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.

Page 67 of 447 · 20 per page

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

  And inasmuch as he has despised obedience by associating with the excommunicate, by many deeds of iniquity, and by spurning the warnings which I have given him for his good, I bind him in the bands of anathema; that all nations of the earth may know that thou art Peter, and that upon thy rock the Son of the living God hath built His Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."68 The empress-widow was present when the anathema was pronounced on her son. At the same time the pope excommunicated all the German and Italian bishops who had deposed him at Worms and Piacenza. This was a most critical moment, and the signal for a deadly struggle between the two greatest potentates in Christendom. Never before had such a tremendous sentence been pronounced upon a crowned head. The deposition of Childeric by Pope Zacharias was only the sanction of the actual rule of Pepin. Gregory threatened also King Philip of France with deposition, but did not execute it. Now the heir of the crown of Charlemagne was declared an outlaw by the successor of the Galilean fisherman, and Europe accepted the decision. There were not wanting, indeed, voices of discontent and misgivings about the validity of a sentence which justified the breaking of a solemn oath. All conceded the papal right of excommunication, but not the right of deposition. If Henry had commanded the respect and love of his subjects, he might have defied Gregory. But the religious sentiment of the age sustained the pope, and was far less shocked by the papal excommunication and deposition of the king than by the royal deposition of the pope. It was never forgotten that the pope had crowned Charlemagne, and it seemed natural that his power to bestow implied his power to withhold or to take away.69 Gregory had not a moment’s doubt as to the justice of his act. He invited the faithful to pray, and did not neglect the dictates of worldly prudence. He strengthened his military force in Rome, and reopened negotiations with Robert Guiscard and Roger. In Northern Italy he had a powerful ally in Countess Matilda, who, by the recent death of her husband and her mother, had come into full possession of vast dominions, and furnished a bulwark against the discontented clergy and nobility of Lombardy and an invading army from Germany.70 When Henry received the tidings of the sentence of excommunication and deposition, he burst into a furious rage, abused Gregory as a hypocrite, heretic, murderer, perjurer, adulterer, and threatened to fling back the anathema upon his head.

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

  God in His mercy had put him to death and dispersed his confederates, whose crimes Urban VI. had revealed.586 Though the English Reformer never used the terms visible and invisible Church, he made the distinction. The Church militant, he said, commenting on John 10:26, is a mixed body. The Apostles took two kinds of fishes, some of which remained in the net and some broke away. So in the Church some are ordained to bliss and some to pain, even though they live godly for a while.587 It is significant that in his English writings Wyclif uses the term Christen men—Christian men—instead of the term the faithful. As for the papacy, no one has used more stinging words against individual popes as well as against the papacy as an institution than did Wyclif. In the treatises of his last years and in his sermons, the pope is stigmatized as anti-Christ. His very last work, on which he was engaged when death overtook him, bore the title, Anti-christ, meaning the pope. He went so far as to call him the head-vicar of the fiend.588 He saw in the papacy the revelation of the man of sin. The office is wholly poisonous—totum papale officium venenosum. He heaped ridicule upon the address "most holie fadir." The pope is neither necessary to the Church nor is he infallible. If both popes and all their cardinals were cast into hell, believers could be saved as well without them. They were created not by Christ but by the devil. The pope has no exclusive right to declare what the Scriptures teach, or proclaim what is the supreme law. His absolutions are of no avail unless Christ has absolved before. Popes have no more right to excommunicate than devils have to curse. Many of them are damned—multi papae sunt dampnati. Strong as such assertions are, it is probable that Wyclif did not mean to cast aside the papacy altogether. But again and again the principle is stated that the Apostolic see is to be obeyed only so far as it follows Christ’s law.589 As for the interpretation of Matthew 16:18, Wyclif took the view that "the rock" stands for Peter and every true Christian. The keys of the kingdom of heaven are not metal keys, as popularly supposed, but spiritual power, and they were committed not only to Peter, but to all the saints, "for alle men that comen to hevene have these keies of God."590 Towards the pope’s pretension to political functions, Wyclif was, if possible, more unsparing. Christ paid tribute to Caesar. So should the pope. His deposition of kings is the tyranny of the devil. By disregarding Peter’s injunction not to lord it over God’s heritage, but to feed the flock, he and all his sect—tota secta — prove themselves hardened heretics. Constantine’s donation, the Reformer pronounced the beginning of all evils in the Church. The emperor was put up to it by the devil.

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

  Then he said, “Let us cast him out of Paradise lest he take from the tree of life and live forever” (Genesis 3:22). Who is this God, who calls evil “good” and good “evil”? What kind of God is this? First, he envied Adam that he should eat from the tree of knowledge.… And secondly he said, “Adam, where are you?” And God does not have foreknowledge, since he did not know this from the beginning. And afterwards, he said, “Let us cast him [out] of this place lest he eat of the tree of life and live forever.” Surely he has shown himself to be a malicious envier. And what kind of God is this? Great is the blindness of those who read, and they did not know it.50 What church leader would not have bridled at a critic who turned the Genesis account upside down, and who blasted all Christians who married or conducted ordinary business for being ignorant, false, and foolish? The same gnostic author attacked the martyrs themselves as “empty martyrs, who witness only to themselves,”51 and castigated their leaders as “blind guides,”52 who were at best immature and at worst liars. Church leaders like Irenaeus who confronted the followers of Valentinus must have found them almost as maddening as the more radical gnostics, but for different reasons. Valentinian Christians agreed with the bishop that practicing good works and sexual restraint was good for those they called “the many” but claimed these were optional for spiritual Christians like themselves.53 Irenaeus complained that these gnostic positions were hard to pin down; they were as wildly inconsistent as their interpretations of the Scriptures. Irenaeus admitted that some Valentinians lived exemplary lives as celibates, but others, he said, only pretended piety to cover their secret licentiousness.54 On the other hand, Clement of Alexandria praised the Valentinians he knew in Egypt because they, unlike most other “heretics,” approved of marriage.55 Where did the Valentinian gnostics stand, then, on the questions that divided their Christian contemporaries—whether, for example, Christians should marry or remain celibate? One certainly would have expected to find a clear answer in their writings; for marriage (or, as the Gospel of Philip calls it, “the mystery of marriage”) figured as a primary theme of their whole theology. Valentinian rituals apparently culminated in the sacrament they called the “bridechamber.”56 Yet astonishingly, in spite of all this, their writings on such practical questions as their attitude toward marriage remain so ambiguous that various scholars have convincingly argued opposite cases. The prominent Dutch scholar Gilles Quispel insists that the Valentinians virtually required marriage of gnostic Christians, and that they celebrated marriage—between gnostics, at any rate—as a sacrament, embodying the divine harmonies of masculine and feminine energies in the divine being.57 The younger American scholar Michael Williams argues, on the contrary, that Valentinian Christians, like medieval Catholic mystics, used sexual imagery only to contrast actual marriage, which they considered to be “polluted,” with heavenly marriage to Christ.58

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

  Becket met Alexander, laid before him the Constitutions of Clarendon, and tendered his resignation. The pope condemned ten as a violation of ecclesiastical privileges, and tolerated six as less evil than the rest. He tenderly rebuked Becket for his weakness in swearing to them, but consoled him with the assurance that he had atoned for it by his sufferings. He restored to him the archiepiscopal ring, thus ratifying his primacy, promised him his protection, and committed him to the hospitable care of the abbot of Pontigny, a Cistercian monastery about twelve leagues distant from Sens. Here Becket lived till 1166, like a stern monk, on pulse and gruel, slept on a bed of straw, and submitted at midnight to the flagellation of his chaplain, but occasionally indulged in better diet, and retained some of his former magnificence in his surroundings. His sober friend, John of Salisbury, remonstrated against the profuse expenditure. Becket proceeded to the last extremity of pronouncing, in the church of Vezelay, on Whitsuntide, 1166, the sentence of excommunication on all the authors and defenders of the Constitutions of Clarendon. He spared the king, who then was dangerously ill, but in a lower tone, half choked with tears, he threatened him with the vengeance of God, and his realm with the interdict. He announced the sentence to the pope and all the clergy of England, saying to the latter, "Who presumes to doubt that the priests of God are the fathers and masters of kings, princes, and all the faithful?" The wrath of Henry knew no bounds. He closed the ports of England against the bearers of the instrument of excommunication, threatening them with shameful mutilation, hanging, and burning. He procured the expulsion of Becket from Pontigny, who withdrew to a monastery near the archiepiscopal city of Sens. He secured through his ambassadors several concessions from Alexander, who was then in exile at Benevento. The pope was anxious to retain the support of the king, and yet he wrote soothing letters to Becket, assuring him that the concessions were to be only temporary. Becket answered with indignation, and denounced the papal court for its venality and rapacity. "Your gold and silver," he wrote to the cardinals, "will not deliver you in the day of the wrath of the Lord." The king now determined to use the permission received from the pope several years before, but afterwards revoked,158 and have his son crowned by Roger, archbishop of York. This humiliating infringement upon the rights of the primate stirred Becket’s blood afresh. He repeated his excommunication. Like Gregory VII., he applied the words, "Cursed is he that refraineth his sword from blood," to the spiritual weapon. He even commanded the bishops of England to lay the whole kingdom under interdict and to suspend the offices of religion (except baptism, penance, and extreme unction), unless the king should give full satisfaction before the feast of purification, Nov. 2, 1170.159 These extreme measures were not without effect.

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

  In view of the opposition on the Rhone, almost holding him as by physical force, she called upon him to "play the man," "to be a manly man, free from fear and fleshly love towards himself or towards any creature related to him by kin," "to be stable in his resolution and to believe and trust in Christ in spite of all predictions of the evil to follow his return to Rome."374 To this impassioned Tuscan woman, the appointment of unworthy shepherds and bad rectors was responsible for the rebellion against papal authority, shepherds who, consumed by self-love, far from dragging Christ’s sheep away from the wolves, devoured the very sheep themselves. It was because they did not follow the true Shepherd who has given His life for the sheep. Likening the Church to a garden, she invoked the pope to uproot the malodorous plants full of avarice, impurity and pride, to throw them away that the bad priests and rulers who poison the garden might no longer have rule. To Urban VI. she addressed burning words of condemnation. "Your sons nourish themselves on the wealth they receive by ministering the blood of Christ, and are not ashamed of being money-changers. In their great avarice they commit simonies, buying benefices with gifts or flatteries or gold." And to the

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

  Et ne praefatus Martinus omnesque alii supradicti, quos praesentes literae quomodolibet concernunt, ignorantiam earundem literarum et in eis contentorum omnium et singulorum praetendere valeant, literas ipsas in Basilicas Principis Apostolorum et Cancellariae Apostolicae, necnon Cathedralium ecclesiarum Brandeburgen., Misnen. et Morspergen. [Merseburg] valvis affigi et publicari debere284 volumus, decernentes, quod earundem literarum publicatio sic facta, supradictum Martinum omnesque alios et singulos praenominatos, quos literae hujusmodi quomodolibet concernunt, perinde arctent, ac si literae ipsae die affixionis et publicationis hujusmodi eis personaliter lectae et intimatae forent, cum non sit verisimile, quod ea quae tam patenter fiunt debeant apud eos incognita remanere. Non obstantibus constitutionibus et ordinationibus apostolicis, seu si supradictis omnibus et singulis vel eorum alicui aut quibusvis aliis a Sede Apostolica praedicta, vel ab ea potestatem habentibus sub quavis forma, etiam confessionali et cum quibusvis etiam fortissimis clausulis, aut ex quavis causa, seu grandi consideratione, indultum vel concessum existat, quod interdici, suspendi, vel excommunicari non possint per literas Apostolicas, non facientes plenam et expressam ac de verbo ad verbum, non autem per clausulas generates id importantes, de indulto hujusmodi mentionem, ejusdem indulti tenores, causas285 et formas perinde ac si de verbo ad verbum insererentur, ita ut omnino tollatur, praesentibus pro expressis habentes. Nulli ergo omnino hominum liceat hanc paginam nostrae damnationis, reprobationis, rejectionis, decreti, declarationis, inhibitionis, voluntatis, mandati, hortationis, obsecrationis, requisitionis, monitionis, assignationis, concessionis, condemnationis, subjectionis, excommunicationis, et anathematizationis infringere, vel ei ausu temerario contraire. Si quis autem hoc attentare praesumpserit, indignationem Omnipotentis Dei ac Beatorum Petri et Pauli Apostolorum ejus se noverit incursurum. Dat. Romae apud S. Petrum anno incarnationis Dominicae Milesimo Quingentesimo Vigesimo. XVII. Kls. Julii. Pontificatus Nostri Anno Octavo. Visa. R. Milanesius. Albergatus. Impressum Romae per Iacobum Mazochium De Mandato S. D. N. Papae.286 § 48. Luther burns the Pope’s bull, and forever breaks with Rome. Dec. 10, 1520. Literature in § 47. Luther was prepared for the bull of excommunication. He could see in it nothing but blasphemous presumption and pious hypocrisy. At first he pretended to treat it as a forgery of Eck.287 Then he wrote a Latin and German tract, "Against the bull of Antichrist,"288 called it a "cursed, impudent, devilish bull," took up the several charges of heresy, and turned the tables against the Pope, who was the heretic according to the standard of the sacred Scriptures. Hutten ridiculed the bull from the literary and patriotic standpoint with sarcastic notes and queries. Luther attacked its contents with red-hot anger and indignation bordering on frenzy. He thought the last day, the day of Antichrist, had come. He went so far as to say that nobody could be saved who adhered to the bull.289 In deference to his friends, he renewed the useless appeal from the Pope to a free general council (Nov. 17, 1520), which he had made two years before (Nov.

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

  We drive home to the city for a few days to finish packing, and on the way the build-up of pressure and sadness and anxiety about all the ways in which our family has changed and is about to again with Daisy’s departure explosively ruptures and spews venom and heartbreak. It is coming from all three of us in the car in equal measure: me, Daisy and Hudson (lucky Georgia has dodged a bullet by staying upstate with my parents). We are like live wires of emotion and I have to pull the car over at a rest stop to keep us from combusting on the highway. Daisy is mad at Hudson for being aloof and sullen; Hudson is mad at Daisy for escaping us and abandoning him; both of them are furious at me that I can’t glue our family back together but even worse, they pity me; and all of us are enraged at the person causing this maelstrom who is not in the car with us. I fold in half, resting my head on the steering wheel and weeping as I have never wept before, primal sobs wracking my body. Sadness I can manage, but this anger – toxic fumes of anger from all of us – suffocates me. Daisy wordlessly places napkins scrounged from the glove compartment on my lap; when I finally pick my head up, I see Hudson in the rear-view mirror looking at me with hostility and contempt. “The anger at me and at each other has to stop,” I say quietly but firmly, holding his gaze in the mirror. “I can handle your sadness and will listen to you cry all day everyday if that’s what it takes, but I can’t be a punching bag anymore. If you’re testing to see how far you can push before I break, please know you’re getting very close. If you hate living with me, you are free to go live with Dad. That’s your alternative.” Daisy and Hudson are silent as I pull back onto the highway. When we arrive in the city, we scatter like strangers. I go for a walk to clear my head and find myself immobilized on the sidewalk, watching people pass by, coming and going in all directions. When did everyone in this city get so beautiful, I wonder. I seem never to have noticed what an attractive, fit species New Yorkers are. Suddenly I perceive every woman who passes me as competition and I am crestfallen to recognize that I am no match for their vibrancy.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  These visits of mine have always been painful, and now my work is beginning to suffer—that I can not allow; I live only for my work and so I intend to guard it in future. There can now be no question of gossip or scandal, for every one knows that I am a writer and as such may have occasion to travel. But in any case I care very little these days for the gossip of neighbours. For nearly three years I have borne your yoke—I have tried to be patient and understanding. I have tried to think that your yoke was a just one, a just punishment, perhaps, for my being what I am, the creature whom you and my father created; but now I am going to bear it no longer. If my father had lived he would have shown pity, whereas you showed me none, and yet you were my mother. In my hour of great need you utterly failed me; you turned me away like some unclean thing that was unfit to live any longer at Morton. You insulted what to me seemed both natural and sacred. I went, but now I shall not come back any more to you or to Morton. Puddle will be with me because she loves me; if I’m saved at all it is she who has saved me, and so for as long as she wishes to throw in her lot with mine I shall let her. Only one thing more; she will send you our address from time to time, but don’t write to me, Mother, I am going away in order to forget, and your letters would only remind me of Morton.’ She read over what she had written, three times, finding nothing at all that she wished to add, no word of tenderness, or of regret. She felt numb and then unbelievably lonely, but she wrote the address in her firm handwriting: ‘The Lady Anna Gordon,’ she wrote, ‘Morton Hall. Near Upton-on-Severn.’ And when she wept, as she presently must do, covering her face with her large, brown hands, her spirit felt unrefreshed by this weeping, for the hot, angry tears seemed to scorch her spirit. Thus was Anna Gordon baptized through her child as by fire, unto the loss of their mutual salvation.

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

  I’m curious if you have the good one,” she said. “Oh, no, we’re not up to that yet,” I said. “Who’s your lawyer?” she asked as I continued to shake my head. “We’re not up to that yet either,” I said. “Anyway, I just really need the music.” “I’ll tell him, but I can’t promise that he’ll send it,” she said brusquely, while her daughter stood next to her, silently listening to our interaction. I wanted to reach over the table and hug her, reassure her that we would make this work for her no matter what, but she turned, shoulders drooping, and went into the school building while her mother strode purposefully down the sidewalk. I watched her until she turned the corner, absorbing the critical information I had just unwittingly received: this is what bitterness and anger look like after years of unchecked growth. If I buy into the negative behavior I’ve read about in newspaper accounts of ugly divorces or in dramatic retellings on TV or in books – or in live exchanges like the one that just took place – I will soon be a hostile, spiteful shadow of myself. Standing now at Georgia’s camp, having rejected Michael’s hug, I know I have to do better. If I am resolute that I want to move forward in my life without him, I have to find a way to soften my anger so that my kids are not in the line of fire – or better yet, so there is no line of fire, just a soft dissolution. I won’t be hugging him any time soon – after all, I’m still working on making eye contact – but the venom inside me has to be treated before it poisons me. * I arrive home before Michael and Georgia. He was indulgent with the kids even before we separated but now that he’s got only one child who will talk to him, all the spoiling goes into her. I’ve warned him that buying her treats all the time and taking her from one activity to the next is having a negative effect on her. When she’s with me she constantly asks, what are we doing today? Can we go to the arcade? Can we go skating? Bowling? Daddy lets me have bubble tea and ice cream. Daddy doesn’t care about bedtime. Daddy is more fun. By the time she returns home to me, I have to run her through a detox program. Now that he’s got his hands on her, I can only imagine how he’s pampering her. I’m seething, not only because I fear he’s ruining her, but also because I feel I have a right to be with her after an absence and sharing her like this feels patently unfair. She’s mine, I think possessively, as if I’m doing him a favor by granting him access to her, and anxiously peer out the window waiting for them to return.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  He ruled against most schismatics and heretics at the behest of orthodox clergy; but in the case of the Novatianists, for instance, he ordered that ‘they shall firmly possess, without disquietude, their own church buildings and places for burial’, and other properties ‘acquired in any manner whatsoever’ – and their priests were accordingly exempt. Constantine justified this on the grounds that they differed from the Catholics on disciplinary rather than doctrinal grounds. His real reasons were doubtless very different; and the extension or withdrawal of fiscal privilege clearly gave him and his successors a powerful voice in the Church’s internal affairs. Julian recognized that the strength of the orthodox Church rested to a great extent on imperial discrimination in its favour. According to Ammianus, he tried to atomize the Church by ending the system: ‘He ordered the priests of the different Christian sects, and their supporters, to be admitted to the palace, and politely expressed his wish that, their quarrels being over, each might follow his own beliefs without hindrance or fear. He thought that freedom to argue their beliefs would simply deepen their differences, so that he would never be faced by a united common people. He found from experience that no wild beasts are as hostile to men, as Christians are to each other.’ By Julian’s day, however, official Christianity was entrenched enough to survive such tactics; it was continually extending its legal privileges and thwarting State efforts to curb them. It had become rich, indeed very rich. As an illegal organization, it had been forbidden, in theory at least, to own property until the edict of toleration. In fact it had acquired a great deal: by purchase, gift and inheritance. With toleration, however, and the removal of all legal restrictions by an edict of 321, endowments multiplied. It became common for wealthy men and widows to leave one-third of their property to the Church; rank and file Christians were taught to treat ‘Christ’s bride’ as an additional child in their wills. There were abuses, too. Julian, an infallible expert on the darker side of Christianity, wrote that he would ‘no longer allow “clerics” to sit as judges and draw up wills and take the inheritance of other men, and assign everything to themselves.’ In the second half of the fourth century, for the first time, we get hints of public complaints against the wealth of Christian clergy and the splendour of its buildings. Some Christian writers took note: ‘Our walls glitter with gold’, wrote Jerome, ‘and gold gleams upon our ceilings and the capitals of our pillars; yet Christ is dying at our doors in the person of his poor, naked and hungry.’ But others were dying too: rich men and women with wills to make and wealth to bequeath. For the first time, also, we get efforts by the State to prevent too great a proportion of the collective wealth, especially real property, falling into the dead hand of the Church.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  A few years later, in 1246, Gregory’s successor, Innocent IV, was almost certainly a party to the attempted murder of the Lord’s Anointed, Frederick II; the plot misfired – the conspirators were blinded, mutilated and burned alive – but there was no let-up in the papal campaign. Observers, participants indeed, saw it as an eschatological conflict, as in the apocalyptic books of the Old Testament; Antichrist was loose on the earth; here was no question of nuance, of political tactic, of give or take, compromise and manoeuvre, but a final conflict between absolute good and absolute evil. In credal terms, Frederick was strictly orthodox, though his wide reading, knowledge of the world – especially the East and Islam – had bred in him a spirit of speculative tolerance. But papal propaganda, concocted not by hack clerical scribes but by the popes personally, presented the head of the earthly society as incarnate wickedness. Frederick, the Pope claimed, had turned a holy altar in an Apulian church into a public latrine, he had used churches as brothels and had practiced sodomy openly; blasphemed by calling Christ, Moses and Mohammed ‘three impostors’; denied the Virgin Birth; and said of the Eucharist: ‘How long will this hocus-pocus continue?’ He was ‘a beast filled with blasphemous words . . . with the feet of a bear, the mouth of an outraged lion, the rest of the body shaped like a panther . . . the creator of lies, oblivious of modesty, untouched by the blush of shame . . . a wolf in sheep’s clothing . . . a scorpion with a sting in its tail . . . A dragon formed to deceive us . . . the hammer of the earth.’ He wanted to turn the whole world into a desert, and rejoiced when he was called Antichrist. He denied the faith, and his aim was to smash up Christian doctrine. He was ‘the master of cruelty . . . the corrupter of the whole world . . . a poisonous serpent . . . the fourth beast in the book of Daniel, whose teeth are of iron and whose nails are of brass’. From the twelfth century we can date the beginnings of anti-papal literature, inspired by the deepening gulf between the claim to spiritual (and therefore material) power, and the spiritual poverty of so many of its own actions. If the Church had a monopoly of education, it had never really possessed a monopoly of literature. Or, to put it another way, the secular element in society found expression even if the hand was strictly a cleric’s. A long line of thought and half-memory stretched back to the imperial Roman concept of earthly authority before the total impress of Christianity was received. In a way, reversion to imperial Rome was one line of escape from an all-enclosing, compulsory Christian society.

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

  And I know what I read, so your denials are making me feel like I’m losing grip with reality. Please, please, how long?” “I don’t know. A few months,” he said unsurely. “A few months? OK, it’s February. Around Christmas? Thanksgiving?” “Around Thanksgiving,” he said. “So when my mom fell and was in a wheelchair and I was upset and in overdrive trying to help her, you started having an affair?” I asked incredulously. “I guess so, yes,” he admitted reluctantly. “So when your mother was dying I took care of her, and when my mother needed help, you were busy falling in love with another woman? I need you to get out of here right now. I can’t take anymore,” I said, nausea rising inside of me. “It’s over, Laura. It’s over. We ended our relationship last week. I was trying to figure out how to tell you, that’s why I was seeing the therapist whose text you found,” he said. “Your relationship?” I choked out. “Do you hear yourself?” “But it’s over now,” he said. “And I want to be with you. I love you. I know that now.” “You texted her last night saying you wished you were sleeping next to her. If that’s how you talk now that it’s over, I’m terrified to know what you said when you were together,” I said, weeping. “It’s over, Laura. I’m telling you the truth,” he said. “You’ll have to forgive me if I no longer believe your version of the truth. Get out, please. I’m begging you. I need to be alone,” I said, tears dampening Georgia’s blanket. Quietly and slowly, he rolled out of the bed and closed the door behind him. The size and scope of this information was too great for me to process. When I closed my eyes, I pictured myself falling through space, away from the soft cushion of the life I had known and toward – well, toward what exactly? In my mind I was just falling, but slowly, drifting through a vast grey space. What do you do when you find out your husband of 22 years, your best friend of 27 years, the father of your children, the man you have made far-off retirement plans with and fantasized about being grandparents with – what do you do when overnight, this man ceases to exist? I texted Jessica, who is an early riser, praying she would be awake. I needed to share this news, to see if I put the words out there if someone might set the record straight and tell me this was impossible and could absolutely not be happening. “Jess, I can’t call you,” I wrote. “But I need you. It’s an emergency.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  A hot flush of anger spread up to her brow as she read and re-read her mother’s brief letter: ‘I want to discuss some important points regarding the management of the estate. As the place will eventually come to you, I think we should try to keep more in touch. . . .’ Then a list of the points Anna wished to discuss; they seemed very trifling indeed to Stephen. She put the letter away in a drawer and sat staring darkly out of the window. In the garden Mary was talking to David, persuading him not to retrieve the pigeons. ‘If my mother had invited her ten times over I’d never have taken her to Morton,’ Stephen muttered. Oh, but she knew, and only too well, what it would mean should they be there together; the lies, the despicable subterfuges, as though they were little less than criminals. It would be: ‘Mary, don’t hang about my bedroom—be careful . . . of course while we’re here at Morton . . . it’s my mother, she can’t understand these things; to her they would seem an outrage, an insult. . . .’ And then the guard set upon eyes and lips; the feeling of guilt at so much as a hand-touch; the pretence of a careless, quite usual friendship—‘Mary, don’t look at me as though you cared! you did this evening—remember my mother. ’ Intolerable quagmire of lies and deceit! The degrading of all that to them was sacred—a very gross degrading of love, and through love a gross degrading of Mary. Mary . . . so loyal and as yet so gallant, but so pitifully untried in the war of existence. Warned only by words, the words of a lover, and what were mere words when it came to actions? And the ageing woman with the far-away eyes, eyes that could yet be so cruel, so accusing—they might turn and rest with repugnance on Mary, even as once they had rested on Stephen: ‘I would rather see you dead at my feet. . . .’ A fearful saying, and yet she had meant it, that ageing woman with the far-away eyes—she had uttered it knowing herself to be a mother. But that at least should be hidden from Mary. She began to consider the ageing woman who had scourged her but whom she had so deeply wounded, and as she did so the depth of that wound made her shrink in spite of her bitter anger, so that gradually the anger gave way to a slow and almost reluctant pity. Poor, ignorant, blind, unreasoning woman; herself a victim, having given her body for Nature’s most inexplicable whim. Yes, there had been two victims already—must there now be a third—and that one Mary? She trembled. At that moment she could not face it, she was weak, she was utterly undone by loving. Greedy she had grown for happiness, for the joys and the peace that their union had brought her.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  You were forced by the curator and the soldiers to give up the sacred books. How did you come to be set free by them, unless you surrendered something, or ordered it to be surrendered? They did not let you go by chance. Yes, I did kill, and I intend to kill those who act against me. So do not now provoke me to say anything more. You know that I interfere with nobody’s affairs.’ This was in Carthage. And of course, after the Edict of Milan, many in Carthage and the territories of the old Punic empire, with its anti-Roman tradition, its continuing separatism and sense of independence, its own Punic, or Berber, language and culture, viewed with repugnance the idea of their Church making common cause with the imperial authorities, their recent persecutors. In a way, the Carthaginian church, founded in the second century, had become the repository of Punic resistance to Roman ideas. It had always had a strong, almost orthodox, Jewish element. It was strict, puritanical, strongly opposed to any compromise with the world and its pagan ideas. It denied the idea of duties to the State. It had its own sense of brotherhood and a readiness to model conduct – including the acceptance of martyrdom – on the examples of the Maccabees. In a sense it looked forward to Luther; in a more concrete sense it looked back to the Dead Sea Scrolls, for men in the Essene tradition had been among its founders. The original Essene insistence on absolute ritual purity found a new expression in the refusal of African Christians to re-admit anyone who had compromised his faith in the time of persecution. And of course this particularly applied to the clergy. He who administered baptism must be undefiled and uncompromised. And a bishop, who ordained priests, had to be above all possible reproach. Unless he were, his baptisms and ordinations were wholly ineffective, indeed, positively evil, for an ecclesiastical organization composed of such men constituted an anti-church, directed by the devil, and casting a hideous shadow over the true Church of the faithful. We have here, in short, a recapitulation of the struggles of the Essenes against the false priests of the defiled Temple. This was the background to the so-called Donatist heresy. Most Carthaginians believed that Church orders were subjective, that is, invalidated by personal unworthiness. A few thought them objective, that is, universally and always efficacious provided the ordination were valid and this view was increasingly held by orthodox elements outside North Africa. The conflict was bound to produce a disputed episcopal succession sooner or later; and in 311 it did. Some eighty Numidian bishops declared invalid the ordination of Caecilian, Bishop of Carthage, on the grounds that the ceremony had been conducted by a traditor bishop who had handed over holy books to be burned by the official persecutors. They elected another bishop in Caecilian’s place and in due course the succession went to Donatus.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  When Tripoli fell to them, in 1109, the Genoese sailors destroyed the Banu Ammar library, the finest in the Moslem world. In general, the effect of the crusades was to undermine the intellectual content of Islam, to destroy the chances of peaceful adjustment to Christianity, and to make the Moslems far less tolerant: crusading fossilized Islam into a fanatic posture. They also did incalculable damage to the eastern churches, whether Orthodox or Monophysite. One of the first acts of the crusaders after the taking of Jerusalem was to expel the Orthodox and members of other non-Latin Christian sects, and Orthodox priests were tortured to force them to reveal the fragments of the True Cross. No attempt was made to reach an accommodation with Christians who did not acknowledge Rome fully. They lost their churches and their property, they were displaced from their bishoprics and patriarchates, and at best they were tolerated; even the Maronite Christians, who were in communion with Rome, were treated as second-class citizens in the states the Latins created in the twelfth century. All the Christians clergy of any importance were recruited direct from the West. Even among the Latins, native birth was a bar to clerical promotion, chiefly because none except elementary schools were established, and schools run by non-Latin sects were not acknowledged. The only exception was William, Bishop of Tyre, the historian. He got a bishopric despite the fact he was born in Outremer, as the crusader states were called; but this was because he had studied in France and Italy for twenty years. Above all, no attempt was made to convert the Moslems. The Latin Christians governed a conquered population like a colonialist élite. In one sense, the experiment disproves the theory that medieval Christianity was ruined by clericalism. For the Latin states, which were projections of the total Christian society across the seas, were run by laymen. There were, at any one time, about 300 Latin clerks there, but though well-endowed they had little power and were completely under the control of the lay lords. The great mistakes were all made by laymen. But the attitude of the Church did not help to establish a viable Latin society out in the East. Laymen were far more willing than clerics to adopt eastern customs and dress, to learn the language, and to integrate themselves with the natives. It was the popes who forbade Christian knights to marry Moslems, even if the children were brought up Latin Christians. This was fatal in the end. The chief reason why the crusaders failed to expand in the twelfth century, and had their kingdom reduced to an insignificant rump in the thirteenth, was that there were too few of them. In the first decade of the crusades, 1095–1105, about 100,000 people of all ages, classes and sexes went to the Holy Land; ten years later nearly all of them were dead. They left very few children.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  In the story of Ghismonda, Tancredi opposes the laws of nature, not only by neglecting to find a second husband for his beautiful and intelligent widowed daughter, but also by severing with savage ferocity the liaison she has formed with Guiscardo. Both of these ill-considered actions stem from his own paternal love for Ghismonda which, as Boccaccio makes abundantly clear in the preamble to the narrative, as well as through his account of Tancredi’s reactions to the events of the story itself, is so excessive as to border upon the incestuous. There are other stories in the Decameron where a father is outraged upon discovering that his daughter is, without his knowledge, actively and willingly involved in a sexual relationship, but it is only in the tale of Ghismonda that the sense of outrage is attributed, by implication, to the father’s repressed incestuous feelings. In most other instances, it arises from the father’s conviction that the young man with whom his daughter has formed a relationship is her social inferior, and it is instructive to note that once he has been reassured that this is not the case, the liaison is formalized by marriage and allowed to flourish. The point can best be illustrated by a comparison between the tragic outcome of Ghismonda’s love for Guiscardo, and the joyous resolution of Caterina’s love for Ric-ciardo, in the celebrated story of the song of the nightingale (V, 4). There is an obvious resemblance between these two narratives, in that both are concerned with the ingenious means through which a beautiful and resourceful young woman evades a watchful father and brings her lover to her bed, where the father eventually discovers them together. But whereas Tancredi, having restrained his initial impulse to vent his anger upon them, holds his peace and remains hidden so that he can pursue what he mistakenly considers a more prudent course of action that will do less damage to his honour, the father of Caterina, Messer Lizio, rouses his wife and conducts her to her daughter’s bed, where she ‘saw for herself exactly how her daughter had taken and seized hold of the nightingale, whose song she had so much yearned to hear’.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘You unprincipled lout, I must say you have given a splendid display of manly vigour here today, in contrast with the feeble, worn-out, lack-lustre manner that you always adopt in your own house. But thanks be to God, it was your own land you were tilling and not some other man’s, as you fondly imagined. It is no wonder that you kept me at a distance last night: you were planning to disburden yourself elsewhere, and you wanted to arrive fresh and strong at the jousting. But with God’s help, I saw to it that the stream took its natural course. ‘Why do you not answer me, you villain? Why don’t you say something? Have my words deprived you of the power of speech? In God’s name, I don’t know how I manage to refrain from plucking your eyes out. You thought you were going to conceal your infidelity very cunningly, didn’t you? But you didn’t succeed, by God, because I’m just as clever as you are, and I’ve had better hounds on your tail than you bargained for.’ Ricciardo was inwardly relishing this sermon, and without offering any reply he embraced and kissed her, and caressed her more passionately than ever, whereupon she began to harangue him afresh. ‘Oh, yes! Now you think you are going to get round me with your false caresses, you disgusting beast. But if you think you can pacify and console me, you’re very much mistaken. I shall never be consoled for this outrage until I have denounced you to every single one of our friends, neighbours and relatives. ‘Well now, villain, am I not as beautiful as Ricciardo Minutolò’s wife? Am I not as nobly bred as she? Why don’t you answer me, you foul beast? What has she got that I haven’t? Stay away from me, keep your filthy hands to yourself; you have done quite enough tilting for one day. Oh, I am well aware that you could impose your will on me by brute force, now that you know who I am; but with God’s grace I shall see that you go hungry. Indeed, I cannot understand what prevents me from sending for Ricciardo, who loved me more dearly than his very life, and yet was never able to claim that I so much as looked at him once. I see no reason why I shouldn’t, because after all, you thought you had his wife here, and it would have been all the same to you if you really had. So if I were to have him, you could hardly hold it against me.’ Now, the words flowed thick and fast, and the lady’s sense of grievance was very great. But in the end, Ricciardo, on reflecting how much trouble might ensue if he let her go away without undeceiving her, decided to disclose who he was. He therefore took her in his arms, holding her tightly so that she could not escape, and said:

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘It was a custom of the house that neither wine nor bread nor any other food or drink was ever placed on the tables till the Abbot came and occupied his seat. So when the steward had got everybody settled, he sent word to the Abbot that the meal was ready and they were awaiting his pleasure. ‘The Abbot ordered a servant to open the door of his room so that he could proceed into the hall, but as he was on his way in, he looked straight ahead, and the first man he happened to catch sight of was Primas, who was very scruffily dressed and unknown to him by sight. No sooner did the Abbot see him, than a malicious thought suddenly crossed his mind, of a sort he had never entertained before, and he said to himself: “Why should I give my hospitality to the likes of this fellow?” And turning on his heel, he ordered the door of his room to be shut, and asked his attendants whether any of them knew the identity of the uncouth fellow who was seated at table opposite the door of his room. But nobody knew who he was. ‘Primas had worked up an appetite from his walk and was not in the habit of going without food, so after waiting for a while and seeing no sign of the Abbot’s return, he took out one of the three loaves he had brought with him, and started to eat. Meanwhile the Abbot ordered one of his servants to go and see whether the man was still there. ‘“Yes, sir,” replied the servant. “What is more, he is eating a loaf of bread, which he must have brought with him.” ‘“Then let him eat his own food, if he has some,” said the Abbot, “for he shall eat none of ours today.” ‘The Abbot would have preferred that Primas should go away of his own accord, for he felt it would be discourteous to order him to leave. Having eaten the first loaf, there being still no sign of the Abbot, Primas began to eat the second. This fact also was reported to the Abbot, who had sent to see whether he was still there.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  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. ‘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-

• From The Decameron (1353)

  When he appeals to her sense of honour, she replies that she will defend what remains of her honour as jealously as anyone, adding that she wishes that her parents had shown an equal regard for her honour when they bestowed her in marriage on an impotent and elderly husband. The allusion to honour is interesting, for it triggers a powerful attack on the hypocrisy of a society in which the institution of marriage has been reduced to the status of a commercial transaction, no attention being paid to the natural inclinations or aspirations of the prospective bride. This of course is the standard way of justifying adulterous relationships in such a society. But it is also worth noting that Boccaccio is sufficiently sensitive towards generally accepted social conventions as to conclude his tale, as in the resolution of the story of Nastagio degli Onesti, with a reference to the marriage of the two protagonists, an outcome made possible in this case by the death of the disillusioned senex. In most, but not all, of Boccaccio’s stories of adulterous love (and it should be noticed incidentally that, contrary to popular belief, they account for only about a quarter of the hundred novelle) the senility of the husband is a major contributory factor. But the exceptions to this general rule should place us on our guard against concluding too readily that the author’s object is purely the polemical one of calling into question the morality of the arranged marriages that were a common feature of the society in which he lived. This was no doubt a part of his intention, but it must never be forgotten that Boccaccio’s main purpose is aesthetic. What he is chiefly concerned with is the communication, in as elegant and articulate a form as he can devise, of a series of interesting narratives, which, albeit for the most part inherently improbable, are rendered plausible by the manner of the telling. With this important reservation in mind, it is none the less possible to detect where the author stands in relation to certain issues. So far as marriage is concerned, the institution is one that he respects, provided that it is based upon the mutual love and trust of the husband and wife. It is when this condition is not fulfilled that the kinds of irregularities which provide the raw material of Boccaccio’s adulterous tales are most likely to occur. In the story of Pietro di Vinciolo (V, 10), for instance, the reader is told of a buxom young woman with red hair and a passionate disposition who finds herself wedded to a pederast. With the assistance of an old bawd, she takes steps to provide herself with what her husband has denied her, until one evening, as she is entertaining a handsome young man to supper, her husband returns home unexpectedly.