Disappointment

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.

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• From The Pisces (2018)

  “My mother doesn’t accept my pit bulls. Or, she accepts them, but she doesn’t like them. Which is exactly the way she was about me as a child. She just tolerated me. But she didn’t think I was special. Also, now that I’m living at home I obviously can’t start conscious-dating anytime soon.” “Your feelings are certainly understandable. But with regard to the conscious dating, I don’t know if that’s necessarily true,” said Dr. Jude. “Of course it’s true!” neighed Chickenhorse. “You don’t know my mother. She has no boundaries. She’ll want to know exactly what’s going on, who I’m with, what family he is from, and then she’ll find some way to involve herself. So, sorry, now that I’m homeless we will have to put off dating again.” Brianne’s dating life was going no better. “Things have gone a little south with the man from OkCupid,” she murmured, adjusting one knee sock. “He sent me an email the other day letting me know that he couldn’t return to the States yet, because he was waiting for a business deal to close and temporarily was out of funds. Then he asked if I could loan him some funds.” The group gasped in unison. “I’m not sure what to do. One of the items I put on my vision board is that I want a man who is financially stable. I don’t want to compromise my vision board. I’m supposed to be manifesting. My life is simply too abundant to take on someone who is living a life of lack. But at the same time, because of that abundance, I can’t help but think that it might be the kind thing to help him out—especially if it will allow us to go on our date.” “Mmmmmm,” said Dr. Jude. “I would strongly suggest setting a boundary with him.” “Do not send the money,” said Chickenhorse. “He’s probably a catfish!” “A what?” asked Brianne. “A catfish. Like, a scammer. Someone who pretends to be someone he isn’t.” “Oh no, he’s not a scammer. I know that he is who he says he is. We’re very close.” “How long have you known him again?” I asked. “About six days,” said Brianne. We all looked at her. “It’s been a rich and rewarding six days.” Sara looked at her quizzically over the pomegranate she was peeling. But she was in no position to judge. Having almost reached her ninety days of no contact with Stan, she had had a slip. A big one. Now not only were they in contact again but they’d been seeing each other. Stan had reached out with an apologetic one-thousand-word email declaring his love. He also sent her a bouquet of carnations. Of course, Sara was allergic to them and gave them to a neighbor, but that wasn’t the point.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  With God’s will we shall ultimately find the truth.’ Against this friendly background, Contarini and Gropper produced their mediatory compromise (which had already been worked on) of double justification: that is, imputed and inherent justification, faith and love. The Christian man is just in a two-fold way, by faith and grace, and by doing the works of love; the former is more assured, man being imperfect. When this formula was accepted, Pole, who was present, commented: ‘When I observed this union of opinion, I felt a delight such as no harmony of sounds could have inspired me with; not only because I see the approach of peace and concord, but because these articles are the foundation of the whole Christian faith.’ Unfortunately, the colloquy then proceeded to break down on the question of the real presence in the eucharist. Contarini was caught off balance by his own ignorance of Protestant teaching. This is not surprising: Protestant teaching varied. All believed in the real presence in one sense or another. None accepted the technical formulation of transubstantiation, which had been devised by Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Bucer, Melanchthon, Calvin, Zwingli all tended to produce different formulae. Luther taught a real, corporal presence of Christ’s body and blood, ‘in, with and under’ the elements. Zwingli denied the corporal eating and drinking. Calvin was halfway between the two. Luther’s position was essentially that of St Augustine (as on justification); his objection to Aquinas’s formulation was more methodological than substantial. In effect, he accepted the Catholic doctrine; as he put it, ‘I would rather drink blood with the papists than mere wine with the Zwinglians.’ But Luther was not present at Regensburg. He thought the effort to meet Rome halfway useless, and he boycotted the colloquies. Charles V would have been willing to accept a simple declaration that Christ was really and truly present, and leave the technical issue of transubstantiation to a General Council. The centre group of princes were willing to accept what had been agreed, and build on it. But extremists on both sides carried the day. Contarini left Regensburg disappointed and baffled. Political factors – the French, the Bavarian dukes and the papacy on the one hand, Luther’s Schmalkaldic League and the Elector of Saxony on the other – had had as much to do with the breakdown as theology. It was the last chance for a compromise. When the General Council finally met at Trent five years later, Contarini was dead, the moderates were scattered, the Catholic Church was a defiant and intransigent rump, no longer thinking of anything but fire and sword, and Charles V had virtually despaired of unity. Luther died during the first session, and the fact was scarcely noted except for savage expressions of regret that it was no longer possible to burn him. By this time, too, the Protestant movement itself was split beyond redemption: there was no longer a united front with which Catholicism might negotiate.

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

  But in the episcopal constitution the church provided an extremely simple but compact and freely expansible organization, planted foot firmly upon earth, became an institution for the education of her infant people, and, as chiliastic hopes receded, fell into the path of quiet historical development; yet unquestionably she thus incurred also the danger of a secularization which reached its height just when the hierarchy became complete in the Roman church, and which finally necessitated a reformation on the basis of apostolical Christianity. That this secularization began with the growing power of the bishops even before Constantine and the Byzantine court orthodoxy, we perceive, for instance, in the lax penitential discipline, the avarice, and the corruption with which Hippolytus, in the ninth book of his Philosophumena, reproaches Zephyrinus and Callistus, the Roman bishops of his time (202– 223); also in the example of the bishop Paul of Samosata, who was deposed in 269 on almost incredible charges, not only against his doctrine, but still more against his moral character.157 Origen complains that there are, especially in the larger cities, overseers of the people of God, who seek to outdo the pomp of heathen potentates, would surround themselves, like the emperors, with a body-guard, and make themselves terrible and inaccessible to the poor.158 We consider, first, the origin of the episcopate. The unreliable character of our documents and traditions from the transition period between the close of the apostolic church and the beginning of the post-apostolic, leaves large room here for critical research and combination. First of all comes the question: Was the episcopate directly or indirectly of apostolic (Johannean) origin?159 Or did it arise after the death of the apostles, and develope itself from the presidency of the congregational presbytery?160 In other words, was the episcopate a continuation and contraction of, and substitute for, the apostolate, or was it an expansion and elevation of the presbyterate?161 The later view is more natural and better sustained by facts. Most of its advocates date the change from the time of Ignatius in the first quarter of the second century, while a few carry it further back to the close of the first, when St. John still lived in Ephesus. I. For the apostolic origin of episcopacy the following points may be made: (1) The position of James, who evidently stood at the head of the church at Jerusalem,162 and is called bishop, at least in the pseudo-Clementine literature, and in fact supreme bishop of the whole church.163 This instance, however, stands quite alone, and does not warrant an inference in regard to the entire church. (2) The office of the assistants and delegates of the apostles, like Timothy, Titus, Silas, Epaphroditus, Luke, Mark, who had a sort of supervision of several churches and congregational officers, and in a measure represented the apostles in special missions.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Thus a high proportion of the late medieval regulars were reluctant saints whose chief object was to make their lives as comfortable as possible. One cannot reform men (or women) into piety against their will. Without the voluntary principle, the monastic movement was bound to become an embarrassment to Christianity. And then there were far too many houses, some too poor, others too rich. Rationalizing them would have involved prodigies of litigation; only the papacy could have done it without using force. The popes should have dissolved the main orders in the fourteenth century and reallocated their resources to new purposes. Instead, they milked them financially – always a temptation. They did point the way, however. Early in the fourteenth century the papacy, at the behest of the French crown, dissolved the Knights Templars. The lesson was not forgotten. During the Hundred Years’ War the English crown seized the so-called alien priories – offshoots in England of French abbeys – on patriotic grounds. Legal devices were also developed within the Church for winding up groups of ecclesiastical foundations to form new and more promising ones. Cardinal Wolsey, for instance, was an adept at this type of canonical operation; and one of the legal experts he employed on it was Thomas Cromwell, who provided similar services, though on a much more extensive scale, to Henry VIII. Thus monastic dissolutions during the sixteenth-century Reformation evolved from established procedures within the Church, and were later employed by Catholic monarchs (in Austria for instance) in the eighteenth century. The monastic system, and its urban adaptations, had played an enormously important role from the sixth to the twelfth centuries; but it never recovered its pristine spirit until after radical reformation, which in some Catholic countries was delayed until the nineteenth century; and even then it survived only on a much reduced scale, as a small minority movement within the more conservative Christian communities. As a major element in western society and economy it had had its day, like, for instance, domaine farming and chain-mail armour. What must strike the historian as curious is that neither western nor eastern Christianity developed missionary orders. Until the sixteenth century, Christian enthusiasm, which took so many other forms, was never institutionally directed into this channel. Christianity remained a universalist religion. But its proselytizing spirit expressed itself throughout the Middle Ages in various forms of violence. The crusades were not missionary ventures but wars of conquest and primitive experiments in colonization; and the only specific Christian institutions they produced, the three knightly orders, were military. This stress on violence was particularly marked in the West. Eastern Christians tended to follow the teachings of St Basil, who regarded war as shameful. This was in the original Christian tradition: violence was abhorrent to the early Christians, who preferred death to resistance; and Paul, attempting to interpret Christ, did not even try to construct a case for the legitimate use of force.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Stephen had hit on a similar idea, but in her case the influence required had been lacking. In vain did she offer to form a Unit at her own expense; the reply was polite but always the same, a monotonous reply: England did not send women to the front line trenches. She disliked the idea of joining the throng who tormented the patient passport officials with demands to be sent out to France at once, on no matter how insufficient a pretext. What was the use of her going to France unless she could find there the work that she wanted? She preferred to stick to her job in England. And now quite often while she waited at the stations for the wounded, she would see unmistakable figures—unmistakable to her they would be at first sight, she would single them out of the crowd as by instinct. For as though gaining courage from the terror that is war, many a one who was even as Stephen, had crept out of her hole and come into the daylight, come into the daylight and faced her country: ‘Well, here I am, will you take me or leave me?’ And England had taken her, asking no questions—she was strong and efficient, she could fill a man’s place, she could organize too, given scope for her talent. England had said: ‘Thank you very much. You’re just what we happen to want . . . at the moment.’ So, side by side with more fortunate women, worked Miss Smith who had been breeding dogs in the country; or Miss Oliphant who had been breeding nothing since birth but a litter of hefty complexes; or Miss Tring who had lived with a very dear friend in the humbler purlieus of Chelsea. One great weakness they all had, it must be admitted, and this was for uniforms—yet why not? The good workman is worthy of his Sam Browne belt. And then too, their nerves were not at all weak, their pulses beat placidly through the worst air raids, for bombs do not trouble the nerves of the invert, but rather that terrible silent bombardment from the batteries of God’s good people. Yet now even really nice women with hairpins often found their less orthodox sisters quite useful. It would be: ‘Miss Smith, do just start up my motor—the engine’s so cold I can’t get the thing going;’ or: ‘Miss Oliphant, do glance through these accounts, I’ve got such a rotten bad head for figures;’ or: ‘Miss Tring, may I borrow your British Warm?

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Both tend to fail because both, in different ways, are too ambitious; and in the process of trying to fend off failure each type of experiment is liable to betray its Christian principles. One of the great, but perhaps inevitable, tragedies of history was the transformation of the Gregorian reform into an institutional obsession with power; and one of the perpetual, but equally fated, tragedies of history is the progression from millenarianism to the total abandonment of moral values. But Christianity, fortunately, contains more than these two imperfect matrices; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we see the emergence and the struggle for survival of a third force: Christian humanism. PART FIVEThe Third Force (1500–1648) SOME TIME BETWEEN 1511 AND 1513, two of Europe’s leading scholars paid a visit to the shrine of St Thomas à Becket at Canterbury. One was John Colet, Dean of St Paul’s and founder of its new grammar school; the other was the Dutchman Erasmus, author of the leading spiritual handbook for Christian laymen, and of a much-admired satire on the Church, In Praise of Folly. In one of his later Colloquies, Erasmus left an account of their visit, and it would be hard to conceive of a more poignant little episode, on the eve of the Reformation, than this confrontation between the shrine of the martyred clerical triumphalist, and the two earnest apostles of the New Learning. Both the scholars were pious men, and their visit was reverent. But Erasmus’s account makes it clear they were deeply shocked by what they saw. The riches which adorned the shrine were staggering. Erasmus found them incongruous, disproportionate, treasures ‘before which Midas or Croesus would have seemed beggars’; thirty years later, Henry VIII’s agents were to garner from it 4,994 ounces of gold, 4,425 of silver-gilt, 5,286 of plain silver and twenty-six cartloads of other treasure. Colet infuriated the verger who accompanied them by suggesting that St Thomas would prefer the whole lot be given to the poor. He added insult to injury by refusing to give a reverential kiss to a prize relic, the arm of St George, and by treating an old rag supposedly soaked in St Thomas’s blood with ‘a whistle of contempt’. Two miles from the town, outside the Harbledown almshouse, the Dean’s impatience with ‘mechanical Christianity’ was further tested when a licensed beggar showered them with holy water and offered St Thomas’s shoe to be kissed: ‘Do these fools expect us to kiss the shoe of every good man who ever lived?’ he asked furiously. ‘Why not bring us their spittle or their dung to be kissed?’ After this memorable encounter, the two men rode back to London. By the time this visit took place, it was already clear that the old medieval Church, the total society dating from Carolingian times, was breaking up.

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

  The Roman Church has not since had an anti-pope. The Council of Basel concluded the series of the three councils, which had for their chief aims the healing of the papal schism and the reformation of Church abuses. They opened with great promise at Pisa, where a freedom of discussion prevailed unheard of before, and where the universities and their learned representatives appeared as a new element in the deliberations of the Church. The healing of the schism was accomplished, but the abuses in the Church went on, and under the last popes of the fifteenth century became more infamous than they had been at any time before. And yet even in this respect these councils were not in vain, for they afforded a warning to the Protestant reformers not to put their trust even in ecclesiastical assemblies. As for the theory of the supremacy of general councils which they had maintained with such dignity, it was proudly set aside by later popes in their practice and declared fallacious by the Fifth Lateran in 1516,338 and by the dogma of papal infallibility announced at the Council of the Vatican, 1870. § 18. The Council of Ferrara-Florence. 1438–1445. The council of Ferrara witnessed the submission of the Greeks to the Roman see. It did not attempt to go into the subject of ecclesiastical reforms, and thus vie with the synod at Basel. After sixteen sessions held at Ferrara, Eugenius transferred the council, February, 1439, to Florence. The reason given was the unhealthy conditions in Ferrara, but the real grounds were the offer of the Florentines to aid Eugenius in the support of his guests from the East and, by getting away from the seaside, to lessen the chances of the Greeks going home before the conclusion of the union. In 1442 the council was transferred to Rome, where it held two sessions in the Lateran. The sessions at Ferrara, Florence, and Rome are listed with the first twenty-five sessions of the council of Basel, and together they are counted as the seventeenth oecumenical council.339

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

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

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  His first success, the Adages (1500), was a collection of Latin quotations used to teach the language but also reflecting his philosophy; it was constantly reprinted and gradually expanded into a collection of over 4,000 short essays, which influenced society in the same way as the crude proverbs of his schooling had done. His Enchiridion, or layman’s handbook, first published in 1503, was reprinted in 1509 and 1515, and then every year, and by his death, had been translated into Czech, German, English, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. His In Praise of Folly, 1511, went into thirty-nine editions before 1536; some of these were very substantial – thus one Paris printer, hearing that the book might be suppressed, quickly ran off an edition of 24,000 copies. There were some years, it has been calculated, when between one-fifth and one-tenth of all books sold in Oxford, London and Paris were by Erasmus. In the 1530s, 300,000 copies of his Greek New Testament were circulating, and over 750,000 of his other works. He was a new phenomenon, a living world best-seller. He got so much correspondence that, when he was living in Antwerp, then the richest city in Europe, the postman used to stop at his house first, before going on to the City Hall. Erasmus was made a political counsellor by the Emperor Charles V and offered a cardinal’s hat by Pope Paul III. A number of leading European cities gave him their freedom and invited him to live there as an honoured citizen. Yet if Erasmus had sought to propound his views a generation later, he would certainly have been hounded by the Habsburgs and excommunicated by the papacy: indeed, in 1546, only a decade after his death, the Council of Trent declared his version of the New Testament anathema, and at a later session Pope Paul IV branded him as ‘the leader of all heretics’ and called for the burning of his collected works. By this time, too, Erasmus’s unrestricted presence would have been regarded as unwelcome in most of reformed Europe. Erasmus, in fact, rode on the crest of the New Learning, which seemed to offer unlimited opportunities for spiritual and intellectual advancement, and which presaged a thoroughgoing reform of society, conducted from within by a universal and voluntary movement. This rosy prospect was obliterated in the middle decades of the century, and what in fact happened was quite different: a division of Christianity on a compulsory and state basis. Two armed camps came into existence: one, half-reformed, basing its claims exclusively on scripture; the other, unreformed, based exclusively on authority; and between them an unbridgeable chasm, filling with the victims of war and persecution. The outcome, in fact, was almost the complete antithesis of the Erasmian dream. Herein lies one of the central historical tragedies, of Christianity, of Europe, and of the world. The Erasmian dream was not wholly utopian. All men agreed that faith was a unity.

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

  There is no sufficient evidence that Leo ever used the words ascribed to him, "how profitable that fable of Christ has been to us."875 Such blasphemy we prefer not to associate with the de’ Medici. Nevertheless, no sharper condemnation of one claiming to be Christ’s vicar on earth could well be thought of than that which is carried by the words of Sarpi, the Catholic historian of the Council of Trent,876 who said, "Leo would have been a perfect pope, if he had combined with his other good qualities a moderate knowledge of religion and a greater inclination to piety, for neither of which he shewed much concern." Before Leo’s death, the papacy had lost a part of its European constituency, and that part which, in the centuries since, has represented the furthest progress of civilization. The bull which this pontiff hurled at Martin Luther, 1520, was consumed into harmless ashes at Wittenberg, ashes which do not speak forth from the earth as do the ashes of John Huss. To the despised Saxon miner’s son, the Protestant world looks back for the assertion of the right to study the Scriptures, a matter of more importance than all the circumstance and rubrics of papal office and sacerdotal functions. Not seldom has it occurred that the best gifts to mankind have come, not through a long heritage of prerogatives but through the devotion of some agent of God humbly born. It seemed as if Providence allowed the papal office at the close of the mediaeval age to be filled by pontiffs spiritually unworthy and morally degenerate, that it might be known for all time that it was not through the papacy the Church was to be reformed and brought out of its mediaeval formalism and scholasticism. What popes had refused to attempt, another group of men with no distinction of office accomplished. CHAPTER VII.HERESY AND WITCHCRAFT.§ 57. Literature. For § 58.—For the Brethren of the Free Spirit, Fredericq: Corpus doc. haer. pravitalis, etc., vols. I-III.—Haupt, art. in Herzog, III. 467–473, Brüder des Freien Geistes. See lit., vol. V., I. p. 459.—For the Fraticelli F. Ehrle: Die Spiritualen. Ihr Verhältniss zum Francis-kanerorden u. zu d. Fraticellen in Archiv f. K. u. Lit. geschichte, 1885, pp. 1509–1570; 1886, pp. 106–164; 1887, pp. 553–623.—Döllinger: Sektengesch., II.—Lea: Inquisition, III. 129 sqq., 164–175.—Wetzer-Welte, IV, 1926–1985.—For the Waldenses, see lit., vol. V., I. p. 459.—Also, W. Preger: Der Traktat des Dav. von Augsburg fiber die Waldenser, Munich, 1878.—Hansen: Quellen, etc., Bonn, 1901, 149–181, etc. See full title below.—For the Flagellants, see lit., vol. V., I. p. 876. Also Paul Runge: D. Lieder u. Melodien d. Geissler d. Jahres 1349, nach. d. Aufzeichnung Hugo’s von Reutlingen nebst einer Abhandlung über d. ital. Geisslerlieder von H. Schneegans u. einem Beitrage über d. deutschen u. niederl. Geissler von H. Pfannenschmid, Leipzig, 1900.

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

  Paul’s."304 But we must not overlook a later testimony, in which the eloquent historian supplemented and qualified this eulogy: — "From the time," says Macaulay in the first chapter of his History of England, "when the barbarians overran the Western Empire, to the time of the revival of letters, the influence of the Church of Rome had been generally favorable to science, to civilization, and to good government. But, during the last three centuries, to stunt the growth of the human mind has been her chief object. Throughout Christendom, whatever advance has been made in knowledge, in freedom, in wealth, and in the arts of life, has been made in spite of her, and has everywhere been in inverse proportion to her power. The loveliest and most fertile provinces of Europe have, under her rule, been sunk in poverty, in political servitude, and in intellectual torpor; while Protestant countries once proverbial for sterility and barbarism, have been turned, by skill and industry, into gardens, and can boast of a long list of heroes and statesmen, philosophers and poets. Whoever, knowing what Italy and Scotland naturally are, and what, four hundred years ago, they actually were, shall now compare the country round Rome with the country round Edinburgh, will be able to form some judgment as to the tendency of papal domination. The descent of Spain, once the first among monarchies, to the lowest depths of degradation; the elevation of Holland, in spite of many natural disadvantages, to a position such as no commonwealth so small has ever reached,—teach the same lesson. Whoever passes, in Germany, from a Roman-Catholic to a Protestant principality, in Switzerland from a Roman-Catholic to a Protestant canton, in Ireland from a Roman-Catholic to a Protestant county, finds that he has passed from a lower to a higher grade of civilization. On the other side of the Atlantic, the same law prevails. The Protestants of the United States have left far behind them the Roman Catholics of Mexico, Peru, and Brazil. The Roman Catholics of Lower Canada remain inert, while the whole continent round them is in a ferment with Protestant activity and enterprise. The French have doubtless shown an energy and an intelligence which, even when misdirected, have justly entitled them to be called a great people. But this apparent exception, when examined, will be found to confirm the rule; for in no country that is called Roman-Catholic has the Roman-Catholic Church, during several generations, possessed so little authority as in France. "It is difficult to say whether England owes more to the Roman-Catholic religion or to the Reformation. For the amalgamation of races and for the abolition of villenage, she is chiefly indebted to the influence which the priesthood in the middle ages exercised over the laity. For political and intellectual freedom, and for all the blessings which political and intellectual freedom have brought in their train, she is chiefly indebted to the great rebellion of the laity against the priesthood." § 50. Charles V.

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

  Calixtus’ death was the signal for the flight of the Spanish lobbyists, whose houses were looted by the indignant Romans. Discerning the coming storm, Pedro made the best bargain he could by selling S. Angelo to the cardinals for 20,000 ducats, and then took a hasty departure. Like Honorius III., Calixtus might have died of a broken heart over his failure to arouse Europe to the effort of a crusade, if it had not been for this consuming concern for the fortunes and schemes of his relatives. From this time on, for more than half a century, the gift of dignities and revenues under papal control for personal considerations and to unworthy persons for money was an outstanding feature in the history of the popes. § 50. Aeneas Sylvius de’ Piccolomini, Pius II. The next pontiff, Pius II., has a place among the successful men of history. Lacking high enthusiasms and lofty aims, he was constantly seeking his own interests and, through diplomatic shrewdness, came to be the most conspicuous figure of his time. He was ruled by expediency rather than principle. He never swam against the stream.735 When he found himself on the losing side, he was prompt in changing to the other. Aeneas Sylvius de’ Piccolomini was born in 1405 at Corsignano, a village located on a bold spur of the hills near Siena. He was one of 18 children, and his family, which had been banished from Siena, was poor but of noble rank. At 18, the son began studying in the neighboring city, where he heard Bernardino preach. Later he learned Greek in Florence. It was a great opportunity when Cardinal Capranica took this young man with him as his secretary to Basel, 1431. Gregorovius has remarked that it was the golden age of secretaries, most of the Humanists serving in that capacity. Later, Aeneas went into the service of the bishop of Novaro, whom he accompanied to Rome. The bishop was imprisoned for the part he had taken in a conspiracy against Eugenius IV. The secretary escaped a like treatment by flight. He then served Cardinal Albergati, with whom he travelled to France. He also visited England and Scotland.736

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

  But persecution is not the only blot on his reputation. He wasted his affections upon a vicious and worthless son, whom he raised in his fourteenth year to full participation of the imperial power, regardless of the happiness of millions, and upon a beautiful but faithless and wicked wife, whom he hastened after her death to cover with divine honors. His conduct towards Faustina was either hypocritical or unprincipled.593 After her death he preferred a concubine to a second wife and stepmother of his children. His son and successor left the Christians in peace, but was one of the worst emperors that disgraced the throne, and undid all the good which his father had done.594 Aristotle was the teacher of Alexander; Seneca, the teacher of Nero; Marcus Aurelius, the father of Commodus. § 93. Plutarch. Ploutavrcou tou' Cairwnevw" ta; jHqikav. Ed. Tauchnitz Lips. The same with a Latin version and notes in Plutarchi Chaeronensis Moralia, id est, Opera, exceptis vitis, reliqua. Ed. by Daniel Wyttenbach. Oxon. 1795–1800, 8 vols. (including 2 Index vols.). French ed. by Dübner, in the Didot collection. Plutarch’s Morals. Translated from the Greek by several Hands. London, 1684–’94, 5th ed. 1718. The same as corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin (Harvard University). With an introduction by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Boston, 1870, 5 vols. Octave Greard: De la moralité de Plutarque. Paris, 1866. Richard Chenevix Trench (Archbishop of Dublin): Plutarch, his life, his Parallel Lives, and his Morals. London (Macmillan & Co.), 2nd ed. 1874. W. Möller: Ueber die Religion des Plutarch. Kiel, 1881. Julia Wedgwood: Plutarch and the unconscious Christianity of the first two centuries. In the "Contemporary Review" for 1881, pp. 44–60. Equally remarkable, as a representative of "unconscious Christianity" and "seeker after the unknown God" though from a different philosophical standpoint, is the greatest biographer and moralist of classical antiquity. It is strange that Plutarch’s contemporaries are silent about him. His name is not even mentioned by any Roman writer. What we know of him is gathered from his own works. He lived between A.D. 50 and 125, mostly in his native town of Chaeroneia, in Boeotia, as a magistrate and priest of Apollos. He was happily married, and had four sons and a daughter, who died young. His Conjugal Precepts are full of good advice to husbands and wives. The letter of consolation he addressed to his wife on the death of a little daughter, Timoxena, while she was absent from home, gives us a favorable impression of his family life, and expresses his hope of immortality. "The souls of infants," he says at the close of this letter, "pass immediately into a better and more divine state." He spent some time in Rome (at least twice, probably under Vespasian and Domitian), lectured on moral philosophy to select audiences, and collected material for his Parallel Lives of Greeks and Romans. He was evidently well-bred, in good circumstances, familiar with books, different countries, and human nature and society in all its phases.

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

  Persecution of heresy always helps heresy unless the heretics are exterminated. The mysteriousness of its doctrine, its compact organization, the apparent solution of the terrible problem of evil, and the show of ascetic holiness sometimes were the chief points of attraction. Even such a profound and noble spirit as St. Augustin was nine years an auditor of the sect before he was converted to the Catholic church. He sought there a deeper philosophy of religion and became acquainted with the gifted and eloquent Faustus of Numidia, but was disappointed and found him a superficial charlatan. Another Manichaean, by the name of Felix, he succeeded in converting to the Catholic faith in a public disputation of two days at Hippo. His connection with Manichaeism enabled him in his polemic writings to refute it and to develop the doctrines of the relation of knowledge and faith, of reason and revelation, the freedom of will, the origin of evil and its relation to the divine government. Thus here, too, error was overruled for the promotion of truth. Pope Leo I. searched for these heretics in Rome, and with the aid of the magistrate brought many to punishment. Valentinian III. punished them by banishment, Justinian by death. The violent and persistent persecutions at last destroyed their organization. But their system extended its influence throughout the middle ages down to the thirteenth century, reappearing, under different modifications, with a larger infusion of Christian elements, in the Priscillianists, Paulieians, Bogomiles, Albigenses, Catharists and other sects, which were therefore called "New Manichaeans." Indeed some of the leading features of Manichaeism—the dualistic separation of soul and body, the ascription of nature to the devil, the pantheistic confusion of the moral and physical, the hypocritical symbolism, concealing heathen views under Christian phrases, the haughty air of mystery, and the aristocratic distinction of esoteric and exoteric—still live in various forms even in modern systems of philosophy and sects of religion.925 § 136. The Manichaean System. Manichaeism is a compound of dualistic, pantheistic, Gnostic, and ascetic elements, combined with a fantastic philosophy of nature, which gives the whole system a materialistic character, notwithstanding its ascetic abhorrence of matter. The metaphysical foundation is a radical dualism between good and evil, light and darkness, derived from the Persian Zoroastrism (as restored by the school of the Magasaeans under the reign of the second Sassanides towards the middle of the second century). The prominent ethical feature is a rigid asceticism which strongly resembles Buddhism.926 The Christian element is only a superficial varnish (as in Mohammedanism). The Jewish religion is excluded altogether (while in Mohammedanism it forms a very important feature), and the Old Testament is rejected, as inspired by the devil and his false prophets. The chief authorities were apocryphal Gospels and the writings of Mani. 1. The Manichaean theology begins with an irreconcilable antagonism between the kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness. And this is identified with the ethical dualism between good and bad.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  He laughed but he looked a little concerned. “I’ve always wanted to fuck in the bathrooms here.” “Oh,” I said. “I thought we were, like, getting a room or something.” “Oh shit, sorry. No. The fantasy was that we would fuck in the bathroom. Sorry. Did I not make that clear?” “Not exactly.” “Are you cool with that?” he asked. I tried not to look disappointed. But I was. What the hell? Was I not good enough for him to get a room? Did I look like I wanted to fuck in a bathroom? Maybe this was sexier. Maybe this was like an honor, that he thought I would be wild enough. Anybody could fuck in a hotel room. Not everyone could fuck in the lobby bathroom. “Okay,” I said. “I’m game.” “You’ll see,” he said. “You’ll love it. The bathrooms here are super lush. They’re like their own little worlds. It will be fucking hot.” I didn’t tell him that I was already well acquainted with the bathrooms, that I had already hidden out in one doing a photo shoot. “I can’t wait to make that ass go up and down,” he said, kissing me on the cheek. I ordered another vodka and pineapple juice. Was this weird or was it okay? I didn’t even remember what day it was, and I wondered what most people my age were doing right now. Probably something boring involving children and applesauce. I should consider myself blessed. They would probably kill to be fucking in a bathroom at the Shalimar. I wondered what Jamie would think if he knew. Would he see me as hot and exciting? Would he be jealous? Or would I just seem desperate and pathetic? I drank and tried to blot those words from my mind. There were men and women at the bar engaged in conversations. I didn’t know how people could stand it, the regular interactions, conscious dating, trying to pass as normal or interesting. Nobody was that interesting and certainly no one was normal. So why was everyone wearing a mask? Why wasn’t everyone fucking in a bathroom? It turned out that there were three bathroom doors, not four. Now that I was paying attention to them as the place of our fucking, I saw that they were big, varnished oak doors with knockers on them, as though you were entering someone’s house. I knocked on the first one. “Can I help you?” came a man’s voice. “Sorry!” I said. I knocked on the next door. Garrett opened it and pulled me in.

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

  Made a cardinal by John XXIII., 1411, he attended the council held at Rome the following year and in vain tried to have a reform of the calendar put through. At Constance, he took the position that the Pisan council? though it was called by the Spirit and represented the Church universal, might have erred, as did other councils reputed to be general councils. He declared that the three synods of Pisa, Rome and Constance, though not one body, yet were virtually one, even as the stream of the Rhine at different points is one and the same. It was not necessary, so he held, for the Council of Constance to pass acts confirming the Council of Pisa, for the two were on a par.378 In the proceedings against John XXIII., the cardinal took sides against him. He was the head of the commission which tried Huss in matters of faith, June 7, 8, 1415, and was present when the sentence of death was passed upon that Reformer. At the close of the council he appears as one of the three candidates for the office of pope, and his defeat was a disappointment to the French.379 He was appointed legate by Martin V., with his residence at Avignon, and spent his last days there. D’Ailly followed Ockam as a nominalist. To his writings in the departments of philosophy, theology and Church government he added works on astronomy and geography and a much-read commentary on Aristotle’s meteorology.380 His work on geography, The Picture of the World,—imago mundi, —written 1410, was a favorite book with Columbus. A printed copy of it containing marginal notes in the navigator’s own hand is preserved in the biblioteca Colombina, Seville. This copy he probably had with him on his third journey to America, for, in writing from Hayti, 1498, he quoted at length the eighth chapter. Leaning chiefly upon Roger Bacon, the author represented the coast of India or Cathay as stretching far in the direction of Europe, so that, in a favorable wind, a ship sailing westwards would reach it in a few days. This idea was in the air, but it is possible that it was first impressed upon the mind of the discoverer of the New World by the reading of D’Ailly’s work. Humboldt was the first to show its value for the history of discovery.381 § 23. John Gerson, Theologian and Church Leader. In John Gerson, 1363–1429, we have the most attractive and the most influential theological leader of the first half of the fifteenth century. He was intimately identified with the University of Paris as professor and as its chancellor in the period of its most extensive influence in Europe. His voice carried great weight in the settlement of the questions rising out of the papal schism. Jean Charlier Gerson, born Dec. 14, 1363, in the village of Gerson, in the diocese of Rheims, was the oldest of twelve children.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Most agreed that there must be a unitary system of knowledge. Society was universally regarded not only as a unity but an organic one. Why should not the first and second infuse the third in harmony? In a sense, the object of these Renaissance reformers was merely to bring the ideal of Carolingian society up to date – to use the new knowledge to correct its accumulated abuses and imperfections. There was, certainly, a consensus of virtually all men that reform was overdue. The astonishing success of Erasmus’s works suggests there was also a wide consensus of educated men for the kind of suggestions he was putting forward. Let us now see what these suggestions were, how much they had in common with the programmes of the Protestant reformers, and where they differed. Erasmus, like all the reformers without exception, began by ignoring the existence of a privileged clerical class. He regarded himself as a layman, and made no distinction between men in orders, like Colet, and lay friends like Sir Thomas More. This was a commonplace among the men of the New Learning, who were interested in the same things and guided by the same considerations irrespective of their status. With leading scholars like Sir John Cheke and Jacob Sturm, for instance, it is often not easy to be sure whether they were in orders or not. Erasmus’s Enchiridion, though specifically addressed to laymen, is a general statement of his views which might, and indeed did, serve equally well for clerics. Intellectually, he was in the tradition of Tertullian and Pelagius, who regarded it as normal and desirable that educated laymen should play their full part in the direction of the Church and declined absolutely to endorse an exclusive role for the clergy. The coming into existence of a Latin-speaking laity was closing the gap that had opened up in the eighth century and had been widened, on an ideological basis, by Gregory VII and his successors. This process had been going on for some time, especially in the big towns; and Erasmus was very much a product of the new urban civilization and spoke for its middle-class members – one might call him the first really articulate urbanite in the West since the fifth century. In the fifteenth century the practical difficulty of reforming the clergy effectively had virtually compelled laymen to invade spheres, particularly education, which clerics had formerly monopolized. The Church still claimed the right to control teaching but more and more schools were being endowed by laymen and run by them. When Colet founded St Paul’s in 1510, Erasmus noted: ‘Over the revenues and the entire management, he set neither priests, nor the bishop, nor the chapter as they call it, nor noblemen; but some married citizens of established reputation.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  In France, too, Montalembert now became convinced that the ultramontanism he had once vigorously sponsored had been perverted to transform the Pope into a theological monster, what he termed ‘a papal Louis XIV’. But it would be an error to suppose these opposition elements were significant either in numbers or influence. In Britain, the Catholic Church, for all practical purposes, was wholly controlled by Cardinal Manning, the most ardent of triumphalists; in France, the liberals were in a tiny minority – Montalembert’s Correspondent was a monthly selling only 3,000 copies. In 1867, Pius summoned another gathering to Rome, to celebrate the eighteenth centenary of the great pontifical feast of SS Peter and Paul. This time over 500 bishops attended, with 20,000 priests and 150,000 lay-pilgrims. Finally, the invitations to the council went out. W. G. Ward, who had greeted the publication of the Syllabus with noisy approval, and who used to say ‘I should like to have a fresh papal bull to read every morning with my breakfast’, not only assumed that papal infallibility would be declared dogmatic, but publicly expressed the hope that it would be defined as widely as possible, that is, to include papal letters and encyclicals. A new Jesuit publication, the Civilita Cattolica, published in Rome and believed to be the semi-official organ of Vatican opinion, went further: in an attack on French progressives, it divided the faithful ‘into two parties – one, simply Catholics, the other those who call themselves liberal Catholics’; the latter were not really Catholics at all, and were to be distinguished by their critical approach to papal infallibility. When the dogma was placed before the council, ‘which it is hoped will be very shortly’, the proper course would be for the Fathers ‘to define it by acclamation’, without debate or vote. This was also the position adopted by L’Univers and other ultramontanist organs. It clearly had the approval of Pius IX himself, who was fond of saying ‘La tradizione sono io !’ In the event, the dogma was defined in 1870 only after long debate and in a qualified form which limited the Pope’s freedom from error only to matters of faith and morals defined ex cathedra. But in all other respects the council marked the apparent extinction of the liberal Catholics. It took place against the background of the Franco-Prussia war, the withdrawal of French military protection, the Italian seizure of Rome and the extinction of the papal states. But this eclipse of the Pope’s temporal power served, in real terms, to emphasize the huge importance of his new and dominant position within the Church and, it seemed, within Christianity in consequence. The fortress had been constructed not in perishable stone but in ideas and populist notions. Its garrison was unanimous.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Nor was there any prospect of the Brahmins making any impact on Christian rites or dogma. The irony in De Nobili’s case is that the low-caste converts to whom he handed the eucharist on a stick were far more numerous even in his mission than any other Indian element. The low-castes often welcomed Christianity enthusiastically; only among them was it possible to effect mass-baptism. Hence some of the friars, especially Franciscans, wanted to concentrate on this approach. But for this to be successful meant the presentation of Christianity in its primitive, revolutionary form (as, of course, St Francis would have wished). Neither the hierarchy in the East, nor Rome – nor indeed most of the missionary clergy – wanted the millenium. The Portuguese secular authorities and merchants (and, later their French and British successors) had no desire to subvert society, which would have meant conflict with the Mohammedans as well as the Indian princes; on the contrary, they were anxious to work through, and reinforce, the existing structure and hierarchy. Hence the missionary effort fell neatly between two stools: neither ‘Asian’ Christianity nor ‘pure’ Christianity was offered. Instead, the Indians were presented with European Christianity, and rejected it. In China the missionaries did not face the problem of caste. But this meant there was less chance of adopting the strategy of conversions from the base. Indeed, it is hard to see how it could have been used unless as part of a deliberate plan to subvert the whole of Chinese government and society, something the sixteenth century Catholic Church could not have contemplated. In any event, it was not considered, since the first on the scene were the élitist Jesuits, in the steps of St Francis Xavier, who regarded China as the key to the Christianization of Asia. They deemed it essential to work through the imperial court. But that meant a confrontation with one of the oldest, most arrogant and least adaptable civilizations in the world, whose moral philosophy was permeated with powerful concepts such as Confucian ancestor-worship. The alternative to confrontation was alliance, in which Christianity would have to play the role of junior, and humble, partner. This, in effect, was the strategy the Jesuits tried to adopt. Chinese imperial policy admitted only subject tribute-payers, Mohammedan merchants, and foreigners ‘lured by the good fame of Chinese virtues’. They did not welcome European Christians. A local south China chronicle, c.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  La Mennais launched his new Catholic social philosophy with a small paper called L’Avenir in 1830, just three years before Keble’s Assize Sermon. The time was well-chosen, since the new bourgeois regime of Louis-Philippe was anxious, as the king put it, ‘to keep my finger out of church affairs . . . for once you put it in you cannot pull it out, and there it has to stay.’ La Mennais had now come to the view that the Vatican’s policy of rebuilding Church-State relationships with the European powers, painstakingly pursued through innumerable concordats and agreements over the last twenty years, was mistaken. He now saw the State as an obstacle to religious truth, and urged that the Church should seek its freedom from it. It should have nothing more to do with the concept of ‘legitimacy’, which was a burden and an embarrassment. It should not seek privileges at the cost of tying its hands. It should not play safe by aligning itself with the old forces of Europe, but should turn to the people, the force of the future. La Mennais did not actually coin the phrase ‘Christian Democracy’, but that was undoubtedly the concept towards which he was moving; and to which, indeed, the Catholic Church itself moved, more than a century later. At the time, however, it was hard to see the papacy reversing its historic conservative role – just at a time, too, when it had appeared to regain so much by maintaining its traditional posture so stoutly. The impact of La Mennais and his group was exceedingly powerful; but it was also narrow. L’Avenir had an impressive following among the younger clergy, but its total subscribers only numbered 2,000. Moreover, the French hierarchy and older Catholics tended to put their trust completely in the monarchy, the idea of legitimacy, and the established forces of the past; the privileges of a Church-State relationship, regarded by La Mennais as encumbrances, they felt to be essential to the defence of religion. We see here the emergence for the first time of the great debate in the modern Catholic Church – the policy of security versus the policy of risk. In 1831, L’Avenir ran into trouble with the French bishops, and La Mennais, Lacordaire and Montalembert decided to make a personal appeal to the Pope. The gesture was naive. It would be hard to imagine a man less likely to be sympathetic to La Mennais’s ideas, or indeed to any new ideas. Chateaubriand, the first to hail the new opportunities of Catholicism in the post-Revolutionary era, had sadly come to recognize Rome’s limitations when he came to serve as ambassador there: ‘Old men name an old man as their sovereign. Once in power he himself appoints old cardinals.