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 Decameron (1353)

  SEVENTH STORY Bergamino, with the help of a story about Primas and the Abbot of Cluny, tellingly chides Can Grande della Scala for a sudden fit of parsimony. Emilia’s story, and the vivacious manner of its telling, provoked the laughter of the whole company, including the queen, and everybody applauded the crusader’s novel interpretation of the gospel. When the laughter subsided and they were all quiet again, Filostrato, whose turn it was to tell a story, began to speak as follows: Excellent ladies, it is a fine thing to strike a sitting target. But when an archer takes sudden aim, and hits an unusual object that has suddenly appeared from nowhere, his achievement is well-nigh miraculous. It is not unduly difficult, for anyone so inclined, to discuss, criticize and admonish the clergy for their foul and corrupt way of life, which in many ways resembles a sitting target of evil. And although our honest man did well to pierce the self-esteem of the inquisitor by pointing out the hypocrisy of friars who offer in alms to the poor what they should be giving to the pigs or throwing down the drain, I feel that the hero of my story (for which I have taken my cue from the previous tale) is the more worthy of praise; for this man censured a great prince, Can Grande della Scala, 1 for a quite unwonted and sudden fit of miserliness, by telling a charming tale in which he represented, through others, what he wanted to say about himself and Can Grande. My story runs as follows: It is a matter of very common knowledge throughout the greater part of the world that Can Grande della Scala, upon whom Fortune smiled in so many of his deeds, was one of the most outstanding and munificent princes that Italy has known since the Emperor Frederick the Second. 2 He once arranged to hold a splendid and marvellous festival at Verona to which many people would be coming from all over the place, in particular court-entertainers of various kinds. But for reasons of his own, he suddenly changed his mind about it, offered token presents to those who had come, and sent them all packing. The only person to receive neither present nor congé was a certain Bergamino, a conversationalist of quite extraordinary wit and brilliance, who lingered on in the hope that it would eventually turn out to his advantage. But Can Grande had the fixed idea that whatever he gave to this man would be more surely wasted than if he had thrown it into the fire. He did not, however, say anything personally to Bergamino about this, nor did he have him told by others. Several days went by, and Bergamino, receiving neither a summons to the Duke’s table nor any request for his professional services, began to feel the crippling expense of staying at the inn with his servants and horses, and fell into a state of melancholy.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The later waves of emigrants had not, for the most part, experienced ‘conversion’ and ‘saving grace’; they tended, increasingly, to be a mere cross-section of Englishmen (and later of Northern Irish and Scottish Presbyterians). A New England synod of 1662 declared that baptism was sufficient for church membership, but not for full communion. This ‘halfway Covenant’ was the beginning of the end of a pure Church, which went into a period of what was woefully termed ‘declension’; calamitous events, such as Indian attacks, were seen as divine punishments. In 1679 it was decided to make ‘a full inquiry . . . into the cause and state of God’s controversy with us’. Thus a ‘Reforming Synod’ was called and reported: ‘That God hath a controversy with his New England people is undeniable, the Lord having written his displeasure in dismal characters against us.’ A new covenant and confession of faith were produced, but everything, it seemed, conspired to frustrate the elect. James II’s attempt to reintroduce Catholicism, the Glorious Revolution, and the subsequent settlement, imposed toleration, an Anglican element, and a franchise based on property rather than church membership. Church leadership was discredited by the witchcraft mania at Salem in 1692, and weakened by the powerful backlash of public remorse which followed it. And the merchant element of Boston, who loathed the strict interpretation of the scriptures, especially the commercial restrictions derived from the Pentateuch, published a ‘manifesto’ in 1699 for a new Church ‘on broad and catholick’ lines, which accorded full status to any who professed Christian belief. The liberal elements captured Harvard College in 1707, and founded Yale at New Haven nine years later. To the Calvinist élite, these hammerblows threatened to destroy their theory that they had been appointed a chosen people to do divine work in America. In 1702 Cotton Mather published his Magnalia Christi Americana, documenting ‘Christ’s great deeds in America’ and was forced to conclude: ‘Religion brought forth prosperity, and the daughter destroyed the mother. . . . There is danger lest the enchantments of this world make them forget their errand into the wilderness.’ But by this time the original Calvinist monopoly in New England had gone for good. The South, too, which had had an Anglican confession but a Puritan ethic and Church-State assumptions, had surrendered to diversity and economics. Tobacco and negro labour, rather than biblical institutionalism, became the determining factors. In 1667 Virginia laid down that ‘Baptism doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage and freedom.’ In 1731 George Berkeley said that American slaveholders held blacks in ‘an irrational contempt . . . as creatures of another species, who had no right to be instructed or admitted to the sacraments’. Religious belief had to be adjusted to fit social and economic realities, rather than vice versa.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The explorers Speke and Grant had arrived in 1862, and impressed King Mutesa of the Baganda: ‘I have not heard a white man tell a lie yet . . . the time they were in Uganda they were very good.’ When H. M. Stanley arrived, he was encouraged by Mutesa to bring missionaries, and he appealed for them in a letter to the Daily Telegraph. The first came in 1877, and within five years were followed by a Catholic mission. Baganda society was in some ways orderly and sophisticated, but royal rule was arbitrary and savage. Mutesa ordered summary executions almost every day, and he had the largest collection of wives on missionary record. As Britain, through the presence of military and naval units to the East, through the operations of the British East Africa Company – which evolved from Livingstone’s trading organization – and through the projected railway, was the power most closely involved, the Protestants felt the obligation to protest against royal depravity fell on them; at any rate, that is what they did. Thus the royal house came to fear the Protestants, and to align itself with the Catholics (and, on occasion, with the Moslems). Both Christian groups built up parties, which armed themselves. The climax came under Mutesa’s heir, Mwanga. In 1885 he had James Hannington, an Anglican bishop, speared to death; and when Christian boys refused to submit to his sodomitic practices – learnt from the Arabs, so the missionaries claimed – he murdered thirty-two of them, three being roasted alive. From the coast, Captain Lugard and a detachment of Askaris were summoned; and in 1892 they fought, and won, the so-called Battle of Mengo against the royalists and their Catholic allies. The event took place perhaps appropriately on a Sunday, and was decided by Lugard’s new Maxim gun. He did not blame the missionaries, but the Africans (probably rightly): ‘My own belief was that the Baganda were par excellence the greatest liars of any nation or tribe I had met or heard of, and that it appeared to be a point of honour that each side should out-lie the others, especially to their missionaries.’ In the House of Commons, Sir Charles Dilke said that the only person who had benefited from the British presence in East Africa was Mr Hiram Maxim; and Sir William Lawson claimed that Uganda was being ‘turned into the Belfast of Africa’. Two years later, Anglican pressure led Britain to take Uganda into protective custody. The Mengo affair caused great scandal at the time, but largely among agnostics and professional anti-Christians. It does not seem to have damaged the image of any of the Christian sects among the Africans; on the contrary, Catholics and Protestants alike reported an increase in converts; and it was a Baganda, Canon Apolo Kivebulaya of Kampala Cathedral, who translated the Gospel of St Mark into pidgin. Indeed, it is a curious and perhaps melancholy fact that violence seems nearly always to have stimulated Christian evangelism.

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

  As we eat, he tells me that he’s made plans for us for the night. A salsa band will be playing at a bar he frequents with his friends and he’s excited for me to meet his gang. I murmur that it sounds like fun, but truthfully, it doesn’t. I don’t know him well enough to meet his friends and being with them at a noisy neighborhood bar sounds like the nights in college that were my least favorite. He is brimming with enthusiasm though and tells me that his friends are excited to meet me, so I smile and go along with it. We walk a block to the bar and he greets his friend Jay, who is standing outside smoking a cigarette. Jay wraps me in a hug, telling me that #7 has told him so much about me. The bar is fairly empty and the band doesn’t start for an hour, so #7 tells Jay we will return in a bit and we walk a few doors down to another, smaller bar, where he orders himself a tequila on the rocks. At his place we drank the entire bottle of red wine and started a second bottle with dinner and I’m not sure how many glasses I drank, so I order a club soda. We chat with a few people he introduces me to at the bar until he suggests we head back to the first bar, where the band will play. Bar hopping is another activity I haven’t done since my college days and I still don’t get what about it is supposed to be fun. When we return to the first bar, it is packed. We have to squeeze through a throng of people to reach his friend Abby, an attractive brunette around my age, who is waiting for us. #7 orders another tequila and I order another club soda. He leaves me with Abby while he talks to a small group of people nearby, saying he really wants me to get to know her. Abby is friendly but seems wary of me. He’s mentioned her to me frequently and told me she’s his absolute closest friend, but now she’s telling me that she moved here from the West Coast a few years ago and I am surprised to learn they haven’t known each other very long.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  That his departure from Naples was indeed reluctant is attested by a letter he wrote from Florence on 28 August 1341 to the friend and companion of his Neapolitan youth, Niccola Acciaiuoli, now a powerful and influential figure in the Angevin court. Acciaiuoli, three years older than Boccaccio, was a fellow Florentine who had gone to Naples in 1331. According to the chronicler Giovanni Villani, his meteoric rise to fame and fortune was not unconnected with his having become the lover of Catherine of Valois, sister-in-law to King Robert and Empress of Constantinople. It was Acciaiuoli who had been instrumental in introducing Boccaccio to the ranks of Neapolitan high society, and in the letter of August 1341 Boccaccio tells him of his dissatisfaction with life in Florence, 1 at the same time strongly hinting that his former friend could perhaps bring about a change in his fortunes, presumably by finding him a sinecure at court. But his plea, like others he addressed to Acciaiuoli on later occasions, fell upon deaf ears. In a work Boccaccio wrote some two or three years after his return to Florence, the Elegy of Madonna Fiammetta, there is a passage which to some extent clarifies his motives for leaving Naples, at the same time confirming the distaste for life in Florence of which he had written to Acciaiuoli. In Book II, the Neapolitan heroine is remonstrating with her young Florentine lover, Panfilo, concerning his decision to abandon her and return to the distant city of his birth. It is mid-winter, a detail that accords with the hypothesis that Boccaccio’s own return took place in the winter of 1340–41. Although, as stated earlier, such ‘autobiographical’ passages require to be treated with caution, it seems reasonable to assume that Panfilo, whose name will later be given to one of the three male storytellers of the Decameron, is an idealized self-portrait. It is perhaps revealing that Panfilo explains his decision to abandon Fiammetta as being due to the love he bears towards his father, who is now an elderly widower, bereft of all his remaining children and kinsfolk. Filial piety was of course a popular literary topos, and one that the author had already exploited in his Filocolo, in an episode where the hero is attempting to dissuade his father from sending him abroad. But it happens that Panfilo’s description in the Fiammetta of his father’s circumstances corresponds more or less exactly with the known facts about Boccaccio’s own father at the time in question. His wife, Margherita de’ Mardoli, was now dead, and so too were the children of that marriage, so that his natural son would indeed have seemed the sole remaining comfort of his declining years. In another passage from the Fiammetta, the Neapolitan heroine reminds her Florentine lover of his own description of his native city: ...

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Simply being alive was not enough. The Greeks needed a new fantasy to make the world more exciting. With their war, wine, poetry, gods, and food, they needed to get high. Maybe we all did. Yes, it certainly seemed like the human instinct, to get high on someone else, an external entity who could make life more exciting and relieve you of your own self, your own life, even for just a moment. Maybe once that person became too real, too familiar, they could no longer get you high—no longer be a drug—and that was why you grew tired of them. That was what had happened to me and Jamie. It was only when he was pushing me away—and then after he was gone—that he became a drug. It was so much easier for someone to be the drug before or after the relationship. When they were absent they were exciting. When they were right there it was a different story. But some human beings did want simple partnership: someone with whom to weather life, like Annika and Steve. How did they stay so into each other living side by side, everything out in the open? How did they simultaneously have each other and still want each other? To want what you had—now, that was an art, a gift maybe. But whenever I felt I finally “had” Jamie, the nights in his bed seemed suffocating. I preferred the acquiring, the almost-getting, the moment before he was mine again. What was left to look forward to after you got a person? To “have” seemed nauseating. Then again, I was the sick one—the one in group therapy—not Annika. The women in group told themselves they were looking for symbiotic companionship, something like Annika and Steve. They thought they wanted a man to show up for them. But I didn’t believe them. They were choosing men who couldn’t be present, so it probably wasn’t really what they wanted. It certainly wasn’t what Claire or Diana wanted. It wasn’t what I wanted. 26. “There’s a light on in your eyes,” said Brianne. “Have you been doing inner-child work?” “Definitely not,” I said. “Trauma work?” clucked Chickenhorse suspiciously. I shook my head no. “Must be the self-dating,” she said. “You actually look alive for once.” “Thanks, I guess.” I let them know that I was doing well and had blocked Adam and Garrett in my phone. I made no mention of Theo or the rocks, as the group would deem it poor self-care that I had been wandering around there so late at night in the dark. Chickenhorse would probably call it self-harm. But everyone was suffering too much today to focus on me for long.

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

  Will I ever meet another man as gentle and decent as this one? Truthfully, it seems unlikely, but aside from abandoning my life here in the city, tantalizing as that may seem, the writing on the wall is pretty clear: it’s time to move on. #4 has been equally dodgy about making plans for my free weekend, though he and I have only been in touch sporadically. Finally, I text him that I am anxious to cement plans so that I can maximize this rare opportunity of kid-free time, and he texts me back that he is sorry but it’s his family’s busy season at the orchard and he has to help. “I enjoy spending time with you, but I don’t want to chase after someone who doesn’t want to be chased by me. I know you’re busy, but I feel like you’re blowing me off and I would rather you just say so straight out so I stop suggesting we make plans. No hard feelings, I just want to be clear,” I text him. Later in the afternoon, my phone rings and I am surprised to see that it is him as we have never before spoken on the phone. I am walking in the door with Georgia after school, and I take the phone into my shower stall and close the glass door behind me for privacy. “Yeah, so hey listen, I got your text and I don’t want you to feel like I’m blowing you off. I really like being with you, it’s just that it felt like it was getting serious too quickly,” he says. I am thoroughly perplexed; given that we have only texted a handful of times since I left and have never spoken on the phone before now, I can’t figure out how he and I have such opposing perspectives. I also want to laugh, as I was just rejected by one man for my inability to be serious with him and now I’m being rejected by another for being too serious. What am I not getting here? “Serious” in my experience has meant cohabitation, marriage, kids, a mortgage, and going to the same dentist. In the 27 years I’ve been off the market, has “serious” come to mean something else entirely that you can achieve in three dates or less? “I think you’re an amazing person going through an incredibly difficult time and I want to be here for you,” he says. “OK, ummmm, that’s nice, though I don’t completely understand what you’re saying. You want to slow things down?” I ask, even though I don’t know how much slower we can go. Even highways have a minimum speed you have to maintain. “I want to be a friend to you, I want you to know that I’m here for you, but I don’t think we should see each other this weekend,” he says. “Ah, OK, I see. Well, I appreciate your honesty and your empathy for my situation.

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

  This so-called book would reveal my entire ecosystem, exposing desires that extended beyond those allowed for a woman my age with kids to raise and a reputation to keep intact. I would be denuding the flaws in my marriage and in myself and doing the entirely unspeakable act of acknowledging and acting on my own needs, not just those of my children. Even more unseemly, I would be telling anyone who listened that I had strong, seemingly insatiable sexual curiosity and longing. I decided that presenting myself this holistically would be too much, too outside the boundaries of the image I had carefully cultivated for myself. I called the same friend who had urged me along when I had wanted to stop and who had since become my literary agent and asked her not to do anything with the material I had been working on for well over a year – I was putting this project to sleep. Over the next few days I was surprised to find myself feeling – more than the relief I had anticipated – profound disappointment. I had seen the spark of a vital woman in the pages I had written and I was effectively burying her. Late one night after dinner with friends I arrived home and found my mother sitting on the couch reading, having babysat for me that night. I confessed everything to her – the dating, the sex, the mishaps, the writing. My mother and I are close. She is a strong, accomplished, fiercely loving woman, but sexuality has always been an uncomfortable subject for us. By the time she had asked me when I was nineteen if I had a diaphragm “or something,” I had already been sexually active for years; I reddened and nodded and that was the extent of our dialogue about birth control and sex. Now, I needed her to see that my recent discovery of myself as a sexual being could still fit within the parameters of being an “acceptable” daughter and mother. I wanted her approval, not of the book but of my decision not to write it. I knew that her squeamishness on the topic of sex would confirm I was making the right decision. My mother, though, is nothing if not full of surprises. In her own steady, determined way, she refuses to conform.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  We want a third one.’ As late as 1526, the imperial chancellor, Mercurio Gattarina, said he saw Christendom divided into three parts: Roman, Lutheran, and those who sought nothing but the glory of God and human welfare – this was the party of Erasmus and he was proud to belong to it. Erasmus himself referred to ‘the third church’. But an eirenic mood was essential to its construction, and its chances crumbled as the gap between Rome and Germany widened, and the battlelines were drawn. At the same time, it is incorrect to present the Lutheran movement as a catastrophe which prevented the carrying through of an Erasmian programme within a framework of Christian unity. The issues were much more complicated. Erasmus had a modern kind of mind: in some ways this was an advantage in that it attuned him to progressive opinion in the wealthier cities and gave him a truly international following. He saw reform as an international movement coming from within the Church, and led by the élite. But to be modern minded was in some ways a disadvantage for it tended to make Erasmus gloss over the realities of power and the way things could actually be done. Luther, ‘the Goth’, the crude, earthy, but clever son of a successful tin-miner, was much closer to the thoughts of ordinary men of all classes, as opposed to intellectuals; and he was much clearer in his own mind about what forces and emotions moved men to action in the early sixteenth century, and which institutions carried weight. Broadly speaking, the rulers of the states favoured reforms of the Church, within limits, and according to their individual requirements. The papacy was opposed to reform because it was expensive in terms of revenues, and of the power that generates revenues. There was thus a clash of interests. But it could be resolved, and during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had been resolved, by the papacy continually handing over to the rulers, as we have seen, portions of its ecclesiastical sovereignty. The states were growing stronger in relation to the Church; and the papacy, to prevent itself from growing correspondingly weaker, was trying to build up its own states in central Italy as a power base. The process can be seen at work under Julius II, whom Luther, during a visit to Rome, denounced as ‘a blood-sucker’ and ‘a cruelly violent animal’. Maybe he was; but in preferring the role of a military commander and a king to that of a pontiff, he was following a certain line of logic. Before his election he had sworn a capitulation, repeated afterwards, that he would call a council within two years to conduct reforms. But in a universal council which he did not control, Julius realized he would be forced to dismantle much of the papacy’s money-raising machinery without getting anything in return.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  It may be asked: after the decisive defeat of papal pretensions by the secular monarchs, why did the clerical system, radiating from the papacy, continue to survive for so long? The answer is not simple. Of course, the system was inherently strong and ramifying. It was the only international system in Europe, with a centralized direction and a tentacle in every village. Its roots were very deep, and it dominated a huge area of human behaviour. By Boniface’s time, the canonical system had already reached its full development – only details remained to be added – and it would have been exceedingly hard to dig out. It handled a lot of matters which the secular law and authority did not touch. The machinery to replace it was not then available, and would have had to be improvised. For this, and for a variety of other reasons, the kings were against change. So long as the papacy was prepared, in practice, to do a deal with them, they were content to leave the theoretical debate unresolved and unargued. On the whole, it was simpler and cheaper to deal direct with the papacy, than with an uncontrolled national clergy. On clerical taxation, which was what the kings cared about most, pope and king agreed to share the spoils, as they had over the appointment of bishops; and they came to the same agreement about lesser benefices. Of course the crown, increasingly, got the lion’s share; but this would probably have happened anyway. The maintenance of the papal-dominated system of canon law enabled such transactions to be conducted with dignity and legality, in outward appearance at least. There was nothing Christian, or indeed religious, about such arrangements. It was in every respect morally and socially inferior to the Carolingian ideal of clerics and laymen, each in their allotted roles, working together to build an Augustinian earthly city on scriptural precepts. With the new system, in effect, the leading clerics and laymen conspired together to milk the Church largely for worldly purposes. All the possessing classes benefited, in one way or another. So long as the various crowns found it desirable to uphold the institutions and doctrines of the Church, and defend its property and privileges, there was not much possibility of change. In due course, and in certain areas, rulers were persuaded by reformers that it was their religious duty to amend matters; that was a different story. Nevertheless, though the system endured, it lost its appeal to the popular imagination. In the Dark Ages, the Church had stood for everything that was progressive, enlightened and humane in Europe; it had made, as we have seen, an enormous material contribution to the resurrection of civilization from the ashes and the raising of standards. It had created a continent in (with all its imperfections) a benign image. In the eleventh century, even in the twelfth, the Church – by which we now mean essentially the clergy – still preserved its identification with ameliorative change.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  high office and discriminated against Christians, excluding them completely from the teaching profession. He thought that by withdrawing State backing from official Christianity he would encourage dissent, especially in the East, and he turned a benevolent eye on the Jews, promising to help them rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem. During a tour of the East he publicly exhorted local authorities to hold mass-sacrifices in the pagan manner and everywhere the temples were reopened and repaired. But there was little enthusiasm. On the contrary, in some areas there were complaints that the sacrifices had led to meat shortages. And then, Julian was superstitious. He believed he reincarnated the soul of Alexander of Macedon, that it was his destiny to re-create the Alexandrine empire, and that the newly-honoured pagan gods would ensure he fulfilled it. He thus made the error of identifying religious truth with military victory. The Roman aristocracy, though predominantly pagan, had ceased to do this. On the whole they thought a pagan revival might raise more problems than it solved. Their interest in the matter was antiquarian and aesthetic. In any case, in these and other respects, Christianity was changing to meet public opinion. In the second century the Church had acquired the elements of ecclesiastical organization; in the third it created an intellectual and philosophical structure; and in the fourth, especially in the latter half of the century, it built up a dramatic and impressive public persona: it began to think and act like a state Church. This policy was shaped by the need to outface paganism – almost consciously so, after the failure of the Julian revival, during the pontificate of Bishop Damasus of Rome, 366–84. His aim seems to have been quite specific: to present Christianity as the true and ancient religion of the empire and Rome as its citadel. Thus he instituted a great annual ceremony in honour of Peter and Paul, making the point that Christianity was already very old and had been associated with Rome and the triumphs of the empire for over three centuries. The two saints, he argued, not only gave Rome primacy over the East, since it was their adopted city, but they were also more powerful protectors of the city than the old gods. Christianity was now a religion with a glorious past as well as an unlimited future. Damasus lived well and entertained sumptuously. In c. 378 he held a synod, ‘at the sublime and holy Apostolic See’ – the first time the phrase was used – which demanded state intervention to ensure that western bishops were subject to Rome. It also ruled that the Bishop of Rome should not be compelled to appear in court: ‘Our brother Damasus should not be put in a position inferior to those to whom he is officially

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Dissolution. These monks had their own rooms, offices and servants. They lived like university dons or estate administrators. They hardly ever did manual work, and by the thirteenth century they found it increasingly difficult to keep up the full routine of services: there were not enough monks, and they had more mundane things to do. Attempts at reform, sometimes vigorous, came to grief on the fact that the Benedictine monastery had changed completely as an economic and social (and therefore spiritual) institution. There is a very full account of Mont St Michel, part of a survey of monastic property undertaken by Benedict XII in 1338. By this time the monks had moved out of highly concentrated domanial farming and were merely administering properties as rentiers. They might be busy, but they had lost their role. Of the ninety monks, fifty were scattered, usually in twos, to look after twenty-two priory estates. They lived like celibate country gentry, though comparatively cheaply, costing £40 a year each. The bulk of the monastic income, totalling £9,000 a year, went on the splendour and hospitality of the main house – including £1,700 on food, £500 on clothing, £460 on repairs, £500 on taxes, £300 on lawsuits and £120 on fuel. The largest single item was wine: £2,200. By this time, the Benedictine ideal had disappeared almost entirely. Monks had private rooms, the dormitories having been partitioned. They took their meals in their rooms, the food being brought from the kitchens by the abbey servants. They entertained. They were paid stipends. Rules about silence and diet had virtually disappeared. They took holidays with pay at one of the abbot’s country houses; or they went to stay with families and friends. Most of them were unenterprising, upper-class parasites. It was almost impossible to reform them effectively. As Benedict XII had noted, ‘because of the power of their relatives, these monks cannot be restrained from unlawful acts, nor can they be compelled to observe the rules of the order’. In fact some very determined people did try and impose reforms. In 1421 Henry V proposed to end separate establishments for abbots, all excessive display, bright or rich clothes, long holidays, meat-eating and extravagant meals, private rooms for eating and sleeping, and all contact with women; and he laid down strict limits on money payments and visits to relatives and friends. Nothing came of this reform. The bishops lacked the power to impose radical changes, and were scared of getting involved in expensive lawsuits. The abbots had long since lost the authority needed to effect internal reform. We have a revealing glimpse of what happened at

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  another example of the growing religious self-centredness. To build cathedrals meant raising enormous quantities of hard cash. Wealthy court bishops, like Stapleton of Exeter, or Wykeham of Winchester, provided large sums themselves. But most of the money was raised by the sale of spiritual privileges. The thirteenth century choir-arm of St Paul’s was financed by forty-day indulgences, sold all over the country, and even in Wales. The 1349–50 fabric roll of Exeter itemized a payment of eight shillings for a scribe to write out 800 indulgences for sale to contributors to the building fund. Money could also be raised by financial penances; the system was critically examined in a book published in 1450 by Thomas Gascoigne, the fiercely orthodox but reformist Chancellor of Oxford. He says that in the desperate efforts to raise funds for York, largest and most expensive of all the English cathedrals, parishes were being ‘farmed out’ to professional fund-raisers, who were taking a large cut of the proceeds. There were also straightforward begging-missions, run by quaestores, much used by York, and also open to abuse; and there were guilds of benefactors formed to raise regular sums – the members being compensated by privileges, exemptions, and so forth. The privileges, right to issue indulgences, and other spiritual knick-knacks had to be obtained in Rome (or Avignon) and likewise paid for. So the wheels of the Church went round. Nothing was for nothing. Even so, money to build often ran out; it is the chief reason why the cathedrals took so long to complete: a century for the nave of Old St Paul’s, 150 years for the nave of Westminster Abbey; major construction was going on at York from 1220–1475, over 250 years, and at Lichfield from 1195–1350. Anyway, what were cathedrals for? Originally they had been the only church of the diocese, or at any rate the only one where all the sacraments could be administered. Then they tended to become, in addition, shrines for valuable (and money-raising) relics. Thomas Becket posthumously paid for much of the rebuilding of Canterbury in the later Middle Ages. The body of Edward II, brutally murdered, and in the eyes of many martyred, paid for the marvellous perpendicular choir at Gloucester Abbey. Among the most popular were Cuthbert at Durham, Etheldreda at Ely, William of Perth at Rochester, Swithun at Winchester and Wulfstan and Oswald at Worcester. A cathedral without a well-known saint was missing an important source of revenue; and for this reason efforts were made to secure from Rome the canonization of people buried within the fabric; but Rome had to be cajoled, and paid. Even so, there were shrines of many unofficial saints whose status

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  been eagerness balanced by serenity. When Origen turned Christianity from a theory of redemption into a philosophical system, he seized on the positive and expectant aspects of faith. Arguing with Celsus the pagan, he rejected the idea of a blind destiny or providence working itself out through the aeons, leaving behind limitless generations of suffering humanity, unchanged and unchangeable. He saw, instead,” the Christian God as an agent whereby mankind was encouraged to improve, indeed perfect, itself: a continuous process of inching upwards to the light. He became a universalist in the double sense: the Christian message was addressed to all humanity, and ultimately all would be accommodated in the majestic forgiveness and beneficence of God, having progressively purged themselves of evil. Thus even the devil and the fallen angels would finally recover paradise. It is notable that the post-Constantine Church repudiated Origen, or at least his optimism. As with Tertullian, his writings were so valuable, and in Origen’s case so central to Christian understanding, that his works were never condemned as heretical, and so allowed to disappear in toto – though very few survive in their original form. But Jerome, once his admirer – ‘the greatest teacher since the Apostles’ – came to regard him not only as heretical in effect, but in intention. The object of Origen all along, he concluded, had been to pervert men’s judgments and cause them to loose their souls, and he had written passages of undoubted orthodoxy simply to throw the unwary reader off his guard. Towards the end of the fourth century this view was widely held, not only among theologians but by laymen such as the Emperor Theodosius. Why the change in intellectual climate? It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the retreat from Origenist optimism reflected profound changes in the social and cultural structure of the empire itself, particularly in the West. The Constantinian revival had not been sustained; it had left the empire more fragmented, politically, militarily and administratively; the problems of currency and inflation in the West remained unsolved. The Church had brought no great accession of strength; in some ways it had added to the empire’s burdens and divisions. 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

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  was marked in 1814 by the reestablishment of the Jesuits throughout the world, and by the presence at the Congress of Vienna the next year of Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, the able papal Secretary of State, who brought the papacy back into the arena of European diplomacy after an absence of nearly two centuries. A new Vatican department was set up to tighten the bonds between the Holy See and Catholics throughout Europe, and fresh concordats or similar arrangements were made with all the Catholic states. Thus we have the paradox that the convulsion which threatened to engulf Roman Christianity ended by endowing a dying papacy with a new cycle of life. And the papacy, thus reborn, returned to an ancient theme but with a modern orchestration – populist triumphalism. To see clearly how this phenomenon came to dominate modern Christianity we must first return to Enlightenment England. The system of belief constructed by Locke, and applied by the Whig Establishment of the Church of England, went a long way towards satisfying the needs of the commercial middle classes of the towns, and it did so without driving a wedge between science and learning on the one hand, and institutional religion on the other. But it had nothing to offer to the lower orders, in particular to the swelling proletariat of the new industrial cities. Moreover, in its anxiety to dispel dangerous ‘enthusiasm’ and avoid any kind of fanaticism, it presented a Christianity which was part cerebral, part ceremonial, and wholly purged of emotion. To the magistrates and the squirearchy, the release of personal emotions in religious expression – the Montanist or millenarian impulse – was necessarily a form of protest against the existing social order. Memories of the egalitarian, Munster-like Civil War sects were long; and authority was determined, if possible, to restrict the religious dynamic within the prescribed forms of the statutory Church. But of course this was a dangerous strategy, with the risk that the popular forces thus confined might, as in France, eventually break out in a secular, political, even revolutionary direction. This did not happen. The existing order was not only saved but greatly reinforced by a man the authorities first thought of as an arch-enemy: John Wesley. Like so many others, Wesley came to active religion by re-reading St Paul to the Romans, in his case in the light of Luther’s preface. This was in 1738, and Wesley was thirty-five and an Anglican clergyman. ‘I then testified openly to all there what I now first felt in my heart.’ His Christianity was almost totally devoid of intellectual content. It had no doctrinal insights. It was wholly ethical and emotional. If

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

  His eyes back at the screen, I am summarily dismissed. * When I get off the train in Long Island, I see #5 waiting for me at the station, leaning against his car, eating peanuts from a red plastic cup that he filled at the firehouse. It is still light out and warm, so he drives me to a trail he likes to walk in the woods. His pace is quick and I seem always to be a few feet behind him, pausing to look up at birds or down at tree trunks to inspect overgrown mushrooms. “I bet you’re the kind of person who takes her kids on nature walks and stops to look at every bug and flower,” he says. “Oh, I definitely am,” I say. “And I bet you’re not?” He laughs, which is answer enough. I am disappointed that as we walk, he does not reach for my hand or stop to give me even a quick kiss – anything to acknowledge my physical presence. For years, I have pushed Michael’s hands away from me because they always seemed to be coming at me, grabbing and tapping and rubbing, so persistent and needy, but now that he’s gone, I crave being touched. I want to feel the warmth of skin, the pressure of a body against my own. After the walk, we go home to change our clothes. I take mine off and walk around the apartment naked, getting a glass of water and digging in my tote bag for a more evening-worthy outfit. “I like how comfortable you are with your body,” he says, watching me. “I like how you walk around with no clothes on and feel no need to cover up. But, one question: have you ever thought about shaving all the hair from your pussy?” he asks. “Well, no, I haven’t,” I say. “I mean, there’s just a small patch of hair anyway, it’s pretty well-trimmed.” “I think it’s hot when women have no pubic hair,” he says. “Really?” I ask, wrinkling my nose. “I think it looks prepubescent. I’ve never understood how men find that sexy.” “It just is,” he says. “Would you think about shaving it all off?” “No, I wouldn’t. I want to look like a woman, not a little girl,” I say. He approaches me, saying, “Oh you definitely look like a woman,” and then kisses me until I’ve backed up against the wall, where he spins me around so that my breasts are pressed against it and he enters me from behind. He wraps his arm around my waist to hold me in place and I let out a yelp of pain as he penetrates me too forcefully, but then we settle into a rhythm. I come quickly and then he does.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  And if he’s as wise a man as they say he is, this ought to make him think more highly of me.’ Ah, what a poor, misguided wretch she must have been, dear ladies, to suppose that she could get the better of a scholar! But to return to our narrative, the maid having delivered the lady’s message, the scholar, overjoyed, proceeded to entreat her with greater warmth than before, writing letters to her and sending her presents, all of which she accepted. But the only answers he received were couched in the vaguest of terms; and in this fashion she toyed with him for some little time. She meanwhile gave a full account of the affair to her lover, who took it rather amiss and displayed a certain amount of jealousy. And so at length, in order to show him that his jealousy was misconceived, she sent her maid to the scholar, who was bombarding her with entreaties, to tell him on her behalf that albeit since the day he had first declared his love, she had not had a single opportunity to grant his desires, she hoped it would be possible to forgather with him in the immediate future, during Christmastide. If, therefore, he would like to come to the courtyard of her house after dark on the evening of the day after Christmas, she would meet him there as soon as she conveniently could. The scholar was the happiest man in Christendom, and having gone to her house at the time she had specified, he was taken by the maid to a courtyard, where he was locked in and began to wait for the lady. Earlier that evening, the lady had invited her lover to the house, and after they had supped merrily together, she told him what she was proposing to do that night, adding: ‘And you’ll be able to see exactly how much I love this fellow, whom you were foolish enough to regard as your rival.’ These words brought great joy to the heart of her lover, who was impatient to see what the outcome would be. Now, it so happened that earlier in the day there had been a heavy fall of snow, and it lay thick all over the place, so before the scholar had spent much time in the courtyard, he began to feel distinctly chilly. But since he was expecting relief at any moment, he suffered it all in patience. After a while, the lady said to her lover: ‘Let’s go and spy on this precious rival of yours from the little window in the bedroom, and see what he has to say to the maid. I have just sent her down to have a few words with him.’ So off they went to the bedroom, from which they could look down on the courtyard without being seen, and they heard the maid addressing the scholar from another window.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  the evidence, that a Christian Church, vested with the plenitude of Christ’s teaching, and with divine authority to uphold it, had been ordained by Jesus right at the beginning, and had then been solidly established by the first generation of apostles. Moreover, it had triumphantly survived the attempts of various heretics to tamper with the truth it passed on intact from generation to generation. This view is a reconstruction for ideological purposes. Eusebius represented the wing of the Church which had captured the main centres of power, had established a firm tradition of monarchical bishops, and had recently allied itself with the Roman state. He wanted to show that the Church he represented had always constituted the mainstream of Christianity, both in organization and faith. The truth is very different. We have already seen that the original legatee of Jesus’s mission, the Jerusalem Church, did not hold steadfast to his teaching and was slipping back into Judaism before it was, in effect, extinguished, its remnants being eventually branded as heretics. The Christology of Paul, which later became the substance of the Christian universal faith, came from the diaspora, and was preached by an outsider whom many in the Jerusalem Church did not recognize as an apostle at all. Christianity began in confusion, controversy and schism and so it continued. A dominant orthodox Church, with a recognizable ecclesiastical structure, emerged only very gradually and represented a process of natural selection – a spiritual survival of the fittest. And, as with such struggles, it was not particularly edifying. The Darwinian image is appropriate: the central and eastern Mediterranean in the first and second centuries AD swarmed with an infinite multitude of religious ideas, struggling to propagate themselves. Every religious movement was unstable and fissiparous; and these cults were not only splitting up and modulating but reassembling in new forms. A cult had to struggle not only to survive but to retain its identity. Jesus had produced certain insights and matrices which were rapidly propagated over a large geographical area. The followers of Jesus were divided right from the start on elements of faith and practice. And the further the missionaries moved from the base, the more likely it was that their teachings would diverge. Controlling them implied an ecclesiastical organization. In Jerusalem there were ‘leaders’ and ‘pillars’, vaguely defined officials modelled on Jewish practice. But they were ineffective. The Jerusalem Council was a failure. It outlined a consensus but could not make it work in practice. Paul could not be controlled. Nor, presumably, could others. Nor could the ‘pillars’ of the centre party maintain their authority even

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  complacent conformity, testified to the apparent solidity of the Christian world. Further inland, however, and often in the great cities themselves, Christianity as imposed by Chalcedon lacked a popular basis. This source of weakness was never eliminated; indeed it increased and ultimately the whole structure was swept away in a few decades by the Arab tribes and their clear Moslem doctrine of One God. Errors of Christian statesmanship thus delivered Asia and Africa to the Moslem alternative. The speed with which it was adopted and the unavailing efforts of Christianity to win back lost ground, indicate the strength of the Moslem popular appeal which banished all dubiety about the one-ness and nature of the divine. Why was it that the arguments about the nature of Christ and the Trinity evoked so much more passion in the Greek-speaking East than in the Latinized West? It is not easy to reconstruct the religious sociology of the fourth and fifth-century Mediterranean world. To some extent there had been elements of mass emotional appeal in Christianity right from the start. This is apparent from the description of Pentecost in Luke’s Acts. And from an early stage internal Christian disputes had been conducted to some extent with a mass public in mind. Lucian describes a revivalist-style meeting held by Alexander, one of the leading sectarians, designed to whip up frenzy against orthodox Christians. It was held at night, with massed torches, and began with a ritual casting-out of Christians, whom Alexander denounced as spies. He would shout: ‘Out with the Christians!’ and his cheer-leaders were taught to reply: ‘Out with the Epicureans!’ Mass-meetings and slogan-shouting were characteristic of the Montanist movement, and later of the Donatist church in North Africa. The huge basilicas Donatist bishops built for their flocks served as echoing auditoria at which the congregations could be worked up into a frenzy by popular orators, sometimes as a preparation to issuing into the streets as an armed mob to impose the Donatist will on the orthodox or on the Roman authorities. The use of money to manipulate crowds of slaves and poor people in a specific doctrinal direction had been one of the earliest features of Christianity. The tendency became more marked under the later empire, with the emergence of trade and craft guilds, in effect hereditary and compulsory unions, which bound sections of the community into tightly organized groups, each with its own series of economic and social interests, and each bribable, or persuadable. These craft-guilds had long played a leading role in municipal politics. By the fourth century they operated in the religious sphere, influencing or even determining the outcome of the episcopal elections,

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  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. 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