Anger

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 The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  He looked up, ‘Ah, it’s you. I must go on greasing. God knows when I shall use these again, to-morrow I join my regiment.’ But he wiped his hands on a stained overall and sat down, after clearing a chair for Puddle. ‘An ungentlemanly war it will be,’ he grumbled. ‘Will I lead my men with a sword? Ah, but no! I will lead my men with a dirty revolver in my hand. Parbleu! Such is modern warfare! A machine could do the whole cursèd thing better—we shall all be nothing but machines in this war. However, I pray that we may kill many Germans.’ Stephen lit a cigarette while the master glared, he was evidently in a very vile temper: ‘Go on, go on, smoke your heart to the devil, then come here and ask me to teach you fencing! You smoke in lighting one from the other, you remind me of your horrible Birmingham chimneys—but of course a woman exaggerates always,’ he concluded, with an evident wish to annoy her. Then he made a few really enlightening remarks about Germans in general, their appearance, their morals, above all their personal habits—which remarks were more seemly in French than they would be in English. For, like Valérie Seymour, this man was filled with a loathing for the ugliness of his epoch, an ugliness to which he felt the Germans were just now doing their best to contribute. Buisson’s heart was not buried in Mitylene, but rather in the glories of a bygone Paris, where a gentleman lived by the skill of his rapier and the graceful courage that lay behind it. ‘In the old days we killed very beautifully,’ sighed Buisson, ‘now we merely slaughter or else do not kill at all, no matter how gross the insult.’ However, when they got up to go, he relented: ‘War is surely a very necessary evil, it thins down the imbecile populations who have murdered their most efficacious microbes. People will not die, very well, here comes war to mow them down in their tens of thousands. At least for those of us who survive, there will be more breathing space, thanks to the Germans—perhaps they too are a necessary evil.’ Arrived at the door Stephen turned to look back. Buisson was once more greasing his foils, and his fingers moved slowly yet with great precision—he might almost have been a beauty doctor engaged upon massaging ladies’ faces. Preparations for departure did not take very long, and in less than a week’s time Stephen and Puddle had shaken hands with their Breton servants, and were driving at top speed en route for Havre, from whence they would cross to England.

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

  The chief product of this period of exile was Huss’ work on the Church, De ecclesia, the most noted of all his writings. It was written in view of the national synod held in 1413, and was sent to Prag and read in the Bethlehem chapel, July 8. Of this tractate Cardinal D’Ailly said at the Council of Constance that by an infinite number of arguments, it combated the pope’s plenary authority as much as the Koran, the book of the damned Mohammed, combated the Catholic faith.660 In this volume, next to Wyclif’s, the most famous treatment on the Church since Cyprian’s work, De ecclesia, and Augustine’s writings against the Donatists, Huss defined the Church and the power of the keys, and then proceeds to defend himself against the fulminations of Alexander V. and John XXIII. and to answer the Prag theologians, Stephen Paletz and Stanislaus of Znaim, who had deserted him. The following are some of its leading positions. The Holy Catholic Church is the body or congregation of all the predestinate, the dead, the living and those yet to be.661 The term ’catholic’ means universal. The unity of the Church is a unity of predestination and of blessedness, a unity of faith, charity and grace. The Roman pontiff and the cardinals are not the Church. The Church can exist without cardinals and a pope, and in fact for hundreds of years there were no cardinals.662 As for the position Christ assigned to Peter, Huss affirmed that Christ called himself the Rock, and the Church is founded on him by virtue of predestination. In view of Peter’s clear and positive confession, "the Rock—Petra — said to Peter—Petro — ’I say unto thee, Thou art Peter, that is, a confessor of the true Rock which Rock I am.’ And upon the Rock, that is, myself, I will build this Church." Thus Huss placed himself firmly on the ground taken by Augustine in his Retractations. Peter never was the head of the Holy Catholic Church.663 He thus set himself clearly against the whole ultramontane theory of the Church and its head. The Roman bishop, he said, was on an equality with other bishops until Constantine made him pope. It was then that he began to usurp authority. Through ignorance and the love of money the pope may err, and has erred, and to rebel against an erring pope is to obey Christ.664 There have been depraved and heretical popes. Such was Joan, whose case Huss dwelt upon at length and refers to at least three times. Such was also the case of Liberius, who is also treated at length. Joan had a son and Liberius was an Arian.665

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The Abbot of St Victor, a fourteenth-century orthodox mystic, wrote of them indignantly: ‘They committed rapes and adulteries and other acts which gave bodily pleasure; and to the women with whom they sinned, and the simple people they deceived, they promised that such sins would not be punished.’ Some taught that women were created to be used by the brothers of the Holy Spirit; a matron, by having intercourse with one of the brethren, could regain her lost virginity; this was linked to their belief that they had rediscovered the precise way in which Adam and Eve had made love. They were often arrested for attempting to seduce respectable middle-class wives; or for eating in taverns and then refusing to pay. ‘They believe that all things are common,’ noted the Bishop of Strasbourg in 1317, ‘whence they conclude that theft is lawful to them.’ These men were often executed, sometimes with hideous cruelty. But many free spirits were not fraudulent or antisocial. In Flanders and the Rhine valley, the orthodox Brethren of the Free Spirit formed one of the largest and most admirable religious movements of the later Middle Ages, running schools and hospitals for the poor, and engaging in a variety of welfare work. Female free spirits, of Beguines, though not exactly nuns since they did not live in convents, worked among the poor in the Rhineland cities – at one time there were 2,000 of them just in Cologne – and were models of piety and orthodoxy. Rome did not like these patterns of religious behaviour, since they did not fit into established categories. So the bishops and the Inquisition kept a close watch, and frequently acted to break up groups of brethren or beguines who looked like toppling over into heterodoxy. The second broad category combined millenarian egality with an overt assault on clericalism and the established Church. The belief that the millenium was imminent was the signal for an attack on the rich – they were to be dragged to the ground in an earthly apocalypse before being committed to eternal flames in the next world. Such ideas were expressed in the sermons of John Ball during the Peasants’ Revolt in England; they recur constantly in France and Germany during the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In Bohemia, the only part of Latin Christendom where heterodoxy successfully established itself before the sixteenth century, egalitarians formed the radical wing of the Hussites after 1419; they had communal chests and kibbutz -type communities. These movements were the obverse side of the Augustinian coin: they were the ‘alternative society’ to the total Christian society of which Augustine had been the ideologist and which had been successfully brought into existence in the West during the Carolingian period.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The Jesuits not only advocated war as a legitimate instrument against heresy but defended the selective murder of Protestants, especially if they held important positions. It was an extension of their educational techniques: if a ruler could not be converted, let him be slain. Thus in 1599, Juan Mariani, offering Philip III advice on the question of the kingship, wrote of Protestant sovereigns: ‘It is a glorious thing to exterminate the whole of this pestilential and pernicious race from the community of mankind. Limbs, too, are cut off when they are corrupt, that they may not infect the remainder of the body; and likewise this bestial cruelty in human shape must be separated from the state and cut off with the sword.’ The Jesuits were a striking case of a highly educated and strongly motivated élite allowing the stresses of religious conflict to confuse their moral values. They were not isolated. Indeed, the problem was general. It is a tragic but recurrent feature of Christianity that the eager pursuit of reform tends to produce a ruthlessness in dealing with obstacles to it which brings the whole moral superstructure crashing down in ruins. The Gregorian papacy, so zealous for virtue, fathered some of the worst crimes of the Middle Ages. So, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the desire to purge the Church of its errors and to recreate an apostolic society set off a chain of consequences which not only wrecked the unity of Christendom but induced its severed fragments to exercise unrivalled ferocity on each other. From the 1520s religious war was endemic in the West until 1648, with one brief respite in the first two decades of the seventeenth century. These wars, civil or international – usually both – were without redeeming features and were destructive of Christian faith itself, as well as human life and material civilization. They came, too, after a period when mankind had rediscovered the riches of the ancient world and was advancing rapidly in knowledge and techniques. The effect of religious conflict was not to halt this process completely but to retard and deform it. Reason was devalued. Dark and horrible forces were unleashed or resuscitated. The hopeful dawn Erasmus noted broadened into a tempestuous day where sensible and civilized men had to shout to make their voices heard above the winds of violence, cruelty and superstition. The religious wars were based on the assumption that only a unitary society was tolerable, and that those who did not conform to the prevailing norms, and who could not be forced or terrified into doing so, should be treated as second-class citizens, expelled, or killed. They thus reinforced or brought back to life destructive forces which already existed in medieval society. South of the Pyrenees, for instance, the elimination of Protestant heretics was presented as a further chapter in the struggle against the Jews, which went back to Visigothic times. The triumphant Catholics of Castile had been systematically persecuting the Jews since the fourteenth century.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  But later on, he began covering more desert locations: Death Valley, Arches. I would stay in the Airstream all day and wait for him to return. Why did I need to explore another desert when I had a desert right at home? And why had I come to see this man who was the same here as he was at home? Same face, same dick. Same ennui of a long relationship but with no desire to commit. I told him I was staying in the Airstream to work on the thesis. But when people asked me what I did for a living, I glossed over my Sappho and the library, and quickly brought up Jamie’s work. I pretended it was still exciting. But the only real excitement left was the challenge of roping him into our imaginary future. On the day of our breakup, I had blown a tire on Camelback Road and called him for help. When he arrived he looked in my trunk and said, “But you don’t have a spare.” “No,” I said. It was late in the evening on a Sunday and the auto-body shops in town would be closed, so we called AAA. While we waited I felt hot and fussy and angry. I wasn’t sure exactly why. He looked silly to me, dough-bellied and chinless. Everything had rounded out. He was making little sucking noises with his front teeth, alternating with small whistling noises. It was one of those moments when you look at the person you have loved for a long time and everything is wrong with them. There is absolutely nothing right. You cannot believe you were ever captivated by them in the first place. “I don’t feel happy,” I said. “There are other places I’d rather be too,” he said. “I’m serious,” I said. “I think we need to talk. About us.” “Now?” I watched him so at ease with himself, the fat in the middle, the various layers of padding around the chin, the chin disappearing into a soufflé of neck meat. His chin area looked like it was a second mouth and I imagined it talking. What was it saying? Feed me, it said. I don’t give a fuck if I’m attractive or not. I don’t need to. I have options. All of him said that. From his nervous laughter whenever I had brought up marriage—or even moving in together—the years of dismissals, the claims that I wouldn’t want that either, to the disappearance of the chiseled, handsome stranger I first met at a party into a honeybear I came to know and love into another kind of stranger: a physical manifestation of time and letting oneself go eclipsing both the stranger and the honeybear until they all but disappeared. I felt irate. How dare he not give a fuck? What a luxury, the luxury of a man. The luxury of someone who looked at the ravages of time and went, “Eh.” And that is when I said it.

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

  Some persons, he said, in speaking of "Holy Church, understand thereby prelates and priests, monks and canons and friars and all that have the tonsure,—alle men that han crownes,—though they live ever so accursedly in defiance of God’s law." But so far from this being true, all popes cardinals and priests are not among the saved. On the contrary, not even a pope can tell assuredly that he is predestinate. This knows no one on earth. The pope may be a prescitus, a reprobate. Such popes there have been, and it is blasphemy for cardinals and pontiffs to think that their election to office of itself constitutes a title to the primacy of the Church. The curia is a nest of heretics if its members do not follow Christ, a fountain of poison, the abomination of desolation spoken of in the sacred page. Gregory XI. Wyclif called a terrible devil—horrendus diabolus. God in His mercy had put him to death and dispersed his confederates, whose crimes Urban VI. had revealed.586 Though the English Reformer never used the terms visible and invisible Church, he made the distinction. The Church militant, he said, commenting on John 10:26, is a mixed body. The Apostles took two kinds of fishes, some of which remained in the net and some broke away. So in the Church some are ordained to bliss and some to pain, even though they live godly for a while.587 It is significant that in his English writings Wyclif uses the term Christen men—Christian men—instead of the term the faithful. As for the papacy, no one has used more stinging words against individual popes as well as against the papacy as an institution than did Wyclif. In the treatises of his last years and in his sermons, the pope is stigmatized as anti-Christ. His very last work, on which he was engaged when death overtook him, bore the title, Anti-christ, meaning the pope. He went so far as to call him the head-vicar of the fiend.588 He saw in the papacy the revelation of the man of sin. The office is wholly poisonous—totum papale officium venenosum. He heaped ridicule upon the address "most holie fadir." The pope is neither necessary to the Church nor is he infallible. If both popes and all their cardinals were cast into hell, believers could be saved as well without them. They were created not by Christ but by the devil. The pope has no exclusive right to declare what the Scriptures teach, or proclaim what is the supreme law. His absolutions are of no avail unless Christ has absolved before. Popes have no more right to excommunicate than devils have to curse. Many of them are damned—multi papae sunt dampnati. Strong as such assertions are, it is probable that Wyclif did not mean to cast aside the papacy altogether. But again and again the principle is stated that the Apostolic see is to be obeyed only so far as it follows Christ’s law.589

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

  beginning, to do good to all the brethren in every way, and to send contributions to many churches in every city."221 The Roman church was no doubt more wealthy than any other, and the liberal use of her means must have greatly increased her influence. Beyond this, Ignatius cannot be quoted as a witness for papal claims. He says not a word of the primacy, nor does he even mention Clement or any other bishop of Rome. The church alone is addressed throughout. He still had a lively sense of the difference between a bishop and an apostle. "I do not command you," he writes to the Romans, "as if I were Peter or Paul; they were apostles." Irenaeus. Irenaeus calls Rome the greatest, the oldest(?) church, acknowledged by all, founded by the two most illustrious apostles, Peter and Paul, the church, with which, on account of her more important precedence, all Christendom must agree, or (according to another interpretation) to which (as the metropolis of the world) all other churches must resort.222 The "more important precedence" places her above the other apostolic churches, to which likewise a precedence is allowed. This is surely to be understood, however, as a precedence only of honor, not of jurisdiction. For when Pope Victor, about the year 190, in hierarchical arrogance and intolerance, broke fellowship with the churches of Asia Minor, for no other reason but because they adhered to their tradition concerning the celebration of Easter, the same Irenaeus, though agreeing with him on the disputed point itself, rebuked him very emphatically as a troubler of the peace of the church, and declared himself against a forced uniformity in such unessential matters. Nor did the Asiatic churches allow themselves to be intimidated by the dictation of Victor. They answered the Roman tradition with that of their own sedes apostolicae. The difference continued until the council at Nicaea at last settled the controversy in favor of the Roman practice, but even long afterwards the old British churches differed from the Roman practice in the Easter observance to the time of Gregory I. Hippolytus. The celebrated Hippolytus, in the beginning of the third century, was a decided antagonist of the Roman bishops, Zephyrinus and Callistus, both for doctrinal and disciplinary reasons. Nevertheless we learn from his work called Philosophumena, that at that time the Roman bishop already claimed an absolute power within his own jurisdiction; and that Callistus, to the great grief of part of the presbytery, laid down the principle, that a bishop can never be deposed or compelled to resign by the presbytery, even though he have committed a mortal sin. Tertullian. Tertullian points the heretics to the apostolic mother churches, as the chief repositories of pure doctrine; and among these gives especial prominence to that of Rome, where Peter was crucified, Paul beheaded, and John immersed unhurt in boiling oil(?) and then banished to the island. Yet the same father became afterwards an opponent of Rome.

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

  The explanation of Philip’s violent animosity and persistent persecution is his cupidity. He coveted the wealth of the Templars. Philip was quite equal to a crime of this sort.107 He robbed the bankers of Lombardy and the Jews of France, and debased the coin of his realm. A loan of 500,000 pounds which he had secured for a sister’s dowry had involved him in great financial straits. He appropriated all the possessions of the Templars he could lay his hands upon. Clement V.’s subserviency it is easy to explain. He was a creature of the king. When the pope hesitated to proceed against the unfortunate order, the king beset him with the case of Boniface VIII. To save the memory of his predecessor, the pope surrendered the lives of the knights.108 Dante, in representing the Templars as victims of the king’s avarice, compares Philip to Pontius Pilate. "I see the modern Pilate, whom avails No cruelty to sate and who, unbidden, Into the Temple sets his greedy sails." Purgatory, xx. 91. The house of the Templars in Paris was turned into a royal residence, from which Louis XVI., more than four centuries later, went forth to the scaffold. The Council of Vienne, the fifteenth in the list of the oecumenical councils, met Oct. 16, 1311, and after holding three sessions adjourned six months later, May 6, 1812. Clement opened it with an address on Psalm 111:1, 2, and designated three subjects for its consideration, the case of the order of the Templars, the relief of the Holy Land and Church reform. The documents bearing on the council are defective.109 In addition to the decisions concerning the Templars and Boniface VIII., it condemned the Beguines and Beghards and listened to charges made against the Franciscan, Peter John Olivi (d. 1298). Olivi belonged to the Spiritual wing of the order. His books had been ordered burnt, 1274, by one Franciscan general, and a second general of the order, Bonagratia, 1279, had appointed a commission which found thirty-four dangerous articles in his writings. The council, without pronouncing against Olivi, condemned three articles ascribed to him bearing on the relation of the two parties in the Franciscan order, the Spirituals and Conventuals. The council has a place in the history of biblical scholarship and university education by its act ordering two chairs each, of Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldee established in Paris, Oxford, Bologna, and Salamanca. While the proceedings against Boniface and the Templars were dragging on in their slow course in France, Clement was trying to make good his authority in Italy. Against Venice he hurled the most violent anathemas and interdicts for venturing to lay hands on Ferrara, whose territory was claimed by the Apostolic See. A crusade was preached against the sacrilegious city. She was defeated in battle, and Ferrara was committed to the administration of Robert, king of Naples, as the pope’s vicar. All that he could well do, Clement did to strengthen the hold of France on the papacy.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  In 316 he thought it necessary to persecute the Donatists, and did so; one Donatist sermon complained that ‘local judges were imperatively ordered to act and put the secular power in motion; buildings were surrounded by troops; our wealthy followers were threatened with proscription, the sacraments were defiled, a mob of heathen were unleashed on us, and our sacred buildings became the scene of profane feasts.’ Again, in 333, in the first instance of censorship being employed in defence of Christian interests, he ordered savage action against Arian writings; ‘If any treatise composed by Arius is discovered, let it be consigned to the flames . . . in order that no memorial of him whatever be left . . . [and] if anyone shall be caught concealing a book by Arius, and does not instantly bring it out and burn it, the penalty shall be death; the criminal shall suffer punishment immediately after conviction.’ Such ferocity betrays an element of exasperation. Indeed, one might say that the attitude of the emperors towards their religious responsibilities tended to follow a regular pattern; they began in a spirit of self-confident ecumenicalism and ended in blind rage and repression. They always underestimated the tenacity with which clerics clung to minute distinctions, and the depth of their odium theologicum. In the end, the emperor always felt he had to back one party, to give it official status and destroy the other simply to keep the peace; but the choice was not always well-judged and the peace was not therefore kept. The empire did not, in the end, solve the Donatist problem which convulsed North Africa, nor the dispute over free will, which flickered over all the Mediterranean, nor the huge series of Christological controversies which fascinated the East and Egypt throughout the fourth and fifth centuries. The empire embraced Christianity with a view to renewing its strength by acquiring a dynamic State religion. In effect, however, it exchanged a State ritual, which was harmless because it was dead, for a religious philosophy which defied easy definition because it was alive and was therefore a risk to the administrative setting in which it found itself. Christianity, by its nature, always ends by damaging its secular patrons. Generations of emperors grappled with the problem of the Christian deity and how to give it a final and universally accepted definition which would end the argument. But it was, by its very nature, insoluble. In the first century the world was waiting for a monotheistic, universalist religion. Christianity supplied it. But then: was Christianity truly monotheistic? In the last resort, what distinguished it from Judaism was belief in the divinity of Christ. If Jesus were a mere messiah then the two religious systems were reconcilable, as indeed the Jewish Christians had argued. But insistence that Jesus was the son of God placed the movement right outside even the furthest confines of Judaic thought and not only separated the systems but brought them into mortal enmity.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Mortuaries were taken on a wife’s death, as well as a husband’s; and if a husband died away from home, his estate was sometimes charged in two parishes. Sometimes, in one parish, both the rector and the vicar claimed. Mortuaries were so much hated, and led to so much trouble, that secular authorities tried to ban them. But by the latter part of the medieval period the Church, as an organization, had become totally insensitive to this type of appeal; and it was imbued with the philosophy of canon law which tended to insist that to abandon a customary right might actually be sinful. Pierre Albert, Grand-Prior of Cluny, defending them at the Council of Basle, 1431–43, could not produce any intrinsic, scriptural or natural law justification, and fell back entirely on custom: ‘And so this custom began as a lion-cub, which cometh forth at first as an abortion, and is afterwards quickened by his mother’s licking . . . this is quickened by an unbroken course of time and by consent, whether tacit or by the mere rendering and payment of the thing.’ In fact, mortuaries were often refused; then the clergy might have taken them by force. This led to riots, as we know from reports to the authorities. Or a man might make transfers of property before death; but these were often invalidated by law (the Church had charge of wills). In Zurich, a man had to be able to walk without staff, crutches or help seven feet from his house to make a valid transfer. The most usual method of enforcement, however, was simply to refuse burial until the goods were handed over. Pierre Albert admitted this could be called simony, but added: ‘In these cases, let the corpse first be buried, and then let an action be brought against the heirs’. The big-wigs of the Church were anxious to defend the custom not least because it was an important part of the income of the underpaid working clergy, who had no access to the pluralities system. As one sixteenth-century lawyer put it: ‘Curates loved mortuaries better than their lives’; and ‘therefore in many places there arose great division and grudge between [clergy and laity].’ The abuse continued, even increased, right up to the Reformation. In 1515 Parliament petitioned Henry VIII that priests ‘daily refuse to fetch and receive the corpses of such deceased persons . . . but if some best jewel, garment, cloth or other best thing as aforesaid be given them following a major scandal, 21 Henry VIII c .6(1529) regulated mortuaries, and abolished them altogether for people dying with less than ten marks in movable goods; but trouble did not end until it was scrapped completely – ‘There were few things within this realm that caused more variance’, wrote an Elizabethan, ‘among the people, than they did when [mortuaries] were suffered.’ Mortuaries led to rows with the clergy at every level of society.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  While Gregory VII, Innocent III or Boniface VIII had seen the contest for world power as between pope and emperor, or pope and king, there was now a new candidate for the post of Vicar of Christ – the proletariat. The bid for power was made as arrogantly as Gregory VII’s had been; and accompanied by a heedless acceptance of violence as necessary and divinely commanded. Muntzer had the mark of the Zealot who had brought Jerusalem down in ruins. Indeed, he signed his letters with the Sword of Gideon and the phrase ‘Thomas Muntzer the Hammer’. He was a biblical warrior-priest. ‘Let not the sword of the saint get cold’ was his motto; and his heraldic sign was a red cross and a naked sword – an early example of the use of an inflammatory political emblem. Luther was the mere propagandist of the ruling classes, ‘the spiritless, soft-living flesh in Wittenberg’, Dr Liar, the Dragon, the Archeathen. The rich were robbers; property was theft; ‘the people will become free and God alone means to be Lord over them’. Muntzer saw the class-war being won only by a tremendous and bloody convulsion, a sort of premonitory apocalypse before the true one when, as Joachim had prophesied, human institutions would wither away and the parousia would mark the beginning of eternal and perfect government. Violence was thus necessary to his eschatology. It is a case, once again, of abuse of the text ‘compel them to come in’ – the text graven on every inquisitor’s heart. Exactly like Augustine, Muntzer used the parable of the wheat and the tares to justify destruction and persecution: ‘The living God is sharpening his scythe in me,’ he said ominously, ‘so that later I can cut down the red poppies and the blue cornflowers.’ When either the Augustinian or the millenarian takes over, the patient, reasonable man, the reformist, the Pelagian-minded liberal, learns to tremble. Muntzer detonated a peasants’ revolt, as had so many millenarians in the past; but he was executed before he could found his post-apocalyptic society. A decade later, in 1534, millenarians seized the German town of Munster, which they held until the following summer. This was by no means the first time Christian fanatics had seized a city in the West; there are many examples, especially in northern France and Flanders, from the twelfth century onwards. But Munster is the first case in which we have a proper documentation, and thus know what it was like to live under a medieval egalitarian terror. The episode began on 25 February 1534, when the religious radicals captured the municipal council and their leader, John Mathijs, announced a Christian popular dictatorship. The ‘godless’ were identified: one, a critical blacksmith, was killed by Mathijs on the spot, the rest expelled – ‘Get out, you Godless ones, and never come back.’ At the same time a number of radical refugees were admitted, to form a police-force and bodyguard for the leadership.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Sometimes criticism was provoked by dislike of Henry himself, for the nation as a whole seems to have deplored his divorce and loathed Anne Boleyn, frequently described as ‘a strong whore’. One Worcestershire suspect blamed Henry for the bad weather, and said it would never improve until ‘he were knocked or patted on the head’. A Welsh priest ‘wished to have the King upon a mountain in North Wales . . . called Snowdon Hill.... He would souse the King about the ears until he had his head soft enough.’ A Londoner said: ‘I set not a pudding by the King’s broad seal, and all his charters be not worth a rush.’ We get reports of reformers indulging in tremendous meat-eating during Lent, to annoy the Catholics; but often enough the Reformation dispute was stood on its head. Thus, in Salisbury, the ‘proud stomach’ of a reforming bishop infuriated the corporation and turned anti-clericalism, normally a chief engine of change into a conservative force. Equally, though the end of clerical celibacy was a lure successfully dangled by the reformers before many priests (a majority of the younger ones), some remained Romanists because they did not want to be forced to marry their concubines. Thus a Father Cornewell swore ‘he had set his wench by the bishop’s nose.... Let me see who dare meddle with her’; if only he would agree to marry her, he said, ‘the bishop would be contented that [I] tilted up her tail in every bush.’ The remarks reported to Cromwell seem a long way from the subject-matter of the colloquy of Regensburg, taking place at the same time. A reforming London Dominican said the new scriptural faith was worth more than ‘a whole shipload laden with friars’ girdles and a dung-cart full of monks’ cowls.’ A pro-Henry lady thought the Scotch might bring the Pope back, but ‘the clobbes of Essex shall drive them forth again, and a bush in Essex shall be worth a castle in Kent.’ A London papist told Cromwell’s informers that he ‘cared not a fart for the Tower’. Many of these remarks were noted down in taverns. Thus we hear of four Coventry yeomen who met for a drinking session and eventually sallied forth to the market-place, where ‘they all untrussed themselves, and did their easement at the Cross.’ One tore down Henry’s proclamations and statutes, nailed to the cross, ‘and cast the same to the said Heynes, and bid him wipe his tail with them’ – which he did. Next morning, hung-over, all four said they remembered nothing. Such protesters, and others who voiced their opinions, risked public whippings. We hear of one poor man who was sentenced, according to the court record, to have his ears ‘cut off by the hard head’ and to be tied ‘to a cart’s arse’. Generally speaking, however, protests at Church reforms were confined to words, usually under the influence of drink.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  All this was beside the point for Voltaire, since he had, in fact, deliberately posed a non-question: the earthquake, horrible and inexplicable though it might be, was not the worst we had to fear: ‘Men do themselves more harm on their little molehill than does nature. More men are slaughtered in their wars than are swallowed up in earthquakes.’ He produced Candide, which exposed the best of all possible worlds optimism as stupid fatalism, ‘a cruel philosophy under a consoling name’. The true solution was ‘to cultivate our garden’, that is, oppose and remove evils, and use not just our reason but all our faculties to reform society and so to reduce the incidence of suffering. Here was a deist theodicy. In 1761 Voltaire punctured the prevailing optimism, in reality a form of complacency, the besetting sin of the eighteenth century, by pointing out that irrationality still flourished triumphantly, not least among the supposedly supine world of orthodox Christianity. His intervention in the Callas case made him the active conscience of the age, the prophet of justice and reason not in abstract but in concrete and personal form, on behalf of a judicially murdered Huguenot, demonstrably the victim of priestcraft and its legal and political (and social) accessories. What made Voltaire hate Pascal was not the latter’s awareness of the limitation of reason, for he shared it, but the way in which Pascal was used to defend a Christianity still capable of monstrous cruelty. In 1766 there was a further outrage, when the young Chevalier de la Barre failed to doff his hat in respect while a Capuchin religious procession passed through the streets of Abbeville. (It was raining.) He was charged and convicted of blasphemy, and sentenced to ‘the torture ordinary and extraordinary’, his hands to be cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and to be burned alive. This atrocious case haunted Voltaire for the rest of his life, and indeed it was a reminder to the European intelligentsia that Catholic Europe, despite the apparent triumph of reason, was still basically unreformed. Was the Church reformable? Or would it be necessary to smash it? The Treaty of Westphalia had been a catastrophe for the papacy. Thereafter, it was rarely consulted on international problems; it was unrepresented at great European peace congresses. The Catholic national Churches were virtually independent. Only Italy was ultramontane, a contradiction in terms. There was a general assumption that only a council was infallible in doctrine, and that it could overrule the Pope; normal authority in each country devolved on synods of bishops; but the Church was too comatose to put the theory to the test. The Popes were nonentities. The only exception, Benedict XIV (1740–58), was mildly progressive: ‘I prefer to let the thunders of the Vatican rest. Christ would not call down fire from heaven . . .

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  is less an argument than a collection of useful quotations from the Fathers and Protestant writers, and a series of vigorous assertions. ‘I have carefully examined what a heretic means, and I cannot make it mean more than this; a heretic is a man with whom you disagree.’ ‘To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine; it is to kill a man.’ ‘The better a man knows the truth, the less he is inclined to condemn.’ ‘Who would not think Christ a moloch, or some such God, if he wanted men to be immolated to him, and burned alive?’ The appeal was emotional, but effective – at any rate, Calvin and Beza tried to get him dismissed from Basle University, and their followers never ceased to hound him. But it met with a response chiefly in areas where both sides were strong and organized, and toleration was the only alternative to war. The best example was France, where civil war led to the Colloquy of Poissy in 1561, and the following year to the first of the toleration edicts. Castellio commented: ‘I think that the aim and decisive cause of this illness – this insurrection and war which torment France – is the forcing of consciences.’ He blamed both sides: ‘Either the victim resists, and you murder his body, or he yields and speaks against his conscience, and you murder his soul.’ But though sensible men in France were struggling towards some system of toleration, they were often in a small minority, at any rate among the educated and influential. Beza, on behalf of the Geneva Calvinists, denounced toleration in 1570 as ‘a purely diabolical doctrine’. To support freedom of conscience was sinful. In 1588, at the States Assembly at Blois, the Bishop of Le Mans tried to maintain that ‘heretics should be loved and brought back by instruction and good example’, but the Assembly ‘shouted with indignation’ and ‘was so angry that they made noises with their hands and feet and did not allow him to say a word’. When the Edict of Nantes was signed in 1598 it was promptly denounced by Pope Clement VIII as ‘the worst thing in the world’. Nevertheless, during the late sixteenth century, burnings for heresy as such began to decline. Most of the victims of the Reformation were killed aimlessly, in the course of religious warfare. Was there any way of ending the fighting, men asked, by finding a middle ground of belief? Here was the second of the two ways in which liberal opinion tried to exert itself. Among the Lutherans, the followers of Melanchthon broke away to form the ‘Philippist’ branch of the Church, which believed an arrangement with Rome was still possible.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  What we do know is that Bruno was in Inquisition hands for eight years, recanted heresies twice, but finally denied that he had ever been a heretic and was burned alive in the Campo de’Fiori in Rome, 1600. Like all those who crossed and recrossed the religious borders, he was a particular object of Roman suspicion.5 In some ways, the Counter-Reformation forces, especially the Jesuits, hated the third force people even more than the militant Protestants. Cabalistic and Hermetic knowledge had been prized in pre-Tridentine Italy: Cardinal Egidius of Viterbo, for instance, had been one of the greatest of the Christian cabalists. With the Council of Trent the atmosphere stiffened. Trent put many cabalistic books on the Index. Rome did not like a force and a system of knowledge which it did not wholly control. Orthodox suspicions grew when the third force went underground and began to form secret societies. These took many forms – the Spiritual Brotherhoods of Holland and Flanders, the Rosicrucians of Germany and, eventually, in a degenerate late seventeenth-century form, the various freemason movements. All incurred the relentless enmity of the papacy, and especially of the Jesuits, and thus tended to be driven increasingly into an anti-Catholic posture. But in the case of the Jesuits and the third force, the relationship was a love-hate one. The Jesuits also cultivated science and art, and tried to put them to religious purposes. They also studied the Hermetic and cabalistic texts. The vast work on Hermetic pseudo-Egyptology published in 1652 by Athanasius Kircher SJ was employed on the Jesuits’ missions; and a colleague of Bruno’s, Tommaso Campanella, arrested on similar charges and held in papal prisons for over twenty years, saved his life by writing Catholic missionary propaganda. Both Campanella and Bruno believed in the idea of a vast, all-embracing general reform, which would be followed by a Christian utopia. At bottom the notion was really a complicated and sophisticated version of the old millenium, to be brought about by a ‘college’ of learned men, rather than by fanatical armed peasants or ‘saints’. And, like the millenarians, the members of the third force tended to identify this marvellous happening with a particular monarch. In this respect, indeed, Renaissance peoples differed very little from their medieval forebears: they still had the same theory of history. The third force needed a royal champion, the catalytic charismatic figure who would personally detonate the process that would bring the Golden Age into existence. Queen Elizabeth of England was certainly an Erasmian princess, learned, moderate in her religious views, and a protector of scholars like Dr Dee; but she was disqualified by her sex. After 1589, attention centred on the new king of France, Henri IV. As head of the house of Navarre, Henri was a Huguenot; as king of France he found it necessary to embrace Catholicism. But his policy was eirenic rather than sectarian, and it transcended the institutional frameworks of the big Christian religions.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Again, it was St Augustine who gave western Christianity the fatal twist in this direction. As always, in his deep pessimism, he was concerned to take society as he found it and attempt to reconcile its vices with Christian endeavour. Men fought; had always fought; therefore war had a place in the Christian pattern of behaviour, to be determined by the moral theologians. In Augustine’s view, war might always be waged, provided it was done so by the command of God. This formulation of the problem was doubly dangerous. Not only did it allow the existence of the ‘just’ war, which became a commonplace of Christian moral theology; but it discredited the pacifist, whose refusal to fight a war defined as ‘just’ by the ecclesiastical authorities became a defiance of divine commands. Thus the modern imprisonment of the conscientous objector is deeply rooted in standard Christian dogma. So is the anomaly of two Christian states each fighting a ‘just’ war against each other. What made the Augustinian teaching even more corrupting was the association in his mind between ‘war by divine command’ and the related effort to convert the heathen and destroy the heretic – his ‘compel them to come in’ syndrome. Not only could violence be justified: it was particularly meritorious when directed against those who held other religious beliefs (or none). The Dark Age church merely developed Augustine’s teaching. Leo IV said that anyone dying in battle for the defence of the Church would receive a heavenly reward; John VIII thought that such a person would even rank as a martyr. Nicholas I added that even those under sentence of excommunication, or other church punishment, could bear arms if they did so against the infidel. There was, it is true, a pacifist movement within the Church as well. But this, paradoxically, was canalized to reinforce the idea of sanctified violence. The motive behind it was to protect innocent peasants from the aimless brutality of competing lords. The bishops of Aquitaine, meeting in 898, said it was the duty of the Church to guarantee immunity for such poor folk. In 1000, William the Great, Duke of Guienne, summed a peace council at Poitiers, which threatened excommunication for anyone who sought to resolve disputes by force of arms. Various oaths were taken by landowners at public assemblies, while the priests and congregations shouted ‘Peace, peace, peace’. Leagues of peace were organized, and every male of fifteen or over asked to swear to take up arms against peace-breakers. But mobs of peasants interpreted the campaign as a license to smash castles, and after one such incident were massacred, 700 clerics with them. Throughout the eleventh century the Church tried to keep the peace movement alive, but the popes eventually surrendered to the temptation to divert what they regarded as the incorrigible bellicosity of western society into crusades against the infidel. The idea of Catholic Christians exercising mass-violence against the infidel hardly squared with scripture.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  But, of course, so the argument ran, the orthodox Christian society had in every respect betrayed its origins and accepted the norms of the world; it was thus the society not of Christ, but of Antichrist, and to overthrow it would be the prelude to the parousia. As Latin Christianity began to crack up under the growing weight of the enemies it harboured, the possibility of these alternative societies establishing themselves, if only briefly, became far stronger. There were egalitarian outbreaks in Germany in the 1470s, and again in 1502, 1513 and 1517. While Luther was conducting his theological debate with Rome, and while various brands of Protestantism were establishing themselves as official Christian religions, mirroring social needs as Catholicism had done since the fourth century, efforts to overthrow society completely, and replace it by a new social-Christian dispensation, were vigorously pursued by religious fringemen. These men and their movements tell us a great deal about Christianity and its distortions. Their inspiration was often early Christian; sometimes pre-Christian. They spoke with the authentic voice of the Montanists or the Donatists, whom orthodox Christianity and the Roman empire had joined forces to persecute; indeed, they echoed the moral rigorism of the Essenes, likewise victims of a combination of official priests and the established secular order. They were an indisputable part of the Christian tradition, shaped by one of the matrices which Christ had implanted in human minds in the first century. But they lacked the balance of the whole Christian vision. Outraged by the wickedness of official Christian society, anxious to replace it, they ended simply by trying to smash it, even caricature it. They embraced violence, denied culture, devalued human life and adopted purely arbitrary – and volatile – systems of morality. One such case was Thomas Muntzer, born in Thuringia (an area where illicit flagellation was rife) around 1488, a well-educated priest who read Greek and Hebrew. His beliefs were a combination of Hussite radicalism, Free Spirit libertinism, and orthodox eschatology. To him, Lutheranism was simply a betrayal of the attempt to reform the Church, just another compromise with godless Mammon. In July 1524 he preached before John, Duke of Saxony, and other German nobles perhaps the most remarkable sermon of the whole Reformation era, to a text from the Book of Daniel, the keystone of the millenarian arch. ‘Deliver us from evil’ he interpreted as ‘deliver us from the anti-Christian government of the godless’. Society, he told his princely congregation, was being pulverized between Church and State in the hateful earthly kingdom of feudal-papal Christendom. But the royal priesthood of the common man would smash it – and the princes should join the covenanted people in overthrowing Antichrist. Here we have the crowned ikons of the Dark Ages, the anointed priest-kings, replaced by the sovereign people.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  But the Elector of nearby Saxony, Frederick the Wise, also had his money-raising collection of relics, some 17,433 fragments of bones, and the entire body of one of the Holy Innocents. He regarded the archbishop’s show, and his sale of indulgences, as a rival, and he wanted to stop the export of bullion. Hence he forbade the sale in his territories, and was furious when some of the subjects simply crossed the border to buy them. It was at this point that Luther, a thirty-four-year-old Augustinian monk, intervened by nailing his ‘Ninety-five theses against Indulgences’ to the church door of Wittenberg Castle. ‘The pope,’ he said, echoing the prevailing misconception, ‘has wealth far beyond all other men – why does he not build St Peter’s church with his own money instead of the money of poor Christians?’ Thus from the first statement of his protest, Luther aligned himself with the interest of his secular ruler. This is not to say Luther was insincere; on the contrary, the monk’s burning sincerity was the strength of his appeal. His approach to reform, as Professor of Scripture at the university, was originally Erasmian, in that it was based on a rejection of medieval metaphysics and a return to the scriptural texts. As he put it, five months before he nailed his theses: ‘Nobody will go to hear a lecture now unless the lecturer is teaching my theology, the theology of the Bible and St Augustine and all true theologians of the church. I am sure the church will never be reformed unless we get rid of canon law, scholastic theology, philosophy and logic as they are studied today. . . .’ Yet the reference to Augustine is significant. It relates almost exclusively to the doctrine of predestination which Augustine developed from a reading of St Paul to the Romans, at the end of his life. Luther, too, had been reading Romans. The moment of conversion came to him while he was on the privy – ‘the Holy Spirit endowed me with this art when I was on the [cloaca]’, as he put it – when he first understood the meaning of the phrase ‘the just shall live by faith’. To Luther this was the whole answer to the superstructure of sacramental and mechanical Christianity which the Church had erected. The scriptures said plainly that man was saved by faith, not by good works – the fact that he performed good works was merely an outward confirmation of his consciousness of being saved. The concept was alien to Erasmus, as was the enthusiasm and absolute conviction with which Luther deployed it. Unlike Erasmus his mind recoiled from doubt and embraced certitude. Hence the importance he attached to theology, as the means to discover truth, and the need he felt to construct an alternative system to the Catholic faith. Here was the parting of the ways: the Erasmians believed in moral reform, the Lutherans (and later the Calvinists) in a new theory of Christianity.

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

  "Do your best, Sir," was the spirited retort of the bishop, who was a son of the duke of Devonshire. A popular tumult ensued, Wyclif being protected by Lancaster. Pope Gregory XI. himself now took notice of the offender in a document condemning 19 sentences from his writings as erroneous and dangerous to Church and state. In fact, he issued a batch of at least five bulls, addressed to the archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop of London, the University of Oxford and the king, Edward III. The communication to Archbishop Sudbury opened with an unctuous panegyric of England’s past most glorious piety and the renown of its Church leaders, champions of the orthodox faith and instructors not only of their own but of other peoples in the path of the Lord’s commandments. But it had come to his ears that the Lutterworth rector had broken forth into such detestable madness as not to shrink from publicly proclaiming false propositions which threatened the stability of the entire Church. His Holiness, therefore, called upon the archbishop to have John sent to prison and kept in bonds till final sentence should be passed by the papal court.560 It seems that the vice-chancellor of Oxford at least made a show of complying with the pope’s command and remanded the heretical doctor to Black Hall, but the imprisonment was only nominal. Fortunately, the pope might send forth his fulminations to bind and imprison but it was not wholly in his power to hold the truth in bonds and to check the progress of thought. In his letter to the chancellor of Oxford, Gregory alleged that Wyclif was vomiting out of the filthy dungeon of his heart most wicked and damnable heresies, whereby he hoped to pollute the faithful and bring them to the precipice of perdition, overthrow the Church and subvert the secular estate. The disturber was put into the same category with those princes among errorists, Marsiglius of Padua and John of Jandun.561 The archbishop’s court at Lambeth, before which the offender was now cited, was met by a message from the widow of the Black Prince to stay the proceedings, and the sitting was effectually broken up by London citizens who burst into the hall. At Oxford, the masters of theology pronounced the nineteen condemned propositions true, though they sounded badly to the ear. A few weeks later, March, 1878, Gregory died, and the papal schism broke out. No further notice was taken of Gregory’s ferocious bulls. Among other things, the nineteen propositions affirmed that Christ’s followers have no right to exact temporal goods by ecclesiastical censures, that the excommunications of pope and priest are of no avail if not according to the law of Christ, that for adequate reasons the king may strip the Church of temporalities and that even a pope may be lawfully impeached by laymen. With the year 1378 Wyclif’s distinctive career as a doctrinal reformer opens. He had defended English rights against foreign encroachment.

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

  Upon the dissolution of the council, Martin V., who, as a member of the curia, had excommunicated Huss, did not allow the measures to root out Hussitism drag. In his bull Inter cunctos,707 Feb. 22, 1418, he ordered all of both sexes punished as heretics who maintained "the pestilential doctrine of the heresiarchs, John Wyclif, John Huss and Jerome of Prag." Wenzel announced his purpose to obey the council, but many of his councillors left the court, including the statesman, Nicolas of Pistna, and the military leader, the one-eyed John Zizka. The popular excitement ran so high that, during a Hussite procession, the crowd rushed into the council-house and threw out of the window seven of the councillors who had dared to insult the procession. Affairs entered a new stage with Wenzel’s death, 1419. With considerable unanimity the Bohemian nobles acceded to his successor Sigismund’s demand that the cup be withheld from the laity, but the nation at large did not acquiesce, and civil war followed. Convents and churches were sacked. Sigismund could not make himself master of his kingdom, and an event occurred during his visit in Breslau which deepened the feeling against him. A merchant, John Krasa, asserting on the street the innocence of Huss, was dragged at a horse’s tail to the stake and burnt. Hussite preachers inveighed against Sigismund, calling him the dragon of the Apocalypse. Martin V. now summoned Europe to a crusade against Bohemia, offering the usual indulgences, as Innocent III. had done two centuries before, when he summoned a crusade against the Cathari in Southern France. In obedience to the papal mandate, 150,000 men gathered from all parts of Europe. All the horrors of war were perpetrated, and whole provinces desolated. Five times the holy crusaders entered the land of Huss, and five times they were beaten back. In 1424 the Hussites lost their bravest military leader, John Zizka, but in 1427, under his successor, Procopius Rasa, called the Great, the most influential priest of Prag, they took the offensive and invaded Germany. While they were winning victories over the foreign intruders, the Hussites were divided among themselves in regard to the extent to which the religious reformation should be carried. The radical party, called the Taborites, from the steep hill Tabor, 60 miles south of Prag, on which they built a city, rejected transubstantiation, the worship of saints, prayers for the dead, indulgences and priestly confession and renounced oaths, dances and other amusements. They admitted laymen, including women, to the office of preaching, and used the national tongue in all parts of the public service. Zizka, their first leader, held the sword in the spirit of one of the Judges. After his death, the stricter wing of the Taborites received the name of the Orphans.