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 Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  This is made clear in the prophet's condemnation of David in which he compares the king to the rich man with an abundant flock who steals the only lamb of a poor man. Bathsheba, like the lamb, was the object taken from the “true” victim, Uriah (2 Sam. 12:1–4). As possessions, women could also be given as ransom for men. This happened more than once, as in the city of Sodom, where Abraham's nephew Lot lived. One night, when Lot had received unknown visitors, the men of Sodom surrounded his house and banged on the door, crying out, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Send them out to us that we may abuse and rape them!” But Lot went out to them and said, My brothers, please do not act evilly. See now, I have two daughters who have never known a man. Please let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you see fit. Only do not do a thing to these men, because they have come under the shadow of my roof. (Gen. 19:7–8) In Lot's mind, his daughters were worth far less than the two strangers, only because the strangers were men. There is a similar scenario in Judges 19–21. On his journey home, a Levite, along with his concubine, stopped in the town of Gibeah, which belonged to the tribe of Benjamin. An old man of the town offered hospitality to the Levite and welcomed him to his house. When night fell, the men of the city came banging at his door, demanding that the Levite be sent out so that the townsmen could have their way with him. The old man went out to meet them and, like Lot, offered his virgin daughter and the Levite's concubine as a ransom, insisting that the men of the town do with them whatever they saw fit. They took the concubine, raped her, and left her lying at the door of the house where the Levite slept. The next morning the Levite arose to find his concubine lying on the floor. He placed her on his donkey and continued his journey home. When he arrived at his house, he took a knife and cut her into twelve pieces, sending her dismembered body parts to the borders of Israel. When the rest of Israel saw what occurred, they were outraged at the wickedness of the people of Gibeah, from the tribe of Benjamin, because they had violated the Levite's possession. All of Israel then went to war against the tribe of Benjamin.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  As American business and culture took root, Egypt began to seem alien and Westernized to many Egyptians. Sadat was also becoming estranged from many of his people. He and his wife, Jihan, had a glitzy Western lifestyle, were frequently seen entertaining foreign celebrities and film stars, were known to drink alcohol, and lived in luxury in their numerous magnificent rest-houses, refurbished at the cost of millions of dollars, isolated from the hardship endured by most of the population. This accorded ill with Sadat’s carefully cultivated religious image. In the Sunni tradition, a good Muslim ruler is commanded not to separate himself from the people, but to live simply and frugally, and to ensure that the wealth of society is distributed as fairly as possible.26 By calling himself “the Pious President” in an attempt to align himself with the new religious mood in the country, and by encouraging the press to photograph him in the mosques, with a prominent “ash mark” on his forehead to show that he prostrated himself five times daily in prayer, Sadat inevitably invited Muslims to make unflattering comparisons between his own actual behavior and the ideal. Yet, on the surface, Sadat was good to religion. He needed to create an identity for his regime that was different from Nasser’s. Since the time of Muhammad Ali, Egyptians had repeatedly tried to enter the modern world and find their own niche there. They had imitated the West, adopted Western policies and ideologies, fought for independence, and tried to reform their culture along modern European lines. None of these attempts had been successful. Like the Iranians, many Egyptians felt that it was time to “return to themselves” and create a modern but distinctively Islamic identity. Sadat was happy to capitalize upon this. He was attempting to make Islam a civil religion on the Western model, firmly subservient to the state. Where Nasser had persecuted Islamist groups, Sadat appeared to be their liberator. Between 1971 and 1975, he gradually released the Muslim Brothers who had been languishing in the prisons and camps. He relaxed Nasser’s strict laws controlling religious groups, and allowed them to meet, preach, and publish. The Muslim Brotherhood was not allowed to reestablish itself as a fully functioning political society, but the Brothers could preach and establish their own journal, al-Dawah (“The Call”). There was much mosque-building and more air time was given over to Islam. Sadat also courted Islamic student groups, encouraging them to wrest control of the campuses from the socialists and Nasserites. Nasser had tried to suppress religion and found that this coercive policy was counterproductive. It had led to the rise of the more extreme religiosity promoted by Sayyid Qutb. Now Sadat was attempting to co-opt religion and use it for his own ends. This would also prove to be a tragic miscalculation.

• From The City of God

  Now, who does not hereby comprehend,--unless he has preferred to imitate such gods rather than by divine grace to withdraw himself from their fellowship,--who does not see how eagerly these evil spirits strive by their example to lend, as it were, divine authority to crime? Is not this proved by the fact that they were seen in a wide plain in Campania rehearsing among themselves the battle which shortly after took place there with great bloodshed between the armies of Rome? For at first there were heard loud crashing noises, and afterwards many reported that they had seen for some days together two armies engaged. And when this battle ceased, they found the ground all indented with just such footprints of men and horses as a great conflict would leave. If, then, the deities were veritably fighting with one another, the civil wars of men are sufficiently justified; yet, by the way, let it be observed that such pugnacious gods must be very wicked or very wretched. If, however, it was but a sham-fight, what did they intend by this, but that the civil wars of the Romans should seem no wickedness, but an imitation of the gods? For already the civil wars had begun; and before this, some lamentable battles and execrable massacres had occurred. Already many had been moved by the story of the soldier, who, on stripping the spoils of his slain foe, recognised in the stripped corpse his own brother, and, with deep curses on civil wars, slew himself there and then on his brother's body. To disguise the bitterness of such tragedies, and kindle increasing ardour in this monstrous warfare, these malign demons, who were reputed and worshipped as gods, fell upon this plan of revealing themselves in a state of civil war, that no compunction for fellow-citizens might cause the Romans to shrink from such battles, but that the human criminality might be justified by the divine example. By a like craft, too, did these evil spirits command that scenic entertainments, of which I have already spoken, should be instituted and dedicated to them. And in these entertainments the poetical compositions and actions of the drama ascribed such iniquities to the gods, that every one might safely imitate them, whether he believed the gods had actually done such things, or, not believing this, yet perceived that they most eagerly desired to be represented as having done them. And that no one might suppose, that in representing the gods as fighting with one another, the poets had slandered them, and imputed to them unworthy actions, the gods themselves, to complete the deception, confirmed the compositions of the poets by exhibiting their own battles to the eyes of men, not only through actions in the theatres, but in their own persons on the actual field.

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

  Marriage and Beyond: A New DepartureAs we have seen, Paul’s hierarchy of relations between man and woman is crafted in a metaphor: a marriage relationship. In one letter to the Corinthians (now 2 Cor. 11.2) he daringly makes himself the paterfamilias who has ‘betrothed [your assembly] to Christ to present you as a pure bride to her one husband’. This is in the face of the untidy fact that Paul personally finds marriage a distasteful prospect, and speaks to the married as if an outsider. One hundred and fifty or so years later, the theologian Clement of Alexandria would claim that Paul had been a married man, but whether true or not, that does not alter his extremely grudging comments about the married state, most famously in his concentrated essay on marriage for the Corinthians: ‘because of the temptation to immorality [porneia], each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband…it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.’[14] Despite Paul’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for the realities of marriage, he made some markedly original contributions to later Christian views on the marriage relationship. We have already noticed his cavalier modification of the Lord’s command on divorce (above, Chapter 4). What is also apparent is that he was already constructing a dichotomy between marriages within the new Christian community whom he was addressing, and every other sort of marriage anywhere. That is actually tangled up with his qualifications modifying Jesus’s prohibition on divorce in 1 Cor. 7, relating them to two different categories of married people, one simply referred to as the ‘married’ and the other as ‘the rest’. He was passionate in urging Corinthian Christians to avoid confusing the two so as not to be ‘mismated with unbelievers’, as the Revised Standard translation has it, softening the burdensome implications of heterozygountes, ‘unequally yoked’. One can see why Paul might feel he could be radical on this: the assemblies of people emerging as Christian Churches had already broken with a host of relational ties to the world around them, simply by constituting themselves Christians – particularly if they were Jews. If a married man and woman had both entered the new rite of baptism, then their marriage became ‘marriage’. Yet what was the extent of novelty in this Christian marriage? How did it relate to God’s general setting-up of marriage for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and thereafter for all humans (the so-called ‘creation ordinance’), or, in Paul’s phrase, for ‘the rest’? There is no trace of a Christian wedding ceremony in the New Testament, and there would be none in the Church for several centuries, as we shall see (below, Chapter 10). Since there was no Christian marriage ceremony for converts from beyond the faith to undertake, the Church simply recognized the ‘creation ordinance’ in their existing marriage – as long as it was monogamous, which in Graeco-Roman society it normally would be.[15]

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

  As an intervention into sexual morality, Paul’s assertion of a marriage debt has had two thousand years of erratic consequences. It clashed with that major presumption within much Graeco-Roman discussion of human biology already noted from Aristotle: a woman was a mere incubator for male seed in the process of procreation, not, as Paul implied, an equal partner in some sense. Even though other ancient authorities likewise disagreed with Aristotle, notably Galen, it is Paul’s mutual marital debt theory that has remained a reference-point, and not always a welcome one, when Christians have discussed marriage. It seems an obvious fit with modern Western views of companionate marriage, but in many other ages it has been a problem for the Church in the societies that it has sought to regulate. The Pauline idea of a marital debt clashes not only with the assertions of male privilege in Hellenistic science, but also with the assumption widespread across many societies that marriages are constructed not so much by the decision of the couple embarking on matrimony but through alliances constructed by two families.[17] Furthermore, the marital debt’s basis in sexual activity as an expression of the mutuality of marriage has always fitted uncomfortably with a pervasive ecclesiastical sense that even marital sex is shot through with sin. Physicality within marriage has often only escaped condemnation as long as the sexual act is intended, in utilitarian fashion, to produce children: what Ingsoc in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four called ‘our duty to the Party’. * It is difficult to escape the general conclusion that centuries of Christian pronouncements making marriage a second-best to celibacy do originate in Paul – but not in any link to procreation. The necessity for procreation is not present at all in Paul’s reluctant justifications for marriage. Later Christians often overlooked that, since they enthusiastically borrowed classic statements of procreative intention from non-Christian philosophical sources in both Greek culture and Hellenistic Judaism (below, Chapter 6). Paul’s contemporaries would have found it obvious that his silence on procreation in marriage, let alone his warm commendation of celibacy or virginity, was radically out of line with both normal Jewish assumptions about marriage and official imperial encouragements to breed large families. The marriage legislation of Augustus and subsequent emperors was obsessively concerned to engineer citizen society in order to encourage childbearing: it tried to make marriage mandatory for women aged between twenty and fifty, and gave privileged status for freeborn women who had born three children, or for freedwomen with four.[18]

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

  A yet more potent fear was theological. In a pattern that will be familiar by now, the stimulus came particularly from Cluny, through exhortations of Abbot Odilo that united Augustine’s reservations about all sexual activity with Cluny’s promotion of a high theology of Eucharistic presence. If even marital sex was by its nature impure, the ritual purity or impurity of a priest was a threat to his proper celebration of the Mass. Latin theologians emphasized with increasing precision that in this liturgical drama, bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. The notion of a ‘real presence’ of Christ in the Eucharist, common to Eastern and Western Christianity, was soon to crystallize for Westerners into definitions of a ‘transubstantiation’ of the Eucharistic elements in the Mass. This reflected Western scholars’ rediscovery of philosophical texts by Aristotle, with their discussions of categories of ‘substance’. Although transubstantiation was as yet a doctrine without exact boundaries, theologians who expressed doubts about such reframing of Eucharistic theology were firmly silenced: in the case of Berengar, Canon of Tours Cathedral, that included a humiliating recantation in front of a Council presided over by the future Gregory VII. Clerical reformers passionately believed that the Mass needed protection from married priests, and from their wives, who must be relabelled without equivocation as ‘concubines’.[28] The same people who pressed for clerical celibacy might also espouse a new Western theological or devotional impulse to make Christ’s mother even better fortified against the impurities of the flesh: the proposition of her ‘Immaculate Conception’. The tangled connection is exemplified by an English collection of Marian miracles which included a reminiscence associated with Anselm, early twelfth-century Abbot of St Edmundsbury in Suffolk: in his Italian youth, he had accidentally spilled consecrated wine while serving at Mass, and, appalled by the spillage and the dark stain on the altar cloth, he prayed to the Mother of God for help. The stain miraculously vanished.[29] Anselm was prominent among a number of English Benedictine abbots who in their enthusiasm for the Mother of God, and anxious to commemorate that all the more splendidly in their already splendid liturgical round, began promoting the idea that she had been conceived without the normal human correlation of concupiscence (lust). Because (like Anselm’s immaculate altar cloth) her conception was unspotted by sin, so was her flesh.[30] The doctrine spread far beyond England, but it remained controversial: the Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the loudest advocates of devotion to Mary in his preaching, said flatly that the idea of Immaculate Conception was a novelty which Mary would not enjoy, and that no conception, not even hers, could be separated from carnal pleasure. It was the nineteenth century before the Church officially made up its mind on the matter (below, Chapter 16).[31]

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

  A tangle of themes around sexual purity, Mary and the power of the Mass proved to be a cause for which reformers could annex the moral excitement of the crowds already involved in the Peace of God movement. Here the harshest voices from pulpits (and perhaps therefore the most exciting) were those of the austere Italian Benedictine Peter Damian and that agent of East–West schism Cardinal Humbert; they were cheerleaders for a campaign to get the laity to boycott any sacraments celebrated by married clergy that culminated under Gregory VII. As we have noted (above, Chapter 8) Damian shared with the fourth-century preacher John Chrysostom some distinctive and eloquently expressed personal obsessions about sex, although it is not certain that Chrysostom’s version of them would have been available in Damian’s time. One of these was a fanatical hatred of same-sex activity, about which he wrote and preached to an exceptional extent; the other was the association of priests with women. Both reflected Damian’s passionate concern for clerical purity: same-sex acts by an abbot or bishop with his monks or clerics were spiritual incest with his ‘sons’, while Damian pointed out that any unchaste bishop who ordained a priest would be using the same hand ‘to touch the private parts of harlots’. Since Christ was born of a virgin, he required the service of virgin hands at the altar.[32] Various biblical themes were pressed into service to champion priestly celibacy. A formidable apparent obstacle was the statement in the Pastoral Epistles that a bishop should have only one wife, but, back in the fifth century, Pope Leo I in his discussion of clerical marriage had found an effective way 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]

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

  Northern Orthodoxy’s view of sexuality and marriage drew on the Greek Orthodox tradition stemming from Basil the Great and pursued through the most authoritative Eastern theologians up to and beyond Maximos the Confessor (above, Chapters 8 and 9): sexual reproduction, even sexual difference, was the product of humanity’s Fall engineered by Satan. Within the bounds of the fallen world, marriage was more unequivocally than elsewhere something for families to agree on, rather than an individual’s choice to make. In that respect, it reflected the assumption that sexual misbehaviour, like behaviour in general, was the business of all society, not simply of the individuals involved. The Church’s task was to keep sex as tightly controlled as possible within the ecclesiastical regulations of canon law. The system had its own logic. It could not have worked if the laity had not accepted it and come to see it as a badge of their own identity. Just as the Church of the East had with eventual success made a particular form of marriage the token of being a Christian in the face of Islamic acceptance of polygyny, so northern Orthodoxy survived amid the devastating invasions of animist and Muslim Mongols from the 1220s by preserving an identity built up over three previous centuries of Christian society, much of which was structured around the Church’s regulation of sex. Popular Slavic culture might seize on a feature of that regulation and internalize it to an alarming extent. Thus, despite cautionary words from theologians and pastors about the continuing goodness of marriage after the Fall of Adam and Eve, Slavic laypeople could view even marital sex as sinful, to the extent that epic literature in Serbian might use the phrase ‘by sin’ (po grehu) to identify a parent or child by birth, while the child’s godparent was its ‘parent without sin’ (roditelj bezgrešni). Such unromantic beliefs would be encouraged by the usage employed in some Church legal texts for the one sexual position allowed to a married couple: what has flippantly been termed by Westerners ‘the missionary position’ was known in Church Slavonic as sexual congress ‘on a horse’ (na konĕ), in reference to its demonstration of the male’s dominance over the female.[48] Predictably, Jerome’s principle derived from the Pythagoreans that too much marital affection was as bad as adultery continued to flourish amid the general Orthodox pessimism about marriage. One thirteenth-century text of moral instruction advised men to ‘separate from your wife, so you don’t become attached to her’. It was common to find in Russian Orthodox guides to what confessors should ask of their penitents that the questions grouped excessive sexual intercourse between married partners alongside serious sexual offences like anal intercourse or association with prostitutes.[49]

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

  Nor do Constantine’s own interventions in lawmaking reveal much knowledge of or interest in Christian moral standards, whatever excited Christian leaders may have thought at the time. In one or two token respects of law one can see Constantine making reference to Christianity; for instance, he does seem to have abolished crucifixion as an imperial penalty. In 315, he prohibited the branding of criminals on the face (notably only on the face), ‘which is shaped in the likeness of the celestial beauty’ – a nod, perhaps at second hand, to the Creation story in Genesis 1.26–27. Overall, his legislation followed the busy moralizing and heightened interference in people’s ordinary lives that had characterized lawmaking by Diocletian, Maximian and Galerius; if anything, Constantine added to the brutality of criminal penalties and diminished the legal rights of women. In 320, for instance, his prohibition of elopement carried the penalty of execution for both the young people involved, while any female servant who helped them would have molten lead poured down her throat.[6] For more than a century, Roman legal enactments made very little reference to Christian Scripture. A more characteristic moral attitude was that of a constitution of Constantine’s issued in 326, which, with very traditional Roman priorities, observed that a case of adultery by a high-status woman deserved punishment as it affected all society, while the same conduct by a woman of low social standing was merely private in character.[7] Gradually change in legislation did reflect more Christian preoccupations: for instance, in 374 the Emperors Valentinian, Valens and Gratian condemned the ancient Roman acceptance of exposing unwanted infants, stipulating death for those who did, and said that everyone must bring up their own children.[8] Yet it was only in the 390s, under the extended rule of the Emperor Theodosius I, that a Christianization of Roman power became decisive. In 378 the Western Emperor Gratian sent Theodosius, a senior army officer from what is now Spain, eastwards as co-Emperor to restore order after a usurpation. Theodosius proved himself energetic in enforcing not merely Christianity, but its theological form agreed at the general ecclesiastical Council of Nicaea back in 325; he therefore eliminated remaining ‘Arian’ leaders from the Church hierarchy of the Empire.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  362 Lecture 54: Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s size relative to the Lilliputians destabilizes the universal concepts that normally govern our view of the world. If Gulliver is a giant compared to the Lilliputians, might not he be a Lilliputian to another race of men? If our customs are not universal, what other ways of conducting the affairs of man might be available to us? Gulliver then travels in Book II to the kingdom of Brobdingnag, a land inhabited by giants, where many of the same issues raised in Book I are examined again, speci fi cally, the relative nature of human culture. Gulliver becomes the sexual plaything of the women at court, whom he fi nds repulsive because of their smell and appearance. The same women in England would, of course, be attractive to him. Gulliver boasts of European civilization, but the king thinks of the English as “odious little vermin.” In Book III, Gulliver travels to various islands, where he encounters theoreticians who engage in speculation and extravagant scienti fi c experiments. While intellectuals play with words and ideas, their people starve in the streets. The proper study for the philosopher and scientist is the good of society—a maxim that allies Swift both with ancient philosophers and with V oltaire. Finally, in Book IV , we meet the Houhynhms, rational horses who rule over the debased and morally degenerate Yahoos. Gulliver is no longer in a human society, albeit one that is either much smaller or much larger than his own, but in a nonhuman world. The opposition between reason and passion, between sanity and madness, is here embodied in the difference between the horses and the human-like Yahoos—a strange way to represent the Enlightenment belief in the power of rational thought and human optimism. Gulliver wishes to remain with the horses even though he recognizes his close resemblance to the Yahoos. He is forced to leave, however. When he returns to England, he fi nds his family disgusting and spends many hours conversing with his horses. He has, in other words, gone mad. Swift wrote A Modest Proposal (1729) after he left England disappointed that his career there had come to an end, and he was personally angry at the English. Even though he was himself Anglo-Irish and, thus, a member of

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  JEROME. For Herodias, fearing that Herod might some time recover his senses, and be reconciled to his brother, and dissolve their unlawful union by a divorce, instructs her daughter to ask at once at the banquet the head of John, a reward of blood worthy of the deed of the dancing. CHRYSOSTOM. Here is a twofold accusation against the damsel, that she danced, and that she chose to ask an execution as her reward. Observe how Herod is at once cruel and yielding; he obliges himself by an oath, and leaves her free to choose her request. Yet when he knew what evil was resulting from her request, he was grieved, And the king was sorry, for virtue gains praise and admiration even among the bad. JEROME. Otherwise; It is the manner of Scripture to speak of events as they were commonly viewed at the time by all. So Joseph is called by Mary herself the father of Jesus; so here Herod is said to be sorry, because the guests believed that he was so. This dissembler of his own inclinations, this contriver of a murder displayed sorrow in his face, when he had joy in his mind. For his oath’s sake, and them which sat with him at meat, he commanded it to be given. He excuses his crime by his oath, that his wickedness might be done under a pretence of piety. That he adds, and them that sat at meat with him, he would have them all sharers in his crime, that a bloody dish might be brought in in a luxurious feast. CHRYSOSTOM. If he was afraid to have so many witnesses of his perjury, how much more ought he to have feared so many witnesses of a murder? REMIGIUS. Here is a less sin done for the sake of another greater; he would not extinguish his lustful desires, and therefore he betakes him to luxurious living; he would not put any restraint on his luxury, and thus he passes to the guilt of murder; for, He sent and beheaded John in prison, and his head was brought in a charger. JEROME. (Liv. xxxix. 43.) We read in Roman history, that Flaminius, a Roman general, sitting at supper with his mistress, on her saying that she had never seen a man beheaded, gave permission that a man under sentence for a capital crime should be brought in and beheaded during the entertainment. For this he was expelled the senate by the censors, because he had mingled feasting with blood, and had employed death, though of a criminal, for the amusement of another, causing murder and enjoyment to be joined together. How much more wicked Herod, and Herodias, and the damsel who danced; she asked as her bloody reward the head of a Prophet, that she might have in her power the tongue that reproved the unlawful nuptials.

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

  An Ultramontane ChurchIt was symptomatic of the new ultramontanism in the Church that when Pius VII restored the Society of Jesus in 1814, the Society’s gratitude to the renewed Papacy made it a bastion of conservative Vatican Catholicism. The sense of creative theological exploration, intellectual flexibility and discreetly independent initiative that had characterized the Society before its dissolution faded away, and only returned amid the wider changes of Catholicism in the 1960s. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century layfolk would experience this in the confessional, where the moral counsel and penances that clergy handed out to penitents were modelled on what was said in official manuals of penitential advice. The most influential was from a Jesuit source, the widely plagiarized manual of a nineteenth-century French moral theologian, Jean-Pierre Gury SJ. Following a steady development in penitential manuals over the previous century, Gury’s work showed a particular rigidity and punitive precision in what it had to say about sexual pleasure, even in marriage. It does not raise the spirits to hear what one of Gury’s Jesuit admirers said about his own discussion of moral theology, as he extended the genre of manuals from Latin into vernacular languages: manuals ‘are not intended for edification, nor do they hold up a high ideal of Christian perfection for the imitation of the faithful. They deal with what is of obligation under pain of sin; they are books of moral pathology.’[11] Just as in the Counter-Reformation, such tightening of personal discipline was dependent on lay willingness to accept it; that rested on the remarkable turnaround in papal fortunes and prestige. Just as important as the political transformations was a wholly unanticipated side-effect of Napoleon’s boldest move of self-assertion; in 1804 he crowned himself as Emperor, having invited Pius VII to travel to Paris to participate in a carefully balanced pageant of medieval liturgy and imperial sovereignty based on the assent of the people. The Pope’s journey north provoked extraordinary public excitement and reverence, not so surprising in Italy but in France far beyond expectations, even on the streets of the capital. Pius was revealed as an international popular celebrity, which was confirmed when, seven years later, relations with Napoleon broke down and he suffered arrest and exile like his predecessor. His tribulations, near-fatal illness in prison and then triumphant restoration to Rome as Napoleon’s power collapsed only affirmed what the Paris coronation began in shaping the charisma of the modern Papacy.[12]

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Each class tries to imitate the one higher up, and to escape from the imitation of those lower down. Thus the ostentation of the overfull purses of the predatory rich lures all society into the worship of false gods. It intensifies “the lust of the eye and the pride of life” unnaturally, and to that extent expels “the love of the Father,” which includes the love of all true values. Any one can test the matter in his own case by asking himself how much of his money, his time, and his worry is consumed in merely “keeping up with the procession,” and is diverted from real culture to mere display by the compulsion of social requirements about him. The man who lives only on his labor is brought into social competition with people who have additional income through rents and profits, and must break his back merely to keep his wife and children on a level with others. The very spirit of democracy which has wiped out the old class lines in modern life, makes the rivalry keener. In Europe a peasant girl or a servant formerly was quite content with the dress of her class and had no ambition to rival the very different dress of the gentry. With us the instinct of imitation works without a barrier from the top of the social pyramid to the bottom, and the whole process of consumption throughout society is feverishly affected by the aggregation of unearned money at the top. The embezzlements of business men, the nervous breakdown of women, the ruin of girls, the neglect of home and children, are largely caused by the unnatural pace of expenditures. If the rich had only what they earned, and the poor had all that they earned, all wheels would revolve more slowly and life would be more sane. Industry and commerce are in their nature productive and therefore good. But in our industry a strong element of rapacity vitiates the moral qualities of business life. A railway president in New York said to me—half in joke, of course: “The men who go down town on the Elevated at seven and eight o’clock really make things. We who go down at nine and ten, only try to take things away from one another.” Supplying goods to the people is, of course, the main thing; but crowding out the other man, who also wants to supply them, takes a large part of the time and energy of business. Our competitive life has so deeply warped our moral judgment that not one man in a thousand will realize anything immoral in attracting another man’s customers. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s trade” is not in our decalogue.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  The same is true of the so-called criminals, who live within our societies. To subjugate these men to Christianity, there is but one, the only way,—the Christian public opinion, which can be established among these men only by means of the true Christian teaching, confirmed by a true, Christian example of life. And so, to preach this Christian teaching and confirm it by a Christian example, we establish among these people agonizing prisons, guillotines, gallows, capital punishments, preparations for murder, for which we use all our strength; we establish for the common people idolatrous doctrines, which are to stupefy them; we establish the governmental sale of intoxicants,—wine, tobacco, opium; we establish even prostitution; we give the land to those who do not need it; we establish spectacles of senseless luxury amidst wretchedness; we destroy every possibility of every semblance of a Christian public opinion; we cautiously destroy the established Christian public opinion,—and then we quote these very men, who have carefully been corrupted by ourselves, and whom we lock up, like wild beasts, in places from which they cannot get away, and in which they grow more bestial still, or whom we kill, as examples of the impossibility of acting upon them otherwise than through violence. What takes place is like what happens when conscientious ignorant physicians place a patient who has been cured by the force of Nature under most unhygienic conditions and stuff him full of poisonous medicines, and then claim that it was only thanks to their hygiene and care that the patient did not die, whereas the sick man would have been well long ago, if they had left him alone. Violence, which is put forth as the instrument for maintaining the Christian structure of life, not only does not produce this effect, but, on the contrary, prevents the social structure from being what it could and should be. The social structure is such as it is, not thanks to violence, but in spite of it. And so there is no truth in the assertion of the defenders of the existing order, that, if violence barely keeps the evil non-Christian elements of humanity from attacking us, the abolition of violence and the substitution of public opinion for it will not protect humanity. It is not true, because violence does not protect humanity, but, on the contrary, deprives humanity of the one possibility of a true protection through the establishment and diffusion of the Christian public opinion as regards the existing order of life. Only with the abolition of violence will Christian public opinion cease to be corrupt, and receive the possibility of an unimpeded diffusion, and men will not direct their strength toward what they do not need, but toward the one spiritual force which moves them. "But how can we reject the visible, palpable protection of the policeman with his revolver, and depend on something invisible, impalpable,—the public opinion? Does it still exist, or not?

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  establish a festival to celebrate the occasion. To be sure, the slaughter is a fantasy, but that hardly makes the vengefulness any less distasteful. The glorification of violence is not exceptional in the Hebrew Bible. At least in Esther, the Jews are attacking people who wanted to attack them, although their actions go well beyond the bounds of self-defense. The conquest narratives in Joshua, which may be equally fictional, are even more problematic, since the slaughter is unprovoked. But Esther cannot be held up as a model for relations between ethnic groups. It seems to view the options in a situation of conflict as either to kill or to be killed. There is no attempt at reconciliation. This is all the more remarkable since Esther shows no desire for Jewish independence. The sovereignty of the Persian king is not questioned. The ideal situation is one where the king can be manipulated to advance the interests of the Jews. In the fantasy of Esther, the Jews are triumphant. The politics of ethnic antagonism, however, seldom yield such a clear-cut result. Violence, and even the fantasy of violence, most often begets just more violence. The Additions to Esther The Additions to Esther make the religious aspects of the text much more explicit than they were in the Hebrew form of the text. The passages are usually identified by the letters A-F. Addition A describes a dream of Mordecai, in which he sees “what God had determined to do” in the coming conflict between Jews and Gentiles. Addition B contains the royal edict ordering the massacre of the Jews. C has prayers of Mordecai and Esther. D describes Esther’s unsummoned appearance before the king. E contains the royal edict drafted by Mordecai, revoking the edict sent by Haman, and F has the interpretation of Mordecai’s dream, which says that God made two lots, one for Israel and one for the nations. The primary effect of these additions is to make the characters more pious and to leave no doubt about the role of God in the story. They do not necessarily all come from the same hand. A, C, and D are probably translations from Hebrew, while B and E are probably composed in Greek. At the end of F there is a statement that the Greek translation was brought into Egypt “in the fourth year of Ptolemy and Cleopatra.” Unfortunately, several Ptolemies who reigned for at least four years had wives named Cleopatra. The most probable date is either 114 B.C.E. (Ptolemy VIII) or 77 B.C.E. (Ptolemy XII). Sculpture “Tobit and the Angel” by Mari Andriessen, in Valkenberg Park, Breda, The Netherlands.

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  And the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet [the divine Roman emperor] who had performed in its presence the signs by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshiped its image. These two were thrown alive into the lake of fire that burns with sulfur. And the rest were killed by the sword of the rider on the horse, the sword that came from his mouth; and all the birds were gorged with their flesh. (19:17–21) Furthermore, those questions and objections about the violent Christ in that climactic book of Revelation were intensified by two contemporary factors external to my lectures in church venues. “Whatever Happens, Never Forget to Wipe Your Sword”ONE FACTOR, BETWEEN 1995 and 2007, was the publication by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins of the multiple books in the Left Behind series. Those books, and their subsequent movies and games, arranged multiple and discrete biblical images of cosmic consummation into a more or less coherent scenario. But in doing so, they made one egregious expansion beyond even Revelation’s divine violence. The great final battle was to involve not just Christ and the angels, as in Revelation, but humans as well. Here is just one example, from Glorious Appearing: The End of Days , the second-to-last book in the set. The human protagonist is Montgomery Cleburn McCullum, known as Mac, a “former pilot for Global Community [GC] Supreme Potentate Nicolae Carpathia [the anti-Christ]” but now converted to “Christ” as the “chief Tribulation Force pilot on assignment at Petra” (p. ix). The incident takes place at Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate: “Lord, forgive me,” he breathed, spraying his Uzi and dropping at least a dozen GC from behind. He felt no remorse. All’s fair . . . It was only fitting, he decided, that the devil’s crew were dressed in black. Live by the sword, die by the sword. (p. 27) Notice how the authors (ab)use the warning of Jesus that “all who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matt. 26:52). Jesus said “all,” but Mac lacks any sense of self-criticism—or even the grace of irony. Another external factor was the release of the film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in 2005. That movie was based on C. S. Lewis’s book of the same name published in 1950 to start his seven-volume series. As in the Left Behind series, so in the Narnia series: humans participate in the great final battle between good and evil. Also, in the Narnia series, good is portrayed by a male character and evil by a female one: Christ, “the Lion of the tribe of Judah” from Revelation 5:5, becomes Aslan, the lion in Narnia; the great whore from Revelation 17:1, 15, 16, and 19:2 becomes the White Witch of Narnia.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  His son was sent for as soon as his danger was known, and to him Mr. Dashwood recommended, with all the strength and urgency which illness could command, the interest of his mother-in-law and sisters. Mr. John Dashwood had not the strong feelings of the rest of the family; but he was affected by a recommendation of such a nature at such a time, and he promised to do every thing in his power to make them comfortable. His father was rendered easy by such an assurance, and Mr. John Dashwood had then leisure to consider how much there might prudently be in his power to do for them. He was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather cold hearted and rather selfish is to be ill-disposed: but he was, in general, well respected; for he conducted himself with propriety in the discharge of his ordinary duties. Had he married a more amiable woman, he might have been made still more respectable than he was:—he might even have been made amiable himself; for he was very young when he married, and very fond of his wife. But Mrs. John Dashwood was a strong caricature of himself;—more narrow-minded and selfish. When he gave his promise to his father, he meditated within himself to increase the fortunes of his sisters by the present of a thousand pounds a-piece. He then really thought himself equal to it. The prospect of four thousand a-year, in addition to his present income, besides the remaining half of his own mother’s fortune, warmed his heart, and made him feel capable of generosity. “Yes, he would give them three thousand pounds: it would be liberal and handsome! It would be enough to make them completely easy. Three thousand pounds! he could spare so considerable a sum with little inconvenience.” He thought of it all day long, and for many days successively, and he did not repent. No sooner was his father’s funeral over, than Mrs. John Dashwood, without sending any notice of her intention to her mother-in-law, arrived with her child and their attendants. No one could dispute her right to come; the house was her husband’s from the moment of his father’s decease; but the indelicacy of her conduct was so much the greater, and to a woman in Mrs. Dashwood’s situation, with only common feelings, must have been highly unpleasing;—but in her mind there was a sense of honor so keen, a generosity so romantic, that any offence of the kind, by whomsoever given or received, was to her a source of immovable disgust. Mrs. John Dashwood had never been a favourite with any of her husband’s family; but she had had no opportunity, till the present, of showing them with how little attention to the comfort of other people she could act when occasion required it.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Yet Nuri expressed a minority view. Most of the mujtahids at Najaf supported the constitution, and would continue to do so. They rejected Nuri’s plea for a Shariah state on the grounds that it was not possible to implement law correctly without the direct guidance of the Hidden Imam. Yet again, the spiritual insights of the Shiah promoted a secularization of the polity, and still regarded state power as incompatible with religion. Many clergy had been disgusted by the growing corruption of the court and by the economic insecurity of the government which had led the Qajars to grant unacceptable financial concessions to foreigners and to take out expensive loans. They had seen that this shortsighted behavior had led in Egypt to military occupation. It seemed clearly preferable to limit the oppressive policies of the Qajar state by means of the constitution.92 This point of view was expressed forcibly by Shaykh Muhammad Husain Naini (1850–1936), in his Admonition to the Nation and Exposition to the People, which was published in Najaf in 1909. Naini argued that representative government was the next best thing to the Hidden Imam; to set up an assembly capable of restraining a despotic ruler was clearly an act worthy of the Shiah. A tyrannical ruler was guilty of idolatry (shirk), the cardinal sin of Islam, because he arrogated to himself divine power and behaved as though he were God himself, lording it over his subjects. The prophet Moses had been sent to destroy the power of Pharaoh, who had oppressed and enslaved his people, and force him to obey the commands of Allah. In the same way, the new Majlis with its panel of religious experts must ensure that the shahs obey God’s laws.93 The most lethal opposition to the new constitution, however, came not from the ulema but from the new shah, who, with the help of a Russian Cossack brigade, led a successful coup in June 1908 and closed the Majlis; the most radical Iranian reformers and ulema were executed. But the popular guard in Tabriz held out against the shah’s forces and, with the help of the Bakhtiari tribe, staged a countercoup the following month, unseated the shah, and put his minor son, Ahmad, on the throne with a liberal regent. A Second Majlis was elected, but, as in Egypt, this fledgling parliamentary democracy was cut down to size by the European powers. When the Majlis tried to break the stranglehold that Britain and Russia had long had on Iranian affairs by appointing a young American financier, Morgan Shuster, to help them reform Iran’s ailing economy, Russian troops advanced on Tehran and closed the Majlis in December 1911. It was three years before the Majlis was permitted to reconvene, and by that time, many had become embittered and disillusioned. The constitution had not been the panacea they had hoped for, but had simply thrown the fundamental impotence of Iran into cruel and clear relief.

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  Notions of activity and penetration were not demarcated only by gender. Class and status factored into the equation to such an extent that maleness and femaleness were not the sole criteria for normative behavior. The wealthy man was free to penetrate actively almost anyone; his object could be a woman, boy, or lower-class man. This is how the widespread and seeming acceptance of homosexuality in Greece and Rome must be understood. In Greece it had long been common for landowning adult men to penetrate, not other adult men of similar status, but young teenage boys. In Rome it was almost axiomatic that wealthy men include in their household teenage boy slaves, and, for example, curly haired imports from Asia Minor were particularly prized for sexual usage. They were pursued and penetrated like women, discarded and replaced when they reached manhood and grew facial hair, but they never, ever, were to penetrate their masters. The poet Tibullus dedicated several of his first erotic poems to his mistress Delia (1, 2, 3, 5, 6), but then others to a servant boy, Marathus (4, 8, 9). That was scandalous, but mainly because he admitted that his affections for mistress and boy had made him a servant. To be penetrated was something for slaves, boys, or women. And they were shamed in the process, as this libel from Pompeii makes clear: “Equitias’s slave Cosmus is a big queer and cocksucker with his legs wide open” (Diehl 648). Read through all the Latin erotic poems or Greek epigrams, and you will agree with the depressing conclusion of Amy Richlin’s just-cited book: The content is determined by the central figure: the man, the poet, the narrator, the lover, the pursuer. The objects of his love are women and boys, whom he perceives as delicate (in comparison to himself) and soft (the better to receive him). They are younger than he and their assets are defined by his assessment. Their elusiveness is a function of their value and can be expressed in terms of cash value or the price of a slave; a high degree of the recognized physically attractive features produces demand and makes the object of desire harder to obtain…. Women rarely, and pueri [boys] never, are the narrators of erotic poems; they have no voice here. (55) What was unimaginable was an egalitarian position, an egalitarian escapade, an egalitarian relationship. Equality was not in any script, whether between man and woman, man and boy, man and man. Jewish morality, of course, was emphatically different in both theory and practice. Simply put, in the Jewish ideal, sex was restricted to marriage between husband and wife and for the purpose of procreation. Nudity was shameful, and an especially sensitive issue for Jewish circumcised men in the public baths. Given all that we have seen and read, it’s not at all surprising that after the initial eruption of Vesuvius and right before Pompeii was engulfed in ashes, a Jew scribbled on the walls: “Sodom and Gomorrah!”

• From In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom (2005)

  These texts preserve the crude machismo urge to “do” or “take” a woman. But many frescoes from Pompeii reveal a more subtle sense in which possession or subordination is scripted in the sexual behavior of the well-to-do. Many scenes—surprising if not discomforting to current sensibilities—depict slaves preparing and pouring wine or attending to the lamps beside a couple who are having intercourse. That was a clear display of power relations, and Antonio Varone, in Eroticism in Pompeii, captures the essence of that kind of humiliation: “Just as they could freely dispose of their slaves for sexual purposes, the master and mistress could also formally consider them as little more than domestic animals, under whose gaze it was licit not to feel the slightest embarrassment” (75). One of Martial’s witty epigrams, in which he demanded more effort and adventure from his wife in bed, hints at his desire for such condescending exhibitionism common among slave owners by declaring that even “Trojan slaves used to masturbate themselves behind the doors whenever Andromache had taken her seat on Hector as her horse” (11.104.13–14). Power and Penetration The crucial role that power played in the social scripts of ancient sexuality is also apparent in the way Greek and Roman authors distinguished between “active” and “passive” roles, with superiority defined as active male penetration. We saw that already in Martial’s sarcastic remarks about the galli priests of the Great Mother goddess. It is also evident in the erotic scenes on the disk-shaped oil lamps that were widespread household artifacts across the Mediterranean, even in Judea, which was notoriously prudish by Roman standards. Almost without exception, these lamps reveal a set of positions in which the man is what the Romans would think of as “active” and the woman as “passive.” But even when the female seems to be “active” by being on top during intercourse or by performing oral sex, that “activity” is portrayed as service to the male and is depicted iconographically by the man holding and controlling her head or by the man extending his arm back behind his head, such as on a bas-relief from Pompeii. That latter gesture may show a certain amount of narcissistic aloofness or may just reflect an attempt to get out of the way. Be that as it may, women only extend a hand to touch or caress the man. Further, a woman’s activity in oral sex was considered not only servile but degrading, for example, in the crude graffito from Pompeii, “Veneria sucked the cock of Maximus through the whole grape harvest, leaving both her holes empty and only her mouth full” (CIL 4.1391), or, again, on some lines scribbled in Pompeii’s Stabian baths, the command to “go down with your mouth along the shaft, licking it, then still licking withdraw it upwards. Ah, there, I’m coming!” (CIL 4.760).