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 Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988)

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

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

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

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

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

• From The Decameron (1353)

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

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

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

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

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

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

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

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

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

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

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

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  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. The Nazi publishing house put out a pamphlet describing ‘forms of celebrations of a liturgical character which shall be valid for centuries.’ The main service consisted of ‘a solemn address of 15–20 minutes in poetical Language’, a ‘confession of faith recited by the congregation’, then the ‘hymn of duty’; the ceremony closed with a salute to the Führer and one verse of each of the national anthems. The Nazi creed, used for instance at harvest festivals, ran: ‘I believe in the land of the Germans, in a life of service to this land; I believe in the revelation of the divine creative power and the pure blood shed in war and peace by the sons of the German national community, buried in the soil thereby sanctified, risen, and living in all for whom it is immolated. I believe in an eternal life on earth of this blood that was poured out and rose again in all who have recognised the meaning of the sacrifice and are ready to submit to them . . . Thus I believe in an eternal God, an eternal Germany, and an eternal life.’

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  asserted as dogmatic fact what historical scholarship had already in 1893 demonstrated to be in great part a matter of argument and speculation. The truth is that very few people of importance in the Vatican (or, often, in national hierarchies) knew enough to understand the premises and methodology of modern biblical exegesis and its related disciplines. Like the theologians Erasmus despised, they condemned from ignorance. Those few who did understand were already – eo ipso, as it were – suspect. Cardinal Meigan summed it up neatly in correspondence with the Abbé Alfred Loisy of the Paris Catholic Institute: ‘Rome has never understood anything about these questions. The whole of the Catholic clergy are profoundly ignorant about the matter. In trying to draw them out of their ignorance one runs grave risks, for our theologians are ferocious.’ The words might have been uttered by Erasmus himself; in this respect Rome seemed to have learned nothing in 400 years. Leo had not followed up his 1893 warning by systematic persecution. Pius X did. There were many victims, great and small. Indeed virtually everyone engaged in biblical studies, unless they were purely mechanical, came under suspicion during this pontificate. One victim was Albert Lagrange, the Dominican founder of the Biblical Study Centre in Jerusalem. He was forced to make a full submission to Pius. Another was Louis Duchesne, whose History of the Early Church was condemned; he, too, was driven to abject submission. More combative was Loisy, a Hebrew and Assyrian scholar. His Gospel and the Church (a reply to What is Christianity? by the great Protestant church historian Adolph von Harnack) led to no less than five of his works being placed on the Index in 1903; unwilling to recant, he was excommunicated by Pius in 1908. Pius was determined to prevent the Catholic clergy from being contaminated by the errors, as he saw them, of the historical and physical sciences. In his very first enyclical, E Supremi Apostolatus Cathedra, he promised: ‘We will take the greatest care to safeguard our clergy from being caught up in the snares of modern scientific thought – a science which does not breathe the truths of Christ, but by its cunning and subtle arguments defiles the mind of the people with the errors of Rationalism and semi-Rationalism.’ Hence the hunt did not stop at the biblical scholars: the net was spread pretty wide. Father George Tyrrell, an Irish convert, Jesuit and Thomist scholar, was attacked because he upheld ‘the right of each age to adjust the historico-philosophical expression of Christianity to contemporary certainties, and thus to put an end to this utterly needless conflict between faith and science which is a mere theological bogey’. Tyrrell was pushed out

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  by bodyguards, not because he feared anyone but to inspire fear in others. He oppressed widows, evicted minors, distributed other people’s patrimonies, broke up marriages, saw to the sale of innocent persons’ properties, and took a share of the proceeds while the owners wept.’ Of course this portrait can be interpreted in two ways: of a man perpetrating injustices, or seeking to correct them. Religious struggle, indeed, throws an illuminating light on social and economic tensions in the fourth-century Roman empire. One characteristic of the Donatist church was the ability and willingness of its bishops and priests to use Punic as well as Latin. They had vernacular services; there may even have been vernacular translations of the scriptures. The political and economic posture was anti-Roman, and the cultural stand, to some extent, was anti-Latin. The surviving writings on the Donatist controversy cast, as it were, a periodic searchlight on the North African theatre; elsewhere, we know much less but we sometimes get hints of similar patterns of conflict and stress. It was a feature of the Montanists, for instance, that they spoke the local, often tribal, language or patois of the areas where they operated; they did so, for instance, in Phrygia. It was one reason for their undoubted successes. How far nonconformist Christianity worked in conjunction with local tribalism and nationalism is hard to determine and harder still to prove it was deliberate and systematic. But the probability is that almost from earliest times Christian groups over widely scattered parts of the empire had become identified or had identified themselves with local aspirations and grievances. This would help to explain the earlier persecutions, always conducted purely at local level. It would also help to explain the anxiety of orthodox Christianity to disengage itself from this kind of religious adventurism – the Montanists being an outstanding example but not the only one. From the second century the Catholic Church, as it increasingly called itself, stressed its universality, its linguistic and cultural uniformity, its geographical and racial transcendance – in short, its identity of aims with the empire. These are the themes of most Catholic propagandists of the Roman school, especially in the third century. In due course, the orthodox Church received its reward: imperial recognition, beneficence and support against its enemies. For, and this is the key point, were not the enemies of the Catholic Church the enemies of empire even before the alliance was forged? From the antinomian perspective of Julian we again get an insight into the truth. In a letter defending his religious policy of withdrawing state military support from the orthodox brand of Christianity, he points out

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  monarchs (in Austria for instance) in the eighteenth century. The monastic system, and its urban adaptations, had played an enormously important role from the sixth to the twelfth centuries; but it never recovered its pristine spirit until after radical reformation, which in some Catholic countries was delayed until the nineteenth century; and even then it survived only on a much reduced scale, as a small minority movement within the more conservative Christian communities. As a major element in western society and economy it had had its day, like, for instance, domaine farming and chain-mail armour. What must strike the historian as curious is that neither western nor eastern Christianity developed missionary orders. Until the sixteenth century, Christian enthusiasm, which took so many other forms, was never institutionally directed into this channel. Christianity remained a universalist religion. But its proselytizing spirit expressed itself throughout the Middle Ages in various forms of violence. The crusades were not missionary ventures but wars of conquest and primitive experiments in colonization; and the only specific Christian institutions they produced, the three knightly orders, were military. This stress on violence was particularly marked in the West. Eastern Christians tended to follow the teachings of St Basil, who regarded war as shameful. This was in the original Christian tradition: violence was abhorrent to the early Christians, who preferred death to resistance; and Paul, attempting to interpret Christ, did not even try to construct a case for the legitimate use of force. Again, it was St Augustine who gave western Christianity the fatal twist in this direction. As always, in his deep pessimism, he was concerned to take society as he found it and attempt to reconcile its vices with Christian endeavour. Men fought; had always fought; therefore war had a place in the Christian pattern of behaviour, to be determined by the moral theologians. In Augustine’s view, war might always be waged, provided it was done so by the command of God. This formulation of the problem was doubly dangerous. Not only did it allow the existence of the ‘just’ war, which became a commonplace of Christian moral theology; but it discredited the pacifist, whose refusal to fight a war defined as ‘just’ by the ecclesiastical authorities became a defiance of divine commands. Thus the modern imprisonment of the conscientous objector is deeply rooted in standard Christian dogma. So is the anomaly of two Christian states each fighting a ‘just’ war against each other. What made the Augustinian teaching even more corrupting was the association in his mind between ‘war by divine command’

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  which he had no sympathy or understanding. His initial reaction to the Arian dispute was that it was about a trifle – ‘a point of discussion . . . suggested by the contentious spirit fostered by misused leisure... merely an intellectual exercise.’ He thought the matter ‘too sublime and abstruse’ to be settled with certainty, or, if settled, above the heads of most people. The issue was ‘small and very insignificant’. He urged both sides to be ‘sparing of words’ and to ‘exhibit an equal degree of forbearance and receive the advice which your fellow-servant righteously gives.’ It was in this spirit that Constantine (and the great majority of his successors) approached his role in Church politics. He was to be a mediator, a role he was good at and enjoyed. From Eusebius’s descriptions of Constantine presiding at the Council of Nicea in 325 and at other great ecclesiastical gatherings we see the emperor in his element, arranging elaborate ceremony, dramatic entrances and processions and splendid services. He brought his skill in public relations to the management of Church affairs. It was a far cry from the days of the ‘pillars’ and the Council of Jerusalem. Constantine, in fact, may be said to have created the décor and ritual of Christian conciliar practice. He tried also to set the tone of debate: eirenic, conciliatory, urbane. It was he who insisted, as a formula for compromise, the insertion of the phrase ‘consubstantial with the father’ in the credal agreement. ‘He advised all present to agree to it,’ says Eusebius, ‘and to subscribe its articles and assent to them, with the insertion of the single word “consubstantial” which, moreover, he interpreted himself.’ Constantine, in accordance with the interests of the State, was anxious to avoid a row if possible and, if one occurred, to look for an honourable solution. Thus, although at Nicea he arranged for an overwhelming majority of the bishops to condemn certain specific beliefs of Arius and his followers, he later showed himself very eager to have Arius restored, on the basis of a confession of faith; again, in 321, to avoid a wrangle with the Donatists over the church he had built at Constantine (Cirta), which they occupied and the orthodox claimed, he gave the latter the State customs house as a substitute. Constantine, in brief, put order and stability, the rule of law, before any other religious consideration. But when dissent in his view challenged the rule of law he acted quite ruthlessly. In 316 he thought it necessary to persecute the Donatists, and did so; one Donatist sermon complained that ‘local judges were imperatively ordered to act and put the secular power in motion; buildings were surrounded by troops; our wealthy followers were threatened with proscription, the sacraments were defiled, a mob of heathen were unleashed on

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  journalism, heating engineering, public health, acting, diesel engines, aeronautics, celestial navigation, radio engineering, and so forth. His encyclicals and published letters and speeches covered a vast range of subjects, usually in considerable technical detail. One of his last encyclicals, Miranda prorsus (1957), dealt with the movies, radio and TV, and laid down, for instance, the moral duties of a news announcer; the way in which regional censorship offices should be set up and operated; the moral responsibilities of cinema managers, distributors and actors; the duty of bishops to rebuke erring Catholic movie directors and producers, and if necessary to impose appropriate sanctions on them; the obligation of Catholic members of festival juries to vote for ‘morally praiseworthy’ movies, and even the moral criteria by which posters advertising movies were to be determined. In such ways Pius came into dogmatic contact, as it were, with an unnumbered host of Catholics throughout the world. Yet the confrontation was impersonal. Carried high on his Sedia Gestatoria – a form of monarchical transport inherited from imperial Rome – amid the cheering crowds, he remained a solitary figure, Montalembert’s ‘little idol in the Vatican’. Pius, wrote Guiseppe Dalla Torre, former editor of L’Osservatore Romano, ‘separated himself from direct contact with life, though not, unfortunately, from people who abused his confidence’. The keynote of his pontificate was isolation. The isolation was not merely personal. It was credal and political. Pius was a Tridentine pope. To him, the Greek Orthodox were simply schismatics, and the Protestants heretics. There was nothing more to be said or discussed. He was not interested in the ecumenical movement. The Catholic Church already was ecumenical in itself. It could not change, because it was right and always had been right. Indeed, fundamental change in the Catholic Church was to be avoided at all costs. Motion was dangerous: experience showed it invariably led in the direction of evil. Catholicism must stay exactly where it was: it was for the heretics and schismatics to submit as, in God’s good time, they surely would. As for the world, Pius saw no reason to alter the analysis set out in his first encyclical. He learnt nothing from the war, or the phenomenon of the Nazis. He had made no mistakes. On the contrary: the war confirmed his initial judgment. International society, by ignoring the Vicar of Christ, was heading for disaster. The war had merely been a further stage of the descent into the abyss. Germany had been divided; the godless Communists controlled all eastern Europe, including the Catholics of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Slovenia and Croatia – ‘the church of silence’. This was the greatest

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  prelate, helping to run an empire. His creative mind leapt ahead to draw conclusions and outline possibilities. In Milan the Church was already behaving like an international organization; it would soon be universal. It was already coextensive with the empire; it would ultimately be coextensive with humanity, and thus impervious to political change and the vicissitudes of fortune. This was God’s plan. Augustine had a historical view of human development. There were six ages: man was now living in the last, between the first and second comings of Christ, when Christianity would gradually envelop the world, as preparation for the final and seventh age. Against the background of this concept, the Donatists seemed ridiculously petty. They had grasped the seriousness of Christianity. But, by worrying about what particular bishops had done at a particular time and in a particular place, they had lost sight of the enormous, objective scale of the faith, its application to all places, times, situations. ‘The clouds roll with thunder,’ Augustine wrote, ‘that the House of the Lord shall be built throughout the earth; and these frogs sit in their marsh and croak – “We are the only Christians!”’ Moreover, the Donatists had got the wrong notion of the world. Because of their obsession with their own limited local predicament and history, they saw the world as hostile and themselves as an alternative to society. But the world was there to be captured; and Christianity was not the anti-society – it was society. Led by the elect, its duty was to transform, absorb and perfect all existing bonds of human relations, all human activities and institutions, to regularize and codify and elevate every aspect of life. Here was the germ of the medieval idea of a total society, with the church permeating everything. Was she not the Mother of All? ‘It is You,’ he wrote, ‘who make wives subject to their husbands... you set husbands over their wives; join sons to their parents by a freely-granted slavery, and set parents above their sons in a pious domination. You link brothers to each other by religious bonds tighter than blood. . . . You teach slaves to be loyal to their masters, masters to be more inclined to persuade than to punish. You link citizens to citizen, nation to nation, you bind all men together in remembrance of their first parents, not just by social bonds but by common kinship. You teach kings to rule for the benefit of their people, and warn the peoples to be subservient to their kings.’ But the idea of a total Christian society necessarily included the idea of a compulsory society. People could not choose to belong or not to belong. That included the Donatists. Augustine did not shrink from the logic of his position. Indeed, to the problem of coercing the Donatists he brought much of their own

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  provided the most important element in the local leadership. These clerics were motivated not by religious beliefs but by economic fears: they thought that reform would prevent them from holding small parishes in plurality, that the dissolved monks would be after their benefices, that the effect of the Act for First Fruits and Tenths would rob them of a year’s income, and that episcopal visitations would be far more onerous under the Reform; they also credited vague rumours that the crown was planning to seize the parish silver-plate. Their rising was not so much an effort to force the crown to reverse its religious policy as a protest against economic grievances. Indeed, when we look at Cromwell’s reports, and are thus able to see the Reformation at a local level, we find not so much a religious or ideological conflict as a complicated morass of personal feuds and grudges, jealousies, rivalries of jurisdiction, provincial contests and sheer bloody-mindedness. Sometimes criticism was provoked by dislike of Henry himself, for the nation as a whole seems to have deplored his divorce and loathed Anne Boleyn, frequently described as ‘a strong whore’. One Worcestershire suspect blamed Henry for the bad weather, and said it would never improve until ‘he were knocked or patted on the head’. A Welsh priest ‘wished to have the King upon a mountain in North Wales . . . called Snowdon Hill.... He would souse the King about the ears until he had his head soft enough.’ A Londoner said: ‘I set not a pudding by the King’s broad seal, and all his charters be not worth a rush.’ We get reports of reformers indulging in tremendous meat-eating during Lent, to annoy the Catholics; but often enough the Reformation dispute was stood on its head. Thus, in Salisbury, the ‘proud stomach’ of a reforming bishop infuriated the corporation and turned anti-clericalism, normally a chief engine of change into a conservative force. Equally, though the end of clerical celibacy was a lure successfully dangled by the reformers before many priests (a majority of the younger ones), some remained Romanists because they did not want to be forced to marry their concubines. Thus a Father Cornewell swore ‘he had set his wench by the bishop’s nose.... Let me see who dare meddle with her’; if only he would agree to marry her, he said, ‘the bishop would be contented that [I] tilted up her tail in every bush.’ The remarks reported to Cromwell seem a long way from the subject-matter of the colloquy of Regensburg, taking place at the same time. A reforming London Dominican said the new scriptural faith was worth more than ‘a whole shipload laden with friars’ girdles and a dung-cart full of monks’ cowls.’ A pro-Henry lady thought

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

  documents.—The authoritative Cath. work is Fr. Beringer: Die Ablässe, ihr Wesen u. Gebrauch, pp. 860 and 64, 13th ed., Paderb., 1906.—Also Nic. Paulus: J. Tetzel, der Ablassprediger, Mainz, 1899.—Best Prot. treatments, H. C. Lea: Hist. of Auric. Conf. and Indulgences in the Lat. Ch., 3 vols., Phil., 1896.—T. Brieger, art. Indulgenzen in Herzog, IX. 76–94, and Schaff-Herzog, V. 485 sqq. and D. Wesen d. Ablasses am Ausgange d. MA, a university address. Brieger has promised an extended treatment in book form.—Schaff: Ch. Hist., V., I. p. 729 sqq., VI. 146 sqq. § 73. The Clergy. Both in respect of morals and education the clergy, during the period following the year 1450, showed improvement over the age of the Avignon captivity and the papal schism. Clerical practice in that former age was so lo that it was impossible for it to go lower and any appearance of true religion remain. One of the healthy signs of this latter period was that, in a spirit of genuine religious devotion, Savonarola in Italy and such men in Germany as Busch, Thomas Murner, Geiler of Strassburg, Sebastian Brant and the Benedictine abbot, Trithemius, held up to condemnation, or ridicule, priestly incompetency and worldliness. The pictures, which they joined Erasmus in drawing, were dark enough. Nevertheless, the clergy both of the higher and lower grades included in its ranks many men who truly sought the well-being of the people and set an example of purity of conduct. The first cause of the low condition, for low it continued to be, was the impossible requirement of celibacy. The infraction of this rule weakened the whole moral fibre of the clerical order. A second cause is to be looked for in the seizure of the rich ecclesiastical endowments by the aristocracy as its peculiar prize and securing them for the sons of noble parentage without regard to their moral and intellectual fitness. To the evils arising from these two causes must be added the evils arising from the unblushing practice of pluralism. No help came from Rome. The episcopal residences of Toledo, Constance, Paris, Mainz, Cologne and Canterbury could not be expected to be models of domestic and religious order when the tales of Boccaccio were being paralleled in the lives of the supreme functionaries of Christendom at its centre. The grave discussions of clerical manners, carried on at the Councils of Constance and Basel, revealed the disease without providing a cure. The proposition was even made by Cardinal Zabarella and Gerson, in case further attempts to check priestly concubinage failed, to concede to the clergy the privilege of marriage.1129 In the programme for a reformation of the Church, offered by Sigismund at Basel, the concession was included and Pius II., one of the attendants on that synod, declared the reasons for restoring the right of matrimony to priests to be stronger in that day than were the reasons in a former age for forbidding it.

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

  Yet many gnostic Christians struggled with the same urgent ethical questions that preoccupied their orthodox contemporaries: Should Christians avoid marriage or embrace it? Are Christians, like Jews, commanded to “be fruitful and multiply”? What kind of relationship is possible, or desirable, between Christian men and women? When gnostic Christians asked themselves these questions, however, they often approached them differently than did their orthodox contemporaries. Instead of formulating a set of community rules, some gnostic Christians sought instead to discover and articulate—precisely through the “bizarre inventions” of gnostic myth—the internal sources of desire and action. What fascinated them was psychodynamics, or, as they might have put it, pneumato-psychodynamics: the interaction between the pneuma, the spiritual element of our nature, and the psyche, that is, the emotional and mental impulses. The Valentinian author of the Gospel of Philip, speaking in mythic language, said, for example, that death began when “the woman separated … from the man”46—that is, when Eve (the spirit) became separated from Adam (the psyche). Only when one’s psyche, or ordinary consciousness, becomes integrated with one’s spiritual nature—when Adam, reunited with Eve, “becomes complete again”47—can one achieve internal harmony and wholeness. According to this Valentinian author, only the person who has “remarried” the psyche with the spirit becomes capable of withstanding physical and emotional impulses that, unchecked, could drive him or her toward self-destruction and evil. Irenaeus was wrong, then, to suggest that gnostic Christians ignored moral issues. But they sometimes engaged them in a way that encouraged each person to explore his or her own internal experience, believing that each one could discover the spirit within. Commenting on their method, Irenaeus said sarcastically that “they imagine that, by means of their obscure interpretations, each of them has discovered a god of his own!”48 But what especially bothered Irenaeus was that gnostic Christians engaged moral issues in ways that made them seem indifferent—or worse, insubordinate—to the community ethics that the bishops sought to impose upon all believers alike. Meanwhile certain radical gnostics, far from criticizing the bishops for being too severe, criticized them instead for being too lenient. One such gnostic Christian, the author of the Testimony of Truth, sided with the ascetics and railed against both orthodox and gnostics alike who endorsed marriage and procreation and who worshiped the God who had created such impurities. This radical teacher dared to tell the story of Paradise from the serpent’s point of view, and depicted the serpent as a teacher of divine wisdom who desperately tried to get Adam and Eve to open their eyes to their creator’s true—and despicable—nature: For the serpent was wiser than any of the animals that were in Paradise.… But the creator cursed the serpent, and called him devil. And he said, “Behold, Adam has become like one of us, knowing evil and good.”49

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

  Clement’s account is amply corroborated by the frescoes discovered at Pompeii and the annals of the court historian Suetonius, who noted, for example, that the emperor Tiberius kept in his bedroom a painting of Juno performing fellatio on Jupiter.43 Clement’s attack upon Jupiter thinly veiled his contempt for some of the rulers themselves: Is Jupiter, then, the good, the prophetic, the patron of hospitality, the protector of supplicants, the avenger of wrongs? No: he is instead unjust, the violator of right and law, the impious, the inhuman, the violent, the seducer, the adulterer, the incestuous … so given to sexual pleasures as to lust after everyone, and to indulge his lust upon everyone.44 Clement also attacked the cult that the emperor Hadrian had established in Clement’s native city of Alexandria to honor his dead lover, the boy Antinous: Another new deity was added to the number with great religious pomp in Egypt, and nearby Greece as well, by the King of the Romans, who deified Antinous, whom he loved as Jupiter loved Ganymede, and whose beauty was extremely rare; for lust is not easy to restrain, being devoid of fear, as it now is; and people observe the “Sacred Nights of Antinous,” the shameful nature of which the lover who spent them with him knew. Why count him among the gods—a boy honored because of impurity?… And why should you expand upon his beauty? Beauty damaged by corruption is horrible.… Now the grave of the prostituted boy is the temple of Antinous!45 Such things happen, Clement concluded, when people worship as gods “those who themselves are only human—and often the worst of humankind!” When Justin wrote his open letter to Hadrian’s son and grandsons, some of the most distinguished emperors in Roman history, he initially addressed them respectfully, as we have seen, as “fellow philosophers and lovers of learning.” But as soon as he brought up the treatment of Christians, Justin showed that he saw even Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius as men dedicated to perpetuating the “violence and tyranny” of a system that treated Christians as capital criminals for refusing to worship demons. Justin darkly hinted that these emperors, too, for all their personal virtues and public rhetoric, were actually no better than a band of criminals—“robbers in a desert”46—who rule by force, not justice. Justin warned Antoninus, Marcus, and Commodus to “be on your guard, lest the demons whom we have been attacking deceive you, and distract you from reading and understanding what we say,” for, Justin told the rulers of the world, “these demons strive to keep you as their slaves!”47