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 51 of 529 · 20 per page

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  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 by bodyguards, not because he feared anyone but to inspire fear in others. He oppressed widows, evicted minors, distributed other people’s patrimonies, broke up marriages, saw to the sale of innocent persons’ properties, and took a share of the proceeds while the owners wept.’ Of course this portrait can be interpreted in two ways: of a man perpetrating injustices, or seeking to correct them. Religious struggle, indeed, throws an illuminating light on social and economic tensions in the fourth-century Roman empire. One characteristic of the Donatist church was the ability and willingness of its bishops and priests to use Punic as well as Latin. They had vernacular services; there may even have been vernacular translations of the scriptures. The political and economic posture was anti-Roman, and the cultural stand, to some extent, was anti-Latin. The surviving writings on the Donatist controversy cast, as it were, a periodic searchlight on the North African theatre; elsewhere, we know much less but we sometimes get hints of similar patterns of conflict and stress. It was a feature of the Montanists, for instance, that they spoke the local, often tribal, language or patois of the areas where they operated; they did so, for instance, in Phrygia. It was one reason for their undoubted successes. How far nonconformist Christianity worked in conjunction with local tribalism and nationalism is hard to determine and harder still to prove it was deliberate and systematic. But the probability is that almost from earliest times Christian groups over widely scattered parts of the empire had become identified or had identified themselves with local aspirations and grievances. This would help to explain the earlier persecutions, always conducted purely at local level. It would also help to explain the anxiety of orthodox Christianity to disengage itself from this kind of religious adventurism – the Montanists being an outstanding example but not the only one. From the second century the Catholic Church, as it increasingly called itself, stressed its universality, its linguistic and cultural uniformity, its geographical and racial transcendance – in short, its identity of aims with the empire. These are the themes of most Catholic propagandists of the Roman school, especially in the third century.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  In due course, the orthodox Church received its reward: imperial recognition, beneficence and support against its enemies. For, and this is the key point, were not the enemies of the Catholic Church the enemies of empire even before the alliance was forged? From the antinomian perspective of Julian we again get an insight into the truth. In a letter defending his religious policy of withdrawing state military support from the orthodox brand of Christianity, he points out passionately that this had ended bloodshed. ‘Many whole communities of so-called heretics’, he claims, ‘were actually butchered, as at Samosata, and Cyzicus in Paphlagonia, Bithynia and Galatia, and among many other tribes villages were sacked and destroyed; whereas in my time exile has been ended and property restored.’ We have here a picture of the Catholic Church and the Roman State operating jointly over a wide area for diverse but compatible motives, to impose order, uniformity and central control. And of course one reason why Julian’s own policy, idealistic though it might be, failed to work and was abandoned and reversed, was that diversity of religious belief was incompatible with the purely secular needs of the imperial administration. Thus, while there is no real evidence that primitive Christianity at any stage in its formation constituted a revolutionary social force, conscious or unconscious, what it did do was to breed a multitude of divergent sects springing from, and aggravating, local particularism, as well as a dominant strain which identified itself with the empire, the possessing classes, and the status quo. So Christianity produced and reflected forces which were both holding the empire together and trying to tear it apart. In Rome and Constantinople, Christians were orthodox and imperial. In North Africa they were predominantly schismatic and nationalist. And over large parts of the empire Christian elements formed a multiplicity of troublesome groups, each trying to thrust its own levers into the cracks in the imperial structure. And these dissenting groups often overlapped. At one time in a single Phrygian town there were churches run by Montanists, Novatianists, Encratites and Apotactites or Saccophori, all of them forbidden sects. Scattered throughout the imperial territories there were varieties of Christian Enthusiasts, priest-deserters or vacantivi, catenati or long-haired, chained ascetics, fanatic robber monks and great numbers of heretical groups. By the 390s, Filastrius, the elderly Bishop of Brescia, who had spent his entire life collecting information about heresy, had compiled a list of 156 distinct ones – all, it would seem, still flourishing. Heresy held particular attractions for dispossessed tribesmen, or tribes within the frontiers which had been subjected to collective punishments, for bands of military deserters, or fugitives from barbarian raids who lived by robbery. And, to both the imperial authorities and the orthodox Church, the most frightening aspect of heresy, particularly of the Montanist or Donatist type, was the speed with which it could spread, leaping like a prairie fire from one local tuft of grievance to the next.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  For if there be a God there is eternal punishment (a posteriori).’ Of course Rome itself had always insisted on the importance of Hell. It was the solidity of this, and similar, doctrines which attracted so many converts. But Rome’s pastoral use of Hell was greatly augmented as a result of the work of St Alphonsus Liguori, who in 1732 founded the Order of the Redemptorists. They specialized in Hell-fire sermons and made themselves available for retreats and Lenten missions in ordinary Catholic parishes. The order flourished; hence, at a time when Protestantism as a whole was pushing Hell into the background, it played a more colourful role for Catholics. Liguori published in 1758 a book called The Eternal Truths, which served as a handbook both for his own community and for parish priests generally. He thought that the stench of one damned person would be enough to asphyxiate all mankind. Oddly enough, he refused to describe Heaven, since he argued it was impossible to picture it for those who had experience only of earthly pleasures; but no such inhibition prevented him from conjuring up Hell: ‘. . . the unhappy wretch will be surrounded by fire like wood in a furnace. He will find an abyss of fire below, an abyss above, and an abyss on every side. If he touches, if he sees, if he breathes, he touches, sees, breathes only fire. He will be in fire like a fish in water. This fire will not only surround the damned, but it will enter into his bowels to torment him. His body will become all fire, so that the bowels within him will burn, his heart will burn in his bosom, his brains in his head, his blood in his veins, even the marrow in his bones; each reprobate will in himself become a furnace of fire.’ It was the Redemptorists who, in 1807, resurrected a remarkable seventeenth-century work by F. Pinamonti, Hell Opened to Christians, and reprinted it with horrific woodcuts. One edition was published in Ireland as late as 1889, and it has demonstrable links with the sermon on Hell described in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Redemptorists often preached Hell-sermons at Catholic schools. One of them, the Reverend Joseph Furniss, wrote a number of books for children, in which Hell figured prominently. In The Sight of Hell he showed Hell as a mid-earth enclosure (thus following Liguori), with streams of burning pitch and sulphur, deluged with sparks and filled with a fog of fire. Tormented souls shrieked, ‘roaring like lions, hissing like serpents, howling like dogs and wailing like dragons.’ There were six dungeons, each with an appropriate torture – a burning press, a deep pit, a red-hot floor, a boiling kettle, a red-hot oven and a red-hot coffin. ‘The little child is in the red-hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out; see how it turns and twists itself about in the fire.

• 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)

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

  In 1598, the Dutch priest, Cornelius Loos Callidus, was imprisoned at Treves for declaring that women, making confession under torture to witch devices, confessed to what was not true. And four years before, 1589, Dr. Dietrich Flade, a councillor of Treves, was burnt for attacking the prosecution of witchcraft.951 The belief in demonology and all manner of malefic arts was a legacy handed down to the Church from the old Roman world and, where the influence of the Northern mythologies was felt, the belief took still deeper roots. But it cannot be denied that cases and passages taken from the Scriptures, especially the Old Testament, were adduced to justify the wild dread of malign spirits in the Middle Ages. Saul’s experience with the witch of Endor, the plagues

• 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 The Pisces (2018)

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

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

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

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  The day went on and the sun shone out brightly, dazzling the tired eyes of the drivers. Dusk fell, and the roads grew treacherous and vague. Night came—they dared not risk having lights, so that they must just stare and stare into the darkness. In the distance the sky turned ominously red, some stray shells might well have set fire to a village, that tall column of flame was probably the church; and the Boches were punishing Compiègne again, to judge from the heavy sounds of bombardment. Yet by now there was nothing real in the world but that thick and almost impenetrable darkness, and the ache of the eyes that must stare and stare, and the dreadful, patient pain of the wounded—there had never been anything else in the world but black night shot through with the pain of the wounded. 4On the following morning the two ambulances crept back to their base at the villa in Compiègne. It had been a tough job, long hours of strain, and to make matters worse the reliefs had been late, one of them having had a breakdown. Moving stiffly, and with red rimmed and watering eyes, the four women swallowed large cups of coffee; then just as they were they lay down on the floor, wrapped in their trench coats and army blankets. In less than a quarter of an hour they slept, though the villa shook and rocked with the bombardment. CHAPTER 361T here is something that mankind can never destroy in spite of an unreasoning will to destruction, and this is its own idealism, that integral part of its very being. The ageing and the cynical may make wars, but the young and the idealistic must fight them, and thus there are bound to come quick reactions, blind impulses not always comprehended. Men will curse as they kill, yet accomplish deeds of self-sacrifice, giving their lives for others; poets will write with their pens dipped in blood, yet will write not of death but of life eternal; strong and courteous friendships will be born, to endure in the face of enmity and destruction. And so persistent is this urge to the ideal, above all in the presence of great disaster, that mankind, the wilful destroyer of beauty, must immediately strive to create new beauties, lest it perish from a sense of its own desolation; and this urge touched the Celtic soul of Mary.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  200), as he pointed out, the Christians were numerous enough to overthrow the Empire, had their intentions been hostile; ‘We are but of yesterday, and we fill everything you have – cities, tenements, forts, towns, exchanges, yes! and camps, tribes, palace, senate, forum. All we leave you with are the Temples!’ Christians were, he urged, a docile as well as a loyal element in society. And of course for the most part they were left alone. As a rule, the Christians, like the Jews, enjoyed complete freedom from persecution. The impression that they lived and worshipped underground is a complete fallacy, arising from the name (Catacombus) of one of their earliest cemeteries. They had their own churches, as the Jews had synagogues. They made no secret of their faith. From the earliest times, Tertullian says, they identified themselves: ‘At every forward step and movement, at every going in and out, when we put on our clothes and shoes, when we bathe, when we sit at table, when we light the lamps, on couch, on seat, in all the ordinary actions of daily life, we trace upon the forehead the sign of the cross.’ There seems to have been no attempt at concealment, strangers being invited to attend part of the Christian service, and to present themselves for instruction. Yet there was from the start considerable prejudice, a form of anti-semitism which persisted even after Roman conformists had learnt to distinguish between Christians and Jews. Thus an anti-Christian writer c. 180 calls them ‘people ignorant of learning, unlettered and unskilled in the meanest arts’. They were ‘a gang of discredited and proscribed desperadoes’, formed from ‘the lowest dregs of the population, ignorant men and credulous women’. At their ‘nocturnal gatherings, solemn feasts and barbarous meals, the bond of union is not a sacred rite but crime’. They were ‘a secret tribe that lurks in darkness and shuns the light, silent in public, chattering in corners . . . and these vicious habits are spreading day by day. . . . These conspirators must be utterly destroyed and cursed.’ In this atmosphere of ignorance and prejudice, Christians became objects of suspicion and the victims of wild rumour. The Christians automatically placed themselves outside the law by refusing divine honours to emperors. Under weak and vulnerable rulers, like Caligula, Nero and Domitian, they became scapegoats for failure or disaster. As Tertullian put it: ‘If the Tiber reaches the walls, if the Nile failes to rise to the fields, if the sky doesn’t move, or the earth does, if there is famine or plague, the cry is at once: “The Christians, to the Lion!”’ Prejudice was much stronger in the central and western Mediterranean than in the east, but certain rumours were current everywhere. The doctrine of the eucharist, under which ‘flesh’ and ‘blood’ were eaten, was understood to mean the practice of cannibalism. The ‘kiss of peace’ at Sunday services was also misinterpreted.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  He could assemble a crowd of supporters, but it was always just as easy to collect a mob against him. Once he began to operate openly in the Temple area he became a marked man for both Roman and Jewish authorities, and an object of suspicion. His refusal to make his claims explicit and unambiguous was resented, and not only by his enemies. His followers were never wholly in his confidence and some of them had mixed feelings from time to time about the whole enterprise. What had they involved themselves in? There is a hint that Judas’s betrayal may have been motivated less by greed – an easy and unconvincing apostolic smear – than by shock at the sudden fear he might be serving an enemy of religion. By the time of his trial and passion Jesus had succeeded in uniting an improbable, indeed unprecedented, coalition against him: the Roman authorities, the Sadducees, the Pharisees, even Herod Antipas. And in destroying him, this unnatural combination appears to have acted with a great measure of popular approval. What conclusions can we draw from this? The actual execution was carried out by Romans under Roman law. Crucifixion was the most degrading form of capital punishment, reserved for rebels, mutinous slaves and other unspeakable enemies of society; and it was also the most prolonged and painful, though Jesus escaped its full horrors by his unusually rapid death. Pilate, the Judean procurator, is presented in the canonical gospels as a reluctant executioner, the beginnings of an imaginative early Christian tradition which later transformed him into a believer and even into a saint. This charitable emphasis, it can be argued, was introduced after the final break between the early Christian community and the Jewish establishment, to impose the whole moral responsibility for Jesus’s death on the Jews. Following up this line of argument, Jewish scholars and others have urged that the trial before the Sanhedrin never took place; that the passages which refer to it do not compare with what we know from other sources of the procedure and competence of this court; that Jesus had done nothing to break Jewish law, let alone invoke capital punishment; and that the episode is a fiction – Jesus had simply fallen foul of the Romans who regarded him as a political agitator. Certainly, what we know of Pilate’s career does not suggest he would be merciful, or hesitate to kill a Jewish troublemaker. Although the attitude of the imperial government towards Jews oscillated from time to time, in accordance with a number of political and economic factors, in general it was becoming steadily more oppressive. The honeymoon of Herod the Great’s day was over. Immediately after Herod’s death in 4 BC, perhaps in the very year of Jesus’s birth, there had been disturbances in Galilee, and some 2,000 Jews had been crucified by Varus. Galilee was an area of mixed religious cults, where Judaism was active and becoming predominant by vigorous and aggressive proselytizing.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Just that lack of willingness to disclose—that’s all it took for me to perceive rejection. So this gave me a little edge. Also, his observation about me and death could have been a bit scary if he wasn’t so matter-of-fact. I mean, he was a stranger, male, and likely stronger than me. He could easily pull me off a rock into the water and drown me. But I trusted him completely—at least in terms of my physical safety. And now that he had complimented me about my proximity to death and I had owned it, and thrown it right back at him, I felt cool. We had both decided now that death was my territory. I was the Professor of Death. Much more than a middle-aged woman who was beginning to get serious crushy feelings for a young stranger in the water. “I know about death,” he said. “Have you ever seen someone die?” I asked. “Like up close and one-on-one?” “Yes,” he said. “I have watched a number of people die.” “Scary, right? The dying process. I don’t feel scared about death but dying freaks me the fuck out.” “I’m not scared of dying,” he said. “You’re not?” Now he was the professor and I was the pussy. “I would say I’m less scared of dying than I am of life.” Actually, I maybe agreed with him. “I think I’m equally scared of both,” I said. This was the truth. It felt good to say it. “What is it about dying that scares you the most? Are you afraid of having regrets?” “No,” I said. “I think it’s literally the physical process. Like, the suffocation. I’m so scared to be suffocating and panicking. I get panicked even when I go to the dentist. I am not good with discomfort. So I think I’m more scared of the discomfort—my own fear around it—than anything else.” “It might be scary for a moment,” he said. “Maybe for a few minutes. But then, from what I’ve seen, you are very free.” “Maybe,” I said. “But it’s the fear before the freedom that I’m scared of. If I could just go to sleep—just like that, go to sleep and never wake up—I would do that anytime. I would do it tonight. But I’m scared to be conscious while it’s happening.” “I had that feeling about you. That you would be happy to just go to sleep.” “Why? Because I’m so boring?” “Not at all,” he said. “The opposite. But I can feel you’ve suffered.” He was so dramatic. “Yeah, well, life is the dumbest,” I said, standing up. “I’ve suffered too,” he said. “I’ve been sick.” This piqued my interest. “Yeah?” “Yes. I have stomach problems, terrible stomach cramps. Problems with my bowel. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.” The word bowel made me giggle. “What kind of problems?”

• From The Pisces (2018)

  He looked like a little boy when he said that, scrunching up his nose and squinting. “Of what?” I laughed. “Are you scared of me? But you just had your face in my pussy.” “I have some imperfections,” he said. “I have—something is wrong with my body. I’m afraid for you to see.” “I think you’re beautiful,” I said. “You are a gorgeous creature. I would never judge you. Anything that could be different or weird about your body I would only see as even more special.” “You can’t tell anyone,” he said. “About what you see.” Now I wondered what it was that was wrong with him. Did he have a shrunken lower body? Was he missing a leg? Was it just a small dick? “I don’t like people,” I said. “I have no friends. I have no one to tell.” This was a lie. I would surely be telling Claire at some point about the pussy-eating in detail and, I figured, probably every inch of his body. As soon as she was better and ready to hear it. It would probably even cheer her up. “Okay,” he said. “But if you don’t like it, there is nothing I can do about it. If you feel frightened by it—by me—I can only go back into the water and swim away. I won’t be able to see you again.” “Come on,” I said. “Would you stop? I won’t not like it. There’s nothing that can scare me.” That wasn’t entirely true, but I believed it. It’s an art to believe your own lies. Some people think you have to actively convince yourself in order to believe your own lies, but in that moment, I just didn’t know any other reality than everything being okay—no matter what he showed me. I knew only that silence and the wanting him to come up on the rock with me. I didn’t think I could be scared of anything. I just wanted him to be with me. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He put his beautiful white arms on the rock and hoisted himself up, then flipped himself over so that he was sitting next to me. Around his pelvic region was a thick beige sash, like an oilcloth. Below it was the wet suit: scaly and coal black, covered in barnacles. At the bottom were what looked like a pair of fins or flippers, of the same color as the suit, connected to the rest of the black rubbery scales. He looked more like a scuba diver than a swimmer and more like a thick piece of cod than a scuba diver. The suit seemed old—like it had been soaking in the ocean for years—with all of the barnacles attached to it, bits of seaweed. It wasn’t sleek or shiny like I had seen on the surfers. It almost looked like the rocks we were seated on. Like he was part of the ocean landscape.

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

  Upon John XXIII.’s flight, fears were felt that Huss might be delivered by his friends, and the keys of the prison were put into the hands of Sigismund. On March 24th the bishop of Constance had the prisoner chained and transferred by boat to his castle, Gottlieben. There he had freedom to walk about in his chains by day, but he was handcuffed and bound to the wall at night. The imprisonment at Gottlieben lasted seventy-three days, from March 24th-June 5th. If Huss wrote any letters during that time none have survived. It was a strange freak of history that the runaway pontiff, on being seized and brought back to Constance, was sent to Gottlieben to be fellow-prisoner with Huss, the one, the former head of Christendom, condemned for almost every known misdemeanor; the other, the preacher whose life was, by the testimony of all contemporaries, almost without a blemish. The criminal pope was to be released after a brief confinement and elevated to an exalted dignity; the other was to be contemned as a religious felon and burnt as an expiation to orthodox theology. At Gottlieben, Huss suffered from hemorrhage, headache and other infirmities, and at times was on the brink of starvation. A new commission, appointed April 6, with D’Ailly at its head, now took up seriously the heresy of Huss and Wyclif, whom the council coupled together.677 Huss’ friends had not forgotten him, and 250 Moravian and Bohemian nobles signed a remonstrance at Prag, May 13, which they sent to Sigismund, protesting against the treatment "the beloved master and Christian preacher" was receiving, and asked that he might be granted a public hearing and allowed to return home. Upon a public hearing Huss staked everything, and with such a hearing in view he had gone to Constance.