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 Satyricon (1)

  What were we miserable wretches to do, shut up in this newfangled labyrinth. The idea of taking a hot bath had commenced to grow in favor, so we finally asked the porter to lead us to the place and, throwing off our clothing, which Giton spread out in the hall to dry, we went in. It was very small, like a cold water cistern; Trimalchio was standing upright in it, and one could not escape his disgusting bragging even here. He declared that there was nothing nicer than bathing without a mob around, and that a bakery had formerly occupied this very spot. Tired out at last, he sat down, but when the echoes of the place tempted him, he lifted his drunken mouth to the ceiling, and commenced murdering the songs of Menacrates, at least that is what we were told by those who understood his language. Some of the guests joined hands and ran around the edge of the pool, making the place ring with their boisterous peals of laughter; others tried to pick rings up from the floor, with their hands tied behind them, or else, going down upon their knees, tried to touch the ends of their toes by bending backwards. We went down into the pool while the rest were taking part in such amusements. It was being heated for Trimalchio. When the fumes of the wine had been dissipated, we were conducted into another dining-room where Fortunata had laid out her own treasures; I noticed, for instance, that there were little bronze fishermen upon the lamps, the tables were of solid silver, the cups were porcelain inlaid with gold; before our eyes wine was being strained through a straining cloth. “One of my slaves shaves his first beard today,” Trimalchio remarked, at length, “a promising, honest, thrifty lad; may he have no bad luck, so let’s get our skins full and stick around till morning.” CHAPTER THE SEVENTY-FOURTH.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

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

• From Satyricon (1)

  In Europe of the middle ages, the priests and abbots helped to some extent in reviving the profession of the courtesans. Long before, Saint Paul had stated in his Epistles that it was permitted to the apostles of the Lord to take with them everywhere a sister for charity. The deaconesses date from the first century of the church. But the celibacy of the clergy was not universally and solidly established until about the eleventh century, under the pontificate of Gregory VII. During the preceding century, the celebrated Marozie and Theodore had put their lovers successively upon the chair of St. Peter, and their sons and grandsons, as well. But after the priests had submitted to celibacy they ostensibly took the concubines of which, alas! our housekeepers of today are but feeble vestiges. The Spanish codes of the middle ages were often concerned with the rights of the concubines of priests (mancebas de los clerigos) and these chosen ones of the chosen ones of the Lord invariably appeared worthy of envy. Finally the courtesans appeared in all their magnificence in the Holy City, and modern Rome atoned for the rebuffs and indignities these women had been compelled to endure in ancient Rome. The princes of the church showered them with gifts, they threw at their feet the price of redemption from sin, paid by the faithful, and the age of Leo X was for Rome a wonderful epoch of fine arts, belles lettres, and beautiful women. But a fanatical monk from Lower Germany fell upon this calm of the church and this happy era of the harlots; since then the revenues of the sacred college have continued to decrease, the beautiful courtesans have abandoned the capital of the Christian world, and their pleasures have fled with them. And can anyone longer believe in the perfection of the human race, since the best, the most holy of human institutions has so visibly degenerated! III. Le Soldat ordonne a embasicetas de m’accabler de ses impurs baisers. The soldier ordered the catamite to beslaver me with his stinking kisses.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The meeting was not very well attended but it reached radical conclusions: the chapter decided that any who wished to leave the order might do so, and that begging and Masses for the dead should be abolished. The prior of the Wittenberg house, his authority undermined by the charismatic preaching of Zwilling, received no support from the order, which refused to punish those monks who had left. Then, on 10 January, the remaining Wittenberg Augustinians went even further and, probably under Zwilling’s leader- ship, ‘made a fire in the cloister square, went into the church, broke the wooden altars, and took them with all the paintings and statues, crucifixes, flags, candles, chandeliers, etc. to the fire, threw them in and burnt them, and cut off the heads of the stone statues of Christ, Mary and other saints, and destroyed all the images in the church’.* Karlstadt too now turned his attention to images, writing a treatise on begging and the removal of images — not a chance combination. At one level, the tract, published in late January in Wittenberg, rejected images on biblical grounds: the first Commandment condemned the worship of idols. But it also made a clear distinction between flesh and spirit, the inner and the outer, a theme which could already be discerned in his earlier writing on the adoration of the sacrament. Images, Karlstadt now argued, ‘point to nothing other than to mere flesh which is of no benefit’. The Word of God, however, ‘is spiritual’; ‘Christ says that his flesh is of no avail but that the spirit is of much 226 MARTIN LUTHER value and gives life.’ Consequently, ‘you will have to admit that one learns mere carnal living and much suffering from [images] and that they cannot lead beyond the flesh’.” It was the indeterminacy of images, and their ability to move the emotions, that had earlier both fascinated and irritated him. Karlstadt had been the first, after all, to employ visual polemic in the service of the Reformation when he published his ‘wagon cartoon’ to ridicule Eck. Now he wrote passionately about what was wrong with images, in language suffused with sexual rhetoric: ‘Our eyes make love to [images] and court them. The truth is that all who honour images, seek their help, and worship them, are whores and adulterers.’

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It was the indeterminacy of images, and their ability to move the emotions, that had earlier both fascinated and irritated him. Karlstadt had been the first, after all, to employ visual polemic in the service of the Reformation when he published his “wagon cartoon” to ridicule Eck. Now he wrote passionately about what was wrong with images, in language suffused with sexual rhetoric: “Our eyes make love to [images] and court them. The truth is that all who honor images, seek their help, and worship them, are whores and adulterers.” He admitted that he had been seduced himself: “my heart has been trained since my youth to give honor and respect to images and such a dreadful fear has been instilled in me of which I would gladly rid myself, but cannot. Thus I am afraid to burn a single idol.” What emerges again from these lines is a very different approach to the body and to the physical world from that of Luther, a deep mistrust of the senses that could be readily allied to sexual puritanism. Indeed, such condemnation of images would become a powerful current within Calvinist Protestantism, leading to the destruction of centuries of Christian art in churches across Europe.30 The same treatise also included a passage on begging, with Karlstadt explaining why there should be no beggars among Christians. Just as images moved the pious to emotional identification with the sufferings of saints, and thereby distorted devotion, so beggars moved people to pity. The result was that they gave money not to those who needed it most, but to those whose plight most seized the senses. Karlstadt clearly realized the implications of abolishing begging for the university in Wittenberg; after all, it was customary for students to beg for their food and expenses. His conclusions were radical. If abolition of begging meant that students would no longer be able to study, did it matter? Children of pious parents would be better off being “sent back to their parents” and taught a useful trade, Karlstadt wrote: “How much better by far, that they learn the trade of their parents instead of begging for bread which makes them good for nothing other than to become papistical, uncouth, and untruthful priests.” These were strong words in a town so heavily dependent on the university. Karlstadt evidently meant them.31

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  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. 37 Luther’s anti-Semitism then reached a crescendo of physical revulsion. He imagined Jews kissing and praying to the Devil’s excrement: “the Devil has…emptied his stomach again and again, that is a true relic, which the Jews, and those who want to be a Jew, kiss, eat, drink and worship.” 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.” 38 Whenever Luther starts talking in this fashion, his deepest impulses are on display. This is no longer rational argument—he did not seriously 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 a 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 humor, 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. 39 The sow rolls about in muck, has no worries, and does not fear death: When the butcher comes, she is dead in a moment.

• From Satyricon (1)

  The arena of his activities is, however, that of Venus and not Mars. Petronius is fond of figurative language, and in several other passages, he has made use of the slang of the arena: (chap. 61 ), “I used to fence with my mistress herself, until even the master grew Suspicious”; and again, in chapter 19, he says: “then, too, we were girded higher, and I had so arranged matters that if we came to close quarters, I myself would engage Quartilla, Ascyltos the maid, and Giton the girl.” Dufour, in commentating upon this expression, Histoire de la Prostitution, vol. III, pp. 92 and 93, remarks: It is necessary to see in Petronius the abominable role which the “obscene gladiator” played; but the Latin itself is clear enough to describe all the secrets of the Roman debauch. “For some women,” says Petronius, in another passage, “will only kindle for canaille and cannot work up an appetite unless they see some slave or runner with his clothing girded up: a gladiator arouses one, or a mule driver, all covered with dust, or some actor posturing in some exhibition on the stage. My mistress belongs to this class, she jumps the fourteen rows from the stage to the gallery and looks for a lover among the gallery gods at the back.” On “cum fortiter faceres,” compare line 25 of the Oxford fragment of the sixth satire of Juvenal; “hic erit in lecto fortissimus,” which Housman has rendered “he is a valiant mattress-knight.” CHAPTER 17. “In our neighborhood there are so many Gods that it is easier to meet one of them than it is to find a man.” Quartilla is here smarting under the sting of some former lover’s impotence. Her remark but gives color to the charge that, owing to the universal depravity of Rome and the smaller cities, men were so worn out by repeated vicious indulgences that it was no easy matter for a woman to obtain satisfaction at their hands. “Galla, thou hast already led to the nuptial couch six or seven catamites; thou went seduced by their delicate coiffure and combed beards. Thou hast tried the loins and the members, resembling soaked leather, which could not be made to stand by all the efforts of the wearied hand; the pathic husband and effeminate bed thou desertest, but still thou fallest into similar couches. Seek out some one rough and unpolished as the Curii and Fabii, and savage in his uncouth rudeness; you will find one, but even this puritanical crew has its catamites. Galla, it is difficult to marry a real man.” Martial, vii, 57. “No faith is to be placed in appearances. What neighborhood does not reek with filthy practices’?” Juvenal, Sat. ii, 8.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Those who rejoice in the sins of others are avoiding their own sin, and they destroy not only the person of whom they speak ill but also those who are polluted by their poison. ‘If we do not consider our sin,’ Luther warned, ‘but see only the cover and veil of our external dealings, hiding our true inward self from others, then we become dirty with the excrement of others.” Hatred, envy and speaking ill of others clearly troubled Luther deeply — for they are among the ‘real knots’. It was not accidental that he drew on the language of demonology here, for the ultimate envier was the witch, who whips up storms, blasts the crops, destroys fertility, digs up dead and rotting bodies, and destroys prosperity and life. But the emotional pitch suggests that Luther too struggled with backbiting: quick to impute envy to others, Luther wrestled with his own feelings of envy, hate and aggression which he could all too readily turn against others, and which he therefore saw as the greatest obstacle to recognising God. It may be that this led to the sensations of utter unworthiness and anxiety that characterised his religiosity. It was Luther’s own internal ‘shit’ — his sinful nature — that created the barrier between himself and God. Although Luther does not say so here, the remedy for sin is confes- sion, as our failings are named and confessed before God. In this respect, this highly emotive sermon is a testament to the relationship with his own father-confessor, Staupitz. The sermon is also a psycho- logical document at a more profound level. By stopping just short of the point where the listener might have been comforted by the idea of confession, Luther leaves his audience, as it were, ‘in the shit’, having evoked in his hearers the kind of unbearable revulsion that was his own spiritual staple. It is almost the exact opposite of Staupitz’s 76 MARTIN LUTHER devotional style. The Gotha sermon takes us closer than any other testimony to the religious despair and overwhelming sinfulness that Luther felt as a monk. And it was at this point that he had begun to study Paul’s Letter to the Romans, an intellectual and devotional exercise that would transform his spirituality. 4 Wittenberg In 1511, probably under Staupitz’s orders, Luther had returned to the small town of Wittenberg in Saxony where he had spent a year of study in 1508-9, this time for good. Wittenberg would become the stage for Luther’s Reformation, which in turn transformed the town’s economy and social structure. An obscure university in an unknown corner of the empire became an institution of international renown to which students flocked in droves; and an insignificant town became a leading publishing centre.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But it also made a clear distinction between flesh and spirit, the inner and the outer, a theme that could already be discerned in his earlier writing on the adoration of the sacrament. Images, Karlstadt now argued, “point to nothing other than to mere flesh which is of no benefit.” The Word of God, however, “is spiritual”; “Christ says that his flesh is of no avail but that the spirit is of much value and gives life.” Consequently, “you will have to admit that one learns mere carnal living and much suffering from [images] and that they cannot lead beyond the flesh.” 29 It was the indeterminacy of images, and their ability to move the emotions, that had earlier both fascinated and irritated him. Karlstadt had been the first, after all, to employ visual polemic in the service of the Reformation when he published his “wagon cartoon” to ridicule Eck. Now he wrote passionately about what was wrong with images, in language suffused with sexual rhetoric: “Our eyes make love to [images] and court them. The truth is that all who honor images, seek their help, and worship them, are whores and adulterers.” He admitted that he had been seduced himself: “my heart has been trained since my youth to give honor and respect to images and such a dreadful fear has been instilled in me of which I would gladly rid myself, but cannot. Thus I am afraid to burn a single idol.” What emerges again from these lines is a very different approach to the body and to the physical world from that of Luther, a deep mistrust of the senses that could be readily allied to sexual puritanism. Indeed, such condemnation of images would become a powerful current within Calvinist Protestantism, leading to the destruction of centuries of Christian art in churches across Europe. 30 The same treatise also included a passage on begging, with Karlstadt explaining why there should be no beggars among Christians. Just as images moved the pious to emotional identification with the sufferings of saints, and thereby distorted devotion, so beggars moved people to pity. The result was that they gave money not to those who needed it most, but to those whose plight most seized the senses. Karlstadt clearly realized the implications of abolishing begging for the university in Wittenberg; after all, it was customary for students to beg for their food and expenses. His conclusions were radical. If abolition of begging meant that students would no longer be able to study, did it matter? Children of pious parents would be better off being “sent back to their parents” and taught a useful trade, Karlstadt wrote: “How much better by far, that they learn the trade of their parents instead of begging for bread which makes them good for nothing other than to become papistical, uncouth, and untruthful priests.” These were strong words in a town so heavily dependent on the university.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The folksy humor 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 that were akin to Judaism, and it is perhaps this proximity that triggered the violence of his assault: He had comparatively little to say about an afterlife; his religiosity put the importance of Scripture and exegesis of the Hebrew and Greek texts center stage; he downgraded the position of Mary so that Christianity no longer contained a female divine figure; and his remarkably positive attitude toward 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 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 many of his supporters but still went much further than most were prepared to go. In his immediate circle, Justus Jonas translated the tracts into Latin, ensuring that they could be read throughout Christendom. Even Martin Bucer, who thought that Jews should be loved above other nonbelievers, suggested that they should be made to clean privies to teach them humility when he drafted a “Jewish Ordinance” for Philip of Hesse in 1539: 40 But while Bucer wanted to ban the building of new synagogues, Luther wanted existing ones razed to the ground. At the Frankfurt Imperial Diet of 1539, Melanchthon had advocated readmitting the Jews to Brandenburg, from where they had been expelled in 1530. The Lutheran Urbanus Rhegius, whose wife had also learned Hebrew, consistently took a more tolerant line toward the Jews, interceding for a rabbi and asking the clergy of Braunschweig to oppose the expulsion of the Jewish community in 1540; while Andreas Osiander of Nuremberg bravely published a pamphlet (albeit anonymously) in which he rejected the blood libel after a ritual murder allegation surfaced in nearby Sappenfeld. 41 Luther’s old opponent Johannes Eck responded with a nearly two-hundred-page reply in which, like Luther, he repeated all the old allegations of poisoning and ritual murder. Yet even Eck argued that Jews should be tolerated, that they should be allowed to renovate existing synagogues, and that they should not be harmed, killed, or exiled. 42 Unpleasant as Eck’s diatribe was, it neither advocated the cultural annihilation contained in Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies nor displayed the phantasmagoric physicality of his Vom Schem Hamphoras . Nor was Luther’s virulence repeating earlier clichés. Medieval anti-Semitism had also often insisted on some toleration for Jews; Luther’s views were not a medieval relic but a development of it. Even more disturbing, it was not incidental to his theology, a lamentable prejudice taken over from contemporary attitudes.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Now, in Wittenberg, matters were moving apace as Karlstadt attacked monastic vows, first in a set of theses for debate, then in longer writings in both Latin and German. Luther not only read these tracts, but discussed them in letters to Melanchthon. 18 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. 19 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 antisexual. 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 adultery. 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. 20 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 designed by God for concupiscence. 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 . 21 When he issued it in German, and toned down much of the invective, Karlstadt included passages on the appropriate behavior of wives, which emphasize 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.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Throughout his later work, he unfailingly talks about Italians in negative terms, writing of the papal emissary Karl von Miltitz, for example, that as an “Italian” he was fond of flowery prose, while deceiving him with his warmth and friendliness. The one place where he seems to have felt at home in Rome was the German church of Santa Maria dell’Anima, where he thought that religious devotion was being properly carried out. In 1540 he gave a damning verdict: “By miraculous advice I came to Rome, so that I saw the head of all wickedness and the seat of the Devil.” 37 His initial excitement can be sensed from his recollection of arriving in the Eternal City: Luther flung himself on the ground, hailing the city hallowed by the blood of martyrs. 38 Rome in 1510 would have been a strange place, much of it a ghost town, with building having barely commenced on what would become the largest church in Christendom, St. Peter’s. Even the existing church, Luther later judged, was too big to preach in. 39 Rome’s medieval population was only a fraction of what it would have been in Roman times. Luther mentioned the catacombs and the hills but, for someone formed by the classics, he made surprisingly little reference to the classical heritage. He would have seen, however, just what ancient Rome had accomplished—and how far the sixteenth century was from equaling it. Buildings like the Colosseum and other antique ruins lay unused, their stone being carted off for St. Peter’s. Years later Luther still remembered that the Colosseum could accommodate 200,000 spectators, but only its foundations and some of its crumbling walls had been visible. 40 He recalled the oppressive Italian nights and the resulting nightmares. Desperately thirsty, and knowing that the water was polluted, the monks were advised to eat pomegranates to cure their headaches, and by this fruit “God saved our lives.” 41 For the young Luther, a papal loyalist, Rome was a trove of religious benefits. “We ran to Rome…” he wrote in 1535, “and the Pope gave indulgence for it, this is all forgotten now, but those who were stuck in it will not forget it.” 42 His monthlong visit to the “seat of the Devil” became the source for many later anecdotes over dinner. Two in particular stand out. Luther was astonished how fast the priests would say Mass, reciting six or seven Masses for payment before he had even got to the end of his first. One cleric shoved him out of the way, telling him to hurry up and “send her son back home to Our Lady”—that is, to clear things up so they would be ready for the next Mass.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The debate concluded with a series of exchanges between Eck and Karlstadt, with the latter insisting again that all human action is sinful. Even the saints do evil, Karlstadt proclaimed, that is, “they feel evil desires in nature,” and these will not cease so long as we are clothed in mortality; only when death is swallowed in victory will it be possible to have a pure, good will without evil desire. Good works, he went so far as to say, were utterly “impure,” like the “filth” that pours out of women’s bodies—menstrual blood being the most shocking and revolting comparison he could think of. Eck retorted that if all good works were evil, confession itself would be pointless and humans would not need to do anything to ensure their own salvation—they could eat, drink, and be merry, leaving it all to God. This was a crude travesty of Karlstadt’s position. But it revealed how uncomfortable the new ideas could be, and how difficult it was to accommodate them to familiar views of human nature.30 The idea of the sinfulness of all human action had by now become central to early Reformation thinking. It is a difficult concept to grasp, but it is evidently an idea that a man like Karlstadt found liberating. It could lead to a very negative conception of humanity, and to hostility to the flesh, as it did in Karlstadt’s case. Not so in Luther’s, for whom it led to a surprisingly positive attitude toward physicality. Behind it lies the idea, familiar too from psychoanalytic thinking now, that all our actions, even the ones we think stem from the most laudable of motives and of which we feel most proud, are tainted with sin—or as we might put it today, can involve quite murky psychic drives, such as anger, pride, or envy. Therefore, far from being something that might be piled up to make the sinner acceptable to God and help reach salvation, good works can do nothing to make us other than what we are—imperfect people. But while Karlstadt and Luther denied that human beings had free will, Eck argued that this would lead to antinomianism—a state of affairs where people reject all laws and commit all sorts of sin. This matter would soon become a major fissure within Reformation thought.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Yet while its origins had a practical purpose, the sermon hardly reads like a response to a particular incident, still less a tactical sally in a dispute within the order.70 It shows Luther backing up his superior, but also signals how the two men differed. It employs a style that is almost a mirror version of Staupitz’s own devotional approach, for, like Staupitz he uses sensually overwhelming allegories in quick succession, but whereas the older man deploys this technique to create a sense of meditative reflection on God’s love, Luther exploits it to propel his hearer into an unbearable world of existential disgust and abandonment. The sermon takes us closer than any other testimony to the religious despair and overwhelming sinfulness that Luther felt as a monk. To make his point about envy, Luther compares the backbiter to a murderer and to a debaucher, using language that goes far beyond the biblical text to make the hearer experience revulsion. Just as the Word of God is holy seed, which conceives in the spirit purely and without violation, so by contrast the word of the backbiter is the adulterous and spurious seed of the Devil, corrupting the listener’s soul; indeed, the very name of the Devil is backbiter.71 Backbiters are “poisoners” and “witches,” Luther says, who “bewitch” and “subvert” the ears of their listeners.72 Just as witches can impede the sexual act and prevent conception, so the backbiter can destroy a community by poisoning relations between individuals, and he who was once loved and “embraced” is rejected. To be in good odor is to have a good reputation, which is born from without; to be in bad odor is to have a bad name, which comes from the ordure within. The backbiter does not allow the ordure of others to remain hidden but loves “to roll in it” like a pig. He is like the bird who hops about in muck so that people say, “Look how he has shit himself,” to which the best response is: “eat it yourself.”73 In the most lurid of all the comparisons, Luther describes how backbiters are like hyenas or dogs who dig up stinking human corpses, pullulating with decay and full of worms, and bite into them—“Ugh, what a dreadful monster the backbiter is!”74

• 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 Martin Luther (2016)

  The other minority that had been expunged from Wittenberg were the Jews. Myths of the “blood libel” were still current at the time, especially in southern Germany, where Jewish communities were regularly accused of kidnapping Christian children and killing them for their blood to use in religious ceremonies. In Wittenberg, anti-Semitism had a different coloring. The main parish church was situated just behind the town hall, and it was here that the town’s prominent citizens were buried. High up on the outside of the building, there is a stone sculpture of a “Jewish sow” dating probably from the 1280s. It shows a large sow with dangling teats, which are suckled by two Jews, recognizable in their distinctive hats and with the yellow circles on their garments that they, like prostitutes, were forced to wear. Another grips a piglet by the ears and tries to ride it, while a fourth large Jew has his head close to the sow’s backside. The sculpture suggests that the Jews are not only pigs themselves but that they look into the pig’s anus. The statue is supposed to ward them off, placing the Jews like demons and gargoyles on the church’s external face.7 [image "13. The Jewish sow on the outside of the Wittenberg parish church." file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_018_r1.jpg] [image "13. The Jewish sow on the outside of the Wittenberg parish church." file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_018_r1.jpg] 13. The Jewish sow on the outside of the Wittenberg parish church. The Jews had been expelled from Wittenberg in 1304, but the existence of a “Jews street” in the center of the town—as in so many other German towns—testifies to their former presence.8 Indeed, one of the four quarters into which the town was divided for military and taxation purposes was still called the “Jews’ quarter” in Luther’s time. Jews populated many of the villages in the surrounding countryside. When Luther traveled the route to Eisleben from Wittenberg in the last months of his life, he was terrified by passing through villages with “scores” of Jewish inhabitants, writing to his wife that he feared their breath had made him ill.9 Like many other towns where pogroms had taken place in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the expulsion of the Jews was linked to a powerful revival in devotion to Mary, whom Christians believed Jews dishonored: The parish church at Wittenberg was dedicated to her.10

• From Satyricon (1)

  “When he had thus upbraided him, his sons being brought into his presence, Panionius was compelled to castrate his own sons, who were four in number; and, being compelled, he did it; and after he had finished it, his sons, being compelled, castrated him. Thus did vengeance and Hermotimus overtake Panionius.” Herodotus, viii, ch. 105-6. Mention of the Galli, the emasculated priests of Cybebe should be made. Emasculation was a necessary first condition of service in her worship. (Catullus, Attys.) The Latin literature of the silver and bronze ages contains many references to castration. Juvenal and Martial have lavished bitter scorn upon this form of degradation, and Suetonius and Statius inform us that Domitian prohibited the practice, but it is in the “Amoures” attributed to Lucian that we find a passage so closely akin to the one forming a basis of this note, that it is inserted in extenso: “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.” The jealous Roman husband’s furious desire to prevent the consequences of his wife’s incontinence was by no means well served by the use of such agents; on the contrary, the women themselves profited by the arrangement. By means of these eunuchs, they edited the morals of their maids and hampered the sodomitical hankerings, active or otherwise, of their husbands: Martial, xii, 54: but when the passions and suspicions of both heads of the family were mutually aroused, the eunuchs fanned them into flame and gained the ascendancy in the home. They even went so far as to marry: Martial, xi, 82, and Juvenal, i, 22.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  29 The debate concluded with a series of exchanges between Eck and Karlstadt, with the latter insisting again that all human action is sinful. Even the saints do evil, Karlstadt proclaimed, that is, “they feel evil desires in nature,” and these will not cease so long as we are clothed in mortality; only when death is swallowed in victory will it be possible to have a pure, good will without evil desire. Good works, he went so far as to say, were utterly “impure,” like the “filth” that pours out of women’s bodies—menstrual blood being the most shocking and revolting comparison he could think of. Eck retorted that if all good works were evil, confession itself would be pointless and humans would not need to do anything to ensure their own salvation—they could eat, drink, and be merry, leaving it all to God. This was a crude travesty of Karlstadt’s position. But it revealed how uncomfortable the new ideas could be, and how difficult it was to accommodate them to familiar views of human nature. 30 The idea of the sinfulness of all human action had by now become central to early Reformation thinking. It is a difficult concept to grasp, but it is evidently an idea that a man like Karlstadt found liberating. It could lead to a very negative conception of humanity, and to hostility to the flesh, as it did in Karlstadt’s case. Not so in Luther’s, for whom it led to a surprisingly positive attitude toward physicality. Behind it lies the idea, familiar too from psychoanalytic thinking now, that all our actions, even the ones we think stem from the most laudable of motives and of which we feel most proud, are tainted with sin—or as we might put it today, can involve quite murky psychic drives, such as anger, pride, or envy. Therefore, far from being something that might be piled up to make the sinner acceptable to God and help reach salvation, good works can do nothing to make us other than what we are—imperfect people. But while Karlstadt and Luther denied that human beings had free will, Eck argued that this would lead to antinomianism—a state of affairs where people reject all laws and commit all sorts of sin. This matter would soon become a major fissure within Reformation thought. Leipzig was a defeat for Luther, as he bitterly recognized when he told Lang that Eck was boasting of victory. 31 His supporters tried to put a positive gloss on the affair; Mosellanus proclaimed that “Eck triumphed with all who either follow like donkeys and understood nothing of the whole matter…or who wished the Wittenbergers ill for some other reason,” while Amsdorf wrote to a friend that comparing Eck with Luther would be likening “stone or rather dung” with “the most beautiful and finest gold.”

• From Satyricon (1)

  vi, 331) “some water carrier will come, hired for the purpose,” and many Roman ladies had their own slaves accompany them to the baths to assist in the toilette: (Martial, vii, 3.4) “a slave girt about the loins with a pouch of black leather stands by you whenever you are washed all over with warn water,” here, the mistress is taking no chances, her rights are as carefully guarded as though the slave were infibulated in place of having his generous virility concealed within a leather pouch. (Claudianus, 18, 106) “he combed his mistress’ hair, and often, when she bathed, naked, he would bring water, to his lady, in a silver ewer.” Several of the emperors attempted to correct these evils by executive order and legislation, Hadrian (Spartianus, Life of Hadrian, chap. 18) “he assigned separate baths for the two sexes”; Marcus Aurelius (Capitolinus, Life of Marcus Antoninus, chap. 23) “he abolished the mixed baths and restrained the loose habits of the Roman ladies and the young nobles,” and Alexander Severus (Lampridius, Life of Alex. Severus, chap. 24.) “he forbade the opening of mixed baths at Rome, a practice which, though previously prohibited, Heliogabalus had allowed to be observed,” but, notwithstanding their absolute authority, their efforts along those lines met with little better success than have those of more recent times. The pages of Martial and Juvenal reek with the festering sores of the society of that period, but Charidemus and Hedylus still dishonor the cities of the modern world. Tatian, writing in the second century, says (Orat. ad Graecos): “paederastia is practiced by the barbarians generally, but is held in pre-eminent esteem by the Romans, who endeavor to get together troupes of boys, as it were of brood mares,” and Justin Martyr (Apologia, 1), has this to say: “first, because we behold nearly all men seducing to fornication, not merely girls, but males also. And just as our fathers are spoken of as keeping herds of oxen, or goats, or sheep, or brood mares, so now they keep boys, solely for the purpose of shameful usage, treating them as females, or androgynes, and doing unspeakable acts. To such a pitch of pollution has the multitude throughout the whole people come!” Another sure indication of the prevalence of the vice of sodomy is to be found in Juvenal, Sat. ii, 12-13, “but your fundament is smooth and the swollen haemorrhoids are incised, the surgeon grinning the while,” just as the physician of the nineties grinned when some young fool came to him with a blennorrhoeal infection! The ancient jest which accounts for the shaving of the priest’s crown is an inferential substantiation of the fact that the evils of antiquity, like the legal codes, have descended through the generations; survived the middle ages, and been transmitted to the modern world.

• From Satyricon (1)

  “Therefore, if you are convinced by my arguments, let us, men and women, keep ourselves apart, as if a wall divided us; but, if it is becoming for men to have intercourse with men, for the future let women have intercourse with women. Come, O new generation, inventor of strange pleasures! As you have devised new methods to satisfy male lust, grant the same privilege to women; let them have intercourse with one another like men, girding themselves with the infamous instruments of lust, an unholy imitation of a fruitless union; in a word, let our wanton Tribads reign unchecked, and let our women’s chambers be disgraced by hermaphrodites. Far better that a woman, in the madness of her lust, should usurp the nature of a man, than that man’s noble nature should be so degraded as to play the woman!” IV. Embasicetas fut bientot au comble de ses voeux. The Catamite soon reached the height of his passion. The theologians class this species of lascivious feeling with pollution which is complete when it produces a result. The Holy Scripture tells us of Onan, son of Judas, grandson of Jacob, and husband of Thamar, who was slain by the Lord because he spilled his semen, “he poured his semen upon the ground.” We may be reproached, perhaps, for citing the Holy Bible too frequently, but that book contains the knowledge of salvation, and those who wish to be saved should not fail to study it with assiduity. That this study has occupied a good part of our life, we admit, and we have always found that study profitable. To vigorous minds that admission may seem ridiculous, but we are writing only for pious souls, and they will willingly applaud this courageous profession of our piety. The theologians have also classified onanism and pollution among the sins against the Holy Ghost, and this being the case, there is no being in the world who has been sinned against so often. A medium indulgence in this sin furnished the pleasure of a queen, the severity of one Lucretia does not repel a thousand Tarquins. Men with vivid imaginations create for themselves a paradise peopled with the most beautiful houris, more seductive than those of Mahomet; Lycoris had a beautiful body but it was unfeeling; the imagination of her lover pictured her as falling before his caresses, he led her by the hand over pressed flowers, through a thick grove and along limpid streams; in that sweet reverie his life slipped by. Here icy cold fountains, here flower covered meadows, Lycoris; Here shady groves; life itself here would I dream out with thee. Virgil Bucol. Ecl. X, 41. In the minds of the theologians pollution is synonymous with all pleasures with persons of the opposite or the same sex, which result in a waste of the elixir of life. In this sense, love between woman and woman is pollution and Sappho is a sinner against the Holy Ghost.