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 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 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 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 A History of Christianity (1976)

  Yet the synoptic gospels, and still more the Gospel according to John, emphasize the importance of the Baptist in the mission of Jesus. He is the operative agent who sets the whole thing in motion. The three synoptic writers, and the editor of John’s gospel, working within a different stream of knowledge, are clearly using very powerful oral traditions, or even written documents, dealing specifically with the Baptist’s work. Somewhere, behind our sources, or behind the sources of our sources, there was once the whole story of the Baptist as related by a follower or lieutenant. But the earliest Christian historians selected only what they regarded as strictly relevant to their purpose, and now the rest is irrecoverably lost. Our only non-Christian source, Josephus, shows that John was at one time an Essene. His account of John’s teaching, such as it is, accords closely with the Qumran Manual of Discipline; and of course his actual appearance is directly related to Essene prophecies, which it resembles in important details, as did his prophecies and sayings. But John was also moving away from Essene concepts, in the direction of what became Christianity. His baptism ceremony, unlike the repeated bathing-rites of the Essenes, is a once and for all affair (but he was not unique in this). Secondly, John thought God would intervene, admittedly in wrathful mood, without the assistance of the Essene army and its war-plan. John was not militaristic. Most important of all, he had broken away from the absolute exclusiveness of the Essenes, teaching that God’s special favours were to be offered to the entire Jewish people, not just to the sect. John was not yet a universalist, but he was moving in that direction. He was, in short, a carrier, bringing certain key Essene doctrines out of their narrow, bellicose, racist and sectarian framework, and proclaiming them in a wider world. The logic of this analysis, then, is that the Baptist was in a sense Jesus’s teacher, and that the pupil improved on, expanded and transformed his master’s ideas. But it is at this point that our evidence breaks down. If anything, it points in another direction. John did not claim to teach the Messiah, merely to identify him; indeed, he specifically rejected any master-pupil relationship. The fact that Jesus was baptized by John does not imply any inferiority, submission or acknowledgement of higher wisdom. The trouble is that we do not know precisely what John taught. We do not know his history or education. We do not even know whether he had a complete theology or cosmology of his own, whether his eschatology was limited to the crude Messianism reflected in the gospels, or, as seems more likely, was elaborate and sophisticated. We do not even know his concept of Jesus’s status: it was obviously high, but how high – the key question? And anyway, how close were their contacts? How well did they know each other? How much, if anything, did either teach each other?

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  In 1874 Bismarck had said that to do so would mean a papal triumph and ‘we non-Catholics must either become Catholics or emigrate or our property would be confiscated, as is usual with heretics.’ But by 1887 he was tired of the struggle and looking for allies; Leo XIII persuaded some of the Catholic Centre party to support Bismarck in the Reichstag, and got as his reward the withdrawal of the laws. Bismarck, who had put them through to preserve national unity from papal interference now said: ‘What do I care whether the appointment of a Catholic priest is notified to the state or not – Germany must be united’ – a reversal of position which marked his discomfiture. The truth is that, in practice, the papacy did not so much turn its back on the world as seek to nudge it in a conservative direction. It did not object to the modern state so long as it had a traditionalist posture. Leo, one of the few modern popes to write elegant Latin, spent a great deal of time publishing encyclicals which purported to lay down Catholic principles; but nearly all of them reflected the views of a conservative empiricist. In Italy, he refused to recognise the regime and forbade Catholics to take any part in it – they were to be ‘neither electors nor elected’; on the other hand he encouraged the systematic creation of a network of Catholic clubs, associations and congresses, which the Church could control much more easily than Catholic deputies, and which could exert almost as much pressure behind the scenes. In 1885 his encyclical Immortale Dei was a move towards recognizing popularly-elected governments where there was really no alternative: he laid down that ‘the greater or less participation of the people in government has nothing blamable in itself. This document set out his political philosophy, such as it was. Both Church and State have their authority from God. The Church has power of judgment over all that relates to the salvation of souls and the worship of God, and of course there can be only one true Church. He denounced the ‘rage for innovation’. Freedom of thought and publication was ‘the fountain-head of many evils’. It was ‘not lawful for the state . . . to hold in equal favour different kinds of religion’; on the other hand ‘no one should be forced to embrace the Catholic faith against his will’, a retreat from the papal position held at least until the 1820s, when toleration had been again condemned as ‘madness’. Leo had attacked socialism as long ago as 1878, in his Quod apostolici muneris, and he denied the right of any state, whatever its composition, to dissolve Christian marriage (Arcanum 1880). The right to rule came from God: civil power did not come from men as such (Diuturnum illud 1881).

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Kings, bishops and abbots might employ professional criminals, or they might venture into crime themselves, using whatever power was available or necessary. Men did not make a distinction between political and military force, and the spiritual force generated by holy bones. An ambitious man like King Cnut, for instance, took risks in this field, just as he staked his kingdoms and his life in battle: the potential rewards were worth it. In 1020, Abbot Æthelstan of Romsey, instigated by the Bishop of Dorchester and with the consent of Cnut, sent a naval expedition to Sohan to steal the body of St Felix: there was nearly a naval battle with the monks of Ely. Three years later, Archbishop Æthelnoth, with Cnut’s help, opened the sarcophagus of St Ælfeah in St Paul’s, using crowbars, while the king’s housecarles stood guard against the angry citizens. Cnut hurried half-clad from his bath to take part in the raid, and himself took the tiller of the boat which carried the corpse, on a plank, across the Thames, to travel under armed escort to reinterment in Canterbury. Cnut also abetted the theft of St Mildred, pinched from Thanet and taken, again, to Canterbury. These incidents were not pranks or escapades, but high acts of State, concerned with power, privilege, authority, jurisdiction and the hopes and fears of primitive rulers. During the twelfth century we get the first doubts cast on certain aspects of the system. About 1120, Guibert, Abbot of Nogent, wrote his Relics of the Saints, which argued that many of the saint-cults were spurious – he instanced a young squire who became the object of a cult solely because he happened to die on Good Friday. A generation later, Pope Alexander III made the whole business of canonization a papal monopoly. Guibert also pointed to elements in the system which were clearly fraudulent. Churches in both Constantinople and Angeli claimed to have the head of St John the Baptist. Was he two-headed then? Ely and St Albans each claimed all the bones of St Dunstan; and so did Odense in Denmark. A rich bishop or abbot might easily be duped. Bishop Odo of Bayeux was swindled by the monks of Corbeil who pretended to sell him the body of St Exupéry but in fact handed over the corpse of a peasant. How could it be explained that duplicate relics, or wholly fraudulent ones, seemed able to exert spiritual power? By this time, of course, the system was in decline. In the thirteenth century the eucharist became the centre of popular devotion, and saints had to be new and spectacular – like St Thomas – to inspire important cults. In the meantime, however, the relic cult had changed the face of Europe. The most important relic of all was the body of St Peter, which Christian opinion had believed, at least since the mid second century, was buried on the site of the Vatican church called after him.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  (This ceremony, atheist in objective, was almost identical with anti-Catholic masquerades staged by Protestants in the mid sixteenth century.) Most of the ceremonies were deist. Occasionally, as an alternative to reason, such abstractions as law, truth, liberty or nature were worshipped. But God had a way of popping up behind these concepts; at Beauvais, reason, liberty and nature emerged as three goddesses, and at Auch, the celebrant asked: ‘What is the cult of reason, if not the homage we render to the order established by the eternal wisdom?’ Robespierre ended de-Christianization, and replaced reason with the Supreme Being; the creed he laid down included immortality of the soul, so it went beyond Locke’s minimal Anglicanism. But without the savage excitement of de-Christianization, the ceremonies were tedious to the mob, and attracted only those solid bourgeois citizens who had a vested interest in them (like late-Roman paganism). The props were repainted and renamed. For a time, enthusiasts called their children Marat, Brutus, and so forth. Poupinel, who wrote republican hymns, urged: ‘Let us use civic pomp to make people forget the old displays of superstition; in a word, provide more striking and attractive alternatives to the ceremonies that for so long have deceived the people, and the skeleton of sacerdotalism will disintegrate of its own accord.’ This was more easily said than done. Christianity, with its many insights and matrices, had found no difficulty at all in absorbing elements of pagan ceremonial, and transforming them. The Republicans, divided and self-conscious, floundered, and their ceremonies oscillated between parody and empty bombast, like the Red Square displays of Soviet Communism or the neo-gymnastics of Mao’s China. It seems to have been assumed that public morale depended on religious or gnostic displays of one kind of another; the Erasmian emphasis on private belief and piety was dismissed as not enough. The Institut in two successive years set an essay-competition under the title: ‘Quelles sont les institutions les plus propres à fonder la morale d’un peuple?’ A large number of cults were invented. There was the ‘Culte des Adorateurs’, compounded of ideas and images from Rousseau, Indian temples, Pompeii and the paintings of Greuze; its priests, elected annually, were to tend an eternal fire, burn incense at funerals and pour libations of milk, honey and wine. A variation had doctors and scientists serving instead of priests, with laboratory experiments replacing the mass. A third was an amalgam of the teachings of Moses, Christ, Confucius and Mohammad. There were social or communist secular cults. The most successful of all seems to have been Théophilanthropie, a form of deism close to Christianity (some of its members called themselves Christians), which had a manual, sixteen places of worship in Paris, and others in the provinces, and whose ‘observances’ were run by ‘directors’, most of them civil servants, schoolmasters and so forth. Former priests provided sermons.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Church. Indeed, the third force, and institutional religion, parted company completely. For the first time we get a disassociation between religious reform and scientific development. The Reformation and the Renaissance had been at one in thinking that the true way to God, and the secrets of knowledge, were to be rediscovered by examination of the mysteries and secrets of the past; it had been assumed that knowledge of the supernatural and the natural world was inextricably linked, that metaphysics began where physics ended, and that theology was indeed the Queen of the Sciences. These were bedrock Christian assumptions; assumptions, in fact, which even antedated Christianity, or rather had been absorbed by Christianity during the process of Hellenization which marked the triumph of Pauline doctrine. During the twenty years 1640–60 we see the earliest challenge to the belief that knowledge was indivisible. We can observe it in the formative period in the history of the Royal Society. The Society, of course, was incorporated under Charles II at the Restoration; but its origins go back to the end of the Civil War. Indeed, it was none other than the materialization of the famous ‘invisible college’ so long demanded by the Christian Hermetics and third force propagandists. In origin it was undoubtedly part of a religious-scientific movement to purge Christianity and give it rebirth as part of a ‘general instauration’ of knowledge. We see this from what might be called the ‘Palatine connection’. John Wallis, in his account of the first meetings in London in 1645, says that those taking part included ‘Dr John Wilkins, afterwards Bishop of Chester, then chaplain to the Prince Elector Palatine in London’, and ‘Mr Theodore Haak, a German of the Palatinate, and then resident in London, who, I think, gave the first occasion and first suggested these meetings’. This group was undoubtedly the ‘invisible college’ referred to by Robert Boyle in letters dating from 1646–7. Later it met at Wadham College, Oxford, and moved to London in 1659, before finally attaining royal recognition, patronage and complete respectability. During its migrations and transmutations, however, the embryo Royal Society seems to have discarded its original religious context completely. Religious ‘enthusiasm’, attachment to a particular sect or credal confession – which might be politically acceptable one year, and illegal the next – were now seen as possible barriers to official approval, even fatal to the survival of the Society. The founder-members of the Royal Society were all sincere Christians, but they were coming to accept that institutional Christianity, with its feuds and intolerances, was an embarrassment and a barrier to

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  charged with breaking a mystical chalice, smashing an episcopal chair, false imprisonment, deposing a bishop unlawfully, placing him under military guard and torturing him, striking other bishops physically, obtaining his bishoprics by perjury, breaking and cutting off the arm of one of his opponents, burning his house, tying him to a column and whipping him, and putting him in a cell illegally – all this in addition to teaching false doctrine. The venom employed in these endemic controversies reflects the fundamental instability of Christian belief during the early centuries, before a canon of New Testament writings had been established, credal formulations evolved to epitomize them, and a regular ecclesiastical structure built up to protect and propagate such agreed beliefs. Before the last half of the third century it is inaccurate to speak of a dominant strain of Christianity. So far as we can judge, by the end of the first century, and virtually throughout the second, the majority of Christians believed in varieties of Christian-gnosticism, or belonged to revivalist sects grouped round charismatics. Eusebius, seeking to push back the origins of uniformity and orthodoxy as close as possible to the generation of the apostles, constantly uses phrases – ‘countless’, ‘very many’, ‘all’, – when he deals with the orthodox Church, its size, its influence, its success, its champions and its heroic sacrifices, which is not borne out by evidence, even when he cites it. In particular, he exaggerates the volume of orthodox literature from the earliest times. His motive was to show that a massive quantity of books setting out the true faith was produced in the first two centuries, that they had wide circulation, were faithfully preserved and enjoyed a long life; they grew up and spread so vigorously that they smashed the heretics or drove them into tiny enclaves. But the books to which Eusebius refers have not survived and he does not seem to have read them, to judge by his references. Why should they survive up to the fourth century, then disappear? On the other side, the overwhelming bulk of heretic writings, including diatribes between rival heresies, have disappeared. But often their titles survive and these, in many cases, do not suggest polemics – the works of sects struggling for survival against orthodoxy – but the regular teaching of the established majority faith. A very complex picture of orthodoxy and heterodoxy in the early period is revealed if we study the ‘succession lists’ of individual bishoprics. By the third century, lists of bishops, each of whom had consecrated his successor, and which went back to the original founding of the see by one or other of the apostles, had been

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  for all types and temperaments of men, as well as all races and generations: the activist, the militant, the doctrinaire, the ascetic, the obedient, the passive, the angular, the scholar, and the simple-hearted? How could it impart both a sense of urgency and immediacy, and at the same time be valid for all eternity? How could it bring about, in men’s minds, a confrontation with God which was both public and collective, and individual and intimate? How could it combine a code of ethics within a framework of strict justice and a promise of unprecedented generosity? These were only a few of the evangelical problems confronting Jesus. Moreover, he had to resolve them within a preordained series of historical events which could be adumbrated but not forecast and whose necessary enactment would terminate his mission. The teaching of Jesus is therefore more a series of glimpses, or matrices, a collection of insights, rather than a code of doctrine. It invites comment, interpretation, elaboration and constructive argument, and is the starting point for rival, though compatible, lines of inquiry. It is not a summa theologica, or indeed ethica, but the basis from which an endless series of summae can be assembled. It inaugurates a religion of dialogue, exploration and experiment. Its radical elements are balanced by conservative qualifications, there is a constant mixture of legalism and antinomianism, and the emphasis repeatedly switches from rigour and militancy to acquiescence and the acceptance of suffering. Some of this variety reflects the genuine bewilderment of the disciples, and the confusion of the evangelical editors to whom their memories descended. But a great deal is essentially part of Jesus’s universalist posture: the wonder is that the personality behind the mission is in no way fragmented but is always integrated and true to character. Jesus contrives to be all things to all men while remaining faithful to himself. This complex and delicate operation was conducted against a politico-religious background full of perils and traps. Jesus had a new doctrine to deliver – salvation through love, sacrifice and faith – but to some extent he had to present it in the guise of a reformation of the old. He was preaching to Jews, introducing new concepts through traditional Jewish forms. He was anxious to carry the orthodox with him, without compromising his universalism. He confronted the establishment on their own territory, while including all the outcast elements in his mission; thus he had to carry on the process of disassociation from the Temple and the law while trying to avoid accusations of blasphemy. Then, too, there was the revelation of his own

• From The Decameron (1353)

  7 He was the Archbishop of Naples, and he had been buried with some very valuable regalia and wearing a ruby on his finger, worth more than five hundred gold florins, which these two fellows were on their way to plunder. They disclosed their intentions to Andreuccio, and being more covetous than well-advised, he set off in their company. As they were on their way to the cathedral, with Andreuccio still putting forth a powerful odour, one of them said: ‘Couldn’t we find some place or other where this fellow could be washed, so that he didn’t stink so appallingly?’ ‘Certainly,’ said the other. ‘Not far from here, there’s a well, which always used to have a pulley and a big bucket at the top. Let’s go there and give him a quick wash.’ On reaching the well, they found that the rope was still there, but the bucket had been removed. So they hit on the idea of tying him to the rope and lowering him into the well so that he could wash himself down below. When he had finished washing, he was to give the rope a tug, and they would haul him up again. Shortly after they had lowered him into the well, some officers of the watch, feeling thirsty on account of the heat and also because they had been chasing somebody, happened to come to the well for a drink. When the other two saw them coming, they immediately took to their heels, making good their escape without being spotted by the officers. Meanwhile Andreuccio, having completed his ablutions at the bottom of the well, gave a tug on the rope. The officers had taken off their surcoats and laid them on the ground beside their bucklers and pikestaffs, and they now began to haul away at the rope, thinking it had a bucket full of water attached to it. When Andreuccio saw that he had nearly reached the top of the well, he let go the rope and threw himself on to the rim, clinging to it with both hands. On seeing this apparition, the officers were filled with sudden panic, and without a word they dropped the rope and began to run as fast as their legs would carry them. Andreuccio stared at them in blank amazement, and if he hadn’t held on tightly, he would have fallen to the bottom, perhaps being killed or doing himself serious injury. However, he clambered out, and when he saw these weapons, he grew even more perplexed, for he knew they had not been left there by his companions. Bewailing his misfortune, and fearing lest anything worse should befall him, he decided to leave all these things where they were and clear off. So away he went without having the slightest idea where he was going. As he was walking along, he came across his two companions, who were on their way back to the well to haul him out.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  When they heard the things he confessed to having done, they were so amused that every so often they nearly exploded with mirth, and they said to each other: ‘What manner of man is this, whom neither old age nor illness, nor fear of the death which he sees so close at hand, nor even the fear of God, before whose judgement he knows he must shortly appear, have managed to turn from his evil ways, or persuade to die any differently from the way he has lived?’ Seeing, however, that he had said all the right things to be received for burial in a church, they cared nothing for the rest. Shortly thereafter Ser Ciappelletto made his communion, and, failing rapidly, he received Extreme Unction. Soon after vespers 5 on the very day that he had made his fine confession, he died. Whereupon the two brothers made all necessary arrangements, using his own money to see that he had an honourable funeral, and sending news of his death to the friars and asking them to come that evening to observe the customary vigil, and the following morning to take away the body. On hearing that he had passed away, the holy friar who had received his confession arranged with the prior for the chapterhouse bell to be rung, and to the assembled friars he showed that Ser Ciappelletto had been a saintly man, as his confession had amply proved. He expressed the hope that through him the Lord God would work many miracles, and persuaded them that his body should be received with the utmost reverence and loving care. Credulous to a man, the prior and the other friars agreed to do so, and that evening they went to the place where Ser Ciappelletto’s body lay, and celebrated a great and solemn vigil over it; and in the morning, dressed in albs and copes, carrying books in their hands and bearing crosses before them, singing as they went, they all came for the body, which they then carried back to their church with tremendous pomp and ceremony, followed by nearly all the people of the town, men and women alike. And when it had been set down in the church, the holy friar who had confessed him climbed into the pulpit and began to preach marvellous things about Ser Ciappelletto’s life, his fasts, his virginity, his simplicity and innocence and saintliness, relating among other things what he had tearfully confessed to him as his greatest sin, and describing how he had barely been able to convince him that God would forgive him, at which point he turned to reprimand his audience, saying: ‘And yet you miserable sinners have only to catch your feet in a wisp of straw for you to curse God and the Virgin and all the Saints in heaven.’ Apart from this, he said much else about his loyalty and his purity of heart.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  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

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  lacked was any kind of stability. It became increasingly less likely that an educated man would support the cult of his parents, let alone his grandparents; or even that he would fail to change his cult once, perhaps twice, in his life. And, perhaps less noticeably, the cults themselves were in constant osmosis. We do not know enough about the time to provide complete explanations for this constant and ubiquitous religious flux. But it is obvious enough that the old city and national creeds were now hopelessly obsolete except as aids to public decorum, and the oriental mystery cults, though syncretized and rendered sophisticated by the Hellenic philosophical machine, still could not provide a satisfactory account of man and his future. There were huge gaps and anomalies in all the systems. And the frantic efforts to plug them produced disintegration, and so yet more change. It is at this point in the argument that we see the crucial relevance of the Jewish impingement on the Roman world. For the Jews not merely had a god; they had God. They had been monotheists for at least two millennia. They had resisted with infinite fortitude and sometimes with grievous suffering, the temptations and ravages of eastern polytheistic systems. It is true that their god was originally tribal, and more recently national; in fact he was still national, and since he was closely and intimately associated with the Temple in Jerusalem, he was in some way municipal too. But Judaism was also, and very much so, an interior religion, pressing closely and heavily on the individual, who was burdened with a multitude of injunctions and prohibitions which posed acute problems of interpretation and scruple. The practising Jew was essentially homo religiosus as well as a functionary of a patriotic cult. The two aspects might even conflict, for Pompey was able to breach the walls of Jerusalem in 65 BC primarily because the stricter elements among the Jewish defenders refused to bear arms on the sabbath. It could be said, in fact, that the power and dynamism of the Jewish faith transcended the military capacity of the Jewish people. The Jewish state might, and did, succumb to empires, but its religious expression survived, flourished and violently resisted cultural assimilation or change. Judaism was greater than the sum of its parts. Its angular will to survive was the key to recent Jewish history. Like other Middle-eastern states, Jewish Palestine had fallen to Alexander of Macedon and then had become a prize in the dynastic struggles which followed his death in 323 BC. It had eventually fallen to the Graeco-oriental monarchy of the Seleucids, but had successfully resisted Hellenization. The attempt by the Seleucid king, Antiochus

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  She’s petite, wears a headband and has a big job working for a bank.” “I don’t think I could do that. I’m trying hard not to judge. I get that everyone needs different things to make them feel whole or turned on or alive or whatever, but the extremeness makes me wonder a hundred different things about her, why she needs so much at once. It seems violent,” I say, and I can’t help but wonder if he realizes that his own approach to sex, if not exactly violent, is definitely aggressive and feral. I sigh and changing topics, he asks me about the rest of my day. “My parents are staying for dinner and we’re going to try out the new air fryer I got for Christmas,” I say. “My mom and I love testing out kitchen appliances.” He pulls up an instructional video on YouTube so that we can watch a demonstration. How odd, I think, to be naked in a man’s bed on a Wednesday afternoon discussing sex parties and watching a video about air fryers. For at least the hundredth time over the past few months I am perplexed, puzzling over the path that led me to this spot at this moment. I was so certain of my life’s trajectory and my vision definitely didn’t include this bit of off-roading, it just involved more of the same: marveling as the kids grew, spending holidays with my parents, upgrading our iPhones, brining increasingly larger turkeys for Thanksgiving, clearing books we didn’t love from the shelves to make room for new ones, arguing over who got more coffee every morning. I liked that life – it was predictable, safe, secure and cozy. It was enough, more than enough. In fact, I had so much that it would have been unseemly to have wanted more. It never crossed my mind to want something else, and yet – and yet – now that it’s gone, I don’t want it back, not if it means giving up this incredible freedom, this not knowing what comes next. “So you probably need to go pick up your daughter,” #8 says, interrupting my internal dialogue. I glance at my watch and shake my head, saying that my mother is in fact picking Georgia up at this very moment. He is silent, and I realize he wasn’t saying that out of concern for my schedule, he is simply ready for me to leave. I pick through the pile of tangled blankets and sheets for my clothes.