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.

Page 209 of 217 · 20 per page

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  There was no one about but me, dulled to the cold by cognac but lucid and suggestible. I thought of the place in summer, jostling with randy youngsters, indistinguishable shrieks from the water's edge: but for once I was content for all that to be in the past. I was applying myself to the subtler connoisseurship of the out-of-season, days without warmth and nights without encounters, empty pleasure-grounds and the violence of the tides. I turned along a short pier and propped myself for a while above the pounding, self-rebuffing blackness. The unseen water's ejaculations awed me: I felt barely connected to the town's ghost facade or the land that lay beyond it. I pictured the dark ploughed distances there, farms and villages secured against the torrents of wind and rain, a blurred lamp swinging. Then there were towns with wind-rocked belfries, the street where I lived. The light in the yard would be throwing its pale stripe across my ceiling. With time the eye would grow accustomed to the shadow and make out the solemn bulk of table and chairs. How spectral the abandoned room was, no rhythmic gasping would ruffle the Spanish girls tonight. I remembered clearly something Paul had said about Orst's prints, how they were the mirror of a northern world, silent, wintry, interior, remote from the outdoor brilliance of the south. They were adressés aux esprits de silence, discreet signals between one solitude and another; their sombre vaguenesses and mystic gleams were images too of the world of their collectors, the inward vigil they kept before the precious sheets, their trembling attunement to the indefinable. So that Orst's tenacious remembrance of Jane was an ideal form of the collectors' passion: he flattered their archaic yearnings and enrolled them among the rich in spirit, scorners of the vulgar modern world and what he termed its demolishing wealth. I felt the poetry of the thing tonight, perched above the breakers and the dim phosphorescence of the returning foam. I knew nothing about this country, to me it was a dream-Belgium, it was Allemonde, a kingdom of ruins and vanished pleasures, miracles and martyrdoms, corners where the light never shone. Not many would recognise it, but some would. I seemed to have lost Luc in it. It was his wildness that had brought me to him and now it had taken him away. I studied my situation with a certain aesthetic amazement. Chapter 20 Helene was back from her honeymoon in Rome and Naples, and radiating a new self-esteem; it showed in the lethargy of her movements, the unembarrassed glow that came to her cheeks, her evident sense of returning to a quaint little world whose rules she observed with a new irony.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Achilles Tatius exposes the internal logic of the genre and tests whether the reader will believe in it simply because it is good theater. He is willing to lay bare the purely artificial, literary substance animating his characters. Leucippe’s sudden and inexplicable transformation from a willing young girl curious about eros into a romantic heroine capable of the most soaring defenses of chastity is an example. More darkly, the creation of a doppelgänger for Leucippe, an “ill-starred” prostitute who is beheaded in Leucippe’s place, is an accomplishment without equal in the ancient romances. In the riddle of the severed head, which hangs, unexplained, over much of the narrative, Achilles confronts the reader with the mysterious dispensations of fate. The brilliance of this creation ensures us that the arch tone Achilles maintains across his romance is not postmodern camp before its time, but instead a serious engagement with the deepest social and cosmological assumptions of romance. The manipulation of romantic protocols is a sincere way of questioning the Fortune that presides over the order of romance—in fact, over the world. This story, with its intricate knowingness, promises the ability to confront the theodicy that underlies literature, through literature.21 The Ethiopian Tale of Heliodorus makes equally canny use of the generic conventions underlying the inviolability of the heroine’s body. The Ethiopian Tale is as self-aware as Leucippe and Clitophon, but the effect achieved by the author’s consciousness is an air of baroque grandeur rather than keen lightness. The Ethiopian Tale is the latest of the erotic romances that survive, and there are compelling reasons to place it sometime in the second half of the fourth century. The Ethiopian Tale deliberately builds an aura of latest and greatest. All of the conventional themes are allowed to unravel, in stately fashion. By far the longest of the erotic romances, it is unique in weaving two story patterns into a single narrative. At one level it is the story of Theagenes and Charicleia, their separation and endurance, their eventual union. The Ethiopian Tale is also a homeward journey for Charicleia, who gradually discovers her true identity as the princess of Ethiopia. In the sophistication of its narrative architecture, The Ethiopian Tale is without peer among the ancient novels. But it is also distinctive in its fixation on male bodily purity, and in general its chilly tone toward the pleasures of the flesh. The Ethiopian Tale very consciously redeploys the traditional armory of the erotic romance, but in the service of a hieratic vision of human life.22

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  To test these observations, Patricelli created a remotely controlled, robotic, stuffed female bowerbird model, which she dubbed a “fembot.” The fembots produced such natural-looking standing, crouching, head-rotating, and wing-fluffing movements that they completely fooled male bowerbirds, as Patricelli’s videos of males copulating with the fembots demonstrate. By placing the fembot in the bower and regulating its posture and movements, Patricelli was able to confirm her hypotheses that (1) female Satin Bowerbirds are communicating their comfort levels to displaying males by crouching, (2) some males modulated their display intensity to put the females more at ease, and (3) those males who can regulate their display intensity to keep females more comfortable are ultimately the most successful at attracting mates. Why should female Satin Bowerbirds be less threatened by aggressive displays performed by more attractive males with more appealing bowers? If what is at stake is the indirect, genetic cost of sexual coercion—that is, male offspring who will be less appealing to females and therefore less likely to perpetuate her genes—then, evolutionarily speaking, females should be more comfortable with the risks posed by an attractive male. Forced copulations from less attractive males will create the same risk of physical harm, that is, the same direct costs. However, the more attractive mates provide a lower risk of the indirect, genetic costs of sexual coercion. Thus, Patricelli’s fembot experiments provide strong support for the idea that bowers function to protect females from the indirect costs of sexual coercion. From Patricia Brennan’s artificial duck vaginas to Gail Patricelli’s fembots, the science of mate choice takes us down some creative paths! And like the ducks, the bowerbirds teach us a whole new way in which to understand the freedom of choice. Here, sexual autonomy is an evolutionary engine of beauty. [image file=image_rsrc3NS.jpg] CHAPTER 7Bromance Before RomanceIt’s extraordinary enough to realize that female mate choice has produced the explosion of beauty we’ve seen in male manakins and bowerbirds. It’s even more amazing to think that female mating preferences could have had a profound impact on male social relations and that this happened even though, as I’ll discuss in this chapter, much of the resulting male behavior is something the females themselves never witness. But in the case of the manakins, this is exactly what has occurred over the course of evolutionary time. The social relationships among males in a manakin lek have evolved into a virtual bromance—long-term, socially engaged relationships that sublimate and moderate competition—and it’s all come about, I think, because of the female pursuit of sexual autonomy. Recognizing females as the active agents in the origin of lekking goes against most of the traditional thinking about why the lek-breeding system evolved. But we will see that entertaining this possibility provides a productive new way to understand the complexity and diversity of the highly unusual behaviors of male manakins and of the variations in lek social organization as well.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Structurally the romances are stories of adversity and adventure that resolve happily in marriage. In the prelude to the final book of his romance, Chariton signaled the shift from misadventure to resolution in revealing terms: “No longer shall we have piracy and slavery, trials and battles, grisly suicide, war or captivity, but righteous passions and legitimate marriages.” Throughout the narrative the heroine faces grave dangers that call into question her status. The heroine of romance is a recognizable social type; her essence precedes her individuality. She is beautiful, of free and noble birth, and in the prime of her marriageable years. Preferably the heroine is superlatively beautiful and impeccably wellborn. Callirhoe, for instance, was the daughter of the leading citizen of Syracuse, and she was the “glory of all Sicily,” with a “beauty that was not human but divine.” Anthia, at fourteen, was “in the very bloom of her body’s beauty,” a beauty that “was an astonishment, far beyond all the other virgins.” In Leucippe and Clitophon, we first encounter Leucippe through the eyes of her lover, Clitophon, who dilates on the experience of such superhuman beauty. In Daphnis and Chloe, the drama revolves around the fact that the protagonists were exposed as infants and raised by simple peasants; Chloe, even as a sheepherder, is supremely if naively charming, but it is only in the very last sequence of the story that her true identity, as a daughter of the town’s gentry, was revealed. In fact, once she was literally scrubbed of her rural grime and properly dressed, it was indisputably obvious that her rustic parents did not in reality produce “such a maiden as that.”10 The heroine is free, but her status is not merely an external attribute describing her current condition. Though the heroine is routinely subjected to enslavement, she retains her free nature. The heroine’s freedom is objective, a quality of her being that is apparent even to other characters in the romance. When tomb raiders abducted Callirhoe, they were worried that it would be obvious from her appearance that they had kidnapped a free person. “Her beauty isn’t human and won’t go unnoticed. Will we say, ‘She’s a slave’—who would believe that once they’ve seen her?” The man who buys her immediately perceives her true status. “It is impossible for anybody who is not free by nature to be beautiful.” In the Ephesian Tale, Anthia’s master gives her to a fellow slave, a goatherd, but she manages to convince him to pity her “good birth.” When Leucippe is enslaved in Ephesus, she throws herself at the feet of her mistress, Melite, who instantly recognized, despite her tattered appearance, that the girl was not really a slave. “Even among such travails your beauty proclaims your good birth.” In The Ethiopian Tale, status is such an objective quality that, after a battle, the victors ransom the free captives and keep the slaves in slavery!11

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Here’s what happens when the female Argus arrives at a male’s court. The male first performs several preliminary displays, which include a ritualized pecking at the ground and elaborate, stylized strutting on his bright red legs. Eventually, he rushes around her in wide circles with his wings hunched up at an angle that exposes their upper surfaces. Then, without warning, when he is just a foot or two away from the female, the male transforms himself instantly into an entirely different shape, revealing unimaginably intricate color patterns on his four-foot-long wing feathers. In what biologists have come to refer to, with inexplicable reserve, as the “frontal movement,” the male bows down to the female, unfurling the elaborate feathers of his open wings into a huge hemispherical disk that extends forward, over his head, and partly surrounds the female from one side. In 1926, the pioneering Dutch animal behaviorist Johan Bierens de Haan compared this cone to the shape of an inverted umbrella blown out by a gust of wind. In this extraordinary posture, the male tucks his head under one of his wings and peeks out at the female from behind the gap in his feathers formed at the “wrist” of his wing to gauge her reaction to his display. The deep blue of the facial skin that surrounds the male’s tiny black eye will be just visible to the female through the gap in his flexing wings. To support this extraordinary posture, the male perches athletically with one set of talons in front of the other like a sprinter in starting blocks. While bowing before the female, he raises his rear, cocks his long tail feathers, and pumps them rhythmically up and down so that the female can get sporadic glimpses of them over the top of the inverted cone of his wing feathers, or in the gap that sometimes opens up between the left and the right wings. The tips of the cone of wing feathers wave over the female’s head like a mini portable amphitheater. After repeated, throbbing shakes of the inverted feathery cone, lasting a total of two to fifteen seconds, the male transforms back into a “normal” bird shape and resumes his ritualized pecking of the ground for a few seconds before repeating the display. [image "The “frontal movement” display of the male Great Argus." file=image_rsrc3MS.jpg] The “frontal movement” display of the male Great Argus.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  The elaborate aesthetic capacities of birds are more than a vivid characteristic of living species. The coevolved desire for beauty might have made the evolution of birds possible in the first place. As spectacular as that realization may be, there is more! About sixty-six million years ago, an enormous meteor hit the earth, leaving a crater 110 miles wide near what is now Chicxulub, Yucatán, Mexico. The cascade of environmental and ecological changes that followed this impact led to a mass extinction of terrestrial and aquatic life on earth including, most famously, the dinosaurs. Of course, we now know that the dinosaurs did not go extinct. Rather, three dinosaur lineages survived the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous; they were the flying ancestors of the three main lineages of living birds. These three lineages would later thrive, diversify (one explosively), and evolve into more than ten thousand species of birds that inhabit the planet today. Why did birds survive the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, and other dinosaurs did not? This is a tough problem, but we can be certain that merely having feathers was not enough, because there were many other lineages of feathered theropods that did not survive the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary—including the fully plumaged raptor dinosaurs, like Velociraptor, the ornithomimids, and the troodontids. In fact, the only lineages of dinosaurs to survive the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction were species that could fly with their feathers. Perhaps the capacity to fly allowed these birds to escape or avoid the worst ecological consequences of the Chicxulub impact or to disperse rapidly and find ephemeral refuges in the ecological chaos that followed. We don’t know for sure. However, were it not for their ability to fly, the ancestors of the modern birds would likely have gone extinct along with all the other dinosaurs. Thus, the potentially aesthetic innovation of planar feathers facilitated the evolution of flight and the avian dinosaur survival of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction. It’s harder to imagine a bigger possible impact for the role of beauty and desire in the history of life. Throughout this book, I have argued that most of the abundant beauty in nature is likely to be meaningless and arbitrary and presents nothing to choosers other than the opportunity to be admired and preferred. But the investigation of the evolution of aesthetic complexity, innovation, and decadence demonstrates that this perspective is not a bleak, frivolous, or nihilistic view of the role of beauty in the natural world. In fact, the more we investigate the history of life from an aesthetic perspective, the more we will discover that aesthetic coevolution has had a powerful, innovative, and decisive impact on the quantity and form of biological diversity. When mating preferences are unconstrained by the narrow task of providing adaptive advantages, beauty and desire are free to explore and to innovate, and thereby transform the natural world. Thankfully, as a result, today we have the birds.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  At last he made me hand over "The Months" and leaving me to browse went off to a chair at the brighter end of the room. I got out the Merrifield volume, which bore the inscription "To Perry Dawlish from 'the Old Rogue'—George Merrifield, May Day 1928: knowing that he will go far . . . " I turned to the list of contents, hoping to find "Cider", which I knew by heart anyway (it was the unobvious rhyme of oozing with refusing in the sestet that I had stolen); but it wasn't in Love and Earth, which was perhaps an earlier collection. I realised for the first time just how large Merrifield's output was. I was awed by the book and its associations, and wondered why its author was known as the Old Rogue. I imagined him like Toad of Toad Hall, with goggles and a cigar, motoring recklessly from one Sussex alehouse to another. I kept peeping towards the window, trying to read Dawlish's reactions. He was in profile, and partly canopied by a broad-leaved plant that sprawled across the glass above him. He seemed to be paying each sonnet the very closest attention. Or had he perhaps fallen into a quiet doze? It occurred to me that he might have died. No—another page was shuffled under. I wondered which month he'd reached. I was aware that some months were stronger than others, which was why the sequence began with September, like a school year. I thought it unlikely that he would be very critical of them, but I would have to be sensible and take his criticism with eagerness and resolution when it came. One time I glanced up and found he was looking at me and slowly nodding, pausing to find the most tactful opening. "Marvellous," he said. "Simply marvellous, you've really got it. Really. I do congratulate you. You understand the sonnet, as few nowadays do. And every one of them has some memorable effect. 'When all is frozen to the rover's call' is a splendid line." And he said it again, to bring out what he heard as the "wintry echo" of all and call. I thought it was the best line of the lot myself, and saw it gaining something like proverbial status with Dawlish's endorsement. "There's absolutely no doubt about it, Edward," he said, with those gestures of regret that sometimes heighten the effect of praise; "You are a writer. A born writer, I would say. I see a very bright future for you indeed."

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Back inside, perched by a fibre-optic miracle at a junction of tunnels which looked like the triforium of some Gaudí church, we saw the freakishly extensile tongue of the ant-eater come flicking towards us, cleaning the fleeing termites off the wall. It was one of the most astonishing pieces of film I had ever seen, and I felt a thrill at the violent intrusion as well as dismay at the smashing of something so strange and intricate; I was disappointed when the attendant, realising I was there and perhaps in need of encouragement, tapped a button and transformed the picture into the relative banality of American college boys sticking their cocks up each other’s assholes. ‘Cinema, sir?’ he said. ‘We’ve got some really hot-core hard films …’ His heart wasn’t in it so I paid him my fiver and left him to the wonderful world of nature. I went down the stairs, lit by one gloomy red-painted bulb. The cinema itself was a small cellar room, the squalor of which was only fully apparent at the desolating moment in the early hours when the show ended for the night and the lights were suddenly switched on, revealing the bare, damp-stained walls, the rubbish on the floor, and the remaining audience, either asleep or doing things best covered by darkness. It had perhaps ten tiers of seats, salvaged from the refurbishment of some bona fide picture house: some lacked arms, which helped patrons get to know each other, and one lacked a seat, and was the repeated cause of embarrassment to diffident people, blinded by the dark, who chose it as the first empty place to hand and sat down heavily on the floor instead. I had not been there for months and was struck again by its character: pushing open the door I felt it weigh on sight, smell and hearing. The smell was smoke and sweat, a stale, male odour tartishly overlaid with a cheap lemon-scented air-freshener like a taxi and dusted from time to time with a trace of Trouble for Men. The sound was the laid-back aphrodisiac pop music which, as the films had no sound-track, played continuously and repetitively to enhance the mood and cover the quieter noises made by the customers. The look of the place changed in the first minute or so, as I waited just inside the door for my eyes to accustom themselves to the near dark. The only light came from the small screen, and from a dim yellow ‘Fire Exit’ sign. I had once taken this exit, which led to a fetid back staircase with a locked door at the top. Smoke thickened the air and hung in the projector’s beam.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Chapter 1 sketches a portrait of sexual life in the heyday of Roman power, from the later first to the early third century. As in any portrait, the angles are carefully chosen, and necessarily selective. We must try, insofar as possible, to recapture the erotic values of the second century as a period in its own right. Here was a Mediterranean society, huddled into little towns that were at once primitive and unusually wealthy. It was a society whose moral lineaments were sculpted by the omnipresence of slaves and by the rigid stratifications of law. A particular feature of the frame used here must be noted: one canvas suffices for both the Latin and the Greek parts of the empire. This choice is a calculated gambit, not just dictated by the necessity of space but more deliberately by the belief that the institutions of army, the webs of commerce, the intimate ties of intermarriage, the syncretism of law, and a shared intellectual culture melded the Greek and Latin elements of the empire into a whole that is not homogeneous but at least capable of representation as a single, complex organism. As far as possible, the authorities of the second century are asked to present themselves. In part this is done because they are so rich and vivid. In part it is done to counterbalance the widespread idea that the Roman Empire was on a trajectory away from sexual freedom and erotic frankness. Above all, the aim in Chapter 1 is to describe the world in which Christian sexual morality took shape, to recapture something of its richness, its chaos, its vitality.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  The female Great Argus is a large, robust pheasant with a complex, finely vermiculated, but dull camouflage pattern of chocolate-brown, reddish-brown, black, and tan swirls on her feathers. Her legs are bright red, and the feathers of her face are sparse, revealing bluish-gray skin beneath. At first view, the main thing that distinguishes the male Great Argus from the female is the great elongation of his tail and wing feathers. The feathers extend over a yard behind him. In total, the male Argus measures nearly six feet from the tip of his beak to the tip of his tail. But length aside, his plumage appears to be quite similar to that of the cryptic female, and he’s not particularly impressive looking. His real charms remain hidden, not to be revealed until the peak of his courtship of the female, which very few people on earth have ever witnessed outside the confines of a zoo. Seeing a Great Argus in the wild is very difficult. They are extraordinarily wary and disappear into the forest at the first sign of your approach. The early twentieth-century ornithologist and pheasant fanatic William Beebe was among the first scientists to see the display of Great Argus in the wild. Beebe was a curator at the New York Zoological Society who would later become world famous for exploring the depths of the oceans in a bathysphere—a primitive, deep-diving submarine. Beebe saw his first Great Argus—a male—descending a muddy bank in tropical Borneo to drink from a puddle of rainwater that had collected in a wild boar wallow. He describes this first sighting ecstatically in his 1922 Monograph of the Pheasants, expressing his feeling of triumph in the language of both a proud bird-watcher and the American, colonial-era adventurer that he was: “Brief as the glimpse had been, I felt a great superiority to my fellow white men the world over, who had not seen an Argus Pheasant in its native home.” As is typical of most avian aesthetic extremists, Great Argus are polygynous, which means that single males mate multiply with different females. However, the opportunity for multiple mating creates competition among males to attract mates. Some attractive males are highly successful, and others are not at all. The result is strong sexual selection for whatever display traits females prefer. After the female chooses a mate, the male’s participation in the reproduction is complete, and he plays no further role in the life of his mate or their offspring. The female is entirely responsible for building a nest of leaves on the ground, incubating her clutch of two eggs, protecting her chicks, and feeding them and herself, which she does by foraging for fruits and insects on the forest floor. Both females and males are reluctant fliers. When threatened, they usually escape by running away on foot. However, at night they fly up to a low perch to roost—except when the female is incubating her eggs, when she remains on the nest.

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

  Reply to Objection 1: According to Richard of St. Victor “cogitation” would seem to regard the consideration of the many things from which a person intends to gather one simple truth. Hence cogitation may comprise not only the perceptions of the senses in taking cognizance of certain effects, but also the imaginations. and again the reason’s discussion of the various signs or of anything that conduces to the truth in view: although, according to Augustine (De Trin. xiv, 7), cogitation may signify any actual operation of the intellect. “Meditation” would seem to be the process of reason from certain principles that lead to the contemplation of some truth: and “consideration” has the same meaning, according to Bernard (De Consid. ii, 2), although, according to the Philosopher (De Anima ii, 1), every operation of the intellect may be called “consideration.” But “contemplation” regards the simple act of gazing on the truth; wherefore Richard says again (De Grat. Contempl. i, 4) that “contemplation is the soul’s clear and free dwelling upon the object of its gaze; meditation is the survey of the mind while occupied in searching for the truth: and cogitation is the mind’s glance which is prone to wander.” Reply to Objection 2: According to a gloss [*Cf. De Trin. xv, 8] of Augustine on this passage, “beholding” [speculatio] denotes “seeing in a mirror [speculo], not from a watch-tower [specula].” Now to see a thing in a mirror is to see a cause in its effect wherein its likeness is reflected. Hence “beholding” would seem to be reducible to meditation. Reply to Objection 3: Admiration is a kind of fear resulting from the apprehension of a thing that surpasses our faculties: hence it results from the contemplation of the sublime truth. For it was stated above [3723](A[1]) that contemplation terminates in the affections. Reply to Objection 4: Man reaches the knowledge of truth in two ways. First, by means of things received from another. In this way, as regards the things he receives from God, he needs “prayer,” according to Wis. 7:7, “I called upon” God, “and the spirit of wisdom came upon me”: while as regards the things he receives from man, he needs “hearing,” in so far as he receives from the spoken word, and “reading,” in so far as he receives from the tradition of Holy Writ. Secondly, he needs to apply himself by his personal study, and thus he requires “meditation.”

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  In the small world of frontier monasticism, rumors of the girl’s plight quickly spread. The brothers were distraught by her fall. They appointed the sturdiest among them, a monk known as John the Dwarf, to go to her and “set her affairs in order.” His mission met resentment as soon as he reached the door, whose guardian chided him. “From the beginning you have devoured her stores, and now she is destitute.” Nevertheless, Taïsia grants John entry, reasoning to herself, “Those monks are always roving about the Red Sea and finding pearls.” She readied herself on the bed, and he sat next to her. Staring into her face, he reproached her, “Why do you have such contempt for Jesus, that you come to this?… I see Satan toying on your face.” Stirred, she asked him, “Is there repentance?” She repented and left, immediately, without even arranging her affairs. The monk and the penitent trekked into the desert. When night fell, John made her a pillow of sand, marked with a cross. He camped some distance apart. In the middle of the night, under the clear desert sky, he awoke to see a luminous path, stretching from heaven down to Taïsia. He went to her lifeless body and pricked her foot, knowing she was dead. But he heard a voice affirm, “After one hour of repentance, she will be received before those who repent for great lengths of time without showing such fervor as did she.”48 The salvation of Taïsia is the kernel of a literary type that was to triumph with irresistible force in the fifth century. Along with Chrysostom’s actress, Taïsia belongs to the earliest stratum of a new legend, and there is no reason to doubt the reality of her existence. Here is the chance to watch the birth of an archetype. The story of Taïsia, as we have it, already bears traces of artistic touch. Taïsia’s internal reflections about the monks and the pearls of the Red Sea are, surely, a contrivance. We sense but cannot grasp some distant connection with the famous actress of Antioch, whose legend was fermenting in the same hothouse of spiritual imagination, and whose stage name was none other than Margarito, pearl. But the story of Taïsia hits with the thud of simple reality. Her material desperation and loss of respectability had no literary parallel. Her story is very early and little stylized, and if we cannot disentangle the authentic core from the light embellishments of time and imagination, the story of Taïsia contains a stronger dose of authenticity than will soon be found in the highly artificial morality tales of penitent women.

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

  In other things also there is a likeness to the Trinity, inasmuch as each thing is one in its substance, informed by a certain species, and has a certain order. Now, as we have already clearly stated, the intellectual concept in intelligible being is like the information of the species in natural being: and love is like the inclination or order of a natural thing. Hence in natural things species represents the Son remotely, and order represents the Holy Ghost. Hence, on account of the likeness in irrational things being remote and obscure, we say that there is in them a trace but not an image of the Trinity, according to Job 11:7: Peradventure thou wilt understand the steps of God, and wilt find out the Almighty perfectly. We have now said enough about the Trinity. CHAPTER XXVII OF THE INCARNATION OF THE WORD, AS HANDED DOWN IN HOLY SCRIPTUREIN speaking of the divine generation we observed that certain things are befitting the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, in respect of His divine nature, and others in respect of His human nature, by taking which in time the eternal Son of God wished to become incarnate. Wherefore we must now proceed to treat of the mystery of the Incarnation. Of all the divine works this surpasses reason more than any: since one cannot imagine God doing anything more wonderful, than that God the Son, true God, should become true man. And because it is the most wonderful of all, it follows that all other wonders are directed to faith in this the greatest of all wonders: since in every genus, what is greatest is the cause of the rest. Our faith in the Incarnation is based on divine authority. For it is said (Jo. 1:14): And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt amongst us: and speaking of the Son of God, the Apostle says (Philip. 2:6, 7): Who, when he was in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God; but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man. The same is clearly indicated by the words of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, since at times He ascribes to Himself lowly and human things that belong to Him in His assumed human nature, for instance, The Father is greater than I (Jo. 14:28), My soul is sorrowful unto death (Matth. 26:38): while sometimes He says of Himself sublime and divine things, such as certainly belong to Him in His divine nature: for instance, I and the Father are one (Jo. 10:30), and, All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine (Jo. 16:15).

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

  DAMASCENE. (ut sup. 13.) Now the devil, seeing His face shining in prayer, recollected Moses, whose face was glorified. But Moses indeed was arrayed with a glory, which came from without; our Lord, with that which proceeded from the inherent brightness of Divine glory. (Exod. 34:29.) For since in the hypostatical union there is one and the same glory of the Word and the flesh, He is transfigured not as receiving what He was not, but manifesting to His disciples, what He was. Hence, according to Matthew, it is said, that He was transfigured before them, and that His face shone as the sun; (Mat. 17:2.) for what the sun is in things of sense, God is in spiritual things. And as the sun, which is the fountain of light, cannot be easily seen, but its light is perceived from that which reaches the earth; so the countenance of Christ shines more intensely, like the sun, but His raiment is white as snow; as it follows, And his raiment was white and glistering; that is, lighted up by its participation of the divine light. And a little afterwards, But while these things were so, that it might be shewn there was but one Lord of the new and old covenant, and the mouths of heretics might be shut, and men might believe on the resurrection, and He also, who was transfigured, be believed to be the Lord of the living and the dead, Moses and Elias, as servants, stand by their Lord in His glory; hence it follows, And behold there talked with him two men. For it became men, seeing the glory and confidence of their fellow servants, to admire indeed the merciful condescension of the Lord, but to emulate those who had laboured before them, and looking to the pleasantness of future blessings, to be the more strengthened for conflicts. For he who has known the reward of his labours, will the more easily endure them. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. 56. in Matt.) Or else this took place because the multitude said He was Elias or Jeremias, to shew the distinction between our Lord and His servants. And to make it plain that He was not an enemy of God, and transgressor of the law, He shewed these two standing by Him; (for else, Moses the lawgiver, and Elias who was zealous for the glory of God, had not stood by Him,) but also to give testimony to the virtues of the men. For each had ofttimes exposed Himself to death in keeping the divine commands. He wishes also His disciples to imitate them in the government of the people, that they might be indeed meek like Moses, and zealous like Elias. He introduces them also to set forth the glory of His cross, to console Peter and the others who feared His Passion. Hence it follows, And spake of his decease, which he should accomplish at Jerusalem.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  I call the evolutionary processes that are driven by the sensory judgments and cognitive choices of individual organisms aesthetic evolution. The study of aesthetic evolution requires engaging with both sides of sexual attraction: the object of desire and the form of desire itself, which biologists refer to as display traits and mating preferences. We can observe the consequences of sexual desire by studying which mates are preferred. More powerfully, perhaps, we can also study the evolution of sexual desire by studying the evolution of the objects of that desire—the ornaments that are particular to a given species and how those ornaments have evolved among multiple species. What emerges from an understanding of the workings of sexual selection is the startling realization that desire and the object of desire coevolve with each other. As I will discuss later, most examples of sexual beauty are the results of coevolution; in other words, the form of the display and the mating preference do not accidentally correspond to each other, but have shaped each other over evolutionary time. It is through this coevolutionary mechanism that the extraordinary aesthetic diversity of the natural world comes into being. This book, then, is ultimately a natural history of beauty and desire. — How does aesthetic evolution differ from other modes of evolution? To explore the difference, let’s compare “normal,” adaptive evolution by natural selection—the evolutionary mechanism famously discovered by Charles Darwin—with aesthetic evolution by mate choice, another amazing discovery of Darwin’s. In the bird world, the beaks of the Galápagos Finches are one of Darwin’s best-known examples of adaptive evolution. The approximately fifteen different species of Galápagos Finches evolved from a single common ancestor, and they differ from each other mainly in the size and shape of their beaks. Certain beak shapes and sizes are particularly effective at handling and opening certain kinds of plant seeds; large beaks are better at cracking larger, harder seeds, while smaller beaks are more efficient at handling smaller, finer seeds. Because the environment of the Galápagos varies in the size, hardness, and abundance of the plant seeds available in different areas and times, some finches will survive better in certain environments than do others. Because beak size and shape are highly heritable traits, differential survival of beak shapes within one generation of Galápagos Finches will result in evolutionary change in beak shape among generations. This evolutionary mechanism—called natural selection—leads to adaptation because subsequent generations will have evolved beak shapes that function better in their environment, contributing directly to improvements in individual survival and fecundity (that is, individual capacity for reproduction and energy and resources to lay lots of eggs, to lay bigger eggs, and to raise lots of healthy offspring).

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  What makes the aesthetic expression of the Satin Bowerbird truly extraordinary, however, is not his plumage but his bower. Like the males of almost all the other species of the bowerbird family, the male Satin Bowerbird creates a courtship structure—a kind of bachelor pad, or crib—to attract mates. As Henry Alleyne Nicholson clarified in the first published use of the word “bowerbird” in his Manual of Zoology in 1870, the bowerbird’s bower is not a nest but an entirely distinct structure built by a displaying male for the sole purpose of attracting mates. The bower has no function beyond its use as a seduction theater—an ornamental stage for male sexual display. [image "Types of bower architecture in Bowerbirds. Display court of Tooth-Billed Bowerbird ornamented with green leaves and no bower." file=image_rsrc3NK.jpg] Types of bower architecture in Bowerbirds. Display court of Tooth-Billed Bowerbird ornamented with green leaves and no bower. [image "Avenue bower of Great Bowerbird." file=image_rsrc3NM.jpg] Avenue bower of Great Bowerbird. [image "Maypole bower of MacGregor’s Bowerbird." file=image_rsrc3NN.jpg] Maypole bower of MacGregor’s Bowerbird. [image "Double-maypole bower of Golden Bowerbird." file=image_rsrc3NP.jpg] Double-maypole bower of Golden Bowerbird. [image "Hut bower variation of the maypole bower of Vogelkop Bowerbird." file=image_rsrc3NR.jpg] Hut bower variation of the maypole bower of Vogelkop Bowerbird. Prior to the ornithological exploration of Australia and New Guinea by Western explorers and colonists in the mid-nineteenth century, the word “bower” referred only to a simple dwelling or hut (like a lean-to); to an interior chamber within a home, especially a lady’s bedroom or boudoir; or to a shady recess with overarching branches and vines. As it happens, all of these traditional meanings seem happily appropriate when applied to the bowers created by male bowerbirds; however, bowerbirds extend these meanings in a whole new direction. The male Satin Bowerbird’s bower is located in a small clearing on the forest floor and consists of two parallel walls made of dry, upright twigs, branches, and straw, with a narrow passageway running down the middle of it (color plate 17). Hence the name given this kind of mating structure, the avenue bower, which is one of the two main forms of bowerbird architecture.

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

  AMBROSE. For the incomprehensible brightness of the Divine nature oppresses our bodily senses. For if the sight of the body is unable to contain the sun’s ray when opposite to the eyes which behold it, how can the corruption of our fleshly members endure the glory of God? And perhaps they were oppressed with sleep, that after their rest they might behold the sight of the resurrection. Therefore when they were awake they saw His glory. For no one, except he is watching, sees the glory of Christ. Peter was delighted, and as the allurements of this world enticed him not, was carried away by the glory of the resurrection. Hence it follows, And it came to pass as they departed, &c. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. For perhaps holy Peter imagined that the kingdom of heaven was at hand, and therefore it seemed good to him to abide on the mount. DAMASCENE. (Orat. de Trans. fig.) It were not good for thee, Peter, that Christ should abide there, for if He had remained, the promise made to thee would never receive its accomplishment. For neither wouldest thou have obtained the keys of the kingdom, nor the tyranny of death been abolished. Seek not bliss before its time, as Adam did to be made a God. The time shall come when thou shalt enjoy the sight without ceasing, and dwell together with Him who is light and life. AMBROSE. But Peter distinguished not only by earnest feeling, but also by devout deeds, wishing like a zealous workman to build three tabernacles, offers the service of their united labour; for it follows, Let us make three tabernacles, one for thee, &c. DAMASCENE. (ubi sup.) But the Lord ordained thee not the builder of tabernacles, but of the universal Church. Thy words have been brought to pass by thy disciples, by thy sheep, in building a tabernacle, not only for Christ, but also for His servants. But Peter said not this deliberately, but through the inspiration of the Spirit revealing things to come, as it follows, not knowing what he said. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. He knew not what he said, for neither was the time come for the end of the world, or for the Saints’ enjoyment of their promised hope. And when the dispensation was now commencing, how was it fitting that Christ should abandon His love of the world, Who was willing to suffer for it? DAMASCENE. (ubi sup.) It behoved Him also not to confine the fruit of His incarnation to the service of those only who were on the mount, but to extend it to all believers, which was to be accomplished by His cross and passion. TITUS BOSTRENSIS. (non occ.) Peter also was ignorant what he said, seeing that it was not proper to make three tabernacles for the three. For the servants are not received with their Lord, the creature is not placed beside the Creator.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The shared plot of these stories, in which an archetype of the beautiful, noble, free virgin is subjected to a series of stock threats to her physical integrity, belongs to the deep structure of romance. In his interpretation of romance, Frye distinguished between the structure of realist narrative and the structure of romance by observing that realism is generally “horizontal”—it uses “a technique of causality in which the characters are prior to the plot, in which the problem is normally ‘given these characters, what will happen?’ ” Romance, by contrast, is vertical, “sensational,” moving “[from] one discontinuous episode to another, describing things that happen to characters, for the most part, externally.” Realism presents a “hence” narrative, romance an “and then” narrative. This analysis generally holds true for the ancient examples of the genre. The characters are presented, but they do not develop. Heroes and villains are highly stereotyped, and the “moral facts,” at the surface level, are greatly simplified.14 The discontinuous episodic structure that was the skeleton of ancient romance was closely related to the undercurrents of popular fatalism that run through the genre. Fortune is omnipresent in the novels. To her capricious will all the twists of the plot are attributed. In Leucippe and Clitophon, some form of tuch- is used 142 times, that is, several times on each page. The Fortune of the imperial romances is not an orderly theological concept; her very nature is mysterious and arbitrary, but ultimately benevolent. She subjects the protagonists to fearsome travails, but she rescues them too. This uncanny mixture of whim and providence, of flux and order, is within the mainstream of religious currents in the high empire. The Fortune of the novels is no mere literary ornamentation. She is the same awesome divinity who was worshipped, in cult, across the Mediterranean, like never before in the Roman Empire—a syncretistic, cosmological goddess in a syncretistic, cosmological age. The romances were, like the temples where Fortune was worshipped, monuments built in awe of her supervenient power over human affairs.15

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  In Club-winged Manakins, the evolution of decadent wing bones has apparently been facilitated by a quirk of avian biology. In all birds, the wing bones begin to develop very early in the life of an embryo, around six days after incubation begins, which is before the embryo has begun sexual differentiation. In other words, the six-day avian embryo does not yet have a sex. So, selection for evolutionary changes in the shape and size of male wing bones will affect female wing bones, too. As a result, female mating preferences that aesthetically transform males will decadently transform the whole species. As soon as the embryo becomes sexually differentiated, however, there is an opportunity for the sexes to diverge developmentally. Events that happen later in development—like the full ossification of the wing bones—can be sexually differentiated. This is why female Club-winged Manakins do not have completely ossified, solid wing bones like the males. The stridulating wing songs of the Club-winged Manakin are more than just a bizarre, innovative way for one bird to sing. They demonstrate again that natural selection is not a universally strong and deterministic force in evolution. Some of the evolutionary consequences of sexual desire and choice in nature are not adaptive. Some outcomes are truly decadent. Natural selection is not the only source of organic design in nature. How far can decadence go? New theoretical models being developed in my lab show that decadence can indeed evolve through the indirect costs of mating preferences. Mathematical genetic models of a similar evolutionary process further imply that the costs of decadent display traits can lead to the extinction of whole populations or species. This means that in addition to recognizing the role of sexual selection in fostering the evolution of new species, we should recognize that sexual selection may facilitate species decline and extinction. Is it any wonder that many of the world’s most exquisitely beautiful and aesthetically extreme creatures are so rare? I don’t think so. — Once we clearly conceive of the possibility, we see that the phenomenon of evolutionary decadence may not be rare or even unusual. There are many other examples in which female mate choice has resulted in female versions of male display ornaments that are useless to them. This phenomenon ignited a big debate between Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace on the nature of sexual difference in bird plumages. In retrospect, their heated discussions of this topic were unproductive because neither one had any clear notions about the mechanisms of genetics or inheritance. But the intensity of their debate demonstrates that the topic is still central to the issue of whether evolution by mate choice is necessarily an adaptive process, as Wallace insisted.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  The aerodynamic theory of the origin of feathers was an example of an adaptationist approach to the origin of novelty. However, this big twentieth-century intellectual project failed. During the hundred years in which everyone was certain that feathers had evolved through natural selection on scales for flight, we learned nothing about how feathers actually evolved. We only made progress on the evolution of feather innovations by shelving the questions of the selective function of each innovation and searching for evidence and predictions concerning feather evolution within the details of feather development. The advantage of this evo-devo approach is that we can figure out what happened in feather evolution before we try to investigate why it happened. Once we understand the progress of feather evolution, we can return to questions about the selective advantages of different stages in feather evolution. Early tubular and tufty stages have been convincingly hypothesized to have evolved for thermoregulation and water repellency. However, there is still no accepted hypothesis for why tufty down feathers (stage II) evolved into vaned feathers (Stage IIIa to Stage IV). What evolutionary advantage could the planar feather vane have provided prior to the evolution of flight? It is clear that a plumage made up of downy feathers, like a modern chick, would be warm enough or water repellent enough to provide any thermoregulatory requirements. After all, baby ducklings manage to stay very warm and very dry with downy plumages. Is it possible that the original selective advantage of the planar vane was actually aesthetic? Obviously, down is fuzzy. Although downy chicks are cute, the plumage coloration pattern complexity that can be produced with fuzzy down feathers is aesthetically quite limited. Just like hair, you can make different down feathers different colors, and you have a limited ability to make the tips and bases of down feathers different colors. But that’s it. The innovative planar feather vane, however, creates a well-defined, two-dimensional surface on which it is possible to create a whole new world of complex color patterns within every feather. In aggregate, many planar feathers can create complex plumage patches and a crisp, smooth, new outline to the entire body plumage. In other words, the planar vane of the feather might have evolved through aesthetic selection to create a two-dimensional canvas upon which to depict complex pigment patterns—including stripes, spots, dots, and spangles. The key innovation of the planar feather vane might have evolved because it provided a whole new way to be beautiful. This is a really big deal, because birds later evolved to use these same planar, vaned feathers to create aerodynamic forces required for flight. Feathers did not evolve for flight; rather, flight evolved from feathers. And among the best hypotheses for the key innovation that allowed birds to launch into the air is the desire for beauty.