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.

Page 163 of 189 · 20 per page

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  are converted more by music than by anything else.’ In the enclaves, terrific religious ceremonies were developed. The Indians learned singing and especially plain-chant more easily than anything else, and they took rapidly to a wide variety of instruments – clarinets, cornets, trumpets, fifes, trombones, Moroccan and Italian flutes, drums, bowed guitars and many others. Juan de Grijalva wrote: ‘There is not an Indian village even of 20 inhabitants which is without trumpets and a few flutes to enrich the services.’ It is typical of Philip II’s niggling attention to detail that he tried to reduce the numbers of singers and instrumentalists in these villages in 1561 – with no success. Equally futile were official bans on liturgical extravaganzas, including wild dancing, which grew up round religious fiestas. But if these protected enclaves were intended (and the policy of the orders was never clear, even to themselves) to produce a distinctively native and self-sustaining form of Christianity, they were total failures. They necessarily involved the concept of tutellage. Travellers could not stay there for more than two days. In Mexico, no Europeans, mestizos, negroes or mulattoes were allowed to settle in them. In parts of Brazil and Paraguay, the Jesuits, with their customary efficiency, created entire colonies, or reductiones as they were called, stretching over thousands of square miles. By 1623 there were over a score of them, encompassing 100,000 inhabitants, and they continued to expand, especially after 1641 when the Portuguese authorities forebade access to these territories and allowed the Jesuits to maintain private armies to defend them. The friars also had their armed bands, and indeed were sometimes accused of fighting pitched battles with each other, with the seculars, and with the authorities themselves. In a way this idea of protecting vulnerable natives and their way of life from intruding European civilization is a modern one; but the instinct was paternalistic and necessarily condescending. ‘All the Indians’, Philip II was told, ‘are like nestlings whose wings have not grown enough yet to allow them to fly for themselves . . . religious, as your Majesty should know, are their true mothers and fathers.’ There was an invincible reluctance to admit that the fledglings might grow up, or assist them to do so. The Dominicans refused to found any secondary schools, and it was always against their policy to teach Latin – the key to advance of any kind – to Indians. The Franciscans and Augustinians were less dogmatic, and they in fact discovered that the natives took to Latin more easily than Spaniards. But the College of Santiago Tlatelolco, where the Franciscans taught it, did not produce a single native priest. Even so attempts to educate the Indians met bitter criticism. Jeronimo

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  But in such relationships as Mary’s and Stephen’s, Nature must pay for experimenting; she may even have to pay very dearly—it largely depends on the sexual mixture. A drop too little of the male in the lover, and mighty indeed will be the wastage. And yet there are cases—and Stephen’s was one—in which the male will emerge triumphant; in which passion combined with a real devotion will become a spur rather than a deterrent; in which love and endeavour will fight side by side in a desperate struggle to find some solution. Thus it was that when Stephen returned from Morton, Mary divined, as it were by instinct, that the time of dreaming was over and past; and she clung very close, kissing many times— ‘Do you love me as much as before you went? Do you love me?’ The woman’s eternal question. And Stephen, who, if possible, loved her more, answered almost brusquely: ‘Of course I love you.’ For her thoughts were still heavy with the bitterness that had come of that visit of hers to Morton, and which at all costs must be hidden from Mary. There had been no marked change in her mother’s manner. Anna had been very quiet and courteous. Together they had interviewed bailiff and agent, scheming as always for the welfare of Morton; but one topic there had been which Anna had ignored, had refused to discuss, and that topic was Mary. With a suddenness born of exasperation, Stephen had spoken of her one evening. ‘I want Mary Llewellyn to know my real home; some day I must bring her to Morton with me.’ She had stopped, seeing Anna’s warning face—expressionless, closed; while as for her answer, it had been more eloquent far than words—a disconcerting, unequivocal silence. And Stephen, had she ever entertained any doubt, must have known at that moment past all hope of doubting, that her mother’s omission to invite the girl had indeed been meant as a slight upon Mary. Getting up, she had gone to her father’s study. Puddle, who had held her peace at the time, had spoken just before Stephen’s departure. ‘My dear, I know it’s all terribly hard about Morton—about . . .’ She had hesitated. And Stephen had thought with renewed bitterness: ‘Even she jibs, it seems, at mentioning Mary.’ She had answered: ‘If you’re speaking of Mary Llewellyn, I shall certainly never bring her to Morton, that is as long as my mother lives—I don’t allow her to be insulted.’ Then Puddle had looked at Stephen gravely. ‘You’re not working, and yet work’s your only weapon. Make the world respect you, as you can do through your work; it’s the surest harbour of refuge for your friend, the only harbour—remember that—and it’s up to you to provide it, Stephen.’

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  its hideous dogmas shine on its brow like flaming fiends; the whole world stands aghast at its wickedness and ruin. The Northern church beholds its mission.’ In fact, nothing happened. As in the Middle Ages, once peace had broken out, the rival prelates came together again, provided they were white. Southern Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians and Lutherans continued to proclaim their loyalty to the lost cause, but otherwise resumed standard Christian attitudes. The liberated slaves formed their own churches, chiefly Baptist and Methodist. These flourished, encompassing more than a third of the black population by 1900. The fact that white Baptist and Methodist ministers had recently preached slavery (and still defended it, sotto voce) seems to have made no difference to black Baptists and Methodists, so long as they could run their own churches. Nor, in a wider sense, does any sect appear to have suffered from the fact that its clergy and members were on both sides or that, institutionally, it evaded the issue. What was necessarily damaged, or at any rate challenged, was the identity between the political aims of the nation and its religious beliefs. For the first time America began to miss the Pascalian element in its Christian philosophy, and to feel the lack of theodicy. Yet the majority of American Christians came to look on the Civil War not as a Christian defeat, in which the powerlessness or contradictions of the faith had been exposed, but as an American-Christian victory, in which Christian egalitarian teaching had been triumphantly vindicated against renegades and apostates. It fitted neatly into a world vision of the Anglo-Saxon races raising up the benighted and ignorant dark millions, and bringing them, thanks to a ‘favouring providence’ into the lighted circle of Christian truth; thus the universalist mission of Christ would be triumphantly completed. For, by the 1860s, the United States, along with Britain, was in the forefront of a huge missionary effort whose aim was no less than the evangelization of the globe. It must be said that it took the Protestant powers, and Protestantism generally, a very long time to get themselves into this posture. Until the early nineteenth century, Protestantism cannot be called a missionary faith. It is true that some efforts were made. As early as 1622, the Dutch set up a seminary in Leyden to train missionaries for work in the East Indies and Ceylon. But the chief object, linked to economic and political penetration, was to combat Spanish and Portuguese efforts to Catholicize the islands, and when Catholic power declined, Dutch efforts slackened too; in the eighteenth century the Dutch claimed many converts, but less than one in ten of

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  was the embodiment of conciliar theory in the permanent machinery of church government. Because of its absence, the Pope had wrested back his monarchical absolutism in the fifteenth century. The same process threatened to occur again. Indeed, even during the first session of the Council, John was made aware of a lacuna in his arrangements. The first series of propositions, or schema, to be debated by the Council dealt with the authority of faith, and the sources of revelation. The subject was absolutely crucial, since it determined the whole manner in which the Christian faith was asserted and interpreted, and transcended all the arguments between the Catholics and the other Christian churches. The schema prepared by the Curialists was Tridentine and asserted that the church’s innate authority or magisterium was an alternative and equal source to that of revelation through scripture; it was, in effect, identical to the position adopted by Pius X at the height of the Modernist controversy. John had been officially classified as ‘suspected of Modernism’ then, and in a sense he proved it in 1962 by intervening on the side of the progressives to prevent the curialists exploiting procedural devices to get their schema through. This ultimately led to the adoption by an enormous majority of a definition of revelation which was eirenic and ecumenical. But it was disquieting that the Pope’s intervention should have been necessary when it was quite clear what most of the bishops wanted. Pope John did not live to remedy this defect in his machinery of change. He died in 1963, before the second session of the Council, and before he or it had the opportunity to tackle the whole question of power and government within the Church – indeed, he was already ill when the council first met. Thus, although John’s intentions and aspirations were clear, and though he had set in motion a ‘revolution of rising expectations’ among many bishops and priests and among ordinary Catholic laymen, he had not in fact changed the manner in which the Church was ruled. He left the absolutist papal powers intact. Hence Cardinal Montini, the curialist who succeeded John as Paul VI, inherited a democratic spirit but an autocratic machine. Which should be allowed to prevail? Pope Paul attempted a compromise. He allowed the council to continue and complete its work. But he withdrew from its competence two subjects which he reserved for himself. This was an arrangement difficult to defend either in logic or on grounds of practical wisdom. Either the Council was sovereign in the Pope’s eyes or not. If it was, then why should it not deal with all topics? If it could not deal with two topics considered so important and delicate that only the Pope had the divine wisdom to settle them, then why should it deal with

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

  Among others to accompany the king were Jean de Joinville, seneschal of Champagne, whose graphic chronicle has preserved the annals of the Crusade.470 The number of the troops is given at thirty-two thousand. Venetian and Genoese fleets carried them to Cyprus, where preparations had been made on a large scale for their maintenance. Thence they sailed to Egypt. Damietta fell, but after this first success, the campaign was a dismal disaster. Louis’ benevolence and ingenuousness were not combined with the force of the leader. He was ready to share suffering with his troops but had not the ability to organize them.471 His piety could not prevent the usual vices from being practised in the camps.472

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

  made at his coronation in 1215 and his coronation as emperor in Rome, 1220.239 Frederick at last seemed ready to comply. The crusaders assembled at Brindisi, and Frederick actually set off to sea accompanied by the pope’s prayers. Within three days of leaving port the expedition returned, driven back by an epidemic, as Frederick asserted, or by Frederick’s love of pleasure, as Gregory maintained. The pope’s disappointment knew no bounds. He pronounced against Frederick the excommunication threatened by Honorius.240 As the sentence was being read in the church at Anagni, the clergy dashed their lighted tapers to the floor to indicate the emperor’s going out into darkness. Gregory justified his action in a letter to the Christian princes, and spoke of Frederick as "one whom the Holy See had educated with much care, suckled at its breast, carried on its shoulders, and whom it has frequently rescued from the hands of those seeking his life, whom it has brought up to perfect manhood at much trouble and expense, exalted to the honors of kingly dignity, and finally advanced to the summit of the imperial station, trusting to have him as a wand of defence and the staff of our old age." He declared the plea of the epidemic a frivolous pretence and charged Frederick with evading his promises, casting aside all fear of God, having no respect for Jesus Christ. Heedless of the censures of the Church, and enticed away to the usual pleasures of his kingdom, he had abandoned the Christian army and left the Holy Land exposed to the infidels.241 In a vigorous counter appeal to Christendom, Frederick made a bold protest against the unbearable assumption of the papacy, and pointed to the case of John of England as a warning to princes of what they might expect. "She who calls herself my mother," he wrote, "treats me like a stepmother." He denounced the secularization of the Church, and called upon the bishops and clergy to cultivate the self-denial of the Apostles. In 1228 the excommunication was repeated and places put under the interdict where the emperor might be. Gregory was not without his own troubles at Rome, from which he was compelled to flee and seek refuse at Perugia. The same year, as if to show his independence of papal dictation and at the same time the sincerity of his crusading purpose, the emperor actually started upon a crusade, usually called the Fifth Crusade. On being informed of the expedition, the pope excommunicated, him for the third time and inhibited the patriarch of Jerusalem and the Military Orders from giving him aid. The expedition was successful in spite of the papal malediction, and entering Jerusalem Frederick crowned himself king in the church of the Holy Sepulchre. Thus we have the singular spectacle of the chief monarch of Christendom conducting a crusade in fulfillment of a vow to two popes while resting under the solemn ban of a third.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  understand the being who, by his nature and mine, must be incomprehensible to me.’ He was clear on one point: ‘God cannot be proved, nor denied, by the mere force of our reason’; and his most serious work in this context, Essai sur les moeurs, touches the topic only once: ‘To believe in absolutely no god . . . would be a frightful moral mistake, a mistake incompatible with good government.’ A letter written as late as 1770, which has only recently turned up, reads: ‘I do not believe that there is in the world a mayor or a podesta, having only 400 horses called men to govern, who does not realize that it is necessary to put a god into mouths to serve as a bit and a bridle.’ Voltaire, in short, was always careful to stress the social need for a deity, and so avoided falling into the Enlightenment trap. And he was too much of a historian to suppose that reason alone was likely to prove a reliable guide for mankind – he had no need of Pascal’s admonitions – or that optimism was a sensible posture for a philosopher. What makes Voltaire a really great man, and an important figure in the history of Christianity, is that in this and other respects he swam against the prevailing tide of the Enlightenment. He found both the underlying notions behind Leibniz’s Theodicée (1710), that everything was for the best in this world, and that in any event the Christian should resign himself and submit, quite misguided: the first fallacious, the second morally repugnant. He rejected Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1733): Safe in the hand of one disposing power, Or in the natal, or the mortal hour... One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right. He thought this was tempting Providence, and was delighted when Providence, tempted, produced the spectacular Lisbon earthquake of 1755. It was as though Voltaire had been waiting for this catastrophe to attack the received wisdom of the age, whether Christian or rationalist: ‘My dear sir, nature is very cruel. One would find it hard to imagine how the laws of movement caused such frightful disasters in the best of possible worlds . . . I flatter myself that at least the reverend fathers Inquisitors have been crushed like the others. That ought to teach men not to persecute each other, for while a few holy scoundrels burn a few fanatics, the earth swallows up one and all.’ Voltaire used the occasion of the earthquake, which aroused a European interest quite disproportionate to its magnitude, to rush out a didactic poem, which went through a score of editions in 1756:

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  of Germany. From this point, there was no real chance that the Lutheran movement would be exterminated; the papacy and its secular allies were faced with the choice of compromise or permanent schism. 1 The overwhelming consensus among secular statesmen was that a compromise, and reconciliation, was possible; and that a universal council should be summoned to bring it about. From the start of the controversy this remained the Emperor Charles v’s policy. His salient object was the reunification of Germany, and he saw this could only be realized by the restoration of religious unity. For the French crown, however, the salient object was the continued division of Germany, and France’s influence was consistently deployed to make a satisfactory council impossible. Clement VII and his successor Paul III were similarly determined to avoid a council which they realized must end in the destruction of papal power; and their procrastinations were successful. By 1539, Luther and his Church were secure, and he had lost interest in compromise; or, rather, he did not believe that the papacy could be brought to entertain one in any circumstances. The principals, as it were, had opted out of the dialogue. But there were many on both sides who still believed the gap could be bridged. In some ways Luther, as they appreciated, was more Catholic than many of his Roman Catholic opponents. At the beginning of the controversy, Johan Eck had chosen deliberately to argue with him on the issue of papal authority rather than on grace, the sacraments and the nature of the Church. Some pious laymen, such as his patron Frederick the Wise, said they could not see where he had been refuted on the basis of scripture. It was the same with Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith. Quite independently of Luther, Cardinal Contarini had reached the same conclusions as early as 1511. There were other instances of Catholic theologians adopting this position as a result of reconsidering St Paul. One example was Cardinal Pole, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in the attempt by Queen Mary Tudor to restore Catholicism in England in the 1550s. Other eirenicists on the Catholic side included Pierre Favre of Savoy, the first Jesuit to go to Germany and one of Ignatius Loyola’s earliest companions. He advocated a policy of love and friendship to heretics and the search of doctrinal harmony. On the Protestant side, Melanchthon and Bucer consistently looked for intermediary positions. Before Erasmus died, some of the Lutheran pastors appealed to him: ‘We hope, man of greatness, that you will be the future Soloman, whose judgment will deprive every party of something, and thereby put an end to discord.’ There were, indeed, a great many reformers who believed a

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Missionary Society in the 1830s, thought the training of black clergy would bring about a qualitative change. ‘When the colour of a man’s skin no longer excludes him from the office of an evangelist, the traffic in slaves will have had its knell. A black bishop and a black clergy of the Protestant church may ere long become a necessity to the civilization of Africa.’ But then he was against colonialism too: ‘Banish the thought that Europe must spread her protecting wings over East Africa, if missionary work is to prosper in that land of outer darkness. Europe would, no doubt, remove much that is mischievous and obstructive out of the way of missionary work, but she would probably set in its way as many, and perhaps still greater checks.’ Examples of similar views could be produced from all the missionary territories. The missions themselves were divided. Those, like Carey and Krapf, who identified themselves with the natives and gave high priority to creating an independent clergy and Church, included most of the ablest and most sensitive of the missionaries, but constituted only a minority of the workers in the field. Most of those who lived among the natives, both in India and Africa, were more struck by their ignorance than by their potentialities. Whereas the Acts of the Apostles, for example, while drawing attention to gentile wickedness, never refers to cultural and economic inferiority of a kind to make the reception of Christianity difficult or the emergence of fully-fledged Christians impossible, the European evangelists tended to feel themselves confronted with a different, and inferior, kind of being. The New Testament seemed to give them no guidance on this point. Charles Grant, who cannot fairly be accused of prejudice against non-European races, who was one of the prime organizers of the anti-slavery campaign, and who strongly urged the case for missions, formed a very pessimistic view during the many years he spent in India. Writing in 1797, just eight years before Carey, he admitted: ‘. . . we cannot avoid recognizing in the people of Indostan a race of man lamentably degenerate and base; retaining but a feeble sense of moral obligation; yet obstinate in their disregard of what they know to be right, governed by malevolent and licentious passions, strongly exemplifying the effects produced on society by a great and general corruption of manners, and sunk in misery by their vices.’ Here, one feels, there is an almost total confusion between economic, cultural and moral ‘inferiority’. This was very common. The missionaries were not anthropologists or sociologists; they found it exceedingly difficult to think in terms of relative scales of moral values. They did not see European-Christian notions of right and wrong as the indices of a particular

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Efforts were undoubtedly made to convey the subtleties and truth of Christianity. In teaching his converts, Maturino Gilberti tried hard to distinguish between devotion and image-worship – later he thought this was the chief reason why he was suspected of Protestantism. Francisco de Bustamente railed against the cult of the Virgin, because of the polytheistic confusion it produced. Most priests did not bother much. Luis Caldera, a Franciscan, who spoke only Spanish, taught the doctrine of Hell by throwing dogs and cats into an oven, and lighting a fire under it: the howls of the animals terrified the Indians. The difficulty was that the more imaginative or sensitive missionaries nearly always got into trouble with their superiors, ecclesiastical or secular. The most remarkable of the sixteenth century Franciscans, Barnadino de Sahagun, who spent over sixty years in Mexico, argued that it was vital to study the ‘spiritual maladies’ and ‘the vices of the country’ in order to effect Christianization. He employed native assistants and an original methodology to compile a gigantic Historia general de las cosas de Nueva Espana, whose twelve volumes covered the religion, customs, constitution, intellectual and economic life, flora, fauna and the languages of Mexico and its peoples. It was written in both Nahuatl and Spanish, and must be regarded as one of the greatest intellectual achievements of the entire Renaissance. But it aroused the opposition of his colleagues, and in 1577 Philip II ordered its confiscation, though one copy was to be sent to the Council of the Indies for examination; no one was to be allowed to ‘describe the superstitions and customs of the Indians’. Barnadino died without knowing what had happened to his life’s work, and the manuscript was not recovered until 1779; two similar studies were made, but none was printed until modern times. Nevertheless, some of the friars, especially the Franciscans, persisted in native studies; some could preach in three dialects, and by 1572 there were 109 publications (that we know of) in ten different native languages, most of them in Nahuatl, which the friars tried to raise to a lingua franca. The Holy Office seems to have disliked all publications for the Indians, even catechisms, especially if they were in translation; and the crown, too, tried to insist on Spanish, ‘that the Indians be instructed in our Castilian speech and accept our social organization and good customs’ (1550). The intrinsic difficulties of finding the exact translation for Christian concepts were greatly increased by fear of heterodoxy. The seculars, who took virtually no part in the missions, and who hated the friars, were always on the watch; and in each order there was a rigorist group in sly contact with the authorities at home. In 1555 the first Mexican synod ordered the seizure of all

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Now, there happened at that time to be living in Naples a compatriot of ours, Pietro dello Canigiano, 4 who was treasurer to Her Highness the Empress of Constantinople 5 – a man of great intelligence and shrewdness, and a very close friend of Salabaetto and his family. Knowing him to be the very soul of discretion, Salabaetto took him into his confidence a few days after his arrival, told him about what he had done and about the sad fate which had befallen him, and requested his assistance and advice in finding some means of livelihood in Naples, declaring that he had no intention of ever returning to Florence. Saddened by what he had heard, Canigiano replied: ‘A fine state of affairs, I must say; a fine way to carry on; a fine sense of loyalty you have shown to your employers. No sooner do you lay your hands on a large sum of money, than you squander the lot in riotous living. But what’s done is done, and now we must look to the remedy.’ Since he had a shrewd head on his shoulders, Canigiano quickly saw what was to be done, and explained his plan to Salabaetto, who, thinking it an excellent idea, set about putting it into effect. He still had a little money of his own, and supplementing this with a loan from Canigiano, he ordered a number of bales of merchandise to be packed and tightly corded up, and having purchased and filled about a score of oil-casks, he loaded the entire consignment aboard a ship and returned to Palermo. There he presented the invoice for the bales to the officers of the dogana, to whom he also declared the value of the casks, and having made sure that they had registered everything under his own name, he placed the goods in store, saying that he wished to leave them there until the arrival of a further consignment of merchandise he was expecting. On learning of his return and hearing that the goods he had brought were worth two thousand gold florins at the very least, without counting the goods

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  than repudiated, his radical ideas. As an anti-aristocratic gesture he henceforth wrote his surname as one word, Lammenais; and his Paroles d’un Croyant (1834) was a sustained attack on tyranny, an aggressive defence of democracy, and a plea for ‘a free church in a free state’ – he prophesied that God would shortly transform society by casting down the oppressors of the poor, and by inaugurating a new age of justice, peace and love. Thus Lammenais in his own lifetime had come full circle, from a legitimist condemnation of revolution to the hope of a Christian millenium. The book was the subject of an explicit papal condemnation, and for the rest of his life (he died in 1854) Lammenais, though never excommunicated, was pushed into the shadows of Catholic disapproval. The failure of his movement meant that the Church in France lost the romantic intellectuals – Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Alfred de Vigny, Lamartine and many others. Thus at the very moment when the Oxford intellectuals – or some of them – were moving to Rome and even crossing the Tiber, the Paris intellectuals were moving out. Intellectually, they met on the drawbridge – some pursuing authority, others fleeing it. But it would not be true to say that the Church, or even specifically the triumphalists, learned nothing from Lammenais. They accepted his view that the Church could become a popular institution, and the Pope a populist leader. What they denied was his assumption that the Church needed to compromise on its traditional social attitudes to win such support. Indeed some of them, if only dimly, grasped the important point that it was the very refusal of the papacy to compromise that, for many, formed its chief attraction. What repelled a Lammenais attracted a Manning; and not just Mannings but men and women of all classes and nations who saw the Vatican fortress as a security-symbol. It was this instinct which lay behind the success of Giovanni Mastari-Ferretti, who became Pope as Pius IX on the death of Gregory XVI in 1846. His life was a Lammenais-type pilgrimage in reverse. He was an aristocrat and a soldier, but epilepsy forced him to give up the army. He had been to Latin-America during the anti-colonial period, and he began his pontificate with a series of liberal reforms in the papal states. He visited prisons and released political prisoners, allowed some freedom of the press, reformed the criminal code, excused Rome’s Jews from attending compulsory sermons, installed gas-lighting and built a railway. The desperate revolutionary year of 1848 turned him round completely: thereafter, for the next thirty years, he aligned himself totally with reaction in Church and State, and set his face steadily against liberalism in any form. In his old age,

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  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. Turning in a vicious circle the supreme power is exhausted and stands permanently on the edge of the tomb.’ Bartolomeo Cappellari, elected

• From The Decameron (1353)

  TENTH STORY Pietro di Vinciolo goes out to sup with Ercolano, and his wife lets a young man in to keep her company. Pietro returns, and she conceals the youth beneath a chicken coop. Pietro tells her that a young man has been discovered in Ercolano’s house, having been concealed there by Ercolano’s wife, whose conduct she severely censures. As ill luck would have it, an ass steps on the fingers of the fellow hiding beneath the coop, causing him to yell with pain. Pietro rushes to the spot and sees him, thus discovering his wife’s deception. But in the end, by reason of his own depravity, he arrives at an understanding with her . When the queen’s tale had reached its conclusion, they all praised God for having given Federigo so fitting a reward, and then Dioneo, who was not in the habit of waiting to be asked, began straightway as follows: Whether it is an accidental failing, stemming from our debased morals, or simply an innate attribute of men and women, I am unable to say; but the fact remains that we are more inclined to laugh at scandalous behaviour than virtuous deeds, especially when we ourselves are not directly involved. And since, as on previous occasions, the task I am about to perform has no other object than to dispel your melancholy, enamoured ladies, and provide you with laughter and merriment, I shall tell you the ensuing tale, for it may well afford enjoyment even though its subject matter is not altogether seemly. As you listen, do as you would when you enter a garden, and stretch forth your tender hands to pluck the roses, leaving the thorns where they are. This you will succeed in doing if you leave the knavish husband to his ill deserts and his iniquities, whilst you laugh gaily at the amorous intrigues of his wife, pausing where occasion warrants to commiserate with the woes of her lover. Not so very long ago, there lived in Perugia 1 a rich man called Pietro di Vinciolo, who, perhaps to pull the wool over the eyes of his fellow-citizens or to improve the low opinion they had of him, rather than because of any real wish to marry, took to himself a wife. But the unfortunate part about it, considering his own proclivities, was that he chose to marry a buxom young woman with red hair and a passionate nature, who would cheerfully have taken on a pair of husbands, let alone one, and now found herself wedded to a man whose heart was anywhere but in the right place. Having in due course discovered how matters stood, his wife, seeing that she was a fair and lusty wench, blooming with health and vitality, was greatly upset about it, and every so often she gave him a piece of her mind, calling him the foulest names imaginable.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  penalties for transgressions, it added: ‘And otherwise than thus, what is herein forbidden, all men may walk as their consciences persuade them, every one in the name of his God. And let the saints of the Most High walk in this colony without molestation, in the name of Jehovah their God, for ever and ever.’ This was confirmed by royal charter in 1663: ‘No person within the said colony, at any time hereafter, shall be in any wise molested, punished, disquieted or called in question, for any differences in opinion in matters of religion, and who do not actually disturb the civil peace of our said colony; but that all . . . may from time to time, and at all times hereafter, freely and fully have and enjoy his and their own judgments and consciences, in matters of religious concernments.’ This was the first commonwealth in modern history to make religious freedom, as opposed to a mere degree of toleration, the principle of its existence, and to make this a reason for separating Church and State. Its existence, of course, opened the door to the Quakers and the Baptists, and indeed to missionaries from the Congregationalists of the north and the Anglicans of the south. In fact, once this decisive breach had been made, it was inevitable that America, with its lay predominance, should move steadily towards religious liberty and the separation of Church and State, and that the vision should cease to be Augustinian and become Erasmian. Economic factors pushed strongly in this direction. 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

• From The Decameron (1353)

  FIRST STORY A worthy knight enters the service of the King of Spain, by whom he feels that he is ill-requited; so the King gives him irrefutable proof that the fault lies, not with himself, but with the knight’s own cruel fortune, in the end rewarding him most handsomely. I account it an especial favour, honourable ladies, that our king should have singled me out to speak first on so weighty a theme as that of munificence, which, even as the sun embellishes and graces the whole of the heavens, is the light and splendour of every other virtue. So I shall tell you a little story, which to my way of thinking is most delightful, and which surely cannot be other than profitable to recall. You are to know, then, that of the many gallant knights who have graced our city for longer than I can remember, there was one in particular, Messer Ruggieri de’ Figiovanni, 1 who was possibly the finest of them all. Being both wealthy and stout of heart, and seeing that, because of the general tenor of Tuscan manners, there would be little or no opportunity for him to prove his worth by remaining in these parts, he made up his mind to spend some time with King Alphonso of Spain, 2 who was better renowned for his prowess than any other ruler of his day. And so he set out with a most impressive array of armour and horses and a large retinue, and made his way to Alphonso’s court in Spain, where the King accorded him a gracious welcome. There accordingly he settled, and because of his princely style of living and the prodigious feats he accomplished in the field, he quickly made his mark as a man of valour. But the longer he remained at Alphonso’s court, the more it seemed to him, through closely observing the ways of the King, that he was granting castles, towns and baronies to one man after another with very little discretion, giving them to people who had done nothing to deserve them. Now, Messer Ruggieri was conscious of his own merits, and since nothing was given to him, he considered that his own standing was thereby greatly diminished. He therefore decided to leave, and went to the King to ask his permission to do so. The King granted his request, and presented him with a most handsome- looking mule, the finest that any man had ever ridden, for which Messer Ruggieri was grateful in view of the long journey ahead of him. The King then instructed one of his confidential servants to arrange as best he could to accompany Messer Ruggieri throughout the first day of his journey without allowing him to suspect that he had been sent by the King, and to make a mental note of everything Ruggieri said about him, so that he could report it later word for word.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  had no answer to the Depression. It regarded the New Deal and similar interventionist schemes as unscriptural and sinful. Hence the great majority of Protestant periodicals and ministers, except in the South, favoured the Republicans and opposed Roosevelt. One survey showed that in the 1936 Roosevelt landslide, over seventy per cent of 21,606 Protestant ministers polled voted for Roosevelt’s Republican opponent, Landon, who also received the majority of the votes of all Protestant church members. Among the Congregationalists, the élite of the traditional Protestant dominance, the vote for Landon was as high as seventy-eight per cent. Thus the 1930s and 1940s marked a Protestant political retreat, before a Democratic coalition in which Jews and Catholics and progressives all had increasing roles to play. Yet it was some time before the weakening in Protestant ability to influence events, or set the tone of society, was translated into figures of church attendance, or was recognized as merely one aspect of a general contraction of Christianity. The number of those actually affiliated to particular churches appeared to be rising. It was calculated at forty-three per cent of the population in 1910, and almost exactly the same in 1920. By 1940 it had risen to forty-nine per cent, and there appears to have been an impressive post-war ‘revival’ to fifty-five per cent in 1950 and sixty-nine per cent in 1960. The phenomenon was not easy to explain. Within academic Protestantism there had, indeed, been an intellectual revival. It sprang originally from Switzerland, where Pastor Karl Barth, the latest in a long line of innovatory theologians who have found inspiration in the Epistle to the Romans, published his Commentary in 1918, followed by his Church Dogmatics in the 1930s. This neo- orthodoxy, as it is termed, reversed the liberal and rationalist attempt to translate Christianity into a formula for progress and reform – the raison d’être of Protestant triumphalism – and emphasized the fact that the Christian hope or kerygma is essentially other-worldly. The new theological philosophy, as it might be called, was Germanic in origin, and in a sense was an attempt to understand or explain the hateful fact of world war. But it proved powerfully attractive to American Christian intellectuals in the 1930s – themselves trying to understand the hateful fact of the Depression – who no longer equated Christianity with the American way of life and capitalist democracy. They believed Christianity was millenarian, but not in a materialist sense at all. Reinhold Niebuhr’s Introduction to Christian Ethics (1935) denied ‘the illusion of liberalism that we are dealing with a possible and prudential

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  passions of young boys’; he told his circle he had seen Erasmus walking ‘arm in arm with the devil in Rome’. As Luther consolidated his position, and the secular powers – as Erasmus had feared – became involved, the old scholar kept his distance from the reformers. In Hyperaspistes, 1526–7, he re-emphasized his plea for a minimum theology: ‘In sacred literature there are certain sanctuaries into which God wills that we shall not penetrate further.’ He held to what he called ‘natural religion’. He refused to break with Rome: ‘I shall bear with this church until I find a better one . . . he does not sail badly who steers a middle course between two evils.’ He concentrated on attacking persecution and the Inquisition; and on pressing for peaceful coexistence. On the Emperor Charles V he urged compromise: the eucharist in both kinds, married clergy, toleration laws. He spent his last years in various free cities, such as Basle and Freiburg, which he hoped would escape the coming religious devastation: ‘I am a citizen of the world, known to all, and to all a stranger.’ He was grievously shocked by Henry VIII’s execution of his friend Thomas More. What had happened to the gifted and enlightened young king he had known? And why had More been so foolish as to defy him on an arguable point? Was the world going mad? Among his last works was On the Sweet Concord of the Church, a plea for mutual toleration, radiant with meekness, goodwill and moderation. It was violently attacked by both sides. Erasmus undoubtedly had a huge constituency in Europe. At one time there seemed a real chance that his approach to reform might win the consensus, and be carried through. He had admirers over a very wide spectrum of opinion. In 1518, for instance, the orthodox controversialist Johann Eck had written: ‘With the exception of a few monks and would-be theologians, all learned men are followers of Erasmus.’ The moderate reformer Oecolampadius wrote to him in 1522: ‘We want neither the Catholic nor the Lutheran church. 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

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  David Hume declared that the maxim that egoism is, though not the exclusive, yet the predominant inclination of human nature, might not be true in fact, but that it was true in politics. {109} He held it to be true in politics since group action is determined by majority opinion and it would always be true that the majority would be actuated by the egotistic motive. It is difficult to read the history of mankind and arrive at any other conclusion. It must be taken for granted therefore that the injustices in society, which arise from class privileges, will not be abolished purely by moral suasion. That is a conviction at which the proletarian class, which suffers most from social injustice, has finally arrived after centuries of disappointed hopes. CHAPTER SIX — THE ETHICAL ATTITUDES OF THE PROLETARIAN CLASSALL societies of the past perpetrated and perpetuated social injustice without meeting significant resistance from those who were victimised by the social system. There were indeed slave revolts in antiquity and peasant rebellions in the Middle Ages; but they were sporadic and usually ineffectual. They represented the rebellious vehemence of hungry men who lacked a social philosophy to give dignity and sustained force to their efforts, and a political strategy adequate to the problem which they faced. Occasional revolts, when hunger and privation exhausted the patience of the serfs, did not materially alter the attitude of submissiveness which generally characterised the lower classes of ancient and medieval ages. The moral cynicism, the equalitarian idealism, the rebellious heroism, the anti-nationalism and internationalism, and the exaltation of their class as the community of significant loyalty, all these characteristic moral attitudes of the modern working classes are the products of the industrial era. To some degree they are the result of the democratic movement, which, while excluding the workers from its chief benefits, did grant them minimum opportunities for education and thus gave them a perspective upon political and economic facts, which the landless and propertyless classes of other ages lacked. But they are chiefly the result of modern capitalism and industrialism. The medieval social organisation was a personal one. The relations between squire and serf, between master and artisan, were direct, and sometimes intimate. The personal quality mitigated and obscured the social injustice and inequality of the relationship. The sense of personal responsibility on the part of the lord or master actually qualified the unethical character of the relationship; and the sentimental charities of the traditional “lady bountiful” added confusion to this measure of moral achievement. The rise of a technological civilisation increased the centralisation of ownership and power; it destroyed the sense of responsibility of the owner, lost the individual laborer in the mass, and obscured the human factors in industrial relations by the mechanism of stock ownership and the technique of mass production. By making human relations mechanical it increased, and more clearly revealed, the economic motive of human activity.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  “In view of the fact,” declared Sidney Webb, “that the socialist movement has been hitherto inspired, instructed and led by members of the middle class or bourgeoisie, the Fabian society protests against the absurdity of socialists, denouncing the very class from which socialism has sprung, as especially hostile to it.” {135} This judgment is, interestingly enough, a good example of the natural confusion into which ethically motivated middle-class leaders, who have identified themselves with the working class, fall, when they imagine that their own attitudes and convictions offer a significant clue to the dominant attitudes of their class. The middle class, though it has furnished leadership for the labor movement, has remained hostile to the labor cause, for all of Mr. Webb’s assurances. The less bellicose attitude of British labor and its softer emphasis upon the class conflict may be a result of the long history of British parliamentarism and the solid achievements of British liberalism in the nineteenth century, which justified, or seemed to justify, confidence in the democratic movement as something more than mere middle-class strategy. Nevertheless it is significant that the difference between the more Marxian socialism of the continent and the quite indigenous socialism of England has been pretty well wiped out by subsequent history. The parliamentary socialists of the continent have not been more revolutionary than the English, even though they did have a stronger admixture of Marxism in their thought. And the British socialists, who seemed for a time to be winning the middle classes to a degree, which the continental socialists found impossible, saw in the election of 1931 how the middle class will inevitably turn against socialism in a crisis when national patriotism is arrayed against the policy of the working class. In both England and Germany the socialist party has been at one time or another the largest party in the nation; and in these countries as well as in France, Belgium and the Scandinavian countries, the party has collaborated in government in either a major or minor capacity. The hope that socialism could be achieved progressively by parliamentary action has been at least partially justified by the history of all these nations. The increasing social control which government has placed upon economic activity and the larger and larger areas of economic action, in which the government has assumed not only control but actual ownership, offer at least some verification of the judgment of Mr. Webb: “The economic history of the century is an almost continuous record of the progress of socialism.” Everywhere the state has interfered in the processes of economic society with the purpose of diminishing the privileges and restraining the power of the owners, and adding to the privileges and power of the workers.