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 Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  I didn’t realize for a few weeks why Saturday was not the shopping day that it was in New York. I decided that weekend that I was going to work in Stamford, save money, and go to Mexico. I could do that, I thought, by conserving on food, which would be no big thing since I couldn’t cook in my room, anyway. I found a supermarket and bought five cans of Mooseabec sardines, a loaf of bread, and five cans of Campbell’s pepperpot soup, my alltime favorite. I figured I was set for the week, a sandwich for lunch, and a can of soup for dinner. I would treat myself on the weekend, I decided, with franks or chicken-foot stew. On Monday I started work, at 8:00 in the morning. I could walk to work in a half-hour from where I lived. I sat at a long table with other women, running a hand-cranked hanking machine which made up ribbon into gaily turned hanks and clipped them with a tiny band of metal. The work was unbelievably boring, but the colors of the ribbons were bright and cheerful, and the table by lunchtime looked like a Christmas tree. This was September, but the factory was working on Christmas orders. It took me a while to get the hang of the machine, and how to turn neat hanks that were not returned by the foreman with a sneer. The woman I worked next to consoled me. “Don’t worry, honey. In three weeks he’ll let you alone.” Stamford was a closed-shop town, and workers had to join the union within three weeks of beginning work. When I started, I was paid ninety cents an hour, which would increase to $1.15, the standard minimum wage, when I joined the union. My coworker knew something I did not. It was standard procedure in most of the “software” factories to hire Black workers for three weeks, then fire them before they could join the union, and hire new workers. The work was not hard to learn. So three weeks later, I found myself with my first paycheck and no job. That autumn I began to write poems again, after months of silence. My weekend nights became noisy with the limping clatter of my battered portable typewriter. The woman next door mildly suggested, when we passed on the outside stairs, that silence after midnight was the usual house rule for radios and typewriters. I folded up my blanket and used it as a pad to deaden the sound, as I worked away at the machine, perched upon my rickety table wedged in between my contraband hotplate and the two neat stacks of Mooseabec sardines and Campbell’s soup cans.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  dangerous circumstances, and the admission that one is merely guessing is especially unacceptable when the stakes are high. Acting on pretended knowledge is often the preferred solution. When they come together, the emotional, cognitive, and social factors that support exaggerated optimism are a heady brew, which sometimes leads people to take risks that they would avoid if they knew the odds. There is no evidence that risk takers in the economic domain have an unusual appetite for gambles on high stakes; they are merely less aware of risks than more timid people are. Dan Lovallo and I coined the phrase “bold forecasts and timid decisions” to describe the background of risk taking. The effects of high optimism on decision making are, at best, a mixed blessing, but the contribution of optimism to good implementation is certainly positive. The main benefit of optimism is resilience in the face of setbacks. According to Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, an “optimistic explanation style” contributes to resilience by defending one’s self-image. In essence, the optimistic style involves taking credit for successes but little blame for failures. This style can be taught, at least to some extent, and Seligman has documented the effects of training on various occupations that are characterized by a high rate of failures, such as cold-call sales of insurance (a common pursuit in pre- Internet days). When one has just had a door slammed in one’s face by an angry homemaker, the thought that “she was an awful woman” is clearly superior to “I am an inept salesperson.” I have always believed that scientific research is another domain where a form of optimism is essential to success: I have yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing, and I believe that someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the face of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers. The Premortem: A Partial Remedy Can overconfident optimism be overcome by training? I am not optimistic. There have been numerous attempts to train people to state confidence intervals that reflect the imprecision of their judgments, with only a few reports of modest success. An often cited example is that geologists at Royal Dutch Shell became less overconfident in their assessments of possible drilling sites after training with multiple past cases for which the outcome was known. In other situations, overconfidence was mitigated (but not eliminated) when judges were

• From Action (2014)

  [image file=image_285.jpg] When you launch yourself into the world you’ve chosen, there’s no need to do so with the first-priority end goal of getting it in with a fellow world-attendee. But there are certainly times when you’ll turn around to find: There is someone beautiful here. What will you say to them? Because, look, you are going to go up to them. If that seems intimidating: Rejection is the universe’s protection, as a creaky adage goes. Whether or not you’re aggravated by platitudes, this one is accurate—you can court dismissal as doggedly as you do success, because it’s just as good for you… and a little easier to accomplish, hee! If you sidle up to someone with a genteel, well-intentioned manner about you, then it’s their decision as to whether their personality meshes with the truth of what you’re presenting. If it doesn’t, that’s fine, and the only thing you’ve “lost” is the non-opportunity to have sex with someone who doesn’t get you. On Winking I find friendly winking totally harmless and equal parts coy and magnetic, and so do the solid handful of people I’ve picked up after I closed my eye at them suggestively. (When you break down the facts of this pick-up move: How is it sexy?! I love the world sometimes.) Winking is ridiculous, but at least it’s not meek. We’re livin’ in a weird zone, more so than ever, when it comes to gauging whether someone wants to hook up or just hang out. Luckily, everyone is trying to squint through the same murky atmosphere to ascertain this. It can be a relief to have someone just tell you what they want. Being amorously point-of-fact reads as daring—even courageous. It distinguishes you as a deliberate and self-assured character, aka the sexiest kind of person. The main tenet of nonchalantly scamming on cool babes is acting like you know and agree that you are a person others would be stoked to be close to, even if you don’t, in fact, know/agree with that. Per Kurt Vonnegut, “We are what we pretend to be,” and that extends to acting like your face is 10 times hotter than you think it is while maintaining your specific personal charms. Eight times out of ten, if you introduce yourself to a new person, assume some air of great purpose about you, and tell them something honest and enticing in its irregularity (especially if it also happens to be funny), that person will talk to you. If they’re receptive to your flirtatious attempts at conversation, then probably two times out of that eight, minimum, you can kiss them if you want later on. (These are bullshit statistics culled from the field. I am not a numbers guy, but they feel really true?)

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Sometimes she met me for lunch and we munched Musli apples leaning up against the Catherine Slip tenements in the strengthening sunlight, watching the sparks fly as workmen continued the complex task of dismantling the last great piece of the Third Avenue El, the Chatham Square Station. Sometimes we walked home together on the nights I worked late. We talked about leaving New York, about homesteading somewhere in the west where a Black woman and a white woman could live together in peace. Muriel’s dream was to live on a farm and it felt like a good life to me. I borrowed pamphlets from the library, and we wrote to all the appropriate government offices to find out if there were any homestead lands still available anywhere in the continental United States. Sadly enough for us, the word came back that there was not, except in some of the more desolate northern reaches of Alaska, which was not yet a state. Neither Muriel nor I could stand the thought of living in a cold climate, and that far away from the sun. Besides, since we would not be able to support ourselves by farming, northern Alaska was definitely out. When I came home from work with my arms full of the latest books and my mouth full of stories, sometimes there was food cooked, and sometimes there was not. Sometimes there was a poem, and sometimes there was not. And always, on weekends, there were the bars. Early Saturday and Sunday mornings, Muriel and I wandered the streets of the Lower East Side and the more affluent West Village, scavenging the garbage heaps for treasures of old furniture, wonders that the unimaginative had discarded. We evaluated their future possibilities and dragged our finds back up six flights of stairs, to add them to the growing pile in the kitchen of things we were one day going to repair. There were wooden radio cabinets, gutted, that could be fitted with shelves for a fine record-holder. Old dresser drawers supplied stout wood for bookcase shelves, supported by scavenged bricks. There were brass lamps and rococo fixtures to be rewired, and a magnificent old dentist’s chair with only one arm support missing.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  As Sayyed Muhammad Tabatabai, a liberal mujtahid , explained: we ourselves had not seen a constitutional regime. But we had heard about it, and those who had seen the constitutional countries had told us that a constitutional regime will bring security and prosperity to the country. This created an urge and an enthusiasm in us. 86 Unlike the Egyptian ulema , who had retreated defensively into the world of the madrasahs , the Iranian ulema were often in the vanguard of change and would continue to have a decisive role in forthcoming events. In December 1905, the governor of Tehran gave orders that the feet of several sugar merchants be beaten for refusing to lower their prices as ordered by the government. They claimed that the high import duties made their high prices necessary. A large group of ulema and bazaaris took sanctuary in the royal mosque of Tehran, until ejected by the agents of Prime Minister Ain al-Dauleh. At once, a significant number of mullahs followed Tabatabai into one of the major shrines, whence they demanded that the shah establish a representative “house of justice.” The shah agreed and the ulema returned to Tehran, but when the prime minister showed no signs of fulfilling this promise, rioting broke out there and in the provinces, and popular preachers denounced the government from the pulpits, stirring up the common people. Finally, in July 1906, the mullahs of Tehran staged a mass exodus to Qum, while some 14,000 merchants took refuge in the British legation. Business came to a halt, while the protesters demanded the dismissal of Ain al-Dauleh and the establishment of a majlis (“representative assembly”), and the more knowledgeable reformers began to discuss a mashruteh (“constitution”). 87 The Constitutional Revolution was initially successful. The prime minister was dismissed at the end of July, and the first Majlis, which included a significant number of elected ulema , opened in Tehran in October. A year later, the new shah, Muhammad Ali, signed the Fundamental Law, which was modeled on the Belgian constitution. This required the monarch to ask the approval of the Majlis in all important matters; all citizens (including those who belonged to a different faith) enjoyed equality before the law, and the constitution guaranteed personal rights and freedoms. There was a flurry of liberal activity throughout Iran. The First Majlis gave new freedoms to the press, and immediately satirical and critical articles began to be published. New societies were formed, there were plans for a national bank, and new municipal councils were elected. The brilliant young deputy for Tabriz, Sayyed Hasan Taqizadeh, led a left-wing, democratic party in the Majlis, while the mujtahids , Ayatollah Tabatabai and Seyyed Abdallah Behbehani, led the Conservative party, which managed to include some clauses in the constitution to safeguard the status of the Shariah. But despite this show of cooperation between the liberal clergy and the reformers, the First Majlis revealed deep divisions.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Once faith was conceived as irrational, and the inbuilt constraints of the best conservative spirituality were jettisoned, people could fall prey to all manner of delusions. The rituals of a cult were carefully designed to lead people through a trauma so that they came out healthily on the other side of it. This was clear in the rites of Lurianic Kabbalah, where the mystic was allowed to express his grief and abandonment but made to finish the vigil joyfully. Similarly, the popular Shii processions in honor of Husain gave people an outlet for their frustration and anger, but in a ritualized form: they did not usually run amok after the ceremony was over and vent their rage on the rich and powerful. But in Northampton, there was no stylized cult to help people through their rite of passage. Everything was spontaneous and undisciplined. People were allowed to run the gamut of their emotions and even to indulge them. For a few, this proved fatal. Nevertheless, Edwards was convinced that the Awakening was the work of God. It revealed that a new age had dawned in America and would spread to the rest of the world. By means of such revivals, Edwards was convinced, Christians would establish God’s kingdom on earth; society would reflect the truth and justice of God himself. There was nothing politically radical about the Awakening. Edwards and Whitefield did not urge their audiences to rebel against British rule, campaign for democratic government, or demand an even distribution of wealth, but the experience did help to prepare the way for the American Revolution. 40 The ecstatic experience left many Americans who would be quite unable to relate to the deist Enlightenment ideals of the revolutionary leaders, with the memory of a blissful state of freedom. The word “liberty” was used a great deal to describe the joy of conversion, and a liberation from the pain and sorrow of normal life. Whitefield and Edwards both encouraged their congregations to see their own ecstatic faith as superior to that of the elite, who had not been born again and regarded the frenzy with rationalist disdain. Many who remembered the hauteur of those clerics who condemned the revivals, were left with a strong distrust of institutional authority, which became part of the Christian experience of many American Calvinists. The Awakening had been the first mass movement in American history; it gave the people a heady experience of taking part in earth-shattering events that would, they believed, change the course of history. 41 But the Awakening also split the Calvinist denominations of the colonies down the middle. People who became known as Old Lights, such as the Boston ministers Jonathan Mayhew (1720–66) and Charles Chauncy (1705–87), believed that Christianity should be a rational, enlightened faith, were appalled by the hysteria of the revivals, and distrusted their anti-intellectual bias.

• From Action (2014)

  In The History of Sexuality, the social theorist Michel Foucault lays out the concept of something called “repressive hypothesis.” This is, paraphrased simply, the idea that in saying, “Our society is so prim and uptight about sex!” we reinforce that taboo, when we could be ameliorating the tension by just talking about the thing itself—sex!—instead (and of course having sex). Attempting to skew the acknowledgment of sexual repression and its attendant hang-ups into “social progression” does nothing to improve our shared situation, because we’re not saying anything productive or meaningful about the ways we fuck. Instead, we’re strengthening the lack of permissiveness we’re bemoaning by catering to it. We can be smarter than that. Plus, talking about sex is a guaranteed-to-be-entertaining pastime, if literally all of television, film, literature, and sitting on the passenger side of my sister’s car are any indication. I honestly can’t see what’s rude about that. Boy About Town [image file=image_179.jpg] I don’t have a sexual “orientation.” My personal theme song is by a band called, fittingly, the Jam. There are many reasons why I love “Boy About Town,” outside of the sole fact that it’s a through-and-through life-affirmer, quality-wise. It tracks a young ruffian who’s on the move: See me walking around, I’m the boy about town that you heard of. See me walking the streets, I’m on top of the world that you heard of. The sunny hustle mapped out by the lyrics matches the daily flânerie of my thinking—scattershot, blithe, far-flung: Oh, like paper caught in wind, I glide upstreet, I glide downstreet. Like a raffish prettyboy traipsing through life with all the pride and beauty of itinerant trash picked up by a breeze, I cruise.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  important principality of the empire whose Elector-Prince Friedrich III came to sympathize with the Reformed cause, an international team of Reformed scholars drew up a catechism (a statement of doctrine for teaching purposes) like the Consensus Tigurinus, designed to unite as many Protestants as possible. Known as the Heidelberg Catechism, since Heidelberg was the Elector Palatine’s capital and home to the university where it was created, it had wide influence from its publication in 1563.55 Three years later, in 1566, Bullinger drew up a statement, the ‘Second Helvetic Confession’, with the same agenda of unity, which also won widespread acceptance. Reformed Christianity saved the Reformation from its mid-century phase of hesitation and disappointment. Lutheranism tended to remain frozen in German-speaking and Scandinavian cultures; Reformed Christianity spread through a remarkable variety of language groups and communities, partly because so many of its leading figures had the same experience as Calvin, finding themselves forced to leave their native lands and to proclaim their message in new and alien settings. REFORMED PROTESTANTS, CONFESSIONALIZATION AND TOLERATION (1560-1660) During the 1560s Reformed Christianity brought militancy and a rebellious spirit to the magisterial Reformation. Like Luther, Calvin was a theologian of Romans 13.1 – of obedience. Yet as he built his Church in Geneva, he was much more careful than Luther or Zwingli to keep Church structures separate from the existing city authorities. He had a clear vision of God’s people making decisions for themselves: his Church had a mind of its own over and against temporal power, just as much as the old Church of the Pope. In Geneva this was not a problem, after Calvin had clawed his way to political dominance, because Church and temporal power were in general agreement, but elsewhere people might take up Calvin’s blueprint for Church structures and ignore what the magistrate wanted or ordered. To Calvin’s alarm, he found that in the Netherlands, Scotland and France, he had sponsored movements of revolution, people inspired by the thought that they were the elect army of God whose duty was to take on Antichrist. Very often revolutionary Reformed leaders were actually noblemen rebelling against their monarchs; rather than humble enthusiasts like the Anabaptists, they were themselves magistrates with power granted by God, just like kings or princes. That made their rebellion all the more effective, as Lutheran princes had earlier found in the 1520s, when the Holy Roman Emperor had tried to force

• From Action (2014)

  Of course you have to pay exclusive attention to yourself sometimes, but it’s atrocious to think about yourself all the time, which is what you’re up to if you’re gazing at a Hope Diamond of a dime-piece and ruminating to the tune of, I’m gonna screw up I always say something ungraceful I want to know and then french that person I won’t be able to muster not zero of the nerve to go over there no way not never. The proper amount of you in there, if we were to trim that thought-attack down to its one valid germ, is: I want to know, and then french, that person. Notice how the rest of it takes place in either the future or the past—and how the selected trimming is the sole part of the thought that accounts for a person outside yourself? That’s the only current truth. The rest is YOURSELF YOURSELF YOURSELF, and not even your real self, but some fictitious version of you involved in events that aren’t even going down to begin with. Do your best not to focus on that mirage self-portrait of a basket case to whom you bear little true resemblance, when you could be admiring the Hope Diamond. So create an empire of your life and your for-real self—the person other people are waiting for you to present them with: the person who doesn’t otherwise exist. Do, make, and enjoy excellent things. When you find yourself slinking around unattractively, you can call upon the memory that you just Jet-Skied through a glass ceiling, or made a Lego model of Seinfeld’s apartment to scale, or learned a new chord progression on your sick-nasty electric keyboard. Or whatever it is you enjoy. Even if some of this seems beyond reach—especially the part about commandeering a WaveRunner through the patriarchy—much more of it is eminently possible. And I feel lucky about that! I think often of something the cartoonist Chris Ware once said in an interview for Rookie, a publication for teenagers for which I am a story editor: “Being able to say ‘I don’t know what to do with my life’ is an incredible privilege that 99 percent of the rest of the world will never enjoy.”* I don’t want to squander the arbitrary and overwhelming luck I have to be able to be and do and see all kinds of things and people! I have all this splendor in front of me. It would be a waste of my life to spend it sulking about how “unfuckable,” and therefore unhappy, I am, when there’s no causality there and neither have to be true.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Ever since I could remember Mexico had been the accessible land of color and fantasy and delight, full of sun, music and song. And from civics and geography in grade school, I knew it was attached to where I lived, and that intrigued me. That meant, if need be, I could always walk there. I was happy to learn that Jean’s boyfriend, Alf, who was in Mexico painting, would soon be coming home. When I returned to New York after my father’s death, going to Mexico became my chief goal. I saw very little of my mother. Where I would have expected grief for my father, there was only numbness. I stayed with Jean and her friends in a West Side apartment while I hunted for work. I eventually went to work as a clinic clerk in a Health Center, and moved in to share an apartment with Rhea Held, a progressive white woman who was a friend of Jean and Alf’s. No matter what emotional scrapes I got into that summer, the idea of Mexico shone like a beacon that I could count on, keeping me steady. The money I was saving from work, together with the small amount I had received from my father’s insurance, would make it possible. I was determined to go, and that determination was fed by the deepening political gloom and red-baiting hysteria. I became deeply involved in working with the Committee to Free the Rosenbergs; even so, the months in New York between my return from Stamford and my going to Mexico were very much a sojourn to me. Rhea Held and I lived quite well together in the bright, sunny seventh-floor walk-up apartment on Seventh Street on the Lower East Side, now becoming known as the East Village. It was at times difficult and new—learning to live with Rhea, learning to share space with anyone, and a white woman, too, especially since I had no deep emotional bonds with her, only warm and casual pleasantries. The work at the health center was interestingly medical and the hours, not tedious. I felt set apart from the other women with whom I worked, by virtue of their lunch-talk about weekend dates (while my noontime fantasies were still filled with the remembered joys of Ginger’s bed). Spring moved to summer. We demonstrated, picketed, stuffed envelopes, rang doorbells, and went to Washington for the Rosenbergs. The second time I came to Washington, I traveled by bus. The trip took six hours and we boarded the buses at Union Square at 6:00 A.M. on a Sunday morning. It was not a pleasure trip, this time. We were seeking life for the parents of two little boys who traveled on the same bus in which I was riding. The Rosenbergs were about to be sacrificed, and this was a last-ditch visit to the white house to beg for a stay of execution .

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  magic, medicine or astrology to sort out the problems of everyday life; some appealed to the same fascination with secret wisdom about the cosmos and the nature of knowledge which had created gnostic Christianity and later Manichaeism (see pp. 123–4 and 170–71). So this ‘hermetic’ literature chimed in with many traditional Christian preoccupations, and it became newly accessible after the 1480s when the Medici in Florence commissioned Marsilio Ficino to translate into Latin the available sections of the Corpus Hermeticum.43 Humanists savoured the cheery prospect that with more investigation, hard work and possibly supernatural aid, more ancient wisdom might be more fully recovered. Equally exciting were the possibilities opened up by the increasing attention that Christian scholars paid to Cabbala, the body of Jewish literature which had started out as commentary on the Tanakh, but which by the medieval period had created its own intricate network of theological speculation, drawing on sub- Platonic mysticism like the gnostics or the hermeticists. Many humanists were gratified to find reinforcement for their own sense of infinite possibilities in humankind; Cabbala embraced a vision of humanity as potentially divine and indwelt by divine spirit. It was the hope of Ficino, or of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the aristocratic translator of Cabbala, that cabbalistic and hermetic ideas together might complete God’s purpose in the Christian message by broadening and enriching it. These themes were to play a great part in intellectual life and discussion throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while also attracting derision and hostility from many theologians in both Catholic and Protestant camps. We will find that, in the end, they helped to bring the Reformation era to a close (see pp. 773–6). How might one establish authenticity amid this intoxicating but unsorted flow of information? One criterion must be to assess a text in every respect: its content, date, origins, motives, even its appearance. So much depended on texts being accurate. This meant developing ways of telling a good text from a corrupt text: looking at the way in which it was written and whether it sounded like texts reliably datable to the same historical period. Historical authenticity gained a new importance: it now became the chief criterion for authority. The attitude which had once led holy men cheerfully to forge supposedly historical documents on a huge scale (see pp. 351–2) would no longer do. A ‘source’ (fons) for authority now outweighed the unchallenged reputation of an auctoritas, a voice of authority from the past. Ad fontes, back to the sources, was the battle-cry of the humanists, and Protestants took it over from them. An individual, equipped with the right intellectual skills, could outface even the greatest and most long-lasting authority in medieval Europe, the Church.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Catholics. Otherwise, it was in eastern Europe that the most practical and official arrangements were made for religious coexistence – and indeed, the east outdid the Graubünden, most spectacularly in the principality of Transylvania which emerged from the wreck of the old Hungarian kingdom. Transylvanian princes, battling to survive against both Habsburgs and Ottomans, were anxious to conciliate as many Hungarian nobility as possible. Yet the nobility were backing a great variety of religious belief, few of them from the discredited old Church, and ranging from card-carrying Lutheranism to a startlingly open denial of the Trinity – the latter encouraged by a diaspora of Italian radical thinkers fleeing the increasingly thorough purges of the Roman Inquisition (see pp. 662–4). The religious spectrum was exemplified in the spiritual journey of the charismatic Hungarian Church leader Ferenc Dávid from Lutheranism to anti-Trinitarianism; he much impressed one prince, János Zsigmond Zápolyai. Accordingly, but extraordinarily by the standards of the time, the Transylvanian Diet decided that it was impossible to reconcile the various factions and instead it would recognize their legal existence. In 1568 it met in the chief church of the town of Torda (a building which now, in its Catholic reinvention, does not commemorate this momentous occasion) and declared: ministers should everywhere preach and proclaim [the Gospel] according to their understanding of it, and if their community is willing to accept this, good; if not, however, no one should be compelled by force if their spirit is not at peace, but a minister retained whose teaching is pleasing to the community … no one is permitted to threaten to imprison or banish anyone because of their teaching, because faith is a gift from God.61 This was the first time that radical Christian communities had been officially recognized in sixteenth-century Europe (albeit more by silence than by explicit permission), with the brief and ill-fated exception of little Nikolsburg. Subsequent Transylvanian princes withdrew from their flirtation with the anti- Trinitarians. With the majority of their Magyar nobility, they committed themselves to the Reformed faith, which led them into occasional harassment and occasional persecution of indiscreet anti-Trinitarians; but still they adhered to the general principles of Torda. The Reformed faith of Transylvania’s princes eventually led them into overenthusiasm for the role of their principality in God’s purposes. In the mid- seventeenth century the talented and ambitious Prince György II Rákóczi was encouraged by the preaching of his Reformed ministers to see himself as King David of Israel, poised to be God’s champion against all God’s enemies. Unfortunately God showed no apparent favour to Prince György’s increasingly

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  work of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners had collapsed, aided by their internal doctrinal squabbles.57 One might say that the Evangelical Revival was an answer to this failure; it was in the decade of the Societies’ collapse that the new movement began gaining momentum. Like the Pietists and Moravians, English Evangelicals sought to create a religion of the heart and of direct personal relationship with Jesus Christ, in consciousness of his suffering on the Cross — his atonement to his Father for human sin. Once more, it was the message of Augustine, filtered through Luther. The impulse in part found a home in the Church of England, but it also revitalized existing English Dissenting denominations from the mid-seventeenth century, and it produced a new religious body which by accident rather than design found itself outside the established Church: Methodism. The leader in what became a worldwide movement was John Wesley, a man who made sure that his career was as well documented as any Pietist might desire, assuring that his own version of his story would get first hearing.58 He was an Anglican clergyman, as was his father. His mother’s father had likewise been a clergyman, ejected from the national Church after Charles II’s restoration as a Dissenter, but both John’s parents were strong Tories. Indeed his mother was for some time a Non-Juror (see p. 734), and Samuel and Susanna Wesley’s disagreements over the royal succession had disrupted the marital bed — John’s conception was actually the sign of their ideological reunion.59 High Churchpeople were increasingly left aside after James’s flight, as subsequent regimes harboured often justified suspicions about their loyalty. The Church which Wesley knew as a young man was dominated by the very different religious style of the ‘Latitudinarians’. The young Wesley, already out of step with the establishment of his Church, followed the family profession of ministry to ordination and a Fellowship of an Oxford college, in a university itself still an obstinate stronghold of the embattled High Church party. Here he gathered a group of friends to share a devotional life and carry out works of charity rather in the style of a Counter- Reformation confraternity (see p. 656); their ordered lifestyle earned them the initially mocking title of ‘Methodists’. Now wider influences came to bear on Wesley’s religious outlook. He and his brother Charles set off in 1735 for the newly founded English American colony of Georgia to work among the settlers on behalf of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (itself dominated by High Churchmen). This ended in an ignominious voyage home, mainly thanks to John’s pastoral clumsiness, but while heading out he had been much impressed by the piety and cheerful courage of a group of Moravians, apparently unmoved by storms which terrified everyone else on board.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  pyramid of status groups: Christians from the New World at the top, then West Africans liberated locally (the two groups together became known as the Krio) and finally the indigenous population, who, like the inhabitants of Canaan three millennia before, had not been given any say in God’s territorial gift to these new Children of Israel. It was an unhealthy imbalance in which the seeds of modern troubles were sown for Sierra Leone; the later American initiative in founding an entirely independent West African state of Liberia (from 1822) suffered from the same problem. Sierra Leone did not make money for its proprietors, but it did survive, a rich source of African Christian leadership for all West Africa, from the many Protestant denominations it hosted. Its Krio language, a creative development of English, soon served as a lingua franca throughout the region.21 The colony was also an interesting sign to imperial strategists that European African colonial possessions might usefully extend beyond scattered coastal outposts. From 1808 Sierra Leone was a Crown Colony, base for a remarkable practical extension of the Parliamentary Act abolishing the slave trade, a British naval squadron which intercepted slave ships and freed their captives. The British government was not unaware that this was a useful part of the war effort against the commerce of the Napoleonic Empire, but the work did not stop with Napoleon’s defeat. The navy now combined a moral campaign with the steady extension of British influence. Evangelicals had produced this result, and their continuing agitation sustained British commitment – which, perhaps surprisingly, extended to the British government bringing pressure to bear on Pope Gregory XVI: an Apostolic Letter in 1839 echoed the recent British condemnation of the slave trade.22 Out of this moral crusade emerged the potent idea that the British Crown was a partner with its subjects in the worldwide enterprise of spreading Christian civilization – a theme as useful to imperial subjects as to imperial government.23 A PROTESTANT WORLD MISSION: OCEANIA AND AUSTRALASIA Rather separate from the abolitionist campaign, although likewise led by anglophone Evangelicals, was a sudden upwelling of commitment to worldwide mission. The Moravians had provided the precedent, while doing nothing to challenge slavery (see pp. 746–7); now a similar missionary fervour seized all the mainstream British Protestant Churches. The coincidental rapidity of the first moves is remarkable. Even a catalogue of dates and institutions provokes astonishment – the energetic (not to say driven) Rev. Thomas Coke appointed by the Wesleyan Conference in 1790 as general supervisor of Methodist world

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  was prominent. A highly influential book, Seven Treatises called the practice of Christianity, by one of East Anglia’s principal Puritan ministers, Richard Rogers, was published in 1603; by the time the Massachusetts venture was launched, it had gone through eight editions. One of its highlights was a description of how, twenty years before, Rogers had made a solemn agreement — covenanted — with those of his people in his Essex parish of Wethersfield who were prepared to separate out from the temptations of the world. Their covenant had endured ever since. This was a potent image, and the communities set up in New England were prompt to covenant for their future.8 They were a chosen people, making a treaty with God and with each other. Other words besides ‘covenant’ also inspired people as they leafed through their Bibles in meditation on the cramped and stinking ships of the Atlantic voyage or amid the deep snow of a New England winter. They found themselves in a wilderness, like the Children of Israel, but was this any worse a wilderness than the Church of England under Laud’s leadership? Might they rather be re-entering an Edenic garden, as their home communities had once been, to tend and bring to order and peace? So they named their new settlements Boston, Dedham, Ipswich, Braintree, to begin cultivating and replicating these gardens of godly England which they had lost to the weeds and pollution of Charles I’s religion. Although the New England settlers made their commonwealth much less like Old England than Virginia was intended to be, it is important to re-emphasize that the vast majority were not separatists but Puritans. They wanted a truer form of the established Church, which somehow (perhaps uncomfortably and untidily, like Rogers’s Wethersfield) would also have the characteristics of a Church of the elect. The New England venture was more than wilderness or garden: it was (in the words of Governor Winthrop as his party prepared to sail out from Southampton) ‘a city upon a hill’. This quotation from Matthew 5.14 has become a famous phrase in American self-identity, but Winthrop did not intend to confer a special destiny on the new colony. He meant that like every other venture of the godly, and as in the quotation’s context in Matthew’s Gospel, Massachusetts was to be visible for all the world to learn from it. At such a moment of crisis, with England’s Protestant Church in disarray, those leaving Southampton should be conscious that the eyes of many in England, and perhaps as far away as Transylvania, were upon them.9 The form assumed by the Church of Massachusetts was therefore the paradox of an established Reformed Church with an all-embracing system of parishes like England, but run by local assemblies of the self-selected godly — a form of Church government which was ‘Congregational’, a Latin-derived word first given currency by John Cotton, one of the Church’s early ministers. The early

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  These eventually made spectacular breaches in the earlier barriers to evangelization of the enslaved, and fostered an African-American Christian culture which expresses itself in the fervency of extrovert Evangelical Protestantism rather than in the cooler tones of Anglicanism. Why did the Awakenings succeed so mightily with enslaved Africans where the Anglicans failed? Central to the answer must be the Evangelical demand for a personal choice: that gave dignity to people who had never been offered a choice in their lives, just as the confraternities and saints’ devotion of the Catholic Church provided the opportunity to make religious choices (see pp. 712–14). Related was Methodism’s insistence on complete personal transformation or regeneration, an attractive theme in lives which offered little other hope of dramatic change. Moravians brought song and uninhibited celebration of God’s blood and wounds to people who knew much of both. Moravians also insisted that God was pleased by cheerfulness, a congenial thought in a culture which remembered better than Europeans how to celebrate. And at the centre was the library of books which was the Bible, in which readers could suddenly find themselves walking into a particular book and recognizing their own life. Where Catholic enslaved peoples in the Caribbean or Iberian America had saints, Protestant American enslaved people had texts which gave them stories and songs. They sang about the biblical stories which made them laugh and cry, in some of the most compelling vocal music ever created by Christians, ‘Negro Spirituals’: a fusion of the Evangelical hymn tradition of the Awakenings with celebratory rhythms and repetitions remembered from days of African freedom. What might the Bible-readers choose? For people made slaves, the Bible contained the experience of Israel’s exile and desolation, in the prophets and psalms. A captive people escaped and entered a promised land (and the deliverer Moses, like St Patrick, brooked no nonsense from snakes). The Saviour was a poor man, whipped and executed, who died for all and rose again. There were thrones for the downtrodden people at the end of time. In other words, there was justice. It was irrelevant that many of these themes had inspired the English to cross the Atlantic a century before, only to become the colonial people who oppressed the African-American; this was a discovery anew, forged painfully out of the acquisition of literacy by a minority of privileged or freed people. How could they not accept such a vulnerable, all-powerful Saviour? They sang of him: Poor little Jesus boy Made him to be born in a manger

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  imitation, but it also represents an optimistic pole of the Christian spectrum of beliefs in human worth, potential and capacity, because if Jesus had a whole human nature, it must by definition be good, and logically all human nature began by being good, whatever its subsequent corruptions. This was a contrast with the savage pessimism that has often emerged from Latin Western Christianity, following Augustine of Hippo’s emphasis on original sin (see pp. 306–9). That outlook continued to illuminate the theology of the Church of the East. It was unimpressed and uninhibited by the condemnations which such teachings had received in the imperial Church around 400, and equally unimpressed by the imperial Church’s later condemnation of the monk and spiritual writer Evagrius Ponticus (see pp. 209–10). Much of Evagrius’s work is now preserved only in Syriac translation, the Greek originals having been deliberately destroyed.46 Isaac, a seventh-century monk from Qatar who briefly held the resonant title Bishop of Nineveh, took up the notion which Evagrius had derived from the writings of that audacious Alexandrian Origen that in the end all will be saved. He saw divine love even in the fire of Hell, which prepared humanity for a future ecstasy: out of it the wealth of His love and power and wisdom will become known all the more – and so will the insistent might of the waves of His goodness. It is not [the way of] the compassionate Maker to create rational beings in order to deliver them over mercilessly to unending affliction … for things of which He knew even before they were fashioned.47 In the writings of Isaac’s successor in the eighth century, the monk John of Dalyatha, the Syriac emphasis on bodily penance was pressed to an extreme as forming a road back to the original purity of human nature. John proclaimed that through humility and contemplation (especially while prostrate), a monk could unite his purged nature not simply with all creation, but also with his creator, to achieve a vision of the glory of God himself: ‘in the same way that fire shows its operation to the eyes, so God shows his glory to rational beings who are pure’. John went so far as to deny that a layperson could experience the mystical union with God which resulted from such self-purging: ‘Christ cannot live with the world … but always, he comes to the soul’s home and visits her to live in her, if she is empty of all that is of the world.’ As so often in the history of Christianity, when mystics try to explain their experience of transcendence, the results are not just difficult for those beyond to understand, but seem to overstep the mark between creator and created. John’s teachings were condemned by a synod of the Church of the East soon after his death, but they continued to hold a fascination for mystics, and much of what he said would be echoed in later

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  in The Descent of Man: all the races agree in so many unimportant details of structure and in so many mental peculiarities, that these can be accounted for only through inheritance from a common progenitor; and a progenitor thus characterized would probably have deserved to rank as man.93 There has been no intellectually serious scientific challenge to Darwin’s general propositions since his time. The modern conservative Christian (and Islamic) fashion for Creationism is no more than a set of circular logical arguments, and Creationist ‘science’ has been unique among modern aspirations to scientific systems in producing no original discoveries at all. From the 1860s, the idea of evolution gained wide acceptance among the educated public of the Western world, which was still overwhelmingly Christian in outlook and belief. Darwinian theory fitted the Hegelian scheme of an evolutionary universe, and far from seeming unremittingly bleak, it chimed in with the optimism about the possibility of human progress which was widespread in the vigorous and expansive society of the industrial revolutions. Many Protestant theologians began constructing a new natural theology which saw evolution as a gradual unfolding of God’s providential plan (see Plates 42 and 43). James McCosh, an Ulsterman appointed president of that powerhouse of Reformed Protestantism, Princeton University, in 1868, did not allow his enthusiasm for the revivalist movements of Ulster and America to chill his friendly reception of Darwin’s work.94 Equally, by the end of the nineteenth century, the Anglican Communion was headed by an Archbishop of Canterbury, Frederick Temple, who in earlier years had presented a series of lectures in Oxford on the relation between religion and science which depended on the assumption that evolution was basic truth.95 More fundamentally challenging to the authority of the Christian Churches than the discoveries of nineteenth-century science was the reassessment of the Christian Bible, which now spread beyond the various scepticisms of earlier radical Christianity and the Enlightenment into the mainstream of the Western Church. French Maurist monks and French Huguenots between them had provided the scholarly tools in the seventeenth century when they edited medieval and ancient texts with scrupulous concern for forgery and contextual dating. German biblical scholars followed them with increasing tenacity over the next hundred years, and the impulse to stand back from the Bible and scrutinize it afresh was much encouraged by Hegel’s evolutionary approach to human affairs. Since Hegel saw the Christian God as an image of Absolute Spirit, the stories about God in the Bible must also be images of greater truths which lay behind them. The biblical narratives could be described as myths, and that put

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Ed White had been a West Point graduate, a devoted husband and father, and a committed patriot. He didn’t screw around with muscle cars or other women. Which was to say he was just like Frank. After eighteen months investigating the fire, testifying before Congress, and working on the Apollo command module redesign, Borman was offered the chance to be the commander of Apollo 8, man’s first lunar mission. The flight was full of risks and unknowns, but it was where Borman had been pointing since he first soloed a single-engine airplane over the skies of Tucson. He hadn’t known how that flight would end, either, but his instructor, Miss Bobbie, had believed he could go anywhere. Now, when he told Deke Slayton he would go to the Moon, he believed it, too. Chapter Six [image file=Image00007.jpg] JUST FOUR MONTHSAstronauts scheduled to fly to the Moon in just four months should have been training in NASA’s command module simulator, a ground-based model of the real thing. But, like most everything else connected to Apollo 8’s new mission, it wasn’t yet ready. Borman, Lovell, and Anders settled on what their responsibilities would be for the mission, each according to his own experience and to his role on the flight. Borman would focus on the boosters and abort systems, the trajectory, and piloting the spacecraft. As commander, he would also be in charge during the flight, overseeing the crew and assuming responsibility for mission success. Lovell would be the command module pilot, in charge of navigation. He would use the spacecraft’s sextant, an optical instrument similar to those used on board sailing ships through the centuries, to measure angles between the Sun, Moon, and stars. (Primary navigation would be done by computers and Mission Control personnel, but Lovell needed to navigate, too, in case of technical failure on the ground or a complete loss of communications.) He would also map lunar landmarks and scout candidate areas for future landings. To learn the new guidance system, Lovell needed to spend time at MIT’s Draper Lab, where he would practice sighting stars by focusing on the bright white light coming from atop a tall insurance building across the Charles River. Anders would be the systems engineer, responsible for understanding how the highly complex spacecraft functioned. He had to master every switch, dial, lever, and gauge in the command module, where the astronauts would live for six days. He needed to have a thorough understanding of the service module attached to its base, which housed the systems for electric power and life support, and propellants essential to making the journey. There were thousands of intricate parts and connections and operations, and Anders had to make sure they all worked. He would also be in charge of photography, chronicling the flight on still and movie film. To this end, Anders fought to bring a 250 millimeter Zeiss Sonnar telephoto lens aboard. It was giant and heavy, but he had a feeling he’d need it.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  monotheists of whatever views taking shelter in his colony. He also tried to maintain friendly relations with Native Americans. Soon Pennsylvania came to have a rich mix not simply of English Protestants, but also Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, Lutherans and the descendants of radical Reformation groups of mainland Europe who were fleeing from Roman Catholic intolerance in central Europe (see p. 647). Among the latter, the Old Order Amish from Switzerland have done their best ever since to freeze their communal way of life as it was when they first arrived in the early eighteenth century.28 All this diversity proved destructive for Penn’s original vision of a community run according to the ideals of the Friends. Under pressure from the English government, Pennsylvania’s assembly even disenfranchised Catholics, Jews and non-believers in 1705.29 Soon good relations with the native population were also badly compromised. Pennsylvania nevertheless fostered a consistent hatred of slavery among Friends, a development of great future significance for all Christians (see p. 869). It set another notable example: no one religious group could automatically claim exclusive status, unlike nearly all other colonies where a particular Church continued to claim official advantages even if it was a minority. This was the first colony to evolve the characteristic pattern of religion of the modern United States of America: a pattern of religious denominations, none claiming the exclusive status of Church, but making up slices in a Protestant ‘cake’ which together adds up to a Church. Anglicanism did manage to strengthen its position in the southern English American colonies after Charles II’s restoration (even in cosmopolitan New York), gaining established status in six out of the eventual thirteen. However, the origins of so many colonies in religious protest against the Church of England back home guaranteed that Anglicanism would never fully replicate its full English privileges in North America. Established churches might have been able to resist the growing pluralism better if they had more effectively set up their structures of government, but virtually everywhere except Massachusetts, the colonies suffered a shortage of clergy in the first formative century, and lay leaders of local religion were generally less inclined to take an exclusive view of what true religion might be than professionally trained clerics. In this they were aided by a strong consideration swaying many promoters of colonies: religious coercion discouraged settlement and was therefore economically bad for struggling colonial ventures. Reformation Europe had known religious toleration; now religious liberty was developing. Toleration is a grudging concession granted by one body from a position of strength; liberty provides a situation in which all religious groups compete on an equal basis. We have already seen precedents: