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 History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Archbishop Cranmer invited Bullinger, together with Melanchthon, Calvin, and Bucer, to a conference in London, for the purpose of framing an evangelical union creed; and Calvin answered that for such a cause he would be willing to cross ten seas. Lady Jane Grey, who was beheaded in 1554, read Bullinger’s works, translated his book on marriage into Greek, consulted him about Hebrew, and addressed him with filial affection and gratitude. Her three letters to him are still preserved in Zürich. Bishop Hooper of Gloucester, who had enjoyed his hospitality in 1547, addressed him shortly before his martyrdom in 1554, as his "revered father and guide," and the best friend he ever had, and recommended his wife and two children to his care. Bishop Jewel, in a letter of May 22, 1559, calls him his "father and much esteemed master in Christ," thanks him for his "courtesy and kindness," which he and his friends experienced during the whole period of their exile, and informs him that the restoration of the Reformed religion under Elizabeth was largely due to his own "letters and recommendations;" adding that the queen refused to be addressed as the head of the Church of England, feeling that such honor belongs to Christ alone, and not to any human being. Bullinger’s death was lamented in England as a public calamity.310 Bullinger faithfully maintained the doctrine and discipline of the Reformed Church against the Roman Catholics and Lutherans with moderation and dignity. He never returned the abuse of fanatics, and when, in 1548, the Interim drove the Lutheran preachers from the Swabian cities, he received them hospitably, even those who had denounced the Reformed doctrines from the pulpit. He represents the German-Swiss type of the Reformed faith in substantial agreement with a moderate Calvinism. He gave a full exposition of his theological views in the Second Helvetic Confession. His theory of the sacrament was higher than that of Zwingli. He laid more stress on the objective value of the institution. We recognize, he wrote to Faber, a mystery in the Lord’s Supper; the bread is not common bread, but venerable, sacred, sacramental bread, the pledge of the spiritual real presence of Christ to those who believe. As the sun is in heaven, and yet virtually present on earth with his light and heat, so Christ sits in heaven, and yet efficaciously works in the hearts of all believers. When Luther, after Zwingli’s death, warned Duke Albert of Prussia and the people of Frankfort not to tolerate the Zwinglians, Bullinger replied by sending to the duke a translation of Ratramnus’ tract, De corpore et sanguine Domini, with a preface. He rejected the Wittenberg Concordia of 1536, because it concealed the Lutheran doctrine. He answered Luther’s atrocious attack on the Zwinglians (1545) by a clear, strong, and temperate statement; but Luther died soon afterwards (1546) without retracting his charges.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Nor did the ante-Nicene fathers mean to deny that Christ, even in the days of his humiliation, had a spiritual beauty which captivated susceptible souls. Thus Clement of Alexandria distinguishes between two kinds of beauty, the outward beauty of the flesh, which soon fades away, and the beauty of the soul, which consists in moral excellence and is permanent. "That the Lord Himself," he says, "was uncomely in aspect, the Spirit testifies by Isaiah: ’And we saw Him, and he had no form nor comeliness; but his form was mean, inferior to men.’ Yet who was more admirable than the Lord? But it was not the beauty of the flesh visible to the eye, but the true beauty of both soul and body, which He exhibited, which in the former is beneficence; in the latter—that is, the flesh—immortality."499 Chrysostom went further: he understood Isaiah’s description to refer merely to the scenes of the passion, and took his idea of the personal appearance of Jesus from the forty-fifth Psalm, where he is represented as "fairer than the children of men." Jerome and Augustin had the same view, but there was at that time no authentic picture of Christ, and the imagination was left to its own imperfect attempts to set forth that human face divine which reflected the beauty of sinless holiness. The first representations of Christ were purely allegorical. He appears now as a shepherd, who lays down his life for the sheep,500 or carries the lost sheep on his shoulders;501 as a lamb, who bears the sin of the world;502 more rarely as a ram, with reference to the substituted victim in the history of Abraham and Isaac;503 frequently as a fisher.504 Clement of Alexandria, in his hymn, calls Christ the "Fisher of men that are saved, who with his sweet life catches the pure fish out of the hostile flood in the sea of iniquity." The most favorite symbol seems to have been that of the fish. It was the double symbol of the Redeemer and the redeemed. The corresponding Greek Ichthys is a pregnant anagram, containing the initials of the words: "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour."505 In some pictures the mysterious fish is swimming in the water with a plate of bread and a cup of wine on his back, with evident allusion to the Lord’s Supper. At the same time the fish represented the soul caught in the net of the great Fisher of men and his servants, with reference to Matt. 4:19; comp. 13:47. Tertullian connects the symbol with the water of baptism, saying:506 "We little fishes (pisciculi) are born by our Fish (secundum jICqUS nostrum), Jesus Christ in water, and can thrive only by continuing in the water;" that is if we are faithful to our baptismal covenant, and preserve the grace there received. The pious fancy made the fish a symbol of the whole mystery of the Christian salvation.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  ImaginingsReading through the pages above, still older images have come back to me, and these images were fabricated. How I conceived them, way before having my first experience and a very long time before I shed my innocence, constitutes a seductively appealing mystery. What shreds of the real world – photographs in Cinemonde; veiled comments of my mother’s like the time when we left a cafe in which there was a group of young people only one of whom was a girl, and her muttering that the girl must be sleeping with everyone; or the fact that my father came home late at night, funnily enough having just come from that cafe – did I pick up and thread together, and what instinctual material did I formulate so that the stories I told myself as I rubbed the lips of my vulva together so accurately prefigured my future sexual adventures? I even remember a criminal case: the arrest of a rather obscure, ageing woman (she must have been something like a maid on a farm) who was accused of killing her lover. I have forgotten the details of the murder because what really struck me was that amongst her belongings they found notebooks which she had filled with memories and into which she pasted little relics – photographs, letters, locks of hair – connected with her lovers, who turned out to have been extraordinarily numerous. As a child I loved sticking bits of plants and flowers into my holiday book, and I had a tidy scrapbook with precious photographs of Anthony Perkins or Brigitte Bardot, so I admired the fact that she had managed to collate this treasure, these traces of the men she had known within a few simple note pads of paper, and a secret corner of my libido was even more disturbed by the fact that this woman was ugly, alone, wild and outcast. There are major structural similarities between situations I have lived and those I have imagined, even though I have never actively chosen to reproduce the latter in my life, and the details of what I have lived have had little part in nourishing my imaginings. Perhaps I should just assume that the fantasies forged in my earliest youth predisposed me to widely diverse experiences. Having never felt ashamed of these fantasies, and having reworked and embellished them rather than trying to bury them, they offered no opposition to what was real but rather a sort of mesh through which real-life situations that other people might have found outrageous struck me as quite normal.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  With very few exceptions, I can remember with relative accuracy the bodies of my main partners, and even what their faces retained at the moment when the other part of their being was released. These images are accompanied by memories of the convulsive movements and particular choice of words each of them had. Observation does not automatically lead to judgement but, if it is scrupulous, it keeps conscience in the realms of objectivity. I may have been seduced by a man’s physical beauty, but that wouldn’t stop me from identifying flaws which could cut short any fascination for him. For example, a roundish face set off with almond eyes but mounted on a head that was very flattened at the back which when I looked at it in profile brought to mind a squashed balloon. A quarter turn and the man whose face could be compared to a Renaissance painting really had no more depth than a picture on canvas. If I run back through a portrait gallery, I can find fault with my memory and my powers of observation: paradoxically, there was one man whose good looks were particularly seductive to me (in fact the only man of all my sexual contacts who was younger than me) but I have no sexual memories of him. I can call to mind lots of expressions and gestures he made and plenty of things that he said, but not one of them would have occured while we were fucking! Was nature trying to spare men the danger of being torn in two when she ordained that, while their muscles are strained to their limits, this tension is compensated by bathing their faces in peace? Doesn’t it look as if they are throwing their faces back to refresh them under a fountain in that instant when they come to the end of the pursuit that has exercised their entire body? Many of them adopt this serene expression: not the man who looked like a Renaissance portrait. While there is a whole succession of peaceful faces in my memory – one making a little ‘o’ with his mouth and, because he had a moustache, looking as daft as a child in disguise; another whose smile was so half-hearted that it could have been a sign of embarrassment, the sort of smile a modest person would wear as they apologised for being caught in some indecent act – or again, this other man whose face was usually so smooth who wore a mask of suppressed pain. He would have seemed pitiable if in those moments he hadn’t added to the usual exclamation of ‘I’m coming, I’m coming!’ the words ‘oh, my God!’ A comical invocation that I could not not notice.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  He freely dispensed food, clothing, and money from his scanty income and contributions of friends, to widows and orphans, to strangers and exiles, not excluding persons of other creeds. He secured a decent pension for the widow of Zwingli, and educated two of his children with his own. He entertained persecuted brethren for weeks and months in his own house, or procured them places and means of travel.307 He paid great attention to education, as superintendent of the schools in Zürich. He filled the professorships in the Carolinum with able theologians, as Pellican, Bibliander, Peter Martyr. He secured a well-educated ministry. He prepared, in connection with Leo Judae, a book of church order, which was adopted by the Synod, Oct. 22, 1532, issued by authority of the burgomaster, the Small and the Great Council, and continued in force for nearly three hundred years. It provides the necessary rules for the examination, election, and duties of ministers (Predicanten) and deans (Decani), for semi-annual meetings of synods with clerical and lay representatives, and the power of discipline. The charges were divided into eight districts or chapters.308 Bullinger’s activity extended far beyond the limits of Zürich. He had a truly Catholic spirit, and stood in correspondence with all the Reformed Churches. Beza calls him "the common shepherd of all Christian Churches;" Pellican, "a man of God, endowed with the richest gifts of heaven for God’s honor and the salvation of souls." He received fugitive Protestants from Italy, France, England, and Germany with open arms, and made Zürich an asylum of religious liberty. He thus protected Celio Secondo Curione, Bernardino Occhino, and Peter Martyr, and the immigrants from Locarno, and aided in the organization of an Italian congregation in Zürich.309 Following the example of Zwingli and Calvin, he appealed twice to the king of France for toleration in behalf of the Huguenots. He dedicated to Henry II. his book on Christian Perfection (1551), and to Francis II. his Instruction in the Christian Religion (1559). He sent deputations to the French court for the protection of the Waldenses, and the Reformed congregation in Paris. The extent of Bullinger’s correspondence is astonishing. It embraces letters to and from all the distinguished Protestant divines of his age, as Calvin, Melanchthon, Bucer, Beza, Laski, Cranmer, Hooper, Jewel, and crowned heads who consulted him, as Henry VIII., Edward VI., of England, Queen Elizabeth, Henry II. of France, King Christian of Denmark, Philip of Hesse, and the Elector Frederick of the Palatinate. Bullinger came into contact with the English Reformation from the time of Henry VIII. to the reign of Elizabeth, especially during the bloody reign of Mary, when many prominent exiles fled to Zürich, and found a fraternal reception under his hospitable roof. The correspondence of Hooper, Jewel, Sandys, Grindal, Parkhurst, Foxe, Cox, and other church dignitaries with Bullinger, Gwalter, Gessner, Simler, and Peter Martyr, is a noble monument of the spiritual harmony between the Reformed Churches of Switzerland and England in the Edwardian and Elizabethan era.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  On the cover, a deeply perturbed Sue held in her arms her irradiated son: “Little Franklin is glowing like an ATOMIC BOMB!” Sure, Paul had tried D.C. Comics. He had read Batman and Justice League of America , and he had followed some of the other Marvel titles, too: Spider-Man, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Avengers , and X-Men , and especially those titles that were F.F. spin-offs, The Silver Surfer and The Sub-Mariner . He had tried them all. He had ranged far and wide. But he kept coming back to the F.F. Batman was cool: his skills were not supernatural. He was just smart and rich. Superman was a moral force. The Hulk had hubris. Silver Surfer was definitely created by a mind on psychedelics. Thor was the comic you read if you wanted to work for one of those touring Renaissance festivals, if you wanted to wear a shirt that was called a blouse . So why the Fantastic Four? First of all, Paul couldn’t shake the uncanny coincidence that his father had the same first name as Benjamin Grimm, the Thing. When he was younger, he actually thought of his father as the Thing: chunky, homely, self-pitying. When Paul was a kid, his dad raged around the house like a pachyderm taking down underbrush. His father would find a damp towel clumped on the bathroom floor and sprint to Paul’s room to accuse him. His father would lay in wait for the tiniest noise, the scantest footfall, and then he would howl from the bottom of the stairs. But his dad was always coming around to apologize, too. He couldn’t terrorize with real commitment. He was like the Thing. He hated the world, hated mankind, hated his family, but loved people, loved kids and dogs. And his mother was the Invisible Girl. Although, on the other hand, sometimes she was like Crystal, the Elemental, a prophetess, a seer. And sometimes his dad was Reed Richards, the elastic scientist. And sometimes Paul himself was Ben Grimm, and sometimes he was Peter Parker, a.k.a. the Spider-Man. These models never worked exactly. Still, the F.F., with all their mistakes and allegiances, their infighting and dependability, told some true tale about family. When Paul started reading these books, the corny melodrama of New Canaan lost some of its sting. By the way, corny melodrama: Tuesday night, only three nights ago, they were all watching television in the dorm. At St. Pete’s, where Paul was incarcerated. It was the last night before Thanksgiving vacation, and he was in the common room. Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer on the box. Seemed like every year they started these Xmas specials earlier and earlier. Someone had turned off the lights. They all cozied together in the dim, flickering images of holiday myth. Didn’t matter who was there. Paul had been lucky enough to score some Thai weed from some math club guys who doubled as drug dealers. He had just smoked it.

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

  The choice between the historical-critical quest for the original words of a prophet and the canonical preference for the “final form” of the text is often a choice between challenging religious tradition in the manner of the prophets and defending it in the manner of religious authorities, ancient and modern. 1 ENDURING VALUES The importance that the Bible has enjoyed in the Western world is due in large part to its canonical status in Judaism and Christianity, and to the widespread belief in its inspiration. Be that as it may, the influence of these books on Western culture is enormous. Knowledge of biblical stories is indispensible for the appreciation of Western art and culture. Think, for example, of the Sistine Chapel paintings of Michelangelo, or of Milton’s Paradise Lost . Even apart from its importance as a cultural aid, however, the Old Testament remains vital and engaging literature even from a purely humanistic perspective. Here it may suffice to mention two factors that render the Bible an important resource for humanistic education. First, no other collection of documents from the ancient world, and scarcely any other documents at all, speak with such passionate urgency on the subject of social justice. The primary voices in this respect are those of the Hebrew prophets, but the law codes of the Pentateuch are also of fundamental importance for our understanding of human rights. To be sure, the biblical laws are not always satisfactory by modern standards. Biblical attitudes to slaves, women, and foreigners are all mired in the cultural assumptions of the ancient world, with only occasional flickers of enlightenment. Nonetheless, the concern for the unfortunate of society in these books is remarkable and often stands as a reproach to the modern Western world. Second, it has been claimed that the biblical authors were the pioneers of prose fiction. Whatever the historical merits of this claim, and it is not without substance, the achievements of the biblical writers are not just a matter of literary form. The biblical narratives offer a warts-and-all picture of human nature that has seldom been surpassed. The realism of the narratives of Genesis or the story of David is widely recognized and appreciated. The account of the brutality of conquest is no less realistic, but has less often been appreciated, because it has too often been construed as moral example. When the Bible is read without moralistic presuppositions, however, it gives a picture of human nature that is not comforting but may well be said to be revelatory. In the modern world, unfortunately, the Bible, and especially the Old Testament, is often viewed with suspicion because of its association with religious fundamentalism. There are, to be sure, laws in the Bible that can only be described as narrow-minded and intolerant, but the collection as a whole cannot be characterized in this way.

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

  It introduces David as if he were previously unknown. Moreover, he is still a shepherd, rather than a musician at Saul’s court. This popular variant of the story must have been interpolated into the Hebrew text at some time in the Second Temple period. Few stories in the Hebrew Bible have such popular appeal as that of David and Goliath. It has become the proverbial story of the underdog. It has much in common with the classic Near Eastern myth of the combat of Marduk and Tiamat (Enuma Elish), with the Philistine in the role of the chaos monster. There is no suggestion, however, that David and Goliath are more than human. David triumphs by wit and agility over the huge but rather immobile Philistine. The Deuteronomist sees another dimension in the conflict. Goliath comes with sword and spear, but David comes in the name of the Lord of hosts (17:45). As in the story of the exodus, YHWH is the God of the underdog and outsider, and no human power can prevail against him. Despite its legendary character, the story of Goliath fits the most plausible scenario of David’s rise. He was successful in battle and outshone his master, King Saul. Hence the popular acclaim: Saul has killed his thousands, but David his tens of thousands. David, at this point, is still supposedly Saul’s loyal servant, but rivalry between the two men is inevitable. Their relationship is complicated by the friendship between David and Saul’s family. We are told that Jonathan, Saul’s son, loved David as himself (18:1). Much has been made of the relationship between David and Jonathan as a possible biblical model of a positive homosexual relationship. Homosexual attraction is certainly a factor in male bonding, especially in all-male institutions like the army (down to current times). (Homoerotic overtones have also been suspected in the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh.) But if there is a sexual dimension in this relationship, it is never acknowledged explicitly. David also has relationships with Saul’s daughters. The marriage with the elder daughter, Merab (18:17), is part of the secondary Goliath story. It is not found in the Old Greek. The story of Michal is more easily intelligible if there was no marriage to the elder daughter. Michal, like Saul, is eventually a tragic character. In 1 Samuel 18 the initiative for the marriage comes from Michal, who loves David, with Saul’s approval. David, then, cannot be accused of marrying for expediency. When David is estranged from Saul, Michal becomes the wife of another man, but David recalls her after Saul’s death, when he is trying to secure the kingship over all Israel.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  He was born July 18, 1504, at Bremgarten in Aargau, the youngest of five sons of Dean Bullinger, who lived, like many priests of those days, in illegitimate, yet tolerated, wedlock.304 The father resisted the sale of indulgences by Samson in 1518, and confessed, in his advanced age, from the pulpit, the doctrines of the Reformation (1529). In consequence of this act he lost his place. Young Henry was educated in the school of the Brethren of the Common Life at Emmerich, and in the University of Cologne. He studied scholastic and patristic theology. Luther’s writings and Melanchthon’s Loci led him to the study of the Bible and prepared him for a change. He returned to Switzerland as Master of Arts, taught a school in the Cistercian Convent at Cappel from 1523 to 1529, and reformed the convent in agreement with the abbot, Wolfgang Joner. During that time he became acquainted with Zwingli, attended the Conference with the Anabaptists at Zürich, 1525, and the disputation at Bern, 1528. He married Anna Adlischweiler, a former nun, in 1529, who proved to be an excellent wife and helpmate. He accepted a call to Bremgarten as successor of his father. After the disaster at Cappel, he removed to Zürich, and was unanimously elected by the Council and the citizens preacher of the Great Minster, Dec. 9, 1531. It was rumored that Zwingli himself, in the presentiment of his death, had designated him as his successor. No better man could have been selected. It was of vital importance for the Swiss churches that the place of the Reformer should be filled by a man of the same spirit, but of greater moderation and self-restraint.305 Bullinger now assumed the task of saving, purifying, and consolidating the life-work of Zwingli; and faithfully and successfully did he carry out this task. When he ascended the pulpit of the Great Minster in Dec. 23, 1531, many hearers thought that Zwingli had risen from the grave.306 He took a firm stand for the Reformation, which was in danger of being abandoned by timid men in the Council. He kept free from interference with politics, which had proved ruinous to Zwingli. He established a more independent, though friendly relation between Church and State. He confined himself to his proper vocation as preacher and teacher. In the first years he preached six or seven times a week; after 1542 only twice, on Sundays and Fridays. He followed the plan of Zwingli in explaining whole books of the Scriptures from the pulpit. His sermons were simple, clear, and practical, and served as models for young preachers. He was a most devoted pastor, dispensing counsel and comfort in every direction, and exposing even his life during the pestilence which several times visited Zürich. His house was open from morning till night to all who desired his help.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  New Zealand gave woman full rights in 1893. Australia followed in 1908. But in England and America victory was difficult. Victorian England imperiously isolated woman in her home; Jane Austen wrote in secret; it took great courage or an exceptional destiny to become George Eliot or Emily Brontë; in 1888 an English scholar wrote: “Women are not only not part of the race, they are not even half of the race but a sub-species destined uniquely for reproduction.” Mrs. Fawcett founded a suffragist movement toward the end of the century, but as in France the movement was hesitant. Around 1903, feminist claims took a singular turn. In London, the Pankhurst family created the Women’s Social and Political Union, which joined with the Labour Party and embarked on resolutely militant activities. It was the first time in history that women took on a cause as women: this is what gave particular interest to the suffragettes in England and America. For fifteen years, they carried out a policy recalling in some respects a Gandhi-like attitude: refusing violence, they invented more or less ingenious symbolic actions. They marched on the Albert Hall during Liberal Party meetings, carrying banners with the words “Vote for Women”; they forced their way into Lord Asquith’s office, held meetings in Hyde Park or Trafalgar Square, marched in the streets carrying signs, and held lectures; during demonstrations they insulted the police or threw stones at them, provoking their arrest; in prison they adopted the hunger strike tactic; they raised money and rallied millions of women and men; they influenced opinion so well that in 1907 two hundred members of Parliament made up a committee for women’s suffrage; every year from then on some of them would propose a law in favor of women’s suffrage, a law that would be rejected every year with the same arguments. In 1907 the WSPU organized the first march on Parliament with workers covered in shawls, and a few aristocratic women; the police pushed them back; but the following year, as married women were threatened with a ban on work in certain mines, the Lancashire women workers were called by the WSPU to hold a grand meeting. There were new arrests, and the imprisoned suffragettes responded with a long hunger strike. Released, they organized new parades: one of the women rode a horse painted with the head of Queen Elizabeth. On July 18, 1910, the day the women’s suffrage law went to the Chamber, a nine-kilometer-long column paraded through London; the law rejected, there were more meetings and new arrests. In 1912, they adopted a more violent tactic: they burned empty houses, slashed pictures, trampled flower beds, threw stones at the police; at the same time, they sent delegation upon delegation to Lloyd George and Sir Edward Grey; they hid in the Albert Hall and noisily disrupted Lloyd George’s speeches. The war interrupted their activities. It is difficult to know how much these actions hastened events. The vote was granted to English women first in 1918 in a restricted form, and then in 1928 without restriction: their success was in large part due to the services they had rendered during the war.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  Even the successes women achieved were cause for new attacks; Les précieuses ridicules (The Pretentious Young Ladies) set public opinion against them; and a bit later Les femmes savants (The Learned Ladies) are applauded. Molière is not, however, woman’s enemy: he vigorously attacks arranged marriages, he demands freedom for young girls in their love lives and respect and independence for the wife. On the other hand, Bossuet does not spare them in his sermons. The first woman, he preaches, is “only a part of Adam and a kind of diminutive. Her mind is about the same size.” Boileau’s satire against women is not much more than an exercise in rhetoric, but it raises an outcry: Pradon, Regnard, and Perrault counterattack violently. La Bruyère and Saint-Evremond take the part of women. The period’s most determined feminist is Poulain de la Barre who in 1673 publishes a Cartesian-inspired work, De l’égalité des deux sexes (The Equality of the Two Sexes). He thinks that since men are stronger, they favor their sex and women accept this dependence out of custom. They never had their chances: in either freedom or education. Thus they cannot be judged by what they did in the past. Nothing indicates their inferiority to men. Anatomy reveals differences, but none of them constitutes a privilege for the male. And Poulain de la Barre concludes with a demand for a solid education for women. Fontenelle writes Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) for women. And while Fénelon, following Mme de Maintenon and Abbot Fleury, puts forward a very limited educational program, the Jansenist academic Rollin wants women to undertake serious studies.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  Nichols Hills was a limited place, a limiting place if you let it be. My parents taught me that, even as they played along. Oklahoma occupies a no-man’s-land between the midwest, the south, and the southwest. It has elements of each, but it’s none exactly. As it is in the south, though, politeness is king in Oklahoma. You did not talk politics or religion; you smiled first and gossiped later. Nichols Hills had few postcard-worthy vistas, so the beauty you had was everything. People weren’t looking out their windows at the mountains or the ocean. They were looking out the window at one another, and at one another’s houses. The women of my hometown modeled themselves on the women of Dallas, who modeled themselves on the women of Beverly Hills. My parents half-joked: their worst nightmare was that I would grow up to stay put. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] It wasn’t until the AIDS crisis that I thought about gay people as a category, or at all. I had an out gay uncle in California, but that he was an anomaly in late-seventies and early-eighties America, or in any-era America, wouldn’t occur to me until I was in grade school. My parents had told me that some men love men and some women love women, the same way that my parents loved each other. Jerry’s being gay was a nonissue within the family. I know only fragments of the story, of what it took for my family to accept Jerry. My grandmother Elaine was Episcopalian, and her husband, Joe, was a devout Catholic. Their children went to Catholic grade school. But Elaine’s parents had been, in her words, broad-minded, and Elaine had a couple of close friends in college who were gay. And Joe, though a quiet, slight man, liked to think for himself. He’d fought in World War II but opposed the Vietnam War and, in the late sixties, wrote a scathing letter to the Archdiocese of Baltimore when the Church refused to take a stand against it. He dictated the letter to my mother, then fresh from secretarial school, and unbeknownst to her and the rest of the family, Joe mailed it not only to the Church but also to the Baltimore Sun, where the letter was published for the entire city to read. Jerry’s son, Jason, told me this: that when our grandfather learned that Jerry was gay, and that Jerry’s marriage was ending, he took a long, slow breath. Then he stood up from his chair and went to the front door, walked to the local library, and pulled down every book he could find on homosexuality. He read for a while, walked back home, and when he came in the door, he said, Okay.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  310 sq.) shows a just appreciation of Zwingli, and his last noble confession addressed to the King of France. He says of him: "Grand docteur, meilleur patriote, nature forte et simple, il a montré le type même, le vrai génie de la Suisse, dans sa fière indépendance de l’Italie, de l’Allemagne. … Son langage à François 1er, digne de la Renaissance, établissait la question de l’Église dans sa grandeur." He then quotes the passage of the final salvation of all true and noble men, which no man with a heart can ever forget.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  Auntie was my great-aunt, and even though she was less than five feet tall and shuffled through the house blindly, she was a fiery old gal. Often, she’d bang her fist on the table and disappear into a rant about how hard it was to find a good rambutan these days (Auntie’s main passion in her old age was good fruit). And she’d mastered the art of casually extreme theatrics. Once, she was calmly telling me stories from her childhood and mentioned that when she was a kid, if you got a zero on a test, your family had to pay a fine to the school. I was surprised for a moment—really? Had I heard her right? “Pay a fine?” I asked. She startled, her whole body snapping upright as if she were possessed, eyes wide behind her Coke-bottle glasses, jaw slack, hands trembling. “WHAT LAH, YOU!” she shouted at me, with a passion generally reserved for cussing out murderers. “YEAH, LAH! PAY FINE!” Then, just as quickly as it began, her body settled and she went back to her story, giggling. She was like that: a total wack job, but her whole self, even her anger, even her sadness, was infused with mischievous glee. Once, she farted loudly during a mah-jongg game and then laughed so hard about it she peed her pants, then hobbled to the bathroom, leaking pee everywhere and screaming with laughter. Auntie was the caretaker of our whole family. When my father was growing up, his mother (Auntie’s sister—my grandmother) got a job as the foreman of a glass factory in Kuala Lumpur, a couple of hours from their home in Ipoh. So my grandmother rented an apartment in KL and stayed there during the week, seeing her kids on the weekends. While she was gone, Auntie took on the responsibility of raising her sister’s children. She worked as a secretary and bounced babies on her hip and even had a money-lending business on the side. Eventually, she saved enough money to buy two houses for her nieces. My father and his siblings all considered Auntie to be a second mother, so after my grandmother died when I was seven, Auntie ascended to the powerful role of matriarch. And she used that power to spoil me. Every time I walked into a room, Auntie would reach for me and coo, “Ho gwaai, ho gwaai.” So well-behaved. So good. She dug the fish balls out of her bowl of soup and fed them to me. She taught me mah-jongg and stroked my hands.

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  As has already been seen, because of the development of social life and its close link to intellectual life, French women’s situation is a little more favorable. Nevertheless, people are largely hostile to the bluestockings. During the Renaissance, noblewomen and intellectuals inspire a movement in favor of their sex; Platonic doctrines imported from Italy spiritualize love and woman. Many well-read men strive to defend her. La nef des dames vertueuses (The Ship of Virtuous Ladies), Le chevalier des dames (The Ladies’ Chevalier), and so on were published. Erasmus in Le petit sénat (The Little Senate) gives the floor to Cornelia, who unabashedly details the grievances of her sex. “Men are tyrants … They treat us like toys … they make us their launderers and cooks.” Erasmus demands that women be allowed to have an education. Cornelius Agrippa, in a very famous work, Déclamation de la noblesse et de l’excellence du sexe féminin (Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex), devotes himself to showing feminine superiority. He takes up the old cabbalistic arguments: Eve means Life and Adam Earth. Created after man, woman is more finished then he. She is born in paradise, he outside. When she falls into the water, she floats; man sinks. She is made from Adam’s rib and not from earth. Her monthly cycles cure all illnesses. Eve merely wandered in her ignorance, whereas Adam sinned, which is why God made himself a man; moreover, after his resurrection he appeared to women. Then Agrippa declares that women are more virtuous than men. He lists “virtuous women” that the sex can take pride in, which is also a commonplace of these praises. Lastly, he mounts an indictment of male tyranny: “Acting against divine right and violating natural law with impunity, the tyranny of men has deprived women of the freedom they receive at birth.” Yet she engenders children; she is as intelligent and even subtler than man; it is scandalous that her activities are limited, “undoubtedly done not by God’s order, nor by necessity or reason, but by the force of usage, by education, work and principally by violence and oppression.” He does not, of course, demand sexual equality, but wants woman to be treated with respect. The work was immensely successful; there is also Le fort inexpugnable (The Impregnable Fort), another praise of woman; and La parfaite amye (The Perfect Friend) by Héroët, imbued with Platonic mysticism. In a curious book introducing Saint-Simonian doctrine, Postel announces the coming of a new Eve, the regenerating mother of humankind: he thinks he has even met her; she is dead, and she is perhaps reincarnated in him. With more moderation, Marguerite de Valois, in her Docte et subtil discours (Learned and Subtle Discourse) proclaims that there is something divine in woman. But the writer who best served the cause of her sex was Margaret of Navarre, who proposed an ideal of sentimental mysticism and chastity without prudery to counter licentiousness, attempting to reconcile marriage and love for women’s honor with happiness. Women’s opponents do not, of course, give up. Among others, Les controverses des sexes masculine et féminin (Controversies over the Masculine and Feminine Sexes), in response to Agrippa, puts forward the old medieval arguments. Rabelais has a good time in The Third Book satirizing marriage in the tradition of Matthew and Deschamps: however, it is women who lay down the law in the privileged abbey of Thélème. Antifeminism becomes virulent once again in 1617, with the Alphabet de l’imperfection et malice des femmes (A Discourse of Women, Shewing Their Imperfections Alphabetically), by Jacques Olivier; the cover pictures an engraving of a woman with a harpy’s hands, covered with the feathers of lust and perched on her feet, because, like a hen, she is a bad housewife: under every letter of the alphabet is one of her defects. Once more it was a man of the Church who rekindled the old quarrel; Mlle de Gournay answered back with Egalité des hommes et des femmes (Equality of Men and Women). This is followed by a quantity of libertine literature, including Parnasse et cabinets satyriques (Parnassus and Satyrical Cabinets),* that attacks women’s moral behavior, while the holier-than-thous quoting Paul, the Church Fathers, and Ecclesiastes drag them down. Woman provided an inexhaustible theme for the satires of Mathurin Régnier and his friends. In the other camp, the apologists outdo themselves in taking up and commenting on Agrippa’s arguments. Father du Boscq in L’honneste femme (The Compleat Woman) calls for women to be allowed to be educated. The Astrée and a great quantity of courtly literature praise their merits in rondeaux, sonnets, elegies, and such.

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

  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 support in the event of war. The Roman interest in this treaty was anti-Syrian rather than pro-Jewish. Rome did not intervene in the wars of the Maccabees and probably never intended to do so. Nonetheless, the occasion is noteworthy as the first official contact between Rome and the Jews. A century later, Rome would conquer Judea and would eventually bring destruction on Jerusalem on a far greater scale than any Syrian ruler ever could. Judas was succeeded by his brother Jonathan. At this time there were various pretenders competing for the throne of Syria, and Jonathan was able to play them off against each other. Eventually, however, he was killed treacherously by a general named Trypho, who was plotting to seize the kingship (12:48). His brother Simon, who succeeded him, met a similar fate, when he and two of his sons were murdered at a banquet in Jericho (16:15). Simon was succeeded by his son, John Hyrcanus. Neither Jonathan nor Simon claimed the title of king. Eventually, their successors would assume that rank, beginning with Aristobulus, the successor of John Hyrcanus, in 104–103 B.C.E. According to 1 Macc 14:30, Jonathan became high priest, presumably by exercising the high priest’s functions. In the case of Simon, we are told that his rank as high priest was confirmed by public decree (13:41-42; 14:35). Not all Jews were happy with this arrangement, since the Maccabees were not from the traditional high priestly family. The legitimacy of the Maccabean high priesthood was criticized both by the Pharisees and by the sect that preserved the Dead Sea Scrolls (most probably the Essenes). There is no hint of criticism of the Maccabees in 1 Maccabees, however. Even though Simon died a rather shameful death (he was drunk when he was murdered), his reign is described as a golden age, the fulfillment of prophecy. According to a poem in 1 Macc 14:4-15, “the land had rest all the days of Simon . . . all the people sat under their own vines and fig trees, and there was none to make them afraid” (cf. Mic 4:4). It is apparent from the ongoing story that any such period of peace was short-lived. First Maccabees, however, is the official chronicle of the Maccabean family, and it depicts the achievements of the family in utopian terms.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Baur (the founder of the Tübingen school of critical historians) says:42 When the two men met, as at Marburg, Zwingli appears more free, more unprejudiced, more fresh, and also more mild and conciliatory; while Luther shows himself harsh and intolerant, and repels Zwingli with the proud word: ’We have another spirit than you.’43 A comparison of their controversial writings can only result to the advantage of Zwingli. But there can be no doubt that, judged by the merits and effects of their reformatory labors, Luther stands much higher than Zwingli. It is true, even in this respect, both stand quite independent of each other. Zwingli has by no means received his impulse from Luther; but Luther alone stands on the proper field of battle where the cause of the Reformation had to be fought out. He is the path-breaking Reformer, and without his labors Zwingli could never have reached the historic significance which properly belongs to him alongside of Luther."44 Dr. Alexander Schweizer (of Zurich), in his commemorative oration of 1884, does equal justice to both: "Luther and Zwingli founded, each according to his individuality, the Reformation in the degenerated Church, both strengthening and supplementing each other, but in many respects also going different ways. How shall we estimate them, elevating the one, lowering the other, as is the case with Goethe and Schiller? Let us rather rejoice, according to Goethe’s advice, in the possession of two such men. May those Lutherans who wish to check the growing union with the Reformed, continue to represent Luther as the only Reformer, and, in ignorance of Zwingli’s deep evangelical piety, depreciate him as a mere humanistic illuminator: this shall not hinder us from doing homage at the outset to Luther’s full greatness, contented with the independent position of our Zwingli alongside of this first hero of the Reformation; yea, we deem it our noblest task in this Zwingli festival at Zurich, which took cheerful part in the preceding Luther festival, to acknowledge Luther as the chief hero of the battle of the Reformation, and to put his world-historical and personal greatness in the front rank; and this all the more since Zwingli himself, and afterwards Calvin, have preceded us in this high estimate of Luther."45 Phillips Brooks (Bishop of Massachusetts, the greatest preacher of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, d. 1893):, Of all the Reformers, in this respect [tolerance], Zwingli, who so often in the days of darkness is the man of light, is the noblest and clearest. At the conference in Marburg he contrasts most favorably with Luther in his willingness to be reconciled for the good of the common cause, and he was one of the very few who in those days believed that the good and earnest heathen could be saved." (Lectures on Tolerance, New York, 1887, p. 34.) Of secular historians, J. Michelet (Histoire de France, X.

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

  When at four in the morning he wished to return home, he found the coachman seemingly frozen dead, and it required several hours of strenuous effort to restore him to consciousness and to save his life. "Why," he asked himself, "should I, a rich, young aristocrat, who has done nothing for society, spend the night amid warmth and luxuries and feastings, while this peasant who represents the class that has built our cities, given us our food and clothing and other necessities, be kept outside to freeze?" He resolved, then and there, to dedicate the remainder of his life to the righting of this and other wrongs. And he kept his promise. How strong an impression this incident made upon him may be gathered from an indirect allusion to it, in his novel "Master and Man ," published some two score years later. Consecrates life to peasant. It was discouraging work at first. The people whom he desired to benefit had no faith in him. They could not conceive of an aristocrat, to whom the serfs had been no more than worms to be trod upon, becoming suddenly interested in their welfare. There were long spells of utter disheartenment. A number of times he found himself at the brink of suicide. He sought relief and diversion in travel, but returned more convinced than ever of the corruptions and evils of society, of the tyranny of the classes and of the sufferings of the masses. Marriage opened at last a new vista of life to him. Aided and stimulated by his cultured and companionable wife he entered upon his reform work by directing a powerful search-light on the goings-on among the high and the low, in a series of novels that secured for him at once rank among the greatest novelists of his age. Aided by his writings. In the second discourse of this series, I spoke of his having deprecated his novels, and of his having expressed his preference for his ethical and religious and sociological and economical and political writings. I ven tured to say to him that but for his novels he would have gotten but comparatively few people to look into his other writings, that his fiction had secured a world-wide audience, that they contained many of the teachings of his other books, and that the public swallows a moral pill easiest when offered in the form of a novel. To which he replied "Most readers swallow the sugar-coating and leave the pill untouched, or, if they swallow it, it remains unassimilated." His novels criticized. And he was right. I have heard much criticism of Tolstoy's novels. Some find him too realistic, too plain spoken, even coarse. A certain magazine that had begun publishing his "Resurrection " was obliged to discontinue the story, because of complaints by many of its readers.

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

  There would then be no need of armies and armaments, of courts and police, of prisons and jails, no need of impoverishing the masses through heavy taxation for the support of millions of soldiers and officers in idleness, who ought to raise their own bread by their own handiwork." Believed that the Messiah is still to come. "On that day," said I, "the Messianic Age, for which the Jews have hoped and prayed, will surely have dawned." To which he answered: "You, Jews, are right, the Messiah is still to come, or, if he has come, his message has not yet entered the hearts of men." Recalling this remark of Tolstoy, on this Christmas morn, suggests the question: How many Christmas days will yet have to come and go before its gospel of peace and good-will will govern the hearts of all who call themselves Christians as it governed that of the Russian peasant-saint. Lessening of church power shown by failure of Tolstoy's excommunication. And vividly I recalled his remarks on the shorn power of the church, when, six years later, the papers brought the news that Tolstoy had been excommunicated by the Russian church. I could picture to myself the expression of sorrow or disgust on his face when that church decree was conveyed to him. Its ecclesiastical wrath, could have meant only hollow sounds to him. None knew better than he that the metropolitans who issued this excommunication merely grasped at a shadow, that the substance was gone, that that age was happily passed when the pronouncement of the ecclesiastical anathema deprived its victim of all association with friend or foe, deprived him of intercourse even with the closest members of his family, prevented them, under the penalty of like punishment, from providing him even with food, shelter and raiment. When during his flight from home, shortly before his death, he knocked at the doors of a monastery, and said "I am the excommunicated and anathematized Leo Tolstoy," the reply was "It is a duty and a pleasure to offer you shelter." The life of Tolstoy passed on as serenely, in the midst of his family and friends, after his excommunication as before. And the world's esteem of him grew even greater than it had been, by reason of the charges upon which the excommunication was based, namely: "In his writings on religious questions he clearly shows himself an enemy of the Russian Orthodox Church. He does not recognize God in three persons (or three persons in one God), and he calls the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, a mortal human being. He scoffs at the idea of Incarnation. He perverts the text of the Gospel. He censures the Holy Church and calls it a human institution. He denies the Church Hierarchy and ridicules the Holy Sacraments and the rites of the Holy Orthodox Church. Therefore, the Holy Synod has decreed that no priest is to absolve Count Tolstoy, or give him communion.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Both drew their strength and authority from the Word of God. Both labored independently for the same cause of evangelical truth, the one on a smaller, the other on a much larger field. Luther owed nothing to Zwingli, and Zwingli owed little or nothing to Luther. Both were good scholars, great divines, popular preachers, heroic characters. Zwingli broke easily and rapidly with the papal system, but Luther only step by step, and after a severe struggle of conscience. Zwingli was more radical than Luther, but always within the limits of law and order, and without a taint of fanaticism; Luther was more conservative, and yet the chief champion of freedom in Christ. Zwingli leaned to rationalism, Luther to mysticism; yet both bowed to the supreme authority of the Scriptures. Zwingli had better manners and more self-control in controversy; Luther surpassed him in richness and congeniality of nature. Zwingli was a republican, and aimed at a political and social, as well as an ecclesiastical reformation; Luther was a monarchist, kept aloof from politics and war, and concentrated his force upon the reformation of faith and doctrine. Zwingli was equal to Luther in clearness and acuteness of intellect and courage of conviction, superior in courtesy, moderation, and tolerance, but inferior in originality, depth, and force. Zwingli’s work and fame were provincial; Luther’s, worldwide. Luther is the creator of the modern high-German book language, and gave to his people a vernacular Bible of enduring vitality. Zwingli had to use the Latin, or to struggle with an uncouth dialect; and the Swiss Version of the Bible by his faithful friend Leo Judae remained confined to German Switzerland, but is more accurate, and kept pace in subsequent revisions with the progress of exegesis. Zwingli can never inspire, even among his own countrymen, the same enthusiasm as Luther among the Germans. Luther is the chief hero of the Reformation, standing in the front of the battle-field before the Church and the world, defying the papal bull and imperial ban, and leading the people of God out of the Babylonian captivity under the gospel banner of freedom. Each was the right man in the right place; neither could have done the work of the other. Luther was foreordained for Germany, Zwingli for Switzerland. Zwingli was cut down in the prime of life, fifteen years before Luther; but, even if he had outlived him, he could not have reached the eminence which belongs to Luther alone. The Lutheran Church in Germany and the Reformed Church of Switzerland stand to this day the best vindication of their distinct, yet equally evangelical Christian work and character. NOTES. I add the comparative estimates of the two Reformers by two eminent and equally unbiassed scholars, the one of German Lutheran, the other of Swiss Reformed, descent. Dr.