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 The Decameron (1353)

  And all that Solomon said by way of reply was: ‘Love.’ This said, Melissus was promptly shown the door, and Joseph explained his own reason for coming. But the only answer he received from Solomon was: ‘Go to Goosebridge,’ and the words were scarcely out of the King’s mouth before Joseph, too, was removed from his presence. Outside, he found Melissus waiting for him, and told him about the answer he had been given. After pondering upon these words without succeeding in extracting a meaning from them, or anything that might help to resolve their problems, the two young men, feeling they had been made to look foolish, began to make their way homewards. After travelling for several days, they came to a fine-looking bridge across a river; and since a lengthy baggage-train of mules and horses happened to be using the bridge, they were forced to wait till all the animals had crossed it. When all but a few of them had done so, one of the mules took fright, in the way they frequently do, and refused to take another step. So one of the muleteers took hold of a stick and began to beat it, quite gently to begin with, in order to make it go across. But the mule, veering from one side of the road to the other and occasionally turning back, was utterly determined not to go on. This caused the muleteer to lose his temper completely, and he began to beat it with his stick quite unmercifully, raining a series of terrible blows on its head, its flanks, and its hindquarters, but all to no avail. Melissus and Joseph, who were standing there watching all this, directed a stream of abuse at the muleteer, saying: ‘Hey! villain, what are you doing? Do you want to kill the poor beast? Why don’t you try talking nicely to him and leading him across gently? He’ll come more quickly that way than by beating him as you are doing.’ ‘You know your horses and I know my mule,’ replied the muleteer. ‘Just you leave him to me.’ Having said this he began to beat the mule all over again, and administered so many blows to each of its flanks that the mule moved on, and the muleteer’s point was made. As the two young men were about to proceed on their way, Joseph saw a fellow sitting on the farther side of the bridge and asked him what the place was called. ‘Sir,’ the good man replied, ‘this place is called Goosebridge.’ No sooner did Joseph hear the name than he recalled the words of Solomon, and said to Melissus: ‘I do declare, my friend, that the advice I had from Solomon may yet turn out to be sound and sensible.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Barbara, fragile and barely nineteen; the angular Jamie not yet quite twenty. They had talked because words will ease the full spirit; talked in abrupt, rather shy broken phrases. They had loved because love had come naturally to them up there on the soft, springy turf and the heather. But after a while their dreams had been shattered, for such dreams as theirs had seemed strange to the village. Daft, the folk had thought them, mouching round by themselves for hours, like a couple of lovers. Barbara’s grand-dame, an austere old woman with whom she had lived since her earliest childhood—Barbara’s grand-dame had mistrusted this friendship. ‘I dinna richtly unnerstan’ it,’ she had frowned; ‘her and that Jamie’s unco throng. It’s no richt for lass-bairns, an’ it’s no proaper!’ And since she spoke with authority, having for years been the village post-mistress, her neighbours had wagged their heads and agreed. ‘It’s no richt; ye hae said it, Mrs. MacDonald!’ The gossip had reached the minister, Jamie’s white-haired and gentle old father. He had looked at the girl with bewildered eyes—he had always been bewildered by his daughter. A poor housewife she was, and very untidy; if she cooked she mucked up the pots and the kitchen, and her hands were strangely unskilled with the needle; this he knew, since his heels suffered much from her darning. Remembering her mother he had shaken his head and sighed many times as he looked at Jamie. For her mother had been a soft, timorous woman, and he himself was very retiring, but their Jamie loved striding over the hills in the teeth of a gale, an uncouth, boyish creature. As a child she had gone rabbit stalking with ferrets; had ridden a neighbour’s farmhorse astride on a sack, without stirrup, saddle or bridle; had done all manner of outlandish things. And he, poor lonely, bewildered man, still mourning his wife, had been no match for her. Yet even as a child she had sat at the piano and picked out little tunes of her own inventing. He had done his best; she had been taught to play by Miss Morrison of the next-door village, since music alone seemed able to tame her. And as Jamie had grown so her tunes had grown with her, gathering purpose and strength with her body. She would improvise for hours on the winter evenings, if Barbara would sit in their parlour and listen. He had always made Barbara welcome at the manse; they had been so inseparable, those two, since childhood—and now? He had frowned, remembering the gossip. Rather timidly he had spoken to Jamie. ‘Listen, my dear, when you’re always together, the lads don’t get a chance to come courting, and Barbara’s grandmother wants the lass married. Let her walk with a lad on Sabbath afternoons—there’s that young MacGregor, he’s a fine, steady fellow, and they say he’s in love with the little lass. . . .’

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  the Messiah but the variations were matters of detail and all rested on the unitary belief that foreign oppressors would be driven out and God alone would rule Israel. Thus a man who criticized the Romans was making a religious statement and a man who insisted on the highest degree of ritual purity was playing politics. In the opening decades of the first century AD the example of the Essenes led to the appearance of a number of baptist movements in the Jordan Valley. The whole area, from the Lake of Genasseret down to the Dead Sea itself was alive with holy eccentrics. Many had been to Qumran, and there imbibed the prevailing obsession with ritual purity and the use of holy water as a therapy and cleansing process. It is, in fact, significant that Philo calls the Essene therapeutae : to ordinary observers it was the most obvious and striking aspect of their teaching. We can be almost certain that John the Baptist was, or had been, an Essene monk. He was recruiting not so much for the monastery but for the broader movement of the élite within the élite, carrying the cleansing and purifying process into the world outside, and thus hastening the apocalyptic moment when the war against the Sons of Darkness would begin. The Baptist is thus the link between the general reformist and nonconformist movement in Judaism and Jesus himself. Unfortunately, in terms of actual historical knowledge, he is a very weak link. In some ways he is a completely mysterious figure. His function, in the history of Christianity, was to attach elements of the Essene teaching to a consistent view of Jewish eschatology. John was an impatient man, as well as a wild-looking one: the Messiah was not merely coming – he was here! The apocalypse was rolling fast towards the people, so now was the time to repent and prepare. And then, in due course, Jesus appeared and was identified. This is the first glimpse, admittedly a vivid one, we get of John. There is one other glimpse, equally vivid, some years later, when he fell foul of Herod Antipas and lost his head. The rest is darkness. The second most important person in the history of Christianity remains enigmatic. 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

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  are characterized by sacramental vomiting, water-rituals, and speaking with tongues, such as (a very common formula): Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz Hhayi, hhayi, hhayi, hhayi, Sorry Jesus Sorry Jesus Sorry Jesus Spy spy spy spy, Naughty boy, Naughty boy Nhayi hhayi hhayi – Halleluja, halleluja, Amen. The big Western Christian communities do not know what they ought to do about these African churches. Significantly, they cannot even agree what, generically, they should be called. ‘Separatist’, ‘messianic’, ‘prophetic’, ‘nativistic’, ‘syncretistic’ have all, in turn, been discarded as offensive to African feelings (and to the feelings of American blacks, too, and West Indians, since many of the churches have international links, and some have outposts in London, Paris and elsewhere). The currently acceptable description is ‘independent’. A number of these churches are broadly orthodox in their teaching. Some even belong to the World Council of Churches. But others are barely Christian and many are chronically unstable. It is the Montanist world of the second century again, though of course with important variations. Some students of these sects argue that their drift is ultimately anti- Christian in that they tend to form a bridge by which Africans pass back into paganism. They move, it is claimed, from the (orthodox) mission church to an ‘Ethiopian’ church, then to a Zionist, then by the nativistic or tribal Zionism back to the African animism of their parents or grandparents. This undoubtedly happens in some cases. On the other hand, some of the sects are startingly original and creative in their theological imaginings, and fervent in their enthusiasm. In any case, the phenomenon is growing. An analysis of these churches published in 1948 listed the names of 1023 distinct sects. An analysis published in 1968 was based on a survey of over 6,000. According to recent calculations, ‘revival movements’, usually leading to new churches, break out on average in seven new tribes each year. The expansion of African Christianity is not confined to the ‘independent’ churches, but they take the lion’s share of the new recruits. At present, African Christians of all denominations

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Europeans, and then, in turn, the Protestants, instead of building on this native tradition, sought instead to convert its representatives to their own Continental varieties. Hence the Thomas Church of India, far from expanding, has in fact contracted under the battering of the Western proselytizers, split into five branches. There are now Romo-Syrians of the Syriac rite (plus those of the Latin rite), Malankarans, Monophysite and Unreformed; Nestorians; the Mar Thomas, or the Reformed Syrian Church, and Thomas Anglicans. The stresses of Christian teaching have produced similar religious abortions elsewhere. Thus in California, there are Wesleyan and Baptist branches of both the Northern anti-slavery Church, and the Southern segregationalist one, though the issue which once split the churches has no meaning in western America. Again, in the Central Provinces of India, there are native branches of the Scottish Original Seceders, though none of their members has been to Scotland or seceded from anything; as primitive Presbyterians they have inherited a disembodied religious tradition. Unassimilated Christianity can also produce entirely new but powerful and creative religions whose origin springs from linguistic and cultural misunderstanding. ‘Where is the road that leads to Cargo?’ asked the natives of parts of Papua and New Guinea. These peoples are unable to accept the white Christian’s distinction between sacred and secular knowledge. The believe that western goods and technology originate in the worlds of gods and spirits. They also think, rationalizing bitter experiences, that the intruding white man prevents the material betterment of the native people, in particular by withholding from them, and keeping to himself, the religious secrets by which they are obtained. Hence there arises a constant stream of prophets – one a month, on average – whose aim is to release the gods held in white bondage so that they will send possessions (Cargo) to the people. Innovation in religion is essentially linked to prophecy. Here, perhaps, we have the key to the creative failure of non-European Christianity. The ferocious battles waged by the orthodox Church in the second and third centuries to stabilize Christian dogma and eliminate unlicensed prophets ended by killing prophecy as a means by which the Christian faith was expanded and interpreted – prophecy became a pseudo-science rather than a form of divine revelation. When therefore Christianity was exported by Europe from the sixteenth century onwards, prophecy was not recognized as a legitimate form of Christian activity. Yet it has made its appearance nevertheless, and has done so against a background of official Christian disapproval,

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  the case of poverty. The secular authorities did not like these crowded prisons, being terrified of gaol fever and plague, and thus burned many more people than the Church authorized. The system was saved from utter horror only by the usual medieval frailties: corruption, inertia, and sheer administrative incompetence. Where the system was employed against an entire community, as in Languedoc, it evoked resistance. There were riots, murders, the destruction of records. Many countries would not admit the Inquisition at all. In Spain, however, it became a state instrument, almost a national institution, like bullfighting, a mystery to foreigners but popular among the natives. It is surprising how often admirable, if eccentric, individuals were burned, not only without public protest but with general approval. Thus the fourteenth-century breakaway movement of Franciscans, the fraticelli, who opposed clerical property and reasserted the apostolic practices of their founder, were hunted and burned all over Europe but especially in their native Umbria and the Mark of Ancona; the crowds who watched them destroyed were apathetic or inclined to believe antinomianism was rightly punished. In the Middle Ages, the ruthless and confident exercise of authority could nearly always swing a majority behind it. And the victims of the flames usually died screaming in pain and terror, thus appearing to confirm the justice of the proceedings. The total Christian society of the Middle Ages was based on an intense belief in the supernatural. It tended to live on its nerves. Lacking any kind of system for determining the truth scientifically and objectively, society was often bewildered. Today’s heterodoxy might become tomorrow’s orthodoxy; and vice versa. The enthusiasm of faith so easily toppled over into hysteria, and so became violently destructive. Inside every saint there appeared a heretic struggling to get out; and the converse. One man’s Christ was another man’s Antichrist. The official Church was conventional, orderly, hierarchical, committed to defend Society as it existed, with all its disparities and grievances. But there was also, as it were, an anti-Church, rebellious, egalitarian, revolutionary, which rejected society and its values and threatened to smash it to bits. It had its own tradition of revolutionary prophecy, inherited from the Jews, and continued into Christianity through the Book of Revelation, which acquired its place in the canon because it was believed to have been written by St John. Millenarianism had been, in the earliest days, almost the official political theory of the Church. But the eschatological moment had receded, and when Christianity became the state religion of the empire, millenarianism was frowned upon.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Having removed the clothes Ferondo was wearing and dressed him in a monastic habit, they left him lying on a bundle of straw until such time as he should come to his senses. And in the meantime, unbeknown to anyone else, the Bolognese monk waited for Ferondo to come round, having been told what to do by the Abbot. Next day, the Abbot, accompanied by one or two of his monks, called on the lady to pay her his respects, and found her dressed in black and full of woe. After offering her a few words of comfort, he quietly reminded her of her promise, and the lady, having caught sight of another fine ring on the Abbot’s finger, and realizing that she was now a free agent, unhindered by Ferondo or anyone else, told him that she was ready to honour it and arranged for him to call there after dark that evening. After dark, therefore, the Abbot decked himself out in Ferondo’s clothes and set off for her house accompanied by his monk. Having spent the whole night in her arms with enormous pleasure and delight, he returned a little before matins to the abbey, and from then on he went regularly- back and forth on the same errand. It occasionally happened that people would chance upon the Abbot as he wended his way to and fro, and they concluded that it must be Ferondo’s ghost, wandering through the district doing penance. So that, in the course of time, various strange legends grew up among the simple countryfolk, and some of these reached the ears of Ferondo’s wife, who was not mystified in the slightest. When Ferondo recovered his senses, without having the faintest idea where he was, the Bolognese monk burst in upon him brandishing a bunch of sticks; and with a terrifying roar, he seized hold of him and gave him a severe thrashing. Weeping and howling, Ferondo kept repeating the same question: ‘Where am I?’ ‘You are in Purgatory,’ replied the monk. ‘What?’ said Ferondo. ‘Do you mean to say I am dead, then?’ ‘You certainly are,’ said the monk; whereupon Ferondo started bemoaning his fate and weeping over the plight of his wife and child, coming out with the most extraordinary statements imaginable. The monk then brought him some food and drink, and Ferondo gasped with astonishment, saying: ‘Do dead people eat?’ ‘Yes,’ said the monk. ‘As a matter of fact, the food I am giving you was sent this morning to the church by the woman who was your wife, with a request that masses should be said for your soul. And it is God’s wish that you should have it here and now.’ ‘God bless her little heart!’ exclaimed Ferondo. ‘I did love her a lot of course, before I died. Why, I used to hold her in my arms all night, and I never stopped kissing her.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  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. But a formal request to make it official was turned down by the Directory: Barras sneeringly told its advocate, La Revellière, that he should first get himself martyred, to launch the religion properly, and Carnot ended the discussion by saying that a successful religion needed absurdity and unintelligibility – and in these respects nothing could beat Christianity. Beneath the public surface, the pattern of belief varied enormously, and often centred around individual Montanist-type figures, ranging from saints to pure charlatans. There was general agreement that some kind of religious mechanism was needed to keep people up to scratch. Some, like Madame de Stael, Necker’s daughter, pushed the argument further. In De la Littérature (1800) she coined what later became a truism: ‘Scientific progress makes moral progress a necessity.’ Her own circle at Coppet swarmed with religious eccentrics, many from German pietist backgrounds. There was Madame de Krudener, ‘converted’ in 1804 at Riga, when an acquaintance raised his hat to her in the street and promptly dropped dead. She had been instructed by Councillor Jung-Stilling of Baden, who had calculated that the world would end in 1819, and Pastor Friedrich Fontaines, who gave her a detailed description of the Kingdom of Heaven; in turn, she later persuaded the Tsar Alexander I to found the notorious Holy Alliance. Another de Staël prophet was the poet Zacharias Werner, who had become a convert to what might be termed Catholic Sexuality. His mother had imagined she was the Blessed Virgin, and he Christ; and he himself believed in ‘Christ and copulatory love’ –‘man’s soul in its ascent must pass

• From The Decameron (1353)

  And after Calandrino had invited them to stay for supper with so reluctant an air that they decided not to accept, they all took their leave of him. After leaving Calandrino, Bruno said to Buffalmacco: ‘Why don’t we steal that pig of his tonight?’ ‘But how are we to do that?’ said Buffalmacco. ‘I’ve already thought of a good way to do it,’ said Bruno, ‘provided that he doesn’t move it to some other place.’ ‘In that case,’ said Buffalmacco, ‘let’s do it. After all, why not? And when the deed is done, you and I, and our friend the priest here, will all make merry together.’ The priest was very much in favour of this idea, and so Bruno said: ‘This thing calls for a certain amount of finesse. Now you know, Buffalmacco, don’t you, that Calandrino is a mean sort of fellow, who’s very fond of drinking when other people pay. So let’s go and take him to the tavern, where the priest can pretend to play the host to the rest of us and pay for all the drinks. When he sees that he has nothing to pay, Calandrino will drink himself into a stupor, and then the rest will be plain sailing because there’s no one else staying at the house.’ Everything turned out as Bruno had predicted. When Calandrino saw that the priest would not allow him to pay, he began to drink like a fish, and quaffed a great deal more than he needed to make him drunk. By the time he left the tavern, it was already very late, and not wishing to eat any supper, he staggered off home and went to bed, thinking he had bolted the door whereas in fact he had left it wide open. Buffalmacco and Bruno went and had supper with the priest, and when the meal was over they stealthily made their way to Caland-rino’s house, taking with them certain implements so that they could break in at the spot that Bruno had decided on earlier in the day. On finding the door open, however, they walked in, collected the pig, and carted it off to the priest’s house, where they stowed it away and went off to bed. Next morning, having slept off the effects of the wine, Calandrino got up and went downstairs to find that his pig had gone and the door was open. So he went round asking various people whether they knew who had taken the pig, and being unable to find any trace of it, he began to make a great outcry, shouting: ‘Alas! Woe is me! Somebody’s stolen my pig!’ Meanwhile, Bruno and Buffalmacco got up and went round to Calandrino’s to hear what he had to say about the pig.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  I waited, and she began again. “I’d befriended the homosexuals because I didn’t want to be unfaithful to Hugo anymore. I thought that with the homosexuals, I could find companionship without temptation. I hadn’t realized what a hothouse of enticements I would be entering. The talk was all about sex, and everyone fell so easily into each other’s beds, the women as well as the men.” Oh my god, how could I have missed it? Especially after she’d told me that she’d wanted to be part of Djuna Barnes’s lesbian clique! It just hadn’t occurred to me that Anaïs went with women because she was so feminine. That should have been the tipoff, though; she was one of those femme lesbians I’d heard about. Renate had to be one, too—all the paintings of her naked girlfriends! Probably Anaïs’s and Renate’s young husbands were shills. They were probably homosexual, too. I felt as if one of Renate’s artichoke hearts had gotten stuck in my throat. If Anaïs and Renate were lesbians, then they must think I was one, too, and that was why I’d been brought there! Or they believed I was one but hadn’t yet recognized it, so they wanted to help me. The secret was about me: that I was a lesbian, too. But how could I be when I liked sex with men? I didn’t even know if I could do it with women, especially women as old as Anaïs and Renate. Making my voice sound both accepting and neutral I asked, “Are you a lesbian?” “No!” She laughed her delightful jingle. “Oh.” I took a relieved breath but felt some disappointment on the exhale. Anaïs went on, “After I turned forty, I was having a midlife crisis like a man. I was in a sexual frenzy, especially for young, beautiful boys, hetero or not.” Her laugh cracked. “When I met Gore I’d already slept with enough homosexual young men to know it would be a disaster, but I couldn’t help myself. He was so brilliant and beautiful when he was young. Once, in a taxi, he grabbed me into a fierce kiss. I responded, inflamed with desire, and that frightened him. He told the driver to stop, jumped out of the cab, and fled to one of his boys.” “Ouch!” I said. “That wasn’t the worst of it.” Her face coiled with ire. “He used secret confidences we’d shared to parody me in his novels! And there was nothing I could do about it because I had to remain friends with him.” “Why?” “He was my only route to a real publisher.” I was confused. “I thought you had a publisher, Gemor Press.” “Those books were self-published. I handprinted all those books myself.” “What about the British Book Company?” “It was a vanity press in England.” Her sigh was more of a groan. “Hugo wasted so much of his capital on vanity publishing for me.” “Well, at least you handprinted some beautiful books.”

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  Lounging sinuously on the floor pillows, Renate explained, “Hugo would phone my number to reach Anaïs, and I would say that ranch guests were not allowed to come to the phone but that I would convey a message. Then I would phone Anaïs at the cabin, and when Rupert went out, Anaïs would drive to Sierra Madre, the nearby town, and phone Hugo collect from a pay phone. She’d told him that I, the ranch owner, wouldn’t let her use the ranch phone for long distance calls.” Anaïs sighed. “It worked well until Renate married Ronnie, and he moved in with her.” Renate seemed to take Anaïs’s words as an accusation, for she rose abruptly and strode back into her kitchen. Anaïs marched after her. I couldn’t make out their whole argument, but I overheard Renate snap, “The phone company promised to have my number changed next week. I can’t get them to do it any faster.” When they returned to the living room, Anaïs said, “Renate is going to explain to you about an unfortunate incident last month.” Renate straightened her posture. “Ronnie was already living with me when my son quit UCLA and moved back home. Anaïs and I didn’t tell either of them about Hugo’s calls to Rancho Sosegado.” Wincing, Anaïs massaged her temples while Renate elaborated. “Last month Hugo called here, and my husband answered. Hugo asked him, ‘Is this Rancho Sosegado?’ and Ronnie said, ‘Wrong number!’ and hung up.” Anaïs added in distress, “Hugo phoned back and Ronnie hung up on him again.” She stopped to slow her breathing. “Renate, tell what happened next.” Renate said with great dignity, “Several days later, Hugo phoned once more, and this time my son answered. Hugo insisted he speak to the woman who owned the place where Anaïs Nin stayed. Peter told Hugo he knew Anaïs, but that she never stayed here.” I asked Anaïs, “Is that why you don’t want to be here when Ronnie or Peter get home?” “Yes, they’re too young to understand,” Anaïs said, and Renate nodded in agreement. I was the same age as Renate’s son and nine years younger than her husband, but they evidently thought I was mature enough, which was flattering. “Tristine, do you understand? Now Hugo knows I’ve been lying to him about Rancho Sosegado for seven years!” Anaïs cried. I was stunned at the enormity of her deception, and at the same time impressed that she had been able to pull it off for so long. She eyed me sternly. “You will warn me before you let anyone move in with you?” I shrugged. “There’s no space for a roommate in my single anyway.” Renate rolled her eyes. “Anaïs means don’t let a man move in with you.” “I don’t even have a boyfriend.” “That won’t last,” Renate said, and Anaïs readily concurred. I grinned, delighted they thought so.

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

  As I began to explore these questions, both substantive and hermeneutical, I soon discovered that Jews and Christians in various times and places have read the creation story—and its practical implications—quite differently, sometimes even antithetically. What Christians see, or claim to see, in Genesis 1–3 changed as the church itself changed from a dissident Jewish sect to a popular movement persecuted by the Roman government, and changed further as this movement increasingly gained members throughout Roman society, until finally even the Roman emperor himself converted to the new faith and Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. During recent decades, several distinguished scholars, including Professors Robert M. Grant, Georges de Ste. Croix, Ramsay MacMullen, Wayne Meeks, and Paul Veyne, have pointed out that Christians were in many ways similar to their pagan neighbors.2 Their works document, among other things, social, political, economic, and cultural parallels that I have not reviewed here. Instead I focus upon ways in which Christians differed from pagans, or claimed to differ—what made them, in other words, specifically Christian within the pagan world; I am interested, in Tertullian’s words, in the “peculiarities of the Christian society.”3 In each chapter I take up a theme that Christians attempted to understand or justify by means of the creation story. Jewish teachers of Jesus’ time and earlier, as I show in Chapter 1, often invoked the story of Adam and Eve to defend Jewish sexual practices ranging from abhorrence of public nakedness (for God clothed Adam and Eve in Paradise) to marital practices designed to facilitate reproduction (for hadn’t God said, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth”?). These Jewish teachers noted that Genesis contains not one but two distinct accounts of creation, of which the first begins with the opening chapter of Genesis and tells how God created the world in six days, crowning his achievement by creating adam—that is, humanity—in his image (Genesis 1:26). But this account ends with Genesis 2:3; and the following verse, Genesis 2:4, begins a different narrative. This second story tells how the Lord made a man out of earth, and, after making all the animals and finding none of them a suitable companion for Adam, he put Adam to sleep, brought woman out of his side, and presented her to Adam as his wife. The woman then persuaded her husband to disobey divine law and earned with him their expulsion from Paradise. Most biblical scholars today agree that the two creation accounts, originally separate, were later joined to make up the first three chapters of Genesis. The story of Adam and Eve (Genesis 2:40, told in the language of folklore, is considered the older of the two accounts, dating to 1000–900 B.C.E.; the account now placed first (Genesis 1:1–2:3) dates to postexilic theologians (c. 400 B.C.E.). Jewish teachers in antiquity, like many Christians after them, turned to theological ingenuity rather than historical or literary analysis to account for contradictions in the texts.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘But where on earth can we leave him,’ inquired the lady, ‘so as to prevent people suspecting, when he is discovered in the morning, that this was the house from which he was taken?’ ‘Ma’am,’ replied the maid, ‘late this evening I caught sight of a trunk standing outside the shop of our neighbour, the carpenter. It was not a very large trunk, but if it is still there it will come in nice and handy, because we can put the body inside, stab him two or three times with a dagger, and leave him there. No matter who finds him in the trunk, they will have no reason for supposing that he came from here rather than from somewhere else. In fact, since he was such an unruly sort of youth, they will think that he was murdered by one of his enemies as he was about to commit some crime or other, and then stuffed inside the trunk.’ The lady said that no power on earth would persuade her to stab him, but that otherwise the maid’s proposal seemed to her a good one, and she sent her to see whether the trunk was still in the same place. Having confirmed that it was, the maid, who was a sturdy young woman, lifted Ruggieri on to her shoulders with the help of her mistress. And with the lady walking on ahead to make sure no one was coming, they got him to the trunk, put him inside, closed the lid, and left him there. Now, a few days earlier, two young men had moved into a house a little further along the street. They were money-lenders, always on the lookout for ways of making pots of money and saving a few coppers, and since they were short of furniture and had noticed the trunk lying there the previous day, they had agreed that if it was still there after dark, they would carry it off to their own house. In the dead of night they came out of their house, found the trunk, and without stopping to examine it closely (though it did seem a little heavy), they carried it quickly back to their house and dumped it in the first convenient place, which happened to be immediately beside a room where their womenfolk were sleeping. And without bothering to see that it was in a secure position, they left it there and went off to bed. Ruggieri slept for a very long time, but eventually he digested the potion, its effects wore off, and just before matins he woke up. But although he had emerged from sleep and recovered the use of his senses, his mind was still blurred, and in fact it was some days before he shook off his state of bewilderment.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Some years ago, in Barletta, there was a priest called Father Gianni di Barolo,1 who, because he had a poor living and wished to supplement his income, took to carrying goods, with his mare, round the various fairs of Apulia, and to buying and selling. In the course of his travels, he became very friendly with a man called Pietro da Tresanti,2 who practised the same trade as his own, but with a donkey, and in token of his friendship and affection he always addressed him, in the Apulian fashion, as Neighbour Pietro. And whenever Pietro came to Barletta, Father Gianni always invited him to his church, where he shared his quarters with him and entertained him to the best of his ability. For his own part, Neighbour Pietro was exceedingly poor and had a tiny little house in Tresanti, hardly big enough to accommodate himself, his donkey, and his beautiful young wife. But whenever Father Gianni turned up in Tresanti, he took him to his house and entertained him there as best he could, in appreciation of the latter’s hospitality in Barletta. However, when it came to putting him up for the night, Pietro was unable to do as much for him as he would have liked, because he only had one little bed, in which he and his beautiful wife used to sleep. Father Gianni was therefore obliged to bed down on a heap of straw in the stable, alongside his mare and Pietro’s donkey. Pietro’s wife, knowing of the hospitality which the priest accorded to her husband in Barletta, had offered on several occasions, when the priest came to stay with them, to go and sleep with a neighbour of hers called Zita Carapresa di Giudice Leo, so that the priest could sleep in the bed with her husband. But the priest wouldn’t hear of it, and on one occasion he said to her: ‘My dear Gemmata, don’t trouble your head over me. I am quite all right, because whenever I choose I can transform this mare3 of mine into a fair young maid and turn in with her. Then when it suits me I turn her back into a mare. And that is why I’d never be without her.’ The young woman was astonished, believed every word of it, and told her husband, adding: ‘If he’s as good a friend as you say, why don’t you get him to teach you the spell, so that you can turn me into a mare and run your business with the mare as well as the donkey? We should earn twice as much money, and when we got home you could turn me back into a woman, as I am now.’

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Arriguccio was left standing there, gazing into space like an idiot, and not knowing whether the things he had done were real or part of a dream. However, he said no more about it, but left his wife in peace, so that not only had she kept her wits about her and avoided the immediate danger, but she had also made it possible, from then on, to enjoy herself to her heart’s content without any fear of her husband.

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

  Dr. Keim, of Zürich (d. at Giessen, 1879), an independent pupil of Baur, and author of the most elaborate and valuable Life of Christ which the liberal critical school has produced, after giving every possible advantage to the mythical view of the resurrection, confesses that it is, after all, a mere hypothesis and fails to explain the main point. He says (Geschichte Jesu von Nazara, III. 600): "Nach allen diesen Ueberlegungen wird man zugestehen müssen, dass auch die neuerdings beliebt gewordene Theorie nur eine Hypothese ist, welche Einiges erklärt, die Hauptsache nicht erklärt, ja im Ganzen und Grossen das geschichtlich Bezeugte schiefen und hinfälligen Gesichtspunkten unterstellt. Misslingt aber gleichmässig der Versuch, die überlieferte Aufs Auferstehungsgeschichte festzuhalten, wie das Unternehmen, mit Hilfe der paulinischen Visionen eine natürliche Erklärung des Geschehenen aufzubauen, so bleibt für die Geschichte zunächst kein Weg übrig als der des Eingeständnisses, dass die Sagenhaftigkeit der redseligen Geschichte und die dunkle Kürze der glaubwürdigen Geschichte es nicht gestattet, über die räthselhaften Ausgange des Lebens Jesu, so wichtig sie an und für sich und in der Einwirkung auf die Weltgeschichte gewesen sind, ein sicheres unumstössliches Resultat zu geben. Für die Geschichte, sofern sie nur mit benannten evidenten Zahlen und mit Reihen greifbarer anerkannter Ursachen und Wirkungen rechnet, existirt als das Thatsächliche und Zweifellose lediglich der feste Glaube der Apostel, dass Jesus auferstanden, und die ungeheure Wirkung dieses Glaubens, die Christianisirung der Menschheit. On p. 601 he expresses the conviction that "it was the crucified and living Christ who, not as the risen one, but rather as the divinely glorified one (als der wenn nicht Auferstandene, so doch vielmehr himmlisch Verherrlichte), gave visions to his disciples and revealed himself to his society." In his last word on the great problem, Keim, in view of the exhaustion and failure of the natural explanations, comes to the conclusion, that we must either, with Dr. Baur, humbly confess our ignorance, or return to the faith of the apostles who "have seen the Lord" (John 20:25). See the third and last edition of his abridged Geschichte Jesu, Zürich, 1875, p. 362.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  “My son. He’s living at home now.” She sighed. “He’s such a sensitive, artistic boy. Anaïs illustrated her novel Solar Barque with pictures Peter drew when he was just seven. Have you seen it?” “No, but I’ve read her other novels. Most of them had illustrations by Ian Hugo. That’s one of the things I’m confused about. Why did Anaïs say she and I went dancing with Ian Hugo? I’ve never even met him. It was her ex-husband Hugo Guiler who took us to Harlem.” “You don’t know anything, do you?” Renate peered out the window, then turned her attention back to me. “Do you know who Ronnie Knox is?” “No.” “He was a star quarterback at UCLA. He played professionally for the Rams.” “I don’t follow football.” “Yes, it’s boring and violent.” She examined her buffed fingernails. “I wouldn’t know who Ronnie Knox is, either, except that he’s my husband. How old are you?” “Twenty.” “Ronnie is only nine years older than you.” Renate had to be near Anaïs’s age, almost sixty, I guessed. She and Anaïs and Christopher Isherwood seemed to be in some sort of cabal where everyone had much younger partners. “Ronnie’s father is his sports manager,” Renate continued. “If the old man ever found out that Ronnie married a bohemian twice his age, he’d kill him. Also, Ronnie is bound by product endorsement contracts that require him to remain a heartthrob bachelor. So it’s paramount we keep our marriage secret.” “I understand,” I said, but I wondered why we were talking about her young husband or her son. “As for me”—Renate looked at me deadpan—“I’d be ashamed if my bohemian friends found out I married a famous footballer.” I laughed. She smiled, pleased that I’d gotten her humor. She lowered her black lashes, and I could see they were definitely fake as she continued. “Some people live in two different worlds that have to be kept separate and secret.” I noticed how skillfully she’d applied her eyeliner to disguise the glue line and extend the wings. “Haven’t you at some point had to keep one side of your life hidden from the other?” She raised her artificial lashes, her piercing blue eyes holding mine. I considered. “I keep secrets from my mother.” “For instance?” “That I take the pill.” “Why can’t you tell her?” “She’d know I’m not a virgin anymore.” “Well, that’s ridiculous. You’re an adult woman.” “I know, but if I told her I’d have to deal with her hysteria and worry. It’s better for her and for me not to say anything about it.” “So you are protecting yourself and her?” “Yes.” “It’s not so different from Ronnie and me, needing to protect ourselves from others’ foolish judgments,” she said. “And not so different from Hugo Guiler and Ian Hugo.” “I don’t understand.” “Hugo had to protect his bosses and himself.” “Which one? Hugo Guiler or Ian Hugo?”

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  She was wearing jeans and a loose green pullover and straddled a little girl with ash-blond hair on her right hip. We embraced and then Karen threw her free arm out in a huge arc. “Look at all this. Can you believe it?” “This” was a sprawling ranch-style house with three bedrooms, large front yard, shade trees, a swing set, and a two-car garage filled with bicycles, camping gear, and other paraphernalia of a family that enjoys the outdoors, plus a spectacular garden. As I expressed my admiration for the beautiful flowers, Karen smiled, “This is the one thing I was glad to inherit from my mother. She gave me my green thumb.” A little later, after putting Maya down for a nap, she said, “You know, I hope, in fact I pray every day, that this is the only way I’m like my mother. All the years that I was growing up, I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to look like my mother, I don’t want to think like my mother, I don’t want to be angry like my mother.’” She smiled. “I guess you could say that goes double for my father. He was always finding some woman to take care of him.” “Sounds like you’ve been thinking a lot about your parents.” “It’s funny, Judy. I didn’t expect this, but my getting married makes me think about them all the time. It didn’t begin so much on my wedding day but almost immediately after, even on our honeymoon, it was like parts of them came floating around in the back of my head.” “What were you thinking?” “Well, it worries me that when they got married, they loved each other. They were both reasonably suited to each other. And then, for reasons I’ll never understand, the marriage went down the tubes.” Karen’s face showed pure frustration. “I never did understand why they divorced. It never occurred to them to discuss what happened with any of us. Sometimes I think they were just howling at the moon. The whole thing made no sense whatsoever. I’m thirty-eight years old and it’s still incomprehensible to me. Who was the divorce for? I have friends whose parents divorced and none of us understands why. Everyone shrugs and says, ‘Well, guess they never should have gotten married in the first place.’” Karen’s voice took on a tinge of anger. “But that’s a cop-out. Fact is, they did get married and they probably were in love at the time and then things just changed.” She shrugged. Karen’s reaction to her parents’ failure to explain the divorce is understandable. If her parents were in love, well suited to each other, and their marriage failed, what’s to keep Karen from following in their footsteps?

• From Augustine: Philosopher and Saint (2005)

  Grace and free will • Grace is an inner connection with Christ (as our Original Sin is an inner connection with Adam). • Grace is the inward power of eternal beauty, which causes us to love and delight in what is right and good. • Grace heals the will that is corrupted and diseased by sin. • Grace helps the will that is weak (convalescing). • Grace is irresistible but not coercive; it moves our will inwardly, not externally. • Merit is based on grace, not the other way around. • God’s grace keeping us in Charity to the end of our lives is called “the gift of perseverance.” This is a gift we can only pray for, because nothing we do now determines the choices we make from now until the hour of our death. Predestination • De(cid:191) nitions: (cid:405) Predestination is not determinism: it does not stem from physical causes but from God’s plan. (cid:405) Predestination is more than foreknowledge: it is God deciding what he shall do (and therefore what shall happen). (cid:405) Predestination is God’s eternal plan to give grace to some and not to others. • The central biblical concept behind Augustinian predestination: chosen people: (cid:405) The biblical notion of election (i.e., of God choosing some people and not others). (cid:405) The central example of election: “Jacob have I loved and Esau have I hated” (Romans 9:13). (cid:405) Grace as divine favor: according to the Bible, God has a favorite son. (cid:405) Augustinian predestination is eternal election. 37 38 noitanitsederP dna ,niS lanigirO ,lliW eerF ,livE :8 erutceL • Problems with Augustine’s concept of predestination: (cid:405) Is human freedom ultimately powerless? (Augustine answers that sinful human freedom is indeed in bondage to such a degree that it does not have the power to save us without grace.) (cid:405) Is God unfair? (Augustine answers that God is inequitable but not unjust: Beginning with a human race that is one “mass of damnation,” God chooses to rescue some who deserve to be damned and not to rescue others who deserve to be damned.) (cid:405) “Double” predestination: If God predestines some to salvation, isn’t he predestining the rest to damnation? (Augustine at least once answers “yes.”) (cid:405) The inscrutability of God’s choices: Augustine quotes Romans 11:33: “O the depth of the wisdom of God.” An odd conclusion to be arrived at by a man whose goal in life has been to understand God! (cid:405) Final suggestion: perhaps what is ultimately at stake here is a key point of incompatibility between Platonist philosophy and the biblical portrait of God: does it make sense to say that God makes choices, as he seems to in the Bible? If it does, then God must be more like a person than like an eternal form. (cid:374) Essential Reading Augustine, Enchiridion, chapters 9–14, 23–55, 95–108. ———, On the Spirit and the Letter, 29.50–34.60. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, chapters 15 and 32–34. Supplementary Reading Augustine, The Essential Augustine, chapter 8.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Around the time I was finishing this book, a very important judge on the family law bench in a large state I shall not name invited me to come see him. I was eager to meet with him because I wanted to discuss some ideas I have for educating parents under court auspices that go beyond the simple advice “don’t fight.” After we had talked for a half an hour or so, the judge leaned back in his chair and said he’d like my opinion about something important. He had just attended several scientific lectures in which researchers argued that children are shaped more by genes than by family environment. Case in point, studies of identical twins reared separately show that in adulthood such twins often like the same foods and clothing styles, belong to the same political parties, and even bestow identical names on their dogs. The judge looked perplexed. “Do you think that could mean divorce is in the genes?” he asked in all seriousness. “And if that’s so, does it matter what a court decides when parents divorce?” I was taken aback. Here was a key figure in the lives of thousands of children asking me whether what he and his colleagues do or say on the bench makes any difference. He seemed relieved by the notion that maybe his actions are insignificant. I told him that I personally doubt the existence of a “divorce gene.” If such a biological trait had arisen in evolution, it would be of very recent vintage. But, I added, “What the court does matters enormously. You have the power to protect children from being hurt or to increase their suffering.” Now it was his turn to be taken aback. “You think we’ve increased children’s suffering?” “Yes, Your Honor, I do. With all respect, I have to say that the court along with the rest of society has increased the suffering of children.” “How so?” he asked. We spent another half hour talking about how the courts, parents, attorneys, mental health workers—indeed most adults—have been reluctant to pay genuine attention to children during and after divorce. He listened respectfully to me but I must say I left the judge’s chambers that day in a state of shock that soon turned to gloom. How can we be so utterly lost and confused that a leading judge would accept the notion of a “divorce gene” to explain our predicament? If he’s confused about his role, what about the rest of us? What is it about the impact of divorce on our society and our children that’s so hard to understand and accept?