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 189 of 267 · 20 per page

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  nothing; the pure community (and a community by birth and race) is all. Jerusalem and its wicked priests are the enemies; but then, so are all the Gentiles. In due course the Son of Light, led by the Essenes, will fight a war against the Sons of Darkness, who have compromised with the non-elect world; after the battle has been won, following the war-plan, a king will be restored to the throne and the purified Israel will live in the manner of Zadok. All the lucky ones, who will live for ever, will be Israelite by birth. The bad Jews and the Gentiles will all be dead. That is the plan for human history, devised by God, and shortly to be enacted. The Essenes had no matrix for a world-religion; far from it. Rather their monastery and their other cells, were incubators for extremists, Zealots, men of violence and enragés. The excavations at Qumran show that the monastery became a centre of resistance during the war of AD 66–70, and was stormed and burned by the Roman army. This annihilation marked the end of the Essenes as a separate sect – inevitably so, since they were exploring a stream of Jewish religious and political thought which led nowhere but to destruction. But the Essene monasteries, cells and city-groups were schools of more than Zealots. Their importance in the history of Christianity lies in the fact that they provided experimental centres – religious universities, indeed – which lay outside the mainstream of Jewish teaching as practised in Jerusalem. In their ultra-conformity, they were essentially nonconformist and antinomial. A man might enter an Essene community a pious, conformist Jew and emerge a Zealot; or he might go there for Zealous reasons and become a hermit. Or he might produce entirely novel ideas, or seize upon some aspect of Essene teaching and practice and develop it in a radically new direction. Thus the Essene movement was a powerful contribution to the fundamental instability of Judaism during this period. And the sense of crisis was deepening. It entered an acute phase after Judea was directly annexed by the Roman state and thus made liable to Roman fiscal procedures. These proved to be much less popular than the pro-Roman party had anticipated; it has been calculated that in first century Palestine, Roman and Jewish taxes together may have reached as much as 25 per cent (non-progressive) of incomes, in an economy which in some respects and in some areas was not far above the subsistence level. Palestine was thus soaked in politico-religious apocalypticism. Irredentist politics and religious extremism were inextricably mixed. All Palestinian Jews to some extent believed in a Messianic solution. There were, it is true, many different doctrines of

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  injuring anyone . . . that he was exalted in power but nevertheless remained poor in spirit.’ Gerald, at least as Odo presents him, was a conservative figure, somewhat harsh and severe in his views. He was furious when he discovered that people were using the water in which he washed to effect cures: ‘he said that if a serf did it he should be maimed, and if a free man, he should be reduced to servitude . . . people took his threats of mutilation seriously, knowing that he would not yield in the matter of punishment.’ So far as one can gather, Gerald did nothing more than treat his dependents justly, by the very imperfect standards of the times; that, in the tenth century, was sufficiently rare to promote a reputation for sanctity. It is a chilling little tale. Of course, the expectations of Dark Age man were not high. The Carolingian age itself was a comparatively brief episode of order between repeated breakdowns in society. The profound pessimism which Christians drew from Augustine’s writings itself seemed to mirror the uncertainties of life as they knew it. There grew up at this time a strong sense of the pointlessness of earthly life, which persisted long after horizons had widened – indeed, until the Renaissance. We find it particularly in endowment charters and documents justifying gifts of property to the church. In 1126, for instance, Stephen, Count of Boulogne, made over lands to Furness Abbey, ‘seeing that the bonds of this our age are breaking and falling daily into decay, seeing, again, how all the transitory pomp of this world, with the flowers and rosy chaplets and palms of flourishing kings, emperors, dukes and all rich men do wither from day to day; how, again, death casts them all into one mingled mass and hurries them swiftly to the grave ...’ And so forth. Otto, Bishop of Bamberg, asked why he founded monasteries when there were already so many, replied: ‘This whole world is a place of exile; and so long as we live in this life we are pilgrims of the Lord. Therefore we need spiritual stables and inns, and such resting-places as monasteries afford to pilgrims. Moreover, the end of all things is at hand, and the whole world is seated in wickedness; wherefore it is good to multiply monasteries for the sake of those who would flee from the world and save their souls.’ Despite these limitations, however, the attempt to create a totally Christian society was neither ignoble nor wholly unsuccessful. There is something enormously impressive, almost heroic, about the work of such men as Charlemagne and Alfred. The Christian theory of kingship had allotted them a giant’s role: they did their best to rise to it. Augustinian theory saw Christian mankind and its institutions as a

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  finally proclaimed, to an apathetic congregation in St Sophia, in 1452. On this occasion the papal promise of aid against the Turks was as insincere as the Greek acceptance of Rome’s doctrinal position. Six months later the city had fallen, and the eastern empire no longer existed. The great African Church radiating from Carthage was ultimately lost because of fatal divisions over the sacramental powers of bishops. Syria and the East, and much else, were lost because no compromise proved possible, or rather durable, over the definition of the Trinity and the nature of Christ. Byzantium came to grief, and European Christianity remained divided, because East and West could not agree on an institutional means to resolve their comparatively trivial points of difference. Christ had founded a universalist Church which would be all things to all men. But it was also a Church with an intense vision, which bred adamantine certitudes. The more the vision was realized, the stronger the certitudes became, the less likely it would be that universality would be based on unity. The Augustinian idea of an authoritarian, compulsory and total Church was incompatible with the ecumenical spirit. Hence the attempt to give it substance in Carolingian times led inevitably to the split with the East. We shall now see how the Augustinian drive within the western Church proved too powerful for its unifying bonds, and how it smashed the Christian society into fragments.

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  Now I’m terrified I’ll always be sad and angry and the enormity of my emotions is eating me alive. I want my old life back,” I said, and with that, covered my face with my hands and let my body heave. “Laura, look at me,” she said, after a few minutes of letting me air my grief. “I need you to look at me.” I dropped my hands from my face and raised my eyes to meet hers, taking in her serene demeanor, her silver hair, her kind eyes. She leaned forward toward me, her eyes never straying from mine. “You are still you. You have not lost the essence of yourself. I see you. I see who you are. There’s no old life and new life, there’s just you. Don’t ever give anyone the power to take you away from yourself. You will always know who you are, no one can change that.” “OK,” I said, sniffling and holding her steady gaze. “What if I’m so lost that I can’t remember who I am or find myself in here? What if I’m actually lost forever?” “No, it’s not possible. Right here, Laura,” she said, pressing her hand to her heart and leaning forward even further in her seat, “you are here. Look inside. You’re too strong to have disappeared. Find yourself, embrace yourself, that’s the part no one can ever take from you, that will always be there for you. You know who you are.” Slowly, I nodded my head, as if she had just re-introduced me to myself. I was wounded, but I wasn’t dead. I had fallen, badly, and had convinced myself that I would never be the same again, but somewhere amidst the wreckage, whatever it was that made me a mother and a daughter and a friend, that was still there. It was possible that whatever had made me a wife was gone forever, but that was only a part of who I was. Its absence would not kill me: it would hurt, it would redefine parts of me, but it would not destroy me if I didn’t allow it to. * On Mother’s Day, I took a spin class that the instructor peppered with feel-good quotes about motherhood. I took a lot of spin classes so I was accustomed to these motivational tidbits and I was apathetic to them. Yes, I showed up, yes, I was doing my best and that was good enough, blah blah blah, but really, let’s be honest, I was here to fight age and gravity. “When life deals you a tough hand, don’t ask why. Don’t bother yourself with why me? Why not you? Because you can handle it, that’s why. You’ve hit hundreds of walls in your life, but you’re powerful and you’re resilient and you’ve got this, that’s why you. Because you can.”

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  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. In 1197 the Pope engaged in a conspiracy to murder Henry VI, in conjunction with his estranged wife Constance of Sicily; the plot was detected and some of its agents arrested: Henry forced Constance to watch their deaths – Jordanus of Sicily had a red-hot crown placed on his head and fixed to his skull with nails; others were burnt at the stake, flayed alive or covered in tar and ignited. But Henry VI himself died the same year; and the minority of his son, Frederick II, coincided with the pontificate of Innocent III, the most formidable of all the medieval lawyer-popes. He took the final steps in the subtle evolutionary process which stretched back to late Roman times, and progressed through Gelasius I, Nicholas I and Gregory VII. After Innocent III, the triumphalist pontification of Boniface VIII and others were mere hyperbole. Innocent III placed the papacy in the centre of the world’s motions. He quoted Nicholas I: ‘The world is an ecclesia .’ The Pope had not merely a right but an obligation to examine the person chosen as king

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Such was the multitude of corpses (of which further consignments were arriving every day and almost by the hour at each of the churches), that there was not sufficient consecrated ground for them to be buried in, especially if each was to have its own plot in accordance with long-established custom. So when all the graves were full, huge trenches were excavated in the churchyards, into which new arrivals were placed in their hundreds, stowed tier upon tier like ships’ cargo, each layer of corpses being covered over with a thin layer of soil till the trench was filled to the top. But rather than describe in elaborate detail the calamities we experienced in the city at that time, I must mention that, whilst an ill wind was blowing through Florence itself, the surrounding region was no less badly affected. In the fortified towns, conditions were similar to those in the city itself on a minor scale; but in the scattered hamlets and the countryside proper, the poor unfortunate peasants and their families had no physicians or servants whatever to assist them, and collapsed by the wayside, in their fields, and in their cottages at all hours of the day and night, dying more like animals than human beings. Like the townspeople, they too grew apathetic in their ways, disregarded their affairs, and neglected their possessions. Moreover they all behaved as though each day was to be their last, and far from making provision for the future by tilling their lands, tending their flocks, and adding to their previous labours, they tried in every way they could think of to squander the assets already in their possession. Thus it came about that oxen, asses, sheep, goats, pigs, chickens, and even dogs (for all their deep fidelity to man) were driven away and allowed to roam freely through the fields, where the crops lay abandoned and had not even been reaped, let alone gathered in. And after a whole day’s feasting, many of these animals, as though possessing the power of reason, would return glutted in the evening to their own quarters, without any shepherd to guide them. But let us leave the countryside and return to the city. What more remains to be said, except that the cruelty of heaven (and possibly, in some measure, also that of man) was so immense and so devastating that between March and July of the year in question, what with the fury of the pestilence and the fact that so many of the sick were inadequately cared for or abandoned in their hour of need because the healthy were too terrified to approach them, it is reliably thought that over a hundred thousand human lives were extinguished within the walls of the city of Florence? Yet before this lethal catastrophe fell upon the city, it is doubtful whether anyone would have guessed it contained so many inhabitants.

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  Michael’s been having an affair. I don’t know what to do.” She wrote me back immediately and offered to get in a car and drive upstate, but I didn’t want her to come running to save me, I wanted her to make this nightmare go away. “But I don’t understand. You’ve always said Michael is so in love with me, that he seems to love me more than I do him. How could this be happening? It makes no sense,” I wrote. “I don’t know Laura. I’m so sorry,” she wrote back. “Please make this go away.” “I would do anything to make that happen. I’m sick for you,” she wrote as my panic swelled. In too great a state of disbelief to comprehend the enormity of this news, I could only stare in horror at the phone’s screen, willing Jessica to write back with an explanation that did not – that could not – come. CHAPTER 13 The Only Way Out Is Through That austere, dismal February day Michael confirmed his affair passed in a haze as I shuffled between Georgia’s bed, the bathroom, and my own bed. I texted my friend Erika and asked her to call me. She told me later that she had been in the middle of making pancakes with her daughter when she got my text but immediately called her husband Tony to take over, knowing that something was wrong as I was not a friend who normally sent out SOS messages. It still pains me to picture the scene – her sun-drenched suburban kitchen, Tony taking the bowl from her hands so she could tend to me, who would never know that kind of domestic ease with my own husband again. She’d known Michael as long as I had, since she and I had been roommates throughout college; she also knew me better than just about anyone, my other half ever since middle school. She said she was devastated for me, but not totally surprised, that Michael had always been hard to fill up, barely finishing one renovation before looking to move again, or planning the next vacation when we were already on one. She had long felt it was the same with the love I gave him: never enough. I was stunned. I had convinced myself that this was mostly my fault – I wasn’t sexual enough, I wasn’t kind enough, I didn’t adore him the way he adored me, I had insisted we marry too young, I had wanted babies right away, I hated moving and resented it every time we did, I complained about his weight. I complained about the way he ate grapefruit, I complained about his snoring, I complained when he took a second cup of coffee and didn’t leave enough in the pot for me. If there was an emptiness inside of him that was simply unfillable then we were both damaged goods who shared in the corruption of our marriage.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  All of this was so difficult for Nastagio to bear that he was frequently seized, after much weeping and gnashing of teeth, with the longing to kill himself out of sheer despair. But, having stayed his hand, he would then decide that he must give her up altogether, or learn if possible to hate her as she hated him. All such resolutions were unavailing, however, for the more his hopes dwindled, the greater his love seemed to grow. As the young man persisted in wooing the girl and spending money like water, certain of his friends and relatives began to feel that he was in danger of exhausting both himself and his inheritance. They therefore implored and advised him to leave Ravenna and go to live for a while in some other place, with the object of curtailing both his wooing and his spending. Nastagio rejected this advice as often as it was offered, but they eventually pressed him so hard that he could not refuse them any longer, and agreed to do as they suggested. Having mustered an enormous baggage-train, as though he were intending to go to France or Spain or some other remote part of the world, he mounted his horse, rode forth from Ravenna with several of his friends, and repaired to a place which is known as Classe, some three miles distant from the city. Having sent for a number of tents and pavilions, he told his companions that this was where he intended to stay, and that they could all go back to Ravenna. So Nastagio pitched his camp in this place, and began to live in as fine and lordly a fashion as any man ever born, from time to time inviting various groups of friends to dine or breakfast with him, as had always been his custom.

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  How does anyone stand out here? My newfound sexual prowess and confidence drain out of me, leaving nothing but a small dirty puddle in the gutter. The two ways I have for decades identified myself – as a loving wife and dedicated mother – are on shaky ground, while my brand new way of identifying myself as a desirable woman now simply vanishes, leaving me with the uncomfortable understanding that I can no longer rely on the self I thought I was. I register that my successes with numbers one through four were completely situational, that my small victories on the amateur fields led me to foolishly believe that I was ready for the big leagues; while I thought I had been gaining a deeper understanding of myself I was actually slowly losing what tenuous understanding of myself I did have. I picture myself almost twenty years ago, standing on the corner outside a bakery on the Upper West Side. I had been trying and failing to get pregnant and had fallen into a deep depression, despondent that friends around me blinked and got pregnant while I seemed destined for barrenness. A therapist suggested I do a simple activity that made me feel happy, and I told her my greatest happiness was found in cleaning my apartment on a Sunday morning after Michael left for work, then going to the bakery for three Italian bakery cookies and a cup of coffee, which I would slowly savor as I paged through piles of manuscripts for work. My therapist had told me to go do it then, to bring a simple pleasure back into my life, to remind myself what happiness felt like. Ever the diligent student, I had done as she instructed. I vacuumed our apartment, polished the dining and wooden end tables, scrubbed the ten linoleum squares that made up our kitchen and bathroom, and left the tiny apartment in its gleaming glory to walk around the corner to the bakery. Once I reached it though, I stopped outside the door leading inside, immobilized as I watched other customers stroll in and out. I could see the glass case of cookies through the window and I felt nothing so much as bafflement: this once made me happy? These crumbling, garishly colored cookies? Jockeying for a spot in line with all the couples pushing overloaded baby strollers? I desperately wanted to be a mother, I wanted to coo over a baby with Michael, saying she has my eyes but your smile, I wanted to know what it meant to feel a life growing inside of me – and these cookies were supposed to bring me some modicum of joy? I didn’t want the crumbs, I wanted the whole bakery.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  And so, having found a buyer for his merchantman, he combined the proceeds with the money he had raised on his cargo, and purchased a light pirate-vessel, which he armed and fitted out, choosing only the equipment best suited for the ship’s purpose. He then applied himself to the systematic looting of other people’s property, especially that of the Turks. In his new role, he met with far more success than he had encountered in his trading activities. Within the space of about a year, he raided and seized so many Turkish ships that, quite apart from having regained what he had lost in trading, he discovered that he was considerably more than twice as wealthy as before. He thus had enough, he now realized, to avoid the risk of repeating his former mistake, and once he had persuaded himself to rest content with what he had, he made up his mind to call it a day and return home with the loot. Being wary of commercial ventures, he did not bother to invest his money, but simply steered a homeward course, at breakneck speed, in the tiny ship with which he had collected his spoils. He had come as far as the Archipelago, 3 when he found himself sailing one evening directly into the teeth of a southerly gale, and his frail craft was barely able to cope with the mountainous seas. So he put into a cove on the leeward side of a small island, with the intention of waiting for more favourable winds. He had not been there long, however, when two large Genoese carracks, 4 homeward-bound from Constantinople, struggled into the bay to escape the same storm from which Landolfo had taken shelter. The crews of the Genoese ships recognized Landolfo’s vessel, which they already knew from various rumours to be loaded with booty. And being by nature a rapacious, money-grubbing set of people, they blocked his way of escape and made their preparations for seizing the prize. First they put ashore a party of well-armed men with crossbows, who were strategically placed so that no one was able to leave Landolfo’s vessel without running into a barrage of arrows. Then they launched cutters, by means of which, aided by the current, they drew themselves towards Landolfo’s little ship. This they captured without losing a man, after a brief and half-hearted struggle, and they took her crew prisoner. Landolfo was left wearing nothing but a threadbare old doublet and taken aboard one of their ships, and after everything of value had been removed from his vessel, they sent it to the bottom. The next day, the wind changed quarter, and the two ships hoisted their sails and set a westerly course. For the whole of that day they made good progress, but in the evening a gale began to blow, producing very heavy seas and separating the two carracks from each other.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  leadership deliver American policy. The righteous Wilson wanted the League; and official religious opinion in America was overwhelmingly in favour of American participation. It greeted the Senate rejection with dismay, but was unable to reverse it. Thus Christian impotence in war was confirmed by Christian impotence in peace. The First World War, a civil war among the Christian sects, opened a period of tragedy and shame for Christianity. The war, and the peace that followed, demonstrated the weakness of the churches; but at least none of them positively identified themselves with evil. That was to come. During the 1920s a mood of pessimism and discouragement set in among Christian leaders. Triumphalism was quietly laid on one side. Ostensibly, there was no decline – at least no dramatic decline – in Christian numbers. But visions of a Christianized world faded, and a defensive posture was adopted. Rome set the tone. As always, in periods of uncertainty, it looked for reliable, conservative allies. In 1922, Achille Ratti, a middle- class archivist, was elected pope as Pius XI. Unlike his predecessor, Benedict XV, he was narrow-minded, unimaginative and reactionary. He feared communism and socialism and saw Soviet Russia. as the supreme enemy. He did not want the Church to get itself mixed up in workers’ movements. Hence he would have nothing to do with Christian Democracy. In France he was reluctantly persuaded to condemn Action Française in 1927, but only after Maurras’s provocative atheism had made such a step inevitable. He gave no corresponding encouragement to Catholic social movements. In Italy, Don Sturzo’s mass party of Christian Workers, the Partito Populare, had received the help and blessing of Pope Benedict; Pius reversed the policy, and instead backed Mussolini, with the object of settling the ‘Roman Question’. This was achieved with the signing of the Lateran Treaty in 1929 which, Pius said, had ‘given Italy back to God’. Mussolini, in return, called the Pope ‘a good Italian’. In the meantime, Sturzo had been forced into exile, his successor Alcide de Gasperi imprisoned, and the Christian Democrats broken up. In Germany, Pius backed the conservative forces of the right, and gave no countenance to Christian socialists, whom he refused to distinguish from Marxists. 2 If the papacy, while discouraging Christian democracy, had been completely consistent and held itself aloof from all political contacts, it would have been in a position simply to uphold and expound Christian principles and identify those who broke them. But it did not do this. While in theory denouncing the whole of the modern world, and remaining within its fortress, in practice it came to terms with

• From The Decameron (1353)

  I know my error now; Not without grief, I vow. ‘I comprehend that false deceit And see how, while I thought that she Seemed to allow my love, she’d found Another servant, spurning me. Ah, then I could not see My future misery! But she the other took And me for him forsook. ‘A mournful song swelled through my heart When I perceived that I was spurned, That dwells there still; and oft I curse Faith, hope, love and the hour I learned Her noble beauteousness Whose radiance doth oppress My dying soul, which yet Cannot those charms forget. ‘Bereft of every comfort now, Oh, Lord of love, to you I cry; I burn with such a torment here That for a less I’d crave to die. Come Death, then, end my life With all its cruel strife; Strike down my misery! I shall the better be. ‘No other way nor other ease Remains to soothe my grief but death. Grant me this, Love, and end my woes; Take from me now my wretched breath. All joy is gone from me, No pleasure’s left for me; Make then my death content her As the new love you sent her. ‘My song, if none should learn to sing Thee over, I take little care; No one can sing thee as I can. Only, to Love one message bear: Beg him, since life was all Loathsome to me, and vile, To safer haven take Me for his honour’s sake.’ Filostrato’s mood, and the reason, were made abundantly clear by the words of his song. And perhaps the face of one of the ladies dancing1 would have clarified the matter still further if the shades of darkness, which had meanwhile descended, had not concealed the blush which spread across her cheeks as he was singing. Many other songs followed, until finally it was time for them to go to bed, whereupon, by the queen’s command, they all retired to their rooms. Here ends the Fourth Day of the Decameron [image file=image_rsrc82M.jpg] FIFTH DAYHere begins the Fifth Day, wherein, under the rule of Fiam-metta, are discussed the adventures of lovers who survived calamities or misfortunes and attained a state of happiness.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  So finding himself down there in the alley, Andreuccio, cursing his bad luck, began calling out to the boy. But as soon as he had heard him falling, the boy had hurried off to tell his mistress, who rushed into her room and made a rapid search for Andreuccio’s clothes. These she found, together with his money, which being a doubting sort of fellow he stupidly carried with him wherever he went. And so it was that this woman of Palermo, this self-styled sister of a Perugian, obtained the prize for which she had laid her trap. Being no longer interested in Andreuccio, she quickly went and locked the door through which he had passed just before he fell. Receiving no answer from the boy, Andreuccio began to call more loudly, but it was of no use. His suspicions being already aroused, he began, now that it was too late, to see how he had been hoodwinked, and having climbed a low wall dividing the alleyway from the road, he scrambled down into the street and went up to the front-door, which he was easily able to identify. He stood there for ages, vainly calling out, and shaking and beating the door for all he was worth. Finally, plainly perceiving the predicament he was in, he burst into tears and said to himself: ‘Oh, poor me! What a sudden way to lose five hundred florins and a sister!’ He said a lot more besides, then began to shout and to pummel on the door all over again, creating such a disturbance that he woke a number of the people living nearby, who got up out of bed as they could not endure the racket. One of the woman’s maids came to the window, all bleary-eyed, and said in tones of annoyance: ‘Who is knocking down there?’ ‘Oh,’ said Andreuccio, ‘don’t you recognize me? I am Andreuccio, the brother of Madonna Fiordaliso.’4 ‘My good man,’ she replied, ‘if you have had too much to drink, go and sleep it off and come back in the morning. I don’t know any Andreuccio; you are talking nonsense. Be off with you, for goodness’ sake, and let us sleep.’ ‘What!’ said Andreuccio. ‘Talking nonsense, am I? You know very well I’m not. But if it’s really true that Sicilians make a habit of discovering blood-relatives and then forgetting all about them, at least give me back the clothes I left there, and I’ll go away gladly.’ ‘My good man,’ she said, hardly able to contain her laughter, ‘you must be dreaming.’

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  under constant attack. The murder of the pagan teacher Hypatia at Alexandria in 415 was only one example of the pressures and perils which faced non-Christian intellectuals. Many, like the poet Cyrus of Panopolis, became converts to escape vindictive treatment. The Christians do not seem to have been willing or able to present a cultural alternative at this level. They allowed the great classical universities to decline, then closed them down: Alexandria in 517, the school of Athens in 529. Some pagan analysts, like the historian Zosimus, were quite convinced that Christianity was wrecking the empire. What did the Christians have to say to this? Nothing. When they came to write secular history, as Procopius and Agathias did in Justinian’s time, they left religion out of it, so dominated were they still by pagan theory. The story might have been different. There were elements in Christianity at the beginning of the fifth century striving to create a distinctive Christian higher culture on Origenist lines. Their frustration and destruction was very largely the work of one man, in whom tendencies implicit in the work of Ambrose and Jerome were carried a decisive stage further. Augustine was the dark genius of imperial Christianity, the ideologue of the Church-State alliance, and the fabricator of the medieval mentality. Next to Paul, who supplied the basic theology, he did more to shape Christianity than any other human being. Yet he is a difficult man to assess, partly because, like Paul, his ideas were steadily changing under the impact of events, cogitation and controversy. He admitted: ‘I am the sort of man who writes because he has made progress, and who makes progress by writing.’ The events of his own lifetime were spectacular and sombrely provocative of thought. He was born at Souk Arras in Algeria in 354, in a middle-class family; became a professor of rhetoric at Carthage; pursued his public career in Rome and then in Ambrose’s Milan, where he became a Christian; was raised to the Bishopric of Hippo (near Bone), where he led the struggle against the Donatists; witnessed, from Africa, the sack of Rome in 410; spent ten years fighting the Pelagians; and then in his old age saw the Vandals overrun North Africa. Augustine wrote an enormous amount, much of it influenced by the events of his own day and his personal experiences. And a great deal of this writing survived in its original form. For a thousand years Augustine was the most popular of the Fathers; medieval European libraries contained over 500 complete manuscripts of his City of God, and there were, for instance, twenty-four printed editions between 1467–95. Above all, Augustine

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

  I tell her that I am inspired by her, the way she bounces through the world with such bravery and positivity; she tells me that I do the same for her. I want her to know that I don’t think we are in the same camp, that there is a difference between my heartbroken status and her fight-for-her-life status, that my courage pales in comparison to hers. “To be honest, Laura, I would say it’s pretty even. I don’t know how I would survive being in your shoes.” I am dumbfounded. Sure, it’s a nightmare to have an unfaithful husband, but I cannot believe that someone would prefer to fight a life-threatening illness. When I mention this to a close friend who recovered from cancer years earlier, she surprises me by not agreeing with me. “I get it,” she says. “When you’re sick, you strategize to attack it. You turn to experts to make decisions. In your situation, there’s no clear path. You may have tons of love and support from friends but at the end of the day, none of them can tell you what to do. The unknown is more terrifying to a lot of people than something known and scary.” This must be bad, I think to myself. I have at times tried to convince myself that men (and women too, but mostly men, let’s be honest) have been having extramarital affairs since the beginning of time, and that since it happens all the time, maybe it’s not as big a deal as I’m making it. If I can put it into historical context, I will be fine. Of course it doesn’t feel fine at all, but sometimes I can convincingly rationalize to myself that this is nothing but a bump. Now people around me are validating the worst and scariest of what I feel: that this is just as bad, if not even more calamitous, than I had thought. When I confide in friends, they inevitably ask, how did you find out? It amazes me that no matter how compassionate they are, and knowing this will evoke painful memories for me, they have to know. I understand and have reverse sympathy. They need to believe there was a fatal error I made, or something inherently wrong with Michael, anything to verify their own immunity. I am annoyed that their need to know trumps their wanting to protect me from having to relive the story, but I comply with an answer anyway. This is the story I tell. For weeks, maybe months, I had a nagging sense that something was wrong with Michael. In our 27 years together, he had usually been the first to apologize, asking within minutes of an argument, “Can we be friends again?” He did not hold grudges and moved on from personal and business disagreements with admirable speed.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Very pitiful Mary was in these days, torn between the two warring forces; haunted by a sense of disloyalty if she thought with unhappiness of losing Martin, hating herself for a treacherous coward if she sometimes longed for the life he could offer, above all intensely afraid of this man who was creeping in between her and Stephen. And the very fact of this fear made her yield to the woman with a new and more desperate ardour, so that the bond held as never before—the days might be Martin’s, but the nights were Stephen’s. And yet, lying awake far into the dawn, Stephen’s victory would take on the semblance of defeat, turned to ashes by the memory of Martin’s words: ‘Your triumph, if it comes, will come too late for Mary.’ In the morning she would go to her desk and write, working with something very like frenzy, as though it were now a neck-to-neck race between the world and her ultimate achievement. Never before had she worked like this; she would feel that her pen was dipped in blood, that with every word she wrote, she was bleeding! 2Christmas came and went, giving place to the New Year, and Martin fought on but he fought more grimly. He was haunted these days by the spectre of defeat, painfully conscious that do what he might, nearly every advantage lay with Stephen. All that he loved and admired most in Mary, her frankness, her tender and loyal spirit, her compassion towards suffering of any kind, these very attributes told against him, serving as they did to bind her more firmly to the creature to whom she had given devotion. One thing only sustained the man at this time, and that was his conviction that in spite of it all, Mary Llewellyn had grown to love him.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  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. Augustine thus bridges the gap between the humanistic optimism of the classical world and the despondent passivity of the Middle Ages. The mentality he expressed was to become the dominant outlook of Christianity, and so to encompass the whole of European society for many centuries. The defeat of the Pelagians was to be an important landmark in this process. To what extent Augustine’s own Manichean pessimism was responsible for this dark coloration of Christian thought is hard to measure; certainly, if we contrast his philosophy with Paul’s, it can be seen that Augustine, not Pelagius, was the heresiarch – the greatest of all, in terms of his influence. But Christian society in Augustine’s age was already moving in this direction. By accepting the Constantinian State, the Church had embarked on the process of coming to terms with a world from which it had hitherto stood apart. It had postponed the construction of the perfect society until after the parousia. Augustine provided an ideology for this change of course, but he did not himself set it. In 398 a curious series of episodes took place in Constantinople. Following a high tide and a series of earth tremors, an official in the imperial army claimed that God had revealed to him that the city would be destroyed. In the second century, a man who spread such superstitions would have been prosecuted: this was precisely why the State had acted against Montanist bishops and ‘speakers with tongues’. In 398 there was a very different sequence of events. The official told his bishop, who

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

  That thought didn’t soothe me so much as temporarily quell the self-loathing that had begun in earnest: an iota of reassurance that was a mere drop in the bucket of my anguish. Sick with grief, I was unable to eat or drink; my breath was shallow, my eyes were puffy and red, my skin pale and clammy. I had no idea what to do next. I felt like a caged animal in my bedroom, unable to leave for fear of having to face Michael or explain myself to the kids, but crawling out of my skin alone. Erika called back a few hours later to tell me that she was getting in her car to drive upstate and would arrive by dinner. She instructed me to shower and drive to a nearby restaurant. I protested, unable to fathom taking the steps even to change my clothes, but she was adamant that I could and must do it. I was reminded of a time she came to visit me in the city when Michael and I had rented our first apartment after graduating from college. When she left to return home to the suburban town we had grown up in together, I stood on the corner and cried as her taxi pulled away. I was homesick, found the city overwhelming, and missed her being glued to my side. I felt homesick for her again and longed for a part of my past I could still rely on. Hudson was confused that I had been in bed sick all day and was now going out to dinner, but I came up with vague excuses, stuffed a wad of tissues in my purse and drove to the restaurant. When Erika came, I wept. When I picked my head up and met her sympathetic gaze, I wept some more. She urged me to take a few bites of the food I had ordered but I pushed it around my plate, afraid I would vomit. When she reminded me that I could not take care of the kids if I didn’t take care of myself, I forced a few bites down. I explained that I had asked Michael to leave, at least for a week, to give me time to digest this, but that he wouldn’t, that he planned to stay in the family room. Erika agreed that it was only fair to give me space right now. “He refuses,” I said. “He won’t stay with a friend either, he says that’s demoralizing. I was looking up cheap hotel options when you came.” “Laura, stop. You’ve done everything for him for years.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Jamie had stared at him, scowling darkly. ‘She doesn’t want to walk out with MacGregor!’ The minister had shaken his head yet again. In the hands of his child he was utterly helpless. Then Jamie had gone to Inverness in order the better to study music, but every week-end she had spent at the manse, there had been no real break in her friendship with Barbara; indeed they had seemed more devoted than ever, no doubt because of these forced separations. Two years later the minister had suddenly died, leaving his little all to Jamie. She had had to turn out of the old, grey manse, and had taken a room in the village near Barbara. But antagonism, no longer restrained through respect for the gentle and child-like pastor, had made itself very acutely felt—hostile they had been, those good people, to Jamie. Barbara had wept. ‘Jamie, let’s go away . . . they hate us. Let’s go where nobody knows us. I’m twenty-one now, I can go where I like, they can’t stop me. Take me away from them, Jamie!’ Miserable, angry, and sorely bewildered, Jamie had put her arm round the girl. ‘Where can I take you, you poor little creature? You’re not strong, and I’m terribly poor, remember.’ But Barbara had continued to plead. ‘I’ll work, I’ll scrub floors, I’ll do anything, Jamie, only let’s get away where nobody knows us!’ So Jamie had turned to her music master in Inverness, and had begged him to help her. What could she do to earn her living? And because this man believed in her talent, he had helped her with advice and a small loan of money, urging her to go to Paris and study to complete her training in composition. ‘You’re really too good for me,’ he had told her; ‘and out there you could live considerably cheaper. For one thing the exchange would be in your favour. I’ll write to the head of the Conservatoire this evening.’ That had been shortly after the Armistice, and now here they were together in Paris. As for Pat, she collected her moths and her beetles, and when fate was propitious an occasional woman. But fate was so seldom propitious to Pat—Arabella had put this down to the beetles. Poor Pat, having recently grown rather gloomy, had taken to quoting American history, speaking darkly of blood-tracks left on the snow by what she had christened: ‘The miserable army.’ Then too she seemed haunted by General Custer, that gallant and very unfortunate hero. ‘It’s Ouster’s last ride, all the time,’ she would say. ‘No good talking, the whole darned world’s out to scalp us!’

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘Look, we’re feeling sorry for you, and since we were on our way to do a little job, if you’d like to join us we can almost guarantee that your share of the proceeds will more than make up for what you’ve lost.’ And as he was feeling desperate, Andreuccio agreed to go with them. Now, just a few hours earlier, the burial had taken place of an archbishop whose name was Messer Filippo Minutolo.7 He was the Archbishop of Naples, and he had been buried with some very valuable regalia and wearing a ruby on his finger, worth more than five hundred gold florins, which these two fellows were on their way to plunder. They disclosed their intentions to Andreuccio, and being more covetous than well-advised, he set off in their company. As they were on their way to the cathedral, with Andreuccio still putting forth a powerful odour, one of them said: ‘Couldn’t we find some place or other where this fellow could be washed, so that he didn’t stink so appallingly?’ ‘Certainly,’ said the other. ‘Not far from here, there’s a well, which always used to have a pulley and a big bucket at the top. Let’s go there and give him a quick wash.’ On reaching the well, they found that the rope was still there, but the bucket had been removed. So they hit on the idea of tying him to the rope and lowering him into the well so that he could wash himself down below. When he had finished washing, he was to give the rope a tug, and they would haul him up again. Shortly after they had lowered him into the well, some officers of the watch, feeling thirsty on account of the heat and also because they had been chasing somebody, happened to come to the well for a drink. When the other two saw them coming, they immediately took to their heels, making good their escape without being spotted by the officers. Meanwhile Andreuccio, having completed his ablutions at the bottom of the well, gave a tug on the rope. The officers had taken off their surcoats and laid them on the ground beside their bucklers and pikestaffs, and they now began to haul away at the rope, thinking it had a bucket full of water attached to it.