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 In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  In Chapter 4 we saw the agreement that was forged at Jerusalem between Peter’s mission to Christian Judaism and Paul’s mission to Christian paganism. We suggest that James led an assembly in Jerusalem that practiced community life with regard to their possessions, just as Acts says. In 2:44–45 they had “all things in common,” and in 4:32–5:11 “no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.” They were known, therefore, as the Poor Ones, just as Jesus had said, “Blessed are the poor.” That program would be similar to the lifestyle of the Qumran Essenes, that is, a divine share-life in opposition to the normalcy of human greed-life. The Jerusalem agreement of Galatians 2:10 was for donations from Christian paganism for the specific support of that ideal, utopian, eschatological model community in Jerusalem. This is also the second major case in this book when it is absolutely necessary to combine Paul’s letters and Luke’s Acts, and the reason is the same. Our first chapter on the God-worshipers showed how Paul never mentions them, but Luke does so repeatedly. In this present chapter on the collection, we have the reverse, Acts never mentions that collection, but Paul does so repeatedly. Still, in both cases, each has material that only makes sense by adding in the other’s data. That correlation on the collection is as follows: (1) Agreement:Galatians 2:10(2) Program:1 Corinthians 16:1–4;2 Corinthians 8–9Acts 11:27–30(3) Delivery:Romans 15:25–31Acts 20:4(4) Condition:Acts 21:17–26(5) Disaster:Acts 21:27–36In other words, we know, from Paul, about gathering the collection, but only from Acts about its delivery. Paul collected the money from his four provinces, Galatia, Macedonia, Achaia, and Asia but, for obvious reasons of propriety, had representatives take each province’s own contribution. Here in the letter to the Romans is his final recorded statement on the collection as the great symbolic act of unity between Christian Judaism and Christian paganism: At present, however, I am going to Jerusalem in a ministry to the saints; for Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to share their resources with the poor among the saints at Jerusalem. They were pleased to do this, and indeed they owe it to them; for if the Gentiles have come to share in their spiritual blessings, they ought also to be of service to them in material things. So, when I have completed this, and have delivered to them what has been collected, I will set out by way of you to Spain; and I know that when I come to you, I will come in the fullness of the blessing of Christ. I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to join me in earnest prayer to God on my behalf, that I may be rescued from the unbelievers in Judea, and that my ministry to Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints. (15:25–31)

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of free institutions.’ And Americans, he added, held religion ‘to be indispensible to the maintenance of republican institutions’. Some of them saw it as much more than this. In the period 1750–1820, Presbyterianism and Congregationalism, the two formative sects of American Protestantism, ceased to be dominant, and, in numbers at any rate, the Baptists and Wesleyans took over. In New England, as indeed in England itself, many well-educated Presbyterians, under the impact of the Enlightenment, became Unitarians; and it was the New England Unitarians who created the so-called American Renaissance, centred round the North American Review (1815) and the Christian Examiner (1824), papers whose editors included William Emerson, the father of the poet, Edward Everett, George Ticknor, Jared Sparks, Richard Henry Dana, Henry Adams, James Russell Lowell and Edward Everett Hale. Harvard, whose staff included John Quincy Adams, Longfellow, Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes, was largely Unitarian. Unitarianism was, to a great extent, the religion of the élite – critics joked that its preaching was limited to ‘the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man and the neighbourhood of Boston’. In fact it had its ultimate roots in Arminianism and the third force, and could trace its pedigree not so much to the Founding Fathers as to Erasmus himself, who saw true Christianity in full alliance with the Renaissance. One could even push it back further, for the idea of human rebirth, the ‘new man’ was the central point of St Paul’s moral theology. ‘Christianity’, wrote William Ellery Channing, ‘. . . should come forth from the darkness and corruption of the past in its own celestial splendour and in its divine simplicity. It should be comprehended as having but one purpose, the perfection of human nature, the elevation of men into nobler beings.’ The declaration of the American Unitarian Association (1853) spoke of God ‘forever sweeping the nations with regenerating gales from heaven, and visiting the hearts of men with celestial solicitations’. The prime instrument in this progressive process was the American Republic itself. Jonathan Edwards had predicted in 1740: ‘It is not unlikely that this work of God’s spirit, that is so extraordinary and wonderful, is the dawning, or at least the prelude, of that glorious work of God so often foretold in scripture, which in the 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.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The Christian assumption that the world was about 5,000 years old (Archbishop Ussher of Armagh, in his Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti, 1650–4, calculated that the date of Creation was 4004 BC , and this was widely accepted, especially in the Protestant world) was belied by Chinese chronology. If the Chinese were right on this point, might they not be right on others? To what extent could their burial customs or prayers, so crucial in almost every religion, be reconciled to Christian theory and practice? The Chinese were clearly not prepared to abandon what Europeans crudely termed ‘ancestor worship’, but which might be reinterpreted and adjusted to the doctrine of the resurrection and the first and second coming. An elementary system on these lines was worked out by Ricci and his successors. They incorporated Chinese nuances in references to God, and used the same Chinese word for mass as was customarily used for ancestor-ceremonies. The compromise was secretly noted by Franciscans and Dominicans in 1631, and a triumphant complaint made to Rome. The subsequent controversy over Asian rites was gradually broadened to include a number of other variations and translations, and became an explosive issue, as indeed it deserved to be. Was Christianity to throw off its European chrysalis and become at last the world religion, united in its central truth, infinitely varied in its presentation, which Christ implicitly and Paul explicitly had always intended? There was a time when the papacy seemed to be ready to grasp the opportunity. In 1615 Paul V had authorized a Chinese liturgy, and translations were made. In 1622 Gregory XV created a new Vatican Department of Propaganda, with the object of universalizing the missionary movement and freeing it from the narrow national horizons of Spain and Portugal. Francesco Ingoli, the first Secretary of Propaganda until his death in 1649, had a personal vision of global, post-European Christianity, and his philosophy was still reflected in instructions on propaganda sent out a decade after his death: ‘Do not regard it as your task, and do not bring any pressure to bear on the peoples, to change their manners, customs and uses, unless they are evidently contrary to religion and sound morals. What could be more absurd than to transplant France, Spain, Italy or some other European country to China? Do not introduce all that to them but only the faith, which does not despise or destroy the manners and customs of any people, always supposing that they are not evil, but rather wishes to see them preserved unharmed. . . . It is the nature of men to love and treasure above everything else their own country and that which belongs to it. . . . Do not draw invidious contrasts between the customs of the peoples and those of Europe; do your utmost to adapt yourselves to them.’ The intention of this document was wise, indeed admirable; but of course the qualifying phrases laid it open to argument.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  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. Like it’s not as much a part of my oeuvre. I’m more—I don’t know what I am actually. But I know what you mean by a palate cleanser. Sometimes everything is just so bleh that you need to fucking cut it with a knife.”

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Of all the Christian sects, the Quakers were the first to adopt the view that slavery was intrinsically wrong in all circumstances. Indeed in 1780 they forced the Pennsylvania legislature to make slavery illegal in the state. It had already been declared illegal in England in 1772, when Lord Mansfield ruled against it not on religious but on Common Law grounds. Thereafter the change of Christian opinion in England was steadily brought about, as all the Christian groups were forced to declare themselves. The movement coincided with the first full-blossoming of upper-class evangelicalism, and William Wilberforce became its leader and made ending the slave-trade the principal object of its enthusiasm. Without this conjunction, slavery would undoubtedly have persisted for much longer. As it was, Britain made the trade illegal in 1807, and in 1824 it was legally ranked with piracy, and punishable by death; nine years later slavery was outlawed in all British territories. The preoccupation with slavery and the slave-trade explains why British upper-class Christians were slow to engage in the missionary venture. But of course the two were closely related, above all in Africa. So long as slaving continued, it was very difficult in practice for missionaries to get into the African interior. But once it was illegal, and the British Navy, consuls, and other agents and agencies instructed to enforce the law, the missionaries found themselves propelled powerfully forward on a ubiquitous secular force. For the first time, in effect, the British empire was giving practical, even if indirect, support to missionary endeavour. This big change coincided with the development of missionary societies not only as a huge middle-class movement but as a global Protestant phenomenon. The Anglican Church Missionary Society was formed in 1799, the British and Foreign Bible Society (Anglican and Free Church) in 1804, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (mainly Congregational) in 1810, the American Baptist Missionary Board in 1814, the Berlin Society in 1824, the Basle Mission in 1815, and mission-boards in Denmark (1821), France (1822), Sweden (1835), and Norway (1842). These societies were the first evangelical wave, to be followed by a second, much bigger one, which in the 1850s came from across the Atlantic. The United States began to take the lead in missionary enthusiasm, especially in the Far East. For the first time, women were dispatched as missionaries, eventually coming to outnumber the men; and for the first time, too, missions began regularly to operate medical as well as educational services, and so to become associated with the developing secular idea that the white man held colonies in a form of trusteeship. Inevitably, then, large-scale missionary effort became involved with colonialism and commerce. In Asian and African eyes it was inextricably involved. As the century progressed, Indian intellectuals, for instance, came to see Christianity as nothing more than an epiphenomenon of western political and commercial expansion. Westerners put it a different way.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I could have lived there. After we’d both had dinner, I touched the candle I’d purchased, rubbing my fingers up and down it, saying a little prayer for happiness. I said a prayer to the gods I wasn’t sure if I believed in—that I doubted even existed. I actually felt like the prayer was saying me. I said, “Gods, please help me to be happy. Let me do the will of the universe and be willing to do the will of the universe, whatever that even is. Clearly I know very little. Clearly what I think I know leads me only to a place of suicidal longing. I never asked to be born on the planet. I never asked to exist. But I am here now so could you maybe at least try and help me enjoy my life?” I felt silly asking to enjoy my life. I wondered if this was more than any human being should ask. Did anyone ever say that life was to be enjoyed and not suffered? What if the suffering was the point? But I didn’t want to suffer anymore. I couldn’t take it. That was clear. So I was going to try to be happy, even if it brought me more suffering. The candle burning, amethyst in hand, sitting on the deck of the beach house, I felt closer to myself than I had since before Jamie. I began to cry. Dominic made a noise, then got up into my lap and licked the tears off my face. He was licking them because they tasted good. He did the same thing when I was sweaty too. But I pretended that they were licks of love, and that’s what it felt like. Maybe this group therapy shit was working. Maybe this was self-love. I didn’t know and I didn’t really care. Where there had been a vile, depressive ooze was now quiet. The quiet itself was a thing: a sweet-filled quiet, as though the depression had been alchemized into something delicious. I looked out at the ocean. It was as though I hadn’t noticed it before, or hadn’t wanted to see it. I was scared of its wild ambivalence, so powerful and amorphous, like the depression itself. It didn’t give a fuck about me. It could eat me without even knowing. But now I saw each of the waves individually, one after the other, and felt them to be in rhythm with my heartbeat. They glimmered and splashed in the moonlight. Maybe the ocean was cheering for me after all? Maybe we were on the same side, comprised of the same things, water mostly, also mystery. The ocean swallowed things up—boats, people—but it didn’t look outside itself for fulfillment. It could take whatever skimmed its surface or it could leave it. In its depths already lived a whole world of who-knows-what. It was self-sustaining. I should be like that.

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

  The Reformation removed the obstructions which the papal church had interposed between Christ and the believer. It opened the door to direct union with him , as the only Mediator between God and man, and made his gospel accessible to every reader without the permission of a priest. It was a return to first principles, and for this very reason also a great advance. It was a revival of primitive Christianity, and at the same time a deeper apprehension and application of it than had been known before. There are three fundamental principles of the Reformation: the supremacy of the Scriptures over tradition, the supremacy of faith over works, and the supremacy of the Christian people over an exclusive priesthood. The first may be called the objective, the second the subjective, the third the social or ecclesiastical principle.7 They resolve themselves into the one principle of evangelical freedom, or freedom in Christ. The ultimate aim of evangelical Protestantism is to bring every man into living union with Christ as the only and all-sufficient Lord and Saviour from sin and death. § 6. The Authority of the Scriptures. The objective principle of Protestantism maintains that the Bible, as the inspired record of revelation, is the only infallible rule of faith and practice; in opposition to the Roman Catholic coordination of Scripture and ecclesiastical tradition, as the joint rules of faith. The teaching of the living church is by no means rejected, but subordinated to the Word of God; while the opposite theory virtually subordinates the Bible to tradition by making the latter the sole interpreter of the former and confining interpretation within the limits of an imaginary consensus patrum. In the application of the Bible principle there was considerable difference between the more conservative Lutheran and Anglican Reformation, and the more radical Zwinglian and Calvinistic Reformation; the former contained many post-scriptural and extra-scriptural traditions, usages and institutions, which the latter, in its zeal for primitive purity and simplicity, rejected as useless or dangerous; but all Reformers opposed what they regarded as anti-scriptural doctrines; and all agreed in the principle that the church has no right to impose upon the conscience articles of faith without clear warrant in the Word of God.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  The letter had been redirected from Morton; she recognized Puddle’s scholastic handwriting. And the other writing—large, rather untidy, but with strong black down-strokes and firmly crossed T’s—she stared at it thoughtfully, puckering her brows. Surely that writing, too, was familiar? Then she noticed a Paris postmark in the corner—that was strange. She tore open the envelope. Martin wrote very simply: ‘Stephen, my dear. After all these years I am sending you a letter, just in case you have not completely forgotten the existence of a man called Martin Hallam. ‘I’ve been in Paris for the past two months. I had to come across to have my eye seen to; I stopped a bullet with my head here in France—it affected the optic nerve rather badly. But the point is: if I fly over to England as I’m thinking of doing, may I come and see you? I’m a very poor hand at expressing myself—can’t do it at all when I put pen to paper—in addition to which I’m feeling nervous because you’ve become such a wonderful writer. But I do want to try and make you understand how desperately I’ve regretted our friendship—that perfect early friendship of ours seems to me now a thing well worth regretting. Believe me or not, I’ve thought of it for years; and the fault was all mine for not understanding. I was just an ignorant cub in those days. Well, anyhow, please will you see me, Stephen? I’m a lonely sort of fellow, so if you’re kind-hearted you’ll invite me to motor down to Morton, supposing you’re there; and then if you like me, we’ll take up our friendship just where it left off. We’ll pretend that we’re very young again, walking over the hills and jawing about life. Lord, what splendid companions we were in those early days—like a couple of brothers! ‘Do you think it’s queer that I’m writing all this? It does seem queer, yet I’d have written it before if I’d ever come over to stay in England; but except when I rushed across to join up, I’ve pretty well stuck to British Columbia. I don’t even know exactly where you are, for I’ve not met a soul who knows you for ages. I heard of your father’s death of course, and was terribly sorry—beyond that I’ve heard nothing; still, I fancy I’m quite safe in sending this to Morton. ‘I’m staying with my aunt, the Comtesse de Mirac; she’s English, twice married and once more a widow. She’s been a perfect angel to me. I’ve been staying with her ever since I came to Paris. Well, my dear, if you’ve forgiven my mistake—and please say you have, we were both very young—then write to me at Aunt Sarah’s address, and if you write don’t forget to put “Passy.” The posts are so erratic in France, and I’d hate to think that they’d lost your letter. Your very sincere friend, Martin Hallam.’

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

  human nature left to itself, and possessed no recuperative force, no regenerative principle. A regeneration of society could only proceed from religion. But the heathen religion had no restraint for vice, no comfort for the poor and oppressed; it was itself the muddy fountain of immorality. God, therefore, who in his infinite mercy desired not the destruction but the salvation of the race, opened in the midst of this hopeless decay of a false religion a pure fountain of holiness, love, and peace, in the only true and universal religion of his Son Jesus Christ. In the cheerless waste of pagan corruption the small and despised band of Christians was an oasis fresh with life and hope. It was the salt of the earth, and the light of the world. Poor in this world’s goods, it bore the imperishable treasures of’ the kingdom of heaven. Meek and lowly in heart, it was destined, according to the promise of the Lord without a stroke of the sword, to inherit the earth. In submission it conquered; by suffering and death it won the crown of life. The superiority of the principles of Christian ethics over the heathen standards of morality even under its most favorable forms is universally admitted. The superiority of the example of Christ over all the heathen sages is likewise admitted. The power of that peerless example was and is now as great as the power of his teaching. It is reflected in every age and every type of purity and goodness. But every period, while it shares in the common virtues and graces, has its peculiar moral physiognomy. The ante-Nicene age excelled in unworldliness, in the heroic endurance of suffering and persecution, in the contempt of death, and the hope of resurrection, in the strong sense of community, and in active benevolence. Christianity, indeed, does not come "with observation." Its deepest workings are silent and inward. The operations of divine grace commonly shun the notice of the historian, and await their revelation on the great day of account, when all that is secret shall be made known. Who can measure the depth and breadth of all those blessed experiences of forgiveness, peace, gratitude, trust in God, love for God and love for man, humility and meekness, patience and resignation, which have bloomed as vernal flowers on the soil of the renewed heart since the first Christian Pentecost? Who can tell the number and the fervor of Christian prayers and intercessions which have gone up from lonely chambers, caves, deserts, and martyrs’ graves in the silent night and the open day, for friends and foes, for all classes of mankind, even for cruel persecutors, to the throne of the exalted Saviour? But where this Christian life has taken root in the depths of the soul it must show itself in the outward conduct, and exert an elevating influence on every calling and sphere of action.

• 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.