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.

Page 87 of 90 · 20 per page

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  The most complex and concretely individualized life is found in mammals. The split of the two vital moments, maintaining and creating, takes place definitively in the separation of the sexes. In this branching out—and considering vertebrates only—the mother has the closest connection to her offspring, whereas the father is more uninterested; the whole organism of the female is adapted to and determined by the servitude of maternity, while the sexual initiative is the prerogative of the male. The female is the prey of the species; for one or two seasons, depending on the case, her whole life is regulated by a sexual cycle—the estrous cycle—whose length and periodicity vary from one species to another. This cycle has two phases: during the first one the ova mature (the number varies according to the species), and a nidification process occurs in the womb; in the second phase a fat necrosis is produced, ending in the elimination of the structure, that is a whitish discharge. The estrus corresponds to the period of heat; but heat in the female is rather passive; she is ready to receive the male, she waits for him; for mammals—and some birds—she might invite him; but she limits herself to calling him by noises, displays, or exhibitions; she could never impose coitus. That decision is up to him in the end. Even for insects where the female has major privileges and consents to total sacrifice for the species, it is usually the male that provokes fertilization; male fish often invite the female to spawn by their presence or by touching; for amphibians, the male acts as a stimulator. But for birds and above all mammals, the male imposes himself on her; very often she submits to him with indifference or even resists him. Whether she is provocative or consensual, it is he who takes her: she is taken. The word often has a very precise meaning: either because he has specific organs or because he is stronger, the male grabs and immobilizes her; he is the one that actively makes the coitus movements; for many insects, birds, and mammals, he penetrates her. In that regard, she is like a raped interiority. The male does not do violence to the species, because the species can only perpetuate itself by renewal; it would perish if ova and sperm did not meet; but the female whose job it is to protect the egg encloses it in herself, and her body that constitutes a shelter for the egg removes it from the male’s fertilizing action; there is thus a resistance that has to be broken down, and so by penetrating the egg the male realizes himself as activity. His domination is expressed by the coital position of almost all animals; the male is on the female. And the organ he uses is incontestably material too, but it is seen in an animated state: it is a tool, while the female organ in this operation is merely an inert receptacle.

• From Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (2023)

  In the same year, in the same parlor, I saw an older white client. He engaged me in a conversation; I forget much of what we spoke about, but I think I pretended to be more literary than I was. I remember that he was a professorial type—condescending, liberal. He told me he liked coming to this parlor—which might more accurately be described as an apartment in an upscale neighborhood, housing two workers at a time on various shifts, who were, often, because of the milieu of the girls who ran the place, white and college-educated—because he felt like the girls here must like the work more. He imagined we all had other options for how we might make money, and had chosen this. He had been to other parlors, he said—and he didn’t quite say the quiet part out loud, but it was implicit from the coded language he used that the workers at these other parlors were largely women of color, and that he actually knew nothing about their backgrounds, but had no awareness of this lack of knowledge—and he feared that the workers at those parlors were trafficked, at worst, or, at best, were there purely due to financial need, and were entirely sexually disinterested in him. I was, of course, entirely sexually disinterested in him. I was also there of my own free will, and so he was right not to worry that I wasn’t. And yet, all work that’s done only because we need money feels coercive. When I told him I did full-service work, he hired me for an hour at a hotel, and though I could barely get through it because I was the most depressed I had ever been, for reasons unrelated to work, and smiling was painful, and being touched was painful—I still did get through it because I needed to pay my rent. Of course I had options: I could have done something else; I could have worked longer hours at a different job; I wouldn’t have been in dire straits had I been unable to pay my rent; I had parents and a partner and friends and a sibling who all would swiftly loan me money. But I went, and I easily fulfilled his fantasy that I wanted to be there—even though no one wants to be at work, most of the time—simply because I had the right combination of identities to appear carefree and willing as opposed to whatever he perceived as in acute need. He chose me for this outside work, and he happily paid me—revolted, bored, melancholy, quasi-suicidal as I was—because my whiteness and the upscale location of the massage parlor matched his fantasy.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Kept in squalid brothels, given none of the profits and only enough to survive, the young women were victims of the sort of forcible prostitution that had been illegal for a century. 83 The law of Justinian showed particular displeasure for the fact that many pimps papered their activities with the trappings of legality. Pimps used written agreements with the prostitutes and “even sought securities for some of the women.” Justinian recognized that the contracts between pimps and prostitutes were intrinsically coercive and little more than an effort to lend a modicum of legality and legitimacy to their practice: it is even possible that pimps extracted consent waivers in response to the legislation of Theodosius II and Leo that forbade coercive pimping and then pimping altogether. Justinian’s remedy was the most sweeping action yet undertaken by the Roman state. The law prohibited anyone from “leading women into perversion by guile, deceit, or coercion.” Justinian decreed even further that “there will henceforth be no allowance given to pimping, keeping women in brothels, offering women for public perversion, or trafficking such women by any other means.” The emperor came down hard on the sex trade. He was specific and exhaustive. Whereas the law of Leo had, in terse language, enjoined “let no one be a pimp,” Justinian’s law forbade pimping, brothel-keeping, prostituting, or any other means of acting as a vendor of sex. 84 For both Theodosius II and Justinian, the two great Christian codifiers of the law, prostitution was a particular fixation. Under Justinian, prostitution was the target of a policy even wider than his campaign against sexual procurement. Justinian and Theodora founded a convent for reformed prostitutes. This refuge was to be a means of escape for women trapped in the life of the brothel. Named “Repentance,” the convent advertised the possibility of inner change for the prostitute and established a reformatory on Christian terms. As we will see in Chapter 4 , the idea of the penitent prostitute is exactly contemporaneous, and ideologically correlated, with the legal program against coercion in the sex industry. As with the regulation of same-sex eros, the state’s intervention in the sex trade reached its pitch of ideological fervor in the reign of Justinian, and once again relied on a religio-juridical complex. In his Secret History, Procopius cynically reported that the emperor and empress forced prostitutes who did not want to convert, against their will, to enter the monastery. He claimed that these prostitutes threw themselves off the walls of the convent as their only means of resistance. The very language, “forced to convert,” showed a close familiarity with the moral and intellectual foundations of Christian policy between Theodosius II and Justinian.

• From Three Women (2019)

  The judge says that the female juror was rushed to the ER because she was suddenly unable to recognize family members. On top of this she refused to provide a blood sample. In the days that follow, the salient stuff finds its way out of the hospital, into the courthouse, out of the courthouse, and onto the street. For one, the juror did not disclose to the court during jury selection that she herself had been sexually assaulted in the past. Then it’s leaked that as she was taken away, she was shouting to the sheriff’s deputies that it was up to her to protect the children. Judge McCullough thanks the jurors and excuses them from the trial. Aaron gets up and kisses an older woman on the cheek. Maggie doesn’t look at him. She can’t. She feels disemboweled. She’s disgusted that he held a rosary in the fingers that had been inside her and disgusted that he brought the rosary to compete with her father’s scapular. She feels, suddenly, like a fool. For believing that the notes would do him in, that nobody could ignore those notes. Without conditions, like our love! The judge would later uphold the three not-guilty verdicts and declare a mistrial on the other two. Aaron Knodel would be reinstated as a teacher at Sheyenne High School. But why, Maggie wonders, didn’t anyone believe the notes were his and think the notes were bad? Why didn’t anyone imagine a troubled child had idealized her teacher, who in turn took that adulation and sullied it? Who was now denying he had ever written the following words: “Sometimes doing the wrong thing just feels way too right.” “The wait for you is sometimes unbearable!” “Remember how bad your hands were shaking? It makes me feel good to know you are so excited!” “From the first night I dreamed of you, I knew I was hooked on you!” “You get me to reveal the best and worst of me… and you still love me!” “ ‘17’—you seem older! How many days are left? [image "Smiley face emoji" file=image_rsrc355.jpg] ” She begins to bite the inside of her cheek so hard that she can taste the blood in her mouth. She wants to rip her vampire teacher’s tongue out. Instead she leaves quietly, with what remains of her family. On the way out the door, she hears a female juror tell the media she hopes Knodel’s family will never have to go through this pain again. linaLike clockwork: the second Lina isn’t thinking of him, he can feel it. Across a couple of Indiana state roads he can sense the reins loosening and he texts a frown face. She has just fallen asleep in her hotel room when the vibration jolts her awake.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  On the 9th of February, 1529, an unbloody revolution broke out. Aroused by the intrigues of the Roman party, the Protestant citizens to the number of two thousand came together, broke to pieces the images still left, and compelled the reactionary Council to introduce everywhere the form of religious service practised in Zürich. Erasmus, who had advised moderation and quiet waiting for a general Council, was disgusted with these violent, measures, which he describes in a letter to Pirkheimer of Nürnberg, May 9, 1529. "The smiths and workmen," he says, "removed the pictures from the churches, and heaped such insults on the images of the saints and the crucifix itself, that it is quite surprising there was no miracle, seeing how many there always used to occur whenever the saints were even slightly offended. Not a statue was left either in the churches, or the vestibules, or the porches, or the monasteries. The frescoes were obliterated by means of a coating of lime; whatever would bum was thrown into the fire, and the rest pounded into fragments. Nothing was spared for either love or money. Before long the mass was totally abolished, so that it was forbidden either to celebrate it in one’s own house or to attend it in the neighboring villages."177 The great scholar who had done so much preparatory work for the Reformation, stopped half-way and refused to identify himself with either party. He reluctantly left Basel (April 13, 1529) with the best wishes for her prosperity, and resided six years at Freiburg in Baden, a sickly, sensitive, and discontented old man. He was enrolled among the professors of the University, but did not lecture. He returned to Basel in August, 1535, and died in his seventieth year, July 12, 1536, without priest or sacrament, but invoking the mercy of Christ, repeating again and again, "O Lord Jesus, have mercy on me!" He was buried in the Minster of Basel. Glareanus and Beatus Rhenanus, humanists, and friends of Zwingli and Erasmus, likewise withdrew from Basel at this critical moment. Nearly all the professors of the University emigrated. They feared that science and learning would suffer from theological quarrels and a rupture with the hierarchy. The abolition of the mass and the breaking of images, the destruction of the papal authority and monastic institutions, would have been a great calamity had they not been followed by the constructive work of the evangelical faith which was the moving power, and which alone could build up a new Church on the ruins of the old. The Word of God was preached from the fountain. Christ and the Gospel were put in the place of the Church and tradition. German service with congregational singing and communion was substituted for the Latin mass. The theological faculty was renewed by the appointment of Simon Grynäus, Sebastian Münster, Oswald Myconius, and other able and pious scholars to professorships.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Leo’s law clearly proscribed pimping, not prostitution. And he banned the collection of taxes throughout the provinces from this source, pimps, not from prostitution in general. In one regard he showed a new level of precision: women could not be prostituted, even if they were actresses. Stage performance had an association with venal sex, and actresses were exempt from the penalties of stuprum. Acting troupes numbered prostitutes, slave and free, among their company. It is not hard to imagine that, in the wake of Theodosius II’s ban on pimping, stage companies continued to run prostitution rings. Leo’s law redressed that possibility and highlighted the state’s eagerness to combat sexual procurement in any form. Only in AD 498, in the reign of Anastasius, with the abolition of the commercial tax altogether, did the Roman state completely extract itself from the sordid revenues of the sex trade. The emperor was specially lauded for this moral dimension, at best secondary, of his fiscal policy. 81 These changes lie in the background of the efforts of Justinian to address prostitution as a public policy concern. Early in his reign, Justinian chartered an investigation into the status quo of prostitution in Constantinople. The results of his commission were recorded in the preamble to a new law. Justinian announced that the “name and deeds of pimps were detestable to the ancient laws and emperors.” He claimed that he had already passed legislation to increase the penalties against pimps, and he tried to maintain a vigilant policy against them. His investigation, which resulted in the legislation of 535, uncovered a seething underworld of violent and fraudulent procurement. In sixth-century Constantinople, where all prostitution was nominally independent, voluntary, and untaxed, the old system of coercive prostitution was thriving. 82 The preamble of Justinian’s law provides remarkable insight into the state of affairs in sixth-century Constantinople. Justinian found that some pimps “went around the provinces and many places deceiving pitiful young girls, promising them food and clothing.” They brought these girls to the capital, where they were kept in miserable conditions. “The pimps offer them out to the perversion of any who wish and take the entire filthy profit that comes from prostituting the girls. The pimps have even made the girls sign written agreements stipulating that they will fulfill the impious and unholy service for the pimps as long as the pimps see fit.” Girls as young as ten were being forced into prostitution, and if anyone wanted to redeem one of the victims, the pimps extorted enormous sums. When Justinian went to examine the world of prostitution in sixth-century Constantinople, he found the ancient slave trade in every regard, except the state’s approval. Pimps were using classic means of obtaining slaves: defrauding the young and kidnapping them. The young age of the girls brought into prostitution is suggestive of the sheer violence of the system.

• From The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)

  Must lure myself into ways and ways of loquacity.… My first job to open my real experience like an old wound; then to extend it; then to invent on the drop of a feather, a whole multicolored bird. Study, study one or two New Yorker ’s. Like the now-prolific Mavis G. Tuesday, September 29 . A smoggy rainy day. Somnolent bird twitters. A weight upon me of the prose solidity of the professional storytellers: something I haven’t come near. A lingering breakfast in the garage room: reminiscent of a private dormitory, an institution, a mental home. The waxed linoleum, the straight straw-backed chairs, the ashtrays and bookcases, and mammoth blue-glass grapes. Looked at the two pages of my Pillars story I wrote yesterday and felt disgust at the thinness of them. The glaze again. Prohibiting the density of feeling getting in. I must be so over-conscious of markets and places to send things that I can write nothing honest and really satisfying. My feverish dreams are mere figments; I neither write nor work nor study. Of course I depend on the mirror of the world. I have one poem I am sure of, the snake one. Other than that, no subjects. The world is a blank page. I don’t even know the names of the pine trees, and, worse, make no real effort to learn. Or the stars. Or the flowers. Read May Swenson’s book yesterday. Several poems I liked: “Snow by Morning” and a fine imagist piece, “At Breakfast,” on the egg. Elegant and clever sound effects, vivid images: but in the poem about artists and their shapes, textures and colors, this seems a mere virtuosity with little root. “Almanac” I liked too, about the world’s history measured by the moon a hammer made on a thumbnail. I write as if an eye were upon me. That is fatal. The New Yorker rejected my two exercises: as if they knew that’s what they were. Are still “considering” Christmas poem, although I am sure they will not take that. The adrenaline of failure. A black hornet sits on the screen, scratching and polishing its yellowed head. Again the rains fall on rooftops the color of a pool table. If I could cut from my brain the phantom of competition, the ego-center of self-consciousness, and become a vehicle, a pure vehicle of others, the outer world. My interest in other people is too often one of comparison, not of pure intrigue with the unique otherness of identity. Here, ideally, I should forget the outer world of appearances, publishing, checks, success. And be true to an inner heart. Yet I fight against a simplemindedness, a narcissism, a protective shell against competing, against being found wanting. To write for itself, to do things for the joy of them. What a gift of the gods. Create Agatha: a mad, passionate Agatha. Immediately I want her husband to keep bees, and I know nothing of bees. My father knew it all.

• From The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)

  For now at least. Break into a limited, folksy, vivid style that limits the girl, defines her: humor, vivid, but serious: “at bottom really grave.” Wife of Bath. Better read Herself Surprised . Make your own style, don’t copy. But a richer “Laundromat Affair” style. And watch it be a best seller. Much easier to work at: style will define material. Most difficult part: style. Vivid direct descriptions. First person: perhaps I can get away with third. I am wicked, sick: a week behind. But will do 5 pages a day until plodding I catch up. Use words as poet uses words. That is it! Gulley Jimson is an artist with words, too—or, rather Joyce Cary is. But I must be a word-artist. The heroine. Like Stephen Dedalus walking by the sea: ooo-ee-ooo-siss. Hissing their petticoats. Now: a quick description: to be in the Cambridge-spring part of the book. Fish and chip shop on a rainy night: Fish & Chips Turned onto the Fen Causeway in black warm blowing mist. Orange lights reflecting in puddles, lurid orange suns, spinning orange cocoons out of the thick mist. Orange rain drops. An unnatural color. She gritted her teeth, patting her hair. Soggy, rain-wet. On the left, the sunken Sheep’s Green, weltering in full brooks and standing ponds, shoved its poplars whoosh into the ragging mists. Those poplars. On clear nights, full of stars, leaning, pointing, big stars caught in the branches. Or angels. On those nights, stuck shining with angels. Remember Tinka Bell. Looked like a firefly glow till you got up close. Little lady then, shining dainty, with dragonfly wings. Squinting, the black, slippery tree branches looked to circle the orange streetlamps. Spinning a net of branches, spiderwebbing orange. “Why do the branches go round the lights?” “The lights,” he said, his pale orange profile cutting itself ahead into the black, “reflect on the branches going round, not the others.” She plunged her hand into his pocket. Orange light made patent-leather strips on his shiny leather coat. They crossed the bare highway by the Royal Hotel, the brick ugly and leprous orange. Across a little iron-railinged bridge by the Botannical Gardens. “I hate orange lights. They make the town sick.” “Some council. Some one or two fat men sitting. Orange lights proposed. Easier to see in snowstorms, one or two snowstorms. And fogs. For the drivers. And we have to walk about in the foul orange mess. Like orange lepers.” No one was out in the rain. The streets shone, and blue-white lights shone on the narrow crisscross streets off the main highway with its globed orange pedestrian crossing lights ticking and blinking of their own accord by the black-and-white painted strip, bordered with metal studs. Russell Street. Ahead, far up on the right. Light spilt out in a warm puddle. Two men climbed into the light, into the bright white doorway of the fish and chip shop. “Do you have money?” “No.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  He left Basel, Feb. 20, 1529, for Catholic Freiburg, and was soon followed by Erasmus and Amerbach. Here he labored as an esteemed professor of poetry and fruitful author, until his death (1563). He was surrounded by Swiss and German students. He corresponded, now, as confidentially with Aegidius Tschudi as he had formerly corresponded with Zwingli, and co-operated with him in saving a portion of his countrymen for the Catholic faith.195 He gave free vent to his disgust with Protestantism, and yet lamented the evils of the Roman Church, the veniality and immorality of priests who cared more for Venus than for Christ.196 A fearful charge. He received a Protestant Student from Zürich with the rude words: "You are one of those who carry the gospel in the mouth and the devil in the heart;" but when reminded that he did not show the graces of the muses, he excused himself by his old age, and treated the young man with the greatest civility. He became a pessimist, and expected the speedy collapse of the world. His friendship with Erasmus was continued with interruptions, and at last suffered shipwreck. He charged him once with plagiarism, and Erasmus ignored him in his testament.197 It was a misfortune for both that they could not understand the times, which had left them behind. The thirty works of Glarean (twenty-two of them written in Freiburg) are chiefly philological and musical, and have no bearing on theology.198 They were nevertheless put on the Index by Pope Paul IV., in 1559. He bitterly complained of this injustice, caused by ignorance or intrigue, and did all he could, with the aid of Tschudi, to have his name removed, which was done after the seven Catholic cantons had testified that Glarean was a good Christian.199 The Reformation progressed in Glarus at first without much opposition. Fridolin Brunner, pastor at Mollis, wrote to Zwingli, Jan. 15, 1527, that the Gospel was gaining ground in all the churches of the canton. Johann Schindler preached in Schwanden with great effect. The congregations decided for the Reformed preachers, except in Näfels. The reverses at Cappel in 1531 produced a reaction, and caused some losses, but the Reformed Church retained the majority of the population to this day, and with it the preponderance of intelligence, enterprise, wealth, and prosperity, although the numerical relation has recently changed in favor of the Catholics, in consequence of the emigration of Protestants to America, and the immigration of Roman-Catholic laborers, who are attracted by the busy industries (as is the case also in Zürich, Basel, and Geneva).200 § 34. The Reformation in St. Gall, Toggenburg, and Appenzell. Watt and Kessler. The sources and literature in the City Library of St. Gall which bears the name of Vadian (Watt) and contains his MSS. and printed works.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Like other trades, prostitution had been subject to an imperial tax. The tax corresponded to the acceptance of prostitution as a legitimate form of commerce. Only in 439 did the state publicly admit that collecting revenue from prostitution was indecent in a Christian empire. The language of the law implied, disingenuously, that the emperor and his officials had lately discovered this impropriety. The praetorian prefect, Florentius, “saw that the negligence of our predecessors had been exploited by the damnable shrewdness of pimps, as though having obtained the right under the payment of some tax, they were allowed to conduct the business of ruining sexual modesty. Nor did the state, in its ignorance, check this injury to itself.” Florentius, “because of his respect for all people, his love of sexual propriety and chastity,” suggested to the emperors that it was “an injury in our times that pimps be allowed to operate in this city, or that their vile profit seem to augment the treasury.” Florentius offered to compensate the treasury from his own pocket for any lost revenue, but the actual disposition of the law was to ban pimping rather than to amend the state’s fiscal policy. It seems that henceforth the tax was levied on prostitutes directly, and Florentius offered to pick up the tab on any shortfalls this reform caused. Clearly, the main business of this law was the criminalization of pimping. “If anyone hereafter should through a sacrilegious effrontery try to prostitute the bodies of slaves, be they his own or another’s, or of freeborn women who have been contracted at any price, first, these most oppressed slaves are vindicated into freedom and the freeborn are freed from this unholy contract. The pimp, having been severely flogged as an example and lesson to all, shall be driven from the boundaries of this city, in which he thought his illicit abomination was to be practiced.” 80 The law of 439 was an extension of the principles laid out a decade earlier, though in the latter law the court reverted to a more traditional vocabulary of sexual morality— pudicitia and pudor rather than peccare. The later law was also more robust. All pimps in Constantinople were flogged and exiled. What had begun as a crusade against coercive pimping was simplified into a prohibition of pimping altogether. Above all the law of 439 is a strong indication that pimping was inherently, incurably coercive. As enacted, the measure was valid in Constantinople. The reign of Leo saw this policy extended beyond Constantinople. In an edict issued to the people, Leo decreed that “no one may hereafter act as a pimp, nor shall revenue be brought into the accounts from this source.” The law thus established on an empire-wide basis the ban on pimping that Theodosius II had enacted for the capital city.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The magistrate looked quietly on, as if in league with the insurrection. Similar scenes of violence were repeated during the summer. The monks under the lead of the Augustinians, forgetting their vows, left the convents, laid aside the monastic dress, and took up their abode among the people to work for a living, or to become a burden to others, or to preach the new faith. Luther saw in these proceedings the work of Satan, who was bringing shame and reproach on the gospel.483 He feared that many left the cloister for the same reason for which they had entered, namely, from love of the belly and carnal freedom.484 During these troubles Crotus, the enthusiastic admirer of Luther, resigned the rectorship of the university, left Erfurt, and afterwards returned to the mother Church. The Peasants’ War of 1525 was another blow. Eobanus, the Latin poet who had greeted Luther on his entry, accepted a call to Nürnberg. The greatest celebrities left the city, or were disheartened, and died in poverty. From this time dates the decay of the university, once the flourishing seat of humanism and patriotic aspirations. It never recovered its former prosperity. § 66. The Revolution at Wittenberg. Carlstadt and the New Prophets. See Lit. in § 65. In Wittenberg the same spirit of violence broke out under the lead of Luther’s older colleague, Andreas Carlstadt, known to us from his ill success at the Leipzig disputation. He was a man of considerable originality, learning, eloquence, zeal, and courage, but eccentric, radical, injudicious, ill-balanced, restless, and ambitious for leadership. He taught at first the theology of mediaeval scholasticism, but became under Luther’s influence a strict Augustinian, and utterly denied the liberty of the human will. He wrote the first critical work on the Canon of the Scriptures, and anticipated the biblical criticism of modern times. He weighed the historic evidence, discriminated between three orders of books as of first, second, and third dignity, putting the Hagiographa of the Old Testament and the seven Antilegomena of the New in the third order, and expressed doubts on the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. He based his objections to the Antilegomena, not on dogmatic grounds, as Luther, but on the want of historical testimony; his opposition to the traditional Canon was itself traditional; he put ante-Nicene against post-Nicene tradition. This book on the Canon, however, was crude and premature, and passed out of sight.485 He invented some curious and untenable interpretations of Scripture, e.g., of the words of institution of the Lord’s Supper. He referred the word "this," not to the bread, but to the body of Christ, so as to mean: "I am now ready to offer this (body) as a sacrifice in death." He did not, however, publish this view till 1524, and afterwards made common cause with Zwingli.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  And yet he cannot be charged with apostasy or even with inconsistency. He never was a Protestant, and never meant to be one. Division and separation did not enter into his program. From beginning to end he labored for a reformation within the church and within the papacy, not without it. But the new wine burst the old bottles. The reform which he set in motion went beyond him, and left him behind. In some of his opinions, however, he was ahead of his age, and anticipated a more modern stage of Protestantism. He was as much a forerunner of Rationalism as of the Reformation. Sketch of His Life. Erasmus was the illegitimate son of a Dutch priest, Gerard, and Margaret, the daughter of a physician,—their last but not their only child.508 He was born in Rotterdam, Oct. 27, in the year 1466 or 1467.509 He received his early education in the cathedral school of Utrecht and in a flourishing classical academy at Deventer, where he began to show his brilliant talents, especially a most tenacious memory. Books were his chief delight. Already in his twelfth year he knew Horace and Terence by heart. After the death of his mother, he was robbed of his inheritance by his guardians, and put against his will into a convent at Herzogenbusch, which he exchanged afterwards for one at Steyn (Emaus), near Gouda, a few miles from Rotterdam. He spent five unhappy years in monastic seclusion (1486–1491), and conceived an utter disgust for monkery. Ulrich von Hutten passed through the same experience, with the same negative result; while for Luther monastic life was his free choice, and became the cradle of a new religious life. Erasmus found relief in the study of the classics, which he pursued without a guide, by a secret impulse of nature. We have from this period a number of his compositions in poetry and prose, odes to Christ and the holy Virgin, invectives against despisers of eloquence, and an essay on the contempt of the world, in which he describes the corruptions of the world and the vices of the monks. He was delivered from his prison life in 1491 by the bishop of Cambray, his parsimonious patron, and ordained to the priesthood in 1492. He continued in the clerical profession, and remained unmarried, but never had a parish.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Piety which should proceed from a living union of the soul with Christ and a consecration of character, was turned outward and reduced to a round of mechanical performances such as the recital of Paternosters and Avemarias, fasting, alms-giving, confession to the priest, and pilgrimage to a holy shrine. Good works were measured by the quantity rather than the quality, and vitiated by the principle of meritoriousness which appealed to the selfish motive of reward. Remission of sin could be bought with money; a shameful traffic in indulgences was carried on under the Pope’s sanction for filthy lucre as well as for the building of St. Peter’s Dome, and caused that outburst of moral indignation which was the beginning of the Reformation and of the fearful judgment on the Church of Rome. This is a one-sided, but not an exaggerated description. It is true as far as it goes, and needs only to be supplemented by the bright side which we shall present in the next section. Honest Roman Catholic scholars, while maintaining the infallibility and consequent doctrinal irreformability of their church, admit in strong terms the decay of discipline and the necessity of a moral reform in the sixteenth century.3 The best proof is furnished by a pope of exceptional integrity, Adrian VI., who made an extraordinary confession of the papal and clerical corruption to the Diet of Nürnberg in 1522, and tried earnestly, though in vain, to reform his court. The Council of Trent was called not only for the extirpation of heresy, but in part also "for the reformation of the clergy and Christian people;"4 and Pope Pius IV., in the bull of confirmation, likewise declares that one of the objects of the Council was "the correction of morals and the restoration of ecclesiastical discipline."5 On the other hand, it must be admitted that the church was more than once in a far worse condition, during the papal schism in the fourteenth, and especially in the tenth and eleventh centuries; and yet she was reformed by Pope Hildebrand and his successors without a split and without an alteration of the Catholic Creed. Why could not the same be done in the sixteenth century? Because the Roman church in the critical moment resisted reform with all her might, and forced the issue: either no reformation at all, or a reformation in opposition to Rome.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  This 1913 photograph from North Carolina shows the disfiguring effects of hookworm. In a shocking contrast, an undersized young man, age twenty-three, is placed alongside a normal boy, two years younger, who towers over him. 236 H North Carolina, Box 53, Folder 1269, #236 Vashti Alexander County, North Carolina, May 29, 1913, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York All in all, the rural South stood out as a place of social and now eugenic backwardness. Tenant farmers and sharecroppers, wandering the dusty roads with a balky mule, seemed a throwback to eighteenth-century vagrants. The “lazy diseases” of hookworm and pellagra created a class of lazy lubbers. Illiteracy was widespread. Fear of indiscriminate breeding loomed large. The stock of poor white men produced in the South were dismissed as unfit for military service, the women unfit to be mothers. In the two decades before the war, reformers had exposed that many poor white women and children worked long, grueling hours in southern textile factories. Was this another sign of “race

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  Now it so happens that, in the NT, aselgeia usually occurs, not alone, but either in lists of sins or in conjunction with other sins. It is instructive to see with what other sins it is most closely connected. (i) Three times (Mark 7.22; Eph. 4.19; II Pet. 2.2) it occurs close to pleonexia. Pleonexia is the unbridled longing to possess more, the uncontrollable desire to possess things which are forbidden and which should not be desired at all. Therefore there is in aselgeia the idea of ‘sheer, shameless greed’. It is the vice of the man who will submit to demean himself and to shame himself in any way in order to possess that which he has set his heart upon. (ii) In four cases (Mark 7.22; II Cor. 12.21; Gal. 5.19; II Pet. 2.18) it is connected with adultery and lust and sexual sin. Therefore in aselgeia there is involved the idea of ‘sheer animal lust’. One has only to walk the streets of any great city to see that kind of aselgeia in terrible action. It is the vice of a man who has no more shame than an animal in the gratification of his physical desires. (iii) In three cases (Gal. 5.19; I Pet. 4.3; Rom. 13.13) it is connected with drunkenness. In particular it is connected with the word kōmoi. Originally a kōmos was a band of friends who accompanied a victor in the games on his way home. They sang their rejoicings and his praises. But the word degenerated until it came to mean a ‘carousal’, a band of drunken revellers, swaying and singing their way through the streets. Therefore aselgeia has in it that ‘sheer self-indulgence’, which is such a slave to its so-called pleasures that it is lost to shame. It is perhaps Josephus who gives us the flavour of the meaning of aselgeia best of all. He couples it with mania, ‘madness’, and he declares that that was the sin of Jezebel when she erected a shrine of Baal in the Holy City, the very city of God. Such an act was a shocking outrage which defied all decency and flaunted all public opinion. Aselgeia is a grim word. It is the wanton insolence that is lost to shame. It is a grim commentary on human nature that a man can be so mastered by sin that in the end he loses even shame. CHARISMATHE GIFT OF GODCharisma basically means ‘a gift’. Outside the NT it is not at all a common word. In classical Greek it is rare. It is not common in the papyri, but there is one suggestive occurrence where a man classifies his property as that which he acquired apo agorasias, ‘by purchase’, and that which he acquired apo charismatos, ‘by gift’. In the NT charisma is a characteristically Pauline word. Altogether it occurs seventeen times, fourteen times in the undoubted Pauline letters, twice in the Pastoral Epistles, and once in I Peter.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  You could take the Irish out of the saloons, but not the saloons out of the Irish. Their hearts were caves of doubt. Edwin O’Malley was a two-fisted drinker, a collector of fine wines, but his wife, Margaret, Elena’s mother, slipped behind the curtain of alcoholism before Elena even graduated from elementary school. Margaret couldn’t communicate in the palaces and mansions that the O’Malleys frequented during the Depression. Her tongue was tied. Chat failed her. She was like the rat balking at the maze. Her father didn’t mince words: You look like hell. Jesus Christ, you look like hell. Why bother to come down here? You can’t even walk—how are you going to feed yourself. You’re drunk and you can’t even walk. You’re a disgrace. Damned disgrace. It seemed to Elena that she was always waiting for her mother to come downstairs. Her parents had separate rooms, of course; they never slept together. When her mother limped downstairs for dinner, it was often the first they had seen of her that day. Elena hid behind servants and furniture and she listened. She stored away the results. She repeated phrases of affection and hatred alike, until she couldn’t tell one from the other, couldn’t tell derision from respect, a beating from a fond hug. Once, a friend of her father’s visited: Oh, Margaret, lovely to see you, you look marvelous. To which her father had replied, Jesus, Karl, don’t you have eyes? That was her mother. Her mother fell down the staircase and they left her there, at her father’s instructions. Her mother disrobed on the front lawn. Her mother locked herself into a shed, looking for stashed treasure. She might have stayed there for days, if it hadn’t been for the gardener. Margaret O’Malley lost a little bit of herself every evening. She turned to climb the stairs again, after each episode of humiliation, until there was no dignity left, no character to assassinate, until she no longer had to climb because it was too dangerous. A primitive home escalator was installed, at great expense. Her father made sure Elena knew about her mother’s condition. He called her down from her room to witness each infraction against him, against his success. So when she was a child and her mother tried to take her own life with sleeping pills, he induced vomiting, called for an ambulance, and then brought Elena into the bedroom. Margaret O’Malley was soiled and unconscious. Shit and piss and bile puddled around her, in her linen, spattered on the rug. This is your mother. Go ahead. Look. It was the holidays that always brought her back to this past. She had left home with the mixed feelings anyone might have.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  those parts of their heritage that they see as favorable and wish to keep, jettisoning what unpleasant truths they would prefer to forget. The same impulses would soon be used to refashion the redneck and embrace white trash as an authentic heritage. It was moonshiners known for trippin’ whiskey and outrunnin’ the law who started the rough and wild sport of stock car racing. By the seventies, with money from Detroit automobile companies and celebrity drivers, an outlaw sport had become NASCAR, the tamer pastime of arriviste middle-class Americans. Meanwhile, country crooners Johnny Russell and Vernon Oxford released the hit singles “Rednecks, White Socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer” (1973) and “Redneck! (The Redneck National Anthem)” (1976). Vernon Oxford defined “redneck” as “someone who enjoys country music and likes to drink beer.” In 1977, the year Elvis died, the new queen of country rock music, Dolly Parton, was featured in the elite fashion magazine Vogue. “Redneck chic” (the cleaned-up redneck) reached Hollywood in the 1981 film Urban Cowboy, in which Jersey boy John Travolta took on the role of hard-hat- wearing, honky-tonk-loving Texas two-stepper Buford Davis. In 1986, Ernest Matthew Mickler’s White Trash Cooking was published, celebrating low-down lingo and rural recipes. When Mickler, a country singer as well as a caterer, gave his book to his seventy-two-year-old aunt, she remarked, “Well, that’s what they call us, ain’t it?” 14 The transition to white trash acceptance or accommodation was not as smooth as it might seem. While Dolly Parton made over-the-top “floozydom” fashionable, and combined the burlesque of blonde bombshells Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield with Daisy Mae of Li’l Abner fame, her public identity did not escape the taint of white trash degradation. “You have no idea how much it costs to make someone look this cheap,” Parton told a reporter in 1986. The Hollywood blockbuster Deliverance lacked even an ounce of delicacy, but offered up instead one of the most devastating portraits of rude hillbillies since the eugenics movement faded from view. White middle-class readers of the novel and film audiences wrote fan mail to author James Dickey, praising the four intrepid Atlanta adventurers as if they were old-time pioneers overcoming wilderness dangers while escaping the clutches of white trash savages. A former student of Dickey’s wrote fawningly to his mentor, apparently oblivious to the dehumanizing tone of his letter. He was an ardent backwoods hiker, he said, “though I carry no bow and there are no rednecks awaiting me at the top for me to stalk and kill.” He could not differentiate, in moral terms, between the thrill of taking on the mountains and the thrill of sending mountain men to their deaths. 15

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

  It is not implausible that some Babylonian practices should have been adopted after the Babylonian conquest. What the vision primarily shows, however, is the kind of offenses that Ezekiel thought would trigger the massive destruction of Jerusalem that was to come. The reason why people are said to have indulged in those practices is that they think the Lord has abandoned the land and will not see (8:12). As we shall see, Ezekiel claims that YHWH does abandon the land after the final destruction of Jerusalem, but in no case would it be safe to infer that “the L ord does not see.” The Vision of Destruction The same figure who had guided Ezekiel in his vision now summons “the executioners of the city.” These are six angelic figures accompanied by “a man dressed in linen, with a writing case at his side.” The linen dress is typical of priests, but the figure in question is clearly heavenly, what we might call a recording angel. This figure is commanded to go through Jerusalem and mark the foreheads of those who oppose the “abominations” with a taw, the last letter of the alphabet, which had the shape of an X in the Old Hebrew alphabet. The marking recalls the smearing of blood on the lintels and doorposts of the Israelites in Egypt, so that the angel of destruction would pass them by (Exod 12:23). In this case, however, the distinction is not between Israelite and Egyptian, but between the people of Jerusalem. The implication is that the people who are killed are sinners. This is a dangerous concept, which is surely not defensible. (The underlying logic, with regard to suffering in general, is criticized in the book of Job.) As Ezekiel sees it, the slaughter in Jerusalem is the work not of the Babylonians but of YHWH. It is pitiless in its execution of old and young, male and female. The prophet is moved to cry out in protest, but he does not contest the explanation given: “The guilt of the house of Israel and Judah is exceedingly great; the land is full of bloodshed and the city full of perversity; for they say, ‘The L ord has forsaken the land, and the L ord does not see’ ” (10:9). In short, Jerusalem is destroyed because the inhabitants deserve it. This explanation is essentially similar to what we find in the Deuteronomists, but there are some distinct nuances in Ezekiel. He is especially concerned with the defilement of the temple, which leads to its utter violation. He is also exceptional in the degree to which he portrays God as pitiless. Ezekiel’s way of dealing with the catastrophe that befell Jerusalem seems to be to persuade himself that it was utterly defiled so that destruction was the only remedy.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 6 (1300 – 1800) (2009)

  some awkward theological questions about the mechanism of transubstantiation. One of the earliest, Henry III’s effort to start a Holy Blood cult in Westminster Abbey in the mid-thirteenth century, to rival King Louis IX’s sensational acquisition of the Crown of Thorns in Paris (see p. 475), never aroused popular enthusiasm and rapidly faded away; it had appeared prematurely.7 By contrast, after the Black Death, blood cults gathered momentum, and like so much else in Passion devotion they acquired an anti-Semitic edge, because they were often associated with stories that Jews had attacked wafers of eucharistic bread. So the anti-Semitism which had been such a feature of Western Christianity since the era of the early Crusades continued to intensify. In 1290 in Paris a Jew had supposedly stabbed a eucharistic wafer with a knife and it started bleeding. Among the hundred or so blood cults which appeared over the next three centuries, mainly in the Holy Roman Empire, a majority involved a story of Jewish desecration. There were further stories of deliberate Jewish maltreatment of the host apart from the pilgrimage cults – some are likely to have reflected real assaults by angry Jews, themselves inspired, ironically, by the myth that such assaults had happened.8 In an allied development, particularly in Iberia, Christ’s earliest days also came often to be associated with the shedding of his blood through the Feast of the Circumcision: this happy celebration of Jesus’s identification with his Jewish people, which so delighted the Viennese beguine Agnes Blannbekin, was turned into a Jewish assault on the child, rather like the atrocities against children imagined in the ‘blood libel’ against the Jews (see pp. 400–401). I remember the shock of seeing in the Museo de Arte Antica in Lisbon an example of one of these Circumcision paintings from an anonymous sixteenth-century Portuguese master. Lying naked in the centre was the Christ Child, over whom stood a rabbi, bishop-like in a mitre, about to wield the knife (and interestingly wearing spectacles, symbolizing his distorted vision, an anti-Semitic visual cliché with a long life ahead of it). On the Child’s right were Mary and Joseph, Joseph a befuddled but harmless old man, so a non-threatening sort of Jew, and Mary looking distinctly worried. On the other side stood as vicious a crowd of Jews as one could expect to meet, gleefully brandishing the Ten Commandments. European society in the wake of the Black Death remained preoccupied by death and what to do about it. No wonder the eleventh- and twelfth-century development of the doctrine of Purgatory was one of the most successful and long-lasting theological ideas in the Western Church. It bred an intricate industry of prayer: a whole range of institutions and endowments, of which the most characteristic was the chantry, a foundation of invested money or landed revenues which provided finance for a priest to devote his time to singing

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

  CHAPTER 22 CONCLUSION The most controversial issue in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah is undoubtedly the attempts to deal with the problem of intermarriage, especially in the case of Ezra. Ezra’s action in expelling the “foreign” women and their children must be understood in the context of a small community that felt itself to be beleaguered and was struggling to maintain its identity. While this particular measure may not have had any lasting effect, the policy of separatism, the insistence of firm boundaries between Jew and Gentile, laid the foundation for the preservation of Jewish identity from antiquity to the present. The Ammonites, Moabites, and Edomites have long since disappeared from history. Ezra, then, must be given credit for his efforts to preserve the heritage of Judaism. Nonetheless, the treatment of the women and children in Ezra 10 is one of the lower points of the biblical record. It does not offend modern sensibilities to the same extent as the slaughter of the Canaanites in Deuteronomy and Joshua, but it is nonetheless offensive. It is one of the more egregious cases in the Bible where considerations of purity and religious belief of one group (the “holy seed”) take precedence over the basic rights of those who do not belong to that group. Such actions are not only offensive to modern sensibilities but are also counter to the teaching of the prophets and to some strands, at least, of the Torah. The book of Malachi can be read in part as a protest against these policies. We find a very different approach to the Gentile world in the stories of Ruth and Jonah. Ezra’s career in Jerusalem was short-lived. His purist interpretation of Judaism is contested even with the Hebrew Bible itself. FOR FURTHER READING Commentaries J. Blenkinsopp, Ezra-Nehemiah (OTL; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1988). Defends the coherence of these books with Chronicles. D. J. A. Clines, Ezra, Nehemiah (NCB; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984). Insightful and readable. L. L. Grabbe, Ezra-Nehemiah (London: Routledge, 1998). Readable commentary with historical focus. R. W. Klein, “The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah,” NIB 3:663–851. Reliable historical commentary with homiletical reflections. H. G. M. Williamson, Ezra, Nehemiah (WBC 16; Waco: Word, 1985). Detailed philological commentary. Assumes that Ezra and Nehemiah are independent of Chronicles. Historical Background J. L. Berquist, Judaism in Persia’s Shadow: A Social and Historical Approach (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). Readable account of the Persian period. J. Blenkinsopp, Judaism. The First Phase: The Place of Ezra and Nehemiah in the Origins of Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009). Historical issues in Ezra and Nehemiah. P. Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2002). Authoritative account of the historical context. L. L. Grabbe, A History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period. Vol. 1. Yehud: A History of the Persian Province of Judah (London: T&T Clark, 2004).