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 A History of God (1993)

  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! How tiny is the area of our lives that is already secularized, compared to everything that is still governed, regulated and shaped by religion!”43 Even if an exceptional man could have achieved the objectivity necessary to question the nature of religion and the existence of God, he would have found no support in either the philosophy or the science of his time. Until there had formed a body of coherent reasons, each of which was based on another cluster of scientific verifications, nobody could deny the existence of a God whose religion shaped and dominated the moral, emotional, aesthetic and political life of Europe. Without this support, such a denial could only be a personal whim or a passing impulse that was unworthy of serious consideration. As Febvre has shown, a vernacular language such as French lacked either the vocabulary or the syntax for skepticism. Such words as “absolute,” “relative,” “causality,” “concept” and “intuition” were not yet in use.44 We should also remember that as yet no society in the world had eliminated religion, which was taken for granted as a fact of life. Not until the very end of the eighteenth century would a few Europeans find it possible to deny the existence of God.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. You are the devil’s gateway; you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree; you are the first deserter of the divine law; you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You so carelessly destroyed man, God’s image. On account of your desert, even the Son of God had to die. 44 Augustine agreed; “What is the difference,” he wrote to a friend, “whether it is in a wife or a mother, it is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in any woman.” 45 In fact Augustine is clearly puzzled that God should have made the female sex: after all, “if it was good company and conversation that Adam needed, it would have been much better arranged to have two men together as friends, not a man and a woman.” 46 Woman’s only function was the childbearing which passed the contagion of Original Sin to the next generation, like a venereal disease. A religion which looks askance upon half the human race and which regards every involuntary motion of mind, heart and body as a symptom of fatal concupiscence can only alienate men and women from their condition. Western Christianity never fully recovered from this neurotic misogyny, which can still be seen in the unbalanced reaction to the very notion of the ordination of women. While Eastern women shared the burden of inferiority carried by all women of the Oikumene at this time, their sisters in the West carried the additional stigma of a loathsome and sinful sexuality which caused them to be ostracized in hatred and fear. This is doubly ironic, since the idea that God had become flesh and shared our humanity should have encouraged Christians to value the body. There had been further debates about this difficult belief. During the fourth and fifth centuries, “heretics” such as Apollinarius, Nestorius and Eutyches asked very difficult questions. How had the divinity of Christ been able to cohere with his humanity?

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. You are the devil’s gateway; you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree; you are the first deserter of the divine law; you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You so carelessly destroyed man, God’s image. On account of your desert, even the Son of God had to die.44 Augustine agreed; “What is the difference,” he wrote to a friend, “whether it is in a wife or a mother, it is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in any woman.”45 In fact Augustine is clearly puzzled that God should have made the female sex: after all, “if it was good company and conversation that Adam needed, it would have been much better arranged to have two men together as friends, not a man and a woman.”46 Woman’s only function was the childbearing which passed the contagion of Original Sin to the next generation, like a venereal disease. A religion which looks askance upon half the human race and which regards every involuntary motion of mind, heart and body as a symptom of fatal concupiscence can only alienate men and women from their condition. Western Christianity never fully recovered from this neurotic misogyny, which can still be seen in the unbalanced reaction to the very notion of the ordination of women. While Eastern women shared the burden of inferiority carried by all women of the Oikumene at this time, their sisters in the West carried the additional stigma of a loathsome and sinful sexuality which caused them to be ostracized in hatred and fear.

• From A History of God (1993)

  1784), a jurist of Najd in the Arabian peninsula, wanted to restore Islam to the purity of its beginnings and get rid of all later accretions. He was particularly hostile to mysticism. All suggestion of an incarnational theology was condemned, including devotion to Sufi saints and the Shii Imams. He even opposed the cult of the Prophet’s tomb at Medina: no mere man, however illustrious, should distract attention from God. Al-Wahhab managed to convert Muhammad ibn Saud, ruler of a small principality in Central Arabia, and together they initiated a reform which was an attempt to reproduce the first ummah of the Prophet and his companions. They attacked the oppression of the poor, indifference to the plight of widows and orphans, immorality and idolatry. They also waged a jihad against their imperial masters the Ottomans, believing that Arabs, not Turks, should lead the Muslim peoples. They managed to wrest a sizable portion of the Hijaz from Ottoman control, which the Turks were not able to regain until 1818, but the new sect had seized the imagination of many people in the Islamic world. Pilgrims to Mecca had been impressed by this new piety, which seemed fresher and more vigorous than much current Sufism. During the nineteenth century, Wahhabism would become the dominant Islamic mood and Sufism increasingly marginalized and, consequently, even more bizarre and superstitious. Like Jews and Christians, Muslims were beginning to step back from the mystical ideal and adopt a more rationalistic type of piety. In Europe a few people were beginning the trend away from God himself. In 1729 Jean Meslier, a country priest who had led an exemplary life, died an atheist. He left behind a memoir which was circulated by Voltaire. This expressed his disgust with humanity and his inability to believe in God. Newton’s infinite space, Meslier believed, was the only eternal reality: nothing but matter existed. Religion was a device used by the rich to oppress the poor and render them powerless. Christianity was distinguished by its particularly ludicrous doctrines, such as the Trinity and the Incarnation. His denial of God was meat too strong even for the philosophes. Voltaire removed the specifically atheistic passages and transformed the abbé into a Deist. By the end of the century, however, there were a few philosophers who were proud to call themselves atheists, though they remained a tiny minority. This was an entirely new development. Hitherto “atheist” had been a term of abuse, a particularly nasty slur to hurl at your enemies. Now it was just beginning to be worn as a badge of pride.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In Europe a few people were beginning the trend away from God himself. In 1729 Jean Meslier, a country priest who had led an exemplary life, died an atheist. He left behind a memoir which was circulated by Voltaire. This expressed his disgust with humanity and his inability to believe in God. Newton’s infinite space, Meslier believed, was the only eternal reality: nothing but matter existed. Religion was a device used by the rich to oppress the poor and render them powerless. Christianity was distinguished by its particularly ludicrous doctrines, such as the Trinity and the Incarnation. His denial of God was meat too strong even for the philosophes. Voltaire removed the specifically atheistic passages and transformed the abbé into a Deist. By the end of the century, however, there were a few philosophers who were proud to call themselves atheists, though they remained a tiny minority. This was an entirely new development. Hitherto “atheist” had been a term of abuse, a particularly nasty slur to hurl at your enemies. Now it was just beginning to be worn as a badge of pride. The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) had taken the new empiricism to its logical conclusion. There was no need to go beyond a scientific explanation of reality and no philosophical reason for believing anything that lay beyond our sense experience. In the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume disposed of the argument that purported to prove God’s existence from the design of the universe, arguing that it rested on analogical arguments that were inconclusive. One might be able to argue that the order we discern in the natural world pointed to an intelligent Overseer, but how, then, to account for evil and the manifest disorder? There was no logical answer to this, and Hume, who had written the Dialogues in 1750, wisely left them unpublished. Some twelve months earlier, the French philosopher Denis Diderot (1713–84) had been imprisoned for asking the same question in A Letter to the Blind for the Use of Those Who See, which introduced a full-blown atheism to the general public.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Some of Staupitz’s THE MONASTERY 73 most evocative and yet harshest writing is about the love of women, which is inborn in us through the love of our mothers, and through the fact that Eve is made from Adam’s rib. “We suck it from our mothers, yes we draw it from the maternal hearts hidden in the body’, Staupitz wrote. At the same time he warns that for the sake of women ‘we leave honour, body and good virtue and reason, and are captured in their love, becoming stupid and losing reason’.® His 1504 preface to the revised statutes for the united Augustinian order states that: Even if your eyes fall on some woman, let them rest on none . . . For women’s desire . . . seeks . . . not with silent feelings alone, but with feelings and glances too. And do not say that you are keeping your minds chaste if you have unchaste eyes: the unchaste eye is the messenger of an unchaste heart. And when unchaste hearts announce themselves in turn with mutual glances, even if the tongue is silent, and if, following desire, the flesh of each is delighted by ardour, even if the bodies are untouched by unclean violation, chastity herself flees from their morals.” The monks should only go to the baths in groups of two or three; they should only wash their clothes when the provost thought fit, ‘lest excessive appetite for clean clothing should bring with it internal squalor of the mind’. An almost allergic reaction towards women — although he dedicated both his German treatises to female followers™ — accompanies Staupitz’s passionate love of the Virgin, who pleads our case with God. Luther, in contrast, came to reject both attitudes, scorning adulation for Mary on the grounds that there can be no mediator between God and man, and also rejecting the idea that sexual renunciation was necessary for holiness. In this context, Luther’s sermon in May 1515 to the Augustinian chapter meeting at Gotha is illustrative not only of some of the emotional underpinnings of his later theological development, but also of both his dependence on, and difference from, his father-confessor. The sermon was organised by Staupitz, and again had more than a little 74 MARTIN LUTHER to do with the complex internal politics of the order; as a result of it, Luther won the position of district vicar overseeing monasteries in the region, the most senior position he had held in the order up to that time. The sermon dwelt on envy, and was delivered at a time when Staupitz was experiencing some of his greatest difficulties in trying to unite the order; indeed he shortly afterwards gave up the attempt altogether. It may therefore have reflected particular tensions within the Augustinians and direct attacks on the vicar general.

• From A History of God (1993)

  He was an impressive thinker who was suspicious of cultural universalism but believed that Muslims should unite to preserve their heritage. Even though he did not like the Shiah, he believed that Sunnis and Shiis should find common ground. He tried to reform the Shariah to make it more relevant to the new conditions of India. Walli-Ullah seemed to have had a presentiment of the consequences of colonialism: his son would lead a jihad against the British. His religious thought was more conservative, heavily dependent upon Ibn al-Arabi: man could not develop his full potential without God. Muslims were still happy to draw on the riches of the past in religious matters, and Walli-Ullah is an example of the power that Sufism could still inspire. In many parts of the world, however, Sufism had become somewhat decadent, and a new reforming movement in Arabia presaged the swing away from mysticism that would characterize the Muslim perception of God during the nineteenth century and the Islamic response to the challenge of the West. Like the Christian reformers of the sixteenth century, Muhammad ibn al-Wahhab (d. 1784), a jurist of Najd in the Arabian peninsula, wanted to restore Islam to the purity of its beginnings and get rid of all later accretions. He was particularly hostile to mysticism. All suggestion of an incarnational theology was condemned, including devotion to Sufi saints and the Shii Imams. He even opposed the cult of the Prophet’s tomb at Medina: no mere man, however illustrious, should distract attention from God. Al-Wahhab managed to convert Muhammad ibn Saud, ruler of a small principality in Central Arabia, and together they initiated a reform which was an attempt to reproduce the first ummah of the Prophet and his companions. They attacked the oppression of the poor, indifference to the plight of widows and orphans, immorality and idolatry. They also waged a jihad against their imperial masters the Ottomans, believing that Arabs, not Turks, should lead the Muslim peoples. They managed to wrest a sizable portion of the Hijaz from Ottoman control, which the Turks were not able to regain until 1818, but the new sect had seized the imagination of many people in the Islamic world. Pilgrims to Mecca had been impressed by this new piety, which seemed fresher and more vigorous than much current Sufism. During the nineteenth century, Wahhabism would become the dominant Islamic mood and Sufism increasingly marginalized and, consequently, even more bizarre and superstitious. Like Jews and Christians, Muslims were beginning to step back from the mystical ideal and adopt a more rationalistic type of piety. In Europe a few people were beginning the trend away from God himself. In 1729 Jean Meslier, a country priest who had led an exemplary life, died an atheist. He left behind a memoir which was circulated by Voltaire. This expressed his disgust with humanity and his inability to believe in God. Newton’s infinite space, Meslier believed, was the only eternal reality: nothing but matter existed.

• From Satyricon (1)

  In the third century a certain Valesius formed a sect which, following the example set by Origen, acted literally upon the text of Matthew, v, 28, 30, and Matthew, xix, 12. Of this sect, Augustine, De Heres. chap. 37, said: “the Valesians castrate themselves and those who partake of their hospitality, thinking that after this manner, they ought to serve God.” That injustice was done upon the wrong member is very evident, yet in an age so dark, so dominated by austere asceticism, this clean cut perception of the best interests of suffering humanity, is only to be rivalled by the French physician in the time of the black plague. He had observed that sthenic patients, when bled, died: the superstition and medical usage of the age prescribed bleeding, and when the fat abbots came to be bled, he bled them freely and with satisfaction. Justinian decreed that anyone guilty of performing the operation which deprived an individual of virility should be subjected to a similar operation, and this crime was later punished with death. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we encounter another and even viler reason for this practice: that “the voice of such a person” (one castrated in boyhood) “after arriving at adult age, combines the high range and sweetness of the female with the power of the male voice,” had long been known, and Italian singing masters were not slow in putting this hint to practical use. The poor sometimes sold their children for this purpose, and the castrati and soprani are terms well known to the musical historian. These artificial voices disgraced the Italian stage until literally driven from it by public hostility, and the punishment of death was the reward of the individual bold enough to perform such an operation. The papal authority excommunicated those guilty of the crime and those upon whom such an operation had been performed, but received artificial voices, which were the result of accident, into the Sistine choir. This pretext served the church well and, until the year 1878, when the disgrace was wiped out by Pope Leo XIII, the Sistine choir was an eloquent commentary upon the attitude of an institution placed, as it were, “between love and duty.” It should be recorded that this choir, in its recent visit to the United States, had but one artificial voice, and its owner was the oldest member of the choir. Young home-born slaves were bought up by the dealers, castrated, because of the increased price they brought when in this condition, and sold for huge sums: Seneca, Controv. x, chap. 4; and kidnapping was frequently resorted to, just as it is in Africa today.

• From Satyricon (1)

  “Some pushed their cruelty so far as to outrage Nature with the sacrilegious knife, and, after depriving men of their virility, found in them the height of pleasure. These miserable and unhappy creatures, that they may the longer serve the purposes of boys, are stunted in their manhood, and remain a doubtful riddle of a double sex, neither preserving that boyhood in which they were born, nor possessing that manhood which should be theirs. The bloom of their youth withers away in a premature old age: while yet boys they suddenly become old, without any interval of manhood. For impure sensuality, the mistress of every vice, devising one shameless pleasure after another, insensibly plunges into unmentionable debauchery, experienced in every form of brutal lust. Whereas, if each would abide by the laws prescribed by Providence, we should be satisfied with intercourse with women, and our lives would be undefiled by shameful practices. Consider the animals, which cannot corrupt by innate viciousness, how they observe the law of Nature in all its purity. He-lions do not lust after he-lions, but, in due season, passion excites them towards the females of their species: the bull that rules the herd mounts cows, and the ram fills the whole flock of ewes with the seed of generation. Again, boars mate with sows, he-wolves with shewolves, neither the birds that fly through the air, nor the fish that inhabit the deep, or any living creatures upon earth desire male intercourse, but amongst them the laws of Nature remain unbroken. But you men, who boast idly of your wisdom, but are in reality worthless brutes, what strange disease provokes you to outrage one another unnaturally? What blind folly fills your minds, that you commit the two-fold error of avoiding what you should pursue, and pursuing what you should avoid? If each and all were to pursue such evil courses, the race of human beings would become extinct on earth. And here comes in that wonderful Socratic argument, whereby the minds of boys, as yet unable to reason clearly, are deceived, for a ripe intellect could not be misled. These followers of Socrates pretend to love the soul alone, and, being ashamed to profess love for the person, call themselves lovers of virtue, whereat I have often been moved to laughter. How comes it, O grave philosophers, that you hold in such slight regard a man who, during a long life, has given proofs of merit, and of that virtue which old age and white hairs become? How is it that the affections of the philosophers are all in a flutter after the young; who cannot yet make up their minds which path of life to take? Is there a law, then, that all ugliness is to be condemned as vice, and that everything that is beautiful is to be extolled without further examination?

• From Satyricon (1)

  When they desire to borrow, they employ the base and supplicating style of the slave in the comedy; but when they are called upon to pay, they assume the royal and tragic declamation of the grandsons of Hercules. If the demand is repeated, they readily procure some trusty sycophant, instructed to maintain a charge of poison or magic against the insolent creditor, who is seldom released from prison till he has signed a discharge for the whole debt. These vices, which degrade the moral character of the Romans, are mixed with a puerile superstition that disgraces their understanding. They listen with confidence to the predictions of haruspices, who pretend to read in the entrails of victims the signs of future greatness and prosperity; and there are many who do not presume either to bathe or to dine, or to appear in public, till they have diligently consulted, according to the rules of astrology, the situation of Mercury and the aspect of the moon. It is singular enough that this vain credulity may often be discovered among the profane sceptics who impiously doubt or deny the existence of a celestial power.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  This did not mean, however, that he respected the Quran itself: it was, he wrote, an ‘accursed, shameful, desperate book’, but it was better to have such ‘secret poison’ out in the open, for ‘you must open the injury and the wound if you want to heal it’.” Both he and Melanchthon wrote brief and surprisingly mild introductions to the work when it finally appeared in 1543; one contemporary noted defensively that the prefaces ‘rather warned the reader about the book than encouraging them to read it’, while Bucer considered asking Luther to write ‘another longer and more forceful warning with thorough indication of the dreadful abominations in the Quran’. Despite his rejection of the Quran, and although Luther could be excoriating about Turkish morals and customs, he never deployed a thetoric of incendiary hostility towards Muslims that he was so willing to let loose on others. This allowed him to develop a model of coex- istence in a divided world, where the Christians had the truth, and must fight to protect themselves, but where Islam was recognised as a separate, if wrong, faith. Moreover, once the immediate danger of the Ottoman threat had receded, Luther lost interest. Instead, he directed the full arsenal of his hatred at the papacy and the Jews. HATREDS 389 Luther’s vicious anti-Semitism has been one of the most fraught subjects in the history of Lutheranism, because it has been difficult for scholars after the Holocaust to recognise and accept its nature and extent. Luther was not always so hostile. In 1523 he had published That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew, a remarkable pamphlet which recognised that Christians ‘have dealt with the Jews as if they were dogs rather than human beings; they have done little else than deride them and seize their property’.” A remarkably tolerant piece by the standards of the time, it has often been regarded as proof that the young Luther was not anti-Semitic: his anti-Semitism, so goes the argument, was a product of his later, embittered years when he realised that the Jews would never convert to Christianity — although there is little evidence that Luther actively tried to convert Jews.” However, the last passages of the tract of 1523 made it clear that toleration of the Jews was dependent ultimately on the dissolution of Jewry: ‘If the Jews should take offence because we confess our Jesus to be a man, and yet true God, we will deal forcefully with that from Scripture in due time. But this is too harsh for a beginning.

• From Satyricon (1)

  After a short interval, Trimalchio gave orders for the dessert to be served, whereupon the slaves took away all the tables and brought in others, and sprinkled the floor with sawdust mixed with saffron and vermilion, and also with powdered mica, a thing I had never seen done before. When all this was done Trimalchio remarked, “I could rest content with this course, for you have your second tables, but, if you’ve something especially nice, why bring it on.” Meanwhile an Alexandrian slave boy, who had been serving hot water, commenced to imitate a nightingale, and when Trimalchio presently called out, “Change your tune,” we had another surprise, for a slave, sitting at Habinnas’ feet, egged on, I have no doubt, by his own master, bawled suddenly in a singsong voice, “Meanwhile AEneas and all of his fleet held his course on the billowy deep”; never before had my ears been assailed by a sound so discordant, for in addition to his barbarous pronunciation, and the raising and lowering of his voice, he interpolated Atellane verses, and, for the first time in my life, Virgil grated on my nerves. When he had to quit, finally, from sheer want of breath, “Did he ever have any training,” Habinnas exclaimed, “no, not he! I educated him by sending him among the grafters at the fair, so when it comes to taking off a barker or a mule driver, there’s not his equal, and the rogue’s clever, too, he’s a shoemaker, or a cook, or a baker a regular jack of all trades. But he has two faults, and if he didn’t have them, he’d be beyond all price: he snores and he’s been circumcised. And that’s the reason he never can keep his mouth shut and always has an eye open. I paid three hundred dinars for him.” CHAPTER THE SIXTY-NINTH.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther not only read these tracts, but discussed them in letters to Melanchthon.* Then in early September 1521, he penned a first short set of theses for discussion within Wittenberg. He soon added others which were published in early October, but Luther did not complete his own full tract on vows until November.” If earlier in the Reformation it had been Karlstadt learning from Luther, now Karlstadt was forcing the pace. For a work advocating marriage, Karlstadt’s tract is strangely anti- erotic, even anti-sexual. He does not mince his words in the Latin text, however: monks only manage celibacy, he argues, by committing the sin of Moloch — that is, masturbation — shedding seed on the ground, or on their robes, and that is worse than fornication or adul- tery. Karlstadt’s pamphlet evokes the horror of frustrated lust, making the reader feel revolted by the sexual perversions to which it gives rise. He names some of these ‘beastly sins’ — ‘I say that there are some young nuns and monks who commit sins (I lay them upon their conscience and into their hearts and shall keep silent on account of my shame) which are weightier than bestiality’ — but in its German version the tract stops short there, leaving the reader to imagine the worst.” Karlstadt is fascinated by the flows that come out of the body, with women’s menses and with men’s — and women’s — ‘seed’: at the time, it was believed that both men and women had to release seed for conception to take place. Regarding marriage as a ‘medicine’ for the ills of sexual lust, he concludes that the bishops should drive all priests to marry, because this is the remedy for concupiscence designed by God. The only thing stopping them from marrying, he claims, is avarice — one of the seven deadly sins, and one to which sixteenth- century society was particularly sensitive. But the financial costs of having a married clergy would indeed turn out to be a major issue for the new Church. It is not surprising that Karlstadt’s treatise would be listed in the Catholic Index of Forbidden Books.” When he issued it in German, and toned down much of the invective, Karlstadt included passages on the appropriate behaviour of wives, which emphasise their duty to obey: ‘For this reason God made women (who are normally soft and gentle) especially tough. He hardened them so that they may serve their husbands.’ While Karlstadt advocated marriage, his revulsion towards 202 MARTIN LUTHER sexuality and the flesh ironically owed a great deal to the Christian monastic ascetic tradition from which he was trying to escape. It was strong stuff.

• From Satyricon (1)

  “Some pushed their cruelty so far as to outrage Nature with the sacrilegious knife, and, after depriving men of their virility, found in them the height of pleasure. These miserable and unhappy creatures, that they may the longer serve the purposes of boys, are stunted in their manhood, and remain a doubtful riddle of a double sex, neither preserving that boyhood in which they were born, nor possessing that manhood which should be theirs. The bloom of their youth withers away in a premature old age: while yet boys they suddenly become old, without any interval of manhood. For impure sensuality, the mistress of every vice, devising one shameless pleasure after another, insensibly plunges into unmentionable debauchery, experienced in every form of brutal lust. Whereas, if each would abide by the laws prescribed by Providence, we should be satisfied with intercourse with women, and our lives would be undefiled by shameful practices. Consider the animals, which cannot corrupt by innate viciousness, how they observe the law of Nature in all its purity. He-lions do not lust after he-lions, but, in due season, passion excites them towards the females of their species: the bull that rules the herd mounts cows, and the ram fills the whole flock of ewes with the seed of generation. Again, boars mate with sows, he-wolves with shewolves, neither the birds that fly through the air, nor the fish that inhabit the deep, or any living creatures upon earth desire male intercourse, but amongst them the laws of Nature remain unbroken. But you men, who boast idly of your wisdom, but are in reality worthless brutes, what strange disease provokes you to outrage one another unnaturally? What blind folly fills your minds, that you commit the two-fold error of avoiding what you should pursue, and pursuing what you should avoid? If each and all were to pursue such evil courses, the race of human beings would become extinct on earth. And here comes in that wonderful Socratic argument, whereby the minds of boys, as yet unable to reason clearly, are deceived, for a ripe intellect could not be misled. These followers of Socrates pretend to love the soul alone, and, being ashamed to profess love for the person, call themselves lovers of virtue, whereat I have often been moved to laughter. How comes it, O grave philosophers, that you hold in such slight regard a man who, during a long life, has given proofs of merit, and of that virtue which old age and white hairs become? How is it that the affections of the philosophers are all in a flutter after the young; who cannot yet make up their minds which path of life to take? Is there a law, then, that all ugliness is to be condemned as vice, and that everything that is beautiful is to be extolled without further examination?

• From Satyricon (1)

  A perusal of the Raggionamente of Pietro Aretino will confirm this statement, in its first premise, and the experiences of Sir Richard Burton in the India of Napier, and Harry Franck’s, in Spain, in the present century, and those of any intelligent observer in the Orient, today, will but bear out this hypothesis. The native population of Manila contains more than its proportion of catamites, who seek their sponsors in the Botanical Gardens and on the Luneta. The native quarters of the Chinese cities have their “houses” where boys are kept, just as the Egyptian mignons stood for hire in the lupanaria at Rome. A scene in Sylvia Scarlett could be duplicated in any large city of Europe or America; there is no necessity of appeal to Krafft-Ebbing or Havelock Ellis. But there is still another and surer method of gauging the extent of paederastic perversion at Rome, and that is the richness of the Latin vocabulary in terms and words bearing upon this repulsive subject. There are, in the Latin language, no less than one hundred and fifteen words and expressions in general usage.

• From Satyricon (1)

  After a short interval, Trimalchio gave orders for the dessert to be served, whereupon the slaves took away all the tables and brought in others, and sprinkled the floor with sawdust mixed with saffron and vermilion, and also with powdered mica, a thing I had never seen done before. When all this was done Trimalchio remarked, “I could rest content with this course, for you have your second tables, but, if you’ve something especially nice, why bring it on.” Meanwhile an Alexandrian slave boy, who had been serving hot water, commenced to imitate a nightingale, and when Trimalchio presently called out, “Change your tune,” we had another surprise, for a slave, sitting at Habinnas’ feet, egged on, I have no doubt, by his own master, bawled suddenly in a singsong voice, “Meanwhile AEneas and all of his fleet held his course on the billowy deep”; never before had my ears been assailed by a sound so discordant, for in addition to his barbarous pronunciation, and the raising and lowering of his voice, he interpolated Atellane verses, and, for the first time in my life, Virgil grated on my nerves. When he had to quit, finally, from sheer want of breath, “Did he ever have any training,” Habinnas exclaimed, “no, not he! I educated him by sending him among the grafters at the fair, so when it comes to taking off a barker or a mule driver, there’s not his equal, and the rogue’s clever, too, he’s a shoemaker, or a cook, or a baker a regular jack of all trades. But he has two faults, and if he didn’t have them, he’d be beyond all price: he snores and he’s been circumcised. And that’s the reason he never can keep his mouth shut and always has an eye open. I paid three hundred dinars for him.” CHAPTER THE SIXTY-NINTH.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In a kind of inverted baptismal exorcism, the Devil fills the mouth, nose and ears of the Jews with filth: “He stuffs and squirts them so full, that it overflows and swims out of every place, pure Devil’s filth, yes, it tastes so good to their hearts, and they guzzle it like sows.’ Whipping himself into a frenzy, Luther invokes Judas, the ultimate Jew: ‘When Judas Schariot hanged himself, so that his guts ripped, and as happens to those who are hanged, his bladder burst, then the Jews had their golden cans and silver bowls ready, to catch the Judas piss (as one calls it) with the other relics, and afterwards together they ate the shit and drank, from which they got such sharp sight that they are able to see such complex glosses in Scripture.”* Whenever Luther starts talking in this fashion, his deepest impulses are on display. This is no longer rational argument — he did not seri- ously believe that Jews had sharp sight because they ate ordure. Rather, he puns, condenses ideas into a single figure, leaps from one idea to another, as if caught in fantastical nightmare. Rhetoric like this stops thought; it overwhelms through the torrent of violent imagery. Luther knew how to turn this kind of anxiety into humour, and he had used it to devastating effect against the papacy. Yet here its effect is not to make the reader laugh, but to induce physical revulsion. Vom Schem Hamphoras is the crazed fantasy that underpinned the apparently rational On the Jews and their Lies. In that work, Luther had written: ‘if God would give me no Messiah but the one the Jews hope for’, he would rather be a pig than a human because the Jewish Messiah does not overcome death.” The sow rolls about in muck, has no worries, and does not fear death: when the butcher comes, she is dead in a moment. The folksy humour cannot hide the barb: Jews, who have no Messiah, are no better than pigs. Yet despite his hatred, there were several aspects of Luther’s theology which were akin to Judaism, and it is perhaps this proximity which triggered the violence of his assault: he had comparatively little to say about an afterlife; his religi- osity put the importance of Scripture and exegesis of the Hebrew and Greek texts centre stage; he downgraded the position of Mary so that Christianity no longer contained a female divine figure; and his remarkably positive attitude towards the body placed him very close to the Jewish emphasis on fertility rather than virginity. He could remain fairly serene about the Turks, as they were so different and so HATREDS 395 far away. The Jews were similar and lived within the society he wished to reform. They, not the far more dangerous Ottomans, attracted the full force of his hatred. His anti-Semitism was propagated by his many of his supporters but still went much further than most were prepared to go.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  This might seem like an abstruse accusation, but it concerned issues that were very close to home. In 1514, Luther had taken the side of the Hebraist Johannes Reuchlin — a relative of Melanchthon — as he resisted an attempt by Catholic conservatives to get all Jewish books destroyed. Yet Reuchlin’s interest in Hebrew had in part concerned the mysterious powers of the Kabbalah; this was why Christians ought to learn it. Luther may have been unaware of Reuchlin’s writings on the wonder-working word, but he was determined to distinguish the evangelicals’ use of words from the magical use of words by the Jews.” Perhaps realising how close they are to each other, he is driven to explain what it is that Lutherans do when they administer the sacrament of baptism or speak the words of consecration over the bread and wine. His ener- gies were passionately engaged in this because the background was the accusation which the sacramentarians brought against the Lutherans: that they pretended to produce God’s flesh magically by means of words. Luther then suddenly breaks off to describe the ‘Schem Hamphoras’ sculpture high up on the parish church of Witten- berg itself, which shows a sow suckling several Jews, while a rabbi lifts its tail and looks into its rear. Next Luther engages in his habitual wordplay, turning the wonder-working word into the ‘shame here’, using mock Hebrew word derivations. The rabbi, he says, is looking into the ‘shame here’ and it denotes not God but the Devil; the Jews are therefore sorcerers who dig around in excrement and worship only the Devil. The point of attacking the Jews for turning Hebrew into a magical code is that it allows Luther to replace the rabbis as biblical interpreter, and claim for the Lutherans the status of being the chosen people.” Luther’s anti-Semitism then reached a crescendo of physical revul- sion. He imagined Jews kissing and praying to the Devil’s excrement: ‘the Devil has . . . emptied his stomach again and again, that is a true 394 MARTIN LUTHER relic, which the Jews, and those who want to be a Jew, kiss, eat, drink and worship.’

• From Satyricon (1)

  At the Roman tables the birds, the dormice, or the fish, which appear of an uncommon size, are contemplated with curious attention; a pair of scales is accurately applied to ascertain their real weight; and, while the more rational guests are disgusted by the vain and tedious repetition, notaries are summoned to attest by an authentic record the truth of such a marvellous event. Another method of introduction into the houses and society of the great is derived from the profession of gaming, or, as it is more politely styled, of play. The confederates are united by a strict and indissoluble bond of friendship, or rather of conspiracy; a superior degree of skill in the Tesserarian art is a sure road to wealth and reputation. A master of that sublime science who in a supper or an assembly is placed below a magistrate displays in his countenance the surprise and indignation which Cato might be supposed to feel when he was refused the praetorship by the votes of a capricious people. The acquisition of knowledge seldom engages the curiosity of the nobles, who abhor the fatigue and disdain the advantages of study; and the only books which they peruse are the Satires of Juvenal and the verbose and fabulous histories of Marius Maximus. The libraries which they have inherited from their fathers are secluded, like dreary sepulchres, from the light of day. But the costly instruments of the theatre-flutes, and enormous lyres, and hydraulic organs--are constructed for their use; and the harmony of vocal and instrumental music is incessantly repeated in the palaces of Rome. In those palaces sound is preferred to sense, and the care of the body to that of the mind. It is allowed as a salutary maxim that the light and frivolous suspicion of a contagious malady is of sufficient weight to excuse the visits of the most intimate friends and even the servants who are dispatched to make the decent inquiries are not suffered to return home till they have undergone the ceremony of a previous ablution. Yet this selfish and unmanly delicacy occasionally yields to the more imperious passion of avarice. The prospect of gain will urge a rich and gouty senator as far as Spoleto; every sentiment of arrogance and dignity is subdued by the hopes of an inheritance, or even of a legacy; and a wealthy childless citizen is the most powerful of the Romans. The art of obtaining the signature of a favorable testament, and sometimes of hastening the moment of its execution, is perfectly understood; and it has happened that in the same house, though in different apartments, a husband and a wife, with the laudable design of overreaching each other, have summoned their respective lawyers to declare at the same time their mutual but contradictory intentions. The distress which follows and chastises extravagant luxury often reduces the great to the use of the most humiliating expedients.

• From Satyricon (1)

  A remarkable thing is that among almost all peoples, the baths are the places where the prostitution of men by their own sex is the most common. We see in Catullus that the “cinaedi” (catamites), a noun which my chaste pen refuses to translate into French, haunted the baths incessantly to carry out their practices. Among the Orientals, of all modern peoples who have retained this taste most generally, this same fact holds good. It was at the bath that Tiberius, impotent through old age and debauchery, was made young again by the touch little children applied to his breasts; these children he called “‘little fishes,” they sucked his withered breasts, his infected mouth, his livid lips, and finally his virile parts. Hideous spectacle of a tyrant disgraced by nature and struggling against her maledictions! But in vain did he invent new pleasures, in vain did he take part in these scenes in which groups of young men by threes and fours assumed all sorts of lascivious postures, and were at the same time active and passive; the sight of these indulgences of the “sprintriae” (for that is the name which was given there) did not enable him to resuscitate his vigor any more than the glamor of the throne or the servile submission of the senate served to mitigate his remorse. But of all the emperors, the ones who carried their taste for young boys to the greatest lengths were, Nero, Domitian and Hadrian. The first publicly wedded the young eunuch Sporus, whom he had had operated upon so that he might serve him like a young woman. He paid court to the boy as he would to a woman and another of his favorites dressed himself up in a veil and imitated the lamentations which women were accustomed to utter on nuptial nights. The second consecrated the month of September to his favorite and the third loved Antinous passionately and caused him to be deified after death. The most ample proof of the universality of the taste for young boys among the Romans is found in the Epithalamium of Manilius and Julia, by Catullus, and it might be cause for surprise that this has escaped all the philologists, were it not a constant thing that men frequently reading about these centuries fail to perceive the most palpable facts in their authors, just as they pass over the most striking phenomena of nature without observing them. It appears, from this epithalamium, that young men, before their marriage, had a favorite selected from among their slaves and that this favorite was charged with the distribution of nuts among his comrades, on the day, they in turn, treated him with contempt and hooted him. Here follows an exact translation of this curious bit. The favorite could not refuse the nuts to the slaves when by giving them it appeared that he owned that his master had put away his love for hire.