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 Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  bishops; rulers like Charlemagne or the local bishops who were their creations had called councils to decide on Church law and policy, even contradicting papal opinions from time to time. When the Pope crowned Charlemagne in 800, it had been in practice if not in theory from a position of some weakness (see p. 349), and later Holy Roman Emperors had proved to have minds of their own. In fact it is a paradox, and an anticipation of the troubles which were now to afflict relations between pope and emperor, that the first pope who can be regarded as a reformer was a German imposed on Rome in 1046 as Clement II, after the Emperor Henry III had forcibly seen off the claims of three competing claimants to the papal title.16 However they arrived at their new situation, the reforming popes now constructed a view of their position which did not brook contradiction. The very name Clement was a manifesto, reminding the world that the first Clement had been a close successor of Peter. Pope Leo IX (reigned 1049–54) was in the final year of his pontificate responsible for the drastic step of excommunicating the Oecumenical Patriarch Michael Keroularios in his own cathedral in Constantinople. The immediate issue was a dispute about eucharistic bread. At some point after it had become apparent that East and West had begun drifting apart, in the years after Chalcedon, the Latin West had come to use unleavened bread (azyma in Greek) at the Eucharist. Azyma had the advantage of not dropping into crumbs when it was broken, a matter of some importance now that eucharistic bread was increasingly identified with the Body of the Lord – yet the Greeks (rightly) regarded this as yet another Western departure from early custom. Was such bread really bread at all? Pope Leo sent his close friend Cardinal Humbert as negotiator with the Patriarch in 1054. Humbert was a former monk of Cluny who had recently been appointed archbishop in Sicily, an area of constant tension between Churches of Greek and Latin usage, and he was not inclined to diplomacy. Beginning with calculated rudeness to the Patriarch after their arrival in Constantinople, Humbert and his fellow envoys then appeared while worship was proceeding in the Great Church of Hagia Sophia. They strode through the congregation up to the altar and placed on it the Pope’s declaration of excommunication, quitting the building with a ceremonial shaking of its dust from their feet, amid jeers from a hostile crowd. This was only a personal excommunication of the Patriarch and his associates, but unlike the Acacian schism of the late fifth century (see p. 234), Pope and Oecumenical Patriarch did not declare the excommunication revoked for another nine hundred years after the events of 1054, and even now in many areas the reconciliation between Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism is distinctly shaky.17

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The rabbi’s ten-minute speech was not only bewildering, but obscurely disturbing to the Israelis who watched him on their television sets. He did not mention the coalition talks directly and addressed none of the issues that obsessed the rest of the nation. He was clearly quite indifferent to such issues as Palestinian rights, national defense, or the feasibility of exchanging territory for peace. He had not a single good word to say about the State of Israel. Instead of seeing the Jewish state as a savior, he referred bleakly to the “terrible and awful” time in which the Haredim now lived. The wars that worried the rabbi were not the Arab-Israeli wars, but the long battle waged by the Zionists against religion. “The wars we are fighting [against those who oppose tradition] did not begin today; they began already at the time of the First World War, and only the Master of the Universe knows what else is expected,” the rabbi said with great emotion. But the outcome was not in doubt: “The Jew cannot be destroyed. He may be killed, but his children will continue to cleave to the Torah.” Bad enough that they were cast as the enemy; but, to their dismay, Laborites had to hear their sacred institutions and themselves denounced as not merely un-Jewish but positively anti-Jewish. “Is Labor something holy?” asked the rabbi derisively. “Have they not separated themselves from the past, and seek a new Torah?” These kibbutzniks were no better than gentiles; they did not even know what Shabbat or Yom Kippur was. How could such people be trusted to decide “critical and essential matters facing the Jewish people?” There could be no deal with Labor politicians. “When they are in the Knesset, they are not interested in strengthening religiosity. To the contrary, they seek to pass laws that will destroy the Jewish religion.”76 The significance of that evening in Yad Eliahu Stadium did not lie simply in the fact that Rabbi Schach, alone and unaided, appeared effortlessly to have swung the balance in favor of Likud, but that it marked the extraordinary journey of the Haredim from a despised out-group to the heart of power. The occasion also showed that there were “two nations” in Israel, who scarcely understood one another’s language and shared none of the same concerns. It also revealed the deep hatred that inspired the piety of so many of the Haredim, a rage directed not merely against gentiles, but also against their fellow Jews.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Nevertheless, a large number of people still want to be religious and have tried to evolve new forms of faith. Fundamentalism is just one of these modern religious experiments, and, as we have seen, it has enjoyed a certain success in putting religion squarely back on the international agenda, but it has often lost sight of some of the most sacred values of the confessional faiths. Fundamentalists have turned the mythos of their religion into logos, either by insisting that their dogmas are scientifically true, or by transforming their complex mythology into a streamlined ideology. They have thus conflated two complementary sources and styles of knowledge which the people in the premodern world had usually decided it was wise to keep separate. The fundamentalist experience shows the truth of this conservative insight. By insisting that the truths of Christianity are factual and scientifically demonstrable, American Protestant fundamentalists have created a caricature of both religion and science. Those Jews and Muslims who have presented their faith in a reasoned, systematic way to compete with other secular ideologies have also distorted their tradition, narrowing it down to a single point by a process of ruthless selection. As a result, all have neglected the more tolerant, inclusive, and compassionate teachings and have cultivated theologies of rage, resentment, and revenge. On occasion, this has even led a small minority to pervert religion by using it to sanction murder. Even the vast majority of fundamentalists, who are opposed to such acts of terror, tend to be exclusive and condemnatory of those who do not share their views.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  This was tantamount to a declaration of civil war. Other Gush rabbis raised the question whether Rabin had become a rodef (“pursuer”), one who actively threatens the life of a Jew, and so is deemed worthy of death under Jewish law. 105 On November 4, 1995, Yigal Amir, a former student of a hesder yeshiva , an army veteran, and a student at Bar Ilan University, assassinated Rabin during a peace rally in Tel Aviv. His study of Jewish law, he said later, had persuaded him that Rabin was just such a rodef , an enemy of the Jewish people; he had a duty to kill him. 106 Like the murder of Sadat, the assassination of Rabin showed that two wars are being fought in the Middle East. One is the Arab-Israeli conflict; the other is a war within such individual countries as Israel and Egypt, between secularists and religious. Religious Jews are not alone in feeling outraged and attacked at a profound level. Secularists in Israel likewise feel repelled and assaulted by religious Jews. Walking around a Haredi district in Jerusalem, the celebrated Israeli novelist Amos Oz recalled that the early Zionists detested Orthodox Judaism and “would have banished this reality from the world around them and from within their souls. In an eruption of hatred and loathing, they portrayed this world as a swamp, a heap of dead words and extinguished souls.” To this secular hatred the Haredim have responded in kind. On the walls of the districts inhabited by members of Neturei Karta, Oz noted the black swastikas and graffiti: “Death to the Zionist Hitlerites.” “To hell with [the Laborite mayor of Jerusalem] Teddy Kollek.” Oz was also reminded of his teacher, Dov Sadan, who had argued that secular Zionism was just a passing episode in Jewish history, and that Orthodox Judaism would reemerge, “swallow Zionism and digest it.” Now as he wandered around the streets of this ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, Oz felt claustrophobic and overwhelmed by the vitality of Haredi Judaism, “for as it grows and swells, it threatens your own spiritual existence and eats away at the roots of your own world, prepared to inherit it all when you and your kind are gone.” 107 Secularist Israelis, it appears, also fear annihilation and feel irrational dread when confronted with their religious enemies. Oz touched upon the core of the problem. Fundamentalists and secularists—of whatever faith—are at war because they have entirely different conceptions of the sacred. When speaking about Gush Emunim, Oz called it “a cruel and obdurate sect” which had emerged “from a dark corner of Judaism, and is threatening to destroy all that is dear and holy to us.” For secularists and liberals—be they Jewish, Christian, or Muslim—such Enlightenment values as the autonomy of the individual and intellectual liberty, are inviolable and holy. They cannot compromise or make concessions on such issues.

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

  Alexandrian theologians, following Origen’s line, tended to stress the distinctness of the three persons of the Trinity, so they were reluctant to stress a further distinctness within the person of Christ. Diodore and Theodore, familiar with an Antiochene literal and historical reading of the Gospel lives of Jesus, were ready to emphasize the real humanity of Christ; they also tended to stress the oneness of the whole trinitarian Godhead, so they were much more prepared to talk of two natures in Christ, truly human and truly divine, in a way which Alexandrians were inclined to think blasphemous. As an image to explain these different positions, the Alexandrian view of Christ’s humanity and divinity contained in a single Person has been likened (although not by Alexandrians themselves) to a vessel which contains wine and water, perfectly and inextricably mixed, in contrast to the view of Theodore and his associates, where the vessel of Christ’s person could be said to contain two natures as it might oil and water, mingling but not mixing. Diodore and Theodore were particularly galvanized to defend their point of view by their horror at Apollinaris’s assertion that Christ was indwelled by the Logos, which replaced a human mind in him. They determinedly affirmed Christ’s real human nature alongside his divinity. For Theodore, it was vital to remember that Christ was the Second Adam, who had effected human redemption by offering himself as a true human being – that emphasis lay behind the frenetically self-destructive attitudes of contemporary Syrian monks towards their bodies, determined to get as close as was possible to the self-denial of the human Jesus. God had become a particular man, not humanity in general, Theodore insisted: ‘to say that God indwells everything has been agreed to be the height of absurdity, and to circumscribe his essence is out of the question. So it would be naïve in the extreme to say that the indwelling [of God in Jesus] was a matter of essence.’ It was therefore vital to keep the distinction between the man Jesus, despite his ‘outstanding inclination to the good’, and the eternal Word, which partook of the essence of the Godhead.82 The real flashpoint came in 428, when an energetic and tactless priest called Nestorius was chosen as Bishop of Constantinople. Nestorius was a devoted admirer of Theodore, having been his pupil in Antioch. His promotion did not please Bishop Cyril, successor to Athanasius in a line of resourceful and power- conscious politician-bishops of Alexandria, a prelate whom we have already met in connection with the lynching of the philosopher Hypatia (see pp. 220–21). Cyril, though unlikely to have been a pleasant man to know, was more than simply an unscrupulous party boss.83 When he contemplated his Saviour Jesus, he could see only God, mercifully offering his presence to sinful humanity, especially every time the Church offered Christ’s flesh and blood in the bread

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

  4. Christianity in the Second Century Equally, the real nature of the gnostic has no solidarity with the flesh of the human body; we should ‘be one of those who pass by’, as the Gospel of Thomas phrases it.38 Mortal flesh must be mortified because it is despicable – or, on the contrary, the soul might be regarded as so independent of the body that the most wildly earthly excesses would not imperil its salvation. Hostile ‘mainstream’ Christian commentators probably took much more relish in contemplating such excesses than was justified by practice among gnostic believers. Their prurient accounts are to be taken with more than a pinch of salt. In the fourth century, Epiphanius/Epiphanios, an energetically unpleasant Cypriot bishop and heresy hunter, described gnostic rites parodying the Eucharist with the use of semen and menstrual blood.39 In fact, the austere, ascetic strain in gnosticism is far more reliably attested than any licentiousness, and that makes it unwise to rebrand gnostic belief as a more generous-minded, less authoritarian alternative to the Christianity which eventually became mainstream. Still less plausible is a view of gnostic belief as a form of proto-feminism.40 Gnostic hatred of the body would match very uneasily with some modern emphases on the liberating power of sexuality or feminism’s physical celebration of all that it is to be female. It is nevertheless the case that gnostics opposed the authority structures then evolving in parts of the Church, particularly in relation to one important issue: martyrdom. As we will see (see Chapter 5), this was a crucial issue in a Church which, from the death of its founder onwards, repeatedly faced bouts of persecution from the authorities of both the Roman and the Sassanian empires.

• From Action (2014)

  • Public transportation. This one is a gamble, and you have to be discerning, because most of the time, people are taking the train to or from work. If you’re into women, be ESPECIALLY conscious of the fact that you are one of forty-two others peering at any attractive female-bodied person in whatever your vicinity is, and it’s best to be among the often slim fraction of those who are decent enough to not do or say anything to express that. If you MUST hit on a fellow passenger, passing notes is less horrible than expecting someone to talk to you, especially when your miniature letter just says “oh my god you are so gorgeous” and you look up and the person won’t meet your eyes because they’re blushing so much, as one memorable guy in a sexy yellow sweater proved to me. Trains are better for furtive glances back and forth across the car that you can then fantasize about for the rest of your life than they are for trying to fulfill those daydreams. • The company for which you work. I’ve undeniably had heaps of sex with colleagues and peers outside of my direct professional biznet (what “in-the-know” corporate insiders like me call “business networks”). So please trust me when I say that getting with coworkers whom you see five days out of the week is pretty dicey—and also one of the sexiest known kinds of entanglements, so long as the two biznetters are smart enough to keep their less-than-professional connection secret, which ramps up the hotness quotient by an enormous margin and has the additional perk of ensuring that you both don’t wind up unemployed. I had two and a half work side-pieces when I worked in an office of the same size and genial temperament as the Death Star, and it made going to work far more bearable. I wouldn’t recommend this at smaller companies, or if there’s a significant power differential between the two employees who are hard at work. I would never have sex with a subordinate or a boss, because the prospect that there would be some subtext of expectation based on one person’s higher-ranking title is too exploitative to follow through with on good faith. If this person works in an unrelated department or is on the same professional plane, though? Use your judgment—your job is (usually) more important than ones that begin with “hand” or “blow,” but there have been instances where I went right ahead and hooked up in the third-floor conference room that no one uses anyway. Consider discretion an unspoken point on the “skill sets” segment of your resume, and you’ll likely be fine. • Planet Hollywood in scenic Orlando, Florida. Other odds were working against me, too—like, his name was Gilbert, but I remained undeterred—at least I heard it right that time.

• From Action (2014)

  Save for the cases in which you’re flagged down by catcallers and “suitors” with defunct understandings of what qualifies as a compliment, turning people down with kindness is an admirable practice. You might not have the kind of tender nerves that make hitting on someone feel like a potentially humiliating risk, but don’t make the assumption that everyone else shares your unflappability! Even if the person wooing you is grounded and easy about any potential negative reaction, it’s still less than preferable to have someone sneer into their drink at your advances. Say, “Thanks, but I’m not interested,” like a self-actualized adult. If someone invades your space, interrupts or touches you without asking, or comes at you clumsily, you do not owe them your politeness, as they haven’t paid any mind to yours. In those cases, I like to crisply pronounce every letter in the phrase “You need to back up,” while looking at the offending party like I want to garnish them with parsley and masticate ’em. That’s usually enough to get the shitheel to slur, “SOH-RRY!” and maybe call me a bitch, then leave. Perfect! Whom Should You Bone? [image file=image_394.jpg] Anyone who’s lucky enough that you should want to. I was going to add, “… as long as they seem like a good person,” but who needs goodness when sometimes you want an encounter to carbonate what you think sexual quality is all about? Often, if you allow the opposite of what you would have engineered to happen without trying to apply the grid of “What You Like” onto it, you find that that framework has more elasticity than you thought. Like, did you know, heretofore until you pinioned your limbs around the person you’re boning, that you were into being bitten like one of those shockingly oversized turkey legs at a county fair, as aggressed by a guy named Ron with something to prove? You did not. Now, you’re sure of it. Allow for the chance for every word in “What You Like” to change meanings whenever you have sex. The act of “what” you’re doing, the “you” who knows only how they’ve gone about sex with people who aren’t the person they’re salivating about in the current moment, and whether “liking” something includes finding room to make it worthy of attention besides, “THIS IS WHAT HAD HAPPENED TO ME SO FAR THAT IS COMPARABLE TO NO-CLOTHES-TIMES I HAD SEEN AT THE MOVIES WHERE THE PEOPLE WERE VERY ‘MTV BEACH BODY CALIFORNIA’ HOT, WHICH I LIKED.” Keep things mutable, and you’ll maximize your happiness.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Besht believed that the ordinary Hasid could not achieve union with God directly. He would find the divine only in the person of a Zaddik (“a righteous man”) who had mastered devekut , a constant mystical consciousness of God which was beyond the reach of most people. 10 The Hasid was, therefore, wholly dependent upon his Zaddik, an attitude which Kant would have condemned as unworthy tutelage. Hasidism was thus deeply at odds with the Enlightenment, and many Hasidim would reject it when it began to penetrate Eastern Europe. While the Besht was alive, the rabbinic establishment did not take him seriously, but Dov Ber, the new leader, a learned man, was a very different proposition, and the movement spread under his leadership. When it reached Lithuania, it came to the attention of a powerful figure: Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (1720–97), head (gaon) of the Academy of Vilna. The Gaon was appalled by the Hasidic movement, especially its denigration of Torah study, which was his chief passion. His scholarship, however, was very different from the casuistic studies of the corrupt Polish rabbis, and had a deeply mystical cast. His sons tell us that he used to study all night with his feet in icy water to keep himself awake. For the Gaon, Torah study was a more aggressive exercise than it was for the Hasidim. He relished what he called the “effort” of study, and it seems as though this intense mental activity tipped him into a new level of awareness. When he did allow himself to sleep, the Torah penetrated his dreams and he would experience a mystical ascent to the divine. Torah study was thus an encounter with God. As his disciple, Rabbi Hayyim Volozhiner (1749–1821), whom we shall meet later, explained: “he who studies Torah communes with God, for God and the Torah are one.” 11 But the Gaon also made time for modern studies; he was proficient in astronomy, anatomy, mathematics, and foreign languages. He found the Hasidim heretical and obscurantist. The conflict became acrimonious. The Gaon’s supporters, whom the Hasidim called Misnagdim (“opponents”), would sometimes observe the rites of mourning when one of their number became a Hasid, as though he had died; the Hasidim, for their part, did not regard the Misnagdim as proper Jews. Eventually, in 1772, the Gaon excommunicated the Hasidim of Vilna and Brody; the shock of this expulsion is said to have killed Dov Ber. Toward the end of the Gaon’s life, Rabbi Shneur Zalman (1745–1813), a Hasidic leader in Ukraine and Belorussia, sought to effect a reconciliation, but the Gaon refused to speak with him.

• 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