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 Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  In one sense Clement exalted the institution of marriage, by picking up the metaphor from the letter to the Ephesians in seeing it as reflecting the monogamous relationship that the Church enjoys with Christ. The idea of a woman remarrying after the death of her partner infringed the simplicity of the trope; grudgingly Clement allowed that it might happen. However, remarriage after divorce was unthinkable, a collapse into ‘fornication’ or adultery against Christ. [40] This was a very different melding of the New Testament and the Greek philosophical tradition from the broodings of young Epiphanes. Looming behind Clement was Philo Judaeus, whose prose often reappears in Clement’s writings, unreferenced. Unsurprisingly amid Clement’s borrowings from Philo came the familiar Hellenistic Jewish circumscribing of what was approved sex even within marriage: heterosexual sexual acts should be solely for the purposes of procreation. In turn Philo had borrowed that principle from a particular strand in Greek philosophy already four centuries old by his own time, since it derived from Pythagoras. [41] Clement followed Philo, also explicitly noting that Pythagoreans make love ‘only for procreation, not for pleasure’ with their wives; it is significant that Clement even called Philo ‘the Pythagorean’. Yet Clement still advanced the Pythagorean and Philonic procreational rule on sex as if it was to be found in Paul’s epistles and the New Testament generally, which it is not. [42] What might be seen as the ‘Alexandrian rule’ of procreationism in marriage, beginning with Clement, has had a long afterlife in Christian thought. It still lies embedded in official Roman Catholic marriage doctrine, particularly in opposition to contraception. Other Alexandrians echoed Clement, perhaps via alternative theological and philosophical routes. Justin Martyr for instance had been taught by Pythagoreans in Alexandria and may not have needed Philo to link him to their conclusions that there was no middle way between sexual intercourse for pleasure or complete continence. Justin’s negative views on sexual pleasure also align with the rhetorical contrast that we have already noted him pioneering on the roles of Eve and Mary in losing and regaining salvation. [43] Like Justin, Origen did not share his teacher Clement’s preoccupation with Philo, but in line with what may have been his personal physical enactment of negativity on sex, Origen made a remarkable extension to a comment by Paul of Tarsus. Paul had suggested that married couples might agree to suspend their ‘marital debt’ to each other for a while to devote themselves to prayer (1 Cor. 7.5). If prayer was thus incompatible with sex, Origen suggested that ‘perhaps the same consideration should apply, if possible, to the place’; in other words, people should not pray in a building where sexual activity had taken place. It is worth speculating that if others in the third century hearkened to Origen’s squeamishness about this, it could be the origin of Christians embarking on a programme of constructing separate buildings called churches: spaces for prayer free of any possible sexual taint.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  As he consolidated his power, he became more brazen, infusing his sermons with graphic sexual material to the point that they seemed vulgar, even “pornographic.” In 2010, in front of thousands of teenagers gathered for a youth conference, Schaap preached a sermon on the “Polished Shaft.” Holding a shaft of an arrow in one hand and a cloth in another, he placed the stick near his groin and simulated masturbation; by “yielding to God,” by allowing God to “polish his shaft,” promised pleasures would be his. When the video was posted on YouTube, viewers found the display shocking; to members of First Baptist, “it was all in a day’s preaching.”28 In 2012, Schaap pleaded guilty to crossing state lines to have sex with a sixteen-year-old girl he was counseling. Investigations revealed “a deeply embedded culture of misogyny and sexual and physical abuse” at First Baptist. More than a dozen men with connections to the church—including several preaching in churches across the country—were implicated in a series of lawsuits and arrests involving rape, sexual molestation, and the abuse of children. A “cultlike culture” led to a culture of corruption, including “pedophilia, violence, defamation of the innocent to protect the guilty . . . defiance against lawful authority.” This institutional culture caused “good people,” sincere Christians who had “hearts for the Lord,” to defend and enable abusers. Even after Schaap’s conviction, many of these “good people” blamed his victim, whom they labeled a “temptress.”29 DESPITE MOUNTING EVIDENCE to the contrary, in the early 2000s many evangelicals persisted in the belief that sexual abuse was a problem plaguing the Catholic church, and that any instances within their own communities were exceptions that proved the rule. But in 2018, the #MeToo movement came to American evangelicalism. The increasing frequency and scale of revelations of abuse within their own circles made this assertion more difficult to sustain. It started after Jules Woodson, inspired by the larger cultural reckoning, sent her former youth pastor Andy Savage an email holding him accountable for sexually assaulting her nearly two decades earlier, when she was seventeen. In front of his Memphis megachurch, in a highly orchestrated event that couched his trespass in terms of redemption, Savage confessed to a “sexual incident”; members responded with a standing ovation. Caught on video, this jarring response prompted a backlash among outside observers, garnering the attention of the New York Times and other media outlets. In light of the outrage, Savage resigned his pastorate and decided to step away from ministry.30 Weeks later, Willow Creek megachurch pastor Bill Hybels was in the news after seven women accused him of sexual misconduct and abuse of power. Allegations went back decades, but the church had failed to address them. When the story broke, church leadership initially cast doubt on the women’s stories, and Hybels, too, received a standing ovation from his congregation. Accumulating evidence eventually forced his resignation. Hybels represented the more progressive wing of evangelicalism, demonstrating that egalitarians were not immune to sexual misconduct.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  called from their Hospital headquarters in Jerusalem, and the Templars from the monumental sacred building that they annexed in the city under the mistaken impression that it was the Temple as built by Herod – it was in fact the seventh-century Muslim Dome of the Rock. The military Orders became wealthy from being endowed with estates right across Europe, on which they established administrative communities of knights (preceptories or commanderies), frequently reproducing the centrally planned Dome of the Rock or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the plan of their church buildings – a symbol in stone of the new acceptance of warfare as part of God’s purpose. At the end of the twelfth century an Order of ‘Teutonic Knights’ from German and north European lands joined the same work of defending Crusader conquests in the Holy Land, just in time to witness them disintegrate; that forced them to turn back to northern Europe to fight other enemies. Not all contemporary commentators were blind to how incongruous the military Orders looked in the light of Christian tradition, and failure made them vulnerable. The loss of any foothold in the Holy Land in the thirteenth century forced all the Orders to rethink their mission, and it also made the secular rulers and nobility of Europe regret their forebears’ generosity in furnishing the landed endowments. In the case of the Templars, the wealthiest of the trio, the consequence was disgrace and destruction at the hands of the French monarchy in 1307–12. [15] Throughout the medieval period, Crusades continued on the frontiers of Latin Christianity in Europe, and Crusader rhetoric was still useful when European Catholic powers began expanding beyond Europe’s boundaries in the fifteenth century. One curious little symptom of it in later medieval Europe is the use of a popular song, ‘The Armed Man’ (L’Homme armé), as the thematic basis for choral settings of the Mass. It seems bizarre that this warlike tune should have so fascinated Western musicians writing for choirs singing the nodal points of Christianity’s central devotional act, but for three centuries beginning with the much-revered Guillaume Dufay (c.1398–1474), the Mass L’Homme armé became something like a proof of proficiency for choral composers. Perhaps Christ could be seen as the Armed Man, just as Bishop Humbaud had seen him at Auxerre, or perhaps it was the militant Archangel Michael, on whose feast day such Masses were often performed. The tradition finally slipped from the interest of composers in the seventeenth century along with the fading of any practicality in the Crusader ideal. [16] The ignominious failure of monastic knights to defend the Crusader conquests up to the final loss of Crete has nevertheless not extinguished Western Christian fascination with Holy War, including much modern muddle-headed conspiracy theory inspired by the messily brutal dénouement of the Templars’ story.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  To begin with, the developing Christian hierarchy was not certain how to react to this zeal for castration; should it be commended as demonstrating Christian self-control? Thus the Athenian convert and philosopher Athenagoras, addressing his Plea for the Christians to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius in the mid-170s, emphasized that ‘remaining in virginity and in the state of a eunuch brings one nearer to God.’ [8] At what point did rhetoric shade into practice? Justin Martyr, pioneer among the second-century literary defenders of Christianity now known as apologists, sympathetically described the disappointment of a young man in Alexandria who petitioned the Roman governor in the city for permission to seek castration from surgeons, to show to the world how far Christians were from indulging in free love. The governor rejected the proposal, leaving him to be ‘satisfied with his own approving conscience, and the approval of those who thought as he did’. [9] The Emperor Antoninus Pius was the notional reader of this apology, so Justin must have believed that elite Romans would have found the tale impressive rather than risible. In a slightly later generation in Alexandria, the brilliant speculative theologian and biblical commentator Origen is said actually to have undergone castration through similar youthful enthusiasm. Yet during the course of the third century Christian official mood-music on voluntary castration changed, and the fourth-century Church historian Eusebios (Eusebius), author of an admiring biography of Origen, reports the story with a mixture of embarrassment and defiant commendation – a confusion that probably indicates its genuineness. [10] Among Syrian ascetics, the loudest encratite voice was Tatian, who had been a student in Rome with Justin Martyr. His conversion to Christianity after an immersion in Hellenistic philosophy and thought involved his dismissing the Graeco-Roman divine pantheon not as fictional, but as active current enemies of the Christian God. The combat was most dramatically expressed in Tatian’s rejection of the whole Graeco-Roman construction of sexuality that we have surveyed (above, Chapter 3), for among the worst of all the Gods of Olympus was Aphrodite, promoter of sexual attraction throughout creation. Caught up in Tatian’s loathing of Aphrodite was the ancient Greek poet Sappho, not for any understanding of her as lesbian, but because of the general eroticism of her verse. ‘Sappho, the sex-mad and cheap little whore, sings licentiousness about herself,’ he snarled. [11] Accordingly, Tatian radically developed his reading of Paul of Tarsus into statements that all those indulging in sexual acts, even in marriage, are ‘enslaved...to sexual fornication and to the devil’. Adam’s disobedience to God was a direct result of his sexual coupling with Eve. [12] 7. Adding later preoccupations to Origen’s story, a late fifteenth-century French MS of the Roman de la Rose satirically depicts him emasculating himself to share a bed with nuns without arousing suspicion. In the background, the pre-Christian Greek philosopher Empedocles prepares to throw himself into flames in an unsuccessful effort to prove his immortality to his disciples.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  After further political confusion in the Western Empire, Theodosius also seized power there in 392, and he had no hesitation in confronting the last resource of traditional strength in the senatorial aristocracy of the ancient capital Rome. That continued his previous policy in the East of ending all privileges for ancient priesthoods and closing temples wherever he could. Theodosius’s determination to tip the scales of society in favour of Christians had been startlingly witnessed in 388, when he forbade Christians and Jews to marry together, making it a crime on a par with adultery (which in theory carried the death penalty). This was the first time that Roman law had yoked marriage to confessional identity. ‘Christian marriage’, glimpsed in the writings of the Apostle Paul, was now an enforceable legal reality, subject to coercion. [9] * Among Theodosius’s other actions against previously sacrosanct customs was the ending of the Olympic Games in 393, after which celebration of the traditional divine pantheon, the Emperor closed them down for good. In Antioch, similar games lingered till 520, but by then the Greek custom of male athletes exercising naked had long ceased. [10] This end to the Classical cult of the male body was a fitting symbol of one of the most significant changes to Graeco-Roman society when the Empire officially turned Christian. Church leaders now had a chance to criminalize the centuries-old practice of male same-sex relations, condemned in New Testament Epistles from Paul of Tarsus and a successor-writer, and attacked thereafter (somewhat repetitively) by later generations of Christian writers. [11] Theodosius’s edict on the subject, issued jointly with his pliable co-emperors in 390, is first preserved in the contemporary writings of an anonymous Latin Christian author who was anxious to demonstrate how the Law of Moses in the Hebrew Bible agreed with Roman law – this eccentric project influenced Western Christian attitudes to law for centuries, including on sexual matters. [12] The Emperor made clear his revulsion that a soul enshrined in a body of male sexual characteristics should turn that masculine body to female sexual positions. This was taking traditional Roman disapproval of passive male intercourse and giving it a new spiritual dimension. In its condemnation of ‘the poison of shameful effeminacy’ enfeebling Roman society, Theodosius’s decree left far behind the assumptions about masculinity that once had constituted the rationale behind the heroic same-sex Theban Band. As a result, the imperial authorities rounded up male prostitutes in Rome’s same-sex brothels. It may be that those arrested suffered the penalty of being burned alive in public; certainly that was enacted in a revised version of Theodosius’s decree incorporated in a comprehensive codification of Roman law by his fifth-century namesake Theodosius II, which also extended the punishment to all passive males.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Unsurprisingly his visceral reaction spawned some hilarious efforts at biblically based argument: for instance, his typological contention to Jovinian that since Jesus only attended one wedding (at Cana, in John’s Gospel) the Saviour had taught that people should only marry once. [6] Faced with an uncongenial contrary opinion from what he would have regarded as Paul’s first letter to Timothy (5.14), which strongly advises widows to remarry, Jerome countered it with an appeal to Genesis: just as Noah’s Ark had contained animals both clean and unclean, a remarried widow would have to make do with being an unclean person within the Christian ark. Besides – in a rapid improvisation on one of his favourite tropes – the Parable of the Sower only included in its grain harvest the three categories of virgins, widows and the married, so anyone twice-married would be left merely as an anomalous tare lurking in the wheat. [7] Naturally the Book of Ruth, that charming Old Testament story of a young widow who finds happiness in a second marriage, not to mention a son who was among the ancestors of David and Jesus, did not feature prominently in Jerome’s recommended reading on the subject. Jerome wrote to at least three widows in his circle of admirers pleading with (or hectoring) them not to remarry. In 394 he addressed the young widow Furia: inevitably hugely wealthy, and actually sister-in-law to his unfortunate protégée Blesilla. His scatological remarks to Furia on wedlock bear repetition in Jane Barr’s translation, brusquely improving on the delicacy of some standard versions: You’ve already learned the miseries of marriage...It’s like unwholesome food, and now that you have relieved your heaving stomach of its bile, why should you return to it again...‘like a dog to its vomit’?...Perhaps you are afraid that your noble race will die out, and your father will not have a brat to crawl about his shoulders and smear his neck with filth. The image of excrement dripping down Grandpa’s neck effortlessly outshines Cyril Connolly’s pram in the hallway as a symbol of marriage’s threat to the

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Five months from now, in April 2014, Benioff will announce plans to make Salesforce.com the anchor tenant for a new skyscraper that is already under construction in San Francisco. Salesforce.com will commit $560 million to help finish work on the one-thousand-foot glass-and-steel skyscraper, which will become the company’s headquarters and be named the Salesforce Tower. When it opens in 2018, it will be the tallest building in the city, dwarfing everything around it. Maybe Benioff is oblivious to the phallic symbolism, or maybe he doesn’t care, or maybe—and this is my theory—he knows exactly what he’s doing and he loves it. Mine’s bigger! It’s the biggest! For P. T. Benioff there is no end to the extravagant spending. At the 2015 Dreamforce he docks a one-thousand-foot-long luxury ocean liner at pier 27 to serve as a hotel and party space—the Dreamboat, he calls it. Salesforce.com still isn’t turning a profit, but thanks to Benioff’s huffing and puffing Salesforce.com’s market value has topped $50 billion and Benioff’s own net worth has swollen to $4 billion. Benioff has invented a form of financial alchemy, one where he makes money by losing money. The more Benioff squanders on parties, the richer he gets. Looking down from my hotel window in November 2013, I realize that things are playing out exactly the way Tad, my investment banker friend, told me they would when I met him for a drink just one year ago at Anchor & Hope. This is what a trillion-dollar wealth transfer looks like. Across the country, in New York, bonuses on Wall Street are going to be the highest they’ve been since 2007, before the crash. In 2013, there will be more IPOs than in any year since the dotcom bubble peaked in 2000, and in 2014 there will be even more, according to Renaissance Capital, a company that tracks the IPO market. Surely it cannot end well when a bunch of money-losing companies go racing into the public markets, and when risk that previously was confined to private investors gets shifted onto the public. Nevertheless, the Fed keeps printing money, and the stock market keeps going up. The ducks are quacking, and the VCs are racing for the exits, launching IPOs as fast as they can. Somehow I find myself sitting in the middle of the maelstrom. Part of me finds the whole thing appalling. But another part still hopes to profit from it. Fourteen Meet the New Boss I’m still in San Francisco when I get an urgent message from Wingman asking me to call him. There’s some big news, he tells me. The company is about to announce an important new hire—a guy named Trotsky. Trotsky will oversee HubSpot’s content operations and thus will now be my boss, instead of Wingman. On the phone, Wingman keeps talking about Trotsky as if he’s a celebrity.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  and 3 rd centuries, did not have a huge impact on society at large. Most people were neither Jew nor Christian, so the squabbles were ultimately of little moment outside the small circles of Christianity. All that changed, of course, with the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine to Christianity in the 4 th century A.D. Thereafter, it become quite popular to be Christian, and Christianity, as a result, eventually had the power of the entire empire behind it. At that point, Christian animosity toward Judaism took on a fevered pitch and Christians had the wherewithal, at last, to act out their animosity. Synagogues were burned, property was con¿ scated, Jews were killed. This was the beginning of one of the most heinous chapters in the history of Christianity, from the anti-Semitism dominant among Christian countries throughout the Middle Ages to the climax in our own time with the unspeakable crimes of the Holocaust. The Book of Hebrews, of course, does not urge acts of anti-Semitism. It stands only at the beginning of a trajectory of thought that leads to anti- Semitism. In fact, it’s clear from the book that it is the Christians at the time who have been experiencing persecution—possibly at the hands of Jews, who near the end of the 1 st century were far more numerous and powerful than the Christians, but more likely at the hands of local governmental authorities (cf., 10:32–34). This author is urging his hearers not to fall away from the faith in the midst of their suffering, not to turn away into a more protected religion, such as Judaism. Those who neglect the salvation provided by Christ, who return to the outside world after joining the Church, will receive a fearful and eternal punishment (2:1–4; 3:7–18; 10:27–29). Ŷ 116 Lecture 21: The Book of Hebrews and the Rise of Christian Anti-Semitism The Epistle to the Hebrews. Brown, Introduction to the New Testament, chap. 32. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction, chap. 24. Sandmel, Anti-Semitism in the New Testament. Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism. Lindars, The Theology of the Letter to the Hebrews. Ruether, Faith and Fratricide. 1. Choose several of the important ¿ gures we have considered in this course—e.g., Jesus, Matthew, Luke, Paul, the author of Hebrews—and discuss ways in which they can be seen as both Jewish and anti-Jewish. Do you see anything that you would label “anti-Semitism” in the New Testament? 2. We saw in an earlier lecture that pagan religions were mostly tolerant of one another, none of them making “exclusivistic” claims for itself. Christianity seems, though, to be different. Do you think Christianity is necessarily exclusivistic (i.e., that it necessarily has to claim that it alone is “true” and “right”)? Is it necessarily intolerant? Is there any way an exclusivistic religion could still be tolerant? Essential Reading Supplemental Reading Questions to Consider

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  It opens with a good deal of specificity around drunkenness or gluttony, particularly coping with the distressing possibility of vomiting up a consecrated host (forty days’ fasting penance, or a hundred if a dog gobbles up the vomit). Cummean’s swift transition on to sex enumerates penitential payback for an array of carefully specified sexual activities: for instance, a year’s penance for bestiality; for a layperson masturbating, penance throughout the three forty-day annual penitential seasons (only one season for young teenagers) or, for clergy, a whole year of penance. ‘Those who befoul their lips’, that is indulge in oral sex, earn four years of penance, or if they persist, seven years, which is also the penalty for acts of ‘sodomy’. ‘Femoral’ (intercrural or maybe lesbian) intercourse only merits two years’ penance. Among other punishments there is a good deal of banning conjugal relations for set periods, but Cummean also specifies those liturgical and medical days on which any husband and wife should not have sex at all, amounting to around two-thirds of a calendar year. After enumerating some thirty-three different sexual and sinful possibilities (including subdivisions, mostly with male perpetrators in mind), Cummean turns no doubt with relief to avarice, but once he has covered all John Cassian’s eight (rather than the later seven) ‘Deadly Sins’, it is back to coping with a range of mostly sexual offences for boys and men living together in monastic communities. The Abbot displays a gloomy awareness of what might be possible, for instance in single or mutual masturbation, sexual activity between older and younger boys (worse if the younger boy enjoys it), intercrural sex, bestiality, and even youthful simulation of heterosexual intercourse (on this, twenty days of penance, forty for recidivists). Unpleasant personal habits are folded into these regulations, which overall give the appearance of being just as interested in curbing bad behaviour and lack of consideration for others as in denouncing sin. [19] Tariff books were thus from the outset remarkably comprehensive, as well as providing a fascinating index of official opinion about the relative seriousness of particular transgressions in the penances specified. They guided pastoral advice in both Western and Eastern Christianity into modern times, forming new common ground between Catholicism and Orthodoxy when so much else in Christian practice was diverging between the two communions. [20] No doubt penitentials represented a clerical ideal difficult to enforce, and maybe their detailed case law was a tribute to the vivid imaginations of priestly confessors anxious to provide cover for any situation. It would be unwise to have given potential penitents ideas by asking them too many leading questions, so a sensible priest would have been selective in confession. Nevertheless, the penitentials do suggest the rich variety of potential sin available to early medieval Irish folk and their successors, in sexual matters as in much else.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  On the last day of creation, he “saw everything that he had made, and indeed it was very good.” 143 This god had no enemies: he blessed every one of his creatures, even his old enemy Leviathan. This principled benevolence is all the more remarkable when we consider that the community of exiles was under almost constant attack by hostile groups in Judea. When Nehemiah, dispatched from the Persian court to supervise the rebuilding of Jerusalem, was overseeing the restoration of the city wall, each of the laborers “did his work with one hand while gripping his weapon with the other.” 144 The priestly writers could not afford to be antiwar but they seem troubled by military violence. They deleted some of the most belligerent episodes in the Deuteronomist history and brushed over Joshua’s conquests. They told the stories of David’s chivalric warfare but omitted his grim order to kill the blind and lame in Jerusalem, and it was the Chronicler who explained that David was forbidden to build the temple because he had shed too much blood. They also recorded a story about a military campaign against the Midianites, who had enticed the Israelites into idolatry. 145 There was no doubt that it was a just cause, and the Israelite armies behaved in perfect accordance with Deuteronomist law: the priests led the troops into battle, and the soldiers killed the Midianite kings, set fire to their town, and condemned to death both the married women who had tempted the Israelites and the boys who would grow up to be warriors. But even though they had “cleansed” Israel, they had been tainted by this righteous bloodshed. “You must camp for seven days outside the camp,” Moses told the returning warriors: “Purify yourselves, you and your prisoners.” 146 In one remarkable story, the Chronicler condemned the savagery of the Kingdom of Israel in a war against an idolatrous Judean king, even though Yahweh himself had sanctioned the campaign. Israelite troops had killed 120,000 Judean soldiers and marched 200,000 Judean prisoners back to Samaria in triumph. Yet the prophet Oded greeted these conquering heroes with a blistering rebuke: You have slaughtered with such fury as reaches to heaven. And now you propose to reduce these children of Judah and Jerusalem to being your serving men and women! And are you not all the while the ones who are guilty before Yahweh your God? Now listen to me—release the prisoners you have taken of your brothers, for the fierce anger of Yahweh hangs over you.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  (‘The Book of the Prick’), a Platonic-style Italian dialogue featuring ‘Arsiccio’ and his pupil ‘Sodo’. It went through several editions, virtually all copies of which have disappeared. [97] Equally unbuttoned was the gleeful literary celebration of sexual activity between older and younger males by a Conventual Franciscan friar of Venice, Antonio Rocco, who vaunted its superiority to heterosexuality in Platonic vein around the theme of Socrates’ charming though unreliable boyfriend in Alcibiades the Schoolboy (1652). Given the Venetian authorities’ sensitivity on such matters, and after investigations of him extending as far as the Roman Inquisition, it is astonishing that Rocco died uncondemned. [98] The Classics continued to make matters complicated as Westerners encountered other world cultures, some of which they came to respect, particularly through the heroic missions of the Society of Jesus to the empires of Asia. Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit pioneer of missions within China, pondered what text might illustrate for a Confucian culture the best and most congenial Western wisdom before the revelation of Christ. He came up with the Enchiridion, a collection of aphorisms on conduct from the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus, which Ricci translated and abridged first into Latin and then into Mandarin. In both those translations, he omitted remarks of Epictetus on emotional and physical moderation which would have been thoroughly congenial in their sentiment, if the subject of the urges to moderation had not been relationships with boys – their inclusion would have been routine for a Classical author but was now deeply unhelpful. [99] In other writings, Ricci observed open same-sex activity in China with great unease and disapproval, not admitting to himself or his correspondents that he could have seen very similar phenomena back in Florence, Venice or his native Papal States if he had decided to look. What was offensive to him was how the Chinese cheerfully accepted such behaviour as part of the way their society worked. [100] As we have already observed, Christians have had a long- standing impulse to ascribe sodomy to the Other. That label could be applied to Muslims and aboriginal peoples overseas: it provided a handy reason for seizing their lands and possessions and enslaving them, just as did frequent accusations that such peoples were cannibals. That did not stop the contrasting sexual mores being a reality. [101] In Reformation Europe, Catholics and Protestants could ‘other’ each other in the same fashion about sodomy. This was an easier rhetorical stance for Protestants than for Catholics, given the obvious available innuendo about priestly celibacy, and the reality of same-sex activity in Italy. [102] One of the earliest manifestations of Reformation attention to same-sex activity came from Henry VIII’s England, when in 1534 Parliament passed a statute against ‘buggery’, to be punished with death.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  In every case, the catalyst for major spiritual change was a principled revulsion from the violence that had reached unprecedented heights as a result of this upheaval. 3 These new spiritualities came into being at a time when the old brain was being co-opted by the calculating, rational new brain in ways that were exciting and life-enhancing but that many found profoundly disturbing. For millennia, human beings had lived in small isolated groups and tribes, using their rational powers to organize their society efficiently. At a time when survival depended on the sharing of limited resources, a reputation for altruism and generosity as well as physical strength and wisdom may well have been valued in a tribal leader. If you had not shared your resources in a time of plenty, who would help you and your people in your hour of need? The clan would survive only if members subordinated their personal desires to the requirements of the group and were ready to lay down their lives for the sake of the whole community. It was necessary for humans to become a positive presence in the minds of others, even when they were absent. 4 It was important to elicit affection and concern in other members of the tribe so that they would come back and search for you if you were lost or wounded during a hunting expedition. But the Four Fs were also crucial to the tribal ethos, as essential for the group as for the individual. Hence tribalism often exhibited an aggressive territorialism, desire for status, reflexive loyalty to the leader and the group, suspicion of outsiders, and a ruthless determination to acquire more and more resources, even if this meant that other groups would starve. Tribalism was probably essential to the survival of Homo sapiens , but it could become problematic when human beings acquired the technology to make deadlier weapons and began to compete for territory and resources on a larger scale. It did not disappear when human beings began to build cities and nations. It surfaces even today in sophisticated, wealthy societies that have no doubts about their survival. But as human beings became more secure, achieved greater control over their environment, and began to build towns and cities, some had the leisure to explore the interior life and find ways of controlling their destructive impulses. From about 900 to 200 BCE, during what the German philosopher Karl Jaspers called the “Axial Age,” there occurred a religious revolution that proved pivotal to the spiritual development of humanity. In four distinct regions, sages, prophets, and mystics began to develop traditions that have continued to nourish men and women: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism on the Indian subcontinent; Confucianism and Daoism in China; monotheism in the Middle East; and philosophical rationalism in Greece.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  during the night too, to powder herself with a kind of cheap talc from a large container standing on the little table beside her bed. Gwendolyn used such quantities of this powder, fine as dust and slightly greasy, that the linoleum floor around her bed, and soon the whole room and the corridors of the upper story as well, were covered with a white layer, slightly sticky because of the damp air. I only recently remembered this white pall over the manse, said Austerlitz, when I was reading the reminiscences of his childhood and youth by a Russian writer who describes a similar mania for powder in his grandmother, a lady who, although she spent most of her time lying on a sofa nourishing herself almost exclusively on wine gums and almond milk, enjoyed an iron constitution and always slept with her window wide open, so that once, after a night of stormy weather, she woke up in the moming under a blanket of snow without coming to the slightest harm. However, it was different in the manse. The sickroom windows were kept closed, and the white powder which had settled on everything, grain by grain, and through which visible paths had now been trodden, was not at all like glittering snow. Rather, it resembled the ectoplasm that, as Evan had once told me, clairvoyants can produce from their mouths in great bubbles which then fall to the ground, where they soon dry and fall to dust. No, it was not newly fallen snow wafting around the manse; what filled it was something unpleasant, and I did not know where it came from, only much later and in another book finding for it the completely incomprehensible but to me, said Austerlitz, immediately enlightening term “arsanical horror.” It was during the coldest winter in human memory that I came home for the second time from the school in Oswestry, and found Gwendolyn barely alive. There was a coal fire smoldering on the hearth of her sickroom. The yellowish smoke that rose from the glowing coals and never entirely dispersed up the chimney mingled with the smell of carbolic pervading the whole house. I stood for hours at the window, studying the wonderful formations of icy mountain ranges two or three inches high formed above the crossbars by water running down the panes. Now and then solitary figures emerged from the snowy landscape outside. Wrapped in dark scarves and shawls, umbrellas open to keep off the flurry of snowflakes, they stumbled up the hill. I heard them knocking the snow off their boots down in the porch before they slowly climbed the stairs, escorted by the neighbor’s daughter who was now keeping house for the minister. With a certain hesitancy, and as if they had to bend underneath something, they stepped over the threshold and put whatever they had brought—a jar of pickled red cabbage, a can of corned beef, a bottle of rhubarb wine—down on the chest of drawers. Gwendolyn took no notice of these visitors, and the visitors themselves dared not look at her. They usually stood at the window with me for a little while,

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  of neutralizing it via allegorical interpretation: ‘one wife’ was a reference to Christ, with whom a bishop had a spiritual marriage. That thought might seem riskily misgendered, but it conveniently dispatched any of the myriad of positive references in early Christian theological writing to clergy wives, and it also had a more general usefulness in defending the already-well-established Western bias towards seeing all true marriages as by their nature indissoluble: every Christian husband was similarly allegorically married to Christ. [33] Damian and Cardinal Humbert also adroitly added to their polemical armoury by redeploying for their own purposes an obscure biblical term of abuse: the sinister-sounding ‘Nicolaitans’ denounced in the Book of Revelation (Rev. 2.6, 15) as being hated by both the writer, St John the Divine, and his readers. St John had not specified what was particularly hateful in Nicolaitan teaching, but it could as well have been their advocacy of clerical marriage as anything else, and so it became in reformist denunciations. The ‘Nicolaitan’ smear fed into Humbert’s abuse of Eastern Orthodoxy, in this case because the Orthodox continued to allow marriage to many clergy, so that polemic became part of the events leading to the schism of 1054. From the Church’s past, the reformers also creatively misunderstood the diatribes of Chrysostom, Jerome and their contemporaries against virgines subintroductae, women chastely living with clergy in syneisactism (above, Chapter 9); they reapplied this hostile rhetoric to the case of any priest living with a woman. [34] Laypeople began hearkening to such insistent voices, particularly in the increasing number of cities emerging as centres of economic power around the Mediterranean: these were expanding, restless communities where people uprooted from their rural world had to redefine their place in society, and equally might wish for a say in defining what that society might be. A crisis of Church reform erupted in one such Italian city, Milan, where from the 1050s a movement known as the Pataria (for now unclear but originally hostile reasons) emerged as among the first such convulsions of mass activism in medieval Europe. The Pataria looked remarkably like one of the morally charged crowds summoned by bishops in the contemporary Peace of God movement, complete with the regular swearing of communal oaths to defend the cause. Galvanized by charismatic local preachers, it developed a rhetoric of fighting against clerical corruption that anticipated the excitement of Crusaders against Muslims in later decades, hardly coincidentally. The purity argument had an obvious appeal to a laity expecting the best of their clergy.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The word sodomia was popularized in the eleventh century by Peter Damian in his polemic ‘Book of Gomorrah’ (Liber Gomorrhianus). It was an inescapably negative theological term, on the analogy of the older Latin word blasphemia; thus Peter paired ‘sodomy’ with the sin of denying God, in the process ‘thinning and condensing’ the wrongdoing of the biblical city of Sodom from malpractices that were originally much more various. [27] Ivo, Bishop of Chartres, Damian’s contemporary and the major influence on canon law before ‘Gratian’, evolved the concept of ‘sins against nature’, in which same- sex acts were ‘always unlawful and beyond doubt more shameful than to sin by a natural use in fornication and adultery’; at least fornication and adultery were not active obstacles to the continuation of the species. All this marched in step with the developing doctrine that marriage must necessarily involve the potential for reproductive sex. It was the obstacle to reproduction that was ‘against nature’, so the same acts committed between men and women, or solo masturbation, fell into the same category. [28] This cluster of theoretical opinions already began crystallizing into legislation during the twelfth century. In 1120 a Church Council at Nablus in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem pioneered punitive enactments with provision for burning sodomites, just like heretics, perhaps with the ancient provisions of Justinian’s Christianized civil code in mind (above, Chapter 8). The issue of male sexuality may have seemed particularly fraught in a militarized enclave surrounded by the ultimate Other, Islam, so often accused by Christians of harbouring sodomites, but the paranoia spread back across the Mediterranean into Western society. [29] A papal Council at the Lateran in 1179, which also took the first measures against Cathars, made enactments against clergy sinning ‘against nature’ with direct reference to the city of Sodom. From the thirteenth century this was increasingly echoed in the legal processes being developed by monarchs beyond canon law, as well as in ecclesiastical legislation. [30] An incentive was the most bizarre and extra-biblical of Western Christian claims about ‘sodomy’: that at the birth of Christ all the ‘sodomites’ in the world died, before he would condescend to enter this sinful world, since they committed sins against nature. This malevolent Christmas fable involved distorted citations of Jerome and Augustine, good evidence that it started life in learned and clerical circles before moving out to instruct the wider public. After surfacing in an anonymous poem of around 1200 in honour of Mary, it has an early association with the Orders of friars as they began their task of preaching and instruction in the thirteenth century, and they went on plugging away at it for centuries; it appears in a Christmas sermon by one of Francis of Assisi’s leading disciples, Bonaventure. It gained further currency through a standard text read, heard or recycled by the devout: the thirteenth-century Dominican Archbishop Jacobus de Voragine’s anthology of saints’ Lives known as The Golden Legend.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  120 Lecture 22: First Peter and the Persecution of the Early Christians Christians were themselves persecuted and prosecuted—not because their religion was against some kind of Roman law—but because they were perceived as public nuisances. Authorities took care of problems on an ad hoc basis. From both Paul and the Book of Acts, we see that Christian missionary activity sometimes led to public disturbances. Christians would often abandon their own families to join the new community. These splits in the family were often painful to those who were left behind (cf., Matt. 10:34–37). Because the Christians were known to be a closed community, they sometimes came under suspicion as a secret society. In particular, widely believed slanders were leveled against the Christians. Because they met at night, called one another brother and sister, engaged in “love feasts” (that is, communal meals), practiced a ritual kiss, and actually ate the body and drank the blood of the son of God, they were widely believed to engage in nocturnal orgies involving incest and cannibalism (cf., the words of Fronto, the teacher of the 2 nd -century emperor Marcus Aurelius). Altogether, the early Christians had a considerable “image problem.” Consider the two pagan authors who were the ¿ rst to mention Jesus, whom we discussed earlier. The Roman historian Tacitus labeled the Christians a “pernicious superstition” and says they were the “hatred of the human race.” This, he claims, is why Nero could easily make them scapegoats for the burning of Rome for which he was responsible (Annals 15). Pliny the Younger, governor of part of the region that 1 Peter itself addresses, called them “obstinate” and “mad” adherents of a “depraved superstition.” He was responsible for their persecution when they refused to abandon their Christian ways. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that Christians refused to participate in the public ceremonies honoring the state and local gods. Because the Christians believed there was only one true God, they couldn’t very well participate in the worship of others. This made no sense, though, to pagans. As polytheists, they found the idea that if you worshipped one god you couldn’t worship another to be nonsense (it would be the same as saying that you couldn’t like one friend if you happened to like another). In addition, it was widely believed that the only thing the gods required was that people perform occasional acts of reverence to them—for example, through public sacri¿ ces—and that any calamities that happened in life were the result of

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  We read of a fag at Shrewsbury who was thrown into a bath of boiling water by some older boys because he liked to take his bath very warm; but this experiment turned out badly, for the little fellow died and the affair could not be hushed up, though it was finally dismissed as a regrettable accident. The English are proud of the fact that they hand over a good deal of the school discipline to the older boys: they attribute this innovation to Arnold of Rugby and, of course, it is possible if the supervision is kept up by a genius, that it may work for good and not for evil; but usually it turns the school into a forcing-house of cruelty and immorality. The older boys establish the legend that only sneaks would tell anything to the masters, and then they are free to give rein to their basest instincts. The two Monitors in our big bedroom in my time were a strapping big fellow named Dick F…, who tired all the little boys by going into their beds and making them frig him till his semen came. The little fellows all hated to be covered with his filthy slime, but they had to pretend to like doing as he told them, and usually he insisted on frigging them by way of exciting himself. Dick picked me out once or twice but I managed to catch his semen on his own nightshirt, and so after calling me a “dirty little devil” he left me alone. The other monitor was Jones, a Liverpool boy of about seventeen, very backward in lessons but very strong, the “Cock” of the school at fighting. He used always to go to one young boy’s bed whom he favored in many ways. Henry H… used to be able to get off any fagging and he never let out what Jones made him do at night, but in the long run he got to be chums with another little fellow and it all came out. One night when Jones was in Henry’s bed, there was a shriek of pain and Jones was heard to be kissing and caressing his victim for nearly an hour afterwards. We all wondered whether Jones had had him, or what had happened. Henry’s chum one day let the cat out of the bag. It appeared that Jones used to make the little fellow take his sex in his mouth and frig him and suck him at the same time. But one evening he had brought up some butter and smeared it over his prick and gradually inserted it into Henry’s anus and this came to be his ordinary practice. But this night he had forgotten the butter and when he found a certain resistance, he thrust violently forward, causing extreme pain and making his pathic bleed. Henry screamed and so after an interval of some weeks or months the whole procedure came to be known.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Had not Paul told the Corinthians that they were like a pure bride to their one husband, Christ? The most extreme extrusion of this line of thinking from Philo into Paul’s writings is his opening salvo in what is now the first chapter of the Epistle to the Christian assembly in Rome. It is a blistering attack on idolatry: the universal propensity of humankind (Mediterranean humankind in particular) to exchange ‘the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles’ (Rom. 1.23). So far, so traditional Judaism; then Paul pulls out of his rhetorical storehouse a suitable punishment for idolatry, sent from God – a wholesale change of nature in the sexual behaviour of idolaters. ‘Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error’ (Rom. 1.26–27).

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Among a flood of detail on Montaillou, there is the statement of a Cathar village holy man Bélibaste that ‘the sin is the same, to know one’s own wife carnally or to do the same with a concubine’, from which he deduced in decidedly pragmatic fashion that this sin was best contained in a monogamous marriage, avoiding a whole set of practical social pitfalls and undesirabilities. No theological issues were involved in this argument, because of Bélibaste’s underlying theological rejection of the physical. [10] One has to allow for the nature of such inquisitorial sources, but cumulatively it is clear that in Cathar lands there were people with a profoundly negative view of sex – not just clerical sex, in the manner of Gregorian reformers, but all sexual activity. At least one treatise survives written by an avowed dualist, the mid-thirteenth-century Book of Two Principles: actually a debate internal to the movement, between moderate and hard-line dualists, and so not tainted by the coercive conditions of inquisitorial records. In the argument that it creates, both sides assume that all marriage is evil, being part of the visible, material world. That immediately suggests a link to the sexual negativity of Eastern Christianity generally, whether in Orthodox or heretical form, and indeed there is strong evidence of links eastward towards Byzantium among Cathar dissidents, especially in Italy. [11] Given the Church’s careful negotiation around love and marriage resulting from the Gregorian revolution of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Catharism’s far more thoroughgoing principled aversion to physicality and fleshliness is likely to have provoked a reaction within Catholic Christianity. Objection to minimalist Cathar views on marriage may have encouraged thirteenth-century Western preachers and theologians to drop the idea that marital sex always partook of the character of sin (this page). Beyond sex, Cathar negativity on physical creation extended to the fleshly humanity of Jesus Christ, born of a woman, thus threatening the increasing Western devotion to the Virgin Mary, biological mother of Jesus. More than that, it denied divine presence within the bread and wine of the Mass, as well as God’s institution of hierarchy in the visible Church. There was much to persecute. Puzzles remain amid the huge variety of evidence on Cathar heresy. It would be a strange dualist opponent of Catholicism whose chief heretical crime (in the eyes of a clerical heresy-hunting chronicler in twelfth-century Orvieto) was to show excessive concern for repairing the roof of the city’s cathedral; such was the chronicler’s accusation against Milita of Monte-Meato, ‘daughter of iniquity’. [12] Equally odd is the case of a fourteenth-century Cathar woman of Montaillou on her deathbed, who, when alerted that the Catholic priest was on the way to give her the last rites, shrieked ‘Holy Mary! Holy Mary!

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  they often expressed an apocalyptic excitement which puts them among the products of the Evangelical ‘Second Great Awakening’. Amid the freedom afforded by the vast territories of north America, one aspect of such utopian experimentation was to explore alternatives to the conventional patterns of Western Christian marriage. In this spirit, and in disgust at the hypocrisy of slave-holding Protestant Christianity, the wealthy Scots emigrant Frances Wright created a utopian anti- slavery community in Tennessee in the 1820s, where the races not only mixed but placed no boundaries on their voluntary sexual activity, in contrast to the sexual coercion of the plantations. In 1848, four years before Brigham Young announced the late Joseph Smith’s revelation, an even larger commune at Oneida, New York State, constituted itself in a regulated system of swapping heterosexual partners: ‘complex marriages’. [61] Smith was positioning the future of his growing community amid all this, with the aim of creating true polygamy for this life and the next: some of the first plural Mormon marriages involved a woman with multiple husbands. Brigham Young, in his later systematic application of the Smith revelation, turned away from polygamy to what might be termed traditional polygyny, an institution that bore all the hallmarks of nineteenth-century male assertiveness. Multiple wives were expected to demonstrate the wifely obedience to a husband that was the ideal in wider monogamous society: all of them. [62] The implementation of polygynous marriage had mixed results for the Mormons’ craving to extend their mission. For the time being, it abruptly ended what had at first been promising growth in a now scandalized and amused monogamous Europe. [63] Yet in societies that already practised polygyny, local reaction could be very different. A notable example is among the Maori in Aotearoa (the pair of major islands that Europeans have called New Zealand). Maori had both a lively curiosity about the British culture that was encroaching on their lands from the 1820s, and an exceptional ability to position themselves in relation to it; they took to Christianity with enthusiasm. Yet, by the 1860s, the increasing settler population and the untrustworthiness of the colonial administration led to bitterness and open war, a particular blow to the progress of Anglicanism that was so closely associated with the government. The Maori filled the religious vacuum with their own syntheses of Christian practice and traditional religion, but additionally many of them became enthusiastic for the LDS, whose young American missionaries were treated as unwelcome outsiders by the British, and who made clear their affirmation of Maori polygyny. It was a lasting cultural alliance, though increasingly strained by the Western racial character of Mormon belief. [64] Mainstream Mormonism in the USA reluctantly brought polygyny to an end under threat of federal legal action threatening its property assets; in 1890 the Church formally laid aside the practice as a prelude to gaining full statehood for its home territory of Utah.