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 A History of Christianity (1976)

  Before Erasmus died, some of the Lutheran pastors appealed to him: ‘We hope, man of greatness, that you will be the future Soloman, whose judgment will deprive every party of something, and thereby put an end to discord.’ There were, indeed, a great many reformers who believed a split in the Church was tragic and avoidable, just as there were many Catholics who were deeply disturbed by the Church’s merit-theology and its teaching about the use of the sacraments, and who were anxious to embrace the Lutheran correctives. As a result of these pressures on both sides, a series of colloquies were held 1539–41. They, if anything, provide the answer to the question: was the Reformation split avoidable? The first meeting at Hagenau, 1540, failed because of inadequate preparation. There was a further meeting at Worms, where the discussion was transferred to a diet at Regensburg in March 1541; but in the meantime secret talks were held in the second half of December 1540. Among those taking part were Gropper, a Catholic eirenic and humanist, Granvella, the imperial chancellor, Bucer and Capito. Gropper had already begun a reform of the Cologne diocese, on behalf of the archbishop, and he feared it would be jeopardized by Catholic and Lutheran extremists. He had already set out in his Enchiridion Christianae Institutionis (1538), a view of justification which was close to that of Contarini and which he hoped would reconcile the Catholic and Protestant positions. Both he and the chancellor were Erasmians. For the colloquy itself, Contarini was appointed papal legate. He came full of goodwill, convinced that justification was the heart of the matter, and that once this was resolved, others, such as papal authority and the sacraments, would fall into place. Like Luther, he had come to justification through Augustine, and did not see what the Catholic objection to it could be: ‘I have truly come to the firm conclusion,’ he wrote in 1523, ‘that no one can justify himself by his works . . . one must turn to the divine grace which can be obtained through faith in Jesus Christ. . . . Since therefore the foundation of the Lutheran edifice is true, we must say nothing against it but we must accept it as true and Catholic, indeed as the foundation of the Christian religion.’ (The Inquisition suppressed such passages in the Venetian edition of his works of 1584.) The colloquy was opened by Charles V in person, who expressed hope that unity could be rapidly restored in the face of the renewed Turkish pressure. Contarini said: ‘How great will be the fruit of unity, and how profound the gratitude of all mankind.’ Bucer replied: ‘Both sides have failed. Some of us have over-emphasized unimportant points, and others have not adequately reformed obvious abuses.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The first, with which we have already dealt, was the justification of constructive persecution: the idea that a heretic should not be expelled but, on the contrary, be compelled to recant and conform, or be destroyed – ‘Compel them to come in.’ His second contribution was in some ways even more sinister because it implied constructive censorship. Augustine believed that it was the duty of the orthodox intellectual to identify incipient heresy, bring it to the surface and expose it, and so force those responsible either to abandon their line of inquiry altogether or accept heretical status. These were the tactics Augustine employed against Pelagius and his followers. Augustine must have seen Pelagius briefly at the great confrontation in Carthage in 411, which Pelagius attended. But the men never met or conversed. They were roughly the same age and had gone to Rome – Pelagius from Britain – at almost the same time. But Pelagius had stayed there, a pious, well-educated layman, much in demand in high-born ascetic circles. He had many powerful supporters among the aristocracy and a number of rich, young and earnest followers. Basically, Pelagius was a reformer. Against the prevailing trend of his age, he looked back to Origen and the idea of Christianity as a great moral force changing and improving society, helping men to become more worthy, more socially useful and responsible. He thought the constricting force of the pagan social habits of the past could be removed. Christianity would become an active, ameliorative element not only among imperial citizens, but among the barbarians without, and the semi-barbarians within, its frontiers. Rich Christians should give away their money to the poor, set a good example, lead exemplary lives. Like Origen, he thought there was no such thing as a completely lost soul. The road to improvement was open to all. It was wrong to say: ‘God’s commands are too difficult to be carried out.’ The fall of Rome, from which he fled, first to Africa, then to the more liberal East, had not dismayed him. It confirmed the need for reform, to create new structures. What mattered was the potentiality of man, his freedom to choose good, and the marvellous virtues with which God had endowed him, sometimes buried deep but waiting to be unearthed. Pelagius had a classical sense of the resources and authority of the human mind. Being a Latinized colonial, he had perhaps more faith in the qualities that had made the empire than its frightened fifth-century ruling class. After the sack of Rome he wrote, in 414, to a wealthy and pious woman, Demetrias, a message of hope and encouragement. Of course, he argued, man could save himself, in the next world as well as in this. ‘We make the God of knowledge guilty of twofold ignorance – of not knowing what he has made, and not knowing what he has commanded.

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

  What are the chances that at this very moment as I admit defeat, a tall, handsome man will walk in alone? He is heading toward me as if we are in a movie in which the music fades to the background while our hearts draw magnetically toward one another, but at the last minute he veers to the side and takes a stool two seats away that the band member, who is now warming up, has vacated. He is dressed in an untucked white button-down shirt over jeans, with black-framed glasses and no wedding ring. I know that I need to hear him order as evidence of whether or not someone is joining him, so I lean less subtly than I would like to the side while bracing myself against the bar so I don’t fall off my seat, and listen to him order food and one – only one – beer. Encouraged, I feel a bit like a cat who has just spotted her mouse. “Do you know this band?” he leans over to ask after a couple of minutes during which I not all that casually eye him. My eyes flare open – is this really happening? “Yes, a bit,” I say. “What kind of music do they play?” “Well, when I say I know them, I mean I looked them up on Spotify on the way here and listened to one song,” I admit, and then add, “but I like what I heard so I guess you could say I’m an expert.” “So you’re actually the band’s manager?” he asks and we laugh. I deflate as a woman appears between us. No-nonsense, outfitted in rain gear and with cropped grey hair, she asks if the seat between us is free. We both say yes and then I turn back to my can of wine, he to his beer, and we quietly watch the band warm up. Should I have said no and then moved over a seat? Would that have seemed too eager? I am once again wishing there was a manual for how this is done. A few minutes later, he passes by on his way back from the food window and offers me French fries from his basket. I smile and take one and note that he’s eating my ideal dinner – fries and a salad – but then he sits down on his stool, and I am alone again. Is he passing fries to any other women here? “Since you’re the manager, do you know when the band is going to start?” he leans over the woman between us a few minutes later to ask. “It’s going to be a while,” I say. “What?” he shouts. It’s loud in here and we are gracelessly leaning over this poor woman as we attempt to keep our conversation going. “Would you like to trade seats with me?” she asks, looking at me and then at him and then back at me when he doesn’t answer.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  He was short and inclined to be rather thick-set with a heavy but intellectual face—a strong face, much lined for a man of thirty. His eyes had the patient, questioning expression common to the eyes of most animals and to those of all slowly evolving races. He shook hands very quietly with Stephen and Mary. Henry was tall and as black as a coal; a fine, upstanding, but coarse-lipped young negro, with a roving glance and a self-assured manner. He remarked: ‘Glad to meet you, Miss Gordon—Miss Llewellyn,’ and plumped himself down at Mary’s side, where he started to make conversation, too glibly . Valérie Seymour was soon talking to Lincoln with a friendliness that put him at his ease—just at first he had seemed a little self-conscious. But Pat was much more reserved in her manner, having hailed from abolitionist Boston. Wanda said abruptly: ‘Can I have a drink, Jamie?’ Brockett poured her out a stiff brandy and soda. Adolphe Blanc sat on the floor hugging his knees; and presently Dupont the sculptor strolled in—being minus his mistress he migrated to Stephen. Then Lincoln seated himself at the piano, touching the keys with firm, expert fingers, while Henry stood beside him very straight and long and lifted up his voice which was velvet smooth, yet as clear and insistent as the call of a clarion: ‘Deep, river, my home is over Jordan. Deep river—Lord, I want to cross over into camp ground, Lord, I want to cross over into camp ground, Lord, I want to cross over into camp ground, Lord, I want to cross over into camp ground. . . .’ And all the hope of the utterly hopeless of this world, who must live by their ultimate salvation, all the terrible, aching, homesick hope that is born of the infinite pain of the spirit, seemed to break from this man and shake those who listened, so that they sat with bent heads and clasped hands—they who were also among the hopeless sat with bent heads and clasped hands as they listened. . . . Even Valérie Seymour forgot to be pagan. He was not an exemplary young negro; indeed he could be the reverse very often. A crude animal Henry could be at times, with a taste for liquor and a lust for women—just a primitive force rendered dangerous by drink, rendered offensive by civilization. Yet as he sang his sins seemed to drop from him, leaving him pure, unashamed, triumphant. He sang to his God, to the God of his soul, Who would some day blot out all the sins of the world, and make vast reparation for every injustice: ‘My home is over Jordan, Lord, I want to cross over into camp ground.’ Lincoln’s deep bass voice kept up a low sobbing. From time to time only did he break into words; but as he played on he rocked his body: ‘Lord, I want to cross over into camp ground.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  It might be argued that Acts and the Epistles require more: but Locke quoted St John’s Gospel, generally believed to be later than them, as confirming the other gospels in requiring only the one central belief. It is Locke’s demonstration that only this one dogma is necessary which confirms, at least to his satisfaction, that Christianity is a religion of reason and common sense, because the simplicity makes it workable. The fact that Jesus is the Son of God is ‘a plain, intelligible proposition; and the all-merciful God seems here to have consulted the poor of this world and the bulk of mankind. These are articles that the labouring and illiterate man may comprehend. This is a religion suited to vulgar capacities and the state of mankind in this world destined to labour and travail. The writers and wranglers in religion fill it with niceties and dress it up with notions which they make necessary and fundamental parts of it, as if there were no way into the church but through the Academy or the Lyceum. The greatest part of mankind have not leisure for learning and logic and superfine distinctions in the schools.’ Here, indeed, was an argument Erasmus, who wanted the ploughboy to sing the psalms as he worked, would have relished. And of course it demolished at a stroke the opponents of the Latitudinarians on either side of the spectrum. Naturally, as an Anglican, Locke does not deny other doctrines. In his Vindication and Second Vindication, he defended himself against the charge that he was a Deist or a Unitarian. But he insisted that, once you departed from his definition of what was absolutely essential, you had to set up on your own, without the assistance of reason, as ‘arbiter and dispenser’ – and so you produced your own set of doctrines, typical of all systems ‘set up by particular men or parties as the just measure of every man’s faith’. It was, Locke argued, precisely because men had departed from his minimum definition based on reason that Europe had sunk into confusion, division and religious war. As a younger man, he had used this as an argument for enforcement of uniformity. The exercise of private judgment in religious affairs leads to ‘readiness for violence and cruelty’ and ‘grows into dangerous factions and tumults’, especially ‘among a people that are ready to conclude God dishonoured upon every small deviation from that way of his worship which either education or interest has made sacred to them, and that therefore they ought to vindicate the cause of God with swords in their hands.’ But in the next thirty years he changed his mind completely.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The reason why the papacy had become so weak went back to the papal-Habsburg alliance of the sixteenth century. The popes had become accustomed to identifying their policies and interests with those of the great ruling Catholic families of Europe, and so had become in effect subservient to royalist states. This, of course, ran directly counter to the triumphalism of Hildebrand, Innocent III and Boniface VIII. Pius VII, no hero and no great intellect, halted and reversed the disastrous trend. He was one of those Italians who found the infusion of French revolutionary ideas welcome, at any rate up to a point. He had been Bishop of Imola when Napoleon invaded, and wrote ‘Liberty and Equality’ at the top of his letters. He urged in a sermon: ‘Be good Christians, and you will be good democrats. The early Christians were full of the spirit of democracy.’ Elected Pope in 1800, his decision to abandon legitimacy and negotiate a settlement with Napoleon allowed the papacy to emerge, once more, as an independent force in European affairs. Now this occurred at precisely the moment when the failure of deism and rationalism in France had revealed the inherent, residual strength of Christianity, and indeed Catholic Christianity, as a mass religion, especially among the bourgeois, petit-bourgeois and peasants to whom the revolution had accorded political power. The point, and the conjunction, was brilliantly perceived by Châteaubriand, who published his Génie du Christianisme in 1802, just before the new concordat was celebrated with a Te Deum in Nôtre Dame. The horrible events of the past decade, he argued, had demonstrated the strength of Christian theodicy: Christians in their thousands had been able to face suffering and death, and transform these experiences, whereas to deists the killings and executions had merely served to call into question the existence of God. Where Napoleon made a Voltairian point, Châteaubriand made a Pascalian one. Christianity was not just a reinforcement of patriotism; it was – if not for all, then for a large and vocal minority – a continuous, living force, which responded to the permanent needs of the human spirit. Christianity not only spiritualized suffering but actually built on it. France, in particular, now had a lot of martyrs, whose blood refreshed the faith of those who remained. The stage was thus set for a Catholic revival, which the institution of the papacy could internationalize: ‘If Rome understands her position truly, she never had before her such great hopes, such a brilliant destiny. We say hopes for we count tribulations in the number of things that the church of Jesus Christ desires.’ This proved to be an astute prediction, though for a number of additional reasons which Châteaubriand could not exactly foresee at the time. The Revolution and its consequences throughout Europe and the world did not assist the papacy directly, but it damaged forces and institutions which were inimical to it.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  It was not built on the remains of a Catholic Church, or an Establishment; it had no clericalism or anti-clericalism. In all these respects it differed profoundly from a world shaped by Augustinian principles. It had a traditionless tradition, starting afresh with a set of Protestant assumptions, taken for granted, self-evident, as the basis for a common national creed. In any case, the idea of a gigantic Geneva was quickly rendered impossible by events. A Calvinist Church-State could not maintain itself without a terrifying apparatus of repression: even Geneva had had to expel people. Some of the problems of the Old World rapidly reproduced themselves in the New. Dissidents like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson emerged, were ejected and took refuge in the future Rhode Island, termed by the orthodox ‘the sewer of New England’. Founding Providence, Williams wrote: ‘I desired it might be for a shelter for persons distressed for conscience.’ In 1644 he published his defence of religious freedom, The Bloody Tenent of Persecution for the Cause of Conscience Discussed, and his new instrument of government declared that ‘the form of government established in Providence Planations is DEMOCRATICAL, that is to say, a government held by the free and voluntary consent of all, or the greater part, of the free inhabitants.’ To its laws and penalties for transgressions, it added: ‘And otherwise than thus, what is herein forbidden, all men may walk as their consciences persuade them, every one in the name of his God. And let the saints of the Most High walk in this colony without molestation, in the name of Jehovah their God, for ever and ever.’ This was confirmed by royal charter in 1663: ‘No person within the said colony, at any time hereafter, shall be in any wise molested, punished, disquieted or called in question, for any differences in opinion in matters of religion, and who do not actually disturb the civil peace of our said colony; but that all . . . may from time to time, and at all times hereafter, freely and fully have and enjoy his and their own judgments and consciences, in matters of religious concernments.’ This was the first commonwealth in modern history to make religious freedom, as opposed to a mere degree of toleration, the principle of its existence, and to make this a reason for separating Church and State. Its existence, of course, opened the door to the Quakers and the Baptists, and indeed to missionaries from the Congregationalists of the north and the Anglicans of the south. In fact, once this decisive breach had been made, it was inevitable that America, with its lay predominance, should move steadily towards religious liberty and the separation of Church and State, and that the vision should cease to be Augustinian and become Erasmian. Economic factors pushed strongly in this direction.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  It must be respected, and as far as possible strengthened and developed, so that it may remain what it is: a foundation of true civilization.’ To this John added, by way of concluding his political and international philosophy, a total condemnation of racialism: ‘Truth calls for the elimination of every trace of racial discrimination, and the consequent recognition of the inviolable principle that all states are by nature equal in dignity.... The fact is that no one can be by nature superior to his fellows, since all men are equally noble in natural dignity.... Each state is like a body, the members of which are human beings.’ In sum, the two encyclicals represented an attempt by John to align Catholic thinking with the progressive economic and political wisdom of his day, and they thus marked a benign revolution in papal attitudes. John saw the council itself as the beginning of a transfer of power from the papal monarchy to the Church as a whole. It was a parliament of the episcopate and he was a constitutional sovereign. He wished to reverse the process whereby, during the nineteenth century, the bishops had been deprived of their independence and had become mere functionaries of a populist papacy. Indeed, he wanted to go further back still to the abortive conciliar theory of the fifteenth century. It had been argued, at the Council of Basle (1431–39), that Christ-delegated authority lay in the Church as a whole. ‘Supreme power’, said John of Segovia, ‘... belongs to the church continuously, permanently, invariably and perpetually.’ Such power could not be alienated any more than a person could discard his own qualities: ‘Supreme power resides first in the community itself like a personal sense or inborn virtue.’ The Second Vatican Council was a reassertion of this view, and a denial that power could be permanently alienated to a monarchical pontiff; indeed, it took up where Basle had left off. The Vatican II Decree on the Church was, in effect, a denial of the dogma of papal infallibility since it asserted that the true source of authority was plural: ‘The body of the faithful... cannot err in matters of belief. Thanks to a supernatural sense of the faith which characterizes the people as a whole, it manifests this unerring quality when, “from the bishops down to the last member of the laity”, it shows universal agreement in matters of faith and morals.’ The revival of conciliar theory, of course, automatically opened up bridges to both the Protestants and the Orthodox, since in both cases the breach had come because of the failure to allow disputes to be settled by true ecumenical methods. Yet John did not overcome the weakness of conciliar method, a weakness which had been fatal to the theory in the fifteen century. Councils were ad hoc affairs. What was also required was the embodiment of conciliar theory in the permanent machinery of church government.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The Perry ultimatum to Japan in 1853 was followed, five years later, by the arrival of the first Christian mission since the destruction of Japanese Christianity in the seventeenth century. The same year, the end of the Second Chinese War brought the further concession of toleration for Christianity throughout China, and in effect ensured the protection of missionaries and their penetration of the interior. In both countries the ability of missionaries to operate was conditional on western military preponderance, and the willingness to exert it. In Africa, the process was taken a stage further when the British government (followed by others) became directly involved in missionary enterprise. This was, to some extent, inevitable because government needed missionary help in suppressing the slave-trade, and the churches were eager to supply it. But it was in Africa, too, that the British ruling establishment first became fully involved in the evangelizing effort. The upper-class Evangelicals moved straight from anti-slavery to missions. Thomas Fowell Buxton, who succeeded Wilberforce as leader of the anti-slavery campaign, coined the phrase: ‘It is the Bible and the plough that must regenerate Africa.’ The Reverend Charles Simeon, the key figure in the Evangelical take-over of bishoprics and parishes, also began to deal in colonial appointments, and to send out his protegés to be, as he put it, ‘princes in all lands’. The Evangelicals dominated the Anglican Church Missionary Society, and in 1840 they launched the new African campaign with an enthusiastic meeting at Exeter Hall, attended by Prince Albert, Sir Robert Peel, Mr Gladstone, Lord Shaftesbury, the French Ambassador, the leader of the Irish Nationalists, Daniel O’Connell and, among others, the young David Livingstone. Archdeacon Wilberforce, William’s sonorous son, told the distinguished throng that their purpose was to make sure ‘that every ship laden with commerce might also bear the boon of everlasting life, that from no part of the earth should they receive only, without giving for the gold of the west and the spices from the east the more precious wealth – the more blessed frankincense of Christ their master’. Fowell Buxton persuaded the government to turn this pledge into reality by providing £80,000 for an expedition to open up the Niger in West Africa. It set off in 1841 in three iron ships, the Albert, the Wilberforce and the Soudan, but was defeated by malaria, which struck down 130 out of the 145 European members of the expedition, and killed 40 of them. But two more sorties were made, under Admiralty protection, and Christianity was established permanently under the aegis of a British presence which inevitably turned into a series of colonies. Some of the local African rulers, such as Eyo Honesty II, king of Greek Town in Old Calabar, were inclined to welcome Christian evangelism, believing it would strengthen their authority. In fact the missionaries tended sooner or later to provoke violence, leading to armed European intervention, a constitutional crisis, and outright annexation.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  But all were invited as observers, and by the end of the council there were over a hundred in this category, including, beside the Orthodox, accredited delegations from the Coptic church of Egypt, the Syrian Orthodox, the Ethiopian (Nestorian) Church, the Russian Orthodox Church in Exile, the Armenian Church and other Monophysite churches, the Old Catholics, the Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, Quakers, the Taize Community, the Disciples of Christ, and other Christian churches, besides the secretariat of the World Council of Churches, which the Vatican had hitherto ignored and instructed Catholics to boycott. The other Christian churches, now re-christened ‘separated brethren’, though not participating, were in fact, by private behind-the-scenes contacts, able to influence the debates and voting, and their very presence acted as a restraining force on religious bigotry during the sessions. The triumphalist rhetoric which had been so notable a feature of the First Vatican Council in 1870 was conspicuously absent. John also engaged in complicated negotiations to secure the presence at the council of full delegations from Communist countries (the term ‘the church of silence’ was now dropped). He failed with China, and also with Albania and Rumania, but he had a notable success in securing the release from prison, to attend, of Mgr Josef Slipyi, the Catholic archbishop of the Byzantine rite in Lvov, who had been in gaol for seventeen years; and in the event there were, for the opening session, seventeen bishops from Poland, four from East Germany, three from Hungary, three from Czechoslovakia, and all the Yugoslav bishops. John arranged and held the council, which opened in 1962, against strong and persistent curial opposition. His position was by no means all-powerful because, though personally popular at all levels of the Church, he was unable or unwilling to reorganize the Vatican bureacracy. It continued to operate as an independent and highly conservative force throughout John’s pontificate. But he made his wishes clear, and he trusted to the bishops of the council to do the rest. His opening speech, setting out the new papal policy, was apparently provoked by a lecture given to the Lateran University, the stronghold of Roman orthodoxy, by a former head of the Holy Office, Cardinal Pizzardo, in the autumn of 1960. Pizzardo reiterated the message of ‘holy isolation’, the Augustinian theory of the Church and the world, as updated by Pius IX and his successors, and as maintained to the end by Pius XII. It was nonsense, he said, to speak or think of ‘one world’. There were two worlds confronting mankind: the so-called ‘modern world’, which was the City of Satan and the City of God, symbolized and represented by the Vatican – he used the old fortress image again.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  supposition is right: the world was intellectually ready for Christianity. It was waiting for God. But it is unlikely the Hellenic world could have produced such a system from its own resources. Its intellectual weapons were various and powerful. It had a theory of nature and a cosmology of sorts. It had logic and mathematics, the rudiments of an empirical science. It could develop methodologies. But it lacked the imagination to relate history to speculation, to produce that startling blend of the real and the ideal which is the religious dynamic. The Greek culture was an intellectual machine for the elucidation and transformation of religious ideas. You put in a theological concept and it emerged in a highly sophisticated form, communicable to the entire civilized world. But Greece could not, or at any rate did not, produce the ideas themselves. These came from the east, from Babylon, Persia, Egypt, mostly tribal or national cults in origin, later liberated from time and place by transformation into cults attached to individual deities. These gods and goddesses lost their localities, changed their names, amalgamated themselves with other, once-national or tribal gods, and then, in turn, moved westwards and were syncretized with the gods of Greece and Rome: thus the Baal of Dolichenus was identified with Zeus and Jupiter, Isis with Ishtar and Aphrodite. By the time of Christ there were hundreds of such cults, perhaps thousands of sub-cults. There were cults for all races, classes and tastes, cults for every trade and situation in life. A new form of religious community appeared for the first time in history: not a nation celebrating its patriotic cult, but a voluntary group, in which social, racial and national distinctions were transcended: men and women coming together just as individuals, before their god. Thus the religious climate, though infinitely various, was no longer wholly bewildering: it was beginning to clear. Indeed, these new forms of voluntary religious association had a tendency to develop in certain particular and significant directions. The new gods were increasingly seen as ‘Lords’ and their worshippers as servants; there was a growth of the ruler-cult, with the king-god as saviour and his enthronement as the dawn of civilization. Above all, there was a marked tendency towards monotheism. More and more men were looking not just for a god, but God, the God. In the strongly syncretist Hellenic world, where the effort to reconcile religions was most persistent and successful, the gnostic cults which were now emerging, and which offered new keys to the universe, were based on the necessity of monotheism, even though they assumed a dualistic universe operated by rival forces of good and evil. So the religious scene was moving, progressing all the time. What it

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘Sire,’ she said, ‘if you are willing, with God’s help I can cure you of this malady within the space of a week, without causing you any bother or discomfort.’ The King refused to take her seriously, saying to himself: ‘How could a young woman succeed in doing something that has defeated the skill and knowledge of the world’s greatest physicians?’ He therefore thanked her for her good intentions, adding that he had resolved to decline all further medical advice. ‘Sire,’ said the girl, ‘you are sceptical of my powers because I am young and because I am a woman; but I would have you know that my powers of healing do not depend so much upon my knowledge as upon the assistance of God and the expertise of my late father, Master Gerard of Narbonne, who in his day was a famous physician.’ ‘Who knows?’ thought the King to himself. ‘Perhaps this woman has been sent to me by God. Why not find out what she can do? After all, she claims she can cure me in next to no time without causing me any discomfort.’ And by reasoning thus, he persuaded himself that he should put her claims to the test. ‘Young woman,’ he said. ‘Suppose we were to break our resolve, only to find that you fail to effect a cure? What penalty would you consider appropriate?’ ‘Sire,’ replied the girl. ‘Keep me under guard, and if I do not cure you within a week, order me to be burned. But what reward shall I have if I make you recover?’ ‘If you do that,’ replied the King, ‘then since you appear to be unmarried, we shall provide you with a fine and noble husband.’ ‘Sire,’ said the girl, ‘I would certainly like you to give me a husband, but only the one I shall ask for, and you may rest assured that I shall not ask you for one of your sons or any other royal personage.’ The King gave her his promise forthwith, and the girl began to apply her remedy, restoring him to health with time to spare. Whereupon the King, feeling he had quite recovered, said to her: ‘Young woman, you have clearly won yourself a husband.’ ‘In that case, sire,’ she replied, ‘I have won Bertrand of Roussillon, with whom I have been deeply in love since the days of my childhood.’ It was no laughing matter to the King that he should be obliged to give her Bertrand. But not wishing to break the promise he had given her, he sent for him and said: ‘Bertrand, you are now fully trained and mature, and it is our pleasure that you should return to govern your lands, taking with you the young lady whom we have decided you should marry.’ ‘And who, my lord, may this young lady be?’ asked Bertrand. ‘She is the one who has restored our health with her physic,’ replied the King.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  was unattainable, and belief in a future life helped the poor to accept their lot. Without a ‘respectable’ religion, people would turn to anything. ‘Religion is a sort of innoculation... which by satisfying our love of the marvellous, makes us immune to fakes and sorcerers.’ He was not sure what he believed in himself: he thought the soul was some kind of magnetic or electrical force. But he found that, in practice, foreign statesmen would not negotiate with him unless they thought he believed in God. So he set himself up as a sceptical Charlemagne, and went through an uneasy recreation of the papal coronation of 800, insisting (this time) on placing the crown on his head himself, with Pope Pius VII almost as a spectator. Napoleon’s coronation, which included an oath, wholly unacceptable to the papacy, to uphold ‘freedom of religious worship’, was seen at the time as a humiliation for the Pope. One of the Bourbon ministers remarked: ‘The sale of offices by Alexander VI is less revolting that this apostasy by his weak successor.’ In point of fact, the papacy was the one undoubted gainer of the whole Napoleonic period. In 1789 it was, as an institution, virtually on its last legs. The European crowns, and the states they represented, had been gaining ground at papal expense ever since the sixteenth century, and even in Italy. The papacy’s one instrument of international control, the Jesuits, had been tamely surrendered, and in all Catholic states the churches had become virtually independent. The reason why the papacy had become so weak went back to the papal-Habsburg alliance of the sixteenth century. The popes had become accustomed to identifying their policies and interests with those of the great ruling Catholic families of Europe, and so had become in effect subservient to royalist states. This, of course, ran directly counter to the triumphalism of Hildebrand, Innocent III and Boniface VIII. Pius VII, no hero and no great intellect, halted and reversed the disastrous trend. He was one of those Italians who found the infusion of French revolutionary ideas welcome, at any rate up to a point. He had been Bishop of Imola when Napoleon invaded, and wrote ‘Liberty and Equality’ at the top of his letters. He urged in a sermon: ‘Be good Christians, and you will be good democrats. The early Christians were full of the spirit of democracy.’ Elected Pope in 1800, his decision to abandon legitimacy and negotiate a settlement with Napoleon allowed the papacy to emerge, once more, as an independent force in European affairs. Now this occurred at precisely the moment when the failure of deism and rationalism in France had revealed the inherent, residual strength of Christianity, and

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

  I told him I liked my independence and wouldn’t require much of his time anyway. We spent our days separately, but when bedtime came I would practically skip across the lawn separating our on-campus apartments and sleep over in his room. His roommate had left for London for the semester and by the time he returned we had broken his wooden futon frame with the copious and vigorous sex we were having every night. Marriage, three kids, and twenty-seven years after that first kiss in his Volvo, he fell in love with another woman. For several months after finding out, I did little aside from scrape myself off the floor and care for our kids, through my misery and theirs. But then that dismal winter turned into a blustery spring which evolved into a lush, fragrant summer. I had a vague memory of what it felt like when I had been wildly confident, when I had laughed with ease, when I had cared if I looked good, when I had felt content, even joyful. I wanted it back and I decided to actively figure out how to accomplish that. My ensuing dating and sexual experiences were empowering, sexy and exhilarating, but they were also full of humanity. By the time we arrive at middle age, most of us have a long, twisting story of failed relationships, shifting life goals, heartbreak, abandonment, love, hope and loneliness. I found all these things in myself and in the men I slept with over the next few months. I had sex that made me feel euphoric and sex that made me feel dirty, sex that helped me find the sensuality well hidden in me most of my life and sex that left me craving intimacy and love, sex that was fumbling and cringeworthy, and sex that made me curl my toes when I recounted it to friends later. I openly shared my dating and sexual experiences with friends – all of it, the good, the bad and the ugly – and was told over and over again that these stories were unusual and I should write them down. I didn’t want to write about dating and sex though, I just wanted to live it and I didn’t believe there was anything special to share anyway. Marriages end all the time and people move on. Mine was a story as old as time and embarrassingly clichéd. Still, friends kept insisting. They said my stories were hilarious and educational, inspiring even. They all had sisters or friends whose marriages had likewise imploded but who had turned inward, not wanting to go out, feeling reduced and undesirable. These women had not embraced their newly single status with my vigor and ferocity.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Pelagius, who regarded it as normal and desirable that educated laymen should play their full part in the direction of the Church and declined absolutely to endorse an exclusive role for the clergy. The coming into existence of a Latin-speaking laity was closing the gap that had opened up in the eighth century and had been widened, on an ideological basis, by Gregory VII and his successors. This process had been going on for some time, especially in the big towns; and Erasmus was very much a product of the new urban civilization and spoke for its middle-class members – one might call him the first really articulate urbanite in the West since the fifth century. In the fifteenth century the practical difficulty of reforming the clergy effectively had virtually compelled laymen to invade spheres, particularly education, which clerics had formerly monopolized. The Church still claimed the right to control teaching but more and more schools were being endowed by laymen and run by them. When Colet founded St Paul’s in 1510, Erasmus noted: ‘Over the revenues and the entire management, he set neither priests, nor the bishop, nor the chapter as they call it, nor noblemen; but some married citizens of established reputation. And when asked the reason, he said that though there was nothing certain in human affairs, he yet found the least corruption in them.’ Erasmus, like Colet, regarded the sober, hard-working, middle- ranking townsman as the Christian élite, and the best hope for reform. Nearly all reformers took this view. They dismissed any special clerical claims. Luther glossed Galatians 3:28: ‘There is neither priest nor layman, canon nor vicar, rich nor poor, Benedictine, Carthusian, Friar Minor or Augustinian, for it is not a question of this or that status, degree or order.’ Or as Nicholas Ridley said: ‘St Peter calleth all men priests.’ William Tyndale, a typical reformer of the 1520s, wrote: ‘Thou that ministereth in the kitchen, and art but a kitchen page . . . knowest that God put thee in that office . . . if thou compare deed and deed, there is a difference between washing of dishes and preaching of the word of God; but as touching to please God, none at all . . .’ As John Knox put it a little later: ‘This is the point wherein, I say, all men are equal.’ For purposes of worship, ‘Ye be in your own houses bishops and kings.’ This downgrading of the clerical role was linked to the belief, which again Erasmus shared with all the reformers, that there could be no intermediaries between the Christian soul and the scriptures. All wanted the Bible to be as widely available as possible, and in vernacular translations. Access to the Bible, whether in the original or

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  world, and because it radiated its unshaken faith in hierarchy and authority. And it also had a single ruling figure, a charismatic or cynosure, holy and international, on whom could focus all the aspirations of traditionalists throughout the world. Why should not the Pope lead a great popular movement of faith, a triumphalism for the millions? The idea was not entirely new. Gregory VII had seen himself interposing between the people and regal tyranny; Becket, and other prelates in conflict with the State, had loudly appealed for popular support. The identification of the Church with one variety of freedom was an ancient doctrine, rooted in St Paul. But the French revolution seemed to give it new life, since it was a reminder that tyranny was multifarious – there could be tyrannies of reason and tyrannies of ideology, tyrannies of progress, and even tyrannies of liberty, equality and fraternity. An institution which upheld an international and timeless divine law was a necessary counterpoise to unbridled human assertion. In 1809, the Abbé Félicité de La Mennais began a new movement within the French Church with his Reflections, which put a distinctively Catholic case against the philosophes for the first time, and argued that Catholicism was indispensible to the well-being of the world; in Tradition (1814), a study of the episcopate and the papacy, he rejected Gallicanism and presented ultramontanism as the true and necessary face of modern Catholicism. La Mennais was an aristocrat, by birth, a Celt, a visionary, a weak, stunted man, with a thin body wrapped in a brown frock-coat, wearing a skullcap; his friends said he looked like a sacristan. He was ordained priest in 1816 and set about compiling a huge four-volume restatement of Christian faith as opposed to the prevailing rationalism of the intellectuals, the first modern summa, but presented in the form of a personal statement. In the 1820s, he emerged as a natural leader, the centre of a group of young, intense Catholic propagandists and activists, a phenomenon unknown in France since the meridian days of the Jansenists. There was Lacordaire, the Bonapartist son of a Burgundy surgeon, a convert, a priest and a liberal; and Montalembert, a romantic aristocrat, wanting to get back to the Middle Ages, which had been destroyed, in his view, by Richelieu and Louis XIV. At the study-centre La Mennais set up at the College de Juilly, many of the future bishops, preachers, apologists and historians of the French Church gathered. They also met for long and highly emotional discussions at La Chenaie, in Normandy, where in 1828 he formed the voluntary Congregation of St Peter and operated a kind of spiritual dictatorship over the abler young clerics. The

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘Pasimondas, who gloats over your undoing and fervently advocates your death, is making every effort to bring forward the celebration of his nuptials to your beloved Iphigenia, and thus enjoy the prize which Fortune had no sooner been content to bestow upon you than she angrily snatched away from you again. If he should succeed, and if you are as deeply in love as I suspect, I can readily imagine the pain you will suffer, for on that same day his brother, Ormisdas, is proposing to do the same to me by marrying Cassandra, whom I love more dearly than anything else in the world. If we are to prevent Fortune from dealing us so heavy and calamitous a blow, it seems to me that she has left us with no other recourse except the stoutness of our hearts and the strength of our right hands, with which we must seize our swords and fight our way to our ladies, you to carry off Iphigenia for the second time and I to carry off Cassandra for the first. If, therefore, you value the prospect of recovering your lady (not to mention your liberty, which must in any case mean little to you without Iphigenia), the gods have placed the means within your reach, provided you will join me in my enterprise.’ These words restored Cimon’s depleted spirits to the full, and his answer was quickly forthcoming. ‘Lysimachus,’ he said, ‘if this scheme of yours procures me the reward of which you have spoken, you could not have chosen a more resolute or loyal comrade. Therefore entrust me with whatever task you desire me to perform, and you will marvel at the energy I devote to your cause.’ ‘Two days hence,’ said Lysimachus, ‘the brides will cross their husbands’ threshold for the first time. As dusk is falling, we shall go to the house, you with your companions and I with some of mine whom I trust implicitly, and make our way inside by armed force. We shall then seize the ladies from the midst of the assembled guests, and carry them off to a ship which I have caused to be fitted out in secret, killing anyone who should have the temerity to stand in our way.’ Cimon agreed to the plan, and lay quietly in prison until the appointed time.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  progress and issue of it shall renew the world of mankind. . . . And there are many things that make it probable that this work will begin in America.’ To the Unitarian élite, the work had already, manifestly, begun. The old Calvinist theory of the Elect Nation infused nineteenth-century American patriotism. Thus Longfellow: Sail on, O Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, With all its hopes for future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate. Within the framework of this early nineteenth-century concept of the chosen people, or what was termed the ‘favouring providence’, at work by using America as the ‘melting pot’ – a new nation arising from the debris of the old – American Christianity and the Republic it infused acquired their modern characteristics. America’s most typical churches tended to leap back straight from the nineteenth century to the age of the New Testament, and to seek to combine both. The Middle Ages, the age of religious wars, were dismissed as nightmares, and the association of Christianity with force (‘compel them to come in’) was broken. The assumption of the voluntary principle, the central tenet of American Christianity, was that the personal religious convictions of individuals, freely gathered in churches and acting in voluntary associations, will gradually and necessarily permeate society by persuasion and example. It is not so much the instrumentation of the good doctrine, as the agency of the good man, which will convert and reform the world. Thus the world was seen primarily in moral terms. This became a dominant factor whether America was rejecting the Old World and seeking to quarantine herself from it (a concept used as recently as 1963 during the Cuban Missile Crisis), or whether America was embracing the world, and seeking to reform it. It was characteristic of the American State, first to reject espionage on moral grounds, then to undertake it through the Central Intelligence Agency, a moralistic institution much more like the Society of Jesus than its Soviet equivalent. In American religion, the reflective aspect of Christianity was subordinated, almost eclipsed. The Catholic-medieval emphasis on the perfection of God – and man’s mere contemplation of Him – was replaced by the idea of God as an active and exacting sovereign, and man’s energetic service in his employment. Augustinian

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

  I see myself with Tina on her deck yesterday, the two of us sipping watermelon margaritas amidst deep purple hydrangeas as the sun set, her advising me to put on a cute strapless sundress, show off my tan and go out and flirt – a good old- fashioned, non-committal flirt to shake off some of the sadness and attempt to locate the part of myself that is ready to move forward. I had adamantly protested: I’m not ready, I want to stay home with the kids and I don’t know how it’s done anymore and anyway, any man who looks at me will know I’m just a shell of a formerly decent flirt. Now her words echo through my mind – I could indeed go out, there’s really nothing to stop me but myself and the barrier of my bedroom door. It would be uncomfortable, but staying here is uncomfortable too, with the added downside of giving me way too much solitude in which to ruminate. I think strategically: if I can find a band playing, it’ll be less awkward to sit at a bar by myself as I will have something on which to focus my attention. I start googling places on my phone and it doesn’t take long to find a possibility – a music venue in town has a soul singer on the schedule. Tickets are still available, standing room only. If I get there early, maybe I can snag a seat at the bar. This is a pivotal moment for me and I hover indecisively over the “purchase ticket” option on the bar’s website as for months I’ve done little aside from force myself out of bed every morning, paste on a tentative smile for my kids and carry on with copious tears and a rage I hadn’t previously known I could even muster up. My daily theme song has been from ‘Santa Claus Is Coming To Town’ in which Frosty is learning to walk: “Put one foot in front of the other, and soon you’ll be walking across the floor. Put one foot in front of the other, and soon you’ll be walking out the door.” I’ve done nothing but walk across the floor for the past five months, but something inside of me has subtly shifted and I am suddenly aware that there is indeed a door, one that I have the power to open, even if just a crack to peek at what’s on the other side.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  converts in every single area, and from all religions; no missionary now stood alone. There were 45,000 missionaries, backed up by more than ten times that number of national workers, and a wonderful generation of native Christian leaders was beginning to emerge. The tone of the summary was optimistic; but much of its factual content was solid and unarguable. It did not seem wholly absurd, at Edinburgh in 1910, to predict that the work of St Paul would be brought to its culmination, within the lifetime of some of those present: a hard-headed, calculated and costed millenium. PART EIGHT The Nadir of Triumphalism (1870– 1975) O N 20 OCTOBER 1939, Eugenio Pacelli, who had become Pope Pius XII six months earlier, published his first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus. The Second World War had just begun. Hitler had completed the conquest of Poland, which he and his temporary ally Stalin had now dismembered and extinguished. The prospects for humanity looked infinitely sombre, and the theme of the letter, which supplied its English title, was ‘Darkness over the Earth’. Yet its tone was not shocked or indignant; it was, rather, reproachful. Pius XII was a triumphalist aristocrat, born into the ‘black nobility’ of Rome and destined almost from birth to occupy the throne of St Peter. Slightly built, austere, autocratic, single-minded to the point of obsession, confident in his own powers and superbly sure of the rights of his Church and office, he identified himself wholly with the divine wisdom. Surveying a tragic and violent world from the serene, uncontaminated walls of the papal fortress, he judged that the Catholic Church had been absolutely right to reject modern civilization and to retire within its citadel. The horrors of 1939, wrote Pius, were not fortuitous or unexpected. They arose inevitably from mankind’s decision to reject the truth as expounded by an infallible papacy:’... the reason why the principles of morality in general have long since been set aside in Europe is the defection of so many minds from Christian doctrine of which Blessed Peter’s See is the appointed guardian and teacher.’ In the earliest medieval times the nations of Europe ‘had been welded together by that doctrine, and it was the Christian spirit which formed them’. In turn, they could pass it on to others. Then came the Reformation, the beginning of tragedy, ‘when many of the