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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  I asked, my mind lurching back through time, remembering countless business trips and late dinners and missed phone calls. “None!” he insisted indignantly. “I can’t do this with you,” I said. “I know what I read. Until you’re ready to come clean, I will not talk to you. If you won’t respect me by telling me the truth, I’ll have enough respect for myself not to listen to your lies.” With that, I walked back upstairs, my alarm growing with each step that I took without him trying to stop me or offer reasonable explanations. What surreal nightmare had I become ensnared in? Could I go to bed now and pretend this didn’t happen in the morning? I walked straight into our bathroom, which I locked behind me as I went through my night-time washing rituals. My life was exploding in pieces around me, but I was damned if I wasn’t going to floss and brush my teeth. By the time I came out, Michael was back on his side of the bed and I nudged Georgia into the middle so I could climb into my side. I lay there for what felt like hours, my heart pounding and my mind racing. This is our bed, I thought, and this is our child between us. This is our home, this is my husband, our son is asleep upstairs. What, really, had changed? All the physical pieces of our life were exactly the same, but now I was a foreigner in it. When I could no longer bear to hear him breathing across the bed from me, I tucked the blankets carefully around Georgia and slipped across the hall to her room, where I curled up in her canopy bed, her soft yellow blanket tucked under my chin. At the break of dawn, Michael came into the room. “Can I lie with you?” he asked. I wordlessly scooted over to the edge of the bed, pushing aside Georgia’s collection of stuffed animals to make room for him. “Can I hold you?” he asked. “No. Don’t touch me. And don’t stay unless you’re ready to tell me the truth.” “This isn’t helpful, Laura. You don’t need details,” he said. “You don’t get to decide anymore what I need. How long has this been going on? The truth Michael, please, I’m begging you. The truth.” I wondered if this was what insanity felt like, the evidence of his affair on spectacular display in front of me and yet he was saying there was nothing there. “This is not productive. If I tell you I had sex with her, that’s all you’ll focus on,” he said. “The sex is the least of it at this point. You fell in love with her! I need to understand how this happened. I feel like I’m going insane second-guessing my memories of our life together.

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  He continues to snore. “Mark,” I say again, this time more urgently, pressing on his shoulder. “Wake up!” “Oh hey,” he says sleepily, blinking his eyes open and smiling up at me. “Sorry, I must have fallen asleep.” “Yes, I see that. Your daughter is home,” I hiss at him. He continues to grin moonily at me, thanking me for letting him know. I remind him that he assured me she wouldn’t be home for hours. “I guess I was wrong,” he says simply, fueling my rage. “Yes, well do you remember that I suggested you check with her? She’s home and I was marching around the apartment completely naked,” I say indignantly. He laughs, reaching for his phone, and then says, “I don’t think she saw you. She would have texted me by now to yell at me if she did.” “OK, well, forget her for a minute, I jumped to get out of her line of sight and fell and broke my rib. Maybe multiple ribs.” He laughs again, which enrages me, so I continue, “I’m serious. It hurts to breathe and I’m in pain.” “So sorry,” he says. “I’m sure you’ll be fine.” Within seconds his eyes have fluttered closed and he is snoring again. I contemplate my options, desperately wanting to leave this apartment and be in my own bed, but it’s too late at night for me to attempt to get home. I lie flat on my back under the covers and pray that my ribs are just bruised and will feel better in the morning. #7’s breathing is a raggedy cacophony and his blissful dream state is an affront to me. I lie absolutely still, gently nudging him away whenever he attempts to throw an arm around me, focusing on shallowly breathing in and out to avoid disturbing my ribs. My heart is racing and I know sleep will not come to me; I’m angry at #7 and wounded and mad at myself for being here in the first place when my better instincts told me #7 was not for me. By the time daylight starts to gently streak its way across the room, his breathing has quieted and I finally drift off. I hear him move in his sleep and then feel the bed shift as he rises from it, but I am not ready to greet him or the day, so I stay still and feign sleep. I hear him move around the kitchen, banging cabinets open and closed as he makes coffee, and then the familiar and welcome sound of the coffee machine burbling. A few minutes later he climbs back into bed. I open my eyes to peek and see he’s got a mug of coffee and his iPad, so I try to fall asleep again.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  I pawned my doublet for thirty-eight shillings, and the man who has it will be bringing it back here any moment. I’m certain he’ll let us have it for thirty-five if we pay him right away.’ A heated discussion then ensued, which was still in full spate when someone interrupted them and made it clear to Angiulieri that Fortarrigo was the person who had taken his money, by informing him exactly how much he had lost, whereupon Angiulieri very nearly threw a fit and would have killed Fortarrigo there and then but for the fact that his fear of the law was greater than his fear of God. So he showered him with abuse, and, threatening to have him hanged by the neck or to see that he was forbidden on pain of death to return to Siena, he mounted his horse. Fortarrigo’s response to this torrent of vituperation was to behave as though it was being directed, not at himself, but at somebody else. And he said: ‘Come now, Angiulieri! We shan’t get anywhere by throwing these little tantrums. Let’s approach the matter sensibly: the fact is that we can have the doublet back for thirty-five shillings if we redeem it now, whereas if we wait for as much as a single day, he’ll insist on being paid the full thirty-eight, which is what he gave me for it. His only reason for making me this concession is that I wagered the money on his advice. Come on, now! Why should we turn down an opportunity to save three shillings?’ Angiulieri was now growing positively distraught, especially when he saw that he was being stared at suspiciously by all the people around him, who seemed to be under the impression, not that Fortarrigo had gambled away Angiulieri’s money, but that Angiulieri was still holding on to some of Fortarrigo’s. ‘What the hell do I care about your doublet?’ he yelled. ‘May you be hanged by the neck. Not only do you rob me and gamble away all my money, but you prevent me from leaving as well. And now you stand there making fun of me.’ Fortarrigo still persisted in acting as though Angiulieri’s words were meant for someone else, and said to him: ‘Ah, why do you want to make me forfeit the three shillings? Do you think I won’t let you have the money back again? Come on now, pay up like a true friend. Why are you in such a hurry? We can still reach Torrenieri 7 quite easily by nightfall. Go and find that purse of yours. I tell you I could never find another doublet that suited me as well as that one, not if I were to ransack the whole of Siena. And to think I let the fellow have it for thirty-eight shillings!

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘Madam,’ Ricciardo began, ‘if I were still in love with you, as I once was, I would not have the heart to tell you anything that might possibly bring you distress; but since my love for you is now a thing of the past, I shall have fewer misgivings in disclosing exactly what is afoot. I do not know whether Filippello ever took offence at my being in love with you, or whether he mistakenly thought that you reciprocated my love; at all events, he never gave me any such impression. But now, having waited perhaps until such time as he thought me least likely to suspect, he appears to be intent on doing me the same service as he doubtless fears I have done to him: in other words, he is having an affair with my wife. From what I have been able to discover, he has been courting her for some time with the utmost secrecy, sending her a number of messages, all of which she has referred to me; and she has been replying in accordance with my instructions. ‘But this very morning, before setting out from home to come here, I found my wife engaged in earnest conversation with some woman whom I instantly recognized for what she was, and so I called my wife and asked her what this person wanted, “It’s that brute of a Filippello,” she said. “By sending him replies and raising his hopes, you have encouraged him to pester me, and now he says he must know at all costs what I am proposing to do. He tells me that he could make arrangements for us to meet in secret at a bagnio3 in the city, and he refuses to take no for an answer. If it weren’t for the fact that you have forced me to lead him on in this way, for reasons best known to yourself, I would have taught him so painful a lesson that he would never have had the courage to look in my direction again” When I heard this, I felt that the fellow was going too far and was no longer to be tolerated, and it seemed to me that I should inform you about it, so that you might know how he rewards that unswerving fidelity of yours which once was almost the death of me. ‘Lest you were to imagine, however, that this was all a fairy story, and so as to let you see the whole thing for yourself if you so desired, I prevailed upon my wife to tell the woman, who was still waiting for her answer, that she would present herself at the bagnio tomorrow afternoon around nones, when everyone is asleep. And the woman went away, looking very pleased with herself.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  depraved women at night, and prayed naked. Despite the protests of a leading Gaulish bishop, Martin of Tours, they were executed – the first instance we have both of the slaughter of ‘heretics’ and of witch-hunting under Christian auspices. The episode aroused indignation, notably that of Ambrose, and provoked a reaction. But it did not end religious persecution in Spain; on the contrary, it was the beginning. Spain was already staging pogroms of Jews by the time Augustine became a bishop. And twenty years later we find him in correspondence with ferocious Spanish heresy-hunter, Paul Orosius, about the best means of winkling out heretics not only in Spain but at the other end of the Mediterranean in Palestine. Augustine changed the approach of orthodoxy to divergence in two fundamental ways. The first, with which we have already dealt, was the justification of constructive persecution: the idea that a heretic should not be expelled but, on the contrary, be compelled to recant and conform, or be destroyed – ‘Compel them to come in.’ His second contribution was in some ways even more sinister because it implied constructive censorship. Augustine believed that it was the duty of the orthodox intellectual to identify incipient heresy, bring it to the surface and expose it, and so force those responsible either to abandon their line of inquiry altogether or accept heretical status. These were the tactics Augustine employed against Pelagius and his followers. Augustine must have seen Pelagius briefly at the great confrontation in Carthage in 411, which Pelagius attended. But the men never met or conversed. They were roughly the same age and had gone to Rome – Pelagius from Britain – at almost the same time. But Pelagius had stayed there, a pious, well-educated layman, much in demand in high-born ascetic circles. He had many powerful supporters among the aristocracy and a number of rich, young and earnest followers. Basically, Pelagius was a reformer. Against the prevailing trend of his age, he looked back to Origen and the idea of Christianity as a great moral force changing and improving society, helping men to become more worthy, more socially useful and responsible. He thought the constricting force of the pagan social habits of the past could be removed. Christianity would become an active, ameliorative element not only among imperial citizens, but among the barbarians without, and the semi-barbarians within, its frontiers. Rich Christians should give away their money to the poor, set a good example, lead exemplary lives. Like Origen, he thought there was no such thing as a completely lost soul. The road to improvement was open to all. It was wrong to say:

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  It’s not that my sexual desire is so strong, though it certainly is, more that I feel like I have to get the first time knocked out and crossed off the list – I just have to make sure it happens. I’m no longer clear if that’s because it’s what I want or simply part of the persona I think I am supposed to inhabit. * That week, I make the dreaded annual pilgrimage to my gynecologist for a check-up and Pap smear. Sitting in the waiting room, I feel old and dried up in the midst of so much new life swelling and pulsing around me. This is a busy obstetrics and gynecology practice and I remind myself to find a new practice that offers just gynecology services and not obstetrics. There is nothing that can make you feel more depleted and deflated, emptied and flattened out and alone than sitting in a waiting room teeming with beautiful women literally bursting with life, who are being attended to by doting husbands. I stare at them openly, willing them to measure their abundance and plentitude against my brittle heart and hollow womb. My God, am I angry! I recognize the feeling of emptiness, and it’s not new, as my years of birthing are well behind me, but now that not just birthing but also marriage is behind me, I’m furious and resentful. Why should you get the golden ring, I wonder, and you and you and you, as I look from one woman to the next, when I lost mine? The doctor bustles into the room where I am sitting on an exam table wrapped in a pale yellow robe. Without taking her eyes off the chart she’s reading, she asks me how I am. “I’m fine,” I say sharply. She looks up at me then and asks if anything in my health has changed that she should know about. “Well, yes actually, quite a bit has changed. My husband and I separated and I’ve been dating a lot and sleeping with a lot of men. So that’s new.” She puts the chart on the counter and sits down on her rolling stool, eyeing me and asking how long I was married. She contemplates my answer and then asks, “How does a marriage just end after that many years together? My friends and I were talking about this recently, trying to figure out how one extricates oneself after so much time together.” “Oh it’s easy, you cheat on your spouse and reveal that you were never who your spouse thought you were to begin with,” I say matter-of-factly. Her eyes widen and she says, “I would kill him.” “Maybe. It’s hard to predict what you would do until it happens to you. I don’t want to kill him, I just want him to disappear forever.

• From Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988)

  The majority of humankind fell under their power, and only an exceptional few, like Socrates and Jesus, escaped demonically induced mental slavery. This invisible network of supernatural energies proceeded, then, to promote the fortunes of their henchmen. “Taking as their ally the desire for evil in everyone,” Justin explained, the demons became the patrons of powerful and ruthless men, and “instituted private and public rites in honor of those who are most powerful.”37 Justin saw the result at every turn—above all in the vast panoply of imperial propaganda, which claimed for the Roman emperors and their governors, magistrates, and armies the power and protection of the gods. The injustice that dominated the law courts indisputably proved, according to Justin, that they were controlled by demons, who manipulated the judges to destroy anyone, from Socrates and Jesus to the present-day Christians, who opposed the demons or threatened to expose them: And when Socrates attempted by true reason and investigation to … deliver men from the demons, then the demons themselves, using men as their instruments, brought upon him death for being an “atheist”; and in our case, too, they do the same things.38 What happened in Urbicus’s courtroom, where the judge protected the interests of a ruthless and immoral man while condemning a Christian teacher and his defenders to torture and death, revealed, Justin believed, this same demonic inversion of justice. As the historian Peter Brown says: For Justin and his contemporaries, the story of the mating of the angels with the daughters of men and its dire consequences for the peace of society was not a distant myth; it was a map on which they plotted the disruptions and tensions around them.39

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘Daughter,’ replied the friar, ‘all I can say is that he has taken an unpardonable liberty and carried things beyond all reasonable bounds, and you took the proper course in sending him off as you did. But I would implore you, since God has protected you from dishonour, that just as you have followed my advice on the two previous occasions, you should do so again this time. Do not, in other words, complain to any of your kinsfolk, but leave things to me, and I shall see whether I can restrain this headstrong devil, whom I had always thought of as such a saintly person. If I can succeed in taming the beast that possesses him, all well and good. If I can’t, then you have my blessing and my permission to follow your instinct and take whatever measures you consider most appropriate.’ ‘Very well, then,’ said the lady. ‘I have no wish to upset you, and therefore I shall follow your instructions just once more. But you’d better see that he takes care not to pester me again, because I promise you that if there’s any more of it, I shan’t be coming back to you.’ And without saying another word, she turned her back on the friar and strode away. She had hardly left the church when the gentleman arrived and was summoned by the friar, who drew him aside and gave him the fiercest scolding anyone ever had, calling him a disloyal traitor and a perjurer. Having twice previously had occasion to observe the eventual drift of these reprimands, the man was careful not to commit himself, but simply tried to wheedle an explanation out of the friar by interpolating ambiguous comments, his first words being: ‘Why are you creating such a fuss? Anyone would think I had crucified Christ.’ ‘For shame, you villain!’ exclaimed the friar. ‘Just listen to the man! He talks for all the world as if a year or two had passed, blotting out the memory of his wickedness and depravity. Can you have forgotten the offence you perpetrated in the short time that has elapsed since matins? Where were you this morning, a little before dawn?’ ‘I don’t recall where I was,’ replied the gentleman. ‘But it didn’t take you long to find out.’

• From Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988)

  In Jesus’ time, these urban Jewish communities were uneasily divided between those who accommodated pagan culture and accepted its political domination and those who resisted both pagan culture and politics. Once allies of the Romans, the Jews were now their subjects, and Judea had become a Roman province ruled by the puppet Jewish dynasty of Herod the Great for their pagan masters. Even those who resisted pagan culture had been deeply affected by it; yet they held to the customs that distinguished and separated them from their pagan neighbors. Many Jews, especially poorer ones, and those who lived in the rural villages where John and Jesus preached, detested the court of the Herods, with its luxurious entertainments and extravagant palaces, which the Herods sometimes named for the emperors but financed with heavy taxes, extortion, and bribes extracted from their fellow Jews. What angered these rural people especially was the way the Herods, neglecting Jewish tradition, courted and copied the Romans.2 Prince Herod Antipas, grandson of Herod the Great, had gone to Rome to be tutored by the same philosophers who tutored the prince Claudius, future emperor of Rome. The Jewish historian Josephus says that not long before Jesus’ birth, two thousand Jews had been crucified in his native Galilee for rebelling against Rome, leaving a forest of crosses littered with rotting corpses as a warning to others.3 Jesus himself, charged with treason against Rome, would one day suffer the same penalty. Especially among the poor, the pious, and the rural Jews, antipagan feeling ran deep; and it was among such people that Jesus found his following. Many Jews distrusted, too, their own religious leaders who served at the Jerusalem Temple, especially the powerful and wealthy men who surrounded the high priest, for their open collusion with the Roman occupiers. Members of Jewish communities responded to this situation in a variety of ways. The most popular sect, the Pharisees, bitterly criticized these leaders for having subverted the Temple,4 while some devout people went further and withdrew in protest from ordinary Jewish life. The Essenes, for example, during the first century B.C.E., abandoned Jerusalem, denounced the Temple worship as polluted, and formed a “pure” community in desert caves overlooking the Dead Sea. There they renounced private property to live in a monastic community; they observed the rules prescribed for holy war; and they avoided sexual contact and impure food, thoughts, and practices as they awaited the battle of Armageddon. They warned that on that day of judgment God himself would annihilate the hypocrites and evildoers and vindicate the Essenes as the righteous.

• From Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988)

  In his later life, Augustine had only contempt for those who regarded sexual desire as a natural energy which every person may express or sublimate—who held that one’s sexual impulses, in other words, are subject to one’s will. For Augustine, these assumptions were facile and contrary to his own experience. What he believed instead was that we are helpless to control sexual desire; that “this diabolical excitement of the genitals”43 arises in everyone, hideously out of control. Even in marriage he finds “boundless sloughs of lust and damnable craving.”44 If not for the restraints imposed by Christian marriage, “people would have intercourse indiscriminately, like dogs.” Julian calls sexual desire “vital fire”; but Augustine admonishes us: Behold the “vital fire” which does not obey the soul’s decision, but, for the most part, rises up against the soul’s desire in disorderly and ugly movements.45 Julian believes that Augustine confuses sexual excess with desire itself; we must, he says, choose how we express that desire. Augustine replies in anger: Who can control this when its appetite is aroused? No one! In the very movement of this appetite, then, it has no “mode” that responds to the decisions of the will.… What married man chooses that the appetite be aroused, except when needed? What honest celibate chooses that the appetite ever be aroused? Yet what he wishes he cannot accomplish.… In the very movement of the appetite, it has no mode corresponding to the decision of the will.46 Bitterly, Augustine adds: You say, “In the married, it is exercised honestly; in the chaste, it is restrained by virtue.” Is this your experience of it? … Indeed, since it is very pleasant, let the married effusively and impulsively seek each other whenever it titillates.… Let the union of bodies be legitimate wherever this, your “natural good,” spontaneously arises!47 Julian was evidently restrained in sexual matters, and probably had little experience of the passions Augustine describes. Yet Augustine’s question came from the heart, for the celibate Augustine was, by his own admission, insatiable, a man who never married and whose experience of sexual pleasure was illicit and guilt-provoking. Augustine assumes that frustrated desire is universal, infinite, and all-consuming. Julian, who had once—and probably briefly—been married to the daughter of a bishop, in a ceremony celebrated by a family friend as renewing the innocence of Adam and Eve, obviously wrote from a different kind of experience. For Julian, sexual desire is innocent, divinely blessed, and, once satisfied, entirely finite. Sexual desire, as Julian sees it, offers us the opportunity to exercise our capacity for moral choice. Augustine concludes that not only are we helpless in infancy, and defenseless against sexual passion, but we are equally helpless in the face of death. We die; therefore we must be guilty of sin. For if we are not all sinners, then God is unjust to let us all die alike, even infants prematurely born, who have had no opportunity to sin.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  himself or jointly, on one occasion, with the Pope. He punished bishops and bestowed privileges on religious establishments. His son, Henry III, showed himself zealous in reforming the Church and seems to have set no limit to his powers in ecclesiastical matters. As ‘head of the Church’, he presided in 1046 at Sutri over a synod which deposed two popes, secured the abdication of a third, and elected yet another. Three years later he, and the outstanding reforming pope, Leo IX, presided jointly over the innovatory Council of Mainz and again at the Council of Constance, where he is described as ‘ascending the steps of the altar together’ with Leo. Yet within a few decades the harmony which ruled Church and State, based on papal acceptance of the wider and superior status of the monarch, had been completely shattered. It was never restored. The pontifical king, Henry IV, found himself challenged by a regal pontiff, in the shape of Pope Gregory VII. The dispute began in the 1070s when Henry, who had succeeded as a minor, began to redress the erosion of the power which had taken place during his minority, and in particular to assert his full right to appoint bishops in imperial Italy. The Pope hotly denied his power to invest bishops with ring and staff, and the dispute quickly became a confrontation over the whole range of Church and State authority, culminating in the excommunication of Henry, his election of an anti-pope, open warfare, the king’s submission at Canossa, and then a long, inconclusive period of attrition. How did this come about? Why did the papacy abruptly attempt to reverse a situation which had at least the merit of tradition and feasibility? There can be little doubt that Gregory VII was the aggressor, in that Henry IV was merely doing what all his predecessors had done. Henry seems to have been a pious and earnest man – Ebo, the biographer of Otto, Bishop of Bamberg, says that Henry used his psalter so much that it became ‘wrinkled and almost unreadable’. But this was irrelevant: or, rather, it could be said that a pious emperor might be storing up trouble for his successors. The efforts of Conrad II, and especially Henry III, to improve standards in the Church, in Rome and elsewhere – their conscientious discharge of their pontifical duties – did a great deal to create a reformed body of clergy which promptly denied Henry IV the right to exercise such duties. The mid-eleventh century was a springtime for Europe. The worst phase of the Viking raids from the north, and the Saracens from the south, was over; western Christendom was no longer a sandwich about to be devoured between barbarous and infidel fangs, but an expanding society. The production of food was growing; so was population, and

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  him, to ensure that Theodore ‘introduced no Greek customs contrary to the true faith into England’. The big changes came in the first half of the eighth century. Byzantine power was in rapid retreat from Italy and all the western Mediterranean theatre – the Moslems pressing north, the Lombards south. The Popes stopped paying imperial taxes, flatly declined to follow Constantinople on the iconoclasm issue, and, from the 750s, turned north to the Frankish house of Pepin for protection. Pope Zacharias, who died in 752, was the last of the Greek Popes. Moreover, the creation of the Frankish connection, while ensuring the Pope’s security against the Lombards, local despots, and indeed Byzantium, robbed Rome of much of its freedom of action. The determined and clear-minded ecclesiastics who advised Charlemagne were bent on imposing unity on the West; it was part of their dream of a total Christian society. The king, for his part, saw the Church, and the Roman connection, as an instrument of State power and a cohesive force in an empire which was expanding rapidly. Universal agreement on ritual and doctrine was therefore essential. Right at the beginning of Charlemagne’s reign, in 769, Roman- style baptism, prayers and mass received the force of law; Roman practice was insisted on in regard to the manner of chanting, the administration of sacraments, and dress – down to the wearing of sandals. And, once Roman forms were adopted in Carolingian territories, the Popes lost the right to change them. A council was held at Nicea in 787 to heal the iconclastic split; the Pope sent legates, who agreed to the compromise. But there were no representatives from the western Church. Charlemagne denounced the outcome of the council, which he saw as an affront to his dignity, and the status of the western Church. He and his court priests produced the Libri Carolini, a violently anti-Greek diatribe, which presented the council findings as ‘stupid, arrogant, erroneous, criminal, schismatic and lacking in sense or eloquence . . . one filthy pond of Hell’. Charlemagne’s own copy survives: it includes exclamations of his approval (‘mire!’) which he ordered to be noted in the margins. The Franks not only denounced the council – which proved, not surprisingly, the last universal gathering of the Church – but drew attention to an emergent doctrinal difference between Latins and Greeks. This was the insertion, in the creed, of the Augustinian formulation filioque, emphasizing the full godhead of Christ by insisting that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Son as well as the Father. They brought this into the creed, which they now made standard and compulsory at all masses in Frankish territories. The papacy advised strongly against inserting filioque, since it

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  a framework of Christian unity. The issues were much more complicated. Erasmus had a modern kind of mind: in some ways this was an advantage in that it attuned him to progressive opinion in the wealthier cities and gave him a truly international following. He saw reform as an international movement coming from within the Church, and led by the élite. But to be modern minded was in some ways a disadvantage for it tended to make Erasmus gloss over the realities of power and the way things could actually be done. Luther, ‘the Goth’, the crude, earthy, but clever son of a successful tin-miner, was much closer to the thoughts of ordinary men of all classes, as opposed to intellectuals; and he was much clearer in his own mind about what forces and emotions moved men to action in the early sixteenth century, and which institutions carried weight. Broadly speaking, the rulers of the states favoured reforms of the Church, within limits, and according to their individual requirements. The papacy was opposed to reform because it was expensive in terms of revenues, and of the power that generates revenues. There was thus a clash of interests. But it could be resolved, and during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had been resolved, by the papacy continually handing over to the rulers, as we have seen, portions of its ecclesiastical sovereignty. The states were growing stronger in relation to the Church; and the papacy, to prevent itself from growing correspondingly weaker, was trying to build up its own states in central Italy as a power base. The process can be seen at work under Julius II, whom Luther, during a visit to Rome, denounced as ‘a blood-sucker’ and ‘a cruelly violent animal’. Maybe he was; but in preferring the role of a military commander and a king to that of a pontiff, he was following a certain line of logic. Before his election he had sworn a capitulation, repeated afterwards, that he would call a council within two years to conduct reforms. But in a universal council which he did not control, Julius realized he would be forced to dismantle much of the papacy’s money- raising machinery without getting anything in return. He preferred to do his own bilateral deals with princes with the object of restoring the papacy as a universal monarchy. Yet pressure from the French king, from the emperor, and from within the Church for a reforming council continued. In 1511, nine cardinals, the outstanding one being Carvajal, who had twice been papal legate in Germany, took the unusual (though not unprecedented) step of summoning a council themselves, after taking the advice of eminent jurists, and with the tacit support of Louis XII and the Emperor Maximilian. Julius responded vigorously by excommunicating and

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The movement which finally destroyed American slavery was religious in a number of different senses. It reflected a degree of extremism in the northern Christian sects. William Lloyd Garrison, a Baptist converted to activism by Quakers, who founded the Boston Public Liberator and Journal of the Times, wrote in its first issue: ‘I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. . . .’ Extremists on this issue had many links with revivalism, which gave it a nationwide platform and constituency. Then, too, the cause was watered with the blood of martyrs, especially by Elijah Lovejoy, murdered in Illinois in 1837 while defending his printing-press. (The printing-press had had a special symbolic significance in the minds of Anglo- Saxon Protestants since the sixteenth century, being equated with liberty and anti- papal propaganda.) Finally, there was the theology of abolition which, as one would expect, was primarily a moral theology. In 1845 Edward Beecher published a series of articles on what he termed the nation’s ‘organic sin’ of slavery, which invested the abolitionist cause with a whole series of evangelical insights, mostly ethical. Theology, but again of a moral nature, was the background to Uncle Tom’s Cabin which appeared seven years later, Harriet Beecher Stowe being the wife of a Congregationalist Old Testament professor, and a lay-theologian herself. The defence of the South was sociological rather than doctrinal. Nevertheless there was little internal opposition to slavery among white Southern Christians, and a notable closing of Christian ranks after the black preacher Nat Turner led the Virginia slave revolt of 1831, in which fifty-seven whites were killed. Revivalism, which in the North was used to strengthen the mass following of abolition, was put to exactly the opposite use in the South, where it was, if anything, more powerful. The South Carolina Baptist Association produced a biblical defence of slavery in 1822, and in 1844 John England, Bishop of Charleston, provided a similar one for Southern white Catholics. There were standard biblical texts on negro inferiority, patriarchal and Mosaic acceptance of servitude, and of course St Paul on obedience to masters. Both sides could, and did, hurl texts at each other. In fact revivalism, and the evangelical movement generally, played into the hands of extremists on both sides. Of course, it could be argued that the slavery issue could just as easily have split the Christian movement in the first century AD, if it had not been side-stepped by Paul; his evasions – so the argument might continue – made it possible for the issue still to be unresolved in the nineteenth century. But the answer to this was that the bulk of

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  PART FOUR The Total Society and its Enemies (1054–1500) ‘A NTIQUITY RELATES that laymen show a spirit of hostility towards the clergy,’ wrote Pope Boniface VIII in 1296, ‘and it is clearly proved by the experience of the present time.’ Having uttered this melancholy reflection, in his bull Clericis laicos, Boniface went on to make a number of pronouncements calculated to ensure that the warfare continued. Clerics were not to pay taxes; those who did so, and secular officials who collected the money from them, were to be excommunicated. Universities who defended the practice of clerical taxation were to be placed under interdict; and those under sentence of excommunication or interdict were not be absolved, except at the moment of death, without the express authority of the papacy. Four years after this bellicose pronouncement, he issued a further one, Unam Sanctam, which attempted to define the claims of his caste. Christianity, he wrote, provides for two swords, the spiritual and the temporal: ‘Both are in the power of the church, the spiritual sword and the material. But the latter is to be used for the church, the former by her; the former by the priest, the latter by kings and captains but at the will and by the permission of the priest. The one sword, therefore, should be under the other, and temporal authority subject to spiritual. . . . If, therefore, the earthly power err, it shall be judged by the spiritual power. . . . But if the spiritual power err, it can only be judged by God, not by man. . . . For this authority, though given to a man and exercised by a man, is not human, but rather divine. . . . Furthermore, we declare, state, define and pronounce that it is altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to

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  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. In Cologne, the Catholic humanist George Cassander put forward, in the 1560s, the idea of Fundamental Articles: ‘In essentials, unity; in inessentials, liberty; in everything, charity.’ Protestants used Catholic works, such as Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ, and works by Melanchthon, Bucer and even Calvin circulated in Catholic countries; but in virtually every case the name of the author was suppressed and the books were edited. Below the surface, we can detect a ‘third force’ at work. To some extent it was connected with the Renaissance discoveries of lost texts and especially the cabalistic and Hermetic philosophies. This led to the belief, quite common among sixteenth- century liberal intellectuals, that there was a complete and final system of knowledge to be discovered, which embraced all the arts and sciences, and revolved around Christianity. When, in due course, this system was completely unveiled, it would

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  The greatest in history. The holiest. It is in the profoundest and truest sense a Holy War . . . . Yes, it is Christ, the king of righteousness, who calls us to grapple in deadly strife with this unholy and blasphemous power.’ The Reverend Courtland Meyers preached in Boston: ‘If the Kaiser is a Christian, the devil in Hell is a Christian, and I am an atheist.’ Newell Dwight Hillis, minister of the Brooklyn Plymouth church, advocated a plan for ‘exterminating the German people... the sterilisation of 10 million German soldiers and the segregation of the women’. Henry B. Wright, the evangelical YMCA director, and former Professor of Divinity at Yale, assured soldiers with qualms about bayonet drill that he could ‘see Jesus himself sighting down a gun- barrel and running a bayonet through an enemy’s body’. Albert C. Dieffenbach, Unitarian, also thought Christ would ‘do the work of deadliness against that which is the most deadly enemy of his Father’s Kingdom in a thousand years’. Shailer Mathews, of the Chicago Divinity School, thought a conscientious objector should be spared persecution,’provided he does not speak with a German accent’, but added that ‘for an American to refuse his share in the present war... is not Christian’. Organized Christianity in America did at least attempt to retrieve some ethical results from the débâcle by demanding peace terms which conformed to Christian principles. In his book Christian Ethics in the World War (1918), W. Douglas MacKenzie, of the Hartford Seminary Foundation, ‘Christianized’ the conflict as a campaign against German militarism, and argued that a Christian outcome would be the replacement of the nation state by the League of Nations. The League, indeed, was the way out of the dilemma which the war posed for Christians. Christianity had been powerless to stop the war, or to shorten it, or to mitigate the ‘frightfulness’, or to prevent both sides – with scarcely a dissenting clerical voice – from invoking the aid of the same God. But at least Christianity could be identified with the peace-solution. This was the spirit in which Woodrow Wilson came to Versailles, as John Maynard Keynes noted at the time: ‘... if the President was not the philosopher-king, what was he? . . . The clue, once found, was illuminating. The President was like a Nonconformist minister . . . His thought and his temperament were essentially theological . . . He had no plan, no scheme, no constructive ideas whatever for clothing with the flesh of life the commandments he had thundered from the White House. He could have preached a sermon on any of them, or have addressed a stately prayer to the Almighty for their fulfilment, but he could not frame their concrete application to the actual state of Europe.’ Nor, as it turned out, could Christian

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  Describing the yoke fell to the lot of Blaise Pascal, who found an uneasy relish in Jansen’s huge and baleful pessimism. He was born in 1623, a hard, grasping Auvergnat, the son of a mathematician and government tax-collector. All the Pascals were fierce, aggressive, quarrelsome, arrogant, litigious and desperately clever. By the age of twenty-two, he had constructed a workable calculating machine; and he also experimented with vacuums and atmospheric pressure, and used gambling to work out theories of probability. He was the same generation as Locke but rejected the Royal Society type of attitude to religious experience. Why? Primarily because, while in Locke’s England Zealotry was not only unfashionable but seen as dangerous and antisocial, in Pascal’s France it was just coming into vogue among Catholics. His case suggests that even great minds are prisoners of their environment. For Pascal was a wonderful controversial writer, clear, profound, wise and savagely witty. Born a century later, he might have rivalled Voltaire in demolishing organized religion. As it was, he underwent the type of religious ‘change’ which transformed Englishmen of the previous generation, like Milton and Cromwell. In 1654, while reading the New Testament, he had a weird emotional experience; this was confirmed, two years later, when his little goddaughter, dying of a lacrymal fistula, was cured by an eccentric relic-collector, who touched her with a supposed thorn of Christ. Thus Pascal, who had the talents of a sensational journalist, became a propagandist on behalf of Jansenist Port-Royal, where his sister was a leading inmate. He used the batteries of rationalist ridicule to expose the verbosity and meaninglessness of the Thomists, who still flourished at the Sorbonne, and the immorality of the Jesuits and their system of casuistry. His Provincial Letters had to be printed secretly, under a pseudonym, but they sold 10,000 copies each, and were read by over a million. Bossuet, the orthodox Gallican court-preacher, said he would rather have written them than any other book. Yet Pascal did not use rationalist techniques to advance the cause of reason; on the contrary. What he really disliked in the Jesuits was their lack of religion, as he understood it. He grew more angry, as he went on, at a system which tried to reconcile Catholicism with the hateful court of Louis XIV; it seemed to him worldliness and atheism masquerading as a faith. (In his last years he became convinced the Pope was wrong, and in heresy; but he did not press the point as he was wearying of controversy.) He wanted Christianity to preserve its original character – austere, harsh, almost scandalous in its rejection of earthly norms. In short, like Tertullian, he moved to a position where he saw Christian truth as

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  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. 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

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  Roman pontiff can and should reconcile and harmonize himself with progress, with liberalism, and with recent civilization’. The Syllabus was received with astonishment, not to say incredulity by many non- Catholics, and with dismay by liberal Catholics (and a number of bishops). Some governments, notably those of France, Austria and Bavaria, feared that it might be invested with full dogmatical authority at any forthcoming council. There was some attempt, on the part of those Catholics who thought it both theologically possible and socially essential, for the Church to adjust to the modern world, to organize opposition and put the brakes on the headlong progress to triumphalism. Among the leading English laity, the liberal historian Lord Acton, who had extensive academic and political contacts on the Continent, went on a tour of European state archives in the years 1864–8, which awoke him to what he termed ‘the vast tradition of conventional mendacity’, including the willingness of a triumphalist papacy to employ lying and violence to further essentially secular policies. In his travels he was able to consult with the critical Catholic element, especially in Germany. In France, too, Montalembert now became convinced that the ultramontanism he had once vigorously sponsored had been perverted to transform the Pope into a theological monster, what he termed ‘a papal Louis XIV’. But it would be an error to suppose these opposition elements were significant either in numbers or influence. In Britain, the Catholic Church, for all practical purposes, was wholly controlled by Cardinal Manning, the most ardent of triumphalists; in France, the liberals were in a tiny minority – Montalembert’s Correspondent was a monthly selling only 3,000 copies. In 1867, Pius summoned another gathering to Rome, to celebrate the eighteenth centenary of the great pontifical feast of SS Peter and Paul. This time over 500 bishops attended, with 20,000 priests and 150,000 lay-pilgrims. Finally, the invitations to the council went out. W. G. Ward, who had greeted the publication of the Syllabus with noisy approval, and who used to say ‘I should like to have a fresh papal bull to read every morning with my breakfast’, not only assumed that papal infallibility would be declared dogmatic, but publicly expressed the hope that it would be defined as widely as possible, that is, to include papal letters and encyclicals. A new Jesuit publication, the Civilita Cattolica, published in Rome and believed to be the semi-official organ of Vatican opinion, went further: in an attack on French progressives, it divided the faithful ‘into two parties – one, simply Catholics, the other those who call themselves liberal Catholics’; the latter were not really Catholics