Confusion

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Case for God (2009)

  Gregory could see this process at work in the life of Moses. His first encounter with God had been the revelation of the Burning Bush, where he had learned that the God that called itself “I Am” was being itself. Everything else in the universe “that the senses perceive or intelligence contemplates” could only participate in the being that sustained it at every second.32 After this initial revelation, Moses, like the great philosophers, had engaged in a disciplined contemplation of the natural world. But while nature could lead us to the Logos, through whom the world was made, it could not bring us to God itself. When Moses climbed Mount Sinai and entered the impenetrable darkness on its summit, however, he was in the place where God was—even though he could not see anything. He had at last left normal modes of perception behind and achieved an entirely different kind of seeing. Pushing his reason to the point where it could go no further, he had intuited the silent otherness that existed beyond the reach of words and concepts. Once the hesychast understood this, he realized that any attempt to define God clearly “becomes an idol of God and does not make him known.”33 Gregory knew that many Christians were confused by the Nicaean statement. How could the Son have the same nature as the Father without becoming a second God? No longer familiar with traditional Jewish terminology, they were also puzzled about the identity of the Holy Spirit. Gregory’s older brother Basil, bishop of Caesarea (c. 330–79), took time out from his diocese to find a solution. Christians must stop thinking about God as a mere being, a larger and more powerful version of themselves. That was not what God was. The new doctrine of creation had made it clear that God was unknowable; our minds could think only about beings in the universe; we could not imagine the “nothingness” out of which our world was formed, because we could think only about things that had some kind of spatial extension or qualities. It was impossible for us to understand what had happened before our world was created, because we could think only in terms of time. This was what Saint John meant when he wrote “In the beginning was the Word.” For thought cannot travel outside was, nor imagination beyond beginning. Let your thought travel ever so far backward you cannot get beyond the was, and however you may strain and strive to see what is beyond the Son, you will find it impossible to get back further than the beginning?34

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The Eucharistic bread and wine had been identical with the transcendent reality to which they directed attention. Now the reformers declared that the Eucharist was “only” a symbol and the Mass no longer a symbolic reenactment of Calvary but a simple memorial. They were beginning to speak about the myths of religion as though they were logoi, and the alacrity with which people seized upon these new teachings suggests that many Christians in Europe were losing the older habits of thought. The theological quarrels between Rome and the reformers and, later, among the reformers themselves were giving more importance to the exact formulation of abstruse doctrines. The Protestant reformers and their Catholic opponents all used the printing press, council, and synod to draw ever finer dogmatic distinctions as they struggled to express their differences from one another. From the 1520s, the reformers started to issue “catechisms,” dialogues of stereotyped questions and answers, to ensure that their congregations accepted a particular interpretation of the creed. Correct faith was gradually becoming a matter of accepting the proper teachings. The Protestant reliance on “scripture alone” dispensed with the Catholic notion of “tradition” that saw each generation deepening its understanding of the sacred text in a cumulative “bricolage.” Instead of trying to get beyond language, Protestants would be encouraged to focus on the precise, original, and supposedly unchanging word of God in print. 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.”

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

  The propriety of a miracle, parallel to the signs in heaven which preceded the destruction of Jerusalem, might be justified by the significance of the victory as marking a great epoch in history, namely, the downfall of paganism and the establishment of Christianity in the empire. But even if we waive the purely critical objections to the Eusebian narrative, the assumed connection, in this case, of the gentle Prince of peace with the god of battle, and the subserviency of the sacred symbol of redemption to military ambition, is repugnant to the genius of the gospel and to sound Christian feeling, unless we stretch the theory of divine accommodation to the spirit of the age and the passions and interests of individuals beyond the ordinary limits. We should suppose, moreover, that Christ, if he had really appeared to Constantine either in person (according to Eusebius) or through angels (as Rufinus and Sozomen modify it), would have exhorted him to repent and be baptized rather than to construct a military ensign for a bloody battle.27 In no case can we ascribe to this occurrence, with Eusebius, Theodoret, and older writers, the character of a sudden and genuine conversion, as to Paul’s vision of Christ on the way to Damascus;28 for, on the one hand, Constantine was never hostile to Christianity, but most probably friendly to it from his early youth, according to the example of his father; and, on the other, he put off his baptism quite five and twenty years, almost to the hour of his death. The opposite hypothesis of a mere military stratagem or intentional fraud is still more objectionable, and would compel us either to impute to the first Christian emperor at a venerable age the double crime of falsehood and perjury, or, if Eusebius invented the story, to deny to the "father of church history" all claim to credibility and common respectability. Besides it should be remembered that the older testimony of Lactantius, or whoever was the author of the work on the Deaths of Persecutors, is quite independent of that of Eusebius, and derives additional force from the vague heathen rumors of the time. Finally the Hoc vince which has passed into proverbial significance as a most appropriate motto of the invincible religion of the cross, is too good to be traced to sheer falsehood. Some actual fact, therefore, must be supposed to underlie the tradition, and the question only is this, whether it was an external visible phenomenon or an internal experience. The hypothesis of a natural formation of the clouds, which Constantine by an optical illusion mistook for a supernatural sign of the cross, besides smacking of the exploded rationalistic explanation of the New Testament miracles, and deriving an important event from a mere accident, leaves the figure of Christ and the Greek or Latin inscription: By this sign thou shalt conquer! altogether unexplained.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  In all of its complexities, nuances, and implications, samegender loving has a particular purchase in relation to Shockley's Loving Her, which, on the one hand, transgresses the typical nationalist/racialized paradigm in its engagement of interracial same-sex desire and intimacy, as it eschews a categorization of the protagonist Renay's sexual orientation with "whiteness" in ways that challenge conflations of same-sex desire with nonblackness. Renay, as evidenced in both her intraracial heterosexual marriage and interracial same-sex relationship, for instance, operates off of or performs a "normativity" that reinforces domesticity, family, and bourgeois class positionality. As characterized, Renay (in terms of race/gender performativity) is complex: she embodies the markers of class and a drive toward "normativity" throughout the novel that, in ways, parallel (or are not dissimilar to) that of the same-gender loving movement itself. As such, she operates off of a "normativity" that subverts pathologized notions of blackness as aberrant as she functions in the contexts of her (interracial) relationship, calling into question not only fixed notions of blackness where gender/ sexuality or concerned, while she destabilizes simultaneously issues of race/class governing (white) homonormativity. Even as Renay appears to uphold "normativity," then, as a "racially marginalized" subject, she "compel[s] a critique of homonormative formations"; for, such "homonormative formations achieve cultural normativity," as Roderick Ferguson maintains," vis-a-vis "the person of color" who is rendered "the cultural anthitheses of a stable and healthy social order" (a point to which I will return).27 Ann Allen Shockley's Loving Her-A Brief Overview In 1974, Ann Allen Shockley-Tennessee librarian, critic, fiction writer, and self-identified "feminist with lesbian sympathies"-published her pioneering novel Loving Her, which, as Alycee Lane asserts, is not only "the first African American novel written with an explicitly lesbian theme, but [... also] the first to feature a black lesbian as its protagonist."28 While Shockley does foreground overt lesbian themes instead of addressing them covertly through codification, Loving Her, I would argue, does not feature a black lesbian protagonist; rather, it depicts a black woman (Renay Davis) who has been perceived historically as a lesbian character. Renay, after several years in a heterosexual marriage, engages in an interracial same-sex relationship and neither expresses nor specifies her own self-established sexual identity. In fact, upon being called a "lesbian" (by a white lesbian who had never before encountered a black one), Renay-who "knew of no visible changes in herself [... and...] still talked, looked and acted the same"-asserts that the conclusion had been made "that she was a Lesbian simply because she was with Terry. Wrong judgments had been made that way."29 What Renay does, then, is transgress and problematize limited constructions of lesbian identity predicated on (mis) conceptions regarding what constitutes a "lesbian"; and she demonstrates, more precisely, that she does not embrace the term "lesbian" because it, with all its rigidity and (un)ambiguousness, neither captures nor reflects the complexity of her sexual life, desires, and experiences.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  We sent it to Canada. Now we just needed a name to go with this logo I didn’t love. Over the next few days we kicked around dozens of ideas, until two leading candidates emerged. Falcon. And Dimension Six. I was partial to the latter, because I was the one who came up with it. Woodell and everyone else told me that it was god-awful. It wasn’t catchy, they said, and it didn’t mean anything. We took a poll of all our employees. Secretaries, accountants, sales reps, retail clerks, file clerks, warehouse workers—we demanded that each person jump in, make at least one suggestion. Ford had just paid a top-flight consulting firm $2 million to come up with the name of its new Maverick, I announced to everyone. “We haven’t got $2 million—but we’ve got fifty smart people, and we can’t do any worse than... Maverick.” Also, unlike Ford, we had a deadline. Canada was starting production on the shoe that Friday. Hour after hour was spent arguing and yelling, debating the virtue of this name or that. Someone liked Bork’s suggestion, Bengal. Someone else said the only possible name was Condor. I huffed and groused. “Animal names,” I said. “Animal names! We’ve considered the name of just about every animal in the forest. Must it be an animal?” Again and again I lobbied for Dimension Six. Again and again I was told by my employees that it was unspeakably bad. Someone, I forget who, summed up the situation neatly. “All these names... suck.” I thought it might have been Johnson, but all the documentation says he’d left and gone back to Wellesley by then. One night, late, we were all tired, running out of patience. If I heard one more animal name I was going to jump out a window. Tomorrow’s another day, we said, drifting out of the office, headed out to our cars. I went home and sat in my recliner. My mind went back and forth, back and forth. Falcon? Bengal? Dimension Six? Something else? Anything else? THE DAY OF decision arrived. Canada had already started producing the shoes, and samples were ready to go in Japan, but before anything could be shipped, we needed to choose a name. Also, we had magazine ads slated to run, to coincide with the shipments, and we needed to tell the graphic artists what name to put in the ads. Finally, we needed to file paperwork with the U.S. Patent Office. Woodell wheeled into my office. “Time’s up,” he said. I rubbed my eyes. “I know.” “What’s it going to be?” “I don’t know.” My head was splitting. By now the names had all run together into one mind-melting glob. Falconbengaldimensionsix. “There is... one more suggestion,” Woodell said. “From who?” “Johnson phoned first thing this morning,” he said. “Apparently a new name came to him in a dream last night.” I rolled my eyes. “A dream?” “He’s serious,” Woodell said.

• From Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1749)

  Louisa and she went one night to a ball, the first in the habit of a shepherdess, Emily in that of a shepherd: I saw them in their dresses before they went, and nothing in nature could represent a prettier boy than this last did, being so fair and well limbed. They had kept together for some time, when Louisa, meeting an old acquaintance of hers, very cordially gives her companion the slip, and leaves her under the protection of her boy’s habit, which was not much, and of her discretion, which was, it seems, still less. Emily, finding herself deserted, sauntered thoughtless about a while, and, as much for coolness and air as any thing else, at length pulled off her mask and went to the sideboard; where, eyed and marked out by a gentleman in a very handsome domino, she was accosted by, and fell into chat with him. The domino, after a little discourse, in which Emily doubtless distinguished her good nature and easiness more than her wit, began to make violent love to her, and drawing her insensibly to some benches at the lower end of the masquerade room, got her to sit by him, where he squeezed her hands, pinched her cheeks, praised and played with her fine hair, admired her complexion, and all in a style of courtship dashed with a certain oddity, that not comprehending the mystery of, poor Emily attributed to his falling in with the humour of her disguise; and being naturally not the cruellest of her profession, began to incline to a parley on those essentials. But here was the stress of the joke: he took her really for what she appeared to be, a smock-faced boy; and she, forgetting her dress, and of course ranging quite wide of his ideas, took all those address to be paid to herself as a woman, which she precisely owed to his not thinking her one. However, this double error was pushed to such a height on both sides, that Emily, who saw nothing in him but a gentleman of distinction by those points of dress to which his disguise did not extend, warmed too by the wine he had plyed her with, and the caresses he had lavished upon her, suffered herself to be persuaded to go to a bagnio with him; and thus, losing sight of Mrs. Cole’s cautions, with a blind confidence, put herself into his hands, to be carried wherever he pleased. For his part, equally blinded by his wishes, whilst here gregious simplicity favoured his deception more than the most exquisite art could have done, he supposed, no doubt, that he had lighted on some soft simpleton, fit for his; purpose, or some kept minion broken to his hand, who understood him perfectly well, and entered into his designs.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  24 Their stringent rationalism led some to develop a radically apophatic vision. Ibn Sina argued that God’s oneness meant that God was perfectly simple: Allah had no attributes that were distinct from his essential being, so there was absolutely nothing that reason could say about him, even though we could infer God’s goodness, life, and power from our own experience of these qualities. In the same vein, Abu Yaqub al-Sijistani (d. 971), who belonged to the Ismaili sect, developed a dialectical method similar to Denys’s, based on the affirmation and denial of the divine names. But the God of the philosophers seemed dangerously close to the old Sky Gods, who had become so remote that they faded from the consciousness of their worshippers. Despite its desire to accommodate the faith of the masses, falsafah remained a minority pursuit and put down no roots in the Muslim world. Most Muslims found it impossible to engage with this distant God, who seemed a mere abstraction, was unaware that human beings existed, and could not possibly communicate with them. The faylasufs themselves may have found that the Sufi rituals helped to make this austere deity a more vibrant reality for them, and at the end of his life, Ibn Sina seems to have been evolving a philosophy based on intuitive insight as well as reason . So did Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali (1058–1111), an emblematic figure in the history of religious philosophy. A rising star in the intellectual establishment of Baghdad, he had made an intensive study of falsafah and could tackle the ideas of al-Farabi and Ibn Sina on their own terms. Finally, in The Incoherence of the Philosophers , al-Ghazzali declared that the faylasufs had contravened their own principles. Our rational powers could investigate only observable data, so while falsafah was competent in mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, it could tell us nothing about matters that lay beyond the reach of the senses. When the faylasufs spoke of God, therefore, they were guilty of zannah , fanciful guesswork. How could they prove the theory of divine emanation? What was their evidence for saying that God knew nothing of mundane affairs? In going beyond their brief, the philosophers had been unphilosophical. Al-Ghazzali was looking for certainty, but he could not find it in any contemporary intellectual movement. His doubts became so severe that he suffered a breakdown and was forced to abandon his prestigious academic post. For ten years he lived in Jerusalem, engaged in the rituals and contemplative disciplines of the Sufis, and when he returned to his teaching duties, he insisted that only spiritual exercises of this kind could provide us with certainty (wujud ) about the existence of God. It was a waste of time to try to prove the existence of Allah, as the faylasufs had done: because God was being itself, an all-encompassing reality, it could not be perceived in the same way as the mere beings that we see, hear, or touch.

• From Educated (2018)

  The sound produced by this method was faint but unmistakable: each time the pad of her middle finger slipped across the nail of her index, there was a fleshy click . Mother used muscle testing to experiment with other methods of healing. Diagrams of chakras and pressure points appeared around the house, and she began charging clients for something called “energy work.” I didn’t know what that meant until one afternoon when Mother called me and Richard into the back room. A woman named Susan was there. Mother’s eyes were closed and her left hand was resting on Susan’s. The fingers on her other hand were crossed, and she was whispering questions to herself. After a few she turned to the woman and said, “Your relationship with your father is damaging your kidneys. Think of him while we adjust the chakra.” Mother explained that energy work is most effective when several people are present. “So we can draw from everyone’s energy,” she said. Mother pointed to my forehead and told me to tap the center, between my eyebrows, while with my other hand I was to grab Susan’s arm. Richard was to tap a pressure point on his chest while reaching out to me with his other hand, and Mother was to hold a point in her palm while touching Richard with her foot. “That’s it,” she said as Richard took my arm. We stood in silence for ten minutes, a human chain. When I think of that afternoon, what I remember first is the awkwardness of it: Mother said she could feel the hot energy moving through our bodies, but I felt nothing. Mother and Richard stood still, eyes shut, breath shallow. They could feel the energy and were transported by it. I fidgeted. I tried to focus, then worried that I was ruining things for Susan, that I was a break in the chain, that Mother and Richard’s healing power would never reach her because I was failing to conduct it. When the ten minutes were up, Susan gave Mother twenty dollars and the next customer came in. If I was skeptical, my skepticism was not entirely my fault. It was the result of my not being able to decide which of my mothers to trust. A year before the accident, when Mother had first heard of muscle testing and energy work, she’d dismissed both as wishful thinking. “People want a miracle,” she’d told me. “They’ll swallow anything if it brings them hope, if it lets them believe they’re getting better. But there’s no such thing as magic. Nutrition, exercise and a careful study of herbal properties, that’s all there is. But when they’re suffering, people can’t accept that.” Now Mother said that healing was spiritual and limitless. Muscle testing, she explained to me, was a kind of prayer, a divine supplication. An act of faith in which God spoke through her fingers.

• From Educated (2018)

  I watched Emily set up the tent we were to share. She was tall and unthinkably slight, with long, straight hair so blond it was nearly silver. We built a fire and sang campfire songs. We played cards. Then we went to our tents. I lay awake in the dark next to Emily, listening to the crickets. I was trying to imagine how to begin the conversation—how to tell her she shouldn’t marry my brother—when she spoke. “I want to talk to you about Shawn,” she said. “I know he’s got some problems.” “He does,” I said. “He’s a spiritual man,” Emily said. “God has given him a special calling. To help people. He told me how he helped Sadie. And how he helped you.” “He didn’t help me.” I wanted to say more, to explain to Emily what the bishop had explained to me. But they were his words, not mine. I had no words. I had come fifty miles to speak, and was mute. “The devil tempts him more than other men,” Emily said. “Because of his gifts, because he’s a threat to Satan. That’s why he has problems. Because of his righteousness.” She sat up. I could see the outline of her long ponytail in the dark. “He said he’ll hurt me,” she said. “I know it’s because of Satan. But sometimes I’m scared of him, I’m scared of what he’ll do.” I told her she shouldn’t marry someone who scares her, that no one should, but the words left my lips stillborn. I believed them, but I didn’t understand them well enough to make them live. I stared into the darkness, searching it for her face, trying to understand what power my brother had over her. He’d had that power over me, I knew. He had some of it still. I was neither under his spell, nor free of it. “He’s a spiritual man,” she said again. Then she slipped into her sleeping bag, and I knew the conversation was over. —I RETURNED TO BYU a few days before the fall semester. I drove directly to Nick’s apartment. We’d hardly spoken. Whenever he called, I always seemed to be needed somewhere to change a bandage or make salve. Nick knew my father had been burned, but he didn’t know the severity of it. I’d withheld more information than I’d given, never saying that there had been an explosion, or that when I “visited” my father it wasn’t in a hospital but in our living room. I hadn’t told Nick about his heart stopping. I hadn’t described the gnarled hands, or the enemas, or the pounds of liquefied tissue we’d scraped off his body. I knocked and Nick opened the door. He seemed surprised to see me. “How’s your dad?” he asked after I’d joined him on the sofa. In retrospect, this was probably the most important moment of our friendship, the moment I could have done one thing, the better thing, and I did something else.

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

  ©2004 The Teaching Company. 74 writing at different times to different audiences, and embodying different perspectives. 2. But there are important distinctions. What was Jesus’s message? The answer depends on whether you read Mark or John. Should the Jewish Law be accepted by Jesus’s followers? That depends on whether you read Paul or Matthew. V. After the books of the New Testament were written, the diversity of Christian beliefs become even more evident. A. This can be seen, for example, in the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, whom we have met already as one of the first Christian martyrs. 1. In his seven surviving letters, written mainly to churches of Asia Minor that he had come to know en route to his martyrdom, he is particularly concerned with “heretical” forms of belief that were threatening the communities. 2. In particular, he appears to be concerned about Judaizing Christians who urged believers to accept the Jewish Law (cf. Paul’s enemies in Galatia) and docetic Christians who insisted that Christ was not a real flesh-and-blood human being but, as fully divine, only appeared to be human (from the Greek word doceo, to “seem” or “appear”). B. The diversity can also be seen in books taken as Scripture by other Christian groups that did not, however, make it into the New Testament. As just one example, we can consider the Gospel of Thomas. 1. This book was discovered in 1945 near the village of Nag Hammadi, Egypt, along with a cache of other “heretical” writings, known collectively as the Nag Hammadi library. 2. The book is significant because it contains 114 sayings of Jesus (and nothing else), many of which are completely unlike what we find in the New Testament (others of them are very similar to the New Testament sayings). 3. Some of the sayings presuppose a view that the world is an inherently bad place in which human spirits are entrapped, imprisoned; that they need to escape this material world to find their salvation; and that this escape can come only by uncovering the secret teachings of Jesus.

• From Educated (2018)

  Let’s say the twenty-seventh.” “No, I’m not sure.” “No, I don’t have documentation.” “Yes, I’ll hold.” The voices always put Mother on hold when she admitted that she didn’t know my birthday, passing her up the line to their superiors, as if not knowing what day I was born delegitimized the entire notion of my having an identity. You can’t be a person without a birthday, they seemed to say. I didn’t understand why not. Until Mother decided to get my birth certificate, not knowing my birthday had never seemed strange. I knew I’d been born near the end of September, and each year I picked a day, one that didn’t fall on a Sunday because it’s no fun spending your birthday in church. Sometimes I wished Mother would give me the phone so I could explain. “I have a birthday, same as you,” I wanted to tell the voices. “It just changes. Don’t you wish you could change your birthday?” Eventually, Mother persuaded Grandma-down-the-hill to swear a new affidavit claiming I’d been born on the twenty-seventh, even though Grandma still believed it was the twenty-ninth, and the state of Idaho issued a Delayed Certificate of Birth. I remember the day it came in the mail. It felt oddly dispossessing, being handed this first legal proof of my personhood: until that moment, it had never occurred to me that proof was required. In the end, I got my birth certificate long before Luke got his. When Mother had told the voices on the phone that she thought I’d been born sometime in the last week of September, they’d been silent. But when she told them she wasn’t exactly sure whether Luke had been born in May or June, that set the voices positively buzzing. —THAT FALL, WHEN I was nine, I went with Mother on a birth. I’d been asking to go for months, reminding her that Maria had seen a dozen births by the time she was my age. “I’m not a nursing mother,” she said. “I have no reason to take you. Besides, you wouldn’t like it.” Eventually, Mother was hired by a woman who had several small children. It was arranged; I would tend them during the birth. The call came in the middle of the night. The mechanical ring drilled its way down the hall, and I held my breath, hoping it wasn’t a wrong number. A minute later Mother was at my bedside. “It’s time,” she said, and together we ran to the car. For ten miles Mother rehearsed with me what I was to say if the worst happened and the Feds came. Under no circumstances was I to tell them that my mother was a midwife. If they asked why we were there, I was to say nothing. Mother called it “the art of shutting up.” “You just keep saying you were asleep and you didn’t see anything and you don’t know anything and you can’t remember why we’re here,” she said.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The Age of Reason was not over, however. Only an elite group of intellectuals had been able to participate in the Enlightenment proper. But a religious movement was about to bring many of its basic assumptions into the mainstream so that they would become essential to the Western outlook. Silence I n 312, Constantine defeated his rival for the imperial throne at the battle of Milvian Bridge and would always believe that he owed his victory to the God of the Christians. The following year, he declared Christianity religio licita , one of the permitted religions of the Roman Empire. This was a dramatic and fateful reversal. From being persecuted members of an outlawed sect, Christians could now own property, build churches, worship freely, and make a distinctive contribution to public life. Even though Constantine continued to preside over the official pagan cult as pontifex maximus and was baptized only on his deathbed, it was clear that he favored Christianity. He had hoped that, once legalized, the church would become a cohesive force in his far-flung empire. This state support proved a mixed blessing, however. Constantine had very little understanding of Christian theology, but that did not prevent him from meddling in doctrinal affairs when he discovered that the church that was supposed to unify his subjects was itself torn apart by a dogmatic dispute. Christians had to adapt to their changed circumstances. They had to find a way of instructing the flood of new converts presenting themselves for baptism, some, doubtless, with an eye on the main chance. They realized that their faith could be puzzling. Now that Christianity was a predominantly gentile religion, the Hebrew terminology of the first Jewish Christians needed to be translated into a Greco-Roman idiom. Christianity claimed to be a monotheistic religion, but what was the status of Jesus, the incarnate Logos? Was he a second God? What did Christians mean when they called him “Son of God”? Or was he a hybrid—half human and half divine—like Dionysus? And who was the Holy Spirit? The problem was exacerbated by a marked change in the intellectual and spiritual climate of late antiquity. There seems to have been a profound loss of confidence in both the physical world and human nature. Hitherto Greeks, like most other peoples, had seen no impassable gulf between God and humanity. Their philosophers had agreed that as rational animals, human beings contained a spark of the divine within themselves; a sage like Socrates, who incarnated the transcendent ideal of wisdom, was a son of God and an avatar of the divine.

• From Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1749)

  But, be that as it would, he led her to a coach, went into it with her, and brought her to a very handsome apartment, with a bed in it; but whether it was a bagnio or not, she could not tell, having spoken to nobody but himself. But when they were alone together, and her inamorato began to proceed to those extremities which instantly discover the sex, she remarked, that no description could paint up to the life, the mixture of pique, confusion and disappointment, that appeared in his countenance, joined to the mournful exclamation: “By heavens, a woman!” This at once opened her eyes, which had been shut in downright stupidity. However, as if he had meant to retrieve that escape, he still continued to toy with and fondle her, but with so staring an alteration from extreme warmth into a chill and forced civility, that even Emily herself could not but take notice of it, and now began to wish she had paid more regard to Mrs. Cole’s premonitions against ever engaging with a stranger. And now an excess of timidity succeeded to an excess of confidence, and she thought herself so much at his mercy and discretion, that she stood passive throughout the whole progress of his prelude: for now, whether the impressions of so great a beauty had even made him forgive her sex, or whether her appearance or figure in that dress still humoured his first illusion, he recovered by degrees a good part of his first warmth, and keeping Emily with her breeches still unbuttoned, stript them down to her knees, and gently impelling her to lean down, with her face against the bed-side, placed her so, that the double way, between the double rising behind, presented the choice fair to him, and he was so fairly set on a mis-direction, as to give the girl no small alarms for fear of losing a maidenhead she had not dreamt of. However, her complaints, and a resistance, gentle, but firm, checked and brought him to himself again; so that turning his steed’s head, he drove him at length in the right road, in which his imagination having probably made the most of those resemblances that flattered his taste, he got, with much ado, to his journey’s end: after which, he led her out himself, and walking with her two or three streets length, got her a chair, when making her a present not any thing inferior to what she could have expected, he left her, well recommended to the chairmen, who, on her directions, brought her home.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  Title : The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (Serpent's Tail Classics) Author: Millet, Catherine Catherine Millet who lives in Paris is an expert on modern art and is the editor of the magazine, Art Press. Her last book, L’Art Contemporain, was published in 1997. She curated the French section of the 1989 Sao Paulo Biennale and the French Pavilion at the 1995 Venice Biennale.Catherine Millet THE SEXUAL LIFE OF CATHERINE M.Translated by Adriana Hunter [image "Logo of the publisher, Serpent's Tail" file=image_rsrcDP.jpg] A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request The right of Catherine Millet to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Copyright © Editions du Seuil, avril 2001 Translation copyright © Adriana Hunter 2002 First published by Editions du Seuil in 2001 First published in this English language edition in 2002 by Serpent’s Tail, 4 Blackstock Mews, London N4 2BT website: www.serpentstail.com Typeset by Intype London in 10.5/13pt Sabon Printed by Bell & Bain Ltd., Glasgow 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 CONTENTS1. Numbers 2. Space 3. Confined Space 4. Details 1. NumbersAs a child I thought about numbers a great deal. The memories we have of single thoughts and actions we had in the first few years of life are very clear cut: they provide the first opportunities for self-awareness, whereas events shared with other people can never be isolated from the feelings (of admiration, fear, love or loathing) that those others inspire in us, feelings which, as children, we are far less able to identify or even understand. I, therefore, have particularly vivid memories of the thoughts which steered me into scrupulous counting exercises every evening before I went to sleep. Shortly after my brother was born (when I was three and a half), my family moved into a new apartment. For the first few years that we lived there, my bed was in the largest room, facing the door. I would lie staring at the light which came across the corridor from the kitchen where my mother and grandmother were still busying themselves, and I could never get to sleep until I had visualised these numerical problems one after the other. One of these problems related to the question of having several husbands. Not the possibility of the situation arising, which seems to have been accepted, but on the circumstances themselves. Could a woman have several husbands at the same time, or only one after the other? In which case, how long did she have to stay married to each one before she could change? What would be an ‘acceptable’ number of husbands: a few, say five or six, or many more than that, countless husbands? How would I go about it when I grew up?

• From Cultish (2021)

  For this reason, Scientology’s intro courses—Overcoming Ups and Downs in Life, Communication—are all quite broad, and delivered in plain English. To ease you into the ideology, the vernacular is introduced bit by bit. “They start just by shortening a lot of words,” Cathy told me. Indeed, Scientology’s lexicon is replete with insider-y acronyms and abbreviations. If a word can be shortened, they do it: ack (acknowledgment), cog (cognition), inval (invalidation), eval (evaluation), sup (supervisor), R-factor (reality factor), tech (technology), sec (security), E-Meter (electropsychometer), OSA and RFP (parts of the organization), TR-L and TR-1 (training routines), PC, SP, PTS, and so on ad nauseam. Spend ten or twenty years committed to the church, and your vocabulary will be replaced wholesale by Hubbardese. Take a look at this dialogue, an example of an entirely plausible conversation between Scientologists that Margery Wakefield composed for her 1991 book Understanding Scientology. Translations (by yours truly) are in brackets. Two Scientologists meet on the street. “How’re you doing?” one asks the other. “Well, to tell you the truth, I’ve been a bit out ruds [rudiments; tired, hungry, or upset] because of a PTP [present time problem] with my second dynamic [romantic partner] because of some bypassed charge [old negative energy that’s resurfaced] having to do with my MEST [Matter, Energy, Space, and Time, something in the physical universe] at her apartment. When I moved in I gave her an R- Factor [reality factor, a harsh talking-to] and I thought we were in ARC [affinity, reality, and communication; a good state] about it, but lately she seems to have gone a bit PTS so I recommended she see the MAA [an officer in the SEA-Org] at the AO [Advanced Organization] to blow some charge [get rid of engram energy] and get her ethics in [getting your Scientology shit together]. He gave her a review [auditing assessment] to F/N [floating needle, sign of a completed audit] and VGIs [very good indicators] but she did a roller coaster [a case that improves and worsens], so I think there’s an SP somewhere on her lines [auditing and training measures]. I tried to audit her myself but she had a dirty needle [an irregular E-Meter reading] . . . and was acting really 1.1 [covertly hostile] so I finally sent her to Qual [Qualifications Division] to spot the entheta on her lines [something that happens if you’ve recently consumed black PR]. Other than that, everything’s fine . . .

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  Is this last note a sign that I’m incurable, that when reality smashes my dream to bits, I mope and snarl while the first shock lasts, and then patiently, idiotically, start putting it together again? And so always? However often the house of cards falls, shall I set about rebuilding it? Is that what I’m doing now? Indeed it’s likely enough that what I shall call, if it happens, a ‘restoration of faith’ will turn out to be only one more house of cards. And I shan’t know whether it is or not until the next blow comes—when, say, fatal disease is diagnosed in my body too, or war breaks out, or I have ruined myself by some ghastly mistake in my work. But there are two questions here. In which sense may it be a house of cards? Because the things I am believing are only a dream, or because I only dream that I believe them? As for the things themselves, why should the thoughts I had a week ago be any more trustworthy than the better thoughts I have now? I am surely, in general, a saner man than I was then. Why should the desperate imaginings of a man dazed—I said it was like being concussed—be especially reliable? Because there was no wishful thinking in them? Because, being so horrible, they were therefore all the more likely to be true? But there are fear- fulfilment as well as wish-fulfilment dreams. And were they wholly distasteful? No. In a way I liked them. I am even aware of a slight reluctance to accept the opposite thoughts. All that stuff about the Cosmic Sadist was not so much the expression of thought as of hatred. I was getting from it the only pleasure a man in anguish can get; the pleasure of hitting back. It was really just Billingsgate—mere abuse; ‘telling God what I thought of Him.’ And of course, as in all abusive language, ‘what I thought’ didn’t mean what I thought true. Only what I thought would offend Him (and His worshippers) most. That sort of thing is never said without some pleasure. Gets it ‘off your chest.’ You feel better for a moment. But the mood is no evidence. Of course the cat will growl and spit at the operator and bite him if she can. But the real question is whether he is a vet or a vivisector. Her bad language throws no light on it one way or the other. And I can believe He is a vet when I think of my own suffering. It is harder when I think of hers. What is grief compared with physical pain? Whatever fools may say, the body can suffer twenty times more than the mind. The mind has always some power of evasion.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Maybe it feels odd and peer pressure–y at first, but they didn’t ask you to fork over your life savings or kill anyone. How much damage can it do? Cultish language works so efficiently (and invisibly) to mold our worldview in the shape of the guru’s that once it’s embedded, it sticks. After you grow your hair out, move back home, delete the app, whatever it is, the special vocabulary is still there. In part 2 of this book, we’ll meet a man named Frank Lyford, a survivor of the 1990s “suicide cult” Heaven’s Gate, who, twenty-five years after defecting and disowning its belief system, still calls his two former leaders by their monastic names, Ti and Do; refers to the group as “the classroom”; and describes its members’ haunting fate with the euphemism “leaving Earth,” just as he was taught to do over two decades ago. The idea to write this book occurred to me after my best friend from college decided to quit drinking and go to Alcoholics Anonymous. She lived three thousand miles away from me at the time, so I only saw her a few times a year, and from afar, I couldn’t tell how committed she was to this no-drinking thing, or really what to make of it. That is, until the first time I went to visit her after she got sober. That night, we were having trouble figuring out dinner plans, when the following sentence exited her mouth: “I’ve been HALTing all day, I caught a resentment at work, but trying not to future-trip . Ugh, let’s just focus on dinner: First things first , as they say!” I must have looked at her as if she had three heads. “HALT”? “Future-trip”? “Caught a resentment”? What on earth was she saying?* Three months in AA, and this person who was so close to me I could’ve accurately distinguished the meanings of her different exhalations was suddenly speaking a foreign language. Instantly, I had a heuristic reaction—it was the same instinct I felt looking at those old photos of Tasha Samar in the desert; the same response my dad had the day he first stepped onto Synanon’s grounds. A Jonestown survivor once told me, “They say that a cult is like pornography. You know it when you see it.” Or, if you’re like me, you know it when you hear it. The exclusive language was the biggest clue. AA wasn’t Synanon, of course; it was changing my friend’s life for the better. But its conquest of her vocabulary was impossible to unhear. Instincts aren’t social science, though—and in truth, I didn’t actually “know” AA was a “cult.” But I had a strong inkling that there was something mighty and mysterious going on there. I had to look deeper. I had to understand: How did the group’s language take such rapid hold of my friend?

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  But ‘this’ is not now imaginable. In that respect H. and all the dead are like God. In that respect loving her has become, in its measure, like loving Him. In both cases I must stretch out the arms and hands of love—its eyes cannot here be used—to the reality, through—across—all the changeful phantasmagoria of my thoughts, passions, and imaginings. I mustn’t sit down content with the phantasmagoria itself and worship that for Him, or love that for her. Not my idea of God, but God. Not my idea of H., but H. Yes, and also not my idea of my neighbour, but my neighbour. For don’t we often make this mistake as regards people who are still alive—who are with us in the same room? Talking and acting not to the man himself but to the picture—almost the précis—we’ve made of him in our own minds? And he has to depart from it pretty widely before we even notice the fact. In real life—that’s one way it differs from novels—his words and acts are, if we observe closely, hardly ever quite ‘in character,’ that is, in what we call his character. There’s always a card in his hand we didn’t know about. My reason for assuming that I do this to other people is the fact that so often I find them obviously doing it to me. We all think we’ve got one another taped. And all this time I may, once more, be building with cards. And if I am He will once more knock the building flat. He will knock it down as often as proves necessary. Unless I have to be finally given up as hopeless, and left building pasteboard palaces in Hell forever; ‘free among the dead.’ Am I, for instance, just sidling back to God because I know that if there’s any road to H., it runs through Him? But then of course I know perfectly well that He can’t be used as a road. If you’re approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you’re not really approaching Him at all. That’s what was really wrong with all those popular pictures of happy reunions ‘on the further shore’; not the simple-minded and very earthly images, but the fact that they make an End of what we can get only as a by-product of the true End. Lord, are these your real terms? Can I meet H. again only if I learn to love you so much that I don’t care whether I meet her or not? Consider, Lord, how it looks to us. What would anyone think of me if I said to the boys, ‘No toffee now. But when you’ve grown up and don’t really want toffee you shall have as much of it as you choose’?

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “Gracias,” I said. “De nada,’ he replied with a gmile. “Y gracias.” Back in my apartment, I tipped half the ice into a freezer bag, stashed it in my ice compartment, and took the remaining ice to bed. I thought I would do my usual routine of rubbing cubes over my skin to cool me into sleep but I must have crashed out at once. In the morning, my jug contained only water and my mind was a fog of lust and filth. Where had I been? What had I done? Did that actually happen? I slipped on a T-shirt, rolled up my shutter and stepped out on to my balcony. It was early morning but already the heat pulsed like the midday sun. I rubbed my eyes. Below, the street was coming to life, the baker’s window lined with breads and pastries, people heading to work, a woman on a Vespa turning left. I could see a couple of bars were open but not Bar Anise. It looked as if it hadn’t been open for years, its facade concealed by chipboard, graffiti and tatty fly posters. Of course. Hadn’t it always been derelict, just another dump waiting to be spruced up before the Olympics? Drowsily, I padded to the kitchen. Had it been a dream then, just a crazy dream brought on by the heat? I withdrew the bag of ice from my fridge and went back to bed. I had another hour before work. I broke the ice into the jug, scooped up a handful and cupped it to my skin. Just a dream, I told myself, and I lay back on the pillows, 118 Kristina Lloyd wondering if the heat would transport me to Bar Anise on nights to come. I smeared the ice over my skin, savoring the trickle of water melting on to my stomach. I murmured softly, imagining the touch was the lick of a lover. Just a dream. Words floated to me as if from a great distance. Stop resisting yourself. And I slid an ice cube up my neck then sucked it into my mouth, closing my eyes as I twirled my tongue around the cube, ice when I wanted fire. Chemistry Velvet Moore The smell of science makes me horny. I narrowly resisted shoving my hands down my pants and rubbing myself to oblivion during my niece’s science fair. My stomach dips with pleasure every time someone lights a match. Each July ’m aroused by the vapors of the noise-making, novelty fireworks called “snappers”. Little do tricksters know that when they crack one on the pavement at my feet, I shiver out of excitement, not fear.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  The expression has fallen into disuse, but it used to be said of a young boy or girl who was not thought to know the process by which the human race is perpetuated, and – by extension – not to know how love and the satisfaction of the senses are connected, that he or she was ‘innocent’. I remained almost completely ‘innocent’ until I had direct experience of the first act of that process. I was twelve when my periods started. My mother and grandmother got into quite a state and called the doctor, my father popped his head round the door and asked with a laugh whether I had a nose bleed. So much for teaching me the facts of life. I had no clear idea of where this blood was coming from, and I couldn’t distinguish between the passages through which my urine and my periods passed. One day the doctor tactfully explained to me that I should clean myself rather more deeply than I was with my flannel, otherwise, he said, sniffing the latex-covered finger that had examined me, ‘it doesn’t smell very nice’. I eventually suspected something because of a scandal at a rock concert. My mother and her friends were talking about it in front of me. The concert had caused an outbreak of violence and the police had had to intervene. ‘Apparently some of the girls were so far gone that they even took the policemen’s truncheons and stuck them up themselves!’ Stuck them up where? And why exactly would they want truncheons? Questions that unsettled me for a long time.