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 The Second Sex (1949)

  “Women never go beyond the pretext,” a writer told me. This is true enough. Still amazed at having had permission to explore the world, they take its inventory without trying to discover its meaning. Where they sometimes excel is in the observation of facts: they make remarkable reporters; no male journalist has outdone Andrée Viollis’s eyewitness reports on Indochina and India. They know how to describe atmosphere and people, to show the subtle relations between them, and let us share in the secret workings of their souls: Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Dorothy Parker, and Katherine Mansfield have sharply and sensitively brought to life individuals, climates, and civilizations. They have rarely succeeded in creating as convincing a masculine hero as Heathcliff: they grasp little more than the male in man; but they often describe their own interior lives, experiences, and universe very well; attached to the secret side of objects, fascinated by the uniqueness of their own sensations, they convey their fresh experience through the use of savory adjectives and sensual images; their vocabulary is usually more noticeable than their syntax because they are interested in things more than in their relations; they do not aim for abstract elegance; instead, their words speak to the senses. One area they have most lovingly explored is Nature; for the girl or the woman who has not completely abdicated, nature represents what woman represents for man: herself and her negation, a kingdom and a place of exile; she is all in the guise of the other. The woman writer will most intimately reveal her experience and dreams in speaking of moors or kitchen gardens. There are many who enclose the miracles of sap and seasons in pots, vases, and flower beds; others, without imprisoning plants and animals, nonetheless try to appropriate them by the attentive love they dispense to them: so it is with Colette and Katherine Mansfield; very rare are those who approach nature in its inhuman freedom, who try to decipher its foreign meanings and lose themselves in order to unite with this other presence: hardly any women venture down these roads Rousseau invented, except for Emily Brontë, Virginia Woolf, and sometimes Mary Webb. And to an even greater extent we can count on the fingers of one hand the women who have traversed the given in search of its secret dimension: Emily Brontë explored death, Virginia Woolf life, and Katherine Mansfield sometimes—not very often—daily contingence and suffering. No woman ever wrote The Trial, Moby-Dick, Ulysses, or Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Women do not challenge the human condition because they have barely begun to be able to assume it entirely. This explains why their works generally lack metaphysical resonance and black humor as well; they do not set the world apart, they do not question it, they do not denounce its contradictions: they take it seriously. The fact is that most men have the same limitations as well; it is when she is compared with the few rare artists who deserve to be called “great” that woman comes out as mediocre. Destiny is not what limits her: it is easy to understand why it has not been possible for her to reach the highest summits, and why it will perhaps not be possible for some time.

• From Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life (2005)

  74 Lecture 13: Plato, Phaedo that each person had a god inside himself—a daemon, that is, a “good spirit” or conscience. That conscience accompanies the soul to the underworld. The soul of a person who has lived in pursuit of truth goes with his conscience to the underworld. The daemon of a person who has lived an evil life must drag that person’s soul down. When a person reaches the underworld, his soul will be judged by God. Those who have done evil deeds are thrown into a deep, fi ery pit. Those who have done bad deeds in a moment of anger or desperation are thrown into a great lake, where they fl oat around until their victims, who stand on the banks, forgive them. Those who have not done anything evil but who have not purifi ed their souls will fl it around until they are reborn as other creatures. Those souls who have spent their lives purifying themselves in the pursuit of wisdom are free forever, and they go to heaven and are joined with God and know only happiness and bliss and purity. Thus, Socrates believes in consequences for good and bad actions and knows that God cares about good and evil. All people make their choices and will pay for them. The jailer makes his presence known, and Socrates says that the jailer has been good to him. The jailer then prepares the poison. After drinking the poison and beginning to feel its effects, Socrates says that Crito should offer a rooster to Aesculapius, the god of healing and health, for healing him of earthly cares and the desires of his body. Thus, with his last breath, Socrates indicts the Athenian democracy that put him to death and shows a more profound belief in the gods than those who had accused him. Socrates dies and Phaedo says, “That was the end of that man who of all the men of our day was the best, the most just, the fi nest man who ever lived.” ■ Plato, Phaedo. Plato, Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito. Essential Reading Supplementary Reading 75 1. What parallels do you see between the Bhagavad Gita and the Phaedo? 2. Do you believe that morality depends on a belief in absolute values or in an afterlife? Questions to Consider

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  Then there were the visions: He foretold his uncle’s and then his grandmother’s death; and the voices: when he played alone he often heard God calling his name.My mother, too, grew up on a first-name basis with God. She was only eight when she heard the voice calling her name in the woods next to the Assemblies of God church where her daddy was pastor. There were no burning bushes, no glowing figures, only an ordinary and somewhat familiar voice calling, Carolyn. She wandered through the trees and looked behind the largest trunk. Carolyn . No one there. Carolyn.That night as she told her family the story, a feeling of awe swept over her. That voice, the voice that called her name in the trees, the voice that sounded so familiar yet belonged to no one, that voice was the eternal I Am, the same voice that spoke the world into existence. She knew it. When her parents asked how she knew, she shrugged and asked, “Well, who else could it have been?” In her family, no one would have suggested it was her imagination. My Pentecostal grandparents and their children existed in a reality that was an extension of biblical times. They believed the temporal world lay like a fine curtain over the realm of the eternal. At any moment the archangel Michael might reach through the veil and tap them on the shoulder with a heavenly message. Or the devil might slip through and tempt with some cheap bit of finery. It could be hard to tell one from the other at times, especially given Satan’s love of deception, but no one questioned the veracity of the experiences.Being singled out by God brought the kind of attention that was hard to come by for kids in large, poor families. Born in 1932 to Alabama sharecroppers, Brother Terrell was the youngest of seven kids. The family lived in a shack without running water or electricity. A broken-down horse provided the only transportation. The Great Depression and the death of Brother Terrell’s father turned the family’s subsistent poverty into a struggle for survival. His mother left him in the care of one of his sisters and went to work in the fields with her other five children. She left at sunrise and came home at sundown. On Sundays, she hitched the horse to a rickety wagon and drove her brood to the nearest holiness church, a backwoods term for a nondenominational Pentecostal offshoot. Her faith was her only source of hope.Mama’s childhood was slightly less desperate. She was one of the middle kids in a family of nine children. Her daddy was the pastor of a string of Assemblies of God churches throughout Alabama and Florida. He farmed to put food on the table. My mother and her siblings picked cotton to pay for their shoes and other necessities. Mama and Brother Terrell were thought to be sensitive children by their mothers and downright peculiar by their siblings.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  Brother Terrell wrote songs and picked out tunes on a neighbor’s guitar early on. For a brief time during adolescence he harbored hopes of making it big on the Grand Ole Opry, but the visions kept coming and he realized that God would not let him go.Mama was a musical prodigy, further proof of God’s favor. Her story is that while picking at the notes on the piano in her daddy’s church one day, she was suddenly able to play a hymn straight through. From that moment she could play any song she wanted. When she was fifteen, she saw herself in a night vision playing a big pearly accordion. A night vision is a foretelling of the future, only the seer is asleep. People who have night visions often go on to full-fledged wide-awake visions. When Mama opened her eyes, she could still feel the heft of the instrument against her. She was meant to have an accordion. Her daddy said that might be true, but he didn’t have the money to buy one. Another teenage girl might have pleaded or thrown a fit. My mother fasted and prayed. In the early hours of what was to be her fourth day without food, a knock on the door awakened her daddy. He turned on the light and opened the door. There on his front porch stood a man he recognized but didn’t know well.“Preacher, I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ve got to give you this.”He thrust a wad of bills at my grandfather and turned to go.“Wait. What is this? What’s it for?” My grandfather tugged at the man’s sleeve.The man shook him off. “Look, I haven’t been able to sleep for days. Something keeps telling me to bring you this money. I don’t know what it’s for. But you have to take it so I can get some sleep. ”Later that morning my grandfather went to town and ordered an accordion from Sears, Roebuck. My mother played it in church the day it arrived. She says she never hit a wrong note.By the time Brother Terrell came along, Mama needed a second chance to fulfill her destiny. She had blown the first one. Her mother had told her, “Honey, any woman can get married and have children. God has something better in mind for you.” Mama’s plan was to go to Bible school and become a missionary, but she ran away from home, or away from her controlling daddy, instead. My grandfather had the idea that his high-cheeked, leggy daughter was something of a wild girl and he was determined to rein her in. According to Mama, the last straw came when he dragged her out of a boy’s car at a local snack shack in “broad daylight” and whipped her with his belt. She was eighteen years old.She hopped a Greyhound bus to Los Angeles.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I’d just gotten my precalc test back, and I was awash with admiration for Alaska, since her tutoring had paved my way to a B-plus. She and I sat alone in the TV lounge watching MTV on a drearily cloudy Saturday. Furnished with couches left behind by previous generations of Culver Creek students, the TV room had the musty air of dust and mildew—and, perhaps for that reason, was almost perennially unoccupied. Alaska took a sip of Mountain Dew and grabbed my hand in hers. “Always comes up eventually. All right, so my mom was something of a hippie when I was a kid. You know, wore oversize sweaters she knitted herself, smoked a lot of pot, et cetera. And my dad was a real Republican type, and so when I was born, my mom wanted to name me Harmony Springs Young, and my dad wanted to name me Mary Frances Young.” As she talked, she bobbed her head back and forth to the MTV music, even though the song was the kind of manufactured pop ballad she professed to hate. “So instead of naming me Harmony or Mary, they agreed to let me decide. So when I was little, they called me Mary. I mean, they called me sweetie or whatever, but like on school forms and stuff, they wrote Mary Young . And then on my seventh birthday, my present was that I got to pick my name. Cool, huh? So I spent the whole day looking at my dad’s globe for a really cool name. And so my first choice was Chad, like the country in Africa. But then my dad said that was a boy’s name, so I picked Alaska.” I wish my parents had let me pick my name. But they went ahead and picked the only name firstborn male Halters have had for a century. “But why Alaska?” I asked her. She smiled with the right side of her mouth. “Well, later, I found out what it means. It’s from an Aleut word, Alyeska . It means ‘that which the sea breaks against,’ and I love that. But at the time, I just saw Alaska up there. And it was big, just like I wanted to be. And it was damn far away from Vine Station, Alabama, just like I wanted to be.” I laughed. “And now you’re all grown up and fairly far away from home,” I said, smiling. “So congratulations.” She stopped the head bobbing and let go of my (unfortunately sweaty) hand. “Getting out isn’t that easy,” she said seriously, her eyes on mine like I knew the way out and wouldn’t tell her. And then she seemed to switch conversational horses in midstream. “Like after college, know what I want to do? Teach disabled kids. I’m a good teacher, right? Shit, if I can teach you precalc, I can teach anybody.

• From Naked Ambition

  - It's so funny that what were considered some of the raciest images of the time, that you had to know a guy who knew a guy, and then you had to get in the mail in a brown envelope, were made by a group of people who in no way was this titillating to them. They didn't even really understand it on any sexuality level. This was business. There are guys who will pay money to get special boots made, and for women to just do something really specific, like dance around with this little stuffed clown. [upbeat music] - [Ed] Bettie came down in 1954 on a vacation. There was someone in New York that Bunny had worked with who told her about Bettie, and they connected that way. [pleasant music] [pleasant music continues] The first shoot she did was at a studio where she just had a ordinary backdrop. [pleasant music] The second shoot was at Africa USA. ♪ I declare sure enough ♪ I'm a hot mama ♪ I know about me - [Bettie] I tried to tell Bunny, I said, "Bunny, I've got circles under my eyes and I feel terrible." I said, "I don't feel like posing." She says, "Bettie, I had to pay money to Little Africa to use it this morning," she said, "We have to do it today." The most popular pictures ever taken of me wearing that leopard outfit, and you can see circles, deep circles under my eyes. ♪ Yeah I'm warning all you chicks ♪ - And those are the images she sent to Playboy. Playboy sent back a response saying, "We love these, but we only use indoor photographs for our centerfolds." "Can you shoot her indoors?" ♪ Hot mama And that's what she did, she went and she photographed her with the Christmas tree and the Christmas hat. And that became the January 55 centerfold, and they both became famous. - [Bettie] I didn't know that Bunny Yeager was gonna send pictures to Mr. Hefner for "Playboy Magazine." I look like I've got a saggy, there's just one breast showing in the picture, you know? That little Santa Claus hat and I'm winking, with a little Christmas tree ball covering you know where. [gentle music] - Being in Playboy at that moment was kind of it, if you were the kind of model who took her clothes off. - Bettie Page would not have received the kind of accolades and star quality that stayed with her forever without appearing in the pages of Playboy. And, of course, Bunny made her a celebrity. [pleasant music] - The collaboration of Bettie Page and Bunny Yeager changed both of their lives. Before working with Bunny Yeager, Bettie Page was considered a fetish model, it had very little to do with celebrating Bettie Page. Bunny Yeager celebrated Bettie Page. - My favorite pictures of Bettie are the ones of her surrounded by the lush foliage.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  As they sat down, I crossed through the appropriate squares on the Colonel’s diagram and handed it to him. Just then, the Old Man shuffled in. He breathed slowly and with great labor through his wide-open mouth. He took tiny steps toward the lectern, his heels not moving much past his toes. The Colonel nudged me and pointed casually to his notebook, which read, The Old Man only has one lung , and I did not doubt it. His audible, almost desperate breaths reminded me of my grandfather when he was dying of lung cancer. Barrel-chested and ancient, the Old Man, it seemed to me, might die before he ever reached the podium. “My name,” he said, “is Dr. Hyde. I have a first name, of course. So far as you are concerned, it is Doctor. Your parents pay a great deal of money so that you can attend school here, and I expect that you will offer them some return on their investment by reading what I tell you to read when I tell you to read it and consistently attending this class. And when you are here, you will listen to what I say.” Clearly not an easy A. “This year, we’ll be studying three religious traditions: Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism. We’ll tackle three more traditions next year. And in my classes, I will talk most of the time, and you will listen most of the time. Because you may be smart, but I’ve been smart longer. I’m sure some of you do not like lecture classes, but as you have probably noted, I’m not as young as I used to be. I would love to spend my remaining breath chatting with you about the finer points of Islamic history, but our time together is short. I must talk, and you must listen, for we are engaged here in the most important pursuit in history: the search for meaning. What is the nature of being a person? What is the best way to go about being a person? How did we come to be, and what will become of us when we are no longer? In short: What are the rules of this game, and how might we best play it?” The nature of the labyrinth, I scribbled into my spiral notebook, and the way out of it . This teacher rocked. I hated discussion classes. I hated talking, and I hated listening to everyone else stumble on their words and try to phrase things in the vaguest possible way so they wouldn’t sound dumb, and I hated how it was all just a game of trying to figure out what the teacher wanted to hear and then saying it. I’m in class , so teach me . And teach me he did: In those fifty minutes, the Old Man made me take religion seriously.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  CHAPTER 16 [image file=image_rsrc3E3.jpg] In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk writes about a form of therapy called EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It’s a strange process reminiscent of hypnosis, where a patient revisits past traumas while moving their eyes left and right. It seemed too simple, almost hokey, but van der Kolk passionately sang its praises. He told the story of a patient who came out of a single forty-five-minute session of EMDR, looked at him, and said that “he’d found dealing with me so unpleasant that he would never refer a patient to me. Otherwise, he remarked, the EMDR session had resolved the matter of his father’s abuse.” Resolved! Here was a form of therapy, van der Kolk said, that could help “even if the patient and the therapist do not have a trusting relationship.” Then again, he said that EMDR was far more effective for adult-onset trauma, and it cured only 9 percent of childhood trauma survivors. But at this point, 9 percent was better than nothing. Nine percent was a beacon I couldn’t afford to ignore. I found exactly one EMDR therapist in New York City who took my insurance. She was located in the financial district, near Wall Street, but her office was the size of a large gas station bathroom, with about as much appeal. There was paper everywhere. Hastily stuffed manila folders stacked several feet high formed a ring around the entire room. Her air-conditioning was spotty and tremendously loud, so she had a couple of pink plastic dollar-store fans, about six inches tall, on the floor, swirling hot air around our feet. “Eleanor” was a tiny, frail-looking woman with a large, frizzy nest of gray hair around her face. She had a persistent dry cough and was a few minutes late to every appointment. But she charged $30 a session—and since apparently I didn’t even need to like her, she’d suffice. During our first session, Eleanor scratched on her notepad through the quick and dirty version of my life story. “Wow,” she said, shaking her head. “You’ve been through a lot and come across the other side with such resilience. You’re really impressive.” I liked that the tone she took wasn’t pitiful but that she acknowledged the severity of what I’d gone through. I could work with this. Then she described the basics. EMDR was developed by psychologist Francine Shapiro in 1987. She discovered that when she was walking through the woods, her upsetting thoughts dissipated when she moved her eyes back and forth, scanning the path around her. She then conducted studies where she waved a finger in front of patients’ faces, directing their gazes left and right, while asking them to revisit their most harrowing traumas. She reported that subjects who received EMDR therapy had “significant decreases in ratings of subjective distress and significant increases in ratings of confidence in a positive belief.”[1]

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  Even now, at the beginning of the movement, there have appeared Greek Orthodox people who follow the example of the Dukhobors. What then, does the future hold? What if similar action is taken by the Molokans, Stundists, Shaloputy, Khlysty, the Pilgrims, all those sectarians who hold the same views as to government and military service, and who do not act as the Dukhobors have done, merely because they have not resolution to take the initiative, and fear to suffer? Of such people there are millions; not in Russia only, but in all Christian countries; not only in Christian, but in Moslem countries; in Persia, Turkey, and Arabia, for instance, there are the Karidshity and the Babisty. It is needful to prevent contagion from these ten of thousands who acknowledge no government, and do not wish to take part in government. But how? Certainly they cannot be killed. They are too many. It is no less difficult to put them in prison. It is only possible to ruin and torture them. And just this is done. But what if these tortures have not the desired effect, and these people still persist in declaring the truth, and by so doing attract more adherents? The position of governments is crucial; the more so that they can take no certain stand. You cannot denounce as bad the deeds of men like Drozhin, who was tortured to death in prison; or Izyumchenko, still suffering in Siberia; or Dr. Skarvan, imprisoned in Austria; or like all those others at present in prisons,— men who are ready to suffer and to die, only to be faithful to the most simple, universally comprehensible and approved religious principles, which prohibit murder and participation in murder. By no device of logic can you demonstrate the acts of these men to be bad or unchristian; and not only are you unable to disapprove, but you cannot help admiring them. Because you must admit that men who so act, act in the name of the noblest qualities of man's soul,— qualities which, if you do not recognize their nobility, you reduce man's life to the level of animal existence. Therefore, however government acts toward these men, it must inevitably forward, not their, but its own, destruction. If government refrains from persecuting these people who, like the Dukhobors, Stundists, Nazarenes, and isolated individuals, refuse to take part in the acts of government, then the advantages of the peaceful Christian lives of these men will attract to them not only sincerely convinced Christians, but also those who will become Christians externally; and the number of people who do not comply with the requirements of government will grow more and more.

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

  Thus we see that those who are practised, not in keeping the Commandments but in sinning against them, are advised to embrace religious life. Such penitent, sinners are, however, deterred from so doing by the admirable wisdom of certain advisers, whose counsel St. Paul thus refutes: “I speak a human thing because of the infirmity of your flesh, for, as you have yielded your members to serve uncleanness and iniquity unto iniquity, so now yield your members to serve justice unto sanctification” (Rom 6:19). “I speak a human thing,” comments the Gloss, “because you owe more service to justice than to sin.” And Baruch (4:28) says, “As it was your mind to go astray from God; so, when you return again, you shall seek him ten times as much.” For after sinning and thus forsaking God and disobeying His commands, a man ought to strive after the highest virtue, and not be content with half measures. This teaching is borne out by the example of numerous saints. For many of both sexes, after leading lives of crime, have embraced the practice of the Counsels, and although they had formed no habit of keeping the Commandments, have devoted themselves to the observance of the strictest religious rule. Their conduct is approved even by philosophers. In the Second book of Ethics Aristotle writes: “When we withdraw from great sin, we shall come to the uniform line, even as they do who plane away the knots from wood.” For those who are knotted by sin, must be brought back to righteousness by practising the more perfect works of virtue. Thus we have made it clear that the opinion of those who maintain that none should practise the Counsels who have not kept the Commandments, cannot be approved, with regard to any class of men. CHAPTER 6

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  Coffin fragment of Isis mourning; Egypt, Late Period, Dynasties 26-31, c. 664-332 B.C.E., painted wood. Now in Brooklyn Museum, New York. Perhaps the most startling aspect of this poem is the degree to which Wisdom praises herself. Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible only the Most High makes such grandiose claims (see especially Isaiah 40–55). This manner of speech has led many scholars to suspect that Wisdom was originally conceived as a goddess. The closest analogies to her speech are found in inscriptions in which the Egyptian goddess Isis sings her own praises (these are called aretalogies of Isis). Isis claims, for example, to be the eldest daughter of the sun-god Re, to be the ruler of all lands, to have set down laws for humanity, to control the rise and fall of kings, and many other accomplishments. (Compare Prov 8:15-16: “By me kings reign and rulers decree what is just; by me rulers rule, and nobles, all who govern rightly.”) These aretalogies of Isis are known from Greek inscriptions, which are no earlier than the first century B.C.E., and therefore too late to have influenced the book of Proverbs. It may be, however, that similar praises of Isis were known in Egyptian tradition at an earlier date. In any case, the similarity is noteworthy. Wisdom has also been compared to another Egyptian goddess, Maat, the goddess of truth and justice. Maat was the foundation principle of Egyptian society, and her role in Egyptian religion is somewhat similar to that of Wisdom in Proverbs. But Maat never sings her own praises and is not even portrayed as speaking. To say that the portrayal of Wisdom is influenced by that of a goddess or goddesses is not necessarily to say that Wisdom was thought to be a goddess herself. Wisdom is first of all an attribute of (some) human beings, which is also presumed to be an attribute of God in a higher degree. When wisdom is depicted as a female figure who speaks, this is the literary device of personification. There are many examples of such personification in the Hebrew Bible and in other literature, ancient and modern. Compare, for example, Ps 85:10-11: “Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other. Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will look down from the sky.” Sometimes personifications of this sort could be

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  the East, orthodoxy was becoming the largest single tradition by the early decades of the third century. The Church was now a great and numerous force in the empire, attracting men of wealth and high education. Inevitably, then, there occurred a change of emphasis from purely practical development in response to need, to the deliberate thinking out of policy. This expressed itself in two ways: the attempt to turn Christianity into a philosophical and political system, and the development of controlling devices to prevent this intellectualization of the faith from destroying it. The twin process began to operate in the early and middle decades of the third century, with Origen epitomizing the first element and Cyprian the second. If Paul brought to the first generation of Christians the useful skills of a trained theologian, Origen was the first great philosopher to rethink the new religion from first principles. As his philosophical enemy, the anti-Christian Porphyry, summed it up, he ‘introduced Greek ideas to foreign fables’ – that is, gave a barbarous eastern religion the intellectual respectability of a philosophical defence. Origen was also a phenomenon. As Eusebius put it admiringly, ‘even the facts from his cradle are worth mentioning’. Origen came from Alexandria, the second city of the empire and then its intellectual centre; his father’s martyrdom left him an orphan at seventeen with six younger brothers. He was a hard-working prodigy, at eighteen head of the Catechetical School, and already trained as a literary scholar and teacher. But at this point, probably in 203, he became a religious fanatic and remained one for the next fifty years. He gave up his job and sold his books to concentrate on religion. He slept on the floor, ate no meat, drank no wine, had only one coat and no shoes. He almost certainly castrated himself, in obedience to the notorious text, Matthew 19:12, ‘there are some who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.’ Origen’s learning was massive and it was of a highly original kind: he always went back to the sources and thought through the whole process himself. Thus he learnt Hebrew and, according to Eusebius, ‘got into his possession the original writings extant among the Jews in the actual Hebrew character’. These included the discovery of lost texts; in the case of the psalms, Origen collected not only the four known texts but three others he unearthed, including ‘one he found at Jericho in a jar’. The result was an enormous tome, the Hexapla, which probably existed only in one manuscript, now lost, setting out the seven alternative texts in parallel columns. He applied the same principles of original research to every aspect of Christianity and sacred

• From A History of God (1993)

  Origen is, perhaps, best known for his self-castration. In the Gospels, Jesus said that some people had made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven, and Origen took him at his word. Castration was quite a common operation in late antiquity; Origen did not rush at himself with a knife, nor was his decision inspired by the kind of neurotic loathing of sexuality that would characterize some Western theologians, such as St. Jerome (342–420). The British scholar Peter Brown suggests that it may have been an attempt to demonstrate his doctrine of the indeterminacy of the human condition, which the soul must soon transcend. Apparently immutable factors such as gender would be left behind in the long process of divinization, since in God there was neither male nor female. In an age where the philosopher was characterized by his long beard (a sign of wisdom), Origen’s smooth cheeks and high voice would have been a startling sight. Plotinus (205–270) had studied in Alexandria under Origen’s old teacher Ammonius Saccus and had later joined the Roman army, hoping that it would take him to India, where he was anxious to study. Unfortunately the expedition came to grief and Plotinus fled to Antioch. Later he founded a prestigious school of philosophy in Rome. We know little else about him, since he was an extremely reticent man who never spoke about himself and did not even celebrate his own birthday. Like Celsus, Plotinus found Christianity a thoroughly objectionable creed, yet he influenced generations of future monotheists in all three of the God-religions. It is important, therefore, to give some detailed consideration to his vision of God. Plotinus has been described as a watershed: he had absorbed the main currents of some 800 years of Greek speculation and transmitted it in a form which has continued to influence such crucial figures in our own century as T. S. Eliot and Henri Bergson. Drawing on Plato’s ideas, Plotinus evolved a system designed to achieve an understanding of the self. Again, he was not at all interested in finding a scientific explanation of the universe or attempting to explain the physical origins of life; instead of looking outside the world for an objective explanation, Plotinus urged his disciples to withdraw into themselves and begin their exploration in the depths of the psyche.

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  57 On the reading, see Gray, ad Joe A similar emendation is made by Stein; so also Ryle and James. The Psalms of Solomon The righteousness of God We may now tum briefly to the concept of the 'righteousness of God', which is one of the most frequent themes in the Psalms of Solomon. 58 When the psalmist says that God is righteous, he asserts that God's judgment is righteous; God is a righteous judge. Thus 2.36 (32); 4.28 (24); 8.8; 8.27-32 (23-6); 9.3-10 (2-5). God's justice makes him the avenger of sin (8. 12 [11]). Just as all his judgments are just (righteous, dikaios), they are good (8.38 [32]). God's reliability in being the just judge also justifies the title 'faithful': he is 'faithful in all His judgements' (17.12 [10]), just as he is faithful to save those who love him and who patiently endure his chastening (14.1tf.). In his justice he punishes both sinful Israelites (2. 12 [IO]) and Gentiles. If his judgment against the latter sometimes seems delayed (2.29 [25]), it is nevertheless sure (2.30-6 [26-32]). One of the most striking elements is the constant assertion that God is righteous or (using the verb) is justified, which is apparently made in the face of events which would seem to call his justice into question. 59 Thus 2.14ff. (12tf.): in spite of the open transgression of some in Israel, yet the psalmist will 'justify' God (dikaioso se), that is, declare him to be just. He continues: For in Thy judgements is Thy righteousness (displayed), 0 God. For Thou hast rendered to the sinners according to their deeds, Yea according to their sins, which were very wicked. Thou hast uncovered their sins, that Thy judgement might be manifest; Thou hast wiped out their memorial from the earth. God is a righteous judge, And he is no respecter of persons. (2.16-19 [15-18)) The righteousness of God (his dikaiosyne, tsedaqah) is thus not his charity or leniency, but his fairness; he does not respect persons. As far as I have tsedaqah never refers in the Psalms of Solomon to noted, dikaiosyne = leniency or charity. It is a characteristic of the righteous to perceive and declare God's justice despite his observation that the pious are suffering: 3.3; cf. 8.31 (26). When all of God's dealings with men are reviewed, the psalmist can justify God (edikaiosa, Gray, 'I held God righteous') (8.7). The psalmist grants the correctness of the dispersion of Israel, which was just punishment for Israel's sins and which was done so that God might 'be justified' in his righteousness (9.3 [2]). In Psalm 4, which may be one of the earliest in the collection,60 the psalmist prays that God may remove 'those that live in hypocrisy in the company of the pious' (v. 7 [6]), so that then 'the pious may 58 Cf. Becker, Das Heil Gottes, pp. 29-32. Becker's analysis is not followed here. 59 See further Buchler, Piety, pp. 167-9. 6° Cf. Ryle and James, p. xliv.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  Coin of Antiochus IV Epiphanes. When Mattathias and his friends heard of the slaughter on the Sabbath, they mourned for the victims, but they resolved that they would defend themselves on the Sabbath, lest the whole Jewish people be wiped from the earth. In doing so, they resolved to break the Law for the greater good of the people. Not all pious Jews agreed with this decision. The dilemma, however, is one that has continued to confront Judaism down to modern times (cf. the Arab attack on Israel on Yom Kippur in 1973). There has always been some division of opinion within Judaism between those who insist on absolute obedience to the Law and those who take a more pragmatic approach and give priority to the survival of the people. The remainder of 1 Maccabees recounts the heroic exploits of the Maccabean family. Mattathias dies at the end of chapter 2. His son Judas, called Maccabeus, or “the hammer,” replaces him as leader. First Maccabees describes him in terms reminiscent of the divine warrior in the Hebrew Bible (1 Macc 3:3-9; cf. Isa 59:15-20). He recaptures Jerusalem and purifies the temple, three years to the day after it had been defiled (1 Macc 4:36-61), and institutes the festival of Hanukkah to commemorate the occasion. He gathers Jews from outlying areas into Judea for safekeeping. In the process he pillages Gentile towns and slaughters their inhabitants (chap. 5). Antiochus Epiphanes is shaken by the news of these exploits, realizes that he has brought ruin on his own head by attacking Jerusalem, and dies in despair (chap. 6). The Jews suffer some setbacks in this generally glorious history. One of Judas’s brothers, Eleazar, dies heroically in battle while stabbing an elephant from underneath (6:43-47). When a new high priest from the line of Aaron, Alcimus, is appointed, one group of Judas’s followers, the Hasidim, appear before him to make peace, but he kills sixty of them in one day (7:16). Judas himself is eventually killed in battle (9:11-18). Before his death, however, Judas took a remarkable action by sending an envoy to Rome (1 Maccabees 8). He was evidently aware of the broader international scene. The Romans made a treaty with the Jews, promising mutual

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  As a European, I have always admired Americans’ optimism. It is the opposite of the fatalism and resignation that pervade so many other, more traditional cultures, and it expresses a healthy sense of entitlement. People here don’t like to say, “That’s just the way it is; you can’t change it.” But this can-do attitude encourages us to assume that dwindling desire is an operational problem that can be fixed. From magazine articles to self-help books, we are encouraged to view a lack of sex in our relationships as a scheduling issue that demands better prioritizing and time management, or as a consequence of poor communication. If the problem is testosterone deficiency, we can get a prescription—an excellent technical solution. For the sexual malaise that can’t be so easily medicalized, remedies abound: books, videos, and sexual accoutrements are there to assist you not only with the basics, but to bring you to unimagined levels of ecstasy. In her book Against Love, Laura Kipnis writes: Whole new sectors of the economy have been spawned, an array of ancillary industries and markets fostered, and massive social investments in new technologies undertaken, from Viagra to couples porn: late-capitalism’s Lourdes for dying marriages. Like dedicated doctors keeping corpses breathing with shiny heart-lung machines and artificial organs, couples too, armed with their newfangled technologies, can now beat back passion’s death. This pragmatic approach typifies how the great country of manifest destiny goes about solving problems. You break the problem down to its component parts, study each one, and come up with a step-by-step plan that you can work on, a solution that promises calculable results. Apply this to sexual problems, though, and you get a model that focuses more on sexual functioning than on sexual feeling. The sex therapist Leonore Tiefer cautions us that in this paradigm, the body is divvied into a collection of unrelated parts, and satisfaction is seen as a result of their perfect functioning. This emphasis on physical achievement rather than desire and pleasure goes hand in hand with an emphasis on genitals, and reinforces the dominant male orientation. The penis is the new patient, having replaced its human owner, and the ability to achieve and maintain a steely erection overshadows any other kind of sexual proficiency. With Viagra, sex is too easily reduced to erections. (And the search is on for a female Viagra—good news for all the helpful husbands currently trading housework for sex, but bad news for the wives who see their own lack of desire as having more to do with romance than with tumescence.) The subjective experience of sexual pleasure is replaced by an objective list of criteria that is easily indexed but woefully truncated: erection, intercourse, orgasm.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Greeks and Latins also developed significantly different views of the divinity of Christ. The Greek concept of the incarnation was defined by Maximus the Confessor (ca. 580–662), who is known as the father of Byzantine theology. This approximates more closely to the Buddhist ideal than does the Western view. Maximus believed that human beings would only fulfill themselves when they had been united to God, just as Buddhists believed that enlightenment was humanity’s proper destiny. “God” was thus not an optional extra, an alien, external reality tacked on to the human condition. Men and women had a potential for the divine and would become fully human only if this was realized. The Logos had not become man to make reparation for the sin of Adam; indeed, the Incarnation would have occurred even if Adam had not sinned. Men and women had been created in the likeness of the Logos, and they would achieve their full potential only if this likeness was perfected. On Mount Tabor, Jesus’ glorified humanity showed us the deified human condition to which we could all aspire. The Word was made flesh in order that “the whole human being would become God, deified by the grace of God become man—whole man, soul and body, by nature and becoming whole God, soul and body, by grace.”57 Just as enlightenment and Buddhahood did not involve invasion by a supernatural reality but were an enhancement of powers that were natural to humanity, so too the deified Christ showed us the state that we could acquire by means of God’s grace. Christians could venerate Jesus the God-Man in rather the same way as Buddhists had come to revere the image of the enlightened Gautama: he had been the first example of a truly glorified and fulfilled humanity. Where the Greek view of Incarnation brought Christianity closer to the oriental tradition, the Western view of Jesus took a more eccentric course. The classic theology was expressed by Anselm, Bishop of Canterbury (1033–1109), in his treatise Why God Became Man. Sin, he argued, had been an affront of such magnitude that atonement was essential if God’s plans for the human race were not to be completely thwarted. The Word had been made flesh to make reparation on our behalf. God’s justice demanded that the debt be repaid by one who was both God and man: the magnitude of the offense meant that only the Son of God could effect our salvation, but, as a man had been responsible, the redeemer also had to be a member of the human race. It was a tidy, legalistic scheme that depicted God thinking, judging and weighing things up as though he were a human being. It also reinforced the Western image of a harsh God who could only be satisfied by the hideous death of his own Son, who had been offered up as a kind of human sacrifice.

• From Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1997)

  When I began pestering my middle-aged Rennellese informants with my questions about fruit edibility, I was brought into a hut. There, in the back of the hut, once my eyes had become accustomed to the dim light, was the inevitable, frail, very old woman, unable to walk without support. She was the last living person with direct experience of the plants found safe and nutritious to eat after the hungi kengi, until people’s gardens began producing again. The old woman explained to me that she had been a child not quite of marriageable age at the time of the hungi kengi. Since my visit to Rennell was in 1976, and since the cyclone had struck sixty-six years before, around 1910, the woman was probably in her early eighties. Her survival after the 1910 cyclone had depended on information remembered by aged survivors of the last big cyclone before the hungi kengi. Now, the ability of her people to survive another cyclone would depend on her own memories, which fortunately were very detailed. Such anecdotes could be multiplied indefinitely. Traditional human societies face frequent minor risks that threaten a few individuals, and they also face rare natural catastrophes or intertribal wars that threaten the lives of everybody in the society. But virtually everyone in a small traditional society is related to each other. Hence it is not only the case that old people in a traditional society are essential to the survival of their own children and grandchildren. They are also essential to the survival of the hundreds of people who share their genes. Any human societies that included individuals old enough to remember the last event like a hungi kengi had a better chance of surviving than did societies without such old people. The old men were not at risk from childbirth or from the exhausting responsibilities of lactation and child care, so they did not evolve protection by menopause. But old women who did not undergo menopause tended to be eliminated from the human gene pool because they remained exposed to the risk of childbirth and the burden of child care. At times of crisis, such as a hungi kengi, the prior death of such an older woman also tended to eliminate all of her surviving relatives from the gene pool—a huge genetic price to pay for the dubious privilege of continuing to produce another baby or two against lengthening odds. That importance to society of the memories of old women is what I see as a major driving force behind the evolution of human female menopause. ·····

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

  Again, we read of St. Matthew (Mt 9) that, at the call of the Lord he “arose and followed Him.” St. Chrysostom comments: “See the obedience of this man thus called. He neither refuses to obey, nor begs that he may go home to acquaint his kinsfolk of his departure.” And Remigius also observes of St. Matthew that he made no account of the dangers which he might incur from the anger of the magistrates, when he left their business unfinished. Thus, it becomes plain that nothing human ought to deter us from the service of God. We read in the Gospel of St. Matthew (8:21), and again in that of Luke (9:59) that “one of His disciples said to Him: ‘Lord, let me first go and bury my father.’ But Jesus said to him: ‘Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead.’” St. Chrysostom, writing on these words, says: “Christ spoke thus, not as contemning the love which we owe to our parents, but to show us that nothing ought to seem more necessary to us than the affairs of the Kingdom of Heaven. He would teach us that with our whole heart, we ought to attach ourselves to them, letting nothing, however important or attractive, to be an obstacle in our way. What would seem more necessary than to bury one’s father? What more easy? It would not have taken much time. But the devil is always on the alert to find some unguarded door, and if he perceive a slight negligence, he will cause it to become great cowardice. Therefore the wise man says: Defer not, from day to day. By these words he warns us not to waste a moment of time and, although numberless affairs may be pressing upon us, to prefer spiritual interests to all other things, even to such as are necessary.” St. Augustine says in De verbis Domini: “Your father is to be honoured, yes, but God must be obeyed. Christ says, ‘I call you to preach the Gospel. You are necessary to me for my task. My work is greater than is that which you desire to perform. There are others who can bury the dead. The first thing must not give place to the last. Love your parents, but prefer God to them.’” If then our Lord refused to grant His disciple a short time in which to perform so necessary a duty, how great is the presumption of those who teach that lengthy deliberation is necessary before embracing the Counsels?

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  Although it is likely to be the case, as Marmorstein said, that the view that the righteous suffer here in order to be rewarded hereafter was precisely formulated and emphasized by Akiba, the idea was not altogether new. It seems to be presupposed in a saying by R. Akiba's older contemporary, R. Eliezer. In discussing God's giving the manna to the Israelites despite their frequent disobedience, he comments, 'If God thus provided for those who provoked Him, how much the more will He in the future [le 'atid /abo'J 117 Marmorstein, The Names and Attributes of God, p. 186. Urbach has argued that R. Akiba dissoci ated suffering from punishment for transgression. On R. Akiba's position, see my 'R. Akiba's View of Suffering', JQR n.s. 63, 1973, pp. 332-51. 118 Gen. Rab. 33. 1. There is a parallel in Lev. Rab. 27. 1. 119 See the beginning of section 6. 120 Sifre Deur. 53 (12of.; to 11.26). 121 Sifre Num. rn3 (102; to 12.8b); cf. ARN 25 (ET, p. rn6). See further ARN 39 (ET, p. 162). Tannaitic Literature [I pay a good reward to the righteous!' 122 In any case, this is a relatively small development within the general idea that the suffering of the righteous is to be explained as God's just punishment for their few sins. 123 Having been punished here, they need not be punished hereafter. Thus Israel is compared to a vessel of common earthenware which, having been broken, cannot be 'punished' further. 'Thus when punishment ceases from Israel, it will not return upon them in the future.' 124 This discussion shows again how incorrect the weighing idea is as an accurate reflection of the views of the Tannaim. It follows logically from their conception of the justice of God, and is sometimes stated. But they also thought that God had provided means of atonement which were both thoroughly efficacious and also in accord with his justice. If salvation be viewed as God's activity, then sufferings may be said to satisfy God's just require ment; one is not both punished and damned for transgression. 125 But internally, sufferings are seen by the religious man as moving him to examination and repentance. The Rabbis did not see suffering as God's just punishment for transgression and suffering as God's means of urging man to repentance as in any way in conflict. Both statements spring from deeply held religious convictions (God is just and man is liable to sin and in need of repentance) and both can be expressed by saying that suffering brings atonement. 126