Humiliation

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  He describes a dinner in which the rich host, Virro, invites some poor clients to a meal and then deliberately insults them by giving good bread, food, wine, and service to himself and his friends but bad equivalents to them. We are back again with commensality, but now as calculated insult and intentional humiliation. Juvenal addresses Trebius, one of those hangers-on who sit far from the host and hope to get his scraps instead of their own bad food. You appear To yourself as a free man, a tycoon’s guest; he thinks you — Not bad guesswork—a slave to his kitchen’s odor. For who Could be so destitute as to suffer this patron twice If as a boy he had worn the free man’s golden device, Or even the leather boss, the badge poor folk would wear? The hope to dine well deceives you: “Look, that half-eaten hare He’ll give us now, or from the haunch of boar some bits; We’ll get what’s left of the capon soon.” So all of you sit In silence, ready, with bread held tight, untasted, and wait. It’s a wise man who treats you thus. If you can tolerate All this, you deserve it. Some day you’ll offer, with shaven pate, Your head to be slapped [like a clown] and won’t be afraid of being skinned By keen whips [like a slave], worthy at last of such feasts and such a friend. Unless you had started life as slaves, asks Juvenal, how could you take such abuse? Maybe, he concludes, you will end up as slaves. Despite his seething resentment we catch a glimpse of what lower-class clientage must have felt like in actual practice. But that is in a big city. It is hard even to imagine how the lower classes fared in rural situations within a patronal society. In the crowded city, even the poorest clients were useful to greet the patron as he appeared from his house in the morning or to accompany him on political or social visits during the day. Their presence and number proclaimed his importance. But, as Juvenal noted, clientage could be very, very close to slavery, and at times it could be much worse. Although slave societies and patronal societies have both been justified as moral associations, it is probably better not to mourn their passing from the human scene. James and Peter What is at stake here is the meaning of the itinerancy of Jesus. Why is he always going somewhere rather than being settled in one place and letting crowds come to him? Many people were permanently on the move in that first century for reasons of teaching, business, administration, or military activity. In those cases itinerancy was simply an accidental necessity of one’s mission. But was the itinerancy of Jesus more than that? Was his itinerancy or even vagrancy a programmatic part of his radical message?

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  The rioters drove the poor fellow into the gymnasium and set him up on high to be seen by all and put on his head a sheet of byblos spread out wide for a diadem, clothed the rest of his body with a rug for a royal robe, while someone who had noticed a piece of the native papyrus thrown away in the road gave it to him for his sceptre. And when in some theatrical farce he had received the insignia of kingship and had been tricked out as a king, young men carrying rods on their shoulders as spearmen stood on either side of him in imitation of a bodyguard. Then others approached him, some pretending to salute him, others to sue for justice, others to consult him on state affairs. Then from the multitude standing round him there rang out a tremendous shout hailing him as Marin, which is said to be the name for “lord” in Syria. For they knew that Agrippa was both a Syrian by birth and had a great piece of Syria over which he was king. Carabas’s mockery as pseudo-king involves not physical abuse or torture but rather a theatrical mime with throne, crown, robe, scepter, bodyguard, salutation, consultation, and especially his proclamation as Lord. Supposing, now, that one took a prophetic exegesis such as that of Barnabas 7 and a historical story such as that of poor Carabas and fused them together. One would get, I propose, a story like that in Mark 15:16–20: Then the soldiers led him into the courtyard of the palace (that is, the governor’s headquarters); and they called together the whole cohort. And they clothed him in a purple cloak; and after twisting some thorns into a crown, they put it on him. And they began saluting him, “Hail, King of the Jews!” They struck his head with a reed, spat upon him, and knelt down in homage to him. After mocking him, they stripped him of the purple cloak and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him out to crucify him. Let me focus the argument a little. Compare the crown (of wool) among thorns at the end of the Epistle of Barnabas 7 text given earlier with the crown of thorns on Jesus’ head here. I can easily imagine a development from former to latter but not the reverse. In fact, I cannot conceive of a human imagination reading Mark 15:16–20 and developing Epistle of Barnabas 7 out of it, but the reverse process, with a little help from the Carabas farce, is quite comprehensible. Or again, that spitting or striking with a reed comes not from what actually happened to Jesus, but from the popular ritual of spitting one’s sins out upon the scapegoat and hurrying it toward the desert by poking or striking it with sharp reeds. To prove my hypothesis would demand a similar argument for every incident in our present passion narratives.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Nay but [man] has never yet fulfilled what he has enjoined upon him. Let man, then, consider [the sources of] his food: [how it is] that we pour down waters, pouring it down abundantly; and then we cleave the earth [with new growth] cleaving it asunder, and thereupon we cause grain to grow out of it, and vines and edible plants, and olive trees and date palms, and gardens dense with foliage, and fruits and herbage, for you and for your animals to enjoy. 13 The existence of God is not in question, therefore. In the Koran an “unbeliever” ( kafir bi na’mat al-Lah ) is not an atheist in our sense of the word, somebody who does not believe in God, but one who is ungrateful to him, who can see quite clearly what is owing to God but refuses to honor him in a spirit of perverse ingratitude. The Koran was not teaching the Quraysh anything new. Indeed, it constantly claims to be “a reminder” of things known already, which it throws into more lucid relief. Frequently the Koran introduces a topic with a phrase like: “Have you not seen …?” or “Have you not considered …?” The Word of God was not issuing arbitrary commands from on high but was entering into a dialogue with the Quraysh. It reminds them, for example, that the Kabah, the House of al-Lah, accounted in large measure for their success, which was really in some sense owing to God. The Quraysh loved to make the ritual circumambulations around the shrine, but when they put themselves and their own material success into the center of their lives they had forgotten the meaning of these ancient rites of orientation. They should look at the “signs” ( ayat ) of God’s goodness and power in the natural world. If they failed to reproduce God’s benevolence in their own society, they would be out of touch with the true nature of things. Consequently, Muhammad made his converts bow down in ritual prayer ( salat ) twice a day. This external gesture would help Muslims to cultivate the internal posture and reorient their lives. Eventually Muhammad’s religion would be known as islam , the act of existential surrender that each convert was expected to make to al-Lah: a muslim was a man or woman who has surrendered his or her whole being to the Creator. The Quraysh were horrified when they saw these first Muslims making the salat: they found it unacceptable that a member of the haughty clan of Quraysh with centuries of proud Bedouin independence behind him should be prepared to grovel on the ground like a slave, and the Muslims had to retire to the glens around the city to make their prayer in secret.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It seems to have been a fair system, but the mining income also had to produce enough funds to support the Renaissance palaces looming over the town. It was long after Luther had left home, in the 1520s, that this balance became increasingly difficult to maintain. While the counts continued to squeeze money out of the leaseholders, income from the mines began to decline—the seams were deeper and therefore harder to reach, water had to be pumped out, and they required more machinery. The numbers of smelter-masters shrank and the silver-refining companies ( Saigergesellschaften ) that had been financing the mine operators now began to gain possession of the mines as the smelter-masters became indebted to them. 45 A proud, independent man, by the 1520s Hans Luder himself was unable to pay off his debts and was forced to work for the hated capitalists, in his case the Saigerhandelsgesellschaft at Schwarza, on a salary of fifty guilders a year with, humiliatingly, a supervisor at his side. 46 When he died in 1530 there were no mines for his son in Mansfeld to inherit, only the family property—worth a not insubstantial sum—to be shared equally among the children. 47 While in 1508 there had been forty-two smelter-masters in Mansfeld, by 1536 their number had halved. 48 In the 1560s, by which time the counts were running the Mansfeld mines themselves, the entire mining enterprise went bankrupt. 49 By the end of the century, the seams were exhausted and German silver production had given way to competition from the silver of the New World. Hans Luder and his contemporaries tried to make sense of economic relationships that no one could understand or control, and which were eventually to destroy them. They had no economic theory and little understanding of how wealth was created: No one knew why the capitalists in Nuremberg and Leipzig profited while the mine owners suddenly became impoverished. Economic thought was based on the assumption that wealth was limited. If one person had wealth, another could not get it. Metals, it was believed, resulted from the mixing of quicksilver and brimstone and were shaped by the influences of the planets. Mining was a matter of luck. There were diviners, and there were printed advice books, but no one knew where the rich seams might lie. Small wonder that the figure of Fate should have been so ubiquitous in the Mansfelders’ lives. There was a rich mining folklore that left its mark on Luther. With water essential to the process of smelting, he grew up with the belief in “nixes,” or water sprites, mischievous creatures who played tricks on humans. The fossils found in the mines were said to be drawings made by the spirits of the earth and of the air, and strange uncanny lights were believed to point to the rich seams.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  While he lived under Luther’s roof, Karlstadt was compelled to write a full recantation of his views on the Last Supper, again printed at Wittenberg and once more prefaced by Luther. 36 Luther conceded that Karlstadt’s treatises on the subject had been presented as theses, matters for discussion, not as statements of truth; but like others, Luther said, he had forgotten the form in which they had been issued and taken them to be statements of his real views. Turning Karlstadt’s emphasis on the spirit against him, Luther insisted that it was clear that his views were not “of the spirit,” because the spirit made people certain and bold; Karlstadt and his ilk, on the other hand, spoke only out of craziness and human darkness, and therefore everyone should be warned against his views. This was humiliating enough, but in early September, Karlstadt was writing to Luther as Luther’s “slave,” apologizing for disturbing his “sweet dream” and begging him to get the Elector to permit him to live in Saxony, preferably in Kemberg. He knew, he groveled to “your reverend lordship,” that it lay in Luther’s “might, not to say, power” to have his exile lifted. 37 Luther duly wrote to the Elector but, possibly on Spalatin’s advice, the Elector refused to permit Karlstadt to reside in Kemberg, because it was on the road to Leipzig and thus “suspicious” travelers might pass through and spread his message. He was to live only in “villages and hamlets” within three miles of Wittenberg, securely marooned in the country and away from the town and the university, but still under the authorities’ watchful eye. 38 The wellsprings of Karlstadt’s intellectual life—colleagues and students, a printer and a pulpit—were all denied him. It seems that he was now condemned to work as a farmer. It left Karlstadt a broken man. He kept his word, publishing virtually nothing once he returned to the Wittenberg area. He did manage to move to Kemberg, however, from where he journeyed to meet sympathetic figures like the noblemen Caspar Schwenckfeld and Valentin Crautwald in Silesia. A few years later, he moved to Basle, where he found a more congenial intellectual home, but he did not publish much. His theology continued to develop the idea of Gelassenheit, and when he died in 1541, he was in the process of composing a major synoptic work on theology in which Gelassenheit would have played a central role. It is puzzling that he failed utterly to capitalize on either the Peasants’ War or on the support his ideas were gaining in the cities of southern Germany. The man who wanted to engage in honest toil like a peasant found himself attacked and hunted by peasants who saw him as a learned grosser Hans, just another “big Jack.”

• From Satyricon (1)

  Driven to the last extremity, I could no longer keep back the tears. “Madame,” I burst out, “is this the night-cap which you ordered served to me?” Clapping her hands softly she cried out, “Oh you witty rogue, you are a fountain of repartee, but you never knew before that a catamite was called a k-night-cap, now did you?” Then, fearing my companion would come off better than I, “Madame,” I said, “I leave it to your sense of fairness: is Ascyltos to be the only one in this dining-room who keeps holiday?” “Fair enough,” conceded Quartilla, “let Ascyltos have his k-night-cap too!” On hearing that, the catamite changed mounts, and, having bestridden my comrade, nearly drove him to distraction with his buttocks and his kisses. Giton was standing between us and splitting his sides with laughter when Quartilla noticed him, and actuated by the liveliest curiosity, she asked whose boy he was, and upon my answering that he was my “brother,” “Why has he not kissed me then?” she demanded. Calling him to her, she pressed a kiss upon his mouth, then putting her hand beneath his robe, she took hold of his little member, as yet so undeveloped. “This,” she remarked, “shall serve me very well tomorrow, as a whet to my appetite, but today I’ll take no common fare after choice fish!” CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FIFTH. She was still talking when Psyche, who was giggling, came to her side and whispered something in her ear. What it was, I did not catch. “By all means,” ejaculated Quartilla, “a brilliant idea! Why shouldn’t our pretty little Pannychis lose her maidenhead when the opportunity is so favorable?” A little girl, pretty enough, too, was led in at once; she looked to be not over seven years of age, and she was the same one who had before accompanied Quartilla to our room. Amidst universal applause, and in response to the demands of all, they made ready to perform the nuptial rites. I was completely out of countenance, and insisted that such a modest boy as Giton was entirely unfitted for such a wanton part, and moreover, that the child was not of an age at which she could receive that which a woman must take. “Is that so,” Quartilla scoffed, “is she any younger than I was, when I submitted to my first man? Juno, my patroness, curse me if I can remember the time when I ever was a virgin, for I diverted myself with others of my own age, as a child then as the years passed, I played with bigger boys, until at last I reached my present age. I suppose that this explains the origin of the proverb, ‘Who carried the calf may carry the bull,’ as they say.” As I feared that Giton might run greater risk if I were absent, I got up to take part in the ceremony. CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SIXTH.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  This was an era in which individuals were much more important than the formal offices they held and in which politics was intensely personal, so those who had access to a ruler wielded enormous power themselves. Not only did Spalatin give Luther an opening to Friedrich and his court, he also introduced him to a circle of Nuremberg humanists, which provided essential support in the early years of the Reformation. Although Staupitz had long had a group of admirers in Nuremberg, it was Spalatin who introduced Luther to Christoph Scheurl, the powerful civic secretary of the city and a brilliant legal mind, who had also spent time at Wittenberg’s 88 MARTIN LUTHER law faculty. This connection to the wealthy south of Germany took Luther for the first time out of the narrow horizons of a world bounded by Erfurt, Mansfeld and Wittenberg. He later acknowledged how much he owed his cultured Nuremberg friends, who became some of his most important supporters. There was much to be accomplished at the new University of Wittenberg. The buildings still had to be completed, its courses of study firmly established, staff hired and students attracted.* And although it was a new foundation, Wittenberg swiftly invented its own traditions, which Luther would come to cherish. Shortly after it was established, the university found its own publicist, Andreas Meinhardi, whose Latin dialogue in its praise was published in 1508. Though this work did not win him the academic post he craved, it secured him a 17. Portrait of Christoph Scheurl by Lucas Cranach the Elder. WITTENBERG 89 position as civic secretary to the town council, a post he held until his death. Meinhardi described the rituals through which new students were admitted, and they were probably not unlike initiation rituals elsewhere in Germany. The initiate would be surrounded by a troupe of old hands, his face would be blacked with soot and dirt, his beard (if he had one) would be tugged, pig’s bristles would be wiped across his face, he would be anointed with ‘what people leave behind hedges’, and he would be ‘baptised’ with wine. The so-called ‘Beanus’ would have to host a celebratory meal for the professors while bound with chains and ritually humiliated. His hair would be washed with ‘horse eggs’, horns would be placed on his head and his teeth filed; his learning would be mocked, and he would be teased first about girls and then quizzed about the quality and extent of his anus. It is hard to imagine a more complete humiliation, or a more searing introduc- tion to academic hierarchy, as those who had experienced it would later inflict it on someone else.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  When the two sides met again the next day, on May 23, Luther asked whether each of the visitors “would recant what he taught and spread about against the Lord Christ, Scripture and the teaching and view of the Church,” and whether they would henceforth “constantly and in one spirit teach the true presence of the body of Christ in or with the bread of the Communion of the Lord.” Bucer and Capito were compelled to make this humiliating admission of error, after which Luther and his followers left the room to discuss what to do next. They then demanded that the sacramentarians concede that the unworthy, not just the believers, received the true body and blood of Christ in Communion; that is, the Lutherans wanted them to admit that Christ was really present in the sacrament, not just “present” depending on the faith and worthiness of the believer.25 Luther had gotten the recantation he had longed for. He then heaped a further humiliation on the visitors, asking each of them to repeat his confession individually, including that the sacrament was present to the unworthy. Finally the longed-for agreement had been reached and Bucer and Capito were weeping when the theologians all shook hands. Luther advised them to introduce the new teaching to their congregations gradually, so they would not notice—a rather cynical counsel and a gross underestimation of ordinary people’s investments in theological issues. The next day—Ascension Day—he preached on Mark 16:15: “Go out into all the world and preach the gospel to all creatures.” The chronicler Myconius, who heard the sermon, wrote, “I have heard Luther preach often, but at that time it seemed to me as if it was not just him speaking, but that he thundered out of the heavens themselves in the name of Christ.”26

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Thus suffering must also be part of the Christian life: ‘It is impossible for a person not to be puffed up by his good works unless he has first been deflated and destroyed by suffering and evil until he knows that he is worthless and that his works are not his but God’s.’ Luther elaborates the idea of the ‘hidden God’ (Deus absconditus), God hidden in suffering, which would become a powerful theme of his theology in his debate with Erasmus: the God who is not inside us, and who can never be fully known by humans. Surprisingly, the theses make no mention of indulgences and they once again expound a theology rather than deducing an argument from propositions. The themes of Luther’s thought were moving well beyond what he had set out in the Ninety-Five Theses; and the full implications of his attack on ‘philosophy’ were becoming evident.’ JOURNEYS AND DISPUTATIONS 107 At the meeting in Heidelberg on 25 April 1518 Luther’s theses were presented in front of Bernhard von Usingen and Jodokus Trutfetter, his former teachers in philosophy. Trutfetter was one of the leading logicians of his day, whose Summulae had synthesised all the latest thinking about modal logic — that is, logic which considers not only what is actually the case, but also what is possible. Trutfetter’s text- book, printed at Wittenberg, presented sequences of binding syllo- gisms, or logically valid arguments, in visual, tabular form, making them a powerful tool with which not only to understand thought itself but also to overwhelm an opponent in debate. Luther reported to Spalatin that everyone had been persuaded by his disputation — except one newly minted doctor, who had exclaimed, much to the hilarity of the audience that, ‘if the peasants heard this, they would stone you to death’. And except for Usingen and Trutfetter. As Luther noted later, his former teachers were revolted ‘to death’ by his views. In fact, when he left Heidelberg after the meeting, Usingen had joined him in his wagon, and during their journey to Erfurt, Luther had tried to persuade him round. But there was no budging either of them, and now, he told Spalatin on 18 May, he was going to leave them behind, just as Christ had left behind the Jews — a mean- spirited equation.’

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  He later acknowledged how much he owed his cultured Nuremberg friends, who became some of his most important supporters. — T HERE was much to be accomplished at the new University of Wittenberg. The buildings still had to be completed, its courses of study firmly established, staff hired, and students attracted. 28 And although it was a new foundation, Wittenberg swiftly invented its own traditions, which Luther would come to cherish. Shortly after it was established, the university found its own publicist, Andreas Meinhardi, whose Latin dialogue in its praise was published in 1508. Though this work did not win him the academic post he craved, it secured him a position as civic secretary to the town council, a post he held until his death. Meinhardi described the rituals through which new students were admitted, and they were probably not unlike initiation rituals elsewhere in Germany. The initiate would be surrounded by a troupe of old hands, his face would be blacked with soot and dirt, his beard (if he had one) would be tugged, pig’s bristles would be wiped across his face, he would be anointed with “what people leave behind hedges,” and he would be “baptized” with wine. The so-called Beanus would have to host a celebratory meal for the professors while bound with chains and ritually humiliated. His hair would be washed with “horse eggs,” horns would be placed on his head and his teeth filed; his learning would be mocked, and he would be teased first about girls and then quizzed about the quality and extent of his anus. It is hard to imagine a more complete humiliation, or a more searing introduction to academic hierarchy, as those who had experienced it would later inflict it on someone else. 29 17. Portrait of Christoph Scheurl by Lucas Cranach the Elder. The university was to be part of the new learning, but although several famous humanists and scholars visited and gave lectures, in the first few years none stayed long. In fact, the university was scholastic in orientation and its first rector, Martin Pollich von Mellerstadt, was an old conservative who adhered to the via antiqua and resisted any departure from the teachings of Aristotle and Duns Scotus. Against Mellerstadt’s influence, Staupitz and others strove to introduce the via moderna, but the humanist ideas that were exciting so many in Europe at this time were not on their agenda. Theology held pride of place in the university, and many of its professors—including Mellerstadt himself—had moved from other disciplines into what was regarded as the queen of the sciences to make it the university’s intellectual powerhouse. Within the theological faculty, Andreas Karlstadt was a follower of Thomas Aquinas. Johannes Lang lectured on moral philosophy. Lang had mixed in humanist circles at Erfurt and learned Greek and Hebrew so he could read the Bible in the original languages; Luther had studied Hebrew with him. It was an immensely productive friendship.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Margarethe, named after her mother, married Heinz Kaufmann, who between 1508 and 1512 ran only one “fire,” but would later go into partnership with his father-in-law, as would Martin’s younger brother Jacob (whose name his family pronounced “Jacuff”). The third sister married Claus Polner, who, like Luder, belonged to the group of mine owners without secure leases. 44 Yet all Hans Luder’s careful calculations and long-term strategies would eventually come to nought. The Mansfeld mines were collectively administered by the five counts, with the exercise of jurisdiction alternating among them. It seems to have been a fair system, but the mining income also had to produce enough funds to support the Renaissance palaces looming over the town. It was long after Luther had left home, in the 1520s, that this balance became increasingly difficult to maintain. While the counts continued to squeeze money out of the leaseholders, income from the mines began to decline—the seams were deeper and therefore harder to reach, water had to be pumped out, and they required more machinery. The numbers of smelter-masters shrank and the silver-refining companies ( Saigergesellschaften ) that had been financing the mine operators now began to gain possession of the mines as the smelter-masters became indebted to them. 45 A proud, independent man, by the 1520s Hans Luder himself was unable to pay off his debts and was forced to work for the hated capitalists, in his case the Saigerhandelsgesellschaft at Schwarza, on a salary of fifty guilders a year with, humiliatingly, a supervisor at his side. 46 When he died in 1530 there were no mines for his son in Mansfeld to inherit, only the family property—worth a not insubstantial sum—to be shared equally among the children. 47 While in 1508 there had been forty-two smelter-masters in Mansfeld, by 1536 their number had halved. 48 In the 1560s, by which time the counts were running the Mansfeld mines themselves, the entire mining enterprise went bankrupt. 49 By the end of the century, the seams were exhausted and German silver production had given way to competition from the silver of the New World. Hans Luder and his contemporaries tried to make sense of economic relationships that no one could understand or control, and which were eventually to destroy them. They had no economic theory and little understanding of how wealth was created: No one knew why the capitalists in Nuremberg and Leipzig profited while the mine owners suddenly became impoverished. Economic thought was based on the assumption that wealth was limited. If one person had wealth, another could not get it. Metals, it was believed, resulted from the mixing of quicksilver and brimstone and were shaped by the influences of the planets. Mining was a matter of luck. There were diviners, and there were printed advice books, but no one knew where the rich seams might lie.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther’s mother later became a target for Catholic polemicists who wanted to show that the reformer was the scion of the Devil. Johannes Nas, for one, a Catholic controversialist of the second half of the sixteenth century, alleged that Luther’s mother had been working as a bath maid—a dishonorable profession and a byword for loose morals. She had been seduced by a stranger dressed in luxurious red, who promised her that she would never suffer want and would catch a rich husband if only she would give herself to him. Thus Luther was the outcome of a liaison with what must have been the Devil himself. This was a throwback to sexual slurs that the Catholic Johannes Cochlaeus, a contemporary originally sympathetic to Luther’s ideas and then his determined antagonist, had cast as early as 1533: that Luther was “a lousy runaway monk and rascally nun’s fanny who had neither land nor people, an ignoble changeling who was born of a bath maid as they say.”15 Luther laughed off these attacks: Either he was a bath maid’s son or he was a changeling, he quipped. He could not be both. But although he affected not to care, he remembered the insult and quoted it several times.16 —HOWEVER much in decline from its glory days, Eisenach was very different to his hometown. While Mansfeld was a town of slag heaps and taverns, Eisenach boasted churches, monasteries, and books. Many of Luther’s relatives on his mother’s side were university graduates who had made careers as doctors, academics, administrators, and lawyers. This was the background that would have prompted him to think of attending university, and to become active in public life. Significantly, when he angrily refuted suggestions in 1520 that his parents were from Bohemia—intended to taint him with connections to Hussite heretics—he referred to Eisenach and his relatives there: “Nearly all my kinfolk are at Eisenach, and I am known there and recognized by them even today…and there is no other town in which I am better known.”17 It was his mother’s side of the family, not his father’s, that exercised a powerful influence on his scholarly and religious identity. Like Mansfeld, Eisenach nestled in the shadow of a castle, the Wartburg. The townspeople’s relationship to the surrounding nobility was, however, turbulent. In the thirteenth century, Sophie of Brabant had constructed a fortress in the town that the locals called the Klemme, or clamp, for it was designed to control them—and they destroyed it with glee at the first opportunity.18 There were repeated conflicts, and in 1304 the Eisenachers even demolished the towers of Our Lady’s Church, so as to strengthen their defenses, an act of sacrilege that resulted in the whole town being put under the ban. In 1306–8 the townsfolk tried to gain independence, even storming the Wartburg itself, and when they failed, were besieged themselves. All this history gave the Eisenachers a powerful sense of their own identity, and a belligerent antagonism toward the lords on the hill.19

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The events of Kaiser’s martyrdom followed closely upon Luther’s breakdown. On July 18 he was taken to Passau and again given an opportunity to recant. When he refused, he was ritually defrocked in a ceremony carried out in front of a large crowd, which included Eck. Piece by piece, his priest’s robes were stripped from his body by the bishop of Passau, and he was shaved. Then he was dressed in nothing but a smock, or Kittel, a black slashed beret was put on his head, and, now an ordinary layman, he was handed over to the city judge. This ritual was not the end of his humiliation, however. Kaiser was kept in the castle dungeon for yet another month, and then paraded in chains around the town, before being taken to his home town of Schärding, where he was executed on August 16. Kaiser died true to his Lutheran faith. The original anonymous pamphlet account of his death insisted that his body miraculously refused to burn, but Luther rejected this spurious miracle.46 Instead, in December he composed a pamphlet including a full account of the trial, several letters, Kaiser’s will, and a precise account of the execution sent to him by his friend Michael Stifel: “Thereupon the fire was lit, and several times he shouted loudly: ‘Jesus, I am thine, save me!’ After which his hands, feet and head burnt off and the fire died down. The executioner took a pole and turned the body, then put more wood on the fire, and afterwards he hewed a hole in the body, stabbed it with a sword, stuck a pole in it and put it back on the scaffold and so burnt it.” All this Luther republished in detail, as if determined not to shrink from the full horror of martyrdom.47 And he concluded the pamphlet with a very personal meditation: “Oh Lord God, I wish that I were worthy or might yet be worthy of such a confession and death. What am I? What am I doing? How ashamed I am, when I read this story that I have not long since…been worthy to suffer the same. But my God, if it should be so, let it be so, your will be done.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In 1539 he produced the Monachopornomachia ( The War of the Monk’s Whores ), a play that owes much to Cochlaeus’s Tragedy of Johann Hus but is far cruder and less psychologically shrewd. 53 Its schoolboy humor derides Luther for being forced into marriage with Katharina von Bora, who everyone knows is a whore. But Luther, suffering from gout and the stone, cannot travel, so she is permanently under his watchful eye and does not get enough time with her young lover. Her friends, the wives of Spalatin and Jonas, recount the wonderful sex they enjoyed while their husbands were away at Augsburg at the Diet. At times Luther is presented as virile, foolishly enslaved to his lusts, but in another scene he begs Katharina to stroke his member and help it stand. Spalatin’s wife explains how she manages to satisfy both her husband and her lover without having two vaginas: She “raises her bottom” for her beau. Lemnius and Cochlaeus let their imaginations run riot about the private lives of Luther and the reformers, and their obsession sprang from what was still so shocking in Luther’s theology: His marriage to a nun and his surprisingly positive attitude toward sexuality. Lemnius could not bear it. In his eyes a cabal of old, ill, and impotent men dominated Wittenberg with their sex-obsessed wives and did not appreciate his talent. But in his writings, the Wittenberg of university students also emerges, a town crammed with girls only too eager to find a student lover, and once again with its own brothels even though they had been closed in 1522 as part of Karlstadt’s moral reformation. 54 Lemnius described his aristocratic friends spending their time in clubs like the Cyclops, all too easily getting into fights and duels. Their worth was measured by their ability to socialize within the right circles, bear weapons, flaunt lovers, and display wit. This was a new generation, and its values were very different from those of the reformers. Gone forever was the world of German humanism, and Lemnius mourned its loss. The generational change that Lemnius represented also meant that Luther was no longer universally revered, even in Wittenberg. For much of the 1530s he had had to deal with fawning adulation; in 1536 the mayor of Basle told him that he treated the letter he had sent him as a “costly jewel.” 55 People treasured his signature and he had to sign and dedicate copies of his Bible translation. His image was everywhere in paintings and prints. In 1542, however, he was even attacked by an angry crowd, who invaded his house and swore and blasphemed; it is not clear what had enraged them, but their actions reveal diminishing respect. 56 Within Wittenberg and beyond, Luther had made enemies who alleged that he had too much power.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  It was at this moment that the United States, which had hitherto been seen as a benevolent power, lost its political innocence in Iran. By 1953, Musaddiq’s support was on the wane. He had never commanded the full allegiance of the army, but now the oil embargo was causing a grave economic crisis, and the bazaaris deserted him. So did the ulema, including Kashani: Musaddiq was an avowed secularist, and was determined to relegate religion to the private sector. He had also felt strong enough to dismiss the Majlis, which made the Shii clergy nervous of tyranny. But just as these old allies abandoned Musaddiq, Tudeh, the socialist party, swung to his support. This alarmed the U.S. government under President Dwight Eisenhower, who feared a pro-communist coup. He therefore approved United States participation in Operation Ajax, a coup engineered by British intelligence and the CIA to depose Musaddiq. In August 1953, however, Musaddiq got wind of the plot and, as agreed in case of discovery, the shah and the queen left the country, only to return under the aegis of CIA agents, who, three days later, orchestrated the dissaffected Iranians and key men in the military in an uprising which unseated Musaddiq. He was later tried by a military court, defended himself brilliantly, and escaped the death penalty, though he spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The 1953 coup could not have succeeded had there not been considerable disaffection in the country, but it is also true that it would not have taken place without foreign intervention. Iranians felt betrayed and humiliated by the United States, which they had previously considered a friend. America was now following in the footsteps of the Russians and the British, who had cynically manipulated events in Iran for their own gain. This seemed clear in 1954, when a new oil treaty was made which returned the control of oil production, its marketing, and fifty percent of the profits to the world cartel companies. 106 This sickened the more thoughtful Iranians. They had tried to take control of their own wealth, with the backing of the international court, but this had not been respected. Ayatollah Kashani was appalled. American aid to Iran benefited only a few people, he protested, and did not reach a hundredth of what the United States took from Iran in petrodollars. “For the hundreds of millions of dollars that the American colonialist imperialists will gain in oil,” he predicted, “the oppressed nation will lose all hope of liberty and will have a negative opinion about all the Western world.” 107 In this, at least, Kashani was a true prophet. When Iranians looked back on Operation Ajax, they would forget the defection of their own people from Musaddiq, and believe implicitly that the United States had single-handedly imposed the shah’s dictatorship upon them, for its own interests.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The riots also disturbed London and Washington, who wanted Musaddiq out. Ayatollah Kashani played a leading role in these demonstrations, rushing through the streets in a shroud to declare his willingness to die in the holy war against tyranny. After only two days, the shah was forced to reinstate Musaddiq. It was at this moment that the United States, which had hitherto been seen as a benevolent power, lost its political innocence in Iran. By 1953, Musaddiq’s support was on the wane. He had never commanded the full allegiance of the army, but now the oil embargo was causing a grave economic crisis, and the bazaaris deserted him. So did the ulema , including Kashani: Musaddiq was an avowed secularist, and was determined to relegate religion to the private sector. He had also felt strong enough to dismiss the Majlis, which made the Shii clergy nervous of tyranny. But just as these old allies abandoned Musaddiq, Tudeh, the socialist party, swung to his support. This alarmed the U.S. government under President Dwight Eisenhower, who feared a pro-communist coup. He therefore approved United States participation in Operation Ajax, a coup engineered by British intelligence and the CIA to depose Musaddiq. In August 1953, however, Musaddiq got wind of the plot and, as agreed in case of discovery, the shah and the queen left the country, only to return under the aegis of CIA agents, who, three days later, orchestrated the dissaffected Iranians and key men in the military in an uprising which unseated Musaddiq. He was later tried by a military court, defended himself brilliantly, and escaped the death penalty, though he spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The 1953 coup could not have succeeded had there not been considerable disaffection in the country, but it is also true that it would not have taken place without foreign intervention. Iranians felt betrayed and humiliated by the United States, which they had previously considered a friend. America was now following in the footsteps of the Russians and the British, who had cynically manipulated events in Iran for their own gain. This seemed clear in 1954, when a new oil treaty was made which returned the control of oil production, its marketing, and fifty percent of the profits to the world cartel companies. 106 This sickened the more thoughtful Iranians. They had tried to take control of their own wealth, with the backing of the international court, but this had not been respected. Ayatollah Kashani was appalled.

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

  compromise. Although it talked of the Union of Two Natures, and took care to give explicit mention of Theotokos, it largely followed Nestorius’s viewpoint about ‘two natures’, ‘the distinction of natures being in no way abolished because of the union’.90 Meanwhile, to satisfy his enemies, the unhappy former Bishop of Constantinople was condemned once more: an ecclesiastical stitch-up, dictated by imperial power. Nestorius was already completely isolated from public affairs, in a remote Egyptian location (which the Egyptian government still uses for a high-security prison); he endured his humiliation at the hands of his enemies with stoicism. He is reputed to have died the day before a message arrived inviting him to participate in the Council of Chalcedon; regardless of this impulse to reconciliation, the Emperor then ordered Nestorius’s writings burned, and children bearing his name were rebaptized and renamed. His last and most extensive work, written in prison, a dignified defence of all that he had done, was only rediscovered in a manuscript in 1889, in the library of the East Syrian Patriarch, whose Church’s separate status originated in its unhappiness with the results of Chalcedon.91 The Chalcedonian Definition certainly proved to have staying power, unlike the Homoean compromise solution to the Arian dispute at Ariminum in 359, but it still won much less acceptance than the credal formula of Constantinople from 381. In the manner of many politically inspired middle-of-the-road settlements, it left bitter discontents on either side in the Eastern Churches. On the one hand were those who adhered to a more robust affirmation of two natures in Christ and who felt that Nestorius had been treated with outrageous injustice. These protestors were labelled Nestorians by their opponents, and the Churches which they eventually formed have habitually been so styled by outsiders ever since. It would be truer to their origins, and more considerate to their self-esteem, to call them Theodoreans, since Theodore of Mopsuestia was the prime source of their theological stance and Nestorius hardly figured in their minds as a founding father. In view of their insistence on two (dyo) natures in Christ, they could with justice be called ‘Dyophysites’, and we will trace their subsequent history primarily as ‘the Church of the East’ using this label. By contrast, on the other side the history of the winners has likewise given those who treasure the memory of Cyril and his campaign against Nestorius a label which they still resent: ‘Monophysites’ (monos and physis=single nature). This latter group of Churches has always been insistent on claiming that title prized among Eastern Churches: ‘Orthodox’. In an age where both Churches of the Greek, Romanian and Slavic Orthodox traditions and the various Catholic and Protestant heirs of the Western Latin Church have increasingly sought to end ancient bitterness, these sensitivities have been respected, and the label

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

  church, butchered him and six of his clergy, and paraded the bleeding corpses round the city: all in the name of the mia physis of Jesus Christ.3 The emperor’s authority in Egypt never fully recovered from this appalling incident: increasingly a majority in the Egyptian Church as well as other strongholds of Miaphysitism denounced Chalcedonian Christians as ‘Dyophysites’ and sneered at them as ‘the emperor’s people’ – Melchites.4 The word ‘Melchite’ has had a complicated later history, and now various Churches of Orthodox tradition in communion with the pope in Rome are happy to use it to label themselves, but it thus started life as a term of abuse as poisonous as ‘collaborator’ in the aftermath of Nazi occupation in the Europe of the 1940s. From now on Egyptian Christianity increasingly worshipped God in the native language of Egypt, Coptic. The Church had long been ready to use various Coptic dialects, liberally seeded with loanwords from Greek, and already in the third century Coptic was being written in a version of Greek script, developed specifically for translating the Christian scriptures. The prestige of Antony, Pachomius and the ascetic movement sealed the respectability of Coptic in Christian life and worship, and it developed a considerable literature both of translated and original devotional texts, both mainstream Christian and unorthodox.5 Now Coptic language and distinctive culture were becoming badges of difference from the Greek Christianity of the Church in Constantinople. There was a tendency all round the eastern Mediterranean for ‘Melchites’ to be concentrated in urban, affluent outposts of Greek society, while anti-Chalcedonian views on either side increasingly found strength in other communities. The leaders of the Miaphysite cause across the empire still loudly proclaimed their loyalty to the imperial throne, and there is no reason to doubt that most were sincere. Their loyalty was certainly worth trying to secure. For two centuries and more a succession of emperors in Constantinople desperately tried to devise ever more intricate theological formulae which would reconcile the Miaphysites to the imperial Church, preferably but not necessarily preserving the essence of the Chalcedonian settlement. In doing so, they constantly imperilled their relations with the Western Latin Church. It was only natural that the Eastern emperors had shifted their political priorities away from the western half of the old empire as that disintegrated. In 410 had come the sack of Rome itself by barbarian armies: a deep humiliation for Romans proud of their history, even if the city had long ceased to be the capital for the emperors. In 451 there had still been an emperor in the West – more or less – but in 476 the barbarian rulers who were taking over so much of the former western territories of Rome allowed the last emperor to reign for no more than a few months of his teenage years

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

  The pope who drew together all the strands of papal self-assertion in the eleventh century was Gregory VII (reigned 1073–85). Born Hildebrand, an Italian who became a monk, he was in papal service from the 1040s, so he was another major voice in the circle of Pope Leo IX alongside the Cluniac Humbert. Once pope, Gregory was free to pursue the programme of Church reform which now had all Europe as its canvas, and which, in a series of formal statements entered into his administrative register, was centred on a definition of the pope as universal monarch in a world where the Church would reign over all the rulers of the earth.18 This one man’s vision can be compared in its consequences over centuries with the vision of Karl Marx eight hundred years later; indeed, all the signs are that it will prove far longer-lasting in its effects. Popes had never before made such revolutionary universal claims. Not even the Donation of Constantine (see p. 351) would satisfy Gregory’s agenda: it still represented a gift from a secular ruler to a pope, and that was the wrong way round, at a time when popes were increasingly bitterly clashing with successive emperors. Twice Gregory went so far as to excommunicate the king and future Emperor Henry IV in the course of an ‘Investiture Controversy’, a dispute which continued to rage through the twelfth century as to whether monarchs could present senior bishops with symbols of sacred office when they were appointed. This was a straightforward struggle about who was going to exercise control in the Church. Famously in the first of their clashes, the Pope kept the excommunicate Henry waiting in penitential garb, allegedly barefoot, for three days in winter snow, at the castle of Canossa in northern Italy, before granting him absolution. Gregory’s successors took a new title, more comprehensive than ‘Vicar of Peter’, more accurately to express his ideas: ‘Vicar of Christ’. Not merely the successor of Peter, the pope was Christ’s ambassador and representative on earth. His duty was to lead the task of making the world and the Church holy.19 Gregory’s humiliation of Henry was soon to be reversed, and the investiture controversy itself ended inconclusively in the early twelfth century, but similar issues flared up repeatedly later. In confrontations which sometimes became military campaigns, popes were able to wound the empire without effectively dominating it. As a result, Western Europe was not destined to become a single sacred state like the early Muslim caliphate, under either emperor or pope, but a constellation of jurisdictions, some of which threw off papal obedience in the sixteenth century. One of the most poisonous confrontations between the Church’s persistent claims and one of these monarchs was a dispute between King Henry II of England and his former Chancellor the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket, about whether the King’s newly developing royal legal system could

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN Part Two THE PRAYERS OF THE SAINTS And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN 1 FLORENCE’S PRAYER Light and life to all He brings, Risen with healing in His wings! F LORENCE raised her voice in the only song she could remember that her mother used to sing: ‘ It’s me, it’s me, it’s me, oh, Lord, Standing in the need of prayer. ’ Gabriel turned to stare at her, in astonished triumph that his sister should at last be humbled. She did not look at him. Her thoughts were all on God. After a moment, the congregation and the piano joined her: ‘ Not my father, not my mother, But it’s me, ob, Lord. ’ She knew that Gabriel rejoiced, not that her humility might lead her to grace, but only that some private anguish had brought her low: her song revealed that she was suffering, and this her brother was glad to see. This had always been his spirit. Nothing had ever changed it; nothing ever would. For a moment her pride stood up; the resolution that had brought her to this place to-night faltered, and she felt that if Gabriel was the Lord’s anointed, she would rather die and endure Hell for all eternity than how before His altar. But she strangled her pride, rising to stand with them in the holy space before the altar, and still singing: ‘ Standing in the need of prayer. ’ Kneeling as she had not knelt for many years, and in this company before the altar, she gained again from the song the meaning it had held for her mother, and gained a new meaning for herself. As a child, the song had made her see a woman, dressed in black, standing in infinite mists alone, waiting for the form of the Son of God to lead her through that white fire. This woman now returned to her, more desolate; it was herself, not knowing where to put her foot; she waited, trembling, for the mists to be parted that she might walk in peace. That long road, her life, which she had followed for sixty groaning years, had led her at last to her mother’s starting-place, the altar of the Lord. For her feet stood on the edge of that river which her mother, rejoicing, had crossed over. And would the Lord now reach out His hand to Florence and heal and save? But, going down before the scarlet cloth at the foot of the golden cross, it came to her that she had forgotten how to pray.