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 A History of Christianity (1976)

  too late; the colonial revolution was beginning. A confident native Christian clergy, running their own national churches, might have played a formative role in the construction of the new societies, as Christianity and the Christian clergy did in western and central Europe between the fifth and ninth centuries. But in the 1950s the clergy did not yet exist; and though they have since been created, the moment appears to have passed. Locally recruited and trained missionaries now dominate the movement, and form the great majority of the 60,000 Catholic and 42,000 Protestants now active in Asia, Africa and Latin-America. But their influence on Third World governments, never extensive, declines steadily; and in a great part of Asia missionary work has been halted by Communist governments. More serious, in the long run, has been the failure, or the unwillingness, of the European Christian movements to allow local insights into Christianity to develop. This failure reaches right back into the sixteenth century, when the Jesuits were first discouraged from allowing cultural reinterpretations of Christian teaching to develop. It explains the inability of Christianity to establish more than a foothold in China, India or Japan. Where syncretistic forms of Christianity have made their appearance, ‘official’ Christianity has promptly stamped on them. Thus in China, the so-called ‘Worshippers of Shang-ti’, in the 1850s, developed a Christian political reform programme, linked to a new set of commandments – their seventh commandment, for instance, included a ban on opium. Here was a case of Christianity rising up from the depths, since the ‘Worshippers’ led a rebellion against the Manchu dynasty. One missionary, Griffiths John of the LMS, wrote in 1860: ‘I fully believe that God is uprooting idolatry in this land through the insurgents, and that he will by means of them, in connection with the foreign missionary, plant Christianity in its stead.’ But the movement allowed polygamy; and it inconvenienced western political arrangements. So it was categorized as non- Christian and destroyed by General ‘Chinese’ Gordon. In Japan, too, there have been several tentative syncretistic cults, such as Kanzo Uchimua’s Mukyokai or ‘Non- Church’ movement. None has received encouragement from official Christian sects. In India, an indigenous Christian Church existed when the first Portuguese missionaries arrived around 1500. These native Christians, mainly around Kerala, and numbering about 100,000, believed they sprang from the evangelizing of India by St Thomas in the first century AD. They had a Syriac liturgy and, apparently, a true apostolic succession. But they were, of course, Nestorians. Hence both the Catholic

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  one turned up for the ceremony. By April, only six bishops were actually in Trent. The opening, postponed from month to month, finally took place in December, with four cardinals, four archbishops, and only twenty-one bishops – including not a single ruling bishop from Germany. There seems to have been no sense of urgency or historical magnitude, no reforming spirit. A papal decree, ordering bishops actually to reside in their sees, a salient reforming issue, had been almost totally ignored, notably by most of the bishops present. Thus Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, Archbishop of Milan for twenty years (1520–50) never once visited the city. The ‘host’ bishop of Trent, Christoforo Madruzzo, was a symbol of the unreformed Church. He was handsome, well-born and well-connected, and always wore the red velvet dress of a secular prince – his scarlet biretta alone betrayed the fact he was a cleric. He had been given two parishes and a canonry in his teens, later three more canonries and a deanery, had been made a bishop at twenty-six and a cardinal at thirty. At the first banquet he gave to the council fathers, he served seventy-four different dishes and a famous Valtellina wine a hundred years old, while his private orchestra played. There were a good many ladies present. Madruzzo danced with them, and induced other clerics to do so; and, so few of the bishops having turned up, the ladies pushed their way into the chancel of the cathedral at the opening ceremony. Nor did the council substantially improve. No preparatory work had been done. Seripando, the Augustinian General, characterized its first session as ‘irresolution, ignorance, incredible stupidity’. Its first decision, to discuss reform and discipline simultaneously, was reversed by the Pope, who ordered it to concentrate on dogma; and he vetoed a statement on justification. The council muddled the issue of vernacular translations, and its decree enforcing episcopal residence was feeble; even while it was being debated, the Pope was issuing exemptions to cardinals, and licensed them to hold sees in plurality, one of the recipients being the notorious d’Este. An outbreak of typhus led to an angry and panicky debate in 1547, on the translation of the council to Bologna. When the motion was finally carried, some prelates had boats and horses waiting for them to get away. They barely listened to the last notes of the Te Deum, and one bishop did not even remove his vestments but galloped out of the city in full pontificals, to the jeers of the citizens. At subsequent sessions, which lasted until the 1560s, the Council of Trent improved both in attendance and decorum. But the atmosphere did not essentially alter. The objectives of Trent, as they developed, were seen to be not so much the reform of the Church as the

• From Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988)

  Many Christian converts of the first three centuries—centuries in which civil authorities treated the church as a subversive sect—regarded the proclamation of [image file=image_rsrc2FW.jpg] —the moral freedom to rule oneself—as virtually synonymous with “the gospel.” Yet with Augustine, in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, this message changed. The work of his later years, in which he radically broke with many of his predecessors, and even with his own earlier convictions, effectively transformed much of the teaching of the Christian faith. Instead of the freedom of the will and humanity’s original royal dignity, Augustine emphasizes humanity’s enslavement to sin. Humanity is sick, suffering, and helpless, irreparably damaged by the fall,6 for that “original sin,” Augustine insists, involved nothing else than Adam’s prideful attempt to establish his own autonomous self-government.7 Astonishingly, Augustine’s radical views prevailed, eclipsing for future generations of western Christians the consensus of more than three centuries of Christian tradition. As he matured, Augustine repudiated the Manichaean version of Christian doctrine he had embraced as an enthusiastic young seeker, a doctrine that categorically denied the goodness of creation and the freedom of the will. Augustine, the chastened convert, now claimed to accept Catholic orthodoxy, and affirmed both. But, as he grasped for ways to understand his own tumultuous experience, Augustine concluded that the qualities of that original state of creation no longer applied—at least not directly—to human experience in the present. Humanity, once given the unflawed glory of creation and the freedom of the will, actually enjoyed these only in those brief primordial moments in Paradise. Ever since the fall, they have been apprehended only in moments of inspired imagination, and even then but partially. For all practical purposes they are wholly lost. Given the intense inner conflicts involving his passionate nature and the struggle to control sexual impulses he reveals in his Confessions, Augustine’s decision to abandon his predecessors’ emphasis on free will need not surprise us. Much more surprising, in fact, is the result. Why did the majority of Latin Christians, instead of repudiating Augustine’s idiosyncratic views as marginal—or rejecting them as heretical—eventually embrace them? Why did his teaching on “original sin” become the center of western Christian tradition, displacing, or at least wholly recasting, all previous views of creation and free will? The political and social situation of Christians in the early centuries had changed radically by Augustine’s time. Traditional declarations of human freedom, forged by martyrs defying the emperor as anti-Christ incarnate, no longer fit the situation of Christians who now found themselves, under Constantine and his Christian successors, the emperor’s “brothers and sisters in Christ.” But Augustine’s theory conformed to this new situation and interpreted the new arrangement of state, church, and believer in ways that, many agreed, made religious sense of the new political realities.

• 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 A History of Christianity (1976)

  of a total Christian society had taken shape: the faith not only had answers, but definitive and compulsory answers, to questions on almost every aspect of human behaviour and arrangements. A pagan society embracing Christianity was accepting a completely new way of life. Moreover, in large parts of central Europe and the Balkans, such societies were offered the choice between two increasingly different brands of Christian practice, each attended by different cultural and geopolitical consequences. Fortunately, we have a unique glimpse of the dilemma, as it appeared to a barbarian monarch, thanks to the survival of two documents. In the 850s, the emergent state of Bulgaria, which feared both Carolingian and Byzantine imperialism, had seemed set on a pro-Frankish course, and in the early 860s it looked as though its king, Boris I, would accept Christianity from Frankish hands. In 864 a powerful military and naval demonstration by the Byzantines led him to change his mind; and he became an Orthodox Christian in 865. Orthodox clergy moved into his territories in huge numbers, and this rapid introduction of new customs provoked a revolt of the Old Bulgar aristocracy, which Boris put down with some savagery. In consequence, Boris wrote to the Patriarch of Constantinople, Photus, asking for an autonomous Church – that is, a patriarchate equivalent to the five which already existed. Photus’s reply, which survives, was long but unsatisfactory; and in 866, Boris made a move to Rome, sending the Pope a letter asking for replies to a hundred and six questions. The Pope, Nicholas I, was delighted, despatched two bishops, and answered all the queries. His reply, which we possess, is one of the most fascinating documents of the entire Dark Ages. Boris did not raise any theological issues. He was concerned with behaviour, not belief. His questions reflect the tensions created in Bulgarian society by the reception of Christianity, and in particular by the rigorous ritualism of the Orthodox Greeks. Were the Byzantines right to forbid the Bulgars to take baths on Wednesdays and Fridays? To take communion without wearing their belts? To eat the meat of animals killed by eunuchs? Was it true that no layman could conduct public prayers for rain, or make a sign of the cross over a table before a meal? And that lay-folk must stand in church with arms folded over their breast? (‘No, no, no,’ said the Pope.) Were the Greek clergy right to refuse to accept the repentance of some of the pagan rebels? (‘Of course not,’ said the Pope.) On the question of Byzantine ecclesiastical claims, the Pope denied that Constantinople was the second in rank of the patriarchates; it was

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Christian ideal, or rather punished when they did not. Powerful men would not have their morals controlled by bishops, let alone rural deans. When, around 1310, the Dean of Crewkerne served an episcopal admonition on Sir Alan Ploknet, he found himself seized by the throat and forced to eat the bishop’s letter, seal and all. The same principle applied to disciplining the clergy. The actual working clergy, living on stipends, were poor, and could be brought to book without too much trouble. Senior clergy, or pluralists – the two were often synonymous – who were more likely than most to break canon law or set a bad example, could fight the bishops in the courts. As the bishops had to pay the costs of such actions, which might well go to Rome, they left offenders alone. Thus the development of canon law, in theory designed to improve the morals of the clergy, in fact made improvement more difficult. The devaluation of the bishop was, for the clergy as a whole, perhaps the most baleful consequence of the reform programme of the papacy. From the late eleventh century onwards they lost their power and independence in such matters as the liturgy, canonization, inspection of abbeys and convents, and definitions of law and doctrine. They were merely lines of communication to the Pope. Hence men who aspired to change and improve society, to carry through a Christian revolution, no longer, on the whole, sought bishoprics. These went, instead, to the younger sons of great territorial magnates, and to successful civil servants. They kept their wealth and their nominal status. Many of the 500 bishops of the Latin church could claim to occupy thrones which went back to the second century, or at any rate were older than any secular royal house. Thus the episcopate had to be treated as one of the key institutions of western society. When attempts were made to reform the Church in the fifteenth century, beginning with the papacy, it was natural to turn to the bishops, and to a revival of the conciliar system, to do the job. But they proved incapable of performing it. Crown and papacy, between them, had destroyed the once-powerful tradition of episcopal initiative and leadership. At the fifteenth- century councils, the bishops tended to vote either by nationalities, in response to royal instructions, or in the supposed Roman interest. The idea of acting independently as an international college had been lost. The spring had broken in an institution which had had its origins in New Testament times. The destruction of episcopal independence obviously enhanced papal authority within the Church; but the main beneficiary was the State. The Ambrosian bishop was a real check to royal power, as well as the Pope’s. With the bishop reduced to a

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  PART SEVEN Almost-Chosen Peoples (1500–1910) O N 13 NOVEMBER 1622, the Virginia Company of London, then engaged in opening up the Atlantic Coast of North America, held a feast at the Merchant Taylors’ Hall. The subscription was three shillings a head: ‘And for that at such great feasts venison is esteemed a most necessary compliment, the Court hath thought fit that letters be addressed in the name of the Company unto such noblemen and gentlemen as are of this society to request this favour at their hands, and withall their presence at the said supper.’ Before the feast, the Company listened to a sermon at St Michael’s Cornhill, delivered by the Dean of St Paul’s, John Donne. Dean Donne told the four hundred well-to-do merchants present that their object in crossing the Atlantic should not be so much the amassing of wealth as the recovery of souls, ‘Act over the Acts of the Apostles; be you a light to the gentiles, that sit in darkness . . . God taught us to make ships, not to transport ourselves, but to transport Him.’. Let them all be missionaries, he concluded, ‘And you shall have made this island, which is but the suburbs of the old world, a bridge, a gallery to the new; to join all to that world that shall never grow old, the Kingdom of Heaven.’ We have no means of knowing how seriously the Virginia merchants took Donne’s exhortations to act in the spirit of the first Apostles. The universalist urge which had animated the early Christians had never wholly disappeared. But it had become inextricably mingled with other motives and often completely subordinated to them. Moreover, it appeared to have lost some of its dynamism. In the seventh century, Christianity’s expansion to the south and east was sealed off by the various Monophysite heresies, and by Islam, which constituted, and indeed still constitutes, an almost impenetrable barrier to Christian progress. Byzantium abandoned its

• 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 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.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  How wrong I had been, I berated myself. Why would I have ever trusted Anaïs with the confidences of my friends? I knew how she was, adamant about others keeping her secrets, but careless in exposing the intimacies of others. Luise Rainer, the actress Anaïs had compared me to when we met, and the writer Leslie Blanch had both accused her of publishing private details about their marriages revealed in confidence. Anaïs had betrayed those friendships in the Diaries, so what made me think she wouldn’t betray me and the friends I’d convinced to trust her? Clara was right. Anaïs wasn’t a feminist; she was a male-identified woman. She was of another generation, had never been in a consciousness-raising group, had gone from her mother’s house surrounded by her protective brothers to become Hugo’s bride at twenty, and had never lived without at least one husband at her side. Oh, she’d understood sisterhood well enough to benefit from our promotion of her as a woman writer, but she didn’t have a clue about the supportive trust that grew between women. When I phoned Anaïs the following week, I complimented her on receiving another honorary doctorate, but could not hold back my disappointment in her. “I told you those tapes were only for you! What am I going to tell the women who trusted me?” “Don’t tell them anything,” she replied lightly. “I want to come to your house tomorrow to pick them up.” “Why do you need them? Are you going to publish them?” Anaïs asked. “No! I’m going to destroy them.” “Oh, don’t do that. I’ll take care of them. They shouldn’t be destroyed.” “Are you going to publish them?” I asked her. “Who told you that?” “No one. You’re the one who said you were looking for erotic stories to buy.” I stopped short, knowing that when she was guilty she would just lie more. “Please let me pick them up.” “I don’t know where they are,” she said. “They got misplaced.” “Oh, don’t do this,” I moaned. “What do you mean?” There was a clear warning in her voice. I had stepped over the line. I was silent, afraid of what I might say. “Just tell those women,” she said in her most soothing voice, “that I returned them to you, and you destroyed them. They don’t need to know anything else.” “What will you do with them?” I asked. “Are you going to give them to that porn collector?” “I don’t know what you’re so worried about,” she said, dismissing my concern. “Rupert and I could hardly hear the voices over the sound of the waves.” I was so upset by the conversation that I immediately phoned Renate. “Those women trusted me, Renate,” I groaned. “If I lie and say what Anaïs told me to tell them, and then one of them discovers the tapes in that collector’s hands, or at the Kinsey Institute, or published somewhere, I couldn’t hold my head up!”

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Not only did the lady fail to repay Salabaetto by the date she had promised, but a further month went by, then another, and when he asked her for his money, all he could get out of her was a string of excuses. Salabaetto now realized how cleverly he had been taken in by her villainy, and knowing that he could prove nothing against her (for he had no written evidence of the transaction, and there was no independent witness), he was exceedingly distressed and reproached himself bitterly for his foolishness. Moreover, he was too ashamed to lodge a complaint with the authorities, because he had been warned of her character beforehand and had only himself to blame if he was made a laughing-stock for behaving so stupidly. And when he received several letters from his principals ordering him to change the money and forward it to them, fearing lest his lapse should be discovered if he remained in Palermo any longer without obeying their instructions, he decided to leave. So he boarded a small ship, and instead of sailing to Pisa as he should have done, he went to Naples. 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 Constantinople5 – 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.’

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘Rinieri,’ she said, ‘my mistress is positively at her wits’ end, for one of her brothers called on her this evening and kept her talking for ages, after which he insisted on staying for supper, and he still hasn’t left, though I think he’ll be going quite soon. This explains why she hasn’t been able to come to you; but she’ll be down in a moment, and begs you not to be angry with her for having to wait so long.’ Thinking the maid’s story was true, the scholar replied: ‘Tell my lady that she is not to worry on my account until it is convenient for her to come. But tell her to come as soon as she can.’ The maid closed the window and retired to bed, whereupon the lady said to her lover: ‘What do you say to that, my dearest? Do you think I’d keep him out there freezing to death if I cared for him, as you suspect?’ Her lover’s doubts were by now almost totally dispelled, and she got into bed with him, where they disported themselves merrily and rapturously for hours on end, laughing and making fun of the hapless scholar. The scholar was walking up and down the courtyard to keep himself warm, and since there was nowhere for him to sit down or take shelter, he kept cursing the lady’s brother for tarrying so long with her. Whenever he heard a sound, he thought it must be the lady opening a door to let him in, but his hopes were dashed every time.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Having already made up his mind what he should do, as soon as the wedding was over he sought the King’s permission to depart, saying that he wished to return to his own estates and consummate his marriage there. So he duly set out on horseback, but instead of going to his estates he came to Tuscany, where he learned that the Florentines were waging war against the Sienese, 3 and resolved to offer them his assistance. The Florentines welcomed him with open arms and placed him in command of a sizeable body of men, paying him a good stipend, and for a long time thereafter he remained in their service. His bride was far from happy with the turn events had taken, and in the hope of persuading him to return to his estates by her wise administration, she went to Roussillon, where all the people received her as their rightful mistress. Since there had been no Count to govern the territory for some little time, she was faced on her arrival with nothing but confusion and chaos. But being a capable woman, she applied herself with great diligence to the task in hand, and soon had everything restored to order, thus winning the profound respect and devotion of her subjects, who were enormously pleased by her endeavours and strongly critical of the Count because of his indifference towards her. Having fully restored the Count’s domain to order, the lady communicated this fact to her husband by way of two knights, beseeching him to inform her whether it was on her account that he was deserting his lands, in which case she would go away in order to please him. He answered them very brusquely, saying: ‘She may do whatever she likes. For my own part, I shall go back to live with her when she wears this ring upon her finger, and when she is carrying a child of mine in her arms.’ The ring was very dear to him, and he never let it stray from his finger on account of certain magical powers which he had been told that it possessed. The knights realized that it was virtually impossible for the lady to comply with either of these harsh conditions, but no amount of reasoning on their part could shift him from his resolve, and they therefore returned to their mistress to acquaint her with his answer. Their tidings filled her with dismay, but after giving some thought to the matter she decided to try and find out how and where these two things might be accomplished, thus enabling her to win back her husband. Having carefully considered what she must do, she called together a group of the leading notables of those parts, gave them a highly succinct and moving description of all she had done out of her love for the Count, and pointed out the results of her endeavours.

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

  They hope that the next generation will be entirely emancipated from it. Waldo Frank reports the following interesting conversation with a communist factory director: “‘Is there then no danger,’ I said at last, ‘to your communist ideal?’ ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ has always seemed to me to be the golden rule of socialism....Yet here you are, remunerating inventions with money, paying superior sums of money to the more capable men. Here you are, planning your new hierarchy of merit by the old hated symbol of money....It almost seems to me as if you were fighting the old order by infecting yourselves with the disease which rotted it.’ The communist answers him....’To meet the temporary emergency, we must induce the men we have, men brought up in the capitalist world, men still open to capitalist ideas, to speed up production. We must do this by any means that will convince them....But meantime, our children are being brought up on pure communist values.’ ‘You mean that the standard by which your young people are being taught to live will be stronger than the example they see before them?...When has education been according to an ideal superior to the practised way of life? And when has an ideal prevailed against the reality which belied it?’” {133} Inequality of reward need not of course, even if it represents a permanent concession to the weaknesses of human nature, as is probably the case, result in the old inequalities of power which breed inequalities of privilege, which are either disproportionate or totally irrelevant to the importance of function and the efficiency with which function is performed. It is possible for society to prevent accumulations of unequal rewards from being transmuted into instruments of social power. But it cannot prevent them from becoming symbols of unequal social prestige. In other words, if the desperate means which the communist uses are to be justified by the totally different and more ideal society which he creates, the justification is not as convincing as it seems to the romantic communist. If the new society does not eliminate the weaknesses of human nature, which cause injustice, as completely as he supposes, he has lost the moral advantage of his absolutism. Perhaps a society which gradually approximates the ideal will not be so very inferior morally to one which makes one desperate grasp after the ideal, only to find that the realities of history and nature dissolve it. Absolutism, in both religious and political idealism, is a splendid incentive to heroic action, but a dangerous guide in immediate and concrete situations. In religion it permits absurdities and in politics cruelties, which fail to achieve justifying consequences because the inertia of human nature remains a nemesis to the absolute ideal. Individuals may aspire to the absolute with more justification and less peril than societies. If the price which they must pay is high, the probable futility of their effort involves only their own losses.