Contempt

Passages

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

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

  After the law of 428, all prostitution was theoretically sinful but consensual. A decade later, in 439, Theodosius II followed with another measure that confirmed the new moral posture toward prostitution. Like other trades, prostitution had been subject to an imperial tax. The tax corresponded to the acceptance of prostitution as a legitimate form of commerce. Only in 439 did the state publicly admit that collecting revenue from prostitution was indecent in a Christian empire. The language of the law implied, disingenuously, that the emperor and his officials had lately discovered this impropriety. The praetorian prefect, Florentius, “saw that the negligence of our predecessors had been exploited by the damnable shrewdness of pimps, as though having obtained the right under the payment of some tax, they were allowed to conduct the business of ruining sexual modesty. Nor did the state, in its ignorance, check this injury to itself.” Florentius, “because of his respect for all people, his love of sexual propriety and chastity,” suggested to the emperors that it was “an injury in our times that pimps be allowed to operate in this city, or that their vile profit seem to augment the treasury.” Florentius offered to compensate the treasury from his own pocket for any lost revenue, but the actual disposition of the law was to ban pimping rather than to amend the state’s fiscal policy. It seems that henceforth the tax was levied on prostitutes directly, and Florentius offered to pick up the tab on any shortfalls this reform caused. Clearly, the main business of this law was the criminalization of pimping. “If anyone hereafter should through a sacrilegious effrontery try to prostitute the bodies of slaves, be they his own or another’s, or of freeborn women who have been contracted at any price, first, these most oppressed slaves are vindicated into freedom and the freeborn are freed from this unholy contract. The pimp, having been severely flogged as an example and lesson to all, shall be driven from the boundaries of this city, in which he thought his illicit abomination was to be practiced.”80

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

  world that is distinctly late classical in its outlook and its familiar cast of sexual types. Like Firmicus, the only extant law of the Constantinian dynasty that approaches the problem of same- sex love is in fact closer to the spirit and motivation of ancient machismo than Christian moralism. An important imperial constitution of AD 342, issued by the chancery of Constantine’s son Constans, is so fl orid that its precise content has been the object of much speculation. “When a man couples in the manner of a woman, that is, as a woman who will have granted men what they want, when sex has lost its place, when there is a crime it is best not to know, when venus is changed into another form, when love is sought but not seen, we command the laws to rise up and justice to be armed with an avenging sword, so that those infamous persons who are or will be guilty shall be subjected to exquisite penalties.” Questions immediately arise. Does “couple” (nubit) here mean “marry” or does it imply the physical act of copula-tion? At stake is the precise aim of the law. Th e law of Constans has some- times been seen as a reaction against “gay marriage.” But this view is unlikely. Marriage between men, mentioned in a handful of imperial sources, received no legal recognition and entailed no legal eff ects, so juridically there was no legal marriage to regulate or prohibit. Instead “coupling” has been taken in a purely sexual sense, which is suggested by the parallel clauses of the law. Th e enactment stands as a grandiloquent, sneering attack on male sexual passivity. Th e mea sure of Constans proposes, ominously, “exquisite penalties” where the Sentences of Paul had envisioned a fi ne. Th e violent punishment of sexual deviance makes the law something of a landmark, if one obscured by the haze of its bilious rhetoric. Th e author of the comparison between Roman and Mosaic law does not mention this enactment, which he may well not have had at his disposal. It would not have helped his case anyhow, because the law is an inspired defense of old- fashioned virility. Th e conservative idiom of the law of Con- stans is the one thing truly beyond dispute. It is about the vir, the man, who abandons his role. Th e ominous penalties were directed against infames, men whose offi cial reputation was impaired by their sexual deviance. If the language and categories of the law are regarded seriously, its motivation must have been the enforcement of old- fashioned sex roles. Th e rhetorical fl ourishes, the judicial savagery, the greater zeal in the direct enforcement of morality are all broadly characteristic of late antique statecraft, and not necessarily tied to religious change. In combination with the traditional

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The festivals of the Jewish New Year, celebrated with a din of trumpets and rams' horns, give rise every year to brawling and bloodshed; our authorities accordingly forbade the public reading of a certain legendary account devoted to the exploits of a Jewish heroine who was said to have become, under an assumed name, the concubine of a king of Persia, and to have instigated a savage massacre of the enemies of her despised and persecuted race. The rabbis managed to read at night what the governor Tineus Rufus forbade them to read by day; that barbarous story, wherein Persians and Jews rivaled each other in atrocities, roused the nationalistic fervor of the Zealots to frenzy. Finally, this same Tineus Rufus, a man of good judgment in other respects and not uninterested in Israel's traditions and fables, decided to extend to the Jewish practice of circumcision the same severe penalties of the law which I had recently promulgated against castration (and which was aimed especially at cruelties perpetrated upon young slaves for the sake of exorbitant gain or debauch). He hoped thus to obliterate one of the marks whereby Israel claims to distinguish itself from the rest of human kind. I took the less notice of the danger of that measure, when I received word of it, in that many wealthy and enlightened Jews whom one meets in Alexandria and in Rome have ceased to submit their children to a practice which makes them ridiculous in the public baths and gymnasiums; and they even arrange to conceal the evidence on themselves. I was unaware of the extent to which these banker collectors of myrrhine vases differed from the true Israel. As I said, nothing in all that was beyond repair, but the hatred, the mutual contempt, and the rancor were so. In principle, Judaism has its place among the religions of the empire; in practice, Israel has refused for centuries to be one people among many others, with one god among the gods.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Chapman suggested that we come to his office in the Monroe County courthouse so that they could turn over all the files together. We agreed. When we arrived, the men were already there. Tate was a tall, heavy-set white man who had come to the meeting in boots, jeans, and a light shirt. Ikner was another white man in his mid-forties, wearing the same outfit. Neither of them smiled much—they greeted Michael and me with the bemused curiosity to which I was getting accustomed. The men knew that we were accusing them of misconduct, but for the most part they remained civil. At one point Tate told Michael that he knew, as soon as he saw him, that he was “a Yankee.” Michael smiled and replied, “Well, actually, I’m a Nittany Lion.” The joke died in the silent room. Undeterred, Michael continued, “I went to Penn State. The mascot at Penn State is—” “We kicked your ass in ’78.” Tate made the statement as if he had just won the lottery. Penn State and the University of Alabama had been football rivals in the 1970s, when both schools had had successful programs and iconic coaches, Bear Bryant at Alabama and Joe Paterno at Penn State. Alabama had defeated the number-one-ranked Penn State team 14–7 to win the 1978 national championship. Michael, a huge college football fan and a “JoePa” devotee, looked at me as if seeking nonverbal permission to say something reckless. I gave him a cautionary stare; to my great relief, he seemed to understand. “How much is ‘Johnny D’ paying y’all?” Tate asked, using the nickname Walter’s friends and family had given him. “We work for a nonprofit. We don’t charge the people we represent anything,” I said as blandly and politely as I could. “Well, you’re getting money from somewhere to do what you do.” I decided to let that pass and move things forward. “I thought that it might be a good idea to sign something that verifies these are all the files you all have on this case. Can we index what you’re turning over to us and then all sign?” “We don’t need to do anything that formal, Bryan. These men are officers of the court, just like you and I. You should just take the files,” Chapman said, apparently sensing that this suggestion had provoked Tate and Ikner. “Well, there could be files that have inadvertently been missed or documents that dropped out. I’m just trying to document that what we receive is what you give us—same number of pages, same file folder headings, et cetera. I’m not questioning anyone’s integrity.” “The hell you ain’t.” Tate was direct. He looked at Chapman. “We can sign something confirming what we give him. I think we may need a record of that more than he does.”

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

  The codes of masculinity that suffuse the ancient literature belong to the millennia; the systems of knowledge that flourished in the Roman Empire provided a new medium for exploring the old stereotypes. But it is worth asking whether perhaps, beneath the placid ideological continuity and the crisper scientific paradigms, there was not a more profound movement under way. Our knowledge of Roman attitudes toward men whose sexual behavior violated prevailing norms comes exclusively from sources that are incandescently hostile; most of the evidence exists because, in the viciously competitive public sphere of the late classical world, it was a canon of invective to insult a man’s sexual honor. Through such a haze of malevolence any speculation on reality is perilous. But there is surely enough testimony from the imperial era to posit the existence of men who openly flaunted dominant sexual norms. A scientist like Ptolemy set out to explain the patterns of social life around him, and what we have here is not an encyclopedist summoning his marvels into existence. There is, in fact, more evidence for frank sexual dissidence in the Roman Empire than for any other period before early modernity.26 Ptolemy distinguished between men who kept their behavior private and those who “straightforwardly and openly lack shame.” That men indulged in deviant behavior behind closed doors was the inexhaustible stuff of invective. More interesting is the second type, those who self-identified as noncompliant sexual beings. This sort, Ptolemy said, occupied a role that was like “that of a vulgar prostitute, exposed to all shame and abuse.” The assimilation of the public pathic and the prostitute may well reflect both material and legal reality. There was certainly a male brothel scene in Rome and presumably in most towns of any scale in the empire. More profoundly, willful sexual submission by a male entailed infamia, literally a lack of respectable reputation, which brought impairment of civil rights. In this atmosphere, it has been suggested, a subculture flourished.27

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

  It is not happenstance that the Acts of Paul praise vir- ginity in the same breath as they urge the Christian disciple to be “arrayed” for a cosmos beyond the present order. Andrew calls his converts to “aban- don this life altogether” and to seek “life beyond time, beyond law, beyond speech, beyond body.” To abandon sex— especially the congress of the mar- riage bed, which symbolized continuity and regeneration of this life— was a searing denunciation of the present order. Th e pagan romances present an enchanting vision of life as a mysterious experience, somewhere just beyond our conscious control but overseen by benevolent fates that ensure the reso- lution of the individual’s story in marriage and reproduction. Th e Acts are romances whose protagonists are messengers of another order, a divine or- der, that is fundamentally at odds with the present age, its authorities, and its patterns of reproduction.  In two of the Acts that survive completely enough to permit judgment, the Acts of Andrew and the Acts of Paul, the manipulation of romantic themes is so essential to the structure of the text that we may consider these works to be virtually inverted romances. Besides Gregory of Tour’s summary of An- drew’s miracles, two Greek manuscripts preserve substantial parts of his leg- end. In the Greek fragments, which reveal how much Gregory has chopped from the story, we meet Andrew on mission in Achaea, where Andrew’s spiri- tual seduction of the proconsul’s wife, Maximilla, leads to his demise. Th e proconsul, Aegeates, goes on a long trip and returns to fi nd his wife steeled against his amorous intentions. To ward off his desires, she contrives a ruse worthy of any romantic heroine, and perhaps a little unexpected in a Chris- tian one: “she summoned an utterly gorgeous slave- girl named Euclia who was naturally dissolute.” Euclia consents to the scheme and becomes the sub- stitute bedmate for Aegeates, who for eight months copulates unwittingly with a surrogate wife! Only the moral economy of romance allows the  FROM SHAME TO SIN Christian story to sacrifi ce, without apparent compunction, the sexual hon- esty of a slave, in the name of salvaging the chastity of a heroine. Needless to say, this detail did not survive the literary scalpel of Gregory, who makes no mention of the scam.  Th e slave Euclia enjoys her temporary promotion, but she is undone by her pride. Tired of her airs, the fellow slaves reveal the plot to their master. Infuriated, he has Euclia’s tongue cut out and her body mutilated. Rather pitifully, he goes to Maximilla in his distress and reiterates his love for her. She rebukes him in a malicious double entendre that served to fuel rather than allay his suspicions. “I love, Aegeates, I do love, but what I love is not of this world. . . .

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

  So blind are the Jews to the true meaning of scripture, so mindlessly attached to their own carnal interpretations of the law, that they did not repent of killing Jesus even after his resurrection; instead, they circulated rumors that his disciples had stolen his body. They accused Jesus of being the source of “godless, lawless, and unholy doctrines”—a reference to popular accusations of Christian cannibalism and sexual profligacy—and thereby incited pagan fury. And even still, Justin continues, the Jews persevere in their malice and their obduracy despite the crushing defeats inflicted on them by Rome. “Your city is captured and your land ravaged,” he asserts (Trypho 108), alluding both to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 70, and to the more recent events of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132–135, the temporal setting of the dialogue (Trypho 1). The facts of history, Justin urges, validate his argument. God had never desired blood sacrifices. He had inaugurated them solely because of Israel’s abiding sinfulness in worshiping idols; he brought the law to a definitive end in Christ (Trypho 43). God has no more patience with the Jews’ carnal interpretations of biblical revelation, and through Roman agency has made the carnal interpretation of the law impossible. Israel has nowhere left to offer sacrifices. Yet prophetic revelation, Justin avers, also foretells that Jerusalem will not lie in ruins forever. Citing Isaiah and Ezekiel, Justin strongly affirms Trypho’s statement that Jerusalem will be rebuilt, enlarged and adorned, and that the patriarchs, prophets, and proselytes will be gathered there together with many people to rejoice with the messiah (Trypho 80). There they will reign with Christ for a thousand years, after which time the general resurrection and final judgment will occur (Trypho 81; Revelation 20.4–5). Justin presents this idea in explicit contrast to Christian “blasphemers” who deny bodily resurrection and who hold that redemption concerns only the soul, and not also the physical body (Trypho 80). Flesh itself, Justin insists, will be redeemed.

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

  In the “Euboean Oration,” Dio proved himself willing to contemplate the social matrix of desire with a frankness and objectivity that was surpassingly rare. His train of reasoning led him to the precipice of an epochal moral insight. The sexual economy rested on the “women and boys taken captive or bought, prostituted for shameful purposes in sordid brothels, which are apparent everywhere in the city—at the governor’s porch, in the marketplaces, by the buildings both civil and religious, right in the middle of what ought to be most revered.” Dio recognized the mechanics of blunt force, of slavery, behind the flesh trade. The “Euboean Oration” reveals an inchoate legislative impulse; Dio would have had the magistrate forbid prostitution, like a doctor tending to the “disease” infecting the civic body. But having walked to the brink, Dio retreats. Dio stopped short of pondering the impossible, the sexual honor of the dishonored. He was concerned to cure the internal moral disorder of the civic body through Stoic therapy writ large. The civic body, rather than the mass of humanity, was the framework for his moral prescription.102 The former slave Epictetus also carried the thought of his teacher Musonius in new directions. If Dio brought a panoramic social perspective to Stoic thought, Epictetus stood in the internalizing, meditative tradition of Stoicism. For Epictetus, pleasure was a nullity. The wise man would place it in the scales and, realizing it had no weight, cast it completely aside as irrelevant. Marriage was a duty, rather than a partnership glued together with the bond of eros. Epictetus would allow for marriage as one of the primary duties: “citizenship, marriage, child production, piety to God, care of one’s parents … all as one was born to do. And how are we born to live? As free men, as wellborn men, as men with a sense of honor.” Beyond the expectation of marriage, we find few explicit social correlates in the doctrines of Epictetus. He was concerned with the internal regulation of desire and, unlike Musonius, did not express his aversion to pleasure in external rules. Rather, the wise man needed to have reason to recognize the falsity of impressions that stirred desire. “If you see a pretty young lady, do you hold off the phantasia? ” Sexual desire was something to be discounted by a rational faculty that had been keenly prepared through the contemplation of the truth. Conquering sexual desire was not unlike solving a logic problem. “If a girl is willing, beckoning, inviting me, grasping me and pulling me close, and I still resist and conquer, then I have solved a problem greater than the Liar or the Quiescent.”103

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  But I preferred even false prophets to those lovers of order at all costs who, though despising us, counted on us to protect them from Simon's demands upon their gold (placed for safety with Syrian bankers), and upon their farms in Galilee. I thought of the deserters from his camp who, a few hours back, had been sitting in my tent, humble, conciliatory, servile, but always managing to turn their backs to the image of my Genius. Our best agent, Elias Ben-Abayad, who played the role of informer and spy for Rome, was justly despised by both camps; he was nevertheless the most intelligent man in the group, a liberal mind but a man sick at heart, torn between love for his people and his liking for us and for our culture; he too, however, thought essentially only of Israel. Joshua Ben-Kisma, who preached appeasement, was but a more timid, or more hypocritical Akiba. Even in the rabbi Joshua, who had long been my counselor in Jewish affairs, I had felt irreconcilable differences under that compliance and desire to please, a point where two opposite kinds of thinking meet only to engage in combat. Our territories extended over hundreds of leagues and thousands of stadia beyond that dry, hilly horizon, but the rock of Bethar was our frontier; we could level to dust the massive walls of that citadel where Simon in his frenzy was consummating his suicide, but we could not prevent that race from answering us "No." A mosquito hummed over me; Euphorion, who was getting along in years, had failed to close exactly the thin curtains of gauze; books and maps left on the ground rattled in the low wind which crept under the tent wall. Sitting up on my bed, I drew on my boots and groped for my tunic and belt with its dagger, then went out to breathe the night air. I walked through the wide, straight streets of the camp, empty at that late hour, but lighted like city streets; sentries saluted formally as I passed; alongside the barracks which served for hospital I caught the stale stench of the dysenterics. I proceeded towards the earthwork which separated us from the precipice, and from the enemy. A sentinel, perilously outlined by the moon, was making his round with long, even tread; his passage and return was one part of the movement of that immense machine in which I was the pivot; for a moment I was stirred by the spectacle of that solitary form, that brief flame burning in the breast of a man midst a world of dangers. An arrow whistled by, hardly more irksome than the mosquito which had troubled me in my tent; I stood looking out, leaning against the rampart of sandbags.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The most primitive Dacians know that their Zalmoxis is called Jupiter in Rome; the Phoenician Baal of Mount Casius has been readily identified with the Father who holds Victory in his hand, and of whom Wisdom is born; the Egyptians, though so proud of their myths some thousands of years old, are willing to see in Osiris a Bacchus with funeral attributes; harsh Mithra admits himself brother to Apollo. No people but Israel has the arrogance to confine truth wholly within the narrow limits of a single conception of the divine, thereby insulting the manifold nature of the Deity, who contains all; no other god has inspired his worshipers with disdain and hatred for those who pray at different altars. I was only the more anxious to make Jerusalem a city like the others, where several races and several beliefs could live in peace; but I was wrong to forget that in any combat between fanaticism and common sense the latter has rarely the upper hand. The clergy of the ancient city were scandalized by the opening of schools where Greek literature was taught; the rabbi Joshua, a pleasant, learned man with whom I had frequently conversed in Athens, but who was trying to excuse himself to his people for his foreign culture and his relations with us, now ordered his disciples not to take up such profane studies unless they could find an hour which was neither day nor night, since Jewish law must be studied night and day. Ismael, an important member of the Sanhedrin, who supposedly adhered to the side of Rome, let his nephew Ben-Dama die rather than accept the services of the Greek surgeon sent to him by Tineus Rufus. While here in Tibur means were still being sought to conciliate differences without appearing to yield to demands of fanatics, affairs in the East took a turn for the worse; a Zealot revolt triumphed in Jerusalem. An adventurer born of the very dregs of the people, a fellow named Simon who entitled himself Bar-Kochba, Son of the Star, played the part of firebrand or incendiary mirror in that revolt. I could judge this Simon only by hearsay; I have seen him but once face-to-face, the day a centurion brought me his severed head.

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

  GREGORY. (Hom. 17. in Ev.) For many when they receive the right of rule, are vehement in persecuting their subjects, and manifesting the terrors of their power. And since they have no bowels of mercy, their desire is to seem to be masters, forgetting altogether that they are fathers, changing an occasion for humility, into an exaltation of power. We must on the other hand consider, that as lambs we are sent among wolves that preserving the feeling of innocence, so we should make no malicious attacks. For he who undertakes the office of preacher ought not to bring evils upon others, but to endure them; who although at times an upright zeal demands that he should deal harshly with his subjects, should still inwardly in his heart love with a fatherly feeling those whom outwardly he visits with censure. And that ruler gives a good example of this, who never submits the neck of his soul to the yoke of earthly desire. Hence it is added, Carry neither purse nor scrip. GREGORY NAZIANZEN. (Orat. 2.) The sum of which is, that men ought to be so virtuous that the Gospel should make no less progress through their way of life than their preaching. GREGORY. (Hom. 17. in Ev.) For the preacher (of the Gospel) ought to have such trust in God, that although he has provided not for the expenses of this present life, he should still be most certainly convinced that these will not fail him; lest while his mind is engaged in His temporal things, he should be less careful for the spiritual things of others. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. Thus He had already commanded them to have no care for these persons, when He said, I send you as lambs among wolves. And He also forbade all care about what is external to the body, by saying, Take neither purse nor scrip. Nor did He allow men to take with them any of those things which were not attached to the body. Hence He adds, Nor shoes. He not only forbade them to take purse and scrip, but He did not allow them to receive any distraction in their work, such as interruption by greetings on their way. Hence He adds, Salute no one by the way. Which had long ago been said by Elisha. (2 Kings. 4:29.) As if He said, Proceed straight on to your work without exchanging blessings with others. For it is a loss to waste the time which is fitter for preaching, in unnecessary things. AMBROSE. Our Lord did not then forbid these things because the exercise of benevolence was displeasing to Him, but because the motive of following after devotedness was more pleasing. GREGORY NAZIANZEN. (ubi sup.) The Lord gave them these commands also for the glory of the word, lest it should seem that enticements could more prevail over them. He wished them also not to be anxious to speak to others.

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

  Reply to Objection 2: If we consider the ordering of the demons on the part of God Who orders them, it is sacred; for He uses the demons for Himself; but on the part of the demons’ will it is not a sacred thing, because they abuse their nature for evil. Reply to Objection 3: The name “Seraphim” is given from the ardor of charity; and the name “Thrones” from the Divine indwelling; and the name “Dominations” imports a certain liberty; all of which are opposed to sin; and therefore these names are not given to the angels who sinned. Whether among the demons there is precedence?Objection 1: It would seem that there is no precedence among the demons. For every precedence is according to some order of justice. But the demons are wholly fallen from justice. Therefore there is no precedence among them. Objection 2: Further, there is no precedence where obedience and subjection do not exist. But these cannot be without concord; which is not to be found among the demons, according to the text, “Among the proud there are always contentions” (Prov. 13:10). Therefore there is no precedence among the demons. Objection 3: If there be precedence among them it is either according to nature, or according to their sin or punishment. But it is not according to their nature, for subjection and service do not come from nature but from subsequent sin; neither is it according to sin or punishment, because in that case the superior demons who have sinned the most grievously, would be subject to the inferior. Therefore there is no precedence among the demons. On the contrary, On 1 Cor. 15:24 the gloss says: “While the world lasts, angels will preside over angels, men over men, and demons over demons.” I answer that, Since action follows the nature of a thing, where natures are subordinate, actions also must be subordinate to each other. Thus it is in corporeal things, for as the inferior bodies by natural order are below the heavenly bodies, their actions and movements are subject to the actions and movements of the heavenly bodies. Now it is plain from what we have said [885](A[1]), that the demons are by natural order subject to others; and hence their actions are subject to the action of those above them, and this is what we mean by precedence—that the action of the subject should be under the action of the prelate. So the very natural disposition of the demons requires that there should be authority among them. This agrees too with Divine wisdom, which leaves nothing inordinate, which “reacheth from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly” (Wis. 8:1). Reply to Objection 1: The authority of the demons is not founded on their justice, but on the justice of God ordering all things.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Anthropologists might marvel to learn that in one corner of the peculiar economic and social ecology of the industrialized, post-plough West, women who are no longer virgins feel compelled to re-create that condition. They are supposed to pull off something along the lines of the miracle of the immaculate conception—to be multiparas, or women who have had more than one child, with the bodies and vaginal elasticity of nulliparas, women who have never given birth. They want not to surgically replace or fortify their hymens (as some women in the Middle East feel pressured to do before their wedding nights) but to “rejuvenate” their own eroded value in an environment where women may be conditionally respected for other things—beauty, motherhood, intelligence—but are arguably ultimately objects for enhanced male pleasure. Dr. Dennis Gross, a cosmetic dermatologist on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, told me that he is getting more questions regarding vaginal rejuvenation. “Patients are asking for referrals, as well as my opinion regarding the effectiveness of the procedures,” he says. Gross, who lasers and Botoxes some of Manhattan’s richest, most powerful residents and has a popular skincare line, is at heart a skin-cancer nerd and a stickler for research. All this vajay business, which is potentially big business, strikes him as “currently more fad than science. As a scientist and laser specialist in dermatology, I very much doubt the validity of claims that lasers can permanently tighten the vagina and labia…or another common claim, that they can restore lubrication,” he told me. He tells his patients as much. Some may go ahead and do it anyway: surgeons and ob-gyns continue performing the procedures, saying that their female patients insist on them. But mightn’t we ask, “What do these doctors expect?” After all, these women’s requests are in line with a culture that prioritizes male sexual pleasure and male sexual privilege. Are these doctors’ allegiances firmly with their patients? What if they, like the Wyandot, revered female sexual pleasure and autonomy so highly and viewed it as so important, so precious and vital to health, and even so powerfully healing to the larger community that their first instinct were to tell a female patient that when it came to that aspect of her being, there was no risk worth taking? And what social circumstances might lead us from the examination room of a vaginal rejuvenation clinic—with its vapid reading materials and insipidly colored walls—to a place where female pleasure takes precedence, and men are so eager to provide it to women that they dutifully attend workshops and devour magazine articles and present their genitals to doctors for procedures for which there is a scarcity of data on safety and efficacy, all in a bid to please us? In this parallel universe, women run the world, have all the money, and birth the babies that propagate the species. And a plough has never been seen.

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

  Paul’s concern in his epistle was to take the diffuse and disorderly eroticism of a Mediterranean town as an expression, an unusually potent and jarring symbol, of the pulsing spiritual errors of ancient polytheism. One small lexical clue to the pedigree of Paul’s thought is that nowhere in his letters do we find any mention of the kinaidos, the starkest figure of sexual deviance in mainstream Greco-Roman culture. The kinaidos was a permanent fixture on the ancient social scene, a stereotype of the monstrously dissolute and feminine male. The invisibility of the kinaidos in Paul points to a primary dependence on the moral armory of Hellenistic Judaism. Once again, comparison with Paul’s near contemporary, Philo, offers instructive parallels. It is revealing that, in the voluminous remnants of Philo, the kinaidos is equally missing. Philo’s attitudes toward same-sex love do not pose any mystery. Philo abhorred any manifestation of homoerotic desire or practice, though his loathing was pulled mainly toward the institution of pederasty. The ubiquity of Plato’s writings in the mental world of Philo evoked the energetic critique of pederasty in the writings of the Alexandrian Jew. But the attack on pederasty was not an attempt to slay some imaginary monster from the past and purge the Platonic kingdom of an unwanted intruder. For Philo, pederasty was a characteristic affliction of the society that surrounded him. It had become “something boasted of, and not just by those who indulge in it, but also those who suffer it.” It was a damnable act, for both parties to the transaction. The deviance of pederasty, at its core, lay in the attraction of males for males. Philo contrasted the madness of men for women and women for men, “in which case the desires themselves are pursued according to the laws of nature,” with the madness of men for other males “who differ only in age.” The pederast sought a “pleasure” that was itself “against nature.”23

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

  Musonius had an impact that continued to reverberate in lasting and unexpected ways through the work of his pupils. Musonius inspired the remarkable social thought of Dio Chrysostom, who carried his teacher’s legacy into the world of grand public oratory. Dio’s seventh opus, the “Euboean Oration,” is a unique masterpiece of Greco-Roman rhetoric. The speech vividly narrates an encounter with two peasant families living in the idyllic hinterland of a Greek town. The natural virtue of their rustic life was contrasted, in the second half of the speech, with the vices of the contemporary Greek city. The fact that stares out at us from the speech is the utter centrality of prostitution in the social life of the high Roman Empire. Prostitution was the fixed point in Dio’s roaring diatribe against contemporary society, and on it hung all the ills and disorders of the world. It was an established tenet of Stoic psychology that indulgence was self-reinforcing. Normally, though, these reflections focused on the individual. Dio turned to consider the circulation of pleasure through the social body, and his attention was locked on the vicious spiral of a society geared to deliver sexual satisfaction cheaply and easily. In the thought of Dio, Stoic skepticism toward pleasure is suddenly refracted through a panoramic vision of society.100 Prostitution was, for Dio, symptomatic of civilizational disorder. In the “Euboean Oration,” Dio launched a frontal attack on the timeworn rationalization of prostitution as a safety valve for dangerous sexual energy. Stoic psychology gave Dio a powerful rejoinder to the assumption that male sexual energy was a determinate quantum. The rulers were wrong to think they had discovered “a sexual-restraint drug” in the “open, unlocked brothels” of the city. Dio argued that men would inevitably become bored with the pleasures that could be had “with permission, at a negligible rate,” and turn their amatory energy to the “freeborn women,” locked in inner chambers. Sexual lust was a self-accelerating force, and far from staving off the violation of respectable women, prostitution fueled the desires that would inevitably lead to adulteries. The “open, dishonorable violation,” even of prostitutes, led straight to the corruption of “respectable women and boys.” Once unbridled, sexual lust could ultimately only lead to sexual ruin—the corruption of wives and the submission of sons.101

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

  Opinion has been divided about the judgment of the author who included a copy of this law in his comparison of Mosaic and Roman jurisprudence. Was the spirit of the Theodosian constitution, indeed, akin to religious injunctions against same-sex love, or was the compiler overreaching in his effort to bend the law into a point of contact between the “spirit of Moses” and the Roman state? In other words, was the Theodosian measure inspired by religious homophobia, or by the immemorial ideals of Roman manhood? On the one hand, the attack came at a moment pregnant with change, as Theodosius I was transforming the Roman state into a Christian one, and the official conflagration of a whole class of sexual outcasts was uncharacteristic of Roman jurisprudence. On the other hand, the language of the law could not possibly be more emphatic about its roots in Roman tradition, and it would be a dodge to explain this rhetoric as a cloak for a clandestine Christian agenda. The official who actually drafted the language of the law was, in fact, one of the most visible pagans around the court. But most tellingly, the object of regulation was sexual passivity, and in the form of public prostitution. The categories of regulation are fundamentally, undeniably Roman.10 The chemistry of the Theodosian measure was complex, and it simply cannot be broken down into discrete proportions of the constituent elements, classical masculinity and unfamiliar malevolence. The law raises the most profound questions about the passage from an ancient legal and cultural regime, whose protocols required men to play the dominant role in sexual encounters, to a legal and cultural regime that treated the gender of the participants as the primary fact of any sexual conjunction. The gradual transition from a classical to a Christian regulatory system produced many complex harmonies along the way, of which the law of 390 is a signal example. It can only be explained by considering the maturation of Christian attitudes toward same-sex eros. In late antiquity Christian opposition to same-sex love developed far beyond the brief, violent injunctions of the scriptural tradition that ascribed the habits of same-sex eroticism to the fallen confusion of polytheistic cultures. The eradication of sexual sin became the object of a nascent penitential discipline; simultaneously, same-sex love became pathologized to an unprecedented degree, spoken of as a disease that threatened to contaminate the body politic. Indeed, a new concern for the sexual behavior of the populace as such grows up in the fourth century. At the same time, the process of legal change cannot be understood apart from the specific mechanisms and traditions of regulation in Roman law, the place of prostitution in the public order, and the subtle institutional shifts in late antiquity that enabled more aggressive attempts at the legal control of sexual morality. In short, a host of much broader changes within Christianity and within the state converged to ignite the awful blaze of 390.11

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

  The references to philosophers and philosophizing scattered throughout his novel are uniformly smirking. The word “philosophy” occurs six times in Leucippe and Clitophon. Three times “to philosophize” means “to abstain from sex,” as when the villain Thersander incredulously asks Leucippe if the pirates who abducted her became philosophers. Twice it means “to wax eloquent for self-interested purposes,” as when Melite makes her final proposition to Clitophon. One time it means “to suffer, passively,” as when Clitophon takes a throttling from Thersander without resistance. Certainly these passages play on the mixed reputation of contemporary philosophy for sophism, complaisance, and fussy continence. Stoicism is clearly in view. The Stoic allusions of the novel are deliberate, but they are not flattering. Stoicism is evoked because it represented the closest thing to a philosophical koinē in the Roman Empire; more than a school, Stoicism seeped into public consciousness. Achilles Tatius is less concerned with its doctrines than with its stance toward the world. Leucippe and Clitophon is, in fact, a grand rejection of Stoicism, or of any philosophy that denies eros as a positive, constitutive source of the self.94 Stoicism in particular was a systematic philosophy, and its sexual ethics cannot be abstracted from the web of problems internal to Stoicism. The core ethical commitment of Stoicism was the principle that happiness, as the end of life, consisted in the possession of virtue. Virtue was sufficient for happiness. Stoic virtue was a thoroughly rationalist exercise, for virtue was the state of a soul in reasoned accord with nature. To live in agreement with nature was the highest ideal of the Stoic sage. Such serene rationality could be fully exercised only in a state of calm that was immune to the impulses of the passions. The Stoic sought apatheia, peace of mind, a reasoned indifference to things external. Hence, the true Stoic was impervious to misfortune; because he would “not for even the shortest time look away from reason,” he could “remain ever the same, in the sharpest pain, at the loss of a child, through the worst disease.” The Stoic achieved, through meditative self-discipline, a wisdom that brought freedom, in the highest sense that nothing external could truly affect the Stoic and his moral commitments.95

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

  Chapter 3 turns to the age of Christian triumph and the gradual transformation of sexual preaching within the context of an expansionary church. Remonstrance, step by step, became regulation. Far from receiving a world prepared for its dream of austerity, the Christian leadership in late antiquity found itself at the helm of a hostile takeover. It was an eventuality for which there was no prepared script. The two pillars of the church’s power were the threats of its penitential regime and the megaphone of its public preaching. These were limited and uncertain sources of power, and only gradually did Christian values prevail as shared public culture. Even more slow and piecemeal was the process by which these values became the inspiration for public law. But prevail Christian norms eventually did. The tradition of frank eroticism withers, and the visual depictions of lovemaking slowly recede. Gone is the warm eroticism of the Pompeian fresco, vanished is the charmed sensuality of the Greek romance. The protean energy of human desire resisted being corralled, but marriage, inexorably, became the only legitimate venue of erotic fulfillment. Freudian intuitions, or simple experience, may lead us to expect that if Christianity was a signal victory for the superego, the id endured, driven underground, searching for its own quiet quarters out of ecclesiastical view, or sublimated into religious ecstasy. But the transformation was epochal. The story of same-sex love in the centuries between Constantine and Justinian unfolds with fierce predictability. Vituperative attacks on same-sex love are strewn across the late antique homiletic literature. Notable is the direct influence of a Pauline conception, in which same-sex love per se is an encompassing category, inclusive of all forms of erotic contact between males and females. At a rhythm that mimicked the deeper diffusion of Christian norms, the late antique state gradually turned its attention to the repression of same-sex encounters. The Theodosian age (ca. AD 379–450) was still marked by the predominance of old categories of masculinity as a regulatory platform, but there is a new, hostile energy in the air that it is not unsafe to attribute to religious fervor. The assimilation of Christian ideology and sexual policing culminates in the reign of Justinian (AD 527–565), whose Institutes for the first time classified sex between males as a crime without distinguishing between active and passive partners. Justinian also passed a law against pederasty and enforced it ex post facto in spectacular fashion. Most remarkably, if Procopius is to be believed, men could be accused of sexual crime even by slaves, signaling a total breakdown of the ancient sexual order.15

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Every week they screened new horrors, always with a somber narrator to remind us that this wasn’t make-believe but actual history, that what we were seeing had really happened and could happen again if we did not maintain ourselves in a state of vigilance. These shows always ended the same way. Overviews of ruined Berlin. Grinning GIs rousting the defeated Aryan soldiery from their hiding places in barn and cave and sewer. Himmler dead in his cell, hollow-eyed Hess in Spandau. The now lathered-up narrator crowing, “Thus was the high-flying Prussian eagle brought to ground!” and “Thus did the little Führer and his bullyboys turn tail and run, giving up forever their dream of The Thousand Year Reich!” But these glimpses of humiliation and loss lasted only a few minutes. They were tacked on as a pretense that the point of the show was to celebrate the victory of goodness over evil. We saw through this fraud, of course. We saw that the real point was to celebrate snappy uniforms and racy Mercedes staff cars and great marching, thousands of boots slamming down together on cobbled streets while banners streamed overhead and strong voices sang songs that stirred our blood though we couldn’t understand a word. The point was to watch Stukas peel off and dive toward burning cities, tanks blowing holes in buildings, men with Lugers and dogs ordering people around. These shows instructed us further in the faith we were already beginning to hold: that victims are contemptible, no matter how much people pretend otherwise; that it is more fun to be inside than outside, to be arrogant than to be kind, to be with a crowd than to be alone. Terry Silver had a Nazi armband that he swore was genuine, though anyone could see he’d made it himself. As soon as we reached his apartment Silver would get this armband from its hiding place and slip it on. Then he would strut around and treat Taylor and me like lackeys. We let him do it because of the candy Mrs. Silver left out in crystal bowls, because of the television set, and because without Silver to tell us what to do we were reduced to wandering the sidewalks, listlessly throwing rocks at signs. First we made a few calls. Taylor and I listened in on the extension in Mrs. Silver’s bedroom while Silver did the talking. He looked up people with Jewish-sounding names and screamed at them in pig German. He ordered entire banquets of Chinese food for his father and stepmother. Sometimes he called the parents of kids we didn’t like and assumed the voice and manner of a Concerned Adult—teacher, coach, counselor—just touching base to ask whether there was some problem at home that might account for Paul’s unusual behaviour at school the other day. Silver never laughed, never gave himself away. When he was being particularly plausible and suave, Taylor and I had to stuff Mrs.

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

  In the matter of same-sex eros, the Roman world knew its own intricate tessellation of rigid limits and extreme permissiveness. Christian norms simply ate through the fabric of late classical morality like an acid, without the least consideration for the well-worn contours of the old ways. As with porneia, Christian hostility to venery involving members of the same sex was nurtured in Hellenistic Judaism, imported to the gentile mission, sharpened in its application and expression. Paul’s letters again provided an incomplete but, really, unambiguous template for the blanket condemnation of same-sex love in early Christianity. Nowhere is this clearer than in the first chapter of his letter to the Romans. There we find the apostle claiming that among the gentiles, “women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another.” For Paul, a little unexpectedly, same-sex attraction symbolized the estrangement of men and women, at the very level of their inmost desires, from the creator. Paul’s overriding sense of gender—rather than age or status—as the prime determinant in the propriety of a sexual act was nurtured by contemporary Jewish attitudes. But the analogy between male and female same-sex attraction was strikingly novel, and truly momentous. By boiling the sex act down to the most basic constituents of male and female, Paul was able to redescribe the sexual culture surrounding him in transformative terms.12