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 The Pisces (2018)

  I took his hand to reassure him. His fingers were chilly. I thought about how cold and lifeless Dominic’s body was, how death was not the warm bath I had imagined. The water was going to be freezing. I was scared of it, scared of feeling the freeze rush into me, or maybe scared of the warmth rushing out of me. I had never thought of that warmth as something I would miss. And Theo was being so distant from me now too, sulking. I felt lonely. “I wonder what the experience will be like, how my life will—manifest under there. Also, how I will stay under the waves and not just bob to the surface.” I was hunting for a potential answer. “You have to trust me,” he said. “It’s going to be beautiful. I will help you go. You will have chosen, but I will assist you. Then we will have a very long time together.” “And we’ll still make love under there?” “Of course we will,” he said. “Okay,” I said. “I’m just a little scared.” “Here, let me come up and join you.” With that he pulled himself out of the water and took a seat next to me. “I love you,” he said, cupping my face with his cold, wet hand. He kissed me softly on the cheek in a way that made me feel like a sweet child, no longer horrible. I felt that I was again back in the womb he and I shared, an innocent. Was this all it took to be cleansed: one beautiful person to treat you kindly and gently, and you were exonerated? How could Dominic’s death and Theo’s love both be true at the same time? How could I have killed Dominic and still be worthy of such tender affection? I was either awful or I wasn’t. Which one was it? I didn’t think I could be both. His kisses moved from my cheek to my nose to my lips. I gently kissed and licked his beautiful mouth, one lip and then the other. He lay back on the rocks and pulled me on top of him. My thighs sandwiched his pelvis. As we kissed more, I felt him get hard under his cloth. I was excited to still have that remaining life force in me, the kind that could make his cock come alive. I began rubbing my body against him, moving up and down on his thigh and then on his pelvis. Then I moved my pussy back and forth on the length of his cock, over the cloth, as though I were anointing him. I rubbed faster and faster as we stayed in an embrace, our mouths locked on each other. A warmth spread from my pussy up through my stomach and into my heart. It radiated out through the top of my head. Everything was suddenly warm, the cold completely eliminated.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Really it was my fault.” “Huh,” I said. We were silent for a little while. “Do you want to come back inside?” she asked. “I’ll be back in a minute. I just need a little more air.” But I didn’t have the strength to go back in. And I knew that if I tried to walk home I wouldn’t make it. Laughing had given me vertigo and now the sidewalk was spinning. I felt the cement with my palm and it was cooler than the afternoon air. I wondered if perhaps I should just lie down right there. Should I just lie down with my cheek against the sidewalk, just lie down and go to sleep? If I die in that sleep I think I would be okay. But I didn’t want to die there in public in front of whoever could walk by. Suddenly I was afraid again. I took out my phone and pressed the buttons to get a car to take me home. This was just what people did now. We went from emotion to phone. This was how you didn’t die in the twenty-first century. The driver, whose name was Chase, pulled up in a silver Honda. He was cute, with a gap in his front two teeth—maybe age twenty-six at most. He looked like he was trying to grow a mustache, and his brown hair was past his ears under a baseball cap that read FML . He babbled that he was an actor, or was trying to become one. His favorite philosophy about acting was Uta Hagen’s, something about being a student of humanity. Well, for a student of humanity he was shitty at reading people. In my head I just kept saying, Shut up, shut up! I wanted to say, Don’t you know I am dying? But even in my dying I couldn’t be mean to him for fear that he would think I was a bitch. Why did I even care what he thought? Was my death that unimportant? How could I prioritize the feelings of this vacant, mustached kid over my own—me, who was probably dying? I repeated, “That’s nice” and “Oh, interesting,” and lay down in the backseat. I didn’t announce that I would be lying down, I just did it. He wasn’t paying any attention to what I was doing, instead going on about an upcoming audition for a prescription allergy medication where he would play the son-in-law of a woman with adult allergies. He said he had mixed feelings about it, because he didn’t want to limit his range to pharmaceuticals. The part he really wanted was at an audition for Samsung next week. He was trying out to play the phone. “It’s not easy to make it in this town. I’m going up against two hundred other potential phones, at least,” he said, looking in the mirror at the traffic behind him. I noticed he had green eyes.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Rudolf’s court entertainments were organized by Giuseppe Archiboldo, whose grotesque ‘composed heads’ still strike us as mysterious and enigmatic. Just as artists like El Greco proclaimed Counter-Reformation doctrine, so others had an eirenic message, though often they were obliged to hide it in a maze of symbols and artifice. Sometimes we can get their point: thus Rudolf’s favourite painter, Pieter Breughel the Elder, attacked the senseless folly of confessional strife between Catholics and Protestants in his allegorical Combat between Carnival and Lent, which hung in Rudolf’s private gallery. But often their meaning, clear enough to their intelligent and learned contemporaries in the third force, is now unfathomable. Those who ranked themselves as eirenic evangelists took risks on either side of the religious frontier. In Protestant countries they tended to be politically suspect. The Elizabethan authorities thought Bruno had come to England as a papal and Counter-Reformation agent, and he was watched. On the Catholic side there was a much more serious risk of the Inquisition and burning. One of those who took part in Dee’s experiments in Prague was the Florentine humanist Francesco Pucci, who accepted Dee’s idea of an ‘imminent renovation’ of Christianity, introduced by learned men, which would obliterate Protestant-Catholic factions. He wrote a book about it, the Forma d’una republica catholica, which spelt out many third force themes, including the idea of an enlightened, invisible ‘college’, and an ecumenical, universal form of Christianity. He had the temerity to wish to carry the good news to Italy. He only got as far as Salzburg, where he was arrested, transferred to Rome, judged and burned. The same fate befell Bruno himself. He went to Venice, where he felt himself reasonably safe. In fact he was ‘delated’ to the Inquisition. The charge against him was that he said (and the words seem plausible): ‘The procedure which the church uses today is not that which the Apostles used, for they converted the people with preaching and the example of good life. But now, whoever does not wish to be a Catholic must endure punishment and pain, for force is used and not love. The world cannot go on like this, for there is nothing but ignorance and no religion which is good. [He said] the Catholic religion pleased him more than any other, but this too has need of great reform. It is not good as it is now, but soon the world will see a general reform of itself, for it is impossible that such corruptions should endure. He hopes great things of the King of Navarre....’ Great mystery still surrounds the Bruno case. Some of the documents turned up as recently as 1942, when they were dicovered in the effects of the librarian-pope, Pius XI; but the official processo, giving the precise reasons for his condemnation, has disappeared.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  When the hunting of heretics and other antinomian groups became endemic in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, witch-hunting began to evolve its own theory and methodology, while at the same time it spread down from the mountain areas to embrace the whole of society. The two leading German Dominican inquisitors, who specialized in witch-hunting, Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprender, compiled a huge dossier based on confessions extracted under torture; in 1484 they used this to persuade Innocent VIII to issue the bull Summis desiderantes affectibus, which gave them specially enlarged powers, and two years later they condensed their ‘findings’ into the great witch-encyclopaedia, the Malleus Maleficarum, which became a best-seller. The combination of bull and book internationalized their hunting techniques. Since their forms of questioning put words into the mouths of the victims, which they were compelled by torture to repeat, the patterns of the Malleus appeared to be confirmed by experience all over Christendom. In reality there is no reason to suppose that such a phenomenon as witchcraft ever existed. The myth was on a level with the supposed ritual murders of Christian children, of which the Jews were accused in the twelfth century. Witches simply replaced Jews as objects of fear and hatred, and torture supplied ‘proof’ of their existence and malevolence. Indeed, witch-hunting could not survive, or even become a powerful movement, without torture. The European craze really dates from about 1468, when the papacy first declared witchcraft a crimen exceptum, and made those accused subject to torture. Once torture was authorized, the confessions multiplied, the number of victims and accusations increased, and the movement generated its own momentum. Once torture was banned, the process was reversed, and the movement gradually died. Where torture was not used, as in England, cases were much rarer and the confessions less horrific. The first big spate of witch-hunting was in the second half of the fifteenth century; then there was a period of relative calm, during which some governments took action against hunting. Charles v’s imperial constitution of 1532 ordered punishments only for witches who did actual harm; merely being a witch was not enough to invoke the law. Erasmus and other Renaissance scholars were highly sceptical, and a new mood appeared to be setting in which would destroy the superstitious base on which the hunt had been created. This more enlightened attitude was rapidly reversed when religious war broke out and the persecution of heretics was intensified. Moreover, both Catholics and reformers tended to hunt witches, as they hunted anabaptists, to demonstrate their doctrinal purity and fervour. With the exception of Zwingli, the German reformers accepted the mythology of witchcraft. Luther thought that witches should be burnt for making a pact with the Devil even if they harmed no one, and he had four of them roasted at Wittenburg.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The entire population was then re-baptized, the city fortified, all food, money, gold and valuables impounded and communized, and housing reallocated on a basis of need. Mathijs was killed in a sortie, and his replacement, John Beukels, the actor-son of an unmarried female serf, reconstructed the regime on a more formal basis. He ran naked through the town, lapsed into prayer, and then announced a new constitution: himself as messianic king, or ‘John of Leyden’, assisted by twelve elders or judges, as a committee of public safety. There was to be a new moral code. All books, except the Bible, were to be burnt. A long list of offences, including blasphemy, swearing, adultery, backbiting, complaining, and any form of disobedience, were to be punished by instant execution. There was to be control of labour, and compulsory polygamy. The regime was violently anti-women. A man sexually dependent on one wife, thought Beukels, was led about ‘like a bear on a rope’; women ‘have everywhere been getting the upper hand’ and it was high time they submitted to men. Hence any women who resisted polygamy were to be executed; and unmarried women had to accept the first man to ask them. Beukels instituted competitions to see who could collect himself the most wives. His histrionic talents, and the fact that Munster contained a large number of skilled craftsmen, enabled him to conduct his court as ‘king of righteousness’ and ‘ruler of the New Zion’ with considerable style. He had clerical vestments remade into royal robes, and designed for himself a golden apple, or orb; a new gold coinage was issued, stamped ‘The word has become flesh and dwells amongst us.’ His harem of wives, all under twenty, and his courtiers, were all beautifully dressed; and the ‘king’ staged dramatic performances and universal banquets, at one of which he distributed communion and then personally carried out an execution, being inspired to do it. This gaudy terror was particularly hard on women, forty-nine of whom were killed for infringing the polygamy decree alone; and it was maintained by dividing the city into twelve sections, each controlled by a ‘duke’ and twenty-four guards, who carried out daily executions and quarterings. The ‘king’ hoped, by despatching apostolic missionaries armed with propaganda printed on his press, to raise a confederacy of Christian-communist towns. But after a few brief successes, the scheme was crushed; Munster itself was betrayed and retaken by the bishop, and Beukels was led about like a performing animal until January 1536, when he was publicly tortured to death with red-hot tongs. The atrocities perpetrated by both millenarians and orthodox Christians on this occasion were roughly equal, each side being anxious to ‘compel them to come in’. During the later stages of the Munster commune, the Christian element became minimal, indeed virtually disappeared; but then it was not prominent on the other side of the barricades either.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Gregory’s vision of a pure, undefiled church aroused more expectations than it could fulfil. The clergy, in particular, simply could not produce the results, in terms of piety and pastoral enthusiasm, which Gregory had seemed to promise. Hence, as with the original Montanists, Christian activists tended to turn against the clergy, and take the religious reform, or revival, into their own hands. Here was a mortal threat to the Church. We mistakenly think of medieval institutional Christianity as an immensely solid and stable structure. But in some ways it was much more vulnerable than the civil power, itself a fragile vessel. Like civil government, the regular routine of organized Christianity could easily collapse; the two often disintegrated together, under pressure. The Christian system was complex and disorganized with comparative ease; an accidental conjunction of two or more of a huge number of forces could bring about de-Christianization over quite a large area very suddenly. Thus St Bernard of Clairvaux on a preaching tour of southern France in 1145 reported that a number of heresies were common and that in large areas Catholicism, as he understood it, had disappeared. Naturally, where antinomian mobs were liable to sweep away church institutions, established authority was anxious to get them out of Christendom – preferably to the East, whence few would return. These mass crusades or armed pilgrimages were usually led by unauthorized prophetae or Montanists, and were a form of popular millenarianism, highly unorthodox but to some extent controlled or canalized by authority. Sometimes they attacked the Jews, regarded as devils like the Moslems, but more accessible. But if no Jews or Moslems were available, they nearly always, sooner or later, turned on the Christian clergy. Hence the anxiety to despatch them to Jerusalem. Yet returned crusaders undoubtedly brought back heresy with them. The dualism of the Balkan Bogomils, which had links stretching right back to the gnostics, reached Italy and the Rhineland in the early twelfth century, and thence spread to France. Once long-distance movement became routine, the spread of a variety of heresies was inevitable, and crusades provided means of communication among precisely the sort of people who took religious ideas seriously and were emotionally prone. Dualism was always attractive because it explained the role of devils, who were everywhere. It was also easy to portray the visible Church as evil because of the evident failure of its theodicy, that is the vindication of divine justice in respect of the existence of suffering. The Bogomils denied that Christ had established an organized Church; therefore Catholic teaching on images, saints, infant baptism and virgin birth, plus many other matters, was false. These ideas spread very rapidly in the West in the mid twelfth century; and once belief in the Church’s system of confession, repentance, penance and redemption was undermined – no great problem – the only spiritual warrants were the outward signs of chastity, poverty, ascetism and humility, which the official Church, as a rule, clearly did not possess.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Everyone from the age of fourteen (girls from twelve) were required to take public oaths every two years to remain good Catholics and denounce heretics. Failure to confess or receive communion at least three times a year aroused automatic suspicion; possession of the scriptures in any language, or of breviaries, hour-books and psalters in the vernacular, was forbidden. Torture was not employed regularly until near the end of the thirteenth century (except by secular officials without reference to the Inquisition) but suspects could be held in prison and summoned again and again until they yielded, the object of the operation being to obtain admissions or denunciations. When torture was adopted it was subjected to canonical restraints – if it produced nothing on the first occasion it was forbidden to repeat it. But such regulations were open to glosses; Francis Pegna, the leading Inquisition commentator, wrote: ‘But if, having been tortured reasonably (decenter), he will not confess the truth, set other sorts of torments before him, saying that he must pass through all these unless he will confess the truth. If even this fails, a second or third day may be appointed to him, either in terrorem or even in truth, for the continuation (not repetition) of torture; for tortures may not be repeated unless fresh evidence emerges against him; then, indeed, they may, for against continuation there is no prohibition.’ Pegna said that pregnant women might not be tortured, for fear of abortions: ‘we must wait until she is delivered of her child’; and children below the age of puberty, and old folk, were to be less severely tortured. The methods used were, on the whole, less horrific than those employed by various secular governments – though it should be added that English common lawyers, for instance, flatly denied that torture was legal, except in case of refusal to plead. Once a victim was accused, escape from some kind of punishment was virtually impossible: the system would not allow it. But comparatively few were executed: less than ten per cent of those liable. Life-imprisonment was usual for those ‘converted’ by fear of death; this could be shortened by denunciations. Acts of sympathy or favour for heretics were punished by imprisonment or pilgrimage; there were also fines or floggings, and penance in some form was required of all those who came into contact with the infected, even though unknowingly and innocently. The smallest punishment was to wear yellow cloth crosses – an unpopular penalty since it prevented a man from getting employment; on the other hand, to cease to wear it was treated as a relapse into heresy. A spell in prison was virtually inevitable. Of course there was a shortage of prison-space, since solitary confinement was the rule. Once the Inquisition moved into an area, the bishop’s prison was soon full; then the king’s; then old buildings had to be converted, or new ones built.

• 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 The Pisces (2018)

  “Aren’t you afraid of drowning?” “No,” he said. I looked at the moon. Then I looked back down at him, and I got scared. Who was he? I didn’t want to die. Or at least, I didn’t want to feel myself dying or drowning. Here I was, sitting on the rocks at midnight talking to a stranger, my legs hanging off the rock. He could just grab my ankle, pull me off the rocks and hold me under, and that would be that. But why would he do that? I don’t know that we are ever really okay in life, but there are times when we feel closer to it—when we don’t remember what it feels like to suffer. During these times we are moving forward in the void, forgetting we are going nowhere, so the void feels less daunting. We feel like we are handling shit. We are handling shit and doing work on ourselves. And then another person comes in, and meets us there, and we think we can handle it. We think we can handle it, because in that moment we feel that we can handle anything. I always thought I could handle things, until I couldn’t. I talked like dying was no big deal, but in that moment I definitely didn’t want to die. It was crazy to be out there. I didn’t know what I was doing. “I should go,” I said. “It’s freezing, and I have to walk my dog.” “Oh, you have a dog?” he said, sounding a little disappointed. This too was strange. Surfer bros always seemed to love dogs. They themselves were like the beautiful carefree mutts of the sea. “Yes. Why?” “No reason,” he said. “Do you have any dogs or cats?” “No,” he said. Then he laughed. “I have fish.” “Fish?” I blurted, and started laughing in spite of myself. “Where do you live?” he asked. “Just across the beach,” I said. “In one of those houses.” I pointed in the general direction of Annika’s house. “Ahhh,” he said. “Venice girl.” “Yeah,” I said. “I live with my sister.” I didn’t tell him that I was from the desert. “Well, if you decide to traipse out to the rocks again late at night, maybe I’ll see you again,” he said. “I’m always out here swimming.” “Yeah, maybe,” I said. “Okay, well, bye. Be safe.” “Bye—you too,” he said. He was still holding on to the rocks when I left. He looked like he didn’t want to let go, but not because he was scared of the waves, just because—I’m not sure why. I walked onto the beach and took my sandals off. When I turned around he was still holding on to the rocks, with his cheek resting on one of them. He waved.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Many central and east European sects successfully established themselves, and still flourish today. Others proved unstable: the German pietist group, under George Rapp, which settled at Harmony, Pennsylvania in 1804, practised auricular confession, opposed procreation and marriage, and contrived to dogmatize itself out of existence. And the Oneida Community of western New York State, which combined socialism with free love or ‘complex marriage’ – procreation as distinguished from other sexual ‘transactions’ was decided communally, and the children brought up in a kibbutz – flourished by making steel-traps, lost its faith and eventually became a prosperous Canadian corporation, thus justifying Wesley’s worst fears. As in the first and second centuries, some groups of enthusiasts ceased to belong to the prophetic or Montanist type and moved into forms of gnosticism, that is, claimed to have discovered secret codes, texts or systems of knowledge which provided keys to salvation. As such, they tended to part company with Christianity since they replaced Revelation with arcane documents of their own. In about 1827, for instance, Joseph Smith Junior was given by the Angel Moroni a new Bible in the form of golden plates inscribed in ‘reformed Egyptian’ hieroglyphics, with a set of seer-stones, called Urim and Thummim, with which to read them. The Book of Mormon, as Smith translated it, was put on sale in 1830, after which the angel removed the original plates. Its 500-page text describes the religious history of America’s pre-Columban people, who originally crossed from the Tower of Babel in barges, surviving only in the form of Mormon and his son, Moroni, who buried the golden plates in AD 384. The text clearly derived from the King James Bible, but it fitted into some of the social realities of the frontier, and its early rejection, harassment by authority, and difficulties created by ‘wicked men’, followed by great success, soon gave the movement a genuine tribal history. Smith was providentially murdered by a mob in Illinois in 1844, after which Brigham Young was able to take the sect on a great exodus to Salt Lake City in 1847. Even at this stage Mormonism had crossed the farthest frontiers of Christianity, but it did so in a more obvious sense when Young introduced polygamy. Under the controlling provision of the First Amendment, ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .’, sects did not become illegal if they offended Christian dogma. But Christian morals and social customs were a different matter, and Mormonism was in continuous battle with the state until polygamy was renounced in 1890. Gnosticism was thus perfectly acceptable within the American total, and voluntary, Christian society, but only provided it genuflected to Protestant morality. It was subject to this qualification that Catholicism was tolerated. It was not so much forced to change itself as to develop a highly defensive posture, which to some extent came to the same thing.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  “You can’t tell anyone you’re going,” he said, pulling away from me. “They will think you’re crazy and lock you up.” “I know. I won’t tell them anything,” I said. “Good,” he said. “In the meantime, how about you come stay at the house with me for a little while? As I’m preparing. The dog is asleep. I’ve been making him sleep every day now just in case you were here so I could bring you home with me.” “No,” he said. “I’m finished with the land.” “Oh,” I said. “This is as far as I can go. I hope you understand why.” I didn’t want to understand, but I did. He had sacrificed for me. The thought of him dragging himself back across the beach that night, the danger he put himself in, was scary. Now he wanted me to sacrifice for him. But hadn’t I done that? What had this whole week been? “I’ll meet you here each night until Thursday,” he said. “And you can tell me whether you are still coming.” He looked different to me now, more bloated in the face and jaded. His eyes looked darker. I didn’t know how I felt about the fact that he needed me as much as I needed him. It scared me to be needed. “I’m coming,” I said. “Good.” We brought our faces together and kissed gently on the mouth. He put one of his hands at the base of my neck, under my chin, and tightened it—not enough to cut off my air supply, but just so I could feel him pressing a bit into my larynx. My throat felt full of pleasure and emotion. I opened my mouth wider on his and made an “ohhh” sound. We kissed wetly. “I wish we could live the rest of our lives on these rocks,” I said. “Why isn’t it possible to just live at the edge of both, the ocean and the land?” Of course I knew why. The edge was an uncomfortable and dangerous place for both of us. The rocks were nowhere to live. I had wanted him to come to my world for that same reason. “One day these rocks won’t be here,” he said. “The ocean will waste them away.” “Then we could find new rocks,” I said. “Eventually you have to choose,” he said. “That’s how the story has always been and that’s the way it will be forever.” “But why?” I asked. “Well,” he said, thinking, “I guess because the choice is always there.” 54.When I got back to the house, Dominic didn’t bark. This was odd, because he always smelled Theo on me. I went into the pantry to check on him. He was lying there on his side, perfectly still. “Dominic,” I said. “Domi.”

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

  He died the same evening, exclaiming, as the story goes: "This is the hand with which I swore fidelity to my lord, King Henry." But, according to another report, he said, when he heard of the victory of his troops: "Now I suffer willingly what the Lord has decreed for me." His body with the severed hand was deposited in the cathedral at Merseburg.82 Rudolf’s death turned his victory into a defeat. It was regarded in that age as a judgment of God against him and the anti-pope. His friends could not agree upon a successor till the following summer, when they elected Count Hermann of Luxemburg, who proved incompetent. In the spring of 1081 Henry crossed the Alps with a small army to depose Gregory, whose absolution he had sought a few years before as a penitent at Canossa. He was welcomed in Lombardy, defeated the troops of Matilda, and appeared at the gates of Rome before Pentecost, May 21. Gregory, surrounded by danger, stood firm as a rock and refused every compromise. At his last Lenten synod (end of February, 1081) he had renewed his anathemas, and suspended those bishops who disobeyed the summons. Nothing else is known of this synod but sentences of punishment. In his letter of March 15, 1081, to Hermann, bishop of Metz, he justified his conduct towards Henry, and on April 8 he warned the Venetians against any communication with him and his adherents. "I am not afraid," he said, "of the threats of the wicked, and would rather sacrifice my life than consent to evil." Henry, not being permitted by the Romans to enter their city, as he had hoped, and not being prepared for a siege, spent the summer in Upper Italy, but returned to Rome in Lent, 1082, and again with a larger force at Easter, 1083, and conquered the city and the Church of St. Peter in June. Gregory was intrenched in the Castle of St. Angelo, and fulminated anew his anathema upon Henry and his followers (June 24). Henry answered by causing Wibert to be enthroned in St. Peter’s (June 28), but soon left Rome with Wibert (July 1), promising to return. He had probably come to a secret understanding with the Roman nobility to effect a peaceful compromise with Gregory; but the pope was inexorable. In the spring of 1084 Henry returned and called a synod, which deposed and excommunicated Gregory. Wibert was consecrated on Palm Sunday as Pope Clement III., in the Lateran, by two excommunicated bishops of Modena and Arezzo (instead of the bishops of Ostia, Albano, and Porto). Henry and his wife, Bertha, received from him the imperial crown in St. Peter’s at Easter, March 31, 1084. He left Rome with Wibert (May 21), leaving the defense of the city in the hands of the Romans. He never returned. In the meantime Gregory called to his aid the Norman chief, Robert Guiscard, or Wiscard.

• 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.

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

  We also saw how these three views might be integrated. Grupe and Nitschke emphasized an additional point of view called the adaptive control hypothesis, originally proposed by Alexander Shackman and Richard Davidson. 139 This idea gives the anterior cingulate cortex a major role in behavioral control. This region, which is altered in anxiety disorders, 140 connects with the amygdala, BNST, hippocampus, and other areas discussed above, and thus can also be integrated into an overarching view of how uncertainty contributes to anxiety. FROM THREAT TO CONSCIOUS FEAR AND ANXIETY The circuits altered in anxiety disorders are, for the most part, those that have been implicated in normal aspects of threat processing and stress regulation in animals and healthy humans. Although the human data are at a less refined level of analysis, they nevertheless confirm that mechanisms discovered in the brains of animals are relevant to human fear and anxiety disorders. But we have to be careful not to confuse malfunctioning cognitive processes with the feeling of fear or anxiety. Fear or anxiety is not an increased attention to threats, or failed safety versus threat discrimination, or increased avoidance, or heightened response to threat uncertainty, or overvaluation of the significance of perceived threats. Nor is it simply the combination of these. Fear and anxiety are unpleasant feelings, and fearful or anxious people want to eliminate them. Although processes that Grupe and Nitschke have identified clearly help us better understand what issues need to be addressed in order to help people feel better, I think we need a subtler understanding of what fear and anxiety are if we are to take our conception to the next level. Specifically, we need to understand how fearful and anxious feelings arise and persist in the stream of consciousness. At least two separate processes are involved: One includes the cognitive processes that underlie any kind of conscious experience, whereas the other includes all the factors that make emotional conscious experiences different from nonemotional ones. Here’s a snapshot of what is to come in the next several chapters. The goal is to arrive at an understanding of how threat detection and threat anticipation give rise to conscious feelings. Consciousness is personal; it’s private; it’s in each of our heads. It’s mental, but it’s also physical. There was a time when mental meant nonphysical, but we are past that belief. Mental processes and states are physical products of the brain. Because you are reading this book, you probably believe this. That’s good, because in the coming chapters we get physical with the most mental of all mental functions—consciousness. CHAPTER 8 FEELING IT: EMOTIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS “You’re not me. You can’t feel like I feel.” —JOHN FOWLES 1 A man standing next to you is aiming a gun at a bull’s-eye target some distance away. Without warning he turns and points the barrel at your head.

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

  purgatory, in which he found forty-one bishops, ragged and dirty, exposed alternately to extreme cold and scorching heat. Among them was Ebo, Hincmar’s predecessor, who immediately implored Bernold to go to their parishioners and clergy and tell them to offer alms, prayers and the sacred oblation for them. This he did, and on his return found the bishops radiant in countenance, as if just bathed and shaved, dressed in alb, stole and sandals, but without chasubles. Leaving them, Bernold went in his vision to a dark place, where he saw Charles the Bald sitting in a heap of putrefaction, gnawed by worms and worn to a mere skeleton. Charles called him by name and implored him to help him. Bernold asked how he could. Then Charles told him that he was suffering because he had not obeyed Hincmar’s counsels, but if Bernold would secure Hincmar’s help he would be delivered. This Bernold did, and on his return he found the king clad in royal robes, sound in flesh and amid beautiful surroundings. Bernold went further and encountered two other characters —Jesse, an archbishop, and a Count Othar, whom he helped by going to the earth and securing the prayers, alms and oblations of their friends. He finally came across a man who told him that in fourteen years he would leave the body and go back to the place he was then in for good, but that if he was careful to give alms and to do other good works he would have a beautiful mansion. A rustic of stern countenance expressed his lack of faith in Bernold’s ability to do this, but was silenced by the first man. Whereupon Bernold asked for the Eucharist, and when it was given to him he drank almost half a goblet of wine, and said, "I could eat some food, if I had it." He was fed, revived and recovered. Hincmar, in relating this vision, calls attention to its similarity to those told in the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, the Ecclesiastical History of Bede, in the writings of St. Boniface, and to that of Wettin, which Walahfrid Strabo related.1412 He ends by exhorting his readers to be more fervent in their prayers, and especially to pray for king Charles and the other dead. 3. The life of St. Remigius,1413 the patron saint of Rheims. This is an expansion of Fortunatus’ brief biography by means of extracts from the Gesta Francorum, Gregory of Tours, and legendary and traditional sources, and particularly by means of moralizing and allegorizing. The length of the book is

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

  The use of mitres, crosses, oil and incense was condemned and also war, on the ground that warriors, after the first blood is let, lose all charity, and so "go straight to hell." In addition to the Bible, the document quotes Wyclif’s Trialogus by name. From about 1390 to 1425, we hear of the Lollards in all directions, so that the contemporary chronicler was able to say that of every two men found on the roads, one was sure to be a Lollard.630 With the accession of Henry IV. of Lancaster (1399–1413), a severe policy was adopted. The culminating point of legislation was reached in 1401, when parliament passed the act for the burning of heretics, the first act of the kind in England.631 The statute referred to the Lollards as a new sect, damnably thinking of the faith of the Church in respect to the sacraments and, against the law of God and the Church, usurping the office of preaching. It forbade this people to preach, hold schools and conventicles and issue books. The violators were to be tried in the diocesan courts and, if found guilty and refusing to abjure, were to be turned over to the civil officer and burnt. The burning, so it was stipulated, was to be on a high place where the punishment might be witnessed and the onlookers be struck with fear. The most prominent personages connected with the earliest period of Wycliffism, Philip Repyngdon, John Ashton, Nicolas Hereford and John Purvey, all recanted. The last three and Wyclif are associated by Knighton as the four arch-heretics. Repyngdon, who had boldly declared himself at Oxford for Wyclif and his view of the sacrament, made a full recantation, 1382. Subsequently he was in high favor, became chancellor of Oxford, bishop of Lincoln and a cardinal, 1408. He showed the ardor of his zeal by treating with severity the sect whose views he had once espoused. John Ashton had been one of the most active of Wyclif’s preachers. In setting forth his heretical zeal, Knighton describes him as "leaping up from his bed and, like a dog, ready to bark at the slightest sound." He finally submitted in Courtenay’s court, professing that he "believed as our modur, holy kirke, believes," and that in the sacrament the priest has in his hand Christ’s very body. He was restored to his privileges as lecturer in Oxford, but afterwards fell again into heretical company.632 Hereford, Wyclif’s fellow-translator, appealed to Rome, was condemned there and cast into prison. After two years of confinement, he escaped to England and, after being again imprisoned, made his peace with the Church and died a Carthusian. In 1389, nine Lollards recanted before Courtenay, at Leicester. The popular preacher, William Swynderby, to whose sermons in Leicester the people flocked from every quarter, made an abject recantation, but later returned to his old ways, and was tried in 1891 and convicted. Whether he was burnt or died in prison, Foxe says, he could not ascertain.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  As they were riding along together, conversing on various topics, they came to a very deep ravine, a lonely spot with precipitous crags and trees all round it, which seemed to the retainer the ideal place to carry out his master’s orders without any risk of detection. He therefore drew his dagger and seized the lady’s arm, saying: ‘Commend your soul to God, my lady, for this is the place where you must die.’ On seeing the dagger and hearing these words, the lady was completely terror-stricken. ‘For God’s sake, have mercy!’ she cried. ‘Before putting me to death, tell me what I ever did to you, that you should want to kill me.’ ‘My lady,’ he replied. ‘To me you have never done anything; but you must have done something or other to your husband, for he ordered me to kill you without mercy in the course of our journey. And if I fail to carry out his instructions, he has threatened to have me hanged by the neck. You know very well how much I depend upon him, and how impossible it would be for me to disobey him. God knows I feel sorry for you, but I have no alternative.’ The lady began to weep. ‘Oh, for the love of God, have mercy!’ she said. ‘Don’t allow yourself to murder someone who never did you any harm, just for the sake of obeying an order. As God is my witness, I have never given my husband the slightest cause for taking my life. But leaving that aside, you have it within your power to satisfy your master without offending God or laying a finger upon me. All you have to do is to take these outer garments I am wearing and leave me a cloak and a doublet. You can then return to our lord and master with the clothes and tell him you have killed me. And I swear to you, upon the life you will have granted me, that I will disappear and go away somewhere so that neither he nor you nor the people of these parts will ever hear of me again.’ The retainer was by no means eager to kill her, and was easily moved to compassion. And so, having taken the clothes, he gave her a tattered old doublet of his and a cloak to put on, left her some money she was carrying, and begged her to disappear entirely from those parts. He then abandoned her in the valley on foot and returned to his master, informing him that not only had his orders been carried out, but he had left her dead body surrounded by a pack of wolves. Some time afterwards, Bernabò returned to Genoa, but once the story had leaked out, he never succeeded in living it down.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  As for the common people and a large proportion of the bourgeoisie, they presented a much more pathetic spectacle, for the majority of them were constrained, either by their poverty or the hope of survival, to remain in their houses. Being confined to their own parts of the city, they fell ill daily in their thousands, and since they had no one to assist them or attend to their needs, they inevitably perished almost without exception. Many dropped dead in the open streets, both by day and by night, whilst a great many others, though dying in their own houses, drew their neighbours’ attention to the fact more by the smell of their rotting corpses than by any other means. And what with these, and the others who were dying all over the city, bodies were here, there and everywhere. Whenever people died, their neighbours nearly always followed a single, set routine, prompted as much by their fear of being contaminated by the decaying corpse as by any charitable feelings they may have entertained towards the deceased. Either on their own, or with the assistance of bearers whenever these were to be had, they extracted the bodies of the dead from their houses and left them lying outside their front doors, where anyone going about the streets, especially in the early morning, could have observed countless numbers of them. Funeral biers would then be sent for, upon which the dead were taken away, though there were some who, for lack of biers, were carried off on plain boards. It was by no means rare for more than one of these biers to be seen with two or three bodies upon it at a time; on the contrary, many were seen to contain a husband and wife, two or three brothers and sisters, a father and son, or some other pair of close relatives. And times without number it happened that two priests would be on their way to bury someone, holding a cross before them, only to find that bearers carrying three or four additional biers would fall in behind them; so that whereas the priests had thought they had only one burial to attend to, they in fact had six or seven, and sometimes more. Even in these circumstances, however, there were no tears or candles or mourners to honour the dead; in fact, no more respect was accorded to dead people than would nowadays be shown towards dead goats. For it was quite apparent that the one thing which, in normal times, no wise man had ever learned to accept with patient resignation (even though it struck so seldom and unobtrusively), had now been brought home to the feeble-minded as well, but the scale of the calamity caused them to regard it with indifference.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Peter, the arrogant swan, turned friendly, and he and his family now welcomed Stephen who fed them every morning and evening, and they glad enough to partake of her bounty. On the lawn Anna set out a tray for the birds, with chopped suet, seed, and small mounds of breadcrumbs; and down at the stables old Williams spread straw in wide rings for exercising the horses who could not be taken beyond the yard, so bad were the roads around Morton. The gardens lay placidly under the snow, in no way perturbed or disconcerted. Only one inmate of theirs felt anxious, and that was the ancient and wide-boughed cedar, for the weight of the snow made an ache in its branches—its branches were brittle like an old man’s bones; that was why the cedar felt anxious. But it could not cry out or shake off its torment; no, it could only endure with patience, hoping that Anna would take note of its trouble, since she sat in its shade summer after summer—since once long ago she had sat in its shade dreaming of the son she would bear her husband. And one morning Anna did notice its plight, and she called Sir Philip, who hurried from his study. She said: ‘Look, Philip! I’m afraid for my cedar—it’s all weighted down—I feel worried about it.’ Then Sir Philip sent in to Upton for chain, and for stout pads of felt to support the branches; and he himself must direct the gardeners while they climbed into the tree and pushed off the snow; and he himself must see to the placing of the stout felt pads, lest the branches be galled. Because he loved Anna who loved the cedar, he must stand underneath it directing the gardeners. A sudden and horrible sound of rending. ‘Sir, look out! Sir Philip, look out, sir, it’s giving!’ A crash, and then silence—a horrible silence, far worse than that horrible sound of rending. ‘Sir Philip—oh, Gawd, it’s over ’is chest! It’s crushed in ’is chest—it’s the big branch wot’s given! Some one go for the doctor—go quick for Doctor Evans. Oh, Gawd, ’is mouth’s bleedin’—it’s crushed in ’is chest—Won’t nobody go for the doctor?’ The grave, rather pompous voice of Mr. Hopkins: ‘Steady, Thomas, it’s no good losin’ your head. Robert, you’d best slip over to the stables and tell Burton to go in the car for the doctor. You, Thomas, give me a hand with this bough—steady on—ease it off a bit to the right, now lift!