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 The Tides of Lust (1973)

  Ahhhh . . .” and thrust again. “Yeah, yeah , shit, yeah . . .” The hot chest peeled from Gunner’s back. The cock in him flooded, had fallen, had flopped from his buttocks. “All right . . .” Nazi caught his breath. “Now . . . which one of you black bastards wants a chance at my boy here? How about you, Jomo? Fine meat, but don’t spoil it jerkin’ it like that. Come on, nigger. Get out of his face. You made it once already. You just playin’ now. Hey, suck on Jomo. Yeah, there you go. Mmmm. You like that, Jomo? Bet your black ass you do. Yeah, nigger, you better grin. Niggers can’t smile in this book. Hey there, you motherfuckers have been putting down some shit. You gonna let that ass go empty? I got it all slicked up for you. Hey, Sambo, where’s your little boy Nig? Or Dove? They fuck almost as good as you. Get down there to it. Go that ass, Sambo! Feels a lot better than my wet hand, huh? Look, once you God damn coons finish, get on inside to Proctor. He’s waitin’ for you. Shit, will you look at Jomo! Okay, boy. Get on inside. Your turn, Jeb—Christ, nigger, you smell like you been dickin’ a hog in a pig wallow. Motherfucker . . . I didn’t know you were that big—come on, get it down his face. He can take it. Alllll the way. Eat up that meat. Look a-here, cocksucker, you can lick my hand all you want as long as you get that dick down. These black boys got some come to come. Hey, what you hanging around here for, nigger? You had yours already. Get on inside. Proctor’s waiting.” “Now,” Kim whispered, “you must dress me. You’ll like that, Bull. You’ll like dressing me.” One big, dirty hand cupped her breast from behind. The other moved on her flank. His breath was moist in her ear; his hand was knuckled between her legs, rough nubs prodding her, piercing her. She rubbed his hairy arm; put her palm on his bony, shaved skull, moved her fingers on his fleshy neck. “Now, Bull,” she said. “Let’s go now.” He grunted as she pulled from him. Following her he felt a door sill under his bare foot, once stubbed his toe on a step. They climbed in heat and dust. Walls: a narrow stair. And still the steps sagged. The small slap of her feet was gone from ahead of him. In the gap, confusion: an unfrosted bulb lights, above her head, came on. She dropped her arm from the string. Shoulders, chin, and stomach shone. Behind her, against the attic wall, beside boxes, old pipes, tools and other attic accouterment, was a painting. A full length portrait of her: It had been put there within the day, the only object without dust. “Now . . .”

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  “You have asked me about the woman? Here she makes her first entrance into my wanderings. Let me introduce her by explaining that I moved down through Italy, keeping to smaller towns. A week from Zurich round me living with a grave digger and his son. Where the mother had gone, or, in truth, if there was actually blood between man and boy, I never knew for sure. The father, whose acquaintance I made in a narrow street lit by half a moon at midnight, had raised the child to his own tastes. They disinterred dead women, carried them to their shack—a print of the Virgin was tacked over the fire, and the roof leaked after any more than an hour’s rain steady—where, with dirty fingers, and stained teeth, father and son would bruise and tear the cold mouth, breasts, buttocks, and box. Though liking to lick, lip, and tongue the cool and putrid corpses, they preferred to give up their juice in something warm, wet and responding, while they groveled, growled and bit. Often they would perform this service for one another (reluctantly claimed the father), one on his knees, hugging the hips of the other, who lowered over the figure on the table flickering under the candles. But their real pleasure was to indulge the yellowing, lardy lumps together while somebody else—male or female, it was no matter—crouched for them. Often I saw their clotted hands meet, while man and boy exchanged congealed kisses, tongueing a bit of fat between them. “I met Guido, the grave digger, as I say, in a dark street. His black eyes followed mine, pulled me around. After I had taken him in a doorway, he asked me if I liked to do the same for boys, say one fourteen. As we walked, he let that young Pietro was his son and helper. When he revealed to me where the stains on his fourth-hand army coat and woolen pants had come from, I grew intrigued. By the time we reached the cemetery and their hut, Guido had tested my reaction with a dozen false tales of what might be expected of me—sometimes exaggerating well beyond anything I ever witnessed later, sometimes not quite reaching it. Finally, we stepped through the shack door, and young Pietro—blue eyes in a rat’s face pocked with acne—released his teeth from the throat bared on the table, and blinked (some of his teeth were broken: his father’s, all large and intact; indeed handsome and dark at forty, Guido’s hair was completely black). They invited me to assist.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  He rolled on floor, cuddling his aching wrist, eyes tight. He lay on his back. His breath made multiple S sounds between clamped teeth. There was a delicate pressure about his thigh, then tiny, needling pains in his groin. He opened his eyes. His pants were below his knees. Perched on his thigh, the little dragon nuzzled and nipped at the base of his cock. And the waving shadows of the great dragon’s wing fell on him. He snatched his hand to his face to block his eyes. He had no hand. Scales swung above him. Ruby insects worried her flanks. Scales broke away at the wrinkled haunch. The bare flesh reddened toward the dribbling eruption below her tail. He rolled out of the way of a hinder talon that scratched through the coals. The little beast clawed to keep its footing. The great worm twisted her head toward him, blinked one fist-sized eye, waddling, tail beating sparks from the cinders over the floor. He sat up: she squatted, mushing her hole, like a hack in bad fruit, on his face. He thrust out his tongue through blind moments while insects chattered at his ears. But she lumbered on, leaving him reeling, nauseated by fumes of acetone. His face and eyes were filmed with her juice. He tried to wipe it away, and his hand balked, slipped, stuck again against the silt that gummed his lids. The points of light about the burning floor were haloed and gauzed prisms. And the beast, glimmering in opal veils, heaved aside piles of smoke. The black captain waited. In the embers, the rime on his feet glowed. The chain about his left ankle was bright black: a crescent of sweaty skin below one knee, and the underlength of his veined erections (its shadow slanted up his chest) gleamed: so did the bottoms of his lips; and his nostril rims; and the brass at his ear; and the roofs of his eyes. The she-beast nosed the burnings around his feet. The captain reached out with flickering palms (swords of light swung through the gauze on Robby’s eyes) to grasp her ears. Her head came up. Her tongue’s double serpent lazed about his sack and shaft. The captain wrestled her. The tail, thicker at its base than the black thigh, beat about his head. The hand had scuttled to the captain’s foot. Tacky with the same gum that dribbled Robby’s cheek, it clawed to the ankle, clawed higher, hung a moment from the calf, then scurried up the wet thigh, palmed the testicles, and thrust the long cock in as the tail swung away. She swiveled against him, forepaws collapsing in the ashes. The captain stretched along her green back, sank yellow teeth in her scales. Blood scarfed her throat, steamed on the coals, while she hiccupped and hissed. The perspiring sides of the black buttocks hollowed, retreated, hollowed. Slowly she began to crawl forward.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  φρυκτός, 77, dv, verb. Adj. of φρύγω, roasted, ὑμᾶς .. φρυκτοὺς σκευάσω ΤΊ] make roast meat of you, Ar. Vesp. 1330. II. as Subst., φρυκτός, 6, a fire-brand, torch: esp. an alarm-fire, signal-fire, bale- γε, beacon, used as a telegraph at night, Aesch. Ag. 30, 282, 292; φρυκτοὶ πολέμιοι αἴρονται és τόπον fire-signals of an enemy’s approach are made to a place, Thuc. 2. 94., 3. 223 cf. φρυκτωρέω, φρυκτωρός, πυρσός Il. 2. φρυκτός (sc. evapos), 6, a lot, because roasted beans were sometimes used for drawing lots, Plut. 2. 492 A:—also a bean for voting, Poll. 8. 18. 3. φρυκτοί, oi, φρυκτά, τά, small fish for frying, small fry, Anaxandr. ’Odvac. 1. 11, Alex.’05. ὑφ. 2. 4. φρυκτή. 7, a kind of σεϑῖρ, Hipp. ap. Galen., v. Diosc. 1. 93. φρυκτωρέω, to give signals by fire, Dinarch. ap. Harpocr. :—Pass., ἐφρυκτωρήθησαν νῆες προσπλέουσαι the approach of ships was signalled by beacon-fires, Thuc. 3. 80. φρυκτωρία, ἡ, a giving signals by beacons or alarm-fires, telegraphing, Aesch. Ag. 33, 490, Soph. Fr. 379.5 ; ἔννυχος Eur. Rhes. 55; φρυκτω- ρίαι ἐν τοῖσι πύργοις Ar, Av. 1161; τὰ σημεῖα τῆς pp. Thuc. 3. 22. φρυκτώριον, τό, a beacon-tower, light-house, Plut. Pomp. 24; Hdn. thy oy 104, φρυκτωρός, 6, (φρυκτός II, οὖρος (B)) a fire-watch, i. e. one who watches on a height to give signals by beacons or alarm-fires, Aesch. Ag. 590, Thuc. 8. 102; see the opening scene and the description in Aesch. Ag. 281 sq. II. the fire-signal or beacon itself, Lyc. 345. φρύνη [Ὁ]. 7, α toad, Bufo cinereus, Arist. H. A. 4. 5, 7, Timae. 156. II. a nickname of several Athenian courtesans, from their complexion, Ar. Eccl. 1101, cf. Ath. 585 sqq.:—so Φρῦνις, 6, the name ofa Com. Poet, Ar. Nub. 971. (Cf. φρῦνος, Φρύνιχος, etc. ; Lat. fur-vus; Skt. ba-bhrus (subrufus) ; O. H. G. briin (brown) ;—so rubeta is akin to ruber; v. Curt. 416.) φρύνιον [Ὁ], τό, a plant, also βατράχιον and ποτήριον, Diosc. 3. 17. Ppiviyeros, a, ov, of or like Phrynichus (the Com. Poet), τὸ &p. ἐκ- λακτίζειν Ar. Vesp. 1524, ubi v. Schol. φρῦνο-ειδής, és, like a toad, βάτραχος Arist. Probl. 1. 22. Φρῦνο-λόγοϑ, ov, toad-catcher, or φρυνολόχος, ov: (Aoyaw) :—lying in wait for toads, a name prob. for the buzzard, Arist. H. A. 9 36, 1" φρῦνος, ὅ, like φρύνη, a toad, Arist. H. A. 9. 40, 41, Nic. Al. 580, Babr. 24. 4:—Babr. also has it fem., 28.6. Ppivovderos, 6, a swindler, cheat, rogue (from Phrynondas, a notorious swindler mentioned by Ar. Thesm. 861, Fr. 92, Isocr. 382 A), A. B. 71. Φρύξ, 6, gen. Φρῦγός, a Phrygian, 1]. 2. 861, al.:—as the name of a slave, Ar. Vesp. 433; cf. Davus, Geta :—the Phrygians were a bye-word for cowardice, δειλότερος λαγὼ Ppvyds ap. Strab. 36, cf. Apollod. Κιθαρ. 1, Tertull. de Anim. 279 A. φρύσσω, φρύττω, -- φρύγω, q. ν. φῦ, fie! faugh! an exclamation of disgust, Ar. Lys. 295, 305 ; cf. φεῦ:

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  His differences with Karlstadt over the sacrament were paralleled by divergent theologies of marriage and morals, and would soon become a major fissure within the Reformation more broadly. Luther’s evangelical opponents, who drew a sharp distinction between flesh and spirit, subscribed largely to two broad views. Some, like Karlstadt, could never entirely reconcile wedded life with Gelassenheit and remained ambivalent about marriage, not only because it involved physical pleasure, but also because it brought emotional attachments to spouse and children. 64 Müntzer too sometimes hinted that it would be better to remain chaste. (Indeed, according to the Lutheran Johann Agricola’s mischievous story, Müntzer was so “spiritual” that he showed no joy when told of the birth of his son on Easter Day 1524.) 65 This unease about the “flesh” would be shared by a variety of spiritualist and Anabaptist thinkers—Anabaptists rejected infant baptism—many of whom were influenced directly by Karlstadt or Müntzer. Formed by their Catholic pasts, with its disgust for sex as polluting, many found it impossible to imagine that any sexual liaison could be pleasing to God. Some, however, building on the idea of marriage as a sacrament in which physical union was an integral part, tried to sacralize sex, believing that God had called them to leave their spouse and take a new “marital sister.” One group of Anabaptists who became known as the Thuringian “blood friends” even held that sexual union was the “Christ-izing,” the true sacrament that should replace the Eucharist. For them, the sacrament had to be experienced in the flesh, and sex itself, the epitome of “fleshly” expression, had to be spiritualized. 66 The other approach taken by those who made a radical separation between body and spirit was to regulate marriage and sexuality in order to create a godly community. Many of the evangelical communities influenced by the teaching of Zwingli set up consistory courts to police marriage and morals, sometimes involving laypeople only, sometimes under the control of the local church, with the participation of the clergy or “Elders” of the congregation. In Zurich itself, a discipline ordinance was issued and a new court set up that would punish those who drank to excess, played games of chance, lived in adultery, or committed fornication. 67 These courts drew on models that predated the Reformation: Guilds-folk had long policed the moral behavior of their members, and town councils had punished bigamists and freelance prostitutes, who worked outside the civic brothels. But the vigor with which marital offenses were now prosecuted was new, and so was the religious value that was placed upon creating a godly community. It would find its fullest expression in Calvin’s Geneva. By contrast, Luther, who believed in Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist and rejected drawing a sharp distinction between flesh and spirit, did not devote his energies to such things; indeed, the Anabaptists in the territory of Hesse accused him of not caring enough about them.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  2 The Mother of Invention If Jesus had said to her before she was born, “There’s only two places available to you. You can either be a [n-word] or you can be white-trash,” what would she have said? “Please. Jesus, please,” she would’ve said, “just let me wait until there’s another place available.” —Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” M other’s yellow station wagon slid like a Monopoly icon along the gray road that cut between fields of Iowa corn, which was chlorophyll green and punctuated in the distance by gargantuan silver silos and gleaming, unrusted tractors glazed cinnamon red. Mother told me how the wealth of these farmers differed from the plight of the West Texas dirt farmers of her Dust Bowl youth, who doled out mortgaged seed from croker sacks. But because I was seventeen and had bitten my cuticles raw facing the prospect of fitting in at the private college we’d reach that night—which had accepted me through some mixture of pity and oversight—and because I was split-headed with the hangover Mother and I had incurred the night before, sucking down screwdrivers in the unaptly named Holiday Inn in Kansas City, I told Mother something like, Enough already about your shitty youth. You’ve told me about eight million times since we pulled out of the garage . She asked me if we had any more of the peaches we’d bought in Arkansas. We got peaches galore, I said. The car was fragrant with the bushels of fruit we’d been wolfing for two days while our bowels grumbled. I picked through the soft bottom peaches for an unbruised one to hand her. I asked, Wasn’t that the name of some famous stripper, Peaches Galore? Pussy Galore, I believe, Mother said. She bit the peach with a zeal that made me cringe, as did her cavalier use of the word pussy , though I myself used it with alacrity. To look at her behind the wheel, with the mess she could make of a peach, appalled me. She was so primordial. She had to wipe the juice off her chin with the back of her hand. Out the window, legions of neat corn about to tassel announced a severe order I longed to enter into, one that would shut out the sprawling chaos of Mother. She tapped her cup of watery ice, saying, I could use a little dollop of vodka in there. The cup was in its sandbagged holder on the bump in the car floor next to her streamlined legs in exercise sandals. And if, as Samuel Johnson said, everyone has the face they deserve at fifty, Mother must have paid some demon off, for despite her wretched habits, her face looked amazing at her half century—with her shock of salt-and-pepper hair, pale skin, and fine features. She said, Don’t look at me that way. We got up at five. It’s cocktail hour by our schedule. We got any more ice?

• From From Judgment to Hope: A Study on the Prophets (2019)

  The person of Ezekiel and consequently the book of Ezekiel reflect a tradition of a priestly, sacramental reading of historical reality. Ezekiel is a priest who assesses the failure of Jerusalem and anticipates the future of Jerusalem beyond its demise through the lens of sacramental practice. Ezekiel is appreciative of aesthetics, of order and symmetry, and is guided especially by practices of holiness that feature ritual purity; it is such purity and cleanness that make it possible for the God of Israel to dwell in the midst of Israel in the Jerusalem temple. On this basis Ezekiel delivers a savage analysis of the failure of Jerusalem. An imagined tour of the temple is a review of compromise and accommodation that violate the purity of God in radical ways and are termed “abomination”: He said to me, “Go in, and see the vile abominations that they are committing here.” So I went in and looked; there, portrayed on the wall all around, were all kinds of creeping things, and loathsome animals, and all the idols of the house of Israel. . . . He also said to me, “You will see still greater abominations that they are committing.” 8:9–13 It is likely that Ezekiel’s catalog of offenses derives from the priestly tradition of the book of Leviticus in which orbit Ezekiel is situated. That tradition affirmed that the practice of holiness was an essential condition of being able to host the presence of God. In both Leviticus and Ezekiel, however, it must not be assumed that condemnation pertains only to liturgical matters, for the tradition also takes serious note of ethical, neighborly affront (see Ezek. 16:49 and 18:14–18). The repulsive practices that Ezekiel found in the temple will cause God to depart the temple. God dramatically departs from the temple, driven into exile by the failure of temple practice and of the priests who supervise it: Then the glory of the LORD rose up from the cherub to the threshold of the house; the house was filled with the cloud, and the court was full of the brightness of the glory of the LORD. The sound of the wings of the cherubim was heard as far as the outer court, like the voice of God Almighty when he speaks. . . . The cherubim rose up. These were the living creatures that I saw by the river Chebar. 10:4–15 God’s glory, the almost material palpable presence of God in the temple, is forced into exile. For that reason, God’s absence is also palpably discernible. And when the divine presence departs the holy city, the city is destined to failure and destruction.

• From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)

  The more affluent settlers in Australia and in the American colonies may have read the Spectator and the Gentleman’s Magazine; they may have built private libraries, bought and used silver tea services, and cultivated formal gardens. But they knew of, and some participated in, the carnage of the Cherokee War (1760–61), just as they knew of the slaughter of the Indians by the Paxton Boys in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, thirty miles from Philadelphia, a seesawing conflict that Benjamin Franklin—scientist and philosophe, the apotheosis of the Enlightenment—was called upon to arbitrate. So too in bustling, bourgeois Sydney, everyone knew of the fierce race conflicts that shot up like rings of fire around the major areas of settlement—first along the Hawkesbury, then along the Hunter, and by the 1830s in the Namoi River valley. But there is no clear geography of these murderous conflicts. Like the massacres at Bolivia Station in the far north of New South Wales and at Fighting Hills in western Victoria, they erupted everywhere along the shifting points of contact between the races, until the natives, in Australia as in America, were destroyed or driven into remote corners of the Outback. Hobart was a civilized town, but guerrilla warfare was the basic fact of life in Tasmania until the entire native population was wiped out in a systematic program of extermination. There was no insulation from this brutality, any more than there was from the knowledge of convict rebellions, which led to bloody reprisals—just as did the many attempted slave revolts that terrified the white populations of mainland North America and the Caribbean islands. This mixture of growing gentility and persistent brutality, of civility and violence, was common to all of the borderland worlds. But there were subtler similarities too—similarities in the awareness of cultural marginality, of inferiority to the core culture “at home,” and acceptance of the homelander’s view of the peripheries as, if not primitive, then deeply provincial, hence derivative and inferior. In all of this the parallels between early British Australia and early British America are particularly striking. But however similar these two sets of settlement colonies may have been, there are major differences too in their historical foundations and development. First, from the beginning early Australia developed within the control of a central authority. America did not. Alan Frost, in his biography of Arthur Phillip, puts the point forcefully. Phillip’s commission and his instructions, Frost writes, gave him

• From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)

  Even Stephen Behrendt, in his intricate explanation of the details of the complex marketing system in the Atlantic slave trade—a wonderful example of the functional integration of elements of the Atlantic world—finds that his firm numbers, which provide a lucid explanation of “transaction cycles on three continents,” lead him into the less precise area of African agriculture, African trading patterns, and African entrepreneurship. And Trevor Burnard and Kenneth Morgan’s paper on the marketing of slaves in Jamaica too, though based on rigorous statistical analysis, involves “heterogeneity of ethnic origins,” the peculiar value placed on “men-boys and girls, none exceeding 16 or 18 years old,” and a discussion of planters’ preferences for people from specific African regions, based on assumptions of cultural characteristics.7 But if the sheer force of numbers and the importance of African agency in all aspects of the slave trade strike one forcibly, so too does a more subtle element, identified in Ralph Austen’s essay. Obviously, the slave trade was a business, and a very profitable business, based on the commodification of human beings. One knows this to begin with, and one assumes at the start that we are dealing with a brutal, inhuman, devastating, tragic traffic that violates every shred of human sensibility. Even so, prepared as one is, as one reads these papers one recoils at the clinical, numerically accurate analysis of the trade—at the London merchant’s reference to the salability of “small slaves and even Mangie Ones,” at the reference to the “added value” of slaves by “seasoning” (sympathizing with the authors’ sense of “the grotesqueness of the notion”), at the merchants’ and planters’ routine calculations of anticipated death rates, at the tricky supply problem of timber for “platforms” and iron for shackles, and at the normality of deaths in passage as a consequence of insurrection. Informed as never before about the details of the slave trade, we can approach the subject objectively, impersonally, but only up to a point, beyond which we find ourselves emotionally involved. The whole story is still within living memory, and not only for people of African descent. We are all in some degree morally involved and must consider the relationship of history and memory.8 That problematic relationship has until recently been discussed mainly in connection with another global catastrophe, the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were deliberately killed. It was the tormenting recollection of that disaster, still part of living memory, that led to the founding of a journal, History and Memory, edited in Israel, in which the subject is constantly analyzed. But the problem’s fullest theoretical exploration has appeared in France, in Pierre Nora’s seven-volume Lieux de mémoire—sites of memory—of which a three-volume selection has appeared in English translation. Like so much of French methodological rumination, Nora’s lengthy theoretical introductions and prefatory essays come across as rhetorical exuberance. But he has made the issue clear, and that issue lies at the latent foundation of the discussions of the slave trade.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”… [3 Remarriage .] When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus. The third act is the child’s escape , and here the popular traditions wisely refrain from tampering with the Exodus account, which is already perfect. Moses escapes from Pharaoh’s massacre and eventually leads his people from Egypt to their Promised Land. But here Matthew introduces a terrible irony: Jesus escapes from Herod, but now it is to rather than from pagan Egypt that he must flee. This underlines another Matthean theme not present in the Mosaic parallel: it is pagan wisdom from abroad, not civil power at home, that accepts and worships the newborn Jesus. It is not the bare biblical account but the expanded popular versions of Moses’ birth that served Matthew as the model for the birth of Jesus. Just as Pharaoh heard of the predestined child’s arrival and sought to kill him by killing all the infant males, so did Herod the Great with Jesus. And just as Moses’ father refused to accept the general decision of divorce and received a heavenly message through Miriam announcing his child’s destiny, so Joseph considered but rejected divorce from Mary upon receiving an angelic message announcing his child’s destiny. Moses would “save my people” from Egypt, but Jesus would “save his people from their sins.” There are, of course, ironic reversals as well as parallel details in Matthew’s account. Pagan wise men read the stars and come from afar to accept Jesus, while Herod reads the Jewish Scriptures and seeks to kill him. And, above all, Jesus flees for refuge to Egypt, the very land from which Moses finally escaped. But once again Matthew, like Luke, sends a strong and powerful message by his very structure. Jesus is the new and greater Moses. Searching the Scriptures On the surface, then, Luke and Matthew created completely different infancy stories about Jesus, the former composing, with emphasis on the mothers, a detailed comparison between Jesus and John as the consummation of the Old Testament, the latter composing, with emphasis on the fathers, a detailed comparison between Jesus and Moses as the pinnacle of the Old Testament. But on a more profound level they adopted exactly the same strategy. The past was used to ground the present and found the future, but in the process Jesus became incomparably greater than any predecessor on which he was being modeled. That similarity in general procedure was not coincidental but represented divergent examples of an even earlier Christian tradition, that of searching the scriptures as foundational, and not just apologetical or polemical, texts to understand Jesus, his movement, his destiny, and the lives and hopes of his first followers.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Josephus mentions defecatory purity explicitly: A candidate anxious to join their sect …[is presented] with a small hatchet …[On the sabbath they do not even] go to stool. On other days they dig a trench a foot deep with a mattock—such is the nature of the hatchet which they present to the neophytes—and wrapping their mantle about them, that they may not offend the rays of the deity, sit above it. They then replace the excavated soil in the trench. For this purpose they select the more retired spots. And though the discharge of the excrements is a natural function, they make it a rule to wash themselves after it, as if defiled. (Jewish War 2.137, 148–149) There is nothing explicit about such defecatory purity in either the Rule of the Community or the Damascus Document , but it does appear in two other very important Qumran documents. The first one is the War Scroll— in Hebrew Milhamah— discovered in Cave i at Qumran, hence its coding as 1QM (DSSP 2.80–203). There are also six related fragments and one similar fragment from Cave 4 (4Q491–497). This is a pre-Qumran text imagining the great apocalyptic battle between the Sons of Darkness under Belial and the Sons of Light under God. Here the term community designates Israel as a whole and not just the Essenes as a sect (DSST 100): And no young boy or any woman at all shall enter the camps when they leave Jerusalem to go to war, until they return. And no lame, blind, paralyzed person nor any man who has an indelible blemish on his flesh, nor any man suffering from undeanness in his flesh, none of these will go out to war with them…. And there will be a space between all their camps and the ‘place of the hand’ of about two thousand cubits. (War Scroll 7:3–7) What is at stake in those decrees, of course, is not battle discipline or military hygiene but ritual purity. They are to go into battle like priests into the Temple. Latrines, therefore, must be about one thousand yards from their encampments. The second document is the Temple Scroll from Cave n. The main copy, coded as 11QTa or 11Q19, is the longest of all the scrolls, but there is also a fragmentary copy, coded as 11QTb or 11Q20. It gives, with God speaking in the first person, a definitive Law for Jerusalem, its Temple, and its king, according to presumably Essene ideals (DSST 138): They shall make my temple holy and respect it, for I dwell among them. You shall make latrines for them outside the city, where they are obliged to go, outside, to the North-east of the city: houses with beams and wells within them into which the excrement shall drop; they shall not be visible from a total distance from the city of three thousand cubits. (Temple Scroll 46:11–13) It is, once again, a question not of urban hygiene but of Temple-city purity.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Systemic evil does not excuse the personal evil of Lord Palmerston of Sligo, who paid passage for all his two thousand peasants, dumping them (many naked, starving, and diseased) on the docks of New Brunswick, and thereby got his lands back for grazing and his welfare assessments vastly reduced. I imagine, from all of that, three widening circles of evil. The first circle is personal and individual. An example is a master brutalizing a slave, an owner beating, raping, or killing a slave. The second circle is structural and systemic. An example is a whole society built on slave labor and considering the entire process ideologically appropriate or even natural. The existence of that second circle does not justify anything in the first one. Systemic evil does not excuse personal evil. But neither does personal goodness obliterate systemic evil. No amount of private almsgiving can excuse the public injustice that necessitates it. The third circle is ecological or cosmic. It is what Lenski described in explaining the Expendable Class. Without exploitation and oppression by the Roman Empire, there would have been ecological disaster in the Mediterranean basin. Does that justify the oppression? This book will argue that Jesus is concerned primarily with systemic rather than individual evil, but that third specter of ecological disaster will always be there in the background. AGRARIAN COMMERCIALIZATION John Kautsky distinguishes two different subtypes within Lenski’s agrarian empires: “Lenski’s … agrarian societies include societies where merchants have become so powerful that they are no longer purely traditional but commercialized or more or less modern, like the late Roman empire…. I distinguish traditional aristocratic empires from more or less ‘modern’ commercialized , colonial, and industrial societies” (20, 21, my italics). For Kautsky, “ancient Athens and Rome … are commercialized” agrarian empires (25 note 31). I accept Kautsky’s distinction of traditional or commercialized as a friendly amendment to the Lenski model of agrarian societies or empires. Put bluntly: in a traditional agrarian empire, the aristocracy takes the surplus from the peasantry; in a commercializing agrarian empire, the aristocracy takes the land from the peasantry. The former devours the industry and productivity of the peasantry, the latter their very identity and dignity. Commercialization moves them in increasing numbers down the terrible slope from small freeholder to tenant farmer to day-laborer to beggar or bandit. In discussing traditional agrarian empires, Kautsky repeats over and over again, like a definitional drumroll, that aristocrats “live off” peasants (4, 6,18, 24). This is, of course, the proper relational or interactional understanding of the term peasant , which is not simply a romantic or nostalgic word for “farmer,” let alone a polite term for “rustic,” “yokel,” or “country bumpkin.” A peasant is, quite simply, an exploited farmer. Kautsky is not persuaded by claims of mutuality. It is “a very one-sided relationship: the aristocrat takes and the peasant gives…. [Generally there is no reciprocity in the relationship between peasant and aristocrat” (110, 113).

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Another disturbing aspect of his time in Rome was the astonishing incompetence and cynicism of many of the priests there. Luther had never seen anything that began to approach it. It was one thing to have questions about God and the religious life, but what to make of these priests who seemed to go through the motions with a contemptuous indifference, or in some cases even a mocking blasphemy? It was positively diabolical. On the first score, Luther noted that Mass was said with such breathless speed that even he, who was exceedingly familiar with every word, found it utterly unintelligible. It was mystifying, as though the priests had secretly been replaced with fast-talking auctioneers. For Luther, who had revered the Mass to the point of awe and even terror, this cavalier attitude toward this holiest of privileges must have been a horror to behold. If ever one needed a picture of “dead religion” and “dead works,” here it was in all of its most legalistic ghastliness. Luther saw that these priests hadn’t the slightest reverence for the holy act in which they were participating but wished only to tick off the appropriate box and gallop off to something less demanding. The shortest time officially allowed in which a priest could hurry through the Mass was twelve minutes, but Luther recalled that at the basilica of St. Sebastian seven masses were said in an hour—in other words, in something less than nine minutes each. And when Luther himself said Mass, the next priest—fidgety with impatience—almost literally breathed down his neck. “Quick, quick!” he said to Luther, sarcastically adding, “And send our Lady back her Son!”—obviously a joke about the transubstantiated host. At St. Sebastian, Luther also recalled the freakish oddity of two masses being said simultaneously at the same altar, the priests merely separated by a painting. Luther also heard scandalous stories from other monks that boggled his innocent and pious mind. He recalled at one meal a group of monks screaming with laughter about how when they were saying Mass, they sometimes blasphemously said, “Panis es et panis manebis, vinum es et vinum manebis”—“bread thou art and bread shalt thou remain, wine thou art and wine shalt thou remain.” For someone to whom the Mass was ineffable and numinous—indeed it was something for which he would give his very life, as others had and many would in centuries hence—Luther hardly knew how to react. The monks making these jokes obviously never considered that there was someone at the table who didn’t share their jaundiced views. Everywhere Luther looked, he was horrified. Later he referred to “the chaos, the filth, and the practice of locals who urinated in public and openly patronized prostitutes.”

• From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)

  During the initial stages of the fur trade, when the traders—hundreds of miles out into the far northwest interior—were dependent upon the Indians for survival, formal and stable alliances with Indian women became a central part of the fur traders’ world, and a mixed-blood population resulted. The close-knit Anglo-Indian families made the traders’ lives bearable; but it was a transitory phase. Mixed-blood girls, the products of these marriages, were led away from their Indian heritage (as their brothers were not), encouraged to imitate the ways of European women, and merge with the European population. And when European women appeared in the Canadian West, first in the Earl of Selkirk’s Red River settlement of 1812, the mixed-race women found themselves disoriented: marginalized and the victims of overpowering racist sentiment.2 But all of this is unique. Intimate relations between the English and the native Irish—people the English considered as barbarous and primitive as the American aborigines—were few before the nineteenth century (in the fourteenth century such unions had been altogether banned), perhaps no more numerous than Anglo-Algonquin or Anglo-Iroquoian relations. When, as with Sir William Johnson at his biracial establishment along the Mohawk River in the 1760s, stable relations between respectable British men and native women occurred openly and officially, it was considered a remarkable development. Lord Adam Gordon, visiting Johnson’s baronial court, cleared, he reported, “in an absolute forest,” was astonished and repelled by what he saw. “No consideration,” he wrote, “should tempt me to lead [Sir William’s] life.… I know no other man equal to so disagreeable a duty.”3 But if the natives and their progeny were not able to supply the necessary labor, other sources would be found—first, indentured servants from the homeland, bound to four or five years of service. Between one-half and two-thirds of all those brought to the Western Hemisphere by the British in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were brought over in some such condition of bonded servitude. When the expanding plantation economy demanded more labor than could be supplied by white servants, Africans were imported as slaves: that is, as chattel slaves. Chattel slavery, the most debased form of bondage, was not something inherited from the past or borrowed from the Mediterranean or South America. Slavery elsewhere and at other times had mollifying elements, elements that softened the rigor of absolute debasement. Chattel slavery had none. In its most extreme form it evolved in British America, took form in British-American law in response to the need for a totally reliable, totally exploitable, and infinitely recruitable labor force. Wherever the possibility of profits existed—and it existed almost everywhere in these raw borderlands—merchant adventurers appeared to exploit it. And almost everywhere their efforts involved not mergers with native peoples but the recruitment of people from elsewhere—settlers to make rentable or salable farms out of wild land, laborers to dig the mines, man the iron works, build the houses, bridges, roads, and ships, and slaves to work in the plantations.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  At the end of his two chapters on agrarian societies Lenski appended a two-page “note on distributive justice.” I quote at length from those pages because they indicate different forms of evil that, however intertwined and interactive, must be kept distinct: “On the whole, agrarian societies give the impression of gross injustice in the distributive realm. As we have seen, a small number of individuals enjoyed immense luxury, consuming in a single day goods and services sufficient to support large numbers of the common people for a year. At the same time a considerable portion of the population was denied the basic necessities of life and was marked out by the social system for a speedy demise. It does not take much imagination to conceive of a more equitable method of distribution. However, when the demographic factor is introduced into the analysis, we suddenly discover that the problem was never so simple as it sometimes seems to those of us who live in the comfort of a modern industrial society. Despite the ravages of war, famine, plague, and other disasters, and despite the influences of infanticide, abortion, monasticism, and prostitution, those segments of the population which were at, or above, the subsistence level continued to produce more offspring than could be employed except by a steady reduction in privilege. Thus, barring an effective method of controlling fertility, which no agrarian society ever discovered, there seems to have been no alternative to the existence of a class of expendables, as harsh as such a statement may sound to modern ears. The most that could have been achieved, had the elite permitted it, was the temporary elimination of this class for the short time it would take population growth to eliminate the economic surplus” (295). In case that is all too abstract, I give an example from Charles Morris’s recent summary description of Ireland’s Great Famine in his book American Catholic . “For a brief time early in the nineteenth century, life may have approached the idyllic even for Irish-speaking peasants…. Irish prosperity touched off a frightening rural population explosion. Between 1779 and 1841, largely because of the improved, potato-based countryside diet, Ireland’s population increased by an almost incredible 172 percent, and Irish peasant life came to be dominated by a desperate scrabble for plots of land to grow potatoes…. Careful estimates are that 2.5 to 3 million Irish were in a state of semistarvation most years before the Great Famine” (31, 32). Then came the potato blight of the late 1840s, the “coffin-ships” to Canada with a general record of one-third dead in passage and another third dead after arrival, and continued immigration in the next decades. On the eve of the Great Famine there were 9 million people in Ireland. By the end of the century Ireland’s “population stabilized at 4 million, or about the same as in 1750” (36). Ecological evil does not excuse the systemic evil of colonial misrule that made disaster inevitable and restoration impossible.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  The sanctity foundation is about contaminant avoidance, and it’s powered by disgust. Humans have generalized from avoidance of physical contaminants (we’re innately grossed out by rotting corpses) to avoidance of conceptual contaminants (we can feel grossed out just by the words “rotting corpses”). You can visualize sanctity as a vertical axis, with stigmatized and taboo behaviors described as “low” and “dirty,” and socially sanctioned behaviors as “high” and “pure.” We judge as wrong anything associated with lowness. In the Judeo-Christian ethic, bodies are low and spirit is high, animal instincts are low and human reason is high, and very often women are low and men are high. Sex draws attention downward to the base, the animal, the contemptible, and it therefore triggers the disgust response. This isn’t true in all cultures or belief systems—quite the opposite.17 And even notoriously “sex-negative” religious traditions may view sex as sacred under certain, “sanctioned” conditions. A religious fundamentalist friend in grad school surprised me after she was married with her eagerness to learn about pleasure and exploration, so that she could share it with her husband. She had to learn to think differently about her body in this new context, but once she had made the shift, her entire experience was revolutionized. In the right context, sex and bodies are not “low” or “degrading,” they can be sanctified and glorious. But many of us were raised in cultures that say our own sexual bodies are disgusting and degrading, and so are the fluids, sounds, and smells those bodies make, as are a wide array of the things we might do with our own bodies and our partner’s. “Avoid sex! Sex is gross, as well as dangerous!” If a sexual behavior or a part of your body is considered “low,” do you suppose that activates the accelerator? Nope. Disgust hits the brakes. Disgust is physiologically distinct from the stress response, but it’s more akin to parasympathetic “freeze” than sympathetic “fight or flight.” Disgust hits the brakes in the emotional One Ring—it slows your heart rate, stops your gut, and closes your throat. It doesn’t matter whether it’s activated by the stink of skunk or the stink of hypocrisy, the sight of blood or the sight of cruelty, the physiology is basically the same.18 As Merritt thought more about her brakes and her lack of trust in her own body, she came to this conclusion: “I want to learn to trust my body.” This became clear as she and Carol sat together, talking about what and how to teach their teenage daughter about sex. They made a list of all the things they wanted her to believe and experience, including Recognize her own beauty of body and spirit Feel fully in control of who touches her body, and how, and when Know how to protect herself against consequences like infections and pregnancy

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Karlstadt’s views on images were far more radical than Luther’s and partook of a kind of Gnostic dualism in which everything that tempted the senses was suspect and outlawed. “Our eyes make love to [images] and court them,” he wrote. “The truth is that all who honor images, seek their help, and worship them, are whores and adulterers.”11 We know that Luther would diverge from Karlstadt’s severely iconoclastic view on art in churches, but Karlstadt went further yet, asserting that church music too was beyond the pale. “Relegate organs, trumpets, and flutes to the theater,” he wrote. “The lascivious notes of the organ awaken thoughts of the world.” King David might have had something to say about these prohibitions on worship music, but Karlstadt was rarely in a temperate mood. “If there is to be singing,” he declaimed stingily, “let it be no more than a solo.”12 Luther not only would have disagreed but would soon enough bring about a glorious revival of music and congregational singing in the life of the church, one that would peal and resound around the globe for centuries. But the winds in Wittenberg were then synonymous with the legalistic howlings of Karlstadt, and who could stand against it? But the doughty Duke George would suddenly volunteer. On hearing of all these barbaric outrages, the superlatively irritated duke—then attending the diet at Nuremberg—bloomed into a fulminating bouquet of rage. He was not about to let this madness continue. He demanded immediate action. So he persuaded the diet to send the following excoriation to his delinquent cousin Frederick and to the bishop of Meissen too: We have heard that priests celebrate mass in lay habit, omitting essential portions. They consecrate the holy sacraments in German. The recipients are not required to have made prior confession. They take the elements into their own hands and in both kinds. The blood of our Lord is not served in a chalice but in a mug. The sacrament is given to children. Priests are dragged from the altars by force. Priests and monks marry, and the common people are incited to frivolity and offense.13

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Later in the chapter I’ll describe three evidence-based strategies for shifting from self-critical ways to live in your body, to compassionate and healthful ways to live in it. But in the end, it will come down to a decision to stop cultivating the weeds of self-criticism and instead nourish the flowers of confidence today—and then remaking that decision each day. “dirty”For as long as I had an office, I kept a basket of single-use bubble packs of lubricant. They were all different colors, so it looks a little like a basket of candies or lip glosses. Coming to my office for the first time, a student would poke their finger into the basket, drawn by the colors, and ask, “What’s this?” “Different kinds of lube,” I say. “Feel free to take as many as you like.” About half the students say, “Cool!” and rummage around for a few they like. And the other half yank their hand away like I just told them it was bubble packs of boogers. That’s sexual disgust. It’s a learned withdrawal response from things that are “gross.” Everyone has something that grosses her out sexually, and everyone’s “yucks” are different. And nobody ever needs to use packaged lube (though I recommend it; you’ll see why in chapter 6)—we got along without it for a few hundred millennia—so it may not matter much if lube is on your list of yucks. But what happens when that same sexual disgust is activated by one’s own body? “My partner wants to…” I have a lot of conversations that begin this way, trailing off into embarrassed silence. In one particular case, the student continued, “… He wants to give me oral sex,” and then she turned bright red. “Okay,” I said. And I waited. So she said, “Well… I mean…” and she trailed off again, not making eye contact. “Would you like him to give you oral sex?” I prompted. “I…” she said, wincing. “I mean…” she went on. “Isn’t it…” she finally asked, “dirty? Down there? The hair? The… mucus…?” I wish it were effective to respond to this question with, “Of course not, it’s beautiful down there! Congratulations on having a partner who appreciates that fact!” Sometimes that is effective. But often there’s a huge resistant knot of beliefs that has to be untangled before the person can get there. Fortunately, research has provided me with a science knife designed to slice through that particular knot: Moral Foundations Theory. Jonathan Haidt and his team have found that there are six “moral foundations” in the human brain, each of which is a solution to a particular evolutionary problem our species has faced.16 Of the six, it’s the “sanctity/degradation” moral foundation I find most relevant to sex.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The archbishop had his agents in the town who successfully fomented unrest among the citizenry, alienated by the high taxes and the city’s financial woes. Ruled over by a tiny oligarchy of patricians, neither the economically important woad merchants nor the guilds folk wielded real political power. When the populace realized the extent of the financial misery of the town, the mayor tried to ride the storm, insisting that “we are all one community,” pointing at himself. This was a major blunder—it looked as if the “common good” meant his self-interest—and he soon met his end, strung up on the gallows outside the city. 10 Refused an honorable burial, he was left to swing in the wind in his fox fur coat—a final humiliation, for fox was the cheapest fur. In the following years, the agents of Saxony and of Mainz continued to fight for dominance, each manipulating the urban factions. For their part, the Saxons tried to get the town put under imperial ban. 11 The archbishop of Mainz, on the other hand, supported a new constitution that excluded the patricians, and in 1514 a much more radical council was able to secure the fall of a group of leading politicians. 12 The clergy and monastic institutions in the town were sucked into the turmoil, partly because they were major creditors and stood to lose financially if the town defaulted. During this unrelenting sequence of bloody infighting, most of the monasteries joined the town’s elite in supporting the Saxon interest, as these years revealed the archbishop of Mainz at his most vicious. All this would have done little to enthuse Luther about the civic unity and urban freedoms on which Germany’s imperial cities prided themselves. 13 8. Erfurt in Hartmann Schedel’s Weltchronik of 1493. The cathedral is the large building on the far left, with the steps leading up to it also visible; opposite is the Church of St. Severus. Ultimately, Mainz lost in the Erfurt power struggle: By 1516, the old elite was back in power, with Saxon support. Even though Luther probably had little detailed knowledge of politics and, as far as we can tell, had no relationships with citizens outside the monastery walls, he cannot have been ignorant of what was taking place, or of the role of Mainz in fomenting disturbance. 14 In 1514, Albrecht, a Hohenzollern opposed to the Wettin Saxons, succeeded as archbishop, and it may be that the memory of the see’s behavior was one reason why Luther addressed the Ninety-five Theses directly to him. Certainly, in the affair that ensued, some contemporaries traced Friedrich the Wise’s support for Luther back to the quarrel over Erfurt. 15 — E ARLY biographies of Luther described his life as a monk as a period of drudgery.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Predictably, the experience of disgust is context sensitive—we’re less grossed out by sex-related things while we are sexually aroused.20 And women tend to be more sensitive than men to learned disgust, particularly in the sexual domain,21 though it’s not yet clear why.22 We can see how the process of learning disgust can unfold, moment by moment, in a person’s life if we imagine, for argument’s sake, a pair of identical twin girls separated at birth. Let’s call them Jessica and Theresa. Imagine that both Jessica and Theresa, when they’re maybe five or six years old, have a habit of masturbating in their rooms at naptime. (If you noticed a disgust-withdrawal response in yourself at the idea of a young girl masturbating, you’ve just experienced what I’m about to describe!) So one day, Jessica is masturbating in her room at naptime, when her adult caregiver walks in and sees her with her hand down her pants. The parent recoils in an involuntary disgust response, and says, “Stop that!” On that same day, in a different home, Theresa is also masturbating, and her adult caregiver also walks in and sees her with her hand down her pants. But that parent says calmly, “We’re leaving for your aunt’s house in a few minutes. Get your shoes on.” Jessica’s brain learns to associate the shame and distress (brakes) communicated by her parent with whatever sexual arousal (accelerator) she was feeling at the moment her parent scolded her. Theresa’s brain, by contrast, learns no such association. This one incident may not have any lasting impact. If there are no other incidents to reinforce this one, the association in Jessica’s brain will be decoupled. But imagine twenty years have passed, and Jessica and Theresa’s life experiences have routinely reinforced these patterns. Jessica’s brain has learned to associate sexual arousal with stress, shame, disgust, and guilt. Theresa’s has learned to associate sexual arousal with pleasure, confidence, joy, and satisfaction. Which of them has a better sex life? Jessica will feel conflicted about her sexual sensations—they’re pleasurable… and they’re not, at the same time. And she won’t have a clear idea why she feels guilty, ashamed, depressed, or even physical pain when she’s sexually aroused. If a girl has a particularly sensitive brakes system, one incident might be enough to create a tangled knot in her arousal process. For many women, though, it takes consistent reinforcement of a negative message in order for it to be embedded in sexual response, and consistent re inforcement takes a sex-negative culture. In other words, it happens all the time.