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 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)

  ‘You say you will make an effort. But how? By doing things in three easy stages, and springing to attention with a blow from a cudgel? I’ve noticed, of course, what a fine, strong fellow you’ve become since I saw you last. Be off with you, and put your efforts into staying alive, for it seems to me that you won’t survive much longer, you have such a sickly and emaciated look about you. Oh, and another thing. Even if Paganino leaves me (and he seems to have no such intention, provided I want to stay), I would never come back to you in any case, because if you were to be squeezed from head to toe there wouldn’t be a thimbleful of sauce to show for it. Life with you was all loss and no gain as far as I was concerned, so if there were to be a next time, I would be trying my luck elsewhere. Once and for all, then, I repeat that I intend to stay here, where there are no holy days and no vigils. And if you don’t clear off quickly I shall scream for help and claim you were trying to molest me.’ On seeing that the situation was hopeless, and realizing for the first time how foolish he had been to take a young wife when he was so impotent, Messer Ricciardo walked out of the room, feeling all sad and forlorn, and although he had a long talk with Paganino, it made no difference whatever. And so finally, having achieved precisely nothing, he left the lady there and returned to Pisa, where his grief threw him into such a state of lunacy that whenever people met him in the street and put any question to him, the only answer they got was: ‘There’s never any rest for the bar.’8 Shortly afterwards he died, and when the news reached Paganino, knowing how deeply the lady loved him, he made her his legitimate wife. And without paying any heed to holy days or vigils or observing Lent, they worked their fingers to the bone and thoroughly enjoyed themselves. So it seems to me, dear ladies, that our friend Bernabò, by taking the course he pursued with Ambrogiuolo, was riding on the edge of a precipice. * * * This story threw the whole company into such fits of laughter that there was none of them whose jaws were not aching, and the ladies unanimously agreed that Dioneo was right and that Bernabò had been an ass. But now that the tale was ended, the queen waited for the laughter to subside, and then, seeing that it was late and everyone had told a story, and realizing that her reign had come to an end, she removed the garland from her own head in the usual way, and, placing it on Neifile’s, she said to her with a laugh:

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  continual official attack – the bull Unigenitus became the law of France in 1730 – Jansenism degenerated into a mere political party, lost its spiritual fervour, and eventually resurfaced as a lawyer’s religion in 1789. Thus Catholicism remained unreformed, and the third force – the Enlightenment – emerged as varieties of deism or atheism operating outside Christianity, or even against it. Locke’s arguments in favour of reason, and the methodology of empirical science, were eagerly applied but in a non-Christian context. Thus Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois and Diderot’s Encyclopedie are essentially non-Christian monuments, something inconceivable in England (or Scotland, where Hume, though esteemed, was regarded as an aberration). The French Enlightenment emerged as the first European intellectual movement since the fourth century to develop outside the parameters of Christian belief. The result was to subject the rational interpretation of phenomena to the test Locke had skilfully avoided, and which Pascal claimed it could not survive. French rationalism was even more self-confident than rational Anglicanism, and challenged wider targets. The philosophes ransacked the past to expose Christianity as the generator of evil – Raynal’s Philosophical and Political History of the Indies, for instance, demonstrated how contact with Christianity destroyed societies. Voltaire wrote to Frederick the Great: ‘Your Majesty will do the human race an eternal service in extirpating this infamous superstition, I do not say among the rabble, who are not worthy of being enlightened and who are apt for every yoke; I say among the well- bred, among those who wish to think.’ Diderot and his friends conceived of enlightenment itself as an ethic, an alternative religion: ‘It is not enough to know more than theologians do; we must show them that we are better, and that philosophy makes men more honourable than sufficient or efficacious grace.’ For Diderot, man’s self-fulfilment was a kind of vicarious atonement, and the love of humanity a substitute for the love of God: hence posterity, not God, was to judge man’s present behaviour. ‘Posterity is for the philosopher what the next world is for the religious man.’ Or again: ‘O, Posterity, holy and sacred support of the oppressed and unhappy, thou who art just, thou who art incorruptible, thou who wilt revenge the good man and unmask the hypocrite, consoling and certain ideal, do not abandon me.’ All this, of course, was to ask for trouble in the future. Locke would have argued that the common man was not interested in the verdict of posterity, whereas he might

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  royal master-mason to York about 1410, the locals ‘conspired together to kill him and his assistant’ – the assistant was actually slain. Building was purely a secular operation. Especially at Exeter and York, the fabric- rolls furnish details over long periods (though there are important gaps). In England, except during the Norman period, when Saxon labour was conscripted (for instance at Durham), the workmen were all professionals, and had to join lodges. In many parts of central Europe and Spain conscript labour was used; and in England, too, craftsmen were conscripted, but only for work on royal foundations, and fortresses. There is no evidence that compulsion was applied to non-royal ecclesiastical buildings. And of course there was no question of voluntary unskilled labour – the guilds would not have allowed it. The cathedral chapters, or the monks, had to pay the going rates. It was not a labour of love. Indeed, constant and strenuous efforts were made to lay down rules and hours of work, and enforce them. This is attested by the survival – especially at Ely, Winchester and Gloucester – of thousands of ‘banker- marks’ on individual stones, which allowed masons to be identified and their work counted and checked. The 1370 fabric roll of York notes: ‘All their times and hours shall be revealed by a bill, ordained therefore’; they were to be at work ‘as early as they may see skilfully by daylight and they shall stand there truly working all day, as long as they may see skilfully for the work.’ They got an hour at noon for a meal, and ‘all their times and hours shall be revealed by a bell ordained therefore’; a slacker was ‘chastised by abating of his payment’. This brief was laid down in 1344 after a report to the chapter revealed negligence, idleness and indiscipline, in which everyone from the master-mason and master-carpenter down was involved. The master admitted he had lost control; the men were unruly and insubordinate; there had been strikes among the labourers; timber, stone, lime and cement had been stolen; and much expensive damage had been caused by carelessness and incompetence. The major cost items were wages, and the purchase and transportation of stone and timber. All this had to be paid for at market-prices. True, the crown sometimes helped by allowing bulk goods to travel without paying tolls. William I, a generous benefactor of the Church, gave Bishop Walkeleyn of Winchester permission to cut as much timber in the Forest of Hempage as his men could remove in four days and nights; he was furious when the bishop brought ‘an innumerable troop’ and denuded a large part of the forest. Such generosity became almost unknown in the later Middle Ages. Royal cash and resources went exclusively to foundations in the king’s name –

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Judaism, initiated by Paul, had to be complete, and Christian texts with Judaizing tendencies or compromises expurgated or scrapped. No book of Marcion’s has survived. He quarrelled with the Roman Christian authorities in AD 144 and went east. Later he was denounced as a heretic by Tertullian, earliest and noisiest of the Christian witch-hunters. This means his works have not survived, except in extracts quoted in books attacking him. Preservation of an ancient author required positive effort over a long period. Early Christian writings were produced in very small quantities on highly perishable papyrus. Unless they were constantly retranscribed they did not survive at all. There was no need of a censor, unless a heresiarch had followers over successive generations to keep his work alive. So we do not know the details of Marcion’s system. His God was the Pauline God of love. He rejected fear as a force God would employ to compel obedience. This reliance on love alone as the mechanism underpinning ethics was the main burden of Tertullian’s complaint against Marcion and his sympathizers. For them, he sneered, ‘God is purely and simply good. He indeed forbids all sin, but only in word . . . for your fear he does not want. . . they have no fear of their God at all. They say it is only an evil being who will be feared, a good one will be loved. Foolish Man! Do you say that he whom you call Lord ought not to be feared, whilst the very title you give him indicates a power which must be feared?’ Without fear, men would ‘boil over into lust,’ frequent games, circuses, theatres – all forbidden to Christians – and submit instantly to persecution. Marcion’s controversy with Tertullian gives us a glimpse, perhaps for the first time, of two basic types of Christian: the rational optimist who believes that the love- principle is sufficient, man having an essential desire to do good, and the pessimist, convinced of the essential corruptibility of human creatures and the need for the mechanism of damnation. Successful Christianity is essentially a coalition of views and spiritualities: it needs to contain both types even when they produce a certain conflict and friction. In this case it was unable to accommodate either, at any rate in Rome. Rome was universalist and Marcion’s ruthless pruning of the Christian texts would have narrowed the limits of its appeal. And then, he did not believe in marriage, believing that procreation was an invention of the evil Old Testament God – or so Tertullian reported. Marcion was a flawed character: his biblical exegesis reveals a superlative mind, his doctrine of Pauline charity an admirable character, but his views on sex set him down as an eccentric. They were compatible with belief in an

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  campaign to reunite Italy, used his ultramontane army to prevent the new crown, and its revolutionary supporters, from making Rome the capital of Italy and annexing the papal states by force. So Pius IX gloried in reaction by virtue of Napoleon’s bayonets. Equally, the steady approval of the Church was a principal factor in keeping Napoleon in power. The arrangement was more practical than edifying. Not only Montalembert found it distasteful when the Empress Eugénie, Napoleon’s raffish consort, sent the Pope a present of £25,000 on his jubilee. The Bourbon Restoration had been a Catholic regime; the Second Empire was merely a clerical one, marked by cynical attention to the quid pro quo on both sides. When Napoleon visited Brittany in 1858, a bishop told him publicly that he was the most devoted Christian king of France since St Louis. The prelate was duly promoted to be archbishop, ‘thus earning his tip, like a cab-driver’. This last remark was made not by a fierce anti-clerical but by the Viscomte de Falloux, author of the regime’s pro-Catholic schools-laws. Indeed, it was among the Catholics that the alliance evoked the most irreverent comments. At election-time, the Pope’s vast and obedient clerical army duly turned out Napoleon’s voters; in return, the emperor was obliged to suppress his embarrassment when, in 1858, a three-year-old Jewish boy, called Mortara, baptized by a Catholic servant when in danger of death, was removed from parental control by the Holy Office as soon as he recovered. This was the law of Rome, upheld solely by French infantry. Hence Montalembert’s sneer that the alliance was ‘a coalition between the guard- room and the sacristy’, capped by General Chargarnier’s epitome of Napoleon’s regime: ‘A bawdy house blessed by bishops.’ Yet there was also a number of active and able French Catholics who upheld the new papalism with passionate devotion. Nearly all were converts, that is former agnostics or atheists who had turned to Rome after an emotional or intellectual crisis. As with the Oxford converts, what chiefly attracted them in their new Church was its authority, and its crude self-confidence in cutting through complex intellectual issues. They were not only ultramontanist but, in most cases, violent papalists. Among them was Louis Veuillot, who became editor of the Catholic daily l’Univers, and radiated the views of a W. G. Ward but on an incomparably greater scale, and in more virulent form. Veuillot was the son of a cooper, self-taught working-class in manner and outlook – totally unlike the well-heeled and highly-educated Oxford Tractarians, or, for that matter, the upper middle-class French Catholic liberals. He had turned himself into a barrister’s clerk and so graduated to journalism, for which

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  of ‘liberating’ the Church from the Hohenstaufen, Innocent IV forbade any episcopal elections on the Lower Rhine without permission of the Holy See. The next year he appointed to Liège Henry, brother of the Count of Gueldre, who was only nineteen and illiterate. He was sent to Liège purely for the papacy’s political and military purposes. As bishop, he was an imperial elector, and one of his first acts was to help elect the Count of Holland as the anti-Staufen king of Germany. He was allowed to remain in minor orders ‘in order to engage more freely in the affairs of the church in Germany’ – that is, lead troops in battle. He was also given dispensations to grant tithes to papal supporters, to keep benefices vacant and appropriate the proceeds to raise troops. He had expert clerks and a full-time deputy to carry out the essential work of the diocese while, for twenty-five years, he carried out his political and military duties. From his episcopal registers, he appears a model diocesan. In fact he was a scoundrel, and eventually, when the Staufen were smashed, he lost his usefulness: in 1273, Gregory X accused him of sleeping with abbesses and nuns, fathering fourteen bastards in twenty-two months, and providing all of them with benefices. Disgraced, he reverted to his natural bent, and became a brigand. Such men were exceptions. The trouble with most bishops, under the royal-papal carve-up, was that they were worldly and mediocre. Often they were absentees, on royal or papal business. But even if they were not officials, they were rarely active diocesans. This was not always their fault. Bishops were expected to move in great state. An episcopal visitation thus became a serious financial burden for the inferior clergy. Odo Rigaud, the Archbishop of Rouen 1247–76, was an exemplary prelate by the standards of his time. But he travelled with a mounted retinue of eighty, and in 1251 this led to a joint protest to the Pope from all the bishops of Normandy. William of Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, was another notorious offender on this score, though the chief complaint about him was the number of his hounds and hawks (hawks had a specially expensive diet). The visitations could be carried out by vicars- general or archdeacons; but they were liable to offend just as grievously. Innocent III was told the Archdeacon of Richmond took with him ninety-seven horses, twenty- one hounds and three hawks. Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, laid down a maximum scale: an archbishop could not have more than fifty men and horses; bishops thirty; archdeacons seven – and no hounds or hawks for any of them. The scale was never adhered to. Things were just as bad 200 years later. When Archbishop Kempe of York was criticized for visiting his diocese for only two or three weeks at a

• From The Decameron (1353)

  As soon as his mask was removed, Friar Alberto was immediately recognized by all the onlookers, who jeered at him in unison, calling him by the foulest names and shouting the filthiest abuse ever to have been hurled at any scoundrel in history, at the same time pelting his face with all the nastiest things they could lay their hands upon. They kept this up without stopping, and would have gone on all night but for the fact that half-a-dozen or so of his fellow friars, having heard what was going on, made their way to the scene. The first thing they did on arriving was to throw a cape over his shoulders, after which they set him free and escorted him back, leaving a tremendous commotion in their wake, to their own quarters, where they placed him under lock and key. And there he is believed to have eked out the rest of his days in wretchedness and misery. Thus it was that this arch-villain, whose wicked deeds went unnoticed because he was held to be good, had the audacity to transform himself into the Angel Gabriel. In the end, however, having been turned from an angel into a savage, he got the punishment he deserved, and repented in vain for the crimes he had committed. May it please God that a similar fate should befall each and every one of his fellows. THIRD STORYThree young men fall in love with three sisters and elope with them to Crete. The eldest sister kills her lover in a fit of jealousy; the second, by giving herself to the Duke of Crete, saves her sister’s life but is in turn killed by her own lover, who flees with the eldest sister. The murder is imputed to the third lover and the third sister, who are arrested and forced to make a confession. Fearing execution, they bribe their gaolers and flee, impoverished, to Rhodes, where they die in penury. On finding that Pampinea had reached the end of her story, Filostrato brooded for a while, then turned to her and said: ‘The ending of your story was not without a modicum of merit, from which I drew a certain satisfaction. But there was far too much matter of a humorous kind in the part that preceded it, and this I would have preferred to do without.’ He then turned to Lauretta, and said: ‘Madam, pray proceed with a better tale if possible.’ ‘You are being much too unkind toward lovers,’ she replied, laughing, ‘if all you demand is an unhappy ending to their adventures. However, for the sake of obedience I shall tell you a story about three lovers, all of whom met an unpleasant fate before they were able to enjoy their separate loves to the full.’ Then she began:

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  was obsessive: ‘Why do you sit from morning until evening,’ he wrote to Eugenius III in 1150, ‘listening to litigants? What fruit is there in these things? They can only create cobwebs.’ His warnings were ignored. The litigious habit gradually permeated the whole Church. Ecclesiastical institutions tended to see their relationship with the lay world, and with each other, primarily in legal terms. The most bitterly fought and enduring cases were inter-clerical battles. One such medieval Jarndyce v. Jarndyce between the monks of St Augustine, Canterbury, and their archbishop, was hotly contested for fifteen years, successive popes being obliged to write seventy letters. Innocent III, exasperated, wrote: ‘I blush to hear of this mouldy business.’ But when had the law not generated mould? St Bernard’s cobwebs continued to spread. For, when he asked what fruit there was in legalism, the answer, of course, was money and power. A successful court – and the papal court was the outstanding legal success of the Middle Ages – generated income, and the need of great and small to solicit its verdicts. The Pope’s legal relations with a king, a duke or an archbishop, might involve a dozen or more cases going on at one time, some momentous, many trivial, all of which had to be weighed by both sides in considering total policy. Much of the Pope’s practical ability to get his way sprang from the power of his court to deliver. So it was impossible for the Pope to avoid the details. And to think chiefly in legal, was to think chiefly in secular, terms. The popes became progressively more entangled in legal-diplomatic considerations, and in the effort to hold together their estates in central Italy as a secure base for their ramifying international activities. In short, they became like any other rulers. The Gregorian reform, which sought to improve moral standards in the Church by disengaging the clergy from their role as supporters of the State, ended, by a kind of helpless logic, in thrusting the Church far more deeply and completely into the secular world. Indeed, the Church became a secular world of its own. As such – as a separate, rival institution – it was bound to come into conflict with the State at every level. Of course clerics and seculars were both Christians and shared not only major assumptions but most minor ones. But they were locked in a conflict of laws, and this could be brutally aggravated by a conflict of personalities. The outstanding case was Henry II’s tragic dispute with Thomas à Becket. Henry was only twenty-nine when he appointed Becket, his chancellor, to be chief ecclesiastical officer of his kingdom in 1162. He hoped that this combination of duties would help to smooth out difficulties which inevitably arose from the conflict of the two legal

• 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)

  The Corbaccio, written, according to Giorgio Padoan, in or around 1365, but attributed more convincingly by Natalino Sapegno and others to a much earlier date (1355), is at once the most enigmatic and least attractive of Boccaccio’s works. The very title is mysterious, being almost an anagram of the author’s name and signifying a bird traditionally associated with omens of misfortune. The ‘ugly crow’ of the title can hardly refer to Boccaccio himself, and it is possible that all he intended it to suggest was the unceasing mockery (il corbacchiare) characterizing the work as a whole, which is a bitter invective against women. It therefore forms part of a tradition of misogynistic writing stretching back to Juvenal and to St Jerome. But although he had made one or two earlier excursions into this equivocal poetic terrain, for instance in an episode in the Filocolo and more especially in the story of the scholar and the widow (Decameron, VIII, 7), the sheer intensity and ferocity of the Corbaccio’s anti-feminism will astonish those who are accustomed to accept Boccaccio’s own self-portrait in the Decameron as the champion of the gentle sex (see the Prologue and the Introduction to the Fourth Day). The Corbaccio is in fact the work which documents in most convincing fashion Boccaccio’s conversion to the kind of literary asceticism to which he became increasingly committed after his encounter with Petrarch. As Sapegno has shrewdly observed, whereas the Muses in the Decameron had been compared to women (IV, Intro.), in the Corbaccio the ‘Ninfe Castalidi’ (‘Castalian nymphs’, a circumlocution for the Muses) are contrasted with wicked women (‘malvagie femmine’). The Epistola consolatoria a Pino de’ Rossi, written in the winter of 1361–2 following the banishment from Florence of the addressee, is not only an attempt to offer encouragement to a close friend at a time of profound personal misfortune, but also an elegant and eloquent exercise in a literary genre with strong classical antecedents, a document that bears witness to the author’s continuing and ever more intensive commitment to humanistic culture. The exile of Rossi had coincided with the execution of that same Niccolò di Bartolo del Buono to whom Boccaccio had dedicated his Comedía delle ninfe fiorentine, and in fact several of the author’s close acquaintances fell victim to the purge carried out by the Florentine Signory after the abortive coup d’état of 1361, with the aims of which he had not, presumably, been entirely out of sympathy. It is perhaps significant that very soon afterwards, in that same year in fact, he handed over the family house in the San Felicita quarter to his stepbrother Iacopo, who was now of age, and retired to Certaldo, the town of his paternal forebears.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The ointment he used is highly efficacious (though it is not mentioned by Galen in any of his treatises on medicine), and he applied it so liberally and effectively that the fire with which he had been threatened was graciously commuted to the wearing of a cross, which made him look as if he were about to set off on a Crusade. In order to make his badge more attractive, the friar stipulated that the cross should be yellow on a black ground. And apart from this, having pocketed the money, he kept him for several days under open arrest, ordering him by way of penance to attend mass every morning in Santa Croce and report to him every day at the hour of breakfast, after which he was free to do as he pleased for the rest of the day. The man carried out his instructions to the letter, and one morning at mass he happened to be listening to the Gospel when he heard these words being sung: ‘For every one you shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life.’ He committed the words firmly to memory, and at the usual hour he presented himself as instructed before the inquisitor, whom he found already at table. The inquisitor asked him whether he had listened to mass that morning, and he promptly replied that he had. Whereupon the inquisitor said: ‘Do you have any doubts, or questions you wish to ask, about anything you heard during the service?’ ‘To be sure,’ the good man replied, ‘I have no doubts about any of the things I heard, indeed I firmly believe them all to be true. But one of the things I heard made me feel very sorry for you and your fellow friars, and I still feel very sorry when I think what an awful time you are all going to have in the life to come.’ ‘And what was it,’ asked the inquisitor, ‘which caused you to feel so sorry for us?’ ‘Sir,’ the good man replied, ‘it was that passage from the Gospel which says that for every one you shall receive an hundredfold.’5 ‘That is true,’ said the inquisitor. ‘But why should this have perturbed you so?’ ‘Sir,’ replied the good man, ‘I will tell you. Every day since I started coming here, I have seen a crowd of poor people standing outside and being given one and sometimes two huge cauldrons of vegetable-water which, being surplus to your needs, is taken away from you and the other friars here in the convent. So if you are going to receive a hundred in the next world for every one you have given, you will have so much of the stuff that you will all drown in it.’

• From The Decameron (1353)

  In the town of Imola, excellent ladies, there once lived a depraved and wicked fellow by the name of Berto della Massa. The townspeople learned from experience that his dealings were crooked, and he brought himself into so much disrepute that there was not a single person in the whole of Imola who was prepared to believe a word he uttered, no matter whether he was speaking the truth or telling a lie. He therefore perceived that Imola no longer afforded him any outlet for his roguery, and as a last resort he moved to Venice,1 where the scum of the earth can always find a welcome. There he decided to go in for some different kind of fraud from those he had practised elsewhere, and from the moment of his arrival, as though conscience-stricken by the crimes he had committed in the past, he gave people the impression that he was a man of quite extraordinary humility. What was more, having transformed himself into the most Catholic man who ever lived, he went and became a Franciscan, and styled himself Friar Alberto of Imola. Having donned the habit of his Order, he gave every appearance of leading a harsh, frugal existence, began to preach the virtues of repentance and abstinence, and never allowed a morsel of meat or a drop of wine to pass his lips unless they came up to his exacting standards. Nobody suspected for a moment that he had been a thief, pander, swindler and murderer before suddenly blossoming into a great preacher; nor had he abandoned any of these vices, for he was simply biding his time until an opportunity arose for him to practise them in secret. His crowning achievement was to get himself ordained as a priest, and whenever he was celebrating mass in the presence of a large congregation, he would shed copious tears for the Passion of the Saviour, being the sort of man who could weep as much as he pleased at little cost to himself. In short, what with his sermons and shedding of tears, he managed to hoodwink the Venetians so successfully that hardly anyone there made a will without depositing it with him and making him the trustee. Many people handed over their money to him for safe keeping, and he became the father-confessor and confidential adviser to the vast majority of the men and women of the city. Having thus been transformed from a wolf into a shepherd, he acquired a reputation for saintliness far greater than any Saint Francis had ever enjoyed in Assisi.

• 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