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 20 of 267 · 20 per page

• From A History of God (1993)

  Luria gave a new meaning to the original image of the exile of the Shekinah. It will be recalled that in the Talmud, the Rabbis had seen the Shekinah voluntarily going into exile with the Jews after the destruction of the Temple. The Zohar had identified the Shekinah with the last sefirah and made it the female aspect of divinity. In Luria’s myth, the Shekinah fell with the other sefiroth when the Vessels were shattered. In the first stage of Tikkun, she had become Nuqrah and by mating with Zeir (the six “Middle” sefiroth) had almost been reintegrated into the divine world. But when Adam sinned, the Shekinah fell once more and went into exile from the rest of the Godhead. Luria was most unlikely to have encountered the writings of those Christian Gnostics who had developed a very similar mythology. He had spontaneously reproduced the old myths of exile and fall to meet the tragic conditions of the sixteenth century. Tales of divine copulation and the exiled goddess had been rejected by the Jews during the biblical period, when they were evolving their doctrine of the One God. Their connection with paganism and idolatry should logically have revolted the Sephardim. Instead, Luria’s mythology was embraced eagerly by Jews from Persia to England, Germany to Poland, Italy to North Africa, Holland to Yemen; recast in Jewish terms, it was able to touch a buried chord and give new hope in the midst of despair. It enabled the Jews to believe that despite the appalling circumstances in which so many of them lived, there was an ultimate meaning and significance.

• From A History of God (1993)

  All the streams of my tears Run their course for you! And the last flame of my heart— It burns up to you! Oh come back My unknown God! My pain! my last—happiness. 20 Like Hegel’s, Nietzsche’s theories were used by a later generation of Germans to justify the policies of National Socialism, a reminder that an atheistic ideology can lead to just as cruel a crusading ethic as the idea of “God.” God had always been a struggle in the West. His demise was also attended by strain, desolation and dismay. Thus in In Memoriam, the great Victorian poem of doubt, Alfred Lord Tennyson recoiled in horror from the prospect of a purposeless, indifferent nature, red in tooth and claw. Published in 1850, nine years before the publication of The Origin of Species, the poem shows that Tennyson had already felt his faith crumbling and himself reduced to An infant crying in the night; An infant crying for the light And with no language but a cry. 21 In “Dover Beach,” Matthew Arnold had lamented the inexorable withdrawal of the sea of faith, which left mankind wandering on a darkling plain. The doubt and dismay had spread to the Orthodox world, though the denial of God did not take on the precise lineaments of Western doubt but was more in the nature of a denial of ultimate meaning. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whose novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880) can be seen to describe the death of God, articulated his own conflict between faith and belief in a letter to a friend, written in March 1854: I look upon myself as a child of the age, a child of unbelief and doubt; it is probable, nay, I know for certain, that I shall remain so to my dying day. I have been tortured with longing to believe—am so, indeed, even now; and the yearning grows stronger the more cogent the intellectual difficulties that stand in the way. 22 His novel is similarly ambivalent. Ivan, described as an atheist by the other characters (who attribute to him the now famous maxim: “If God does not exist, all is permitted”), says unequivocally that he does believe in God. Yet he does not find this God acceptable, since he fails to provide ultimate meaning for the tragedy of life.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Sabellius attracted some disciples, but most Christians were distressed by his theory: it suggested that the impassible God had in some sense suffered when playing the role of the Son, an idea that they found quite unacceptable. Yet when Paul of Samosata, Bishop of Antioch from 260 to 272, had suggested that Jesus had simply been a man, in whom the Word and Wisdom of God had dwelt as in a temple, this was considered equally unorthodox. Paul’s theology was condemned at a synod at Antioch in 264, though he managed to hold on to his see with the support of Queen Zenobia of Palmyra. It was clearly going to be very difficult to find a way of accommodating the Christian conviction that Jesus had been divine with the equally strong belief that God was One. When Clement had left Alexandria in 202 to become a priest in the service of the Bishop of Jerusalem, his place at the catechetical school was taken by his brilliant young pupil Origen, who was about twenty years old at the time. As a youth Origen had been passionately convinced that martyrdom was the way to heaven. His father, Leonides, had died in the arena four years earlier, and Origen had tried to join him. His mother, however, saved him by hiding his clothes. Origen had started by believing that the Christian life meant turning against the world, but he later abjured this position and developed a form of Christian Platonism. Instead of seeing an impassible gulf between God and the world, which could only be bridged by the radical dislocation of martyrdom, Origen developed a theology that stressed the continuity of God with the world. His was a spirituality of light, optimism and joy. Step by step, a Christian could ascend the chain of being until he reached God, his natural element and home. As a Platonist, Origen was convinced of the kinship between God and the soul: the knowledge of the divine was natural to humanity. It could be “recollected” and awakened by special disciplines. To adapt his Platonic philosophy to the Semitic scriptures, Origen developed a symbolic method of reading the Bible. Thus the virgin birth of Christ in the womb of Mary was not primarily to be understood as a literal event but as the birth of the divine Wisdom in the soul. He also adopted some of the ideas of the Gnostics. Originally, all the beings in the spiritual world had contemplated the ineffable God who had revealed himself to them in the Logos, the divine Word and Wisdom. But they had grown tired of this perfect contemplation and fallen from the divine world into bodies, which had arrested their fall. All was not lost, however.

• From A History of God (1993)

  He can only be found by the ways taught in the Gospels. 1 This essentially mystical experience meant that the God of Pascal was different from the God of the other scientists and philosophers we shall consider in this chapter. This was not the God of the philosophers but the God of revelation, and the overwhelming power of his conversion led Pascal to throw in his lot with the Jansenists against the Jesuits, their chief enemies. Where Ignatius had seen the world as full of God and had encouraged Jesuits to cultivate a sense of the divine omnipresence and omnipotence, Pascal and the Jansenists found the world to be bleak and empty, bereft of divinity. Despite his revelation, Pascal’s God remains “a hidden God” who cannot be discovered by means of rational proof. The Pensées , Pascal’s jottings on religious matters, which were published posthumously in 1669, are rooted in a profound pessimism about the human condition. Human “vileness” is a constant theme; it cannot even be alleviated by Christ, “who will be in agony until the end of the world.” 2 The sense of desolation and of God’s terrifying absence characterizes much of the spirituality of the new Europe. The continuing popularity of the Pensées shows that Pascal’s darker spirituality and his hidden God appealed to something vital in the Western religious consciousness. Pascal’s scientific achievements, therefore, did not give him much confidence in the human condition. When he contemplated the immensity of the universe, he was scared stiff: When I see the blind and wretched state of man, when I survey the whole universe in its dumbness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair. 3 This is a salutary reminder that we should not generalize about the buoyant optimism of the scientific age. Pascal could envisage the full horror of a world that seemed empty of ultimate meaning or significance. The terror of waking up in an alien world, which had always haunted humanity, has rarely been more eloquently expressed. Pascal was brutally honest with himself; unlike most of his contemporaries, he was convinced that there was no way of proving the existence of God. When he imagined himself arguing with somebody who was constitutionally unable to believe, Pascal could find no arguments to convince him. This was a new development in the history of monotheism. Hitherto nobody had seriously questioned the existence of God. Pascal was the first person to concede that, in this brave new world, belief in God could only be a matter of personal choice.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Ever since the prophets of Israel started to ascribe their own feelings and experiences to God, monotheists have in some sense created a God for themselves. God has rarely been seen as a self-evident fact that can be encountered like any other objective existent. Today many people seem to have lost the will to make this imaginative effort. This need not be a catastrophe. When religious ideas have lost their validity, they have usually faded away painlessly: if the human idea of God no longer works for us in the empirical age, it will be discarded. Yet in the past people have always created new symbols to act as a focus for spirituality. Human beings have always created a faith for themselves, to cultivate their sense of the wonder and ineffable significance of life. The aimlessness, alienation, anomie and violence that characterize so much of modern life seem to indicate that now that they are not deliberately creating a faith in “God” or anything else—it matters little what—many people are falling into despair. In the United States, we have seen that ninety-nine percent of the population claim to believe in God, yet the prevalence of fundamentalism, apocalypticism and “instant” charismatic forms of religiosity in America is not reassuring. The escalating crime rate, drug addiction and the revival of the death penalty are not signs of a spiritually healthy society. In Europe there is a growing blankness where God once existed in the human consciousness. One of the first people to express this dry desolation—quite different from the heroic atheism of Nietzsche—was Thomas Hardy. In “The Darkling Thrush,” written on December 30, 1900, at the turn of the twentieth century, he expressed the death of spirit that was no longer able to create a faith in life’s meaning: I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-grey And Winter’s dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires. The land’s sharp features seemed to be The Century’s corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervourless as I. At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware.

• From A History of God (1993)

  More dramatic than the linguistic philosophers were the radical theologians of the 1960s who enthusiastically followed Nietzsche and proclaimed the death of God. In The Gospel of Christian Atheism (1966), Thomas J. Altizer claimed that the “good news” of God’s death had freed us from slavery to a tyrannical transcendent deity: “Only by accepting and even willing the death of God in our experience can we be liberated from a transcendent beyond, an alien beyond which has been emptied and darkened by God’s self-alienation in Christ.”4 Altizer spoke in mystical terms of the dark night of the soul and the pain of abandonment. The death of God represented the silence that was necessary before God could become meaningful again. All our old conceptions of divinity had to die before theology could be reborn. We were waiting for a language and a style in which God could once more become a possibility. Altizer’s theology was a passionate dialectic which attacked the dark God-less world in the hope that it would give up its secret. Paul Van Buren was more precise and logical. In The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (1963), he claimed that it was no longer possible to speak of God acting in the world. Science and technology had made the old mythology invalid. Simple faith in the Old Man in the Sky was clearly impossible, but so was the more sophisticated belief of the theologians. We must do without God and hold on to Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospel was “the good news of a free man who has set other men free.” Jesus of Nazareth was the liberator, “the man who defines what it means to be a man.”5 In Radical Theology and the Death of God (1966), William Hamilton noted that this kind of theology had its roots in the United States, which had always had a Utopian bent and had no great theological tradition of its own. The imagery of the death of God represented the anomie and barbarism of the technical age, which made it impossible to believe in the biblical God in the old way. Hamilton himself saw this theological mood as a way of being Protestant in the twentieth century. Luther had left his cloister and gone out into the world. In the same way, he and the other Christian radicals were avowedly secular men. They had walked away from the sacred place where God used to be to find the man Jesus in their neighbor out in the world of technology, power, sex, money and the city. Modern secular man did not need God. There was no God-shaped hole within Hamilton: he would find his own solution in the world.

• From A History of God (1993)

  It meanwhile pants and struggles and endeavors to go above itself but sinks back, overpowered with weariness, into its own familiar darkness. 15 God could only be reached after “a great effort of the mind,” which had to wrestle with him as Jacob had wrestled with the angel. The path to God was beset with guilt, tears and exhaustion; as it approached him, “the soul could do nothing but weep.” “Tortured” by its desire for God, it only “found rest in tears, being wearied out.” 16 Gregory remained an important spiritual guide until the twelfth century; clearly the West continued to find God a strain. In the East, the Christian experience of God was characterized by light rather than darkness. The Greeks evolved a different form of mysticism, which is also found worldwide. This did not depend on imagery and vision but rested on the apophatic or silent experience described by Denys the Areopagite. They naturally eschewed all rationalistic conceptions of God. As Gregory of Nyssa had explained in his Commentary on the Song of Songs , “every concept grasped by the mind becomes an obstacle in the quest to those who search.” The aim of the contemplative was to go beyond ideas and also beyond all images whatsoever, since these could only be a distraction. Then he would acquire “a certain sense of presence” that was indefinable and certainly transcended all human experiences of a relationship with another person. 17 This attitude was called hesychia , “tranquillity” or “interior silence.” Since words, ideas and images can only tie us down in the mundane world, in the here and now, the mind must be deliberately stilled by the techniques of concentration, so that it could cultivate a waiting silence. Only then could it hope to apprehend a Reality that transcended anything that it could conceive. How was it possible to know an incomprehensible God? The Greeks loved that kind of paradox, and the hesychasts turned to the old distinction between God’s essence ( ousia ) and his “energies” ( energeiai ) or activities in the world, which enabled us to experience something of the divine. Since we could never know God as he is in himself, it was the “energies” not the “essence,” that we experienced in prayer. They could be described as the “rays” of divinity, which illuminated the world and were an outpouring of the divine, but as distinct from God himself as sunbeams were distinct from the sun. They manifested a God who was utterly silent and unknowable. As St.

• From A History of God (1993)

  These intensely emotional reversals have continued to be characteristic of religious revival in America. It was a new birth, attended by violent convulsions of pain and effort, a new version of the Western struggle with God. The Awakening spread like a contagion to surrounding towns and villages, just as it would a century later when New York state would be called the Burned-Over District, because it was so habitually scorched by the flames of religious fervor. While in this exalted state, Edwards noted that his converts felt that the whole world was delightful. They could not tear themselves away from their Bibles and even forgot to eat. Not surprisingly, perhaps, their emotion died down, and about two years later Edwards noted that “it began to be very sensible that the Spirit of God was gradually withdrawing from us.” Again, he was not speaking metaphorically: Edwards was a true Western literalist in religious matters. He was convinced that the Awakening had been a direct revelation of God in their midst, the tangible activity of the Holy Spirit as on the first Pentecost. When God had withdrawn, as abruptly as he had come, his place was—again, quite literally—taken by Satan. Exaltation was succeeded by suicidal despair. First one poor soul killed himself by cutting his throat and: “After this multitudes in this and other towns seemed to have it strongly suggested to them, and pressed upon them, to do as this person had done. Many had it urged upon them as if somebody had spoken to them, ‘Cut your own throat, now is a good opportunity. Now!’ ” Two people went mad with “strange, enthusiastic delusions.”43 There were no more conversions, but the people who survived the experience were calmer and more joyful than they had been before the Awakening, or so Edwards would have us believe. The God of Jonathan Edwards and his converts, who revealed himself in such abnormality and distress, was clearly just as frightening and arbitrary in his dealings with his people as ever. The violent swings of emotion, the manic elation and profound despair, show that many of the less privileged people of America found it difficult to keep their balance when they had dealings with “God.” It also shows a conviction that we find also in the scientific religion of Newton that God is directly responsible for everything that happens in the world, however bizarre.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Like the later Pietists and Methodists, he was trying to internalize a God who had become distant and inhumanly objective and to transpose traditional doctrine into religious experience. He also shared the rejection of authority and essentially optimistic view of humanity shared later by the philosophers of the Enlightenment and those who subscribed to a religion of the heart. Bauthumely was flirting with the deeply exciting and subversive doctrine of the holiness of sin. If God was everything, sin was nothing—an assertion that Ranters like Laurence Clarkson and Alastair Coppe also tried to demonstrate by flagrantly violating the current sexual code or by swearing and blaspheming in public. Coppe was particularly famous for drunkenness and smoking. Once he had become a Ranter, he had indulged what was obviously a long-suppressed craving to curse and swear. We hear of him cursing for a whole hour in the pulpit of a London church and swearing at the hostess of a tavern so fearfully that she trembled for hours afterward. This could have been a reaction to the repressive Puritan ethic, with its unhealthy concentration on the sinfulness of mankind. Fox and his Quakers insisted that sin was by no means inevitable. He certainly did not encourage his Friends to sin and hated the licentiousness of the Ranters, but he was trying to preach a more optimistic anthropology and restore the balance. In his tract A Single Eye , Laurence Clarkson argued that since God had made all things good, “sin” only existed in men’s imagination. God himself had claimed in the Bible that he would make the darkness light. Monotheists had always found it difficult to accommodate the reality of sin, though mystics had tried to discover a more holistic vision. Julian of Norwich had believed that sin was “behovely” and somehow necessary. Kabbalists had suggested that sin was mysteriously rooted in God. The extreme libertarianism of Ranters like Coppe and Clarkson can be seen as a rough and ready attempt to shake off an oppressive Christianity which had terrorized the faithful with its doctrine of an angry, vengeful God. Rationalists and “enlightened” Christians were also trying to shake off the fetters of a religion which had presented God as a cruel authority figure, and to discover a milder deity. Social historians have noted that Western Christianity is unique among world religions for its violent alternations of periods of repression and permissiveness. They have also noted that the repressive phases usually coincide with a religious revival. The more relaxed moral climate of the Enlightenment would be succeeded in many parts of the West by the repressions of the Victorian period, which was accompanied by an upsurge of a more fundamentalist religiosity.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In this, he was the first modern. Pascal’s approach to the problem of God’s existence is revolutionary in its implications, but it has never been accepted officially by any church. In general, Christian apologists have preferred the rationalistic approach of Leonard Lessius, discussed at the end of the last chapter. Such an approach, however, could only lead to the God of the philosophers, not to the God of revelation experienced by Pascal. Faith, he insisted, was not a rational assent based on common sense. It was a gamble. It was impossible to prove that God exists but equally impossible for reason to disprove his existence: “We are incapable of knowing either what [God] is or whether he is.… Reason cannot decide this question. Infinite chaos separates us. At the far end of this infinite distance a coin is being spun which will come down heads or tails. How will you wager?” 4 This gamble is not entirely irrational, however. To opt for God is a win-win solution. In choosing to believe in God, Pascal continued, the risk is finite but the gain infinite. As the Christian progresses in the Faith, he or she will become aware of a continuous enlightenment, an awareness of God’s presence that is a sure sign of salvation. It is no good relying on external authority; each Christian is on his own. Pascal’s pessimism is countered by a growing realization in the Pensées that once the wager has been made, the hidden God reveals himself to anyone who seeks him. Pascal makes God say: “You would not seek me, if you had not already found me.” 5 True, humanity cannot batter its way to the distant God by arguments and logic or by accepting the teaching of an institutional church. But by making the personal decision to surrender to God, the faithful feel themselves transformed, becoming “faithful, honest, humble, grateful, full of good works, a true friend.” 6 Somehow the Christian will find that life has acquired meaning and significance, having created faith and constructed a sense of God in the face of meaninglessness and despair. God is a reality because he works. Faith is not intellectual certainty but a leap into the dark and an experience that brings a moral enlightenment. René Descartes (1596–1650), another of the new men, had far more confidence in the ability of the mind to discover God. Indeed, he insisted that the intellect alone could provide us with the certainty we seek.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In addi- tion, the debacle over Luther’s doctoral celebrations — and Nathin’s role in this episode — would have given Luther good reason to think about the subject as well. Yet while its origins had a practical purpose, the sermon hardly reads like a response to a particular incident, still less a tactical sally in a dispute within the order.” It shows Luther backing up his superior, but also signals how the two men differed. It employs a style which is almost a mirror version of Staupitz’s own devotional approach, for, like Staupitz he uses sensually overwhelming allegories in quick succes- sion, but whereas the older man deploys this technique to create a sense of meditative reflection on God’s love, Luther exploits it to propel his hearer into an unbearable world of existential disgust and abandonment. The sermon takes us closer than any other testimony to the religious despair and overwhelming sinfulness that Luther felt as a monk. To make his point about envy, Luther compares the backbiter to a murderer and to a debaucher, using language that goes far beyond the biblical text to make the hearer experience revulsion. Just as the Word of God is holy seed, which conceives in the spirit purely and without violation, so by contrast the word of the backbiter is the adulterous and spurious seed of the Devil, corrupting the listener’s soul; indeed, the very name of the Devil is backbiter.7” Backbiters are ‘poisoners’ and ‘witches’, Luther says, who ‘bewitch’ and ‘subvert’ the ears of their listeners.” Just as witches can impede the sexual act and prevent conception, so the backbiter can destroy a community by poisoning relations between individuals, and he who was once loved and ‘embraced’ is rejected. To be in good odour is to have a good reputation, which is born from without; to be in bad odour is to have a bad name, which comes from the ordure within. The THE MONASTERY 75 backbiter does not allow the ordure of others to remain hidden but loves ‘to roll in it’ like a pig. He is like the bird who hops about in muck so that people say, ‘Look how he has shit himself’, to which the best response is: “eat it yourself’.” In the most lurid of all the comparisons, Luther describes how backbiters are like hyenas or dogs who dig up stinking human corpses, pullulating with decay and full of worms, and bite into them — “Ugh, what a dreadful monster the backbiter is!’ | We are all sinners, Luther argues, and should be preoccupied with our own excrement.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The sore on his leg made it so difficult for him to walk that he had to use a little cart to get him to the university and church so he could lecture and preach, even though the buildings were just around the corner. ‘I am too tired to write’, became a frequent refrain in his letters. He was sixty years old, and also suffering from the stone, gout, constipa- tion, urine retention and coldness. It was believed that the body grew colder as it aged, and Luther frequently dealt with illness by having himself rubbed and warmed. He was convinced that he was going to die. ‘I am completely sluggish, tired, cold, that is, old and useless’, he wrote. ‘I have run my course; it is time for me to meet my fathers and for corruption and the worms to have their share.’* There were even further strains, too, in the critical friendship with Melanchthon that underpinned the Reformation, although on the face of it, the personal bonds between the two men were stronger than ever.* In fact, each considered the other had saved his life. When Luther was suffering from urine retention at Schmalkalden in 1537, Melanchthon had insisted that he wait a day before travelling on to Gotha because the astrological signs were not auspicious. Luther had laughed at his credulousness, but the jolting cart dislodged his stone and enabled him to pass large quantities of urine, saving his life.” When in 1540 Melanchthon had fallen into a feverish melancholy and refused to eat after the debacle of Philip of Hesse’s bigamy, Luther had travelled straight to Weimar to see him, threatening, “You must eat, or else I’ll excommunicate you. He was convinced that Melanch- thon’s illness was a variety of melancholic Anfechtung, and that his prayer had saved his friend.“ Luther rarely had anything but praise for the younger man, and freely admitted that his intellect was more systematic and his know- ledge of Greek and Hebrew better than his own. Increasingly, however, Melanchthon worked around Luther, as he started to delegate more of the difficult correspondence and issues on which he was asked to take a view. He and Chancellor Briick increasingly controlled the flow of letters, deciding, for example, whether to show the irascible 378 MARTIN LUTHER reformer letters from Bucer which might further darken his mood. Where once it had been Luther who had encouraged Melanchthon, and given him direction and support, now it was the younger man who was managing the older, trying to prevent the worst excesses of Luther's temper.® Luther, however, was not easily managed, and the attempt had its cost in that it aroused his suspicions even about Melanchthon. In 1544, when Hermann von der Wied instituted a programme of reformation in Cologne, which had been a Catholic stronghold, Luther did not at first read the draft, leaving it to Melanchthon.

• From Satyricon (1)

  I thought this was a parting joke till he whipped out his sword, with a murderous hand. “You’ll not have this prize you’re brooding over, all to yourself! Since I’ve been rejected, I’ll have to cut off my share with this sword.” I followed suit, on my side, and, wrapping a mantle around my left arm, I put myself on guard for the duel. The unhappy boy, rendered desperate by our unreasoning fury, hugged each of us tightly by the knee, and in tears he humbly begged that this wretched lodging-house should not witness a Theban duel, and that we would not pollute--with mutual bloodshed the sacred rites of a friendship that was, as yet, unstained. “If a crime must be committed,” he wailed, “here is my naked throat, turn your swords this way and press home the points. I ought to be the one to die, I broke the sacred pledge of friendship.” We lowered our points at these entreaties. “I’ll settle this dispute,” Ascyltos spoke up, “let the boy follow whomsoever he himself wishes to follow. In that way, he, at least, will have perfect freedom in choosing a ‘brother’.” Imagining that a relationship of such long standing had passed into a tie of blood, I was not at all uneasy, so I snatched at this proposition with precipitate eagerness, and submitted the dispute to the judge. He did not deliberate long enough to seem even to hesitate, for he got up and chose Ascyltos for a “brother,” as soon as the last syllable had passed my lips! At this decision I was thunder-struck, and threw myself upon the bed, unarmed and just as I stood. Had I not begrudged my enemy such a triumph, I would have laid violent hands upon myself. Flushed with success, Ascyltos marched out with his prize, and abandoned, in a strange town, a comrade in the depths of despair; one whom, but a little while before, he had loved most unselfishly, one whose destiny was so like his own. As long as is expedient, the name of friendship lives, Just as in dicing, Fortune smiles or lowers; When good luck beckons, then your friend his gleeful service gives But basely flies when ruin o’er you towers. The strollers act their farces upon the stage, each one his part, The father, son, the rich man, all are here, But soon the page is turned upon the comic actor’s art, The masque is dropped, the make-ups disappear! CHAPTER THE EIGHTY-FIRST.

• From Satyricon (1)

  The prophet, hung wavering deep in the blackest despair. Apollo commanded! The forested peaks of Mount Ida Were felled and dragged down; the hewn timbers were fitted to fashion A war-horse. Unfilled is a cavity left, and this cavern, Roofed over, capacious enough for a camp. Here lie hidden The raging impetuous valor of ten years of warfare. Malignant Greek troops pack the recess, lurk in their own offering. Alas my poor country! We thought that their thousand grim war-ships Were beaten and scattered, our arable lands freed from warfare! Th’ inscription cut into the horse, and the crafty behavior Of Sinon, his mind ever powerful for evil, affirmed it. Delivered from war, now the crowd, carefree, hastens to worship And pours from the portals. Their cheeks wet with weeping, the joy Of their tremulous souls brings to eyes tears which terror Had banished. Laocoon, priest unto Neptune, with hair loosed, An outcry evoked from the mob: he drew back his javelin And launched it! The belly of wood was his target. The weapon Recoiled, for the fates stayed his hand, and this artifice won us. His feeble hand nerved he anew, and the lofty sides sounded, His two-edged ax tried them severely. The young troops in ambush Gasped. And as long as the reverberations re-echoed The wooden mass breathed out a fear that was not of its own. Imprisoned, the warriors advance to take Troia a captive And finish the struggle by strategem new and unheard of. Behold! Other portents: Where Tenedos steep breaks the ocean Where great surging billows dash high; to be broken, and leap back To form a deep hollow of calm, and resemble the plashing Of oars, carried far through the silence of night, as when ships pass And drive through the calm as it smashes against their fir bows. Then backward we look towards the rocks; the tide carries two serpents That coil and uncoil as they come, and their breasts, which are swollen Aside dash the foam, as the bows of tall ships; and the ocean Is lashed by their tails, their manes, free on the water, as savage As even their eyes: now a blinding beam kindles the billows, The sea with their hissing is sibilant! All stare in terror! Laocoon’s twin sons in Phrygian raiment are standing With priests wreathed for sacrifice. Them did the glistening serpents Enfold in their coils! With their little hands shielding their faces, The boys, neither thinking of self, but each one of his brother! Fraternal love’s sacrifice! Death himself slew those poor children By means of their unselfish fear for each other! The father, A helper too feeble, now throws himself prone on their bodies: The serpents, now glutted with death, coil around him and drag him To earth! And the priest, at his altar a victim, lies beating The ground. Thus the city of Troy, doomed to sack and destruction, First lost her own gods by profaning their shrines and their worship.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It left Karlstadt a broken man. He kept his word, publishing virtu- ally nothing once he returned to the Wittenberg area. He did manage to move to Kemberg, however, from where he journeyed to meet sympathetic figures like the noblemen Caspar Schwenckfeld and Valentin Crautwald in Silesia. A few years later, he moved to Basle, where he found a more congenial intellectual home, but he did not publish much. His theology continued to develop the idea of Gelas- senheit, and when he died in 1541, he was in the process of composing a major synoptic work on theology in which Gelassenheit would have played a central role. It is puzzling that he failed utterly to capitalise on either the Peasants’ War or on the support his ideas were gaining in the cities of southern Germany. The man who wanted to engage in honest toil like a peasant found himself attacked and hunted by peasants who saw him as a learned grosser Hans, just another ‘big Jack’. And instead of moving south after the Peasants’ War, to his supporters in Basle, Zurich and Strasbourg, he had returned like a moth flying around a candle to Saxony, and to the embrace of the relationship with Luther who had proved his nemesis. Perhaps at some psychological level he depended on Luther’s approval and wanted fervently to persuade him. It is revealing that when he set out his theological views in one of his last pamphlets in early 1525, he did so in the form of a dialogue in which he ventriloquised the man who THE PEASANTS WAR 271 had refused to engage in a proper debate with him at Wittenberg.” In print at least, he could triumph over Luther and win the argument. For both sides the encounter at the Black Bear Inn had been the culmination of a personal battle, a struggle between two former friends and allies. Karlstadt as much as Luther had been mesmerised by that confrontation, and he remained trapped in his promise, sealed with the guilder, to attack Luther — and unable to see beyond him, to his own sources of support. By June 1525 the peasants had been defeated, but things would not be the same again in Saxony. Friedrich the Wise, who had supported Luther through his appearance at the Diet of Worms and protected him afterwards, was dead. There had been portents: a rainbow that Melanchthon and Luther saw in the night that winter over Lochau, some twenty miles from Wittenberg, where there was a castle used by Friedrich; a child born at Wittenberg without a head, and another with bent feet.

• From Satyricon (1)

  CHAPTER THE ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-EIGHTH. (As she said this OEnothea brought) out a leathern dildo which, when she had smeared it with oil, ground pepper, and pounded nettle seed, she commenced to force, little by little, up my anus. The merciless old virago then anointed the insides of my thighs with the same decoction; finally mixing nasturtium juice with elixir of southern wood, she gave my genitals a bath and, picking up a bunch of green nettles, she commenced to strike me gently all over my belly below the navel. {The nettles stung me horribly and I suddenly took to my heels, with the old hags in full pursuit.} Although they were befuddled with wine and lust they followed the right road and chased me through several wards, screaming “Stop thief.” I made good my escape, however, although every toe was bleeding as the result of my headlong flight. (I got home as quickly as I could and, worn out with fatigue, I sought my couch, but I could not snatch a wink of sleep for the evil adventures which had befallen me kept running through my brain and, brooding upon them, I came to the conclusion that no one could be so abjectly unfortunate. “Has Fortune, always inimical to me, stood in need of the pangs of love, that she might torture me more cruelly still,” I cried out; “unhappy wretch that I am! Fortune and Love have joined forces to bring about my ruin. Cruel Eros himself had never dealt leniently with me, loved or lover I am put to the torture! Take the case of Chrysis: she loves me desperately, never leaves off teasing me, she who despised me as a servant, because, when she was acting as her mistress’s go-between, I was dressed in the garments of a slave: she, I say) that same Chrysis, who looked with contempt upon your former lowly lot, is now bent upon following it up even at the peril of her life; (she swore that she would never leave my side on the day when she told me of the violence of her passion: but Circe owns me, heart and soul, all others I despise. Who could be lovelier than she?) What loveliness had Ariadne or Leda to compare with hers? What had Helen to compare with her, what has Venus? If Paris himself had seen her with her dancing eyes, when he acted as umpire for the quarreling goddesses, he would have given up Helen and the goddesses for her! If I could only steal a kiss, if only I might put my arms around that divine, that heavenly bosom, perhaps the virility would come back to this body and the parts, flaccid from witchcraft would, I believe, come into their own. Contempt cannot tire me out: what if I was flogged; I will forget it! What if I was thrown out! I will treat it as a joke! Only let me be restored to her good graces!

• From Satyricon (1)

  The Roman matron had learned how to be a mother, the lesson of love was an unopened book; and, when the foreign hetairai poured into the city, and the struggle for supremacy began, she soon became aware of the disadvantage under which she contended. Her natural haughtiness had caused her to lose valuable time; pride, and finally desperation drove her to attempt to outdo her foreign rivals; her native modesty became a thing of the past, her Roman initiative, unadorned by sophistication, was often but too successful in outdoing the Greek and Syrian wantons, but without the appearance of refinement which they always contrived to give to every caress of passion or avarice. They wooed fortune with an abandon that soon made them the objects of contempt in the eyes of their lords and masters. “She is chaste whom no man has solicited,” said Ovid (Amor. i, 8, line 43). Martial, writing about ninety years later says: “Sophronius Rufus, long have I been searching the city through to find if there is ever a maid to say ‘No’; there is not one.” (Ep. iv, 71.) In point of time, a century separates Ovid and Martial; from a moral standpoint, they are as far apart as the poles. The revenge, then, taken by Asia, gives a startling insight into the real meaning of Kipling’s poem, “The female of the species is more deadly than the male.” In Livy (xxxiv, 4) we read: (Cato is speaking), “All these changes, as day by day the fortune of the state is higher and more prosperous and her empire grows greater, and our conquests extend over Greece and Asia, lands replete with every allurement of the senses, and we appropriate treasures that may well be called royal,--all this I dread the more from my fear that such high fortune may rather master us, than we master it.” Within twelve years of the time when this speech was delivered, we read in the same author (xxxix, 6), “for the beginnings of foreign luxury were brought into the city by the Asiatic army”; and Juvenal (Sat. iii, 6), “Quirites, I cannot bear to see Rome a Greek city, yet how small a fraction of the whole corruption is found in these dregs of Achaea? Long since has the Syrian Orontes flowed into the Tiber and brought along with it the Syrian tongue and manners and cross-stringed harp and harper and exotic timbrels and girls bidden stand for hire at the circus.” Still, from the facts which have come down to us, we cannot arrive at any definite date at which houses of ill fame and women of the town came into vogue at Rome.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  36. 37- NOTES TO PAGES 310-315 505 WT 3, 2292 b, 90:22-3. See also, for example, WT 3, 369, 3511: in 1536, Luther remarked that ‘ten years ago I was in death’s ditch’, almost certainly a reference to the events of 6 July 1527. WT 3, 2922 a, 81; 2922 b, 89-90. WB 4, 1121, 10 July 1527. To Melanchthon he wrote that he had been near death and hell for over a week (WB 4, 1126, 2 Aug. 1527); he asked Menius to pray for him, explaining that the torment had been more spiritual than physical (1128); Agricola comforted him and Luther replied thanking him (1132, 21 Aug. 1527); to Rithel he wrote that he was not yet back to full strength (1136, 26 Aug. 1527); to Michael Stifel, he wrote that he had been physically ill for about three months (263:9—10); to Amsdorf he wrote in November that he would reply to the sacramentarians, but was too weak to do so now (1164, I Nov. 1527, 275:10). WS 23, 665-75; see 672, n.I. When Luther said his first Mass, his father paid for the feast (as Luther always remembered). Luther’s wedding feast was paid for in part by Luther and in part by the Elector Johann, Friedrich the Wise’s brother, who provided the gift of game for the feast, and who was in a sense a father figure. WB 4, 973, 20 Jan. 1526, 19:1-3. WB 3, 779, 3 Oct. 1524, 354:15; see Chapter 11. WB 4, 1164, I Nov. 1527. In this revealing letter to Amsdorf, Luther asked his friend for comfort and begged him to join in prayer that God would not let him become an enemy of all that he had preached with such energy hitherto. He seems to have been especially reflective about the progress of the Reformation at this point, and dated his letter ‘All Saints’ Day, in the tenth year after Indulgences were trodden underfoot’ — interestingly placing the anniversary of the posting of the 95 Theses on 1 November, not 31 October). WB 4, tor: it was available by 4 May 1527. In the interim, some of his sermons against the sacramentarians were published by his supporters in late 1526 because of the urgent need to clarify Luther’s position on the Eucharist and because Luther himself still had not done so: WS 19, 482-523. WS 23, 197:14, 18; 283:1-18. WT 3, 2922 b, 88:15-19 (Jonas); 83:13-17 (Bugenhagen) and see also Cordatus’s account, based on Jonas, WT 3, 2922 a. According to Bugen- hagen he had continued, “But even St John didn’t become a martyr, though he wrote a much worse book against the papacy than I did’ (83:15-17). So surprised was Bugenhagen by this statement that he confirmed parenthetically that this was what Luther had actually said. 506 38. 39. 4o. Ate 42. 43.

• From Satyricon (1)

  I thought this was a parting joke till he whipped out his sword, with a murderous hand. “You’ll not have this prize you’re brooding over, all to yourself! Since I’ve been rejected, I’ll have to cut off my share with this sword.” I followed suit, on my side, and, wrapping a mantle around my left arm, I put myself on guard for the duel. The unhappy boy, rendered desperate by our unreasoning fury, hugged each of us tightly by the knee, and in tears he humbly begged that this wretched lodging-house should not witness a Theban duel, and that we would not pollute--with mutual bloodshed the sacred rites of a friendship that was, as yet, unstained. “If a crime must be committed,” he wailed, “here is my naked throat, turn your swords this way and press home the points. I ought to be the one to die, I broke the sacred pledge of friendship.” We lowered our points at these entreaties. “I’ll settle this dispute,” Ascyltos spoke up, “let the boy follow whomsoever he himself wishes to follow. In that way, he, at least, will have perfect freedom in choosing a ‘brother’.” Imagining that a relationship of such long standing had passed into a tie of blood, I was not at all uneasy, so I snatched at this proposition with precipitate eagerness, and submitted the dispute to the judge. He did not deliberate long enough to seem even to hesitate, for he got up and chose Ascyltos for a “brother,” as soon as the last syllable had passed my lips! At this decision I was thunder-struck, and threw myself upon the bed, unarmed and just as I stood. Had I not begrudged my enemy such a triumph, I would have laid violent hands upon myself. Flushed with success, Ascyltos marched out with his prize, and abandoned, in a strange town, a comrade in the depths of despair; one whom, but a little while before, he had loved most unselfishly, one whose destiny was so like his own. As long as is expedient, the name of friendship lives, Just as in dicing, Fortune smiles or lowers; When good luck beckons, then your friend his gleeful service gives But basely flies when ruin o’er you towers. The strollers act their farces upon the stage, each one his part, The father, son, the rich man, all are here, But soon the page is turned upon the comic actor’s art, The masque is dropped, the make-ups disappear! CHAPTER THE EIGHTY-FIRST.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Müntzer fled from the battlefield but was found hiding in a bed in a room in Frankenhausen. The man who had once inspired thousands with his bloodcurdling biblicism now cried: “Ey, I am a sick poor man.”13 The contents of his bag, including a letter from Count Albrecht, gave him away, and he was taken prisoner. What happened next, however, was astonishing and reveals just how comprehensively the Peasants’ War had shaken established hierarchies. When Müntzer was brought to the princely commanders, Duke Georg himself sat down next to him on the bench, and asked what had driven him to execute Count Ernst’s three servants. Müntzer replied, addressing the duke as “Brother,” that divine justice, not he, had done so. Soon he became embroiled in an argument with Duke Heinrich von Braunschweig and Count Albrecht of Mansfeld, with the count quoting the New Testament as Müntzer adduced the Old. For one last defiant time Müntzer sat down face-to-face with the lords, addressing them as equals, and engaging them in debate.14 On May 27, 1525, Thomas Müntzer and his fellow preacher Heinrich Pfeiffer were executed and their heads and bodies displayed on pikestaffs. Müntzer had recanted on May 17, reconciling himself to the Catholic faith, probably as a result of torture. But his final letter to the people of Mühlhausen, written on the same day, does not revoke anything. Instead he told them that he awaited martyrdom and saw his death as a sign: “Since it is God’s good pleasure that I should depart hence with an authentic knowledge of the divine name, and in recompense for certain abuses which the people embraced, not understanding me properly—for they sought only their own interests and the divine truth was defeated as a result—I, too, am heartily content that God has ordained things in this way….Do not allow my death, therefore, to be a stumbling block to you, for it has come to pass for the benefit of the good and the uncomprehending.”15 Luther refused to believe that Müntzer had recanted—he grumpily insisted that his interrogators had asked him the wrong questions. His confession, Luther said, was “nothing other than a devilish, hardened obstinacy in his undertaking.”16