Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Oddly enough, we almost certainly know what he looked like, too, for the mosaic of him in Sant’Ambrogio is early fifth-century, and seemingly taken from life. It shows Ambrose as St Augustine must have known him: a small, frail man, with a high forehead, long melancholy face, and huge eyes. Augustine was struck by the fact, when they first met, that Ambrose read to himself, a habit unknown to the classical world: ‘His eyes scanned the page, and his mind penetrated its meaning, but his voice and tongue were silent.’ There were other impressive things about Ambrose. His father came from the highest social class. As Praetorian Prefect of Gaul he ruled a huge chunk of western Europe and was one of the half-dozen most important civilians in the empire. Ambrose’s election to the episcopal throne of Milan, a city which by then played a more important role in the administration of the West than Rome itself, appears to have been in some sense an act of state, since he was transformed from a prominent layman, not yet baptized, into a bishop within eight days. His biographer, Paulinus, says this was due to popular acclamation. But this is a simplification. The West was orthodox, the East, for the time being – roughly 360–80 – Arian, and it seems likely that the authorities were anxious to balance the existence of an Arian court circle in the West by appointing a staunchly Trinitarian bishop; and this of course would have been popular too. Ambrose played a pontifical role in the politics of his time. He seems to have thought that the bishops exercised collegiate power in the church, but that the influence of individual sees must depend on the importance of the city with which they were identified. ‘What is said to Peter,’ he wrote, ‘is said to the Apostles’ – thus brushing aside any special pleading for Rome. And again: ‘All we bishops have in the blessed Apostle Peter received the keys of the kingdom of heaven.’ ‘Christ gave to his Apostles the power of remitting sins, which has been transmitted by the Apostles to the sacerdotal office.’ ‘We are not usurping a power but obeying a command.’ ‘Power’ was a word constantly on Ambrose’s lips: in his mind, the degree of power the Church exercised reflected its spiritual authority and claims, which ultimately must be limitless. Thus: ‘We priests have our own way of rising to empire. Our infirmity is our own way to the throne. For when I am weak, then am I powerful’ The degree of power exercised by Ambrose during the quarter century he ruled the church in Milan was something to which no churchman had hitherto aspired. He influenced the policy of successive western emperors, Gratian, Valentinian II, Theodosius. He won a public debate against the pagans, and prevented the restoration of the pagan Altar of Victory in the Senate House, despite the wishes of the Roman aristocracy.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  From near-contemporary frescoes, later destroyed, he discovered that Gregory was of medium height, with a large bald head, light-brown eyes, and long, thin, arched eyebrows; he had an aquiline nose, red thick lips, a swarthy complexion, often flushed in later life. Rather like St Paul, he lacked personal dignity or impressiveness, and he called himself ‘an ape forced to play the lion’. He also lamented his poor health, his weak digestion, his gout and his bouts of malaria, which he dosed with retsina wine from Alexandria. Like many frail clerics, however, he had a strong will, and much practical common sense. He might have been born to rule in the Dark Ages, when the Church could not afford frills and had to concentrate on essentials. He surrounded himself with hard-working monks. The future, he thought, lay with the ‘emerging nations’ north of the Alps. The job of the Bishop of Rome was to bring them into Christianity, to integrate them with the ecclesiastical system. It was no use lamenting the empire. ‘The eagle’, he wrote, ‘has gone bald and lost his feathers.... Where is the senate, where are the old people of Rome? Gone.’ It was no use speculating on doctrinal niceties. As one of his immediate successors put it, the debate over Christ’s ‘will’ – the fashionable Constantinople topic of the moment – was for grammarians, not active churchmen; philosophy was for ‘croaking frogs’. Gregory preached a basic evangelical religion, shorn of classical complexity and elegance; and he sent his monks to teach it to wild, coarse Germanic-speaking warriors with long hair and the future in their strong arms. Meanwhile he himself concentrated on creating a papal patrimony for the ecclesiastical administration of Italy. He developed and expanded the systematic charity which had always been a feature of the Christian Church. But he also raised funds to repair the aqueducts. We find him employing his considerable energies on such matters as horse-breeding, the slaughter of cattle, the administration of legacies, the accuracy of accounts, the level of rents and the price of leases. He took a direct part in the running of estates scattered throughout Italy, and in North Africa, Sardinia and Sicily. He obliged his peasants to pay a tax on marriage, death-duties, and a land-tax payable three times a year. All papal administrators had to be clergy, or at least tonsured. Gregory did not exactly create this system, but he enormously enlarged and strengthened it. He found the Roman clergy already with a distinctive caste structure and dress. They had a white fringed saddlecloth or mappula, and wore flat black slippers, campagi, and udones or white stockings – all inherited from the imperial senate and magistrature. Here, then, we have the clergy taking over from imperial Rome in appearance as well as function. The Roman clergy were already organized in colleges, according to grade. Gregory extended this to the regions and provinces, to the lay lawyers and defensors who ran papal towns and estates.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  There was an Irish circle at Liège in the mid ninth century, led by Sedulius Scottus, or Scottigena, who even knew some Greek – a monopoly of the Irish in western Europe at this time – and whose writings range from political theory to a large group of Latin poems, some delightfully humorous. There was a similar circle at Laon and Reims in the ninth century, under ‘John the Irishman’ or Johannes Scotus Erigena, whose knowledge of Latin and Greek was outstanding for the period, and whose On the Division of the Universe is an ambitious attempt to construct a philosophical and theological theory of the creation and the origins of the universe. And along with the Irish, the English monks were the great cultural transmitters of the eighth and ninth centuries. We get an early example in Wilfrid, a bishop who wholly identified his office and his religion with cultural grandeur, and who was active as a missionary on the Frisian Coast; and, still more so, with Boniface, whose English mission to Germany carried Christianity into northern and central Europe and founded such cultural centres as Fulda, Boniface’s favourite monastery. Perhaps the most important of the cultural lines in transition was the chain which stretched from Wearmouth-Jarrow (itself, as we have seen, linked to Rome, and through Rome to Byzantium) to the archiepiscopal school of York in the eighth century, and from York to the Frankish territories. Here the agent, in this last stage, was the greatest cultural transmitter of all, Alcuin, described by Charlemagne’s biographer, Einhard, as ‘the king’s master, nicknamed Albino, a deacon, but a Saxon of Britain by birth, and the most learned man of his day’. We have already seen him at work at Charlemagne’s coronation; we shall meet him again. Alcuin, first as head of the palace school, later as the Abbot of St Martin’s, Tours, France’s most revered monastery, became Charlemagne’s chief cultural and religious adviser – the two roles were inseparable. Indeed in the mind of a man like Alcuin the desire to spread the faith, to understand it fully through literacy and knowledge of the scriptures and the ancillary disciplines, and to adorn and celebrate it through art, was all part of the same Christian vision, whose intensity and brightness were the products of personal conviction. The level of culture was directly related to the degree of faith. It was Alcuin who filled Charlemagne’s mind with the missionary fervour of Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, and it was Alcuin who showed him a copy of Gregory the Great’s letter to King Æthelbert of Kent on the subject of conversion by race. In 789 Alcuin caused the king to issue the Admonitio Generalis, a magisterial statement of Church policy, based on earlier Frankish capitularies and Roman canonical collections, and dealing with almost everything.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  They were enormously learned in the scriptures, and wonderfully gifted in the arts. They combined exquisite Latin scholarship with a native cultural tradition which went back to the La Tène civilization of the first century. Their rudimentary dry-stone houses were unpretentious without, but treasure-houses within. They had a great deal to teach western Europe. And, above all, they were nomadic. In the western part of the British Isles, in fact in western Europe as a whole, sixth-and seventh-century communications were maritime. The Celtic monks were all sailors; they travelled by water and they lived on fish. The semi-mythical St Brendan, who founded the monastery of Clonfert in Galway, and died about 580, was supposed to have undertaken a remarkable series of voyages, the story of which was translated into French, Norman, Provençal, German, Italian and Norwegian. Monks were often buried at sea: the Welsh monk Gildas, the British equivalent of Gregory of Tours, though a far less gifted historian, asked, when he died, to be laid in a boat and pushed out to sea. What is more, clan relationships spanned the seas. Thus St Columba’s mission from Ulster to the Western Isles of Scotland, where he founded the great monastery of Iona, was almost certainly a product of clan politics. And from western Scotland the Celtic monks penetrated east and south; during the course of a century they moved in a great arc round the north-western fringes of the British Isles, reaching the English kingdom of Northumbria in the early sixth century, where Aidan from Iona was invited by the Northumbrian court to found a sister-house at Lindisfarne in 634. Meanwhile the Irish had moved far east. St Columbanus, born c .540, was like Columba an Irish tribal leader, head of a family monastery. He was a big man, with big ideas, a good knowledge of Latin – he had read Virgil, Pliny, Sallust, Horace, Ovid and Juvenal as well as the Fathers – and even a little Greek; and a burning passion to spread his own austere brand of Christianity. In 575 he landed in Brittany with a shipload of monks. They wore long white habits, nothing else, carried curved staffs and their liturgical books packed in waterproof leather bags; and around their necks they had water-bottles and pouches containing holy relics and consecrated wafers. This was one of the most remarkable expeditions in history. By the time Columbanus died in 615, he, his entourage and their immediate followers had spread Celtic monasticism across a huge area of France, Italy and the Alps, and had founded about forty monasteries, including Rebais, Jumièges, St Gall, Bobbio, Fontenelle, Chelles, Marmoutier, Corbier, St Omer, St Bertin, Remiremont, Hautvilliers, Montierender, St Valéry-sur-Somme, Solignac, Fontaine and Luxeuil, many of them to become among the glories of the Middle Ages. Columbanus was disgusted with the Europe he found. Travelling east through Gaul he noted that ‘virtue is more or less nonexistent’. The last vestiges of ancient civilization, he thought, had disappeared.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  speeches by Peter, who supported Paul, by Paul himself and Barnabas, and a summing up by James, the younger brother of Jesus. He put forward a compromise which was apparently adopted ‘with the agreement of the whole Church’. Under this, Paul and his colleagues were to be sent back to Antioch accompanied by a Jerusalem delegation bearing a letter. The letter set out the terms of the compromise: converts need not submit to circumcision but they must observe certain precepts in the Jewish law in matters of diet and sexual conduct. Luke’s record in Acts states that this halfway position was arrived at ‘unanimously’, and that when the decision was conveyed to the Antioch congregation, ‘all rejoiced’. The Jerusalem delegates were thus able to return to Jerusalem, having solved the problem, and Paul carried on with his mission. This, then, is the account of the first council of the Church as presented by a consensus document, what one might call an eirenic and ecumenical version, designed to present the new religion as a mystical body with a co-ordinated and unified life of its own, moving to inevitable and predestined conclusions. Acts, indeed, says specifically that the ruling of the Council was ‘the decision of the Holy Spirit’. No wonder it was accepted unanimously! No wonder that ‘all’ in Antioch ‘rejoiced at the encouragement it brought’. Paul’s version, however, presents quite a different picture. And his is not merely an eye-witness account, but an account by the chief and central participant, perhaps the only one who grasped the magnitude of the issues at stake. Paul is not interested in smoothing the ragged edges of controversy. He is presenting a case to men and women whose spiritual lives are dominated by the issues confronting the elders in that room in Jerusalem. His purpose is not eirenic or ecumenical, still less diplomatic. He is a man burning to tell the truth and to imprint it like fire in the minds of his readers. 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.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  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. In the great Roman cities, the Jewish communities gave an impression of wealth, increasing power, self-confidence and success. Within the Roman system, they were exceptionally privileged. Many of the diaspora Jews were already Roman citizens, and all Jews, since the days of Julius Caesar, who greatly admired them, enjoyed rights of association. This meant they could meet to hold religious services, community dinners and feasts, and for every kind of social and charitable purpose. The Romans recognized the strength of Jewish religious feelings by, in effect, exempting them from observance of the state religion. In place of emperor-worship, the Jews were allowed to show their respect for the state by offering sacrifices on the emperor’s behalf. This was a unique concession. The wonder is that it was not more resented. But the diaspora Jews were, on the whole, admired and imitated, rather than envied. They were not in the least self-effacing. They could, when they chose, play a leading role in municipal politics, especially in Egypt, where they were perhaps over a million strong. Some had notable careers in the imperial service. Among these there were passionate admirers of the Roman system, like the historian Josephus, or the philosopher Philo. While the Jews of Judea, and still more so of semi-Jewish areas like Galilee, tended to be poor, backward, obscurantist, narrow-minded, fundamentalist, uncultured and xenophobic, the diaspora Jews were expansive, rich, cosmopolitan, well-adjusted to Roman norms and to Hellenic culture, Greek-speaking, literate and open to ideas. They were also, in notable contrast to the Palestine Jews, anxious to spread their religion. In general, diaspora Jews were proselytizers, often passionately so. Throughout this period some Jews at least had universalist aims, and hoped that Israel would be ‘the light of the gentiles’. The Greek adaptation of the Old Testament, or Septuagint, which was composed in Alexandria and was widely used in diaspora communities, has an expansionist and missionary flavour quite alien to the original. And there were in all probability catechisms and manuals for aspiring converts, reflecting the liberal-mindedness and large-heartedness of the diaspora Jew to the gentile. Philo, too, projected in his philosophy the concept of a gentile mission and wrote joyfully: ‘There is not a single Greek or barbarian city, not a single people,

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  evaded the normal hierarchical system of the Church. But, unlike the easterners, it was not passive and stationary. On the contrary, the Irish monks had a tremendous cultural dynamic. They were enormously learned in the scriptures, and wonderfully gifted in the arts. They combined exquisite Latin scholarship with a native cultural tradition which went back to the La Tène civilization of the first century. Their rudimentary dry-stone houses were unpretentious without, but treasure-houses within. They had a great deal to teach western Europe. And, above all, they were nomadic. In the western part of the British Isles, in fact in western Europe as a whole, sixth-and seventh-century communications were maritime. The Celtic monks were all sailors; they travelled by water and they lived on fish. The semi-mythical St Brendan, who founded the monastery of Clonfert in Galway, and died about 580, was supposed to have undertaken a remarkable series of voyages, the story of which was translated into French, Norman, Provençal, German, Italian and Norwegian. Monks were often buried at sea: the Welsh monk Gildas, the British equivalent of Gregory of Tours, though a far less gifted historian, asked, when he died, to be laid in a boat and pushed out to sea. What is more, clan relationships spanned the seas. Thus St Columba’s mission from Ulster to the Western Isles of Scotland, where he founded the great monastery of Iona, was almost certainly a product of clan politics. And from western Scotland the Celtic monks penetrated east and south; during the course of a century they moved in a great arc round the north-western fringes of the British Isles, reaching the English kingdom of Northumbria in the early sixth century, where Aidan from Iona was invited by the Northumbrian court to found a sister- house at Lindisfarne in 634. Meanwhile the Irish had moved far east. St Columbanus, born c .540, was like Columba an Irish tribal leader, head of a family monastery. He was a big man, with big ideas, a good knowledge of Latin – he had read Virgil, Pliny, Sallust, Horace, Ovid and Juvenal as well as the Fathers – and even a little Greek; and a burning passion to spread his own austere brand of Christianity. In 575 he landed in Brittany with a shipload of monks. They wore long white habits, nothing else, carried curved staffs and their liturgical books packed in waterproof leather bags; and around their necks they had water-bottles and pouches containing holy relics and consecrated wafers. This was one of the most remarkable expeditions in history. By the time Columbanus died in 615, he, his entourage and their immediate followers had spread

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Nyasaland, which had a pit-prison, and where a man died after receiving over two hundred lashes. Andrew Chirnside reported to the Royal Geographical Society: ‘Flogging with the whip is an everyday occurrence, three lads in one day getting upwards of 100 lashes; and it is a fact that after being flogged on several occasions, salt has been rubbed on their bleeding backs.’ He claimed he had seen a man executed without trial. In 1883 there was a similar case in Nigeria where a woman died after she had been beaten and had red pepper rubbed in her wounds. These cases were rare, and caused uproar. More damaging, in the long run, was the gentle deprecation of missionary work by travellers like Mary Kingsley, whose Travels in West Africa (1897) was a huge success; she hinted that the natives were probably better if left alone, polygamy and all, and she poured scorn on missionary efforts to dress African women in the asexual ‘Mother Hubbard’. In general, though, missionaries were held in high esteem, and reporting on their work was almost universally favourable. The pattern of hero-worship was set by the Livingstone legend, and in the late nineteenth century they provided a new type of hero for European, and still more American, society. Their competitors for fame, imperialists and business tycoons, had their opponents; but to all except a tiny minority, the missionaries seemed harmless as well as valiant. Biographies of well- known missionaries sold in large editions, and formed a special department of literature. S. W. Partridge, the leading performer in the field, wrote no less than thirty-six; and they often had children’s editions. For the Catholics, the missionary became a new type of saint, and even the Protestants indulged in hagiography. There were children’s games, such as The African Picture Game ; What Next?, which had thirty-six cards, four series of nine each devoted to famous missionaries; A Missionary Tour of India, like snakes and ladders; Missionary Outpost, ‘an instructive round- game for children’; missionary jigsaws and painting-books, and, for adults, Missionary Lotto. In Catholic countries there were elaborate money-raising schemes, run by convent schools, by which schoolgirls could buy stamps and ‘adopt’ African orphans. The climax of missionary expectations coincided with the climax of European imperialism, and it was very widely supposed that the entire world would be Christianized in the process of being westernized – that is, incorporated politically, economically, or at any rate culturally, in a system which was still wholly identified with Christendom. It is this optimistic background of global predominance which helps to explain the

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  He is apologetic about his cramped kitchen with its peeling counters and ’70s stove, but I tell him he could be cooking in a cave and I would be equally enchanted. When dinner is on the table, glistening scallops from the fishmonger at the farmers’ market, a bright green salad, long stems of roasted baby broccoli, fresh focaccia from the Italian market, I stand by the table with my hands pressed together over my heart. He urges me to sit down before the food gets cold. “I will in a minute, I’m just taking it in. It’s always been my dream for a man to cook for me. Sorry to tell you one man beat you to the punch by preparing a lovely picnic for me this summer, but this is next level. I really appreciate it,” I say and am quiet; if I say more, I will cry. Our nights always end the same way, with my going back to his kid-free apartment after dinner if we have eaten out, or straight to the couch and then bed after cleaning the kitchen if he’s cooked for me. He is intrigued and enthralled by how easily I can orgasm and peppers me with questions about my previous liaisons. “Your confidence is a huge turn-on,” he says one night after we have depleted ourselves and are lying naked in his bed. “You have so much power.” I appreciate the compliment and love that this is how he views me, but I clarify that I’m more curious than confident. I’ve slept with twice as many people in the past four months as I did the rest of my life until now, so having sex has become something of a fact-finding mission for me at this point. “Yes, but you have to have enough confidence to get to that point. I don’t have the same insatiable curiosity as you do, maybe because I had so many years as a bachelor before I got married. And honestly, it’s enough for me just to keep up with your sexual appetite,” he says. I laugh and he continues, “No, really. I was forty when I got married. That’s a lot of years of bachelorhood. I’m older than you and you have a ton of energy.” “You’re not that much older than me,” I say. He raises his eyebrows, so I ask, “Wait, how old are you?” “62,” he says. “Oh come on! How old really?” I ask, propping myself up on my elbow, my hair spilling over his bare chest. “62,” he repeats. “No way!” I shriek, my eyes widening. “I’m shocked. You have a six-pack for God’s sake! Are people as old as 62 even capable of having six-packs? You’re my first older man. I’ve slept with men a little older but this is a big age difference.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  to which the custom of Sabbath observance has not spread, or in which the feast days, the kindling of the lights, and many of our prohibitions about food are not heeded.’ This claim was generally true. Though it is impossible to present accurate figures, it is clear that by the time of Christ the diaspora Jews greatly outnumbered the settled Jews of Palestine: perhaps by as many as 4.5 million to 1 million. Those attached in some way to the Jewish faith formed a significant proportion of the total population of the empire and in Egypt, where they were most strongly entrenched, one in every seven or eight inhabitants was a Jew. A large proportion of these people were not Jewish by race. Nor were they full Jews in the religious sense: that is, few of them were circumcized or expected to obey the law in all its rigour. Most of them were noachides, or God-fearers. They recognized and worshipped the Jewish God and they were permitted to mingle with synagogue worshippers to learn Jewish law and customs – exactly like the future Christian catechumens. But, unlike the catechumens, they were not generally expected to become full Jews; they had intermediate status of various kinds. On the other hand, they seemed to have played a full role in Jewish social arrangements. Indeed, this was a great part of the appeal of diaspora Judaism. The Jews, with their long and assured tradition of monotheism, had much to offer to a world looking for a sure, single god, but their ethics were in some ways even more attractive than their theology. The Jews were admired for their stable family life, for their attachment to chastity while avoiding the excesses of celibacy, for the impressive relationships they sustained between children and parents, for the peculiar value they attached to human life, for their abhorrence of theft and their scrupulosity in business. But even more striking was their system of communal charity. They had always been accustomed to remit funds to Jerusalem for the upkeep of the Temple and the relief of the poor. During the Herodian period they also developed, in the big diaspora cities, elaborate welfare services for the indigent, the poor, the sick, widows and orphans, prisoners and incurables. These arrangements were much talked about and even imitated; and, of course, they became a leading feature of the earliest Christian communities and a principal reason for the spread of Christianity in the cities. On the eve of the Christian mission they produced converts to Judaism from all classes, including the highest: Nero’s empress, Poppaea, and her court circle, were almost certainly God-fearers, and King Izates II of Adiabene on the Upper Tigris embraced a form of Judaism with all his house. There were probably other exalted converts. Certainly many authors, including Seneca,

• From The Decameron (1353)

  FIRST STORY Cimon 1 acquires wisdom through falling in love with Iphigenia, whom he later abducts on the high seas. After being imprisoned at Rhodes, he is released by Lysimachus, with whom he abducts both Iphigenia and Cassandra whilst they are celebrating their nuptials. They then flee with their ladies to Crete, whence after marrying them they are summoned back with their wives to their respective homes. Delectable ladies, I can think of many stories with which I could aptly make a beginning to so joyful a day as this. But there is one in particular that strikes me as specially pleasing, for not only will it enable you to perceive the happy goal to which our discussions will from now on be directed, but it will also allow you to appreciate the sacredness, the power, and the beneficial effects of the forces of Love, which so many people, ignorant of what they are saying, mistakenly treat with contempt and abuse. All of which, unless I am mistaken, you will find most agreeable, for I take it that you are yourselves in love. In the chronicles of the ancient Cypriots, then, we read that there once lived in the island of Cyprus a very noble gentleman, Aristippus by name, who was richer in worldly possessions than any other man in the country. And if Fortune had not presented him with one particular source of affliction, he would have accounted himself the happiest man alive. This consisted in the fact that one of his children, a youth of outstandingly handsome appearance and perfect physique, was to all intents and purposes an imbecile, whose case was regarded as hopeless. His true name was Galesus, but since the sum total of his tutor’s persistent efforts, his father’s cajolings and beatings, and all the ingenuity of various others, had failed to drum a scrap of learning or good manners into his head, on the contrary leaving him coarsely inarticulate and with the manners rather of a wild beast than a human being, he had earned himself the unflattering nickname of Cimon, which in their language has the same sort of meaning as ‘simpleton’ in ours. His hopeless condition was a matter of very grave concern to his father, who, despairing of any improvement and not wishing to have the source of his affliction constantly before him, ordered him to go and live with his farm-workers in the country. Cimon was only too pleased to obey, for to his way of thinking the customs and practices of country yokels were far more congenial than life in the city. So Cimon went away to the country, where one afternoon, whilst going about his rustic business on one of his father’s estates, with a stick on his shoulder, he chanced to enter a wood, renowned in those parts for its beauty, the trees of which were thickly leaved as it happened to be the month of May.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  martyr’s palm, tended to create a climate of clerical opinion which forced other prelates to insist on church rights more than they thought prudent. It says a lot for the practical sagacity of Henry and Pope Alexander III that the cleavage in society opened by the murder was so soon healed. In practical terms Becket achieved nothing by his death. Alexander endorsed Henry’s choices for vacant bishoprics – faithful royal supporters, variously denounced by Becket as ‘archdiabolus’ ‘that offspring of fornication’, and ‘that notorious schismatic’. At Canterbury, Henry got the sort of man he wanted, Richard, Prior of Dover, who gave first place to the reform of the clergy and cooperation with the State. Alexander warmly supported Henry’s policy of conquering Ireland, and threatened excommunication to anyone who declined to aid ‘this catholic and most Christian king’. On the question of appeals to Rome, it was evident that Henry did not oppose them in principle; he merely wished to control them. When Cardinal Vivian, papal legate, arrived in England in 1176, ‘without the King’s license’, Henry, according to the chronicler Roger of Howden, sent two bishops to warn him that ‘unless he was ready to abide by the will of the King he would not be allowed to proceed further’. The cardinal swore ‘that he would do nothing on his legation hostile to [Henry] or to his kingdom’; Henry then treated him with great honour, and the next legate took good care to obtain the king’s permission to land in advance. Henry liked upright and spiritual-minded churchmen; he disliked those whom, he said, ‘embraced the world with both arms’. He often promoted men who might have been expected to give him trouble, such as Baldwin of Ford, whom he first made Bishop of Worcester, then Canterbury. Henry II was one of those medieval sovereigns, by no means uncommon, who genuinely wanted to make the Christian society work; who thought that an active, vigorous, even militant church and higher clergy were necessary for the material, as well as the spiritual, well-being of the commonwealth. Such rulers, in the Carolingian tradition, were willing to work with the Church even after it had robbed them of much of their theoretical status and power as anointed servants of the Lord. But of course none of them, however well disposed, could conceivably have accepted the line of thinking illustrated by Boniface VIII’s bulls cited at the beginning of this section. The result was that, after the twelfth century, it was rare even for the more serious-minded and hardworking monarchs to devote much of their energies to reforming the Church and improving its pastoral performance – objects which had been central to the policies even of mediocre Dark Age Christian monarchs. On the

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Alcuin, first as head of the palace school, later as the Abbot of St Martin’s, Tours, France’s most revered monastery, became Charlemagne’s chief cultural and religious adviser – the two roles were inseparable. Indeed in the mind of a man like Alcuin the desire to spread the faith, to understand it fully through literacy and knowledge of the scriptures and the ancillary disciplines, and to adorn and celebrate it through art, was all part of the same Christian vision, whose intensity and brightness were the products of personal conviction. The level of culture was directly related to the degree of faith. It was Alcuin who filled Charlemagne’s mind with the missionary fervour of Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, and it was Alcuin who showed him a copy of Gregory the Great’s letter to King Æthelbert of Kent on the subject of conversion by race. In 789 Alcuin caused the king to issue the Admonitio Generalis, a magisterial statement of Church policy, based on earlier Frankish capitularies and Roman canonical collections, and dealing with almost everything. It has, as it were, a Roman imperial vision of a Christian society living at peace within itself, united under its king and fearing nothing but injustice – an Augustinian vision, we could say. Article 62 reads: ‘Let peace, concord and unanimity reign among all Christian people, and the bishops, abbots, counts and our other servants, great and small; for without peace we cannot please God.’ What is perhaps even more remarkable, however, is the central role which culture played in this vision. Article 72 dealt with the establishment and maintenance of monastic and cathedral schools, and the transcription and correction of biblical and liturgical texts. It is clear from this and other documents that Charlemagne, inspired by Alcuin, saw a cultural renaissance, directed by the Church, as the chief means by which the perfect Christian society would be brought into existence. The Church had given the rulers of the western barbarians an awareness of their classical heritage, and an anxiety to preserve and transmit it almost as strong as among the men of the late empire and after, like Cassiodorus and Boethius. But of course the inheritance was now seen entirely in a Christian context. And because the cultural urge was Christianized, it was linked to Christian policy and objectives. Charlemagne built and endowed schools because he needed a trained clergy to convert the Frisians, Saxons, Slavs and Avars, and live among them; and because he needed more priests for the Frankish world which was already nominally Christian. And, in teaching the faith, accurate and standardized texts were needed in huge quantities. There was thus a call for trained manpower to overhaul the texts and copy

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Christian system of knowledge in which every aspect of human creativity and intellectual endeavour was related to Christian belief. He produced the matrix which continued to be elaborated throughout the Middle Ages. But how was this knowledge to be transmitted? It is curious that during the fifth century, when Roman institutions were crumbling, no attempt appears to have been made to create Christian schools. The first such suggestion was made in 536, when Cassiodorus, a prominent Catholic layman who was secretary to the Ostrogothic king, Theodoric, asked Pope Agapetus to found a Christian university in Rome: ‘Seeing that the schools were swarming with students with a great longing for secular letters’, he urged the pope ‘to collect subscriptions and to have Christian rather than secular schools in the city of Rome, with professors, just as there had been for so long in Alexandria’. The project was started but collapsed in the Gothic-Byzantine wars, which finally put paid to the state system of education, and indeed to what remained of Roman civilization in Italy. By the time Gregory the Great came to the papal throne, the West had descended to an altogether lower level of culture. Yet something had been saved. Boethius, another sixth-century Catholic layman and minister at the Gothic court, had contrived – before he was executed in a Gothic- Arian persecution – to translate into Latin the complete works of Plato and Aristotle. His manuscripts were copied, and re-copied, and slowly proliferated. Cassiodorus himself, during the darkest days, created a Christian institution at Squillace in Calabria, at which learned laymen or monks copied manuscripts of standard texts. Developing the ideas of Augustine, he prepared an encyclopaedic course of study, both secular and divine, for Christian ascetics. Thus, for the first time, a great portion of available knowledge was assembled for a Christian purpose and in a monastic context. In the next two generations, the Cassiodoran system was taken up in Seville, under Bishop Leander, a friend of Gregory the Great, and his successor, Bishop Isidore. Seville had already become a gathering place for scholarly Christian refugees, and with the conversion of the Arian court it became possible to build up a centre of Christian culture. Over a period of twenty years Isidore and his helpers compiled a vast survey of human knowledge, arranged etymologically and incorporating the works and transmissions of Boethius and Cassiodorus, and much else. His object was partly to assist the Visigothic kings, partly to instruct his own priests and monks. Almost by accident he founded a civilization, or at any rate an educational system. His work, made public in 636, first describes the seven liberal arts, grammar, rhetoric,

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Lindisfarne Gospels, where the magnificent initial letter on folio 149r, surrounded by its 10,600 dots, is a two-dimensional rendering of a piece of jewellery, which might once, as it were, have been fashioned for a pagan Celtic princess. Indeed, two great contemporary Irish artifacts, the Ardagh Chalice and the Tara Brooch, both correspond closely with the forms of the Lindisfarne Gospels. The pagan work of abstract imagery again surfaces in a Christian context in the seventh-century Book of Durrow, where the colouring is limited and primitive, and in the ninth-century Book of Kells, where Roman-Byzantine influence has added polychromatic brilliance to the basic Celtic-pagan skeleton. Perhaps most spectacular of all was the development of the entirely new Celtic-Christian idiom of the stone cross. The stone-art of Ireland went right back to the La Tène period of the first century AD. The Christian device of the cross gave pagan technology the opportunity to develop a unique art-world of its own, with a multitude of periods and schools, and an increasing elaboration of the message conveyed. Eventually what we have in these high stone crosses is a theology in stone, imparting a number of elaborate Mediterranean religious concepts in a purely Celtic artistic vernacular. The crosses stood at the wayside, throughout the western parts of the British Isles, wherever tracks converged and men gathered – lifted fingers both admonitory and benign, mute witnesses to Christianity which spoke powerfully to the eyes. The stone crosses of the Celtic world symbolize the intense and complete identification between art and Christianity which was so striking and powerful a feature of these centuries. Christianity was not just a carrier of culture; through the agency of the monks it in effect became culture. At the height of the Wearmouth- Jarrow epoch, there were over 700 monks in the two houses, all literate, each with a disciplined skill: this must have represented an enormously high proportion of the total literacy and talent of a small semi-barbarian kingdom. Again, a very large percentage of the available economic resources of Northumbria must have been invested in this enterprise. Monasticism, in fact, proved highly effective in persuading these emergent western societies to devote a dramatic part of their wealth and skills to cultural purposes. If the monks performed prodigies in raising the total amount of land used for crops and pasture, as we have seen, they also ensured that agricultural surpluses, or at any rate a large part of them, were diverted to art and literacy, and not squandered in consumption. They thus raised Europe from the trough of the post- Roman world in two distinct but complementary ways. Moreover, because of the

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Being mentally very well clothed and well shod, they had as yet left no blood-stained foot-prints; they were hopeful as yet, refusing point-blank to believe in the existence of a miserable army. They said: ‘We are as we are; what about it? We don’t care a damn, in fact we’re delighted!’ And being what they were they must go to extremes, must quite often outdo men in their sinning; yet the sins that they had were the sins of youth, the sins of defiance born of oppression. But Dickie was in no way exceptionally vile—she lived her life much as a man would have lived it. And her heart was so loyal, so trustful, so kind that it caused her much shame and much secret blushing. Generous as a lover, she was even more so when there could not be any question of loving. Like the horseleech’s daughter, her friends cried: ‘Give! Give!’ and Dickie gave lavishly, asking no questions. An appeal never left her completely unmoved, and suspecting this, most people went on appealing. She drank wine in moderation, smoked Camel cigarettes till her fingers were brown, and admired stage beauties. Her greatest defect was practical joking of the kind that passes all seemly limits. Her jokes were dangerous, even cruel at times—in her jokes Dickie quite lacked imagination. Jeanne Maurel was tall, almost as tall as Stephen. An elegant person wearing pearls round her throat above a low cut white satin waistcoat. She was faultlessly tailored and faultlessly barbered; her dark, severe Eton crop fitted neatly. Her profile was Greek, her eyes a bright blue—altogether a very arresting young woman. So far she had had quite a busy life doing nothing in particular and everything in general. But now she was Valérie Seymour’s lover, attaining at last to a certain distinction. And Valérie was sitting there calm and aloof, her glance roving casually round the café, not too critically, yet as though she would say: ‘Enfin, the whole world has grown very ugly, but no doubt to some people this represents pleasure.’ From the stained bar counter at the end of the room came the sound of Monsieur Pujol’s loud laughter. Monsieur Pujol was affable to his clients, oh, but very, indeed he was almost paternal. Yet nothing escaped his cold, black eyes—a great expert he was in his way, Monsieur Pujol. There are many collections that a man may indulge in; old china, glass, pictures, watches and bibelots; rare editions, tapestries, priceless jewels. Monsieur Pujol snapped his fingers at such things, they lacked life—Monsieur Pujol collected inverts. Amazingly morbid of Monsieur Pujol, and he with the face of an ageing dragoon, and he just married en secondes noces, and already with six legitimate children. A fine, purposeful sire he had been and still was, with his young wife shortly expecting a baby. Oh, yes, the most aggressively normal of men, as none knew better than the poor Madame Pujol.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  allegiance in huge numbers, and so work upwards from the base. This was the method followed by the first Christians within the Roman empire. The second is to aim at the élite, or even at the individuals at the head of the élite, obtain recognition or adoption of the faith as a matter of state policy, and then work downwards, by authority, example or force (or all three). This was the method followed in the conversion of the Germanic and Slavonic tribes of the Dark Ages, and to some extent in Spanish America. In India, the caste system presented the choice in its most acute form, for it made a combination of the two approaches, at any rate in the same area, almost impossible. The religious instinct of the missionaries was to go for the masses, for, in the absence of military and state sanctions, Christianity is most successful when it appeals to the underdogs and the deprived, and so comes closest to its earliest pastoral attitudes. But their social instinct, coming from a European background where the will of the prince was paramount in matters of faith, was to go for the élite. Both were tried, but neither successfully. Some of the most intelligent of the missionaries, especially among the Jesuits, believed passionately in the élitist approach. It was their proven method in Europe, and it gave the widest possible scope for their gifts as educators and scholars. It also reflected Jesuit admiration for many of the customs (including religious customs) and cultural achievements of the Asian societies. To capture the élite it was necessary not only to accept their culture but many quasi-religious assumptions and ways of presenting ideas. There was really no other way to do it successfully. But this posed the risk of conflict with superiors at home (and, of course, with other, rival orders, and the seculars). In South India, the Jesuit Robert de Nobili insisted to the high- caste Indians among whom he worked that he was not a low-caste Parangi (European). He accepted the caste system entirely, and placed himself in its highest rank as a Brahmin. He adopted Brahmin dress and diet, shaved his head, and wrote Christian poems in the form of Vedic hymns. These compromises might have been acceptable to authority. But De Nobili allowed India to penetrate his presentation of Christianity. He wrote Tamil poems which reconciled Christian doctrine with Hindu wisdom; he allowed his high-caste converts to wear the sacred thread and to observe certain Hindu feasts, and perhaps most important of all he administered communion to inferior castes by holding the wafer on the end of a stick. As a result, he was repeatedly denounced in Rome. In 1618 he was summoned to the archiepiscopal court in Goa, and appeared in a Brahmin robe. In 1623, Rome refused

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  had only 270 field-workers in the entire world. The recovery was due not so much to the restoration of the Jesuits in 1814 as to the emergence of popular French ultramontanism, and its close alliance with a reinvigorated papacy. New mission orders were founded: the Oblates of Mary Immaculate in 1816, the Marists in 1817, the Salesians in 1859, the Scheut Fathers in 1862, the White Fathers in 1868. French diplomacy pushed missionary work far more ardently than any other major power – French missionaries in China, for instance, were provided with special diplomatic passports – and the growth, from the 1820s, of a huge French African empire provided a natural field of endeavour. France did not hesitate to back up missions with force. It was attacks on missionaries which led to Napoleon III’s Indo-China expedition of 1862, and in 1885 to the occupation by France of the entire country; and in North and Central Africa, missionaries, most of whom had served in the French army, worked closely with the military commanders, nearly all of them bien- pensant Catholics. Moreover, in Charles Lavigerie, Bishop of Nancy at the age of thirty-eight, and later Cardinal-Archbishop of Algiers, French colonialism found an enthusiastic spiritual leader, and the Vatican a superb international propagandist. Lavigerie was a flamboyant French patriot from Bayonne, a region where the Gallic spirit was forged in fierce combat with Basque nationalism. 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

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

  The enthusiasm for classical studies and the monuments of antiquity reached its high pitch in Italy in the middle and latter half of the 15th century. Many distinguished classical students appeared, none of whom, however, approached in literary eminence the three Italian literati of the preceding century. Admirable as was their zeal in promoting an acquaintance with the writers of Greece and Rome, they were in danger of becoming mere pedants and imitators of the past. The whole field of ancient literature was searched, poetry and philosophy, letters and works of geography and history. Italy seemed to be bent on setting aside all other studies for the ancient classics. Cicero was taken as the supreme model of style, and his age was referred to as "that immortal and almost heavenly age."1006 The services of the Italian Humanists in reviving an interest in ancient literature and philosophy were, however, quite enough to give distinction to their era, though their own writings have ceased to be read. One new feature of abiding significance was developed in the 15th century, the science of literary and historical criticism. This was opened by Salutato, d. 1406, who contended that Seneca could not have been the author of the tragedies ascribed to him, and culminated in Laurentius Valla and the doubts that scholar cast upon the authorship of the Apostles’ Creed and the Donation of Constantine. The Fall of Constantinople in 1453, with which the middle of the century was signalized, cannot be regarded as more than an incident in the history of the spread of Greek letters in the West, which would have been accomplished had the city remained under the Greek emperors. To the discovery and copying of manuscripts, led by such men as Poggio or the monk Nicolas of Treves, who in 1429 brought to Rome 12 hitherto unpublished comedies of Plautus, were added the foundation of princely libraries in Florence, Rome, Urbino and other cities. Numerous were the translations of Greek authors made into Latin, and more numerous the translations from both languages into Italian. By the recovery of a lost or half-forgotten literature, the Italian Renaissance laid the modern world under a heavy debt. But in its restless literary activity, it went still further, imitating the literary forms received from antiquity. Orations became a marked feature of the time, pompous and stately. The envoys of princes were called orators and receptions, given to such envoys, were opened with classical addresses. Orations were also delivered at the reception of relics, at funerals and—the epithalamials—and even at the consecration of bishops. At a betrothal, Filelfo opened his address with the words, "Aristotle, the peripatetic teacher." The orations of this Latinist, most eminent in his day, are pronounced by Geiger a disgusting mixture of classic and biblical quotations.1007 Not seldom these ornate productions were extended to two or three hours. Pius II.’s fame for oratory helped him to the papal throne.

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

  government and aspiring aims. The papacy was a necessity and a blessing in a barbarous age, as a check upon brute force, and as a school of moral discipline. The popes stood on a much higher plane than the princes of their time. The spirit has a right to rule over the body; the intellectual and moral interests are superior to the material and political. But the papal theocracy carried in it the temptation to secularization. By the abuse of opportunity it became a hindrance to pure religion and morals. Christ gave to Peter the keys of the kingdom of heaven, but he also said, "My kingdom is not of this world." The pope coveted both kingdoms, and he got what he coveted. But he was not able to hold the power he claimed over the State, and aspiring after temporal authority lost spiritual power. Boniface VIII. marks the beginning of the decline and fall of the papal rule; and the seeds of this decline and fall were sown in the period when the hierarchy was in the pride of its worldly might and glory. In this period also, and chiefly as the result of the crusades, the schism between the churches of the East and the West was completed. All attempts made at reconciliation by pope and council only ended in wider alienation. The ruling nations during the Middle Ages were the Latin, who descended from the old Roman stock, but showed the mixture of barbaric blood and vigor, and the Teutonic. The Italians and French had the most learning and culture. Politically, the German nation, owing to its possession of the imperial crown and its connection with the papacy, was the most powerful, especially under the Hohenstaufen dynasty. England, favored by her insular isolation, developed the power of self-government and independent nationality, and begins to come into prominence in the papal administration. Western Europe is the scene of intellectual, ecclesiastical, and political activities of vast import, but its arms and devotion find their most conspicuous arena in Palestine and the East. Finally this period of two centuries and a half is a period of imposing personalities. The names of the greatest of the popes have been mentioned, Gregory VII., Alexander III., and Innocent III. Its more notable sovereigns were William the Conqueror, Frederick Barbarossa, Frederick II., and St. Louis of France. Dante the poet illumines its last years. St. Bernard, Francis d’Assisi, and Dominic, the Spaniard, rise above a long array of famous monks. In the front rank of its Schoolmen were Anselm, Abelard, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura, and Duns Scotus. Thomas à Becket and Grosseteste are prominent representatives of the body of episcopal statesmen. This combination of great figures and of great movements gives to this period a variety of interest such as belongs to few periods of Church history or the history of mankind.