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

  These stories of Christian girls who escaped from the brothel are minor but revealing marks of a closely shared imaginative space, and they point to the central place of sex in the fictional economy of both traditions. The writings known, somewhat unhappily, under the moniker of the apocryphal Acts of the apostles, bear a telling family resemblance to contemporary Greek novelistic writing. The apocryphal Acts are the primary vehicle of early Christian romance. The apostles, the wandering heroes of early Christianity, were an endlessly fertile source of Christian legend. Close to the divine presence, the aura of the miraculous clung to them. The institutional church claimed descent from them. The canonical scriptures testified to their historicity but left ample room to the imagination. An enormous body of Christian legend, continuously reshaped, came to attach to the heroic generation. The Acts are adventure stories, but unlike the pagan novels the Acts are historical romances, set against a backdrop recognizable as the Roman Empire of the first century. As in the pagan romance, travel and serial endangerments hold together the structure, which is episodic, sensational. The apostles are miracle workers, endowed above all with the wondrous ability to resurrect the dead. They are also preachers who come to be arrested by the Roman authorities. The apocryphal Acts, like the romances but to an even greater degree, are forensic dramas. The gathering tension between apostolic missionizing and the Roman order inevitably resolves into a judicial conflict. The apostle, in the end, is martyred, so that death substitutes for marriage as the common ending of the apostle’s story. Between the travel, miracle working, and martyrdom of the apostles, sex continually juts into the foreground of the stories. Sex functions as a primary symbolic code in the world of Christian legend, but in a radically reformulated sense. Christian romances not only preach a new model of proper sexual conduct, they also discovered a way of expressing a strikingly original romance of the eternal soul, in which this world of flux and regeneration is a façade and the reunion with God, through purity and death, is the ultimate consummation. “Nothing of yours endures, but all things, right down to human conventions, are transient.”31

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

  Comparing the radically different display repertoires of just these two manakin species introduces the central dilemma of their aesthetic evolution. How did they evolve to be so different from each other? The true magnitude of this mystery emerges when we realize that every one of the approximately fifty-four species of manakins has evolved its own distinct repertoire of plumage ornaments, display behaviors, and acoustic signals; that is fifty-four distinctive “ideals” of beauty. Because nearly all species of the family are lekking, we can be confident that all manakins evolved from a single lekking common ancestor, which, we can infer from time-calibrated molecular phylogenies, lived about fifteen million years ago. So, why did the females of each manakin species evolve such highly diverse mating preferences—their own Darwinian standards of beauty? And how did this aesthetic radiation occur? Learning the answer requires that we explore the history of beauty through the Tree of Life. [image "A male White-bearded Manakin landing on a sapling on his display court with his throat feathers erected." file=image_rsrc3MW.jpg] A male White-bearded Manakin landing on a sapling on his display court with his throat feathers erected. — There is a reason manakins are such a good example of the evolution of beauty, and it has to do with family life. Over 95 percent of the world’s more than ten thousand bird species are raised by two attentive, hardworking parents. But not manakins. The British ornithologist and pioneering manakin man David Snow first proposed an evolutionary explanation for their distinctive breeding system in his enchanting 1976 book, The Web of Adaptation. The book is an evocative account of his and his wife’s adventures studying lekking manakins and cotingas in Trinidad, Guyana, and Costa Rica. (I read the book with great excitement when I was in high school, and my still vivid memory of it was one reason why I responded so positively to Kurt Fristrup’s suggestion to go study manakins in Suriname.) Snow hypothesized that eating a diet consisting largely of fruits, as manakins do, can rearrange an animal’s family life and unleash a cascade of effects on its social evolution. Imagine that you eat insects for a living. You are probably thinking that this would not be an easy life, and you would be right. Insects make themselves difficult to find, prickly, hard to handle, distasteful, and sometimes even toxic. Living on a diet of insects is hard work quite simply because insects do not want to be eaten. That’s why raising a family on insects is almost always a two-bird job.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  But over animals he had singular powers. I have watched his grizzled head approaching cautiously, though in friendly wise, toward a nest of adders, and before a lizard have seen his gnarled fingers execute a kind of dance. On summer nights he took me with him to study the sky from the top of a barren hill. I used to fall asleep in a furrow, tired out from counting meteors. He would stay sitting, gazing upward and turning imperceptibly with the stars. He must have known the systems of Philolaus and of Hipparchus, and that of Aristarchus of Samos which was my choice in later years, but these speculations had ceased to interest him. For him the stars were fiery points in the heavens, objects akin to the stones and slow-moving insects from which he also drew portents, constituent parts of a magic universe in which were combined the will of the gods, the influence of demons, and the lot apportioned to men. He had cast my horoscope. One night (I was eleven years old at the time) he came and shook me from my sleep and announced, with the same grumbling laconism that he would have employed to predict a good harvest to his tenants, that I should rule the world. Then, seized with mistrust, he went to fetch a brand from the small fire of root ends kept going to warm us through the colder hours, held it over my hand, and read in my solid, childish palm I know not what confirmation of lines written in the sky. The world for him was all of a piece; a hand served to confirm the stars. His news affected me less than one might think; a child is ready for anything. Later, I imagine, he forgot his own prophecy in that indifference to both present and future which is characteristic of advanced age. They found him one morning in the chestnut woods on the far edge of his domain, dead and already cold, and torn by birds of prey. Before his death he had tried to teach me his art, but with no success; my natural curiosity tended to jump at once to conclusions without burdening itself under the complicated and somewhat repellent details of his science. But the taste for certain dangerous experiments has remained with me, indeed only too much so. My father, Aelius Hadrianus Afer, was a man weighed down by his very virtues. His life was passed in the thankless duties of civil administration; his voice hardly counted in the Senate. Contrary to usual practice, his governorship of the province of Africa had not made him richer. At home, in our Spanish township of Italica, he exhausted himself in the settlement of local disputes.

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

  Chrysostom adds a fifth miracle (Hom. lxxxviii in Matth.), saying that “the darkness in this case lasted for three hours, whereas an eclipse of the sun lasts but a short time, for it is soon over, as those know who have seen one.” Hence we are given to understand that the moon was stationary below the sun, except we prefer to say that the duration of the darkness was measured from the first moment of occultation of the sun to the moment when the sun had completely emerged from the eclipse. But, as Origen says (on Mat. 27:45), “against this the children of this world object: How is it such a phenomenal occurrence is not related by any writer, whether Greek or barbarian?” And he says that someone of the name of Phlegon “relates in his chronicles that this took place during the reign of Tiberius Caesar, but he does not say that it occurred at the full moon.” It may be, therefore, that because it was not the time for an eclipse, the various astronomers living then throughout the world were not on the look-out for one, and that they ascribed this darkness to some disturbance of the atmosphere. But in Egypt, where clouds are few on account of the tranquillity of the air, Dionysius and his companions were considerably astonished so as to make the aforesaid observations about this darkness. Reply to Objection 3: Then, above all, was there need for miraculous proof of Christ’s Godhead, when the weakness of human nature was most apparent in Him. Hence it was that at His birth a new star appeared in the heavens. Wherefore Maximus says (Serm. de Nativ. viii): “If thou disdain the manger, raise thine eyes a little and gaze on the new star in the heavens, proclaiming to the world the birth of our Lord.” But in His Passion yet greater weakness appeared in His manhood. Therefore there was need for yet greater miracles in the greater lights of the world. And, as Chrysostom says (Hom. lxxxviii in Matth.): “This is the sign which He promised to them who sought for one saying: ‘An evil and adulterous generation seeketh a sign; and a sign shall not be given it, but the sign of Jonas the prophet,’ referring to His Cross . . . and Resurrection . . . For it was much more wonderful that this should happen when He was crucified than when He was walking on earth.”

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

  She sub- jects the protagonists to fearsome travails, but she rescues them too. Th is uncanny mixture of whim and providence, of fl ux and order, is within the mainstream of religious currents in the high empire. Th e 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. Th e romances were, like the temples where Fortune was worshipped, monuments built in awe of her supervenient power over hu- man aff airs.  Th e Fortune who presides over the romances is a literary spirit. Over and over again, Fortune is said to be a dramatist. One character tells Chareas, “Fortune loves invention, and you have been cast in an unhappy drama.” Not just the authors of romance, but also the characters are aware that their lives have the shape of literature. Clitophon launches on his story with the refl ection, “I was nineteen years of age when Fortune began her drama.” Later he laments yet another bad turn. “Fortune as usual has set upon me and contrived a new drama.” In Th e Ethiopian Tale the characters experience the “ceaseless turning of the human lot, full of twists.” In despair Th eagenes wonders if he and Charicleia should not just submit to the “destiny that everywhere chased” them by surrendering. Th e gods’ vendetta was “making us into playthings, as though our aff airs were a drama on a stage.” Chari- cleia, by contrast, counsels re sis tance. In the fi nal scenes, the king and his people alike marvel at the “theatrics of Fortune.” Th e literary pretensions of Fortune are part of the high- pitched aesthetic self- awareness of the ro- mances. But given the real place of Fortune in the imperial pantheon, it would be misleading to dismiss these comparisons as empty authorial self- aggrandizement.  ROMANCE IN THE LATE CLASSICAL WORLD  Th e canny allusions to life as literature manifest themselves in a reveal- ing meta phor that recurs across the romances. When Anthia is enslaved in the brothel, she laments her fate, but she steels her resolve and decides to fi nd “some contrivance” for protecting her chastity: the feigned fi t of epi- lepsy. After she survives and is re united with her lover, she attributes her chastity to the fact that she contrived “every device” for the protection of virtue. Similarly, in Th e Ethiopian Tale, the protagonist can rely, in the most hopeless of circumstances, on “some contrivance” that will allow escape.

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

  In other words, in Origin, Darwin saw sexual selection as simply the handmaiden of natural selection, another means of guaranteeing the perpetuation of the most vigorous and best-adapted mates. This view still prevails today. By the time he wrote Descent, however, Darwin had embraced a much broader concept of sexual selection that may have nothing to do with a potential mate’s being more vigorous or better adapted per se, but only with being aesthetically appealing, as he stated clearly for the mesmerizing example of the Argus Pheasant: “The case of the male Argus pheasant is eminently interesting, because it affords good evidence that the most refined beauty may serve as a sexual charm, and for no other purpose [emphasis added].” Moreover, in Descent, Darwin viewed sexual selection and natural selection as two distinct and frequently independent evolutionary mechanisms. Thus, the concept of two distinct but potentially interacting and even conflicting sources of selection is a fundamental and vital component of an authentically Darwinian vision of evolutionary biology. As we will see, however, this view has been rejected by most modern evolutionary biologists in favor of Darwin’s earlier view of sexual selection as just another variant on natural selection. Another distinctive feature of Darwin’s theory of mate choice was that it was coevolutionary. Darwin hypothesized that the specific display traits and the “standards of beauty” used to select a mate evolved together, mutually influencing and reinforcing each other—as demonstrated again by the Argus Pheasant: The male Argus Pheasant acquired his beauty gradually through the preference of the females during many generations for the more highly ornamented males; the aesthetic capacity of females advanced through exercise or habit just as our own taste is gradually improved. Here, Darwin envisions an evolutionary process in which each species coevolves its own, unique, cognitive “standards of beauty” in concert with the elaboration of the display traits that meet those standards. According to this hypothesis, behind every biological ornament is an equally elaborate, coevolved cognitive preference that has driven, shaped, and been shaped by that ornament’s evolution. By modern scientific criteria, Darwin’s description of the coevolutionary process in the Argus Pheasant is rather hazy, but it is no less substantive than his explanations of the mechanism of natural selection, which are viewed today as being brilliantly prescient, despite his ignorance of genetics. — Within Darwin’s argument for mate choice in Descent was another revolutionary idea: that animals are not merely subject to the extrinsic forces of ecological competition, predation, climate, geography, and so on that create natural selection. Rather, animals can play a distinct and vital role in their own evolution through their sexual and social choices. Whenever the opportunity evolves to enact sexual preferences through mate choice, a new and distinctively aesthetic evolutionary phenomenon occurs. Whether it occurs within a shrimp or a swan, a moth or a human, individual organisms wield the potential to evolve arbitrary and useless beauty completely independent of (and sometimes in opposition to) the forces of natural selection.

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

  How could this have happened? Apparently, in selecting on male wing song production capacity through mate choice, female Club-winged Manakins have evolutionarily transformed both the male’s wing morphology and their own. Again, we do not yet have physiological evidence that these morphological changes affect the female’s flight capacity or energetics. However, the best explanation of why these wing bones are so invariant across all of the rest of birds is that natural selection has maintained their highly functional, tubular, columnar design to achieve optimal flight function and capacity. In other words, the morphological consistency in wing bone design among birds is strong evidence that other variations in wing bone shape are functionally inferior and costly to survival and fecundity. Although female Club-wings will never use their wings to sing a song, they appear to incur at least some of the functional costs of the extraordinary wing bone changes necessary for males to make these attractive songs. By not completely ossifying these bones, as males do, and maintaining a hollow space in the center, female Club-wings appear to avoid at least some of the costs of growing extreme ulnas that males incur. The observation that male Club-wings are likely made worse by the action of female mate choice—less functional, capable, and efficient—could still be rationalized as providing honest information about mate quality. But the observation that female Club-wings have also likely made themselves less functional, capable, and efficient at flight as a consequence of their mating preferences for exotic male wing songs can only be described as decadent. Interestingly, females will not be harming their own survival and fecundity by preferring males that make attractive songs with extreme wing bones. Rather, females with preferences for males with maladaptive wing bones will only pay an indirect, genetic cost for their preferences, because their daughters may inherit more awkward wing bones, which will interfere with their daughters’ survival and fecundity. However, this indirect genetic cost to mate choice can be outweighed by a simultaneous indirect, genetic benefit of having sexually attractive male offspring. Because the maladaptive costs of aesthetically extreme mate choices are deferred by each generation of choosers, the whole population can ease further and further into decadence and dysfunction generation by generation. The population will not be saved from decadence by natural selection, because the maladaptive functional costs are indirect and will be more than balanced by the advantages of having beautiful, sexually attractive offspring. Nevertheless, the entire population becomes increasingly maladapted because the fit between the organisms and the environment gets worse and worse over time. The survival and fecundity of all individuals—both males and females—suffers.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  It could be proved, if need were, that these four men had plotted my death; it was to their interest, in any case, to do so. Every transition from one reign to another involved its operations of mopping up; he had taken this task upon himself in order to leave my hands clean. If public opinion demanded a victim, nothing was simpler than to deprive him of his post of Praetorian prefect. He had envisaged such a measure; he was advising me to take it. And if more were needed to conciliate the Senate, he would approve my going as far as relegation to the provinces, or exile. Attianus had been the guardian from whom money could be wheedled, the counselor of my difficult days, the faithful agent; but this was the first time that I had ever looked attentively at that face with its carefully shaven jowls, at those crippled hands tranquilly clasped over the handle of his ebony cane. I knew well enough the different elements of his life as a prosperous citizen: his wife, whom he loved, and whose health was frail; his married daughters and their children, for whom he was modest but tenacious in his ambitions, as he had been for himself; his love of choice dishes; his decided taste for Greek cameos and for young dancing girls. He had given me precedence over all these things: for thirty years his first care had been to protect me, and next to serve me. To me, who had not yet given first place to anything except to ideas or projects, or at the most to a future image of myself, this simple devotion of man to man seemed prodigious and unfathomable. No one is worthy of it, and I am still unable to account for it. I followed his counsel: he lost his post. His faint smile showed me that he expected to be taken at his word. He knew well that no untimely solicitude toward an old friend would ever keep me from adopting the more prudent course; this subtle politician would not have wished me otherwise. Let us not exaggerate the extent of his disgrace: after some months of eclipse, I succeeded in having him admitted to the Senate. It was the greatest honor that I could offer to this man of equestrian rank. He lived to enjoy the easy old age of a wealthy Roman knight, much sought after for his perfect knowledge of families and public affairs; I have often been his guest at his villa in the Alban Hills.

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

  HILARY. Or; By the lilies are to be understood the eminences of the heavenly Angels, to whom a surpassing radiance of whiteness is communicated by God. They toil not, neither do they spin, because the angelic powers received in the very first allotment of their existence such a nature, that as they were made so they should ever continue to be; and when in the resurrection men shall be like unto Angels, He would have them look for a covering of angelic glory by this example of angelic excellence. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. If God then thus provides for the flowers of the earth which only spring up, that they may be seen and die, shall He overlook men whom He has created not to be seen for a time, but that they should be for ever? JEROME. To-morrow in Scripture is put for time future in general. Jacob says, So shall my righteousness answer for me to-morrow. (Gen. 30:33.) And in the phantasm of Samuel, the Pythoness says to Saul, To-morrow shalt thou be with me. 1 Sam. 28:19.) GLOSS. Some copies have into the fire, or, into an heap, which has the appearance of an oven. CHRYSOSTOM. He calls them no more lilies, but the grass of the field, to shew their small worth; and adds moreover another cause of their small value; which to-day is. And He said not, and to-morrow is not, but what is yet greater fall, is cast into the oven. In that He says How much more you, is implicitly conveyed the dignity of the human race, as though He had said, You to whom He has given a soul, for whom He has contrived a body, to whom He has sent Prophets and gave His Only-begotten Son. GLOSS. He says, of little faith, for that faith is little which is not sure of even the least things. HILARY. Or, under the signification of grass the Gentiles are pointed to. If then an eternal existence is only therefore granted to the Gentiles, that they may soon be handed over to the judgment fires; how impious it is that the saints should doubt of attaining to eternal glory, when the wicked have eternity bestowed on them for their punishment.

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

  In the penulti- mate scene, as Charicleia and Th eagenes are married, the high priest pro- nounces them solemnly wed by the law of procreation. In the fi nal scene the two are invested as priest and priestess and march into the city to per- form even “more sacred” mysteries. In any other ancient novel, such an al- lusion would clearly be to the rites of the nuptial couch, but here there is no hint of sex. Gone is the warm eroticism of carnal friction, in its place an obsession with purity that is sacerdotal in its tone and timbre.  Th e fi fth- century church historian Socrates reported, in the fi fth book of his ecclesiastical history, that the same Heliodorus who wrote Th e Ethiopian Ta l e in his youth became a Christian bishop in Th essaly. Unlike later Byz- antine tales which have Achilles Tatius converting to the faith, this bio- graphical note is not so far removed in time and it is not an obvious speci- men of literary wish fulfi llment. Th e report deserves credence, as does the detail, added by Socrates, that Heliodorus introduced strict clerical continence  FROM SHAME TO SIN in his church. Th at the author of this fi nal romance, so frigid in its erotic outlook, enjoined sexual abstinence on even the married members of his clergy, is entirely consonant with the hieratic fi xation on purity and pollu- tion in Th e Ethiopian Tale. Heliodorus lived against the backdrop of mass conversion to Christianity and became a leader in the movement at a par- ticularly consequential moment. He may well have found the sexual auster- ity of the religion congenial and familiar. But what he would have quickly discovered, on the entry to his new faith, was its will to impose rigorous codes of corporal purity on all its adherents, not just a priestly race, set apart, with special privileges of divine communication. Th e Christians would soon develop a literature adequate to such an ambitious project, and it would entail reworking the conventions of romance so thoroughly that we cannot but wonder if a nostalgic spirit like Heliodorus would have been enthused or scandalized. He lived on the cusp of a tremendous literary revolution.

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

  The evolution of limbs, eyes, and feathers is an important subject in evolutionary biology. Indeed, I have worked a lot myself on the evolutionary origin of feathers. But the mechanical sounds of manakins are distinct from all of these evolutionary novelties because they are aesthetic innovations that have evolved by mate choice. Aesthetic innovations provide us with a unique opportunity to investigate both how sexual coevolution works and how evolutionary innovations happen. In recent years, biologists have discovered that adaptation provides at best an incomplete account of the process of evolutionary innovation. I hope that by exploring aesthetic innovation here, we will see that adaptive mate choice provides an insufficient explanation of the origin and diversification of ornament as well. So, how did the innovative mechanical sounds of manakins evolve? The best hypothesis is that manakin display movements produced incidental noises—the whirrs or shuffles or other sounds of moving feathers—in the same way that running and dancing produce incidental noises as feet touch the ground. However, through aesthetic coevolution, these incidental sounds became subject to female preferences along with the rest of the display. Consequently, distinct preferences for such sounds evolved and diversified, until the sounds themselves became a distinct part of the aesthetic repertoire of the species, much as tap dancing became its own genre of dance. Mating preferences for mechanical wing songs probably evolved from earlier acoustic preferences for vocal advertisement songs and became distinct, new preferences over evolutionary time. The Club-winged Manakin has gone in for innovation in a big way. Most manakins, like tap dancers, are satisfied making percussive pops, snaps, and riffles, but the male Club-winged Manakin really sings. Sings, perhaps, even better than he flies. As we’ll see, the Club-winged Manakin is not only an example of aesthetic innovation; it also shows us how adaptation and aesthetic selection can be at odds with each other and how decadent beauty can win. —

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

  Of course, it could be argued that any definition of art should rest on the kind of cultural transmission of ideas that we see in human artworlds. The human arts are cultural phenomena that are transformed by aesthetic ideas that pass from person to person within a social network—a cultural mechanism of aesthetic innovation and influence. If we accept a cultural definition of art, that might seem to suggest that aesthetically coevolving, genetic entities cannot be art. However, this definition will not eliminate the biotic arts. For example, nearly half of all species of birds on the planet learn their songs from other members of their own species. These bird species have avian cultures that have persisted, thrived, and diversified for over forty million years. Consequently, learned bird songs have regional variations (that is, dialects), and cultural transmission can give rise to rapid and sometimes radical changes in these songs, just the way change sometimes occurs in the human arts. Similar aesthetic cultural processes occur in whales and bats. In short, when we get out of the art museum and the library, and look closely at the aesthetic complexity of nature, and think about how it all came into being, we find that it is difficult to define the arts in any way that will include everything we recognize as human art but exclude the aesthetic productions of all nonhuman animals. Some aesthetic philosophers, art historians, and artists may find the recognition of myriad new biotic art forms to be more of an annoyance, or even an outrage, than a contribution to their fields. But I think there is reason to welcome this more inclusive, “post-human” view of art as a real opportunity for progress in aesthetics. Originally, we humans conceived of ourselves as being at the center of all creation, with the sun and the stars revolving around us. Over the last five hundred years, however, scientific discoveries have demanded that we reframe our view of the cosmos and our place in it. With each discovery, humans have moved further and further from the organizing center of the universe. The reality is that we live in an entirely normal solar system, in the boring backwaters of a thoroughly vanilla galaxy—literally, a cosmic Nowheresville. Although the size of earth and its distance from the sun are indeed special, in every other way our position within the cosmos is profoundly random, unpredictable, and unimpressive. While many have found this intellectual change disconcerting, I think such knowledge can only enhance our appreciation of the astounding, unexpected richness of the biological world, human existence, our conscious experience, and our technological and cultural accomplishments.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  There those great captives of rock and wave, eternally lashed by a tireless ocean, never at rest, forever consumed by dreams, continue to defy the Olympian rule with their violence, their anguish, and their burning but perpetually crucified desire. In this myth which is set on the remote edges of the world I came again upon philosophical theories which I had already adopted as my own: each of us has to choose, in the course of his brief life, between endless striving and wise resignation, between the delights of disorder and those of stability, between the Titan and the Olympian. . . . To choose between them, or to succeed, at last, in bringing them into accord. The civil reforms effected in Britain are part of my administrative work of which I have spoken elsewhere. What imports here is that I was the first emperor to settle pacifically in that island situated on the boundaries of the known world, where before me only Claudius had ventured for several days' time in his capacity as commander-in-chief. For an entire winter Londinium became, by my choice, what Antioch had been by necessity at the time of the Parthian war, the virtual center of the world. Thus each of my voyages changed the center of gravity for imperial power, placing it for some time along the Rhine, or on the banks of the Thames, and permitting me to estimate what would have been the strength and the weakness of such a capital. That stay in Britain made me envisage a hypothetical empire governed from the West, an Atlantic world. Such imaginary perspectives have no practical value; they cease, however, to be absurd as soon as the calculator extends his computations sufficiently far into the future. Barely three months before my arrival the Sixth Legion Victrix had been transferred to British territory. It replaced the unhappy Ninth Legion, cut to pieces by the Caledonians during the uprisings which made the grim aftermath, in Britain, of our Parthian expedition. Two measures were necessary to prevent the return of a like disaster. Our troops were reinforced by creation of a native auxiliary corps at Eboracum. From the top of a green knoll, I watched the first maneuvers of this newly formed British army. At the same time the erection of a wall cutting the island in two in its narrowest part served to protect the fertile, guarded areas of the south from the attacks of northern tribes. I myself inspected a substantial part of those constructions begun everywhere at the same time along an earthwork eighty miles in length; it was my chance to try out, on that carefully defined space running from coast to coast, a system of defense which could afterward be applied anywhere else.

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

  In our very first day together in the field, Tom took me to a viewing point from which he was able to show me this novel flight display, which took place more than fifty to a hundred feet above the tallest trees in the forest. After waiting for about thirty minutes, I saw a male ascending skyward while vocalizing an emphatic series of SEEEE…SEEEEE…SEEEEE notes that were even louder, more intense, and more emphatic than the similar notes I’d heard at the logs during log-approach displays. The ascending male flew in a bizarre fluffed-out posture looking rather like a black-and-white cotton ball. After the male reaches the apex of his flight, he suddenly plummets back down into the forest. In the previous year, Tom had made a tantalizing observation; some of the above-the-canopy flight displays end with a loud, mechanical Pop! note after the male disappears back into the forest. In the weeks that followed, I was able to piece together the entire display sequence. One day during observations at a display log, I heard the especially intense version of the SEEEE calls that the male makes during his above-the-canopy flight from overhead and suddenly saw the male come careening downward through a hole in the forest canopy toward the log and perform a full log-approach display. Only then did I realize that I should have been looking up! Within a few days, I made multiple observations of males plummeting down through the forest canopy to the log after their above-the-canopy flights. I am sure that I would never have discovered these flight displays by myself, given that I was spending all my time inside the forest at the display logs themselves. So, Tom Davis’s fantastic observations were essential to the story. The specific function of this especially extravagant behavior—advertising to females over many acres of forest?—remains enigmatic. — My ornithological Wanderjahr in Suriname was a transformative personal and intellectual experience. I had made it out of the university to a distant and exotic corner of the world, and I had thrived. During my five months there, I had used my birding skills to observe hundreds of species of birds. I came away with unique scientific observations of previously unknown lek behaviors, which were significant enough to constitute my first scientific papers, published a few years later in the canonical ornithological journals the Auk and the Ibis. I had also made good progress on devising a doctoral project on the evolution of manakin behavior.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was, as Charles had said, a big night, and the lino-tiled hallway was full of family people—rather got up, I suspected: mothers with arms crossed anxiously under their bosoms, and fathers showing the suppressed pride of parents at a speech-day. Many youngsters were rushing about, and the sense of private occasion made me feel more than ever out of place. I went over to the glass-fronted NoBos and communed for a second with my reflection before scanning the lists of activities, notices about excursions, and team photographs, routinely seeking out the faces of pretty boys (of which there were several) and those inevitable glimpses of underwear up the rucked short-legs of seated footballers. Then, in the next frame, there was a larger notice, printed in an old-fashioned and distinguished way, announcing that on this very day, in contests of three rounds each, the London and Home Counties Boys’ Club Boxing Championship would be decided, and the winning team presented with ‘the Nantwich Cup’. I felt how slow and incurious I had been now that I saw this evidence of Charles’s further influence and philanthropy. Of course he hadn’t sent me all this way merely to speak to the mysterious Shillibeer; I was amused and impressed that there was more to it, as well as getting the uneasy feeling that Charles was orchestrating his revelations with some expertise. I became convinced that when the line had gone dead two nights before it was a deliberate foreclosure on his part, and that back in the City he would now be nodding expectantly. Coming hard upon the grotesque and momentary episode in the churchyard it made me feel just a little out of control. I heard applause and a voice raised beyond the swinging green doors into the hall. I went in, trying to look as if I knew what to expect. The ring was raised in the middle of the room, which still had its galleries on three sides, supported on thick wooden pillars. Seating rose in scaffolded tiers around the ring, leaving a kind of ambulatory under the galleries, through which I could walk almost unnoticed. Up above, too, the place was packed, and I hoped I would be allowed to drift around rather than getting penned in a seat for the evening. I loitered in one of the aisles, leaning against the stepped edge of the temporary arena. The man whose feet were by my elbow leant over and said, ‘You want a seat?’—making accommodating gestures and showing how he and his party could squeeze up. But I declined.

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

  I answer that, The difference of states and duties in the Church regards three things. In the first place it regards the perfection of the Church. For even as in the order of natural things, perfection, which in God is simple and uniform, is not to be found in the created universe except in a multiform and manifold manner, so too, the fulness of grace, which is centered in Christ as head, flows forth to His members in various ways, for the perfecting of the body of the Church. This is the meaning of the Apostle’s words (Eph. 4:11,12): “He gave some apostles, and some prophets, and other some evangelists, and other some pastors and doctors for the perfecting of the saints.” Secondly, it regards the need of those actions which are necessary in the Church. For a diversity of actions requires a diversity of men appointed to them, in order that all things may be accomplished without delay or confusion; and this is indicated by the Apostle (Rom. 12:4,5), “As in one body we have many members, but all the members have not the same office, so we being many are one body in Christ.” Thirdly, this belongs to the dignity and beauty of the Church, which consist in a certain order; wherefore it is written (3 Kings 10:4,5) that “when the queen of Saba saw all the wisdom of Solomon . . . and the apartments of his servants, and the order of his ministers . . . she had no longer any spirit in her.” Hence the Apostle says (2 Tim. 2:20) that “in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and silver, but also of wood and of earth.” Reply to Objection 1: The distinction of states and duties is not an obstacle to the unity of the Church, for this results from the unity of faith, charity, and mutual service, according to the saying of the Apostle (Eph. 4:16): “From whom the whole body being compacted,” namely by faith, “and fitly joined together,” namely by charity, “by what every joint supplieth,” namely by one man serving another. Reply to Objection 2: Just as nature does not employ many means where one suffices, so neither does it confine itself to one where many are required, according to the saying of the Apostle (1 Cor. 12:17), “If the whole body were the eye, where would be the hearing?” Hence there was need in the Church, which is Christ’s body, for the members to be differentiated by various duties, states, and grades.

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  [image "iamge" file=image_rsrc4UW.jpg] On First Principles is a systematic theology, an effort to understand in a coherent and coordinated way the full scope of God’s relation to the universe from its creation outside of time to its final redemption. To present his vision, Origen expounds in four books his understanding of God (book I), of the material universe (book II), of rational being (thus free will; book III), and of revelation (that is, scripture; book IV). Before embarking on his exposition, Origen lays out his doctrinal presuppositions in a creedal-sounding preface. These align him securely with the self-designated “orthodoxy” of his third-century church. “All who believe and are convinced that grace and truth came by Jesus Christ and that Christ is the Truth,” he begins, “derive [this] knowledge from no other source but the very words and teaching of Christ.” This teaching, he continues, is to be found both in the New Testament (from the period “when [Christ] was made man and dwelt in the flesh”) and in the Old (“since even before that [time], Christ the Word of God was in Moses and the prophets,” On First Principles I. praef., 1). Noting that many Christians who hold this belief nonetheless have conflicting opinions about important issues, Origen also invokes ecclesiastical tradition, “the teaching of the church handed down in unbroken succession from the apostles.” Canonical scripture and apostolic teaching together are the guarantors of correct doctrine (I. praef., 2). But apostolic doctrine, like scripture itself, Origen notes, has many different levels. Its plainest meanings even the dull-minded grasp. God’s book holds deeper or higher meanings, however, and these beckon to those readers who, loving wisdom, train themselves through intellectual exercise to become worthy and capable of receiving them (I. praef., 3). Presenting a crisp punch list of doctrinal fixed points—God is one; the Son and the Spirit are also God; the Son was incarnate in human flesh; human will is free; the devil and his angels oppose the good, and so on—Origen notes as well a sweep of issues on which the church “does not speak clearly” (I. praef., 4–10). These obscurities invite diligent believers to sound scripture’s depths, aided by the disciplined application of allegorical or “spiritual” interpretation.3

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

  Achilles has no doctrine, other than eros and its compatibility with the narrative arc of human life. It is the genius of his art to raise romance to heights of self- awareness that allow it to compete with philosophy. Achilles does not argue for eros. He, unlike Plato, unlike the Stoics, embraces the world, with its ceaseless cycle of rebirth and death in which eros fi nds its natural place. And he laughs at anyone who believes it might be otherwise. CONCLUSION: COSMOS AND EROS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE Th e sexual culture of the high Roman Empire was dominated by the im- peratives of social reproduction. Th e symphony of sexual values, in all its various movements and complex harmonies, was set to the rhythms of the material world: early marriage for women, jealous guarding of honorable female sexuality, an expansive slave system, late marriage for men, and basi- cally relaxed attitudes toward male sexual potential, so long as it was conso- nant with masculine protocols and social hierarchies. Moral expectations were in tune with social roles, and social roles strictly determined both the points of release and the rigid constraints in ancient sexual culture. Th e value of a sexual act derived, fi rst and foremost, from its objective location within a matrix of social relationships. Th e romances of the Roman Empire are such extraordinary witnesses to the experience of eros because they transform the exigencies of social repro- duction into the workings of a cosmic destiny, they toy with the tensions between fl ux and order in the individual’s coming- to- be in the world, and in the end, they spiritualize the mysterious erotic energies that connect man to nature. In the romances, these stirrings are a constitutive source of the self. When a romancer like Achilles Tatius looked out upon the gloomy counsels of the phi los o phers, it was not as a partisan of one ideology upon another, competing for supremacy in the public mind; it was, rather, as a spokesman for life, and the timeless patterns of sexual experience, upon a THE MORALITIES OF SEX IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE  small reformation movement.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  What thought and care to determine the exact site for a bridge, or for a fountain, and to give a mountain road that perfect curve which is at the same time the shortest. . . . The widening of the road to Megara transformed the shore along the Scironian Cliffs; the two thousand odd stadia of paved way, provided with cisterns and military posts, which connected Antinoöpolis with the Red Sea brought an era of security to the desert following an era of danger. For construction of a system of aqueducts in Troas all the revenue from five hundred cities of the province of Asia was not too high a price; an aqueduct for Carthage atoned in some part for the rigors of the Punic Wars. The erecting of fortifications was much like constructing dykes: the object was to find the line on which a shore, or an empire, can be defended, the point where the assault of waves (or barbarians) will be held back, stopped, or utterly broken. The beauty of the gulfs bore fruit with the opening of harbors. The founding of libraries was like constructing more public granaries, amassing reserves against a spiritual winter which by certain signs, in spite of myself, I see ahead. I have done much rebuilding. To reconstruct is to collaborate with time gone by, penetrating or modifying its spirit, and carrying it toward a longer future. Thus beneath the stones we find the secret of the springs. Our life is brief: we are always referring to centuries which precede or follow our own as if they were totally alien to us, but I have come close to them in my play with stone. These walls which I reinforce are still warm from contact with vanished bodies; hands yet unborn will caress the shafts of these columns. The more I have meditated upon my death, and especially upon that of another, the more I have tried to add to our lives these virtually indestructible extensions. At Rome I preferred to use our enduring brick; it returns but slowly to the earth, from which it comes, and its imperceptible settling and crumbling leave a mountainous mass even when the edifice has ceased to be visibly what it was built for, a fortress, a circus, or a tomb. In Greece and in Asia I chose the native marble, that fair substance which, once cut, stays so faithful to human measurements and proportions that the plan of an entire temple survives in each fragment of a broken column. Architecture is rich in possibilities more varied than Vitruvius' four orders would seem to allow; our great stone blocks, like our tones in music, are amenable to endless regrouping. For the Pantheon I turned to the ancient Etruria of augurs and soothsayers; the sunny temple of Venus, on the contrary, is a round of Ionic forms, a profusion of white and pale rose columns clustered about the voluptuous goddess whence sprang the race of Caesar.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  It is only in studying Phlegon, secretary to Hadrian, that I learned that we owe to this forgotten personage the first, and one of the finest, of the great ghost stories, that somber, sensuous Bride of Corinth which inspired Goethe's ballad, and likewise the Corinthian Wedding of Anatole France. It must be said, however, that Phlegon also took down, with the same avid and uncritical curiosity for everything beyond ordinary experience, some absurd stories of two-headed monsters, and of hermaphrodites got with child. Such was the stuff of the conversations, on some days, at least, at the imperial table. Those who would have preferred a Journal of Hadrian to his Memoirs forget that a man of action rarely keeps a journal; it is almost always later on, and in a period of prolonged inactivity, that he does his recollecting, makes his notations, and, very often, has cause for wonder at the course his life has taken. If all other documents were lacking, the Letter of Arrian to the Emperor Hadrian on the Circumnavigation of the Black Sea would suffice to recreate in broad outline that great imperial figure: the scrupulous exactitude of the chief-of-state who would know all details; his interest in the work both of war and of peace; his concern for good likenesses in statues, and that these should be finely wrought; his passion for the poetry and legend of an earlier day. And that society, rare in any period, but destined to vanish completely after the time of Marcus Aurelius, wherein the scholarly administrator can still address his prince as a friend, however subtly shaded his deference and his respect. Everything is there: the nostalgia for ancient Greece and its ideals, discreet allusion to a lost love and to mystical consolation sought by the bereaved survivor, the haunting appeal of unknown lands and barbarous climes. The evocation of desert wastes peopled only by sea-birds, so profoundly romantic in spirit, calls to mind the exquisite vase found in Villa Hadriana, to be seen today in the Museum of the Terme in Rome; there on a field of marble snow a flock of wild heron are spreading their wings to fly away, in utter solitude. Note of 1949: the more I strive for an exact portrait the farther I diverge from the kind of book, and of man, who would please the public. Only a few students of human destiny will understand. In our time the novel devours all other forms; one is almost forced to use it as the medium of expression. This study of the destiny of a man called Hadrian would have been cast in the form of a tragedy in the Seventeenth Century, or of an essay, perhaps, in the period of the Renaissance.