Disgust

Passages

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

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• From The Pisces (2018)

  His house was one tiny room that reeked of cigarettes. The mini refrigerator, stove, and oven were right at the foot of his bed, and the bathroom just off the head of it. There was beige wall-to-wall carpeting, even in the “kitchen” part, with stains that looked like spaghetti sauce, tar, and generally a lot of lint. He had very few books for someone who claimed to be a writer and loved to read. I counted seven: three of them Bukowski. “I love Bukowski maybe the best, actually,” he said when he caught me looking at the books. “Find what you love and let it kill you. So raw.” I didn’t say anything. He put his arms around my waist and began kissing me, then pulled me onto the dirty plaid bedspread and took off my dress. “You have such a hot body for forty,” he said. “Thirty-eight,” I said. “Mmmm,” he said, sliding his fingers into my underpants and tracing my war-torn labia. “I love your pussy. So hot that you have hair down there.” I took off his pants. His cock was hard as a stone, yet simultaneously pink and slimy. I didn’t want to touch it. So I didn’t. He began fingering me, very dryly, adding further battering to my poor wax-mangled vagina. He kept whispering, “Can I fuck you? I want to fuck you. Will you suck my dick?” I kept saying, “No, not yet. I’m not ready.” I guess in an effort to turn me on he inserted two more fingers into my wilting vagina, banging them in and out. My labia burned but I was surprised to find that up inside me I was wet, as though I didn’t know I was turned on. Now the wetness began to come down onto my labia and clit. But he ignored my clit and just kept banging away. “Such a hot, tight, pink pussy,” he said. I didn’t know how he knew it was pink. He hadn’t even looked at it or licked it. “Let me fuck it. Please?” he said. “No,” I said. “Okay, then will you suck me? Just suck me a little,” he asked. “I want to see those hot old lips on my cock.” That was it. “You know what I think would be hot?” I asked. “What would do it for me? I want to watch you jerk off for a little.” He stopped finger fucking me and looked me in the eye. “Really?” “Oh, yeah. It’s the biggest turn-on. I wanna watch as you lie there and give yourself pleasure. Jerk that hot dick.” I don’t know where I was getting this from. When I was in my twenties I used to like to watch my boyfriend jerk off. But not this dude. I think I was just trying to get him to come, and get out of there without having to touch his weird pink dick and mismatched brown balls.

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

  The new pope, Lorenzo Cibo, born in Genoa, 1432, had been made cardinal by Sixtus IV., 1473. During his rule, peace was maintained with the courts of Italy, but in Rome clerical dissipation, curial venality and general lawlessness were rampant. "In darkness Innocent was elected, in darkness he lives, and in darkness he will die," said the general of the Augustinians.774 Women were carried off in the night. The murdered were found in the streets in the morning. Crimes, before their commission, were compounded for money. Even the churches were pilfered. A piece of the true cross was stolen from S. Maria in Trastavere. The wood was reported found in a vineyard, but without its silver frame. When the vice-chancellor, Borgia, was asked why the laws were not enforced, he replied, "God desires not the death of a sinner, but rather that he should pay and live."775 The favorite of Sixtus IV., Jerome Riario, was murdered in 1488. His widow, the brave and masculine Catherine Sforza, who was pregnant at the time, defended his castle at Forli and defied the papal forces besieging it, declaring that, if they put her children to death who were with her, she yet had one left at Imola and the unborn child in her womb. The duke of Milan, her relative, rescued her and put the besiegers to flight. All ecclesiastical offices were set for sale. How could it be otherwise, when the papal tiara itself was within the reach of the highest bidder?776 The appointment of 18 new papal secretaries brought 62,400 ducats into the papal treasury. The bulls creating the offices expressly declared the aim to be to secure funds. 52 persons were appointed to seal the papal bulls, called plumbatores, from the leaden ball or seal they used, and the price of the position was fixed at 2,500 ducats. Even the office of librarian in the Vatican was sold, and the papal tiara was put in pawn. In a time of universal traffic in ecclesiastical offices, it is not surprising that the fabrication of papal documents was turned into a business. Two papal notaries confessed to having issued 50 such documents in two years, and in spite of the pleas of their friends were hung and burnt, 1489.777 Innocent’s children were not persons of marked traits, or given to ambitious intrigues. Common rumor gave their number as 16, all of them children by married women.778 Franceschetto and Theorina seem to have been born before the father entered the priesthood. Franceschetto’s marriage to Maddalena, a daughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent, was celebrated in the Vatican, Jan. 20, 1488. Ten months later, the pope’s granddaughter, Peretta, child of Theorina, was also married in the Vatican to the marquis of Finale. The pontiff sat with the ladies at the table, a thing contrary to all the accepted proprieties. In 1492, another grandchild, also a daughter of Theorina, Battistana, was married to duke Louis of Aragon.779

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And this thing that you are is a sin against creation. Above all is this thing a sin against the father who bred you, the father whom you dare to resemble. You dare to look like your father, and your face is a living insult to his memory, Stephen. I shall never be able to look at you now without thinking of the deadly insult of your face and your body to the memory of the father who bred you. I can only thank God that your father died before he was asked to endure this great shame. As for you, I would rather see you dead at my feet than standing before me with this thing upon you—this unspeakable outrage that you call love in that letter which you don’t deny having written. In that letter you say things that may only be said between man and woman, and coming from you they are vile and filthy words of corruption—against nature, against God who created nature. My gorge rises; you have made me feel physically sick—’ ‘Mother—you don’t know what you’re saying—you’re my mother—’ ‘Yes, I am your mother, but for all that, you seem to me like a scourge. I ask myself what I have ever done to be dragged down into the depths by my daughter. And your father—what had he ever done? And you have presumed to use the word love in connection with this— with these lusts of your body; these unnatural cravings of your unbalanced mind and undisciplined body—you have used that word. I have loved—do you hear? I have loved your father, and your father loved me. That was love.’ Then, suddenly, Stephen knew that unless she could, indeed, drop dead at the feet of this woman in whose womb she had quickened, there was one thing that she dared not let pass unchallenged, and that was this terrible slur upon her love. And all that was in her rose up to refute it; to protect her love from such unbearable soiling. It was part of herself, and unless she could save it, she could not save herself any more. She must stand or fall by the courage of that love to proclaim its right to toleration. She held up her hand, commanding silence; commanding that slow, quiet voice to cease speaking, and she said: ‘As my father loved you, I loved. As a man loves a woman, that was how I loved—protectively, like my father. I wanted to give all I had in me to give. It made me feel terribly strong . . . and gentle. It was good, good, good—I’d have laid down my life a thousand times over for Angela Crossby. If I could have, I’d have married her and brought her home—I wanted to bring her home here to Morton.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The priests were supposed to be descendants of the tribe of Aaron, temple-attendants of Levi, kings and rulers of David, and so forth. These rules were not always observed and exact heredity was a matter of guesswork, imagination or downright fraud, but manifest breaches were always resented and frequently led to violence and schism over generations. Then, too, there was the obstacle of circumcision, on which no compromise seemed possible within the Judaic framework; and the monstrous ramifications of a legal system which had elaborated itself over many generations. The Jewish scriptures, formidable in bulk and often of impenetrable obscurity, gave employment in Palestine to a vast cottage industry of scribes and lawyers, both amateur and professional, filling whole libraries with their commentaries, enmeshing the Jewish world in a web of canon law, luxuriant with its internal conflicts and its mutual exclusions, too complex for any one mind to comprehend, bread and butter for a proliferating clergy and an infinite series of traps for the righteous. The ultimate success of a Gentile mission would depend on the scale and hardihood of the demolition work carried out on this labyrinth of Mosaic jurisprudence. And where would the demolition stop? Must it not be extended to the Temple itself, whose very existence as the geographical pivot of the faith anchored it firmly in place and history, and thus denied its universality? The Temple, now, in Herod’s version, rising triumphantly over Jerusalem, was an ocular reminder that Judaism was about Jews and their history – not about anyone else. Other gods flew in across the deserts from the East without much difficulty, jettisoning the inconvenient and embarassing accretions from their past, changing, as it were, their accents and manners as well as their names. But the God of the Jews was still alive and roaring in his Temple, demanding blood, making no attempt to conceal his racial and primitive origins. Herod’s fabric was elegant, modern, sophisticated – he had, indeed, added some Hellenic decorative effects much resented by fundamentalist Jews who constantly sought to destroy them – but nothing could hide the essential business of the Temple, which was the ritual slaughter, consumption and combustion of sacrificial cattle on a gigantic scale. The place was as vast as a small city. There were literally thousands of priests, attendants, temple-soldiers and minions. To the unprepared visitor, the dignity and charity of Jewish diaspora life, the thoughtful comments and homilies of the Alexandrian synagogue, was quite lost amid the smoke of the pyres, the bellows of terrified beasts, the sluices of blood, the abattoir stench, the unconcealed and unconcealable machinery of tribal religion inflated by modern wealth to an industrial scale. Sophisticated Romans who knew the Judaism of the diaspora found it hard to understand the hostility towards the Jews shown by colonial officials who, behind a heavily-armed escort, had witnessed Jerusalem at festival time.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  During the closing decades of the fourth century there was a wave of discoveries, forgeries, thefts and sales of saintly treasures. Pagans did their best to ridicule the practice. The writer Faustus accused the Christians of simply substituting martyrs for pagan idols, and reviving the idea of prodigies under another name. Some Christian writers were also disturbed. Vigilantius, a presbyter, called the cult ‘a heathen observance introduced into the churches under a cloak of religion. . . the work of idolators’. He particularly deplored the placing of relics in costly caskets to be kissed, the prayers of intercession, the building of churches in the honour of particular martyrs, and the practice of holding vigils, lighting tapers and lamps, and attributing miracles to such shrines. The government, too, showed some alarm. It was angered by monks who stole the remains of holy men, and hawked portions of them for money. Theodosius laid down: ‘No person shall transfer a buried body to another place; no person shall sell the relics of a martyr; no person shall traffic in them.’ But the government permitted the building of churches over the grave of a saint, and it was this that lay at the bottom of the whole theory and practice of relic-worship. Once that was conceded, the rest automatically followed, whatever the law said. The world was terrified of demons – now joined by the dethroned pagan gods, and the devils of the heretics – and the bones and other attachments of sanctified just men were the best possible protection against the evil swarms. Any church well endowed with such treasures radiated a powerful circle of protection; and its bishop was a man to have on your side. So Ambrose pushed the relic-system for all it was worth. At the dedication of his new basilica, he providentially discovered the skeletons of SS Gervasius and Protasius, ‘of extraordinary stature, such as ancient times produced’. The episode was accompanied by the curing of a blind man, and other miraculous events, trumpeted abroad by Ambrosian flack-men, and embroidered upon by later generations – in the sixth century Gregory of Tours said that during the translation mass a panel fell from the ceiling, grazing the martyrs’ heads, from which blood flowed. At the time, the Arians scoffed, but were soon dismayed by the popular success of Ambrose’s find. It was followed by the unearthing of the bodies of SS Agricola and Vitalis, and SS Nazarius and Celsus. In the case of Nazarius, the ‘martyr’s blood was as fresh as if it had been shed that day, and his decapitated head was entire, with its hair and beard as if it had just been washed’, according to Ambrose’s biographer. A demon interrupted the sermon in which Ambrose celebrated this event, but the bishop rebuked and silenced him. Cloths dipped in the miraculous blood were sent all over Italy and Gaul.1 It is clear from Ambrose’s writing that he was wholly sincere in his cult of relics.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The Jew mounted a horse, and rode off with all possible speed to the court of Rome, where on his arrival he was warmly welcomed by his Jewish friends. And there he settled down, without telling anybody why he had come, and cautiously began to observe the behaviour of the Pope, the cardinals, the other Church dignitaries, and all the courtiers. Being a very perceptive person, he discovered, by adding the evidence of his own eyes to information given him by others, that practically all of them from the highest to the lowest were flagrantly given to the sin of lust, not only of the natural variety, but also of the sodomitic, without the slightest display of shame or remorse, to the extent that the power of prostitutes and young men to obtain the most enormous favours was virtually unlimited. In addition to this, he clearly saw that they were all gluttons, winebibbers, and drunkards without exception, and that next to their lust they would rather attend to their bellies than to anything else, as though they were a pack of animals. Moreover, on closer inspection he saw that they were such a collection of rapacious money-grubbers that they were as ready to buy and sell human, that is to say, Christian blood as they were to trade for profit in any kind of divine object, whether in the way of sacraments or of church livings. In this activity, they had a bigger turnover and more brokers than you could find on any of the Paris markets including that of the textile trade. They had applied the name of ‘procuration’ to their unconcealed simony, and that of ‘sustentation’ to their gluttony, as if (to say nothing of the meaning of the words) God were ignorant of the intentions of their wicked minds and would allow Himself to be deceived, as men are, by the there names of things. All this, together with many other things of which it is more prudent to remain silent, was highly distasteful to the Jew, who was a sober and respectable man. And so, feeling he had seen enough, he decided to return to Paris, which he did. On hearing of his arrival, Jehannot, thinking nothing to be less likely than that his friend should have turned Christian, came to his house, where they made a great fuss of each other. And after Abraham had rested for a few days, Jehannot asked him what sort of an opinion he had formed about the Holy Father and the cardinals and the other members of the papal court. Whereupon the Jew promptly replied: ‘A bad one, and may God deal harshly with the whole lot of them. And my reason for telling you so is that, unless I formed the wrong impression, nobody there who was connected with the Church seemed to me to display the slightest sign of holiness, piety, charity, moral rectitude or any other virtue.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  As Richard Scott, one of Weyer’s admirers, put it in 1584: ‘Note also how easily they may be brought to confess that which they never did, nor lieth in the power of man to do.’ (Scott’s book was burned by James I.) Many intellectuals shared the sceptical attitude of Montaigne: ‘It is rating our conjectures highly to roast people alive for them’; and even in the worst affected areas the judicial authorities were eventually persuaded to discountenance torture. As Sir George Mackenzie, the Scottish Lord Advocate, said: ‘Most of all that ever were taken were tormented after this manner, and this usage was the ground of all their confession.’ This had been apparent all along, to anyone with an open mind. But so long as men killed each other for their religious beliefs, witches were extensively hunted. Once the major fighting had stopped, with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, reason had the chance to raise its head again, and the rapid diffusion of scientific ideas about the workings of nature undermined the theoretical basis of witch-hunting. Witchcraft ceased to be an international mania, but special local conditions produced brief outbursts, in Sweden in the 1660s, following the defection of Queen Christina to Rome, and in New England in the 1690s. The last legal execution of a witch was carried out in Protestant Switzerland in 1782; and there was an illegal burning in Catholic Poland eleven years later. The identification of Protestants with Jews in Spain, and the persecution of old women in northern and central Europe, were only two of the ways in which the Christian schism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the religious passion it generated, damaged the structure of European civilization and retarded the progress of reason. Here, then, we come to an important watershed in the history of Christianity. In Roman times, philosophers and intellectuals generally had tended to identify Christianity with obscurantism and superstition, an impression only gradually (and never completely) effaced in the fourth century. Thereafter, however, Christianity had appeared to associate itself wholly with Roman culture, and after the collapse of the secular Roman state in the West it had successfully grafted the civilization of the ancient world on to the dynamic barbarian societies of the West. Following this, and for many centuries, Christianity remained both the chief focus of culture and the driving force behind economic and institutional innovation. The strength of the total Christian society was essentially religious, and linked to the well-being and vigour of the Catholic Church. But then in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there came the first sign of a change: that is, a tendency for the more progressive and innovatory elements in society to operate not within the institutional framework of the Church but outside it – and eventually against it. The Church ceased to be in the van of progress, and quite rapidly became an obstacle to it. This switch-about came both in the economic and the intellectual field.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  What is clear is that by the beginning of the fifteenth century, the image of the Church was financial rather than spiritual. Adam of Usk, a case-hardened ecclesiastical lawyer from Wales, was nevertheless shocked by his first visit to Rome in c . 1415: ‘At Rome everything is bought and sold. Benefices are given not for desert, but to the highest bidder. Everyone with money keeps it in the merchant’s bank, to further his advancement. . . . As, therefore, under the old dispensation, miracles ceased when the priests were corrupted by venality, so I fear it will come to pass under the new; the danger standeth daily knocking at the very doors of the church.’ On the whole, this type of criticism tended to come from the clergy. Laymen did not care how clerics got their appointments, provided they were decent men who attended to their duties. But there were certain exactions which affected all classes, and were deeply and increasingly resented. Most of these became obtrusive, and so came to be regarded as abuses, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Perhaps the worst was the mortuary, a clerical byproduct of the feudal heriot or death-duty. It may have been voluntary in origin, as so many of the payments to the Church were; or it may have been based on the presumption that the dead man had failed to pay all his tithes, so his second-best possession should go to the Church as compensation. It had no foundation in secular law. Indeed, it varied enormously. One common form was for the dead man’s family to hand over his bed, or bedding, to the parish priest. This was causing resentment even by the beginning of the thirteenth century. Innocent III wrote to his French legates in 1204: ‘Warn the clergy that they use no burdensome exaction and dishonourable importunity with regard to the bedding which is brought with the corpses to their churches; on the other hand, take care to induce the laity by diligent warning to maintain in these matters that laudable custom.’ Why was it laudable? It would be hard to think of anything more calculated to scandalize than such a compulsory exaction from a bereaved family. What made it so odious was that it was applied to the very poor. The Abbot of Schwanheim could claim a heriot ‘from any who had only so much land on his domain as he could set a three-legged stool upon’. On the Continent, certain abbeys could claim up to one-third of the goods of the dead man. There was nothing like this in England. But the Vicar of Morstow claimed ‘the best day-garment of each parishioner that dieth in the said parish’; and the Rector of Silverton ‘the second-best possession or best’. Sometimes clerical landowners got a double death-duty, as lord and as rector; thus the Abbot of Gloucester Abbey got his tenants’ ‘best-beast as lord, and another as rector’.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Many had accepted Catholicism, and the conversos, always suspect, were a powerful element in Spanish society. In Spain, the Inquisition was part of the process whereby the Castilians penetrated and unified the whole of Spanish society: it was set up in 1478 to examine the credentials of the converts. The conquest of the Moors was virtually completed in 1492 with the fall of Granada; three months later the crown ordered all remaining Jews to leave the country, the culmination of twelve years of intensive anti-Semitic legislation. In fact, up to fifty per cent, perhaps 400,000, remained as forced converts, and solving the Jewish problem merely exacerbated the problem of the conversos. Christians with Jewish blood had been, and remained, powerful in finance, administration and medicine. By the end of the fifteenth century most of the noblest and richest families in Spain, including the royal family of Aragon, were ‘tainted’. Nevertheless, racial legislation was introduced to ‘purify’ the upper regions of society. Statutes of limpieza de sangre were passed banning descendants of Moors and Jews (especially the latter) from universities and religious orders. The Inquisition effectively controlled their enforcement and progressively extended their scope. Torquemada, who set the system in motion, and his successor as head of the Inquisition, Diego Deza, both had Jewish blood. But the Inquisition could authenticate false genealogies, and the fact that virtually everyone of any importance was vulnerable merely increased its power – accurate genealogies, secretly circulated, were a form of subversive literature. It was the guardian of the Spanish race, and one of the reasons it was popular among the Castilian masses was that in general they alone had the limpieza de sangre. In a memorandum to Charles v, the historian Lorenzo Galindez de Carvajal pointed out that most of the members of his council were ‘tainted’; among the exceptions was Dr Palacios Rubios, ‘a man of pure blood because he is of labouring descent’. The effect of the Inquisition under Torquemada was to confuse the theoretically separate matters of racial and religious purity. He issued instructions at Seville in 1484 that the ‘children and grandchildren of those condemned [by the Inquisition] may not hold or possess public offices or posts or honours, or be promoted to hold orders, or be judges, majors, constables, magistrates, jurors, stewards, officials of weights and measures, merchants, notaries, public scriveners, lawyers, attorneys, secretaries, accountants, treasurers, physicians, surgeons, shopkeepers, brokers, changers, collectors, tax-farmers or holders of any other public office.’ A new doctrine of original sin was thus introduced, all the more un-Christian since it could not be effaced by baptism; the saffron robes worn by the condemned (the great majority of whom were Jews) had to be hung up in churches as a perpetual reproach to their descendants – a law observed until the end of the eighteenth century. The limpieza de sangre system might have disappeared in the sixteenth century under the weight of its own contradictions and cruelties.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  grossly offensive, and they were outraged by Pilate’s seizure of Temple funds to finance improvements in the Jerusalem water-supply. He took a harsh line with awkward Jews, and surely executed Jesus without hesitation or scruple. On the other hand, we know that Pilate’s career in Judea finally came to an end in AD 36, following his violent suppression of another exotic religious movement. On this occasion, by contrast, the entire Jewish establishment in Palestine and the diaspora protested to the imperial legate in Syria, and Pilate was recalled in disgrace. Why, then, the silence in Jesus’s case? The acquiescence of the Jewish authorities, taken in conjunction with the quite explicit accusations of the gospel narratives, make it hard to reject the explanation that Jesus had effectively, and quite dramatically, broken with the Jewish faith, as least as conceived by the prevailing opinion in Jerusalem. That the Sadducees should regard Jesus as a nuisance, disturbing their relations with the Roman authorities (as well as a teacher of heterodoxy), was to be expected. What is much more significant is that the Pharisees should accept, and indeed promote, his extinction, and carry public opinion with them in so doing. Evidently what Jesus had claimed or preached was regarded as so outrageous by a predominant section of the Jewish community, and by thousands of ordinary pious Jews, that they were prepared to invoke the Roman power – normally abhorrent to them, especially in a religious matter – to rid Israel of his mission. Such a breach with the Jewish consensus was perhaps inevitable. Jesus was a practising Jew from a conformist background, learned in his faith, and with a deep respect for the Jewish tradition. Many of his ideas had Jewish origins. If he sometimes brushed aside the law, he sometimes – on marriage, for instance – interpreted it strictly. He showed a higher respect for the Temple than its own custodians. Yet the core of his message could not be contained within a Jewish framework. He was, in effect, giving the Jews a completely new interpretation of God and, in delivering his message, claiming not merely divine authority, but divine status. It was not a conflict on ethics. There were many ethical tendencies within the Jewish spectrum, and on this aspect accommodation could have been reached. But Jesus linked his new ethics, and the link was causal and compulsory, with a new description of the mechanism of salvation. He was telling the Jews that their theory of how God made the universe work was wrong, and that he had a better. He was asking them to embark with him on a religious revolution. They had either to follow or repudiate him. For the Sadducees to follow was out of the question. They and Jesus had nothing in

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  origins. Herod’s fabric was elegant, modern, sophisticated – he had, indeed, added some Hellenic decorative effects much resented by fundamentalist Jews who constantly sought to destroy them – but nothing could hide the essential business of the Temple, which was the ritual slaughter, consumption and combustion of sacrificial cattle on a gigantic scale. The place was as vast as a small city. There were literally thousands of priests, attendants, temple-soldiers and minions. To the unprepared visitor, the dignity and charity of Jewish diaspora life, the thoughtful comments and homilies of the Alexandrian synagogue, was quite lost amid the smoke of the pyres, the bellows of terrified beasts, the sluices of blood, the abattoir stench, the unconcealed and unconcealable machinery of tribal religion inflated by modern wealth to an industrial scale. Sophisticated Romans who knew the Judaism of the diaspora found it hard to understand the hostility towards the Jews shown by colonial officials who, behind a heavily-armed escort, had witnessed Jerusalem at festival time. Diaspora Judaism, liberal and outward-minded, contained the matrix of a universal religion, but only if it could be cut off from its barbarous origins; and how could so thick and sinewy an umbilical cord be severed? In a sense, the same problem and tension could be felt within Palestine Judaism. Jews were aware of the huge dynamic within their faith and of the almost intolerable restraints from the past which bound and emasculated it. Able, industrious, God- fearing, they felt bitter and frustrated by their manifest inability to solve their political problems. There was a yawning gap between their religious pretensions, their historical claims, their elect status, on the one hand, and the ugly reality of poverty and subservience to the kittim. Was there not something monstrously wrong with a nation which complained bitterly of Roman taxation and misrule, yet insisted that the empire was at least preferable to the mess the Jews would make of it themselves? To what extent was the disjunction between Jewish aspiration and performance the responsibility of a fallacious religious analysis and prognosis? These questions and others, constantly asked, never satisfactorily answered, kept the Jewish world on the brink of a perpetual reformation. In some ways Judaism was highly unstable, and it was certainly fissiparous. It had gaps. The Jews took their theory of nature from the Greeks. There is no proper cosmology in the Old Testament; it was not entirely clear to the Jews where exactly God was in relation to man, in either space or time. Satan rarely made his appearance so could not be regarded as the causal agent of sin, and only a few Jews accepted the oriental explanation of twin worlds of good and evil,

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Celtic monasticism across a huge area of France, Italy and the Alps, and had founded about forty monasteries, including Rebais, Jumièges, St Gall, Bobbio, Fontenelle, Chelles, Marmoutier, Corbier, St Omer, St Bertin, Remiremont, Hautvilliers, Montierender, St Valéry-sur-Somme, Solignac, Fontaine and Luxeuil, many of them to become among the glories of the Middle Ages. Columbanus was disgusted with the Europe he found. Travelling east through Gaul he noted that ‘virtue is more or less nonexistent’. The last vestiges of ancient civilization, he thought, had disappeared. He found himself fighting loose morals, rather than ignorance, and teaching discipline instead of grammar. The rule he drew up for his new establishments was very severe, and corporal punishment harsh and frequent. This was all very well: Columbanus’s success indicates the appeal of his mission. But his activities, for the first time, brought the nature of Celtic monasticism firmly to the attention of the Church authorities – to western bishops in general, and to the Bishop of Rome in particular. The Irish monks were not heretical. But they were plainly unorthodox. They did not look right, to begin with. They had the wrong tonsure. Rome, as was natural, had ‘the tonsure of St Peter’, that is, a shaven crown. Easterners had the tonsure of St Paul, totally shaven; and if they wished to take up an appointment in the West they had to wait until their rim grew before being invested. But the Celts looked like nothing on earth: they had their hair long at the back and, on the shaven front part, a half-circle of hair from one ear to the other, leaving a band across the forehead. More serious was their refusal to celebrate Easter according to the calculations made by Rome. There were a number of divergent calendar systems in the Mediterranean area; the one used by the Celts corresponded with none of them. The issue was more important than it may seem to us. Getting the right date for Easter was the most obvious instance of the problem of calculating time – man’s effort to orient himself in relation to events. There had been liturgical rows about Easter going back to the second century, perhaps even to the distant conflicts between gentile and Jewish Christians. In western Europe, the newly Christianized barbarian societies had adjusted their sense of the annual routine, from the court downwards, to fit the Christian year. Divergence over the most important and awesome event in the yearly round was not merely indecorous but sinister. And how could the Church claim unity if it could not even agree on the date of the resurrection, the core of its belief? Behind these discrepancies, which reflected not so much deliberate defiance on

• From The Decameron (1353)

  But then it has occurred to me that men are apt to be tactless in their handling of these matters, and when they receive a dusty answer they start bandying words with one another and eventually somebody gets hurt. So in order to avoid unpleasantness and scandal, I have always held my tongue. Since, however, you appear to be a friend of his, I decided I would break my silence, for after all it is perfectly proper for you to censure people for this kind of behaviour, no matter whether they are your friends or total strangers. For the love of God, therefore, I implore you to speak to him severely and persuade him to refrain from his importunities. There are plenty of other women who doubtless find this sort of thing amusing, and who will enjoy being ogled and spied upon by him, but I personally have no inclination for it whatsoever, and I find his behaviour exceedingly disagreeable.’ And having reached the end of her speech, the lady bowed her head as though she were going to burst into tears. The reverend friar realized immediately who it was to whom she was referring, and having warmly commended her purity of mind (for he firmly believed she was telling the truth), he promised to take all necessary steps to ensure that the fellow ceased to annoy her. Moreover, knowing her to be very rich, he expounded the advantages of charitable deeds and almsgiving, and told her all about his needy condition, whereupon the lady said: ‘Please do restrain him, for the love of God; and if he should deny it, by all means tell him who it was who informed you and complained to you about it.’ Then, having completed her confession and received her penance, suddenly remembering the friar’s injunctions to her on the subject of almsgiving, she casually stuffed his palm with money and requested him to say a few masses for the souls of her departed ones, after which she got up from where she was kneeling at his feet, and made her way home. Shortly afterwards, the gentleman in question paid one of his regular visits to the reverend friar, and after they had conversed together for a while on general topics, the friar drew him to one side and reproached him in a very kindly sort of way for the amorous glances which, as the lady had given him to understand, he believed him to be casting in her direction. Not unnaturally, the gentleman was amazed, for he had never so much as looked at the lady and it was very seldom that he passed by her house. But when he started to protest his innocence, the friar interrupted him. ‘Now it’s no use pretending to be shocked,’ he said, ‘or wasting your breath denying it, because you simply haven’t a leg to stand on. This is no piece of idle gossip that I picked up from her neighbours.

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

  Yet Justin and his Christian contemporaries, far from expressing the “enlightened” or skeptical attitudes that later historians have projected upon them, usually regarded pagan practices with the utmost seriousness and recoiled from them in disgust. Justin agreed with pious pagans that the gods and emperors reflected elemental forces in the universe, but there agreement ended. For the gods that Marcus Aurelius revered as his divine patrons Justin detested as demons—evil forces manipulating the law to enforce the inequities that Christians protested and the injustices that they, among many others, suffered. Following his conversion, Justin had been shocked to learn that the gods that he, too, once had worshiped were actually mere pretenders to divine power. Writing his open letter to the emperors, he unmasked the gods’ secret identity: the patron gods of Rome were none other than the fallen angels, who, according to Genesis 6, were cast out of heaven at the beginning of time. For Justin, like many Jews and many of his fellow Christians, tended to interpret the difficulties of human life less in terms of the fall of Adam and Eve (Genesis 2–3) than in terms of the fall of the angels (Genesis 6:1–6). According to Genesis 6, the great and famous men of ancient times—those called giants—were the result of a hybrid union between God’s angels and human women: The sons of God [angels] saw that the daughters of men were fair; and they took to wife such of them as they chose.… There were giants on the earth in those days,… when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them, the mighty men of renown. (GENESIS 6:2–4) Justin explained that after some of the angels whom God had entrusted to administer the universe betrayed their trust by seducing women and corrupting boys (so Justin amplified the story of Genesis 6), they “begot children, who are called demons.”35 When God discovered the corruption of his administration, he expelled them from heaven. But then these exiled angels tried to compensate for their lost power by joining with their offspring, the demons, to enslave the human race. Drawing upon the supernatural powers that even disgraced angels still retain, they awed and terrified people into worshiping them instead of God. Thus, Justin said: The truth shall be told; since of old these evil demons, effecting apparitions of themselves, both polluted women and corrupted boys, and showed such terrifying visions to people that those who did not use their reason … were struck by terror; and being carried away by fear, and not knowing that these were demons, they called them gods.36

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  ‘They made it their business to set up the light of nature, under the name of Christ in Men, and to dishonour and cry down the Church, the Scriptures, the present Ministry, and our Worship and Ordinances; and called men to hearken to Christ within them. But withal, they conjoined a Cursed Doctrine of Libertinism, which brought them to an abominable filthiness of Life. They taught . . . that God regardeth not the Actions of the Outward Man, but of the Heart, and that to the Pure all things are Pure (even things forbidden). And so as allowed by God, they spoke most hideous Words of Blasphemy, and many of them committed whoredoms commonly. Insomuch that a Matron of great Note for Godliness and Sobriety, being perverted by them, turned so shameless a Whore, that she was Carted in the streets of London.’ These extremists were prophets or Ranters, who had much in common with the Joachimites or, for that matter, Tertullian. Such elements have always seized the opportunity of a crisis or breakdown in society to promote apocalyptic or extraordinary solutions, whether moral or politico-economic. The English Civil War was just such an occasion. As one orthodox critic put it (1651): ‘It is no new work of Satan to sow Heresies, and breed Heretics, but they never came up so thick as in these latter times. They were wont to peep up by one and one, but now they sprout out by huddles and clusters (like locusts out of the bottomless pit) . . . thronging upon us in swarmes, as the Caterpillars of Aegypt.’ More recently, the specifically Christian element, always the first victim when millenarianism lurches into terror, had tended to recede into the background or disappear altogether. Yet millenarians, from Tertullian on, had nearly always been anti-clerical – a characteristic they share with modern non-Christian prophets and apocalyptics, like Marx, the Paris communards of 1870, Trotskyites, Maoists and other seekers for an illusory perfection in this world. The secular Daniels of the twentieth century have scriptural credentials and their lineage is Christian. This analysis of medieval Christianity thus presents two types of social experiment in moulding society around moral principles – an orthodox experiment and the radical alternative it provoked. Both tend to fail because both, in different ways, are too ambitious; and in the process of trying to fend off failure each type of experiment is liable to betray its Christian principles. One of the great, but perhaps inevitable, tragedies of history was the transformation of the Gregorian reform into an institutional obsession with power; and one of the perpetual, but equally fated, tragedies of history is the progression from millenarianism to the total abandonment of moral values. But Christianity, fortunately, contains more than these two imperfect matrices; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we see the emergence and the struggle for survival of a third force: Christian humanism.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  sins are washed away with a little paper, a sealed parchment, with the gift of a little money or some wax image, with a little pilgrimage. Thou art utterly deceived.’ Who had done the deceiving? Chiefly the papacy. And no wonder: the papacy was corrupt and desperately in need of reform. His In Praise of Folly was the outcome of a visit to the Rome of the scandalous soldier-pope Julius II, who stormed fortresses in full armour. In Julius’s Rome, wrote Erasmus, ‘you can see a tired old man act with youthful energy and without regard to labour and expense simply in order to overturn laws, religion, peace and humane institutions.’ No man could hope to reach Heaven by using the machinery of the Church: ‘Without ceremonies, perhaps thou shalt not be a Christian; but they make thee not a Christian.’ Where, then, was the road to salvation? Erasmus agreed with the reformers that the Bible must be studied. He agreed with the practice of private devotion, especially prayer. Man saved himself through knowledge of God, obtained directly, not through the mediation of an institution. But it is at this point that his thought diverged from both the Lutherans and the later Calvinists. Erasmus, as a scholar and textual critic, had learnt to distrust theology, whose dogmatic conclusions were often based, as he had discovered, on faulty readings of the text. (This distrust was violently reciprocated by the theologians, who hotly disputed the right of text-scholars to pronounce on ‘theological’ problems, and who clung fiercely to their old texts, however corrupt.) In his own investigations, he had found himself obliged to eliminate the famous Trinitarian verse from 1 John 5:7, since it was not in the Greek manuscript. This led him to doubt the process of metaphysical reasoning and logic which allowed the schoolmen to produce exact certitudes in any theological situation. In his commentary on Hilary of Poitiers, he asks: ‘Is it not possible to have fellowship with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, without being able to explain philosophically the distinction between them, and between the nativity of the Son and the procession of the Holy Spirit?’ This was indeed a reasonable but also an audacious question – so much, Erasmus was saying, for the disputes which led to Arianism, to the Monophysite schism and to Islam, and so much for the fatal word which had divided East and West since 1054 and had lost Byzantium to the Christian world. He went on to dismiss the importance of much theological speculation and definition, and to reassert, instead, the virtues which Jesus had outlined in the New Testament and which, to him, were the essence of Christianity: ‘You will not be damned if you do not know whether the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son had one or two

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  sides often identified witchcraft with opposing beliefs; on the other hand, they drew on each other’s theoretical writings and practical experiences. The Catholic witchcraft terror in Germany was remarkably like the Inquisition’s ‘Protestant- Jewish’ terror in Spain, since it might strike at anyone. Philip Adolf von Ehrenberg, Bishop of Wurtzburg, burned over 900 during his reign 1623–31, including his own nephew, nineteen priests and a child of seven. In the Bavarian prince-bishopric of Eichstatt, 274 were burned in the year 1629 alone. In Bonn, the chancellor and his wife, and the wife of the archbishop’s secretary, were executed. The worst hunt of all was at Bamberg, where the ‘witch-bishop’, Johann Georg II Fuchs von Dornheim burned 600 witches, 1623–33. His chancellor, accused of leniency, implicated under torture five burgomasters; one of them, arrested and tortured in turn, accused twenty-seven colleagues, but later managed to smuggle out a letter to his daughter: ‘It is all falsehood and invention, so help me God. . . . They never cease to torture until one says something.... If God sends no means of bringing the truth to light, our whole kindred will be burned.’ The hunt led a Jesuit, Friedrich Spee, who had acted as confessor to witches in the Wurzburg persecution, to circulate in manuscript an attack on hunting called Cautio Criminalis : ‘Torture fills our Germany with witches and unheard-of wickedness, and not only Germany but any nation that attempts it.... If all of us have not confessed ourselves witches, that is only because we have not all been tortured.’ This revealing Catholic document fell into the hands of Protestants, who printed it in 1631. But exposures of Catholic enormities did not prevent Protestants from doing the same. Erasmian humanists like Johann Weyer had long since drawn the connection between torture and confessions. (His book was put on the Index). As Richard Scott, one of Weyer’s admirers, put it in 1584: ‘Note also how easily they may be brought to confess that which they never did, nor lieth in the power of man to do.’ (Scott’s book was burned by James I.) Many intellectuals shared the sceptical attitude of Montaigne: ‘It is rating our conjectures highly to roast people alive for them’; and even in the worst affected areas the judicial authorities were eventually persuaded to discountenance torture. As Sir George Mackenzie, the Scottish Lord Advocate, said: ‘Most of all that ever were taken were tormented after this manner, and this usage was the ground of all their confession.’ This had been apparent all along, to anyone with an open mind. But so long as men killed each other for their religious beliefs, witches were extensively hunted. Once the major fighting had

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  both sexes took part. And the pillar of Spanish orthodoxy, the Dominican anti- Semite and rabble-rouser, Saint Vincent Ferrer, led a party of flagellants through Spain, France and Italy, following the instructions of a vision in 1396. Thus there was orthodox flagellation, heretical flagellation, and apparently secret flagellation too. Generally speaking, if both sexes took part, it was permitted. Nearly all unofficial male flagellant movements ended in anti-clericalism, heresy or violence. Then the Inquisition was called in, and executions followed. Christianity also had its orthodox tradition of apostolic poverty, and its theory that the world, in its pristine state, was egalitarian and just, before the irruption of sin produced the rule of the strong and the degradation of the weak. In the later Middle Ages, many millenarian movements launched themselves on crazy careers from these propositions. They took two main forms, some combining both. The first group, usually termed ‘Free Spirits’, were antinomians, of a type St Paul had had to deal with in Greece. They believed themselves to be perfect and above moral norms. The Abbot of St Victor, a fourteenth-century orthodox mystic, wrote of them indignantly: ‘They committed rapes and adulteries and other acts which gave bodily pleasure; and to the women with whom they sinned, and the simple people they deceived, they promised that such sins would not be punished.’ Some taught that women were created to be used by the brothers of the Holy Spirit; a matron, by having intercourse with one of the brethren, could regain her lost virginity; this was linked to their belief that they had rediscovered the precise way in which Adam and Eve had made love. They were often arrested for attempting to seduce respectable middle-class wives; or for eating in taverns and then refusing to pay. ‘They believe that all things are common,’ noted the Bishop of Strasbourg in 1317, ‘whence they conclude that theft is lawful to them.’ These men were often executed, sometimes with hideous cruelty. But many free spirits were not fraudulent or antisocial. In Flanders and the Rhine valley, the orthodox Brethren of the Free Spirit formed one of the largest and most admirable religious movements of the later Middle Ages, running schools and hospitals for the poor, and engaging in a variety of welfare work. Female free spirits, of Beguines, though not exactly nuns since they did not live in convents, worked among the poor in the Rhineland cities – at one time there were 2,000 of them just in Cologne – and were models of piety and orthodoxy. Rome did not like these patterns of religious behaviour, since they did not fit into established categories. So the bishops and the Inquisition kept a close watch, and frequently

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  He strips down to his white briefs, and I see that his body is intimidatingly thick, solid and muscular. He goes down on me, and I am gone now: in my mind I am floating in a vast ocean, warm water carrying my body, sun beating down and saturating me. I don’t want to be in bed with this man, and the longer I stay here, the more I am disgusted by him – and, more horribly, by myself for being here. Sex has been purely fun and joyous and liberating and toe-curling and energizing and fulfilling and transcendent these past two months, but now the ugly side of it is lashing its forked tongue at me: asymmetry of power, physical vulnerability, fear, mistrust, revulsion. He puts on a condom and comes inside of me and then lies next to me, interrogating me about my sexual predilections. Do I like anal sex? Have I ever been with a woman? Am I interested in threesomes? What is the kinkiest thing I have ever done? I respond haltingly and do not ask him anything at all. Finally, I say that I have to get home to my kids and he strokes my upper thigh up to the curve of my hip and back down again to my waist, asking, “Can I have you one more time before you go?” The wording of his question is spot on, as that’s exactly what he’s doing: having me. And I am allowing it. “Sure,” I say quietly, because now I am so far gone that I suspect I will not return to my body for days. He straddles me and rolls me onto my stomach, then he enters me vaginally from behind. I lie like a ragdoll, just letting it happen. When he shudders and then collapses on top of me, I feel like all air has been pressed out of me and I wait for him to realize he is crushing me. I deserve this, I think, to feel breathless and powerless, because I have willingly made myself prostrate and obedient. Finally, he rolls off me and I wordlessly rise from the bed, taking my small pile of clothes from the dresser and heading to the bathroom, where I clean myself as best I can with toilet paper and water and put my clothes back on. He is waiting for me in the kitchen, looking like the lord of the manor, relaxing in a bathrobe, refilling his coffee cup. I say goodbye and head to the door, which he opens for me as he waves a distracted farewell, coffee cup in hand like he’s sending me out on my way to work in the morning.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Outraged by her body she must ruthlessly scourge it—no good, the lust of the eye would betray her. Seeing she desired and desiring she drank, seeking to drown one lust in another. And then she would stand up before her tall easel, swaying a little but with hand always steady. The brandy went into her legs, not her hands; her hands would remain disconcertingly steady. She would start some gigantic and heart-broken daub, struggling to lose herself in her picture, struggling to ease the ache of her passion by smearing the placid white face of the canvas with ungainly yet strangely arresting forms—according to Dupont, Wanda had genius. Neither eating nor sleeping she would grow very thin, so that everybody would know what had happened. They had seen it before, oh, but many times, and therefore for them the tragedy was lessened. ‘Wanda’s off again!’ some one might say with a grin. ‘She was tight this morning; who is it this time?’ But Valérie, who hated drink like the plague, would grow angry; outraged she would feel by this Wanda. There was Hortense, Comtesse de Kerguelen; dignified and reserved, a very great lady, of a calm and rather old-fashioned beauty. When Valérie introduced her to Stephen, Stephen quite suddenly thought of Morton. And yet she had left all for Valérie Seymour; husband, children and home had she left; facing scandal, opprobrium, persecution. Greater than all these most vital things had been this woman’s love for Valérie Seymour. An enigma she seemed, much in need of explaining. And now in the place of that outlawed love had come friendship; they were close friends, these one-time lovers. There was Margaret Roland, the poetess, a woman whose work was alive with talent. The staunchest of allies, the most fickle of lovers, she seemed likely enough to end up in the work-house, with her generous financial apologies which at moments made pretty large holes in her savings. It was almost impossible not to like her, since her only fault lay in being too earnest; every fresh love affair was the last while it lasted, though of course this was apt to be rather misleading. A costly business in money and tears; she genuinely suffered in heart as in pocket. There was nothing arresting in Margaret’s appearance, sometimes she dressed well, sometimes she dressed badly, according to the influence of the moment. But she always wore ultra feminine shoes, and frequently bought model gowns when in Paris. One might have said quite a womanly woman, unless the trained ear had been rendered suspicious by her voice which had something peculiar about it. It was like a boy’s voice on the verge of breaking. And then there was Brockett with his soft, white hands; and several others there were, very like him. There was also Adolphe Blanc, the designer—a master of colour whose primitive tints had practically revolutionized taste, bringing back to the eye the joy of the simple.