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 The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Andrew and his Jewish friends had taken a first step towards modern historical criticism of the Bible, but Andrew, a morose, uncharismatic man, had few followers in his own day. During the twelfth century, the men of the hour were the philosophers, who were beginning to develop a new kind of rationalistic theology in which they used reason to sustain their faith and clarify what had hitherto been deemed ineffable. Anselm of Bec (1033–1109), who would become Archbishop of Canterbury in 1189, thought that it was possible to prove anything.16 As a monk, lectio divina was essential to his spiritual life but he wrote no commentaries on scripture and seldom quoted the Bible in his theological writing. But religion, like poetry or art, requires an intuitive rather than a purely rational approach and Anselm’s theology shows its limitations. In his treatise Cur Deus Homo, for example, he attempted a logical account of the Incarnation that bore no relation at all to scripture: any biblical quotations simply carried the argument along. The Greek Orthodox had also produced a theology that was independent of scripture, but Anselm’s forensic explanation of the incarnation lacks the spiritual insight of Maximus. He argued that the sin of Adam required atonement; because God was just, a human being must atone; but because the fault was so serious, only God could make reparation. Therefore God had to become man.17 Anselm makes God weigh the matter up as if he were a mere human being. It is not surprising that at this time the Greek Orthodox feared that Latin theology was too anthropomorphic. Anselm’s theory of the atonement, however, became normative in the West, while the Greek Orthodox continued to prefer Maximus’s interpretation. The French philosopher Peter Abelard (1079–1142) developed a different account of the redemption, which again owed little to scripture but came closer to the spirit of the fathers.18 Like some of the rabbis, he believed that God suffered with his creatures and argued that the crucifixion showed us one moment in the eternal pathos of God. When we contemplate the flayed figure of Jesus we are moved to pity, and it is the act of compassion that saves us – not Jesus’s sacrificial death. Abelard was the intellectual star of his generation; students flocked to his lectures from all over Europe. Like Anselm, he rarely quoted scripture and raised questions without appearing to offer solutions. In fact, Abelard was more interested in philosophy and his theology was rather conservative. But his iconoclastic, aggressive manner made it sound as though he was arrogantly pitting his human reason against the mystery of God and this brought him into headlong collision with one of the most powerful churchmen of the day.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Reconstructionists are thus planning the Christian commonwealth in which the modern heresy of democracy will be abolished and every single law of the Bible implemented literally: slavery will be re-established, contraception prohibited, adulterers, homosexuals, blasphemers and astrologers will be executed, and persistently disobedient children stoned to death. God is not on the side of the poor: indeed, North explains, there is a ‘tight relationship between wickedness and poverty’. 71 Taxes must not be used for welfare, since ‘subsidizing sluggards is the same as subsidizing evil’. 72 The Bible forbids all foreign aid to the developing world: its addiction to paganism, immorality and demon worship is the cause of its economic problems. 73 In the past, exegetes tried to bypass these less than humane portions of the Bible or had given them an allegorical interpretation. The Reconstructionists seem to seek these passages out deliberately and interpret them ahistorically and literally. Where other fundamentalists have absorbed the violence of modernity, the Reconstructionists have produced a religious version of militant capitalism. 74 Fundamentalists grab the headlines but other biblical scholars have tried to revive traditional biblical spirituality in a more eirenic spirit. Writing in the 1940s, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber (1878–1965) believed that the Bible witnessed to God’s presence at a time when he seemed absent. Exegesis could never stand still, since the Bible represented an ongoing dialogue between God and humanity. The study of the Bible must lead to a transformed lifestyle. When we open the Bible, we must be ready to be fundamentally changed by what we hear. Buber was much struck by the fact that the rabbis called scripture a miqra , a ‘calling out’. It was a summons that did not allow readers to abstract themselves from the problems of the world but trained them to stand fast and listen to the undercurrent of events. His friend Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) agreed that the Bible compelled us to face the crises of the hour. Readers must respond to its miqra in the same way as the prophets, crying: ‘ Hinneni: “Here I am” – all ready, all soul. . . to the reality at hand.’ 75 The Bible was not a preordained script. Our daily lives should illuminate the Bible, and in turn the Bible will help us to discover the sacred dimension of our day-to-day experience. Reading scripture was an introspective process. Rosenzweig knew that modern human beings could not respond to the Bible in the same way as earlier generations. We needed the new covenant described to Jeremiah, when the law would be written within our hearts. 76 The text must be appropriated and interiorized in patient, disciplined study and translated into action in the world. Michael Fishbane, currently Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago, believes that exegesis could help us to retrieve the idea of a sacred text. 77 Historical criticism of the Bible makes it impossible for us to read the scriptures synchronistically any longer, linking passages widely separated in time.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Shannon giggled and waved me out on the porch. “Sometimes Mama needs a little hand on her throttle. You know what I mean?” She laughed and rolled her eyes like a broken kewpie doll. “Daddy has to throttle her back down to a human level or she’d take off like a helium angel.” I couldn’t help myself. I laughed back, remembering what Aunt Raylene had said about Mrs. Pearl—“If she’d been fucked right just once, she’d have never birthed that weird child.” I poked Shannon on one swollen arm, just in case she could read behind my eyes. “Your mama’s an ayn-gel,” I whispered hoarsely, mocking the way Mrs. Pearl would say it, “just an ayn-gel of Gaaaaad.” “Gaaaaad damn right,” Shannon whispered back, and I saw her hatred burning pink and hot in those eyes. It scared and fascinated me. Was it possible she could see the same thing in my eyes? Did I have that much hate in me? I looked back at Mrs. Pearl, humming around the pins in her mouth. A kind of chill went through me. Did I hate Mrs. Pearl? I looked at their porch, the baby’s breath hanging in baskets and the two rocking chairs with hand-sewn cushions. Shannon’s teeth flashed sunlight into my eyes. “You look like the devil’s walking on your grave.” I shivered and then spit like Granny. “The grave I’ll lie in an’t been dug yet.” It was something I’d heard Granny say. Shannon grabbed my arm and gave it a jerk. “Don’t say that. It’s bad luck to mention your own grave. They say my grandmother McCray joked about her burying place on Easter morning and fell down dead at evening service.” She jerked my arm again, hard. “Think about something else quick.” I looked down at her hand on my arm, puffy white fingers gripping my thin brown wrist. “That child will rot fast when she goes,” Aunt Raylene had said once. I felt sick. “I got to go home.” I pulled air in fast as I could. “Mama wants me to help her hang out the laundry this afternoon.” “Your mama’s always making you work.” And yours never does, I thought. “I like your family,” Shannon sometimes said, though I knew that was a polite lie. “Your mama’s a fine woman,” Roseanne Pearl would agree, eying my too-tight raggedy dresses. She reminded me of the way James Waddell looked at us, of his daughters’ smug, superior faces, laughing at my mama’s loose teeth and Reese’s curls done up in paper scraps. Daddy Glen was still working for the Sunshine Dairy and continued to take us over to his father’s or one of his brothers’ every few weeks, though they never seemed any happier to see us. Their contempt had worn my skin thin, and I had no patience for it. Whenever the Pearls talked about my people, I’d take off and not go back for weeks.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  All these ‘Joannine’ texts saw Jesus as the incarnate Logos who had descended to earth as God’s ultimate revelation. 91 Jesus was the Lamb of God, a sacrificial victim who took away the sins of the world, like the lambs ritually slaughtered in the temple at Passover. 92 They believed that their most important duty was to love one another, 93 but they did not reach out to the stranger. This community felt beleaguered and clung together in opposition to ‘the world’. 94 The whole of existence seemed polarized into conflicting opposites: light against darkness, world against spirit, life against death, and good against evil. The churches had recently suffered a painful schism: some of their members had found their teachings ‘intolerable’ and ‘stopped going with Jesus’. 95 The faithful saw these apostates as ‘antichrists’, filled with murderous hatred of the messiah. 96 The members of this Christian sect were convinced that they alone were right and that the whole world was against them. 97 John’s gospel in particular was addressing an ‘in group’, which had a private symbolism that was incomprehensible to outsiders. Constantly Jesus had to tell ‘the Jews’ that they would look for him and fail to find him: ‘where I am you cannot come’. 98 His audience was continually baffled but because Jesus was God’s ultimate revelation to the world, this lack of acceptance was a judgement: those who rejected him were the children of the devil and would remain in darkness. For John, Judaism was well and truly over. He systematically depicted Jesus replacing every single one of God’s major revelations to Israel. Henceforth the risen Logos would be the place where Jews would encounter the divine presence: Jesus the Logos would take over the function of the ruined temple, and become the place where Jews would encounter the divine presence. 99 When he walked out of the temple, the Shekhinah withdrew with him. 100 When he celebrated the festival of Sukkoth, during which water was ceremonially poured over the altar and the giant torches of the temple were set alight, Jesus – like Wisdom – cried aloud that he was the living water and the light of the world. 101 On the feast of Unleavened Bread, he claimed that he was the ‘bread of life’. Not only was he greater than Moses 102 and Abraham, but he embodied the divine presence: he had the temerity to pronounce the forbidden name of God: ‘before Abraham ever was, I Am [ Ani Waho ]’. 103 Unlike the synoptics, John never showed Jesus attracting non-Jewish converts. His ekklesia was probably entirely Jewish at the beginning and the apostates were probably Jewish Christians, who found the community’s controversial and potentially blasphemous Christology ‘intolerable’.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Now I took a deep breath, trying to get my stomach under control. Sometimes I really couldn’t stand Shannon. “We’re gonna go to the diner for supper tonight. They have peach cobbler this time of year.” “My daddy’s gonna make fresh ice cream tonight.” Shannon smiled a smile full of the pride of family position. “We got black walnuts to put on it.” I didn’t say anything. She would. She would rot very fast. [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] The gospel circuit ran from North Carolina to South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama. The singers moved back and forth on it, a tide of gilt and fringed jackets that paralleled and intersected the country western circuit. Sometimes you couldn’t tell the difference, and as times got harder certainly Mr. Pearl stopped making distinctions, booking any act that would get him a little cash up front. More and more, Mama sent me off with the Pearls in their old yellow DeSoto, the trunk stuffed with boxes of religious supplies and Mrs. Pearl’s sewing machine, the backseat crowded with Shannon and me and piles of sewing. We would pull into small towns in the afternoon so Mr. Pearl could do the setup and Mrs. Pearl could repair tears and frayed embroidery while Shannon and I went off to picnic alone on cold chicken and chow-chow. Mrs. Pearl always brought tea in a mason jar, but Shannon would rub her eyes and complain of a headache until her mama gave in and bought us RC Colas. Most of the singers arrived late. It was a wonder to me that the truth never seemed to register with Mr. and Mrs. Pearl. No matter who fell over the boxes backstage, they never caught on that the whole Tuckerton Family had to be pointed in the direction of the microphones, nor that Little Pammie Gleason—“Lord, just thirteen!”— had to wear her frilly blouse long-sleeved because she had bruises all up and down her arms from that redheaded boy her daddy wouldn’t let her marry. They never seemed to see all the “boys” passing bourbon in paper cups backstage or their angel daughter begging for “just a sip.” Maybe Jesus shielded their eyes the way he kept old Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego safe in the fiery furnace. Certainly sin didn’t touch them the way it did Shannon and me. Both of us had learned to walk carefully backstage, with all those hands reaching out to stroke our thighs and pinch the nipples we barely had. “Playful boys,” Mrs. Pearl would laugh, stitching the sleeves back on their jackets, mending the rips in their pants. I was amazed that she couldn’t smell the whiskey breath set deep in her fine embroidery, but I wasn’t about to commit the sin of telling her what God surely didn’t intend her to know.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Telling the story, Aunt Ruth snarled and twanged like Uncle Beau did when he’d been drinking, sounding so like him that I giggled to hear her. “Bet they didn’t really want to be in no army,” I told her. “Bet they went down there on a dare or something.” “Well, they an’t the type to play soldier,” she agreed, “but they’d love the chance to shoot strangers, drive trucks, and work on engines. No different really from what they do now, except for the uniform. They love that story, though, never seem to pay no mind to the fact that the army didn’t want no trash that has spent so much time in jail and hasn’t even finished high school.” “They’re drunks,” I said, and Aunt Ruth just nodded. “Kind of. No different from Travis, I suppose. But you know, they don’t think about it. It’s like going to jail. They think that a working man just naturally turns up in jail now and then, just like they believe they got a right to stay drunk from sunset on Friday to dawn on Monday morning. Beau himself swears that he was fine until he started drinking on weekdays.” She shook her head, pushing her thin hair back with one trembling hand. “You can’t tell them nothing.” “Beau got his taste for beer as a boy,” Aunt Ruth told us one Saturday morning. She was sitting out on her porch while I scraped at the railing and Earle cleaned the gunk out of the works of the old wringer washer she’d decided to sell. “He used to go off with Raylene to that roadhouse over at the Greer city limits after she quit school and he’d just turned thirteen. They earned a little money by sweeping up and cleaning and stocking the coolers full of beer and Coca-Cola. They’d always take themselves a few bottles as a bonus. Never hurt Raylene none, but she didn’t have the taste. Liked cola better, matter of fact, and only took beer to sell back to Beau. Boy liked bottle beer better than mother’s milk, and that’s most of what he’s always drunk, no matter what that wife of his swears. Beer can rot you out too, destroy your liver and turn your brains to bleached oatmeal. It’s a fact. He didn’t need that white liquor they sell over at the franchise.” “Oh, hell!” Earle slapped his palm against the oily metal of the wringer. He never liked to hear anything bad said about his brother Beau. He didn’t even like to hear people repeat things he said himself. “Beau’s got worse stuff than beer in his life. Beer’s nothing. Keeps you regular, beer and pinto beans. If Beau was to stop drinking his beer, he’d probably swell up and explode.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] It was not only Daddy Glen’s brothers being lawyers and dentists instead of mechanics and roofers that made them so different from Boatwrights. In Daddy Glen’s family the women stayed at home. His own mama had never held a job in her life, and Daryl and James both spoke badly of women who would leave their children to “work outside the home.” His father, Bodine Waddell, owned the Sunshine Dairy and regularly hired and fired men like my mother’s brothers, something he never let us forget. “Awful proud for a man runs cows,” Beau said of him once, and Glen was immediately indignant. “Daddy don’t have to handle the cows,” he told Earle. “Farmers all over the county bring him their milk, or he has it picked up. Daddy just processes the milk, bottles it under the Sunshine label, and his trucks deliver it.” “Oh, yeah,” Earle nodded solemnly. “That’s a big difference, that is. Man don’t run cows, he just leases the rights to their titties.” Glen looked like he was going to spit or cry but controlled himself. “Just don’t say nothing about my daddy.” He almost growled. “Just don’t.” Earle and Beau let it go at that. Glen couldn’t help what a shit his daddy was, and it was never smart to talk bad about a man’s people to his face. With the passage of time, Glen had gotten more and more peculiar about his family, one moment complaining of how badly they treated him and the next explaining it away. Worst of all, he insisted that we all had to go over to his brothers’ or daddy’s places whenever there was any kind of family occasion, though it was clear to me that they were never happy to see us. We wound up going over to Daddy Waddell’s place at least once every other month. In the Pontiac with the top down and paper scraps blowing around on the floor, Reese and I would lean over the front seat to watch Mama try to keep her hair neat in the whistling wind and listen to Daddy Glen lie. “We won’t stay long,” he would always promise, and Mama would smile like she didn’t care at all. We gritted our teeth. We knew that he would not have the nerve to leave before his father had delivered his lecture on all the things Glen had done wrong in his long life of failure and disappointment. “Your daddy wants his daddy to be proud of him,” Mama once said. “It about breaks my heart. He should just as soon whistle for the moon.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  She wasn’t so sure it was that simple. Mama almost never went to church, but she took God and most issues of faith absolutely seriously. “Oh, Anney’s a Christian woman,” Uncle Earle told Aunt Alma the morning after the night Mama threw him out for puking liquor on her kitchen table. “But she wears me down being so stubborn all the time. You’d think she never took a drink of whiskey or chased no good-looking man in her life.” “She’s just as stiff-necked as she can be,” Cousin Deedee agreed. She was supposed to be with Aunt Ruth but seemed to be over at Alma’s or Raylene’s more than she was home. “You know, Bone, your mama’s the kind gets us all in trouble to begin with. Like something out of one of them stories they tell in Sunday school, supposed to be a lesson to the rest of us.” She smirked at me. “Ask for nothing, trust in God. Do the right thing. Right! And he’ll send you bastards and rabies before he’s through. “I hate,” Deedee swore, “the very notion of a Christian woman with her hard-scrubbed, starved-thin, stiff and scrawny neck!” “She hates herself,” Mama told us when Reese repeated what Deedee had said. “And I don’t know that God has much of anything to do with it.” She gave me one of those sharp, almost frightening looks she seemed to have developed over the summer. “People don’t do right because of the fear of God or love of him. You do the right thing because the world doesn’t make sense if you don’t.” I no longer accepted everything Mama told me as gospel, but I knew what she meant. Doing the right thing shouldn’t have anything to do with like or love or goodness or Jesus, though most people swore Jesus had something to do with everything. I knew Mama believed in Jesus well enough, even though she wouldn’t talk about it, and I decided that deep in her heart she understood exactly what I was doing. I gave myself over to the mystery of Jesus’ blood, reading the Bible at the kitchen table after dinner and going to the Wednesday-night services for young people. Mama said nothing, Reese teased me, and Daddy Glen sneered. Aunt Alma thought the whole thing was funny. “Well, at least she an’t copying Bible passages out and hiding them in your drawers like my Temple did. You just got to let her ride it out. When Temple got it, I teased her a little and the girl nearly took my head off. Almost had the preacher out to talk to me—as if I wasn’t a good Baptist—just because I don’t see no reason to go to church every Sunday of my life.” “But you should go to church,” I told Aunt Alma imperviously.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Reese and I stood still and said nothing. We knew we were not supposed to pay attention when Mama talked about Daddy Glen’s people. “Whose birthday is it?” was about the only safe thing to ask, since it was always somebody’s birthday, or a wedding or christening. The Waddells didn’t have as many cousins and aunts and uncles as we did, but the women still made babies—somebody was always celebrating something. One Sunday it was a double, a birthday for James and one of his kids. “One of the children,” Daddy Glen’s sister-in-law Madeline corrected me. “Kids are billygoats.” Goddam right, I thought, staring over at my puffy cousin in creased pants, an eight-year-old copy of his fat ugly father. They served us tea in the backyard, just us—Anney’s girls, they called us. Their kids went in and out of the house, loud, raucous, scratching their nails on the polished furniture, kicking their feet on the hardwood floors, tracking mud in on the braided rugs. “Those little brats need their asses slapped.” Mama was sitting with us at the picnic table in the garden, out where no one could hear her. She’d come to check on us where we sat in our starched dresses, our faces as stiff as the sleeves. Reese and I were sweaty and miserable trying not to wiggle around on the benches, to look well-behaved for Mama’s sake and stay out of the way of those kids who hated us as much as we did them. “When are we going?” we kept asking Mama, knowing she couldn’t tell us but asking just the same. “Soon,” she’d say, and light another cigarette with shaking hands. Mama didn’t smoke in Daddy Waddell’s house, though no one ever told her she couldn’t. They just didn’t leave ashtrays out. But I once saw Madeline smoking over the kitchen sink, dropping her ashes down the drain. It made me wonder if all of them went off in the kitchen or bathroom to smoke, pretending the rest of the time that they didn’t have any such dirty habits. “Can’t we go home now?” “No, James wants to show Daddy his new lawnmower.” “I thought he got a new one last year.” “This one’s the kind that you can ride on while you cut the grass.” “Don’t seem the yard’s big enough to need that.” “Well”—Mama gave a short laugh—“I don’t think James buys anything just ‘cause he needs it.” She brushed herself down carefully before going back in, though there wasn’t a speck of ash on her. “You girls play nice, now.” We sat still, wonderfully behaved, almost afraid to move. “Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am.” We kept our backs straight and never spoke out of turn, trying to imagine that Daddy Glen would look out and see us and be proud. His people watched us out the windows. Behind them, shelves of books and framed pictures mocked me.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I loved that house, the cool dimness under the porch ripe with the smell of dogs and red dirt, but Daddy Glen hated it. “It’s a goddam nigger shanty! Don’t they care how they’re living?” He wouldn’t put us in such a house, he insisted. He moved us instead to a cinder-block house where the tile floors were always peeling up in the damp and where we didn’t stay very long anyway. “But a decent neighborhood,” he told Mama, who said nothing, just unpacked the dishes one more time. My aunt Alma earned Daddy Glen’s undying contempt the year I was nine and she moved out on my uncle Wade. Uncle Earle joked that Alma had finally caught Wade doing just what he’d been doing for years. “Messing around,” Cousin Deedee said. “If he was my husband, I’d shoot his dick off.” “Might be a factor in why you don’t have one—a husband, that is,” Aunt Alma told her, and then laughed at the idea of shooting Uncle Wade in his private parts. “It’d get his attention anyway,” she told Mama. “But hell, the man’s a dog. Don’t care where he sticks it. Don’t know the value of what he had. Might as well take myself out of reach of his dirty ways.” She moved her brood of kids into an apartment building downtown, a second-floor frame walk-up with a shaky wide porch hanging off one side. No matter where she lived, Alma always had a porch. Nobody else we knew had ever lived in an apartment. Mama took us over to visit with a paper sack of towels and cotton diapers for the new baby from the Salvation Army thrift store. Aunt Alma smiled to see her, pulled a pitcher of cold tea out of the icebox, and shooed us out on the porch. A long flight of steps ran off the porch and looped back past the lower apartment extending down to the yard. Grey and Little Earle were sitting on the top steps, leaning over to watch the kids from downstairs, who were looking out their windows up to where we all stood. Shiny brown faces kept pressing against the glass and then withdrawing, stern blank faces that we could barely tell one from the other. “Niggers,” Grey whispered proudly. “Scared of us.” I wrapped my fingers around the banister rail, working splinters loose from the dry wood, and leaned over to look for myself. I had never seen colored people up close, and I was curious about these. They did look scared. “Their mama won’t let them come out.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Uncle Earle was joking to Grey and Garvey out on the porch in the dark, the three of them standing close together smoking and sharing a beer. They’d wanted to get in the house so bad Mama had finally let them move some of the broken furniture, insisting they do it quietly so that Alma could sleep. “Oh, women,” Garvey grunted. “They’re not that hard to handle.” “You think!” Uncle Earle laughed. “I’m telling you, boy, you never can predict what a woman might not do. You remember that little girl from Nashville I brought around two summers ago, sweet little thing not any bigger than Bone and all pasty-faced, blond, and giggly?” “Tiny, yeah,” Grey almost laughed. He sounded like he remembered her well. “She was so shy nobody got to know her.” “Well, that little thing,” Uncle Earle drawled, “that little thing just about cut my balls off with a pair of scissors one night. Got me by the short hairs and tried as hard as she could. If I hadn’t been twice her weight and six times as scared, she’d have left me a eunuch.” He laughed like the idea still made him nervous. “I’m telling you, women are dangerous. You need to keep it in mind.” I leaned my face against the screen door. It creaked slightly, and they all looked over toward me. I must have been silhouetted against the kitchen light like some ghostly night creature, because they all jumped. Earle’s face went stiff. “Bone,” he said, “you better get back in there with your mama. She might need your help.” Grey stood there quietly beside Earle, his hand still holding a beer can. I waited a minute, looking at him, remembering when he swore he would never forget what we had done. He lifted the beer can, drank deeply. He looked so proud to be standing on that porch drinking with Uncle Earle. “Didn’t you hear Earle?” Garvey’s tone was harsh. I looked at him directly and snorted. Little boy pretending to be a man didn’t scare me, but I backed into the kitchen anyway. I remembered that Nashville girl perfectly well. She had been so shy she stuttered whenever she tried to answer a question, and she was terrified of bugs of any kind. We’d teased her until she cried and went running to Earle like he was her father, not her supposed-to-be husband. She hadn’t looked to me like the kind that could do any damage at all, or even think about it. Not like Aunt Alma, who was, after all, a Boatwright, and dangerous as any man even when she wasn’t crazy. But you can’t tell with women, I thought. I looked down at my hands in the dim light of the lamp Mama had set up on the counter near the sink.

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

  Of Christianity as a new, free, and universal religion, they had no conception. Hence they hated Paul, the liberal apostle of the Gentiles, as a dangerous apostate and revolutionist, impugned his motives, and everywhere, especially in Galatia and Corinth, labored to undermine his authority in the churches. The epistles of Paul, especially that to the Galatians, can never be properly understood, unless their opposition to this false Judaizing Christianity be continually kept in view. The same heresy, more fully developed, appears in the second century under the name of Ebionism. 2. The opposite extreme is a false Gentile Christianity, which may be called the Paganizing or Gnostic heresy. It is as radical and revolutionary as the other is contracted and reactionary. It violently breaks away from the past, while the Judaizing heresies tenaciously and stubbornly cling to it as permanently binding. It exaggerates the Pauline view of the distinction of Christianity from Judaism, sunders Christianity from its historical basis, resolves the real humanity of the Saviour into a Doketistic illusion, and perverts the freedom of the gospel into antinomian licentiousness. The author, or first representative of this baptized heathenism, according to the uniform testimony of Christian antiquity, is Simon Magus, who unquestionably adulterated Christianity with pagan ideas and practices, and gave himself out, in pantheistic style, for an emanation of God.863 Plain traces of this error appear in the later epistles of Paul (to the Colossians, to Timothy, and to Titus), the second epistle of Peter, the first two epistles of John, the epistle of Jude, and the messages of the Apocalypse to the seven churches. This heresy, in the second century, spread over the whole church, east and west, in the various schools of Gnosticism. 3. As attempts had already been made, before Christ, by Philo, by the Therapeutae and the Essenes, etc., to blend the Jewish religion with heathen philosophy, especially that of Pythagoras and Plato, so now, under the Christian name, there appeared confused combinations of these opposite systems, forming either a Paganizing Judaism, i.e., Gnostic Ebionism, or a Judaizing Paganism i.e., Ebionistic Gnosticism, according as the Jewish or the heathen element prevailed. This Syncretistic heresy was the caricature of John’s theology, which truly reconciled Jewish and Gentile Christianity in the highest conception of the person and work of Christ. The errors combated in the later books of the New Testament are almost all more or less of this mixed sort, and it is often doubtful whether they come from Judaism or from heathenism. They were usually shrouded in a shadowy mysticism and surrounded by the halo of a self-made ascetic holiness, but sometimes degenerated into the opposite extreme of antinomian licentiousness. Whatever their differences, however, all these three fundamental heresies amount at last to a more or less distinct denial of the central truth of the gospel—

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

  3. Similar sayings are found long before Hillel, not only in the Pentateuch and the Book of Tobith 4:15: (o} misei'" mhdeni; poihvsh/", "Do that to no man which thou hatest"), but substantially even among the heathen (Confucius, Buddha, Herodotus, Isocrates, Seneca, Quintilian), but always either in the negative form, or with reference to a particular case or class; e.g. Isocrates, Ad Demonic. c. 4: "Be such towards your parents as thou shalt pray thy children shall be towards thyself;" and the same In Aeginet. c. 23: "That you would be such judges to me as you would desire to obtain for yourselves." See Wetstein on Matt. 7:12 (Nov. Test. I. 341 sq.). Parallels to this and other biblical maxims have been gathered in considerable number from the Talmud and the classics by Lightfoot, Grotius, Wetstein, Deutsch, Spiess, Ramage; but what are they all compared with the Sermon on the Mount? Moreover, si duo idem dicunt, non est idem. As to the rabbinical parallels, we must remember that they were not committed to writing before the second century, and that, Delitzsch says (Ein Tag in Capernaum, p. 137), "not a few sayings of Christ, circulated by Jewish Christians, reappeared anonymously or under false names in the Talmuds and Midrashim." 4. No amount of detached words of wisdom constitute an organic system of ethics any, more than a heap of marble blocks constitute a palace or temple; and the best system of ethics is unable to produce a holy life, and is worthless without it. We may admit without hesitation that Hillel was "the greatest and best of all Pharisees" (Ewald), but he was far inferior to John the Baptist; and to compare him with Christ is sheer blindness or folly. Ewald calls such comparison "utterly perverse" (grundverkehrt, v. 48). Farrar remarks that the distance between Hillel and Jesus is "a distance absolutely immeasurable, and the resemblance of his teaching to that of Jesus is the resemblance of a glow-worm to the sun" (II. 455). "The fundamental tendencies of both," says Delitzsch (p. 23), "are as widely apart as he and earth. That of Hillel is legalistic, casuistic, and nationally contracted; that of Jesus is universally religious, moral and human. Hillel lives and moves in the externals, Jesus in the spirit of the law." He was not even a reformer, as Geiger and Friedlander would make him, for what they adduce as proofs are mere trifles of interpretation, and involve no new principle or idea.

• From Trash (1988)

  He’d had a fine talent for the winches and pumps at the mine, but the cables and wheels of the spinning machines confused him. After a few weeks, he found himself standing in front of a wheeled cart, pulling off full bobbins and popping on empty ones. His ears rang with the noise and his eyes watered from the dust, but Shirley just shrugged. “Mill workers are a better class of people than miners. I never planned to live my life as a miner’s wife.” Tucker Boatwright took to slipping whiskey into his cold tea, while his blue eyes faded to a pale gray. The Boatwright children had bad dreams. After supper they were all required to wash again while their mama watched. “That neck don’t look clean to me, Bo. You trying to grow mold in those armpits, Mattie? Why are you so dirty and stupid?” The children scrubbed and scrubbed, while Shirley rubbed her neck with one hand and her bulging belly with another. “I’d kill this thing, if I could,” she muttered. Her five sons and three daughters dreamed often of their mother, dreamed she came in to wash their faces with lye, to cut off the places where their ears stuck out, to tie down their wagging tongues, and plane down their purplish genitals. “You won’t need this,” they dreamed she told them, as she pulled off one piece or another of their flesh. “Or this, or this.” They dreamed and screamed and woke each other in terror. Sometimes Shirley beat on the stairs with a broom handle to remind them how much she and Tucker needed their sleep. She hated the way they cringed away from her. After all, she never hit them. A pinch was enough, if you knew how it should be done. But more than their shameful fear of her, she hated the way Mattie would stare back at her and refuse to drop her eyes. “You think you’re something, don’t you?” Shirley would push her face right up to her daughter’s flushed and sweating cheekbones. “You think God’s got his eye on you?” She would pinch the inside of Mattie’s arm and twist her mouth at the girl’s stubborn expression. “Wouldn’t nobody take an interest in you if you were to birth puppy dogs and turtles—which you might. You might any day now.” She sent them all to bed early and came up to beat the foot of each bed with her broomstick until the children squeezed up near the top. “Boatwrights, you’re all purely bred Boatwrights. My side of the family don’t even want to know you’re alive. I look at you and I swear you an’t no kin to me at all.” It was true that Shirley’s family took no interest in her children.

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

  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. None of the great Rabbis, no Hillel, no Shammai, no Gamaliel attempted or even conceived of a reformation; on the contrary, they heaped tradition upon tradition and accumulated the talmudic rubbish of twelve large folios and 2947 leaves, which represents the anti-Christian petrifaction of Judaism; while the four Gospels have regenerated humanity and are the life and the light of the civilized world to this day.

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

  The Ebionites spread the lie that Paul was of heathen parents, fell in love with the daughter of the high priest in Jerusalem, became a proselyte and submitted to circumcision in order to secure her, but failing in his purpose, he took revenge and attacked the circumcision, the sabbath, and the whole Mosaic law.384 In the pseudo-Clementine Homilies, which represent a speculative form of the Judaizing heresy, Paul is assailed under the disguise of Simon Magus, the arch-heretic, who struggled antinomian heathenism into the church. The manifestation of Christ was either a manifestation of his wrath, or a deliberate lie.385 2. The Rationalistic Theory of Thunder and Lightning.—It attributes the conversion to physical causes, namely, a violent storm and the delirium of a burning Syrian fever, in which Paul superstitiously mistook the thunder for the voice of God and the lightning for a heavenly vision.386 But the record says nothing about thunderstorm and fever, and both combined could not produce such an effect upon any sensible man, much less upon the history of the world. Who ever heard the thunder speak in Hebrew or in any other articulate language? And had not Paul and Luke eyes and ears and common sense, as well as we, to distinguish an ordinary phenomenon of nature from a supernatural vision? 3. The Vision-Hypothesis resolves the conversion into a natural psychological process and into an honest self-delusion. It is the favorite theory of modern rationalists, who scorn all other explanations, and profess the highest respect for the intellectual and moral purity and greatness of Paul.387 It is certainly more rational and creditable than the second hypothesis, because it ascribes the mighty change not to outward and accidental phenomena which pass away, but to internal causes. It assumes that an intellectual and moral fermentation was going on for some time in the mind of Paul, and resulted at last, by logical necessity, in an entire change of conviction and conduct, without any supernatural influence, the very possibility of which is denied as being inconsistent with the continuity of natural development. The miracle in this case was simply the mythical and symbolical reflection of the commanding presence of Jesus in the thoughts of the apostle. That Paul saw a vision, he says himself, but he meant, of course, a real, objective, personal appearance of Christ from heaven, which was visible to his eyes and audible to his ears, and at the same time a revelation to his mind through the medium of the senses.388 The inner spiritual manifestation389 was more important than the external, but both combined produced conviction. The vision-theory turns the appearance of Christ into a purely subjective imagination, which the apostle mistook for an objective fact.390

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

  The great majority of the Christians in Rome, even down to the close of the second century, belonged to the lower ranks of society. They were artisans, freedmen, slaves. The proud Roman aristocracy of wealth, power, and knowledge despised the gospel as a vulgar superstition. The contemporary writers ignored it, or mentioned it only incidentally and with evident contempt. The Christian spirit and the old Roman spirit were sharply and irreconcilably antagonistic, and sooner or later had to meet in deadly conflict. But, as in Athens and Corinth, so there were in Rome also a few honorable exceptions. Paul mentions his success in the praetorian guard and in the imperial household.508 It is possible, though not probable, that Paul became passingly acquainted with the Stoic philosopher, Annaeus Seneca, the teacher of Nero and friend of Burrus; for he certainly knew his brother, Annaeus Gallio, proconsul at Corinth, then at Rome, and had probably official relations with Burrus, as prefect of the praetorian guard, to which he was committed as prisoner; but the story of the conversion of Seneca, as well as his correspondence with Paul, are no doubt pious fictions, and, if true, would be no credit to Christianity, since Seneca, like Lord Bacon, denied his high moral principles by his avarice and meanness.509 Pomponia Graecina, the wife of Aulus Plautius, the conqueror of Britain, who was arraigned for "foreign superstition" about the year 57 or 58 (though pronounced innocent by her husband), and led a life of continual sorrow till her death in 83, was probably the first Christian lady of the Roman nobility, the predecessor of the ascetic Paula and Eustochium, the companions of Jerome.510 Claudia and Pudens, from whom Paul sends greetings (2 Tim. 4:21), have, by an ingenious conjecture, been identified with the couple of that name, who are respectfully mentioned by Martial in his epigrams; but this is doubtful.511 A generation later two cousins of the Emperor Domitian (81–96), T. Flavius Clemens, consul (in 95), and his wife, Flavia Domitilla, were accused of "atheism, " that is, of Christianity, and condemned, the husband to death, the wife to exile (A.D. 96).512 Recent excavations in the catacomb of Domitilla, near that of Callistus, establish the fact that an entire branch of the Flavian family had embraced the Christian faith. Such a change was wrought within fifty or sixty years after Christianity had entered Rome.513 CHAPTER VI.THE GREAT TRIBULATION. (MATT. 24:21.)§ 37. The Roman Conflagration and the Neronian Persecution. "And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. And when I saw her, I wondered with a great wonder."—Apoc. 17:6. Literature. I. Tacitus: Annales, 1. XV., c. 38–44. Suetonius: Nero, chs. 16 and 38 (very brief). Sulpicius Severus: Hist. Sacra, 1. II., c. 41. He gives to the Neronian persecution a more general character.

• From Fragments (7)

  Il ne nous servirait pas de grand'chose d'avoir chassé la prétendue femme aimée de l'Ode II, si nous bornions là notre œuvre d'assainissement : il nous reste donc à étudier tous les textes de Sappho, qu'on met en avant pour autoriser ses prétendus débordements. Parmi les prétendues amies de Sappho, celle qui est la mieux établie dans l'opinion vulgaire, à cause des quelques textes qui paraissent la concerner, c'est sans contredit Atthis : puisqu'on a été jusqu'à créer le « Cycle d'At- this », Voyons un peu ce qu'il en est : Tout d'abord nous devons constater qu'Atthis est le propre nom de l'Attique : En effet ce pays s'appela d'abord 'Axtt,, à cause de la forme de ses rivages ; et ce nom finit par s'adoucir en 'At6i^, probablement selon le rapport 'A-rtitç : 'Ay,rJ] = tfxTO) : zi^ en tout cas ce nom n'apparaît, pour la première fois, que dans Euripide, deux siècles après la mort de Sappho. De plus, l'habitude d'appeler les domestiques du nom de leur pays est propre aux comi- ques ; ainsi que nous l'apprend entre autres Boissonade (Thcr., p. 226) : « Propter nomen servile ^pjyix appo- nam observationem grammatici e codice 1310, p. 399 : 'ôv. oî xtoiA'.xcl Tcùç c'ixé-a^ To [xàv irXécv âro toO yivouç êxaXouv, cTcv Supsv, Kap(tova, Fl-rav, M(Sav (scr., MT,8av) xal xi o[ao'«- Dès lors, comme il a existé une comédie d'Alexis inti- tulée précisément Atthis, il nous semble qu'elle est bien plus qualifiée que les œuvres de Sappho, pour recueillir tous les fragments où nous découvrirons ce nom. Mais voyons un peu ces fragments : i° Sappho Fr. 33. Ici d'après Bergk lui-même nous trouvons à'-re dans les — 54 — six manuscrits qu'il a marqués B,H,N, FI., Turneb., Plot. Apostol. VIII, 68 b.; axoi dans trois mss. A, P, Ming., 489 ; et enfin àtt dans deux C,M, Or, il est ma- nifeste que oîTe est une erreur de copiste pour ate ; de plus un grand nombre d'exemples nous prouvent que aTt a été amené par l'iotacisme, à la place de âtst qui est dû à un reviseur interprétant axe éol, =î^T5l att., selon le rapport axe : ^toI = [jivxe : ij-£vto\ (cf. Bergk III, 116 : [jiév T£ i. e \).evzo\ secundum epicorum consuetudi- nem etiam Lesbii poetse adhibent., cf. Fr. adespot, 55 A *; adde Hellad., ap. Phot., Bibl, 532). Par con- séquent il est clair que le Fr. 33 doit se lire : 'Hpi;jLav \Kh lyw a£0cv «te TciXat ^é a ; il n'y a absolument aucune l)()uue raison de I écrire autrement. Ce qui n'a pas em- pêché Bentley de changer àtt en 'Atô\ç et Bergk de l'approuver.

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

  Great minds, indeed, are always more or less at war with their age, as we may see in the reformers, in the apostles, nay, in Christ himself. But their antagonism proceeds from a clear knowledge of the real wants and a sincere devotion to the best interests of the age; it is all progressive and reformatory, and at last carries the deeper spirit of the age with itself, and raises it to a higher level. The antagonism of Julian, starting with a radical misconception of the tendency of history and animated by selfish ambition, was one of retrogression and reaction, and in addition, was devoted to a bad cause. He had all the faults, and therefore deserved the tragic fate, of a fanatical reactionist.

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  Wilson of California said, “I should like to say a few words, and introduce into the record some material regarding the controversial religious leader, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, a man who has induced thousands of our young people to join his cult.” The congressman then explained, “Unfortunately, there are always those who would take advantage of the American system, people who would take advantage of our laws safeguarding civil rights, and our laws insuring religious freedom. Such a person, in my estimation, is the Reverend Moon…who also seems to profit by it himself enormously, while his converts, our youngsters, are begging for him in the streets.”25 Weeks before the tragedy at Jonestown, a congressional investigation of Moon and the Unification Church (UC) concluded with the following: (1) The UC and numerous other religious and secular organizations headed by Sun Myung Moon constitute essentially one international organization. This organization depends heavily upon the interchangeability of its components and upon its ability to move personnel and financial assets freely across international boundaries and between businesses and nonprofit organizations. ( 2) The Moon Organization attempts to achieve goals outlined by Sun Myung Moon, who has substantial control over the economic, political, and spiritual activities undertaken by the organization in pursuit of those goals. (3) Among the goals of the Moon Organization is the establishment of a worldwide government in which the separation of church and state would be abolished and which would be governed by Moon and his followers. The congressional report stated that a “task force should address itself to the following issues.” (a) Whether there have been systemic and planned violations of U.S. immigration laws and regulations in connection with the importation of large numbers of foreign nationals for purposes of fundraising, political activities, and employment in the Moon Organization business enterprises. (b) Whether there have been systematic and planned violations of U.S. currency and foreign exchange laws in connection with the movement of millions of dollars of cash and other financial assets into and out of the United States without complying with appropriate reporting requirements. (c) Whether U.S. tax laws have been violated through large cash transfers to individuals which were characterized as loans.26 In July 1982 Moon and an associate, Takeru Kamiyama, were convicted by a jury of intentionally failing to pay taxes on the interest earned from more than $1.7 million. Reportedly this involved a “massive” and systematic effort to defraud the government and obstruct justice. After exhausting the appeals process, Moon served an eighteen-month prison sentence for tax fraud.27 In a pattern that would repeat itself endlessly concerning the criminal prosecution of a purported cult leader, Moon claimed he was being “persecuted.” A subsequent book characterized his trial and conviction as an “inquisition.”28 Critics of the book noted that the author had ties to the UC and was less than objective.