Hope

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)

  Didn’t it say something about my ability to make decisions, or at the last moment save myself and evade disaster? Maybe I could have two lives. Maybe I could be with Theo and also go to group. I had been avoiding them, thinking that the two could not coexist. But what if they could? Why couldn’t I, then, stay in Los Angeles? I could get a job at a library or something. I could live somewhere on the beach in a little bungalow, if cheap bungalows still existed. I could be a woman who didn’t kill herself over her problems, but triumphed. I would be balanced, a measured human being. There wouldn’t have to be any more sadness. I would have love and sanity. Or, like Claire, would I just keep getting worse? It was so hard to reconcile fantasy with reality. It was hard to believe that something as beautiful as the way Theo made me feel could put me in the hospital or kill me. Did chasing the light inevitably lead us here? If we didn’t chase the light, did people like us just end up here anyway? If Claire had never left her marriage, where would she be now? She said that she was depressed during her marriage and ended up here once before. And that was before she began her odyssey of love and sex. If you were just going to end up here, regardless of what you did, it seemed worth it to really push things like she did. The nothingness was going to eat you alive anyway. It was going to be mashed potatoes at the end no matter what. So why not just grab for whatever you could get? — “Well, I’ve really mucked it up this time,” said Claire. “I’m back in group therapy now, only here with a pack of sad arses who are completely catatonic—which is maybe actually better.” She laughed. It was good to see her sense of humor back. Her hair was still greasy, piled on top of her head, but the circles under her eyes had diminished and there was a glint in her eyes again. “You seem better,” I said. “Like you’re not just staring at the wall.” “Yes, with my last suicide attempt I woke up completely miffed that I was still alive. But this one was oddly refreshing. Maybe I just needed some sort of sorbet—a life palate cleanser.” My God, I loved her. “I get it,” I said. “I mean, not really, because mine wasn’t really a consciously active attempt.” “No, yours was more of a gesture.” “Exactly, a gesture. I’m not the suicide pro that you are. But I think I understand.” “Love, if I were a pro I wouldn’t be here.” “Right,” I said. “But I mean I’m not as, like, experienced with suicide or whatever.

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

  Removed from Prag, Huss was indefatigable in preaching and writing. Audiences gathered to hear him on the marketplaces and in the fields and woods. Lords in their strong castles protected him. Following Wyclif, he insisted upon preaching as the indefeasible right of the priest, and wrote that to cease from preaching, in obedience to the mandate of pope or archbishop, would be to disobey God and imperil his own salvation.658 He also kept in communication with the city by visiting it several times and by writing to the Bethlehem chapel, the university and the municipal synod. This correspondence abounds in quotations from the Scriptures, and Huss reminds his friends that Christ himself was excommunicated as a malefactor and crucified. No help was to be derived from the saints. Christ’s example and his salvation are the sufficient sources of consolation and courage. The high priests, scribes, Pharisees, Herod and Pilate condemned the Truth and gave him over to death, but he rose from the tomb and gave in his stead twelve other preachers. So he would do again. What fear, he wrote, "shall part us from God, or what death? What shall we lose if for His sake we forfeit wealth, friends, the world’s honors and our poor life?... It is better to die well than to live badly. We dare not sin to avoid the punishment of death. To end in grace the present life is to be banished from misery. Truth is the last conqueror. He wins who is slain, for no adversity "hurts him if no iniquity has dominion over him." In this strain he wrote again and again. The "bolts of anti-christ," he said, could not terrify him, and should not terrify the "elect of Prag."659 Of the extent of Huss’ influence during this period he bore witness at Constance when, in answer to D’Ailly, he said: I have stated that I came here of my own free will. If I had been unwilling to come, neither that king [referring to Wenzel] nor this king here [referring to Sigismund] would have been able to force me to come, so numerous and so powerful are the Bohemian nobles who love me, and within whose castles I should have been able to lie concealed. And when D’Ailly rebuked the statement as effrontery, John of Chlum replied that it was even as the prisoner said, "There are numbers of great nobles who love him and have strong castles where they could keep him as long as they wished, even against both those kings."

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  As John Adams, who had lost his original religious faith, put it in his diary: ‘One great advantage of the Christian religion is that it brings the great principle of the law of nature and nations, love your neighbour as yourself, and do to others as you would that others should do to you – to the knowledge, belief and veneration of the whole people. Children, servants, women and men are all professors in the science of public as well as private morality. . . . The duties and rights of the man and the citizen are thus taught from early infancy.’ The diversity of American religion thus seemed no barrier to its social and political unity since it rested on a Christian ethic which was infinitely more important than the dogmatic variations of the sects. Indeed, the key state in the formation of the union, Pennsylvania, was also the most diverse in religions. Philadelphia, its ‘City of Brotherly Love’, saw the last great flowering of Puritan political innovation. It was the city of the Quakers, a Presbyterian stronghold, the headquarters of the Baptists, an Anglican centre, and the home of a number of German pietistic groups, and of Moravians, Memmonites and other sects, as well as a place where Catholicism was tolerated and flourished. What mattered were not doctrinal differences but the fact that all were able to live there in harmony, alongside the seat of the American Philosophical Society – and at the centre of America’s system of communications and economic traffic. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were thus framed in a highly appropriate and prophetic setting. What is tremendously significant and new about the American Revolution is that its victory for religious freedom and the separation of Church and State was won not so much by left-wing millenarian sects revolting against magisterial churchmen, but by the denominational leaders and statesmen themselves, who saw that pluralism was the only form consonant with the ideals and necessities of the country. Thus for the first time since the Dark Ages, a society came into existence in which institutional Christianity was associated with progress and freedom, rather than against them. The United States was Erasmian in its tolerance, Erasmian in its anti-doctrinal animus, above all Erasmian in its desire to explore, within a Christian context, the uttermost limits of human possibilities. It was Christianity presented not as a total society, but as an unlimited society. De Tocqueville, in Democracy in America (1835), says the attitude of and towards the churches was the first thing that struck him in the United States: ‘In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other: but in America I found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country.’ He concluded: ‘Religion . . .

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The Pope, as Bishop of Rome, ruled what was a duchy of the empire, and paid taxes accordingly. The West as a whole became an area of tribal settlement, in which semi-barbarous kingdoms existed behind fluctuating frontiers. In these circumstances, the western Church found itself the residual legatee of Roman culture and civilization, and the only channel by which it could be transmitted to the new societies and institutions of Europe. It thus faced a greater challenge and opportunity than at the time of Constantine’s conversion. It had the chance to recreate the secular framework of society ab initio, and in its own Christian image. It was the only organized international body left with ideas, theories, a sophisticated hierarchy and advanced cultural technologies, in an empty world which possessed little but tribalism. Moreover, the Church, in the writings of St Augustine, possessed an outline – albeit a pessimistic one – of how a Christianized, earthly society should work. During these four centuries, then, the Church acted as a ‘carrier’ of civilization rather as, in its formative period, the Hellenistic religious-culture machine had ‘carried’ Christian Judaism into a Roman, universalist context. The great merit of the Latin Church – the chief reason for its success – was that it was not anchored in any particular racial, geographical, social or political context. It bore the marks of its development but it was still genuinely universalist, the church of St Paul: ‘all things to all men’. It is important, however, to appreciate the elements of continuity, as well as those of discontinuity, between the Roman world of St Augustine, and the Christian-barbarian world which succeeded it. The great tribal confederations did not so much break up the western empire as occupy an area which had already lost its unifying institutional force. There was no sudden catastrophe; indeed, no series of catastrophes. The process was economic, rather than military and political. Skilled tribal tradesmen – carpenters, gardeners, smiths and so forth – had been emigrating into the empire for centuries, in search of money-wages, or higher wages. And they had joined the Roman army, as individuals and as units. This movement of peoples was accepted, even institutionalized. It seems to have increased in the fifth century, and taken on some of the aspects of a tribal migration into settled Roman territory. But those involved had had long contact with Roman civilization. Some of their leaders were Roman allies. Most of them were Christians in the sense that they were Arians; for the great Christian missionary Ulfilas, a Goth who had carried the new faith back to his people in the middle of the fourth century, had been an Arian. Both the Vandals, who settled in North Africa, and the various Gothic tribal groupings – Visigoths in Spain and southern Gaul, Ostrogoths in Italy – were Arians. This fact quickly became the chief differentiation between the ‘barbarians’ and the Romans, who accepted the Trinitarian doctrine worked out by Augustine. The tribesmen were also hungry Arians.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  In February 1517 Erasmus wrote to his friend Wolfgang Capito: ‘Now I almost wish I were young again, for this reason – I foresee the coming of a golden age: so clearly do we see the minds of princes, as if inspired, devoting all their energies to the pursuit of peace.’ Again, two months later – not long before Luther sprang into prominence with his theses – he addressed the Pope: ‘I congratulate this age of ours, which promises to be an age of gold if ever there was one.’ He saluted Leo on ‘the public and lasting concord of Christendom’. Before the end of 1517, Erasmus had changed his mind: ‘I fear a great revolution is about to take place in [Germany].’ He saw no serious objections to Luther’s original Wittenberg theses. He tried, behind the scenes, to protect Luther from the anger of the authorities, and urged moderation on both sides. But as early as 1518 he took the view that both would end by turning against learning, because they were obsessed by theology. To Luther himself he wrote: ‘I try to stay neutral to help the revival of learning as best I can. And it seems to me that more is accomplished by a civil modesty than by impetuosity.’ This advice was ignored. Luther, though initially deferential to the sage of Europe, at least publicly, saw him as ‘a proud sceptic’, a man of little faith – ‘human conditions prevail in him much more than divine.’ Erasmus privately dismissed Luther as ‘a Goth’, a man of the past, but also in a sinister way the portent of a horrific future – ‘the tree which bears the poisonous fruit of nationalism.’ He was furious to find himself accused of guilt by association, and still more to discover that some thought him the author of Luther’s diatribes. Dragged unwillingly into the controversy, he was attacked by the orthodox Edward Lee, later Archbishop of York; and he was acutely embarrassed by the vulgar counter-attack on Lee published by his friends: ‘You filth, if you do not beg forgiveness of Erasmus, I shall throw your name, like a piece of shit, across the frontiers of posterity, that people may remember your stench forever.’ This was just the kind of theologians’ Billingsgate he loathed, and in which Luther and his opponents were now freely indulging. Luther invited Christendom to ‘wash your hands in the blood of these cardinals, popes and other dregs of the Roman Sodom’, while the papist theologians of Louvain called for the execution of ‘that pestilential fart of Satan whose stench reaches to Heaven’. Erasmus tried to keep out of this distasteful row, which went directly contrary to his view of how reform should be carried out. But the wide dissemination of Luther’s deterministic views of salvation, with which he totally disagreed, forced him to make his own position clear.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  James told the Venetian ambassador in 1606: ‘Pope Clement VIII invited me to join the Roman church. I replied that if they would resolve the various difficulties in a general council, legitimately convened, I would submit myself to its decisions. What do you think he answered? Just look at the zeal of the Vicar of Christ! Why, he said: “The King of England need not speak of Councils. I won’t hear of one. If he will not come in by any other means, things stand as they are.”’ There were, indeed, as Henri IV had already discovered, obstacles to an ecumenical agreement which could only be removed by force, that is, by a combination of enlightened Catholic and Protestant forces. In the Jacobean period there appeared to be excellent hopes for the third force. It was a great time for free intellectual exchanges between scholars. The phrase ‘the republic of letters’ was coined, entirely in line with Erasmus’s claim: ‘I am a citizen of all states.’ After half a century of darkness and killing, it seemed, for a few brief years, that the ideological barriers were coming down again, and that reason and knowledge would triumph over bigotry and ignorance. Bacon, who had his own vision of the ‘great instauration’ of learning and science, published his Advancement of Learning in 1605, and was already at work on his Novum Organum and New Atlantis, projects which placed the millenarian dream on a firm foundation of experimental science. As with Greece and Rome, he thought, a new civilization was coming into existence: ‘Surely, when I set before me the condition of these times, in which learning hath made her third visitation, I cannot but be raised to this persuasion, that this third period of time will far surpass that of the Grecian and Roman learning – if only men will know their own strength and their own weakness both, and take, one from the other, light of invention, not fire of contradiction.’ The times seemed propitious in other respects. England was no longer hag-ridden by the Spanish war and Jesuit subversion. In Holland, Arminius and his ‘followers, such as Hugo Grotius, were triumphantly developing a new and liberal form of Calvinism. In Venice, the battling friar Paolo Sarpi had successfully persuaded the authorities to defy the Vatican, and keep the Counter-Reformation out of Venetian territory, which included the great Renaissance university of Padua. The English ambassador, Sir Henry Wotton, thought Sarpi’s Venice might well embrace a form of Anglicanism. In 1616 Antonio de Dominis, Archbishop of Spalato, actually became an Anglican; and three years later he published in England Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent, which told the inside story of how the council was manipulated by the papacy; the book was dedicated to James I. It is significant that Sarpi was in touch with Christian of Anhalt, chief adviser to the Elector Frederick at his court in Heidelberg.

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

  Professor Comba, of the Waldensian school in Florence, has definitely given up this theory in deference to the investigations of Dieckhoff, Herzog, and other German scholars. Of Waldo’s life little is known. A prosperous merchant of Lyons, he was aroused to religious zeal by the sudden death of a leading citizen of the city, of which he was a witness, and by a ballad he heard sung by a minstrel on the public square. The song was about St. Alexis, the son of wealthy parents who no sooner returned from the marriage altar than, impressed by the claims of celibacy, he left his bride, to start on a pilgrimage to the East. On his return he called on his relatives and begged them to give him shelter, but they did not recognize who he was till they found him dead. The moral drawn from the tale was: life is short, the times are evil, prepare for heaven. Waldo sought counsel from a priest, who told him there were many ways to heaven, but if he would be perfect, he must obey Christ’s precepts, and go and sell all that he had and give to the poor, and follow him. It was the text that had moved Anthony of Egypt to flee from society. Waldo renounced his property, sent his two daughters to the convent of Fontevrault, gave his wife a portion of his goods, and distributed the remainder to the poor. This was about 1170. His rule of life, Waldo drew from the plain precepts of the Bible. He employed Bernard Ydros and Stephen of Ansa to translate into the vernacular the Gospels and other parts of the Scriptures, together with sayings of the Fathers. He preached, and his followers, imitating his example, preached in the streets and villages, going about two by two.1058 When the archbishop of Lyons attempted to stop them, they replied that "they ought to obey God, rather than men." Very unexpectedly the Waldenses made their appearance at the Third Lateran council, 1179, at least two of their number being present. They besought Alexander III. to give his sanction to their mode of life and to allow them to go on preaching. They presented him with a copy of their Bible translation. The pope appointed a commission to examine them. Its chairman, Walter Map, an Englishman of Welsh descent and the representative of the English king, has left us a curious account of the examination. He ridicules their manners and lack of learning.1059 They fell an easy prey to his questionings, like birds, as he says, who do not see the trap or net, but think they have a safe path. He commenced with the simplest of questions, being well aware, as he said, that a donkey which can eat much oats does not disdain milk diet.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  A year or so before, Johann Geiler of Strasburg, one of the last great preachers of the Middle Ages, had predicted the dissolution in his final sermon before the Emperor Maximilian: ‘Since neither pope, nor emperor, kings nor bishops, will reform our life, God will send a man for the purpose. I hope to see that day . . . but I am too old. Many of you will see it; think, then, I pray you, of these words.’ It was true that the papacy itself, the Church as an institution, had proved unwilling or incapable of directing the reforming process. But other agencies were relentlessly at work. The Christian universities, which had sprung from the total society, and underpinned it with their metaphysical systems, were in a state of change and uncertainty. The universalist method of St Thomas Aquinas, with its logical superstructure providing answers to every conceivable human query, had been elbowed aside by the Nominalists in the fourteenth century; they taught that many of the basic elements of Christianity could not be demonstrated by logic but must be accepted by blind faith; and in the fifteenth century scholars turned increasingly to re-examine the fundamental credentials of Christianity: the scriptures, the documents of the church, the writings of the early fathers. In the 1440s, Lorenzo di Valla, secretary to Pope Nicholas V, demonstrated that the Donation of Constantine and many other key texts were blatant forgeries. He developed and popularized new techniques for the critical evaluation of sacred literature. Political changes in the Mediterranean world at this time brought to the attention of European scholars a large number of ancient books, sacred and profane, Greek, Latin and Hebrew, which had not been systematically examined for centuries. Where their Byzantine and Jewish custodians had been content to preserve these texts, Italian Renaissance scholars, like Valla, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, treated them as keys to the future, collated them, and used them as standards of measurement for conventional western learning. In this new school, there was no separation of, and no desire to separate, religious and secular learning. Ficino thought of Plato, whose basic works were now available in the original Greek, as belonging to a series of interpreters of the divine, beginning with Zoroaster and stretching on through Hermes Trismegistus and Pythagoras – an ancient wisdom anticipating and confirming Christianity. At the same time, the whole range of Hebrew scholarship, which had been preserved untouched in Spain for centuries, was made available to the West by Mirandola, who married Jewish cabalistic theosophy to neo-Platonic cosmology. His pupil, the Hebraist Johann Reuchlin, produced the first Hebrew-Christian grammar in 1506, and tried to prevent the systematic destruction of these emerging Jewish books by the Dominican Inquisition. Thus was the New Learning first brought into conflict with the established Church. But conflict was inevitable.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Had Claire somehow helped me find a new direction, a new legitimacy to my thesis? At least I was admitting that my own idea had been bullshit—that you couldn’t read something as intentional if it had never been intentional, even through a perverted academic lens. Yet one crux of my thesis remained: there should be no attempt made to fill in the gaps with biography or bullshit narrative. So what to do with them then—the discomfort of not knowing? How to savor what was there without guessing at what wasn’t? I was drunk but the question seemed good. The writing seemed good. Around midnight, somehow, I found myself back out again on the rocks. It was chilly and I didn’t bring a sweater. I looked around, and then, feeling embarrassed, I stopped. It was obvious Theo wasn’t there, but I kept imagining that he was—or that he was deeper in the waves, farther out, watching me looking for him, laughing. I pretended to myself that I had come out to the rocks simply because I had wanted to be near the ocean. But I was disappointed. I turned to go home. “Lucy,” said a voice. It was Theo. Had he been hiding behind a rock? This kid was confusing. When I felt him watching me from far away, maybe was he watching me from much closer? He sort of bobbed a few feet away. “You’re back,” I said cheerfully, but casual. I did not ask where he had been. “I’m back,” he said. “How have the dates been treating you?” “Disgusting,” I said. “Ah, too bad.” “Each its own little death.” “Funny,” he said. “You’re like a little death.” “What?” I asked. “You are. You’re…gloomy yet charming. I like it.” “Well, no one has said that before.” “You’re gently death-ish. You know about death, you’re aware of it, and most people aren’t anymore. But you’re not a killer. You’re a soft darkness.” A soft darkness. “Yeah, I’m aware of death,” I said. I was thinking about the doughnut incident. “In high school I wore black lipstick and black nail polish.” “That’s not what I mean,” he said. “It’s not manufactured. You have it in you.” “What about you? What’s your story?” I asked. “Oh God, I hate my story,” said Theo. “I bet you have a great story.” “What do you want to know, exactly?” he asked. He was treading water a little faster now. I caught a glint of his wet suit under the waves. “Where do you live?” I asked. “Around here,” he said. “So cryptic,” I said. “Are you aware of death?” Asking that, I felt kind of creepy in a good way. He had a lot of power in not revealing too much of himself.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  “Show me his Facebook.” “I’ve only met him a few times and I don’t have his number or email or anything. I don’t even know his last name. He meets me at this rock pile, these breakers, on the ocean. Like, he swims up at night.” “What do you mean ‘he swims up at night’?” “He swims up at night. And we talk. Also, he touched my foot.” “He touched your foot?” “Yeah.” “Oh so he has a fetish. Like Sara from group.” “Sara touches her own foot,” I said. “More like caresses,” said Claire. “She really makes love to that foot. Maybe she’s replaced men with her own foot?” “Ha! No, it was more like he thought my foot was special. Or like through the foot he was touching my soul.” Claire stared at me. “It’s not as weird as it sounds. And I think it’s safe for me emotionally, like, I’m not getting romantically obsessed, because I sort of just know now that he will show up. I can rely on him not to ignore me. It’s as though he is more of a friend or something. Granted, I don’t really want friends. And he’s gorgeous and looks like he is twenty-one.” “Twenty-one!” she squealed. “That’s brilliant.” “But I think he does like me. I mean, with the foot touching there was an indication that he is attracted to me in some way, though maybe not, because the way he touched it was sort of sensual at first but then it was just sort of friendly. The point is—I don’t feel crazy around this one.” “Well, that’s what matters,” she said. “That you’re happy.” “Yeah, I don’t even care that I don’t have his number or email or even know his last name. I just feel like, I don’t know, like the universe put him there to show me—” “The universe?” “Yes, that the universe put him there to show me that I can have some of that male energy in my life without going totally insane.” “The universe is a wanker,” she said. 26.“There’s a light on in your eyes,” said Brianne. “Have you been doing inner-child work?” “Definitely not,” I said. “Trauma work?” clucked Chickenhorse suspiciously. I shook my head no. “Must be the self-dating,” she said. “You actually look alive for once.” “Thanks, I guess.” I let them know that I was doing well and had blocked Adam and Garrett in my phone. I made no mention of Theo or the rocks, as the group would deem it poor self-care that I had been wandering around there so late at night in the dark. Chickenhorse would probably call it self-harm. But everyone was suffering too much today to focus on me for long. Chickenhorse had been forced to move back in with her parents, which was traumatizing for her. Actually, she said it was “retraumatizing” and calling up trauma from earlier in life.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  But, as a rule, they were impelled more by simple Bible-reading enthusiasm than by any knowledge of the peoples and territories involved. The first mission to the Pacific, sent out by the Congregationalists in the ship Duff to Tahiti in 1796, consisted of four ministers, six carpenters, two shoemakers, two bricklayers, two weavers, two tailors, a shopkeeper, a harness-maker, a servant, a gardener, a surgeon, a blacksmith, a cooper, a butcher, a cotton-manufacturer, a hatter, a draper and a cabinet-maker. This class and occupational composition was characteristic. Very few of the early missionaries had educational qualifications. The effort was earnest but it was unsophisticated and often wildly off target. What Protestantism lacked was an élite organization like the Jesuits, which could develop a thorough understanding of the cultural and social structure of the mission-territory, appeal to its intellectual leaders, and argue from its own assumptions rather than from European ones. From the 1780s, a section of the British upper classes became interested in the global responsibilities of British Christianity, but they concentrated almost exclusively, at first, on the slave trade; in other words, their focus was on English vice rather than the spiritual demands of the black heathen. In a way this was natural. Slave-trading had become a huge English industry by the 1780s. In four centuries, the European slave trade carried over ten million slaves from Africa, over sixty per cent of them between 1721 and 1820. Some of them went east. Thus the East India Company had a few slaves, but left the business in 1762. By then the trade had become largely transatlantic, shipping an average of 60,000 a year, with Portuguese America the chief market, followed by the West Indies and the United States. The trade was shared out between the French, British and Portuguese, with Britain taking half. After 1792, the French dropped out, and the British took up the slack, making 1798, for instance, a record year, with 160 British slaving ships operating, mostly from Liverpool. Slaving was one of the largest, and certainly the most profitable, sectors of the British economy. In England, 18,000 people were employed simply on making goods to pay for slaves in Africa; this trade alone formed 4.4 per cent of British exports in the 1790s. The trade had been traditionally tolerated by Anglican divines. It was defended even by some missionaries. One of the founders of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, Thomas Thompson, who had worked among negroes in New Jersey, and then spent four years in Guinea, ‘to make a trial with the Natives’, wrote The African Trade for Negro Slaves shown to be Consistent with the Principles of Humanity and the Laws of Revealed Religion, setting out the kind of case made by southern state Christians in the 1840s and 1850s. In fact the SPG itself actually owned slaves in Barbados.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Some even belong to the World Council of Churches. But others are barely Christian and many are chronically unstable. It is the Montanist world of the second century again, though of course with important variations. Some students of these sects argue that their drift is ultimately anti-Christian in that they tend to form a bridge by which Africans pass back into paganism. They move, it is claimed, from the (orthodox) mission church to an ‘Ethiopian’ church, then to a Zionist, then by the nativistic or tribal Zionism back to the African animism of their parents or grandparents. This undoubtedly happens in some cases. On the other hand, some of the sects are startingly original and creative in their theological imaginings, and fervent in their enthusiasm. In any case, the phenomenon is growing. An analysis of these churches published in 1948 listed the names of 1023 distinct sects. An analysis published in 1968 was based on a survey of over 6,000. According to recent calculations, ‘revival movements’, usually leading to new churches, break out on average in seven new tribes each year. The expansion of African Christianity is not confined to the ‘independent’ churches, but they take the lion’s share of the new recruits. At present, African Christians of all denominations are doubling in numbers every twelve years, and by the end of the century there may be over 350 million professing African Christians, thus forming the largest single group within the global Christian community, exceeding in numerical importance even the Latin Americans. A big majority of these Christians will be ‘independents’. How they will be regarded by the churches of European origin may prove one of the most important ecclesiastical developments of our time. Much will depend, of course, on how western Christianity organizes itself in the meantime; and this, in turn, will be determined very largely by the attitude of the Catholic Church. So long as Pius XII lived, world Catholicism was immobile, frozen in a posture which, in all essentials, had been assumed by Pius IX in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. While Protestant triumphalism was quietly abandoned, the populist triumphalism of the papacy remained intact, lovingly preserved like a precious heirloom from an earlier age. Pius XII was, indeed, the last of a long line of popes stretching back to Boniface VIII, Innocent III and Hildebrand himself. His vision of the Church was Augustinian in that, while he reluctantly recognized that it did not embrace all society, he upheld its authority as universal and omnicompetent. There was, in effect, no aspect of life on which the Church did not have the right, and usually the duty, to give its ruling.

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

  No one, says Cyprian, should be made sad by death, since in living is labor and peril, in dying peace and the certainty of resurrection; and he quotes the examples of Enoch who was translated, of Simeon who wished to depart in peace, several passages from Paul, and the assurance of the Lord that he went to the Father to prepare heavenly mansions for us.689 The day of a believer’s death, especially if he were a martyr, was called the day of his heavenly birth. His grave was surrounded with symbols of hope and of victory; anchors, harps, palms, crowns. The primitive Christians always showed a tender care for the dead; under a vivid impression of the unbroken communion of saints and the future resurrection of the body in glory. For Christianity redeems the body as well as the soul, and consecrates it a temple of the Holy Spirit. Hence the Greek and Roman custom of burning the corpse (crematio) was repugnant to Christian feeling and the sacredness of the body.690 Tertullian even declared it a symbol of the fire of hell, and Cyprian regarded it as equivalent to apostasy. In its stead, the church adopted the primitive Jewish usage of burial (inhumatio),691 practiced also by the Egyptians and Babylonians. The bodies of the dead were washed, 692 wrapped in linen cloths,693 sometimes embalmed,694 and then, in the presence of ministers, relatives, and friends, with prayer and singing of psalms, committed as seeds of immortality to the bosom of the earth. Funeral discourses were very common as early as the Nicene period.695 But in the times of persecution the interment was often necessarily performed as hastily and secretly as possible. The death-days of martyrs the church celebrated annually at their graves with oblations, love feasts, and the Lord’s Supper. Families likewise commemorated their departed members in the domestic circle. The current prayers for the dead were originally only thanksgiving for the grace of God manifested to them. But they afterwards passed into intercessions, without any warrant in the reaching of the apostles, and in connection with questionable views in regard to the intermediate state. Tertullian, for instance, in his argument against second marriage, says of the Christian widow, she prays for the soul of her departed husband,696 and brings her annual offering on the day of his departure. The same feeling of the inseparable communion of saints gave rise to the usage, unknown to the heathens, of consecrated places of common burial.697 For these cemeteries, the Christians, in the times of persecution, when they were mostly poor and enjoyed no corporate rights, selected remote, secret spots, and especially subterranean vaults, called at first crypts, but after the sixth century commonly termed catacombs, or resting-places, which have been discussed in a previous chapter. We close with a few stanzas of the Spanish poet Prudentius (d.

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

  Another important collection is in the Kircherian Museum, in the Roman College, another in the Christian Museum of the University of Berlin.541 The entire field of ancient epigraphy, heathen and Christian in Italy and other countries, has been made accessible by the industry and learning of Gruter, Muratori, Marchi, De Rossi, Le Blant, Böckh, Kirchhoff, Orelli, Mommsen, Henzen, Hübner, Waddington, McCaul. The most difficult part of this branch of archaeology is the chronology (the oldest inscriptions being mostly undated).542 Their chief interest for the church historian is their religion, as far as it may be inferred from a few words. The key-note of the Christian epitaphs, as compared with the heathen, is struck by Paul in his words of comfort to the Thessalonians, that they should not sorrow like the heathen who have no hope, but remember that, as Jesus rose from the dead, so God will raise them also that are fallen asleep in Jesus. Hence, while the heathen epitaphs rarely express a belief in immortality, but often describe death as an eternal sleep, the grave as a final home, and are pervaded by a tone of sadness, the Christian epitaphs are hopeful and cheerful. The farewell on earth is followed by a welcome from heaven. Death is but a short sleep; the soul is with Christ and lives in God, the body waits for a joyful resurrection: this is the sum and substance of the theology of Christian epitaphs. The symbol of Christ (Ichthys) is often placed at the beginning or end to show the ground of this hope. Again and again we find the brief, but significant words: "in peace;"543 "he" or "she sleeps in peace;"544 "live in God," or "in Christ;" "live forever."545 "He rests well." "God quicken thy spirit." "Weep not, my child; death is not eternal." "Alexander is not dead, but lives above the stars, and his body rests in this tomb."546 "Here Gordian, the courier from Gaul, strangled for the faith, with his whole family, rests in peace. The maid servant, Theophila, erected this."547 At the same time stereotyped heathen epitaphs continued to be used but of course not in a polytheistic sense), as "sacred to the funeral gods," or "to the departed spirits."548 The laudatory epithets of heathen epitaphs are rare,549 but simple terms of natural affection very frequent, as "My sweetest child;" "Innocent little lamb;" "My dearest husband;" "My dearest wife;" "My innocent dove;" "My well-deserving father," or "mother."550 A. and B. "lived together" (for 15, 20, 30, 50, or even 60 years) "without any complaint or quarrel, without taking or giving offence."551 Such commemoration of conjugal happiness and commendations of female virtues, as modesty, chastity, prudence, diligence, frequently occur also on pagan monuments, and prove that there were many exceptions to the corruption of Roman society, as painted by Juvenal and the satirists.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  I know that in a few years I shall be cut off in that country, which is now open. Do not let it be shut again! I go back to Africa to try to make an open path for commerce and Christianity. Do you carry on the work which I have begun. I leave it with you’ – the speech ending in a shout. Again, the next year, he wrote to Professor Sedgwick: ‘That you may have a clear idea of my objects, I may state that they have more in them than meets the eye. They are not merely exploratory, for I go with the intention of benefiting both the African and my own countrymen. I take a practical mining geologist to tell us of the mineral resources of the country, an economic botanist to give a full report of the vegetable productions, an artist to give the scenery, a naval officer to tell of the capacity of river communications, and a moral agent to lay a Christian foundation for anything that may follow. All this machinery had for its ostensible object the development of African trade and the promotion of civilization; but what I can tell to none but such as you, in whom I have confidence, is that I hope it may result in an English colony in the healthy high lands of Central Africa! . . . I have told it only to the Duke of Argyll.’ In some cases, the missionaries regarded colonialism (and commerce) with open hostility. New Zealand, which the missionaries first penetrated in 1814, was a battleground between the Church, which wanted to create an independent, self-sustaining Maori Christian state – rather like the Jesuits in Japan – and the colonizing interests, which recognized the country as an ideal area for European settlement. Darwin, who was there in 1835, warmly praised the missionaries’ work: ‘. . . all this is very surprising when it is considered that five years ago nothing but the fern flourished here. . . . The lesson of the missionary is the enchanter’s wand.’ Five years later, the declaration of British sovereignty marked the victory of the settlers and colonists, and was the prelude to Maori wars. Yet the defeat of mission policy, and the Maori-European conflict does not seem to have sullied the Christian image: by 1854 it was reported that ninety-nine per cent of the Maoris were Christian. In the Far East, by contrast, the missionaries undoubtedly supported the use of force by the great western powers to open up opportunities. In 1839–42, the consequence of the first Opium War was the cession of Hong Kong to Britain, and the transfer to the great powers of five treaty ports. Missionaries took the view that the deplorable war had been in some way manipulated by divine providence to make China accessible to the gospel. Missionary societies from the main sects sent teams to all six places.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  preserve himself in good health, to receive further education and a more thorough professional training; the right to housing, work, suitable leisure and recreation.’ He did not spell out his idea of the perfect form of government, but his advocacy of a written constitution, the separation of powers, and built-in checks on total government power indicated that he took the American system as his model – a system which, in his own lifetime, had very nearly been condemned by the papacy as immoral. In Pacem in Terris he accepted, for the first time in the history of the papacy, total liberty of conscience – an idea which Gregory XVI had dismissed as ‘monstrous and absurd’ and Pius IX as a cardinal error. Every human being, John wrote, should be able ‘to worship God in accordance with the right dictates of his own conscience, and to profess his religion both in private and in public’. He also indicated a desire to come to terms with Socialism, Communism and other materialist philosophies. He distinguished between Communism as such, which he termed ‘a false philosophy’, and many of its aspects, which might be welcome in practical political programmes, ‘even when such a programme draws its origins and inspiration from such a philosophy’. Such consequences, he argued, were more important than philosophical logic, since theory, as he put it, ‘was subject to practical considerations’ and the practice of Communist states might well contain ‘good and commendable elements’. Communist leaders might be theoretically committed to world revolution but in concrete terms it was possible and even likely they would settle for peaceful coexistence; the Church should recognize this probability and turn it to good advantage. Statesmen should strive for disarmament, disputes should be settled through the United Nations, and all should work ‘towards the establishment of a juridical and political organization of the world community’. He indicated that he was more concerned with the poor countries of the Third World than with the ‘lost territories’ of eastern Europe. He urged the rich nations to help underdeveloped countries ‘in a way which guarantees to them the preservation of their own freedom’. John brushed aside previous papal objections to the principle of national sovereignty. He argued that the collective right of a nation to national independence was merely an extension of the rights of an individual, which it was the duty of the Church to uphold. In Africa and Asia, the Church should not merely cease to oppose necessary changes, but should identify itself with them. And it should protest against the attempt to impose uniform western ideas; the countries of the Third World ‘have often preserved in their ancient traditions an acute and vital awareness of the more important human values. To attempt to undermine this national integrity is essentially immoral.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The Church could wait, as it had waited before. It would remain in its fortress, avoiding contact with the evils of compromise, and from time to time lifting its admonitory voice. It was a policy of splendid isolation; or, if the isolation was not splendid, it was at least holy. The policy changed, in almost all its aspects, from the end of 1958 when Angelo Roncalli succeeded Pius as Pope John XXIII. Roncalli was in his late seventies; he had been a popular patriarch of Venice and it was thought he would prove an acceptable and moderate transitional pope until the time came to hand over to a younger and more liberal generation. In fact he quickly inaugurated an era of rapid change. John, though conservative in such matters as liturgy and devotions, was a political liberal who had begun his career as secretary to Bishop Radini of Bergamo, a protégé of Cardinal Rampolla. He had spent most of his career as a papal diplomat en poste and had never involved himself in Vatican politics, but he had always remained loosely attached to the progressive forces within the Church. Unlike Pius XII he was an extrovert, a voluble and well-adjusted hedonist who loved human contact and enormously enjoyed pastoral work. He was a historian, not a theologian, and thus he was not afraid of change but rather welcomed it as a sign of growth and greater illumination. His favourite words were aggiornamento (‘bringing up to date’) and convivienza (‘living together’). Not only did he immediately open the windows and let fresh air into Pius’s musty and antique court, but he changed papal policy in three vital respects. First he inaugurated a new, Rome-centred ecumenical movement, which he placed under the direction of a secretariat headed by the German Jesuit-diplomat Cardinal Bea. Second, he opened up lines of communication with the Communist world, and ended the policy of ‘holy isolation’. Third he set in motion a process of democratization within the Church by summoning a general council. Of these the most important was the council – announced within three months of John’s election to a stunned and silent group of curial cardinals – because it also embraced the other two aspects of the new policies. John was unable to make the council ecumenical in the true sense, since it proved impossible to arrange an agreed representation of the Orthodox churches, and therefore the Protestants could not be invited either.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  As Commissary James Blair reported in 1743: ‘From being an instrument of wealth, [slavery] has become a moulding power, leaving it a vexed question which controlled society most, the African slave or his master.’ Yet the collapse of the total Christian society did not lead to a growth of secularism. In America as a whole, religion continued to be the dynamic of society and history. The difference was that Christianity now became a voluntary movement, or series of movements, rather than a compulsory framework. And it was these movements which determined the shape of America’s constitutional and social development. The multiplicity of America’s religious structure, and the continuance of the millenarian ideal, gave revivalism the opportunity to act as a unifying, national force. Moreover, the establishment of the voluntary principle led to an identification, in the minds of all religious groups, of Christian enthusiasm with political liberty. As John Adams put it in 1765, in his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law: ‘Under the execrable race of the Stuarts, the struggle between the people and the confederacy of temporal and spiritual tyranny became formidable, violent and bloody. It was this great struggle that peopled America. It was not religion alone, as was commonly supposed, but it was a love of universal liberty, and a hatred, a dread, a horror of the internal confederacy of ecclesiastical, hierarchical and despotic rulers that projected, conducted and accomplished the settlement of America.’ That being so, revivalism tended to precede political action; and it was the so-called Great Awakening of the 1730s and after which prepared the American Revolution. The Awakening was a much more complicated phenomenon than Wesley’s revival in England, since it combined rumbustious and unsophisticated mass-evangelism with the ideas of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Both shared a distrust of doctrinal ideas, a stress on morality and ethics, an ecumenical spirit. The Awakeners would agree with Wesley: ‘I . . . refuse to be distinguished from other men by any but the common principles of Christianity. . . . Dost thou love and fear God? It is enough! I give thee the right hand of fellowship.’ But Jonathan Edwards, who first preached the revival in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1733, was also in the mainstream of the Erasmian intellectual tradition. He was the pupil, at New Haven, of Samuel Johnson, whose work reflected the liberation from the ancient theological system as it was still taught in the seventeenth century – ‘a curious cobweb of distributions and definitions’, as he termed it. Johnson traced his own intellectual birth to the reading of Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, which he says left him ‘like one at once emerging out of a glimmer of twilight into the full sunshine of open day’. He read and admired Bishop Berkeley’s attempt to reconcile idealism, reason and Christian belief, and he defended ‘natural’ law, holding morality to be ‘the same thing as the religion of Nature’, not indeed discoverable without revelation but ‘founded on the first principles of reason and nature’.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  It was marked by a general erosion of ecclesiastical authority, the assertion of lay opinion, the defiance of superiors, the spread of public debate among Catholics, the defection of many clergy and nuns, and the decline of papal prestige. And, for perhaps the first time since the Reformation, the number of practising Catholic Christians owing allegiance to Rome began to contract.4 Catholicism appeared to have joined Protestantism and Orthodoxy in a posture of decline. Yet it must be asked: is the expression ‘decline’ appropriate? If the claims of Christianity are true, the number of those who publicly acknowledge them is of small importance; if they are not true, the matter is scarcely worth discussing. In religion, quantitative judgments do not apply. What may, in the future, seem far more significant about this period is the new ecumenical spirit, the offspring of the Second Vatican Council. On 7 December 1965, the Bishop of Rome, Pope Paul VI, and the Bishop of New Rome, the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras, at a simultaneous ceremony in Rome and Istanbul, performed what was termed a ‘joint act’, and lifted the mutual excommunications imposed by their predecessors nine hundred years before in 1054. On 23 March 1966, the Bishop of Rome and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Ramsay, exchanged the kiss of peace before the altar of the Sistine Chapel. Both these symbolic gestures have been followed by detailed and continuing negotiations. Progress has been made on marginal matters, such as the status of Anglican orders. Whether the churches reunite will depend entirely on the question of authority, which always has been, and remains, the real source of division within Christianity.5 And the definition of authority between the churches cannot be settled until the Catholic Church determines the source of ecclesiastical power within itself – an issue which the Vatican Council raised but left unresolved. As we have seen, the argument about the control of the Christian Church is almost as old as Christianity itself; and it may be that it will continue so long as there are men and women who assert that Christ was God, and who await the parousia. Perhaps it is part of the providential plan that the organization of Christianity should be a perpetual source of discord. Who can say? We should remember the words of St Paul, towards the end of his letter to the Romans, the key document of the faith: ‘O depth of wealth, wisdom and knowledge in God! How unsearchable his judgments, how untraceable his ways! Who knows the mind of the Lord? Who has been his counsellor?’ EpilogueIT SHOULD BE EVIDENT from this account of 2,000 years of Christian history that the rise of the faith, and its developing relationship with society, were not fortuitous. The Christians appeared at a time when there was a wide, and urgent, if unformulated need for a monotheistic cult in the Graeco-Roman world.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  others have done before us, and as indeed they are doing still. We could go and stay together on one of our various country estates, shunning at all costs the lewd practices of our fellow citizens and feasting and merrymaking as best we may without in any way overstepping the bounds of what is reasonable. ‘There we shall hear the birds singing, we shall see fresh green hills and plains, fields of corn undulating like the sea, and trees of at least a thousand different species; and we shall have a clearer view of the heavens, which, troubled though they are, do not however deny us their eternal beauties, so much more fair to look upon than the desolate walls of our city. Moreover the country air is much more refreshing, the necessities of life in such a time as this are more abundant, and there are fewer obstacles to contend with. For although the farmworkers are dying there in the same way as the townspeople here in Florence, the spectacle is less harrowing inasmuch as the houses and people are more widely scattered. Besides, unless I am mistaken we shall not be abandoning anyone by going away from here; on the contrary, we may fairly claim that we are the ones who have been abandoned, for our kinsfolk are either dead or fled, and have left us to fend for ourselves in the midst of all this affliction, as though disowning us completely. ‘Hence no one can reproach us for taking the course I have advocated, whereas if we do nothing we shall inevitably be confronted with distress and mourning, and possibly forfeit our lives into the bargain. Let us therefore do as I suggest, taking our maidservants with us and seeing to the dispatch of all the things we shall need. We can move from place to place, spending one day here and another there, pursuing whatever pleasures and entertainments the present times will afford. In this way of life we shall continue until such time as we discover (provided we are spared from early death) the end decreed by Heaven for these terrible events. You must remember, after all, that it is no more unseemly for us to go away and thus preserve our own honour than it is for most other women to remain here and forfeit theirs.’ Having listened to Pampinea’s suggestion, the other ladies not only applauded it but were so eager to carry it into effect that they had already begun to work out the details amongst themselves, as though they wanted to rise from their pews and set off without further ado. But Filomena, being more prudent than the others, said: ‘Pampinea’s arguments, ladies, are most convincing, but we should not follow her advice as hastily as you appear to wish.