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.

Page 186 of 253 · 20 per page

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Widows and virgins from the upper classes were put there for a variety of non-religious reasons, and did not see why they should sacrifice any of the comforts to which they were accustomed. This could not be prevented, in practice, provided the endowment would stand it; more serious, from the authorities’ point of view, was the habit of well-born nuns of breaking bounds. English bishops, for instance, spent over two hundred years trying in vain to keep nuns within their cloisters; they were still hard at it when Henry VIII dissolved the lot. Celibate upper-class women, living communally, and with too little to occupy them, tended to become eccentric and very difficult to control. There is a note of exasperation in the letter the great William of Wykeham addressed to the Abbess of Romsey in 1387: ‘. . . we strictly forbid you all and several . . . that ye presume henceforth to bring to church no birds, hounds, rabbits or other frivolous things that promote indiscipline . . . through hunting dogs and other hounds abiding within your monastic precincts, the alms that should be given the poor are devoured and the church and cloisters . . . foully defiled . . . and through their inordinate noises divine service is frequently troubled . . . we strictly command and enjoin you, Lady Abbess, to remove the dogs altogether.’ Nuns, however, often defied bishops, even bishops backed up by the secular authorities. When a bishop of Lincoln deposited a papal disciplinary bull at one of the nunneries in his diocese, the nuns ran after him to the gate, threw it at his head, and said they would never observe it. Johann Busch, the great Augustinian reformer, who held a commission from the Council of Basle to tackle recalcitrant nuns and monks, left a graphic description of his battle with the nuns of Wennigsen, near Hanover, in the mid fifteenth century. He says they had abandoned poverty, chastity and obedience, apparently with the connivance of the Bishop of Minden; but when, accompanied by armed local officials, he read out his disciplinary charge to them ‘the nuns laid forthwith with one accord flat on the choir pavement, with arms and legs outstretched in the form of a cross and chanted at the top of their voices, from beginning to end, the antiphon In the Midst of Life We are in Death .’ The object of this performance of part of the burial service was to invoke an evil death on the intruders. Busch had to use physical violence before the nuns submitted; and he came across similar opposition to reform in seven out of twenty-four nunneries in this diocese. Of the new types of religious organization developed in the central Middle Ages, few were making a positive contribution to Christian standards and morale by the fifteenth century. The Cistercians had abandoned their pioneering agricultural role by the end of the thirteenth century.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  There were six ages: man was now living in the last, between the first and second comings of Christ, when Christianity would gradually envelop the world, as preparation for the final and seventh age. Against the background of this concept, the Donatists seemed ridiculously petty. They had grasped the seriousness of Christianity. But, by worrying about what particular bishops had done at a particular time and in a particular place, they had lost sight of the enormous, objective scale of the faith, its application to all places, times, situations. ‘The clouds roll with thunder,’ Augustine wrote, ‘that the House of the Lord shall be built throughout the earth; and these frogs sit in their marsh and croak – “We are the only Christians!”’ Moreover, the Donatists had got the wrong notion of the world. Because of their obsession with their own limited local predicament and history, they saw the world as hostile and themselves as an alternative to society. But the world was there to be captured; and Christianity was not the anti-society – it was society. Led by the elect, its duty was to transform, absorb and perfect all existing bonds of human relations, all human activities and institutions, to regularize and codify and elevate every aspect of life. Here was the germ of the medieval idea of a total society, with the church permeating everything. Was she not the Mother of All? ‘It is You,’ he wrote, ‘who make wives subject to their husbands... you set husbands over their wives; join sons to their parents by a freely-granted slavery, and set parents above their sons in a pious domination. You link brothers to each other by religious bonds tighter than blood. . . . You teach slaves to be loyal to their masters, masters to be more inclined to persuade than to punish. You link citizens to citizen, nation to nation, you bind all men together in remembrance of their first parents, not just by social bonds but by common kinship. You teach kings to rule for the benefit of their people, and warn the peoples to be subservient to their kings.’ But the idea of a total Christian society necessarily included the idea of a compulsory society. People could not choose to belong or not to belong. That included the Donatists. Augustine did not shrink from the logic of his position. Indeed, to the problem of coercing the Donatists he brought much of their own steely resolution and certitude, the fanaticism they themselves displayed, and the willingness to use violence in a spiritual cause. To internationalize Africa, he employed African methods – plus, of course, imperial military technology. When Augustine became a bishop in the mid-390s, the Donatist church was huge, flourishing, wealthy and deeply rooted.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Another of the Decameron’s recurrent motifs, and one which has been analysed in some detail by Branca,59 is the entrepreneurial spirit that was so important a factor in establishing the economic prosperity of fourteenth-century Florence, and that seems to motivate a number of the characters in Boccaccio’s stories, or at least to form part of the background to many of the narratives. The more obvious examples of this are to be found in the Second Day, where the topic for discussion (‘those who after suffering a series of misfortunes are brought to a state of unexpected happiness’) is itself conducive to the telling of stories set in the business and mercantile world, with its attendant hazards and opportunities, its see-saw movements between the extremes of ruinous loss and prodigious profit. But the motif of commercial enterprise (in Branca’s phrase, the ragion di mercatura, which he sees as the dominant force of fourteenth-century Italy, as distinct from the ragion di stato of the Renaissance) is by no means confined to the stories of the Second Day. It is an important element in at least a score of the other novelle, and the Decameron as a whole, including the framework, reflects the mores and aspirations of the enterprising and industrious Florentine middle class which succeeded the feudal aristocracy of medieval Italy, and to which the author himself decidedly belonged. The ragion di mercatura provides a sort of key to the interpretation of many of the stories, but it requires to be used with discretion. In the case of Ciappelletto, for example, it has been suggested, by Branca, that Boccaccio is here expressing his distaste for the inhumane and unscrupulous practices through which vast private fortunes were frequently accumulated,60 or, to use a modern expression, what the author is doing is condemning the unacceptable face of capitalism. But an interpretation along these lines can be valid only if the narrator’s prefatory and concluding remarks are read as reliable pointers to the writer’s own opinion of Ciappelletto (instead of as the tongue-in-cheek declarations of piety that they patently are), and if moral as distinct from narrative significance is attached to certain passages, such as the one describing the main character as ‘perhaps the worst man ever born’ and the quite literally rhetorical question of the two money-lenders: ‘What manner of man is this, whom neither old age nor illness, nor fear of the death which he sees so close at hand, nor even the fear of God, before whose judgement he knows he must shortly appear, have managed to turn away from his evil ways, or persuade to die any differently from the way he has lived?’61

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  power of faith, the precious gift of the elect. To him Christians were supermen because the spirit moved in them. This is Paul’s conception of the Church: a community where the spirit worked through individuals, rather than an organized hierarchy where authority was exercised by office. Tertullian’s burning faith made him a scourge of heretics and an avid propagandist for the Church – one of the best it ever had. Yet his alignment with orthodoxy, at any rate orthodoxy as conceived by a clerical establishment, was fundamentally against his nature. He thought direct communication with the deity not only possible but essential. And so did many other people. It was among the earliest traditions of the Church, and it had the full stamp of Pauline authority. But the idea of a free-lance, self-appointed proclaimer of truth was, in the end, incompatible with a regular priesthood, charged with the duty of protecting the canon. The crisis came to a head in the second half of the second century but it had been building up for a long time. The nature of Christianity, carried rapidly forward by wandering evangelists, attracted charlatans. Some of the earliest Christian documents (and the earliest pious forgeries) were attempts to establish the bona fides of missionaries and warnings against fraud. Sophisticated pagans sneered at Christians for their gullibility. That sparkling Greek satirist Lucian, who took a contemptuous view of human credulity, was particularly critical of Christians because ‘they take their beliefs from tradition, and do not insist on definite evidence. Any professional fraud can impose himself on them and make a lot of money very quickly.’ Lucian gave as one example the Cynic philosopher Peregrinus who picked up Christianity in Palestine, ‘and in no time made them all look like children – he was prophet, cult- leader, head of the synagogue, everything. He interpreted their holy books, and composed some himself. They revered him as a god, treated him as a lawgiver, and made him their leader – next, of course, after the man who introduced their cult into the world, and who was crucified in Palestine, whom they still worship.’ Peregrinus may have been more sincere than Lucian gave him credit for: he eventually cremated himself on a funeral pyre at the close of the Olympic Games in 165. It was always difficult to distinguish between the truly inspired, the self-deluded, and the plain criminal. And, inconvenient as individual ecstatics and ‘speakers with tongues’ might be, there was always the more serious danger that they might fall under the spell of an outstanding charismatic and prophet who would constitute a counter-Church. Just as the varieties of gnosticism risked capturing the Church’s personality and absorbing

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Un jour tout sera bien, voilà notre espérance, Tout est bien aujourd’hui, voilà I’illusion ... The poem was a challenge to the European intelligentsia, sceptical or Christian, to explain natural disasters in terms of moral assumptions. Pamphlets poured out by the hundred. Christian theodicy proved particularly feeble. Rousseau, trying to blend rationalism with emotion, was no better: men were responsible, he reasoned, since the casualties would have been less if men did not huddle together unnaturally in cities. Young Emmanuel Kant was another respondent. He was already moving towards a post-rational and romantic solution: insight is really more important than exact scientific knowledge, and moral experience carries us further than the truths revealed by phenomena: ‘I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to leave room for faith.’ The lesson of the earthquake, Kant argued, was that in the world of phenomena man was subject to the necessities of natural law, but in the world of the spirit he is free – nature was subordinate to the realm of ends governed by purpose, and spirit was superior to matter. The process of reasoning thus ended in God. All this was beside the point for Voltaire, since he had, in fact, deliberately posed a non-question: the earthquake, horrible and inexplicable though it might be, was not the worst we had to fear: ‘Men do themselves more harm on their little molehill than does nature. More men are slaughtered in their wars than are swallowed up in earthquakes.’ He produced Candide, which exposed the best of all possible worlds optimism as stupid fatalism, ‘a cruel philosophy under a consoling name’. The true solution was ‘to cultivate our garden’, that is, oppose and remove evils, and use not just our reason but all our faculties to reform society and so to reduce the incidence of suffering. Here was a deist theodicy. In 1761 Voltaire punctured the prevailing optimism, in reality a form of complacency, the besetting sin of the eighteenth century, by pointing out that irrationality still flourished triumphantly, not least among the supposedly supine world of orthodox Christianity. His intervention in the Callas case made him the active conscience of the age, the prophet of justice and reason not in abstract but in concrete and personal form, on behalf of a judicially murdered Huguenot, demonstrably the victim of priestcraft and its legal and political (and social) accessories. What made Voltaire hate Pascal was not the latter’s awareness of the limitation of reason, for he shared it, but the way in which Pascal was used to defend a Christianity still capable of monstrous cruelty. In 1766

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  From this basic disagreement, the area of discord widened. If theological definition were not essential, might even be undesirable, it followed naturally that one should not attempt to impose uniformity or force consciences. Erasmus hated the witch-hunting atmosphere engendered by the Inquisition and the endless search for an illusory certainty even about details. ‘Formerly heresy involved only deviation from the gospels, or the articles of faith, or something of similar authority. Nowadays they shout ‘heresy!’ at you for almost anything. Anything that does not please them, or that they do not understand, is heresy. To know Greek is heresy. To pronounce it correctly is heresy.’ This could only lead to endless turmoil. But ‘the works of the mind, and charity, demand universal peace.’ Reformers should be less reckless in demanding change; those who wanted to burn people at the stake should be less intolerant. Both should extend charity to each other. Persecution was an offence against charity. And it was unproductive: ‘Vigorous minds will not suffer compulsion. To exercise compulsion is typical of tyrants; to suffer it, typical of asses.’ In cities where men differed on religion, both sides should keep to their quarters and everyone be left to his conscience until time brought the opportunity for agreement. In the meantime, open sedition should be put down, but manifest abuses corrected; and toleration should be extended until a universal council met and achieved reunification on a new basis of faith. This eirenic formula was unwelcome to Rome at all times; initially it appealed to Luther and other rebels, but later it was seen as an impediment to the consolidation of their position, and an infringement of what they regarded as their undoubted right to enforce their doctrines and institutions on areas under their influence. This was linked to a further point of difference, perhaps the most important of all: Erasmus deplored Luther’s invocation of the aid of the German princes in establishing reform. He had the progressive townsman’s intense suspicion of princely power, and the idea of the ruler of each state settling the religion of his subjects on the basis of his own personal predilections was abhorrent. Erasmus associated princely or kingly rule with war and destruction: ‘The eagle is the image of the king, neither beautiful, not musical, nor fit for food: but carnivorous, rapacious, a brigand, a destroyer, solitary, hated by all, a pest.... Are not noble cities erected by the people and destroyed by princes? Does not a state grow rich by the industry of its citizens, only to be plundered by the greed of

• From The Decameron (1353)

  He rushes from the house to rescue her, where upon she seizes her opportunity to dash into the house, bolt the door, and subject him to such a torrent of abuse about his drinking habits that she arouses all the neighbours. When word of the incident reaches the ears of her kinsfolk, they hasten to the scene and give the husband a severe hiding before taking away his wife and all of her belongings. He is able to retrieve her only by surrendering total control of domestic space, giving his wife leave to amuse herself at will, provided that she does it discreetly and without his knowledge. The woman is described as semplicetta, or not unduly intelligent, her ingenious stratagem for regaining entry to the house being attributed to the power of Love. Intelligence is not in fact a quality that is always admired in the women characters of the Decameron, as can be seen from the narrator’s portrayal of Ghismonda (IV, 1) as one who ‘possessed rather more intelligence than a woman needs’. 69 But in the story of the werewolf (VII, 1), Lotteringhi’s wife is described as a woman ‘of great intelligence and perspicacity’ (‘savia e avveduta molto’), qualities that she exhibits to the full in her hour of need, not only by inventing a plausible tale to allay her husband’s suspicions, but by extemporizing a rhyming prayer to ‘exorcize’ the nocturnal visitor. The resourcefulness shown by Monna Sismonda (VII, 8), when her husband discovers the length of string that she uses to communicate with her lover, is no less impressive. The story is one that highlights incidentally the tensions that arose from mixed marriages between the daughters of older patrician families and representatives of the newer Florentine social order, the affluent merchant class. The husband is presented as one who ‘foolishly decided to marry into the aristocracy, and took to wife a young gentlewoman, quite unsuited to him’, and towards the end of the story he is subjected to a barrage of violent and vulgar abuse by his mother-in-law, who roundly expresses her contempt for his origins and social pretensions. Further examples of the celebration of intelligence in the Decameron may be seen in several of the stories of the last three days, but in the tenth and last day the theme is developed in such a way as to provide a grandiose, uplifting climax to the work as a whole. These tales of liberal or munificent deeds, prompted by the exercise of intelligence, have led some of Boccaccio’s modern commentators to argue that his celebration of that quality is a pointer to the work’s underlying morality, in that they show how the application of reason is the key to a virtuous and responsible way of life.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Not long ago then, dear young ladies, there was in our city a Franciscan, an inquisitor1 on the look-out for filthy heretics, who whilst trying very hard, as they all do, to preserve an appearance of saintly and tender devotion to the Christian faith, was no less expert at tracking down people with bulging purses than at seeking out those whom he deemed to be lacking in faith. His diligence chanced to put him on the trail of a certain law-abiding citizen, endowed with far more money than common sense, who one day, not from any lack of faith but simply in the course of an innocent conversation with his friends, came out with the remark that he had a wine of such a quality that Christ himself would have drunk it. The worthy soul had been drinking too much perhaps, or possibly he was over-excited, but unfortunately his words were reported to the inquisitor, who on hearing that the man had large estates and a tidy sum of money, hastily proceeded cum gtadiis et fustibus2 to draw up serious charges against him. This, he thought, would have the effect, not so much of lessening his victim’s impiety, as of lining his own pockets with florins, which was what in fact happened. Having issued a summons, he asked the man whether the charges against him were correct. The good man admitted that they were, and explained the circumstances, whereupon this devout and venerable inquisitor of Saint John Golden-Mouth3 said: ‘So you turned Christ into a drinker, did you, and a connoisseur of choice wines, as if he were some tosspot or drunken tavern-crawler like one of yourselves? And now you eat humble-pie, and try to pass the whole thing off as something very trifling. But that is where you are mistaken. The fire is what you deserve when we come to take action against you, as indeed we must.’ The friar addressed these words to him, and a great many more, with a menacing look all over his features, as though the fellow were an Epicurean4 denying the immortality of the soul. In brief, he struck such terror into him, that the poor man arranged for certain go-betweens to grease the friar’s palm with a goodly amount of Saint John Golden-Mouth’s ointment (a highly effective remedy against the disease of galloping greed common among the clergy, and especially among Franciscans, who look upon money with distaste), so that the inquisitor would deal leniently with him.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  certainly fakes. Hairs of Our Lady were particularly common. Reading’s English relics were presumably genuine. It kept up to date – another important point – and had a splendid list of bits of St Thomas à Becket, and relics of Bernard of Clairvaux, St Malachy of Armagh, the popular boy-saints William of Norwich and Robert of Bury, both supposedly murdered by Jews in ‘anti-Christian’ rituals, and – this was a rarity – the head, jawbone, vestments, rib and hair of St Brigid, recently ‘discovered’ at Downpatrick in 1185. Reading’s prize possession, however, was the hand of St James, which its benefactress, the Empress Matilda, had stolen from the German imperial chapel, and which had once been an imperial possession in Constantinople. Almost as good was the ‘head’ of St Philip (that is, a bone encased in a gold head), which was later added by King John. This was part of the loot of the Fourth Crusade, which sacked Constantinople and was a potent source of primary relics. The trouble with relics was that, being valuable, they could not be separated from crime. There were various acute phases of relic-forgery: in Syria and Egypt during the post-Constantine age; in eighth-century Germany during the Carolingian relic- inflation, when Italian travelling salesmen peddled vast quantities to the Franks; and in the early thirteenth century, when the looting of Byzantium brought quantities of ‘genuine’ relics, plus even larger numbers of recently forged ones, to western Europe. But there were frauds on a huge scale and at all periods. In 761 Pope Paul I protested in a decree that ‘many of the cemeteries of Christ’s holy martyrs and confessors, of great antiquity, sited outside the walls of Rome have fallen into a state of neglect and now through the devastations of the impious Lombards are in ruins; for these men most sacreligiously desecrated them, digging up the graves of the martyrs and removing the bodies of the saints as plunder.’ This was an old tale: Gregory I found some Greek monks had been digging up ordinary bodies at Rome by night, and when arrested and questioned they said they were taking the bones back to Constantinople to pass them off as relics of saints. At least the monks were honest enough to insist on Roman bones. Successive popes made efforts to check the worst abuses: on important relics it was necessary for the Pope’s personal signet to be stamped, as a guarantee of authenticity. But the popes had a huge vested interest in the trade. Rome was constantly ‘finding’ bodies, rather like St Ambrose. Thus in the ninth century it discovered the corpse of St Cecilia, following a miraculous vision of Pope Paschal. In many cases, the flesh of these discoveries was found intact, or almost so. This, in Rome’s view, was a sign of

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  when Bishop Stubbs, once Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, triumphantly records – as he did in a public lecture – his first meeting with the historian John Richard Green: ‘I knew by description the sort of man I was to meet: I recognised him as he got into the Wells carriage, holding in his hand a volume of Renan. I said to myself, “If I can hinder, he shall not read that book.” We sat opposite and fell immediately into conversation. . . . He came to me at Navestock afterwards, and that volume of Renan found its way into my waste-paper basket.’ Stubbs had condemned Renan’s Vie de Jésus without reading it, and the whole point of his anecdote was that he had persuaded Green to do the same. So one historian corrupted another, and Christianity was shamed in both. For Christianity, by identifying truth with faith, must teach – and, properly understood, does teach – that any interference with the truth is immoral. A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts; a Christian historian who draws the line limiting the field of enquiry at any point whatsoever, is admitting the limits of his faith. And of course he is also destroying the nature of his religion, which is a progressive revelation of truth. So the Christian, according to my understanding, should not be inhibited in the smallest degree from following the line of truth; indeed, he is positively bound to follow it. He should be, in fact, freer than the non- Christian, who is precommitted by his own rejection. At all events, I have sought to present the facts of Christian history as truthfully and nakedly as I am able, and to leave the rest to the reader. Iver, Buckinghamshire 1975

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  certainly, two Christian empires, essentially rivals to the same legacy, meant, if both survived, two brands of Christianity. Thus the coronation of 800, which made the total Christian society of the West conceivable, was also fatal to the unity of Christendom, a decisive milestone on the road to schism. In 1054, papal legates went to Constantinople for talks, the object being joint action against a common enemy, the Normans of southern Italy. The episode merely served to bring all the various strands of conflict together into one envenomed mass, from the Greek use of leavened bread for communion to their practice of fasting on Saturdays. Paradoxically, the reopening of the Mediterranean to Christian traffic, which was a feature of the mid eleventh century, served to sharpen the antagonism it brought East and West into closer contact, and so made both aware of the innumerable differences which had grown up in the previous three centuries. One difference became only too apparent in 1054: the papacy, from being conciliatory, was now wholly insistent on discipline, obedience and uniformity. The 1054 meeting also revealed a shift in papal tactics, which then remained constant for the next 400 years. By the mid eleventh century, the papacy was becoming increasingly aware of the dangers presented by the existence of a western empire. It wished to be on good terms with the Greek empire, as a potential counterpoise. Hence in 1054, the papacy, in effect, put forward a package proposal: papal support for the Greek empire, in return for the submission of the Greek Church to the Pope. The Pope wrote in warm terms to the emperor, calling him serenissimus (whereas the western emperor, Henry III was merely carissimus); the letter he addressed to the patriarch, by contrast, was severe and punitive: Rome was the mother, and her spouse was God; Constantinople was a naughty and corrupt daughter; any Church which dissented from Rome was a ‘confabulation of heretics, a conventical of schismatics, and a synagogue of Satan’. This dual approach did no good. Nevertheless, it remained essentially Rome’s line until the Turkish conquest of the mid fifteenth century made the dispute obsolete. For Rome it was the only possible tactic. A compromise with the patriarch was ruled out. For one thing, the Greeks did not think the barbarous Latins capable of serious theological discussion. This obstacle could have been overcome: in the fourteenth century, Greek intellectuals translated the classics of medieval Latin theology, and thereafter eastern churchmen were prepared to debate on equal terms. But this was never conceded by the papacy. The Latins, with their authoritarian tradition, did not want discussion:

• From The Decameron (1353)

  This Ciappelletto was a man of the following sort: a notary by profession, he would have taken it as a slight upon his honour if one of his legal deeds (and he drew up very few of them) were discovered to be other than false. In fact, he would have drawn up free of charge as many false documents as were requested of him, and done it more willingly than one who was highly paid for his services. He would take great delight in giving false testimony, whether asked for it or not. In those days, great reliance was placed in France upon sworn declarations, and since he had no scruples about swearing falsely, he used to win, by these nefarious means, every case in which he was required to swear upon his faith to tell the truth. He would take particular pleasure, and a great amount of trouble, in stirring up enmity, discord and bad blood between friends, relatives and anybody else; and the more calamities that ensued, the greater would be his rapture. If he were invited to witness a murder or any other criminal act, he would never refuse, but willingly go along; and he often found himself cheerfully assaulting or killing people with his own hands. He was a mighty blasphemer of God and His Saints, losing his temper on the tiniest pretext, as if he were the most hot-blooded man alive. He never went to church, and he would use foul language to pour scorn on all of her sacraments, declaring them repugnant. On the other hand, he would make a point of visiting taverns and other places of ill repute, and supplying them with his custom. Of women he was as fond as dogs are fond of a good stout stick; in their opposite, he took greater pleasure than the most depraved man on earth. He would rob and pilfer as conscientiously as if he were a saintly man making an offering. He was such a prize glutton and heavy drinker, that he would occasionally suffer for his over-indulgence in a manner that was most unseemly. He was a gambler and a card-sharper of the first order. But why do I lavish so many words upon him? He was perhaps the worst man ever born. Yet for all his villainy, he had long been protected by the power and influence of Messer Musciatto, on whose account he was many a time treated with respect, both by private individuals, whom he frequently abused, and by the courts of law, which he was forever abusing. So that when Musciatto, who was well acquainted with his way of living, called this Ser Ciappelletto to mind, he judged him to be the very man that the perverseness of the Burgundians required. He therefore sent for him and addressed him as follows:

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  initially, of their choosing. But use by governments of Benedictine abbeys (especially royal foundations) for state purposes goes back to a very early date. Nor did the reformed papacy make any attempt to change the system; on the contrary, the papacy developed its own forms of exploitation, chiefly by forcing the abbots-elect to come to Rome for confirmation. Thomas of Walsingham complains of ‘horrible expenses’, ‘lavish presents’ and ‘greasing the palm of the examiners’ – that is, papal officials who scrutinized the abbot’s credentials. Many detailed lists of curial exactions survive. The new Abbot of St Albans in 1302, John IV, paid ‘to the Lord Pope, for a private visitation, 3,000 florins, or 1,250 marks sterling; for a public visitation 1,008 marks sterling. . . , Item, by the hand of Corsini in the matter of obtaining the bulls, and for writing the bulls for the first time, 63 gros tournois; to Master Blondino, who corrected the annulled letter, 2 florins; to the scribe, for the second time, 60 gros tournois; to Master P., that they might be sooner enregistered, 4 gros tournois; for three supplicatory letters, 65 gros tournois; to the clerks who sealed the bulls, 12 florins and 2 gros tournois. . . .’ And so on. The total came to over £1,700; and just over seven years later John died, and his successor had to produce another £1,000, plus the first-fruits. In due course, St Albans took out an insurance-policy with Rome, paying twenty marks a year instead; and in the fifteenth century they composed with a capital sum. However, the exactions of Rome did not prevent newly elected heads of houses from celebrating themselves. All the higher clergy (especially bishops) had monstrous installation feasts in the later Middle Ages. When the Prior of Canterbury was installed in 1309, there were 6,000 guests, who consumed 53 quarters of wheat, 58 of malt, 11 tuns of wine, 36 oxen, 100 hogs, 200 piglets, 200 sheep, 1,000 geese, 793 capons, hens and pullets, 24 swans, 600 rabbits, 16 shields of brawn, 9,600 eggs and so on, at a cost of £287. From the twelfth century abbots were under fire for living like great territorial magnates. In particular, critics objected to their hunting, which was, above any other activity, the hallmark of upper-class status and behaviour. At the Fourth Lateran Council, in Canon 15, Innocent III laid down: ‘We forbid hunting to the whole clergy. Therefore let them not presume to keep hounds or hawks.’ This injunction, often repeated, was totally ineffective. Abbots argued that, if they had to entertain the great, they had to keep up the hunting. William Clown, Augustinian abbot of Leicester, was Edward III’s favourite hunting companion (and the model for Chaucer’s sporting monk); Edward visited him once a year in what is now the Quorn

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The previous story, dear friends, implants in me a desire to tell you how, in similar fashion and not without fruitful effects, a worthy courtier derided the covetous habits of a very rich merchant. Although the burden of my tale is similar to the last, that is no reason for you to find it less agreeable, when you consider how much good eventually came of it. In Genoa, then, a long time ago, there lived a gentleman called Ermino de’ Grimaldi,1 who was generally acknowledged, on account of his vast wealth and huge estates, to be by far the richest citizen in the Italy of his day. Not only was he richer than any man in Italy, he was incomparably greedier and more tight-fisted than every other grasper or miser in the whole wide world. For he would entertain on a shoestring, and in contrast to the normal habits of the Genoese (who are wont to dress in the height of fashion), he would sooner go about in rags than spend any money on his personal appearance. Nor was his attitude to food and drink any different. It was therefore not surprising that he had lost the surname of Grimaldi and was simply known to one and all as Ermino Skinflint.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  the idea of the real, physical Temple and its actual sacrifices of animal flesh. But they threw out another concept which was later used to provide an escape from the old sacrificial idea. From Temple practice, the Essenes at Qumran and elsewhere developed the regular practice of a sacral meal of bread and wine, which at Qumran took place in the main meeting-hall, or Hall of the Covenant, of the monastery. It was preceded by purification rites, special robes were worn, and the meal was presided over by a priest who blessed the elements and was the first to eat and drink them. The meal was an anticipation, it seems, of the perfect ritual in the heavenly Temple. Thus we have here the concept of a symbolic sacrifice, later applied by and to Jesus, which eventually allowed the Christians to break away completely from the Temple cult and its daily sacrifices and so free themselves from Jewish history and Palestine geography. Nevertheless, it is quite wrong to present the Essene cult as Christianity without Jesus. Among other Jewish sects, the Temple was being spiritualized, if much more slowly. Between the Maccabean period and the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, the law was gradually displacing the Temple as the central focus of religion; the influence of the priests was diminishing and the scribes, chiefly Pharisees, were emerging as popular leaders, preparing the way for the age of the rabbis. The earliest Christians had greater difficulty than the Essenes in freeing themselves from the Temple, as we shall see. Moreover, though it is possible to isolate certain Essene ideas which were later Christianized, many of their other concepts were very different. In some ways they were a backward and obscurantist group, rigid, bigoted, and liable to express their convictions in bloodshed and hatred. They had a communal life and shared their goods, at any rate in their monastic camps, but like many other poor, humble and convinced believers, they were grotesquely and theoretically intolerant. Their literature includes some striking and edifying hymns, but it centres round far more menacing documents, which are in effect disciplinary and training manuals, culminating in an actual war-plan, based on Roman military methods, in which Essene priests are to lead a purified and reinvigorated Israel to a final victory. The Essenes were, in fact, members of an extremist apocalyptic-eschatological sect, who expected their triumph to come soon. Their interpretation of the events which created their Qumran mission, of the whole of Jewish history, and their very careful and selective exegesis of the scriptures, is essentially violent, militaristic and racial. Their ideas are marked by the narrowest kind of exclusiveness. The individual is

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Christians. Thus the followers of Isis adored a madonna nursing her holy child; the cult of Attis and Cybele celebrated a day of blood and fasting, followed by the Hilaria resurrection-feast, a day of joy, on 25 March; the elitist Mithraics, many of whom were senior army officers, ate a sacred meal. Constantine was almost certainly a Mithraic, and his triumphal arch, built after his ‘conversion’, testifies to the Sun-god, or ‘unconquered sun’. Many Christians did not make a clear distinction between this sun-cult and their own. They referred to Christ ‘driving his chariot across the sky’; they held their services on Sunday, knelt towards the East and had their nativity-feast on 25 December, the birthday of the sun at the winter solstice. During the later pagan revival under the Emperor Julian many Christians found it easy to apostatize because of this confusion; the Bishop of Troy told Julian he had always prayed secretly to the sun. Constantine never abandoned sun-worship and kept the sun on his coins. He made Sunday into a day of rest, closing the lawcourts and forbidding all work except agricultural labour. In his new city of Constantinople, he set up a statue of the sun- god, bearing his own features, in the Forum; and another of the mother-Goddess Cybele, though she was presented in a posture of Christian prayer. Constantine’s motives were probably confused. He was an exceptionally superstitious man, and he no doubt shared the view, popular among professional soldiers, that all religious cults should be respected, to appease their respective gods. He clearly underwent a strange experience at some time in his military career, in which his Christian troops played a part. He was a slave to signs and omens and had the Christian Chi-Rho sign on his shields and standards long before Milan. Superstition guided his decision to build a new capital, the choice of its site, and many other of his major acts of state. He was not baptized until his last illness. This was by no means unusual, since few Christians then believed in a second forgiveness of sins; sinful or worldly men, especially those with public duties seen as incompatible with Christian virtue, often delayed baptism till they were about to depart. But Eusebius’s account of Constantine’s late baptism is ambiguous; and it may be that the Church refused him the sacrament because of his manner of life. Certainly it was not his piety which made him a Christian. As a young man, he had the imperial look about him. He was tall, soldierly, athletic, with strongly marked features, heavy eyebrows, a powerful chin. But there were early reports of his violent temper and his cruelty in anger. He was much criticized for condemning prisoners of war to mortal combat with wild beasts at Trier and Colmar and for wholesale massacres in north

• From The Decameron (1353)

  EIGHTH STORY With a few prettily spoken words, Guiglielmo Borsiere punctures the avarice of Ermino de’ Grimaldi. Next to Filostrato was sitting Lauretta, who, knowing that she was expected to speak, without waiting to be bidden allowed the applause for Bergamino’s cleverness to subside, then gracefully began as follows: The previous story, dear friends, implants in me a desire to tell you how, in similar fashion and not without fruitful effects, a worthy courtier derided the covetous habits of a very rich merchant. Although the burden of my tale is similar to the last, that is no reason for you to find it less agreeable, when you consider how much good eventually came of it. In Genoa, then, a long time ago, there lived a gentleman called Ermino de’ Grimaldi, 1 who was generally acknowledged, on account of his vast wealth and huge estates, to be by far the richest citizen in the Italy of his day. Not only was he richer than any man in Italy, he was incomparably greedier and more tight-fisted than every other grasper or miser in the whole wide world. For he would entertain on a shoestring, and in contrast to the normal habits of the Genoese (who are wont to dress in the height of fashion), he would sooner go about in rags than spend any money on his personal appearance. Nor was his attitude to food and drink any different. It was therefore not surprising that he had lost the surname of Grimaldi and was simply known to one and all as Ermino Skinflint. Now, it so happened that whilst this fellow, by spending not a penny, was busily increasing his fortune, there arrived in Genoa a worthy courtier, Guiglielmo Borsiere 2 by name, who was refined of manner and eloquent of tongue, altogether different from the courtiers of today. For to the eternal shame of those who nowadays lay claim, despite their corrupt and disgraceful habits, to the title and distinction of lords and gentlemen, our modern courtiers are better described as asses, brought up, not in any court, but on the dungheap of all the scum of the earth’s iniquities. In former times, their function usually consisted, and all their efforts were expended, in making peace whenever disputes or conflicts arose between two nobles, negotiating treaties of marriage, friendship or alliance, restoring tired minds and amusing the courts with fine and graceful witticisms, and censuring the failings of miscreants with pungent, fatherly strictures, all of which they would do for the slenderest of rewards. Whereas nowadays they spend the whole of their time in exchanging scandal with each other, sowing discord, describing acts of lewdness and ribaldry, or worse still, practising them in the presence of gentlemen. Or else they will justly or falsely accuse one another of wicked, disgusting and disreputable conduct, and entice noble spirits with false endearments to do what is evil and sinful.

• 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 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.