived in peace and prosperity, tilling the ground and
worshipping their gods? They had what all animals crave most - security. But sooner or later, some
minor squabble would blow up between small groups of rival citizens, and then all their fellow
citizens would feel outraged to hear about the affront; every ego would rise up on its hind legs and
cry out for revenge. (Rabelais satirises it in Gargantua when a war flares up over a quarrel between
shepherds and bakers about cakes.) And the human ability for sympathy and communication
instantly becomes a disadvantage as everyone feels that he himself has personally received the
insult. Nothing heals more slowly or festers more persistently than a bruised ego. New resentments
supplement the old ones, and soon both sides are convinced that the only answer lies in the total
humiliation of the other.
The Assassins furnish a typical example, but the history of Christianity could offer a thousand
more. As soon as Pépin gave the popes a basis of power by making them a present of the first Papal
States, the popes became as violent and predatory as any emperor. Two and a half centuries later,
the German emperor Otto the Great set out to create the Holy Roman Empire and pope and
emperor instantly came into head-on collision; the pope lost, and was deposed by Otto, who
replaced him with his own man. The struggle with the popes was continued by Otto’s successors. A
century later, a pope named Hildebrand - Gregory VII - came to the throne with the conviction that
the pope should be the temporal as well as the spiritual head of Christendom, and that he ought to
choose emperors rather than vice versa. He could, said Gregory, interfere as he liked with the laws
of any Catholic country, and his papal decrees should automatically overrule any decree of king or
emperor. He sent messengers to all the European courts informing the kings and emperors of these
new rules. Henry IV of Germany, the Holy Roman Emperor, was outraged by this presumption. He
called a synod of German bishops at Worms and informed Gregory that he had been deposed.
Whereupon Gregory used the most formidable weapon in his armory: excommunication. In the
Middle Ages, it was the most terrifying penalty the Church could impose. For the medieval intellect
was curiously static (this was before the crusades); every Christian accepted without reservation