Admiration

Passages

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

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• From Untrue (2018)

  Like Dufu, Philyaw has long been fascinated by the black church; all its contradictions and rules spoken and unspoken have provided fertile ground for her storytelling, though I was unaware of this for the first years of our acquaintanceship. I got to know her initially through our mutual work supporting and writing about women with stepchildren and adult stepkids—she was for many years the co-host with her ex-husband of an online radio show on co-parenting after divorce. We kept in touch as our work focus shifted, mine into writing about motherhood and sex, Philyaw’s as she increasingly concentrated on writing essays and fiction, much of it about relationships, parenting, race, feminism, pop culture, and female sexuality. When I wrote an article on assumed heterosexual women on the Upper East Side having affairs with their female trainers on the down-low during the summer months in the Hamptons, Philyaw reached out to tell me about her interest in and writing about the unexpected sex lives of women in her world, her contemporaries and women she remembered from childhood. She sent me some of her writings. In addition to “Eula,” I devoured her essay in Brevity titled “Milk for Free.” In it, she movingly, impressionistically chronicles what she learned about sex as a child—from the Jackie Collins novels she read on the floor of the children’s section of the local public library, from older lady neighbors who urged her not to give away the “milk for free,” from her first real boyfriend the summer after sixth grade, from the neighborhood drunk from whom her mother and the police could not protect her, and from the long-repressed memory of the time, when she was two or three, that a white lady detective showed up at their home because Philyaw’s mother had been raped. Like Tamara Winfrey Harris, the cultural critic and author of The Sisters Are Alright, Philyaw unflinchingly looks at the particular burdens and dangers black women face in expressing and even experiencing their sexuality—constraints created by history and economics and ideology. Also like Winfrey Harris, she refuses to capitulate to the notion that being an African American woman means being “broken” and works assertively against that pervasive portrayal. Philyaw writes about women with strong libidos and big brains for whom sex is complicated, joyous, illicit, rote, thrilling, or end-of-the-line boring. The predicaments of her protagonists, including herself in her first-person essays, feel raw and real, deliciously complex.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The somewhat arrogant arbiter of Roman fashion, the budding orator timidly dependent upon models of style and seeking my advice on a difficult passage, the anxious young officer twisting his thin beard, the invalid exhausted by coughing whom I watched over to his death, none of these existed till much later on. The picture of Lucius the boy is confined to more secret recesses of my memory: a face, a body, a complexion with the pale flush of alabaster, the exact equivalent of an amorous epigram of Callimachus or of certain perfectly turned, unadorned lines of Strato. But I was eager to leave Rome. My predecessors, up to this time, had absented themselves chiefly for war; for me the great undertakings, the activities of peace, and my life itself began outside Rome's bounds. There was one last service to perform, the duty of giving to Trajan that triumph which had obsessed his dying dreams. Actually a triumph becomes only the dead. When we are living there is always someone to reproach us for our failings; thus once they mocked Caesar for his baldness and his loves. But the dead are entitled to such inauguration into the tomb, to those few hours of noisy pomp before the centuries of glory and the millenniums of oblivion. Their fortune is safe from all reverses, and even their defeats acquire the splendor of victories. The last triumph of Trajan commemorated not his more or less dubious success over Parthia, but the honorable effort which his whole life had been. We had come together to celebrate the best emperor that Rome had known since the later years of Augustus, the hardest working, the most honest, and the least unjust. His very defects were no more than those distinguishing traits which prove the perfect resemblance between the marble portrait and the face. The emperor's soul ascended to the heavens, borne up along the still spiral of the Trajan Column. My adoptive father became a god: he had taken his place in that series of soldierly incarnations of the eternal Mars who come from century to century to shake and to change the world. As I stood upon the balcony of the Palatine I weighed the differences between us; I was directing myself toward calmer ends. I began to dream of truly Olympian rule. Rome is no longer confined to Rome: henceforth she must identify herself with half the globe, or must perish. Our homes and terraced roofs of tile, turned by the setting sun to rose and gold, are no longer enclosed, as in the time of our kings, within city walls. Our true ramparts now are thousands of leagues from Rome. I have constructed a good part of these defenses myself along the edges of Germanic forest and British moor.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Severus was quick to grasp that such an elusive enemy could be exterminated, but not conquered; he resigned himself to a war of attrition. The peasants, fired by Simon's enthusiasm, or terrorized by him, made common cause with the Zealots from the start; each rock became a bastion, each vineyard a trench; each tiny farm had to be starved out, or taken by assault. Jerusalem was not recaptured until the third year, when last efforts to negotiate proved futile; what little of the Jewish city had been spared by the destruction under Titus was now wiped out. Severus closed his eyes for a long time, voluntarily, to the flagrant complicity of the other large cities now become the last fortresses of the enemy; they were later attacked and reconquered in their turn, street by street and ruin by ruin. In those times of trial my place was with the army, and in Judaea. I had utter confidence in my two lieutenants, but it was all the more fitting, therefore, that I should be present to share responsibility for decisions which, however carried out, promised atrocities to come. At the end of a second summer of campaign I made my preparations for travel, but with bitterness; once more Euphorion packed up my toilet kit, wrought long ago by an artisan of Smyrna and somewhat dented by wear, my case of books and maps, and the ivory statuette of the Imperial Genius with his lamp of silver; I landed at Sidon early in autumn. The army is the first of my callings; I have never gone back into it without feeling repaid for my constraints there by certain inner compensations; I do not regret having passed the last two active years of my existence in sharing with the legions the harshness and desolation of that Palestine campaign. I had become again the man clad in leather and iron, putting aside all that is not immediate, sustained by the routines of a hard life, though somewhat slower than of old to mount my horse, or to dismount, somewhat more taciturn, perhaps more somber, surrounded as ever (the gods alone know why) by a devotion from the troops which was both religious and fraternal. During this last stay in the army I made an encounter of inestimable value: I took a young tribune named Celer, to whom I was attached, as my aide-de-camp. You know him; he has not left me. I admired that handsome face of a casqued Minerva, but on the whole the senses played as small a part in this affection as they can so long as one is alive.

• From Untrue (2018)

  As we took our seats and Kaupp began his talk, I noted that, like my dad, he frequently refers to women as “gals” and says “gosh” a lot. But utterly unlike my father, he says, “A gal called me to ask me how comfortable I felt treating people in ‘the lifestyle’…by which she meant swingers. And I said sure!” He makes pronouncements like “At a certain point, I decided that, while I do not have any photos in my office other than of my dog, and I don’t wear a wedding ring in sessions with clients because I don’t want them to be distracted by my own choices, I was just completely over not being able to go to the gay nude beach because I might see a client or former client there.” He does so in such a pragmatic, sensible tone that you find yourself automatically nodding in agreement, as if you too have such options and are just completely over self-imposed limitations. Kaupp is impassioned, persuasive, and has an approachable, vaguely goofy quality—something to do with his height, perhaps, combined with his self-effacement and easy chuckle. All this belies his vast clinical experience and impressive commitment to a subfield of marital and family therapy submerged in mystery and misunderstanding for many practitioners. Mark Kaupp is what we might think of as an expert’s expert—the one called on to teach the teachers. Kaupp is certified in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), a type of psychotherapy pioneered by Dr. Sue Johnson, author of mega bestseller Hold Me Tight. The goal of EFT is to help couples in therapy construct a healthy, secure emotional attachment to each other. This not only improves our intimate partnerships, the thinking goes—it can heal our very selves. Complicating matters for Kaupp, Johnson, whom he greatly admires, believes that monogamy helps strengthen healthy attachment and that non-monogamy disrupts it. In his impassioned support for those who choose not to be sexually exclusive, Mark Kaupp, all his gregariousness aside, is a bomb thrower. And today he wasted no time in getting down to it. “Most therapists will tell you that working with couples on consensual non-monogamy is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic,” Kaupp told us. “‘Non-monogamy does not work. It is going to take you down!’” He waved his arms histrionically, parroting the views of many clinicians in the country and perhaps not a few in the room. He pointed out that people for whom non-monogamy does work are probably not the ones coming to therapists for help. He said he believed therapists should get out into their communities in general, and into non-monogamous communities in particular, to educate themselves and expand their points of view. Too often they were seeing non-monogamous patients only when the patients were in crisis, which skewed their view of the issue, making them unnecessarily negative. “Non-monogamy can work,” he insisted. “I don’t really think it can,” a hip-looking, curly-haired therapist behind me said very quietly.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Ultimately, Ley thinks that the cuckold and hotwife relationships he studied may be about many things for men: bisexuality, an interest in being submissive, wanting control, wanting to cede control, being masochistic. Miller-Young might add: accessing the black male body while warding off “gayness.” What strikes Ley most, he told me, is the incredible resourcefulness and creativity of the arrangements he witnessed. “It’s like these guys understand the very real sexual power of the women they’re partnered with,” he marveled, “and so they’re saying, ‘Okay, female sexuality is “insatiable” in ways male sexuality is not. So let’s ride this engine together.’ They get vicarious fulfillment, these men, from revving the engine of female sexuality.” The cuck elects to join forces with his hotwife, knowing that her capacity for pleasure, unlike his, is nearly limitless. Standing apart from the tradition of men who have tried to contain or exterminate or diminish the female libido, or force it into the confines of fidelity, he knows better. He embraces it, because it can take him everywhere. Chapter Nine Life Is Short. Should You Be Untrue?There is no shortage of research about why people cheat. Perhaps the most common belief, one we’ve embraced and built an entire culture and gender script around, is a neat binary asserting that men want sex and women want connection and intimacy. You can’t Google “affair” without eventually running into this supposedly “universal truth” about lust and commitment. But tell it to Alicia Walker’s study participants, the ones who went on Ashley Madison to find and audition men who could provide them with what they didn’t have in their marriages: sex. And the ones in avowedly heterosexual marriages who seek out other women online for one-time sexual encounters. Tell it to couples therapists like Tammy Nelson, author of The New Monogamy, who says that in her experience, “men and women basically want the same things when they’re having an affair. They want sex and connection. I wish I had known that earlier in my life and career—that when it comes to motivation, men and women are really very similar.” Too often study participants are asked questions that lead them to answer a certain way, or they feel pressured by an overarching cultural script to do so. Women told they seek intimacy and emotional connection are likely to internalize that that’s how women are, so that’s how they should be, and then researchers hear what they expect, and so there is little incentive for them to ask the kind of questions Lisa Diamond and Sarah Hrdy did about male and female sexual motivations, identities, and desires. Such self-reporting is a slippery slope when ideology looms so large.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  It takes quite a spine to turn the other cheek. It takes phenomenal fortitude to love your enemy. It takes firm resolve to pray for those who persecute you.25 This isn’t true just on an individual, relational level. It’s true for families and people groups and even nations. Consider Ghandi, who is famous for his commitment to nonviolence. Think about what he accomplished. A short, bald man from India wearing a white robe and spectacles stood up to the British Empire.26 And won. Without a gun. This appeared at the time to be incredibly weak, but history teaches us, in this and many other cases, that there is a better way. It’s a way that may appear weak, but it is actually strong. Take, for example, the Roman soldiers who flogged, mocked, beat, and then nailed Jesus to the execution stake. Soldiers in the army, earning a decent wage, spending another day at work in the far reaches of the empire, taking care of another Jew who has caused some sort of ruckus about rules and rituals and religion that makes very little sense to a sophisticated Roman. These soldiers exercise power over Jesus in killing him, but it’s hollow and ungrounded strength. They are serving no greater cause than their masters’ conquering more lands and building larger armies and gaining more power and wealth. The whips and hammers and nails and stakes are in the service of no greater ideal than simple human greed. It is, in the end, pointless. Jesus is calling all of this into question. He sees it for the lie that it is and is willing to go the whole way to resist it. Including his own death. He is confronting an entire system of rank and exclusion and hierarchy that says some people are better than others and some people are worth more than others, and some are good enough for God and some aren’t, and some should triumph while others suffer at their expense. In Jesus’s public exposure, he exposes the lie of the empire. In Jesus’s vulnerability, he shows how vulnerable the “strength” of power and corruption really are. In Jesus’s thirst, he shows us how greed will always leave us thirsting for more. In Jesus’s emptiness, he shows us how empty the way of the world really is. It’s all upside down: an obscure Jewish rabbi challenging a world-dominating regime, and yet several days later, rumors spread that’s he’s risen from the dead. Perhaps this is why one of the soldiers at his execution starts to believe. He sees the two paths laid out before him. And in the midst of the blood and tears and suffering, he gets a glimpse of a better way.27 If there is a God who loves us and has acted in history to express that love, what would it look like?

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I hadn’t been able to afford a direct flight to Atlanta, so I had to change planes in Charlotte, North Carolina, and that’s where I met Steve Bright, the director of the SPDC, who was flying back to Atlanta after the holidays. Steve was in his mid-thirties and had a passion and certainty that seemed the direct opposite of my ambivalence. He’d grown up on a farm in Kentucky and ended up in Washington, D.C., after finishing law school. He was a brilliant trial lawyer at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia and had just been recruited to take over the SPDC, whose mission was to assist condemned people on death row in Georgia. He showed none of the disconnect between what he did and what he believed that I’d seen in so many of my law professors. When we met he warmly wrapped me in a full-body hug, and then we started talking. We didn’t stop till we’d reached Atlanta. “Bryan,” he said at some point during our short flight, “capital punishment means ‘them without the capital get the punishment.’ We can’t help people on death row without help from people like you.” I was taken aback by his immediate belief that I had something to offer. He broke down the issues with the death penalty simply but persuasively, and I hung on every word, completely engaged by his dedication and charisma. “I just hope you’re not expecting anything too fancy while you’re here,” he said. “Oh, no,” I assured him. “I’m grateful for the opportunity to work with you.” “Well, ‘opportunity’ isn’t necessarily the first word people think of when they think about doing work with us. We live kind of simply, and the hours are pretty intense.” “That’s no problem for me.” “Well, actually, we might even be described as living less than simply. More like living poorly—maybe even barely living, struggling to hang on, surviving on the kindness of strangers, scraping by day by day, uncertain of the future.” I let slip a concerned look, and he laughed. “I’m just kidding…kind of.” He moved on to other subjects, but it was clear that his heart and his mind were aligned with the plight of the condemned and those facing unjust treatment in jails and prisons. It was deeply affirming to meet someone whose work so powerfully animated his life. There were just a few attorneys working at the SPDC when I arrived that winter. Most of them were former criminal defense lawyers from Washington who had come to Georgia in response to a growing crisis: Death row prisoners couldn’t get lawyers. In their thirties, men and women, black and white, these lawyers were comfortable with one another in a way that reflected a shared mission, shared hope, and shared stress about the challenges they faced.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Whether the contemplative life consists in the mere contemplation of God, or also in the consideration of any truth whatever?Objection 1: It would seem that the contemplative life consists not only in the contemplation of God, but also in the consideration of any truth. For it is written (Ps. 138:14): “Wonderful are Thy works, and my soul knoweth right well.” Now the knowledge of God’s works is effected by any contemplation of the truth. Therefore it would seem that it pertains to the contemplative life to contemplate not only the divine truth, but also any other. Objection 2: Further, Bernard says (De Consid. v, 14) that “contemplation consists in admiration first of God’s majesty, secondly of His judgments, thirdly of His benefits, fourthly of His promises.” Now of these four the first alone regards the divine truth, and the other three pertain to His effects. Therefore the contemplative life consists not only in the contemplation of the divine truth, but also in the consideration of truth regarding the divine effects. Objection 3: Further, Richard of St. Victor [*De Grat. Contempl. i, 6] distinguishes six species of contemplation. The first belongs to “the imagination alone,” and consists in thinking of corporeal things. The second is in “the imagination guided by reason,” and consists in considering the order and disposition of sensible objects. The third is in “the reason based on the imagination”; when, to wit, from the consideration of the visible we rise to the invisible. The fourth is in “the reason and conducted by the reason,” when the mind is intent on things invisible of which the imagination has no cognizance. The fifth is “above the reason,” but not contrary to reason, when by divine revelation we become cognizant of things that cannot be comprehended by the human reason. The sixth is “above reason and contrary to reason”; when, to wit, by the divine enlightening we know things that seem contrary to human reason, such as the doctrine of the mystery of the Trinity. Now only the last of these would seem to pertain to the divine truth. Therefore the contemplation of truth regards not only the divine truth, but also that which is considered in creatures. Objection 4: Further, in the contemplative life the contemplation of truth is sought as being the perfection of man. Now any truth is a perfection of the human intellect. Therefore the contemplative life consists in the contemplation of any truth. On the contrary, Gregory says (Moral. vi, 37) that “in contemplation we seek the principle which is God.”

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  e scenes do not generate much compelling spiritual drama, but as a transposition of romantic tropes they are at least clever. Pelagia bequeaths her estate to Nonnos, who instructs the church’s steward, following Mosaic law, not to allow the wages of the prostitute to cross the threshold of the church. Instead the money is distributed directly to orphans and widows. Pelagia manumits her slaves, urging them to free themselves from “slavery to the sin of this world.” Th e crowds marvel at her very public transformation, and many of her fellow prostitutes are inspired to follow her example. Pelagia’s days of public fame are behind her. She takes a hair shirt and woolen robe from Nonnos, and by night, dressed as a man, she leaves the city. No one saw her depart. Th ree years later the author of the life, Jacob, went to Jerusalem on pilgrimage. Nonnos told him to fi nd a monk named Pelagius, a eunuch. Jacob fi nds him living in a cell on the Mount of Olives, wasted by asceticism, with cavernous eyes. Jacob does not recognize the shell of skin and bones before him as the once- famous actress. Pelagius has achieved, through gruesome self- mortifi cation, a state beyond biological sex, transcending male or female. When Pelagius dies, crowds gather for the burial of the recluse. Anointing the body, the clergy of Jerusalem realize that Pelagius was a woman. She is buried on the Mount of Olives. Indeed, the sepulture of Pelagia provides a reminder that the stories of penitent prostitutes do not simply belong to a closed world of monastic literature. In the 570s a western pilgrim visiting the holy land reported, among the other R O M A N C E I N T H E L AT E C L A S S I C A L WO R L D  sights encountered on his journey, the tomb of Pelagia. Her memory belonged to a vibrant world of pop u lar Christian imagination. Indeed, a tomb of Pelagia can still be visited in Jerusalem today, a numinous site sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. A custom is remembered at the site, by which a curious penitent may try to step through a cramped passage in the tomb, to test whether forgiveness for one’s sins has been granted. Th e deep symbolism of these folk traditions is almost too perfect: just as the penitent prostitutes replaced the virgins of romance, the tomb of Pelagia has replaced the cave of Pan— and as a test of penance rather than purity. Pelagia inhabited the vibrantly bilingual world of late antique Syria. Th e legends of the penitent prostitutes passed easily between the interconnected worlds of Greek and Syriac. At least one of the legends of a penitent prostitute, Mary the niece of Abraham, was originally composed in Syriac. Th e tale of her repentance belonged to a longer cycle of narratives about her uncle, the hermit Abraham of Qidun. Th

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  They taught me to enter into the thought of each man in turn, and to understand that each makes his own decisions, and lives and dies according to his own laws. The reading of the poets had still more overpowering effects; I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry. Poetry transformed me: initiation into death itself will not carry me farther along into another world than does a dusk of Virgil. In later years I came to prefer the roughness of Ennius, so close to the sacred origins of our race, or Lucretius' bitter wisdom; or to Homer's noble ease the homely parsimony of Hesiod. The most complicated and most obscure poets have pleased me above all; they force my thought to strenuous exercise; I have sought, too, the latest and the oldest, those who open wholly new paths, or help me to find lost trails. But in those days I liked chiefly in the art of verse whatever appealed most directly to the senses, whether the polished metal of Horace, or Ovid's soft texture, like flesh. Scaurus cast me into despair in assuring me that I should never be more than a mediocre poet; that both the gift and the application were wanting. For a long time I thought he was mistaken; somewhere locked away are a volume or two of my love poems, most of them imitated from Catullus. But it is of little concern to me now whether my personal productions are worthless or not. To my dying day I shall be grateful to Scaurus for having set me early to the study of Greek. I was still a child when for the first time I tried to trace on my tablets those characters of an unknown alphabet: here was a new world and the beginning of my great travels, and also the feeling of a choice as deliberate, but at the same time as involuntary, as that of love. I have loved the language for its flexibility, like that of a supple, perfect body, and for the richness of its vocabulary, in which every word bespeaks direct and varied contact with reality: and because almost everything that men have said best has been said in Greek. There are, I know, other languages, but they are petrified, or have yet to be born. Egyptian priests have shown me their antique symbols; they are signs rather than words, ancient attempts at classification of the world and of things, the sepulchral speech of a dead race. During the Jewish War the rabbi Joshua translated literally for me some texts from Hebrew, that language of sectarians so obsessed by their god that they have neglected the human. In the armies I grew accustomed to the language of the Celtic auxiliaries, and remember above all certain of their songs. . . .

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  In the first fight, between two fourteen-year-olds, the Limehouse youngster had started well, but it was a sloppy affair, the St Albans boy always retreating to the ropes and clinching with his opponent rather than putting up a fight. In the second break I strolled off round the back and came in again on the side where the judges’ table was, just below the ringside. A lean sixty-year-old man, with no forehead and grey pointed sideburns that curved across his cheeks like a Roman helmet, was standing talking with some parents in the audience. When he turned round I saw the words ‘Limehouse Boys’ Club’ on the back of his sweatshirt. Just as the bell rang I said, ‘Excuse me, can you tell me where I can find Mr Shillibeer?’ He looked at me stonily, not out of aggression but out of slowness. ‘Bill? Yeah, he’s out the back somewhere, I should say. Try over there, through the blue door. Come on, Sean, let ’im ’ave it,’ switching without notice to the really important matter and showing in his wild singlemindedness that he had already forgotten me. It seemed a foregone conclusion, anyway, and as the sporadic engagements of the final round began I slipped away and made for the blue door. It was a fire door, and had a window of wired glass in it, through which I saw, as I pushed it open, two figures approaching down a corridor: a boy in pumps, singlet, shorts and gloves, and the massive, stocky figure of Bill Shillibeer—Bill, that is to say, who had befriended me years before at the Corry, and whose courteous adoration of Phil I had been privy to over the last few months. ‘Hallo, Will,’ he said as usual. ‘Hi, Bill …’ ‘His Lordship said you’d be coming down. This is Alastair, by the way.’ He rested his hand on the boy’s head. ‘Hello,’ I nodded. Alastair blinked, shuffled and pummelled the air in front of him, breathing in and out like a steam train. I laughed with relief that Phil had not come with me.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Objection 3: Further, as stated above [3761](A[1]), perfection is measured according to charity. Now the most perfect charity would seem to be in the martyrs, according to Jn. 15:13, “Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends”: and a gloss on Heb. 12:4, “For you have not yet resisted unto blood,” says: “In this life no love is more perfect than that to which the holy martyrs attained, who strove against sin even unto blood.” Therefore it would seem that the state of perfection should be ascribed to the martyrs rather than to religious and bishops. On the contrary, Dionysius (Eccl. Hier. v) ascribes perfection to bishops as being perfecters, and (Eccl. Hier. vi) to religious (whom he calls monks or {therapeutai}, i.e. servants of God) as being perfected. I answer that, As stated above [3762](A[4]), there is required for the state of perfection a perpetual obligation to things pertaining to perfection, together with a certain solemnity. Now both these conditions are competent to religious and bishops. For religious bind themselves by vow to refrain from worldly affairs, which they might lawfully use, in order more freely to give themselves to God, wherein consists the perfection of the present life. Hence Dionysius says (Eccl. Hier. vi), speaking of religious: “Some call them {therapeutai},” i.e. servants, “on account of their rendering pure service and homage to God; others call them {monachoi}” [*i.e. solitaries; whence the English word ‘monk’], “on account of the indivisible and single-minded life which by their being wrapped in,” i.e. contemplating, “indivisible things, unites them in a Godlike union and a perfection beloved of God” [*Cf. Q[180], A[6]]. Moreover, the obligation in both cases is undertaken with a certain solemnity of profession and consecration; wherefore Dionysius adds (Eccl. Hier. vi): “Hence the holy legislation in bestowing perfect grace on them accords them a hallowing invocation.”

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  HILARY. The natural order of things is here preserved; the dæmon is first cast out, and there the functions of the members proceed. And the multitude marvelled, saying, It was never so seen in Israel. CHRYSOSTOM. They set Him thus above others, because He not only healed, but with such ease, and quickness; and cured diseases both infinite in number, and in quality incurable. This most grieved the Pharisees, that they set Him before all others, not only those that then lived, but all who had lived before, on which account it follows, But the Pharisees said, He casteth out dæmons through the Prince of dæmons. REMIGIUS. Thus the Scribes and Pharisees denied such of the Lord’s miracles as they could deny; and such as they could not they explained by an evil interpretation, according to that, In the multitude of thy excellency thy enemies shall lie unto thee. (Ps. 66:3.) CHRYSOSTOM. What can be more foolish than this speech of theirs? For it cannot be pretended that one dæmon would cast out another; for they are wont to consent to one another’s deeds, and not to be at variance among themselves. But Christ not only cast out dæmons, but healed the lepers, raised the dead, forgave sins, preached the kingdom of God, and brought men to the Father, which a dæmon neither could nor would do. RABANUS. Figuratively; As in the two blind men were denoted both nations, Jews and Gentiles, so in the man dumb and afflicted with the dæmon is denoted the whole human race. HILARY. Or; By the dumb and deaf, and dæmoniae, is signified the Gentile world, needing health in every part; for sunk in evil of every kind, they are afflicted with disease of every part of the body. REMIGIUS. For the Gentiles were dumb; not being able to open their mouth in the confession of the true faith, and the praises of the Creator, or because in paying worship to dumb idols they were made like unto them. They were afflicted with a dæmon, because by dying in unbelief they were made subject to the power of the Devil. HILARY. But by the knowledge of God the frenzy of superstition being chased away, the sight, the hearing, and the word of salvation is brought in to them. JEROME. As the blind receive light, so the tongue of the dumb is loosed, that he may confess Him whom before he denied. The wonder of the multitude is the confession of the nations. The scoff of the Pharisees is the unbelief of the Jews, which is to this day. HILARY. The wonder of the multitude is followed up by the confession, It was never so seen in Israel; because he, for whom there was no help under the Law, is saved by the power of the Word.

• From The Songs of Bilitis (1894)

  The incomparable history of Phryne, as transmitted to us from the Athenæum, gives some idea of the nature of this veneration. It is not true that Hyperides stripped her naked to soften the Areopagos, and because her crime was great: she had committed murder. The orator tore off the top of her tunic and revealed only her breasts. And he supplicated the judges: “Do not put to death the priestess and the inspired of Aphrodite.”--In distinction from the other courtesans who went out in transparent cyclas through which all the details of their bodies appeared, Phryne wore a costume which enveloped even her hair in a great folded vestment of which the statuettes of Tanagra have preserved the grace. No one, unless it were her lovers, had ever seen her arms and her shoulders, and she never appeared in the pool of the public baths. But one day an extraordinary thing occurred. It was the day of the festival of Eleusis; twenty thousand people had come from all parts of Greece and were assembled on the sea-shore when Phryne advanced to the waves: she removed her garment, she unfastened her cincture, she removed even her under tunic, “she unrolled her hair and entered the sea.” And in that throng stood Praxiteles who, after this living goddess, designed the Aphrodite of Knidos; and Apelles who, from her, revealed his Anadyomene. Admirable people, to whom naked Beauty could appear without exciting laughter or false shame! I would that this history were that of Bilitis, for, in translating her songs, I have learned to love the friend of Mnasidika. Without doubt her life was also wonderful. I regret only that she is not spoken of oftener by ancient authors, and that those whose works have survived, give us so few tokens of her person. Philodemos, who pillaged her twice, does not even mention her name. In default of better anecdotes, I beg that you will be contented with the details which she herself has given us about her life as a courtesan. That she was a courtesan is undeniable; and even her last songs prove that, if she had the virtues of her vocation, she had also its worst weaknesses. But I would know only her virtues. She was pious and skillful. She remained faithful to the temple so long as Aphrodite consented to prolong the youth of her purest adorer. “The day when she ceased to be loved, she ceased to write,” she has said. Nevertheless it is difficult to admit that the songs of Pamphylia could have been written at the epoch when the events took place. How could a little shepherdess of the mountains learn to scan verses according to the difficult rhythms of the Æolic delivery? It is more reasonable to believe that, become old, Bilitis found pleasure in singing for herself the remembrances of her childhood. We know nothing of this last period of her life. We know not even at what age she died.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. This centurion was the first-fruits of the Gentiles, and in comparison of his faith, all the faith of the Jews was unbelief; he neither heard Christ teaching, nor saw the leper when he was cleansed, but from hearing only that he had been healed, he believed more than he heard; and so he mystically typified the Gentiles that should come, who had neither read the Law nor the Prophets concerning Christ, nor had seen Christ Himself work His miracles. He came to Him and besought Him, saying, Lord, my servant lieth at home sick of the palsy, and is grievously afflicted. Mark the goodness of the centurion, who for the health of his servant was in so great haste and anxiety, as though by his death he should suffer loss, not of money, but of his well being. For he reckoned no difference between the servant and the master; their place in this world may be different, but their nature is one. Mark also his faith, in that he said not, Come and heal him, because that Christ who stood there was present in every place; and his wisdom, in that he said not, Heal him here on this spot, for he knew that He was mighty to do, wise to understand, and merciful to hearken, therefore he did but declare the sickness, leaving it to the Lord, by His merciful power to heal. And he is grievously afflicted; this shews how he loved him, for when any that we love is pained or tormented, though it be but slightly, yet we think him more afflicted than he really is. RABANUS. All these things he recounts with grief, that he is sick, that it is with palsy; that he is grievously afflicted therewith, the more to shew the sorrow of his own heart, and to move the Lord to have mercy. In like manner ought all to feel for their servants, and to take thought for them. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. xxvi.) But some say that he says these things in excuse of himself, as reasons why he did not bring the sick man himself. For it was impossible to bring one in a palsy, in great torment, and at the point to die. But I rather think it a mark of his great faith; inasmuch as he knew that a word alone was enough to restore the sick man, he deemed it superfluous to bring him. HILARY. Spiritually interpreted, the Gentiles are the sick in this world, and afflicted with the diseases of sin, all their limbs being altogether unnerved, and unfit for their duties of standing and walking. The sacrament of their salvation is fulfilled in this centurion’s servant, of whom it is sufficiently declared that he was the head of the Gentiles that should believe. What sort of head this is, the song of Moses in Deuteronomy teaches, He set the bounds of the people according to the number of the Angels. (Deut. 32:8.)

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  29. Then touched he their eyes, saying, According to your faith be it unto you. 30. And their eyes were opened: and Jesus straitly charged them, saying, See that no man know it. 31. But they, when they were departed, spread abroad his fame in all that country. JEROME. The miracles that had gone before of the ruler’s daughter, and the woman with the issue of blood, are now followed by that of two blind men, that what death and disease had there witnessed, that blindness might now witness. And as Jesus passed thence, that is, from the ruler’s house, there followed him two blind men, crying, and saying, Have mercy on us, thou Son of David. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. xxxii.) Here is no small charge against the Jews, that these men, having lost their sight, yet believe by means of their heaving only; while they who had sight, would not believe the miracles that were done. Observe their eagerness; they do not simply come to Him, but with crying, and asking for nothing but mercy; they call Him Son of David, because that seemed to be a name of honour. REMIGIUS. Rightly they call Him Son of David, because the Virgin Mary was of the line of David. JEROME. Let Marcion and Manichæus, and the other heretics who mangle the Old Testament, hear this, and learn that the Saviour is called the Son of David; for if He was not born in the flesh, how is He the Son of David? CHRYSOSTOM. Observe that the Lord oftentimes desired to be asked to heal, that none should think that He was eager to seize an occasion of display. JEROME. Yet were they not healed by the way-side and in passing as they had thought to be; but when He was entered into the house, they come unto Him; and first their faith is made proof of, that so they may receive the light of the true faith. And when he was come into the house, the blind men came unto him; and Jesus said unto them, Believe ye that I am able to do this? CHRYSOSTOM. Here again He teaches us to exclude the desire of fame; because there was a house hard by, He takes them there to heal them apart. REMIGIUS. He who was able to give sight to the blind, was not ignorant whether they believed; but He asked them, in order that the faith which they bare in their hearts, being confessed by their mouth might be made deserving of a higher reward, according to that of the Apostle, By the mouth confession is made unto salvation. (Rom. 10:10.)

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  This presentation employs an eclectic armory of sources: law and literature, scientific treatises and moralizing tracts, even a glance at the ubiquitous erotic art of the Roman Empire. The mélange is deliberate, for it helps us resist the temptation to ascribe supremacy to any one witness or class of witnesses. There will be no doubting, however, which type of informant is accorded a measure of favoritism: the novelist. The history of the ancient novel is effectively coterminous with the four centuries of Roman Empire. Rarely in history are great genres of literature born, and when they are, it surely signals a significant cultural juncture. The novels are tales of eros; they are dedicated to the power of eros and celebrate its divine power. A heady synthesis of comedy, love poetry, travel literature, and philosophy, the novels are the quintessential cultural expression of a civilization with a mature tradition of speculation on human sexual experience. At the same time, the novels are breathtakingly unique creations whose narrative intricacy allowed their authors to explore, slowly and with a new sympathy, the contours of the soul experiencing eros. On the whole, the romances strike a tone of wry conservatism. These stories are the product of a confident and assertive aristocracy, capable of believing that the world could be redeemed through social reproduction. But it is too much to declare the novels simple propaganda. Their authors are too alert to the unruly power of eros, too eager to portray the sinuous routes to conjugal love to be trying to put over something as bland as a point. In particular, Chapter 1 lets Leucippe and Clitophon, a romance written in the second century by an author named Achilles Tatius, act as a guide as we trek across the landscape of imperial sexual culture. Among the surviving romances, Leucippe and Clitophon is probably the most sensational and certainly the most canny. The whole work is marked by a sly, if not subversive, sympathy for the inevitable disjuncture between the inarticulate mysteries of human sexuality and the artificial constraints of any erotic code. Achilles Tatius makes an ideal tour guide, one who knows all the traditional details but gleefully spills unauthorized truths.8

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  If anyone should still argue, that the counsel of Our Lord concerning the renunciation of possessions is futile, because Abraham, though a rich man, was perfect, we will refer him for an answer to what has been already said. Our Lord, we repeat, did not mean, by this counsel, that rich men cannot be perfect, or cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven; but He meant that they cannot do so easily. The virtue of Abraham was very great; for, although possessed of great wealth, his heart was detached from riches. The virtue, likewise, of Samson was eminent, for, armed only with the jawbone of an ass, he slew many of his enemies; nevertheless the instruction which he gave to the soldier to take up arms in combat with his foes, was not unprofitable. Neither, then, is it useless to counsel those that seek perfection to part with their earthly goods, although Abraham was perfect with all his wealth. We must not draw conclusions from wonderful deeds; for the weak among us are more capable of wondering at and praising such deeds, than of imitating them. Hence we read in Eccles. 31:8, “Blessed is the rich man that is found without blemish; and that hath not gone after gold, nor put his trust in money nor in treasures.” This passage proves that the rich man who does not sin by covetousness, nor by pride, must, indeed, be a man of tried virtue, with a heart adhering closely, by perfect charity, to God. St. Paul bids Timothy to “charge the rich of this world not to be highminded, nor to trust in the uncertainty of riches” (1 Tim. 6:17). The greater the blessedness and the virtue of the wealthy who obey this behest, the smaller is their number. Thus Ecclesiasticus (31) speaking of a virtuous and yet a wealthy man, says: “Who is he, and we will praise him? for he hath done wonderful things in his life.” For truly, he who, while abounding in riches has not set his heart upon his treasures, has indeed done wonderful things, and without the shadow of a doubt has proved himself perfect. The same chapter of Ecclesiasticus continues, “Who hath been tried thereby,” that is to say, who has been tested as to whether he can live a sinless life in the midst of wealth, “and made perfect.” This is as much as to say: “such a man is indeed rare, and his virtue will merit for him eternal glory.” This test of Ecclesiasticus bears out the saying of Our Lord, that a rich man shall hardly enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. This, then, is the first means of attaining perfection, to wit the renunciation of riches, and the profession of poverty, from a desire of following Christ. CHAPTER VIII

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  He must have been thoroughly frightened because he never came back again; the next that was heard of him was that he had been picked up out West somewhere and sent to a reformatory. His mother, who was a slatternly, jolly Irish bitch, said that it served him right and she hoped to God she’d never lay eyes on him again. When the boy Silverstein recovered he was not the same any more; people said the beating had affected his brain, that he was a little daffy. Joe Gerhardt, on the other hand, rose to prominence again. It seems that he had gone to see the Silverstein boy while he lay in bed and had made a deep apology to him. This again was something that had never been heard of before. It was something so strange, so unusual, that Joe Gerhardt was looked upon almost as a knight errant. Nobody had approved of the way Johnny behaved, and yet nobody would have thought of going to young Silverstein and apologizing to him. That was an act of such delicacy, such elegance, that Joe Gerhardt was looked upon as a real gentleman—the first and only gentleman in the neighborhood. It was a word that had never been used among us and now it was on everybody’s lips and it was considered a distinction to be a gentleman. This sudden transformation of the defeated Joe Gerhardt into a gentleman I remember made a deep impression upon me. A few years later, when I moved into another neighborhood and encountered Claude de Lorraine, a French boy, I was prepared to understand and accept “a gentleman.” This Claude was a boy such as I had never laid eyes on before. In the old neighborhood he would have been regarded as a sissy; for one thing he spoke too well, too correctly, too politely, and for another thing he was too considerate, too gentle, too gallant. And then, while playing with him, to hear him suddenly break into French as his mother or father came along, provided us with something like a shock. German we had heard and German was a permissible transgression, but French! why to talk French, or even to understand it, was to be thoroughly alien, thoroughly aristocratic, rotten, distingué. And yet Claude was one of us, as good as us in every way, even a little bit better, we had to admit secretly. But there was a blemish—his French! It antagonized us. He had no right to be living in our neighborhood, no right to be as capable and manly as he was. Often, when his mother called him in and we had said good-by to him, we got together in the lot and we discussed the Lorraine family backwards and forwards. We wondered what they ate, for example, because being French they must have different customs than ours. No one had ever set foot in Claude de Lorraine’s home either—that was another suspicious and repugnant fact. Why?

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  But the most precious of all these encounters was that with Arrian of Nicomedia, the best of my friends. Younger than I by some twelve years, he had already begun that outstanding political and military career in which he continues to distinguish himself and to serve the State. His experience in government, his knowledge of hunting, horses, and dogs, and of all bodily exercise, raised him infinitely above the mere word-mongers of the time. In his youth he had been prey to one of those strange passions of the soul without which, perhaps, there can be no true wisdom, nor true greatness: two years of his life had been passed at Nicopolis in Epirus in the cold, bare room where Epictetus lay dying; he had set himself the task of gathering and transcribing, word for word, the last sayings of that aged and ailing philosopher. That period of enthusiasm had left its mark upon him; from it he retained certain admirable moral disciplines, and a kind of grave simplicity. In secret he practiced austerities which no one even suspected. But his long apprenticeship to Stoic duty had not hardened him into self-righteousness; he was too intelligent not to realize that the heights of virtue, like those of love, owe their special value to their very rarity, to their quality of unique achievement and sublime excess. Now he was striving to model himself upon the calm good sense and perfect honesty of Xenophon. He was writing the history of his country, Bithynia; I had placed this province, so long ill governed by proconsuls, under my personal jurisdiction; Arrian advised me in my plans for reform. This assiduous reader of Socratic dialogue treated my young favorite with tender deference, for he knew full well the rich stores of heroism, devotion, and even wisdom, on which Greece has drawn to ennoble love between friends. These two Bithynians spoke the soft speech of Ionia, where word endings are almost Homeric in form. I later persuaded Arrian to employ this dialect in his writings. At that period Athens had its philosopher of the frugal life: in a cabin of the village of Colonus, Demonax was leading an exemplary but merry existence. He was no Socrates, for he lacked both the subtlety and the ardor, but I relished his waggish good humor. Another of these good-hearted friends was the actor Aristomenes, a spirited performer of ancient Attic comedy. I used to call him my Greek partridge; short, fat, happy as a child (or a bird), he was better informed than anyone else on religious rituals, poetry, and cookery of former days.