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Last week I gave a keynote address at the Society for the Study of Theology annual conference, which was on the theme “Theology: A Discipline of Failure?” Below is the text of my paper.

“I couldn’t encounter my loss face to face”[1][2]

As I write this piece, US and Israeli bombs continue to fall on Iran. US secretary of defence Pete Hegseth, author of American Crusade, tattooed with Christian insignia including both a Jerusalem Cross and a Chi Rho, recently quoted the Bible at a Pentagon briefing.[3] A few weeks ago, Christian pastors gathered in the Oval Office to pray for Trump as he led the US into war.[4] Theologian James Orr was recently appointed head of policy for Reform UK.[5] Billionaire Peter Thiel — friend of Jeffrey Epstein, fan of Tolkien, and founder of Palantir — continues to tour his Girardian theology of the end times, according to which we are invited to view Greta Thunberg as the avatar of the antichrist.[6] Perhaps the problem contemporary theology faces as a discipline is not so much its failure as its success.

But we are here to talk about failure. I have argued elsewhere that if there is one thing that Christians can agree on, it is that theology has failed. I am conscious that not all SST members are Christians, and I so hope it is not too much of a colonizing move to suggest that we might broaden this still further: if there is one thing we can all agree on, it is that theology has failed. Things become tricky only when we try to pin down precisely what has gone wrong, and why. In this paper I will take as my starting point a 2024 paper by Esther McIntosh and Anupama Ranawana, which argues that SST specifically has failed in the face of the ongoing genocide in Palestine. I will suggest that failure is best understood neither as a falling away from an original goodness or as a disordering of theology’s inherent orientation towards a particular telos but as inherent and constitutive. The question we should be asking is not how to stop failing but, rather, how to relate to failure. Whether or not we are willing to acknowledge it, theology has always renewed itself through its liaisons with its others, and I will argue that the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan offers us resources for considering this question – how to relate to failure? If Palestine is now, as Steven Salaita argues, an “avatar of campus suppression”, it is because it also condenses so many of the urgent crises we face today.[7]

If I am pessimistic about the possibility of our agreeing on the nature of theological failure, then all the more so about the possibility that we might agree on what theology is. For the purposes of this paper, let us assume that (to lightly paraphrase the SST constitution) ‘theology’ refers to everyone engaged in what they consider to be theology, across a wide range of contexts including the academy and the churches. Theology is done not only in preaching, teaching, and research, but also in the work of making and remaking the institutions in and by which theology is done – in administration, in informal networks of influence and prestige, in mentoring and pastoral care just as much as in gossip and in whisper networks. I think it is crucial, as theologians, that we reflect not only on what we think, but also on what we do, consciously and unconsciously. I am conscious here that my primary location in a university will shape what I say, and want to emphasise that this is not intended in any way to disparage or dismiss the theological work done in churches and elsewhere (some of my best friends are priests).

To begin, then. In their 2024 paper, ‘Silence is Complicity: Theological Failure in the Face of Genocide’, Esther McIntosh and Anupama Ranawana argue that SST has failed in the face of the ongoing genocide in Palestine.[8] “This failure”, they argue, “in the form of theological silence, is complicity” in the ongoing injustices suffered by Palestinians.[9] This silence, the authors argue, is in conflict with SST’s 2016 Theology and Race report, which argued that “British academic theologians need to engage critically with the role of race in the formation of the discipline in the context of race in the UK and the British Empire.”[10] Since McIntosh and Ranawana’s paper was published, SST has sought to address the issue of Palestine in both speech and action. The Society organised an online event on “Theology and the War in Gaza” in 2024, issued a public statement in 2025, and in 2025 also decided to relocate from the University of Warwick, where staff and student campaigns to end the university’s complicity in “genocide, the arms trade & occupied apartheid Palestine” have so far been unsuccessful.[11] Despite these developments, I think that McIntosh and Ranawana are right to see in SST’s response to the genocide a failure. But their critique gives us too much credit.

Theology has a long history when it comes to justifying slaughter. In 1274 Humbert of Romans, Master General of the Dominican Order, wrote a treatise which set out to theologically justify the crusades and to respond to various critics who saw crusading as incompatible with the demands of Christianity.[12] Some people, he said, were arguing that it was wrong for Christians to shed blood. After all, don’t the examples of Christ and the martyrs demonstrate that the truly Christian path is to turn the other cheek and to refuse violence, even if it costs us our lives? Ah, says Humbert, there is a time to build and a time to tear down buildings, a time to refuse the sword and a time to take it up. What if infidels wanted to kill every Christian and erase Christianity from the face of the earth; surely then Christians would not continue to preach peace? There is no end to the hostility and ill-will of the Muslims, he claims. How can Christians accept the occupation of the land of Israel by such an evil people, who do not allow for true Christian worship? Did not God command the Hebrews never to make treaties with the worshippers of false gods who occupied the promised land? The Crusaders, Humbert insists, are not invading other people’s territory, but taking back their own land, the land which God gave first to the Jews and then to the Christians.

Humbert goes on to remind his readers of Jesus’ parable about a field where the wheat was growing alongside weeds. The servants of the field’s owner asked if they should pull up the weeds, but the owner told them to hold back – pulling up the weeds would also damage the wheat. Instead, he said, the servants should wait until harvest time to separate out the good plants from the bad. But what of a field which has only weeds and no wheat? Should the plants not all be pulled up? Is the Holy Land not like a fig tree which bears no fruit, and should be cut down; or like the city of Sodom, in which not even ten good men could be found, and which should be razed to the ground with fire?

The editors’ note I have attached to my copy of Humbert’s text says that his arguments “would certainly not convince anyone today”.[13] But they are all too familiar.[14] Humbert draws on biblical passages in which God commands the Hebrew people to enter the promised land and to wipe out its existing inhabitants; to erase their religion, their culture, and their memory from the earth. Contemporary scholarship suggests that this violent erasure of the Canaanites never actually took place (at least not on anything like the scale imagined by the biblical text). But the texts come to us now dripping with blood, thanks to the work of Christian interpreters in whose hands it became a warrant not only for the ultimately failed Christian attempt to recapture Jerusalem for Christianity, but also for the brutal expulsion of Jews and Muslims from medieval Spain, and for the modern invention of settler colonialism.[15] As Robert Warrior and Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz have shown, the theological tools developed by Humbert and his contemporaries to justify the Crusades were wielded once again during the conquest of the Americas and European attempts to wipe indigenous Americans from the face of the earth.[16] They are wielded again today both by Christian Zionists and by the state of Israel, arguing that the mass killing and starvation of Palestinians is both necessary and morally justified.

As Warrior points out, the other side of the story of the liberation of the Hebrew people from captivity in Egypt is the story of their conquest of the land of Canaan, and God’s injunctions to wipe the Canaanites from the face of the earth.[17] It is tempting, in the face of horrors committed in the name of God, to move to disavowal, to insist that these things are not Christian, that theology cannot be claimed as a warrant for such obscenity. But to make this claim is not only to fail to face up to the reality of the discipline which has formed us, it is also to fall into the very logic which so often legitimizes Christian violence.

As Daniel Boyarin argues, the emergence of Christian identity is centrally tied to the distinction of heresy. In inventing heresy, Christianity draws for itself a border, a partition line which cuts artificially across the divisions which formerly defined the world from which it was born — between Jew and Greek, enslaved and free, male and female — and brings into being a new and more absolute distinction between Christian and non-Christian.[18] As Denise Kimber Buell has it, this distinction produces not only a new divide between Christians and non-Christians but also Christian universalism, composed of three claims: that Christianity is one thing —  that it consists of a unified set of beliefs and practices — that anyone can become a Christian, and that everyone should become a Christian.[19] As Gil Anidjar puts it,

Christianity, the Jesuic distinction in humanity (if I may propose this awkward rephrasing of Jan Assmann’s “Mosaic distinction”), is the difference between innocence and guilt as the basis of human society, the difference across humanity, between the old and guilty (humans) and the new and innocent (Christians). It is indeed the advent of a new humanity. From now on, may God protect the humanity of old.[20]

Both the desire to see Christianity as one thing only and the attempt to identify a purely liberatory core to Christianity in relation to which all other elements of Christian tradition are corruptions or degenerations mirror the theological logics of sexual, racial, and ethnic purity which have profoundly shaped Christianity across its history. They obscure the ways that liberation theologies so often remain implicated in the very systems which they seek to oppose;[21] the difficult, skilful, and creative work which goes into the endless remaking of Christian theology for new times, places, and contexts;[22] and the ways in which liberatory forms of Christianity have been shaped not only by Christian tradition but by Christians’ relations with those outside of the church. Christianity has never been simply the passing down of traditions or the preservation of an original message. Fidelity to Christian tradition is always also betrayal, miscegenation, and mutation.[23]

If we want to think about theology and its failure in the face of the genocide in Palestine, we cannot simply seek to exonerate some pure essence of Christianity from responsibility. We must instead confront the ways in which theology has functioned — and continues to function —  as one element of the machinery of this abomination.  Theology is deeply implicated in the logics of supersession, anti-Judaism, and philosemitism on which not only Christian Zionism but also Christian nationalism, secular modernity, and the modern nation state rely; and in the ideology and practices of settler colonialism, Islamophobia, Orientalism, and racism on which our world is founded.[24] The systems of secular politics, international law and human rights which have — for all their supposedly universal values — so signally failed to stop the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians draw deep from theological wells. More directly, the theological academy is deeply tied to the Zionist project, most especially so in biblical studies whose entanglement in the ongoing settler colonial project includes both participation in archaeological research which has functioned to displace Palestinians both materially and theoretically, and the construction of narratives of “ancient Israel” which serve to legitimise contemporary Israeli identity.[25]

“We might expect”, McIntosh and Ranawana write, “to see widespread public statements and action by theologians and theological ethicists across the globe condemning genocide, especially a genocide that claims theological justification and threatens the lives of Christians”.[26] It will not surprise you by now to hear that I do not share this optimism. I am not trying to deny that people have struggled against genocide, violence, and other forms of injustice in the name of theology. I am not — to be very clear —  suggesting that those of us who call ourselves theologians cannot or should not justify our struggle against these things in theological terms. But I do think we need to confront the reality that Christianity is not simply one thing; that is is, as it always has been, a religion of both oppressors and oppressed. Both individual theologians and theological institutions have taken sides with both enslavers and enslaved, revolution and repression, lynch mobs and lynched, fascists and anti-fascists, the wealthy and the dispossessed, and with both colonialism and decolonisation. 

This is a problem for us to grapple with not merely as individual theologians, but also as members of SST. The SST constitution says that the Society will “support all those engaged in theology, across the full range of approaches and church traditions”.[27] This commitment to representing the diversity of theology underpins SST’s statement on theology and race, which states that SST “is seeking to address, within the scope of its life, the marginalisation in academia of black and minority ethnic people and their perspectives, and the narrowing of scholarship that goes with it around the concerns and interests of those racialised as white’” so that SST can be “a society for all scholars and students of theology”.[28] Here we encounter a problem.

As the SST statement on Gaza says, “Our Society and our Committee include people who have a range of views regarding the purpose and responsibilities of theologians, the work of theology and of the Society”. A series of quite careful statements follows. The society condemns “the use of Christian Zionist thought, which has led to uncritical support for the Israeli state’s assault on the Palestinian people.” SST “support … the view that theologians must consider the implications and outcomes of their theological production, in this case, their complicity in perpetuating new and old forms of violent settler colonialism” [italics mine].[29] I do not find this satisfying as a response to the open letter from Palestinian Christians, which calls on church leaders and theologians to condemn not only Israel’s response to October 7 but also “the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine”, and asks us to recognise the fact that October 7 and the events which followed it must be placed within the wider context of ‘Israel’s systematic oppression of the Palestinians over the last 75 years since the Nakba, the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the oppressive and racist military occupation that constitutes the crime of apartheid’.[30]

I find the statement’s careful hedging to be both unethical and strategically unhelpful: in addressing itself to members it offers neither meaningful solidarity to the open letter’s authors, nor any commitment to defend members who do take a more unambiguous public stand. But I also know that to be a member of SST, to be a theologian, to be an academic, is to find myself a member of institutions which are either actively or passively enabling an ongoing genocide. I know that I am thereby implicated, and I know that there are limits to the price I am willing to pay to challenge either this or the other forms of violence which I know myself to be reproducing, however unwillingly, however imperfectly. I know that theological systems and structures which it seems to me we should be working urgently to dismantle are for others of you foundational and indispensable.

There are irreconcilable contradictions here. What would happen if we paid attention to them, instead of trying to paper over the cracks? As I have said elsewhere, “A Christianity which sees itself as one thing into which everyone can and should be brought is a Christianity which cannot reckon with the possibility or the reality of internal disagreement and dissent, and which cannot see the failure to convert as an indication of anything other than in indication of corruption. It is this fantasy of wholeness, of one-ness, which has tended to make Christianity so dangerous to both internal dissenters and external others, and which has rendered it so unable to reckon with the conflicts, disagreements, and inconsistencies that run through its institutions, texts, and practices.”[31]

There is no escape from failure. But there are good theological reasons to understand failure not as a fall away from some primordial success, some original wholeness, but as in fact the constituting condition of our being. To insist that God creates from nothing, from freedom rather than necessity, is to say that at the heart of our being is something which cannot be explained. To speak about God is to founder on the limits of theological language, to try and to fail again to name the unnameable, to limit the illimitable, to know the unknowable. Failure is ontological.

Failure is also the reality of the disciplines and institutions which form us as theologians. The sexual, familial, and reproductive metaphors so central to Christian narratives of both ecclesial identity and the study of theology, however disciplined, cannot but draw our attention to the impossibility of fidelity, to the inevitability of failure. We neither understand nor control the ways that our parents have formed us, any more than parents can grasp or master who and what their children become. On sex, the Bible will tell the truth if we will not — that the order based on men’s possession of women has always been sustained and maintained by violent men, manipulative wives, courageous sex workers, and infidelities great and small.

The question that we should ask then, is not how we might now succeed but, instead, how to relate to this constitutive failure. Theological failure is a problem of being, of knowledge, and of power; and the question of how to relate to this failure is a problem of desire. I want to turn now to the Jacques Lacan, who offers a typology of four discourses, four ways of relating to the incompleteness, the constitutive failure of being, language, and order. As I’ve argued elsewhere, this typology is deeply indebted to Christian theology, and Lacan’s four discourses — the master’s discourse, the university discourse, the hysteric’s discourse and the analyst’s discourse — correspond to the four stages of theological speech as set out in Dionysius’ foundational account of mystical theology: the naming of God according to the logic of doctrinal propriety, the proliferation of divine names, the denial of divine names, and finally the mystical language of contradiction, paradox, and silence.[32] As Thomas Lynch puts it, “Understanding these configurations enables an analysis of four key social phenomena: ‘governing, education, protesting, and revolutionizing’”; all of which, I will argue, can illuminate the discipline of theology as it is exercised in the context of churches, universities and (of course) learned societies.[33]

The first of Lacan’s four discourses is the Master’s discourse. This “is the discourse of unquestionable authority; the discourse of strong leaders and traditional values. It says that the solution to what ails us is a reaffirmation of authority (biblical, encyclical, or political), and a return to hierarchies of race, gender, class, or church governance.”[34] It is the discourse of sovereign power, of groundless decision, of the God who creates by dividing, out of nothing. The Master’s discourse believes that the solution to failure is to re-establish proper order, and is willing to wield violence in order to do so.

But there are two truths that the Master’s discourse cannot confront. First is the reality of incompleteness and division. Christianity is not one. However hard we try to impose authority on the world, it will always escape our grasp. I am sure I am not the only member of the Society who grew up very sure that there was a right way to be a Christian, a right way to read the Bible, and who has found that this belief fell apart the more tightly I clung to it. I suspect that this failure is one reason why so much energy is now being put into various attempts to discipline academic theology along with the rest of higher education.[35] There are cracks in the texts that some of us cannot help but fall through. The other thing concealed by the Master’s discourse is the pleasure of transgression and the ways that enjoyment is intensified by prohibition. The last few years have been a lesson on the ubiquity of those pleasures in the places of power. This pleasure is, for Lacan, crucial to understanding the way that this discourse is sustained: “What keeps people attached to a model so obviously built on repression and hypocrisy are the pleasure of hating those who are excluded by this discourse’s legalistic order and the transgressive pleasures of breaking the law”; though also, I think it is important to add, the pleasures of doing violence to others who transgress it. As Alberto Toscano has argued, “the fascist – as the phantasmatic synthesis of the settler and the soldier (or the cop) – needs to imagine him or herself as an active shareholder in the monopoly of violence”.[36]

When the master’s discourse begins to break apart, one route out of these contradictions is what Lacan refers to as the ‘university discourse’. Here the solution to incompleteness and contradiction is to multiply knowledge: “If we just write another report, create another policy or procedure, conduct more research, run more training sessions, track more data, or add another layer of paperwork, then we will arrive at a resolution. This is the discourse of bureaucracy, of ‘equality and diversity’ committees, and of ‘post-political’ pragmatic government” which claims not to be ideological but to be interested simply in better management, in more efficient systems and processes.[37] I am reminded here of a paper that Gerard Loughlin gave at SST several years ago in which he described the Anglican Living in Love and Faith process as an endless series of reports suggesting that what was needed was “more listening”; whether this was better or worse than the decisions lately arrived at I will leave to you to decide. This is also, of course, the discourse of the REF. One of the last things I did before leaving the UK for Ireland last summer was to draft a REF environment statement. I had to describe what my unit was doing to encourage career progression amongst its members. A laudable goal, except that we had not been able to apply for promotions for four years, due to an ongoing financial crisis; and when the university had paused its promotion process it had also withdrawn its promotion criteria, with the (also laudable!) goal of rewriting them to be both clearer and more equitable. A report, then, on how we were working to help our colleagues work towards unknown criteria for a non-existent end, for a system of assessment which barely anyone believes in, all in the middle of a deepening crisis in which it was (and is) not even clear that my job, my programme, or the institution as a whole would make it as far as the next REF. The university discourse functions, then, “both to evade the real questions and conflicts that characterise institutions and also to disempower and deflate any attempts to confront these real problems by ensuring that people are kept so bored and alienated by endless busy-work that they become cynical and disengaged.”[38] While — as the very persistence of the REF testifies — it is possible to get stuck here, it is also possible that the pointlessness, the absurdity, or the sheer tedium will lead to the discourse breaking down.

If at this point we resist the lure of the Master’s discourse, we may find ourselves instead moving into the discourse of protest, of complaint: the hysteric’s discourse. For Lacan, this is a moment with transformative potential. The hysteric insists on the failure of the system within which she is positioned. The master discourse’s insistence on order is incoherent, and the university discourse’s insistence that incoherence can be resolved by the production of knowledge is doomed. This is the work of critique; but critique can be a trap. In the student revolutions of 1968, Lacan notoriously said to his protesting students, “You are hysterics who demand a new master. You will get one.”[39] The hysteric recognises that there is something wrong with the way that things are, but has not yet given up on the fantasy of wholeness. Sara Ahmed writes eloquently about the ways that complaint and protest can be absorbed by universities into self-serving and self-aggrandising narratives of improvement and transformation.[40] Critique can function to reproduce the very systems and structures at which it is directed, and this reproductive function cannot be laid solely at the feet of institutions.  The queer theorist Lauren Berlant talks about “cruel optimism” which exists, they say, “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing”; Daniel Colluciello Barber suggests that something like cruel optimism can come to structure the way we critique the institutions we are part of.[41] The very act of critique, he suggests, can itself be a form of investment in that institution. Why waste time understanding what is wrong, trying to convince others to agree with us and so on if not that we hope, on some level, that change is possible, that the institution can become better? Critique can be a way of sustaining our relation to the things we criticise; it can be a way of disavowing our on responsibility for a situation and of failing to reckon with the power that we have ourselves; it can be a way to sustain our own sense of goodness by distancing ourselves from the institutions in which we are implicated. Critique, that is to say, can be a form of care, a kind of reproductive labour.

It is difficult to inhabit institutions in the midst of multiple overlapping catastrophes. I know I am not the only person to find myself returning over and again to Walter Benjamin’s famous description of the angel of history pictures the angel, eyes wide open, mouth open and wings outstretched, his face turned towards the past, blowing him into the future and so ever further from paradise as he watches history unfold as “one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his fee”’.[42] As Nadia Abu El-Haj demonstrates, one tendency which emerged out of the horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima was the figure of the witness, whose “prophetic quality was inseparable from her trauma”.[43] El Haj connects this figure of the witness to the emergence, over the last few days, of a “new humanitarianism”, a new ethics of care which focuses not on the struggle for a most just world so much as on the attempt to relieve human suffering, which replaces “talk of politics” with “moral obligation”, an “ethical turn … understood as ideologically neutral and thus ‘post’-political”.[44]

Of course, before there were hysterics there were medieval women mystics. I want to close this discussion of the hysteric’s discourse by turning to Catherine of Siena, in whose life and work protest, care, and the witness of suffering are closely entangled; in whose self-aggrandising self-abnegation, martyr complex, violence, frustrated power and compassion I recognise not only myself but also — please forgive me — many of you. According to Catherine’s biographer Raymond of Capua, when a local sister called Andrea became sick with breast cancer, her wounds so putrid that people could only stand to be near her if they stuffed their noses so as not to be able to smell, Catherine tended to her faithfully, washing Andreas’ oozing breast. Catherine was not immune to the stench of Andrea’s wound, but demonstrated her perfect self-mastery when, experiencing nausea whilst tending to the wound, she bent her face to it until she almost passed out (I, too, have attended meetings about my institution’s financial crisis).[45]

You might think that such commitment to care and self-sacrifice would be met with gratitude but, like so many people around the saint, it seems that Andrea could not stand the holy Catherine, spreading nasty rumours about her, and accusing her of sexual immorality. Catherine, however, remained undeterred, continuing to attend to Andrea’s bedside until one day the bitter and resentful old sister saw Catherine’s face transformed into that of an angel, on which she repented, called together all those to whom she had slandered Catherine’s reputation, and admitted that Catherine was not only pure but, indeed, a saint.

Catherine’s greatest joys, it seems, were always prompted by great suffering; in her letters she writes to her confessor, Raymond of Capua of the unspeakable joys she experienced when attending the execution of a young nobleman, with whom she had stayed up praying throughout the night. As she waited for him to be brought out to the executioner’s block, eager for spiritual encounter, she laid her neck upon the block. But, she says, “my desire did not come there, for I had too full consciousness of myself.”[46] Instead she resumed her prayers for the young man, as he in turn laid his head upon the block, speaking the names of both Jesus and of Catherine herself just before the axe fell and his head in turn fell into Catherine’s lap, whereupon she experienced the ecstasy for which she had been longing.

With all this holiness, Raymond marvels, it is difficult to understand the many insults Catherine received throughout her life from those around her. Those around her seem to have been persistently incensed by her spiritual patience and self-discipline. So greatly did the Sisters of Penance of St Dominic envy Catherine’s superior wisdom and devotion that they began to complain about her, deciding that her miracles were not from God but the devil, working to keep her out of their meetings, keeping her away from holy communion, denying her access to a confessor; so incensed by her that, when she did manage to partake in communion, falling immediately after into a deep trance, they would pick her up and throw her bodily out of the church, some of them even kicking her as she lay insensible on the ground.[47]

What does it mean to insist on tending to the wounds of someone who finds your presence extremely irritating? What does it mean to ecstatically receive the host in a community which finds that ecstasy so unacceptable that your fellow congregants literally pick up your body to remove you from church? What complex ties of power, pleasure, suffering and self-aggrandisement are at work in Catherine’s relationships with the pious nuns who cannot bear her and her confessor Raymond for whom the obvious irritation which Catherine provokes in others becomes itself a sign of her sainthood?

Writing about the psychic burn-out often experienced by migrant care workers, Jared Sexton suggests that burnout and breakdown are endemic to the profession of caring, because of the inherent paradoxes at the heart of care work itself. Psychoanalysis tells us, he suggests, that our best intentions are laced with unbidden aggression and sexuality, that dangerous and sometimes violent desires emerge when those cared for do not go along with the caregiver’s best intentions, resulting in harms both to the carer and to those cared for.[48] Catherine’s life and work speaks to this complex intertwining of self-sacrifice and pleasure, to the ways that self-denial can be a way to seek out power; the violence that so often takes root in the midst of care, directed both at carers and at those cared for. Liberation theology has often talked about God’s preferential option for the poor, but there is a risk here – as liberation theologians well knew – that this sense of God’s solidarity with the oppressed can turn into a kind of fetishisation of suffering and poverty.[49]

Why do so many of us stay in jobs, churches and institutions which are draining the life out of us? Why is it that so many of us find ourselves frozen, being blown ever further from Paradise, as catastrophe piles upon catastrophe before our open eyes? Why are we so much more easily moved by pity than by anger; what does it mean that it was not Palestinian resistance and struggle against occupation and genocide which brought about mass support within the West for the Palestinian cause, but the endless, unbearable images of Palestinian suffering?

The route out of this bind, Lacan suggests, is the final of the four discourses: the analyst’s discourse. It is only here, for Lacan, that we truly confront the reality of failure: the impossibility of mastering ourselves or those around us. The task of the analyst is not to control, not to produce endless knowledge, not to protest, but to open a space in which the other may come face to face with failure. We might think of this in terms of Slavoj Žižek’s suggestion that the role of philosophy is not to provide answers but to ask the “right questions”.[50] We might think of it in terms of Marcella Althaus-Reid’s argument for “a theology which aims (as only Queer Theology can) to scandalise, that is, to be a stone on the road to force theologians to stop, fall down, while pausing in their pain and thinking during the pause”.[51]

This work of interruption, of scandal, of asking questions, is no simple matter of brute force. It may take only a single blow of the hammer to stop the wheels from turning; the art is in knowing where to hit it. Things are trickier still when we begin to work at scale: how to trip the feet of a discipline, a sub-field, a scholarly guild, an institution, a congregation, or a classroom? Here too is failure; here too we must seek to know not only ourselves, not only the institutions and structures we inhabit, but also the relationship between those things. This is work — for Žižek, the work of love, of agape —  and it requires careful attention, along with a sustained attempt to let go of the fantasies of wholeness or redemption which so often structure our relationship to research, teaching, preaching, our ministry, pastoral and administrative work.[52]

Perhaps this has always been the case, but it seems to me that one of most significant difficulties with which this task presents us is that to truly pay attention, to face up to the task of theology —  be that intellectual, institutional, or pedagogical — is to  find ourselves, like Catherine, face to face with horror and obscenity. Academic theology has always been a site of struggle, has always been an engine of violence, and of the reproduction of the violent distinctions of race, class, and gender; but just as Christians come together in agreement that theology has failed if not on anything else, so too I would suggest to you, my readers, that if we can agree on anything it is that university life is not, on the whole, improving. Back in 2013, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney wrote that, “it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment.”[53] There is still truth in this, but places of refuge are shrinking everywhere, albeit still in ways stratified by geography and also by class.

It has become commonplace to speak about “the Palestine exception” — the tendency for both speech and action by and about Palestine to be suppressed, particularly within universities. Yet as Steven Salaita points out, “this Palestine exception informs and is constituted by broader, and older, forms of suppression”, the return of repressed truths of colonial violence past on which our world is built.[54] What is happening — what continues to happen — in Palestine is a horror beyond grasping. It is also a vision of the future which looks to be coming for us all: the razing to the ground of universities and libraries, the killing, torture and incarceration of both students and teachers in Palestine the corollary of the central role Israeli universities play in producing not only the historical and theoretical justification for apartheid, in making and testing technologies of surveillance and slaughter, and in suppressing both staff and student speech and activism.[55]

Christian narratives of salvation and redemption can render us, as Amaryah Armstrong argues, unable to confront the reality of loss.[56] It is difficult not to fall into the logic of theodicy, which says that any kind of suffering, loss, or failure can be justified if – and only if – we believe that ultimately all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. Modern secular narratives of historical progress have deep roots in Christian tradition. One thing that these narratives imply is that failure can only ever be a staging post on the way towards victory; that hope is only possible if we believe that God hides behind the curtain of history, ensuring that, whatever happens to other people over there, we are going to be fine, that the suffering and defeat of others exists in the end as a backdrop to our own final triumph over history. Christ’s crucifixion has come to mean, for many of us, not the necessity of the destruction of a world which is willing to put Christ to death, but that redemption will emerge out of suffering, through suffering. There is a kind of obscenity in this. What kind of glorious victory would suffice to cancel out the suffering of all of those who been killed in Gaza, in California fires, in small boats in the British channel, in countless other singular apocalypses?

Perhaps instead we might come, as Amaryah Armstrong suggests, to “understand black riots as an instance of black revelation”; to see “looting, property destruction, and physical resistance to the state’s and citizenry’s enforcement of white nationalism” as “a means of contesting the law, order, and economy of an anti-black world and the reality it legitimates”.[57] Perhaps we might welcome, with whatever trepidation, the abolition of “what exists now” which is, as Anthony Paul Smith argues, “indefensible”, such that “its destruction is a kind of grace, a liberation from the deathly self”.[58] Perhaps we might hear the words of Edward Said, in the poem by Mahmūd Darwīsh from which this paper takes its title: “If I die before you, I urge you to cling to the impossible!”[59] Perhaps we might ask one another how we can relate to our failure to love our enemies, who are also ourselves.

[1] Mahmūd Darwīsh, ‘Antithesis’, trans. George El-Hage, Journal of Arabic Literature (The Netherlands) 36, no. 1 (2005): 50–56, https://doi.org/10.1163/1570064053560620.

[2] I am grateful to Christians for Palestine UK (and especially to Grey Collier) and to Modern Church (especially Alison Webster) for giving me the opportunity to develop these thoughts on Palestine, some of which have been previously published as blog posts: ‘Remember Amalek’, Modern Church blog, 12 April 2024, https://modernchurch.org.uk/marika-rose-remember-amalek; and ‘Hope and Heartsickness’, Modern Church blog, 8 August 2025, https://modernchurch.org.uk/hope-and-heartsickness. Fellow members of the International Network for Experimental Theology and Philosophy  (INEPT) provided invaluable input on a very sketchy draft of the paper – thank you to Tommy Lynch, Hannah Strømmen, Ulrich Schmiedel. Aaron Goldman, Annette Langer-Pitschmann, Gorazd Andrejč, Zoran Grozdanov, Mattias Martinson, Ida Simonsson, Susanne Wigorts Yngvesson, and Mark Godin . I’m also very grateful to my Dublin colleagues, Brad Anderson, Miriam DeCock, Alyson Staunton, and Daniele Pevarello who read and commented on an early draft, and especially to Anthony Paul Smith who was an invaluable sounding board and insightful editor throughout the writing process. I should note that the generosity of the interlocutors I have listed above should not be taken either as implicating them in any errors which remain or as signalling their agreement with the arguments I make in what follows.

[3] ‘Hegseth’s Christian Rhetoric Sparks Concern amid Iran Conflict’, The Independent, 21 March 2026, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/hegseth-christian-rhetoric-iran-war-pentagon-b2943142.html.

[4] ‘Pastors Pray over Trump in the Oval Office’, Reuters, 6 March 2026, https://www.reuters.com/video/watch/idRW151406032026RP1/.

[5] ‘Dr James Orr Appointed Head of Policy for Reform UK’, accessed 22 March 2026, https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2026/20-february/news/uk/professor-james-orr-appointed-head-of-policy-for-reform-uk.

[6] Johana Bhuiyan et al., ‘Inside Tech Billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-Record Lectures about the Antichrist’, US News, The Guardian, 10 October 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/peter-thiel-lectures-antichrist; Nick Vivarelli, ‘Peter Thiel Sparks Vatican Ire With Antichrist Lectures in Rome’, Variety, 18 March 2026, https://variety.com/2026/digital/global/peter-thiel-vatican-ire-antichrist-lectures-rome-1236692140/.

[7] Steven Salaita, ‘The Free Speech Exception to Palestine’, Middle East Critique (Abingdon) 33, no. 3 (2024): 4, https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2024.2342667.

[8] While Mark Carney is correct that the ‘rules based international order’, now ending, was (at best) a half-truth (Denis Staunton, ‘Mark Carney Says Rules-Based Global Order Is over, Offers Blueprint for “Third Path”’, The Irish Times, accessed 23 March 2026, https://www.irishtimes.com/world/2026/01/21/mark-carney-says-rules-based-global-order-is-over-offers-blueprint-for-third-path/.), it seems very clear to me that the term ‘genocide’ is appropriate in this context; in this view I am joined by Amnesty International, the UN, and the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security, amongst others (‘Israel/Occupied Palestinian Territory: “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman”: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza’, Amnesty International, 5 December 2024, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/8668/2024/en/.; M.I, ‘Report: “Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime” by the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967 (A/80/492)’, Question of Palestine, n.d., accessed 22 March 2026, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/special-rapporteur-report-gaza-genocide-a-collective-crime-20oct25/. ‘Israel Has Committed Genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission Finds’, OHCHR, accessed 22 March 2026, https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds. ‘Active Genocide Alert – Israel-Palestine: There Is No Justification for Genocide’, Lemkin Institute, accessed 22 March 2026, https://www.lemkininstitute.com/active-genocide-alert-1/active-genocide-alert—israel-palestine%3A-there-is-no-justification-for-genocide.

[9] Esther McIntosh and Anupama M. Ranawana, ‘Silence Is Complicity: Theological Failure in the Face of Genocide’, International Journal of Public Theology (Leiden, The Netherlands) 18, no. 4 (2024): 463–87, https://doi.org/10.1163/15697320-20241605. 464

[10] ‘Report of the SST Executive Committee Subgroup on Theology and Race’, 2018, 7.

[11] Warwick Staff and Student Solidarity Network, An Investment in Injustice (2024).

[12] Humbert of Romans, ‘Opus Tripartitum’, in The Crusades: Idea and Reality, 1095-1274, ed. Louise Riley-Smith and Jonathan Riley-Smith (Edward Arnold, n.d.).

[13] ‘Opus Tripartitum’, 103.

[14] See, for example, the section on ‘Expressions of Genocidal Intent Against the Palestinian People by Israeli State Officials and Others’ in South Africa, ‘Application Instituting Proceedings and Request for the Indication of Provisional Measures’, International Court of Justice, 29 December 2023, 140–64, https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20231228-app-01-00-en.pdf.

[15] See, for example, John Edwards, ‘Reconquista and Crusade in the Fifteenth Century’, in Crusading in the Fifteenth Century: Message and Impact, ed. Norman Housley (Springer, 2004), 166; Sarah Covington, The Devil from over the Sea: Remembering and Forgetting Oliver Cromwell in Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2022), 2; Jace Weaver, ‘Unsettling the Settled: A Response’, Political Theology 24, no. 7 (2023): 788.

[16] Robert Allen Warrior, ‘Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians’, Christianity and Crisis (New York) 49, no. 12 (1989): 261; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2023); see also  Steven Salaita, Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine (U of Minnesota Press, 2016).

[17] Warrior, ‘Canaanites’.

[18] Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judeo-Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 1–33.

[19] Denise Kimber Buell, Why This New Race : Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity / Denise Kimber Buell., Gender, Theory, and Religion (Columbia University Press, 2005), https://doi.org/10.7312/buel13334., 140.

[20] Gil Anidjar, Blood: A Critique of Christianity (Columbia University Press, 2014). 254.

[21] See for example, Warrior, ‘Canaanites’; Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology (Routledge, 2002), 4–6; Amy-Jill Levine and Ted A. Smith, ‘Habits of Anti-Judaism: Critiquing a PCUSA Report on Israel/Palestine’, The Christian Century, accessed 22 March 2026, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2010-06/habits-anti-judaism; James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Orbis Books, 2010), xx.

[22] See, for example, Delores Williams, ‘Hagar in African American Appropriation’, in Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives, ed. Phyllis Trible and Letty M. Russell (n.d.), 172; Amaryah Armstrong, ‘Christian Order and Racial Order: What Cedric Robinson Can Teach Us’, The Bias, 3 June 2020, https://christiansocialism.com/2020/06/03/cedric-robinson-racial-order-christianity-socialism/.

[23] Marika Rose, A Theology of Failure : Žižek against Christian Innocence / Marika Rose., First edition., Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (Fordham University Press, 2019), 11–13, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823284092; Marika Rose, ‘Holy Mothers of God: Sex Work, Inheritance, and the Women of Jesus’ Genealogy’, Theology & Sexuality (Abingdon) 25, nos 1–2 (2019): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/13558358.2019.1652031; Marika Rose and Anthony Paul Smith, ‘Hexing the Discipline: Against the Reproduction of Continental Philosophy of Religion’, Humanities & Social Sciences Communications (London) 5, no. 1 (2019): 2, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-018-0207-4; Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler, ‘Editor’s Introduction: What Is Continental Philosophy of Religion Now?’, After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion, 2010, 1–25.

[24] See, for example, Mahmood Mamdani: ‘the history of the prevailing state system begins in 1492, with the Reconquista’ (Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), 5.

[25] See, for example, Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (University of Chicago Press, 2008); Keith W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (Routledge, 1996); Nur Masalha, The Bible and Zionism : Invented Traditions, Archaeology and Post-Colonialism in Palestine-Israel / Nur Masalha. (Zed Books, 2007); Michael J. Sandford, ed., The Bible, Zionism, and Palestine: The Bible’s Role in Conflict and Liberation in Israel-Palestine (Relegere, 2016), https://www.academia.edu/29776721/The_Bible_Zionism_and_Palestine_The_Bibles_Role_in_Conflict_and_Liberation_in_Israel_Palestine; Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (Verso, 2024).

[26] ‘Silence is Complicity’, 466.

[27] ‘Constitution’, Society for the Study of Theology, n.d., accessed 22 March 2026, https://www.theologysociety.org.uk/about-us/constitution/.

[28] ‘Report of the SST Executive Committee Subgroup on Theology and Race’, SST, n.d.

[29] SST Committee, ‘Statement on SST and Gaza’, March 2025, https://www.theologysociety.org.uk/about-us/initiatives/statement-on-sst-and-gaza/.

[30] ‘A Call for Repentance: An Open Letter from Palestinian Christians to Western Church Leaders and Theologians’, n.d., accessed 22 March 2026, https://www.kairospalestine.ps/images/A_Call_for_Repentance__An_Open_Letter_from_Palestinian_Christians_1.pdf.

[31] Marika Rose, ‘Love Your Enemy: Theology, Identity and Antagonism’, in Dissenting Church: Exploring the Theological Power of Conflict and Disagreement (Springer, 2024), 205.

[32] Rose, Theology of Failure.

[33] Thomas Lynch, ‘Making the Quarter Turn: Liberation Theology after Lacan’, in Theology after Lacan: The Passion for the Real, ed. Creston Davis et al. (2015), 217, citing Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (Norton, 2007), 166.

[34] Rose, ‘Love Your Enemy’, 206.

[35] Here I am thinking not only of direct government intervention such as the gutting of the US National Endowment for the Humanities, attacks on ‘DEI’ and the attempt to impose a ‘Compact’ on US institutions of higher education (Sara Custer, ‘How DOGE Gutted the NEH in 22 Days’, Inside Higher Ed, accessed 22 March 2026, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/research/2026/03/11/how-doge-gutted-neh-22-days; ‘Over 50 Universities Are under Investigation as Part of Trump’s Anti-DEI Crackdown’, NPR, 14 March 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/03/14/g-s1-53831/dei-universities-education-department-investigation; egalluscio, ‘What Is Trump’s Compact for Higher Education? — FAQ’, PEN America, 11 November 2025, https://pen.org/trumps-compact-for-higher-education-faq/ ) but also the disappearance of institutions and programmes as a result of austerity (here I would include the reduction of financial support for students) and/or decisions made by university boards and senior management (e.g. ‘Professor Warns of “Scary” Cuts to University Theology Departments’, accessed 22 March 2026, https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2026/20-march/news/uk/professor-warns-of-scary-cuts-to-university-theology-departments; ‘History in UK Higher Education: A Statement from the Royal Historical Society’, RHS, accessed 22 March 2026, https://royalhistsoc.org/policy/history-in-uk-higher-education-a-statement-from-the-royal-historical- society/.), the targeting of universities by groups such as Turning Point (now active in the UK as well as the US), as well as the broader moral panic about universities in general and the humanities in particular

[36] Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis (Verso Books, n.d.), 149.

[37] Rose, ‘Love Your Enemy’, 206.

[38] Rose, ‘Love Your Enemy’, 206.

[39] Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Ambiguous Legacy of 68’, In These Times, 20 June 2008, https://inthesetimes.com/article/the-ambiguous-legacy-of-68.

[40] Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Duke University Press, 2020).

[41] Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Duke university press, 2020), 1; Daniel Colucciello Barber, ‘World-Making and Grammatical Impasse’, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 25, nos 1–2 (2016): 179–206.

[42] Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, trans. Dennis Redmond, n.d., accessed 22 March 2026, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm.

[43] Nadia Abu El-Haj, Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in Post-9/11 America (Verso Books, 2022), 28.

[44] Combat Trauma, 17.

[45] Raymond of Capua, The Life of Catherine of Siena, trans. George Lamb (P.J. Kennedy & Sons, n.d.), 369–71.

[46] Catherine of Siena, ‘To Brother Raimondo of Capua of the Order of the Preachers’, in Saint Catherine of Siena as Seen in Her Letters, trans. Vita Dutton Scudder (J.M. Dent and E.P. Dutton, 1905), http://www.domcentral.org/trad/cathletters.htm.

[47] Raymond of Capua, Life, 364-265.

[48] Jared Sexton, ‘Antidoting’, The Black Scholar 51, no. 3 (2021): 12–13.

[49] See, for example, Gustavo Gutiérrez et al., A Theology of Liberation : History, Politics and Salvation / Gustavo Gutiérrez ; Translated and Edited by Caridad Inda and John Eagleson. (SCM, 1985), 287–91.

[50] Anja Steinbauer, Interview: Slavoj Žižek, n.d., accessed 22 March 2026, https://philosophynow.org/issues/122/Slavoj_Zizek.

[51] Marcella Althaus-Reid, The Queer God (Routledge, 2004), 35.

[52] Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (Verso, 2000), 117–18.

[53] Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013.), 26.

[54] Salaita, ‘The Free Speech Exception to Palestine’, 3.

[55] On scholasticide in Palestine, see e.g.  00/00/0000 00:00:00 On Israeli universities, see e.g. Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel; Anthony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (Verso Books, 2024).

[56] Amaryah Shaye Armstrong, ‘Losing Salvation: Notes toward a Wayward Black Theology’, Critical Times 6, no. 2 (2023): 325, https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-10437087.

[57] Armstrong, ‘Christian Order and Racial Order’.

[58] Anthony Paul Smith, ‘On White Christian Violence’, in In Sheep’s Clothing: The Idolatry of White Christian Nationalism, ed. George Yancy and Bill Bywater (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023), 340.

[59] ‘Antithesis’, 56.

Thomas Hobbes’ biographer Arnold Rogow writes that, “Hobbes … may never have loved a woman, but no one has ever hinted that he was homosexual” (Radical in the Service of Reaction, 66). Even if that was true at the time Rogow was writing (1986), I’m sure it can’t possibly be true any more; but I spent some time digging around Hobbes scholarship over the summer (with the generous support of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies) and came up empty-handed. Let me then be, perhaps, the first person to suggest it: I think it’s possible that Hobbes was gay. Here are some of my reasons:

• Rogow’s claim comes in the middle of his discussion of Hobbes’ extremely close friendship with notorious homosexual Francis Bacon.
• As Rogow notes, Hobbes never married and was described by his biographer John Aubrey as not ‘a woman-hater … but … even in his youth, (generally) temperate, both as to wine and women’ (66).
• One of Hobbes’ early pieces of writing was a Latin poem about a cavern in Derbyshire called the Devil’s Arse (‘partially so-called because the rocks supposedly look like the buttocks of a person bending over. The rocks are enormous and between them is a very deep cavern, in which the sun never shines’), in which he also discussed another local cave called “Poole’s Hole”. (A P Martinich, Thomas Hobbes, 73)
• Rogow writes, ‘References to human anatomy in the Peak do not establish that Hobbes and the second earl shared an interest in the more intimate physical aspects of life, but we may doubt that Hobbes would have included these references had the earl, for whom the poem was written, be displeased by them’ (71) — the earl here is Hobbes’ student as well as his employer, and also a close companion. Of the earl, Hobbes writes in a. poem full of bawdy innuendos the following lines: “Magnificent, not lavish, still he spends/His riches freely, and amongst his Friends’ (73).
• Rogow suggests that these images of holes and caves haunted Hobbes for the rest of his life and that the Devil’s Arse may have inspired Hobbes’ last reported words before his death: ‘I shall be glad to find a Hole to creep out of the world at’ (71).
• Hobbes was convinced that the secret to a long life was ridding the body of excess moisture, and so as an old man he would play vigorous games of tennis or go for long walks to work up a sweat and then, according to Aubrey, “give the servant some money to rub him” (Brief Lives, 165).
• Also, apparently in quest of a less moist life, Hobbes would lie in bed at night singing ‘prick songs’ (Rogow, 226). Here ‘prick’ refers to a particular form of musical notation, but also, I mean, come on
• Aubrey also recounts a story told to him by Hobbes about a time that Hobbes was hired as a tutor to the young Duke of Buckingham, according to Hobbes a man of ‘great naturall parts’ and a quick wit, who was however slow to comprehend Hobbes’ instruction; this, it transpired, was because he was “at mastrupation (his hand in his Cod-piece)” (Rogow, 153).
• At the heart of Hobbes’ political theory is an (unusual!) insistence that authority has no gender, that the distinctions between men and women are overwhelmingly artificial rather than natural, and that the same therefore goes for any societal norms around sexual behaviour

Obviously none of this is conclusive. But I do think that it’s at least worth both asking the question, and also wondering why it is that the question has not been more seriously considered (in the process of writing this post I began to wonder whether Rogow — a psychoanalyst and close friend of Gertrude Stein — was, in fact, hinting at the possibility of Hobbes’ homosexuality). I do think it’s symptomatic of a general gap between political theological readings of Hobbes which tend to be better at thinking about the symbols, metaphors and underlying metaphysics of Hobbes’ thinking but tend to ignore questions of gender and sexuality, and the feminist scholarship of Hobbes which tends to a somewhat literalist reading of Hobbes which tends to assume that his ideas about gender can primarily be inferred from the times when he explicitly discusses gender and not say, his ideas about snakes and frogs and rivers of blood. Rogow says, when discussing Hobbes in relation to Bacon, that both expressed ‘more than a hint of misogyny’. I’ve not finished the Rogow book so it’s possible I am missing something, but what I’ve read so far suggests that it is not so much that Hobbes — who worked for women, left money to women, and could imagine a world in which women ruled over men — hated women as that he was just more personally interested in men.

Hello, Editor Matt here!

It’s been a long time since you heard from me. A quick station identification: This newsletter is Dracula Daily, which sends out the entire book Dracula in bite-sized pieces.

This list has been quiet for a while because Dracula Season doesn’t start until May. But I’m interrupting here to let you know some quick news about a new thing to read.

(In the meantime, sit tight for Dracula. If you’re getting this newsletter, then you’re already signed up for Dracula Daily, and you’ll start getting the story in your email in May)

The quick news

We’re kicking off a new newsletter - another underrated and overlooked book, delivered in ‘real time’ to your inbox. It’s called The Honeywood File, and the newsletter is Honeywood Daily. You can sign up for it here.

The short version is: here’s another great book, told through letters and telegrams, that we can read together like Dracula. It’s got much shorter sections, and it’s spread out over a longer time period. The book is about people trying to design and build a house - an architect, his client, and the people they work with along the way. I think it’s very, very funny. Honeywood is one of my favorite books I’ve discovered over the last few years.

Here’s my pitch on why you’ll love it.

We’ll start on April 1st (no fooling!) - so sign up if you want to read along. More details over at Honeywood.

Thanks

That’s it. If you’re just here for Dracula, then sit tight - our story begins in May!

• Milestone

This is a release focussing on bug fixing, in particular regressions from the release 1.28.0.

Selected new features ✨:

• New customisable message for closed registrations
• Add username in Apache access logs (also in Docker logs): for GReader API, and for HTTP Basic Auth from reverse proxy

Improved performance 🏎️:

• Disable counting articles in user labels for Ajax requests (unused)

Many bug fixes 🐛

This release has been made by @Alkarex, @Frenzie, @Inverle and newcomers @ciro-mota, @eveiscoull, @hackerman70000, @Hufschmidt, @johan456789, @martgnz, @mmeier86, @netsho, @neuhaus, @RobLoach, @rupakbajgain.

Full changelog:

• Features
  • Handle Web scraping of text/plain as <pre class="text-plain"> #8340
  • New customisable message for closed registrations #8462
• Bug fixing
  • Fix unwanted expansion of user queries (saved searches) applied to filters #8395
  • Fix encoding of filter actions for labels #8368
  • Fix searching of tags #8425
  • Fix refreshing feeds with token while anonymous refresh is disabled #8371
  • Fix RSS and OPML access by token #8434
  • Fix MySQL/MariaDB transliterator_transliterate fallback (when the php-intl extension is unavailable) #8427
  • Fix regression with MySQL/MariaDB index hint #8460
  • Auto-add lastUserModified database column also during mark-as-read action #8346
  • Do not include hidden feeds when counting unread articles in categories #8357
  • Remove wrong PHP deprecation of OPML export action #8399
  • Fix shortcut for next unread article #8466
  • Fix custom session.cookie-lifetime #8446
  • Fix feed validator button when changing the feed URL #8436
• Performance
  • Disable counting articles in user labels for Ajax requests (unused) #8352
• Security
  • Change Content-Disposition: inline to attachment in f.php #8344
  • Hardened user methods exists, mtime, ctime #26c1102
• Deployment
  • Add username in Apache access logs (also in Docker logs): for GReader API, and for HTTP Basic Auth from reverse proxy #8392
• SimplePie
  • Update of CURLOPT_ACCEPT_ENCODING #8376, simplepie#960, simplepie#962
  • Fix don’t preserve children inside disallowed <template> element #8443
  • Fixes before PHPStan 2 #8445, simplepie#957
• Extensions
  • Update .gitignore to ignore installed extensions #8372
• UI
  • Add data-category="3" to ease custom CSS styling of articles #8397
  • Fix space between By: and the author’s name #8422
• I18n
  • Improve Brazilian Portuguese #8411
  • Improve Dutch #8403
  • Improve German #8402
  • Improve Polish #8408
  • Improve Spanish #8464
• Misc.
  • Update dev dependencies #8387, #8388, #8389,
    #8390, #8391, #8393,
    #8453

• Milestone

This is a major release, just in time for the holidays 🎄

Selected new features ✨:

• New sorting and filtering by date of User modified, with corresponding search operator, e.g. userdate:PT1H for the past hour
• New sorting by article length
• New advanced search form
• New overview of dates with most unread articles
• New ability to share feed visibility through API (implemented by e.g. Capy Reader)
  • Bonus: Capy Reader is also the first open source Android app to support user labels
• Better transitions UI between groups of articles
• New links in UI for transitions between groups of articles, and jump to next transition
• Docker default image updated to Debian 13 Trixie with PHP 8.4.11
• And much more…

Improved performance 🏎️:

• Scaling of user statistics in Web UI and CLI, to help instances with 1k+ users
• Improve SQL speed for some critical requests for large databases
• API performance optimisation thanks to streaming of large responses

Selected bug fixes 🐛:

• Fix OpenID Connect with Debian 13
• Fix MySQL / MariaDB bug wrongly sorting new articles
• Fix SQLite bind bug when adding tag

Breaking changes 💥:

• Move unsafe autologin to an extension
• Potential breaking changes for some extensions (which have to rename some old functions)

This release has been made by @Alkarex, @Frenzie, @Inverle, @aledeg, @andris155, @horvi28, @math-GH, @minna-xD and newcomers @Darkentia, @FollowTheWizard, @GreyChame1eon, @McFev, @jocmp, @larsks, @martinhartmann, @matthew-neavling, @pudymody, @raspo, @scharmach, @scollovati, @stag-enterprises, @vandys, @xtmd, @yzx9.

Full changelog:

• Features
  • New sorting and filtering by date of User modified #7886, #8090,
    #8105, #8118, #8130
    • Corresponding search operator, e.g. userdate:PT1H for the past hour #8093
    • Allows finding articles marked by the local user as read/unread or starred/unstarred at specific dates for e.g. undo action.
  • New sorting by article length #8119
  • New advanced search form #8103, #8122, #8226
  • Add compatibility with PCRE word boundary \b and \B for regex search using PostgreSQL #8141
  • More uniform SQL search and PHP search for accents and case-sensitivity (e.g. for automatically marking as read) #8329
  • New overview of dates with most unread articles #8089
  • Allow marking as read articles older than 1 or 7 days also when sorting by publication date #8163
  • New option to show user labels instead of tags in RSS share #8112
  • Add new feed visibility (priority) Show in its feed #7972
  • New ability to share feed visibility through API (implemented by e.g. Capy Reader) #7583, #8158
  • Configurable notification timeout #7942
  • OPML export/import of unicity criteria #8243
  • Ensure stable IDs (categories, feeds, labels) during export/import #7988
  • Add username and timestamp to SQLite export from Web UI #8169
  • Add option to apply filter actions to existing articles #7959, #8259
  • Support CSS selector ~ subsequent-sibling #8154
    • Upstream PR phpgt/CssXPath#231
  • Rework saving of configuration files for more reliability in case of e.g. full disk #8220
  • Web scraping support date format as milliseconds for Unix epoch #8266
  • Allow negative category sort numbers #8330
• Performance
  • Improve SQL speed for updating cached information #6957, #8207,
    #8255, #8254, #8255
  • Fix SQL performance issue with MySQL, using an index hint #8211
  • Scaling of user statistics in Web UI and CLI, to help instances with 1k+ users #8277
  • API streaming of large responses for reducing memory consumption and increasing speed #8041
• Security
  • 💥 Move unsafe autologin to an extension #7958
  • Fix some CSRFs #8035
  • Strengthen some crypto (login, tokens, nonces) #8061, #8320
  • Create separate HTTP Retry-After rules for proxies #8029, #8218
  • Add data: to CSP in subscription controller #8253
  • Improve anonymous authentication logic #8165
  • Enable GitHub release immutability #8205
• Bug fixing
  • Exclude local networks for domain-wide HTTP Retry-After #8195
  • Fix OpenID Connect with Debian 13 #8032
  • Fix MySQL / MariaDB bug wrongly sorting new articles #8223
  • Fix MySQL / MariaDB database size calculation #8282
  • Fix SQLite bind bug when adding tag #8101
  • Fix SQL auto-update of field f.kind to ease migrations from FreshRSS versions older than 1.20.0 #8148
  • Fix search encoding and quoting #8311, #8324, #8338
  • Fix handling of database unexpected null content (during migrations) #8319, #8321
  • Fix drag & drop of user query losing information #8113
  • Fix DOM error while filtering retrieved full content #8132, #8161
  • Fix config.custom.php during install #8033
  • Fix do not mark important feeds as read from category #8067
  • Fix regression of warnings in Web browser console due to lack of window.bcrypt object #8166
  • Fix chart resize regression due to chart.js v4 update #8298
  • Fix CLI user creation warning when language is not given #8283
  • Fix merging of custom HTTP headers #8251
  • Fix bug in the case of duplicated mark-as-read filters #8322
• SimplePie
  • Fix support of HTTP trailer headers #7983, simplepie#943
  • Apply HTTPS policy also on GUIDs and permalinks #8037, simplepie#951
    • Fix WordPress.com HTTP duplicates with WebSub Automattic/pushpress#16
  • Implement HTML whitelist for SimplePie sanitizer #7924, simplepie#947
  • Various upstream contributions simplepie#940, simplepie#944
• Deployment
  • Docker default image updated to Debian 13 Trixie with PHP 8.4.11 and Apache 2.4.65 #8032
  • Docker alternative image updated to Alpine 3.23 with PHP 8.4.15 and Apache 2.4.65 #8285
  • Fix Docker healthcheck cli/health.php compatibility with OpenID Connect #8040
  • Improve Docker for compatibility with other base images such as Arch Linux #8299
    • Improve cli/access-permissions.sh to detect the correct permission Web group such as www-data, apache, or http
  • Update PostgreSQL volume for Docker #8216, #8224
  • Catch lack of exec() function for git update #8228
  • Work around DOMDocument::saveHTML() scrambling charset encoding in some versions of libxml2 #8296
  • Improve configuration checks for PHP extensions (in Web UI and CLI), including recommending e.g. php-intl #8334
• UI
  • New button for toggling sidebar on desktop view #8201, #8286
  • Better transitions between groups of articles #8174
  • New links in transitions and jump to next transition #8294
  • More visible selected article #8230
  • Show the parsed search query instead of the original user input #8293,
    #8306, #8341
  • Show search query in the page title #8217
  • Scroll into filtered feed/category on page load in the sidebar #8281, #8307
  • Fix autocomplete issues in change password form #7812
  • Fix navigating between read feeds using shortcut shift+j/k #8057
  • Dark background in Web app manifest to avoid white flash when opening #8140
  • Increase button visibility in UI to change theme #8149
  • Replace arrow navigation in theme switcher with <select> #8190
  • Improve scroll of article after load of user labels #7962
  • Keep scroll state of page when closing the slider #8295, #8301
  • Scroll into filtered feed/category on page load #8281
  • Display sidebar dropdowns above if no space below #8335, #8336
  • Use native CSS instead of SCSS #8200, #8241
    • Using CSS nesting and relative colours.
  • Various UI and style improvements: #8171, #8185, #8196
  • JavaScript finalise migration from Promise to async/await: #8182
• API
  • API performance optimisation: streaming of large responses #8041
  • Fever API: Add with_ids parameter to mass-change read/unread/saved/unsaved on lists of articles #8312
  • Misc API: better REST error semantics #8232
• Extensions
  • Add support for extension priority #8038
  • Add support for extension compatibility #8081
  • Improve PHP code with hook enums #8036
  • New hook nav_entries #8054
  • Rename Extensions default branch from master to main #8194
• I18n
  • Translation status as text in README #7842
  • Add new translate CLI commands move #8214
  • Change some regional language codes to comply with RFC 5646 / IETF BCP 47 / ISO 3166 / ISO 639-1 #8065
  • Improve German #8028
  • Improve Greek #8146
  • Improve Finnish #8073, #8092
  • Improve Hungarian #8244
  • Improve Italian #8115, #8186
  • Improve Polish #8134, #8135
  • Improve Russian #8155, #8197
  • Improve Simplified Chinese #8308, #8313
• Misc.
  • Add code to modify a search expression #8293
  • Remove Pocket sharing service #8127, #8128
  • Update to PHPMailer 7.0.1 #8048, #8180, #8272
  • 💥 Housekeeping of lib_rss.php with potential breaking changes for some extensions #8193,
  • Use native PHP #[Deprecated] #8325
  • Improve PHP code #8156, #8203, #8284,
    #8292, #8297
  • GitHub Actions: --no-progress #8315
  • Update dev dependencies #8043, #8044,
    #8045, #8046, #8047,
    #8052, #8176, #8177,
    #8178, #8179, #8210,
    #8270, #8271, #8273,
    #8274, #8275, #8276

Hello! Editor Matt here; this is Dracula Weekly, Week 27.

That was it! The events of Dracula wrapped up this week. I cannot overstate how meaningful your support is: for all the other hundreds of thousands of people reading Dracula together. But really I’m so grateful for YOUR support, dear Weekly subscriber.

I know the point of subscribing to Dracula Wee…

Read more

NOTE

Seven years ago we all went through the flames; and the happiness of some of us since then is, we think, well worth the pain we endured. It is an added joy to Mina and to me that our boy's birthday is the same day as that on which Quincey Morris died. His mother holds, I know, the secret belief that some of our brave friend's spirit has passed into him. His bundle of names links all our little band of men together; but we call him Quincey.

In the summer of this year we made a journey to Transylvania, and went over the old ground which was, and is, to us so full of vivid and terrible memories. It was almost impossible to believe that the things which we had seen with our own eyes and heard with our own ears were living truths. Every trace of all that had been was blotted out. The castle stood as before, reared high above a waste of desolation.

When we got home we were talking of the old time—which we could all look back on without despair, for Godalming and Seward are both happily married. I took the papers from the safe where they had been ever since our return so long ago. We were struck with the fact, that in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of typewriting, except the later note-books of Mina and Seward and myself, and Van Helsing's memorandum. We could hardly ask any one, even did we wish to, to accept these as proofs of so wild a story. Van Helsing summed it all up as he said, with our boy on his knee:—

"We want no proofs; we ask none to believe us! This boy will some day know what a brave and gallant woman his mother is. Already he knows her sweetness and loving care; later on he will understand how some men so loved her, that they did dare much for her sake."

JONATHAN HARKER.

THE END

WHEW.

Matt here with a brief note! Aren't you glad we didn’t have to wait seven years in real time to get this postscript? :)

I’ll send another email later to chat about what happens next and answer some common questions. But for now, I only have one thing to say:

THANK YOU.

Mina Harker's Journal.

6 November.—It was late in the afternoon when the Professor and I took our way towards the east whence I knew Jonathan was coming. We did not go fast, though the way was steeply downhill, for we had to take heavy rugs and wraps with us; we dared not face the possibility of being left without warmth in the cold and the snow. We had to take some of our provisions, too, for we were in a perfect desolation, and, so far as we could see through the snowfall, there was not even the sign of habitation. When we had gone about a mile, I was tired with the heavy walking and sat down to rest. Then we looked back and saw where the clear line of Dracula's castle cut the sky; for we were so deep under the hill whereon it was set that the angle of perspective of the Carpathian mountains was far below it. We saw it in all its grandeur, perched a thousand feet on the summit of a sheer precipice, and with seemingly a great gap between it and the steep of the adjacent mountain on any side. There was something wild and uncanny about the place. We could hear the distant howling of wolves. They were far off, but the sound, even though coming muffled through the deadening snowfall, was full of terror. I knew from the way Dr. Van Helsing was searching about that he was trying to seek some strategic point, where we would be less exposed in case of attack. The rough roadway still led downwards; we could trace it through the drifted snow.

In a little while the Professor signalled to me, so I got up and joined him. He had found a wonderful spot, a sort of natural hollow in a rock, with an entrance like a doorway between two boulders. He took me by the hand and drew me in: "See!" he said, "here you will be in shelter; and if the wolves do come I can meet them one by one." He brought in our furs, and made a snug nest for me, and got out some provisions and forced them upon me. But I could not eat; to even try to do so was repulsive to me, and, much as I would have liked to please him, I could not bring myself to the attempt. He looked very sad, but did not reproach me. Taking his field-glasses from the case, he stood on the top of the rock, and began to search the horizon. Suddenly he called out:—

"Look! Madam Mina, look! look!" I sprang up and stood beside him on the rock; he handed me his glasses and pointed. The snow was now falling more heavily, and swirled about fiercely, for a high wind was beginning to blow. However, there were times when there were pauses between the snow flurries and I could see a long way round. From the height where we were it was possible to see a great distance; and far off, beyond the white waste of snow, I could see the river lying like a black ribbon in kinks and curls as it wound its way. Straight in front of us and not far off—in fact, so near that I wondered we had not noticed before—came a group of mounted men hurrying along. In the midst of them was a cart, a long leiter-wagon which swept from side to side, like a dog's tail wagging, with each stern inequality of the road. Outlined against the snow as they were, I could see from the men's clothes that they were peasants or gypsies of some kind.

On the cart was a great square chest. My heart leaped as I saw it, for I felt that the end was coming. The evening was now drawing close, and well I knew that at sunset the Thing, which was till then imprisoned there, would take new freedom and could in any of many forms elude all pursuit. In fear I turned to the Professor; to my consternation, however, he was not there. An instant later, I saw him below me. Round the rock he had drawn a circle, such as we had found shelter in last night. When he had completed it he stood beside me again, saying:—

"At least you shall be safe here from him!" He took the glasses from me, and at the next lull of the snow swept the whole space below us. "See," he said, "they come quickly; they are flogging the horses, and galloping as hard as they can." He paused and went on in a hollow voice:—

"They are racing for the sunset. We may be too late. God's will be done!" Down came another blinding rush of driving snow, and the whole landscape was blotted out. It soon passed, however, and once more his glasses were fixed on the plain. Then came a sudden cry:—

"Look! Look! Look! See, two horsemen follow fast, coming up from the south. It must be Quincey and John. Take the glass. Look before the snow blots it all out!" I took it and looked. The two men might be Dr. Seward and Mr. Morris. I knew at all events that neither of them was Jonathan. At the same time I knew that Jonathan was not far off; looking around I saw on the north side of the coming party two other men, riding at break-neck speed. One of them I knew was Jonathan, and the other I took, of course, to be Lord Godalming. They, too, were pursuing the party with the cart. When I told the Professor he shouted in glee like a schoolboy, and, after looking intently till a snow fall made sight impossible, he laid his Winchester rifle ready for use against the boulder at the opening of our shelter. "They are all converging," he said. "When the time comes we shall have gypsies on all sides." I got out my revolver ready to hand, for whilst we were speaking the howling of wolves came louder and closer. When the snow storm abated a moment we looked again. It was strange to see the snow falling in such heavy flakes close to us, and beyond, the sun shining more and more brightly as it sank down towards the far mountain tops. Sweeping the glass all around us I could see here and there dots moving singly and in twos and threes and larger numbers—the wolves were gathering for their prey.

Every instant seemed an age whilst we waited. The wind came now in fierce bursts, and the snow was driven with fury as it swept upon us in circling eddies. At times we could not see an arm's length before us; but at others, as the hollow-sounding wind swept by us, it seemed to clear the air-space around us so that we could see afar off. We had of late been so accustomed to watch for sunrise and sunset, that we knew with fair accuracy when it would be; and we knew that before long the sun would set. It was hard to believe that by our watches it was less than an hour that we waited in that rocky shelter before the various bodies began to converge close upon us. The wind came now with fiercer and more bitter sweeps, and more steadily from the north. It seemingly had driven the snow clouds from us, for, with only occasional bursts, the snow fell. We could distinguish clearly the individuals of each party, the pursued and the pursuers. Strangely enough those pursued did not seem to realise, or at least to care, that they were pursued; they seemed, however, to hasten with redoubled speed as the sun dropped lower and lower on the mountain tops.

Closer and closer they drew. The Professor and I crouched down behind our rock, and held our weapons ready; I could see that he was determined that they should not pass. One and all were quite unaware of our presence.

All at once two voices shouted out to: "Halt!" One was my Jonathan's, raised in a high key of passion; the other Mr. Morris' strong resolute tone of quiet command. The gypsies may not have known the language, but there was no mistaking the tone, in whatever tongue the words were spoken. Instinctively they reined in, and at the instant Lord Godalming and Jonathan dashed up at one side and Dr. Seward and Mr. Morris on the other. The leader of the gypsies, a splendid-looking fellow who sat his horse like a centaur, waved them back, and in a fierce voice gave to his companions some word to proceed. They lashed the horses which sprang forward; but the four men raised their Winchester rifles, and in an unmistakable way commanded them to stop. At the same moment Dr. Van Helsing and I rose behind the rock and pointed our weapons at them. Seeing that they were surrounded the men tightened their reins and drew up. The leader turned to them and gave a word at which every man of the gypsy party drew what weapon he carried, knife or pistol, and held himself in readiness to attack. Issue was joined in an instant.

The leader, with a quick movement of his rein, threw his horse out in front, and pointing first to the sun—now close down on the hill tops—and then to the castle, said something which I did not understand. For answer, all four men of our party threw themselves from their horses and dashed towards the cart. I should have felt terrible fear at seeing Jonathan in such danger, but that the ardour of battle must have been upon me as well as the rest of them; I felt no fear, but only a wild, surging desire to do something. Seeing the quick movement of our parties, the leader of the gypsies gave a command; his men instantly formed round the cart in a sort of undisciplined endeavour, each one shouldering and pushing the other in his eagerness to carry out the order.

In the midst of this I could see that Jonathan on one side of the ring of men, and Quincey on the other, were forcing a way to the cart; it was evident that they were bent on finishing their task before the sun should set. Nothing seemed to stop or even to hinder them. Neither the levelled weapons nor the flashing knives of the gypsies in front, nor the howling of the wolves behind, appeared to even attract their attention. Jonathan's impetuosity, and the manifest singleness of his purpose, seemed to overawe those in front of him; instinctively they cowered, aside and let him pass. In an instant he had jumped upon the cart, and, with a strength which seemed incredible, raised the great box, and flung it over the wheel to the ground. In the meantime, Mr. Morris had had to use force to pass through his side of the ring of Szgany. All the time I had been breathlessly watching Jonathan I had, with the tail of my eye, seen him pressing desperately forward, and had seen the knives of the gypsies flash as he won a way through them, and they cut at him. He had parried with his great bowie knife, and at first I thought that he too had come through in safety; but as he sprang beside Jonathan, who had by now jumped from the cart, I could see that with his left hand he was clutching at his side, and that the blood was spurting through his fingers. He did not delay notwithstanding this, for as Jonathan, with desperate energy, attacked one end of the chest, attempting to prize off the lid with his great Kukri knife, he attacked the other frantically with his bowie. Under the efforts of both men the lid began to yield; the nails drew with a quick screeching sound, and the top of the box was thrown back.

By this time the gypsies, seeing themselves covered by the Winchesters, and at the mercy of Lord Godalming and Dr. Seward, had given in and made no resistance. The sun was almost down on the mountain tops, and the shadows of the whole group fell long upon the snow. I saw the Count lying within the box upon the earth, some of which the rude falling from the cart had scattered over him. He was deathly pale, just like a waxen image, and the red eyes glared with the horrible vindictive look which I knew too well.

As I looked, the eyes saw the sinking sun, and the look of hate in them turned to triumph.

But, on the instant, came the sweep and flash of Jonathan's great knife. I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat; whilst at the same moment Mr. Morris's bowie knife plunged into the heart.

It was like a miracle; but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight.

I shall be glad as long as I live that even in that moment of final dissolution, there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested there.

The Castle of Dracula now stood out against the red sky, and every stone of its broken battlements was articulated against the light of the setting sun.

The gypsies, taking us as in some way the cause of the extraordinary disappearance of the dead man, turned, without a word, and rode away as if for their lives. Those who were unmounted jumped upon the leiter-wagon and shouted to the horsemen not to desert them. The wolves, which had withdrawn to a safe distance, followed in their wake, leaving us alone.

Mr. Morris, who had sunk to the ground, leaned on his elbow, holding his hand pressed to his side; the blood still gushed through his fingers. I flew to him, for the Holy circle did not now keep me back; so did the two doctors. Jonathan knelt behind him and the wounded man laid back his head on his shoulder. With a sigh he took, with a feeble effort, my hand in that of his own which was unstained. He must have seen the anguish of my heart in my face, for he smiled at me and said:—

"I am only too happy to have been of any service! Oh, God!" he cried suddenly, struggling up to a sitting posture and pointing to me, "It was worth for this to die! Look! look!"

The sun was now right down upon the mountain top, and the red gleams fell upon my face, so that it was bathed in rosy light. With one impulse the men sank on their knees and a deep and earnest "Amen" broke from all as their eyes followed the pointing of his finger. The dying man spoke:—

"Now God be thanked that all has not been in vain! See! the snow is not more stainless than her forehead! The curse has passed away!"

And, to our bitter grief, with a smile and in silence, he died, a gallant gentleman.

Memorandum by Abraham Van Helsing.

5 November, morning.—Let me be accurate in everything, for though you and I have seen some strange things together, you may at the first think that I, Van Helsing, am mad—that the many horrors and the so long strain on nerves has at the last turn my brain.

All yesterday we travel, ever getting closer to the mountains, and moving into a more and more wild and desert land. There are great, frowning precipices and much falling water, and Nature seem to have held sometime her carnival. Madam Mina still sleep and sleep; and though I did have hunger and appeased it, I could not waken her—even for food. I began to fear that the fatal spell of the place was upon her, tainted as she is with that Vampire baptism. "Well," said I to myself, "if it be that she sleep all the day, it shall also be that I do not sleep at night." As we travel on the rough road, for a road of an ancient and imperfect kind there was, I held down my head and slept. Again I waked with a sense of guilt and of time passed, and found Madam Mina still sleeping, and the sun low down. But all was indeed changed; the frowning mountains seemed further away, and we were near the top of a steep-rising hill, on summit of which was such a castle as Jonathan tell of in his diary. At once I exulted and feared; for now, for good or ill, the end was near.

I woke Madam Mina, and again tried to hypnotise her; but alas! unavailing till too late. Then, ere the great dark came upon us—for even after down-sun the heavens reflected the gone sun on the snow, and all was for a time in a great twilight—I took out the horses and fed them in what shelter I could. Then I make a fire; and near it I make Madam Mina, now awake and more charming than ever, sit comfortable amid her rugs. I got ready food: but she would not eat, simply saying that she had not hunger. I did not press her, knowing her unavailingness. But I myself eat, for I must needs now be strong for all. Then, with the fear on me of what might be, I drew a ring so big for her comfort, round where Madam Mina sat; and over the ring I passed some of the wafer, and I broke it fine so that all was well guarded. She sat still all the time—so still as one dead; and she grew whiter and ever whiter till the snow was not more pale; and no word she said. But when I drew near, she clung to me, and I could know that the poor soul shook her from head to feet with a tremor that was pain to feel. I said to her presently, when she had grown more quiet:—

"Will you not come over to the fire?" for I wished to make a test of what she could. She rose obedient, but when she have made a step she stopped, and stood as one stricken.

"Why not go on?" I asked. She shook her head, and, coming back, sat down in her place. Then, looking at me with open eyes, as of one waked from sleep, she said simply:—

"I cannot!" and remained silent. I rejoiced, for I knew that what she could not, none of those that we dreaded could. Though there might be danger to her body, yet her soul was safe!

Presently the horses began to scream, and tore at their tethers till I came to them and quieted them. When they did feel my hands on them, they whinnied low as in joy, and licked at my hands and were quiet for a time. Many times through the night did I come to them, till it arrive to the cold hour when all nature is at lowest; and every time my coming was with quiet of them. In the cold hour the fire began to die, and I was about stepping forth to replenish it, for now the snow came in flying sweeps and with it a chill mist. Even in the dark there was a light of some kind, as there ever is over snow; and it seemed as though the snow-flurries and the wreaths of mist took shape as of women with trailing garments. All was in dead, grim silence only that the horses whinnied and cowered, as if in terror of the worst. I began to fear—horrible fears; but then came to me the sense of safety in that ring wherein I stood. I began, too, to think that my imaginings were of the night, and the gloom, and the unrest that I have gone through, and all the terrible anxiety. It was as though my memories of all Jonathan's horrid experience were befooling me; for the snow flakes and the mist began to wheel and circle round, till I could get as though a shadowy glimpse of those women that would have kissed him. And then the horses cowered lower and lower, and moaned in terror as men do in pain. Even the madness of fright was not to them, so that they could break away. I feared for my dear Madam Mina when these weird figures drew near and circled round. I looked at her, but she sat calm, and smiled at me; when I would have stepped to the fire to replenish it, she caught me and held me back, and whispered, like a voice that one hears in a dream, so low it was:—

"No! No! Do not go without. Here you are safe!" I turned to her, and looking in her eyes, said:—

"But you? It is for you that I fear!" whereat she laughed—a laugh, low and unreal, and said:—

"Fear for _me_! Why fear for me? None safer in all the world from them than I am," and as I wondered at the meaning of her words, a puff of wind made the flame leap up, and I see the red scar on her forehead. Then, alas! I knew. Did I not, I would soon have learned, for the wheeling figures of mist and snow came closer, but keeping ever without the Holy circle. Then they began to materialise till—if God have not take away my reason, for I saw it through my eyes—there were before me in actual flesh the same three women that Jonathan saw in the room, when they would have kissed his throat. I knew the swaying round forms, the bright hard eyes, the white teeth, the ruddy colour, the voluptuous lips. They smiled ever at poor dear Madam Mina; and as their laugh came through the silence of the night, they twined their arms and pointed to her, and said in those so sweet tingling tones that Jonathan said were of the intolerable sweetness of the water-glasses:—

"Come, sister. Come to us. Come! Come!" In fear I turned to my poor Madam Mina, and my heart with gladness leapt like flame; for oh! the terror in her sweet eyes, the repulsion, the horror, told a story to my heart that was all of hope. God be thanked she was not, yet, of them. I seized some of the firewood which was by me, and holding out some of the Wafer, advanced on them towards the fire. They drew back before me, and laughed their low horrid laugh. I fed the fire, and feared them not; for I knew that we were safe within our protections. They could not approach, me, whilst so armed, nor Madam Mina whilst she remained within the ring, which she could not leave no more than they could enter. The horses had ceased to moan, and lay still on the ground; the snow fell on them softly, and they grew whiter. I knew that there was for the poor beasts no more of terror.

And so we remained till the red of the dawn to fall through the snow-gloom. I was desolate and afraid, and full of woe and terror; but when that beautiful sun began to climb the horizon life was to me again. At the first coming of the dawn the horrid figures melted in the whirling mist and snow; the wreaths of transparent gloom moved away towards the castle, and were lost.

Instinctively, with the dawn coming, I turned to Madam Mina, intending to hypnotise her; but she lay in a deep and sudden sleep, from which I could not wake her. I tried to hypnotise through her sleep, but she made no response, none at all; and the day broke. I fear yet to stir. I have made my fire and have seen the horses, they are all dead. To-day I have much to do here, and I keep waiting till the sun is up high; for there may be places where I must go, where that sunlight, though snow and mist obscure it, will be to me a safety.

I will strengthen me with breakfast, and then I will to my terrible work. Madam Mina still sleeps; and, God be thanked! she is calm in her sleep....

Dr. Seward's Diary.

5 November.—With the dawn we saw the body of Szgany before us dashing away from the river with their leiter-wagon. They surrounded it in a cluster, and hurried along as though beset. The snow is falling lightly and there is a strange excitement in the air. It may be our own feelings, but the depression is strange. Far off I hear the howling of wolves; the snow brings them down from the mountains, and there are dangers to all of us, and from all sides. The horses are nearly ready, and we are soon off. We ride to death of some one. God alone knows who, or where, or what, or when, or how it may be....

Dr. Van Helsing's Memorandum.

5 November, afternoon.—I am at least sane. Thank God for that mercy at all events, though the proving it has been dreadful. When I left Madam Mina sleeping within the Holy circle, I took my way to the castle. The blacksmith hammer which I took in the carriage from Veresti was useful; though the doors were all open I broke them off the rusty hinges, lest some ill-intent or ill-chance should close them, so that being entered I might not get out. Jonathan's bitter experience served me here. By memory of his diary I found my way to the old chapel, for I knew that here my work lay. The air was oppressive; it seemed as if there was some sulphurous fume, which at times made me dizzy. Either there was a roaring in my ears or I heard afar off the howl of wolves. Then I bethought me of my dear Madam Mina, and I was in terrible plight. The dilemma had me between his horns.

Her, I had not dare to take into this place, but left safe from the Vampire in that Holy circle; and yet even there would be the wolf! I resolve me that my work lay here, and that as to the wolves we must submit, if it were God's will. At any rate it was only death and freedom beyond. So did I choose for her. Had it but been for myself the choice had been easy, the maw of the wolf were better to rest in than the grave of the Vampire! So I make my choice to go on with my work.

I knew that there were at least three graves to find—graves that are inhabit; so I search, and search, and I find one of them. She lay in her Vampire sleep, so full of life and voluptuous beauty that I shudder as though I have come to do murder. Ah, I doubt not that in old time, when such things were, many a man who set forth to do such a task as mine, found at the last his heart fail him, and then his nerve. So he delay, and delay, and delay, till the mere beauty and the fascination of the wanton Un-Dead have hypnotise him; and he remain on and on, till sunset come, and the Vampire sleep be over. Then the beautiful eyes of the fair woman open and look love, and the voluptuous mouth present to a kiss—and man is weak. And there remain one more victim in the Vampire fold; one more to swell the grim and grisly ranks of the Un-Dead!...

There is some fascination, surely, when I am moved by the mere presence of such an one, even lying as she lay in a tomb fretted with age and heavy with the dust of centuries, though there be that horrid odour such as the lairs of the Count have had. Yes, I was moved—I, Van Helsing, with all my purpose and with my motive for hate—I was moved to a yearning for delay which seemed to paralyse my faculties and to clog my very soul. It may have been that the need of natural sleep, and the strange oppression of the air were beginning to overcome me. Certain it was that I was lapsing into sleep, the open-eyed sleep of one who yields to a sweet fascination, when there came through the snow-stilled air a long, low wail, so full of woe and pity that it woke me like the sound of a clarion. For it was the voice of my dear Madam Mina that I heard.

Then I braced myself again to my horrid task, and found by wrenching away tomb-tops one other of the sisters, the other dark one. I dared not pause to look on her as I had on her sister, lest once more I should begin to be enthrall; but I go on searching until, presently, I find in a high great tomb as if made to one much beloved that other fair sister which, like Jonathan I had seen to gather herself out of the atoms of the mist. She was so fair to look on, so radiantly beautiful, so exquisitely voluptuous, that the very instinct of man in me, which calls some of my sex to love and to protect one of hers, made my head whirl with new emotion. But God be thanked, that soul-wail of my dear Madam Mina had not died out of my ears; and, before the spell could be wrought further upon me, I had nerved myself to my wild work. By this time I had searched all the tombs in the chapel, so far as I could tell; and as there had been only three of these Un-Dead phantoms around us in the night, I took it that there were no more of active Un-Dead existent. There was one great tomb more lordly than all the rest; huge it was, and nobly proportioned. On it was but one word:

DRACULA.

This then was the Un-Dead home of the King-Vampire, to whom so many more were due. Its emptiness spoke eloquent to make certain what I knew. Before I began to restore these women to their dead selves through my awful work, I laid in Dracula's tomb some of the Wafer, and so banished him from it, Un-Dead, for ever.

Then began my terrible task, and I dreaded it. Had it been but one, it had been easy, comparative. But three! To begin twice more after I had been through a deed of horror; for if it was terrible with the sweet Miss Lucy, what would it not be with these strange ones who had survived through centuries, and who had been strengthened by the passing of the years; who would, if they could, have fought for their foul lives....

Oh, my friend John, but it was butcher work; had I not been nerved by thoughts of other dead, and of the living over whom hung such a pall of fear, I could not have gone on. I tremble and tremble even yet, though till all was over, God be thanked, my nerve did stand. Had I not seen the repose in the first place, and the gladness that stole over it just ere the final dissolution came, as realisation that the soul had been won, I could not have gone further with my butchery. I could not have endured the horrid screeching as the stake drove home; the plunging of writhing form, and lips of bloody foam. I should have fled in terror and left my work undone. But it is over! And the poor souls, I can pity them now and weep, as I think of them placid each in her full sleep of death for a short moment ere fading. For, friend John, hardly had my knife severed the head of each, before the whole body began to melt away and crumble in to its native dust, as though the death that should have come centuries agone had at last assert himself and say at once and loud "I am here!"

Before I left the castle I so fixed its entrances that never more can the Count enter there Un-Dead.

When I stepped into the circle where Madam Mina slept, she woke from her sleep, and, seeing, me, cried out in pain that I had endured too much.

"Come!" she said, "come away from this awful place! Let us go to meet my husband who is, I know, coming towards us." She was looking thin and pale and weak; but her eyes were pure and glowed with fervour. I was glad to see her paleness and her illness, for my mind was full of the fresh horror of that ruddy vampire sleep.

And so with trust and hope, and yet full of fear, we go eastward to meet our friends—and him—whom Madam Mina tell me that she know are coming to meet us.

Dr. Seward's Diary.

4 November.—To-day we heard of the launch having been detained by an accident when trying to force a way up the rapids. The Slovak boats get up all right, by aid of a rope and steering with knowledge. Some went up only a few hours before. Godalming is an amateur fitter himself, and evidently it was he who put the launch in trim again. Finally, they got up the rapids all right, with local help, and are off on the chase afresh. I fear that the boat is not any better for the accident; the peasantry tell us that after she got upon smooth water again, she kept stopping every now and again so long as she was in sight. We must push on harder than ever; our help may be wanted soon.

Memorandum by Abraham Van Helsing

4 November.—This to my old and true friend John Seward, M.D., of Purfleet, London, in case I may not see him. It may explain. It is morning, and I write by a fire which all the night I have kept alive—Madam Mina aiding me. It is cold, cold; so cold that the grey heavy sky is full of snow, which when it falls will settle for all winter as the ground is hardening to receive it. It seems to have affected Madam Mina; she has been so heavy of head all day that she was not like herself. She sleeps, and sleeps, and sleeps! She who is usual so alert, have done literally nothing all the day; she even have lost her appetite. She make no entry into her little diary, she who write so faithful at every pause. Something whisper to me that all is not well. However, to-night she is more vif. Her long sleep all day have refresh and restore her, for now she is all sweet and bright as ever. At sunset I try to hypnotise her, but alas! with no effect; the power has grown less and less with each day, and to-night it fail me altogether. Well, God's will be done—whatever it may be, and whithersoever it may lead!

Now to the historical, for as Madam Mina write not in her stenography, I must, in my cumbrous old fashion, that so each day of us may not go unrecorded.

We got to the Borgo Pass just after sunrise yesterday morning. When I saw the signs of the dawn I got ready for the hypnotism. We stopped our carriage, and got down so that there might be no disturbance. I made a couch with furs, and Madam Mina, lying down, yield herself as usual, but more slow and more short time than ever, to the hypnotic sleep. As before, came the answer: "darkness and the swirling of water." Then she woke, bright and radiant and we go on our way and soon reach the Pass. At this time and place, she become all on fire with zeal; some new guiding power be in her manifested, for she point to a road and say:—

"This is the way."

"How know you it?" I ask.

"Of course I know it," she answer, and with a pause, add: "Have not my Jonathan travelled it and wrote of his travel?"

At first I think somewhat strange, but soon I see that there be only one such by-road. It is used but little, and very different from the coach road from the Bukovina to Bistritz, which is more wide and hard, and more of use.

So we came down this road; when we meet other ways—not always were we sure that they were roads at all, for they be neglect and light snow have fallen—the horses know and they only. I give rein to them, and they go on so patient. By-and-by we find all the things which Jonathan have note in that wonderful diary of him. Then we go on for long, long hours and hours. At the first, I tell Madam Mina to sleep; she try, and she succeed. She sleep all the time; till at the last, I feel myself to suspicious grow, and attempt to wake her. But she sleep on, and I may not wake her though I try. I do not wish to try too hard lest I harm her; for I know that she have suffer much, and sleep at times be all-in-all to her. I think I drowse myself, for all of sudden I feel guilt, as though I have done something; I find myself bolt up, with the reins in my hand, and the good horses go along jog, jog, just as ever. I look down and find Madam Mina still sleep. It is now not far off sunset time, and over the snow the light of the sun flow in big yellow flood, so that we throw great long shadow on where the mountain rise so steep. For we are going up, and up; and all is oh! so wild and rocky, as though it were the end of the world.

Then I arouse Madam Mina. This time she wake with not much trouble, and then I try to put her to hypnotic sleep. But she sleep not, being as though I were not. Still I try and try, till all at once I find her and myself in dark; so I look round, and find that the sun have gone down. Madam Mina laugh, and I turn and look at her. She is now quite awake, and look so well as I never saw her since that night at Carfax when we first enter the Count's house. I am amaze, and not at ease then; but she is so bright and tender and thoughtful for me that I forget all fear. I light a fire, for we have brought supply of wood with us, and she prepare food while I undo the horses and set them, tethered in shelter, to feed. Then when I return to the fire she have my supper ready. I go to help her; but she smile, and tell me that she have eat already—that she was so hungry that she would not wait. I like it not, and I have grave doubts; but I fear to affright her, and so I am silent of it. She help me and I eat alone; and then we wrap in fur and lie beside the fire, and I tell her to sleep while I watch. But presently I forget all of watching; and when I sudden remember that I watch, I find her lying quiet, but awake, and looking at me with so bright eyes. Once, twice more the same occur, and I get much sleep till before morning. When I wake I try to hypnotise her; but alas! though she shut her eyes obedient, she may not sleep. The sun rise up, and up, and up; and then sleep come to her too late, but so heavy that she will not wake. I have to lift her up, and place her sleeping in the carriage when I have harnessed the horses and made all ready. Madam still sleep, and she look in her sleep more healthy and more redder than before. And I like it not. And I am afraid, afraid, afraid!—I am afraid of all things—even to think but I must go on my way. The stake we play for is life and death, or more than these, and we must not flinch.

Jonathan Harker's Journal.

4 November, evening.—The accident to the launch has been a terrible thing for us. Only for it we should have overtaken the boat long ago; and by now my dear Mina would have been free. I fear to think of her, off on the wolds near that horrid place. We have got horses, and we follow on the track. I note this whilst Godalming is getting ready. We have our arms. The Szgany must look out if they mean fight. Oh, if only Morris and Seward were with us. We must only hope! If I write no more Good-bye, Mina! God bless and keep you.

Hello! Editor Matt here; this is Dracula Weekly, Week 26.

We’ve got daily updates! The plot is really moving along now, as the team makes its approach towards Transylvania. I love this part!

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Dr. Seward's Diary.

3 November.—We heard at Fundu that the launch had gone up the Bistritza. I wish it wasn't so cold. There are signs of snow coming; and if it falls heavy it will stop us. In such case we must get a sledge and go on, Russian fashion.

Jonathan Harker's Journal.

2 November, morning.—It is broad daylight. That good fellow would not wake me. He says it would have been a sin to, for I slept peacefully and was forgetting my trouble. It seems brutally selfish to me to have slept so long, and let him watch all night; but he was quite right. I am a new man this morning; and, as I sit here and watch him sleeping, I can do all that is necessary both as to minding the engine, steering, and keeping watch. I can feel that my strength and energy are coming back to me. I wonder where Mina is now, and Van Helsing. They should have got to Veresti about noon on Wednesday. It would take them some time to get the carriage and horses; so if they had started and travelled hard, they would be about now at the Borgo Pass. God guide and help them! I am afraid to think what may happen. If we could only go faster! but we cannot; the engines are throbbing and doing their utmost. I wonder how Dr. Seward and Mr. Morris are getting on. There seem to be endless streams running down the mountains into this river, but as none of them are very large—at present, at all events, though they are terrible doubtless in winter and when the snow melts—the horsemen may not have met much obstruction. I hope that before we get to Strasba we may see them; for if by that time we have not overtaken the Count, it may be necessary to take counsel together what to do next.

Dr. Seward's Diary.

2 November.—Three days on the road. No news, and no time to write it if there had been, for every moment is precious. We have had only the rest needful for the horses; but we are both bearing it wonderfully. Those adventurous days of ours are turning up useful. We must push on; we shall never feel happy till we get the launch in sight again.

MINA HARKER'S JOURNAL

2 November, morning.—I was successful, and we took turns driving all night; now the day is on us, bright though cold. There is a strange heaviness in the air—I say heaviness for want of a better word; I mean that it oppresses us both. It is very cold, and only our warm furs keep us comfortable. At dawn Van Helsing hypnotised me; he says I answered "darkness, creaking wood and roaring water," so the river is changing as they ascend. I do hope that my darling will not run any chance of danger—more than need be; but we are in God's hands.

2 November, night.—All day long driving. The country gets wilder as we go, and the great spurs of the Carpathians, which at Veresti seemed so far from us and so low on the horizon, now seem to gather round us and tower in front. We both seem in good spirits; I think we make an effort each to cheer the other; in the doing so we cheer ourselves. Dr. Van Helsing says that by morning we shall reach the Borgo Pass. The houses are very few here now, and the Professor says that the last horse we got will have to go on with us, as we may not be able to change. He got two in addition to the two we changed, so that now we have a rude four-in-hand. The dear horses are patient and good, and they give us no trouble. We are not worried with other travellers, and so even I can drive. We shall get to the Pass in daylight; we do not want to arrive before. So we take it easy, and have each a long rest in turn. Oh, what will to-morrow bring to us? We go to seek the place where my poor darling suffered so much. God grant that we may be guided aright, and that He will deign to watch over my husband and those dear to us both, and who are in such deadly peril. As for me, I am not worthy in His sight. Alas! I am unclean to His eyes, and shall be until He may deign to let me stand forth in His sight as one of those who have not incurred His wrath.

Jonathan Harker's Journal.

1 November, evening.—No news all day; we have found nothing of the kind we seek. We have now passed into the Bistritza; and if we are wrong in our surmise our chance is gone. We have over-hauled every boat, big and little. Early this morning, one crew took us for a Government boat, and treated us accordingly. We saw in this a way of smoothing matters, so at Fundu, where the Bistritza runs into the Sereth, we got a Roumanian flag which we now fly conspicuously. With every boat which we have over-hauled since then this trick has succeeded; we have had every deference shown to us, and not once any objection to whatever we chose to ask or do. Some of the Slovaks tell us that a big boat passed them, going at more than usual speed as she had a double crew on board. This was before they came to Fundu, so they could not tell us whether the boat turned into the Bistritza or continued on up the Sereth. At Fundu we could not hear of any such boat, so she must have passed there in the night. I am feeling very sleepy; the cold is perhaps beginning to tell upon me, and nature must have rest some time. Godalming insists that he shall keep the first watch. God bless him for all his goodness to poor dear Mina and me.

MINA HARKER'S JOURNAL

1 November.—All day long we have travelled, and at a good speed. The horses seem to know that they are being kindly treated, for they go willingly their full stage at best speed. We have now had so many changes and find the same thing so constantly that we are encouraged to think that the journey will be an easy one. Dr. Van Helsing is laconic; he tells the farmers that he is hurrying to Bistritz, and pays them well to make the exchange of horses. We get hot soup, or coffee, or tea; and off we go. It is a lovely country; full of beauties of all imaginable kinds, and the people are brave, and strong, and simple, and seem full of nice qualities. They are very, very superstitious. In the first house where we stopped, when the woman who served us saw the scar on my forehead, she crossed herself and put out two fingers towards me, to keep off the evil eye. I believe they went to the trouble of putting an extra amount of garlic into our food; and I can't abide garlic. Ever since then I have taken care not to take off my hat or veil, and so have escaped their suspicions. We are travelling fast, and as we have no driver with us to carry tales, we go ahead of scandal; but I daresay that fear of the evil eye will follow hard behind us all the way. The Professor seems tireless; all day he would not take any rest, though he made me sleep for a long spell. At sunset time he hypnotised me, and he says that I answered as usual "darkness, lapping water and creaking wood"; so our enemy is still on the river. I am afraid to think of Jonathan, but somehow I have now no fear for him, or for myself. I write this whilst we wait in a farmhouse for the horses to be got ready. Dr. Van Helsing is sleeping, Poor dear, he looks very tired and old and grey, but his mouth is set as firmly as a conqueror's; even in his sleep he is instinct with resolution. When we have well started I must make him rest whilst I drive. I shall tell him that we have days before us, and we must not break down when most of all his strength will be needed.... All is ready; we are off shortly.