Shame

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 A History of Christianity (1976)

  How ridiculous their sacrifice of integrity seems in retrospect! We laugh at John Henry Newman because, to protect his students, he kept his copy of The Age of Reason locked up in his safe. And we feel uncomfortable when Bishop Stubbs, once Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, triumphantly records – as he did in a public lecture – his first meeting with the historian John Richard Green: ‘I knew by description the sort of man I was to meet: I recognised him as he got into the Wells carriage, holding in his hand a volume of Renan. I said to myself, “If I can hinder, he shall not read that book.” We sat opposite and fell immediately into conversation. . . . He came to me at Navestock afterwards, and that volume of Renan found its way into my waste-paper basket.’ Stubbs had condemned Renan’s Vie de Jésus without reading it, and the whole point of his anecdote was that he had persuaded Green to do the same. So one historian corrupted another, and Christianity was shamed in both. For Christianity, by identifying truth with faith, must teach – and, properly understood, does teach – that any interference with the truth is immoral. A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts; a Christian historian who draws the line limiting the field of enquiry at any point whatsoever, is admitting the limits of his faith. And of course he is also destroying the nature of his religion, which is a progressive revelation of truth. So the Christian, according to my understanding, should not be inhibited in the smallest degree from following the line of truth; indeed, he is positively bound to follow it. He should be, in fact, freer than the non-Christian, who is precommitted by his own rejection. At all events, I have sought to present the facts of Christian history as truthfully and nakedly as I am able, and to leave the rest to the reader. Iver, Buckinghamshire 1975 PART ONEThe Rise and Rescue of the Jesus Sect (50 BC—AD 250) SOME TIME ABOUT THE MIDDLE of the first century AD, and very likely in the year 49, Paul of Tarsus travelled south from Antioch to Jerusalem and there met the surviving followers of Jesus of Nazareth, who had been crucified about sixteen years before. This Apostolic Conference, or Council of Jerusalem, is the first political act in the history of Christianity and the starting-point from which we can seek to reconstruct the nature of Jesus’s teaching and the origins of the religion and church he brought into being. We have two near-contemporary accounts of this Council. One, dating from the next decade, was dictated by Paul himself in his letter to the Christian congregations of Galatia in Asia Minor. The second is later and comes from a number of sources or eye-witness accounts assembled in Luke’s Acts of the Apostles.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  They raised no objection to Nazi youth-camps, attended by hundreds of thousands of young Catholics, though Hitler made no secret of his aims: ‘I want a powerful, masterly, cruel and fearless youth.... The freedom and dignity of the wild beast must shine from their eyes... that is how I will root out a thousand years of human domestication.’ At no point were Catholics given, either by their own hierarchy or by Rome, the relaxation from their moral obligation to obey the legitimate authority of the Nazi rulers, which had been imposed on them by the 1933 directives of the hierarchy. Nor did the bishops ever tell them officially that the regime was evil, or even mistaken. The turning point, even for the most blind, should have come on 30 June 1934, when the Nazi State carried out its mass-purge. Among those murdered were, for example, Dr Erich Klausener, General-Secretary of Catholic Action, Adalbert Probst, Director of the Catholic Sports Organization, Dr Fritz Gerlich, editor of a Munich Catholic weekly, and Father Bernard Stempfle, editor of an anti-semitic Bavarian newspaper; Hitler refused to hand over their bodies to relatives and had them cremated in defiance of Catholic teaching. But the Catholic bishops made no protest, no statement at all. Nor did the Evangelicals. What reaction there was was favourable. Dr Dietrich, Evangelical bishop of Nassau-Hessen, sent Hitler a telegram of ‘warmest thanks for the first rescue operation’, followed by a circular letter claiming that the blood-bath ‘demonstrated to the world’ the ‘unique greatness of the Führer’; ‘he has been sent to us by God’. The failure of the churches at this great turning-point, which demonstrated the essential criminality of the regime and opened the way for all the horrors ahead, proved Hitler was right in his estimate of organized Christianity in Germany. ‘Why should we quarrel?’ he asked. ‘They will swallow everything in order to keep their material advantages. Matters will never come to a head. They will recognise a firm will, and we need only show them once or twice who is the master.’ The churches were on Hitler’s pay-roll. Both Evangelicals and Catholics, as state churches, benefited from public taxation. Hitler pointed out, in a speech in January 1939, that the two churches were, after the State, the largest landowners in Nazi Germany, and that they had accepted state subsidies which rose from 130 million marks in 1933 to 500 million in 1938; during the war they further increased to over 1,000 million. In fact, both churches, in the main, gave massive support to the regime.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  One Catholic encyclopaedia (1930) asserted that ‘political anti-semitism’ was permissible provided it utilized morally acceptable means. Bishop Buchberg called it ‘justified self-defence’ against ‘too-powerful Jewish capital’ (1931). Archbishop Grober, editing a handbook on religious problem, included an article on ‘race’ which stated: ‘Every people bears itself the responsibility for its successful existence, and the intake of entirely foreign blood will always represent a risk for a nationality that has proven its historical worth. Hence, no people may be denied the right to maintain undisturbed their previous racial stock and to enact safeguards for this purpose. The Christian religion merely demands that the means used do not offend against the moral law and natural justice.’ What did this mean in practice? Many Jews became Catholics to avoid persecution; thus the old Spanish problem of ‘new Christians’ cropped up again in a different form. The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 dealt with this by forbidding two Catholics to marry if one were racially non-Aryan. By and large the Church bowed to this new law, which she had earlier termed an inadmissible infringement of her spiritual jurisdiction. One Catholic bishop, Hudel, actually defended the Nuremberg laws. The clergy made some effort to protect Catholics of Jewish birth; but it was unsystematic and unsuccessful. They claimed credit for forcing the Nazis to drop the compulsory divorce of people who had made racially mixed marriages, but this was probably achieved, rather, by demonstrations by Aryan wives. When the bishops condemned ‘killing’, as they occasionally did, they did not mention words like ‘Jews’ or ‘non-Aryan’, and never made it clear precisely what they were calling sinful. Thus Catholics engaged in the extermination processes were never told specifically by their clergy that they were doing wrong. The point is academic since they must have known already. The Church excommunicated Catholics who laid down in their wills that they wished to be cremated, or who took part in duels; but it did not forbid them to work in concentration or death-camps – and at the end of 1938, 22.7 per cent of the SS were practising Catholics. Provost Lichtenberg of Berlin was one of the very few Catholic priests who made a real protest against Hitler’s Jewish policy; he died on the way to Dachau in 1943. The laity were not much better, and the behaviour of the German bishops contrasted shamefully with that of their colleagues in France, Holland and Belgium. In 1943, the Prussian Synod of the Confessing Church pointed out that liquidation of the Jews was against the Fifth Commandment; this was a statement which the German Catholic bishops could not bring themselves to echo. The most that can be said in their favour is that they received no guidance from the Pope. When French cardinals and archbishops objected to Pétain’s ‘Jewish statutes’ in June 1941, the Vichy Ambassador, Léon Berard, reported that the Vatican did not consider them in conflict with Catholic teaching.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Then looking up at the calm, lovely face, Stephen would be filled with a sudden contrition, with a sudden deep sense of her own shortcomings; she would long to blurt all this out to her mother, yet would stand there tongue-tied, saying nothing at all. For these two were strangely shy with each other—it was almost grotesque, this shyness of theirs, as existing between mother and child. Anna would feel it, and through her Stephen, young as she was, would become conscious of it; so that they held a little aloof when they should have been drawing together. Stephen, acutely responsive to beauty, would be dimly longing to find expression for a feeling almost amounting to worship, that her mother’s face had awakened. But Anna, looking gravely at her daughter, noting the plentiful auburn hair, the brave hazel eyes that were so like her father’s, as indeed were the child’s whole expression and bearing, would be filled with a sudden antagonism that came very near to anger. She would awake at night and ponder this thing, scourging herself in an access of contrition; accusing herself of hardness of spirit, of being an unnatural mother. Sometimes she would shed slow, miserable tears, remembering the inarticulate Stephen. She would think: ‘I ought to be proud of the likeness, proud and happy and glad when I see it!’ Then back would come flooding that queer antagonism that amounted almost to anger. It would seem to Anna that she must be going mad, for this likeness to her husband would strike her as an outrage—as though the poor, innocent seven-year-old Stephen were in some way a caricature of Sir Philip; a blemished, unworthy, maimed reproduction—yet she knew that the child was handsome. But now there were times when the child’s soft flesh would be almost distasteful to her; when she hated the way Stephen moved or stood still, hated a certain largeness about her, a certain crude lack of grace in her movements, a certain unconscious defiance. Then the mother’s mind would slip back to the days when this creature had clung to her breast, forcing her to love it by its own utter weakness; and at this thought her eyes must fill again, for she came of a race of devoted mothers.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Censoring or preventing the circulation of printed books was essentially the same as controlling manuscripts; but the difference in speed and scale was absolutely crucial. It took at least a generation for the censors to tackle it, and they were never able to exercise the same degree of effective supervision as in the days before cheap printing. Erasmus was born into this new arena of scholarship and communication in 1466. His background was quintessentially that of the old age. He was the bastard son of a priest, by a washerwoman. This was the common fate of a vast number of people at the time. It testified to the unwillingness of the Church to sanction clerical marriage and its inability to stamp out concubinage. Probably as many as half the men in orders had ‘wives’ and families. Behind all the New Learning and the theological debates, clerical celibacy was, in its own way, the biggest single issue at the Reformation. It was a great social problem and, other factors being equal, it tended to tip the balance in favour of reform. As a rule, the only hope for the child of a priest was to go into the Church himself, thus unwillingly or with no great enthusiasm, taking vows which he might subsequently regret: the evil tended to perpetuate itself. Many thousands of men (and women) were trapped in this predicament, grudging and awkward members of a privileged class, sentenced for life to a spiritual role for which they had no calling and – since no seminaries existed – no training. Erasmus was a case in point. After his birth his parents no longer lived together. In an autobiographical fragment, written when he was already world famous, he concealed his bastardy, indicating that it still rankled. His schooling was wretched. The Brethren of the Common Life, founded by Gerard Groote, were one of the more successful of the idealistic orders of the later Middle Ages. They were genuinely poor, they took their social work seriously; in some ways they adumbrated the Protestant reformers by their stress on the Bible and their distaste for elaborate forms of worship, such as polyphonic singing. But Erasmus was taught as one of 275 boys in one room, under a single master; and the curriculum was largely confined to thought-conditioning Latin rhymes and sayings, such as ‘The prelates of the church are the salt of the earth.’ He was eighteen when both his parents died, and he saw no alternative but to join the clergy as an Augustinian; he soon regretted it and spent the next thirty years disentangling himself from his legal clerical ties, knowing that at any moment his superiors could ruin his career as a scholar and writer by forcing him to live in strict conformity with the rules of his order. He was one of many thousands who, while members of the privileged clerical order, were emotionally committed to its destruction.

• From Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988)

  How can one imagine that millions of individuals not yet born were “in Adam” or, in any sense, “were” Adam? Anticipating objections that would reduce his argument to absurdity, Augustine declares triumphantly that, although “we did not yet have individually created and apportioned forms in which to live as individuals,” what did exist already was the “nature of the semen from which we were to be propagated.”53 That semen itself, Augustine argues, already “shackled by the bond of death,” transmits the damage incurred by sin.54 Hence, Augustine concludes, every human being ever conceived through semen already is born contaminated with sin. Through this astonishing argument,55 Augustine intends to prove that every human being is in bondage not only from birth but indeed from the moment of conception. And since he takes Adam as a corporate personality, Augustine applies his account of Adam’s experience, disrupted by the first sin, to every one of his offspring (except, of course, to Christ, conceived, Augustine ingeniously argued, without semen). When he describes the onset of original sin in Adam, Augustine chooses political language—and specifically the language of sexual politics.56 He describes his experience of passion in political metaphors—as “rebellion” against the mind’s governance. For in the beginning, when there was only one man in the world, Adam discovered within himself the first government—the rule of the rational soul, the “better part of a human being,” over the body, the “inferior part.” Augustine, influenced, no doubt, by his study of Platonic philosophy, characterizes their respective roles in political terms: the soul by divine right is to subjugate every member of its “lower servant,” the body, to the ruling power of its will. Within Adam as within Eve both soul and body originally obeyed the authority of rational will: “Although they bore an animal body, yet they felt in it no disobedience moving against themselves.… Each received the body as a servant … and the body obeyed God … in an appropriate servitude, without resistance.”57 But the primal couple soon experienced within themselves not only the first government on earth but also the first revolution. Adam’s assertion of his own autonomy was, Augustine insists, tantamount to rebellion against God’s rule. Augustine appreciates the aptness with which the punishment for this uprising fits the crime: “The punishment for disobedience was nothing other than disobedience. For human misery consists in nothing other than man’s disobedience to himself.”58 Augustine stresses, however, that the penalty for sin involves more than bodily impulses rebelling against the mind. Instead, the “flesh” that wars against the “law of the mind” includes, he says, the “whole of one’s natural being.”59 The commonest experiences of frustration—mental agitation, bodily pain, aging, suffering, and death—continually prove to us our incapacity to implement the rule of our will, for who would undergo any of these, Augustine asks, if our nature “in every way and every part obeyed our will?”60

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And yet there was a kind of large splendour about her—absurd though she was, she was splendid at that moment—grotesque and splendid, like some primitive thing conceived in a turbulent age of transition. ‘Are you going to fight me, you coward?’ she demanded, as she stepped round the table and faced her tormentor. But Roger thrust his hands deep into his pockets: ‘I don’t fight with girls!’ he remarked very grandly. Then he sauntered out of the schoolroom. Stephen’s own hands fell and hung at her sides; her head drooped, and she stood staring down at the carpet. The whole of her suddenly drooped and looked helpless, as she stood staring down at the carpet. ‘How could you!’ began Violet, who was plucking up courage. ‘Little girls don’t have fights—I don’t, I’d be frightened—’ But Stephen cut her short: ‘I’m going,’ she said thickly; ‘I’m going home to my father.’ She went heavily downstairs and out into the lobby, where she put on her hat and coat; then she made her way round the house to the stables, in search of old Williams and the dog-cart. 4 ‘You’re home very early, Stephen,’ said Anna, but Sir Philip was staring at his daughter’s face. ‘What’s the matter?’ he inquired, and his voice sounded anxious. ‘Come here and tell me about it.’ Then Stephen quite suddenly burst into tears, and she wept and she wept as she stood there before them, and she poured out her shame and humiliation, telling all that Roger had said about her mother, telling all that she, Stephen, would have done to defend her, had it not been that Roger would not fight with a girl. She wept and she wept without any restraint, scarcely knowing what she said—at that moment not caring. And Sir Philip listened with his head on his hand, and Anna listened bewildered and dumbfounded. She tried to kiss Stephen, to hold her to her, but Stephen, still sobbing, pushed her away; in this orgy of grief she resented consolation, so that in the end Anna took her to the nursery and delivered her over to the care of Mrs. Bingham, feeling that the child did not want her. When Anna went quietly back to the study, Sir Philip was still sitting with his head on his hand. She said: ‘It’s time you realized, Philip, that if you’re Stephen’s father, I’m her mother. So far you’ve managed the child your own way, and I don’t think it’s been successful. You’ve treated Stephen as though she were a boy—perhaps it’s because I’ve not given you a son—’ Her voice trembled a little but she went on gravely: ‘It’s not good for Stephen; I know it’s not good, and at times it frightens me, Philip.’ ‘No, no!’ he said sharply.

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

  The edict was kept back till the Elector Frederick and the Elector of the Palatinate with a large number of other members of the Diet had gone home. It was not regularly submitted to, nor discussed and voted on, by the Diet, nor signed by the Chancellor, but secured by a sort of surprise.395 On Trinity Sunday, May 26, Aleander went with the Latin and German copy to church, and induced the Emperor to sign both after high mass, "with his pious hand." The Emperor said in French, "Now you will be satisfied."—"Yes," replied the legate in the same language, "but much more satisfied will be the Holy See and all Christendom, and will thank God for such a good, holy, and religious Emperor."396 The edict is not so long, but as turgid, bombastic, intolerant, fierce, and Cruel, as the Pope’s bull of excommunication.397 It gave legal force to the bull within the German Empire. It denounces Luther as a devil in the dress of a monk, who had gathered a mass of old and new heresies into one pool, and pronounces upon him the ban and re-ban.398 It commands the burning, and forbids the printing, publication, and sale, of his books, the sheltering and feeding of his person, and that of his followers, and directs the magistrates to seize him wherever he may be found, and to hand him over to the Emperor, to be dealt with according to the penal laws against heretics. At the same time the whole press of the empire was put under strict surveillance.399 This was the last occasion on which the mediaeval union of the secular empire with the papacy was expressed in official form so as to make the German emperor the executor of the decrees of the bishop of Rome. The gravamina of the nation were unheeded. Hutten wrote: "I am ashamed of my fatherland."400 Thus Luther was outlawed by Church and State, condemned by the Pope, the Emperor, the universities, cast out of human society, and left exposed to a violent death. But he had Providence and the future on his side. The verdict of the Diet was not the verdict of the nation. The departure of the Emperor through the Netherlands to Spain, where he subdued a dangerous insurrection, his subsequent wars with Francis in Italy, the victorious advance of the Turks in Hungary, the protection of Luther by the Elector Frederick, and the rapid spread of Protestant doctrines, these circumstances, combined to reduce the imperial edict, as well as the papal bull, to a dead letter in the greater part of Germany. The empire was not a centralized monarchy, but a loose confederation of seven great electorates, a larger number of smaller principalities, and free cities, each with an ecclesiastical establishment of its own.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She was gazing at him and he turned away quickly: ‘Darling, I’m busy, you must leave me,’ he faltered. ‘Thank you,’ she said very quietly and simply, ‘I felt that I had to ask you about Martin—’ 3 After she had gone he sat on alone, and the lie was still bitter to his spirit as he sat there, and he covered his face for the shame that was in him—but because of the love that was in him he wept. CHAPTER 13 1 T here was gossip in plenty over Martin’s disappearance, and to this Mrs. Antrim contributed her share, even more than her share, looking wise and mysterious whenever Stephen’s name was mentioned. Every one felt very deeply aggrieved. They had been so eager to welcome the girl as one of themselves, and now this strange happening—it made them feel foolish which in turn made them angry. The spring meets were heavy with tacit disapproval—nice men like young Hallam did not run away for nothing; and then what a scandal if those two were not engaged; they had wandered all over the country together. This tacit disapproval was extended to Sir Philip, and via him to Anna for allowing too much freedom; a mother ought to look after her daughter, but then Stephen had always been allowed too much freedom. This, no doubt, was what came of her riding astride and fencing and all the rest of the nonsense; when she did meet a man she took the bit between her teeth and behaved in a most amazing manner. Of course, had there been a proper engagement—but obviously that had never existed. They marvelled, remembering their own toleration, they had really been extremely broad-minded. An extraordinary girl, she had always been odd, and now for some reason she seemed odder than ever. Not so much as a word was said in her hearing that could possibly offend, and yet Stephen well knew that her neighbors’ good-will had been only fleeting, a thing entirely dependent upon Martin. He it was who had raised her status among them—he, the stranger, not even connected with their county. They had all decided that she meant to marry Martin, and that fact had at once made them welcoming and friendly; and suddenly Stephen longed intensely to be welcomed, and she wished from her heart that she could have married Martin. The strange thing was that she understood her neighbours in a way, and was therefore too just to condemn them; indeed had nature been less daring with her, she might well have become very much what they were—a breeder of children, an upholder of home, a careful and diligent steward of pastures. There was little of the true pioneer about Stephen, in spite of her erstwhile longing for the forests.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Theology, but again of a moral nature, was the background to Uncle Tom’s Cabin which appeared seven years later, Harriet Beecher Stowe being the wife of a Congregationalist Old Testament professor, and a lay-theologian herself. The defence of the South was sociological rather than doctrinal. Nevertheless there was little internal opposition to slavery among white Southern Christians, and a notable closing of Christian ranks after the black preacher Nat Turner led the Virginia slave revolt of 1831, in which fifty-seven whites were killed. Revivalism, which in the North was used to strengthen the mass following of abolition, was put to exactly the opposite use in the South, where it was, if anything, more powerful. The South Carolina Baptist Association produced a biblical defence of slavery in 1822, and in 1844 John England, Bishop of Charleston, provided a similar one for Southern white Catholics. There were standard biblical texts on negro inferiority, patriarchal and Mosaic acceptance of servitude, and of course St Paul on obedience to masters. Both sides could, and did, hurl texts at each other. In fact revivalism, and the evangelical movement generally, played into the hands of extremists on both sides. Of course, it could be argued that the slavery issue could just as easily have split the Christian movement in the first century AD, if it had not been side-stepped by Paul; his evasions – so the argument might continue – made it possible for the issue still to be unresolved in the nineteenth century. But the answer to this was that the bulk of Christian opinion and teaching had been anti-slavery for more than a millenium, that Christianity was the one great religion which had always declared the diminution, if not the final elimination, of slavery to be meritorious; and that no real case for slavery could be constructed, in good faith, from Christian scripture. The fact that Southerners from a variety of Christian churches were prepared to do so, in the second half of the nineteenth century, was a shocking and flagrant stain on the faith. What followed when war came was even worse. The Presbyterians from North and South tried to hold together by suppressing all discussion of the issue, but split in the end. So did the Wesleyans. (In 1843, 1200 Methodist clergy owned slaves, and 25,000 church members collectively owned over 200,000.) So did the Baptists. The Congregationalists, because of their atomized structure, remained theoretically united, but in fact were divided in exactly the same way as the others. Only the Lutherans, the Episcopalians and the Catholics successfully avoided public debates and voting, but the evidence suggests that they, too, were diametrically opposed on a salient matter of Christian principle. The parallel was not exactly with the wars of religion, but rather with the papal schisms and the papal-imperial contests of the Middle Ages, with both sides operating from precisely the same assumptions and using the same agreed texts, but reaching diametrically opposed and dogmatically asserted verdicts.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  You talk much of Our Lady – think of the want of love of her, who so jubilees in Communions. (9) Want of humility, in not doing so, if you thought you were being put upon. (10) Want of charity in judging, if you thought you were being put upon. (11) Plain absence of the saints’ principle of always being on the look out to increase your merits, and to do something for God. (12) The extreme nastiness of this pettiness, as compared with the grand, large, kindly apostolic spirit of St Philip’s Institute. (13) The disclosure of it is the absence of a life and spirit of prayer. (14) A token of fearful want of sensitiveness of conscience. (15) A proof of non-abiding presence of God: your first thought is self – and self’s comfort. Only your selfishness is prompt and at home: supernatural principles not at all. My poor child, sad and shameful as this disclosure of your interior must be for you, it is what I have seen all along – but I cannot put aside the mists of self-love and self-occupation and hardened delusion in which you habitually live. Vileness . . . is your characteristic.’ This, it should be emphasized, is one intellectual writing to another. The stress on authority, and the maintenance of detailed clerical control of the conscience of the individual, were almost necessarily accompanied by a continued insistence on eternal punishment. The retreat from Hell was a characteristic of the nineteenth century liberal Protestant churchmen, many of whom, claimed their opponents, were guilty of the heresy of universalism. The nearer a man moved to Rome, the more the need for Hell seemed to increase (though it was also marked on the extreme fundamentalist wing of Protestantism). The Tractarians insisted that burning by physical fire was an essential part of eternal punishments. In his sermon on Hell (1856) Pusey noted: ‘This, then is the first outward suffering of the damned, that they are purged, steeped in a lake of fire. O woe, woe, woe! Woe unutterable, woe unimaginable, woe interminable!’ He wrote to Keble: ‘People risk too much now. They would risk everything, if they did not dread an eternity of suffering. A mere purgatory for the bad would not move them.’ Newman, while believing in physical torture, gave a description of the plight of the damned soul, in the sermon reprinted in Discourses to Mixed Congregations which is far more imaginative and frightening. It was evidently a topic on which his mind frequently dwelt, and he emphasized the centrality of the doctrine: Hell was ‘the great crux in the Christian system . . . . It is the turning point between pantheism and Christianity, it is the critical doctrine – you can’t get rid of it – it is the very characteristic of Christianity. We must therefore look matters in the face. Is it more improbable that eternal punishment should be true, or that there should be no God?

• From The Pisces (2018)

  She was so nonjudgmental. But she only withheld her judgment of me so she didn’t have to judge herself. She couldn’t have me be a villain, or she would be one too. “What about your swimmer?” asked Claire. “Did he ever come back?” “Yes, he did.” “And?” “We’re going to run away together.” “To the desert?” “No,” I said. “To the depths of the ocean.” “Dark,” she said. “Like a suicide pact. So romantic, I love it.” “Sort of,” I said. “Sort of.” 55. Annika and Steve immediately got on a plane and headed home. I was terrified for their return. I sat on the white sofa, thinking of all that had gone on there, and dug my fingernails into my gums. When they bled a little, I imagined wiping the blood under the sofa cushions where my period bloodstains were. Now I understood the desire Claire had to hurt herself. I couldn’t drink anything or take a pill, because I needed to be clearheaded for their arrival. But the last thing I wanted was to be lucid. I needed an out, something to release me from the feelings of shame. So I took it out on my gums. When they pulled up in the driveway, Annika refused to get out of the taxi and only Steve came in. He had never liked me to begin with, but now he clearly hated me. I thought of his trench coat, covered in Garrett’s semen, in a dumpster somewhere. He issued a brusque hello and went into the pantry, where Dominic was still covered with the blanket. “Goddammit,” he said. He sounded angry. Then he went back outside. I crept over to the window and saw him talking softly to Annika, coaxing her out of the cab. But she refused to come. I heard her crying and saying, “No, no, no.” She looked up and our eyes met through the glass. She opened the cab door and came rushing into the house. I thought that she might yell at me, but she took me in her arms and hugged me. I sort of stood there as she cried on my shoulder, not knowing what to do. “I loved him so much, Lucy,” she said. “I know.” “He was the most special baby in the whole world. I just, I never loved anything like I loved him.” “Let’s sit down,” I said. We sat down at the kitchen table. She was tan from the Roman sun and smelled like orange blossoms. Her ass had gotten bigger under her yoga pants and she wore a blousy shirt to cover it. I sat with my hands under me, clenched in fists, and squeezed them hard every time she spoke. “What am I going to do now?

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  The Catholic bishops welcomed ‘the new, strong stress on authority in the German state’; Bishop Bornewasser told the Catholic youth in Trier Cathedral: ‘With raised heads and firm step we have entered the new reich and we are prepared to serve it with all the might of our body and soul.’ In January 1934, Hitler saw twelve Evangelical leaders, and after this meeting they withdrew any support for the Pastors’ Emergency League and issued a communiqué which pledged ‘the leaders of the German Evangelical Church unanimously affirm their unconditional loyalty to the Third Reich and its leader. They most sharply condemn any intrigue or criticism against the state, the people or the [Nazi] movement, which are designed to endanger the Third Reich. In particular they deplore any activities on the part of the foreign press which seek falsely to represent the discussions within the church as a conflict against the state.’ The Evangelicals provided both the most craven supporters of Hitler and the only element in the state churches to oppose him. Resistance, of a sort, began with the Evangelical ‘Barmen Confession’ of May 1934, rejecting ‘the false doctrine that the state, over and above its special commission, should and could become the single and totalitarian order of human life, thus fulfilling the church’s vocation as well.’ But this was a theological not a political statement; the ‘Confessing Church’ never attempted political opposition. Even in Neimoller’s church, Nazi flags hung from the walls, and the congregation gave the Nazi salute. And the courage of the pastors was limited. When some of them sent a private protest to Hitler in 1936, which was later published in Switzerland, the public outcry – Hitler was growing in popularity at the time – led the signatories to backtrack. When the Olympic Games were over, Dr Weissler, who had authorized publication (and had then been disowned by the ‘Confessing Church’) was put into Sachsenhausen, and beaten to death a few months later. The first, and virtually the only, protest gesture by the Catholics was Pius XI’s German encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge, smuggled into Germany and read out on Palm Sunday in 1937. It attacked not merely violations of the concordat but Nazi state and racial doctrines, and was taken by Hitler to be a declaration of war. He suppressed it without difficulty and there is no evidence it stirred Catholic opposition to the regime. Indeed, he dealt with the state churches without really raising his voice. He used the currency laws, from 1935, to punish priests or nuns with contacts abroad, a device later adopted by the Communist states. The Gestapo carried out repression when necessary. It rarely needed to be severe. Except for a few individuals, the clergy were hardly ever imprisoned for long. Of 17,000 Evangelical pastors, there were never more than fifty serving long terms at any one time. Of the Catholics, one bishop was expelled from his diocese, and another got a short term for currency offences.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Archbishop Grober’s line was that the church had ‘never left it to the judgment of the individual Catholic, with all his shortsightedness and emotionalism, to decide, in the event of war, its permissibility or lack of it.’ Instead, this final decision has always been in the province of lawful authority.’ But what did lawful authority have to say? Nothing. The only relevant statement was made right at the end, in January 1945, when Archbishop Jager, calling for further Catholic sacrifices, wrote of Germany’s two great enemies, ‘liberalism and individualism on the one side, collectivism on the other’. The rest simply told their flocks to obey Hitler. The Pope gave no guidance. Pius XII advised all Catholics everywhere to ‘fight with valour and charity’ on whichever side they happened to find themselves. Later, he defended his early war-statements by claiming that both sides construed them to be in their favour. In that case, what was the point in issuing them? It is against this whole background that his encyclical quoted at the beginning of this section should be read. Curiously enough, it contains no condemnation of the Nazi-Soviet carve-up of Catholic Poland. The topic was not even mentioned. During the war, the churches’ attitude to Hitler became, if anything, more servile. There was wholesale confiscation of church property of all kinds, each ministry taking what it wanted. There was anti-Christian propaganda in the armed forces. But the churches continued to greet Nazi victories by ringing their bells, until they were taken away to be melted down for the war-effort. Only seven Catholics in the whole of the German Reich refused to perform military service; six were executed, the seventh was declared insane. The sacrifices of the Protestants were more considerable, but still insignificant. In June 1940, their leader, Kerrl, offered to donate all Evangelical property to the State, and make Hitler its ‘supreme head’ and Summus Episcopus. Hitler contemptuously refused. When he heard of Kerrl’s death in 1941, he remarked: ‘Pure Christianity, the Christianity of the catacombs, is concerned with translating the Christian doctrine into fact. It leads simply to the annihilation of mankind. It is merely wholehearted Bolshevism under a tinsel of metaphysics.’ Thus Hitler, whom Pius XII saw as the indispensible bastion against Russia, himself equated true Christianity with communism. In the end he intended to exterminate the Christians. But first he wanted to deal with the Jews. Here he rightly believed he could get German Christian support, or at least acquiescence. ‘As for the Jews,’ he told Bishop Berning of Osnabruch in April 1933, ‘I am just carrying on with the same policy which the Catholic church had adopted for 1500 years.’ It was true there was an anti-semitic element in nineteenth-century German Catholicism. In the 1870s, Bishop Martin of Pederborn had asserted his belief in stories of Jewish ritual murders of Christian children. The Catholics had used anti-semitism when German Jews supported the Kulturkampf.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  In IX, 5, he falls in love with his employer’s pretty young mistress, who connives with Bruno and Buffalmacco to land him in a compromising situation where he is discovered and severely beaten by his outraged wife, Monna Tessa. Boccaccio’s Calandrino was the prototype for many of the simpleton characters of Italian Renaissance comedy. It is sometimes claimed that in the Decameron he figures in more of the stories than any of the other characters, but that distinction belongs to Calandrino’s two companions, Bruno and Buffalmacco, who appear in all four stories involving Calandrino and also in a fifth, the hoodwinking of the gullible physician, Master Simone (VIII, 9). Almost Rabelaisian in tone, the story is unique in the Decameron for its constant stream of scatological references, culminating in the dumping of the unfortunate Simone at dead of night in a cesspit. Boccaccio’s delight in wordplay, a prominent aspect of the tale’s humour, poses serious problems for the translator, especially in Bruno’s outrageous catalogue of the exotic, high-born ladies with whom he claims acquaintance, and in Buffalmacco’s equally outrageous list of the nobles who form part of the retinue of la contessa di Civilian, or the Countess of Cesspool. The distinctively Florentine flavour of the five stories involving Bruno and Buffalmacco stems mainly from their being placed within specifically Florentine contexts, no opportunity being missed to pinpoint the exact location of particular narrative episodes. By contrast, there is one story, that of Monna Belcolore and the priest of Varlungo (VIII, 2), where the setting in the Florentine countryside (contado) is secondary in importance to its dazzling display of Florentine verbal wit. The wordplay here is a vital component of the narrative itself, which moves swiftly along by way of a series of lively and intricately assembled effusions of verbal humour, from the initial description of Monna Belcolore to the equivocal final paragraph, with its account of her eventual conversion to the priest’s way of thinking. Florentinisms and double meanings pour forth in a constant stream, and even the names of the characters contribute to the tale’s overall comic effect. Apart from Belcolore herself and her slow-witted husband, Bentivegna del Mazzo, the narrative includes a whole gallery of other characters whose sole raison d’être is to heighten the humorous effect by the very sound of their odd and at times equivocal Florentine names. And similar considerations apply to the various references to rustic pursuits, such as Belcolore’s flair for singing and dancing and the priest’s gardening skills that account for the curious presents he sends to the object of his lustful passion. No translation can convey the uniquely Florentine rustic tone of the original text, which is one of the most brilliant examples of humorous writing in medieval literature.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  It resisted a good deal of pressure to come out against anti-Jewish atrocities. In the autumn of 1943, Bishop Hudel, head of the German Catholic community in Rome, asked the German military commander to stop the arrest and deportation of 8,000 Jews, not on the grounds that it was wrong to exterminate them, but because ‘I fear that otherwise the Pope will have to make an open stand which will serve the anti-German propaganda as a weapon against us.’ Both he and the German ambassador, Ernst von Wiezsacker, took it for granted that Pius would not protest willingly, but only under pressure – they knew their man. In fact he did nothing at all, though 1,000 Jews were sent off for extermination. The only action taken was a statement in Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican paper, describing the treatment of Jews in concentration camps, and the confiscation of their property, as ‘too harsh’. What would have been adequately harsh? The paper did not say. What made Pius keep silent, apart from natural timidity and fear for the safety of the Vatican itself, was undoubtedly his belief that a total breach between Rome and Hitler would lead to a separatist German Catholic Church. Like the Protestant pastors, he was a man of little faith. The Frenchman, Cardinal Tisserant, who watched this sad story unfold in Rome, said at the time: ‘I fear that history will reproach the Holy See with having practised a policy of selfish convenience and not much else!’ Would the Germans have resisted a similar campaign to exterminate active Christians? Hitler was susceptible to pressure. There is no record of church protests against such Nazi activities as human stud-farms, breeding and sex experiments conducted at Himmler’s Lebensborn Institute and elsewhere. But in August 1941, Bishop Galen of Munster preached a sermon on the sanctity of human life, aimed at the compulsory euthanasia programme, of which he gave details. This sermon was widely circulated and talked about. Not only was the bishop not punished – despite demands from Nazis that he be hanged – but Hitler ordered the operation to be halted. (He later allowed it to be resumed secretly, and in 1943 the system was extended to include orphan children.) The euthanasia issue was the only one on which the German people seem to have felt strongly, apart from the special case of the wives who protested against compulsory divorces; in each case Hitler gave way, at any rate in public, which indicates that he was less intransigent in such matters than either the Pope or the German Christian clergy supposed. But it is notable that when the same gas-chambers intended for the euthanasia victims were in fact employed on Jews of all ages, and in vast numbers, no Christian protest was heard. What the papacy failed to realize was that the Nazis were more serious enemies of Christianity than even the Communists.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Ambrose took an old-fashioned line on this, acting as a bridge between the pagan vestal and the early medieval closed convent. Virgins should not even go to church often: churches were dangerous places, because frequented. ‘Even to speak what is good is generally a fault in a virgin.’ The true virgin should remain perpetually silent. Ambrose was strict rather than severe. A virgin suspected of sexual intercourse, he ruled, should not be medically examined by force, except in certain special cases, and then only on the authority and under the supervision of a bishop. If found guilty, she should not be executed (Ambrose did not believe in capital punishment but in redemptive justice), and certainly not tortured to death. Head-shaving and penance for life would suffice. A virgin threatened with rape or imprisonment in a brothel would be justified in committing suicide. Ambrose connected in his mind the spiritual and sexual purity of the virgin with cleanliness. His virgins were spotless: his Virgin Mary, who to some extent became the medieval stereotype, wore white, silver and pale blue, the ‘cleanest’ of colours. It was quite a different matter with Jerome, his younger contemporary. He was not, like Ambrose, well adjusted to life. As secretary to Bishop Damasus, he seems at one time to have considered himself as a possible successor. But he had the temperament of the scholar, not the administrator. He was a wild man of God, not an urbane prelate. Jerome found sex an enormous difficulty. He was quite convinced it was evil: ‘Marriage is only one degree less sinful than fornication’. He found women attractive, and especially virtuous women. This was why he left fashionable Church life in Rome, writing, on board the ship which was to carry him to Palestine: ‘The only woman who took my fancy was one whom I had not seen at table. But when I began to revere, respect and venerate her, as her conspicuous chastity deserved, all my former virtues deserted me on the spot.’ By this he appears to mean that his behaviour aroused hostile and malicious comment. In Jerusalem he founded and entered a monastery from which, for the rest of his life, he conducted a vast correspondence with scholars and saintly ladies all over the empire. One of his letters (to Augustine) took nine years to arrive; most have disappeared forever. Enough survive to reveal him as a wonderfully vivid and outspoken controversialist. His image made him the favourite of all the saints among Christian painters: Jerome and his lion (a sixth-century addition) were painted more often than any other figure outside the Holy Family.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  which was continued at intervals until Constantine switched to the second sixty years later. State hostility was exercised universally, persistently, and in due legal manner. There was no longer mass-hysteria, simply relentless bureaucracy. Everyone had to obtain certificates proving he had made sacrifice to the official gods. Some of these have been recovered from sites in Egypt. Thus: ‘To the commission appointed to supervise sacrifices at the village of Alexander’s Isle. From Aurelius Diogenes, son of Satabus, of the village of Alexander’s Isle, aged 72 years, with a scar on the right eyebrow. I have always sacrificed to the gods and now in your presence in accordance with the edict I have made sacrifice and poured a libation, and partaken of the sacred victuals. I request you to certify this below. Farewell: I, Aurelius Diogenes, have presented this petition.’ There is no doubt that this and later persecutions were extremely effective. The blood of the martyrs, as Tertullian had claimed, might be the seed of the faith; but the property of the Church was a temptation to compromise. By 250, for instance, the Church in Rome was rich enough to support a bishop, forty-six presbyters, seven deacons, seven sub-deacons, forty-two acolytes and fifty-two exorcists, readers and doorkeepers; it had a charity list of over 1,500. State inventories show that vast quantities of goods were seized, gold and silver plate, precious ornaments and vestments, supplies of food and clothing, books and cash. Christian clergy might be more willing to surrender their lives than the Church’s valuables. Cyprian, writing from Africa, said there was mass apostasy, led by bishops; multitudes flocked to the magistrates to make their retractions, ‘spontanously submitting to the commissions in charge of that dreadful deed’. There was a general collapse of morale: ‘Many bishops, who ought to have been an encouragement and example to others, gave up their sacred ministry, deserted their people, left the district, tried to make money, took possession of estates by fraudulent means, and engaged in usury.’ Some of the faithful made state sacrifices but also continued as Christians; in Spain, for instance, we hear of Christians acting as civic priests. The Church was never able to adopt a uniform policy towards persecution. Thus there were acute divisions about the degree of compromise to adopt, not only between regions, but within them. Old schisms between ‘revivalist’ and ‘official’ Christians instantly reappeared and became inextricably mingled with doctrinal questions. Spasmodic persecution of Christian ‘extremists’ tended to strengthen orthodoxy in the Church, as we have noted, but

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

  If I’m lucky enough to have sex with another man, I can probably stop worrying about this part of my anatomy. I don’t want to rely on male approval, and frown when I think of my distinctly non-feminist dependence on it, but I have lost faith in the power and beauty of my body that I took for granted the last time I was single. I’m realistic about the inevitable changes that result from childbirth and age. Even though I’m grateful to have had a chance to experience both, and believe on a fundamental level that they only add to a woman’s power and beauty, I worry that for me they don’t sweeten the pot but mark me instead as if I am decaying. Over the years, I’ve worked to maintain my physique, but I did so to stay attractive and appealing to Michael, not for myself. Now I see that I need to do a search-and-rescue mission for the confidence I once had in my physical prowess, that I need to embrace the imperfections I see as battle scars and not apologize for them. Johnny is suddenly inside of me and thrusting, fast and hard. Within a couple of minutes, I worry that he is disconcertingly breathless – not lustful panting, but more the way I sound like I’m wheezing after an intense workout. “Are you OK, Johnny?’” “Yes, sorry, I’m fine.” But he does not sound fine to me; unbidden, my caretaking instincts kick in. “I think we should stop. Just lie with me while you catch your breath.” He lies next to me and I put my hand on his chest over his heart. “I’m so embarrassed,” he says, shaking his head. “I’m still recovering. I can’t do all the things I did before. It’s frustrating but also just so embarrassing.” “Shhhh,” I say, like I’m soothing a child. “It’s OK. Recovery is a process. Don’t feel bad if this is too much for you.” “I cannot believe I have a sexy woman lying naked in my bed and I can’t keep up.” “Please, don’t apologize or feel bad. You’ll get back to yourself eventually. I’m sure most men would fare much worse after having half a lung removed!” We lie quietly for a few minutes, my hand remaining firmly over his heart as it slows to its normal rhythm, and it occurs to me that just being here, being held by a man, may be enough for now. “I don’t know how you like your coffee in the morning,” he says, breaking the silence. I hesitate. I’m enjoying being held but I was not planning to spend the night and his assumption that I will makes me panic. My mind starts racing – what if I’m thinking this is a fun one-night stand but to him it’s the start of something? What if he thinks we’re embarking on a relationship of some sort?

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

  Having intercourse with Kevin reminded me that sex can be a double-edged sword and that I need to be more careful and discerning going forward. I can have sex with whomever I want whenever I want, but it needs to be because it makes me feel good and sexy and powerful, not because it meets someone else’s needs. Like most lessons, this one was painful to learn. CHAPTER 21 Another White Girl with Curly Hair I stash away my experience with #4.5 and it becomes a shameful secret I carry, starting from the moment I entered a strange man’s apartment – not just a man who was a stranger to me, but a man who even from our first phone call gave off a vibe I didn’t wholly trust. It’s not exactly like I had known #1–4 terribly well, but I did spend a few hours with each before going home with them and they had been kind, straightforward and respectful. Frankly, in each case, if anyone had been the aggressor, it was me. But I’ve got four dates lined up for my upcoming weekend, so I put #4.5 in a little box in my brain, use it as a wake-up call to be more prudent going forward, and forge ahead. First up, Friday morning, I head uptown to meet Scott for coffee. He owns a swim instruction school and will meet me during a break between lessons. He warns me he will be coming from the pool and casually dressed, so I put on a pair of cut-off jean shorts and flip-flops. I spot him in the coffee bar as I enter and he looks a lot like his pictures – tall, graying but still-thick hair, a prominent nose that looks slightly askew, like it’s been broken once or twice. We have only communicated by text, so his robust Long Island accent startles me. We take a seat at the counter and the banter between us comes easily. He is an engaged listener and lobs questions at me, which I appreciate as I always ask a lot of questions and it’s a nice break for me not to have to carry the conversation. It turns out his swim school is just a side hustle, that his main job is as a physical education teacher to kids with special needs. It also turns out that he does not live uptown as he told me via text, but a half-hour drive away (if there’s no traffic, which there always is) in Long Island.