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 Sister Outsider (1984)

  For we have also been taught that a man acquired was the sole measure of success, and yet they almost never stay. One Black woman sits and silently judges another, how she looks, how she acts, how she impresses others. The first woman’s scales are weighted against herself. She is measuring the impossible. She is measuring the self she does not fully want to be. She does not want to accept the contradictions, nor the beauty. She wishes the other woman would go away. She wishes the other woman would become someone else, anyone other than another Black woman. She has enough trouble dealing with being herself. “Why don’t you learn to fly straight,” she says to the other woman. “Don’t you understand what your poor showing says about us all? If I could fly I’d certainly do a better job than that . Can’t you put on a more together show? The white girls do it. Maybe we could get one to show you how.” The other woman cannot speak. She is too busy keeping herself from crashing upon the ground. She will not cry the tears which are hardening into little sharp stones that spit from her eyes and implant themselves in the first woman’s heart, who quickly heals over them and identifies them as the source of her pain. V There are myths of self-protection that hold us separate from each other and breed harshness and cruelty where we most need softness and understanding. 1. That courtesy or politeness require our not noticing each other directly, only with the most covert of evaluating glances. At all costs, we must avoid the image of our fear. “How beautiful your mouth is” might well be heard as “Look at those big lips.” We maintain a discreet distance between each other also because that distance between us makes me less you, makes you less me. When there is no connection at all between people, then anger is a way of bringing them closer together, of making contact. But when there is a great deal of connectedness that is problematic or threatening or unacknowledged, then anger is a way of keeping people separate, of putting distance between us. 2. That because we sometimes rise to each other’s defense against outsiders, we do not need to look at devaluation and dismissal among ourselves. Support against outsiders is very different from cherishing each other. Often it is a case of “like needs like.” It doesn’t mean we have to appreciate that like or our need of it, even when that like is the only thin line between dying and living.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Crowley was unimpressed. “Apparently Parsons or Hubbard or somebody is producing a Moonchild,” he complained to another follower. “I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these goats.” Cameron did become pregnant, but got an abortion, with Parsons’s consent, so it’s unclear exactly what this ceremony was designed to produce. (Parsons and Cameron later married and aborted another pregnancy.) Nonetheless, Parsons asserted that the ritual had been a success. “Babalon is incarnate upon the earth today, awaiting the proper hour for her manifestation,” he wrote after the ceremony. “And in that day my work will be accomplished, and I shall be blown away upon the Breath of the father.” Until that apocalypse occurred, Hubbard and Parsons decided, they would go into business together. The plan was for Hubbard to purchase yachts in Florida, sail them through the Panama Canal to California, and resell them at a profit. Parsons and Sara sold the Parsonage and handed over the money to Hubbard—more than twenty thousand dollars from Parsons alone. Hubbard and Northrup promptly left for Miami. While in Florida, Hubbard appealed to the Veterans Administration for an increase in his medical disability. He was already receiving compensation for his ulcers, amounting to $11.50 per month. “I cannot tolerate a general diet—results in my having to abandon my old profession as a ship master and explorer, and seriously hampers me as a writer.” He said his eyesight had been affected by “prolonged exposure to tropical sunlight,” incurred while he was in the service, which caused a chronic case of conjunctivitis. He also complained that he was lame from a bone infection, which he theorized must have occurred by the abrupt change in climate when he was shipped to the East Coast. “My earning power, due to injuries, all service connected, has dropped to nothing,” he summed up. Sara Northrup added a handwritten note of support. “I have know [sic] Lafayette Ronald Hubbard for many years,” she claimed. “I see no chance of his condition improving to a point where he can regain his old standards. He is becoming steadily worse, his health impaired again by economic worries.” Parsons grew to believe that Hubbard and Sara had other plans for his money, and he flew to Miami to confront them. When he learned that they had just sailed away, he performed a “Banishing Ritual,” invoking Bartzabel, a magical figure associated with Mars. According to Parsons, a sudden squall arose, ripping the sails off the ship that Hubbard was captaining, forcing him to limp back to port.

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

  They surrounded it with so many hair-splitting distinctions and refinements that the people could not see the forest for the trees or the roof for the tiles, and mistook the shell for the kernel.198 Thus they made void the Word of God by the traditions of men.199 A slavish formalism and mechanical ritualism was substituted for spiritual piety, an ostentatious sanctimoniousness for holiness of character, scrupulous casuistry for genuine morality, the killing letter for the life-giving spirit, and the temple of God was turned into a house of merchandise. The profanation and perversion of the spiritual into the carnal, and of the inward into the outward, invaded even the holy of holies of the religion of Israel, the Messianic promises and hopes which run like a golden thread from the protevangelium in paradise lost to the voice of John the Baptist pointing to the Lamb of God. The idea of a spiritual Messiah who should crush the serpent’s head and redeem Israel from the bondage of sin, was changed into the conception of a political deliverer who should re-establish the throne of David in Jerusalem, and from that centre rule over the Gentiles to the ends of the earth. The Jews of that time could not separate David’s Son, as they called the Messiah, from David’s sword, sceptre and crown. Even the apostles were affected by this false notion, and hoped to secure the chief places of honor in that great revolution; hence they could not understand the Master when he spoke to them of his, approaching passion and death.200 The state of public opinion concerning the Messianic expectations as set forth in the Gospels is fully confirmed by the preceding and contemporary Jewish literature, as the Sibylline Books (about b.c. 140), the remarkable Book of Enoch (of uncertain date, probably from b.c. 130–30), the Psalter of Solomon (b.c. 63–48), the Assumption of Moses, Philo and Josephus, the Apocalypse of Baruch, and the Fourth Book of Esdras.201 In all of them the Messianic kingdom, or the kingdom of God, is represented as an earthly paradise of the Jews, as a kingdom of this world, with Jerusalem for its capital. It was this popular idol of a pseudo-Messiah with which Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness, when he showed him all the kingdoms of the world; well knowing that if he could convert him to this carnal creed, and induce him to abuse his miraculous power for selfish gratification, vain ostentation, and secular ambition, he would most effectually defeat the scheme of redemption. The same political aspiration was a powerful lever of the rebellion against the Roman yoke which terminated in the destruction of Jerusalem, and it revived again in the rebellion of Bar-Cocheba only to end in a similar disaster. Such was the Jewish religion at the time of Christ. He was the only teacher in Israel who saw through the hypocritical mask to the rotten heart.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  I suggested that Scientology didn’t seem to be effective if people at the highest levels of spiritual attainment were actually liars, adulterers, wife beaters, drunks, and embezzlers. “This is a religion,” Davis responded movingly. “It aspires to greatness, hope, humanity, spiritual freedom. To be greater than we are. To rise above our craven, humanoid instincts.” Scientology doesn’t pretend to be perfect, he said, and it shouldn’t be judged on the misconduct of a few apostates. “I haven’t done things like that,” Davis said. “I haven’t suborned perjury, destroyed evidence, lied—contrary to what Paul Haggis says.” He spoke of his frustration with Haggis after his resignation: “If he was so troubled and shaken on the fundamentals of Scientology ... then why the hell did he stick around for thirty-five years?” He continued: “Did he stay a closet Scientologist for some career-advancement purpose?” Davis shook his head in disgust. “I think he’s the most hypocritical person in the world.” He said he felt that he’d done all he could in dealing with Haggis over the issue of Proposition 8. He added that the individual who had made the mistake of listing the San Diego church as a supporter of the initiative—he didn’t divulge his name—had been “disciplined” for it. I asked what that meant. “He was sat down by a staff member of the local organization,” Davis explained. “He got sorted out.” Davis thought I was making too much out of the issue of Suppressive Persons in the piece. “Do you know how many people, grand total, there are in the world who have been declared Suppressive?” he asked rhetorically. “A couple of thousand over the years. At most.” He said that in fact many had been restored to good standing. “Yet again, you’re falling into the trap of defining our religion by the people who’ve left.” Hubbard had said that only 2.5 percent of the human population were Suppressive, but one of the problems I faced in writing about Scientology, especially its early days, is that the preponderance of people who had been close to Hubbard had either quietly left the church or been declared Suppressive. Some, like Pat Broeker, had gone underground. Many others, like David Mayo, had signed non-disclosure agreements. Those who remained in the church were off-limits to me. 8 We discussed the allegations of abuse lodged by many former members against Miscavige. “The only people who will corroborate are their fellow apostates,” Davis said. “They’re a pack of sanctimonious liars.” He produced affidavits from other Scientologists refuting their accusations. He noted that in the tales about Miscavige, the violence always seemed to come out of nowhere. “One would think that if such a thing occurred, which it most certainly did not, there’d have to be a reason,” Davis said.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  “Aren’t you going to speak to me?” he said. “Don’t you know that I have the authority to let you go, and the authority to crucify you?” “You couldn’t have any authority at all over me,” replied Jesus, “unless it was given to you from above. That’s why the person who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.” (19:10–11) Even the rule of Caesar and his subordinates, it seems, has its place within the larger providence of God; the only sense we can make of this is the standard Jewish sense that God, as creator, intends his world to be looked after by humans, and that even when the humans who are supposed to be exercising that vocation are self-serving brutes, the mandate still stands, though they will be judged more severely for what they have done with their commission. Jesus’s affirmation of Pilate’s subordinate but God-given authority is of course itself related to his sense that God is in overall control of the process now under way. This is the way by which the rulers of the world will overreach themselves and, doing their worst, be overthrown by the triumphing power of God’s creative love. And it is at this point that the Judaean leaders make their final double move. Like their forebears in 1 Samuel 8:4, 20, they want to be “like the nations.” They want to be part of Caesar’s empire. They have grown tired of waiting for the “son of man” to be vindicated and will cut a deal with the fourth monster. They have glimpsed the servant vocation held out to Israel and are content to accept the rule of Babylon. Jesus came to his own, and his own didn’t want to know him. “If you let this fellow go,” they say, “you are no friend of Caesar” (19:12). And when Pilate challenges them one more time about whether he should, after all, crucify “their king,” they answer, chillingly, with the words that exactly reverse the ancient Jewish dream of God’s kingdom. Instead of “no king but God,” they sell their birthright for a mess of imperial pottage. “We have no king,” they reply, “except Caesar” (19:15).

• From Going Clear (2013)

  But with German U-boats attacking American shipping in the North Atlantic—and even in American coastal waters—President Roosevelt declared a national emergency, and Hubbard’s physical shortcomings were suddenly overlooked. He received his commission in the Naval Reserve, as a lieutenant (junior grade), in July 1941. According to Hubbard, he got into the action right away. He said he was aboard the destroyer USS Edsall, which was sunk off the north coast of Java. All hands were lost, except for Hubbard, who managed to get to shore and disappear into the jungles. That is where he says he was when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. (Actually, the Edsall was not sunk until March 1942.) Hubbard said that he survived being machine-gunned by a Japanese patrol while he was hiding in the area, then escaped by sailing a raft to Australia. Elsewhere, Hubbard claimed that he had been posted to the Philippines at the outbreak of the war with Japan, then was flown home on the Secretary of the Navy’s private plane in the spring of 1942 as the “first U.S. returned casualty from the Far East.” According to Navy records, however, Hubbard was training as an intelligence officer in New York when the war broke out. He was indeed supposed to have been posted to the Philippines, but his ship was diverted to Australia because of the overwhelming Japanese advance in the Pacific. There he awaited other transport to Manila, but he immediately got on the wrong side of the American naval attaché. “By assuming unauthorized authority and attempting to perform duties for which he has no qualification he became the source of much trouble,” the attaché complained. “This officer is not satisfactory for independent duty assignment. He is garrulous and tries to give impressions of his importance.” He sent Hubbard back to the United States for further assignment. Hubbard found himself back in New York, working in the Office of the Cable Censor. He agitated for a shipboard posting and was given the opportunity to command a trawler that was being converted into a gunboat, the USS YP-422, designed for coastal patrol. “Upon entering the Boston Navy Yard, Ron found himself facing a hundred or so enlisted men, fresh from the Portsmouth Naval Prison in New Hampshire,” the church narrative goes. “A murderous looking lot, was Ron’s initial impression, ‘their braid dirty and their hammocks black with grime.’ While on further investigation, he discovered not one among them had stepped aboard except to save himself a prison term.”

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

  "But the Church of God is not subject to a wicked pope; nor even absolutely, and on all occasions, to a good one. Let us rather in our difficulties resort to our brethren of Belgium and Germany than to that city, where all things are venal, where judgment and justice are bartered for gold. Let us imitate the great church of Africa, which, in reply to the pretensions of the Roman pontiff, deemed it inconceivable that the Lord should have invested any one person with his own plenary prerogative of judicature, and yet have denied it to the great congregations of his priests assembled in council in different parts of the world. If it be true, as we are informed by, common report, that there is in Rome scarcely a man acquainted with letters,—without which, as it is written, one may scarcely be a doorkeeper in the house of God,—with what face may he who hath himself learnt nothing set himself up for a teacher of others? In the simple priest ignorance is bad enough; but in the high priest of Rome,—in him to whom it is given to pass in review the faith, the lives, the morals, the discipline, of the whole body of the priesthood, yea, of the universal church, ignorance is in nowise to be tolerated .... Why should he not be subject in judgment to those who, though lowest in place, are his superiors in virtue and in wisdom? Yea, not even he, the prince of the apostles, declined the rebuke of Paul, though his inferior in place, and, saith the great pope Gregory [I.], ’if a bishop be in fault, I know not any one such who is not subject to the holy see; but if faultless, let every one understand that he is the equal of the Roman pontiff himself, and as well qualified as he to give judgment in any matter.’ "286 The secretary of this council and the probable framer of this remarkable speech was Gerbert, who became archbishop of Rheims, afterwards of Ravenna, and at last pope under the name of Sylvester II. But pope John XV. (or his master Crescentius) declared the proceedings of this council null and void, and interdicted Gerbert. His successor, Gregory V., threatened the kingdom of France with a general interdict unless Arnulf was restored. Gerbert, forsaken by king Robert I., who needed the favor of the pope, was glad to escape from his uncomfortable seat and to accept an invitation of Otho III. to become his teacher (995). Arnulf was reinstated in Rheims. § 65. The Second Degradation of the Papacy from Otho I to Henry III. A.D. 973–1046.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  This kind of action is a prevalent error among oppressed peoples. It is based upon the false notion that there is only a limited and particular amount of freedom that must be divided up between us, with the largest and juiciest pieces of liberty going as spoils to the victor or the stronger. So instead of joining together to fight for more, we quarrel between ourselves for a larger slice of the one pie. Black women fight between ourselves over men, instead of pursuing and using who we are and our strengths for lasting change; Black women and men fight between ourselves over who has more of a right to freedom, instead of seeing each other’s struggles as part of our own and vital to our common goals; Black and white women fight between ourselves over who is the more oppressed, instead of seeing those areas in which our causes are the same. (Of course, this last separation is worsened by the intransigent racism that white women too often fail to, or cannot, address in themselves.) At a recent Black literary conference, a heterosexual Black woman stated that to endorse lesbianism was to endorse the death of our race. This position reflects acute fright or a faulty reasoning, for once again it ascribes false power to difference. To the racist, Black people are so powerful that the presence of one can contaminate a whole lineage; to the heterosexist, lesbians are so powerful that the presence of one can contaminate the whole sex. This position supposes that if we do not eradicate lesbianism in the Black community, all Black women will become lesbians. It also supposes that lesbians do not have children. Both suppositions are patently false. As Black women, we must deal with all the realities of our lives which place us at risk as Black women — homosexual or heterosexual. In 1977 in Detroit, a young Black actress, Patricia Cowan, was invited to audition for a play called Hammer and was then hammered to death by the young Black male playwright. Patricia Cowan was not killed because she was Black. She was killed because she was a Black woman, and her cause belongs to us all. History does not record whether or not she was a lesbian, but only that she had a four-year-old child. Of the four groups, Black and white women, Black and white men, Black women have the lowest average wage. This is a vital concern for us all, no matter with whom we sleep.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  He went on: “What does this do to any religious nature of Scientology? It strengthens it. New religions always overthrow the false gods of the old, they do something to better man. We can improve man. We can show the old gods false. And we can open up the universe as a happier place in which a spirit may dwell.” One might compare Scientology with the Church of Latter-day Saints, a new religion of the previous century. The founder of the movement, Joseph Smith, claimed to have received a pair of golden plates from the angel Moroni in upstate New York in 1827, along with a pair of magical “seeing stones,” which allowed him to read the contents. Three years later, he published The Book of Mormon, founding a movement that would provoke the worst outbreak of religious persecution in American history. Mormons were chased all across the country because of their practice of polygamy and their presumed heresy. Smith himself was murdered by a mob in Carthage, Illinois. His beleaguered followers sought to escape the United States and establish a religious theocracy in the territory of Utah, which they called Zion. Mormons were so despised that there was a bill in Congress to exterminate them. And yet Mormonism would evolve and go on to become one of the fastest- growing denominations in the twentieth, and now the twenty-first, centuries. Members of the faith now openly run for president of the United States. In much of the world, this religion, which was once tormented because of its perceived anti-American values, is now thought of as being the most American of religions; indeed, that’s how many Mormons think of it as well. It is a measure not only of the religion’s success but also of the ability of a faith to adapt and change. And yet Joseph Smith was plainly a liar. In answer to the charge of polygamy, he claimed he had only one wife, when he had already accumulated a harem. A strange but revealing episode occurred in 1835, when Smith purchased several Egyptian mummies from an itinerant merchant selling such curiosities. Inside the mummy cases were scrolls of papyrus, reduced to fragments, which Smith declared were the actual writings of the Old Testament patriarchs Abraham and Joseph. Smith produced what he called a translation of the papyri, titled The Book of Abraham. It still forms a portion of Mormon doctrine. In America at the time, Egyptian was still thought to be indecipherable, but the Rosetta Stone had already been discovered, and Jean-François Champollion had successfully rendered the hieroglyphic language into French.

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

  Members of the other three classes—Brahmins, vaishyas, and shudras—now had to relinquish violence and were no longer allowed to take part in raids nor fight in their kingdom’s wars. In the two lower classes we see the systemic violence of this new society. They came from Purusha’s legs and feet, the lower and largest part of the body; their dharma was to serve, to run errands for the nobility, and bear the weight of the entire social frame, performing the productive labor on which the agrarian kingdom depended. 32 The dharma of the vaishya, the ordinary clansman, now forbidden to fight, was food production; the Kshatriya aristocracy would now confiscate his surplus. The vaishya was thus associated with fertility and productivity but also, being taken from a place close to Purusha’s genitals, with carnal appetite, which, according to the two upper classes, made him unreliable. But the most significant development was the introduction of the shudra: the dasa at the base of the social body was now defined as a “slave,” one who labors for others, performing the most menial tasks and therefore stigmatized as impure. In Vedic law, the vaishya was to be oppressed; however, the shudra could be removed or slain at will. 33 The Purusha Hymn thus acknowledged the structural violence that lay at the heart of the new Aryan civilization. The new system may have limited fighting and raiding to one of the privileged classes, but it implied that the forcible subjugation of vaishya and shudra was part of the sacred order of the universe. For the Brahmins and Kshatriyas, the new Aryan aristocracy, productive work was not their dharma, so they had the leisure to explore the arts and sciences. While sacrifice was expected of everybody, the greatest sacrifice was demanded of the lower classes, condemned to a life of servitude and stigmatized as inferior, base, and impure. 34 The Aryan conversion to agriculture continued. By about 900 BCE, there were several rudimentary kingdoms in the Land of the Arya. Thanks to the switch from wheat cultivation to wet rice production, the kingdoms enjoyed a larger surplus. Our knowledge of life in these emerging states is limited, but again, mythology and ritual can throw some light on the developing political organization. In these embryonic kingdoms, the raja, though still elected by his Kshatriya peers like a tribal chieftain, was well on his way to becoming a powerful agrarian ruler and was now invested with divine attributes during his yearlong royal consecration, the rajasuya.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  It has already begun. For the first time in an american war, the american press was kept out until the stage could be set. This extends by precedent the meaning of military censorship in this country. At the time, it also deflected attention from the invasion itself. Mission accomplished with “surgical precision” meant attempting to conceal the bombing and destruction of civilian homes, the destruction of a hospital and a radio station and police headquarters; attempting to conceal the american heavy transports left mangled on the side of the road by soldiers not trained to drive to the left, and the civilian cars those army vehicles collided with. It meant the appropriation, use, and destruction of homes and stores and other businesses with no compensation. When the american press was finally admitted after the cosmetic cleanup, we were treated to photographs of smiling Grenadians welcoming their conquerors (look what your tax dollars have bought). But no photos of the signs calling for information about neighbors. No photos of the signs throughout the countryside calling for an end to yankee imperialism. NO BISHOP NO REVO . So what did Revolution in Grenada mean? It meant the inauguration of an agro-industry which for the first time in the island’s history processed the island’s own fruit, its own coffee, under its own brand, Spice Isle Foods. Canned products from their own soil available in stores. The beginning of a fishing and fish-processing industry. In a country rich with tropical fruit, whose waters abound with fish, why should the most common fruit juice be Florida orange juice, the most commonly used fish, imported saltfish from Canada? It meant almost doubling the number of doctors on the island from twenty-three to forty, a health center set up in every parish for the first time, a dental clinic. It meant a public health anti-mosquito cleanup campaign implemented by the National Youth Organization that successfully protected Grenada from the wave of Dengue Fever sweeping through the rest of the Caribbean in the summer of 1981. 20 It meant twelve-year-old Lyndon Adams of L’Esterre, Carriacou, teaching a seventy-three-year-old woman how to read and write as part of the each-one-teach-one program against functional illiteracy conducted by the Center for Popular Education. This highly successful program enlisted the aid of one of the most brilliant educators of all time, Paulo Friere, head of the World Council of Churches’ literacy program. When the echos of Ocean Venture drifted across the Caribbean from Vieques in 1981, and the stench of the threat of U.S. invasion hung over the hills from Grand Etang to Harvey Vale, Lyndon, one of the youngest teachers in the CPE program, was quoted as saying: “Before the revolution we were not in the light.

• 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)

  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.