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 Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  alteration became a matter of high offence in the East (see p. 350). Augustine’s reputation among Greeks suffered accordingly. Modern Western readers may find it hard to understand Greek anger over the Augustinian view of the Trinity, while finding Augustine’s view of human nature more difficult to condone, particularly if one reads the increasingly harsh later phases of his writings against the Pelagians. What we need to remember is that Augustine’s bleak view of human nature and capabilities was formed against a background of the destruction of the world he loved. In one of the greatest disappointments ever experienced by the Church, the Western Roman Empire of the 390s, which had promised to be an image of God’s kingdom on earth, disintegrated into chaos and futility. Augustine himself died in 430 during a siege of his beloved Hippo by the Arian Vandals, who captured all North Africa and bitterly persecuted the Catholic Church there for sixty years. He stands between the Classical world and a very different medieval society, sensing acutely that the world was getting old and feeble: a sense which did not desert Western Europe down to the seventeenth century. EARLY MONASTICISM IN THE WEST (400–500) It was hardly surprising that the sudden sequence of great power and great disappointment for the imperial Church in the West inspired Western Christians to imitate the monastic life of the Eastern Church. Among the first was Martin, who became one of the most important saints in Western Latin devotion. An ex- soldier like the Egyptian pioneer Pachomius, he abandoned his military career in Gaul (France) to live a life apart from the world. Around him, probably in the year 361, there gathered the West’s first known monastic community at what seems to have been an ancient local cultic site in a marshy valley, now called Ligugé; it was near the city of Pictavia (now Poitiers), which was already the seat of an important bishopric. Archaeological traces still remain of Martin’s first community buildings at Ligugé, treasured by the monks who, after many vicissitudes, have returned to this place so resonant in the story of the religious life.59 Not long afterwards, in 372, Martin was one of the first ascetics anywhere in the Church to be chosen as a bishop, in the Gaulish city far north of Poitiers called Civitas Turonum (now Tours). While bishop, he still lived as a monk, and his second monastic foundation near Tours was destined to fare rather better than Ligugé in its later monastic history: as Marmoutier, it remained one of the most famous and ancient abbeys in France until its near-total destruction in the French Revolution.

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

  first encountered the unfamiliar name of Origen through the pages of Erasmus’s Enchiridion. Pacifist radicals also honoured his pacifism, while others noted certain discreet indications that he might not have been entirely convinced of the adequacy of the views of God, Christ, salvation and Trinity which the Council of Chalcedon summed up back in 451. Erasmus had rightly (but at the time unsuccessfully) poured scorn on the so-called ‘Johannine comma’, the suspect text in I John 5.7-8 which is the only explicit mention in the Bible of the Trinity in something like its developed form.78 Erasmus had also noted that the term ‘God’ is rarely used for Christ in the biblical text, being normally reserved for the Father alone. When editing the fourth-century theologian Hilary of Poitiers he acutely picked up the same phenomenon in Hilary, besides Hilary’s total silence on the divine status of the Spirit. And it was hard to miss one very individual strand running through so much of Erasmus’s writing: he brought an ironic smile to the contemplation of the divine and the sacred, and he discerned an ironic smile on the face of the divinity. That sense of irony has not left Western theology since.79 Erasmus did not end his life feeling that his career was a success. His pan- European humanist project seemed at its most convincing and his reputation at its highest peak in a brief period after 1517, that same year which saw the beginning of Martin Luther’s rebellion. When Erasmus died on a visit to Basel in 1536, his chaste red marble monument was placed in the former cathedral, from where the prince-bishop had already fled and where Reformers had smashed sacred furniture and images of the saints, much to the elderly scholar’s alarm and misery. For a decade and more before his death, Erasmus unhappily shifted his centre of operations (he never really looked for a home) round a circuit of western Europe, successively from Louvain to Basel to a house overlooking the cathedral in Freiburg im Breisgau. He had taken one principled stand against Luther, and thus had signalled that he would not abandon the old Church (see pp. 613–14), but he still desperately tried to avoid decisively taking sides in the storm which was now tearing apart the world of elegantly phrased letters, high- minded reform projects and charming Latin-speaking friends which he had patiently extended across the face of Europe. As a result, increasing numbers on either side of the new divide regarded him as a time-serving coward who lacked courage to take sides now that everyone was expected to do so. What had gone wrong? What had happened to the humanist project for changing the world through the power of a perfectly balanced Ciceronian sentence?

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

  Catholic Church from a miniature state centring on a vast basilican church built above Peter’s shrine. Although Paul is honourably enshrined in a major basilica (San Paolo fuori le Mura), it is sited in a formerly malaria-infested plain, a mile beyond the walls of Rome, and the average tourist could be forgiven for not noticing that the Apostle of the Gentiles had much to do with the city. That was the case long before the catastrophic fire which destroyed most of the historic interest of Paul’s shrine-church in 1823 – and it is significant that much of the previous fascination of that church lay in the fact that, in contrast to the strenuous construction history of St Peter’s Basilica, no one had bothered to rebuild or much alter St Paul’s-outside-the-Walls since its first enlargement in the 380s. Its neglect in the late medieval period was not the least among the scandals of fifteenth-century Rome.59 Paul’s epistles are the oldest surviving documents in the Christian tradition. They shaped the theology of the Christianity which survived as mainstream, and the theology of the Latin West especially reflects Paul’s preoccupations, which had brought him into serious conflict with his fellow Apostle Peter (see pp. 105–6). Tensions between the two are also reflected in early apocryphal Christian books.60 By contrast with Paul’s literary achievement, we have already noted Peter as being credited with two short epistles in the New Testament which are so different in character that at least one of them cannot be by him, and in any case no one has regarded either of them as especially significant in the life of the Church. Yet Peter has taken the limelight in Rome. The fading of Paul from popular devotional consciousness and from much share in the charisma of Rome is one of the great puzzles of Christian history, but it is obvious that part of the answer to the puzzle lies in a vast expansion of the power and prestige of the Bishops of Rome. Some time in the 160s a shrine was built for Peter at the place of his burial, perhaps to commemorate a hundred years passing since his death. The remains of it, directly under the high altar of the present basilica, were recovered during the twentieth century in a sensational series of archaeological investigations.61 The shrine was a modest structure, but its very existence in a public urban cemetery speaks of a community determined to stake its claim to an open existence in the capital. It is unclear whether Peter had actually played the role of bishop in the Church in Rome, even if he did indeed die in the city, and the names traditionally provided for his successor bishops up to the end of the first century are no more than names. They are probably the result of later second- century back-projection to create a history for the episcopal succession in the era when episcopal succession had become significant. Even in the second century, the evidence suggests that Bishops of Rome were part of a team of presbyters

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  wrong, and I guess some of us thought he always would. One of his sisters sobbed, “I thought he was going to get a miracle.” All the hemorrhages and death sentences he had survived didn’t count. On the night prior to the funeral, family members gathered in the funeral home in Brownwood, the largest town close to Bangs, and greeted one another with exclamations of surprise at how long it had been since we last saw one another. The old animosities no longer held. Betty Ann gave me a long hug and said, “How’s your mama? Tell her I love her.” Only my mother and brother were missing; they had begged off, saying neither of them felt up to it. Betty Ann drew my sisters to her and they clung to her like a long-lost aunt. The preacher woman’s daughter was there, laughing and talking with my sisters. I marveled at the banality of the scene. After all the lies and secrets, we were, finally, like any other family. Voices, soft and layered one upon the other—how you been, have you seen so and so, that’s her over there, her husband died ten years back, oh no, it’s been so long—all spoken in half whispers, as though we feared to wake the dead. At the edges of the crowd, the conversation was of an entirely different nature: Should Brother Terrell raise Randall from the dead? Maybe he should leave him in peace. He was so sick when he died. Well, God had promised Randall a miracle. But he had already been embalmed. Wasn’t that a problem? If only Randall hadn’t been sick so long. If only Brother Terrell had gotten to him before the mortician. No one said, “Look, this isn’t going to happen.” Several of us had left the ministry decades earlier to pursue nursing, software development, accounting, and other careers built on reason and rationality, but that evening we had once again taken our places in a universe where the impossible could happen, whether you really wanted it to or not. The next morning, my husband steered the car down Highway 84 toward the funeral in Bangs. I gazed out the window, puzzled at the unreality of finding myself en route to a place I had left so far behind, a place I turned away from at every juncture. When friends said things like, “Nothing happens in God’s world without a reason,” and “There are no coincidences,” I rolled my eyes and shuddered. They had no idea where that kind of thinking could lead. Everything within me had shifted, from belief to atheism to agnosticism to a sort of “cultural Christianity,” yet the stretch between Brownwood and Bangs remained

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Joan was talking about quitting her job and becoming a bum for a while. I envied her the freedom of choice that allowed her to consider this, knowing she could get another job whenever she wanted one. That was what being white and knowing how to type meant. This was to be a holiday fete, not simply a wash-your-foot-and-come. I never enjoyed parties much if Muriel and I weren’t giving them, although I had started to really enjoy the parties out in Queens that we went to with Vida and Pet and Gerri. Those parties given by Black women were always full of food and dancing and reefer and laughter and high-jinks. Vida with her dramatic voice and sense of the absurd, and Pet with her dancing feet that were never still, made it easy not to be shy, to move with the music and laughter. It was at those parties that I finally learned how to dance. Joan and Nicky’s parties were different. Usually there wasn’t much music, and when there was, it was not for dancing. There was always lots of wine around, both red and white, because Nicky and Joan were more Bermuda shorts than dungarees. One of the noticeable differences between the two sets was wine versus hard liquor. But more than one glass of any kind of wine gave me heartburn, and besides it was all too dry for my taste. It was not sophisticated to like sweet wine, and that became another one of my secret vices, like soft ice cream, to be indulged only around tried and true friends. And there was never enough food. Tonight, for the holidays, a beautifully laid table graced the corner of Nicky and Joan’s great, high-ceilinged parlor. Upon an old linen tablecloth that had belonged to Nicky’s mother, and bright red poinsettia mats cut from felt, sat little plates of potato chips and pretzels and crackers and cheeses, a bowl of sour cream and onion dip made from Lipton’s onion soup mix, and tiny little jars of red caviar with bright green bibs around them. There were saucers of olives and celery and pickles on the edges of the table, and in various corners of the room, baskets of mixed nuts. I kept thinking of the pigs-in-a-blanket and fried chicken wings and potato salad and hot corn bread at Gerri and them’s last “do,” knowing it wasn’t a question of money, because red caviar cost a lot more than chicken wings. The feeling in the room was subdued. Mostly, women sat around in little groups and talked quietly, the sound of moderation—thick and heavy as smoke in the air. I noticed the absence of laughter only because I always thought parties were supposed to be fun, even though I didn’t find them particularly so, never knowing what to say. I busied myself looking through the bookshelves lining the room. Muriel circulated with ease.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  the timing of my healing and my relapse were weird coincidences. What I believe, or what I think I believe, is far less rational. I had faith once in a man’s connection to what I thought of as God. Strange as it seems, that faith, misplaced and undeserved, made me well, and when the last remnant of it deserted me, I fell ill again. The symptoms remained for two years until we found a drug to control them. These days I am mostly well. After an investigation that lasted almost a decade, Brother Terrell’s case went to trial. I’m not sure how much of a role, if any, my mother’s answer to the grand jury played. We learned during the trial that Brother Terrell had fathered a child with Sarah, the woman he had taken home after a tent service more than twenty years earlier. Pam murmured during the trial something about hoping there were no more children hidden under a bush somewhere. Her dad was found guilty of criminal income-tax evasion and sentenced to three ten-year sentences, to run concurrently. It wasn’t until my mother tried to see Brother Terrell in prison that she realized he had finally worked everything out. He had put my sisters on the visitors list as his daughters. The preacher woman was listed as his wife. My mother’s name was not on the list. There is a small tree—I picture it as a skinny, overgrown bush—in the yard of the prison where Brother Terrell served his time. He told my sisters that when he finished his work as a prison janitor, he went to the tree to read his Bible and pray. Since praying and pacing were synonymous for Brother Terrell, he walked around the tree and called out to his God, sometimes in silence and at other times aloud. Did he beg forgiveness and ask for a second chance? Did he call down the wrath of Jehovah upon his enemies? Knowing Brother Terrell, I would bet he did both. My sister Carol met a man who served as chaplain of the prison after her daddy left. He told her that her father had become something of a legend. Five years after his release, the longtime prisoners still talked about the tent preacher, and when they were troubled, many of them visited what had become known as the Prayin’ Tree.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  failing to anticipate difficulties, and for failing to allow for difficulties that they could not have anticipated—the unknown unknowns. Decisions and Errors That Friday afternoon occurred more than thirty years ago. I often thought about it and mentioned it in lectures several times each year. Some of my friends got bored with the story, but I kept drawing new lessons from it. Almost fifteen years after I first reported on the planning fallacy with Amos, I returned to the topic with Dan Lovallo. Together we sketched a theory of decision making in which the optimistic bias is a significant source of risk taking. In the standard rational model of economics, people take risks because the odds are favorable— they accept some probability of a costly failure because the probability of success is sufficient. We proposed an alternative idea. When forecasting the outcomes of risky projects, executives too easily fall victim to the planning fallacy. In its grip, they make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than on a rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities. They overestimate benefits and underestimate costs. They spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations. As a result, they pursue initiatives that are unlikely to come in on budget or on time or to deliver the expected returns—or even to be completed. In this view, people often (but not always) take on risky projects because they are overly optimistic about the odds they face. I will return to this idea several times in this book—it probably contributes to an explanation of why people litigate, why they start wars, and why they open small businesses. Failing a Test For many years, I thought that the main point of the curriculum story was what I had learned about my friend Seymour: that his best guess about the future of our project was not informed by what he knew about similar projects. I came off quite well in my telling of the story, in which I had the role of clever questioner and astute psychologist. I only recently realized that I had actually played the roles of chief dunce and inept leader. The project was my initiative, and it was therefore my responsibility to ensure that it made sense and that major problems were properly discussed by the team, but I failed that test. My problem was no longer the planning fallacy. I was cured of that fallacy as soon as I heard Seymour’s statistical summary. If

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

  optimism for a turn for the better in Christian fortunes; in addition to two hundred known manuscripts of the Latin letter written by the imaginary king between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries, there were fourteen early printed editions of the letter up to 1565, and large numbers of translations into vernacular European languages.62 Nevertheless, in cold practical results, Prester John turned out to be a disappointing myth, and what it chiefly revealed was just how little Western Chalcedonian Christians knew about centuries of Christian struggle, scholarship, sanctity and heroism in another world. Western Christianity, heir to Chalcedon, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, still has a long way to go before the balance is fully righted. Western Christians have forgotten that before the coming of Islam utterly transformed the situation in the eastern Mediterranean and Asia, there was a good chance that the centre of gravity of Christian faith might have moved east to Iraq rather than west to Rome. Instead, the ancient Christianity of the East was nearly everywhere faced with a destiny of contraction in numbers, suffering and martyrdom which still continues. But there was one practical consequence of the fifteenth-century Latin delusion that Prester John might unite with Western Christians. The myth generated an optimism which had a vital galvanizing effect on Latin Christianity, so it played a part in that surprising new expansion worldwide which from the end of the fifteenth century led Western Catholicism and Protestantism to become the dominant form of the Christian faith into modern times (see Chapter 17). It is towards Rome that we now turn, to begin exploring how this unlikely turn of events took place. PART IV The Unpredictable Rise of Rome (300–1300)

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

  unrealistic campaigns to win the Polish throne and his defiance of his Ottoman overlords, and after his death from battle-wounds in 1660, the principality faced ruin. It was a telling symbol of changed times that by the late seventeenth century the Rákóczi family, now no longer the princely dynasty, converted to Catholicism. Yet even when the Catholic Habsburgs acquired the territory and did their best to chip away at its religious liberties, the Torda agreement obstinately left its mark on Transylvania’s religious landscape. In a country where the medieval parish network is about as dense as in many parts of western Europe, it is an exhilarating experience to travel from village to village and find the ancient parish churches of Transylvania still exhibiting here a rich German Lutheran interior, there assertive Baroque Catholicism, now a whitewashed Reformed preaching house, bright with colour from cheerfully decorated lace hangings, or finally the exotic sight of a place of worship from the Middle Ages which is home to a Unitarian parish – distinguished in appearance from the Reformed church in the next village largely by the proud motto on the wall in Magyar, ‘God is one!’ Transylvania’s initiative was soon followed by Poland-Lithuania, albeit with very different end results. Even in 1600, the identification of Catholicism with Polish identity, which in the twentieth century survived Hitler and Stalin, produced a Polish pope and crippled the power of Soviet Communism, still remained remote, while at the beginning of the 1560s it would have been impossible to say whether the religious future of Poland-Lithuania lay with Roman Catholics, Lutherans or the Reformed – maybe even the Jews. Lutherans, mostly German-speakers in the towns and cities, were vital to Poland- Lithuania’s economic life. The Reformed not only boasted one of the most statesmanlike of European Protestant leaders, Johannes à Lasco, but also commanded the allegiance of some of Poland-Lithuania’s greatest families, in particular the Radziwiłłs, who lived like kings and controlled the main armed forces of the Grand Principality of Lithuania. Perhaps a fifth of the nobility became Reformed, and in the Polish Senate in the 1560s and 1570s an absolute majority of the non-clerical members were Reformed sympathizers or adherents.62 Anti-Trinitarian radicals in their own ‘Minor’ or Arian Church enjoyed a more open life than any similar group in Europe except for their near allies in Transylvania. Their strength was particularly in the east of the Duchy of Lithuania, and they may have connections with various pre-existing Orthodox dissident groups, notably the so-called ‘Judaizers’, who also expressed doubts about the Trinity and rejected icons (see p. 527). However, these existing Orthodox roots were soon enriched by exiles from southern Europe, to the extent

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

  Elizabeth’s activist Reformed Protestant subjects could see no reason why it should remain fossilized or half-finished, and kept up pressure on her for more change. Increasingly those who were prepared to conform to the Queen’s wishes named the discontented, in no friendly spirit, ‘Puritans’.58 The result by 1570 was a Europe in which the divisions were increasingly clear. A series of separate political crises shifted the balance in favour of Protestants in the north and Catholics in the south. The contrasting stories in north and south after 1570 can be symbolized by the fortunes of two Catholic navies, one victorious, another destroyed. In 1571, a fleet recruited overwhelmingly from the Catholic world and commanded for the King of Spain by Don John of Austria, an illegitimate son of Charles V, crushingly defeated the Turkish fleet at Lepanto (the Gulf of Corinth or Nafpaktos); this was one of the most decisive checks on Islamic expansion into western Europe. Far to the north, in 1588, the other Spanish Armada was outmanoeuvred in the English Channel by Queen Elizabeth’s naval commanders, and then scattered by the storms of the North Sea and the Atlantic, never to achieve a Roman Catholic conquest of Protestant England. As a result of this north-south divide, people were forced to make decisions, or at least their rulers forced decisions on them. Which checklist of doctrine should they sign up to? Historians have given an unlovely but perhaps necessary label to this process: confessionalization – creating fixed identities and systems of belief for separate Churches which had previously been more fluid in their self-understanding, and which had not even sought separate identities for themselves.59 Confessionalization represents the defeat of efforts to rebuild the unified Latin Church. In western Europe, it was difficult to escape this impulse to tidy and to build boundaries. One small part of Switzerland, the Grisons or Graubünden, quickly took advantage of the freedom bestowed by their Alpine remoteness and poverty: in 1526, as the Reformation began dividing Europe, they came to a deal in their chief town of Ilanz, by which each village could choose to maintain either a Catholic or a Reformed church. Despite much bickering, this arrangement persisted for more than a century, by which time some imaginative thinkers elsewhere in western Europe were just beginning to glimpse the sense in the idea.60 Another important area for religious pluralism, in this instance emphatically against the wishes of its established Protestant Church, was the northern Netherlands. Having thrown off one clerical tyranny and jealously guarding a host of local autonomies, the secular rulers (the ‘regents’) of this new republic were not going to allow their Reformed clergy to establish a real monopoly of religious practice. Dutch people were free to ignore the life of their parish churches, as long as they did not cause trouble; even, in the end, Roman

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

  about to end: they collected and preserved stories about the founder in a newly invented form of written text, the codex (the modern book format). They survived a major crisis of confidence at the end of the first century when the Last Days did not arrive – perhaps one of the greatest turning points in the Christian story, although we know very little about it. Christianity emerged from it a very different institution from the movement created by its founder or even its first great apostle, Paul. Since from the beginning, radical change and transmutation were part of the story, the succeeding millennia provide plenty of further examples. After three centuries of tension and confrontation with Roman imperial power, the counter- cultural sect mutated into the agent of settled government and preserved Graeco- Roman civilization in the West when that government collapsed. In nineteenth- century America, marginal Christians created a frontier religion with its own new sacred book, the basis of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons). The astonishing growth of the Mormons is as much part of the modern story of Christianity as that of Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism or Protestantism, however fiercely conventionally conceived Christianity may deny the Mormons the name Christian. So are later extensions of the Christian core identity, such as the Kimbanguists of central Africa or the Unification Church founded by the Korean Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Such transformations have always been unpredictable. In Korea, an extraordinarily successful Presbyterian (Reformed Protestant) Church now lectures Reformed Protestants in Europe on how to be true to the sixteenth-century European Reformer John Calvin, while this same Korean Church expresses its faith in hymns borrowed from the radically anti-Calvinist Protestantism of Methodism. What is more, many Korean Christians manage to be intensely patriotic, while worshipping in churches which are careful reproductions of the Protestant church architecture of the Midwestern United States (see Plate 68). The passions which have gone into the construction of a world faith are if nothing else the catalyst for extraordinary human creativity in literature, music, architecture and art. To seek an understanding of Christianity is to see Jesus Christ in the mosaics and icons of Byzantium, or in the harshly lit features of the man on the road to Emmaus as Caravaggio painted him (see Plate 18). Looking up at the heavily gilt ceiling of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, one should realize that all its gold was melted down from temples across the Atlantic Ocean, sent as a tribute to the Christian God and to the Catholic Church by the King of Spain, the theft accompanied or justified by frequent misuse of the name of Christ. The sound of Christian passion is heard in the hymns of John and Charles Wesley, bringing pride, self-confidence and divine purpose to the lives of poor

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

  communities, producing radical spirits who contributed to the reassessment of religion: Jews and Huguenots. The Huguenots were part of the international Reformed Protestant bloc which, like Jews at the same time, embraced high hopes of apocalypse and divine consummation, only to have them dashed in the political disappointments of the mid-seventeenth century which ranged from England to Transylvania. After Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the Huguenots had their own catastrophe to ponder as they followed the Jews into continent-wide exile. Even before that, Huguenots had been among the first to make a consistent return to Erasmus’s project of historical criticism of the biblical text, particularly at Saumur’s Royal Academy for Protestant theology, before Louis XIV closed it (Louis did not close Saumur’s pioneering Academy for cavalry instruction, which formed part of the same foundation). The first major controversy was provoked in the early seventeenth century by the Saumur scholar Louis Cappel’s demonstration that the elaborate Hebrew system of vowel pointing and accenting in the text of the Tanakh was not as ancient as it claimed to be. Many regarded this comparatively minor philological correction as a dangerous attack on the integrity and divine inspiration of scripture; but Cappel was clearly right in his conclusions, and by the end of the century they were accepted wisdom among Protestants. This was a basis for much more searching scholarly investigation of both Old and New Testaments, which has continued ever since. Saumur led the way, but the systematic application of critical principles to textual scholarship in general was actually a product of the Counter-Reformation in the same kingdom. A seventeenth-century Congregation of reformed French Benedictine monasteries dedicated to St Maur (a disciple of St Benedict credited with introducing his Rule to France) developed the ancient Benedictine commitment to scholarship in a specialized direction: Church history. Generally they eschewed the delicate business of scrutinizing the Bible itself, but they established, on a scale so comprehensive as to be impossible to ignore, the requirement to scrutinize historical texts without sentiment or regard for their sacred character. All texts were there as part of the range of historical evidence, not simply the familiar material of narrative historical sources such as chronicles, but official and legal documents. Even if the Maurists did not follow the logic of this through into biblical scholarship, others would. The Pope might laugh at La Peyrère, but the questions about the Bible troubled Catholics as well as Protestants. One Jesuit working in China, Martino Martini, was driven by his fascination with Chinese civilization and its historical writing to point to the shakiness of biblical chronology, in a work published three years after La Peyrère’s best-seller.33 Protestants were

• From Action (2014)

  When they aren’t? You know how it’s rude to insert sidebars into conversations with three or more people that you know only you and one other person in the group will get? Imagine that same ill-mannered behavior, except naked. Nobody likes to feel neglected, or extrapolate that into butchered self-esteem. I am happy to say I’ve never experienced that, but that is, in large part, because I would never become involved in a threesome that I foresaw was an emotional demolition derby disguised as the kind of agreeable fuckfest that I wondered about from pornography. Asking the person to whom you are committed to have a threesome with you might feel daunting if you’re monogamous with them. This doesn’t mean it is impossible, or that they’ll shoot you down out of hand. If you’re uncertain whether your person will respond favorably to a three-part harmony, do some detective work. Just maybe don’t do it by saying, “Hey! You know your friend Dan from the radio show with the graceful hands and shag-carpet chest hair? I want to lobotomize him via fucking his brains out. Wanna join in, person I love?” This approach is obviously a bad one, but let’s dissect just how it would result in watching your their-place toothbrush get snapped over your partner’s knee: 1. It suggests a specific person. In addition to the above principles regarding who gets to pick, and why, in terms of the two of you: How do you know Dan would be down? If it’s because you asked him firsthand, you likely extracted that information via a proposition that your person would hate. You either dangled the prospect of a threesome without their permission, or you said, “Hey, DAN. DANIEL. HEY. Over here, behind the turntables. Real quick secret: I desperately want you to bend me over. No, Matt doesn’t know, but he could watch if he wanted, I guess?” or you didn’t even mention Matt at ALL, until now, when you confirmed to him that you and his colleague are making flimsy passes at each other behind his back. That’s insulting. Don’t do it. If you DON’T know Dan would be down, then you’re confounding this whole situation for a prospect that is unlikely to go down with the exact cast of characters you were hoping in reality, since finding willing and enthusiastic threesome partners is… complex. More on that later. First, I’m going to keep berating you for not saying something that I myself wrote! How could you???

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

  results: by the end of the century there were perhaps as many as 300,000 Christian converts in Japan, aided by a determined and imaginative effort to meet Japan on its own terms. From the beginning, the Jesuits took Japanese culture seriously: ‘these Japanese are more ready to be implanted with our holy faith than all the nations of the world,’ Xavier affirmed, and he recommended bringing members of the Society from the Low Countries and Germany since they were used to a cold climate and would work more efficiently in it.37 The Italian Jesuit Alessandro Valignano envisaged the formation of a native clergy, and a Portuguese, Gaspar Coelho, was active in recruiting some seventy novices by 1590, concentrating especially on the sons of noblemen and samurai who would command respect in Japanese society (his colleagues felt more cautious and restrained his initiative).38 In counterpoint to this success was a fatal entanglement with politics, both Portuguese trading policy and the internal concerns of Japan. The Portuguese trade was led by their so-called ‘Great Ship’ trading in bullion and luxury goods annually; the Jesuits not only invested in this to support what had proved to be an extremely expensive mission, but also encouraged the ship to travel to as many Japanese ports as possible to excite interest in Christianity. The missionaries and merchants were lucky enough to arrive at a time when Japan was split between rival feudal lords. Many lords saw Christianity as a useful way of attracting Portuguese trade and also of furthering their own political aims, particularly the powerful Tokugawa family, who initially encouraged the missionaries. By 1600 the Tokugawa had eliminated all their rivals in politics, and now saw Christianity not as a convenience but as a nuisance, even a threat. They had some justification: the Philippines fell under Spanish royal control with such comparative ease because missionary activity by Augustinian friars had preceded the arrival of King Philip’s ships and soldiers. Matters were made worse when Franciscan friars arrived in Japan to establish a missionary presence in 1593. Anticipating the controversies with Jesuits that were to arise in the Chinese Empire, they adopted an aggressively negative attitude towards Japanese culture, which led to a number of them suffering death by crucifixion. In the early seventeenth century the Tokugawa expelled Europeans from Japan except for one rigorously policed trading post.39 They then launched one of the most savage persecutions in Christian history, and their repression of Japanese Christians was not without some military assistance from the Protestant Dutch, who were doing their best to wreck Portuguese power in eastern Asia, and had few regrets about campaigns against popish Jesuits and friars. The Church in Japan, despite the heroism of its native faithful, was reduced to a tiny and half-instructed remnant. It struggled to maintain even a

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

  of directly contradicting Job and Qoheleth, with calls to activism in leading a morally upright life, such as those in the Book of Proverbs, whose cosy assertions of the value of everyday goodness have provided material for settled Jewish or Christian societies ever since. Writers seeking to rebuild Israel gave unambiguous answers to the great question aroused by Jewish experiences after 586. They created new sets of laws and careful restorations and extensions of past ceremonial practice in the Temple, taking care that most of it was represented as a return to ancient decrees of the Lord from before the Exile. They stated in ever more extreme terms the message of separation which had been the centrepiece of the Deuteronomistic reform movement; now they had the catastrophe of the Babylonian captivity to ram home the point that Yahweh wanted obedience to his law and had severely punished the nation for not providing that obedience. Never again should Israel make the same mistake. On this principle was founded the continuing existence and development of Judaism. Like its daughter religion, Christianity, Judaism has often fostered the idea that it has an exclusive approach to the divine. Yet this claim to exclusivity was coupled with a remarkable new feature of Yahweh’s religion – or perhaps really a return to its miscellaneous origins amid the displaced people of the Habiru. From this period under Persian rule comes an acceptance that it was not necessary to be born a Jew to enter the Jewish faith: what was necessary was to accept fully the customs of the Jews, including the rite of genital circumcision performed on all Jewish males. One could then be accepted as a convert (‘proselyte’, from a Greek word meaning ‘stranger’ or ‘foreigner living in the land’). It was enough to accept the story which Judaism told: so in theory, Judaism could become a universal religion. Jews did not generally take that logical step of thought. It was left first to Christianity and then to Islam to make it a great theme of their faith.36 In the centuries after the return from Babylon, the Jews in Palestine were repeatedly faced with the same prospect of more powerful cultures overwhelming their own and overpowering them. Most disturbing was the coming of Hellenistic kingdoms, after Alexander the Great burst into the eastern Mediterranean in the 330s (see pp. 37–40). First, the Ptolemaic Pharaohs of Egypt ruled the land, and then (from 198 BCE) the Seleucids of Syria. The worst confrontation between Jewish identity and the Greek world surrounding it exploded into open violence when their second Seleucid overlord, King Antiochos IV (who boastfully called himself Epiphanēs or ‘Manifestation’), tried to force Greek customs on to the Jews and attacked the religious life centred on the Temple in Jerusalem. From 167 BCE the Jews rebelled against him, first under the leadership of Judas Maccabeus. With the unpromising

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

  rebranding of the Church of England attempted by Archbishop Laud and his associates in the early seventeenth century (see pp. 649–50), but there were other important elements. If the State was apparently no longer going to support the Church of England, then the Church would have to look to its own devices – and the only English precedent for that was to be found in that group of High Church refuseniks who, in impressively perverse loyalty to an ungrateful James II, had formed the ‘Non-Juring’ Church in 1689. Freed from the imperatives to discretion which establishment brings, and including in their ranks some formidable intellects, the Non-Jurors had ranged freely in their thoughts about the shape of an authentically Catholic Church of England, possessing an episcopate continuous with the Church of the Apostles, uncorrupted by Roman error and unshackled from the State. A large dose of their radical conclusions in both liturgy and ecclesiology (that is, their theology of the nature of the Church), together with their interest in Eastern Orthodoxy and their frequent open rudeness about the Reformation, now enriched the spiritual explorations of the Tractarians. That separated them from older High Churchmen, who had not shown much sympathy with the eventually expiring Non-Juring Church.56 Tractarianism was thus a movement with a good many opinions, as well as a good opinion of itself – perhaps not surprisingly, given the large number of young and single Oxford dons among its leadership.57 The Tractarians’ problem was that this good opinion was not shared by the bishops whose government in the Church they theoretically exalted. In 1841 Newman produced the ninetieth of their tracts, arguing, with more ingenuity than was sensible, that England’s Reformed Protestant doctrinal statement, the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563, was not directed against the doctrines which made the Church of Rome distinct from those of the Church of England. He seemed genuinely surprised at the uproar which followed, including his own bishop’s urgent requirement that the tract should be withdrawn.58 Later in the year came the hammer blow (as far as Newman and his sympathizers were concerned) of the project for the Anglo- Prussian bishopric of Jerusalem. Their fears for the Catholic integrity of the English Church were blended with a refined disdain for Michael Solomon Alexander, the first bishop appointed under the scheme, and for the fact that Evangelicals celebrated his Jewish ancestry. In retrospect, Newman reflected with not untypical feline sarcasm about the Jerusalem bishopric, ‘I never heard of any good or harm it has ever done, except what it has done for me; which many think a great misfortune, and I one of the greatest of mercies. It brought me on to the beginning of the end.’59 What Newman meant was that he could no longer escape the instability of the view of Anglicanism which he had constructed for himself. Behind Laud and the

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  everything out. Eventually a grand jury convened to examine the IRS evidence against him. It came out in the hearing that my mother had made a down payment on a property with thirty thousand dollars in cash. The attorney who handled the transaction remembered it ten years later as one of the strangest moments of his career. “This woman hands me all this money in a bag. A brown paper bag! I kept waiting for the wise guys with machine guns.” My mother told the grand jury she had borrowed the money from an individual, but she wasn’t at liberty to tell them who had loaned it to her. She had promised the person she wouldn’t. The jury sent her home to reconsider, but her answer remained the same. She spent several weeks in the Wichita County jail for contempt. Eventually the person she had “borrowed” the money from (she told me it was not Brother Terrell) released her from her promise and she answered the jury’s question. Mama told me later that while she was in jail, the preacher woman and Brother Terrell had been in Hawaii ready to leave the country “if things went wrong.” It was the closest my mother ever came to saying a bad word against Brother Terrell. She wouldn’t elaborate on which things could have gone wrong. I assumed she meant answering the grand-jury question in a way that would have incriminated Brother Terrell. I remembered that during the weeks my mother was in jail, he had called me almost every day. “I’m really concerned about your mama,” he said in that hoarse, overworked preacher voice. I asked my mother what she thought about a man who would have left the country when she was facing legal repercussions for protecting him. Instead of answering my question, she voiced a fear around which she had detoured for almost twenty years. “I guess he didn’t really care what happened to me.” She looked tired and defeated. If anyone had asked me at the time of this conversation if I still believed in David Terrell, I would have said no, and I would have been wrong. Belief, like love, can go underground. It can become a part of our operating system, without our knowledge or approval. As my mother spoke of Brother Terrell’s betrayal, another layer of faith fell away even as I recognized its existence. What a surprise to feel its absence. Within hours, the illness from which I had been healed returned. I had been symptom-free for nine years. One doctor said the symptoms I experienced can occur and then disappear and remain dormant for years. I nodded, thinking all the time, You have no idea. I sometimes think that

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  He and Nixon would run on a campaign of law and order, one aimed at a “silent majority” and voters shaken by the events of the year. The Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago later in August. As protests erupted around the city, McCarthy seemed unwilling to seize the moment and lead the passionate supporters who’d backed him for so long. In the end, he received just 23 percent of the votes at the convention, and Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who hadn’t entered a single primary, became the Democratic nominee, with Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine his running mate. It was a crushing blow to believers in the antiwar movement. In London, the Beatles were set to release a new single, “Hey Jude,” written by Paul McCartney to reassure John Lennon’s son, Julian, during his parents’ divorce. It would include as its B side the John Lennon–penned song “Revolution,” which questioned the tactics of the year’s aggressive political protesters: “But when you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out.” It had been just four years since the Beatles had dressed in matching suits and run from screaming fans in the opening scene of the film A Hard Day’s Night . In 1968, they had long hair and flowing beards and were singing about the pain in the world. Even in music, little seemed the same anymore. At the end of the summer, Atlantic City hosted the 1968 Miss America pageant. Outside the venue, at least a hundred women protested the event, which they deemed exploitative. Officials had feared that the demonstrators would start fires, as happened so often during protests in 1968, but the women had promised they wouldn’t do anything dangerous—“just a symbolic bra-burning.” When the event began, they tossed false eyelashes and girdles into a garbage can and crowned a sheep Miss America. But from that day forward, the concept of a “bra-burning women’s libber” gained currency in the United States, despite the fact that nothing was ever set ablaze. In October, the Summer Olympic Games were held in Mexico City. Two American sprinters, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, won the gold and bronze medals, respectively, in the 200-meter race. Standing on the podium to receive their medals, each wearing a black glove on one hand, the two Americans bowed their heads and raised a fist in a Black Power salute during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a protest of the inequality of treatment and opportunity for black people in their home country. Immediately, the athletes were suspended from the team and sent home from Mexico City. The silent statement by the two sprinters had a polarizing and powerful effect in the United States. On October 20, almost five years after her husband’s death, Jacqueline Kennedy became Jackie O. Everyone seemed to have an opinion—mostly negative—of the surprise wedding between the former First Lady and the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, a man twenty-three years her senior.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  with a head cold—a condition made even more uncomfortable given that noses don’t run in zero gravity. To make matters worse, the crew struggled with their biomedical equipment, strained to see out their windows, and were forced to pump waste water manually from the spacecraft. When Mission Control asked about the live television broadcast scheduled for that day, Schirra made it clear where he stood. “You’ve added two burns to this flight schedule, and you’ve added a urine water dump, and we have a new vehicle up here, and I can tell you [at] this point TV will be delayed without any further discussion until after the rendezvous.” It got worse. Though the spacecraft was functioning beautifully, the astronauts’ attitudes were breaking down. On day seven, Cunningham said to controllers, “I’d just like to go on record here as saying that people that dream up procedures like this after you lift off have somehow or another been dropping the ball for the last three years....It looks kind of Mickey Mouse.” On day eight, Schirra said, “I wish you would find out the idiot’s name who thought up this test....I want to talk to him personally when I get back down.” In Houston, Kraft and Slayton were seething. Not only were Schirra and his crew nearly insubordinate, they were doing it for the public to hear. At a press briefing, a reporter said, “I’ve covered sixteen flights, and I don’t recall ever finding a bunch of people up there growling the way these guys are. Now, you’re either doing a bad job down here, or they’re a bunch of malcontents. Which is it?” Apollo 7 splashed down eleven days after lift-off. Every mission objective had been achieved, and more. The spacecraft had worked beautifully. The SPS engine, so critical to a lunar journey, had performed well. By virtually every measure, the flight had been nearly perfect, and it would open the door to Apollo 8’s flight to the Moon. Many attributed the negative behavior by the crew of Apollo 7 to the constant discomfort from their head colds. Others wondered if Schirra had been terrified by the Apollo 1 fire. The commander of that mission, Gus Grissom, had been Schirra’s next-door neighbor. Schirra had been Grissom’s backup pilot for the flight. Long after the fire, Schirra had told people, “We all spent a year wearing black arm bands for three very good men. I’ll be damned if anybody’s going to spend the next year wearing

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

  different in their social profile from the exalted figures around the emperor. At the peak of the Chinese mission’s success at the end of the seventeenth century, it was serving perhaps around a quarter of a million people — an extraordinary achievement, even though still, as in India, a tiny proportion of the whole population.33 Yet at that time there were only seventy-five priests to serve this number, labouring under enormous difficulties with language: how, for instance, to solve that problem already encountered in America, to hear confessions in such circumstances? What the Jesuits did very effectively in this situation was to inspire a local leadership which was not clerical, both catechists in the classic American mould and a particular Chinese phenomenon (perhaps inspired by the Ursulines), ‘Chinese virgins’: laywomen consecrated to singleness but still living with their families, teaching women and children. This preserved the mission into the nineteenth century despite worsening clerical shortages, which became acute when the emperor expelled foreign clergy in 1724. If the trend in Counter- Reformation Europe was for the clergy to take more control of the lives of the laity, circumstances in China consistently promoted lay activism — and the same was to prove true of Chinese Catholicism’s daughter-mission to Korea in the eighteenth century (see pp. 899–902).34 As elsewhere in Asia and Africa, Portuguese suspicion of non-Portuguese clergy complicated the spread of Catholicism in China, and more serious problems emerged. When Dominicans and Franciscans arrived in China from the Philippines in the 1630s, they launched bitter attacks on their Jesuit rivals, and raised major matters of missionary policy. The friars, with a background in America assuming total confrontation with previous religions, violently disagreed with the Jesuits in their attitude to the Chinese way of life, particularly traditional rites in honour of Confucius and the family; they even publicly asserted that deceased emperors were burning in Hell. The French, including many French Jesuits of ‘Jansenist’ sympathies (see pp. 797–9), weighed in against the policy of flexibility when they became a significant presence in the 1690s. Complaints about the ‘Chinese rites’ were taken as far as Rome itself, and after a long struggle successive popes condemned the rites in 1704 and 1715. This was a deeply significant setback for Western Christianity’s first major effort to understand and accommodate itself to another culture, and it was not surprising that the Yongzheng Emperor reacted so angrily in 1724.35 Christian work in Japan was the most extreme story, as the most spectacular success of any mission launched from Portuguese bases in Asia or Africa ended in almost total destruction.36 Francis Xavier and his fellow Jesuits arrived as early as 1549, only seven years after the first Portuguese visit to Japan, and Jesuits continued to dominate the Japanese mission. They quickly achieved