Relief

Passages

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

Page 17 of 88 · 20 per page

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  As we have seen, Luther later dated his spiritual transformation to the period after the Leipzig Debate, and his confident assurance that he now understood the righteousness of God—if he was correct about the date—may explain this release of energy, even if an outsider might think he had reached that intellectual position in 1515 when he lectured on Romans. Whatever the truth about this, something fundamental and new was certainly emerging in Luther as he entered this period of profound creativity, and it involved his devotional practice, his theological orientation, and his closest relationships. First of all, in the wake of the Leipzig Debate, Luther’s attitude to his monastic vocation began to alter. From his early years as a monk, he had been obliged to attend services and perform the “hours,” the repetition of prayers that took a prominent place in a monk’s daily routine and consumed much of his time.1 Even after the Augsburg discussions, when Staupitz had released Luther from his vows, he still found it hard to give up this duty, as if it were a burden he could not put down. At some point in 1520, however, he stopped altogether. He recalled in 1531, “Our Lord God pulled me by force away from the canonical hours in 1520, when I was already writing a great deal, and I often saved up my hours for a whole week, and then on Saturday I would do them one after another so that I neither ate nor drank anything for the whole day, and I was so weakened that I couldn’t sleep, so that I had to be given Dr. Esch’s sleeping draught, the effects of which I still feel in my head.”2 In the end, a “whole quarter-year” of hours had mounted up: “This was too much for me, and I dropped it altogether.”3 The resulting liberation—and the amount of time it freed up—may have played a great part in the burst of creativity he experienced in 1520: Now he could devote himself to writing and thinking without interruption or guilt.

• From Shunned (2018)

  It made no sense to go through the turmoil of being shunned only to be trapped by self-pity or resentment, which are just different forms of dogma. Over time, my family seldom came to mind, and then with only a twinge of melancholy and matter-of-factness. Agony faded to discomfort, which then morphed into a faint emotional bruise that caused an occasional cringe when a random song or memory pressed against it. The black hooded riders rode into the same world occupied by Mother Goose. I did not feel possessed of blame, anger, or fear. The world felt safe as I found my place in it, as I discovered my own unique “worldliness.” Over that transformational decade, I kept my word and sent my parents a card whenever I changed addresses or phone numbers. Clear lines had been drawn, but I wanted my family always to know where I lived and how to reach me. The world prepared for Y2K, which I quietly mocked as another man-made Armageddon. By my thirty-eighth birthday, I was living in California. Visa recruited me to oversee one of its emerging-market segments and offered to move me to San Francisco, near its headquarters. After shivering through five Chicago winters, I was happy for a new scene and professional challenge. Daffodils bloomed in February, and the mild Mediterranean climate allowed for hiking and biking year-round. I was in a state of continuous rapture over the beauty of the area. Working for a leading global brand was an eye-opener, and I had to step up my professional game to keep up and flourish. Over the years, I held a variety of leadership positions, interacting with executives at all levels of our banking system. During that time, I grew dismayed by the suffering caused by unskillful leadership and the foolish decisions smart people make when they lose connection with their heart and soul. I wanted to contribute to a shift in how leaders show up and sensed this would require leaving corporate life. I decided to pursue a career as an executive coach and devised an exit strategy that including being trained in that field. After five years at Visa, I resigned and hung my shingle as an independent consultant. No more corporate plastic, first-class flights, or quarterly bonus checks. In the early months of self-employment, I had several panic attacks, jolted awake in the middle of the night, soaked with perspiration, fearing abject poverty and the disgrace of failure. Thankfully, within six months I was busy with client work and have never looked back. One year after moving to San Francisco, I met Bob Curtis while attending a fundraiser for my friend Lynne’s nonprofit.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Surprisingly, Luther now backtracked from his previous support for the Reformation in Wittenberg and came to the Elector’s aid. On or around February 22, having heard about what was afoot in town, he wrote an extraordinary letter to the Elector, congratulating him on his new “relic”—“a whole cross, together with nails, spears, and scourges,” which he had secured “without cost or effort.” He was referring to the religious changes in Wittenberg: “Satan” had come “among the children of God.” “Stretch out your arms confidently and let the nails go deep,” he wrote. “Be glad and thankful, for thus it must and will be with those who desire God’s Word.” Luther teased the Elector for his fondness for relics but while making light of the unrest, he assured him that “my pen has had to gallop” because he had no time: He was already setting out for Wittenberg.47 It is not clear what role Spalatin played in the course of events but much of Luther’s political advice, when he was in the Wartburg, must have come from the Elector’s right-hand man. The letter made clear which side Luther was on: The Elector would have known that he could count on his support to reverse the “innovations” that the Nuremberg mandate condemned. Immediately, the Elector dictated a lengthy letter to his official at Eisenach, ordering him to meet with Luther and instructing him what to say. It was a tortuous missive, in which the Elector first forbade Luther to return, but then, taking Luther’s quip about his relic, “a whole cross,” seriously, gave him authority to return if this was the cross the Elector had to bear. Quite how all this was conveyed to Luther we do not know, but the length of the letter reveals just how much weight the Elector attached to the meeting. Time was of the essence, which is why Friedrich resorted to instructing his official on the spot rather than sending for Luther or ordering Spalatin to see him.48

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Now Erasmus the “eel” became the “viper.” 43 Erasmus insisted—as Eck had done at the Leipzig Debate in 1519—that there was a part of the will that could participate in doing good works; thus he was denying that humans were totally corrupt. He discussed a range of conflicting biblical passages, conveying the difficulty of knowing who had the “spirit,” that is, whose interpretation was correct. In his reply, De servo arbitrio ( On the Enslaved Will ), Luther argued with vehemence and passion, rejecting the need for the “spirit” to inspire truth, insisting again on the sole authority of Scripture, which was “a spiritual light far clearer than the sun,” in spite of the “pestilent claim of the sophists that Scripture is obscure and ambiguous.” 44 At the same time, he conveyed a powerful sense of the radical otherness of God and his “inscrutable will”—the “hidden God” whom human beings cannot understand, and who is beyond human rationality. Humans will always tend toward Satan, and there is no way in which they can ever truly “choose”; and if we are not free, only God’s grace can enable us to do anything good. Toward the end of the tract, he moved to a dramatic counterfactual testimony: As for me, I firmly confess that if it were possible I would not wish to be given free will or to have anything left in my power by which I could endeavor to be saved, not only because, in the midst of so many adversities and dangers and also so many assaults by devils, I would not be able to stand firm and keep hold of it (since one devil is stronger than all men put together and no person would be saved), but also because even if there were no dangers, no adversities, no devils, I would still be forced to struggle continually towards an uncertainty and beat the air with my fists; for no matter how long I should live and do works, my conscience would never be certain and sure how much it had to do to satisfy God. For no matter how many works I did, there would always remain a scruple about whether it pleased God or whether he required something more, as is proved by the experience of all self-justifiers and as I learned over so many years, much to my own grief. 45 “I would not wish to be given free will”: To modern ears this is a remarkable statement. It is a rejection of everything we associate with the importance of the individual, the striving for human perfection, the role of human agency. Luther wanted none of it. His newfound relationship with God required there be no free will, because “I am certain and safe, because he is trustworthy and will not lie to me, and also because he is so powerful and great that no devils, no adversities could break him or snatch me from him.”

• From Shunned (2018)

  The bankcard industry is a very esoteric branch of financial services that has its own unique language. The acronyms were flying left and right. “Will I ever learn all this?” I whispered to the person seated next to me. “No,” he said frankly. “I’ve been doing this for years, and trust me, it’s impossible to know it all. And it keeps changing with updates in technology. Each deal will teach you something new, you’ll see.” Despite my overwhelm, it was a very liberating time for me personally. New friends and coworkers knew only the “present” me—the single, thirty-three- year-old executive type—and whatever else I chose to reveal. Here there was no “past” of religious rules, unstudied Watchtower and Awake! magazines, or dejected family. I could walk the city streets and revel in fresh anonymity, free of concern about bumping into anyone who might inquire into my spiritual well- being. I had the emotional and spiritual space I’d yearned for. I was the auteur of a new life and a new persona. Regular calls from home were my only connection to my former life. Once a week, usually on Sundays, Mom would call and we’d talk until finally, at the end, Dad would come on the line. Never much of a phone talker, he would ask, “How you doin’, Lindy? Humidity melted you away yet?” When I asked about him, he’d reply, “Same old, same old.” It was the routine we’d always had— short but sweet. Lory called in the middle of the week and less often. In the early months, I found these calls comforting. We discussed how the tomatoes were thriving in the garden, Randy’s family camping trip to eastern Oregon, the deck Ove was building out back. Sometimes I admitted to being overwhelmed, experiencing brief periods of exhaustion and bouts of loneliness. But it was impossible to disguise my overriding enthusiasm when describing my latest adventures: scoring bleacher seats at Wrigley Field, watching Fourth of July fireworks with the masses at Grant Park, sitting three feet from Ahmad Jamal as he played piano at the Blackstone, and having tea with my next-door neighbor, a dancer with the Joffrey Ballet. In every conversation, specific things were left unsaid. A steady and affectionate relationship had developed between Steve and me, and we were spending time together on the weekends and occasionally during the week. My family would have been aghast just to think I was romantically involved with anyone, let alone someone I’d met on a blind date. One time I mentioned him by name and hinted he was a coworker. As a rule, I was vague about whom I spent time with, guiding my family to deduce I was with new girlfriends from the office. And when I had been with girlfriends, I would go into detail about the meal we’d shared but avoided mentioning how much fun we’d had later, dancing to Bob Marley songs at a reggae bar with a variety of attractive men.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  He was forced to leave the community and took refuge in Antwerp. Some said that he even tried to be reconciled with the Catholic church; if so, it was a desperate step which, once again, shows how impossible it was for an ordinarily constituted man to exist outside the confines of religion during the seventeenth century. 36 Prado and Da Costa were both precursors of the modern spirit. Their stories show that the mythos of confessional religion is unsustainable without the spiritual exercises of prayer and ritual, which cultivate the more intuitive parts of the mind. Reason alone can produce only an attenuated deism, which is soon abandoned because it brings us no help when we are faced with sorrow or are in trouble. Prado and Da Costa lost their faith because they were deprived of the opportunity to practice it, but another Marrano Jew from Amsterdam showed that the exercise of reason could become so absorbing and exhilarating in itself that the need for myth receded. This world becomes the sole object of contemplation, and human beings, not God, become the measure of all things. The exercise of reason can itself, in a man or woman of exceptional intellect, lead to some kind of mystical illumination. This has also been part of the modern experience. At the same time as the rabbis first excommunicated Prado, they also opened proceedings against Baruch Spinoza, who was only twenty-three years old. Unlike Prado, Spinoza had been born in Amsterdam. His parents had lived as Judaizing Marranos in Portugal, and had managed to make the transition to Orthodox Judaism when they arrived in Amsterdam. Spinoza, therefore, had never been hunted or persecuted. He had always lived in liberal Amsterdam, and had access to the intellectual life of the gentile world and the opportunity to practice his faith unmolested. He had received a traditional education at the splendid Keter Torah school, but had also studied modern mathematics, astronomy, and physics. Destined for a life in commerce, Spinoza had seemed devout, but in 1655, shortly after Prado’s arrival in Amsterdam, he suddenly stopped attending services in the synagogue and began to voice doubts. He noted that there were contradictions in the biblical text that proved it to be of human not divine origin. He denied the possibility of revelation, and argued that “God” was simply the totality of nature itself. The rabbis eventually, on July 27, 1656, pronounced the sentence of excommunication upon Spinoza, and, unlike Prado, Spinoza did not ask to remain in the community. He was glad to go, and became the first person in Europe to live successfully beyond the reach of established religion.

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

  then became a prime bargaining counter in diplomacy when the new Sassanian Queen Boran, recognizing reality in the wake of Heraclius’s successful counterattacks, sought a peace settlement with Byzantium. The Sassanian peace delegation which returned the True Cross was led by Patriarch Ishoyahb, and in 630 he had a satisfaction unprecedented in the history of the Dyophysites when he celebrated the Eucharist according to the rites of his Church in the city of Berrhoea (now Aleppo) in the presence of the Byzantine Emperor and of Chalcedonian bishops. The treaty was a triumph for Heraclius too, for it enabled him to parade his relic back in what remained of Byzantine Jerusalem after its comprehensive trashing by the Sassanian armies.52 This climax of peace between the two traditional enemy great powers in fact proved a sad irrelevance to the future. Kavad II’s murder of his father, Khusrau II, swiftly followed by his own death, had poisonously destabilized Sassanian Court politics, leading to a procession of shortlived rulers struggling to maintain their position, while the constant frontier warfare with the Byzantines devastated the Middle East and weakened both imperial armies. Moreover, the clash of the two empires brought destruction to lesser Christian military powers, principally the Miaphysite Ghassānids, who for more than a century had kept the Byzantines in touch with events in Arabia and had brought security to the region. The Ghassānids could have alerted the Byzantines to the early formation of a new military power which had appeared quite unexpectedly from the south: the armies of Islam. The arrival of the Muslims proved terminal for the Sassanians. Within a decade in the 640s, the three-centuries-old empire was in ruins. Yazdgerd III, last ruling Sassanian shah, defeated and murdered, was buried not with Zoroastrian rites but by a bishop of the Church of the East; his son and heir fled all the way to China. There he was treated with respect, and one of his acts was to found the second monastery for Dyophysite Christianity to be sited in the capital, Chang’an.53 Yet this royal favour had all come all too late for the Church of the East. Now Christianity everywhere faced the consequences of the new prophecy from Arabia – consequences which are still unravelling in our own time.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  America.” I skipped the altar and headed for my car. I passed my sisters, crying in the back row, fists stuffed into their mouths. Their fake grandma was on her knees. I wanted to comfort them, but that would have frightened them more. I stepped out into the night feeling purged of every transgression and wondered if Brother Terrell felt the same. The whippings continued off and on for several years and most of the men associated with the ministry, including Randall, had to take a turn with the belt. Brother Terrell never handed the belt to my mother or the preacher woman, who sat on opposite ends of the platform. Not long after I witnessed the whipping, Brother Terrell sent word through my mother that if I didn’t get right with God, I wouldn’t live past twenty-five. Right on cue, I came down with an illness that doctors could neither diagnose nor cure. Sores erupted on my body. I was beset with fever and chills. My bones ached and my energy dwindled. No matter how much I ate, I lost weight. After several months, I made my way to the tent in Bangs. Brother Terrell began calling people out of the audience almost at once that night. He made his way to our section. I tried to catch his eye but he looked over my head and asked a man in the back to stand up. He prayed for him and moved on to the young mother across the row. Finally, he pointed at my most recent live-in boyfriend and told him to step into the aisle. He clapped his hand on the man’s forehead and told him he had been bound by the powers of Satan and from that moment forward, he was free. The boyfriend hit the ground so hard he had a lump on the back of his head for a couple of weeks. He later told me he lost consciousness as soon as the prophet laid hands on him. He estimated he was out for ten minutes, maybe longer. Brother Terrell placed his hands on my head next, and it was as if a curtain fell over my senses. Sight, sound, smell, and touch were gone. The I that was me, separate and distinct, released its hold, and I experienced myself as a vast and bliss-filled darkness. I did not shout or speak in tongues. I did not fall to the ground as my boyfriend had. I was there, but I was not there. I don’t know how long I drifted like this before slowly becoming aware of sound and of being back in my body. When I opened my eyes, I knew Brother Terrell had prayed for me, but I didn’t know the content of the prayer. It didn’t matter because the sores, fevers, and lethargy that had plagued me for months disappeared that night. The healing increased the dissonance between what I believed and what I thought. I believed Brother Terrell was a prophet and a healer. I knew he was a liar and an adulterer. I did not know how to reconcile the two. I also believed the Terrellites

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  than a chance to win; it is the right to dream pleasantly of winning. The bottom right cell is where insurance is bought. People are willing to pay much more for insurance than expected value—which is how insurance companies cover their costs and make their profits. Here again, people buy more than protection against an unlikely disaster; they eliminate a worry and purchase peace of mind. The results for the top right cell initially surprised us. We were accustomed to think in terms of risk aversion except for the bottom left cell, where lotteries are preferred. When we looked at our choices for bad options, we quickly realized that we were just as risk seeking in the domain of losses as we were risk averse in the domain of gains. We were not the first to observe risk seeking with negative prospects—at least two authors had reported that fact, but they had not made much of it. However, we were fortunate to have a framework that made the finding of risk seeking easy to interpret, and that was a milestone in our thinking. Indeed, we identified two reasons for this effect. First, there is diminishing sensitivity. The sure loss is very aversive because the reaction to a loss of $900 is more than 90% as intense as the reaction to a loss of $1,000. The second factor may be even more powerful: the decision weight that corresponds to a probability of 90% is only about 71, much lower than the probability. The result is that when you consider a choice between a sure loss and a gamble with a high probability of a larger loss, diminishing sensitivity makes the sure loss more aversive, and the certainty effect reduces the aversiveness of the gamble. The same two factors enhance the attractiveness of the sure thing and reduce the attractiveness of the gamble when the outcomes are positive. The shape of the value function and the decision weights both contribute to the pattern observed in the top row of table 13. In the bottom row, however, the two factors operate in opposite directions: diminishing sensitivity continues to favor risk aversion for gains and risk seeking for losses, but the overweighting of low probabilities overcomes this effect and produces the observed pattern of gambling for gains and caution for losses. Many unfortunate human situations unfold in the top right cell. This is where people who face very bad options take desperate gambles, accepting a high probability of making things worse in exchange for a small hope of avoiding a large loss. Risk taking of this kind often turns manageable failures into disasters. The thought of accepting the large sure loss is too painful, and the hope of complete relief too enticing, to make the sensible decision that it is time to cut

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

  lively cult of Mary in the Eastern Church.15 Heraclius, one of the greatest if often maligned heroes of the whole Byzantine story, performed extraordinary feats in outfacing these cumulative military threats, and his accession in 610 marked the beginning of an imperial dynasty which was to last throughout the seventh century. Still there remains his greatest failure: in his preoccupation with defeating his enemies in east and west, Heraclius had missed the importance of the new invaders from the south, the Muslim Arabs. After the defeat of a Byzantine army in 636, all its southern provinces were soon lost, Jerusalem included. There was actually a six-year- period when the Emperor Constans II, desperate to defend his western provinces, abandoned Constantinople and took refuge with his Court in Sicily before being murdered in 668 by courtiers infuriated by his drastic efforts to secure revenue and his apparent intention to make this move permanent; ever afterwards, his name was reviled and made into the belittling ‘Constans’ rather than his baptismal ‘Constantine’.16 The heirs of Heraclius did succeed in preventing the whole empire from being swallowed up. Constantine IV beat off Muslim armies from Constantinople itself in 678, saved by the city’s formidable walls and by the innovative use of a terrifying incendiary device known as ‘Greek fire’ (whose composition was always successfully kept undisclosed, a true Byzantine secret weapon) to destroy Arab ships.17 While in hindsight we can see this Byzantine victory as a decisive move blocking westwards Islamic advance into Europe for centuries, there would have been little reason to feel relief at the time. The miseries of repeated warfare were compounded by a long-drawn-out natural catastrophe: from the 540s a major plague spread westwards through the empire and beyond, and it recurred right through to the eighth century. Population plummeted, including in Constantinople itself, and the general impact can still be seen dramatically in Syria, until then an area of continuing vigorous Classical urban civilization, where town after town was sucked dry of life and was never reoccupied, leaving a series of ruins in semi-desert wilderness to the present day. Constantinople itself was a city of ruins, a ghost of its former self.18 This weakening of both Byzantine and Sassanian society by the plague must have been another reason why the Arabs found it so easy to overwhelm such large areas of mighty empires. Archaeologists have noted a remarkable fall in the number of coins recovered from excavations datable to the period from around 650 to around 800: economic activity must have drained away.19 A Mediterranean-wide society faced ruin; no wonder that Byzantium was ready to listen with respect and longing to those who sought to bring it closer to its God.

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

  disruptors of the Church like the Spiritual Franciscans, crystallized a good deal of academic debate about magic and witchcraft which had been building up during the previous half-century. In 1320 he commissioned a team of theological experts to consider whether certain specific cases of malicious conjuring could be considered heresy, a controversial proposition generally previously denied by theologians, who had tended to treat magic, spells and meetings with the Devil as devilish illusions without substance. In the wake of the Pope’s commission, six or seven years later he issued a bull, Super illius specula, which now proclaimed that any magical practices or contacts with demons were by their nature heretical and therefore came within the competence of inquisitions. This was one of those ideas which bide their time; for the moment witches were not much troubled by the Church’s discipline, but more than a century later, with the aid of new publicists fired by their own obsessions, the Western Church and its Protestant successors were to initiate more than two centuries of active witch persecution (see pp. 686–8).39 It is pleasant to turn back from this aspect of medieval Western devotion to something very different: an intensification of personal mysticism, particularly among women recluses and religious. As with the emergence of a more personalized view of the Christian story among Western Christians generally, there were previous precedents. The most famous twelfth-century female mystic was Hildegard of Bingen, Abbess of Rupertsberg, who a generation before Joachim of Fiore recorded her visions and prophesied about the end of time, and whose writings cover a range of interests unusual at the time in male scholars let alone abbesses: cosmology, medicine, musical composition as well as theology. Hildegard was speaking and writing at the end of the age when women in monasteries were likely to have as good an access to scholarship as men. In her lifetime, the first universities were taking shape, all-male institutions which were to gather to them most of the intellectual activity of Western Latin culture. Perhaps that is why women were now so attracted to a mode of spirituality which was independent of formal intellectual training, but in which mind and imagination sought out the hiddenness of God, beyond doctrinal propositions or the argumentative clashes of scholasticism. Such mystics reversed the normal priorities of Western spirituality, which privileges the positive knowledge of God and affirms what Christian teaching positively says about him, to join Easterners in privileging silence and otherness. One of the best-known works to emerge from this tradition, an anonymous English fourteenth-century meditation probably by a country priest and called The Cloud of Unknowing, goes beyond Aquinas in quoting that mysterious and subversive fount of Eastern spirituality, Dionysius the Areopagite, when he says that ‘the most godlike knowledge of

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  She walked over to him. “I’m sorry, Daddy. We shouldn’t have done it.” “Pamela, you know I hate to whip you more’n anything. But I got to this time.” “I know, Daddy. I deserve it.” Brother Terrell raised the belt. She didn’t move. I noticed the belt always landed on her behind, not on her legs, and determined that I, too, would stand perfectly still. When the belt stopped, Brother Terrell caught Pam up in his arms and held her for long time. By the time he came for me, all the anger had left him. He gave me a few swipes with the belt. It wasn’t even as bad as when Mama whipped me. After the whippings, Brother Terrell went back to the woods to pray. He said he’d lost all his sanctification. When the fire had reduced the barn to a pile of blackened rubble, the firemen said they’d see us at the tent and waved good-bye. Mama and Betty Ann put us into the bathtub two by two, washed the soot and grime from us, and dressed us in our church clothes. We always bathed and dressed early so that the adults had time to get ready for church. We sat in the living room, quiet and subdued for once. Randall actually looked through one of the books from his homeschool program. Pam showed me how to pop my knuckles. The fire had burned the badness out of us, and Brother Terrell’s whipping had chased away any residual demons. We felt relaxed for the first time in days. We were sitting there being as good as we could be, when Brother Terrell walked back into the house. He stared at us from the dining room and I saw his face go hard. Before we knew what was happening, he had slipped his belt out of his pants and was on us, tongue pinched between his teeth. We did a St. Vitus dance around the living room as the belt popped over our legs. Mama and Betty Ann ran into the room, yelling for him to stop, pleading that he had already whipped us. Brother Cotton and his wife watched from the doorway, mouths open. Then it was over and the three of us kids were scattered across the room, whimpering. Brother Terrell looked around in a daze, running his hand over his head. “I don’t know what come over me. I saw those kids and the thought of paying for that barn . . . we barely have enough money to pay the bills . . . I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry.” He walked out of the room, the belt looped in his hand like a noose. That night under the tent, he took the microphone from Brother Cotton with his head slightly bowed.

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

  order in 382, then a decade later the statue alone was only temporarily restored in the brief usurpation of Eugenius. This was in every sense a symbolic conflict and its resolution in Christians’ favour coincided with Theodosius’s imposition of a monopoly for Christianity after Eugenius’s fall. Once the statue of Victory had gone from their midst, the senators took the hint: nearly all of them joined the Church with telling rapidity. A RELIGION FIT FOR GENTLEMEN (300–400) A Christianity fit for the Roman aristocracy now came to terms with aristocratic values, while doing what it felt necessary to modify them. Roman noblemen valued ‘nobility’ or ‘distinction’: so much for the Virgin Mary’s Magnificat, celebrating the mighty being put down from their seats. The Roman elite also put a positive value on wealth, unlike the wanderer Jesus, who had told the poor that they were blessed and told a rich man to sell all he had. Churchmen squared this circle by encouraging the rich to give generously out of their good fortune to the poor, for almsgiving chimed in with their own priorities: bishops were aware of the advantages to themselves and to the prestige of the Church in general of being able to dispense generous charity to the poor. Augustine of Hippo, whom we will meet as the prime theologian of this new era in the Western Church, made an adroit appeal to aristocratic psychology in one of his sermons when he said that the poor who benefited could act as heavenly porters to the wealthy, using their gratitude to carry spiritual riches for their benefactors into the next life.18 Other preachers and biblical commentators brought their own glosses or enrichments which went beyond such socially conventional rhetoric, into territory more problematic for a great nobleman. Christian talk of almsgiving often portrayed the poor who received charity not simply as porters but in much more intimate ways: as the children or friends of the givers, fellow servants to that higher master in Heaven, God himself, or even as the humble Christ himself. Preachers also often showed themselves aware that St Paul had said that those who did not work should not eat, but they delicately contradicted the Apostle by massing alternative texts or explaining that Paul’s hard-headed remark concerned those poor healthy enough to work.19 The Church would also have to decide what it should keep from the literary culture so prized by wealthy and distinguished Romans. There was predictable hostility to such literature as the raunchy novels of Petronius or Apuleius, but Christians could not and would not dispense with that icon of Roman literature from the age of the first emperor, the poetry of Virgil. This was after all one of

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

  The Mongols’ rise among the various peoples of the steppes was comparatively sudden at the end of the twelfth century. They had their own religious system, which described the way in which sky and earth combined in cosmic consciousness, as do male and female; they also believed that souls animated both people and animals, and survived after death. Given their nomadic lifestyle close to one of the world’s greatest trade routes, they had nevertheless long been familiar with and genially interested in a wide spectrum of other people’s religious beliefs, and they were inclined to give an ear to any religious ideas which took their fancy – Chinese Taoism and Confucianism, Islam, Buddhism and Dyophysite Christianity were the principal wares on offer.29 When in 1007 Christianity gained its first success among the Mongols, it was thanks to the long-dead Syrian St Sergius – a tribute to how this hugely popular military saint had impressed himself on imaginations far away from the site of his Roman martyrdom seven centuries before (see pp. 237–8). Sergius had power, and the Mongols became increasingly interested in power. Perhaps also these warriors who relied for their success on their close bonding found Sergius’s intimate relationship with his soldier-companion Bacchus a good model for their own warfare. It was indeed to one of the most powerful rulers among the Mongols that Sergius appeared in a vision. In or around 1007, the Mongol Khan of the Keraits, adrift in a snowstorm, became convinced that he would die lost and alone, but the saint promised deliverance in return for conversion, and deliverance from the blizzard duly arrived. The Dyophysite clergy who then received the large numbers of Keraits trooping into baptism in the wake of their hugely relieved khan were, with characteristic flexibility, creative in their tolerance of existing Mongol religious beliefs. They were happy to preside over the solemn corporate drinking of mares’ milk blessed on their altar by the Khan himself. Amid the immensity of the Central and East Asian steppes, with few clergy of any persuasion to badger their beliefs into tidiness, Mongols preserved a comfortable mixture of Christianity and tradition. It is clear from archaeological finds that they enjoyed wearing Christian crosses, though they might enliven these with such symbols as the Indian swastika which Buddhists had brought them. Some of their rulers took Christian names; the greatest Mongol ruler of them all, Temüjin, who in 1206 was proclaimed ‘Genghis Khan’ (‘Ruler of the Ocean’), had been the vassal of a Christian Kerait khan and married his overlord’s Christian niece.30 It was through Temüjin’s leadership that, in the space of a few decades, the Mongols became a world power to terrify people from the Mediterranean to the China Sea. His successors were convinced that they had been destined for world supremacy, and for a while it looked as if they were

• From Action (2014)

  Here’s the lovely thing about non-monogamy: Having realized that my issues have far more to do with my own brain than with what my partner chooses to do with his D, it was actually the hugest relief to me that, on the surface, the reality of my relationship with Wes (he and I slept with other people) was the exact worst-case scenario I would have imagined in my previous history of loving people. The difference is that back then, these dalliances would have been hidden and clandestine, and if I had found out about them on my own, they would have broken my heart (and then I would break everything my partner ever found comfort or enjoyment in) (maybe); whereas in my non-monoggo pairing, I was secure in the knowledge that none of that affected how massively in love we were with each other. Instead of feeling cataclysmic, sex was—whoa, it was great, and if I ever felt jealous, we just talked about it. I no longer let it melt my brain into a rage-magma that overwhelmed all my rationality, empathy, and happiness. Basically, not being pressured to stay sexually faithful to the person I’m committed to drove home the point that boning ≠ love, even though they obviously involve each other quite deeply in most relationships (including mine with Wes). This, in turn, helped me mentally redistribute my self-worth so that I don’t freak out quite as much about increasing the amount of my hair/advanced degrees in comparative literature. • If you’re having sex with more than one person, BE SAFE. I mean, be safe no matter what kind of sex you’re having with anybody, but if you have multiple partners, USE CONDOMS AND/OR OTHER BARRIER METHODS OF PROTECTION AND COMMON SENSE 357 percent of the time, with everybody, including your foremost paramour. I cannot stress this enough. Putting your partner’s sexual health at risk is not only inconsiderate, it can be harmful to them in the long run. So please make a custom of being extra-safe. • Be fair to the people you’re seeing outside the relationship. I feel like all the best romantic wisdom comes from down-home country and blues singers, so here is a mournful old-timey ballad that I just wrote about telling a potential hookup that you’re seriously involved with someone else (imagine that I am casually holding a banjo but not really knowing what to do with it and also I tried to put spurs on my Keds): Tell them as soon as you can without presuming That something’s gonna happen with your mouths or other parts But definitely before getting physical or going on like twelve dates And breaking their doggone heartsssssss

• From Action (2014)

  The first time I came down with a persistent case of celibacy, I tried to fight it. I was like a mulish office cold sufferer insisting she’s just fine, saying of course I can work, as sodden tissues explode from her pockets and her eyelids hover at sunset-horizon-level. Is that person likely to nail a big account capably, given that her head feels like the contents of her overtaxed nostrils and she’s not giving herself time to let it pass? No, and I was even less likely of capable nailing during that bout of sexual indifference and all the ones that followed. In that case, I was twenty-one and had just completed my customary three-week, post-ruinous-breakup seminar on how to bone people who aren’t actively in love with me, which is a bit what I imagine an extended continental vacation (a real one, this time) feels like. By the end, the novelty wears off, just as it’s intended to: Three weeks is time enough to tire of your trip abroad, which is a necessary part of returning to the normal keel of your life without constantly being all wistful, like, Man, wish I were in perfect old France right now. Fuck this apartment—there aren’t even croque madames at any of the restaurants in my neighborhood. Similarly, it’s the exact right duration of time for noticing, Huh–why is it that I’m not actively salivating over this obviously gorgeous person in my bed? Oh, right. It’s because it has been my singular myopic focus to do just that, with as many people as possible, for the same amount of time that it would take me to complete an accredited Harvard extension class called “Gene Expression: A Hands-on Approach”; I miss edifying myself about more than just other people’s bods… and I also haven’t checked to see if my apartment is still there, for that matter, and isn’t rent due pretty soon? Congrads!! Now that you’ve relegated sex back to the equivocal plane of all the other lovely ways to spend your time, it doesn’t seem so intimidating. When I do this, I am reminded that there’s no such thing as being “rusty,” which can bear repeating after long-term monogamous sex.

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

  RACING THE MOON Screens and charts at Mission Control changed. No longer was the spacecraft 202,700 miles from Earth; it was now 38,760 miles from the Moon. And it was picking up speed, passing 2,700 miles per hour and gaining by the minute. At their consoles, controllers made printouts of their displays to commemorate the moment. Someday they would show these papers to their grandchildren and tell them what they’d seen. A few minutes later, Collins radioed Apollo 8 with an update on their recent television broadcast. “We are having a playback of your TV shows and are all enjoying it down here. It was better than yesterday because it didn’t preempt the football game.” “Don’t tell me they cut off a football game,” Borman said. “Didn’t they learn from Heidi?” Just a month earlier, as millions of Americans watched the New York Jets and Oakland Raiders battle into the final minute of a spectacular game, NBC stuck to its strict broadcast schedule, switching over at 7:00 P.M. to Heidi, a film about a young girl who was living with her grandfather in the Swiss Alps. Viewers erupted in protest, flooding the network with irate calls (and threats) and blowing out twenty-six fuses on the NBC switchboard while the Raiders scored two touchdowns in nine seconds to pull off a miracle come-from-behind win. The next day, The New York Times ran a front-page story on the debacle, and David Brinkley addressed it on the evening news—then showed tape of the game’s last minute. Even on this pioneering trip to the Moon, Borman wanted nothing to do with messing with his beloved game of football. Thirty minutes after she’d arrived, Marilyn left Mission Control with astronaut John Young, who was going to drive her home. “Have you seen Susan yet?” Young asked, then offered to take her over

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

  After much discussion, Lunney and Kraft came to a decision on the matter of the SPS engine. Each of them thought through the theory offered by the man from North American and ultimately judged it to be correct, and they were willing to bet the rest of the flight on it. After consulting with other controllers, who concurred, the men decided to continue with Apollo 8’s flight plan just as it had been written. The next time the SPS engine fired would be when the spacecraft slipped behind the Moon. At that moment, the crew’s lives would depend on its functioning properly. As midnight approached in Houston, all three of the astronauts’ wives, too, struggled to sleep. It had been a long and exhausting first day, but Susan and Valerie remained attached to their squawk boxes as they lay in bed, each trying to pick out a hint of how her husband was feeling by the tone of his voice. Staying overnight in Florida, Marilyn Lovell had no squawk box; instead, she listened to the sound of the waves by her beachside cottage, wondering whether Jim could see that same stretch of ocean from space. A few hours after test-firing the SPS engine, Houston got good news. The test burn hadn’t fouled Apollo 8’s trajectory, as some had feared. In fact, tracking analysis showed that if the spacecraft made no further changes and was simply allowed to coast, it would slingshot around the Moon at an altitude of just 80 miles above the lunar surface, then return to Earth, just as the trajectory specialists had designed. For the first time in a long while, Mission Control grew quiet. It was past midnight and the spacecraft was coasting. And Borman was supposed to be sleeping. Instead, he tossed and turned in his hammock. Borman had never been sick for a minute on the two-week flight of Gemini 7, or even on the “Vomit Comet,” the zero gravity airplane used to acclimate astronauts to weightlessness. Even when flying in violent thunderstorms as an inexperienced fifteen-year-old student of Miss Bobbie Kroll, he’d not experienced so much as a stomachache. Now he swallowed hard in his sleeping bag and tried to push away the nausea, but the waves were building and moving fast toward shore. “I’m sorry, guys,” he called to his crewmates above. And then the vomit came. Retching, Borman reached to capture the floating green globules, but there were too many of them, going in too many directions, to corral at once. Even when he caught them, they just split in two or four or eight and made their escape from his flailing hands. A moment later, the odor of the vomit reached Borman’s two crewmates. Overwhelmed, Anders reached for his gas mask. “You’re not supposed to use those!” Lovell said. “To hell with that, I’m using it,” Anders replied. He opened the oxygen supply to maximum, then turned his attention to Borman.

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

  good dinner, a pile of amusing correspondence and a handsome research grant. Erasmus himself created this misleading use of the place name, and he also added the ‘Desiderius’ as a supposed Latin synonym for ‘Erasmus’. His crafting of his name is only one aspect of the great humanist’s careful construction of his own image: he perfectly exemplified the humanist theme of building new possibilities, for he invented himself out of his own imaginative resources. He needed to do this because when he was born as Herasmus Gerritszoon in a small Dutch town (either Rotterdam or Gouda), he was that ultimate non-person in medieval Catholic Europe, the son of a priest. His family put him on the customary road to self-construction by preparing him for office in the Church. After a Devotio Moderna-inspired education, the young man was persuaded to enter a local Augustinian monastery at Steyn, but he did so with great reluctance. He hated monastic life and became additionally miserable when he fell in love with Servatius Rogerus, a fellow monk – but then he identified an escape route: his passion and talent for humanist scholarship.67 The Bishop of Cambrai, conveniently far to the south of Steyn, needed a secretary to give his correspondence the fashionable humanist polish appropriate to an important Church dignitary, and Erasmus persuaded his superiors to let him take the post, which he held just long enough to make sure that Steyn was well behind him and that there would be no serious recriminations when he moved on. Erasmus never returned to monastic life (the authorities in Rome eventually regularized this unilateral declaration of independence in 1517, after he had become a celebrity). Although he had been ordained priest in 1492, he never took conventional opportunities for high office in Church or university, which someone of his talent could have had for the asking. Instead, he virtually created a new category of career: the roving international man of letters who lived off the proceeds of his writings and money provided by admirers. He wrote the first best-seller in the history of printing after a stroke of bad luck: desperate for cash after English customs officials confiscated the sterling money in his luggage, he compiled a collection of proverbs with detailed commentary about their use in the classics and in scripture. This work, the Adagia or Adages (1500), offered the browsing reader the perfect short cut to being a well- educated humanist; Erasmus greatly expanded his money-spinner in successive editions. At much the same time, Erasmus changed direction in his scholarly enthusiasms, with momentous consequences for the history of European religion: he moved from a preoccupation with secular literature to apply his humanist learning to Christian texts. On one of his visits to England, his admiration for his friend John Colet’s biblical learning nerved him to the painful

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

  just heard, a decision had to be made now, on the spot, about aborting the mission. The men spoke for a few moments, then motioned to Collins to radio back to the crew. “Apollo 8, Houston,” Collins called. “We are closing this circuit down and we will be up in our normal voice loop in about five minutes. And then we will get on with the water dump.” By which NASA meant, “Let’s keep this thing going.” Dr. Berry and the others had determined that Borman’s illness had passed, and that if it recurred, it could be treated. Not long after, the doctor explained his thinking in a press conference, telling reporters that “this may be the type of thing that we see with motion sickness, it is just going to take some more watching to see.” NASA’s public affairs officer announced the same to America. Listening at home, Fred Borman could only smile. He knew his father. Even if he’d suffered a heart attack and was lying paralyzed in the spacecraft, he would have ordered Lovell and Anders to continue the mission. That was his dad. — Apollo 8 was now 140,000 miles from Earth and just 100,000 miles from the Moon. In about an hour, the crew would be making its first live television broadcast. It had been more than twelve hours since Borman had taken sick. Now he felt better. As the telecast time drew closer, the spacecraft’s high gain antenna was adjusted and communications checked. The antenna, comprising four 31-inch dishes, could swivel to point at Earth to send and receive tracking, voice, and television signals. When the astronauts of Apollo 7 had made their appearance in living rooms across America two months earlier, they had done so from an altitude of about 150 miles. When Apollo 8 would go live for the first time, it would do so from almost a thousand times that distance. No one knew if it would work. Barbecue mode was halted so that the antenna could remain pointed at Earth. In the command module, the crew worked to set up a four-and- a-half-pound black-and-white RCA video camera fitted with one of two