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 A History of Christianity (1976)

  something which responded to a popular demand, especially among the well-to-do. Indeed, those of Greek culture found it hard to understand why Christianity should wish or need to maintain the Jewish connection. They found the Septuagint a monstrous document: barbarous and obscure or, when comprehensible, repugnant. Why should Christians lumber themselves with it? This line was all the more insidious in that it merely carried Paul’s logic a little further. There must have been times when Paul, for all his Jewishness, was tempted to drop the Septuagint himself. How much of it was authentic? Valentinus argued that a great deal had simply been inserted by Jewish elders and possessed no authority; and many other portions represented compromises with contemporary opinion, Moses being a prime culprit. As forms of Christianity spread and enveloped, or indeed produced, highly-educated men, the glaring blemishes of the scriptures were closely examined. By the early decades of the second century there were masses of Christian texts, too, which had no precise status and spoke with many tongues. Which were valid and which were not? The problem attracted the attention of a brilliant and wealthy Greek convert from Pontus, Marcion, who had come to Rome in the 120s or 130s to take an active part in propagating the faith. He was from the school of Paul, indeed his greatest theological follower. He represents two important and permanent strains in Christianity: the cool, rationalist approach to the examination of the Church’s documentary proofs, and a plain, unspectacular philosophy of love. He was, as it were, a preincarnation of a certain type of Renaissance scholar, an adumbration of Erasmus. Marcion had no doubt that Paul’s essential teachings were sound and he knew they were closest to Jesus in date. His difficulty was how to square them either with the teachings of the Old Testament, or with post-Pauline Christian writings. Using historical and critical methods basically similar to those of modern scriptural scholars, he identified only seven Pauline epistles as authentic, rejecting all the later documents which were circulating in the apostle’s name. Of the so-called evangelists he accepted only portions of Luke (in his gospel and Acts) as inspired, rejecting all the rest as later fabrications, rationalizations and muddle. This stripped the New Testament down to its bare Pauline bones: indeed, to Marcion, the teaching of Paul was, essentially, the gospel of Jesus. The Old Testament he rejected in toto since it seemed to him, as it has seemed to many Christians since, to be talking of a quite different God: monstrous, evil-creating, bloody, the patron of ruffians like David. His textual analysis and the process by which he arrived at the first ‘canon’, thus had a unity: the breach with

• 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:

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  low for the purpose of vulgar appeal, remorselessly exploiting popular prejudice, an anti-intellectual, a hater of classical culture, a mob orator, and a sex-obsessive. In the infinitive wisdom of God, he noted, the genitals were appropriately made the instruments for the transmission of original sin: ‘Ecce unde! That’s the place! That’s the place from which the first sin is passed on!’ Adam had defied God – and for every man born, the shame at the uncontrollable stirring of the genitals was a reminder of, and a fitting punishment for, the original crime of disobedience. Did not every man, he asked his cringing congregation, feel shame at having a wet dream? Of course he did. By contrast, Julian’s line seems a straightforward deployment of elementary classical reason: ‘You ask me why I would not consent to the idea that there is a sin that is part of human nature. I answer: it is improbable. It is untrue. It is unjust and impious. It makes it seem as if the devil were the maker of men. It violates and destroys the freedom of the will . . . by saying that men are so incapable of virtue that in the very womb of their mothers they are filled with bygone sins . . . and, what is disgusting as it is blasphemous, this view of yours fastens, as its most conclusive proof, on the common decency with which we cover our genitals.’ Julian argued that sex was a kind of sixth sense, a form of neutral energy which might be used well or ill. ‘Really?’ replied Augustine, ‘is that your experience? So you would not have married couples restrain that evil – I refer, of course, to your favourite good? So you would have them jump into bed whenever they like, whenever they felt stirred by desire? Far be it from them to postpone it till bedtime . . . if this is the sort of married life you lead, don’t drag up your experience in debate.’ Augustine’s own life ended in darkness. The Vandals broke into Africa in 429, and Augustine died next year in his episcopal city, already under siege. ‘He lived to see cities overthrown and destroyed,’ wrote his biographer, Possidius, ‘churches denuded of priests and ministers, virgins and monks dispersed, some dying of torture, others by the sword, others captured and losing innocence of soul and body, and faith itself, in cruel slavery; he saw hymns and divine praises ceasing in the churches, the buildings themselves often burned down, the sacraments no longer wanted or, if wanted, priests to administer them hard to find. . . .’ In the City of God Augustine had already contrasted the vulnerable earthly citadel with the imperishable kingdom of Christianity. Man should set his sights on the second; nothing was to be hoped for on

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  There was Wanda, the struggling Polish painter; dark for a Pole with her short, stiff black hair, and her dusky skin, and her colourless lips; yet withal not unattractive, this Wanda. She had wonderful eyes that held fire in their depths, hell-fire at times, if she had been drinking; but at other times a more gentle flame, although never one that it was safe to play with. Wanda saw largely. All that she envisaged was immense, her pictures, her passions, her remorses. She craved with a well-nigh insatiable craving, she feared with a well-nigh intolerable terror—not the devil, she was brave with him when in her cups, but God in the person of Christ the Redeemer. Like a whipped cur she crawled to the foot of the Cross, without courage, without faith, without hope of mercy. 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.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  at all, and were to be distinguished by their critical approach to papal infallibility. When the dogma was placed before the council, ‘which it is hoped will be very shortly’, the proper course would be for the Fathers ‘to define it by acclamation’, without debate or vote. This was also the position adopted by L’Univers and other ultramontanist organs. It clearly had the approval of Pius IX himself, who was fond of saying ‘La tradizione sono io !’ In the event, the dogma was defined in 1870 only after long debate and in a qualified form which limited the Pope’s freedom from error only to matters of faith and morals defined ex cathedra. But in all other respects the council marked the apparent extinction of the liberal Catholics. It took place against the background of the Franco-Prussia war, the withdrawal of French military protection, the Italian seizure of Rome and the extinction of the papal states. But this eclipse of the Pope’s temporal power served, in real terms, to emphasize the huge importance of his new and dominant position within the Church and, it seemed, within Christianity in consequence. The fortress had been constructed not in perishable stone but in ideas and populist notions. Its garrison was unanimous. Montalembert had turned his back on the council in disgust: ‘I do not want to offer up justice, reason and history as a burnt offering to the idol that the lay theologians of Catholicism have set up for themselves in the Vatican.’ Bishop Doupanloup protested in vain that Cardinal Barnabo, Prefect of the College of Propaganda, was ‘driving the bishops like pigs’. Professor Johann von Dollinger, leader of the German anti-triumphalists, and Acton’s close friend, rejected the dogma: ‘As a Christian, as a theologian, as a historian and as a citizen, I cannot accept this doctrine.’ A few, mainly academics, went with him, and formed the Old Catholic Church. Acton himself washed his hands of ecclesiastical politics. These desertions or renunciations caused scarcely a ripple within the Church, and were welcome to most of the triumphalists. Of the few bishops who initially voted against the dogma, or allowed their opposition to it to become known, some survived because of the strength of their personal position. Others were victimized, not indeed by the Vatican – that was unnecessary – but by their own triumphalist clergy. Thus Mgr de Marguerye, Bishop of Autun, after his return from the council, tried to justify his negative vote at a meeting of his diocesan clergy: they denied him a hearing by drumming their feet on the wooden boards of the chapter-house, and he felt he had no choice but to resign his see. A great silence descended on the Catholic Church.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Vagrants, Juvenile Mendicants, Youthful Sinners, Distressed Widows, Poor Clergymen, Infirm Gentlewomen, Degraded Females, those imprisoned for Small Debts, and Societies to build and maintain hospitals, fever-wards, asylums, lying-in homes, infirmaries, refuges and penitentiaries. Wilberforce’s letters recorded progress: ‘It is delightful to witness the many accessions to the cause of Christian piety in the higher ranks of life’ (1811);‘. . . wide and more wide the blessed circle spreads in the elevated walks of life... a great increase in piety, especially among the higher classes’ (1813). Gradually, the robust commercial rationalism of Locke ceased to be the main characteristic of middle- and upper-class religion, and yielded to the emotion-charged propriety which we associate with Victorianism, but which established its grip a whole generation before Victoria came to the throne. An Evangelical had to be ‘converted’, however long he had been a member of the Church, or even if he were in holy orders. In the movement, both sexes tended to wear black gloves. There were many other characteristics, especially the phrase ‘Shall we engage?’ as a prelude to discussing religion. Most amusements were banned. One of the Clapham Sect, John Venn, said of his children: ‘They never go anywhere where cards and dancing are introduced, neither do they learn to dance.’ His son banned dancing, cards, theatres and novel-reading amongst his family. Abner Brown recorded of one Evangelical parson’s wife: ‘When her fine and manly boys came home for the holidays, she would not allow them to stand at the window of their father’s parsonage without making them turn their backs so as not to look at the romantic views by which the house was encircled, lest the loveliness of “Satan’s Earth” should alienate their affections from the better world to come.’ The Evangelical paper, the Record, set the tone. It suspected Handel’s oratorios because they were performed at Ranelagh and Vauxhall; indeed, it called an oratorio ‘an awful and impious desecration of holy things by a giddy and perishing world’; it wanted theatres ‘shut altogether’, since people went there ‘to see a strumpet crowned with garlands and cheered to the echo by a demoralized multitude’; it deplored the idea of clergymen playing cards, and published the names of those present at balls and hunts; it thought Scott’s novels ‘in the highest degree injurious’ and lamented the fact that even Wilberforce read them – several readers wrote in horrified disgust when they heard this news, one signing himself ‘Flag of Distress’. As Evangelicalism penetrated down the social scale, meeting Methodist influence on the way. it tended to take on an additional middle- or lower-class colouring, and from the 1830s supported

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Said Valérie with her calm little smile: ‘I think I preferred it when we were all martyrs!’ The dancers drifted back to their seats and Brockett manœuvred to sit beside Stephen. ‘You and Mary dance well together,’ he murmured. ‘Are you happy? Are you enjoying yourselves?’ Stephen, who hated this inquisitive mood, this mood that would feed upon her emotions, turned away as she answered him, rather coldly: ‘Yes, thanks—we’re not having at all a bad evening.’ And now the Patron was standing by their table; bowing slightly to Brockett he started singing. His voice was a high and sweet baritone; his song was of love that must end too soon, of life that in death is redeemed by ending. An extraordinary song to hear in such a place—melancholy and very sentimental. Some of the couples had tears in their eyes—tears that had probably sprung from champagne quite as much as from that melancholy singing. Brockett ordered a fresh bottle to console the Patron. Then he waved him away with a gesture of impatience. There ensued more dancing, more ordering of drinks, more dalliance by the amorous couples. The Patron’s mood changed, and now he must sing a song of the lowest boites in Paris. As he sang he skipped like a performing dog, grimacing, beating time with his hands, conducting the chorus that rose from the tables . Brockett sighed as he shrugged his shoulders in disgust, and once again Stephen glanced at Mary; but Mary, she saw, had not understood that song with its inexcusable meaning. Valérie was talking to Jeanne Maurel, talking about her villa at St. Tropez; talking of the garden, the sea, the sky, the design she had drawn for a green marble fountain. Stephen could hear her charming voice, so cultured, so cool—itself cool as a fountain; and she marvelled at this woman’s perfect poise, the genius she possessed for complete detachment; Valérie had closed her ears to that song, and not only her ears but her mind and spirit. The place was becoming intolerably hot, the room too over-crowded for dancing. Lids drooped, mouths sagged, heads lay upon shoulders—there was kissing, much kissing at a table in the corner. The air was fœtid with drink and all the rest; unbreathable it appeared to Stephen. Dickie yawned an enormous, uncovered yawn; she was still young enough to feel rather sleepy. But Wanda was being seduced by her eyes, the lust of the eye was heavy upon her, so that Pat must shake a lugubrious head and begin to murmur anent General Custer. Brockett got up and paid the bill; he was sulky, it seemed, because Stephen had snubbed him. He had not spoken for quite half an hour, and refused point-blank to accompany them further. ‘I’m going home to my bed, thanks—good morning,’ he said crossly, as they crowded into the motor.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Adolphe Blanc met her eyes. ‘You are wrong, very wrong—this is only the beginning. Many die, many kill their bodies and souls, but they cannot kill the justice of God, even they cannot kill the eternal spirit. From their very degradation that spirit will rise up to demand of the world compassion and justice. ’ Strange—this man was actually speaking her thoughts, yet again she fell silent, unable to answer. Dickie and Pat came back to the table, and Adolphe Blanc slipped quietly away; when Stephen glanced round his place was empty, nor could she perceive him crossing the room through the press and maze of those terrible dancers. 5 Dickie went sound asleep in the car with her head against Pat’s inhospitable shoulder. When they got to her hotel she wriggled and stretched. ‘Is it . . . is it time to get up?’ she murmured. Next came Valérie Seymour and Jeanne Maurel to be dropped at the flat on the Quai Voltaire; then Pat who lived a few streets away, and last but not least the drunken Wanda. Stephen had to lift her out of the car and then get her upstairs as best she could, assisted by Burton and followed by Mary. It took quite a long time, and arrived at the door, Stephen must hunt for a missing latchkey. When they finally got home, Stephen sank into a chair. ‘Good Lord, what a night—it was pretty awful.’ She was filled with the deep depression and disgust that are apt to result from such excursions. But Mary pretended to a callousness that in truth she was very far from feeling, for life had not yet dulled her finer instincts; so far it had only aroused her anger. She yawned. ‘Well, at least we could dance together without being thought freaks; there was something in that. Beggars can’t be choosers in this world, Stephen!’

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

  The duchy became a fief of Rome by an obligation to pay yearly twelve dinars for every yoke of oxen and to defend the Holy See against attacks upon its authority. Robert’s brother, Roger, d. 1101, began the conquest of Sicily in earnest in 1060 by the seizure of Messina, and followed it up by the capture of Palermo, 1071, and Syracuse, 1085. He was called Prince of Sicily and perpetual legate of the Holy See. One of his successors, Roger II., 1105–1154, was crowned king of Sicily at Palermo by the authority of the anti-pope Anacletus II. A half century later the blood of this house became mingled with the blood of the house of Hohenstaufen in the person of the great Frederick II. In the prominent part they took we shall find these Norman princes now supporting the plans of the papacy, now resisting them. About the same time the Hautevilles and other freebooting Normans were getting a foothold in Southern Italy, the Normans under William the Conqueror, in 1066, were conquering England. To them England owes her introduction into the family of European nations, and her national isolation ceases.17 § 8. The War against Clerical Marriage. The same Lateran Council of 1059 passed severe laws against the two heresies of simony and Nicolaitism. It threatened all priests who were unwilling to give up their wives or concubines with the loss of their benefices and the right of reading mass, and warned the laity against attending their services. "No one," says the third of the thirteen canons, "shall hear mass from a priest who to his certain knowledge keeps a concubine or a subintroducta mulier." These severe measures led to serious disturbances in Northern Italy, especially in the diocese of Milan, where every ecclesiastical office from the lowest to the highest was for sale, and where marriage or concubinage was common among priests of all grades, not excluding the archbishop.18 Sacerdotal marriage was regarded as one of the liberties of the church of St. Ambrose, which maintained a certain independence of Rome, and had a numerous and wealthy clergy. The Milanese defended such marriage by Scripture texts and by a fictitious decision of Ambrose, who, on the contrary, was an enthusiast for celibacy. Candidates for holy orders, if unmarried, were asked if they had strength to remain so; if not, they could be legally married; but second marriages were forbidden, and the Levitical law as to the virginity of the bride was observed. Those who remained single were objects of suspicion, while those who brought up their families in the fear of God were respected and eligible to the episcopate. Concubinage was regarded as a heinous offense and a bar to promotion.19 But the Roman Church and the Hildebrandian party reversed the case, and denounced sacerdotal marriage as unlawful concubinage.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  nuns laid forthwith with one accord flat on the choir pavement, with arms and legs outstretched in the form of a cross and chanted at the top of their voices, from beginning to end, the antiphon In the Midst of Life We are in Death .’ The object of this performance of part of the burial service was to invoke an evil death on the intruders. Busch had to use physical violence before the nuns submitted; and he came across similar opposition to reform in seven out of twenty-four nunneries in this diocese. Of the new types of religious organization developed in the central Middle Ages, few were making a positive contribution to Christian standards and morale by the fifteenth century. The Cistercians had abandoned their pioneering agricultural role by the end of the thirteenth century. Their numbers declined; those that remained were mostly administrators and rent-collectors. The barriers they had erected against the luxuries which inevitably crept into the lives of monks who belonged to a well- endowed order were progressively dismantled. Wine was administered first to the sick; then to all on special feast-days; then on Sundays; then on Tuesdays and Thursday as well; then daily; then the ration was increased to a pint. And so on. The Cistercians were even more aristocratic than the Benedictines. Such ‘country’ orders were disliked by middle-class townsmen. But then the townsmen grew to view the urban orders, too, with suspicion. The Franciscans, in theory at least, clung to their vows of poverty. But the laymen in their ranks were soon eliminated. In 1239, the last lay general, Brother Elias, was deposed, accused of promoting laymen to positions of authority; three years later a new constitution was adopted which made the order a bastion of clericalism. The Dominicans, for their part, took over the routine conduct of the Church’s anti-heretical machinery, especially the inquisition. They also invaded the universities, which in the thirteenth century replaced monasteries as the centres of western culture. The Franciscans followed suit. Soon the two were bitter rivals for dominance of the university scene, supplying between ten and fifteen per cent of the total university population at Paris and Oxford, for instance. They changed the universities from training-grounds for lawyers and financial administrators into centres of theology and philosophy. Both the orders were prepared to finance the university careers of clever recruits. Hence many scholars found it convenient to abandon the clerical rat-race for benefices, and join the friars – the scientist Roger Bacon, and the theologian Alexander of Hales being cases in point. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries most of the great university names

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

  What clinched the gods’ identity as fallen angels was their arrogance, brutality, and licentiousness. Wherever Justin turned in Rome, he, like everyone else, encountered images of the gods; and what once he had admired as splendid, beautiful, or awesome he now saw as the leering masks of corruption and wickedness. Statues of Jupiter, often identified with the emperors, stood not only in temples but also in the public squares and government buildings and dominated the Roman amphitheater. In other cities, other gods shared the place of honor, as Saturn and Ceres did in the amphitheater at Carthage, presiding over the slaughter of Perpetua and her companions. Within these arenas, on religious holidays, actors and gladiators paraded images of the gods; often they dressed as Hercules or Attis while fighting each other to the death. Condemned criminals were forced into costume to die as if in sacrifice to the gods, as Perpetua narrowly escaped doing; her contemporary, the North African Christian Tertullian, saw in the same amphitheater men dressed as Mercury and Pluto, the gods of the dead, poking at the bodies of the dying with red-hot irons, as if the same gods who once delighted in the violence of the Trojan War now presided over the everyday brutality of slaughter for public entertainment. Images of Apollo, Mercury, Hercules, and Venus adorned the public baths, while Apollo and the Roman Dionysus, Bacchus, presided over the theaters, where actors often played out the stories of the gods on stage. Among the most popular were amorous adventures, such as those of Apollo and Daphne; Venus’s affair with Mars; Zeus, whom the Romans called Jupiter, appearing in multiple forms to his human lovers—to Danae in a shower of gold, to Leda in the form of a swan, to Europa in the form of a bull, or to the boy Ganymede, whom Zeus, as an older lover, abducted and raped. Justin’s student in Christianity, Tatian, charged that even the solemn festivals of religious drama offered public demonstrations of promiscuity: “Your sons and daughters see [the gods] giving lessons in adultery on stage.”40 The Christian philosopher Athenagoras said that stories such as those celebrating Zeus’s rape of the boy Ganymede not only lent false glamor to those who seduce young boys but also encouraged merchants who set up “marketplaces for immorality, and establish infamous resorts for the young for every kind of corrupt pleasure.”41 Besides the many well-known public statues, many people, as the Christian teacher Clement of Alexandria said accusingly, depict in their houses the unnatural passions of the demons.… they decorate their bedroom with paintings hung there, regarding licentiousness as religion; and lying in bed, in the midst of their embraces, they see Aphrodite locked in the embrace of her lover.… Such are the theologies of arrogance [hybris]; such are the instructions of your gods, who commit immorality with you.42

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

  They felt uncomfortable in the sensuous and perishing world, ruled by the Demiurge, and by Satan; they abhorred the body as formed from Matter, and forbade the use of certain kinds of food and all nuptial intercourse, as an adulteration of themselves with sinful Matter; like the Essenes and the errorists noticed by Paul in the Colossians and Pastoral Epistles. They thus confounded sin with matter, and vainly imagined that, matter being dropped, sin, its accident, would fall with it. Instead of hating sin only, which God has not made, they hated the world, which he has made. The licentious Gnostics, as the Nicolaitans, the Ophites, the Carpocratians, and the Antitactes, in a proud conceit of the exaltation of the spirit above matter,

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

  For sake of her whom all as death detest, And banish from the gate of their desire, Before the court of heaven, before His father, too, he took her for his own; From day to day, then loved her more and more, Twelve hundred years had she remained, deprived Of her first spouse, deserted and unknown, And unsolicited till he arrived. ************* But lest my language be not clearly seen, Know, that in speaking of these lovers twain, Francis and Poverty henceforth, I mean." —Dante, Paradiso XI., Wright’s trans. High up in the list of hagiography stands the name of Francis of Assisi, the founder of the order of the Franciscans. Of all the Italian saints, he is the most popular in Italy and beyond it.791 Francesco,—Francis,—Bernardone, 1182–1226, was born and died in Assisi. His baptismal name was Giovanni, John, and the name Francis seems to have been given him by his father, Pietro Bernardone, a rich dealer in textile fabrics, with reference to France, to which he made business journeys. Francis studied Latin and was imperfectly acquainted with the art of writing. He had money to spend, and spent it in gayeties. In a war between Assisi and Perugia he joined the ranks, and was taken prisoner. When released, he was twenty-two. During an illness which ensued, his religious nature began to be stirred. He arose from his bed disgusted with himself and unsatisfied with the world. Again he enlisted, and, starting to join Walter of Brienne in Southern Italy, he proceeded as far as Spoleto. But he was destined for another than a soldier’s career. Turning back, and moved by serious convictions, he retired to a grotto near Assisi for seclusion. He made a pilgrimage to Rome, whether to do penance or not, is not known. His sympathies began to go out to the poor. He met a leper and shrank back in horror at first, but, turning about, kissed the leper’s hand, and left in it all the money he had. He frequented the chapels in the suburbs of his native city, but lingered most at St. Damian, an humble chapel, rudely furnished, and served by a single priest. This became to his soul a Bethel. At the rude altar he seemed to hear the voice of Christ. In his zeal he took goods from his father and gave them to the priest. So far as we know, Francis never felt called upon to repent of this act. Here we have an instance of a different moral standard from our own. How different, for example, was the feeling of Dr. Samuel Johnson, when, for an act of disobedience to his father, he stood, as a full-grown man, a penitent in the rain in the open square of Litchfield, his head uncovered! The change which had overcome the gay votary of pleasure brought upon Francis the ridicule of the city and his father’s relentless indignation. He was cast out of his father’s house.

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

  There are also works of supererogation, performed by Christ and by the saints, with corresponding extra-merits and extra-rewards; and these constitute a rich treasury from which the Pope, as the treasurer, can dispense indulgences for money. This papal power of dispensation extends even to the departed souls in purgatory, whose sufferings may thereby be abridged. This is the scholastic doctrine. The granting of indulgences degenerated, after the time of the crusades, into a regular traffic, and became a source of ecclesiastical and monastic wealth. A good portion of the profits went into the papal treasury. Boniface VIII. issued the first Bull of the jubilee indulgence to all visitors of St. Peter’s in Rome (1300). It was to be confined to Rome, and to be repeated only once in a hundred years, but it was afterwards extended and multiplied as to place and time. The idea of selling and buying by money the remission of punishment and release from purgatory was acceptable to ignorant and superstitious people, but revolting to sound moral feeling. It roused, long before Luther, the indignant protest of earnest minds, such as Wiclif in England, Hus in Bohemia, John von Wesel in Germany, John Wessel in Holland, Thomas Wyttenbach in Switzerland, but without much effect. The Lateran Council of 1517 allowed the Pope to collect one-tenth of all the ecclesiastical property of Christendom, ostensibly for a war against the Turks; but the measure was carried only by a small majority of two or three votes, and the minority objected that there was no immediate prospect of such a war. The extortions of the Roman curia became an intolerable burden to Christendom, and produced at last a successful protest which cost the papacy the loss of its fairest possessions. § 31. Luther and Tetzel. I. On the Indulgence controversy: Luther’s Works, Walch’s ed., XV. 3–462; Weim. ed. I. 229–324. Löscher: Reformations-Acta. Leipzig, 1720. Vol. I. 355–539. J. Kapp: Schauplatz des Tetzelschen Ablass-krams. Leipzig, 1720. Jürgens: Luther, Bd. III. Kahnis: Die d. Ref., I. 18 1 sqq. Köstlin I. 153 sqq. Kolde, I. 126 sqq. On the Roman-Catholic side, Janssen: Geschichte, etc., II. 64 sqq.; 77 sqq.; and An meine Kritiker, Freiburg-i.-B., 1883, pp. 66–81.—On the editions of the Theses, compare Knaake, in the Weimar ed. I. 229 sqq. Edw. Bratke: Luther’s 95 Thesen und ihre dogmengesch. Voraussetzungen. Göttingen, 1884 (pp. 333). Gives an account of the scholastic doctrine of indulgences from Bonaventura and Thomas Aquinas down to Prierias and Cajetan, an exposition of Luther’s Theses, and a list of books on the subject. A. W. Dieckhoff (of Rostock): Der Ablassstreit. Dogmengeschichtlich dargestellt. Gotha, 1886 (pp. 260). II. On Tetzel in particular: (1) Protestant biographies and tracts, all very unfavorable. (a) Older works by G. Hecht: Vita Joh. Tetzeli. Wittenberg, 1717. Jac. Vogel: Leben des päpstlichen Gnadenpredigers und Ablasskrämers Tetzel. Leipzig, 1717, 2d ed., 1727. (b) Modern works: F. G. Hofmann: Lebensbeschreibung des Ablasspredigers Tetzel. Leipzig, 1844. Dr. Kayser: Geschichtsquellen über Den Ablasspred. Tetzel Kritisch Beleuchtet. Annaberg, 1877 (pp.

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

  She acquired and inherited for the sole profit of her lord; and so clearly was woman defined, not as a person, but as a thing, that, if the original title were deficient, she might be claimed like other movables, by the use and possession of an entire year." Monogamy was the rule both in Greece and in Rome, but did not exclude illegitimate connexions. Concubinage, in its proper legal sense, was a sort of secondary marriage with a woman of servile or plebeian extraction, standing below the dignity of a matron and above the infamy of a prostitute. It was sanctioned and regulated by law; it prevailed both in the East and the West from the age of Augustus to the tenth century, and was preferred to regular marriage by Vespasian, and the two Antonines, the best Roman emperors. Adultery was severely punished, at times even with sudden destruction of the offender; but simply as an interference with the rights and property of a free man. The wife had no legal or social protection against the infidelity of her husband. The Romans worshipped a peculiar goddess of domestic life; but her name Viriplaca, the appeaser of husbands, indicates her partiality. The intercourse of a husband with the slaves of his household and with public prostitutes was excluded from the odium and punishment of adultery. We say nothing of that unnatural abomination alluded to in Rom. 1:26, 27, which seems to have passed from the Etruscans and Greeks to the Romans, and prevailed among the highest as well as the lowest classes. The women, however, were almost as corrupt as their husbands, at least in the imperial age. Juvenal calls a chaste wife a "rara avis in terris." Under Augustus free-born daughters could no longer be found for the service of Vesta, and even the severest laws of Domitian could not prevent the six priestesses of the pure goddess from breaking their vow. The pantomimes and the games of Flora, with their audacious indecencies, were favorite amusements." The unblushing, undisguised obscenity of the Epigrams of Martial, of the Romances of Apuleius and Petronius, and of some of the Dialogues of Lucian, reflected but too faithfully the spirit of their times."637 Divorce is said to have been almost unknown in the ancient days of the Roman republic, and the marriage tie was regarded as indissoluble. A senator was censured for kissing his wife in the presence of their daughter. But the merit of this virtue is greatly diminished if we remember that the husband always had an easy outlet for his sensual passions in the intercourse with slaves and concubines. Nor did it outlast the republic. After the Punic war the increase of wealth and luxury, and the influx of Greek and Oriental licentiousness swept away the stern old Roman virtues.

• 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 A History of Christianity (1976)

  do, as the woman was not his ‘legitimate wife’. Moreover, it is clear that Augustine’s ruling sprang from his restrictive view of marriage as solely procreative in purpose. For a couple to have intercourse without actively willing conception was, in his view, sinful. He made his position gruesomely clear in Marriage and Concupiscence, a book which greatly influenced Christian teaching on sex for fifteen hundred years: ‘It is one thing not to lie except with the sole will of generating: this has no fault. It is another to seek the pleasure of the flesh in lying, although within the limits of marriage: this has venial fault. I am supposing then that, although you are not lying for the sake of procreating offspring, you are not for the sake of lust obstructing their procreation by an evil prayer or an evil deed. Those who do this, although they are called husband and wife, are not; nor do they retain any reality of marriage, but with a respectable name cover a shame... sometimes this lustful cruelty or cruel lust, comes to this, that they even procure poisons of sterility, and, if those do not work, extinguish and destroy the foetus in some way in the womb, preferring that their offspring die before it lives, or if it was already alive in the womb to kill it before it was born.’ This position, as elaborated by Aquinas, and endorsed by Luther, Calvin and other theologians, remained orthodox teaching in all Christian churches until after the First World War. The Anglican Church reluctantly accepted artificial contraception at the Lambeth Conference of 1930, and shifted the moral theology to a consideration of whether the married couple’s intention was selfish or not. This analysis was later adopted by most other Protestant churches. In his 1930 encyclical, Casti Connubii, Pius XI reiterated the traditional view in the most forceful terms. But in 1951, Pius XII, in an address to Italian Catholic Midwives, stated that use of the so-called ‘safe period’ as a system of birth control was lawful, provided the intention was justified by circumstances. Such a compromise undermined the Augustinian teaching since Augustine had specifically denounced use of the safe period in his The Morals of the Manichees; and the concession was also fatal to Augustine’s whole doctrine of marriage. Moreover, use of the safe period systematically tended to raise the question of whether it was legitimate to stabilize the period artificially; and if this were conceded, it became almost impossible to a draw a workable moral distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ contraception. The supposition among many Council members was that the Council would

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

  At first I thought Renate was speaking metaphorically as we often did, but she continued, “My uncle molested me, and Anaïs had an incestuous affair with her father.” “I don’t believe you.” The alcohol had changed Renate’s personality. Her usually precise enunciation was slurry in a few places. “You think I don’t know my uncle molested me? He lived with us. Ha! And all the while Freud was living next door, and my uncle was his patient. The great doctor probably knew what was going on and did nothing. I’m sure my uncle’s case is documented if you don’t believe me.” “No, I don’t believe you about Anaïs and her father. He abandoned her; that’s all.” “He abandoned her when she was a child. Hers wasn’t childhood incest like mine. When Anaïs was in her late twenties, your age, and already married to Hugo, she met her father again and seduced him.” How dare Renate play with me this way! She was drunk, and I didn’t feel safe around her. I’d put her in her place. “Anaïs and I talk about our fathers all the time, and she’s never said anything like that.” “No? I’m surprised.” “It’s impossible,” I insisted. “She wrote about a flirtation with her father when she was in her late twenties in her published Diary. The most they did was flatter each other and admire each other’s narrow feet, if that’s what you’re calling incest. She says she wanted to entice him into loving her, but as a daughter!” “Well that’s not what happened. She seduced him.” “You’re wrong,” I said. “Anaïs is the most joyful person I know. If she’d seduced her father the guilt would have driven her insane. That’s what Oedipus is about.” “Don’t you know Freud has been discredited?” “I’m not just talking about Freud. The incest taboo is a lot older than Freud.” “If you mean Oedipus Rex, it’s a play about a myth.” Renate handed a passing waiter her gimlet glass with a nod that she would like another. “You of all people know that Anaïs specializes in breaking taboos. You’ve even helped her.” “Bigamy is different from incest!” I protested. “Really? How so?” I was sure they were different but I couldn’t find the words to explain. The nausea churning in my stomach was making it hard for me to speak at all. Renate shrugged. “It’s not such a big deal.” “It’s the biggest deal!” “Tristine! I never imagined you were so conventional.” Conventional? What Renate was talking about was beyond the pale. The room was beginning to turn around me; the waiter and coffee station on my right were sliding counterclockwise to my left. “It was two consenting adults,” Renate said. “It wasn’t like me with my uncle. I was a child. But Anaïs planned it.” “Stop it, Renate! She would never do that!”

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

  To licentiousness were added luxury, gaming, the vendetta or the law of blood-revenge, and murder paid for by third parties. Life was cheap where revenge, a licentious end or the gain of power was a motive. Cardinals added benefice to benefice in order to secure the means of gratifying their luxurious tastes.1054 In the middle of the 16th century, Italy, says Burckhardt, was in a moral crisis, out of which the best men saw no escape. In the opinion of Symonds, who has written seven volumes on the Renaissance, it is "almost impossible to overestimate the moral corruption of Rome at the beginning of the 16th century. And Gregorovius adds that "the richest intellectual life blossomed in a swamp of vices."1055 Of open heresy and attacks upon the papal prerogatives, popes were intolerant enough, as was quickly proved, when Luther appeared and Savonarola preached, but not of open immorality and secret infidelity. In the hierarchical interest they maintained the laws of sacerdotal celibacy, but allowed them to be broken by prelates in their confidence and employ, and openly flaunted their own bastard children and concubines. And unfortunately, as has been said, not only did the Humanists, with some exceptions, fall in with the prevailing licentiousness: there even was nothing in their principles to prevent its practice. As a class, the artists were no better than the scholars and, if possible, even more lax in regard to sexual license. Such statements are made not in the spirit of bitterness toward the Church of the Middle Ages, but in deference to historic fact, which ought at once to furnish food for reflection upon the liability of an ecclesiastical organization to err and even to foster vice as well as superstition by its prelatical constitution and unscriptural canons, and also to afford a warning against the captivating but fallacious theory that literature and art, not permeated by the principles of the Christian faith, have the power to redeem themselves or purify society. They did not do it in the palmy days of Greece and Rome, nor did they accomplish any such end in Italy.