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)

  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.

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

  Again. The soul that enjoys God will adhere to Him most completely, and will participate in His goodness in the highest degree possible that is consistent with its mode of being. Wherefore both the body will be perfectly subject to the soul, and it will share in the soul’s properties, as far as possible, in acuteness of sense, in the orderliness of the bodily appetite, and in the superlative perfection of its nature. For a thing is so much the more perfect in nature, as its matter is more completely subject to its form. Hence the Apostle says (1 Cor. 15:44): It is sown a natural (animal) body; it shall rise a spiritual body. In the resurrection, the body will be spiritual, not that it will be a spirit, as some wrongly understood (whether spirit mean a spiritual substance, or air or wind), but because it will be completely subject to the spirit. Even so, we speak of the animal body, not that it is an animal, but because it is subject to animal passions, and needs food. From the foregoing it follows that just as man’s soul will be raised to the glory of the heavenly spirits, by seeing God in His essence, as above stated, so will his body be uplifted to the properties of the heavenly bodies, in brightness, impassibility, easy and unwearying movement, and in being perfected by its most perfect form. This is what the Apostle meant when he said that man will rise again with a celestial body, celestial indeed not in nature, but in glory. Hence, after saying that there are bodies celestial, and bodies terrestrial, he adds that one is the glory of the celestial, and another the glory of the terrestrial (1 Cor. 15:40). And just as the glory to which the human soul is uplifted surpasses the natural power of the heavenly spirits, as we have proved, so does the glory of risen bodies surpass the natural perfection of heavenly bodies in greater brightness, more changeless impassibility, and more perfect agility and dignity of nature. CHAPTER LXXXVII THE PLACE OF THE GLORIFIED BODIESSINCE a place should be proportionate to that which is in it, it follows that, as the bodies of those who rise again acquire the properties of heavenly bodies, they have a place in heaven also, or rather above all the heavens, in order that they may be together with Christ, by whose power they will be brought to that glory; and of whom the Apostle says (Eph. 4:10) that he ascended above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.

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

  PSEUDO-ORIGEN. (Hom. in div. 5.) And now also when the heads of Churches, holy men and acceptable to God, enter your roof, then in them the Lord also enters, and do you think of yourself as receiving the Lord. And when you eat and drink the Lord’s Bodya, then the Lord enters under your roof, and you then should humble yourself, saying, Lord, I am not worthy. For where He enters unworthily, there He enters to the condemnation of him who receives Him. JEROME. The thoughtfulness of the centurion appears herein, that he saw the Divinity hidden beneath the covering of body; wherefore he adds, But speak the word only, and my servant will be healed. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. He knew that Angels stood by unseen to minister to Him, who turn every word of his into act; yea and should Angels fail, yet diseases are healed by His life-giving command. HILARY. Also he therefore says that it needed only a word to heal his son, because all the salvation of the Gentiles is of faith, and the life of them all is in the precepts of the Lord; therefore he continues saying, For I am a man set under authority, having soldiers under me; and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. He has here developed the mystery of the Father and the Son, by the secret suggestion of the Holy Spirit; as much as to say, Though I am under the command of another, yet have I power to command those who are under me; so also Thou, though under the command of the Father, in so far as Thou art Man, yet hast Thou power over the Angels. But Sabellius perhaps affirms, seeking to prove that the Son is the same as the Father, that it is to be understood thus; ‘If I who am set under authority have yet power to command, how much more Thou who art under the authority of none.’ But the words will not bear this exposition; for he said not, ‘If I being a man under authority,’ but, ‘For I also am a man set under authority;’ clearly not drawing a distinction, but pointing to a resemblance in this respect between himself and Christ. AUGUSTINE. (ubi sup.) If I who am under command have yet power to command others, how much more Thou whom all powers serve! GLOSS. (ord.) Thou art able without Thy bodily presence, by the ministry of Thy Angels, to say to this disease, Go, and it will leave him; and to say to health, Come, and it shall come to him.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I was drawn the more to this aim by my love of things foreign; I liked to deal with the barbarians. This great country lying between the mouths of the Danube and the Borysthenes, a triangular area of which I have covered at least two sides, is one of the most remarkable regions of the world, at least for us who are born on the shores of the Interior Sea and are used to the clear, dry line of southern landscape, with its hills and promontories. At times there I worshipped the goddess Earth in the way that we here worship the goddess Rome; I am speaking not so much of Ceres as of a more ancient divinity, anterior even to the invention of the harvest. Our Greek and Latin lands, everywhere supported by bone-structure of rock, have the trim beauty of a male body; the heavy abundance of the Scythian earth was that of a reclining woman. The plain ended only where the sky began. My wonder never ceased in presence of the rivers: that vast empty land was but a slope and a bed for their waters. Our rivers are short; we never feel far from their sources; but the enormous flow which ended there in confused estuaries swept with it the mud of an unknown continent and the ice of uninhabitable regions. The cold of Spain's high plateaus is second to none, but this was the first time that I found myself face to face with true winter, which visits our countries but briefly. There it sets in for a long period of months; farther north it must be unchanging, without beginning and without end. The evening of my arrival in camp the Danube was one immense roadway of ice, red at first and then blue, furrowed by the inner working of currents with tracks as deep as those of chariots. We made use of furs to protect ourselves from the cold. The presence of that enemy, so impersonal as to be almost abstract, produced an indescribable exaltation, and a feeling of energy accrued. One fought to conserve body heat as elsewhere one fights to keep one's courage. There were days when the snow effaced the few differences in level on the steppes; we galloped in a world of pure space and pure atoms. The frozen coating gave transparency to the most ordinary things, and the softest objects took on a celestial rigidity. Each broken reed was a flute of crystal.

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

  On this point, however, credence is to be given rather to Dionysius, who is an eyewitness as to this having occurred by the moon eclipsing the sun. For he says (Ep. ad Polycarp): “Without any doubt we saw the moon encroach on the sun,” he being in Egypt at the time, as he says in the same letter. And in this he points out four miracles. The first is that the natural eclipse of the sun by interposition of the moon never takes place except when the sun and moon are in conjunction. But then the sun and moon were in opposition, it being the fifteenth day, since it was the Jewish Passover. Wherefore he says: “For it was not the time of conjunction.”—The second miracle is that whereas at the sixth hour the moon was seen, together with the sun, in the middle of the heavens, in the evening it was seen to be in its place, i.e. in the east, opposite the sun. Wherefore he says: “Again we saw it,” i.e. the moon, “return supernaturally into opposition with the sun,” so as to be diametrically opposite, having withdrawn from the sun “at the ninth hour,” when the darkness ceased, “until evening.” From this it is clear that the wonted course of the seasons was not disturbed, because the Divine power caused the moon both to approach the sun supernaturally at an unwonted season, and to withdraw from the sun and return to its proper place according to the season. The third miracle was that the eclipse of the sun naturally always begins in that part of the sun which is to the west and spreads towards the east: and this is because the moon’s proper movement from west to east is more rapid than that of the sun, and consequently the moon, coming up from the west, overtakes the sun and passes it on its eastward course. But in this case the moon had already passed the sun, and was distant from it by the length of half the heavenly circle, being opposite to it: consequently it had to return eastwards towards the sun, so as to come into apparent contact with it from the east, and continue in a westerly direction. This is what he refers to when he says: “Moreover, we saw the eclipse begin to the east and spread towards the western edge of the sun,” for it was a total eclipse, “and afterwards pass away.” The fourth miracle consisted in this, that in a natural eclipse that part of the sun which is first eclipsed is the first to reappear (because the moon, coming in front of the sun, by its natural movement passes on to the east, so as to come away first from the western portion of the sun, which was the first part to be eclipsed), whereas in this case the moon, while returning miraculously from the east to the west, did not pass the sun so as to be to the west of it: but having reached the western edge of the sun returned towards the east: so that the last portion of the sun to be eclipsed was the first to reappear. Consequently the eclipse began towards the east, whereas the sun began to reappear towards the west. And to this he refers by saying: “Again we observed that the occultation and emersion did not begin from the same point,” i.e. on the same side of the sun, “but on opposite sides.”

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

  CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. xxvii.) Why did He enter into Peter’s house? I think to take food; for it follows, And she arose, and ministered to them. For He abode with His disciples to do them honour, and to make them more zealous. Observe Peter’s reverence towards Christ; though his mother-in-law lay at home sick of a fever, yet he did not force Him thither at once, but waited till His teaching should be completed, and others healed. For from the beginning he was instructed to prefer others to himself. Wherefore he did not even bring Him thither, but Christ went in of Himself; purposing, because the centurion had said, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof, to shew what He granted to a disciple. And He did not scorn to enter the humble hut of a fisherman, instructing us in every thing to trample upon human pride. Sometimes He heals by a word, sometimes He reaches forth His hand; as here, He touched her hand, and the fever left her. For He would not always work miracles with display of surpassing power, but would sometimes be hid. By touching her body He not only banished the fever, but restored her to perfect health. Because her sickness was such as art could cure, He shewed his power to heal, in doing what medicine could not do, giving her back perfect health and strength at once; which is intimated in what the Evangelist adds, And she arose, and ministered to them. JEROME. For naturally the greatest weakness follows fever, and the evils of sickness begin to be felt as the patient begins to recover; but that health which is given by the Lord’s power is complete at once. GLOSS. (non occ.) And it is not enough that she is cured, but strength is given her besides, for she arose and ministered unto them. CHRYSOSTOM. This, she arose and ministered unto them, shews at once the Lord’s power, and the woman’s feeling towards Christ. BEDE. (in loc.) Figuratively; Peter’s house is the Law, or the circumcision, his mother-in-law the synagogue, which is as it were the mother of the Church committed to Peter. She is in a fever, that is, she is sick of zealous hate, and persecutes the Church. The Lord touches her hand, when He turns her carnal works to spiritual uses. REMIGIUS. Or by Peter’s mother-in-law may be understood the Law, which according to the Apostle was made weak through the flesh, i. e. the carnal understanding. But when the Lord through the mystery of the Incarnation appeared visibly in the synagogue, and fulfilled the Law in action, and taught that it was to be understood spiritually; straightway it thus allied with the grace of the Gospel received such strength, that what had been the minister of death and punishment, became the minister of life and glory.

• From Untrue (2018)

  These questions and the issue of pleasure bring us to one of our very closest primate relatives, the bonobo, with whom we share nearly 99 percent of our DNA. Bonobos (Pan paniscus), formerly known as “pygmy chimps,” do in fact look like taller, slimmer versions of their other close relatives, chimps (Pan troglodytes). They live in only one place in the wild: the Congo Basin of the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire. Bonobos also live under human care in seven zoos in the United States, and in several European countries. My questions about female sexuality, female pleasure, female sociality, and female “infidelity” brought me to San Diego for several days to speak with Dr. Amy Parish, a primatologist who trained with both Sarah Hrdy and Frans de Waal. Parish, who had been inspired and mentored by the same woman who sparked my own interest in primatology at the University of Michigan, Barbara Smuts, had created a considerable commotion in her field very early in her career by reporting what she observed in her work with bonobos. Since then, she has periodically lobbed insights based on her research at the San Diego, Stuttgart, and Frankfurt zoos that blew up the prevailing view of primate social behavior—that humans, like chimps, are inherently prone to (mostly male) conflict and violence, and that male dominance, including infanticide and sexual coercion of females, is deeply woven into our evolutionary legacy. Through careful study and many hours of observation and data collection, Parish brought forward groundbreaking insights about bonobos, insights that reveal an important, surprising, and untold aspect of our hominin prehistory.

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

  complement to the injunctions of the moralists and the dictates of law. Literature is capable of expressing, in a way more intimate than mere commands, the shape of sexual morality, when actually projected onto the fur-rowed plane of human life. Pagans, Christians, and Jews alike used stories as vehicles to express their deepest beliefs about the relationships between the sexual body, the mechanics of society, and the nature of the cosmos. Th e Christian transformation of sex can be retraced in the history of literature, which mirrors quite sensitively the passage from a public sexual ideology or ga nized around the imperatives of social reproduction to a mentality founded in ecclesiastical norms. In short, the history of literature recapitulates the passage from shame to sin. Chapter 4 is focused on one of the central preoccupations of ancient fi ction, female chastity. Feminine purity was a transcendent symbol, capable of bearing the most consequential meanings. Th e authors of the imperial romances invested no small part of their talents in contriving elaborate threats to the chastity of their heroines. Th ese scenes, looked at across the genre, provide direct access to the ideological code of romance. Th e romances are stories in which essence precedes existence. What is most remarkable about the imperial romances is the extent to which they are explicitly built on an acute awareness that forces beyond the individual’s control shape his or her life. Fate furnishes us with moral ends, and more instru-mentally, society constitutes us as selves. Th e romances make their most daring approaches to the inscrutable mysteries of fate in the image of the heroine’s endangered chastity. Th e romances fl irt with the possibility of her violation, because the transgression of her body would mark a visceral con-travention of the social and cosmic order. Th ese typological scenes are very I N T R O D U C T I O N  near the deep theology of the romance. In the end, she is always rescued, and the deeper order of the cosmos prevails against the fl ux and frustration that is experienced in human time. Th e heroine is reserved, by the will of the gods, for marriage. Th ere is salvation in the cycle of nature, which imparts to us the gift of eros within its mysterious order. Christians and Jews would rework these very scenes of feminine imperil-ment to express their deepest reservations about the world and the place of eros in the constitution of the self. Already in the primitive phases of the religion, Christian authors were adept at reformulating the fi ctional tropes of Greco- Roman literature. A whole body of legend grew up around the heroes of Christianity, the apostles. In the apocryphal acts, we fi nd the sexual mechanics of the romance deliberately inverted. Th e ruling Roman order

• From Untrue (2018)

  Bonobos are harder still to find in their native habitat and even harder to study. Because they live in an area with a long history of political unrest and violence, for decades it was impossible for primatologists to observe them in any sustained way. It’s only within the last quarter century or so, thanks to fieldworkers in Congo and others, including Parish, who study them under human care in zoos, that anyone got a handle on who and what they are. There was no bonobo gene sequencing until 2012, at which point we learned that bonobos are more closely related to humans than they are to gorillas and at least as closely related to us as are chimps. A 2017 studying comparing human, chimp, and bonobo muscles confirmed what previous molecular research had suggested: “Bonobo muscles have changed the least [from our common ancestor], which means they are the closest we can get to having a ‘living’ ancestor,” according to the research head of the George Washington University Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology. Some paleontologists believe that bonobos look a great deal like our pre-hominin ancestor Australopithecus afarensis. Female bonobos have more pronounced breasts than other female primates (though a bit less pronounced than ours), and posturally, bonobos resemble humans quite a bit, especially with their tendency to walk bipedally. Like us, they have sex ventrally, or face-to-face, something very rare in other primates. And bonobos are known to both spontaneously console victims of harassment and revel in being consoled. Researchers say that in doing so, bonobos follow the same “empathic gradient” that humans do, offering support to kin, friends, and acquaintances. Except for a difference in frequency, human and bonobo babies have extraordinarily similar laughs when they are tickled.

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

  For my doctoral dissertation, I went a step further, using new information about manakin anatomy to produce a reasonably complete and well-resolved phylogeny of the entire manakin family. This research involved hundreds of dissections of the syrinx—the unique little gizmo the birds sing with—of all manakin species. I then used this evolutionary tree to test my hypotheses about behavioral homology. For example, I found common features of syringeal structure that confirmed my hypothesis that the Pin-tailed, Golden-winged, and White-throated Manakin genera had an exclusive common ancestor. And, as I had proposed based on their display behavior, these features also pointed to the Golden-winged and White-throated Manakins’ being more closely related to each other than either was to the Pin-tailed Manakin. [image "Phylogeny of the White-throated, Golden-winged, and Pin-tailed Manakins depicting the evolutionary origins and losses of the behavioral elements within the display repertoires of each species and their shared ancestors. Based on Prum (1997) ." file=image_rsrc3N2.jpg] Phylogeny of the White-throated, Golden-winged, and Pin-tailed Manakins depicting the evolutionary origins and losses of the behavioral elements within the display repertoires of each species and their shared ancestors. Based on Prum (1997). Today, what we know of the aesthetic radiation of manakins provides many evolutionary lessons about how Beauty Happens over the Tree of Life. We’ve learned that manakin aesthetic repertoires include many elements that are older than the individual species themselves. We can see that each species’ display repertoire is contingent upon both the evolutionary legacy of that species—what it inherited from its various ancestors—and any new display elements—aesthetic elaborations, innovations, or losses—that have evolved in that species alone. — How the elements of a given display repertoire come into being over the course of time shows us the inherently serendipitous and unpredictable nature of aesthetic evolutionary process. From a common history, sister species evolve in many different and unpredictable aesthetic directions. Through each aesthetic change, mate choice also creates new aesthetic opportunities, which can unleash an evolutionary cascade of effects. These include the evolution of further aesthetic extremity and complexity. As Beauty Happens, different species evolve off in ever more different, arbitrary directions from their shared ancestral repertoires. Especially when sexual selection is strong, as in manakins and other lekking birds, Beauty Happening over the course of long evolutionary timescales results in explosive aesthetic radiations.