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)

  Puddle glanced at the new gold watch on her wrist; it had been a Christmas present from Stephen. ‘It’s past ten o’clock—I think I’ll turn in.’ ‘Do. Why not? I hope Adèle’s filled your hot water bottle; she’s rather light-headed over her Jean.’ ‘Never mind, I can fill it myself,’ smiled Puddle. She went, and Stephen sat on by the fire with her eyes half closed and her lips set firmly. She must put away all these thoughts of the past and compel herself to think of the future. This brooding over things that were past was all wrong; it was futile, weak-kneed and morbid. She had her work, work that cried out to be done, but no more unworthy books must be written. She must show that being the thing she was, she could climb to success over all opposition, could climb to success in spite of a world that was trying its best to get her under. Her mouth grew hard; her sensitive lips that belonged by rights to the dreamer, the lover, took on a resentful and bitter line which changed her whole face and made it less comely. At that moment the striking likeness of her father appeared to have faded out of her face. Yes, it was trying to get her under, this world with its mighty self-satisfaction, with its smug rules of conduct, all made to be broken by those who strutted and preened themselves on being what they considered normal. They trod on the necks of those thousands of others who, for God knew what reason, were not made as they were; they prided themselves on their indignation, on what they proclaimed as their righteous judgments. They sinned grossly; even vilely at times, like lustful beasts—but yet they were normal! And the vilest of them could point a finger of scorn at her, and be loudly applauded. ‘God damn them to hell!’ she muttered. Along in the kitchen there was singing again. The young men’s voices rose tuneful and happy, and with them blended Adèle’s young voice, very sexless as yet, like the voice of a choirboy. Stephen got up and opened the door, then she stood quite still and listened intently. The singing soothed her over-strained nerves as it flowed from the hearts of these simple people. For she did not begrudge them their happiness; she did not resent young Jean with his Adèle, or Pierre who had done a man’s work in his time, or Pauline who was often aggressively female. Bitter she had grown in these years since Morton, but not bitter enough to resent the simple.

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

  Eleutherius, a son of bishop Arsenius (the legate of Nicolas), carried away the pope’s daughter (an old maid of forty years, who was engaged to another man), fled to the emperor Louis, and, when threatened with punishment, murdered both the pope’s wife and daughter. He was condemned to death. This affair might have warned the popes to have nothing to do with women; but it was succeeded by worse scenes. John VIII. was an energetic, shrewd, passionate, and intriguing prelate, meddled with all the affairs of Christendom from Bulgaria to France and Spain, crowned two insignificant Carolingian emperors (Charles the Bald, 875, and Charles the Fat, 881), dealt very freely in anathemas, was much disturbed by the invasion of the Saracens, and is said to have been killed by a relative who coveted the papal crown and treasure. The best thing he did was the declaration, in the Bulgarian quarrel with the patriarch of Constantinople, that the Holy Spirit had created other languages for worship besides Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, although he qualified it afterwards by saying that Greek and Latin were the only proper organs for the celebration of the mass, while barbarian tongues such as the Slavonic, may be good enough for preaching. His violent end was the beginning of a long interregnum of violence. The close of the ninth century gave a foretaste of the greater troubles of the tenth. After the downfall of the Carolingian dynasty the popes were more and more involved in the political quarrels and distractions of the Italian princes. The dukes Berengar of Friuli (888–924), and Guido of Spoleto (889–894), two remote descendants of Charlemagne through a female branch, contended for the kingdom of Italy and the imperial crown, and filled alternately the papal chair according to their success in the conflict. The Italians liked to have two masters, that they might play off one against the other. Guido was crowned emperor by Stephen VI. (V.) in February, 891, and was followed by his son, Lambert, in 894, who was also crowned. Formosus, bishop of Portus, whom John VIII. had pursued with bitter animosity, was after varying fortunes raised to the papal chair, and gave the imperial crown first to Lambert, but afterwards to the victorious Arnulf of Carinthia, in 896. He roused the revenge of Lambert, and died of violence. His second successor and bitter enemy, Stephen VII. (VI.), a creature of the party of Lambert, caused his corpse to be exhumed, clad in pontifical robes, arraigned in a mock trial, condemned and deposed, stripped of the ornaments, fearfully mutilated, decapitated, and thrown into the Tiber. But the party of Berengar again obtained the ascendency; Stephen VII. was thrown into prison and strangled (897). This was regarded as a just punishment for his conduct towards Formosus. John IX. restored the character of Formosus.

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

  declared its agreement with the six oecumenical councils, and the lawfulness of invoking the blessed Virgin and saints. It denounced all religious representations by painter or sculptor as presumptuous, pagan and idolatrous. Those who make pictures of the Saviour, who is God as well as man in one inseparable person, either limit the incomprehensible Godhead to the bounds of created flesh, or confound his two natures, like Eutyches, or separate them, like Nestorius, or deny his Godhead, like Arius; and those who worship such a picture are guilty of the same heresy and blasphemy. The eucharist alone is the proper image of Christ. A three-fold anathema was pronounced on the advocates of image-worship, even the great John of Damascus under the name of Mansur, who is called a traitor of Christ, an enemy of the empire, a teacher of impiety, and a perverter of the Scriptures. The acts of the Synod were destroyed except the decision (o{ro") and a brief introduction, which are embodied and condemned in the acts of the second Nicene Council.542 The emperor carried out the decree with great rigor as far as his power extended. The sacred images were ruthlessly destroyed and replaced by white-wash or pictures of trees, birds, and animals. The bishops and clergy submitted; but the monks who manufactured the pictures, denounced the emperor as a second Mohammed and heresiarch, and all the iconoclasts as heretics, atheists and blasphemers, and were subjected to imprisonment, flagellation, mutilation, and all sorts of indignities, even death. The principal martyrs of images during this reign (from 761–775) are Petrus Kalabites (i.e. the inhabitant of a hut, kaluvbh), Johannes, Abbot of Monagria, and Stephanus, Abbot of Auxentius, opposite Constantinople (called "the new Stephanus," to distinguish him from the proto-martyr). The emperor made even an attempt to abolish the convents.543 § 102. The Restoration of Image-Worship by the Seventh Oecumenical Council, 787. Leo IV., called Chazarus (775–780), kept up the laws against images, though with more moderation. But his wife Irene of Athens distinguished for beauty, talent, ambition and intrigue, was at heart devoted to image-worship, and after his death and during the minority of her son Constantine VI. Porphyrogenitus, labored with shrewdness and perseverance for its restoration (780–802). At first she proclaimed toleration to both parties, which she afterwards denied to the iconoclasts. She raised the persecuted monks to the highest dignities, and her secretary, Tarasius, to the patriarchal throne of Constantinople, with the consent of Pope Hadrian, who was willing to overlook the irregularity of the sudden election of a layman in prospect of his services to orthodoxy. She removed the iconoclastic imperial guard, and replaced it by one friendly to her views. But the crowning measure was an oecumenical council, which alone could set aside the authority of the iconoclastic council of 754. Her first attempt to hold such a council at Constantinople in 786 completely failed. The second attempt, owing to more careful preparations, succeeded.

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

  The photo mystifies my friends, from whom I receive a litany of texts ranging from, “I hope you’re OK, you look miserable” to “Has he kidnapped you and is he holding you hostage?” to “It looks like that hold he’s got on you is very tight.” Daisy texts me and asks, “I’m confused by this photo, are things good now between you and Dad?” I’m furious that he feels he has a right to me and that for the sake of my kids, I really have no choice but to play along. When the fair ends, Georgia and her friends run around the classroom while the other moms and I sweep up cake crumbs. Georgia suddenly runs headfirst into me, pressing her face against my stomach, tears dampening my shirt. “I heard the other kids talking about me. They called me bossy,” she sobs. “Well sometimes you are a little bossy. It’s OK, love,” I say. Her small body heaves as she wraps her arms tightly around me. She is a proud child who doesn’t like to show feelings of sadness so I know she must be really upset to have unraveled like this. She presses her face even deeper into my stomach until Tina gently pulls her onto her lap so that I can finish cleaning up. She weeps and Tina strokes her hair. I know that she would never get this upset about her friends, that her grief at seeing me and Michael together, at having us in the same room but about to go our separate ways again, is more than she can bear. She looks small and piteous as the black and white eye make-up we painted on earlier streaks down her face. When we all leave the building together en masse, I give her a hug and wave goodbye as she stands forlornly, holding Michael’s hand. It is Saturday night, her night to stay with him. I have to let her go, even though my maternal instinct urges me to take her home, help her get cleaned up and curl into bed with her while we accept that this is how it is now, even though sometimes it’s hard and often it physically hurts. I have to let Michael adopt this role too, learn how to be a nurturer. I know his love for Georgia is deep and abiding, but that he’s usually played the role of fun uncle. If I take over every time the going gets tough for her, he will never learn how to be there for her in all circumstances. Ultimately it is best for her and best for him if they wade through these murky waters together without me. The only person it’s not best for is me, who has never viewed motherhood as a walk-on role. I have to let Michael be Georgia’s father. It does not devastate me to let him in, but it does devastate me to walk away.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  The bath over, and Stephen garbed in her nightgown, a long pause would ensue, known as: ‘Waiting for Mother,’ and if mother, for some reason, did not happen to arrive, the pause could be spun out for quite twenty minutes, or for half an hour even, if luck was with Stephen, and the nursery clock not too precise and old-maidish. ‘Now come on, say your prayers;’ Mrs. Bingham would order, ‘and you’d better ask the dear Lord to forgive you—impious I calls it, and you a young lady! Carrying on because you can’t be a boy!’ Stephen would kneel by the side of the bed, but in such moods as these her prayers would sound angry. The nurse would protest: ‘Not so loud, Miss Stephen! Pray slower, and don’t shout at the Lord, He won’t like it!’ But Stephen would continue to shout at the Lord in a kind of impotent defiance. CHAPTER 7 1 S oon after the departure of Mademoiselle Duphot, there occurred two distinct innovations at Morton. Miss Puddleton arrived to take possession of the schoolroom, and Sir Philip bought himself a motor-car. The motor was a Panhard, and it caused much excitement in the neighbourhood of Upton-on-Severn. Conservative, suspicious of all innovations, people had abstained from motors in the Midlands, and, incredible as it now seems to look back on, Sir Philip was regarded as a kind of pioneer. The Panhard was a high-shouldered, snub-nosed abortion with a loud, vulgar voice and an uncertain temper. It suffered from frequent fits of dyspepsia, brought about by an unhealthy spark-plug. Its seats were the very acme of discomfort, its primitive gears unhandy and noisy, but nevertheless it could manage to attain to a speed of about fifteen miles per hour—given always that, by God’s good grace and the chauffeur’s, it was not in the throes of indigestion. Anna felt doubtful regarding this new purchase. She was one of those women who, having passed forty, were content to go on placidly driving in their broughams, or, in summer, in their charming little French victorias. She detested the look of herself in large goggles, detested being forced to tie on her hat, detested the heavy, mannish coat of rough tweed that Sir Philip insisted she must wear when motoring. Such things were not of her; they offended her sense of the seemly, her preference for soft, clinging garments, her instinct for quiet, rather slow, gentle movements, her love of the feminine and comely. For Anna at forty-four was still slender, and her dark hair, as yet, was untouched with grey, and her blue Irish eyes were as clear and candid as when she had come as a bride to Morton. She was beautiful still, and this fact rejoiced her in secret, because of her husband.

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

  I can’t even bring myself to look straight at him yet, unable to have anything more than a halting conversation while my eyes frantically dart and roam so they’ll land anywhere but on him. It was here in this house, where we come to escape our hectic city lives two hours away and spend quality family time, that I discovered that Michael was not only sleeping with a woman I knew, but also that he had been contemplating divorcing me to be with her. Over the course of our many years together he and I had discussed the concept of infidelity and I had always maintained that I thought I had it in me to understand and forgive a one-night stand; anything more, no way. The exposition of his affair had brought me to my knees – he wasn’t just with her physically, he had fallen in love with her and in the process had fallen out of love with me and our life together. However, my “no way” is not so easy to sustain now that it’s a reality and I’m actually facing down the violation, not just the vague idea of what it might feel like. Our lives are inextricably linked; we share kids and friends and two homes and a dentist and a Netflix account. We were together from such a young age that he still remembers when I had the blemished skin of an acne-prone teenager and I vividly recall the layout of his childhood room before his stepmother threw out his tennis trophies and Andre Agassi posters to transform the room into a den. I was with him when first his father and then his mother died of cancer. Just a couple of years ago, I nursed his mother during the last month of her life, breaking it to her that she was too ill for further medical treatments when Michael could not find the courage to tell her himself. He is my partner, my co-parent, my best friend, my family – family being a concept that apparently only I had believed to be unalterable and essential. I hate him for how he’s hurt me and our kids, but I’m not ready to throw in the towel on our marriage and I don’t know if I have it in me to be alone. For over thirty years, I have continuously had a boyfriend or husband, moving from one to the next as if an interruption in the sequence would be fatal. I have no evidence to the contrary and cling to the notion I was raised on: any man is better than no man at all. Michael, in turn, believes our marriage can be revived, albeit with sweeping changes. Instead of crawling back to me as I had expected, he’s infuriated with me, as if I caused him to have an affair and am now being uncooperative in our recovery.

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

  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. It’s not for the weak, sustaining this,” I say shrugging, my voice tight. “OK, and tell me what you’ve been up to. You’re having sex, are you using condoms?” she asks. “Yes, for the most part. I’m not going to lie and tell you I’ve used a condom every time, and now that I’m exclusive with one man, we aren’t using condoms.” She jots down notes in my chart and says she will do a full STD screening just to be on the safe side. I suggest that while she’s at it, she also check for a UTI as I think I may have one. “I’ll run a test, but in the meantime I’m going to start you on an antibiotic so it doesn’t get worse. I’m sure you do have one with the amount of sexual activity you’re having,” she says. She is direct and forthright, which is fine, but is she judging me?

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

  The rule of auricular confession Wyclif also disparaged. True contrition of heart is sufficient for the removal of sins. In Christ’s time confession of man to man was not required. In his own day, he said, "shrift to God is put behind; but privy (private) shrift, a new-found thing, is authorized as needful for the soul’s health." He set forth the dangers of the confessional, such as the unchastity of priests. He also spoke of the evils of pilgrimages when women and men going together promiscuously were in temptation of great "lecherie."593 Clerical celibacy, a subject the Reformer seldom touched upon, he declared, when enforced, is against Scripture, and as under the old law priests were allowed to marry, so under the new the practice is never forbidden, but rather approved. Straight truth-telling never had a warmer champion than Wyclif. Addressing the clergy, he devotes nearly a hundred pages of his Truth of Scripture to an elaboration of this principle. Not even the most trifling sin is permissible as a means of averting a greater evil, either for oneself or one’s neighbor. Under no circumstances does a good intention justify a falsehood. The pope himself has no right to tolerate or practice misrepresentation to advance a good cause. To accomplish a good end, the priest dare not even make a false appeal to fear. All lying is of itself sin, and no dispensation can change its character.594 The friars called forth the Reformer’s keenest thrusts, and these increased in sharpness as he neared the end of his life. Quotations, bearing on their vices, would fill a large volume. Entire treatises against their heresies and practices issued from his pen. They were slavish agents of the pope’s will; they spread false views of the eucharist; they made merchandise of indulgences and letters of fraternity which pretended to give the purchasers a share in their own good deeds here and at the final accounting. Their lips were full of lies and their hands of blood. They entered houses and led women astray; they lived in idleness; they devoured England.595 The Reformer had also a strong word to say on the delusion of the contemplative life as usually practised. It was the guile of Satan that led men to imagine their fancies and dreamings were religious contemplation and to make them an excuse for sloth. John the Baptist and Christ both left the desert to live among men. He also went so far as to demand that monks be granted the privilege of renouncing the monkish rule for some other condition where they might be useful.596

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

  As I walk home after the appointment, I call #5. He asks me how it was and I tell him I’m fine minus an infection. I barely have the words out before he announces definitively that the infection is not from him because he doesn’t have any diseases. “Neither do I. It’s an infection. Women get them all the time. I don’t even know for sure if I have one. Anyway, thanks for your concern,” I say sarcastically. A few days later, he calls as I leave the nail salon with freshly painted bright pink fingernails, asking me my plans for the evening since Georgia is with Michael. When I tell him that I am going to dinner with my friend Danny, an old college friend, he sounds dejected. “I’m disappointed. I was going to come downtown and surprise you, take you out,” he says. I thank him, but since I’ve had these plans for a while I don’t offer to change them. “I find it a little odd that you’re having dinner with a man I’ve never heard about and that you didn’t tell me sooner,” he says. It’s not odd at all as I have a lot of friends he doesn’t know about yet, but he continues, “I don’t believe that men and women can be platonic friends because it’s impossible to be attracted to someone as a friend and not eventually be curious about what else could be there.” “Is this one of those moments in which you’re arguing with me for argument’s sake or are you serious?” I say. He replies immediately that he is serious and reiterates that he doesn’t like that I have these dinner plans. “Oh wow. Listen, I’m not someone who gets jealous easily and I’ve never been with a man who gets jealous, and I don’t like that I feel defensive when all I’m doing is having dinner with a very old friend,” I say. “I’m not jealous at all,” he says. “I’m calling you out on the fact that this is not just a friend.” “I don’t think this is going to work between us,” I say, coldly and abruptly. “It feels like we are fundamentally too different to be together.” “I’m hurt,” he says quietly. “I really like you.” Neither of us says anything for a long, awkward moment. “Let me come downtown and take you to dinner,” he says. “Tell your friend you’ll see him another night. I had a nice surprise planned for you.” “No,” I say firmly. “I’m not changing my plans. If you don’t trust me, I don’t want to see you again.” “I’m sorry,” he says evenly. “I get hot-headed sometimes. I do trust you. Give me another chance?” I tell him that I’m too frustrated to talk further and hang up the phone. * The next day, I have to acknowledge that the relentless itchy sensation I feel is likely a yeast infection. Back to the gynecologist I go, tail between my legs.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  It was, actually, not a two-way but a three-way argument, with a God-worshiper or pagan sympathizer between Paul and his fellow Jews. Here Paul does have a valid apologetic point and not just an invalid polemical point. What the God-worshiper does could very well be described as works before faith rather than works from faith. You, Paul would have said to that God-worshiper, are lost between worlds, are working not from pagan faith, from Jewish faith, or from Christian faith. You may be working merely from religious superstition or social association. And there certainly would be a polemical hint from Paul that any opposing Jews might be doing the same. In any case, and even without that last element, Paul’s fellow Jews would be understandably furious at his territorial invasion, stripping from them the safety and security of a buffer group of female and male sympathizers crucially important in either a popular pogrom or an official persecution. Paul’s antithesis of faith versus works stands on that delicate interface between valid apologetic argument from a Christian to a God-worshiper and invalid polemical argument from a Jew to a fellow Jew. Law, Sin, and Death FROM LAW TO SIN. In both Galatians and Romans Paul uses three expressions more or less synonymously, and always negatively, with all three opposed to faith. We have just seen the first term, works, in some detail. The second term is law, as in, for example, Galatians 3:12, “The law does not rest on faith,” or Romans 10:5–6, “righteousness that comes from the law…righteousness that comes from faith.” The third expression is works of the law in, say, Galatians 2:16 (thrice) or works prescribed by the law in Romans 3:28. Why does Paul create this opposition between law and faith especially since, in those same two letters, Paul can speak positively of “the law of Christ” in Galatians 6:2, “the law of faith” in Romans 3:27, and “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus” in Romans 8:2. Also, “The whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” in Galatians 5:14 and, twice, “love is the fulfilling of the law” in Romans 13:8–10. Is Jewish “law” bad but Christian “law” good? What, for Paul, is wrong with law? Or, from our contemporary point of view, if life under law is so good for sociopolitical life, how can it be so bad for religio-political life? First of all, by law Paul means all law, not just Jewish law but Roman law, not just human law but divine law. So what is wrong with all law for Paul? The specific criticism is found in Romans rather than Galatians. Here is the key verse: “The law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation” (4:15; read 5:13; 7:5, 7, 8).

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Augustine saw in Pelagius a form of arrogance, a rebellion against an inscrutable Deity by an undue stress on man’s powers. To Augustine, the duty of man was to obey God’s will, as expressed through his Church. He wrote: ‘Give what thou commandest, and command what thou wilt.’ He noted, significantly, that Pelagius ‘could not endure these words of mine’. And then, Jerome prompted him – a characteristic touch this – had not Pelagius, ‘that corpulent dog, weighed down with Scotch porridge’, denied original sin? To Augustine, original sin was important not so much for its own sake but because it influenced the theory of baptism, which to any African, involved in the Donatist affair, was a crucial test of orthodoxy. As a matter of fact it is hard to discover when, before Augustine, the Church had accepted original sin as a matter of faith. Tertullian had used the phrase (it was, indeed, a very African concept) but had specifically denied that children were born in sin. Since then, the practice of infant baptism had become common, and was tending to be general. Once Augustine concentrated on the baptismal point, he seems to have become determined to drive Pelagius and his followers out of the Church, or enforce from them an abject submission. It is not even clear that Pelagius opposed infant baptism; as always with men branded as heretics, only snatches of his works survive, embedded in refutations of them. It was his disciple Caelestius who first appears to have raised the baptismal point, and he insisted, under pressure, that the issue was a matter simply for debate: ‘On the subject of original sin and its transmission, I have already asserted that I have heard many persons of acknowledged position in the Catholic Church deny it altogether; and on the other hand many affirm it; it may fairly indeed be deemed a matter for inquiry, but not a heresy. I have always maintained that infants require baptism. What else does he want?’ What Augustine wanted was what he had already obtained in the case of the Donatists, absolute condemnation followed by total submission – monitored by State enforcement. He did not want discussion. ‘Far be it from the Christian rulers of the earthly commonwealth that they should harbour any doubt on the ancient Christian faith . . . certain and firmly-grounded on this faith they should, rather, impose on such men as you are fitting discipline and punishment.’ And again: ‘Those whose wounds are hidden should not for that reason be passed over in the doctor’s treatment. . . . They are to be taught; and in my opinion this can be done with the greatest ease when the teaching of truth is aided by the fear of severity.’ Thus Augustine hunted Pelagius and his followers. He had them condemned twice in Africa.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The great African Church radiating from Carthage was ultimately lost because of fatal divisions over the sacramental powers of bishops. Syria and the East, and much else, were lost because no compromise proved possible, or rather durable, over the definition of the Trinity and the nature of Christ. Byzantium came to grief, and European Christianity remained divided, because East and West could not agree on an institutional means to resolve their comparatively trivial points of difference. Christ had founded a universalist Church which would be all things to all men. But it was also a Church with an intense vision, which bred adamantine certitudes. The more the vision was realized, the stronger the certitudes became, the less likely it would be that universality would be based on unity. The Augustinian idea of an authoritarian, compulsory and total Church was incompatible with the ecumenical spirit. Hence the attempt to give it substance in Carolingian times led inevitably to the split with the East. We shall now see how the Augustinian drive within the western Church proved too powerful for its unifying bonds, and how it smashed the Christian society into fragments. PART FOURThe Total Society and its Enemies (1054–1500) ‘ANTIQUITY 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. . . .

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  ‘Disguised in sheep’s clothing, these ravenous wolves send legates hither and thither to excommunicate, to suspend, to punish – not as sowers of seed, that is the word of God, but to extort money, to harvest and reap that which they did not sow.’ He appealed to the idea of primitive Christianity: ‘No man can erect a church other than on the foundation laid down by the Lord Jesus himself; and he warned the princes to unite: ‘Look to your own house when your neighbour’s has been set on fire.’ To Richard of Cornwall, his brother-in-law, he wrote: ‘True, it begins with Us [the empire], but it will end with all the other kings and princes . . . kings, therefore, defend the justice of your own cause in ours.’ Frederick’s arguments directly foreshadowed the development of secularist theory in the next century by Marsilio of Padua, in which, as he argued in his Defensor Pacis , the ambitions of the papacy had become the prime cause of war and the dissolvent of Christian social unity: ‘The singular cause which in the past has produced civil discord in princedoms and communities, and which will soon spread to other states unless checked, is the belief, the desire and the effort by means of which the Roman bishop and his clerical associates, in particular, aim to seize each secular sovereignty and so gain possession of its temporal wealth.’ But Frederick II was before his time in his almost desperate efforts to erect defences, ecclesiastical and secular, against the papal exploitation of spiritual power to conjure up divisive forces within society. The papal victory over the Staufen was total. Frederick II died still at liberty, but thereafter the ‘viper’s brood’ as the popes called it, was exterminated. His son Manfred had been defeated and killed at the battle of Benevento, 1266, and buried without religious ceremony; on the orders of the Pope, Clement IV, what he referred to as ‘the putrid corpse of that pestilential man’ was dug up again, and reburied outside the borders of the Sicilian kingdom, now a papal fief. Conradin, the last emperor, aged sixteen, fell into the Pope’s hand two years later, and (according to one account) Clement remarked, when ordering his death: ‘Vita Conradini, mors Caroli [Charles of Anjou, the papal agent]. Vita Caroli, mors Conradini.’ The boy was executed in Naples. The end of the Staufen was pitiless. Manfred’s daughter Beatrice was kept in prison for eighteen years; his three bastard sons never emerged – one was still alive in 1309, having been in papal custody forty-five years. Of Frederick’s children and grandchildren, ten died by papal violence or in papal dungeons. We must not imagine that the battle between Church and State took place only at the highest level. The popes fought the Staufen not merely as rival claimants to supreme rule, but as the heads of a caste. The clerical challenge to the layman ran right down through society.

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

  I’m still paying for this apartment you won’t let me into, you should try to remember that.” “Right, the apartment you don’t live in anymore because you chose to have a relationship with another woman, maybe you should try to remember that fun little detail,” I say with a snarky laugh. “You know why I had the affair, Laura?” he snarls at me. “To get out of our marriage.” The words land with a crash, startling me, making me audibly draw in the stale air of my apartment. “That’s a cruel thing to say,” I finally sputter out. “It may be cruel,” he says, “but it’s true.” I hold onto the smooth marble of the kitchen counter, feeling its cool weight under my hands. I imagine prison bars, Michael trapped behind them, leering at me. “You’re very angry, but I know you don’t mean that,” I say calmly, willing him to take the words back. “I do mean it though. I couldn’t figure out how else to get out of it. I knew an affair would end it,” he says, still seething. “I’m going to hang up now before one of us says something else awful,” I say quietly, and then end the call before he has a chance to respond. Michael so rarely gets angry, and in this state of fury he is no longer recognizable. The Michael I knew and loved is gone – in fact, may as well be dead minus the financial support he has vowed to give me. I am as perplexed as I am grief-stricken. It’s as if the word “divorce” I used this morning released toxic fumes into our orbit, like a skunk spraying its fetid stench and penetrating every atom of the air around us. The foulness of the word charged the molecules between us and irrevocably changed our trajectory. Before that word, there was hope between us, paltry and fading, but present nonetheless. Now that it’s gone, hope replaced by divorce, there is no need for either of us to continue our attempt at civility, to protect each other from the blows we could have landed months ago. We are out for blood now. The word “divorce” has effectively changed everything. CHAPTER 26 Outlook My friend Leslie, who had been one of my college roommates, calls to chat and offhandedly asks me if I have heard the news that a couple we know, Alan and Liz, have broken up.

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

  Against the whole system of foreign jurisdiction he raised his voice, as also against the Church’s claim to hold lands, except as it acknowledged the rights of the state. He also opposed the tenure of secular offices by the clergy and, when Archbisbop Sudbury was murdered, declared that he died in sin because he was holding the office of chancellor. Wyclif’s views on government in Church and state are chiefly set forth in the works on Civil and Divine Lordship—De dominio divino, and De dominio civili — and in his Dialogus.579 The Divine Lordship discusses the title by which men hold property and exercise government, and sets forth the distinction between sovereignty and stewardship. Lordship is not properly proprietary. It is stewardship. Christ did not desire to rule as a tenant with absolute rights, but in the way of communicating to others.580 As to his manhood, he was the most perfect of servants. The Civil Lordship opens by declaring that no one in mortal sin has a right to lordship, and that every one in the state of grace has a real lordship over the whole universe. All Christians are reciprocally lords and servants. The pope, or an ecclesiastical body abusing the property committed to them, may be deprived of it by the state. Proprietary right is limited by proper use. Tithes are an expedient to enable the priesthood to perform its mission. The New Testament does not make them a rule. From the last portion of the first book of the Civil Lordship, Gregory XI. drew most of the articles for which Wyclif had to stand trial. Here is found the basis for the charge ascribing to him the famous statement that God ought to obey the devil. By this was meant nothing more than that the jurisdiction of every lawful proprietor should be recognized. III. As a Preacher.—Whether we regard Wyclif’s constant activity in the pulpit, or the impression his sermons made, he must be pronounced by far the most notable of English preachers prior to the Reformation.581 294 of his English sermons and 224 of his Latin sermons have been preserved. To these discourses must be added his English expositions of the Lord’s prayer, the songs of the Bible, the seven deadly sins and other subjects. With rare exceptions, the sermons are based upon passages of the New Testament. The style of the English discourses is simple and direct. No more plainly did Luther preach against ecclesiastical abuses than did the English Reformer. On every page are joined with practical religious exposition stirring passages rebuking the pope and worldly prelates. They are denounced as anti-christ and the servants of the devil—the fiend—as they turn away from the true work of pasturing Christ’s flock for worldly gain and enjoyment. The preacher condemns the false teachings which are nowhere taught in the Scriptures, such as pilgrimages and indulgences.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  And, at a higher social level, the meetings of the pagan Pontifical College in chapter, the solemn and very ancient state rituals, conducted in the superb surroundings of the temples whose history went back in some cases nearly a thousand years, had a powerful appeal, which was nostalgic, patriotic and aesthetic. Not surprisingly, then, the assault on paganism was directed chiefly at its externals, above all at its fabric. Constantine himself began the depredations by removing gold and silver treasures from some temples and in the East he actually pulled several down to make way for Christian basilicas. But to some degree he kept his word about toleration, since one pagan writer admits that in his reign ‘though the temples were poor, you could see the rites being carried out’. Constantius II passed the first major anti-pagan law in 341 and next year ordered that ‘all superstitions must be completely eradicated’. Temples were allowed to stand only outside city walls, where they were to be used merely for ‘plays, the circus and contests’ being ‘the long-established amusements of the Roman people’. By mid-century the temples were ordered to be closed ‘in all places and cities’ in order to ‘deny abandoned men the opportunity to sin’; temple sacrifices were forbidden and anyone performing them liable to death and confiscation of property. By this time there is evidence that the court was under constant pressure from leading Christians to change a policy of qualified toleration to one of outright suppression. The Christian convert senator, Firmicus Maternus, wrote a book addressed to the Imperial House (c. 345) in which he demanded: ‘These practices must be completely excised, destroyed and reformed. . . . Away with the Temple treasures! Let the fire of your mind and the flame of your smelting-works roast these gods!’ There was a mass of legislation dealing with paganism in the later part of the fourth century, and the first two decades of the fifth. Much of it was contradictory or purely local. Thus in 399 some country districts were ordered to destroy the temples after closing them; others to preserve them intact; others still to remove idols and put the buildings to public uses. Evidently some of these laws were only partly enforced, or not at all, depending on the allegiance of the officials concerned. But where the State was slow, the Church was increasingly swift. The pagan apologist Libanius, writing in 390, complained bitterly to the Emperor Theodosius about the behaviour of Christian monks: ‘You did not order the temples to be closed, but the men in black – they eat like elephants and keep the servants busy with their drinking – attack the temples with stones, poles and iron crowbars, or even their bare hands and feet. Then the roofs are knocked in and the walls levelled to the ground, the statues are overturned and the altars demolished. The temple priests must suffer in silence or die.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  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 knew the formulation could not be accepted in Constantinople. But it was overruled, and in the ninth century began to insist that it was essential to a true and complete statement of doctrine. When, in 1014, Rome finally inserted the creed in its own mass, at the insistence of the German emperor Henry II, filioque was included. By this time Rome was convinced that it had introduced the phrase itself and that it was of immemorial antiquity. In 1054, when the final breach with the East came, the papal legates were so ignorant of the true story that they accused the Greeks of having deliberately omitted the filioque from their creed centuries before. In the meantime, however, further conflicts had developed in Europe.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I was playing it cool. Look how chill I was. But I felt angry and sad. This wasn’t what I was in this for. I mean, it was something, at least, not just ordinary, hollow life. It was a stab at the nothingness. But I had wanted him to really fall for me, obsess about me. Had I been used? Could you be used if you were also using the other person? Did the one who came automatically become the user? Or was the one who was less attached automatically the user? I tried not to cry as I put on the trench. I felt embarrassed that it was so fucked up, and I didn’t want him to see it, even though it was him who had fucked it up. I wanted to seem untouchable. “Go out first,” he said. “So we don’t make it obvious. I’ll maybe wait a minute or two?” “Okay,” I said. I saw that he had a tote bag with him and a package inside had fallen on the floor. The package said “R. Garrett Campbell.” I wondered what the “R.” stood for. How creative could he be with his dumb dick flopping around and a first initial? I went over to the bar and ordered a club soda, then applied lipstick. I wanted to look hot for him, collected. I sipped the cold soda through a little straw and pretended to be engaged in my phone so that when he approached the bar I would seem disinterested. Five minutes passed and he didn’t appear. He was really playing it safe. Then ten minutes passed. you ok in there? I texted huh? he wrote Are you going to come out of the bathroom or do you need me to help? Oh sorry. I left. headed home. That was fun ;) —When I stepped out into the late-afternoon heat I didn’t allow myself to feel sad or angry. In a way I was relieved. If I had come all over his face, then I might have gotten more attached. I would have been disappointed that he didn’t even want to say goodbye outside the bathroom. But his stupid pencil dick, his lack of regard for whether I actually came, the clumsiness, made me want him less. In my fantasies they always are dying to taste it, dying to make me come. They will literally die if they don’t. Or maybe I did feel sad. Was I angry about the bathroom itself? I wanted him to like me in the same way that I wanted him not to have a girlfriend. Or I wanted him to like me more than the girlfriend, to care a little more. I knew this was not the nature of the one-night stand. I knew that what I wanted was something that couldn’t exist. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t something I wanted. 21.At home I found a sleeping Dominic.