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

  In almost every work that he wrote, Erasmus, in a vein of satire or in serious statement, inveighed against the hypocritical pretension of the monkery of his time and against the uselessness of hollow religious rites. In his edition of the New Testament, he frequently returns to these subjects. For example, in a note on Matt. 19:12 he speaks of the priests "who are permitted to fornicate and may freely keep concubines but not have a wife."1086 Nowhere is his satire more keen on the clergy than in the Praise of Folly. In this most readable book, Folly represented as a female, delivers an oration to an audience of all classes and conditions and is most explicit and elaborate when she discourses on the priests, monks, theologians and the pope. After declaring with consummate irony that of all classes the theologians were the least dependent upon her, Folly proceeds to exhibit them as able to give the most exquisite solutions for the most perplexing questions, how in the wafer accidents may subsist without a subject, how long a time it required for the Saviour to be conceived in the Virgin’s womb, whether God might as easily have become a woman, a devil, a beast, an herb or a stone as a man. In view of such wonderful metaphysics, the Apostles themselves would have needed a new illuminating spirit could they have lived again. As for the monks, whose name signifies solitude, they were to be found in every street and alley. They were most precise about their girdles and hoods and the cut of their crowns, yet they easily provoked quarrels, and at last they would have to search for a new heaven, for entrance would be barred them to the old heaven prepared for such as are true of heart. As for the pope, Luther’s language never pictured more distinctly the world-wide gulf between what the successor of St. Peter should be and really was, than did the biting sentences of Erasmus. Most liberal, he said, were the popes with the weapons of the Spirit,—interdicts, greater and lesser excommunications, roaring bulls and the like,—which they launch forth with unrestrained vehemence when the authority of St. Peter’s chair is attacked. These are they who by their lusts and wickedness grieve the Holy Spirit and make their Saviour’s wounds to bleed afresh.1087 In the Enchiridion, he says, "Apostle, pastor and bishop" are names of duties not of government, and papa, pope, and abbas, abbot, are titles of love. The sale of indulgences, saint worship and other mediaeval abuses came in for Erasmus’ poignant thrusts.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  the Moslem world. In general, the effect of the crusades was to undermine the intellectual content of Islam, to destroy the chances of peaceful adjustment to Christianity, and to make the Moslems far less tolerant: crusading fossilized Islam into a fanatic posture. They also did incalculable damage to the eastern churches, whether Orthodox or Monophysite. One of the first acts of the crusaders after the taking of Jerusalem was to expel the Orthodox and members of other non-Latin Christian sects, and Orthodox priests were tortured to force them to reveal the fragments of the True Cross. No attempt was made to reach an accommodation with Christians who did not acknowledge Rome fully. They lost their churches and their property, they were displaced from their bishoprics and patriarchates, and at best they were tolerated; even the Maronite Christians, who were in communion with Rome, were treated as second-class citizens in the states the Latins created in the twelfth century. All the Christians clergy of any importance were recruited direct from the West. Even among the Latins, native birth was a bar to clerical promotion, chiefly because none except elementary schools were established, and schools run by non-Latin sects were not acknowledged. The only exception was William, Bishop of Tyre, the historian. He got a bishopric despite the fact he was born in Outremer, as the crusader states were called; but this was because he had studied in France and Italy for twenty years. Above all, no attempt was made to convert the Moslems. The Latin Christians governed a conquered population like a colonialist élite. In one sense, the experiment disproves the theory that medieval Christianity was ruined by clericalism. For the Latin states, which were projections of the total Christian society across the seas, were run by laymen. There were, at any one time, about 300 Latin clerks there, but though well-endowed they had little power and were completely under the control of the lay lords. The great mistakes were all made by laymen. But the attitude of the Church did not help to establish a viable Latin society out in the East. Laymen were far more willing than clerics to adopt eastern customs and dress, to learn the language, and to integrate themselves with the natives. It was the popes who forbade Christian knights to marry Moslems, even if the children were brought up Latin Christians. This was fatal in the end. The chief reason why the crusaders failed to expand in the twelfth century, and had their kingdom reduced to an insignificant rump in the thirteenth, was that there were too few of them. In the first decade of the crusades, 1095–1105, about 100,000 people of all ages, classes and sexes went to the Holy Land; ten years

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  depriving the nine men, denouncing them as ‘sons of darkness’ and ‘true schismatics’, and promptly called a council of his own, the Fifth Lateran of 1512. This council, the last of the undivided Church, was a mere manoeuvre and contemporaries saw it as such; it was not designed to carry through reforms; indeed it concentrated on the arid topic, dear to old-fashioned theologians, of the exact status of the soul between the death of the body and the Last Judgment. But it was marked by the signature of a new concordat with France which gave the French monarchy virtually everything it asked for in terms of controlling the French Church, made it possible for the French crown to carry through its own reforms, if it wished, and thus relaxed pressure on the papacy from France. Julius, in fact, had saved himself by a bilateral deal, and at the expense of the Church as a whole. But the deal was expensive, and added to the papacy’s already pressing financial problems. Shortage of money tends to produce constitutional crises in all states: the papacy was no exception. Its revenue at this time was half a million ducats, less than half of Venice’s. The most upright popes tended to be those most in debt. Honesty came dear: reform cost money. This was something reformers did not understand. Alexander VI, the worst of the popes, kept himself solvent; most of his immediate predecessors and successors were desperate. But it was universally assumed that the popes were very rich – we must never underestimate the powerful effect on history of ignorance of state secrets. In 1517, Archbishop Albert of Mainz, the twenty-seven- year-old brother of the Elector of Brandenberg, had purchased from Rome a number of very expensive dispensations to hold sees in plurality; and to pay for them, he engaged in another deal with Rome to proclaim throughout Germany an indulgence for the building of St Peter’s. The archbishop had a permanent and lucrative exhibition of relics, some 9,000 items, which included whole bodies of saints, a bone of Isaac, manna from the wilderness, a bit of Moses’s burning bush, a jar from Cana (with actual wine in it), a bit of the crown of thorns, and one of the stones that killed St Stephen. But the Elector of nearby Saxony, Frederick the Wise, also had his money- raising collection of relics, some 17,433 fragments of bones, and the entire body of one of the Holy Innocents. He regarded the archbishop’s show, and his sale of indulgences, as a rival, and he wanted to stop the export of bullion. Hence he forbade the sale in his territories, and was furious when some of the subjects simply crossed the border to buy them. It was at this point that Luther, a thirty-four-year-old Augustinian monk, intervened by nailing his ‘Ninety-five theses against Indulgences’

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  witchcraft mania at Salem in 1692, and weakened by the powerful backlash of public remorse which followed it. And the merchant element of Boston, who loathed the strict interpretation of the scriptures, especially the commercial restrictions derived from the Pentateuch, published a ‘manifesto’ in 1699 for a new Church ‘on broad and catholick’ lines, which accorded full status to any who professed Christian belief. The liberal elements captured Harvard College in 1707, and founded Yale at New Haven nine years later. To the Calvinist élite, these hammerblows threatened to destroy their theory that they had been appointed a chosen people to do divine work in America. In 1702 Cotton Mather published his Magnalia Christi Americana, documenting ‘Christ’s great deeds in America’ and was forced to conclude: ‘Religion brought forth prosperity, and the daughter destroyed the mother. . . . There is danger lest the enchantments of this world make them forget their errand into the wilderness.’ But by this time the original Calvinist monopoly in New England had gone for good. The South, too, which had had an Anglican confession but a Puritan ethic and Church-State assumptions, had surrendered to diversity and economics. Tobacco and negro labour, rather than biblical institutionalism, became the determining factors. In 1667 Virginia laid down that ‘Baptism doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage and freedom.’ In 1731 George Berkeley said that American slaveholders held blacks in ‘an irrational contempt . . . as creatures of another species, who had no right to be instructed or admitted to the sacraments’. Religious belief had to be adjusted to fit social and economic realities, rather than vice versa. As Commissary James Blair reported in 1743: ‘From being an instrument of wealth, [slavery] has become a moulding power, leaving it a vexed question which controlled society most, the African slave or his master.’ Yet the collapse of the total Christian society did not lead to a growth of secularism. In America as a whole, religion continued to be the dynamic of society and history. The difference was that Christianity now became a voluntary movement, or series of movements, rather than a compulsory framework. And it was these movements which determined the shape of America’s constitutional and social development. The multiplicity of America’s religious structure, and the continuance of the millenarian ideal, gave revivalism the opportunity to act as a unifying, national force. Moreover, the establishment of the voluntary principle led to an identification, in the minds of all religious groups, of Christian enthusiasm with political liberty. As John Adams put it in 1765, in his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law:

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

  Leo’s father, Lorenzo, said of his three sons that Piero was a fool, Giuliano was good and Giovanni shrewd. The last characterization was true to the facts. Leo X. was shrewd, the shrewdness being of the kind that succeeds in getting temporary personal gain, even though it be by the sacrifice of high and accessible ends. His amiability and polish of manners made him friends and secured for him the tiara. He was not altogether a degenerate personality like Alexander VI., capable of all wickedness. But his outlook never went beyond his own pleasures. The Vatican was the most luxurious court in Europe; it performed no moral service for the world. The love of art with Leo was the love of color, of outline, of beauty such as a Greek might have had, not a taste controlled by regard for spiritual grace and aims. In his treatment of the European states and the Italian cities, his diplomacy was marked by dissimulation as despicable as any that was practised by secular courts. Without a scruple be could solemnly make at the same moment contradictory pledges. Perfidy seemed to be as natural to him as breath.874 At the same time, Leo followed the rubrics of religion. He fasted, so it is reported, three times a week, abstained from meat on Wednesday and Friday, daily read his Breviary and was accustomed before mass to seek absolution from his confessor. But he was without sanctity, without deep religious conviction. The issues of godliness had no appreciable effect upon him in the regulation of his habits. Even in his patronage of art and culture, he forgot or ignored Ariosto, Machiavelli, Guicciardini and Erasmus. What a noble substitution it would have been, if these men had found welcome in the Vatican, and the jesters and buffoons and gormandizers been relegated to their proper place! The high-priest of the Christian world is not to be judged in the same terms we would apply to a worldly prince ruling in the closing years of the Middle Ages. The Vatican, Leo turned into a house of revelling and frivolity, the place of all others where the step and the voice of the man of God should have been heard. The Apostle, whom he had been taught to regard as his spiritual ancestor, accomplished his mission by readiness to undergo, if necessary, martyrdom. Leo despoiled his high office of its sacredness and prostituted it into a vehicle of his own carnal propensities. Had he followed the advice of his princely father, man of the world though he was, Leo X. would have escaped some of the reprobation which attaches to his name.

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

  William was a despot in Church and State, and rather grew harder and more reckless of human suffering in his later years. His will was the law of the land. Freeman places him both "among the greatest of men" and "among the worst of men."99 His military genius and statesmanship are undoubted; but he was utterly unscrupulous in the choice of means. He had a strong sense of religion and reverence for the Church, and was liberal to her ministers; he did not, like his son, keep the benefices vacant and rob her revenues; he did not practise simony, and, so far, he fell in with the Hildebrandian reform.100 But he firmly insisted on the right of investiture. He declared that he would not allow a single bishop’s staff to pass out of his hands. He held his own even against Hildebrand. He felt that he owed his crown only to God and to his own sword. He was willing to pay Peter’s pence to the pope as alms, but not as tribute, and refused to swear allegiance to Gregory VII. He made full use of the right of a victor. He subjected the estates of the Church to the same feudal obligations as other lands. He plundered religious houses. He deposed Archbishop Stigand and other Saxon bishops to make room for Norman favorites, who did not even understand the language of the people. These changes were not begun till 1070, when Stigand was tried before the papal legates who had placed the crown on William’s head. The main charges were simony and that he had received the pall from the usurping pope, Benedict X. William left only one Englishman, the simple-minded Wulfstan of Worcester, in possession of his see. He gradually extended the same system to abbacies and lower dignities. He allowed no synod to convene and legislate without his previous permission and subsequent confirmation of its decrees, no pope to be acknowledged in England without his will, no papal letters to be received and published without his consent. No ecclesiastic was to leave the kingdom without his permission, and bishops were forbidden to excommunicate a noble for adultery or any capital crime without the previous assent of the king. In these ways the power of the clergy was limited, and a check put upon the supremacy of Rome over the English Church. Lanfranc seems to have fully sympathized with these measures. For after the death of Alexander II., who had been his pupil at Bec, he seems to have treated the popes, especially Gregory VII., coolly. Gregory wrote him several letters threatening him with suspension and for his absence from the synods which were convening in Rome.101 On the other hand, the law was passed in William’s reign remanding ecclesiastical suits to separate tribunals,102 a law which afterwards gave occasion for much contention. The bishops’ court henceforth used the canon law instead of the common English law used in the shire courts.

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

  The cardinal-abbot of Monte Cassino was elected and consecrated as Stephen IX. (X.), Aug. 3, 1057, by the clergy and people of Rome, without their consulting the German court; but he died in the following year, March 29, 1058. In the meantime a great change had taken place in Germany. Henry III. died in the prime of manhood, Oct. 5, 1056, and left a widow as regent and a son of six years, the ill-fated Henry IV. The long minority reign afforded a favorable opportunity for the reform party to make the papacy independent of the imperial power, which Henry III. had wisely exerted for the benefit of the Church, yet at the expense of her freedom. The Roman nobility, under the lead of the counts of Tusculum, took advantage of Hildebrand’s absence in Germany to reassert its former control of the papacy by electing Benedict X. (1058–1060). But this was a brief intermezzo. On his return, Hildebrand, with the help of Duke Godfrey, expelled the usurping pope, and secured, with the consent of the empress, the election of Gerhard, bishop of Florence, a strong reformer, of ample learning and irreproachable character, who assumed the name of Nicolas II. at his consecration, Jan. 25, 1059. Benedict was deposed, submitted, and obtained absolution. He was assigned a lodging in the church of St. Agnes, where he lived for about twenty years. § 7. Nicolas II. and the Cardinals. 1059–1061. The pontificate of Nicolas II. was thoroughly under the control of Hildebrand, who became archdeacon and chancellor of the Roman Church in August or September, 1059. His enemies said that he kept Nicolas like an ass in the stable, feeding him to do his work. Peter Damiani calls him the lord of the pope, and said that he would rather obey the lord of the pope than the lord-pope himself.12 He also grimly calls Hildebrand his "holy Satan,"13 because he had sometimes to obey him against his will, as when he desired to lay down his bishopric at Ostia and retire to a convent, but was not permitted to do so. He disliked the worldly splendor which Hildebrand began to assume in dress and mode of living, contrary to his own ascetic principles. Two important steps were made in the progress of the hierarchy,—a change in the election of the pope, and an alliance with the Normans for the temporal protection of the pope. Nicolas convened a Lateran Council in April, 1059, the largest held in Rome down to that time. It consisted of a hundred and thirteen bishops and a multitude of clergymen; but more than two-thirds of the prelates were Italians, the rest Burgundians and Frenchmen. Germany was not represented at all. Berengar was forced at this synod to submit to a formula of recantation (which he revoked on his return to France).

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

  The transfer of these two estates was treated by the Sforza as disturbing the balance of power in the peninsula, and Ludovico and Ascanio Sforza pressed Alexander to check the influence of Ferrante, king of Naples, who was the supporter of the Orsini. Ferrante, a shrewd politician, by ministering to Alexander’s passion to advance his children’s fortunes, won him from the alliance with the Sforza. He promised to the pope’s son, Joffré, Donna Sancia, a mere child, in marriage. Ludovico Sforza, ready to resort to any measure likely to promote his own personal ambition, invited Charles VIII. to enter Italy and make good his claim to the crown of Naples on the ground of the former Angevin possession. He also applauded the French king’s announced purpose to reduce Constantinople once more to Christian dominion. On Ferrante’s death, 1494, Alfonso II. was crowned king of Naples by Alexander’s nephew, Cardinal Juan Borgia. Charles, then only 22, was short, deformed, with an aquiline nose and an inordinately big head. He set out for Italy at the head of a splendid army of 40,000 men, equipped with the latest inventions in artillery. Julian Rovere, who had resisted Alexander’s policy and fled to Avignon, joined with other disaffected cardinals in supporting the French and accompanying the French army. Charles’ march through Northern Italy was a series of easy and almost bloodless triumphs. Milan threw open its gates to Charles. So did Pisa. Before entering Florence, the king was met by Savonarola, who regarded him as the messenger appointed by God to rescue Italy from her godless condition. Rome was helpless. Alexander’s ambassadors, sent to treat with the invader, were either denied audience or denied satisfaction. In his desperation, the pope resorted to the Turkish sultan, Bajazet, for aid. The correspondence that passed between the supreme ruler of Christendom and the leading sovereign of the Mohammedan world was rescued from oblivion by the capture of its bearer, George Busardo.796 40,000 ducats were found on Busardo’s person, a payment sent by Bajazet to Alexander for Djem’s safe-keeping. Alexander had indicated to the sultan that it was Charles’ aim to carry Djem off to France and then use him as the admiral of a fleet for the capture of Constantinople. In reply, Bajazet suggested that such an issue would result in even greater damage to the pope than to himself. His papal friend, whom he addressed as his Gloriosity—gloriositas, might be pleased to lift the said prisoner, Djem, out of the troubles of this present world and transfer his soul into another, where he would enjoy more quiet.797 For performing such a service, he stood ready to give him the sum of 300,000 ducats, which, as he suggested, the pope might use in purchasing princedoms for his children. On the last day of 1494, the French army entered the holy city, dragging with it 36 bronze cannon. Such military discipline and equipment the Romans had not seen, and they looked on with awe and admiration.

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

  Tertullian, whom he once calls the oldest of the fathers (though he lived after 200), was "durus et superstitiosus." Of Cyprian he speaks favorably. As to Jerome, he had to admit that he was the greatest Bible translator, and will not be surpassed in this line (Erl. ed. LXII. 462). But he positively hated him on account of his monkery, and says: "He ought not to be counted among the doctors of the church; for he was a heretic, although I believe that he was saved by faith in Christ. I know no one of the fathers, to whom I am so hostile as to him. He writes only about fasting, virginity, and such things" (LXII. 119sq.). He was tormented by carnal temptations, and loved Eustochium so as to create scandal. He speaks impiously of marriage. His commentaries on Matthew, Galatians, and Titus are very thin. Luther had no more respect for Pope Gregory I. He is the author of the fables of purgatory and masses for souls; he knew little of Christ and his gospel, and was entirely too superstitious. The Devil deceived him, and made him believe in appearances of spirits from purgatory. "His sermons are not worth a copper" (Erl. ed., LI. 482; LII. 187; LX. 189, 405; XXVIII. 98 sqq.; Bindseil, III. 140, 228). But he praises beyond its merits his hymn Rex Christe, which he wrongly ascribes to Ambrose (Bindseil, III. 149; comp. Daniel, Thesaurus Hymnol., vol. I. 180 sq.).

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

  He had the sagacity to select and to keep the ablest men for his cabinet, the army and navy, and the diplomatic service. He was a good soldier, and could endure every hardship and privation except fasting. He was the first of the three great captains of his age, the Duke of Alva being the second, and Constable Montmorency the third. His insatiable ambition involved him in several wars with France, in which he was generally successful against his bold but less prudent rival, Francis I. It was a struggle for supremacy in Italy, and in the Councils of Europe. He twice marched upon Paris.307 He engaged in about forty expeditions, by land and sea, in times when there were neither railroads nor steamboats. He seemed to be ubiquitous in his vast dominions. His greatest service to Christendom was his defeat of the army of Solyman the Magnificent, whom he forced to retreat to Constantinople (1532), and his rescue of twenty thousand Christian slaves and prisoners from the grasp of the African corsairs (1535), who, under the lead of the renowned Barbarossa, spread terror on the shores of the Mediterranean. These deeds raised him to the height of power in Europe. But he neglected the internal affairs of Germany, and left them mostly to his brother Ferdinand. He characterized the Germans as "dreamy, drunken, and incapable of intrigue." He felt more at home in the rich Netherlands, which furnished him the greatest part of his revenues. But Spain was the base of his monarchy, and the chief object of his care. Under his reign, America began to play a part in the history of Europe as a mine of gold and silver. He aimed at an absolute monarchy, with a uniformity in religion, but that was an impossibility; France checked his political, Germany his ecclesiastical ambition. His Personal Character. In his private character he was superior to Francis I., Henry VIII., and most contemporary princes, but by no means free from vice. He was lacking in those personal attractions which endear a sovereign to his subjects.308 Under a cold and phlegmatic exterior he harbored fiery passions. He was calculating, revengeful, implacable, and never forgave an injury. He treated Francis I., and the German Protestant princes in the Schmalkaldian war, with heartless severity. He was avaricious, parsimonious, and gluttonous. He indulged in all sorts of indigestible delicacies,—anchovies, frogs’ legs, eel-pasties,—and drank large quantities of iced beer and Rhine wine; he would not listen to the frequent remonstrances of his physicians and confessors, and would rather endure the discomforts of dyspepsia and gout than restrain his appetite, which feasted on twenty dishes at a single meal. In his autobiography he speaks of a fourteenth attack of gout, which "lasted till the spring of 1548."309 He had taste for music and painting.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  construe the first sentence of the first collect of the canon. Such examples are endless. Guillaume le Maire, Bishop of Angers in the early fourteenth century, complained that his priests included ‘innumerable contemptible persons of abject life, utterly unworthy in learning and morals . . . from whose execrable lives and pernicious ignorance infinite scandals arise, the church sacraments are despised by the laity, and in many districts the layfolk hold the priests as viler and more despicable than Jews.’ This was a problem of poverty and education. The bishops might well complain: why did they not do anything? Selection and training of clergy was the bishop’s responsibility; yet not one built a seminary throughout the Middle Ages – there was no such thing until the sixteenth century. Nor did any bishop, so far as we know, institute diocesian funds to raise the stipends of the poorer priests and so improve their ‘abject life’ – though such equalization funds had been used in the earliest Church. The truth is that the Church tended to be hostile to the peasants. There were very few peasant saints. Medieval clerical writers emphasize the bestiality, violence and avarice of the peasant. We get few genuine glimpses of peasant life in the documents; most clerical critics dealt with popular stereotypes. Clericalism was increasingly an urban phenomenon in the later Middle Ages. It was rare to see a priest in the country districts. Joan of Arc came from a pious family; but it is interesting to observe in her deposition how infrequently the clergy impinged on her life. What the Church and peasant had most in common was devotion to relics. In the villages they were used for oath-taking and all kinds of purposes. And the peasants valued the church for its efforts to avert natural disasters. 2 Parish priests exorcized and cursed storms, and they tried to drive away swarms of locusts by excommunications and processions. In a monastic formulary dating from 1526–31, we find a service for banishing caterpillars and ‘palmer worms’ from the diocese of Troyes, on condition the peasants paid their tithes. Documents often refer to the excommunication (and hanging) of animals for antisocial offences. In 1531, a French canon lawyer, Chassenée, defended the practice in his De Excommunicatione Animalium Insectorum. He claimed it had often worked, citing eels expelled from lakes, sparrows from churches, and so on. Caterpillars and similar pests would laugh if proceeded against in a secular court; therefore they should be struck ‘with the pain of anathema, which they fear more, as creatures obedient to the God who made them’. However, he added, the law should be observed, and an advocate appointed to plead their defence. In some cases, pieces

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  evade the moral law rather than interpret it; and they took the ‘probabilist’ line that penitents should be given the benefit in doubtful cases. Casuistry was for them a form of charity, an attempt to make the moral law human. But generosity tended to degenerate into laxism, as Jesuit confessors adopted the déformation professionnelle of their worldly clients. Cardinal Noris, an Inquisition expert, explained to Cosimo III of Florence (1692) why some Jesuits opposed the strict morality of their General, Tirso Gonzales: ‘As they were confessors to so many great princes in Europe, so many princely prelates in Germany, and so many high-ranking courtiers, they must not be so severe as their General desires, because if they followed his teaching they would lose their posts as confessors at all courts.’ It is clear, too, that Jesuit confessional activities covered the whole political and military field. As Louis XIII’s Jesuit confessor, Father Caussin, put it in a letter to his General, Vitelleschi, whether an alliance with the infidel Turks was right or not was, to the king’s confessor, a matter of conscience, as well as politics. In fact the Jesuits were at all stages, and in all countries, deeply involved in the physical, as well as the moral, aspects of the Counter-Reformation. They were active in the Catholic League in France, organized to fight civil war against the Huguenots, and the legitimate King Henri IV; their provincial, Odon Pigenat, was a member of the League’s governing Conseil des Seize and known to the Huguenots as ‘the cruellest tiger in Paris’. Jesuits organized subversion against Queen Elizabeth in England and Ireland, and against the regency government in Scotland. They played a leading role in the Thirty Years War, both in its opening, and the forced ‘conversion’ of Bohemia, and by preventing a compromise peace after the victories of the Swedish Protestant army under Gustavus Adolphus. In 1626, the papal nuncio in Vienna reported to Rome: ‘[The Jesuits] have the upper hand over everything, even over the leading ministers of state. . . . Their influence has always been considerable, but it has reached its zenith since Father Lamormaini has been confessor to the Emperor.’ Gustavus Adolphus remarked: ‘There are three Ls I should like to see hanged: the Jesuit Lamormaini, the Jesuit Laymann and the Jesuit Laurentius Forer.’ Above all, the Jesuits were widely identified with the view that the moral code could in some way be suspended when Catholic interests were at risk. The Jesuits not only advocated war as a legitimate instrument against heresy but defended the selective murder of Protestants, especially if they held important positions. It was an extension of their educational techniques: if a ruler could not be converted, let him

• From The Decameron (1353)

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

• From The Decameron (1353)

  But she pretended not to believe them, and by curtly replying that she wanted no more to do with either of them, as they had failed to carry out her bidding, she neatly rid herself of both.

• From The Decameron (1353)

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

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

  While granting that the imperial system preserves social order, he charges that it tolerates—or, worse, even enforces—injustice, immorality, and inequality. Roman laws, John says, are, “for the most part, corrupt, useless, and ridiculous.” They expose to torture or execution the man who steals clothes or money, but they ignore worse crimes: “Who would be considered wiser, by most people, than the persons considered worthy to legislate for the cities and nations? But yet to these wise men sexual immorality is unworthy of punishment; at least, none of the pagan laws … bring men to trial for this reason.”14 Chrysostom explains specifically what kind of case he has in mind: “If a married man has intercourse with a female slave, it seems to be nothing to pagan laws, nor to people in general.”15 Most people, he admits, would laugh at anyone who tried to bring such a case to court, and the judge would dismiss it. The same is true for a married man involved with an unmarried woman or with a prostitute. Roman law protects only the man’s rights in such cases, but, Chrysostom declares, “we are punished, though not by the Roman laws, yet by God.”16 Roman laws, John continues, allow dealers to enslave children and to train them in sexual specialties for sale as prostitutes. And pagan tradition praises the legislators as “common benefactors of the city” for instituting public entertainment that features, in the theaters, prostitutes and prostituted children and, in the sports arena, contests between men and wild animals: Those places, too, being full of all senseless excitement, train the people to acquire a merciless and savage and inhuman kind of temperament, and give them practice in seeing people torn in pieces, and blood flowing, and the viciousness of wild beasts upsetting everything. Now all these our wise lawgivers introduced from the beginning—so many plagues—and our cities applaud and admire them.17 So much for the masses; but what about the few who, chastened by the example of Adam’s sin, and recovered from sin through baptism, exercise appropriate restraint over themselves? Such persons, Chrysostom declares, remain exempt from the punishment that falls upon the corrupt majority—exempt, in fact, from the constraints of human government as a whole: “For those who live in a state of piety require no correction on the part of the magistrates, for ‘the law was not made for a righteous man.’ But the more numerous, if they had no fear of these hanging over them, would fill the cities with innumerable evils.”18

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

  The remarkable collection of sayings we know as the Gospel of Philip may offer us clues to sort out such contradictions, for its author challenged the way that most people set up moral questions in the first place. Christians then, as now, ordinarily assumed that certain acts are good and others bad; but they furiously debated which acts—marriage or celibacy, for example—belong to which category. The gnostic author of the Gospel of Philip rejects this whole way of thinking. As this author sees it, no act in itself—and specifically neither celibacy nor marriage—is necessarily good or bad. Instead the moral significance of any act depends upon the situation, intentions, and level of consciousness of the participants. This author characterizes such terms as “good” and “bad,” like other pairs of opposites, as merely mental categories that necessarily imply one another: Light and darkness, life and death, right and left, are brothers of one another. They are inseparable. Because of this, the “good” are not good, nor the “evil” evil, nor is “life” life, nor is “death” death.59 For “the names given to things in the world are very deceptive,”60 especially when one mistakes the names for reality. The author traces this deception directly back to the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve first sought to gain knowledge through such deceptive categories, by partaking of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Then the law, based on the same categories, continued the same process of deception: The law was the tree.… For when [the law] said, “Eat this, do not eat that,” it became the beginning of death.61 Leaders of the church who confronted such Valentinians among their congregations must have recognized themselves—and their “simpleminded” moralism—as the target of such criticisms; but they were not the only targets, for these gnostic Christians would have been equally critical of the advocates of asceticism. The Gospel of Philip suggests that those who say that celibacy is good err as much as those who pronounce marriage good—and those who call either bad err equally. It may be no accident, then, that not one of the extant Valentinian texts unequivocally endorses marriage over celibacy, or the opposite. The author of Philip implies instead that what each person should do depends upon each person’s intention and level of consciousness. The same author compares the gnostic teacher to a householder who is responsible for the care of children, slaves, cattle, dogs, and pigs: [being] a sensible person, he knew what each one should eat.… Compare the disciple of God; if he is a sensible man, he understands what discipleship is all about.… He will not be misled by the physical appearance of anyone, but will look at the condition of each one’s soul, and so speak to each one.62 Yet the author of Philip warns that gnostic Christians are not to think of themselves as exempt from sin:

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Among laymen ordained direct to the presbyterate were St Augustine, St Jerome, Origen and Paulinus of Nola. Fabian was a layman when made Pope in 236; Eusebius was only a catechumen when made bishop of Caesarea in 314; other laymen-bishops were Philogonius of Antioch in 319, Nectarius of Constantinople in 381 and Synesius of Ptolemais in 410. Eusebius, it should be added, was enthroned by the military, as were Martin of Tours and Philiaster of Brescia. Gregory of Nazianzus says it was common in the fourth century for bishop to be selected ‘from the army, the navy, the plough, the forge’. Jerome complained: ‘One who was yesterday a catechumen is today a bishop; another moves overnight from the amphitheatre to the church; a man who spent the evening in the circus stands next morning at the altar, and another who was recently a patron of the stage is now the dedicator of virgins.’ Direct bribery was also common. John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, found six cases of episcopal simony at the synod he held at Ephesus in 401. They came clean: ‘We have given bribes – the thing is admitted – so we would be made bishops and exempt from civil duties.’ They asked to be confirmed or, if this were impossible, to have their money back. They were evidently small men: ‘Some of us have handed over furniture belonging to our wives.’ They got their bribes back and, after Chrysostom’s fall, their bishoprics too, keeping their wives all the time. Almost from the start, the State tried to limit the exploitation of clerical privilege or, rather, use it for secular purposes. As early as 320, and again in 326, Constantine tried to prevent tax-evasion by the rich by edicts which banned decurions, their descendants and other wealthy groups from becoming clergy; the priesthood was to be open only to ‘those with small fortunes who are not liable to compulsory municipal services.’ The merit of the rule, in Constantine’s eyes, was that he, as emperor, could dispense exceptions to the rule. He wanted a system in which the clergy was mainly recruited from uninfluential groups, plus men of his own choosing from the upper ranks. Thus the State was already acting in a discriminatory fashion. It continued to do so in an increasing number of ways. Ammianus notes that Constantius II allowed the clergy to use the imperial transport system free when travelling on official journeys. This was a discriminatory ruling in favour of orthodox bishops: Ammianus says they bankrupted the service by travelling in hordes to endless synods, ensuring that orthodoxy was always in the majority. And were clergy judged heterodox to enjoy fiscal privileges? Here again, Constantine forged a useful weapon for himself. He ruled against most schismatics and heretics at the behest of

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  constituted an impediment to ordination. He did not like married bishops: he feared the creation of a priestly caste, with hereditary bishops. Married men ordained as bishops should cease to cohabit and beget children. He thought that this was how Adam and Eve had lived in Paradise. From his writing, it does not seem probable that Ambrose was a highly sexed man. But his judgments seem to have been influenced less by his personal habits and desires than by his pastoral experience. He acted as spiritual adviser to a large number of ladies, virtually all of them from the upper classes, and most with a long history of marital misfortunes. Their tales led Ambrose to take a pessimistic view of the marital state, at any rate as a promoter of felicity. His writings abound with lapidary comments. ‘Even a good marriage is slavery. What, then, must a bad one be?’ For a woman, marriage was ‘a bondage, indignity, a burden, a yoke’. On the other hand, his experience of the Empress-Mother Justina, an Arian who wanted to steal one of his Milanese basilicas for the Arian Goths in the army, led him to reflect sourly: ‘Every man is persecuted by some woman or another.’ He advised his female penitents to fast, if possible to avoid food altogether for a week or more at a time; it was economical, it preserved beauty and health and stimulated the appetite – and it made chastity or continence easier. But the best course for a woman was virginity. A virgin could redeem the sin of her parents in conceiving her. Ambrose’s sermons on these lines angered parents. But he denied that virginity was responsible for a supposed falling birth-rate: history, he said, proved the world has suffered more from the ravages of ill-advised marriages than from virginity. ‘Marriage is honourable but celibacy is more honourable; that which is good need not be avoided, but that which is better should be chosen.’ There were contradictions here which Ambrose left unresolved. But on some aspects of virginity he was clear. A virgin was married to Christ. For her, the ceremony of taking the veil should be like a marriage-feast. Thereafter she should conceal herself. Ambrose took an old-fashioned line on this, acting as a bridge between the pagan vestal and the early medieval closed convent. Virgins should not even go to church often: churches were dangerous places, because frequented. ‘Even to speak what is good is generally a fault in a virgin.’ The true virgin should remain perpetually silent. Ambrose was strict rather than severe. A virgin suspected of sexual intercourse, he ruled, should not be medically examined by force, except in certain special cases, and then only on the authority and under the supervision of a bishop. If found guilty, she should not be executed (Ambrose did not believe in capital punishment but in

• From The Decameron (1353)

  SECOND STORY The priest of Varlungo goes to bed with Monna Belcolore, leaving her his cloak by way of payment; then, having borrowed a mortar from her, he sends it back and asks her to return the cloak which he had left with her as a pledge. The good woman hands it over, and gives him a piece of her mind. The gentlemen and ladies alike were still applauding Gulfardo’s treatment of the covetous Milanese lady when the queen turned, smiling, to Panfilo, and enjoined him to follow; so Panfilo began: Fair ladies, it behoves me to relate a little story against a class of persons who keep on offending us without our being able to retaliate. I am referring to the priests, who have proclaimed a crusade against our wives, and who seem to think, when they succeed in laying one of them on her back, that they have earned full remission of all their sins, as surely as if they had brought the Sultan back from Alexandria to Avignon 1 in chains. Whereas we poor dupes who belong to the laity cannot do the same to them, albeit we may vent our spleen against their mothers, sisters, mistresses and daughters with no less passion than the priests display when assailing our wives. But however that may be, I propose to tell you this tale of country love, more amusing for its ending than conspicuous for its length, from which you will be able to draw a useful moral, namely, that you shouldn’t believe everything that a priest tells you. I say then, that in Varlungo, 2 which as all of you know or will possibly have heard is a hamlet, no great distance from here, there once lived a worthy priest, robust and vigorous in the service of the ladies, who, albeit he was none too proficient at reading books, always had a rich stock of good and holy aphorisms with which to entertain his parishioners under the Elm every Sunday. And when-ever the men of the parish were away from their homes, he was far more assiduous in calling on their wives than any of his predecessors, bringing them fairings and holy water and a candle-end or two, and giving them his blessing. Now, among the many women in his parish who had taken his fancy, there was one in particular for whom he had a very soft spot indeed. Her name was Monna Belcolore, 3 she was married to a farmworker called Bentivegna del Mazzo, 4 and without a doubt she was a vigorous and seductive-looking wench, buxom and brown as a berry, who seemed better versed in the grinder’s art than any other girl in the village. When, moreover, she had occasion to play the tambourine, and sing ‘A little of what you fancy does you good’, and dance a reel or a jig, with a dainty little kerchief in her hand, she could knock spots off every single one of her neighbours.