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

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

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

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

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

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

• From The Decameron (1353)

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

• 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.

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  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 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)

  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 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

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  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

• From The Decameron (1353)

  For a long time now, the fair lady had been a plaything in the hands of Fortune, but the moment was approaching when her trials would be over. When she espied Antigono, she recalled having seen him in Alexandria, where he once occupied a position of some importance in her father’s service. Knowing that her merchant was away, and being suddenly filled with the hope that there might be some possibility of returning once more to her regal status with the help of this man’s advice, she sent for him at the earliest opportunity. When he called upon her, she shyly asked whether she was right in thinking him to be Antigono of Famagusta. Antigono said that he was, adding: ‘I have an idea, ma’am, that I have seen you before, but I cannot for the life of me remember where. Pray be good enough, therefore, if you have no objection, to remind me who you are.’ On hearing that this was indeed the man she had assumed him to be, the lady burst into tears and threw her arms round his neck, and presently she asked her highly astonished visitor whether he had ever seen her in Alexandria. No sooner had she put the question than Antigono recognized her as the Sultan’s daughter Alatiel, whom everybody believed to be drowned at sea, and he prepared to make her the ceremonial bow that was her due. But she would not allow this and asked him instead to come and sit down with her for a while. Complying, Antigono asked her in reverential tones how, when and whence she had come to Cyprus, and told her that the whole Egyptian nation had been convinced, for many years, that she had been drowned at sea. ‘I wish to goodness they were right,’ said the lady, ‘and I think my father would share my opinion if he were ever to discover the sort of life I have led.’ And so saying, she started crying prodigiously all over again, whereupon Antigono said to her: ‘My lady, it is too soon for you to go upsetting yourself like this. Tell me about your misfortunes, if you like, and about the life you have been living. Possibly we shall find that the point has been reached where we shall be able, with God’s help, to devise some happy outcome to your dilemma.’

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  ‘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. As if in forgetfulness of human frailty, which he made, he had laid upon men commandments which they could not bear . . . so that God seems to have been seeking not so much our salvation as our punishment. . . . No one knows better the measure of our strength than he who gave us our strength; and no one has a better understanding of what is within our power than he who endowed us with the very resources of our power. He has not willed to command anything impossible, for he is righteous; and he will not condemn a man for what he could not help, for he is holy,’ The Christian should have heroic fortitude like Job. And he should have compassion, should ‘feel the pain of others as if it were his own, and be moved to tears by the grief of other men’. With much of this the young Augustine might have not have disagreed. His earliest writings show an insistence on free will which was close to Pelagius’s own. Later, as a militant bishop and persecutor, Augustine developed a grim determinism of his own. He took from Paul’s epistle to the Romans a theory of grace and election which was not wholly unlike Calvin’s. ‘This is the predestination of the saints,’ he wrote, ‘the prescience and preparation of the benefits of God, whereby whoever are set free are most certainly set free. And where are the rest left by the just judgment of God, save in that mass of perdition, where were left the men of Tyre and the Sidonians, who were also capable of belief, had they but seen those wonderful works

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

  Does he wish last night hadn’t happened? Hudson jumps in the pool to join Georgia and they play their usual games, which involve a combination of shrieking, laughter and, eventually, tears. Michael and I are left alone on the chair, watching them and unsure what to talk about when we aren’t talking about them. In moments like this, I have to remind myself that we are not who we used to be to each other, that a tranquil moment like this is hard-won. “Michael,” I start. “Yes?” He swivels his head to look at me, seeming surprised and thrilled that I have initiated a conversation with him. “You know how I asked you for a laptop so that I could do some writing?” “Yes. I’m so glad you’re writing. I really think you could get copywriting work, the stuff you did for me was great.” “That’s not the kind of writing I want to do. I mean, if I can do that and make some money, I’d be thrilled, but I’m more interested in creative writing.” “OK, well do both. This could be a whole new direction for you,” he says encouragingly. “Actually, I want to tell you about a project I’m working on. Sort of a memoir about my life after marriage. It’s not about you, but you obviously play a big role in it. It’s my story, about finding myself again,” I say cautiously. “I’m writing it with the hope that it’ll be published. I’m writing carefully about you, I don’t want to trash you. You’re the father of our kids and I hope that we are moving into a new dynamic in which we can be friends, but the story of how we fell apart is included.” “Laura, I’m interested in the truth, in people speaking their truth. As long as you’re honest, it’s OK with me. I have nothing to hide,” he says. “You say that now because it’s an abstract notion. It could feel different when it’s spelled out on a page,” I say. “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, if it’s making you feel good to write, do it,” he says. I nod my head and thank him. “Hey, just to lighten the mood a bit, can I tell you something funny?” he asks, and continues without awaiting my response. “The doormen still sometimes call my cell phone instead of yours when you have visitors. I gather you’re dating someone named Alan, because I get phone calls from the doorman like clockwork on Friday nights after I pick Georgia up for the weekend, asking if it’s OK to send him upstairs.” “Oh my God, that’s so embarrassing,” I say, my face reddening. “I’m telling you because I think it’s funny.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  It is she who not only supplies a graphic account of the indignation that she and her companions experience in their daily lives because of the collapse of traditional civilized values but also indicates how their dilemma may be resolved. Her eloquent address to her companions is faintly reminiscent of the harangue delivered to his crew by another, much more famous representative of human intelligence, Dante’s Ulysses, who in a well-known passage from the twenty-sixth canto of Inferno impresses upon his shipmates that they were not born to live like animals, but to pursue virtue and knowledge. 55 So, too, Pampinea implants in her companions the desire to escape from a brute-like existence and pursue the virtue and knowledge which will inevitably flow from their active participation in the well-ordered, civilized mode of living she prescribes for their own brief odyssey. Like the quest of Dante’s Ulysses, it has as its objective the attainment of a mythical state of well-being, associated in the medieval consciousness with the notion of the earthly paradise. The fate of Dante’s Ulysses is a warning to those who pursue the spirit of inquiry beyond reasonable bounds, symbolically represented by the pillars of Hercules that stand at the extremity of the known terrestrial world. For Dante, the earthly paradise is located at the summit of the mountain of Purgatory, at the antipodes of the world as he and his contemporaries knew it. But no sooner do Ulysses and his companions, spurred on by their desire for knowledge, chance upon the mountain in their mortal state than they are caught up in a whirlwind and destroyed. In contrast, what Boccaccio seems to be suggesting is that, through human initiative allied to wisdom, mortals may indeed attain to a condition of terrestrial bliss. To achieve that condition, the main prerequisites are a meticulous regard for order and a constant sense of propriety, and these are the attributes which figure most prominently in Pampinea’s elaborate proposals for the withdrawal of the company to their pastoral refuge.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Having waited for some time, only to discover that no answer was forthcoming, Zima was at first perplexed, but gradually began to realize how cleverly the nobleman had played his hand. Even so, as he continued to gaze upon her face, he noticed that every so often her eyes would dart a gleam in his direction, and this, together with the fact that she was obviously having some difficulty in restraining her sighs, filled him with hope and inspired him to improvise a second line of approach. And thus, mimicking the lady’s voice whilst she sat and listened, he began to answer his own plea, speaking as follows: ‘My poor, dear Zima, you may rest assured that I have been aware for some time of the depth and completeness of your devotion, and what you have just said has made it all the more obvious to me. I am glad of your love, as is only natural, and I would not wish you to suppose, because I have seemed harsh and cruel, that my outward appearance reflected my true feelings towards you. On the contrary, I have always loved you and held you higher than any other man in my affection, but I was obliged to behave as I did for fear both of my husband and of damaging my good name. However, the time is now approaching when I shall be able to show you clearly how much I love you, at the same time offering you some reward for your past and present devotion towards me. Take heart, then, and be of good cheer, for Messer Francesco will leave within the next few days to become Governor of Milan, a fact of which you, who have given him your handsome palfrey for my sake, are already aware. And in the name of the true love I bear you, I give you my solemn promise that within a few days of his departure you will be able to come to me, and we shall bring our love to its total and pleasurable consummation. ‘However, since there will be no further opportunity for us to discuss the matter, I must explain without further ado that one day in the near future you will see two towels hanging in the window of my room, which overlooks the garden. On that same evening, after darkness has fallen, you are to come to me, entering by way of the garden-gate and taking good care not to let anyone see you. There you will find me waiting for you, and we shall spend the whole night having all the joy and pleasure of one another that we desire.’ Having impersonated the lady whilst he said all this, Zima now began to speak on his own behalf.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  beginnings, but you will not escape damnation if you do not cultivate the fruits of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, long-suffering, mercy, faith, modesty, continence and chastity.’ What the Church needed, Erasmus argued, was a theology reduced to the absolute minimum. Christianity must be based on peace and unanimity, ‘but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible.’ On many points ‘everyone should be left to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in these matters.’ Men searching for the truth should be encouraged to return to the scriptural and patristic sources. Perhaps there was a case for a commission of learned men to draw up a formula of faith. But it must be brief, just ‘the philosophy of Christ’, which was concerned chiefly with moral virtues. ‘All that is of faith,’ he wrote, ‘should be condensed into a very few articles, and the same should be done for all that concerns the Christian way of life.’ Then theologians, if they wished, should be left to develop their own theories, and the faithful to believe or ignore them. On most of the contentious points, he freely admitted: ‘I would not dare deprive a man of his life, if I were the judge, nor would I risk my own.’ Of course here again Erasmus was essentially striking at the clerical point of view, with its urge to define and its need for an authoritative answer to every conceivable question. He thought it was not God’s desire or intention to illuminate the whole in this life. Such agnosticism was abhorrent to the Church shaped by St Augustine, and organized by Gregory VII and Innocent III, to whom the extension of definition and the reinforcement of authority was the only criterion of growth and progress. It was abhorrent to the papacy; but it was also uncongenial to the Protestant reformers. At bottom, Erasmus believed in a moral reform, pure and simple: if the moral spirit of the Church were transformed and illuminated, then all the problems of Christendom, institutional and even doctrinal, would solve themselves in turn; but the Church, in St Paul’s word, had to become a ‘new man’ again first. To Luther, a moral reform was equally urgent. But it would prove meaningless and transitory unless it were able to operate within the context of institutional change and drastic doctrinal corrections. Indeed, moral reform was not only useless but perhaps worse than useless unless we got the theological equations right. We had first to understand how man justified himself to God, and this was a theological problem. The need was not to simplify doctrine, but to get it right – and that meant not less definition, but more.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

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

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

  The storm that has been agitating my family has not yet passed, nor do I feel confident that it will pass anytime soon or maybe ever. Back in early summer I did not have the energy to plant a garden as I usually did and the barren plots of dirt, now filled with weeds instead of fragrant herbs and colorful pansies, rebuke me every time I pass by. I do not have the wherewithal to stock my house with an abundance of freshly picked cherries and peaches from orchards I have always loved to meander through, and I apathetically watch birds devour every last blueberry from my bushes without even attempting my annual battle against them. My biggest home repair – trying to fix the relationship between Michael and the two of our three kids who still refuse contact with him – is dead in the water. Still, even though I have no cause to, I feel stirrings of hope and find that a mere iota of optimism after a punishing winter goes a long way. I regard myself as a delicate flower bud and imagine myself emerging from the soil after a long, cruel winter as something miraculous and precious. I am fragile, but even the coldest frost can’t stop me from poking my head through the soil. The fact of this gives me a sense of bravura I have never recognized in myself before now. Most of my attention is dedicated to preparing for Daisy’s impending departure for college. She has made it clear that having Michael present on her move-in day will make her more anxious than she already is. I long for a partner for this milestone – someone to smile at as we bask in the glow of a job well done, someone to hold me steady as I walk away and let her go – but I am on my own. This is not the way it was supposed to be, I think to myself for the umpteenth time, mournful that the milestones we had envisioned spending together are now my sole domain.