Bewilderment

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

  The character and career of Alexander VI. afford an argument against the theory of the divine institution and vicarial prerogatives of the papacy which the doubtful exegesis of our Lord’s words to Peter ought not to be allowed to counteract. If we leave out all the wicked popes of the 9th and 10th centuries, forget for a moment the cases of Honorius and other popes charged with heresy, and put aside the offending popes of the Renaissance period and all the bulls which sin against common reason, such as Innocent VIII.’s bull against witchcraft, Alexander is enough to forbid that theory. Could God commit his Church for 12 years to such a monster? It is fair to recognize that Catholic historians feel the difficulty, although they find a way to explain it away. Cardinal Hergenröther says that, Christendom was delivered from a great offence by Alexander’s death, but even in his case, unworthy as this pope was, his teachings are to be obeyed, and in him the promise made to the chair of St. Peter was fulfilled (Matt. 23:2, 3). In no instance did Alexander VI. prescribe to the Church anything contrary to morals or the faith, and never did he lead her astray in disciplinary decrees which, for the most part, were excellent."822 In like strain, Pastor writes:823 In spite of Alexander, the purity of the Church’s teaching continued unharmed. It was as if Providence wanted to show that men may injure the Church, but that it is not in their power to destroy it. As a bad setting does not diminish the value of the precious stone, so the sinfulness of a priest cannot do any essential detriment either to his dispensation of her sacraments or to the doctrines committed to her. Gold remains gold, whether dispensed by clean hands or unclean. The papal office is exalted far above the personality of its occupants, and cannot lose its dignity or gain essential worth by the worthiness or unworthiness of its occupants. Peter sinned deeply, and yet the supreme pastoral office was committed to him. It was from this standpoint that Pope Leo the Great declared that the dignity of St. Peter is not lost, even in an unworthy successor. Petri dignitas etiam in indigno haeredo non deficit." Leo’s words Pastor adopts as the motto of his history.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She would wonder if Stephen were tired or just sulky, or if, after all, the child might be stupid. Ought she, perhaps, to feel sorry for the child? She could never quite make up her mind. Meanwhile, Stephen, enjoying the comfortable brougham, would begin to indulge in kaleidoscopic musings, those musings that belong to the end of the day, and occasionally visit children. Mrs. Thompson’s bent spine, it looked like a bow—not a rainbow but one of the archery kind; if you stretched a tight string from her feet to her head, could you shoot straight with Mrs. Thompson? China dogs—they had nice china dogs at Langley’s—that made you think of someone; oh, yes, of course, Collins—Collins and a cottage with red china dogs. But you tried not to think about Collins! There was such a queer light slanting over the hills, a kind of gold glory, and it made you feel sorry—why should a gold glory make you feel sorry when it shone that way on the hills? Rice pudding, almost as bad as tapioca—not quite though, because it was not so slimy—tapioca evaded your efforts to chew it, it felt horrid, like biting down on your own gum. The lanes smelt of wetness, a wonderful smell! Yet when Nanny washed things they only smelt soapy—but then, of course, God washed the world without soap; being God, perhaps He didn’t need any—you needed a lot, especially for hands—did God wash His hands without soap? Mother, talking about calves and babies, and looking like the Virgin Mary in church, the one in the stained-glass window with Jesus, which reminded you of Church Street, not a bad place after all; Church Street was really rather exciting—what fun it must be for men to have hats that they could take off, instead of just smiling—a bowler must be much more fun than a Leghorn—you couldn’t take that off to Mother— The brougham would roll smoothly along the white road, between stout leafy hedges starred with dog-roses; blackbirds and thrushes would be singing loudly, so loudly that Stephen could hear their voices above the quick clip, clip, of the cobs and the muffled sounds of the carriage. Then from under her brows she must glance across at Anna, who she knew loved the songs of blackbirds and thrushes; but Anna’s face would be hidden in shadow, while her hands lay placidly folded. And now the horses, nearing their stables, would redouble their efforts as they swung through the gates, the tall, iron gates of the parklands of Morton, faithful gates that had always meant home.

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

  An even more spectacular discovery was made at Pompeii in 1909. Italian archaeologists uncovered perhaps the world’s most famous frescoes in a house outside the city that they later called the Villa of the Mysteries. Wall murals on all sides of its Room 5 depict various scenes relating to the rituals of the god Dionysos, and an extremely large number of women are represented in them. Among the mural depictions are a woman startled by Dionysos, a scroll being read (some sacred text?), a revelation behind a sheet (of the phallus?), a daemon flagellating a young girl (an initiate?), dancing maenads, and a woman with cupids grooming herself as a matron looks on (the initiate as bride?). This room was separated from the atrium by at least one other room and was thus relatively inaccessible and invisible, and the function of that frescoed room is intensely debated. Was it hidden as a cultic room for initiation into the mysteries? And, if so, we emphasize its location inside a private villa. Was it a bridal preparatory room? (If you go there on Saturday afternoons—at least in summer—several Neapolitan couples will be having their wedding photos taken in that room!) Was it the master bedroom? A triclinium, or dining room, for family and guests? It is very hard to decide, but keep this in mind. There is no other evidence of Dionysos’s worship anywhere within that villa, although two other shrines were discovered there. One was in the north courtyard with a tufa altar and statues of Hercules and an unidentifiable goddess. The other was near the hearth with painted images of the Roman handicraft goddess Minerva and, ironically, the fire god Vulcan. A tile was also found dedicated to the grain goddess Ceres. But there was no other evidence for Dionysos. In the end, we are not sure what to make of that room, but for our purposes it shows how religion was intimately woven into the architectural and decorative fabric of life in the Roman house.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The reflections in it of oral traditions – deliberate repetitions and symmetrical arrangements – and of the patterns of popular story-telling are very strong. In presenting his material in written form he had, it is true, some Greek models, and he must have been influenced by the literary doctrines of Aristotle’s Poetics. All the same, he was trying to do something which had never been done before and his problems were not only those of an unpractised writer but also those of an amateur theologian trying to transmit a complex message which he himself had received from the far from lucid Peter. Hence he often does not attempt to solve the problems of comprehensibility and falls back on a constant use of a ‘secrecy motive’. He stresses that the apostles and disciples did not always understand what Jesus was trying to do; he implies that the full meaning of his person and message was not understood during his ministry, though some followers grasped more than others, and indeed that not all of Jesus’s teaching was intended for the public. Mark’s gospel has thus been called a book of secret epiphanies, mysterious glimpses of a manifestation of divinity, rather than a coherent explanation of the phenomenon of Jesus Christ. The text was much altered and interpolated during the earliest period, for both good and bad reasons, and was a favourite source-book for primitive heresiarchs to justify their divergencies. Matthew and Luke, quite independently, produced their own narratives. They evidently found Mark unsatisfactory, both in general and from the point of view of their own particular interests – Luke belonged to the school of Paul’s gentile mission, and Matthew represented the rump of the Jewish Jerusalem Church after the murder of James and the departure of Peter. Each had Mark to work from, though probably in a carelessly copied form; and they also had another source, called by modern scholars ‘Q’, which may be the ‘oracles’ which Papias mentioned, but is really nothing more than an academic device to designate non-Marcan materials common to both Luke and Matthew. All these synoptic gospels, moreover, emerged from a miasma of oral tradition and counter-tradition; and it is possible that Mark’s Greek gospel was itself derived from an earlier version of Matthew written in Hebrew – this would accord with the traditional view in the early Church that Matthew was the first of the synoptics, a view still held by some Roman Catholic scholars. The gospel attributed to John, on the other hand, has no demonstrable connection with the synoptics, though it also derives, naturally, from the same oral miasma. It is, however, more of a theological treatise than a historical narrative and shows strong connections both with the Pauline epistles and with the Jewish apocalyptic tradition. It has been edited, as its closing words make clear; and there is evidence of heavy tampering in the earliest manuscripts – obvious glosses, and so forth – as well as sheer muddle.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  Apart from in the Bois – even there, as we’ve seen, even there! – you don’t mix with people until you have greeted them first, until you have respected a transitional moment in which a few words are exchanged, where each person maintains just the time and space between themselves and the others to offer them a glass or hand them an ashtray. I always wanted to abolish this suspense, but there were some rituals that I tolerated better than others. Armand used to make me laugh because, while everyone else was still at the chatting stage, he would strip completely naked, a few minutes ahead of all the others, and would fold his clothes as carefully as a butler. Or I would comply with what I thought was a stupid policy of one group who would not swing until they had dined, always in the same restaurant, like an old school reunion; and what made their evening was to ‘de-knicker’ or ‘de-tight’ one of the women in their party while the waiter was going round the table. On the other hand, I thought it was obscene to tell salacious stories at an orgy. Was it because I instinctively made a distinction between the playlets presented as a prelude to a play – the better to prepare you for it – and the play-acting which serves only to delay it? The acts performed in the one are never performed in the other where they really would be ‘out of place’.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  The grave and the image are equally links with the irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable. But the image has the added disadvantage that it will do whatever you want. It will smile or frown, be tender, gay, ribald, or argumentative just as your mood demands. It is a puppet of which you hold the strings. Not yet of course. The reality is still too fresh; genuine and wholly involuntary memories can still, thank God, at any moment rush in and tear the strings out of my hands. But the fatal obedience of the image, its insipid dependence on me, is bound to increase. The flower-bed on the other hand is an obstinate, resistant, often intractable bit of reality, just as Mum in her lifetime doubtless was. As H. was. Or as H. is. Can I honestly say that I believe she now is anything? The vast majority of the people I meet, say, at work, would certainly think she is not. Though naturally they wouldn’t press the point on me. Not just now anyway. What do I really think? I have always been able to pray for the other dead, and I still do, with some confidence. But when I try to pray for H., I halt. Bewilderment and amazement come over me. I have a ghastly sense of unreality, of speaking into a vacuum about a nonentity. The reason for the difference is only too plain. You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it? The same with people. For years I would have said that I had perfect confidence in B.R. Then came the moment when I had to decide whether I would or would not trust him with a really important secret. That threw quite a new light on what I called my ‘confidence’ in him. I discovered that there was no such thing. Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief. Apparently the faith—I thought it faith—which enables me to pray for the other dead has seemed strong only because I have never really cared, not desperately, whether they existed or not. Yet I thought I did. But there are other difficulties. ‘Where is she now?’ That is, in what place is she at the present time? But if H. is not a body—and the body I loved is certainly no longer she—she is in no place at all. And ‘the present time’ is a date or point in our time series.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  We already heard the cryptic hint in 1 Corinthians 2:8, where the “rulers” wouldn’t have executed Jesus if they had understood who he was and what the result would be. Here the point is spelled out far more graphically. If we ask Paul what had happened when Jesus died—if we bring to him our question of what had changed by six o’clock on that evening, what was different about the world, what was now true that hadn’t been true twenty-four hours earlier—I think this is one of the primary things he would have said, that the rulers, the powers, had been defeated. When Paul speaks of the “rulers and authorities,” he means both the visible rulers, the Herods, the Caesars, the governors, and the priests, and the “invisible” rulers, the dark powers that stand behind them and operate through them. By the time Jesus’s body was taken down from the cross, Paul believed, these “rulers and authorities” had been stripped, shamed, and defeated. Even at the time—especially at the time!—this must have sounded completely crazy. (Well, Paul did say that the “word of the cross” looked like madness.) One of the Caesars was still on the throne. His local officials around the world were still running the show with brutal efficiency. The chief priests were still in charge of the Temple in Jerusalem. Paul himself was in prison! So is this statement about God’s overthrowing the rulers and authorities in the cross of Jesus simply a bit of over-the-top bravado, whistling in the wind, shaking an apostolic fist at the cosmos? No doubt the rhetoric is deliberately designed to sound a bit like that, but underneath there is a logic that is crystal in its clarity and compelling in its conviction. The power of the rulers has been broken—the new Passover, to use our earlier language, has now taken place for certain—because in the messianic events “God made us alive together with Jesus, forgiving us all our offenses.” Victory over the powers, once more, is accomplished through the forgiveness of sins. Paul adds a note about God “blotting out the handwriting that was against us,” referring obliquely to the Jewish law, which had kept non-Jews out of the reckoning and had pronounced condemnation for disobedience on the Jews themselves. That has been done away with. It has been nailed to the cross. (Remember Gal. 2:19: “Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God”? This is a very similar point.) Once again, it is because of this victory that the Gentile mission was even thinkable. The “powers” that had held the nations captive had been defeated. The slaves could now walk free. So how does “forgiveness” result in “victory over the powers”? Here we go back to our earlier analysis of sin and idolatry.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Because nothing was as it appeared, human reason must rise above common sense, prejudice, and unverified opinion; only then could it grasp true reality. 82 But many of his contemporaries felt that he made it impossible to think constructively about anything at all. 83 Parmenides argued that the world could not have developed in the way the Milesians had described, because all change was an illusion. Reality consisted of one, simple, complete, and eternal Being. He insisted that we could say nothing sensible about phenomena that did not exist. Thus, because Being was eternal and not subject to alteration, there was no such thing as change. We could, therefore, never say that something was born, because that implied that previously it had not existed, nor, for the same reason, could we say that it died or ceased to be. It appeared that creatures came into being and passed away, but this was an illusion, because reality was beyond time and change. Again, nothing could “move,” in the sense that at a given moment an object shifted from one place to another. We could never say that something had “developed,” that it had been one way once but become something different. So the universe was not in flux, as Heraclitus claimed; nor did it evolve, as the Milesians had argued. The universe was the same at all times and in all places. It was unchanging, uncreated, and immortal. The Milesians had based their philosophy on their observation of such phenomena as water and air. But Parmenides did not trust the evidence of the senses, and relied, with remarkable, ruthless consistency, on a purely reasoned argument. He cultivated the habit of “second-order thinking,” reflection upon the thought processes themselves. Like many of the Axial sages, he had arrived at a new, critical awareness of the limitations of human knowledge. Parmenides had also embarked on the philosophical quest for pure existence. Instead of contemplating individual creatures, he was trying to put his finger on quintessential being. But in the process, he created a world in which it was impossible to live. Why would anybody undertake any course of action, if change and movement were illusory? His disciple Melissus was a naval commander: How was he supposed to guide his moving ship? How should we evaluate the physical changes that we note within ourselves? Were human beings really phantoms? By divesting the cosmos of qualities, Parmenides had also deprived it of heart. Human beings do not respond to the world with logos alone; we are also emotional creatures, with a complex subconscious life. By ignoring this and cultivating his rational powers exclusively, Parmenides had discovered a void: there was nothing to think about. Increasingly, as philosophers of the Axial Age practiced sustained logical reflection, the world became unfamiliar and human beings appeared strange to themselves.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  René Descartes, an authentic member (though a late convert) of the old third force, had thought that truth was reached by a combination of careful doubting and clear reasoning. Pascal was concerned to point out that reason was human, not superhuman; it had its limitations and distortions. Cartesianism was an external enemy of the Church, just as casuistry was an internal one. Now here Pascal touched on a very powerful line of argument, and a permanent one, calculated in all ages and in all societies to exercise a certain appeal. But he did not live to present it as a philosophical system. What he left behind was a 500-page volume of miscellaneous writing, which, after various vicissitudes, now forms MS 9,202 in the Bibliothèque Nationale. A selection of his Pensées, as they were called, appeared as early as 1670, and others, selected and edited by different hands, followed. The original manuscript was hopelessly confused, and raised intrinsic difficulties as to Pascal’s meaning. It was not always clear, for instance, whether he was presenting his own or his opponents’ arguments. Early editors shed darkness rather than light, and they irreversibly rearranged the manuscript, so that the editorial problems are now insuperable. Thus all except the most modern editions of Pascal give his thoughts in a distorted or misleading form, and commentaries by the most eminent names in French literature, Bossuet, Fénelon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Valéry and so forth, are often based on misconceptions which add to the disarray. We now know, for instance, that Pascal’s supposed remark, ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me’, was intended as a frightened comment from an atheist. There are many other pitfalls, equally fatal. Hence much of Pascal’s influence bore no relation, or even a contrary relation, to what he actually thought, and one of the modern world’s most provocative books proved only partly authentic. This was of considerable historical significance. Pascal became, in effect, a secular monk, and he was undoubtedly concerned to emancipate his spirit from the flesh. He ate vegetables and drank water, swept his own room, took his plates to the kitchen and lived like a pauper; his method of sustaining meditation was to wear a spiked belt next to the flesh. But he was not an obscurantist. He suffered from fearful chronic rheumatism, and argued that this gave him peculiar insights. He was preoccupied with theodicy, and rightly recognized that suffering posed as many problems to rationalism as to religion. Illness, he thought, was ‘an integral part of the mechanism of sanctity’. Christianity disintegrated ‘without wretchedness, poverty and sickness’, because it was, in a sense, an answer to them. Reason, too, claimed to shed more light that it actually could.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  God, said the Bishop, was the author of kingship, and ‘There is one king, and his Word and royal law is one; a law not subject to the ravages of time, but the living and self-subsisting word.’ Clearly, according to this analysis, Constantine, as emperor, was an important agent of the salvation process, at least as vital to it as the apostles. So, evidently, the emperor himself thought. Thus he had a tomb prepared for himself within the new Church of the Apostles he built and gloriously endowed in Constantinople, ‘anticipating’, says Eusebius, ‘that his body would share the title with the apostles themselves, and that he should after his death become the subject, with them, of the devotions performed in their honour in this church.’ His coffin and tomb, in fact, were placed in the centre, with monuments to six apostles on each side, making him the thirteenth and chief; and he contrived to die on Whitsunday. How could the Christian Church, apparently quite willingly, accommodate this weird megalomaniac in its theocratic system? Was there a conscious bargain? Which side benefited most from this unseemly marriage between Church and State? Or, to put it another way, did the empire surrender to Christianity, or did Christianity prostitute itself to the empire? It is characteristic of the complexities of early Christian history that we cannot give a definite answer to this question. It is not at all clear why the empire and Christianity came into conflict in the first place. The empire extended toleration to all sects provided they kept the peace. Jewish Christianity may have been penetrated by Zealotry and Jewish irredentism, but the gentile Christianity of the Pauline missions was non-political and non-racial. Its social implications were, in the long run, revolutionary, but it had no specific doctrines of social change. Jesus had told his hearers to pay taxes. Paul, in a memorable passage, advised the faithful, while waiting for the parousia, to obey duly-constituted authority. As early as the mid-second century, some Christian writers saw an identity of interests between the burgeoning Christian movement, with its universalist aims, and the empire itself. Christians might not yield divine honours to the emperor, but in other respects they were loyal Romans. Tertullian claimed: ‘We are for ever making intercession for the emperors. We pray for them a long life, a secure rule, a safe home, brave armies, a faithful senate, an honest people, a quiet world, and everything for which a man and a Caesar may pray. . . . We know that the great force which threatens the whole world, the end of the age itself with its menace of hideous sufferings, is delayed by the respite which the Roman Empire means for us . . . when we pray for its postponement we assist the continuance of Rome. . . . I have a right to say, Caesar is more ours than yours, appointed as he is by our God.’ By Tertullian’s time (c .

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Humanistic psychologists, fed up with the traditional focus on pathology, emphasize human potential and our capacity for growth. This approach allows people much more freedom to be human, and thus diverse. But the humanists have shockingly little to say about sex, and even less about eroticism. They prefer to talk about love and intimacy, worthy topics to be sure, but made strangely one-sided by ignoring our lustier impulses. I’m humanistically oriented myself and have always been perplexed about how eroticism became the neglected stepchild of humanistic psychology. Could it be that it’s just too messy? Masters and Johnson launched the field of modern sex therapy in 1970.3 They started with the traditional medical model with an emphasis on physiological function and dysfunction. Then from humanism they incorporated an acceptance of sexual variations and an optimistic belief that people gravitate toward health. Using principles of behaviorism they developed practical, step-by-step methods for facilitating change. This mixture proved to be far more effective than traditional approaches in helping people resolve problems with their sexual functioning. Like all new fields, modern sex therapy has limitations, one of which is the fact that it is firmly rooted in the neat-and-clean perspective. Masters and Johnson considered sex to be fundamentally simple—a “natural” function. According to this view, all that is required for a happy sex life is the removal of disruptive impediments, most notably anxiety and guilt. If it ever occurred to them that the same impediments they sought to eliminate might also be turn-ons, they neglected to mention it. Many of today’s sex therapists are still so preoccupied with getting rid of inhibitions that they rarely stop to wonder how sexual passion is actually created and intensified. They assume, for example, that uncomplicated, comfortable sex is the best kind—which, of course, isn’t necessarily so. Neat-and-clean practitioners also believe that the ability to become aroused and to have orgasms should be sufficient for satisfaction. They don’t dwell on the fact that eroticism is intertwined with the untidy struggles of being human and is therefore inherently complex and unpredictable. EMBRACING PARADOXThis book is based on a completely different point of view. Whereas the pathology perspective fails to appreciate the inevitable variability of eroticism, and the neat-and-clean perspective tries to downplay its irrational power, the paradoxical perspective recognizes the joys of eros without denying its intricacies and risks. This new paradigm acknowledges and embraces the contradictory, dual-edged nature of erotic life. It recognizes that anything that inhibits arousal—including anxiety or guilt—can, under different circumstances, amplify it. Consequently, we must view with considerable skepticism any absolute statements about what makes sex either exciting or problematic.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  When we turn to the earliest Christian sources, we enter a terrifying jungle of scholarly contradictions. All were writing evangelism or theology rather than history, even when, like Luke in his gospel, they assume the literary manners of a historian and seek to anchor the events of Jesus’s life in secular chronology. Moreover, all the documents have a long pre-history before they reached written form. Their evaluation was a source of acute puzzlement to thoughtful Christians even in the earliest decades of the second century and probably before. Indeed, the puzzles began as soon as any Christian had access to more than one account or source, written or oral. This was happening increasingly by the closing decades of the first century, for oral accounts continued to circulate long after the earliest written gospels appeared in the two decades 60–80, and were attaining written form well into the second century. The canonical documents (let alone those later judged apocryphal) thus overlap with the earliest writings of the Church Fathers. They are products of the early Church and they are tainted in the sense that they reflect ecclesiastical controversy as well as evangelistic motivation, the difficulties of reducing oral descriptions of mysterious concepts to writing, and a variety of linguistic traps. The four gospels declared canonical, for instance, were circulated, but not necessarily first written, in colloquial Greek; but Matthew was almost certainly translated from Hebrew, and all four were either thought in Aramaic, or transcriptions from tales which were Aramaic in original circulation, yet which drew on Hebrew quotations and, to a lesser extent, on Hellenic or Hellenized concepts. The possibilities for misunderstanding are infinite. Moreover, we cannot assume that the gospels we have reflect the earliest oral traditions. The prologue to Luke makes it clear that they are based on earlier written accounts, themselves derived from the words of eye-witnesses: Luke is thus the third or possibly even fourth link along a chain stretching back two generations. The first Christian to comment on the problem was Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis, who flourished in the first decades of the second century. The fourth-century historian Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, through whose compilations Papias survives at all, remarks irritably: ‘Clearly he was very weak of intellect.’ Yet on this subject, at least, he makes sense:’... if ever any man came who had been a follower of the elders, I would inquire about the sayings of the elders; what Andrew said, or Peter, or Philip, or Thomas or James, or John or Matthew, or any other of the Lord’s disciples; and what Aristion says and John the Elder, who are disciples of the Lord. For I did not consider I got so much profit from the contents of books as from the utterances of a living and abiding voice.’ By Papias’s day, indeed, knowledge of the authorship of the canonical gospels, and the manner in which they were composed, is already confused; what he has to say about Mark and Matthew is shaky tradition.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Grant, in his Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain (1797) observed: ‘Those distant territories. . . were given to us not merely that we might draw an annual profit from them, but that we might diffuse among their inhabitants . . . the light and benign influence of the truth, the blessing of well-regulated society, the improvements and comforts of active industry. . . . In every progressive step of this work, we shall also serve the original design with which we visited India, that design so important to this country–the extension of our commerce.’ The point was made more crudely by Holman Bentley: ‘So, with the opening up of Africa, Manchester may take heart; not only are there thousands more to wear its cloth, but thousands more to be buried in it.’ Yet here again, the western mind was not unanimous, or even quite sure of itself. Officially, the British empire, for instance, was not a proselytizing organization. The proclamation which replaced the East India Company by direct British rule began: ‘Firmly relying ourselves on the truth of Christianity, and acknowledging with gratitude the solaces of religion, We disclaim alike the right and the desire to impose Our convictions on any of Our subjects. . . .’ This prolegomena was only agreed after much argument. Again, the 1854 provision of state aid to Indian schools, from which missionary establishments chiefly benefited, was defended by Sir Charles Wood, first Viscount Halifax, with notable ambivalence, on the grounds that ‘it will strengthen our empire. But. . . even if the result should be the loss of that empire, it seems to me that this country will occupy a far better and prouder position in the history of the world, if by our agency a civilized and Christian empire should be established in India, than if we continued to rule over a people debased by ignorance and degraded by superstition.’ Sometimes it is extremely hard for the historian, trying to peer into a nineteenth-century mind, to decide exactly how important the Christian impulse was among so many others. Was David Livingstone, for instance, primarily a Christian evangelist, an imperialist – or an egoist? It is possible to make out a case for all three. (His father-in-law, Robert Moffat, was also a puzzling figure: in 1857 he finished the vast work of translating the Bible into Tswana, but he seems to have had no interest in the African background, believing quite wrongly, for instance, that the Bechuna had no word for God.) Livingstone’s initial motive was almost wholly spiritual: ‘Can the love of Christ not carry the missionary where the slave-trade carries the trader?’ His life can be quite plausibly interpreted as a sacrifice. Yet after fame came to him, he left the London Missionary Society for a consulship in East Africa, the government backing his venture with £5,000. He told the University of Cambridge in 1857: ‘I beg to direct your attention to Africa.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  What should an officer do about a soldier whose weapons and horse did not pass muster before battle? Did criminal law contradict Christian ethics? (The Pope took the general line of tempering justice with mercy.) How should one treat inveterate worshippers of idols? Should they be forced to accept Christianity? (The Pope advised gentle persuasion.) How should one conclude an alliance with a friendly nation? What happens if a Christian State breaks a solemn treaty? Could a Christian country make a treaty with a pagan one? (The Pope was a little hesitant: international treaties depended on the customs of the country concerned; in case of difficulty, ask the Church’s advice; alliance with a pagan country was permissible, provided attempts were made to convert it.) Boris also wanted to know what Nicholas thought of Bulgarian customs the Greeks had banned. Was it all right to use a horse’s tail as a banner; to seek auguries, cast spells, have ceremonial songs and dances before battle, and take oaths upon a sword? (‘Alas, no,’ said the Pope.) Could miraculous stones cure, or neck-amulets protect against sickness? (Certainly not.) Was the cult of ancestors permissible? (No: Bulgars must not pray for dead parents if they had died as pagans.) Among customs approved by Nicholas were the eating of birds and animals slain without shedding blood; the practice of the ruler eating alone, at a raised table (the Pope thought this bad manners rather than sinful), and various dress-customs: Nicholas saw no objection to wearing trousers. The struggle for the soul of Bulgaria envenomed relations between Rome and Constantinople. First the Greek, then, in turn, Latin clergy were expelled. Patriarch Photius called the Latin missionaries ‘impious and execrable men from the darkness of the West’; they were like thunderbolts, violent hailstones, or wild boars trampling up the Lord’s vineyard. Among other false practices they were trying to impose on the hapless Bulgarians were fasting on Sundays, a shorter Lent, a celibate clergy, and the weird theory that only bishops could confirm! This was unacceptable: ‘Even the smallest neglect of tradition causes complete contempt for dogma.’ And, of course, teaching of filoque was downright heresy. The two sides met in council, to no avail. The dispute became jurisdictional, based on provincial frontiers which had once been part of the Roman system of government, and now had no meaning. The papacy accused the Greeks of resorting to large-scale bribery among the Bulgarians. This may well have been true. To the Bulgars, Byzantium seemed much richer and more powerful than Rome; it was also nearer. These factors in combination determined the Bulgarian allegiance, and with it went, in time, virtually the whole of the Slav world. Nevertheless, the Orthodox penetration, of south-east and eastern Europe was not merely a matter of proximity. On one issue, the use of the vernacular for Christian services and sacred writings, the Greeks were far more flexible than the Latins.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  This was a political solution, and its advocates were termed politiques. But it had some support among the religiously committed. Philip Camerarius, the German Lutheran jurist, argued in his Historical Meditations (1591): ‘If the prince supports one party and tramples on the other . . . seditions will inevitably occur. . . . So it is equally certain that civil wars will cease if the prince stands with sword drawn between the two parties, neither inclining to the right nor left unless for the purpose of beheading, without exception, all instigators of riot, sedition and faction.’ But this implied that the State itself, and those who ran it, should be, in effect, neutral in religion, something almost inconceivable to sixteenth- and indeed seventeenth-century minds. Thus in France, after various experiments in peaceful coexistence interspersed by three religious wars, a settlement was reached in the 1590s, whereby the Huguenots became the beneficiaries of an edict of toleration, signed at Nantes, and their leader and king, Henri IV, embraced Catholicism. But the monarchy remained Catholic, and when Henri’s great-grandson, Louis XIV, turned to a more militant brand of papalism, the edict was revoked and the system broke down. Again, if the principle of peaceful coexistence were admitted, how far should it stretch? Lutheranism achieved a kind of international respectability in 1555, Calvinism became an official state religion (in Scotland) in 1562. What about the more radical reformers? Where should the line be drawn? Varieties of Protestantism proliferated instantly and wherever state persecution was relaxed. One reformer, a Venetian weaver, Marcantonio Varotto, rejoined the Catholic Church in disgust in 1568, explaining: ‘I left Moravia because during the two months I spent there I saw so many faiths and sects . . . all drawing up catechisms, all desiring to be ministers, all pulling in different directions, all claiming to be the true church. In one small place, Austerlitz, there are 13 or 14 different sects.’ George Eder’s Evangelical Inquisition of 1573 enumerates forty sects; they included the Munzerites, the Adamists, who ran naked, the secretive Garden Brethren, the Open Witnesses, the Devillers (who believed the Devil would be saved on Judgment Day), the Libertines, who cohabited freely, the Weeping Brethren, the Silent Ones, who banned preaching, the Augustinians, who believed in the sleep of the soul, various Munsterites, Paulinists, who claimed to have the originals of Paul’s Epistles, priest-murderers, Antichristians, who worshipped a mythical harlot, and Judaizers. Some were violently anti-social, some not even Christian. Virtually all states banned and hounded them all. Poland was the most liberal.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The babbling of the relaxed women now spread like water boiling over. The compact crowd gave birth to sudden movements as the individual women decided to change their positions, to climb down from a chair, to rise from the floor, and they all laughed, rushed off to find red scarves, to add incense to the burners. The musicians also seemed to shake their limbs like snorting horses, laughing among themselves with all their teeth showing white and yellow in their black faces. One could hear their guttural voices against a background of shrill gossip. The drummer heated and gently beat above the fire the skin of his instrument, the cymbal-player checked the leather thongs that bound the metal to his hands. Then, like flames, the red scarves were handed above the heads of the crowd, from woman to woman, to the heart of this gay, happy, and relaxed gathering, where my mother, still in her seizure, still lay on the floor, all by herself, in the indifferent gathering of her sisters and of all these other women. When at last the cock was brought in and the musicians got ready to start again, I had to admit that I was entirely helpless and took to flight. I ran down the stairs, rudely pushed aside anyone who was in my way, and was out of the house before the music had started again. In the cool evening air I shivered and then noticed for the first time that I was in a sweat. Unconsciously, I thought of going back, to avoid catching cold: this too had been taught me since childhood, not to leave a warm room without first drinking a glass of water, then to go out by degrees, breathing the colder air in small doses. But I no longer wanted to do anything that I had been taught to do. From now on, I’ll stare straight at the moon, though I’ve been taught that it may strike one blind; when I cut my nails, I’ll throw the parings away anywhere, without fearing that I’ll have to return every night, after my death, in order to find them, by the light of my own ten fingers flaming like torches, throughout all the dust and mud of the whole world; and I’ll no longer whisper to the Djnoun spirits, before throwing out water: “Excuse me, please excuse me!” So I rushed out of our Passage with my teeth already chattering from the drafts of the windy street. I walked fast to keep warm, and the exercise reduced my anxiety, which at the same time depressed me. Once more I felt that my revolt against all this was useless and made no sense. With whom was I really annoyed?

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  The underlying motivation for claiming that female orgasm was unique to human beings probably lay in the role it played in the standard narrative. According to this view, orgasm evolved in the human female to facilitate and sustain the long-term pair bond at the heart of the nuclear family.18 Once you’ve swallowed that story, it becomes problematic to admit that the females of other primate species are orgasmic, too. Your problem gets worse if the most orgasmic species happen to be the most promiscuous as well, which appears to be the case. As Alan Dixson writes, this monogamy-maintenance explanation for female orgasm “seems far-fetched. After all,” he writes, “females of other primate species, and particularly those with multimale–multifemale [promiscuous] mating systems such as macaques and chimpanzees, exhibit orgasmic responses in the absence of such bonding or the formation of stable family units.” On the other hand, Dixson goes on to note, “Gibbons, which are primarily monogamous, do not exhibit obvious signs of female orgasm.”19 Although Dixson classifies humans as mildly polygynous in his survey of primate sexuality, he seems to have doubts, as when he writes, “One might argue that…the female’s orgasm is rewarding, increases her willingness to copulate with a variety of males rather than one partner, and thus promotes sperm competition.”20 Donald Symons and others have argued that “orgasm is most parsimoniously interpreted as a potential all female mammals possess.” What helps realize this “potential” in some human societies, argues Symons, are “techniques of foreplay and intercourse [that] provide sufficiently intense and uninterrupted stimulation for females to orgasm.”21 In other words, Symons thinks women have more orgasms than mares simply because men are better lovers than stallions. Stomp your foot three times if you believe this. In support of his theory, Symons cites studies like Kinsey’s showing that fewer than half of women questioned (Americans in the 1950s) experienced orgasm at least nine out of ten times they had intercourse, whereas in other societies (he refers to Mangaia, in the South Pacific), elaborate and extended sexual play result in nearly universal orgasm for women. “Orgasm,” Symons concludes, “never is considered to be a spontaneous and inevitable occurrence for females as it always is for males.” For Symons, Stephen Jay Gould, Elisabeth Lloyd,22 and others, some women have orgasms sometimes because all men do every time. For them, the female orgasm is the equivalent of male nipples: a structural echo without function in one sex of a trait vital in the other.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The story of Elijah contains the last mythical account of the past in the Jewish scriptures. Change was in the air throughout the Oikumene. The period 800–200 BCE has been termed the Axial Age. In all the main regions of the civilized world, people created new ideologies that have continued to be crucial and formative. The new religious systems reflected the changed economic and social conditions. For reasons that we do not entirely understand, all the chief civilizations developed along parallel lines, even when there was no commercial contact (as between China and the European area). There was a new prosperity that led to the rise of a merchant class. Power was shifting from king and priest, temple and palace, to the marketplace. The new wealth led to intellectual and cultural florescence and also to the development of the individual conscience. Inequality and exploitation became more apparent as the pace of change accelerated in the cities and people began to realize that their own behavior could affect the fate of future generations. Each region developed a distinctive ideology to address these problems and concerns: Taoism and Confucianism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India and philosophical rationalism in Europe. The Middle East did not produce a uniform solution, but in Iran and Israel, Zoroaster and the Hebrew prophets respectively evolved different versions of monotheism. Strange as it may seem, the idea of “God,” like the other great religious insights of the period, developed in a market economy in a spirit of aggressive capitalism. I propose to look briefly at two of these new developments before proceeding in the next chapter to examine the reformed religion of Yahweh. The religious experience of India developed along similar lines, but its different emphasis will illuminate the peculiar characteristics and problems of the Israelite notion of God. The rationalism of Plato and Aristotle is also important because Jews, Christians and Muslims all drew upon their ideas and tried to adapt them to their own religious experience, even though the Greek God was very different from their own. In the seventeenth century BCE, Aryans from what is now Iran had invaded the Indus valley and subdued the indigenous population. They had imposed their religious ideas, which we find expressed in the collection of odes known as the Rig-Veda. There we find a multitude of gods, expressing many of the same values as the deities of the Middle East and presenting the forces of nature as instinct with power, life and personality. Yet there were signs that people were beginning to see that the various gods might simply be manifestations of one divine Absolute that transcended them all. Like the Babylonians, the Aryans were quite aware that their myths were not factual accounts of reality but expressed a mystery that not even the gods themselves could explain adequately. When they tried to imagine how the gods and the world had evolved from primal chaos, they concluded that nobody—not even the gods—could understand the mystery of existence:

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Poseidon sired the horse, while Athena invented the bit and bridle; Poseidon stirred up the waves, and Athena built a ship. And yet because she was also a war goddess, Athena reflected the violence at the heart of any civilization and the struggle of any polis to survive. Poseidon was also coupled with Apollo; together they represented old age and youth, which were polar opposites but also complementary. Hera and Dionysus were profoundly antagonistic to each other; but both were associated with madness, which could be a divine scourge or a liberating ecstasy. Apollo and Dionysus were brothers, who balanced and counterbalanced each other: Apollo standing for form, clarity, definition, and purity, while Dionysus embodied the forces of dissolution—at Delphi he was honored as Apollo’s mysterious, chthonic counterpart. Every single Greek god had a dark and dangerous aspect. None was wholly good; none was concerned about morality. Together they expressed the rich diversity and complexity of life, without evading paradox or denying any part of the world. The Greeks felt no need to develop new forms of religion but remained satisfied by the ancient cult, which survived for seven hundred years after the end of the Axial Age. T he eighth century was also a time of transition in China. In 771, the Qong Rang barbarians, who had been harassing the Zhou court for more than fifty years, overran their capital at Zhouzhuang and killed King Yon. This was not the end of the dynasty, however. King Ping (770–720) succeeded his father and was invested with the mandate of Heaven in the eastern capital, Changzhou. But the Zhou kings were mere shadows of their former selves. The monarch maintained his small impoverished domain around the eastern capital, performed his ritual tasks, but had no real political power. The dynasty survived in this attenuated form for more than five hundred years. The kings remained nominal rulers and retained a symbolic aura, but the princes of the cities had de facto power. Their principalities were getting steadily larger. Increasingly, ritual ( li ) rather than loyalty to the monarch governed the relations between the principalities, which were officially allies but in practice often rivals and competitors. Ancient custom replaced the royal authority, acting as a kind of international law to control wars, vendettas, and treaties, and supervised the interchange of goods and services. This was the start of the era that historians call Chunqiu (Spring and Autumn), the name given to the laconic annals of the principality of Lu, which covered the era from 722 to 481. At the time, it seemed a chaotic period of conflict and fragmentation, but with hindsight we can see that China was making a complex transition from archaic monarchy to a unified empire. We know very little about the eighth century in China, but it seems that these years saw the emergence of a new sensibility. The decline of the monarchy was only one of the unsettling changes of this time.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  42 In political life, people always preferred frenzied activity to doing nothing, knowledge to ignorance, and strength to weakness, but—to the astonishment of his contemporaries, who were intrigued with this novel idea 43 —Laozi insisted that they should do the exact opposite. In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it. This is because there is nothing that can take its place. That the weak overcomes the strong, And the submissive overcomes the hard, Everyone in the world knows, yet no one can put this knowledge into practice. 44 All human effort was directed against passivity, so to do the opposite of what was expected by the aggressively scheming politicians was to return to the spontaneity of the Way. 45 It was a law of nature that everything that went up must come down, so in strengthening your enemy by submission, you actually hastened his decline. The reason why Heaven and Earth endured forever was precisely because they did not struggle to prolong their existence: Therefore the sage puts his person last and comes first. . . . Is it not because he is without thought of self that he is able to accomplish his private ends? 46 Such self-emptying required a long mystical training, but once the sage ruler had achieved this interior void, he would become as vital, fluid, and fecund as the so-called weaker things of life. Force and coercion were inherently self-destructive. Here Laozi returned to the spirit of the ancient rituals of warfare, which had urged the warriors to “yield” to the enemy. “Arms are ill-omened instruments, and are not the instruments of the sage,” Laozi maintained. “He uses them only when he cannot do otherwise.” 47 Sometimes war was a regrettable necessity, but if he was forced to fight, the sage must always take up his weapons with regret. There must be no egotistic triumphalism, no cruel chauvinism, and no facile patriotism. The sage must not intimidate the world with a show of arms, because this belligerence would almost certainly recoil on him. The sage must always try to bring a military expedition to an end. “Bring it to a conclusion, but do not boast; bring it to a conclusion, but do not brag; bring it to a conclusion, but do not be arrogant; bring it to a conclusion, but only where there is no choice; bring it to a conclusion, but do not intimidate.” 48 Wu wei, therefore, did not mean total abstinence from action, but an unaggressive, unassertive attitude that prevented the escalation of hatred.