Fear

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)

  In 1559 the Inquisition arrested Bartolomeo de Carranza, Archbishop of Toledo, and kept him in its underground cells at Valladolid despite papal intervention for seven years. In 1565, a papal legation including three future popes, Gregory XIII, Urban VII and Sixtus V, reported to Pius IV: ‘Nobody dares to speak in favour of Carranza because of the Inquisition . . . and its authority would not allow it to admit that it had imprisoned Carranza unjustly. The most ardent defenders of justice here consider that it is better for an innocent man to be condemned than for the Inquisition to suffer disgrace.’ Pius V finally got Carranza brought to Rome in 1566, where he was held in the fortress at St Angelo. The power of Spain prevented his clearance until 1576, just eighteen days before his death. The Inquisition was not only supremely powerful (it constituted one of the governing councils of Spain); it proved durable, largely because it was self-financing from the confiscated property of the condemned. The fact that it needed the money for its operations meant that it had to secure convictions. Hence the use of torture. It is calculated that in the Toledo Tribunal, 1575–1610, about thirty-two per cent of those whose ‘offences’ made them liable to torture were in fact tortured; those thus brutalized, according to the records, included women aged seventy to ninety, and a girl of thirteen. After funds from confiscations ran out, the Inquisition raised money by selling posts as informers or ‘familiars’, who enjoyed privileges such as freedom from arrest; in 1641 they cost 1,500 ducats each. Even so, the Inquisition finally ran out of money in the late eighteenth century, and from that point it became moribund, though it was not effectively abolished until 1834. The last official Spanish execution for heresy was in 1826, when a schoolmaster was hanged for substituting ‘Praise be to God’ in place of ‘Ave Maria’ in school prayers. The limpieza de sangre statutes remained valid (though increasingly unenforceable) until 1865. While in Spain orthodox intolerance concentrated on Moors and Jews, and then on an amalgamation of Jews, Protestants, foreigners and those of ‘impure blood’, north of the Pyrenees Jews had ceased to be the main object of hatred in the thirteenth century, and attention had focussed on those heretics who fled into mountain areas to escape persecution. Almost imperceptibly, in these remote and backward areas, the heresy-hunt broadened out into the witch-hunt. Witches had not, on the whole, been hunted in the Dark Ages, since belief in their existence tended to be treated as pagan superstition: Charlemagne, in fact, passed laws against the hunting of witches. The position changed in the thirteenth century with the development of the Dominican Inquisition, which tended to create (often for financial reasons) a new category of victims when it ran out of an old one. Thus in the Alps witches were called Waudenses and in the Pyrenees Gazarii or Cathars.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  As with the Inquisition against heretics, officials who dragged their feet were liable to become victims: thus Schoneburg had the University Rector, Dietrich Flade, chief judge of the electoral court, arrested for leniency, tortured, strangled and burned. The hunters constantly alarmed the authorities by stories of vast and growing conspiracies of witches; once they were allowed to torture they produced not only scores of victims but hundreds of accusations – thus justifying their forecasts. Some hunters were paid by results: Balthasar Ross, minister to the Prince-Abbot of Fulda, made 5393 guilden out of 250 victims, 1602–5. There seems to have been a fairly steady correlation between the intensity of the Protestant-Catholic struggle and the number of witches accused and burned. Just as there had been a lull in the early sixteenth century, ended by the Lutheran Reformation and its violent consequences, so there was another lull just before the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618. Then, with the Catholic reconquest of Bohemia and parts of Germany, the witch-trials multiplied. This last great phase of witch-hunting was the product of Catholic-Protestant rivalry, since hunters on both sides often identified witchcraft with opposing beliefs; on the other hand, they drew on each other’s theoretical writings and practical experiences. The Catholic witchcraft terror in Germany was remarkably like the Inquisition’s ‘Protestant-Jewish’ terror in Spain, since it might strike at anyone. Philip Adolf von Ehrenberg, Bishop of Wurtzburg, burned over 900 during his reign 1623–31, including his own nephew, nineteen priests and a child of seven. In the Bavarian prince-bishopric of Eichstatt, 274 were burned in the year 1629 alone. In Bonn, the chancellor and his wife, and the wife of the archbishop’s secretary, were executed. The worst hunt of all was at Bamberg, where the ‘witch-bishop’, Johann Georg II Fuchs von Dornheim burned 600 witches, 1623–33. His chancellor, accused of leniency, implicated under torture five burgomasters; one of them, arrested and tortured in turn, accused twenty-seven colleagues, but later managed to smuggle out a letter to his daughter: ‘It is all falsehood and invention, so help me God. . . . They never cease to torture until one says something.... If God sends no means of bringing the truth to light, our whole kindred will be burned.’ The hunt led a Jesuit, Friedrich Spee, who had acted as confessor to witches in the Wurzburg persecution, to circulate in manuscript an attack on hunting called Cautio Criminalis : ‘Torture fills our Germany with witches and unheard-of wickedness, and not only Germany but any nation that attempts it.... If all of us have not confessed ourselves witches, that is only because we have not all been tortured.’ This revealing Catholic document fell into the hands of Protestants, who printed it in 1631. But exposures of Catholic enormities did not prevent Protestants from doing the same. Erasmian humanists like Johann Weyer had long since drawn the connection between torture and confessions. (His book was put on the Index).

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

  “Many lifted up their hands to their gods,” the younger Pliny wrote to his friend Tacitus at the end of the first century, “but a great number believed there were no gods, and that this night was to be the world’s last, eternal one” (Letters 5.16; 5.20). It was the night of August 24, 79 C.E., and since noon of that day Vesuvius had hurled gas, ash, and pumice 12 miles into the air above the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Pliny said that the initial eruption looked like a huge umbrella pine (we would have said a giant mushroom cloud). “Like an immense tree trunk it was projected into the air, and opened out with branches. I believe that it was carried up by a violent gust, then left as the gust faltered; or, overcome by its own weight, it scattered widely—sometimes white, sometimes dark and mottled, depending on whether it bore ash or cinders.” The younger Pliny watched from the relative safety of his uncle’s official residence at Misenum about 20 miles across the Gulf of Naples from Vesuvius. The elder Pliny lived there as prefect of Rome’s Mediterranean battle fleet. A messenger had come from Stabia, presumably by boat, to ask him for help after the eruption started. He took a squadron of fast warships on a search and rescue mission straight across the bay and lost his life in an action as brave in intention as it was foolish in execution (he slept there that night). That first day meant lethal danger at worst and timely flight at best. But around midnight the second and far more terrible act began. Down its southern side toward Pompeii , 6 miles away with twenty thousand inhabitants, and down its western side toward Herculaneum, 4 miles away with five thousand inhabitants, Vesuvius poured a ground surge and pyroclastic flow, a hot, molten avalanche of gas, ash, and pumice (but not red-hot lava). It moved at over 50 miles an hour with a temperature of about 750 degrees Fahrenheit and buried Pompeii to a depth of almost 20 feet, Herculaneum to a depth of almost 70 feet.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  ‘Let me therefore be no longer reproached for lack of clarity, since I make a point of it; but let the truth of religion be recognized in its very obscurity, in the little understanding of it we have, and in our indifference about knowing it.’ Man’s suffering and ignorance were thus permanent facts: ‘On seeing the blindness and misery of man, and the astonishing contradictions presented by his nature, and seeing the whole universe dumb, and man without light, abandoned to himself, and as it were lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who has put him there, what he will become when he dies, I become fearful, like a man who, transported in his sleep to a deserted and frightful island, awakens without knowing where he is, and without having any possibility of leaving it; and I then marvel that one does not despair of so wretched a condition.’ Faced with this predicament, Pascal argued that Christianity provided a better answer than a solution which depended purely on reason. In all probability, it was a better bet. Pascal was not anti-reason. He saw it as neutral. A rational proof of God, or Christianity, would never displace the gift of faith. He saw a sinister tendency for man’s reason to end in irrationality, just as his natural goodwill was corrupted by animosity. Human life was not necessarily progressing towards sweetness and light: man has a two-fold nature – the Fall, as well as divine grace, operates within him. More positively, the establishment and survival of Christianity was itself a challenge to rationalism (a point Tertullian, or for that matter St Paul, might have made), and in rare moments of inspiration we discover a reality which it is absurd to dissect by reason, and which shows Christ still operates in this world. Thus: ‘Reason’s final step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.’ Or again: ‘There is nothing more reasonable than the rejection of reason.’ Finally: ‘We come to know truth not only by reason, but still more so through our hearts.’ The phenomenon of Pascal, who echoed medieval mysticism and adumbrated nineteenth-century romanticism, dominated the forces of protest within French Catholicism, and so prevented the fusion of reform and reason which produced Locke’s system in England, and allowed the Enlightenment there to develop peacefully within the framework of the Established Christian religion. Under continual official attack – the bull Unigenitus became the law of France in 1730 – Jansenism degenerated into a mere political party, lost its spiritual fervour, and eventually resurfaced as a lawyer’s religion in 1789. Thus Catholicism remained unreformed, and the third force – the Enlightenment – emerged as varieties of deism or atheism operating outside Christianity, or even against it. Locke’s arguments in favour of reason, and the methodology of empirical science, were eagerly applied but in a non-Christian context.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  It beats its head against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor . . . . God was very good to this little child. Very likely God saw it would get worse and worse and never repent, and so it would have been punished more severely in Hell. So God in his mercy called it out of the world in early childhood.’ About four million copies of Furniss’s works were sold in English-speaking countries. But we must not suppose that Hell was directed chiefly at children. The Catholics, unlike some of the Protestants, had no ‘double doctrine’ on Hell; they taught it, in all its imaginative rigour, to all ages and all classes. Father Faber, who was greatly interested in death and its consequences (‘O grave and pleasant cheer of death. . . the diligent, ubiquitous benignity of death’; ‘Deathbeds form a department of the church . . . which belongs to her officially’), deplored any tendency to preach Hell-fire to the lower classes but not to their betters: ‘I see real, good wholesome work to be done in real, good wholesome souls, by frequent meditation on Hell . . . .’ Moreover, Catholic intellectuals were expected to subscribe to the doctrine, and, where appropriate, to reflect it in their writings. In 1892, Professor St George Mivart, a Catholic zoologist, suggested that the sufferings of the damned might gradually be ameliorated, a speculation Newman thought admissible. Cardinal Vaughan, Archbishop of Westminster, thought otherwise, and required Mivart to subscribe to a statement of orthodox doctrine. Mivart refused, and found himself outside the Church.3 The image of Rome as a repository of medieval certitudes, of social homogeneity, of a unitary view of life, exercised a marked appeal to a certain type of intellectual, and not only in England. In France, the current was, initially at least, much stronger, and it was linked to social and political forces which made nineteenth-century French Catholicism the driving force behind populist triumphalism. Chateâubriand’s Génie du Christianisme was the harbinger of a new Catholic and papal apologetic. For the first time since the twelfth century, various vocal interests saw the papacy, potentially at least, as a popular force, as a protection against unwelcome secular claims, and as a far more acceptable defender of civilized tradition than the old royal houses. The decline of Gallicanism and localism in the Church, and the virtual eclipse of the old type of bishop-aristocrat, produced an abrupt and permanent decline in episcopal authority, and thus placed the Pope and the parish priests (and through them, their congregations) in a direct relationship. In 1819 de Maistre published his remarkable celebration of the papacy, Du Pape, which not only reasserted the complete doctrine of papal infallibility, which had been devalued in the eighteenth century, but advanced persuasive and modern secular reasons for keeping, and exalting, the papal institution, as a barrier against barbarism and proletarian terror.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  And then, too, the clergy has always been employed by the Spanish kings as royal agents, just as their councils had served as legislative assemblies. The Catholic Church was a department of the Spanish government, and never more so than in the Americas. Right from the start Charles V and Philip II used clerics to check abuses and limit the independence of early colonists and officials, the precedent being set by the appointment of Fr Bernado Boil to represent the crown’s interests in newly discovered Hispaniola, the first settlement. In return, the Church required protection, privilege, and the crown’s unswerving devotion to the orthodox faith. In these circumstances, there was no place or opportunity for experiment or deviation. Steadfast and united against change, both Church and crown liked this working arrangement, whereby the Pope was excluded along with heresy, and the crown ruled – but vicariously, through the hierarchy. The system was remarkably successful, and cheap. The royal garrisons were tiny. The clergy mesmerized Spaniards and natives alike. They could always be brought in to quell riots when soldiers failed. The system broke down only when the crown itself, in the eighteenth century, deserted the orthodox Catholic camp and initiated reforms. This was all very well for enlightened despots in Europe, but it was fatal in the Americas, where the Church, not the army, was the instrument of control. The first warning came in 1769, when the Jesuits were suppressed, arrested and deported. Mobs of angry Indians tried to break into the barracks where the Jesuits were held, in an effort to release them; and a large military escort was required to march 500 Jesuits to the coast at Veracruz. The crown was repeatedly advised that moves against the clergy would weaken its grip on the colonies. There was need, the king was told for ‘constant vigilance to preserve suitable conduct and healthy principles of obedience and love for Your Majesty among the clergy’ (1768); ‘the conduct of the people depends in large part on that of the clergy’ (1789). The most effective way of quelling unrest, he was informed, was ‘to station a friar with a holy crucifix in the nearest plaza’. In 1799 the cathedral chapter of Pueblo wrote to the king of the ‘fanatical devotion’ of the Indians to the clergy, whose hands ‘they always knelt to kiss’, and whose advice they ‘blindly followed’. The same year an Indian crowd attacked a Pueblo gaol where a priest was imprisoned. The Indians, the king was warned, ‘resented royal reforming efforts to remove ecclésiastical privileges’. It was the failure of the Spanish crown and government to hood these warnings which led to the colonial revolution, under the cry ‘America is the only refuge left for the religion of Jesus Christ.’ The Latin-American clergy did not want an uneasy mixture of Bourbonism and Voltaire, and when they were given it they revolted, and carried the masses with them.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Although American Christianity escaped religious warfare, the witchcraft frenzy showed that it was not immune to fanatical infection, and at times the development of Protestant horror-literature aimed at Catholics came close to bringing about a breakdown in the consensus. Of course, to many Protestants, a number of Catholic institutions infringed the moral consensus in spirit, even if they did not actually defy it legally, as the Mormon polygamists did. One example was convents, the objects of a campaign by the Protestant Vindicator, founded in 1834. The next year saw the publication in Boston of Six Months in a Convent, and, in 1836, Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal, written by a group of New York anti-Catholics. This was followed by Further Disclosures and The Escape of Sister Frances Patrick, Another Nun from the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal. Maria Monk herself was arrested for picking pockets in a brothel and died in prison in 1849; but her book had sold 300,000 copies by 1860 and was termed ‘the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of Knownothingness’. (It was reprinted as recently as 1960.) An Ursuline convent was burned down by a Boston mob in 1834 and those responsible were acquitted – Protestant juries believed Catholic convents had subterranean dungeons for the murder and burial of illegitimate children. There were also widespread fears of a Catholic political and military conspiracy – fears which had existed, in one form or another, since the 1630s, when they were associated with Charles I. In the 1830s, Lyman Beecher’s Plea for the West revealed a plot to take over the Mississippi Valley, the Emperor of Austria being in league with the Pope. Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, made the conspiracy more plausible by suggesting that the reactionary kings and emperors of Europe were deliberately promoting Catholic emigration to America as a preliminary to a take-over. (Morse was not particularly Protestant, but, during a visit to Rome, he had been outraged by a papal soldier who had knocked off his hat when Morse failed to doff it to a religious procession.) In fact, during the 1850s, America’s population rose from 23,191,000 to 31,443,000, or almost fifty per cent, more than a third of the increase being due to immigration. This brought the Catholic issue into politics with the emergence of the secretive ultra-Protestant American Party, whose ‘I don’t know’ answer to a key question led to their popular title, the ‘Know Nothings’. The party became a national force before being merged into the Republican Party in 1854; and it was a matter of note that, whereas the Republican Party became identified with the anti-slavery campaign, the Roman Catholic hierarchy remained non-committal on the issue, and took virtually no part in the crusade. This brings us to the second precondition needed to make the American politico-religious system work. As we have seen, there was no difficulty about the level of religiosity.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I looked around the living room. There were pictures of Dominic everywhere: Dominic on the beach in Malibu with his ears blowing back, Dominic dressed as a bumblebee on Halloween, Annika cradling Dominic as a little puppy, her face serene and dreamlike. Dominic himself now had his head in my lap and was looking up at me from under his dog brow. “I’m going to do better,” I said to him, scratching his white diamond. “I promise. From now on it’s only going to be you and me. As soon as I get back from this date.” 17.I got to the Ace at five and had time to kill. I decided I would go up to the roof and maybe try to think about my book a little bit. Once again, I’d somehow shoved Sappho under a man: multiple men this time. I’d come to Venice to purge the influence of dick on my life and had wound up becoming Helen of Troy. What would Sappho think? The advisory committe said the thesis draft was due by fall semester. Did that mean the beginning of the semester? Day one? I knew that it did. But I pretended I had some wiggle room: that I could just pop in there on Halloween, draft in hand, like, Sorry for the delay! and my funding would go on. I’d always been scared not to finish the thesis but maybe even more scared to finish it. What would happen then? Would I apply for teaching jobs in other cities? I had thought that maybe I would, in the hopes that it would make Jamie ask me to stay—that the catalyst of my moving somewhere else would make him finally step up. But somewhere in my mind, I always knew he wouldn’t. I hadn’t wanted to face that. On the Ace roof there was flamenco music playing, or bossa nova or something. It all seemed so contemporary and pleasant. The sun was setting and I ordered a white wine. Was this how everything was now? Just nice? I wondered if other people felt comfortable within niceness, or whether they didn’t even notice that things were nice. Maybe they expected everything to be nice. Maybe nice was like air to them.

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

  Bajazet was willing to pay the pope 40,000 ducats for the hospitality extended to his rival brother, and delegations came from him to Rome to arrange the details of the bargain. The report ran that attempts were made by the sultan to poison both his brother and the pope by contaminating the wells of the Vatican. When the ambassador brought from Constantinople the delayed payment of three years, 120,000 ducats, Djem insisted that the Turk’s clothes should be removed and his skin be rubbed down with a towel, and that he should lick the letter "on every side," as proof that he did not also carry poison.781 Djem survived his first papal entertainer, Innocent VIII., three years, and figured prominently in public functions in the reign of Alexander VI. He died 1495, still a captive. Another curious instance was given in Innocent’s reign of the hold open-mouthed superstition had in the reception given to the holy lance. This pretended instrument, with which Longinus pierced the Saviour’s side and which was found during the Crusades by the monk Barthélemy at Antioch, was already claimed by two cities, Nürnberg and Paris. The relic made a greater draft upon the credulity of the age than St. Andrew’s head. The latter was the gift of a Christian prince, howbeit an adherent of the schismatic Greek Church; the lance came from a Turk, Sultan Bajazet. Some question arose among the cardinals whether it would not be judicious to stay the acceptance of the gift till the claims of the lance in Nürnberg had been investigated. But the pope’s piety, such as it was, would not allow a question of that sort to interfere. An archbishop and a bishop were despatched to Ancona to receive the iron fragment, for only the head of the lance was extant. It was conducted from the city gates by the cardinals to St. Peter’s, and after mass the pope gave his blessing. The day of the reception happened to be a fast, but, at the suggestion of one of the cardinals, some of the fountains along the streets, where the procession was appointed to go, were made to throw out wine to slake the thirst of the populace. After a solemn service in S. Maria del Popolo, on Ascension Day, 1492, the Turkish present, encased in a receptacle of crystal and gold, was placed near the handkerchief of St. Veronica in St. Peter’s.782 The two great stains upon the pontificate of Innocent VIII., the crusade he called to exterminate the Waldenses, 1487, and his bull directed against the witches of Germany, 1484, which inaugurated two horrible dramas of cruelty, have treatment in another place.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  50.After four nights I began to lose hope. The sickness reemerged and it was deeper, all the way to my bones, the way addicts describe dope sickness. I shit myself constantly. I vomited into the ocean. Whatever he had done to me had made my body dependent. I literally needed him to survive. I had heard of people who died from drug withdrawals. Whatever was leaking from me could not be good. Was I going to die of the shits and the shakes? Was I going to die a painful, shitty death? Suddenly I became terrified of dying. It seemed like I was about to stop breathing. Even just the thought that I could stop breathing and disappear was terrifying. What was scarier still was that I had done this to myself. I needed help. There were two hours until group. I needed some kind of emotional methadone, some advice at least about what they had done to tone down their withdrawals. I showered quickly, then walked from Venice to Santa Monica, afraid that if I took a car I might vomit or shit inside of it. Stopping at CVS to buy Pepto-Bismol, I felt terrified, like an alien, as though I were Theo on land. This trip to CVS was so unlike last time—the urinary tract infection where I had felt that strange closeness to myself. Now I was totally estranged and out of my body, as though I had no idea how to move. I saw my feet walking, felt my heart pumping, but I didn’t know how I was breathing on my own—how my lungs knew to breathe and my heart knew to beat. —“Well, I did it again,” said Diana. “I slept with one of the tennis pros again. This time an even younger one. Barely eighteen. It’s like they’re just passing me around now. I don’t know how everyone in my social circle is not going to find out.” Everyone looked at her in awe as though we were watching a soap opera. Sara was popping cashews like popcorn. “I just—I don’t even know how it happened. It was like I was in a blackout. One minute I was getting into my car, the next minute I was talking to him. Then he got in the car with me and we started making out right there in the club parking lot. I took him to the Loews on the beach and got us a room, because only tourists go there and I knew we wouldn’t see anyone. The whole thing lasted less than an hour. He didn’t even ask for my number.” “Did it come on spontaneously? Or was there any moment leading up to it where you noticed the idea in your mind? Anything that could have been a trigger?” asked Dr. Jude.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And because under Brockett’s skilful guidance she developed a fondness for the beautiful city, she felt very tolerant of him at moments, almost grateful she felt, grateful too towards Paris. And Puddle also felt grateful. The strain of the sudden complete rupture with Morton had told on the faithful little grey woman. She would scarcely have known how to counsel Stephen had the girl come to her and asked for her counsel. Sometimes she would lie awake now at nights thinking of that ageing and unhappy mother in the great silent house, and then would come pity, the old pity that had come in the past for Anna—she would pity until she remembered Stephen. Then Puddle would try to think very calmly, to keep the brave heart that had never failed her, to keep her strong faith in Stephen’s future—only now there were days when she felt almost old, when she realized that indeed she was ageing. When Anna would write her a calm, friendly letter, but with never so much as a mention of Stephen, she would feel afraid, yes, afraid of this woman, and at moments almost afraid of Stephen. For none might know from those guarded letters what emotions lay in the heart of their writer; and none might know from Stephen’s set face when she recognized the writing, what lay in her heart. She would turn away, asking no questions about Morton. Oh, yes, Puddle felt old and actually frightened, both of which sensations she deeply resented; so being what she was, an indomitable fighter, she thrust out her chin and ordered a tonic. She struggled along through the labyrinths of Paris beside the untiring Stephen and Brockett; through the galleries of the Luxembourg and the Louvre; up the Eiffel Tower—in a lift, thank heaven; down the Rue de la Paix, up the hill to Montmartre—sometimes in the car but quite often on foot, for Brockett wished Stephen to learn her Paris—and as likely as not, ending up with rich food that disagreed badly with the tired Puddle. In the restaurants people would stare at Stephen, and although the girl would pretend not to notice, Puddle would know that in spite of her calm, Stephen was inwardly feeling resentful, was inwardly feeling embarrassed and awkward. And then because she was tired, Puddle too would feel awkward when she noticed those people staring. Sometimes Puddle must really give up and rest, in spite of the aggressive chin and the tonic. Then all alone in the Paris hotel, she would suddenly grow very homesick for England—absurd of course and yet there it was, she would feel the sharp tug of England. At such moments she would long for ridiculous things; a penny bun in the train at Dover; the good red faces of English porters—the old ones with little stubby side-whiskers; Harrods Stores; a properly upholstered arm-chair; bacon and eggs; the sea front at Brighton.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Nevertheless, some of the friars, especially the Franciscans, persisted in native studies; some could preach in three dialects, and by 1572 there were 109 publications (that we know of) in ten different native languages, most of them in Nahuatl, which the friars tried to raise to a lingua franca. The Holy Office seems to have disliked all publications for the Indians, even catechisms, especially if they were in translation; and the crown, too, tried to insist on Spanish, ‘that the Indians be instructed in our Castilian speech and accept our social organization and good customs’ (1550). The intrinsic difficulties of finding the exact translation for Christian concepts were greatly increased by fear of heterodoxy. The seculars, who took virtually no part in the missions, and who hated the friars, were always on the watch; and in each order there was a rigorist group in sly contact with the authorities at home. In 1555 the first Mexican synod ordered the seizure of all sermons in the native language; and ten years later a further synod forbade the Indians access to the scriptures, in any language. We come here to some of the central problems which confronted mission work, which indeed have always bedevilled efforts to spread Christianity. To what extent should Christianity, in penetrating new societies and cultures, take on a native coloration and adapt its presentation of the essential truth? There is very good reason to believe, as we have seen, that the earliest Christian missionaries, spreading in Africa, Asia Minor and southern Europe, developed modulations and varieties which assisted the rapid dissemination of Christian ideas, and which were only later, in the course of three centuries, reconciled to a standard. It is hard not to believe that this was the apostles’ intention; it is certainly adumbrated in Paul’s Epistles. But by the sixteenth century, a millenium and a half of increasingly narrow doctrinal definition had deprived Christianity of its flexibility and ambiguities. And then, in its homeland, Christianity itself was locked in dispute over points of doctrine which had come to seem momentous. Any divergence was held to entail torture and death in this world and eternal horror in the next. Moreover, arrogant and insistent state power was involved: Christianity was identified with a national culture whose export was the whole point of the conquest. In Spanish and Portuguese America, the missionary friars (and later the Jesuits) were far too closely supervised by state and church authorities to attempt, or permit, a marriage between Christian and local culture. They did what seemed to them the next best thing: attempted to effect a separation between the native Christians and the Spanish settlers and half-castes; and this was made possible because it was both official and ecclesiastical policy to gather the Indians in new villages. In Mexico all the orders, but especially the Augustinians, were enthusiastic founders of new villages and towns.

• From Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (2015)

  57 The economic cost of fear and anxiety disorders is estimated to exceed $40 billion annually. 58 These conditions have a significant impact on the workforce. For example, a study from Australia found that anxiety and affective disorders resulted in 20 million work impairment days annually, mostly involving absences. 59 But the problem is actually more pervasive than the 20 percent anxiety prevalence statistic implies. Problems with threat processing and maladaptive fear and anxiety are factors in many other psychiatric conditions. GAD and depression often occur together, and fear and anxiety can play a role in schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, autism, and eating and addictive disorders. Moreover, many individuals are impaired by uncontrollable fear or anxiety without having received an official psychiatric diagnosis of their condition. These issues can also trouble those whose health is compromised by illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, and other chronic physical ailments. Even many people who are considered otherwise healthy in mind and body can from time to time suffer from bouts of excessive fear and worry. A better understanding of the nature of these conditions, and the brain mechanisms involved, would be extremely helpful to just about everyone . Figure 1.5: Major Symptoms of Fear / Anxiety Disorders. What determines who will be likely to suffer from a fear or anxiety disorder? For example, why does only a relatively small proportion of people exposed to a trauma develop PTSD? 60 David Barlow has proposed that three factors make people vulnerable to these disorders 61 ( Figure 1.6 ). One is genetics or other biological factors in the brain. The heritability of anxiety is estimated to be between 30 percent and 40 percent, which is considerably less than that of some other conditions. 62 But the rates rise when one examines particular anxious traits, such as the tendency to be inhibited and withdrawn in situations involving uncertainty. Genetic influences on anxiety and other mental disorders are complex and involve interactions between multiple genes. Individual differences in brain organization that arise from environmental influences, and interactions between genetic and environmental factors, are also important. Another source of vulnerability involves general psychological processes, such as an individual’s tendency to perceive situations as unpredictable and uncontrollable. The third factor listed by Barlow is specific learning experiences . If a child is given excessive attention when ill, he may continue to use “sick behaviors” as a way to attract attention and sympathy. Similarly, if a child observes a parent or other adults using such strategies, he might adopt them as well. Early life situations in which one experiences negative consequences that cannot be controlled following situations involving uncertainty may well predispose one to feel less in control in later life.

• From Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (2015)

  Synaptic change is a physiological process sustained by molecular events. We are not consciously privy to these activities. In the case of explicit memory, we can be conscious of the content that is stored but not of the processes that enabled the storage. But in implicit systems, the changes are nonconscious all the way. We can, in other words, explain a change in defensive behavior and physiological responses without assuming that a change in a subjective feeling of fear mediates the behavioral change. Indeed, as noted, subjective feelings of fear do not always correlate well with physiological and behavioral responses elicited by threats. 77 Emotional processing theory would explain this as the result of an incomplete activation of the fear structure, and so the exposure only partly extinguishes the fear structure’s control over overall fear response, which includes behavioral, physiological, and cognitive (as assessed verbal responses) components. But this assumes that behavioral, physiological, and verbal responses are all products of a single system in the brain (the fear structure or program). I have argued against such notions of a unitary fear system throughout this book. Although emotional processing theory has been very influential, it has also been challenged on certain points. 78 Although Lang stated that fear is not a lump in the brain that can be palpated the concept of a fear structure that has to be changed in its entirety seems to lend credence to the idea of a system or module in the brain dedicated to making all things related to fear. I support the idea of a defensive system that detects and responds to threats, but I don’t believe that fear is a direct product of this system. The defense system works implicitly, whereas fear is constructed as conscious feeling via cognitive systems responsible for any kind of conscious awareness. For this reason, I believe that the implicit and explicit processes have to be targeted separately with different therapeutic strategies. A similar idea has been proposed by Chris Brewin and Tim Dalgleish in their multiple representation theory, in which they suggest that both verbally accessible and automatic implicit processes underlie problems with fear and anxiety and should be treated separately. 79 Therapeutic procedures that target systems that work implicitly are best at changing implicit memories, whereas procedures that engage explicit processes and working memory are best at changing explicit processes.

• From Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (2015)

  This is an a-noetic state that does not have any necessary connection to conscious knowing or the self. However, the same stimulus that triggered the a-noetic state can, and likely will, also result in the retrieval of conscious noetic knowledge (semantic memory) about the threat (some snakes are venomous) and also result in an autonoetic state of fear and anxiety (this snake might bite me; if it’s venomous, I might not be able to make it out of the woods to a hospital, and even if I do they may not have the antidote, or they might have it, but it may be too late). Further, as mentioned above, the a-noetic state has observable bodily consequences (rapid heartbeat, freezing behavior). The semantic fact that freezing and a quickened heartbeat are associated with feelings of fear and anxiety, and the episodic fact that these symptoms are happening to YOU, can interact with other semantic and episodic information and contribute to the feelings of fear and anxiety that are evolving in working memory at the moment. ANIMAL CONSCIOUSNESS: THE EPISODIC MEMORY DEBATE Animals obviously have creature consciousness—they are alive and respond to their environments. And some animals, especially mammals, but also birds and other vertebrates 43 and even some insects, 44 are said to use complex cognitive (mental) operations to guide their behavior. The question is not so much about whether they have mental states, but instead whether they have mental state consciousness. Hard data are sparse when it comes to this topic, because we can never truly know whether an animal consciously experiences what is going on inside its brain: We can measure information processing but not conscious content. Although much of the debate has been based on passion and speculation, in recent years some have tried to close this gap with empirical evidence. I mentioned this work in Chapter 6 but held back one important aspect of the research until after explaining what episodic memory is and how it relates to consciousness. So let’s look at the very interesting studies that have asked whether evidence for episodic memory can be demonstrated in animals. The current debate was triggered, in part, by Tulving’s claim that episodic memory is a unique human adaptation, 45 which led some researchers to design experiments to test whether episodic memory is present, or at least possible, in other animals.

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

  "I cannot do otherwise than I have done," he said, and turning to Fitz-Urse, who was armed with a sword and an axe, he added; "Reginald, you have received many favors at my hands: come you to me and into my church armed!" The knights tried to drag him out of the sanctuary, not intending to kill him there; but he braced himself against the pillar between the altars of the Virgin, his special patroness, and St. Benedict, whose rule he followed, and said: "I am ready to die. May the Church through my blood obtain peace and liberty! I charge you in the name of God Almighty that you hurt no one here but me." In the struggle, he grappled with De Tracy and threw him to the pavement. He called Fitz-Urse (who had seized him by the collar of his long cloak) a miserable wretch, and wrenched the cloak from his grasp, saying, "Off, thou pander, thou!"164 The soldier, maddened by the foul epithet, waving the sword over his head, struck the first blow, and dashed off his cap. Tracy, rising from the pavement, aimed at his head; but Edward Grim, standing by, interposed his arm, which was almost severed, and then he sank back against the wall. Becket received blow after blow in an attitude of prayer. As he felt the blood trickling down his face, he bowed his neck for the death-blow, clasped his hands, and said in a low voice: "I commend my cause and the cause of the Church to God, to St. Denis, the martyr of France, to St. Alfege, and to the saints of the Church.165 In the name of Christ and for the defence of his Church, I am ready to die. Lord, receive my spirit." These were his last words. The next blow felled him to his knees, the last laid him on the floor at the foot of the altar of St. Benedict. His hands were still joined as if in prayer. Richard the Breton cut off the upper part of his skull, which had received the sacred oil. Hugh of Horsea, the subdeacon, trampled upon his neck, thrust his sword into the ghastly wound, and scattered the blood and the brains over the pavement.166 Then he said, "Let us go, let us go; the traitor is dead; he will rise no more." The murderers rushed from the church through the cloisters into the palace for plunder; while a violent thunder-storm broke over the cathedral. They stole about two thousand marks in gold and silver, and rode off on Becket’s fine horses in the thick darkness of the night. The body of Thomas was buried in the crypt. The remains of his blood and brains were sacredly kept. His monkish admirers discovered, to their amazement and delight, that the martyr, who had once been arrayed in purple and fine linen, wore on his skin under his many garments the coarsest haircloth abounding with vermin.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Another general letter sent out by Alcuin and Charlemagne noted that the king had set up a task-force to ‘correct with all possible care’ the entire Bible ‘degraded through the ignorance of copyists’. Alcuin was in charge of this effort: and it was the great codex embodying the results which, as we have seen, was handed to his master in Rome on Christmas Day 800. In a way, the revised and amended Bible of Alcuin sums up, not unfairly, the limitations of Dark Age Christian culture – a conscientious, and in the circumstances heroic, effort to recover as much as possible, and as accurately as possible, the understanding of the past; but an almost total absence of the desire to reach out for new frontiers. These Dark Age scholars believed that God had imposed definite limits on what knowledge man might acquire in this world without sin. In accepting these limits they were motivated by fear, as well as by respect for the past. They were, indeed, fearful and superstitious men. The Christian Church of Alcuin in the late eighth century was still, in certain basic essentials, recognisably the same as the Church of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, around AD 50–60. But in certain other respects it was very different. If Christianity had been ‘imperialized’ in the fourth century, it was to some extent ‘barbarianized’ in the West, during the three centuries beginning about 500. Nothing exactly new was created; but certain elements already present in ‘imperial Christianity’ were enormously inflated and so transformed. Of these by far the most important was the cult of relics. The popularization of this cult by Ambrose in fourth century Milan was a decisive event in Christian history. Relics rapidly became, and for some 800 years remained, the most important single element in Christian devotion. They were the Christian’s only practical defence against inexplicable suffering, and the constant and malignant activities of devils. Saints were believed to communicate with the world through contact with their earthly remains. Thus relics radiated a kind of energy, rather like a nuclear pile, and were correspondingly dangerous as well as useful. Important relics were approached with terror, and frequently revenged themselves on the profane and the sceptical. They conveyed a sense of supernatural power constantly humming through the world, which could be switched on through access to the right liturgical and sacramental channels. It had been acknowledged at least since imperial times that ‘the age of miracles’ was over, in the sense that Christian leaders could no longer spread the gospel, like the apostles, with the aid of supernatural power – at any rate as a rule. From the time of the Montanists onwards, the Church had eliminated those who claimed to be able to work miracles and speak with tongues. An alternative theory had been evolved. As Gregory I put it: ‘Now, my brethren, seeing that ye work no such signs, is it that ye believe not?’ and answered: ‘Not so.

• From Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (2015)

  Nonconscious threat processing by the brain activates defensive survival circuits, resulting in changes in information processing in the brain, controlled in part by increases in arousal and behavioral and physiological responses in the body that then produce signals that feed back to the brain and complement the physiological changes there, intensifying them and extending their duration. Collectively, these give rise to a defensive motivational state. When the state itself, or components of it, grab attention and enter working memory, a representation of the experience is created. The representation includes not just the defensive motivational state information (including noticeable responses like rapid heartbeat and behavioral avoidance) but also information about external stimuli (the threat and other stimuli that are present) and memories about the semantic meaning of the stimuli and past episodic experiences with such stimuli. The result is a variant of the conscious feeling of fear or anxiety, depending on whether the initial threat signal is itself a clear and present danger or a warning about a potential future danger. But even if the threat is present, the feeling of fear quickly gives way to anxiety. These conscious feelings do not simply present themselves but have to be assembled via interpretation. Indeed, a leading contemporary theory assumes that conscious emotional feelings are psychological constructions in which schemas stored in memory are matched with present cues (brain arousal, body feedback, memories, etc.) in working memory to give rise to the experience. 82 Scenario 2 . The trigger stimulus does not have to be an external stimulus but can be an internal one, as some people are particularly sensitive to body signals. The slightest twinge in the gut, or muscle spasm, is sufficient to trigger a health concern in those prone to hypochondria. People who suffer from panic attacks are especially attuned to body sensations. These sensations become conditioned triggers that activate (much like an external stimulus) the defensive circuit and have many of the same consequences. The cognitive biases of the person, based on past experiences stored as episodic and semantic memories in the form of schemas, are what cause him or her to worry about illness or the imminence of a panic attack when such symptoms occur and match stored schemas. Note that I am not proposing that conditioned sensations are causes of panic attacks but, instead, that these sensations initiate processes that lead to anxiety, dread, and worry that a panic attack might be coming and may therefore indirectly prime the brain in such a way as to lower the threshold for an attack. (For an excellent overview of a modern learning theory approach to panic disorders, see the paper by Mark Bouton, Susan Mineka, and David Barlow, who each come from a different background in psychology.

• From Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (2015)

  Freezing has the lowest threshold and so is activated first. But then the prey’s changing position in the imminence sequence triggers the activation of a new response and the inhibition of other options. As the sequence unfolds, the particular state of activation and inhibition of each response can rapidly change: Freezing gives way to fleeing or fighting, either of which may, in turn, give way to the other. As in other central motive state theories, the defensive motivational state proposed by Fanselow and Bolles is presumed to dictate the responses that occur. But as I noted in Chapter 2 , I differ on this point. The defensive motivational state, in my view, is a consequence , not a cause, of the responses that result when a survival circuit is activated by a threat: the survival circuits cause brain arousal and the expression of defensive behaviors and supporting physiological changes, which produce signals that feed back to the brain; the defensive motivational state is the result, not the cause, of all this. That said, once a defensive motivational state exists, it may contribute to the selection of additional responses to help cope with the threat. In particular, avoidance and other learned instrumental responses that help cope with potential danger are greatly influenced by the defensive motivational state. Fanselow and Bolles, as discussed in Chapter 2 , did not regard the defensive motivational state as a subjective experience (conscious feeling) of being afraid. 36 They and other central state proponents viewed subjective states as unnecessary (and counterproductive) in understanding how environmental conditions are translated into behavioral outcomes via processes in the nervous system of animals or people. By default, then, they assume that defensive motivational states are nonconscious states. I obviously agree that defensive motivational states are nonsubjective (nonconscious) states elicited by threats. But in contrast to these theorists, I think the subjective experience—the conscious feeling of fear and anxiety—can and must be accounted for if we are to truly understand fear and anxiety. In research on humans, this can be done. In summary, the prey’s present relation to the predator (is there a predator in the area, has it detected you, and how close is it?) and environmental conditions (do they support escape?) are significant aspects in determining what the prey will do defensively. But some other factors are also important. 37 One is the nature of the threat: Not all predators are equally dangerous. Another is the group dynamic: Do others have to be protected (mate, offspring, other members of the group)? If so, fighting may have to trump fleeing and freezing. Still another is whether physical defenses are available (armor, camouflage).

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  government itself being otherwise as capable of kindness, goodness and charity as a more private society.’ The founding of a colony was an individual and collective contract with the deity to set up a Church-State: ‘We whose names are underwritten. . . .’ reads the Mayflower Compact of 1620, ‘having undertaken, for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honour of our king and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of God, and of one another, covenant and combine ourself together in a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation, and furtherance of the ends aforesaid. . . .’ The Church was also formally constituted, as at Salem 1629: ‘We covenant with the Lord and one with another; and do bind ourselves in the presence of God, to walk together in all his ways, according as he is pleased to reveal himself unto us in his blessed word of truth.’ The official religion, set out in the Cambridge Platform of 1648, was based on the English Westminster Confession of 1643–5, and was Independent rather than Presbyterian – that is, councils and synods had advisory and admonitory powers, but no coercive authority. But there was no toleration either: the magistrates or ‘nursing fathers’ were to tackle heresy, schism and disobedience, ‘to be restrained and punished by civil authority’. A man could not be a member of the State without being a member of the Church, exactly as in medieval society, since the beliefs and objects of the two were necessarily identical. As Uriah Oakes, later President of Harvard, put it (1673): ‘According to the design of our fathers and the frame of things laid by them, the interests of righteousness in the commonwealth and holiness in the churches are inseparable. . . . To divide what God hath joined . . . is folly in its exaltation. I look upon this as a little model of the glorious kingdom of Christ on earth. Christ reigns among us in the commonwealth as well as in the church and hath his glorious interest involved and wrapt up in the good of both societies respectively.’ Was New England, then, to expand into a gigantic Geneva? Not exactly. It was not a theocracy. It gave the clergy themselves less actual authority than any other government in the western world at the time. The minister’s power lay in determining Church membership. Moreover, the churches were, right from the start, managed by laymen. The religious establishment was popular, not hieratic. This was the foundation of the distinctive American religious tradition. There was never any sense of division in law between layman and cleric, between those with spiritual privileges and those without – no jealous juxtaposition and confrontation of a secular and ecclesiastical world. America was born Protestant, and did not have to become so through revolt and struggle.