Disgust

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 Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988)

  Certain Christian moralists of this period insisted that sexual intercourse should not be pursued for pleasure, even among those monogamously married, but should be reserved solely for procreation. Not all these attitudes were original with the Christians, who borrowed much from Jewish and philosophical, particularly Stoic, tradition; but the Christian movement emphasized and institutionalized such views, which soon became inseparable from Christian faith. Heroic Christians went even further and embraced celibacy “for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven,” behavior which, they said, Jesus and Paul had exemplified, and which they had urged upon those capable of the “angelic life.” By the beginning of the fifth century, Augustine had actually declared that spontaneous sexual desire is the proof of—and penalty for—universal original sin, an idea that would have baffled most of his Christian predecessors, to say nothing of his pagan and Jewish contemporaries. Many pagan contemporaries of the early Christians in the Graeco-Roman society of the first four centuries pursued sexual practices that superficially may look familiar to some people in the twentieth century. The Romans, for example, legalized and taxed prostitution, both male and female; and some of them easily tolerated divorce, as well as homosexual and bisexual relationships, especially during adolescence or, in the case of married men, as a diversion from family obligations. Yet when we investigate Roman practices more closely, we find ourselves upon more unfamiliar ground; we may be dismayed to see, for example, that exposing and abandoning infants was widely and openly practiced during the first and second centuries of the common era, as was the routine sexual use and abuse of slaves. To the extent that we recoil from such practices, we reveal, whether or not we explicitly identify ourselves with religious tradition, that we too are affected by the transformation of sexual values that Christian tradition introduced into western culture. From the first century, when the Christian movement appeared as a new and “deadly superstition” (in the words of the Roman historian Tacitus), through two centuries of persecution, during which its members were subject to arrest, torture, and execution, the movement continued to grow. Then in 313 occurred an event of incalculable significance—the conversion to Christianity of the emperor Constantine; and from that time, with only a two-year interruption during the brief reign of the neopagan emperor Julian, called the Apostate, Christianity increasingly became the official religion of the empire. Accompanying the spread of Christianity—although, as classical historians remind us, not limited to it—was a revolution in sexual attitudes and practices.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  “She seduced her father to hurt him the way he’d hurt her mother, by making him fall in love with her and then abandoning him.” That had the jolt of credibility. I could imagine wanting to make my father experience my mother’s pain to even the score. But not that way. “Personally I think she did it as a surrealist act,” Renate continued, apparently enjoying herself. “Breton and Artaud and that gang, they were all trying to outdo each other: who could push the boundaries the furthest, break the most taboos. Anaïs one-upped them!” That explanation, too, hit with a whack. “Anyway,” Renate said, “she only had intercourse with her father a few times and she was the one who ended it.” I felt clammy. I was going to throw up. I was too dizzy to make it to the ladies’ room. I wanted to lie down on the cool marble floor so I would not fall. I tried to breathe. “Have a sip of water,” Renate said. Through the unworldly atmosphere, my hand reached out and accepted the glass from hers. “Stop talking about it,” I pleaded. “I’m sorry.” Renate looked concerned for me. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Let’s just get a check and go see the ballet.” “You go. I have to go home. I don’t feel well.” “Suit yourself,” Renate said, “but I think you’re making a big deal over nothing.” Driving home, I staved off my nausea by thinking about the town of Bloomington, Indiana I had visited when interviewing for teaching positions. Going to that Midwestern college town could be a new beginning; a clean, blank slate. No Anaïs with her duplicity, no Renate with her never-mentioned dead son, no Philip with his perpetual pot smoking, no more guilt-inducing Christmases in my mother’s decaying house. That night I tossed on the sloshing waterbed as Philip slept. I was plagued by images of Anaïs costumed as the moon-goddess Astarte with her head in a birdcage, her sequined nakedness flashing light; Renate dressed in black like Morticia; Curtis Harrington impersonating a debased Roman slave; all of them actors in a demonic orgiastic ritual. I recognized the images from Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, which I’d seen when it screened at UCLA. Its frenzied finale had been disturbingly arousing, edited in fast cuts with multiple superimpositions of fire and occult symbols. I crawled out of bed, trying not to rock Philip awake. I opened the Dutch windows and let the damp ocean air blow on me, watching the moon move behind a mist of clouds. I thought about Renate’s past association with black magic. She’d told me she had been close friends with Marjorie Cameron, a self-proclaimed black witch, and that Cameron had been a follower of Aleister Crowley, who’d practiced sexual magic.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  Instead of kissing her mouth, Henry shoved a snapshot in our faces. “Look at my new girlfriend.” He grinned, sunlight through the paned window of the front door shining on his bald pate. “That’s Hoki. She’s brought me back to life!” Rupert said, “She’s very beautiful.” Anaïs said, “She’s very young.” “Twenty-seven,” Henry leered, his face crumpling like a squashed piece of paper. Goosebumps of revulsion crept up my arms as I imagined his young girlfriend touching that old man’s wizened body. As if reading my mind, Henry said, “She won’t touch me because she thinks, at seventy-five, I’m too old for her. But I’ll win her. I won’t give up. All for love, heh, Anaïs?” “Until you win her,” Anaïs said under her breath. “You think I’m deaf, but I heard that.” His troll eyes twinkled. “What has happened to your faith in the inspiration of Eros, Anaïs? What does it matter how it ends, heh? It’s all the insanely beautiful, hellish and holy chase, doncha know?” Anaïs made a beeline to a couch and chairs and settled there. We all followed, Henry shuffling on his walker. He lowered himself into his armchair where a profusion of books and his dashed-off watercolors covered a side table. “So Henry,” Anaïs began, “I’m here because the last time we corresponded you begged me to let you pay me back.” “Pay you back for what?” he snarled. “For all the help I gave you at the beginning of your career.” He immediately softened. “Yes, yes, of course. Anything, Anaïs, I owe you.” Grinning lasciviously, he turned to Rupert. “She gave me everything she had, doncha know? Everything.” He hummed to himself and added, “Even her typewriter.” He tried to raise himself from the chair. “Do you need money?” His hands went to his pockets as if looking for his wallet, a clown doing mime. His round face looked eager as a child’s. “Give me the chance to repay you.” “Thank you. You are a good friend, Henry.” Anaïs smiled. “What I need from you is your help in getting my diary published.” “Anything I can do! I’ll call Barney Rosset at Grove. I always said that diary was your ticket to fame.” His sentences trailed off into the introspective hum that Anaïs had described in the diary pages she’d let me read about her affair with Henry. “But you’ll make peanuts from royalties, Anaïs, doncha know, hmm, hmm. Pea-nuts!” “They must be paying you something, Henry; this is an expensive house.” Anaïs looked around. I could tell she was not impressed with its bourgeois conventionality. “Yeah, running it is expensive, too. And so are my children, and my ex-wives, and Hoki’s new Jag, and all the hangers-on who come here needing to be fed. Sell your papers to a university, Anaïs, that’s where you get the dough.” “I tried that.” “No luck? Those white-gloved special collectors at UCLA bought everything from me. They should pay for your diaries ’cause I’m in ’em.”

• From Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988)

  When Jerome set out to refute Jovinian, he went through many of the scriptural passages cited by Jovinian and claimed that they supported opposite conclusions. Jerome was famous—and still is—for his knowledge of the Scriptures, and he undoubtedly knew that Genesis 2 describes the institution of marriage before the fall; but he tendentiously switched the order of verses in order to make it appear that marriage followed sin, and so fell under God’s curse: As for Adam and Eve, we must maintain that before the fall they were virgins in Paradise; but after they sinned, and were cast out of Paradise, they were immediately married. Then we have the passage, “For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”52 Jerome declares that Jesus himself remained “a virgin in the flesh and a monogamist in the spirit,” faithful to his only bride, the church, and adds that “although I know that crowds of matrons will be furious at me, … I will say what the apostle [Paul] has taught me.… indeed in view of the purity of the body of Christ, all sexual intercourse is unclean.”53 In such passages Jerome expresses a loathing for the flesh, the revulsion of a man ashamed of his own past sexual conduct, as he himself admitted. Other advocates of celibacy, however, from Clement to such married Christians as Tertullian in his early years54 and Gregory of Nyssa, express no such revulsion. Indeed, much of the evidence we have surveyed suggests that loathing for the flesh was not, as some have tried to argue, the basis for advocating celibacy, although, in cases like Jerome’s, such responses no doubt intensified the inclination toward celibacy. Then Jerome finally turns to Paul: I will therefore do battle with the whole army of enemies. In the front rank I will set up the apostle Paul, and, since he is the bravest of generals, I will arm him with his own weapons, that is, with his own statements.55 Jovinian had invoked the deutero-Pauline letters, but Jerome draws primarily from what scholars regard as Paul’s genuine letters, and emphasizes 1 Corinthians 7, infusing Paul’s words with vehement hyperbole: If “it is good for a man not to touch a woman,” it is bad to touch one.… [Paul allows marriage only] “because of fornication,” as if one were to say, “it is good to eat the finest wheat flower,” and yet to prevent a starving man from devouring excrement, I may allow him to also eat barley.… the reason why he says “it is better to marry” is that it is worse to burn.… It is as though he said, “it is better to have one eye than to be totally blind; it is better to stand on one foot and support the body with a cane than to crawl upon broken legs.”56

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  I’d seen photos of her male psychiatrists Rene Allende and Otto Rank, both of whom she’d told me she’d slept with to “help return them to their bodies.” The thought of Anaïs giving charity sex to these aggressively ugly men revolted me. Yet, as they had, I was now playing on her saintly impulses to get what I wanted, and Renate knew exactly what I was doing. “How can your students be disappointed?” Renate chided me. “Did you promise them Anaïs’s appearance without even asking her?” I thought Anaïs would object, “Oh, I enjoy the appearances. They energize me,” as she always did when Renate tried to get her to slow down. Instead, she sighed, “I am getting tired of repeating myself. And I’m beginning to feel, I don’t know, insincere.” This was something new! In response to Renate’s and my double-take, Anaïs explained, “I say I value intimacy, but the crowds of people are the opposite of intimate. I don’t think all this celebrity is good for me.” “Now you see the horror of fame,” Renate said with satisfaction. “It’s not that bad, Renate.” Anaïs’s laugh was a tiny cough. “Besides, this would be for Tristine.” She smiled on me. “And it’s not like I have to get on a plane.” “And it will be intimate,” I promised. “It’ll only be the fourteen women from my consciousness group, my thirty students, and my five commune members.” “You moved into the commune, Tristine?” Anaïs exclaimed. “We found a mansion in Santa Monica. We have an acre of grounds and a big rolling lawn in front.” “I’ve visited communes.” Renate wrinkled her aristocratic nose. “I don’t object to the polymorphously perverse sex, but the houses are so unkempt.” “Not ours. We have the cleanest, most anally retentive commune ever.” Anaïs laughed, but Renate harrumphed. “Well, that doesn’t sound like the Birkenstock communes I’ve seen. What about Jadu?” Renate was always concerned about my cat. She’d identified him as my “familiar.” “He’s the house mascot,” I said. “I assume you play musical beds.” Renate raised a penciled eyebrow. “No! I told you, Renate, it’s a socio-political experiment.” Anaïs coaxed, “Come now. You can’t tell us that there isn’t at least one man in this commune you find desirable.” After Neal’s disappearance, Sabina had returned to me, and now my varied sex life provided entertainment for our little cabal. “Give us the latest installment in the Adventures of Donna Juana,” Anaïs commanded gaily. “Donna Juana has found a Don Juan,” I began. “That sounds promising!” Anaïs sang. “What’s his name?” “Don.” “No, his real name.” “Don Brannon. The problem is he’s my brother.” “No, Tristine!” Anaïs cried. “I thought you were an only child.” Renate scowled. “I told you before, I have a younger sister and a half-brother.” I was concerned about Renate; she was struggling financially, doing temp work assisting old people, and I was afraid the stress was affecting her usually impeccable memory.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  “She seduced her father to hurt him the way he’d hurt her mother, by making him fall in love with her and then abandoning him.” That had the jolt of credibility. I could imagine wanting to make my father experience my mother’s pain to even the score. But not that way. “Personally I think she did it as a surrealist act,” Renate continued, apparently enjoying herself. “Breton and Artaud and that gang, they were all trying to outdo each other: who could push the boundaries the furthest, break the most taboos. Anaïs one-upped them!” That explanation, too, hit with a whack. “Anyway,” Renate said, “she only had intercourse with her father a few times and she was the one who ended it.” I felt clammy. I was going to throw up. I was too dizzy to make it to the ladies’ room. I wanted to lie down on the cool marble floor so I would not fall. I tried to breathe. “Have a sip of water,” Renate said. Through the unworldly atmosphere, my hand reached out and accepted the glass from hers. “Stop talking about it,” I pleaded. “I’m sorry.” Renate looked concerned for me. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Let’s just get a check and go see the ballet.” “You go. I have to go home. I don’t feel well.” “Suit yourself,” Renate said, “but I think you’re making a big deal over nothing.” Driving home, I staved off my nausea by thinking about the town of Bloomington, Indiana I had visited when interviewing for teaching positions. Going to that Midwestern college town could be a new beginning; a clean, blank slate. No Anaïs with her duplicity, no Renate with her never-mentioned dead son, no Philip with his perpetual pot smoking, no more guilt-inducing Christmases in my mother’s decaying house. That night I tossed on the sloshing waterbed as Philip slept. I was plagued by images of Anaïs costumed as the moon-goddess Astarte with her head in a birdcage, her sequined nakedness flashing light; Renate dressed in black like Morticia; Curtis Harrington impersonating a debased Roman slave; all of them actors in a demonic orgiastic ritual. I recognized the images from Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, which I’d seen when it screened at UCLA. Its frenzied finale had been disturbingly arousing, edited in fast cuts with multiple superimpositions of fire and occult symbols. I crawled out of bed, trying not to rock Philip awake. I opened the Dutch windows and let the damp ocean air blow on me, watching the moon move behind a mist of clouds. I thought about Renate’s past association with black magic. She’d told me she had been close friends with Marjorie Cameron, a self-proclaimed black witch, and that Cameron had been a follower of Aleister Crowley, who’d practiced sexual magic.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And now the Patron was standing by their table; bowing slightly to Brockett he started singing. His voice was a high and sweet baritone; his song was of love that must end too soon, of life that in death is redeemed by ending. An extraordinary song to hear in such a place—melancholy and very sentimental. Some of the couples had tears in their eyes—tears that had probably sprung from champagne quite as much as from that melancholy singing. Brockett ordered a fresh bottle to console the Patron. Then he waved him away with a gesture of impatience. There ensued more dancing, more ordering of drinks, more dalliance by the amorous couples. The Patron’s mood changed, and now he must sing a song of the lowest boites in Paris. As he sang he skipped like a performing dog, grimacing, beating time with his hands, conducting the chorus that rose from the tables. Brockett sighed as he shrugged his shoulders in disgust, and once again Stephen glanced at Mary; but Mary, she saw, had not understood that song with its inexcusable meaning. Valérie was talking to Jeanne Maurel, talking about her villa at St. Tropez; talking of the garden, the sea, the sky, the design she had drawn for a green marble fountain. Stephen could hear her charming voice, so cultured, so cool—itself cool as a fountain; and she marvelled at this woman’s perfect poise, the genius she possessed for complete detachment; Valérie had closed her ears to that song, and not only her ears but her mind and spirit. The place was becoming intolerably hot, the room too over-crowded for dancing. Lids drooped, mouths sagged, heads lay upon shoulders—there was kissing, much kissing at a table in the corner. The air was fœtid with drink and all the rest; unbreathable it appeared to Stephen. Dickie yawned an enormous, uncovered yawn; she was still young enough to feel rather sleepy. But Wanda was being seduced by her eyes, the lust of the eye was heavy upon her, so that Pat must shake a lugubrious head and begin to murmur anent General Custer. Brockett got up and paid the bill; he was sulky, it seemed, because Stephen had snubbed him. He had not spoken for quite half an hour, and refused point-blank to accompany them further. ‘I’m going home to my bed, thanks—good morning,’ he said crossly, as they crowded into the motor. They drove to a couple more bars, but at these they remained for only a very few minutes. Dickie said they were dull and Jeanne Maurel agreed—she suggested that they should go on to Alec’s. Valérie lifted an eyebrow and groaned. She was terribly bored, she was terribly hungry. ‘I do wish I could get some cold chicken,’ she murmured.

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

  The moral corruption of the Roman empire, which had the appearance of Christianity, but was essentially heathen in the whole framework of society, the oppressiveness of taxes269 the extremes of despotism and slavery, of extravagant luxury and hopeless poverty, the repletion of all classes, the decay of all productive energy in science and art, and the threatening incursions of barbarians on the frontiers—all favored the inclination toward solitude in just the most earnest minds. At the same time, however, monasticism afforded also a compensation for martyrdom, which ceased with the Christianization of the state, and thus gave place to a voluntary martyrdom, a gradual self-destruction, a sort of religious suicide. In the burning deserts and awful caverns of Egypt and Syria, amidst the pains of self-torture, the mortification of natural desires, and relentless battles with hellish monsters, the ascetics now sought to win the crown of heavenly glory, which their predecessors in the times of persecution had more quickly and easily gained by a bloody death. The native land of the monastic life was Egypt, the land where Oriental and Grecian literature, philosophy, and religion, Christian orthodoxy and Gnostic heresy, met both in friendship and in hostility. Monasticism was favored and promoted here by climate and geographic features, by the oasis-like seclusion of the country, by the bold contrast of barren deserts with the fertile valley of the Nile, by the superstition, the contemplative turn, and the passive endurance of the national character, by the example of the Therapeutae, and by the moral principles of the Alexandrian fathers; especially by Origen’s theory of a higher and lower morality and of the merit of voluntary poverty and celibacy. Aelian says of the Egyptians, that they bear the most exquisite torture without a murmur, and would rather be tormented to death than compromise truth. Such natures, once seized with religious enthusiasm, were eminently qualified for saints of the desert. § 29. Development of Monasticism. In the historical development of the monastic institution we must distinguish four stages. The first three were completed in the fourth century; the remaining one reached maturity in the Latin church of the middle age. The first stage is an ascetic life as yet not organized nor separated from the church. It comes down from the ante-Nicene age, and has been already noticed. It now took the form, for the most part, of either hermit or coenobite life, but continued in the church itself, especially among the clergy, who might be called half monks. The second stage is hermit life or anchoretism.270 It arose in the beginning of the fourth century, gave asceticism a fixed and permanent shape, and pushed it to even external separation from the world. It took the prophets Elijah and John the Baptist for its models, and went beyond them. Not content with

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

  When Luther came in sight of the eternal city he fell upon the earth, raised his hands and exclaimed, "Hail to thee, holy, Rome!145 Thrice holy for the blood of martyrs shed here." He passed the colossal ruins of heathen Rome and the gorgeous palaces of Christian Rome. But he ran, "like a crazy saint," through all the churches and crypts and catacombs with an unquestioning faith in the legendary traditions about the relics and miracles of martyrs.146 He wished that his parents were dead that he might help them out of purgatory by reading mass in the most holy place, according to the saying: "Blessed is the mother whose son celebrates mass on Saturday in St. John of the Lateran." He ascended on bended knees the twenty-eight steps of the famous Scala Santa (said to have been transported from the Judgment Hall of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem), that he might secure the indulgence attached to this ascetic performance since the days of Pope Leo IV. in 850, but at every step the word of the Scripture sounded as a significant protest in his ear: "The just shall live by faith" (Rom. 1:17).147 Thus at the very height of his mediaeval devotion he doubted its efficacy in giving peace to the troubled conscience. This doubt was strengthened by what he saw around him. He was favorably struck, indeed, with the business administration and police regulations of the papal court, but shocked by the unbelief, levity and immorality of the clergy. Money and luxurious living seemed to have replaced apostolic poverty and self-denial. He saw nothing but worldly splendor at the court of Pope Julius II., who had just returned from the sanguinary siege of a town conducted by him in person. He afterward thundered against him as a man of blood. He heard of the fearful crimes of Pope Alexander VI. and his family, which were hardly known and believed in Germany, but freely spoken of as undoubted facts in the fresh remembrance of all Romans. While he was reading one mass, a Roman priest would finish seven. He was urged to hurry up (passa, passa!), and to "send her Son home to our Lady." He heard priests, when consecrating the elements, repeat in Latin the words: "Bread thou art, and bread thou shalt remain; wine thou art, and wine thou shalt remain." The term "a good Christian" (buon Christiano) meant "a fool." He was told that "if there was a hell, Rome was built on it," and that this state of things must soon end in a collapse.

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

  The scenes of carnage which followed belong to the many dark pages of Jerusalem’s history and showed how, in the quality of mercy, the crusading knight was far below the ideal of Christian perfection. The streets were choked with the bodies of the slain. The Jews were burnt with their synagogues. The greatest slaughter was in the temple enclosure. With an exaggeration which can hardly be credited, but without a twinge of regret or a syllable of excuse, it is related that the blood of the massacred in the temple area reached to the very knees and bridles of the horses.373 "Such a slaughter of the pagans had never been seen or heard of. The number none but God knew."374 Penitential devotions followed easily upon the gory butchery of the sword. Headed by Godfrey, clad in a suit of white lined, the Crusaders proceeded to the church of the Holy Sepulchre and offered up prayers and thanksgivings. William of Tyre relates that Adhemar and others, who had fallen by the way, were seen showing the path to the holy places. The devotions over, the work of massacre was renewed. Neither the tears of women, nor the cries of children, nor the protests of Tancred, who for the honor of chivalry was concerned to save three hundred, to whom he had promised protection—none of these availed to soften the ferocity of the conquerors. As if to enhance the spectacle of pitiless barbarity, Saracen prisoners were forced to clear the streets of the dead bodies and blood to save the city from pestilence. "They wept and transported the dead bodies out of Jerusalem," is the heartless statement of Robert the Monk.375 Such was the piety of the Crusaders. The religion of the Middle Ages combined self-denying asceticism with heartless cruelty to infidels, Jews, and heretics. "They cut down with the sword," said William of Tyre, "every one whom they found in Jerusalem, and spared no one. The victors were covered with blood from head to foot." In the next breath, speaking of the devotion of the Crusaders, the archbishop adds, "It was a most affecting sight which filled the heart with holy joy to see the people tread the holy places in the fervor of an excellent devotion." The Crusaders had won the tomb of the Saviour and gazed upon a fragment of the true cross, which some of the inhabitants were fortunate enough to have kept concealed during the siege. Before returning to Europe, Peter the Hermit received the homage of the Christian inhabitants of Jerusalem, who remembered his visit as a pilgrim and his services in their behalf. This was the closing scene of his connection with the Crusades.376 Returning to Europe, he founded the monastery at Huy, in the diocese Liège, and died, 1115. A statue was dedicated to his memory at Amiens, June 29, 1854.

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

  century.251 "Why should Christ not be able to include his body within the substance of bread, as well as within the accidents? Fire and iron, two different substances, are so mingled in red-hot iron, that in every part of it are both fire and iron. Why may not the glorious body of Christ much more be in every part of the substance of the bread?" Common people do not understand the difference between substance and accidents, nor argue about it, but "believe with simple faith that the body and blood of Christ are truly contained in the elements." So also the incarnation does not require a transubstantiation of the human nature, that so the Godhead may be contained beneath the accidents of the human nature; "but each nature is entire, and we can say with truth, This man is God; this God is man." (c) The sacrifice of the mass: that is, the offering to God of the very body and blood of Christ by the hands of the priest when he pronounces the words of institution; in other words, an actual repetition of the atoning sacrifice of the cross, only in an unbloody manner. This institution is the very heart of Roman- Catholic (and Greek-Catholic) worship. Luther attacks it as the third bondage, and the most impious of all. He feels the difficulty, and perhaps impossibility, of a task which involves an entire revolution of public worship. "At this day," he says, "there is no belief in the Church more generally received, or more firmly held, than that the mass is a good work and a sacrifice. This abuse has brought in an infinite flood of other abuses, until faith in the sacrament has been utterly lost, and they have made this divine sacrament a mere subject of traffic, huckstering, and money-getting contracts; and the entire maintenance of priests and monks depends upon these things." He goes back to the simplicity of the primitive institution of the Lord’s Supper, which is a thankful commemoration of the atoning death of Christ, with a blessing attached to it, namely, the forgiveness of sins, to be appropriated by faith. The substance of this sacrament is promise and faith. It is a gift of God to man, not a gift of man to God. It is, like baptism, to be received, and not to be given. The Romanists have changed it into a good work of man and an opus operatum, by which they imagine to please God; and have surrounded it with so many prayers, signs, vestments, gestures, and ceremonies, that the original meaning is obscured. "They make God no longer the bestower of good gifts on us, but the receiver of ours. Alas for such impiety!" He proves from the ancient Church that the offering of the eucharist, as the name indicates, was originally a thank-offering of the gifts of the communicants for the benefit of the poor.

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

  But all the humane sentiments are shocked again by the atrocity, of the execution; while sympathy is roused for the unfortunate sufferer who died true to his conviction, reconciled to his enemies, and with the repeated prayer in the midst of the flames: "Jesus, thou Son of the eternal God, have mercy upon me!" The enemies of Calvin raised, in anonymous and pseudonymous pamphlets, a loud protest against the new tribunal of popery and inquisition in Geneva, which had boasted to be an asylum of all the persecuted. The execution of Servetus was condemned by his anti-trinitarian sympathizers, especially the Italian refugees in Switzerland, and also by some orthodox Christians in Basel and elsewhere, who feared that it would afford a powerful argument to the Romanists for their persecution of Protestants. Calvin felt it necessary, therefore, to come out with a public defense of the death-penalty for heresy, in the spring of 1554.85 He appealed to the Mosaic law against idolatry and blasphemy, to the expulsion of the profane traffickers from the temple-court (Matt. 21:12), and he tries to refute the arguments for toleration which were derived from the wise counsel of Gamaliel (Acts 5:34), the parable of the tares among the wheat (Matt. 13:29), and Christ’s rebuke of Peter for drawing the sword (Matt. 26:52). The last argument he disposes of by making a distinction between private vengeance and public punishment. Beza also defended, with his usual ability, in a special treatise, the punishment of heretics, chiefly as a measure of self-defense of the state which had a right to give laws and a duty to protect religion. He derived the doctrine of toleration from scepticism and infidelity and called it a diabolical dogma.86 The burning of the body of Servetus did not destroy his soul. His blood was the fruitful seed of the doctrine of toleration and the Unitarian heresy, which assumed an organized form in the Socinian sect, and afterward spread in many orthodox churches, including Geneva. Fortunately the tragedy of 1553 was the last spectacle of burning a heretic in Switzerland, though several years later the Anti-trinitarian, Valentine Gentile, was beheaded in Berne (1566). (c) In France the Reformed church, being in the minority, was violently and systematically persecuted by the civil rulers in league with the Roman church, and it is well for her that she never had a chance to retaliate. She is emphatically a church of martyrs.

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

  From the Alps to Scandinavia, concubinage was widely practised and in parts of Germany, such as Saxony, Bavaria, Austria and the Tirol, it was general. The region, where there was the least of it, was the country along the Rhine. In parts of Switzerland and other localities, parishes, as a measure of self-defence, forced their young pastors to take concubines. Two of the Swiss Reformers, Leo Jud and Bullinger, were sons of priests and Zwingli, a prominent priest, was given to incontinence before starting on his reformatory career. It was a common saying that the Turk of clerical sensualism within was harder to drive out than the Turk from the East. How far the conscientious effort, made in Germany in the last years of the Middle Ages to reform the convents, was attended with success is a matter of doubt. John Busch labored most energetically in that direction for nearly fifty years in Westphalia, Thuringia and other parts. The things that he records seem almost past belief. Nunneries, here and there, were no better than brothels. In cases, they were habitually visited by noblemen. The experience is told of one nobleman who was travelling with his servant and stopped over night at a convent. After the evening meal, the nuns cleared the main room and, dressed in fine apparel, amused their visitor by exhibitions of dancing.1137 Thomas Murner went so far as to say that convents for women had all been turned into refuges for people of noble birth.1138 The dancing during the sessions of the Diet of Cologne, 1505, was opened by the archbishop and an abbess, and nuns from St. Ursula’s and St. Mary’s, the king Maximilian looking on. Preachers, like Geiler of Strassburg, cried out against the moral dangers which beset persons taking the monastic vow.1139 The cloistral life came to be known as "the compulsory vocation." As the time of the Reformation approached, there was no lessening of the outcry against the immorality of the clergy and convents, as appears from the writings of Ulrich von Hutten and Erasmus.

• From The World of Biblical Israel (2013)

  157 o Upon his return, his daughter goes out to meet the “daughters of the land.” This phrase recalls the “people of the land” that the returning exiles encountered when they began to rebuild the temple. o While out, Dinah is sexually violated by Shechem, the prince of the land, a Hivite. • Shechem is drawn to Dinah and begs his father to negotiate his marriage to her. o Hamor, Shechem’s father, begins negotiations with Jacob and his sons. Of course, the situation is not ideal because Shechem has already seized, abducted, and violated Dinah, and she is with him in his home. o The deal that Hamor puts forward, however, goes beyond a marriage between Dinah and Shechem (Gen. 34:9–10). He proposes a long-term treaty between the Israelites and the Shechemites that will involve an ongoing exchange of women in marriage. A postexilic reading of Hamor’s proposal would view it as defying the Torah. • Dinah’s brothers ultimately agree to the marriage treaty for Dinah and, more broadly, for the two peoples, but we learn that the brothers had negotiated deceitfully. To allow intermarriage between these two peoples, Dinah’s brothers demand that all the Shechemite men undergo circumcision. Several things stand out as strange in this request. o First, Hamor and Shechem are said to be pleased with this request and, without hesitation, have themselves circumcised. They have no trouble convincing all their Shechemite brethren to follow suit. o Second, the Shechemites were part of a larger group known as the Canaanites, and this group, as far as we know, practiced circumcision, perhaps as a rite performed before a man’s marriage. If this is true, then it seems strange that all the

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Lies, always lies! She was growing proficient at the glib kind of lying that pacified Ralph, or at all events left him with nothing to say, nonplussed and at a distinct disadvantage. She was suddenly seized with a kind of horror, she felt physically sick at what she was doing. Her head swam and she caught the jamb of the door for support—at that moment she remembered her father. 2Two days later as they sat alone in the garden at Morton, Stephen turned to Angela abruptly: ‘I can’t go on like this, it’s vile somehow—it’s beastly, it’s soiling us both—can’t you see that?’ Angela was startled. ‘What on earth do you mean?’ ‘You and me—and then Ralph. I tell you it’s beastly—I want you to leave him and come away with me.’ ‘Are you mad?’ ‘No, I’m sane. It’s the only decent thing, it’s the only clean thing; we’ll go anywhere you like, to Paris, to Egypt, or back to the States. For your sake I’m ready to give up my home. Do you hear? I’m ready to give up even Morton. But I can’t go on lying about you to Ralph, I want him to know how much I adore you—I want the whole world to know how I adore you. Ralph doesn’t understand the first rudiments of loving, he’s a nagging, mean-minded cur of a man, but there’s one thing that even he has a right to, and that’s the truth. I’m done with these lies—I shall tell him the truth and so will you, Angela; and after we’ve told him we’ll go away, and we’ll live quite openly together, you and I, which is what we owe to ourselves and our love.’

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Next came Valérie Seymour and Jeanne Maurel to be dropped at the flat on the Quai Voltaire; then Pat who lived a few streets away, and last but not least the drunken Wanda. Stephen had to lift her out of the car and then get her upstairs as best she could, assisted by Burton and followed by Mary. It took quite a long time, and arrived at the door, Stephen must hunt for a missing latchkey. When they finally got home, Stephen sank into a chair. ‘Good Lord, what a night—it was pretty awful.’ She was filled with the deep depression and disgust that are apt to result from such excursions. But Mary pretended to a callousness that in truth she was very far from feeling, for life had not yet dulled her finer instincts; so far it had only aroused her anger. She yawned. ‘Well, at least we could dance together without being thought freaks; there was something in that. Beggars can’t be choosers in this world, Stephen!’ CHAPTER 491O n a fine June day Adèle married her Jean in the church of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires—the shrine of innumerable candles and prayers, of the bountiful Virgin who bestows many graces. From early dawn the quiet old house in the Rue Jacob had been in a flutter—Pauline preparing the déjeuner de noces, Pierre garnishing and sweeping their sitting-room, and both of them pausing from time to time to embrace the flushed cheeks of their happy daughter. Stephen had given the wedding dress, the wedding breakfast and a sum of money; Mary had given the bride her lace veil, her white satin shoes and her white silk stockings; David had given a large gilt clock, purchased for him in the Palais Royal; while Burton’s part was to drive the bride to the church, and the married pair to the station. By nine o’clock the whole street was agog, for Pauline and Pierre were liked by their neighbours; and besides, as the baker remarked to his wife, from so grand a house it would be a fine business. ‘They are after all generous, these English,’ said he; ‘and if Mademoiselle Gordon is strange in appearance, one should not forget that she served la France and must now wear a scar as well as ribbon.’ Then remembering his four sons slain in the war, he sighed—sons are sons to a king or a baker. David, growing excited, rushed up and down stairs with offers to help which nobody wanted, least of all the flustered and anxious bride at the moment of putting on tight satin slippers. ‘Va donc! Tu ne peux pas m’aider, mon chou, veux tu te taire, alors!’ implored Adèle.

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

  A few words on his views concerning the toleration of the Jews who had to suffer every indignity from Christians, as if they were personally responsible for the crime of the crucifixion. Luther was at first in advance of public opinion. In 1523 he protested against the cruel treatment of the Jews, as if they were dogs, and not human beings, and counseled kindness and charity as the best means of converting them. If the apostles, he says, who were Jews, had dealt with the heathen, as we heathen Christians deal with the Jews, no heathen would ever have been converted, and I myself, if I were a Jew, would rather become anything else than a Christian.62 But in 1543 he wrote two violent books against the Jews.63 His intercourse with several Rabbis filled him with disgust and indignation against their pride, obstinacy and blasphemies. He came to the conclusion that it was useless to dispute with them and impossible to convert them. Moses could do nothing with Pharaoh by warnings, plagues and miracles, but had to let him drown in the Red Sea. The Jews would crucify their expected Messiah, if he ever should come, even worse than they crucified the Christian Messiah. They are a blind, hard, incorrigible race.64 He went so far as to advise their expulsion from Christian lands, the prohibition of their books, and the burning of their synagogues and even their houses in which they blaspheme our Saviour and the Holy Virgin. In the last of his sermons, preached shortly before his death at Eisleben, where many Jews were allowed to trade, he concluded with a severe warning against the Jews as dangerous public enemies who ought not to be tolerated, but left the alternative of conversion or expulsion.65 Melanchthon, the mildest of the Reformers, went—strange to say—a step further than Luther, not during his lifetime, but eight years after his death, and expressly sanctioned the execution of Servetus for blasphemy in the following astounding letter to Calvin, dated Oct. 14, 1554: "Reverend sir and dearest brother: I have read your work in which you have lucidly refuted the horrible blasphemies of Servetus, and I thank the Son of God, who has been the arbiter (brabeuthv") of this your contest. The church, both now and in all generations, owes and will owe you a debt of gratitude. I entirely assent to your judgment. (Tuo judicio prorsus adsentior.) And I say, too, that your magistrates did right in that, after solemn trial, they put the blasphemer (hominem blasphemum) to death."66 He expressed here his deliberate conviction to which he adhered. Three years later, in a warning against the errors of Theobald Thammer, he called the execution of Servetus "a pious and memorable example to all posterity."67 We cannot tell what Luther might have said in this case had he lived at that time. It is good for his reputation that he was spared the trial.68

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

  The sacrament of penance includes three elements,—contrition of the heart, confession by the mouth (to the priest), and satisfaction by good works, such as prayer, fasting, almsgiving, pilgrimages, all of which are supposed to have an atoning efficacy. God forgives only the eternal punishment of sin, and he alone can do that; but the sinner has to bear the temporal punishments, either in this life or in purgatory; and these punishments are under the control of the church or the priesthood, especially the Pope as its legitimate head. There are also works of supererogation, performed by Christ and by the saints, with corresponding extra-merits and extra-rewards; and these constitute a rich treasury from which the Pope, as the treasurer, can dispense indulgences for money. This papal power of dispensation extends even to the departed souls in purgatory, whose sufferings may thereby be abridged. This is the scholastic doctrine. The granting of indulgences degenerated, after the time of the crusades, into a regular traffic, and became a source of ecclesiastical and monastic wealth. A good portion of the profits went into the papal treasury. Boniface VIII. issued the first Bull of the jubilee indulgence to all visitors of St. Peter’s in Rome (1300). It was to be confined to Rome, and to be repeated only once in a hundred years, but it was afterwards extended and multiplied as to place and time. The idea of selling and buying by money the remission of punishment and release from purgatory was acceptable to ignorant and superstitious people, but revolting to sound moral feeling. It roused, long before Luther, the indignant protest of earnest minds, such as Wiclif in England, Hus in Bohemia, John von Wesel in Germany, John Wessel in Holland, Thomas Wyttenbach in Switzerland, but without much effect. The Lateran Council of 1517 allowed the Pope to collect one-tenth of all the ecclesiastical property of Christendom, ostensibly for a war against the Turks; but the measure was carried only by a small majority of two or three votes, and the minority objected that there was no immediate prospect of such a war. The extortions of the Roman curia became an intolerable burden to Christendom, and produced at last a successful protest which cost the papacy the loss of its fairest possessions. § 31. Luther and Tetzel. I. On the Indulgence controversy: Luther’s Works, Walch’s ed., XV. 3–462; Weim. ed. I. 229–324. Löscher: Reformations-Acta. Leipzig, 1720. Vol. I. 355–539. J. Kapp: Schauplatz des Tetzelschen Ablass-krams. Leipzig, 1720. Jürgens: Luther, Bd. III. Kahnis: Die d. Ref., I. 18 1 sqq. Köstlin I. 153 sqq. Kolde, I. 126 sqq. On the Roman-Catholic side, Janssen: Geschichte, etc., II. 64 sqq.; 77 sqq.; and An meine Kritiker, Freiburg-i.-B., 1883, pp. 66–81.—On the editions of the Theses, compare Knaake, in the Weimar ed. I. 229 sqq.

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

  or even on the diabolical principle, that sensuality must be overcome by indulging it, bade defiance to all moral laws, and gave themselves up to the most shameless licentiousness. It is no great thing, said they, according to Clement of Alexandria, to restrain lust; but it is surely a great thing not to be conquered by Iust, when one indulges in it. According to Epiphanius there were Gnostic sects in Egypt, which, starting from a filthy, materialistic pantheism and identifying Christ with the generative powers of nature, practised debauchery as a mode of worship, and after having, as they thought, offered and collected all their strength, blasphemously exclaimed: "I am Christ." From these pools of sensuality and Satanic pride arose the malaria of a vast literature, of which, however, fortunately, nothing more than a few names has come down to us. § 119. Cultus and Organization. In cultus, the Gnostic docetism and hyper-spiritualism led consistently to naked intellectual simplicity; sometimes to the rejection of all sacraments and outward means of grace; if not even, as in the Prodicians, to blasphemous self-exaltation above all that is called God and worshiped.822 But with this came also the opposite extreme of a symbolic and mystic pomp, especially in the sect of the Marcosians. These Marcosians held to a two-fold baptism, that applied to the human Jesus, the Messiah of the psychical, and that administered to the heavenly Christ, the Messiah of the spiritual; they decorated the baptistery like a banquet-hall; and they first introduced extreme unction. As early as the second century the Basilideans celebrated the feast of Epiphany. The Simonians and Carpocratians used images of Christ and of their religious heroes in their worship. The Valentinians and Ophites sang in hymns the deep longing of Achamoth for redemption from the bonds of Matter. Bardesanes is known as the first Syrian hymn-writer. Many Gnostics, following their patriarch, Simon, gave themselves to magic, and introduced their arts into their worship; as the Marcosians did in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. Of the outward organization of the Gnostics (with the exception of the Manichaeans, who will be treated separately), we can say little. Their aim was to resolve Christianity into a magnificent speculation; the practical business of organization was foreign to their exclusively intellectual bent. Tertullian charges them with an entire want of order and discipline.823 They formed, not so much a sect or party, as a multitude of philosophical schools, like the modern Rationalists. Many were unwilling to separate at all from the Catholic church, but assumed in it, as theosophists, the highest spiritual rank.

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

  A few words on his views concerning the toleration of the Jews who had to suffer every indignity from Christians, as if they were personally responsible for the crime of the crucifixion. Luther was at first in advance of public opinion. In 1523 he protested against the cruel treatment of the Jews, as if they were dogs, and not human beings, and counseled kindness and charity as the best means of converting them. If the apostles, he says, who were Jews, had dealt with the heathen, as we heathen Christians deal with the Jews, no heathen would ever have been converted, and I myself, if I were a Jew, would rather become anything else than a Christian.62 But in 1543 he wrote two violent books against the Jews.63 His intercourse with several Rabbis filled him with disgust and indignation against their pride, obstinacy and blasphemies. He came to the conclusion that it was useless to dispute with them and impossible to convert them. Moses could do nothing with Pharaoh by warnings, plagues and miracles, but had to let him drown in the Red Sea. The Jews would crucify their expected Messiah, if he ever should come, even worse than they crucified the Christian Messiah. They are a blind, hard, incorrigible race.64 He went so far as to advise their expulsion from Christian lands, the prohibition of their books, and the burning of their synagogues and even their houses in which they blaspheme our Saviour and the Holy Virgin. In the last of his sermons, preached shortly before his death at Eisleben, where many Jews were allowed to trade, he concluded with a severe warning against the Jews as dangerous public enemies who ought not to be tolerated, but left the alternative of conversion or expulsion.65 Melanchthon, the mildest of the Reformers, went—strange to say—a step further than Luther, not during his lifetime, but eight years after his death, and expressly sanctioned the execution of Servetus for blasphemy in the following astounding letter to Calvin, dated Oct. 14, 1554: "Reverend sir and dearest brother: I have read your work in which you have lucidly refuted the horrible blasphemies of Servetus, and I thank the Son of God, who has been the arbiter (brabeuthv") of this your contest. The church, both now and in all generations, owes and will owe you a debt of gratitude. I entirely assent to your judgment. (Tuo judicio prorsus adsentior.) And I say, too, that your magistrates did right in that, after solemn trial, they put the blasphemer (hominem blasphemum) to death."66 He expressed here his deliberate conviction to which he adhered. Three years later, in a warning against the errors of Theobald Thammer, he called the execution of Servetus "a pious and memorable example to all posterity."67 We cannot tell what Luther might have said in this case had he lived at that time. It is good for his reputation that he was spared the trial.68 The other Lutheran Reformers agreed essentially with the leaders.