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.

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• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 4 (300 – 1300, Rome) (2009)

  East, they showed an enterprising interest in alliance with the Church of Rome, despite the problems caused by memories of Chalcedon, and this produced some lasting results, despite the intense divisions which it also created among Armenian Christians. Pope John XXII, an energetic though not uncontroversial pontiff (reigned 1316–34), showed particular interest in the plight of the Armenians and the prospect of bringing them into the Catholic fold. He sustained the missions of friars (both Franciscans and Dominicans) into Central Asia which had begun in the thirteenth century. Some of the warmest contacts which the friars made were with migrant Armenian communities in Iran and on the steppes; the earliest translations of recent Latin theologians like the Dominican Thomas Aquinas (see pp. 412–15) into any other language were into Armenian. One group of Armenian monks in Asia actually remodelled their monastic life on Dominican lines and accepted Roman obedience, taking a Latin name which also proclaimed their pride in their Armenian heritage as the Fratres Unitores of the congregation of St Gregory the Illuminator (see pp. 186–7). Similar Church unions took place in eastern Europe in the fifteenth century, in which Armenian congregations kept their liturgy and distinctive devotional practices, while acknowledging papal primacy as ‘Uniates’. These unions provided the model for later similar arrangements which Rome made with many other groups in the Counter-Reformation (see pp. 533–5). Not everyone was delighted by these moves to unity on Rome’s terms: the Armenian hierarchy clinging on in the Armenian heartland furiously opposed union with the papacy and the word ‘Uniate’ has often carried an abusive flavour. A Miaphysite Catholicate continued in very difficult circumstances to sustain the independent life of the Church from the cathedral in the former Armenian capital city of Ējmiacin or Vałaršapat.41 In the same period, the Dyophysite Church of the East developed its own strategies for survival. In a move of pragmatic desperation, it diverged from the universal tradition of Eastern Christianity and increasingly abandoned artistic representations of sacred subjects, especially in paintings or statues; they were likely to attract vandalism from Muslims. The Dyophysites had in any case always rejected crucifixes, which suggested to them a confusion of the natures of Jesus making God suffer on the Cross; so their crosses were bare to symbolize the resurrected Christ (ironically, the Miaphysite Armenians favoured the same bare cross, for their own opposite theological reasons). Friar William of Rubruck had been scandalized in the 1250s when a Dyophysite Christian in Central Asia saw a silver crucifix ‘in the French style’ and wrenched the figure of Christ off it.42 When Protestant missionaries arrived in the Ottoman Empire in the

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 4 (300 – 1300, Rome) (2009)

  Certainly Ezana’s coins witness to a conversion no less dramatic and personal than Constantine’s: they change motifs from traditional symbols of a crescent and two stars to a cross. Ezana has left a surviving inscription in Greek announcing his renunciation of his status as son of the Ethiopian war god, putting himself instead under the care of the Trinity.An energetic monarch determined to secure immortal memory in this world as in the next, Ezana was responsible for beginning a tradition of monumental religious sculpture in the city of Aksum which is breathtaking, though now difficult to interpret: scores of monolithic stelae (upright monoliths) imitating tower-like buildings with multiple doors and windows. Some of them are immense: one, probably originally more than a hundred feet high and which may have fallen down almost as soon as it was put up, is among the biggest single stones ever quarried in the ancient world.27 There is no good reason to doubt the story that it was also Ezana who made contact with the Church in Alexandria, asking no less a divine than Bishop Athanasius to supply his people with a bishop. Thus from a very early date comes that peculiar Ethiopian arrangement which persisted for sixteen hundred years, as late as 1951: the presiding bishop (abun) in the Church of Ethiopia was never a native Ethiopian, but an import from the Coptic Church hundreds of miles to the north, and there was rarely any other bishop present in the whole country.28 6. Ethiopia, Eastern Arabia, the Red Sea and Egypt This has meant that the abun rarely had much real power or initiative in a Church to which he came usually as an elderly stranger with a different native language. Authority was displaced elsewhere, to monarchs and to abbots of monasteries; monasticism seems to have arrived early in the Church in Ethiopia and quickly gained royal patronage. Around these leaders are still numerous hereditary dynasties of non-monastic clergy who, over the centuries, might swarm in their thousands to seek ordination on the abun‘s rare visits to their area. The education of these priests, deacons and cantors might not extend far beyond a detailed knowledge of how to perform the liturgy, but that was a formidable intellectual acquisition in itself. They were ordinary folk who thus shaped their religion into that of a whole people rather than simply the property

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 6 (1300 – 1800) (2009)

  Julius a pioneer in this. He merely improved on the previous practice of the Papal States, where for a century or more cardinals had been the military commanders most trusted alike by the pope and by their mercenary soldiers. One of the most effective generals of the early fifteenth century had been a cardinal, Giovanni Vitelleschi; his spiritual duties as Archbishop of Florence, still less his titular status as Patriarch of Alexandria, do not seem to have curbed his streak of sadism. A recent study describes him as ‘a master of sackings, massacres and summary executions’, and his own death by summary execution in 1440 had reputedly forestalled his seizure of the papal fortress in Rome, Castel Sant’Angelo, with a view to the papal throne itself.24 NOMINALISTS, LOLLARDS AND HUSSITES (1300-1500) A centralized papacy, particularly one which recruited such dubious assistants, could not stop people thinking new thoughts. Two movements, the Lollards and the Hussites, rose to challenge the Church authorities. Another potential challenge was from the nominalism espoused by William of Ockham. The Franciscan Ockham denied the assumptions embodied in the Dominican Thomas Aquinas’s adaptation of Greek philosophy to Christianity, centring on the word nomen. At its simplest this is the ordinary Latin word for ‘name’, but in the philosophical terminology of the time it signified the universal concept of a particular phenomenon: the word ‘tree’, for instance, is the nomen which unites our perception of every individual tree and points to the universal concept of a tree. Ockham and his fourteenth-century nominalist successors denied that there was any such individual reality behind a nomen. For them, it was simply a word to organize our thinking about similar phenomena – thus individual examples of objects which we decide to label trees. If this was accepted, it became impossible to construct overall systems of thought or explanation by the use of reason. This denied the value of Aquinas’s work, with its majestic system of relationships throughout the cosmos: it implied that the line of analytical thought derived from Aristotle was pointless. To turn from trees to the problem of discussing one of the chief issues of the Christian faith: what happens when bread and wine are consecrated in the Eucharist? If they become the body and blood of Christ, as virtually all medieval Western Christians agreed was the case, how can this be explained? As we have seen, those theologians or philosophers like Aquinas who drew on the vocabulary provided by Aristotle, could do so in terms of ‘substance’ and ‘accidents’ (see pp. 405–6). Ockham and nominalist philosophers or theologians

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

  Born in Florence, Dec. 11, 1475, Giovanni de’ Medici, the second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, had every opportunity which family distinction, wealth and learned tutors, such as Poliziano, could give. At 7 he received the tonsure, and at once the world of ecclesiastical preferment was opened to the child. Louis XI. of France presented him with the abbey of Fonte Dolce, and at 8 he was nominated to the archbishopric of Aix, the nomination, however, not being confirmed. A canonry in each of the cathedral churches of Tuscany was set apart for him, and his appointments soon reached the number of 27, one of them being the abbacy of Monte Cassino, and another the office of papal pronotary.847 The highest dignities of the Church were in store for the lad and, before he had reached the age of 14, he was made cardinal-deacon by Innocent VIII., March 9, 1489. Three years later, March 8, 1492, Giovanni received in Rome formal investment into the prerogatives of his office. The letter, which Lorenzo wrote on this latter occasion, is full of the affectionate counsels of a father and the prudent suggestions of the tried man of the world, and belongs in a category with the letters of Lord Chesterfield to his son. Lorenzo reminded Giovanni of his remarkable fortune in being made a prince of the church, all the more remarkable because he was not only the youngest member of the college of cardinals, but the first cardinal to receive the dignity at so tender an age. With pardonable pride, he spoke of it as the highest honor ever conferred upon the Medicean house. He warned his son that Rome was the sink of all iniquities and exhorted him to lead a virtuous life, to avoid ostentation, to rise early, an admonition the son never followed, and to use his opportunities to serve his native city. Lorenzo died a few months later.848 Forthwith the young prelate was appointed papal legate to Tuscany, with residence in his native city. When Julius died, Giovanni de’ Medici was only 37. In proceeding to Rome, he was obliged to be carried in a litter, on account of an ulcer for which an operation was performed during the meeting of the conclave. Giovanni, who belonged to the younger party, had won many friends by his affable manners and made no enemies, and his election seems to have been secured without any special effort on his part. The great-grandson of the banker, Cosimo, chose the name of Leo X. He was consecrated to the priesthood March 17, 1513, and to the episcopate March 19. The election was received by the Romans with every sign of popular approval. On the festivities of the coronation 100,000 ducats, or perhaps as much as 150,000 ducats, were expended, a sum which the frugality of Julius had stored up.

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

  The papal cause seemed to be hopelessly lost, but the spirit of Julius rose with the defeat. He is reported to have exclaimed, "I will stake 100,000 ducats and my crown that I will drive the French out of Italy," and the victory of Ravenna proved to be another Cannae. The hardy Swiss, whose numbers Cardinal Schinner had increased to 18,000, and the Venetians pushed the campaign, and the barbarians, as Julius called the French, were forced to give up what they had gained, to surrender Milan and gradually to retire across the Alps. Parma and Piacenza, by virtue of the grant of Mathilda, passed into his hands, as did also Reggio. The victory was celebrated in Rome on an elaborate scale. Cannons boomed from S. Angelo, and thanks were given in all the churches. In recognition of their services, the pope gave to the Swiss two large banners and the permanent title of Protectors of the Apostolic see—auxiliatores sedis apostolicae. Such was the end of this remarkable campaign. Julius purchased Siena from the emperor for 30,000 ducats and, with the aid of the seasoned Spanish troops, took Florence and restored the Medici to power. In December, 1513, Maximilian, who at one time conceived the monstrous idea of combining with his imperial dignity the office of supreme pontiff, announced his support of the Lateran council, the pope having agreed to use all the spiritual measures within his reach to secure the complete abasement of Venice. The further execution of the plans was prevented by the pope’s death. In his last hours, in a conversation with Cardinal Grimani, he pounded on the floor with his cane, exclaiming, "If God gives me life, I will also deliver the Neapolitans from the yoke of the Spaniards and rid the land of them."835 The Pisan council had opened Sept. 1, 1511, with only two archbishops and 14 bishops present. First and last 6 cardinals attended, Carvajal, Briçonnet, Prie, d’Albret, Sanseverino and Borgia. The Universities of Paris Toulouse and Poictiers were represented by doctors. After holding three sessions, it moved to Milan, where the victory of Ravenna gave it a short breath of life. When the French were defeated, it again moved to Asti in Piedmont, where it held a ninth session, and then it adjourned to Lyons, where it dissolved of itself.836 Hergenröther, Pastor and other Catholic historians take playful delight in calling the council the little council—conciliabulum—and a conventicle, terms which Julius applied to it in his bulls.837 Among its acts were a fulmination against the synod Julius was holding in the Lateran, and it had the temerity to cite the pope to appear, and even to declare him deposed from all spiritual and temporal authority. The synod also reaffirmed the decrees of the 5th session of the Council of Constance, placing general councils over the pope.

• From The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)

  My first victory was accepting this job, the second, coming up & plunging into it before my demon could say no, I wasn’t good enough, the third, going to class after a night of no sleep & desperation, the fourth, facing my demon last night with Ted & spitting in its eye. I’ll work hard on my planning, but work just as hard to build up a rich home life: to get writing again, to get my mind fertilized outside my job.… No more knuckling under, groaning, moaning: one gets used to pain. This hurts. Not being perfect hurts. Having to bother about work in order to eat & have a house hurts. So what. It’s about time. This is the month which ends a quarter of a century for me, lived under the shadow of fear: fear that I would fall short of some abstract perfection: I have often fought, fought & won, not perfection, but an acceptance of myself as having a right to live on my own human, fallible terms. Attitude is everything. No whining or fainting will get me out of this job & I’d not like to think what would happen to my integral self if it did. I’ve accepted my first check: I’ve signed on, and no little girl tactics are going to get me off, nor should they. To the library. Finish James book, memorize my topics, maybe the squirrel story. Have fun. If I have fun, the class will have fun. Come home tonight: read Lawrence, or write, if possible. That will come too. Vive le roi; le roi est mort, vive le roi . Tuesday night, November 5 . Brief note: to self. Time to take myself in hand. I have been staggering about lugubrious, black, bleak, sick. Now to build into myself, to give myself backbone, however much I fail. If I get through this year, no matter how badly, it will be the biggest victory I’ve ever done. All my spoiled little girl selves cry to escape before my bad teaching, ignorant somnolence is made drearily public among my old teachers and my new students. If I fainted, or paralyzed myself, or pleaded gibberingly to Mr. Hill that I couldn’t carry on, I’d probably escape all right: but how to face myself, to live after that? To write or be intelligent as a woman? It would be a worse trauma than this, although escape looks very sweet & plausible. This way, I can build up a dull, angry resentment & feel I’m going through with it & will deserve my freedom in June, for sacrificing a year of my life. 7 more months.

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

  He wrote to his friend Link: "Suddenly, and while I was occupied with far other thoughts, the Lord has, plunged me into marriage." The manner was highly characteristic, neither saint-like nor sinner-like, but eminently Luther-like. By taking to himself a wife, he wished to please his father, to tease the Pope, and to vex the Devil. Beneath was a deeper and nobler motive, to rescue the oldest ordinance of God on earth from the tyranny of Rome, and to vindicate by his own example the right of ministers to the benefit of this ordinance. Under this view, his marriage is a public event of far-reaching consequence. It created the home life of the evangelical clergy. He had long before been convinced that vows of perpetual celibacy are unscriptural and unnatural. He held that God has created man for marriage, and that those who oppose it must either be ashamed of their manhood, or pretend to be wiser than God. He did not object to the marriage of Carlstadt, Jonas, Bugenhagen, and other priests and monks. But he himself seemed resolved to remain single, and continued to live in the convent. He was now over forty years of age; eight years had elapsed since he opened the controversy with Rome in the Ninety-Five Theses; and, although a man of powerful passions, he had strictly kept his monastic and clerical vow. His enemies charged him with drinking beer, playing the lute, leading a worldly life, but never dared to dispute his chastity till after his marriage. As late as Nov. 30, 1524, he wrote to Spalatin I shall never take a wife, as I feel at present. Not that I am insensible to my flesh or sex (for I am neither wood nor stone); but my mind is averse to wedlock, because I daily expect the death of a heretic."576 But on April 10, 1525, he wrote to the same friend: "Why do you not get married? I find so many reasons for urging others to marry, that I shall soon be brought to it myself, notwithstanding that enemies never cease to condemn the married state, and our little wiseacres (sapientuli) ridicule it every day."577 He got tired of his monastic seclusion; the convent was nearly emptied, and its resources cut off; his bed, as Melanchthon tells us, was not properly made for months, and was mildewed with perspiration; he lived of the plainest food; he worked himself nearly to death; he felt the need of a helpmate. In April, 1523, nine nuns escaped from the convent of Nimptsch near Grimma, fled to Wittenberg, and appealed to Luther for protection and aid. Among them was Catharina von Bora,578 a virgin of noble birth, but poor, fifteen years younger than Luther,579 not remarkable for beauty or culture, but healthy, strong, frank, intelligent, and high-minded. In looking at the portraits of Dr. and Mrs.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 2 (4 BCE – 451 CE) (2009)

  noticeable that in geographical references throughout his letters, he refers as a matter of course to the names set up by the Romans for their various provinces throughout the empire.57 When Paul was put on trial by a provincial tribunal in Palestine (according to Acts, because he had brought a non-Jew into the Temple in Jerusalem), he insisted on appealing to the emperor, though his appeal did not do any more than buy him a good deal of time to spread his message more widely before his eventual execution in Rome. He took pride in the title he had conferred on himself: ‘an Apostle to the Gentiles’.58 In reality, Paul’s move towards the Gentile world may at first have been partial and cautious. The Book of Acts does portray him preaching in fully Gentile settings, although the most famous of such encounters, in the centre of Athens, is not presented as having much result. Yet Paul’s authentic letters take for granted a very detailed knowledge of Jewish tradition in their readers, which does not suggest that his congregations were made up of converts recruited at random from the general Classical public. It is far more likely that in making his approaches to the Gentile world, Paul was helped by a particular feature of many synagogue communities in the Mediterranean world: in addition to those members of the synagogue who were identified as Jews, through birth and the physical mark of circumcision, there were groups of non-Jews who had consciously bought into the faith of Judaism. The writer of Acts calls them by various terms, one of which is ‘God-fearers’ or ‘God-reverers’ (theosebeis), and he makes them an important part of Paul’s audience. Some commentators on Acts have doubted the historical reality of this category theosebēs, but in 1976 archaeological excavations at Aphrodisias, in what is now south-west Turkey, revealed an inscription belonging to a synagogue from the third century CE in which that same word was used in a list of benefactors of the building: the set of names was arranged separately from Jewish names and represented only slightly less than half of the total number of donors. So at least this synagogue boasted a substantial proportion of people emotionally committed to Judaism and its tradition, yet still part of a wider world. Paul himself does not use the word theosebēs in his letters, but his epistle to Christians in Galatia is by implication directed exactly to such an audience: pressure is being brought on them to be circumcised, indicating that they are not already but are still knowledgeable enough about Judaism to be expected to appreciate Paul’s detailed references to Jewish sacred literature and beliefs.59 They might be ready to listen to a message which was both radically different from what they had heard before and yet clearly had a relationship to it, a relationship expressed with a passion and urgency appropriate for a final age. One wonders what Paul was preaching when he started out. His surviving

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

  Since we were, at the time of the fall, "in lumbis Adami," the sin of Adam is "jure seminationis et germinationis," our sin and guilt, and physical death is a penalty even upon infant children, as it was a penalty upon Adam. The posterity of Adam therefore suffer punishment not for the sin of another, but for the sin which they themselves committed in Adam. This view, as we shall see farther on, Augustine founds upon a false interpretation of Rom. v. 12. I. The Fall. The original state of man included the possibility of sinning, and this was the imperfection of that state. This possibility became reality. Why it should have been realized, is incomprehensible; since evil never has, like good, a sufficient reason. It is irrationality itself. Augustine fixes an immense gulf between the primitive state and the state of sin. But when thought has accomplished this adventurous leap, it finds his system coherent throughout. Adam did not fall without temptation from another. That angel, who, in his pride, had turned away from God to himself, tempted man, who, standing yet in his integrity, provoked his envy. He first approached the woman, the weaker and the more credulous. The essence of the sin of Adam consisted not in the eating of the fruit; for this was in itself neither wrong nor harmful; but in disobedience to the command of God. "Obedience was enjoined by that commandment, as the virtue which, in the rational creature, is, as it were, the mother and guardian of all virtues." The principle, the root of sin, was pride, self-seeking, the craving of the will to forsake its author, and become its own. This pride preceded the outward act. Our first parents were sinful in heart, before they had yet fallen into open disobedience. "For man never yet proceeded to an evil work, unless incited to it by an evil will." This pride even preceded the temptation of the serpent. "If man had not previously begun to take pleasure in himself, the serpent could have had no hold upon him." The fall of Adam appears the greater, and the more worthy of punishment, if we consider, first, the height he occupied, the divine image in which he was created; then, the simplicity of the commandment, and ease of obeying it, in the abundance of all manner of fruits in paradise; and finally, the sanction of the most terrible punishment from his Creator and greatest Benefactor. Thus Augustine goes behind the appearance to the substance; below the surface to the deeper truth. He does not stop with the outward act, but looks chiefly at the disposition which lies at its root. II. The Consequences of the primal sin, both for Adam and for his posterity, are, in Augustine’s view, comprehensive and terrible in proportion to the heinousness of the sin itself.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  The ubiquity of squatters across the United States turned them into a powerful political trope. They came to be associated with five traits: (1) crude habitations; (2) boastful vocabulary; (3) distrust of civilization and city folk; (4) an instinctive love of liberty (read: licentiousness); and (5) degenerate patterns of breeding. Yet even with such unappealing traits, the squatter also acquired some favorable qualities: the simple backwoodsman welcomed strangers into his cabin, the outrageous storyteller entertained them through the night. Squatters, then, were more than troublesome, uncouth rascals taking up land they didn’t own. This double identity made the squatter a contested figure. By the 1830s and 1840s, he was fully a symbol of partisan politics, celebrated as the iconic common man who came to epitomize Jacksonian democracy. Americans tend to forget that Andrew Jackson was the first westerner elected president. Tall, lanky, with the rawboned look of a true backwoodsman, he wore the harsh life of the frontier on his face and literally carried a bullet next to his heart. Ferocious in his resentments, driven to wreak revenge against his enemies, he often acted without deliberation and justified his behavior as a law unto himself. His controversial reputation made him the target of attacks that painted him as a Tennessee cracker. His wife Rachel’s backcountry divorce and her recourse to both cigar and corncob pipe confirmed the couple as Nashville bumpkins, at least in the eyes of their eastern detractors. 21 Jackson and his supporters worked on a different image. During three successive presidential campaigns (1824, 1828, 1832), General Jackson was celebrated as “Old Hickory,” in sharp contrast to Crèvecoeur’s tame analogy of Americans as carefully cultivated plants. Rising up in the harsh hinterland of what was once the western extension of North Carolina, the Tennessean with the unbending will and rigid style of command was a perfect match for the tough, dense wood of Indian bows and hickory switches from which he acquired his nickname. 22 Jackson’s personality was a crucial part of his democratic appeal as well as the animosity he provoked. He was the first presidential candidate to be bolstered by a campaign biography. He was not admired for statesmanlike qualities, which he lacked in abundance in comparison to his highly educated rivals John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay. His supporters adored his rough edges, his land hunger, and his close identification with the Tennessee wilderness. As a representative of America’s cracker country, Jackson unquestionably added a new class dimension to the meaning of democracy.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 2 (4 BCE – 451 CE) (2009)

  have a special destiny in Christian history, as we will discover. So Christian life in Constantinople straight away became based on a rhythm of ‘stational’ visits to individual churches at special times, the clergy linking them by processions which became a characteristic feature of worship in the city. To live in Constantinople was to be in the middle of a perpetual pilgrimage.14 Constantine’s vigorous annexation of the Christian past for imperial purposes in Rome and Byzantium also bore fruit in a remarkable enterprise which was a huge boost to the growing Christian urge to visit sacred places: the recreation of a Christian Holy Land centred on Jerusalem.15 Palestine had been a backwater of the empire since its miserable century of rebellion and destruction from 66 CE. The former Jerusalem was a small city with a Roman name, Aelia Capitolina, some evocative ruins on the former Temple site, and a modest number of Christians who had unobtrusively returned to live around the area. In the middle years of Constantine’s reign its provincial tranquillity began to be interrupted, much to the delight of its ambitious bishop, Macarius, who was pressing for appropriate honour to be done to the true home of Christianity. The bishop clearly attracted the Emperor’s attention by some skilled self-promotion at the great Council of Nicaea in 325. He returned home armed with instructions to start an expensive programme of church-building, the preparations for which revealed a sensational double find beneath the stately imperial Capitoline temple built by Hadrian (see p. 107). What emerged was the exact site of Christ’s crucifixion and the tomb in which the Saviour had been laid. It is possible that there had been a continuous Christian tradition as to the whereabouts of these sites and that therefore there was not much revealing to be done.16 Less plausibly, it was not long before the Jerusalem Church was announcing that the actual wood of the Cross had also been rediscovered, and within a quarter- century another enterprising Bishop of Jerusalem, named Cyril, was linking that discovery to an undoubted historic event: a state visit to the Holy City in 327 by Constantine’s mother, the dowager Empress Helena. Helena may not have found the wood of the Cross (certainly no one at the time said that she did), but her presence was important enough – important from the imperial family’s point of view, in demonstrating their Christian piety in the wake of the unfortunate and unexplained recent sudden deaths of the Emperor’s wife and eldest son, and vital to the Church in Jerusalem as a direct imperial endorsement of a new centre of world pilgrimage. It took nearly a century for pilgrimage to Jerusalem to gather momentum, partly because of the expense, but partly because not everyone was enthusiastic either for pilgrimage or for this particular destination. Eusebius’s comments on developments in Jerusalem are reserved, including the lofty remark in his later years that ‘to think that the

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Pat aggressively, producing tons of campaign materials that included badges, flags, brochures, combs, jewelry, and a variety of buttons, all of which boosted Pat as the ideal suburban homemaker. Party organizers stormed the barricades of suburban shopping centers with “Patmobiles” and “Pat Parades.” Unlike a stunning young Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy decked out in “French couture,” Pat Nixon picked her clothing off the store racks and chose those items she could easily pack. 18 The Nixons hailed from Whittier, in southern California, an area of the Sunbelt that underwent dramatic changes from 1946 to 1970. As millions of Americans bought new homes, suburban enclaves arose in the orbit of metropolitan Los Angeles, Phoenix, Houston, Miami, and elsewhere. One of the best-publicized housing developments of the era grew in Levittown on the outskirts of New York City. The Levitts thought big, putting up 17,400 houses and attracting 82,000 residents to their Long Island development. This sweeping success led them to construct two massive subdivisions in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and Willingboro, New Jersey. As skilled promoters, the Levitts did more than simply build homes. Like their earliest progenitor, Richard Hakluyt of old Elizabethan England, they were planting self-sustaining colonies in the hinterland. The Levitts imagined suburbs as middle-class consumer outposts, geared for leisure activities: baseball fields, bicycle pathways, and swimming pools complemented commercially zoned areas for shopping centers. 19 The key to the Levitts’ system was not just cheaper housing, but homogeneous populations—in their phrasing, “stabilized” neighborhoods. They meant racial and class homogeneity, which led them to endorse “restrictive covenants” prohibiting owners from selling their homes to black families. The Levitts knew the South, because their first large-scale project was an all-white facility for wartime workers in Norfolk, Virginia. By planting suburbs in quasi- rural areas, the Levitts recognized that the value of land was not determined by industry or commerce. As isolated outposts, land values were tied to the class status of the occupants. Buying a home here required the male breadwinner to have a steady income—a mark of the new fifties middle class. 20 Levittown was dubbed a “garden community.” But the new style of tract homes uneasily occupied this rustic space. During the fifties, the pastoral image of suburbs was applied to all kinds of bedroom communities. Popular magazines featured wives tending their gardens, husbands grilling at their barbecues. This was a fanciful recasting of the Jeffersonian ideal: suburbanites were the new, let

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  toothy grin, his strange duel with a swamp rabbit, and, most notably, his redneck doppelgänger—brother Billy. 28 Carter was the perfect candidate of the seventies, because he was someone who came to politics with “roots.” He ran as the man from tiny Plains, as one who loved the land, loved his kin, and treasured his local community. That simple heritage was his calling card, and as a profile in the Christian Science Monitor concluded, “Few cling to their roots with more tenacity.” Like Alex Haley, he was obsessed with his family’s genealogy. He successfully cultivated his “common man” origins until a British publication on the peerage released a startling twenty-three-page finding on the Carter family lineage in 1977. Instead of descending from indentured servants, the president had one of the most significant family histories in the English-speaking world: he was related to both George Washington and the queen of England. The New York Times projected that his fellow Americans would find this discovery “amusing.” It tempered the British announcement with a reminder to readers that some of the Carters in old England were poachers, the American equivalent of would-be moonshiners. Noble blood or hillbilly moonshiners? A spokesman for the British study, Debrett’s Peerage, invoked eugenic thinking when he claimed that the Carter family had produced “intelligent to brilliant” people. The family line had its share of “sleepers,” the expert confided, and it was from those less successful branches that Jimmy’s brother Billy had acquired his less fine attributes. 29 That said, Billy Carter was no sleeper. He became a redneck luminary, and tourists poured into the Carters’ hometown of Plains looking for autographs and photographs with the down-home celebrity. He began producing his own beer, Billy Beer, and hired an agent to coordinate talks he gave around the country. He was known for voicing ornery, uncensored opinions. Billy smoked five packs of Pall Malls a day, and his code name on the CB radio was “Cast Iron,” for his iron-gutted ability to drink anything and a lot of it. He was no “Holy Roller,” no celebrant of the “Lost Cause.” When asked what side he would have fought on in the Civil War, Billy joked, “I’d probably hid out in the swamp.” In 1981, after his brother left office, Billy was peddling mobile homes. 30 Roy Blount said he wished that Jimmy had a bit more of Billy in him, a little more irreverence and sass: “The first Cracker President should have been a mixture of Jimmy and Billy, . . . Billy’s hoo-Lord-what-the-hell-get-out-the-way attitude heaving up under Jimmy’s prudent righteousness—or Jimmy’s idealism heaving up under Billy’s sense of human limitations—and forming a nice-and-

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 2 (4 BCE – 451 CE) (2009)

  beyond, and its sense of community. We have no definite witness to Christianity in Britain before the early fourth century, and not much from the far end of the Mediterranean in Spain, but from the late second and early third centuries there is evidence elsewhere of well-established communities, invariably with an episcopal organization which had been in existence for some time. This is true, for instance, in North Africa around Carthage, in Alexandria and in the south of France at Lyons. Fragments preserved from letters of the late-second-century Bishop Dionysius of Corinth shed sudden shafts of light on Christian Churches in Athens, Crete and Pontus (a section of the southern coast of the Black Sea).21 The largest cities of the empire produced the largest and most important Christian communities – Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, Carthage – and while Rome pointed back to an authentic presence of the Apostles Peter and Paul in its early past, others which had not had an episcopal organization or were founded later on are likely to have confected lists in which a line of bishops could be traced back to Apostles of the first generation. Athens, for instance, pointed to Paul’s convert Dionysius the Areopagite (usefully mentioned in Acts 17.34), while Alexandria claimed foundation by the evangelist Mark himself. The genuineness of such claims is less important than the witness they give to the way in which apostolic succession had now established itself as a vital idea in the thinking of the Church, and to the self-confidence which these communities could feel in the ownership of a common tradition which involved many others. In what may be the earliest datable Christian sculpted inscription, a self- composed epitaph from before 216, Abercius, Bishop of Phrygian Hierapolis, in the next generation from Bishop Apollinaris, proudly describes his Mediterranean adventures in terms of the travels of Paul of Tarsus. It is notable that among the places he describes, Judaea and Jerusalem do not figure. The Catholic Church had already rewritten the history of its past and there was no longer much need for Jerusalem to play an active role in it.22 By the late second century, intelligent non-Christians had started to realize the significance of this self-confidence. Christianity was beginning to offer a complete alternative to the culture and assumptions of the Roman establishment, an establishment which had never felt thus threatened by the teeming ancient cults of the provinces, or even by Judaism. Christianity had no national base; it was as open to those who wished to work hard to enter it as Roman citizenship itself. It talked much of new covenant, new law, amid all its selective annexation of a Jewish past. Was it really trying to create a new citizenship for its own purposes, to create an empire within an empire? This was certainly the opinion of one well-educated late-second-century traditionalist called Celsus, who wrote a bitter attack on Christianity, probably somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 2 (4 BCE – 451 CE) (2009)

  Most striking of all Constantine’s symbolic associations with the new religion was his founding of a new capital for his empire. He had no emotional investment in the city of Rome. It is likely that he had hardly if ever visited it before his victory at the Milvian Bridge, and he found the city problematic. Its ruling class was unsympathetic to his new faith and clung to their ancient temples, and it was difficult to change the face of the city itself with monumental building for his new-found friends.9 Instead he looked to the eastern part of the empire to create a city which would be peculiarly his own, and would also mark his victory over the former ruler in the East, Licinius.10 He had considered refounding the city of Troy, original home of Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome, as his New Rome, but this association with pre-Christian Roman origins did not prove enough of an incentive.11 The site Constantine chose was an ancient city enjoying a superb strategic site at the entrance to the Black Sea and the command of trade routes east and west: Byzantion. He renamed the city after himself, as previous emperors had done in imitation of Alexander’s precedent: Constantinople. The old name persisted, eventually modified in academic Latin to Byzantium. It was destined to provide a new identity for the Eastern Roman state, whose capital it remained over the next millennium, in what has commonly become known in history as the Byzantine Empire.12 But for countless numbers of people of the eastern Mediterranean over that millennium and beyond, Constantinople would simply be ‘the City’, the dominant presence in their society, their religious practice and their hopes for the future. Constantine quadrupled Byzantium in size, and although virtually none of the buildings which he provided survive, the Great Palace of the emperors remained on the same site from its first completion in 330 until the death of the last emperor in 1453. This new Rome reflected the new situation of tolerance for all, but with Christianity more equal than others. Traditional religion was put in a subordinate place: the core centres of worship were Christian churches of great magnificence. They included a church in which Constantine proposed to gather the bodies of all twelve Apostles to accompany his own corpse: a mark of how he now saw his role in the Christian story, although the coffins alongside his own had to remain mainly symbolic in default of enough relics of the Twelve.13 For the most part the city churches were not exactly congregational or parish churches. They were designed like the contemporary temples of non-Christians with specific dedications or commemorations in mind, to concentrate on a particular saint or aspect of the Christian holiness. One of the greatest, close to the Imperial Palace, was dedicated to Holy Peace (Hagia Eirēnē). It was soon outclassed when Constantine’s son put up an even greater church right beside it dedicated to the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia), whose successor building was to

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

  Farel published at Neuchâtel in 1533, and introduced at Geneva in 1537, the first French Reformed liturgy, which includes, in the regular Sunday service, a general prayer, the Lord’s Prayer (before sermon), the Decalogue, confession of sins, repetition of the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed, a final exhortation and benediction.513 It resembled the German liturgy of Bern, which was published in 1529, and which Calvin caused to be translated into French by his friend Morelet.514 Of Farel’s liturgy only the form of marriage survived. The rest was reconstructed and improved by Calvin in the liturgy which he first introduced in Strassburg, and with some modifications in Geneva after his return. Calvin’s liturgy was published twice in 1542. It was introduced at Lausanne in the same year, and gradually passed into other Reformed Churches. Calvin built his form of worship on the foundation of Zwingli and Farel, and the services already in use in the Swiss Reformed Churches. Like his predecessors, he had no sympathy whatever with the Roman Catholic ceremonialism, which was overloaded with unscriptural traditions and superstitions. We may add that he had no taste for the artistic, symbolical, and ornamental features in worship. He rejected the mass, all the sacraments, except two, the saints’ days, nearly all church festivals, except Sunday, images, relics, processions, and the whole pomp and circumstance of a gaudy worship which appeals to the senses and imagination rather than the intellect and the conscience, and tends to distract the mind with the outward show instead of concentrating it upon the contemplation of the saving truth of the gospel. He substituted in its place that simple and spiritual mode of worship which is well adapted for intelligent devotion, if it be animated by the quickening presence and power of the Spirit of God, but becomes jejune, barren, cold, and chilly if that power is waiting. He made the sermon the central part of worship, and substituted instruction and edification in the vernacular for the reading of the mass in Latin. He magnified the pulpit, as the throne of the preacher, above the altar of the sacrificing priest. He opened the inexhaustible fountain of free prayer in public worship, with its endless possibilities of application to varying circumstances and wants; he restored to the Church, like Luther, the inestimable blessing of congregational singing, which is the true popular liturgy, and more effective than the reading of written forms of prayer. The order of public worship in Calvin’s congregation at Strassburg was as follows: — The service began with an invocation,515 a confession of sin and a brief absolution.516 hen followed reading of the Scriptures, singing, and a free prayer. The whole congregation, male and female, joined in chanting the Psalms, and thus took an active part in public worship, while formerly they were but passive listeners or spectators.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  MY MOTHER WOULD hardly talk to me on the drive home that night, she was so appalled. She refused to understand that I’d really had to fight, that there was no choice. The entire spectacle had disgusted her, and most of all my own losing part in it. She said she’d been so mortified she had to put her face in her hands. I resented this. I thought I had run a pretty close second, and so did Dwight, who praised the use I had made of his coaching. The truth was, I hadn’t made nearly enough use of it. During the first round I followed my intention and fought like a crazy man. Arthur was all over me, his craziness proving more radical than my own. Twice his windmilling gloves came straight down on my head and knocked me to my knees. He knocked me to my knees again during the second round. After I got up he rushed me, and without calculation I sidestepped and threw him an uppercut. It stopped him cold. He just stood there, shaking his head. I hit him again and the bell rang. I caught him with that uppercut twice more during the final round, but neither of them rocked him like that first one. That first one was a beaut. I launched it from my toes and put everything I had into it, and it shivered his timbers. I could feel it travel through him in one pure line. I could feel it hurt him. And when it landed, and my old friend’s head snapped back so terribly, I felt a surge of pride and connection; connection not to him but to Dwight. I was distinctly aware of Dwight in that bellowing mass all around me. I could feel his exultation at the blow I’d struck, feel his own pride in it, see him smiling down at me with recognition, and pleasure, and something like love.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  is the father of his country. . . . You little dandies, and other big folk may freely enjoy the fruits of our hardships; you may feast, where we had to starve; and frolic, where we had to fight; but at peril of all of you, give the Backwoodsman none of your slack-jaw. 56 All of this explains Congressman Walker’s point-counterpoint in distinguishing General Jackson from the congressional investigators. The beau was an effete snob, and his ridicule an uncalled-for taunt. The real men of America were Jacksonian, the hearty native sons of Tennessee and Kentucky. They fought the wars. They opened up the frontier through their sacrifice and hardship. They fathered the next generation of courageous settlers. Defensive westerners thus attached to Jackson their dreams and made him a viable presidential candidate. 57 Another way to promote their cracker president was through humorous exaggeration. As the different coffin handbills made the rounds in 1828, Jackson’s men used Crockett-like humor to defend him, claiming that the general was really guilty of having eaten the six militiamen, “swallowing them all, coffins and all.” When John Quincy Adams supporters circulated a note written by Jackson filled with misspellings and bad grammar, Jacksonians praised him as “self-taught.” If his lack of diplomatic experience made him “homebred,” this meant that he was less contaminated than the former diplomat Adams by foreign ideas or courtly pomp. The class comparison could not be ignored: Adams had been a professor of rhetoric at Harvard, while his Tennessee challenger was “sprung from a common family,” and had written nothing to brag about. Instinctive action was privileged over unproductive thought. 58 Given that his initial support in the 1824 campaign came from Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee, Jackson was derided for having cornered the cracker vote. A humorous piece in a southern newspaper described a Georgia cracker in Crockett prose, “half alligator, half man,” giving a hurrah for Jackson. By 1828, his Indiana constituency was presented as “The Backwoods Alive with Old Hickory.” 59 Jackson partisans were routinely chastised for their lack of taste and breeding. At a gathering in Philadelphia in 1828, drinkers lifted their glasses in violent toasts: “May the hickory ramrods ram down the powder of equality into our national guns, and wadded well with the voices of the people to blow Clay in the mud.” Another toastmaster wished that an “Adamite head was a drum head,

• From The Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us (2004)

  “No, Thank You”Of course, sometimes you get turned down. My own fear of rejection shrank to a manageable size the day I overheard a stunning femme graciously deflect a sexual come-on. The would-be suitor approached the femme and said, “We’ve been eyeing each other all day. I want you to know I find you very attractive.” The femme responded, “Thank you.” Period. She did not find it necessary to qualify her response (“Thanks, but I’m not interested in taking this further”), nor did she find it necessary to behave defensively (“No way!”). I understood in that moment that a genuine expression of desire had value, regardless of the response. I was no less beautiful or worthy a human being because someone said, “No, thank you.” (I also understood that I needn’t fear a rude or unkind response—since that would reflect a lack of grace on the part of the speaker, and say nothing about me.) Signs of Healthy Boundaries • Appropriate trust • Revealing a little of yourself at a time, then checking to see how the other person responds to your sharing • Moving step by step into intimacy • Considering compatibility before moving into a relationship • Deciding whether a potential relationship will be good for you • Touching only with permission • Weighing the consequences before acting on sexual impulse • Being sexual when you want to be sexual, concentrating on your own experience • Maintaining personal values despite what others want • Noticing when someone else displays inappropriate boundaries • Saying no to unwanted food, drinks, gifts, touch, sex • Respecting others—not taking advantage of someone’s generosity • Respecting self—not giving too much, hoping that someone will like you • Not allowing someone to take advantage of your generosity • Trusting your own decisions and accepting the consequences • Knowing who you are and what you want • Pursuing your own growth • Recognizing that friends and partners are not mind readers • Clearly communicating your wants and needs (recognizing that you may be turned down, but you can ask) • Talking to yourself with gentleness, humor, love, and respect “No” is an expression of a preference and is as valid a response to a sexual request as “yes”—though it’s not what you hope to hear. Respect that preference. Being told “no” is not an invitation to argue or persuade. Move on and ask someone else. What if someone approaches you for sex, and you’re not interested or available? If you like, you can say, “I’m flattered you asked, but no” or “Not right now, but check in with me another time” (if you really think you might be interested later). However, a simple “No, thank you” is enough. You don’t owe an explanation. Personal Ads in Newspapers and MagazinesThe world of personal ads offers a wonderful opportunity to practice asking for what you want. Personal ads are especially helpful if asking for sex face to face makes you feel shy.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  The ark was the traditional symbol of the presence of YHWH. By bringing it to Jerusalem, David made the old Jebusite city the center of worship for the tribes of Israel that worshiped YHWH. David is ostentatious in his public celebration of the event, leaving no doubt about his devotion to YHWH. The disapproval of Michal, daughter of Saul, is of little consequence at this point. The house of Saul is no longer a factor in the kingship of Israel. THE CONQUESTS OF DAVID Chapters 8 and 10 describe the wars of David, in which he allegedly subjugated all the surrounding peoples—Philistia, Moab, Ammon, Edom, but also the Arameans as far as Damascus and the Euphrates. Modern scholarship is skeptical of these claims. Not only are they not supported by extrabiblical evidence, but the Bible itself does not claim that these peoples were under Israelite control in later generations. David may be credited with containing the Philistines and bringing an end to the conflict between Philistines and Israelites. He may also have conducted campaigns against neighboring peoples, but it is unlikely that he established lasting control of these areas. Second Samuel 24 describes a census taken by David that allegedly included Tyre and Sidon and all the cities of the Canaanites, but does not extend to Arameans or other neighboring peoples. Moreover, it is quite clear from the account of the reign of Solomon in 1 Kings that Tyre was never subject to Israel. The claims made for David in 2 Samuel 8 and 10 are at best hyperbolic, and their historical value is suspect. It may be that the author was influenced by the promise made to Abraham in Gen 15:18-21: “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.” The descendants of Abraham certainly did not control all this territory at any time after the reign of Solomon, and Solomon was not a warrior, so the author may have reasoned that the promise was fulfilled in the time of David. Minimum Extent of David’s Kingdom. Maximum Extent of David’s Kingdom. Stepped structure in Jerusalem, shown by the archaeologist Eilat Mazar to be part of the massive royal palace of David. THE PROMISE TO DAVID Second Samuel 7 is one of the key passages not only in the Deuteronomistic History but in the Hebrew Bible as a whole. The promise to David that is narrated here is the foundation charter of the Davidic dynasty and is a frequent point of reference in later writings. It would eventually become the basis for messianic hope, that is, the hope that the Davidic kingship would be restored and would last forever. The setting of the promise is when the king is settled in his house and has rest from his enemies. Palace and temple were often associated in the ancient Near East. The same Hebrew word , hekal, is used for both.