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

  Yet Cyril did not, like Augustine, exempt the Virgin from sin or infirmity, but, like Basil, he ascribed to her a serious doubt at the crucifixion concerning the true divinity of Christ, and a shrinking from the cross, similar to that of Peter, when he was scandalized at the bare mention of it, and exclaimed: "Be it far from thee, Lord!" (Matt. xvi. 22.) In commenting on John xix. 25, Cyril says: The female sex somehow is ever fond of tears,2044 and given to much lamentation .... It was the purpose of the holy evangelist to teach, that probably even the mother of the Lord Himself took offence2045 at the unexpected passion; and the death upon the cross, being so very bitter, was near unsettling her from her fitting mind .... Doubt not that she admitted2046 some such thoughts as these: I bore Him who is laughed at on the wood; but when He said He was the true Son of the Omnipotent God, perhaps somehow He was mistaken.2047 He said, ’I am the Life;’ how then has He been crucified? how has He been strangled by the cords of His murderers? how did He not prevail over the plot of His persecutors? why does He not descend from the cross, since He bade Lazarus to return to life, and filled all Judaea with amazement at His miracles? And it is very natural that woman,2048 not knowing the mystery, should slide into some such trains of thought. For we should understand, that the gravity of the circumstances of the Passion was enough to overturn even a self-possessed mind; it is no wonder then if woman2049 slipped into this reasoning." Cyril thus understands the prophecy of Simeon (Luke ii. 35) concerning the sword, which, he says, "meant the most acute pain, cutting down the woman’s mind into extravagant thoughts. For temptations test the hearts of those who suffer them, and make bare the thoughts which are in them."2050 Aside from his partisan excesses, he powerfully and successfully represented the important truth of the unity of the person of Christ against the abstract dyophysitism of Nestorius.

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

  We must make a passing mention of the curious and mysterious myth of papess Johanna, who is said during this period between Leo IV. (847) and Benedict III. (855) to have worn the triple crown for two years and a half. She was a lady of Mayence (her name is variously called Agnes, Gilberta, Johanna, Jutta), studied in disguise philosophy in Athens (where philosophy had long before died out), taught theology in Rome, under the name of Johannes Anglicus, and was elevated to the papal dignity as John VIII., but died in consequence of the discovery of her sex by a sudden confinement in the open street during a solemn procession from the Vatican to the Lateran. According to another tradition she was tied to the hoof of a horse, dragged outside of the city and stoned to death by the people, and the inscription was put on her grave: "Parce pater patrum papissae edere partum." The strange story originated in Rome, and was first circulated by the Dominicans and Minorites, and acquired general credit in the 13th and 14th centuries. Pope John XX. (1276) called himself John XXI. In the beginning of the 15th century the bust of this woman-pope was placed alongside with the busts of the other popes at Sienna, and nobody took offence at it. Even Chancellor Gerson used the story as an argument that the church could err in matters of fact. At the Council in Constance it was used against the popes. Torrecremata, the upholder of papal despotism, draws from it the lesson that if the church can stand a woman-pope, she might stand the still greater evil of a heretical pope. Nevertheless the story is undoubtedly a mere fiction, and is so regarded by nearly all modern historians, Protestant as well as Roman Catholic. It is not mentioned till four hundred years later by Stephen, a French Dominican (who died 1261).263 It was unknown to Photius and the bitter Greek polemics during the ninth and tenth centuries, who would not have missed the opportunity to make use of it as an argument against the papacy. There is no gap in the election of the popes between Leo and Benedict, who, according to contemporary historians, was canonically elected three days after the death of Leo IV. (which occurred July 17th, 855), or at all events in the same month, and consecrated two months after (Sept. 29th). See Jaffé, Regesta, p. 235. The myth was probably an allegory or satire on the monstrous government of women (Theodora and Marozia) over several licentious popes—Sergius III., John X., XI., and XII.—in the tenth century. So Heumann, Schröckh, Gibbon, Neander. The only serious objection to this solution is that the myth would be displaced from the ninth to the tenth century.

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  Some groups called “cults” may have conveniently defined themselves as “religions” to obtain such protections and tax-exempt status. There is considerable legal protection for any religious group, as provided by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which specifically states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech.”2 But as some have noted, the First Amendment isn’t a “suicide pact.” That is, it doesn’t provide the basis to do anything in the name of religious freedom, thereby preventing authorities from enforcing the law equally regarding all religious groups. Dr. John G. Clark, a Harvard psychiatrist known for his study of contemporary cults, observed some years ago, “The new youth cults, though usually self-styled as religious for purposes of First Amendment privileges, are increasingly dangerous to the health of their converts and menacing to their critics.”3 John Clark’s criticism of cults certainly made him a target. Scientology reportedly launched a “series of threats, harassment, and false and malicious accusations” against Clark.4 But in the United States, the First Amendment ideally protects the constitutional rights of groups called “cults” and their critics through its provisions for freedom of expression. For us to better understand the issue of destructive cults, knowing their history is important. What follows is a historical examination of some of the largest and most destructive groups called “cults,” reported in chronological order. 1978—Jonestown Mass Murder/Suicide During the 1970s Jim Jones, a charismatic preacher in San Francisco, gained popularity and power. In the end the cult Jones formed would come to represent the most terrible cult tragedy in American history. Now simply referred to as “Jonestown,” this horrific mass murder/ suicide claimed the lives of more than nine hundred people, including more than two hundred children.5 The murders at Jonestown took place on November 18, 1978. The public struggled to understand how so many lives were claimed so suddenly under the influence of a single charismatic leader. How could a church and a pastor, both once greatly admired, end in such infamy? In the beginning there seemed to be little to fear from Jim Jones. A well-established Protestant denomination called the Disciples of Christ ordained him in 1964. Jones set up two churches, the main one in San Francisco and another one in Los Angeles. The organization was called People’s Temple, and at its peak there were as many as eight thousand members. Jim Jones, though now known as a notorious cult leader, was once a popular and trusted community celebrity. He could routinely turn out thousands of his people for an event. During the 1970s Jones appeared with many prominent politicians including the state assemblyman Willie Brown. In 1976 the mayor George Moscone gave Jim Jones a seat on the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission. Governor Jerry Brown was seen attending services at People’s Temple.6 Negative press reports began to surface about Jim Jones in the summer of 1977.

• From The Girls (2016)

  9 The clatter on the porch startled me, followed by the sound of my mother’s dissolving laughter, Frank’s heavy steps. I was in the living room, stretched out in my grandfather’s chair and reading one of my mother’s McCall’s. Its pictures of genitally slick hams, wreathed with pineapple. Lauren Hutton lounging on a rocky cliff in her Bali brassieres. My mother and Frank were loud, coming into the living room, but stopped talking when they caught sight of me. Frank in his cowboy boots, my mother swallowing whatever she’d been saying. “Sweetheart.” Her eyes were filmy, her body swaying just enough so I knew she was drunk and trying to hide it, though her pink neck—exposed in a chiffon shirt—would have given it away. “Hi,” I said. “Whatcha doing home, sweetheart?” My mother came over to wrap her arms around me, and I let her, despite the metallic smell of alcohol on her, the wilt of her perfume. “Is Connie sick?” “Nah.” I shrugged. Turning back to my magazine. The next page: a girl in a butter-yellow tunic, kneeling on a white box. An advertisement for Moon Drops. “You’re usually in and out so quick,” she said. “I just felt like being home,” I said. “Isn’t it my house, too?” My mother smiled, smoothing my hair. “Such a pretty girl, aren’t you? Of course it’s your house. Isn’t she a pretty girl?” she said, turning to Frank. “Such a pretty girl,” she repeated to no one. Frank smiled back but seemed restless. I hated that unwilling knowledge, how I’d started to notice each tiny shift of power and control, the feints and jabs. Why couldn’t relationships be reciprocal, both people steadily accruing interest at the same rate? I snapped the magazine shut. “Good night,” I said. I didn’t want to imagine what would happen later,

• From The Girls (2016)

  “It was a long time ago,” I said to Sasha, but her expression was empty. “Still,” Julian said, brightening. “I always thought it was beautiful. Sick yet beautiful,” he said. “A fucked-up expression, but an expression, you know. An artistic impulse. You’ve got to destroy to create, all that Hindu shit.” I could tell he was reading my bewildered shock as approval. “God, I can’t even imagine,” Julian said. “Actually being in the middle of something like that.” He waited for me to respond. I was woozy from the ambush of kitchen lights: didn’t they notice the room was too bright? I wondered if the girl was even beautiful. Her teeth had a cast of yellow. Julian nudged her with his elbow. “Sasha doesn’t even know what we’re talking about.” Most everyone knew at least one of the grisly details. College kids sometimes dressed as Russell for Halloween, hands splashed with ketchup cadged from the dining hall. A black metal band had used the heart on an album cover, the same craggy heart Suzanne had left on Mitch’s wall. In the woman’s blood. But Sasha seemed so young—why would she have ever heard of it? Why would she care? She was lost in that deep and certain sense that there was nothing beyond her own experience. As if there were only one way things could go, the years leading you down a corridor to the room where your inevitable self waited —embryonic, ready to be revealed. How sad it was to realize that sometimes you never got there. That sometimes you lived a whole life skittering across the surface as the years passed, unblessed. Julian petted Sasha’s hair. “It was like a big fucking deal. Hippies killing these people out in Marin.” The heat in his face was familiar. The same fervor as those people who populated the online forums that never seemed to slow down or die. They jostled for ownership, adopting the same knowing tone, a veneer of scholarship masking the essential ghoulishness of the endeavor. What were they looking for among all the banalities? As though the weather on that day mattered. All of the scraps seemed important, when considered long enough: the station the radio was tuned to in Mitch’s kitchen, the number and depth of the stab wounds. How the shadows might have flickered on that particular car driving up that particular road.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The ease with which they had been so thoroughly subjugated was profoundly disturbing to the people of India since it implied that something was radically amiss with their social systems.95 Traditional Indian aristocracies now had to cope not only with a foreign ruling class but with a wholly different socioeconomic order and with the new native cadres of clerks and bureaucrats, created by the British, who often earned more than the old elites. These Westernized Indians had become in effect a new caste, separated by a gulf of incomprehension from the unmodernized majority. The increasing democratization of their British rulers was alien to the social arrangements of India, which had always been strongly hierarchical and had encouraged synergy among disparate groups rather than organized unity. Moreover, confronted with the bewildering social variety of the subcontinent, the British latched on to the groups they mistakenly thought they understood and divided the population into “Hindu,” “Muslim,” “Sikh,” and “Christian” communities. The “Hindu” majority, however, consisted of multifarious castes, cults, and groups that did not see themselves as forming an organized religion, as Western people now understood this term. They had no unifying hierarchy and no standard set of rituals, practices, and beliefs. They worshipped numerous unrelated gods and engaged in devotions that had no logical connection with one another. Yet now they all found themselves lumped together into something the British called “Hinduism.”96 The term hindu had been used first by the Muslim conquerors to describe the indigenous people; it had no specifically religious connotation but simply meant “native” or “local,” and the indigenous peoples, including Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs, came to use it of themselves. Under the British, however, “Hindus” had to become a close-knit group and cultivate a broad, casteless communal identity that was alien to their age-old traditions. It was ironic that the British, who had banished “religion” from the public sphere at home, should classify the subcontinent in such tightly religious terms. They based the Indian electoral system on religious affiliation and in 1871 conducted a census that made these religious communities acutely aware of their numbers and areas of strength in relation to one another. By bringing religion to the fore in this way, the British inadvertently bequeathed a history of communal conflict to South Asia. In the Moghul Empire, there had certainly been tension between the Muslim ruling class and its hindu subjects, but this had not always had a religious coloration. While Western Christians had become more sectarian during their Reformation, India had been going in the opposite direction. During the thirteenth century, Vedic orthodoxy had begun to be transformed by bhakti, a “devotion” to a personal deity that refused to acknowledge differences of caste or creed. Bhakti drew much inspiration from Sufism, which had become the dominant mode of Islam in the subcontinent and had long insisted that because the omniscient and omnipresent God could not be confined to a single creed, belligerent assertion of orthodoxy was a form of idolatry (shirk).

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  There was the accomplished and very eloquent young Asian woman, an anthropology student, she said, who acted as our museum guide in Samarkand and shared her great store of historical knowledge with us. The night that we arrived in Samarkand and again the next day in looking through the museums, I felt that there were many things we were not seeing. For instance, we passed a case where there are a number of coins which I recognized as ancient Chinese coins because I’d used them for casting the I Ching. I asked our guide if these were from China. She acted as if I’d said a dirty word. And she said, “No, these were from right here in Samarkand.” Now obviously they had been traded, and that was the whole point, but of course I couldn’t read the Russian explanation under it, and she evidently took great offense at my use of the word China. In all of the women I’ve met here I feel an air of security and awareness of their own powers as women, as producers, and as human beings that is very affirming. But I also feel a stony rigidity, a resistance to questioning that frightens me, saddens me, because it feels destructive of progress as process. We arrived in Samarkand about 9:30 P.M., quite wearied by a very full day. We got into the main square just in time to catch the last light-show at Tamerlane’s tomb. The less said about that the better. But the following day, Helen, Fikre, and I played hooky from one mausoleum and ran across the street and went to a market. It is very reassuring and good as always. People in markets find a way of getting down to the essentials of I have, you want; you have, I want.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  “Who knows about what happened?” he asks, gently. I watch the fire eat the logs. For a minute I’m not sure which instance he’s referring to. There were so many. The carousel, I remind myself. It’s such a strange memory. Nothing fancy. But private. “Only you. That’s why it seems unlikely…” I look at him. “Did you—?” “No … no, Senna, never. That was our moment. I didn’t even want to think about it after.” I believe him. For a long second our eyes are locked and the past seems to float between us—a frail soap bubble. I break eye contact first, looking down at my socks. Patterned socks, not white. I searched for white, but all that was stocked for me were knee length patterned socks. A deviation from my character. I wear my new, colorful socks over my tights. Today, they are purple and grey. Diagonal stripes. “Senna…?” “Yes, sorry. I was thinking about my socks.” He laughs through his nose, like he’d rather not laugh. I’d rather he not laugh, too. “Isaac, what happened on the carousel was … personal. I don’t tell people things. You know that.” “Okay, let’s forget how this … this … person knows. Let’s assume he does. Maybe it’s a clue.” “A clue?” I say in disbelief. “To what? Our freedom? Like this is a game?” Isaac nods. I study his face, look for a joke. But, there are no jokes in this house. There are just two stolen people, clutching knives as they sleep. “And they call me the fiction writer,” I say it to make him angry, because I know he’s right. I make to stand up, but he grabs my wrist and gently pulls me back down. His eyes travel across the span of my nose and my cheeks. He’s looking at my freckles. He always did that, like they were works of art rather than screwed up pigment. Isaac doesn’t have freckles. He has soft eyes that dip down at the outer corners and two front teeth that overlap slightly. He’s average looking and beautiful at the same time. If you look close enough, you see how intense his features are. Each one speaks to you in a different way. Or maybe I’m just a writer. “We are not here for ransom,” he insists. “They want something from us.” “Like what?” I sound like a petulant child. I lift the back of my hand to my lips and bite the skin on my knuckles. “No one wants anything from me—except more stories, maybe.” Isaac raises his eyebrows. I think of Annie Wilkes and her rooty-patooties. No way. “They didn’t leave me a typewriter,” I point out. “Or even a pen and paper. This isn’t about my writing.” He doesn’t look convinced. I’d rather steer him toward the carousel, especially if it mean he’ll stops looking at me like I have the magical key to get out of here.

• From Between Us

  I am very certain that I will never be able to make a go-to reference manual on cultural differences in emotions; nor will anybody else. To grasp the absurdity of the task, ask yourself: How would I deal with the emotions of a Dutch person, any Dutch person? (Substitute, as you wish, “Catholic Irish American,” “white American from Boston,” “Japanese from Tokyo,” . . . for “Dutch.”) What emotions do they have? How to understand these emotions? What do these emotions look like in behavior? The answers to those questions would all depend on who the Dutch person is, what their history is, their gender and position in society, their specific predicaments. It depends on what they as an individual specifically care about at that moment, what the relational context is, and what specifically is at stake. It will also depend on whom they are interacting with, and what these people’s responses are. This is true for any person with any ethno-racial or national background. I agree with anthropologist Andrew Beatty that there is no “good reason to expect cultural others to be less complex in their emotional and moral functioning than we take ourselves to be. . . .” and “an emotionally engaged ethnography will fail to deliver if it ignores particulars and assumes that the general frame is determinate or that everyone who fits the categorical profile will think, feel, and relate in the same way. With emotions, the devil is in the details.” Emotional Literacy in Culturally Diverse Schools Two of the examples at the beginning of this chapter took place in schools: young Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ahmet. This is no coincidence: emotions play a big role in learning environments, and misunderstandings may have large, and sometimes lasting, effects on the futures of students. The young Coates was suspended, and Ahmet accused of something he did not do, in large part because their teachers did not correctly unpack the emotional episodes. Had Coates’s teacher understood his behavior as a desperate claim for dignity, and had Ahmet’s teacher Ellen understood his shame as conciliatory—a sign of respect—they might have been better teachers for it. Here again, teachers’ resonance may precisely lie in a recognition that their students’ emotions are incongruent with their own—that their students’ responses were steps in a different dance than their own. Coates’s angry threats were steps in the dance of physical integrity; Ahmet’s shameful responses were steps in the dance of respect to elders.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  It appears to be a normal family meal, but Ophelia’s inner dialogue is riddled with the kind of markers that herald a girl both strange and strangely old. She is angry with her parents for existing, for being such simple contributors to society. She compares them to her mashed potatoes then goes on to talk about their failed attempts to replace her with another baby. My mother has had four miscarriages. I’d take that as God’s way of saying you aren’t supposed to fuck up any more kids. I cringe at this part, wanting to know more about Carol Blithe’s broken uterus, but my page has come to an end, and I am forced to pick up a new one. It goes like this for hours, as I gather bursts of information about Ophelia, who almost seems like the anti-heroine. Ophelia is a narcissist; Ophelia has a superiority complex; Ophelia can’t stick with anything for too long before becoming bored. Ophelia marries a man who is the antithesis of boring, and she pays for it. She leaves him eventually, and marries someone else, but then she leaves him, too. I find a page where she speaks about a china doll that she had to leave behind after divorcing her second husband. She laments the loss of the china doll in the most peculiar way. I gather these details until my brain is hurting. I am trying to sort through all of it, put it in order, when I come across the last page. She is self- actuating on the last page of the book. When I reach the final line, my eyes cross. You will feel me in the fall I vomit. Isaac finds me lying on my back on the floor. He stands over me with a leg on each side of my body, and hauls me to my feet. His eyes briefly explore the puddle of vomit beside me before he reaches up and feels my forehead. When he finds it cool, he asks me, “What did you read?” I turn my face away. “Nick’s book?” I shake my head. He looks at the pile closest to where I was lying. “Do you know who wrote it?” I can’t look at him, so I close my eyes and nod. “My mother,” I say. I hear his breath catch. “How do you know?” “I know.” I hobble into the kitchen. I need water to wash out my mouth. Isaac follows behind me. “How do I know it wasn’t you who did this?” He takes a threatening step toward me. I back into a bag of rice. It falls over.

• From Between Us

  The reality of modern societies is that we come together as people from different cultural backgrounds (and different positions). We know that it takes more than a lifetime to grow new emotions—if that is even the goal. In the meantime, we coinhabit our organizations, our schools, and our neighborhoods. We meet as colleagues, neighbors, and citizens, but also as teachers and students, doctors and patients, therapists and clients, and bosses and employees. In all of these relationships, cultural differences in emotions may be the source of subtle misconceptions, even if we are not necessarily aware of them. In intercultural relationships, our emotions may act at cross-purposes, as when Ahmet tried to make peace when his teacher expected independent indignation. When some of us are in positions of power—as is the case with teachers, doctors, therapists, managers—our misunderstandings may hurt others’ chances. In those cases, emotions become invisible gatekeepers. If we don’t want that to happen, we need to look into ways of understanding emotions across cultures. Beyond Empathy In his book The War for Kindness, psychologist Jamil Zaki makes a case that, as a human species, we need kindness: we need each other’s understanding and help, because only together, as families, groups, and societies, can we survive. Kindness has played a role in our evolutionary survival, but it is not merely a relic of the past. We still need it to flourish, as individuals and as a society. Zaki assumes a big role for empathy. “Empathy is the mental superpower that overcomes [the] distance” between people, he writes. Where hate dehumanizes others and creates schisms, empathy humanizes them and grows connection. Empathy has been key to our survival as a species, because it inspires kindness towards each other. A culture of empathy grows social cohesion: it shows the human face of students, employees, patients, and citizens, and in doing so, creates room for development and well-being. Some of us may be endowed with a higher “set point” of empathy than others, but each of us can decide to become more empathic than we are. We can invest in becoming more attuned to other people’s feelings and experiences. So how do we grow empathy? Zaki’s answer is to try to imagine how another person thinks or feels. Meditating on someone else’s “motives, beliefs, and history . . . conjures an authentic inner world.” Attend to another person, grasp their circumstances, and know what they feel.

• From Between Us

  I read many similar ethnographies in the late ’80s, and I certainly picked up that people talked about emotions differently across cultures. I summarized the work of many ethnographies of emotion, such as the one by Abu-Lughod about hasham , in a review article on culture and emotion that I co-authored with my advisor Nico Frijda. Catherine Lutz, one of the main anthropologists studying emotion at the time, complimented me once on these summaries, saying they presented a fair description. And yet, it was not until later that I came to subscribe to the main implication of cultural differences in talk: that talking about emotions matters for how you do them. I still own some hard copies from the ’80s and ’90s with my own incredulous notes scribbled in the margin, notes such as “This is emotion talk, not emotions themselves” or “The fact that they do not talk about this emotion does not mean that these emotions do not exist.” They bear witness to my early disbelief that the way people from these cultures far from my own talked about their emotions constituted a truth—their truth. I believed that, deep down, all people would turn out to have emotions just like mine. I no longer do. Some ten years after I had first read anthropological accounts on emotions, a collaboration with fellow psychologist Mayumi Karasawa brought them to life. By that time, I lived in the United States, and psychology had started to discover the power of culture. Driven by opportunity mostly, many psychological studies had started to test if “fundamental” psychological processes could be replicated in East Asian cultures; most studies were done in Japan, but some comparative research looked towards China and Korea. The opportunity was created by East Asian researchers trained in the United States, who together with their American colleagues and advisors, started to challenge the textbook psychology in which they did not recognize themselves. Karasawa was not one of them: she was trained in Japan. We met at a conference, and started to collaborate. She was an assistant professor in Japan at the time, and I was an assistant professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Her questions were often uncomfortable because they challenged my training as an emotion scientist.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  They believed this, of course, because of Jesus’s resurrection—just as it was disbelief in the bodily resurrection that made scholars from Reimarus to Bultmann and beyond assume that there must still be some great coming event to which the evangelists were referring. Such scholars have normally supposed this great coming event to be the Parousia. The word parousia is a Greek term meaning “royal presence” or “divine appearing,” or perhaps both. It has become the regular technical term used by New Testament scholars to refer to Jesus’s “second coming” and its supposed attendant phenomena, which, they maintain, the early church believed to be “imminent.” Early Christians thought, say these scholars, that the Parousia would be the final kingdom-bringing moment. That scholarly mistake has fused with the dispensationalism of popular (mostly American) subculture and speculation to give the present state of confusion about the “end-times” that is so prominent a feature of today’s American church life. The four gospels are well aware that this central contention about the kingdom’s arrival—that is, the claim that God was already king of the world and had become so in a dramatic new way through the work, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus—was highly paradoxical in their own context, as indeed it has remained so to our day. Then, as now, a claim about God’s kingdom being already present was likely to meet with the obvious rejoinder: “Of course God’s kingdom hasn’t arrived—just look out the window!” The problem was more acute for them, facing hostility and often persecution. However, they were in no danger of having what today we might call an overrealized eschatology, imagining (as some today have suggested, absurdly in my view) that the entire new creation had now arrived and that there was nothing more to hope for. There is, actually, a secular parody of this that was quite popular in the Western world, at least until the events of September 11, 2001: the belief that history had now developed as far as it was going to do, that Western capitalism and liberal democracy had “won” the Cold War, and that the whole world would now come into line with the brave new “enlightened” world. One does not hear this proposal so often today. But again, we may here be looking at one of the reasons why critics in the modern period were unwilling even to contemplate the possibility that the evangelists might really have believed that God had become king through the work of Jesus. It may not have been objective historical analysis on the critics’ part. It could just as easily have been because their whole culture, that of eighteenth-to twentieth-century Europe and America, believed implicitly that some kind of utopia had now arrived—through the triumph of “Enlightenment” ideology. The fact of continuing intractable evil in today’s world has highlighted the necessity to think again.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  This order is strange indeed, unexpected to say the least. A closer look reveals details behind these intriguing facts, for example, successful cooperative behaviors of the sort that we tend to associate, and reasonably so, with human wisdom and maturity. But cooperative strategies did not have to wait for wise and mature minds to appear. Such strategies are possibly as old as life itself and were never more brilliantly displayed than in the convenient treaty celebrated between two bacteria: a pushy, upstart bacterium that wanted to take over a bigger and more established one. The battle resulted in a draw, and the pushy bacterium became a cooperative satellite of the established one. Eukaryotes, cells with a nucleus and complicated organelles such as mitochondria, were probably born this way, over the negotiating table of life. The bacteria in the above tale do not have minds, let alone wise minds. The pushy bacterium operates as if concluding that “when we cannot win over them, we might as well join them.” The established bacterium, on the other side, operates as if thinking, “I may as well accept this invader provided it offers something to me.” But neither bacterium thought anything, of course. No mental reflection was involved, no overt consideration of prior knowledge, no cunning, guile, kindness, fair play, or diplomatic conciliation. The equation of the problem was resolved blindly and from within the process, bottom up, as an option that, in retrospect, worked for both sides. The successful option was shaped by the imperative requirements of homeostasis, and that was not magic, except in a poetic sense. It consisted of concrete physical and chemical constraints applied to the life process, within the cells, in the context of their physicochemical relations with the environment. Of note, the idea of algorithm is applicable to this situation. The genetic machinery of the successful organisms made sure the strategy would remain in the repertoire of future generations. Had the option not worked, it would have joined the large graveyard of evolution. We would never have known that fact. The intriguing process of cooperation does not stand alone, unaided. Bacteria are able to sense the presence of others thanks to the chemical probes installed in their membranes, and they can even tell relatives from strangers via the molecular structure of those probes. This is a modest forerunner of our sensory perceptions, closer to taste and smell than to the image-based hearing or seeing. These strangely ordered emergences reveal the deep power of homeostasis. The indomitable imperative of homeostasis operated by trial and error to select naturally available behavioral solutions to a number of problems of life management. The organisms searched and screened, unwittingly, the physics of their environments and the chemistry within their walls and came up, unwittingly, with at least adequate but often good solutions for the maintenance and flourishing of life.

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

  It requires us to believe that many persons, singly and collectively, at different times, and in different places, from Jerusalem to Damascus, had the same vision and dreamed the same dream; that the women at the open sepulchre early in the morning, Peter and John soon afterwards, the two disciples journeying to Emmaus on the afternoon of the resurrection day, the assembled apostles on the evening in the absence of Thomas, and again on the next Lord’s Day in the presence of the skeptical Thomas, seven apostles at the lake of Tiberias, on one occasion five hundred brethren at once most of whom were still alive when Paul reported the fact, then James, the brother of the Lord, who formerly did not believe in him, again all the apostles on Mount Olivet at the ascension, and at last the clearheaded, strong-minded persecutor on the way to Damascus—that all these men and women on these different occasions vainly imagined they saw and heard the self-same Jesus in bodily shape and form; and that they were by this baseless vision raised all at once from the deepest gloom in which the crucifixion of their Lord had left them, to the boldest faith and strongest hope which impelled them to proclaim the gospel of the resurrection from Jerusalem to Rome to the end of their lives! And this illusion of the early disciples created the greatest revolution not only in their own views and conduct, but among Jews and Gentiles and in the subsequent history of mankind! This illusion, we are expected to believe by these unbelievers, gave birth to the most real and most mighty of all facts, the Christian Church which has lasted these eighteen hundred years and is now spread all over the civilized world, embracing more members than ever and exercising more moral power than all the kingdoms and all other religions combined! The vision-hypothesis, instead of getting rid of the miracle, only shifts it from fact to fiction; it makes an empty delusion more powerful than the truth, or turns all history itself at last into a delusion. Before we can reason the resurrection of Christ out of history we must reason the apostles and Christianity itself out of existence. We must either admit the miracle, or frankly confess that we stand here before an inexplicable mystery. Remarkable Concessions.—The ablest advocates of the vision-theory are driven against their wish and will to admit some unexplained objective reality in the visions of the risen or ascended Christ. Dr. Baur, of Tübingen (d.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Purchas initially believed that the land must not be forcibly taken from the Indians because it had been assigned to them by God.15 His Protestant ideology may have been paternalistic, but it also had a measure of respect for the indigenous peoples. Yet during the first two terrible winters, when the colonists were starving to death, some of their conscripted laborers had fled to the local Powhattans, and when the English governor asked their chief to return the fugitives, he disdainfully refused. Whereupon the English militia descended on the settlement, killed fifteen Native Americans, burned their houses, cut down their corn, and abducted the queen, killing her children. So much for peaceful “dailie conversation.” The Indians were bewildered: “Why will you destroy us who supply you with food?” asked Chief Powhattan: “Why are you jealous of us? We are unarmed and willing to give you what you ask, if you come in a friendly manner.”16 By 1622 the Indians had become seriously alarmed by the rapid growth of the colony; the English had taken over a significant acreage of their hunting grounds, depriving them of essential resources.17 In a sudden attack on Jamestown, the Powhattans killed about a third of the English population. The Virginians retaliated in a ruthless war of attrition: they would allow local tribes to settle and plant their corn and then, just before the harvest, attack them, killing as many natives as possible. Within three years they had avenged the Jamestown massacre many times over. Instead of founding their colony on the compassionate principles of the gospel, they had inaugurated a policy of elimination imposed by ruthless military force. Even Purchas was forced to abandon the Bible and rely on the humanists’ aggressive doctrine of human rights when he finally agreed that the Indians deserved their fate because, by resisting English settlement, they had broken the law of nature.18 More pragmatic considerations were beginning to replace the old piety. The company had not been able to produce the staples England needed, and investors had not seen an adequate return. The only way their colony could function was to cultivate tobacco and sell it at five shillings a pound. Begun as a holy enterprise, Virginia would gradually be secularized not by Locke’s liberal ideology but by pressure of events.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  Isaac pushes the box closer to where I’m sitting so that I’m able to reach inside. The pages are all pulled from their binding, lined in four rows. I lift another page. The style lines up with the first book, lyrical with an old-fashioned feel to the prose. There is something strange about the writing, something I know I should remember, and cannot. I start pulling out pages at random. Separating the pages of Nick’s book from the new one. I work quickly, my fingers lifting and piling, lifting and piling. Isaac watches me from where he leans against the wall, his arms folded, lips pursed. I know that underneath his lips his two front teeth slightly overlap. I don’t know why I have this thought, at this time, but as I sort pages my thoughts are on Isaac’s two front teeth. I am about halfway through the box when I realize that there is a third book. This one is mine. My fingers linger over the bright white pages—white because I told the publisher if they printed on cream I would sue them for breach of contract. Three books. One written for MV, one written for Nick … but the third…? My eyes reach over to the unknown pile. Who belongs to that book? And what is the zookeeper trying to tell me? Isaac pushes himself off the wall and steps toward the pile that belongs to Nick. “We have to finish reading this one,” he says. My face drains of blood and I can feel a tingling along the tops of my shoulders as they tighten. I hand him the pile. “It’s out of order and the pages aren’t numbered. Good luck.” Our fingers touch. Gooseflesh rises on my arms and I look away quickly. [image file=image35.jpg] We work to set the books in order. Through the longest night, the night that never ends. It’s good to have something to do, to keep you from waltzing down crazy street—not that we haven’t already been there. It’s a street you only want to visit a couple times in your life. We have power again … heat. So we take advantage by not sleeping, our fingers flying over pages, our brows creased with the strain. Isaac has Nick’s book. I take on the task of the other two—mine and…? It seems that there are too many pages to make up only three books. I wonder if we will discover a fourth.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I see only the wood at first. Then he reaches over me with a pink Zippo and holds it as close to the inner wall as he can. Strange, I think, at first—there is writing on the walls. Some of the wood is obscuring it. I reach inside and move a couple of the logs over. I start shaking. He wraps his arms around my torso and squeezes, then leads me backwards to the sofa where I sit. Part of me wants to break away to go look some more, but I feel. I feel too much. If I don’t stop feeling I’m going to explode. Pages of my book—over and over—wall-papered on the inside of the closet like a slap in the face. “What does it mean?” I ask Isaac. He shakes his head. “A fan? I don’t know. It’s someone playing games.” “How did we never notice that before?” I want to press my fingers into the sides of his face and force him to look at me. I want him to tell me that he hates me, because for some reason he is here as a result of me. But he doesn’t. Nothing he does is encumbered by blame or anger. I wish I could be like that. “We weren’t looking,” he says. “What else are we not seeing because we aren’t looking?” “I have to read what’s in there.” I stand up, but Isaac pulls me back. “It’s Chapter Nine.” Chapter Nine? I reach for it in my mind. Then I let it go. Chapter Nine hurts. I wish I hadn’t written it. I tried to get the publishers to take it out of the manuscript before the book went to print. But they felt it was necessary to the story. The day the book hit shelves, I sat in my white room, holding back my vomit, knowing that everyone was reading Chapter Nine and living my pain. I don’t want to read it, so I stay sitting. “Chapter Nine is—” I cut him off. “I know what it is,” I snap. “But why is it there?” “Because someone is obsessed with you, Senna.” “No one knew that was real! Who did you tell?” I am screaming; so angry I want to throw something large. But the zookeeper didn’t give us anything large to throw. Everything is bolted, sewn into the walls and floors like this is a dollhouse. “Stop it!” He grabs me, tries to slow me down. His voice is getting loud. I release mine, too. If he’s going to yell I’m going to yell louder. “Then why are you here?” I punch his chest with both of my fists. He sits down abruptly. It throws me off. I was all geared up to fight.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  There had been very few rebellions against imperial Persia. The Persian kings had propagated the myth that they had inherited an empire that would last forever: it had been inaugurated by the Assyrians, had then passed to the Babylonians, and finally, to Cyrus. Any revolt was, therefore, doomed. But as the people of the Near East watched the diadochoi battling for control of the region, one succeeding another, their mood changed. The world had been turned upside down, and some Jews began to entertain hopes of independence under their own messiach. When in 201 the Ptolemies were ousted from Judea by the Seleucids, these hopes flared again. The behavior of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV in the second century resulted in a surge of Jewish apocalyptic passion, which drew on the ancient theology of the Davidic monarchy. But this messianic piety had no roots in the Axial Age, and took Judaism in a different, post-Axial direction. Alexander had won his empire at the peak of Greek intellectual achievement and his career marked the beginning of a new era. After his death, some poleis on the Greek mainland, including Athens, revolted against Macedonian rule, and Antipater, one of the six original diadochoi, took savage reprisals. This finished Athenian democracy. As Greek migrants and colonists settled in the new territories, Greek civilization began to merge with the cultures of the east. Scholars of the nineteenth century called this fusion “Hellenism.” The challenge of this encounter was enriching, but in the process the intensity of the Greek experiment became diluted. Spread thinly over such a huge, foreign area, it fragmented and became Greekish rather than truly Greek. Any period of major social change is troubled. The collapse of the old order and the inevitable political disruption were disturbing. 58 There was widespread bewilderment and malaise. Personal and political autonomy had always been crucial to the Greeks’ sense of identity, but now their world had expanded so dramatically that people felt that their destiny was controlled by vast impersonal forces. During the third century, three new philosophies, rooted in the pain of the period, tried to assuage this sense of alienation. 59 Epicurus (341–270), for example, experienced very little security for the first thirty-five years of his life. His family was expelled from Samos by the Macedonians, and he wandered from one polis to another before arriving in Athens in 306. There he bought a house with a garden near the Academy, and founded a community of close friends. Pleasure, he taught, was the chief goal of human existence, but this did not mean, as his detractors assumed, that he flung himself into a hectic round of hedonistic delights.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The theses were really points for contemplation, designed to show that the distinctions we imagine we see were delusions. Even life and death were aspects of each other: “When the sun is in the centre, it is in the decline,” said Huizi. “That which is born is dying.” Everything was in flux, so from the very first moment of its existence, the life of any creature had already started to decay. People used words such as “high” and “low” in an absolute sense, without realizing that an object is only “high” in comparison with something else, so “Heaven is on the same level as Earth and the mountains are equal with the marshes.” It was a mistake to put things into hard-and-fast categories, because everything was unique, even objects that were superficially similar: “That which is joined is separate.” All things were, therefore, one: Heaven and earth, life and death, superior and lowly. A politician, an activist, and a Mohist, Huizi may have wanted to suggest that all human beings had equal value, and that social fortune was also mutable. 20 In the first of his theses, Huizi pointed to a reality that lay beyond anything we experienced in ordinary life. “The greatest thing has nothing outside it and we call this the great One; the smallest thing has nothing inside it, and we call this the smallest One.” We called an object “big” only because it was larger than something else; but actually everything was “great” because there was nothing in our world that was not bigger than something else. Yet the categories “greatest” and “smallest” existed in our minds, which showed that we had the power to imagine the absolute. Language laid bare a transcendence that was built into the structure of our thought. Huizi’s paradoxes had a spiritual and social resonance that Zeno’s did not, and his ten propositions were framed by the notions of transcendence and compassion. In the first thesis, Huizi directed our attention to the great One that had nothing beyond itself. The tenth and last thesis was Mohist: “Love embraces all forms of life and Heaven and Earth are of One.” Because the distinctions on which we based our likes and dislikes were delusions, we should feel equal concern for all beings. The last thesis looked back to the first, because the “great One” comprised the whole of reality: Heaven and Earth were not distinct and antithetical but one. 21 Everything, therefore, deserved our love and ultimate concern. This spiritual vision helps to explain Huizi’s unlikely friendship with Zhuangzi (c. 370–311), one of the most important figures of the Chinese Axial Age. 22 A Yangist and a hermit, Zhuangzi seems at first sight to have little in common with the dignified prime minister of Wei.