Bewilderment

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 The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  My curiosity about him delayed my surprise that he should already be out and taking exercise only ten days after a cardiac arrest. And on the other hand something abnormal in him made me feel that all his manifestations would be unpredictable and irreconcilable with each other. He stared at me, or through me, and I wondered what to say, to what extent recognition was taking place. He doesn’t know at all who I am, I thought; he’s just looking at a pretty young man; he would hardly be able to remember me. And to confirm this he seemed suddenly not to be there himself, appeared to die out of the scene in a moment. He turned and made off slowly to the steps at the corner of the bath; Nigel, the attendant, barely looked up from his book as the old boy hauled himself out and moved with heavy, wavering steps to the stairs. I gave him time to get up them, imagining already a further incident like that in the Kensington Gardens lavatory. The shower-room was in its busy last shift: one of the sudden and unpredictable fluctuations in water temperature occurred as I came in, and there were cat-like yells as naked men leapt aside from the scalding jets. Darting movements of hands tried to regulate the taps, steam filled the air, and through it an impression of Bacchic pinkness was suffused, the colour of Anglo-Saxon flesh flushed by just tolerable heat. Warm from exercise I showered in water that was almost cold, and observed the strange variety of physical forms which were making their lingering transit back to the clean, clothed world. His Lordship was upset by the temperature of his shower, and made feeble efforts to adjust it. He looked unhappy, the rubber cap, which he kept on, intensifying the babyish whiteness of his figure. He took tiny steps back and forth, and peered around with his mouth slightly open, revealing his lower teeth à l’anglaise. Beneath his round belly candy-striped bathing shorts sagged dispiritedly. It struck me I might often have seen him here before but, so selective was my vision, never paid him any attention until he had fallen down in front of me and made his claim to be taken care of. Now he had chanced on one of the standard hard-on sessions of the shower, as on both sides of him and across the room three queens sported horizontal members which they turned round from time to time to conceal or to display, barely exchanging looks as they revolved. The old man took no interest in this activity, knowing perhaps from long experience that it rarely meant anything or led anywhere, was a brief and helpless surrender to the forcing-house of the shower. In a few seconds the hard-on might pass from one end of the room to the other with the foolish perfection of a Busby Berkeley routine.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  But that period of heroic foolhardiness taught me to distinguish between the different aspects of courage. The kind of courage which I should like always to possess would be cool and detached, free from all physical excitement and impassive as the calm of a god. I do not flatter myself that I have ever attained it. The semblance of such courage which I later employed was, in my worst days, only a cynical recklessness toward life; in my best days it was only a sense of duty to which I clung. When confronted with the danger itself, however, that cynicism or that sense of duty quickly gave place to a mad intrepidity, a kind of strange orgasm of a man mated with his destiny. At the age which I then was this drunken courage persisted without cessation. A being afire with life cannot foresee death; in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists. If death does take him, he is probably unaware of the fact; it amounts to no more for him than a shock or a spasm. I smile with some bitterness at the realization that now out of any two thoughts I devote one to my own death, as if so much ceremony were needed to decide this worn body for the inevitable. At that time, on the contrary, a young man who would have lost much in not living a few years more was daily risking his future with complete unconcern. It would be easy to construe what I have just told as the story of a too scholarly soldier who wishes to be forgiven his love for books. But such simplified perspectives are false. Different persons ruled in me in turn, though no one of them for long; each fallen tyrant was quick to regain power. Thus have I played host successively to the meticulous officer, fanatic in discipline, but gaily sharing with his men the privations of war; to the melancholy dreamer intent on the gods; the lover ready to risk all for a moment's rapture; the haughty young lieutenant retiring to his tent to study his maps by lamplight, making clear to his friends his disdain for the way the world goes; and finally the future statesman. But let us not forget, either, the base opportunist who in fear of displeasing succumbed to drunkenness at the emperor's table; the young fellow pronouncing upon all questions with ridiculous assurance; the frivolous wit, ready to lose a friend for the sake of a bright remark; the soldier exercising with mechanical precision his vile gladiatorial trade. And we should include also that vacant figure, nameless and unplaced in history, though as much myself as all the others, the simple toy of circumstance, no more and no less than a body, lying on a camp bed, distracted by an aroma, aroused by a breath of wind, vaguely attentive to some eternal hum of a bee.

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

  Accordingly, he says, first (255), that, having dismissed those who treated the truth by using fables, it is necessary to seek information about the aforesaid question from those who have treated the truth in a demonstrative way, by asking them why it is that, if all beings are derived from the same principles, some beings are eternal by nature and others are corrupted. And since these men give no reason why this is so, and since it is unreasonable that things should be as they say (that in the case of beings having the same principles some should be corruptible and others eternal), it seems clearly to follow that corruptible and eternal things do not have the same principles or the same causes. 473. For the explanation (256). Then he gives one solution. He says that the explanation given to the aforesaid question which seems to fit it best is the one which Empedocles gave, although he was subject to the same error as the others, because the explanation which he gave is no more adequate than theirs, as is about to be shown. For he maintained that corruptible and incorruptible things have certain common principles, but that a special principle, hate, causes the corruption of the elements in such a way that the coming together of this cause and another principle produces corruption in the world. 474. Yet even hate (257). Here he criticizes Empedocles ’ argument, and he does this in three ways. First (257:C 474), he does this by showing that the argument which Empedocles gave is not in keeping with his position; second (261:C 478), by showing that it is not adequate ( “ Moreover, he does not ” ); third (263:C 481), by showing that it is not to the point ( “ Yet he alone speaks ” ). In regard to the first he does three things. First, he shows that Empedocles ’ argument does not agree with his other views about hate; second (258:C 476), that it does not agree with his view about God himself ( “ For this reason ” ); and third (26o:C 477), that it does not agree with his view about love ( “ Nor, similarly ” ).

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Finally, I have some special advice about remarriage and building relationships between a child and a stepparent. All of these issues are central to the child’s well-being in the divorced family and are areas of concern for which the parent has very little preparation or guidance. Finally, I have another important audience in mind. This book is also written for concerned judges, attorneys, mediators, and mental health professionals who work with the courts and families. All of you are caught in dilemmas created by a legal system that gives priority to the rights of parents but is mandated to protect children. I invite you to hear the voices of these young adults who have grown up under the policies of our legal system. Few of you have ever had the opportunity to find out what happens to such children after agreements—in which they have no voice—are signed, sealed, and delivered. This is your chance to hear from these children. They speak from the heart. I begin with the rest of Karen’s story. PART ONE Parallel Universes: Karen and Gary K ONE When a Child Becomes the Caregiver aren James’s visit drove me to continue probing the long-term effects of divorce on children. The minute she left, I went to my study and drew out her family’s record to refresh my memory. I have copious files on each family member in our study, including verbatim transcripts of past interviews, letters from teachers, notes describing dollhouse play, children’s drawings, comments from parents about their own lives and their beliefs about their children, comments from children showing an astonishing difference in perceptions, and my own margin notes about what each family represents. The first item that caught my eye was a drawing Karen had done when we met. (Children’s drawings often tell you what they are feeling and reveal far more than spoken words.) Karen had depicted each member of her family in meticulous detail—her mother, father, eight-year-old brother Kevin, and six-year-old sister Sharon. Dressed in bright colors, they were standing very close together, each smiling broadly. Even the cat was smiling. “My Family” was printed across the top in large block letters. I was intrigued by Karen’s capacity to maintain an image of serenity in her drawing because by now I was privy to the shrieking disorganization in her family life. Karen’s wish for peace and family togetherness was poignantly clear. As I was to learn, this was the central desire of her life. The James divorce totally bewildered the children. Though on a rocky course for several years, the marriage was functioning (in the children’s eyes) and family life seemed pretty stable. The father made a good living as a dermatologist who worked long hours in a private practice with four other physicians. The mother was furious at her husband, complaining that he was never available, spent zero time with the children, was cold and aloof as a husband and incompetent as a lover.

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

  Given the moral and material centrality of prostitution in Roman society, it is noteworthy that so little comment was aroused by the problem of how women became prostitutes. In part this silence is explained by the constant infl ux of slaves into the sex trade; slaves were social nonbeings whose exploitation was unremarkable. But the silence is more deafening than that. In comparison with other cultures, Roman ideology placed virtually no emphasis on the prostitute’s lust. Prostitution was a bios, a condition of life, not necessarily a result of the woman’s interior constitution. In parallel, the Roman ideology of slavery was equally underdeveloped. Aristotle’s natural slave theory had little purchase in the Roman Empire. Slavery was a fact; it was “an economic and po liti cal necessity, and that was that.” Th e prostitute, similarly, required no deep or elaborate psychopathol-ogy. She was an ill- starred creature, like the faceless victim sacrifi ced for Leucippe. What is notable about female sexual morality in the Roman Empire is its resolute constancy. Primitive expectations of the woman’s body endured with little questioning. A woman’s sexual behavior was an organic expression of the role she was assigned in the economy of desire and reproduction. Th e principal novelty in the imperial era is a heightened awareness of the deep association of social status and moral expectations. Th is awareness seeped into ordinary consciousness. It is evident, for instance, in an oft-quoted series of rhetorical exercises preserved by the elder Seneca. Th ese ephemera of the Roman schools, such an important organ of socialization in the empire, transmit some of the most primitive and most progressive sentiments to have reached us from the ancient world. One elaborate series revolves around the imaginary dilemmas of a virgin enslaved in a brothel who escapes unstained and wishes to become a priestess. Some orators argued that the mere placement of the girl’s body in the brothel shamed it; others argued that her invincible chastity was all the greater for having triumphed over bad fortune. It would be inadvisable to extract any of these dicta and treat them as the Roman attitude. Th e exercise was aimed, with pinpoint accuracy, at the fundamental but unstable assumption that status and behavior were aligned. Th e tension, and even more so a consciousness of the tension, is specifi cally Roman. Th e imagination that produced these rich socio- legal riddles is not far at all from the literary spirit that informs the romances. Th e contemplation of the possible disjuncture between essence and circumstance is identical. In T H E M O R A L I T I E S O F S E X I N T H E R O M A N E M P I R E 

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

  At the core of this failure was the a priori belief in a powerfully rational idea, the efficient market hypothesis, which states that, given open access to accurate information, free markets will always establish the true, correct value of an asset. According to the efficient market hypothesis, economic bubbles are impossible. Sound familiar? As the economist Paul Krugman concluded, “The belief in the efficient market hypothesis blinded many if not most economists to the emergence of the biggest financial bubble in history.” I think that most evolutionary biologists are equivalently blind to the reality of arbitrary mate choice. To explore the parallels between the science of mate choice and the business cycle, I had lunch one day with my Yale colleague and neighbor Robert Shiller, the Nobel Prize–winning economist. A well-known expert on housing markets and an advocate of behavioral economics, Shiller was dubbed “Mr. Bubble” in a 2005 New York Times story in which he presciently warned that real estate prices could drop by 40 percent over the next generation. It took only three years for his predictions to be realized. In his now-classic 2000 book, Irrational Exuberance, Shiller presented the case for the role played by human psychology in the volatility of many economic markets. A speculative financial market bubble, he wrote, occurs when price increases spur investor confidence and lead to increased expectations of future gains. The result is a positive feedback loop in which each increase in asset prices begets greater confidence, increased expectations, increased investment, and higher prices. These economic feedback loops involve some of the same basic dynamics as the Beauty Happens mechanism. Both sexual displays and asset prices can be driven by popularity alone, decoupled from extrinsic sources of value. I asked Bob what he thought about the idea that there might be similarities between the intellectual frameworks of macroeconomics and evolutionary biology. He was particularly struck by how closely the arguments waged by efficient market theorists and adaptationist evolutionary biologists resembled each other. What he said made perfect sense to me: To many economists, the mere existence of an asset at a given price indicates that its price must accurately reflect its value. That’s very similar to arguing that the existence of a given tree or bird in a certain environment demonstrates that it must have achieved an optimal solution to the challenge of survival because it has not yet been displaced by some other ecological competitor. Both use their views to interpret the world in a way that reinforces those views. Such logic results in empirical intellectual disciplines that are more dedicated to confirming their own worldviews than to establishing an accurate understanding of the world.

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

  Reply to Objection 1: After her sanctification the fomes remained in the Blessed Virgin, but fettered; lest she should be surprised by some sudden inordinate act, antecedent to the act of reason. And although the grace of her sanctification contributed to this effect, yet it did not suffice; for otherwise the result of her sanctification would have been to render impossible in her any sensual movement not preceded by an act of reason, and thus she would. not have had the fomes, which is contrary to what we have said above [4130](A[3]). We must therefore say that the above mentioned fettering (of the fomes) was perfected by divine providence not permitting any inordinate motion to result from the fomes. Reply to Objection 2: Origen (Hom. xvii in Luc.) and certain other doctors expound these words of Simeon as referring to the sorrow which she suffered at the time of our Lord’s Passion. Ambrose (in Luc. 2:35) says that the sword signifies “Mary’s prudence which took note of the heavenly mystery. For the word of God is living and effectual, and more piercing than any two-edged sword” (Heb. 4:12). Others again take the sword to signify doubt. But this is to be understood of the doubt, not of unbelief, but of wonder and discussion. Thus Basil says (Ep. ad Optim.) that “the Blessed Virgin while standing by the cross, and observing every detail, after the message of Gabriel, and the ineffable knowledge of the Divine Conception, after that wondrous manifestation of miracles, was troubled in mind”: that is to say, on the one side seeing Him suffer such humiliation, and on the other considering His marvelous works. Reply to Objection 3: In those words Chrysostom goes too far. They may, however, be explained as meaning that our Lord corrected in her, not the inordinate motion of vain glory in regard to herself, but that which might be in the thoughts of others. Whether , by her sanctification in the womb, the Blessed Virgin received the fulness of grace?Objection 1: It would seem that, by her sanctification in the womb, the Blessed Virgin did not receive the fulness or perfection of grace. For this seems to be Christ’s privilege, according to Jn. 1:14: “We saw Him [Vulg.: ‘His glory’] as the Only-Begotten [Vulg.: ‘as it were of the Only-Begotten’] full of grace and truth.” But what is proper to Christ ought not to be ascribed to some one else. Therefore the Blessed Virgin did not receive the fulness of grace at the time of her sanctification.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘I’m sure you do. Isn’t there an agency?’ Charles was fingering the biscuits, unable to decide which he wanted. ‘I always try to help them.’ He spoke almost to himself. ‘One day I’ll tell you the whole story. But I can tell you now, he is not the first. Others have had to go. If I can’t entertain a young man to afternoon tea …’ ‘You mean I am the cause of all this, it can’t be.’ He nodded at me as if to say that he too found it incredible—indeed, as if not sure that I believed it. ‘He is not normal,’ he explained. ‘But he will have to get used to it, when you come again.’ I thought for a moment about the implications of this. ‘I don’t want to make things worse for you,’ I insisted. ‘We could have tea somewhere else.’ ‘It’s important to me that you come here,’ Charles said calmly. ‘There are things I want to show you, and ask you, too. It’s quite a little museum I have here.’ He looked around the room, and I politely did the same. ‘I’m the prime exhibit, of course, but I’m afraid I’m about to be removed from display; returned to my generous lender, as it were.’ How does one treat such baleful jokes from the elderly? I looked blank, as if not with him—and so perhaps showed that I knew it to be true. ‘I’m sure you must have some fascinating things. Of course I still don’t know anything about you. I still haven’t looked you up.’ He grunted, but his mind was clearly running on to something else, so that he broke through my following platitudes: ‘Come on, let me show you around.’ We were still on our first cup of tea. He had begun to push himself out of his armchair and I jumped up to help him. ‘That’s what it’s all about,’ he confirmed mysteriously. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll come back here—want to take a biscuit with you?’ I gave him my arm and we made for the door. ‘So much stuff in here,” he complained. ‘God knows what it all is … books, of course. Need more shelves but don’t want to spoil the room. Still, it won’t matter soon.’ In the hall he hesitated. His suited forearm lay along my bare brown one, and his hand gripped mine, half-interlocked with it. It was a broad, mottled, strong hand, the knuckles slightly swollen by arthritis, the fingertips broad and flattened, with well-shaped yellow nails. My hand looked effete and inexperienced in its grasp. ‘Straight across,’ he decided. The room we entered was a panelled dining-room with a carved overmantel and a leafy frieze picked out in gold, an effect rather like paint-sprayed holly at Christmas-time. It had the sleepy acoustic quality that some rooms have which are rarely, if ever, used.

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

  If the Christian revolution in sexual moral- ity brings us toward a world that seems somehow more familiar, the revolu- tion itself was defi ned by terms and preoccupations that were resolutely an- cient. It played out against debates over the nature of society’s claims on the body and the question of whether those claims were to be a matter of fate or freedom. Some of the fatalism of the old order was lost forever, and with it an indiff erence toward the brutalities accepted in the name of destiny, but also, perhaps, some of the enchantment that comes with the belief that eros makes us part of nature and constitutes a mysterious source of the self. In the freedom of the new order, we recognize how potent was the idea that claims of moral dignity might cut across all accidents of circumstance to the core of the individual’s being. But it is one of history’s true paradoxes that such a model of freedom was harnessed to a movement that was anti- erotic to its very foundations, and that this concept of freedom enabled a model of responsibility that would promote unpre ce dented accumulations of power in the regulation of sexual acts. Th ese paradoxes are part of our cultural his- tory, and it has been the hope of this book that, by exploring them, we might gain a better understanding of the inheritance fate has delivered to us. ABBREVIATIONS NOTES AC KNOW LEDG MENTS INDEX Abbreviations Th e following list off ers the full forms of the authors and titles of works cited in the Endnotes. To locate the editions used, the reader may consult, for classical sources, S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth, eds., Th e Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4 th ed. (Oxford, 2012), and for Christian sources in Greek and Latin, respectively, M. Geerard et al., eds., Clavis patrum graecorum (Turnhout, 1974– 87) and E. Dekkers, ed., Clavis patrum latinorum, 3 rd ed. (Turnhout, 1995). PRIMARY SOURCES Ach. Tat. Achilles Tatius Ps.- Acro Pseudo- Acro Act. Andr. gr. Acts of Andrew, Greek version Act. Paul. et Th ec. Acts of Paul and Th ecla Act. Th om. Acts of Th omas Adamantius Physiog. Physiognomy Alciph. Alciphron Ep. Epistulae  ABBREVIATIONS Alex. Aphr. Alexander of Aphrodisias De fat. De fato Ambr. Ambrose of Milan Abr. De Abraham De virg. De virginitate Ep. Epistulae Ambrosiast. Ambrosiaster Comm. Ep. I Cor. Commentarius in xiii epistulas Paulinas, ad I Cor. Comm. Ep. I Tim. Commentarius in xiii epistulas Paulinas, ad I Tim. Comm. Rom. Commentarius in xiii epistulas Paulinas, ad Rom. Quaest. vet. et nov. test. Quaestiones Veteris et Novi Testamenti Amphil. Icon. Amphilocius of Iconium Or. in mul. pecc. Oratio in mulierem peccatricem Anth. Gr. Th e Greek Anthology Anth. Pal. Th e Palatine Anthology Anton. Plac. Antoninus of Piacenza Itin. Itinerarium Apoc. Pet. Apocalypse of Peter Apophth. patr., coll. alph. Sayings of the Fathers, alphabetic collection Aristaen. Aristaenetus Ep. Epistulae Artem. Artemidorus On. Oneirocritica Aster. Amas.

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

  Darwin’s third big problem was the origin of impracticable beauty. If natural selection was driven by the differential survival of heritable variations, what could explain the elaborate beauty of that peacock’s tail that troubled him so much? The tail obviously did not help the male peacock to survive; if anything, the huge tail would be a hindrance, slowing him down and making him much more vulnerable to predators. Darwin was particularly obsessed with the eyespots on the peacock’s tail. He had argued that the perfection of the human eye could be explained by the evolution of many incremental advances over time. Each evolutionary advance would have produced slight improvements in the ability of the eye to detect light, to distinguish shadows from light, to focus, to create images, to differentiate among colors, and so on, all of which would have contributed to the animal’s survival. But what purpose could the intermediate stages in the evolution of the peacock’s eyespots have served? Indeed, what purpose do the “perfect” eyespots of a peacock serve today? If the problem of explaining the evolution of the human eye was an intellectual challenge, the problem of explaining the peacock’s eyespot was an intellectual nightmare. Darwin lived this nightmare. It was in that context that in 1860 he wrote that oft-quoted line to his American friend the Harvard botanist Asa Gray: “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!” In 1871, with the publication of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin boldly addressed both the problem of human origins and the evolution of beauty. In this book he proposed a second, independent mechanism of evolution—sexual selection—to account for armaments and ornaments, battle and beauty. If the results of natural selection were determined by the differential survival of heritable variations, then the results of sexual selection were determined by their differential sexual success—that is, by those heritable features that contribute to success at obtaining mates.

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

  Encountering Limit (Horos, also personified as an active agent), Sophia renounced “her original purpose, together with the passion that had arisen from her stupefied wonder” (Against Heresies I.2, 2). Chastened, she returned to her proper place with her proper “consort” (I.2, 4).18 Sophia’s fall has cosmic consequences. Ultimately, she is responsible for the generation of a lower deity, the Demiurge, who in turn creates the lower, material world (Against Heresies I.5, 1–4). Both this god and his creation are related to the upper world, but as distorted or defective images of it. It is here, in this lower world, that people themselves struggle (as had Sophia) with the disorienting afflictions of ignorance and passion. These last, again, do not seem to be sinful in and of themselves, even though they result from a “fall”; rather, they are a condition that inhibits knowledge of God. Renouncing passion—for the believer no less than for this errant aeon—is the first step back to restoration and unity. According to Theodotos, a follower of Valentinus, “the Savior came down to tear us away from the passions and to bring us into union with himself” (Excerpts from Theodotos LXVII, 4).19 What about Marcion’s views on sin? Here we have only such clues as remain in the massive refutation of his work, the five books of Tertullian’s hefty Adversus Marcionem. In this treatise, Tertullian’s silences are as significant as are the themes that he does sound. Despite the routine rhetoric of abuse leveled at the ethics of Christian competitors, for instance—that seeming ascetics were actually libertines, or that docetic Christology undermined the entire idea of salvation in Christ—“not even Tertullian can find any strictures to pass on the morals of Marcion or his adherents,” whose ethic of celibacy and of heroic martyrdom even the “orthodox” grudgingly acknowledged.20 The best that Tertullian can do is complain that Marcion’s (commendable) ethics seem logically inconsistent with his separation of law from gospel (1.19). Why live ethically, he complains, why avoid sin, if you don’t believe that God punishes sinners? It’s all well and good to love God, but can you really love God if you do not also fear him? The Marcionites, Tertullian observes, refuse to impute to the high god, the father of Jesus, “those emotions of mind which they object to in the Creator. For if he displays neither hostility nor wrath, if he neither condemns nor judges, how stable can his moral law be?” (1.26). But if that were the case, “how shall you love,” he challenges, “unless you fear not to love? . . . If you decline to fear your god because he is good, what keeps you from bubbling over into all manner of vice? . . . Why during persecution do you not at once offer your incense?” (1.27).

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

  In light of how much united all three of them, this acrimony can seem surprising. The intellectual commitments of all three depended upon points of principle drawn from pagan paideia. All three applied these principles to orient themselves within the enormous written patrimony of western Judaism, the Septuagint. And all three had to make sense of those traditions from and about Jesus, and from Paul, in light of the destruction of Jerusalem and the necessity of reinterpreting the intense eschatological expectation proclaimed in those first-century texts. Their high god, further, was not the lord of Jewish history but the supreme deity of pagan philosophy: unique, changeless, perfect, radically transcendent; and for all three, this perfect deity was the father of Jesus Christ. All three asserted, in light of their commitment to this idea of the high god, that the divine intelligence organizing the material cosmos could only be a lower god. And all three concurred that this lower god was the creative deity described in Genesis and active throughout the Septuagint. Finally, all three held that the Septuagint, interpreted “correctly”—that is, with spiritual understanding—provided fundamental insight into Christian revelation.9 These deep areas of agreement notwithstanding, broad scope for argument remained. By comparing the work of these three contemporaries—Valentinus (fl. 130), Marcion (fl. 140), and Justin Martyr (fl. 150)—we will gain a view of the ways that new gentile communities made sense of their common Jewish heritage, constructed their own Christian identities, and interpreted ideas of redemption and, thus, of sin.10 [image file=image_rsrc4UW.jpg] Valentinus and Valentinian Christianity were easier to describe when scholars knew less. Dependent on the hostile witness of proto-orthodox writers—Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Tertullian, whose works by and large survived the fourth-century triage—modern academic descriptions more-or-less echoed the ideas given in these ancient ecclesiastical ones. Thus, the Alexandrian Valentinus, rejected by the proto-orthodox Roman church, went on to found his own movement, which was a Christianized form of Gnosticism. Gnosticism itself was a theosophical and radically dualistic form of religion that mixed elements from Platonism, apocalyptic Judaism, and other more oriental forms of mythology. These Gnostics were radical dualists: they believed in two gods—a high god, previously unknown before the revelation of Jesus Christ, and a lower, malevolent god, the god of the Jews, who was the author of matter. Accordingly, they depreciated not only the Jewish god but also the Jewish books, which they subjected to fantastic interpretations. Among these interpretations was their elaborate myth of a precosmic fall of divine wisdom (Sophia in Greek), whose disoriented wanderings inadvertently gave rise to the creator god of Genesis. This material cosmos, in brief, was fundamentally the product of a disastrous accident. Accordingly, Christ when he did appear in the lower material realm did not actually possess a body of flesh, since matter was the creation of the evil god. Rather, he was a phantasm, a sort of optical illusion, only seeming to possess a lowly body. This docetic Christ never suffered or died; he merely seemed to.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Like everyone else I have at my disposal only three means of evaluating human existence: the study of self, which is the most difficult and most dangerous method, but also the most fruitful; the observation of our fellowmen, who usually arrange to hide their secrets from us, or to make us believe that they have secrets where none exist; and books, with the particular errors of perspective to which they inevitably give rise. I have read nearly everything that our historians and poets have written, and even our story-tellers, although the latter are considered frivolous; and to such reading I owe perhaps more instruction than I have gathered in the somewhat varied situations of my own life. The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as the great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motions. On the other hand, but more slowly, life has thrown light for me on the meaning of books. But books lie, even those that are most sincere. The less adroit, for lack of words and phrases wherein they can enclose life, retain of it but a flat and feeble likeness. Some, like Lucan, make it heavy, and encumber it with a solemnity which it does not possess; others, on the contrary, like Petronius, make life lighter than it is, like a hollow, bouncing ball, easy to toss to and fro in a universe without weight. The poets transport us into a world which is vaster and more beautiful than our own, with more ardor and sweetness, different therefore, and in practice almost uninhabitable. The philosophers, in order to study reality pure, subject it to about the same transformations as fire or pestle make substance undergo: nothing that we have known of a person or of a fact seems to subsist in those ashes or those crystals to which they are reduced. Historians propose to us systems too perfect for explaining the past, with sequence of cause and effect much too exact and clear to have been ever entirely true; they rearrange what is dead, unresisting material, and I know that even Plutarch will never recapture Alexander. The story-tellers and spinners of erotic tales are hardly more than butchers who hang up for sale morsels of meat attractive to flies. I should take little comfort in a world without books, but reality is not to be found in them because it is not there whole.

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

  Title : Sin Author: Fredriksen, Paula Sin Sin [image file=image_rsrc4UW.jpg] THE EARLY HISTORY OF AN IDEA Paula Fredriksen [image file=image_rsrc4UX.jpg] Copyright © 2012 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire 0X20 1TW press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fredriksen, Paula, 1951– Sin : the early history of an idea / Paula Fredriksen. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-12890-0 (hardback) 1. Sin—Christianity—History of doctrines—Early church, ca. 30-600. I. Title. BT715.F74 2012 241′.309015—dc23 2011053128 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Bodoni Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For my sister, Lisa 1957–2010 ContentsPrologue CHAPTER 1 God, Blood, and the Temple: Jesus and Paul on Sin CHAPTER 2 Flesh and the Devil: Sin in the Second Century CHAPTER 3 A Rivalry of Genius: Sin and Its Consequences in Origen and Augustine Epilogue Timeline Acknowledgments Notes Glossary Works Cited Index Locorum General Index Sin PROLOGUEJesus of Nazareth announced the good news that God was about to redeem the world. Some 350 years later, the church taught that the far greater part of humanity was eternally condemned. The earliest community began by preserving the memory and the message of Jesus; within decades of his death, some Christians asserted that Jesus had never had a fleshly human body at all. The church that claimed the Jewish scriptures as its own also insisted that the god who had said “Be fruitful and multiply” now actually meant “Be sexually continent.” Some four centuries after Paul’s death, his conviction that “All Israel will be saved” (Rm 11.26) served to support the Christian belief that the Jews were damned. What accounts for this great variety in ancient Christian teachings? The short answer is: dramatic mutations in Christian ideas about sin. As these ideas grew and changed in the turbulence of Christianity’s first four centuries, so too did others: ideas about God, about the physical universe, about the soul’s relation to the body, about eternity’s relation to time; ideas about Christ the Redeemer—and, thus, ideas about what people are redeemed from.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Like everyone else I have at my disposal only three means of evaluating human existence: the study of self, which is the most difficult and most dangerous method, but also the most fruitful; the observation of our fellowmen, who usually arrange to hide their secrets from us, or to make us believe that they have secrets where none exist; and books, with the particular errors of perspective to which they inevitably give rise. I have read nearly everything that our historians and poets have written, and even our story-tellers, although the latter are considered frivolous; and to such reading I owe perhaps more instruction than I have gathered in the somewhat varied situations of my own life. The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as the great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motions. On the other hand, but more slowly, life has thrown light for me on the meaning of books. But books lie, even those that are most sincere. The less adroit, for lack of words and phrases wherein they can enclose life, retain of it but a flat and feeble likeness. Some, like Lucan, make it heavy, and encumber it with a solemnity which it does not possess; others, on the contrary, like Petronius, make life lighter than it is, like a hollow, bouncing ball, easy to toss to and fro in a universe without weight. The poets transport us into a world which is vaster and more beautiful than our own, with more ardor and sweetness, different therefore, and in practice almost uninhabitable. The philosophers, in order to study reality pure, subject it to about the same transformations as fire or pestle make substance undergo: nothing that we have known of a person or of a fact seems to subsist in those ashes or those crystals to which they are reduced. Historians propose to us systems too perfect for explaining the past, with sequence of cause and effect much too exact and clear to have been ever entirely true; they rearrange what is dead, unresisting material, and I know that even Plutarch will never recapture Alexander. The story-tellers and spinners of erotic tales are hardly more than butchers who hang up for sale morsels of meat attractive to flies. I should take little comfort in a world without books, but reality is not to be found in them because it is not there whole.

• From Untrue (2018)

  I was lucky enough to have set up an interview with Dr. Meredith Chivers, who suggested we meet there one evening. Earlier that day, a hundred or so other attendees and I had watched her take command of the dais with rock-star-like self-confidence in her black jacket and black jeans to explain her recent work. Chivers spoke quickly about topics familiar to most of her listeners, including Rosemary Basson’s concept of “responsive desire.” This “desire style” is more common among women than men, according to numerous sex researchers and therapists, and describes a tendency to feel sexually excited after erotic stimulation, versus in anticipation of it (that’s called “spontaneous desire,” based on an experience that sexual desire is an appetite like hunger that just comes upon us). I found myself at sea as I struggled to keep up, but thankfully, I already knew something of Chivers’s work. I had read about how, as founder, director, and principal investigator of Queen’s University’s Sexuality and Gender Laboratory, Chivers has her study participants sit in what looks like a La-Z-Boy to watch porn. But first, they hook themselves up to a machine called a plethysmograph. This tiny instrument is inserted into a woman’s vagina or attached to a man’s penis, allowing Chivers and her students to measure blood flow—precisely how much of it rushes to fill the participant’s vaginal walls or penis, or to engorge her clitoris. This helps Chivers and her team better understand what does and does not trigger a physical response in participants. Chivers shows the study participants explicit photos or movies—of women and men having sex, of women and women having sex, of men having sex with men. That’s when things get interesting. The women who describe themselves as heterosexual have physical responses to just about everything they see—a man having sex with another man, a woman going down on a woman, a man and a woman doing it. They are adventurous, at least in their minds, un-finicky and indiscriminate omnivores. They take it in with category-blurring gusto, liking what they see regardless of who they presumably are. In a detail the media has loved around the world, they even respond physically when Chivers shows them images of bonobos—close relatives of chimps—getting it on. The self-described straight men, on the other hand, have desires that are more predictable: they respond to images of men and women having sex, and of women having sex with one another. Watching two men may get their blood flowing, but they have the strongest responses to the movies and images that match their reported sexual attractions and interests, and bonobos leave them flaccid. Unlike the women, the men’s desires are mostly what we would expect based on how they identify—that is, their arousal patterns are more category specific.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  I’ll also find the door to the fenced backyard whose knob was always too high for me to reach, and the interior stairs that lead down to a carpeted basement with two small couches that I remember well: That’s where my sisters and I used to sleep at night. Julia escorts me into the kitchen: still yellow and brown. “I baked you crumb cake,” she says. “Would you like a slice? Some baked ziti?” “I’d love some crumb cake, please,” I tell her. This moment is surreal; awkward, yet so familiar. “You look like him, you know.” I pause for a beat. Would she refer to my father so plainly? “You look like Pauly. When your grandmother held you, she told Pauly that you looked just like him when he was a baby. I think you still do! Those Accerbi features. He’s your father, you know. You said the crumb cake, right?” Is this really happening? “When did Paul’s mother hold me?” “When you were here—you and your sisters lived here when you were little.” I knew it. This is the Happy House, and it was our home. I think of asking Julia whether I can use the phone to call Camille, but I don’t even want to take a breath that could risk derailing our conversation. “I’ve been thinking about where to begin, so I guess I’ll start at the beginning: with them dating.” She sets the cake in front of me and I edge it to the side, more enticed by the revelations that are lingering than the cakey cinnamon scent rising from the plate. “Cookie and Pauly dated,” Julia says. “God, I remember my first impression of Cookie: her striking dark eyes, white skin like milk, and those two adorable little girls. Pauly dated a lot of girls after he and Carol divorced, but he wouldn’t bring them all around here,” she says. “But sure enough, he brought your mom a few times. Pauly has another daughter, you know, from his marriage to Carol. So you have another sister, and two nieces—I think they still live in Alaska.” “How did we end up here?” She stays silent a moment, then reaches out for my hand. “Frank—that was my husband, Paul’s older brother. He died ten years ago. See, Frank already had three kids from his first marriage but his wife died giving birth to the third, God rest her soul. Then we had three more, and Frank worked full-time to support us all. But, you know, for a family of eight, we needed more income. So I watched other people’s kids while they worked. Parents brought their children to me either by references or they’d find me in the Pennysaver ads.” I look at her hand, still on mine. With carefully chosen words, Julia explains she hadn’t seen Cookie for over a year and a half after she and Paul stopped dating. “So I was . . .

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Take it slow.” “Okay.” By the time Julia’s card arrives several days later, matching Addie’s description to the dotting of her i ’s, I’ve already worked on several drafts of a letter to her, which I’m planning to fold inside a Christmas card. Although there’s so much I want to know, I keep my message simple: My work’s going well, I’ve adapted to be happy, normal, and successful. I know better than to ask the big questions: why she signed it Aunt , why she sent it to my foster home, why her husband’s name wasn’t listed in the card, and why she’s writing me now. A month later, I receive a letter back from Julia, this time sent to my Manhattan address: January 1998 Dear Regina, Received your card and was so glad to hear from you. I often think of you and your sisters. Regina, any time you want to come to visit me, you know you can. I knew that you had to get my card because it did not come back. I’m so glad you made something of yourself. I’m so happy for you. I don’t know if I told you that your uncle Frank died. It’s been pretty hard for me since he’s gone. I do wish you and your sisters would come to see me. Let me know ahead of time and I would make a meal for you all. How are your sisters doing? Did any of them get married? Regina, I’m so happy for you. I know life was not easy for any of you girls. There’s so much we could talk about. Lots of luck in your job. I hear from Pauly every so often. He’s still in Florida. Please come see me. I’ve been having a little trouble with my heart. When you reach a certain age everything falls apart. Good luck again and please get in touch with me. Take care. Love, Aunt Julia I reread the letter several times, too experienced in disappointment to hope I’m seeing it all correctly. She referred so casually to Paul; she explained why Frank’s name wasn’t on the card . . . but how does she know my sisters? Why is she so plainly signing the card Aunt Julia and referring to her husband as Uncle Frank ? The letter’s postmarked from Long Island . . . why is she just now getting in touch with me when, minus my three years at college upstate, the farthest I’ve ever lived from her is ninety minutes away in Manhattan? I call Camille and read the letter out loud. “So, come on! What do you think?” She pauses, then cautiously puts this forth: “Maybe we stayed with her when we were kids.” “Camille, I have zero recollection of staying with this woman.

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

  But in the context of the current discussion I’m less interested in the question of why some mammals have a baculum than in why men have lost it. This is apparently not a new intellectual puzzle. Attempts to explain the mystery date back to the foundational text of Judeo-Christian culture—the story of the creation of Eve in the book of Genesis. In 2001, two well-respected academics—the developmental biologist Scott Gilbert at Swarthmore and the biblical scholar Ziony Zevit at UCLA—teamed up to investigate this question in a scientific paper titled “Congenital Human Baculum Deficiency: The Generative Bone of Genesis 2:21–23,” which was published in the American Journal of Medical Genetics. Some twenty-five hundred years after the composition of the well-known Genesis creation story, Gilbert and Zevit propose that the story claimed that God had created Eve not from Adam’s rib but from Adam’s baculum. They maintain that the “rib story” would have been recognized as false by any ancient Israelite, based on the readily made observation that men and women have the same number of ribs. (Indeed, I remember counting my ribs and pondering this exact problem myself in Sunday school as a kindergartner.) Gilbert and Zevit further discredit the Adam’s rib story as narratively lackluster—because ribs are “lacking any intrinsic generative capacity.” Apparently, the Greatest Story Ever Told requires a more potent plotline than the King James translation has given us. Gilbert and Zevit provide some impressive linguistic evidence to support their radical hypothesis: The Hebrew noun translated as “rib,” tzela (tzade, lamed, ayin), can indeed mean a costal rib. It can also mean the rib of a hill (2 Samuel 16:13), the side chambers (enclosing the temple like ribs, as in 1 Kings 6:5, 6), or the supporting columns of trees, like cedars or firs, or the planks in buildings and doors (1 Kings 6:15, 16). So the word could be used to indicate a structural support beam. “Structural support beam” is a very succinct description of the baculum. Gilbert and Zevit then discover the smoking gun in this evo-scriptural mystery—unexpectedly clear anatomical evidence in the Hebrew Bible: Genesis 2:21 contains another etiological detail: “The Lord God closed up the flesh.” This detail would explain the peculiar visible sign on the penis and scrotum of human males—the raphe. In the human penis and scrotum, the edges of the urogenital folds come together over the urogenital sinus (urethral groove) to form a seam, the raphe…The origin of this seam on the external genitalia was “explained” by the story of the closing of Adam’s flesh.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  But that period of heroic foolhardiness taught me to distinguish between the different aspects of courage. The kind of courage which I should like always to possess would be cool and detached, free from all physical excitement and impassive as the calm of a god. I do not flatter myself that I have ever attained it. The semblance of such courage which I later employed was, in my worst days, only a cynical recklessness toward life; in my best days it was only a sense of duty to which I clung. When confronted with the danger itself, however, that cynicism or that sense of duty quickly gave place to a mad intrepidity, a kind of strange orgasm of a man mated with his destiny. At the age which I then was this drunken courage persisted without cessation. A being afire with life cannot foresee death; in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists. If death does take him, he is probably unaware of the fact; it amounts to no more for him than a shock or a spasm. I smile with some bitterness at the realization that now out of any two thoughts I devote one to my own death, as if so much ceremony were needed to decide this worn body for the inevitable. At that time, on the contrary, a young man who would have lost much in not living a few years more was daily risking his future with complete unconcern. It would be easy to construe what I have just told as the story of a too scholarly soldier who wishes to be forgiven his love for books. But such simplified perspectives are false. Different persons ruled in me in turn, though no one of them for long; each fallen tyrant was quick to regain power. Thus have I played host successively to the meticulous officer, fanatic in discipline, but gaily sharing with his men the privations of war; to the melancholy dreamer intent on the gods; the lover ready to risk all for a moment's rapture; the haughty young lieutenant retiring to his tent to study his maps by lamplight, making clear to his friends his disdain for the way the world goes; and finally the future statesman. But let us not forget, either, the base opportunist who in fear of displeasing succumbed to drunkenness at the emperor's table; the young fellow pronouncing upon all questions with ridiculous assurance; the frivolous wit, ready to lose a friend for the sake of a bright remark; the soldier exercising with mechanical precision his vile gladiatorial trade. And we should include also that vacant figure, nameless and unplaced in history, though as much myself as all the others, the simple toy of circumstance, no more and no less than a body, lying on a camp bed, distracted by an aroma, aroused by a breath of wind, vaguely attentive to some eternal hum of a bee.