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 Come As You Are (2015)

  Often disgust is reinforced in subtle ways, but sometimes we can remember a specific moment when the message is made clear. I talked to a grandmother—a badass Southern grandma sex educator, to be specific—who told me about just such a moment from when she was a teenager. She had been sitting on the front porch making out with her boyfriend, but when she went inside, her mother came up to her with disgust in every line of her face and said, “What you were just doing out there? That’s sex!” And this sixty-something grandmother told me, “It took me a long, long time to realize why I got so anxious about sex with my husband—and I mean nauseated anxious—and when I finally figured it out, I was angry for about ten seconds, and then I was just so sad for my mother.” She went on, “Now when I do health education at my church, I just say it right out loud: ‘I like sex!’ I want everyone to know that it’s okay!” I love this woman. For sex educators, the rule is, “Don’t yuck anybody’s yum.” And since we can’t know what everybody else’s yums are, we don’t yuck anything. We know that disgust is a social emotion and that our students have already been exposed to too many people who communicate disgust around sex. That’s why sex educators and sex therapists go through an educational process of intensive exposure, deliberately designed to minimize our own judgment, shame, and disgust reactions, so that we can respond with open neutrality to whatever students or clients bring into the room. This training often takes the form of a Sexual Attitude Reassessment, a multiday training that includes values clarification exercises, guest panels and speakers, plus (in my experience) a range of porn that would surprise most people in its variety, intensity, and creativity, followed by reflection and processing of our reactions to all of it. Unless you become a sex educator, you never need to go through a process like this. All you ever need to do is begin to recognize where your learned disgust response is interfering with your own sexual pleasure, and decide whether it’s something you’d rather let go of. Your genitals and your partners’, your genital fluids and your partners’, your skin and sweat and the fragrances of your body, these are all healthy and beautiful—not to mention normal—elements of human sexual experience. You get to choose whether you feel grossed out by them. The research tells us that disgust, as a learned response to sex, impairs women’s sexual functioning and is especially associated with sexual pain disorders.23

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But the emperor’s sister Kunigunde, Duchess of Bavaria, was not so gullible. Herself a woman of considerable Christian piety, she smelled something amiss in all the holy rigmarole and thought she should investigate further. So the duchess somehow contrived to invite the unsuspecting sibyl to visit with her at a Munich cloister, where she would be deliberately situated in a certain guest room. For it was into this carefully selected chamber, via a peephole, that Duchess Kunigunde could observe all of Anna’s doings, hoping to perhaps unmask the real truth behind all the pious foofaraw. So Anna accepted the invitation and soon clambered into the duchess’s trap, for once alone in her guest room this “hunger martyr” was observed to unpack—and then tuck into—a fabulous stash of dainties and delicacies, including juicy pears and pepper cakes. And as far as her inevitable stools were concerned, once they had found egress, she was to be observed coolly flinging them from the window. When the duchess had the hard facts, she and some others confronted Anna with the foul evidence and, to ensure the ascetic chicanery would end once and for all, forced her to eat and drink in front of the assemblage. They charged her with reforming her ways, to which she solemnly agreed, and then let her return to Augsburg. But once there, she resumed the well-worn “hunger martyr” act just as sincerely as before. By this time, it had been widely rumored that she had had sexual relations with several men of the city, most notably the vicar of a local church, as well as the tremendously wealthy and powerful merchant Anton Welser. There can be no doubt of the latter, because she bore him a son, for whose support Welser would pay the handsome sum of thirty gulden each year. The child soon died, but in order to continue receiving the annual payments, Anna kept the news from Welser for many years. When the duchess discovered that Anna had returned to Augsburg only to continue the holy charade, she had had enough. She informed her brother, the emperor, who now decreed that Anna be expelled from Augsburg. But because she agreed to leave her considerable assets with the city, she was allowed to depart with dignity, and did so, in a luxurious carriage provided by Welser.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  One major reason for not knowing what he had awakened in his “teaching moment” with the Ninety-five Theses was that he had no idea how personally invested Archbishop Albrecht was in the success of Tetzel’s indulgence campaign. As it happened, the archbishop had a dirty dog in this fight about which almost no one knew besides him and the pope. But it is this particularly sordid detail that frames the controversy perfectly, that underscores just how far the greasy bandwagon had traveled by the time of Luther’s theses. The truly extraordinary detail of which Luther was unaware was that the Archbishop Albrecht was not merely overseeing the papal indulgence in his territory to raise money for the building of St. Peter’s in Rome. There was a second extremely personal and deeply secret reason for allowing indulgences to be preached and sold in his territory. The story begins in 1513, when Albrecht first became the archbishop of Magdeburg at the tender age of twenty-three. Then just one year later, he also became the elector of Mainz, a plum political position. But now came the rub: Albrecht’s territorial and ecclesiastical ambitions were still not sated. The ambitious Albrecht also wished to become the archbishop of Mainz. But alas, by the time this ambition had bloomed, the Vatican had put in place a new rule that said holding several archbishoprics simultaneously was strictly verboten. This practice had been terribly abused over the years, so some cadre of scrupulous Vatican officials had stepped in and passed this new prohibition, just in time to frustrate Albrecht. It was a prohibition that could not be relaxed; after all, what was the point of a prohibition or a rule if it could easily be relaxed? No, this was not something that could be undone—unless of course one was willing to pay a genuinely exorbitant sum of money. It was understood that the Vatican was always in dire need of money, because Leo’s habits as a spendthrift made all others look like sober landlubbers. So if someone was able to get his hands on an especially impressive amount of money—which he was somehow inclined to give as a gift to the Vatican treasury—that could always cover a multitude of sins.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But there were all along the way signs that did not bode well for Karlstadt’s future. The townspeople were sometimes driven to violence by their enthusiasm, with one group of rowdy goons venting their passions by storming a local pastor’s house. And then, on January 6, the Reformed congregation of Augustinians had convened right there in Wittenberg, at the Augustinian cloister. The affair was presided over by Luther’s friend Wenceslas Linck, who had come from Nuremberg. Johannes Lang was there too, from Erfurt. But the Augustinians had come to a strange pass. The Wittenberg cloister alone had already lost a third of its monks and at this convention, the leaders decided to adopt some drastic reforms, which would have widespread ripples throughout monasteries everywhere. They now officially allowed any monks who wished to leave to do so, making their lifelong vows officially voluntary and therefore essentially meaningless. Actually, Luther had hoped they would do this. But without him in Wittenberg, some of the usual suspects got carried away. For example, a few days after this convention, Zwilling decided it was time for some public theater. So he instigated and oversaw the destruction of some of the cloister’s previously sacred objects. Figures of the saints had their arms and heads chopped off. Images of them were burned. Karlstadt had in his sermons agitated against images in church, saying that the commandment “Thou shalt not make for thyself any graven images”10 must be obeyed, so all images were now considered nothing but worldly temptations to sin. He even said crucifixes should no longer be displayed. Luther might have agreed with some of what Karlstadt said, but he would never have taken things so far so fast and would certainly not have allowed the destruction of these statues, images, and other things. A number of the wooden altars were smashed and destroyed too, as were banners. The unbridled perpetrators even burned the consecrated oil that was used in administering last rites.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  During this time, Luther also put forward the idea that to truly be a part of the church of Jesus Christ was inevitably to enter into a spiritual battle. He was keenly aware that before Emperor Constantine made the Roman Empire officially Christian in the fourth century, the Roman state had murdered men and women for their faith; but he believed that suffering and battling nonetheless continued throughout the ages, until the day of Christ’s return. And he believed that now this battle must be fought within the church against those who would pervert God’s doctrines and the deeper meaning of God’s Word. Such enemies had formerly been outside the church, but now they were inside it and had gained leading positions in it. Luther later referred to them as “impious prelates.”5 So to battle against them, one would suffer too, and to suffer for this was a noble honor. Anyone wishing to follow Christ must not shrink from suffering for his sake, however that suffering should manifest itself. So the idea that one could advance as a Christian merely by amassing a head full of intellectual knowledge was not only wrong but evil and perverse; it was the very reason for which Christ had railed against the Pharisees, who clearly knew the Torah backward and forward but whose lives were often at odds with what it taught. The Christian faith was an affair of the heart and of the whole person. To relegate it to the attic of mere learning was to miss the point. Luther understood this and stressed it in teaching his students. Already in 1513, Luther was convinced that the church of Christ was in an advanced state of decrepitude that had been prophesied in the Bible, one in which the Antichrist would reveal himself and do battle with the saints of God. Luther had picked up much of his thinking along these lines from Saint Augustine, but Bernard of Clairvaux had also been an influence. Bernard had been canonized only twenty years after his 1153 death and while alive held that there were three ages of the church. The first had been the epoch of martyrs, in which Christians were persecuted and killed for their faith; the second had been the era of heretics, in which Christians perverted church teaching; and the third and most terrible would be the third epoch, the Last Days, in which the church itself would be so corrupt that the Antichrist himself would arise from within it. Luther believed the church had entered this third and final stage. He had been sickened by the sales of indulgences and even spoke about it to his students. He was convinced that this abuse was a clear sign of having entered the end-time spoken of by Christ. “The way I see it,” he had said, “the Gospel of St. Matthew counts such perversions as the selling of indulgences among the signs of the Last Days.”6

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Finally, Erasmus did not like writing on doctrinal matters, and said so, but he had felt compelled to write on this one and privately hoped that although Adrian was dead and replaced by Leo’s nephew, his own time in the papal doghouse might be ended, that he had done his penance, as it were, and could be restored. Of course, once he had written this work, the Catholic rulers naturally and perhaps somewhat greedily expected him to continue in this openly anti-Luther vein. Duke George wanted him to keep his quill moving! He hadn’t had a moment’s patience for nuance in his life and thought Erasmus should immediately refute Luther’s execrable stand against monasticism; after all, when one had a big gun like Erasmus, it was a great pity not to blast it off once in a while, if only to remind the opposition that one had it! Luther was so busy when De libero arbitrio was published that he did not read any of it until November. Usually, Luther only read bits of works that attacked him, lest their untruths and confused arguments affect him too much. He would read enough to be able to write a rebuttal, and then because of the shortage of paper at that time, and as a way of incarnationally expressing his sentiments, he did what the Orlamünders had done with his own Against the Heavenly Prophets, using the remainder as a spongi culus. In this case, Luther did Erasmus the honor of reading the entire work, but it so disgusted him that he knew it would take a great effort to respond to it. As far as he was concerned, it was a putrid goulash he greatly preferred to leave untouched. Perhaps the servants would like his portion.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  to the economy of salvation both logistical brilliance and a real sense of theater. The campaigns were planned like the military operations they were ostensibly intended to fund. Towns that Peraudi proposed to visit on his preaching tour were contacted in advance, and detailed contracts agreed for the division of the sums raised (generally one third to the local church and two thirds to Peraudi and his team).8 Many others besides Luther had spoken against indulgences, but their booming popularity drowned out any niggling cries of dissent. In 1489, there was one distinguished theologian from Würzburg who had spoken out against indulgences rather forcefully. In his sermons at the cathedral church there, Dr. Dietrich Morung spoke against the preposterous notion that anyone, even the pope, could sell a reduction of one’s years in purgatory. It was madness. But the church—in the shape of Cardinal Peraudi—would not suffer this idealistic priest gladly. For his troubles, Morung was promptly excommunicated and then thrown into prison, where he languished for a decade. But after Peraudi’s death in 1505, others began to speak out. Even Staupitz spoke against indulgences in a sermon series that he preached at Nuremberg in 1516. And these sermons were published early in 1517 in both Latin and German. So we cannot help but think that Luther was encouraged by the example of his beloved superior and friend. Nor was the blowback in all of this limited to Germany. At the Sorbonne in Paris, theologians spoke out against indulgences. It was a widely recognized problem that needed fixing, but who was listening, and who would do anything about it? There was one more reason that many German leaders did not like the practice of indulgences. This was because they were paid for with coins, and the great popularity of indulgences with the faithful meant that vast amounts of German currency were being carried out of the country to Rome. Emperor Maximilian himself had confronted Peraudi on this score and at one point was able to keep significant moneys from being taken out of Germany. A contemporary of Luther’s named Myconius recounted the following hilarious incident regarding Tetzel: After Tetzel had received a substantial amount of money at Leipzig, a nobleman asked him if it were possible to receive a letter of indulgence for a future sin. Tetzel quickly answered in the affirmative, insisting, however, that the payment had to be made at once. This the nobleman did, receiving thereupon letter and seal from Tetzel. When Tetzel left Leipzig the nobleman attacked him along the way, gave him a thorough beating, and sent him back empty-handed to Leipzig with the comment that this was the future sin which he had in mind. Duke George at first was quite furious about this incident, but when he heard the whole story he let it go without punishing the nobleman.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  But when I said that, the lower-desire partner leaned away from the table with a cringe of disgust on her face. “Okay, wow,” I said gently. “So the problem isn’t that you don’t desire sex. The problem is you don’t like the sex. Tell me what you don’t you like about the sex.” And she talked about feeling ignored for years. Ignored! For years! Of course she didn’t like the sex! And if she didn’t like it, of course she didn’t desire it! In my all years of reading the research on sexual desire and talking with couples, therapists, scientists, and medical providers, I have seen no more powerful key to treating “problems” with desire than to understand that it is normal not to want sex you don’t like. As Peggy Kleinplatz and her team write, “[P]erhaps much of what is currently diagnosed as sexual desire disorders can be best understood as a healthy response to dismal and disappointing sex.”22 When couples with low desire see Kleinplatz, a sex therapist and researcher, she asks them, “What kind of sex is worth wanting?” Remember from chapter 4, “Sex That Advances the Plot”? It’s sex that moves you toward a larger goal, powered by more than just the sexual response cycle. That’s the kind of sex Kleinplatz’s clients describe as “worth wanting.” People don’t just want orgasm, they want more. And she helps them find their way to more. She leads a team of researchers who have spent years studying people who self-identify as having extraordinary sex lives. These people come from every background imaginable, every sexual orientation, and every gender identity; some are kinky, some are vanilla, some are monogamous, some are not. They are many different ages, with different health statuses and different bodies. What they share is an inspiring capacity to access a sense of connection and pleasure through sexuality. The results of the research are described in Magnificent Sex, coauthored by Peggy Kleinplatz and Dana Ménard. They report that people who have these “Optimal Sexual Experiences” describe it with these eight major components: Being present, focused, and embodied. This is the experience of slowing down, letting go of distractions and inhibitions, and paying attention to what’s happening right now, to the exclusion of everything else. Connection, alignment, merger, being in sync. Feeling aligned with your partner was described by many participants as essential to extraordinary sex. Deep sexual and erotic intimacy. Not just during sex, but in the whole relationship, these folks felt deep mutual respect, genuine acceptance and caring, and a deep and penetrating trust with their partners. Extraordinary communication, heightened empathy. Extraordinary lovers are also, necessarily, extraordinary communicators, which means they are extraordinarily empathic, tuned in to their partners’ inner worlds. Authenticity, being genuine, uninhibited, transparency. Extraordinary sex involves emotional nakedness and a shame-free expression of sexual pleasures and desires, which usually requires going through a process of rejecting the sexual scripts and “shoulds” we’re raised with.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In fact, the young Albrecht so desperately desired the Mainz archbishopric that he was willing to get his hands on the necessary funds, if that was possible. And in the end, despite strong misgivings, the pope suggested that Albrecht cough up the mighty sum of twenty-three thousand ducats in order to have the unpleasant rule waived. It was a staggering figure, and truth be told, Albrecht didn’t have anything close to it to hand. What, then, was to be done? There was one possible solution: he could simply borrow it from Jakob Fugger of the dizzyingly wealthy Fugger banking family. But how could Albrecht ever pay it back? Where there was a will, there was a way, and Pope Leo happened to come up with a way that was ingenious. What if Albrecht was willing to sponsor an indulgence crusade in his territory—ostensibly to help build the new St. Peter’s in Rome? But what if the pope would officially allow him to retain half of all he raised for himself and with that money pay back the greedy Fuggers? No one need know the details, and everyone might come out ahead. And so it happened. This dirty secret was about as dirty as the business of indulgences could get. It therefore seems fitting that this particular excess would be the last straw that broke the back of medieval Christendom. That the humble faithful would hurl their coins into an iron coffer believing they really would pay for their sins—and simultaneously build St. Peter’s—was bad enough. But that half of what they paid was actually going to pay an exorbitant debt so that a papal rule might be ignored—and the ambitious archbishop could collect a second impressive bishopric—took the cake. And ate it too. Luther knew nothing at all of these details. But he knew enough of what was happening that he wished to tell the archbishop of his concern and to provoke an academic debate on the subject among the church theologians at Wittenberg. That was the only point of posting the theses on the church doors. Our ideas about the import of the theses have been twisted in hindsight. Luther was only posting the theses he wished to debate with his fellow academics. And following his posting them, an academic debate on the subject was scheduled. But not a soul showed up for this debate. Why students did not show up, we don’t know. But because the theses were written in Latin, the non-Latin-speaking citizens of Wittenberg were at a disadvantage and did not show up either. Except for the actions of Archbishop Albrecht and Tetzel, the whole thing might have fizzled like an errant spark landing on damp ground.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  This kind of religiosity—or what modern writers have termed “holy anorexia”—was a powerful streak in late medieval devotion, encouraged by an extreme asceticism that regarded bodily appetites as inimical to religious perfection. Female saints in particular might fast to extremes and undergo mystical experiences. In a church that was deeply distrustful of women, asceticism offered them an avenue of expression and authority. Laminit reported visions of St. Anna, her name saint and the saint to whom we know Luther himself was attached. Not only did she go without food, but she was famed as passing neither water nor stools. She had drawn people since 1498, and her following included rich Augsburg patricians. 11. Anna Laminit by Hans Holbein, 1511. On the left, the sketch is labeled “lamanätly”; on the right, in another sixteenth-century hand, “dz nit ist,” meaning “who is not”—in other words, who is a fraud. Luther shrewdly asked her whether she wanted to die, a question to which it would have been difficult to give a correct answer. As he remembered it, she replied, “No! There I don’t know how things work; here I do.” She was unmasked soon after by the duchess of Bavaria, who discovered her secret stash of luxury food, such as pepper cakes and pears; it turned out that she emptied her stools out of the window. It was also rumored that she had a child by a leading patrician and merchant. Laminit was consequently drummed out of town. For the later Luther, Laminit was a fraud, a “whore” and schemer, but whether he saw through her or not at the time we cannot know. It may be that he, like others, was already beginning to have doubts about this extreme and exhibitionistic mortification of the flesh, a skepticism that would color his later theology and that was fostered by his relationship with his confessor, Johann von Staupitz. 46 — A T least fifteen years older than Luther, Staupitz was utterly different in background, well traveled, and at home among the nobility and at court. 47 A patrician who had grown up with Friedrich the Wise of Saxony, he was initially vicar general of the observant wing of the order, but would also become head of the conventuals in Saxony, those Augustinians who took a laxer line.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  12 This respect for established authority and for property rights, even over slaves, was consistent with the line he had taken in 1523, in On Secular Authority, and again Luther could not imagine resistance except in relation to the dilemmas of individuals, who were advised to suffer martyrdom passively; revolt was not envisaged. The writing also betrays considerable admiration for the excellence of Turkish government, and Luther incorporated details about Turkish customs from Gregory of Hungary’s treatise on the Ottomans, which he edited and published to complement his tract. 13 His description of Turkish character provided an opportunity to ponder that of Germans as well. Whereas “we Germans” eat and drink to excess, the Turks show moderation; where the Germans are given to luxuriousness of dress, the Turks practice modesty; they do not swear and do not build such extravagant buildings. In these respects their mores were better than those of the Germans. Luther admired how the Turkish patriarchs kept their women on a tight leash: “they keep their wives in such discipline and beautiful behavior, that there is no such mischief, excess, immodesty and other excessive ornamentation, splendor amongst their women, as there is amongst ours.” 14 However, they did not respect marriage, because they allowed divorce too readily; they practiced polygamy, and their marriages had all the chastity of a soldier’s relation with a prostitute. Worse, they “practice such Latin and sodomitical unchastity that it is not to be mentioned in front of respectable people,” although he also leveled this charge against the Pope and his court. All Luther’s old obsessions, with sex, sodomy, and extravagance, shaped his portrait of the Turks, but he was also genuinely interested in the customs and social structure of an alien world. When the Turkish threat became imminent again in 1541, he published his Admonition to Prayer Against the Turks, but even then he called for repentance rather than for aggressive prayer. 15 65. Lucas Cranach the Elder’s The Origins of the Monks shows a she-devil sitting atop a gallows defecating tonsured friars. Luther remained genuinely curious about the Turks, and when he came across a Latin translation of the Quran in 1542, he immediately set about reading it. He strongly believed that the Quran should be published, and when the Basle city council banned publication by the leading printer Oporinus, Luther, along with many of the Strasbourg preachers, objected. 16 It was important, Luther argued, that Christians should know what was written in the Quran. Otherwise, how could they refute it?

• From A History of God (1993)

  12 Yahweh was utterly revolted by the animal sacrifices in the Temple, sickened by the fat of calves, blood of bulls and goats and the reeking blood that smoked from the holocausts. He could not bear their festivals, New Year ceremonies and pilgrimages. 13 This would have shocked Isaiah’s audience: in the Middle East these cultic celebrations were of the essence of religion. The pagan gods depended upon the ceremonies to renew their depleted energies; their prestige depended in part upon the magnificence of their temples. Now Yahweh was actually saying that these things were utterly meaningless. Like other sages and philosophers in the Oikumene, Isaiah felt that exterior observance was not enough. Israelites must discover the inner meaning of their religion. Yahweh wanted compassion rather than sacrifice: You may multiply your prayers, I shall not listen. Your hands are covered with blood, wash, make yourselves clean. Take your wrong-doing out of my sight. Cease to do evil. Learn to do good, search for justice, help the oppressed, be just to the orphan, plead for the widow. 14 The prophets had discovered for themselves the overriding duty of compassion, which would become the hallmark of all the major religions formed in the Axial Age. The new ideologies that were developing in the Oikumene during this period all insisted that the test of authenticity was that religious experience be integrated successfully with daily life. It was no longer sufficient to confine observance to the Temple and to the extratemporal world of myth. After enlightenment, a man or woman must return to the marketplace and practice compassion for all living beings. The social ideal of the prophets had been implicit in the cult of Yahweh since Sinai: the story of the Exodus had stressed that God was on the side of the weak and oppressed. The difference was that now Israelites themselves were castigated as oppressors. At the time of Isaiah’s prophetic vision, two prophets were already preaching a similar message in the chaotic northern kingdom. The first was Amos, who was no aristocrat like Isaiah but a shepherd who had originally lived in Tekoa in the southern kingdom. In about 752, Amos had also been overwhelmed by a sudden imperative that had swept him to the kingdom of Israel in the north. He had burst into the ancient shrine of Beth-El and shattered the ceremonial there with a prophecy of doom. Amaziah, the priest of Beth-El, had tried to send him away. We can hear the superior voice of the establishment in his pompous rebuke to the uncouth herdsman.

• From A History of God (1993)

  He and Isaac set off on a three-day journey to the Mount of Moriah, which would later be the site of the Temple in Jerusalem. Isaac, who knew nothing of the divine command, even had to carry the wood for his own holocaust. It was not until the very last moment, when Abraham actually had the knife in his hand, that God relented and told him that it had only been a test. Abraham had proved himself worthy of becoming the father of a mighty nation, which would be as numerous as the stars in the sky or the grains of sand on the seashore. Yet to modern ears, this is a horrible story: it depicts God as a despotic and capricious sadist, and it is not surprising that many people today who have heard this tale as children reject such a deity. The myth of the Exodus from Egypt, when God led Moses and the children of Israel to freedom, is equally offensive to modern sensibilities. The story is well known. Pharaoh was reluctant to let the people of Israel go, so to force his hand, God sent ten fearful plagues upon the people of Egypt. The Nile was turned to blood; the land ravaged with locusts and frogs; the whole country plunged into impenetrable darkness. Finally God unleashed the most terrible plague of all: he sent the Angel of Death to kill the firstborn sons of all the Egyptians, while sparing the sons of the Hebrew slaves. Not surprisingly, Pharaoh decided to let the Israelites leave but later changed his mind and pursued them with his army. He caught up with them at the Sea of Reeds, but God saved the Israelites by opening the sea and letting them cross dry-shod. When the Egyptians followed in their wake, he closed the waters and drowned the Pharaoh and his army. This is a brutal, partial and murderous god: a god of war who would be known as Yahweh Sabaoth, the God of Armies. He is passionately partisan, has little compassion for anyone but his own favorites and is simply a tribal deity. If Yahweh had remained such a savage god, the sooner he vanished, the better it would have been for everybody. The final myth of the Exodus, as it has come down to us in the Bible, is clearly not meant to be a literal version of events. It would, however, have had a clear message for the people of the ancient Middle East, who were used to gods splitting the seas in half. Yet unlike Marduk and Baal, Yahweh was said to have divided a physical sea in the profane world of historical time. There is little attempt at realism.

• From A History of God (1993)

  But no Israelite would have wanted to hear that his own people had brought political destruction upon its own head by its shortsighted policies and exploitative behavior. Nobody would have been happy to hear that Yahweh had masterminded the successful Assyrian campaigns of 722 and 701, just as he had captained the armies of Joshua, Gideon and King David. What did he think he was doing with the nation that was supposed to be his Chosen People? There was no wish fulfillment in Isaiah’s depiction of Yahweh. Instead of offering the people a panacea, Yahweh was being used to make people confront unwelcome reality. Instead of taking refuge in the old cultic observances which projected people back into mythical time, prophets like Isaiah were trying to make their countrymen look the actual events of history in the face and accept them as a terrifying dialogue with their God. While the God of Moses had been triumphalist, the God of Isaiah was full of sorrow. The prophecy, as it has come down to us, begins with a lament that is highly unflattering to the people of the covenant: the ox and the ass know their owners, but “Israel knows nothing, my people understand nothing.” 12 Yahweh was utterly revolted by the animal sacrifices in the Temple, sickened by the fat of calves, blood of bulls and goats and the reeking blood that smoked from the holocausts. He could not bear their festivals, New Year ceremonies and pilgrimages. 13 This would have shocked Isaiah’s audience: in the Middle East these cultic celebrations were of the essence of religion. The pagan gods depended upon the ceremonies to renew their depleted energies; their prestige depended in part upon the magnificence of their temples. Now Yahweh was actually saying that these things were utterly meaningless. Like other sages and philosophers in the Oikumene, Isaiah felt that exterior observance was not enough. Israelites must discover the inner meaning of their religion. Yahweh wanted compassion rather than sacrifice: You may multiply your prayers, I shall not listen. Your hands are covered with blood, wash, make yourselves clean. Take your wrong-doing out of my sight. Cease to do evil. Learn to do good, search for justice, help the oppressed, be just to the orphan, plead for the widow. 14 The prophets had discovered for themselves the overriding duty of compassion, which would become the hallmark of all the major religions formed in the Axial Age. The new ideologies that were developing in the Oikumene during this period all insisted that the test of authenticity was that religious experience be integrated successfully with daily life. It was no longer sufficient to confine observance to the Temple and to the extratemporal world of myth. After enlightenment, a man or woman must return to the marketplace and practice compassion for all living beings.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Yet to modern ears, this is a horrible story: it depicts God as a despotic and capricious sadist, and it is not surprising that many people today who have heard this tale as children reject such a deity. The myth of the Exodus from Egypt, when God led Moses and the children of Israel to freedom, is equally offensive to modern sensibilities. The story is well known. Pharaoh was reluctant to let the people of Israel go, so to force his hand, God sent ten fearful plagues upon the people of Egypt. The Nile was turned to blood; the land ravaged with locusts and frogs; the whole country plunged into impenetrable darkness. Finally God unleashed the most terrible plague of all: he sent the Angel of Death to kill the firstborn sons of all the Egyptians, while sparing the sons of the Hebrew slaves. Not surprisingly, Pharaoh decided to let the Israelites leave but later changed his mind and pursued them with his army. He caught up with them at the Sea of Reeds, but God saved the Israelites by opening the sea and letting them cross dry-shod. When the Egyptians followed in their wake, he closed the waters and drowned the Pharaoh and his army. This is a brutal, partial and murderous god: a god of war who would be known as Yahweh Sabaoth, the God of Armies. He is passionately partisan, has little compassion for anyone but his own favorites and is simply a tribal deity. If Yahweh had remained such a savage god, the sooner he vanished, the better it would have been for everybody. The final myth of the Exodus, as it has come down to us in the Bible, is clearly not meant to be a literal version of events. It would, however, have had a clear message for the people of the ancient Middle East, who were used to gods splitting the seas in half. Yet unlike Marduk and Baal, Yahweh was said to have divided a physical sea in the profane world of historical time. There is little attempt at realism. When the Israelites recounted the story of the Exodus, they were not as interested in historical accuracy as we would be today. Instead, they wanted to bring out the significance of the original event, whatever that may have been. Some modern scholars suggest that the Exodus story is a mythical rendering of a successful peasants’ revolt against the suzerainty of Egypt and its allies in Canaan.15 This would have been an extremely rare occurrence at the time and would have made an indelible impression on everybody involved. It would have been an extraordinary experience of the empowerment of the oppressed against the powerful and the mighty.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  As for Müntzer, he and his sleeves escaped to an attic and scrambled under the covers of a bed. When he was at last discovered there, he tried to pawn himself off as a pathetic invalid, but a nearby satchel of incriminating papers made everything clear, at which point he was indecorously hauled out of his garret sickbed and down into the famously bearded presence of Duke George himself. Amazingly, the duke sat with Müntzer on a bench and asked him about what had taken place at nearby Artern, where three emissaries had been sent to Müntzer by Count Ernest. Duke George said that he understood that Müntzer had in fact ordered that these peace-seeking emissaries be beheaded, which they were. Müntzer’s reply was “Dear Brother, I tell you I didn’t do it; divine justice did it.” After this, Landgrave Philip entered the heated conversation, trading Scripture quotations with Müntzer. The next day Müntzer underwent a trial in which he was tortured and confessed a number of things. He even recanted his sermons against the rulers. And after his extreme advocacy for taking Communion “in both kinds,” he now even humbly received Communion according to the Roman rite, which is to say bread alone. Knowing he would be executed, he wrote a letter of farewell to his Mühlhausen congregation in which he confessed nothing by way of his own guilt but actually blamed the selfishness of the peasants for the defeat, saying, “Without a doubt things happened that way because everyone there was seeking his own good more than the justification of Christendom.” This more than anything else outraged Luther when he learned of it later. “Anyone who saw Müntzer,” Luther said, “would say that he had seen the devil in the flesh at his most ferocious.”31 In his letter, Müntzer even had the strange temerity to admonish those whom he had whipped toward deadly violence to “flee from the shedding of blood.” This was the man who had said he was appointed to end the lives of all those who were not the elect, who had wailed, “I am sharpening my sickle.” At the trial of Heinrich Pfeiffer, who had been Müntzer’s ally since Mühlhausen, Pfeiffer guilelessly stated what Müntzer’s plans had always been. “After annihilating all rulers,” Pfeiffer said, “he intended to carry out a Christian reformation.” But instead, eighty thousand peasants had died, and the Reformation of Luther had been so mixed up with this sprawling blood-soaked tragedy that in the eyes of any inclined against that Reformation, it was further discredited. On May 27, Müntzer and fifty-three others—Pfeiffer among them—were beheaded. Their heads and bodies were impaled upon pike staffs, where they remained to grimly decorate the outside of Mühlhausen’s city walls for years. CHAPTER SEVENTEENLove and MarriageThe life of married people, if they are in the faith, deserves to be rated higher than those who are famous for miracles.1 —Martin Luther

• From A History of God (1993)

  These myths were never intended as literal accounts of creation and salvation; they were symbolic expressions of an inner truth. “God” and the Pleroma were not external realities “out there” but were to be found within: Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you makes everything his own and says, My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body. Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate. Learn how it happens that one watches without willing, loves without willing. If you carefully investigate these matters, you will find him in yourself. 36 The Pleroma represented a map of the soul. The divine light could be discerned even in this dark world, if the Gnostic knew where to look: during the Primal Fall—of either Sophia or the Demiurge—some divine sparks had also fallen from the Pleroma and been trapped in matter. The Gnostic could find a divine spark in his own soul, could become aware of a divine element within himself which would help him to find his way home. The Gnostics showed that many of the new converts to Christianity were not satisfied with the traditional idea of God which they had inherited from Judaism. They did not experience the world as “good,” the work of a benevolent deity. A similar dualism and dislocation marked the doctrine of Marcion (100–165), who founded his own rival church in Rome and attracted a huge following. Jesus had said that a sound tree produced good fruit: 37 how could the world have been created by a good God when it was manifestly full of evil and pain? Marcion was also appalled by the Jewish scriptures, which seemed to describe a harsh, cruel God who exterminated whole populations in his passion for justice. He decided that it was this Jewish God, who was “lustful for war, inconstant in his attitudes and self- contradictory,” 38 who had created the world. But Jesus had revealed that another God existed, who had never been mentioned by the Jewish scriptures. This second God was “placid, mild and simply good and excellent.” 39 He was entirely different from the cruel “juridical” Creator of the world. We should, therefore, turn away from the world, which, since it was not his doing, could tell us nothing about this benevolent deity and should also reject the “Old” Testament, concentrating simply upon those New Testament books which had preserved the spirit of Jesus. The popularity of Marcion’s teachings showed that he had voiced a common anxiety.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The Christians of the West had always seemed to find that God was something of a strain and the Reformers, who had sought to allay these religious anxieties, seem ultimately to have made matters worse. The God of the West, who was believed to predestine millions of human beings to everlasting damnation, had become even more frightening than the harsh deity envisaged by Tertullian or Augustine in his darker moments. Could it be that a deliberately imaginative conception of God, based on mythology and mysticism, is more effective as a means of giving his people courage to survive tragedy and distress than a God whose myths are interpreted literally? Indeed, by the end of the sixteenth century, many people in Europe felt that religion had been gravely discredited. They were disgusted by the killing of Catholics by Protestants and Protestants by Catholics. Hundreds of people had died as martyrs for holding views that it was impossible to prove one way or the other. Sects preaching a bewildering variety of doctrines that were deemed essential for salvation had proliferated alarmingly. There was now too much theological choice: many felt paralyzed and distressed by the variety of religious interpretations on offer. Some may have felt that faith was becoming harder to achieve than ever. It was, therefore, significant that at this point in the history of the Western God, people started spotting “atheists,” who seemed to be as numerous as the “witches,” the old enemies of God and allies of the devil. It was said that these “atheists” had denied the existence of God, were acquiring converts to their sect and undermining the fabric of society. Yet in fact a full-blown atheism in the sense that we use the word today was impossible. As Lucien Febvre has shown in his classic book The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century , the conceptual difficulties in the way of a complete denial of God’s existence at this time were so great as to be insurmountable. From birth and baptism to death and burial in the churchyard, religion dominated the life of every single man and woman. Every activity of the day, which was punctuated with church bells summoning the faithful to prayer, was saturated with religious beliefs and institutions: they dominated professional and public life—even the guilds and the universities were religious organizations. As Febvre points out, God and religion were so ubiquitous that nobody at this stage thought to say: “So our life, the whole of our life, is dominated by Christianity!

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  —LUCAS Cranach the Elder was one of the incomers to Wittenberg. He arrived in 1505, shortly before Luther, and, as painter to the Elector, established a studio in the castle. His portraits of Luther—at first young, thin, and intense, and later, large, foursquare, and authoritative—would shape the reformer’s public image, and the partnership between the two men would be immensely important for the Reformation. In 1512 Cranach purchased two adjacent houses on the market square that he rebuilt to include a studio big enough to create large panels, transforming the number, size, and ambition of works he could produce. Then, in 1518, he acquired the Cranachhof, a complex of buildings that included a four-story house and six outbuildings to create an inner courtyard, and with plenty of windows. His residence on the main square was one of the grandest houses in town, a massive building with an elegant Renaissance façade and room for stores and workshops, capable of hosting important visitors such as the exiled king of Denmark or the ruler of Brandenburg. Cranach, known as “the fast painter,” had an eye for business. Since there was no other painter in town, and no one who could supply the pigments, bristles, oils, and panels he needed and which would have been so easy to obtain in Nuremberg or Augsburg, he had to import everything. He made a virtue of necessity. Since his cargoes left plentiful room on the wagons, he set up a business importing fine wines and pharmaceutical goods. Cranach even acquired a monopoly on the import and sale of such items—a concession the town council later had cause to regret, for they complained that the painter, who by 1528 had become the richest man in town, was exploiting his stranglehold on medicaments to palm off poor-quality drugs on the townsfolk.21 Cranach’s move into commerce not only speaks volumes about his business sense but also tells us what kind of place Wittenberg was at the time. It reveals how meager the town’s business elite was up to then, and how little appetite there had been for the systematic import of luxury items. Cranach’s warehouses would become treasure troves, containing cloth and all kinds of materials; Luther rummaged among them to see what goods had arrived from the Leipzig fairs, and he no doubt would have sampled the fine Rhine wines that Cranach also imported.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Concupiscence was the irrational desire to take pleasure in mere creatures instead of God; it was felt most acutely during the sexual act, when our rationality is entirely swamped by passion and emotion, when God is utterly forgotten and creatures revel shamelessly in one another. This image of reason dragged down by the chaos of sensations and lawless passions was disturbingly similar to Rome, source of rationality, law and order in the West, brought low by the barbarian tribes. By implication, Augustine’s harsh doctrine paints a terrible picture of an implacable God: Banished [from Paradise] after his sin, Adam bound his offspring also with the penalty of death and damnation, that offspring which by sinning he had corrupted in himself, as in a root; so that whatever progeny was born (through carnal concupiscence, by which a fitting retribution for his disobedience was bestowed upon him) from himself and his spouse—who was the cause of his sin and the companion of his damnation—would drag through the ages the burden of Original Sin, by which it would itself be dragged through manifold errors and sorrows, down to that final and never-ending torment with the rebel angels.… So the matter stood; the damned lump of humanity was lying prostrate, no, was wallowing in evil, it was falling headlong from one wickedness to another; and joined to the faction of the angels who had sinned, it was paying the most righteous penalty of its impious treason. 43 Neither Jews nor Greek Orthodox Christians regarded the fall of Adam in such a catastrophic light; nor, later, would Muslims adopt this dark theology of Original Sin. Unique to the West, the doctrine compounds the harsh portrait of God suggested earlier by Tertullian. Augustine left us with a difficult heritage. A religion which teaches men and women to regard their humanity as chronically flawed can alienate them from themselves. Nowhere is this alienation more evident than in the denigration of sexuality in general and women in particular. Even though Christianity had originally been quite positive for women, it had already developed a misogynistic tendency in the West by the time of Augustine. The letters of Jerome teem with loathing of the female which occasionally sounds deranged. Tertullian had castigated women as evil temptresses, an eternal danger to mankind: Do you not know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too.