Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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

  Paul is now turning his mission from the east to the west with Rome as the pivot of that shift. The letter, therefore, is not just an abstract discussion of unity, but a practical appeal to the Roman communities to accept Paul’s vision for a world united under the justice and righteousness of God and to support him in working for its accomplishment. But first there is one final duty to the east, and Paul prepares to return there for the first time since the great disagreement and separation at Antioch in Galatians 2. As mentioned in Chapter 4, we are not following Luke’s suggestion of that too-swift visit in Acts 18:22–23. Paul is very much aware of two separate dangers at Jerusalem. One is that the Christian Jewish community will simply refuse the collection. The other is that non-Christian Jews will attack him. Paul was right to worry on both counts, but from this point onward Paul himself is silent and our only information is from Acts. First, James’s community refuses to accept the collection unless Paul shows that “you yourself observe and guard the law” by using (some of?) the money to pay for a purification ritual in the Temple (Acts 21:24; read 21:17–24). Paul apparently agreed to accept this admittedly rather ambiguous test. Second, Paul was in Jerusalem with a group of Christian pagans carrying the collection. Nothing whatsoever prohibited him and those Christian pagan companions from entering the huge outer Court of the Gentiles, but they would have to wait for him there while he and those other Christian Jews passed the warning balustrade and entered the smaller inner courts reserved under penalty of death for Jews alone. Third, once he had entered the Temple he was attacked by “Jews from Asia” for violating that ban by bringing those pagan associates into the inner Court of the Jews (Acts 21:27–28). Paul is then arrested and starts the long journey to Rome. Luke’s Acts never tells us what eventually happened to Paul when he reached Rome. Acts was written long after Paul’s death, so Luke must have known the outcome. And we do not need to presume a missing third volume. But, as we saw in Chapter 1, Acts is not just about Paul, but about the Holy Spirit bringing the gospel from Jerusalem to Rome and establishing Rome for Christianity as Jerusalem was for Judaism. Once Paul is openly preaching in Rome, the story Luke intended to tell is over. So he simply ends by saying that Paul “lived there two whole years at his own expense and welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance” (28:30–31). But what do we think happened to Paul after that ending? The Martyrdom of Paul

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

  All of that points to one conclusion. In Romans Paul is struggling hard for a vision that most pagans, many Jews, and some Christians do not share. He is struggling hard for the meaning of his own life and his own vocation as “a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God” (1:1; read 1:1–6), a gospel about “salvation for everyone who has faith…in the righteousness of God” (1:15–16). But salvation, righteousness, and faith are words whose backs are bent if not broken by the weight of post-Reformation theological controversy. They will need very delicate and very accurate handling. Finally, we cannot forget that Paul is also locked in controversy for “my gospel” (2:16; 16:25). That means we can never ignore or forget the rhetoric of religious polemics by Paul against direct or indirect Christian, Jewish, and pagan opponents. We emphasize this not from political correctness, ecumenical courtesy, or post-Holocaust sensitivity, but from simple historical actuality. Nothing is ever easier, in either political or religious polemics, than that accusation of “works” against “faith,” of externalism against intern, of action against intention. If I do not like your external action, I will attack your internal motivation as evil (“You just want money”) or even as totally absent (“You just want publicity”). Paul’s accusation works well as long as it is read only by Christians and as long as no Jews get to respond. If they did, their answer would be obvious. Of course we Jews are justified only by God’s grace, God’s free gift of covenant, and we both receive it initially and maintain it continually; we both accept it internally and live it externally through faith. Works are simply faith’s external face. It is by the grace of faith that we receive the law, and it is by the grace of faith that we live the law. You, Paul, are making a separation of faith and works that we would never make. Any Jew and every Jew would have agreed with Paul’s own injunction in Philippians to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (2:12–13). To will and to work, or faith and works, are two gifts or, better, a single gift of God’s grace. Paul, however, is struggling with his native Judaism to convert its sympathetic pagan God-worshipers to Christ. In that struggle he gives no quarter, takes no prisoners, and considers the strongest external attack the best internal defense. The Unity of Pagans and Jews: Romans 1–8

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

  Blaze sorts through the pile of clothing until he finds his shorts. He spills out the contents of his pockets and I hear coins and keys falling, but he soon holds up another condom, announcing that it is his last one. He enters me from behind and I brace my hands on the back of the chair as his indefatigable thrusting continues. We both hear voices at the same time, a small group of people, and their voices get louder as they approach the area where we are. He pauses, saying “Shhhhh” to me. We are suspended in motion, silent, listening to the voices rise and fall and the ocean waves gently break on the sand a few feet away. I am squeezing my eyes shut, praying we can’t be seen in the dark since we are mostly covered by a canopy anyway, and eventually the voices fade away. When Blaze gently turns me around again to get back on top of me, I hear him curse under his breath. “What?” I ask. He points sheepishly down at his penis, which is dark and erect and once again missing its rubber sheath. I wordlessly reach inside myself and pull it out again, this time handing it back to him so he can resume using it, and note that I should probably march myself back into my gynecologist’s office and ask for yet another STD panel, even if I am chastened by the mere thought of it. Our bodies are slick with sweat and when he clamps his hips against mine and lets out a surprisingly high-pitched coyote-like yelp, I am relieved, as I am physically spent. He collapses on top of me, panting, and then rolls to the side. Suddenly curious about his age, I ask him how old he is, guessing that he’s 35, but he’s actually only 31. “Oh wow. A baby,” I say. “You like older women, huh?” “I like beautiful women,” he says. “How often do you sleep with guests at this hotel?” I ask. “Never. You’re my first one,” he says, unconvincingly. I give him a skeptical look and he continues, “Sometimes three women in a month and then nothing for a few months.” I ask an improbably naïve question then, needing to know if these women have all been single. He laughs. “Married women proposition you?” I ask, unable to keep the shock out of my voice. “I guess they can’t stay away – you exude sex.” “So do you,” he says. He starts putting his clothes back on, reaching in the dark for a collection of money, keys, matches and joints which had fallen from his pockets. I pull my dress on, shoving the thong he produces from under the mattress into my purse, which I remember just now is holding its own condom. He asks if he can see me again since I still have two more nights here, but I hesitate.

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

  The street outside is deserted and wet from the rain. I lean against a lamp post and wonder if Jack is really coming out or if he might find a backdoor to sidestep me. Maybe this is his way of getting rid of me, an obvious imposter, so that he can flirt with the real sexy divorcée he spotted in the crowd. After a few minutes in which I fear that I will actually die of embarrassment, Jack noiselessly appears next to me. We smile shyly at each other now that we are alone with only the crickets as background noise and I lead the way through muddy puddles to the more populated part of town. At the entrance to a noisy barbecue place, he asks if I will eat with him. “No, probably not,” I say. I love to eat, but how can I possibly do so right now with my stomach doing its own unique form of nervous acrobatics? “I’m not hungry, but I’ll sit with you.” “I don’t want to eat alone,” he says. “Will you have a drink?” “No, I can’t,” I say, shaking my head, my curls bouncing in the humidity. “I’ve reached my two-drink maximum and have to drive home.” I’m pretty sure this goes against the bold, carefree persona I’m trying to put forth, but the practical mom in me keeps breaking through. We face each other, contemplating. “I’m happy to sit with you while you eat,” I say, and then add in a rush of words that I can’t believe are coming from my mouth, “but are you really that hungry?” The words themselves are less meaningful than the impassioned look I am giving him that basically says, ravish me instead. “I guess not,” he says carefully, taking a moment to register my meaning, and then suddenly he is pressed against me, kissing me so hard that I back up to the brick wall behind me and brace myself against it. His lips, soft and full, are pushing against mine with a sense of urgency that I recognize and reciprocate. Like water being poured over a wilting plant, I immediately perk up. I haven’t been kissed like this, with passion and curiosity, since I was barely more than a teenager. I am astonished. How have I survived until now without this source of nourishment? When he pulls back, he breathlessly tells me, “My hotel is up the street.”

• From The Pisces (2018)

  On the way home in the car, I kept checking my phone but he didn’t message me right away like Adam did. I kept turning my ringer off and on. Did I want to be notified? Did I not want to be notified or just be surprised? What if he never texted me again? When I got home, a pile of what looked like brown soft-serve ice cream was waiting for me on the kitchen tile. Dominic had shit on the floor. 18.The following night, tired of waiting, I texted Garrett. I had fun last night I waited to hear back, carrying the phone with me from room to room. There was no response. I felt like Dominic’s pile of shit. Was he really going to ignore me? I had gotten a weird feeling after our kisses, that I had suffocated him or seemed too interested. I texted him again. Would you want to hang out again? And again: Hey, sorry if I seemed too eager or something. And again: Ok I’ll leave you alone now I went outside to the beach. I saw a girl bike by on the boardwalk. She had long hair to her ass and was wearing a tiny black skirt and a hot-pink crop top with her stomach showing. I thought to myself, You little slut. I didn’t think it in a mean way but as a celebratory thing. I wanted to be her in that moment. She seemed like such an independent slut. I bet she never waited for texts, just fucked guys like Garrett all the time, casually. Surfer boys who looked like Theo the swimmer too, probably. I bet she never got attached. I wanted to be like this girl, not dependent on anyone else to be okay. Slutty, but an island. She wasn’t pretending to be content without anyone while secretly wallowing in misery. She genuinely didn’t give a fuck. I walked over to the rocks to see if Theo was there, but he wasn’t: only the waves. It was still probably too early. I waited a few minutes and wondered if he was mad at me for talking about my dating life. Was he jealous? That couldn’t be possible. I wasn’t even sure if he liked me. Still, now I was being ignored by two men. This felt worse than only being ignored by one, like the hole in me had gotten bigger. Maybe the more men you put in it the more stretched it became. Maybe Claire had been wrong. But suddenly a text came through. It was Garrett. fuck you this Sunday? My heart jumped. It was brazen, not exactly romantic, but it was clear that he wanted me. I felt as though someone had suddenly injected me with good drugs. In an instant the world had gone from black and white to Technicolor again. I began walking back to the house, smiling. ok yeah good he wrote. have you heard of the Shalimar? YES, I wrote back.

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

  She sings with her eyes closed and is enraptured by the music. I envy both her smooth voice and the bliss she exudes, and I lean back on the wicker couch, tucked between the kids. Georgia is leaning heavily against me, her eyelids fluttering closed, and she pats me and asks if she can go back to the villa to sleep. I ask Michael to take her so that Hudson and I can stay and listen to the music. I am keeping an eye on the time and know that soon I will have to make my getaway to meet Blaze on the beach if I’m really going through with it. Luckily, the band announces it is playing its last song, and when they are done, Hudson and I walk along the beach to get back to our villa. It’s a beautiful starry night with a gentle breeze coming off the ocean and we walk in a contented silence. When we reach the end of the beach and the beginning of the path that leads to our villa, I tell Hudson I left my wrap on the couch and I will have to go back to get it. He offers to run back and retrieve it for me, but I send him ahead and tell him that I want to sit on the beach for a little while by myself anyway. I watch him walk up the path and wait a few more minutes. The wrap is inside my purse, where I stuffed it as we left the beach so that I would have an excuse to turn back. It’s a few minutes after 10pm now and Blaze had said he would wait until 10:15. When I am sure Hudson is far enough ahead, I walk along the path to the private beach, which is pitch-black and deserted. I take off my sandals and dangle them from my fingers as I try to gracefully make my way over shells and shallow pools of water to the bar, which is shut down for the night. As I approach, I hear a long whistle come from the direction of a stretch of empty chairs on the beach. I amble over, feigning casualness as best I can. The chairs are more like round beds, half covered by a canopy, and it’s not until I get to the second one that I see Blaze tucked inside of it. “Hey beautiful,” he says quietly. I say hello shyly, still clutching my sandals in one hand and holding up the hem of my maxi dress in the other. I didn’t really expect him to be here and am surprised and nervous. He gestures to the enclosed seat.

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

  I am already playing through the conversation I know will take place from this encounter later today. I make my way back to my seat, gulp down a glass of water as delicately as possible, and return to the business of attempting charm. As soon as I see that my parents are seated on the other side of the wall, I relax. To their credit, they don’t even glance in my direction. #4 kindly asks me if I am OK. “Yes, great. This is not a conversation I’m ready to have yet with my mom, but here we are. I don’t want to have to explain myself,” I say. “Why do you have to?” he asks with genuine curiosity. “Excellent question. I always feel like I have to answer to someone. It doesn’t seem to matter how old I get, I still want my mom to feel I’m doing the right thing,” I say. “Why would your being on a date suggest to her that you’re doing something wrong?” he asks. “She thinks it’s too soon, maybe that I’m acting rashly, that I’m not thinking clearly yet. I wish I cared less,” I say wistfully. #4 looks down at his watch and remarks that we’ve been sitting for over two hours and should relinquish our table. When the bill comes, he pulls out a crisp $100 bill as I reach behind me for my bag, which he firmly waves away. I thank him, grateful for his generosity and that we have successfully navigated the date to its conclusion. It is still raining when we exit, so we carefully walk down the slick steps and run under the porch for cover. I wonder if I will ever get used to this awkward dance of saying goodbye. We strategize how we will get to our cars without getting soaked and finally, when we are out of things to say, he gives me a hug and says it was great to meet me. The hug lasts long enough that I can smell the clean scent of soap on his body and feel how solid his muscles are under his thin shirt. I linger, breathing him in, and when I pull away our faces stay close so that he can lean in for a kiss.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  . a good conscience has no motive for inventing quibbles about a matter which does not concern it. It is therefore to crime, stubborn crime, that this opinion owes its existence.’ Many Anglicans held this view; but they were confronted with the problem of divines who rejected it, at least in private; and the effort to maintain a double standard gradually foundered. By mid century there was wide agreement that belief in Hell was less firm than hitherto, and that the damping down of Hell-fire was attended with perceptible social consequences. Preaching to Oxford University in 1741, William Dodwell lamented: ‘It is but all too visible that since men have learned to wear off the Apprehension of Eternal Punishment, the Progress of Impiety and Immorality among us has been very considerable.’ The authorities considered Hell to be the most effective deterrent against crime; as fear of it declined, therefore, judges and Parliament agreed that the statutory penalties must be increased. During the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, a series of Acts, extending capital punishment to cover over 300 offences, tried to repair the yawning gaps in Locke’s system of ethical enforcement. However, the chief defect of rational Christianity was that it made no appeal to the emotions. It offered no incentive other than enlightened self-interest. The element of sacrifice and abnegation was eliminated. Morality was presented simply as a shrewd bargain. As Tillotson put it, ‘Now these two things must make our duty very easy: a considerable reward in hand, and not only the hopes but the assurance of a far greater recompense hereafter.’ The whole thing could be worked out and calculated. Conscience had no role to play, since it was merely subjective opinion. Thus the element of personal responsibility was scrapped, and all a man needed to be saved was to stick to the rules. Now this was to sacrifice the whole point of the Reformation and to return, in effect, to the mechanical Christianity of canon law. And mechanical Christianity necessarily produced a corrupt Church, led by a secular-minded clergy. This is precisely what happened in the eighteenth century. In their anxiety to avoid fanaticism of any kind, the rational Christians tended to depersonalize religion, and to emphasize its forms and institutions at the expense of its spirit. In these circumstances, a state Church is bound to become corrupt. As in the Middle Ages, its bishops tended to be seen, and to see themselves, as government servants rather than sacramental ministers, and as financially, rather than spiritually, privileged. The process went furthest in Lutheran Germany, above all in Prussia, where the Church possessed virtually no independent rights, and the ruler had absolute powers over all forms of religious activity. The system evolved in the reigns of Frederick William I and Frederick the Great, and was finally codified in a law of the Prussian Landrecht of 1794.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  In 1846, Manning indicted Anglicanism: ‘There seems about the Church of England a want of antiquity, system, fullness, intelligence, order, strength, unity; we have dogmas on paper; a ritual almost universally abandoned; no discipline, a divided episcopate, priesthood and laity.’ The Roman Church was the opposite to this sorry picture – a triumphalist monolith, unchanged, unchangeable and, granted its assumptions, impervious to challenge. It alone, in practice, was prepared to accept wholeheartedly Newman’s premise that inquiry into such assumptions was illegitimate, and exert ecclesiastical power to render it impossible. Thus on the darkening plain of nineteenth-century agnosticism and fading belief, the Church of Rome stood out like a fortress: once within, the drawbridge could be raised, and the solid walls would separate absolutely the true Christians from the rest. By comparison the walls of the Protestant citadel were crumbling, were, in fact, being rapidly demolished, since the enemy was already within. The images of safety, refuge and the flight to security abound in the writings of the converts. It gives us the essential clue to the reinvigoration of the nineteenth-century Roman Church, and the reassertion of papal power. Of course, the presence within the Church of those who fled there for security and authority necessarily reinforced those burgeoning tendencies. A case in point was W. G. Ward, who, even before he left the Anglicans for Rome in 1845, had been working on his Ideal of a Christian Church, with its stress on the abdication of personal responsibility. ‘Within the magic circle which it protects, we are saved from the pain of doubt, from the necessity of disputation, and are called upon but to learn and to believe.’ What he called ‘conscience’ was the act of obeying Church authority; there was no role in it for the reason or the intellect. As a refugee from liberalism, he naturally fought fiercely against any attempt to establish it within the fortress. He strongly approved, in 1857, of the Vatican’s condemnation of works by Anton Gunther, who held that there was no real cleavage between natural and supernatural truth, a position fundamental to the whole scientific argument. In 1863 Ward became editor of the influential Dublin Review and used it to urge that Rome should direct and control all scientific and historical research conducted by Catholics. This was the return to the medieval assumption of a total society, in which it was impossible to mark a point where the authority of the Church ended since spiritual considerations pervaded all material affairs. Ward argued that a separation between theology and other aspects of human knowledge was in practice impossible because the overlay was too great: ‘We therefore see over how large a field of secular science the church’s authority extends. She has the power. . . of infallibly pronouncing propositions to be erroneous if they tend by legitimate consequence to a denial of any religious doctrine which she teaches.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  But since I had been the forward one, the one who asked him if we could kiss, I didn’t want to be too needy. “What time tomorrow night?” I asked. “Ten?” “Kiss me goodbye?” We kissed quickly and then I watched him swim off. I wondered if I had been too engaged in the kiss, too desperate and needy, falling down a hole. Maybe he could sense my addictive tendencies coming off of me like bad perfume. Maybe he was just sexually attracted to me? It was hard to say, but I assumed I had done something wrong, because, well, I always did. When I got home Dominic was in the corner. I had forgotten to give him his medicine and feed him. This was what happened when I followed my desires. I couldn’t believe how quickly I had forsaken him. It was as though he simply ceased to exist while I was out frolicking on the beach with a stranger. Was going to the rocks a mistake? For a moment I wished that they weren’t so near to Annika’s house and that Theo hadn’t given me a time for tomorrow—that we couldn’t have a day or two apart. But of course, when the time came I knew I’d rush out there to be with him. I gave Dominic a bowl of dehydrated duck and added a little water. I gave him some extra too, even though I wasn’t supposed to. “I’m so sorry, Domi,” I said. He ate hungrily, then licked my face. Then he started sniffing me, almost compulsively, and growled. Clearly he did not like the smell of Theo. I wondered if it was the scent of the ocean itself that made him angry. Perhaps he liked the ocean and was jealous that he couldn’t go there with me. I felt bad, but Venice Beach had a massive fine if you were caught there with a dog. I washed my face and realized that I hadn’t eaten either, but was too tired to make anything. I thought of that song, I didn’t know the music, just the words, something like “When you’re in love you’re never hungry.” Was I in love with this swimmer boy? Or was I just completely crazy? It didn’t make sense that something could feel so good, holy, and spiritual—like the gods themselves had put it there—and still not be right. It must be right, a gift for all of my suffering. But what if Theo just wanted sex? I thought about whether he was an “unavailable” man, and it seemed unlikely. I mean, I had never spent time with him out of the water.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Augustine thus bridges the gap between the humanistic optimism of the classical world and the despondent passivity of the Middle Ages. The mentality he expressed was to become the dominant outlook of Christianity, and so to encompass the whole of European society for many centuries. The defeat of the Pelagians was to be an important landmark in this process. To what extent Augustine’s own Manichean pessimism was responsible for this dark coloration of Christian thought is hard to measure; certainly, if we contrast his philosophy with Paul’s, it can be seen that Augustine, not Pelagius, was the heresiarch – the greatest of all, in terms of his influence. But Christian society in Augustine’s age was already moving in this direction. By accepting the Constantinian State, the Church had embarked on the process of coming to terms with a world from which it had hitherto stood apart. It had postponed the construction of the perfect society until after the parousia. Augustine provided an ideology for this change of course, but he did not himself set it. In 398 a curious series of episodes took place in Constantinople. Following a high tide and a series of earth tremors, an official in the imperial army claimed that God had revealed to him that the city would be destroyed. In the second century, a man who spread such superstitions would have been prosecuted: this was precisely why the State had acted against Montanist bishops and ‘speakers with tongues’. In 398 there was a very different sequence of events. The official told his bishop, who preached an alarmist sermon. At sunset, a red cloud was seen approaching the city; men thought they could smell sulphur, and many rushed to the churches demanding baptism. The next week there were more alarms, culminating in a general exodus from the city, led by the emperor in person. For several hours Constantinople was deserted, while its terrified inhabitants camped in the fields five miles away. Such human stampedes were to become a feature of medieval Europe. The incident at Constantinople in 398 was an indication that the classical era was over, and that men were now inhabiting a different mental universe. PART THREEMitred Lords and Crowned Ikons (450–1054) ON 23 DECEMBER, in the year 800, a lengthy meeting took place in the Secret Council Chamber of the Lateran Palace in Rome. Among those present were Charlemagne, the Frankish leader, the Pope, Leo III, Frankish, Lombard and Roman ecclesiastics and generals, and two French monks from Tours, Witto and Fridugis, who represented their abbot, the Yorkshireman Alcuin. There were two points at issue. First, should the Pope, who had been bitterly criticized, accused of a variety of crimes and vices, and very nearly assassinated by his enemies, be allowed to continue in office? And second, should western Christianity continue to recognize the imperial overlordship of the emperor in Constantinople?

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Thus a Mediceus of Virgil, dating from the end of the fifth century, and probably once in the possession of Cassiodorus, was preserved in various monastic houses, found its way to Bobbio, and is now in the Laurentian Library in Florence. The monks argued that the more copies they succeeded in making, the more likely it was that one at least would survive; and they were right. In the eighth century, the scriptorium of St Martin’s of Tours transcribed a fifth-century Livy; the copy survived, the original is lost. Right at the end of his life, Bede was urging his scribe to ‘write faster’. There was a sense of gloomy urgency about the task, for men believed that, however horrible the period since Rome’s decline had been, things would get worse, not better; and there was much evidence to support their belief. One chief reason why King Alfred, at the end of the ninth century, wanted all the essential Latin texts translated into English was that he believed the coming hard times would wipe out Latin scholarship and that, even if the originals were not destroyed, no one would be able to read them. Hence, in the eighth and ninth centuries virtually all the ancient texts were re-copied, often many times, and so saved. Much of this work was carried out in the big German monasteries – Lorsch, Cologne, Witzburg, Reichenau, St Gall, and so forth. Outstanding was Fulda, the centre of historiography east of the Rhine, to which we owe, for instance, vital texts of Tacitus, Suetonius, Ammianus, Vetruvius and Servius, through whom medieval men learnt their Virgil. Fulda had huge resources, and recruited a large number of conspicuously able men. One of its ninth-century monks, Hrabanus Maurus, later Archbishop of Mainz, put together an encyclopaedia of received knowledge, modelled on Isidore of Seville; and one of Hrabanus’s pupils, Servatus Lupus, later Abbot of Ferrières, became the nearest approach to the modern idea of a scholar before the twelfth century John of Salisbury. Yet the work of both these Fulda monks is essentially derivative. Hrabanus’s encyclopaedia contains no original thinking; Servatus’s chief contribution was to compile a corpus of barbarian laws for the Duke of Friuli. These works were useful but uncreative. Moreover, we must not think that the monks were primarily concerned with transmitting the classics. No Greek secular works were preserved in the original. Even the Greek fathers were studied, and copied, in Latin translations. Profane literature in Latin occupied only a fraction of the time available. The work of the scriptoria was overwhelmingly centred on the Fathers, chiefly Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, Gregory the Great, and later Bede; on bibles and lives of the saints; and on liturgical works – that is, sacramentals, lectionaries and gospelaries, missals (sacramentary plus the lectionary), antiphonaries or song-books, and hymnals. There was also a mass output of psalters, ordines, martyrologies, pontifications – that is books dealing with the bishop’s functions – and penitentials.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Christianity, as we have noted before, is essentially a historical religion; and in giving absolutely priority to the historical documents – the scriptures – the Protestants had appeared to be on infinitely stronger ground than the Catholics, who relied for their dogmatic justification on the unscriptural authority or magisterium of the Church – that is, the mere opinions of uninspired men – and who could justly be accused of trying to keep the text of the inspired Revelation from the hands of the multitude. The Evangelicals, in particular, relied on the traditional strength of the Bible. Everything was to be found there; and nothing that was not found there was of consequence. Their standard textbook, the Elements of Christian Theology by Bishop George Pretyman Tomline, had a totally uncritical approach to scripture. Thus, the thirteenth edition (1820) noted: ‘The great length to which human life was extended in the patriarchal ages rendered it very practicable for the Jews, in the time of Moses, to trace their lineal descents as far as the Flood, nay even to Adam’; Methuselah ‘was 243 years contemporary with Adam, and 600 with Noah’; and so forth. Both the Old and the New Testaments were treated as historical records, and to question their literacy accuracy was to deny their inspirational status. By the end of the eighteenth century, this position was beginning to be highly vulnerable. Science itself was not necessarily a threat to Christianity. Christianity could rationalize within its own assumptions changes in cosmology and the discovery of new operative laws. Indeed, up to a point at least, the very existence of scientifically demonstrable laws was welcome to Christian apologists who could instance them to prove the workings of an all-powerful divine intelligence. But could religion withstand the invariable application of scientific methodology, that is the pursuit of truth for its own sake regardless of the consequences? Chritianity being a faith which identified itself with truth, it was essential that it should do so. Locke’s presentation was based on this assumption. But then Locke had lived at a time when it had seemed more likely that scientific demonstration of truth would confirm rather than discredit Christian claims. A hundred years later the situation was changing radically. It then emerged that what Christianity had to fear was not so much science itself as scientific method applied historically. This worked in two ways. Geologists and astronomers on the one hand, and biologists and anthropologists on the other, combined to present a historical picture of the earth’s origin, and of man’s habitation of it, which was wholly incompatible with the historical account in the Old Testament. Secondly, study of the scriptural texts using the new methods of historical analysis, and with the assistance of philology and archaeology, revealed the scriptures as a much more complicated collection of documents than anyone had hitherto imagined, a bewildering compound of allegory and fact, to be sifted like any other ancient literature.

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

  What was Sigismund doing? He had issued the letter of safe-conduct, Oct. 18. On the day before his arrival in Constance, Dec. 24th, John of Chlum posted up a notice on the cathedral, protesting that the king’s agreement had been treated with defiance by the cardinals. Sigismund professed to be greatly incensed, and blustered, but this was the end of it. He was a time-serving prince who was easily persuaded to yield to the arguments of such ecclesiastical figures as D’Ailly, who insisted that little matters like Huss’ heresy should not impede the reformation of the church, the council’s first concern, and that error unreproved was error countenanced.674 All good churchmen prayed his Majesty might not give way to the lies and subtleties of the Wycliffists. The king of Aragon wrote that Huss should be killed off at once, without having the formality of a hearing. During his imprisonment in the Black Friars’ convent, Huss wrote for his gaoler, Robert, tracts on the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, Mortal Sin and Marriage. Of the 13 letters preserved from this time, the larger part were addressed to John of Chlum, his trusty friend. Some of the letters were written at midnight, and some on tattered scraps of paper.675 In this correspondence four things are prominent: Huss’ reliance upon the king and his word of honor, his consuming desire to be heard in open council, the expectation of possible death and his trust in God. He feared sentence would be passed before opportunity was given him to speak with the king. "If this is his honor, it is his own lookout," he wrote.676 In the meantime the council had committed the matter of heresy to a commission, with D’Ailly at its head. It plied Huss with questions, and presented heretical articles taken from his writings. Stephen Paletz, his apostate friend, badgered him more than all the rest. His request for a "proctor and advocate" was denied. The thought of death was continually before him. But, as the Lord had delivered Jonah from the whale’s belly, and Daniel from the lions, so, he believed, God would deliver him, if it were expedient.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The common characteristic of these entrepreneurs was their desire to be left alone by the religious enthusiasts and organizers, and to escape from the clericalist and canon law network. Their religion might be intense, but it was essentially private and personal. Thus it had a good deal in common with the type of religious piety advocated by Erasmus in his Enchiridion ; indeed, the ideas of Erasmus, who had a similar urban background, both reflected and shaped the attitudes of the new economic élite. These well-to-do and hard-working men were educated. They wished to read the scriptures for themselves. They did not want their reading matter interfered with or censored. They disapproved of clerics, especially those in the orders, whom they thought dishonest or lazy, or both. They deplored the superstitious accretions of medieval Christianity, and preferred the simpler practices of the ‘primitive’ Church which they claimed to discern in the acts of the apostles and the epistles of St Paul. They believed in the worthiness, indeed sanctification, of lay life; they exalted the married state and thought laymen the spiritual equal of clerks. This type of urban bourgeois had found it possible to come to terms with the pre-Reformation Church in roughly the same way as Erasmus himself. But after the 1520s the situation changed. Reformed Christianity seemed to offer a more viable alternative. Reformed Tridentine Catholicism, on the other hand, became less tolerable. Moreover, many of the urban centres where pre-sixteenth-century capitalism flourished were convulsed by the religious struggle, and life became intolerable for independent-minded businessmen who wished to keep their religion private. The sixteenth century thus witnessed a great series of displacements among the entrepreneurial class. Jews moved out of Seville and Lisbon, and to northern and central Europe. Merchants from Germany, the Rhineland and France moved to Lisbon and Seville. Italians moved northwards from Como, Locarno, Milan and Venice into the Rhineland. South Germans moved away from the Counter-Reformation into north Germany. From such Flanders towns as Lieèe, Brussels and Ghent, where Catholicism of the new Counter-Reformation variety was forcibly imposed by the Spanish tercios, there was a movement to Frankfurt, Hamburg, Bremen, the Rhineland and Switzerland; and a movement into the Protestant Netherlands, especially after the fall of Antwerp to the Spanish in 1585. Some of these emigrants were Catholics; among the Protestants many were Lutherans rather than Calvinists. They were seeking peace and toleration rather than a new doctrinal system. It was from these emigrant business communities that the giants of the new capitalism were drawn. One such was the Calvinist Jan de Willem, who worked for Christian IV of Denmark. He and his brothers helped to create the Danish East India Company. They came from Amsterdam. King Christian also employed Gabriel and Celio Marcelis to farm tolls and mineral tithes, and advance loans on the proceeds, as contractors, munition merchants and timber exporters. Both were Flemish, refugees from the Counter-Reformation.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  This, in turn, led to the methodical practice of good works (thus developing in economic terms habits of industry and capitalism). Good works were useless as a means of attaining salvation, since that was already determined, but they were indispensible as a sign of election, to get rid of the fear of damnation, and induce what Luther called ‘the feeling of blessed assurance’ – an inner conviction that you were saved. Weber thought that Calvinism was an anxiety-inducing ideology that drove its victims to seek self-control and confidence in methodical work and worldly success. But there is no evidence that Calvinism, or other powerful forms of Protestantism, induced anxiety. The anxiety was already there. It always had been. Origen, with his theory of universal salvation, had always represented a minority trend in Christianity. Vast numbers of Christians had feared Hell and its fires at all periods. These anxieties naturally tended to generate work. Anxious men assuaged their worries, in medieval society, by paying for masses to be said for them, or by buying indulgences. They had to work to get this salvation money. But profit thus generated was creamed off by the Church, and used in display buildings, masses and charitable foundations. It was not available for entrepreneurial investment. To this extent medieval society was not a saving society; or, rather, it banked its treasure in Heaven. It had a wealthy Church, rather than capitalist enterprises, to show for its industry. Again, medieval merchants were less inclined to bequeath large sums in cash to their heirs than their successors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Huge bequests went to purposes which Protestantism later ruled to be futile or anti-Christian. A comparatively small percentage change in such habits could effect, over a period, a major transformation in economic life. This does not mean that passionate Protestants, especially Calvinists, were more likely to be successful in business. It has not been, and probably cannot be, demonstrated that, for instance, Englishmen who actually became Puritans and lived through the ‘salvation panic’ then became entrepreneurial businessmen or significantly changed their commercial habits as a result. The evidence from individual diaries, letters and memoirs suggests that the most significant expression of their new faith was in the cultural and political field rather than the economic. It is true that the Puritan spirit did tend to make good organizers; but, as such, it operated on both sides of the religious divide – Loyola and Borromeo were both brilliant organizers, as indeed had been the early Benedictines and Cistercians, quite independent of any particular Salvationist theology. Thus, though it is true that the commercial instinct tended to turn men against the Catholic Church, with its excessive clericalism, it did not necessarily turn them to Protestantism. There was nothing in Luther’s teaching specifically favourable to commerce or industry. He condemned usury, as did most Catholic evangelists; both Lutheran and Catholic writers continued to attack usury in any form until well into the seventeenth century.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  “No, I can handle it,” I said. “But thank you. I think I only need two items anyway: one bra, one pair of underpants. Oh, and garters!” Claire laughed. “What are you going to, a bachelorette party?” “I don’t know, he asked for garters specifically,” I said. “What a wanker. Does he think you’re some kind of doll?” I actually liked being a doll. I wished Garrett would just pick out the bra and underwear too. It made it easier than having to decide on my own. My decisions had never led anywhere good. But Bridget, hopped up on a potential commission, was thrilled to sell me garters. She tsked Claire and told her that garters were chic for a modern woman. They were a nod to the classic, but you could do them in a modern way. I settled on the black lace thong, the black lace bra with the pink underneath, a plain pair of black velvet and satin garters, and some sheer black thigh-high stockings. The total was $395. I didn’t know what I was doing or who I was being, but I knew that I liked it better than me. 19.The following morning I packed an overnight bag with everything in it. Then I took it all out, thinking I should probably just wear it all to the hotel. I didn’t know if I’d be staying over or if it would just be an afternoon thing. Staying over scared me. The thought of it made me feel trapped, like the way I felt once I begged myself into Jamie’s house and then was like “Now what?” I was already having “now what” and I wasn’t even in the bed with this guy. What if I sweat in my sleep or farted? I hadn’t slept with a new person in years. Farting in my sleep with Jamie was an entirely different situation than farting on a handsome stranger. Also, I didn’t know what to do about Dominic and his food and medication. If I left him at home could he wait to use the bathroom all night? I didn’t think so. Annika sometimes used a dog sitter named Moira who would sleep over. She had left me Moira’s number in case of emergencies. But I didn’t want Moira to tell Annika I’d been out all night. I decided I would just walk Dominic and feed him right before I left, maybe leave him some extra food. If I slept over I would make sure to come home first thing at dawn. And if he peed and pooped on the floor, so what? It could be cleaned up.

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

  First, their selective Jewish observances were works, not faith, he said, and those sympathizers were in greater danger before God than either pure pagans or full Jews. Second, once converted to Christianity, they would be constantly pulled in two directions—one way by Paul and the other way by their former Jewish friends. If they retained or acquired Jewish observances, did they come from Jewish faith or from Jewish works? But how could their practices come from Jewish faith, since they were not full Jews? We will see below Paul’s startling warning, “Whatever does not proceed from faith is sin” (14:23). In that struggle between Christian Judaism and non-Christian Judaism, Paul not only used strong apologetics for the former position, but equally strong polemics against the latter. He not only warned pagans and especially converted God-worshipers against works and for faith; he went over to the attack against his Jewish opponents and accused them of trying to live by works themselves. But was that accusation fair and accurate? Of course not. It was, as noted at the start of this chapter, the standard rhetoric of religious polemics. The Unity of Jewish Christians and Pagan Christians: Romans 12–16 The third, final, and innermost circle of Paul’s narrowing focus concerns the unity of Roman Christians with one another and, of course, with outsiders, as far as that was possible. Romans 12–16 starts with more general admonitions in chapters 12–13 and concludes with specific details and greetings in 13–16. Two sets of sentences serve as thematic emphases toward the start and conclusion of the section. “Live in harmony with one another,” Paul says in 12:16 and 15:5 and, by the time you get to that second one, you know that the first was not just abstract generality. Furthermore, Paul advises them “not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned” (12:3). Later, he speaks of “the faith that you have, have as your own conviction before God” (14:22). Harmony is required, it would seem, because God has granted them divergences within Christian faith or differences of Christian faith. What, then, was the exact situation inside and outside Roman Christianity that required such a long plea for peaceful unity? “Do Not Be Conformed to This World”

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  This did not happen. The existing order was not only saved but greatly reinforced by a man the authorities first thought of as an arch-enemy: John Wesley. Like so many others, Wesley came to active religion by re-reading St Paul to the Romans, in his case in the light of Luther’s preface. This was in 1738, and Wesley was thirty-five and an Anglican clergyman. ‘I then testified openly to all there what I now first felt in my heart.’ His Christianity was almost totally devoid of intellectual content. It had no doctrinal insights. It was wholly ethical and emotional. If anything, Wesley was an Arminian. He thought: ‘God willeth all men to be saved.’ Among his associates were strict Calvinists, like the great preacher George Whitfield, who subscribed to double predestination, accused Wesley of the heresy of universalism, and told him: ‘Your God is my devil’. It was necessary to ‘rouse the soul out of its carnal security’ which Wesley’s ‘assurances of salvation’ induced. But Wesley did not concern himself much with such matters. Right to the end he thought of himself as an Anglican: ‘I live and die a member of the Church of England. None who regard my judgment or advice will ever separate from it.’ But he believed he had been appointed by God to assume the role of a modern Paul, and ‘proclaim the glad tidings of salvation’ among a supposedly Christian people who had forgotten them. This meant breaking the conventions of the Anglican parochial system and preaching wherever he could find an audience. He travelled over 250,000 miles, and spoke to gatherings in the open air of up to 30,000 people. On forty-two occasions he crossed the Irish Sea, and it is calculated he preached over 40,000 sermons, some of which lasted for three hours. Moreover, Wesley was not just a Montanist charismatic: he had the organizing ability of a Gregory the Great or a Benedict. He discovered that religious enthusiasm was an ephemeral thing unless it was harnessed to a carefully defined structure, periodically galvanized by meetings, and given a chance to express itself in regular, planned and arduous activities. He started with ‘societies’ and ‘classes’. Then he introduced the Methodist Conference, ‘circuits or rounds’, quarterly meetings, then district meetings. Lay leadership was organized in the shape of ‘class leaders’, stewards, trustees, and local preachers. Every member was drawn into a corporate life, giving (or receiving) financial support, and all pledged themselves to take part in activities such as Bible-meetings, sewing for charity, and so forth. He produced regulations about clothes, food and drink, ornaments, money, buying and selling, and language. There was strict corporate and personal discipline; victories and defeats were reported at class meetings, and offenders excommunicated. Thus at Newcastle in 1743, Wesley himself expelled sixty-four members for a variety of sins ranging from swearing and Sabbath-breaking to vaguer categories such as ‘idleness, railing, lightness, etc.’.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The gentry often thought Wesley preached community of goods, and there was a case at Middleton in Yorkshire of a gentleman picking up a stick and joining the mob himself, swearing ‘most dreadfully that the Methodists should not take his lands from him’. This combination of upper-class hostility and lower-class prejudice had the effect, as it undoubtedly did with many of the early Christian groups, of strengthening the conventional and conservative forces within the movement. This was Wesley’s own inclination (he was a Hanoverian Tory), and he used popular reactions to repress any tendency for Methodists to drift to millenarianism. Not only did his sermons endorse the existing order of society; he urged his converts to strive actively to prevent economic or political discontent breaking out into violence, and to obey the law in all its rigour. His appeal was particularly powerful among the upper echelons of the working classes – skilled craftsmen and journeymen – and small traders and shopkeepers, all those anxious to improve their status, inch their way up the social or commercial ladder, and to achieve respectability and modest affluence. Such groups could easily be detached from any revolutionary element among the proletariat, and used to emasculate it. Wesley never had the slightest fear that he was stirring up social demons. On the contrary, he noted from the start that his converts tended to improve their social and economic situation, and his only anxiety was that this would lead to a loss of religious fervour: ‘I fear, wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion. Therefore I do not see how it is possible, in the nature of things, for any renewal of true religion to continue long. For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger and the love of the world in all its branches. How then is it possible that Methodism, that is, a religion of the heart, though it flourishes now as a green bay tree, should continue in this state? For the Methodists in every place grow diligent and frugal; consequently they increase in goods. Hence they proportionately increase in pride, in anger, in the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life. So, although the form of religion remains, the spirit as swiftly vanishes away. Is there no way to prevent this — the continual decay of pure religion? We ought not to prevent people from being diligent and frugal; we must exhort all Christians to gain all they can, and save all they can: that is, in effect, to grow rich.’ In 1773, he noted in his Journal : ‘I went to Macclesfield, and found a people still alive to God, in spite of swiftly increasing riches.