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 Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  But it is very wrong to see all those we can classify as Deists as either dissemb lers or only half-committed to their views. And this mistake is crippling, if we want to understand this period; it obscu res our picture of religious and irreligious alike. Or so I want to claim. That is because it hides from us the force of these Deist views as religious beli efs. But unle ss we see what they had going for them, how they could convi nce and even inspire those who held them, we will miss som ething crucial in the whole context in whic h they rose and fell. Paradoxically, the best way to appreciate this point is to take serious ly the cliche that Deism is halfway on the road to the radical Enlightenmen t, because then we will see how coming to understand what could inspir e the former will give us insight into the latter. So we sho uld ask what could move people in the religious outl ook we find expressed in Hutcheson or, more radically perhaps, in Tindal. What would lead one to praise and be thankful to God, if one saw his work the way they did? The answer is obviously his goodness, his benevolenc e. And this was expressed in his having made a world in whi ch the purp oses of the different beings inhabit ing it, and particular ly of the ration al beings, so perfectly .266 The Providenti al Order • 2 6 7 interlock. The world was designed so tha t each in seeking his or her good will also serve the good of oth ers. The fulles t hu man happiness, on Hutcheson's view, is attained when we give full reign to our moral sentiments and feelings of benevo lence. But it is ju st then that we do mos t to contri bute to the general happiness. God's goodness thus consists in his bringing about our good. His beneficence is explained partly in terms of our happiness. But wha t is strikin g about these Deist views is that the converse relatio n, so central to the religious traditi on, seems to be lacking. It is after all a central tenet of the J udaeo Christian religious traditio n that God love s and seeks the good of his creatures. But this good in turn has always been defined as consisting in some relation to God: in our loving him, servi ng him, being in his presence, contem plating him in the beatific vision, or somethin g of this kind. What is striking about Deist views is that the human good in terms of which God' s benevolence is defined is so self-contained . It is not that the reference to God is wholly absent, but it seems to be subor dinate to a conception of happiness which is defined purely in creaturely terms.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  systematic theology and the social task of Christianity. The monumental work of Troeltsch, “die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen,” is the first and chief attempt to apply the methods of the history of doctrine to the social convictions and hopes of the Churches. Conservative theology is naturally less responsive to the newer influences. But the wonderful work of the “Innere Mission” since Wichern, and the social reconstruction of Germany, in which the conservative parts of the nation have taken a full share, have not left their conception of the mission of Christianity untouched. Switzerland democratizes whatever it handles. The “Religiös-sozialen” in German Switzerland have more political radicalism and more religious enthusiasm for the doctrine of the Kingdom of God than the corresponding German groups. They have done thorough and inspiring work on the combination of social and theological ideas, especially Ragaz, Kutter, Matthieu, Benz, and Reinhardt. Social and democratic idealism is one of the most active ingredients in Catholic Modernism. The French Protestants, though they number only about 700,000, have produced a social and socialist literature of a richness and maturity which puts our greater numbers to shame, and witnesses to the intellectual fertility of French life. Auguste Sabatier, Charles Secrétan, Tomy Fallot, Wilfred Monod, Elie Gounelle, and Paul Passy occur to me among those who have given doctrinal formulation to the social gospel. Great Britain has been the foremost capitalistic nation for a century and a half. Its religion and theology have necessarily matched its individualistic political economy and political philosophy. When the early Christian Socialists, Frederick Denison Maurice and Charles Kingsley, first asserted solidaristic ideas on theology and social questions, they justly felt that they were preaching a new and prophetic gospel in the midst of a Babylon of competitive selfishness. The trend of things is strikingly brought out by the contrast between their lonely position in the revolutionary year of 1848 and the Anglican Congress of 1908, where Christian Socialism was in possession of the platform and only Lord Cecil made a stand against it. It is significant that, so far as the social gospel is concerned, the High Church section has become Broad, and some of its intellectual leaders are weaving solidaristic ideas into their most sacramental and ecclesiastical doctrines. At the same time the Free Church leaders have worked their way out of individualistic Evangelicalism, and are freely applying their heritage of democratic faith to the social problems. Of course I am not now discussing the popular propaganda of social Christianity, nor the growth of organizations for its practical application, but simply the reaction of the social gospel on doctrinal theology. In our country,

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The safety of commerce and the ease of travel and transportation did for the Empire what steam transportation did for the nineteenth century. The mass of slaves secured by the wars of conquest, and organized for production in the factories and on the great estates, furnished that increase in cheap productive force which the invention of steam machinery and the division and organization of labor furnished to the modern world. No new civilization was created by these improved conditions; but the forces latent in existing civilization were stimulated and set free, and their application resulted in a rapid efflorescence of the economic and intellectual life. Just as the nations about the Seven Seas are drawing together to-day and are sharing their spiritual possessions in a common civilization, so the Empire broke down the barriers of the nations about the Mediterranean, gathered them in a certain unity of life, and poured their capacities and thoughts into a common fund. The result was a breakdown of the old faiths and a wonderful fertilization of intellectual life. Wealth—to use a homely illustration—is to a nation what manure is to a farm. If the farmer spreads it evenly over the soil, it will enrich the whole. If he should leave it in heaps, the land would be impoverished and under the rich heaps the vegetation would be killed. The new wealth created in the Roman Empire was not justly distributed, but fell a prey to a minority who were in a position to seize it. A new money aristocracy arose which financed the commercial undertakings and shouldered the old aristocratic families aside, just as the feudal aristocracies were superseded in consequence of the modern industrial revolution. A few gained immense wealth, while below them was a mass of slaves and free proletarians. The independent middle class disappeared. The cities grew abnormally at the expense of the country and its sturdy population. Great fortunes were made and yet there was constant distress and frequent hard times. The poor had no rights in the means of production, so they used the political power still remaining to them to secure state grants of land, money, grain, and pleasures. There was widespread reluctance to marry and to rear children. Education became common, and yet culture declined. There were plenty of universities, great libraries, well-paid professors, and yet a growing coarseness of taste and a decline in creative artistic and literary ability. If the yellow newspaper could have been printed, it would have “filled a long-felt want.” The social conditions involved a readjustment of political power.

• From Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  At the same time he often served as pastor, preacher, and retreat leader for many of the increasing number of white men and women who sought some source of alliance with the fermenting Black forces. Crucial to the sense of change that marked the African-American community by the end of the 1940s was its acute awareness of the rising tide of anticolonial struggles that was shaking the foundations of white, Western world hegemony in places such as Africa, India, and Asia. Thurman was a part of all that, and the “Disinherited” of his title was also meant to encompass the colonized peoples beyond these shores. (Indeed, shortly after “Good News for the Underprivileged” was published, Thurman and his gifted soul mate, wife, and coworker, Sue Bailey Thurman, were visiting with Gandhi in India, seeking to learn from the Mahatma’s experiences in spiritually based social struggle and responding to his well-informed questions about the African-American situation.) When Jesus and the Disinherited appeared the Thurmans had already left Howard University, and Howard Thurman was serving as pastor of the nation’s first intentionally interracial congregation, the Church for the Fellowship of All People in San Francisco. By that time Thurman had developed an approach to (or better, a relationship with) Jesus of Nazareth that took him beyond the central orthodoxies of American Christianity and, more importantly, was opening the way toward a liberating spirituality that made great demands on what he called the “inward center,” the heart and soul of the dispossessed. For the spirituality that emerged and focused itself in Jesus and the Disinherited carried an insistent message that life under oppression provided no excuses for avoiding a path of courageous, creative integrity. As a matter of fact, while Thurman wrote with great compassion about the difficulties faced by the marginalized peoples whose lives are constantly besieged by the threatening, destructive power of the dominating forces, still this deeply loving and caring pastor of the dispossessed would not back away from the demands of a life of integrity, a life that refuses to give into “fear, hypocrisy and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited.” For he recognized—and he believed Jesus recognized—that no external force, however great and overwhelming, can at long last destroy a people if it does not first win the victory of the spirit against them.” In the light of that perspective it was not surprising that Thurman summarized the essential message of Jesus for the disinherited in these words: “You must abandon your fear of each other and fear only God. You must not indulge in any deception and dishonesty, even to save your lives. Your words must be Yea-Nea; anything else is evil. Hatred is destructive to hated and hater alike.

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The prophets were the heralds of the fundamental truth that religion and ethics are inseparable, and that ethical conduct is the supreme and sufficient religious act. If that principle had been fully adopted in our religious life, it would have turned the full force of the religious impulse into the creation of right moral conduct and would have made the unchecked growth and accumulation of injustice impossible. This assertion can be verified by history. The Calvinistic Reformation stripped off a large part of the traditional ceremonial of the Church and it turned religious energy into political and intellectual channels. As a consequence the Calvinistic peoples at once leaped forward in the direction of democracy and education, and received such an increment of social efficiency that in spite of terrible handicaps they outstripped the stronger nations which failed to make this fuller connection between religion and social morality. Public and not private morality It is important to note, further, that the morality which the prophets had in mind in their strenuous insistence on righteousness was not merely the private morality of the home, but the public morality on which national life is founded. They said less about the pure heart for the individual than of just institutions for the nation. We are accustomed to connect piety with the thought of private virtues; the pious man is the quiet, temperate, sober, kindly man. The evils against which we contend in the churches are intemperance, unchastity, the sins of the tongue. The twin-evil against which the prophets launched the condemnation of Jehovah was injustice and oppression. The religious ideal of Israel was the theocracy. But the theocracy meant the complete penetration of the national life by religious morality. It meant politics in the name of God. That line by which we have tacitly separated the domain of public affairs and the domain of Christian life was unknown to them. The prophets were not religious individualists. During the classical times of prophetism they always dealt with Israel and Judah as organic totalities. They conceived of their people as a gigantic personality which sinned as one and ought to repent as one. When they speak of their nation as a virgin, as a city, as a vine, they are attempting by these figures of speech to express this organic and corporate social life. In this respect they anticipated a modern conception which now underlies our scientific comprehension of social development and on which modern historical studies are based. We shall see that it was only when the national life of Israel was crushed by foreign invaders that the prophets began to address themselves to the individual life and lost the large horizon of public life.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  Okay, I get it, she is marrying the most powerful man in the world, but what man doesn’t want to feel like he is the man you look up to, adore, and respect. What man doesn’t want to be his wife’s lover. She thinks so highly of him she is turned on just thinking about him—right? I mean she says, when he lies down beside her, her fragrance fills the room—she is saying, she is wet with arousal—just saying. Remember the brain is the female’s most important sex organ. Whatever you are saying to yourself about this man of yours will translate directly into how you feel sexually about him and yourself. When he lays his head between her breasts, she just breathes him in and recalls the beautiful love they make together. She isn’t focusing on how he leaves his dirty clothes on the floor or the bodily noises he seems to enjoy making. No, she focuses on how he makes her body feel and the amazing things he does to her. It’s a sensual feast. She engages her sense of smell and taste, and what she hears and sees, which ignites her sexually. And men, this is one smart lover in that he talks to her. He tells her how beautiful she is. He says things like, “You remind me of Pharaoh’s well-groomed and satiny mares. Pendant earrings line the elegance of your checks, strands of jewels illumine the curve of your throat. I’m making jewelry for you, gold and silver jewelry that will mark and accent your beauty” (Song of Sol. 1:9–11). This man pays attention; he notices. Have you stood and admired a field of beautiful, satiny mares recently? If you haven’t you should. The muscles, the intricate details of a well-groomed horse, are beyond beautiful—it’s majestic. My dad raised thoroughbred race horses, and they have the most beautiful legs created. I think Solomon was taking time to notice his woman. He even noticed her earrings and decided to make her more pairs to accent her beautiful cheeks. Guys, stop at Anthropologie and get the woman a pair of earrings. It goes a long way when she has been home all day wiping your darling children’s bottoms and sweeping the cheerios off the floor for the fifth time in one day. Seriously, you absolutely cannot take her for granted and think she is going to want to make love to you. You have to make love to her heart first, and then she will happily open up and make love to your body.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The Teaching of JesusSince Jesus left no writings himself, we hear his Aramaic voice through a Greek filter in texts written sixty to a hundred years after his execution sometime around 30 CE. Given such distancing, it is surprising how much a recognizable and charismatic individual emerges from the Gospels: preaching an urgent message in punchy phrases that resound with confident authority but are also full of comedy and irony. His discourses sparkle with stories that subvert normal expectations – sometimes puzzling the listeners, including the Evangelists who recorded them. Around him he gathered many disciples, messengers and admiring companions, but at the centre of them were the Twelve, a number signifying the long-dispersed Twelve Tribes of Israel: Twelveness was a sign that the tragic past and broken present were to be made perfect. All of this pounded home the proclamation of an imminent end to all things in ‘the Kingdom of God’, which would be very unlike the kingdoms and empires of the world around Judaea.[22] Jesus came to his own decisions within his own understanding and practice of Judaism on how his followers should behave, and he struck out in directions which, as one might expect from someone from an unconventional background, were frequently distinctive, deliberately divisive and countercultural. Should Christians, then, take that pious modern American bumper-sticker ‘What would Jesus do?’ as a touchstone for discussing such matters as marriage? The problem about the bumper-sticker is that the sayings of Jesus on marriage and the family (or indeed on anything else) are a series of occasional illuminations that over the four Gospels and the other New Testament books light up like fireworks, and often as startlingly. Jesus can be disconcerting, as in his careful interest in classifying eunuchs (Matt. 19.12): ‘there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.’ The other Gospel writers, who do not record this thought, may have found it unhelpful; though not much discussed in modern Christian focuses on the family, it has in the past been of great interest to Christians for a variety of reasons (below, Chapter 8), and it may prove to be so again in an era of gender fluidity. Family values are far from being Jesus’s main concern. In one saying echoed from Mark’s Gospel by Matthew and Luke, he speaks of the extravagant reward for those who have left home and family for the sake of what is variously described as the kingdom of God, the Gospel, or Jesus himself.[23]

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  A fascination with both the Roman imperial heritage around him and its local saintly champion tilted Clovis’s Christian beliefs towards the faith of his wife and of the Bishop of Rome. Later popes have been duly grateful ever since; Francia under the ‘Merovingian’ dynasty of Clovis set patterns in reshaping Western Christian monarchy into a Catholic mould, from the Mediterranean to Europe’s furthest north. Until then, Germanic and surviving Roman cultures had uneasily coexisted side by side in much of the former Western Empire, Catholic Christians acknowledging the dominance of their Germanic masters rather as Eastern Christians acquiesced in the Caliphate.[4] When Western Roman imperial institutions had collapsed, what was left of its administrative and social functions was in the hands of the Catholic Church. That included the conservation of the Classical literary and philosophical heritage, which from the mid-sixth century survived in a perilously fragile condition: survival was a matter of copying and recopying perishable manuscripts, and alarmingly few manuscripts can be dated as the work of copyists over the next two hundred years. The surviving literature was largely in the care of monks and nuns. Thanks to Jerome’s rhetorical sleight of hand in adding scholarship to the rigours of monastic life (above, Chapter 8), enough monastic libraries and readers remained to carry forward what portions of Classical knowledge they cared to preserve, when the libraries of villas, towns and schools crumbled into dust. Fortunately for Western civilization, the next half-millennium revealed the vigour of its monastic life. Much came eventually to be structured by the Rule devised in the sixth century for Italian monasteries, the work of Benedict of Nursia and monastic predecessors going back to the much-travelled Easterner John Cassian a century earlier. Benedict’s Rule itself might be contained on a single skin of parchment, and its brevity was the key to its eventual success, because it could be creatively developed, particularly when its commands to ‘labour and pray’ extended to embrace a monastic vocation to study and preserve past wisdom. Central to any development of the Rule remained the principle of an autonomous community established in one place, in obedience to its abbot, part of a constellation of similar communities wherever they might be set up. Yet its adoption was a protracted process: for some centuries to come, Western monasticism was marked by its variety in societies embracing a Christian Catholic identity.[5]

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  When in the seventh and eighth centuries Irish monks launched missions within and beyond the boundaries of Latin Christianity in mainland Europe, they continued to practise individual confession based on tariff books. So did missionaries from the Anglo-Saxon Church, which enthusiastically took over the custom from the Celts – interestingly, on the initiative of the Archbishop of Canterbury who came from the eastern Mediterranean, Theodore of Tarsus. By contrast, bishops in Francia put up some initial resistance to this innovation, notably in the hostile comments of a major episcopal Synod at Chalon-sur-Saône in 813 – ‘the errors are obvious, the authors undetermined’, the Council observed sniffily about Irish penitentials.[17] Itinerant missionaries of any sort, not merely Irish missionaries, did arouse suspicion in the hierarchy of mainstream Latin Christianity, which had already consciously set its face against wandering monks. Nevertheless, this was a temporary setback, no doubt overcome by the deep impression made by the missionaries in their determination to spread their version of the Christian faith; it was a notable act of self-sacrifice for Irish monks to have left their own society and its all-embracing network of kinship support to venture into an unfamiliar world across the seas.[18] The harsh words of the Synod of Chalon about tariff books were actually part of a growing movement of the Frankish bishops to take control of the system and produce a more uniform version of it. As a result, a system of individual penance became a feature of the whole Western Church, and then beyond into Orthodoxy. The penances laid down in the penitentials centred typically on rigorous fasting for set periods, but also common were repeated recitation of sets of psalms (maybe even having to sing them, more daunting for some than others), and a variety of extravagant ways of keeping still for set periods, such as lying in a grave with a corpse. Punishment might overlap with traditional pre-Christian law systems, so it could include flogging or almsgiving or compensation to an injured party; a sentence to travel as an exile as punishment might now be given a Christian focus as a pilgrimage to a suitably cleansing holy place. Self-evidently such penitential results of confession were unlikely to be secret even if the initial formal conversation was in private. They directed the penitent’s spiritual rehabilitation back into the whole community, lay or monastic.

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

  [69] Again, those who rule others well are more worthy of praise than those who act well under others’ direction. This applies to the field of all arts and sciences. In the speculative sciences, for instance, it is nobler to impart truth to others by teaching than to be able to grasp what is taught by others. So, too, in matters of the crafts, an architect who plans a building is more highly esteemed and paid a higher wage than is the builder who does the manual labour under his direction; also, in warfare the strategy of the general wins greater glory from victory than the bravery of the soldier. Now the ruler of a multitude stands in the same relation to the virtuous deeds performed by each individual as the teacher to the matters taught the architect to the buildings, and the general to the wars. Consequently, the king is worthy of a greater reward if he governs his subjects well than any of his subjects who act well under him. [70] Further, if it is the part of virtue to render a man’s work good, it is, it seems, from greater virtue that one does greater good. But the good of the multitude is greater and more divine than the good of one man. Wherefore the evil of one man is sometimes endured if it redounds to the good of the multitude, as when a robber is killed to bring peace to the multitude. God Himself would not allow evils to be in the world were it not for the fact that He brings good out of them for the advantage and beauty of the universe. Now it belongs to the office of the king to have zealous concern for the good of the multitude. Therefore a greater reward is due to the king for good ruling than to the subject for acting according to rule. [71] This will become clearer if considered in greater detail. For a private person is praised by men, and his deed reckoned for reward by God, if he helps the needy, brings peace to those in discord, rescues one oppressed by a mightier; in a word, if in any way he gives to another assistance or advice for his welfare How much the more, then, is he to be praised by men and rewarded by God who makes a whole province rejoice in peace, who restrains violence, preserves justice and arranges by his laws and precepts what is to be done by men?

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  In fact, this quotation, which is used to tell of the greatness of Moses, is proof of the unique position which the Jews assigned to him. ‘Moses was faithful in all his house.’ The quotation is from Numbers 12:7. Now, the point of the argument in Numbers is that Moses differs from all the prophets. To them, God makes himself known in a vision; to Moses, he speaks ‘mouth to mouth’. To the Jews, it would have been impossible to conceive that anyone ever stood closer to God than Moses did, and yet that is precisely what the writer of the Hebrews sets out to prove. He tells his hearers to fix their attention on Jesus. The word he uses (katanoein) is significant and full of meaning. It does not mean simply to look at or to notice a thing. Anyone can look at a thing or even notice it without really seeing it. The word means to fix the attention on something in such a way that its inner meaning, the lesson that it is designed to teach, may be learned. In Luke 12:24, Jesus uses the same word when he says: ‘Consider the ravens.’ He does not merely mean: ‘Look at the ravens.’ He means: ‘Look at the ravens and understand and learn the lesson that God is seeking to teach you through them.’ If we are ever to learn Christian truth, a detached glance is never enough; there must be a concentrated gaze in which we focus the mind in a determined effort to see its meaning for us. In a sense, the reason for that is implicit when the writer addresses his friends as sharers in heaven’s calling. The call that comes to Christians has a double direction. It is a calling from heaven and it is a calling to heaven. It is a voice which comes from God and calls us to God. It is a call which demands concentrated attention because of both its origin and its destination. No one can afford merely to glance without interest at an invitation to God from God. When we fix our attention on Jesus, what do we see? We see two things. (1) We see the great apostle. No one else in the New Testament ever calls Jesus an apostle. That the writer to the Hebrews does so deliberately is quite clear, because apostle is a title he never gives to any individual. He keeps it for Christ. What does he mean when he uses it in this way? The word apostolos literally means one who is sent forth. In Jewish terminology, it was used to describe the envoys of the Sanhedrin, the supreme court of the Jews. The Sanhedrin sent out apostoloi who were clothed with its authority and the bearers of its commands. In the Greek world, it frequently meant ambassador. So, Jesus is the supreme ambassador of God – and ambassadors have two supremely important and relevant characteristics.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Ernest was glad too that he had supported and complimented Halston rather than voicing any doubts about the authenticity of the dramatic recall of the Artemis evening. Ernest wasn’t sure how to evaluate what he had just heard. He knew, of course, of sudden returns of repressed memories, but he had had little personal experience with such phenomena in his clinical work. Though relatively common in post-traumatic stress disorder, to say nothing of Hollywood portrayals of therapy, it was rare in Ernest’s quotidian psychotherapy. But all of Ernest’s self-congratulatory impulses passed quickly, as did all of his benevolent thoughts about Halston. What really captured his attention was Artemis. The more he thought about it, the more horrified he was by Halston’s behavior toward her. What kind of monster would make love, fantastic love, to a woman and then abandon her with no explanation, no note, no phone call? It was beyond belief. Ernest’s heart went out to Artemis. He knew exactly how she must have felt. Once, fifteen years ago, he had arranged a weekend rendezvous with Judy, an old girlfriend, at a New York hotel. They had spent a lovely night together, or so Ernest believed. In the morning he had left for a brief appointment and returned with a huge, grateful bouquet of flowers. But no Judy. She had left without a trace. Packed her bags and absconded—no note, and no response to his later phone calls or letters. No explanation, ever. He had been devastated. Psychotherapy had never entirely erased his pain, and even now, all these years later, the memory still stung. Above all, Ernest hated not knowing. Poor Artemis: she had given so much to Halston, taken such risks, and in the end been so shabbily treated. Over the next few days Ernest thought occasionally about Halston but dwelled often upon Artemis. In his fantasy she became a goddess—beautiful, giving, nurturing but badly wounded. Artemis was a woman to revere, honor, treasure: the idea of debasing such a woman seemed hardly human to him. How tormented she must be by not knowing what had happened! How many times must she have relived that night, trying to understand what she had said, what she had done, to drive Halston away. And Ernest knew he was in a privileged position to help her. Aside from Halston, I am, he thought, the only one who knows the truth of that night. Ernest had often been awash in grandiose fantasies of rescuing distressed damsels. He knew that about himself. How could he not know? Again and again his analyst, Olive Smith, and his supervisor, Marshal Strider, had rubbed his nose in it. Rescue fantasies played a role both in his personal relationships, where he often overlooked warning signals of obvious incompatibility, and in his psychotherapy, where his countertransference sometimes ran wild and he became overinvested in curing his female patients.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  And one can argue that the emphasis on production of Renaissance magi like Dee and Paracelsus helped lay the groundwork for the Baconian revolut ion. 3 Here again, we have what looks like a· preparation for the new within the bounds of the old. The new understanding of the place of human productive power within the cosmic order prepares the subversion and utter rejection of this whole conception of cosmic order. And of course currents well beyond the boundaries of philosophy and science helped prepare the modern identity. The new importance of human poietic powers is reflected and foreshadowed in the great prestige of the visual and plastic arts in the Italian Renaissance, something which had no precedent among the ancients . This is the way we look at it today, but it is also the way people looked at it at the time. The writings of Vasari and Alberti, for instance, give expression to their sense that their age is remarkable for the great discoveries (partly rediscoveries) it has made in the visual arts. Ind eed, the rediscovery of nature, in which the Italian Renaissance believed itself to have rejoined the ancients in spirit, after the "middle ages" inaugurated by barbarian destructio n, was realized as much- indee d, perhaps pre- Digression on Historical Explanation · 2.01 eminentl y-i n visual art as in literature. And when Florentine neo-Pl atoni sm begins to becom e the dominant view, it is quite understandable that some artists begin to see their work within its framewo rk: visual art has a vocation to mak e the Ideas manifest. This notion Plato would have found incomp re hensible and repelle nt: making Ideas manif est is for dialectic alone. Mich aelangelo is deeply im bued with the neo-Platonic idea th at earthly beauty is the mor tal veil through which we see divine grace. The artist, both writer and painter/sculpt or, makes this hidden reality shine through the veil. Leonardo is looking for "reasons " in nature: "Nature is full of an infinity of reasons which have never been in experienc e". 4 Later in the century, the claim was made that the activity of forming things in art brings us to a "perfect knowledge of the intell igible obj ects" .5 And the classical revival of the Italian sevente enth century, according to Panofsky, make s an appeal again to a neo- Platoni c visio n in order to define the true nature of art against both ma nnerist and natu ralist deviations. 6 But Rena issance visual art can be seen as preparing the emergence of the modern identity in a more direct way than merely by enhan cing the import ance of the poietic. The Renaissance aspiration to imitate nature leads to a more realistic and full portraiture, to free-standing scu lpture no longer "consubstan tial " with its architectural context.

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

  [77] First of all, among all worldly things there is nothing which seems worthy to be preferred to friendship. Friendship unites good men and preserves and promotes virtue. Friendship is needed by all men in whatsoever occupations they engage. In prosperity it does not thrust itself unwanted upon us, nor does it desert us in adversity. It is what brings with it the greatest delight, to such an extent that all that pleases is changed to weariness when friends are absent, and all difficult things are made easy and as nothing by love. There is no tyrant so cruel that friendship does not bring him pleasure. When Dionysius, sometime tyrant of Syracuse, wanted to kill one of two friends, Damon and Pythias, the one who was to be killed asked leave to go home and set his affairs in order, and the other friend surrendered himself to the tyrant as security for his return. When the appointed day was approaching and he had not yet returned, everyone said that his hostage was a fool, but he declared he had no fear whatever regarding his friend’s loyalty. The very hour when he was to be put to death, his friend returned. Admiring the courage of both, the tyrant remitted the sentence on account of the loyalty of their friendship, and asked in addition that they should receive him as a third member in their bond of friendship. [Cf. Valerius Maximus IV, 7, Ext. 1; Vincent of Beauvais, Specul. Doctrinale V, 84.] [78] Yet, although tyrants desire this very benefit of friendship, they cannot obtain it, for when they seek their own good instead of the common good there is little or no communion between them and their subjects. Now all friendship is concluded upon the basis of something common among those who are to be friends, for we see that those are united in friendship who have in common either their natural origin, or some similarity in habits of life, or any kind of social interests. Consequently there can be little or no friendship between tyrants and their subjects. When the latter are oppressed by tyrannical injustice and feel they are not loved but despised, they certainly do not conceive any love, for it is too great a virtue for the common man to love his enemies and to do good to his persecutors. Nor have tyrants any reason to complain of their subjects if they are not loved by them, since they do not act towards them in such a way that they ought to be loved by them. Good kings, on the contrary, are loved by many when they show that they love their subjects and are studiously intent on the common welfare, and when their subjects can see that they derive many benefits from this zealous care. For to hate their friends and return evil for good to their benefactors—this, surely, would be too great a malice to ascribe fittingly to the generality of men.

• From Quiet (2012)

  But the introvert pairs tended to focus on one or two serious subjects of conversation, while the extrovert pairs chose lighter-hearted and wider-ranging topics. Often the introverts discussed problems or conflicts in their lives: school, work, friendships, and so on. Perhaps because of this fondness for “problem talk,” they tended to adopt the role of adviser, taking turns counseling each other on the problem at hand. The extroverts, by contrast, were more likely to offer casual information about themselves that established commonality with the other person: You have a new dog? That’s great. A friend of mine has an amazing tank of saltwater fish! But the most interesting part of Thorne’s experiment was how much the two types appreciated each other. Introverts talking to extroverts chose cheerier topics, reported making conversation more easily, and described conversing with extroverts as a “breath of fresh air.” In contrast, the extroverts felt that they could relax more with introvert partners and were freer to confide their problems. They didn’t feel pressure to be falsely upbeat. These are useful pieces of social information. Introverts and extroverts sometimes feel mutually put off, but Thorne’s research suggests how much each has to offer the other. Extroverts need to know that introverts—who often seem to disdain the superficial—may be only too happy to be tugged along to a more lighthearted place; and introverts, who sometimes feel as if their propensity for problem talk makes them a drag, should know that they make it safe for others to get serious. Thorne’s research also helps us to understand Jon Berghoff’s astonishing success at sales. He has turned his affinity for serious conversation, and for adopting an advisory role rather than a persuasive one, into a kind of therapy for his prospects. “I discovered early on that people don’t buy from me because they understand what I’m selling,” explains Jon. “They buy because they feel understood.” Jon also benefits from his natural tendency to ask a lot of questions and to listen closely to the answers. “I got to the point where I could walk into someone’s house and instead of trying to sell them some knives, I’d ask a hundred questions in a row. I could manage the entire conversation just by asking the right questions.” Today, in his coaching business, Jon does the same thing. “I try to tune in to the radio station of the person I’m working with. I pay attention to the energy they exude. It’s easy for me to do that because I’m in my head a lot, anyways.” But doesn’t salesmanship require the ability to get excited, to pump people up? Not according to Jon. “A lot of people believe that selling requires being a fast talker, or knowing how to use charisma to persuade. Those things do require an extroverted way of communicating. But in sales there’s a truism that ‘we have two ears and one mouth and we should use them proportionately.’

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  In the Eastern Churches, there was a completely different trajectory on these matters, both in the Churches that accepted the Chalcedonian compromise of 451 (above, Chapter 8) and those that did not. One striking symptom of the difference was the prolonged survival of a functioning diaconate for women, complete with rites of ordination in a similar fashion to male clergy. This puzzled, and indeed disconcerted, Western Catholic scholars when, in the late seventeenth century, the study of manuscripts revealed these diaconal ordinations. The standard way of writing off the phenomenon was to confuse these female deacons with the Western Latin usage of diaconissa for the wife of a deacon. That ignored the evidence of the ordination rite and the abundant reality of their liturgical presence in the Byzantine Church until at least the ninth century.[49] One outstanding and much-celebrated fourth-century example was Olympias of Constantinople, who turned her lavish palace adjacent to the church of Hagia Sophia into a centre of charity and female community; her charitable energy (not to mention her exceptional wealth and property portfolio) led the Patriarch Nectarios to bend the rules and ordain her deacon at the age of thirty, thirty years before the normal accepted age. The leading theologian Gregory of Nyssa indeed dedicated a biblical commentary to her, significantly on the Song of Songs.[50] The Eastern Churches in general also came to a different solution to the West in the disputes over whether clergy should marry. They took their cue from an imperial novella (law) of the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century forbidding the consecration of married men with children to the episcopate, though he said that married men without children could be eligible if they separated from their wives. This provision was repeated more than a century later by a general Council of 691–92 (having met in the Trullum, a domed hall in the imperial palace, it is generally called the Council In Trullo). Its main purpose was to gather together for the first time a general code of discipline for the Orthodox Church, so its legislation was much repeated.[51]

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Nevertheless, the Qur’an maintains a resounding and surely deliberate silence on the subject of Paul, who would have been a familiar figure to Muhammad through his lifelong contacts with Christians and their literature. That contrasts with the singular honour that the Qur’an gives to Mary the mother of Jesus. Her role in it is a point of contact with the special place that by the seventh century she held in Christian devotion; in fact, she appears in the Qur’anic text more frequently and with more intense contemplation of her significance than she does in the New Testament, and an entire sūrah (chapter) of it takes her name, the only sūrah to bear the name of a woman.[4] It is one of the Qur’an’s curious features that it never refers to any other woman by a personal name, but amid its portrayals of women in sacred history, from Adam’s spouse through Mary up to Muhammad’s own time, the text frequently celebrates their resourcefulness and spiritual excellence, and it depicts God intervening in circumstances where women are oppressed or at risk. In his pioneering analysis of attitudes to sex across the great world faiths, Vern Bullough was prepared to classify Islam as a ‘sex-positive religion’, unlike the Judaeo-Christian tradition or the ascetic tradition in Greek philosophy on which Christianity had drawn. Muhammad ‘regarded sex as a good rather than an evil aspect of life’, for both men and women, and indeed marriage was the highest good, including the traditional Arabian institution of polygyny.[5] In symmetry with this, the Qur’an is not positive towards the ascetic celibacy that we have seen become so central to Christianity; it veers between denouncing monks as greedy charlatans and admiring the piety of some Christian ascetics, so accordingly the relationship of Muslims with celibate communities remained uncomfortable and untidy.[6] Besides that ambivalence, over centuries Islam allowed considerable cultural space for same-sex relations both male and female, via a generously creative perspective on the Qur’an’s criticisms of same-sex activity, which are in any case a good deal more tepid than the denunciations to be found in Hebrew Scripture or New Testament. It is important not to allow the accidents of modern history to obscure those historical characteristics of the Muslim world. The loudest current noise in Islam comes from its Wahhabist or Salafist variant, a revivalist movement created in eighteenth-century Arabia. That is no more representative of Islamic tradition than it would be to consider Christianity as solely embodied in contemporary American Southern Baptists: a Christian variant that likewise happens ultimately to be a product of eighteenth-century revival.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  It can never be too often emphasized that through most of recorded Christian history, and in the societies that preceded Christianity, marriage was a contract between two men: the fathers of the bride and groom respectively. Paul of Tarsus introduced a Christian complication into this by speaking in one of his letters to the Corinthians of the mutuality and sexual equality of a couple in marriage: that emphasis has continued to thrust itself into subsequent Christian discussions of marriage, though as a result it has frequently been written out of the theological picture. Here medieval Western canon lawyers deserve salutation for their efforts to ensure that at least the Western Church remembered what Paul had said (above, Chapter 13). My observation of the discussion of sexual morality during six decades of ecclesiastical life and politics has been that self-styled traditionalists rarely know enough about the tradition that they proclaim; conservatives do not fully admit to themselves or to others what it is they are trying to conserve, and why they are trying to conserve it. It is important when demolishing myths from the past not to create new ones to justify the present. That was the quixotic aim of John Boswell, a creative and original historian who nevertheless suggested that his work revealed a past where the Church tolerated gay people and indeed created a liturgy of gay marriage. It was largely illusory, and later historians have seen the need gently to correct him (above, Chapter 8). The work of Michel Foucault was equally misleading, shot through with monocausal explanation of social and ideological change through repression, regulation and definition, plus an excessive francophone preoccupation with Catholic sacramental confession. Foucault gave minimal credit to the obstinate ability of human beings to think for themselves, to struggle towards what they want in unpromising circumstances, and on occasion to succeed; that potential has been one of the recurrent themes of this book. It was likewise a natural impulse to find a history to accompany the new roles for women that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the resulting body of pseudo-history has not stood up to scholarly investigation. Some late Victorian folklore enthusiasts, and then the archaeologist moonlighting as an anthropologist, Margaret Murray, spoke of a barely Christianized medieval Europe, in which pre-Christian religion lived on in full force as witchcraft. Romantic ideas of an ancient surviving religion of ‘the Great Goddess’ and the like leached into popular and still enjoyable literature for adults and children. As recently as the 1940s the corpus was enriched by the creation of an entire new religion of witchcraft in the romantic English imaginations of Gerald Gardner and his wife Donna. Virtually all the historical evidence for witchcraft cults or Wicca has been courteously dismantled: the chief demolition expert, Ronald Hutton, reminds us to distinguish between ‘surviving paganism’ and ‘a pagan survival’, such as the English custom of lighting bonfires at Midsummer.[1]

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

  even if the link is not made explicit. The mention of Ahikar also links Tobit to the world of Near Eastern folklore. Ahikar was a legendary wise man at the Assyrian court. His story, which included a collection of proverbs, circulated in several languages. An Aramaic version was preserved by the Jewish community in Elephantine in southern Egypt in the fifth century B.C.E. All these folkloric elements are woven together by a master storyteller with a good sense of humor. What other Israelite hero is undone by bird droppings? One of the delightful touches of the story is the role of the dog, which is quite unnecessary for the plot but adds a dimension of realism. Unlike the story of Esther, Tobit is not lacking in explicit piety. The protagonists miss no opportunity to praise the God of heaven. The piety, however, involves a strange mix of elements. On the one hand, Tobit gives a rare glimpse of popular Jewish piety in the Second Temple period. This involved a lively faith in angels and demons and in cures that we would regard as superstitious, or even magical. There is great appreciation of spontaneous virtue and common humanity. The piety of burying the dead has a pivotal role in the Greek tragedy Antigone. Almsgiving and care for the poor are widespread, if not universal, human values. On the other hand, there are repeated references to the law of Moses, strictly interpreted in the Deuteronomic tradition. Tobit refuses to eat Gentile food and insists that his son not marry a Gentile. He also deplores the “sin of Jeroboam,” who rebelled against the house of David (Tob 1:4-5), and claims to have worshiped in Jerusalem when he lived in the land of Israel. His final testament at the end, about the coming desolation and restoration of Jerusalem, also has a distinctly Deuteronomic ring to it. It seems likely then that a popular folktale was reworked by an author who was deeply committed to the law of Moses. It is remarkable, however, that the folkloric, and even magical, elements in the story were allowed to stand. Tobit’s indebtedness to the Torah is not confined to legal issues. The journey of Tobias in quest of a wife from his own people recalls the stories of Isaac and Jacob in Genesis. The prayer of Tobias on his wedding night draws explicitly on Genesis: “You said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; let us make a helper for him like himself’ ” (Tob 8:6). This is one of the earliest citations of

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  which she experiences in church during the Sunday services through ecstatic vision in the Spirit.’ Tertullian’s case gives us a precious, in some ways unique, glimpse into the workings of the early Church. Here was a great Church statesman, a man of impeccable rectitude and burning faith, embracing heresy. His adherence thus completely undermines the orthodox attacks on the morals and public behaviour of the Montanists, sets a stamp of ethical approval, at any rate, on the movement. The Montanists were evidently sincere, holy and probably humble and abstemious people. But that we know this is due to accident, or rather to the conscious decision of orthodox authority to preserve Tertullian as a personality and a theological writer. Normally he would have been allowed to sink into oblivion, or have survived as a caricatured fragment. But he was not only the first, but one of the most outstanding Latin theologians; the bulk of his work constitutes a tremendous affirmation of the Christian faith. It was exciting to read then, as indeed it still is now. Tertullian was too precious to be sacrificed to orthodox uniformity. Though the first Protestant, he was saved by his art. The Church continued to reproduce and use his works, or the bulk of them, and thus, incidentally, confirms the good faith of the Montanists. As a rule, however, those who disputed with what later became, or already was, the orthodox tradition, have been buried under a mountain of ecclesiastical Billingsgate. Odium theologicum was not a Christian innovation. It was part of the Judaic heritage, along with the concept of heresy and the anathema. As we have seen, the bland, eirenic tone of the Acts, picturing the early Church as a collegiate body of fair- minded senators, moving peaceably to collective decisions, belies the reality we find in Paul. Harsh words among the brothers in Christ made their appearance early and thereafter there was a steady inflation in the exchange of abuse. In the second century, discussion with heretics yielded to polemic and the magnitude of the orthodox accusations and the scurrility of the abuse, usually corresponded to the success of the movement. With the growth of polemic, it became necessary to attack the morals as well as the doctrine of the divergent. In fact the theory soon developed that doctrinal error inevitably induced moral decay. Thus orthodox polemicists could invent and believe accusations in good faith. Montanist officials were accused of gluttony and avarice simply because they received salaries. The orthodox Apollonius accused Alexander, whom he called a heretic, of highway robbery; he held disgusting feasts with the prophetess Priscella, and she was covetous. The indictment continues: ‘Does