Despair

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 182 of 267 · 20 per page

• From The Pisces (2018)

  52.I returned to the rocks. I knew I belonged there. If there was going to be desolation, no number of terrestrial men could fix me. I needed to go to the ocean, the primal tap, where the catalyst of my illness swam freely. If I was going to be alone and full of despair, let me at least be desolate here. Let me go cold turkey in the place I now loved most. Maybe it wouldn’t be so cold turkey after all? Maybe the fumes of memories could bring me down more gently. Only once in that week of waiting by the rocks did someone bother me. A lifeguard drove by in a jeep and asked me if everything was okay. I wanted to say, Well, actually, if you really want to know… but instead I said that I was fine. Then I told him I was a scientist conducting a study of the waves. “You know you’re not supposed to be out here this late at night,” he said. “I know. But it’s for the good of the tides.” “Are you sure you’re okay?” “I’m okay.” Then everything fell silent and he drove away. I took this to mean that I was supposed to be there. I was surely being tested, to see how strong and devoted I was. It was like I was part of some ancient worship ceremony, only instead of leaving candles, food, or wine at the altar, I was leaving myself. And instead of an altar there was the ocean. I would look out into the waves and for a moment I would really believe that I saw him. I had never seen him out in the waves, he never swam close enough to the surface, but now I constantly hallucinated him. Usually he was a bird skimming across the water. Once he was a dolphin. And every time, when what I thought was him would turn out to be only seafoam, or the wind blowing on the water, I wondered how much of everything I had seen or thought I’d seen in my lifetime had been only illusion like that. I wondered if anything was really living or if anything had ever lived.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Rockets of pain, burning rockets of pain—their pain, her pain, all welded together into one great consuming agony. Rockets of pain that shot up and burst, dropping scorching tears of fire on the spirit—her pain, their pain . . . all the misery at Alec’s. And the press and the clamour of those countless others—they fought, they trampled, they were getting her under. In their madness to become articulate through her, they were tearing her to pieces, getting her under. They were everywhere now, cutting off her retreat; neither bolts nor bars would avail to save her. The walls fell down and crumbled before them; at the cry of their suffering the walls fell and crumbled: ‘We are coming, Stephen—we are still coming on, and our name is legion—you dare not disown us!’ She raised her arms, trying to ward them off, but they closed in and in: ‘You dare not disown us!’ They possessed her. Her barren womb became fruitful—it ached with its fearful and sterile burden. It ached with the fierce yet helpless children who would clamour in vain for their right to salvation. They would turn first to God, and then to the world, and then to her. They would cry out accusing: ‘We have asked for bread; will you give us a stone? Answer us: will you give us a stone? You, God, in Whom we, the outcast, believe; you, world, into which we are pitilessly born; you, Stephen, who have drained our cup to the dregs—we have asked for bread; will you give us a stone?’ And now there was only one voice, one demand; her own voice into which those millions had entered. A voice like the awful, deep rolling of thunder; a demand like the gathering together of great waters. A terrifying voice that made her ears throb, that made her brain throb, that shook her very entrails until she must stagger and all but fall beneath this appalling burden of sound that strangled her in its will to be uttered. ‘God,’ she gasped, ‘we believe; we have told You we believe . . . We have not denied You, then rise up and defend us. Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!’ THE EN D CHAPTER 3 1 S tephen never went to her father’s study in order to talk of her grief over Collins. A reticence strange in so young a child, together with a new, stubborn pride, held her tongue-tied, so that she fought out her battle alone, and Sir Philip allowed her to do so. Collins disappeared and with her the footman, and in Collins’ stead came a new second housemaid, a niece of Mrs. Bingham’s, who was even more timid than her predecessor, and who talked not at all.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Otto thought the long period between Constantine and the reign of Henry III had been one of godliness and harmony because empire and papacy had been able to work together. Then Gregory VII and Henry IV had destroyed the unitary structure; heresy and schism had followed; and Otto detected other portents of impending dissolution. Obviously the power of evil was increasing, the world was in its death-throes, and the last trump would soon sound: ‘We are here,’ he wrote, ‘set down as it were at the end of time.’ Otto, however, was open to conviction. In 1152, his young nephew, Frederick Barbarossa, head of the house of Staufen, became emperor. A few years later he and his advisers confided to Otto their grand design for the reinvigoration of the Germanic empire, based on the creation of a new series of territorial fiefs directly administered by imperial agents, which would give the emperor the economic and political power to make him completely independent of papal support. As a result, Frederick and his court persuaded Otto to revise his gloomy prognostication. He not only altered the text of his Chronicle but, more important, set to work to write a biography of Frederick, the Gesta Frederici Imperatoris, in which he described the beginning of a new renaissance in the life of mankind, made possible by the glorious emergence of the Staufen family. In total contrast to his Chronicle, he wrote in his preface: ‘I consider those who write at this time as in a certain manner blessed, because after the turbulence of the past, there has dawned the unheard calm of peace’. The progress of Otto of Freising’s historical and political thought indicates the importance men attached to the idea of harmony in the regulation of the Christian world. Nor is this surprising. If there was something wrong in the top direction of the total Christian society, how could the organism as a whole function? Must not breakdown impinge on every aspect of human life? That would be the prelude to total dissolution, the end of the world. But Otto was foolishly optimistic in assuming a new royal house could reconstruct world order on a permanent basis. The Staufen were immensely gifted. But they were human, and therefore vulnerable. Their flesh and blood was no match for the impersonal institution of the papacy. Accident, death, minorities: these fatal weaknesses of medieval secular power did not hold the same terrors for the elderly tiara-men. It is no accident that the contest began as the result of an imperial minority; or that the papacy pursued a personal vendetta against members of the Staufen clan, on at least two occasions stooping to plans for assassination. Frederick Barbarossa died by drowning, his even more magisterial son, Henry VI, of that relentless Mediterranean killer, dysentery. The popes were not always willing to wait for God to strike. Unspeakable ferocity was throughout the hallmark of these death-struggles between popes and emperors.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Jansenism needs to be examined in some detail because it serves to show, more explicitly than the Protestant movement in the sixteenth century, that reform was an evangelical rather than a progressive force, and explains why in the long run Locke’s synthesis between basic Christianity and science was bound to break down. Cornelius Jansen, the Bishop of Ypres, was essentially a Catholic Lutheran – that is, he moved from Paul’s Romans, through Augustine to the doctrine of justification by faith and predestination. For this reason, his Augustinus, published in 1640, was anathematized by orthodox theologians at the Sorbonne as early as 1649, and papal condemnations were constant, culminating in the notorious bull Unigenitus of 1713. Yet Jansenism remained a force, in one sense the only real force, in French Christianity. It had many assets. It was Gallican and anti-papal. It was, like Puritanism in England, a counter-monarchical force, associated with the constitutional lawyers of the parlements. It was zealous. Its centre was the pious foundation for women at Port-Royal, just outside Paris, and it was linked to such austere experiments as the Trappists. Above all, it opposed the attempt of the Jesuits to use canon law to transform Christianity into a mere court and state religion. These characteristics gave it a vicarious popular base, and ensured that even a monarch as powerful as Louis XIV, who grew to hate it as he aged, failed to eliminate its influence. But it was an élite, not a mass, religion; its appeal was not wide, but extremely deep, and it enslaved many highly intelligent men, as the Manicheans had done. Indeed, the link with Augustine was not fortuitous. The Jansenists were the Manichees of the pre-Enlightenment, the first harbingers of modern philosophies of pessimism. Jansen himself regarded the human predicament as an unrelieved tragedy: ‘From the moment of its origin, the human race bears the full burden of its condemnation; and its life, if it can be called such, is totally bad. Do we not arrive in a horrible state of ignorance? From the womb does not the child lie in impenetrable darkness? . . . Already guilty of a crime, and incapable of virtue, so enveloped and buried in obscurity that it is impossible to arouse him from the state of stupor of which he is unaware. And this torpor lasts for months and years. From this darkness come all the errors of human life... What love of vanity and evil, what gnawing care, worry, sufferings, fears, unhealthy joys, disputes, struggles, wars, pursuits, rages, hostilities, lies, flatteries, pains, thefts, rapes, perfidies, pride, ambitions, envies, homicides, parricides, cruelties, sadism, wickedness, lusts, boastings, impudences, impurities, fornications, adulteries, incests, infamies against the natures of both sexes, which are too shameful to mention – what sacrileges, heresies, blasphemies, perjuries, oppressions of the innocent, slanders, swindles, frauds, false witnesses, miscarriages of justice, violence, larcenies . . .

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  State inventories show that vast quantities of goods were seized, gold and silver plate, precious ornaments and vestments, supplies of food and clothing, books and cash. Christian clergy might be more willing to surrender their lives than the Church’s valuables. Cyprian, writing from Africa, said there was mass apostasy, led by bishops; multitudes flocked to the magistrates to make their retractions, ‘spontanously submitting to the commissions in charge of that dreadful deed’. There was a general collapse of morale: ‘Many bishops, who ought to have been an encouragement and example to others, gave up their sacred ministry, deserted their people, left the district, tried to make money, took possession of estates by fraudulent means, and engaged in usury.’ Some of the faithful made state sacrifices but also continued as Christians; in Spain, for instance, we hear of Christians acting as civic priests. The Church was never able to adopt a uniform policy towards persecution. Thus there were acute divisions about the degree of compromise to adopt, not only between regions, but within them. Old schisms between ‘revivalist’ and ‘official’ Christians instantly reappeared and became inextricably mingled with doctrinal questions. Spasmodic persecution of Christian ‘extremists’ tended to strengthen orthodoxy in the Church, as we have noted, but blanket persecution, especially over a long period, weakened it in many ways, especially by undermining its unity. However, the systematic harassment of huge groups within the empire also weakened the State, not least in the army, where Christians were numerous. The Decian persecution had to be called off when there was trouble on the frontier. Later edicts, c. 300, were never fully applied in the West for this reason. Then, too, actions against Christians were increasingly unpopular. Whereas, in the first and second centuries, official hostility was a response to anti-Christian feeling among urban mobs, from 250 onwards the State usually had to act alone, indeed against public criticism. There is an air of desperation about the last great wave of persecutions, conducted by Maximinus in 308–12. In Damascus, said Eusebius, the authorities ‘seized the market-place whores, and under the threat of torture forced them to state in writing that they were once Christians and give evidence of orgies practised in Christian churches.’ This deliberate attempt to revive old slanders suggests they had lost their potency. On the contrary, the Christians had long been recognized as a virtuous and essentially inoffensive element in the community. They were, of course, different. As the so-called Epistle to Diognetus puts it: ‘They live in their own countries, but simply as visitors . . . to them every foreign land is a fatherland, and every fatherland foreign. . . . They have a common table, but yet not common. They exist in the flesh, but they do not live for the flesh. They spend their existence on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven. They obey the established laws and in their own lives they try to surpass the laws.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  As if in forgetfulness of human frailty, which he made, he had laid upon men commandments which they could not bear . . . so that God seems to have been seeking not so much our salvation as our punishment. . . . No one knows better the measure of our strength than he who gave us our strength; and no one has a better understanding of what is within our power than he who endowed us with the very resources of our power. He has not willed to command anything impossible, for he is righteous; and he will not condemn a man for what he could not help, for he is holy,’ The Christian should have heroic fortitude like Job. And he should have compassion, should ‘feel the pain of others as if it were his own, and be moved to tears by the grief of other men’. With much of this the young Augustine might have not have disagreed. His earliest writings show an insistence on free will which was close to Pelagius’s own. Later, as a militant bishop and persecutor, Augustine developed a grim determinism of his own. He took from Paul’s epistle to the Romans a theory of grace and election which was not wholly unlike Calvin’s. ‘This is the predestination of the saints,’ he wrote, ‘the prescience and preparation of the benefits of God, whereby whoever are set free are most certainly set free. And where are the rest left by the just judgment of God, save in that mass of perdition, where were left the men of Tyre and the Sidonians, who were also capable of belief, had they but seen those wonderful works of Christ?’ Every event was charged with a precise meaning as a deliberate act of God, of mercy for the elect, or judgment for the damned. A ‘divine decree’ had established ‘an unshakeable number of the elect’ who were ‘permanently inscribed in the archive of the father’. What role had man’s own efforts to play in this process? Very little. Deuteronomy warned, did it not: ‘Say not in thy heart, My strength and the power of my hand has wrought this great wonder – but thou shalt remember the Lord thy God, for He it is who gives the strength to do great deeds.’ Augustine was powerfully struck by a case he heard of – a man of eighty-four, of exemplary piety, who had lived a life of religious observance with his wife for a quarter of a century, and then had suddenly bought a dancing-girl for his pleasure, and so lost eternity. Was not this the hand of God, the fatal absence of grace, without which the human will was impotent? Augustine’s attention was first drawn to Pelagius by Jerome, who was still engaged in stamping out Origen’s belief in the perfectibility of the soul, and who instantly recognized in Palagius a modern Origenist.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Hence men who aspired to change and improve society, to carry through a Christian revolution, no longer, on the whole, sought bishoprics. These went, instead, to the younger sons of great territorial magnates, and to successful civil servants. They kept their wealth and their nominal status. Many of the 500 bishops of the Latin church could claim to occupy thrones which went back to the second century, or at any rate were older than any secular royal house. Thus the episcopate had to be treated as one of the key institutions of western society. When attempts were made to reform the Church in the fifteenth century, beginning with the papacy, it was natural to turn to the bishops, and to a revival of the conciliar system, to do the job. But they proved incapable of performing it. Crown and papacy, between them, had destroyed the once-powerful tradition of episcopal initiative and leadership. At the fifteenth-century councils, the bishops tended to vote either by nationalities, in response to royal instructions, or in the supposed Roman interest. The idea of acting independently as an international college had been lost. The spring had broken in an institution which had had its origins in New Testament times. The destruction of episcopal independence obviously enhanced papal authority within the Church; but the main beneficiary was the State. The Ambrosian bishop was a real check to royal power, as well as the Pope’s. With the bishop reduced to a dignified functionary, the Pope was left on a lonely eminence, face to face with the secular world. Indeed, it could be said that papal policy had created this secular spirit, and turned it into an enemy. The Christian society of the ninth century, say, had been an entity. There was then no such thing as a ‘clerical world’ and a ‘secular world’. The Gregorian reforms had brought the idea of the secular state into existence by stripping the ruler of his sacerdotal functions. For a time this enhanced the Church’s power, or appeared to. The superiority of the priestly element in society was emphasized, and the lay element was demoted along with the monarchy. There was a tendency to equate the clergy with ‘the Church’. In the long run this was fatal to the whole concept of the Christian society. The lay element was initially put on the defensive but it eventually responded by developing its own modes of thought outside the assumptions of the Christian-clerical world. These modes were alien to Christianity, and ultimately hostile to it. Again, the idea of a militant clerical caste, with all the advantages of superior learning and sophisticated legal and administrative techniques, initially carried all before it. It was the first great trades union. But the secular world learnt from its methods. In the twelfth century, royal justice was a generation or two behind canon law, but it soon caught up. The old empire was destroyed, but kings took its place.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Who can describe the yoke that weighs on the sons of Adam?’ Describing the yoke fell to the lot of Blaise Pascal, who found an uneasy relish in Jansen’s huge and baleful pessimism. He was born in 1623, a hard, grasping Auvergnat, the son of a mathematician and government tax-collector. All the Pascals were fierce, aggressive, quarrelsome, arrogant, litigious and desperately clever. By the age of twenty-two, he had constructed a workable calculating machine; and he also experimented with vacuums and atmospheric pressure, and used gambling to work out theories of probability. He was the same generation as Locke but rejected the Royal Society type of attitude to religious experience. Why? Primarily because, while in Locke’s England Zealotry was not only unfashionable but seen as dangerous and antisocial, in Pascal’s France it was just coming into vogue among Catholics. His case suggests that even great minds are prisoners of their environment. For Pascal was a wonderful controversial writer, clear, profound, wise and savagely witty. Born a century later, he might have rivalled Voltaire in demolishing organized religion. As it was, he underwent the type of religious ‘change’ which transformed Englishmen of the previous generation, like Milton and Cromwell. In 1654, while reading the New Testament, he had a weird emotional experience; this was confirmed, two years later, when his little goddaughter, dying of a lacrymal fistula, was cured by an eccentric relic-collector, who touched her with a supposed thorn of Christ. Thus Pascal, who had the talents of a sensational journalist, became a propagandist on behalf of Jansenist Port-Royal, where his sister was a leading inmate. He used the batteries of rationalist ridicule to expose the verbosity and meaninglessness of the Thomists, who still flourished at the Sorbonne, and the immorality of the Jesuits and their system of casuistry. His Provincial Letters had to be printed secretly, under a pseudonym, but they sold 10,000 copies each, and were read by over a million. Bossuet, the orthodox Gallican court-preacher, said he would rather have written them than any other book. Yet Pascal did not use rationalist techniques to advance the cause of reason; on the contrary. What he really disliked in the Jesuits was their lack of religion, as he understood it. He grew more angry, as he went on, at a system which tried to reconcile Catholicism with the hateful court of Louis XIV; it seemed to him worldliness and atheism masquerading as a faith. (In his last years he became convinced the Pope was wrong, and in heresy; but he did not press the point as he was wearying of controversy.) He wanted Christianity to preserve its original character – austere, harsh, almost scandalous in its rejection of earthly norms. In short, like Tertullian, he moved to a position where he saw Christian truth as transcending, even defying reason, and Christians rejoicing in its implausibility.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  You’re going to find someone top notch, I promise,” she says soothingly. “No, I see the writing on the wall for middle-aged women like me. I’m scarred by that conversation – it was an eye-opener and a reality check,” I say, shaking my head. “It’s like the old adage, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? I’m disposable now. I’m not young, I can’t give a man a family – and oh, by the way, my sagging boobs and crepe-y stomach aren’t all you’ll get with me – I come attached to three kids! My demographic is a dime a dozen. We’re all fighting gravity and trying to look like we’re still relevant, but men can see the truth about us.” We bike back down the boardwalk, stiffly and silently. Plunked down in chairs on the beach a few hours later, Lauren convinces me it will cheer me up to send a picture of myself in a bikini to #2. We’ve exchanged a few texts since our ill-fated night together a week ago and I’ve been hinting to him that I’ll be free when I’m back upstate Friday night, my last night before I have to pick Georgia up from camp. I don’t know what I’m hoping for by spending another evening with him, given the challenges of the last time, but I’m grasping at straws here. I spend the next hour trying to take a sexy selfie, but after a series of failed attempts at seductive poses leaves me and Lauren laughing and gasping for air, I settle for a photo of my toes in the sand, bright pink nail polish peeking through. I demand that Lauren also send a picture of her toes in the sand to her husband, who is at work in the city, and he writes back that the sand looks white and clean. We laugh even harder and agree that being jilted as I’ve been has its perks because now my toes are sexy and hers are just a backdrop to the sand. #2 responds to me that he would love to be on a beach with me, that it’s been ages since he’s had a proper vacation, and this is all the encouragement I need to start tormenting him with texts. Lauren’s goading and the bottle of wine we are now drinking on her terrace lend me bravado and I send some of the failed selfies from the beach as well as insist that he see me when I return on Friday night. He’s evasive, cagily says maybe. When I scan the texts the next morning, I wish I could erase them all: they start out playful and flirty, but as they go on become bolder and obnoxiously persistent.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  and, what is disgusting as it is blasphemous, this view of yours fastens, as its most conclusive proof, on the common decency with which we cover our genitals.’ Julian argued that sex was a kind of sixth sense, a form of neutral energy which might be used well or ill. ‘Really?’ replied Augustine, ‘is that your experience? So you would not have married couples restrain that evil – I refer, of course, to your favourite good? So you would have them jump into bed whenever they like, whenever they felt stirred by desire? Far be it from them to postpone it till bedtime . . . if this is the sort of married life you lead, don’t drag up your experience in debate.’ Augustine’s own life ended in darkness. The Vandals broke into Africa in 429, and Augustine died next year in his episcopal city, already under siege. ‘He lived to see cities overthrown and destroyed,’ wrote his biographer, Possidius, ‘churches denuded of priests and ministers, virgins and monks dispersed, some dying of torture, others by the sword, others captured and losing innocence of soul and body, and faith itself, in cruel slavery; he saw hymns and divine praises ceasing in the churches, the buildings themselves often burned down, the sacraments no longer wanted or, if wanted, priests to administer them hard to find. . . .’ In the City of God Augustine had already contrasted the vulnerable earthly citadel with the imperishable kingdom of Christianity. Man should set his sights on the second; nothing was to be hoped for on earth. In his last, unfinished, work, he examined theodicy and the whole problem of evil. It was nonsense to suppose, he wrote, as the Pelagians did, that God was equitable in a human sense. His justice was as inscrutable as any other aspect of his nature. Human ideas of equity were like ‘dew in the desert’. Human suffering, deserved or not, occurred because God was angry. ‘This life, for mortals, is the wrath of God. The world is a small-scale Hell’. ‘This is the Catholic view: a view that can show a just God in so many pains and in such agonies of tiny babies.’ Man must simply learn to accept suffering and injustice. There was nothing he could do about either. Whereas Pelagius had portrayed the Christian as a grown-up man, a son no longer leaning on the Father, but capable of carrying out his commands by free will – emancipatus a deo, as he put it – Augustine saw the human race as helpless children. He constantly used the image of the suckling baby. Humanity was utterly dependent on God. The race was prostrate, and there was no possibility that it might raise itself by its own merits. That was the sin of pride – Satan’s sin. Mankind’s posture must be that of total humility. Its only hope lay in God’s grace.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I was trying to ask her in a roundabout way if it was worth it. We felt the same nothingness, of that I was sure. But I wanted to see if she knew if we were going to be okay or not. Or, at least, if I was. I was asking life advice, couched in the language of suicide, from a friend in a mental hospital. This was the direction my life had taken. “So are you glad about everything? Like, everything that led you up to this point where you feel okay, maybe even good about being alive? Are you glad for that trajectory of your life?” “Yeah,” she said. “I feel strangely good about everything. Sure, no regrets. I regret nothing.” “I regret everything,” I said. “Lucy.” “I’m still fooling around with that swimmer,” I said. “More than fooling around, like, I’m completely, totally in love with him. But the thing is that he’s totally in love with me. I mean, it’s the most passionate, real, most spiritual experience I’ve ever had with someone. And yet, I’m not even totally sure if the whole thing even exists.” “What do you mean?” “Well, we don’t function well in the real world.” “The real world is rubbish.” “But we’re mostly relegated to a rock. We’re tied to a rock.” “Sounds like most marriages. At least ones with children.” “I just—I’m afraid it might kill me. I can’t tell if it’s a sickness or the best thing that ever happened to me.” “That’s brilliant!” “Tell me, was it definitely men who landed you in here?” She paused. “Yes, I suppose it was the men,” she said. “But really it was me.” 41.That afternoon I got my period. When I saw the blood, I wept. I wondered if that was why I had been feeling so anxious and afraid. I had cramps that felt like I was being stabbed in the uterus. Usually I enjoyed getting my period, the release of it—I always had. It made me feel connected to some primal goddess energy. But today I just felt heartsick. I had only five more weeks left with Theo and now the next week would be spent bloody, unsexed. What would we do together? I supposed we could just talk. I could put his cock in my mouth. He was waiting for me when I got to the rocks. He put his arms on the rock and his shiny body came shooting out of the water. He looked like he wanted to stand to greet me, to come running over. I imagined him standing, how or if that could ever happen. I would have to prop something up for him, almost like a frame or a podium. I wondered how much weight his tail could withstand. “Guess what?” “What?” he asked, kissing my cheek. “I have my period,” I said, dejected. “I know,” he said. “What do you mean you know?” I laughed.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I wandered into a fancy convenience store, crying next to the chips. I realized that I hadn’t eaten all day. I got a pint of strawberry ice cream and sat on a bench outside the store, watching people walk by. I wasn’t sure what time it was. There were a lot of couples, hand-in-hand. I imagined that when these couples broke apart for a time, when they took a day apart, they didn’t crumble and get sick like me. I was different from most people. Whatever this thing was, I definitely had it and it was only getting worse. 39. That night I went out to the rocks even though he said he wouldn’t be there. Where was he in the ocean? I pictured him breathing under the waves. I imagined him lying in a sand bed on the seafloor in pure, total darkness. He was sleeping. His eyes were closed and he was faintly smiling. I wanted to be there with him, in quietude, a better abyss than the one up here. I wanted to swim to the bed and curl up beside him, kiss him on the forehead, the water rippling out around us, brining us both. A passing submarine rang above us. It was my phone. I looked at it. I didn’t recognize the number so I didn’t answer. But I held it up to my ear and pretended that I could talk to Theo through the waves. What would I say to him? How are you? Who are you? Are you me? There were so many questions I had for him that I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to puncture what we had. I feared chasing him away with curiosity and neediness—too much of a desire to pin him down—when he was already giving me so much. I didn’t want to know his limits, where his dimensions—both physical and emotional—began and ended. I wondered who else could see him as I saw him. I didn’t know the exact constraints of his world or his existence and I didn’t want to fracture it. My greatest fear was that I would make him disappear. Was this how it was with all men? Did they all exist in a totally different reality—one in which you couldn’t ask certain questions or the spell would be broken? But it was the same for me. When a man held me at arm’s length I wanted him. But if he came closer, stayed too close for too long, the spell was broken for me: the myth dissolved. He wasn’t who I thought he was. What was love without the spell? The spell was broken for me around Jamie. It broke twice: once before the breakup, re-congealing in my need for him, and again now. He’d been frantically texting me every day. This contact, his pursuit, which had gotten me so high just weeks before, only bored me now.

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

  The pope, on receiving the official news of the occurrences in Florence, sent word congratulating the signory, gave the city plenary absolution and granted it the coveted tithes for three years. He also demanded that Savonarola be sent to Rome for trial, at the same time, however, authorizing the city to proceed to try the three friars, not neglecting, if necessary, the use of torture.1204 A commission was appointed to examine the prisoners. Torture was resorted to. Savonarola was bound to a rope drawn through a pulley and, with his hands behind his back, was lifted from the floor and then by a sudden jerk allowed to fall. On a single day, he was subjected to 14 turnings of the rope. There were two separate trials conducted by the municipality, April 17 and April 21–23. In the delirious condition, to which his pains reduced him, the unfortunate man made confessions which, later in his sane moments, he recalled as untrue.1205 He even denied that he was a prophet. The impression which this denial made upon such ardent admirers as Landucci, the apothecary, was distressing. Writing April 19,1498, he says:— I was present at the reading of the proceedings against Savonarola, whom we all held to be a prophet. But he said he is no prophet and that his prophecies were not from God. When I heard that, I was seized with wonder and amazement. A deep pain took hold of my soul, when I saw such a splendid edifice fall to the ground, because it was built upon the sorry foundation of a falsehood. I looked for Florence to become a new Jerusalem whose laws and example of a good life—buona vita — would go out for the renovation of the Church, the conversion of infidels and the comfort of the good and I felt the contrary and took for medicine the words, "in thy will, O Lord, are all things placed"—in voluntate tua, Domine, omnia sunt posita. Diary, p. 173. Alexander despatched a commission of his own to conduct the trial anew, Turriano, the Venetian general of the Dominicans and Francesco Romolino, the bishop of Ilerda, afterwards cardinal. Letters from Rome stated that the commission had instructions "to put Savonarola to death, even if he were another John the Baptist." Alexander was quite equal to such a statement. Soon after his arrival in Florence, Romolino announced that a bonfire was impending and that he carried the sentence with him ready, prepared in advance. Fra Domenico bore himself most admirably and persisted in speaking naught but praise of his friend and ecclesiastical superior. Fra Silvestro, yielding to the agonies of the rack, charged his master with all sorts of guilt. Other monks of St. Mark’s wrote to Alexander, making charges against their prior as an impostor. So it often is with those who praise in times of prosperity. To save themselves, they deny and calumniate their benefactors. They received their reward, the papal absolution.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Things were so bad for me by the end—the end of my last run. It could have killed me, easily. If I ever end up in that emotional space again? In a way, I think I’d be lucky to be dead. It would be worse to roam the planet, a tormented soul, for the rest of my life.” Maybe this was why I was in group, to remind people like her of the hell that awaited them just on the other side. I was here to be a cautionary tale. “How did you get through your withdrawal without dying?” I asked. “I just kept going. One minute at a time. And gradually I saw that the feelings didn’t destroy me.” “But you were forced to give him up, right? You didn’t choose to do it. I mean, he got a restraining order?” “What does a restraining order mean to people like us? In the face of our kind of obsession? But I guess, technically, yes, I was forbidden from being with him. I didn’t make the choice.” So there it was. She hadn’t so much recovered as she was stopped by the law. I pictured her like a marionette, a marionette of obsessive love, with a judge pulling the strings. She was running in place, like a boxer, but could not move toward what she thought she loved. “But what if you could be with him? If you could be with him again, wouldn’t you do it in a heartbeat?” “No, I wouldn’t,” she said quickly. “Come on. What if he was standing right here on the sidewalk?” She thought about it for a second and the corners of her mouth twitched downward. “Do I still miss him? Yes, I do. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t. But I don’t miss what being with him took away from me.” “Like what?” “Everything,” she said. “Dignity, sanity. My life.” “What was the restraining order for anyway?” I said. “It’s embarrassing.” “Come on. I’m in child’s pose on the sidewalk.” She laughed. I’d never seen her laugh before. “Fine,” she said. “One day I saw his wife out walking. I’d never met her, only stalked her on the Internet. But there she was, power walking down Montana right in front of me. And I thought about how unfair it was that I knew so much about her, from the stalking, and she didn’t even know I existed. I just felt livid about it. And I sort of chased her down…with my Prius.” “No!” “It’s true.” “You chased her down! Like tried to run her over?” “I wouldn’t have said that at the time. But yes, that’s what I was doing.” “My God, that’s amazing.” I laughed. “It’s not,” she said. “It’s pretty disgusting.” “I suddenly like you so much more,” I said. “You shouldn’t. None of it was her fault. It was her husband’s fault.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  So she said yet again, only now she spoke loudly: ‘I won’t have you interfering in my home!’ Then Stephen turned on her, white with passion: ‘You—you—’ she stuttered, ‘you’re unspeakably cruel. You know how you make me suffer and suffer because I love you the way I do; and because you like the way I love you, you drag the love out of me day after day—Can’t you understand that I love you so much that I’d give up Morton? Anything I’d give up—I’d give up the whole world. Angela, listen; I’d take care of you always. Angela, I’m rich—I’d take care of you always. Why won’t you trust me? Answer me—why? Don’t you think me fit to be trusted?’ She spoke wildly, scarcely knowing what she said; she only knew that she needed this woman with a need so intense, that worthy or unworthy, Angela was all that counted at that moment. And now she stood up, very tall, very strong, yet a little grotesque in her pitiful passion, so that looking at her Angela trembled—there was something rather terrible about her. All that was heavy in her face sprang into view, the strong line of the jaw, the square, massive brow, the eyebrows too thick and too wide for beauty; she was like some curious, primitive thing conceived in a turbulent age of transition. ‘Angela, come very far away—anywhere, only come with me soon—to-morrow. ’ Then Angela forced herself to think quickly, and she said just five words: ‘Could you marry me, Stephen?’ She did not look at the girl as she said it—that she could not do, perhaps out of something that, for her, was the nearest she would ever come to pity. There ensued a long, almost breathless silence, while Angela waited with her eyes turned away. A leaf dropped, and she heard its minute, soft falling, heard the creak of the branch that had let fall its leaf as a breeze passed over the garden. Then the silence was broken by a quiet, dull voice, that sounded to her like the voice of a stranger: ‘No—’ it said very slowly, ‘no—I couldn’t marry you, Angela.’ And when Angela at last gained the courage to look up, she found that she was sitting there alone. CHAPTER 22 1 W hen they got back to Morton there was Puddle in the hall, with that warm smile of hers, always just a little mocking yet pitiful too, that queer composite smile that made her face so arresting. And the sight of this faithful little grey woman brought home to Stephen the fact that she had missed her. She had missed her, she found, out of all proportion to the size of the creature, which seemed to have diminished.

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

  It invoked upon him the curse of beholding with his own eyes the destruction of his children by their enemies.213 During Clement’s pontificate, 1348–1349, the Black Death swept over Europe from Hungary to Scotland and from Spain to Sweden, one of the most awful and mysterious scourges that has ever visited mankind. It was reported by all the chroniclers of the time, and described by Boccaccio in the introduction to his novels. According to Villani, the disease appeared as carbuncles under the armpits or in the groin, sometimes as big as an egg, and was accompanied with devouring fever and vomiting of blood. It also involved a gangrenous inflammation of the lungs and throat and a fetid odor of the breath. In describing the virulence of the infection, a contemporary said that one sick person was sufficient to infect the whole world.214 The patients lingered at most a day or two. Boccaccio witnessed the progress of the plague as it spread its ravages in Florence.215 Such measures of sanitation as were then known were resorted to, such as keeping the streets of the city clean and posting up elaborate rules of health. Public religious services and processions were appointed to stay

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  They exposed the ambivalence and weakness of Christians, and their cowardice, whereas Communism brought out their strength. And, in the last resort, the Nazis were much more implacably determined to stamp out Christianity. When the Christian aristocrats who had taken part in the July 1944 plot were brought to trial, the president of the court, Roland Freisler, told their leader: ‘Count Moltke, Christianity and we Nazis have one thing in common and one only: we claim the whole man.’ The real threat of Nazism to Christianity was proclaimed far more loudly by the Nazis themselves than by the official Catholic leaders, who largely ignored it – at any rate in Germany, Austria and Italy. Hitler’s plans for Christianity were more draconian than anything envisaged by the Russians. He told his entourage on 13 December 1941: ‘The war will be over one day. I shall then consider that my life’s final task will be to solve the religious problem.... The final state must be: in the pulpit, a senile officiant; facing him, a few sinister old women, as gaga and poor in spirit as anyone could wish.’ Anti-Christian activities undertaken in Poland and elsewhere were more ferocious than anything contrived by the Russians, and applied equally to Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox churches. Himmler said: ‘We shall not rest until we have rooted out Christianity.’ The Nazi image of the future was adumbrated in the experimental area of the Warthegau, carved out of former Polish territories and handed over completely to party control as a tabula rasa. The plan involved not merely the separation of Church and State but the progressive and systematic destruction of religion. Did Pius XII know of this? He was usually well-briefed on what was going on. Eventually, Pius made a speech to the College of Cardinals. Nazism he said was a satanic spectre ... the arrogant apostasy from Jesus Christ, the denial of his doctrine and of his work of redemption, the cult of violence, the idolatry of race and blood, the overthrow of human liberty and dignity’. But it was then June 1945, the Germans had surrendered and Hitler was safely dead. Thus the Second World War inflicted even more grievous blows on the moral standing of the Christian faith than the First. It exposed the emptiness of the churches in Germany, the cradle of the Reformation, and the cowardice and selfishness of the Holy See. It was the nemesis of triumphalism, in both its Protestant and Catholic forms. Yet the Christian record was not entirely shameful. Christian resistance to Hitler and the Nazis had been weak and ineffectual, yet it did exist – it was more persistent and principled than that of any other element in German society. Some Christians in the West recognized its existence and tried to strengthen it; there was a slender line of Christian communication across the abyss of war.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The dynamism it has unleashed has brought massacre and torture, intolerance and destructive pride on a huge scale, for there is a cruel and pitiless nature in man which is sometimes impervious to Christian restraints and encouragements. But without these restraints, bereft of these encouragements, how much more horrific the history of these last 2,000 years must have been! Christianity has not made man secure or happy or even dignified. But it supplies a hope. It is a civilizing agent. It helps to cage the beast. It offers glimpses of real freedom, intimations of a calm and reasonable existence. Even as we see it, distorted by the ravages of humanity, it is not without beauty. In the last generation, with public Christianity in headlong retreat, we have caught our first, distant view of a de-Christianized world, and it is not encouraging. We know that Christian insistence on man’s potentiality for good is often disappointed; but we are also learning that man’s capacity for evil is almost limitless – is limited, indeed, only by his own expanding reach. Man is imperfect with God. Without God, what is he? As Francis Bacon put it: ‘They that deny God destroy man’s nobility: for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and, if he be not kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.’ We are less base and ignoble by virtue of divine example and by the desire for the form of apotheosis which Christianity offers. In the dual personality of Christ we are offered a perfected image of ourselves, an eternal pace-setter for our striving. By such means our history over the last two millennia has reflected the effort to rise above our human frailties. And to that extent, the chronicle of Christianity is an edifying one. Select BibliographyAddington, Raleigh, ed., Faber, Poet and Priest. Selected Letters by Frederick William Faber from 1833–1863 (London 1974) Ahlstron, Sidney A., A Religious History of the American People (New Haven 1972) Aigrain, René, L’Hagiographie: ses sources, ses méthodes, son histoire (Paris 1953) Albright, W.F., From the Stone Age to Christianity (Baltimore 1957) Alphanery, A. and Dupront, A., La Chrétienté et l’idée de la Croisade, 2 vols. (Paris 1954–9) Andreson, H., Jesus and Christian Origins (New York 1964) Atiya, A.S., A History of Eastern Christianity (London 1968) Atkinson, James, Martin Luther and the Birth of Protestantism (London 1968) Attwater, Donald, ed., The Penguin Dictionary of Saints (London 1965) Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Harvard 1967) Bainton, R., ‘The development and consistency of Luther’s attitude to religious liberty’, Harvard Theological Review (1929) Bainton, R., ‘The parable of the Tares as the proof text for religious liberty to the end of the sixteenth century’, Church History (London 1932) Bainton, R.H., Erasmus of Christendom (London 1970) Baker, Derek, ‘Vir Dei: Secular sanctity in the early 10th century’, Studies in Church History (Cambridge 1972) Bald, R.C., John Donne: A Life (Oxford 1970) Barley, M.W.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Furthermore, we declare, state, define and pronounce that it is altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff.’ One of the great tragedies of human history – and the central tragedy of Christianity – is the break-up of the harmonious world-order which had evolved, in the Dark Ages, on a Christian basis. Men had agreed, or at least had appeared to agree, on an all-enveloping theory of society which not only aligned virtue with law and practice, but allotted to everyone in it precise, Christian-orientated tasks. There need be no arguments or divisions because everyone endorsed the principles on which the system was run. They had to. Membership of the society, and acceptance of its rules, was ensured by baptism, which was compulsory and irrevocable. The unbaptized, that is the Jews, were not members of the society at all; their lives were spared but otherwise they had no rights. Those who, in effect, renounced their baptism by infidelity or heresy, were killed. For the remainder, there was total agreement and total commitment. The points on which men argued were slender, compared to the huge areas of complete acquiescence which embraced almost every aspect of their lives. Yet these slender points of difference were important, and they tended to enlarge themselves. There were flaws in the theory of society, reflected in its imagery. If society was a body, what made up its directing head? Was it Christ, who thus personally directed both arms, one – the secular rulers – wielding the temporal sword, the other – the Church – handling the spiritual one? But if Christ directed, who was his earthly vicar? There was no real agreement on this issue. The popes had been claiming to be vicars of St Peter since very early times. Later, they tended to raise this claim, and call themselves vicars of Christ. But kings, too, and a fortiori emperors, claimed a divine vicariate derived from their coronation; sometimes it was of God the Father, sometimes of Christ; when it was the former, the Christ-vicariate, being in some way inferior, was relegated to the Church. Now none of this should have mattered in the slightest. Since the vicarial direction, in all cases, was coming from the same source – Heaven – and since, presumably, there was no disagreement between the Father and the Son and St Peter, it should have made no difference who was vicar of whom. The direction would be the same, and all would obey. Alas, experience showed that this did not always happen. So Christian theory had an answer to this point. There could be wicked emperors, kings, popes, bishops. They represented the work of the Devil, who might well contrive, from time to time, to get one of his own elected to such offices. But this would soon become manifest; God would then arrange that they would be detected, judged and deprived. But such a process implied a court. Whose court?

• From The Pisces (2018)

  But nothing terrible had happened. In fact something beautiful had occurred—or, at least, it was supposed to be beautiful. Would the pain begin to outweigh the beauty? How much pain would I have to get into before I gave up on pursuing beauty? And what would I do then anyway? No, I wouldn’t stop. Even if the experience became only pain, eclipsing the beauty entirely, I would wait at those rocks. I would wait for that little bit of relief that fed the pain in the first place. And what if I really were to stay in Venice and not return to Phoenix? Would it even be possible? Would Theo even want me here? I knew nothing about his patterns of migration or anything about his life. Maybe he took off for other places at other times of the year. How did I know that he wouldn’t be leaving? And what about Annika? Her love had always been across a distance. Even in her act of kindness this summer we were never together in the same space. How would she feel about me taking root where she lived? Would it expose a less geographic, more profound internal distance in our relationship? I was scared to need her, to ask for more than she could give. I didn’t want to be rejected by her again. Venice looked like nothingness to me now—the same nothingness that I had fled Phoenix to escape. The only difference was that I still had Theo. He hadn’t gone anywhere. I would see him tomorrow night. In the past the emptiness came when the person rejected me and would not be coming back, like Jamie or Garrett. But I was going to see Theo again, this I pretty much knew. We were connected. So how, in spite of this, had the emptiness made its way in anyway? I wandered into a fancy convenience store, crying next to the chips. I realized that I hadn’t eaten all day. I got a pint of strawberry ice cream and sat on a bench outside the store, watching people walk by. I wasn’t sure what time it was. There were a lot of couples, hand-in-hand. I imagined that when these couples broke apart for a time, when they took a day apart, they didn’t crumble and get sick like me. I was different from most people. Whatever this thing was, I definitely had it and it was only getting worse.