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.

Page 181 of 529 · 20 per page

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  and indeed total religious conformity, was necessary, efficacious, and wholly justified. He admitted he had changed his mind on this point. He wrote to a Donatist friend that he had seen his own town, originally Donatist, ‘brought over to the Catholic unity by fear of the imperial edicts’. That had convinced him. In fact heretics in their hearts welcomed persecution: they would say ‘fear made us become earnest to examine the truth. . . the stimulus of fear startled us from our negligence’. And then, this was Christ’s own way. Had not he, ‘by great violence’, ‘coerced’ Paul into Christianity? Was not this the meaning of the text from Luke, 14:23: ‘Compel them to come in’? It was Augustine who first drew attention to this, and a number of other convenient texts, to be paraded through the centuries by the Christian apologists of force. He also had the inquisitorial emphasis: ‘The necessity for harshness is greater in the investigation, than in the infliction, of punishment’; and again: ‘. . . it is generally necessary to use more rigour in making inquisition, so that when the crime has been brought to light, there may be scope for displaying clemency.’ For the first time, too, he used the analogy with the State, indeed appealed to the orthodoxy of the State, in necessary and perpetual alliance with the Church in the extirpation of dissidents. The Church unearthed, the State castigated. The key word was disciplina – very frequent in his writings. If discipline were removed, there would be chaos: ‘Take away the barriers created by the laws, and men’s brazen capacity to do harm, their urge to self- indulgence, would rage to the full. No king in his kingdom, no general with his troops, no husband with his wife, no father with his son, could attempt to put a stop, by any threats or punishments, to the freedom and the sheer, sweet taste of sinning.’ Here, first articulated, is the appeal of the persecuting Church to all the authoritarian elements in society, indeed in human nature. Nor did Augustine operate solely at the intellectual level. He was a leading bishop, working actively with the State in the enforcement of imperial uniformity. We have a vignette of him at Carthage in 399, when imperial agents arrived to close down pagan shrines, preaching to excited mobs: ‘Down with the Roman gods!’ Perhaps more sinister is Augustine’s contact with authoritarian elements in Spain, already a centre of Christian rigorism and orthodox violence. There, in 385, the Bishop of Avila, Priscillian, a notable ascetic and preacher, had been accused of gnosticism, Manicheism and moral depravity, had been indicted under the imperial law of witchcraft, tried at Bordeaux, and brought to the imperial court at Trier. There, under torture, he and his companions confessed they had studied obscene doctrines, held meetings with

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  the Moslems the inhabited earth? They have made Asia, which is a third of the world, their homeland. . . . They have also forcibly held Africa, the second portion of the world, for over 200 years. There remains Europe, the third continent. How small a portion of it is inhabited by us Christians.’ Of course, he added, ‘in one sense the whole world is exile for the Christian’ but in another ‘the whole world is his country’. In any case, he concluded, ‘in this land’ – meaning Christian Europe – ‘you can scarcely feed the inhabitants. That is why you use up its goods and excite endless wars among yourselves.’ The crusades were thus to some extent a weird halfway house between the tribal movements of the fourth and fifth centuries and the mass trans-atlantic migration of the poor in the nineteenth. According to Anna Comnena, the Byzantine court was alarmed to hear that ‘all the West and all the barbarian tribes from beyond the Adriatic as far as the Pillars of Hercules were moving in a body through Europe towards Asia, bringing whole families with them.’ This was not true. But the numbers were large, particularly in the first two generations of the crusading movement. Peter the Hermit led a mob of 20,000 men, women and children, including, one presumes, many families carrying all their worldly goods with them. Most of these people were very poor; they had been unable to obtain land on any lease, or agricultural work during an acute and prolonged labour surplus; they intended to settle. So, of course, did the most determined of the knights. Most of them had no money or lands. Godfrey de Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine, who emerged as the leader of the First Crusade, claimed descent from Charlemagne, but he held his duchy as an office not a fief, and may have been in danger of dismissal: hence his crusade. Apart from Raymond of Toulouse, all the crusaders who settled in the Holy Land were poor men; the rich, like Stephen of Blois, or the Counts of Flanders and Boulogne, returned to Europe as quickly as they honourably could. From the start, then, the crusades were marked by depredations and violence which were as much racial as religious in origin. Mass-gatherings of Christians for any purpose invariably constituted a danger to Jewish communities in European cities. Local rulers nearly always tried to protect them, for their own selfish financial reasons; but they were powerless to control the vast crusading bands. To Christian crusaders, in particular, the Jews were hateful: they were believed to have helped the Roman pagans to persecute the early Christians, and they had assisted the Islamic conquests. 3 Men like Godfrey de Bouillon terrorized Jewish communities into

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  undefiled and uncompromised. And a bishop, who ordained priests, had to be above all possible reproach. Unless he were, his baptisms and ordinations were wholly ineffective, indeed, positively evil, for an ecclesiastical organization composed of such men constituted an anti-church, directed by the devil, and casting a hideous shadow over the true Church of the faithful. We have here, in short, a recapitulation of the struggles of the Essenes against the false priests of the defiled Temple. This was the background to the so-called Donatist heresy. Most Carthaginians believed that Church orders were subjective, that is, invalidated by personal unworthiness. A few thought them objective, that is, universally and always efficacious provided the ordination were valid and this view was increasingly held by orthodox elements outside North Africa. The conflict was bound to produce a disputed episcopal succession sooner or later; and in 311 it did. Some eighty Numidian bishops declared invalid the ordination of Caecilian, Bishop of Carthage, on the grounds that the ceremony had been conducted by a traditor bishop who had handed over holy books to be burned by the official persecutors. They elected another bishop in Caecilian’s place and in due course the succession went to Donatus. But, as Caecilian pointed out, many of the eighty bishops had themselves been traditores. He refused to resign. Both sides appealed to Constantine, now the protector of the Church. After much inquiry and hesitation, the emperor opted for Caecilian. That, for the Donatists, completed the persecution syndrome. They now regarded the alliance with the Constantinian state with horror. One of their slogans was: ‘The servants of God are those who are hated by the world.’ They asked: ‘What has the Emperor to do with the church?’ Efforts by Caecilian and his supporters to occupy their benefices were resisted by organized force, usually successfully. Donatists were able to play not merely on the rigorist religious sentiment of their congregations but on local Punic nationalism and anti-Roman, anti-imperial sentiment. We have a little vignette of Donatus, no doubt malicious, from Optatus, Bishop of Milevis: ‘When people visited him from any part of Africa, he did not ask the usual questions about the weather, peace and war, and the harvest, but always: “How goes my party in your part of the world?”’ Thus religious politics were superimposed on the politics of geography, race and economics. Constantine kept the Caecilian or imperialist Church party in being but he did not attempt, or perhaps was not able, to do much more. Orthodox Catholicism was confined to wealthy landowners and to the Romanized urban

• From The Decameron (1353)

  When Andreuccio saw that he had nearly reached the top of the well, he let go the rope and threw himself on to the rim, clinging to it with both hands. On seeing this apparition, the officers were filled with sudden panic, and without a word they dropped the rope and began to run as fast as their legs would carry them. Andreuccio stared at them in blank amazement, and if he hadn’t held on tightly, he would have fallen to the bottom, perhaps being killed or doing himself serious injury. However, he clambered out, and when he saw these weapons, he grew even more perplexed, for he knew they had not been left there by his companions. Bewailing his misfortune, and fearing lest anything worse should befall him, he decided to leave all these things where they were and clear off. So away he went without having the slightest idea where he was going. As he was walking along, he came across his two companions, who were on their way back to the well to haul him out. They could hardly believe their eyes when they saw him coming, and they asked him who had helped him out. Andreuccio said he didn’t know and gave them a detailed account of how it had happened, describing what he had found lying beside the well. Putting two and two together, they had a good laugh and told him why they had run away, and explained who it was that had hauled him out of the well. And without wasting any more words, the night already being half spent, they made their way to the cathedral, which they entered without any difficulty. On reaching the tomb, which was very big and made of marble, they got out their tools and lifted the enormously heavy lid, propping it up so that there was just enough room for a man to squeeze his way inside. When this operation was complete, one of them said: ‘Who’s going in?’ ‘I’m not,’ said the other. ‘And I’m not, either,’ said the first. ‘How about Andreuccio?’ ‘I won’t do it,’ said Andreuccio, whereupon both the others rounded on him saying: ‘What do you mean, you won’t do it? If you don’t damned well get in there quickly, we’ll give you such a hammering over the pate with these iron bars that we’ll kill you stone dead.’

• From The Decameron (1353)

  SEVENTH STORY Madonna Filippa is discovered by her husband with a lover and called before the magistrate, but by a prompt and ingenious answer she secures her acquittal and causes the statute to be amended. Fiammetta had finished speaking, and everyone was still laughing over the novel argument used by Scalza to ennoble the Baronci above all other families, when the queen called upon Filostrato to tell them a story; and so he began: Worthy ladies, a capacity for saying the right things in the right place is all very well, but to be able to say them in a moment of dire necessity is, in my opinion, a truly rare accomplishment. With this ability, a certain noblewoman of whom I propose to speak was so liberally endowed, that not only did she provide laughter and merriment to her listeners, but, as you shall presently hear, she disentangled herself from the meshes of an ignominious death. In the city of Prato, there used to be a statute, no less reprehensible, to be sure, than it was severe, which without exception required that every woman taken in adultery by her husband should be burned alive, whether she was with a lover or simply doing it for money. While this statute was in force, a case arose in which a certain noble lady, beautiful and exceedingly passionate by nature, whose name was Madonna Filippa, was discovered one night in her own bedchamber by her husband, Rinaldo de’ Pugliesi, 1 in the arms of Lazzarino de’ Guazzagliotri, a handsome young noble of that city, with whom she was very deeply in love, and who loved her in return. Rinaldo, seeing them together, was greatly dismayed, and could scarcely prevent himself from rushing upon them and killing them; and but for the fact that he feared the consequences to himself, he would have followed the promptings of his anger, and done them to death. Having been restrained by his caution from taking precipitate action, he could not however be restrained from desiring the death of his wife, and since it would have been unlawful for him to kill her with his own hands, he was determined to invoke the city statute. And so, having more than sufficient evidence to prove her guilt, he denounced her on the very next morning without inquiring any further into the matter, and took out a summons. Now, a woman who is genuinely in love is apt to be quite fearless, and Rinaldo’s wife was no exception. And although many of her friends and relatives advised her against such a course, she firmly resolved to answer the summons, confess the truth, and die a courageous death, rather than run away like a coward, thus being forced to live in exile for defying the court, and proving herself unworthy of a lover such as the man in whose arms she had lain the night before.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The tales of adventure are frequently spiced with humour, sometimes in the manner of the telling, at other times in the narrative itself. In the account of Landolfo Rufolo’s ordeal in the sea, he is described as ‘having nothing to eat and far more to drink than he would have wished’, and by the following day he ‘had almost turned into a sponge’. The story of Andreuccio (II, 5), set in Naples, includes two splendid comic vignettes of minor characters, to which attention was drawn by Benedetto Croce, himself a Neapolitan, in a well-known essay.77 The first occurs when the hapless Andreuccio, having fallen from an upper storey of the courtesan’s house in the middle of the night into an open sewer, repeatedly hammers on her door to be re-admitted. Various neighbours, awakened by the noise, fling open their windows and advise him to go away, whereupon the woman’s bully sticks out his head and asks who is there ‘in a low, fierce, spine-chilling growl’. Andreuccio looks up and catches sight of a face which … clearly belonged to some mighty man or other, who had a thick black beard and was yawning and rubbing his eyes as though he had just been roused from a deep sleep.78 Andreuccio’s attempt to explain his presence there is cut short by the fearsome-looking newcomer, who showers him with abuse: ‘I don’t know what restrains me from coming down there and giving you the biggest pasting you’ve ever had in your life, you miserable drunken idiot, making all this racket in the middle of the night and keeping everyone awake.’79 Later in the same story, when Andreuccio finds himself imprisoned in a deep tomb with the corpse of a recently dead archbishop, a gang of grave robbers opens the tomb and props up its massive lid. An argument ensues over who should enter the tomb to steal the archbishop’s ruby ring, then a priest steps forward, saying ‘What are you afraid of? Do you think he is going to devour you? Dead men don’t eat the living. I will go in myself.’80 Fortune traditionally favours the brave, but not in this instance. When the priest lays the upper part of his body on the edge of the tomb and swivels round, ready to descend, Andreuccio stands up and grabs one of his legs, giving the priest the impression that he is about to be dragged inside by the corpse. The priest … no sooner felt this happening than he let out an ear-splitting yell and hurled himself bodily out of the tomb. The rest of the gang were terrified by this turn of events, and, leaving the tomb open, they all started running away as though they were being pursued by ten thousand devils.81

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘On seeing this, the four men, who to judge from their appearance seemed to hold positions of authority, rode swiftly up and asked me a lot of questions, to which I gave as many answers. But it was impossible to make ourselves understood. After talking together for some little while, they took me up on one of their horses and conducted me to a convent of nuns who practised these men’s religion. I do not know what it was that they said to the nuns, but at any rate I was kindly received by everybody, and I was always treated with great respect. Whilst there, I joined them in the reverent worship of Saint Stiffen-in-the-Hollows, to whom the women of that country are deeply devoted. But after staying with them for some time, and acquiring a discreet knowledge of their language, I was asked who I was and where I had come from. Knowing where I was, I feared to tell them the truth lest they should expel me as an enemy of their religion, and so I replied that I was the daughter of a fine nobleman of Cyprus, who was sending me to be married in Crete when we were driven by a storm on to those shores and shipwrecked. ‘For fear of meeting a worse fate, I imitated their customs regularly, in various ways. Eventually, I was asked by the oldest of these women, whom the others refer to as the Abbess, whether I wished to return to Cyprus, and I replied that there was nothing I desired more. However, being concerned for my honour, she was unwilling to entrust me to anyone coming to Cyprus until about two months ago, when certain French gentlemen, some of them related to the Abbess, arrived there with their wives. And when she heard that they were going to Jerusalem to visit the Sepulchre, where the man they look upon as God was buried after being killed by the Jews, she placed me under their care and asked them to hand me over to my father on reaching Cyprus. ‘It would take too long to describe how greatly I was honoured and how warmly I was welcomed by these noblemen and their wives. Suffice it to say that we all took ship, and that several days later we reached Paphos, where I found myself facing a dilemma, because there was nobody there who knew me and I had no idea what to say to these gentlemen, who were anxious to carry out the venerable lady’s instructions and hand me over to my father.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Meanwhile, in the clear light of morning, the honest man happened to be passing through the Rialto district3 when he heard people talking about how the Angel Gabriel, having gone to spend the night with Monna Lisetta, had been discovered there by her in-laws, whereupon he had hurled himself into the canal in a fit of terror, thereafter vanishing without trace. The man immediately realized that the person in question was none other than the one he was sheltering under his roof, and having returned to the house, he persuaded the Friar, after turning a deaf ear to a string of tall stories, to admit that this was indeed the case. The man then insisted on being paid fifty ducats in exchange for keeping the Friar’s where-abouts secret from the lady’s in-laws, and the two of them devised a way for the payment to be made. Once the money had been handed over, Friar Alberto was anxious to get away from the place, and the honest man said to him: ‘There is only one way of doing it, but it won’t work unless you are willing to cooperate. Today we are holding a carnival, to which everyone has to bring a partner wearing some form of disguise, so that one man will be dressed up as a bear, another as a savage, and so on and so forth. To round off the festivities, there is to be a sort of fancy-dress hunt, or caccia, in Saint Mark’s Square, after which all the people disperse, going off wherever they choose and taking their partners with them. Now if, instead of lying low here until someone gets wind of your whereabouts, you were to let me take you along in one of these disguises, after the ceremony I could leave you off wherever you wished. Apart from this, I can think of no other way for you to escape from here without being recognized, because the lady’s in-laws have realized that you must have gone to ground somewhere in this part of the city, and their men are keeping watch over the whole neighbourhood, ready to seize hold of you the moment you appear.’ Although he baulked at the notion of going about the streets in a disguise of this sort, Friar Alberto was so terrified of the lady’s in-laws that he allowed himself to be persuaded, and he told the fellow where he wanted to be taken, leaving him to work out the actual details.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The two gallants immediately rushed to her assistance, and with the aid of honeyed words and extravagant promises, few of which she understood, they attempted to pacify her. What she was bemoaning was not so much the loss of Marato as her own sorry plight, and so after she had listened to a stream of fine talk, repeated twice over, she seemed considerably less distraught. The two brothers then got down to a private discussion to decide which of them was to take her off to bed. Each man claimed priority over the other, and having failed to reach any agreement on the matter they began to argue fiercely between themselves. Nor did their quarrel stop with the exchange of verbal abuse. Losing their tempers, they reached for their knives and hurled themselves furiously upon one another, and before the ship’s crew could separate the pair, they had both inflicted a number of stab-wounds, from which one man died instantly whilst the other emerged with serious injuries to various parts of his body. The lady was sorely distressed by all this, for she could see that she was now alone on the ship with nobody to turn to for help or advice, and she was greatly afraid lest the relatives and companions of the two men should vent their rage upon her. However, partly because of the injured man’s pleas on her behalf, partly because they soon arrived at Corinth, the danger to her person was short-lived. On their arrival, she disembarked with the injured man, and went to live with him at an inn, whence the story of her great beauty spread rapidly through the city, eventually reaching the ears of the Prince of Morea,8 who was living in Corinth at that time. He therefore demanded to see her, and on discovering her to be more beautiful than she had been reported, he immediately fell so ardently in love with her that he could think of nothing else. When he learnt about the circumstances of her arrival in the city, he saw no reason why he should not be able to have her. And indeed, once the wounded man’s relatives discovered that the Prince was putting out inquiries, they promptly sent her off to him without asking any questions. The Prince was highly delighted, but so also was the lady, who considered that she had now escaped from a most dangerous situation. On finding that she was endowed with stately manners as well as beauty, the Prince calculated, since he could obtain no other clue to her identity, that she must be a woman of gentle birth, and his love for her was accordingly redoubled. And not only did he keep her in splendid style, but he treated her as though she were his wife rather than his mistress.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  And so saying, they seized him and dragged him away; then they took him by the hair, tore every stitch of clothing from his back, and started to punch and to kick him. In fact, everybody within sight was bearing down upon him, or so it seemed to Martellino. ‘Mercy, for the love of God!’ he cried, defending himself as best he could. But it was of no use, for more and more people were piling on top of him every minute. When Marchese and Stecchi saw what was happening, they began to have serious misgivings. Fearing for their own safety, they dared not go to Martellino’s assistance, but on the contrary they yelled ‘Kill him!’ as loudly as anybody else, at the same time trying to devise some way of rescuing him from the hands of the mob. And he would certainly have been killed but for a quick piece of thinking on the part of Marchese, who made his way as swiftly as possible to the captain in charge of the watch, drawn up in strength outside the church, and said to him: ‘For God’s sake, come quickly! There’s a villain over here who has cut my purse, and robbed me of a hundred gold florins at the very least. Arrest him! Please don’t let him run off with my money!’ On hearing this, a dozen or more of the officers rushed over to the place where poor Martellino was having his brains beaten out, and after forcing their way through the crowd with enormous difficulty, they removed him all bruised and battered from their clutches, and hauled him off to the magistrate’s palace. A number of people followed him all the way, still angry with him for hoodwinking them, and when they heard he had been arrested as a cutpurse, they too began to claim that he had stolen their purses, thinking this as fair a way as any of making life unpleasant for him. The magistrate, who was of a harsh disposition, no sooner heard these accusations than he took him aside and began to interrogate him on the matter. But Martellino gave him facetious answers, as though quite unconcerned at his arrest. This upset the judge, who had him fastened to the strappado, and ordered him to be given a series of good hard blows, with the intention of extracting a confession from him before having him hanged. When they let him down, and the judge asked him whether the accusations brought against him were true, he replied, since a straight denial would have been useless: ‘Sir, I am ready to confess the truth. But make each of my accusers say when and where I cut his purse, and I will tell you whether or not I did it.’

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  men, heiresses and widows had already become orthodox Catholics by the mid- fourth century; in addition there were many large-scale local landowners identified with the Caecilian party and, of course, with imperial authority. Judaic Zealotry had always shown a tendency to attack the rich in the name of religion. Had not the hated Sadducees also aligned themselves with the Roman State, thus defiling the true faith and assisting the grasping oppressor? Josephus accused the Zealots of the 66–70 war of ‘thirsting after the blood of valiant men and men of good families’. The conjunction of religious and economic forces in the case of the circumcellions was fundamentally the same; it was yet one more episode in a continuing phenomenon – one which was later to include, for instance, the fourteenth-century peasants’ revolt in England. Donatism was a movement of poor men led by puritan clergy. Their shock-troops, the circumcellions, were millenarians who saw the idea of a revived eschatology as an occasion for settling scores on earth first. They called themselves the ‘Captains of the Saints’. Their phases of violent activity usually coincided with periods of economic depression. They protected peasants in debt by terrorizing creditors and landlords. They also extended their umbrella to slaves, who thus became a powerful element in the Donatist Church. In an empire where the carrying of lethal weapons was, strictly speaking, illegal except for privileged categories of people, the circumcellions wielded the huge staves they used for knocking the olive-harvest off the trees. Outside the cities their threats usually sufficed. If not, they burnt crops and houses and seized and destroyed the documents attached to slaves. To Augustine, the hammer of the Donatists, the ideologue of the Christian empire, they were agents of anarchy and social horror, ‘crazy herds of abandoned men’. He noted that they feasted their martyrs with drunken rioting, which he attributed to the survival of pagan traditions. No doubt there were pagan survivals in the country areas and the hills; but so there were in the towns also. And Catholics, as well as Donatists, liked these riotous saints’ days. Augustine’s real fear sprang from his hatred of religious dissent in alliance with social revolution. ‘What master was there’, he asked. ‘who was not compelled to live in dread of his own slave, if the slave had put himself under the protection of the Donatists?’ And he was able, no doubt with exaggeration but also with some justice, to show the Donatists creating private empires in defiance of law. There was the case of the Bishop of Timgad, who left behind him one of the largest cathedrals ever built in Africa. Augustine says he travelled around ‘with intolerable power, accompanied

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

  He’s right to be upset with me – I did lie, and I was caught in my lie – but still, the violation of my privacy and the intensity of his reaction gives me the creeps. At home, I lock the door behind me, shower and change for my lunch date with Lanie, an old friend. The phone rings over and over again, so I mute it. Then the texts start pouring in: “I’m sorry”, “Please pick up the phone”, “I just want to talk to you for a minute”, “I understand what you’re saying”, “I want to suggest something to you”, “You’ve been so good to me, you didn’t deserve the way I spoke to you”, “Just give me five minutes, I talked to a friend and have calmed down”. I call him back as I walk to the café where I am to meet Lanie. “Thank you for calling me,” he says in a tight voice. “Please give me another chance.” “No,” I say. “Anything else?” “I have a proposition. I understand that you don’t want to be in a relationship with me, but you have to admit we have amazing sexual chemistry. We don’t have to date to have sex, we can continue to meet up during the day as we’ve been doing, no strings attached,” he says. I can’t help myself: I laugh, loudly. “You’re serious?” I ask. “Why not? The sex is great for both of us. Why give that up?” “Oh wow, I’m not even going to respond aside from an emphatic no. I don’t want to see you again and I’m asking you to stop calling and texting. I have to go now,” I say as I open the door to the café and spot Lanie seated at a table. I bend over to give her a quick hug and then slide into the booth. “Tell me everything,” she says, her eyes lighting up. “I cannot imagine what it would be like to start dating again at this point in my life. It seems like yesterday you were visiting me in Brooklyn with sweet Daisy strapped into a BabyBjörn. And now you’re single and dating, like your life is going in reverse.” “It feels that way to me too, like I’m sowing the wild oats I should have sown in my 20s,” I say, and then tell her about my one-night stand with #1, my debacle with #2, my summer flings with #3 and #4, the disaster that #5 has turned out to be, the promising potential of #6. “Oh wow, you’ve been busy!” she says. ‘I’m impressed with how bold you’ve been and that you keep forging ahead even when you have experiences that aren’t positive.” “I’m surprised too that I haven’t been deterred by the more unpleasant experiences.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  the outward form of a man’. Christians who were Roman citizens were beheaded. Others were forced through a gauntlet of whips into the amphitheatre and then, before an audience composed largely of unromanized tribesmen, given to the beasts. Severed heads and limbs of Christians were displayed, guarded for six days, then burned, the ashes being thrown into the Rhone. But there were regular interrogations and trials before the Prefect, Rusticus. Some Christians ‘were manifestly unready, untrained and still weak, unable to bear the strain . . . ten proved apostates’. This does not sound like an uncontrolled pogrom. One lady, Blandina, was the worst treated of all, ‘tortured from dawn till evening, till her torturers were exhausted and . . . marvelled that the breath was still in her body’. She was then scourged, roasted in the ‘frying pan’, and finally put in a basket to be tossed to death by wild bulls. Of course she was a mystic and a prophetess, probably a Montanist. If one reason why the Church branded such people as heretics was its fear of attracting persecution, then equally the State tended to strengthen the orthodox elements in the Church by concentrating its savagery on the antinomian elements among Christians. By the middle of the third century, however, a much more critical period had opened. Christians were now far more numerous, better organized, and more homogenous in their views and practices. Once it had been possible to dismiss them for their lower-class credulity. The pagan propagandist Celsus, writing his True Word c. 180, claimed: ‘Some do not even want to give or receive a reason for what they believe, and simply say “Do not ask questions: just believe”, and “Thy faith will save thee”. They say: “The wisdom of the world is evil” and “Foolishness is a good thing”.’ Celsus illustrates a Christian line of argument: ‘Let no one wise, no one sensible, no one educated draw near. For we think these things are evils. But as for anyone ignorant, educated or stupid – anyone like a child – let him draw near.’ This was of course a caricature of genuine Christian attitudes which could be traced back to Jesus. But as a portrait of the Church as a whole, it was ceasing to be true even when Celsus wrote. The class and education barriers came down and Christianity penetrated deep into circles which shaped secular policy and imperial culture. The age of Origen, of a Christianity which had achieved intellectual maturity in terms of the ancient world, made a direct and final confrontation with the State inevitable. It was now a universalist alternative to the civil religion and a far more dynamic (and better organized) one; it had either to be exterminated or accepted. The Decian persecution, around 250, marked the attempt to apply the first policy,

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The lady had no idea where she was, but she quickly gathered from their mode of living that the people she was staying with were Christians, and she could see little purpose, even if she had known her whereabouts, in revealing her identity. From the way Pericone was behaving, she knew that sooner or later, whether she liked it or not, she would be compelled to let him have his way with her, but meanwhile she was proudly resolved to turn a blind eye to her sorrowful predicament. To the three surviving members of her female retinue, she gave instructions that they should never disclose their identity to anyone until such time as they were in a position that offered them a clear prospect of freedom. Furthermore, she implored them to preserve their chastity, declaring her own determination to submit to no man’s pleasure except her husband’s – a sentiment that was greeted with approval by the three women, who said they would do their utmost to follow her instructions. As the days passed, and Pericone came into closer proximity with the object of his desires, his advances were more firmly rejected, and the flames of his passion raged correspondingly fiercer. Realizing that his flattery was getting him nowhere, he decided to fall back on ingenuity and subterfuge, holding brute strength in reserve as a last resort. He had noticed more than once that the lady liked the taste of wine, which, since it is prohibited by her religion, she was unaccustomed to drinking, and by using this in the service of Venus, he thought it possible that she would yield to him. And so one evening, having feigned indifference concerning the matter for which she had paraded so much distaste, he held a splendid banquet with all the trappings of a great festive occasion, at which the lady was present. The meal was notable for its abundance of good food, and Pericone arranged with the steward who was serving the lady to keep her well supplied with a succession of different wines. The steward carried out his instructions to the letter, and the lady, being caught off her guard and carried away by the agreeable taste of the wines, drank more than was consistent with her decorum. Forgetting all the misfortunes she had experienced, she became positively merry, and when she saw some women dancing in the Majorcan manner, she herself danced Alexandrian fashion.5

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘Sweet my soul, do not upset yourself so. What I was unable to achieve by mere wooing, Love has taught me to obtain by deception. I am your Ricciardo.’ No sooner did Catella hear these words and recognize his voice than she tried to leap out of bed, only to find that she was unable to move. She then prepared to scream, but Ricciardo placed a hand over her mouth, saying: ‘My lady, it is impossible now to undo what has happened, even if you were to scream for the rest of your life. Besides, if you scream, or if you ever make this known to anyone, two things will ensue. The first (which ought to cause you no small concern) is that your honour and good name will be laid in ruins, because no matter how much you insist that I tricked you into coming here, I shall say that you are lying. Indeed, I shall maintain that I induced you to come by promising you money and presents, and that the reason you are making such a song and dance about it is simply that you were annoyed because your gains fell short of your expectations. I need hardly remind you that people are more inclined to believe in bad intentions than in good ones, and hence my account will carry no less conviction than yours. In the second place, your husband and I will become mortal enemies, and it could just as easily happen that he is killed by me as I by him, in which case you would inevitably spend the rest of your days in grief and mourning. ‘Light of my life, do not at one and the same time bring dishonour upon yourself and jeopardize the lives of your husband and me by setting us at each other’s throats. You are not the first woman to have been deceived, nor will you be the last, and in any case I had no intention of depriving you of anything. I was impelled to do it by excess of love, and indeed I am prepared to love you and serve you in all humility for the rest of my days. For a long time past, I and everything I possess have been yours, and all my power and influence have been at your disposal; but henceforth I intend to place them more completely than ever at your command. You are a wise woman, and I am certain that you will act now with that same good sense that you are wont to display in other matters.’ Catella wept bitterly while Ricciardo was speaking, and though she was exceedingly annoyed and upset, she was none the less able to see that he was right, and realized that events could easily follow the course he predicted.

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

  I mapped out two hours on local roads and saw we could stop at a motel for the night at that point. The skies and roads had cleared and we set off. Within an hour, both kids were sound asleep and thus could not hear the stream of curses emerge from my mouth as a sudden blizzard blew snow in every direction. The roads were pitch-black and curvy, snow coming down in white twisting sheets. I drove 25mph, leaning forward in my seat as far as I could. Georgia woke up and started asking a litany of questions: where are we, is this safe, can we stop for the night, are there any snacks in here? “Georgia!” I yelled. “Stop talking. I have to focus.” I saw a sign indicating that in ten miles there was a gas station and a motel. Hallelujah, I thought, and crept along the road, counting down every mile. When we at last pulled off the highway, the gas station was closed and the only difference I could see between this motel and the one in Psycho was that this one was called Lee’s. There was no sign of life, just a few dim lightbulbs over weathered doors and broken screens. “Mommy, do you want to stay here?” Georgia asked with trepidation. “No, we can’t stay here. It’s creepy and it looks deserted anyway.” Back on the road, slipping along in a blaze of white, it was now 1am and my eyes were fluttering. I was exhausted, terrified, and saw no end to this journey from hell. Every twenty minutes my mother would call, demanding an update on our whereabouts, and I would calm her down only to panic myself. On and on we went this way as I searched my GPS for the nearest motel and reassured Georgia with a false cheerfulness that we would be at a warm, clean motel very soon. When we pulled off the highway thirty minutes later into the motel parking lot, I laughed bitterly when I saw that it was not just closed but actually boarded up. I put my head down on the steering wheel and started pounding it with my fists. “Mommy, do you wish now that we had stayed at Lee’s Motel?” Georgia asked so sincerely that I started laughing, possibly a tad maniacally. “No, I don’t wish that. Well, maybe just a little I wish that. I’m going to find a place to turn around and we’ll continue our search or else we’ll nap in the car.” Up ahead I saw lights, and my heart swelled.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Moreover, he was so deformed of body and his features were so hideously distorted that any stranger, on seeing him for the first time, would have been terrified out of his wits. He had been buried in a tomb outside the church of the Franciscans, and the lady, seeing this as a good opportunity to further her intentions, summoned one of her maidservants and said: ‘As you know, not a day passes without my being plagued and tormented from morning till night with the attentions of those two Florentines, Rinuccio and Alessandro. I have no intention of conceding my love to either of the two, and in order to be rid of them, I have made up my mind, since they are always so free with their promises, to test their sincerity by setting them both a task which I am certain they will fail to accomplish, and thus I shall put an end to their pestering. ‘Now this is how I shall go about it. As you know, this morning at the convent of the Franciscans, the burial took place of Scannadio 4 (such was the name of the villain in question), the sight of whom was sufficient, when he was still alive, let alone now that he is dead, to frighten the bravest men in the land. So I want you first of all to go secretly to Alessandro, and say to him: “Madonna Francesca sends me to tell you that the time has come when you may have the love for which you have been craving, and that if you so desire you can go to her in the manner I shall now explain. For reasons you will be told about later, a kinsman of hers is obliged to convey to her house, tonight, the body of Scannadio, who was buried this morning. And since she is utterly repelled by the thought of harbouring this man’s corpse under her own roof, she implores you to do her a great favour, namely that when darkness has fallen, you should enter Scannadio’s tomb, put on his clothes, and lie there impersonating him till her kinsman comes to fetch you. Without saying a word or uttering any sound, you are to allow yourself to be taken from the tomb and brought to her house. She will be waiting there to receive you, and you will be able to stay with her for as long as you like, leaving everything else to her” If he agrees to do this, all well and good; but if he refuses, you are to tell him from me that I never want to set eyes on him again, and that if he values his life he will take good care not to send me any more of his messages or entreaties.

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

  Once a rat has learned the avoidance response, the presence of the CS, by virtue of its relation to the US, then becomes an incentive, a stimulus that motivates behavior: the CS not only tells the brain when to perform the learned avoidance response, it also regulates the vigor of the avoidance behavior. Some have argued that conditioned avoidance responses may look like they are instrumentally learned but are really just species-specific defenses. 57 However, our findings, described in the next chapter, show that the neural circuits that underlie innate reactions like freezing and learned actions like avoidance are distinct, making these unique kinds of behavior and not simply variants of species-specific defense responses. Many of the criteria for evaluating instrumental responses come from appetitive conditioning studies with food or addictive drug reinforcers, and, for technical reasons, it has been difficult to conduct studies of this type in research using aversive stimuli (especially shocks) as reinforcers. I am less concerned with whether avoidance responses are in some abstract sense strictly instrumental than with whether these are an interesting category of responses that deserve to be investigated. I have little doubt that this is the case. Studies described below are consistent with this view, and my laboratory is now vigorously pursuing these issues. Figure 3.10: Active Avoidance. Active avoidance conditioning involves a tone conditioned stimulus (CS) and a shock unconditioned stimulus (US). At first the subject freezes to the CS. Over time, though, it learns that if it crosses to the other side of the chamber when the tone appears, then the shock US can be escaped from or even avoided altogether. Responses such as these that are learned by their consequences are thought to be goal-directed or instrumental responses. In contrast to the reactions elicited by a Pavlovian CS, instrumental responses are actions that are emitted in the presence of the CS. The outcome achieved in successful avoidance conditioning likely depends on the fact that the response both prevents the shock US from occurring and also terminates and/or prevents exposure to the threatening CS. That CS termination can, on its own, produce the learning of a new response has been shown through studies using a task called escape from threat 58 (often less appropriately called escape from fear 59 ). In this procedure, rats undergo Pavlovian conditioning in one chamber, and then some time later are placed in a new chamber where the CS is presented. The rats freeze, but if they make any movement, the CS is terminated. Over time they learn to shuttle or perform other responses that turn the CS off. The only reinforcement in this scenario is escape from the CS—there is no shock involved in the learning of the new response. 60 Essentially, this separates the Pavlovian and instrumental components of avoidance learning into two separate procedures and allows the reinforcing effects of the CS to be assessed independently of reinforcement by the shock US.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  offence of the Montanists, was strongly disapproved of by the State. It caused sudden and unpredictable crowd movements, panic and disruption of the economy. We hear of early bishops in the Balkans leading their flocks out of the towns, or away from the fields, in response to spirit instructions. Rome could be severe with such people. Marcus Aurelius, a reasonable man, justified persecuting Christians by arguing that it was dangerous to upset ‘the unstable mind of man by superstitious fear of the divine’. And then he disliked the ‘sheer spirit of opposition’ of Christians. The more obdurate were, of course, members of Christian revivalist groups, ‘speaking with tongues’. The great majority of the early martyrs were Christians of a type which the Church would later classify as heretic. The first stories of martyrs reflect not only Jewish martyrologies, as one might expect, but a form of literature echoing the defiant opposition of Greek rebels against Roman domination. The so-called ‘Acts of the Pagan Martyrs’, which survive in Egyptian papyrus fragments, glorify men able to defeat their Roman persecutors in intellectual dialogue – philosopher heroes smashing tyranny with words, even though they subsequently lost their heads. These became models for Christian nonconformists, openly challenging the might of the State. The Church took an increasingly severe view of provocative would-be martyrs. Ignatius, martyred at Rome around 117, begged his influential friends not to intervene and deprive him of suffering in the Lord; this attitude would have been regarded as heretical later in the century, when the saintly Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, set the pattern by doing nothing to provoke the authorities. The Church would not compromise on the matter of emperor-worship or the divinity of Christ, but otherwise it did not look for trouble. There was no systematic persecution of Christians before the second half of the second century. The worst episodes were isolated incidents, as in the Rhone Valley in 177. Eusebius, who quotes from a contemporary letter, does not explain what set in motion this savage affair. The occasion was the annual summer gathering in the region for the payment of tribal taxes. Eusebius says that rumours were put about that Christians had been engaging in cannibal feasts and incest, the old tales; under pressure some of their household servants gave testimony to that effect. What followed was like a state-supervised riot. The letter speaks of ‘the mighty rage of the heathen’, ‘the whole mass of the people’, ‘an infuriated mob’. Many Christians were tortured, in the stocks or in cells. Sanctus, a deacon from Vienne, had red-hot plates applied to his testicles – ‘his poor body was one whole wound and bruise, having lost

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  influential people to speak on its behalf when the authorities tried to act. Thus, on at least two occasions, members were hauled before the religious courts but reprieved, or at most escaped with a scourging; they were unruly yet still Jews. But of course this protection and forbearance was bought at a price. It imposed limits both on doctrinal divergence and on missionary activism among the ordinary Jewish people. Thus the whole movement was in danger of being first contained, then reabsorbed. It is at this point that the idea of a gentile mission became crucial. It had always been inherent in Jesus’s work. His chosen district, as well as his native place, had been Galilee, not the obvious Judea: Galilee was only partly Jewish and it was very poor. His mission was to the poor and deprived, without distinction. And universalism was logically implied in his theology. Of course, the road to the Gentiles lay through the diaspora. Jesus met many diaspora Jews when they came on pilgrimage to attend great feasts at which he was active. But there is no evidence of his movement in the diaspora until after the Pentecostal drive. Then it followed naturally: the diaspora, among other things, was a proselytizing agency. But the very existence of a gentile mission, run by a movement which was already itself heterodox, and careless of many Jewish regulations, was incompatible with its accommodation with mainstream Judaism. Most Jerusalem Jews of substance disapproved of the gentile mission even when conducted by learned and respectable Pharisees. And, equally, there were diaspora Jews, especially Pharisees, who disapproved of the whole enterprise, were fiercely conformist and strongly opposed to any bending of the law for the benefit of converts and ‘God fearers’. What they ultimately feared, of course, was the grave risk of Hellenization implicit in any gentile mission, a risk much increased when the mission was carried out by members of an unstable and nonconformist Jewish sect. Indeed, it is impossible completely to separate the cultural and doctrinal points at issue. The teaching of Jesus had a much stronger appeal to Greek-speakers than the Judaism of the diaspora mission. It seems to have attracted converts almost from the start, especially in Antioch. Thus, if one wing of the Jesus movement was being penetrated by Pharisees, another was being penetrated by Greek-speaking Gentiles and diaspora liberals. There was soon, says Acts, ‘disagreement between those of them who spoke Greek and those who spoke the language of the Jews’. The issue was money: the distribution of charity. Most of it came from the diaspora and Gentiles and went to the more orthodox Jews of the Jerusalem community. The Greek party set up a committee of seven to look into the matter. One of its members was Stephen;