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 Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  is also at odds with the prophetic tradition reflected in the Hebrew Bible. Prophets like Amos and Micah were extremely skeptical of the value of sacrifice and cultic worship, and accused the cultic establishments of their day of distorting the demands of the Lord. Jeremiah had derided those who set their hopes on “the temple of the L ORD , the temple of the L ORD .” That tradition was continued in Haggai’s own time by the prophet of Isaiah 66, who declared that heaven is God’s throne and earth his footstool, and asked, “What is this house that you would build for me?” Evidently, not everyone in Judah shared Haggai’s confidence in the efficacy of temple worship. At the urging of the prophets, the rebuilding of the temple was begun. Haggai 2 describes the rather anticlimactic reaction to the foundations: “Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing?” Ezra 3:12-13 reports that many old people who remembered the first temple wept when they saw the foundations of the new one, so that one could not distinguish between the joyful shout of the younger people and the weeping of their elders. Haggai was unabashed. It was only a matter of time until the glory of the Lord would be revealed: “Once again, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land, and I will shake all the nations, so that the treasure of all the nations shall come, and I will fill this house with splendor, says the L ORD of hosts” (2:7). The splendor of the new temple would be greater than that of its predecessor. It should be noted that this prophecy is dated less than two months after the opening oracle in chapter 1. Haggai’s prophecy was not fulfilled. The second chapter of his book attempts to deal with this problem. The prophet briefly suggests that the offerings of the people are unclean, but his basic response is to reaffirm his prediction; it has not happened yet, but it will certainly happen soon, “from this day on.” The failure of prophecy is often associated with apocalyptic and millenarian predictions of a later era. We shall find an example in the book of Daniel. But prophets had always made predictions that did not succeed. What is remarkable here is that such a prophecy should still be accepted as inspired and canonical by later generations. The reason, perhaps, was that Haggai had succeeded in his mission

• From How the Bible Actually Works (2019)

  Something About Jesus That Doesn’t Get the Attention It Deserves Jesus is described in all sorts of ways in the Bible—king, prophet, priest, savior, shepherd, door, gate, vine, healer, rabbi, Lord—all of which are fine and good, of course, though some other words tend to get lost in the shuffle. Jesus was also a wise teacher, a sage, a purveyor of wisdom and the deep mysteries of God, a teller of stories, a confounder of the so-called wise. It has bothered me for some time how little press wisdom gets in the Christian world I inhabit when we see how central it is to the Old Testament. I suppose one reason for this lack is that wisdom gets messy, compared to thinking of the life of faith as a set of rules and clearly defined and never- changing boundaries. We are just people, after all, and we tend to gravitate toward the black and white. But the Christian faith doesn’t. Think of Jesus’s main teaching method: telling parables. If your aim is to get people to comprehend black-and-white information, try a lecture or a press release. If you want to move people to own the moment and take responsibility to work it out for themselves, you tell them a story to stimulate their imagination. The Gospels record almost forty distinct parables (who knows how many more Jesus told), and not a single one of them has a clear and obvious meaning. And if you think they do, I suggest you walk into a room of eager Bible readers studying a parable, make your case for its obvious meaning, and then duck for cover; or wander into a theological library and go to section BT373 through 378 and start reading. Parables can be downright obscure, so much so that Jesus’s own disciples sometimes looked like fourteen-year-old gamers trying to grasp theoretical physics. And if parables themselves weren’t enough of a challenge, Jesus announces his surprising—even disturbing—purpose for using them: To you [the disciples and others close to Jesus] has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that “they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.” (Mark 4:11–12; Matt. 13:13; Luke 8:10; quoting Isa. 6:9–10)

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  What was the name of his abode again? Yasna Polyana? No, Yasnaya Polyana. Well, anyway, what the hell am I speculating on this for? Wake up! I shake myself and push forward into the icy gale. Driftwood lying all about. Fantastic forms. (So many stories about bottles with messages inside them.) I wish now I had thought to ask MacGregor to come along. That idiotic, pseudo-serious line of his sometimes stimulated me in a perverse way. How he would laugh to see me pacing the beach in search of material! “Well, you’re working anyhow,” I can hear him chirping. “That’s something. But why in hell did you have to pick this for a subject? You know damned well nobody will be interested in it. You probably just wanted a little outing. Now you’ve got a good excuse, haven’t you? Jesus, Henry, you’re just the same as ever—nuts , completely nuts.” As I board the train to go home I realize that I have made just three lines of notes. I haven’t the slightest idea what I shall say when I sit down to the machine. My mind is a blank. A frozen blank. I sit staring out the window and not even the tremor of a thought assails me. The landscape itself is a frozen blank. The whole world is locked in snow and ice, mute, helpless. I’ve never known such a bleak, dismal, gruesome, lacklustre day. That night I went to bed rather chastened and humbled. Doubly so, because before retiring I had picked up a volume of Thomas Mann (in which there was the Tonio Kröger story) and had been overwhelmed by the flawless quality of the narrative. To my astonishment, however, I awoke the next day full of piss and vinegar. Instead of going for my usual morning stroll—“to get my blood up”—I sat down at the machine immediately after breakfast. By noon I had finished my article on Coney Island. It had come without effort. Why? Because instead of forcing it out I had gone to sleep—after due surrender of the ego, certes . It was a lesson in the futility of struggle. Do your utmost and let Providence do the rest! A petty victory, perhaps, but most illuminating. The article, of course, was never accepted. (Nothing was ever accepted.) It went the rounds from one editor to another. Nor did it make the rounds alone. Week after week I was turning them out, sending them forth like carrier pigeons, and week after week they came back, always with the stereotyped rejection slip. Nevertheless, nothing daunted, as they say, “always merry and bright,” I adhered rigidly to my program.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In the year before the hijra or migration to Yathrib (or Medina, the City, as the Muslims would call it), Muhammad had adapted his religion to bring it closer to Judaism as he understood it. After so many years of working in isolation he must have been looking forward to living with members of an older, more established tradition. Thus he prescribed a fast for Muslims on the Jewish Day of Atonement and commanded Muslims to pray three times a day like the Jews, instead of only twice as hitherto. Muslims could marry Jewish women and should observe some of the dietary laws. Above all, Muslims must now pray facing Jerusalem like the Jews and Christians. The Jews of Medina were at first prepared to give Muhammad a chance: life had become intolerable in the oasis, and like many of the committed pagans of Medina they were ready to give him the benefit of the doubt, especially since he seemed so positively inclined toward their faith. Eventually, however, they turned against Muhammad and joined those pagans who were hostile to the newcomers from Mecca. The Jews had sound religious reasons for their rejection: they believed that the era of prophecy was over. They were expecting a Messiah, but no Jew or Christian at this stage would have believed that they were prophets. Yet they were also motivated by political considerations: in the old days, they had gained power in the oasis by throwing in their lot with one or the other warring Arab tribe. Muhammad, however, had joined both these tribes with the Quraysh in the new Muslim ummah, a kind of super-tribe of which the Jews were also members. As they saw their position in Medina decline, the Jews became antagonistic. They used to assemble in the mosque “to listen to the stories of the Muslims and laugh and scoff at their religion.”31 It was very easy for them, with their superior knowledge of scripture, to pick holes in the stories of the Koran—some of which differed markedly from the biblical version. They also jeered at Muhammad’s pretensions, saying that it was very odd that a man who claimed to be a prophet could not even find his camel when it went missing.

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  A final aspect of the current situation which must be mentioned is the disappearance of the perception that the main constructions of Judaism which were made in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were and are in sharp conflict. We may note especially Lohse's introduction to the latest edition of Bousset-Gressmann, an edition prepared to serve as a basic textbook on 'the religion of Judaism' in the series Handbuch zum Neuen Testament. 77 Bousset's intention, according to Lohse, was not simply to contrast Jewish and Christian piety. He wished to set Judaism in its context in the Hellenistic world and to show how Christianity took up the inherit- 73 There is now a major constructive account of Rabbinic Judaism in Hebrew: E. E. Urbach, Haza{ (The Sages - Their Concepts and Beliefs), 1969. The ET appeared too late to be used in this study, but pa~e numbers have been added in parentheses. 4 Studies in Sin and Atonement and Types of Jewish-Palestinian Piety. 75 Sjoberg, Gott und die Sunder, p. xxiii: one should use above all Moore's fundamental work for the correct understanding of Judaism, then those of Herford, Bonsirven, Dietrich (on repentance, not a general account of Judaism), Biichler, Marmorstein, Abelson, Schechter, Montefiore, Friedlaender, Kohler and Baeck. 76 On the continuation of the denigrating view of Judaism in English-speaking New Testament scholarship, see Lloyd Gaston's review of F. W. Danker, Jesus and the New Age According to St Luke, JBL, 94, 1975, pp. 14of. For an example of how the view appears in popular homiletical dress, see Sandmel's citation of Harry Emerson Fosdick Oews neglected the weightier matters in favour of trivia) in 'The Need of Cooperative Study', p. 33. 77 Citations are from the 4th ed. of 1966 of Die Religion des Judentums. Tannaitic Literature [I

• From Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939)

  It must not be supposed that they are therefore imaginary, nor that they are bound to vanish away later. Their falsity is that of an essential weakness pretending to be violence. My pleasure in the object I have just been given exists much more as a duty than as a reality; it has a sort of parasitic reality as a tribute, of that I am very well aware; I know that I am endowing the object with it by a kind of fascination, but when I desist from my incantations this will immediately disappear.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  accredited spokesmen of the Christian faith, had to subscribe to certain beliefs; and he persuaded Convocation to pass unanimously a resolution which ‘places on record its conviction that the historical facts stated in the Creeds are an essential part of the faith of the Church’. The Anglican solution placed the onus on the individual, and remained faithful to the teaching of St Paul. A scholar was to pursue the truth; but it might lead him to a stage at which he passed the bounds of Christianity, which had defined limits. If so, it was better to face the fact, in the light of his own mind and conscience, rather than try to suppress it, since Christianity itself was identical with truth. The implication of this line of argument was that ultimately the problem would be resolved by scholarship, which would reconcile historical truth and scripture – or that Christianity would disappear, having been shown to be untrue. The implication of the papal attitude was that man was too frail a vessel to be left to wrestle with truth individually; he needed the collective guidance of the Church, which was divinely directed, and which he must follow even against the apparent evidence of his senses and conscience. The controversy thus served to demonstrate that nothing essential had changed in the Catholic-Protestant argument since the sixteenth century. In 1914, then, Christians still could not reach a consensus about how their creed was to absorb the new knowledge pouring in from all directions, or even about how Christians were to acquire it. This depressing conclusion ran counter to the spiritual euphoria of the times. There were still plenty of triumphalists in 1914. The papalists assumed an eventual submission of all Christians to Rome, followed by a redirection of the world under papal guidance; a return, as it were, to Innocent III’s thirteenth century, but with steamships, radio and aircraft. The Protestant triumphalists looked forward to the evangelization of the world along the lines of American voluntaryism. Their rival future projections were thus very different. But they rested on similar assumptions. The paramountcy of the West – intellectual, economic, military and political – would be maintained. Indeed, it would be fortified. And Christianity would continue to be the beneficiary of western strength. The West still rested on an essentially Christian framework of beliefs and ethics. And Westerners, as individuals, were overwhelmingly Christian in their outlook and expectations. The historical process begun by the First World War has demonstrated the fragility of all these certitudes. If 1914 was a watershed in the history of monarchy and legitimacy, of privilege and liberal capitalism, of western imperialism and the

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  was not as widespread in Judah as it was in northern Israel. The Deuteronomists paint Manasseh in lurid colors, in part to explain why there were so many abuses when Josiah came to the throne, and in part to explain the fate that ultimately befell Judah, despite the reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah. According to 21:10-15, it is because of the sins of Manasseh that the Lord resolves to destroy Jerusalem. We have already discussed the reforms of Josiah in connection with the book of Deuteronomy. The account indirectly gives a vivid picture of religion in Judah before the reform, with widespread worship of Baal and Asherah. The reforms represent the climax of the Deuteronomistic History. The first edition of the work was probably promulgated during the reign of Josiah. We might expect that the reform would earn Judah a reprieve in the eyes of the Lord, but this is not what happens. When the pharaoh goes to meet the king of Assyria at the Euphrates, Josiah goes to meet him at Megiddo, and, we are told, the pharaoh killed him. The parallel account in 2 Chron 35:20-24 makes clear that Josiah went to fight the pharaoh, although it is not at all clear why he should have done so. Chronicles explains that Josiah was killed by archers in battle. The account in Kings is ambiguous. The pharaoh may have had Josiah executed for whatever reason. In any case, the premature death of the reforming king confounds the expectations of Deuteronomic theology. The editors, however, provide an explanation. In 2 Kgs 22:20 the Lord tells Josiah: “I will gather you to your ancestors, and you shall be gathered to your grave in peace; your eyes shall not see all the disaster that I will bring on this place.” Josiah is to be spared the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. The problem with this explanation is that death at the hands of the pharaoh was hardly a peaceful demise. Fragment of a cuneiform tablet from Babylon listing deliveries of oil to “Jehoiachin, king of Judah”.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  Tourists flock today to Turkey’s seaside resorts and turquoise beaches or Istanbul’s covered bazaars, historic palaces, and magnificent mosques. But although around fifty tourist buses wait at the exit from Ephesus, none usually waits at the gate of Pisidian Antioch, and if one drives through the country town of Yalvaç, it is usually on its way to somewhere else. You make the three-hour drive north from the coastal city of Antalya, Paul’s Attalia, and its adjacent ancient Perge, inland along the route of the Augustan Via Sebaste through the western Taurus Mountains, the rough terrain of Isparta, the lakeside town of Egirdir, to the ruins of Pisidian Antioch about half a mile up a slope from modern Yalvaç. The great Pauline scholar Sir William Ramsay said after a visit to that onetime Roman city in 1905, “The situation of Antioch is very fine, but the locality is now deserted, forlorn, and devoid of ruins that possess any interest or beauty.” Today, the situation is as fine as ever, the locality is not exactly deserted, and the ruins may not as such possess much beauty, but surely their interest is a very different matter. In spite of on-and-off excavations before and after World War I, the latter with the aid of Francis W. Kelsey of the University of Michigan and under the direction of David M. Robinson of Johns Hopkins University, not much seems to have changed except for some scattered yellow rusting signs in German and Turkish. Tall brown weeds and charcoal gray dirt engulf the few protruding stones and surround the few excavated areas, but, on this sunny August day in 2002, you are privileged to have the young and energetic Ünal Demirer, newly appointed director of the Yalvaç Museum, as your very special guide. You walk past the site’s gate, guards, and the inevitable kiosk selling books, trinkets, and sodas. You stay carefully clear of a bulldozer hoisting a newly cut limestone block to reconstruct the Roman city gate and, it is hoped, bring more tourists to the site. Ünal leads you along a wire fence to one church and then up the hill to another. The first one’s outlines are clearly visible. It is a large fourth-century basilica with some damaged mosaics near which was found a font inscribed with the words “Saint Paul.” The second church is a much smaller one, but there is no evidence for the speculation that it was built atop the synagogue where Paul preached in Acts 13. “Maybe Paul’s synagogue is under this small church,” Ünal says, shrugging his shoulders. “Who knows?” In any case, you are not there for what Christianity later made of Paul, but for what Augustus earlier made of Galatia through cities like Pisidian Antioch, and for what Paul confronted in that world with his gospel of Christ.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Young fans such as Matilda argue that the stars themselves do. Female artists, they insist, are taking control (or at least are being marketed as taking control) of a hypersexualized industry that too often exploits women. Yes, these women may be products, but they are also producers. The decision to twerk onstage, or twirl on a poll, or dance in one’s drawers around a fully clothed man, or to pose nude on the cover of a magazine is now a woman’s alone: rather than capitulating, they are actually reclaiming their sexuality. Yet those performers still work within a system that, for the most part, demands women look and present their bodies in a particular way in order to be heard, in order to be seen, in order to work. Successfully manipulating that system to their advantage by, say, nominally reimagining the same old strip club clichés may get them rich, it may get them famous, but it shouldn’t be confused with creating actual change. Artists such as Gaga or Rihanna or Beyoncé or Miley or Nicki or Iggy or Kesha or Katy or Selena may not be puppets, but they aren’t necessarily sheroes, either. They’re shrewd strategists, spinning commodified sexuality as a choice, one that may be profitable but is no less constraining, ultimately, either to female artists or to regular girls. So the question is not whether pop divas are expressing or exploiting their sexuality so much as why the choices for women remain so narrow, why the fastest route to the top as a woman in a sexist entertainment world (just as for ordinary girls on social media) is to package your sexuality, preferably in the most extreme, attention-getting way possible. The Twerk Seen ’Round the World Miley Cyrus’s face floated against the back wall of Oakland’s Oracle Arena, a cross between a humongous selfie and the disembodied head from The Wizard of Oz. An eye winked, the lips pursed and stretched. A pink tongue unfurled, and suddenly the real Miley, dressed in a red, spangly two-piece leotard with bird feather shoulders, stepped out, arms aloft, and slid onto the stage. As she launched into the opening lines of her song “SMS (Bangerz),” tens of thousands of girls (and a few boys) screamed and held up flashing iPhones, the latter-day version of waving cigarette lighters. It was February 2014, about six months since Miley buried her Disney image forever with what has been called “the twerk seen ’round the world.”

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Some girls, such as Holly, reported feeling affirmed by hookups, released from emotional responsibility for their partner, free to acknowledge straight-up lust. At the same time, the actual sex? Meh. Girls’ physical satisfaction in hookups tends, once again, to be secondary, an afterthought. They are considerably less likely, for instance, to receive oral sex in casual encounters, and when they do, it’s rarely to climax: only 17 percent of women reported orgasms in first hookups that included oral sex alone, as opposed to 60 percent whose most recent cunnilingus experience was in a relationship. (Men in hookups, incidentally, overestimate their partners’ orgasms by a third to a half.) In hookups involving intercourse, 40 percent of women said they’d come (half the rate of men who did), as opposed to three-quarters in serious relationships. Orgasm may not be the only measure of sexual satisfaction—girls sometimes complained to me that the pressure from boyfriends to “achieve” climax stressed them out, especially when they were sexually inexperienced—but since young women are up to six times more likely to say they enjoyed an encounter (either in a relationship or a hookup) when they did come, neither is it irrelevant. Perhaps one could argue that it takes time for men to learn a female partner’s body and responses, but it also requires interest—and basic respect. Young men routinely express far less of both for hookup partners than for girlfriends or even “friends with benefits.” As one boy put it to Armstrong and her colleagues, “In a hookup, I don’t give a shit.” Women were equally invested in their partners’ pleasure either way. That may partly explain why 82 percent of men said that the morning after a hookup, they were generally glad they’d done it, compared to 57 percent of women.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Tensions: Traditional and Modern BeliefsA classic case of conflicts of beliefs involves a perceived tension between traditional belief systems and their modern equivalents. A good example of this can be seen from early twentieth-century China. After a long period of occupation by colonial powers, China was able to begin to regain its sense of national identity following the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912 and the end of the First World War in 1918. Chinese nationalists called for a rejection of traditional values – such as those of Confucianism – and the adoption of western cultural values as the best way of modernising the bruised nation.2 Gradually western science came to be seen not simply as an instrument or a technique for achieving cultural and social change, but as an ideology – a way of determining values and meaning, which inevitably eroded traditional Chinese values. Western science was seen as progressive; Confucianism as regressive. In the late 1950s, however, ‘Neo-Confucianism’ emerged as a means of maintaining continuity with older and distinctively Chinese understandings of the natural world, and offering answers to important questions that could not be answered on the basis of science alone.3 Neo-Confucianism did not deny the usefulness of scientific discourse, but rather emphasised the importance of complementing its ‘objective logical causal mode of thinking’ with an approach which could offer ‘a subjective, direct, and empathic comprehension of the world.’ This development was consolidated through the widespread revival of Confucianism in contemporary China, following the ending of Mao Zedong’s abortive ‘Cultural Revolution’ (1966–76).4 Neo-Confucianism allowed an account of the world which was attentive to both its objective and subjective dimensions, rooted in traditional Chinese understandings of the natural world. The perception of a significant tension between traditional belief systems and their modern western equivalents has become particularly significant through the rise of post-colonial criticism of the imposition of western cultural norms and values on indigenous cultures in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Polynesia. What happens when traditional beliefs, often held as identity-giving by indigenous peoples, are not so much disparaged as suppressed? To illustrate the difficulties that arise, we shall consider issues relating to the role of indigenous belief systems in modern science education in New Zealand.

• From Open (2009)

  MY RANKING PLUMMETS. I fall out of the top ten. The only time I feel fairly competent on the court is when I play Davis Cup. In Fort Meyers I help the U.S. beat Czechoslovakia, winning both matches. Otherwise, the only game at which I show any improvement is Asteroids. At the 1992 French Open I beat Pete, which feels good. Then I run into Courier again, this time in the semis. The memories of last year are still fresh, still painful, and I lose again—in straight sets. Once again Courier laces up his running shoes and goes for a jog afterward. I still can’t burn enough calories for him. I limp to Florida and crash at Nick’s house. I don’t pick up a racket the whole time I’m there. Then, reluctantly, I have one short practice on a hard court at the Bollettieri Academy, and we all fly to Wimbledon. The talent assembled in London in 1992 is stunning. There’s Courier, ranked number one, fresh off two slam victories. There’s Pete, who keeps getting better. There’s Stefan Edberg, who’s playing out of his mind. I’m the twelfth seed, and the way I’ve been playing I should be seeded lower. In my first-round match, against Andrei Chesnokov, from Russia, I play like a low seed. I lose the first set. Frustrated, I rip into myself, curse myself, and the umpire gives me an official warning for saying fuck. I almost turn to him and fire a few fuck-fuck-fucks. Instead I decide to shock him, shock everyone, by taking a breath and being composed. Then I do something more shocking. I win the next three sets. I’m in the quarters. Against Becker, who’s reached six of the last seven Wimbledon finals. This is his de facto home court, his honey hole. But I’ve been seeing his serve well lately. I win in five sets, played over two days. Memories of Munich, put to rest. In the semis I face McEnroe, three-time Wimbledon champion. He’s thirty-three, nearing the end of his career, and unseeded. Given his underdog status, and his legendary accomplishments, the fans want him to win, of course. Part of me wants him to win also. But I beat him in three sets. I’m in the final. I’m expecting to face Pete, but he loses his semifinal match to Goran Ivanisevic, a big, strong serving machine from Croatia. I’ve played Ivanisevic twice before, and both times he’s shellacked me in straight sets. So I feel for Pete, and I know I’ll be joining him soon. I have no chance against Ivanisevic. It’s a middleweight versus a heavyweight. The only suspense is whether it will be a knockout or a TKO.

• From Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939)

  It is in this same way that we must conceive the change of intention and of behaviour which characterizes emotion. The impossibility of finding a solution to the problem is apprehended objectively, as a quality of the world. This serves to motivate the new unreflective consciousness which now grasps the world differently, under a new aspect, and imposes a new behaviour — through which that aspect is grasped — and this again serves as hyle for the new intention. But emotional conduct is not on the same plane as other kinds of behaviour; it is not effectual. Its aim is not really to act upon the object as it is, by the interpolation of particular means. Emotional behaviour seeks by itself, and without modifying the structure of the object, to confer another quality upon it, a lesser existence or a lesser presence (or a greater existence, etc.). In a word, during emotion, it is the body which, directed by the consciousness, changes its relationship with the world so that the world should change its qualities. If emotion is playacting, the play is one that we believe in. A simple example will serve to explain this emotive structure: I lift my hand to pluck a bunch of grapes. I cannot do so; they are beyond my reach; so I shrug my shoulders, muttering: 'they are too green', and go on my way. The gestures, words and behaviour are not to be taken at face value. This little comedy that I play under the grapes, thereby conferring this quality of being 'too green' upon them, serves as a substitute for the action I cannot complete. They presented themselves at first as 'ready for gathering'; but this attractive quality soon becomes intolerable when the potentiality cannot be actualized. The disagreeable tension becomes, in its turn, a motive for seeing another quality in those grapes: their being 'too green', which will resolve the conflict and put an end to the tension. Only, I cannot confer this quality upon the grapes chemically. So I seize upon the tartness of grapes that are too green by putting on the behaviour of disrelish. I confer the required quality upon the grapes magically. In this case the comedy is only half sincere. But let the situation be more critical; let the incantatory behaviour be maintained in all seriousness: and there you have emotion.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  the nineteenth century. To the shrewd and analytical observer the salient fact remained the almost unrelieved failure of the missions to penetrate the heartlands of the great imperial cults: Islam, the Hindu family, Confucianism, Buddhism or for that matter, Judaism. But among the primitives and the pagans, the hills tribes and the mountains, in swamps and islands – everywhere where cultural standards were low or imperial religions had not yet penetrated – Christianity made spectacular conquests. And even in India, China and Japan, and in cities throughout the Moslem world, the Christians could boast of flourishing, if select, Christian communities, well-staffed and amply-financed missions, and an air of confidence and hope for the future. It is true there were critics, eager to pounce on any missionary detected in an un- evangelical posture. Missionaries tended to take too easily to firepower. Francis McDougal, first Bishop of Labuan, reported of an attack by pirates in 1862: ‘My double-barrelled Torry’s breechloader proved a most deadly weapon for its true shooting and certainty and rapidity of firing.’ In East Africa, the year before, Bishop Mackenzie’s battles against the slave-trading Ajawa, which involved burning villages, brought haughty protests from the High Church party, which kept aloof from missionary work. ‘It seems to me a frightful thing,’ grumbled Pusey, ‘that the messengers of the Gospel of Peace should in any way be connected, even by their presence, with the shedding of human blood. . . . The Gospel has always been planted not by doing, but by suffering. . . .’ The missionaries retorted that this was bad history, and most of them were only too glad to invoke military aid on occasion. The Reverend Denis Kemp, from the Wesleyan Gold Coast mission, asserted, in Nine Years at the Gold Coast (1898): ‘I should consider myself worse than despicable if I failed to declare my first conviction that the British army and navy are today used by God for the accomplishments of His purpose.’ They were also under fewer illusions than those at home about the virtues of their ‘charges’. The Reverend Colin Rae, from the Anglican South Africa mission, spoke for the majority: ‘The native must be kept under control, and subjected to discipline, and the keynote must be work! work! work!’ How much discipline? There was constant criticism of Catholic missions for inflicting corporal punishment on natives. But then, so did all colonial (and native) governments; and, it soon emerged, so did Protestant missions, especially the Scots ones. In 1880 there was much criticism of the Free Church of Scotland mission in

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  settlements. As early as 1769, New Englanders began celebrating “Forefathers Day” in Plymouth. Boston artist Henry Sargent unveiled his painting Landing of the Fathers in 1815. But the first volume of George Bancroft’s widely praised History of the United States (1834) may be the best example of how the Mayflower and Arbella washed ashore and seeded the ground where love of liberty bore its ripest fruit in hubristic orations by the likes of Daniel Webster at well-attended nineteenth-century anniversary celebrations. These efforts were magnified as a result of promotional skills demonstrated by such organizations as the Colonial Dames, who worked to elevate the Mayflower Pilgrims and Winthrop’s Puritans into some of the foremost figures in our national memory. 4 In 1889, the Pilgrim Monument (now known as the National Monument to the Forefathers) was dedicated at Plymouth. Showing just how “colossal” the original plan was, the Boston architect and sculptor Hammatt Billings submitted a design for a 150-foot monument, which he conceived as the American version of the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It does not nullify his purpose that the final sculpture proved to be of a smaller scale and (predictably) allegorical: a female figure of Faith points to heaven and clutches a Bible, much like the Statue of Liberty with her torch. 5 Monuments imperfectly record the past, as we all know. There is strange discrepancy between the chiseled female form (which could appear almost anywhere) and the event being recalled. John Gast’s famous 1872 painting American Progress has an ethereal female spirit flying above the pioneers’ transcontinental migratory march west across the plains; stagecoaches, wagons, railroad tracks, telegraph lines push aside Indians and buffalo that stand in their way. Billings’s statue also heralds Faith, who lofts above the actual people on the Mayflower: their names appear less prominently on the side of the structure. Thus the first English settlers’ personal motives for making the journey have been subsumed into a singular, overwhelming force of religious liberty. The settlers remain mute. The complex process of colonization is condensed and forgotten, because all human traces (the actual people tied to those names) are lost. There is no remembrance of those who failed, those without heirs or legacies. Instead, time has left subsequent generations with a hollow symbol: progress on the march. 6 The compression of history, the winnowing of history, may seem natural and neutral, but it is decidedly not. It is the means by which grade school history becomes our standard adult history. And so the great American saga, as taught, excludes the very pertinent fact that after the 1630s, less than half came to

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Church. Indeed, the third force, and institutional religion, parted company completely. For the first time we get a disassociation between religious reform and scientific development. The Reformation and the Renaissance had been at one in thinking that the true way to God, and the secrets of knowledge, were to be rediscovered by examination of the mysteries and secrets of the past; it had been assumed that knowledge of the supernatural and the natural world was inextricably linked, that metaphysics began where physics ended, and that theology was indeed the Queen of the Sciences. These were bedrock Christian assumptions; assumptions, in fact, which even antedated Christianity, or rather had been absorbed by Christianity during the process of Hellenization which marked the triumph of Pauline doctrine. During the twenty years 1640–60 we see the earliest challenge to the belief that knowledge was indivisible. We can observe it in the formative period in the history of the Royal Society. The Society, of course, was incorporated under Charles II at the Restoration; but its origins go back to the end of the Civil War. Indeed, it was none other than the materialization of the famous ‘invisible college’ so long demanded by the Christian Hermetics and third force propagandists. In origin it was undoubtedly part of a religious-scientific movement to purge Christianity and give it rebirth as part of a ‘general instauration’ of knowledge. We see this from what might be called the ‘Palatine connection’. John Wallis, in his account of the first meetings in London in 1645, says that those taking part included ‘Dr John Wilkins, afterwards Bishop of Chester, then chaplain to the Prince Elector Palatine in London’, and ‘Mr Theodore Haak, a German of the Palatinate, and then resident in London, who, I think, gave the first occasion and first suggested these meetings’. This group was undoubtedly the ‘invisible college’ referred to by Robert Boyle in letters dating from 1646–7. Later it met at Wadham College, Oxford, and moved to London in 1659, before finally attaining royal recognition, patronage and complete respectability. During its migrations and transmutations, however, the embryo Royal Society seems to have discarded its original religious context completely. Religious ‘enthusiasm’, attachment to a particular sect or credal confession – which might be politically acceptable one year, and illegal the next – were now seen as possible barriers to official approval, even fatal to the survival of the Society. The founder-members of the Royal Society were all sincere Christians, but they were coming to accept that institutional Christianity, with its feuds and intolerances, was an embarrassment and a barrier to

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  not a religious movement. It had no specific programme, other than the negative one of stamping out Protestant ‘error’. It involved no substantial reform of the Church, and embodied no change of attitude on the part of the papacy. Between 1520–42, there was a distinct chance that a council would be summoned, probably in Germany, which would in effect impose changes on the papacy. Charles V did his best to bring it about. The only occasion on which he is recorded as having lost his temper arose from the delaying tactics of Paul III. These were successful, from the papacy’s point of view. Up until about 1542, the evidence of secret consistories shows that many of the cardinals would have been willing to concede Protestant demands on a married clergy, on communion in both kinds, on vernacular translations of the scriptures, on justification by faith, on feast-days, fasts and on many other contentious points. A council held on these assumptions, and with a Protestant attendance, must have ended in a reduction of papal power. But no such council was held. After 1542 there was, in effect, a move to the right in Rome. The colloquies had failed. The Protestants were moving further apart, and it was increasingly evident that, whatever prospect there might be of compromise with the Lutherans, there could be none with the Calvinists. Contarini died, and those of his school fell under suspicion. The Inquisition was set up in Rome, under the fanatical Neapolitan papalist Cardinal Caraffa (later Pope Paul IV), whose watchwords were: ‘No man is to abase himself by showing toleration towards any sort of heretic, least of all a Calvinist’; and ‘Even if my own father were a heretic, I would gather the wood to burn him.’ The new atmosphere in Rome was puritanical and intolerant, but not reformist. The Index of Forbidden Books was set up, and there were massive book- burnings; Jews were forced to wear the Yellow Star; Daniel of Volterra, ‘the Trouserer’, was employed to clothe the nudes of the Sistine Chapel; Protestants were burned and liberals silenced. Against this background a council finally met, at Trent, in 1545. By this time few took it seriously. It had been delayed twenty-five years, during which time forms of Protestantism had spread over a large part of Europe. The dying Luther remarked: ‘The remedy comes too late’. How could he negotiate and submit now? ‘This might have been done a quarter of a century ago.’ Its proceedings were ‘twaddle’. Bucer, far more ecumenically minded, nevertheless dismissed it as ‘a joke’. Catholics were scarcely less scathing. The Council began to assemble in March; but hardly anyone arrived on time. On the day appointed for the opening, it poured with rain and no

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  worship, such as polyphonic singing. But Erasmus was taught as one of 275 boys in one room, under a single master; and the curriculum was largely confined to thought- conditioning Latin rhymes and sayings, such as ‘The prelates of the church are the salt of the earth.’ He was eighteen when both his parents died, and he saw no alternative but to join the clergy as an Augustinian; he soon regretted it and spent the next thirty years disentangling himself from his legal clerical ties, knowing that at any moment his superiors could ruin his career as a scholar and writer by forcing him to live in strict conformity with the rules of his order. He was one of many thousands who, while members of the privileged clerical order, were emotionally committed to its destruction. Erasmus was fortunate to become secretary to the Bishop of Cambrai, who sent him to the university at Paris. Here, too, was the old medieval world. The College de Montaigu was known to Parisians as ‘the cleft between the buttocks of Mother Theology’. It was ancient, dilapidated, dank and filthy; the food was revolting, the dormitories stank of urine, and there were frequent beatings. Erasmus was already twenty-six and hated it; so did Rabelais, who wanted it burnt down. Two other of its alumni, however, Ignatius Loyola and Jean Calvin, admired its austerities and welcomed their time there: here we have one of the great cleavages of the sixteenth century, between the Humanists and the Puritans. Work at the university stressed the mechanical side of religion. Thus, at the University of Louvain, where Erasmus spent some time, teachers and students were in 1493 debating the topics: do four five- minute prayers on consecutive days stand a better chance of being answered than one twenty-minute prayer? Is a prayer of ten minutes, said on behalf of ten people, as efficacious as ten one-minute prayers? The debate lasted eight weeks, longer than it had taken Columbus to sail to America the previous year, 1492. Erasmus’ intellectual break-through came in 1499, when he went to England and, at Oxford, heard Colet lecture on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Colet did not know Greek but he had been to Florence and absorbed the spirit of Valla, Ficino and the neo-Platonists. In his lectures he went behind the endless layers of commentaries to re-examine the text of Paul afresh and discover its actual meaning as an exposition of Christian faith. Thus not for the first, or the last, time, Paul’s Epistle to the Romans brought about a spiritual revelation and a new approach to the Christian life. Erasmus determined to re-examine the scriptures himself, and to learn Greek in order to do it effectively. And to support himself and his studies he began to write books.

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  Although the discussion is not strictly required in order to understand the methodology of the present study, many may find it useful to know why I have not adopted James Robinson's proposal that Christianity, especially when being compared with other religious movements of the Greco-Roman world, should be studied in terms of'trajectories'. 10 In Robinson's program matic essay, he accurately notes, in the section titled 'The Crisis of Categor ies' (pp. 4-8), that the agenda of New Testament studies has, since the initiation of critical-historical scholarship, been set by later accretions ('the patina') around the text of the New Testament. Thus, for example, scholars have written endlessly about the authorship of the Gospel of John, not because the original Gospel poses the question of authorship, but because Christian tradition attributed it to John. In order to get at the text, the overlay of tradition had first to be penetrated. This situation has now resulted, in Robinson's view, in a crisis for scholarship, since the categories of study established by the need to penetrate the patina are not effective for actually studying early Christianity. Robinson proceeds, still accurately, to criticize New Testament scholars for dealing with non-Christian religions in static terms. As he recognizes, this procedure was adopted because of a lack of evidence and research: 'The fragmentary state of the documentation did not permit tracing step by step a series of developments but required the amalgamation of references scattered over half a millenium into one coherent and harmonized picture' (pp. 12f.). When the discoveries at Qµmran and Nag Hammadi fully revealed how inadequate such a procedure was, scholars felt unable to achieve a new synthesis, but fell back on 'a disintegra- 10 See 'Introduction: The Dismantling and Reassembling of the Categories of New Testament Scholarship', in ). M. Robinson and H. Koester, Trajectories through Early Christianity, pp. 1-19. I speak of Robinson's view, since it is not clear that Koester is of precisely the same view, although several of his essays appear in the joint volume. The holistic comparison of patterns of religion 21 ted positivistic caution: rather than risk a generalization, such as describing a view as "Jewish" or "gnostic" or "Hellenistic," one limits oneself to recording that it is present in a particular document at a given place'. The listing of'unrelated instances of a given term', however, is not history (p. 13). The dilemma of scholarship and the solution proposed are put this way: The Jewish, Greek, or gnostic 'background' or 'environment' cannot be mastered by reducing it to a mass of disorganized parallels to the New Testament; it must be reconceptualized in terms of movements, 'trajectories' through the Hellenistic world (p. 13).