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 25 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  I changed in Dr. Sutter’s back office, and arrived at the bus station at 7:30. Peter was due at 8:00 and our bus left at 8:45. He never showed up. By 9:30 I realized he wasn’t going to show up. The bus station was warm and I just sat there for another hour or so, too stunned and tired to move. At last, I gathered up my belongings and started to trudge across town to the BMT subway. The holiday crowd was already beginning to form, and the festivities and horn-blowing to welcome in the New Year were already beginning. I walked through Times Square in my jeans and my jackboots and my lumber jacket, carrying my knapsack and sleeping bag, and the tears rolled down my face as I made my way through the crowds and the slush. I could not quite believe this was all happening to me. He called me a few days later with an explanation and I hung up on him immediately, in self-protection. I wanted to pretend he had never existed and that I had never been someone who could be treated so. I would never let anyone treat me like that again. Two weeks later I discovered I was pregnant. I tried to recall half-remembered information garnered from other people’s friends who had been “in trouble.” The doctor in Pennsylvania who did good clean abortions very cheaply because his daughter had died on a kitchen table after he had refused to abort her. But sometimes the police grew suspicious, so he wasn’t always working. A call through the grapevine found out that he wasn’t. Trapped. Something—anything—had to be done. No one else can take care of this. What am I going to do? The doctor who gave me the results of my positive rabbit test was a friend of Jean’s aunt, who had said he might “help.” This help meant offering to get me into a home for unwed mothers out of the city run by a friend of his. “Anything else,” he said, piously, “is illegal.” I was terrified by the stories I had heard in school and from my friends about the butchers and the abortion mills of the Daily News . Cheap kitchen table abortions. Jean’s friend Francie had died on the way to the hospital just last year after trying to do it with the handle of a number 1 paintbrush. These horrors were not just stories, nor infrequent. I had seen too many of the results of botched abortions on the bloody gurneys lining the hallways outside the emergency room. Besides, I had no real contacts. Through winter-dim streets, I walked to the subway from the doctor’s office, knowing I could not have a baby and knowing it with a certainty that galvanized me far beyond anything I knew to do. The girl in the Labor Youth League who had introduced me to Peter had had an abortion, but it had cost three hundred dollars.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  They were in God’s hands. Now that they had taken the initiative, God would do the rest. The police kept a watchful eye on the Society, but dismissed them as harmless cranks and dropouts. 34 But if Sadat and his advisers had bothered to look at the lives of these young, desperate fundamentalists, they might have seen that these Muslim communes were a reverse image of the Open Door policy and reflected the shadow side of modern Egypt. Shukri’s excommunication of the whole of Egyptian society may have been extreme, but it was not wholly without foundation. However many mosques were built in Sadat’s Egypt, there was nothing Islamic about a nation in which wealth was commandeered by a small elite while the majority languished in hopeless poverty. The hijrah or “migration” which members of the Society made to the most desperate neighborhoods of the cities also demonstrated the plight of so many young Egyptians, who felt that there was no place for them in Egypt, that they had been pushed out of their own country. The Society’s communes were maintained by young men whom Shukri sent to the Gulf states, like so many other Egyptian youths. Many members of the Society had received a university education, but Shukri declared that all secular learning was a waste of time; all a Muslim needed was the Koran. This was another extreme position, but there was a grain of truth in it. The education that many Egyptians were receiving during the 1970s was entirely useless to them. Not only were the teaching and methods of study grossly inadequate, but a university degree did not even ensure that a graduate would get a decent job: a lady’s maid in a foreign household was likely to earn more than an assistant university professor. 35 As long as the Society kept a low profile, the regime left them alone. But in 1977 Shukri broke his cover. In November 1976, rival Islamic groups had enticed some members of the Society away and, in Shukri’s eyes, these defectors had become apostates worthy of death. His disciples launched a series of raids against them and, as a result, fourteen members of the Society were arrested for attempted homicide. Shukri immediately went on the offensive. For the first six months of 1977, he campaigned for the release of his colleagues, sending articles to the newspapers and trying to broadcast on radio and television. When these peaceful methods failed, Shukri resorted to violence. On July 7, he kidnapped Muhammad al-Dhahabi, who had written a pamphlet denouncing the Society as heretical.

• From Action (2014)

  In one such monogamous relationship, which included a lengthy and serious engagement, I vowed not to cheat, and I didn’t. But after two and a half years, I started backsliding into the realm of backdoor Facebook encounters. When I caught myself typing double entendres to people whose profile pictures I found achingly cute, I broke up with my then-fiancé rather than violate his trust, which I could tell I was about to do. Even though I was the one who chose to end that relationship, I was overwhelmed by despair and grief when it was over. I wondered if I would ever be able to love someone without emotionally fucking them over with my constant tail-chasing and tomcatting, and I decided the answer was no: I had tried my hardest with someone I was prepared to spend the rest of my life with, and I had failed. Clearly I was incapable of curbing my desire to freaq a sizable fraction of the world’s population, and that, I felt, made me worthy of contempt. Then I met Wes. We were introduced by a mutual friend on a beach trip two years ago, when I was twenty-one, right before I made the choice to leave my fiancé. A few months after we settled into our partnership, Wes told me that he knew he wanted to go out with me when, upon being picked up at my apartment, I burst into the car and greeted him by affectionately biting his arm. Suave, right? That sense of sexy intrigue intensified for both of us over the course of the afternoon as we discovered we had the same favorite animal (squid) and compared our imitations of the director Orson Welles. We separated from the rest of the group for a while, and I told him secrets that not even my best friends knew at the time, like why my engagement was ending (and that it was even ending at all). I felt closer to him than I had to anyone else in a long time.

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

  revised by Benedetto’s friend Marcantonio Flaminio, a protégé of Valdés and Pole, to heighten its presentation of the spiritual and mystical aspects of Valdesian theology, and it also silently incorporated substantial quotations from the 1539 edition of John Calvin’s Institutes! The text emphasized justification by faith alone and celebrated the benefits of suffering for the faith, yet Cardinal Morone loved it for its eloquence on the benefits of the Eucharist. The new Roman Inquisition’s opinion of it (and therefore Carafa’s) can be gauged by the fact that of all the thousands of copies printed in Italian, none was seen again from the sixteenth century down to 1843, when a stray turned up in the University Library in Cambridge, England. That disappearance, proof of the Inquisition’s energy when it felt the need, is an eloquent symbol of the exclusion of the Spirituali from the future of the Catholic Church.10 Only now did a council of the Church meet, in a compromise location to satisfy the mutual distrust of Pope and Emperor. It took place south of the Alps, but in a prince-bishopric which was imperial territory, at Trent in the Tyrol. The episcopal host and chairman from 1545, Cristoforo Madruzzo, was a Spirituale sympathizer and old friend of Reginald Pole, and Pole was one of the Pope’s three legates – but soon it became clear that other forces, among whom Carafa was an éminence grise, were directing the agenda. The council’s decrees rained down to shut out compromise. First was a decree on authority, which emphasized the importance of seeing the Bible in a context of tradition, some of which was unwritten and therefore needed to be exclusively expounded by an authoritative Church. Then came a decree on justification which achieved the remarkable feat of using Augustine’s language and concepts to exclude Luther’s theology of salvation, particularly his assertion that sinful humanity cannot please God by any fulfilment of divine law. Before that decree was passed in January 1547, Pole had left the council, his plea of illness all too real in terms of mental anguish. The last chance for the now dispirited Spirituali came on Pope Paul III’s death in 1549. There was a distinct possibility that Pole might become pope – the dying pontiff had been one of those recommending him – but Carafa’s dramatic intervention with charges of heresy against the Englishman turned a series of close votes away from him and a safe papal civil servant was elected as Julius III. Pole was not the sort of man to put up a fight. Even though in private correspondence with trusted friends in the 1550s he was prepared to declare the Roman Inquisition satanic in its operations, he was always inclined to leave the Holy Spirit to do the political manoeuvring. One might regard that instinct as admirably unworldly. It could also be seen as unrealistic, egotistically idealistic, or even springing from an apocalyptic certainty that God’s purposes were about

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

  of Christianity in the Ottoman Empire, and sponsored mission in the far north of America. In 1658, two French missionary bishops created a society of secular priests, the Missions Etrangères de Paris, with a brief to work in the Far East, in Vietnam and later, where it was allowed, in the Chinese Empire — at first, as we have seen, being as much sources of disruption there as of growth (see p. 707). But as the power of Louis XIV met reverses at the hands of Protestant armies in Europe (see pp. 735–6), the initiative shifted from the Catholic south to Protestant central Europe and the British Isles. The final blow to nearly three centuries of Catholic world mission came in 1773 when the Catholic powers in concert forced the Pope to suppress the whole organization of the Society of Jesus; that was followed by the trauma of the French Revolution. It was now the turn of Protestant Churches to find a call to world mission.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Of course, I was convinced that I had nothing to do with that grade. As soon as a challenge was overcome, it ceased to be a challenge, becoming the expected and ordinary rather than something I had achieved with difficulty, and could, therefore, be justly proud of. I could not own my own triumphs, nor give myself credit for them. Getting the A became not an achievement won by my hard work and study, but only something that had happened—probably, german must be getting easier to understand than it used to be. And besides, if Muriel was leaving me, obviously I couldn’t be a person who did anything right, certainly not get an A in german under her own steam. Some nights I couldn’t sleep. Dawn found me walking up and down in front of the building where Joan and Nicky lived, the sharp edge of a fingered butcher knife up my sleeve. Muriel was in there, and most likely not asleep. I had no idea what I was planning to do. I felt like an actor in some badly written melodrama. My heart knew what my head refused to understand. Our life together was over. If not Joan, then someone else. Another piece of me insisted this could not possibly be happening, while images of murder, death, earthquake harrowed my dreams. The psychic discord was ripping my brain apart. There must be something I could do differently that would take care of everything, end my agonies of bereavement, return Muriel to reason. If only I could figure out how to convince her this was all ridiculous behavior, unnecessary. We could start from there. Other times, fury, cold as dry ice, strummed behind my eyes. When she did not come home for days, I stalked the streets of the Village, hunted and hunting her and Joan, at the mercy of emotional typhoons over which there was no control. Hate. I blew through summer pre-dawn streets like a winter wind, surrounded by a cloud of pain and rage so intense that no sane person would dare to intrude upon it. Nobody approached me on those journeys. I was sometimes sorry about that; I longed for an excuse to kill. My piercing headaches went away. I called my mother to see how she was doing. Out of a clear blue sky, she inquired as to how Muriel was doing. “How’s your friend? She’s all right?” My mother was nothing if not psychic. “Oh, she’s fine,” I said hurriedly. “Everything’s fine.” Desperate that my mother not know of my failure. Determined to hide this shame. Summer school started and I registered for english and german.

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

  themselves by one of the most statistically intense persecutions in Europe, which was not unconnected to the Scottish clergy’s constant struggle to assert their authority in the kingdom against secular authority. The Scots Kirk had the distinction of inventing that form of torture still popular in the contemporary world, sleep deprivation, in order to extract confessions.50 The pattern in eastern Europe was different again: the paranoia started later, lasted longer and in fact climaxed in the eighteenth century. By then half of those charged with witchcraft in now strongly Catholic Poland ended up being burned, whereas the proportion had been around 4 per cent in the sixteenth century. The ‘State without Stakes’ was increasingly belying its reputation, in parallel to the decline in its tolerance of religious diversity. The executions ended only with a Polish royal decree in 1776, by which time perhaps around a thousand people had died, a similar figure to that in Hungary and Transylvania through the same period. The eastern persecutions were being fuelled by new crises and social tensions in the lands where Habsburg, Romanov and Hohenzollern were remaking the map and disposing of ancient political rivals. By the end of the seventeenth century, despite losses to Russian Orthodoxy in the east, far more of the religious life of Europe was under Catholic obedience than in 1600. There had been a number of political milestones on that journey: the Union of Brest in 1596, which had seemed to absorb most of the Orthodox of eastern Europe into the Catholic Church; the Battle of White Mountain, which had crushed Bohemian Utraquism in 1620; the Treaty of Westphalia, which restricted Protestant recovery of territory in 1648; the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which repudiated Henri IV’s generous vision of two Christian confessions coexisting in a single kingdom. The story was partly of war, high diplomacy, official persecution and coercion; but it was also the result of much patient missionary work, preaching, rebuilding of a devotional life part traditional and part as innovative as anything Protestants did. And those Jesuits, friars or secular priests who laboured in the forests and plains of eastern Europe, or tried to spark fresh vigour into Church life in secretive villages down the heel of Italy, were encouraged to do so because they knew that they were part of a still wider mission. Not for nothing did the Jesuits refer to the remote parts of Europe in which they laboured as the ‘Indies’ – because the Society had also reached Indies overseas, both India and lands newly named and hitherto unknown to Europeans. The missionary goal was to make a reality of Pope Gregory VII’s ancient vision: to see the world turning in obedience to the Church ruled over by Christ’s Vicar on earth.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  The guy had paid for it. I did not have three hundred dollars, and I had no way of getting three hundred dollars, and I swore her to secrecy telling her the baby wasn’t Peter’s. Whatever was going to be done I had to do. And fast. Castor oil and a dozen bromo quinine pills didn’t help. Mustard baths gave me a rash, but didn’t help either. Neither did jumping off a table in an empty classroom at Hunter, and I almost broke my glasses. Ann was a licensed practical nurse I knew from working the evening shift at Beth David Hospital. We used to flirt in the nurses’ pantry after midnight when the head nurse was sneaking a doze in some vacant private room on the floor. Ann’s husband was a soldier in Korea. She was thirty-one years old—and knew her way around , in her own words—beautiful and friendly, small, sturdy, and deeply Black. One night, while we were warming the alcohol and talcum for p.m. care backrubs, she pulled out her right breast to show me the dark mole which grew at the very line where her deep-purple aureola met the lighter chocolate brown of her skin, and which, she told me with a mellow laugh, “drove all the doctors crazy.” Ann had introduced me to amphetamine samples on those long sleepy night shifts, and we crashed afterward at her bright kitchenette apartment on Cathedral Parkway, drinking black coffee and gossiping until dawn about the strange habits of head nurses, among other things. I called Ann at the hospital and met her after work one night. I told her I was pregnant. “I thought you was gay!” I heard the disappointed half-question in Ann’s voice, and remembered suddenly our little scene in the nurses’ pantry. But my experience with people who tried to label me was that they usually did it to either dismiss me or use me. I hadn’t even acknowledged my own sexuality yet, much less made any choices about it. I let the remark lay where Jesus flang it. I asked Ann to get me some ergotrate from the pharmacy, a drug which I had heard from nurses’ talk could be used to encourage bleeding. “Are you crazy?” she said in horror. “You can’t mess around with that stuff, girl; it could kill you. It causes hemorrhaging. Let me see what I can find out for you.” Everybody knows somebody, Ann said. For her, it was the mother of another nurse in surgery. Very safe and clean, fool-proof and cheap, she said. An induced miscarriage by Foley catheter. A homemade abortion. The narrow hard-rubber tube, used in post-operative cases to keep various body canals open, softened when sterilized.

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

  this revolutionary measure with wide political consent, he used the organizing skills of a newly recruited royal minister, Thomas Cromwell, to secure legislation in his Parliament enacting a break with Rome. His new wife, Anne Boleyn, was a none-too-discreet sympathizer with evangelical Reformation, and was able to encourage evangelicals at Court.28 Among them was Cromwell, who was working closely with another new recruit, the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, appointed in 1533 to formalize Henry’s annulment and new marriage. Between them, from 1534 Cromwell and Cranmer discreetly encouraged a piecemeal dismantling of the old Church, not always in harmony with the King’s wishes; in 1540, Cromwell was disgraced and executed, partly because of this, and partly because of his disastrous recruitment of yet a fourth royal wife who turned out unacceptable.29 By then, Henry was twice a widower. Queen Anne had failed to provide the much-sought male heir. Henry could not foresee that the birth of her daughter, Elizabeth, in 1533 had furnished a worthy successor to the throne, and in default of any boys, Anne preceded Cromwell to the scaffold, beheaded in 1536 on absurd charges of adultery and incest. Her replacement, Jane Seymour, suited the king well, and provided the vital male heir, Prince Edward, but she died of post-partum infection. Through all these crises and more, Cranmer’s survival skills were sorely tested. One of King Henry’s most celebrated executions was done by proxy, the victim dying on the command of the Emperor Charles V. He was William Tyndale, one of the geniuses of the English Reformation; after Henry’s agents secured his kidnap while he was in exile in Antwerp, he was strangled at the stake before his corpse was burned near Brussels. He bequeathed the English nothing less than the first translation of the New Testament and Pentateuch in their own language since the by then archaic version of the Lollards 150 years before. Tyndale, an Oxford scholar from Gloucestershire, made the English Bible his life’s work, had to flee his native land to continue his labours on it and lost his life because of it. He brought not just evangelical fervour and an exceptional skill in Greek and Hebrew to his task, but an exceptional ear for languages, perhaps borne of his childhood spent in English western borderlands, where the sound of Welsh was almost as familiar as English. He understood that English might actually be closer than Latin to Hebrew in its rhythms and driving narrative force, and the results coruscate with life and energy – here is the moment at which Adam and Eve fell from obedience to God, that greatest tragedy of humankind in the Christian story: And the woman saw that it was a good tree to eat of and lusty unto the eyes and a pleasant tree for to make wise. And took of the fruit of it and ate, and gave unto her husband also with her, and he ate. And the eyes of both of them were opened, that they understood how that they were naked.30

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

  secret existence for more than two centuries until Europeans used military force to secure free access to the country after the 1850s, and rediscovered it with astonishment. They had then to abolish the official imposition of ‘Christ- stepping’, a test of rejection of Christianity in which those suspected of Christian allegiance were forced to walk on pictures of Christ or the Virgin. The Japanese persecution is a standing argument against the old idea that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.40 COUNTER-REFORMATION IN AFRICA: THE BLIGHT OF THE SLAVE TRADE Christian mission in Africa was likewise based on Portuguese trading posts and contacts with local powers, and, as in Japan, it achieved some success among local elites. There were even efforts to create an indigenous clergy, spurred by a chronic shortage of clerical manpower: the climate and disease ecology proved lethal to most European missionary clergy, in an exact reversal of the American situation. An early attempt at what might now be called indigenization occurred in one of the first forts which the Portuguese built on the West African coast, Fort St George of Elmina, in what is now Ghana. A wooden statue of St Francis was so affected by the humid heat that his face and hands turned black: the Governor announced a miracle, in which the saint had proclaimed himself patron of the local population by identifying with them.41 Yet Francis’s favour could not counterweigh the disastrous flaw in European Christian mission in Africa, its association with the Portuguese slave trade. Millions were rounded up in the African interior by local rulers and shipped out through the Portuguese forts across the Atlantic to sustain the economy of American plantations; they introduced a third element to the racial kaleidoscope of the Iberian American empires. Portuguese Brazil accounted for the largest number — perhaps 3.5 million people over three centuries — but from the late sixteenth century the Portuguese were (unwillingly) sharing this trade with the English and Dutch, and hundreds of thousands of slaves were taken to new plantations in Protestant colonies in North America.42 The Spaniards were not actively involved in the shipping trade, but their plantation colonies could not have survived without it. Depressingly, as we have noted in discussing the polemic of Bartolomé de las Casas (see p. 692), the expedient of importing African slaves was in part meant to protect the native American population from exploitation. Not many clergy comprehended the moral disaster. One Franciscan based in the University of

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  People cried in the streets and hung pictures of the cosmonaut in their homes. —Gagarin’s flight dealt an even bigger blow to the United States than did Sputnik. “We are behind,” Kennedy admitted at a press conference. Soviet propaganda rained down from Moscow extolling the virtues of Communism and the superiority of Soviet science and technology, and it was hard to argue with any of it—the Soviets continued to do everything first, and biggest, in space. And that meant that no matter what Khrushchev claimed about wanting peace, the Soviets were building their advantage in war. Kennedy needed to strike back. He asked his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, to find a long-term challenge that NASA might undertake, one that would allow sufficient time for the space agency to catch up to the Soviets, but one that was so difficult, and so spectacular, it could put America ahead in space for good. Kennedy needed something epic, and he needed to announce it soon. Just days after Gagarin returned from his trip, a group of about fifteen hundred Cuban exiles trained and armed by the Central Intelligence Agency launched a failed invasion of Soviet-backed socialist Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy, who’d approved the mission and then withdrawn his support, was devastated by the failure, knowing the damage it would cause to his reputation and that of the United States. “All my life I’ve known better than to depend on the experts,” he told Theodore Sorensen, his adviser and speechwriter. “How could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead?” To Khrushchev, the answer was simple: The young American president was indecisive and weak. Three weeks after Gagarin journeyed around the globe, Alan Shepard flew the inaugural Mercury mission. The former Navy test pilot became the first American in space. The fifteen-minute solo flight inspired ticker tape parades, but facts couldn’t be ignored: The astronaut had simply gone up and down, while the cosmonaut had made it into orbit—a significant difference in terms of the technology required. As always, the Soviets were far ahead, and with each victory they made a statement to the world, not just about the superiority of their political system and way of life, but about the future. On May 25, 1961, just a month after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy addressed a special joint session of Congress on “urgent national needs.” He warned that a battle was being waged around the world between freedom and tyranny, one in which achievement in space could prove decisive. Then he threw down a gauntlet. “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.” The room stood silent.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  to the Borman house. When they arrived, Marilyn found a familiar scene—loads of visitors, trays of food, kids pinballing between rooms, squawk boxes chirping. The only thing missing was Susan. “She’s in the bedroom,” someone said. “I’ll tell her you’re here.” Marilyn sat in the living room and waited, chatting with other visitors and fixing herself a drink. She kept waiting, for thirty minutes, an hour. After two hours, Susan still had not emerged. I’m part of this just as much as you are, Marilyn thought. My husband is on this flight, too. Marilyn didn’t know how painful things had been for Susan after the Apollo 1 tragedy. She didn’t know how clearly Susan pictured herself as a widow in the coming hours. If Marilyn had known any of this, she would have understood and would have tried to help. But Susan never showed that vulnerability to anyone, not even to Frank. As Marilyn waited, Susan remained curled up on the bed in her bedroom, listening for her husband’s voice on the squawk box. When Marilyn left, she left with hurt feelings. Back at home, Marilyn found her house oddly empty. She poured herself a scotch on the rocks, sat on a stool at the wood-paneled bar in the family room, and sobbed. In just ten hours, Apollo 8 would disappear behind the Moon. How had she been so confident all this time? Her husband was disappearing behind the Moon. And that meant he might never come home. — At almost exactly two and a half days into the flight, Apollo 8 prepared for just its second—and final—midcourse correction burn of the outbound leg. It would be accomplished by firing four thrusters on the spacecraft, each of which could produce 100 pounds of thrust. That was only the tiniest fraction of the force that had been required to get Apollo 8 off the launchpad, but it was all the vehicle would need for eleven seconds as it refined its line to the Moon. “Okay, stand by,” Borman called to his crewmates. “Burn,” Lovell said.

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

  pitilessly reminded their enthralled audiences from pulpit or market cross. The Church offered the remedy: its contact with the divine, summed up in the consecrated Host exhibited amid a blaze of candles, promised hope and salvation. Although the means of salvation differed, the histrionics and the saving of the desperate from despair were not dissimilar in their message from themes prominent in the revivals which Protestants began to foment a century later (see chapter 20).42 Time itself was divided by the Reformation. An energetic and intellectually curious pope, Gregory XIII, took it upon himself, with the newfound papal confidence of the Counter-Reformation, to reform the deficiencies of the existing Julian calendar, from 15 October 1582. He was much concerned for unity with the Eastern Churches, that process which indeed did produce the Union of Brest under one of his successors fourteen years later. So to emphasize the temporal as well as ecclesiastical role of the papacy as focus for world unity, Gregory decided to model himself on Constantine the Great. According to Eusebius, Constantine had been commanded by God to convene the Council of Nicaea in order to fix a universally reliable date for Easter in the face of the Julian calendar’s inaccuracy. Unsurprisingly, Protestants took the papacy’s overdue scientific correction as a sinister plot. They took a long time to accept it, at different dates in different parts of Europe, to the despair of later historians trying to work out relative dates in documents. In England, the delay extended to 1752, over 150 years after the more Protestant but also more logical Scots had accepted (without obvious public gratitude) that the Pope was right.43 Having made the correct scientific decision over the calendar, Rome made a disastrous miscalculation in its treatment of the great Italian astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei. Galileo was condemned by the Roman Inquisition in 1633 for providing empirical evidence for the radical revision of cosmology proposed by the long-dead Polish cleric Nicolaus Copernicus. In 1616 the Church had belatedly declared Copernicus to be in error; the Roman authorities then forced Galileo to deny that the earth moved round the sun and not the other way round, because his observations challenged the Church’s authority as the source of truth. There were good theological reasons why they should reject heliocentric theory: the Bible presents creation in moral terms, and depicts a cosmic drama of sin and redemption centred on God’s relationship with humankind. It was not unreasonable to assume that in his creation, he would have made the planet earth, the stage for that drama, the centre of his universe, rather than a morally neutral fiery disc. Yet Galileo’s observations represented reality. Obstinately he turned his humiliation by the Roman authorities to positive use: after they had forced him

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

  8. Asia in 1260 Timur’s orgies of destruction hit Christian populations in Central Asia which had already been terribly reduced by the advance of the plague which western Europe would come to know in 1348–9 as the Black Death. From now on, outside the comparative safety of India, the story of the Church of the East recedes to the efforts by disparate enclaves to cling on to existence in the face of Islamic dominance, usually in remote upland areas out of sight of the authorities. Even when Timur found no successors in his cruelty and the Mongol threat receded, the growing power of the Ottoman Turks (see p. 483) continued the pressure on non-Muslims. In an increasingly hostile Islamic world, embittered at the memory of the alien outrage of the Western Crusades, the ancient privileged place of Christians at the Courts of monarchs disappeared. The Miaphysite Church of Armenia suffered like the Dyophysites from the calamities of the fourteenth century. The last independent Armenian kingdom, in Cilicia in south-west Turkey, fell to Mamluk forces in 1375 and more than two centuries of struggle for Christian survival followed. The Armenians had centuries of experience in being buffeted by neighbouring great powers and they were long used to migrating away from disaster. These desperate years sent more of them travelling through eastern Europe as far away as Poland, let alone whatever refuge they could find in Asia – but as with the Jews in diaspora, their sufferings sharpened their skills in commerce and negotiation, skills which they were ready to apply to their religious troubles. From the fourteenth century, at odds theologically with both their Byzantine neighbours and the Church of the

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

  to be summed up in the Last Days, with Pole as his agent.11 The Holy Spirit did not oblige, and with Pole’s defeat there died the last chance of a peaceful settlement of religion in Western Christendom of which his hero Erasmus might have approved. One sign of radical change and of the quashing of alternative futures in that decade after 1545 was a literally spectacular volte-face from the best-informed family in Italy, the Florentine Medici. Throughout the 1540s, Duke Cosimo de’ Medici continued to extend patronage and protection to disciples of Juan de Valdés, not least because Cosimo hated both Paul III (who was not above sheltering admirers of the unmentionable Savonarola) and Cardinal Carafa, who became Pope Paul IV in 1555. Apart from his fear of the family ambitions of a Farnese pope, Cosimo shared the determination of his own patron, Charles V, to seek ways of conciliating Protestants in the fashion of the Regensburg Colloquy. He prolonged his policy dangerously late. For a decade from 1545, the Medici were paying for a new scheme of fresco decoration for the choir and family chapels in their ancestral parish church of San Lorenzo, one of Florence’s oldest and most famous churches. Their frescoes were an open declaration of support for evangelical reform in the Catholic Church. It is unlikely that the artist, Jacopo da Pontormo, himself dreamt up the iconography of this highly sensitive project, startling in what it did not depict: any emblem of Purgatory, sacraments, institutional Church or Trinity. What it did draw on were themes from the Catechism of Valdés, already prohibited in 1549 by the authorities in Venice, later also by the Roman Inquisition – images which clearly pointed those with eyes to see to the doctrine of justification by faith. Like Valdés’s tract, Pontormo’s paintings approached this incendiary theme through well-known Old Testament stories such as Noah building his ark, or Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac. With Pontormo dead in 1556 and Paul IV’s death in 1559 bringing a pope much more congenial to the Medici, silence descended on the conundrum of why Pontormo had painted what he had painted. Medici publicists, led by the art historian Giorgio Vasari, attributed the fresco design to the artist’s mental instability, and while the Medici became devout patrons of the Counter-Reformation (gaining an augmented title of Grand Duke from Pope Pius V), the unfortunate Pontormo has gone down in art history as a lunatic. Although his frescoes survived much criticism and perplexity up to 1738, now we only have some of his original cartoons and a few rough sketches.12 It is worth focusing on this episode, because it illuminates the murky and uncertain background to the early development of the Jesuits. It is no coincidence that they remained aloof from the work of the Inquisitions,

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

  trained English members for the Society – but an English version of Ignatius’s Exercises went on sale, and Jesuits actually arrived in 1558 poised for action, only to be pre-empted by Mary’s death.19 English Catholicism now faced a disaster, since Philip could only have succeeded to the English throne if Mary had borne him an heir, under the stringent terms of the marriage deal of 1554, negotiated by English politicians whose suspicion of Habsburg acquisitiveness had outweighed their Catholic sentiment. Instead, the new queen, last of the Tudors, was Protestant Elizabeth, who did not expend great energy in responding to some rather unconvincing courting from her half-sister’s widower. Now the Jesuits were banned from the realm, together with all other Catholic clergy trained abroad, facing execution if they arrived in England and were captured, yet Catholics still felt an urgent need to sustain the minority who wanted to remain loyal to Rome. In the face of often savage though inconsistent repression (and also amid some bitter internal disagreements about future strategy), Jesuit and non-Jesuit clergy alike patiently and heroically built up a community of Catholics, led by gentry families scattered throughout England and Wales. It survived Elizabeth’s death in 1603 and persisted through seventeenth-century persecutions and eighteenth-century marginalization, embodied in a formidable set of discriminatory legislation, into modern times.20 In Elizabethan Ireland, Franciscan friars led a parallel mission which was able to enjoy far wider success, partly because the Protestant Reformation there quickly became fatally identified with Westminster’s exploitation of the island and made little effort to express itself in the Gaelic language then spoken by the majority of the population. Ireland became the only country in Reformation Europe where, over a century, a monarchy with a consistent religious agenda failed to impose it on its subjects: an extraordinary failure on the part of the Tudors and Stuarts. Yet there is irony in that exceptional story. It was Catholic Queen Mary who implemented a policy of planting settlements of English incomers in Leix and Offaly, counties which were officially known until the revolution of 1918–22 as King’s and Queen’s Counties, a commemoration of both Mary and her husband, Philip of Spain, already the proprietor of the spectacularly successful Spanish colonies in Central and South America. If the English monarchy had remained Catholic, perhaps Ireland would have become as Protestant as the Dutch Republic in reaction to this alien colonial occupation; but as it was, Mary’s early death and Protestant Elizabeth’s accession made it increasingly easy for both the Gaelic-and English-speaking Irish to identify Catholicism as a symbol of Irish difference from the English. With England lost, and most of northern Europe in Protestant hands, Tridentine Catholicism looked to Habsburg power. Charles V on his abdication

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  “I hope this baby holds out for another two and a half days,” Anders said. “It sure has performed admirably, hasn’t it?” None of the men had dwelled on what awaited them if the SPS engine didn’t perform. If test pilots and fighter pilots thought like that, they would never climb into a cockpit. But none of the men could say he hadn’t thought about being marooned in lunar orbit, or how he’d spend his remaining time—perhaps four days—before dying. In fact, Borman had been asked about it before launch. “I don’t know how I’d want to spend my last days,” he’d told reporters. “I think that’s something you decide when it happens. If the engine doesn’t work, we’ve had a bad day.” NASA had considered a plan for a lunar rescue mission should something catastrophic happen. It involved sending a single astronaut to the Moon in his own command and service module, atop his own Saturn V, which would stand ready to launch at Cape Kennedy. Once in lunar orbit, rendezvous and rescue would involve complex maneuvers that would also place the rescuing astronaut at risk. Such a contingency would add significantly to the agency’s already massive budget. In the end, the idea was scrapped. NASA hadn’t bothered training the astronauts on how to handle being stranded at the Moon, or being flung off irretrievably toward the Sun, or any other hopeless scenario. It hadn’t supplied them with a suicide pill or any other means of putting an end to their lives. But the crew knew how things would end for them. About a week after TEI failed, the canisters of lithium hydroxide used to purge exhaled carbon dioxide from the cabin would run out, causing the men to grow drowsy, fall asleep, and suffocate. None of them intended to waste that week, though they did not discuss the matter aloud. Almost certainly, they would have continued to make observations of the Moon, providing as much detail as possible for Houston. They would also have continued to wear a biomedical harness, to give NASA and its doctors information about what happens as one meets his end in space. And they would have radioed home to say goodbye to their parents, wives, and children, and told them how much they loved them. But they might not have waited to suffocate. Satisfied that their work had been done, the crew likely would have decided together to shut down their communications, then vent the spacecraft by opening a pressure relief valve. Doing so would cause an immediate loss of oxygen in the cabin, a fast loss of consciousness, and a painless death. For now, the astronauts could only hope that that wouldn’t be necessary. —Twenty minutes remained until the SPS engine was scheduled to fire for TEI. Ordinary people might use this time to say something profound, or perhaps to bid their companions goodbye in case things went bad.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Charles: Yes, they haunt you. Dr. Wheeler: Why are you ashamed? Charles: Because I don’t have the money. —To win the Democratic nomination for president, Robert Kennedy had to win the California primary. A week earlier, he’d lost Oregon to McCarthy, and was trailing new entrant Vice President Hubert Humphrey in delegates. For RFK, the Golden State was the crossroads. If he lost there, he’d likely drop out. As the California returns rolled in, it was clear Kennedy would win. Just before midnight, the candidate went to the sweltering ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and addressed a packed house of supporters. Looking more boyish than his forty-two years, Kennedy spoke of his belief that America could be healed and come together. In closing, he made a V with his raised fingers—which in 1968 stood for both peace and victory. Followed by his entourage and a string of reporters, Kennedy made his way to the hotel’s pantry, where he reached out to shake hands with Juan Romero, a seventeen-year-old busboy who’d delivered food to his room earlier that week. As the two moved close, a man with a pistol lunged forward, pointed the gun just inches from Kennedy, and began firing, hitting the senator once in the head and twice in the right armpit. As Kennedy collapsed, Romero cradled his head to protect it from the cold concrete and tried to comfort the senator, who had been kind to him a few days earlier and had treated him as an equal. Photographers snapped photos of Romero holding Kennedy. The images would become among the most memorable of the twentieth century. Pandemonium erupted throughout the hotel; supporters held their heads, sobbed, and screamed “No! No!” and “Not again!” Police seized the shooter, a twenty-four-year-old Jordanian American named Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. In his pocket they found a newspaper story noting Kennedy’s support for Israel. Kennedy was rushed to the hospital, where he clung to life. In England, the British Broadcasting Corporation told its audience, “We pray for the American people that they may come to their senses.” Early the next morning, on June 6, Kennedy died of his wounds. Across the country, people walked around dazed. In New York City, WPIX-TV broadcast the image of a single word—SHAME —and let it run for two and a half hours. People of all colors and classes and ages gathered spontaneously at railroad tracks to glimpse the train that carried Kennedy’s body from New York City to Washington. When it passed, mothers holding babies waved, children saluted, the elderly tried to stand. Black and white Americans chased the train, running on the tracks together until the last car disappeared. —Richard Nixon became the Republican nominee for president on the first ballot at the party’s national convention in Miami in early August. His running mate, Maryland governor Spiro Agnew, had backed the Civil Rights Movement but now scolded black people, and some of their leaders, for not disavowing so-called black racists.

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

  The centrepiece became a Coptic Patriarchal College founded, as its name implied, by the head of the Coptic Church, Kyrillos (Cyril) IV, who initiated a wave of Church reforms, a surprising number of which survived, considering that he had only seven years in which to implement them. The CMS were disappointed in their initial hopes of mass conversions of Egyptian Muslims, but unwittingly they had aided a renaissance in an ancient Church. In the face of all the tribulations which followed for Ottoman Christians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was to prove one of the most successful in all Eastern Christianity.66 Ethiopia’s continuing existence was the most emphatic reminder that Christianity was an ancient African faith, and the resurgence of its Church owed little to the sort of quasi-colonial assistance which benefited the Copts. In the early nineteenth century the Ethiopian Empire might have entirely disintegrated, but it was rescued by a provincial governor, Kassa, who hacked his way to power so successfully that in 1855 he was crowned Negus under the name of Tewodros (Theodore), the hero whose providential arrival as monarchical saviour had been predicted in a sixteenth-century Ethiopian Christian prophecy. Intensely pious – ‘Without Christ I am nothing,’ he declared – he ended the tradition of royal polygamy and toyed with Protestant missions travelling down from Egypt, some of whom had a particular use for him in their ability to manufacture armaments. But like several of Ethiopia’s most energetic monarchs before him, Tewodros descended into paranoia and murderous vindictiveness; it was not good for his sanity to think himself lineally descended from King David. His cruelty alienated his own people, and his imperial posturing led to a British expeditionary force which crushed his armies at Maqdala in 1868. In despair, he turned one of his missionary-forged guns on himself.67 Ethiopia survived this disaster and its Church maintained its Miaphysite character. Yöhannes IV, another provincial governor turned Negus, imitated Constantine in presiding over a Church council in 1878 to settle long-standing disputes on Christology, although his order to tear out the tongues of some of those challenging his decision rather outdid the Roman Emperor’s enforcement of Nicene Orthodoxy.68 His less opinionated successor, Menelik II, brought the empire to an unprecedented size, and delivered the most lasting defeat suffered by a colonial power during the nineteenth century when he crushed the invading Italians at Adwa in 1896. It was an event celebrated all over Africa: a sign (like the Japanese victory over the Russian Empire nine years later) that Europeans were not all-powerful. It was also a triumph for authentically African Christianity, which might now turn to Ethiopia for inspiration. Already in 1892, far away in the Transvaal, a Methodist minister of the Pedi

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

  were trying to destroy. Their detestation of Christianity was as extreme as that of the Jacobins in the French Revolution; the formal separation of Church and State in January 1918 was just one first step towards death and destruction, the Romanov family’s murder being symbolic of so many others. The civil war which was already raging by then, and which ended in 1922 with Bolshevik victory, marked the beginning of seventy years for the Russian Orthodox Church which represent one of the worst betrayals of hope in the history of Christianity. During those terrible decades, the destruction of life and of the material beauty of church buildings and art outdid anything in Orthodox experience since the Mongol invasions; the Orthodox faithful were made strangers amid the culture which they had shaped over centuries. Patriarch Tikhon, desperately trying to protect his Church with no real assets at his disposal apart from the ability to forgive his enemies, eventually died under house arrest in 1925. It is likely that he was murdered by thugs commanded by a Bolshevik leader who was possibly the bastard son of a priest and in early life was one of the most unpromising of seminarians. Long before Tikhon’s death, this Georgian gangster, who never fulfilled his mother’s hopes that he might become a bishop, had adopted the pseudonym Josef Stalin.13 The Bolsheviks’ hatred of religious practice extended far beyond the official Church. Of all the stories of Christian suffering in Russia after 1917, that of the Mennonites can stand for others because of the peculiar moral dilemma it presented for this sect, which since the Reformation had itself rejected the ideal of Christendom now in collapse. First gathered in the Netherlands in the 1530s by Menno Simons, a Frisian former priest sickened by the blood-soaked end to the siege of Münster (see pp. 623–4), Mennonites expressed their difference from the world around them by renouncing all forms of coercion or public violence, soldiering of course included. Their hard work and orderly peace- ableness made them attractive colonists for the tsars, and by the time of the revolution hundreds of thousands lived in Mennonite communities, mostly in the Volga region. Their prosperity attracted Bolshevik and anarchist raids, both out of ideological hatred of ‘bourgeois’ farmers, and from simple greed or necessity – but there was another intoxicating element for bullies: the Mennonites would not fight back when attacked. Men were murdered, women raped, everything was stolen. For many of them, it was too much. They fought back and sent perpetrators of the outrages packing – but now they had to face the wrath of brethren and sisters who said that they were betraying Mennonite principles. When Russian Mennonites finally had the chance, most made new lives in communities in North America; but they did not forget the controversy. Bad feeling and arguments about the Russian civil war still beset quiet places in the