Anger

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 My People (2022)

  “This is very important,” he said, “because of the rush of revolutionary talk, it is not understood that whatever the level of the struggle, goods and services will be needed, and of course finance.” Local party people should not only set up programs such as free health care programs that would have a direct benefit to the people, but they should also control all monies to be used in the community—such as Model Cities and anti-poverty funds, he said. Mr. Jones strongly urged coalitions and alliances with black organizations and Third World people, but he warned against coalitions with whites. This contradicts the positions taken by groups such as the Black Panther party. “I would rather make a political alliance with Whitney Young [Urban League leader],” he said, “than with Abbie Hoffman [the white yippie leader] because Whitney Young controls masses of black people’s minds.” The audience applauded heartily. In a series of obvious allusions to the Black Panthers, who were not named specifically and who are not at this convention, Mr. Jones said: “No so-called vanguard organization can bring a revolution. Only the people themselves can do this. An organization moving without the community or alienating the community will soon be isolated, and very soon eliminated.” Mr. Jones cautioned against being “co-opted by talk of instant revolution, and to being the peasant army, the first slaughtered wave for another people’s rise to political power.” While he contended that disruption—“either the threatened use of violence, or the actual, is a means of achieving political power”—this was listed last on his suggested priorities. School a Beacon of Hope in NigeriaThe Root MAY 19, 2013 Whenever northern Nigeria has been in the news in recent months, the stories are usually about killings and kidnappings by Boko Haram—a radical Islamist insurgency group that has killed some two thousand people and kidnapped others in the region since its emergence in 2002. The slayings included several people killed during a bank robbery in Yola, a tiny village in the region. The group’s aim is to create an Islamic state. Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, has just declared a state of emergency there and in two other areas, and the Nigerian military has met violence with violence, drawing criticisms for what some see as unnecessary brutality. This week, U.S. secretary of state John Kerry said there were “credible allegations” of human rights violations committed by Nigerian security forces. Boko Haram means “Western education is sacrilege,” so when I was invited to come to Yola to give the graduation address at the American University of Nigeria, or AUN, it was with some trepidation that I considered whether or not to accept, even though there have been no attacks on Westerners or Western interests, except for one suicide bombing of the United Nations compound in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital. Although I had been to Nigeria many times over the years on various reporting assignments, I had never heard of Yola or the American University.

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

  In Gaul, Leo succeeded in asserting the Roman jurisdiction, though not without opposition, in the affair of the archbishop Hilary of Arles, or Arelate. The affair has been differently represented from the Gallican and the ultramontane points of view.542 Hilary (born 403, died 449), first a rigid monk, then, against his will, elevated to the bishopric, an eloquent preacher, an energetic prelate, and the first champion of the freedom of the Gallican church against the pretensions of Rome, but himself not free from hierarchical ambition, deposed Celidonius, the bishop of Besançon, at a council in that city (synodus Vesontionensis), because he had married a widow before his ordination, and had presided as judge at a criminal trial and pronounced sentence of death; which things, according to the ecclesiastical law, incapacitated him for the episcopal office. This was unquestionably an encroachment on the province of Vienne, to which Besaçon belonged. Pope Zosimus had, indeed, in 417, twenty-eight years before, appointed the bishop of Arles, which was a capital of seven provinces, to be papal vicar in Gaul, and had granted him metropolitan rights in the provinces Viennensis, and Narbonensis prima and secunda, though with the reservation of causae majores.543 The metropolitans of Vienne, Narbonne, and Marseilles, however, did not accept this arrangement, and the succeeding popes found it best to recognize again the old metropolitans.544 Celidonius appealed to Leo against that act of Hilary. Leo, in 445, assembled a Roman council (concilium sacerdotum), and reinstated him, as the accusation of Hilary, who himself journeyed on foot in the winter to Rome, and protested most vehemently against the appeal, could not be proven to the satisfaction of the pope. In fact, he directly or indirectly caused Hilary to be imprisoned, and, when he escaped and fled back to Gaul, cut him off from the communion of the Roman church, and deprived him of all prerogatives in the diocese of Vienne, which had been only temporarily conferred on the bishop of Arles, and were by a better judgment (sententia meliore) taken away. He accused him of assaults on the rights of other Gallican metropolitans, and above all of insubordination toward the principality of the most blessed Peter; and he goes so far as to say: "Whoso disputes the primacy of the apostle Peter, can in no way lessen the apostle’s dignity, but, puffed up by the spirit of his own pride, he destroys himself in hell."545 Only out of special grace did he leave Hilary in his bishopric. Not satisfied with this, he applied to the secular arm for help, and procured from the weak Western emperor, Valentinian III., an edict to Aetius, the magister militum of Gaul, in which it is asserted, almost in the words of Leo, that the whole world (universitas; in Greek, oijkoumevnh) acknowledges the Roman see as director and governor; that neither Hilary nor any bishop might oppose its commands; that neither Gallican nor other bishops should, contrary to the ancient custom, do anything without the authority of the venerable pope of the eternal city; and that all decrees of the pope have the force of law.

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

  "Seigneur Jehan, As your last letter was brought to me on my departure, I had no leisure to reply to the enclosure it contained. After my return I use the first moment of my leisure to comply with your desire; not indeed that I have any great hope of proving serviceable to such a man, seeing him disposed as I do. But I will try once more, if there be any means left of bringing him to reason, and this will happen when God shall have so wrought in him that he has become altogether another man. Since he has written to me in so proud a spirit, I have been led to write to him more sharply than is my wont, being minded to take him down a little in his presumption.1077 But I could not do otherwise. For I assure you there is no lesson he needs so much to learn as humility. This must come to him through the grace of God, not otherwise. But we, too, ought to lend a helping hand. If God give such grace to him and to us that the present answer will turn to his profit, I shall have cause to rejoice. If he persists, however, in the style he has hitherto seen fit to use, you will only lose your time in soliciting me further in his behalf; for I have other affairs that concern me more nearly, and I shall make it a matter of conscience not to busy myself further, not doubting that he is a Satan who would divert me from more profitable studies. Let me beg of you, therefore, to be content with what I have already done, unless you see occasion for acting differently." Frellon sent this letter to Villeneuve by a special messenger, together with a note in which be addresses him as his "dear brother and friend."1078 On the same day Calvin wrote the famous letter to Farel already quoted. He had arrived at the settled conviction that Servetus was an incorrigible and dangerous heretic, who deserved to die.1079 But he did nothing to induce him to come to Geneva, as he wished, and left him severely alone. . In 1548 he wrote to Viret that he would have nothing more to do with this desperately obstinate heretic, who shall force no more letters from him.1080

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  One sign of the acute distress of the population was the large number of people afflicted with neurological and psychological symptoms attributed to demons who came to Jesus for healing. He and his disciples seem to have had the skill to “exorcise” these disorders.38 When they cast out demons, Jesus explained, they were replicating God’s victory over Satan in the cosmic sphere. “I watched Satan fall like lightning from Heaven,” he told his disciples when they returned from a successful healing tour.39 So-called spirit possession seems often linked with economic, sexual, or colonial oppression, when people feel taken over by an alien power they cannot control.40 In one telling incident, when Jesus cast out a host of demons from a possessed man, these satanic forces told him that their name was “legion,” identifying themselves with the Roman troops that were the most blatant symbol of the occupation. Jesus did what many colonized people would like to do: he cast “legion” into a herd of swine, the most polluted of animals, which rushed headlong into the sea.41 The ruling class seems to have regarded Jesus’s exorcisms as politically provocative: they were the reason Antipas decided to take action against him.42 In Jesus’s mission, therefore, politics and religion were inextricable. The event that may have led to his death was his provocative entrance into Jerusalem at Passover, when he was hailed by the crowds as “Son of David” and “king of Israel.”43 He then staged a demonstration in the temple itself, turning over the money changers’ tables and declaring that God’s house was a “den of thieves.”44 This was not, as is sometimes assumed, a plea for a more spiritual style of worship. Judea had been a temple state since the Persian period, so the temple had long been an instrument of imperial control, and the tribute was stored there—although the high priests’ collaboration with Rome had recently brought the institution into such disrepute that peasants were refusing to pay the temple tithes.45 But neither did Jesus’s preoccupation with imperial misrule mean that he was “confusing” religion with politics. As he upturned the tables, he quoted the prophets who had severely castigated those who ignored the plight of the poor but whose religious observance was punctilious. Oppression, injustice, and exploitation had always been religiously charged issues in Israel. The idea that faith should not involve itself in such politics would have been as alien to Jesus as it had been to Confucius.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  It had already begun to disentangle itself from the melee of Shii militias by developing an underground cell structure and devised a spiritual process designed to replace what Khomeini had called the “colonized brain” with one that could think outside the parameters imposed by the West. All Hizbollah leaders still attend philosophy classes to develop their capacity to think critically and independently. As the American civil rights activists did, they work with small groups in the villages to discover how each individual can best contribute to the community: they may set someone up in business or train him for an elite militia. Their goal, reminiscent of the Confucian ideal, is to develop a Shii community in which everybody receives and gives a measure of respect and feels valued and needed. Since the 2006 war with Israel, Hizbollah has concentrated especially on anger management: “We want to turn this anger from a destructive course into something politically useful—building resistance, perhaps—or into some socially constructive activity.”49 During that war, Hizbollah modeled an alternative solution to the problem of asymmetrical warfare.50 In preparation for such a contingency, it had constructed deep underground tunnels and bunkers, some forty feet below the surface, where its militias could sit out Israeli air strikes, before emerging to mount a prolonged rocket and missile attack. Hizbollah knew that these could not seriously damage the powerful Israeli war machine, but the long duration and unremitting nature of these missile barrages did affect Israeli morale. Hizbollah’s goal was to force Israel to launch a ground invasion, whereupon the well-trained Hizbollah guerrilla forces, with intimate knowledge of the terrain, could effectively assault Israel’s armored tanks with their shoulder-launched missiles. They had also achieved such a mastery of intelligence and public relations that many Israeli journalists frankly admitted that they preferred Hizbollah’s dispatches to the IDF’s. Their victory in compelling the Israelis to withdraw demonstrated that terrorism need not be the only way to repel a militarily superior enemy.

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

  About the same time, in the autumn and winter of 1553, John à Lasco, a Polish nobleman, a friend of Calvin, and minister of a foreign Reformed congregation in London, fled with one hundred and seventy-five Protestants from persecution under the bloody Mary, and sought shelter on Danish and German shores; but was refused even a temporary refuge in cold winter at Helsingör, Copenhagen, Rostock, Lübeck, and Hamburg (though they found it at last in East Friesland). Westphal denounced these noble men as martyrs of the devil, enraged the people against them, and gloried in the inhuman cruelty as an act of faith.963 This conduct roused the Swiss to self-defence. Bullinger vindicated the orthodoxy of the Zürich ministry with his usual moderation. Calvin heard of the treatment of the refugees through a letter of Peter Martyr, then at Strassburg, in May, 1554, and took up his sharp and racy pen in three successive pamphlets. He at first wished to issue a joint remonstrance of the Swiss Churches, and sent a hasty draft to Bullinger. But Zürich, Basel, and Bern found it too severe, and refused to sign it. He corrected the draft, and published it in his own name under the title "Defence of the Sound and Orthodox Doctrine on the Sacraments," as laid down in the Consensus Tigurinus (Geneva, 1555). He treated Westphal with sovereign contempt, without naming him. Westphal replied in a tract thrice as large, complaining of the unworthy treatment, denying the intention of disturbing the peace of the Church, but repeating his charges against the Sacramentarians.964 Calvin, after some hesitation, prepared a "Second Defence," now openly directed "contra Westphali calumnias," and published it, with a preface to the Churches of Germany, in January, 1556. Westphal replied in two writings, one against Calvin and one against à Lasco, and sent letters to the leading cities of North Germany, urging them to unite in an orthodox Lutheran Confession against the Zürich Consensus. He received twenty-five responses, and issued them at Magdeburg, 1557. He also reprinted Melanchthon’s former opinions on the real presence (Hamburg, 1557). To meet these different assaults Calvin issued his "Last Admonition to Westphal" (1557). Westphal continued the controversy, but Calvin kept silent and handed him over to Beza. Besides these main contestants several others took part in the fight: on the Lutheran side, Timan, Schnepf, Alberus, Gallus, Judex, Brenz, Andreae, etc.; on the Reformed side, à Lasco, Ochino, Polanus, Bibliander, and Beza. Calvin indignantly rebuked the "rude and barbarous insults" to persecuted members of Christ, and characterized the ultra-Lutherans as men who would rather have peace with the Turks and Papists than with Swiss Christians. He called them "apes of Luther." He triumphantly vindicated against misrepresentations and objections his doctrine of the spiritual real presence of Christ, and the sealing communication of the life-giving virtue of his body in heaven to the believer through the power of the Holy Spirit.

• From The Art of Memoir

  got there. So many scenes—including his own run-in with the victim and a popular cross-dressing character’s role early in the investigation—are pure fiction. Which he at least admitted to, albeit somewhat slyly in back pages. That’s me speaking temperately as I can about other writers’ artistic freedom, which I would go to the mat for. No writer can impose his own standards onto any other, nor claim to speak for the whole genre. I would defend anybody’s right to move the line for veracity in memoir, though I’d argue the reader has a right to know. But my own humble practices wholly oppose making stuff up. As a reader, I am way less temperate in my opinions. It niggles the hell out of me never to know exactly what parts the fabricators have fudged. In her recent interview in The Believer, Vivian Gornick claims to falter at truth telling, even in putatively nonfiction forms. I embellish stories all the time. I do it even when I’m supposedly telling the unvarnished truth. Things happen, and I realize that what actually happens is only partly a story, and I have to make the story. So I lie. I mean, essentially—others would think I’m lying. But you understand. It’s irresistible to tell the story. And I don’t owe anybody the actuality. What is the actuality? I mean, whose business is it? Well, if I forked over a cover price for nonfiction, I consider it my business. While it’s great she owned up to her deceits, it’s hard to lend credence to any after-the-fact confession, especially one as vague or self-justifying as this one. It’s as if after lunch the deli guy quipped, “I put just a teaspoon of catshit in your sandwich, but you didn’t notice it at all.” To my mind, a small bit of catshit equals a catshit sandwich, unless I know where the catshit is and can eat around it. So here I stand with my little stick, attempting to draw a line in the dirt for the sake of memoir’s authenticity. Truth may have become a foggy, fuzzy nether area. But untruth is simple: making up events with the intention to deceive. Even in this day of the photoshopped Facebook pic, that’s not so morally hard to gauge. You know the difference between a vague memory and a clear one, and the vague ones either get left out or labeled dubious. It’s the

• From My People (2022)

  Surely the economic assistance the United States has provided Ethiopia in the past and the $350 million in assistance it is asking for in 2013 gives it some weight in pressing Addis Ababa to live up to the same principles enshrined in their constitution as in ours? Freedom of speech is a crucial cornerstone of democracy. It should not be a death sentence. New Party Urged for World BlacksThe New York Times SEPTEMBER 5, 1970 ATLANTA, Sept. 4—More than 1,700 delegates to the International Congress of African People here were urged to create a World African party. The proposal, on the second day of the four-day parley, was made by Imamu Baraka, the poet playwright, widely known as LeRoi Jones. The suggestion was greeted with enthusiasm by the conferees, for the most part youths, who represent a broad spectrum of black thought both in this country and in predominantly black countries abroad. Many delegates here hailed the key role that Mr. Jones played in the election of Newark’s first black mayor, Kenneth A. Gibson. The slightly built bearded Mr. Jones has emerged, along with Haywood Henry, as a key strategist in this quiet, orderly conference that is attempting to bridge the gap between black and Third World people. There are delegates here from twenty-seven African countries, the Caribbean nations, four South American countries, and Australia. Some of those from the United States include members of the Nation of Islam, and the Urban League. Mr. Henry, the principal organizer of this meeting, is a twenty- seven-year-old lecturer in black studies at both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We are controlled largely by the ideas of our oppressors,” Mr. Jones said in one of eleven workshop sessions being conducted throughout the conference. “The political party must build alternative systems, values, institutions that will move us and raise us. How we build alternative forms is what this congress is about.” Mr. Jones suggested that local community organizing would be the base for creating and developing “an international Pan-Africanist party capable of dealing not only with the international problems of Africans by means of international alliances and international exchanges of information and resources but also a party able to function on the smallest level. “If you can’t organize in a two-block area in your community,” he asked, “what can you do to defeat Nixon?” He urged “getting into the homes of the black people, every day, organizing from strictly local to regional, to state, while the Congress of African People superstructure works to create the national and international cohesion and development.” In addition, Mr. Jones argued that the organization must also “run candidates in all elections.” He maintained that local people respond more readily to “the goods and services that can accrue from even the smallest political office,” than other more esthetic appeals.

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

  Theodosius issued no law for the destruction of temples. He only continued Gratian’s policy of confiscating the temple property and withdrawing entirely the public contribution to the support of idolatry. But in many places, especially in the East, the fanaticism of the monks and the Christian populace broke out in a rage for destruction, which Libanius bitterly laments. He calls these iconoclastic monks "men in black clothes, as voracious as elephants, and insatiably thirsty, but concealing their sensuality under an artificial paleness." The belief of the Christians, that the heathen gods were living beings, demons,97 and dwelt in the temples, was the leading influence here, and overshadowed all artistic and archaeological considerations. In Alexandria, a chief seat of the Neo-Platonic mysticism, there arose, at the instigation of the violent and unspiritual bishop Theophilus,98 a bloody conflict between heathens and Christians, in which the colossal statue and the magnificent temple of Serapis, next to the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus in Rome the proudest monument of heathen architecture,99 was destroyed, without verifying the current expectation that upon its destruction the heavens would fall (391). The power of superstition once broken by this decisive blow, the other temples in Egypt soon met a similar fate; though the eloquent ruins of the works of the Pharaohs, the Ptolemies, and the Roman emperors in the valley of the Nile still stand and cast their twilight into the mysterious darkness of antiquity. Marcellus, bishop of Apamea in Syria, accompanied by an armed band of soldiers and gladiators, proceeded with the same zeal against the monuments and vital centres of heathen worship in his diocese, but was burnt alive for it by the enraged heathens, who went unpunished for the murder. In Gaul, St. Martin of Tours, between the years 375 and 400, destroyed a multitude of temples and images, and built churches and cloisters in their stead. But we also hear important protests from the church against this pious vandalism. Says Chrysostom at Antioch in the beginning of this reign, in his beautiful tract on the martyr Babylas: "Christians are not to destroy error by force and violence, but should work the salvation of men by persuasion, instruction, and love." In the same spirit says Augustin, though not quite consistently: "Let us first obliterate the idols in the hearts of the heathen, and once they become Christians they will either themselves invite us to the execution of so good a work [the destruction of the idols], or anticipate us in it. Now we must pray for them, and not exasperate them." Yet he commended the severe laws of the emperors against idolatry. In the west the work of destruction was not systematically carried on, and the many ruined temples of Greece and Italy at this day prove that even then reason and taste sometimes prevailed over the rude caprice of fanaticism, and that the maxim, It is easier to tear down than to build up, has its exceptions.

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

  He differed also from Calvin on the subject of persecution. Being himself persecuted, he was one of the very few advocates of religious toleration in opposition to the prevailing doctrine and practice of his age. In this point also he sympathized with the Unitarians. After the execution of Servetus and Calvin’s defence of the same, there appeared, under the false name of Martinus Bellius, a book against the theory of religious persecution, which was ascribed to Castellio.913 He denied the authorship. He had, however, contributed to it a part under the name of Basilius (Sebastian) Montfortius (Castellio). The pseudo-name of Martinus Bellius, the editor who wrote the dedicatory preface to Duke Christopher of Württemberg (the protector of Vergerius), has never been unmasked. The book is a collection of judgments of different writers against the capital punishment of heretics. Calvin and Beza were indignant, and correctly ascribed the book to a secret company of Italian "Academici,"—Laelius Socinus, Curio, and Castellio. They also suspected that Magdeburg, the alleged place of publication, was Basel, and the printer an Italian refugee, Pietro Perna. Castellio wrote also a tract, during the Huguenot wars in France, 1562, in which he defended religious liberty as the only remedy against religious wars.914 § 127. Calvinism and Unitarianism. The Italian Refugees. Comp. §§ 38–40 (pp. 144–163). I. Calvin: Ad questiones Georgii Blandatrae responsum (1558); Responsum ad Fratres Polonos quomodo mediator sit Christus ad refutandum Stancari errorem (1560); Impietas Valentini Gentilis detecta et palam traducta qui Christum non sine sacrilega blasphemia Deum essentiatum esse fingit (1561); Brevis admonitio ad Fratres Polonos ne triplicem in Deo essentiam pro tribus personis imaginando tres sibi Deos fabricent (1563); Epistola Jo. Calv. quo fidem Admonitionis ab eo nuper editae apud Polonos confirmat (1563). All in Opera, Tom. IX. 321 sqq. The correspondence of Calvin with Lelio Sozini and other Italians, see below. On the controversy with Servetus, see next chapter. The Socinian writings are collected in the Bibliotheca fratrum Polonorum quos Unitarios vocant, Irenopoli (Amsterdam), 1656 sqq., 8 vols in 11 tomes fol. It contains the writings of the younger Socinus and his successors (Schlichting, Crell, etc.). II. Trechsel: Die Protestantischen Antitrinitarier, Heidelberg, 1839 and 1844, 2 vols. The first volume treats chiefly of Servetus; the second, of the Italian Antitrinitarians.—Otto Fock: Der Socinianismus, Kiel, 1847. (The first part contains the history, the second and more valuable part the system, of Socinianism.)—Schweizer: Die Protest. Centraldogmen (Zürich, 1854), vol. I. 293 sqq.—Henry, III. 276 sqq.—Dyer, 446 sqq.—Stähelin, II. 319 sqq.—L. Coligny: L’Antitrinitarianism à Genève au temps de Calvin. Genève, 1873.—Harnack: Dogmengeschichte, III. (1890) 653–691. Comp. Sand: Bibliotheca Antitrinitariorum, 1684.

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

  For when he saw the picture of Christ or a saint1205 on the altar-curtain in Anablatha, a village of Palestine, he tore away the curtain, because it was contrary to the Scriptures to hang up the picture of a man in the church, and he advised the officers to use the cloth for winding the corpse of some poor person.1206 This arbitrary conduct, however, excited great indignation, and Epiphanius found himself obliged to restore the injury to the village church by another curtain. 2. The prevalent spirit of the age already very decidedly favored this material representation as a powerful help to virtue and devotion, especially for the uneducated classes, whence the use of images, in fact, mainly proceeded. Plastic representation, it is true, was never popular in the East. The Greek church tolerates no statues, and forbids even crucifixes. In the West, too, in this period, sculpture occurs almost exclusively in bas relief and high relief, particularly on sarcophagi, and in carvings of ivory and gold in church decorations. Sculpture, from its more finite nature, lies farther from Christianity than the other arts. Painting, on the contrary, was almost universally drawn into the service of religion; and that, not primarily from the artistic impulse which developed itself afterwards, but from the practical necessity of having objects of devout reverence in concrete form before the eye, as a substitute for the sacred books, which were accessible to the educated alone. Akin to this is the universal pleasure of children in pictures. The church-teachers approved and defended this demand, though they themselves did not so directly need such helps. In fact, later tradition traced it back to apostolic times, and saw in the Evangelist Luke the first sacred painter. Whereof only so much is true: that he has sketched in his Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles vivid and faithful pictures of the Lord, His mother, and His disciples, which are surely of infinitely greater value than all pictures in color and statues in marble.1207 Basil the Great († 379) says "I confess the appearance of the Son of God in the flesh, and the holy Mary as the mother of God, who bore Him according to the flesh. And I receive also the holy apostles and prophets and martyrs. Their likenesses I revere and kiss with homage, for they are handed down from the holy apostles, and are not forbidden, but on the contrary painted in all our churches."1208 His brother, Gregory of Nyssa, also, in his memorial discourse on the martyr Theodore, speaks in praise of sacred painting, which "is wont to speak silently from the walls, and thus to do much good." The bishop Paulinus of Nola, who caused biblical pictures to be exhibited annually at the festival seasons in the church of St.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Saint-Florent adds that, several years later, having recognized you in Lyon, he yielded to your importunings and permitted you to come to pay him a call at his home upon condition you would give him your word to behave well in future and that, while he was delivering a lecture on manners to you, while he was seeking to persuade you to persist along the paths of righteousness, you carried insolence and crime to the point of choosing these moments of kindness to steal a watch and one hundred louis he had left lying upon the mantel...." And, profiting from the resentment and anger such atrocious calumnies provoked in me, Cardoville ordered the court clerk to write that my silence and my facial expressions were ample acknowledgment of my guilt and were tantamount to a confession. I threw myself upon the ground, I made the walls resound with my cries, I struck my head against the stone floor, hoping to obtain a speedier death, unable to find vehicles to give expression to my rage: "Villain!" I screamed, "I put my faith in the God of Justice who will revenge me for your crimes; He shall cry out innocence, He shall make you repent your disgraceful abuse of the authority vested in you!" Cardoville rings and tells the jailer to take me away, I appear, says he, to be unsettled by despair and remorse and, at any rate, in no state to follow the interrogation; "But, on the other hand, what remains to be asked or said? The dossier is complete; she has confessed to all her crimes." And the villain leaves peacefully I And divine lightning strikes him not! The case was tried in short order; motivated and directed by hatred, vengeance, and lust, the court promptly condemned me and I was dispatched to Paris for the confirmation of my sentence. While on this fatal journey, which, though guiltless, I made in the character of the last of criminals, the most bitter and the most dolorous thoughts gathered in my head and completed the desolation of my heart. Under what doom-spelling star must I have been born, I wondered, in order that I be utterly incapable of conceiving a single generous sentiment without immediately being drowned in a sea of misfortunes! And why is it that this enlightened Providence whose justice I am pleased to worship, the while punishing me for my virtues, simultaneously shows me those who crush me with their crimes carried to the pinnacle of happiness! During my childhood I meet a usurer; he seeks to induce me to commit a theft, I refuse, he becomes rich. I fall amongst a band of thieves, I escape from them with a man whose life I save; by way of thanks, he rapes me. I reach the property of an aristocratic debauchee who has me set upon and devoured by his dogs for not having wanted to poison his aunt.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  32 Fragments of the text have been found spanning a thousand years, so it seems that this tale was widely known. 33 Thus writing, originally invented to serve the structural violence of Sumer, began to record the disquiet of the more thoughtful members of the ruling class, who could find no solution to civilization’s dilemma but tried at least to look squarely at the problem. We shall see that others—prophets, sages, and mystics— would also raise their voices in protest and try to devise a more equitable way for human beings to live together. The Epic of Gilgamesh, set toward the mid-third millennium, when Sumer was militarizing, presents martial violence as the hallmark of civilization. 34 When the people beg the gods for help, Anu attempts to alleviate their suffering by giving Gilgamesh someone of his own size to fight with and siphon off some of his excessive aggression. So the Mother Goddess creates Enkidu, primeval man. He is huge, hairy, and has prodigious strength but is a gentle, kindly soul, wandering happily with the herbivores and protecting them from predators. But to fulfill Anu’s plan, Enkidu has to make the transition from peaceable barbarian to aggressive civilized man. The priestess Shamhat is given the task of educating him, and under her tutelage, Enkidu learns to reason, understand speech, and eat human food; his hair is cut, sweet oil is rubbed into his skin, and finally “he turned into a man. He put on a garment, became like a warrior.” 35 Civilized man was essentially a man of war, full of testosterone. When Shamhat mentions Gilgamesh’s military prowess, Enkidu becomes pale with anger. “Take me to Gilgamesh!” he cries, pounding his chest. “I will shout in his face: I am the mightiest! I am the man who can make the world tremble! I am supreme!” 36 No sooner do these two alpha males set eyes on each other than they begin wrestling, careening through the streets of Uruk, thrashing limbs entwined in a near-erotic embrace, until finally, satiated, they “kissed each other and formed a friendship.” 37 By this period, the Mesopotamian aristocracy had begun to supplement its income with warfare, so in the very next episode Gilgamesh announces that he is about to lead a military expedition of fifty men to the Cedar Forest, guarded by the fearsome dragon Humbaba, to bring this precious wood back to Sumer. It was probably by such acquisition raids that the Mesopotamian cities came to dominate the northern highlands, which were rich in the luxury goods favored by the aristocracy. 38 Merchants had long been dispatched to Afghanistan, the Indus Valley, and Turkey to bring back timber, rare and base metals, and precious and semiprecious stones. 39 But for an aristocrat like Gilgamesh, the only noble way to acquire these scarce resources was by force. In all future agrarian states, aristocrats would be distinguished from the rest of the population by their ability to live without working.

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

  The moral character of those councils was substantially parallel with that of earlier and later ecclesiastical assemblies, and cannot therefore be made a criterion of their historical importance and their dogmatic authority. They faithfully reflect both the light and the shade of the ancient church. They bear the heavenly treasure in earthen vessels. If even among the inspired apostles at the council of Jerusalem there was much debate,634 and soon after, among Peter, Paul, and Barnabas, a violent, though only temporary collision, we must of course expect much worse of the bishops of the Nicene and the succeeding age, and of a church already interwoven with a morally degenerate state. Together with abundant talents, attainments, and virtues, there were gathered also at the councils ignorance, intrigues, and partisan passions, which had already been excited on all sides by long controversies preceding and now met and arrayed themselves, as hostile armies, for open combat. For those great councils, all occasioned by controversies on the most important and the most difficult problems of theology, are, in fact, to the history of doctrine, what decisive battles are to the history of war. Just because religion is the deepest and holiest interest of man, are religious passions wont to be the most violent and bitter; especially in a time when all classes, from imperial court to market stall, take the liveliest interest in theological speculation, and are drawn into the common vortex of excitement. Hence the notorious rabies theologorum was more active in the fourth and fifth centuries than it has been in any other period of history, excepting, perhaps, in the great revolution of the sixteenth century, and the confessional polemics of the seventeenth.

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

  Epiphanius, in his seventy-eighth Heresy, combats the advocates of the opposite view in Arabia toward the end of the fourth century (367), as heretics under the title of Antidikomarianites, opposers of the dignity of Mary, i.e., of her perpetual virginity. But, on the other hand, he condemns, in the seventy-ninth Heresy, the contemporaneous sect of the Collyridians in Arabia, a set of fanatical women, who, as priestesses, rendered divine worship to Mary, and, perhaps in imitation of the worship of Ceres, offered little cakes (kollurivde") to her; he claims adoration for God and Christ alone. Jerome wrote, about 383, with indignation and bitterness against Helvidius and Jovinian, who, citing Scripture passages and earlier church teachers, like Tertullian, maintained that Mary bore children to Joseph after the birth of Christ. He saw in this doctrine a desecration of the temple of the Holy Ghost, and he even compares Helvidius to Erostratus, the destroyer of the temple at Ephesus.784 The bishop Bonosus of Sardica was condemned for the same view by the Illyrican bishops, and the Roman bishop Siricius approved the sentence, A.D. 392. Augustine went a step farther. In an incidental remark against Pelagius, he agreed with him in excepting Mary, "propter honorem Domini," from actual (but not from original) sin.785 This exception he is willing to make from the sinfulness of the race, but no other. He taught the sinless birth and life of Mary, but not her immaculate conception. He no doubt assumed, as afterward Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas, a sanctificatio in utero, like that of Jeremiah (Jer. i. 5) and John the Baptist (Luke i. 15), whereby, as those two men were fitted for their prophetic office, she in a still higher degree was sanctified by a special operation of the Holy Ghost before her birth, and prepared to be a pure receptacle for the divine Logos. The reasoning of Augustine backward from the holiness of Christ to the holiness of His mother was an important turn, which was afterward pursued to further results. The same reasoning leads as easily to the doctrine of the immaculate conception of Mary, though also, just as well, to a sinless mother of Mary herself, and thus upward to the beginning, of the race, to another Eve who never fell. Augustine’s opponent, Pelagius, with his monastic, ascetic idea of holiness and his superficial doctrine of sin, remarkably outstripped him on this point, ascribing to Mary perfect sinlessness. But, it should be remembered, that his denial of original sin to all men, and his excepting of sundry saints of the Old Testament besides Mary, such as Abel, Enoch, Abraham, Isaac, Melchizedek, Samuel, Elijah, Daniel, from actual sin,786 so that pavnte" in Rom. v. 12, in his view, means only a majority, weaken the honor he thus appears to confer upon the mother of the Lord. The Augustinian view long continued to prevail; but at last Pelagius won the victory on this point in the Roman church.787

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Moreover, the revelation which Freud imagined would poison female life is probably, in most cases, a glimpse of a male playmate urinating or having a bath. It is never explained how the girl child makes the logical jump from the sight of bathing or urination to knowledge that the boy masturbates with this novel article. Even should her first sight of the penis occur in masturbatory games, Freud’s supposition that she could judge this foreign item to be more conducive to autoerotic pleasure than her own clitoris (she having no possible experience of penile autoeroticism as males have none of clitoral) such as assumption is groundless. Yet Freud believed that female autoeroticism declines as a result of enlightenment, finding in this “yet another surprising effect of penis-envy, or of the discovery of the inferiority of the clitoris.”64 Here, as is so often the case, one cannot separate Freud’s account of how a child reasons from how Freud himself reasons, and his own language, invariably pejorative, tends to confuse the issue irremediably. Indeed, since he has no objective proof of any consequence to offer in support of his notion of penis envy or of a female castration complex,65 one is struck by how thoroughly the subjectivity in which all these events are cast tends to be Freud’s own, or that of a strong masculine bias, even of a rather gross male-supremacist bias.66 This habitual masculine bias of Freud’s own terms and diction, and the attitude it implies, is increased and further emphasized by his followers: Deutsch refers to the clitoris as an “inadequate substitute” for the penis; Karl Abraham refers to a “poverty in external genitals” in the female, and all conclude that even bearing children can be but a poor substitute for a constitutional inadequacy.67 As Klein observes in her critique of Freud, it is a curious hypothesis that “one half of humanity should have biological reasons to feel at a disadvantage for not having what the other half possess (but not vice versa).”68 It is especially curious to imagine that half the race should attribute their clear and obvious social-status inferiority to the crudest biological reasons when so many more promising social factors are involved. It would seem that Freud has managed by this highly unlikely hypothesis to assume that young females negate the validity, and even, to some extent, the existence, of female sexual characteristics altogether. Surely the first thing all children must notice is that mother has breasts, while father has none. What is possibly the rather impressive effect of childbirth on young minds is here overlooked, together with the girl’s knowledge not only of her clitoris, but her vagina as well.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Since Freud’s conception of female character depends as much upon his understanding of biology as it does upon the psychological motive of penis envy, it is necessary to outline the former before proceeding. For the gravest distortion in Freud’s theory of female psychology stems from his incapacity, unconscious or deliberate, to separate two radically different phenomena, female biology and feminine status. By inferring the latter is as much, or nearly as much, the product of nature as the former, and somehow inevitable, rather than the product of a social situation, he seems eager to convince us that what a man’s world has made of woman is only what nature had made of her first. In general, Freud defines and identifies the masculine with activity, the feminine with passivity.94 He rationalizes this on two grounds: the sexual behavior of his contemporaries, both in its social and in its coital manifestations, and the attributes of biosexual materials and processes: sperm and penetration are said to be active, vaginal reception and the ova are said to be passive.95 The biological data are themselves overstated; not only does the ova journey through the Fallopian tubes and so partake of activity, the sperm are caught, held, and lifted by the plungerlike movement of the cervix and so partake of passivity. Yet it is scarcely rational to attempt to formulate the workings of an entire society upon minor distinctions in the properties of microscopic human cells. Nor does Freud ever go so far. He does, however, appear to use sexual cells as sources of analogy both of temperament and role and in the psychological aspects of masculine and feminine. Failing to pause and to consider fully how “masculine” and “feminine” are elaborate behavioral constructs for each sex within society, obviously cultural and subject to endless cross-cultural variation, Freud somewhat precipitously equates such behavior with inherency, with the biologically inevitable, and finally arrives at prescriptive conformity to a social norm built upon what he believes to be an anatomical base.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  In analyzing the behavior of each sex, Erikson has solicitously italicized all the clue words in his somewhat overdeliberate verbal interpretation of the events he beheld into a sort of anatomical predestination. The description, which for the sake of fairness, has been reprinted almost in its entirety, has its amusing moments. The vulva, less the author’s interest than the womb, is to be derived from the phrase “elaborate doorways”; one wonders if the clitoris may be construed from some element of entrance decor. The time-honored device of equating “femininity” with the passive (“static”) so that one may prescribe and enforce it is balanced by the equation of the penis with grandiose towers, speeding and colliding autos, cannons and ruins. “Do we have wars because of detumescence?” one is expected to ask. Feminine “passivity” is always reasoned from anatomy, but masculine activity is generally reasoned from history and technology; a logical inconsistency which leaves the parallel with an asymmetry that is aesthetically unsatisfying.193 As an experiment, there is so much in Erikson’s report and in the implications he derives from it, which will not bear scrutiny, that its claim to be accepted as scientific evidence is negligible indeed. It does however, tell us a good deal about Erikson, a man genuinely interested in peace and the “feminine” virtues, although apparently quite unable to conceive that since they are humanly valuable they should, logically, be equally valuable for both sexes. Within the experiment no variable was employed, no attempt to reverse proceedings, both of which are essential when one is trying to prove inherency, since what is not arbitrary, imposed, irrelevant, acquired, or learned, will continue to be manifest despite other instructions or modifications in the situation. Erikson’s whole theory is built on psychoanalysis’ persistent error of mistaking learned behavior for biology. The elaborate phraseology of “somatic design” is calculated to appeal to the common reader and to convince social scientists, often remarkably gullible in respect to physiological evidence. When describing behavior by hypotheses which are so often intuitive, even literary, they are all too prone to make vague appeals to the natural sciences for the support of ascertainable evidence, enlisted to confirm the mythic with incontrovertible data.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The Blacks is a turning point in Genet’s exegesis of the politics and psychology of oppression, marking a move away from defeated self-hate to dignity and self-definition. And, finally, to rage. Blacks, colonials, women, all prisoners of definitions imposed on them by others, must, if they are not to become the victims of their own self-loathing (like the maids) or of their traditional illusions (like the people of The Balcony) find freedom by an angry assertion of selfhood and solidarity. Exploring the vexed and complicated problem of sexual and racial politics, Genet suggests that whites have divided blacks, as the colons did the Algerians, by introducing or capitalizing upon a variety of sexual hostility which provides a particular set of advantages for white ends. Among the blacks this has been effected by the proposition that the white master’s aesthetic is embodied in “his woman,” a bit of property he advertises so that it might be coveted, coveted so that the act may be punished. Meanwhile the black woman is imprisoned as her master’s whore—“Every brothel has its negress,”77 “I make my troops tear off a piece every Saturday,”78 the White Governor chuckles. For the white distorts love and sexuality in his subjects, forcing the black male to accept both the white woman’s beauty, and scorn of the black woman. “I hate you,” Village confesses to Virtue. “I began to hate you when every thing about you would have kindled love and when love would have made men’s contempt unbearable.”79 Unable to “bear the weight of the world’s condemnation,” he has shared its disdain. Exorcising the myth which has bewitched them, the black lovers must first repudiate the white fallacy that the female is an aesthetic object and that beauty itself is white. Until this lie goes, Village cannot love Virtue, Charley’s despised prostitute, who, of all the blacks, is “the only one who experiences shame to the bitter end.”80 The signal of the play’s victory is his final acceptance of her. Sounding the very depths of the colonial attitude, Genet demonstrates how the inability to accept the black woman is tantamount to a kind of self-hatred infecting the whole race. “Stately mother of my race…you are Africa, oh monumental night, and I hate you,”81 Village bursts out. Felicity, the Black Queen, and the spirit of Africa, the matriarch who challenges and defeats the figurehead of the White Queen, is in fact the mother of this race: its future depends on its ability to come to terms with its origin, to identify with its negritude, the alternative value which will save it from the destructive standards of whiteness. In Felicity’s magnificent evocations of Africa, the force and magic of an entire continent is gathered:

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The brothel is a sort of barometer of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary progress. During the stupor of colonial despair, it was the refuge of dreams and hope, where Si Slimane, the first martyr-agitator, was honored. When the insurrection actually occurs, the whores lose their leper status, are united with the village women and become one with the national cause. For a while they dispense free service. Later they even consider closing shop. But as the revolt is co-opted by efficient native patriarchal authority (“We want to be the stronger”98 the new soldiers preach to the village) the prostitutes fall back to their traditional outcast standing. One is murdered by the village wives and the rest settle back into the normalcy of divided female camps, inflationary prices, and an ill-disguised hostility for the men who use them. Kadidja and Ommu were the personifications of the popular rage. The new Arab army, like the French Legion, are but the old oppressive virility cult subsidized by the state, another set of bullies, in power through a new establishment. And as officials, they are infinitely more noxious than individualist criminals or the Big Shots of Mettray. Of the triad of matriarchs who proclaim the spirit of the revolution, Kadidja and Said’s Mother (who grew so unconventional she lifted her hand to a man and strangled a French soldier) have been ghosts long enough to be beyond politics. Only Ommu is left. And her only course lies in “bottling” Said, the symptom of that crushing ignominy which, through the example of its ulcerous spiritual condition, first excited the tumult. Said is the product of the colonial system, a way of life, which, since it produced the revolution, must never be forgotten. If the shame of the past were to be obliterated, the Algerians would also be left without purpose. So Said must be preserved in art, or as Ommu puts it, he must “become song.” Turning upon a soldier of the new militia, Ommu taunts them as a new set of bosses: “You lousy little stinker, you snot nose…go join the other side where there’s stately beauty…maybe you’ve already done it, you’re joining them and copying them excites you. To be their reflection is already to be one of them.”99 For the “expected” has come about, and Ommu sees her own sons have “reached the stage of uniforms, discipline, jaunty marches and bare arms…parade and heroic death.”100 Not to mention “martial beauty” which as she points out, equates lovemaking with murder quite as the Legion had done.101