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 195 of 267 · 20 per page

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  I went into his Notes folder and in a bit of technological wizardry I didn’t know I was capable of, figured out there were notes in the virtual trash bin that could be opened. I found a letter he had written to someone to whom he had given a watch – not just any watch, but the first watch his father had ever given him. It was a loving letter but not proof of anything. It could have been a note to Hudson, though it was odd that neither of them had mentioned it to me. Stumped, I sat idly, staring at the phone screen, grimacing at my suspicious mind but also enormously relieved. I was about to turn his phone off and quietly return it to its spot on his nightstand when an app caught my eye – I had used WhatsApp to communicate with friends in other countries, but I didn’t know Michael used it. I clicked on it, but it was locked. I entered the passwords we usually used. Still locked. My stomach dropped as I instantly understood that what I was looking for was in here. I frantically entered passwords until an error message popped up saying I had tried too many times and was now locked out. This password was all that was standing between my bewilderment and the clues I needed to make sense of the state of my marriage. Was it portentous or a gift that I was locked out? I could go to sleep right now and in the morning ask Michael about it, or press a little harder about why he was so mad at me if I couldn’t bring myself to confess I had searched his phone. I could stop the ground from opening beneath me by setting the phone down now and calling it a night. I clicked on the OK button to close the app when it unexpectedly opened and I was in. I had been sitting with the phone for two hours. I noted the time, 11:30, and the last text Michael had sent was at 9pm to a female friend, saying he was going to sleep – and here are the words I read as my life as I had known it ceased to exist – he wished it was with her. I felt sheer panic as my finger scrolled back through their conversation. Words leapt off the screen at me in fragments I couldn’t piece together: “I can’t live my life in secret anymore”. “My mother is onto us”. “I stand to lose everything”. “Tell my wife”. “Soulmate”. “Love”. “Divorce”.

• 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

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  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.

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

  He’s a grown man and can find a place to stay on his own. You can’t solve his problems right now,” she told me. “OK, but if I don’t solve this he’ll stay and I can’t tolerate that,” I said. “You’re going to have to take a step back and let him handle this by himself. All you have to do now is take care of yourself and the kids. Stand your ground and focus on what you need to get through a terrible situation he created. You didn’t do this, he did. And he has to clean it up. If you need space, he can at least give you that.” When I arrived home, I was relieved to see my bed empty and Georgia’s door closed; Michael had had the decency to give me privacy for the night. When I awoke in the morning after a fitful sleep, I staggered down the hall to the kitchen to find him typing on his laptop at the table. “Oh, hey,” he said, cheerfully. “So here’s what I’m thinking. I’m writing you a letter. I’m going to write you a letter every day to tell you how I’m feeling so that I can be totally honest with you.” “What? Why? How is that going to help me?” “You said you wanted the truth, so I’m going to give it to you and share my feelings with you on a daily basis.” “No, please don’t,” I cried out. “I don’t want to know what you’re thinking. It’s a moot point now.” “This could be the best thing that’s ever happened to us,” he said with an incessant chipperness. “I see this as an opportunity for us to improve our marriage and reinvent what we once had!” “Wow, Michael. Look at me, I’m a wreck,” I sobbed. “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I can’t stop crying. The rug has been pulled out from under me and I’m still falling. I am questioning everything about our lives together since we first met. You’ve always been an optimist but to call this an opportunity? The best thing that could ever happen to us? That’s delusional. You have destroyed me,” I said, and with that, put my head down on the table and convulsed with sobs. When I picked my head up, he looked at me with something between compassion and pity and asked, “What can I do to help you through this?” “You can leave. You can find a place to stay. If you want me to consider giving our marriage a chance, you have to give me space.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Overjoyed by these tidings, the young Rhodians assembled a large number of the townspeople and instantly returned to the shore. Cimon and his companions had meanwhile disembarked, intending to seek refuge in some neighbouring woods, but before they could do so they were all seized, along with Iphigenia, and led away to the town. Here they were held until Lysimachus, the chief magistrate of Rhodes in that particular year, came from the city and marched them all off to prison under a specially heavy armed escort, as arranged by Pasimondas, who had lodged a complaint with the Senate of Rhodes as soon as the news had reached him. And so it came about that the hapless Cimon lost his beloved Iphigenia almost as soon as he had won her, with nothing to show for his pains except one or two kisses. As for Iphigenia, she was given hospitality by various noble ladies of Rhodes, who restored her spirits from the shock of her abduction and the fatigue she had suffered in the tempest; and she remained with them until the day appointed for her wedding. Pasimondas urged with all his eloquence that Cimon and his companions should be put to death, but their lives were spared on account of having set the young Rhodians at liberty on the previous day, and they were condemned to spend the rest of their lives in prison. And there, as may readily be imagined, they led a wretched existence, and despaired of ever knowing happiness again. It was whilst Pasimondas was pressing zealously ahead with the preparations for his forthcoming marriage that Fortune, as though to make amends for the sudden blow she had dealt to Cimon’s hopes, devised a novel way of procuring him his liberty. Pasimondas had a brother, younger but no less eligible than himself, whose name was Ormisdas, and who for some time had been seeking to marry a beautiful young noblewoman of the city called Cassandra, with whom Lysimachus, the chief magistrate, was very deeply in love. But the marriage had been several times postponed because of some unexpected turn of events. Now, seeing that he was about to hold a huge reception to celebrate his own wedding, Pasimondas thought it would be an excellent idea to arrange for Ormisdas to be married at the same time, thus avoiding a second round of spending and feasting. He therefore re-opened discussions with Cassandra’s kinsfolk and brought them to a successful conclusion, all the parties agreeing that on the day that Pasimondas married Iphigenia, Ormisdas should marry Cassandra. Lysimachus, having heard of this arrangement, was greatly distressed, for it now appeared that all his hopes of marrying Cassandra, provided that Ormisdas did not marry her first, had suddenly vanished. He was wise enough, however, to conceal the agony he was suffering, and began to study various ways and means of preventing the marriage from taking place, eventually concluding that the only possible solution was to abduct her.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Christian family separated themselves from the infallible teaching of the church’. This opened the way to the ‘general deterioration and decline of the religious idea’. Christianity, ‘the truth that sets us free’, had been exchanged for ‘the lie that makes slaves of us’. By rejecting Christ, men had been ‘handing themselves over to a capricious ruler, the feeble and grovelling wisdom of man. They boasted of progress, when they were in fact relapsing into decadence; they conceived they were reaching heights of achievement when they were miserably forfeiting their human dignity; they claimed that this century of ours was bringing maturity and completion with it, when they were being reduced to a pitiable form of slavery.’ In medieval Christian Europe there had been quarrels and wars, but at least ‘men had a clear consciousness of what was right and what was wrong, what was allowable and what was forbidden.’ Now there was total moral confusion, ‘which allows all the canons of private and public honesty and decency to be overthrown’. There had never been an age like the present when ‘men’s spirits are broken by despair’ and they searched in vain to provide ‘any remedy for their disorders’. In fact the remedy had been there all along, and was available still: the return to Christianity under papal guidance. Pius would continue to proclaim it: ‘To bear witness of the truth is the highest debt we owe to the office we hold and the times we live in.’ This had been the theme of papal triumphalism for some seventy years, since Pius IX had issued his Syllabus of Errors; in a sense, it was a theme inherent in the whole of Augustinian Christianity. Gregory VII and Innocent III had called on the world to align itself with the policies and precepts of the imperial papacy, and had anathematized those of its rulers who declined to do so. When the world refused to obey him, the Pope looked on it with sorrow, and predicted doom. It was a natural and traditional pontifical attitude. But of course there was another form of Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – Protestant triumphalism, which we have seen proclaiming itself at the Edinburgh world mission conference in 1910. It identified Christianity with modern progress and democracy, and the burgeoning success of the American ideal and system with its Protestant ethics. One rejected the modern world; the other not only accepted it but to some extent claimed paternity. Both of these Christian theories were based on the assumption that the acceptance or rejection of Christianity was the only real formative element in society, and the criterion by which it should be judged. Both evolved against a cultural background in which Christianity inevitably dominated any discussion of truth and

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  There was Wanda, the struggling Polish painter; dark for a Pole with her short, stiff black hair, and her dusky skin, and her colourless lips; yet withal not unattractive, this Wanda. She had wonderful eyes that held fire in their depths, hell-fire at times, if she had been drinking; but at other times a more gentle flame, although never one that it was safe to play with. Wanda saw largely. All that she envisaged was immense, her pictures, her passions, her remorses. She craved with a well-nigh insatiable craving, she feared with a well-nigh intolerable terror—not the devil, she was brave with him when in her cups, but God in the person of Christ the Redeemer. Like a whipped cur she crawled to the foot of the Cross, without courage, without faith, without hope of mercy. Outraged by her body she must ruthlessly scourge it—no good, the lust of the eye would betray her. Seeing she desired and desiring she drank, seeking to drown one lust in another. And then she would stand up before her tall easel, swaying a little but with hand always steady. The brandy went into her legs, not her hands; her hands would remain disconcertingly steady. She would start some gigantic and heart-broken daub, struggling to lose herself in her picture, struggling to ease the ache of her passion by smearing the placid white face of the canvas with ungainly yet strangely arresting forms—according to Dupont, Wanda had genius. Neither eating nor sleeping she would grow very thin, so that everybody would know what had happened. They had seen it before, oh, but many times, and therefore for them the tragedy was lessened. ‘Wanda’s off again!’ some one might say with a grin. ‘She was tight this morning; who is it this time?’ But Valérie, who hated drink like the plague, would grow angry; outraged she would feel by this Wanda. There was Hortense, Comtesse de Kerguelen; dignified and reserved, a very great lady, of a calm and rather old-fashioned beauty. When Valérie introduced her to Stephen, Stephen quite suddenly thought of Morton. And yet she had left all for Valérie Seymour; husband, children and home had she left; facing scandal, opprobrium, persecution. Greater than all these most vital things had been this woman’s love for Valérie Seymour. An enigma she seemed, much in need of explaining. And now in the place of that outlawed love had come friendship; they were close friends, these one-time lovers.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  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!’ As for Margaret Roland, she was never attracted to anyone young and whole-hearted and free—she was, in fact, a congenital poacher. While as for Wanda, her loves were so varied that no rule could be discovered by which to judge them. She loved wildly, without either chart or compass. A rudderless bark it was, Wanda’s emotion, beaten now this way now that by the gale, veering first to the normal, then to the abnormal; a thing of torn sails and stricken masts, that never came within sight of a harbour. 3These, then, were the people to whom Stephen turned at last in her fear of isolation for Mary; to her own kind she turned and was made very welcome, for no bond is more binding than that of affliction. But her vision stretched beyond to the day when happier folk would also accept her, and through her this girl for whose happiness she and she alone would have to answer; to the day when through sheer force of tireless endeavour she would have built that harbour of refuge for Mary.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  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. They love all men, and are persecuted by all. . . . They are poor, and make many rich. They lack everything, and in everything they abound. They are humiliated, and their humiliation becomes their glory. They are abused – and they bless. They are reviled, and are justified. They are insulted, and they repay insults with honour.’ It was the Christian spirit of mutual love and communal charity which most impressed pagans. Tertullian quotes them as saying: ‘How these Christians love one another!’ And he adds that the funds which financed their charities were essentially voluntary: ‘Every man once a month brings some modest coin, or whenever he wishes and only if he does wish, and if he can – for nobody is compelled.’ And the funds were spent ‘not on banquets and drinking parties’ but ‘to feed the poor and bury them, for boys and girls who lack property and parents, and then for slaves grown old

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Blanc stood in a little niche by himself, which at times must surely have been very lonely. A quiet, tawny man with the eyes of the Hebrew, in his youth he had been very deeply afflicted. He had spent his days going from doctor to doctor: ‘What am I?’ They had told him, pocketing their fees; not a few had unctuously set out to cure him. Cure him, good God! There was no cure for Blanc, he was, of all men, the most normal abnormal. He had known revolt, renouncing his God; he had known despair, the despair of the godless; he had known wild moments of dissipation; he had known long months of acute self-abasement. And then he had suddenly found his soul, and that finding had brought with it resignation, so that now he could stand in a niche by himself, a pitiful spectator of what, to him, often seemed a bewildering scheme of creation. For a living he designed many beautiful things—furniture, costumes and scenery for ballets, even women’s gowns if the mood was upon him, but this he did for a physical living. To keep life in his desolate, long-suffering soul, he had stored his mind with much profound learning. So now many poor devils went to him for advice, which he never refused though he gave it sadly. It was always the same: ‘Do the best you can, no man can do more—but never stop fighting. For us there is no sin so great as despair, and perhaps no virtue so vital as courage.’ Yes, indeed, to this gentle and learned Jew went many a poor baptized Christian devil. And such people frequented Valérie Seymour’s, men and women who must carry God’s mark on their foreheads. For Valérie, placid and self-assured, created an atmosphere of courage; every one felt very normal and brave when they gathered together at Valérie Seymour’s. There she was, this charming and cultured woman, a kind of lighthouse in a storm-swept ocean. The waves had lashed round her feet in vain; winds had howled; clouds had spued forth their hail and their lightning; torrents had deluged but had not destroyed her. The storms, gathering force, broke and drifted away, leaving behind them the shipwrecked, the drowning. But when they looked up, the poor spluttering victims, why what should they see but Valérie Seymour! Then a few would strike boldly out for the shore, at the sight of this indestructible creature. She did nothing, and at all times said very little, feeling no urge towards philanthropy. But this much she gave to her brethren, the freedom of her salon, the protection of her friendship; if it eased them to come to her monthly gatherings they were always welcome provided they were sober. Drink and drugs she abhorred because they were ugly—one drank tea, iced coffee, sirops and orangeade in that celebrated flat on the Quai Voltaire.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Until now they had never gone out much at night except to occasional studio parties, or occasional cafés of the milder sort for a cup of coffee with Barbara and Jamie; but that spring Mary seemed fanatically eager to proclaim her allegiance to Pat’s miserable army. Deprived of the social intercourse which to her would have been both natural and welcome, she now strove to stand up to a hostile world by proving that she could get on without it. The spirit of adventure that had taken her to France, the pluck that had steadied her while in the Unit, the emotional, hot-headed nature of the Celt, these things must now work together in Mary to produce a state of great restlessness, a pitiful revolt against life’s injustice. The blow struck by a weak and thoughtless hand had been even more deadly than Stephen had imagined; more deadly to them both, for that glancing blow coming at a time of apparent success, had torn from them every shred of illusion. Stephen, who could see that the girl was fretting, would be seized with a kind of sick apprehension, a sick misery at her own powerlessness to provide a more normal and complete existence. So many innocent recreations, so many harmless social pleasures must Mary forego for the sake of their union—and she still young, still well under thirty. And now Stephen came face to face with the gulf that lies between warning and realization—all her painful warnings anent the world had not served to lessen the blow when it fell, had not served to make it more tolerable to Mary. Deeply humiliated Stephen would feel, when she thought of Mary’s exile from Morton, when she thought of the insults this girl must endure because of her loyalty and her faith—all that Mary was losing that belonged to her youth, would rise up at this time to accuse and scourge Stephen. Her courage would flicker like a lamp in the wind, and would all but go out; she would feel less steadfast, less capable of continuing the war, that ceaseless war for the right to existence. Then the pen would slip from her nerveless fingers, no longer a sharp and purposeful weapon. Yes, that spring saw a weakening in Stephen herself—she felt tired, and sometimes very old for her age, in spite of her vigorous mind and body. Calling Mary she would need to be reassured; and one day she asked her: ‘How much do you love me?’ Mary answered: ‘So much that I’m growing to hate . . .’ Bitter words to hear on such young lips as Mary’s.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  substance.’ According to the historian Socrates, writing c. 440, his actual formulation was as follows: ‘If the Father begat the Son, he that was begotten had a beginning of existence; hence it is clear that there was a time when the Son was not. It follows then of necessity that he had his existence from the non-existent.’ The intrinsic difficulty of the problem lay in the lack of room for manoeuvre for a middle course. A right-thinking theologian, anxious to remain orthodox, tended to smash his ship on Charybdis while trying to avoid Scylla. Thus Apollinaris, Bishop of Laodicea (d. 392), in his efforts to demonstrate his anti-Arianism, emphasized the divinity of the Lord at the expense of his manhood and ended by creating a heresy of his own which denied that Christ had a human mind. Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople 428–31, reacting from Apollinarianism, reasserted the manhood of Christ to the extent of questioning the divinity of the infant Jesus and thus denying Mary her title of theotokos or ‘God-bearer’. He, too, found himself a reluctant heresiarch. In turn, Eutyches, a learned monk from Constantinople, in his anti- Nestorian fervour, swung too far in the direction of Apollinarianism and came to grief over Constantine’s compulsory word ‘consubstantial’. Summoned to recant before a council in 448, he gave up in despair: ‘Hitherto I have always avoided the phrase “consubstantial after the flesh” [as tending to confusion]. But I will use it now, since your holiness demands it.’ What room for manoeuvre there was consisted in verbal manipulations behind which lay nebulous concepts. ‘Consubstantial after the flesh’ was, indeed, such a device. But a clever formula might, in solving an old problem, raise an entirely new one and a compromise meaningful and satisfactory to one generation of fathers was often interpreted in rival ways by the next. The Church’s collective memory was an imperfect instrument. By the third century, for instance, it had forgotten the origins of the old Jewish-Christian Ebionites and assumed they were the followers of a heresiarch called Ebion; not only was he denounced by orthodox writers but sentences from his works were produced for refutation. All kinds of subsequent constructions were placed upon the Nicene formula, and the motives of those who approved it. Then there were language difficulties. Greek lent itself to complexity of religious discussion. This was one important reason why the great Christological rows were all of eastern origins and were mere imports in Latin-speaking areas. Our word ‘essence’ can be used in a general or a particular sense. The Greeks had two, hypostasis and ousia, each of which could be used in either sense. Some of the leading fourth-

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Came the day when Mary refused to see Martin, when she turned upon Stephen, pale and accusing: ‘Can’t you understand? Are you utterly blind—have you only got eyes now for Valérie Seymour?’ And as though she were suddenly smitten dumb, Stephen’s lips remained closed and she answered nothing. Then Mary wept and cried out against her: ‘I won’t let you go—I won’t let you, I tell you! It’s your fault if I love you the way I do. I can’t do without you, you’ve taught me to need you, and now . . .’ In half-shamed, half-defiant words she must stand there and plead for what Stephen withheld, and Stephen must listen to such pleading from Mary. Then before the girl realized it she had said: ‘But for you, I could have loved Martin Hallam!’ Stephen heard her own voice a long way away: ‘But for me, you could have loved Martin Hallam.’ Mary flung despairing arms round her neck: ‘No, no! Not that, I don’t know what I’m saying.’ 3The first faint breath of spring was in the air, bringing daffodils to the flower-stalls of Paris. Once again Mary’s young cherry tree in the garden was pushing out leaves and tiny pink buds along the whole length of its childish branches. Then Martin wrote: ‘Stephen, where can I see you? It must be alone. Better not at your house, I think, if you don’t mind, because of Mary.’ She appointed the place. They would meet at the Auberge du Vieux Logis in the Rue Lepic. They two would meet there on the following evening. When she left the house without saying a word, Mary thought she was going to Valérie Seymour. Stephen sat down at a table in the corner to await Martin’s coming—she herself was early. The table was gay with a new check cloth—red and white, white and red, she counted the squares, tracing them carefully out with her finger. The woman behind the bar nudged her companion: ‘En voilà une originale—et quelle cicatrice, bon Dieu!’ The scar across Stephen’s pale face stood out livid. Martin came and sat quietly down at her side, ordering some coffee for appearances’ sake. For appearances’ sake, until it was brought, they smiled at each other and made conversation. But when the waiter had turned away, Martin said: ‘It’s all over—you’ve beaten me, Stephen . . . The bond was too strong.’ Their unhappy eyes met as she answered: ‘I tried to strengthen that bond.’ He nodded: ‘I know . . . Well, my dear, you succeeded.’ Then he said: ‘I’m leaving Paris next week;’ and in spite of his effort to be calm his voice broke, ‘Stephen . . . do what you can to take care of Mary . . .’ She found that she was holding his hand. Or was it some one else who sat there beside him, who looked into his sensitive, troubled face, who spoke such queer words? ‘No, don’t go—not yet.’

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And one evening her weary mind must switch back to the earliest days of her friendship with Stephen. What a lifetime ago it seemed since the days when a lanky colt of a girl of fourteen had been licked into shape in the schoolroom at Morton. She could hear her own words: ‘You’ve forgotten something, Stephen; the books can’t walk to the bookcase, but you can, so suppose that you take them with you,’ and then: ‘Even my brain won’t stand your complete lack of method.’ Stephen fourteen—that was twelve years ago. In those years she, Puddle, had grown very tired, tired with trying to see some way out, some way of escape, of fulfilment for Stephen. And always they seemed to be toiling, they two, down an endless road that had no turning; she an ageing woman herself unfulfilled; Stephen still young and as yet still courageous—but the day would come when her youth would fail, and her courage, because of that endless toiling. She thought of Brockett, Jonathan Brockett, surely an unworthy companion for Stephen; a thoroughly vicious and cynical man, a dangerous one too because he was brilliant. Yet she, Puddle, was actually grateful to this man; so dire were their straits that she was grateful to Brockett. Then came the remembrance of that other man, of Martin Hallam—she had had such high hopes. He had been very simple and honest and good—Puddle felt that there was much to be said for goodness. But for such as Stephen men like Martin Hallam could seldom exist; as friends they would fail her, while she in her turn would fail them as lover. Then what remained? Jonathan Brockett? Like to like. No, no, an intolerable thought! Such a thought as that was an outrage on Stephen. Stephen was honourable and courageous; she was steadfast in friendship and selfless in loving; intolerable to think that her only companions must be men and women like Jonathan Brockett—and yet—after all what else? What remained? Loneliness, or worse still, far worse because it so deeply degraded the spirit, a life of perpetual subterfuge, of guarded opinions and guarded actions, of lies of omission if not of speech, of becoming an accomplice in the world’s injustice by maintaining at all times a judicious silence, making and keeping the friends one respected, on false pretences, because if they knew they would turn aside, even the friends one respected. Puddle abruptly controlled her thoughts; this was no way to be helpful to Stephen. Sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof. Getting up she went into her bedroom where she bathed her face and tidied her hair. ‘I look scarcely human,’ she thought ruefully, as she stared at her own reflection in the glass; and indeed at that moment she looked more than her age.

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

  For more than twelve years Augustine and Julian debated, shouting back and forth their respective views, until Augustine died. After considerable controversy, the church of the fifth century accepted his view of the matter and rejected Julian’s, having concluded that Augustine, the future saint, read Scripture more accurately than the heretic Julian. Recently, however, several scholars have pointed out that Augustine often interprets scriptural passages by ignoring fine points—or even grammar—in the texts. Augustine attempts to rest his case concerning original sin, for example, upon the evidence of one prepositional phrase in Romans 5:12, insisting that Paul said that death came upon all humanity because of Adam, “in whom all sinned.” But Augustine misreads and mistranslates this phrase (which others translate “in that [i.e., because] all sinned”) and then proceeds to defend his errors ad infinitum, presumably because his own version makes intuitive sense of his own experience.51 When Julian accused him of having invented this view of original sin, Augustine indignantly replied that he was only repeating what Paul had said before him. Had not the “great apostle” confessed that even he was incapable of doing what he willed? I do not do what I will, but I do the very thing I hate.… So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells in me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is good, but I cannot do it. (ROMANS 7:15–18) Augustine’s argument has persuaded the majority of western Catholic and Protestant theologians to agree with him; and many western Christians have taken his interpretation of this passage for granted. But, as Peter Gorday has shown,52 when we actually compare Augustine’s interpretation with those of theologians as diverse as Origen, John Chrysostom, and Pelagius, we can see that Augustine found in Romans 7 what others had not seen there—a sexualized interpretation of sin and a revulsion from “the flesh” based on his own idiosyncratic belief that we contract the disease of sin through the process of conception. Other theologians assumed that Paul used these words to dramatize the situation of one who, still unbaptized and unredeemed, lacks hope; for Paul goes on to praise God for his own freedom, found in Christ: Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.… For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free. (ROMANS 7:25; 8:2) Augustine alone applied the despairing expressions of the previous passage to the baptized Christian; other readers assumed that the triumphant and joyful note of the rest of the chapter expressed Paul’s experience of his life in Christ.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  5That night Stephen took the girl roughly in her arms. ‘I love you—I love you so much . . .’ she stammered; and she kissed Mary many times on the mouth, but cruelly so that her kisses were pain—the pain in her heart leapt out through her lips: ‘God! It’s too terrible to love like this—it’s hell—there are times when I can’t endure it!’ She was in the grip of strong nervous excitation; nothing seemed able any more to appease her. She seemed to be striving to obliterate, not only herself, but the whole hostile world through some strange and agonized merging with Mary. It was terrible indeed, very like unto death, and it left them both completely exhausted. The world had achieved its first real victory. CHAPTER 471T heir Christmas was naturally overshadowed, and so, as it were by a common impulse, they turned to such people as Barbara and Jamie, people who would neither despise nor insult them. It was Mary who suggested that Barbara and Jamie should be asked to share their Christmas dinner, while Stephen who must suddenly pity Wanda for a misjudged and very unfortunate genius, invited her also—after all why not? Wanda was more sinned against than sinning. She drank, oh, yes, Wanda drowned her sorrows; everybody knew that, and like Valérie Seymour, Stephen hated drink like the plague—but all the same she invited Wanda. An ill wind it is that blows no one any good. Barbara and Jamie accepted with rapture; but for Mary’s most timely invitation, their funds being low at the end of the year, they two must have gone without Christmas dinner. Wanda also seemed glad enough to come, to leave her enormous, turbulent canvas for the orderly peace of the well-warmed house with its comfortable rooms and its friendly servants. All three of them arrived a good hour before dinner, which on this occasion would be in the evening. Wanda had been up to Midnight Mass at the Sacré Cœur, she informed them gravely; and Stephen, reminded of Mademoiselle Duphot, regretted that she had not offered her the motor. No doubt she too had gone up to Montmartre for Midnight Mass—how queer, she and Wanda. Wanda was quiet, depressed and quite sober; she was wearing a straight-cut, simple black dress that somehow suggested a species of cassock. And as often happened when Wanda was sober, she repeated herself more than when she was drunk. ‘I have been to the Sacré Cœur,’ she repeated, ‘for the Messe de Minuit; it was very lovely.’

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Monks put the preservation of the surviving texts above their own lives, and regarded their reproduction as infinitely more important than their own creative labours. Thus a Mediceus of Virgil, dating from the end of the fifth century, and probably once in the possession of Cassiodorus, was preserved in various monastic houses, found its way to Bobbio, and is now in the Laurentian Library in Florence. The monks argued that the more copies they succeeded in making, the more likely it was that one at least would survive; and they were right. In the eighth century, the scriptorium of St Martin’s of Tours transcribed a fifth-century Livy; the copy survived, the original is lost. Right at the end of his life, Bede was urging his scribe to ‘write faster’. There was a sense of gloomy urgency about the task, for men believed that, however horrible the period since Rome’s decline had been, things would get worse, not better; and there was much evidence to support their belief. One chief reason why King Alfred, at the end of the ninth century, wanted all the essential Latin texts translated into English was that he believed the coming hard times would wipe out Latin scholarship and that, even if the originals were not destroyed, no one would be able to read them. Hence, in the eighth and ninth centuries virtually all the ancient texts were re- copied, often many times, and so saved. Much of this work was carried out in the big German monasteries – Lorsch, Cologne, Witzburg, Reichenau, St Gall, and so forth. Outstanding was Fulda, the centre of historiography east of the Rhine, to which we owe, for instance, vital texts of Tacitus, Suetonius, Ammianus, Vetruvius and Servius, through whom medieval men learnt their Virgil. Fulda had huge resources, and recruited a large number of conspicuously able men. One of its ninth-century monks, Hrabanus Maurus, later Archbishop of Mainz, put together an encyclopaedia of received knowledge, modelled on Isidore of Seville; and one of Hrabanus’s pupils, Servatus Lupus, later Abbot of Ferrières, became the nearest approach to the modern idea of a scholar before the twelfth century John of Salisbury. Yet the work of both these Fulda monks is essentially derivative. Hrabanus’s encyclopaedia contains no original thinking; Servatus’s chief contribution was to compile a corpus of barbarian laws for the Duke of Friuli. These works were useful but uncreative. Moreover, we must not think that the monks were primarily concerned with transmitting the classics. No Greek secular works were preserved in the original. Even the Greek fathers were studied, and copied, in Latin translations. Profane literature in Latin occupied only a fraction of the time available. The work of the scriptoria was overwhelmingly centred on the Fathers, chiefly Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome,

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

  As God had first created it, the earth was free of thorns and thistles, bringing forth a marvelous abundance of food, according to Augustine. Then Adam sinned, and “all nature was changed for the worse”;20 thorns and thistles suddenly sprang up from the once fertile land. God had placed man in Eden “to till it and to cultivate it,” and before he sinned, Adam worked “not only without laboring, but, indeed, with pleasure for the soul.”21 But now, Augustine says, every man experiences pain, frustration, and hardship in his labor, as every woman does in hers: the miseries of human nature now beset both sexes “from infancy to the grave.”22 Worst of all is what awaits us at the end—“the last enemy, death.” In the beginning, God granted “the power to live, not any necessity of dying.”23 Death was in no sense natural but arose only after Adam chose to sin, bringing upon himself and all his progeny this dreadful agony, along with “the innumerable forms of illness that bring people to death.”24 Adam’s single arbitrary act of will rendered all subsequent acts of human will inoperative. Humankind, once harmonious, perfect, and free, now, through Adam’s choice, is ravaged by mortality and desire, while all suffering, from crop failure, miscarriage, fever, and insanity to paralysis and cancer, is evidence of the moral and spiritual deterioration that Eve and Adam introduced. Ever since Augustine, the hereditary transmission of original sin has been the official doctrine of the Catholic church. Augustine thus denies the existence of nature per se—of nature as natural scientists have taught us to perceive it—for he cannot think of the natural world except as a reflection of human desire and will. Where there is suffering, there must have been evil and guilt, for, Augustine insists, God would not allow suffering where there was no prior fault. How, Augustine challenges Julian, could a just and all-powerful God allow infants to suffer the evils that nearly all infants suffer in this transitory life, if nothing calling for punishment were contracted from parents? Without a glance you bypass those evils which … all of us see them suffer. You say, “Human nature, at the beginning of life, is adorned with the gift of innocence.” We agree, in regard to personal sins, but not about original sin.… You must explain why such great innocence is sometimes born blind or deaf. If nothing deserving punishment passes from parents to infants, who could bear to see the image of God sometimes born retarded, since this afflicts the soul itself? Consider the plain facts; consider why some infants suffer from a demon.25