Disappointment

Passages

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

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• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Not everybody was enamoured of the new torah. The prophet Jeremiah, who began his ministry at about this time, admired Josiah and agreed with many of the reformers’ aims, but had reservations about a written scripture: the ‘lying pen of the scribes’ could subvert tradition by a mere sleight of the pen and a written text could encourage a superficial mode of thought that concentrated on information rather than wisdom.46 In a study of modern Jewish movements, the eminent scholar Haym Soloveitchik argues that the transition from an oral tradition to written texts can lead to religious stridency by giving the reader an unrealistic certainty about essentially ineffable matters.47 Deuteronomist religion was certainly strident. The reformers depicted Moses preaching a policy of violent suppression of the native Canaanites: ‘You must destroy completely all the places where the nations you dispossess have served their gods . . . you must tear down their altars, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred poles, set fire to the carved images of their gods and wipe out their name from that place.’48 They described with approval Joshua massacring the people of Ai as though he were an Assyrian general: When Israel had finished killing all the inhabitants of Ai in the open ground and where they followed them into the wilderness, and when all to a man had fallen by the edge of the sword, all Israel returned to Ai and slaughtered all its people. The number of those who fell that day, men and women together, was twelve thousand, all people of Ai.49 The Deuteronomists had absorbed the violent ethos of a region that had experienced nearly two hundred years of Assyrian brutality. It was an early indication that scripture reflects the failures as well as the high points of the religious quest. Although these texts were revered, they had not yet become ‘scripture’. People felt free to alter older writings and there was no canon of prescribed sacred books. But they were beginning to express the community’s highest aspirations. The Deuteronomists who celebrated Josiah’s reform were convinced that Israel was on the brink of a glorious new era but in 622 he was killed in a skirmish with the Egyptian army. Within a few years, the Babylonians had conquered Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, and became the major power in the region. Judah’s brief independence was over. For a few decades the kings veered in their allegiance between Egypt and Babylon. Many still believed that Judah would be safe as long as Yahweh dwelt in his temple, even though Jeremiah warned them that to defy Babylon was suicidal. Finally, after two futile rebellions, Jerusalem and its temple were destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 586.

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

  Some have been moved by these and the like arguments to lay down the statement that God is never to be seen by any created intelligence. But this position, besides taking away the true happiness of the rational creature, which cannot be except in the vision of the divine substance, as has been shown (Chap.LI), is also in contradiction with the authority of Holy Scripture, and is to be rejected as false and heretical. CHAPTER LV THAT THE CREATED INTELLIGENCE DOES NOT COMPREHEND THE DIVINE SUBSTANCETHE aforesaid light is a principle of divine knowledge, since by it the created intelligence is elevated to see the divine substance. Therefore the mode of divine vision must be commensurate with the intensity of the aforesaid light. But the aforesaid light falls far short in intensity of the brightness of the divine understanding. It is impossible therefore for the divine substance to be seen by such light so perfectly as the divine understanding sees it. The divine understanding sees that substance as perfectly as it is perfectly visible: for the truth of the divine substance and the clearness of the divine understanding are equal, nay are one. It is impossible therefore for created intelligence through the aforesaid light to see the divine substance as perfectly as it is perfectly visible. But everything that is comprehended by any knowing mind is known by it as perfectly as it is knowable. Thus he who knows that a triangle has three angles equal to two right angles, taking it as a matter of opinion on probable grounds because wise men say so, does not yet comprehend that truth: he alone comprehends it, who knows it as matter of science, through the medium of a demonstration showing cause. It is impossible therefore for any created intelligence to comprehend the divine substance. 2. Finite power cannot compass in its activity an infinite object. But the divine substance is infinite in comparison with every created intellect, since every created intellect is bounded within the limits of a certain species. When it is said that the divine substance is seen but not comprehended by created intelligence, the meaning is not that something of it is seen and something not seen, since the divine substance is absolutely simple: what is meant is that it is not seen perfectly so far as it is visible. In the same way he who holds a demonstrable conclusion as a matter of opinion, is said to know it but not to comprehend it, because he does not know it perfectly, that is, scientifically, though there is no part of it that he does not know. CHAPTER LVI

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I was astonished—both by her gross misperception of the new cotherapist and by her bitter, condemning tone. Why so harsh, Paula? I thought. Why so uncompassionate, so unchristian? The research grant stipulated that during the first six months of funding I hold a two-day workshop to consult with a panel of six experts in cancer treatment, research design, and statistical analysis. I invited Paula and four other group members to attend as patient consultants. The workshop was pure window dressing, a flagrant waste of time and money. But such is life in the field of federally sponsored contractual research: one simply learns to accommodate these charades. Paula, however, couldn’t accommodate. Calculating the amount of money spent in the two-day meeting (approximately $5,000), she railed at me about the immorality of the workshop: “Think of the help that five thousand dollars could provide for cancer patients!” Paula, I thought, I do love you, but you can be so muddle-headed. “Can’t you see,” I said, “that compromise is necessary? There’s no way that the five thousand dollars can be used for direct patient care. More important, we’ll lose our funding if we don’t follow federal guidelines for a consultation workshop. If we can persevere, complete the research, and demonstrate the value of our approach to dying cancer patients, we will benefit more patients, many more, than could be directly helped by the five thousand dollars. Let’s not be penny-wise and pound-foolish, Paula. Compromise, please,” I pleaded, “this one time.” I could sense her disappointment with me. Shaking her head slowly, she replied, “Compromise once, Irv? No such thing as a single compromise. They breed.” During the workshop the consultants all made the contribution for which they had been recruited (and were well paid). One discussed psychological testing to measure depression, anxiety, modes of coping, locus of control; another talked about health care delivery systems; another about community resources. Paula threw herself fully into the workshop. I assume she felt that with little time left, one doesn’t play a waiting game. She acted the Socratic gadfly to the solemn consultant panel. When, for example, they discussed such objective evaluation indices of maladaptive coping as a patient’s not getting out of bed, not dressing, withdrawing, and crying, Paula argued that for her, each of these activities was at times a stage of incubation that eventually ushered in another stage, sometimes a period of growth. She rejected the experts’ attempts to convince her that when one uses a large enough sample, aggregate scores, and a control group, such considerations can be easily dealt with statistically in the data analysis. Then came the moment when the workshop participants were asked to suggest important antecedent variables, that is, factors that might predict a person’s psychological adjustment to cancer. Dr. Lee, a cancer specialist, wrote these factors on the blackboard as the participants called them out: marital stability, available environmental resources, personality profile, family history. Raising her hand, Paula suggested, “How about courage? And spiritual depth?”

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Most people have never heard of the anti-trans parent websites that I described in the last section. The fact that many of their talking points have nevertheless seeped into the public discourse is the result of mainstream media outlets presenting them as though they are reasonable concerns. Since there is no smoking gun—no actual proof of a conspiracy to recklessly “rush kids into hormones and surgeries,” and no tangible evidence that trans youth are rejecting those identities en masse upon reaching their late teens or adulthood—these mainstream efforts tend to rely on a “just asking questions” style of reporting that sows doubts in audiences’ minds without ever explicitly taking a side. In addition to rendering the subject as inherently “questionable,” this approach often utilizes outliers and anecdotes to make it seem as though scientifically unfounded positions (e.g., “there’s no evidence for anthropogenic climate change”; “vaccines may cause autism”; or in this case, “gender-affirming care is still experimental” and “these kids will likely grow out of being trans”) are on equal footing with scientifically supported ones. Several 2022 New York Times articles relied heavily on this approach. “The Battle Over Gender Therapy” was ostensibly about the latest World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH; formerly the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association) Standards of Care publication, which, while imperfect, supports and provides an extensive literature review for gender-affirming approaches.25 Yet the article instead emphasized disagreements between researchers, gave disproportionate attention to trans health practitioners who reject the gender affirmative model, and is filled with unqualified comments from “concerned parents” (some of whom are clearly active in online anti-trans parent forums) discounting their children’s trans identities and gender-affirming practices. Another article, “They Paused Puberty, but Is There a Cost?,” attempted to make the several-decade-old medical practice of puberty delay appear “questionable,” but in the process disseminated so much misinformation that WPATH released a statement to correct the record.26 Perhaps the most influential of these “just asking questions” articles is The Atlantic’s July/August 2018 cover story, “When Children Say They’re Trans.”27 While the article interviews people on “all sides” of the issue, it is frontloaded with cautionary tales of kids who briefly considered themselves trans but never actually transitioned and three individuals who did transition but later detransitioned. We aren’t introduced to a single happily transitioned teen until three-quarters of the way through this twelve-thousand-word article. A whole section of the article is devoted to “social contagion,” which is introduced as one of “the reasons [parents] question their children’s desire to transition.” Yet the article never disclosed that some of the parents interviewed were associated with 4thWaveNow, the website that originated and promoted that theory. It also omitted that the detransitioned women interviewed also had connections to anti-trans organizations.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  The second, or painful, visit did not help, and neither did the third, or tearful, letter. Quite clearly, therefore, things are still getting worse rather than better, and this intensifies our basic question: What went bad and got steadily worse between Paul and Corinth? LETTER 4. There are two separate letters now contained and reversed in the text we know as 2 Corinthians. The chronologically first one is 2 Corinthians 10–13, and it is so bitter that the trouble has clearly escalated into an out-and-out attack on Paul himself. It involves other Christian Jewish missionary opponents whom Paul sarcastically calls “super-apostles,” but regardless of them and their purpose, the question is Why are some, most, or all the Corinthians ready to follow them and not Paul? LETTER 5. After sending that Letter 4, Paul sent Titus ahead of him to see how things stood at Corinth. Paul traveled north from Ephesus expecting to meet Titus either at Troas on the Asian side or Philippi on the European side of the upper Aegean, according to 2 Corinthians 2:12–13. They met in Macedonia, and the news was very, very good, as Paul exults in 2 Corinthians 7:5–15. Paul then wrote the letter we know as 2 Corinthians 1–9, a letter of joyful reconciliation. VISIT 3. After receiving Titus’s report and sending that Letter 5, we may presume that all went well at Corinth, and we will have to return there and consider 2 Corinthians 8–9 and the Great Collection in the next chapter. PROBLEMS. What underlay that complicated weave of visits, reports, and letters was a fundamental clash between two visions of moral community and, even more important, of two fundamental theologies on which those discordant visions were based. At Corinth, Paul and his vision encountered more forcefully than ever before the full normalcy of high-powered Roman patronage backed, of course, by Roman imperial theology. What, after all, was a divine emperor but a supreme patron? First, recall that egalitarian negation of privilege between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female “in Christ Jesus,” that is to say, within the Christian assembly, seen earlier in Galatians 3:28. Paul repeats it here in 1 Corinthians 12:13 by saying, “In the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” None of that arises, for Paul, from ideas about general political democracy or universal inalienable rights, but from the common status of Christians as equals before and under God. As he himself put it in Romans 8:29, those whom God “foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family.” We already saw the practical results of that intra-Christian equality with regard to slavery and patriarchy in Chapter 2.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Beyond individual emotion concepts, different cultures don’t even agree on what “emotion” is. Westerners think of emotion as an experience inside an individual, in the body. Many other cultures, however, characterize emotions as interpersonal events that require two or more people. This includes the Ifaluk of Micronesia, the Balinese, the Fula, the Ilongot of the Philippines, the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, the Minangkabau of Indonesia, the Pintupi Aborigines of Australia, and the Samoans. More intriguingly, some cultures don’t even have a unified concept of “Emotion” for the experiences that Westerners lump together as emotional. The Tahitians, the Gidjingali Aborigines of Australia, the Fante and Dagbani of Ghana, the Chewong of Malaysia, and our friends the Himba from chapter 3 are a few well-studied examples.31 Most scientific research on emotion is conducted in English, using American concepts and American emotion words (and their translations). According to noted linguist Anna Wierzbicka, English has been a conceptual prison for the science of emotion. “English terms of emotion constitute a folk taxonomy, not an objective, culture-free analytic framework, so obviously we cannot assume that English words such as disgust, fear, or shame are clues to universal human concepts, or to basic psychological realities.” To make matters even more imperialistic, these emotion words are from twentieth-century English, and there’s evidence that some are fairly modern. The concept of “Emotion” itself is an invention of the seventeenth century. Before that, scholars wrote about passions, sentiments, and other concepts that had somewhat different meanings.32 Different languages describe diverse human experience in different ways—emotions and other mental events, colors, body parts, direction, time, spatial relations, and causality. The diversity from language to language is astonishing. The experiences of my friend Batja Mesquita, the cultural psychologist whom you met in chapter 5, provide an example. She was born and raised in the Netherlands and immigrated to America for her postdoctoral training. Over the next fifteen years, she married, raised a family, and was a professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. When living in the Netherlands, Batja felt that her emotions were, for lack of a better word, natural. After moving to the United States, however, she soon noticed her emotions were not a good fit for American culture. Americans struck her as unnaturally happy. We constantly spoke in an upbeat tone of voice. We smiled a tremendous amount. When Batja asked how people were doing, we would always answer positively (“I’m doing great!”). Batja’s own emotional responses seemed inadequate in the U.S. cultural context. When asked how she was feeling, she did not respond with sufficient enthusiasm or say she was “fabulous” or “wonderful.” I once heard her give a talk on her experiences, and I nodded through the entire thing, clapped vigorously at the end, and then walked up to her, gave her a hug, and said “excellent job!” It took me a moment to realize I had just confirmed every one of her observations.33

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  John the Baptist and Jesus were proclaiming the gospel, the Kingdom of God was its central word, and the ethical teaching of both, which was their practical commentary and definition of the Kingdom idea, looked toward a higher social order in which new ethical standards would become practicable. To the first generation of disciples the hope of the Lord’s return meant the hope of a Christian social order on earth under the personal rule of Jesus Christ, and they would have been amazed if they had learned that this hope was to be motioned out of theology and other ideas substituted. The social gospel is nothing alien or novel. When it comes to a question of pedigree and birth-right, it may well turn on the dogmas on which the Catholic and Protestant theologies are based and inquire for their birth certificate. They are neither dominant in the New Testament nor clearly defined in it. The more our historical investigations are laying bare the roots of Catholic dogma, the more do we see them running back into alien Greek thought, and not into the substance of Christ’s message nor into the Hebrew faith. We shall not get away again from the central proposition of Harnack’s History of Dogma, that the development of Catholic dogma was the process of the Hellenization of Christianity; in other words, that alien influences streamed into the religion of Jesus Christ and created a theology which he never taught nor intended. What would Jesus have said to the symbol of Chalcedon or the Athanasian Creed if they had been read to him? The doctrine of the Kingdom of God was left undeveloped by individualistic theology and finally mislaid by it almost completely, because it did not support nor fit in with that scheme of doctrine. In the older handbooks of theology it is scarcely mentioned, except in the chapters on eschatology; in none of them does it dominate the table of contents. What a spectacle, that the original teaching of our Lord has become an incongruous element in so-called evangelical theology like a stranger with whom the other doctrines would not associate, and who was finally ejected because he had no wedding garment! In the same way the distinctive ethics of Jesus, which is part and parcel of his Kingdom doctrine, was long the hidden treasure of suppressed democratic sects. Now, as soon as the social gospel began once more to be preached in our own time, the doctrine of the Kingdom was immediately loved and proclaimed afresh, and the ethical principles of Jesus are once more taught without reservation as the only alternative for the greedy ethics of capitalism and militarism. These antipathies and affinities are a strong proof that the social gospel is neither alien nor novel, but is a revival of the earliest doctrines of Christianity, of its radical ethical sprit, and of its revolutionary consciousness.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  During the Chinese Axial Age, some of the philosophers would reject the artifice of ritual, but others would build a profound spirituality based upon these liturgical ceremonies. The establishment of the rites was one of the great achievements of the Zhou, and later generations recognized this. The Record of Rites, a text that was only completed after the Axial Age, remarked that the Shang had put the spirits in first place, and the rites second, but the Zhou put the rites first and the spirits second.55 The Shang had wanted to use their rituals to control and exploit the gods, but the Zhou had intuitively realized that the rites themselves contained a much stronger transformative power. By the end of the ninth century, it was clear that the Zhou dynasty was in dire straits. In 842, King Lih was deposed and forced into exile. The embarrassing failure of the kings made some people skeptical. If the sons of Heaven were so incompetent and shortsighted, what did that say about the High God himself? Poets began to write satirical odes: “Di on High is so contradictory, that the people below are all exhausted,” one wrote. The kings and their royal rites no longer embodied the Way: “You utter talk that is not true . . . and there is no substance at the altar.”56 When King Lih died in exile in 828, his son was restored to power. But the Way was not reestablished; poets noted that in these days there was one natural disaster after another. Despite the meticulous performance of the rites, drought was burning up the country, and the ancestors did nothing at all to help: The great mandate is about to end. Nothing to look ahead to or back upon. The host of dukes and past rulers Does not help us. As for Mother and Father and the ancestors How can they treat us so?57 The rituals were still performed beautifully, and still had a profound effect on the participants, but a few tough-minded critics were beginning to lose faith in their magical efficacy. Yet the response to this growing crisis would be more ritual—not less. By the ninth century, ritual experts in India had embarked on a liturgical reformation that inaugurated India’s Axial Age. In the course of a systematic analysis of the sacrificial rituals, they discovered the inner self. We know little about these ritualists as individuals. We do not know their names, and they left no personal record of their journey toward this new vision. We know only that they belonged to the Brahmin priestly class, which had risen to new prominence during the late Vedic period.58 Their work was preserved in the Brahmanas, technical ritual texts compiled between the ninth and seventh centuries. What does emerge from these somewhat dry treatises is that the reformers were motivated by the desire to eliminate violence from the sacrificial rites.

• From Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932)

  This social validity of a moral ideal which transcends social considerations in its purest heights, is progressively weakened as it is applied to more and more intricate, indirect and collective human relations. It is not only unthinkable that a group should be able to attain a sufficiently consistent unselfish attitude toward other groups to give it a very potent redemptive power, but it is improbable that any competing group would have the imagination to appreciate the moral calibre of the achievement. Furthermore a high type of unselfishness, even if it brings ultimate rewards, demands immediate sacrifices. An individual may sacrifice his own interests, either without hope of reward or in the hope of an ultimate compensation. But how is an individual, who is responsible for the interests of his group, to justify the sacrifice of interests other than his own? “It follows,” declares Hugh Cecil, “that all that department of morality which requires an individual to sacrifice his interests to others, everything which falls under the heading of unselfishness, is inappropriate to the action of a state. No one has a right to be unselfish with other people’s interests.” {159} This judgment is not sufficiently qualified. A wise statesman is hardly justified in insisting on the interests of his group when they are obviously in unjust relation to the total interests of the community of mankind. Nor is he wrong in sacrificing immediate advantages for the sake of higher mutual advantages. His unwillingness to do this is precisely what makes nations so imprudent in holding to immediate advantages and losing ultimate values of mutuality. Nevertheless it is obvious that fewer risks can be taken with community interests than with individual interests. The inability to take risks naturally results in a benevolence in which selfish advantages must be quite apparent, and in which therefore the moral and redemptive quality is lost. Every effort to transfer a pure morality of disinterestedness to group relations has resulted in failure. The Negroes of America have practiced it quite consistently since the Civil War. They did not rise against their masters during the war and remained remarkably loyal to them. Their social attitudes since that time, until a very recent date, have been compounded of genuine religious virtues of forgiveness and forbearance, and a certain social inertia which was derived not from religious virtue but from racial weakness. Yet they did not soften the hearts of their oppressors by their social policy. During the early triumphs of fascism in Italy the socialist leaders suddenly adopted pacifist principles. One of the socialist papers counselled the workers to meet the terror of fascism with the following strategy: “(1) Create a void around fascism. (2) Do not provoke; suffer any provocation with serenity. (3) To win, be better than your adversary.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  But Paula’s network of her church, hospital clinics, and home-care organizations began to yield potential group members. The Stanford renal dialysis unit referred the first, Jim, a nineteen-year-old with severe kidney disease. Though he must have known that his life span was short, he had little interest in deepening his acquaintance with death. Jim avoided eye contact with Paula and me and, for that matter, any form of engagement—with anyone. “I’m a man without a future,” he said. “Who would want me as a husband or a friend? Why keep facing the pain of rejection? I’ve talked enough. Been rejected enough. I’m doing okay without anyone.” Paula and I saw him only twice; he did not return for a third session. Jim, we concluded, was too healthy. Renal dialysis offers too much hope, postponing death so long that denial takes root. No, we needed the doomed, the short-timers on death row, those without hope. Then Rob and Sal came through our door. Neither of them met our qualifications precisely: Rob often denied that he was dying, and Sal claimed that he had already come to terms with his illness and needed no help from us. Rob, only twenty-seven, had lived for six months with a highly malignant brain tumor. Lurching in and out of denial, he would insist, at one moment, “You’ll see, I’ll be backpacking in the Alps in six weeks” (I don’t believe poor Rob had ever been east of Nevada), and, a few moments later, curse his paralyzed legs for preventing him from searching for his life insurance policy: “I’ve got to find out whether the benefits to my wife and kids will be canceled if I commit suicide.” Although we knew the group was not large enough, we started with four members—Paula, Sal, Rob, and I. Since Sal and Paula needed no help and I was the therapist, Rob became the group’s raison d’être. But Rob obstinately refused to give us much satisfaction. We tried to offer him comfort and guidance while respecting his choice to deny. Supporting denial, however, is an unsatisfying, duplicitous endeavor, especially when what we wanted was to help Rob accept his dying and get the most out of what life he had left. None of us looked forward to our meetings. After two months Rob’s headaches grew more severe, and one night he died quietly in his sleep. I doubt we were useful to him.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  Don’t try to fix her. She doesn’t want to be a problem you fix, she wants to be the woman you adore. She will glow with your love if you adore her. You adore her by paying attention, being sweet, helping her out, making her your priority. So many women tell me they desperately wanted their man when they were dating and then after getting married everything fizzled. The sizzle was gone. I think the reason this can happen is because men can be so goal oriented. When dating, she was the prize to win, so he paid attention, asked her out on dates, showered, and showed up smelling good and looking handsome. After marriage some men can think, I got my woman and now I can move on to my next conquest. Good luck with that. No woman wants to be a conquest and then be basically hung on the wall like some kind of trophy because you have moved on to something more exciting. She wants to be the prize you won for the rest of your life. If you treat her this way, she will most likely respond to you. If she doesn’t respond, then my guess would be something happened in her history that has disrupted her God-given desire and arousal system. If that is your woman, go to her and tell her how much you love her and how much you care for her. If something bad happened to her, you want to be the one man in her life who will be by her side. You will walk through whatever it was that happened to her. You aren’t going anywhere and you will be there, not to fix her, but to care for her. Ask her what she needs and ask her if she will open up; and tell her what that would mean to you.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  357 In Canto II, like Cleopatra on the Nile, Belinda journeys on the Thames to Hampton Court Palace, her beauty ironically set off by the cross she wears around her neck. Her curls are the cause of man’s destruction and particularly ensnare the Baron, who has built an altar to love to implore help. Ariel, Belinda’s chief protector, summons the fairy guardians and assigns them their duties. While the partygoers talk, take tea, and fl irt, judges condemn men to death. Such is the context of this “heroic” contest. After a game of cards and the taking of coffee—a luxury that depends upon the labor of slaves—the Baron takes up his scissors and cuts off the coveted lock. Pope condemns the confusion of small matters with great and the subsequent confusion of moral responses. Belinda demands that her “knight,” Sir Plume, challenge the Baron and retrieve “the precious Hairs.” Finally, in Canto V , Clarissa, who had helped the Baron to his prize, now tries to persuade Belinda to use humor and reason to end the battle. No one applauds Clarissa’s good moral sense, and Belinda takes up the battle. In the confusion, the lock is lost and the poet consoles Belinda with the thought that it has been transformed into a constellation. In this fi nal reminder of the insignifi cance of the argument over the lock, the poet also reminds Belinda that even those who can “murder” with their eyes must themselves die at last. ■ Alexander Pope, The Major Works, Pat Rogers, ed. ———, The Rape of the Lock, Cynthia Wall, ed. Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life. Supplementary Reading Essential Reading 358 Lecture 53: Alexander Pope 1. How does Pope’s poetry exemplify the values he promotes in his Essay on Criticism? 2. How does Pope reinforce Neoclassical universal values even as he focuses on speci fi c contemporary events and characters in The Rape of the Lock? Questions to Consider

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Set between event and non-event, conditions for the future of both Judaism and Christianity radically changed: a turning point in both their stories. Roman armies crushed further rebellions in Judaea in the 130s, and after more than a thousand years of dominance, Jewish presence in the Promised Land steadily declined. Out of previous entanglement, two separate new clusters of religious identity eventually emerged, each with its own sacred literature, devotional practice and structures of authority. The process of separation was hesitant, piecemeal and took much longer than the histories of either side cared to admit.[2] Perhaps it was only complete in the fourth century CE, and a single Christianity never emerged from the end of the process, more a family of identities that have continued to proliferate up to our own era, even while some have faded from history. For a long time, developments within Judaism would have seemed more significant than those within the Christian groupings: they ensured the maintenance of Jewish life in a myriad of synagogue communities around the whole Mediterranean and west Asia. With the governing elite in Jerusalem eliminated along with the Temple, leadership was increasingly dependent on the rabbis: male teachers dedicated to the preservation, standardization and an industry of detailed interpretation of the Hebrew Bible as a basis for shared Jewish identity. Moreover, the rabbis concentrated on refining Hebrew versions of their sacred writings, and on instruction and commentary in Hebrew around the scriptural text. Greek-speaking Judaism took a long time to decline, but it was never part of the future dominated by the rabbis. As a result, the rich culture of the Septuagint and of Philo, the greatest representative of Alexandrian Jewish thinking, faded from Judaism; ironically their influence remained far stronger on Christians than on Jews. One could argue indeed that Mediterranean Christianity was essentially a rebranding of Hellenistic Judaism, and eventually so successful that it is not surprising that its parent culture atrophied.[3] Roman attitudes to Jews followed the same pattern as towards early Christians, fluctuating between localized hostility (extending sometimes into pogroms) and an indifference that generally allowed Jewish life to flourish. The great exception was the complete refusal to allow the rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple or revival of any Jewish presence in the city around it, renamed Aelia Capitolina in the mid-second century to hammer home its new status as a Roman colony. The imperial authorities nevertheless continued to treat Judaism as an officially recognized religion (religio licita), and one great puzzle is that, amid all this, the Romans adopted the Jewish division of the week into seven days, complete with rest-day, rather than the traditional Roman eight. This happened in much the same period that saw the destruction of Jerusalem.[4]

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  There was marvellous courage and tenacity, heroic loyalty to conviction, a tenderness of personal piety and a devotion to religion surpassing that of better times. But on its serious brow this religion wore a pallid complexion. It became legal, fixed, monotonous, a thing by itself, shut off from the spontaneity and naturalness of the general life. The prophetic voice was hushed and the prophetic fire died out. The scribe now sat where the prophet had stood, and the sacred book took the place of the living Voice. There was greater insistence on holiness than ever, but the conception of holiness had insensibly been lowered. The prophets had lifted the expression of religion to the ethical plane. The strong ethical ingredient was never again lost from Jewish religion, but the ceremonial ingredient began to mix with it in larger proportions and to become almost the chief constituent of holiness. Religion became once more priestly and ritual, with a timid and legal reverence for externals. It was coming to be dominated by those influences which Jesus and Paul opposed. This was a development similar to that of Christianity when the primitive spirituality of Paul passed into the ecclesiasticism and ceremonialism of the Catholic Church. This is not the classical period of Israel to which we turn for inspiration. Yet this is the period when personal religion was cultivated and when the teachers of religion did not preach politics, but devoted themselves to questions of worship and to church affairs. The prophetic hope of national perfection In our personal Christian life every call to duty is immensely strengthened by the large hope of ultimately attaining a Christlike character and the eternal life. That creates the atmosphere for the details of the religious life. In the social movement of our time the single reformatory demands are drawing a new and remarkable power from the larger conception of a reconstitution of social life on a coöperative basis. It takes a great and comprehensive hope to kindle the full power of enthusiasm in human lives. The prophets too cherished a large ideal of the ultimate perfection of their people. Their specific demands for justice were reënforced by the conviction that these were at the same time an approximation to that wider national regeneration and a condition of its final completion. In the earliest age of prophetism there was no distant outlook. Religious patriots were content if the nation was victorious over its enemies and could live in peace and prosperity under just kings. The development of a larger national hope was due to a double cause. On the one hand the ethical development of the nation and of its prophetic spokesmen furnished a higher ideal standard by which to measure the present. As long as a man has a low conception of what a perfect human character would imply, his idea of salvation will consist in slight reforms of conduct.

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  One reason for this backward reeling was aesthetic and political. Basson’s circle was supplanting a line, a diagram—credited to Masters and Johnson, along with psychotherapist and sexologist Helen Singer Kaplan—that had long been applied to both men and women, its progression going something like this: desire (first rather than laggard and nearly last) followed by physical arousal followed by pleasure. The line, the linear, could seem, from a certain feminist angle, phallic and patriarchal, decidedly unfemale in its symbolism, and at last Basson had provided an alternative, no matter that her lust-free woman was almost a Victorian paragon. Another reason was bound up with a David-and-Goliath battle that some therapists saw themselves fighting heroically against the drug industry—against its rush to find, win FDA approval for, and market what was loosely known as a female Viagra. Since the late nineties, when pharmaceutical companies had begun making billions by assisting erections with a chemical that affected the capillaries of the penis, the corporations had been seeking an equivalent for women. But this hadn’t been going smoothly, because women’s sexual problems usually aren’t genital; they’re entrenched in psychological complexities. Meanwhile, a set of clinicians had taken up a campaign, waged mostly within the psychiatric profession but also through the media, to make sure that the industry didn’t manage to persuade huge numbers of women that they should feel more drive, that they needed a drug, soon to be discovered, to help them. The circle served as a useful emblem for the campaign, which was led by a New York University psychiatry professor, Leonore Tiefer, the author of a collection of polemics. Its title, Sex Is Not a Natural Act, amplified Basson’s words, “We’re just not talking about innate hunger.” As for Basson’s own attitude about the industry’s search, she told me, “There are already enough date rape drugs around.” Men would be sneaking lust pills instead of sleeping tablets into women’s drinks to ease their assaults. Female modesty needed protection. But maybe most of all, the circle was being consecrated as psychiatric doctrine because it gave sex therapists and couples counselors a solution to one of their most prevalent and stubborn problems—women’s faint or non-existent desire for their husbands or long-term partners. The solution was low expectations. Clinicians had latched on to the diagram. They’d distilled it into a three-word lesson that they taught in treatment: “Desire follows arousal.” They taught that arousal might take some time. Patience was a necessity; slowness and faintness were entirely fine; “lust” should be banished from the vocabulary. By lowering the bar, the circle offered therapists a standard for treatment that they might have a chance to meet. And all the while, monogamy seemed to hover like an invisible angel above Basson’s diagram. Occasionally Basson acknowledged that the new might be a key to combustion. But commitment, faithfulness, trust, familiarity—for her, these were the allies of female eros. Tenderness and intimacy ushered women along the circle toward the grand prize of yet more tenderness and intimacy.

• From The City of God

  This is the confession of Cicero, long indeed after the death of Africanus, whom he introduced as an interlocutor in his work _De Republica_, but still before the coming of Christ. Yet, if the disasters he bewails had been lamented after the Christian religion had been diffused, and had begun to prevail, is there a man of our adversaries who would not have thought that they were to be imputed to the Christians? Why, then, did their gods not take steps then to prevent the decay and extinction of that republic, over the loss of which Cicero, long before Christ had come in the flesh, sings so lugubrious a dirge? Its admirers have need to inquire whether, even in the days of primitive men and morals, true justice flourished in it; or was it not perhaps even then, to use the casual expression of Cicero, rather a coloured painting than the living reality? But, if God will, we shall consider this elsewhere. For I mean in its own place to show that--according to the definitions in which Cicero himself, using Scipio as his mouthpiece, briefly propounded what a republic is, and what a people is, and according to many testimonies, both of his own lips and of those who took part in that same debate--Rome never was a republic, because true justice had never a place in it. But accepting the more feasible definitions of a republic, I grant there was a republic of a certain kind, and certainly much better administered by the more ancient Romans than by their modern representatives. But the fact is, true justice has no existence save in that republic whose founder and ruler is Christ, if at least any choose to call this a republic; and indeed we cannot deny that it is the people's weal. But if perchance this name, which has become familiar in other connections, be considered alien to our common parlance, we may at all events say that in this city is true justice; the city of which Holy Scripture says, "Glorious things are said of thee, O city of God." 22. _That the Roman gods never took any steps to prevent the republic from being ruined by immorality._

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  It was obvious that Halston was stressed because of cultural dislocation. From the age of nine he had lived in Great Britain and had only recently arrived in the United States and California as the managing officer of a British bank. But Ernest believed that cultural dislocation was only part of the story—there was something profoundly remote about this man. Okay, okay, Ernest took his own counsel, I won’t say, I won’t even think, “Geh Gesunter Heit.” He went back to work, choosing his words carefully so as to engage Halston. “Well, I can certainly understand that you want to reduce stress in your life, not to increase it by more time and money pressures. Makes sense. But you know, one thing about your decision puzzles me.” “Yes, and that is—?” “Well, I was pretty explicit about the time required and the fees before we started meeting. There have been no real surprises there. Right?” Halston nodded. “I cannot take issue with that. Doctor, you’re entirely correct.” “So it seems only logical to think there’s more to it than money and time pressures. Something about you and me? Is it possible you’d feel more comfortable seeing a black therapist?” “No, Doctor; off the mark. Wrong tree, as you Americans say. The racial difference is not an issue. Remember, I spent several years at Eton and six more at the London School of Economics. Very few blacks there. I’d feel no different, I assure you, consulting a black therapist.” Ernest decided to give it one final shot so that he need never accuse himself of having failed to fulfill his professional obligations. “Well, Halston, let me put it another way. I understand the reasons you gave. They make sense. Can’t be faulted. Let’s assume those are sufficient reasons to stop. I can honor that decision. But before we call it a day, I wonder if you’d consider one other question.” Halston looked up warily and, with a slight nod, gestured for Ernest to continue. “My question is, Could there be any additional reasons? I’ve known many patients—every therapist has—who’ve shied away from therapy for reasons that weren’t quite so rational. If that is true for you, would you be willing to give voice to any of those reasons?” He paused. Halston closed his eyes. Ernest could almost hear the gray cylinders of cognition creaking into motion. Would Halston take a chance? Even-money bet, Ernest thought. He watched Halston open his mouth, just a crack, as though to speak, but no words issued forth. “I’m not talking about anything big, Halston. But even a smidgen, a hint, of other reasons?” “Perhaps,” Halston ventured, “I belong neither in therapy nor in California.” Patient and therapist sat looking at each other: Ernest at Halston’s perfectly buffed fingernails and six-button gray vest; Halston, it seemed, at his therapist’s untidy mustache and white turtleneck sweater. Ernest decided to hazard a guess. “California too loose? Prefer London formality?” Bingo! Halston’s nod was almost animated.

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

  A WORD in conclusion from the translator, or restorer. There has been present in my mind throughout my task the figure which I employed in the preface, of the restoration of a thirteenth-century church. I find myself surrounded with debris which I have found it necessary to remove from the structure of the Contra Gentiles:—Ptolemaic astronomy pervading the work even to the last chapter; a theory of divine providence adapted to this obsolete astronomy (B. III, Chapp. XXII, XXIII, LXXXII, XCI, XCII); an incorrect view of motion (B. I, Chap. XIII); archaic embryology (B. II, Chapp. LXXXVI, LXXXIX); total ignorance of chemistry, and even of the existence of molecular physics: deficient scholarship, leading at times to incorrect exegesis (B. IV, Chap. VII, S: 5: Chap. XVII, S: 2: Chap. XXXIV in Heb. ii, 10): even a theology of grace and the Sacraments that might here and there have expressed itself otherwise had the writer lived subsequently to the Council of Trent and the Baian and Jansenist controversies (B. III, Chap. L): finally, an over-cultivation of genera and species, that is, of logical classification, issuing in a tendency to deductive argument from essences downwards to effects, as though whatever is most valuable in human knowledge could be had by the Aristotelian method of demonstration,’ with comparatively slight regard to observation and experiment, to critical, historical, and a posteriori methods generally.

• From The City of God

  21. _Cicero's opinion of the Roman republic._ But if our adversaries do not care how foully and disgracefully the Roman republic be stained by corrupt practices, so long only as it holds together and continues in being, and if they therefore pooh-pooh the testimony of Sallust to its "utterly wicked and profligate" condition, what will they make of Cicero's statement, that even in his time it had become entirely extinct, and that there remained extant no Roman republic at all? He introduces Scipio (the Scipio who had destroyed Carthage) discussing the republic, at a time when already there were presentiments of its speedy ruin by that corruption which Sallust describes. In fact, at the time when the discussion took place, one of the Gracchi, who, according to Sallust, was the first great instigator of seditions, had already been put to death. His death, indeed, is mentioned in the same book. Now Scipio, in the end of the second book, says: "As, among the different sounds which proceed from lyres, flutes, and the human voice, there must be maintained a certain harmony which a cultivated ear cannot endure to hear disturbed or jarring, but which may be elicited in full and absolute concord by the modulation even of voices very unlike one another; so, where reason is allowed to modulate the diverse elements of the state, there is obtained a perfect concord from the upper, lower, and middle classes as from various sounds; and what musicians call harmony in singing, is concord in matters of state, which is the strictest bond and best security of any republic, and which by no ingenuity can be retained where justice has become extinct." Then, when he had expatiated somewhat more fully, and had more copiously illustrated the benefits of its presence and the ruinous effects of its absence upon a state, Pilus, one of the company present at the discussion, struck in and demanded that the question should be more thoroughly sifted, and that the subject of justice should be freely discussed for the sake of ascertaining what truth there was in the maxim which was then becoming daily more current, that "the republic cannot be governed without injustice." Scipio expressed his willingness to have this maxim discussed and sifted, and gave it as his opinion that it was baseless, and that no progress could be made in discussing the republic unless it was established, not only that this maxim, that "the republic cannot be governed without injustice," was false, but also that the truth is, that it cannot be governed without the most absolute justice. And the discussion of this question, being deferred till the next day, is carried on in the third book with great animation. For Pilus himself undertook to defend the position that the republic cannot be governed without injustice, at the same time being at special pains to clear himself of any real participation in that opinion. He advocated with great keenness the cause of injustice against justice, and endeavoured by plausible reasons and examples to demonstrate that the former is beneficial, the latter useless, to the republic. Then, at the request of the company, Lælius attempted to defend justice, and strained every nerve to prove that nothing is so hurtful to a state as injustice; and that without justice a republic can neither be governed, nor even continue to exist.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Back on campus, Parkhurst and Hopmeyer, who is now a researcher at Occidental College, pondered what the kids had said. The researchers had used a well-established method to measure popularity: Each kid got a list of others in their grade. Students were asked to circle the names of the three kids they liked best and the three kids they liked least. Then they were asked to do the same for those who were “kind,” “someone you can trust,” “cooperates,” “starts fights,” “easy to push around,” and “can’t take teasing.” It was a simple tally: You were popular if you got lots of “like most” votes and few “like least” votes. You were unpopular if you got lots of “like least” votes and few “like most” votes. Easy-peasy. But in the face of the kids’ feedback, Parkhurst and Hopmeyer reconsidered how to measure popularity. Maybe popularity wasn’t just a tally of likes and dislikes. They did another study, this time with one simple tweak: they added “popular” to the list. Then they crunched the numbers again. What they found changed the game. With the new method, being chosen as “popular” didn’t actually mean a kid was well liked; it meant they were dominant. The kids who were pegged as “popular” did get lots of “likes,” but they also got many “dislikes.” These alpha dogs and queen bees were liked by some, but mostly by other high-status kids. With others, they racked up the eye rolls. It’s easy to mistake being dominant for being liked, because dominant kids get a lot of attention. Their visibility is high. The shy among us despair, thinking, I’ll never be able to do that, or, That’s not me. But you don’t need to be someone you’re not. You don’t need to own the room to be liked. You don’t need to be a big shot, alpha, or self-important. True, honest, by-the-numbers popularity, as Parkhurst and her colleagues discovered, didn’t come from commanding attention or gaining deference. It didn’t even come from having the most confidence. Instead, the kids with the most “like most” votes and the fewest “like least” votes were those who were also rated as the package deal of kind, cooperative, and trustworthy. Dominance, it turns out, equaled perceived popularity. Warmheartedness equaled actual popularity. This phenomenon continues into adulthood. An oft-cited study found that in first impressions of others we prioritize warmth over anything else, which is defined as—you guessed it—kindness and trustworthiness. It’s startling, then, to realize that the shouts and whispers of the Inner Critic are mostly about competence and confidence—we worry we’ll do something stupid, look weird, seem incompetent. We work hard to increase our competence and confidence, but we’re barking up the wrong tree. Competence and confidence aren’t what others are hoping for in a friend—they’re hoping for warmth.