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 Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  She was a recluse, a neighborhood mystery. She came outside only to smoke. She never said hello, and her lights were always off. She and her husband had divorced, and her children had landed in jail. She was extremely obese—as a child, I used to wonder if she hated the outdoors because she was too heavy to move. There were the neighbors down the street, a younger woman with a toddler and her middle-aged boyfriend. The boyfriend worked, and the woman spent her days watching The Young and the Restless . Her young son was adorable, and he loved Mamaw. At all times of the day—one time, past midnight—he would wander to her doorstep and ask for a snack. His mother had all the time in the world, but she couldn’t keep a close enough watch on her child to prevent him from straying into the homes of strangers. Sometimes his diaper would need changing. Mamaw once called social services on the woman, hoping they’d somehow rescue the young boy. They did nothing. So Mamaw used my nephew’s diapers and kept a watchful eye on the neighborhood, always looking for signs of her “little buddy.” My sister’s friend lived in a small duplex with her mother (a welfare queen if one ever existed). She had seven siblings, most of them from the same father—which was, unfortunately, a rarity. Her mother had never held a job and seemed interested “only in breeding,” as Mamaw put it. Her kids never had a chance. One ended up in an abusive relationship that produced a child before the mom was old enough to purchase cigarettes. The oldest overdosed on drugs and was arrested not long after he graduated from high school. This was my world: a world of truly irrational behavior. We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being. We spend to pretend that we’re upper-class. And when the dust clears—when bankruptcy hits or a family member bails us out of our stupidity—there’s nothing left over. Nothing for the kids’ college tuition, no investment to grow our wealth, no rainy-day fund if someone loses her job. We know we shouldn’t spend like this. Sometimes we beat ourselves up over it, but we do it anyway. Our homes are a chaotic mess. We scream and yell at each other like we’re spectators at a football game. At least one member of the family uses drugs—sometimes the father, sometimes the mother, sometimes both. At especially stressful times, we’ll hit and punch each other, all in front of the rest of the family, including young children; much of the time, the neighbors hear what’s happening. A bad day is when the neighbors call the police to stop the drama.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  My sister and I still call the old mail carrier “the chicken man,” and years later even a mention of how the city government ganged up on the chicken man could inspire Mamaw’s trademark vitriol: “Fucking zoning laws. They can kiss my ruby-red asshole.” The move to Middletown created other problems, as well. In the mountain homes of Jackson, privacy was more theory than practice. Family, friends, and neighbors would barge into your home without much warning. Mothers would tell their daughters how to raise their children. Fathers would tell sons how to do their jobs. Brothers would tell brothers-in-law how to treat their wives. Family life was something people learned on the fly with a lot of help from their neighbors. In Middletown, a man’s home was his castle. However, that castle was empty for Mamaw and Papaw. They brought an ancient family structure from the hills and tried to make it work in a world of privacy and nuclear families. They were newlyweds, but they didn’t have anyone to teach them about marriage. They were parents, but there were no grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins to help them with the workload. The only nearby close relative was Papaw’s mother, Goldie. She was mostly a stranger to her own son, and Mamaw couldn’t have held her in lower esteem for abandoning him. After a few years, Mamaw and Papaw began to adapt. Mamaw became close friends with the “neighbor lady” (that was her word for the neighbors she liked) who lived in a nearby apartment; Papaw worked on cars in his spare time, and his coworkers slowly turned from colleagues to friends. In 1951 they welcomed a baby boy—my uncle Jimmy—and showered him with their new ma terial comforts. Jimmy, Mamaw would tell me later, could sit up at two weeks, walk at four months, speak in complete sentences just after his first birthday, and read classic novels by age three (“A slight exaggeration,” my uncle later admitted). They visited Mamaw’s brothers in Indianapolis and picnicked with their new friends. It was, Uncle Jimmy told me, “a typical middle-class life.” Kind of boring, by some standards, but happy in a way you appreciate only when you understand the consequences of not being boring. Which is not to say that things always proceeded smoothly. Once, they traveled to the mall to buy Christmas presents with the holiday throng and let Jimmy roam so he could locate a toy he coveted. “They were advertising it on television,” he told me recently. “It was a plastic console that looked like the dash of a jet fighter plane. You could shine a light or shoot darts. The whole idea was to pretend that you were a fighter pilot.” Jimmy wandered into a pharmacy that happened to sell the toy, so he picked it up and began to play with it. “The store clerk wasn’t happy.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  see behind the hype and the mass-produced, the flashing cook ies and the neon ta-tas. When I see the plethora of erotic books and Web sites, I say, “Good for them.” Good for their initiative, their hard clits and wet pants. But when I read the ingredients on their pages, like any can of soup, their contents often reveal too much artificial junk, without the original taste I’m looking for. The sad truth about most of what’s sold as sex books, sex aids, and sex gurus is that it’s fourth-rate slop presented to con sumers as something they’ll buy because people are just too stupidly horny to expect anything better. Put “SEX” on the cover with a pink ribbon, and watch the suckers fall for it— that’s the maxim of many on the erotic publishing scene. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or sincere; what matters is that you touch the familiar keys, press the prurient buttons, adding salt, adding sugar—leaving you hungry again ten minutes later. It’s not hard for me to single out the outstanding erotica when there is so much cynicism and exploitation in this genre. The artists and publishers who actually give a damn are like angel-flesh glowing under the moonlight—I can see them a mile away, and I want to cut through the muck faster to get close to them. The writers and publishers you see represented in BAE are not only erotic, they are exotic, in the sense that their fragrance and meatiness are genuine rarities. If you love sexual writing and art, you know how false the stereotypes are that surround it—erotic expression is the hard est thing to do well, not the easiest. When I find great erotic writers, I know they could write about death, about violence, about intimacy, about the end of the world and the first gasp of life. Shakespeare wrote his sonnets in a lover’s voice, but his words testify to the writer’s muse as well: “Being your slave, what should I do but tend upon the hours and times of your desire?” Those hours are well spent, as every sincere devotee can attest. What is the drama of arousal after all, or the com edy of our sexual manners, if not the ground soil of every fic tion? I’ll take mine fresh, right off the vine. —Susie Bright February 2001 the best AMERICAN EROTCA 2001

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  The presence of some wealthy and powerful people among Christians in Corinth is the context for many of the issues addressed in Paul’s letters to Corinth. These include, for example, Paul’s emphasis on “Christ crucified” as the subversion of the normalcy of that world, which we treated in Chapter 5; taking financial disputes into civil courts (6:1–8); marriage between a stepson and a widowed stepmother to protect patrimony (5:1–13); and attending celebratory dinners in pagan temples and buying and eating meat that came from animals sacrificed at such gatherings (10:14–33). These were problems for the haves rather than the have-nots. This is the setting in which Paul addresses an issue about the way the Lord’s Supper was observed at Corinth (11:17–34). In Paul’s communities (and generally among early Christians), the Lord’s Supper was a real meal, a “share meal,” and not simply a ritual involving a morsel of bread and a sip of wine. From what Paul says in this chapter, the Lord’s Supper began with the breaking of the bread, which was followed by the meal, and concluded with the passing of the cup after the meal (11:24–25; note “after supper” in v. 25). The meal was framed by bread and wine in remembrance of the final meal of Jesus. But this was not what was happening at Corinth. Paul’s comments in this section of Corinthians presume that the meal was being hosted by those in the community who were wealthy and powerful, most likely in a villa. At the beginning of the section on the Lord’s Supper, Paul writes: I do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse. For, to begin with, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you…. When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s Supper. (11:17–18, 20) Why this judgment? Why is what they are doing “not really” the Lord’s Supper? Paul continues: Each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. What! Do you not have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? (11:21–22) The issue here is that not everybody got to eat the same food. The wealthy had their own food and drink, and others had little or nothing. This practice was common in the Roman world when a wealthy patron hosted a meal that included people from lower social classes. The patron would serve finer food and wine to others from his social rank and less fine food and wine to those of lower rank. Meals, even when they crossed social boundaries, would nevertheless mirror those boundaries.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  When the mailman ignored their advice, he met a large woman with an extra-long menthol cigarette hanging out of her mouth who told him to stay the fuck off of her property. “Hoarder” hadn’t entered everyday parlance, but Mamaw fit the bill, and her tendencies only worsened as she withdrew from the world. Garbage piled up in the house, with an entire bedroom devoted to trinkets and debris that had no earthly value. To hear of this period, one gets the sense that Mamaw and Papaw led two lives. There was the outward public life. It included work during the day and preparing the kids for school. This was the life that everyone else saw, and by all measures it was quite successful: My grandfather earned a wage that was almost unfathomable to friends back home; he liked his work and did it well; their children went to modern, well-funded schools; and my grandmother lived in a home that was, by Jackson standards, a mansion—two thousand square feet, four bedrooms, and modern plumbing. Home life was different. “I didn’t notice it at first as a teenager,” Uncle Jimmy recalled. “At that age, you’re just so wrapped up in your own stuff that you hardly recognize the change. But it was there. Dad stayed out more; Mom stopped keeping the house—dirty dishes and junk piled up everywhere. They fought a lot more. It was all around a rough time.” Hillbilly culture at the time (and maybe now) blended a robust sense of honor, devotion to family, and bizarre sexism into a sometimes explosive mix. Before Mamaw was married, her brothers had been willing to murder boys who disrespected their sister. Now that she was married to a man whom many of them considered more a brother than an outsider, they tolerated behavior that would have gotten Papaw killed in the holler. “Mom’s brothers would come up and want to go carousing with Dad,” Uncle Jimmy explained. “They’d go drinking and chasing women. Uncle Pet was always the leader. I didn’t want to hear about it, but I always did. It was that culture from back then that expected the men were going to go out and do what they wanted to do.” Mamaw felt disloyalty acutely. She loathed anything that smacked of a lack of complete devotion to family. In her own home, she’d say things like “I’m sorry I’m so damned mean” and “You know I love you, but I’m just a crazy bitch.” But if she knew of anyone criticizing so much as her socks to an outsider, she’d fly off the handle. “I don’t know those people. You never talk about family to some stranger. Never.” My sister, Lindsay, and I could fight like cats and dogs in her home, and for the most part she’d let us figure things out alone.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Local papers had painted Walter as a dangerous drug dealer who had possibly murdered several innocent teenagers. Monroeville and Mobile newspapers freely printed assertions that Walter was a “drug kingpin,” a “sexual predator,” and a “gang leader.” When he was first arrested, local headlines emphasized the absurd sexual misconduct charges involving Ralph Myers. “McMillian Charged with Sodomy” was a common headline. In covering the hearings, the Monroe Journal focused on the danger Walter posed: “Those entering the courtroom had to pass through a metal detector, as has been the case throughout the court proceedings against McMillian, and officers were stationed throughout the courtroom.” Despite all of the evidence presented at our hearing showing that Walter had nothing to do with the Pittman murder, the local press invoked the case to scare up more fear about Walter. “Convicted Slayer Wanted in East Brewton Murder” was an early headline in the Brewton paper. “Ronda Wasn’t the Only Girl Killed” was the headline in the Mobile Press Register after our hearing. The Mobile paper reported after the hearing: “Myers and McMillian were part of a burglary, theft, forgery and drug smuggling ring that operated in several counties in South Alabama, according to law enforcement officers. McMillian was the leader of the operation.” From its focus on his pretrial placement on death row to the extra security surrounding his court appearances, the narrative in the press was clear: This man was extremely dangerous. At this point, people seemed uninterested in the truth surrounding the crime. During the most recent hearing in Baldwin County, the State’s local supporters walked out of the courtroom rather than hear the evidence that supported Walter’s innocence. It was risky, but we hoped that national press coverage of our side of the story would change the narrative. A Washington Post journalist, Walt Harrington, had come to Alabama to do a piece on our work a year earlier and had heard me describe the McMillian case. He passed that information to a journalist friend of his, Pete Earley, who contacted me and became immediately interested. After reading the transcripts and files we provided him, he jumped into the case, spent time with several of the players, and quickly came to share our astonishment that Walter had been convicted on such unreliable evidence.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  When the mailman ignored their advice, he met a large woman with an extra-long menthol cigarette hanging out of her mouth who told him to stay the fuck off of her property. “Hoarder” hadn’t entered everyday parlance, but Mamaw fit the bill, and her tendencies only worsened as she withdrew from the world. Garbage piled up in the house, with an entire bedroom devoted to trinkets and debris that had no earthly value. To hear of this period, one gets the sense that Mamaw and Papaw led two lives. There was the outward public life. It included work during the day and preparing the kids for school. This was the life that everyone else saw, and by all measures it was quite successful: My grandfather earned a wage that was almost unfathomable to friends back home; he liked his work and did it well; their children went to modern, well-funded schools; and my grandmother lived in a home that was, by Jackson standards, a mansion—two thousand square feet, four bedrooms, and modern plumbing. Home life was different. “I didn’t notice it at first as a teenager,” Uncle Jimmy recalled. “At that age, you’re just so wrapped up in your own stuff that you hardly recognize the change. But it was there. Dad stayed out more; Mom stopped keeping the house—dirty dishes and junk piled up everywhere. They fought a lot more. It was all around a rough time.” Hillbilly culture at the time (and maybe now) blended a robust sense of honor, devotion to family, and bizarre sexism into a sometimes explosive mix. Before Mamaw was married, her brothers had been willing to murder boys who disrespected their sister. Now that she was married to a man whom many of them considered more a brother than an outsider, they tolerated behavior that would have gotten Papaw killed in the holler. “Mom’s brothers would come up and want to go carousing with Dad,” Uncle Jimmy explained. “They’d go drinking and chasing women. Uncle Pet was always the leader. I didn’t want to hear about it, but I always did. It was that culture from back then that expected the men were going to go out and do what they wanted to do.” Mamaw felt disloyalty acutely. She loathed anything that smacked of a lack of complete devotion to family. In her own home, she’d say things like “I’m sorry I’m so damned mean” and “You know I love you, but I’m just a crazy bitch.” But if she knew of anyone criticizing so much as her socks to an outsider, she’d fly off the handle. “I don’t know those people. You never talk about family to some stranger. Never.” My sister, Lindsay, and I could fight like cats and dogs in her home, and for the most part she’d let us figure things out alone.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Nobody is quite agreed on what the figures are,’ Charles conceded hospitably. ‘The chappie at the back could be Neptune but he could be the Thames god with an urn or whatever. Then these are little fishes, évidemment; and here are these young boys going swimming.’ I nodded. ‘Swimming, you think, do you? Isn’t it a bit hard to tell?’ ‘Oh no, swimming. That’s the whole point. This is the floor of a swimming-bath, do you see. There used to be a great baths here, in the very early days. There were springs. The water soaked through the gravel and what-have-you until it hit the London clay and then out it came!’ He seemed delighted at this trick of geology, as if it had operated for his special benefit. ‘And what’s happened to it now?’ ‘Stuck it in a pipe,’ he replied with breezy contempt. ‘Led it away. Buried it. Whatever. This little bit of the baths is all that’s left to show how all those lusty young Romans went leaping about. Imagine all those naked legionaries in here …’ I did not have to look far to do so. The scenes around the walls were as graphic an imagining as Petronius could have come up with. ‘I think your friend has given us his impression,’ I said. ‘Eh? Oh, Henderson’s pictures, yes.’ He laughed hollowly. ‘They’re a trifle embarrassing, I’m afraid—when eggheads come to look at the floor, you know. They think they’re going to get caught up in an orgy.’ We both looked up at the section nearest us, where a gleaming slave was towelling down his master’s buttocks. In front of them two mighty warriors were wrestling, with legs apart, and bull-like genitals swinging between. ‘Quite amusing though, too, n’est-ce pas?’ He looked down pointedly at my crotch. ‘They used to fairly turn me on. But needless to say it was a long time ago.’

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  It got him so badly that he had to stop and hold his guts; the tears were streaming down his eyes and between the cackles he let out the most terrible, heartrending sobs. “I knew you would do me good,” he blurted out, as the last outbreak died away. “I always said you were a crazy son of a bitch. . . . You’re a Jew bastard yourself, only you don’t know it. . . . Now tell me, you bastard, how was it yesterday? Did you get your end in? Didn’t I tell you she was a good lay? And do you know who she’s living with? Jesus, you were lucky you didn’t get caught. She’s living with a Russian poet—you know the guy, too. I introduced you to him once at the Café Royal. Better not let him get wind of it. He’ll beat your brains out . . . and then hell write a beautiful poem about it and send it to her with a bunch of roses. Sure, I knew him out in Stelton, in the anarchist colony. His old man was a Nihilist. The whole family’s crazy. By the way, you’d better take care of yourself. I meant to tell you that the other day, but I didn’t think you would act so quickly. You know she may have syphilis. I’m not trying to scare you. I’m just telling you for your own good. . . .” This outburst seemed to really assuage him. He was trying to tell me in his twisted Jewish way that he liked me. To do so he had to first destroy everything around me—the wife, the job, my friends, the “nigger wench,” as he called Valeska, and so on. “I think some day you’re going to be a great writer,” he said. “But,” he added maliciously, “first you’ll have to suffer a bit. I mean really suffer, because you don’t know what the word means yet. You only think you’ve suffered. You’ve got to fall in love first. That nigger wench now . . . you don’t really suppose that you’re in love with her, do you? Did you ever take a good look at her ass . . . how it’s spreading, I mean? In five years she’ll look like Aunt Jemima. You’ll make a swell couple walking down the avenue with a string of pickaninnies trailing behind you. Jesus, I’d rather see you marry a Jewish girl. You wouldn’t appreciate her, of course, but she’d be good for you. You need something to steady yourself. You’re scattering your energies. Listen, why do you run around with all these dumb bastards you pick up? You seem to have a genius for picking up the wrong people. Why don’t you throw yourself into something useful? You don’t belong in that job—you could be a big guy somewhere. Maybe a labor leader . . . I don’t know what exactly.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  Whenever the principal would hit me, it was like he was afraid to do it too hard. One day I was getting a hiding and I thought, Man, if only my mom hit me like this, and I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. The principal was quite disturbed. “If you’re laughing while you’re getting beaten,” he said, “then something is definitely wrong with you.” That was the first of three times the school made my mom take me to a psychologist to be evaluated. Every psychologist who examined me came back and said, “There’s nothing wrong with this kid.” I wasn’t ADD. I wasn’t a sociopath. I was just creative and independent and full of energy. The therapists did give me a series of tests, and they came to the conclusion that I was either going to make an excellent criminal or be very good at catching criminals, because I could always find loopholes in the law. Whenever I thought a rule wasn’t logical, I’d find my way around it. The rules about communion at Friday mass, for example, made absolutely no sense. We’d be in there for an hour of kneeling, standing, sitting, kneeling, standing, sitting, kneeling, standing, sitting, and by the end of it I’d be starving, but I was never allowed to take communion, because I wasn’t Catholic. The other kids could eat Jesus’s body and drink Jesus’s blood, but I couldn’t. And Jesus’s blood was grape juice. I loved grape juice. Grape juice and crackers—what more could a kid want? And they wouldn’t let me have any. I’d argue with the nuns and the priest all the time. “Only Catholics can eat Jesus’s body and drink Jesus’s blood, right?” “Yes.” “But Jesus wasn’t Catholic.” “No.” “Jesus was Jewish.” “Well, yes.” “So you’re telling me that if Jesus walked into your church right now, Jesus would not be allowed to have the body and blood of Jesus?” “Well…uh…um…” They never had a satisfactory reply. One morning before mass I decided, I’m going to get me some Jesus blood and Jesus body. I snuck behind the altar and I drank the entire bottle of grape juice and I ate the entire bag of Eucharist to make up for all the other times that I couldn’t. In my mind, I wasn’t breaking the rules, because the rules didn’t make any sense. And I got caught only because they broke their own rules. Another kid ratted me out in confession, and the priest turned me in. “No, no,” I protested. “You’ve broken the rules. That’s confidential information. The priest isn’t supposed to repeat what you say in confession.” They didn’t care. The school could break whatever rules it wanted. The principal laid into me. “What kind of a sick person would eat all of Jesus’s body and drink all of Jesus’s blood?” “A hungry person.”

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Age dynamics were at the core of acceptable same-sex love in the Roman world. The “short season of rejoicing” was the span of time between early adolescence and the growth of the first beard. In the wry words of a witty courtesan, “boys are beautiful so long as they look like females.” The physiological boundaries of pederasty were flexible, if inexorable, indeed a symbol of evanescence: “time, which lays waste to beauty.” Sixteen to eighteen were the canonically acceptable years, propriety decreasing by degrees with distance from this window, without firm breaks. A mischievous poet from the age of Hadrian was indiscreetly precise: the age of seventeen marked a sort of perfection reserved for Zeus himself; after that, he said, there was a risk the boy might turn the tables. It was a traditional charge: by twenty, when the boy had a bristling chin, there was too much suspicion of alternating sexual roles. But in Lucian’s satirical account of an all-male society on the moon, the boys played the part of wives until twenty-five, then entered the ranks of the husbands.10 The notion of “Greek love” is misleading on two counts. In the first place, practices and attitudes varied across the Greek world, and classical Athenian culture was hardly standard. Even in Athens, pederasty could not be washed of its aristocratic connotations, and the law was ambiguous enough that the adult partner might find himself liable for criminal violation. It is an even greater error, though, to insinuate that Greek love was not an indigenous Roman practice. This charge goes back to late republican moralists, who, in chauvinistic terms, decried the effects of underlying social change as the by-product of Hellenization. In reality, Greek and Roman codes of sexual behavior shared profound structural similarities: a sexual act was composed of an active and a passive partner, and masculinity required the insertive role. Roman pederasty was distinct in small but decisive ways. The Romans had an absolute abhorrence for the violation of freeborn boys; the body of the Roman man was impenetrable, and there was no twilight of indeterminacy between boyhood and manhood. This prohibition was backed by the fearsome power of public law. The severity of the rule eliminated the zone of ambiguity that had proven such fertile ground in the Greek philosophical tradition for celebrating the mentorship of the lover and beloved.11

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I stepped into the Museum's inner glass lobby with an expectation of comfort and bookish peace.. Behind the table, with the postcards and cash-box, sat, not the pleasant student of the past few days but the repellently spruce figure of. . .I found I'd completely suppressed his name, for some reason Rex Stout came to mind, in the second or two that I stopped dead, wishing it wasn't true. "Hul-lo," he said. I gave a bitter little grunt, and he said, "I suppose I should have known you'd be an art-buff." Even in that moment I found myself recalling my spluttering efforts to convey to Edie the intensity of his awfulness, his pseudish self-confidence, his active vanity, his thick-skinned suggestive matiness, his, his . . . and seeing all over again how I had failed. "I'm not an art-buff," I said in an icy mutter; and went on towards the stairs. "Even so, it's fifty francs to go in." I was just by the desk and looking down at his work, densely written pages of notes that he was going through with a yellow highlighter. It was A levels looming, a hopeless pretence of system . . . "I work here." (By which I clearly meant, I work here, arsehole.) Any sense of a gaffe was lost in his satisfied twinkle as he absorbed this fact. Ronald something—"researcher". It must be paranoia but I couldn't help feeling that one of the things he was researching was me—not of course for myself but as a figure in the life of a certain tall lean blond young man . . . "I wasn't told about anyone working here." I shrugged. "You mean you're one of the guards?" "I work with the Director—I'm his assistant." I saw him glimpse the opportunity of delaying me and asking me further questions. "And you say you're not an art-buff!" I sighed sharply. "You've never told me your name, incidentally." Was there any way I could refuse it? I could use a false name, I could be Casey Hopper again for a minute . . . "Manners," I said sternly, pleased as I had sometimes been before that it meant something and could sound like a reproof. "Well, Manners," he said, " I hope this means we may see more of each other." He took up his highlighting pen and settled forward again with a queeny wobble of the head, as if to imply I had discomposed him unnecessarily. As I started up the stairs he said, without looking round, "The Director's not here today, by the way. As I'm sure you know."

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The broadening of the penitential regime of the church in late antiquity is a sign of the mainstreaming of the religion. As the church became a sacramental dispenser on a mass scale, it generated a need to manage sinners like never before. Though no one will mistake the late antique church for its powerful late medieval successor, the elaboration of rules for the administration of baptism and communion reflects the nascent influence of ecclesiastical structures in private life. The Apostolic Constitutions, an important collection of church canons redacted in the later fourth century, reflect this expansion. The Apostolic Constitutions are especially revealing because the collection preserves multiple layers of canonical tradition. In book 7, we find a lightly reworked presentation of the primitive Didache, whose bare injunction against the corruption of children has been modestly elaborated. “Do not violate children, for contrary to nature is the evil born at Sodom, which was laid waste by the fire of God.” A rule deriving from a slightly later tradition uses the “sin of the Sodomites” as a synecdoche for all same-sex intercourse, which is grouped with bestiality as a violation of nature. The latest stratum in the Apostolic Constitutions does not just prohibit various sexual practices but addresses how the bishop must react when confronted with sinners seeking entry to the church. “The doer of unspeakable deeds, the kinaidos, and the debauched,” along with miscellaneous rogues like magicians and astrologers, might be admitted to baptism, but not at first. They were to be “scrutinized for some time.” Dokimasia, “the Scrutiny,” was the same word once used to describe the ethical inspection of ancient Athenian citizens, but it has now been adopted by the church, which was willing to rely on the moral espionage of rumor in a face-to-face society. The church’s sexual expectations were far more strict, and its ambitions of control reached deeper into the soul, than the institutions of the ancient polis had ever imagined. Former sinners were to be watched so carefully because “such evil is so hard to wash out.”13

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  I answer that, “Savagery” and “brutality” take their names from a likeness to wild beasts which are also described as savage. For animals of this kind attack man that they may feed on his body, and not for some motive of justice the consideration of which belongs to reason alone. Wherefore, properly speaking, brutality or savagery applies to those who in inflicting punishment have not in view a default of the person punished, but merely the pleasure they derive from a man’s torture. Consequently it is evident that it is comprised under bestiality: for such like pleasure is not human but bestial, and resulting as it does either from evil custom, or from a corrupt nature, as do other bestial emotions. On the other hand, cruelty not only regards the default of the person punished, but exceeds in the mode of punishing: wherefore cruelty differs from savagery or brutality, as human wickedness differs from bestiality, as stated in Ethic. vii, 5. Reply to Objection 1: Clemency is a human virtue; wherefore directly opposed to it is cruelty which is a form of human wickedness. But savagery or brutality is comprised under bestiality, wherefore it is directly opposed not to clemency, but to a more excellent virtue, which the Philosopher (Ethic. vii, 5) calls “heroic” or “god-like,” which according to us, would seem to pertain to the gifts of the Holy Ghost. Consequently we may say that savagery is directly opposed to the gift of piety. Reply to Objection 2: A severe man is not said to be simply savage, because this implies a vice; but he is said to be “savage as regards the truth,” on account of some likeness to savagery which is not inclined to mitigate punishment. Reply to Objection 3: Remission of punishment is not a vice, except it disregard the order of justice, which requires a man to be punished on account of his offense, and which cruelty exceeds. On the other hand, cruelty disregards this order altogether. Wherefore remission of punishment is opposed to cruelty, but not to savagery. OF MODESTY (TWO ARTICLES)We must now consider modesty: and (1) Modesty in general; (2) Each of its species. Under the first head there are two points of inquiry: (1) Whether modesty is a part of temperance? (2) What is the matter of modesty? Whether modesty is a part of temperance?Objection 1: It would seem that modesty is not a part of temperance. For modesty is denominated from mode. Now mode is requisite in every virtue: since virtue is directed to good; and “good,” according to Augustine (De Nat. Boni 3), “consists in mode, species, and order.” Therefore modesty is a general virtue, and consequently should not be reckoned a part of temperance. Objection 2: Further, temperance would seem to be deserving of praise chiefly on account of its moderation. Now this gives modesty its name. Therefore modesty is the same as temperance, and not one of its parts.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "My dear Edward!" Slightly ponderous now. He frowned and smiled, and I realised he looked so much balder because he'd done the sensible thing and cut it all off short. Last time I'd seen him there had been fatally middle-aged wisps. His features were so good that he looked even more handsome without hair than with it. As he wandered round through the debris of plastic bricks and scribbled scrap-paper I couldn't help thinking back through his shapeless casual clothes to the naked prefect he had been, his magically unblemished skin, the blue veins that ran over his upper arms, the idle beauty of his big cock and balls. Not for the first time I thought what an excellent homosexual he would have made. "Would you like a drink?" "Mmm. Perhaps the merest rumour of Scotch. The merest hearsay . . . " "I'll bring the bottle." I swept the rubbish from an armchair and sat down and still got a piece of Lego up the bum. Why did they do it? Why did this dully charming man, who was already working absurdly to support two children, who got up at six each day to commute to town and was sometimes not home till nine, then go inanely on and sire a third? It must be instinct, nothing rational could explain it — instinct or inattention or else what Edie called polyfilla-progenitiveness: having more children to stop up the gaps in a marriage. I was at the age when I couldn't ignore it; my straight friends married and bred, sometimes remarried and bred again, or just bred regardless. I saw them losing the gift of speech, so used to being interrupted by the demands of the young that they began to interrupt themselves, or to prefer the kind of fretful drivel they had become accustomed to. I saw the huge, humiliating vehicles these studs of the GTi were forced to buy: like streamlined dormobiles, with tiers of baby seats and stacks of the grey plastic crap which seemed inseparable from modern infancy. I saw their doped surrender to domestic muddle, not enough letters on the fridge door to spell anything properly, the chairs covered in yoghurt. "This is all very sad," said Willie, with a stern smile. Neither of us knew yet just how seriously the other was taking it, whether we would shortly be telling slightly derisory stories in an air of accomplished melancholy or if one of us would be comforting the other as he sobbed out his bitter regrets and griefs. The thought of a scene of unguarded emotion with Willie, whatever its cause, had a certain appeal. "I wondered if Mirabelle might be here," I said.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  But having walked to the brink, Dio retreats. Dio stopped short of ponder-ing the impossible, the sexual honor of the dishonored. He was concerned to cure the internal moral disorder of the civic body through Stoic therapy writ large. Th e civic body, rather than the mass of humanity, was the framework for his moral prescription. Th e former slave Epictetus also carried the thought of his teacher Musonius in new directions. If Dio brought a panoramic social perspective to Stoic thought, Epictetus stood in the internalizing, meditative tradition of Stoicism. For Epictetus, plea sure was a nullity. Th e wise man would place it in the scales and, realizing it had no weight, cast it completely aside as irrelevant. Marriage was a duty, rather than a partnership glued together with the bond of eros. Epictetus would allow for marriage as one of the primary duties: “citizenship, marriage, child production, piety to God, care of one’s parents . . . all as one was born to do. And how are we born to live? As free men, as wellborn men, as men with a sense of honor.” Beyond the expectation of marriage, we fi nd few explicit social correlates in the doctrines of Epictetus. He was concerned with the internal regulation of desire and, unlike Musonius, did not express his aversion to plea sure in external rules. Rather, the wise man needed to have reason to recognize the falsity of impressions that stirred desire. “If you see a pretty young lady, do you hold off the phantasia? ” Sexual desire was something to be discounted by a rational faculty that had been keenly prepared through the contemplation of the truth. Conquering sexual desire was not unlike solving a logic problem. “If a girl is willing, beckoning, inviting me, grasping me and pulling me close, and I still resist and conquer, then I have solved a problem greater than the Liar or the Quiescent.” Th e extant ruminations of Epictetus off er a clear image of the place of sex in the moral economy of Stoicism. Desire was human, and it was inevitable: a man could cut off his penis more easily than his desire. In consequence, the sage had to wean himself of plea sure through reason and self-discipline, but sex was only one category of plea sure and by no means a privileged one. “Learn to use wine with refi nement . . . and to hold back from some little lass or a little fl atcake.” Stoicism, at least its more austere side, was no philosophy for young men; a passage surviving in the Stoic Handbook of Epictetus is particularly revealing. “Remain as pure as you can  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Sex is uniformly devalued throughout the stories of apostolic wandering, and encratic ideas surface forcefully in some of the texts (especially the Acts of Andrew and the Acts of Th omas, which may have originated in Tatian’s Syriac milieu). Nevertheless, the complete re- nunciation of sex in the apocryphal literature functioned symbolically, as a dramatic gesture of withdrawal from the fallen order of this world. Conti- nence, in the acts, is like martyrdom: a trait admired in heroes as an espe- cially stark rejection of secular values. As in the formal apologetic literature, the attitude toward sex in the apocryphal acts is strongly colored by the urge to distinguish Christian life, with its commitment to an invisible or- der, from the corrupt structures of Roman society. Th e apocryphal acts have rightly been called an “open text,” a sprawling, amorphous body of memories, constantly reshaped by Christian communities. Th e place of sex in the acts— generally devalued, at times veering toward strict renuncia- tion, but above all deeply symbolic of the relationship between Christians and the world— refl ects some of the formless energy of sexual austerity in a radical movement that was only gradually brought under the control of an THE WILL AND THE WORLD  orderly church. Th e institutional church, too, lodged its authority in the very apostles who so fi red the Christian imagination, but in the place of the raw enthusiasm that animates apostolic legend, the church came to off er a disciplined and defi nite interpretation of the textual artifacts of the apos- tolic generation. Th at hermeneutic project was a collective eff ort, but no- where is it more in evidence than in the literary output of that scourge of encratism, Clement of Alexandria.  CLEMENT AND THE CORE OF ORTHODOX SEXUALITY Th e apologists were Christians speaking in the vernacular of Greek philoso- phy. None of them was quite so striking, or as successful, as Clement. More than any other Christian of the age, he belongs alongside his learned poly- theistic contemporaries. He was a fi gure of Mediterranean horizons, born perhaps in Greece, passing time in Italy, but settling in the polyglot metropo- lis of Alexandria. He was thus a contemporary, and neighbor, of Achilles Tatius. Like so many of his competitors, Clement wore his erudition heavily: his work quotes no fewer than 348 diff erent classical authors and cites Plato some six hundred times. Clement has fully absorbed the eclectic Hellenic nostalgia that was characteristic of his age, mainly to reject it. He had little patience for the “great throng” of “accursed sophists” who loomed so large in the civic culture of the period, or for their “useless rivers of words, with scarcely a drop of sense.” Th e scriptures, he believed, counseled the Chris- tian “to use the wisdom of the world but not to abide in it.”

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  GREGORY. (in Hom. ut sup.) But it may be asked, how are we bid to hate our parents and our relations in the flesh, who are commanded to love even our enemies? But if we weigh the force of the command we are able to do both, by rightly distinguishing them so as both to love those who are united to us by the bond of the flesh, and whom we acknowledge our relations, and by hating and avoiding not to know those whom we find our enemies in the way of God. For he is as it were loved by hatred, who in his carnal wisdom, pouring into our ears his evil sayings, is not heard. AMBROSE. For if for thy sake the Lord renounces His own mother, saying, Who is my mother? and who are my brethren? (Matt. 12:48, Mark 3:33.) why dost thou deserve to be preferred to thy Lord? But the Lord will have us neither be ignorant of nature, nor be her slaves, but so to submit to nature, that we reverence the Author of nature, and depart not from God out of love to our parents. GREGORY. (in Hom. ut sup.) Now to shew that this hatred towards relations proceeds not from inclination or passion, but from love, our Lord adds, yea, and his own life also. It is plain therefore that a man ought to hate his neighbour, by loving as himself him who hated him. For then we rightly hate our own soul when we indulge not its carnal desires, when we subdue its appetites, and wrestle against its pleasures. That which by being despised is brought to a better condition, is as it were loved by hatred. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. But life must not be renounced, which both in the body and the soul the blessed Paul also preserved, that yet living in the body he might preach Christ. But when it was necessary to despise life so that he might finish his course, he counts not his life dear unto him. (Acts 20:24.) GREGORY. (in Hom. ut sup.) How the hatred of life ought to be shewn He declares as follows; Whosoever bears not his cross, &c. CHRYSOSTOM. He means not that we should place a beam of wood on our shoulders, but that we should ever have death before our eyes. As also Paul died daily and despised death. (1 Cor. 15:31.) BASIL. By bearing the cross also he announced the death of his Lord, saying, The world is crucified to me, and I to the world, (Gal. 6:14.) which we also anticipate at our very baptism, in which our old man is crucified, that the body of sin may be destroyed.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The photographs were balletic and metaphorical, with a good deal of emphasis on the slim gilt soul aspect and a number of images, in Staines’s most typical style, crossed and half-obscured by the shadows of prison bars. I was following a line of the music—a sort of Mahler-and-French which came as close as sexless music could to being explicitly homosexual—when there was a nudge, and Aldo himself was standing beside me. He didn’t say anything, but announced himself in this physical way as some people do in clubs and bars, or as boys do abroad, when there is a language problem. I smirked at him and carried on reading, and he seemed happy to stand by. ‘Ronnie didn’t think you’d come,’ he said after a minute. ‘I’m a bit of a martyr myself,’ I said. ‘One day one of Ronnie’s little jeux d’esprit will finish me off altogether.’ ‘You don’t like the pictures?’ Aldo looked cast down. ‘Oh they’re all right. I like these ones here.’ We turned and ran our eyes over the plated athletes. ‘They aren’t martyrs, are they? I don’t like the martyrs so much—they’re just soft porn. You look very pretty in them … but I honestly prefer to have hard porn—or no porn at all. It’s all pretending, that stuff.’ ‘Still, you didn’t stay long at Ronnie’s house the other day,’ he objected. ‘It was very good fun. We made this great scene and then at the end everyone joined in.’ ‘That was just what I was afraid of.’ ‘Even Lord Charlie had a feel.’ ‘Please!’ ‘Those boys Raymond and Derek were so tired,’ he had to go on. ‘Not Abdul, though. He could have kept at it all night.’ ‘They should be showing the film here,’ I suggested, and Aldo was full of giggly shock. I looked him over candidly. In his tight white jeans and red-and-white checked shirt he reminded one vaguely of an Italian restaurant. ‘Is that all you?’ I asked, my question loitering around his groin. He seemed not to get it, and chuckled vacantly rather than asking me to repeat or explain. I pressed past him, squeezing his heavy bulge as I did so—it seemed real enough—a situation which my brother-in-law Gavin’s expression, as he suddenly reached out to me over several people’s heads, seemed to suggest he found tolerably typical. ‘Gavin! Wonderful to see you.’ We shook hands warmly and he said, ‘Good to see you, my dear,’ in that agreeable, almost nostalgic way that straight men sometimes flirt with gays. ‘How are things?’ ‘Things are rather sort of emotional and peculiar … fortunately one is in good shape and can cope.’ ‘Sounds fascinating!’ He looked quickly aside to Aldo, wondering perhaps if he could be the source of this peculiarity, and I hastened to introduce them. ‘Gavin, this is Aldo, he’s in some of the pictures upstairs, he impersonates John the Baptist—Aldo, this is Gavin, who’s married to my sister.’

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  GREGORY. (in Hom. 34. in Evang.) From which we may gather, that true justice feels compassion, false justice scorn, although the just are wont rightly to repel sinners. But there is one act proceeding from the swelling of pride, another from the zeal for discipline. For the just, though without they spare not rebukes for the sake of discipline, within cherish sweetness from charity. In their own minds they set above themselves those whom they correct, whereby they keep both them under by discipline, and themselves by humility. But, on the contrary, they who from false justice are wont to pride themselves, despise all others, and never in mercy condescend to the weak; and thinking themselves not to be sinners, are so much the worse sinners. Of such were the Pharisees, who condemning our Lord because He received sinners, with parched hearts reviled the very fountain of mercy. But because they were so sick that they knew not of their sickness, to the end that they might know what they were, the heavenly Physician answers them with mild applications. For it follows, And he spake this parable unto them, saying, What man of you having an hundred sheep, and if he lose one of them, does not go after it, &c. He gave a comparison which man might recognise in himself, though it referred to the Creator of men. For since a hundred is a perfect number, He Himself had a hundred sheep, seeing that He possessed the nature of the holy angels and men. Hence he adds, Having an hundred sheep. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. We may hence understand the extent of our Saviour’s kingdom. For He says there are a hundred sheep, bringing to a perfect sum the number of rational creatures subject to Him. For the number hundred is perfect, being composed of ten decades. But out of these one has wandered, namely, the race of man which inhabits earth. AMBROSE. Rich then is that Shepherd of whom we all are a hundredth part; and hence it follows, And if he lose one of them, does he not leave &c. GREGORY. One sheep then perished when man by sinning left the pastures of life. But in the wilderness the ninety and nine remained, because the number of the rational creatures, that is to say of Angels and men who were formed to see God, was lessened when man perished; and hence it follows, Does he not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, because in truth he left the companies of the Angels in heaven. But man then forsook heaven when he sinned. And that the whole body of the sheep might be perfectly made up again in heaven, the lost man was sought for on earth; as it follows, And go after that &c.