Admiration

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

  other English religious leader, independence of thought, devotion to conscience, solid religious common sense, and the sound exposition of the Gospel. In the history of the intellectual and moral progress of his people, he was the leading Englishman of the Middle Ages.576 § 41. Wyclif’s Teachings. Wyclif’s teachings lie plainly upon the surface of his many writings. In each one of the eminent rôles he played, as schoolman, political reformer, preacher, innovator in theology and translator of the Bible, he wrote extensively. His views show progress in the direction of opposition to the mediaeval errors and abuses. Driven by attacks, he detected errors which, at the outset, he did not clearly discern. But, above all, his, study of the Scriptures forced upon him a system which was in contradiction to the distinctively mediaeval system of theology. His language in controversy was so vigorous that it requires an unusual effort to suppress the impulse to quote at great length. Clear as Wyclif’s statements always are, some of his works are drawn out by much repetition. Nor does he always move in a straight line, but digresses to this side and to that, taking occasion to discuss at length subjects cognate to the main matter he has in hand. This habit often makes the reading of his larger works a wearisome task. Nevertheless, the author always brings the reader back from his digression or, to use a modern expression, never leaves him sidetracked. I. As a Schoolman.—Wyclif was beyond dispute the most eminent scholar who taught for any length of time at Oxford since Grosseteste, whom he often quotes.577 He was read in Chrysostom, Augustine, Jerome and other Latin Fathers, as well as in the mediaeval theologians from Anselm to Duns Scotus, Bradwardine, Fitzralph and Henry of Ghent. His quotations are many, but with increasing emphasis, as the years went on, he made his final appeal to the Scriptures. He was a moderate realist and ascribed to nominalism all theological error. He seems to have endeavored to shun the determinism of Bradwardine, and declared that the doctrine of necessity does not do away with the freedom of the will, which is so free that it cannot be compelled. Necessity compels the creature to will, that is, to exercise his freedom, but at that point he is left free to choose.578 II. As a Patriot.—In this role the Oxford teacher took an attitude the very reverse of the attitude assumed by Anselm and Thomas à Becket, who made the English Church a servant to the pope’s will in all things. For loyalty to the Hildebrandian theocracy, Anselm was willing to suffer banishment and à Becket suffered death. In Wyclif, the mutterings of the nation, which had been heard against the foreign regime from the days of William the Conqueror, and especially since King John’s reign, found a stanch and uncompromising mouthpiece.

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

  Huguenots of France, the Calvinists of Holland, the Puritans of England and New England, and the Presbyterians of Scotland are distinguished for their strict principles and habits. An impartial comparison of Protestant countries and nations with Roman Catholic, in regard to the present state of public and private morals and general culture, is eminently favorable to the Reformation. § 8. The Priesthood of the Laity. The social or ecclesiastical principle of Protestantism is the general priesthood of believers, in distinction from the special priesthood which stands mediating between Christ and the laity. The Roman church is an exclusive hierarchy, and assigns to the laity the position of passive obedience. The bishops are the teaching and ruling church; they alone constitute a council or synod, and have the exclusive power of legislation and administration. Laymen have no voice in spiritual matters, they can not even read the Bible without the permission of the priest, who holds the keys of heaven and hell. In the New Testament every believer is called a saint, a priest, and a king. "All Christians," says Luther, "are truly of the spiritual estate, and there is no difference among them, save of office alone. As St. Paul says, we are all one body, though each member does its own work, to serve the others. This is because we have one baptism, alike; one gospel, one faith, and are all Christians for baptism, gospel and faith, these alone make spiritual and Christian people." And again: "It is faith that makes men priests, faith that unites them to Christ, and gives them the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, whereby they become filled with all holy grace and heavenly power. The inward anointing—this oil, better than any that ever came from the horn of bishop or pope— gives them not the name only, but the nature, the purity, the power of priests; and this anointing have all they received who are believers in Christ." This principle, consistently carried out, raises the laity to active co-operation in the government and administration of the church; it gives them a voice and vote in the election of the pastor; it makes every member of the congregation useful, according to his peculiar gift, for the general good. This principle is the source of religious and civil liberty which flourishes most in Protestant countries. Religious liberty is the mother of civil liberty. The universal priesthood of Christians leads legitimately to the universal kingship of free, self-governing citizens, whether under a monarchy or under a republic. The good effect of this principle showed itself in the spread of Bible knowledge among the laity, in popular hymnody and congregational singing, in the institution of lay-eldership, and in the pious zeal of the magistrates for moral reform and general education.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  [image file=image_rsrc82M.jpg] THIRD DAYHere begins the Third Day, wherein, under the rule of Neifile, the discussion turns upon people who by dint of their own efforts have achieved an object they greatly desired, or recovered a thing previously lost. On the following Sunday, when already the dawn was beginning to change from vermilion to orange with the approach of the sun, the queen arose and summoned all her companions. Some time earlier, the steward had dispatched most of the things they required to their new quarters, together with servants to make all necessary preparations for their arrival. And once the queen herself had set out, he promptly saw that everything else was loaded on to the baggage train, as though he were striking camp, and then departed with the rest of the servants who had remained behind with the ladies and gentlemen. Meanwhile the queen, accompanied and followed by her ladies and the three young men, and guided by the song of perhaps a score of nightingales and other birds, struck out westward at a leisurely pace along a little-used path carpeted with grass and flowers, whose petals were gradually opening to greet the morning sun. After walking no more than two miles, she brought them, long before tierce was half spent,1 to a most beautiful and ornate palace,2 which was situated on a slight eminence above the plain. Entering the palace, they explored it from end to end, and were filled with admiration for its spacious halls and well-kept, elegant rooms, which were equipped with everything they could possibly need, and they came to the conclusion that only a gentleman of the highest rank could have owned it. And when they descended to inspect the huge, sunlit courtyard, the cellars stocked with excellent wines, and the well containing abundant supplies of fresh, ice-cold water, they praised it even more. The whole place was decked with seasonable flowers and cuttings, and by way of repose they seated themselves on a loggia overlooking the central court. Here they were met by the steward, who had thoughtfully laid on a supply of delectable sweetmeats and precious wines for their refreshment.

• 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)

  ‘A bad one, and may God deal harshly with the whole lot of them. And my reason for telling you so is that, unless I formed the wrong impression, nobody there who was connected with the Church seemed to me to display the slightest sign of holiness, piety, charity, moral rectitude or any other virtue. On the contrary, it seemed to me that they were all so steeped in lust, greed, avarice, fraud, envy, pride, and other like sins and worse (if indeed that is possible), that I regard the place as a hotbed for diabolical rather than devotional activities. As far as I can judge, it seems to me that your pontiff, and all of the others too, are doing their level best to reduce the Christian religion to nought and drive it from the face of the earth, whereas they are the very people who should be its foundation and support. ‘But since it is evident to me that their attempts are unavailing, and that your religion continues to grow in popularity, and become more splendid and illustrious, I can only conclude that, being a more holy and genuine religion than any of the others, it deservedly has the Holy Ghost as its foundation and support. So whereas earlier I stood firm and unyielding against your entreaties and refused to turn Christian, I now tell you quite plainly that nothing in the world could prevent me from becoming a Christian.2 Let us therefore go to the church where, in accordance with the traditional rite of your holy faith, you shall have me baptized.’ When Jehannot, who was expecting precisely the opposite conclusion, heard him saying this, he was the happiest man that ever lived. And he went with him to Nôtre Dame de Paris,3 and asked the clergy there to baptize Abraham. This they did, as soon as they heard that he himself desired it: Jehannot stood as his sponsor, and gave him the name of John. And afterwards he engaged the most learned teachers to instruct him thoroughly in our religion, which he quickly mastered, thereafter becoming a good and worthy man, holy in all his ways. THIRD STORYMelchizedek1 the Jew, with a story about three rings, avoids a most dangerous trap laid for him by Saladin.2 Neifile’s story was well received by all the company, and when she fell silent, Filomena began at the queen’s behest to address them as follows:

• 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)

  that he was richly clothed, provided him with money and a saddle-horse, and offered him the freedom of his household. Well satisfied, Primas thanked the Abbot as heartily as he could, before returning on horseback to Paris, whence he had set out on foot.’ Can Grande, being a man of some intelligence, had no need to hear any more in order to see exactly what Bergamino was driving at. And with a broad smile, he said to him: ‘Bergamino, you have given an apt demonstration of the wrongs you have suffered. You have shown us your worth, my meanness, and what it is that you want from me. To tell you the truth, I was never seized before with the meanness I have lately felt on your account. But I shall drive it away with the stock that you yourself have furnished.’ Can Grande saw that the innkeeper’s account was settled, then dressed Bergamino most sumptuously in one of his own robes, provided him with money and a saddle-horse, and offered him the freedom of his household for the rest of his stay.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  worked on his book about Arianism in the fourth century. He discovered on his own account how serious a threat history was to Protestantism because of its biblical fundamentalism. He wrote: ‘To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.’ He saw history as an asset to Catholicism in that its study reminded the believer of the incredible richness of its past, which Rome alone seemed fully to represent in the nineteenth century. The movement began by assuming that they were safe within the Church of England, at any rate as they conceived it, ‘a true branch or portion of the one Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ’. It taught the truth, whereas the Nonconformists and Evangelicals taught only part of the truth, and Rome more than the truth. They rejected the Latitudinarian doctrine that ‘every man’s view of revealed religion is acceptable to God if he acts on it’; and they argued that religious truth was not part scriptural, part authority, as Rome maintained, but wholly scriptural – ‘though it is in tradition, yet it can also be gathered from the communication of the scripture . . . the Gospel message or doctrine . . . is but indirectly and covertly recorded there, under the surface.’ This was an exceptionally difficult halfway house to occupy. In the end many found themselves unable to maintain it, if only because they needed to rely more and more on the principle of authority to defend scripture from the ‘higher criticism’. Thus Newman wrote in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, attacking Protestant liberalism: ‘Liberty of thought is in itself a good; but it gives an opening to false liberty. Now by Liberalism I mean false liberty of thought, or the exercise of thought on matters in which, from the constitution of the human mind, thought cannot be brought to any successful issue, and therefore is out of place. Among such matters are first principles of whatever kind; and of these the most sacred and momentous are especially to be reckoned the truths of Revelation. Liberalism then is the mistake of subjecting to human judgment those revealed doctrines which are in their nature beyond and independent of it, and of claiming to determine on intrinsic grounds the truth and value of propositions which rest for their reception simply on the external authority of the Divine word.’ Now this is a very clear and weighty statement, which effectively repudiates the Erasmian tradition and specifically denies Locke’s insistence that truth must be pursued wherever it leads. Some Anglicans of the school, such as Samuel Wilberforce

• From The Decameron (1353)

  In narrating the final story of the Sixth Day (VI, 10), Dioneo for the first and only time, unless one takes seriously his curious claim that the Griselda story (X, 10) exemplifies munificence in the person of her husband, conforms to the prescribed topic by portraying a character, Friar Cipolla, who displays verbal ingenuity of a very high order indeed. The remarkable dexterity shown by Cipolla in turning an awkward situation to his advantage represents the apotheosis of the day’s talking point, which covers those who have ‘avoided danger, discomfiture or ridicule’ through resorting to a ‘prompt retort or shrewd manoeuvre’. Cipolla’s capacity for thinking and talking on his feet, comparable, according to the narrator, to the oratorical skills of Cicero and Quintilian, is not the result of a refined upbringing and education, but is simply an inborn and natural gift which he exploits to the full in persuading a not very discerning audience that his flights of fancy are nothing less than gospel truth. In his handling of the provincials who flock to hear his annual sermon, he displays all the qualities associated with a market salesman and many more besides. His triumphant escape from a precarious position, sealed by his daubing of black crosses on the clothes of his hearers, is made possible only because of the lack of sophistication of an audience whose lives ‘still conformed to the honest precepts of an earlier age’. As in the case of the holy friar who is taken in by Ciappelletto’s confession (I, 1), there is no real criticism, either open or implied, of the victims of the deception, but rather a sneaking admiration for the ingenuity of its perpetrator. Quickness of wit is the distinguishing quality, also, of most of the adulterous wives whose escapades are recounted in the stories of the Seventh Day. Although several of the narratives are traceable to other literatures, notably the French fabliaux, Boccaccio’s elaborate re-working of his source materials renders them distinctively Italian in tone and atmosphere. With the exception of the ninth story, a version of a medieval Latin text, which Boccaccio sets in ancient Greece, the locations of these tales are representative of the flourishing commercial life and prosperous bourgeoisie of fourteenth-century Italy: Florence, Naples, Siena, Arezzo, Rimini, Bologna. One recent commentator has argued that the stories of the Seventh Day reflect the ‘battle for the control of domestic space’68 that inevitably arose in a society where arranged marriages were the norm and where a woman’s only way of preserving the status she had brought to the marriage with her dowry (which passed at once into the hands of the husband) was to establish herself as mistress of her own household.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The Epistola consolatoria a Pino de’ Rossi, written in the winter of 1361–2 following the banishment from Florence of the addressee, is not only an attempt to offer encouragement to a close friend at a time of profound personal misfortune, but also an elegant and eloquent exercise in a literary genre with strong classical antecedents, a document that bears witness to the author’s continuing and ever more intensive commitment to humanistic culture. The exile of Rossi had coincided with the execution of that same Niccolò di Bartolo del Buono to whom Boccaccio had dedicated his Comedía delle ninfe fiorentine, and in fact several of the author’s close acquaintances fell victim to the purge carried out by the Florentine Signory after the abortive coup d’état of 1361, with the aims of which he had not, presumably, been entirely out of sympathy. It is perhaps significant that very soon afterwards, in that same year in fact, he handed over the family house in the San Felicita quarter to his stepbrother Iacopo, who was now of age, and retired to Certaldo, the town of his paternal forebears. 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

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  quite sure the Jesuits would cooperate in recruiting the Japanese volunteers. (The Spanish actually used Japanese mercenaries in their expedition to Cambodia in 1595, and to suppress the Chinese rebellion at Manila in 1603.) The Bishop of Manila begged Philip II to give his approval: ‘Not even Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great had an opportunity such as this. And on the spiritual plane, nothing greater was ever projected since the time of the Apostles.’ The Japanese leaders were not privy to Spanish official correspondence but they knew perfectly well that such schemes were being discussed. All along they proved much better informed than even the Jesuits supposed. They saw the connection between religion and politics perfectly clearly. In a letter to Don Francisco Tello, Governor of the Philippines, Hideyoshi pointed out that Shinto, which the Franciscans in Japan had crudely attacked, was the basis of the Japanese social structure: ‘If perchance religious or secular Japanese proceeded to your kingdoms and preached the law of Shinto there, disturbing the public peace, would you, as lord of the soil be pleased? Of course not; and therefore you can see why I acted.’ The massacre of 1597 was intended as a warning. Having made their point, the Japanese authorities allowed the Jesuit mission to proceed, and the number of converts increased steadily, reaching an estimated 750,000 in 1606. Valignano ordered all Jesuits to conform as closely as was ethically possible to Japanese life. They showed no approval of Buddhist or Shinto rites but they did not preach against them, and they avoided crucifixes, associated in Japanese minds with the shame of criminal punishment. What they were not allowed to do, however, was to ordain large numbers of Japanese priests; and the papacy, and the Jesuit general, Aquaviva, ruled that even lay-brothers might be recruited only in sufficient numbers to disarm Japanese criticism. Thus the Jesuit aim of attaining rapid self-sufficiency, which would have allowed them to depart, leaving Japanese Christians in control of the mission, was made unattainable. Worse, despite the appeals of all the civil and ecclesiastical authorities of Portuguese India, the papacy and the Spanish crown proved unable, or unwilling, to keep the friars out. Friar Jeronimo de Jesus proclaimed in 1598 that he and his team would stay in Japan despite pope, king, prelate or governor. They preached openly against ‘pagan cults’. They flourished their crucifixes. They fuelled the suspicions of the feudal class by proselytizing among what the Jesuits called ‘the poxy rabble’. And, despite Jesuit advice, they insisted on treating the victims of 1597 as honoured martyrs. In 1608 Paul V gave in and threw

• 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