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.

Page 55 of 267 · 20 per page

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Anti-Seducers come in many shapes and kinds, but almost all of them share a single attribute, the source of their repellence: insecurity. We are all insecure, and we suffer for it. Yet we are able to surmount these feelings at times; a seductive engagement can bring us out of our usual self-absorption, and to the degree that we seduce or are seduced, we feel charged and confident. Anti-Seducers, however, are insecure to such a de- Count Lodovico then gree that they cannot be drawn into the seductive process. Their needs, remarked with a smile: "I promise you that our their anxieties, their self-consciousness close them off. They interpret the sensible courtier will never slightest ambiguity on your part as a slight to their ego; they see the merest act so stupidly to gain a hint of withdrawal as a betrayal, and are likely to complain bitterly about it. woman's favor." • Cesare It seems easy: Anti-Seducers repel, so be repelled—avoid them. Unfor- Gonzaga replied: "Nor so stupidly as a gentleman I tunately, however, many Anti-Seducers cannot be detected as such at first remember, of some repute, glance. They are more subtle, and unless you are careful they will ensnare whom to spare men's you in a most unsatisfying relationship. You must look for clues to their blushes I don't wish to mention by name. " • self-involvement and insecurity: perhaps they are ungenerous, or they argue "Well, at least tell us what with unusual tenacity, or are excessively judgmental. Perhaps they lavish he did," said the Duchess. you with undeserved praise, declaring their love before knowing anything • Then Cesare continued: "He was loved by a very about you. Or, most important, they pay no attention to details. Since they great lady, and at her cannot see what makes you different, they cannot surprise you with nu- request he came secretly to anced attention. the town where she was. After he had seen her and It is critical to recognize anti-seductive qualities not only in others but enjoyed her company for as also in ourselves. Almost all of us have one or two of the Anti-Seducer's long as she would let him qualities latent in our character, and to the extent that we can consciously in the time, he sighed and root them out, we become more seductive. A lack of generosity, for in- wept bitterly, to show the anguish he was suffering at stance, need not signal an Anti-Seducer if it is a person's only fault, but an having to leave her, and he ungenerous person is seldom truly attractive. Seduction implies opening begged her never to forget yourself up, even if only for the purposes of deception; being unable to him; and then he added that she should pay for his

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Prado was an arrogant man, and he roundly abused the rabbis, threatening at one point to attack them in the synagogue with a drawn sword. The rabbis also acted less than honorably: they set a spy on Prado, who reported that his views had become still more radical. After his excommunication, he maintained that all religion was rubbish and that reason, not so-called “revelation,” must always be the sole arbiter of truth. Nobody knows how Prado ended his days. 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.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  54 This was all very dangerous, however. Lurianic Kabbalah was a myth; it was not intended to be translated into practical political programs in this way, but to illuminate the internal life of the spirit. Mythos and logos were complementary but entirely separate spheres and had different functions. Politics was in the domain of reason and logic; myth gave it meaning but was not intended to be interpreted as literally as Nathan had interpreted the mystical vision of Isaac Luria. Jews may have felt powerful, free, and in control of their destiny, but their circumstances had not changed. They were still weak, vulnerable, and dependent upon the goodwill of their rulers. The Lurianic image of the Messiah wrestling with the powers of darkness was a powerful symbol of the universal struggle against evil, but when the attempt was made to give the image concrete embodiment in a real, emotionally unstable human being, the result could only be disastrous. And so indeed it proved to be. In February 1666, Shabbetai set out, with Nathan’s blessing, to confront the sultan, who had understandably been much alarmed by this wild Jewish enthusiasm and, with reason, feared an uprising. When Shabbetai landed near Gallipoli, he was arrested, taken to Istanbul, brought before the sultan, and given the choice of death or conversion to Islam. To the horror of Jews all over the world, Shabbetai chose Islam. The Messiah had become an apostate. That should have been the end of the matter. The vast majority recoiled in disgust from Shabbetai and, in shame, returned to their normal life and to the full observance of the Torah, anxious to put the whole sorry business behind them. But a significant minority could not give up this dream of freedom. They could not believe that their experience of liberation during those heady months had been an illusion; they were able to come to terms with an apostate Messiah, just as the first Christians had been able to accommodate the equally scandalous idea of a Messiah who had died the death of a common criminal. Nathan, after a period of intense depression, adapted his theology. The redemption had begun, he explained to his disciples, but there had been a setback, and Shabbetai had been forced to descend still further into the realm of impurity and take the form of evil himself. This was the ultimate “holy sin,” the final act of tikkun . 55 Shabbateans, those who remained true to Shabbetai, responded to this development in different ways.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In Teresa’s case, Judaism and Christianity were able to blend fruitfully, but other, less gifted conversos experienced conflict. A case in point: Tomás de Torquemada (1420–98), the first Grand Inquisitor.22 The zeal with which he attempted to stamp out residual Judaism in Spain may perhaps have been an unconscious attempt to extirpate the old faith from his own heart. Most of the Marranos had accepted Christianity under duress, and many, it seems, had never fully made the transition to the new faith. This was hardly surprising, since, once they had been baptized, they were watched closely by the Inquisition, and lived in constant fear of arrest on the flimsiest of charges. Lighting candles on Friday evening or refusing to eat shellfish could mean imprisonment, torture, death, or, at the very least, the confiscation of one’s property. As a result, some became alienated from religion altogether. They could not fully identify with the Catholicism that made their lives a misery, and, over the years, Judaism became an unreal, distant memory. After the Great Expulsion of 1492, there were no practicing Jews left in Spain and, even if Marranos wished to practice their faith in secret, they had no means of learning about Jewish law or ritual practice. In consequence, they had no real allegiance to any faith. Long before secularism, atheism, and religious indifference became common in the rest of Europe, we find instances of these essentially modern attitudes among the Marrano Jews of the Iberian Peninsula. According to the Israeli scholar Yirmiyahu Yovel, it was quite common for conversos to be skeptical about all religion.23 Even before the Great Expulsion of 1492, some, such as Pedro and Fernando de la Caballeria, members of a great Spanish family, simply immersed themselves in politics, art, and literature, and appeared to have no interest in religion at all. Pedro, indeed, would scoff openly about being a fake Christian, which, he claimed, left him free to do as he wished without bothering about holy rules and regulations.24 Shortly before 1492, one Alvaro de Montalban was brought before the Inquisition for eating cheese and meat during Lent; he had thereby, significantly, broken not only a Christian fast but also Jewish law, which forbids the consumption of meat and dairy products together. He obviously felt no commitment to either faith. On this occasion, Alvaro escaped with a fine. He was not likely to feel warmly disposed to Catholicism. His parents had been killed by the Inquisition for practicing Judaism secretly; their bodies had been exhumed, their bones burned, and their property confiscated.25 Unable to retain even a tenuous link with Judaism, Alvaro was forced into a religious limbo. As an old man of seventy, he was finally imprisoned by the Inquisition for a repeated and deliberate denial of the doctrine of the afterlife. “Let me be well off down here,” he had said on more than one occasion, “since I don’t know if there is anything beyond.”26

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  This right to legislate did not come from the people but from God, who had passed his authority to the Prophet, to the Imams, and now to Imam Khomeini, and it was they—not the people—who gave legitimacy to the rulings of the Majlis. “So you see,” Rafsanjani argued, “democracy is present in a form better than the West,” because it was rooted in God. It was a “healthy style of government of the people, by the people, with the permission of Velayat-e Faqih.” 31 Yet again, as had happened in the West, the needs of the modern state had propelled Iran toward a democratic polity, but this time it came in an Islamic package to which the people could relate and link with their own Shii traditions. Rafsanjani had probably gone beyond his brief, but Khomeini seemed pleased. In the spring elections of 1988, he merely asked the people to support the Majlis, making no mention of the clergy. The people, who were longing for economic reconstruction, did not miss this implied rebuke, and the ulema lost half their seats. In the new Majlis, only 63 out of the 270 members had received a traditional madrasah education. 32 Again, Khomeini seemed pleased with the results. He also gave the green light to the more pragmatic politicians who, in the winter of 1988, sought to amend the constitution. In October, he insisted that the ulema must not be permitted to impede the progress of the country. The reconstruction program should be led by “experts, in particular, cabinet ministers, the appropriate Majlis committees,… scientific and research centers,… inventors, discoverers and committed specialists.” 33 Two months later, he allowed a committee to convene to revise the constitution. The more radical Islamists, who saw any dilution of Velayat-e Faqih as a betrayal of the revolution, were dismayed, but the pragmatists seemed to be winning the day, with the Imam’s approval. It was in this context of internal conflict that, on February 14, 1989, four months before his death, Khomeini issued his fatwa against the British Indian author Salman Rushdie. In his novel The Satanic Verses , Rushdie had created what many Muslims regarded as a blasphemous portrait of the Prophet Muhammad, which presented him as a lecher, a charlatan, and a tyrant, and—most dangerously—suggested that the Koran had been tainted by satanic influence. It was a novel that brilliantly expressed the giddy confusion of the postmodern world, where there are no boundaries, no certainties, and no clearly or easily defined identity. The passages that gave offense were the recorded dreams and fantasies of a deracinated Indian film star, who is suffering a breakdown and has interiorized the anti-Islamic prejudices of the West. The blasphemy was also an attempt to cancel the clinging relics of the past and to achieve an independent identity, free of old shibboleths. But many Muslims experienced this portrait of Muhammad as profoundly wounding. It seemed a violation of something sacred to their own Muslim personae .

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

  Islamic and Jewish heritage of his country in mind, denied that the conventional notion of the Trinity could be found in the Bible; he had already been condemned by a Catholic inquisition as a heretic, with Calvin’s connivance. Calvin saw his duty as clear: Servetus must die. So the Genevan city authorities burned Servetus at the stake, though Calvin wanted a more merciful death, such as beheading. Thus Calvin established that Protestants were as determined as Catholics to represent the mainstream traditional Christianity which had culminated in the Council of Chalcedon in 451.47 Consistently with this, from 1536 Calvin published and repeatedly rewrote a textbook of doctrine, the Institution of the Christian Religion – commonly known as the Institutes.48 This was designed to lay claim to Catholic Christianity for the Reformation: since the Pope obstructed the Reformation, he was Antichrist, and Protestants were the true Catholics. In greatly expanded later editions and the complete rearrangement which Calvin made in 1559 not long before his death, virtually all the original text is still there. The opening sentence was never displaced, though Calvin enlarged its scope from a reference simply to ‘sacred [i.e. Christian] doctrine’ to all human knowledge; so in the 1559 version it reads, ‘Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves’.49 From this premise, Calvin leaps to another assumption fundamental to his book from 1536 onwards: scrutinizing ourselves honestly after contemplating God is bound to shame us. None of our capacities can lift us from this abyss in our fallen state, only an act of free grace from God. This is Augustine restated, the Luther of the Slavery of the Will. For Calvin this ‘double knowledge’ (duplex cognitio) lay at the heart of Catholic Christianity, and it became his life’s work to recall his beloved France to a real version of the Catholic Church. Over time, he came to explain the failures of the Reformation by reference to a doctrine which Luther had also held, but which many of his fellow Lutherans followed Melanchthon in finding difficult and downplayed: God’s plan of predestination. After reading Bucer’s commentary on Romans of 1536, Calvin discussed this in increasing intricacy in the Institutes’ enlargements. If salvation was entirely in God’s hands, as Luther said, and human works were of no avail, then logically God took decisions on individual salvation without reference to an individual’s life-story. God decided to save some and logically also to consign others to damnation. Predestination was thus double. Evidently those who did not listen to and act on the Word were among the damned; that lessened the sense of disappointment that not all heeded the Reformation message. The good news was that the elect of God could not lose their salvation. The doctrine of election became ever more important, and

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  They find relief in the breaking of old taboos. Some have even gone so far as to evolve a theology of “holy sin.” When the scandal which held the nation enthralled finally broke in March 1987, it appeared that something of the sort may have been going on in PTL circles. The Charlotte Observer alleged that in 1980, Jim Bakker had drugged and seduced Jessica Hahn, a church secretary from Long Island, and then paid her $250,000 to keep quiet. 115 On the heels of this revelation, it emerged that Tammy Faye had become so infatuated with country-and-western singer Gary Paxton that she had broken up his marriage. When the sordid truth was out, however, the Bakkers did not slink away in shame, but went public with their contrition, chattering to huge television audiences about God’s love and forgiveness. Falwell’s regime in Lynchburg had been an attempt to hold on to the restraints of the conservative, premodern religion, which had helped people to accept necessary limitations. The Bakkers’ story shows what happens when these restraints are entirely cast aside. Where other fundamentalist movements sprang from the experience of suppression, the Bakkers’ postmodern Christianity expressed the late-twentieth-century conviction that “anything goes.” With vast sums of money at their command, the Bakkers felt they could make anything happen. There were no limitations, and old categories of right and wrong could be dissolved as easily as truth and fiction in Heritage USA. That this was all a distortion of Christianity goes without saying. Then new horrors came to light. Jim Bakker resigned from PTL and asked Jerry Falwell to rescue the network by acting as temporary caretaker. Jim then turned on Jimmy Swaggart, who had brought the scandal to light, claiming that Swaggart had been plotting to take over PTL. Swaggart, for his part, had been making his own foray into antinomianism. At this time, Swaggart was probably the most successful of the televangelists. His shows were screened in 145 countries and, so he claimed, were available to half the homes on the planet. But he had taken to visiting a prostitute in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The woman, who later sold her story, made it clear that Swaggart was less interested in sex than in ritual humiliation and abasement. He also seemed to be courting self-destruction, since he knew that people had seen and recognized him at the motel and yet continued to go there until all hell broke loose. His misconduct was revealed by another minister, Marvin Gorman, whom Swaggart had attacked on his show. 116 Swaggart was a Pentecostalist. In its early days, Pentecostalism had been the polar opposite of fundamentalism, attempting to bypass reason and give voice to the ineffability of divine truth.

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

  Naturally a created human being would have a different relationship to the first cause of all things than she or he would to other objects of creation which were capable of secondary causation – such as the emperor. If one accepted this vocabulary and Aristotelian framework, then devotion to visual images in Christianity was safe.52 Constantine V might nevertheless have carried the day and set patterns for his successor had it not been for the intervention of the Empress Irene, widow of his son Leo IV. Irene became regent for her son Constantine VI on Leo’s death in 780. There was a long tradition in Byzantine history of imperial women intervening in political decisions which became theological decisions, even before Pulcheria, who had so shaped the Council of Chalcedon (see pp. 226–7), and Irene was not the last. Now she took the initiative in convening a council to authorize images once more. Her motives for switching imperial policy so drastically are impenetrable. Later, when the twenty-six-year-old Emperor Constantine showed signs of wishing to exercise real power, she ordered him to be blinded in the same palace chamber where she had given birth to him, leaving her free to become the first sole-ruling empress in Byzantine history. This does not suggest a contemplative spirit any more than it reveals a strong maternal instinct. Irene was determined to assert her will against the establishment in Church and Palace; after a first set of meetings had been taken over by iconoclast bishops and sympathetic troops, she followed the example of Constantine the Great nearly five centuries before and in 787 called the bishops together at the more easily controlled venue of Nicaea. The Patriarch – actually a hastily consecrated layman chosen for his hostility to iconoclasm – presided, but his proceedings were scrutinized closely by the Empress regent and her teenage (as yet unblinded) son. The council made official the distinction already set out by John of Damascus between latreia and proskynēsis. It might have been supposed that this reaffirmation of images would have gratified the outraged Church authorities in the West – and indeed Pope Hadrian I gave an enthusiastic reception to the Acts of the second Council of Nicaea. This was one of the last occasions when a pope would thus hail the work of a patriarch in Constantinople, but in politics there were other realities to consider. In Francia, Charlemagne was shaping an empire for the West, based on his Frankish monarchy, and after his coronation, in 800, the relationship of this newly minted emperor with the holders of the ancient imperial title in the East was fraught (see pp. 349–50). Charlemagne’s hostility to the imperial power in the East was sharpened by a disastrous Latin mistranslation of one part of the council’s Acts: one of the bishops of the Church in Cyprus was represented as saying that he gave the same veneration to images as to the Trinity, when he had

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  During the 1980S, however, fundamentalism received a severe setback. There was no murder of a president, no terrorist campaign. Instead the fundamentalist cause was damaged by a scandal that was just as destructive and nihilistic in its own way, threatening to drown the televangelists in a sea of triviality, money-grubbing, and sexual intrigue. Was there anything about the nature of American fundamentalism that contributed to the Television Scandals of 1987? Because of the Christian concern with doctrine, Protestant fundamentalism had set out in a different direction from the other movements we have considered. The Jewish and Muslim emphasis on practice had meant that fundamentalists in these faiths had turned the myths of their traditions into ideologies. Some of their worst excesses had come about because they had tried to realize these mythologies literally in the practical world of affairs. They had sought to meet the modern criterion of efficiency, in which a “truth” had to work effectively in order to be taken seriously. Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists had turned their mythoi into pragmatic logoi designed to achieve a practical result. Protestant fundamentalists had perverted myth in a different way. They had turned the Christian myths into scientific facts, and had created a hybrid that was neither good science nor good religion. This had run counter to the whole tradition of spirituality and had involved great strain, since religious truth is not rational in nature and cannot be proved scientifically. Because Protestant fundamentalists tended to overlook the intuitive and the mystical, they had also lost touch with the unconscious, deeper impulses of the personality. As a result, American revivalism had sometimes been anarchic and neurotic. By the late 1980S, some fundamentalists were ready to revolt against the constraints of this rationalistic faith. Sex, as we have seen, was problematic for fundamentalists, many of whom appeared to be anxious about potency and gender boundaries. It was not surprising, perhaps, that the rebellion, when it came, took a sexual form. Television and the public adulation that sometimes comes with it are also traps for the spiritually unwary. Not only is the narcissism involved in a personality cult incompatible with the transcendence of ego that should characterize the spiritual quest, but the televangelist could also lose touch with reality. The vast sums of money that the more successful networks could command sat uneasily with the Gospel demand to abandon the pursuit of material wealth. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of PTL (Praise The Lord and People That Love) network in North Carolina had attracted adverse criticism for their extravagant lifestyle. The Charlotte Observer had for some years been pointing out that while they urged their viewers to make sacrifices and give their money to the needy, the Bakkers themselves had spent $375,000 on an ocean-front condominium and $22,000 on floor-to-ceiling mirrors.112 All this was a far cry from Jerry Falwell’s regime in Lynchburg, which was characterized by sobriety and self-restraint.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Atheists were beginning to take the high moral ground. This became clear in the aftermath of the publication of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, by Charles Darwin (1809–82). This represented a new phase of modern science. Instead of collecting facts, as Bacon had prescribed, Darwin put forward a hypothesis: animals, plants, and human beings had not been created fully formed (as the Bible implied), but had developed slowly in a long period of evolutionary adaptation to their environment. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin proposed that Homo sapiens had evolved from the same proto-ape that was the progenitor of the orangutan, gorilla, and chimpanzee. Darwin’s name has become a byword for atheism in fundamentalist circles, yet the Origin was not intended as an attack upon religion, but was a sober, careful exposition of a scientific theory. Darwin himself was an agnostic but always respectful of religious faith. Nevertheless, the Origin was a watershed. It sold 1400 copies on the day of publication. Certainly, it and Darwin’s later work dealt another blow to human self-esteem. Copernicus had displaced humanity from the center of the cosmos, Descartes and Kant had alienated humans from the physical world, and now Darwin had suggested that they were simply animals. They had not been specially created by God, but had evolved like everything else. Indeed, there seemed no place for God in the creative process and the world, “red in tooth and claw,” had no divine purpose.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  As students in Cairo, Banna and his friends were moved almost to tears by the political and social confusion in the city.60 There was a political stalemate: the parties engaged in fruitless and vociferous debate and were still manipulated by the British, who despite Egyptian “independence” remained very much in command of the country. When Banna took up his first teaching post in Ismailiyyah in the Suez Canal Zone, where the British were ensconced, the humiliation of his people affected his very soul. The British and other expatriates had no interest in the local population, but kept a firm hand on the economy and public utilities. He was shamed by the contrast between the luxurious homes of the British and the miserable hovels of the Egyptian workers.61 For Banna, a devout Muslim, this was not merely a matter of politics. The condition of the ummah, the Muslim community, is as crucial a religious value in Islam as a particular doctrinal formulation in Christianity. Banna was as spiritually distressed by the plight of his people as a Protestant fundamentalist when he felt that the inerrancy of the Bible had been impugned, or a member of Neturei Karta when he saw what he regarded as the desecration of the Holy Land by the Zionists. Banna was especially concerned to see the people drifting away from the mosques. The vast majority of Egyptians had not been included in the modernization process, and they were bewildered by the Western ideas they encountered in the numerous newspapers, journals, and magazines that were published in Cairo, which seemed either to have nothing in common with or to be positively hostile toward Islam. The ulema had turned their backs on the modern scene, and could offer the people no effective guidance, and the politicians made no sustained attempt to deal with the social, economic, or educational problems of the masses.62 Banna decided that something had to be done. It was no good having high-flown discussions about nationalism and Egypt’s future relationship with Europe when the vast bulk of the population felt confused and demoralized. As he saw it, the only way the people could find spiritual healing was by returning to the first principles of the Koran and the Sunnah.

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

  been preserved for us in the rubbish pits and desert sands of Egypt.43 The order was coupled with punishment, usually imprisonment but in some cases death, for those who refused. Two later emperors, Trebonianus Gallus and Valerian, revived the policy in 252 and 257 between their many other preoccupations, and persecution was only abandoned in 260 by Gallienus, son and successor of the hapless Persian prisoner Valerian, because the empire faced so many other pressing dangers. But in the previous decade, the Christian Church had been severely damaged, not so much in terms of death and suffering, because few died outside a small group of leaders, but in terms of morale. The truth is that the overwhelming majority of Christians gave way. This might have been predicted, because the same thing had happened when, for instance, Pliny the Younger had arrested Bithynian Christians back in 112. It was only natural to wish to obey the emperor: that most Christians felt a deep reverence for the empire is obvious from their leading writers’ confused and contradictory statements about the limits on obedience to it.44 Moreover, the Church as a whole was not used to persecution, or certainly not a systematic campaign directed from the centre. Trouble did not end when persecution ended and the leadership began picking up the pieces. The bishops’ authority was at stake. Some bishops had followed the Lord’s command recorded in John’s Gospel to suffer martyrdom bravely and had been killed (including the Bishops of Antioch, Jerusalem and Rome). Others had followed the Lord’s precisely contradictory advice to be found in Matthew’s Gospel to flee from city to city; they included such important figures as the Bishops of Carthage and Alexandria.45 Those who had fled were likely to come in for criticism from those who had stayed and suffered for their faith; from the Roman technical legal term for someone who pleads guilty as accused in court, these steadfast Christians were termed ‘confessors’. Confessors provided the troubled Church with an alternative sort of authority based on their sufferings, particularly when arguments began about how and how much to forgive those Christians who had given way to imperial orders – the so-called ‘lapsed’. Many of the lapsed flocked to the confessors to gain pardon and re-entry to the Church, and the bishops did not like this at all. Especially important disputes broke out in Rome and Carthage over the issue of forgiveness. Faced with both defiance from some confessors and the election of a rival bishop, Bishop Cyprian of Carthage engaged in pamphlet warfare, producing statements about the role of a bishop in the Church which were long to outlive this particular dispute. He came to see authority for forgiveness of sins as vested in the bishop and he stressed that the bishop was the focus for unity in the whole Catholic Church, a successor of the

• From Action (2014)

  [image file=image_161.jpg] Treating sex as an unsavory, improper, or inappropriate topic is one of the most oppressive forces grinding down our individual and collective happiness. You know how anything more revelatory than stony opacity about money—talking about one’s salary, expenditures, et cetera—is considered gauche? Clock how the richest people continue to remain the only segment of the population with access to the wildly complex specifics of how becoming wealthy functionally happens while the poor are stuck with “secrets” that nobody wants to know and that everyone already knows anyway, aka that being broke sucks, life is too expensive, debt is meant to fuck you not help you, and money is everything. Sex is similar, except in this case, the stigmatized are people who cop to being interested in it who aren’t straight men. (And then straight men are left working inside a system where they are supposed to believe that they’re the only people who enjoy, or are being served by, sex, which, in addition to being morally and ethically backward—plus interpersonally alienating—makes them garbage lays, and advises them to police some of the people they’d benefit from allowing sexual autonomy. All of that is far less pressing than what precedes this parenthetical, though.) The ettiquette in play here works the same way as shushing salary talk: things stay the same for those reaping the paver, and vice versa. I suspect that many of our internal panic-hurricanes that keep us from talking about sex come from whether we’re convincingly puppeteering the gendered costumes we’re wearing—whether we know that that’s the cause of our anxieties or not. As with so many of life’s dumbest facets, shyness surrounding sex can stem in part from how masculine and feminine norms are expressed on a cultural level, which is to say immaculately. THEY’RE THE BEST, JUST LOVE ’EM, LUV BEING A “GIRL” WITH MY “PURSE” OF “HAIRSTYLES.” No, of course gender roles necessitate feelings of inadequacy in their very being. That is their point. It’s absurd, but who among us hasn’t felt like shit based on observing the twinkling heteronormatoné casts of toothpaste commercials, or by uneasily taking in comedy routines about the uproarious and irreconcilable differences between the sexes as conveyed by our attitudes about Valentine’s Day/parents-in-law/the color or yeastiness of the alcoholic beverages we like (followed by the equally boring commentary about just how downright condemnable those aforementioned yuk-yuk jokes are for assuming broad tropes of nuanced people—aka this sentence)? We are made to feel rude for our difference.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography 3 When I was five years old and still legally blind, I started school in a sight-conservation class in the local public school on 135th Street and Lenox Avenue. On the corner was a blue wooden booth where white women gave away free milk to Black mothers with children. I used to long for some Hearst Free Milk Fund milk, in those cute little bottles with their red and white tops, but my mother never allowed me to have any, because she said it was charity, which was bad and demeaning, and besides the milk was warm and might make me sick. The school was right across the avenue from the catholic school where my two older sisters went, and this public school had been used as a threat against them for as long as I could remember. If they didn’t behave and get good marks in school-work and deportment, they could be “transferred.” A “transfer” carried the same dire implications as “deportation” came to imply decades later. Of course everybody knew that public school kids did nothing but “fight,” and you could get “beaten up” every day after school, instead of being marched out of the schoolhouse door in two neat rows like little robots, silent but safe and unattacked, to the corner where the mothers waited. But the catholic school had no kindergarten, and certainly not one for blind children. Despite my nearsightedness, or maybe because of it, I learned to read at the same time I learned to talk, which was only about a year or so before I started school. Perhaps learn isn’t the right word to use for my beginning to talk, because to this day I don’t know if I didn’t talk earlier because I didn’t know how, or if I didn’t talk because I had nothing to say that I would be allowed to say without punishment. Self-preservation starts very early in West Indian families. I learned how to read from Mrs. Augusta Baker, the children’s librarian at the old 135th Street branch library, which has just recently been torn down to make way for a new library building to house the Schomburg Collection on African-American History and Culture. If that was the only good deed that lady ever did in her life, may she rest in peace. Because that deed saved my life, if not sooner, then later, when sometimes the only thing I had to hold on to was knowing I could read, and that that could get me through. My mother was pinching my ear off one bright afternoon, while I lay spreadeagled on the floor of the Children’s Room like a furious little brown toad, screaming bloody murder and embarrassing my mother to death.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Reluctantly, Mendelssohn felt bound to respond, and in 1783 he published Jerusalem, Concerning Religious Authority and Judaism. The German Enlightenment was quite positive toward religion, and Mendelssohn himself seemed to share the same serene deist faith as Locke, though it is difficult to recognize it as Judaism. Mendelssohn seemed to find the existence of a benevolent God a matter of common sense, but insisted that reason must precede faith. We could only accept the authority of the Bible after we had demonstrated its truth rationally. This, of course, totally reversed the priorities of traditional, conservative faith, which took it for granted that reason could not demonstrate the truth of the kind of myths found in the scriptures. Mendelssohn also argued for the separation of church and state, and for the privatization of religion—a solution that was very attractive to Jews who longed to shake off the restrictions of the ghetto and become involved in mainstream European culture. By making their faith a purely personal affair, they could both remain Jewish and become good Europeans. Mendelssohn insisted that Judaism was a rational faith that was eminently suited to the temper of the times; its doctrines were based on reason. When God had revealed himself to Moses on Mount Sinai, he had brought the Jewish people a law and not a set of doctrines. Judaism was, therefore, only concerned with morality and human behavior; it left the minds of Jews entirely free. Mendelssohn seemed to have little understanding of the mystical and mythical element in Judaism; his was the first of a number of attempts to make Judaism acceptable to the modern world by forcing it into a rationalistic mold that was alien to it—as it was alien to most religions. Mendelssohn’s ideas were, of course, anathema to the Hasidim and Misnagdim of Eastern Europe, as well as to the more Orthodox Jews of the Western world. He was reviled as a new Spinoza, a heretic who had abandoned the faith and gone over to the gentiles. Yet this would have grieved Mendelssohn; while he clearly found much of traditional Judaism incredible and alien, he did not want to abandon the Jewish God or his Jewish identity. He had a significant number of disciples, however. Ever since the Shabbetai Zevi affair, many Jews had shown that they longed to transcend the strictures of traditional Judaism, which they found confining. They were happy to follow Mendelssohn’s example: to mix in gentile society, study the new sciences, and keep their faith a private matter. Mendelssohn was one of the first to devise a way out of the ghetto into modern Europe that did not oblige Jews to reject their people and their own cultural heritage.

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

  little investment in the anti-clerical rhetoric common in northern Europe, but they also threw up some surprising variants beyond the Church hierarchy’s control, under the stress of shocks to society like the Black Death or the French invasions of the 1490s: the flagellant movement (see pp. 400–401) and the Florentine Piagnoni, who revered Savonarola’s memory (see pp. 592–3). Now their capacity for renewal and self-propagation produced more surprising offshoots. In 1497 Ettore Vernazza, a layman from Genoa, founded a confraternity which he called the Oratory of Divine Love. He was much influenced by his spiritual contacts with an aristocratic mystic, Caterina Adorno: she was preoccupied both with reverence for the Eucharist and with comforting and helping the sick, particularly victims of that new and especially terrifying and shaming disease syphilis, which appeared for the first time alongside French armies in the 1490s (see p. 563). The Oratory reflected these twin concerns: clergy and laity combined communal devotions and care for the sick, including the administration of a syphilis hospice. Not unconnected with this latter work was provision for gentlefolk in financial or other distress, a distinctively Italian charitable concern which became a prominent feature in various parallel foundations in other cities.2 Several leaders prominent in the Italian Church’s later recovery of nerve against the Reformation learned pious activism in oratories, and some extended this into the renewal of various religious orders. One founding member of an Oratory of Divine Love in Rome between 1514 and 1517 was a nobleman of Naples, Giovanni (Gian) Pietro Carafa. Carafa turned away in self-disgust from a comfortable Church career as a papal official financed by multiple benefices, and in 1524 he joined with Gaetano da Thiene, a nobly born priest from Vicenza and fellow member of the Roman Oratory, to found a congregation of clergy under special vows, or ‘clerks regular’, in an echo of the ‘Canons Regular’ of long-standing Augustinian usage (see p. 392). Their austere life was intended to provide a shaming example of vocation to less conscientious priests. Carafa was at that time Bishop of Chieti or ‘Theate’, hence the new order was called the Theatines.3 In northern Europe, such commitment among serious-minded articulate clergy was rapidly being diverted into new forms of Protestant clerical ministry: the difference in this Mediterranean initiative by a former papal diplomat was its complete loyalty to the papacy. That loyalty, which fatefully shaped Carafa’s entire career, was twinned with his talent for hatred, the diverse if not contradictory objects of which included Spaniards (loathed automatically by all patriotic Neapolitans as their colonial power) but extended also to Erasmus, Protestants and Jews. A different form of loyalty to Rome was shown by another member of the

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

  written in mid-life, he observed with no condemnation of his former career that he had been ‘upon the whole, satisfied with it, as the appointment Providence had marked out for me’.2 The trade taught him discipline, and formed the setting for his Evangelical Calvinist conversion in 1747, after which happy experience he continued to pass on his new-found discipline to his unruly charges by applying thumbscrews to them when necessary. A stroke, not any qualm of conscience about slavery, ended his career at sea in 1754. It took three decades for him publicly to express revulsion for his old business and make common cause with those now seeking to abolish it, grown from a group of eccentrics to a national movement. ‘I am bound in conscience,’ the old man said bravely in 1788, ‘to take shame to myself by a public confession, which, however sincere, comes too late to prevent or repair the misery and mischief to which I have, formally been an accessory.’3 Newton’s belated change of heart was part of a new departure in Christianity: a conviction which over two centuries has now become well-nigh universal among Christians that slavery in all circumstances is against the will of God. There had of course long been a widespread opinion that slavery was not a desirable condition – particularly for oneself. Frequently Christians had felt that being a Christian and being a slave were not compatible, so that it was an act of Christian charity to free slaves. But that is very different from condemning the whole institution – hardly surprisingly, since the Christian Bible, both Tanakh and New Testament, unmistakably takes the condition of slavery for granted.4 Quite apart from its general connivance with slavery’s existence, the Bible contributed a useful prop to the institution, in the story of the drunkenness of Noah. A drunken and naked Noah was humiliated when his son Ham saw him in this state, and subsequently Noah cursed Canaan, son of Ham, and all his descendants to slavery at the hands of Ham’s elder brothers, Shem and Japheth.5 Apart from its popularity among medieval Western preachers, who saw in the story a pleasingly ingenious allegory of Christ’s Passion and human redemption (Michelangelo uses it thus on the Sistine Chapel ceiling), this story was regularly trotted out by slave traders both Christian and Muslim to justify enslaving Africans, children of Ham.6 It is in early Muslim sources that the Bible’s listing of many black races among Ham’s descendants was first extended into an aspect of Noah’s curse – the first Muslims were familiar with black slaves from across the Red Sea. This interpretation ignored the fact that the Bible indicated that the curse was actually pronounced on Canaan and not his voyeur father (a baffling shift which Genesis does not explain), and further that Canaanites were not actually among the black races of the ancient world.7 The link between blackness and slavery reached the Christian West late, and it

• From Action (2014)

  Chris picked me up on the sidewalk and we stole into a diner and ordered hamburgers on English muffins (an ancient aphrodisiac, so I have heard, or would like to pretend I have heard). We hated being broken up almost as much as we hated being a couple, so we agreed to reinstate the mock-casual rituals of preliminary dating, when you don’t know someone yet, so are able to make yourself sick gorging on your crush on them. We dutifully visited parks and photographed each other among their blossoms, plus ate at places with homey linoleum-paved tables, like this one, the location of which made it convenient to hop right back up to the room my roommate had vacated some hours earlier. Chris, like Ahmed, was wiry and avian-boned, but tall, and the nice thing about going on these impostor first dates with him was that, after, we got to skip the tentative nametag–style HELLO MY BODY IS introductory sex, since we’d already been fucking for two years. All of the excitement, none of the awkwardness, I’d say if I didn’t think those two things were inextricable. I didn’t think of Will or Ahmed while I was with Chris, but I was flimsily aware of their participation in the memory this day would become underneath the moment unfolding, in which Chris had his palms on my lower back. Until now, I have kept all of this a secret. It’s one-eighth because I wanted this private in-joke stashed where I exclusively could enjoy it, but I know the other majority of my brain concealed it because I didn’t want to feel horrible about it—a realization that, upon having it the day after, totally made me feel horrible about it. Up until that point, I had had some, but not much, casual sex, and even though this seemed totally quotidian as it was happening, the network of other people’s potential reactions kept me clammed up about it. I imagined being told, “YOU’RE BRAGGING,” and, “YOU’RE OUT OF CONTROL,” which are two of the main fears I harbor in all areas of my life, by anyone to whom I might have mentioned the triptych of different bedspread patterns I saw on my bed crawl.

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

  claim full jurisdiction over English clergy, at a time when the Church’s canon law was far more comprehensively developed. A party of Henry’s knights took the initiative in murdering Becket at the altar in his own cathedral in 1170. It was a disaster for the public image of the English monarchy, inspiring Henry’s undeferential neighbour King William I of Scotland gleefully to found a monastery at Arbroath dedicated to Becket, only eight years after the archbishop’s martyrdom. The monks of Christ Church Canterbury, who had never liked Becket in life, had plenty of reason to be grateful to him after his death, since he attracted a considerable pilgrimage cult to their cathedral, magnificently rebuilt to highlight his shrine.20 Yet the English monarchy was no more permanently intimidated by papal claims to superior jurisdiction than were later Holy Roman Emperors; the relationship remained always open to negotiation. The same was true of those devout heirs of the Merovingian monarchs and servants of St Denis, the kings of France, or indeed any of the monarchies of Europe who took on their own sacred trappings. In many kingdoms of Europe, particularly in Aragon, monarchs were known to assert their own semi-priestly character by themselves preaching sermons on great occasions, despite angry protests from senior churchmen.21 A universal monarchy, however notional, needed a complex central bureaucracy. The popes had earlier built up a permanent staff of assistant clergy, cardinals. They were so called from the Latin cardo, meaning a wedge rammed between timbers, for ‘cardinals’ were originally exceptionally able or useful priests thrust into a church from outside – their appointment had systematically breached the early Church’s (fairly breachable) convention that clergy should keep in the same place for life.22 From the twelfth century these cardinals gained their own power, including the privilege of electing a new pope. Like every other European monarch, the Bishop of Rome found that he needed a Court (Curia); this would not only provide him with more personal and less independent attendants than the cardinals had become, but would also meet the ever-growing demand from the faithful of Europe that the pope must do business for them. So in the 1090s the crusader-pope, Urban II, formalized structures for his Curia which became permanent. Rome’s newly imposed importance in the everyday life of the Church meant that it was worth making the long journey there. A monastery might seek a privilege like Fleury’s or Cluny’s to stop interference from a local bishop; an illegitimate boy might need a dispensation to get round the Church’s rules excluding bastards from the priesthood; a nobleman, desperate for a legitimate heir under the rules of primogeniture, might need to have his childless marriage declared non-existent. One petitioner in the time of Pope Innocent III in 1206

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

  Mexico City, Bartolomé de Albornoz, in a book on contract law published in 1571, had the clearsightedness to condemn the common argument that Africans were being saved from pagan darkness by their removal to America, remarking sarcastically, ‘I do not believe that it can be demonstrated that according to the law of Christ the liberty of the soul can be purchased by the servitude of the body.’43 His words found few echoes: such missionary concern as there was was mostly limited to souls. In early-seventeenth-century Cartagena in what is now Colombia, one of only two entry points for slaves in the Spanish dominions, two maverick Jesuits, Alonso de Sandoval and Pedro Claver, spent years amid terrible conditions ministering to and baptizing those West African slaves who had managed to survive the Atlantic crossing and were newly arrived in the docks. A telling detail of the Jesuits’ ministry was to make sure that their baptismal ceremony included plenty of cool drinkable water; the desperate and grateful slave would be more receptive to the Christian message.In its context, this pastoral work was bravely countercultural, arousing real disapproval among the settler population, but the Jesuits’ efforts to instil first a sense of sin (particularly sexual sin) and then repentance in their wretched penitents now seem oddly placed amid one of the greatest communal sins perpetrated by Western Christian culture.44 Attempts to adjust the system and improve on their work by transferring baptism across the Atlantic do not impress. The city of Loanda in what is now Angola was the main departure point for enslaved people from the south-west, and the clergy’s main role in the city became to baptize them before departure; right up to the 1870s, forty years after the British had declared slavery abolished in their dominions and the Portuguese had officially followed suit, the Portuguese Bishop of Loanda was accustomed to being enthroned in a marble chair at the dockside, presiding over the rite before captives were dispatched across the Atlantic.45 It was hardly surprising that popular mission was hampered in Africa or that the native population despised Christianity. The most promising initiative for Catholic Christianity came under local patronage rather than at the command of Portuguese guns: in the Central African Atlantic kingdom of Kongo. Here the ruler Mvemba Nzinga became a fervent Christian and adopted the Portuguese title of Afonso I. He welcomed Iberian priests, saw to it that one of his sons was consecrated in Portugal in 1518 as a bishop, opened schools to teach the Portuguese language, and created a stately inland cathedral city, São Salvador, as his capital; he has been called ‘one of the greatest lay Christians in African Church history’.46 His successors continued officially Catholic into the eighteenth century, and together with their nobility they created a genuinely indigenous Church (see Plate 16). Its government was