Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Rainwater and the overflow pipes of lavatories had dribbled chalky stains across the blank panels, and above the concrete rims of the windows weeds and grass grew from the slime. The only variation came from the net curtains, some plain, some gathered back, a few fringed and archly raised in the middle like the hoop of a skirt. Behind them lay hundreds of invisible dwellings, very small and stuffy, despite the open windows from which, here and there, the thump and throb of pop music could be heard. I found myself sweating with gratitude that I did not live under such a tyranny, dispossessed in my own home by the insistent beat of rock or reggae. Casterbridge, which I came to first, was connected to Sandbourne by a serviceway with, on one side, a double row of garages with buckled up-and-over doors, and on the other a six-foot wall screening, in various compartments, a generator and a number of institutional dustbins on wheels, large enough to dump a body in. At the end of this alley a group of skinheads were playing around, kicking beercans against the wall and kneeing each other in spasmodic mock-fights. One of them, slobbish, with moronic sideburns, and braces hoisting his jeans up around a fat ass and a fat dick, was very good. I looked at him for only a second; a phrase from the Firbank I had just been reading came back to me: ‘Très gutter, ma’am.’ Perhaps it was he and his friends who had smashed the glass of one of the doors into Sandbourne: it was now blind with hardboard. The lift arrived as I went into the hall, and a very old man with a hat and all his buttons done up shuffled out, looking at me apprehensively. It was a big, functional lift, like a goods-lift, with a battered door that shuddered shut and metal walls sprayed thickly with graffiti, and with the menacing, urchin monogram of the National Front scratched over and over in the paint. It was only when I got out at the ninth floor that I began to feel anxious. The door closed behind me at once and left me alone. I could hear a television from within one of the flats, and the sound of a police siren outside came from very far off, from some other transgression in the hot summer world below. The flats opened off the corridor where I stood in electric light; transverse corridors, with windows at each end, formed an H plan, and I went along very cautiously till I found the right number. By the door there was a bell and under it a little plastic window showing a card with ‘HOPE’ written on it in blue ink.

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  In the larger context of the Jewish Diaspora, Paul was unusual in making such a demand. Diaspora communities for centuries before this period and for centuries after encouraged the admiration and the support of their pagan neighbors, and they embraced pagans as patrons of and even as participants in synagogue activities. Outsider affiliation with the diaspora synagogue was ad hoc and voluntary: pagans affiliated as pagans while continuing in their native cults as well. Only if a pagan chose to become an “ex-pagan”—that is, if he chose to affiliate with the synagogue community as a proselutos, a full “convert”—would he have to repudiate his former gods. Sympathizers, however, did not. The Acts of the Apostles routinely mention such people as “god-fearers”; pagan, Jewish, and later Christian sources also use this term, as well as another: “Judaizers.” Both terms are vague, which suits the range of affiliation and activity that they describe. The larger point is the important one: Jews and pagans mixed in the synagogue communities of the Diaspora no less that in the larger religious institution, the ancient pagan city, that was their matrix. As with the temple in Jerusalem (where gentiles had the largest courtyard), so with communities in the Diaspora: Jews made room for pagans qua pagans to show respect to the god of Israel.17 This practical and stable social arrangement between diaspora synagogue communities and interested pagans drawn from the wider city contrasts sharply with an equally long-lived Hellenistic Jewish rhetorical tradition, one that immediately informs Paul’s writings. This rhetoric discoursed lavishly upon the immoral and demeaning consequences of idolatry, defining the pagans’ worship of idols as their root sin, and as the root cause of their sin. “How miserable are those, their hopes set on dead things, who give the name ‘gods’ to the works of human hands,” exclaims the author of Wisdom of Solomon, sometime in the first century BCE (Wisdom 13.10). Such people kill children in their initiation ceremonies and give themselves over to frenzied reveling; they defile their own marriages with adultery, their societies with treacherous murders; they prophesy falsehoods and commit perjury; they lie, cheat and steal (Wisdom 14.23–28). We see here, transposed into Greek, the reuse of the old anti-Canaanite biblical polemic, wherein the worship of idols invariably leads to fornication and murder.18

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  In his lengthy Dialogue with Trypho, Justin repeats these accusations. Like Luke, he changes the “ethnicity” of idol worship. Demon worship, idolatry, and blood sacrifices—now paradigmatic Jewish sins—eventuate in Israel’s murderous rejection of the prophets, of Christ, and of (Justin’s) Christianity. These arguments serve a vital function, enabling Justin to read the Septuagint as a work of exclusively Christian revelation. (As he says to his Jewish interlocutor when reviewing Christological passages in psalms and prophets, “Are you familiar with these, Trypho? They are contained in your scriptures—or, rather, not yours, but ours,” Trypho 29.) If Christ were the go-between god so active in the Bible, then Christ was and always had been the proper object of Jewish worship. Indeed, the great spiritual heroes of Israel—Moses, David, Isaiah—had realized this, which was why their works, when read with true spiritual understanding (as Justin and his community read them), yield so many symbolic and prophetic references to their actual divine source, Christ himself (Trypho 29, and passim, esp. 127). But most Jews throughout their generations had missed the fundamental meaning of their own law. Instead, ignorant of the law’s true referent, they enacted revelation kata sarka, in a fleshly way, performing its spiritual tenets as physical acts: circumcision, purifications, Sabbath protocols, food laws, and most especially blood sacrifices. But true circumcision, corrects Justin, is not of the body but of the heart (Trypho 15–16, and frequently); true purification comes only through faith in the blood of Christ (Trypho 13), and so on. When Trypho finally protests that Justin selects and quotes “whatever you wish from the prophetic writings, but do not refer to those that expressly command” observance, Justin responds with a ringing indictment: “You [Jews] are a people hard-hearted and without understanding, both blind and lame, children in whom is no faith, as he himself says, honoring him only with your lips, far from him in your hearts, teaching doctrines that are your own and not his” (Trypho 27). The Jews, claims Justin, are and always have been obdurate and spiritually blind. They expressed these intrinsic faults from their very birth as a nation, in the immediate aftermath of the redemption from Egypt, when they made and worshiped the Golden Calf (Trypho 19–23). The perduring Jewish addiction to idolatry and the Jews’ proverbially stony hearts in turn explain the second great function of the law: not only to prophecy Christ, but also to discipline and punish fleshly Israel. Its myriad details about offerings were God’s effort to distract Israel from idol worship. (“Your ungrateful nation . . . made a Calf in the wilderness, where God, accommodating himself to that nation, enjoined them also to offer sacrifices as if to his name, in order that you might not serve idols” Trypho 19; cf. 43.) So also with the temple: God did not need a house, but he permitted it “so that you would not worship idols” (Trypho 22). So also with the food laws (and the Calf again):

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

  Reply to Objection 4: To receive gifts so as to increase one’s wealth, or to accept a livelihood from another without having a claim to it, and without profit to others or being in need oneself, affords an occasion of sin. But this does not apply to religious, as stated above. Reply to Objection 5: Whenever there is evident necessity for religious living on alms without doing any manual work, as well as an evident profit to be derived by others, it is not the weak who are scandalized, but those who are full of malice like the Pharisees, whose scandal our Lord teaches us to despise (Mat. 15:12–14). If, however, these motives of necessity and profit be lacking, the weak might possibly be scandalized thereby; and this should be avoided. Yet the same scandal might be occasioned through those who live in idleness on the common revenues. Whether it is lawful for religious to beg?Objection 1: It would seem unlawful for religious to beg. For Augustine says (De oper. Monach. xxviii): “The most cunning foe has scattered on all sides a great number of hypocrites wearing the monastic habit, who go wandering about the country,” and afterwards he adds: “They all ask, they all demand to be supported in their profitable penury, or to be paid for a pretended holiness.” Therefore it would seem that the life of mendicant religious is to be condemned. Objection 2: Further, it is written (1 Thess. 4:11): “That you . . . work with your own hands as we commanded you, and that you walk honestly towards them that are without: and that you want nothing of any man’s”: and a gloss on this passage says: “You must work and not be idle, because work is both honorable and a light to the unbeliever: and you must not covet that which belongs to another and much less beg or take anything.” Again a gloss [*St. Augustine, (De oper. Monach. iii)] on 2 Thess. 3:10, “If any man will not work,” etc. says: “He wishes the servants of God to work with the body, so as to gain a livelihood, and not be compelled by want to ask for necessaries.” Now this is to beg. Therefore it would seem unlawful to beg while omitting to work with one’s hands. Objection 3: Further, that which is forbidden by law and contrary to justice, is unbecoming to religious. Now begging is forbidden in the divine law; for it is written (Dt. 15:4): “There shall be no poor nor beggar among you,” and (Ps. 36:25): “I have not seen the just forsaken, nor his seed seeking bread.” Moreover an able-bodied mendicant is punished by civil law, according to the law (XI, xxvi, de Valid. Mendicant.). Therefore it is unfitting for religious to beg.

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

  Perhaps the earliest extant witness to the more encompassing meaning of porneia is Sirach, written in the fi rst de cades of the second cen- tury BC. Th e most intriguing witness to the spread of porneia as a regula- tive norm is a text known as the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, where porneia has become the “mother of all evils.” Th e Te s t a m e n t is invaluable because its unusual detail confi rms that porneia could be used to describe a whole array of improper sexual confi gurations: incest, prostitution, exog- amy, homosexuality, and unchastity. But by far the most important witness to the sexual sensibilities of Hellenistic Judaism on the eve of the Pauline  FROM SHAME TO SIN missions lies in the dossier of Philo. Philo is, to be sure, an idiosyncratic fi gure, his ethics a singular attempt to synthesize the Mosaic law and Pla- tonic psychology. Th e key to Philo’s sexual code is that it was a tribal code. Th e boundaries of the moral community were constitutive. Exogamy threat- ened to fray the cordons of the moral group. It led Jewish men away from their ancestral customs. Th e sexual purity of the Jewish people set them apart. Th e “polity of Moses,” by its very nature, “excluded the prostitute from citizenship.” As a “common miasma,” she was worthy of stoning. Adul- tery was punishable by death, while the seduction of a free citizen girl was a damnable violation. In a community without prostitutes, where honorable women were available only as wives, the limitation of sex to marriage would be built into the very borders of the sexual polity. In this, above all else, does Philo anticipate the early Christian church: the internal structure of the minority community, adrift in a sea of depravity, quietly forms the moral architecture of his sexual ideology.  In Philo’s voluminous commentaries on sexual propriety, porneia never becomes a central term. Th e idea of “fornication” was in the air of the Jew- ish communities strewn across the Mediterranean, but it was not a domi- nant element in their sexual outlook. In other words, fornication was not predestined to become the presiding term of Christian sexual morality. But in the middle de cades of the fi rst century, as missionaries poured out of Palestine with the message that the Jewish messiah had come as a universal savior, “fornication” was ready to serve as a shorthand for the culture of sexual indulgence that followers of the new cult were being asked to leave behind. In the fi rst de cades of the Christian mission, no single form of sin- ful sexual behavior stuck to the term with any greater force than others. In the texts that would become part of the Christian canon, porneia still means, variously, incest, exogamy, even idolatry.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  After they’re inside, Camille scurries around with the keys and opens the trunk, then passes them off to me so I can insert them back in the ignition. We’re careful to conduct the move-in with no detail that could keep our mother here longer than absolutely necessary. She’s probably inside having a drink right now, which could be enough to disorient her from recalling where she put her keys. The trunk of the car is stuffed with green garbage bags that Camille, the kids, and I packed: There’s a bag filled with each of our clothes, a near-empty bag with our collective toiletries (half a bar of soap; an old toothbrush we share; a bottle of peroxide; and a dull, rusty razor), a bag stuffed with old towels, and a bag packed with all the groceries we cleaned out of our last place. We have a prevailing unpacking rule: You unpack the bag you pick. This way we can’t fight about who unpacks Cookie’s clothes. I can tell that I’m carrying our nonperishables, which I always make sure travel with us: vinegar, mustard and ketchup, and other essentials like coffee, flour, sugar, and powdered milk. From the other side of the trunk, I can smell Camille’s cargo—it reeks of stale cigarettes. She cringes despairingly. “Finders keepers,” I tell her. “I have kitchen duty, you’re on Cookie duty. Just be glad she likes you better.” It’s always been clear that Cookie prefers my older sisters to me. Because we all have different fathers, our last names are as varied as our first names. Cherie is the luckiest. She was named after the Four Seasons’ song “Sherry” that hit number one on the Billboard charts in 1962, the year she was born. (However, Cookie found the French spelling, Cherie , to be much more sophisticated.) My mother named her second daughter after herself—Camille. Her famous line is that she named me Regina because it means royalty . “I was right,” she always says, “because you turned out to be a royal pain in my ass.” Norman was named after his father, and Roseanne was named after my great-grandmother, Rosalia KunaGunda Maskewiez, whom none of us has ever met. Camille and I shuffle the bags inside. “Whoa,” Camille says. “This place actually has furniture.” Rosie’s climbed onto a sofa in front of the bay window, and is stretched across it with her feet as far as they can go, mimicking Cookie’s position on the couch across the room. “There’s even a TV!” she exclaims, pointing to the large unit in the corner. “Wow,” I tell her, crouching down and twisting her pigtail around my finger. “Did you try it out?” “Yeah, it works!” I smile and steal a glance at Cookie. She looks pleased with herself, smoking a cigarette with her right arm wrapped across her waist. Mother of the freakin’ year.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Throwing herself back in her chair and regarding me from beneath long, hennaed bangs, she lit another cigarette. “You really want to know?” “It’s important that I understand,” I told her seriously. “He’s not really different from the others. He loves me, he’s kinda hyper, and he likes to party. He’s good in bed. He’s a really cute Italian guy. I think I was just ready to settle down. We were out to dinner and I said to him, ‘It’s my birthday, marry me.’ And he said, ‘Why not, let’s do it!’ So, we’re getting married.” “But you’re barely twenty-one,” I ventured again. “Why do you want to settle down? Many women feel they’re just getting started when they’re twenty-one.” Paula raised her eyebrows and snorted derisively. “Most women haven’t had the kind of life I’ve had. I’ve been sleeping with men since I was twelve. I’ve probably been with over seventy guys. I’ve hardly ever been without a boyfriend. Lots of times when I’d get the man then I’d be mean and they’d be nice and I didn’t like that. I’d end it if they were spineless jellyfish.” Paula grinned and raised a tightly clenched fist. “I mean, I’d hit them, not slap.” “Does this include Brad?” I asked. She nodded. “Yup, but he’s not spineless. He’s ambitious, he likes to work. He pushes the business. And he’s cute!” she finished triumphantly. I reminded Paula of our last meeting, when she had been in so much trouble in high school. Shortly after her interview with me when she was fifteen, Paula did get expelled. She went to an alternative school but dropped out when she was sixteen. She worked at part-time jobs—a gas station, a convenience store, and a number of restaurants. At age seventeen Paula’s mother offered her a new car as a reward if Paula went back and finished high school. Paula was able to follow through on her end of the bargain, although it took her several years. She got her diploma when she was nineteen and marriage license at age twenty-one. Many children of divorce take up with people they hardly know and, like Karen and Paula, impulsively marry them or move in together. Unions like these feature virtually no courtship and certainly no exploration of shared background, goals, or values. Such marriages are almost doomed before they start. In looking over the cases, I recalled that only sixty children of divorce (out of the ninety- three we followed for twenty-five years) had ever gotten married. 3 I was dismayed to learn that of those who did marry, half made the decision the way Paula had—on the spur of a moment during their late teens or early twenties. “Marry me,” she said. “It’s my birthday.” His response: “Why not?” One nineteen-year-old married a trucker who was driving through her hometown. Many of them married people they met in bars and bedded after a few drinks.

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

  He teaches her that “the reputation that comes from your high rank, the authority of this world, and the disgusting intercourse with your husband will avail you not at all if you are without the union of truth . . . for the union that brings the production of children passes away, and is even worthy of contempt.” Her husband, close kin to the king, is predictably befuddled by her newfound commitment to sexual abstention, not to mention the truculence with which she disobeys him. “I am your husband from the time of your virgin- ity, by the gods and by the laws given the right to rule over you.” Th omas is arrested, but his arraignment only provides a platform to spread the message that salvation comes to those who are “delivered from all bodily pleasures.” Th e king’s eff orts backfi re when his own wife, then his son and heir, take up chastity. Th e king has Th omas killed. As a postscript to his martyrdom, we are told that the king and his relative Charisius “tried very much to force their wives” but “could not persuade them to abandon their will.”  What ever else may be said of them, the sexual doctrines presented by the heroes of apostolic legend are consistently extreme. Th omas denigrates mar- ried intercourse as “fi lthy,” and he leaves no room for ambiguity. In the Acts of Andrew, the apostle’s primary convert, Maximilla, calls sex with her husband a “defi ling intercourse.” When Peter preaches the “word of purity,” it is a gospel of complete continence. Th e Acts of Paul have the great mission- ary coming into the city of Iconium proclaiming, “Blessed are those who re- frain from sex altogether, for God will speak to them. Blessed are those who stand in array for something beyond the present cosmos, for they will be pleasing to God.” Here the only Christian apostle whose views we actually know through his own writings, and who was so cautious that he would not upset a single marriage through the unwanted abstinence of a spouse, ROMANCE IN THE LATE CLASSICAL WORLD  has been attributed a radical doctrine of chastity capable of overturning entire cities!  Th e preaching is unrelentingly shrill. But it has been perceptively ob- served that, in comparison with the abundant ascetic literature of late an- tiquity, the sexual doctrine of the apocryphal Acts is shallow. It is stylized rather than substantive, a symbol for something deeper and even more de- manding. In other words, sexual renunciation in the corpus of apostolic legend is more rhetorical than doctrinal. Th e rejection of sexual experience is a direct ideological twin of the apostles’ martyrdom at the hands of the temporal authorities.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I saw to it that a slave should no longer be anonymous merchandise sold without regard for the family ties which he has formed, or a contemptible object whom a judge submits to torture before taking his testimony, instead of accepting it upon oath. I prohibited forced entry of slaves into disreputable or dangerous occupations, forbidding their sale to brothel keepers, or to schools of gladiators. Let only those who like such professions practice them; the professions will but gain thereby. On farms, where overseers exploit the strength of slaves, I have replaced the latter, wherever possible, by free shareholders. Our collections of anecdotes abound in stories of gourmets who feed their household servants to their fish, but scandalous crimes are readily punishable, and are insignificant in comparison with the thousands of routine atrocities perpetrated daily by correct but heartless people whom no one would think of questioning. There was a great outcry when I banished from Rome a rich and highly esteemed patrician woman who maltreated her aged slaves; any bad son who neglects his old parents shocks the public conscience more, but I see little difference between these two forms of inhumanity. The condition of women is fixed by strange customs: they are at one and the same time subjected and protected, weak and powerful, too much despised and too much respected. In this chaos of contradictory usage, the practices of society are superposed upon the facts of nature, but it is not easy to distinguish between the two. This confused state of things is in every respect more stable than might appear: on the whole, women want to be just as they are; they resist change, or they utilize it for their one and only aim. The freedom of the women of today, which is greater, or at least more visible, than that of earlier times, is but an aspect of the easier life of a prosperous period; the principles and even the prejudices of old have not been seriously disturbed. Whether sincere or not, the official eulogies and epitaphs continue to attribute to our matrons those same virtues of industry, chastity, and sobriety which were demanded of them under the Republic. These real or supposed changes have in no respect modified the eternal freedom of morals in the humbler classes, nor the perpetual prudery of the bourgeoisie; time alone will prove which of these changes will last.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  In this book, I discuss many groups I characterize as destructive cults that use mind control techniques. When I identify an organization in this way it is only after thorough research and close examination. I would never slap unfair labels on unpopular or controversial groups. Any designation I may give them is well earned. For example, I have no qualms about referring to the Unification Church as a destructive cult.15 The group’s record speaks for itself.16 Of course, members of this and many other groups would likely be offended and deny that destructive mind control is happening. It is also true, however, that although many people sincerely believe that they had a fair choice in joining—and always have a fair choice about leaving—that is, sadly, too often a delusion created by the cult itself. The Many Faces Of The Unification Church How did this group start out? One of the best summaries is in the Fraser Report, published on October 31, 1978 by the U.S. House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on International Organizations of the Committee on International Relations. Chaired by Rep. Donald Fraser, a Democrat from Minnesota, the committee unearthed many astounding and previously unreported facts about what they called the “Moon organization,” out of a recognition that it was not just one, but many moving parts working towards common ends, under the direction of Sun Myung Moon. Among the investigation’s findings was the Unification Church’s intimate involvement with the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA). The investigation revealed that the Unification Church was not merely a body of believers but also a political organization with an active political agenda. Here is what the Fraser Report documented: In the late 1950s, Moon’s message was favorably received by four young, English-speaking Korean Army officers, all of whom were later to provide important contacts with the post-1961 Korean government. One was Bo Hi Pak, who had joined the ROK (Republic of Korea) army in 1950. Han Sang Keuk…became a personal assistant to Kim Jong Pil, the architect of the 1961 coup and founder of the KCIA. Kim Sang In retired from the ROK army in May, 1961, joined the KCIA and became an interpreter for Kim Jong Pil until 1966. At that time, [Kim Sang In] returned to his position as KCIA officer, later to become the KCIA’s chief of station in Mexico City. He was a close friend of Bo Hi Pak and a supporter of the Unification Church. The fourth, Han Sang Kil, was a military attaché at the ROK embassy in Washington in the late 1960s. Executive branch reports also link him to the KCIA. On leaving the service of the ROK government, Han became Moon’s personal secretary and tutor to his children.

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

  havior that developed principally out of Paul’s reactions to the erotic culture surrounding him received fuller expression in the second and third centuries as a distinct alternative to the social order of the Roman Empire. Clement, writing just before more radical experiments in asceticism would begin to capture the Christian imagination, presents a sort of asceticism within the order of marriage and within the order of the ancient city. Ultimately Clement’s principal achievement was exegetical; he was able to weave into a whole the disparate strands of authoritative tradition and give clear expression to the meaning of Christian norms in the midst of a world alienated from God. Clement, more than any other representative of the early church, presented his views in the language of the culture around him. Early Christian sexual morality can sound deceptively familiar. But the familiar echoes belie a radically new sensibility. Th e few and mostly feeble injunctions against prostitution and same- sex love in Roman culture have been deliberately preserved by Christian authors in search of classical pedigrees, and the pre- Christian dissenters loom larger in retrospect than they did in their own day. Regardless, in no sense should early Christian sexual morality be construed as an off shoot of Roman conservatism. Th e ideas about sex emanating from the new religion marked a discrete and categorical rupture. For the community of the faithful, the pleasures of the fl esh became caught in a cosmic battle between good and evil. New rules, more interesting and less predictable than sometimes argued, formed. Porneia, fornication, went from being a cipher for sexual sin in general to a sign for all sex beyond the marriage bed, and it came to mark the great divide between Christians and the world. Same- sex love, regardless of age, status, or role, was forbidden without qualifi cation and without remorse. Unexpectedly, sexual behavior came to occupy the foreground in the landscape of human morality, in a way that it simply never had in classical culture. “Above all else take thought for chastity; for fornication has been marked out as an exceedingly terrible thing in God’s eyes.”  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N Th e code of sexual rules that came to prevail in the early Christian church was highly distinctive; its moral logic was more innovative still. For the Greeks and Romans, public sexual ideology was an organic expression of a social system. Sexual norms were in harmony with public law, the protocols of marriage, and the patterns of inheritance. Even pagan philosophy tended, at its deepest level, to off er a duty- based sexual ethics that accepted the logic of social reproduction while devaluing plea sure as such. But early Christianity showed itself prepared to abandon the traditional needs and expectations of society, if necessary in the most dramatic fashion. Christianity broke sexual morality free from its social moorings. Th e indiff erence

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

  Contests with other Christians consumed much of Clement’s energy. To one side of him stood various modes of libertinism, whose reality is obscured by the intense glare of Clement’s disdain. Far more serious was the threat on Clement’s other flank, encratism. Advocates of virginity captured Clement’s full attention and bore the brunt of his polemical acumen. These heretics “through their continence commit sacrilege against creation, against the holy creator and sole all-ruling God, teaching that marriage is not to be allowed.” They taught that procreation was fuel for death; intercourse itself was “polluted.” What most alarmed Clement was their claim to exegetical authority. Those who claimed that marriage was fornication “vaunt that they apprehend the gospel more deeply than others.” They offered not only mystical readings of texts but argued that Paul had denigrated marriage in plain sight. It was too much for Clement. “It is not to be accepted, as some have interpreted it, that he means to say the binding of man and woman is a mixture of the flesh with corruption.” Clement has Tatian specifically in mind. “In his exegesis of the apostle, he is engaged in sophistry rather than verity, fabricating falsehood from the very stuff of truth.” Clement agreed that fornication and dissolution were “passions of the devil.” But Tatian went too far in declaring marriage sinful in itself. “Indeed, the distance between marriage and fornication is as great as the gulf separating God and the devil.”44 It must be admitted that as an exegete of First Corinthians, Clement routs Tatian. But he reserves his clinching evidence for last. For Clement, Paul was also the author of the pastoral epistles, which left no ambiguity about the licitness of marriage. “Taken together, all the letters of the apostle teach chastity and continence, offering up so many thousands of commands about marriage, procreation, and the arts of housecraft without anywhere rejecting self-controlled marriage.” Clement’s exegesis demanded the interpretation of a body of texts, read in light of each other; no strand of the tradition could be privileged at the expense of another. Clement’s writings are filled with an uncompromising conviction that he had solved the encratite challenge, salvaging the virtues of both marriage and continence. “The harmonies of a self-controlled marriage offer a middle way, continence conducing to prayer and nuptial solemnity to procreation.”45

• From Untrue (2018)

  A Phoenician princess who worshipped Baal, Jezebel is portrayed in the Old Testament’s Book of Kings as a crafty, cunning, and power-hungry beauty. Her love of ornamentation—she is often represented looking coyly into a mirror, the original selfie-snapping Kim Kardashian—was only equaled, legend goes, by her craving for influence. Specifically, she wanted to convert her husband Ahab’s people—northern Israelites and disciplines of Yahweh—to her own religion. She was allegedly ruthless in her pursuit of this goal, “destroying” as much of Yahwism as she could (the language, Hazleton points out, is vague, and even in the most negative rewritings, Jezebel is never accused of killing Yahweh’s prophets or worshippers). Another critical detail of the Kings version of Jezebel: when Naboth, owner of an exquisitely beautiful vineyard, refused to sell it to Ahab, putting Jezebel’s husband into a profound funk, she falsely accused the reluctant vintner of blasphemy out of spite. He was stoned to death. Having made so many enemies and earned the righteous wrath of Yahweh, once Ahab died and she was no longer under the protection of a powerful man, Jezebel’s days were numbered. For a time, Jezebel ensured that her older son ruled, but he was pushed off a balcony in an “accident” that was convenient for Jezebel’s enemies, to say the least. She quickly installed her younger son, but he was killed as well. According to legend, on the last day of her life, knowing she was to be killed, Jezebel applied full makeup, donned an elaborate wig, and dressed in her finest clothing. What may have been an attempt to appear queenly and noble was read by history as a ploy to seduce her murderer, Jehu. Now when Jehu had come…Jezebel heard of it; and she put paint on her eyes and adorned her head, and looked through a window… And he looked up at the window, and said, “Who is on my side? Who?” So two or three eunuchs looked out at him. Then he said, “Throw her down.” So they threw her down, and some of her blood spattered on the wall and on the horses; and he trampled her underfoot. And when he had gone in, he ate and drank. Then he said, “Go now, see to this accursed woman, and bury her, for she was a king’s daughter.” So they went to bury her, but they found no more of her than the skull and the feet and the palms of her hands. Therefore they came back and told him. And he said, “This is the word of the Lord, which He spoke by His servant Elijah the Tishbite, saying, ‘On the plot of ground at Jezreel dogs shall eat the flesh of Jezebel and the corpse of Jezebel shall be as refuse on the surface of the field, in the plot at Jezreel, so that they shall not say, “Here lies Jezebel.”’”

• From Untrue (2018)

  According to Stephanie Coontz, the work of the plough’s gender hierarchy and stratification was soon abetted by female ornamentation. Initially in the Middle East and then worldwide in plough contexts, heavy jewelry, restrictive, elaborately decorative clothing, and long fingernails all communicated that a women did not work—it would be impossible to—and by extension, that her husband was wealthy and successful. And, not coincidentally, that women were not free. In this sense, the woman’s decorativeness, ostensibly a “celebration” of this new version of femininity, also functioned as a figurative sequestering. In some areas, there was literal sequestering as well. Separation of the sexes, a widespread practice in the Middle East by 2000 BC, kept women out of public view and allowed high-ranking men to demonstrate to the world that they were so rich their wives and daughters not only didn’t have to work; they didn’t even need to leave the house. This, like their ornamentation, was an explicit demonstration of their surplus value and shored up the idea that they were property rather than people or producers, costly objects to maintain by men wealthy and powerful enough to do so. Conveniently and not coincidentally, literal containment and separation from men—as in a zenana, or “women’s quarters,” of a household, inner areas where no men were allowed—was also a way to ensure women could not stray sexually. Beware, everything from laws, moral beliefs, and literature now suggested to men, “lest the seeds of others be sown on your soil.” If that happened, if women were wayward, progeniture might be muddled in ways that mattered as never before: fathers might bequeath wealth, land, and power itself to sons not their own. Female monogamy—coerced, enforced, mythologized, celebrated, institutionalized, legislated—became the bedrock without which this new version of society, in which resources were passed down from patriarch to patriarch, would crumble. Counting on women to be true became the highest-stakes gamble man has ever known. Jezebel(s)The story of Jezebel epitomizes how preoccupations with progeniture, female ambition, and female sexual autonomy were gradually mapped together in the tradition of Western thought and religion. As Lesley Hazleton has suggested in her masterful biography, Jezebel is a tissue of representations over time as much as she is an historical personage. Old Testament “editors” revisited that text repeatedly over centuries, and part of what emerged was the larger story of female fates, in the form of the story of one queen, the wife of Ahab and mortal enemy of Elijah.

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  You were commanded to abstain from certain kinds of food in order that you might keep God before your eyes while you ate and drank, since you were prone to depart from his knowledge, as Moses himself affirms: “The people ate and drank, and rose up to play.” (Ex 32.6; Trypho 20) But why then, Trypho challenges, long after the incident of the Golden Calf, did the prophets continue to proclaim as God’s will the same commandments as he had given through Moses? For the very same reason, answers Justin: “On account of your hardness of heart and your ingratitude toward him . . . so that if you repent you might please him, and not sacrifice your children to demons, . . . nor fail to do judgment for orphans, nor justice to widows, nor have your hands full of blood” (Trypho 27, Justin’s segue to Isaiah 1–2; for repeated accusations of such sacrifice, see 19; 73; 133). The question, really, is, when has Israel ever not worshiped idols? Justin’s presentation of Israel as always and everywhere prone to idolatry allows him to adapt and to mobilize yet another Jewish tradition, this one preserved in the pseudepigraphic Lives of the Prophets. These late Second Temple legends, amplifying the canonical prophets’ complaints about resistance to their message, related lurid tales of the prophets’ murders by their own recalcitrant people. Justin evokes them to develop a “trail of blood” motif: the Jews’ obtuseness, and their perennial attachment to idol worship, led them first to kill the prophets, and then to kill the one whom they prophesied,—that is, Jesus. Not content with that, Justin goes on, the Jews continue right into the present to persecute Christians, cursing them in synagogues and spreading calumnies about them among the pagans, “so that you are the cause not only of your own unrighteousness, but in fact of that of all other men” (Trypho 16–17).

• From Untrue (2018)

  As primatologist Sarah Hrdy observed, “To Darwin, elusiveness was as integral to female sexual identity as ardor was to that of their male pursuers.” And the stakes of this distinction between male and female, ardent and elusive, active and passive, coy and eager, selfish and tender, were high. Indeed, all of civilization, Darwin and his contemporaries suggested, hung in the balance. The English gynecologist William Acton, author of the ambitious and influential The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life, Considered in the Physiological, Social, and Moral Relations (1857), may have influenced Darwin’s thinking and was another voice contributing to the culture’s discourse about “inherent” female sexual restraint and even aversion to sex. Women with sex drives, asserted this well-respected thought leader of his time (who also believed that masturbation depleted life energies and contributed to illness), were exceptional: …the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind. What men are habitually, women are only exceptionally…There are many females who never feel any sexual excitement whatever. Others, again, immediately after each period do become, to a limited degree, capable of experiencing it; but this capacity is often temporary, and will cease entirely till the next menstrual period. The best mothers, wives, and managers of households know little or nothing of sexual indulgences. Love of home, children, and domestic duties are the only passions they feel. In Acton’s characterization, women are at once chaste, lauded, and sentimentalized supra-sexual beings; and creatures driven by biology (their menstrual periods). But in no instance do they exercise agency in matters of their sexuality, which, after all, they do not “have,” their “passion” having been rerouted into “love” of the domestic sphere. In many ways, Darwin’s view of sexual selection and Acton’s take on female sexuality culminated in Krafft-Ebing’s apocalyptic vision of what would happen if we undid such an order of things, which he offered up in 1886: “If a woman is normally developed mentally, and well-bred, her sexual desire is small. If this were not so, the whole world would become a brothel and marriage and family impossible.” Female passivity and sexlessness is the homeostasis that keeps the world in balance.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Arrian shared these views. I passed a whole evening discussing with him the injunction which consists in loving another as oneself; it is too foreign to the nature of man to be followed with sincerity by the average person, who will never love anyone but himself, and it is not at all suited to the philosopher, who is little given to self-love. On many points, however, the thinking of our philosophers also seemed to be limited and confused, if not sterile. Three quarters of our intellectual performances are no more than decorations upon a void; I wondered if that increasing vacuity was due to the lowering of intelligence or to moral decline; whatever the cause, mediocrity of mind was matched almost everywhere by shocking selfishness and dishonesty. I had directed Herod Atticus to supervise the construction of a chain of aqueducts in the Troad; he made use of that trust to squander public funds in shameful fashion, and when called to render an accounting sent back the insolent reply that he was rich enough to cover all deficits; such wealth was itself a scandal. His father, who had but recently died, had made a discreet arrangement to disinherit him by multiplying bounties to the Athenian citizenry; young Herod refused outright to pay the paternal legacy, and a law suit ensued which is still going on. In Smyrna my erstwhile intimate, Polemo, had the effrontery to oust a deputation of senators from Rome who had thought it reasonable to count on his hospitality. Your father Antoninus, the gentlest of men, was enraged; statesman and sophist finally came to blows over the matter; such pugilism, if unworthy of an emperor-to-be, was still more disgraceful for a Greek philosopher. Favorinus, that greedy dwarf whom I had showered with money and honors, was peddling witticisms on all sides at my expense: the thirty legions which I commanded were, according to him, my only strong arguments in the philosophical bouts wherein I had the vanity to indulge, and wherein, he explained, he took care to leave the last word to the emperor. That was to tax me with both presumption and stupidity, but it amounted, above all, to admission of singular cowardice on his part. Pedants are always annoyed when others know their narrow specialty as well as they do themselves, and everything now served as pretext for their ugly remarks: because I had added the much neglected works of Hesiod and Ennius to the school curriculum, those routine minds promptly attributed to me the desire to dethrone Homer, and the gentle Virgil as well (whom nevertheless I was always quoting). There was nothing to be done with people of that sort.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  eaters, you hear? What I serve, they eat. This ain’t no diner and I ain’t no short- order cook.” “I’m sure they’ll appreciate anything you put in front of them. They haven’t had a real meal in weeks.” Mrs. Brady gave a forced smile, and I wondered if she didn’t like Mrs. Callahan. “And the stipend sure don’t give me enough money to buy them separate meals! It barely covers the cost of keeping them here. I do this outta generosity, you hear? You gotta be a giving and generous soul to spend your own money on people like this.” Mrs. Callahan’s nose lifted again. I wondered if she was part dog and that’s why she kept sniffing at us. “I’m sure they’ll appreciate all your good will and all your good meals,” Mrs. Brady said. “Won’t you, kids?” “Yes ma’am,” Norm said, and he put his hands on my ears to stop me from shaking my head no. “Becky will show them around,” Mrs. Callahan said and then she shouted into the house, “Becky! Now!” A second later, a freckle-faced, open-mouth-breathing girl a little taller than Norm appeared. She wore small wire-rim glasses and had brown hair cut in the shape of an upside-down salad bowl on her head. When she stood still, her body made the letter S: shoulders slumped forward, back rounded at the top, stomach bulging, butt out. Below all that her legs splayed out wide, feet pointing into a V. “Show ’em around the house,” Mrs. Callahan said, and she walked the social worker to the car, leaving Norm and me with splatter-footed Becky. “C’mon,” Becky said and waddled away with Norm and me following, “Mom said we weren’t getting no more grimy rent-a-kids, but lookee lookee—” Becky looked back at us, as if to make sure we knew that we were the rent-a-kids to which she was referring. We entered the kitchen. Becky said, “This is the kitchen. Obviously.” Norm and I looked at each other, trying not to smirk. “You’re not allowed to touch anything in here. Ever. Unless you get permission from my mom, but she’ll never give you permission so don’t even ask.” Becky picked up a wrapped Twinkie off the counter, opened it, and ate it in three giant bites while Norm and I watched. Becky was still chewing the Twinkie when we followed her into the living room. “Living room,” she said. “Obviously.” Norm squeezed my hand, and I bit my lip so I wouldn’t laugh. “You’re not allowed to go in this room. Ever.”

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

  His pre de ces sor Trajan, the masculine warrior, was “an enthusiast for wine and boys.” Th e sexual culture of the high empire does not parse neatly into eastern and western styles; as with so much else, the pederastic mores of the imperial period fused Greek and Roman elements, and by the second century this synthesis was well established. Th ough the love of boys in the east could always be described in the fashionably anti- quarian language of Platonic eros, in reality Greek pederasty reveals the creeping infl uences of the slave trade and of harder legal norms. Pederasty in imperial Greece was presumptively practiced with unfree partners. Herodes Atticus, the “tongue of the Greeks,” was publicly enamored with his trophimoi, his fosterlings. One, Polydeucion, apparently was free, and Herodes treated him as a son, but the other two, Achilles and Memnon, were manifestly slaves. A recent assertion that they “no doubt acquiesced to his desires, what ever they were,” may well be true, but we must admit that the nature of the relationships between them and Herodes is, in traditional Athenian style, perfectly obscure. Th e verse of Hadrian’s court, as techni- cally accomplished as any poetry in the anthologies, focuses with verve on the beauty of servile wine- pourers. Lucian’s fi ercest satires assume the love of slave boys. In the dream manual of Artemidorus, it was natural and aus- picious to have sex with one’s slaves— male or female.  While the advance of the slave trade tended to align pederastic eros with the master’s power, the law protected freeborn boys in ever starker terms. Violation of a freeborn boy was illegal in Roman law. What is underappre- ciated, though, is the extent to which freeborn boys in the east were gradu- ally fenced off by public force. Dio considered sex with a freeborn boy “an THE MORALITIES OF SEX IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE  assault” and “an even more lawless violation” than the corruption of women. Th e law “so far exceeds all else in modesty and faith that to it has been vouchsafed the matrimonial bond, the beauty of the virgin, the bloom of boys.” Seduction of freeborn boys became conspicuously dangerous, but the statutory basis of the crime is a little unclear. In the early empire the Romans gave the towns under their sway considerable control over private law, so that the empire was a patchwork of jurisdictions and legal regimes. But Roman rules had an irresistible infl uence. Roman law applied to the growing number of provincials who earned Roman citizenship, and Roman governors played an ever larger role in the resolution of disputes. Th rough what ever channels, Roman offi cials came to preside over the sexual honor of free provincial boys. Lucian reports that the charlatan Peregrinus, having “corrupted a pretty lad,” paid three thousand drachmas to the boy’s par- ents, “who were poor, to avoid being hauled before the governor of Asia.”

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Symmetrical faces are not especially beautiful, because symmetry is bland. Bland is not beautiful, and facial symmetry can be the ultimate in bland. By contrast, asymmetry is actually attractive, in part because it is recognizable. This is why three of the twentieth century’s most glamorous and sexually idolized American women—Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, and Cindy Crawford—came to fame with prominent, symmetry-defying facial moles. It’s also why the majority of hairstyles—like side parts—create and enhance facial asymmetries. Of course, monstrous asymmetries are unattractive, but so are monstrous symmetries. Think Cyrano de Bergerac. The adaptationist hypothesis that we have evolved a preference for symmetry because it is an indicator of genetic quality is a zombie idea that refuses to die despite all the evidence to the contrary, because people are ideologically committed to believing it. Researchers will go to practically any length to keep the zombie alive, no matter how dubious the kinds of evidence they have to turn to for support. For example, a team of evolutionary psychologists from Rutgers University, including the famous sociobiologist Robert Trivers, published a study of symmetry in 185 Jamaican men and women in Nature (Brown et al. 2005). Their paper claimed that human dancing ability is an indicator of underlying body symmetry, and therefore an honest signal of genetic quality, which is why we have evolved to admire good dancing and to consider it sexy. The paper was featured on the cover of Nature and was covered in newspaper stories and media reports around the world. Unfortunately, the data were too good to be true. Several years after publication, Trivers himself uncovered irregularities in the data set and began to discredit the paper as a fraud perpetrated by one of his co-authors. Ultimately, a full investigation by Rutgers University concluded that there was “clear and convincing evidence” of data fabrication by the postdoc and lead author on the study. The paper was finally retracted by Nature in December 2013. See Reich (2013). humans have evolved bones: An excellent discussion of evolutionary context 1 is presented by Neil Shubin (2008) Your Inner Fish. better body-cooling efficiency: See Bramble and Lieberman (2004) and Lieberman (2013). Elizabeth Grice and colleagues have written: Grice et al. (2009, 1190).