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 43 of 174 · 20 per page

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

  of a royal elite. Over the centuries of trials and bizarre disasters to afflict the Ethiopian Church, they are the constant underlying force which has preserved its unique life against the odds. King Ezana may have renounced traditional gods, but the worship of the Church over which he first presided has remained unique and unmistakably African in character. Since church buildings are often temple-like in character rather than congregational spaces, much of the liturgy is conducted in the open air, accompanied by a variety of drums and percussive and stringed instruments, and with the principal clergy and musicians shaded from the weather by elaborately decorated umbrellas. Instead of church bells, sonorous echoes struck on stones hanging from trees summon worshippers to prayer (see Plate 20). The Church’s liturgical chant, inseparable from its worship, is attributed to the sixth- century Court musician Yared. According to legend, his genius rather backfired on him when Gabra Maskel, the then king of Aksum, was so entranced by Yared’s singing that he failed to notice that the spear on which he was leaning had pierced the singer’s foot. Yared himself was (perhaps diplomatically) too absorbed in his own art to comment.29 It was not surprising that during the controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries, this Church, which derived its fragile link to the wider episcopal succession via Alexandria, followed the Egyptian Church into the Miaphysite camp. One of the concepts which remain central in Ethiopian theology is täwahedo, ‘union’ of humanity and divinity in the Saviour who took flesh. Nevertheless, despite the crucial role of the abun, the Ethiopian Church did not become Coptic in character. Far more all-pervasive were its links with the Semitic world, already evident before the coming of Christianity in Ethiopian language and even place names in the coastal regions of Tigray and Eritrea.30 It was one of those Semitic languages, Ge’ez, which became the liturgical and theological language of the Ethiopian Church, and remains so, even though it is not otherwise in current use. The arrival of Miaphysite faith is also connected to the Semitic world, because in legend it is associated with ‘Nine Saints’ of mostly Syriac background, who are said to have arrived as refugees from Chalcedonian persecution in the late fifth century and to have been instrumental in establishing the Ethiopian monastic system. Ethiopia’s Semitic links are also apparent in the unique fascination with Judaism which has developed in its Christianity. This is reminiscent of the distinctively close relationship with Judaism in early Syriac Christianity (see pp. 178–9), but over a much longer period the character has become much more pronounced in Ethiopia. This may not originally have arisen so much from direct contacts with Jews as from Ethiopian pride in that foundation episode in the

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

  the time of the pious and energetic King Alfred (reigned 871–99), the kings of Wessex had done their best to fight off invasion and occupation by Danish and Viking armies to create a version of Carolingian monarchy, just at the time when the Carolingians themselves were descending into quarrels and failure. Alfred’s successors Aethelstan (reigned 924–39) and Edgar (reigned 944–75) achieved the united English kingdom anticipated in the Church of Augustine’s mission and in the writings of Bede (see pp. 341–2). The uniting of England provoked an outburst of pride which might almost be styled nationalist, and which had a distinctive and galvanizing effect on the English Church. Reforms in England were the work of a small group of great reformers whom King Edgar made bishops and archbishops. Aethelwold, a courtier of King Aethelstan, who had become a monk and from 963 was bishop in Edgar’s royal capital of Winchester, was a scholar and dynamic teacher who inspired a series of decaying monasteries to adopt the Benedictine Rule as their standard of life, having himself translated that Rule from Latin into Old English. His unusual impact on the English Church left it one individual feature not often found elsewhere in Europe, and which was even extended after the Norman Conquest of 1066: the creation of cathedral churches which, up to Henry VIII’s sixteenth- century dissolutions, were also monasteries, with a prior and monks instead of a dean and canons. The capital, Winchester, was itself one; another was Worcester, another Canterbury, though the cathedral canons of York ‘Minster’ never succumbed to reorganization into the monastic life. Dunstan, who had been Abbot of Glastonbury when Aethelwold was there, was Archbishop of Canterbury from 959. He was both a great statesman, who presided over King Edgar’s quasi-imperial coronation at Bath in 973, and a zealous promoter of Aethelwold’s Benedictine project throughout the kingdom (engagingly if surprisingly, he also took an interest in personally annotating a manuscript of no-holds-barred erotic verse by the Latin poet Ovid, which still exists in the Bodleian Library in Oxford). Oswald of Worcester, a monk of Danish descent, was equally energetic in monastic foundations and refoundations across the English Midlands from Worcester to Ramsey; Edgar promoted him to the Archbishopric of York in 971. Notably, all these scholars were as concerned to write in Old English as in Latin, developing with pride a vernacular literary tradition which had most unusually been fostered by the writings of a king, Alfred of Wessex. That emphasis on the vernacular might well have altered the patterns of Christianity in northern Europe, if England rather than Cluny had proved to be the powerhouse of Christian change in the next century.1 Cluny’s glory days came later than the English revival. The abbey outgrew the

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

  decades from 605 the Shah had control of the hills of Tūr ‘Abdīn, where the monasteries had previously been divided between Melchite and Miaphysite communities (see p. 237). From this date, some monastic communities of Dyophysites held on to their places in Tūr ‘Abdīn, and it was not until after 1838 that the last monks from the Church of the East left this enclave of extraordinary Christian sanctity.40 The Church of the East was now travelling astonishing distances away from the heartlands of the previous Christian centuries: eastwards along land and sea routes which connected the Roman and Sassanian worlds with China and India – and noticeably without any political support. To begin with, it must have been something like a chaplaincy for expatriates, but it was also a mission which could draw on the natural articulacy and propensity for salesmanship which made Syrian merchants so successful across Asia. During the fourth and fifth centuries the east Syrians reached out beyond the Sassanian Empire and established Christian outposts among the peoples of Central Asia, and over the next centuries they moved steadily onwards in their activities, which means that in such unexpected places as the mountains and plains around Samarqand, so long the territory of Islam, it is possible to have the shock of encountering the sight of carved medieval crosses or inscriptions in Syriac.41 One of the Syrians’ earliest extensions of the Christian faith was to India. The ‘Mar Thoma’ Church there treasures a claim to have been founded by the Apostle Thomas, which is not beyond the bounds of possibility, given the evidence that archaeology has revealed of vigorous trade between the Roman Empire and India in the first century CE. Traditions about Thomas certainly already triggered an early-third-century apocryphal Syrian account of his deeds in the subcontinent (see p. 202). By the fourth century there was a sufficiently organized Church in the Malabar Coast in south-west India (what is now Kerala) that arrangements were made to put it under the authority of the bishop in one of the main trading ports in the Sassanian Empire, Rew Ardashir (now Bushehr on the Persian Gulf).42 A century later, a Christian writer from Alexandria called Cosmas took a nickname from his extraordinary travels around India – Indicopleustes, ‘voyager to India’ – though the traveller was also an eyewitness of King Kaleb of Ethiopia’s momentous campaign in the Yemen in the 520s (see pp. 244–5). Despite coming from Egypt, Cosmas Indicopleustes was a Dyophysite, steeped in the writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia and Diodore of Tarsus, and he sneered at the recent ‘schismatical Father’, the exiled Bishop Theodosius of Alexandria. He was proud of the Church of the East, which had spread its faith from Persia to Churches in India and even Sri Lanka, rejoicing that his travels had shown him how the whole earth was ‘still being filled, and

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

  Book of Acts, in which Christianity’s Jewish heritage already lies at the heart of the story of Philip and the eunuch. Meditation on this during the passing of centuries in the isolation of Africa has made that seed grow into a major theme in a Church which honours the Jewish Sabbath, practises circumcision (female as well as male, unlike the Jews), and makes its members obey Jewish dietary laws. External sources as early as the thirteenth century record the Church as treasuring an object which was claimed to be the Ark of the Covenant once housed in the Temple in Jerusalem. The report that the Ark was decorated with crosses does present problems for this provenance, given that, if genuine, it had been constructed a millennium before the Crucifixion.31 At its extreme, the preoccupation with the Hebrew past in Ethiopian Christianity has produced a grouping of peoples first attested in Ethiopia in the fourteenth century, who have been styled by other Ethiopians Falasha, ‘Strangers’, but who call themselves Beta Israel (‘House of Israel’) because they claim full Jewish identity. In recent years, most of the Beta Israel have emigrated to the State of Israel.32 Central to the complex of associations with Israel and Judaism is a foundational work of Ethiopian literature, the Kebra Nagast, the ‘Book of the Glory of Kings’. It is this work, difficult to date and composite in character, which sets out the origins of the Ethiopian monarchy in the union of King Solomon of Israel and the Queen of Sheba, that legendary ruler of a Yemeni kingdom whom the Tanakh had recorded as visiting Jerusalem in great splendour. What is now considered to be a late addition to the accounts in the Kebra Nagast is the story that their son Menelik, the first Ethiopian king, brought the Ark, or tabot, back to Ethiopia, where it is kept to this day in a chapel in Aksum. Every Ethiopian church has a much-venerated representation of the tabot in its sanctuary. Quite when the tabot at Aksum became so important in Ethiopian devotion is controversial. The latest historian to consider the confused and partial evidence places it as late as the end of the sixteenth century, when recent Islamic destruction and bruising contacts with the wider Christian world made the Ethiopian Church particularly concerned to assert its special character and enrich its existing Jewish traditions (see pp. 711–12).33 The original form of the Kebra Nagast is certainly much older, and it may relate to a period in the sixth century when Aksum was at one of its peaks of power. This formidable Christian empire under King Kaleb then had an intimate concern with the land of the Queen of Sheba, the Yemen. The active role which Ethiopia now seized in the politics of Yemen and Arabia was one of the great might-have-beens of history, and would certainly explain the later fascination in Ethiopia with Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. In the early years of the sixth century, Miaphysite Christian refugees from the Byzantine Empire gathered in

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

  At issue was how far the Ethiopian Church was prepared to travel in its own direction and ignore what links it had with the wider world: monks of the House of Ewostatewos rejected ordination by the abun, and it is possible that they might have ended up as separate from their parent Christianity as that other independent-minded Ethiopian movement, the Falasha (see pp. 243–4). The triumph of the Sabbath was sealed by devoted advocacy from one of Ethiopia’s most remarkable monarchs, Zar’a Ya’qob (reigned 1434–68), who combined military success with intense piety, himself writing works of Christian instruction for his subjects. Thanks to Zar’a Ya’qob, Ethiopia’s effective rule extended once more to the coast of the Red Sea, and despite the Negus’s pride in the special character of Ethiopian devotion, he was intensely aware of his links with a wider world; he took the regnal name Constantine. There was a great sensation in Europe when a delegation of two monks from the Ethiopian monastery in Jerusalem arrived in 1441 at the Pope’s council at Florence (see pp. 492–3) and uttered the name of their far-distant monarch – this was the same council which also received representations from the beleaguered Copts. Zar’a Ya’qob also derived great spiritual comfort from an unlikely source, a short popular work of devotion called The Miracles of Mary, which seems to have been compiled for use in Marian shrines in France in the twelfth century; having gained great popularity in western Europe, it had been translated into Arabic and then into Ethiopic. The Negus made it a mandatory work of devotion for his clergy: a strange stray from an alien world which he nevertheless found a useful tool in moulding his people to a single style of faith, and Marian devotion was hugely reinforced in the Ethiopian Church.59 Less indebted to French devotional style was Zar’a Ya’qob’s decree that all his subjects should be tattooed on their foreheads with the words ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’ and on their right and left hands respectively ‘I deny the Devil’ and ‘I am a servant of Mary’. Ethiopian Christian tattooing still characteristically features a cross in blue on the chin or the forehead.60 Zar’a Ya’qob was determined that religious divisions should not undermine his newly extended empire, and key to this was a full understanding between the Solomonic monarchy and the awkward monks of the House of Ewostatewos. This was achieved at a major council of the Ethiopian Church summoned to the Negus’s newly founded monastery of Däbra Mitmaq in 1449, at which the main agreement was that both the Sabbath and Sunday should henceforth be observed. In return, monks of the House of Ewostatewos agreed to be reconciled to the abun and accept ordination at his hands; so the forces of Ethiopian particularism were not terminally separated from the Church’s link to the wider Christian world. It was an important moment for the future of Ethiopian Christianity, a

• From Action (2014)

  Unglue your hands and eyes from your phone. When you arrive at whatever enticing place has beckoned you from out of the house, your cell phone is not your date. Put it away and pay attention for the entirety of the time you’re out, save for commutes, necessary communiqués, and entering previously uncollected contact information into it. If you have to wait in a line, bring a book. If you’re taking in a lecture, performance, or other event where you’d like to record notes, bring a small journal or notepad instead of pecking into your phone screen, unless a work-related reason demands otherwise. You will be more aware of, and look and feel more composed, wherever you are; being a hunched-over social-media-scroller detracts from your experience and the ability of others to differentiate you from three-quarters of the room you’re in. It’s less compelling, anyway. Pick up your lovely face and look the heck around!!! Be excellent at a job—preferably one that you adore, but any position will do. Even if you’re assembling drivel about being a nineteen hundred and nineties kid-lennial for a third-rate website (see: my listicle-based plight just above), do it with gusto. Self-sufficiency is the sexiest thing. If there are certain pragmatic/situational demands or restraints that keep a person from this, don’t castigate yourself—given the current economic state we’re collectively floundering in, I would be an utter knob-job if I didn’t recognize that, in many cases, obtaining any kind of paid work, let alone in a field you love that ALSO keeps you in Diet Cokes, is pretty lucky. Knuckle on what rent-making labor you’ve got, and dedicate yourself as best you can to excelling at it rather than stewing over how much you despise it. Those energies are better utilized by trying to transcend the level you’re at. And don’t balk at taking work that “isn’t what you want to do”—I know plenty of unemployed associates whom I’m always hearing say that they’re broke, but they don’t want to take a part-time or entry-level position because it doesn’t precisely fit the model of what career they’d like in the long run… except, when pressed as to what that is, they usually say something amorphous like, “Something creative?” NO TO THIS. Find something—anything—that earns you the scrilla you need to scrape by, even if it’s just a life-sustaining amount and no more, while you work out the specifics of that nebulous creativity or whatever it is. You’ll be padding your skills, both professional and social, in the meanwhile, without depleting the mental faculties you need to do your real CREATIVE (or whatever enterprising area of inquiry you favor) work.

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

  now a trophy saint for the Merovingian dynasty. He had become a potent symbol of the triumph of Catholicism over Arianism as far away as Byzantine Italy and the late Arian Ostrogothic kingdom of Ravenna. In the 550s, when the Archbishop of Ravenna celebrated the Byzantine emperor’s confiscation of the great Arian chapel royal in Ravenna (now Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo) and converted it to a place of Catholic worship, he rededicated the building to Martin the Gaulish saint, even though the archbishop’s imperial master in Constantinople could have furnished plenty of Eastern saintly champions against Arianism. It was a significant little gesture to demonstrate that the Western Church was not going to be digested into Eastern Christian practice, even after such a significant victory for Byzantine military power and Catholic Christianity as the reoccupation of Ravenna. In the nave wall mosaics of that church in Ravenna, Martin of Tours still proudly leads the procession of male saints towards the Saviour, even now the church itself has been inconsiderately rededicated to the local hero, St Apollinaris.7 The Frankish Merovingian dynasty survived far longer than any of its Arian or pagan rivals among the former barbarian peoples, and despite its later political divisions and misfortunes, it carried forward in the territories of Francia the sense of a political unit consecrated by a trio of great Catholic Christian saints. Besides Martin of Tours, there was a third-century bishop martyred in northern Gaul in the time of Decius, Dionysius (in later French, Denis); he had been the first bishop of Lutetia, the city which was the forerunner of Paris, which Clovis had refounded as his capital on the island site of the old settlement. These two were joined by an extraordinary woman contemporary of Clovis, a nun called Genovefa (in later French, Geneviève), who had built a tomb for the martyr Denis and is said to have organized Lutetia’s resistance to invading Huns in the mid-fifth century.8 Towards the end of her life, she had a great personal influence on Clovis when Lutetia’s surrender to his armies became inevitable. She probably played a part in his conversion and his new enthusiasm for Denis. When Genovefa died in 512, the Merovingian royal family guaranteed her instant promotion to sanctity by burying her in a new basilica which overlooked their island capital, and which signalled their new-found loyalty to Rome with its dedication to Peter and Paul. Geneviève’s fame eventually saw to the church’s rededication in her honour, and the chilly grandeur of its eighteenth-century successor is now secularized as Paris’s Pantheon, a shrine to the very different intellectual and cultural achievements of Enlightenment France. The three great Catholic saintly patrons of the Frankish dynasty thus comprised two bishops, one a monk who was an ex-soldier, together with a saint highly unusual at the time or indeed at any other: a woman who had pioneered

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

  easily have become emperor himself now wielded the spiritual power of the Church against the most powerful ruler in the known world. The Church had come a long way from the days when the Roman authorities had seen it as a minor nuisance. More extraordinary still was the fact that Ambrose consistently won. In 385 he refused to surrender a major church in the city to the anti-Nicene Homoeans, still a powerful force at Court under the young Western emperor, Valentinian II, despite the decisions of the Councils of Constantinople and Aquileia in 381 (see pp. 218–20). As the power struggle in the city continued, the following year Ambrose was inspired to an extraordinary act of self-assertion. He had commissioned another large new church and now let it be known that he himself would eventually be buried there at its heart, under the altar. There was no precedent for a living bishop to do this and not even Constantine had dared to provide such a place for his burial. What Ambrose was telling the imperial Court was that he expected to be a martyr and had made provision for a suitable commemoration of his martyrdom. Piling audacity on audacity, he then put workmen to dig up the floor in his newly built church, where they unearthed the bodies of two martyrs from the time of Nero’s persecution, complete with names, Gervasius and Protasius, ‘long unknown’, and indeed the first martyrs ever known in the Church of Milan. Around the chief churches of the city, the bishop triumphantly paraded their impressively large blood-covered bones – perhaps, if this was indeed a genuine discovery, ochre-painted bones from prehistoric burials. Miraculous cures followed. The Homoeans could not compete, and their power in any case ended with the death of Valentinian.25 After these years of struggle, Ambrose was well prepared for self-assertion, or the assertion of the Church’s power, against the pious Nicene Emperor Theodosius I. To our eyes, the results seem ambiguous. In two famously contrasting instances, Ambrose both forced the Emperor to cancel an order for compensation to a Jewish community in Mesopotamia whose synagogue had been burned down by militant Christians and, on the other hand, successfully ordered the Emperor to do penance for his vindictiveness in massacring the riotous inhabitants of Thessalonica (the modern Thessaloniki).26 Both atrocities had taken place hundreds of miles from Milan, but this made it clear that a bishop of the Church universal could indeed be an international statesman. When Ambrose came to preach funeral sermons first for the young and rather ineffective Emperor Valentinian II and then for Theodosius, he had no compunction in ignoring all the conventions for praising such world leaders, presenting them as fallible, suffering human beings, and particularly emphasizing the humility of the great Theodosius.27

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

  Portuguese monarchy of the right to rule in certain regions of Africa.22 Now that popes were back in Italy, it was unsurprising that they took a particular interest in Italian politics like the other Italian princes around them, and it was no fault of theirs that suddenly in the 1490s Italy became the cockpit of war and the obsessive concern of the great dynastic powers of Europe. The trigger was the ambition of the Valois dynasty of France, when in 1494–5 Charles VIII intervened in the quarrels of Italian princes with a major military invasion; this gained France little, but threw the various major states of Italy into chaos, war and misery for more than half a century. Amid this suddenly unbalanced high politics, it was a natural protective strategy for the papacy stranded in the middle to redouble its self-assertion, a mood which in any case came naturally to the successive popes Alexander VI (1492-1503) and Julius II (1503-13), despite their mutual detestation. Alexander followed the example of Nicholas V with an adjudication in 1493–4 between the claims of the two European powers which were now exploring and making conquests overseas, Portugal and Spain; he divided the map of the world beyond Europe between them, commissioning them to preach the Gospel to the non- Christians whom they encountered, in an action which had all the ambition of the twelfth-century papacy. Likewise, fifteenth-century popes began to restore the architectural splendour of their sadly ramshackle city; display was an essential aspect of power for secular rulers, and surely it was all the more important for Christ’s representative on earth. The most important – and, as we shall see, the most fateful – project was the demolition of the monumental basilica of St Peter built by the Emperor Constantine, so that it could be replaced with something even more spectacular. This was a particular enthusiasm of Julius II, one of the most discriminating but also one of the most extravagant patrons of art and architecture in the papacy’s history (see Plate 26). The two popes who between them occupied St Peter’s throne for two decades had a very selective understanding of what might glorify the papacy. Alexander VI, from the Valencian noble family of Borja (Borgia), shielded his vulnerability as an outsider against his many Italian enemies by ruthlessly exploiting the Church’s most profitable offices to promote his relatives, including his own children by his several mistresses. It was a scandalous flouting of the clerical celibacy imposed by the twelfth-century Reformation, even if Lucrezia and Cesare, the Pope’s most notorious children, had not provided extreme examples of aristocratic self-indulgence. Julius II relished being his own general when he plunged into the Italian wars which proliferated after the French invasion, and he was especially proud when in 1506 he recaptured Bologna, second city of the Papal States after Rome, lost to the papacy seventy years before.23 Nor was

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

  there were fewer English in North America than in North Africa, with its thousands of English slaves, Muslim converts, traders and adventurers. Now that quickly changed. In that decade perhaps as many as twenty thousand emigrated to the New World — rather more than the entire contemporary population of Norwich, early Stuart England’s largest city after London.5 Some colonists established themselves far to the south in islands in the Caribbean, financed by Puritan grandees who saw these as useful bases for harassing the Spanish colonies, in the manner of the great Elizabethan Protestant captains like Francis Drake. Most did not: they followed the earlier separatists to New England and in 1630 founded a new colony of Massachusetts, taking under their wing an ailing earlier venture in that region sponsored by the prominent Puritan minister of Dorchester John White.6 The New England leadership of the Massachusetts Bay Company was generally less socially prominent than in the Virginian and Caribbean enterprises — ministers and minor gentry — and those in charge now proposed to migrate to the colony themselves rather than stay in England. This was a measure of their commitment to starting England afresh overseas. From the beginning, they were a ‘Commonwealth’, whose government lay in the hands of the godly adult males who were the investors and colonists. The first governor chosen by the investors, John Winthrop, was like his Puritan contemporary Oliver Cromwell an East Anglian gentleman of no great local standing who had survived financial and family crisis in the late 1620s. Winthrop’s family had a tradition of cosmopolitan Protestantism stretching back to the 1540s. Rejected in his attempt to secure election to Parliament to promote the godly cause, he devoted his talent for leadership, previously confined in the roles of justice of the peace and minor royal official, to a grander enterprise.7 His associates included a number of university-trained ministers ejected from or not prepared to serve in Laud’s Church, and as early as 1636 they founded a university college in Massachusetts to train up new clergy. Significantly, they placed the new college (soon named Harvard after an early benefactor) in a town named Cambridge — back in England over the previous century, Cambridge had been a much firmer centre of Reformation than Oxford. Equally significantly, they took care to furnish Cambridge with a printing press; the third book printed was a new version of the Genevan-style metrical psalms already so familiar in the parish churches of England. They ignored the other component of English worship, Cranmer’s Prayer Book, which the Laudians had now tainted irredeemably by their ceremonial adaptations of it. The rhetoric of this emigration sprang out of Puritan and Reformed themes which had sounded from English pulpits since the 1560s. Naturally, the idea of covenant, first proclaimed in Zwingli’s and Bullinger’s Zürich (see pp. 620–21),

• From Action (2014)

  Here’s how to be a hot person, regardless of your externalities: Stuff your life. When you do: You’ll find that you’re not even doing it to attract somebody, once you get going, because the best thing to do with your life is everything (and also everyone). Look around for the kind of ideal company you’re already keeping all by yourself. If you decorate your world, people will come to gawp admiringly at all of its many ornaments. In looking at the great fortune of your self-possession, others will be tempted to follow your example. (And also have sex with it.) You are yourself, and you are brimming. Become Yourself [image file=image_225.jpg] Make borderline-severe eye contact with everyone. (And, while we’re keeping it stodgily parental in this bit of advice, please: Sit up straight): Look right into the face of the person with whom you’re yammering. Allow it to feel deliberate, but not invasive. In the most fledgling sexual/social capacity, like when you’re encountering a babe for the very first time and are tempted instead to openly gawp at them, it’s extra-important to be able to identify the difference between “flirtatious” and “intrusive/lecherous/looking for a pepper-spraydown”: Is the other person willfully involved in conversation with you? You’re golden. If they aren’t, but they are looking back with pleasant interest/their tongue running across their teeth like YEAH YOU WANT THIS? you’re also probably golden. If they look away and appear in any way bummed, HALT. You are initiating a staring contest with someone who’d rather not compete. Some might be unsettled by prolonged eye-to-eye (does everyone else also have social anxiety?), but I promise almost all will thrill at being its recipient. Holding the gaze of someone with whom you’re conversing (or would like to be) isn’t awkward, as I once thought despite the urgings of every last cliché about making solid impressions. It’s just good etiquette. But, like most overtures based in diligent manners, many people aren’t used to it. Use this sense of novelty to highlight your own social rectitude: Letting a person speak with your eyes trained on theirs gives them the rare chance to feel heard when they’re talking. Sensuous stare-downs are efficacious because, to many people, nothing is sexier than the feeling of being paid clear attention to. This is how Bill Clinton not only became president, but convinced the national masses of his charm, too—he is often said to make those he interacts with feel like the only person in a room, regardless of their politics. The first step in copying that magnetism is letting the person you’re interested in know you can SEE them in said room, and that you find what you’re looking at compelling enough to linger on it. There is enormous value in conveying that a person deserves—and downright commands—respectful, attentive interest, even if you end up getting nothing out of it.

• From Action (2014)

  All told, the only advice you absolutely need to follow when you’re figuring out your own relationship configuration is to always be aware and considerate of your own and your partner’s feelings. Keep talking! Do a State of the Union every so often to make sure you’re both still feeling happy and loved, and if one of you isn’t for whatever reason, make some adjustments and see if things improve. All relationships require communication and a genuine desire to be sweet and kind to the person you’re dating. Hold these things at the forefront of your mind when you’re deciding if you want to open your relationship. If you both decide you do, go get it, and above all, have fun and be respectful of the people you care about. That part’ll come real easy. PART III [image file=image_110.jpg] Mistakes Were Made [image file=image_1151.jpg] I am loath to take part in the narrative trope that conveys, “Young women who have sex, in doing so, are embarking on a wacky, embarrassing, ill-thought-out comedy of errors,” without some recognition of how cool and worthwhile casual sex can be. Sexual autonomy is often presented as “confessional”—either overly comic or overly melodramatic, and when a female sexual youth is described as a series of “misadventures,” it rankles me. Upon taking in movies, magazines, and the anecdotes of others about the so-called bad behavior of a wayward woman they know, I so often feel like screaming, “She didn’t lampoon or victimize herself—she fucked someone!” I have never once seen a young dude subjected to the same hand-wringing or false pity that his female counterparts are so regularly met with, or a guy who, in every other beat of his story about a physical encounter, feels the need to giggle or apologize it into an acceptable shape for his listeners. If a woman has had sex that she likes: Enough with the jokey contrition. Sex doesn’t have to be “bad” to be good. Just as destructive would be recounting a sexual past that’s been edited and finessed into a montage of soft-focus orgasms in which I am played by a young Natalie Wood, except with butt implants. I can’t pretend that all the sex I’ve had was that of a swanlike pinup sans an overbite that makes head risky if I’m not careful. Making mistakes is one of my very favorite things in this life, because then you become aware of how they were forged, and how to avoid them in the future. The key is not letting them define, discount, or dissuade you from the superb aspects of your sex life, or even seeing them as extricable from those. Fucking up is how you go pro. No need to be abashed or apologetic about that.

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

  quickly saw sense and formed themselves into an episcopally led denomination suitable for a republic, the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America; but their future was as a relatively small body with a disproportionate number of the wealthy and influential, their restrained and European ethos of devotion rather countercultural amid American Protestantism. Thus though the first lasting American English-speaking colony was Anglican Virginia, the rhetoric of covenant, chosenness, of wilderness triumphantly converted to garden, has descended in American political and religious consciousness from Governor Winthrop’s expedition to New England. Since Winthrop’s would-be monolithic Congregational Church establishment has also long gone, American Protestantism in its exuberant variety has adroitly grafted on to its memories of Massachusetts the obstinate individualism and separatism of the Plymouth Pilgrim Fathers — an ethos which Winthrop and his covenanting congregations deplored. All of this is served up with a powerful dose of extrovert revivalist fervour ultimately deriving from the Scottish Reformation. The consequences of the British upheavals between the 1620s and 1660s were thus wholly out of scale with what could have been expected in the seventeenth century from a marginal, second-rank European power. Because Protestant anglophone culture has until the present century remained hegemonic in the USA, the American varieties of British Protestantism are the most characteristic forms of Protestant Christianity today — together with their offshoots, the most dynamic forms of Christianity worldwide. American Roman Catholicism too has largely left the Counter-Reformation behind, and in much of its behaviour and attitudes, it has been enrolled as a subset of the American Protestant religious scene. This is a Christianity shaped by a very different historical experience from western Europe, and similarities in language and confessional background may mislead us into missing the deep contrasts. In the next century, American and European Protestants went into partnership with the aim of creating a new Protestant empire of the mind across Asia and Africa; but when they set out to bring the Gospel to new lands, they did so from countries increasingly in disagreement about the nature and content of that Gospel and the God which it proclaimed. When the literary executor of C. S. Lewis, the British novelist, literary scholar and Christian apologist, gathered together a set of Lewis’s popular apologetic essays, he gave the little book and one of its chapters a title from Lewis’s metaphor of God standing in the accused’s box in an English courtroom — ‘God in the Dock’.93 To see how God arrived there, we need to venture into a meeting with the Enlightenment, that transforming force of Western culture which took shape alongside the Reformation itself.

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

  house of Hohenzollern, whose leading representatives in Brandenburg were Reformed princes stranded uncomfortably in a landscape of Lutherans. From 1695, Francke created at Halle an extraordinary complex of orphanage, medical clinic, schools for both poor children and young noblemen and a teacher-training college, complete with printing press, library and even a museum to demonstrate to the pupils the wonders of God’s creation. The work was paid for by an enterprise useful in itself: the first commercial production in Europe of standardized medical remedies, complete with multilingual advertising brochures.42 All this was eventually housed in monumental buildings which have survived the twentieth-century disasters of Germany remarkably intact and available for their original functions. Franke’s principle was that everyone, whatever their position in life, should come out of childhood education able to read the Bible and to take pride in at least one special skill. This was to link the profession of Christianity to personal self-confidence and practical achievement, in a fashion which had no exact precedent, and which has become characteristic of modern Evangelicalism. Halle set patterns in the Protestant world for institutions created by private initiative, as Jesuits had done for Catholics a century and more before. The work of Halle extended throughout northern Europe and deep into Russia, as Francke sent out his pupils into government service or clerical ministry, printed innumerable devotional tracts and kept up a correspondence with a vast diaspora of the like-minded — around five thousand of them.43 In 1690–91, he wrote an autobiography which, although looking back to patterns set by Augustine and Luther as they described their conversion experiences, laid out the whole first thirty years of his life in terms of progressive and not instantaneous conversion: a continuous spiritual struggle marked by dramatic high points. It was hugely influential. Countless Evangelicals thereafter tried to shape their lives in the same way, and many of them turned their efforts into books.44 All this busy activity had an urgent purpose: it was a preparation for the End Times, which would be heralded by the conversion of the Jews. Like Spener before him, Francke was very aware of the decades of excited speculation about the return of the Messiah which had agitated contemporary Judaism, along with the appearance of several Jewish candidates for the post. That was one of the reasons that Francke’s eyes turned so much towards eastern Europe, with its vast spread of Jewish communities. Despite the enthusiasm which he inspired in others for the cause of conversion, leading to the foundation in Halle of the first Protestant institution for Jewish mission, this effort proved one of the real failures of the Pietist movement (apart from the non-appearance of the Last Days).45

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

  yearning to expand: a state more or less permanently at war either to maintain or to expand its frontiers could not afford the luxury of real democracy. Why was Rome’s expansion so remarkably successful? Plenty of other states produced dramatic expansion, but survived for no more than a few generations or a couple of centuries at most. The western part of the Roman state survived for twelve hundred years, and in its eastern form the Roman Empire had a further thousand years of life after that. The answer probably lies in another contrast with Greece: the Romans had very little sense of racial exclusiveness. They gave away Roman citizenship to deserving foreigners – by deserving, they would mean those who had something to offer them in return, if only grateful collaboration. Occasionally whole areas would be granted citizenship. It was even possible for slaves to make the leap from being non-persons to being citizens, simply by a formal ceremony before a magistrate, or by provision in their owners’ wills.32 Where this highly original view of citizenship came from is not clear; it must have evolved during the struggle for power between the patricians and the plebeians after the fall of the kings. In any case, the effect was to give an ever- widening circle of people a vested interest in the survival of Rome. That became clear in one dramatic case in the first century of the Common Era, when a Jewish tent-maker called Paul, from Tarsus, far away from Rome in Asia Minor, could proudly say that he was a Roman citizen, knowing that this status protected him against the local powers threatening him. It might have been his pride in this status of universal citizen which first suggested to Paul that the Jewish prophet who had seized his allegiance in a vision had a message for all people and not just the Jews. The story of the Roman Republic is one of steady expansion throughout the Mediterranean. Rome must have had contact with Greeks from its earliest days, but it started casting interested and acquisitive eyes on the Greek mainland during the second century BCE. Rome’s eventual conquest of Greece and the Near East, still ruled by Seleucid descendants of one of Alexander the Great’s generals, was not planned: initially friendly relations gradually deteriorated until the Republic lurched into war with the Seleucid king Antiochos III from 192 to 188 BCE. As a result Rome became the master of Greece and soon the Romans extended their encirclement of the Mediterranean basin with their conquest of the Ptolemaic monarchy of Egypt. The paradoxical cliché (no less true for being so) about the consequence of this advance was suavely expressed in Latin by the Emperor Augustus’s admirer the Roman poet Horace: ‘Greece, the captive, made her savage victor captive, and brought the arts into rustic Latium.’33 The relationship was always edgy, its awkwardness symbolized by newly imperial Rome’s adoption of a convenient fiction that it had been founded by descendants

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

  emphasized local people’s part in building the Church; in 1907 Presbyterians united to form a single national Presbytery, independent and self-governing. Christianity might have been associated, as in China, with the humiliation of a decaying and ineptly Westernizing monarchy by Western powers, but already it had established its indigenous character. It is not surprising that both Catholics and Protestants were significant in maintaining Korean national identity in the decades after Japanese armies had seized their country in 1910. Their defiance brought them new persecution before the liberation of 1945 and Koreans did not forget that. Christianity’s place in Korean life and its capacity to reflect the nation’s suffering and pride contrasted with the faith’s lack of penetration in the culture of the occupying power, Japan. Here, then, Christianity was a symbol of resistance to colonialism, not its accompaniment. That consciousness has shaped the extraordinary dynamism of Korean Christianity in the last half-century. AMERICA: THE NEW PROTESTANT EMPIRE In visiting the Christian experiences of East Asia, we have been exchanging the dominance of British activity for intervention by the new world Protestant power, the United States of America. Struggling at the beginning of the nineteenth century to the extent that the British dealt a humiliating defeat in the war of 1812 (with surprisingly little long-term repercussion), by the century’s end the USA had spanned its own continent and was becoming a trans-Pacific power, on the verge of still greater things. As Federal government expanded west, Christianity experienced growth as vigorous as any in the nineteenth century. At the time of the Revolution, despite all the bustle of the Great Awakenings, only around 10 per cent of the American population were formal Church members, and a majority had no significant involvement in Church activities.94 In 1815 active Church membership had grown to around a quarter of the population; by 1914 it was approaching half – this in a country which in the same period through immigration and natural growth had seen its numbers balloon from 8.4 million to 100 million. That growth reflected the dynamism, freedom, high literacy rates and opportunity available in this society, and the Christian religion seemed to owe its success to a competitive and innovative spirit as much as did American commerce and industry.95 Americans were justifiably proud of themselves. It was easy to cast their pride in the language of their religion (and all the more reason to ignore the feelings of the Native Americans who stood in the way of further achievement blessed by providence). Even the laying down of the railroad could be part of God’s grand design –

• From Action (2014)

  In many cases, in getting off to polemically tricky porno, it seems like people are exorcising its presence in the life they know outside their internet browsers—as a form of relief. I like some porn that is rough or intentionally derogatory toward women, just as I do sex that plays similar power games. If I ever experienced anything like the plots listed by my search history, or of previously agreed-upon and mutually respectful rough sex, when I hadn’t agreed to it, the experience would be horrifying/traumatic. By taking pleasure in porn that embraces the horror-trauma plots that others might foist upon me and/or people with bodies like mine, I feel like I’m in control of and subverting the rape-culture-borne reality that I am a target. That’s sexy to me. Porn can be a depressurized expression of all that is ridiculous and wrong in reality—a safe place to exercise sexual inclinations that you would shudder, panic, and feel hatred toward should they show up in earnest in your true-blue bedroom or life. Shame, fear, displeasure, and anger, unlikely as it may or should seem, can interweave into the network of what a person finds desirable. This is not to say that those who like offbeat sex are damaged or flawed—finding a private, self-directed way to morph those feelings into something that feels good and self-determined means you are the opposite, because it’s incredibly healthy. When you choose to let the nightmarish cartoon of hard porn play out before your eyes and you’re able to feel pleasure and power instead of pain from making it your entertainment, you claim victory over it. I have limitations within this. I would never be able to get off to porn if I were aware that the actors in it were being disenfranchised or forced or otherwise hurt by what they were doing. The majority of porn actors in “produced” porn movies, aka those videos that look like they were shot on a tripod and not the Droid of some guy named Mike, have willfully signed contracts to appear in their star vehicles. I love an autonomous adult-film impresario. Find actors who seem to take genuine joy in what they do. Outside of that directive: Porn comes in all different categorizatons and search-bar terminologies. What you’re looking for can be surmised from what you otherwise fantasize about when you masturbate. Distill it into one to three words, turn on private browsing, and go find it. I promise you that it is there.

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

  Conditions grew impossible for them when the whole kingdom collapsed, so they migrated westwards across the Mediterranean. After they reached Europe, they accounted for their odd history to a wary Church hierarchy by the drastically ingenious means of inventing an even more exotic origin, in the time of the Prophet Elijah, a much earlier enthusiast for Mount Carmel. Thus they became the only religious order ever to claim a pre-Christian past, as well as the only order of contemplative religious to take their origins among the Latin settlements of the East. Carmelite pseudo-history was ridiculed even at the time, particularly by the Dominicans. Although Dominican leaders had been involved in drawing up a rule for the new order which in 1247 turned the Carmelites into another grouping of friars, the Dominicans found themselves drawn into a number of turf wars with their protégés. They were particularly annoyed when the Carmelites proclaimed with renewed creativity that one of their number had a vision from Our Lady remarkably like a previous vision of her to a Dominican. She granted the Whitefriars identical powers to the Blackfriars, to bless a part of their friar’s habit which draped over their shoulders and was known as the scapular; now laity could wear it and derive spiritual privileges from it. Dominicans were not slow to point out the coincidence.20 Despite such scepticism, enough influential people chose to believe Carmelite fictions to ensure their survival as a respected section of the mendicant world. There was indeed a distinctive value in their stubborn adherence to their story of Elijah: because they kept their collective memory of contemplation on Mount Carmel, they brought to the West a love of wilderness which the Cistercians had at first possessed but were already losing. Carmelites appreciated the aesthetic beauty of wild nature with a relish which anticipates later European romanticism. In his first defence of the order in 1270, their Prior-General Nicholas Gallicus wrote with engaging delight: I want to tell you of the joys of the solitary life. The beauty of the elements, the starry heavens and the planets ordered in perfect harmony, invite us to contemplate infinite wonders … all our sisters the creatures strive in the solitude to fill our eyes, ears and feelings with their caresses. Their inexpressible beauty cries out in silence and invites us to praise the marvellous Creator. In order to enjoy such divine pleasures, the Carmelites later had their donors create wildernesses for them, not to farm but simply for contemplation: the first wild gardens or sacred theme parks.21 Other enterprises were not so lucky. The Italian Order of Apostles, for instance, was founded in Parma by Gerardo Segarelli in the 1260s to promote apostolic poverty like the Franciscans, but in 1300 Segarelli was burned as a heretic by a Dominican inquisitor. Through the filter of viciously biased later

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

  attributed to Gudit through their indestructibility. It is said that King Lalibela conceived the idea of recreating Jerusalem in his capital after a visit to the Holy Land, in an effort to compensate for the renewed fall of the Holy City to Muslim armies in 1187 (see p. 385). As so often in Ethiopian history, it is impossible to know whether centuries of subsequent meditation, wishful thinking and purposeful political rebranding have overlaid whatever original scheme was intended at Lalibela, to produce its present rich skein of associations with Jerusalem – the Church of Golgotha now includes two tombs designated respectively for Jesus Christ and King Lalibela, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre lies at the heart of the Lalibela complex.51 What is clear is that this wave of new monuments to Ethiopian Christian confidence was followed by a major expansion of Christian life in a renewal of monasticism. Monks founded their communities for the first time in the central highlands, usually deliberately seizing pre-Christian holy sites, and they displayed all the heroic feats of ascetic self-denial which had been pioneered in Syria and Egypt. They were at the heart of two centuries and more which were another golden age of Ethiopian Christianity, as well as one of its greatest periods of contention and struggle.52 At the end of the thirteenth century, another dynasty supplanted the Zagwe, and between its founder, Yekuno Amlak (reigned 1270–85), and his grandson Amdä Seyon (reigned 1314–44), it came to restore the military might of Ethiopia. It appears that the Egyptian Coptic Church was affronted at the usurpation and refused to supply an abun, so for some considerable time the Ethiopians had to resort to bishops from Syria to preserve their episcopal succession.53 Such internationally expressed doubts needed addressing and a sustained campaign began to plug the dynasty into ancient history, with the aid of King Solomon: Amdä Seyon’s name (‘Pillar of Zion’) was no casual reference. It may thus be that this was the stage at which the Ethiopian Church’s identification with Israel really began to become distinctive. The existence of the Kebra Nagast may have been the inspiration for this stratagem, and it is likely that its present literary form dates largely to around 1300.54 Later tradition represents a vital element in Negus Yekuno’s support as his understanding with the chief activist in the expansion of monasteries, the monk from Däbra Damo, Iyäsus Mo’a (‘Jesus has prevailed’). It is a plausible but also a convenient story, since the monks were to prove a constant source of difficulty for the ‘Solomonic’ dynasty, through their independent charismatic authority and individual opinions. The chief disciple of Iyäsus Mo’a, Täklä Haymanot (‘Plant of Faith’), was a formidable ascetic, said to have spent a considerable proportion of his life standing on one leg in his monastic cell, feeding on one seed brought by a bird once a year. When the other leg atrophied away, God rewarded the