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 68 of 447 · 20 per page

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  But cynical as I try to sound about Mother’s stab at normalcy, I hang up to dial my sister, and together our tough talk gets thinner, the pauses in the conversation longer. We’re starting—reluctantly—to hope. Afterward, I go into Warren’s study and lean on the door frame, saying, Mother’s getting sober. He glances up, saying, I never thought she drank that much. I gape at him, and he says, I know when you were little, she was bad. Later, Mother calls, sounding chastened, and I scold her and hang up, for when she’s in no immediate danger of killing herself, I get to spill onto her the black bile I feel. Eventually, I get drunk at her again, driving to the liquor store for a bottle of Jack Daniels like my poor old daddy used to drink (no scrap of awareness in the similarity), and I drink it in the garage while flipping through my wedding pictures, where Mother looks walleyed and very pleased with herself. I could drag her behind my car, I think. Instead, I drain the poison that I hope will kill her.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  (Which, I now think, fails to take Ted Bundy into account.) Another morning the phone rang early, and Mother whispered that Bill was in the shower, but she’d gotten his license out and his name wasn’t, in fact, Ben Barker. It was Wilbur Fred Bailey, she said. And his ID was from—let’s say—Kentucky. At this point Toby interrupts to comment on the poetic perfection of the guy’s actual name. Wilbur Fred Bailey, Toby repeats. It has a Faulkneresque ring. I notice the rest of the table has gone quiet. The agent has her hand on a glass of water. Toby’s editor is leaning forward. Fred’s the ideal middle name for the guy, Lux says, who’s heard the story before. Fred has that foreshortened, temporary feel to it. A real trailer-park name. So what’d your mother do? Toby asks. I briefly stall like an arid engine, for it’s different telling the story sober—and to these people. But Lux gives my elbow the slightest tap, and, since the current of the story has me in its grip, I start right up. The morning Mother found the license, I told her to run to the library and xerox it, then drop it by Stooge’s office. She did copy it but changed her mind about the sheriff, because—it turned out—Wilbur Fred was paying all her bills. Which pissed me off, since I was paying her gas bill and grocery bill. As was, it turned out, my sister. I made Lecia go down there and call me with Mother on the line, so we could confront this bookkeeping inconsistency. Mother elided it by saying, Oh, Ben doesn’t pay those. He helps me out all kinds of ways. Helps you out how? I wanted to know. How? Lecia said. Well, he cuts the grass, Mother said. I pay Sweet to cut the grass, I said, referring to an old pal of my dead daddy’s. I pay Sweet to cut the grass! Lecia said. The agent said, Hilarious. Triple-dipping. What a woman. Lecia said, Let’s you and me talk after this. Mother said, If Sweet lets the grass get too long, Ben cuts it. Plus he edges the walk real straight. He takes the tops off jars. He hooked up my VCR. He takes me out for Mexican food…. You could be in danger here, Mother, Lecia said. He’s good company, Mother said. Besides, I’d hate to be a dime-dropper. A what? Lecia said. A snitch, Mother said. A tattletale. But drop the dime Mother did, after Ben, aka Wilbur Fred, took out the trash one day, failing—as she’d told him to do a zillion times—to reline the can with a plastic bag afterward. She later said it had been the straw that broke the camel’s back. The very morning of the unlined garbage can, she called Stooge, who called the feds, who descended on my childhood home with dope-sniffing dogs. What’re you looking for?

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  LW Letters, II, 6-8; WB 2, 499, 28 May 1522, 544:11-2; 545:26-8. We do not know for certain who the recipient of the letter was, but it may have been Caspar Borner, professor at Leipzig; it was certainly an academic at Leipzig. Luther had been critical of Erasmus previously in letters; see for example WB 1, 27, 19 Oct. 1516; he wrote more negatively about Erasmus to Lang (1 March 1517), but told him to keep his views secret, doing the same in a letter to Spalatin (18 Jan. 1518). By 1522, however, he was willing openly to express his antipathy not only to Erasmus’s theology but to those who were ‘erasmian’, like Mosellanus, the target of this letter. WB 4, 1028, 5 and to July 1526 (Gerbel to Luther). WB 4, 27 March 1526 (to Spalatin), ‘vipera illa’, 42:28; and see WB 4, 1002, 23 April 1526 to the Elector Johann, ‘die vipera’, 62:8. He termed him an ‘eel’ in On the Enslaved Will, 1525: WS 18, 716; and in 1531 at table he compared Erasmus to an eel ‘whom no one can grasp’: WT 1, 131. Miller (ed.), Erasmus and Luther, 47; the first German translation was provided by none other than Justus Jonas, Das der freie wille nichts sey, Wittenberg 1526 [VD 16 L 6674]. He dedicated it to Count Albrecht of Mansfeld, ruler of the territory where Luther had grown up, and in his introduction, Jonas insisted that Erasmus, ‘our dear friend’, was ‘other- wise a dear, great man’, but his writings on free will were ‘vexatious, and contrary to the gospel’; fo. A i (v). On the Enslaved Will, 121; WS 18, 783:17-28. Ibid. WB 4, 1160, 19 Oct. 1527, 269:6~7. WT 4, 5069: she had done so on the urging of Camerarius, he said, and to please her, he took up his pen. Luther told this story in June 1540, taking the book out at table. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53- 54. 55- 56. 57- 58. 59. 60. 61. NOTES TO PAGES 284-293 497 The modern biographer Richard Marius, for one, wrote ‘the workis insulting, vehement, monstrously unfair and utterly uncompromising’ in response to a man who approached him ‘gently’. Marius, Martin Luther, 456. WB 4, 989, 43, n.10. Erasmus wrote to Luther in reply to a letter, now missing, in which he apologised for the tone of his attack; WB 4, 992, m1 April 1526. The second part of Erasmus’s treatise was published in 1527. On the Enslaved Will, 39; WS 18, 648:14—-15. Ibid., 687:27—34. WB 4, 992, 11 April 1526 (Erasmus to Luther); WB 4, 1002, 23 April 1526 (to Elector Johann), 62:7; 62:13-14.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In fact, Melanchthon turned out to be less clear-thinking, more mercurial and less constant.* Yet there is no sign that Luther blamed Karlstadt for what had happened in Wittenberg until after his return from the Wartburg. Then, he rapidly personalised developments: it had all been the fault of Zwilling and Karlstadt. Their headstrong preaching had caused the populace to riot and had undermined civic order. This was of course the line that the forces of reaction — the conservative canons of All Saints — had been pushing for some time, presenting minor disruptions of church services as serious breaches of public order. As Luther set about restoring this ‘order’, his indebtedness to them became clear. He repeated their slur about people taking the sacrament KARLSTADT AND THE CHRISTIAN CITY OF WITTENBERG 235 after drinking brandy, although he had them drinking after they had taken Communion; and he told the story about the hosts that dropped on the floor, exclaiming that the sacrament was treated with such disrespect ‘that it is a surprise that thunder and lightning didn’t strike you into the ground’. Taking the wafer in your hands, Luther reckoned, does not make one a good Christian — at that rate, a sow would be the perfect Christian because it could pick it up with its snout.” Zwilling rapidly fell into line. He apologised and recanted so fully that Luther recommended him to Altenburg for a post as pastor, getting him safely out of the way but putting him under the Elector’s supervision in a town dominated by one of Friedrich’s castles. That left Karlstadt alone with his head in the noose, as he later put it.* The ban on preaching, to which Karlstadt had already agreed, was rein- forced and when he tried to publish, he found the university censor would not permit him to have his work printed.” It is hard to resist the conclusion that Karlstadt was a convenient scapegoat. While Luther forgave Zwilling with remarkable speed, he did not readily forgive Karlstadt, to whom he had been much closer. In Luther’s narrative the events in Wittenberg were transformed into the story of a broken friendship, and a personal betrayal by Karlstadt. He was the first in what would become a long line of former acolytes who were seen to have betrayed their leader. There is something chilling about the no-holds-barred nature of Luther’s hatred. In the Invocavit Sermons, he had refrained from criticising Karlstadt directly, but there is no mistaking the note of sarcasm as he called his former colleague ‘Dr Karlstadt’.

• From A History of God (1993)

  16 Amos had not been absorbed like the Buddha into the selfless annihilation of nirvana; instead, Yahweh had taken the place of his ego and snatched him into another world. Amos was the first of the prophets to emphasize the importance of social justice and compassion. Like the Buddha, he was acutely aware of the agony of suffering humanity. In Amos’s oracles, Yahweh was speaking on behalf of the oppressed, giving voice to the voiceless, impotent suffering of the poor. In the very first line of his prophecy as it has come down to us, Yahweh is roaring with horror from his Temple in Jerusalem as he contemplates the misery in all the countries of the Near East, including Judah and Israel. The people of Israel were just as bad as the goyim, the Gentiles: they might be able to ignore the cruelty and oppression of the poor, but Yahweh could not. He noted every instance of swindling, exploitation and breathtaking lack of compassion: “Yahweh swears it by the pride of Jacob: ‘Never will I forget a single thing that you have done.’ ” 17 Did they really have the temerity to look forward to the Day of the Lord, when Yahweh would exalt Israel and humiliate the goyim? They had a shock coming: “What will this Day of Yahweh mean to you? It will mean darkness, not light!” 18 They thought they were God’s Chosen People? They had entirely misunderstood the nature of the covenant, which meant responsibility, not privilege: “Listen sons of Israel, to this oracle Yahweh speaks against you!” Amos cried, “against the whole family I brought out of the land of Egypt: You alone, of all the families of the earth, have I acknowledged, therefore it is for your sins that I mean to punish you.” 19 The covenant meant that all the people of Israel were God’s elect and had, therefore, to be treated decently. God did not simply intervene in history to glorify Israel but to secure social justice. This was his stake in history and, if need be, he would use the Assyrian army to enforce justice in his own land. Not surprisingly, most Israelites declined the prophet’s invitation to enter into a dialogue with Yahweh. They preferred a less demanding religion of cultic observance either in the Jerusalem Temple or in the old fertility cults of Canaan. This continues to be the case: the religion of compassion is followed only by a minority; most religious people are content with decorous worship in synagogue, church, temple and mosque. The ancient Canaanite religions were still flourishing in Israel. In the tenth century, King Jeroboam I had set up two cultic bulls at the sanctuaries of Dan and Beth-El.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Yeah, if he wasn’t around to help and they were bigger. He’d say, Lay the ivory to ’em, Pokey . That’s funny, Dev says. I kiss his shampooed head, and later, standing in the doorway as I click off the light, I briefly pray for a car that I might track down and smash the little bastards like the toads they are. I tell him I’m gonna call some of the kids’ parents, the ones I know. Don’t get them in trouble, he says. That’ll just make it worse. Downstairs, I call around but get no answers, and when finally I reach one mom I barely know, she harumphs into the phone, saying, Why do you think they’re picking on him? You think he’s innocent, I guess. My face gets hot. I say, I have no doubt that Dev is as savage as any grade school boy, but this is five against one. This is Lord of the Flies. Well, he must be doing something, she says. Out of the blue, I say, I’m from the state of Texas. What’s that supposed to mean? I know my son is gonna survive these ass-whippings no matter how many of them there are. But when it’s five against one and there’s not a grown-up to intervene, I’m gonna instruct Dev to pick up a rock or a stick and leave a mark on somebody. Let’s hope it’s not your kid. My uncle’s a lawyer, she says. My daddy’s Pete Karr, I say, and hang up. Over breakfast the next day, I tell Dev the strategy’s this: if he’s away from school, and there are that many of them, he should turn and fight. Throw down his book bag and just accept the fact that he’s gonna take an ass-whipping. Slipping his backpack on, he looks completely defeated. One ass-whipping hurts once, I says. Running home afraid every day hurts every day. Why would they ever stop? he says. Because you’re gonna pick out one of them—the closest one you can get to—and you’re gonna leave a mark. Bite the dog dookey out of him. Lay the ivory to ’em . He tries to grin, but a cloud passes over his face as he pulls his royal blue watchman’s cap on. What? I say. What’s the matter? Dan does know karate, Dev says. Do you know, I say, what would happen to Dan if you hit him full-on? What? Dev says. He’d topple like a pine. He’s a pipsqueak of a thing. You’ve got a leg as big as Dan. Dev grins all over his face. He says, Really? Absolutely. Karate or no karate. You’re twice his size. He’s out the door when he turns and hollers back, You swear I won’t get in trouble? If you hit first, you’ve lost TV for a month. That afternoon he comes in shucking off his backpack. He’d run for about a block before turning to face the pack.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The intolerance that many people condemn in Islam today does not always spring from a rival vision of God but from quite another source: 29 Muslims are intolerant of injustice, whether this is committed by rulers of their own—like Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran—or by the powerful Western countries. The Koran does not condemn other religious traditions as false or incomplete but shows each new prophet as confirming and continuing the insights of his predecessors. The Koran teaches that God had sent messengers to every people on the face of the earth: Islamic tradition says there had been 124,000 such prophets, a symbolic number suggesting infinitude. Thus the Koran repeatedly points out that it is not bringing a message that is essentially new and that Muslims must emphasize their kinship with the older religions: Do not argue with the followers of earlier revelation otherwise than in the most kindly manner—unless it be such of them as are set on evil doing—and say: “We believe in that which has been bestowed upon us, as well as that which has been bestowed upon you: for our God and your God is one and the same, and it is unto him that we [all] surrender ourselves.” 30 The Koran naturally singles out apostles who were familiar to the Arabs—like Abraham, Noah, Moses and Jesus, who were the prophets of the Jews and Christians. It also mentions Hud and Salih, who had been sent to the ancient Arab peoples of Midian and Thamood. Today Muslims insist that if Muhammad had known about Hindus and Buddhists, he would have included their religious sages: after his death they were allowed full religious liberty in the Islamic empire, like the Jews and Christians. On the same principle, Muslims argue, the Koran would also have honored the shamans and holy men of the American Indians or the Australian aborigines. Muhammad’s belief in the continuity of the religious experience was soon put to the test. After the rift with the Quraysh, life became impossible for the Muslims in Mecca. The slaves and freedmen who had no tribal protection were persecuted so severely that some died under the treatment, and Muhammad’s own clan of Hashim were boycotted in an attempt to starve them into submission: the privation probably caused the death of his beloved wife, Khadija. Eventually Muhammad’s own life would be in danger. The pagan Arabs of the northern settlement of Yathrib had invited the Muslims to abandon their clan and to emigrate there. This was an absolutely unprecedented step for an Arab: the tribe had been the sacred value of Arabia and such a defection violated essential principles. Yathrib had been torn by apparently incurable warfare between its various tribal groups, and many of the pagans were ready to accept Islam as a spiritual and political solution to the problems of the oasis. There were three large Jewish tribes in the settlement, and they had prepared the minds of the pagans for monotheism.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Thus, to start with, Luther had to decide on tactics without any advice. Before the first formal encounter, Serralonga, the Italian churchman appointed as mediator, advised Luther to appear before the cardinal and admit his errors. When Luther objected, the Italian repeatedly asked: ‘Do you want to stage a tournament?’ Cajetan, however, had carefully planned the meetings to avoid an undignified verbal slanging match; he intended to speak to Luther in a ‘fatherly’ way, admonish him for his errors, set him on the right path, and avoid a trial in Rome. Yet Luther was fresh from trouncing his former teachers Trutfetter and Usingen at Heidelberg and the paternal approach was bound to enrage him, not least because he had arrived at his own sense of identity by falling out with his father. Indeed, time and again when writing about the meeting, Luther expressed his annoyance with the 116 MARTIN LUTHER cardinal who kept calling him his ‘dear son’. Moreover, Cajetan, a Dominican so enthusiastic a follower of Aquinas that he had adopted his first name, Thomas, symbolised the scholasticism which Luther now detested. Consequently, while the cardinal tried to avoid debate by setting out clearly where Luther's theses departed from Church doctrine, Luther refused to be instructed unless he could be shown where he was wrong — a somewhat different thing. Not surprisingly, the first meeting failed. Despite his well-meaning intentions, Cajetan ended up shouting Luther down and laughing with his Italian supporters at the German monk’s arguments. What Luther did next is extraordinary. He appeared at the second meeting the next day not on his own but accompanied by four imperial counsellors, the newly arrived Staupitz, and a group of witnesses. He also brought a notary. Luther opened the interview by reading out a document stating that he would submit to the ‘judgement and the lawful conclusion of the Holy Church and of all who are better informed than I’, but denying that he had said anything contrary to Holy Scripture, the Church Fathers or papal decrees. He then refused to say anything more but instead ‘promised to answer in writing’. Then, at the third meeting the following day, he produced a long written document setting out his position on the issues discussed together with supporting citations from Scripture, concluding, ‘As long as these Scripture passages stand, I cannot do otherwise, for I know that one must obey God rather than men . . . I do not want to be compelled to affirm something contrary to my conscience.’ Luther had thus turned what Cajetan had intended to be a private admonition into a public, ritualised battle, where positions were formally set out in writing rather than evolving through discussion. He had done exactly what Serralonga had warned him against: he was staging a tournament. Luther's discussions with Cajetan centred on two issues in particular: the nature of the ‘treasury of merits’, which underpinned the practice of indulgences, and the role of faith in the sacrament.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The ‘confutatio’ was read in the full session of the Diet on 3 August but only to the secular estates, and the evangelicals were not given a copy. The imperial side sought to prevent at all costs a theo- logical dispute which Luther might win, so they offered the evan- gelicals sight of the text only on condition that they promised neither to print it nor copy it, an offer they wisely refused. Judging by what they heard, it did not seem too threatening: Jonas was scornful of the ‘farrago’, and the Wittenberg party were convinced they had not been bested in argument.“ When negotiations between the Lutherans and the Catholics began to explore the possibility of some kind of religious settlement, Luther received letters from Melanchthon pleading for advice, for the Witten- bergers needed urgently to know where they might compromise. 332 MARTIN LUTHER Everything had been discussed in advance at the meeting of Luther and his companions at Torgau, Melanchthon conceded, but real-life encounters were always unpredictable. What was essential, and what could be negotiated? Luther, incensed by feeling that he had been ignored for several weeks, now took the opportunity to sulk. He sent word that he was furious with the Wittenberg delegation, but other- wise refused to respond.” Melanchthon, seriously alarmed, fired off letter after letter.“° How could Luther desert them at such a crucial time? They needed his advice. Melanchthon portrayed the dire situ- ation the evangelicals faced, outnumbered by the Catholics. “Sophists and monks are constantly running to the emperor and inciting him against us ... Those who were on our side before are not there now, and we hang in great danger and in contempt . . . Read our letters and help’, he pleaded. “We spend most of the time weeping, therefore I beg you for the glory of the gospel or for the public good to reply to us, because it seems that unless you are in charge [the ship] will go under in these terrible storms.” Letters from Jonas told the same story: Melanchthon was doing well, but was suffering from ‘sadness’. Luther never responded well to attempts to make him feel guilty: being a martyr was his role. When, after an earlier gap in communi- cation, post had finally arrived on 29 June, he dashed off a letter while the messenger waited, pouring out his bile: ‘In these letters you remind me of your work, danger, and tears in such a way that it appears that I, in an unfair way, add insult to injury by my silence, as if I did not know of these things, or sat here among roses and cared nothing. I wish my cause were such as to permit the flow of tears!’*?

• From Little Birds (1979)

  “Of course,” he said to Dorothy, “you know who is responsible for this. I would not have minded at all if you had discovered you didn’t love me, left me, gone to Robert. I knew you were attracted to him, I didn’t know how deeply. But I couldn’t forgive your keeping us both at the same time, in Paris. I must have taken you often a few minutes after he had. You asked for violence. I didn’t know you were asking me to surpass Robert, to try to efface him from your body. I thought you were merely in a frenzy of desire. So I responded. You know how I made love to you, I cracked your bones, I bent you, twisted you. Once I made you bleed. Then from me you would take a taxi and go to him. And you told me that after lovemaking you didn’t wash because you liked the smell that went through your clothes, you liked the smells that followed you for a day after. I nearly went crazy when I discovered all this, I wanted to kill you.” “I have been sufficiently punished,” said Dorothy violently. Donald looked at her. “What do you mean?” “Ever since I married Robert I have been frigid.” Donald’s eyebrows lifted. Then his face set in an ironical expression. “And why do you tell me this? Do you expect me to make you bleed again? So that you can go back to your Robert all wet between the legs, and enjoy him at last? God knows I still love you. But my life is changed. I do not go in for love anymore.” “How do you live?” “I have my little pleasures. I invite certain choice friends; I offer them drinks; they sit in my room—where you are sitting. Then I go into the kitchen to mix more drinks, and give them a little time alone. They already know my taste, my little predilections. “When I come back . . . well, she may be sitting in your armchair with her skirt lifted, and he kneeling before her looking at her or kissing her, or he may be sitting in the chair and she . . . “What I like is the surprise, and seeing them. They do not notice me. In a way, that is how it would have been with you and Robert if I could have witnessed your little scenes. Possibly a remembrance of some kind. Now if you like, you can wait for a few minutes. There is a friend coming. He is exceptionally attractive.” Dorothy wanted to leave. Then she observed something that made her stop. The door of Donald’s bathroom was open. It was covered with a mirror. She turned to Donald and said: “Listen, I’ll stay, but can I express a whim, too? One that will not in the least alter the satisfaction of yours.” “What is it?”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  There was a huge readership for them, lay as well as clerical. In just two months they were known all over Germany, and soon beyond it. Whatever really happened on 31 October 1517, there is no doubting the significance of the theses themselves: the Reformation truly was sparked by a single text. Theses were sets of numbered propositions designed for an academic debate, although in this case that debate never occurred and Luther probably never intended it to. They were not composed in continuous prose, nor were they statements of truth; rather they set out hypothetical claims to be tested through subsequent argument, and were terse to the point of being difficult to understand. Few copies of Luther's text survive, and there are none INTRODUCTION 3 from Wittenberg itself.” Printed single-sided on a large sheet of paper, they were meant to be posted on a wall — which suggests there may be some truth in the story of the church door — even though the size of the typeface would make them difficult to read. At the top, in a larger font, is an invitation in Luther’s name that these theses should be debated at Wittenberg.* The first begins with the words “When our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ said “do penance” he willed the whole life of a believer to be one of repentance.’ The Latin puts the emphasis on the main verb — voluit — on what Christ willed the believer's life to be. Luther goes straight on to say that this cannot be interpreted to mean simply performing the devotional penalties that a priest might impose, such as saying prayers, or indeed, buying indulgences. The statement is deceptive in its simplicity; in fact, it implied a root-and-branch critique of the whole edifice of the late medieval Church.’ How could such a simple message have such implications and cause such uproar? Luther was not even the first or the only person to criticise indulgences; Luther's confessor, the Augustinian Johann von Staupitz, for example, had done so in sermons in 1516. At one level, Luther was simply articulating a long-standing position on the nature of grace that went back to St Augustine: the idea that our own good deeds can never ensure salvation, and that we must rely on God’s mercy. Luther, however, alleged that the sacrament of confession was being perverted from a spiritual exercise into a monetary transaction. What sparked his anger, so he later reminisced, was the preaching of a Dominican friar, Johannes Tetzel, in the nearby town of Jiiterbog, who went so far as to claim that his indulgences were so efficacious that even if a person had raped the Virgin Mary they would be assured complete remission from Purgatory.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  At first only Bucer and Wolfgang Capito, the two Strasbourgers, were permitted to join in the discussions, in which they were massively outnumbered by the Wittenbergers. From Luther’s point of view, the talks were not so much to reach a compromise as to signal an acceptance of the Lutheran line, with Bucer and Capito there to agree that the body of Christ truly was present in the sacrament. Even then, Luther nearly scup- pered the agreement, delivering a rambling diatribe in which he accused Zwingli and Oecolampadius of having published ‘godless, dreadful false teaching’, of misleading the people, and of supporting revolt. It would be better ‘if one left things as they were, than that one made a fictional, coloured concord which would make the matter, which is bad now, a hundred times worse’. Bucer was visibly shocked 352 MARTIN LUTHER by Luther’s apparent rejection of a concord he had worked so hard to broker. Luther insisted “with great earnestness, that either there should be a true unity, or none at all’. When the two sides met again the next day, on 23 May, Luther asked whether each of the visitors ‘would recant what he taught and spread about against the Lord Christ, Scripture and the teaching and view of the Church’, and whether they would henceforth ‘constantly and in one spirit teach the true presence of the body of Christ in or with the bread of the Communion of the Lord’. Bucer and Capito were compelled to make this humiliating admission of error, after which Luther and his followers left the room to discuss what to do next. They then demanded that the sacramentarians concede that the unworthy, not just the believers, received the true body and blood of Christ in Communion; that is, the Lutherans wanted them to admit that Christ was really present in the sacrament, not just ‘present’ depending on the faith and worthiness of the believer.” Luther had got the recantation he had longed for. He then heaped a further humiliation on the visitors, asking each of them to repeat their confession individually, including that the sacrament was present to the unworthy. Finally the longed-for agreement had been reached and Bucer and Capito were weeping when the theologians all shook hands. Luther advised them to introduce the new teaching to their congregations gradually, so they would not notice — a rather cynical counsel and a gross underestimation of ordinary people’s investments in theological issues. The next day — Ascension Day — he preached on Mark 16:15: ‘Go out into all the world and preach the gospel to all creatures.’ The chronicler Myconius, who heard the sermon, wrote, ‘I have heard Luther preach often, but at that time it seemed to me as if it was not just him speaking, but that he thundered out of the heavens themselves in the name of Christ.’ Luther seemed to have won a complete victory, but it was a hollow triumph.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The crusading religion of Western Christendom had separated it from the other monotheistic traditions. The First Crusade of 1096–99 had been the first cooperative act of the new West, a sign that Europe was beginning to recover from the long period of barbarism known as the Dark Ages. The new Rome, backed by the Christian nations of Northern Europe, was fighting its way back onto the international scene. But the Christianity of the Angles, the Saxons and the Franks was rudimentary. They were aggressive and martial people and they wanted an aggressive religion. During the eleventh century, the Benedictine monks of the Abbey of Cluny and its affiliated houses had tried to tether their martial spirit to the church and teach them true Christian values by means of such devotional practices as the pilgrimage. The first Crusaders had seen their expedition to the Near East as a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but they still had a very primitive conception of God and of religion. Soldier saints like St. George, St. Mercury and St. Demetrius figured more than God in their piety and, in practice, differed little from pagan deities. Jesus was seen as the feudal lord of the Crusaders rather than as the incarnate Logos: he had summoned his knights to recover his patrimony—the Holy Land—from the infidel. As they began their journey, some of the Crusaders resolved to avenge his death by slaughtering the Jewish communities along the Rhine Valley. This had not been part of Pope Urban II’s original idea when he had summoned the Crusade, but it seemed simply perverse to many of the Crusaders to march 3,000 miles to fight the Muslims, about whom they knew next to nothing, when the people who had—or so they thought—actually killed Christ were alive and well on their very doorsteps. During the long terrible march to Jerusalem, when the Crusaders narrowly escaped extinction, they could only account for their survival by assuming that they must be God’s Chosen People, who enjoyed his special protection. He was leading them to the Holy Land as he had once led the ancient Israelites. In practical terms, their God was still the primitive tribal deity of the early books of the Bible. When they finally conquered Jerusalem in the summer of 1099, they fell on the Jewish and Muslim inhabitants of the city with the zeal of Joshua and massacred them with a brutality that shocked even their contemporaries.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Whereas, the preaching of the resurrec- tion of Christ raises up the conscience, shocked by the death of Christ, and restores the understanding and conscience; that is: it teaches the forgiveness of sins.’* This might appear like conventional Lutheranism, but references to ‘shocked consciences’ were new and emotional terms, deviations from what had now become the established Wittenberg terminology. Moreover, Agricola was putting the Crucifixion in place of the Law, that is, God’s law through which we come to recognise our sin. As Luther saw it, he was too quick to set aside the law of the Old Testa- ment, the ‘law of anger’, as if Christians did not first have to come to a realisation of their own sin as they failed to fulfil God’s command- ments. Only then would they come to recognise and appreciate Christ’s saving death. Having spent so much energy over the last decade in developing definitive statements of the evangelical faith, he was increasingly defensive, unwilling to tolerate the slightest devi- ation or innovation. Agricola put the subjective feelings of the believer at the heart of salvation — something that Luther refused to do — and his theology, with its concern for troubled consciences, moved too quickly to focus on the forgiveness of sin and to relieve the indi- vidual’s misery. The reaction was harsh: when Agricola published three sermons with Luther’s own printer Hans Lufft in July 1537, they were seized, and the hapless printer was imprisoned.” Next Luther published Agri- cola’s theses on the law (which had been circulating secretly and were rumoured to be critical of Melanchthon) in a broadsheet, much to Agricola’s alarm. Pointedly, Luther dedicated his refutation to Caspar Giittel, the preacher at Eisleben; and it was to Giittel, too, that Luther dedicated Against the Antinomians, which he published in 1539, and which attacked Agricola, and denounced those who rejected the Law as binding on Christians.” 372 MARTIN LUTHER The dispute dragged on for several years, with passionate recon- ciliations followed by equally passionate denunciations. At one point, Agricola even sought Luther out in the church, begging for forgive- ness. To his friends at table, Luther confided how he felt: ‘As God is my witness, I loved you and still loved you’, while Agricola insisted that he ‘had always considered [Luther] as my father in God’s place, through whom I too became a Christian and a child of God’.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Very soon, however, Luther was linking him with the Devil: it was Satan who, in the shape of Karlstadt, turned against Luther to shatter the Reformation. Karlstadt was an ‘angel’ who had become an ‘angel of light’ — that is, he was of the Devil.” Luther had originally approved many of the changes that Karlstadt had introduced — Communion in two kinds, a service in German — but in 1523, when he introduced a new liturgy, it was in Latin, and until 1523, Communion for the laity was to be bread only. The distinctive features of the Wittenberg Mass, with priests wearing secular clothing, and the congregation permitted to touch the bread and wine themselves rather than receiving them from the priest, were abolished. In other respects, however, Luther's later German liturgy of 1526 was little different from Karlstadt’s. Indeed, although Luther later rewrote the story of the 236 MARTIN LUTHER dispute as a doctrinal breach, Karlstadt had been no sacramentarian at this point: to all intents and purposes he held the same position on the Eucharist as Luther. It would be tempting to conclude that the real breach was over the leadership of the nascent Reformation movement. And yet this would be only half the truth. At a deeper level Luther grasped a key difference between himself and Karlstadt. Although they were shaped by the same spiritual tradition, the Theologia deutsch, and both were influenced by Staupitz, they were taking different paths and this led them, in time, to take different attitudes to the sacrament. Two years later, Karlstadt would argue that Communion was a memorial act only — the presence of Christ in the Eucharist was his spiritual presence, not his actual existence in the bread. Luther had already sensed Karlstadt’s hostility to the flesh when he read his treatise on vows. Soon the two men’s theologies would become irreconcilable. With Luther back, Zwilling brought into line, Karlstadt muzzled, and the council’s radical ordinances overturned, it seemed that the Wittenberg Reformation had been comprehensively defeated. And yet not every trace was obliterated. The begging ordinance and the Common Chest remained in force. The monks could not be brought back, and the smashed images could not be restored. In the end, most of Karlstadt’s reforms would be reintroduced — although Luther point- edly waited until he died in 1541 before abolishing the elevation of the sacrament in Wittenberg. Still, the council had resigned from its reli- gious role, and thereafter the Wittenberg Reformation was a princely Reformation, not one driven by a popular civic movement. It was Luther who decided when weak consciences were strong enough to graduate from pap.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  44. 45. MARTIN LUTHER St John’s ‘book’ was the book of Revelation, which Luther interpreted as unmasking the Pope as the Antichrist; this had become a settled axiom of his theological outlook, finding its most vivid expression in the set of woodcuts and commentaries entitled Passional Christi und Antichristi which Cranach, the goldsmith Christian Déring and Melanch- thon had produced together in 1521. In Luther's eyes, Revelation was an anti-papal book that prefigured his own work. In January 1527, he had written to Hausmann: ‘persecution rages every- where and many are being burned at the stake’; LW Letters, II, 160; WB 4, 1072. On 31 May 1527 (Ascension) he had preached in the Castle Church, expatiating also on Christ’s death and descent into hell, and beginning with a reference to the ‘Rottegeister’, the Schwarmer who cannot be helped: WS 23, 696-725, 700:7. WS 23, 390-434, Tréstung an die Christen zu Halle iiber Herr Georgen ihres Predigers Tod. Winkler had attended one of Luther’s sermons shortly before, on 20 March; and Luther learnt of his death on 31 May. He wrote the work at some point after 17 September. He also repeatedly referred to the suicide of Krause, suspected of the murder, who worked for Albrecht of Mainz: the man had stacked up all his money and stabbed himself to death. See, for example, the lengthy description in WB 4, 1180, 10 Dec. 1527. WS 18, 224-40; LW 32, 265-86. Luther had also noted the martyrdom of two Augustinians in Brussels in 1523, adding that together with a previous third martyr they were the first in this region; WB 3, 635, 22 or 23 July 1523. He did not write much in his letters about the martyrdom of the layman Caspar Tauber, which took place on 17 September 1524 in Vienna, though he was impressed by his bravery; a pamphlet about Tauber appeared in Magdeburg (Ein erbermlich geschicht So an dem frommen christlichen man Tauber von Wien . . . gescheen ist, Magdeburg, 1524 [VD 16 ZV 5338]), and others in Strasbourg, Breslau, Nuremberg, and Augsburg [VD 16 H 5770; VD 16 W 293; VD 16 ZV 24131; VD 16 W 295; VD 16 ZV 29583; VD 16 W 294]; but Tauber was not in Luther’s circle, and in the writing that originally got Tauber into trouble in Vienna, he had taken a sacramentarian line on the Real Presence. WB 4, 1107, 20 May 1527. WB 4, 1161, 22 Oct. 1527, 270:5-15; He continued, “Who will make me worthy, that I might overcome Satan not with twice his spirit but with even half of his spirit, and might leave this life?’ WS 23, 463:40. WB 3, 785, 27 Oct. 1524, 361:13-14. WT 3, 81:3-4. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53- 54. 55- 56. 57- 58.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In this climate of extreme insecurity, the Deuteronomist’s policies made a great impact. Far from obeying Yahweh’s commands, the last two kings of Israel had deliberately courted disaster. Josiah instantly began a reform, acting with exemplary zeal. All the images, idols and fertility symbols were taken out of the Temple and burned. Josiah also pulled down the large effigy of Asherah and destroyed the apartments of the Temple prostitutes, who wove garments for her there. All the ancient shrines in the country, which had been enclaves of paganism, were destroyed. Henceforth the priests were only allowed to offer sacrifice to Yahweh in the purified Jerusalem Temple. The chronicler, who recorded Josiah’s reforms nearly 300 years later, gives an eloquent description of this piety of denial and suppression: [Josiah] looked on as the altars of the Baals were demolished; he tore down the altars of incense standing on them, he smashed the sacred poles and the carved and cast idols; he reduced them to dust, scattering it over the graves of those who had offered them sacrifices. He burned the bones of their priests on their altars, and so purified Judah and Jerusalem; he did the same in the towns of Manasseh, Ephraim, Simeon, and even Naphtali, and in the ravaged districts around them. He demolished the altars and the sacred poles, smashed the idols and ground them to powder, and tore down all the altars of incense throughout the land of Israel.36 We are far from the Buddha’s serene acceptance of the deities he believed he had outgrown. This wholesale destruction springs from a hatred that is rooted in buried anxiety and fear. The reformers rewrote Israelite history. The historical books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings were revised according to the new ideology and, later, the editors of the Pentateuch added passages that gave a Deuteronomist interpretation of the Exodus myth to the older narratives of J and E. Yahweh was now the author of a holy war of extermination in Canaan. The Israelites are told that the native Canaanites must not live in their country,37 a policy which Joshua is made to implement with unholy thoroughness: Then Joshua came and wiped out the Anakim from the highlands, from Hebron, from Debir, from Anoth, from all the highlands of Judah and all the inhabitants of Israel; he delivered them and their towns over to the ban. No more Anakim were left in Israelite territory except at Gaza, Gath and Ashod.38

• From A History of God (1993)

  It is equally inappropriate for people who call themselves Jews, Christians and Muslims to condone an inequitable social system. The God of historical monotheism demands mercy not sacrifice, compassion rather than decorous liturgy. There has often been a distinction between people who practice a cultic form of religion and those who have cultivated a sense of the God of compassion. The prophets fulminated against their contemporaries who thought that temple worship was sufficient. Jesus and St. Paul both made it clear that external observance was useless if it was not accompanied by charity: it was little better than sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. Muhammad came into conflict with those Arabs who wanted to worship the pagan goddesses alongside al-Lah in the ancient rites, without implementing the compassionate ethos that God demanded as a condition of all true religion. There had been a similar divide in the pagan world of Rome: the old cultic religion celebrated the status quo, while the philosophers preached a message that they believed would change the world. It may be that the compassionate religion of the One God has only been observed by a minority; most have found it difficult to face the extremity of the God-experience with its uncompromising ethical demands. Ever since Moses brought the tablets of the Law from Mount Sinai, the majority have preferred the worship of a Golden Calf, a traditional, unthreatening image of a deity they have constructed for themselves, with its consoling, time-honored rituals. Aaron, the high priest, presided over the manufacture of the golden effigy. The religious establishment itself is often deaf to the inspiration of prophets and mystics who bring news of a much more demanding God. God can also be used as an unworthy panacea, as an alternative to mundane life and as the object of indulgent fantasy. The idea of God has frequently been used as the opium of the people. This is a particular danger when he is conceived as an-other Being—just like us, only bigger and better—in his own heaven, which is itself conceived as a paradise of earthly delights. Yet originally, “God” was used to help people to concentrate on this world and to face up to unpleasant reality. Even the pagan cult of Yahweh, for all its manifest faults, stressed his involvement in current events in profane time, as opposed to the sacred time of rite and myth. The prophets of Israel forced their people to confront their own social culpability and impending political catastrophe in the name of the God who revealed himself in these historical occurrences. The Christian doctrine of Incarnation stressed the divine immanence in the world of flesh and blood. Concern for the here and now was especially marked in Islam: nobody could have been more of a realist than Muhammad, who was a political as well as a spiritual genius.

• From A History of God (1993)

  It will mean darkness, not light!” 18 They thought they were God’s Chosen People? They had entirely misunderstood the nature of the covenant, which meant responsibility, not privilege: “Listen sons of Israel, to this oracle Yahweh speaks against you!” Amos cried, “against the whole family I brought out of the land of Egypt: You alone, of all the families of the earth, have I acknowledged, therefore it is for your sins that I mean to punish you.” 19 The covenant meant that all the people of Israel were God’s elect and had, therefore, to be treated decently. God did not simply intervene in history to glorify Israel but to secure social justice. This was his stake in history and, if need be, he would use the Assyrian army to enforce justice in his own land. Not surprisingly, most Israelites declined the prophet’s invitation to enter into a dialogue with Yahweh. They preferred a less demanding religion of cultic observance either in the Jerusalem Temple or in the old fertility cults of Canaan. This continues to be the case: the religion of compassion is followed only by a minority; most religious people are content with decorous worship in synagogue, church, temple and mosque. The ancient Canaanite religions were still flourishing in Israel. In the tenth century, King Jeroboam I had set up two cultic bulls at the sanctuaries of Dan and Beth-El. Two hundred years later, the Israelites were still taking part in fertility rites and sacred sex there, as we see in the oracles of the prophet Hosea, Amos’s contemporary. 20 Some Israelites appear to have thought that Yahweh had a wife, like the other gods: archaeologists have recently unearthed inscriptions dedicated “To Yahweh and his Asherah.” Hosea was particularly disturbed by the fact that Israel was breaking the terms of the covenant by worshipping other gods, such as Baal. Like all of the new prophets, he was concerned with the inner meaning of religion. As he makes Yahweh say: “What I want is love ( hesed ), not sacrifice; knowledge of God ( daath Elohim ), not holocausts.” 21 He did not mean theological knowledge: the word daath comes from the Hebrew verb yada: to know, which has sexual connotations. Thus J says that Adam “knew” his wife, Eve. 22 In the Old Canaanite religion, Baal had married the soil and the people had celebrated this with ritual orgies, but Hosea insisted that since the covenant, Yahweh had taken the place of Baal and had wedded the people of Israel.

• From Satyricon (1)

  Before he had run out of wind, a tray upon which was an enormous hog was placed upon the table, almost filling it up. We began to wonder at the dispatch with which it had been prepared and swore that no cock could have been served up in so short a time; moreover, this hog seemed to us far bigger than the boar had been. Trimalchio scrutinized it closely and “What the hell,” he suddenly bawled out, “this hog hain’t been gutted, has it? No, it hain’t, by Hercules, it hain’t! Call that cook! Call that cook in here immediately!” When the crestfallen cook stood at the table and owned up that he had forgotten to bowel him, “So you forgot, did you?” Trimalchio shouted, “You’d think he’d only left out a bit of pepper and cummin, wouldn’t you? Off with his clothes!” The cook was stripped without delay, and stood with hanging head, between two torturers. We all began to make excuses for him at this, saying, “Little things like that are bound to happen once in a while, let us prevail upon you to let him off; if he ever does such a thing again, not a one of us will have a word to say in his behalf.” But for my part, I was mercilessly angry and could not help leaning over towards Agamemnon and whispering in his ear, “It is easily seen that this fellow is criminally careless, is it not? How could anyone forget to draw a hog? If he had served me a fish in that fashion I wouldn’t overlook it, by Hercules, I wouldn’t.” But that was not Trimalchio’s way: his face relaxed into good humor and he said, “Since your memory’s so short, you can gut him right here before our eyes!” The cook put on his tunic, snatched up a carving knife, with a trembling hand, and slashed the hog’s belly in several places. Sausages and meat-puddings, widening the apertures, by their own weight, immediately tumbled out. CHAPTER THE FIFTIETH.