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 Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  There is a well-known historical reason for this anti-ascetic animus that accompanies all the praise of discernment: in the fourth century, the discipline of monastic life—the cenobic rules that were formulated, but also the prescriptions and advice surrounding desert solitude or semi-reclusion—were, especially in Lower Egypt, where Cassian garnered most of his lessons and examples, elaborated in reaction against unauthorized, anarchic, individual, and competitive forms of asceticism. Faced with those isolated hermits or vagabond monks who were competing in thaumaturgic marvels and exploits of self-mortification, the regulation of monastic life had the goal of defining a middle way, accessible to the majority of monks and capable of being incorporated into communitarian institutions. What was demanded of discernment was to determine this middle path between the too-much and the too-little; but it was also, in a particular way, to perceive any dangerous excess that might lurk in the ascetic urge, in the drive toward perfection; to distinguish what might be mixed with weakness, with indulgence, with attachment to oneself in the desire to taste the extremes of one’s exercises; and to recognize the elements of its contrary in the guise of the greatest saintliness. In this preoccupation with a correct measure, a suitably regulated modus of monastic life, there was concern with avoiding the weakness and excess of rigor, but also and perhaps above all with detecting the weakness hidden in every excess of mortification. This same historical situation explains another inflection of the theme of discernment. In the ancient conception, the ability to distinguish between the too-much and the too-little and to be moderate in one’s conduct was tied to each person’s use of their own reason. For a theoretician of monastic life like Cassian,73 the principle of right measure cannot come from man himself. If the monk must observe himself constantly and attentively, this is not in the hope of discovering a principle of correct equilibrium there: it’s rather to discover all the reasons for finding his bearings outside his own consciousness. The Christian monk can never be the measure of himself, however advanced he may be on the road to sainthood. A story told by Cassian, about the recitation of psalms, attests to this.74 In the exalted times of earliest Christianity, zeal pushed everyone to chant as many psalms as their strength permitted. But it was soon realized that “disharmony” and even just sheer variety could in the future germinate the seeds of “error, jealousy, and schism.” So the venerable Fathers got together to set the correct number, but an unknown brother, slipping in among them, and chanting only twelve psalms before suddenly disappearing, showed both what the proper limit was and that it was God himself who set it.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  For most Jews, the Messiah was probably going be some kind of political leader, the son of David, the great king of Israel. This would be a political leader, a great warrior, who would lead Israel in victory over its enemies and establish Israel as a sovereign state in the land. That would be the Messiah. The Messiah was understood, then, to be a successor to King David. The term “Messiah” by itself, by the way, is a technical term. It comes from a Hebrew word that means “‘“‘anointed one.” Well, who was the anointed one in ancient Israel? It was the king. During the inauguration ceremony in ancient Israel—they had an inauguration ceremony in Israel, just as we do; to swear in a president today, the president puts his hand on a Bible, and swears an oath of office—in the ancient world, they didn’t do that; they had an anointing ceremony where oil was poured on the king’s head to show God’s special favor. This was his anointing. The word “Messiah” comes from the word “anointing.” The Greek word that corresponds to that, by the way, is christos, so that “Jesus Christ” means “Jesus the Messiah.” I tell this to my students so that they recognize that “Christ” is not Jesus’s last name, Jesus Christ born to Joseph or Mary Christ, and that, in fact, this is a title that means “the Messiah.” Well, Jews didn’t expect a Messiah to suffer and die. Many Jews thought he would be a political leader or warrior. Some Jews thought that this coming Son of Man talked about by Daniel was a Messiah figure, some divine figure who would be Messiah, a leader of people, coming on the clouds of heaven in judgment. Some Jews expected a great priest to arrive who would be an authoritative interpreter of the Jewish Law. There were various understandings of the Messiah among ancient Jews, and one of the things these various understandings had in common was that all of these understandings understood that the coming Messiah would be a great figure, a figure of grandeur and power. We have no Jewish source prior to Christianity that thought that the coming Messiah was going to be somebody who was weak, who was going to be killed, who was going to be crucified—the kind of lowly death reserved for lowlife criminals in the Roman Empire. 61 How was it, then, that Jesus was crucified if he is the Messiah? Jewish Christians, Christians who were Jews, started reading their Bibles, which they had obviously done all of their lives, but they started reading their Bibles for a specific purpose in order to see how it was that Jesus could have died if he was the Messiah. They knew he had died, and they thought he was the Messiah, but how was that possible?

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Donato, the Sicilian lad, who in taking an axe to his old man had luckily chopped off only one arm. What aspirations he had, this budding parricide! At seventeen he was dreaming of getting a job in the Vatican. In order, he said, to become better acquainted with St. Francis! Making the rounds from one alkali bed to another, I brought my geography, ethnology, folk lore and gunnery up to date. The architecture teemed with atavistic anomalies. There were dwellings seemingly transplanted from the shores of the Caspian, huts out of Andersen’s fairy tales, shops from the cool labyrinths of Fez, spare cart wheels and sulkies without shafts, bird cages galore and always empty, chamber pots, often of majolica and decorated with pansies or sun flowers, corsets, crutches and the handles and ribs of umbrellas … an endless array of bric-a-brac all marked “manufactured in Hagia Triada.” And what midgets! One, who pretended to speak only Bulgarian—he was really a Moldavian—lived in a dog kennel in the rear of his shack. He ate with the dog—out of the same tin plate. When he smiled he showed only two teeth, huge ones, like a canine’s. He could bark too, or sniff and growl like a cur. None of this did I dare to put into the novel. No, the novel I kept like a boudoir. No Dreck . Not that all the characters were respectable or impeccable. Ah no! Some whom I had dragged in for color were plain Schmucks . (Prepucelos.) The hero, who was also the narrator and to whom I bore a slight resemblance, had the air of a trapezoid cerebralist. It was his function to keep the merry-go-round turning. Now and then he treated himself to a free ride. What element there was of the bizarre and the outlandish intrigued Pop no end. He had wondered—openly—how a young woman, the author, in other words, came by such thoughts, such images. It had never occurred to Mona to say: “From another incarnation!” Frankly, I would hardly have known what to say myself. Some of the goofiest images had been stolen from almanacs, others were born of wet dreams. What Pop truly enjoyed, it seemed, was the occasional introduction of a dog or a cat. (He couldn’t know, of course, that I was mortally afraid of dogs or that I loathed cats.) But I could make a dog talk. And it was doggy talk, no mistake about it. My true reason for inserting these creatures of a lower order was to show contempt for certain characters in the book who had gotten out of hand. A dog, properly inspired, can make an ass of a queen.

• From Who Wrote the Bible? Searching for Its Origins and Authors (2025)

  9. The Three Isaiahs 56 me” (Isa. 43:10). These chapters of Isaiah from the 6th century don’t ever say things like “don’t worship any other gods,” the way that the Bible has up to this point. Doing so assumes that there are other gods to be worshipped. The Second Isaiah The Isaiah who prophesied in the 8th century isn’t the same Isaiah who’s prophesying in the 6th century. For almost 200 years, scholars have recognized that these are two distinct prophetic texts—the one from the 8th century, called 1 Isaiah, and the one from the 6th century, called 2 Isaiah. Interestingly, 2 Isaiah may never have existed as its own separate prophetic text, and it seems to be aware of 1 Isaiah, adapting imagery and ideas from it. Likely, 8th-century Isaiah’s teachings and writings must have remained popular in the centuries after he lived. And when the whole world turned upside down in the 6th century—when new prophecy was required to make sense of everything—someone decided to expand the centuries-old book of Isaiah, both affirming its importance and updating it for the new world order. A 6th-century audience familiar with the 8th-century Isaiah would probably have recognized exactly what 2 Isaiah was doing. However, 2000 years later, Isaiah is read as one continuous whole, and prophecy that was about its own time and place is now understood to be about things far in the future. Thus, the shift at chapter 40 doesn’t look like an obvious switch to a new prophet building on an old tradition. The Third Isaiah In Isaiah 56, another shift occurs: “Maintain justice, and do what is right, for soon my salvation will come” (Isa. 56:1). This is strange, given that readers have just spent 15 chapters learning about how salvation has already happened. Moreover, in 2 Isaiah, the book was preparing the highway for the exiles to return. Now, the return has seemingly happened: “I will gather others to them besides those already gathered” (Isa. 56:8). The book has jumped ahead in time again—to just a couple of decades after the restoration.

• From City of Night (1963)

  me up, asks me to wait in the lobby for a few moments, returns shortly with another youngman, and takes us both to his place in the hills, where he comes on with both of us — and later, with someone met while Im hitchhiking (as cars like glowing-eyed bugs curve along Sunset Boulevard as if in general alarm), I go to his house, where — he being hung up on pictures — I merely stand while he peers behind the clicking camera, and I wonder, Is this all?

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Instead of reading the sacred text in a communal setting, they would wrestle with its obscurities on their own. Slowly, in tune with the new commercial and scientific spirit, a distinctively “modern” notion of religious truth as logical, unmediated, and objective was emerging in the Western Christian world. 42 As the Reformation proceeded, Protestantism began to morph into a bewildering number of sects, each with its own doctrinal bias, its own interpretation of the Bible, and each convinced that it alone had a monopoly on truth. 43 There was now a clamor of religious opinion in Europe. When Luther had battled with the Catholic authorities, other intellectually minded clergy either did the same or took vociferous issue with his ideas. Preachers began to air their disagreements in public and urged the laity to join the debate. Zwingli argued that lay folk should feel empowered to question official dogma and should not need to wait on the decisions of a synod. “Calvinists” started to articulate doctrines to distinguish themselves from “Lutherans.” Inevitably, this orgy of acrimonious doctrinal debate would affect the traditional notion of “belief,” pushing intellectual orthodoxy to the fore. Catholics also found it necessary to reformulate their faith, but they maintained to a greater degree the older notion of religion as practice. The Spaniards, still in the vanguard of modernization, took the lead in the Catholic reformation initiated by the Council of Trent (1545–63), which made the Church a more centralized body on the model of the absolute monarchy. The Council reinforced the power of pope and hierarchy, issued a catechism to ensure doctrinal conformity, ensured that the clergy were educated to a higher standard, and rationalized liturgical and devotional practices, jettisoning those that were either corrupt or no longer effective. Trent set up programs of education and parish organization to ensure that the new intellectual style spread to the laity. 44 But even though the Council fathers went to such lengths to enforce dogmatic orthodoxy, their prime concern was to promote regular liturgical observance to enable the laity to transform the old external, communal rites into genuinely interior devotion. Catholics were certainly drifting toward the new conception of “belief,” but they would never identify it so completely with doctrinal assent as Protestants. 45 Other Spanish reformers, such as Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, modernized the religious orders, attempting to weed out the more dubious and superstitious devotions and make the spiritual quest more systematic and less dependent on the whims of inadequate advisers. Mystics of the new age should know what to expect, learn how to deal with the pitfalls and dangers of the interior life, and husband their spiritual energies productively.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Here, Ida paused, looking about her. She looked up at Eric. “What happened to Richard and Cass? ” “They asked me to apologize for them. They couldn’t come. One of the kids was sick.” He felt, as he said this, a faint tremor of disloyalty—to Ida: as though she were mixed up in his mind with the colored children who had attacked Paul and Michael in the park. “ Today of all days,” she sighed—but seemed, really, scarcely to be concerned about their absence. Her eyes continued to search the crowd; she sighed again, a sigh of private resignation. The musicians were ready, attempts were being made to silence the mob. A waiter appeared and seated them at a tiny table in a corner next to the ladies’ room, and took their order. The malevolent heat, now that they were trapped in this spot, began rising from the floor and descending from the ceiling. Eric did not really listen to the music, he could not; it remained entirely outside him, like some minor agitation of the air. He watched Ida and Vivaldo, who sat opposite him, their profiles turned toward the music. Ida watched with a bright, sardonic knowingness, as though the men on the stand were beating out a message she had commanded them to convey; but Vivaldo’s head was slightly lowered and he looked up at the bandstand with a wry, uncertain bravado; as though there were an incipient war going on between himself and the musicians, having to do with rank and color and authority. He and Ida sat very still, very straight, not touching—it was as though, before this altar, touch was forbidden them. The musicians sweated on the stand, like horses, played loudly and badly, with a kind of reckless contempt, and failed, during their first number, to agree on anything. This did not, of course, affect the applause, which was loud, enthusiastic, and prolonged. Only Vivaldo made no sound. The drummer, who, from time to time, had let his eyes travel from Ida to Vivaldo—then bowed his head to the drums again—registered Vivaldo’s silence with a broad, mocking grin, and gestured to Ida. “It’s your turn now,” he said. “Come on up here and see what you can do to civilize these devils.” And, with the merest of glances at Eric and Vivaldo, “I think you might have had enough practice by now.” Ida looked into his eyes with an unreadable smile, which yet held some hint of the vindictive. She crushed out her cigarette, adjusted her shawl, and rose, demurely. “I’m glad you think I’m ready,” she said. “Keep your fingers crossed for me, sugar,” she said to Vivaldo, and stepped up on the stand.

• From Another Country (1962)

  But Jane seemed to be exactly what she was, a monstrous slut, and she thus, without knowing it, kept Rufus and Vivaldo equal to one another. At last Vivaldo was free and hurried toward them on the path still grinning, and now waving to someone behind them. “Look,” he cried, “there’s Cass!” Rufus turned and there she was, sitting alone on the rim of the circle, frail and fair. For him, she was thoroughly mysterious. He could never quite place her in the white world to which she seemed to belong. She came from New England, of plain old American stock—so she put it; she was very fond of remembering that one of her ancestors had been burned as a witch. She had married Richard, who was Polish, and they had two children. Richard had been Vivaldo’s English instructor in high school, years ago. They had known him as a brat, they said—not that he had changed much; they were his oldest friends. With Leona between them, Rufus and Vivaldo crossed the road. Cass looked up at them with that smile which was at once chilling and warm. It was warm because it was affectionate; it chilled Rufus because it was amused. “Well, I’m not sure I’m speaking to either of you. You’ve been neglecting us shamefully. Richard has crossed you off his list.” She looked at Leona and smiled. “I’m Cass Silenski.” “This is Leona,” Rufus said, putting one hand on Leona’s shoulder. Cass looked more amused than ever, and at the same time more affectionate. “I’m very happy to meet you.” “I’m glad to meet you ,” said Leona. They sat down on the stone rim of the fountain, in the center of which a little water played, enough for small children to wade in. “Give an account of yourselves,” Cass said. “ Why haven’t you come to see us?” “Oh,” said Vivaldo, “I’ve been busy. I’ve been working on my novel.” “He’s been working on a novel,” said Cass to Leona, “ever since we’ve known him. Then he was seventeen and now he’s nearly thirty.” “That’s unkind,” said Vivaldo, looking amused at the same time that he looked ashamed and annoyed. “Well, Richard was working on one, too. Then he was twenty-five and now he’s close to forty. So—” She considered Vivaldo a moment. “Only, he’s had a brand-new inspiration and he’s been working on it like a madman. I think that’s one of the reasons he’s been rather hoping you’d come by—he may have wanted to discuss it with you.” “What is this new inspiration?” Vivaldo asked. “Offhand, it sounds unfair.” “Ah!”—she shrugged merrily, and took a deep drag on her cigarette—“I wasn’t consulted, and I’m kept in the dark. You know Richard.

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  I wanted nothing to do with it and moved back into my full prig mode. Then Oren Frank, the founder of Talkspace, the largest online text-therapy program, called and told me his company was now offering therapy groups that met via texting and asked me to consult with his therapists. TEXTING THERAPY GROUPS! Once again I was shocked. A group of individuals who never saw one another (to maintain anonymity, their faces were never shown on the monitor, but were represented by symbols) and communicated entirely by text—this was too much! I could not imagine group therapy working via texting, but I agreed to participate, almost entirely out of curiosity. I observed a few of the groups and this time I was right. The group therapy I witnessed turned out to be too cumbersome, and the project was soon abandoned. Instead, the company then concentrated entirely on using texting for individual therapy. Soon other text-therapy companies opened up in the United States and several other countries, and three years ago, I agreed to supervise therapists who were responsible for Talkspace staff training. Now in my eighties, I rarely read journals or travel to attend professional conferences in my field, and I feel increasingly out of touch with new developments. Even though texting seemed the epitome of impersonality and the very opposite of my highly intimate approach to therapy, I sensed that texting was to play a significant role in the future of therapy. As a way of combatting personal obsolescence, I elected to keep current with this rapidly expanding method of delivering psychotherapy. The platform’s format offers clients the opportunity to send and receive texts (daily if desired) with a therapist for a modest fixed monthly fee. The use of such therapy is expanding exponentially and, at this writing, Talkspace, the largest of the US companies, engages over a thousand therapists. Many such platforms are opening in other countries—three companies in China have contacted me, each claiming to be the largest Chinese Internet therapy company. The innovation evolved quickly. Soon Talkspace offered not only text therapy, but also the possibility for clients and therapists to leave voice messages to one another. Then, a short time later, the client was offered the option of meeting via live videoconference. Soon only 50 percent of the sessions were via texting, 25 percent by phone-messaging, and 25 percent by videoconference. My expectation was that there would be an inevitable sequence, that clients would use texting only during the initial phase of therapy and gradually progress to audio, and then finally to video—the real stuff. But how wrong I was! That was not what happened! Many clients prefer texting and decline phone and video contact. That seemed counterintuitive to me, but I soon learned that many clients felt safer with the anonymity of texting, and, moreover, that younger clients were extremely comfortable with texting: they grew up with texting and often prefer texting to phone contact with their friends.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He stared into the streets and thought—bitterly, but also with a chilling, stunned sobriety—that, though he had been seeing them so long, perhaps he had never known them at all. The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived—nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died—through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not he had ever, really, been present at his life. For if he had ever been present, then he was present still, and his world would open up before him. Now the girl who lived across the street, whose name, he knew, was Nancy, but who reminded him of Jane—which was certainly why he never spoke to her—came in from her round of the bars and the coffee houses with yet another boneless young man. They were everywhere, which explained how she met them, but why she brought them home with her was a somewhat more sinister question. Those who wore their hair long wore beards; those who wore theirs short felt free to dispense with this useful but somewhat uneasy emphasis. They read poetry or they wrote it, furiously, as though to prove that they had been cut out for more masculine pursuits. This morning’s specimen wore white trousers and a yachting cap, and a paranoiac little beard jutted out from the bottom half of his face. This beard was his most aggressive feature, his only suggestion of hardness or tension. The girl, on the other hand, was all angles, bone, muscle, jaw; even her breasts seemed stony. They walked down the street, hand in hand, but not together. They paused before her stoop and the girl staggered. She leaned against him in an agony of loathing, belching alcohol; his rigidity suggested that her weight was onerous; and they climbed the short steps to the door. Here she paused and smiled at him, coquettishly raising those stony breasts as she pulled back her hair with her hands. The boy seemed to find this delay intolerable. He muttered something about the cold, pushing the girl in before him. Well, now, they would make it—make what? not love, certainly—and should he be standing at this window twenty-four hours hence, he would see the same scene repeated with another boy.

• From Who Wrote the Bible? Searching for Its Origins and Authors (2025)

  17. Understanding the Synoptic Gospels Eyewitness or Secondhand Accounts Most readers understand the gospels to be eyewitness accounts of Jesus’s life. However, this understanding depends on the idea that the authors of the gospels were actually Matthew, Mark, and Luke—that is, three people who lived and worked alongside Jesus. Matthew was one of the disciples, Mark was the secretary of Peter, and Luke was a companion of Paul. But the gospels themselves don’t ever say who wrote them, and they aren’t signed by their authors. Thus, academics have to get into the texts themselves to determine whether they really are eyewitness accounts. The Gospel of Matthew opens with a genealogy of Jesus and then launches into a description of Jesus’s birth. Was Matthew somehow there when Jesus was born? Perhaps he heard about it somehow—but parts of the story seem private, like what the angel said to Joseph in a dream (Matt. 1:20–21). Matthew doesn’t even enter the picture until chapter 9: “As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up and followed him” (Matt. 9:9). If Matthew the tax collector was in fact Matthew the author, one would think he’d say, “As Jesus was walking along, he saw me sitting at the tax booth.” The Gospel of Mark has fewer of these sorts of problems, in part because it starts with Jesus’s baptism. However, several passages should at least make people question whether it’s an eyewitness account. The book tells readers what some characters in the story were thinking but not saying aloud (Mark 2:6–7). It states what Herod thought when he heard about Jesus’s miracles (Mark 6:16). It even describes what happened when Jesus privately took Peter, James, and John up the mountain, complete with dialogue—but also says that Peter, James, and John didn’t tell anyone about what happened (Mark 9:2–10). Additionally, Matthew and Mark have several disparities. For example, the verse in Matthew where Matthew himself is introduced as the tax collector Jesus finds while on the road is also in Mark—but with one key difference: “As he was walking along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up and followed him” (Mark 2:14). If Matthew and Mark were both in Jesus’s entourage and were both eyewitnesses to all the same things, they’d probably know each other’s names. 102

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  The classic interpretation appears still more unsustainable when we know what the primitive mourning consists in. It is not made up merely of pious regrets accorded to him who no longer is, but also of severe abstinences and cruel sacrifices. The rite does not merely demand that one think of the deceased in a melancholy way, but also that he beat himself, bruise himself, lacerate himself and burn himself. We have even seen that persons in mourning sometimes torture themselves to such a degree that they do not survive their wounds. What reason has the dead man for imposing such torments upon them? Such a cruelty on his part denotes something more than a desire not to be forgotten. If he is to find pleasure in seeing his own suffer, it is necessary that he hate them, that he be thirsty for their blood. This ferocity would undoubtedly appear natural to those for whom every spirit is necessarily an evil and redoubted power. But we know that there are spirits of every sort; how does it happen that the soul of the dead man is necessarily an evil spirit? As long as the man is alive, he loves his relatives and exchanges services with them. Is it not strange that as soon as it is freed from his body, his soul should instantly lay aside its former sentiments and become an evil and tormenting genius? It is a general rule that the dead man retains the personality of the living, and that he has the same character, the same hates and the same affections. So this metamorphosis is not easily understandable by itself. It is true that the natives admit it implicitly when they explain the rite by the exigencies of the dead man, but the question now before us is to know whence this conception came. Far from being capable of being regarded as a truism, it is as obscure as the rite itself, and consequently cannot account for it. Finally, even if we had found the reasons for this surprising transformation, we would still have to explain why it is only temporary. For it does not last beyond the period of mourning; after the rites have once been accomplished, the dead man becomes what he was when alive, an affectionate and devoted relation. He puts the new powers which he receives from his new condition at the service of his friends.[1266] Thenceforth, he is regarded as a good genius, always ready to aid those whom he was recently tormenting. Whence come these successive transfers? If the evil sentiments attributed to the soul come solely from the fact that it is no longer in life, they should remain invariable, and if the mourning is due to this, it should be interminable.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The term heresy is derived from ai{resi" which means originally either capture (from aiJrevw), or election, choice (from aiJrevomai), and assumed the additional idea of arbitrary opposition to public opinion and authority. In the N. Test. it designates a chosen way of life, a school or sect or party, not necessarily in a bad sense, and is applied to the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and even the Christians as a Jewish sect (Acts 5:17; 15:5; 24:5, 14; 26:5; 28:22); then it signifies discord, arising from difference of opinion (Gal. 5:20; 1 Cor. 11:19); and lastly error (2 Pet. 2:1, aiJrevsei" ajpwleiva" destructive heresies, or sects of perdition). This passage comes nearest to the ecclesiastical definition. The term heretic (aiJretiko;" a[nqrwpo") occurs only once, Tit 3:10, and means a factious man, a sectary, a partisan, rather than an errorist. Constantine the Great still speaks of the Christian church as a sect, hJ ai{resi" hJ kaqolikhv, hJ aJgiwtavth ai{resi" (in a letter to Chrestus, bishop of Syracuse, in Euseb, H. E. X. c. 5, § 21 and 22, in Heinichen’s ed. I, 491). But after him church and sect became opposites, the former term being confined to the one ruling body, the latter to dissenting minorities. The fathers commonly use heresy of false teaching, in opposition to Catholic doctrine, and schism of a breach of discipline, in opposition to Catholic government. The ancient heresiologists—mostly uncritical, credulous, and bigoted, though honest and pious, zealots for a narrow orthodoxy—unreasonably multiplied the heresies by extending them beyond the limits of Christianity, and counting all modifications and variations separately. Philastrius or Philastrus, bishop. of Brescia or Brixia (d. 387), in his Liber de Haeresibus, numbered 28 Jewish and 128 Christian heresies; Epiphanius of Cyprus (d. 403), in his Panavrion. 80 heresies in all, 20 before and 60 after Christ; Augustin (d. 430), 88 Christian heresies, including Pelagianism; Proedestinatus, 90, including Pelagianism and Nestorianism. (Pope Pius IX. condemned 80 modern heresies, in his Syllabus of Errors, 1864.) Augustin says that it is "altogether impossible, or at any rate most difficult" to define heresy, and wisely adds that the spirit in which error is held, rather than error itself, constitutes heresy. There are innocent as well as guilty errors. Moreover, a great many people are better than their creed or no-creed, and a great many are worse than their creed, however orthodox it may be. The severest words of our Lord were directed against the hypocritical orthodoxy of the Pharisees. In the course of time heresy was defined to be a religious error held in wilful and persistent opposition to the truth after it has been defined and declared by the church in an authoritative manner, or "pertinax defensio dogmatis ecclesiae universalis judicio condemnati." Speculations on open questions of theology are no heresies Origen was no heretic in his age, but was condemned long after his death.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  For when I hear any Christian brother ignorant of these things, and mistaken on them, I can patiently behold such a man holding his opinion; nor do I see that any ignorance as to the position or character of the corporeal creation can injure him, so long as he doth not believe any thing unworthy of Thee, O Lord, the Creator of all. But it doth injure him, if he imagine it to pertain to the form of the doctrine of piety, and will yet affirm that too stiffly whereof he is ignorant. And yet is even such an infirmity, in the infancy of faith, borne by our mother Charity, till the new-born may grow up unto a perfect man, so as not to be carried about with every wind of doctrine. But in him who in such wise presumed to be the teacher, source, guide, chief of all whom he could so persuade, that whoso followed him thought that he followed, not a mere man, but Thy Holy Spirit; who would not judge that so great madness, when once convicted of having taught any thing false, were to be detested and utterly rejected? But I had not as yet clearly ascertained whether the vicissitudes of longer and shorter days and nights, and of day and night itself, with the eclipses of the greater lights, and whatever else of the kind I had read of in other books, might be explained consistently with his sayings; so that, if they by any means might, it should still remain a question to me whether it were so or no; but I might, on account of his reputed sanctity, rest my credence upon his authority.

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  It is certain that the sentiment of mystery has not been without a considerable importance in certain religions, notably in Christianity. It must also be said that the importance of this sentiment has varied remarkably at different moments in the history of Christianity. There are periods when this notion passes to an inferior place, and is even effaced. For example, for the Christians of the seventeenth century, dogma had nothing disturbing for the reason; faith reconciled itself easily with science and philosophy, and the thinkers, such as Pascal, who really felt that there is something profoundly obscure in things, were so little in harmony with their age that they remained misunderstood by their contemporaries.[29] It would appear somewhat hasty, therefore, to make an idea subject to parallel eclipses, the essential element of even the Christian religion.

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  Moreover, far from being able to explain totemism, this belief takes for granted one of the fundamental principles upon which this rests; that is to say, it begs the question to be explained. It, just as much as totemism, implies that man is considered a close relative of the animal; for if these two kingdoms were clearly distinguished in the mind, men would never believe that a human soul could pass so easily from one into the other. It is even necessary that the body of the animal be considered its true home, for it is believed to go there as soon as it regains its liberty. Now while the doctrine of transmigration postulates this singular affinity, it offers no explanation of it. The only explanation offered by Tylor is that men sometimes resemble in certain traits the anatomy and physiology of the animal. "The half-human features and actions and characters of animals are watched with wondering sympathy by the savage, as by the child. The beast is the very incarnation of familiar qualities of man: and such names as lion, bear, fox, owl, parrot, viper, worm, when we apply them as epithets to men, condense into a word some leading features of a human life."[562] But even if these resemblances are met with, they are uncertain and exceptional; before all else, men resemble their relatives and companions, and not plants and animals. Such rare and questionable analogies could not overcome such unanimous proofs, nor could they lead a man to think of himself and his forefathers in forms contradicted by daily experience. So this question remains untouched, and as long as it is not answered, we cannot say that totemism is explained.[563] Finally, this whole theory rests upon a fundamental misunderstanding. For Tylor as for Wundt, totemism is only a particular case of the cult of animals.[564] But we, on the contrary, know that it is something very different from a sort of animal-worship.[565] The animal is never adored; the man is nearly its equal and sometimes even treats it as his possession, so far is he from being subordinate to it like a believer before his god. If the animals of the totemic species are really believed to incarnate the ancestors, the members of foreign clans would not be allowed to eat their flesh freely. In reality, it is not to the animal as such that the cult is addressed, but to the emblem and the image of the totem. Now between this religion of the emblem and the ancestor-cult, there is no connection whatsoever. While Tylor derives totemism from the ancestor-cult, Jevons derives it from the nature-cult,[566] and here is how he does so.

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  But this distinction is arbitrary. It is true that mythology has an æsthetic interest as well as one for the history of religions; but it is one of the essential elements of the religious life, nevertheless. If the myth were withdrawn from religion, it would be necessary to withdraw the rite also; for the rites are generally addressed to definite personalities who have a name, a character, determined attributes and a history, and they vary according to the manner in which these personalities are conceived. The cult rendered to a divinity depends upon the character attributed to him; and it is the myth which determines this character. Very frequently, the rite is nothing more than the myth put in action; the Christian communion is inseparable from the myth of the Last Supper, from which it derives all its meaning. Then if all mythology is the result of a sort of verbal delirium, the question which we raised remains intact: the existence, and especially the persistence of the cult become inexplicable. It is hard to understand how men have continued to do certain things for centuries without any object. Moreover, it is not merely the peculiar traits of the divine personalities which are determined by mythology; the very idea that there are gods or spiritual beings set above the various departments of nature, in no matter what manner they may be represented, is essentially mythical.[168] Now if all that which appertains to the notion of gods conceived as cosmic agents is blotted out of the religions of the past, what remains? The idea of a divinity in itself, of a transcendental power upon which man depends and upon which he supports himself? But that is only an abstract and philosophic conception which has been fully realized in no historical religion; it is without interest for the science of religions.[169] We must therefore avoid distinguishing between religious beliefs, keeping some because they seem to us to be true and sane and rejecting others because they shock and disconcert us. All myths, even those which we find the most unreasonable, have been believed.[170] Men have believed in them no less firmly than in their own sensations; they have based their conduct upon them. In spite of appearances, it is therefore impossible that they should be without objective foundation. However, it will be said that in whatever manner religions may be explained, it is certain that they are mistaken in regard to the real nature of things: science has proved it. The modes of action which they counsel or prescribe to men can therefore rarely have useful effects: it is not by lustrations that the sick are cured nor by sacrifices and chants that the crops are made to grow. Thus the objection which we have made to naturism would seem to be applicable to all possible systems of explanation.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  If her aim was to have hundreds or thousands of followers, like other gurus, another significant tactical error on her part was that she stopped coming to Wednesday nights and moved away from Vancouver. She was the reason we had all joined the group, so with her gone, there was no charismatic leader left to reel in new recruits. Wolf’s Den is so remote that it would be hopeless to try and recruit new members in that area. I often wonder why she left the city and stayed on the move or at Wolf’s Den. It seems a counterproductive strategy, for someone who wants to control people, to diminish her own influence by leaving the faithful, and the heavily populated city where she’d started her recruiting, behind. Was she beginning to be wary of confrontation as more members left her fold? Was she afraid of exposure as a fraud as a result of having all those ex-members out walking around freely and alive? I don’t have an answer for this. As of this writing, as far as I know, there may be only seven or eight people living at Wolf’s Den, the last of the faithful few. I have no idea what has happened to the nine or ten women who were still going to the Vancouver group when I left it. I don’t even know if the group still meets. I do know that Jessica cottoned on to the fact that she was being manipulated and left the cult a year or so after I did. Gender biasIt is only with the benefit of hindsight that I was able to recognize that Limori often treated her male followers better than she treated those who were female. Limori treated the men more like peers than subjects. It was a very subtle difference in approach; the men were still subjected to the same seduction and thought-reform techniques that the women were. But I rarely witnessed her subjecting a man to the heights of soul-crushing abuse that she levelled at the women. I’ve puzzled over this for years but have finally concluded that the reasons for this difference in approach may be, ultimately, very simple to explain. First, there were far fewer men in the group than women. In the Vancouver group, during the heyday of the early to mid-1990s, the ratio of women to men was probably ten to one. But in order to play her game of Musical Beds with us, Limori needed men to be in her sway. My observation was that she treated them therefore with slightly less abuse than she treated the women so that there would be less risk of losing them. Her rate of failure in converting the men to true believers had to be lower than with the women, simply because there were fewer men to lose. She also needed men to do the heavy work of building and renovating at Wolf’s Den.

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  But whence comes the religious character of the totemic beliefs and practices? For the fact that a man considers himself an animal of a certain species does not explain why he attributes marvellous powers to this species, and especially why he renders a cult to the images symbolizing it.--To this question Lang gives the same response as Frazer: he denies that totemism is a religion. "I find in Australia," he says, "no example of religious practices such as praying to, nourishing or burying the totem."[607] It was only at a later epoch, when it was already established, that totemism was drawn into and surrounded by a system of conceptions properly called religious. According to a remark of Howitt,[608] when the natives undertake the explanation of the totemic institutions, they do not attribute them to the totems themselves nor to a man, but to some supernatural being such as Bunjil or Baiame. "Accepting this evidence," says Lang, "one source of the 'religious' character of totemism is at once revealed. The totemist obeys the decree of Bunjil, or Baiame, as the Cretans obeyed the divine decrees given by Zeus to Minos." Now according to Lang the idea of these great divinities arose outside of the totemic system; so this is not a religion in itself; it has merely been given a religious colouring by contact with a genuine religion. But these very myths contradict Lang's conception of totemism. If the Australians had regarded totemism as something human and profane, it would never have occurred to them to make a divine institution out of it. If, on the other hand, they have felt the need of connecting it with a divinity, it is because they have seen a sacred character in it. So these mythological interpretations prove the religious nature of totemism, but do not explain it.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  2. A few years afterwards, about A.D. 170, the controversy broke out in Laodicea, but was confined to Asia, where a difference had arisen either among the Quartadecimanians themselves, or rather among these and the adherents of the Western observance. The accounts on this interimistic sectional dispute are incomplete and obscure. Eusebius merely mentions that at that time Melito of Sardis wrote two works on the Passover.340 But these are lost, as also that of Clement of Alexandria on the same topic.341 Our chief source of information is Claudius Apolinarius (Apollinaris),342 bishop of Hierapolis, in Phrygia, in two fragments of his writings upon the subject, which have been preserved in the Chronicon Paschale.343 These are as follows: "There are some now who, from ignorance, love to raise strife about these things, being guilty in this of a pardonable offence; for ignorance does not so much deserve blame as need instruction. And they say that on the fourteenth [of Nisan] the Lord ate the paschal lamb (to; provbaton e[fage) with his disciples, but that He himself suffered on the great day of unleavened bread344 [i.e. the fifteenth of Nisan]; and they interpret Matthew as favoring their view from which it appears that their view does not agree with the law,345 and that the Gospels seem, according to them, to be at variance.346 The Fourteenth is the true Passover of the Lord, the great sacrifice, the. Son of God347 in the place of the lamb ... who was lifted up upon the horns of the unicorn ... and who was buried on the day of the Passover, the stone having been placed upon his tomb."