Contempt

Passages

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

  Caesar Borgia returned to Rome, was recognized as gonfalonier and given apartments in the Vatican. Julius had been in amicable relations with the prince in France and advanced his marriage, and Caesar wrote that in him he had found a second father. But Caesar now that Alexander was dead, was as a galley without a rudder. He was an upstart; Julius a man of power and far-reaching plans. Prolonged co-operation between the two was impossible. The one was sinister, given to duplicity; the other frank and open to brusqueness. The encroachment of Venice upon the Romagna gave the occasion at once for Caesar’s fall and for the full restoration of papal authority in that region. Supporters Caesar had none who could be relied upon in the day of ill success. He no longer had the power which the control of patronage gives. Julius demanded the keys of the towns of the Romagna as a measure necessary to the dislodgment of Venice. Caesar yielded, but withdrew to Ostia, meditating revenge. He was seized, carried back to Rome and placed in the castle of S. Angelo, which had been the scene of his dark crimes. He was obliged to give up the wealth gotten at his father’s death and to sign a release of Forli and other towns. Liberty was then given him to go where be pleased. He accepted protection from the Spanish captain, Gonsalvo de Cordova, but on his arrival in Naples the Spaniard, with despicable perfidy, seized the deceived man and sent him to Spain, August, 1504. For two years he was held a prisoner, when he escaped to the court of his brother-in-law, the king of Navarre. He was killed at the siege of Viana, 1507, aged 31. Thus ended the career of the man who had once been the terror of Rome, whom Ranke calls "a virtuoso in crime," and Machiavelli chose as the model of a civil ruler. This political writer had met Caesar after Julius’ elevation, and in his Prince827 says, "It seems good to me to propose Caesar Borgia as an example to be imitated by all those who through fortune and the arms of others have attained to supreme command. For, as he had a great mind and great ambitions, it was not possible for him to govern otherwise." Caesar had said to the theorist, "I rob no man. I am here to act the tyrant’s part and to do away with tyrants." Only if to obtain power by darkness and assassination is worthy of admiration, and if to crush all individual liberty is a just end of government, can the Machiavellian ideal be regarded with other feelings than those of utter reprobation. There is something pathetic in the recollection that, to the end, this inhuman brother retained the affection of his sister, Lucretia. She pled for his release from imprisonment in Spain, and Caesar’s letter to her announcing his escape is still extant.828 When the rumor came of his death, Lucretia despatched her servant, Tullio, to Navarre to find out the truth, and gave herself up to protracted prayer on her brother’s behalf. This beautiful example of a sister’s love would seem to indicate that Caesar possessed by nature some excellent qualities.

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

  In Rome, the bloody pope fanned the feud between the Colonna and the Orsini, and almost succeeded in blotting out the name of the Colonna by assassination and judicial murder. Sixtus has the distinction of having extended the efficacy of indulgences to souls in purgatory. He was most zealous in distributing briefs of indulgence.768 The Spanish Inquisition received his solemn sanction in 1478. Himself a Franciscan, he augmented the privileges of the Franciscan order in a bull which that order calls its great ocean—mare magnum. He canonized the official biographer of Francis d’Assisi, Bonaventura. He issued two bulls with reference to the worship of Mary and the doctrine of the immaculate conception, but he declared her sinlessness from the instant of conception a matter undecided by the Roman Church and the Apostolic see—nondum ab ecclesia romana et apostolica sede decisum.769 In all matters of ritual and outward religion, he was of all men most punctilious. The chronicler, Volterra, abounds in notices of his acts of devotion. Asa patron of art, his name has a high place. He supported Platina with four assistants in cataloguing the archives of the Vatican in three volumes. Such was Sixtus IV., the unblushing promoter of the interests of his relatives, many of them as worthless as they were insolent, the disturber of the peace of Italy, revengeful, and yet the liberal patron of the arts. The enlightened diarist of Rome, Infessura,770 calls the day of the pontiff’s decease that most happy day, the day on which God liberated Christendom from the hand of an impious and iniquitous ruler, who had before him no fear of God nor love of the Christian world nor any charity whatsoever, but was actuated by avarice, the love of vain show and pomp, most cruel and given to sodomy.771 During his reign, were born in obscure places in Saxony and Switzerland two men who were to strike a mighty blow at the papal rule, themselves also of peasant lineage and the coming leaders of the new spiritual movement. § 53. Innocent VIII. 1484–1492. Under Innocent VIII. matters in Rome were, if anything, worse than under his predecessor, Sixtus IV. Innocent was an easy-going man without ideals, incapable of conceiving or carrying out high plans. He was chiefly notable for his open avowal of an illegitimate family and his bull against witchcraft. At Sixtus’ death, wild confusion reigned in Rome. Nobles and cardinals barricaded their residences. Houses were pillaged. The mob held carnival on the streets. The palace of Jerome Riario was sacked. Relief was had by an agreement between the rival families of the Orsini and Colonna to withdraw from the city for a month and Jerome’s renunciation of the castle of S. Angelo, which his wife had defended, for 4,000 ducats. Not till then did the cardinals feel themselves justified in meeting for the election of a new pontiff.

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

  He subscribes himself "Petrus peccator monachus." The letters to the anti-pope Cadalous show his power of sarcasm; he tells him that his very name from cado, to fall, and laov", people, was ominous, that he deserved a triple deposition, that his new crime was adultery and simony of the worst sort, that he had sold his own church (Parma) and bought another, that the church was desecrated to the very top by such adulteries. He prophesied his death within one year, but Cadalous outlived it, and Damiani defended his

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

  The revenues derived from feudal states and princes, called census, were divided equally between the cardinals and the pope’s private treasury. Gregory X., in 1272, was the first to make such a division of the tribute from Sicily, which amounted to 8000 ounces of gold, or about $90,000.204 In the pontificate of John XXII. there is frequent mention of the amounts contributed by Sicily and their equal partition. The sums varied from year to year, and in 1304 it was 3000 ounces of gold. The tribute of Sardinia and Corsica was fixed in 1297 at the annual sum of 2000 marks, and was divided between the two treasuries.205 The papal state and Ferrara yielded uncertain sums, and the tribute of 1000 marks, pledged by John of England, was paid irregularly, and finally abrogated altogether. Peter’s pence, which belongs in this category, was an irregular source of papal income.206 The yearly income of the papal treasury under Clement V. and John XXII. has been estimated at from 200,000 to 250,000 gold florins.207 In 1353 it is known to have been at least 260,000 florins, or more than $600,000 of our money These sources of income were not always sufficient for the expenses of the papal household, and in cases had to be anticipated by loans. The popes borrowed from cardinals, from princes, and from bankers. Urban V. got a loan from his cardinals of 30, 000 gold florins. Gregory XI. got loans of 30,000 florins from the king of Navarre, and 60, 000 from the duke of Anjou. The duke seems to have been a ready lender, and on another occasion loaned Gregory 40,000 florins.208 It was a common thing for bishops and abbots to make loans to enable them to pay the expense of their confirmation. The abbot of St. Albans, in 1290, was assessed 1300 pounds for his servitium, and borrowed 500 of it.209 The habit grew until the time of the Reformation, when the sums borrowed, as in the case of Albrecht, archbishop of Mainz, were enormous. The transactions of the Avignon chancellory called forth loud complaints, even from contemporary apologists for the papacy. Alvarus Pelagius, in his Lament over the Church, wrote: "No poor man can approach the pope. He will call and no one will answer, because he has no money in his purse to pay. Scarcely is a single petition heeded by the pope until it has passed through the hands of middlemen, a corrupt set, bought with bribes, and the officials conspire together to extort more than the rule calls for." In another place he said that whenever he entered into the papal chambers he always found the tables full of gold, and clerics counting and weighing florins.210 Of the Spanish bishops he said that there was scarcely one in a hundred who did not receive money for ordinations and the gift of benefices. Matters grew no better, but rather worse as the fourteenth century advanced.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Hugh of St Victor, in his Rules for Novices, forbids listening with the mouth open, moving the tongue round the lips while working, gesturing, raising the eyebrows while speaking, rolling eyeballs, tossing the head, shaking the hair, smoothing garments, moving the feet unnecessarily, twisting the neck, pulling faces, grinning, wrinkling the nostrils and ‘all contortions of the lips which disfigure the comeliness of a man’s face and the decency of discipline’. Again, for nuns, their bodily posture, for almost any activity, was laid down in detail. Both monks and nuns were scourged for comparatively minor faults, especially for murmuring at correction. For the Brigittine nuns of Syon in Middlesex, corporal punishment was mandatory for any fault, however venial, which a nun failed to report herself, and which was later noted. Five lashes was the norm, ‘but if the default be of the more grievous kind, or she or they show any token of rebellion, the discipliners shall not cease till the abbess chargeth them to cease’. From Syon, too, we have a table of signs for both the sisters and brothers (who lived in separate establishments) which indicates that the rules of silence were enforced. But when the rules multiplied, spirit tended to fly out of the cloister; medieval man was superbly gifted at imposing rules on himself and then defeating their purpose. Giraldus Cambrensis noted, c . 1180, that the Canterbury monks were ‘so profuse in their gesticulations of fingers and hands and arms, and in the whisperings whereby they avoided open speech, wherein all showed a most unedifying levity and license’, that they looked like ‘a company of actors and buffoons’. He thought it would have been better ‘to speak modestly in plain human speech than to use such a dumb garrulity of frivolous signs and hissings’. This is but a tiny example of the contempt which familiarity with the sacred inevitably breeds, and which is inseparable from the religious life. But the root causes of the monastic failure went deeper, and were economic and social. In northern and central Europe, where the Benedictines were strongest and wealthiest, and where the monks’ economic role was most important, they were fully integrated into the tenurial system. The abbot was, and had to behave as, a pillar of feudal society. The big abbeys were nearly always on royal progress-routes, and had to entertain the kings and their courts; later, parliaments or estates-general. Abbots nearly always came from the higher social classes. By the twelfth century they already had their separate establishments, staff and buildings (especially kitchen), from which they dispensed large-scale hospitality to the rich. They were, in fact, in charge of something which was a combination of a luxury hotel and a cultural centre. Of course this role was not, initially, of their choosing. But use by governments of Benedictine abbeys (especially royal foundations) for state purposes goes back to a very early date.

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

  At Innocent VIII.’s death, 23 cardinals entered into the conclave which met in the Sistine chapel. Borgia and Julian Rovere were the leading candidates. They were rivals, and had been candidates for the papal chair before. Everything was to be staked on success in the pending election. Openly and without a blush, ecclesiastical offices and money were offered as the price of the spiritual crown of Christendom. Julian was supported by the king of France, who deposited 200,000 ducats in a Roman bank and 100,000 more in Genoa to secure his election. If Borgia could not outbid him he was, at least, the more shrewd in his manipulations. There were only five cardinals, including Julian, who took nothing. The other members of the sacred college had their price. Monticelli and Soriano were given to Cardinal Orsini and also the see of Cartagena, and the legation to the March; the abbey of Subiaco and its fortresses to Colonna; Civita Castellana and the see of Majorca to Savelli; Nepi to Sclafetanus; the see of Porto to Michïel; and rich benefices to other cardinals. Four mules laden with gold were conducted to the palace of Ascanio Sforza, who also received Rodrigo’s splendid palace and the vice-chancellorship. Even the patriarch of Venice, whose high age—for he had reached 95—might have been expected to lift him above the seduction of filthy lucre, accepted 5,000 ducats. Infessura caustically remarks that Borgia distributed all his goods among the poor.786 The ceremonies of coronation were on a scale which appeared to the contemporaries unparalleled in the history of such occasions. A figure of a bull, the emblem of the Borgias, was erected near the Palazzo di S. Marco on the line of the procession, from whose eyes, nostrils and mouth poured forth water, and from the forehead wine. Rodrigo was 61 years of age, had been cardinal for 37 years, having received that dignity when he was 25. His fond uncle, Calixtus III., had made him archbishop of Valencia, heaped upon him ecclesiastical offices, including the vice-chancellorship, and made him the heir of his personal possessions. His palace was noted for the splendor of its tapestries and carpets and its vessels of gold and silver.787 The new pope possessed conspicuous personal attractions. He was tall and well-formed, and his manners so taking that a contemporary, Gasparino of Verona, speaks of his drawing women to himself more potently than the magnet attracts iron.788 The reproof which his gallantries of other days called forth from Pius II. at Siena has already been referred to.

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

  was appointed archbishop of Avignon and then of Bologna, bishop of Lausanne, Constance, Viviers, Ostia and Velletri, and placed at the head of several abbeys. Riario, who, according to popular hearsay, was the pope’s own child, was bishop of Spoleto, Seville and Valencia, Patriarch of Constantinople, and recipient of other rich places, until his income amounted to 60,000 florins or about 2,500,000 francs. He went about with a retinue of 100 horsemen. His expenditures were lavish and his estate royal. His mistresses, whom he did not attempt to conceal, were dressed in elegant fabrics, and one of them wore slippers embroidered with pearls. Dominico received one after the other the bishoprics of Corneto, Tarentaise, Geneva and Turin. The visit of Leonora, the daughter of Ferrante, in Rome in 1473, while on her way to Ferrara to meet her husband, Hercules of Este, was perhaps the most splendid occasion the city had witnessed since the first visit of Frederick III. It furnished Riario an opportunity for the display of a magnificent hospitality. On Whitsunday, the Neapolitan princess was conducted by two cardinals to St. Peter’s, where she heard mass said by the pope and then at high-noon witnessed the miracle play of Susanna and the Elders, acted by Florentine players. The next evening she sat down to a banquet which lasted 3 hours and combined all the skill which decorators and cooks could apply. The soft divans and costly curtainings, the silk costumes of the servants and the rich courses are described in detail by contemporary writers. In anticipation of modern electrical fans, 3 bellows were used to cool and freshen the atmosphere. In such things, remarks Infessura, the treasures of the Church were squandered.763 In 1474, on the death of Peter Riario, a victim of his excesses and aged only 28,764 his brother Jerome, a layman, came into supreme favor. Sixtus was ready to put all the possessions of the papal see at his disposal and, on his account, he became involved in feuds with Florence and Venice. He purchased for this favorite Imola, at a cost of 40,000 ducats, and married him to the illegitimate daughter of the duke of Milan, Catherine Sforza. The purchase of Imola was resented by Florence, but Sixtus did not hesitate to further antagonize the republic and the Medici. The Medici had established a branch banking-house in Rome and become the papal bankers. Sixtus chose to affront the family by patronizing the Pazzi, a rival banking-firm. At the death of Philip de’Medici, archbishop of Pisa, in 1474, Salviati was appointed his successor against the protest of the Medici. Finally, Julian de’ Medici was denied the cardinalship. These events marked the stages in the progress of the rupture between the papacy and Florence. Lorenzo, called the Magnificent, and his brother Julian represented the family which the fiscal talents of Cosmo de’Medici had founded.

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

  A long chapter, I. 6, is devoted to showing woman’s inferiority to man and the subject of her alliance with demons is dwelt upon, apparently with delight. The cohabitation with fiends was in earlier ages, the authors affirm, against the will of women, but in their own age it was with their full consent and by their ardent desire. They thank God for being men. Few of their sex, they say, consent to such obscene relations,—one man to ten women. This refusal was due to the male’s natural vigor of mind, vigor rationis. To show the depravity of woman and her fell agency in history, Institoris and Sprenger quote all the bad things they can heap up from authors, biblical and classic, patristic and scholastic, Cato, Terence, Seneca, Cicero, Jerome. Jesus Sirach’s words are frequently quoted, "Woman is more bitter than death." Helen, Jezebel and Cleopatra are held forth as examples of pernicious agency which wrought the destruction of kingdoms, such catastrophes being almost invariably due to woman’s machinations. It was the common representation of the writers of the outgoing century of the Mediaeval Age that God permits the intervention of Satan’s malefic agency through the marriage bed more than through any other medium, and for the reason that the first sin was carried down through the marital act. On this point, Thomas Aquinas is quoted by one author after the other.934 Preachers, as well as writers on witchcraft, took this disparaging view of woman. Geiler of Strassburg gave as the reason for ten women being burnt to one man on the charge of witchcraft, woman’s loquacity and frivolity. He quoted Ambrose that woman is the door to the devil and the way of iniquity—janua diaboli et via iniquitatis. Another noted preacher of the 15th century, John Nider, gave ten cases in which the cohabitation of man and woman is a mortal sin and, in a Latin treatise on moral leprosy, included the marriage state.935 A century earlier, in his De planctu ecclesiae, written from Avignon, Bishop Alvarez of Pelayo enumerated 102 faults common to women, one of these their cohabitation with the denizens of hell. From his own experience, the prelate states, he knew this to be true. It was practised, he says, in a convent of nuns and vain was his effort to put a stop to it.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The pattern was not necessarily deliberate, but it was remarkably similar in various parts of the African coast. The missionaries might seek to dissociate themselves from European colonization, but the fact is that most of them, in Africa at least, found it far more convenient (and safe) to operate with whites in control. In Calabar the missions soon focussed their hostility on the Old Town and Duke Town, described as ‘an African Sodom and Gomorrah’, where obnoxious customs, such as infanticide, were said to flourish. They promptly formed a Society for the Abolition of Inhuman and Superstitious Customs and for Promoting Civilization in the area, and the British Consul was signed up as a founder member. The missionary stationed in the Old Town, the Reverend Samuel Edgerley, made no secret of his anxiety to change the habits of those he termed ‘a degraded and heathen people’. In 1849 he kicked over a religious drum; and in 1854, following an alleged massacre of fifty slaves by the deposed king of Old Town, Willie Tom, Edgerley smashed up images in a local shrine and broke its sacred egg; he also removed various objects as souvenirs. In the ensuing trouble, the missionaries, seconded by European traders, persuaded the Consul that he would be ‘forwarding the work of civilization’ if he got HMS Antelope to bombard Old Town; and this was done. A CMS missionary, the Reverend C. A. Gollmer, commented: ‘I look upon it as God’s intervention for the good of Africa.’ Two years later, Gollmer instigated another naval attack, this time on the Ijebu tribe. Vessels like HMS Scourge were repeatedly used on the coast and river to frighten chiefs into complying with missionary demands to operate freely. Local bylaws soon reflected the needs of Christian evangelism. Thus Greek Town legislated for the Sabbath: ‘Henceforth, on God’s day, no market to be held in any part of Greek Town territory; no sale of strong drink, either native or imported, in doors and verandahs; no work; no play; no devil making; no firing of guns; no Egbo processions; no Palaver.’ From this it was a short step to the permanent deposition of kings and the assumption of all executive power in the hands of white officials. On the other hand, as experience in both Central and East Africa showed, without European rule, one of two things was likely to happen. The missionaries nearly always found a demand for Christian teaching. Many of the Africans were looking for a new and less primitive religion, and for a refuge from the often appalling cruelties of cults centred on tyrannical chiefs. It was comparatively easy for missionaries, even in territories where Europeans exercised no direct power, to set up new Christian villages, thus falling into a form of evangelization with strong social and political (and indeed economic) implications. They then rapidly found themselves becoming de facto chieftains.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  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 it into a disintegrating mess of sub-Hellenic cults, so the charismatics might submerge the Church’s unitary voice under a Babel of ‘prophecies’. The moment was judged to have come about 170 when Montanus, a successful charismatic who described himself as the Paraclete, was declared an enemy of the Church. Many of his closest followers were women, and they clearly played an outstanding role in his movement – as, indeed, they did in one or two of the Pauline congregations. Montanus was attacked by his enemies for breaking up marriages and then giving these inspired matrons who flocked to join him ecclesiastical offices. Montanism, or rather the efforts to combat it, played a conclusive role in persuading the orthodox to ban the ministry to women. Tertullian, while still an orthodox propagandist, snarled at this subversion of Church order: ‘The impudence of the heretics’ women! They dare to teach, to dispute, to carry out exorcisms, perform cures – perhaps they even baptize.... Of course, nowhere is promotion easier than in a camp of rebels: the mere fact of being there is meritorious!’ In his tract On Baptism and the Veiling of Virgins, he emphatically denied that women could exercise any ministerial functions. There were two lines of attack on the Montanists. On the one hand, they were accused of excessive austerity; thus Hippolytus, putting the orthodox case in his Refutatio omnium haeresium : ‘They introduced novelties in the shape of special fasts and ceremonies, and diets of radishes which they adopted on the inspired advice of their womenfolk.’ But Montanus was also attacked for handling large sums of money, for moving about in an ostentatious manner and for paying stipends to his chief followers. Some of the orthodox smears on him are manifest inventions. Eusebius repeats a tale that Montanus and his chief woman-prophet died as a result of a suicide pact, but he indicates that this is fiction. Many of the accusations levelled merely suggest that the Montanists were behaving like the Church, were in fact the Church in large areas – thus they raised money, paid their clergy and so forth.

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

  first, in the genuine catholic spirit, "there is the Spirit of God, and where the Spirit of God is there is all grace."238 Only on the bosom of the church, continues he, can we be nursed to life. To her must we flee, to be made partakers of the Holy Spirit; separation from her is separation from the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Heretics, in his view, are enemies of the truth and sons of Satan, and will be swallowed up by hell, like the company of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. Characteristic in this respect is the well-known legend, which he relates, about the meeting of the apostle John with the Gnostic Cerinthus, and of Polycarp with Marcion, the "first-born of Satan." 3. Tertullian is the first to make that comparison of the church with Noah’s ark, which has since become classical in Roman catholic theology; and he likewise attributes heresies to the devil, without any qualification. But as to schism, he was himself guilty of it since he joined the Montanists and bitterly opposed the Catholics in questions of discipline. He has therefore no place in the Roman Catholic list of the patres, but simply of the scriptores ecclesiae. 4. Even Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, with all their spiritualistic and idealizing turn of mind, are no exception here. The latter, in the words: "Out of the church no man can be saved,"239 brings out the principle of the catholic exclusiveness as unequivocally as Cyprian. Yet we find in him, together with very severe judgments of heretics, mild and tolerant expressions also; and he even supposes, on the ground of Rom. 2:6 sqq., that in the future life honest Jews and heathens will attain a suitable reward, a low grade of blessedness, though not the "life everlasting" in the proper sense. In a later age he was himself condemned as a heretic. Of other Greek divines of the third century, Methodius in particular, an opponent of Origen, takes high views of the church, and in his Symposion poetically describes it as "the garden of God in the beauty of eternal spring, shining in the richest splendor of immortalizing fruits and flowers;" as the virginal, unspotted, ever young and beautiful royal bride of the divine Logos. 5. Finally, Cyprian, in his Epistles, and most of all in his classical tract: De Unitate Eccelesiae, written in the year 251, amidst the distractions of the Novatian schism, and not without an intermixture of hierarchical pride and party spirit, has most distinctly and most forcibly developed the old catholic doctrine of the church, her unity, universality, and exclusiveness. He is the typical champion of visible, tangible church unity, and would have made a better pope than any pope before Leo I.; yet after all he was anti-papal and anti-Roman when he differed from the pope. Augustin felt this inconsistency, and thought that he had wiped it out by the blood of his martyrdom. But he never gave any sign of repentance.

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

  § 23. William Rufus and Anselm. William II., commonly called William Rufus or the Red (for his red hair), the third son and first successor of the Conqueror, ruled from 1087 to 1100. He bought Normandy from his brother Robert to enable him to make a crusade. This is the only good thing he did, besides appointing Anselm primate of England. He inherited all the vices and none of the virtues of his father. He despised and hated the clergy. It was said of him that, "he feared God but little, and man not at all." He was not a sceptic or infidel, as some represent him, but profane and blasphemous. He believed in God, like the demons, but did not tremble. He defied the Almighty. When he recovered from a severe sickness, he said: "God shall never see me a good man; I have suffered too much at his hands." He doubted his justice, and mocked at the ordeals. He declared publicly that neither St. Peter nor any other saint had any influence with God, and that he would not ask them for aid. He used to swear "by the holy face of Lucca."104 He was not married, but indulged in gross and shameless debaucheries. The people said of him that he rose a worse man every morning, and lay down a worse man every evening. He had promised Lanfranc at his coronation to exercise justice and mercy and to protect the freedom of the Church, but soon forgot his vow, and began systematically to plunder the Church and to oppress the clergy. He robbed the bishoprics and abbeys of their income by leaving them vacant or selling them to the highest bidders. Within four years he changed thirty cemeteries into royal parks to satisfy his passion for bunting, which at last cost him his life. He used to say: "The bread of Christ is rich; the kings have given to the Church one-half of its income: why should I not try to win it back?" He kept the see of Canterbury vacant for nearly four years (1089–1093). At last he yielded, under the influence of a severe sickness, to the pressure of the better class of bishops and noblemen, and elected Anselm, who was then in England, and well known as a profound theologian and saintly character. A greater contrast can scarcely be imagined. While William Rufus delighted in witnessing the tortures of innocent men and animals, Anselm was singularly tenderhearted: he saved the life of a hare which was chased by the hunters and had sought protection under his horse; he saw a worthy object for prayer in the sufferings of a bird tortured by a thoughtless child.105 Yet, with all his gentleness, he could be firm and unyielding in the defence of truth and righteousness. The primacy was forced upon Anselm in spite of his remonstrance. He foresaw a hard struggle.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  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 be persuaded to accept a system of rewards and punishments; Pascal would have asked why anyone should suppose posterity likely to deliver, in our terms, a rational judgment. Voltaire was careful never to entrench himself in such an exposed position. As a matter of fact, it is exceptionally difficult to determine what Voltaire’s credal position really was. Some of his statements appear both definite and emphatic: ‘I believe in God, not the god of the mystics and the theologians but the god of nature, the great geometrician, the architect of the universe, the prime mover, unalterable, transcendental, everlasting.’ Voltaire lived to an immense age and wrote prodigiously at all times; but his real convictions are not necessarily reflected in anything he wrote on a particular occasion, or in a particular context, or at a particular time. It is an astonishing fact that, for quite different reasons, the inner convictions of both Pascal and Voltaire, the two most influential thinkers on the Continent after Erasmus, remain mysterious.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

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

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

  In Scotland, the state of the clergy in pre-Reformation times was probably as low as in any other part of Western Europe.1147 John IV.’s bastard son was appointed bishop of St. Andrews at 16 and the illegitimate sons of James V., 1513–1542, held the five abbeys of Holyrood, Kelso, St. Andrews, Melrose and Coldingham. Bishops lived openly in concubinage and married their daughters into the ranks of the nobility. In the marriage document, certifying the nuptials of Cardinal Beaton’s eldest daughter to the Earl of Crawford, 1546, the cardinal called her his child. On the night of his murder, he is said to have been with his favorite mistress, Marion Ogilvie. Side by side with the decline of the monastic institutions, there prevailed among the monks of the 15th century a most exaggerated notion of the sanctifying influence of the monastic vow. According to Luther, the monks of his day recognized two grades of Christians, the perfect and the imperfect. To the former the monastics belonged. Their vow was regarded as a second baptism which cleared those who received it from all stain, restored them to the divine image and put them in a class with the angels. Luther was encouraged by his superiors to feel, after he had taken the vow, that he was as pure as a child. This second regeneration had been taught by St. Bernard and Thomas Aquinas. Thomas said that it may with reason be affirmed that any one "entering religion," that is, taking the monastic vow, thereby received remission of sins.1148 § 74. Preaching. The two leading preachers of Europe during the last 50 years of the Middle Ages were Jerome Savonarola of Florence and John Geiler of Strassburg. Early in the 15th century, Gerson was led by the ignorance of the clergy to recommend a reduction of preaching,1149 but in the period just before the Reformation there was a noticeable revival of the practice of preaching in Germany and a movement in that direction was felt in England. Erasmus, as a cosmopolitan scholar made an appeal for the function of the pulpit, which went to all portions of Western Europe.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  He thought it was not God’s desire or intention to illuminate the whole in this life. Such agnosticism was abhorrent to the Church shaped by St Augustine, and organized by Gregory VII and Innocent III, to whom the extension of definition and the reinforcement of authority was the only criterion of growth and progress. It was abhorrent to the papacy; but it was also uncongenial to the Protestant reformers. At bottom, Erasmus believed in a moral reform, pure and simple: if the moral spirit of the Church were transformed and illuminated, then all the problems of Christendom, institutional and even doctrinal, would solve themselves in turn; but the Church, in St Paul’s word, had to become a ‘new man’ again first. To Luther, a moral reform was equally urgent. But it would prove meaningless and transitory unless it were able to operate within the context of institutional change and drastic doctrinal corrections. Indeed, moral reform was not only useless but perhaps worse than useless unless we got the theological equations right. We had first to understand how man justified himself to God, and this was a theological problem. The need was not to simplify doctrine, but to get it right – and that meant not less definition, but more. 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.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  (This was a common illusion, based entirely on wishful-thinking, among German clergy of all sects.) Some bishops went further: Shreiber of Berlin dissociated himself from the Mainz condemnation, and when an attempt was made at Fulda in August 1931 to get a unanimous condemnation of Nazism by all the Catholic bishops, the resolution was voted down. The fact is that most of the bishops were monarchists. They hated liberalism and democracy much more than they hated Hitler. So an ambiguous statement went through instead; worse, on this as on other occasions, it was accompanied by fervent balancing assertions of German patriotism, and by rabid complaints at Germany’s unfair treatment and sufferings, so that the net effect of the declaration was to help the Nazis, and incline Catholic voters to support them. By trying to trump Hitler’s patriotic ace, the Catholic bishops played straight into his hands, and thus encouraged the faithful to give him their votes. Moreover, once Hitler attained power, German Catholicism dropped its ‘negative’ attitude and assumed a posture of active support. This was carried through by the bishops as early as 28 March 1933, on a firm indication from Rome (advised by Pacelli) that there would be no Vatican support for a policy of opposition. In the summer, Rome signed a concordat with Hitler, which in effect unilaterally disarmed German Catholicism as a political and social force, and signalled to rank-and-file Catholic priests and laymen that they should accept the new regime to the full. The Church accepted that only avowedly non-political Catholic societies and clubs had the right to exist in Hitler’s Germany; the rest – trades unions, political parties, discussion groups, pressure-groups of every kind – were promptly disbanded. The surrender was amazing; a century of German Catholic social activity was scrapped without a fight, and all the principles which had been passionately defended during the Kulturkampf were meekly abandoned. Moreover this was done at a time when the Nazis had already begun to demonstrate their hostility, by searching priests’ houses, forcing Catholic clubs and organizations to liquidate themselves, dismissing Catholic civil servants, confiscating diocesan property, censoring Catholic papers, and even attempting to close Catholic schools – all these actions had been undertaken before Rome signed the concordat. On 28 June 1933, over two hundred prominent Bavarian Catholics, a hundred of them priests, were arrested, and not released until the Catholic Bavarian People’s Party had agreed to dissolve itself. Pacelli’s defence of his advice to Rome to sign the concordat at all costs was that ‘a pistol had been pointed at my head’; he had to choose ‘between an agreement on their lines and the virtual elimination of the Catholic church in Germany’. But if the Catholics did not dare fight for what they had just yielded, what then would they fight for? One factor in the Catholic capitulation was undoubtedly fear of the Lutherans. For if the Catholic attitude to Hitler was apprehensive and pusillanimous, many of the Protestant clergy were enthusiastic.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  In 1880 there was much criticism of the Free Church of Scotland mission in Nyasaland, which had a pit-prison, and where a man died after receiving over two hundred lashes. Andrew Chirnside reported to the Royal Geographical Society: ‘Flogging with the whip is an everyday occurrence, three lads in one day getting upwards of 100 lashes; and it is a fact that after being flogged on several occasions, salt has been rubbed on their bleeding backs.’ He claimed he had seen a man executed without trial. In 1883 there was a similar case in Nigeria where a woman died after she had been beaten and had red pepper rubbed in her wounds. These cases were rare, and caused uproar. More damaging, in the long run, was the gentle deprecation of missionary work by travellers like Mary Kingsley, whose Travels in West Africa (1897) was a huge success; she hinted that the natives were probably better if left alone, polygamy and all, and she poured scorn on missionary efforts to dress African women in the asexual ‘Mother Hubbard’. In general, though, missionaries were held in high esteem, and reporting on their work was almost universally favourable. The pattern of hero-worship was set by the Livingstone legend, and in the late nineteenth century they provided a new type of hero for European, and still more American, society. Their competitors for fame, imperialists and business tycoons, had their opponents; but to all except a tiny minority, the missionaries seemed harmless as well as valiant. Biographies of well-known missionaries sold in large editions, and formed a special department of literature. S. W. Partridge, the leading performer in the field, wrote no less than thirty-six; and they often had children’s editions. For the Catholics, the missionary became a new type of saint, and even the Protestants indulged in hagiography. There were children’s games, such as The African Picture Game ; What Next?, which had thirty-six cards, four series of nine each devoted to famous missionaries; A Missionary Tour of India, like snakes and ladders; Missionary Outpost, ‘an instructive round-game for children’; missionary jigsaws and painting-books, and, for adults, Missionary Lotto. In Catholic countries there were elaborate money-raising schemes, run by convent schools, by which schoolgirls could buy stamps and ‘adopt’ African orphans. The climax of missionary expectations coincided with the climax of European imperialism, and it was very widely supposed that the entire world would be Christianized in the process of being westernized – that is, incorporated politically, economically, or at any rate culturally, in a system which was still wholly identified with Christendom. It is this optimistic background of global predominance which helps to explain the triumphalism of the age. For it is important to realize that there were two kinds of triumphalism.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Nor was this odd. Despite the attempts of both Protestant and Catholic clergy to delude themselves, Hitler was not a Christian, and most of the members of his movement were avowedly anti-Christian. Of course Hitler was sometimes deceptive. He never officially left the Church; he sometimes referred to ‘providence’ in his speeches, and he attended church several times in his first years of power. In the 1920s he told Ludendorf that he had to conceal his hatred of Catholicism, because he needed the Bavarian Catholic vote as much as he needed the Prussian Protestants – ‘the rest can come later’. His party programme was deliberately ambiguous: ‘We demand freedom for all religious denominations in the state so far as they are not a danger to it and do not militate against the customs and morality of the German race’. These careful qualifications ought to have been enough to have alerted any intelligent Christian. Yet the belief persisted, especially among Protestants, that Hitler was a very pious man. They accepted his smooth assurances when he dissociated himself, or if convenient the movement, from the writings of his men – thus he pointed out that Rosenberg’s anti-Christian tract, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, which the Catholics put on the Index, was a personal view, not official party policy. In fact he hated Christianity and showed a justified contempt for its German practitioners. Shortly after assuming power, he told Hermann Rauschnig that he intended to stamp out Christianity in Germany ‘root and branch’. ‘One is either a Christian or a German. You can’t be both.’ He thought the method might be to ‘leave it to rot like a gangrenous limb’. Again: ‘Do you really believe the masses will ever be Christian again? Nonsense. Never again. The tale is finished . . . but we can hasten matters. The parsons will be made to dig their own graves. They will betray their God to us. They will betray anything for the sake of their miserable little jobs and incomes.’ This harsh judgment comes close to the truth. Neither the Evangelical nor the Catholic Church ever condemned the Nazi regime. Yet the Nazis as a whole did not even go through the motions (as Hitler did at first) of pretending to be Christians. They fiercely rejected accusations that they were atheists. Himmler declared that atheism would not be tolerated in the ranks of the SS. They claimed, rather, to believe in the ‘religion of the blood’. They were in the millenarian tradition, and had something in common with the experimental pseudo-religions of the 1790s in revolutionary France, but with an added racialist content. Like the revolutionary cults, they tried to develop a liturgy.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  These outrages occur in the towns; it is worse in the country.’ He said that in rural areas, pagan shrines were seized by the Church, declared ‘sacred’ and the attached land appropriated by monks – a charge confirmed by the pagan historian Zosimus. The pagan priests lost their privileges in 396, and further laws attached their tax-incomes to the army and transferred the remaining property to the State. Little attempt was made by the authorities to protect pagan institutions from militant Christians, though very occasionally the pagans retaliated themselves. Sozomen recounts an incident at Aulon when Marcellus, the violently iconoclastic Bishop of Apamea, led a band of soldiers and gladiators in an attack on the local temple. ‘He kept out of range of the arrows, for his gout prevented him from fighting, pursuing or fleeing. While the soldiers were attacking the temple, some of the pagans discovered he was alone, seized him, and burned him alive.’ In 391 another militant bishop, Theophilus of Alexandria, led a massed attack on the Serapeum, or Temple of Serapis, in Alexandria, said to be the largest place of worship in the world. This complex contained an immense wooden statue of the god, which threatened earthquakes if anyone touched it. According to Theodoret’s Ecclesiastical History, ‘The bishop looked on these tales as the drivel of drunken hags, and sneering at the lifeless monster’s vast bulk, told a man with an axe to strike it. . . . Serapis’s head was cut off, and out ran a multitude of mice. It was broken into small pieces and burnt, but the head was carried through the town, in mockery of those who worshipped it.’ Also brought to light were a number of weird priestly tricks, such as hollow statues of wood or brass, with hidden apertures from which priests had whispered oracles or maledictions. These seem to have born a striking resemblance to the various frauds, such as the Boxley Rood, later brought to light during the first great wave of iconoclasm at the Reformation. The destruction of the pagan temples indeed adumbrated many of the attitudes on both sides produced by the puritan campaign against sixteenth-century Christian ‘idolatry’. The weakness of paganism, in fact, was its dependence on external show and, among its upper-class defenders, on a purely aesthetic approach to religious practice. Third-century pagan intellectuals, such as Plotinus and his biographer Porphyry were unable, like the earlier critic Celsus, to attack Christianity as a barbarous superstition, unworthy of educated men. They wrote on the defensive, conceding much of the Christian case. The inability of pagan thinkers to supply a credible alternative to what was now the dominant religious group in the empire completely undermined Julian’s attempt to reimpose paganism by state power in the 360s. The attempt ended with his early death in battle, a misfortune seen naturally as a judgment on his cause and we cannot know how successful perseverance might have proved.