Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 36 of 253 · 20 per page

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  place in the Western Church. Unlike in the East, where Churches in the great cities had competing claims, there was no rival to the pope’s position in the West, particularly as the Latin North African Church, once so self-assertive, was laid low by the seventh-century Arab invasions. The Church’s constant search for a source of authority to solve its disputes encouraged the trend. For all the honour paid to great oecumenical councils like Nicaea and Chalcedon, the conflicts in their aftermaths, and the messy outcome of the council of 553, revealed the drawbacks in this method of decision-making. The battered prestige of the Bishop of Rome was restored and then extended by the pontificate of Pope Gregory I (590–604), often known as ‘the Great’. He was from the same wealthy, traditional administrative background as Ambrose two centuries before, and indeed he was Prefect of the City of Rome before becoming a monk in the city. Gregory was the first monk to become pope, although this was not monasticism as Pachomius or even Martin had known it: Gregory financed the foundation of the monastery which he entered, built on a family property within the city, and a later tradition asserted that his mother, Silvia, customarily sent him vegetables to his monastery on a silver dish.11 This Roman aristocrat showed no enthusiasm for the claims of the surviving Roman emperor. For six years Gregory had represented the Church of Rome as a diplomat (apocrisiary) at the Byzantine Court; despite or perhaps because of this, he had no great affection for or high opinion of the Greeks. When at the end of the sixth century Byzantine power in Italy was shattered by a central European people known as Lombards, Gregory certainly did not see the Lombard victory as a baffling catastrophe, as many had seen Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410. On the contrary, in 592–3 he presided over a separate peace with the Lombards, ignoring the Byzantine imperial representative in Ravenna. He strongly objected to the title of Oecumenical or Universal Patriarch which the Patriarch of Constantinople had used for the past century, particularly because its justification was that the patriarch was bishop in the Universal City of Constantinople, ‘Universal’ because it was capital of the empire. It may have been in order to highlight the pride embodied in the Oecumenical Patriarch’s title that Gregory adopted one of aggressive self-deprecation, which his successors have used ever since: ‘Servant of the servants of God’.12 Gregory did have a strong sense of urgency in his papacy, for the good reason that he believed that the end of the world was imminent. It was easy to assume this, amid the political upheavals and decay of the society which had brought his family their prestige and fortune.13 If the Last Days were coming soon, it was essential that all Christians, not just monks, should prepare themselves for the end by reforming their lives; the clergy, chiefly himself, should be energetic in

• From Action (2014)

  Getting a copied-and-pasted missive on a dating site is similarly insulting and tone-deaf, as far as I’ve heard. This makes good sense to me, especially if it’s just some variation on “sup,” the most irritating and expectant manner of “hitting on” someone in recorded history. The writers of “sup” are leeches! They are placing the onus wholly on the other person to come up with some witty retort, and those recipients don’t even know that they have a reason to bother yet! Actually, they have the opposite, since “what’s up” is an instant boner-killer. Some people use a more expansive template, but when the reader can tell it’s a dating Mad Lib all the same, the sender often may as well not have bothered. What you might do instead of copying the suave and flirtatious moves of institutions shilling credit cards: Comment on the aspect of a person’s profile that genuinely attracted you to begin with, like a certain interest or mutual trait, compliment the person’s appearance without going full-skeeve-overboard in the ass-cheexz direction, and ask them a question about something in their profile that they seem to have spent thought and time devising. Hollering at someone on the internet is easy: Keep it short, spell correctly, and don’t be a bank. If the person messages back and seems cool, your online interactions should end with one more communiqué, and that’s it! The longer you go back and forth without putting voices, faces, and inflections to your conversation, the greater the opportunity to conjure false or misleading versions of yourselves. Ask them out! Propose an activity that you think they’d like based on what they’ve chosen to say about themselves in their profile—much like “sup,” open-ended requests to hang, as in interrogating them about what they’d like to do, make them do your work for you. Conversely, asking to spend time with them decisively demonstrates that you know what you’re doing, and that they’d probably like to do whatever that is with you. Suggest something specific, and then say that you’re down to try out some other pursuit if what you’ve floated isn’t of interest. When you’re the one responding to an introductory message like the ones conceptualized above, you’re in a far easier position. A nice, optional guideline: Even if, like me, you’re not naturally funny, come at your reply with levity and/or wryness. Thank them for writing you. Ask a question, and make it specific to them in the style laid out above. Then let them chase you! The fun of being wanted is similar to the fun of wanting. With luck, a person will come to experience both. The whole point of these endeavors is good sex, and the whole point of good sex is realizing that you can position and reposition yourself as you go. How to Graciously Turn Someone Down

• From Action (2014)

  That mindset also applies to having a “type” when it comes to sexual partners. Usually, if someone I’m involved with seems to be pantomiming the choreography of porn without including me in their mimicry, I’m not hooking up with them again. I also don’t sleep with people who perpetuate, or in any way behave like they generally agree with, bigoted slurs/acts of any category. Barring larger discussions about consent, physical aggression, and so on, these are my only mineral rules. Other more flexible demographics to consider: • People who you can mostly bet are accomplished experts in bed: under-thirty drivers of station wagons, not DJs, dudes whose nail polish matches another element of their outfits, any person with short, clean fingernails (varnished or not), lockpickers, piano players, anyone of any hand-based vocation, ballerinas, gymnasts, wearers of loafers with no socks in the summer (even if their feet smell), thoughtful upholders of spinal posture (my endless wolf-whistles, once again, to eye contact–maintainers, as well), adults with spotless orthodontia, people who prefer going to the movies instead of watching them at home, girls with Morrissey pompadours, guys with Morrissey pompadours, anyone with a Morrissey pompadour, youngs in overalls (if they’re not wearing anything underneath, bring them home as soon as you can), people with nicknames that would also be at home on the hull of a speedboat, fixers of small household appliances, sewers of their own clothing, the guy at the supermarket who smiles with every part of his face except his mouth and you can tell it’s because he’s shy about his beautifully haywire teeth, listeners of the radio. • People around whom you should padlock your thighs closed: most career music critics, bigots, anyone who thinks being “politically correct” is a drag, any utterers of the words “politically correct” full end stop, jerks who don’t listen when you talk—they are going to be even less attentive going-at-it-wise, your friends’ partners unless you’re all aware of and into that scenario, dudes who NEED you to know that they are feminists, white people who NEED you to know they advocate for people of color and/or “don’t see race,” anyone who makes fun of other people in a way reliant on the “teasing” part over the loving part (those elements are at their best when they’re given equal, or close to equal, weight), male improv students, self-identified “philosophers,” those who condescend, hashtag enthusiasts (unless that’s for a cause or event), “truthers” of all stripes, hosts of the radio.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  much later), they became deeply enmeshed in the system of importing African slaves which had already sustained the Iberian colonies for more than a century. The first record of enslaved people in Virginia is as early as 1619.21 It was ironic that in the 1640s and 1650s, as the English on both sides of the Atlantic were talking in unprecedented ways about their own freedom and rights to choose, especially in religion, slaves were being shipped into the English colonies in hundreds, then thousands. Christianity did not seem to alter this for Protestants any more than it had for Catholics. An act of the Virginia Assembly in 1667 spelled out that ‘the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or Freedome’, which was only to restate the policy already adopted by the Portuguese in their slave trade, and to look back to the position of English serfs, formally enshrined in English common law (as it still is).22 It was a different position from that of the Reformed Protestant Dutch in their seventeenth-century colonial venture in the southern Cape of Africa — there, slaves who were baptized could not be sold again, and the Dutch were therefore careful to keep those baptized to a minimum.23 21. North America in 1700 The double standard seemed to be ever more entrenched. The great exponent of toleration and liberty John Locke, in his Two Treatises of Government,

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Medieval tradition, ancient local privileges and inherited intricacies of government were an obstacle to their plans, making their countries inefficient producers of taxes to pay for their armies. Medieval institutions were left alone if they did not get in the way; there was no change for change’s sake. If benefiting the people at large clashed with the interests of government, that would be a reform too far, though if both could be accommodated, that was eminently desirable. But rival powers must be crushed, ecclesiastical powers included. Accordingly, Catholic monarchs beginning with King José I of Portugal in 1759 brought mounting pressure on successive popes to dissolve the whole Society of Jesus, because they resented its vision of priorities wider than their own, including its loyalty to the papacy. After individual suppressions in various empires, they finally bullied the Pope into complete suppression in 1773. The dismantling of the Society led to the disintegration of the unrivalled Jesuit network of schools and colleges.71 Such a wanton act of cultural vandalism was a sign that the religious outlook of such monarchs had shifted far from the confessional warfare of the Reformation; more evidence was the cynical process which, between 1772 and 1795, witnessed Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox great powers, respectively Austria, Prussia and Russia, amicably dividing up the diminished remnant of the once-great Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, and exiling its Catholic monarch to St Petersburg. More creditably, and with considerable irony, the Society of Jesus could maintain a covert existence only beyond the boundaries of Catholic Europe, through the connivance of Protestant Prussia and Orthodox Russia, whose respective monarchs Friedrich and Catherine, neither high-temperature Christians, were alarmed at the likely destruction of educational institutions in their Catholic lands.72 Equally, the repression of religious minorities had gone out of fashion in these countries: when the Prince-Bishop of Salzburg sent his Protestant subjects packing in 1731, he incurred widespread disapproval from other rulers, including Catholics, and by the end of the century, edicts of toleration began the restoration of a public life to formerly persecuted groups from Ireland and Britain to France, Austria and Russia. Eighteenth-century Europe thus presented curious contrasts between government-sponsored change and vigorous survival from the past. While the Catholic Church was under attack even from Catholic monarchs, it was also full of life and energy. The monasteries of central Europe plunged into rebuilding schemes with the same panache as their French counterparts, the bishops still patiently worked away at the huge task of carrying out the reforms mapped out two centuries before at the Council of Trent. One symptom of what resources this Church might discover that it commanded was the fate of Joseph II of

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  some awkward theological questions about the mechanism of transubstantiation. One of the earliest, Henry III’s effort to start a Holy Blood cult in Westminster Abbey in the mid-thirteenth century, to rival King Louis IX’s sensational acquisition of the Crown of Thorns in Paris (see p. 475), never aroused popular enthusiasm and rapidly faded away; it had appeared prematurely.7 By contrast, after the Black Death, blood cults gathered momentum, and like so much else in Passion devotion they acquired an anti-Semitic edge, because they were often associated with stories that Jews had attacked wafers of eucharistic bread. So the anti-Semitism which had been such a feature of Western Christianity since the era of the early Crusades continued to intensify. In 1290 in Paris a Jew had supposedly stabbed a eucharistic wafer with a knife and it started bleeding. Among the hundred or so blood cults which appeared over the next three centuries, mainly in the Holy Roman Empire, a majority involved a story of Jewish desecration. There were further stories of deliberate Jewish maltreatment of the host apart from the pilgrimage cults – some are likely to have reflected real assaults by angry Jews, themselves inspired, ironically, by the myth that such assaults had happened.8 In an allied development, particularly in Iberia, Christ’s earliest days also came often to be associated with the shedding of his blood through the Feast of the Circumcision: this happy celebration of Jesus’s identification with his Jewish people, which so delighted the Viennese beguine Agnes Blannbekin, was turned into a Jewish assault on the child, rather like the atrocities against children imagined in the ‘blood libel’ against the Jews (see pp. 400–401). I remember the shock of seeing in the Museo de Arte Antica in Lisbon an example of one of these Circumcision paintings from an anonymous sixteenth-century Portuguese master. Lying naked in the centre was the Christ Child, over whom stood a rabbi, bishop-like in a mitre, about to wield the knife (and interestingly wearing spectacles, symbolizing his distorted vision, an anti-Semitic visual cliché with a long life ahead of it). On the Child’s right were Mary and Joseph, Joseph a befuddled but harmless old man, so a non-threatening sort of Jew, and Mary looking distinctly worried. On the other side stood as vicious a crowd of Jews as one could expect to meet, gleefully brandishing the Ten Commandments. European society in the wake of the Black Death remained preoccupied by death and what to do about it. No wonder the eleventh- and twelfth-century development of the doctrine of Purgatory was one of the most successful and long-lasting theological ideas in the Western Church. It bred an intricate industry of prayer: a whole range of institutions and endowments, of which the most characteristic was the chantry, a foundation of invested money or landed revenues which provided finance for a priest to devote his time to singing

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  it is notable for its absence from his spiritual writings, but they develop an Evagrian theme of ‘purity of heart’ as the goal of monastic endeavour. Unlike another favourite term of Evagrius, ‘passionlessness’ or ‘serenity’, apatheia, which quickly aroused hostile criticism from Jerome among others, this was a safely biblical phrase, but it is clear from Cassian’s writings that the aim of purifying the heart, like the aim of stripping out the passions from human consciousness, was to lead on to a union with the glorified, resurrected Christ. The vehicle for this was a life of unceasing prayer and contemplation.68 Since Cassian’s teaching and example inspired enthusiasm among the growing monastic communities of Gaul, the inheritance from Origen (not for the last time) provoked a confrontation with the theology of that great Westerner whose call to serve his Church had led him to turn away from monastic life: Augustine. The issue was the extreme version of predestination which had appeared in Augustine’s writings in the later phases of his conflict with Pelagius. It is doubtful whether Cassian and Augustine would have differed much in their everyday practice of an austere Christian life, but Augustine’s view of grace offended Cassian’s theology of salvation, grounded as it was in the rival tradition of Origen and Evagrius. Cassian, like Pelagius, wanted to give human beings a sense of responsibility for their progress towards God, and Augustine’s picture of humans stranded helplessly in their ‘lump of lostness’ threatened this possibility.69 He penned some fairly open and pointed criticisms of Augustine’s assertions; he found a sympathetic audience among the monks of communities newly founded in south-eastern Gaul, for whom Cassian was a major inspiration and in many respects a founding father, and who have often been given a label intended to discredit their theology, ‘Semi-Pelagians’. Augustine did have his admirers in Gaul: one monk, Prosper of Aquitaine, alerted the Bishop of Hippo to the controversy, and Augustine replied to his critics with two of his most savage treatises spelling out the logic of predestination. For many among the Gaulish monks, such statements transcended the bounds of acceptability.70 In particular, Vincent, a monk on the island of Lérins (Ile-Saint Honorat), admired much of Augustine’s writings where he dealt with the Trinity and Christ’s incarnation, but he also felt that on the subject of grace both Augustine and Prosper had gone beyond the bounds of doctrine as understood in the universal Church. He gave a definition of how doctrine should be judged properly Catholic or universal. It was what had been believed everywhere in the Church, always and by everyone (‘quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est’).71 The formula has become a favourite of Catholic Christians, although the story of Christianity so far should give us a fair indication that, if applied with historical knowledge, it would leave a rather skeleton faith.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Austria’s attempts to impose his own vision of reform on the Catholic Church in Habsburg lands. Briskly contemptuous of the contemplative life, the Holy Roman Emperor dissolved a large proportion of the monasteries in his territories, creating a Religious Fund under the monarch’s control for other Church purposes, such as the endowment of parishes. He would have preferred a complete confiscation, which would decisively have placed the Church in the hands of the Crown – but even his modified plan provoked disaster for him. The people’s reaction in the Austrian Netherlands (modern Belgium) was to rise in revolt in 1789, forcing the dying emperor humiliatingly to abandon much of his scheme from the Netherlands to Hungary. It was a curious Catholic counterpoint to what was happening in France at the same time, and a harbinger of the Catholic resurgence of the nineteenth century (see pp. 817–27).73 What is striking about Christian Europe at this period, Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox, is the withering of autonomous Church government in the face of State onslaught: the decay of the Oecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople, the shackling of the Russian Orthodox Church to the imperial government, the growing impotence of the pope witnessed in the destruction of the Jesuits, but also, in the Protestant world, the effective silencing of the Church of England’s deliberative bodies. The Hanoverian monarchs did not allow Convocations of Canterbury and York to meet to transact business, and for nearly a century and a half after 1717, English bishops lacked any forum for concerted action. John Wesley’s authoritarian answer, his tightly controlled organization of Methodism, also faced rapid disintegration after his death. At the end of the century, an unexpected convulsion of society appeared to accelerate this process, threatening complete dismemberment in the Catholic Church. In fact new power relationships and a new debate about authority in Western Christianity emerged, the consequences of which are still being worked out today. From 1789 events moved so quickly that, already in the 1790s, the French were talking about the ‘ancien régime’, the former state of things, looking back to this society so confusingly tangled between medieval survival and Enlightenment, and seeing something remote and discredited. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION (1789–1815) Few in 1789 could have predicted that France would be the seat of revolution. It was western Europe’s greatest power, its language spoken by elites everywhere. After the crushing of the Huguenot uprisings in the first decade of the century, it was generally a less violent or excitable country than its otherwise not dissimilar

• From Action (2014)

  If you’re skittish for a more identity-based reason… why? I’ve encountered male partners who worried that it means that they are WAY GAY, or at least effeminate. I’m offended by both “concerns”—what’s so horrific about being either, bro? However: I also understand that, from mondo-young ages, men are very often socialized to believe that either state, as doubled up with manhood, renders them unlovable, undesirable, and of lower worth than more traditionally masculine dudes. It’s so dumb. To put this in terms with which people of other genders might be able to better empathize: You know how hyperaware women are that it’s ruinously devaluing, or at least distracting, to buy the lie that you have to be two-dimensionally thin (except, of course, in your butt and chest zones), pretty, and otherwise SUPER-FEMME? You know how, sometimes, it doesn’t matter how gravely you know that that’s bull hockey—you just want someone to tell you you’re beautiful, goddamnit??? Even the most well-intentioned men can go through similar mental capitulations—they know better than to assume “masculine” poses, but if they’re observed making other kinds, it’s hurtful, depending on who’s looking. Gender norms brand you for life!!! They’re so awesome that way. If you’re with a dude who is nervous on this front (or if you are one who’s looking to tell a partner you want to try this), a helpful reminder is that men’s bodies are anatomically designed to respond to prostrate stimulation. It has zero to do with gender-subversion unless you want it to (which is awesome, also, but maybe not the best immediate lead-in for anxious straight men who are just getting started in this arena). If the concern is that this means you have a manufacturer’s error, sexually, for curiosity about more than straight-up vaginal penetration, please be bolstered by the reality that openness about sexual experiments of this and every ilk gives partners proof that you’re a worthwhile fuck. Outside of societal anxieties, the recipient may be worried about pain. I am sympathetic to this: If executed hastily, which is to say without lube or foreplay, or by receiving too much, too soon, anal penetration can definitely hurt. A lucky truth: Avoiding pain is so much easier than screwing up. All you have to do is get ready, which is hot in its own right.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  God (this argument pioneered by Karlstadt may seem crass now, but it became a firm favourite with Reformed Christians). In any case, what was a sacrament? Zwingli, as a good humanist, considered the origins of the Latin word sacramentum, and discovered that the Latin Church had borrowed it from everyday life in the Roman army, where it had meant a soldier’s oath. That struck a strong chord in Switzerland, where regular swearing of oaths was the foundational to a society whose strength came from mutual interdependence and local loyalty. It also resonated with that ancient Hebrew idea which has repeatedly sounded anew for Christians: covenant. So the sacrament of Eucharist was not a magical talisman of Christ’s body. It was a community pledge, expressing the believer’s faith (and after all, had not Luther said a great deal about faith?). The Eucharist could indeed be a sacrifice, but one of faith and thankfulness by a Christian to God, a way of remembering what Jesus had done for humanity on the Cross, and all the Gospel promises which followed on from it in scripture. And what was true for the Eucharist must be true for the other biblical sacrament, baptism. This was a welcome for children into the Lord’s family the Church; it did not involve magical washing away of sin. For Zwingli, therefore, the sacraments shifted in meaning from something which God did for humanity, to something which humanity did for God. Moreover, he saw sacraments as intimately linked with the shared life of a proud city. The Eucharist was the community meeting in love, baptism was the community extending a welcome. This nobly coherent vision of a better Israel, faithful to God’s covenant, was a reformed version of Erasmus’s ideal of how the world might be changed. It was utterly different from the raw paradoxes about the human condition, the searing, painful, often contradictory insights which constituted Luther’s Gospel message. Therefore the two could never agree on the Eucharist, even when in 1529 their frustrated princely supporter Philipp, Landgraf of Hesse, brought them face to face at Marburg to heal the breach. Such was the bitterness that in 1530 Luther told his followers that they should get married and have their children baptized in Catholic churches rather than among Zwinglians, as Zwingli was far more in error than the Pope.23 This was all the more remarkable because Luther, as much as Zwingli, found that he was reliant on German princes for help in two directions: first, against ordinary people who did not want to be reformed and who needed orders from princes to move them along; second, against the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who had outlawed him after Worms, and who now wished to destroy him and his whole programme. In fact from princely support came a new label for the movement, when a group of the princes supporting Luther made a protest against the decisions of the Imperial Diet at Speyer in

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  no other protective organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. True to the scholastic Thomism which was now the approved theological style of the Church, there was a pervasive medievalism in Leo’s encyclical. It urged the forming of corporations like the gilds of the Middle Ages, which would repudiate class conflict and ground society in organic cooperation between interest groups. Despite its fairly shallow social analysis and inbuilt political caution, the document provided a convenient shield against the hostility of later popes for Catholics who wished to take part in the enterprise of social reform with liberal groups, or even to find common ground with socialism. Pope Leo’s realism also led him to seek an understanding with French Republican leaders, when it became apparent in the 1880s that any form of monarchy in France, Bourbon, Orleanist or Bonapartist, was unlikely to overturn the Third Republic. His successors proved less capable of maintaining good relations. Many Republican politicians were still mentally fighting the battles of the 1790s against the Catholic Church. It was easy to see why they should, when from the mid-1890s so many in the Church irrationally supported the harsh imprisonment of a Jewish army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, long after it was clear that he was innocent of the betrayal of military secrets of which he was accused. The sheer nastiness of the ‘Anti-Dreyfusards’ did not present French Catholicism in a good light, particularly their hatred of ‘deicidal’ Jews, whom they saw as staging a conspiracy along with the Freemasons against Christian society. Their paranoia was matched by anticlerical fears that the Catholic Church was sponsoring conspiracy against the Republic, led by Jesuits and the anti-Dreyfusard promoters of the Lourdes shrine, the Assumptionist Order of Augustinians.27 After tense confrontations, Napoleon’s Concordat was abrogated in 1906. For a hundred years from the mid-nineteenth century, every village in France was liable to become a battleground between church and school, pitting the power of the curé against the state-paid schoolmaster to win the minds of the next generation. The fault line in French politics between Church and Revolution persisted into the 1960s, anachronistically shaping the structure of political parties, and absorbing political energies which could have been spent on more pressing social and political problems.28 PROTESTANTISM: BIBLES AND ‘FIRST-WAVE’ FEMINISM Protestantism benefited as much as Catholicism from all the new resources of

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  back in 313 had proclaimed general toleration. That had been a reaffirmation of traditional Roman practice, with the one great exception of Christianity, which had leapt from persecuted to favoured religion. Now ‘Catholic’ Christianity was given monopoly status, not just against its own Christian rivals but against all traditional religion: ancient priesthoods lost all privileges and temples were ordered to be closed even in the most remote districts. The process began with a decree in Constantinople in 380, but politics intervened to accelerate the new situation. In 392 a barbarian general of the Roman army named Arbogast backed a coup d’état in which the legitimate Western emperor, Valentinian II, was murdered and replaced with a modest and competent academic of traditionalist sympathies named Eugenius. Moves to restore honour and equal treatment to the old religions had not got very far when, in 394, Theodosius intervened from the East and destroyed the usurping regime. His conclusion, naturally enough, was that his policy, already launched in the East, should be extended throughout the empire. The Olympic Games were no longer celebrated after 393. Further decrees after his death banned non-Christians from service in the army, imperial administration or at Court.78 This was backed up by ruthless action: some of the most beautiful and famous sacred places of antiquity went up in flames, together with a host of lesser shrines. Monks were prominent agitators in the crowds which exulted in the destruction, and dire consequences are always likely to follow rampaging mobs. Perhaps the most repulsive case was the death in 415 of the Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia, so well respected for her learning that she had overcome the normal prejudices of men to win pre-eminence in the Alexandrian schools. Christian mobs were persuaded that she was instrumental in preventing the Prefect of Egypt from ending a quarrel with Bishop Cyril of Alexandria, so she was dragged from her carriage, publicly humiliated, tortured and murdered. The perpetrators went unpunished. It was a permanent stain on the episcopate of Cyril and few Christian historians have had the heart to excuse it.79 Nearly fifteen hundred years later, the breezy Anglican clerical novelist Charles Kingsley used Hypatia’s story to annoy Roman Catholics, casting them in a none-too-veiled parallel in the role of the intolerant Alexandrian killers. Although Arian Christianity was now harried to extinction in the imperial Church, significantly where imperial repression could not follow, across the northern frontier, it flourished – among the ‘barbarian’ tribes known as the Goths and their relatives the Vandals. Eusebius of Nicomedia had proved that he was not merely a politician with short-term goals when he had encouraged a mission to the Goths, led by one of their own called Ulfila. Ulfila translated the Bible into his native language, though he omitted to translate the Books of Kings

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  monochrome Christian culture — if monochrome is the right word for the heady Counter-Reformation Baroque of the colonial churches of Goa, which include the largest Catholic cathedral so far built in Asia. Portuguese religious rhetoric tended to ignore political realities, and Portuguese Church authorities often made things more difficult for non-Portuguese European missionaries by insisting on the paramountcy of their own culture and ecclesiastical jurisdiction as granted in the Padroado: the Archbishop of Goa became primate of all Catholic churches around the Pacific Ocean.So once outside these uncomfortable pockets of European rule, Catholicism in Asia had to make its way on its merits, often where earlier Eastern Christian missions had already known success followed by gradual decline and contraction (see Chapter 8). Only in the Philippine Islands, a Spanish colony named after King Philip II, did Christianity eventually secure a substantial foothold among a large population in Asia — but the reason for this exception proved the rule. There, as in America, the Augustinian friars leading the Church’s mission could rely on backing from colonial authorities with substantial military force. In fact, in a link-up at first sight bizarre, but highlighting the Philippine analogy with Spanish American experience, the bishopric of Manila in the Philippines was first ranked as part of the archdiocese in New Spain, thousands of miles across the Pacific, since most links with the home government in Madrid were via America. Presenting the Christian message without military backing posed considerable problems for a missionary priest. Nearly always a Jesuit or a friar, he faced Asian peoples with age-old and subtle cultures, full of self-confidence and likely to be profoundly sceptical that Westerners could teach them anything of value. Muslim rulers and Hindu elites in India could contemplate with sarcastic interest the normally dire relations between the Christian newcomers and the ancient Dyophysite ‘Mar Thoma’ Church in India which derived from Syria. The Portuguese contempt for Christians they regarded as schismatics or heretics, and the schisms and disputes which Portuguese interference provoked in these Churches, were not impressive demonstrations of Christian brotherly love, as Catholic Christians burned venerable Christian libraries and occasionally people too for Dyophysite heresy. Catholic clergy did not at first appreciate a perennial obstacle in India: Hindu converts to Christianity automatically lost caste. It was not surprising that the missionaries’ main success was with peoples lowest in the caste system (though it must also be said that the Mar Thoma Christians, who had over the centuries established themselves with higher-caste status, showed no signs of ever having reached out to such people). One story of Christian success should be better known, because it is

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  High Church tidy-mindedness in 1645, even though he had been a helpless prisoner of the Westminster Parliament for the previous four years). The successive Puritan regimes were too straitlaced for the people of England and they could find no popular political substitute for the monarchy. The de facto ruler through most of the 1650s, Oliver Cromwell, former military commander turned reluctant dictator in the name of godly Reformation (and a distant cousin of Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell), eventually authorized the abolition of Christmas and tore down the maypoles around which the English had danced on their spring holidays. Worse still for the population was one respect in which the regime was not tidy-minded: it tolerated with different degrees of reluctance a variety of radical sects who were widely seen as offending against all convention. There were English Baptists, who took up the principle of adult or believers’ baptism like the Anabaptists of mainland Europe in the previous century; Baptists had been a tiny group before the civil wars began, but their numbers swelled in the Parliamentary army and in the country at large in its aftermath, causing huge offence to the vast majority who took it for granted that a Christian society depended on all its members being baptized in infancy. Most shocking were those whom scandalized respectable folk called ‘Ranters’: they were a group like some of the sixteenth-century radicals of mainland Europe who believed that God had sent them a particular revelation, an ‘inner light’, surpassing that in the printed pages of the Bible. Yet they shared and drew extreme conclusions from Martin Luther’s central scriptural affirmation that God’s free grace was the only source of salvation. That freed all the saved from any law, human or divine, or (if God were truly to be glorified) from good behaviour at all. This was the ‘antinomian’ conclusion (nomos is a Greek word for ‘law’ – hence antinomianism is ‘against law’) which had haunted the respectable magisterial Reformation from its earliest days. God- given antinomian freedom might be expressed by such gestures as ecstatic blasphemy, joyous tobacco-smoking and running naked down the street. Such tales lost nothing in the telling, especially in the burgeoning sensationalist journalism of those years.79 More closely associated with the Ranters than they liked to admit in later years were the ‘Friends’, whom their enemies called Quakers. Their conviction of their special role in God’s purposes and of their ‘inner light’ led them to disrupt public worship and refuse to doff their hats to social superiors, among many signs of contempt for the norms of ordinary society. The bulk of the English people applauded the beating up of Quakers – and the bulk of the English people also refused to open their shops on Christmas Day, as the regime demanded. Cromwell’s morose authority postponed any greater

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  5 The Prince: Ally or Enemy? (100–300) THE CHURCH AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE (100–200) It took the Romans some time to distinguish between Christians and the other quarrelling segments of Judaism, but once Jews and Christians had separated, Christianity could not hope for any sort of official recognition. Normally the Roman authorities were tolerant of the religions in their conquered territories; as long as a religion had a tradition behind it, they could accept it as having some vague relationship to the official gods of Rome. All that they demanded was that subjects of the empire accept in turn some sort of allegiance to the official cult of the emperors, alive and dead. Even Judaism, an exceptionally exclusive religion which refused to make this concession, with an awkward insistence on regarding every other religion as untrue, could be accepted because it had a long pedigree (see p. 109). Christianity had no such tradition to excuse it, despite the claim by many of its exponents that it could share the antiquity of the Hebrew prophets. Particularly when its episcopal or Catholic form, with its increasingly fixed canon of scripture and carefully constructed creeds, began shouldering aside gnostic forms of Christian belief, Christianity made exclusive claims for its three-in-one God. That attitude is already aggressively promoted in its earliest surviving literature, the letters of Paul. At the beginning of his letter to the Romans, he develops at some length the idea that all religion directed away from the true God and towards ‘images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles’ is a perversion, a theme which he goes on to elaborate in the most lurid terms that a Jewish tent-maker from Tarsus could imagine.1 The unnerving self-confidence of Christians and their view of every other form of religion as demonic contrasted with the comfortable openness to variety normal in contemporary religious belief. The only exception Christians made was for Judaism, despite their increasingly tense relations with it; and unlike Judaism, they seemed actively to be aiming for total monopoly of the religious market.2 Greek-speaking Christians, like Jews before them, called all non-

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  for Italy to the indignant monks of Monte Cassino, who now claimed that Benedict had not gone missing at all.83 This steadily increasing stream of papal benevolence reflected the fact that the flow of benefit was not in one direction only. An exclusive relationship with a flourishing Frankish monastery was good for papal prestige and influence over the Alps, at a time when the reputation of individual popes was, to put it charitably, not high. These were dismal years for the Bishops of Rome, at the mercy of powerful families in their city and rarely rising above their difficult situation. Edward Gibbon had some good clean anti-clerical Georgian fun describing the most notorious of them, John XII (reigned 955–63), descended from a lady of some notoriety named Marozia: The bastard son, the grandson, and the great grandson of Marozia, a rare genealogy, were seated in the chair of St Peter, and it was at the age of nineteen years that the second of these became head of the Latin church. His youth and manhood were of a suitable complexion; and the nations of pilgrims could bear testimony to the charges that were urged against him in a Roman synod, and in the presence of [the Holy Roman Emperor] Otho the Great. As John XII had renounced the dress and decencies of his profession, the soldier may not perhaps be dishonoured by the wine which he drank, the blood that he spilt, the flames that he kindled, or the licentious pursuits of gaming and hunting. His open simony might be the consequence of distress: and his blasphemous invocation of Jupiter and Venus, if it be true, could not possibly be serious. But we read with some surprise, that the worthy grandson of Marozia lived in public adultery with the matrons of Rome: that the Lateran palace was turned into a school for prostitution, and that his rapes of virgins and widows had deterred the female pilgrims from visiting the tomb of St. Peter, lest, in the devout act, they should be violated by his successor.84 While the papacy languished, the Western Roman Empire recovered. The idea of empire persisted through its years of weakness, and during the tenth century it was given political reality once more in the eastern part of the old Carolingian dominions by Emperor Henry I (919–36) and his successor, Otto I (Gibbon’s ‘Otho the Great’: 936–73). This Ottonian dynasty did its best to imitate the achievements of the first Western emperor, inspiring a spectacular new burst of creativity in architecture, art and manuscript illumination. In 972 the Emperor Otto II outdid the Carolingians: he married into the imperial family of Constantinople. His wife, Theophano, proved an effective governor for her son, who became emperor, behaved impeccably in her lavish endowment of monasteries as far north as the Low Countries, and did her utmost to bring the best of Eastern devotion to the West, including the dedication of major churches to Greek saints. Yet this initiative led nowhere. Theophano’s young son, the Emperor Otto III, died in his early twenties in 1002, just as a marriage was being negotiated for him in Byzantium.85 Many in the West were pleased at the failure. One eleventh-century chronicler in Regensburg (in modern-day Germany) recorded with satisfaction the vision of

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  as emperor in 1556, exhausted by the effort of governing his vast empire, had divided his family inheritance: his younger brother Ferdinand had been elected Holy Roman Emperor and took the other Habsburg territories of central Europe, while Charles’s son Philip had received Spain and all its overseas dominions. Although both branches of the family were determined to uphold papal Catholicism, their priorities differed, and the Austrian Habsburgs were themselves divided. Ferdinand I was mindful of the Habsburgs’ recent defeat at the hands of Lutheran princes of the empire which had forced him to sign the Peace of Augsburg (his brother Charles could not bring himself to do this). He was ruler over three powerful varieties of Western Christianity: Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, Bohemian Utraquist Hussitism. Both Ferdinand and his son Maximilian II sought accommodations with Lutherans, wheedled a reluctant pope into allowing Catholic laity into receiving the Eucharist Hussite- style in both bread and wine, and maintained a Court in Vienna sheltering a remarkable variety of religious belief. Maximilian’s younger brother Archduke Ferdinand felt very differently, and he implemented an aggressive Catholic agenda in the various family dominions which he administered in the course of a long life. A further brother, Karl, joined the Archduke Ferdinand in his intransigence, and entered a marriage alliance with the one prominent imperial princely family who had remained Catholic, the Wittelsbach Dukes of Bavaria.21 In concert they encouraged the Jesuits to set up institutions in towns and cities under their control, and they also made sure that important bishoprics of the empire did not slide into the hands of Lutherans in the manner pioneered by the Hohenzollern Grand Master of the Teutonic Order (see p. 615). King Philip II of Spain, freed by bereavement from his unexciting and ultimately embarrassing marriage to Queen Mary of England, returned to Spain in 1559 to sort out a rising tide of turbulence and financial chaos; in tackling this, he saw the Spanish Inquisition as a chief ally. Ruling from a monumental but bleak new monastery-palace, the Escorial, which also incorporated his future tomb, Philip brought his temperamental workaholism to the task of being a world ruler as significant in God’s plan as his father before him – the Escorial’s grid-pattern plan was based on Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, although it is not surprising that visitors commonly supposed it to have been based on the gridiron which legend said had been the instrument of torture and death for the palace’s patron saint, Lawrence.22 Philip and his government committed themselves to the proposition that there was only one way to be a Spaniard: a traditionalist Catholic, untainted by unsupervised contact with alien thought, now Protestant as well as Islamic or Jewish. The King was readily persuaded to back the Spanish Inquisition’s busy efforts to achieve this end.

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  19 A Worldwide Faith (1500-1800) IBERIAN EMPIRES: THE WESTERN CHURCH EXPORTED The distinctive Christianity of Spain and Portugal in the Iberian peninsula, which during the fifteenth century had destroyed the last non-Christian societies in western Europe, simultaneously began to extend Western Christendom beyond its historic frontiers across the sea. Their successes were in sharp contrast to Christian defeats and contraction in the East. The Portuguese took the lead: their seafaring expertise was forced on them by their exposed position on the Atlantic seaboard and by their homeland’s agricultural poverty, but they also had a tradition of successful crusading against Islam. They began in North Africa, capturing the Moroccan commercial centre of Ceuta in 1415, and went on to contest for dominance in African trade, seeing their efforts as a fight for Christianity as well as a quest for wealth. Portuguese ships soon became more ambitious, fuelled in their adventures by the optimistic myth of ‘Prester John’, an unbeatable ally against Islam (see pp. 284–5), and although he never fulfilled European hopes, the galvanizing effect was enough. The Portuguese eventually rounded the Cape of Good Hope, reaching India by 1498 and sailing around the Chinese coast by 1513. In 1500 they made their first landing on the east coast of what later became their colony of Brazil. Once abroad, the Portuguese turned their crusading ethos to religious intolerance as extreme as anywhere in western Europe. Having established a secure Indian base in Goa in 1510, they massacred six thousand Muslims, and by mid-century they had also forbidden the practice of Hinduism in Portuguese royal dominions; for good measure they despised and severely harassed the heretical ‘Nestorian’ Dyophysite Christians of India.1 If later Christian missions based on the worldwide Portuguese Empire showed a certain humility and caution in their operations, it was largely because the Portuguese never overcame their poverty. Their empire, run on a shoestring, consisted of a motley collection of fortified but under-garrisoned coastal trading posts. The historian Garrett Mattingly once unkindly but accurately commented that by the mid-

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  the most famous man in Europe when he died in 1778: the Erasmus of his age, read with delight in multiple translations, and master of the usefully calculated relationship, especially with monarchs. His effect on the reputation of the Catholic Church was even more immediately disruptive than Erasmus’s: he set himself up as a lifelong campaigner against it. He much admired England, where he had spent a couple of years when he needed to escape from French officialdom after two spells of imprisonment in the Bastille. If the philosophy of Locke and the mechanical universe of Newton had banished mystery from human affairs, Voltaire saw Catholicism as a self-interested conspirator to perpetuate that mystery.63 Voltaire’s was an elitist view of Enlightenment: he added an aristocratic ‘de’ prefix to his pseudonym, and loved the life of the great seigneur that he had created for himself out of harm’s way at Ferney in the Swiss Confederation. From that safe refuge just beyond the French border, he spoke out against injustices perpetrated by French Catholic authorities against Huguenots and those accused of blasphemy, but it was the Church’s capacity to interfere with the minds of the intelligent that he chiefly detested; religion could be left to the ‘rabble’ (canaille), a favourite word of his. His Jesuit education had left him with an intimate knowledge of the Bible, which he was almost obsessively ready to employ, far more than most of his philosophe contemporaries. It has been calculated that around 13 per cent of his letters contain biblical quotations, but most of them are there in order to structure a joke. Jesus he often referred to with a sneer as ‘the hanged man’, or elsewhere ‘the first theist’.64 Towards the end of his life, he famously said, ‘If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him’: significantly, this was in a poem addressed to his far less talented predecessors, the anonymous authors of Treatise of the three impostors. Couched as an attack on them, its snarls at organized religion were as thoroughgoing as theirs, but, with his usual oblique wit, Voltaire seemed to be saying that even an imagined God might preserve the morality of society when the ‘coarse atheism’ of the Treatise would not. The effect of his attacks on organized religion was to deny any meaningful place to God in human affairs. Voltaire, with characteristic prudence, kept his distance from and wrote little in the most substantial as well as the most risky enterprise of the French Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie. Its editor and major contributor was Denis Diderot, a former seminarian turned unmemorable novelist, whose atheism was much more thoroughgoing than that glimpsed in Voltaire’s carefully modulated sarcasm. Diderot’s view of knowledge was severely material: the world was a collection of molecules, and knowledge was that available to the senses, which might structure morality – why should a blind person have any shame in being

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  of Common Prayer as it was to Anglo-Catholicism, so Sydney’s elegant St Andrew’s Cathedral under Dean Phillip Jensen now shelters the minimal possible lip service to its long-standing Anglican choral tradition. Sydney stands at the centre of a worldwide campaigning network throughout Anglicanism which has made no secret of its inclination to end the role of Lambeth Palace at the centre of the Anglican Communion.101 The weapon of choice in this Anglican contest, as in so many others within Christianity since the 1960s, has been sexuality, and homosexuality in particular. The causes célèbres uniting Anglican conservatives around the world have been two choices of openly gay men as bishops. One failed in England through a maladroit use of the Church of England’s secretive appointments system; the other, of Gene Robinson in New Hampshire, USA, was duly completed by popular open election in 2003. Sexual morality has been a good issue for conservatives to rally round, since it is about the only thing on which all can agree – not just Christians, but Muslim conservatives too. One favourite argument of that section of African Anglicanism which denounces Western attitudes to sexuality is that African Christians are ridiculed or worse by African Muslims because of their association with a Church which condones homosexuality. South African Anglicans, who are more sensitive to Western concerns through their history of liberation struggle, have taken a very different line, particularly in vehement statements from Archbishop Desmond Tutu that the acceptance of the moral integrity of same-sex relationships is ‘a matter of ordinary justice’.102 Behind the passing conflicts of the moment lies a debate throughout Christianity about whether the Bible and Christian tradition can be wrong and can be changed. It is also a debate about whether God’s plan for the world centres on the supremacy of heterosexual men. ‘Male headship’ is one of the overriding concerns of the Sydney variant on Anglicanism, and worldwide, those Anglicans opposed to any change on attitudes to same-sex relationships overlap fairly snugly with those opposed to the ordination of women to the priesthood or consecration to the episcopate, who use the same sort of arguments. Because of the fundamental nature of this debate, conservative Christians who look coldly on the style of ecumenism parented by twentieth-century liberal Protestantism, and who are frequently deeply suspicious of the World Council of Churches, will make some religious alliances which a century ago would have been unthinkable. So Moscow and Rome are at one in their attitudes to such questions as homosexuality and the ordination of women. Equally, when conservative Episcopalians met in a Dallas hotel conference centre to discuss their future after the Robinson consecration in 2003, these members of a heretical Protestant sect,