Pride

Passages

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

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• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (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

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

  protests, he heeded Friedrich the Wise and gave Luther a formal hearing within the boundaries of the empire at the first available meeting of the Diet, the regular imperial assembly, at Worms in April 1521. Luther arrived after a triumphal tour across Germany. Facing the Emperor, he acknowledged a long list of books as his own. Ordered to say yes or no to the question ‘Will you then recant?’ he asked for a day’s grace to answer. Would he return to being the best monk in Germany, or go forward into an unformed future, guided only by what he had found in the Bible? Luther’s answer next day was no single word, but a careful and dignified speech. His books were of various sorts, some of which were indeed ‘polemic against the papacy’ which reflected ‘the experience and the complaint of all men’: ‘if then, I revoke these books, all I shall achieve is to add strength to tyranny, and open not the windows but the doors to this monstrous godlessness, for a wider and freer range than it has ever dared before’. He spelled out to the Emperor that without a conviction from ‘scripture or plain reason (for I believe neither in Pope nor councils alone)’, he could recant nothing. It was such a momentous culmination that not long after his death, Georg Rörer, the first editor of his collected works, felt compelled to construct two tiny summary sentences in German which have become the most memorable thing Luther never said: ‘Here I stand; I can do no other’.14 This can stand for the motto of all Protestants: ultimately, perhaps, of all modern Western civilization. To his great credit, Charles ignored the Emperor Sigismund’s treachery to Hus in 1415 (see pp. 571–2) and honoured Luther’s safe conduct from the Diet. Still Luther was in peril, and the best solution was for him to vanish; the Elector Friedrich duly arranged that. Luther occupied those months in the Wartburg, a Wettin stronghold on the wooded massif high above Eisenach, familiar to him from his childhood, by beginning a translation of the Bible into German. It would present his own spin on the text, to make sure that his liberating message got across, but it was an astonishing achievement at a time of great personal stress and amid a welter of polemical writing.15 Although time only allowed the completion of the New Testament, and the complete Old Testament followed later, his text has shaped the German language. Luther was a connoisseur of the vernacular, like his English contemporary Thomas Cranmer, whose speech has haunted formal English to the present day (see pp. 630–32), but Luther had a different gift. Cranmer’s meticulously calculated liturgical prose presented a public, ceremonial face of the Reformation in restrained dignity, even sobriety, whereas Luther’s talent was for seizing the emotion with sudden, urgent phrases. His hymns, first published in Wittenberg and Strassburg in 1524, reveal his genius perhaps even more than his Bible, because they transcend the notorious

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

  attitudes fostered by Isabel in Castile set patterns for the future. Her expulsions of Jews were imitated in Portugal, when in 1497 King Manoel (who was hoping to marry her daughter) ordered mass conversion of the Jewish population, many of whom had only just fled from Spain.54 So Latin Christianity, in an especially self-conscious version of its traditional form, became the symbol of identity for Iberia’s kingdoms, and Protestantism would stand little chance of making any headway there against the project of building a monolithic Catholic Christian culture. Indeed it is possible to talk of an Iberian Reformation before the Reformation: well in advance of the general Protestant Reformation in Europe, Spain tackled many of the structural abuses – clerical immorality, monastic self-indulgence – which elsewhere gave Protestant Reformers much ammunition against the old Church. This Reformation was promoted by the monarchy, which increasingly excluded any real possibility of interference in the Church from the pope. A series of papal concessions allowed the Crown to appoint bishops, and by 1600 a third or more of the yearly income of the Castilian Church disappeared into the royal treasury.55 The pope tolerated being thus kept at arm’s length partly because he had little choice, but partly because Spanish royal power was consistently exercised to create a ‘purified’ and strong Latin Christianity free from heresy or non-Christian deviation, and indeed to spread it throughout the Spanish Empire overseas. Such a satisfactory deal for the Iberian monarchies meant that they had no reason to sympathize with any other challenge to papal authority. The first chief agent of the royal programme in the Church was Francisco Ximénes de Cisneros, a Castilian who gave up a distinguished career in Church administration to join one of the most rigorous religious orders, the Observant Franciscans, within which he sought to escape the world as a hermit. Yet when the fame of his single-minded spiritual activism forced him, against his better judgement, to become confessor to Queen Isabel in 1492, he found himself in Castile’s highest offices in Church and commonwealth, Archbishop of Toledo (Spain’s primatial see) and eventually, from 1516, regent of the kingdom during the minority of Charles Habsburg. In his austere, focused piety and his determination to proclaim his vision of Christian faith to the peoples of the Spanish kingdoms, he was much more like Luther, Zwingli or Calvin than his Spanish contemporary Pope Alexander VI, yet many of his reforms anticipated what the Council of Trent was to decree many decades later. He used his unequalled opportunities for action in ways which do not now seem entirely consistent, but which sum up the main themes of the Spanish religious revolution. An advocate of apostolic poverty who was also the premier statesman in Spain, he spent money lavishly as a major patron of the most

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

  World treated him so mean Treat me mean, too.79 The results were spectacular, but posed new questions. By 1800, around a fifth of all American Methodists were enslaved people — and enslaved they were still, despite being Methodists. In this aftermath of the Revolution which had talked much of life, liberty and human happiness, African-Americans whether free or bonded found little welcome in white Churches and at best would be directed to a segregated seat. So they frequently made a further choice — to create their own Churches (see Plate 41). From 1790 there was an African Methodist Episcopal Union; there followed Black Baptist Unions, taking their known origin from a congregation of Baptists no more than eight strong in the 1770s.80 Congregations demanded their share in Christian decency — and how could Evangelical Protestants deny them that? Clothing and the dignity it conveyed, indeed, would become a major theme in Evangelical mission worldwide. Plantation slaves had frequently been kept naked for work — fuelling white fantasies about their innate lasciviousness.81 Now members of black congregations were known to walk more than fourteen miles to church, dressed in their special Sunday clothes but barefoot, carrying their clean shoes with them, which they put on when they reached their church buildings. Such independent Churches naturally wanted their own clergy — white clergy would not minister to them in such settings. In a land which restricted any blacks to the manual work for which they had been imported, suddenly there was a profession open to them, and it was difficult for white Evangelicals to deny the clerical character of such ministers who used the same charged language of conversion, and won souls for Christ just as they did.82 So a racial revolution, shaped by Evangelical Christianity, took shape quietly alongside a different revolutionary uprising by whites against whites. In the 1770s a gradual poisoning of relations between the British mother-country and the thirteen colonies became a political crisis, which ended in a colony-wide Declaration of Independence in 1776. The relationship of the Awakenings to this great fracture in anglophone power is not straightforward. One element in it was paradoxically the British victory in the Seven Years War, which in 1763 delivered New France (Canada) into British control. This forced the British government to face the problem of how a Protestant power might govern an overwhelmingly Catholic territory. One precedent was Protestant ‘Ascendancy’ government in Ireland, but already the punitive policies against Irish Catholics produced by two centuries of warfare after the Reformation were beginning to be modified; and the political situation in Canada, where there was no loyalist

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

  Bible published for the first time in good literary Welsh by the Protestant Bishop William Morgan in 1588. Morgan’s Bible preserved the special character of Welsh culture in the face of the superior resources and colonial self-confidence of the English, and it also ensured, against all likelihood in the early Reformation, that the religious expression of the Welsh became overwhelmingly Protestant.5 So it was too for Koreans at the end of the nineteenth century, when the Korean Bible translation revived their alphabet and became a symbol of their national pride, sustaining them through Japanese repression and paving the way for the extraordinary success of Christianity in Korea over the last half-century. And one of the reasons for the obstinate survival and now huge revival of Orthodox Christianity has been a story (largely unknown in the Christian West) of biblical translation, undertaken by the Russian Orthodox Church for an astonishing variety of language groups in Eastern Europe and the area of the former Soviet Union. The Bible thus embodies not a tradition, but many traditions. Self-styled ‘Traditionalists’ often forget that the nature of tradition is not that of a humanly manufactured mechanical or architectural structure with a constant outline and form, but rather that of a plant, pulsing with life and continually changing shape while keeping the same ultimate identity. The Bible’s authority for Christians lies in the fact they have a special relationship with it that can never be altered, like the relationship of parent and child. This does not deny relationships with other books which may be both deep and long-lasting, and it does not necessarily make the parental relationship easy or pleasant. It is simply of a different kind, and can never be abrogated. Once we see this, much modern neurosis about the authority of the Bible can be laid aside. Maybe the Bible can be taken seriously rather than literally. Books are the storehouses for human ideas. Three great religions which come from the Middle East centre their practice on a sacred book and are indeed frequently known as Religions of the Book: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. This book about the people of a book therefore necessarily discusses ideas. Many readers may want to see it as a narrative: students and scholars may find it helpful to test how social and political history both breed and are transformed by theology. Ideas, once born, often develop lives of their own within human history, and they need to be understood in their own terms as they interact with societies and structures. Christianity in its first five centuries was in many respects a dialogue between Judaism and Graeco-Roman philosophy, trying to solve such problems as how a human being might also be God, or how one might sensibly describe three manifestations of the one Christian God, which came to be known collectively as the Trinity. After much ill-tempered debate on

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

  ‘Epaenetus, who was the first convert in Asia for Christ … Mary, who has worked hard among you … Andronicus and Junias, my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners … Ampliatus, my beloved in the Lord …’3 The most striking feature of the correspondence is the locations of its recipients: in busy Graeco-Roman towns, commercial centres throughout the eastern half of the Mediterranean as far as Rome, and including people like Epaenetus, who had much experience of travel. By contrast, the story of Jesus told in the Gospels had been played out in a rural and largely non-Greek environment, where villages within an easy day’s journey of each other could naively be described by the writers as cities and where only the denouement of the story took place in a real city, Jerusalem. Now Paul, the Apostle of the Gentiles, divided up the world he perceived around him into city, sea and wilderness (II Corinthians 11.26), and despite his pride in his Jewish roots, he unselfconsciously divided the people of that world into Greeks and barbarians (Romans 1.14). One significant and at first sight puzzling peculiarity actually emphasizes Paul’s break with Jesus’s first followers in Palestine. His letters have a preoccupation with personal means of support, which he links directly to one of his few quotations of the Lord Jesus. Characteristically, he takes a contrary line to the Lord. Jesus had said that ‘those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel’: that is, they deserve support from others.4 Paul emphasizes that he has not done this: he tells us that he has supported himself, although in what seems to be an attempt to face down criticism, he proclaims his contradiction of Jesus’s practice as a privilege renounced rather than an obligation spurned. He makes no bones about saying ‘keep away from any brother who is living in idleness and not in accord with the tradition that you received from us’. So much for Jesus and his wandering Twelve. Paul was on the side of busy people who valued hard work and took a pride in the reward that they got from it: tent-makers of the world, unite.5 Christianity had become a religion for urban commercial centres, for speakers of common Greek who might see the whole Mediterranean as their home and might well have moved around it a good deal – Paul’s restless journeyings are unlikely to have been unique. The communities associated with him included such figures as Gaius, wealthy enough to be ‘host to me and the whole Church’, or Erastus, a man prominent as ‘the city treasurer’ in the great city of Corinth.6 Although there is not much sign that Christianity had yet made inroads on ‘old money’ – the aristocratic elites of Mediterranean society – it was already gathering people across a wide spectrum of social status, and it is not surprising that differences of wealth and public esteem produced tensions and arguments. Two examples involve food, but have much wider implications. The earliest

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Lovell burst out laughing when the Gemini 6 crew, Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford, flashed a sign to Borman: BEAT ARMY . Schirra, Stafford, and Lovell were Navy, and as a West Point man Borman had no choice but to take it. By the time Borman and Lovell splashed down in the western Atlantic, they had set records for duration of flight (more than 330 hours, or 13.75 days), distance traveled (more than 5 million miles), and number of orbits (206). More important, they’d helped America take a major step toward the Moon by proving man could endure long stretches in space. The two weeks they’d spent was the maximum duration it was believed a lunar mission would require. Borman was immediately made a full colonel, the youngest in the Air Force at age thirty-seven. A few weeks after splashdown, Susan wrote an article that was published in newspapers around the country. People had noticed how frightened she’d been during launch and the flight, and not everyone appreciated it—including some at NASA. “These past weeks I had worn my feelings on my sleeve,” she wrote. “Some said they were pleased to see an astronaut’s wife willing to admit she was scared. Others, including some people in the space program, were critical because I failed to maintain the traditional stiff upper lip. ‘For heaven’s sake, wipe your tears. You’re ruining my morning coffee,’ one woman wrote. At one time, such criticism would have cut me deeply. But…I have come to realize you can’t be all things to all people. So I decided not to pretend and not to try to hide my feelings—I decided to be myself.” Soon after Gemini 7’s return, Borman received a telegram from West Point offering him a permanent professorship of mechanics. Susan loved the idea of returning to an idyllic life at West Point. But Borman said he couldn’t do it—his heart was in flying, and he had a Cold War to help win. He would stay with NASA. A year later, the tragic Apollo 1 fire occurred. Susan made it her mission to comfort and support her friend Pat White, the wife of one of the fallen astronauts. She visited the new widow every day, listening to her, holding her, and crying with her, trying to be strong as Pat kept repeating, “Who am I, Susan? Who am I? I’ve lost everything. It’s all gone.” At night, when Susan got home, she began to drink a bit, if only to quiet her nerves. In the past, Susan had dealt with fatalities among Frank’s colleagues the same way he did—by assuming it would never happen to him. But Ed White was different. He was a near-perfect physical specimen, even stronger than Frank, yet even he had been unable to get the spacecraft’s hatch open during the fire. Frank told her that Charles Atlas himself couldn’t have moved the hatch, but it was more than that to Susan.

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

  because the town was one of the few in Germany to be spared bombing in the Second World War. That exemption was a tribute to the worldwide impact of a monk-lecturer’s spiritual turmoil in what in 1517 was one of Europe’s newest universities. The university owed its existence to the then head of the Wettin dynasty, Friedrich of Saxony, a strong-minded and creative ruler, by hereditary right one of seven electors, who chose a new Holy Roman Emperor when required (the imperial title had never become hereditary). That honour gave Friedrich a good deal of influence on the Habsburg dynasty, who since the early fifteenth century had normally provided one of their number as the next emperor, but who could never be certain that the electors would allow this to continue. Without the Elector Friedrich’s support (puzzling in its consistency – he did not know Martin Luther well and never approved of his religious revolution), it is likely that Luther would have suffered the fate of Jan Hus a century before, burned by the authority of the Church. The Wettin were hugely wealthy from the profits of mining, particularly mining for silver, and one of the justifications for Friedrich’s later nickname ‘the Wise’ was the constructive uses to which he had put his generous inheritance, especially the improvement of the little market town at the gates of his palace in Wittenberg. Some of his spending was what was expected of a medieval prince, like the beautiful music which he sponsored in the Castle Church, or the large collection of holy relics which he also assembled there, all lovingly listed for pious visitors in a printed catalogue. The foundation of the university was less conventional. The first in Germany to be founded without the blessing of the Church authorities, it brashly boasted against its older rivals that it could provide students with an up-to-date immersion in humanist learning.2 The lecturer who arrived in 1511, nine years after Friedrich had founded the university, came from the sort of family who provided most of the Western Church’s most effective clergy: not especially rich or endowed with long pedigrees, but hard-working and high-achieving. Martin Luther’s father made his money in the mining industry, and with a miner for a father, Luther was prone in later years to emphasize his credentials as a man of the people. In fact his mother’s family boasted more than one successful graduate. It was only natural for Hans Luther to direct his son towards graduate study to become a lawyer, but Martin struck out in his own direction into the religious life, after an incident which, if he had become a saint of the Catholic Church, would have been the perfect opening for hagiography in a traditional mould. Caught in a thunderstorm in 1505, the young man was so terrified that he vowed to St Anne, the mother of Mary, that he would enter monastic life if he survived. When the

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

  for production, Britain developed Europe’s first industrial revolution, resulting in huge wealth for some, and a great deal of modest prosperity and spending power for many — not to mention other equally profound changes, as we will see (see pp. 787–91). This was the basis for a British world empire, based improbably on a comparatively minor archipelago of Atlantic islands. Its self- image was based on a narrative of heroic struggle against popery and arbitrary tyranny (represented generally by the French), in which Protestant English and Protestant Scots had buried their differences in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, creating a common new home for their two peoples: Great Britain. A leading historian of this period has subtitled her study of it with an appropriate play on words, speaking of the process as ‘forging’ a nation. British adventures across the world became, for the next century and more, an overwhelmingly Protestant story.38 In the eighteenth century, European politicians and generals began to realize that the Mughal Empire in India, which had seemed so formidable to Catholic European powers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was beginning to fail. By contrast, their own governmental and military organizations were growing ever more efficient and effectively financed, tested by the century of European confessional wars from 1618 onwards. India was only the centrepiece: everywhere, Spanish and Portuguese power was looking far more vulnerable. In the mid-eighteenth century, Great Britain and France contended for supremacy: a ‘Seven Years War’ drew in all the major European powers, the first war to be fought in continents circling the globe. American ‘Indians’ were enlisted on the borders of New France and the thirteen English American colonies; Africans were swept in; in armies of the Indian subcontinent, Muslims and Hindus found themselves fighting European quarrels, the beginning of two centuries during which the Christian West was to be the dominant force in world power struggles. When the British fought the French to a standstill and concluded a peace treaty in Paris in 1763, they found themselves in charge of a land empire which needed defending across the world, and their armies were now carried by a navy with a near-universal range. Their victory was sealed in 1799, when British armies defeated Tipu Sultan, the last Indian ruler capable of seriously challenging them; in Tipu’s defeat, they dashed the hopes of his French allies, now revolutionary Republicans spoiling to reverse the French monarchy’s humiliation of 1763.39 The large British gains in India had been equalled in 1763 by Britain’s acquisition of France’s Northern American territories to the north and west of their own thirteen colonies. It was tempting to see Protestantism as the Christianity of the future.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  After seven years at GE, Anders left to become chief operating officer of the aerospace and defense firm Textron. In 1989, he left that company to become vice chairman of General Dynamics, a major supplier of aircraft, tanks, and other weapons to the United States Department of Defense. By agreement, he would become the company’s CEO a year later. On paper, the move might have seemed crazy. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the coming end of the Cold War, defense contractors began to suffer, their wares no longer in name-your-price demand. General Dynamics seemed even worse off than its competitors; having amassed huge debt, it looked headed for bankruptcy. But Anders saw possibility in darkened clouds. On becoming CEO, he instituted many of the principles he’d seen Welch use at GE. Among other moves, he sold off any part of the business in which General Dynamics couldn’t be a market leader. He worked hard to change the corporate culture and become efficient, replacing most executives and many personnel, getting rid of waste endemic to the industry, and focusing on shareholder return. He even pitched in as a test pilot, flying the firm’s F-16 fighter jets—until he sold off that part of the business, too. The company’s fortunes turned around fast. Billions of dollars flowed in, enough so that Warren Buffett purchased 16 percent of the company’s stock—then gave Anders proxy to vote his shares. By the end of Anders’s three-year term as CEO, he was a darling of Wall Street and, by many accounts, had saved General Dynamics. “After orbiting the Moon,” one industry analyst said, “mundane business problems did not faze him.” Anders stayed on at General Dynamics for another year as chairman of the board, then retired from the company a wealthy man in May 1994. Soon after, he and Valerie fell in love with the natural beauty of Washington State, where they bought a house on the water and established the Anders Foundation, a philanthropic organization devoted to supporting education and the environment. All the while, Anders kept flying. He’d already purchased a De Havilland Beaver airplane restored by his friend and former commander, Frank Borman, but what he truly envied was Borman’s P-51 Mustang single-seat fighter-bomber, a workhorse from World War II and the Korean War. “If you ever find another, let me know,” he told Borman. Not long after, Anders found himself flying over Borman’s home in New Mexico. He flipped open his cellphone and called to say hello. “Hey, Anders,” Borman said, “I found a Mustang for you—get your ass down here!” The two men drove to inspect the plane. “I’ll buy it if you test it,” Anders told Borman. Borman, the old test pilot, put the plane through its paces. Anders wrote a check—and then had an idea. He would start a museum dedicated to preserving—and flying—historic military aircraft.