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 A History of Christianity (1976)

  He excommunicated Theodosius for carrying out a mass-reprisal against the citizens of Thessalonica, who had murdered a barbarian army commander, and required the emperor to accept public penance before being readmitted to communion. His ascendancy over Theodosius explains the severity of the legal code enacted against pagans: this ensured that the most beautiful and ancient temples, and their treasures, would be preserved, but that otherwise temple-smashing would go unpunished. Ambrose was thus instrumental in hastening the process which aligned imperial authority completely behind the orthodox Catholic Church, and also the Church completely behind imperial policy. It is a matter of fine judgment, therefore, whether Ambrose was a case of the ruling class penetrating Christianity, or vice versa. Perhaps the truth is both. He carried through the logic of the Constantinian conversion. In his day it began to be commonly assumed that non-membership of the Church was, in effect, an act of disloyalty to the emperor. State exile of dissenters went back as far as 314. In the time of Ambrose it became systematic, as a necessary characteristic of an orthodox empire. Those guilty of religious error became automatically enemies of society, to be excluded from it or reduced to second-class status. Who was the judge of error? The Church, naturally. Therein lay power. And, since religion concerned the higher things of the spirit, it was to take precedence over more material considerations. Therein lay superior power. We see the workings of Ambrose’s mind and method in his attitude to the Jews. They were now a ‘problem’ within the Christian empire, as they had been a problem in the pagan one – a large and conspicuous element which would not accept the Christian norms. And they were increasingly unpopular among Christians. Jews had assisted the authorities during the period of imperial persecution of Christians; they had collaborated with Julian in his pagan revival. Under Theodosius, when Christian uniformity became the official policy of the empire, Christian mob-attacks on synagogues became common. Any such unlicensed violence was contrary to public policy; moreover the Jews were regarded as a valuable and respectable element in society, notable for their general support of authority. In 388 the Jewish synagogue at Callinicum on the Euphrates was burnt down at the instigation of the local bishop. Theodosius decided to make this a test-case, and ordered it rebuilt at Christian expense. Ambrose hotly opposed the decision. His dictum was: ‘The palace concerns the emperor, the churches the bishop.’ Was this not a matter of Christian principle? No such depredations had hitherto been punished. To humiliate the bishop and the Christian community would damage the Church’s prestige. He wrote to Theodosius: ‘Which is more important, the parade of discipline or the cause of religion? The maintenance of civil law is secondary to religious interest.’ He preached a sermon on these lines in the emperor’s presence, and Theodosius lamely withdrew his orders. The incident was a prelude to the emperor’s humiliation over the Thessalonica massacre.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

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

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

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

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

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

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

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

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

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

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

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

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

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

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

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

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

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

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  By 1525, he had forbidden the mass, ‘that this blasphemy may be suppressed by the proper authority’, and this ban was soon extended to other forms of Protestantism: ‘A secular prince should see to it that his subjects are not led to strife by rival preachers whence factions and disturbances might arise, but in any one place there should be only one kind of preaching.’ By 1527 he had passed to positive, rather than defensive, intervention to ensure uniformity by organizing state ecclesiastical visitations, and in 1529 he went further still to deny ‘freedom of conscience’: ‘Even if people do not believe, they should be driven to the sermon, because of the ten commandments, in order to learn at least the outward works of obedience.’ Two years later he agreed that anabaptists and other Protestant extremists ‘should be done to death by the civil authority’. Calvin, by contrast, had never asserted that consciences should be free. How could the perfected society of the elect tolerate among it those who challenged its rules? The obvious answer to critics was to expel them from the city, following excommunication. If they attempted to remonstrate they were executed. But execution, Calvin found, was also useful to inspire terror and thus bring about compliance. One of his favourite ways of triumphing over an opponent was to make him burn his books publicly with his own hands – Valentin Gentilis saved his life by submitting to this indignity. He was particularly severe with any who rebelled against his own rule, or who used the New Learning to challenge the doctrine of the Trinity. One such was the Basque Erasmian polymath Michael Servetus, who worked and wrote in many parts of Europe as a printer, geographer, astrologer, physician and surgeon. He had an encyclopaedic mind and a passion for novelty, whether scientific or religious. In 1546, he sent a number of his writings to Calvin, and asked for his opinion. Calvin wrote to a friend: ‘Servetus has just sent me . . . a long volume of his ravings. If I consent, he will come here [Geneva], but I will not give my word; for should he come, if my authority is of any avail, I will not suffer him to get out alive.’ In 1553, Servetus, who had become prior of a Catholic confraternity at Vienna, published his Christianismi restitutio, under the initials MSV, proving from scripture that Christ was man only. The Catholic Inquisition at Lyons was alerted to it by Guillaime de Trie, a Calvinist and friend of Calvin, who pointed out that MSV stood for Michael Servetus Villanovanus, and who supplied documents, including Servetus’s letters to Calvin, to establish his guilt. It looks as though Calvin was a party to this plan to have Servetus burned by the Inquisition. In the event, he escaped from the Inquisition but fled to, of all places, Geneva, where he was promptly recognized in church and handed over to Calvin’s consistory.

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

  Distinct witness is borne by Tyndale to the unwillingness of the old party to have the Bible in English, in these words: "Some of the papists say it is impossible to translate the Scriptures into English, some that it is not lawful for the layfolk to have it in the mother-tongue, some that it would make them all heretics."1244 After the new views were quite prevalent in England, the English Bible had a hard time in winning the right to be read. Tyndale’s version, for the printing of which he found no room in England, was at Wolsey’s instance proscribed by Henry VIII. and the famous burning of 1527 in St. Paul’s churchyard of all the copies Bishop Tonstall could lay his hands on will always rise up to rebuke those who try to make it appear that the circulation of the Word of God was intended by the Church authorities to be free. Tyndale declared that, "in burning the New Testament, the papists did none other thing than I looked for; no more shall they do if they burn me also." Any fears he may have had were realized in his execution at Vilvorde,1536.1245 No doubt, the priest represented a large class when he rebuked Tyndale for proposing to translate the Bible in the words, "We were better without God’s laws than the pope’s." The martyr Hume’s body was hung when an English Bible was found on his person. In 1543, the reading of the Scriptures was forbidden in England except to persons of quality. The Scotch joined the English authorities when the Synod of St. Andrews,1529, forbade the importation of Bibles into Scotland. In France, according to the testimony of the famous printer Robert Stephens, who was born in 1503, the doctors of the Sorbonne, in the period when he was a young man, knew about the New Testament only from quotations from Jerome and the Decretals. He declared that he was more than 50 years old before he knew anything about the New Testament. Luther was a man before he saw a copy of the Latin Bible. In 1533, Geneva forbade its citizens to read the Bible in German or French and ordered all translations burnt.1246 The strict inquisition of books would have passed to all countries, if the hierarchy had had its way. In 1535, Francis I. closed the printing-presses and made it a capital offence in France to publish a religious book without authorization from the Sorbonne. The attitude of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, since the Reformation as well as during the Reformation, has been against the free circulation of the Bible. In the 19th century, one pope after another anathematized Bible societies. In Spain, Italy and South America, the punishments visited upon Bible colporteurs and the frequent burning of the Bible itself have been quite in the line of the decrees of Arundel and Bertholdt and the treatment of Bishop Tonstall.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  In the tenth century, shortly after the revival of the imperial title by Otto I at Rome in 962, a nun from the royal monastery of Gandersheim, Hrotswitha, produced a number of ideological verse-histories, and six ‘dramas’ in metrical prose, supposedly to provide a Christian alternative to Terence, which included Gallicanus , set in the court of Constantine. In the latter part of the twelfth century, we have an imperial Staufen propaganda play, the Ludus de Antichristo , written for Frederick Barbarossa – Otto of Freising may have had a hand in it – which is not merely pro-German (and anti-French and anti-Greek accordingly) but distinctly anti-papal. Reflecting on the way in which the papacy switched from one emperor to an anti-emperor and back again, under Innocent III, the poet Walther von der Vogelweide denounced papal duplicity: ‘Two tongues fit badly into one mouth.’ Frederick II fought back against the ferocious assaults of Gregory IX and Innocent IV with his own propaganda: a materialist papacy, a ‘temporal’ Church was against reason, contrary to nature. Writing of the German ecclesiastical princes, he denounced priests ‘who grasp the spear instead of the crozier . . . one calls himself duke, another margrave, and another count. One of them organizes phalanxes, another cohorts, another incites men to war. . . . Such today are the pastors of Israel: not priests of the church of Christ, but rapacious wolves, wild beasts, who devour Christian folk.’ As for the Pope: ‘From him in whom all men hope to find consolation of body and soul comes evil example, deceit and wrongdoing.’ In Frederick’s propaganda we find, for the first time, the assertion that the monstrous growth of papal power made a fundamental reform of the Church necessary. He appealed to the cardinals (1239) as ‘successors of the apostles’, on an equality with the Pope, to demand ‘equal participation in whatever he who presides over the see of Peter proposes as law or promulgates officially’. Frederick thus anticipated the attempts to revert to the conciliar system as a counterweight to the regal pontiff. He also argued, especially in his letters to other princes, that the papal claims were not directed at the emperor alone but were an assault on the whole concept of secular authority and the freehold monarch. Excommunicated, he wrote to the kings of Europe, warning them that the papacy threatened them all: ‘Has not the King of England seen his father, King John, held in excommunication until both he and his kingdom were made tributary?’ The clergy were ‘insatiable leeches’. Innocent III had used the barons against King John, then deserted them and helped to crush them.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The Reverend Charles Kingsley wrote of evolution: ‘Men find that now they have got rid of an interfering God – a master-magician as I call it – they have to choose between the absolute empire of accident, and a living, immanent, ever-working God.’ But the majority resisted theological change with varying degrees of anger. This raised special disciplinary difficulties for the Anglican Church. It was an Establishment, subject to Parliament. In fact, in the cause of institutional reform, Parliament was becoming more active in the affairs of the Church. Measures passed included the Established Church Act and the Tithes Act (1836), the Church Pluralities Act (1838), the Church Discipline Act and the Sinecures Act (1840), and a measure which transferred church appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (1833). In fact the Church did not have charge of its own discipline and doctrine, except in so far as statute allowed; and Anglican theologians who offended against majority opinion could look for protection to the State. In 1832, the Reverend Reed Dickson Hampden gave the Bampton Lectures at Oxford, in which he took the German position that theology varies from age to age, and reflects contemporary philosophy, that doctrines are built on inspired facts by uninspired men, and that church pronouncements had been repeatedly inconsistent and could not be infallible. His Observations on Religious Dissent (1834) declared that dogma was unimportant compared to religion itself, and it pleaded for toleration, since on the essence of religion few Christians differed. In short, the line was again Erasmian. There were violent Anglican protests when Hampden was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford in 1836; and when, in 1847, he was promoted to be Bishop of Hereford, an attempt to prevent his formal election was abandoned only after the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, threatened to invoke statutory sanctions against the protestors. There was, moreover, the further problem within the Anglican Church of reconciling a huge spectrum of theological opinion, which tended to widen in the light of the new scholarship. In 1847, the Bishop of Exeter refused to institute the Reverend G. C. Gorham to a living on the grounds that his Calvinistic views on baptismal regeneration were inconsistent with the Thirty-Nine Articles. Gorham fought the case, was defeated in the Anglican Court of Arches in 1849, but was upheld when he appealed to the secular Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in 1850. The effect of these two cases, as it seemed, was to demonstrate that the Anglican Church did not control its own doctrines and could not prevent the rise to authority within it of men whom it considered heretics. It was against this background that the High Church developed and began to turn in the direction of Rome.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  This, in turn, led to a reaction on the Republican side, in the form of anti-clericalism – in some ways more bitter than during the Revolution since it was aimed at clerics as such rather than as privileged enemies of the State. Archbishops of Paris were murdered in 1848 and again in 1857. Napoleon III’s ‘bawdy house blessed by bishops’ led to a fresh wave of anti-clericalism in the 1860s under Peyrat’s slogan: ‘Clericalism – there’s the enemy’; and when the Commune took power in Paris, Mgr Darboys, the comparatively liberal archbishop, was dragged before Raoul Rigaud at the Prefecture of Police. His remonstrance: ‘What are you thinking of, my children?’ was answered by ‘There are no children here, only magistrates.’ Darboys, too, was murdered; and the Catholic Right took its revenge, when the Commune collapsed, by mass shootings without trial. The republic and Catholicism thus seemed natural enemies. ‘My aim’, said Jules Ferry, speaking for the republic, ‘is to organize humanity without God and without kings.’ His Catholic opponent, Count Albert de Mun, accepted the dichotomy: ‘The church and the revolution are irreconcilable. Either the church must kill the revolution, or the revolution will kill the church.’ In an age of mass electorates, when even a pope was driven to advise Catholics to accept a republic, Catholicism had to be identified with popular issues: that was what the new triumphalism was about. It possessed its own machinery for evangelizing the workers. In 1845 the ultra-Catholic Père d’Alzon had founded the Assumptionist order specifically to work among the lower classes. They had their own publishing house and printing-presses and took a rabid right-wing populist line. There were other Catholic extremist papers, like L’Autorité, run by Paul de Cassagnac, which proclaimed that it did not matter whether the country were run by a legitimist king or a Napoleonic emperor ‘provided the bastard [republicanism] is crushed’. But the Assumptionists’ La Croix, a daily from 1883, became the most powerful, its circulation boosted by salesmen called ‘Les Chevaliers de la Croix’, and its leaders written by Père Vincent de Paul Bailly under the pseudonym ‘Le Moine’. It was not the only Catholic publishing house in France but it was the only one to make money, and this gave it a good deal of freedom from the hierarchy.1 In the 1880s the anti-republicans, searching for a popular issue, began to whip up anti-semitism. The tone was set by Edouard Drumont’s La France Juive, which concluded: ‘At the end of this history, what do you see? I myself see but one thing, the figure of Christ, insulted, covered with opprobrium, torn by the thorns, and crucified. Nothing has changed in 1800 years. It is the same lie, the same hate, and the same people.’ The Jews were behind the Republic, its financial scandals, the betrayal of the army at Sedan, the success of Jew-controlled Germany, and of course behind the campaign against the Church.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Liutprand of Cremona says that that in 968 when papal legates came to Constantinople with a letter addressed to ‘the Emperor of the Greeks’, in which the Pope referred to Otto I as ‘the august emperor of the Romans’, the Byzantines were outraged: ‘The audacity of it, to call the universal emperor of the Romans, the one and only Nicephorus, the great, the august, “Emperor of the Greeks”, and to style a poor, barbaric creature “Emperor of the Romans”! O sky! O earth! O sea! What shall we do with these scoundrels and criminals?’ The rise of the Franks had, moreover, been accompanied by a steady erosion of Byzantine military power, and therefore political and ecclesiastical influence, in the whole Mediterranean era. In the seventh century, the doctrinal errors which had led to the Monophysite schism finally came home to roost: the whole enormous area where Monophysite belief was dominant succumbed with great speed to the new Islamic version, which not only engulfed these territories but swept along the coast of North Africa and into Spain. By 700, Christianity had lost more than half its territory, including the oldest patriarchal churches, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. There was virtually no contact or intercommunion across the new Islamic line: when the first crusaders made contact with Antioch Christians at the end of the eleventh century, they did not even know the succession of the Popes after 681. The loss of the old patriarchates in some ways brought Constantinople and Rome closer together. Byzantium still controlled part of Italy, from Ravenna, and the emperor’s writ ran as far as Marseilles. Rome was to a considerable extent under eastern influence: between 654 and 752 only five out of seventeen popes were of Roman origin – three were Greek, five Syrian, three from Greek-speaking Sicily, and one from somewhere in Italy. The Greek emperor visited Rome as its lawful ruler in 663; in 680, papal legates at a council in Constantinople agreed in condemning the teachings of four patriarchs and one pope; in 710 the Pope himself paid an amicable visit to Constantinople. But this was the limit of the ecumenical mood. Outside Rome, very few western Christians spoke Greek; there was deep-rooted prejudice against Greek liturgical customs. Thus when, in 668, the Pope made the Greek Theodore of Tarsus Archbishop of Canterbury, he sent an African, Hadrian, with 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.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  But maybe the worst part about Sara was her feet. She wore a pair of ugly white “athletic sandals” that she removed as soon as she sat down. Her feet were small, yet crusty, with one yellowing toenail. Throughout the session, she gave herself different iterations of foot massage: caressing, stroking, rubbing. She also picked at her calluses and between her toes. What a luxury to think that your feet deserved to be rubbed, in front of other people, so languidly! How amazing to be so utterly unselfconscious that one didn’t worry what other people thought. I wondered if her feet were even sore or if she simply enjoyed stroking something. Maybe she was trying to gross us out on purpose? I vowed to never touch her hand or receive anything from her. The whole thing, for some reason, filled me with anger. I felt that it wasn’t fair to us. I wondered if I could call out her behavior, let the group know that it made the space feel “unsafe” for me. A shoe rule should be imparted. But was she the freak for massaging or was I the freak for caring? How had I ended up with these losers? I hated the words they used: inner child, self-care, intimacy, self-love. We were Americans, how much gentler could life be on us? All we had received was coddling. What had Annika done to me? Did I want to assuage my suffering? Absolutely. But sorry, I was not about to learn to love myself here. It was as though they were each in competition with the other to see who could be grossest while simultaneously loving themselves the most. Is that what it meant to love yourself? To be repellent? Seated next to Sara was Brianne: a native Los Angeleno, who I guessed was also in her early fifties but had shot her face up with so much junk that she no longer existed in time. Instead of growing old, Brianne’s face just kind of grew out: puffy fish lips, cheek skin stretched and shiny—straining to contain all the filler. Somewhere along the line she’d had a botched nose job that left one nostril flaring widely and the other in a small triangular shape. She also appeared to have a skin condition, some kind of rash creeping across her face, neck, and chest, her skin so thin from whatever she was doing to it that you could see all the capillaries in her cheeks. From under her wide-brimmed hat, hair in two long black braids like a doll, Brianne said that she hadn’t had sex or dated anyone since the birth of her son fifteen years ago. From what I gathered, her son’s father still came around sometimes—and was maybe even interested in her—but they had never been married. While they usually got along, there had been a recent incident involving an attempted neck massage that did not go well. Now he was persona non grata.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  At least, she was no longer crying. “I’m never going back to that group again,” she said. “Fuck them and their shite, they know fuck-all about me. I don’t believe in love addiction. I don’t believe in withdrawal or taking time off from dating or anything that puritanical or black and white can fix my problem.” “Yeah, they’re pretty depressing.” “The worst,” she said. “And I just had a date with a hot younger man. His name is David, a total crumpet. I’m already enamored, probably on the road to obsession. But I think that if I can just keep them coming—you know, have more than one boy I’m fucking, maybe two or three—then I won’t get so fixated on one of them.” “That seems smart,” I said. “I’m already interviewing a harem. I’ve been going to polyamory events. I met this one guy, Trent, at an event in Topanga. He is a little older, did porn. He has a ponytail and I can’t tell if it’s scraggly or scrummy, but I think scrummy. He has a wife. She has boyfriends. I’m going to fuck him tomorrow night. I also met this other guy named Orion; he’s, like, barely eighteen, very twee. He was wearing a kilt. He’s pansexual. We made out all night. But he lives in Vermont and already went back, so I’m still looking for a third. I might shag this guy who works at Best Buy. We’ve fucked in the past. He’s a Jamaican guy, super cut, really nice to me.” “Are they all poly? Is David poly too?” “No, he’s, like, I don’t know what. A computer programmer. Might be on the spectrum. Does yoga, though. Huge cock.” “So fun,” I said. “I’m jealous.” “You should really be doing Tinder,” she said. “Or come with me to these poly things.” “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I’m worried about getting obsessed with someone else. And Dr. Jude said—” “Rubbish,” she said. “How else do you think you are going to get over him? You think you are going to just heal? Nobody heals. You need to replace! That’ll be the thing that makes him come back in the end, but by then you won’t want him. Men can smell it when we’ve moved on. Especially to a bigger cock. Bald Brad texted me.” “Don’t text him back!” “Oh, I won’t,” she said. “I have no need.” “Well, that’s interesting,” I said. “I’m glad you found a way to balance it all and not get attached.” “For women like us? I’m convinced this is the only way. The only way you’re going to get over him is by having a lot of sex and seeing what else is out there. You might even surprise yourself. You might see that you can do it, you can just fuck and not get attached. I guarantee I will not be getting attached to Trent.” “Ponytail man?” “Yes.”

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  There is no evidence that Holy Office files were ever cleansed of information supplied by the group, and indeed this is most unlikely. The anti-modernist terror as such was only halted when Benedict XV succeeded Pius X in 1914. Pius X’s campaign against Catholic scholarship was accompanied by a series of political moves, organized by Del Val, to extinguish any spirit of independence among the progressive-minded Catholic laity, and in particular to curb the development of a Christian democrat movement. In Italy this had taken the form of the Opera dei Congressi, a nationwide series of clubs, societies, charities and unions, organized by laymen to provide a machine for Catholic penetration of the political system the moment the papacy ended the non-expedit policy and allowed Catholics to participate in the public life of the state. On 28 July 1904, without warning, but with Pius’s approval, Del Val sent out letters dissolving the Opera, and transferring all their activities to the diocesan bishops. The movement was replaced by a Vatican-organized rightwing pressure group, Azione Cattolica. Much the same procedure was followed in France, where Christian democracy was being organized around a group called Le Sillon (‘the furrow’), founded by Marc Sagnier in 1898. This too was primarily a lay organization, and outside the control of the bishops. By 1908, ten archbishops and twenty-six bishops had forbidden their clergy to join it, and Pius gave it sentence of death by condemning it in its existing form, and ordering it to be reorganized by the bishops at a diocesan level. What made the attack on Le Sillon, which was doctrinally quite orthodox, more reprehensible was that an extraordinary tolerance was shown to its extreme right-wing rival, Action Française. Though controlled by an atheist, and wildly eccentric in its teaching, the movement enjoyed the protection of the Vatican, and continued to recruit French Catholics, including clergy. Pius called Maurras ‘a doughty defender of the church and the Holy See’. When his books were delated to the Holy Office, it had no alternative (within its own terms of reference) but to condemn them as heretical. But Pius vetoed a public condemnation, saying they were ‘Damnabilis, non damnandus’ – worthy of condemnation but not to be condemned; and he forbade any action against the movement. In technical terms, the condemnation was drawn up in 1914, but suspended by the Pope’s wish. A few years later, all the papers relating to the case were discovered to have been ‘lost’ by the Holy Office, and it may be that Pius and Del Val ordered them to be destroyed. The conclusion which many drew from these unseemly proceedings was that, to the Vatican, orthodoxy in doctrine was less important that orthodoxy in politics, and that the object of crushing both biblical scholarship and the Christian democrat movement was not so much a concern for the purity of Christian truth as a hatred of any challenge to the existing order of society, and the imposition of authority from above.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  What else would I do? I could not go back to Phoenix, languish in my apartment. There was nothing there for me. And every day I would have to face consciousness, cursing myself for not dissolving in the most beautiful of ways when I could have. Suddenly, though, this dissolve no longer seemed beautiful. It seemed all wrong. If I were to die for him, if I were to be dead—and I knew within myself that I was to be dead—I could not just be a dead girl among many. The dead girl among many is not worshipped. I wanted to be the lone dead girl or nothing at all. “I fucking hate you,” I said coolly. I was shocked that these words came out of me. Immediately I thought to correct them, but I didn’t. “Lucy.” I looked at him carefully. Did he really love me, or had it been just a game? In a way it was both. It was a game he was playing with himself, a very serious game, in which I had occupied a crucial role. Theo had hoped that I could fill his emptiness, at least for a little while. Then, once he had me under the water—once my want for him was proven—he would have no need for me anymore. I would begin to dissolve in that emptiness and he would need someone else to fill it. This was a game I knew well. Like Claire, I too wanted a thousand cocks. Didn’t we all just want a thousand hard cocks attached to the bodies of boys who have died for us, still warm, to plug our infinite holes? It was a whole way of life, really, the pursuit of that satiety. And it felt like life or death for him too. I wondered if I was looking at myself. Was I that beautiful and cold? What had always felt to me like an overabundance of want, too much desire, had not been the problem. It was my fear of having to feel it that hurt me. Theo was afraid too. That innate desire was something warm, lovely even, but his fear had turned it into something cold. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to need, even if you risked rejection. Annika needed me now. When she put it out there on the line it moved me. In her it didn’t seem weak or disgusting, but like a beautiful quality. Her need brought something out in me that I didn’t know that I could be. It was transformational. I could go back to the beach house. I could go back to the house and I could stay, she told me so. In fact, she not only wanted me to do that—she needed me to do it. Maybe I could even finish the book on my own terms. Fuck the university.