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

  He never crossed the Alps. After holding his court at Bordeaux, Poictiers, and Toulouse, he chose, in 1309, Avignon as his residence. Thus began the so-called Babylonian captivity, or Avignon exile, of the papacy, which lasted more than seventy years and included seven popes, all Frenchmen, Clement V., 1305–1314; John XXII., 1316–1334; Benedict XII., 1334–1342; Clement VI., 1342–1352; Innocent VI., 1352–1362; Urban V., 1362–1370; Gregory XI., 1370–1378. This prolonged absence from Rome was a great shock to the papal system. Transplanted from its maternal soil, the papacy was cut loose from the hallowed and historical associations of thirteen centuries. It no longer spake as from the centre of the Christian world. The way had been prepared for the abandonment of the Eternal City and removal to French territory. Innocent II. and other popes had found refuge in France. During the last half of the thirteenth century the Apostolic See, in its struggle with the empire, had leaned upon France for aid. To avoid Frederick II., Innocent IV. had fled to Lyons, 1245. If Boniface VIII. represents a turning-point in the history of the papacy, the Avignon residence shook the reverence of Christendom for it. It was in danger of becoming a French institution. Not only were the popes all Frenchmen, but the large majority of the cardinals were of French birth. Both were reduced to a station little above that of court prelates subject to the nod of the French sovereign. At the same time, the popes continued to exercise their prerogatives over the other nations of Western Christendom, and freely hurled anathemas at the German emperor and laid the interdict upon Italian cities. The word might be passed around, "where the pope is, there is Rome," but the wonder is that the grave hurt done to his oecumenical character was not irreparable.85 The morals of Avignon during the papal residence were notorious throughout Europe. The papal household had all the appearance of a worldly court, torn by envies and troubled by schemes of all sorts. Some of the Avignon popes left a good name, but the general impression was bad—weak if not vicious. The curia was notorious for its extravagance, venality, and sensuality. Nepotism, bribery, and simony were unblushingly practised. The financial operations of the papal family became oppressive to an extent unknown before. Indulgences, applied to all sorts of cases, were made a source of increasing revenue. Alvarus Pelagius, a member of the papal household and a strenuous supporter of the papacy, in his De planctu ecclesiae, complained bitterly of the speculation and traffic in ecclesiastical places going on at the papal court. It swarmed with money-changers, and parties bent on money operations. Another contemporary, Petrarch, who never uttered a word against the papacy as a divine institution, launched his satires against Avignon, which he called "the sink of every vice, the haunt of all iniquities, a third Babylon, the Babylon of the West." No expression is too strong to carry his biting invectives.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  He was holding out his arms, while she shrank back bewildered: ‘I love you, I’m deeply in love with you, Stephen—look at me, don’t you understand me, belovèd? I want you to marry me—you do love me, don’t you?’ And then, as though she had suddenly struck him, he flinched: ‘Good God! What’s the matter, Stephen?’ She was staring at him in a kind of dumb horror, staring at his eyes that were clouded by desire, while gradually over her colourless face there was spreading an expression of the deepest repulsion—terror and repulsion he saw on her face, and something else too, a look as of outrage. He could not believe this thing that he saw, this insult to all that he felt to be sacred; for a moment he in his turn, must stare, then he came a step nearer, still unable to believe. But at that she wheeled round and fled from him wildly, fled back to the house that had always protected; without so much as a word she left him, nor did she once pause in her flight to look back. Yet even in this moment of headlong panic, the girl was conscious of something like amazement, amazement at herself, and she gasped as she ran: ‘It’s Martin—Martin—’ And again: ‘It’s Martin!’ He stood perfectly still until the trees hid her. He felt stunned, incapable of understanding. All that he knew was that he must get away, away from Stephen, away from Morton, away from the thoughts that would follow after. In less than two hours he was motoring to London; in less than two weeks he was standing on the deck of the steamer that would carry him back to his forests that lay somewhere beyond the horizon. CHAPTER 10 1 C hristmas came and with it the girl’s eighteenth birthday, but the shadows that clung round her home did not lessen; nor could Stephen, groping about in those shadows, find a way to win through to the light. Every one tried to be cheerful and happy, as even sad people will do at Christmas, while the gardeners brought in huge bundles of holly with which to festoon the portraits of Gordons—rich, red-berried holly that came from the hills, and that year after year would be sent down to Morton. The courageous-eyed Gordons looked out from their wreaths unsmiling, as though they were thinking of Stephen. In the hall stood the Christmas-tree of her childhood, for Sir Philip loved the old German custom which would seem to insist that even the aged be as children and play with God on His birthday.

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

  § 16. The Council of Constance. 1414–1418. At Alexander’s death, seventeen cardinals met in Bologna and elected Balthazar Cossa, who took the name of John XXIII. He was of noble Neapolitan lineage, began his career as a soldier and perhaps as a corsair,283 was graduated in both laws at Bologna and was made cardinal by Boniface IX. He joined in the call of the council of Pisa. A man of ability, he was destitute of every moral virtue, and capable of every vice. Leaning for support upon Louis of Anjou, John gained entrance to Rome. In the battle of Rocca Secca, May 14, 1411, Louis defeated the troops of Ladislaus. The captured battle-flags were sent to Rome, hung up in St. Peter’s, then torn down in the sight of the people, and dragged in the dust in the triumphant procession through the streets of the city, in which John participated. Ladislaus speedily recovered from his defeat, and John, with his usual faithlessness, made terms with Ladislaus, recognizing him as king, while Ladislaus, on his part, renounced his allegiance to Gregory XII. That pontiff was ordered to quit Neapolitan territory, and embarking in Venetian vessels at Gaeta, fled to Dalmatia, and finally took refuge with Charles Malatesta of Rimini, his last political ally. The Council of Constance, the second of the Reformatory councils, was called together by the joint act of Pope John XXIII. and Sigismund, king of the Romans. It was not till he was reminded by the University of Paris that John paid heed to the action of the Council of Pisa and called a council to meet at Rome, April, 1412. Its sessions were scantily attended, and scarcely a trace of it is left.284 After ordering Wyclif’s writings burnt, it adjourned Feb. 10, 1413. John had strengthened the college of cardinals by adding fourteen to its number, among them men of the first rank, as D’Ailly, Zabarella of Florence, Robert Hallum, bishop of Salisbury, and Fillastre, dean of Rheims. Ladislaus, weary of his treaty with John and ambitious to create a unified Latin kingdom, took Rome, 1413, giving the city over to sack. The king rode into the Lateran and looked down from his horse on the heads of St. Peter and St. Paul, which he ordered the canons to display. The very churches were robbed, and soldiers and their courtesans drank wine out of the sacred chalices. Ladislaus left Rome, struck with a vicious disease, rumored to be due to poison administered by an apothecary’s daughter of Perugia, and died at Naples, August, 1414. He had been one of the most prominent figures in Europe for a quarter of a century and the chief supporter of the Roman line of pontiffs. Driven from Rome, John was thrown into the hands of Sigismund, who was then in Lombardy. This prince, the grandson of the blind king, John, who was killed at Crécy, had come to the throne of Hungary through marriage with its heiress.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Now it was the bums, especially the kids who ran away out here, who kept Venice from becoming a total Google campus—at least so far. They graffitied the palm trees, made sure the drugs were still flowing. I felt drawn to them, particularly the younger ones, how they just let everything go. How they were able to do that. Palm trees in pristine locations depressed me. But with a little grit they were sexy against the setting sun. “Fuck me,” I said to the palm trees. When I was on Abbot Kinney, the long yuppie strip of contemporary blondewood-and-metal shops that cut across Venice diagonally, I felt out of place, more aligned with the homeless. Here were so many beautiful women: ombre-headed twentysomethings in boho-chic dresses, minimalist French women clad in black leather with angular jewelry, models even, who made me look at my toe hair and fuzzy legs in disgust. I had stopped shaving since the breakup. My hair, which had always been frizzy, was now even more coarse thanks to an infestation of gray. I was no longer even using henna. The cottage cheese on my hips stood out against my skinny legs. I had stopped giving a fuck. Looking at these women now, I thought, What if I could get really hot while I was here? What if I became the old me, or the very old me, or someone entirely new? When I get back home, maybe Jamie would want me again. What would I do? Maybe dye my hair auburn, start wearing lipstick again, wax my vagina into some sort of formation. I had always been more of a natural woman, and I assumed that Megan the scientist was low maintenance in the pubic realm, but how natural was too natural? I had gotten so natural that I was naturally dead. 7.After a few days in Venice I went to my first group therapy session: a specialty group for women with depression, and sex and love issues. There were four women in the group, plus the therapist and me. But they all blurred together into a multiheaded hydra of desperation. Judith, our therapist and leader, was definitely unmarried. With her unringed hands she held a ceramic mug of steaming green tea and said very little, periodically murmuring sounds of “mmmmm” and “ahhhh.” Occasionally, she asked how some event made a person feel. Everyone called her “Dr. Jude.” Dr. Jude was a collector of things—her office stuffed with tchotchkes: Buddha statuettes, a small Freud action figure, licorice pastilles, air plants, an old gumball machine, angel cards, little signs with sayings like “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” and “Trust yourself! You know more than you think you do!” Clearly none of us could trust ourselves or we wouldn’t be there.

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

  These crimes went unpunished; for who could judge a pope? And his brother, Gregory, was Patrician of the city. At one time, it is reported, he had the crazy notion of marrying his cousin and enthroning a woman in the chair of St. Peter; but the father of the intended bride refused unless he abdicated the papacy.298 Desiderius, who himself afterwards became pope (Victor III.), shrinks from describing the detestable life of this Benedict, who, he says, followed in the footsteps of Simon Magus rather than of Simon Peter, and proceeded in a career of rapine, murder, and every species of felony, until even the people of Rome became weary of his iniquities, and expelled him from the city. Sylvester III. was elected antipope (Jan., 1044), but Benedict soon resumed the papacy with all his vices (April 10, 1044), then sold it for one or two thousand pounds silver299 to an archpresbyter John Gratian of the same house (May, 1045), after he had emptied the treasury of every article of value, and, rueing the bargain, he claimed the dignity again (Nov., 1047), till he was finally expelled from Rome (July, 1048). Gregory VI. John Gratian assumed the name Gregory, VI. He was revered as a saint for his chastity which, on account of its extreme rarity in Rome, was called an angelic virtue. He bought the papacy with the sincere desire to reform it, and made the monk Hildebrand, the future reformer, his chaplain. He acted on the principle that the end sanctifies the means. Thus there were for a while three rival popes. Benedict IX. (before his final expulsion) held the Lateran, Gregory VI. Maria Maggiore, Sylvester III. St. Peter’s and the Vatican.300 Their feuds reflected the general condition of Italy. The streets of Rome swarmed with hired assassins, the whole country with robbers, the virtue of pilgrims was openly assailed, even churches and the tombs of the apostles were desecrated by bloodshed. Again the German emperor had to interfere for the restoration of order. § 66. Henry III and the Synod of Sutri. Deposition of three rival Popes. A.D. 1046. Bonizo (or Bonitho, bishop of Sutri, afterwards of Piacenza, and friend of Gregory VII., d. 1089): Liber ad amicum, s. de persecutione Ecclesiae (in Oefelii Scriptores rerum Boicarum II., 794, and better in Jaffe’s Monumenta Gregoriana, 1865). Contains in lib. V. a history, of the popes from Benedict IX. to Gregory VII., with many errors. Rodulfus Glaber (or Glaber Radulfus, monk of Cluny, about 1046): Historia sui temporis (in Migne, Tom. 142). Desiderius (Abbot of M. Cassino, afterwards pope Victor III., d. 1080): De Miraculis a S. Benedicto aliisque monachis Cassiniensibus gestis Dialog., in "Bibl. Patr." Lugd. XVIII. 853. Annales Romani in Pertz, Mon. Germ. VII. Annales Corbeienses, in Pertz, Mon. Germ. V.; and in Jaffé, Monumenta Corbeiensia, Berlin, 1864. Ernst Steindorff: Jahrbucher des deutschen Reichs unter Heinrich III. Leipzig, 1874. Hefele: Conciliengesch. IV. 706 sqq. (2d ed.). See Lit. in § 64, especially Höfler and Will.

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

  657): "Nach all’ diesen Bemerkungen sind wir öbrigens weit entfernt, der Spanichen Inquisition an sich das Wort reden zu wollen, vielmehr bestreiten wir der weltlichen Gewalt durchaus die Befugniss, das Gewissen zu knebeln, und sind von Herzensgrund aus jedem staatlichen Religionszwang abhold, mag er von einem Torquemada in der Dominikanerkutte, oder von einem Bureaucraten in der Staatsuniform ansgehen. Aber das wollten wir zeigen, dass die Inquisition das schaendliche Ungeheuer nicht war, wozu es Parteileidenschaft und Unwissenheit häufig stempeln wollten." II. The torture was abolished in England after 1640, in Prussia 1740, in Tuscany 1786, in France 1789, in Russia 1801, in various German states partly earlier, partly later (between 1740 and 1831), in Japan 1873. Thomasius, Hommel, Voltaire, Howard, used their influence against it. Exceptional cases of judicial torture occurred in the nineteenth century in Naples, Palermo, Roumania (1868), and Zug (1869). See Lea, p. 389 sqq., and the chapter on Witchcraft in Lecky’s History of Rationalism (vol. I. 27–154). The extreme difficulty of proof in trials of witchcraft seemed to make a resort to the torture inevitable. English witchcraft reached its climax during the seventeenth century, and was defended by King James I., and even such wise men as Sir Matthew Hale, Sir Thomas Browne, and Richard Baxter. When it was on the decline in England it broke out afresh in Puritan New England, created a perfect panic, and led to the execution of twenty-seven persons. In Scotland it lingered still longer, and as late as 1727 a woman was burnt there for witchcraft. In the Canton Glarus a witch was executed in 1782, and another near Danzig in Prussia in 1836. Lecky concludes his chapter with an eloquent tribute to those poor women, who died alone, hated, and unpitied, with the prospect of exchanging their torments on earth with eternal torments in hell. I add a noble passage on torture from Brace’s Gesta Christi, p. 274 sq. "Had the ’Son of Man’ been in body upon the earth during the Middle Ages, hardly one wrong and injustice would have wounded his pure soul like the system of torture. To see human beings, with the consciousness of innocence, or professing and believing the purest truths, condemned without proof to the most harrowing agonies, every groan or admission under pain used against them, their confessions distorted, their nerves so racked that they pleaded their guilt in order to end their tortures, their last hours tormented by false ministers of justice or religion, who threaten eternal as well as temporal damnation, and all this going on for ages, until scarce any innocent felt themselves safe under this mockery of justice and religion—all this would have seemed to the Founder of Christianity as the worst travesty of his faith and the most cruel wound to humanity. It need not be repeated that his spirit in each century struggled with this tremendous evil, and inspired the great friends of humanity who labored against it.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  The suppression of the Bacchanalia is dated to the early second century B.C.E., but is narrated by Livy’s History of Rome in the Augustan era, and that latter era’s perception is more important to us than the former era’s actuality. We are watching, in other words, Roman attitudes around the time of Paul rather than Roman realities from two centuries earlier. As Livy tells the story, a cult of the Greek god Dionysos, the Roman Bacchus, was started by a “nameless Greek” who was “a dabbler in sacrifices and a fortune-teller; nor was he one who, by frankly disclosing his creed and publicly proclaiming both his profession and his system, filled minds with error, but a priest of secret rites performed by night” (39.8). Both senatorial consuls had to investigate these “clandestine meetings” in which, according to Livy, worship was conducted in frenzied orgies that defied traditional social boundaries by mingling rich and poor, city and country, slave and free, and, perhaps most problematic, men and women. He describes their nocturnal activities in some detail: To the religious element in them were added the delights of wine and feasts, that the minds of a larger number might be attracted. When wine had inflamed their minds, and night and the mingling of males with females, youth with age, had destroyed every sentiment of modesty, all varieties of corruption first began to be practiced, since each one had at hand the pleasure answering to that to which his nature was more inclined. There was not one form of vice alone, the promiscuous matings of free men and women, but perjured witnesses, forged seals and wills and evidence, all issued from this same workshop: likewise poisonings and secret murders, so that at times not even the bodies were found for burial. Much was ventured by craft, more by violence. This violence was concealed because amid the howlings and the crash of drums and cymbals no cry of the sufferers could be heard as the debauchery and murders proceeded. (39.8) Although the meetings were initially restricted to women, according to Livy a priestess later initiated men as well, and the meetings quickly degenerated into sexual orgies punctuated with ecstatic prophesies, wild convulsions, and married women running through the city in Bacchic dress with disheveled hair and flaming torches. Those who were less eager to “join in the crimes” were carried away on a machine and sacrificed, and the devotees were so many that they “almost constitut[ed] a second state; among them were certain men and women of high rank” (39.13). The final decree went beyond the case of the Bacchanalia and ordered “that no celebration of the rites should be held in secret” (39.14).

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  There is also, however, an even deeper level beneath patriarchy but caused by it and interacting with it. When you read that vicious epigram from Martial about the galli, did you find its language unacceptable in the public realm? Is it impolite, rude, crude, and vulgar? Is it pornographic? And what is the difference between vulgarity and pornography? As we consider several of the texts in this section, those questions will be consistently presumed and implicitly asked. But this is our deepest question: What about the conjunction of sex and war, the collaboration of possession and penetration by phallus and sword, the coincidence of violent pornography by sexual and martial control? Why do we have so many vulgar words for bodily functions that are perfectly human and natural, but no vulgar words for the slaughter of war that is surely inhuman and unnatural? Must we distinguish absolutely between vulgarity, which includes words too impolite for public use and acts too private for public display, and pornography, which always includes violence, whether ideological, rhetorical, or physical, and applies to both sex and war with a deadly male symbiosis? Should we transfer the use of “obscene” from sex to war, transfer it from what describes our humanity crudely to what destroys our humanity profoundly? Phallus and Control For Rome, not unexpectedly, normative sexual behavior was scripted according to power relations based on gender, age, and status, with the adult landowning male as the most powerful. We can already see that patriarchy-power nexus in the frequent depiction of the phallus as a magiclike symbol of power. It was used to ward off the evil eye, to protect houses from intrusion, and to ensure fecundity. On Delos, for example, while Apollo’s sanctuary was guarded by a row of lion statues, Dionysos’s temple was guarded by two enormous erect phalli , the symbol of uncontrollable pleasure and the sacred object of his mysteries. Other sanctuaries and large villas across the Mediterranean were protected by herms, square bonze or marble pillars with a bust on top and male genitals protruding from the front of the pillar. More modest private houses in Pompeii often engraved or scratched an erect phallus near the entrance to ward off curses or serve as good-luck charms. Its power was not that clearly distinguished from sensual pleasure, as the ambiguity of one accompanying inscription makes clear: Hic habitat felicitas, “Herein dwells happiness,” surrounds the phallus.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  These texts preserve the crude machismo urge to “do” or “take” a woman. But many frescoes from Pompeii reveal a more subtle sense in which possession or subordination is scripted in the sexual behavior of the well-to-do. Many scenes—surprising if not discomforting to current sensibilities—depict slaves preparing and pouring wine or attending to the lamps beside a couple who are having intercourse. That was a clear display of power relations, and Antonio Varone, in Eroticism in Pompeii, captures the essence of that kind of humiliation: “Just as they could freely dispose of their slaves for sexual purposes, the master and mistress could also formally consider them as little more than domestic animals, under whose gaze it was licit not to feel the slightest embarrassment” (75). One of Martial’s witty epigrams, in which he demanded more effort and adventure from his wife in bed, hints at his desire for such condescending exhibitionism common among slave owners by declaring that even “Trojan slaves used to masturbate themselves behind the doors whenever Andromache had taken her seat on Hector as her horse” (11.104.13–14). Power and Penetration The crucial role that power played in the social scripts of ancient sexuality is also apparent in the way Greek and Roman authors distinguished between “active” and “passive” roles, with superiority defined as active male penetration. We saw that already in Martial’s sarcastic remarks about the galli priests of the Great Mother goddess. It is also evident in the erotic scenes on the disk-shaped oil lamps that were widespread household artifacts across the Mediterranean, even in Judea, which was notoriously prudish by Roman standards. Almost without exception, these lamps reveal a set of positions in which the man is what the Romans would think of as “active” and the woman as “passive.” But even when the female seems to be “active” by being on top during intercourse or by performing oral sex, that “activity” is portrayed as service to the male and is depicted iconographically by the man holding and controlling her head or by the man extending his arm back behind his head, such as on a bas-relief from Pompeii. That latter gesture may show a certain amount of narcissistic aloofness or may just reflect an attempt to get out of the way. Be that as it may, women only extend a hand to touch or caress the man. Further, a woman’s activity in oral sex was considered not only servile but degrading, for example, in the crude graffito from Pompeii, “Veneria sucked the cock of Maximus through the whole grape harvest, leaving both her holes empty and only her mouth full” (CIL 4.1391), or, again, on some lines scribbled in Pompeii’s Stabian baths, the command to “go down with your mouth along the shaft, licking it, then still licking withdraw it upwards. Ah, there, I’m coming!” (CIL 4.760).

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  The next expulsion occurred more than 150 years later, by Tiberius in 19 C.E., and again it had to do with oriental “superstitions” infiltrating Roman traditions. In his Annals, written a decade or so after the Histories, Tacitus speaks of Tiberius’s proscription “of the Egyptian and Jewish rites,” his military absorption of “four thousand descendants of enfranchised slaves” to fight Sardinian bandits, and his orders for “the rest to leave Italy, unless they had renounced their impious ceremonial by a given date” (2.85:4). Suetonius’s version of that story, published in his Lives of the Caesars: Tiberius around 120 C.E., says that Tiberius “abolished foreign cults, especially the Egyptian and the Jewish rites, compelling all who were addicted to such superstitions to burn their religious vestments and all their paraphernalia,” absorbed “those of the Jews who were of military age” into the army, and banished others “from the city, on pain of slavery for life if they did not obey.” Almost a century later, Cassius Dio’s Roman History summarized it even more tersely: “As the Jews flocked to Rome in great numbers and were converting many of the natives to their ways, [Tiberius] banished most of them” (58.18:5a). The archaeological background for those Roman Jews is found in many inscriptions from multiple synagogues named for a major patron (Agrippa), a local area (Sibura), a specific language (Hebrew), or a foreign origin (Tripolis). The Roman Jews, unlike their Alexandrian counterparts, were not under a single ethnarch, but those inscriptions show similar administrative structures and executive officers—a council of elders (gerousia) and their leader (gerousiarch), executives (archontes), a secretary (grammateus), a liturgical officer (archisynag [image file=image_rsrc2XW.jpg] gos), and patrons, both female (mothers) and male (fathers). The final expulsion happened only thirty years after that preceding one, which means, of course, that not “all” could have left under Tiberius. But the cause is now much more specific than either a general distaste for oriental sects or Jewish successes. In the first century, Luke’s Acts says that when Paul arrived at Corinth “he found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had ordered all Jews to leave Rome” (18:2). In the second century, Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars: Divus Claudius explains that “since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus [i.e., Christ], he expelled them from Rome” (25.4). In the third century, Cassius Dio’s Roman History gives a different account, dated to the start of Claudius’s reign in 41: As for the Jews, who had again [after Tiberius’s edict?] increased so greatly that by reason of their multitude it would have been hard without raising a tumult to bar them from the city, he [Claudius] did not drive them out, but ordered them, while continuing their traditional mode of life, not to hold meetings. (60.6:6)

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

  The duke was soon back in Italy, accompanying the French army led by Louis XII. The reduction of Milan and Naples followed. The taking of Milan reduced Alexander’s former ally and brought captivity to Ascanio Sforza, the cardinal, but it was welcome news in the Vatican. Alexander was bent, with the help of Louis, upon creating a great dukedom in central Italy for his son, with a kingly dominion over all the peninsula as the ultimate act of the drama. The fall of Naples was due in part to the pope’s perfidy in making an alliance with Louis and deposing the Neapolitan king, Frederick. Endowed by his father with the proud title of duke of the Romagna and made captain-general of the church, Caesar, with the help of 8,000 mercenaries, made good his rights to Imola, Forli, Rimini and other towns, some of the victories being celebrated by services in St. Peter’s. At the same time, Lucretia was made regent of Nepi and Spoleto. As a part of the family program, the indulgent father proceeded to declare war against the Gaetani house and to despoil the Colonna, Savelli and Orsini. No obstacle should be allowed to remain in the ambitious path of the unscrupulous son. Upon him was also conferred that emblem of purity of character or of high service to the Church, the Golden Rose. The celebration of the Jubilee in the opening year of the new century, which was to be so eventful, brought hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to the holy city, and the great sums which were collected were reserved for the Turkish crusade, or employed for the advancement of the Borgias. The bull announcing the festival offered to those visiting Rome free indulgence for the most grievous sins.803 On Christmas eve, 1499, Alexander struck the Golden Gate with a silver mallet, repeating the words of Revelation, "He openeth and no man shutteth." In glaring contrast to the religious ends with which the Jubilee was associated in the minds of the pilgrims, Caesar entered Rome, in February, surrounded with all the trappings of military conquest. Among the festivities provided to relieve the tedium of religious occupations was a Spanish bull-fight. The square of St. Peter’s was enclosed with a railing and the spectators looked on while the pope’s son, Caesar, killed five bulls. The head of the last he severed with a single stroke of his sword. Another of the fearful tragedies of the Borgia family filled the atmosphere of this holy year with its smothering fumes, the murder of Lucretia’s husband, the duke of Besiglia, to whom she had borne a son.804 On returning home at night he was fallen upon at the steps of St. Peter’s and stabbed. Carried to his palace, he was recovering, when Caesar, who had visited him several times, at last had him strangled, August 18, 1500. The pope’s son openly declared his responsibility, and gave as an explanation that he himself was in danger from the prince.

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

  The first, and for a long time the only, university of Switzerland was that of Basle (1460), where one of the three reformatory Councils was held (1430). During the Middle Ages the whole country, like the rest of Europe, was subject to the Roman see, and no religion was tolerated but the Roman Catholic. It was divided into six episcopal dioceses,—Geneva, Coire, Constance, Basle, Lausanne, and Sion (Sitten). The Pope had several legates in Switzerland who acted as political and military agents, and treated the little republic like a great power. The most influential bishop, Schinner of Sion, who did substantial service to the warlike Julius II. and Leo X., attained even a cardinal’s hat. Zwingli, who knew him well, might have acquired the same dignity if he had followed his example. § 2. The Swiss Reformation. The Church in Switzerland was corrupt and as much in need of reform as in Germany. The inhabitants of the old cantons around the Lake of Lucerne were, and are to this day, among the most honest and pious Catholics; but the clergy were ignorant, superstitious, and immoral, and set a bad example to the laity. The convents were in a state of decay, and could not furnish a single champion able to cope with the Reformers in learning and moral influence. Celibacy made concubinage a common and pardonable offence. The bishop of Constance (Hugo von Hohenlandenberg) absolved guilty priests on the payment of a fine of four guilders for every child born to them, and is said to have derived from this source seventy-five hundred guilders in a single year (1522). In a pastoral letter, shortly before the Reformation, he complained of the immorality of many priests who openly kept concubines or bad women in their houses, who refuse to dismiss them, or bring them back secretly, who gamble, sit with laymen in taverns, drink to excess, and utter blasphemies.13 The people were corrupted by the foreign military service (called Reislaufen), which perpetuated the fame of the Swiss for bravery and faithfulness, but at the expense of independence and good morals.14 Kings and popes vied with each other in tempting offers to secure Swiss soldiers, who often fought against each other on foreign battle-fields, and returned with rich pensions and dissolute habits. Zwingli knew this evil from personal experience as chaplain in the Italian campaigns, attacked it before he thought of reforming the Church, continued to oppose it when called to Zurich, and found his death at the hands of a foreign mercenary.

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

  of lust and drunkenness.607 The circus was devoted to horse and chariot races, hunts of wild beasts, military displays and athletic games, and attracted immense multitudes. "The impatient crowd," says the historian of declining Rome608 "rushed at the dawn of day to secure their places, and there were many who passed a sleepless and anxious night in the adjacent porticos. From the morning to the evening careless of the sun or of the rain, the spectators, who sometimes amounted to the number of four hundred thousand, remained in eager attention; their eyes fixed on the horses and charioteers, their minds agitated with hope and fear for the success of the colors which they espoused; and the happiness of Rome appeared to hang on the event of a race. The same immoderate ardor inspired their clamors and their applause as often as they were entertained with the hunting of wild beasts and the various modes of theatrical representation." The most popular, and at the same time the most inhuman and brutalizing of these public spectacles were the gladiatorial fights in the arena. There murder was practised as an art, from sunrise to sunset, and myriads of men and beasts were sacrificed to satisfy a savage curiosity and thirst for blood. At the inauguration of the Flavian amphitheatre from five to nine thousand wild beasts (according to different accounts) were slain in one day. No less than ten thousand gladiators fought in the feasts which Trajan gave to the Romans after the conquest of Dacia, and which lasted four months (A.D. 107). Under Probus (A.D. 281) as many as a hundred lions, a hundred lionesses, two hundred leopards, three hundred bears, and a thousand wild boars were massacred in a single day.609 The spectacles of the worthless Carinus (284) who selected his favorites and even his ministers from the dregs of the populace, are said to have surpassed those of all his predecessors. The gladiators were condemned criminals, captives of war, slaves, and professional fighters; in times of persecution innocent Christians were not spared, but thrown before lions and tigers. Painted savages from Britain, blonde Germans from the Rhine and Danube, negroes from Africa, and wild beasts, then much more numerous than now, from all parts of the world, were brought to the arena. Domitian arranged fights of dwarfs and women. The emperors patronized these various spectacles as the surest means of securing the favor of the people, which clamored for "Panem et Circenses." Enormous sums were wasted on them from the public treasury and private purses. Augustus set the example. Nero was so extravagantly liberal in this direction that the populace forgave his horrible vices, and even wished his return from death. The parsimonious Vespasian built the most costly and colossal amphitheatre the world has ever seen, incrusted with marble, decorated with statues, and furnished with gold, silver, and amber.

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

  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 The statement of Infessura is difficult to believe, although it is made at length, that Innocent issued a decree permitting concubinage in Rome both to clergy and laity. The prohibition of concubinage was declared prejudicial to the divine law and the honor of the clergy, as almost all the clergy, from the highest to the lowest, had concubines, or mistresses. According to the Roman diarist, there were 6,800 listed public courtezans in Rome besides those whose names were not recorded.780 To say the least, the statement points to the low condition of clerical morals in the holy city and the slight regard paid to the legislation of Gregory VII. Infessura was in position to know what was transpiring in Rome. What could be expected where the morals of the supreme pontiff and the sacred senate were so loose? The lives of many of the cardinals were notoriously scandalous. Their palaces were furnished with princely splendor and filled with scores of servants.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  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 temperance and even prohibition. The Lord’s Day Observance Society, founded in 1831, was another non-gentlemanly feature. But the wealthy Evangelicals had long campaigned to abolish Sunday work. In 1809 one of them, Spencer Percival, stopped Parliament sitting on Monday so that MPs would not have to travel on the Sabbath; and Evangelicals gave their servants the day off. This advertisement, for a coachman, was typical of many carried by the Record: ‘High wages not given. A person who values Christian privileges will be much preferred.’ Where Evangelicals of all classes united was in their opposition to any open treatment of the sexual or bodily functions. The Reverend Lewis Way’s daughter, Drusilla, wrote home after seeing the Medici Venus: ‘As to the Venus, she looks like what she is, and ought to be – a naked woman thoroughly ashamed of herself!’ Instead, they dwelt lovingly on the subject of death. Through their children’s magazines, they popularized the child death-beds later immortalized by Dickens (for instance, the death of Paul Dombey in Dombey and Son). They thought it a public duty to publicize ‘successful’ deaths. Hannah More wrote in 1792: ‘I, and indeed all of us, have been for nearly three weeks closely engaged in another triumphant death-bed scene.’ When Bishop Home died, she thought ‘a more delightful or edifying death-bed cannot well be imagined’ – ‘two such dying beds, so near to each other, are not to be found.’ They also enjoyed funerals. One of her correspondents, Miss Patty, wrote to her: ‘The undertaker from Bristol wept like a child and confessed that, without emolument, it was worth going a hundred miles to see such a sight.’ There were also bad deaths.

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

  The famous controversy as to whether a mouse, partaking of the sacramental elements, really partakes of Christ’s body is discussed in the first pages of the treatise on the eucharist. Wyclif pronounces the primary assumption false, for Christ is not there in a corporal manner. An animal, in eating a man, does not eat his soul. The opinion that the priest actually breaks Christ’s body and so breaks his neck, arms and other members, is a shocking error. What could be more shocking,—horribilius,—he says, than that the priest should daily make and consecrate the Lord’s body, and what more shocking than to be obliged to eat Christ’s very flesh and drink his very blood. Yea, what could be thought of more shocking than that Christ’s body may be burned or eructated, or that the priest carries God in bodily form on the tips of his fingers. The words of institution are to be taken in a figurative sense. In a similar manner, the Lord spoke of himself as the seed and of the world as the field, and called John, Elijah, not meaning that the two were one person. In saying, I am the vine, he meant that the vine is a symbol of himself. The impossibility of the miracle of elemental transmutation, Wyclif based on the philosophical principle that the substance of a thing cannot be separated from its accidents. If accidents can exist by themselves, then it is impossible to tell what a thing is or whether it exists at all. Transubstantiation would logically demand transaccidentation, an expression the English Reformer used before Luther. The theory that the accidents remain while the substance is changed, he pronounced "grounded neither in holy writt ne reson ne wit but only taughte by newe hypocritis and cursed heretikis that magnyfyen there own fantasies and dremes."601 Another proof of Wyclif’s freedom of mind was his assertion that the Roman Church, in celebrating the sacrament, has no right to make a precise form of words obligatory, as the words of institution differ in the different accounts of the New Testament. As for the profitable partaking of the elements, he declared that the physical eating profits nothing except the soul be fed with love. Announcing it as his expectation that he would be set upon for his views, he closed his notable treatise on the eucharist with the words, The truth of reason will prevail over all things. Super omnia vincit veritas rationis. In these denials of the erroneous system of the mediaeval Church at its vital points, Wyclif was far in advance of his own age and anticipated the views of the Protestant Reformers. § 42. Wyclif and the Scriptures.

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

  The directions for the prosecution of witches, given in the third part of the treatise, are set forth with great explicitness. Public rumor was a sufficient cause for an indictment. The accused were to be subjected to the indignity of having the hair shaved off from their bodies, especially the more secret parts, lest perchance some imp or charm might be hidden there. Careful rules were given to the inquisitors for preserving themselves against being bewitched, and Institoris and Sprenger took occasion to congratulate themselves that, in their long experience, they had been able to avoid this calamity. In case the defender of a witch seemed to show an excess of zeal, this was to be treated as presumptive evidence that he was himself under the same influence. One of the devices for exposing guilt was a sheet of paper of the length of Christ’s body, inscribed with the seven words of the cross. This was to be bound on the witch’s body at the time of the mass, and then the ordeal of torture was applied. This measure almost invariably brought forth a confession of guilt. The ordeal of the red-hot iron was also recommended, but it was to be used with caution, as it was the trick of demons to cover the hands of witches with a salve made from a vegetable essence which kept them from being burnt. Such a case happened in Constance, the woman being able to carry the glowing iron six paces and thus going free. Of all parts of this manual, none is quite so infamous as the author’s vile estimate of woman. If there is any one who still imagines that celibacy is a sure highway to purity of thought, let him read the testimonies about woman and marriage given by mediaeval writers, priests and monks, themselves celibate and presumably chaste. Their impurities of expression suggest a foul atmosphere of thought and conversation. The very title of the Malleus maleficarum—the Hammer of the Female Malefics—is in the feminine because, as the authors inform their readers, the overwhelming majority of those who were behagged and had intercourse with demons were women.933 In flat contrast to our modern experience of the religious fidelity of women, the authors of this book derive the word femina — woman—from fe and minus, that is, fides minus, less in faith. Weeping and spinning and deceiving they represent as the very essence of her nature. She deceives, because she was formed from Adam’s rib and that was crooked.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  When a medieval tomb was opened in the cathedral in 1757, word got around that a new saint had been discovered, and a frenzied mob tore the remains to pieces, making off with bits of bones and rags. The religious houses of Angers presented a sorry, though not exactly a scandalous, picture. There were no reports of fornicating nuns; but the Benedictine sisters (the richest) were allowed to go out, unescorted and without veils, in their carriages. Unmarried noble ladies were almost exclusively the beneficiaries of this, and other, wealthy institutions; indeed it was officially admitted they existed ‘to provide decent and honourable retreats for that numerous portion of the nation which is too well-bred to degrade itself by doing the humble tasks to which lack of income seems to condemn it’ (1770). The monks, too, usually came from privileged backgrounds. The ‘best’ monastery, St Aubin, had an income of 50,000 livres a year. Of this 11,000 went on upkeep, taxes, and so on, 20,000 to the non-resident noble abbot, and the rest to fifteen monks. They led a gentlemanly existence with horses and carriages, 120 livres a year pocket-money, a month’s holiday, card-parties and a concert on Sundays. They had given up the habit, and adopted comfortable shoes and silk stockings. It is true they did not eat ‘red’ meat (except at the so-called ‘infirmary table’, where the prior dined), but they had the best salt and fresh fish, hares, duck, teal, woodcocks and so forth. Many abbacies were now held in commendam by under-endowed (or well-connected) bishops. In Angers, four Benedictine houses provided four high ecclesiastics (nonresident) with supplementary stipends, and an easy life for fewer than fifty monks, out of a total income of over 200,000 livres; at St Nicholas, the abbot pocketed two-thirds of its revenue of 25,000 and spent his time entirely at Versailles. The Augustine canons were no better. Of the friars, recruited from the non-noble classes, the Capuchins were really poor. The rest led comfortable lives. One observer noted: ‘There are more coffee-pots and tea-sets, snuff boxes and knick-knacks on their tables than books of theology.’ The Cordeliers ate from silver, had a hundred and sixty linen sheets and twenty-four pipes of wine; the Dominicans had their own furniture, clothing allowance and private possessions, and their menu included capons, partridges, rabbits and pigs’ trotters (‘extraordinary expediture’). Among progressive-minded people it was agreed that reforms were necessary and overdue but no one foresaw a complete smash-up. There was a fundamental division in the Church between the cathedral chapters and religious, who were over-endowed, unemployed and mainly aristocratic, and the parish clergy, who were plebeian and poor. It was generally agreed, among philosophes, that the latter were worthy and hard-working too. Indeed, it was among the parish clergy that the clamour for reform was loudest. Everyone agreed the monks would have to go.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Turning in a vicious circle the supreme power is exhausted and stands permanently on the edge of the tomb.’ Bartolomeo Cappellari, elected Pope as Gregory XVI not long before the L’Avenir appeal, was an old-fashioned monk and in papal terms an embittered triumphalist – indeed, in 1799 he had written a book called II Trionfo della Santa Sede. He belonged to what was called the Zelanti group, a freemasonry of Vatican right-wingers, and his Secretary of State, Lambruschini, the General of the Barnabites, was strongly anti-liberal and worked closely with the Jesuits. The natural conservatism of the two men was intensified by constant political unrest in the papal states. Indeed, Gregory thought he had no alternative but to support princely power everywhere, in the hope that his fellow-sovereigns would rally to his own if the need arose. His was a medieval mind, but not quite in the sense that the La Chenaie group understood. He was crudely superstitious – during a cholera epidemic, he led a propitiatory procession through the streets of Rome carrying a picture of the Madonna he believed had been painted by St Luke; and he accepted uncritically the rights of hereditary title and property, which to him were the very foundations of society. The idea that people had rights, or monarchs obligations, was foreign to him. To the Polish Catholics who rose for religious and national freedom against the oppressive rule of Orthodox Russia he flatly refused support or sympathy; they were, he wrote in an encyclical, ‘certain intriguers and spreaders of lies, who under pretence of religion in this unhappy age, are raising their heads against the power of princes’. On 1 March 1832, Gregory granted La Mennais and his lieutenants an interview, but only provided religious topics were not mentioned; it took place in the hostile presence of their legitimist enemy, the Cardinal de Rohan, and was confined to cold platitudes. La Mennais found the Pope ‘a cowardly old imbecile’, and Rome ‘a huge tomb in which there are nothing but bones’. Of the Vatican court he wrote: ‘I saw there the most dreadful cesspit that it has ever been the lot of man to look upon. The great sewer of Tarquin itself would have been incapable of dealing with such a mass of filth.’ Six months later, during a banquet given in La Mennais’s honour by German progressive Catholics in Munich, he was handed the Pope’s answer on a silver tray: it took the form of the encyclical Mirari vos, which totally condemned his ideas without mentioning his name. This was effectively the end of the initiative. Lacordaire slipped away from La Chenaie in the night, without saying good-bye. La Mennais himself was ordered to submit openly, and he did so, saying afterwards: ‘I signed, yes I signed. I would have admitted that the moon was made of green cheese.’ But in fact he intensified, rather than repudiated, his radical ideas.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  If they continue so, it will be the first instance I have known in above half a century.’ As the eighteenth century progressed, Methodism accordingly identified itself with the established order of society, and after its break with the Anglican Church it became an institution on its own. Like the primitive Church itself, it became immersed in the problems and responsibilities of finance, it built expensive churches, and virtually abandoned itinerant preaching – it underwent the subtle transformation from awakening and enthusing to teaching and ruling. As Methodism changed itself from a revival to an established sect, the more militant sections of the movement hived off. In 1807, when the Methodist Conference voted against camp-meetings, a group broke away to form the Primitive Methodist Connection in which revivalism was institutionalized. Among the poorer elements of the working class, it provided religious fireworks as a substitute for political activism. At Redruth in Cornwall, in 1814, a revival went on for nine successive days and nights: ‘Hundreds were crying for mercy at once. Some remained in great distress of soul for one hour, some for two, some six, some nine, 12 and 15 hours before the Lord spoke peace in their souls – then they would rise, extend their arms and proclaim the wonderful works of God with such energy that bystanders would be struck in a moment and fall to the ground and roar for the disquieture of their souls.’ This wild revivalism, known in Britain as ‘Ranterism’, was an international phenomenon during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic period, and was particularly common in Germany. In the Middle Ages and the sixteenth century, revivalism was always liable to transform itself into political violence. Now, in Britain, the two forms of activism became alternatives. It is true that the sons of strict Methodists sometimes became political revolutionaries: six out of seventeen Luddites hanged at York in January 1813, for instance, came from Methodist families. But Methodist radicals were more likely to be political reformers – the beginning of a tradition which made Methodism and other nonconformist sects the allies first of the Liberals, then of the Labour Party. And the Methodist organization itself almost invariably sided with law, order and property during difficult times. In 1812, the rich Burton family, leading Methodists who were said to be exceptionally generous to their workers, summoned cannons to defend their print-works at Rhodes and, aided by the prayers of Methodist preachers, mowed down the factory hands. In 1818 the preachers took the conformist title of ‘Reverend’, thus defying an earlier ruling; and three years later, one of them, John Stephens, put their social philosophy plainly: ‘The objects we have to keep in view are: (1) to give the sound part of society a decided ascendancy . . . (2) To put down the opposition . . . (3) To cure those of them that are worth saving. (4) To take the rest one by one and crush them . . .