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

  [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] After Moses’s death, it fell to Joshua to conquer the Promised Land. The biblical book of Joshua still contains some ancient material, but this was radically revised by these same reformers, who interpreted it in the light of their peculiarly xenophobic theology. They give the impression that, acting under Yahweh’s orders, Joshua massacred the entire population of Canaan and destroyed their cities. Yet not only is there no archaeological evidence for this wholesale destruction, but the biblical text itself admits that for centuries Israelites coexisted with Canaanites and intermarried with them, and that large swaths of the country remained in Canaanite hands.45 On the basis of the reformers’ work, it is often claimed that monotheism, the belief in a single god, made Israel especially prone to violence. It is assumed that its denial of other gods reveals a rabid intolerance not found in the generous pluralism of paganism.46 But the Israelites were not monotheists at this date and would not begin to be so until the sixth century BCE. Indeed, both the biblical and the archaeological evidence suggests that the beliefs and practices of most early Israelites differed little from those of their Canaanite neighbors.47 There are in fact very few unequivocally monotheistic statements in the Hebrew Bible.48 Even the first of the reformers’ Ten Commandments takes the existence of rival deities for granted and simply forbids Israel to worship them: “You are not to have any other gods before my presence.”49

• From Going Clear (2013)

  The mystique that surrounds the religion is owed mainly to the second tier of membership: a small number of Hollywood actors and other celebrities. To promote the idea that Scientology is a unique refuge for spiritually hungry movie stars, as well as a kind of factory for stardom, the church operates Celebrity Centres in Hollywood and several other entertainment hubs. Any Scientologist can take courses at Celebrity Centres; it’s part of the lure, that an ordinary member can envision being in classes with notable actors or musicians. In practice, the real celebrities have their own private entry and course rooms, and they rarely mix with the public—except for major contributors who are accorded the same heightened status. The total number of celebrities in the church is impossible to calculate, both because the term itself is so elastic and because some well-known personalities who have taken courses or auditing don’t wish to have their association known. An ordinary public Scientologist can be inconspicuous. No one really needs to know his beliefs. Public members who quit the church seldom make a scene; they just quietly remove themselves and the community closes the circle behind them (although they are likely to be pursued by mail and phone solicitations for the rest of their lives). Celebrity members, on the other hand, are constantly being pressed to add their names to petitions, being showcased at workshops and galas, or having their photos posted over the logo “I’m a Scientologist.” Their fame greatly magnifies the influence of the church. They are deployed to advance the social agendas of the organization, including attacks on psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry, and the promotion of Hubbard’s contested theories of education and drug rehabilitation. They become tied to Scientology’s banner, which makes it more difficult to break away if they should become disillusioned. Neither the public nor the celebrity tiers of Scientology could exist without the third level of membership—the church’s clergy, called the Sea Organization, or Sea Org, in Scientology jargon. It is an artifact of the private navy that Hubbard commanded during a decade when he was running the church while on the high seas. The church has said on various occasions that the Sea Org has 5,000, 6,000, or 10,000 members worldwide. Former Sea Org members estimate the actual size of the clergy to be between 3,000 and 5,000, concentrated mainly in Clearwater, Florida, and Los Angeles. Many of them joined the Sea Org as children. They have sacrificed their education and are impoverished by their service. As a symbol of their unswerving dedication to the promotion of Hubbard’s principles, they have signed contracts for a billion years of service—only a brief moment in the eternal scheme, as seen by Scientology, which postulates that the universe is four quadrillion years old. The church disputes the testimony of many of the sources I’ve spoken to for this book, especially those former members of the Sea Org who have now left the organization, calling them “apostates” and “defectors.”

• From Going Clear (2013)

  He believed that the fetus not only recorded details of his parents copulating during his pregnancy, but also every word spoken during the act. Such recordings can be restimulated in adult life by hearing similar language, which would then awaken the anxiety that the fetus experienced—during a violent sexual episode, for instance. That could lead to “aberration,” which for Hubbard includes all psychoses, neuroses, compulsions, and any other deviation from rational behavior. Engrams form chains of similar incidents, Hubbard suggests. He gives the example of seventeen prenatal engrams found in a single individual, who “had passed for ‘normal’ for thirty-six years of his life.” Among them: COITUS CHAIN, FATHER. 1 st incident zygote. 56 succeeding incidents. Two branches, father drunk and father sober. COITUS CHAIN, LOVER. 1 st incident embryo. 18 succeeding incidents. All painful because of enthusiasm of lover. FIGHT CHAIN. 1 st incident embryo. 38 succeeding incidents. Three falls, loud voices, no beating. ATTEMPTED ABORTION, SURGICAL. 1 st incident embryo. 21 succeeding incidents. ATTEMPTED ABORTION, DOUCHE. 1 st incident fetus. 2 incidents. 1 using paste, 1 using Lysol, very strong. MASTURBATION CHAIN. 1 st incident embryo. 80 succeeding incidents. Mother masturbating with fingers, jolting child and injuring child with orgasm. And so on, all leading up to: BIRTH. Instrument. 29 hours labor. Hubbard’s view of women as revealed in this and many other examples is not just contemptuous; it betrays a kind of horror. He goes on to make this amazing statement: “It is a scientific fact that abortion attempts are the most important factor in aberration. The child on whom the abortion is attempted is condemned to live with murderers whom he reactively knows to be murderers through all his weak and helpless youth!” In his opinion, it is very difficult to abort a child, which is why the process so often fails. “Twenty or thirty abortion attempts are not uncommon in the aberree and in every attempt the child could have been pierced through the body or brain,” Hubbard writes. “However many billions America spends yearly on institutions for the insane and jails for the criminals are spent primarily because of attempted abortions done by some sex-blocked mother to whom children are a curse, not a blessing of God.” One of the charges that would be lobbed against Hubbard by his disaffected eldest son was that his father had attempted two abortions on his mother. “One I observed when I was around six or seven,” L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., later testified. He recalled seeing his father standing over his mother with a coat hanger in his hand. The other attempted abortion was upon himself. “I was born at six and a half months and weighed two pounds, two ounces. I mean, I wasn’t born: this is what came out as a result of their attempt to abort me.”

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

  and ambrosia. They are awake and fall asleep. They travel, but with the swiftness of thought. They mingle in battle. They cohabit with human beings, producing heroes or demigods. They are limited to time and space. Though sometimes honored with the attributes of omnipotence and omniscience, and called holy and just, yet they are subject to an iron fate (Moira), fall under delusion, and reproach each other with folly and crime. Their heavenly happiness is disturbed by all the troubles of earthly life. Even Zeus or Jupiter, the patriarch of the Olympian family, is cheated by his sister and wife Hera (Juno), with whom he had lived three hundred years in secret marriage before he proclaimed her his consort and queen of the gods, and is kept in ignorance of the events before Troy. He threatens his fellows with blows and death, and makes Olympus tremble when he shakes his locks in anger. The gentle Aphrodite or Venus bleeds from a spear-wound on her finger. Mars is felled with a stone by Diomedes. Neptune and Apollo have to serve for hire and are cheated. Hephaestus limps and provokes an uproarious laughter. The gods are involved by their marriages in perpetual jealousies and quarrels. They are full of envy and wrath, hatred and lust prompt men to crime, and provoke each other to lying, and cruelty, perjury and adultery. The Iliad and Odyssey, the most popular poems of the Hellenic genius, are a chronique scandaleuse of the gods. Hence Plato banished them from his ideal Republic. Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles also rose to loftier ideas of the gods and breathed a purer moral atmosphere; but they represented the exceptional creed of a few, while Homer expressed the popular belief. Truly we have no cause to long with Schiller for the return of the "gods of Greece," but would rather join the poet in his joyful thanksgiving: "Einen zu bereichern unter allen, Musste diese Götterwelt vergehen." Notwithstanding this essential apostasy from truth and holiness, heathenism was religion, a groping after "the unknown God." By its superstition it betrayed the need of faith. Its polytheism rested on a dim monotheistic background; it subjected all the gods to Jupiter, and Jupiter himself to a mysterious fate. It had at bottom the feeling of dependence on higher powers and reverence for divine things. It preserved the memory of a golden age and of a fall. It had the voice of conscience, and a sense, obscure though it was, of guilt. It felt the need of reconciliation with deity, and sought that reconciliation by prayer, penance, and sacrifice. Many of its religious traditions and usages were faint echoes of the primal religion; and its mythological dreams of the mingling of the gods with men, of demigods, of Prometheus delivered by Hercules from his helpless sufferings, were unconscious prophecies and fleshly anticipations of Christian truths.

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

  After the murder of Alberic I. (about 926), Marozia, who called herself Senatrix and Patricia, offered her hand and as much of her love as she could spare from her numerous paramours, to Guido, Markgrave of Tuscany, who eagerly accepted the prize; and after his death she married king Hugo of Italy, the step-brother of her late husband (932); he hoped to gain the imperial crown, but he was soon expelled from Rome by a rebellion excited by her own son Alberic II., who took offence at his overbearing conduct for slapping him in the face.279 She now disappears from the stage, and probably died in a convent. Her son, the second Alberic, was raised by the Romans to the dignity of Consul, and ruled Rome and the papacy from the Castle of St. Angelo for twenty-two years with great ability as a despot under the forms of a republic (932–954). After the death of his brother, John XI. (936), he appointed four insignificant pontiffs, and restricted them to the performance of their religious duties. John XII. On the death of Alberic in 954, his son Octavian, the grandson of Marozia, inherited the secular government of Rome, and was elected pope when only eighteen years of age. He thus united a double supremacy. He retained his name Octavian as civil ruler, but assumed, as pope, the name John XII., either by compulsion of the clergy and people, or because he wished to secure more license by keeping the two dignities distinct. This is the first example of such a change of name, and it was followed by his successors. He completely sunk his spiritual in his secular character, appeared in military dress, and neglected the duties of the papal office, though he surrendered none of its claims. John XII. disgraced the tiara for eight years (955–963). He was one of the most immoral and wicked popes, ranking with Benedict IX., John XXIII., and Alexander VI. He was charged by a Roman Synod, no one contradicting, with almost every crime of which depraved human nature is capable, and deposed as a monster of iniquity.280 § 64. The Interference of Otho the Great. Comp., besides the works quoted in § 63, Floss: Die Papstwahl unter den Ottonen. Freiburg, 1858, and Köpke and Dummler: Otto der Grosse. Leipzig, 1876.

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

  gathered thy children together even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate! Thus the Land and the Book illustrate and confirm each other. The Book is still full of life and omnipresent in the civilized world; the Land is groaning under the irreformable despotism of the "unspeakable" Turk, which acts like a blast of the Sirocco from the desert. Palestine lies under the curse of God. It is at best a venerable ruin "in all the imploring beauty of decay," yet not without hope of some future resurrection in God’s own good time. But in its very desolation it furnishes evidence for the truth of the Bible. It is "a fifth Gospel," engraven upon rocks.172 The People. Is there a better argument for Christianity than the Jews? Is there a more patent and a more stubborn fact in history than that intense and unchangeable Semitic nationality with its equally intense religiosity? Is it not truly symbolized by the bush in the desert ever burning and never consumed? Nebuchadnezzar, Antiochus Epiphanes, Titus, Hadrian exerted their despotic power for the extermination of the Jews; Hadrian’s edict forbade circumcision and all the rites of their religion; the intolerance of Christian rulers treated them for ages with a sort of revengeful cruelty, as if every Jew were personally responsible for the crime of the crucifixion. And, behold, the race still lives as tenaciously as ever, unchanged and unchangeable in its national traits, an omnipresent power in Christendom. It still produces, in its old age, remarkable men of commanding influence for good or evil in the commercial, political, and literary world; we need only recall such names as Spinoza, Rothschild, Disraeli, Mendelssohn, Heine, Neander. If we read the accounts of the historians and satirists of imperial Rome about the Jews in their filthy quarter across the Tiber, we are struck by the identity of that people with their descendants in the ghettos of modern Rome, Frankfurt, and New York. Then they excited as much as they do now the mingled contempt and wonder of the world; they were as remarkable then for contrasts of intellectual beauty and striking ugliness, wretched poverty and princely wealth; they liked onions and garlic, and dealt in old clothes, broken glass, and sulphur matches, but knew how to push themselves from poverty and filth into wealth and influence; they were rigid monotheists and scrupulous legalists who would strain out a gnat and swallow a camel; then as now they were temperate, sober, industrious, well regulated and affectionate in their domestic relations and careful for the religious education of their children. The majority were then, as they are now, carnal descendants of Jacob, the Supplanter, a small minority spiritual children of Abraham, the friend of God and father of the faithful. Out of this gifted race have come, at the time of Jesus and often since, the bitterest foes and the warmest friends of Christianity.

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

  The disagreeable fact of the marriage of Peter he endeavors to weaken by the groundless assumption that the apostle forsook his wife when he forsook his net, and, besides, that "he must have washed away the stain of his married life by the blood of his martyrdom."2140 In a letter, otherwise very beautiful and rich, to the young Nepotian,2141 he gives this advice: "Let your lodgings be rarely or never visited by women. You must either ignore alike, or love alike, all the daughters and virgins of Christ. Nay, dwell not under the same roof with them, nor trust their former chastity; you cannot be holier than David, nor wiser than Solomon. Never forget that a woman drove the inhabitants of Paradise out of their possession. In sickness any brother, or your sister, or your mother, can minister to in the lack of such relatives, the church herself maintains many aged women, whom you can at the same time remunerate for their nursing with welcome alms. I know some who are well in the body indeed, but sick in mind. It is a dangerous service in any case, that is done to you by one whose face you often see. If in your official duty as a clergyman you must visit a widow or a maiden, never enter her house alone. Take with you only those whose company does you no shame; only some reader, or acolyth, or psalm-singer, whose ornament consists not in clothes, but in good morals, who does not crimp his hair with crisping pins, but shows chastity in his whole bearing. But privately or without witnesses, never put yourself in the presence of a woman." Such exhortations, however, were quite in the spirit of that age, and were in part founded in Jerome’s own bitter experience in his youth, and in the thoroughly corrupt condition of social life in the sinking empire of Rome. While advocating these ascetic extravagancies Jerome does not neglect to chastise the clergy and the monks for their faults with the scourge of cutting satire. And his writings are everywhere strewn with the pearls of beautiful moral maxims and eloquent exhortations to contempt of the world and godly conduct.2142 IV. The Epistles of Jerome, with all their defects are uncommonly instructive and interesting, and, in easy flow and elegance of diction, are not inferior to the letters of Cicero. Vallarsi has for the first time put them into chronological order in the first volume of his edition, and has made the former numbering of them (even that of the Benedictine edition) obsolete. He reckons in all a hundred and fifty, including several letters from cotemporaries, such as Epiphanius, Theophilus of Alexandria, Augustine, Damasus, Pammachius, and Rufinus; some of them written directly to Jerome, and some treating of matters in which he was interested.

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

  The same pontiff, on the pretext of disturbances going on in Sicily, made a general reservation of all appointments in the realm, otherwise subject to episcopal or capitular choice. Urban IV. withdrew the right of election from the Ghibelline cities of Lombardy; Martin IV. and Honorius IV. applied the same rule to the cathedral appointments of Sicily and Aragon; Honorius IV. monopolized all the appointments of the Latin Church in the East; and Boniface VIII., in view of Philip IV.’s resistance, reserved to himself the appointments to all "cathedral and regular churches" in France. Of 16 French sees which became vacant, 1295–1301, only one was filled in the usual way by election.168 With the haughty assumption of Clement IV.’s bull and the practice of later popes, papal writers fell in. Augustinus Triumphus, writing in 1324, asserted that the pope is above all canon law and has the right to dispose of all ecclesiastical places.169 The papal system of appointments included provisions, expectances, and reservations.170 In setting aside the vested rights of chapters and other electors, the pope often joined hands with kings and princes. In the Avignon period a regular election by a chapter was the exception.171 The Chronicles of England and France teem with usurped cases of papal appointment. In 1322 the pope reserved to himself all the appointments in episcopal, cathedral, and abbey churches, and of all priors in the sees of Aquileja, Ravenna, Milan, Genoa, and Pisa.172 In 1329 he made such reservation for the German dioceses of Metz, Toul, and Verdun, and in 1339 for Cologne.173 There was no living in Latin Christendom which was safe from the pope’s hands. There were not places enough to satisfy all the favorites of the papal household and the applicants pressed upon the pope’s attention by kings and princes. The spiritual and administrative qualities of the appointees were not too closely scrutinized. Frenchmen were appointed to sees in England, Germany, Denmark, and other countries, who were utterly unfamiliar with the languages of those countries. Marsiglius complains of these "monstrosities "and, among other unfit appointments, mentions the French bishops of Winchester and Lund, neither of whom knew English or Danish. The archbishop of Lund, after plundering his diocese, returned to Southern France. To the supreme right of appointment was added the supreme right to tax the clergy and all ecclesiastical property. The supreme right to exercise authority over kings, the supreme right to set aside canonical rules, the supreme right to make appointments in the Church, the supreme right to tax Church property, these were, in their order, the rights asserted by the popes of the Middle Ages. The scandal growing out of this unlimited right of taxation called forth the most vigorous complaints from clergy and laity, and was in large part the cause which led to the summoning of the three great Reformatory councils of the fifteenth century.174 Popes had acted upon this theory of jurisdiction over the property of the Church long before John XXII.

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

  The shocking immoralities of the popes called forth strong protests, though they did not shake the faith in the institution itself. A Gallican Synod deposed archbishop Arnulf of Rheims as a traitor to king Hugo Capet, without waiting for an answer from the pope, and without caring for the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals (991). The leading spirit of the Synod, Arnulf, bishop of Orleans, made the following bold declaration against the prostitution of the papal office: "Looking at the actual state of the papacy, what do we behold? John [XII.] called Octavian, wallowing in the sty of filthy concupiscence, conspiring against the sovereign whom he had himself recently crowned; then Leo [VIII.] the neophyte, chased from the city by this Octavian; and that monster himself, after the commission of many murders and cruelties, dying by the hand of an assassin. Next we see the deacon Benedict, though freely elected by the Romans, carried away captive into the wilds of Germany by the new Caesar [Otho I.] and his pope Leo. Then a second Caesar [Otho II.], greater in arts and arms than the first [?], succeeds; and in his absence Boniface, a very monster of iniquity, reeking with the blood of his predecessor, mounts the throne of Peter. True, he is expelled and condemned; but only to return again, and redden his hands with the blood of the holy bishop John [XIV.]. Are there, indeed, any bold enough to maintain that the priests of the Lord over all the world are to take their law from monsters of guilt like these-men branded with ignominy, illiterate men, and ignorant alike of things human and divine? If, holy fathers, we be bound to weigh in the balance the lives, the morals, and the attainments of the meanest candidate for the sacerdotal office, how much more ought we to look to the fitness of him who aspires to be the lord and master of all priests! Yet how would it fare with us, if it should happen that the man the most deficient in all these virtues, one so abject as not to be worthy of the lowest place among the priesthood, should be chosen to fill the highest place of all? What would you say of such a one, when you behold him sitting upon the throne glittering in purple and gold? Must he not be the ’Antichrist, sitting in the temple of God, and showing himself as God?’ Verily such a one lacketh both wisdom and charity; he standeth in the temple as an image, as an idol, from which as from dead marble you would seek counsel.285

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  Along with the worship of the mother goddess came that of the youthful and handsome Attis, who, according to the Roman understanding of the myth, had castrated himself in a frenzy brought on by a jealous Magna Mater. He died, but she resurrected him, and he became the model for the galli, priests who castrated themselves with a broken potsherd or stone, dressed in bright colors, and wore effeminate hairstyles and bonnets. They were the antithesis of the various Roman priestly colleges, whose pietas was always heavily laden with decorous solemnity, or gravitas. The galli intentionally spilled and splashed blood on themselves during sacrifice, but the Romans meticulously avoided sullying their dress. Galli priests danced erratically with tambourines and sang ecstatic songs. Roman priests moved slowly and deliberately with self-control and moderation. The galli were shamanlike ecstatics outside civic life—their appointment depended not on a record of civic duty or suitable family lineage, but on personal devotion and what we might call charisma. Roman priests were embedded in political and civic life, were fathers of important families, and were men. But most despicably in Roman eyes, galli priests were neither men nor women. Their self-mutilation was particularly disdainful to Roman authors. In dismissal they slandered them with the charge of performing oral sex with women in spite of being eunuchs. The savage vulgarity of Martial’s Epigrams emphasizes Roman inability to understand such non-Roman religion: What, Gallus, have you to do with a woman’s pit? This tongue of yours ought naturally to lick men’s middles. Why was your prick cut off with a Samian sherd, if a cunt (cunnus) was so pleasant to you? It’s your head should be gelded, for though you are a Gallus in the groin, still you mock Cybele’s rites, in mouth you are a man. (3.81) Notice, however, both what is taken for granted as normal and what is mocked as abnormal in that text’s crude linguistic savagery. The galli confused Roman males because, once self-mutilated, they no longer met the basic criterion for male sexual behavior, which was defined as penetration and control. Yet according to Martial’s slander they nevertheless stooped so low as to penetrate women with their tongues, commonly considered degrading and anti-masculine by Roman males. The galli crossed and therefore confused what Roman male elites considered to be proper sexual roles. Furthermore, they crossed legal categories, as a first-century story in Valerius Maximus’s Memorable Deeds and Sayings makes clear. A priest of the Magna Mater named Genucius once received an inheritance, but it was disallowed because he was neither a man nor a woman. Like the galli’s sexual behavior, Genucius’s legal status didn’t fit the Roman legal system for inheritance (7.7.6).

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  Priapus alerts us to the essential public scripting of normative sexual behavior in the Roman Empire at the time of Paul. Even at best, it was based on control and power. At worst, and that was mostly, it was based on subjugation and humiliation. We look next at more private details, at elements not from public or official civic life, but from the private life of brothel and bedroom from across the Roman world in general and from Pompeian graffiti and frescoes in particular. We examine lines and slogans scribbled in bathhouse corners and small erotic scenes painted on bedroom walls, images the otherwise racy Elegies of Propertius called “lewd panels” and “indecent pictures” that “corrupted the innocent eyes of girls”—but not boys, apparently? (2.6.29). We repeat what we said above about the deeper presuppositions of such items: They were much less about egalitarian sexual mutuality and much more about sexual patriarchy as a microcosm of martial imperialism. They indicate male control, abuse, and even humiliation of female bodies. They specify male power, possession, and penetration of female bodies. Power and Possession Most of the erotic images on lamps, medallions, or walls were intended to evoke feelings of pleasure and sensuality. But we look beneath that surface to see how those images unveil attitudes about possession and subordination. Remember, at the outset, that those Augustan marriage laws were mostly concerned with controlling female promiscuity and elite procreation. Those imperial women depicted on the Ara Pacis Augustae, for example, were cloaked in stolae less for female modesty about their bodies and more for male control over those same bodies. Horace’s Odes describes Rome as “teeming with sin” because “our times have sullied first the marriage-bed, our offspring, and our homes.” Next, “the maiden…plans unholy amours, with passion unrestrained.” Finally, amid “her husband’s revels she seeks younger paramours.” But then to sex and war. He concludes by comparing a present wife’s promiscuity, “lavish purchaser of shame” and “not without her husband’s knowledge,” with past parents “of whom were sprung the youth that dyed the sea with Punic blood” when Hannibal threatened the very future of Rome (3.6.17–36). If you make love virtuously, you will make war vigorously. That attitude is captured in a graffito from the House of the Moralist in Pompeii that warns, “Don’t cast lustful glances, or make eyes at other men’s wives” (CIL 4.7698b). But although men protected their women from others, they sought to conquer the daughters or wives of those same others with near impunity, and the number of those conquests served to establish intramale ascendancy. We find these boasts on walls near a brothel: “I have screwed many girls here” “When I came here, I screwed. Then I returned home” and even one Restitutus bragged that he “seduced often many girls” (CIL 4.2175, 2246, 5251). And again, “Few women have known that I, Floronius, great cocksman, soldier in the VII Legion, was here: and I will do me only six” (CIL 4.8767).

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

  After the death of John the Faster in 596 Gregory instructed his ambassador at Constantinople to demand from the new patriarch, Cyriacus, as a condition of intercommunion, the renunciation of the wicked title, and in a letter to Maurice he went so far as to declare, that "whosoever calls himself universal priest, or desires to be called so, was the forerunner of Antichrist."219 In opposition to these high-sounding epithets, Gregory called himself, in proud humility, "the servant of the servants of God."220 This became one of the standing titles of the popes, although it sounds like irony in conjunction with their astounding claims. But his remonstrance was of no avail. Neither the patriarch nor the emperor obeyed his wishes. Hence he hailed a change of government which occurred in 602 by a violent revolution. When Phocas, an ignorant, red-haired, beardless, vulgar, cruel and deformed upstart, after the most atrocious murder of Maurice and his whole family (a wife, six sons and three daughters), ascended the throne, Gregory hastened to congratulate him and his wife Leontia (who was not much better) in most enthusiastic terms, calling on heaven and earth to rejoice at their accession, and vilifying the memory of the dead emperor as a tyrant, from whose yoke the church was now fortunately freed.221 This is a dark spot, but the only really dark and inexcusable spot in the life of this pontiff. He seemed to have acted in this case on the infamous maxim that the end justifies the means.222 His motive was no doubt to secure the protection and aggrandizement of the Roman see. He did not forget to remind the empress of the papal proof-text: "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church," and to add: "I do not doubt that you will take care to oblige and bind him to you, by whom you desire to be loosed from your sins." The murderer and usurper repaid the favor by taking side with the pope against his patriarch (Cyriacus), who had shown sympathy with the unfortunate emperor. He acknowledged the Roman church to be "the head of all churches."223 But if he ever made such a decree at the instance of Boniface III., who at that time was papal nuntius at Constantinople, he must have meant merely such a primacy of honor as had been before conceded to Rome by the Council of Chalcedon and the emperor Justinian. At all events the disputed title continued to be used by the patriarchs and emperors of Constantinople. Phocas, after a disgraceful reign (602–610), was stripped of the diadem and purple, loaded with chains, insulted, tortured, beheaded and cast into the flames. He was succeeded by Heraclius. In this whole controversy the pope’s jealousy of the patriarch is very manifest, and suggests the suspicion that it inspired the protest.

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

  In these cases such expressions are used as "remission and indulgence of penances," "relaxation or remission from the imposed penance," "the relaxation of the imposed satisfaction," and also "a lightening or remission of sins."1742 The free-handed liberality with which these franchises were dispensed by bishops became so much of a scandal that the Lateran council of 1215 issued a sharp decree to check it. More than half a century before, in 1140, Abaelard had condemned the abuse of this prerogative by bishops and priests who were governed in its lavish exercise by motives of sordid cupidity.1743 The construction of bridges over rivers, the building of churches, and the visiting of shrines were favorite and meritorious grounds for the gifts of indulgence. Innocent III., 1209, granted full remission for the building of a bridge over the Rhone; Innocent IV. for rebuilding the cathedrals of Cologne, 1248, and Upsala, 1250, which had suffered from fire.1744 According to Matthew Paris, Gregory IX., in 1241, granted an indulgence of forty days to all worshipping the crown of thorns and the cross in the chapel at Paris and, in 1247, the bishop of Norwich, speaking for the English prelates, announced a remission of all penances for six years and one hundred and forty days to those who would worship the Holy Blood at Westminster.1745 Indulgences for building bridges and roads were common in England.1746 To the next period belongs the first cases of indulgence granted in connection with the Jubilee Year by Boniface VIII., 1300. Among the more famous indulgences granted to private parties and localities was the Portiuncula indulgence giving remission to all visiting the famous Franciscan shrine at Assisi on a certain day of the year,1747 and the Sabbatina, granting to all entering the Carmelite order or wearing the scapulary deliverance from purgatory the Saturday after their death.1748 The practice of dispensing indulgences grew enormously. Innocent III. dispensed five during his pontificate. Less than one hundred years later, Nicolas IV., in his reign of two years, 1288–1290, dispensed no less than four hundred. By that time they had become a regular item of the papal exchequer. On what grounds did the Church claim the right to remit the works of penance due for sins or, as Alexander of Hales put it, grant abatement of the punishment due sin?1749The statement was this: Christ’s passion is of infinite merit. Mary and the saints also by their works of patience laid up merit beyond what was required from them for heaven. These supererogatory works or merits of the saints and of Christ are so abundant that they would more than suffice to pay off the debts of all the living.1750 Together they constitute the thesaurus meritorum, or fund of merits; and this is at the disposal of the Church by virtue of her nuptial union with Christ, Col. 1:24. This fund is a sort of bank account, upon which the Church may draw at pleasure.

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

  Julian charges the Christians, on this point, with apostasy from their own Master, and sarcastically reminds them of His denunciation of the Pharisees, who were like whited sepulchres, beautiful without, but within full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.892 This opposition, of course, made no impression, and was attributed to sheer impiety. Even heretics and schismatics, with few exceptions, embraced this form of superstition, though the Catholic church denied the genuineness of their relics and the miraculous virtue of them The most and the best of the church teachers of our period, Hilary, the two Gregories, Basil, Chrysostom, Isidore of Pelusium, Theodoret, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Leo, even those who combated the worship of images on this point, were carried along by the spirit of the time, and gave the weight of their countenance to the worship of relics, which thus became an essential constituent of the Greek and Roman Catholic religion. They went quite as far as the council of Trent,893 which expresses itself more cautiously, on the worship of relics as well as of saints, than the church fathers of the Nicene age. With the good intent to promote popular piety by sensible stimulants and tangible supports, they became promoters of dangerous errors and gross

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  For the people who are going to work in the sales department this process will be particularly brutal. The reps have high quotas, and if you fall short, you get cut. Most companies put sales reps on a quarterly or annual quota. At HubSpot the quotas are monthly, which means sales reps never come up for air. The sales department churns through these young hires. Bring them in, burn them out, toss them away, find new ones—that’s the model. In every aspect of life, we’re told, there is a HubSpotty way of doing things. Nobody can really explain what HubSpotty means, but it is a real word that people use, all the time. Some people are more HubSpotty than others. Some are 100 percent HubSpotty, possessed of a HubSpottiness that is so complete as to be beyond reproach. Those people “bleed orange.” Their ideas cannot be questioned. They can do pretty much anything they want. They are the HubSpot equivalent of a Level 8 Operating Thetan in Scientology. Newcomers are by definition not HubSpotty yet. We have to earn that designation, and it takes time. Nobody just comes in and gets accepted. A big part of establishing your HubSpottiness involves being relentlessly upbeat and positive. HubSpot is like a corporate version of Up with People, the inspirational singing group from the 1970s, but with a touch of Scientology. It’s a cult based around marketing. The Happy!! Awesome!! Start-up Cult, I began to call it. Instead of ID badges, the company gives out rubber ID bracelets with the HubSpot logo on them. The bracelets contain a transponder that unlocks doors into different parts of the office. It feels ridiculous and cultish to wear a special bracelet, but you can’t get anywhere without one. I’ve spent years writing incredibly over-the-top satire about the technology industry, inventing stories in which Steve Jobs possesses the power to hypnotize people just by staring at them, and depicting Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, as a crazy cult compound policed by rifle-toting public relations people and populated by brainwashed corporate zombies who speak their own private jargon and all truly believe they are doing incredibly important work, making the world a better place. Now I am encountering a real-life version of this, at a company in Kendall Square. It’s amazing. It’s the craziest, best thing ever. I love this place the way I love movies like Showgirls and Battlefield Earth and anything with Nicolas Cage—movies that are so bad you can’t believe they exist, yet you’re glad they do, movies that are so bad that they’re good. Five [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] HubSpeakS o I can be the DRI on this, or Jan and I can be DRIs together, and we’ll coordinate with Courtney to work up some potential KPIs, and then we can all meet again in like a week or two and we’ll present some ideas and then we can develop an SLA.

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

  These efforts, generally known as social Darwinism, resulted in eugenic recommendations in Europe and in the United States. Later, during the Third Reich, biological facts were misinterpreted and applied to human societies with the goal of producing a radical sociocultural transformation. The result was a horrifying and massive extermination of specific human groups targeted because of their ethnic background or political and behavioral identity. Biology was unfairly but understandably blamed for this inhumane perversion. It would take decades for the relation between biology and cultures to become an acceptable subject of scholarship. 2 By the last quarter of the twentieth century and thereafter, sociobiology and the discipline it spawned, evolutionary psychology, have made a case not only for a biological perspective on the cultural mind but for the biological transmission of culture-related traits. 3 The latter efforts concentrated on the relationship between cultures and the genetic replication process. The fact that the worlds of feeling and reason are in endless interplay and that cultural ideas, objects, and practices are inevitably caught in their accommodations and contradictions has not been the focus of those efforts (although evolutionary psychologists have included the action component of the world of affect—such as emotions—in their proposals). The same applies to the topic I privilege in this book: the ways in which the cultural mind copes with human drama and exploits human possibilities, and the manner in which cultural selection completes the cultural mind’s job and complements the achievements of genetic transmission. I am not favoring affect and human drama, to the exclusion of other participants in the cultural process. I am simply focusing attention on affect—and feeling in particular—in the hope that it can be more clearly incorporated in accounts of the biology of cultures. To achieve this, I must insist on the role of homeostasis and of its conscious deputy—feeling—in the cultural process. In spite of all the historical forays of biology into the world of cultures, the notion of homeostasis, even in the conventional and narrow sense of life regulation, is absent from classical treatments of culture. As noted earlier, Talcott Parsons did mention homeostasis when he considered cultures from the perspective of systems, but in his account homeostasis was unrelated to feelings or to individuals. 4 How does one connect the state of homeostasis to the making of a cultural instrument capable of correcting a homeostatic deficit? As I suggested, the bridge is provided by feeling, a mental expression of the homeostatic state.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  1 1 And indeed, an inherent bent towards social levelling is imp licit in th e affirmation of ordinary life. The centre of the good life lies now in something which everyone can have a part in, rather than in ranges of activity which only a leisured few can do justice to. The scope of this social reversal can be better measured if we look at t he critique launched against the other ma i n variant of the traditional hierarchical view, the honour ethic, which had its original roots in · the citizen life. This was closely connected with the soc ial stratification of the age and particularly with the distinction between aristocrats and commoners, and so the challenge turns out to have an important social di m ension. But this was not immediately evident. The et hi c o f honour a nd glory, after receiving one of its most inspiring expression s in the work of Corneille, is subjected to a withering critique in the seventeenth century. Its goals are denounced as vainglory and vanity, as th e fruits of an almost childish presumption. We find this with Hobbes as well as with Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, and Moliere. But the negative arguments in these writers are not new. Plato himself was su sp icio us of the honour ethi c, a s concerned with mere ap pea r ances. The Stoics rejected it; and it was denounced by Augustine as the exaltation of the desire for power, the libido dominandi, whic h w as on e of a trinity of disorder ed passions, along with sexual desire and the craving for gain. A writer like Pascal was really reformulating the uncompromising Augustinian criti q ue. 12 But what eventuall y gives this critique its historical significanc e as an engi ne of social change is the new promotion of ordinary life. In the latter part of the century, the critique is taken up and becomes a commonplace of a new ideal of life, in which sob er and disciplined production was given the central place, and the search for honour condemned as fractious and undisciplined self-indulgence, gratuitously endangering the really valuable things in life. A new model of civility emer g es in the eighteenth century , in which the life of commerce and acquisition gains an unprecedent ed ly positive place . As Albert Hirschman shows, 1 3 a conception arose of "le doux c ommerce,, as a property o f civilized nations.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  "How comes it then ... that according as the Deity is represented to us, he should more resemble th e weak, womanish, and impotent part of our nature, than the generous, manly and divine?" 2 6 A religion of fear, in which man is motivated by the prospect of reward and punishment, stifles true piety, which is "to love God for his own sake". 2 7 This kind of religion suffers from "mercenariness and a slavish spirit". 28 Locke's theology deserves this stinging epithet as well. But Locke is also re p r o ached for somethi ng worse: h e has continued the work of Hobbes and denied our natural ben t towards the good. According to this view, nothing is g ood or bad, admirable or contemptible intrinsically, but only in relation to s ome law or rule unde r which it is made to fall, backed by penalties; "that all a ctions are naturally indifferent; that they have no note or character of good or ill in themselves; but are distinguished by mere fashion, law, or arbitrary d ecr ee " . 29 N othing could be more wrong. It is as absurd to say that virtue and vice, ho n our and dishonour, could be a matter of arbitr ary decree, as "that the me asu re or rule of harmony was caprice or will, humour or fashion". 30 S haft esbury recurs again and again to this analogy with music-and with a r c hi tecture and painting-in defending against this Hobbes-Locke thesis of n a tu ral indifference: let me call it the extrinsic theory of morality. Right and wrong are just as fixed to standards in nature as are harmony and dissonance. 3 1 Something like a harmony or proportion of numbers is to be 2.54 • THE AFFIRMAT ION OF OR DINA RY LIFE found in all these fields. In Advice, the tr ue artist is sai d to be on e who is no t "at a loss in those numbers which make the harmony of a mind. For knavery is mere dissonance and di sproportion" . 3 2 He has to have a n ey e o r ear "fo r these interior nu m be rs".33 And "the real honest man ... instead of outwar d forms of symmetries, is struck with that of inward character , the harmony and numbers of the heart and beauty of the affections" . 34 What did Shaftesbury mean in using these as terms of moral descripti on? It's not entirely clear to us, and perhaps it wasn't fully so to him.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Crunchbase, a website that tracks venture capital investments, lists Cranium as one of three participants in HubSpot’s Series A round of funding in 2007, the year he joined the company. Cranium believes he is a marketing genius. He has people surrounding him who believe that, too. But sometimes I wonder if Cranium knows what he’s doing. One of his ploys to get attention involves publishing an article on Mashable, a technology news site, with the provocative headline 10 REASONS WHY I IGNORED YOUR RESUME . In the article Cranium makes fun of the awful resumes he fields in his position as a world-famous marketing superstar. Cranium says people need to proofread their resumes, catch typos, and spell things correctly—but his article contains typos, and includes a reference to the actor Will Ferrell, but misspells his name as Will Farrell . Some readers post comments praising the article, but others savage Cranium, not only for the Will Ferrell mistake and typos, but for his snooty tone. “Would anyone want to work for HubSpot after the CMO writes something like this?” one person writes. “All the money in the world as payment would not be enough to work for this moron,” another commenter writes. “Someone has a power/ego problem,” says a third. Cranium perceives himself as being skilled at recruiting and hiring, yet turnover in his department is so high that people in other parts of HubSpot refer to the marketing department as “the French Revolution.” People are constantly being hired and fired, or “graduated,” as Cranium says in his emails to the group. I keep making friends, only to have them disappear. These “graduations” sometimes happen suddenly, with no warning. In my second week at HubSpot I have lunch with a woman named Bettina. She’s right out of college, working in her first job, and wants to write a book about marketing to Millennials. That night everyone in the department gets an email saying Bettina has “graduated” and will not be back in the morning. I email Bettina and ask why she never mentioned this at lunch. She tells me she didn’t know. Her boss just fired her, out of the blue, and told her to never come back. Usually, Cranium has other people do the firing for him, and he typically does not speak to the “graduates,” even in cases where the person being fired has spent years working in his department. Before my time, Cranium created a weekly video podcast called HubSpot TV, starring himself and a co-host. The show streamed live, every Friday afternoon. I can’t imagine many people outside HubSpot actually watched it. Cranium didn’t care! He and his co-host kept doing the podcast for four years and recorded 225 episodes. Those videos still exist online someplace. They are like a real-life version of the comedy done by Ricky Gervais in the British version of The Office , where the goal is not so much to make you laugh as to make you feel uncomfortable.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  The world "in disconnection dead and spiritless,., 1 0 or the world as seen through Blake ' s vegetative eye, has some affini ty with the Waste Land of Eliot. There is a continuing thread here, a critique of th e mechanistic and instrument al, as a way of seeing , and as a way of livi ng, and then as the very pri nciple of our social existence, which runs through an immense varie ty of differ e nt articu lations , interpretations, and suggested remedies. An allegiance to epiphanic an has almost invariably been accompanied by a strong hostility to t h e developing commercial-industrial-capitalist society, from Schiller to Marx t o M arcuse and Adorno; from Blake to Baudelaire to Pound and Eliot. But just speaking of the moral significance of epiphanic art leaves an important ambiguity unexamined. The relation to morality of the wholene ss or intensity it p r omises is very problematic. Already Schiller, in his famous Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, seems to offer two incompatibl e views of the relation of beauty to morality. On one view, play and the beauty it creates is an aid to the moral will. This will define s the content of h um an perfection, and beauty is an auxiliary, even though an indispensable one, in attaining this. 1 1 B ut another view is · constantly suggested through the wor k, and occasionally formulated: play and the aesthetic offer a higher fulfilm e n t than th e merely moral, because the moral only realizes one side of us, form and not matter, while beauty can make us whole, give us harmony an d freedom . 12 M orality her e is understood in the terms of the eighteenth centu ry, wh er e justice and benevolence, and the control of the desires by reason, constitu t e its essence. The new thought emerging in Schiller's text is that beauty mi gh t offer us a higher goal. At least on Schiller's version this woul d incorporate Visions of the Post-Romantic Age • 4 2. 3 morality and be fully compatible with it. The harm9nized, free being who p lays would spontaneously want to be good in the accepted senses; he would ju st have something more than the stern follower of duty. But the worrisome po ssibility is now open that this higher fulfilment might take us outside the received morality; i t might lead us to turn aside from it , as Pater feared; 13 or it might even demand that we repudiate it; as Nietzsche affirms of the e thic o f benevolence. The germ was t here in the new aesthetic which developed in the eighteenth century.