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• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Paul was a Christian scholar, gentle, loving, and beloved; ever learning and disseminating learning. Although not a great man, he was a most useful one, and his homilies and histories of the Lombards are deservedly held in high esteem. His Works embrace histories, homilies, letters, and poems. I. Histories. (1) Chief in importance is the History of the Lombards.1073 It is divided into six books, and carries the history of the Lombards from their rise in Scandinavia down to the death of Liutprand in 744. It was evidently Paul’s intention to continue and revise the work, for it has no preface or proper conclusion; moreover, it has manifest slips in writing, which would have been corrected by a final reading. It is therefore likely that he died before its completion. It is not a model of historical composition, being discursive, indefinite as to chronology, largely a compilation from known and unknown sources, full of legendary and irrelevant matter. Nevertheless it is on the whole well arranged and exhibits a love of truth, independence and impartiality. Though a patriot, Paul was not a partisan. He can see some good even in his hereditary foes. The popularity of the History in the Middle Age is attested by the appearance of more than fifteen editions of it and of ten continuations. (2) Some scholars1074 consider the History of the Lombards the continuation of Paul’s Roman History,1075 which he compiled (c. 770) for Adelperga from Eutropius (Breviarum historiae Romanae);1076 Jerome, Orosius (Historia adversus Paganos),1077 Aurelius Victor (De Caesaribus historia), Jordanis (De breviatione chronicorum),1078 Prosper (Chronicon),1079 Bede and others. The Historia is in sixteen books, of which the first ten are mere excerpts of Eutropius, with insertions from other sources. The last six carry the history from Valens, where Eutropius ends, down to Justinian. The plan of these latter books is the same as that of the former: some author is excerpted, and in the excerpts are inserted extracts from other writers. The History is worthless to us, but in the Middle Age it was extremely popular. To the sixteen books of Paul’s were added eight from the Church History of Anastasius Bibliothecarius, and the whole called Historia Miscella, and to it Landulph Sagax wrote an appendix, which brings the work down to 813. Besides these histories several other briefer works in the same line have come down to us. (3) Life of St. Gregory the Great,1080 a compilation from Bede’s Church History of England, and Gregory’s own works. (4) A short History of the bishopric of Metz.1081 It was written about 784, at the request of Angilram, bishop of Metz. It is in good part only a list of names. In order to please Charlemagne, Paul inserted irrelevantly a section upon that monarch’s ancestry. II. Homilies.1082 A collection made by request of Charlemagne, and which for ten centuries was in use in the Roman Church. It is in three series. 1. Homilies upon festivals, two hundred and two in number, all from the Fathers.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Like all great men, he harbored in his mind colossal contrasts, and burst through the trammels of logic. He was a giant in public, and a child in his family; the boldest reformer, yet a conservative churchman; the eulogist of reason as the handmaid of religion, and the abuser of reason as the mistress of the Devil; the champion of the freedom of the spirit, and yet a slave of the letter; an intense hater of popery to the last, and yet an admirer of the Catholic Church, and himself a pope within his own church.998 Yet there was a unity in this apparent contradiction. He was a seeker of the righteousness of works and peace of conscience as a Catholic monk, and he was a finder of the righteousness of faith as an evangelical reformer; just as the idea and pursuit of righteousness is the connecting link between the Jewish Saul and the Christian Paul. It was the same engine, but reversed. In separating from papal catholicism, Luther remained attached to Christian catholicism; and his churchly instincts were never suppressed, but only suspended to re-assert themselves with new and greater force after the revolutionary excesses of the Reformation. His history naturally divides itself into three periods: the Roman-Catholic and monastic period, till 1517; the Protestant and progressive period, till 1525; the churchly, conservative, and reactionary period, till 1546. But he never gave up his devotion to the free gospel, and his hatred of the Pope as the veritable Antichrist.999 Luther’s greatness is not that of a polished work of art, but of an Alpine mountain with towering peaks, rough granite blocks, bracing air, fresh fountains, and green meadows. His polemical books rush along like thunderstorms or turbid mountain torrents. He knew his violent temper, but never took the trouble to restrain it; and his last books against the Papists, the Zwinglians, and the Jews, are his worst, and exceed any thing that is known in the history of theological polemics. In his little tract against the Romish Duke Henry of Brunswick,1000 the word Devil occurs no less than a hundred and forty-six times.1001 At last he could not pray without cursing, as he confessed himself.1002 He calls his mastery of the vocabulary of abuse his rhetoric. "Do not think," he wrote to Spalatin, "that the gospel can he advanced without tumult, trouble, and uproar. You cannot make a pen of a sword. The Word of God is a sword; it is war, overthrow, trouble, destruction, poison; it meets the children of Ephraim, as Amos says, like a bear on the road, or like a lioness in the wood."1003 We may admit that the club and sledge-hammer of this Protestant Hercules were necessary for the semi-barbarous Germans of his day. Providence used his violent temper as an instrument for the destruction of the greatest spiritual tyranny which the world ever saw.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Wyclif’s chief service for his people, next to the legacy of his own personality, was his assertion of the supreme authority of the Bible for clergy and laymen alike and his gift to them of the Bible in their own tongue. His statements, setting forth the Scriptures as the clear and sufficient manual of salvation and insisting that the literal sense gives their plain meaning, were as positive and unmistakable as any made by Luther. In his treatise on the value and authority of the Scriptures, with 1000 printed pages,602 more is said about the Bible as the Church’s appointed guide-book than was said by all the mediaeval theologians together. And none of the Schoolmen, from Anselm and Abaelard to Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, exalted it to such a position of preëminence as did he. With one accord they limited its authority by coördinating with its contents tradition, that is, the teachings of the Church. This man, with unexcelled precision and cogency, affirmed its final jurisdiction, as the law of God, above all authorities, papal, decretist or patristic. What Wyclif asserts in this special treatise, he said over again in almost every one of his works, English and Latin. If possible, he grew more emphatic as his last years went on, and his Opus evangelicum, probably his very last writing, abounds in the most positive statements language is capable of. To give the briefest outline of the Truth of Scripture will be to state in advance the positions of the Protestant Reformers in regard to the Bible as the rule of faith and morals. To Wyclif the Scriptures are the authority for every Catholic tenet. They are the Law of Christ, the Law of God, the Word of God, the Book of Life—liber vitae. They are the immaculate law of the Lord, most true, most complete and most wholesome.603 All things necessary to belief for salvation are found in them. They are the Catholic faith, the Christian faith,—fides christiana,—the primal rule of human perfection, the primal foundation of the Christian proclamation.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  In the North, Humanism entered into the service of religious progress. German scholars were less brilliant and elegant, but more serious in their purpose and more exact in their scholarship than their Italian predecessors and contemporaries. In the South, the ancient classics absorbed the attention of the literati. It was not so in the North. There was no consuming passion to render the classics into German as there had been in Italy. Nor did Italian literature, with its loose moral teachings, find imitators in the North. Boccaccio’s Decameron was first translated into German by the physician, Henry Stainhöwel, who died in 1482. North of the Alps, the attention was chiefly centred on the Old and New Testaments. Greek and Hebrew were studied, not with the purpose of ministering to a cult of antiquity, but to more perfectly reach the fountains of the Christian system. In this way, preparation was made for the constructive work of the Protestant Reformation. And what was true of the scholarship of Germany was also true of its art. The painters, Albrecht Dürer, who was born and died at Nürnberg, 1471–1528, Lukas Kranach, 1472–1553, and for the most part Hans Holbein, 1497–1543, were free from the pagan element and contributed to the spread of the Reformation. Kranach lived in Wittenberg after 1504 and painted portraits of Luther, Melanchthon and other leaders of the German Reformation. Holbein gave illustrations for some of the new writings and painted portraits of Erasmus and Melanchthon. His Madonna, now at Darmstadt, has a German face and wears a crown on her head, while the child in her arms reflects his concern for the world in the sadness of his countenance. If any one individual more than another may be designated as the connecting link between the learning of Italy and Germany, it is Aeneas Sylvius. By his residence at the court of Frederick III. and at Basel, as one of the secretaries of the council, he became a well-known character north of the Alps long before he was chosen pope. The mediation, however, was not effected by any single individual. The fame of the Renaissance was carried over the pathways of trade which led from Northern Italy to Augsburg, Nürnberg, Constance and other German cities. The visits of Frederick III. and the campaigns of Charles VIII. and the ascent of the throne of Naples by the princes of Aragon carried Germans, Frenchmen and Spaniards to the greater centres of the peninsula. A constant stream of pilgrims itinerated to Rome and the Spanish popes drew to the city throngs of Spaniards. As the fame of Italian culture spread, scholars and artists began to travel to Venice, Florence and Rome, and caught the inspiration of the new era.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Dante began his poem in Latin and was blamed by Giovanni del Virgilio, a teacher of Latin literature in Bologna, because he abandoned the language of old Rome for the vulgar dialect of Tuscany. Poggio also lamented this course. But the poet defended himself in his unfinished book, Eloquence in the Vernacular, De vulgari eloquio,995 and, by writing the Commedia, the Vita nuova, the Convivio and his sonnets in his native Florentine tongue, he became the father of Italian literature and opened the paths of culture to the laity. Within three years of the poet’s death, commentaries began to be written on the Divina Commedia, as by Graziuolo de’ Bambagliolo, 1324, and within 100 years chairs were founded for its exposition at Florence, Venice, Bologna and Pisa. A second service which Dante rendered in his poem to the coming culture was in bringing antiquity once more into the foreground and treating pagan and Christian elements side by side, though not as of the same value, and interweaving mythological fables with biblical history, classical with Christian reminiscences. By this tolerance he showed himself a man of the new age, while he still held firmly to the mediaeval theology.996 Dante’s abiding merit, however, was his inspiring portrayal of the holiness and love of God. Sin, the perversion of the will, is punished with sin continuing in the future world and pain. Salvation is through the "Lamb of God who takes away our sins and suffered and died that we might live." This poem, like a mighty sermon, now depresses, now enraptures the soul, or, to use the lines of the most poetic of his translators, Longfellow, Thy sacred song is like the trump of doom; Yet in thy heart what human sympathies, What soft compassion glows. Francesco Petrarca, 1304–1374, was the most cultured man of his time. His Italian sonnets and songs are masterpieces of Italian poetic diction, but he thought lightly of them and hoped to be remembered by his Latin writings.997 He was an enthusiast for the literature of antiquity and gave a great impulse to its study. His parents, exiled from Florence, removed to Avignon, then the seat of the papacy, which remained Francesco’s residence till 1333. He was ordained to the priesthood but without an inward call. He enjoyed several ecclesiastical benefices as prior, canon and archdeacon, which provided for his support without burdening him with duties. He courted and enjoyed the favor of princes, popes and prelates. He abused the papal residence on the Rhone as the Babylon of the West, urged the popes to return to Rome and hailed Cola da Rienzo as an apostle of national liberty. His writings contain outbursts of patriotism but, on the other hand, the author seems to contradict himself in being quick to accept the hospitality of the Italian despots of Mantua, Padua, Rimini and Ferrara, and the viconti of Milan. In 1350, he formed a friendship with Boccaccio which remained warm until his death.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Celsus cast it up as a reproach to Christianity, that it let itself down so readily to slaves, fools, women, and children. But Origen justly saw an excellence of the new religion in this very fact, that it could raise this despised and, in the prevailing view, irreclaimable class of men to the level of moral purity and worth. If, then, converted slaves, with the full sense of their intellectual and religious superiority still remained obedient to their heathen masters, and even served them more faithfully than before, resisting decidedly only their immoral demands (like Potamiaena, and other chaste women and virgins in the service of voluptuous masters)—they showed, in this very self-control, the best proof of their ripeness for civil freedom, and at the same time furnished the fairest memorial of that Christian faith, which raised the soul, in the enjoyment of sonship with God and in the hope of the blessedness of heaven, above the sufferings of earth. Euelpistes, a slave of the imperial household, who was carried with Justin Martyr to the tribunal of Rusticus, on being questioned concerning his condition, replied: "I am a slave of the emperor, but I am also a Christian, and have received liberty from Jesus Christ; by his grace I have the same hope as my brethren." Where the owners of the slaves themselves became Christians, the old relation virtually ceased; both came together to the table of the Lord, and felt themselves brethren of one family, in striking contrast with the condition of things among their heathen neighbors as expressed in the current proverb: "As many enemies as slaves."624 Clement of Alexandria frequently urges that "slaves are men like ourselves," though he nowhere condemns the institution itself. That there actually were such cases of fraternal fellowship, like that which St. Paul recommended to Philemon, we have the testimony of Lactantius, at the end of our period, who writes in his Institutes, no doubt from life: "Should any say: Are there not also among you poor and rich, servants and masters, distinctions among individuals? No; we call ourselves brethren for no other reason than that we hold ourselves all equal. For since we measure everything human not by its outward appearance, but by its intrinsic value we have notwithstanding the difference of outward relations, no slaves, but we call them and consider them brethren in the Spirit and fellow- servants in religion."625 The same writer says: "God would have all men equal .... With him there is neither servant nor master. If he is the same Father to all, we are all with the same right free. So no one is poor before God, but he who is destitute of righteousness; no one rich, but he who is full of virtues."626 The testimony of the catacombs, as contrasted with pagan epitaphs, shows that Christianity almost obliterated the distinction between the two classes of society. Slaves are rarely mentioned.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  soul longs to be freed from the prison house of the body and to return to God. Yet Epictetus does not clearly teach the immortality of the soul. He speaks of death as a return to the elements in successive conflagrations. Seneca approaches much more nearly the Platonic and Socratic, we may say Christian, view of immortality. The prevailing theory of the Stoics was, that at the end of the world all individual souls will be resolved into the primary substance of the Divine Being.574 Epictetus nowhere alludes directly to Christianity, but he speaks once of "Galileans," who by enthusiasm or madness were free from all fear.575 He often recurs to his predecessors, Socrates, Diogenes, Zeno, Musonius Rufus. His ethical ideal is a cynic philosopher, naked, penniless, wifeless, childless, without want or desire, without passion or temper, kindly, independent, contented, imperturbable, looking serenely or indifferently at life and death. It differs as widely from the true ideal as Diogenes who lived in a tub, and sought with a lantern in daylight for "a man," differs from Christ who, indeed, had not where to lay his head, but went about doing good to the bodies and souls of men. Owing to the purity of its morals, the Enchiridion of Epictetus was a favorite book. Simplicius, a Neo-Platonist, wrote an elaborate commentary on it; and monks in the middle ages reproduced and Christianized it. Origen thought Epictetus had done more good than Plato. Niebuhr says: "His greatness cannot be questioned, and it is impossible for any person of sound mind not to be charmed by his works." Higginson says: "I am acquainted with no book more replete with high conceptions of the deity and noble aims of man." This is, of course, a great exaggeration, unless the writer means to confine his comparison to heathen works. § 92. Marcus Aurelius. Mavrkou jAntonivnou tou' aujtokravtoro" tw'n eij" eJauto;n bibliva ib j(De Rebus suis libri xii). Ed. by Thomas Gataker, with a Latin Version and Notes (including those of Casaubon). Trajecti ad Rhenum, 1697, 2 vols. fol. The second vol. contains critical dissertations. (The first ed. appeared at Cambridge, 1652, in 1 vol.) English translation by George Long, revised ed. London, 1880. See the liter. quoted in § 20, above (especially Renan’s Marc. Auréle, 1882). Marcus Aurelius, the last and best representative of Stoicism, ruled the Roman Empire for twenty years (A.D. 161–180) at the height of its power and prosperity. He was born April 26, 121, in Rome, and carefully educated and disciplined in Stoic wisdom. Hadrian admired him for his good nature, docility, and veracity, and Antoninus Pius adopted him as his son and successor. He learned early to despise the vanities of the world, maintained the simplicity of a philosopher in the splendor of the court, and found time for retirement and meditation amid the cares of government and border wars, in which he was constantly engaged. Epictetus was his favorite author.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  When the Crusades closed, feudalism was decadent throughout Europe, and had largely disappeared from parts of it. The need petty knights and great nobles had to furnish themselves with adequate equipments, led to the pawn or sale of their estates and their prolonged absence gave sovereigns a rare opportunity to extend their authority. And in the adjoining camps of armies on Syrian soil, the customs and pride of independent national life were fostered. Upon the literature and individual intelligence of Western Europe, the Crusades, no doubt, exerted a powerful influence, although it may not be possible to weigh that influence in exact balances. It was a matter of great importance that men of all classes, from the emperor to the poorest serf, came into personal contact on the march and in the camp. They were equals in a common cause, and learned that they possessed the traits of a common humanity, of which the isolation of the baronial hall kept them ignorant. The emancipating effect which travel may always be expected to exert, was deeply felt.491 The knowledge of human customs and geography was enlarged. Richard of Hoveden is able to give the distances from place to place from England to the Holy Land. A respectable collection of historical works grew out of the expeditions, from the earliest annalists of the First Crusade, who wrote in Latin, to Villehardouin and John de Joinville who wrote in French. The fountains of story and romance were struck, and to posterity were contributed the inspiring figures of Godfrey, Tancred, and St. Louis—soldiers who realized the ideal of Christian chivalry. As for commerce, it would be hazardous to say that the enterprise of the Italian ports would not, in time, have developed by the usual incentives of Eastern trade and the impulse of marine enterprise then astir. It cannot be doubted, however, that the Crusades gave to commerce an immense impetus. The fleets of Marseilles and the Italian ports were greatly enlarged through the demands for the transportation of tens of thousands of Crusaders; and the Pisans, Genoese, and Venetians were busy in traffic at Acre, Damietta, and other ports.492 In these various ways the spell of ignorance and narrowing prejudice was broken, and to the mind of Western Europe a new horizon of thought and acquisition was opened, and remotely within that horizon lay the institutions and ambitions of our modern civilization.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  His appearance was well suited to strike the popular imagination. He rode on an ass, his face emaciated and haggard, his feet bare, a slouched cowl on his head,342 and a long mantle reaching to his ankles, and carrying a great cross. In stature he was short.343 His keen wit,344 his fervid and ready, but rude and unpolished, eloquence,345 made a profound impression upon the throngs which gathered to hear him.346 His messages seemed to them divine.347 They plucked the very hairs from his ass’ tail to be preserved as relics. A more potent effect was wrought than mere temporary wonder. Reconciliations between husbands and wives and persons living out of wedlock were effected, and peace and concord established where there were feud and litigation. Large gifts were made to the preacher. None of the other preachers of the Crusade, Volkmar, Gottschalk, and Emich,348 could compare with Peter the Hermit for eloquence and the spell he exercised upon the masses. He was held in higher esteem than prelates and abbots.349 And Guibert of Nogent says that he could recall no one who was held in like honor.350 In a few months large companies were ready to march against the enemies of the cross. A new era in European history was begun.351 A new passion had taken hold of its people. A new arena of conquest was opened for the warlike feudal lord, a tempting field of adventure and release for knight and debtor, an opportunity of freedom for serf and villein. All classes, lay and clerical, saw in the expedition to the cradle of their faith a solace for sin, a satisfaction of Christian fancy, a heaven appointed mission. The struggle of states with the papacy was for the moment at an end. All Europe was suddenly united in a common and holy cause, of which the supreme pontiff was beyond dispute the appointed leader. § 50. The First Crusade and the Capture of Jerusalem. "And what if my feet may not tread where He stood, Nor my ears hear the dashing of Galilee’s flood, Nor my eyes see the cross which He bowed Him to bear, Nor my knees press Gethsemane’s garden of prayer, Yet, Loved of the Father, Thy Spirit is near To the meek and the lowly and penitent here; And the voice of Thy Love is the same even now, As at Bethany’s tomb or on Olivet’s brow." Whittier. The 15th of August, 1096, the Feast of the Assumption, fixed by the Council of Clermont for the departure of the Crusaders, was slow in coming. The excitement was too intense for the people to wait. As early as March throngs of both sexes and all ages began to gather in Lorraine and at Treves, and to demand of Peter the Hermit and other leaders to lead them immediately to Jerusalem.352 It was a heterogeneous multitude of devout enthusiasts and idle

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Confronted with a stiff-necked subordinate people, with a strong cultural tradition of its own, they always hesitated to impose direct rule, except in extremis, preferring, instead, to work with a local ‘strong man’, personally attached to Rome, who could deal with his subjects in their own vernacular of law and custom; such a man could be rewarded (and contained) if successful, dropped and replaced if he failed. Thus Judea was placed under the new province of Syria, ruled by a governor in Antioch and local authority was entrusted to ethnarchs, recognized as ‘kings’ if they proved themselves sufficiently durable and ruthless. Under the Syrian province, Herod, who seized the Judean throne in 43 BC, was confirmed as ‘King of the Jews’ four years later, and granted Roman approval and protection. Herod was the type of man with whom Rome preferred to deal, to the point where they accepted and endorsed his arrangement for dividing his kingdom after his death among three sons, Archelaus, who got Judea, Herod Philip, and Herod Antipas. The division was not entirely successful, for in AD 6 Judea had to be placed in direct Roman custody under a succession of procurators; and in the 60s, the system as a whole blew up, in a disastrous revolt and bloody reprisal, the cycle repeating itself in the next century, until Rome, in exasperation, razed Jerusalem to the ground and rebuilt it as a pagan city. The Romans never solved the Palestine problem. Nevertheless, especially in its early decades under Herod the Great, Rome’s relationship with the Jews was fruitful. There was already a huge Jewish diaspora, especially in the great cities of the eastern Mediterranean – Alexandria, Antioch, Tarsus, Ephesus, and so forth. Rome itself had a large and rich Jewish colony. During the Herodian years, the diaspora expanded and flourished. The empire gave the Jews equality of economic opportunity and freedom of movement for goods and persons. They formed wealthy communities wherever the Romans had imposed stability. And in Herod they had a munificent and powerful patron. To many Jews he was suspect and some refused to recognize him as a Jew at all – not on account of his voluptuous and exceptionally violent private life, but because of his Hellenic attachments. But Herod was unquestionably generous to the Jews. In Jerusalem, he rebuilt the Temple on twice the scale of Solomon. This huge and magnificent enterprise was still uncompleted at Herod’s death in 4 BC, and was finished in Jesus’s lifetime. It was large and expensive even by the standards of Graeco-Roman architecture, and one of the great tourist sights of the empire: an impressive symbol of a fierce, living, expanding religion. Herod was equally generous to the diaspora Jews. In all the big cities he provided them with community centres and he endowed and built scores of synagogues, the new type of ecclesiastical institution, prototype of the Christian basilica, where services were held for the dispersed.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  It was wonderful to see with what words, with what eloquence, with what arguments, with what countenance and with what composure, Jerome replied to his adversaries, and how fairly he put his case .... He advanced nothing unworthy of a good man, as though he felt confident—as he also publicly asserted—that no just reason could be found for his death .... Many persons he touched with humor, many with satire, many very often he caused to laugh in spite of the sad affair, jesting at their reproaches .... He took them back to Socrates, unjustly condemned by his fellow-citizens. Then be mentioned the captivity of Plato, the flight of Anaxagoras, the torture of Zeno and the unjust condemnation of many other Pagans .... Thence he passed to the Hebrew examples, first instancing Moses, the liberator of his people, Joseph, sold by his brethren, Isaiah, Daniel, Susannah .... Afterwards, coming down to John the Baptist and then to the Saviour, he showed how, in each case, they were condemned by false witnesses and false judges .... Then proceeding to praise John Huss, who had been condemned to be burnt, he called him a good man, just and holy, unworthy of such a death, saying that he himself was prepared to go to any punishment whatsoever .... He said that Huss had never held opinions hostile to the Church of God, but only against the abuses of the clergy, against the pride, the arrogance and the pomp of prelates .... He displayed the greatest cleverness,—for, when his speech was often interrupted with various disturbances, he left no one unscathed but turned trenchantly upon his accusers and forced them to blush, or be still .... For 340 days he lay in the bottom of a foul, dark tower. He himself did not complain at the harshness of this treatment, but expressed his wonder that such inhumanity could be shown him. In the dungeon, he said, he had not only no facilities for reading, but none for seeing .... He stood there fearless and unterrified, not alone despising death but seeking it, so that you would have said he was another Cato. O man, worthy of the everlasting memory of men! I praise not that which he advanced, if anything contrary to the institutions of the Church; but I admire his learning, his eloquence, his persuasiveness of speech, his adroitness in reply .... Persevering in his errors, he went to his fate with joyful and willing countenance, for he feared not the fire nor any kind of torture or death .... When the executioners wished to start the fire behind his back that he might not see it, he said, ’Come here and light the fire in front of me. If I had been afraid of it, I should never have come to this place.’ In this way a man worthy, except in respect of faith, was burnt .... Not Mutius himself suffered his arm to burn with such high courage as did this man his whole body. Nor did Socrates drink the poison so willingly as be accepted the flames.702

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  transferred his allegiance from the Cistercian order to Cluny. Bernard’s request that he be given up Pontius declined to grant. What his predecessor had declined to do, Peter did. Perhaps it was not without feeling over the memory of Pontius’ action that Bernard wrote, comparing599 the simple life at Citeaux with the laxity and luxury prevailing at Cluny. This tract, famous in the annals of monastic controversial literature, Bernard opened by condemning the lack of spirituality among his own brethren, the Cistercians. "How can we," he exclaims, "with our bellies full of beans and our minds full of pride, condemn those who are full of meat, as if it were not better to eat on occasion a little fat, than be gorged even to belching with windy vegetables!" He then passed to an arraignment of the Cluniacs for self- indulgence in diet, small talk, and jocularity. At meals, he said, dish was added to dish and eggs were served, cooked in many forms, and more than one kind of wine was drunk at a sitting. The monks preferred to look on marble rather than to read the Scriptures. Candelabra and altar cloths were elaborate. The art and architecture were excessive. The outward ornamentations were the proof of avarice and love of show, not of a contrite and penitent heart. He had seen one of them followed by a retinue of sixty horsemen and having none of the appearance of a pastor of souls. He charged them with taking gifts of castles, villas, peasants, and slaves, and holding them against just complainants.600 In spite of these sharp criticisms Peter remained on terms of intimacy with Bernard. He replied without recrimination, and called Bernard the shining pillar of the Church. A modification of the rule of St. Benedict, when it was prompted by love, he pronounced proper. But he and Bernard, he wrote, belonged to one Master, were the soldiers of one King, confessors of one faith. As different paths lead to the same land, so different customs and costumes, with one inspiring love, lead to the Jerusalem above, the mother of us all. Cluniacs and Cistercians should admonish one another if they discerned errors one in the other, for they were pursuing after one inheritance and following one command. He called upon himself and Bernard to remember the fine words of Augustine, "have charity, and then do what you will, "habe charitatem et fac quicquid vis.601 What could be more admirable? Where shall we go for a finer example of Christian polemics? After Peter’s death the glory of Cluny declined.602 Six hundred years later, 1790, the order was dissolved by the French Government.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  This literary Knight and German patriot was descended from an ancient but impoverished noble family of Franconia. He was born April 21, 1488, and began life, like Erasmus, as an involuntary monk; but he escaped from Fulda in his sixteenth year, studied humanities in the universities of Erfurt, Cologne, and Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, law at Pavia and Bologna, traveled extensively, corresponded with the most prominent men of letters, was crowned as poet by the Emperor Maximilian at Augsburg (1517), and occupied an influential position at the court of Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz (1517–1520), who had charge of the sale of indulgences in Germany. He took a lively part in Reuchlin’s conflict with the obscurantism of the Dominicans of Cologne.233 He is, next to his friend Crotus of Erfurt, the chief author of the Epistolae obscurorum Virorum, that barbarous ridicule of barbarism, in which the ignorance, stupidity, bigotry, and vulgarity of the monks are exposed by factitious letters in their own wretched Latin with such success that they accepted them at first as genuine, and bought a number of copies for distribution.234 He vigorously attacked the abuses and corruptions of the Church, in Latin and German pamphlets, in poetry and prose, with all the weapons of learning, common-sense, wit, and satire. He was, next to Luther, the boldest and most effective polemical writer of that period, and was called the German Demosthenes on account of his philippics against Rome. His Latin is better than Luther’s, but his German far inferior. In wit and power of ridicule he resembles Lucian; at times he reminds one of Voltaire and Heine. He had a burning love of German liberty and independence. This was his chief motive for attacking Rome. He laid the axe at the root of the tree of tyranny. His motto was, "Iacta est alea. Ich hab’s gewagt."235 He republished in 1518 the tract of Laurentius Valla on the Donation of Constantine, with an embarrassing dedication to Pope Leo X., and exposed on German soil that gigantic fraud on which the temporal power of the papacy over all Christian Europe was made to rest. But his chief and most violent manifesto against Rome is a dialogue which he published under the name "Vadiscus, or the Roman Trinity," in April, 1520, a few months before Luther’s "Address to the German Nobility" (July) and his "Babylonian Captivity" (October). He here groups his experiences in Rome under several triads of what abounds in Rome, of what is lacking in Rome, of what is forbidden in Rome, of what one brings home from Rome, etc. He puts them into the mouth of a Roman consul, Vadiscus, and makes variations on them. Here are some specimens:236 — "Three things keep Rome in power: the authority of the Pope, the bones of the saints, and the traffic in indulgences. "Three things are in Rome without number: strumpets, priests, and scribes.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  In the apocryphal Acts of Paul, written perhaps a hundred years after his death, the tradition of his physical appearance is vividly preserved: ‘... a little man with a big, bold head. His legs were crooked, but his bearing was noble. His eyebrows grew close together and he had a big nose. A man who breathed friendliness.’ He himself says that his appearance was unimpressive. He was, he admits, no orator; not, in externals, a charismatic leader. But the authentic letters which survive him radiate the inner charisma: they have the ineffaceable imprint of a massive personality, eager, adventurous, tireless, voluble, a man who struggles heroically for the truth and then delivers it in uncontrollable excitement, hurrying ahead of his powers of articulation. Not a man easy to work with, or confute in argument, or rebuke into silence, or to advance a compromise: a dangerous, angular, unforgettable man, breathing friendliness, indeed, but creating monstrous difficulties and declining to resolve them by any sacrifice of the truth. Moreover, Paul was quite sure he had got the truth. He has no reference to the Holy Spirit endorsing, or even advancing, the compromise solution as presented by Luke. In his Galatians letter, a few sentences before his version of the Jerusalem Council, he dismisses, as it were, any idea of a conciliar system directing the affairs of the Church, any appeal to the judgment of mortal men sitting in council. ‘I must make it clear to you, my friends,’ he writes, ‘that the gospel you heard me preach is no human invention. I did not take it over from any man; no man taught it me; I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.’ Hence, when he comes to describe the council and its consequences he writes exactly as he feels, in harsh, concrete and unambiguous terms. His Council is not a gathering of inspired pneumatics, operating in accordance with infallible guidance from the spirit, but a human conference of weak and vulnerable men, of whom he alone had a divine mandate. How, as Paul saw it, could it be otherwise? Jewish elements were wrecking his mission in Antioch, which he was conducting on the express instructions of God, ‘who had set me apart from birth and called me through his grace, chose to reveal his Son to me and through me, in order that I might proclaim him among the gentiles’. To defeat them, therefore, he went to Jerusalem ‘because it had been revealed by God that I should do so’. He saw the leaders of the Jerusalem Christians, ‘the men of repute’, as he terms them, ‘at a private interview’. These men, James, Christ’s brother, the Apostles Peter and John, ‘those reputed pillars of our society’, were inclined to accept the gospel as Paul taught it and to acknowledge his credentials as an apostle and teacher of Christ’s doctrine. They divided up the missionary territory, ‘agreeing that we should go to the gentiles while they went to the Jews’.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  For all the dramatic intensity of its opening account of the plague, what strikes one most forcibly about the Decameron’s second plane of reality, the world of the lieta brigata, is its literariness, its artificiality, its sense of unworldliness. Poetically real, it is a very different world from the tangible world of the stories themselves. The coded implications of the world of the storytellers are at once apparent from the choice of their initial meeting place. They do not meet in the cathedral, or in one of Florence’s more centrally situated churches, but in the church of Santa Maria Novella, which had only recently been incorporated within the walls of the city. The choice of assembly place is an early pointer to the author’s delight in wordplay, since its very name foreshadows the imminent participation of the young people who forgather in Santa Maria Novella in the telling of novelle. But it is when Boccaccio introduces the various members of the group to his reader that the allusive implications begin to flow in earnest. In an effort to preserve the illusion of historical objectivity that has been studiously fostered in his description of the plague and its effects, he claims that he could tell us their actual names, but will refrain from doing so in order to protect them from possible future embarrassment. The embarrassment of which he writes is that which would result from the stories that will follow, all of which they either listened to or recounted themselves. The protective pseudonyms supplied by Boccaccio for the ten members of the lieta brigata have given rise to much speculation. Confining ourselves to the facts, we may note that all of the names carry literary or mythological overtones and that several of them had already appeared as the names of characters in one or more of Boccaccio’s earlier vernacular writings. Pampinea, literally ‘full of vigour’, is a name that had already appeared in the Comedía delle ninfe fiorentine. Fiammetta, ‘little flame’, was the name of the female protagonist and narrator of the Elegia, as well as that of the presiding figure in the questioni d’amore sequence in the Filocolo. Filomena, ‘the beloved’ or ‘the lover of song’, was the dedicatee of the Filostrato, whilst Emilia, ‘she who allures’, was the object of the intense rivalry of Palamon and Arcite in the Teseida. Of the other three ladies’ names, Elissa is a variant on the original name of Virgil’s Dido, Neifile (‘newly enamoured’) probably represents, according to Branca, the poetry of the dolce stil novo and of Dante himself, whilst Lauretta is the diminutive form of Petrarch’s Laura. Thus these last three are associated with the poets (Virgil, Dante and Petrarch) whose work Boccaccio most greatly admired.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  He was a Frenchman first, an ultramontane second, but his attachment was to France as a culture rather than a crown, and he took the lead in reconciling the papacy and the French hierarchy to republican institutions. Marshal McMahon picked him for the Algiers job, and the papacy doubled his powers by making him Apostolic Delegate for the Sahara region. Colonel Playfair, British consul in Algiers, noted: ‘We have St Augustine amongst us again.’ The comment was shrewd: Lavigerie clearly saw himself in the role of a Constantinian patriarch, knitting together the ecclesiastical infrastructure of a new African empire. In Carthage, on the site of the ancient citadel, he built a cathedral bigger even than Augustine’s basilica at Hippo, and installed in it, ready for his own reception, an elaborate and grandiose tomb. He held strongly to the Elect Nation theory: ‘God has chosen France to make of Algeria the cradle of a great and Christian nation . . . our country is watching . . . the eyes of the whole church are fixed upon us.’ He thought of Algeria as ‘the open port of entry to a barbaric continent with 200 million inhabitants.’ The White Fathers were created by him as a Jesuit-style élite of priests, bound to mission-work by special lifelong vows. To assist them, Lavigerie became the first prince of the Catholic Church to take a vigorous line against the slave-trade, and swung France, and the other Catholic powers, into line. At the 1884 Berlin Conference on Colonial Questions, the Protestants at last got Catholic backing on this issue, and all the powers undertook to suppress slavery and to exterminate the traffic; they agreed, too, to adopt full religious liberty in colonial territories and to guarantee special protection for Christian missions. Five years later, at the Brussels Conference for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Lavigerie got a definitive international agreement drawn up and signed. There is no doubt that Lavigerie’s initial aim was to Christianize the Arab peoples, and thus begin to reverse the ravages introduced by the Monophysite schism over 1300 years before. He sent his White Fathers into the desert (where they were often murdered by Tuaregs) and for a time ran his own ‘Christian Militia’ to protect them. But like Raymond Lull before him, and indeed everyone else, he found it impossible to make any real headway against Islam. The French could conquer Arab territories, and annex them, or establish protectorates; and they planted huge numbers of Christian settlers in Algeria; but they could not make Moslem converts. It was this failure which led them (later followed by the Belgians) to push south of the Sahara into black Africa, and the easy missionary pickings among the pagans. Here they did exceedingly well; on the whole, much better than the Protestants. Lavigerie’s advice was: ‘Be all things to all men.’ He told his Fathers: ‘Love the poor pagans. Be kind to them. Heal their wounds.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The shaming of a parsimonious benefactor forms the subject, also, of the tale that follows (I, 7), but this time it is brought about by the elaborate telling of a story within a story by one Bergamino, described as ‘a faster and more brilliant talker than anyone could ever imagine’ (‘oltre al credere di chi non l’udí presto parlatore e ornato’). The target of Bergamino’s timely parable is Can Grande della Scala, whose sudden fit of meanness towards his guest is totally out of character, whereas the protagonist of the following tale (I, 8), Ermino Grimaldi, is not only the richest man in Italy but also so much of a miser that his name has become synonymous with avarice. The transformation of his character is effected by the sharp riposte (‘Let Generosity be painted there’) of a distinguished courtier, Guiglielmo Borsiere, to his request for a suitable topic for a new picture he intends to commission for the main hall of his house in Genoa. Admonitory wit effects a comparable transformation in the next story (I, 9), recounting the way in which a gentlewoman of Gascony, travelling through Cyprus, having suffered a brutal assault from a pack of ruffians, converts the king, a cowardly weakling, into the implacable scourge of all wrongdoers. And the First Day ends with yet another admonitory tale (I, 10), this time featuring a brilliant physician, Master Alberto of Bologna, now ‘an old man approaching seventy’, who reproaches a young gentlewoman and her companions for mocking his amatory feelings towards her, by his witty and delightfully allusive account of the way young ladies go about the eating of leeks. No specific topic is prescribed for the stories of the First Day, but all are concerned with various forms of human weakness, and all involve the application of the intellectual faculties to correct or modify their harmful effects. Intelligence is thus established as the initial theme of the work as a whole, whilst in the stories of the Second Day the theme of Fortune occupies a dominant position. Boccaccio’s third major theme is Love, which figures prominently in the stories of the following three days, although in several of the stories narrated on those days, especially on the Third Day, Intelligence is an important ancillary theme. As already noted, the protagonists of the story of King Agilulf and the groom (III, 2) embody the qualities of wisdom and ingenuity respectively in their reactions to the events of the narrative. Ingenuity is also the distinguishing feature of the anonymous Florentine noblewoman (III, 3) who hoodwinks a solemn friar into unwittingly acting as pander between herself and the young man on whom she has fixed her amorous longings. The initial description of the lady is significant, stressing as it does the strength of her intellectual character.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  It was at any rate in Florence that Boccaccio spent his childhood. Contemporary records indicate that his infancy coincides with the period when his father was making his mark with the famous Florentine banking house known as the Compagnia dei Bardi. At some time before 1320, his father married Margherita de’ Mardoli, whose family could proudly boast an ancestral connection with Beatrice Portinari, the inspiring force of Dante’s Commedia. From early childhood, therefore, he was ideally placed to acquire the rudiments of that veneration of Dante which is evident in the whole of his work from his earliest compositions to the lengthy but unfinished commentaries on Dante’s poem that constitute his last major literary labour. One of the companions of his childhood and adolescence was Zanobi da Strada, who like Boccaccio was destined to become a poet and to establish himself in Neapolitan society. And it was Zanobi’s father, Giovanni Mazzuoli, acting as tutor to both, who encouraged his pupils to study and admire the work of the poet of the Commedia. Boccaccio’s reverence for Dante was similar in its intensity to that of Dante himself for Virgil. Just as Dante’s poetry is interspersed with echoes and reminiscences of the Aeneid, so Boccaccio’s work is consistently studded with fragments from the medieval epic of his Florentine predecessor. Boccaccio’s description of Dante, in a letter to Petrarch of 1359, as the first guide of his studies (primus studiorum dux) recalls the terminology used by Dante in the Commedia to describe the great Latin poet. At the age of thirteen, or thereabouts, Boccaccio moved from Florence to Naples, where his father had been appointed to a high-ranking position in the Neapolitan branch of the Bardi bank, which, like the other leading Florentine banking houses, the Peruzzi and the Acciaiuoli, had for many years been the financial mainstay of the kingdom’s Angevin rulers. Even before reaching adolescence, the young Boccaccio had himself been apprenticed by his father to a career in banking, for which he had no natural inclination whatsoever. After what he later described as ‘six wasted years’, he persuaded his father to allow him to take up the study of canon law at the Neapolitan Studium, a Dominican institution established in 1269, which had close links with the university, founded in 1224 by Emperor Frederick II. Although his formal course of studies there was little more congenial to him than the career he had abandoned, it enabled him not only to begin assembling the vast store of erudition that underpins all of his literary work, but also to establish influential contacts in the fields of scholarship and culture in general.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  His withdrawal to Certaldo signalled a pause in his involvement in Florentine diplomatic affairs, which had lasted for more than a decade and had taken him at least three times to the Romagna (in 1350, 1353 and 1357), once to the court of Ludwig of Brandenburg in the South Tyrol to explore the reasons for his intervention in Milanese affairs (in December 1351/January 1352), and once as leading spokesman of an apparently very successful legation to Pope Innocent VI at Avignon (in May–June 1354). There was also his diplomatically abortive mission to Petrarch in Padua during the spring of 1351. Other journeys he undertook during the decade preceding his move to Certaldo included a visit in September 1355 to Naples, during which he worked briefly in the great library at Monte Cassino, and a further visit in March 1359 to Petrarch, who was now established in Milan. Boccaccio had long admired Petrarch’s clerical garb, which by this time he had probably himself adopted, for there is a decree of Innocent VI dated 2 November 1360 granting certain dispensations and privileges to Boccaccio, which would suggest that he had taken holy orders some little time before it was issued. The decade was notable also, from Boccaccio’s point of view, for the fleeting visit to Florence in 1355 of Niccola Acciaiuoli, by now universally known as the Grand Seneschal. It seems that during his visit, Acciaiuoli referred disparagingly to Boccaccio as Iohannes tranquillitatum, a label implying that he was a fair-weather friend whose support was not to be counted upon in times of political adversity such as Acciaiuoli had experienced during his exile from Naples to Avignon some years before.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  According to the narrator, Filomena, she was: a noblewoman of striking beauty and impeccable breeding, who was endowed by Nature with as lofty a temperament and shrewd an intellect as could be found in any other woman of her time. 65 The narrative, carefully structured and brilliantly told, includes a smattering of anti-clerical polemic and, by way of justification for the lady’s adulterous quest, a disapproving commentary on arranged marriages (her husband being an immensely rich woollen-draper, incapable of anything more than ‘distinguishing wool from cotton, supervising the setting up of a loom, or debating the virtues of a particular yarn with a spinner-woman’), but the novella’s strength derives from the high degree of sophistication with which the lady pursues and eventually achieves her objective. The exercise of intelligence in the pursuit of an objective, generally amatory in scope, is seen in most of the other stories of the Third Day, from the initial account of Masetto’s heroic exertions in the convent (III, 1) to the tale, appropriated by Shakespeare in All’s Well that Ends Well, of Gilette of Narbonne’s successful fulfilment of the seemingly impossible conditions imposed by a reluctant husband for the consummation of their marriage (III, 9). A variant on the same theme (intelligence as the spur in the cause of love) is found in the story of Cimon (V, 1), where the boorish hero, having miraculously acquired wisdom through his chance discovery in a woodland clearing of the sleeping form of the beautiful Iphigenia, employs all his resources of guile and physical strength to secure her as his bride. Whether he is deserving of such a prize, which he obtains through murder and abduction, depends on how much importance one attributes to the underlying intent to echo the myth of Pholus the centaur. The tale that immediately follows (V, 2) is a love story of quite a different kind, and includes an episode where Martuccio Gomito, having been captured and imprisoned by the Saracens, wins his freedom and the grateful esteem of the King of Tunis by providing him with some ingenious advice on how to win a war against a powerful invader. The form of intelligence displayed in the narratives of the Sixth Day is verbal wit, of which several examples have already appeared in the course of the First Day’s proceedings. The tale of Madonna Oretta (VI, 1) is of special interest, since her clever response to her admirer’s persistent but clumsy attempts at storytelling is preceded by a catalogue of his shortcomings. Like the scene in which Hamlet advises the players on what to avoid in the art of acting, the passage reveals by implication the qualities that Boccaccio considered essential to the art of the storyteller: variety of phrasing, avoidance of repetition, clarity of exposition, and a delivery suited to the characters and incidents being described.