Contempt

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 Pisces (2018)

  “It’s triggering for me, because it means I’ve been isolating a lot more,” she said from under her wide-brimmed hat, face covered in a chalky substance that I guessed was zinc. She looked like she was wearing a clown mask. “He never had many friends, but now he is out most of the time and I don’t have any companionship.” I wondered, too, if Brianne’s son was also in therapy. If not, he would be soon. “I’ve been staying the course with Match and Millionaire Match,” she said, gently patting her lips to make sure they were still huge. “And we will just have to wait and see. If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be. If not, it’s okay. I don’t need anyone. I have a very full life.” I wasn’t buying it today. “So you’d really be okay to never fall in love again for the rest of your life?” I asked her. Brianne looked at me through her clown paint. “I’m feeling judged,” said Brianne. “Sorry,” I said. “What about you, Lucy? You don’t believe that a person can be alone and be content with that?” asked Dr. Jude. “I don’t know. Probably not,” I said. “Mmmm.” “Do you?” “Oh, definitely,” said Dr. Jude, yellow teeth flashing. “I don’t believe we need another person to complete us.” “Not even to fuck?” “Let’s be sure to be conscious of any triggering language,” she said. “Yes, I’m feeling triggered,” said Sara. “Right, sorry,” I said. The room got quiet. “Are you in a relationship, Dr. Jude?” I asked. She paused and toyed with an angel card on the table next to her. It said Awakening. “No,” she said. “Not at the moment.” “When was the last time you were in one?” “Well, if you want to know, I’m pretty recently divorced,” she said. “Oh,” I said. “Would you say you’re content?” “Hmmmm,” she said, sipping her green tea. “Actually, yes. Most of the time I would say yes, I am content.” Nobody said a word. Sara was slowly peeling a clementine with the hand she used to massage her foot. The amount of time it was taking could not be worth the bite-sized little fruit. I watched her peel and peel the white-and-orange rind, and began to shake. It was the clementine of Sisyphus. Everything was hopeless. Then Sara offered Brianne a slice of her foot-fruit and Brianne accepted gleefully, as though she were giving her a jewel. I felt sorry for them. None of them had anything left to look forward to in the romance department. Maybe they would go on some tepid controlled dates, but no dark alleys. What did any of them have to live for, really? A son who would just grow up and forget all about you? Some man in hemp pants at a workshop saying you had a nice aura? An office filled with shit? At least I still had sparkle in my life. I was going on an adventure.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  ‘adapting a whole accumulation of ancient superstitions to the ideas of their sect, preaching liberty and equality like the Eleusian or Ephesian mysteries, translating natural law into an occult doctrine and a mythological jargon’. Such weird sects homed on Paris even before the Revolution. There was Mesmer, who arrived there in 1778, with his theory of animal magnetism as a healing force; he held séances at which social and intellectual leaders joined hands round a bucket of water. Lavater taught that character could be deduced from facial appearance; his rival measured skulls. The Rosicrucians presented apparitions and set up their boxes of tricks in the very room where Voltaire had once bandied rationalism with Frederick the Great. Joseph de Maistre was already working on his mystical theories of right-wing tyranny (Considérations sur la France appeared in 1796); there were gnostics in plenty, like Robespierre’s friend Catherine Theot, and mystics like Saint-Martin, who described himself as ‘official defender of Providence’. Against this background, the new rulers of France set about the removal and replacement of Catholic Christianity. One eye-witness, Mercier, later recorded in his memoirs that if Robespierre had only appeared with an old Bible under his arm, and firmly told the French to become Protestant, he might have succeeded. But the Revolution was not reformist, it was millenarian. It was, in fact, the first modern millenarian revolt. It looked backwards to the Munster of the 1520s, and the Middle Ages, and forward to Karl Marx and Mao Tse-tung. It was also influenced by its own décor, a reflection of the classical revival: thus it had overtones of the Emperor Julian’s pathetic attempts to revivify imperial paganism. Cadet de Vaux erected the first ‘patriotic altar’ in January 1790 at his country house; it had Roman axes and fasces, a pike crowned with a cap of Liberty, a shield with a portrait of Lafayette and verses by Voltaire; the arrangement was widely copied. Such altars were the foci of open-air ceremonies, where oaths of loyalty were sworn, the Te Deum sung, and communal banquets consumed. The designer and régisseur was J-P. David, who staged a huge ceremony in July 1791 to convey the remains of Voltaire to the Panthéon. This raised the issue of the role of religion in state ceremonies, and so in turn the question of civil marriage and secular education. Should not the Revolution, creating a new society, give it a new religion? Many of the revolutionaries were deists. They believed in nature; or, like Rousseau, in direct communication with God without intermediaries. Other elements in their belief were patriotism and the cult of sensibilité – hence Saint-Just’s Temple of Friendship, where every adult was to record

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

  As the Christian movement increasingly gained converts throughout Roman society during the third and fourth centuries, some of the most ardent Christians insisted that to realize the greatest freedom one must “renounce the world” and choose poverty and celibacy. For certain Christians, celibacy was a way of rejecting Roman social life. In Genesis 1–3, where Jews—and many Christians, for that matter—traditionally saw God’s endorsement of marriage and procreation, ascetic Christians saw the opposite: Adam and Eve were virgins in Paradise and should have remained so; as Gregory of Nyssa explained, God could have arranged for the human race to “multiply” in completely nonsexual ways, as angels do. But when one Roman monk, Jovinian, although himself celibate, tried to prove from the Scriptures that celibate Christians were no holier than their married sisters and brothers, Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine, three future saints of the church, attacked him, while Pope Siricius of Rome denounced and excommunicated Jovinian for his “heresy.” In Chapter 4 I explore what motivated men—and especially women—to embrace that ascetic life; and what kinds of freedom its advocates did indeed find in choosing celibacy.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  I am ashamed to say it, since in condemning others I condemn myself: but these over-dressed, heavily made-up, excessively ornamented females either stand around like marble statues in an attitude of dumb indifference, or else, on being asked a question, they give such stupid replies that they would have been far better advised to remain silent. And they delude themselves into thinking that their inability to converse in the company of gentlemen and ladies proceeds from their purity of mind. They give the name of honesty to their dull-wittedness, as though the only honest women are those who speak to no one except their maids, their washerwomen, or their pastrycooks. Whereas if, as they fondly imagine, this had been Nature’s intention, she would have devised some other means for restricting their prattle. In this as in other things one must, it is true, take account of the time and the place and the person with whom one is speaking. For it sometimes happens that men or women, thinking to make a person blush through uttering some little pleasantry, and having underestimated the other person’s powers, find the blush intended for their opponent recoiling upon themselves. Wherefore, in order that you may learn to be on your guard, and also in order that people should not associate you with the proverb commonly heard on everyone’s lips, namely that women are always worsted in any argument, I desire that the tale which it falls to me to relate, and which completes our storytelling for today, should be one which will make you conversant with these matters. Thus you will be able to show that you are different from other women, not only for the noble qualities of your minds, but also for the excellence of your manners.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Lopez wrote in 1541: ‘It is a most dangerous error to teach science to the Indians and still more to put the Bible and the holy scriptures into their hands. . . . Many people in our Spain have been lost that way, and have invented a thousand heresies.’ Teaching Latin bred insolence and, worse, exposed the ignorance of European priests. (Bishop Montufar quoted an instance in which, of twenty-four Spanish Augustinians brought to him for ordination, only two knew Latin.) One complaint was that ‘reading the holy scriptures, [the Indians] would learn that the old patriarchs had many wives at the same time, just as they used to have.’ Eventually the college was accused of teaching heresy, and entrance to Indians was forbidden; thus it lost its purpose and decayed. Synods repeatedly made it clear, in any case, that natives were not to be ordained, or indeed admitted to monastic orders except as servitors. We know of one case in which an Indian, Lucas, was refused admission to the Dominicans, despite ‘his virtues and exemplary life’, the reason being stated bluntly ‘because he is an Indian’. If individual friars favoured Indian priests, the policies of their orders remained adamant until quite recent times. The Jesuits in South America were no more enlightened. They protected their Indian charges jealously but never accorded them the status of adult Christians. Hence, when the society was suppressed in the late eighteenth century, the reductiones had no native cadres to sustain them, and were quickly and ruthlessly pillaged by the settlers. The failure to produce self-sustaining Christianity among the natives was paralleled among the Latin-American communities of European descent. In the Roman empire distinctive regional schools of Christianity had soon emerged, both before the development of orthodoxy, and after: Alexandria, Antioch, Carthage, Spain, the Rhone Valley – all had made their cultural and doctrinal contributions to Christian richness within a few generations of receiving the faith. The process had been repeated again and again as Christianity spread over Europe. But the transplantation to Latin America bore no such fruit. This huge continent, where paganism was quickly expunged, where great cities, universities and sub-cultures were soon established, where Christianity was united and monopolistic, carefully protected by the State from any hint of heresy, schism or rival, and where the clergy were innumerable, rich and privileged, made virtually no distinctive contribution to the Christian message and insight in over four centuries. Latin America exuded a long, conformist silence. This is not entirely surprising. Spain, as we have seen, had staged its own orthodox reformation before the Lutheran schism. It possessed

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  mortal sin. Relaxation was accompanied by a formal plea for mercy; in fact this was meaningless, and the individual civil officer (sheriffs and so forth) had no choice but to burn, since otherwise he was denounced as a ‘defender of heretics’, and plunged into the perils of the system himself. The codification of legislation against heresy took place over half a century, roughly 1180–1230, when it culminated in the creation of a permanent tribunal, staffed by Dominican friars, who worked from a fixed base in conjunction with the episcopate, and were endowed with generous authority. The permanent system was designed as a reform; in fact it incorporated all the abuses of earlier practice and added new ones. It had a certain vicious logic. Since a heretic was denied burial in consecrated ground, the corpses of those posthumously convicted (a very frequent occurrence) had to be disinterred, dragged through the streets and burnt on the refuse pit. The houses in which they lived had to be knocked down and turned into sewers or rubbish-dumps. Convictions of thought-crimes being difficult to secure, the Inquisition used procedures banned in other courts, and so contravened town charters, written and customary laws, and virtually every aspect of established jurisprudence. The names of hostile witnesses were withheld, anonymous informers were used, the accusations of personal enemies were allowed, the accused were denied the right of defence, or of defending counsel; and there was no appeal. The object, quite simply, was to produce convictions at any cost; only thus, it was thought, could heresy be quenched. Hence depositors were not named; all a suspect could do was to produce a list of his enemies, and he was allowed to bring forward witnesses to testify that such enemies existed, but for no other purpose. On the other hand, the prosecution could use the evidence of criminals, heretics, children and accomplices, usually forbidden in other courts. Once an area became infected by heresy, and the system moved in, large numbers of people became entangled in its toils. Children of heretics could not inherit, as the stain was vicarial; grandchildren could not hold ecclesiastical benefices unless they successfully denounced someone. Everyone from the age of fourteen (girls from twelve) were required to take public oaths every two years to remain good Catholics and denounce heretics. Failure to confess or receive communion at least three times a year aroused automatic suspicion; possession of the scriptures in any language, or of breviaries, hour-books and psalters in the vernacular, was forbidden. Torture was not employed regularly until near the end of the thirteenth century (except by secular

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  ‘dissoluteness and contempt of principle in the higher part of the world,’ and ‘profligate intemperance and fearlessness of committing crimes in the lower’. He claimed that ‘Christianity is now railed at and ridiculed with very little reserve, and its teaching without any at all.’ But who was Seeker to talk? His was a purely political appointment; Horace Walpole says he had earlier been an atheist. His fellow- metropolitan John Gilbert, promoted to York the year before (1757), was no better advertisement for the bench. ‘Gilbert,’ wrote Walpole, ‘was composed of that common mixture, ignorance, meanness and arrogance . . . On the news of [his] promotion, they rung the bells at York backwards, in detestation of him. He opened a great table there, and in six months they thought him the most Christian prelate that had ever sat in that see.’ Walpole sums up the age neatly: ‘There were no religious combustibles in the temper of the times. Popery and Protestantism seemed at a stand. The modes of Christianity were exhausted and could not furnish novelty enough to fix attention.’ In England the Establishment clergy virtually ceased to be a proselytizing or even an active force, though it remained a powerful social one. The many verbatim conversations recorded in James Boswell’s diaries reveal the better sort of clergyman as learned, rather than pious. They were, in fact, encouraged to take a polite interest in the arts and sciences to fill the time. In 1785, for instance, William Paley, Archdeacon of Carlisle, gave a Charge entitled ‘Amusements Suitable to the Clergy’, based on the premise that ‘the life of a clergyman . . . does not supply sufficient encouragements to the time and thoughts of an active mind.’ He recommended natural history, botany, electrical experiments, the use of a microscope, chemistry, the measurement of mountains, meteorology and, above all, astronomy, ‘the most proper of all recreations to a clergyman’. With these pursuits, ‘there is no man of liberal education who need be at a loss to know what to do with his time.’ In Scotland, the collapse of fanaticism was long delayed, but then came (at least in the big cities) quite abruptly in the mid eighteenth-century. An index of it is the attitude to the theatre, once defined by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland as ‘the actual temple of the Devil, where he frequently appeared clothed in a corporeal substance and possessed the spectators, whom he held as his worshippers’. First, English players made their appearance. Then, in the 1740s, Edinburgh acquired a permanent theatre, disguised as a concert hall. In 1756, The Tragedy of Douglas, actually written by a clergyman, was put on, and it was attended by the leading

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  doctrine of original sin was thus introduced, all the more un-Christian since it could not be effaced by baptism; the saffron robes worn by the condemned (the great majority of whom were Jews) had to be hung up in churches as a perpetual reproach to their descendants – a law observed until the end of the eighteenth century. The limpieza de sangre system might have disappeared in the sixteenth century under the weight of its own contradictions and cruelties. In fact, the religious struggle not only prolonged its life but immeasurably increased the authority, power and durability of its control-mechanism, the Inquisition. By an almost magical process, Protestantism was simply identified with impure blood, that is with the Jewish taint. Archbishop Siliceo of Toledo expressed the common view in 1547: ‘It is said, and it is considered true, that the principal heretics of Germany, who have destroyed all that nation . . . are descendants of Jews.’ In fact no one had said this outside Spain; and Luther himself was notoriously anti-Semitic. But Spaniards of Jewish descent were duly identified by the Inquisition as Protestants, and burned, and these convictions were taken as proof of an unfounded assumption. By 1556 we find Philip II writing: ‘All the heresies which have occurred in Germany and France have been sown by descendants of Jews, as we have seen and still see daily in Spain.’ Protestantism was thus fitted into the hate-structure of the country, and doctrinal orthodoxy was reinforced by racism. The campaign was directed against foreigners as well as Spanish Jews and intellectuals; in fact after the mass-burning of Protestants in 1559–62, conducted at grandiose ceremonies in front of the king and other members of the royal family, most of the Protestants executed were foreigners, who were assumed to be actively plotting to subvert the State. Many of these were seamen and merchants, chiefly from France, England and the Low Countries; commercial rivalry was thus reinforced by doctrinal hatred, and sea-warfare took on a new ferocity. The process tended to seal off Spain (and her colonies) from the rest of the world. The Spanish Erasmians were wiped out or driven into exile, one of the first victims being Ximenes’s former secretary, Juan de Vergera. The great Spanish pedagogue Juan Luis Vives wrote: ‘We live in such difficult times that it is dangerous either to speak or to be silent.’ As one of Vives’s correspondents, Rodrigo Manrique, put it (from exile): ‘Our country is a land of pride and envy and, you may add, of barbarism; down there one cannot produce any culture without being suspected of heresy, error and Judaism. Thus silence has been imposed on the learned.’ The Spanish Index of Prohibited Books was first published in 1551, and progressively

• From The Decameron (1353)

  … if he has always taken as much of me as he needed and as much as he chose to take… what am I to do with the surplus? Throw it to the dogs? Is it not far better that I should present it to a gentleman who loves me more dearly than himself, rather than allow it to turn bad or go to waste?42 The logic of her novel argument is unanswerable, Madonna Filippa is freed, and the statute is amended so that it applies in future only to those wives who commit adultery for monetary gain, a class of women for whom the author registers his profound contempt in the story of Gulfardo and Guasparruolo (VIII, 1), where, as in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale, a wife’s ill-gotten gains turn out to have been borrowed in advance from her husband, in whose presence she is later forced to acknowledge that the debt has been fully settled. Madonna Filippa’s outrageous but ostensibly rational defence of her wayward behaviour has been used to illustrate the thesis that for Boccaccio love consists in the gratification of instinctive sexual desires, whether within marriage or outside it. Such a view draws some support from several other stories in the Decameron, for instance the tales of Paganino of Monaco (II, 10), of the anonymous lady who uses a priest as her unwitting go-between (III, 3), of Zima and the wife of Francesco Vergellesi (III, 5), of Ricciardo Minutolo and Catella Sighinolfo (III, 6), of Teodoro and Violante (V, 7), and of the wife of Pietro di Vinciolo (V, 10). Other stories that are relevant in this connection are the tales of the Seventh Day in general, the tale of the three beds (IX, 6), and the prolix account of the remarkable friendship of Titus and Gisippus (X, 8). In several of these stories, the Christian view of marriage is questioned just as vigorously and outrageously as in Madonna Filippa’s spirited defence of her adultery. In the tale of Paganino, the Monegasque pirate, for instance, the beautiful young wife of a senile Pisan judge, who with the aid of a calendar of Saints has accustomed her to a frugal sexual regime matching his own limited physical powers, is seized by a dashing young pirate who wastes no time in supplying her with a more wholesome diet. The judge discovers where she is living, and goes to fetch her home, but she refuses to return with him, treating him to a torrent of vulgar abuse for his failure to satisfy her natural needs. When he appeals to her sense of honour, she replies that she will defend what remains of her honour as jealously as anyone, adding that she wishes that her parents had shown an equal regard for her honour when they bestowed her in marriage on an impotent and elderly husband.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  THIRD STORY Under the pretext of going to confession and being very pure-minded, a lady who is enamoured of a young man induces a solemn friar to pave the way unwittingly for the total fulfilment of her desires. Pampinea was now silent, and the bravery and prudence of the groom were praised by most of her listeners, who likewise applauded the wisdom of the King. Then the queen turned to Filomena, enjoining her to continue, whereupon Filomena began to speak, gracefully, as follows: The story I propose to relate, concerning the manner in which a sanctimonious friar was well and truly hoodwinked by a pretty woman, should prove all the more agreeable to a lay audience inasmuch as the priesthood consists for the most part of extremely stupid men, inscrutable in their ways, who consider themselves in all respects more worthy and knowledgeable than other people, whereas they are decidedly inferior. They resemble pigs, in fact, for they are too feeble-minded to earn an honest living like everybody else, and so they install themselves wherever they can fill their stomachs. It is not only in obedience to the command I have received, dear ladies, that I shall tell you this story. I also wish to impress upon you that even the clergy, to whom we women pay far too much heed on account of our excessive credulity, are capable of being smartly deceived, as indeed they sometimes are, both by men and by one or two of ourselves. A few short years ago, in our native city, where fraud and cunning prosper more than love or loyalty, there was a noblewoman of striking beauty and impeccable breeding, who was endowed by Nature with as lofty a temperament and shrewd an intellect as could be found in any other woman of her time. Although I could disclose her name, along with those of the other persons involved in this story, I have no intention of doing so, for if I did, certain people still living would be made to look utterly contemptible, whereas the whole matter should really be passed off as a huge joke. This lady, being of gentle birth and finding herself married off to a master woollen-draper because he happened to be very rich, was unable to stifle her heartfelt contempt, for she was firmly of the opinion that no man of low condition, however wealthy, was deserving of a noble wife. And on discovering that all he was capable of, despite his massive wealth, was distinguishing wool from cotton, supervising the setting up of a loom, or debating the virtues of a particular yarn with a spinner-woman, she resolved that as far as it lay within her power she would have nothing whatsoever to do with his beastly caresses.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  a true prophet use make-up? Does he dye his eyebrows and eyelids? Does he love ornaments? Does he gamble? Play dice? Does he lend money at interest?’ What was normal practice among all Christians – the practice of calling widows virgins, the payment of priests, the use of money to get persecuted brethren out of state prisons, were in heretic sects described as evil. The sects which attracted the largest followings were, as a rule, the most austere and God-fearing; but, being the most successful, they had to be the most bitterly assailed on moral grounds. There is thus a sinister Goebbels’ Law about early Christian controversy: the louder the abuse, the bigger the lie. In a circular letter to bishops in c . 324, Bishop Alexander of Alexandria wrote of Arians: ‘Impelled by avarice and ambition, these knaves are constantly plotting to gain possession of the richest dioceses... they are driven insane by the devil who works in them . . . skilled deceivers . . . hatched a conspiracy . . . vile purposes . . . equipped dens of robbers . . . organized a gang to fight Christ . . . excite disorders against us... persuade people to persecute us... their immoral womenfolk . . . their younger women followers run around the street in an indecent fashion and discredit Christianity....’ And so on. There was a constant and depressing inflation in the vocabulary of invective during the course of the first two centuries; thus the orthodox were told that among the Manichees ‘no modesty, no sense of honour and no chastity whatever is to be found; their moral code is a mass of falsehoods, their religious beliefs are shaped by the devil, and their sacrifice is immorality itself.’ Where their writings survive, we find that heretics, schismatics and critics of the orthodox used the same language. Thus the anti-Nestorian Bishop Cyril of Alexandria was described by Isidore of Pelusium as ‘a man determined to pursue his private hatreds rather than seek the true faith of Jesus Christ’; and another critic, Bishop Theodoret of Cyrrhus, greeted Cyril’s death with the words: ‘The living are delighted. The dead, perhaps, are sorry, afraid they may be burdened with his company. . . . May the guild of undertakers lay a huge, heavy stone on his grave, lest he should come back again and show his faithless mind again. Let him take his new doctrines to Hell, and preach to the damned all day and night.’ The mind boggles at the lists of offences with which distinguished ecclesiastics accused each other. The historian Sozomen relates that at the Council of Tyre, 335, Athanasius, the orthodox Bishop of Alexandria, was

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

  For of governments, some are natural [ [image file=image_rsrc2FY.jpg] ], and others artificial [ [image file=image_rsrc2FZ.jpg] ]: natural, such as the rule of the lion over the quadrupeds, or the eagle over the birds; artificial, as of an emperor over us; for he does not reign over his fellow slaves by any natural authority. Therefore it happens that emperors often lose their sovereignty.11 As John saw it, imperial rule epitomizes the social consequences of sin. Like his persecuted Christian predecessors, John ridiculed imperial propaganda that claimed that the state rests upon concord, justice, and liberty. On the contrary, he said, the state relies upon force and compulsion, often using these to violate justice and to suppress liberty. But because the majority of humankind followed Adam’s example in sinning, government, however corrupt, has become indispensable and, for this reason, even divinely endorsed: [God] himself has armed magistrates with power.… God provides for our safety through them.… If you were to abolish the public court system, you would abolish all order from our life.… If you deprive the city of its rulers, we would have to live a life less rational than that of the animals, biting and devouring one another.… For what crossbeams are in houses, rulers are in cities, and just as, if you were to take away the former, the walls, being separated, would fall in upon one another, so, if you were to deprive the world of magistrates and the fear that comes from them, houses, cities, and nations would fall upon one another in unrestrained confusion, there being no one to repress, or repel, or persuade them to be peaceful through the fear of punishment.12 John believes that because of human sin, fear and coercion have infected the whole structure of human relationships, from family to city and nation. Everywhere he sees the disastrous results: “Now we are subjected to one another by force and compulsion, and every day we are in conflict with one another.”13

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  talked comically, is a mortal man, wants to be ravished, and desired me expressly to write to my Lord Townshend to prevent the King’s coming to any resolution about the disposal of the Clerks of the Closet’s and Lord Almoner’s places. We grow well acquainted. He must be pope, and would as willingly be our pope as anybody’s.’ Bishops often decided the vote in the House of Lords; Walpole could usually count on twenty-four out of twenty-six of them. For government had the power of translation and salaries ranged from £450 a year for Bristol up to £7,000 for Canterbury. Thus bishops were made to earn their keep. Benjamin Hoadley was the son of a Norwich schoolmaster, and so crippled that he could only preach on his knees; but Whig subservience assured him of a steady rise. In the Lords he could be relied upon for even the most disagreeable tasks, such as attacking anti-corruption bills, and Walpole used him as a pamphleteer on secular as well as Church matters. He was kept so busy by the government that he never visited Bangor, though he was its bishop for six years; thereafter he was translated to Hereford, Salisbury and Winchester, the last worth £5,000 a year. He was the favourite object of abuse for clerical Tories: ‘Deist Egyptian! A rebel against the Church! A vile republican! An apostate of his own order! The scorn and ridicule of the whole kingdom!’ Among the lesser clergy, stipends varied wildly. There were 5,500 livings worth less than £50 a year, of which 1,200 were less than £20; curates, of whom there were multitudes, could not expect to earn more than £30. Hence the upper classes were now reluctant to enter the Church. The Bishop of Killala pointed out that this limited the value of ecclesiastical patronage, and he urged: ‘The only remedy to which is by giving extraordinary encouragements to persons of birth and interest whenever they seek preferment, which will encourage others of the same quality to come into the church and may thereby render ecclesiastical preferments of the same use to their Majesties with civil employments.’ It was not just votes in the Lords: cathedral chapters often turned the scales in borough elections, and clergymen were widely used to organize local opinion. The Duke of Newcastle’s election agent in Sussex was the Reverend James Baker; so keen was he to proselytize (on behalf of the Whigs, not Christianity) that he interrupted a cricket match at Lewes and was nearly mobbed by the spectators. Archbishop Seeker of Canterbury maintained that ‘the distinguishing mark of the present age’ was ‘an open and professed disregard of religion’ reflected in

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  attack.’ The Jesuit La Civilta Catholica commented in 1898: ‘If a judicial error has indeed been committed, the Assembly of 1791 was responsible when it accorded French nationality to Jews.’ The Jesuit intervention was particularly unfortunate since it led to accusations of an elitist anti-republican conspiracy, particularly in the army, where many of the senior officers were practising Catholics. Attention centred on the Jesuit Père du Lac, headmaster of the Society’s leading Paris school, who had converted Edouard Drumont, and was the confessor of Albert de Mun and General de Boisdeffre, chief of the army general staff. Joseph Reinarch, the most impressive of the Dreyfusard propagandists, described his study and its central importance in the campaign to deny Dreyfus justice: ‘The orders of the day emanate from Pere du Lac’s simple cell. In it, there is a crucifix on the wall, and on the writing table an annotated copy of the Army List.’ The Church’s problems were compounded by the fact that some of the most vociferous and embarrassing anti-semites were not themselves Catholics but were, rather, authoritarian ideologues in the de Maistre tradition who regarded Rome as a natural defence against the Left. Thus Jules Le Maitre, prominent in the anti-Dreyfus League of Patriots, wrote: ‘We want to make love of the fatherland a kind of religion . . . the equivalent of the denominational faith which Frenchmen no longer hold.’ Again, Charles Maurras, who founded the anti-Dreyfus Action Française in 1898, was an agnostic, but virtually all his followers in the movement were passionate Catholics, and its so-called Institute had a professorial chair endowed in honour of the Syllabus of Errors. Maurras had no scruples in taking the supposedly Jesuitical line that the end justified the means. He had nothing but praise for Major Henry, whose anti-Dreyfus forgery was exposed and who committed suicide on the eve of arrest, and only regretted that his crime had been unsuccessful: ‘Colonel, there is not a drop of your precious blood that does not cry out wherever the heart of the nation beats.’ And L’Action française added: ‘We need money to buy all the tools we require and to provide the necessary bribes. We must buy women and consciences, and we must buy disloyalty.’ This was just what the anti-clericals wanted to hear. The tragedy was that a number of young, thoughtful Catholics were strongly pro- Dreyfus. Charlés Peguy wrote that, so long as Dreyfus remained condemned unjustly, France was ‘living in a state of mortal sin’. How could Catholics, of all people, and the Church, of all institutions, deny justice in the name of patriotism? He argued powerfully that the Church, in its anti-Dreyfus posture, was being un-

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘There was once a time3 when friars were very saintly and worthy men, but those who lay claim nowadays to the title and reputation of friar have nothing of the friar about them except the habits they wear. Even these are not genuine friars’ habits, because whereas the people who invented friars decreed that the habit should be close-fitting, coarse, and shabby, and that, by clothing the body in humble apparel, it should symbolize the mind’s disdain for all the things of this world, your present-day friars prefer ample habits, generously cut and smooth of texture, and made from the finest of fabrics. Indeed, they now have elegant and pontifical habits, in which they strut like peacocks through the churches and the city squares without compunction, just as though they were members of the laity showing off their robes. And like the fisherman who tries to take a number of fish from the river with a single throw of his casting-net, so these fellows, as they wrap themselves in the capacious folds of their habits, endeavour to take in many an over-pious lady, many a widow, and many another simpleton of either sex, this being their one overriding concern. It would therefore be more exact for me to say that these fellows do not wear friars’ habits, but merely the colours of their habits. ‘Moreover, whereas their predecessors desired the salvation of men, the friars of today desire riches and women. They have taken great pains, and still do, to strike terror into simple people’s hearts with their loud harangues and specious parables, and to show that sins may be purged through almsgiving and mass-offerings. In this way, having taken refuge in the priesthood more out of cowardice than piety and in order to escape hard work, they are supplied with bread by one man and wine by another, whilst a third is persuaded to part with donations for the souls of his departed ones. ‘It is of course true that prayers and almsgiving purge sins. But if only the donors were familiar with the sort of people to whom they were handing over their money, they would either keep it for themselves or cast it before a herd of swine. These so-called friars are well aware that the fewer the people who share a great treasure, the better off they are, and so each of them strives by blustering and intimidation to exclude others from whatever he is anxious to retain for his own exclusive use. They denounce men’s lust, so that when the denounced are out of the way, their women will be left to the denouncers. They condemn usury and ill-gotten gains, so that people will entrust them with their restitution, and this enables them to make their habits more capacious and procure bishoprics and the other major offices of the Church, using the very money which, according to them, would have led its owners to perdition.

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

  Certain scholars, prominently including Paul Veyne, as we have noted, have recently downplayed these differences and have pointed out that philosophical moralists such as Musonius Rufus and Plutarch advocated similar moral practices. Veyne concludes that “we must not argue in stereotypes, and imagine a conflict between pagan and Christian morality.”13 Yet as the philosopher and convert Athenagoras (c. 160 C.E.) points out in his defense of the Christians, addressed to their persecutors, the emperors, what philosophers advocate may have little or nothing to do with what actually motivates people to change, as conversion has done to many Christians.14 Indeed, such converts as Justin, Athenagoras, Clement, and Tertullian all describe specific ways in which conversion changed their own lives and those of many other, often uneducated, believers, in matters involving sex, business, magic, money, paying taxes, and racial hatred.15 Justin and Tertullian both relate cases in which the moral transformation accompanying a believer’s conversion aroused pagan relatives to outrage and even led to legal accusations and disinheritance. Of course these Christians were writing in defense of their faith; we need not accept all their rhetoric as fact to acknowledge that they and many others certainly did “imagine a conflict between pagan and Christian morality” and tried to act accordingly. Their own accounts suggest that such converts changed their attitudes toward the self, toward nature, and toward God, as well as their sense of social and political obligation, in ways that often placed them in diametric opposition to pagan culture. For the most dedicated Christians, conversion transformed both consciousness and behavior; and such converts, gathered in the increasingly popular Christian movement, would profoundly affect the consciousness of all subsequent generations as well.16 Other Jewish teachers of Jesus’ time, and for generations before, had pronounced certain pagan sexual practices abominable. Among conscientious Jews, only the worship of pagan gods aroused more outrage than pagan sexual behavior. Generations of Jewish teachers had warned that pagans thought nothing of pederasty, promiscuity, and incest. Yet the clash with outside cultures challenged Jewish customs in turn. Many pagans found such practices as circumcision to be peculiar, antiquated, and no less barbaric than Jews found the sexual habits of pagans. Babylonians and Romans, themselves monogamous, criticized the ancient Jewish custom of polygamous marriage, practiced by such venerable patriarchs as Abraham, David, and Solomon, as well as by the wealthy few who could afford it, even in Jesus’ time and later.17 The Jewish historian Josephus, himself apparently polygamous, tried to justify to his Roman readers the ten wives of King Herod the Great (and possibly his own bigamy as well)18 by explaining that “among us it is the custom to have many wives simultaneously.”19 Those familiar with Roman law could also question traditional Jewish divorce law, which granted to the husband (but not to the wife) the often easy right of divorce.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  city: they called themselves Rhomaioi, and claimed exclusively the inheritance of the Roman imperial tradition. Thus a reconciliatory theory based on the idea of two empires would not wash with them. It might make logical or geographical sense for the Popes to speak of ‘Romans’ and ‘Greeks’, but to the Byzantines this was to deny both faith and history. Liutprand of Cremona says that that in 968 when papal legates came to Constantinople with a letter addressed to ‘the Emperor of the Greeks’, in which the Pope referred to Otto I as ‘the august emperor of the Romans’, the Byzantines were outraged: ‘The audacity of it, to call the universal emperor of the Romans, the one and only Nicephorus, the great, the august, “Emperor of the Greeks”, and to style a poor, barbaric creature “Emperor of the Romans”! O sky! O earth! O sea! What shall we do with these scoundrels and criminals?’ The rise of the Franks had, moreover, been accompanied by a steady erosion of Byzantine military power, and therefore political and ecclesiastical influence, in the whole Mediterranean era. In the seventh century, the doctrinal errors which had led to the Monophysite schism finally came home to roost: the whole enormous area where Monophysite belief was dominant succumbed with great speed to the new Islamic version, which not only engulfed these territories but swept along the coast of North Africa and into Spain. By 700, Christianity had lost more than half its territory, including the oldest patriarchal churches, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. There was virtually no contact or intercommunion across the new Islamic line: when the first crusaders made contact with Antioch Christians at the end of the eleventh century, they did not even know the succession of the Popes after 681. The loss of the old patriarchates in some ways brought Constantinople and Rome closer together. Byzantium still controlled part of Italy, from Ravenna, and the emperor’s writ ran as far as Marseilles. Rome was to a considerable extent under eastern influence: between 654 and 752 only five out of seventeen popes were of Roman origin – three were Greek, five Syrian, three from Greek-speaking Sicily, and one from somewhere in Italy. The Greek emperor visited Rome as its lawful ruler in 663; in 680, papal legates at a council in Constantinople agreed in condemning the teachings of four patriarchs and one pope; in 710 the Pope himself paid an amicable visit to Constantinople. But this was the limit of the ecumenical mood. Outside Rome, very few western Christians spoke Greek; there was deep-rooted prejudice against Greek liturgical customs. Thus when, in 668, the Pope made the Greek Theodore of Tarsus Archbishop of Canterbury, he sent an African, Hadrian, with

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Valérie would genuinely want to be helpful, but would find very little to say that was consoling. It was hard on the young, she had thought so herself, but some came through all right, though a few might go under. Nature was trying to do her bit; inverts were being born in increasing numbers, and after a while their numbers would tell, even with the fools who still ignored Nature. They must just bide their time—recognition was coming. But meanwhile they should all cultivate more pride, should learn to be proud of their isolation. She found little excuse for poor fools like Pat, and even less for drunkards like Wanda. As for those who were ashamed to declare themselves, lying low for the sake of a peaceful existence, she utterly despised such of them as had brains; they were traitors to themselves and their fellows, she insisted. For the sooner the world came to realize that fine brains very frequently went with inversion, the sooner it would have to withdraw its ban, and the sooner would cease this persecution. Persecution was always a hideous thing, breeding hideous thoughts—and such thoughts were dangerous. As for the women who had worked in the war, they had set an example to the next generation, and that in itself should be a reward. She had heard that in England many such women had taken to breeding dogs in the country. Well, why not? Dogs were very nice people to breed. ‘Plus je connais les hommes, plus j’aime les chiens.’ There were worse things than breeding dogs in the country. It was quite true that inverts were often religious, but church-going in them was a form of weakness; they must be a religion unto themselves if they felt that they really needed religion. As for blessings, they profited the churches no doubt, apart from which they were just superstition. But then of course she herself was a pagan, acknowledging only the god of beauty; and since the whole world was so ugly these days, she was only too thankful to let it ignore her. Perhaps that was lazy—she was rather lazy. She had never achieved all she might have with her writing. But humanity was divided into two separate classes, those who did things and those who looked on at their doings. Stephen was one of the kind that did things—under different conditions of environment and birth she might very well have become a reformer. They would argue for hours, these two curious friends whose points of view were so widely divergent, and although they seldom if ever agreed, they managed to remain both courteous and friendly.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  The result was that everything he possessed apart from what had gone to her stepson—and the Comte de Mirac had been very wealthy—had found its way to the patient Aunt Sarah. She was one of those survivals who look upon men as a race of especially privileged beings. Her judgment of women was more severe, influenced no doubt by the ancien régime, for now she was even more French than the French whose language she spoke like a born Parisian. She was sixty-five, tall, had an aquiline nose, and her iron-grey hair was dressed to perfection; for the rest she had Martin’s slow blue eyes and thin face, though she lacked his charming expression. She bred Japanese spaniels, was kind to young girls who conformed in all things to the will of their parents, was particularly gracious to good-looking men, and adored her only surviving nephew. In her opinion he could do no wrong, though she wished that he would settle down in Paris. As Stephen and Mary were her nephew’s friends, she was predisposed to consider them charming, the more so as the former’s antecedents left little or nothing to be desired, and her parents had shown great kindness to Martin. He had told his aunt just what he wished her to know and not one word more about the old days at Morton. She was therefore quite unprepared for Stephen . Aunt Sarah was a very courteous old dame, and those who broke bread at her table were sacred, at all events while they remained her guests. But Stephen was miserably telepathic, and before the déjeuner was half-way through, she was conscious of the deep antagonism that she had aroused in Martin’s Aunt Sarah. Not by so much as a word or a look did the Comtesse de Mirac betray her feelings; she was gravely polite, she discussed literature as being a supposedly congenial subject, she praised Stephen’s books, and asked no questions as to why she was living apart from her mother. Martin could have sworn that these two would be friends—but good manners could not any more deceive Stephen. And true it was that the Comtesse de Mirac saw in Stephen the type that she most mistrusted, saw only an unsexed creature of pose, whose cropped head and whose dress were pure affectation; a creature who aping the prerogatives of men, had lost all the charm and the grace of a woman. An intelligent person in nearly all else, the Comtesse would never have admitted of inversion as a fact in nature. She had heard things whispered, it is true, but had scarcely grasped their full meaning.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  he had a kind of genius. He wrote magnificent French prose, and had a sharp eye for the sensational. His posture was one of aggressive enthusiasm, with his short, stocky body, huge head and bristling mane. Veuillot’s views of religion and history were unsubtle, the crude prejudices of the traditionalist working-class croyant: ‘If there is anything to be regretted, it is that they did not burn John Huss earlier, that Luther was not burned with him, and that, at the time of the Reformation, there was not one prince in Europe with enough piety and political sense to start a crusade against the countries it had infected.’ On the other hand, he grasped the potentialities of working-class Catholicism. Just as, with a mass-suffrage, the Catholic parish clergy could prove themselves indispensible election-agents to the Right – one of the salient discoveries of the mid nineteenth century – so the advent of modern communications made it possible to organize and regiment the Catholic proletariat and peasantry into a huge force within the Church. The churchgoing masses and the Pope, in alliance, were an unbeatable combination. Veuillot’s populism coincided with the growth, under papal impulse, of new forms of mass devotion associated with the Sacred Heart, the Virgin Mary, and the eucharist. Many of these were, in fact, a return to late medieval ideas, and were associated with visions, visitations and the ecstasies of mystics. The Madonna made her appearance twice in Paris, in 1830 and 1836, in Savoy in 1846 and, from 1858, at Lourdes. The two most celebrated religious figures of the age were both sensational, and both French: Bernadette herself, and J-B. Marie Vianney, the parish-priest of Ars, near Lyons. The Curé of Ars flogged himself unmercifully, fasted prodigiously, held all-night prayer sessions and wrestled physically with the Devil. He became a cult-figure, thousands travelling from all over France (and abroad) to confess to him. Father Vianney was significant of a new trend to exalt the work of the priest and his contacts with the Catholic masses. Veuillot, the astute populist, reinforced this tendency in L’Univers. Nearly all the parish priests took it; it was sold outside their churches on Sunday. It reflected and amplified their simple views on religion: devotional piety, the cult of the papacy, and, concealed beneath a thick veneer of emotionalism and sentimentality, the mechanical Christianity of the Middle Ages, the credal climate in which populist triumphalism could flourish. Ozanam said of Veuillot and his friends: ‘They are not trying to convert unbelievers but to rouse the passions of believers.’ This was broadly true. The ultimate object of a total Christian society was not abandoned, but it was subordinated to the organization of the