Awe

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 Austerlitz (2001)

  following the white strip of the Suffolk coast, when shadows emerged from the depths of the sea, gradually rising and inclining towards us, until the last gleam of light was extinguished on the horizons of the western world. Soon the shapes of the landscape below, the woods and the pale stubble fields, could be distinguished only as shadowy outlines, and I shall never forget, said Austerlitz, how the curving estuary of the Thames emerged before us as if out of nothing, a dragon’s tail, black as cart grease, winding its way through the falling night, while the lights of Canvey Island, Sheerness, and Southend-on-Sea came on beside it. Later, as we described a wide arc over Picardy in the darkness and then turned back on course for England, if we raised our eyes from the illuminated board instruments to look through the glazed cockpit we could see the whole vault of heaven as I had never seen it before, apparently at a standstill but in truth turing slowly, with the constellations of the Swan, Cassiopeia, the Pleiades, the Charioteer, the Corona Borealis, and all the rest almost lost in the shimmering dust of the myriads of nameless stars sprinkled over the sky. It was in the autumn of 1965, continued Austerlitz, who had drifted for some time in his memories, that Gerald began developing what we now know was his trail- blazing hypothesis on the so-called Eagle Nebula in the constellation of the Serpent. He spoke of huge regions of interstellar gas which, not unlike stormclouds, became concentrated into vast, billowing forms projecting several light-years into the void, where new stars were born in a process of condensation steadily intensifying under the influence of gravity. I remember Gerald’s saying that there were positive nurseries of stars out there, a claim which I recently found confirmed in a newspaper report accompanying one of the spectacular photographs sent back to earth from the Hubble telescope on its further journey into space. At any rate, said Austerlitz, Gerald then moved from Cambridge to continue his work at an astrophysics research institute in Geneva, where I visited him several times, and as we walked out of the city together and along the banks of the lake I observed the way his ideas, like the stars themselves, gradually emerged from the whirling nebulae of his astrophysical fantasies. On one of these occasions Gerald also told me about the flights he had made over the gleaming, snow-covered mountains in his Cessna, over the volcanic peaks of the Puy-de-DoOme region, down the beautiful Garonne and on to Bordeaux. I suppose it was inevitable that he would fail to come home from one of these flights, said Austerlitz. It was a bad day when I heard that he had crashed in the Savoy Alps, and perhaps that was the beginning of my own decline, a withdrawal into myself which became increasingly morbid and intractable with the passage of time.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  First, think about those experiences that touch you deeply and lift you momentarily beyond yourself so that you seem to inhabit your humanity more fully than usual. It may be listening to a particular piece of music, reading certain poems, looking at a beautiful view, or sitting quietly with someone you love. Spend a little time each day enjoying this ekstasis and notice how difficult it is to speak of your experience or to say exactly what it is that moves you. Try to explain to somebody precisely how it has this effect on you, what it is telling you, and listen to the inadequacy of your words. Investigate the theme of unknowing in human experience. If you are scientifically inclined, you can explore the indeterminate universe of quantum mechanics, the neurological complexity of the mind, or depth psychology. Second, stand back and listen to the aggressive certainty that characterizes so much of our discourse these days. Consider your profession or something that really interests you: literature, the law, economics, sports, pop music, medicine, or history. Isn’t it true that the more you know about this special field of yours, the more acutely you become aware of all you still have to learn? Then notice how disturbing it is to hear somebody talking dogmatically about your subject over dinner or on the radio, making serious mistakes and false claims that are almost physically painful to hear. When you listen to talk shows and phone-ins or to politicians arguing with one another, do you think these people really know what they are talking about? Are they able to see both sides of an argument? Are they identifying themselves too closely with their own opinions, in the way Zhuangzi suggested, so that self-interest is clouding their judgment? Are they more interested in scoring points than seeking the truth? Does anybody ever say “I don’t know”? What would Socrates have made of these discussions? As an exercise in open-mindedness, select one of your most deeply held opinions—about politics, religion, the economy, football, movies, music, or business—and make a list of everything you know that supports your viewpoint. Then make a list of arguments that contradict it. If you are in a reading discussion group, conduct a debate in which everybody argues for a position that is the opposite of what he or she believes. Then discuss your experience. What does it feel like to enter into another perspective? Did you learn something that you didn’t know before? What do you think Socrates meant when he said, “The unexamined life is not worth living”? Third, spend some time trying to define exactly what distinguishes you from everybody else.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  pyramid against one of the side walls, and departing from their native custom, said Austerlitz, they had lined these casks themselves with wood shavings from a sawmill down beside the river. Most of them even survived the hard winter of 1947, since Adela kept the old orangery stove heated for them through the two icy months of January and February. It was wonderful, said Austerlitz, to see the dexterity with which the birds clambered around the trelliswork, hanging on by their beaks, and performing all kinds of acrobatic feats as they came down; to watch them flying in and out of the open windows or hopping and walking along the ground, always active and always, or that was the impression they gave, intent upon some purpose or other. In fact they were very like human beings in many ways. You might hear them sigh, laugh, sneeze, and yawn. They cleared their throats before beginning to converse in their own cockatoo language, they showed themselves alert, scheming, mischievous and sly, deceitful, malicious, vindictive and quarrelsome. They liked certain people, particularly Adela and Gerald, and persecuted others with downright malice, for instance the Welsh housekeeper who seldom showed her face out of doors. They seemed to know exactly when she would be going to chapel, always wearing a black hat and carrying a black umbrella, and on these occasions they lay in wait to screech at her in the most obnoxious way. They also reflected human society in the way they ganged up together in ever-changing groups, or then again paired off in couples sitting side by side as if they knew nothing but harmony and were forever inseparable. They even had their own cemetery, with a long row of graves in a clearing surrounded by strawberry trees, and one of the rooms on the upper floor of Andromeda Lodge had in it what was obviously a purpose-built wall cupboard, full of dark green cardboard boxes containing a number of dead birds of species related to the cockatoos, their red-chested or yellow-headed brothers, Hyacinth and Scarlet Macaws, Ruby Lorikeets and Blue-Winged Parrotlets, Horned Parakeets and Ground Parrots, all brought back by Gerald’s great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather from his circumnavigation of the globe, or alternatively ordered from a trader called Théodore Grace in Le Havre for a few guineas or louis d’or, as noted on the provenances placed inside the boxes. The finest of all these birds, in a collection which also included some native woodpeckers, wrynecks, kites, and orioles, was the African Gray parrot. I can still see the inscription on his green cardboard sarcophagus: Jaco, Ps. erithacus L. He came from the Congo and had reached the great age of sixty-six in his Welsh exile, as his obituary recounted, adding that he had been very tame and trusting, was a quick learner, chattered away to himself and others, could whistle entire songs and had composed some too, but best of all he liked to mimic the voices of children and to have them teach him new words. His one

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  “But I’m placing a bet that I’ll have that Lewis wrapped around my finger by Saturday night.” “Yes, the most improbable candidate for your love in the whole school.” “I like a challenge,” he said. We laughed at the incongruity. Lewis was Clarence’s best friend. He rode bulls and even looked like a bull. He was square to the earth and thought of himself as a stud. He would beat Herbie up if he caught Herbie staring at him in public. Lupita’s singing pulled me up the hallway as I walked to my meeting with Mrs. Wilhelm. Her office was near the dorm entrance, where Lupita now perched, a crowd around her. I stopped to listen along with everyone else who was captured by her voice. Her voice was a living, breathing thing, like Jimi Hendrix’s guitar, like Jackson Pollock’s paintings. My father had told me that some voices are so true they can be used as weapons, can maneuver the weather and change time. He said that a voice that powerful could walk away from the singer if it is shamed. After my father left us, I learned that some voices could deceive you. There is a top layer and there is a bottom layer, and sometimes they don’t match. My stepfather’s voice had a top layer. It was jovial and witty and knew how to appeal to women. The bottom layer was a belt studded with anger. Everyone clapped when the song was over. “Forget opera,” I blurted out. “You can sing anything you want.” Everyone turned to look at me, including Clarence, who was leaning against the wall, pretending he was an innocent audience member. “Hey, thanks,” Lupita said warmly. “Do I know you?” We had met at the ditch. Maybe she had forgotten, and then I saw her eyes move sideways toward the dorm assistants, who were listening to everything. We couldn’t be too careful. Maybe she too was waiting for Mrs. Wilhelm. “I’m Lupita, from the planet Venus.” She smiled at me, aware of the rapt attention of the high school boys, who all snickered when she mentioned Venus. I introduced myself as being from Oklahoma and added, “Oklahoma is a long way from Venus.” Everyone laughed. We were all in awe of this girl with the magic voice whose easy sexual suggestiveness reminded us of an earthy goddess. Though she was my age, Lupita seemed suddenly older as she slid her hands along her tight sheath skirt. Her nails were long and manicured, the look Georgette strived for but would never get. In that small moment I felt sorry for Georgette. She didn’t have a chance. “Do you really like my singing?” She glanced over at Clarence, who gave her a shy dance of his eyes. It was obvious that despite his bet, they had a thing for each other. There was a light that jumped between them, an electrical force so strong that it sparkled in the late afternoon sun.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  There had been those young years of her mother’s in Ireland; she spoke of them sometimes but only vaguely, as though they were now very far away, as though they had never seriously counted. And yet she had been lovely, lovely Anna Molloy, much admired, much loved and constantly courted—And her father, he too had been in the world, in Rome, in Paris, and often in London—he had not lived much at Morton in those days; and how queer it seemed, there had been a time when her father had actually not known her mother. They had been completely unconscious of each other, he for twenty-nine years, she for just over twenty, and yet all the while had been drawing together, in spite of themselves, always nearer together. Then had come that morning away in County Clare, when those two had suddenly seen each other, and had known from that moment the meaning of life, of love, just because they had seen each other. Her father spoke very seldom of such things, but this much he had told her, it had all grown quite clear—What had it felt like when they realized each other? What did it feel like to see things quite clearly, to know the innermost reason for things? Morton—her mother had come home to Morton, to wonderful, gently enfolding Morton. She had passed for the first time through the heavy white doorway under the shining semi-circular fanlight. She had walked into the old square hall with its bearskins, and its pictures of funny, dressed-up looking Gordons—the hall with the whip-rack where Stephen kept her whips—the hall with the beautiful iridescent window, that looked over the lawns and herbaceous borders. Then, perhaps hand in hand, they had passed beyond the hall, her father a man, her mother a woman, with their destiny already upon them—and that destiny of theirs had been Stephen.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  40 Yet they each see , understand and experience this world in very different ways, as a result of the different perceptual frameworks they use to interpret it. 41 Although this statement needs to be treated with caution, we could say that these two observers live in different worlds, in that each has a quite distinct vision of the world and their place within it. And this affects how we feel about ourselves and the world. It makes no difference to me how many moons the planet Saturn has, or whether the scientific consensus about the age of the universe is 13.8 billion years or 13.797 billion years. These don’t affect me. I don’t connect with them. From a religious perspective, God is not an item of information but the basis of a meaningful life, evoking worship and adoration rather than an indifferent mental assent. Faith is affective, not simply cognitive, offering transformation and not merely information . Religion in general has the capacity to create a new and intensified engagement with the natural world and the fundamental questions of existence. My Oxford colleague Mark Wynn has explored the ways in which religious ideas or frameworks can help stimulate and shape our sensory experience. Wynn channels the Harvard psychologist William James, who noted that an individual’s perception and experience of the world often shifted radically as a result of their religious conversion: ‘It was like entering another world, a new state of existence. Natural objects were glorified, my spiritual vision was so clarified that I saw beauty in every material object in the universe, the woods were vocal with heavenly music.’ 42 This emphasis on a new way of seeing things, or a new quality of apprehending the world, needs further exploration. David Cooper suggests that a religious teacher or tradition offers not so much a set of ideas to be accepted but a ‘vision’ that is to be apprehended and inhabited – a way of beholding our world which, once it has been ‘properly absorbed’, leads to a new attitude towards the world. 43 While Cooper explores this question from a Daoist perspective, the same point is made repeatedly from other religious standpoints. One of the most important recent discussions of this point is found in Charles Taylor’s notion of the ‘social imaginary’, which shifts attention from abstract theories and ideas about reality to the way in which we imagine our world, and locate ourselves within it. The way we imagine the world is prior to what we believe about it, which is ‘not expressed in theoretical terms, but is carried in images, stories, and legends’, 44 more easily and naturally expressed using the language of ‘seeing’ than ‘thinking’. The Oxford philosopher of religion Austin Farrer saw this point as central to understanding why C. S. Lewis’s way of commending Christianity was so effective, particularly in comparison with more abstract rational defences of faith.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Significance . Many feel overwhelmed by the immensity of the universe and the depth of cosmic time, which seems to make human beings utterly insignificant. This point is explored by the novelist Marilynne Robinson, in a theologically engaged essay entitled ‘Psalm Eight’. Robinson here explores the deep human feeling of insignificance in the face of the temporal and spatial vastness of the universe by drawing on the opening verses of this psalm: When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? (Psalm 8:3–4). Robinson suggests that the fact that this ‘infinite distance between God and humankind’ is intentionally and graciously bridged by God. In the act of incarnation – the distinctively Christian idea that God enters and inhabits human history in Christ – God ‘visits’ humanity, deeming us to be worthy of such a divine act of humility and compassion. If the great heavens are the work of God’s fingers, what is small and mortal man? The poem answers its own question this way: Man is crowned with honor and glory. He is in a singular sense what God has made him, because of the dignity God has conferred upon him. 56 Beliefs shape our understanding of meaning, in a way that bare facts do not. Each worldview will articulate significantly different understandings of the nature and grounds of coherence, purpose and significance. The point is that beliefs can make human existence existentially viable. Yet while some beliefs liberate and ennoble, others enslave and impoverish. Wittgenstein’s dark broodings on the risk of being ‘held captive by a picture’ express a genuine concern, which I shall consider in the next chapter. Yet we need to move on to consider a further question: how can we understand how beliefs are best enacted in life? What is the most authentic or appropriate expression of certain beliefs? If beliefs make possible certain ways of life, where can we find models of such lives? What exemplars of embodied belief can be identified, that help us grasp both the impact of beliefs on human existence, and the forms of life that they inform and enable? Saints and Sages: Exemplars and a Meaningful Life In her important reflections on the growing importance of moral exemplars in a postmodern context, the American philosopher Edith Wyschogrod highlighted the importance of having someone we can observe or imagine who lives up to and lives out an ethical ideal, rather than simply being presented with an abstract theory that is detached from real life. ‘To lead a moral life one does not need a theory about how one should live, but a flesh and blood existent.’

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Pea "ravioli" was a seemingly impossible concoction in which the bright green, liquidy essence of baby peas was wrapped only in itself with no pasta or outer shell to contain it: a ravioli filling miraculously suspended in space. Carrot "air" was an intensely flavored, truly lighter-than-air froth of carrot and tangerine served in a cut-glass bowl. I accidentally inhaled while bringing the spoon to my mouth—aspirating some into my lungs—and struggled to maintain composure as I coughed and turned red. The inconceivable-sounding iced powder of foie gras with foie gras consomme was one of those revelatory concepts for which Adria is famous. A hot, perfectly clear consomme of foie shared a bowl with a just-fallen snow of foie gras "powder." Instructed to eat from one side of the dish then the other, alternating between hot and cold, I was awestruck by the fact that the frozen, finely ground powder somehow maintained its structural integrity in a bowl of hot broth. It defied all known physical properties of the universe. And it was as good as anything cooked anywhere—a direct rebuke to centuries of classical cooking, miles out in front of all the "foie gras cappuccinos" and stacks of "pan- seared foie gras with chutney and microgreens" one sees everywhere these days. I thought it the strongest, best argument for what Adria says he's trying to do. "Every night is like opening night," he says. "It has to be . . . magic." "Oysters with oysters and yogurt, rolled with macadamia nut" was another astonishing success. Two perfect oysters, in an essence of liquefied smaller oysters, a dot of lemon relish, and then a macadamia yogurt cream, when eaten precisely in sequence, took the tongue on a wild yet strangely familiar ride around the world—and then right back to my very first oyster. A shimmering, translucent globe of raw tuna marrow topped with a few beads of caviar was so good that Adria says, "I won't serve it to my Japanese customers. If the Japanese find out about this the price for tuna bones will go up!" He had a point. The ultralight, unearthly substance tasted like top-quality Edo-style sushi—from another planet. Like nearly everything I tried that night, it had a carefully calibrated progression of clean, precise flavors and a pleasurable aftertaste that didn't intrude on the course to follow. Cuttlefish and coconut "ravioli" was two tight pillows of cuttlefish that exploded unexpectedly (and disturbingly) in the mouth, flooding it with liquid. When I recovered from the surprise, I looked up to see Adria laughing delightedly.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Something transfigured and infinite. The beatific vision – God, I do not find it, I do not think it is to be found – but the love of it is my life. It the actual spring of life within me. 35 Russell’s intellectual motivation to discover the grounds of a powerful and indefinable experience of ‘curious, wild pain’ – something that seemed to point beyond ‘what the world contains’ – has parallels throughout human history. We might think of Isaac Newton’s reflection, dating from late in his life, in which he imagined himself standing on the threshold of something that was signposted by this world, yet which tantalisingly lay beyond his reach: I seem to have been only like a small boy playing on the sea-shore, diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. 36 William Wordsworth expressed this idea in the phrase ‘spots of time’ – rare yet precious moments of profound feeling and imaginative strength, in which individuals sense that they have grasped something of ultimate significance within or beyond themselves. I can still recall vividly such an experience when, as an Oxford scientific researcher during the 1970s, I was travelling in the depths of a moonless night towards the Iranian city of Kermān on a dilapidated coach. Its sputtering engine finally failed, leaving the passengers to stroll around the ruins of an abandoned caravanserai while the coach driver tinkered with its fuel pump. I saw the stars that night as I had never seen them before – a solemn and beautiful brilliance amid a dark and silent desert landscape. I experienced a ‘rapturous amazement’ (to borrow a phrase from Albert Einstein), an inexpressible sense of awe, the memory of which still sends shivers down my spine. I felt very small and insignificant that night in comparison with the untamed immensity of the heavens, experiencing a strange intimation of transcendence in the face of the overwhelming vastness of the natural world that I, as a scientist, had once hoped to master. Richard Dawkins also recognises the importance of such experiences. ‘The great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation. And it’s exactly this feeling of spine-shivering, breath-catching awe – almost worship – this flooding of the chest with epiphanic wonder, that modern science can provide.’ 37 Yet this experience is neither ‘religious’ nor ‘scientific’; it is simply an experience, until and unless it is connected with a conceptual framework, a network of beliefs that illuminates its nature and endows it with meaning. Psychological accounts of the origins of an experience of awe can easily be given. 38 These, however, are simply explanations of how an experience of awe arises within the human consciousness; it does not explain how meaning might arise from it, or what that meaning might be.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Summer truffle "cannelloni" with veal bone marrow and rabbit brains was rich, over the top, sumptuous and buttery flavored, and the most traditional "entree" of many. "Two meters of Parmesan cheese spaghetti" was one six-foot-long strand of cheese-flavored consomme suspended with agar-agar. Coiled in a bowl like a small portion of spaghetti carbonara, with a dot of black pepper, it is to be slurped into the mouth (Mr. Adria demonstrated noisily) in one long sucking movement. A single rack of fried anchovy rack—just crispy head and bones— arrived in a funereal cloud of cotton-candy-looking substance and once again tasted wonderful despite its scary appearance. The unconventional, even horrifying-looking, "chocolate soil," which resembled a bowl full of playground dirt and pebbles, was in fact a conventional tasting chocolate and hazelnut dessert. A "morphing" course of "English bread"—a loaf with the appearance of Wonder Bread that virtually disappeared once placed on the tongue—leaving no trace of ever having been there was followed by a freebie take-home "surprise." A bag with what seemed to be a baguette protruding from it was placed in front of me. Mr. Adria suddenly reached across the table and brought a fist down on it. It shattered into brittle shards of fennel-scented pastry. Was dinner good? I don't know if that's a word one can use when describing the El Bulli experience. It can be more comfortably described as "great"— meaning hugely enjoyable, challenging to the world order, innovative, revolutionary. It was an uncomfortably revelatory experience for an old-school cook like me who had always thought food was about terroir and tradition, the familiar ways in which chefs have always sought to please their customers. Everything about the meal was clear evidence that the world has changed in bold, new, and uncontrollable ways. Perhaps no one says it better than Juan Mari Arzak, the more traditional chef- owner of the Michelin three-star restaurant Arzak in San Sebastian and Adria's staunchest supporter. "What Ferran does is very important," he said, sitting down to join us for coffee and cigarettes at the end of the meal. The two men— Arzak, the passionate Basque, and Adria, the driven, inquisitive Catalonian— have become best friends. "We call each other at four in the morning all the time," Arzak says. " 'I have an idea!' one of us will say. He is moving cooking forward." Back in New York, Mr. Ripert is a little more equivocal. "He's a phenomenon. We need one Ferran Adria, not five. Not even three. I don't see anyone succeeding in emulating him."

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  system already under construction, although they knew it was now far from being able to meet the actual requirements. The last link in the chain was the fortress of Breendonk, said Austerlitz, a fort completed just before the outbreak of the First World War in which, within a few months, it proved completely useless for the defense of the city and the country. Such complexes of fortifications, said Austerlitz, concluding his remarks that day in the Antwerp Glove Market as he rose from the table and slung his rucksack over his shoulder, show us how, unlike birds, for instance, who keep building the same nest over thousands of years, we tend to forge ahead with our projects far beyond any reasonable bounds. Someone, he added, ought to draw up a catalogue of types of buildings listed in order of size, and it would be immediately obvious that domestic buildings of less than normal size—the little cottage in the fields, the hermitage, the lockkeeper’s lodge, the pavilion for viewing the landscape, the children’s bothy in the garden—are those that offer us at least a semblance of peace, whereas no one in his right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice on the old Gallows Hill in Brussels. At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins. These remarks, made by Austerlitz as he was leaving, were still in my mind next morning when I was sitting over a coffee in the Glove Market which he had left so abruptly the day before, and was hoping that he might reappear. And as I was glancing through the newspapers while I waited I came upon an article—I don’t remember now if it was in the Gazet van Antwerpen or La libre Belgique—about the fortress of Breendonk, from which it emerged that in 1940, when for the second time in its history the fort had to be surrendered to the Germans, it was made into a reception and penal camp which remained in existence until August 1944, and that since 1947, preserved unchanged as far as possible, it had been a national memorial and a museum of the Belgian Resistance. If the name of Breendonk had not come up in my conversation with Austerlitz the previous evening, this mention of it in the paper, even supposing I had noticed it at all, would hardly have made me go to see the fort that very day. The passenger train I boarded later that morning took a good half-hour to travel the short distance to Mechelen, where a bus runs from outside the station to the small town of Willebroek; it is on the outskirts of this town that the fort stands in its grounds of some ten hectares, set among the fields rather like an island in the sea and surrounded by an embankment, a barbed-wire fence, and a wide moat. It was unusually hot for the time of year, and large cumulus clouds were piling up on the southwest horizon as I crossed the bridge

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

  on horseback, constructed entirely out of multicoloured peppers, triumphantly trampling a Muslim, equally vegetable though inevitably supine.) Accordingly, one of the many interconnected features of the Gregorian revolution was that, by the end of the eleventh century, pilgrimage was linked to the Church hierarchy’s radical rethinking on armed conflict: defining what violence was forbidden to Christians and what was actually holy warfare, blessed by God. Both definitions had dramatic effects on the Western Church. The first practical results stemmed from the more obvious and traditional proposition: fellow Christians should not fight each other, at least within Western Latin Christendom. The development of the parochial system had directed the attention of Church leaders to aristocratic violence that harmed all society, not least themselves and their own landed estates. In the late tenth century, Carolingian abbots and bishops began appealing to the consciences of their communities to secure peace. They convened large gatherings of laity and clergy; the Bishop of Le Puy in southern Francia provided the first known precedent in 975, threatening violent wrongdoers with excommunication and demanding that the crowds in front of him swear an oath to keep the peace. Other bishops imitated his initiative, drawing on their churches’ various collections of relics to reinforce their threats with the wrath of the saints. Eventually they even brokered formal agreements defining on which days fighting might legitimately take place. This ‘Peace of God’ movement spread through much of western Europe; Odilo, the renowned and energetic Abbot of Cluny for more than half a century from 994, was among its leading advocates. Soon both monarchs and popes were involved in regulating these councils and agreements. In the same way that the parochial system was embracing everyone in society beyond religious houses, the Peace of God movement was a practical demonstration of how the Church could appeal to consciences beyond social elites; the crowds who witnessed the proceedings were as much part of the pressure put on recalcitrant magnates as the bones of the saints and the clergy who guarded them. There was a clear general benefit from the Church offering an institutional setting to resolve disputes, and the success of the Peace of God movement suggested that the nobility of Europe might be persuaded that it was in their own interests to modify their way of life in other ways. Many such councils accordingly extended their activities into all sorts of regulation affecting the lives of both laity and clergy, since the resolution of violence necessarily involved adjudicating in disputes which could involve any aspect of society – for instance, questions of disputed inheritance that might turn on whether or not a marriage was valid in the eyes of the Church, or whether a local scandal had been made worse by clerical misbehaviour (however defined).

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

  Ironically, an incident in Genesis 19 that has bequeathed Christian societies the word ‘sodomy’ was little used in ancient Judaism for condemnations of specifically same-sex activity (see Plate 26). Sodomy in any case long continued to refer to a much wider range of sexual activity not leading to procreation. The outrage committed in the ill-fated city of Sodom certainly had a sexual element in it, for the men of the city sought to humiliate a couple of travellers by male rape (Gen. 19). Nevertheless, the outrage is the rape, not the gender of the victim: God punished Sodom for an inexcusable breach of the hospitality conventionally to be offered to travellers in the ancient world. That is demonstrated by an incident in Judges 19, supposedly much later but evidently in reality the model for the Sodom narrative at Gen. 19: dwellers in the city of Gibeah rape a male visitor’s ‘concubine’ as a substitute for raping the man himself. ‘If Genesis 19 condemns homosexuality, then clearly Judges 19 condemns heterosexuality,’ tartly observes one modern commentator. [28] Jesus evidently considered the sin of Sodom to be inhospitality. Advising his disciples on how to treat houses or towns who rejected them and their message, he observed that it would be worse for such communities than for Sodom and Gomorrah on the Day of Judgement (Matt. 10.15). By contrast, his Jewish near-contemporaries Philo of Alexandria and Josephus did indeed identify Sodom’s sin as same-sex activity. Their observations were part of a growing hostility in Jewish literature from the second century BCE and after, which denounced Graeco-Roman unequal same-sex relationships, a genre of relationship that is simply not mentioned in the Hebrew Bible itself. By now, Hasmonean Judaism had won its victories against the intervention of Hellenistic monarchs, and the abomination of Greek nude male gymnastics concentrated Judaean minds on the general Mediterranean sexual custom, which they rejected as symbolic of Hellenism. [29] It is a further irony that one of the purest examples of the heroic same-sex love of equals from the ancient Mediterranean is to be found in the Hebrew Bible: the saga of David and Jonathan, told now in texts between 1 Samuel 18 and 2 Samuel 1. Jonathan was the eldest son of King Saul; David and Jonathan loved each other ‘passing the love of women’, in the words of a song which lamented Jonathan’s admittedly well-timed subsequent death in battle (2 Sam. 1.26). At one particularly torrid moment in their relationship, ‘they kissed one another, and wept with one another, until David recovered himself .’ Thus runs the Revised Standard Version of 1 Sam. 20.41 in English, though it has the honesty to add the alternative reading of the verb, that David ‘ exceeded ’. That is the word that the English scholars creating the King James Version of 1611 had decided was closest to the Hebrew meaning in this passage. The most obvious way to read ‘exceeded’ is physical and sexual: either as erection or orgasm.

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

  8. In this early sixteenth-century French Book of Hours, Mary the Mother of Jesus forgives Salome, whose hands were burned away (according to the Protevangelium of James ) to punish her gynaecological investigations of Mary’s virginity. An angel proffers a pair of hands for reattachment. From these narrative beginnings emerged the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary and, later still, in the West her ‘Immaculate Conception’, free from the original sin of Adam like her son; the Protevangelium has been called ‘the ultimate source of almost all later Marian doctrine’. [20] Around it, Syria’s precocious development of hymnody only swelled the chorus of praise of Mary as virgin Mother. For instance, Ode 19 of Christianity’s earliest known hymn book, The Odes of Solomon , from much the same era as the Protevangelium , uses strikingly physical metaphors to celebrate her virginity. They reflect the view common in antiquity that milk and blood were different forms of the same fluid: The Holy Spirit opened Her bosom, And mixed the milk of the two breasts of the Father. Then She gave the mixture to the generation without their knowing, And those who have received [it] are in the perfection of the right hand. The womb of the Virgin took [it], And she received conception and gave birth. So the Virgin became a mother with great mercies. And she labored and bore the Son but without pain, Because it did not occur without purpose. And she did not require a midwife, Because He caused her to give life. [21] Justin Martyr was a product of the same eastern Mediterranean Christianity as these writers and singers of the second century, and he insisted on the importance of Mary’s virgin conception (although not yet of a virgin birth); he did admit that not all Christians agreed with him on this. [22] Justin was a pioneer in linking his argument to the Evangelist Matthew’s quotation of the prophecy in Isaiah 7.14 about a virgin who conceived. He was apparently also first in crafting a powerful rhetorical contrast between the first woman Eve who had brought the Fall of humankind through sexual attraction, and this second Eve who had reversed it by her virginal purity. A snappy, easily remembered phrase is often the best way to cement a doctrine in popular consciousness, and as this trope spread from Greek-speaking theologians to Latin-speaking Christians, Latin provided a satisfyingly simple word-reversal expressing the contrast between the two archetypal women: EVA turned to become AVE, the greeting ‘Hail’ that the angel Gabriel had addressed to Mary in the Annunciation. [23] To our second great fiction of the period: Thecla was supposedly a disciple of Paul of Tarsus. The popularity of her second-century Acts kept her memory green, and in the fourth century it stimulated one of Christianity’s first cults of a female saint, even before Mary or Anna (below, Chapter 8). The Acts of Paul and Thecla resembles a contemporary Graeco-Roman novel even more than does the canonical Acts of the Apostles, but here boy and girl are not happily united at the end of their adventures, since the part of the romantic lead is taken by a grittily celibate Paul, and part of his contribution to the story is to persuade Thecla against agreeing to marriage and sexual relations with her family’s choice of husband. Nevertheless, amid her adventures Thecla takes an active role in transforming herself from dutiful daughter to defiant standard-bearer of Christianity, explicitly defying her mother in her determination to keep her virginity. As a woman, she openly teaches her faith, and she may even presume to administer baptism: she certainly baptizes

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James drew extensively on personal testimonies to the perceived significance of religious experiences, which he framed in terms of intense and brief ‘privileged moments’ that carry an ‘enormous sense of inner authority and illumination’, transfiguring the understanding of those who experience them, often taking the form of disclosures of ‘new depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.’ 39 For James, it seemed as if there is ‘in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call “something there,” more deep and more general than any of the special and particular “senses” by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.’ 40 Truth is something that needs to be felt , that needs to resonate with our experience of life. Examples of these experiences would include the exquisite sense of longing for something undefined and apparently unattainable, often referred to using the German term Sehnsucht , which Matthew Arnold glossed as a ‘wistful, soft, tearful longing’. 41 In his Prelude , Wordsworth similarly pointed to a ‘dim and undetermined sense’ of ‘unknown modes of being.’ These liminal experiences hint at a new world beyond a limiting threshold of human vision. Virginia Woolf once spoke of experiencing privileged ‘moments of being’, which seemed to her to be ‘a token of some real thing behind appearances’ 42 which constantly eluded her attempts to find and possess it. More recently, the term ‘epiphany’ has come to be used for such moments of disclosure or insight – an ‘overwhelming existentially significant manifestation of value in experience, often sudden and surprising,’ which ‘feels like it “comes from outside”’ and allows us to grasp something new.’ 43 While such epiphanies are not necessarily religious, they are often linked with what is usually described as ‘religious experience’. These experiences of ‘partial and fleeting realisations’ are seen as life-changing, possessing both weight and significance. 44 They are like ‘bolts of lightning on a dark night that brilliantly illuminate everything in a single, instantaneous flash.’ 45 These ‘epiphanic’ moments of disclosure illuminate what was once dark, obscure or out of focus, bringing a ‘sense of clarification, which seems to allow us to understand things in their true nature’. Something of vast yet unassimilated significance seems to be shown to us in a dazzling moment of illumination – something that we proved unable to discover for ourselves by extended reflection and reason. What, then, do such experiences mean? Is this deep sense of longing a genuine response to something that lies, dimly glimpsed and partially apprehended, beyond the world of appearances, or is it simply a trick of the mind that points to nothing – a cypher without a key? Might there be a conceptual scheme that can unlock its meaning?

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  After a thorough sampling of raw seal brain, liver, kidney, rib section, and blubber, an elder crawled across the floor and retrieved a platter of frozen blackberries. She generously rolled a fistful of them around in the wet interior of the carcass, glazing them with blood and fat, before offering them to me. They were delicious. Words fail me. Again and again. Or maybe it's me that fails the English language. My depiction of the day's rather extraordinary events is workmanlike enough, I guess . . . but, typically, I fall short. How to describe the feeling of closeness and intimacy in that otherwise ordinary-looking kitchen? The way the fifteen-year-old daughter and her eighty-five-year-old grandmother faced each other, nearly nose to nose, and began "throat singing," first warming up with simultaneous grunts and rapid breathing patterns, then singing, the tones and words coming from somewhere independent of their mouths, from somewhere . . . else? The sheer, unselfconscious glee (and pride) with which they tore apart that seal—how do I make that beautiful? The sight of Charlie, blood spread all across his face, dripping off his chin . . . Grandma, her legs splayed, rocking a crescent-shaped chopper across blubber, peeling off strips of black seal meat. . . How do I make them as sympathetic, as beautiful, in words as they were in reality? "Without the seal, we would not be here," said Charlie. "We would not be alive." A true enough statement, but not an explanation. You'd have to have felt the cold up there, have seen it, hundreds and hundreds of miles without a single tree. You'd have to have gone out with Charlie, as I had, out onto that freezing bay, a body of water nearly the size of an ocean, watched him walk across a thin, tilting layer of ice to drag the seal back to the canoe. Heard, as we did, the resigned calls from other hunters over Charlie's radio, stuck out in a blizzard for the night, realizing they would have no shelter and no fire. You'd have to have been in that room. A photograph wouldn't do it. I know. I take them in my travels, look at them later—and they're inevitably, woefully flat, a poor substitute for the smell of a place, the feeling of being there. Videotape? It's another language altogether. You've turned what was experienced in Greek into Latin, edited places and people into something else, and however beautiful or dramatic or funny, it's also . . . different. Maybe only music has the power to bring a place or a person back, so close to you that you can smell them in the air. And I can't play guitar. Fragments. Pieces of the strange ride, the larger, dysfunctional but wondrous thing my life has become. It's been like this for the last five years. Always in motion, nine, then ten, then eleven months out of the twelve.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  And these films made a powerful impression. Recently I visited my favorite Web site, gangland.com—an online repository for up-to-date organized crime arcana—to find a transcript of New Jersey's De Cavalcante crime family members enthusiastically speculating on which among their number had provided inspiration for the Tony Soprano character on The Sopranos. Real-life gangster "Crazy Joe" Gallo, prior to falling down dead into his linguine with white clam sauce, is said to have practiced his Tommy Udo imitation in front of the mirror every morning. (You remember Tommy, the Richard Widmark character in Kiss of Death? The famous scene in which the giggling Widmark binds and gags an old lady into her wheelchair, then pushes her down a flight of stairs? "Heee-heee . . . heee . . . heeee"?) And there must be scores of aspiring Joe Pescis out there, taking the occasional break from the daily grind of extortion and murder to do dead-on impressions of Joe: "What? I amuse you? I'm a clown?" There is a powerful element of pure comedy, of classic schtick in the business of crime. With so many natural wordsmiths, mimics, movie fans, and practitioners of a century-old oral tradition, is it any wonder? And as Monty Python so astutely demonstrated many years ago, the basic elements of comedy all come down to the unexpected head injury, repeated blunt-force trauma to the skull. Whether it's Oliver Hardy getting a good smack upside the nut with a mishandled ladder, or a Colombo loanshark getting his brains spattered all over the dashboard of his shiny new Buick, the principle is the same—and it spells funny. Joe Pesci, thinking that today he's gonna be a "made guy," looks down at the floor, sees that the carpet has been rolled up—and has time only to say, "Oh shit!" before getting two behind his ear. Classic! Just like Oliver Hardy should know that a ladder will soon be bouncing off his face—because it bounced off his face in the scene before, and in the scene before that—Pesci's character should know that when a close personal friend invites you to a sit-down with the bosses, or says that you can have the front passenger seat ("That's okay . . . you sit in front"), there's every likelihood that a fatal head injury is imminent. There's a historic inevitability to both comedy and organized crime, and the punch lines are often the same.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  (Spicy in the center, sweeter as it moves farther afield.) Digging into ribs, chopped brisket, pulled pork, spicy slaw, and baked beans at Oklahoma Joe's (an unassuming cafeteria like space situated in a combination gas station- convenience store), I enjoy the most tender, inspiring barbecue I've ever experienced: greasy, sticky, served on plastic trays between slices of white bread. It's a revelation. In Saint Louis, a goateed chef with a mountain drawl tells me he's thrown out his salamander grill and microwave. "Won't have any a' that cheatin' in my kitchen. Nope. Won't have it." He nearly tears up at the thought of cutting into a hunk of lamb or duck before it's rested. There's a curiosity about new food among the public, even when it's coupled with apprehension. "Saw you eatin' that snake heart on the TV. How'd that taste? That pho stuff didn't look half bad, though, I gotta say." And they can find pho themselves, because everywhere I go are Vietnamese restaurants; Thai, Hmong, and Chinese markets; families of emigres operating small businesses, many looking and tasting just like the ones back home. There are Mongolian, Japanese, Korean, Indian, and Pakistani joints popping up everywhere. America's cool, if you look hard enough, if you wander far enough from the strip malls and theme restaurants and Starbucks and Mickey D's. Things have changed. Things are different now. Every day. SWEET NAME DROPPING DOWN UNDER Holy shit, Ainsley Harriott is fucking huge! I'm in Sydney, Australia, drinking vodka at Fix, the bar behind Luke Mangan's restaurant, Salt, when I look over and see Ainsley, whom I've said some very nasty things about in print (meant every damn word too), and realize that this guy, towering over the crowd, could—should he be so inclined—probably kick my ass. Watching him on TV, cudding housewives and doing the cooing, squealing Jerry Lewis schtick, I figured the guy had to be a shrimp. I figured a guy that flouncy wasn't the sort to maybe see me in a bar someday, reach down, smash a beer bottle against the wall, and then grind it into my neck. Now I'm not so sure. Jesus he's big! His shoulders are the size of basketballs . . . Maybe I should start worrying about Jamie Oliver too. Haven't been so nice to him either. He could be studying some lethal form of martial art; he's already got a fucking paramilitary, I heard. "Oliver's Army?" What is that? Are they like Saddam's Republican Guard? Do they do Oliver's bidding, up to and including eliminating his enemies? Is some glassy-eyed acolyte with a faux cockney accent gonna drive by on a Vespa and let loose with a full clip from a Tec-9?

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  And again he pictured a cup of dark liquid. ‘Poison, bring me poison . . .’ And again he heard the voice: ‘The truth is, first of all, that your head aches, and aches so badly that you’re having faint-hearted thoughts of death. You’re not only unable to speak to me, but it is even hard for you to look at me. And I am now your unwilling torturer, which upsets me. You can’t even think about anything and only dream that your dog should come, apparently the one being you are attached to. But your suffering will soon be over, your headache will go away.’ The secretary goggled his eyes at the prisoner and stopped writing in mid-word. Pilate raised his tormented eyes to the prisoner and saw that the sun already stood quite high over the hippodrome, that a ray had penetrated the colonnade and was stealing towards Yeshua’s worn sandals, and that the man was trying to step out of the sun’s way. Here the procurator rose from his chair, clutched his head with his hands, and his yellowish, shaven face expressed dread. But he instantly suppressed it with his will and lowered himself into his chair again. The prisoner meanwhile continued his speech, but the secretary was no longer writing it down, and only stretched his neck like a goose, trying not to let drop a single word. ‘Well, there, it’s all over,’ the arrested man said, glancing benevolently at Pilate, ‘and I’m extremely glad of it. I’d advise you, Hegemon, to leave the palace for a while and go for a stroll somewhere in the vicinity—say, in the gardens on the Mount of Olives. 16 A storm will come . . .’ the prisoner turned, narrowing his eyes at the sun, ‘. . . later on, towards evening. A stroll would do you much good, and I would be glad to accompany you. Certain new thoughts have occurred to me, which I think you might find interesting, and I’d willingly share them with you, the more so as you give the impression of being a very intelligent man.’ The secretary turned deathly pale and dropped the scroll on the floor. ‘The trouble is,’ the bound man went on, not stopped by anyone, ‘that you are too closed off and have definitively lost faith in people. You must agree, one can’t place all one’s affection in a dog. Your life is impoverished, Hegemon.’ And here the speaker allowed himself to smile. The secretary now thought of only one thing, whether to believe his ears or not. He had to believe. Then he tried to imagine precisely what whimsical form the wrath of the hot-tempered procurator would take at this unheard-of impudence from the prisoner. And this the secretary was unable to imagine, though he knew the procurator well. Then came the cracked, hoarse voice of the procurator, who said in Latin: ‘Unbind his hands.’

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

  Such strident assertion of the ego was a delusion that could only lead to pain and confusion. Release ( moksha ) from such suffering was dependent on the profound acknowledgment that at base everybody was Brahman and should therefore be treated with absolute reverence. The Upanishads bequeathed to India a sense of the fundamental unity of all beings, so that your so-called enemy was no longer the heinous other but inseparable from you. 70 Indian religion had always endorsed and informed the structural and martial violence of society. But as early as the eighth century BCE, the “ renouncers” ( samnyasin ) mounted a disciplined and devastating critique of this inherent aggression, withdrawing from settled society to adopt an independent lifestyle. Renunciation was not, as is often thought in the West, simply life negating. Throughout Indian history, asceticism has nearly always had a political dimension and has often inspired a radical reappraisal of society. That certainly happened in the Gangetic plain. 71 Aryans had always possessed the “restless heart” that had made Gilgamesh weary of settled life, but instead of leaving home to fight and steal, the renouncers eschewed aggression, owned no property, and begged for their food. 72 By about 500 BCE, they had become the chief agents of spiritual change and a direct challenge to the values of the agrarian kingdoms. 73 This movement was in part an offshoot of brahmacharya, the “holy life” led by the Brahmin student, who would spend years with his guru, studying the Vedas, begging humbly for his bread, and living alone in the tropical forests for a given period. In other parts of the world too, Aryan youths lived in the wild as part of their military training, hunting for food and learning the arts of self-sufficiency and survival. But because the Brahmin’s dharma did not include violence, the brahmacharin was forbidden to hunt, to harm animals, or ride in a war chariot. 74 Moreover, most of the renouncers were adult Brahmins when they embarked on their solitary existence, their apprenticeship long past. 75 A renouncer made a deliberate choice. He repudiated the ritual sacrifices that symbolized the Aryan political community and rejected the family household, the institutional mainstay of settled life. He had in effect stepped right outside the systemic violence of the varna system and extracted himself from the economic nexus of society in order to become a “beggar” ( bhiksu ). 76 Some renouncers returned home, only to become social and religious irritants within the community, while others remained in the forest and challenged the culture from without. They condemned the aristocratic preoccupation with status, honor, and glory, yearned for insults “as if they were nectar,” and deliberately courted contempt by behaving like madmen or animals. 77 Like so many Indian reformers, the renouncers drew upon the ancient mythology of warfare to model a different kind of nobility.