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.

Page 31 of 253 · 20 per page

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

  Thus, with the freedom of conscience, was born the freedom of the press. But it had to pass through a severe ordeal, even in Protestant countries, and was constantly checked by Roman authorities as far as their power extended. The German Empire, by the Edict of Worms, made itself an ally of the pope against free thought and free press, and continued so until it died of old age in 1806.755 Fortunately, the weakness of the empire and the want of centralization prevented the execution of the prohibition of Protestant books, except in strictly papal countries, as Bavaria and Austria. But unfortunately, the Protestants themselves, who used the utmost freedom of the press against the Papists, denied it to each other; the Lutherans to the Reformed, and both to the Anabaptists, Schwenkfeldians and Socinians.756 Protestant princes liked to control the press to protect themselves against popery, or the charges of robbery of church property and other attacks. The Elector John Frederick was as narrow and intolerant as Duke George on the opposite side. But these petty restrictions are nothing compared with the radical and systematic crusade of the Papists against the freedom of the press. King Ferdinand of Austria ordered, July 24, 1528, all printers and sellers of sectarian books to be drowned, and their books to be burnt. The wholesale burning of Protestant books, including Protestant Bibles, was a favorite and very effective measure of the Jesuitical reaction which set in before the middle of the sixteenth century, and was promoted by the political arm, and the internecine wars of the Protestants. Pope Paul IV. published in 1557 and 1559 the first official Index Librorum prohibitorum; Pius IV. in 1564, an enlarged edition, generally known as Index Tridentinus, as it was made by order of the Council of Trent. It contains a list of all the books forbidden by Rome, good, bad, and indifferent. This list has been growing ever since in size (1590, 1596, 1607, 1664, 1758, 1819, etc.), but declining in authority, till it became, like the bull against the comet, an anachronism and a brutum fulmen.757 § 93. Protestantism in Saxony. H. G. Hasse: Meissnisch-Albertinisch-Sächsische Kirchengesch. Leipz. 1847, 2 parts. Fr. Seifert: Die Reformation in Leipzig, Leipz. 1881. G. Lechler: Die Vorgeschichte der Reform. Leipzigs, 1885. See also the literary references in Köstlin, II. 426 and 672. Electoral Saxony was the first conquest of the Reformation. Wittenberg was the centre of the whole movement, with Luther as the general in chief, Melanchthon, Jonas, Bugenhagen, as his aids. The gradual growth of Lutheranism in this land of its birth is identical with the early history of the Reformation, and has been traced already.

• From Trash (1988)

  It was one of those parties where everyone pretends to know everyone else. My borrowed silk blouse kept pulling out of my skirt, so I tried to stay with my back to the buffet and ignore the bartender, who had a clear view of my problem. The woman who brushed my arm was a friend of the director of the organization where I worked; a woman who was known for her wardrobe and sudden acts of well-publicized generosity. She tossed her hair back when she saw me and laughed like an old familiar friend. “Southerners are so charming, I always say, giving their children such clever names.” She had a wineglass in one hand and a cherry tomato in the other, and she gestured with that tomato—a wide, witty, “charmed” gesture I do not ever remember seeing in the South. “I just love yours. There was a girl at school had a name like yours, two names said as one actually. Barbara-Jean, I think, or Ruth-Anne. I can’t remember anymore, but she was the sweetest, most soft-spoken girl. I just loved her.” She smiled again, her eyes looking over my head at someone else. She leaned in close to me. “It’s so wonderful that you can be with us, you know. Some of the people who have worked here, well . . . you know, well, we have so much to learn from you—gentility, you know, courtesy, manners, charm, all of that.” For a moment I was dizzy, overcome with the curious sensation of floating out of the top of my head. It was as if I looked down on all the other people in that crowded room, all of them sipping their wine and half of them eating cherry tomatoes. I watched the woman beside me click her teeth against the beveled edge of her wineglass and heard the sound of my mother’s voice hissing in my left ear, Yankeeeeeees! It was all I could do not to nod. When I was sixteen I worked counter with my mama back of a Moses Drugstore planted in the middle of a Highway 50 shopping mall. I was trying to save money to go to college, and ritually, every night, I’d pour my tips into a can on the back of my dresser. Sometimes my mama would throw in a share of hers to encourage me, but mostly hers was spent even before we got home—at the Winn Dixie at the far end of the mall or the Maryland Fried Chicken right next to it. Mama taught me the real skills of being a waitress—how to get an order right, get the drinks there first and the food as fast as possible so it would still be hot, and to do it all with an expression of relaxed good humor. “You don’t have to smile,” she explained, “but it does help.

• From Trash (1988)

  She’d talk nice, drawling like she never did with friends or me, while she moved slower than you’d think a wide-awake person could. “Uh huh,” she’d say, and “Shore-nuf,” and offer them honey for their biscuits or tell them how red-eye gravy is made, or talk about how sorry it is that we don’t serve grits on Sunday. That couple would grin wide and start slowing their words down, while the regulars would choke on their coffee. Mama never bet on the tip, just put it all into the pot, and it was usually enough to provoke a round of applause after the couple was safely out the door. Mama said nothing about it except the first time when she told me, “Yankees eat boiled eggs for breakfast,” which may not sound like much, but had the force of a powerful insult. It was a fact that the only people we knew who ate boiled eggs in the morning were those stray tourists and people on the TV set who we therefore assumed had to be Yankees. Yankees ate boiled eggs, laughed at grits but ate them in big helpings, and had plenty of money to leave outrageous tips but might leave nothing for no reason that I could figure out. It wasn’t the accent that marked Yankees. They talked different, but all kinds of different. There seemed to be a great many varieties of them, not just northerners, but westerners, Canadians, black people who talked oddly enough to show they were foreign, and occasionally strangers who didn’t even speak English. Some were friendly, some deliberately nasty. All of them were Yankees, strangers, unpredictable people with an enraging attitude of superiority who would say the rudest things as if they didn’t know what an insult was. “They’re the ones the world was made for,” Harriet told me late one night. “You and me, your mama, all of us, we just hold a place in the landscape for them. Far as they’re concerned, once we’re out of sight we just disappear.” Mabel plain hated them. Yankees didn’t even look when she rolled her soft wide hips. “Son of a bitch,” she’d say when some fish-eyed, clipped-tongue stranger would look right through her and leave her less than fifteen cents. “He must think we get fat on the honey of his smile.” Which was even funnier when you’d seen that the man hadn’t smiled at all. “But give me an inch of edge and I can handle them,” she’d tell me. “Sweets, you just stretch that drawl. Talk like you’re from Mississippi, and they’ll eat it up.

• From Trash (1988)

  Shirley Wilmer, of the Knoxville County Wilmers, married Tucker Boatwright when she was past nineteen, and he was just barely sixteen. Her family had a peanut farm off to the north of Knoxville, a piece of property they split between the five sons. Shirley was the only daughter. Her inheritance was a cedar chest full of embroidered linen and baby clothes that she and her mama had gotten together over the years—that and sixty dollars in silver that her daddy gave her, a fortune in those days. Granny Mattie swore that when Grandma Shirley died, those silver coins were still tied in the same cloth in which she had gotten them. Two of Grandma Shirley’s children died of the flu after gathering melons on a frosty fall day. People swore you could cure the flu with a bath of hot oil and comfrey, but Shirley wasn’t the kind to gather herbs and certainly not the kind to spend her silver on someone who would. She’d never wanted children anyway—not really—and hated the way her body continuously swelled and delivered. She called the children devils and worms and trash, and swore that, like worms, their natural substance was dirt and weeds. Shirley Boatwright believed herself to be one of the quality . “The better people,” she told her daughters. “They know their own. You watch how it goes; you watch how people treat me down at the mill. They can see who I am. It’s in the eyes if nothing else.” Mattie, the oldest girl, watched the way her mama’s lips thinned and tightened, the way her sisters and brothers held their own mouths pinched together so their lips stuck out. Shirley Boatwright was proud of getting on at the mill and of how much she earned there, as proud of that as she was ashamed that Tucker still worked in the coal mine. “A tight mouth,” Tucker Boatwright was heard to say. “A tight mouth betrays a tight heart, and a shallow soul.” His wife said nothing, but pulled her lips in tighter still, and the next day Tucker found the doors locked against him when he came home from the mine. “Woman, what do you think you’re doing?” He beat on the front door with a swollen dirty right fist. “Woman, open this door!” He spit and shouted and kicked the base of the doorjamb. “Kids, do you hear me? Shirley? Woman?”

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

  Of mediaeval divines Luther esteemed Nicolaus Lyra as a most useful commentator. He praises St. Bernard, who in his sermons "excels all other doctors, even Augustin." He speaks highly of Peter the Lombard, "the Master of Sentences," and calls him a "homo diligentissimus et excellentissimi ingenii," although he brought in many useless questions (Bindseil, III. 151; Erl. ed. LXII. 114). He calls Occam, whom he studied diligently, "summus dialecticus" (Bindseil, III. 138, 270). But upon the whole he hated the schoolmen and their master, "the damned heathen Aristotle," although he admits him to have been "optimus dialecticus," and learned from him and his commentators the art of logical reasoning. Even Thomas Aquinas, "the Angelic Doctor," whom the Lutheran scholastics of the seventeenth century highly and justly esteemed, he denounced as a chatterer (loquacissimus), who makes the Bible bend to Aristotle (Bindseil, III. 270, 286), and whose books are a fountain of all heresies, and destructive of the gospel ("der Brunn und Grundsuppe aller Ketzerei, Irrthums und Verleugnung des Evangeliums." Erl. ed. XXIV. 240). This is, of course, the language of prejudice and passion.—His views on Augustin are the most correct, because he knew him best, and liked him most. Melanchthon and Oecolampadius from fuller knowledge and milder temper judged more favorably and consistently of the fathers generally, and their invaluable services to Christian literature. § 86. Changes in the Views on the Ministry. Departure from the Episcopal Succession. Luther ordains a Deacon, and consecrates a Bishop. The Reformers unanimously rejected the sacerdotal character of the Christian ministry (except in a spiritual sense), and hence also the idea of a literal altar and sacrifice. No priest, no sacrifice. "Priest" is an abridgment of "presbyter,"706 and "Presbyter" is equivalent to "elder." It does not mean sacerdos in the New Testament, nor among the earliest ecclesiastical writers before Tertullian and Cyprian.707 Moreover, in Scripture usage "presbyter" and "bishop" are terms for one and the same office (as also in the Epistle of Clement of Rome, and the recently discovered "Teaching of the Twelve Apostles".708 This fact (conceded by Jerome and Chrysostom and the best modern scholars) was made the basis for presbyterian ordination in those Lutheran and Reformed churches which abolished episcopacy.709 In the place of a graded hierarchy, the Reformers taught the parity of ministers; and in the place of a special priesthood, offering the very body and blood of Christ, a general priesthood of believers, offering the sacrifices of prayer and praise for the one sacrifice offered for all time to come. Luther derived the lay-priesthood from baptism as an anointing by the Holy Spirit and an incorporation into Christ. "A layman with the Scriptures," he said, "is more to be believed than pope and council without the Scriptures."710

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

  Schröckh: vii. p. 213 sqq. Stuffken: De Theodosii M. in rem christianam meritis. Lugd. Batav. 1828 From this time heathenism approached, with slow but steady step, its inevitable dissolution, until it found an inglorious grave amid the storms of the great migration and the ruins of the empire of the Caesars, and in its death proclaimed the victory of Christianity. Emperors, bishops, and monks committed indeed manifold injustice in destroying temples and confiscating property; but that injustice was nothing compared with the bloody persecution of Christianity for three hundred years. The heathenism of ancient Greece and Rome died of internal decay, which no human power could prevent. After Julian, the succession of Christian emperors continued unbroken. On the day of his death, which was also the extinction of the Constantinian family, the general Jovian, a Christian (363–364), was chosen emperor by the army. He concluded with the Persians a disadvantageous but necessary peace, replaced the cross in the labarum, and restored to the church her privileges, but, beyond this, declared universal toleration in the spirit of Constantine. Under the circumstances, this was plainly the wisest policy. Like Constantine, also, he abstained from all interference with the internal affairs of the church, though for himself holding the Nicene faith and warmly favorable to Athanasius. He died in the thirty-third year of his age, after a brief reign of eight months. Augustin says, God took him away sooner than Julian, that no emperor might become a Christian for the sake of Constantine’s good fortune, but only for the sake of eternal life. His successor, Valentinian I. (died 375), though generally inclined to despotic measures, declared likewise for the policy of religious freedom,88 and, though personally an adherent of the Nicene orthodoxy, kept aloof from the doctrinal controversies; while his brother and co-emperor, Valens, who reigned in the East till 378, favored the Arians and persecuted the Catholics. Both, however, prohibited bloody sacrifices89 and divination. Maximin, the representative of Valentinian at Rome, proceeded with savage cruelty against all who were found guilty of the crime of magic, especially the Roman aristocracy. Soothsayers were burnt alive, while their meaner accomplices were beaten to death by straps loaded with lead. In almost every case recorded the magical arts can be traced to pagan religious usages. Under this reign heathenism was for the first time officially designated as paganismus, that is, peasant-religion; because it had almost entirely died out in the cities, and maintained only a decrepit and obscure existence in retired villages.90 What an inversion of the state of things in the second century, when Celsus contemptuously called Christianity a religion of mechanics and slaves! Of course large exceptions must in both cases be made.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  [Footnote 225: Lit. of those who _was_ held of the greatest casuists (_di quelli che de' maggior cassesi era tenuto_). This is another very obscure passage. The meaning of the word _cassesi_ is unknown and we can only guess it to be a dialectic (probably Venetian) corruption of the word _casisti_ (casuists). The Giunta edition separates the word thus, _casse si_, making _si_ a mere corroborative prefix to _era_, but I do not see how the alteration helps us, the word _casse_ (chests, boxes) being apparently meaningless in this connection.] There was, then, noble ladies, in Imola, a man of wicked and corrupt life, who was called Berto della Massa and whose lewd fashions, being well known of the Imolese, had brought him into such ill savour with them that there was none in the town who would credit him, even when he said sooth; wherefore, seeing that his shifts might no longer stand him in stead there, he removed in desperation to Venice, the receptacle of every kind of trash, thinking to find there new means of carrying on his wicked practices. There, as if conscience-stricken for the evil deeds done by him in the past, feigning himself overcome with the utmost humility and waxing devouter than any man alive, he went and turned Minor Friar and styled himself Fra Alberta da Imola; in which habit he proceeded to lead, to all appearance, a very austere life, greatly commending abstinence and mortification and never eating flesh nor drinking wine, whenas he had not thereof that which was to his liking. In short, scarce was any ware of him when from a thief, a pimp, a forger, a manslayer, he suddenly became a great preacher, without having for all that forsworn the vices aforesaid, whenas he might secretly put them in practice. Moreover, becoming a priest, he would still, whenas he celebrated mass at the altar, an he were seen of many, beweep our Saviour's passion, as one whom tears cost little, whenas he willed it. Brief, what with his preachings and his tears, he contrived on such wise to inveigle the Venetians that he was trustee and depository of well nigh every will made in the town and guardian of folk's monies, besides being confessor and counsellor of the most part of the men and women of the place; and doing thus, from wolf he was become shepherd and the fame of his sanctity was far greater in those parts than ever was that of St. Francis at Assisi.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  So Anichino got up and made his way to the garden with a switch of silver willow in his hand, and just as he was approaching the pine-tree, Egano, seeing him coming, stood up and came to meet him, as though with the intention of bidding him a most cordial welcome. But Anichino said: ‘So you came after all, did you, you filthy little whore? You thought me capable of wronging my master, did you? A thousand curses upon you!’ And raising his stick, he began to beat him. On hearing this outburst and catching sight of the stick, Egano took to his heels without saying a word, being closely pursued by Anichino, who kept on saying: ‘Take that, you shameless hussy, and may God punish you as you deserve! Mark my words, I shall tell Egano of this tomorrow!’ Bruised and battered all over, Egano returned as fast as he could to his bedroom, and his wife asked him whether Anichino had come to the garden. ‘Would to God that he hadn’t,’ said Egano, ‘for he mistook me for you, beat me black and blue with a cudgel, and addressed me by the foulest names that any wicked woman was ever called. I must say I thought it very strange that he should have spoken to you as he did with the intention of dishonouring me. But I see now that, finding you so gay and sociable, he simply wanted to put you to the test.’ Then the lady said: ‘Thanks be to God that he tested me with words, and saved his deeds for you! At least it can be said that his words tried my patience less severely than his deeds tried yours. But since he is so loyal to you, we should do him honour and hold him high in our esteem.’ ‘I agree with you entirely,’ said Egano. In view of what had happened, Egano came to the conclusion that he was blessed with the most faithful wife and the most loyal servant that any nobleman had ever possessed. And for this reason, whilst on many a future occasion they all three had a good laugh over the events of that particular night, at the same time it became far easier than it would otherwise have been for Anichino and the lady to do the thing that brought them pleasure and delight, at any rate for as long as Anichino chose to remain with Egano in Bologna.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Now, one day, Guido had walked from Orsammichele along the Corso degli Adimari as far as San Giovanni, which was a favourite walk of his because it took him past those great marble tombs, now to be found in Santa Reparata,3 and the numerous other graves that lie all around San Giovanni. As he was threading his way among the tombs, between the porphyry columns that stand in that spot and the door of San Giovanni, which was locked, Messer Betto and his friends came riding through the piazza of Santa Reparata, and on seeing Guido among all these tombs, they said: ‘Let’s go and torment him.’ And so, spurring their horses and making a mock charge, they were upon him almost before he had time to notice, and they began to taunt him, saying: ‘Guido, you spurn our company; but supposing you find that God doesn’t exist, what good will it do you?’ Finding himself surrounded, Guido promptly replied: ‘Gentlemen, in your own house you may say whatever you like to me.’ Then, placing a hand on one of the tombstones, which were very tall,4 he vaulted over the top of it, being very light and nimble, and landed on the other side, whence, having escaped from their clutches, he proceeded on his way. Betto and his companions were left staring at one another, then they began to declare that he was out of his mind, and that his remark was meaningless, because neither they themselves nor any of the other citizens, Guido included, owned the ground on which their horses were standing. But Messer Betto turned to them, and said: ‘You’re the ones who are out of your minds, if you can’t see what he meant. In a few words he has neatly paid us the most back-handed compliment I ever heard, because when you come to consider it, these tombs are the houses of the dead, this being the place where the dead are laid to rest and where they take up their abode. By describing it as our house, he wanted to show us that, by comparison with himself and other men of learning, all men who are as uncouth and unlettered as ourselves are worse off than the dead. So that, being in a graveyard, we are in our own house.’ Now that Guido’s meaning had been pointed out to them, they all felt suitably abashed, and they never taunted him again. And from that day forth, they looked upon Messer Betto as a paragon of shrewdness and intelligence. TENTH STORYFriar Cipolla promises a crowd of country folk that he will show them a feather of the Angel Gabriel, and on finding that some bits of coal have been put in its place, he proclaims that these were left over from the roasting of Saint Lawrence.

• From Trash (1988)

  Once a year Shirley would go alone to visit her mother, but neither her parents nor her brothers ever visited her. The only thing the children knew about their grandparents was Shirley’s stories about their house, how big and clean it was, how the porch shone with soapstoned wood and baskets of sweet herbs that Grandma Wilmer used in her cooking, how the neighbors admired her mother and looked up to her daddy. By contrast, their father’s father, a widower, was nothing but a drunk. “Vegetables . . . hell!” That man sells whiskey out of that roadside stand, whiskey I tell you, not tomatoes and squash. He just has those runty old tomatoes there to keep the law off.” “Now Shirley, you know that an’t true,” Tucker always protested. “I know what’s true, Tucker Boatwright, and I won’t have these children spared the truth. You want them to grow up like their grandfather? Like those lazy sisters of yours in their dirt-floor cabins? I surely don’t. They grow up to live in dirt and I’ll renounce them.” “That woman hates her children,” the neighbors all said. They did not say that the children hated her. It was not possible to know what those children thought, so quiet and still they were. They all had the same face, the same pinched features, colorless hair, and nervous hands. Only their eyes varied in shade, from Bo’s seawater blue to Mattie’s grapeskin hazel. In the warmer weather, they all took on the same shade of deep red-brown tan, a tan acquired from staying away from the house as much as they could, and from long hours spent weeding and picking at their mama’s direction in a half a dozen farmers’ fields. “Money is hard come by,” Shirley told them, pocketing eight cents a week on the boys, and three on the girls. “Dreams are all that come free, dreams and talk. And that’s all lazy people know about. You should see those bent-necks down at the mill, trying to pretend they’re working when they’re dreaming or talking. Talk about how badly they’re used. Trash don’t know the meaning of use. Just like you kids.” She tucked the pennies in her kerchief and that in her apron. “The way you eat, you’d think you didn’t know the cost of boiled rice.” “Two cents a pound.” When Mattie spoke, all the other children dropped their heads, though Bo and Tucker Junior always turned their faces so they could look up from the side. They knew Mattie was crazy, but they worshiped her craziness and suspected that without her they might have all curled up and died. “You little whore!” Shirley gripped the fabric of her apron in twisted fingers. Her voice was an outraged hiss. “You an’t worth two cents a night yourself.”

• From Trash (1988)

  Yankees ate boiled eggs, laughed at grits but ate them in big helpings, and had plenty of money to leave outrageous tips but might leave nothing for no reason that I could figure out. It wasn’t the accent that marked Yankees. They talked different, but all kinds of different. There seemed to be a great many varieties of them, not just northerners, but westerners, Canadians, black people who talked oddly enough to show they were foreign, and occasionally strangers who didn’t even speak English. Some were friendly, some deliberately nasty. All of them were Yankees, strangers, unpredictable people with an enraging attitude of superiority who would say the rudest things as if they didn’t know what an insult was. “They’re the ones the world was made for,” Harriet told me late one night. “You and me, your mama, all of us, we just hold a place in the landscape for them. Far as they’re concerned, once we’re out of sight we just disappear.” Mabel plain hated them. Yankees didn’t even look when she rolled her soft wide hips. “Son of a bitch,” she’d say when some fish-eyed, clipped-tongue stranger would look right through her and leave her less than fifteen cents. “He must think we get fat on the honey of his smile.” Which was even funnier when you’d seen that the man hadn’t smiled at all. “But give me an inch of edge and I can handle them,” she’d tell me. “Sweets, you just stretch that drawl. Talk like you’re from Mississippi, and they’ll eat it up. For some reason, Yankees got strange sentimental notions about Mississippi.” “They’re strange about other things, too,” Mama would throw in. “They think they can ask you personal questions just ’cause you served them a cup of coffee.” Some salesman once asked her where she got her hose with the black thread sewed up the back and Mama hadn’t forgiven him yet. But the thing everyone told me and told me again was that you just couldn’t trust yourself with them. Nobody bet on Yankee tips, they might leave anything. Once someone even left a New York City subway token. Mama thought it a curiosity but not the equivalent of real money. Another one ordered one cup of coffee to go and twenty packs of sugar. “They made road liquor out of it,” Mabel said. “Just add an ounce of vodka and set it down by the engine exhaust for a month or so. It’ll cook up into a bitter poison that’ll knock you cross-eyed.” It sounded dangerous to me, but Mabel didn’t think so. “Not that I would drink it,” she’d say, “but I wouldn’t fault a man who did.”

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  “So,” Dan recalls, “I said, ‘If it’s that time, that’s cool.’ ” The Lafferty brothers visited Circus Circus early on the afternoon of August 7, but they didn’t see Debbie dealing cards at any of the blackjack tables. According to Dan, he inquired of Ron, “‘Should I go and ask for her?’ which I knew would spring the trap.” Ron told him to go ahead and do it. When Dan approached a pit boss and asked to speak with Debbie, Dan says, “his eyes got big and he quickly disappeared.” At that point Ron and Dan strolled over to one of the casino’s eateries and got in line for the lunch buffet. As they stood in the queue, Dan says, he could see men who appeared to be FBI agents “peeking around corners and stuff.” A moment later a swarm of police officers “rushed up from behind and put guns to our heads and said, ‘Don’t move or we’ll blow your brains out.’ I just smiled. It was kind of fun.” Both Lafferty brothers surrendered without a fight and were placed in the Reno jail under extraordinary security. TWENTY-THREE JUDGMENT IN PROVO Critical examination of the lives and beliefs of gurus demonstrates that our psychiatric labels and our conceptions of what is or is not mental illness are woefully inadequate. How, for example, does one distinguish an unorthodox or bizarre faith from delusion? . . . Gurus are isolated people, dependent upon their disciples, with no possibility of being disciplined by a Church or criticized by contemporaries. They are above the law. The guru usurps the place of God. Whether gurus have suffered from manic-depressive illness, schizophrenia, or any other form of recognized, diagnosable mental illness is interesting but ultimately unimportant. What distinguishes gurus from more orthodox teachers is not their manic-depressive mood swings, not their thought disorders, not their delusional beliefs, not their hallucinatory visions, not their mystical states of ecstasy: it is their narcissism. * ANTHONY STORR, FEET OF CLAY It’s August 5, 2002, a Monday morning, and outside Utah’s Fourth Judicial District Courthouse merchants and businessmen are striding purposefully to work in downtown Provo. Although it’s still early in the day, the heat is already rising from the pavement in visible waves. Inside the courthouse, the clock on the wall shows 9:21 when the bailiff abruptly shouts, “All rise! The Honorable Steven Hansen presiding!” The murmur from the gallery subsides, and a moment later a side door swings open, through which sixty-one-year-old Ron Lafferty, attired in orange coveralls with UDC INMATE stenciled across the back, is hustled into the courtroom by four armed sheriff’s deputies. Ron’s reddish-brown hair, now streaked with gray and thinning across the crown, is neatly trimmed. Except for a bushy, Yosemite Sam mustache, he is clean-shaven. For the past few months, according to the prison grapevine, he has been obsessively lifting weights and working out; his bulging forearms and thick shoulders appear to confirm the rumor.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘I suppose we ought to stop and relieve the animals.’ So they stopped at a suitable place, where all the animals relieved themselves with the exception of the mule. They then rode on, with the King’s servant still listening carefully to the words of the knight, till they came to a watercourse, where, as they were watering their mounts, the mule staled into the river. On seeing this, Messer Ruggieri said: ‘Ah! God curse you, beast! you’re just like the gentleman who presented you to me.’ The King’s servant noted these words, and though he noted many more in the course of their long day’s journey together, he heard nothing else from Ruggieri’s lips that was other than highly complimentary to the King. Next morning, as soon as they were mounted and about to set off again for Tuscany, the servant delivered the King’s order to Messer Ruggieri, who immediately turned back. Having already been informed of what Messer Ruggieri had said about the mule, the King summoned him to his presence, welcomed him with a broad smile, and asked him why he had compared him to the mule, or rather vice versa. Messer Ruggieri replied, with the greatest of candour: ‘My lord, I compared it to you for this reason, that just as you bestow your gifts where they are inappropriate, and withhold them where they would be justified, so the mule relieved itself, not in the right place, but in the wrong one.’ So the King said: ‘Messer Ruggieri, it was not because I failed to recognize in you a most gallant knight, deserving of the highest honours, that I withheld my bounty from you and bestowed it on many others, who were insignificant by comparison with yourself. The blame rests not with me but with your fortune, which has prevented me from giving you your deserts. And I intend to prove to you that I am speaking the truth.’ ‘My lord,’ replied Messer Ruggieri, ‘the fact that you have not rewarded me is immaterial, for I never had any desire to multiply my wealth. What distresses me is the absence of any token of your esteem. However, I consider your explanation to be sound and reasonable, and though I am ready to see whatever you wish to show me, I accept your word and there’s no need for you to prove it.’ The King then led him into a great hall, where, as he had arranged beforehand, there were two large chests,3 both of which were padlocked; and in the presence of a large gathering, he said: ‘Messer Ruggieri, one of these chests contains my crown, my orb and my royal sceptre, along with many fine brooches, rings and jewelled belts of mine and every other precious stone I possess. The other is filled with earth. Choose whichever one you like, and it shall be yours to keep, and thus you shall see whether it was I or your fortune that failed to acknowledge your worth.’

• From Carmina (-50)

  Egnatius, quod candidos habet dentes, renidet usque quaque: sei ad rei uentum est subsellium, cum orator excitat fletum, renidet ille: si ad pii rogum fili lugetur, orba cum flet unicum mater, 5 renidet ille: quidquid est, ubicumque est, quodcumque agit, renidet: hunc habet morbum, neque elegantem, ut arbitror, neque urbanum. quare monendum test mihi, bone Egnati. si urbanus esses aut Sabinus aut Tiburs, 10 aut parcus Vmber aut obesus Etruscus, aut Lanuinus ater atque dentatus, aut Transpadanus, ut meos quoque attingam, aut qui lubet, qui puriter lauit dentes, tamen renidere usque quaque te nollem: 15 nam risu inepto res ineptior nulla est. nunc Celtiber es: Celtiberia in terra, quod quisque minxit, hoc sibi solet mane dentem atque russam defricare gingiuam, ut quo iste uester expolitior dens est, 20 hoc te amplius bibisse praedicet loti. XL Quaenam te mala mens, miselle Rauide, agit praecipitem in meos iambos? quis deus tibi non bene aduocatus uecordem parat excitare rixam? an ut peruenias in ora uulgi? 5 quid uis? qua lubet esse notus optas? eris, quandoquidem meos amores cum longa uoluisti amare poena. XLI Ameana puella defututa tota milia me decem poposcit, ista turpiculo puella naso, decoctoris amica Formiani. propinqui, quibus est puella curae, 5 amicos medicosque conuocate: non est sana puella, nec rogare qualis sit solet aes imaginosum. XLII Adeste, hendecasyllabi, quot estis omnes undique, quotquot estis omnes. iocum me putat esse moecha turpis, et negat mihi uestra reddituram pugillaria, si pati potestis. 5 persequamur eam, et reflagitemus. quae sit, quaeritis. illa, quam uidetis turpe incedere, mimice ac moleste ridentem catuli ore Gallicani. circumsistite eam, et reflagitate, 10 'moecha putida, redde codicillos, redde, putida moecha, codicillos.' non assis facis? o lutum, lupanar, aut si perditius potes quid esse. sed non est tamen hoc satis putandum. 15 quod si non aliud potest, ruborem ferreo canis exprimamus ore. conclamate iterum altiore uoce 'moecha putida, redde codicillos, redde, putida moecha codicillos,' 20 sed nil proficimus, nihil mouetur. mutanda est ratio modusque uobis, siquid proficere amplius potestis, 'pudica et proba, redde codicillos.' XLIII Salue, nec minimo puella naso, nec bello pede nec nigris ocellis, nec longis digitis nec ore sicco, nec sane nimis elegante lingua, decoctoris amica Formiani. 5 ten prouincia narrat esse bellam? tecum Lesbia nostra comparatur? o saeclum insapiens et infacetum! XLIV

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

  Among the enactments of this period are the following: The Jews were forbidden to employ Christian nurses, servants, or laborers, to publicly sell meat, to work on Sundays or feast days, to employ Christian physicians,915 or to practise usury, and were commanded to make a money payment to the priest at Easter, and to wear a distinguishing patch or other object on their garments. On the other hand, Christians were forbidden to attend Jewish funerals and marriages, and were punished for borrowing from Jews. None of the regulations was so humiliating as the one requiring the Jew to wear a distinguishing costume or a distinguishing patch upon his garments. This patch was ordered placed on the chest, or on both chest and back, so that the wearer might be distinguished from afar, as of old the leper was known by his cry "unclean," and that Christians might be prevented from ignorantly having carnal connection with the despised people. At the instance of Stephen Langton the synod of Oxford, 1222, prescribed a woollen patch, and Edward I., 1275, ordered the yellow patch worn by all over seven. Louis IX. ordered that the color of the patch should be red or saffron, the king of England that it should be yellow. Its size and shape were matters of minute enactment. The Fourth Lateran gave the weight of its great authority to this regulation about dress, and decreed that it should be enforced everywhere. Dr. Graetz pronounces this law the culminating blow in the humiliation of his kinsmen. He declares that Innocent III. brought more misery upon the Jews than all their enemies had done before, and charges him with being the first pope who turned the inhuman severity of the Church against them.916 The position Innocent took was that God intended the Jews to be kept, like Cain, the murderer, to wander about on the earth designed by their guilt for slavery till the time should come in the last days for their conversion.917 With this view, the theologians coincided. Peter the Venerable, a half-century before Innocent, presented the case in the same aspect as did the great pope, and launched a fearful denunciation against the Jews. In a letter to Louis VII. of France, he exclaimed, "What would it profit to fight against enemies of the cross in remote lands, while the wicked Jews, who blaspheme Christ, and who are much worse than the Saracens, go free and unpunished. Much more are the Jews to be execrated and hated than the Saracens; for the latter accept the birth from the Virgin, but the Jews deny it, and blaspheme that doctrine and all Christian mysteries. God does not want them to be wholly exterminated, but to be kept, like the fratricide Cain, for still more severe torment and disgrace.

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

  Council of Constance, made such an authoritative decision. Its weight was derived from its advocates, the most distinguished theologians and canonists of the time, and the combined voice of the universities and the nations of Latin Christendom. But the decision proved to be no stronger than a spider’s web. The contention, which had been made by that long series of pungent tracts which was opened with the tract of Gelnhausen, was easily set aside by the dexterous hand of the papacy itself. Gelnhausen had declared that the way to heal the troubles in the papal household was to convoke a general council.1338 To this mode of statement Pius II. opposed his bull, Execrabilis, and his successors went on untroubled by the outcry of Latin Christendom for some share in the government of the Church. But the appeal for a council was an ominous portent. It had been made by Philip the Fair and the French Parliament,1303. It was made by the Universities of Paris and Oxford and the great churchmen of France. It was made by Wyclif, by Huss and Savonarola. In vain, to be sure, but the body of the Church was thinking and the arena of free discussion was extending. The most extravagant claims of the papacy still had defenders. Augustus Triumphus and Alvarus Pelayo declared there could be no appeal from the pope to God, because the pope and God were in agreement. He who looks upon the pope with intent and trusting eye, looks upon Christ, and wherever the pope is, there is the Church. Yea, the pope is above canon law. But these men were simply repeating what was current tradition. Dante struck another note, when he put popes in the lowest regions of hell, and Marsiglius of Padua, when he cast doubt upon Peter’s ever having been in Rome and insisted that the laity are also a part of the Church. The scandalous lives of the popes whose names fill the last paragraph of the history of the Middle Ages would have excluded them from decent modern circles and exposed them to sentence as criminals. They were perjurers, adulterers. Avarice, self-indulgence ruled their life. They had no mercy. The charges of murder and vicious disease were laid to their door. They were willing to set the states of Italy one over against the other and to allow them to lacerate each other to extend their own territory or to secure power and titles for their own children and nephews. Luther was not far out of the way when, in his Appeal to the German Nobility, he declared "Roman avarice is the greatest of robbers that ever walked the earth. All goes into the Roman sack, which has no bottom, and all in the name of God." In all history, it would be difficult to discover a more glaring inconsistency between profession and practice than is furnished by the careers of the last popes of the Middle Ages.

• From Trash (1988)

  Oh, Bobby loved that part of it, like she loved her chintz sofa, the antique armoire with the fold-down shelf she used for a desk, the carefully balanced display of appropriate liquors she never touched—unlike the bottles on the kitchen shelves she emptied and replaced weekly. Bobby loved the aura of acceptability, the possibility of finally being bourgeois, civilized, and respectable. I was the uncivilized thing in Bobby’s life, reminding her of the taste of hunger, the remembered stink of her mother’s sweat, her own desire. I became sex for her. I held it in me, in the push of my thighs against hers when she finally grabbed me and dragged me off into the citadel of her bedroom. I held myself up, back and off her. I did what I had to do to get her, to get myself what we both wanted. But what a price we paid for what I did. What I did. What I was. What I do. What I am. I paid a high price to become who I am. Her contempt, her terror, was the least of it. My contempt, my terror, took over my life, because they were the first things I felt when I looked at myself, until I became unable to see my true self at all. “You’re an animal,” she used to say to me, in the dark with her teeth against my thigh, and I believed her, growled back at her, and swallowed all the poison she could pour into my soul. Now I sit and think about Bobby’s thighs, her legs opening in the dark where no one could see, certainly not herself. My own legs opening. That was so long ago and far away, but not so far as she finally ran when she could not stand it anymore, when the lust I made her feel got too wild, too uncivilized, too dangerous. Now I think about what I did. What I did. What I was. What I do. What I am. “Sex,” I told her. “I will be sex for you.” Never asked, “You. What will you be for me?” Now I make sure to ask. I keep Bobby in mind when I stare at women’s thighs. I finger my seams, flash my teeth, and put it right out there. “You. What will you let yourself be for me?” Muscles of the Mind

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And true it was that the Comtesse de Mirac saw in Stephen the type that she most mistrusted, saw only an unsexed creature of pose, whose cropped head and whose dress were pure affecta- tion; a creature who aping the prerogatives of men, had lost all the charm and the grace of a woman. An intelligent person in nearly all else, the Comtesse would never have admitted of in- version as a fact in nature. She had heard things whispered, it is true, but had scarcely grasped their full meaning. She was in- nocent and stubborn; and this being so, it was not Stephen’s morals that she suspected, but her obvious desire to ape what she was not —in the Comtesse’s set, as at county dinners, there was firm insistence upon sex-distinction. On the other hand, she took a great fancy to Mary, whom she quickly discovered to be an orphan. In a very short time she had learnt quite a lot about Mary’s life before the war and about her meeting with Stephen in the Unit; had learnt also that she was quite penniless — since Mary was eager that every one should know that she owed her prosperity entirely to Stephen. Aunt Sarah secretly pitied the girl who must surely be living a dull existence, bound, no doubt, by a false sense of gratitude to this freakish and masterful-looking woman — pretty girls should 480 THE WELL OF LONELINESS find husbands and homes of their own, and this one she con- sidered excessively pretty. Thus it was that while Mary in all loyalty and love was doing her best to extol Stephen’s virtues, to convey an impression of her own happiness, of the privilege it was to serve so great a writer by caring for her house and her personal needs, she was only succeeding in getting herself pitied. But as good luck would have it, she was blissfully unconscious of the sympathy that her words were arousing; indeed she was finding it very pleasant at Aunt Sarah’s hospitable house in Passy. As for Martin, he had never been very subtle, and just now he must rejoice in a long-lost friendship — to him it appeared a delightful luncheon. Even after the guests had said goodbye, he remained in the very highest of spirits, for the Comtesse was ca- pable of unexpected tact, and while praising Mary’s prettiness and charm, she was careful in no way to disparage Stephen. ‘Oh, yes, undoubtedly a brilliant writer, I agree with you, Martin.’ And so she did. But books were one thing and their scribes another; she saw no reason to change her opinion with regard to this author’s unpleasant affectation, while she saw every reason to be tactful with her nephew. 4

• From The Decameron (1353)

  After this promise the physician redoubled in his hospitalities to the two rogues, who enjoyed themselves [at his expense,] what while they crammed him with the greatest extravagances in the world and fooled him to the top of his bent, promising him to give him to mistress the Countess of Jakes,[408]who was the fairest creature to be found in all the back-settlements of the human generation. The physician enquired who this countess was, whereto quoth Buffalmacco, 'Good my seed-pumpkin, she is a very great lady and there be few houses in the world wherein she hath not some jurisdiction. To say nothing of others, the Minor Friars themselves render her tribute, to the sound of kettle-drums.[409] And I can assure you that, whenas she goeth abroad, she maketh herself well felt,[410] albeit she abideth for the most part shut up. Natheless, it is no great while since she passed by your door, one night that she repaired to the Arno, to wash her feet and take the air a little; but her most continual abiding-place is in Draughthouseland.[411] There go ofttimes about store of her serjeants, who all in token of her supremacy, bear the staff and the plummet, and of her barons many are everywhere to be seen, such as Sirreverence of the Gate, Goodman Turd, Hardcake,[412] Squitterbreech and others, who methinketh are your familiars, albeit you call them not presently to mind. In the soft arms, then, of this great lady, leaving be her of Cacavincigli, we will, an expectation cheat us not, bestow you.' [Footnote 408: _La Contessa di Civillari_, _i.e._ the public sewers. Civillari, according to the commentators, was the name of an alley in Florence, where all the ordure and filth of the neighbourhood was deposited and stored in trenches for manure.] [Footnote 409: _Nacchere_, syn. a loud crack of wind.] [Footnote 410: Syn. smelt (_sentito_).] [Footnote 411: _Laterina_, _i.e._ Latrina.] [Footnote 412: Lit. Broom-handle (_Manico della Scopa_).]

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  a land squeezed between the even higher plateaus of Utah and the Grand Canyon of Arizona. The community of Short Creek is 400 miles by the shortest road from the Mohave county seat of Kingman. . . . Massive cliffs rearing north of Short Creek’s little central street provide a natural rock barrier to the north. To the east and west are the sweeping expanses of dry and almost barren plateaus before the forests begin. To the south there is the Grand Canyon. It is in this most isolated of all Arizona communities that this foulest of conspiracies has flourished and expanded in a terrifying geometric progression. Here has been a community entirely dedicated to the warped philosophy that a small handful of greedy and licentious men should have the right and the power to control the destiny of every human soul in the community. Here is a community—many of the women, sadly, right along with the men—unalterably dedicated to the wicked theory that every maturing girl child should be forced into the bondage of multiple wifehood with men of all ages for the sole purpose of producing more children to be reared to become more chattels of this totally lawless enterprise. One day after the raid, the Deseret News, a daily newspaper owned by the LDS Church, editorialized in support of the action: “Utah and Arizona owe a debt of gratitude to Arizona’s Howard Pyle . . . we hope the unfortunate activities at Short Creek will be cleaned up once and for all.” The raid made national headlines; it was even reported on the front page of the New York Times, with the same prominence given to a story announcing the armistice ending the Korean War. But to the dismay of the LDS leadership, most of the press presented the polygamists in a favorable light. Photographs of crying children being torn from their mothers’ arms generated sympathy throughout the nation for the fundamentalists, who protested that they were upstanding, law-abiding Mormons simply trying to exercise their constitutionally protected freedoms. The raid was widely perceived as religious persecution by overly zealous government agencies, and it sparked a great outcry in support of the polygamists. The Arizona Republic, for example, criticized the action as “a misuse of public funds.” In 1954, Governor Pyle was voted out of office, thanks largely to the raid and the egg it left on his face. The arrests and subsequent trials cost taxpayers $600,000, yet by 1956 all the polygamists who had been arrested were out of jail and reunited with their families in Short Creek. Members of the UEP unapologetically resumed living the Principle as taught by Joseph Smith, and the population of the town continued to more than double each decade—a consequence of the community’s giant families and astronomical birth rate. Paradoxically, the Short Creek raid proved to be a huge boon to the FLDS Church.