Pride

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.

Page 15 of 174 · 20 per page

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The first tells of a single military campaign, probably reflecting some real war of centuries before, in which Greeks besieged and destroyed the (non-Greek) city of Troy in north-west Anatolia (Asia Minor, today Turkey). The Odyssey chronicles journeys home to Ithaka from the siege by one Greek hero, Odysseus, over ten years. The two epics took shape orally in recitation sometime in the eighth or seventh century BCE, attributed to a poet named Homer, of whom we know nothing for certain. They were written down in a form of script that the Greeks borrowed from the Phoenicians, another coastal Mediterranean people, and refined for their own purposes: the alphabet, ancestor of our own alphabet via its later adaptation by the Romans. The Israelites, neighbours (and frequently fractious neighbours) of the Phoenicians, took the technology of the alphabet in a different direction to record their own Hebrew language and write down their own sacred literature. In both cases, literature reinforced or created self-identification. For the Greeks identity was based on their shared knowledge of Homer’s epics, together with certain religious sites, temples and ceremonies which they saw as common property in Hellas – especially the oracle of the god Apollo at Delphi and a shrine and associated pan-Hellenic games held at Olympia in the Peloponnese. It is notable that the Iliad portrays the defeated Trojans as no different in culture from the Greeks besieging them. Greeks loftily told themselves that all non-Greeks were barbaroi, an expressive way of saying that non-Greek languages were as meaningless as a baby’s ‘ba-ba’ babble. In reality they were keenly interested in other sophisticated cultures, particularly in two great empires impinging on their lives: Persia (Iran), which long dominated their eastern flank and actually ruled many of their cities; and Egypt, south across the Mediterranean. While Greeks were impressed by the antiquity of these civilizations, they were not enthused by the political organization of such giant powers, and they showed an emphatic preference for living in and identifying with small city-states. That made perfect geographical sense in the fragmented and mountainous heartlands of Greece and Anatolia, but Greeks deliberately replicated such independent city-states in flatlands when they founded colonies far dispersed round the Mediterranean coast. These colonies affectionately remembered their origins for centuries, and in time of trouble might draw on the link with an ancient Greek founder-city. [2] The outlook that nurtured such long-term relationships reflected this sense that a city-state was the natural Greek way to live. The Greek word for city is polis (pl. poleis) – but Greek is a language where apparently simple words can have as many resonances as ripples from a stone thrown into a still pond, and with polis the resonances are rather like those of the English word ‘home’. A polis was more than the cluster of houses and marketplaces around a temple which was universally its visible embodiment in Hellas.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Across the parking lot stood the World Prayer Center’s global headquarters, a “spiritual NORAD,” and in its atrium stood another bronze warrior angel armed with enormous biceps and packing a sword. The chapel contained computers where visitors entered personal prayers; the center’s staff provided more politically oriented prayers—for a marriage amendment, for the appointment of new justices, and for the president. The center also offered prayers for US foreign policy, for God to “crush [the] demonic stronghold and communist regime of Kim Jun II,” and for the forces of good to prevail in Iraq.9 Those at New Life were aware of the strategic position they occupied. Colorado Springs was a battleground, a “spiritual Gettysburg,” explained one man who understood his own role in militarized terms: “I’m a warrior, dude. I’m a warrior for God. Colorado Springs is my training ground.” Like the military, New Life employed a rigid chain of command to ensure strict ideological conformity. Male authority and female submission were essential to that hierarchical order. The church also elevated the role of sexual purity, though Haggard insisted that purity didn’t diminish pleasure; evangelicals, he boasted, had “the best sex lives” of anyone. All this came together in a larger mission. Evangelicals who flocked to Colorado Springs shared in a mythical dream “populated by cowboys and Indians, monsters and prayer warriors to slay them, and ladies to reward the warriors with chaste kisses.” Haggard’s New Life Church was a hotbed of militant evangelicalism. Together, Haggard and Dobson worked to spread this militant faith throughout the US military.10 FOR HALF A CENTURY , evangelicals had been working to strengthen the military and imbue it with evangelical values, and they’d been warmly received, particularly by evangelicals already entrenched within the armed forces. By the 2000s, however, some service members began to object to the overt proselytizing and coercive religious atmosphere they encountered within the military. The air force academy in Colorado Springs was ground zero in the battle over religious expression and coercion. The mission to combat an alleged evangelical takeover was led by Mikey Weinstein, a 1977 honor graduate of the academy, former air force officer, and former legal counsel to the Reagan White House. Weinstein and his family were Jewish, and both of his sons attended the academy, where they encountered aggressive Christian proselytizing at times tinged with anti-Semitic undertones. Weinstein began to gather documentation, and his complaints led to an investigation that revealed a “pervasive” religious intolerance at the academy. A number of questionable activities came to light. Johnny A.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Etheldreda did have a continuing usefulness for tenth-century reformers because of her emphatic defence of her virginity through her two marriages. Beyond her was the ultimate example of the divine favour offered to virginity, in Mary. There is previous evidence of the cult of Mary from the seventh century, but that evidence mainly comes from the north and west Midlands, the kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia, suggesting that it may have been an overspill from devotion in Irish or Welsh Christianity. A new phase in the tenth century has a different distribution in southern England, with its central energy in Winchester, just at the period and in the area most involved in monastic reform. [44] There was more to Mary than simply a symbol of virginity. Prominent in the lively literature that Marian devotion generated was the theme of Mary as Queen of Heaven, which chimed with the long-standing Anglo-Saxon devotion to queens who were saints. Even if their royal successors had lost much of their actual power in the Church, a turn to Mary was perhaps a way of squaring that rhetorical circle. In the same fashion as the links of the whole monastic reform movement with Francia, English Marian devotion could draw on a century or more of Frankish Marian literature. Such literature had grown increasingly fascinated by Mary’s genealogy that made her Queen of Heaven: she now became the pinnacle of the genealogical line of Jesus set out in Matthew’s Gospel, regardless of the complications of that genealogy which we have already observed as leading not to Mary but to Joseph (above, Chapter 4). The Marian family tree was a development that well suited an age of royal families struggling to retain or reclaim their power. [45] 14. This late fifteenth-century French translation of the Golden Legend puts Mary emphatically at the centre of the family tree back to Jesse, father of David, though the caption below hints at the complications of genealogy in Matthew and Luke’s Gospels. Church reform in England created a second set of victims, this time male. Contemptuous of what remained of the former Anglo-Saxon system of religious foundations organized with families and dynasties in mind, the reformers bitterly attacked the supposed sinfulness and debauchery of clergy living as ‘canons’ of English minsters, whether married or professedly celibate – the distinction was not always clear. Bishop Æthelwold led the way in expelling the existing clerical staff of two adjacent minsters in his cathedral city of Winchester, all with the backing of King Eadgar and the King’s thegns. Such reformers as Æthelwold were reading Bede’s diatribes against those monasteries of which he had disapproved, and behind Bede was the ‘Apostle of the English’ Gregory the Great. Both these venerated authorities reached back to the writings of the mysterious Easterner Pseudo-Dionysios the Areopagite, and they confronted their readers with Dionysios’s resonant identification of true ascetics as angels: remember the investigative journalism of Bede’s angel at Coldingham. [46] Conversely, Bishop Æthelwold (ventriloquizing King Eadgar in a royal charter to the refounded New Minster in Winchester) compared his clerical victims to the angel companions of Satan/Lucifer/the Devil whom God had expelled from Paradise, ‘cast[ing] out the filth of the rebel angels with their puffed-up haughtiness’. The Wessex campaigners for purity were in the same way ‘clearing away the filth of evil deeds’. [47] In the Byzantine world, eunuchs had seized on the image of the angel for their own purposes (above, Chapter 8), but eunuchs hardly impinged on the consciousness of Latin Westerners, and so the angelic metaphor was now left in the sole possession of monks. Nuns rather fell out of this comparison, in keeping with the unexamined assumption that the genderlessness of angels was still vaguely male: as vague as the maleness of a monk should be. Therefore nunneries were not going to share much of the benefit of this literary construction. Nor could a nun celebrate the Eucharist, unlike an ordained monk, who upstaged her virginity by his resemblance to an angel. Prolonged and serious resistance from married clergy no doubt encouraged the violence of the reformers’ rhetoric, who might have had to recognize that in the Atlantic islands, as in the coastal regions of Francia facing England, most clergy were in fact the sons of clergy right into the eleventh century, if not

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  She stood out in the Bible Belt. My parents were from the East Coast, and they’d met in Baltimore, her hometown. When my father took a job in Oklahoma City in the mid-seventies, they didn’t intend the move to be permanent. My mother says she was depressed for the first two years. But they stayed. Eventually they bought a house in Nichols Hills, the ritziest part of town, and sent me to the private prep school nearby. They scoffed at the flat horizon of Oklahoma City, but they also learned how to live with it, how to make the most of it. Oklahoma is known best for being, in the nineteenth century, the place where the US government put Native Americans it had cruelly expelled from other parts of the country. It is also known for its bizarro Land Rush of 1889, when white settlers raced to grab up parcels of Native land; for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical of the same (exclamation-pointed) name; and perhaps less so, for having an oil well on the lawn of the state capitol. In the 1980s, if you told someone from somewhere else that you lived in Oklahoma, they’d ask if you rode a cow to school, and this would seem hilarious to everyone but you. But Oklahoma was also a place of new and flashy wealth, and this was especially true in Nichols Hills, a manicured enclave of oil and gas money and gated mansions that people casually called “houses.” My father was a radiation oncologist in private practice, and I had a childhood of privilege. My mother stayed home until I was twelve, then made her aerobics habit a job. She became a certified personal fitness trainer. My parents clung to vestiges of their old coastal life: progressive politics and a subscription to the Sunday New York Times. We didn’t go to church on Sundays. My father instead spent weekend mornings combing estate sales for silver saltcellars, etched crystal glasses, and glazed ceramics from England and France with lobsters and serpents on the lid. He’d hit up the Chinese supermarket, bring home a haul of slender eggplants and crisp-skinned lacquered duck. My parents bought plane tickets and got me out, took me to see other cities and countries.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Amulets as emblems of magic power were especially associated with pre-Christian female graves in England, but they were succeeded in Christian interments with a new crop of amulets with cross designs, or little bags likely to have contained sacred relics. These graves are another notable feature of Anglo-Saxon Christianity; contrary to the general custom in most Christian societies, richly furnished burials continued after Augustine’s arrival and even revived around 660, and the majority are female. [30] This local individuality overlaps with other special features of the early Anglo-Saxon ‘conversion’ that reflect the reality that Christianity spread through the decisions of Christianized monarchs: having opted for the new religion, they ordered their people to accept it in place of previous polytheistic cults. First came a brief vogue for male royal holiness: some kings deserted their realms to undertake long pilgrimages to Rome from which they did not return. At least four Anglo-Saxon Christian monarchs even voluntarily renounced their thrones and retired to monasteries, beginning with King Sigebert of the East Angles sometime after his accession as king in 630/31. This was a most unusual impulse among the Germanic kingdoms of Europe, and it was accompanied by the promotion of saintly cults for further monarchs who died defending their Christian faith, such as King Oswald of Northumbria, killed in battle against the non-Christian King Penda of Mercia in 642. Associated with particular royal families, these were the first native Christian cults created by the Anglo-Saxons. There may be a connection with local pre-Christian traditions of honouring kings who sacrificially defended their people in battle; later monarchs who died violently, such as young Edmund of East Anglia butchered by non-Christian Danes in 869, also joined the saintly club of royal martyrs. [31] The seventh century nevertheless saw a change of direction for royal activity in the Anglo-Saxon Church. Elsewhere, in both Latin and Byzantine Christianity, when monarchs became monks it was done under duress and was a sign of personal failure. Perhaps with that in mind, and maybe accompanied by a certain restiveness among their subjects at what might be viewed as royal malingering, the Anglo-Saxons swiftly reconfigured their own thoughts on royal holiness. In place of kings becoming ascetics, female members of the various royal dynasties acted on recent precedents that they might have noted among their relatives in northern Francia. Royal ladies founded lavishly funded monastic communities and presided over them as abbesses, ruling over both men and women; over several generations an appropriate female member of the dynasty would then succeed as abbess. The women involved were princesses or queens who were either widowed or had effectively made a decision to declare themselves single, such as the celebrated Æthelthryth, who insisted on guarding her virginity through two royal marriages.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  According to his biographer, “for the better part of sixty years, virtually every newspaper article about Graham commented on his appearance.” Standing six feet two inches tall, he was the “All-American Male” with “Scottish genes and Nordic looks,” a “craggy face, blue eyes, square jaw.”16 Not leaving anything to chance, Graham took pains to bolster his masculine credentials. He jogged, lifted weights, and otherwise kept up a rigorous exercise regime; in preparation for his crusades, he trained “like a prizefighter.” Before his conversion, Graham had “always thought of religion as being more or less ‘sissy,’” something well suited for “old people and girls, but not for a real ‘he man’ with red blood in his veins.” In his own conversion narrative, then, he drew on both athletic and military metaphors to make perfectly clear that his faith did not conflict with his masculinity. Jesus was no sissy—he was a “star athlete” who could “become your life’s hero.” The Christian life was “total war,” and Jesus was “Our Great Commander.” Graham’s Jesus was “a man, every inch a man,” the most physically powerful man who had ever lived.17 In the interest of saving souls, and for the success of his own career, it was incumbent upon Graham to prove that Christianity was wholly compatible with red-blooded masculinity. The Second World War provided an ideal context in which to make this case. Among fundamentalists and evangelicals, any lingering ambivalence toward war was swept away by the attack on Pearl Harbor. The new war was an indisputable battle between good and evil, and this time around they would give no reason to be tarred as unpatriotic. Among Americans more generally, the war rehabilitated a more militant—and militaristic—model of masculinity, and fundamentalists and newly branded evangelicals, many of whom had never entirely abandoned the older muscular Christianity, joined the fray. Tellingly, when it came to the tactics of total war employed by the US military, it was liberal Protestants—many still chastened by the First World War—who expressed reservations. Ockenga, on the other hand, defended the firebombing of German cities in the pages of the New York Times . Evangelicals relished this role reversal, and their newfound patriotism and militarism would help them overcome their reputation as extremists and their marginal status.18 . [image "image" file=Image00002.jpg] Billy Graham speaking at a Youth for Christ rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in September 1947. COURTESY OF THE BILLY GRAHAM CENTER ARCHIVES , WHEATON COLLEGE , WHEATON , ILLINOIS . Even as they supported the war against totalitarianism, many evangelicals nonetheless harbored doubts about the US military. Through the 1940s and into the 1950s, most evangelicals saw the military as a place of moral corruption for young men. Contrary to later myths about “the good war” and “the greatest generation,” the military was known as an institution where drunkenness, vulgarity, gambling, and sexual disease abounded.

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

  elements on a heathen stock, but the starting point was radically different: Manichaeism being anti-Jewish and dualistic, Mohammedanism, pseudo-Jewish and severely and fanatically monotheistic. First the external history. The origin of Manichaeism is matter of obscure and confused tradition. It is traced to Mani (Manes, Manichaeus),920 a Persian philosopher, astronomer, and painter,921 of the third century (215–277), who came over to Christianity, or rather introduced some Christian elements into the Zoroastrian religion, and thus stirred up an intellectual and moral revolution among his countrymen. According to Arabic Mohammedan sources, he was the son of Fatak (Pavtekio"), a high-born Persian of Hamadan (Ecbatana), who emigrated to Ctesiphon in Babylonia. Here he received a careful education. He belonged originally to the Judaizing Gnostic sect of the Mandaeans or Elkesaites (the Mogtasilah, i.e. Baptists); but in his nineteenth and again in his twenty-fourth year (238) a new religion was divinely revealed to him. In his thirtieth year he began to preach his syncretistic creed, undertook long journeys and sent out disciples. He proclaimed himself to be the last and highest prophet of God and the Paraclete promised by Christ (as Mohammed did six hundred years later). He began his "Epistola Fundamenti," in which he propounded his leading doctrines, with the words: "Mani, the apostle of Jesus Christ, by the providence of God the Father. These are the words of salvation from the eternal and living source." He composed many books in the Persian and Syriac languages and in an alphabet of his own invention but they are all lost.922 At first Mani found favor at the court of the Persian king Shapur I. (Sapor), but stirred up the hatred of the priestly cast of the Magians. He fled to East India and China and became acquainted with Buddhism. Indeed, the name of Buddha is interwoven with the legendary history of the Manichaean system. His disputations with Archelaus in Mesopotamia are a fiction, like the pseudo-Clementine disputations of Simon Magus with Peter, but on a better historic foundation and with an orthodox aim of the writer.923 In the year 270 Mani returned to Persia, and won many followers by his symbolic (pictorial) illustrations of the doctrines, which he pretended had been revealed to him by God. But in a disputation with the Magians, he was convicted of corrupting the old religion, and thereupon was crucified, or flayed alive by order of king Behram I. (Veranes) about 277; his skin was stuffed and hung up for a terror at the gate of the city Djondishapur (or Gundeshapur), since called "the gate of Mani."924 His followers were cruelly persecuted by the king. Soon after Mani’s horrible death his sect spread in Turkistan, Mesopotamia, North Africa, Sicily, Italy and Spain. As it moved westward it assumed a more Christian character, especially in North Africa. It was everywhere persecuted in the Roman empire, first by Diocletian (A. D. 287), and afterwards by the Christian emperors. Nevertheless it flourished till the sixth century and even later.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  But you said: ‘I’ve got muscles, haven’t I, Father? Williams says I’ve got riding muscles already!’ Then you dug your heels sharply into the pony, so that he whisked round, bucking and rearing. As for you, you stuck to his back like a limpet. Wasn’t that enough to convince them? ‘Steady on, Stephen!’ came Sir Philip’s voice, warning. Then the Master’s: ‘She’s got a fine seat. I’ll admit it—Violet’s a little bit scared on a horse, but I think she’ll get confidence later; I hope so.’ And now hounds were moving away towards cover, tails waving—they looked like an army with banners. ‘Hi, Starbright—Fancy! Get in, little bitch! Hi, Frolic, get on with it, Frolic!’ The long lashes shot out with amazing precision, stinging a flank or stroking a shoulder, while the four-legged Amazons closed up their ranks for the serious business ahead. ‘Hi, Starbright!’ Whips cracked and horses grew restless; Stephen’s mount required undivided attention. She had no time to think of her muscles or her grievance, but only of the creature between her small knees. ‘All right, Stephen?’ ‘Yes, Father.’ ‘Well, go steady at your fences; it may be a little bit slippery this morning.’ But Sir Philip’s voice did not sound at all anxious; indeed there was a note of deep pride in his voice. ‘He knows that I’m not just a rag doll, like Violet; he knows that I’m different to her!’ thought Stephen. 3The strange, implacable heart-broken music of hounds giving tongue as they break from cover; the cry of the huntsman as he stands in his stirrups; the thud of hooves pounding ruthlessly forward over long, green, undulating meadows. The meadows flying back as though seen from a train, the meadows streaming away behind you; the acrid smell of horse sweat caught in passing; the smell of damp leather, of earth and bruised herbage—all sudden, all passing—then the smell of wide spaces, the air smell, cool yet as potent as wine. Sir Philip was looking back over his shoulder: ‘All right, Stephen?’ ‘Oh, yes—’ Stephen’s voice sounded breathless. ‘Steady on! Steady on!’ They were coming to a fence, and Stephen’s grip tightened a little. The pony took the fence in his stride, very gaily; for an instant he seemed to stay poised in mid-air as though he had wings, then he touched earth again, and away without even pausing. ‘All right, Stephen?’ ‘Yes, yes!’ Sir Philip’s broad back was bent forward over the shoulder of his hunter; the crisp auburn hair in the nape of his neck showed bright where the winter sunshine touched it; and as the child followed that purposeful back, she felt that she loved it utterly, entirely. At that moment it seemed to embody all kindness, all strength, and all understanding. 4They killed not so very far from Worcester; it had been a stiff run, the best of the season. Colonel Antrim came jogging along to Stephen, whose prowess had amused and surprised him.

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

  The Templars took part in all the Crusades except the first and the crusade of Frederick II., from which they held aloof on account of the papal prohibition. Their discipline was conspicuous on the disastrous march of the French from Laodicea to Attalia and their valor at the battle of Hattim, before Gaza524 and on many other fields.525 The order degenerated with riches and success.526 To drink like a Templar, bibere templariter, became proverbial for fast living. Their seal, representing the two founders entering Jerusalem in poverty on one horse, early came to misrepresent their real possessions. A famous passage in the history of Richard of England set forth the reputation the Templars had for pride. When Fulke of Neuilly was preaching the Third Crusade, he told Richard he had three daughters and called upon him to provide for them in marriage. The king exclaimed, "Liar, I have no daughters." "Nay, thou hast three evil daughters, Pride, Lust, and Luxury," was the priest’s reply. Turning to his courtiers, Richard retorted, "He bids me marry my three daughters. Well, so be it. To the Templars, I give my first-born, Pride, to the Cistercians my second-born, Lust, and to the prelates the third, Luxury."527 The order survived the fall of Acre less than twenty years. After finding a brief refuge in Cyprus the knights concentrated their strength in France, where the once famous organization was suppressed by the violent measures of Philip the Fair and Clement V. The story of the suppression belongs to the next period. III. The order of the Teutonic Knights528 never gained the prominence in Palestine of the two older orders. During the first century of its existence, its members devoted themselves to the maintenance and care of hospitals on the field of battle. They seldom appeared until the historic mission of the order opened in the provinces of what is now northeastern Germany which were reduced to subjection and to a degree of civilization by its arms and humanizing efforts.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  6. Radegund: Survivor, Queen, Abbess Radegund gave lavishly to hermits and bishops in dramatic public displays, stripping off her expensive clothes and jewelry and piling them on the altar at the end of religious services. This was not only a charitable impulse but a clever political move. Bishops held great political power and commanded wealth and authority. She was shedding her queenly trappings and securing their support as well as making a public statement about her identity and piety. Finally, Radegund settled at a villa near Poitiers that she owned as part of her dowry. At her villa in Saix, she ate a restricted diet, began a tradition of Lenten self-mortification and retreats, and lived simply in service to the local poor. Baudonivia tells us how she performed the same menial chores as the other women. Her reputation as a holy woman grew quickly, and she began to attract other women—and relics. For centuries, Radegund was known above all for her reputation as a voracious relic collector. Her efforts tell us a great deal about the ways she maintained and expanded her political network, leveraging it to increase her convent’s prestige and stability, even while enclosed as a nun. The Monastery of the Holy Cross From Saix, Radegund seems to have negotiated a settlement with Chlotar. He founded a monastery outside nearby Poitiers for her, which was dedicated to the Holy Cross. She gave the women one of the earliest rules for female monastic communities, written by Caesarius of Arles for his sister Caesaria’s community just a few decades earlier. But once the convent was founded and its way of life established, Radegund sought her own individual path within the community. She appears to have been on friendly terms with a number of male friends, including Venantius, and she closely followed secular politics. She refused to be named abbess, instead making her close companion Agnes the first governing figure of the community. Her greatest triumph was securing a splinter of the True Cross from the Byzantine emperor. By that time, Chlotar had died, and she was on good terms with his heir, her stepson Sigebert. For nearly a decade, he was in 45

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered. I myself, added Austerlitz, in spite of all the accounts of it I have read, remember only the picture of the final defeat of the Allies in the battle of the Three Emperors. Every attempt to understand the course of events inevitably turns into that one scene where the hosts of Russian and Austrian soldiers are fleeing on foot and horseback on to the frozen Satschen ponds. I see cannonballs suspended for an eternity in the air, I see others crashing into the ice, I see the unfortunate victims flinging up their arms as they slide from the toppling floes, and I see them, strangely, not with my own eyes but with those of shortsighted Marshal Davout, who has made a forced march with his regiments from Vienna and, glasses tied firmly behind his head with two laces, looks like an early motorist or aviator. When I look back at André Hilary’s performances today, said Austerlitz, I remember once again the idea I developed at the time of being linked in some mysterious way to the glorious past of the people of France. The more often Hilary mentioned the word Austerlitz in front of the class, the more it really did become my own name, and the more clearly I thought I saw that what had at first seemed like an ignominious flaw was changing into a bright light always hovering before me, as promising as the sun of Austerlitz itself when it rose above the December mists. All that school year I felt as if I had been chosen, and although, as I also knew, such a belief in no way matched my uncertain status, I have held fast to it almost my whole life. I don’t think that any of my fellow pupils at Stower Grange knew my new name, and the masters, who had been informed of my double identity by Penrith-Smith, went on calling me Elias too. André Hilary was the only one to whom I myself told my real name. It was soon after we had handed in an essay on the concepts of empire and nation that Hilary summoned me to his study outside regular school hours to return my work, which he had marked with a triple-starred A, giving it back in person and not, as he put it, along with everyone else’s pathetic efforts. He himself had published various articles in historical journals, and he said he could not have written such a perceptive piece in so comparatively short a space of time; he wondered whether I had perhaps been initiated into historical studies at home by my father or an elder brother. When I answered Hilary’s question I had some difficulty in not losing my command over myself, and it was in this situation, which I felt I could no longer endure, that I told him the secret of my real name. It was some time before he was able to calm down. He struck his forehead again and again, breaking into exclamations of astonishment, as if Providence had finally sent him the pupil he had always wanted. For the rest of my time at Stower Grange, Hilary supported and encouraged me in every possible way. I owe it to him first and foremost,

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  (No matter that in the film she played some kind of weirdly generic cartoonish Arab character.) I made penne in fresh pomodoro sauce, preceded by woody but welcome steamed white asparagus. My knife was sure as I filleted perfectly acceptable plum tomatoes and slivered slightly older than vintage garlic. I picked fresh basil leaves, cracked a can of Italian plums, another can of paste, sweated, swirled, simmered, and seasoned, all without a moment's seasickness, the kitchen behaving brilliantly. It had everything, didn't it? A microwave with broiler, a food disposal that could have handled Jimmy Hoffa, a dishwasher, all the appliances and doodads one could hope for, including vertical slicer/grater, blender, food processor, manual juicer, and blending wand. And so clean! Always clean! How could it not be? The whole place was scrubbed down, polished, and tidied twice a day, first in the morning while we drank and sweated by the pool, and again later, by a hurrying duo of charming yet focused Scandinavian girls, cute as buttons but with the work ethic of Sherpas, who'd arrive at six bearing chocolates, towels, and replacement staple items and give the whole place a quick going over. Fredy's had been, on balance, very good to me, managing to come up with everything on my provisions list but fresh chives. For chicken stock, I received a fresh batch from The World's kitchens. A "small amount of flour" arrived portioned in a paper cup, sparing me the burden of a five-pound bag. The kitchen was pretty damn stylish too. Recessed lighting, elegantly concealed washer and dryer, shiny new refrigerator with ice-maker. I cooked al dente penne in one of the heavy-bottomed sauce pots, drained it quickly into a colander, and dragged it, still leaking a little of the starchy pasta water, into the waiting sauce. A few tosses, that magic moment when the pasta took in the sauce, a last glorious shot of extra-virgin olive oil, and onto the plates. No one alive could have cooked better pasta that day. I was sure of it. As we ate, the sea moving by outside our long expanse of windows, the sun setting on the horizon, I felt like Emperor of the Sea. Not wanting this alcohol-inspired sense of mastery to end, when I finished my penne, I diced up the complementary platter of tropical fruit, tossed the mix in balsamic with a little fresh mint and sugar, and served macerated fruit salad for dessert.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The charismatic Dorothy Hassard of Bristol set up a meeting separate from the nearby parish church at which her Puritan clerical husband ministered: hers survives to the present day as Broadmead Baptist Church, while his church has long vanished. It is clear that such activism had begun in the decades before the Civil War broke out, but now it was able to flourish freely. [123] All this culminated in the radicalism of Spirit-inspired groups such as the early Society of Friends, who began gathering in the early 1650s: opponents called them ‘Quakers’, and, as often in Christian history, they defiantly borrowed the sneer as a self-identification. Quaker women in this period followed Psalm 68.11 to enjoy prophetic roles reminiscent of women in the early days of radicalism in central Europe during the 1520s and 1530s. Often as a result they met horrified repression from males in mainstream religion, particularly when they crossed to the Puritan English colonies across the Atlantic; a woman was among the four Quakers executed in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1661. [124] Just as in the sixteenth-century radical groups, over subsequent decades male Quaker leadership steadily moved to restrict women’s activism, but that was part of a general disciplining of life in the Society away from its first inclination noisily to shock wider society into listening to the message; now Quaker gatherings were programmatically quiet but still obstinately distinctive. The Friends preserved an itinerant ministry whose members were as often female as male. When Dr Johnson made his famous sneer against a woman preaching as being ‘like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs’, it was about a Quaker preacher that he was trying to be funny. [125] By the early eighteenth century, much of the appeal of the Friends to women may have become the way in which Quaker worship resonated with that more traditional and distinctively female form of spirituality, the outwardly silent waiting on the Lord. At the same time as the consolidation of the Quakers in the 1670s, there developed within the official Lutheran Churches of northern Europe an intimately devotional renewal movement that came to be known (again at first abusively by its opponents) as Pietism: small private groups developed a spirituality which likewise emphasized an inner personal encounter with the divine, although in that case, the devotional group took its place alongside the public worship of the Lutheran Church. It is interesting that these Pietists were among the few people to interest themselves in the writings of women activists from the earliest days of the Lutheran Reformation. [126] Thus were emerging various female challenges to the male Reformation noise of polemical texts, sermons and massed congregational singing. Some Protestant women took notice of their Catholic counterparts who had chosen monastic enclosure and contemplation in its many Counter- Reformation variants, and they considered that their own Reformation had suffered significant losses.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  About the Author Diarmaid MacCulloch is a fellow of both St Cross College and Campion Hall, Oxford, and emeritus professor of the history of the church at Oxford University. His books include Thomas Cranmer: A Life , which won the Whitbread Biography Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, and the Duff Cooper Prize and Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years , a New York Times bestseller that won the Cundill Prize in History. He has presented many highly celebrated documentaries for television and radio, and was knighted in 2012 for his services to scholarship. He is an ordained deacon of the Church of England. He lives in Oxford, England. What’s next on your reading list? Discover your next great read! Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author. Sign up now. _150871060_

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The odd name ‘Beguine’ still defies certain explanation, but it seems to be a term of ridicule verging on hostility, like the later description of English heretics as ‘Lollard’, meaning mumbler of possibly dubious prayers. That says something about the obscurity of the movement’s origins, and possibly about male suspicion and surprise that it should exist at all. Its recent historian has commented that it is ‘the only movement in medieval monastic history that was created by women and for women – and not affiliated with, or supervised by, a male order’. He points out some of the Beguines’ unusual characteristics: ‘a lack of overarching governmental structures, a low level of internal hierarchy, a tendency toward the sacralization of routine work, the use of dance and ecstasy in worship, and an emphasis on the continuity between female existence before and after entrance into the community’. [77] Despite all this informality, the Beguines won papal approval during the thirteenth century, in step with the various Orders of friars, while keeping their distinctiveness. It was a remarkable exemption from the effects of Periculoso , which must have been the result of benevolent and deliberately untidy thinking by some senior clergy, aware of the sheer usefulness of the Beguines in their urban settings. Not least among their oddities was the size of some of the communities (‘Beguinages’): several hundred strong in some places, and thus little female towns within a town, often surrounded by their own moat and walls, but readily welcoming visitors. One can still enjoyably tour some of the surviving examples and notice how different their informal clusters of cosy domestic buildings are from the classic monastery layout. Beguinages were home to the range of craft skills deployed by women, especially textile production on an almost industrial scale: very different from the delicate embroidery that became the speciality of many nunneries in the wake of their isolation from higher education. The Beguines nevertheless also provided education for both girls and boys in surroundings permeated with worship and spiritual exploration. Among the ranks of the Beguines in their expansion across central Europe was the excitable Viennese mystic Agnes Blannbekin, joyfully contemplating her celestial nudity. Their communal life went on to inspire further female initiatives in celibate life during the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation (below, Chapter 14). Without having to think much about it, the institutional Church had discovered one civilizing force amid the streets of its great cities – although not everywhere in Europe since, rather puzzlingly, the Atlantic Isles showed little interest in the Beguine movement, despite England’s close involvement with the Low Countries’ textile trade, and southern Europeans may have found the Beguines’ female assertiveness too much to handle. * More universal was the adoption of a new mode of conceiving the Christian family in Western Christianity, so that the copulating laity could take a decorous place alongside a well-regulated celibate clergy.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  In Catholic Europe after 1815, where secular political authority took its cue from the Code Napoléon and emphasized the superiority and agency of a man as paterfamilias , it proved to be the Church that gave more space for women to seize initiatives for themselves. In that frequent paradox of Western Christianity since the Reformation, as for instance in British Methodism, French Catholicism became an organization run by (clerical) men for the benefit of women. The institutional component of female Catholic life was led by a quite astonishing proliferation of convents and female Orders, a process heralded in pre-Revolutionary France but now spreading elsewhere, as both Enlightenment and Revolution cut a swathe through comfortably funded male monasteries. Belgium, for instance, was a new country on the European map from 1830, forged in a national revolt based on Catholic resentment of the Protestant Dutch monarchy imposed on the former Habsburg Netherlands in the international peace settlement of Vienna in 1815. Belgium became a laboratory for the new shapes of European Catholicism. Between 1780 and 1860, the proportion of Belgian women religious to men reversed, from 40/60 to 60/40, and latterly, in a decided rebuff to what the Council of Trent had decreed, only 10 per cent of Belgian nuns were in contemplative Orders: the vast majority devoted themselves to working out in the world in teaching, health care and help for the poor. [14] In nineteenth-century Ireland, as in Belgium, Catholicism became the prime vehicle of national identity against external rule, and statistics for nuns compared with clergy are equally striking. There were a mere 120 nuns in the whole island in 1800, but 8,000 in 1900 – nuns outnumbered priests and male religious in the Irish Church two to one, with the numbers still rising. [15] That growth had a worldwide effect because of the remarkable scale of Irish emigration across the anglophone world, especially to the United States and Australia. A persistent feature of Irish migration, unique amid the various streams of nineteenth-century European migrants overseas, was the high proportion of women participating; that helped to spread Irish patterns of convent life across the globe. In the rapidly growing Catholic population of the United States (of course not all Irish in origin), more than two hundred women’s Orders were operating by the early twentieth century, and nuns then outnumbered priests four to one. A common feature of convent life in all these situations was a rhetoric of female subservience to male clerical authority combined with a sturdy independence of action in testing circumstances, often of dire social deprivation that demanded heroic initiative. One might call it a manifestation of Catholic feminism, though the rapid rise in numbers of nuns in relation to monks and other male clergy can be strikingly paralleled in the Orthodox Church in tsarist Russia in the same period.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  It's a shame—but we'll cry about it later, at the after-action reporting, when we're all comfortably sucking down late-night sushi together and drinking iced sake or vodka shots at some chef-friendly joint. Right now it's System D time, bro'—and there's no time for that bouquet of herbs. There's the fish to contend with, and one of the runners just fell down the stairs and broke his ankle, and they need forks on table number seven, and that twelve-top arrived late and is eating up half the dining room while they linger over cognacs, and the customers waiting by the bar and shivering in the street are starting to get that angry, haunted look you see in lynch mobs and Liberian militia who've spent too much time in the jungle. Running out of arugula? Substitute mache for Chrissakes! Fluff it out with spinach, watercress . . . anything green! At times like these, even one heroic practitioner of System D can save the day, step in and turn the tide. One guy can make the difference between another successful Saturday night and total chaos. We can go home laughing about all we endured, feeling good about ourselves, talking about the bus that didn't hit us instead of slinking out the door quietly, mulling over la puta vida, muttering half-formed recriminations. Now, I've heard and seen some very fine chefs sneer at The System. "I would never do that," they say, when told of some culinary outrage performed in another kitchen. "Never!" they insist, with all the assurance of an officer on the prewar Maginot Line. But when the Hun starts pouring over the wall, and there's no fire support, and the rear guard is in full retreat—these same chefs are often the first guys to commit food crimes that even the most pragmatic practitioner of System D would never (okay, almost never) do. Fast well-done steak? I've watched French grads of three-star kitchens squeeze the blood out of filet mignons with their full body weight, turning a medium to well in seconds. I've watched in horror as chefs have hurled beautiful chateaubriands into the deep-fat fryer, microwaved veal chops, thinned sauce with the brackish greasy water in the steam table. And when it gets busy? Everything that falls on the floor, amazingly, falls "right on the napkin." Let me tell you—that's one mighty big napkin. System D, arguably, reached its heyday in the Victorian-era railway hotels, where the menus were huge and it was not unusual for an extra two hundred guests to show up wanting, say, the Fricassee of Lobster Thermidor—for which only fifty portions were ever available.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Whether familiar with the term or not, I have always assigned great value to debrouillards, and at various times in my career, particularly when I was a line cook, I have taken great pride in being one. The ability to think fast, to adapt, to improvise when in danger of falling "in the weeds" or dans la merde, even if a little corner-cutting is required, has been a point of pride with me for years. My previous sous-chef, Steven, a very talented cook with a criminal mind, was a Grandmaster Debrouillard, a Sergeant Bilko-like character who, in addition to being a superb saucier, was fully versed in the manly arts of scrounging, refrigeration repair, surreptitious entry, intelligence collection, subornation, and the effortless acquisition of objects which did not rightly belong to him. He was a very useful person to have around. If I ran out of calves' liver or shell steaks in the middle of a busy Saturday night, Steven could be counted on to slip out the kitchen door and return a few moments later with whatever I needed. Where he got the stuff I never knew. I only knew not to ask. System D, to work right, requires a certain level of plausible deniability. I am always pleased to find historical precedent for my darker urges. And in the restaurant business, where one's moods tend to swing from near euphoria to crushing misery and back again at least ten times a night, it's always useful to remember that my crew and I are part of a vast and well-documented continuum going back centuries. Why did this particular reference hold such magic for me, though? I had to think about that. Why this perverse pride in finding that my lowest, sleaziest moments of mid-rush hackwork were firmly rooted in tradition, going back to the French masters? It all comes down to the old dichotomy, the razor's edge of volume versus quality. God knows, all chefs want to make perfect food. We'd like to make sixty-five to seventy-five absolutely flawless meals per night, every plate a reflection of our best efforts, all our training and experience, only the finest, most expensive, most seasonal ingredients available—and we'd like to make a lot of money for our masters while we do it. But this is the real world. Most restaurants can't charge a hundred fifty bucks a customer for food alone. Sixty- five meals a night (at least in my place) means we'll all be out of work—and fast. Two hundred fifty to three hundred meals a night is more like it when you're talking about a successful New York City restaurant and job security for your posse of well-paid culinarians in the same breath.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Woman’s Work for Woman was the title of the monthly magazine of the main US Presbyterian missionary organization from the 1870s; it stood as a programme for the whole movement, which broadened in its self-understanding and aims as the work expanded, away from simple evangelism towards medical skills, childcare, education and a broadening concept of women’s rights. The overwhelming majority of female missionaries through the period were single, and so not constrained by families in patriarchal mode: they could justifiably claim to be more free than men to listen to the experiences of those women to whom they sought to minister, and they had the capacity to acquire multiple skills after appropriate training that formed them into as much of a profession as the male clergyman. All this was so successful that after the 1920s a half-century of separate female leadership was subsumed in mixed missionary societies. In one sense that was a statement of equality between the sexes, but it was also an end to the separate female world of control and initiative which possessed its own distinctive agenda. [47] Nevertheless, by that time, female missionary efforts had created institutions that carved out a permanent place for women to co- operate and express themselves in ways that cut across male institutions. The Mothers’ Union, one of the most large-scale and effective, was created for Anglicans in 1876 by Mary Sumner, the wife of an Anglican bishop. Notably it was one of the very few voluntary organizations in the Anglican Communion not to take on the colours of one theological ‘party’. Its ideology of motherhood and family sounds conservative (Queen Victoria graciously agreed to be its patron in 1897), but in fact such assumptions sheltered a remarkable degree of flexibility and freedom of thought, rather as the profession of papal loyalty had done for the old Society of Jesus. The leadership was female and international; discussions among members led some of them to become among the earliest Anglican advocates of the ordination of women. [48] In some circumstances, the Mothers’ Union might wield formidable social power, such as the occasion in 1953 when the British Governor of Uganda was startled to receive an angry delegation from distinguished members of the colony’s MU after he exiled the Kabaka (King) of Buganda for political reasons. They denounced his action as a threat to all Christian marriage in the Kingdom of Buganda, since the Kabaka’s coronation was a marriage to the Kingdom, sealed by the bestowing of a ring by the Anglican Bishop. [49] This was a directly Christian intervention in Ugandan politics, but, over the previous century and a half, the self-assertion of women in Western society had a wider effect in the cultures to which the missionaries travelled. In India, the rhetoric and intentions of the Deobandi movement (and other revivalist moves in Islam) were emphatically conservative and in opposition to ‘Western’ institutions of the British Raj, but their effectiveness involved a necessary adjustment in their own approach to the Muslim faithful. In defence against Western encroachment, they gave women an unprecedented degree of agency. To begin with, it was expressed in a literature of men writing for women, but that was in itself a novelty, reaching out to an audience now broadly assumed to be literate or wishing to be, and to have a rational grasp of how to make the most of women’s admittedly highly bounded place in society. In the twentieth century, such hitherto unexpressed thoughts went on to be the basis of an Islamic feminism. [50] POLYGAMIES

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  VALUES AND IMPERIAL CULTURES As nineteenth-century Britain built up an increasingly vast empire on the back of generally successful achievements by its army and navy, so it evolved a masculine ethos similar to that of the citizen armies of mainland Europe in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. There were important differences: this was a patriotism of deference, shaped by British pride in its constitutional monarchy and attendant aristocracy, both of which had been strengthened after previous humiliations in the American War of Independence by their epic achievements contributing to Napoleon’s defeat. All that was framed from 1837 by the long reign of Queen Victoria, who by 1901 had managed to outlive any previous ruler in the Atlantic Isles, and who learned over time how to play the role of grandmotherly figurehead for her subjects worldwide. British territorial reach continued to expand into the 1920s (its largest nominal extent came with its acquisition of a League of Nations’ mandate over the former Ottoman territories of Palestine in 1923). By that time its real power was beginning to cede to that of the United States, but in the intervening century the imperial achievements of a modestly sized north Atlantic archipelago were impressive, even considering its temporary industrial and technological advantages. Out of Britain’s relatively small population, there needed to be a means of selecting and training enough men to govern and administer a dauntingly varied spread of formal territories, as well as to staff the organization of the informal British empire beyond. This required an educational revolution to transform Hanoverian England’s miscellaneous and often ramshackle provision of schools. Certainly, Victorians sought to spread popular literacy generally throughout the United Kingdom, which they did mostly through often acrimoniously competing efforts from Britain’s various religious denominations; but, within that wider programme, they created a leadership cadre on the basis of a class-stratified and hierarchical society. This was achieved through a system of ‘public schools’ – an English rather than Scots or Irish phenomenon. The name was misleading, since these schools were the reverse of public, being aimed at the landed elite and the large number of middle-class parents anxious to model their families on elite patterns of behaviour. Schools which in the medieval and Tudor period had been founded to provide opportunities for boys of exceptional talent from a humble background, such as Eton or Winchester Colleges, were now hijacked for an imperial governing class. By 1900 there were around 150 members of the ‘Headmasters’ Conference’ of public schools. Reflecting the ethos of the English landed gentry and nobility, they were predominantly Anglican (and indeed largely low-temperature Evangelical), with some outliers from what had been a parallel world of upper-class Roman Catholic recusancy, and there were even a handful of public schools that were Methodist. For around a decade of a boy’s life from about the age of seven, he was taken away from his family and boarded with his peers in an inward-looking, single-sex world that emphasized physical fitness, team sport and participation in the Officer Training Corps, alongside frequent chapel attendance and a Classical academic curriculum that provided a reference framework of imperial experience from the Roman Empire. In the mordant words of one eminent modern historian who endured it all, ‘[t]he English upper classes traditionally made up for the comfort of their background and the privileges of their station by ten years of misery at boarding- school.’ [28] The British Empire has long gone, but the public school system survives into the twenty-first century, not as yet doing much to question its reason for a continued existence.