Disappointment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘Madam, it was a costly idea of mine to take you fishing with me, for nobody ever experienced so much sorrow as I have endured from the day I lost you, and now it appears, from the coldness of your greeting, that you do not even recognize me. Don’t you see that I am your Messer Ricciardo? Don’t you understand that I came to Monaco fully prepared to offer this gentleman whatever ransom he required, so that I could have you back again and take you away from this house? And are you perhaps unaware that he has been good enough to tell me that he’ll hand you over for whatever sum I choose to pay?’ The lady turned towards him, with the faintest suggestion of a smile on her lips. ‘Are you addressing me, sir?’ she asked. ‘You must surely be mistaking me for someone else, for as far as I can recall, I have never seen you before in my life.’ ‘Oh, come now,’ said Messer Ricciardo. ‘Take a good look at me, and if you choose to remember properly, you will soon see that I am your husband, Ricciardo di Chinzica.’ ‘You will forgive me for saying so, sir,’ said the lady, ‘but it is not so proper as you imagine for me to stare at you. And in any case, I have already looked at you sufficiently to know that I have never seen you before.’ Messer Ricciardo supposed her to be doing this because she was afraid of Paganino, in whose presence she was perhaps reluctant to admit that she recognized him. And so, after a while, he asked Paganino if he would kindly allow him to speak with her alone in her room. Paganino agreed, on condition that he made no attempt to kiss her against her will, and he told the lady to go with Messer Ricciardo into her room, listen to what he had to say, and reply as freely as she pleased. Thus the lady and Messer Ricciardo went into her room, closed the door behind them, and sat down. ‘Oh, my dearest,’ said Messer Ricciardo, ‘my dear, sweet darling, my treasure, now do you remember your Ricciardo who loves you more than life itself? No? How is this possible? Can I have changed so much? Oh, my pretty one, do take another little look at me.’ The lady, who had begun to laugh, interrupted his babbling, saying:

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

  European leadership because of military defeat, and then there would be other contenders: first England, followed by Geneva.Prospects for a civilized religious settlement and the reunion of the Western Church were high around 1541–2, but they ended in disappointment. This was the time when Hermann von Wied, Archbishop of Cologne, the only prince- bishop in Germany to try meeting the Reformation halfway, was attempting to lead his archdiocese in a Reformation whose planning involved not just his own clergy but also Martin Bucer. In the next few years, however, he failed, defeated by fierce opposition from traditionalists in his own Cathedral Chapter and by firm intervention from Charles V which eventually saw him ejected from his see. If von Wied’s plans had worked, Cologne might have been an example to other Catholic prelates of how to find a middle path of change within the old structures.37 With the failure of discussions between Protestants and Catholics around the imperial Diet at Regensburg in 1541 (see pp. 662–3), the time for humanist moderation was evidently past; against this background, in 1545 a council of the Western Church convened by the Pope at last began meeting at Trent, in a mood of aggressive confidence, to take new initiatives in the papal Church. By the late 1540s, it looked as if the Reformation’s opponents were triumphing. Luther died in 1546, by which point Zwingli was long dead. The Holy Roman Emperor confronted the military alliance formed by his Lutheran princes, the ‘Schmalkaldic League’, and in 1547 roundly defeated them (see Plate 55): as part of his victory, he ended the independent career of the Reformation in Strassburg, which had with uncharacteristic rashness committed itself to the Schmalkaldic alliance.38 Martin Bucer hastily left Strassburg for England, where the group of politicians ruling in the name of Henry VIII’s young son, Edward VI, after Henry’s death in 1547 now had the chance to propel England into the leadership of the Reformation throughout Europe. Archbishop Cranmer, one of their number and now a hardened political operator, led a thoroughgoing destruction of the traditional devotional world in England. His Reformation owed most to the example of Strassburg and the Swiss, though in his vernacular liturgy for the English Church, the Book of Common Prayer of 1549, revised in more uncompromisingly Reformed style in 1552, Cranmer was ready to draw on any useful precedent. Those included the more conservative Lutheran forms of worship recently devised in Germany (he had married a German theologian’s niece in the conservatively Lutheran city of Nuremberg when on embassy there for Henry VIII in 1532).39 Consequently the English Prayer Book, only lightly revised in 1559 and finally given a slightly more Catholic-leaning makeover in 1662, has remained an extraordinarily flexible vehicle for a form of Western

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

  § 163. The Pseudo-Clementine Works. The most complete collection of the genuine and spurious works of Clement in Migne’s Patrol. Graeca, Tom. I. and II. The name of Clement has been forged upon several later writings, both orthodox and heretical, to give them the more currency by the weight of his name and position. These pseudo-Clementine works supplanted in the church of Rome the one genuine work of Clement, which passed into oblivion with the knowledge of the Greek language. They are as follows: 1. A Second Epistle to the Corinthians, falsely so called, formerly known only in part (12 chapters), since 1875 in full (20 chapters).1217 It is greatly inferior to the First Epistle in contents and style, and of a later date, between 120 and 140, probably written in Corinth; hence its connection with it in MSS.1218 It is no epistle at all, but a homily addressed to "brothers and sisters." It is the oldest known specimen of a post-apostolic sermon, and herein alone lies its importance and value.1219 It is an earnest, though somewhat feeble exhortation to active Christianity and to fidelity in persecution, meantime contending with the Gnostic denial of the resurrection. It is orthodox in sentiment, calls Christ "God and the Judge of the living and the dead," and speaks of the great moral revolution wrought by him in these words (2 Cor. 1): "We were deficient in understanding, worshipping stocks and stones, gold and silver and brass, the works of men; and our whole life was nothing else but death.... Through Jesus Christ we have received sight, putting off by his will the cloud wherein we were wrapped. He mercifully saved us.... He called us when we were not, and willed that out of nothing we should attain a real existence." 2. Two Encyclical Letters on Virginity. They were first discovered by J. J. Wetstein in the library of the Remonstrants at Amsterdam, in a Syriac Version written A.D. 1470, and published as an appendix to his famous Greek Testament, 1752.1220 They commend the unmarried life, and contain exhortations and rules to ascetics of both sexes. They show the early development of an asceticism which is foreign to the apostolic teaching and practice. While some Roman Catholic divines still defend the Clementine origin,1221 others with stronger arguments assign it to the middle or close of the second century.1222 3. The Apostolical Constitutions and Canons.1223 The so-called Liturgia S. Clementis is a part of the eighth book of the Constitutions. 4. The Pseudo-Clementina, or twenty Ebionitic homilies and their Catholic reproduction, the Recognitions.1224 5. Five Decretal Letters, which pseudo-Isidore has placed at the head of his collection. Two of them are addressed to James, the Lord’s Brother, are older than the pseudo-Isidore, and date from the second or third century; the three others were fabricated by him.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  § 195. But, however the objections are put, the result is damaging to this theory. To say that fire or air is a living body is most improbable in itself; it is contradicted by experience; and is unsupported by any good reason. And to deny that things which have souls need be living bodies is most unreasonable; for it would follow that there was no difference between souls that exist in bodies and those that do not. § 196. Then, at ‘They seem to have held’, he states the reason used in support of this theory and refutes it; after which, at ‘It is... evident’ he draws a general conclusion from all the foregoing discussions. The reason, he says, why some philosophers seem to have thought that a soul existed in ‘these’, i.e. in all the elements, was that they thought that the whole and the parts in elements were of the same nature, since the elements are simple. Observing that that part of ‘the containing element’, i.e. the air, which came into contact with the bodies of animals through their breathing, was the cause and principle of animal life, they thought it necessary to conclude that the soul of the whole was ‘of the same specific nature as the parts’, that is to say, that all the containing air was alive. § 197. At ‘If then’ he refutes this argument. The assumption is that, because the portion of the air removed and inhaled by an animal is of a like nature to the air as a whole, the soul of the animal itself is, as it were, a portion of the soul of the whole air. But on their own principle this is clearly false; for, according to them, the soul of air ‘exists’, i.e. is immortal, as that which has never ceased from vivifying animate beings, whereas the soul of this or that particular animal ‘does not exist’, i.e. is not immortal. Therefore either of two awkward consequences flow from this theory. If all the parts of air, those outside and those breathed in, are homogeneous, then the same is true of the soul; but this has been disproved. But if the soul’s parts are heterogeneous while the air’s are homogeneous, then the soul is not in every part ‘of the whole’, i.e. of the whole air; which is against those who said that all the air had a soul. § 198. Then at ‘It is evident’ Aristotle concludes this part of the discussion of earlier opinions. Neither of these two predications made’ by the ancients was, he says, either true or well-expressed; namely that knowledge in the soul is a consequence of its being composed of elements, and that movement is in it for the same reason. So much should be clear to anyone who has followed the discussion up to the present. TEXT 411a26–41lb30

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

  Gregory Nazianzen, who, in the judgment of Socrates, was the most devout and eloquent man of his age,635 and who himself, as bishop of Constantinople, presided for a time over the second ecumenical council, had so bitter an observation and experience as even to lose, though without sufficient reason, all confidence in councils, and to call them in his poems "assemblies of cranes and geese." "To tell the truth" thus in 382 (a year after the second ecumenical council, and doubtless including that assembly in his allusion) he answered Procopius, who in the name of the emperor summoned him in vain to a synod—"to tell the truth, I am inclined to shun every collection of bishops, because I have never yet seen that a synod came to a good end, or abated evils instead of increasing them. For in those assemblies (and I do not think I express myself too strongly here) indescribable contentiousness and ambition prevail, and it is easier for one to incur the reproach of wishing to set himself up as judge of the wickedness of others, than to attain any success in putting the wickedness away. Therefore I have withdrawn myself, and have found rest to my soul only in solitude."636 It is true, the contemplative Gregory had an aversion to all public life, and in such views yielded unduly to his personal inclinations. And in any case he is inconsistent; for he elsewhere speaks with great respect of the council of Nice, and was, next to Athanasius, the leading advocate of the Nicene creed. Yet there remains enough in his many unfavorable pictures of the bishops and synods of his time, to dispel all illusions of their immaculate purity. Beausobre correctly observes, that either Gregory the Great must be a slanderer, or the bishops of his day were very remiss. In the fifth century it was no better, but rather worse. At the third general council, at Ephesus, 431, all accounts agree that shameful intrigue, uncharitable lust of condemnation, and coarse violence of conduct were almost as prevalent as in the notorious robber-council of Ephesus in 449; though with the important difference, that the former synod was contending for truth, the latter for error. Even at Chalcedon, the introduction of the renowned expositor and historian Theodoret provoked a scene, which almost involuntarily reminds us of the modern brawls of Greek and Roman monks at the holy sepulchre under the restraining supervision of the Turkish police. His Egyptian opponents shouted with all their might: "The faith is gone! Away with him, this teacher of Nestorius!" His friends replied with equal violence: "They forced us [at the robber-council] by blows to subscribe; away with the Manichaeans, the enemies of Flavian, the enemies of the faith! Away with the murderer Dioscurus? Who does not know his wicked deeds?