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

  Petrarch, as he had written before to Benedict XII. and Clement VI., now, in his old age, wrote to the new pontiff rebuking the curia for its vices and calling upon him to be faithful to his part as Roman bishop. Why should Urban hide himself away in a corner of the earth? Italy was fair, and Rome, hallowed by history and legend of empire and Church, was the theocratic capital of the world. Charles IV. visited Avignon and offered to escort the pontiff. But the French king opposed the plan and was supported by the cardinals in a body. Only three Italians were left in it. Urban started for the home of his spiritual ancestors in April, 1367. A fleet of sixty vessels furnished by Naples, Genoa, Venice, and Pisa conducted the distinguished traveller from Marseilles to Genoa and Corneto, where he was met by envoys from Rome, who put into his hands the keys of the castle of St. Angelo, the symbol of full municipal power. All along the way transports of wine, fish, cheese, and other provisions, sent on from Avignon, met the papal party, and horses from the papal stables on the Rhone were in waiting for the pope at every stage of

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  With these pursuits, ‘there is no man of liberal education who need be at a loss to know what to do with his time.’ In Scotland, the collapse of fanaticism was long delayed, but then came (at least in the big cities) quite abruptly in the mid eighteenth-century. An index of it is the attitude to the theatre, once defined by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland as ‘the actual temple of the Devil, where he frequently appeared clothed in a corporeal substance and possessed the spectators, whom he held as his worshippers’. First, English players made their appearance. Then, in the 1740s, Edinburgh acquired a permanent theatre, disguised as a concert hall. In 1756, The Tragedy of Douglas, actually written by a clergyman, was put on, and it was attended by the leading moderate, the Reverend Alexander Carlyle. Carlyle was publicly rebuked by the General Assembly, and the unfortunate minister of Liberton, also present, was prosecuted by the Edinburgh Presbytery. He answered that ‘he owned the charge, but pleaded by way of alleviation that he had gone to the playhouse only once and endeavoured to conceal himself in a corner to avoid giving offence.’ But by 1784, when Mrs Siddons appeared in Edinburgh, the General Assembly altered its timetable to give delegates the chance to go to a matinée. Clergymen led the Scottish Enlightenment, and Carlyle was able to claim in his Autobiography: ‘Who has written the best histories, ancient and modern? It has been a clergyman of this church. Who has written the best system of rhetoric, and exemplified it by his own orations? A clergyman of this church. Who wrote a tragedy that has been deemed perfect? A clergyman of this church. Who was the most profound mathematician of the age he lived in? A clergyman of this church . . .’ The claim was to secular, not spiritual, excellence. On the Continent, Catholicism, the pattern set by France, made its way essentially to the same destination, though by a more devious and complicated route. After Westphalia, Spain ceased to count, and until 1815 France determined the course of Roman orthodoxy. Now the French Church was a peculiar case. It had not, like Spain, undergone a pre-Reformation renewal. On the other hand, it was Gallican, not papist. It had, by concordat, achieved a degree of independence which Henry VIII and England seized unilaterally. Thus the reform movement in France had never been buttressed by the salient force of xenophobia and nationalism, and that was the principal reason why it had never become the majority. Instead, the essential conflict was fought out in the seventeenth century within the French Catholic Church itself, with the puritanical Jansenists representing moral and doctrinal reform, the Jesuits and the crown standing for traditional Catholic authority, and an entirely secular third force pressing the claims of reason.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Valérie, Brockett, indeed all her friends were whole-hearted in their congratulations; and David’s tail kept up a great wagging. He knew well that something pleasant had happened: the whole atmosphere of the house was enough to inform a sagacious person like David. Even Mary’s little bright-coloured birds seemed to take a firmer hold on existence; while out in the garden there was much ado on the part of the proudly parental pigeons—fledglings with huge heads and bleary eyes had arrived to contribute to the general celebration. Adèle went singing about her work, for Jean had recently been promised promotion, which meant that his savings, perhaps in a year, might have grown large enough for them to marry. Pierre bragged to his friend, the neighbouring baker, anent Stephen’s great eminence as a writer, and even Pauline cheered up a little. When Mary impressively ordered the meals, ordered this or that delicacy for Stephen, Pauline would actually say with a smile: ‘Mais oui, un grand génie doit nourrir le cerveau!’ Mademoiselle Duphot gained a passing importance in the eyes of her pupils through having taught Stephen. She would nod her head and remark very wisely: ‘I always declare she become a great author.’ Then because she was truthful she would hastily add: ‘I mean that I knowed she was someone unusual.’ Buisson admitted that perhaps, after all, it was well that Stephen had stuck to her writing. The book had been bought for translation into French, a fact which had deeply impressed Monsieur Buisson. From Puddle came a long and triumphant letter: ‘What did I tell you? I knew you’d do it! . . .’ Anna also wrote at some length to her daughter. And wonder of wonders, from Violet Peacock there arrived an embarrassingly gushing epistle. She would look Stephen up when next she was in Paris; she was longing, so she said, to renew their old friendship—after all, they two had been children together. Gazing at Mary with very bright eyes, Stephen’s thoughts must rush forward into the future. Puddle had been right, it was work that counted —clever, hard-headed, understanding old Puddle! Then putting an arm round Mary’s shoulder: ‘Nothing shall ever hurt you,’ she would promise, feeling wonderfully self-sufficient and strong, wonderfully capable of protecting. 2 That summer they drove into Italy with David sitting up proudly beside Burton. David barked at the peasants and challenged the dogs and generally assumed a grand air of importance. They decided to spend two months on Lake Como, and went to the Hotel Florence at Bellagio. The hotel gardens ran down to the lake—it was all very sunny and soothing and peaceful. Their days were passed in making excursions, their evenings in drifting about on the water in a little boat with a gaily striped awning, which latter seemed a strange form of pleasure to David.

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

  John Huss was born of Czech parents, 1369, at Husinec in Southern Bohemia. The word Hus means goose, and its distinguished bearer often applied the literal meaning to himself. For example, he wrote from Constance expressing the hope that the Goose might be delivered from prison, and he bade the Bohemians, "if they loved the Goose," to secure the king’s aid in having him released. Friends also referred to him in the same way.648 His parents were poor and, during his studies in the University of Prag, he supported himself by singing and manual services. He took the degree of bachelor of arts in 1393 and of divinity a year later. In 1396 he incepted as master of arts, and in 1398 began delivering lectures in the university. In 1402 he was chosen rector, filling the office for six months. With his academic duties Huss combined the activity of a preacher, and in 1402 was appointed to the rectorship of the Chapel of the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem. This church, usually known as the Bethlehem church, was founded in 1391 by two wealthy laymen, with the stipulation that the incumbent should preach every Sunday and on festival days in Czech. It was made famous by its new rector as the little church, Anastasia, in Constantinople, was made famous in the fourth century by Gregory of Nazianzus, and by his discourses against the Arian heresy. As early as 1402, Huss was regarded as the chief exponent and defender of Wycliffian views at the university. Protests, made by the clergy against their spread, took definite form in 1403, when the university authorities condemned the 24 articles placed under the ban by the London council of 1382. At the same time 21 other articles were condemned, which one of the university masters, John Hübner, a Pole, professed to have extracted from the Englishman’s writings. The decision forbade the preaching and teaching of these 45 articles. Among Wyclif’s warm defenders were Stanislaus of Znaim and Stephen Paletz. The subject which gave the most offence was his doctrine of the Lord’s Supper.

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

  CHAPTER II. GREGORY VII, 1073–1085. See literature in § 3. § 10. Hildebrand elected Pope. His Views on the Situation. Alexander II. died April 21, 1073, and was buried in the basilica of St. John in Lateran on the following day. The city, usually so turbulent after the death of a pope, was tranquil. Hildebrand ordered a three days’ fast with litanies and prayers for the dead, after which the cardinals were to proceed to an election. Before the funeral service was closed, the people shouted, "Hildebrand shall be pope!" He attempted to ascend the pulpit and to quiet the crowd, but Cardinal Hugo Candidus anticipated him, and declared:, "Men and brethren, ye know how since the days of Leo IX. Hildebrand has exalted the holy Roman Church, and defended the freedom of our city. And as we cannot find for the papacy a better man, or even one that is his equal, let us elect him, a clergyman of our Church, well known and thoroughly approved amongst us." The cardinals and clergy exclaimed in the usual formula, "St. Peter elects Gregory (Hildebrand) pope."21 This tumultuary election was at once legalized by the cardinals. He was carried by the people as in triumph to the church of S. Petrus ad Vincula, clothed with the purple robe and tiara, and declared elected, as "a man eminent in piety and learning, a lover of equity and justice, firm in adversity, temperate in prosperity, according to the apostolic precept (1 Tim. 3:2), ’without reproach ... temperate, soberminded, chaste, given to hospitality, ruling his house well’ ... already well brought up and educated in the bosom of this mother Church, for his merits advanced to the office of archdeacon, whom now and henceforth we will to be called Gregory, Pope, and Apostolic Primate."22 It was eminently proper that the man who for nearly a quarter of a century had been the power behind the throne, should at last be pope in name as well as in fact. He might have attained the dignity long before, if he had desired it. He was then about sixty years old, when busy men begin to long for rest. He chose the name Gregory in memory of his departed friend whom he had accompanied as chaplain into exile, and as a protest against the interference of the empire in the affairs of the Church.23 He did not ask the previous confirmation of the emperor, but he informed him of his election, and delayed his consecration long enough to receive the consent of Henry IV., who in the meantime had become emperor. This was the last case of an imperial confirmation of a papal election.24 Hildebrand was ordained priest, May 22, and consecrated pope, June 29, without any opposition. Bishop Gregory of Vercelli, the German chancellor of Italy, attended the consecration.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  It’s been a year since I started along this path, clumsily and impatiently stumbling along, desperate to reach the end of it. Now I finally see: there is no end, just forks, detours, hills and valleys, an ever-shifting footpath that I have time, freedom, courage and insatiable curiosity to amble along. Most importantly, I am willing to let whoever is inside me emerge without rushing her along. All my life I’ve been a fixer, doer, plan maker, strategist – needing to know what’s coming, and now, for the first time ever, I simply don’t need to know. I would even go so far as to say that I embrace not knowing and will tenaciously cling to the right to evolve as I go along. I think back to a recent conversation I had with #6 as I attempted to clarify our status, explaining that I love him and want him in my life, but not at the cost of my freedom. I had told him, you may not continue to be comfortable with my being with other men as we become more deeply invested in each other, and that’s a choice you have to make. He had misunderstood my meaning, thinking I was seeking his permission, that I was requesting that he allow me to be with other men. “No,” I had said, shaking my head, “my freedom is not yours to give me or withhold from me, it’s simply for you to decide if it works for your own needs.” I see now there can be commitment without monogamy and further that a lack of monogamy doesn’t signify that a particular relationship is not enough. No matter how fulfilling a relationship is, it doesn’t negate the part of me that still wants to be noticed and wanted, that enjoys the flirting and the hunt, as #6 likes to call it. I don’t know what I want in a relationship and why should I? I am privileged to be able to live by my own rules and standards and am surprised to realize that what I avidly pursued ever since I first started dating as a teenager – security, stability, a sure thing – is less important to me than what I gave up to have those things and have since reclaimed, namely my self-awareness, independence and choice.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  Are they ministers of Christ? I am talking like a madman—I am a better one: with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless floggings, and often near death. Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked…. If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness. The God and Father of the Lord Jesus (blessed be he forever!) knows that I do not lie. In Damascus, the governor under King Aretas guarded the city of Damascus in order to seize me, but I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall, and escaped from his hands. That is a marvelous and humorous finale. The Roman legionary soldier who swore he was first over the enemy’s city walls received the corona muralis, a battlemented gold crown for conspicuous bravery. I got, says Paul, in climaxing this lampoon of superior achievements, the corona ex-muralis, for getting away safely, for being first over the wall in the opposite direction. “I am content,” he concludes in 2 Corinthians 12:10, “with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.” Power and the Eucharist Most of the problems at Corinth stem, as John Chow has shown, from powerful patrons within the assembly, important people both very good for help, support, and protection, but also very bad for unity, equality, and commonality. It was those whom Paul calls the Corinthian powerfuls who could take financial disputes outside the Christian assembly and into the civil courts (1 Cor. 6:1–8), who could countenance marriage between stepson and widowed stepmother to protect patrimony (5:1–13), and who could argue for attending celebratory meals in pagan temples, buying such meat in the market, and eating it at private dinners (10:14–33). All such problems involved not just their position inside the Christian assembly, but their contacts with friends, freedmen, and clients outside it. Those were problems for the haves rather than the have-nots. What happened at the eucharistic meal or Lord’s Supper in 1 Corinthians 11:17–34 is a fascinating example. Greco-Roman moralists argued whether it was ethically correct to serve superior food and wine to friends and equals, but inferior food and wine to freedmen and clients at a patronal banquet. Was it right, in other words, to turn that banquet into one more display of social stratification that exalted the haves and humiliated the have-nots?

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  They are down and we intend to keep them down . . . Methodism stands high among the respectable people.’ Of course it did, though it did not primarily interest itself in ‘respectable people’. Or, rather, it was designed – and in this it was highly successful – to convert a significant section of the upper working-class to moral ‘respectability’. Wesley ignored the upper classes. He told his preachers: ‘You are no more concerned to have the manners of a gentleman than a dancingmaster.’ Yet indirectly Methodism was to have a powerful influence on the ruling class. A number of wealthy families were associated with the movement; and when it split from the Anglicans they remained within the Establishment and sought to evangelize it from within. They were primarily concerned with moral reform, but also to some extent with social reform, since they believed that poverty, squalor and cruelty were enemies of the Ten Commandments. They wanted to make society more moral by making it more bearable; but of course they did not want to change its structure. Most of the Evangelicals were Tories. Their real founder was John Thornton of Clapham, who was born in 1720 and who became the wealthiest merchant in England. After his death in 1790, the leadership devolved on William Wilberforce, the heir to a Hull merchant fortune, a diminutive orator and friend of William Pitt, the Prime Minister. He and his friend Hannah More constituted the nucleus of the Clapham Sect, which was not really a sect at all but a pressure-group within the Anglican Church and within the ruling class. The idea had met with Wesley’s approval. He said to Hannah’s sister: ‘Tell her to live in the world – there is the sphere of her usefulness; they will not let us come nigh them.’ While Methodism sought to make the working class respectable, reformist and tame, the Evangelicals sought to instil a spirit of noblesse oblige among their betters. They presented a ‘change of heart’ as a more moral, and acceptable, alternative to change of a more fundamental kind. They made a great point of their gentility. The first Evangelical in Parliament, Sir Richard Hill, was lovingly described by the Reverend Edward Sidney, his biographer, as ‘a model of a Christian gentleman and an upright senator’. Hill quoted the Bible to the Commons to ‘prolonged roars of laughter’. Willingness to face ridicule was a hallmark of the group. After the French Revolution broke out, however, the laughter changed to tolerance: fear of radicalism and its consequences brought the Evangelicals a widening foothold among the upper and middle classes; its programme gave many influential people an object in life when the road to political reform was barred, or seemed too dangerous. Hence Wilberforce and his group prospered. He carried earnest religion from Wesley’s fields to the public hall, and to the hearing of what the papers always termed a ‘noble and respectable gathering’.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The Bourbon Restoration had been a Catholic regime; the Second Empire was merely a clerical one, marked by cynical attention to the quid pro quo on both sides. When Napoleon visited Brittany in 1858, a bishop told him publicly that he was the most devoted Christian king of France since St Louis. The prelate was duly promoted to be archbishop, ‘thus earning his tip, like a cab-driver’. This last remark was made not by a fierce anti-clerical but by the Viscomte de Falloux, author of the regime’s pro-Catholic schools-laws. Indeed, it was among the Catholics that the alliance evoked the most irreverent comments. At election-time, the Pope’s vast and obedient clerical army duly turned out Napoleon’s voters; in return, the emperor was obliged to suppress his embarrassment when, in 1858, a three-year-old Jewish boy, called Mortara, baptized by a Catholic servant when in danger of death, was removed from parental control by the Holy Office as soon as he recovered. This was the law of Rome, upheld solely by French infantry. Hence Montalembert’s sneer that the alliance was ‘a coalition between the guard-room and the sacristy’, capped by General Chargarnier’s epitome of Napoleon’s regime: ‘A bawdy house blessed by bishops.’ Yet there was also a number of active and able French Catholics who upheld the new papalism with passionate devotion. Nearly all were converts, that is former agnostics or atheists who had turned to Rome after an emotional or intellectual crisis. As with the Oxford converts, what chiefly attracted them in their new Church was its authority, and its crude self-confidence in cutting through complex intellectual issues. They were not only ultramontanist but, in most cases, violent papalists. Among them was Louis Veuillot, who became editor of the Catholic daily l’Univers, and radiated the views of a W. G. Ward but on an incomparably greater scale, and in more virulent form. Veuillot was the son of a cooper, self-taught working-class in manner and outlook – totally unlike the well-heeled and highly-educated Oxford Tractarians, or, for that matter, the upper middle-class French Catholic liberals. He had turned himself into a barrister’s clerk and so graduated to journalism, for which he had a kind of genius. He wrote magnificent French prose, and had a sharp eye for the sensational. His posture was one of aggressive enthusiasm, with his short, stocky body, huge head and bristling mane. Veuillot’s views of religion and history were unsubtle, the crude prejudices of the traditionalist working-class croyant: ‘If there is anything to be regretted, it is that they did not burn John Huss earlier, that Luther was not burned with him, and that, at the time of the Reformation, there was not one prince in Europe with enough piety and political sense to start a crusade against the countries it had infected.’ On the other hand, he grasped the potentialities of working-class Catholicism.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  Just take it in. You got yourself here, you crazy girl. Own it,” she says, serious now and wrapping me in a hug that for once hasn’t been prefaced by my weeping. CHAPTER 43PassionfruitIn the months since Lanie suggested that I write about my recent experiences with dating and sex, I have committed myself to shaping my random musings into something deeper and more structured. My pledge to write five minutes a day has evolved into longer sessions, hours at a time, which have become like therapy sessions for me. I ponder the images and words from my past that come back to me in vivid detail, firmly embedded in my memory, and those that seem fixedly out of grasp, no matter how I try to recall them. It fascinates me to bring back to life the conversations and situations that have been so critical to my growth, as of course in the moments when events are happening we rarely understand the lasting impact they may have on us. When, in the pre-dawn hours of the day we are to leave for the Caribbean, Michael arrives in a taxi to pick me, Hudson and Georgia up from our building, I am holding my new shimmery backpack with my laptop tucked inside in case I find some quiet moments and feel inspired to write. Michael sits in the front with the driver and the kids and I bundle into the backseat, leaning against each other sleepily and talking about what we will do when we first arrive, swimming in the turquoise ocean, ordering virgin frozen daiquiris by the pool, walking down the beach to see if Blaze is there with his kayak of fruit. We have only two assigned seats on the plane that are together, so Georgia and I take them while Michael and Hudson go further back to their individual seats. I remember how many torturous flights I went on with the kids when they were little, squirming in their tight seats, knocking over the cans of ginger ale they had begged for, propping open bags in case turbulence made vomiting a plausible threat, holding them as they screamed with ear pain, eyeing Michael to see if he might take over for a while and give me a break. Georgia is newly independent and I luxuriate in what it means to travel with her now – beyond minor iPad set-up issues and excited chatter, I am free to read my book and relax. I hear a cacophony of noise behind me and turn my head, just enough to catch a glimpse of a woman juggling toddler twins.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Prophecy has, in fact, become the characteristic form of Christianity in Africa, the only large area (apart from Latin America) where Christian missions were faced not with other imperial cults but with primitive pagan religions which could be overborne. Christianity is thus making headway in Africa, but in ways which the official Christian churches find disturbing or even horrific. The history of separatist native Christian churches in Africa now goes back nearly a century, to the Native Baptist Church (1888) organized in West Africa by David Vincent. The motive was, from the start, independence from white-controlled churches, and the emotional framework was nationalist and racialist. Vincent renamed himself Mojola Agbebi, and he wrote: ‘. . . when no bench of foreign bishops, no conclave of cardinals lord over Christian Africa, when the Captain of Salvation, Jesus Christ himself, leads the Ethiopian host, and when our Christianity ceases to be London-ward and New York-ward, but Heaven-ward, then will be an end to Privy Councils, Governors, Colonels, Annexations, Displacements, Partitions, Cessions and Coercions.’ Vincent defended secret societies, human sacrifice and cannibalism, and he was plainly anxious to bring about a Christian absorption of African customs; but he was not strictly speaking prophetic since he did not claim a personal revelation. The Liberian episcopalian, William Wade Harris, did. He appeared on the French Ivory Coast about 1914, preaching orthodox morality but claiming a direct line to the Deity and urging immediate repentance, rather like John the Baptist. A French observer, Captain Marty, described him as ‘an impressive figure, adorned with a white beard, of magnificent stature, clothed in white, his head enturbaned with a cloth of the same colour, wearing a black stole; in his hand a high cross and on his belt a calabash containing dried seeds, which he shakes to keep rhythm for his hymns.’ The Prophet Harris was immensely successful, and set a completely new pattern for African Christianity. He himself did not attempt to found a personal church, and the orthodox Baptists were the beneficiaries of his converts when he disappeared. But those who followed in his wake had higher ambitions, or less altruistic ones. In the 1920s, Isiah Shembe created the black Nazarite Church, which flourished near Durban in South Africa, and from this point native churches multiplied. Christian native charismatics often fell foul of the colonial authorities. The Congolese baptist Simon Kimbangu, creator of the Church of Christ on Earth, which now has over three million members and is affiliated to the World Council of Churches, was sentenced by the Belgians to thirty years and died in gaol. John Chilembwe, founder of the Ajawa Providence Industrial Mission of Nyasaland, was shot after capturing the land-grabber W. J. Livingstone, one of the Doctor’s family, cutting his head off, and mounting it on a pole during a service.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Just as, with a mass-suffrage, the Catholic parish clergy could prove themselves indispensible election-agents to the Right – one of the salient discoveries of the mid nineteenth century – so the advent of modern communications made it possible to organize and regiment the Catholic proletariat and peasantry into a huge force within the Church. The churchgoing masses and the Pope, in alliance, were an unbeatable combination. Veuillot’s populism coincided with the growth, under papal impulse, of new forms of mass devotion associated with the Sacred Heart, the Virgin Mary, and the eucharist. Many of these were, in fact, a return to late medieval ideas, and were associated with visions, visitations and the ecstasies of mystics. The Madonna made her appearance twice in Paris, in 1830 and 1836, in Savoy in 1846 and, from 1858, at Lourdes. The two most celebrated religious figures of the age were both sensational, and both French: Bernadette herself, and J-B. Marie Vianney, the parish-priest of Ars, near Lyons. The Curé of Ars flogged himself unmercifully, fasted prodigiously, held all-night prayer sessions and wrestled physically with the Devil. He became a cult-figure, thousands travelling from all over France (and abroad) to confess to him. Father Vianney was significant of a new trend to exalt the work of the priest and his contacts with the Catholic masses. Veuillot, the astute populist, reinforced this tendency in L’Univers. Nearly all the parish priests took it; it was sold outside their churches on Sunday. It reflected and amplified their simple views on religion: devotional piety, the cult of the papacy, and, concealed beneath a thick veneer of emotionalism and sentimentality, the mechanical Christianity of the Middle Ages, the credal climate in which populist triumphalism could flourish. Ozanam said of Veuillot and his friends: ‘They are not trying to convert unbelievers but to rouse the passions of believers.’ This was broadly true. The ultimate object of a total Christian society was not abandoned, but it was subordinated to the organization of the faithful for the purpose of exercising power. As Veuillot saw it, this would be achieved by readjusting the balance within the Church, by strengthening the links between the sole and autocratic power of the papacy, on the one hand, and the parish priests and the masses on the other; and by turning the episcopate into mere Vatican functionaries. L’Univers, and the spiritual atmosphere it created, was an important instrument in this process. It became extremely difficult for any French bishop, unless his personal position was exceptionally strong, to argue or act against a line taken by the paper, especially if, as was usual, it was supported by the Pope and a majority of the parish priests. When in 1853 the Archbishop of Paris and Bishop Doupanloup of Orléans, the outstanding individualist of the French hierarchy, condemned the paper, Veuillot appealed to the Pope.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Indeed, it marked an important stage in the construction of a society in which only orthodox Christianity exercised full civil rights. Ambrose, however, was well aware that those rights could only be secured and maintained by the exploitation of the potentialities of Christianity. He brought to his task as bishop the skills of a great administrator, evolving by trial and error a pastoral theology and canon law which supplied the answers to all the questions the Christian life raised. Perhaps no man played a greater part, in practice, in constructing the apparatus of practical belief which surrounded the European during the millenium when Christianity was the environment of society. At Milan, in the great new basilica he completed in 386, the prototype of the medieval cathedral came into existence, with daily mass, prayers at morning and evening and sometimes at other times in the day, and special ceremonies to commemorate the saints, according to a strict calendar. To combat the Arians in the city. Ambrose deliberately dramatized the cathedral services, introducing splendid vestments and antiphonal singing of psalms and metrical hymns. He employed professional choristers, but also trained his congregation. He wrote: ‘From the singing of men, women, virgins and children there is a harmonious volume of sound, like the waves of the ocean,’ He thought this celestial harmony drove out demons. It certainly angered the Arians, since Ambrose got his people to roar out the praise of the Trinity. He was, in fact, facing the Arians with their own weapons since Arius had himself been a writer of propaganda hymns – popular monotheist ditties for trades-guilds, marching-songs for soldiers, vast numbers of whom became Arians, and theological sea-shanties for merchant seamen. Ambrose was not the earliest hymn-writer in the West; some earlier though unimpressive efforts by Hilary of Poitiers survive. But Ambrose had the knack of producing verse which was memorable and adaptable to music, iambic diameters in four-line stanzas of eight syllables to the line. Four are still in use. It was Ambrose, in his fight to defeat the popular challenge of Arianism, who first systematically developed the cult of relics. Milan was poorly provided in this respect: it had no tutelary martyrs. Rome had the unbeatable combination of St Peter and St Paul; Constantinople acquired Andrew, Luke and Timothy; and during the last fifty or sixty years amazing discoveries had been made at Jerusalem – the body of St Stephen, the head of John the Baptist, the chair of St James, the chains of St Paul, the column used in the scourging of Christ and, since 326, the cross itself. Ambrose, who took a fanatical interest in all the details of martyrology and relic-mongering, says that when the cross was discovered by Constantine’s mother, Helena, it still had the titulus attached to it; and she found the nails, too, having one fashioned into a bit for her son’s horse, and another put into his diadem.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  By the time she had asked me when I was nineteen if I had a diaphragm “or something,” I had already been sexually active for years; I reddened and nodded and that was the extent of our dialogue about birth control and sex. Now, I needed her to see that my recent discovery of myself as a sexual being could still fit within the parameters of being an “acceptable” daughter and mother. I wanted her approval, not of the book but of my decision not to write it. I knew that her squeamishness on the topic of sex would confirm I was making the right decision. My mother, though, is nothing if not full of surprises. In her own steady, determined way, she refuses to conform. I explained to her that I was worried I would scandalize her with this book, but she stared straight at me with her crystal blue eyes and said, “I will never be embarrassed by anything you do, only proud.” When I told her I wouldn’t want her to read the book for its many graphic scenes, she said, “So I won’t read it, or I will and I’ll be sorry I didn’t do all the things you did.” When I told her I was worried the book would embarrass my kids, she said, “Your kids are resilient, they might feel embarrassed but they’ll also see that you’re living life on your own terms and they’ll grow from that.” She refused to let me off the hook; she would not approve of me closing myself back inside the box from which I had just recently emerged. Many women ascribe to long-standing notions of femininity and maternalism to the extent that they become all that matter. The desires of our youth become trapped beneath the carefully crafted veneer we paint on as we age until the exterior layers are so thick that those desires become distant memories of an inner life we vaguely recall from our days pre-marriage, pre-kids, pre-middle age. But it doesn’t have to be that way and I am living proof. If someone had asked me during the many years of my married life what I would do if I found out my husband was in love with another woman, I’m fairly certain the last answer I would come up with would be what actually happened: that I started dating and having sex with wild abandon and in doing so awakened a part of myself that I had neither known I needed nor wanted. I wouldn’t take my old life back even if it was offered to me, which would come as a shock to the woman who a mere two years ago believed that she had been destroyed by losing the love of her life. I hope that anyone who reads this recognizes the part of herself she’s locked away and considers giving her a chance to emerge.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  As we have seen, there was the populist triumphalism of the reinvigorated papacy, whose new victories in the missionary field were seen as adumbrating an ultimate – if still far distant – reinstallation of Rome as the world centre of a ubiquitous Christian creed; every baptized black and yellow baby was bringing that inevitable day nearer. But there was also, during these decades, a species of Protestant triumphalism, linked closely to the huge industrial paramountcy of the Protestant powers, to their burgeoning economic and political empires, and to the very widespread conviction that Protestant theology and moral teaching were intimately, indeed organically, linked to worldly achievement. The picture we have, then, is of two forms of Christianity struggling, peaceably but persistently, for a world religious supremacy which both believed was inevitable. Nowhere was this conviction more strongly held than in the United States. The American Christian Republic was a gigantic success. It was a success because it was, essentially, Protestant; failure was evidence of moral unworthiness. In the 1870s, Henry Ward Beecher used to tell his congregation in New York: ‘Looking comprehensively through city and town and village and country, the general truth will stand, that no man in this land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his fault – unless it be his sin. . . . There is enough and to spare thrice over; and if men have not enough, it is owing to the want of provident care, and foresight, and industry and frugality and wise saving. This is the general truth.’ And a related general truth was that God’s will was directly related to the destiny of a country where success-breeding virtue was predominant. The dynamic of Protestant triumphalism was American triumphalism. George Bancroft, in his History of the United States (1876 edition) began: ‘It is the object of the present work to explain . . . the steps by which a favouring providence, calling our institutions into being, has conducted the country to its present happiness and glory.’ Was it not, as Jonathan Edwards had termed it, ‘the principal kingdom of the Reformation’? Sooner or later the world would follow suit – it was urged to do so, in 1843, by the American missionary Robert Baird, in his Religion in America, projecting the principal of Protestant voluntarism on to a global frame. History and interventionalist theology were blended to produce a new kind of patriotic millenarianism, as in Leonard Woolsey Bacon’s History of American Christianity (1897): ‘By a prodigy of divine providence, the secret of the ages (that a new world lay beyond the sea) had been kept from premature disclosure. . . . If the discovery of America had been achieved . . .

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Now this was getting crazy. Was I a sorcerer? Had I conjured all of this? What was he trying to do? It was like I was the other woman and Megan was the one he was stuck with. I suddenly no longer felt hurt that he was with her. I liked being the desirable one. Also, I liked playing with him. I was going to ignore him. Already high on Garrett and our impending date, I would be able to do it. This was what I needed—multiple men at all times. Then I wouldn’t need any of them. Put me naked in a clamshell. Let them all fawn around me. 16.“You’re absolutely glowing! You’re not dating anyone, are you?” asked Annika. She was standing on the balcony of her hotel wearing a long embroidered caftan. Through video chat I could see the Provence sunset behind her. “No, I’m keeping to myself.” “Good,” she said. “Get that kundalini shakti recharged. Don’t go scattering that chi anywhere and you’ll be a warrior by the time I get back. How is the group?” “A nightmare,” I said. “But you’re going?” “I’m going.” “Let me see my baby.” I held the computer screen up to Dominic. She made cooing noises and he pawed it, whined a little. “He looks a touch sad,” she said. “You’re spending ample time with him?” “We’re thick as thieves.” “Good,” she said. “Maybe add a bit of coconut oil to his dry food. It keeps his coat nice and shiny.” “Already doing it.” “Thanks, and you should cook for him. That turkey, zucchini, and peas dish I left the recipe for out on the counter. He loves it. Vegetables are good for his blood sugar.” “Will do.” “I hate being separated from him for so long. You don’t think I’m a bad mother, do you?” “No, it’s the twenty-first century, don’t be a helicopter parent.” “But—” “That’s just patriarchal guilt. Enjoy your trip, Aunt Lucy is taking great care of him.” When we hung up I felt like an asshole. Annika had always tried to be a good sister to me. By the time my mother died she was already in college, out of the house, but she tried her best. She called often to check in on me and never made me feel like I had been forgotten. She sent me mix tapes, weed, and makeup, so that I could feel cool in high school. Before she was even rich she paid for the abortion I had at nineteen so I wouldn’t have to ask my father for the money. How was I repaying her? By neglecting the most beloved thing in her life for strangers on the Internet.

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

  of Lund on his way from Rome through Germany to his Scandinavian diocese.132 Adrian spoke of Frederick’s empire as a benefice, beneficium, a word which meant either a fief or a gift. In either case the implication was offensive to the Germans, and they chose to interpret it as a claim that the emperor held his empire as a fief of the apostolic see. Two legates, rent by Adrian, attempted to soften down the meaning of the imprudent expression. The pope was too much of a hierarch and Frederick too much of an emperor to live in peace. In 1158 Frederick led his army across the Alps to reduce Milan and other refractory Lombard cities to submission. Having accomplished this, he assembled a diet on the plain of Roncaglia, near Piacenza, which is memorable for the decision rendered by Bologna jurists, that the emperor held his empire by independent divine right and not by the will of the pope. This was the most decisive triumph the empire had won since the opening of the conflict with Henry IV. But the decision of professors of law did not change the policy of the papacy. Adrian again gave offence by denying the emperor’s right to levy a tax for military purposes, fodrum, on estates claimed by the papacy and demanded that he should recognize the papal claim of feudal rights over the Matilda grant, Sardinia, Corsica, Ferrara, and the duchy of Spoleto. Frederick proudly retorted that instead of owing fealty to the pope, the popes owed fealty to the emperor, inasmuch as it was by the gift of the emperor Constantine that Pope Sylvester secured possession of Rome. A war of letters followed. Adrian was intending to punish his imperial foe with excommunication when he was struck down by death at Anagni. He was buried in St. Peter’s in an antique sarcophagus of red granite which is still shown. So ended the career of a man who by his moral character and personal attractions had lifted himself up from the condition of a child of a poor cleric to the supreme dignity of Christendom, and ventured to face the proudest monarch as his superior and to call the imperial crown a papal beneficium.133 This English pope, who laid the city of Rome under the interdict, which no Italian or German pope had dared to do, presented Ireland to the crown of England, on the ground that all the islands of the Christian world belong to the pope by virtue of Constantine’s donation. The curious bull Laudabiliter, encouraging Henry II. to invade and subjugate the land and giving it to him and to his heirs for a possession, may not be genuine, but the authorization was certainly made by Adrian as John of Salisbury, writing about 1159, attests, and it was renewed by Alexander III. and carried out, 1171.134 The loyal sons of Ireland will hardly want to have a second trial of an English pope. § 29. Alexander III.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The Pope, reduced to the Vatican redoubt, was cut off from the world outside and in no way responsible for it. Yet the image was false because incomplete; for beyond the Vatican lay the whole of Catholic Christianity, which not only dealt with the world but to a great extent was the world; and the Pope, as its leader, was necessarily and continually involved in the shaping of that world. Like any other power, it had done its utmost to advance its policies and extend its influence. There had, in fact, been no renunciation; the papacy too had helped to make the modern world what it was. Indeed, from 1870 onwards, the papacy, acting in conjunction with the hierarchies and Catholic lay organizations throughout the world, had been as busy as at any time in its history, and had certainly wielded more effective power than it had done since the sixteenth century. Populist triumphalism never fulfilled all its expectations, but it often won battles and sometimes whole campaigns. Indeed, the papacy was the only institution to inflict a defeat, if a qualified one, on Bismarck’s Germany. For Bismarck, who was anxious to subordinate every element in German society to the control of the State, gave covert backing to the Independent Catholic Church which came into existence after the Vatican decree of 1870. It was mainly an academic group, which had little chance of capturing a mass following among German Catholics, but he was anxious to keep it in play; hence in 1871 he forbade Catholic bishops to remove Old Catholic professors and lecturers from their jobs. This quickly widened into a conflict with the papacy and official Catholicism in Germany over the whole field of education, and the influence international Catholicism exerted on German national culture. Bismarck called it a Kulturkampf or culture-war; he was not going to submit to another Canossa, and he said so publicly. A law forbade clergymen to discuss matters of state from the pulpit, and in 1872 a programme was launched to bring all schools under the State. The Jesuits were expelled, and diplomatic relations with the papacy were broken off. As a result of Bismarck’s penal laws, several bishops and hundreds of priests were imprisoned, seminaries were closed and Catholic newspapers suspended. The Kulturkampf was a product of the last years and decline of Pius IX. Pius died in 1878 and was succeeded by Luigi Pecci, a former Bishop of Perugia, as Leo XIII. Leo was as conservative as his predecessor, but he was more of a realist, and he believed in making minor adjustments to the world if it was to the Church’s advantage. He was quite happy to do a deal with Bismarck if only the anti-Catholics laws were withdrawn.

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

  The sermon381 was a familiar exposition of Scripture and exhortation to repentance and a holy life, and gradually assumed in the Greek church an artistic, rhetorical character. Preaching was at first free to every member who had the gift of public speaking, but was gradually confined as an exclusive privilege of the clergy, and especially the bishop. Origen was called upon to preach before his ordination, but this was even then rather an exception. The oldest known homily, now recovered in full (1875), is from an unknown Greek or Roman author of the middle of the second century, probably before A.D. 140 (formerly ascribed to Clement of Rome). He addresses the hearers as "brothers" and "sisters," and read from manuscript.382 The homily has no literary value, and betrays confusion and intellectual poverty, but is inspired by moral earnestness and triumphant faith. It closes with this doxology: "To the only God invisible, the Father of truth, who sent forth unto us the Saviour and Prince of immortality, through whom also He made manifest unto us the truth and the heavenly life, to Him be the glory forever and ever. Amen."383 3. Prayer. This essential part of all worship passed likewise from the Jewish into the Christian service. The oldest prayers of post-apostolic times are the eucharistic thanksgivings in the Didache, and the intercession at the close of Clement’s Epistle to the Corinthians, which seems to have been used in the Roman church.384 It is long and carefully composed, and largely interwoven with passages from the Old Testament. It begins with an elaborate invocation of God in antithetical sentences, contains intercession for the afflicted, the needy, the wanderers, and prisoners, petitions for the conversion of the heathen, a confession of sin and prayer for pardon (but without a formula of absolution), and closes with a prayer for unity and a doxology. Very touching is the prayer for rulers then so hostile to the Christians, that God may grant them health, peace, concord and stability. The document has a striking resemblance to portions of the ancient liturgies which begin to appear in the fourth century, but bear the names of Clement, James and Mark, and probably include some primitive elements.385 The last book of the Apostolical Constitutions contains the pseudo- or post-Clementine liturgy, with special prayers for believers, catechumens, the possessed, the penitent, and even for the dead, and a complete eucharistic service.386 The usual posture in prayer was standing with outstretched arms in Oriental fashion. 4. Song. The Church inherited the psalter from the synagogue, and has used it in all ages as an inexhaustible treasury of devotion. The psalter is truly catholic in its spirit and aim; it springs from the deep fountains of the human heart in its secret communion with God, and gives classic expression to the religious experience of all men in every age and tongue. This is the best proof of its inspiration. Nothing like it can be found in all the poetry of heathendom.

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

  In fact, it is unknown whether they used it at all. Some of its words, such as mote and beam and strait gate, which are found in the version of the 16th century, seem to indicate, to say the least, that these terms had become common property through the medium of Wyclif’s version.619 The priceless heirloom which English-speaking peoples possess in the English version and in an open Bible free to all who will read, learned and unlearned, lay and cleric, will continue to be associated with the Reformer of the 14th century. As has been said by one of the ablest of recent Wyclif students, Buddensieg, the call to honor the Scriptures as the Word of God and to study and diligently obey them, runs through Wyclif’s writings like a scarlet thread.620 Without knowing it, he departed diametrically from Augustine when he declared that the Scriptures do not depend for their authority upon the judgment of the Church, but upon Christ. In looking over the career and opinions of John Wyclif, it becomes evident that in almost every doctrinal particular did this man anticipate the Reformers. The more his utterances are studied, the stronger becomes this conviction. He exalted preaching; he insisted upon the circulation of the Scriptures among the laity; he demanded purity and fidelity of the clergy; he denied infallibility to the papal utterances, and went so far as to declare that the papacy is not essential to the being of the Church. He defined the Church as the congregation of the elect; he showed the unscriptural and unreasonable character of the doctrine of transubstantiation; he pronounced priestly absolution a declarative act. He dissented from the common notion about pilgrimages; he justified marriage on biblical grounds as honorable among all men; he appealed for liberty for the monk to renounce his vow, and to betake himself to some useful work. The doctrine of justification by faith Wyclif did not state. However, he constantly uses such expressions as, that to believe in Christ is life. The doctrine of merit is denied, and Christ’s mediation is made all-sufficient. He approached close to the Reformers when he pronounced "faith the supreme theology,"— fides est summa theologia,—and that only by the study of the Scriptures is it possible to become a Christian.621 Behind all Wyclif’s other teaching is his devotion to Christ and his appeal to men to follow Him and obey His law. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the name of Christ appears on every page of his writings. To him, Christ was the supreme philosopher, yea, the content of all philosophy.622 In reaching his views Wyclif was, so far as we know, as independent as any teacher can well be. There is no indication that he drew from any of the medieval sects, as has been charged, nor from Marsiglius and Ockam.