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

  All we have to do is click on a link and a tweet will go out from our account, urging our followers to check out this amazing new article about a brilliant management technique. Our tweets will contain a link to Dharmesh’s post on LinkedIn. The lazy tweets make life easier for us, but having a bunch of people from HubSpot suddenly flood Twitter with exactly the same messages at exactly the same time doesn’t strike me as the smartest way to promote an article. On the Internet, ginning up fake grassroots support is called astroturfing, and the tactic is generally frowned upon. I’m surprised to see HubSpot doing it, because the company touts its expertise at social media marketing and claims it can teach small business owners how to attract attention online by creating unique, “lovable” content and being “remarkable.” But here we are, bludgeoning social media with a barrage of identical tweets, all telling everyone we know to go read this great new article by our boss. I’m willing to help, but before I post any tweets I take a few minutes to read the article—and what Dharmesh has written nearly knocks me off my chair. The title of the article is “Your Customers Are Not Ignorant, Selfish Control Freaks.” Our company’s “thought leader” claims he has made an innovative breakthrough in management science: He now brings a teddy bear to meetings, and he recommends that everyone else do the same. That’s right. A teddy bear. Dharmesh argues that a company should always be “solving for the customer,” or SFTC as people call it at HubSpot. This means that in everything you do, you should be putting the needs of your customers ahead of everything else. To remind his HubSpot colleagues of that, Dharmesh has acquired a teddy bear, and he sits her at the table during meetings as a stand-in for the customer. Her name is Molly. Dharmesh goes on to say that he started out just placing an empty chair at the conference table and pretending that the chair was a customer. But the empty chair wasn’t enough, he decided. So now he has taken his innovation to the next level and brought in Molly. Dharmesh’s LinkedIn article even includes a photograph of Molly sitting at a meeting, next to Cranium. In the photo, Cranium is the big guy in the white shirt at the right side, and Molly is the little one next to him, drinking what appears to be a Red Bull and looking like she’s ready to carve someone a new asshole. [image "image" file=Image00004.jpg] I cannot believe this. Here are grown men and women, who I presume are fully sentient adult human beings, and they are sitting in meetings, talking to a teddy bear . And I am working with these people. No: worse! I am working for them. At Newsweek I worked for Jon Meacham, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Andrew Jackson.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  In other chapters other qualities have seemed, and will again seem, more important parts of psychology. Men are so ingrained partial that, for common-sense and scholasticism (which is only common-sense grown articulate), the notion that there is no one quality genuinely, absolutely, and exclusively essential to anything is almost unthinkable. "B thing's essence makes it what it is. Without an exclusive essence it would be nothing in particular, would be quite nameless, we could not say it was this rather than that. What you write on, for example,—why talk of its being combustible, rectangular, and the like, when you know that these are mere accidents, and that what it really is, and was made to be, is just paper and nothing else?" The reader is pretty sure to make some such comment as this. But he is himself merely insisting on an aspect of the thing which suits his own petty purpose, that of naming the thing; or else on an aspect which suits the manufacturer's purpose, that of producing an article for which there is a vulgar demand. Meanwhile the reality overflows these purposes at every pore. Our usual purpose with it, our commonest title for it, and the properties which this title suggests, have in reality nothing sacramental. They characterize us more than they characterize the thing. But we are so stuck in our prejudices, so petrified intellectually, that to our vulgarest names, with their suggestions, we ascribe an eternal and exclusive worth. The thing must be, essentially, what the vulgarest name connotes; what less usual names connote, it can be only in an 'accidental' and relatively unreal sense. [343] Locke undermined the fallacy. But none of his successors, so far as I know, have radically escaped it, or seen that the only meaning of essence is teleological, and that classification and conception are purely teleological weapons of the mind. The essence of a thing is that one of its properties which is so important for my interests that in comparison with it I may neglect the rest. Amongst those other things which have this important property I class it, after this property I name it, as a thing endowed with this property I conceive it; and whilst so classing, naming, and conceiving it, all other truth about it becomes to me as naught. [344] The properties which are important vary from man to man and from hour to hour. [345] Hence divers appellations and conceptions for the same thing. But many objects of daily use—as paper, ink, butter, horse-car—have properties of such constant unwavering importance, and have such stereotyped names, that we end by believing that to conceive them in those ways is to conceive them in the only true way.

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

  A gap like this surfaced in the discussion above, wh er e som e n aturalist s pr opose to t rea t all moral on tologie s a s ir relevant stories, without validity, while the y themselves go on arguing like the rest of us about what objects are fit and what reactions appropriate. What generall y happens here is that the reductive explanation itself, often a sociobiological one, which supposedl y justifies this exclusion, itself takes on t he role of moral ontology. That is, it starts to provide the basis for discriminations about app ro pri ate obj ects or valid resp on ses . Wha t st arts off in ch apter I as a ha rd- n osed scient i fic theory ju stifying an error theory of moral ity becomes i n t he co nclus ion the basis for a ne w 's cientific' or 'evol utio na ry' ethic . 5 Here, o ne is fo rced to con cl ude, there reig ns an ideol ogical ly ind uce d illus ion ab out t he n a ture of the mor al ont o l o gy that the think ers con cerned a ctually rely on. The re is a very contro ve rsial but very im porta n t job of ar tic ula tion to be done zo • I DENTITY AND THE GOOD here, in the teeth of the people co ncerned , which can show to what extent the real spiritual basis of their own moral judgements deviates fr om what is officially admitted. It will be my claim that there is a gr eat deal of motiva ted supp res sion of moral ontol o gy among our contempo ra ries, in part because the pluralist na tur e of modern society m akes it easier to liv e that way, but also beca use of the grea t weight of modern epistemology (as with the naturalists evoked above} and, behind this, of the spiritual outlook associated w ith this epistemology. So the work I am embarked u p on her e could be called in large degree an essay in· retrieval.

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

  fully persuaded that the tenor of his life and conduct among the Jews was the best apology that could possibly be made in his behalf .... And even now he preserves the same silence, and makes no other answer than the unblemished lives of his sincere followers; they are his most cheerful and successful advocates, and have so loud a voice that they drown the clamors of the most zealous and bigoted adversaries." II. To their defence the Christians, with the rising consciousness of victory, added direct arguments against heathenism, which were practically sustained by, its dissolution in the following period. (1) The popular religion of the heathens, particularly the doctrine of the gods, is unworthy, contradictory, absurd, immoral, and pernicious. The apologists and most of the early church teachers looked upon the heathen gods not as mere imaginations or personified powers of nature or deifications of distinguished men, but as demons or fallen angels. They took this view from the Septuagint version of Ps. 96:5,104 and from the immorality of those deities, which was charged to demons (even sexual intercourse with fair daughters of men, according to Gen. 6:2). "What sad fates," says Minucius Felix, "what lies, ridiculous things, and weaknesses we read of the pretended gods! Even their form, how pitiable it is! Vulcan limps; Mercury has wings to his feet; Pan is hoofed; Saturn in fetters; and Janus has two faces, as if he walked backwards .... Sometimes Hercules is a hostler, Apollo a cow-herd, and Neptune, Laomedon’s mason, cheated of his wages. There we have the thunder of Jove and the arms of Aeneas forged on the same anvil (as if the heavens and the thunder and lightning did not exist before Jove was born in Crete); the adultery of Mars and Venus; the lewdness of Jupiter with Ganymede, all of which were invented for the gods to authorize men in their wickedness." "Which of the poets," asks Tertullian, "does not calumniate your gods? One sets Apollo to keep sheep; another hires out Neptune to build a wall; Pindar declares Esculapius was deservedly scathed for his avarice in exercising the art of medicine to a bad purpose; whilst the writers of tragedy and comedy alike, take for their subjects the crimes or the miseries of the deities. Nor are the philosophers behindhand in this respect. Out of pure contempt, they would swear by an oak, a goat, a dog. Diogenes turned Hercules into ridicule; and the Roman Cynic Varro introduces three hundred Joves without heads." From the stage abuser the sarcastic African father selects, partly from his own former observation, those of Diana being flogged, the reading of Jupiter’s will after his decease, and the three half-starved Herculesses!

• From The Pisces (2018)

  Alas, our fearless leader was deeply single and trying to be at peace with it. I wondered if she even had a boyfriend. How could she lead a group on sex and love issues? Who would want to take love advice from a single woman who convinced herself she was happy using store-bought sayings she posted on her wall? And what kind of doctor was she anyway? I didn’t see a PhD next to her name. Was she a doctor of love? Dr. Jude had yellowish teeth and a Dorothy Hamill haircut. I guess the yellow teeth meant that she accepted herself and would not be changing for anyone. I was oddly intrigued by her positivity in the face of the abyss, as though I were an anthropologist encountering a new culture for the first time. But when she quoted E. E. Cummings in an attempt to say that we could only be ourselves, I decided she was stupid. Also, she used the words radical acceptance a lot. I didn’t want to radically accept anything. When I returned to Phoenix I wanted everything to be radically different. I didn’t like her. But compared to the disaster that was the rest of the group, Dr. Jude seemed like a winner. Our youngest member was Amber: mid-twenties, built like a female wrestler, sweatpants covered in dog hair. Amber had been in the group longest and was furthest along in terms of “doing the work” in the personal growth and love department. She made sure we all knew that. Immediately, in my mind I called her Chickenhorse, as her head was long and horse-shaped but she had a beaky nose and big pink gums that resembled a chicken’s comb and wattles. She seemed to get aroused by telling all of us we were wrong. Dr. Jude had encouraged Chickenhorse to start dating again, but she had not yet begun. Instead, she focused on problematic interactions she had with people in her life. “My boss is emotionally abusive. He’s victimizing me,” she said. “Can you tell us more?” asked Dr. Jude. “I can’t explain it, it’s just a feeling,” she said. “And as the victim, I don’t think I should have to explain myself.” “Understandable,” said Dr. Jude. “It’s my truth. And I’m afraid to bring it up to his supervisors, because this is what happened with my last boss too. He was another abuser; there’s a pattern of abuse. When I came forward about it at my last job, everyone started gaslighting me by acting like I’m the crazy one.”

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  Margot and Mother do the dishes, Mr. and Mrs. van D. head for the divan, Peter for the attic, Father for his divan, Dussel too, and Anne does her homework. What comes next is the quietest hour of the day; when they’re all asleep, there are no disturbances. To judge by his face, Dussel is dreaming of food. But I don’t look at him long, because the time whizzes by and before you know it, it’ll be 4 P.M. and the pedantic Dr. Dussel will be standing with the clock in his hand because I’m one minute ,late clearing off the table. Yours, Anne SATURDAY, AUGUST 7, 1943 Dearest Kitty, A few weeks ago I started writing a story, something I made up from beginning to end, and I’ve enjoyed it so much that the products of my pen are piling up. Yours, Anne MONDAY, AUGUST 9, 1943 Dearest Kitty, We now continue with a typical day in the Annex. Since we’ve already had lunch, it’s time to describe dinner. Mr. van Daan. Is served first, and takes a generous portion of whatever he likes. Usually joins in the conversation, never fails to give his opinion. Once he’s spoken, his word is final. If anyone dares to suggest otherwise, Mr. van D. can put up a good fight. Oh, he can hiss like a cat. . . but I’d rather he didn’t. Once you’ve seen it, you never want to see it again. His opinion is the best, he knows the most about everything. Granted, the man has a good head on his shoulders, but it’s swelled to no small degree. Madame. Actually, the best thing would be to say nothing. Some days, especially when a foul mood is on the way, her face is hard to read. If you analyze the discussions, you realize she’s not the subject, but the guilty

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

  It falls between t he holes in the grid. We ca n e asily s ee why. It is not the exploration of an 'objective' order in the classical sense of a publicly accessible reality. The order is only a ccessib le through personal, hence 'subjective', resonance. This is why, as I argued e arlier, the danger of a regression to subjectivism always exists in this enterprise. It can easily slide into a celebration of our creative powers, or the s ources can be appropriated, interpreted as within us, and represented as the basis for 'liberation'. But at its best, in full integrity, the enterpr i se is an attem pt to surmount subjectivism. It is just that this remains a con tinuin g task , which cannot be put behind u s o n ce and for all, as wi th the pub lic ord er of former times. This exploration of order through personal resonance fares no better at the hands of another class of views, even more strongly anti-subjectivist tha n the ones just examined. These are views, like those of the followers of Leo Strauss, which are critical of the whole modern turn, both in its disengaged- The Conflicts of Modernity • 5 r r instrumental and in its Romantic-expressive forms. The sympathies of this type of outlook tend to be rather narrow, and their reading of the varied facets of the modern identity unsympathetic. The dee p er moral vision, the genuine moral sources invoked in the aspiration to disengaged reason or expressive fulfilment tend to be overlooked; and the less impressive motives pride, self-satisfaction, liberation from demanding standards-brought to the fore. Moderni ty is often read through its least impressive, most trivializing offshoots. 25 But this distorts. The most frivolous and self-indulgent forms of the human potential movement in the United States today can't give us the measure of the aspiration to expressive fulfilment as we find it, for instance, in Goethe or Arnold. And even the most frivolous manifestation may reflect more than we can see at a glance. Above all, we have to avoid t he error of declaring those goods invalid whose exclusive pursuit leads to contemptible or disastrous consequences. The search for pure subjective expressive fulfil ment may ma k e lif e thin and insubsta n ti a l , may ultimately undercut i tself, as I argued above. But that by itself does nothing to show that subjective fulfilment is not a good. It shows o nl y that it needs to be part of a 'package', to be sought within a life which is also ai med at other goods.

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

  A nd then Nietzsche took this attack a st age further and tried to break out of the wh o le form of thought he defined as 'moral', i.e., all forms whi ch involve the rejection of the sup po sedly "lower" in us, of our will to power, a nd to come to a more total self-af fir m ;:ation, a yea-sa ying to what one i s. Enlightenment naturalism also frequ ent l y portra y ed rel igious mo ralit i es o f the "higher" not only as the sourc e of self-r e pr es s ion but als o as t h e Ethics of Inarticulacy • 7 I ju st i fi c a tio n of social oppression, as the supposed carriers of the "higher", be t h e y p ri es ts or aristocrats, exercise their natural right to rule the " lower u o r d e rs fo r the latter's own good. Neo-Nietzschean thinkers have extended th i s c riti q ue an d tried to show ho w various forms of socia l exclusion and d o m in at i on are built into the very de fi n itions by which a h yp ergo o d pe rs p e cti ve is constituted, as certain models of religious order excluded and d o m in a ted w omen, 31 as ideals and disciplines of rational c ontrol excluded a n d do m in ated the lower classes (as well as women again), 32 as definitions of h eal th and fulfilment exclude and marginalize dissidents, 33 as other notions o f ci v i li z ation exclude subje ct rac e s , 34 and so on. Of cou rse, the argument is complicated by the fact that all of these a tt ac ks, with the exception of Foucault's, are overtly (and, in fact, I believe Fo uc a ult's are as well, though unadmittedly) committed to their own rival hy p ergoods, generally in the range of our third example above, connected to the principle of universal and equal respect. But this doe s n't reduce the p erplexity and uncertainty we feel here. It seems that at least some of the h ypergoods espoused so passionatel y must be illusory, the projection of le s s admirable interests or desires. Why then shouldn't all of them be so? So indeed they might be.

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

  I sit in the Tesla that’s on display outside the auditorium, dreaming that my HubSpot options might someday be worth enough that I can buy a car like this. I figured Cranium would be setting up dinners for the HubSpot gang. But… nothing. No email from Cranium, no invitations to get together. Just like with my first day at HubSpot, I’ve been flown out here to attend this show then left to myself, with no instructions, no socializing. Cut loose, I spend my evenings catching up with friends in San Francisco. I do some shopping in Union Square. I have breakfast with a tech CMO from the East Coast and lunch with a PR exec from a company in the Valley. Torrential rains strike on the night of the Green Day concert, but thousands of people go anyway. Many of them stay even after the sound system blows out and Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong tries to carry on as an acoustic show, with no microphone. I stay in my hotel and gaze out my window at the rain-blurred lights down below, marveling at all the money and evil sloshing around down there. One hundred and forty thousand salespeople have hit San Francisco, armed with expense accounts and determined to have the time of their lives. They will sleep with their clients. They will sleep with their colleagues. Hookers have flown in from all over the country for this. Tinder and Grindr and the Craigslist “casual encounters” listings are packed with out-of-towners looking to hook up. The strip bars and S&M clubs are booming. Dreamforce turns out to be a four-day orgy worthy of Caligula, a triumph of vulgarity and wasteful spending, with free booze and endless shrimp cocktail and a rate of STD transmission that probably rivals Fleet Week. Gazing down on this mess is like looking into the pit of Mordor. So many lost souls! These glorified car salesmen, these people whose jobs involve coercion and manipulation, whose lives revolve around making their numbers. Every month, every quarter, every year: sell, sell, sell! These are the people who took the Internet, one of the most wonderful and profound inventions of all time, and polluted it with advertising and turned it into a way to sell stuff. No wonder these zombies need to take a week off in San Francisco once a year, with some Deepak Chopra and maybe an eight ball of coke and a Canadian hooker to make the whole thing seem worthwhile. Dreamforce is only part of Benioff’s mad campaign of megalomaniacal self-aggrandizement. Five months from now, in April 2014, Benioff will announce plans to make Salesforce.com the anchor tenant for a new skyscraper that is already under construction in San Francisco. Salesforce.com will commit $560 million to help finish work on the one-thousand-foot glass-and-steel skyscraper, which will become the company’s headquarters and be named the Salesforce Tower. When it opens in 2018, it will be the tallest building in the city, dwarfing everything around it.

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

  Jerome, who lived a monk at Bethlehem, was at first decidedly favorable to the synergistic theory of the Greek fathers, but at the same time agreed with Ambrose and Augustine in the doctrine of the absolutely universal corruption of sin.1724 But from an enthusiastic admirer of Origen he had been changed to a bitter enemy. The doctrine of Pelagius concerning free will and the moral ability of human nature he attributed to the influence of Origen and Rufinus; and he took as a personal insult an attack of Pelagius on some of his writings.1725 He therefore wrote against him, though from wounded pride and contempt he did not even mention his name; first in a letter answering inquiries of a certain Ctesiphon at Rome (415);1726 then more at length in a dialogue of three books against the Pelagians, written towards the end of the year 415, and soon after the acquittal of Pelagius by the synod of Jerusalem.1727 Yet in this treatise and elsewhere Jerome himself teaches the freedom of the will, and only a conditional predestination of divine foreknowledge, and thus, with all his personal bitterness against the Pelagians, stands on Semi-Pelagian ground, though Augustine eulogizes the dialogue.1728 A young Spanish ecclesiastic, Paul Orosius, was at that time living with Jerome for the sake of more extended study, and had been sent to him by Augustine with letters relating to the Origenistic and Pelagian controversy. At a diocesan synod, convoked by the bishop John of Jerusalem in June, 415,1729 this Orosius appeared against Pelagius, and gave information that a council at Carthage had condemned Coelestius, and that Augustine had written against his errors. Pelagius answered with evasion and disparagement: "What matters Augustine to me?" Orosius gave his opinion, that a man who presumed to speak contumeliously of the bishop to whom the whole North African church owed her restoration (alluding apparently to the settlement of the Donatist controversies), deserved to be excluded from the communion of the whole church. John, who was a great admirer of the condemned Origen, and made little account of the authority of Augustine, declared: "I am Augustine,"1730 and undertook the defence of the accused. He permitted Pelagius, although only a monk and layman, to take his seat among the presbyters.1731 Nor did he find fault with Pelagius’ assertion, that man can easily keep the commandments of God, and become free from sin, after the latter had conceded, in a very indefinite manner, that for this the help of God is necessary. Pelagius had the advantage of understanding both languages, while John spoke only Greek, Orosius only Latin, and the interpreter often translated inaccurately. After much discussion it was resolved, that the matter should be laid before the Roman bishop, Innocent, since both parties in the controversy belonged to the Western church. Meanwhile these should refrain from all further attacks on each other. A second Palestinian council resulted still more favorably to Pelagius.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  Yours, Anne THURSDAY, MARCH 4, 1943 Dearest Kitty, Mrs. van D. has a new nickname -- we’ve started calling her Mrs. Beaverbrook. Of course, that doesn’t mean anything to you, so let me explain. A certain Mr. Beaverbrook often talks on the English radio about what he considers to be the far too lenient bombardment of Germany. Mrs. van Daan, who always contradicts everyone, including Churchill and the news reports, is in complete agreement with Mr. Beaverbrook. So we thought it would be a good idea for her to be married to him, and since she was flattered by the notion, we’ve decided to call her Mrs. Beaverbrook from now on. We’re getting a new warehouse employee, since the old one is being sent to Germany. That’s bad for him but good for us because the new one won’t be famthar with the building. We’re still afraid of the men who work in the warehouse. Gandhi is eating again. The black market is doing a booming business. If we had enough money to pay the ridiculous prices, we could stuff ourselves silly. Our greengrocer buys potatoes from the “Wehrmacht” and brings them in sacks to the private office.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  In The Laws, his last work, Plato described another utopian polis in which the old worship remained important. He denied that there was any conflict between reason and traditional Greek piety. There were no compelling proofs for the existence of the Olympian daimones, but it was irrational and unintelligent to deny the ancient myths, because like fairy tales, they contained a modicum of truth. Plato wanted to reform the cult. He insisted that the Olympians could not be influenced by sacrifice or prayer, but that people should express their gratitude to these intermediaries with the ineffable, divine world. 101 Hester, Zeus, and Athena must have their shrines on the acropolis of his ideal city. Its agora would be surrounded by temples, and the festivals, processions, sacrifices, and prayers must all be carried out punctiliously. The most important deities of his imaginary city were Apollo and Helios, who had long been identified with the sun, and could easily be integrated with Plato’s cosmic theology. Plato tried to merge old and new. During the festivals of his polis, gods and daimones would dance unseen beside the human celebrants. Indeed, the purpose of these rituals was precisely “to share [the gods’] holidays.” 102 The festival involved orgiazein, a word used to describe the ecstatic mystery celebrations. 103 The sacrifices could not propitiate the Olympians, but they could still lift the spirit and give humans intimations of transcendence. Nevertheless, despite Plato’s approval of the old religion, he considered it inferior to philosophy. It could not bring true enlightenment: the forms could only be apprehended through the reasoning powers of the mind, not in the insights of myth or the sacred drama of ritual. Traditional religion had been downgraded; mythos had become subservient to Plato’s mystical logos. There was a sinister directive in The Laws that took Plato even further away from the Axial Age. 104 His imaginary city was a theocracy. The first duty of the polis was to inculcate “the right thoughts about the gods, and then to live accordingly: well or not well.” 105 Correct belief came first; ethical behavior only second. Orthodox theology was the essential prerequisite for morality. “No one who believes in gods as the law directs ever voluntarily commits an unholy act or lets any lawless word pass his lips.” 106 None of the Axial thinkers had placed any great emphasis on metaphysics. Some even regarded this type of speculation as misguided. Ethical action came first; compassionate action, not orthodoxy, enabled human beings to apprehend the sacred.

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

  Should Christians have behaved more compassionately? asked Captain John Underhill, a veteran of the Thirty Years’ War. He answered his rhetorical question with a decided negative: God supported the English, “so we had sufficient light for our proceedings.” 21 Thirty years later, when Europeans were recoiling from the violence in the Thirty Years’ War, some Puritans had begun to question the validity of these Indian campaigns. 22 After the murder of an Indian convert to Christianity in 1675, the Plymouth authorities, on very shaky evidence, pinned the blame on Metacom, chief of the Wampanoag, whom the English called “King Philip.” When they executed three of his aides, Metacom with his Indian allies promptly devastated fifty out of the ninety English towns in Plymouth and Rhode Island; by the spring of 1676 the Indian armies were within ten miles of Boston. In the autumn the war turned in the colonists’ favor. Yet they were facing a hard winter and the Narragansetts on Rhode Island had food and supplies. Accusing them—again on dubious grounds—of aiding Metacom, the English militia attacked and looted the village, massacred its inhabitants—most of them noncombatant refugees—and burned the settlement to the ground. The war continued with atrocities on both sides—Indian warriors scalped their prisoners alive; the English disemboweled and quartered theirs—but in the summer of 1676, both sides abandoned the struggle. Almost half the prewar Indian population had been eliminated: 1,250 were killed in battle, 625 died of wounds, and 3,000 died of disease in captivity. The colonies, however, suffered only about 800 casualties, a mere 1.6 percent of the total English population of 50,000. The Puritan establishment believed that God had used the Indians to punish the colonists for their backsliding from godly ways and for the decline in church attendance and were therefore unconcerned about the Indian casualties. But many of the colonists were now less convinced of the morality of all-out warfare. This time a vocal minority spoke out against the war. The Quakers, who had first arrived in Boston in 1656 and had themselves been the victims of Puritan intolerance, vigorously condemned the atrocities. John Easton, governor of Rhode Island, accused the Puritans of Plymouth of arrogance and overconfidence in provocatively expanding their settlements and mischievously playing the tribes off against one another. John Eliot, a missionary to the Indians, argued that this had not been a war of self- defense; the real aggressors were the Plymouth authorities who had fudged evidence and treated the Indians with rough justice. As in Virginia, flagging piety meant that gradually more rational and naturalistic arguments would replace theological ones in their politics. 23 As is often the case, a general decline in religious fervor tends to inspire a revival from some dissatisfied element of society. By the early eighteenth century, worship had become more formal in the colonies and elegant churches transformed the skylines of New York and Boston.

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

  Under Innocent, England comes, if possible, into greater prominence in the history of the papacy than during the controversy in the reign of Alexander III., a generation before. Then the English actors were Henry II. and Thomas à Becket. Now they are Henry’s son John and Becket’s successor Stephen Langton. The pope was victorious, inflicting the deepest humiliation upon the English king; but he afterwards lost the advantage he had gained by supporting John against his barons and denouncing the Magna Charta of English popular rights. The controversy forms one of the most interesting episodes of English history. John, surnamed Sansterre or Lackland, 1167–1216, succeeded his brother Richard I. on the throne, 1199. A man of decided ability and rapid in action but of ignoble spirit, low morals, and despotic temper, he brought upon his realm such disgrace as England before or since has not suffered. His reign was a succession of wrongs and insults to the English people and the English church. John had joined Richard in a revolt against their father, sought to displace his brother on the throne during his captivity after the Third Crusade, and was generally believed by contemporaries to have put to death his brother Geoffrey’s son, Arthur of Brittany, who would have been Richard’s successor if the law of primogeniture had been followed. He lost Normandy, Anjou, Maine, and Aquitaine to the English. Perjury was no barrier to the accomplishment of his plans. He set aside one wife and was faithless to another. No woman was too well born to be safe against his advances. He plundered churches and convents to pay his debts and satisfy his avarice, and yet he never undertook a journey without hanging charms around his neck.198 Innocent came into collision with John over the selection of a successor to Archbishop Hubert of Canterbury, who died 1205.199 The monks of Canterbury, exercising an ancient privilege, chose Reginald one of their number. With the king’s support, a minority proceeded to another election and chose the king’s nominee, John de Grey, bishop of Norwich. John was recognized by the suffragan-bishops and put into possession by the king. An appeal was made by both parties to Rome, Reginald appearing there in person. After a delay of a year, Innocent set aside both elections and ordered the Canterbury monks, present in Rome, to proceed to the choice of another candidate. The choice fell upon Stephen Langton, cardinal of Chrysogonus. Born on English soil, Stephen was a man of indisputable learning and moral worth. He had studied in Paris and won by his merits prebends in the cathedral churches of Paris and York. The metropolitan dignity could have been intrusted to no shoulders more worthy of wearing it.200 While he has no title to saintship like à Becket, or to theological genius like Anselm, Langton will always occupy a place among the foremost of England’s primates as a faithful administrator and the advocate of English popular liberties.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  He’s an obnoxious boy who lies around on his bed all day, only rousing himself to do a little carpentry work before returning to his nap. What a dope! Mama gave me another one of her dreadful sermons this morning. We take the opposite view of everything. Daddy’s a sweetheart; he may get mad at me, but it never lasts longer than five minutes. It’s a beautiful day outside, nice and hot, and in spite of everything, we make the most of the weather by lounging on the folding bed in the attic. Yours, Anne COMMENT ADDED BY ANNE ON SEPTEMBER 21, 1942: Mr. van Daan has been as nice as pie to me recently. I’ve said nothina, but have been enjoyina it while it lasts. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 1942 Dearest Kitty, Mr. and Mrs. van Daan have had a terrible fight. I’ve never seen anything like it, since Mother and Father wouldn’t dream of shouting at each other like that. The argument was based on something so trivial it didn’t seem worth wasting a single word on it. Oh well, to each his own. Of course, it’s very difficult for Peter, who gets caught in the middle, but no one takes Peter seriously anymore, since he’s hypersensitive and lazy. Yesterday he was beside himself with worry because his tongue was blue instead of pink. This rare phenomenon disappeared as quickly as it came. Today he’s walking around with a heavy scarf on because he’s got a stiff neck. His Highness has been complaining of lumbago too. Aches and pains in his heart, kidneys and lungs are also par for the course. He’s an absolute hypochondriac! (That’s the right word, isn’t it?) Mother and Mrs. van Daan aren’t getting along very well. There are enough reasons for the friction. To give you one small example, Mrs. van D. has removed all but three of her sheets from our communal linen closet. She’s assuming that Mother’s can be used for both families. She’ll be in for a nasty surprise when she discovers that Mother has followed her lead. Furthermore, Mrs. van D. is ticked off because we’re using her china instead of ours. She’s still trying to find out what we’ve done with our plates; they’re a lot closer than she thinks, since they’re packed in cardboard boxes in the attic, behind a load of Opekta advertising material. As long as we’re in hiding, the plates will remain out of her reach. Since I’m always having accidents, it’s just as well! Yesterday I broke one of Mrs. van D.’s soup bowls. “Oh!” she angrily exclaimed. “Can’t you be more careful? That was my last one.” Please bear in mind, Kitty, that the two ladies speak abominable Dutch (I don’t dare comment on the gentlemen: they’d be highly insulted). If you were to hear their bungled attempts, you’d laugh your head off. We’ve given up pointing out their errors, since correcting them doesn’t help anyway. Whenever I quote Mother or Mrs.

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

  (6) Good reasons can be given for the omission of Peter’s conduct prior to the Council of Clermont by the earliest writers. The Crusade was a holy and heroic movement. The writers were interested in magnifying the part taken by the chivalry of Europe. Some of them were with Peter in the camp, and they found him heady, fanatical, impracticable, and worse. He probably was spurned by the counts and princes. Many of the writers were chaplains of these chieftains, -Raymund, Baldwin, Tancred, Bohemund. The lawlessness of Peter’s bands has been referred to. The defeat at Nicaea robbed Peter of all glory and position he might otherwise have had with the main army when it reached Asia.382 In Antioch he brought upon himself disgrace for attempting flight, being caught in the act by Tancred and Bohemund. The Gesta gives a detailed account of this treachery, and Guibert383 compares his flight to an angel falling from heaven. It is probably with reference to it that Ekkehard says, "Many call him hypocrite."384 Strange to say, Albert of Aachen and William of Tyre omit all reference to his treacherous flight.385 It is not improbable that, after the experiences they had of the Hermit in the camp, and the disregard and perhaps the contempt in which he was held by the princes, after his inglorious campaign to Constantinople and Nicaea, the early writers had not the heart to mention his services prior to the council. Far better for the glory of the cause that those experiences should pass into eternal forgetfulness. Why should legend then come to be attached to his memory? Why should not Adhemar have been chosen for the honor which was put upon this unknown monk who made so many mistakes and occupied so subordinate a position in the main crusading army? Why stain the origin of so glorious a movement by making Peter with his infirmities and ignoble birth responsible for the inception of the Crusade? It would seem as if the theory were more probable that the things which led the great Crusaders to disparage, if not to ridicule, Peter induced the earlier writers to ignore his meritorious activity prior to the Council of Clermont. After the lapse of time, when the memory of his follies was not so fresh, the real services of Peter were again recognized. For these reasons the older portrait of Peter has been regarded as the true one in all its essential features. § 51. The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. 1099–1187.

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

  But this is said of the beast, i.e., the Roman empire, which is throughout clearly distinguished from the seven heads, i.e., the emperors. In Daniel, too, the beast is collective. Moreover, a distinction must be made between the death of one ruler (Nero) and the deadly wound which thereby was inflicted on the beast or the empire, but from which it recovered (under Vespasian). § 38. The Jewish War and the Destruction of Jerusalem. A.D. 70. "And as He went forth out of the temple, one of his disciples saith unto Him, Master, behold, what manner of stones and what manner of buildings! And Jesus said unto him, Seest thou these great buildings? There shall not be left here one stone upon another, which shall not be thrown down."—Mark 13:1,2. Sources. Josephus: Bell. Jud., in 7 books; and Vita, c. 4–74. The history of the Jewish war was written by him as eye-witness about A.D. 75. English translations by W. Whiston, in Works of Jos., and by Rob. Traill, ed. by Isaac Taylor, new ed., Lond., 1862. German translations by Gfrsörer and W. Hoffmann, Stuttgart, 1836; and Paret, Stuttg., 1855; French translations by Arnauld d’andilly, 1667, Joachim Gillet, 1756, and Abbé Glaire, 1846. Rabbinical traditions in Derenbourg: Histoire de la Palestine depuis Cyrus jusqu’à Adrien. Paris, 1867 (first part of his L’Histoire et la géographie de la Palestine d’après les Thalmuds et les autres sources rabbiniques), pp. 255–295. Tacitus: Hist., II. 4; V. 1–13. A mere fragment, full of errors and insults towards the vanquished Jews. The fifth book, except this fragment, is lost. While Josephus, the Jew, is filled with admiration for the power and greatness of Rome, Tacitus, the heathen, treats Jews and Christians with scorn and contempt, and prefers to derive his information from hostile Egyptians and popular prejudice rather than from the Scriptures, and Philo, and Josephus. Sulpicius Severus: Chronicon, II. 30 (p. 84, ed. Halm). Short. Literature. Milman: The History of the Jews, Books XIV.-XVII. (New York ed., vol. II., 219 sqq.). Ewald: Geschichte des Folkes Israel, VI. 705–753 (second ed.). Grätz: Geschichte der Juden, III. 336–414. Hitzig: Geschichte des Volkes Israel, II. 594–629. Lewin: The Siege of Jerusalem by Titus. With the Journal of a recent Visit in the Holy City, and a general Sketch of the Topography of Jerusalem from the Earliest Times down to the Siege. London, 1863. Count de Champagny: Rome et la Judie au temps de la chute de Néron (ans 66–72 après Jésus-Christ), 2. éd., Paris, 1865. T. I., pp. 195–254; T. II., pp. 55– 200. Charles Merivale: History of the Romans under the Empire, ch. LIX. (vol. VI., 415 sqq., 4th ed., New York, 1866). De Saulcy: Les derniers jours de Jérusalem. Paris, 1866. E. Renan: L’Antechrist (ch. X.-XX., pp. 226–551). Paris, second ed., 1873. Emil Schürer: Lehrbuch der neutestamentlichen Zeitgeschichte (Leipzig, 1874), pp. 323–350. He also gives the literature. A. Hausrath: Neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte, Part III., second ed., Heidelberg, 1875, pp. 424 487. Alfred J.

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

  Among the noted hospitals to which indulgences were issued—that is, the right to secure funds by their sale—were hospitals in Nürnberg,1515, Strassburg,1518 and S. Spirito, Rome,1516. Both of the churches in Wittenberg were granted indulgences and a special indulgence was issued for the reliquary-museum which the elector Frederick had collected. An indulgence of 100 days was attached to each of the 5,005 specimens and another 100 to each of the 8 passages between the cases that held them. With the 8,133 relics at Halle and the 42 entire bodies, millions and billions of days of indulgence were associated, a sort of anticipation of the geologic periods moderns demand. To be more accurate, these relics were good for pardons covering 39,245,120 years and 220 days and the still further period of 6,540,000 quarantines, each of 40 days. In Rome, the residence of the supreme pontiffs, as we might well have expected, the offer of indulgences was the most copious, almost as copious as the drops on a rainy day. According to the Nürnberger relic-collector, Nicolas Muffel, every time the skulls of the Apostles were shown or the handkerchief of St. Veronica, the Romans who were present received a pardon of 7,000 days, other Italians 10,000 and foreigners 14,000. In fact, the grace of the ecclesiastical authorities was practically boundless. Not only did the living seek indulgences, but even the dying stipulated in their wills that a representative should go to Assisi or Rome or other places to secure for their souls the benefit of the indulgences offered there. Prayers also had remarkable offers of grace attached to them. According to the penitential book, The Soul’s Joy, the worshipper offering its prayers to Mary received 11,000 years indulgence and some prayers, if offered, freed 15 souls from purgatory and as many earthly sinners from their sins. It professed to give one of Alexander Vl.’s decrees, according to which prayer made three times to St. Anna secured 1,000 years indulgence for mortal sins and 20,000 for venial. The Soul’s Garden claimed that one of Julius II.’s indulgences granted 80,000 years to those who would pray a prayer to the Virgin which the book gave. No wonder Siebert, a Roman Catholic writer, is forced to say that "the whole atmosphere of the later Middle Ages was soaked with the indulgence-passion."1329 An indulgence issued by Alexander VI., in 1502, was designed to secure aid for the knights of the Teutonic Order against the Russians. The latter was renewed by Julius II. and Cologne, Treves, Mainz, Bremen, Bamberg and other sees were assigned as the territory. Much money was collected, the papal treasury receiving one-third of the returns. The preaching continued till 1510 and Tetzel took a prominent part in the campaign.1330