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 Martin Luther (2016)

  One of the reasons may lie in the fact that when he arrived in 1511, there was a group of academics all about the same age, creating more of a level playing field. In addition to Lang, there was Andreas Karlstadt, three years younger, but his academic senior and the man who conferred his doctorate on him. The professor of law, Hieronymus Schurff, was just two years older; Wenzeslaus Linck, prior of the Wittenberg monastery from 1511 to 1515, gained his doctorate in 1511, a year before Luther. Nikolaus von Amsdorf, Staupitz’s nephew and a highly competent dialectician, was just a few months younger; he taught in the philosophy faculty but soon switched to theology. Although they all taught different subjects, they formed a cohesive peer group; many of them shared a similar formation and several were Augustinians living together in the Wittenberg monastery, which housed about forty monks. 40 Another reason for Luther’s rise may have been the effect of his forceful personality in what was still a minor institution. Even in 1536, there were only twenty-two faculty posts at Wittenberg: four each in theology and law, three in medicine and eleven in the arts. 41 Karlstadt, for one, was profoundly influenced by his erstwhile junior colleague and new friend, and rapidly absorbed his ideas. In 1516 Luther’s student Bartholomäus Bernhardi gave a disputation, part of the customary academic training, and advanced some of Luther’s ideas on grace developed in the lectures on Romans; in its course, Luther publicly stated that he did not believe St. Augustine was the author of the treatise attributed to him, De vera et falsa poenitentia . Karlstadt vigorously disagreed and immediately procured his own copy from Leipzig. But on rereading the text he decided that Luther was correct, and he began to be influenced by Luther’s understanding of Augustine. 42 Both radical and passionate, Karlstadt easily got lost in the thread of his own thought and needed direction: Luther’s intensity seems to have unleashed his creativity, sparking him to rethink all his intellectual and spiritual positions. Schurff, more cautious by nature, was also captivated, perhaps because Luther was able to articulate the desperation and sense of sinfulness he too had felt. Luther clearly had an intellectual drive that drew others to him, in part because they recognized their own ideas in what he argued. He was intellectually independent and decisive, and could communicate complex opinions with passion.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Peasants, so the images seemed to suggest, were pious evangelicals—simple Christians who could preach better than the educated clergy. It seemed that in Peringer’s sermons God’s spirit was being poured out on ordinary folk. Even Spalatin, who heard him preach at Nuremberg, was impressed. But in 1524 Peringer was unmasked as an ex-cleric, who certainly knew how to read and write (and preach)—much to Luther’s amusement, who teased Spalatin for being taken in. Yet if Peringer had not existed, he would have had to be invented. His imposture gave voice to a prevalent mood in Germany of admiration of simple folk, especially peasants, and suspicion of intellectuals. Karlstadt, who shared in this mood, now began to toy with leaving the university for good and becoming a vintner—he had grown up in a wine-growing area—or living as an ordinary priest. He eventually opted for the latter and chose to move to Orlamünde, for which he was technically responsible as archdeacon. Karlstadt was careful to square this with the authorities, and in May 1523 the parish formally asked the Elector to appoint him as pastor. It was quite a comedown. It meant taking on a lowly paid job that he had previously employed someone else to do, in the days when he had aspired to the richest benefice in Wittenberg. Instead of the fine clothes he had worn after his return from Italy, the former university professor now took to wearing gray peasant attire, and donned the peasant felt hat in place of his doctor’s cap.10 As he later put it, “I now have a gray coat (thank God) in place of the finery which at one time greatly delighted me and caused me to sin.” Luther mocked his “felt hat and a gray garb, not wanting to be called doctor, but Brother Andrew and dear neighbor, as another peasant,” but these were visible signs of Karlstadt’s determination to relinquish social superiority.11 The parsonage in Orlamünde was falling down and the fences were broken; the woods had not been properly tended and the previous incumbent, who had left under a cloud, had used the manure set aside for the priest’s vines for his own fields. Yet this was the peasant life that Karlstadt had craved—although it is unclear how much laboring he did himself.12 [image "43. and 44. Two illustrations from Diepold Peringer’s tracts. In the first, the peasant holds a rosary and gestures like a preacher with the other hand; in the second the pious peasant, wearing peasant boots, holds a flail." file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_051_r1.jpg] [image "43. and 44. Two illustrations from Diepold Peringer’s tracts. In the first, the peasant holds a rosary and gestures like a preacher with the other hand; in the second the pious peasant, wearing peasant boots, holds a flail." file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_051_r1.jpg] 43. and 44. Two illustrations from Diepold Peringer’s tracts. In the first, the peasant holds a rosary and gestures like a preacher with the other hand; in the second the pious peasant, wearing peasant boots, holds a flail.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But the very next day, Saxo, 70 who had been firmest in his protestations, denied him three times. The Romanists howled for Luther’s blood, worst amongst them, the bishops of Mainz and Merseburg. Luther, in the house of Caiaphas, remained calm. The bishop of Trier considered what to do: Luther was a pious Christian and he could see no reason to condemn him. But the priests yelled “Burn him!” So they took Luther’s writings and put them on a pyre with the image of his face on top of the books. To the left of him they put Hutten’s writings and to the right, Karlstadt’s. Yet although the fires burnt the books to ashes, the portrait of Luther refused to burn. The author of The Passion of the Blessed Martin Luther, or His Sufferings was the humanist Hermann Busche, who named himself Marcellus after the man who had buried the martyred St. Peter. 71 The equation of Christ and Luther seems blasphemous. Yet the pamphlet, which enjoyed huge success, was in line with much of Luther’s own understanding of Worms: Luther himself saw it as a passion, and believed he was imitating Christ. In his account of events at Augsburg in 1518, he had compared himself to Christ in the house of Caiaphas, and he had been prepared to see his arrival at Erfurt on the way to Rome as his “Palm Sunday.” There was a long tradition of profound devotional identification with Christ reaching back through mystics and saints, which encompassed pious laypeople as well as clerics. Paintings of the Crucifixion or of the Holy Family routinely showed the onlookers, aside from Christ himself, dressed in the sumptuous silks and velvets of the day, with slashed trousers and sleeves with extravagant patterns. This was not because the artists did not know what people wore in biblical times: rather, their devotional images imported the present into the biblical past, allowing viewers to overcome historical time as they entered into devotional time and participated in the stories of Christ’s Passion. In 1500, Albrecht Dürer had painted himself, facing the viewer, with long, curling hair and with his hand raised in blessing in the style of Christ—a self-portrait that was anything but a proclamation of the divine status of the artist. For Dürer this would have been a devotional act, attempting to model himself as closely on Christ as possible as he reached his twenty-ninth year, about the age it was believed that Christ had begun his ministry. Luther’s description of his sufferings as a “passion” was not the only way he understood what was taking place—he had too great a sense of irony ever to credit it completely. But he habitually applied biblical drama to present his experience.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It was not only theologians who were turning to print. Now laypeople were weighing in on Luther’s side as well, and their work was finding keen readers. A sign of what was to come was the 1519 publication (in German) of Apology and Christian Reply of an Honorable Lover of the Divine Truth of Holy Writ, by the layman and Nuremberg civic secretary Lazarus Spengler; it was the very pamphlet that the author of Eccius dedolatus claimed Eck wanted to burn.54 Spengler’s broadside was published in Nuremberg, Basle, Leipzig, Wittenberg, and Augsburg, and went into a second edition. “Whether Luther’s teaching is in accord with Christian ordinance and reason I leave to every rational pious person’s judgment,” Spengler wrote. “But this I know for certain, that although I don’t consider myself to be particularly skilled or intellectually educated in these matters, I have never known any teaching or sermon pierce my mind so strongly, my whole life long.” Those who were attacking Luther’s teaching as “sour beer” were not worthy “to do up his shoelaces.” In particular, Spengler attacked those who argued that Luther’s teaching was suitable only for universities and educated folk: “If [his teaching] is just and godly, then it ought to be shouted and proclaimed publicly, and not just taught in the universities, or to speak more truly, in the Jewish synagogues.”55 Lutheran rhetoric increasingly equated scholastics and university conservatives with Jews, a mobilization of anti-Semitism that would create a difficult legacy for the movement. [image "25. On the title page of the printed Leipzig sermon, Luther’s “rose,” the monogram he had chosen to represent himself and which would soon become famous, is displayed below in a shield and he is shown gesturing, as if preaching. He wears his doctor’s cap and monk’s garb, and is clearly identified as an Augustinian, and as a Wittenberger, although the artist ran out of room to write the full name of Luther’s university." file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_029_r1.jpg] [image "25. On the title page of the printed Leipzig sermon, Luther’s “rose,” the monogram he had chosen to represent himself and which would soon become famous, is displayed below in a shield and he is shown gesturing, as if preaching. He wears his doctor’s cap and monk’s garb, and is clearly identified as an Augustinian, and as a Wittenberger, although the artist ran out of room to write the full name of Luther’s university." file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_029_r1.jpg] 25. On the title page of the printed Leipzig sermon, Luther’s “rose,” the monogram he had chosen to represent himself and which would soon become famous, is displayed below in a shield and he is shown gesturing, as if preaching. He wears his doctor’s cap and monk’s garb, and is clearly identified as an Augustinian, and as a Wittenberger, although the artist ran out of room to write the full name of Luther’s university.

• From Shunned (2018)

  “If Jehovah God is going to resurrect anyone,” I said, content to play along, “it would definitely be the magnificent Bob Curtis. No question.” Dad was looking out the side window toward a large, empty hangar and the blue DEPARTING FLIGHTS sign. “Yes, Lindy,” Mom continued, looking at me. She went on about death being full payment for sins, how those who are resurrected will get to start life with a clean slate. “It would be a shame for you to miss seeing Bob again. You obviously loved each other very much.” Bob would have laughed at being characterized a sinner, for indeed he was (by her standards)—and so what? Despite my lethargy, I was amused. I slowed the car, pulled up to the curb, and turned off the ignition as I thanked them for coming. In that moment, it occurred to me to tell them something more. I turned and leaned against my door to face them. “I want you to know, Mom and Dad, that Bob never judged you. Many people would be appalled by parents who shun their daughter for leaving a religion.” “We know that,” Mom said matter-of-factly, and I realized it took courage for them to have shown up at the service, their reputations preceding them, unsure how they might be received. “Bob never judged you,” I repeated. “He would never shun his own daughter, but he didn’t make unilateral assessments about people. He didn’t perceive you as wrong or hold your beliefs against you, and that made all the difference to me.” There was a thick silence inside the car. Dad was sitting back in his seat, and Mom was looking at me, waiting for me to say more, but I was tapped out. With every breath I was growing more tired, exhaustion seeping into my body like an invisible ether. We got out of the car, and I hugged Mom while Dad removed the luggage from the trunk and placed it on the curb. It crossed my mind that I might never see them again, but the idea did not stir tears. I had bigger fish to fry. Mom urged me to call them if I needed anything. I hugged Dad. I knew I would not call them for help and they would not call me until life brought us another serious illness or death exemption. I got into the car and pulled into the far exit lane, then glanced into my rearview mirror to see Mom and Dad standing at the curb, watching me drive away. Acknowledgments [image "Images" file=Image00000.jpg] T his book was years in the making and I could not have completed it without the support and encouragement of some very special people. My heartfelt gratitude to: Bob , for your intelligence, humor, and boundless love and generosity, before, during, and after. Angeles Arrien , for lending me your cherished terrapin rattle at a very difficult time and helping me discover how to begin again.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Eleven years later, Dürer included himself in another landmark picture, the All Saints Altar for Nuremberg’s Landauer chapel. It is a painting that has eluded definitive interpretation. It shows the saints, led by St. Augustine, while beneath them hovers another celestial group of representatives of all the different social orders, from emperors to peasants. Dürer included himself in the picture as a small figure on a grassy sward on the earth below, holding a cartouche to proclaim that he was the painter. He stands alone, observing the New Jerusalem and the heavenly hosts, to whom the Christian community is joined through prayer. The altarpiece epitomized the devotional life of the old Church—the Church of indulgences, mutual prayer, and works—and it was painted for a chapel where perpetual Masses were said for the dead. This was the piety that Luther’s Reformation would sweep away. Dürer’s painting of the four apostles, finished in 1528, the year he died, exuded a completely different spirituality. John and Mark are blocks of color, their solidity conveying the authority of Scripture. Dürer incorporated into the painting quotations from Luther’s German Bible of 1522. He also chose not to depict the customary four evangelists, replacing Matthew and Luke with Peter, who embodies the Church, and Paul, whose writings were key to Luther’s thought. This was the religion of the Lutheran Bible. The painting was not displayed in church but Dürer donated it to Nuremberg’s town council, in homage to one of the first cities to have introduced the Reformation, in 1524. Like the peasants, Dürer used the word freedom to encapsulate Luther’s message. He hoped for a future where all, “Turks, heathens and Calicutts [Indians], may turn to us.” He saw Luther as a man who preached “clear and transparent doctrine,” and who helped people become “free Christians.” But Dürer does not seem to have made much of the corresponding concept of the absolute sinfulness of man, and where Luther looked inward, praising his fellow Germans over the hated Italians, Dürer was a citizen of Nuremberg, open to global commerce and exchange, who knew how much he had learned from his journeyman years in Italy. He also collected objects from around the world—feathers, weapons, “Indian cocoanuts and a very fine piece of coral,” curiosities of all kinds that found their way into his art.42 Luther, by contrast, barely ever mentioned Africa, India, or the New World, either in his writings or his conversations. While he envisaged the Reformation as the struggle of the true Christians against the Pope and the Devil, for Dürer it meant the future coming together of all the religions and people of the world in peaceful unity.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It was the insecurity of the monks, Günzburg argued, that shackled the nuns’ intellectual and devotional capacities, “for coarse, unlearned, foolish monks are assigned to the convents; for them it would be painful if the nuns know more than they do, and so they don’t tolerate those who are more knowledgeable than they are. This they justify under the cover of claiming that studying is not appropriate for nuns, that it places obstacles in the way of humility, piety, and so on.” Like Luther, he thought that convents would only deform a young woman’s desires and development. He understood, too, the bitterness of relationships in a closed institution: “If she has a vindictive abbess or prioress or if she angers a sister especially beloved by her superiors, she will never have rest or peace.” 43 For a time, excited by the radical potential of the Reformation, Günzburg became a supporter of Karlstadt, but without losing his original admiration for Luther. This drew him to Wittenberg, where he spent 1522–23, and in the end he returned to the Lutheran fold. He eventually found a position with the duke of Wertheim, at first preaching in the small village of Remlingen, and then in Wertheim itself. He lost his post when the duke died in 1530, and his later years were tough. His health broken, he spent his remaining years ministering in the small parish of Leutershausen, mired in controversy; he died in 1533. A man who would have expected to spend his life in a monastery, all his physical needs catered for, Günzburg ended up an author, traveler, father, and convinced evangelical. For him the Reformation meant the liberation of the monks, the freeing of nuns from a tyranny and perverted sexuality, and the possibility of a new world of social justice. Luther was a hero whose life had inspired and transformed his own. Argula von Grumbach, a lay noblewoman in Ingolstadt married to a knight, and mother of four children, also had her life turned upside down by Luther’s message. In the early 1520s, she devoured his writings and read his translation of the New Testament. When in 1523 the university in Ingolstadt started proceedings against a Lutheran student, she was outraged and determined to take up the student’s cause. She wrote a letter in his support and had it published. 44 It was a runaway success, published in fourteen editions in just two months, and it made her famous. Her convictions gave her the courage to override all the contemporary expectations of what a woman could and could not do. She corresponded with Luther himself and in 1530 she even met him in the castle at Coburg. It was doubtless her social status as a member of the noble Staufen family that enabled her to become Luther’s friend—she belonged to the social group Luther had always cultivated.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  57 With Cajetan comprehensively defeated, or so it appeared to Luther, and with the Elector on his side, Luther seemed to be immune from attack, at least for the moment. * “Obelisks” were printers’ markers for errors; “asterisks” for things to be added. The titles were in-jokes by humanists who knew all about the new technology of print. T HE LONG-AWAITED DEBATE with Johannes Eck, which had been brewing since the spring of 1518, was finally arranged for June 1519 at Leipzig, in the territory of Georg of Saxony. The meeting was another of the dramatic intellectual set pieces that pushed the Reformation forward, and was a decisive step in the movement reaching a wider public beyond an academic audience. But while it saw the emergence of a pro-Luther party, it also gave rise to the beginnings of a coalition against him. Moreover, it marked yet a further radicalization of Luther’s theology; indeed, the older Luther would date his Reformation “breakthrough” to around this time. For Luther, there was no going back after Leipzig. If the battle with Cajetan had been a tussle with father figures, the disputation with Eck was a battle of brothers. Unlike the hated Italians at Augsburg, Eck was no papal courtier. Born in Egg, near Memmingen in Swabia, he was the son of a peasant and had been raised by his uncle, a priest in Rottenburg am Neckar, who taught him classics and sent him to the University of Heidelberg. Eck’s intellectual formation was not unlike that of Luther: He had read Ockham, Aristotle, and Augustine before becoming interested in mystical theology and humanism. He could not be dismissed out of hand as an old-fashioned scholastic or a Thomist like Cajetan. Fluent not only in Latin and Greek but also, unusually, in Hebrew, he was numbered among the “humanist theologians” by the Augsburg civic secretary and fellow humanist Conrad Peutinger. 1 Eck had become pro-chancellor at the University of Ingolstadt in 1512, where he introduced a number of reforms. His students included men like Urbanus Rhegius, who later became an influential cathedral preacher in Augsburg, and who praised his teacher as someone whose sheer intellectual brilliance incited the envy of others, and blinded “the horde of those suited to evil darkness.” 2 Not only did Eck defend Johannes Reuchlin against the Dominicans but he also invited him to Ingolstadt, where he stayed from late 1519 to the spring of 1521; Eck regarded the lectures Reuchlin gave there as among his major intellectual influences.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  This gave his correspondents huge power, because they alone had records of what he had written, but Luther was relaxed about this, joking that he could always deny his own “hand,” a remark that reveals his remarkable confidence. This breezy indifference to formalities is one of Luther’s most appealing characteristics. A brilliant, engaging personal correspondent, he had a sure sense of what would make his recipient laugh. He inquired about illness with genuine interest, but he also knew exactly how to cut to the chase, confronting a correspondent’s anguish with directness. More than anything else, the letters give us a sense of the charisma he must have radiated, and the sheer delight his correspondents must have experienced in being his friends. It was Luther’s vivid friendships and enmities that convinced me that he had to be understood through his relationships, and not as the lone hero of Reformation myth. Luther’s theology was formed in dialogue and debate with others—and it is no accident that the disputation, the form in which he proposed the Ninety-five Theses, remained an intellectual tool he cherished right up to his death. This book also presents an unfamiliar picture of Luther’s theology. We are used to regarding him as the advocate of “salvation by grace alone,” the man who insisted on sola scriptura, the principle that the Bible is sole authority on matters of doctrine. But just as important to Luther himself was his insistence on the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. This is probably the issue many modern Protestants, suspicious of ritual and of the idea that the divine can be manifest in objects, find most alien. Yet the question dominated Luther’s later years and mobilized his deepest energies; it also split the Reformation. It was here that Luther was at his most original as a thinker, refusing to make the easy distinction between sign and signified, and insisting that Christ really was present in the Eucharist, which truly was the body and blood of Christ. Though he was an intellectual, Luther mistrusted “reason, the whore,” as he called it. 20 His position on the Eucharist was at one with his striking ease with physicality, a trait that modern biographies find it hard to come to terms with. A deeply anti-ascetic thinker, Luther constantly undermined and subverted the distinction between flesh and spirit, and this aspect of his thought is among his most compelling legacies. This is also why his theology has to be understood in relation to Luther the man. Luther’s Reformation unleashed passionate emotions: anger, fear, and hatred as well as joy and excitement. Luther himself was a deeply emotional individual, yet much of the history of the Reformation edits those emotions out, as unbecoming or irrelevant to the development of his theology. It is hard for historians and theologians to tackle what now seems so alien, his disturbing obsession with the Devil, virulent anti-Semitism, and crude polemic.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The equation of Christ and Luther seems blasphemous. Yet the pamphlet, which enjoyed huge success, was in line with much of Luther’s own understanding of Worms: Luther himself saw it as a passion, and believed he was imitating Christ. In his account of events at Augsburg in 1518, he had compared himself to Christ in the house of Caiaphas, and he had been prepared to see his arrival at Erfurt on the way to Rome as his “Palm Sunday.” There was a long tradition of profound devotional identification with Christ reaching back through mystics and saints, which encompassed pious laypeople as well as clerics. Paintings of the Crucifixion or of the Holy Family routinely showed the onlookers, aside from Christ himself, dressed in the sumptuous silks and velvets of the day, with slashed trousers and sleeves with extravagant patterns. This was not because the artists did not know what people wore in biblical times: rather, their devotional images imported the present into the biblical past, allowing viewers to overcome historical time as they entered into devotional time and participated in the stories of Christ’s Passion. In 1500, Albrecht Dürer had painted himself, facing the viewer, with long, curling hair and with his hand raised in blessing in the style of Christ—a self-portrait that was anything but a proclamation of the divine status of the artist. For Dürer this would have been a devotional act, attempting to model himself as closely on Christ as possible as he reached his twenty-ninth year, about the age it was believed that Christ had begun his ministry. Luther’s description of his sufferings as a “passion” was not the only way he understood what was taking place—he had too great a sense of irony ever to credit it completely. But he habitually applied biblical drama to present his experience. On the journey to Worms he interpreted the book of Joshua for those traveling with him in the wagon. It was an interesting choice, for the biblical Joshua was the leader of the Israelites after the death of Moses; he had fought the battle of Jericho, and led the Israelites during their exile in the desert, just as Luther was now leading the members of the true church against the forces of Rome.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  I’ve studied German for the past three years and never once met a person who spoke it. And that includes my German teacher. I also learned how to use my knife to push food onto my fork. Jean-Pierre’s stepmother is dark and beautiful and gracious as I imagine wives of ambassadors are gracious. She also has a maid, which probably makes being gracious a little easier. His stepsister was born in Brazil. She’d give both Belle and Rayette a run in terms of beauty, but in terms of composure and grace she seemed a world away from the girls I know. Even Carla. Jean-Pierre’s little brother was born in Pasco, but you’d never know it. He wears a Brazilian World Cup Soccer uniform all the time and won’t speak anything but Portuguese. We all talked about politics and atomic energy and “futebol ,” which is what Carlos Henrique, the little brother, calls soccer. And the neat thing was that everybody got to talk and everybody got listened to. Mr. and Mrs. Baldosier and Jean-Pierre stopped and waited to hear Lucia out on her condemnation of torture in Brazil and they deferred to Carlos Henrique on the sad state of French futebol. Lucia shared some false information about heavy water and Jean-Pierre set her straight patiently. Then his dad set him straighter, and just as patiently. I guess I’d just never seen a family pay that much attention to each other. But then, most of the families I know don’t even take the time to sit down together. Sometimes I sure wish I had some brothers and sisters. * * * We’re headed out of Missoula after munching up a whole bunch of Battleground Bluecoats. Doug Bowden stole the show at fifty-four by beating Battleground’s undefeated Ray Rillke, whom I am glad I didn’t have to wrestle. It was an especially big victory for Doug and the whole team because if Doug can beat guys like Rilke, losing me isn’t going to make any difference. When Otto found out Doug was wrestling in my place he went to Coach and asked if Doug could be captain. Coach thanked Otto and said sure. Coach would never have said a thing if Otto hadn’t suggested it. Doug went right after Rilke, which is something Rilke wasn’t used to. Most guys, if they think you’re tough, will hang back and wrestle defensively. As a team we reject that philosophy, but we do have a couple guys who occasionally experience failures of faith. But that’s okay, because wrestling isn’t really a team sport. It could be that Rilke is so fucking strong and tough-looking nobody has tried to push him around before, because when Doug took it to him at the whistle, Rilke acted like he’d wandered into the girls’ bathroom. Balldozer says Rilke “wants to fart higher than his hole,” which I guess means he’s arrogant. After Doug took him down, Rilke regained his composure and reversed him in a flash.

• From Satyricon (1)

  I had not done speaking, when Trimalchio chimed in, “As I hope to grow fatter in fortune but not in figure, my cook has made all this out of a hog! It would be simply impossible to meet up with a more valuable fellow: he’d make you a fish out of a sow’s coynte, if that’s what you wanted, a pigeon out of her lard, a turtle-dove out of her ham, and a hen out of a knuckle of pork: that’s why I named him Daedalus, in a happy moment. I brought him a present of knives, from Rome, because he’s so smart; they’re made of Noric steel, too.” He ordered them brought in immediately, and looked them over, with admiration, even giving us the chance to try their edges upon our cheeks. Then all of a sudden two slaves came in, carrying on as if they had been fighting at the fountain, at least; each one had a water-jar hanging from a yoke around his neck. Trimalchio arbitrated their difference, but neither would abide by his decision, and each one smashed the other’s jar with a club. Perturbed at the insolence of these drunken ruffians, we watched both of them narrowly, while they were fighting, and then, what should come pouring out of the broken jars but oysters and scallops, which a slave picked up and passed around in a dish. The resourceful cook would not permit himself to be outdone by such refinements, but served us with snails on a silver gridiron, and sang continually in a tremulous and very discordant voice. I am ashamed to have to relate what followed, for, contrary to all convention, some long-haired boys brought in unguents in a silver basin and anointed the feet of the reclining guests; but before doing this, however, they bound our thighs and ankles with garlands of flowers. They then perfumed the wine-mixing vessel with the same unguent and poured some of the melted liquid into the lamps. Fortunata had, by this time, taken a notion that she wanted to dance, and Scintilla was doing more hand-clapping than talking, when Trimalchio called out, “Philargyrus, and you too, Carrio, you can both come to the table; even if you are green faction fans, and tell your bedfellow, Menophila, to come too.” What would you think happened then? We were nearly crowded off the couches by the mob of slaves that crowded into the dining-room and almost filled it full. As a matter of fact, I noticed that our friend the cook, who had made a goose out of a hog, was placed next to me, and he stunk from sauces and pickle. Not satisfied with a place at the table, he immediately staged an impersonation of Ephesus the tragedian, and then he suddenly offered to bet his master that the greens would take first place in the next circus games. CHAPTER THE SEVENTY-FIRST.

• From Satyricon (1)

  These notes, humorously and perhaps sarcastically ascribed to Lallemand, Sanctae Theologiae Doctor, “are six in number (all on various forms of vice); and show great knowledge, classical and sociological, of unsavory subjects. Now that the book is too rare to do us any harm, we may admit that the pastiche was not only highly amusing, but showed a perverse cleverness amounting almost to genius.” Marchena died at Madrid in great poverty in 1821. A contemporary has described him as being rather short and heavy set in figure, of great frontal development, and vain beyond belief. He considered himself invincible where women were concerned. He had a peculiar predilection in the choice of animal pets and was an object of fear and curiosity to the townspeople. His forgery might have been completely successful had he not acknowledged it himself within two or three years after the publication of his brochure. The fragment will remain a permanent tribute to the excellence of his scholarship, but it is his Ode to Christ Crucified which has made him more generally known, and it is one of the ironies of fate that caused this deformed giant of sarcasm to compose a poem of such tender and touching piety. Very little is known about Don Joe Antonio Gonzalez de Salas, whose connecting passages, with the exception of one which is irrelevant, are here included. The learned editors of the Spanish encyclopedia naively preface their brief sketch with the following assertion: “no tenemos noticias de su vida.” De Salas was born in 1588 and died in 1654. His edition of Petronius was first issued in 1629 and re-issued in 1643 with a copper plate of the Editor. The Paris edition, from which he says he supplied certain deficiencies in the text, is unknown to bibliographers and is supposed to be fictitious. To distinguish the spurious passages, as a point of interest, in the present edition, the forgeries of Nodot are printed within round brackets, the forgery of Marchena within square brackets, and the additions of De Salas in italics {In this PG etext in curly brackets}. The work is also accompanied by a translation of the six notes, the composition of which led Marchena to forge the fragment which first appeared in the year 1800. These have never before been translated. Thanks are due Ralph Straus, Esq., and Professor Stephen Gaselee. THE SATYRICON OF PETRONIUS ARBITER BRACKET CODE: (Forgeries of Nodot) [Forgeries of Marchena] {Additions of De Salas} DW VOLUME 1.--ADVENTURES OF ENCOLPIUS AND HIS COMPANIONS CHAPTER THE FIRST.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  He discovered that they had their own spirituality. Yes, they were brazen and insolent, but they also had the great qualities of “kindness, honesty, fairness, and mercy,... and the spirit of knowledge and idealism is ascendent [among them].” More important, their rebelliousness, which so offended the “weak who inhabit the world of order, the moderate, and well- mannered,” would push the Jewish people forward; their dynamism was essential if Jews were to progress and fulfill their destiny. 61 When he praised the Zionist pioneers, he picked out those qualities which would have been utterly abhorrent to a sage of the premodern period, where people had to accept the rhythms and restrictions of the existing order and where individuals who stepped out of line could gravely damage society: 62 These fiery spirits assert themselves, refusing to be bound by any limitation.... The strong know that this show of force comes to rectify the world, to invigorate the nation, humanity and the world. It is only in the beginning that it appears in the form of chaos. 63 Had not the rabbis of the Talmudic period predicted that there would be an “age of insolence and audacity,” 64 in which young men would rise up against their elders? This distressing rebellion was simply “the footsteps of the Messiah,... gloomy steps, leading to a rarefied, joyous existence.” 65 Kook was one of the first deeply religious thinkers able to embrace the new secularism, though he believed that ultimately the Zionist enterprise would lead to a religious renewal in Palestine. Instead of seeing the religious and secularists—representing mythos and logos, respectively—as coexisting peacefully, he developed a Hegelian vision of a dialectical clash of opposites leading to the synthesis of Redemption. The secularists clashed with the religious, but in this rebellion the Zionists were pushing history forward to new fulfillment. The whole of creation was being propelled, often painfully, toward a final reunion with the divine. One could see this in the evolutionary processes described by modern science, Kook believed, or in the scientific revolutions of Copernicus, Darwin, or Einstein, which seemed to destroy traditional ideas but which led to new understanding. Even the agony of the First World War could be seen, in Lurianic terms, as a “breaking of the vessels,” part of the creative process, which would eventually reinstate the sacred in our world. 66 This was how religious Jews should see the Zionist rebellion. “There are times when the laws of the Torah must be overridden,” Kook argued audaciously. When people were searching for a different path, everything was new and unprecedented, so “there is no one to show the legitimate way and so the aim is accomplished by a bursting of bounds.”

• From Shunned (2018)

  Title : Shunned Author: Curtis, Linda A. ASIN : B074CW45BZ [image file=Image00003.jpg] Praise for Shunned [image "Images" file=Image00000.jpg] “ What a pleasure to journey with Linda Curtis in her brave, captivating story of really growing up all the way. I read this book deep into the night and picked it up in the morning, unable to turn away from the unfolding adventure of a young woman determined to live a true life.” —SHERRY RUTH ANDERSON , coauthor of The Feminine Face of God and The Cultural Creatives “ You can’t read Shunned without realizing that Linda’s story is, writ large, the primal story of leaving home, in which you can’t become yourself without betraying your family. A wonderful book that is about so much more than the Jehovah’s Witnesses.” —ADAIR LARA , longtime columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and author of Hold Me Close, Let Me Go “ Shunned is a beautiful and moving account of discovery, awakening, and courage. Linda’s candor, insight, and warmth are a gift.” —MARC LESSER , author of Less: Accomplishing More By Doing Less “ A profound, at times fascinating, personal transformation told with meticulous detail. The author’s radical transformation— from dogmatism to relativism and from timidity to self-assurance—unfolds gradually. Beyond providing an eye-opening look at her former religious community, this memoir subtly encourages readers to challenge childhood views in search of chosen beliefs.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS “ This memoir of faith, struggle and rebirth will have you on the edge of your seat. It’s brilliant, respectful, insightful and most of all hopeful.” —OPENLY BOOKISH “ Linda’s brilliant writing lights up the page. She speaks with great authenticity, insight, and candor. This book is a wonderful inspiration for anyone who has been trapped in religious dogma or constricted by social and family pressures. Her courageous journey beautifully illuminates the path to find one’s freedom in the face of being shunned.” —MARK COLEMAN , Mindfulness Meditation Teacher, author of Awake In The Wild Shunned [image "Images" file=Image00001.jpg] Copyright © 2018 by Linda Curtis All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press. Published April 17, 2018 Printed in the United States of America Print ISBN: 978-1-63152-328-1 E-ISBN: 978-1-63152-329-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017959980 For information, address: She Writes Press 1563 Solano Ave #546 Berkeley, CA 94707 Interior design by Tabitha Lahr She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC. Names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals. For my mother, Ruth, who nurtured my reverence for the Divine, and my father, Frank, who instilled in me an appreciation for the well-told story.

• From Shunned (2018)

  Here was a person who did nothing to hide his flaws or embellish a story to appear the hero. He seemed comfortable and unaware of this innocence. Part of me thought him simple and unsophisticated, but I admired the courage and commitment he showed to change his life so completely. I spent the majority of my time in the door-to-door ministry, looking for people willing to make this type of dramatic conversion. It disarmed me to meet someone so sincere and open at first meeting. Something fluttered inside my chest and then relaxed. I knew intuitively this person would not judge me or look down upon me. I wanted to believe his openness was caused by something he saw in me, something that put him at ease in the same way. “From what I hear,” Ross said, “your story is quite different from mine.” And then he paused to focus his gaze on me, the way a TV reporter might do as he shifts his microphone and awaits a reply. I noticed the soft skin of his lips and wondered what it would be like to kiss them. “What have you heard?” I was in a coy mood and jumped down off the counter, standing about a foot away from him. “You seem to already know a few things about me, and I wouldn’t want to bore you by repeating anything.” He smiled like someone who had been caught stealing a glimpse of another’s poker hand. “At my insistence, Bill has told me a thing or two about you—all of it good, of course. Ed Torres and I work together, and he’s been talking you up for months now. Ever since you moved in to his congregation, he’s been telling me about this wonderful woman I should meet. He keeps encouraging me to come over and visit your congregation’s Sunday meeting.” A wave of heat radiated through my chest and cheeks as I imagined having unknowingly been the central topic of several conversations. In Witness circles, visiting someone’s congregation was a classic courtship move. “Please go on,” Ross said. “Bill said you were raised in The Truth, just like he was. But I understand your dad isn’t a Witness, which means your mom took the lead teaching you, just like Ellen did with Emily and Paige. Is that right?” His genuine curiosity summoned my story into focus. I told him that my mom’s immediate family were all Witnesses and had raised her with those principles. They lived in the small town of Dundee in the Willamette Valley, decades before it became a denizen of world-renowned pinot noirs. Dad was a dashing football player at Newberg High School. Mom was a cheerleader. They became sweethearts. A better athlete than student, Dad enlisted in the navy when he was barely nineteen. After basic training, he shipped off to Korea. Mom got a job as an operator at the phone company and waited.

• From Shunned (2018)

  A successful graphic designer by trade, Phil was the latest in a long succession of elders assigned to lead the study group. He and his wife, Grace, became Witnesses after their three children were born. They were first contacted by other Witnesses in the door-to-door ministry, and both responded to the message out of concern over what kind of world their children might inherit. Phil was well into his forties, but his well-toned, stocky build and jaunty personality gave him the air of a thirty-year-old. He kept fit by running five miles each day. Phil and Grace were two of the few Witnesses I knew with college degrees. They were well off, well traveled, and interesting, especially to my dad. There was a certain indescribable something about Phil that Dad couldn’t dismiss, and the feeling was mutual. When Dad learned that Phil had a daily addiction to ice cream, he made a point of having a fresh gallon at the ready each Tuesday. After the Bible study, everyone was invited upstairs to linger for dessert. Phil and Grace were usually the last to leave; he and my dad sat together at the kitchen table while the women chatted on the couch. Phil was just as interested in getting to know my father as a person as he was in teaching him anything about God. I suspect my father was undone by the genuine personal interest Phil showed, minus any agenda to convert him. One day he said, “Frank, no matter what happens—whether you ever study the Bible or not—we’ll always be friends.” And Dad knew that he meant it. “He’s not a bullshitter,” Dad said. Phil had come from the world and did not fear its influences the same way we Lifers did. Soon Mom and Dad were playing cards each weekend with Phil and Grace and dining out with them often. Throughout most of their marriage, my parents did not blend much of their social lives. Mom had rich friendships with women in the congregation, but relationships with other couples were rare because Dad was an unbeliever. I noticed a gentle felicity emerge between my parents as they basked in the joy of this new era. Phil never mistook Dad’s absence of scholarly accomplishments for a lack of intelligence. The two men shared a fascination with history and love of a well-told story. For the sheer joy and mental stimulation of it, they purchased a four-foot roll of white butcher-block paper and over many months mapped out a timeline of man’s history on Earth. At the far end of the paper was a line for Year Zero, to mark the first of the seven “creative days” described in Genesis. Using a scale of one inch per hundred years, they unfurled all the major stories of the Bible, marked with notches across the advancing timeline, like seams on a football.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Once people were deprived of that type of spiritual activity, they would lose their faith. This is what happened to some of the Jews who decided to convert to Christianity and remain in the Iberian Peninsula. This has also happened to many modern people who no longer meditate, perform rituals, or take part in any ceremonial liturgy, and then find that the myths of religion mean nothing to them. Many of the conversos were able to identify wholly with Catholicism. Some, indeed, such as the reformers Juan de Valdes (1500–41) and Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540), became important leaders of the Counter Reformation and thus made a significant contribution to early modern culture in rather the same way that secularized Jews such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Albert Einstein, and Ludwig Wittgenstein had a profound impact on later modernism after their assimilation into mainstream society. One of the most illustrious of these influential conversos was Teresa of Avila (1515–82), the mentor and teacher of John of the Cross and the first woman to be declared a Doctor of the Church. She was a pioneer of the reform of spirituality in Spain and was especially concerned that women, who did not have the benefit of a good education and were frequently led into unhealthy mystical practices by inept spiritual directors, receive a proper grounding in religious matters. Hysterical trances, visions, and raptures had nothing to do with holiness, she insisted. Mysticism demanded extreme skill, disciplined concentration, a balanced personality, and a cheerful, sensible disposition, and must be integrated in a controlled and alert manner with normal life. Like John of the Cross, Teresa was a modernizer and a mystic of genius, yet had she remained within Judaism she would not have had the opportunity to develop this gift, since only men were allowed to practice the Kabbalah. Yet, interestingly, her spirituality remained Jewish. In The Interior Castle, she charts the soul’s journey through seven celestial halls until it reaches God, a scheme which bears a marked resemblance to the Throne Mysticism that flourished in the Jewish world from the first to the twelfth centuries CE. Teresa was a devout and loyal Catholic, but she still prayed like a Jew and taught her nuns to do the same. In Teresa’s case, Judaism and Christianity were able to blend fruitfully, but other, less gifted conversos experienced conflict. A case in point: Tomás de Torquemada (1420–98), the first Grand Inquisitor. 22 The zeal with which he attempted to stamp out residual Judaism in Spain may perhaps have been an unconscious attempt to extirpate the old faith from his own heart.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  It was an aggressive movement, which imposed itself on the people by force. Some of these violent and rejectionist Wahhabi techniques would be used by some of the fundamentalist Islamist reformers during the twentieth century, a period of even greater change and unrest. 24 The Moroccan Sufi reformer Ahmad ibn Idris (1780–1836) had quite a different approach, which also has its followers in our own day. His solution to the disintegration of life in the peripheral Ottoman provinces was to educate the people and make them better Muslims. He traveled extensively in North Africa and the Yemen, addressing the people in their own dialect, teaching them how to perform the ritual of communal prayer, and trying to shame them out of immoral practices. This was a grassroots movement. Ibn Idris had no time for Wahhabi methods. In his view, education, not force, was the key. Killing people in the name of religion was obviously wrong. Other reformers worked along similar lines. In Algeria, Ahmad al-Tigrani (d. 1815), in Medina, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Karim Sameem (d. 1775), and in Libya, Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi (d. 1832) all took the faith directly to the people, bypassing the ulema. This was a populist reform; they attacked the religious establishment, which they considered to be elitist and out of touch, and, unlike Abd al-Wahhab, were not interested in doctrinal purity. Taking the people back to the basic cult and rituals and persuading them to live morally would cure the ills of society more effectively than complicated figh. For centuries, Sufis had taught their disciples to reproduce the Muhammadan paradigm in their own lives; they had also insisted that the way to God lay through the creative and mystical imagination: people had a duty to create their own theophanies with the aid of the contemplative disciplines of Sufism. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these reformers, whom scholars call “Neo-Sufis,” went one step further. They taught the common people to rely entirely on their own insights; they should not have to depend upon the scholars and learned clerics. Ibn Idris went so far as to reject the authority of every single Muslim sage and saint, however exalted, except the Prophet. He was thus encouraging Muslims to value what was new and to cast off habits of deference. The goal of the mystical quest was not union with God, but a deep identification with the human figure of the Prophet, who had opened himself so perfectly to the divine. These were incipiently modern attitudes. Even though the Neo-Sufis were still harking back to the archetypal persona of the Prophet, they seem to have been evolving a humanly rather than a transcendently oriented faith and were encouraging their disciples to prize what was novel and innovative as much as the old.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther may well have picked up humanist ideas through Lang, and together they brought the new biblical humanism, critical of scholasticism and determined to return to the original texts, to university teaching. 30 Yet this was not a friendship of equals. Although Luther was probably only four years older, the younger man’s admiration for him was evident from the beginning, and Luther did not mince his words when, in 1517, sending him the Ninety-five Theses, he felt Lang did not understand his new theological direction. 31 Luther’s position at the university, which he had inherited from Staupitz and would hold until his death, was professor of the Bible, and it required him to lecture on Scripture, hold disputations, and preach to students and members of the university. 32 He undertook the task with gusto, lecturing first on the Psalms. Using the new technology of printing when he lectured on Romans in 1515–16, he had the university printer, Johann Rhau-Grunenberg, set the Vulgate text in double-spaced format, with generous margins on all sides. In his lectures Luther then read out his glosses and emendations to the text, based on the more up-to-date editions of Faber Stapulensis and Erasmus’s edition of Lorenzo Valla’s text; the students would insert them into their individual copies. Luther would expound the meaning of the text, working from notes he had prepared but sometimes speaking extempore. 33 Johann Oldecop, later an opponent of the Reformation, recalled how well Luther explained biblical passages, not using Latin but German. 34 This style of lecturing, which engaged closely with the text, would have given the students an almost tactile experience of encountering Scripture and working with it themselves. 18., 19., and 20. Three woodcuts from 1578 illustrate the rituals involved at Wittenberg, showing the blackened faces and horned fools’ caps of the initiates. The ceremonial tools—gilded saw, pliers, ax, brush, bell, and the like—have survived from the University of Leipzig. The rituals, which also involved a mock confession, are clearly parodies of religious ceremonies, yet Luther supported their retention. Just as Staupitz joked that Luther needed the Devil, so Luther never frowned upon a ritual that captured something of the state of utter sinfulness of the Christian—and in this case, the university initiate. It was also transforming Luther.