Fear

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 Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  29. (For he had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. For oftentimes it had caught him: and he was kept bound with chains and in fetters; and he brake the bands, and was driven of the devil into the wilderness.) 30. And Jesus asked him, saying, What is thy name? And he said, Legion: because many devils were entered into him. 31. And they besought him that he would not command them to go out into the deep. 32. And there was there an herd of many swine feeding on the mountain: and they besought him that he would suffer them to enter into them. And he suffered them. 33. Then went the devils out of the man, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the lake, and were choked. 34. When they that fed them saw what was done, they fled, and went and told it in the city and in the country. 35. Then they went out to see what was done; and came to Jesus, and found the man, out of whom the devils were departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind: and they were afraid. 36. They also which saw it told them by what means he that was possessed of the devils was healed. 37. Then the whole multitude of the country of the Gadarenes round about besought him to depart from them; for they were taken with great fear: and he went up into the ship, and returned back again. 38. Now the man out of whom the devils were departed besought him that he might be with him: but Jesus sent him away, saying, 39. Return to thine own house, and shew how great things God hath done unto thee. And he went his way, and published throughout the whole city how great things Jesus had done unto him. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. The Saviour, as He sailed with His disciples, came to a port, as it is said, And they arrived at the country of the Gadarenes, which is over against Galilee. TITUS BOSTRENSIS. Many accurate copies have neither “Gerazenes” nor “Gadarenes,” but “Gergezenes.” For Gadara is a city in Judæa, but neither lake nor sea is found at it; and Geraza is a city of Arabia, having neither lake nor sea near. But Gergeza, from which the Gergezenes are called, is an ancient city near the lake of Tiberias, above which is a rock hanging over the lake, into which they say the swine were dashed down by the devils. But since Gadara and Geraza border upon the land of the Gergezenes, it is probable that the swine were led from thence to their parts.

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

  AUGUSTINE. (Tract. xxxi. 7) And many of the people believed on Him. Our Lord brought the poor and humble to be saved. The common people, who soon saw their own infirmities, received His medicine without hesitation. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. l. 2) Neither had these however a sound faith; but took up a low way of speaking, after the manner of the multitude: When Christ cometh, will He do more miracles than this Man hath done? Their saying, When Christ cometh, shews that they were not steady in believing that He was the Christ: or rather, that they did not believe He was the Christ at all; for it is the same as if they said, that Christ, when He came, would be a superior person, and do more miracles. Minds of the grosser sort are influenced not by doctrine, but by miracles. AUGUSTINE. (Tract. xxxi. 7) Or they mean, If there are not to be two Christs, this is He. The rulers however, possessed with madness, not only refused to acknowledge the physician, but even wished to kill Him: The Pharisees heard that the people murmured such things concerning Him, and the Pharisees and chief priests sent officers to take Him. CHRYSOSTOM. He had discoursed often before, but they had never so treated Him. The praises of the multitude however now irritated them; though the transgression of the sabbath still continued to be the reason put forward. Nevertheless, they were afraid of taking this step themselves, and sent officers instead. AUGUSTINE. (Tract. xxxi. s. 8) Not being able to take Him against His will, they sent men to hear Him teach. Teach what? Then said Jesus unto them, Yet a little while I am with you. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. l. 2) He speaks with the greatest humility: as if to say, Why do ye make such haste to kill Me? Only wait a little time. AUGUSTINE. (Tract. xxxi. 8) That which ye wish to do now, ye shall do sometime, but not now: because it is not My will. For I wish to fulfil My mission in due course, and so to come to My passion. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. l. 2) In this way He astonished the bolder part of the multitude, and made the earnest among them more eager to hear Him; so little time being now left, during which they could have the benefit of His teaching. He does not say, I am here, simply; but, I am with you; meaning, Though you persecute Me, I will not cease fulfilling my part towards you, teaching you the way to salvation, and admonishing you. What follows, And I go unto Him that sent Me, was enough to excite some fear. THEOPHYLACT. As if He were going to complain of them to the Father: for if they reviled Him who was sent, no doubt they did an injury to Him that sent.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  The lieutenant had just come up with the others. “Help me!” he screamed. “Somebody help!” “Well goddamn it sergeant! What’s the matter? How many did we kill?” “They’re children!” he screamed at the lieutenant. “Children and old men!” cried Molina. “Where are their rifles?” the lieutenant asked. “There aren’t any rifles,” he said. “Well, help him then!” screamed the lieutenant to the rest of the men. The men stood in the entrance of the hut, but they would not move. “Help him, help him. I’m ordering you to help him!” The men were not moving and some of them were crying now, dropping their rifles and sitting down on the wet ground. They were weeping now with their hands against their faces. “Oh Jesus, oh God, forgive us.” “Forgive us for what we’ve done!” he heard Molina cry. “Get up,” screamed the lieutenant. “What do you think this is? I’m ordering you all to get up.” Some of the men began slowly crawling over the bodies, grabbing for the bandages that were still left. By now some of the villagers had gathered outside the hut. He could hear them shouting angrily. He knew they must be cursing them. “You better get a fucking chopper in here,” someone was yelling. “Where’s the radio man? Get the radio man!” “Hello Cactus Red. This is Red Light Two. Ahhh this is Red Light Two. We need an emergency evac. We got a lot of wounded . . . ahh . . . friendly wounded. A lot of friendly wounded out here.” He could hear the lieutenant on the radio, trying to tell the helicopters where to come. The men in the hut were just sitting there crying. They could not move, and they did not listen to the lieutenant’s orders. They just sat with the rain pouring down on them through the roof, crying and not moving. “You men! You men have got to start listening to me. You gotta stop crying like babies and start acting like marines!” The lieutenant who was off the radio now was shoving the men, pleading with them to move. “You’re men, not babies. It’s all a mistake. It wasn’t your fault. They got in the way. Don’t you people understand—they got in the goddamn way!” When the medivac chopper came, he picked up the little boy who was lying next to the old man. His foot came off and he grabbed it up quickly and bandaged it against the bottom stump of the boy’s leg. He held him looking into his frightened eyes and carried him up to the open door of the helicopter. The boy was still crying softly when he handed him to the gunner. And when it was all over and all the wounded had been loaded aboard, he helped the lieutenant move the men back on patrol. They walked away from the hut in the rain.

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

  Chapter 4 is focused on one of the central preoccupations of ancient fiction, female chastity. Feminine purity was a transcendent symbol, capable of bearing the most consequential meanings. The authors of the imperial romances invested no small part of their talents in contriving elaborate threats to the chastity of their heroines. These scenes, looked at across the genre, provide direct access to the ideological code of romance. The romances are stories in which essence precedes existence. What is most remarkable about the imperial romances is the extent to which they are explicitly built on an acute awareness that forces beyond the individual’s control shape his or her life. Fate furnishes us with moral ends, and more instrumentally, society constitutes us as selves. The romances make their most daring approaches to the inscrutable mysteries of fate in the image of the heroine’s endangered chastity. The romances flirt with the possibility of her violation, because the transgression of her body would mark a visceral contravention of the social and cosmic order. These typological scenes are very near the deep theology of the romance. In the end, she is always rescued, and the deeper order of the cosmos prevails against the flux and frustration that is experienced in human time. The heroine is reserved, by the will of the gods, for marriage. There is salvation in the cycle of nature, which imparts to us the gift of eros within its mysterious order. Christians and Jews would rework these very scenes of feminine imperilment to express their deepest reservations about the world and the place of eros in the constitution of the self. Already in the primitive phases of the religion, Christian authors were adept at reformulating the fictional tropes of Greco-Roman literature. A whole body of legend grew up around the heroes of Christianity, the apostles. In the apocryphal acts, we find the sexual mechanics of the romance deliberately inverted. The ruling Roman order provides the villains, while the apostles, intermediaries of a higher power, furnish the heroes. In these legends, sexual rejection functions as an expression of dissent from the dominant order. By reading the parallel scenes of female endangerment, we glimpse the theological imagination of a movement set apart from mainstream society and convinced in its belief in a separate, spiritual order.17

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

  CHRYSOSTOM. Then that those to whom the love of God is preferred should not be offended thereat, He leads them to a higher doctrine. Nothing is nearer to a man than his soul, and yet He enjoins that this should not only be hated, but that a man should be ready to deliver it up to death, and blood; not to death only, but to a violent and most disgraceful death, namely, the death of the cross; therefore it follows, And whoso taketh not up his cross and followeth me, is not worthy of me. He had as yet said nothing to them respecting his own sufferings, but instructs them in the meanwhile in these things, that they may the more readily receive His words concerning His passion. HILARY. Or; They that are Christ’s have crucified the body with its vices and lusts. (Gal. 5:24.) And he is unworthy of Christ who does not take up His cross, in which we suffer with Him, die with Him, are buried and rise again with Him, and follow his Lord, purposing to live in newness of spirit in this sacrament of the faith. GREGORY. (Hom. in Ev. xxxii. 3.) The cross is so called from 1torment; and there are two ways in which we bear the Lord’s cross; either when we afflict the flesh by abstinence; or when in compassion for our neighbour we make his afflictions our own. But it should be known that there are some who make a shew of abstinence not for God, but for ostentation; and some there are who shew compassion to their neighbour, not spiritually but carnally, not that they may encourage him in virtue, but rather countenancing him in faults. These indeed seem to bear their cross, but do not follow the Lord; therefore He adds, And followeth me CHRYSOSTOM. Because these commands seemed burdensome, He proceeds to shew their great use and benefit, saying, He that findeth his life shall lose it. As much as to say, Not only do these things that I have inculcated do no harm, but they are of great advantage to a man; and the contrary thereof shall do him great hurt—and this is His manner every where. He uses those things which men’s affections are set upon as a means of bringing them to their duty. Thus: Why are you loath to contemn your life? Because you love it? For that very reason contemn it, and you will do it the highest service. REMIGIUS. The life in this place is not to be understood as the substance, (the soul,) but as this present state of being; and the sense is, He who findeth his life, i. e. this present life, he who so loves this light, its joys and pleasures, as to desire that he may always find them; he shall lose that which he wishes always to keep, and prepare his soul for eternal damnation.

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

  GREGORY. (Hom. in Ev. xi. 4.) Or otherwise; The Holy Church is likened to a net, because it is given into the hands of fishers, and by it each man is drawn into the heavenly kingdom out of the waves of this present world, that he should not be drowned in the depth of eternal death. This net gathers of every kind of fishes, because the wise and the foolish, the free and the slave, the rich and the poor, the strong and the weak, are called to forgiveness of sin; it is then fully filled when in the end of all things the sum of the human race is completed; as it follows, Which, when it was filled, they drew out, and sitting down on the shore gathered the good into vessels, but the bad they cast away. For as the sea signifies the world, so the sea shore signifies the end of the world; and as the good are gathered into vessels, but the bad cast away, so each man is received into eternal abodes, while the reprobate having lost the light of the inward kingdom are cast forth into outer darkness. But now the net of faith holds good and bad mingled together in one; but the shore shall discover what the net of the Church has brought to land. JEROME. For when the net shall be drawn to the shore, then shall be shewn the true test for separating the fishes. CHRYSOSTOM. Wherein does this parable differ from the parable of the tares? There, as here, some perish and some are saved; but there, because of their heresy of evil dogmas; in the first parable of the sower, because of their not attending to what was spoken; here, because of their evil life, because of which, though drawn by the net, that is, enjoying the knowledge of God, they cannot be saved. And when you hear that the wicked are cast away, that you may not suppose that this punishment may be risked, He adds an exposition shewing its severity, saying, Thus shall it be in the end of the world; the angels shall come forth and sever the wicked from among the just, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire, there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Though He elsewhere declares, that He shall separate them as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats; He here declares, that the Angels shall do it, as also in the parable of the tares. GREGORY. (ubi sup.) To fear becomes us here, rather than to expound for the torments of sinners are pronounced in plain terms, that none might plead his ignorance, should eternal punishment be threatened in obscure sayings.

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

  BEDE. This may also be taken to refer to certain heretics or schismatics, or even to a bad Catholic, from whom at the time of his baptism the evil spirit had gone out. And he wanders about in dry places, that is, his crafty device is to try the hearts of the faithful, which have been purged of all unstable and transient knowledge, if he can plant in them any where the footsteps of his iniquity. But he says, I will return to my house whence I came out. And here we must beware lest the sin which we supposed extinguished in us, by our neglect overcome us unawares. But he finds his house swept and garnished, that is, purified by the grace of baptism from the stain of sin, yet replenished with no diligence in good works. By the seven evil spirits which he takes to himself, he signifies all the vices. And they are called more wicked, because he will have not only those vices which are opposed to the seven spiritual virtues, but also by his hypocrisy he will pretend to have the virtues themselves. CHRYSOSTOM. (ut sup.) Let us receive the words which follow, as said not only to them, but also to ourselves, And the last state of that man shall be worse than the first; for if enlightened and released from our former sins we again return to the same course of wickedness, a heavier punishment will await our latter sins. BEDE. It may also be simply understood, that our Lord added these words to shew the distinction between the works of Satan and His own, that in truth He is ever hastening to cleanse what has been defiled, Satan to defile with still greater pollution what has been cleansed. 11:27–2827. And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked. 28. But he said, Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  My thoughts too led an independent existence. Suddenly, looking at Hymie and thinking of that strange word “ovaries,” now stranger than any word in my whole vocabulary, this feeling of icy isolation came over me and Hymie sitting beside me was a bullfrog, absolutely a bullfrog and nothing more. I was jumping from the bridge head first, down into the primeval ooze, the legs clear and waiting for a bite; like that Satan had plunged through the heavens, through the solid core of the earth, head down and ramming through to the very hub of the earth, the darkest, densest, hottest pit of hell. I was walking through the Mojave Desert and the man beside me was waiting for nightfall in order to fall on me and slay me. I was walking again in Dreamland and a man was walking above me on a tightrope and above him a man was sitting in an airplane spelling letters of smoke in the sky. The woman hanging on my arm was pregnant and in six or seven years the thing she was carrying inside her would be able to read the letters in the sky and he or she or it would know that it was a cigarette and later would smoke the cigarette, perhaps a package a day. In the womb nails formed on every finger, every toe; you could stop right there, at a toenail, the tiniest toenail imaginable, and you could break your head over it, trying to figure it out. On one side of the ledger are the books man has written, containing such a hodgepodge of wisdom and nonsense, of truth and falsehood, that if one lived to be as old as Methuselah one couldn’t disentangle the mess; on the other side of the ledger things like toenails, hair, teeth, blood, ovaries , if you will, all incalculable and all written in another kind of ink, in another script, an incomprehensible, undecipherable script. The bullfrog eyes were trained on me like two collar buttons stuck in cold fat; they were stuck in the cold sweat of the primeval ooze. Each collar button was an ovary that had come unglued, an illustration out of the dictionary without benefit of lucubration; lackluster in the cold yellow fat of the eyeball each buttoned ovary produced a subterranean chill, the skating rink of hell where men stood upside down in the ice, the legs free and waiting for a bite. Here Dante walked unaccompanied, weighed down by his vision, and through endless circles gradually moving heavenward to be enthroned in his work. Here Shakespeare with smooth brow fell into the bottomless reverie of rage to emerge in elegant quartos and innuendoes. A glaucous frost of non-comprehension swept clear by gales of laughter. From the hub of the bullfrog’s eye radiated clean white spokes of sheer lucidity not to be annotated or categorized, not to be numbered or defined, but revolving sightless in kaleidoscopic change.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  In fact, my body was afraid of me; continually now I was aware of the obscure presence of fear, of a feeling of constriction in my chest which was not yet pain, but the first step toward it. I had long been used to insomnia, but from this time on sleep was worse than vigil; hardly would I doze off before there were frightful awakenings. I was subject to headaches which Hermogenes attributed to the heat of the climate and the helmet's weight; by evening, after prolonged fatigue, I sank into a chair like one falling; rising to receive Rufus or Severus was an effort for which I had to prepare well in advance; when seated I leaned heavily on the arms of my chair, and my thigh muscles trembled like those of an exhausted runner. The slightest motion became actual labor, and of such labors life was now composed. An accident almost ridiculous, a mere childish indisposition, brought to light the true malady beneath that appalling fatigue. During a meeting of the general staff I had a nosebleed, but took little notice of it at first; it persisted, however, until time for the evening meal; I awoke at night to find myself drenched in blood. I called Celer, who slept in the next tent, and he in his turn roused Hermogenes, but the horid warm flood went on. With careful hands the young officer wiped away the liquid which smirched my face. At dawn I was seized with retching as are the condemned in Rome who open their veins in their bath. They warmed my chilled body the best they could with the aid of blankets and hot packs; to staunch the blood Hermogenes prescribed snow; it was not to be had in camp; coping with innumerable difficulties Celer had it brought from the summit of Mount Hermon. I learned later that they had despaired of my life, and I myself felt attached to it by no more than the merest thread, as imperceptible as the too rapid pulse which now dismayed my physician. But the sudden, inexplicable hemorrhage came to an end; I got up again and strove to live as before, but did not succeed. When, but poorly restored to health, I had imprudently attempted an evening ride, I received a second warning, more serious than the first. For the space of a second I felt my heartbeats quicken, then slow down, falter, and cease; I seemed to fall like a stone into some black well which is doubtless death. If death it was, it is a mistake to call it silent: I was swept down by cataracts, and deafened like a diver by the roaring of waters. I did not reach bottom, but came to the surface again, choking for breath.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I knelt over him with the chaplain when they brought his body in. He was covered with a raincoat. There was a small bullet hole in his forehead and the whole back of his head had been shot out. He was dead like all the rest, and for some reason right then I felt something big was about to happen. The major called me over and told me to get the men ready to move out. We were going north across the river. When I got back to the tent, Michaelson told me he would see me in heaven after today. He was to die that afternoon. Every one of us seemed to have a funny feeling. I kept thinking over and over that I was going to get hit—that nothing would be quite the same after this day. We went to get some chow and I remember the major yelled at me for not putting helmets on the men. We’d never used them in the past and I couldn’t understand why on this day the major wanted us to wear helmets and flak jackets. We had to walk all the way back to our tents and put the stuff on. We felt like supermen in the cumbersome jackets as we got into the truck that took us to the southern bank of the river. We all got out and waited for a while and then a small boat took us to the other side, where everybody else was getting ready to sweep up north to where the lieutenant’s squad had been wiped out. I remember moving along the beach beside the ocean later. There were sand dunes that reminded me of home and lots of scrub pine trees. The men were in a very sloppy formation. It seemed everyone was carrying far too much equipment. The sky was clear and the Vietnamese were walking and fishing. Except for the noise of the tanks and Amtracs that were moving slowly along with us, it seemed like a Sunday stroll with everyone dressed up in costume. It was hard to remember that at any moment the whole thing might bust wide open and you might get killed like all the other dead losers. There was that salt air that smelled so familiar. Then the whole procession suddenly came to a stop and we were told to go back. There was something happening in the village on the north bank of the river. A big fight was going on and the Popular Forces were pinned down and in lots of trouble. I ran up to the captain who had given the order and asked him was he sure we weren’t supposed to continue going up north. The men didn’t want to go back, I said. Was it the major who had given the order? I asked. The captain said he’d try to get confirmation. I waited with the Amtrac engines roaring in my ears while he radioed the rear.

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

  The violent repression of same-sex love dates to the ambitious early years of Justinian’s reign. It was the dramatic and decisive policy of a zealous emperor bent on rebuilding the Roman Empire, without time or tears for those who risked the favor of God. The enterprise of reconquest, of course, was to collapse, crumbling of its own overweening ambition and the unforeseeable advent of plague. The later legislation of Justinian bears the darkened mood of political disappointment and desperate suffering. A law issued sometime in the years after the appearance of the bubonic plague reflects the utterly transformed atmosphere. The law is motivated by the fear of God, whose displeasure manifested itself in the famines, earthquakes, and pestilence that had struck so inexplicably. It is written in the language of sin and salvation. Justinian, as legislator, considered the “sins” against nature within his regulatory remit. The prefect was charged to take care lest these sins lead to the destruction of the “city and the polity.” Another law, composed toward the end of Justinian’s reign, represents a complete union of Christian ideology, state power, and ecclesiastical ambition. In response to terrible earthquakes, Justinian came to believe that God was angry at the sins of man, with special anger reserved for the grievous impiety of sex between men. If proof were needed, he pointed to the fires of Sodom, which smoldered “up to the present time.” What God wanted, even more than the destruction of sinners, was their repentance. Justinian commanded that all guilty of such sin immediately repent. They were to take themselves to the patriarch of Constantinople, undergoing penance as a “therapy for their disease.” The prefect was to encourage penitence, but any who failed to submit themselves faced “atrocious penalties.” To allow sin to abide was to invite “the good God to destroy us all.”36 The late measures of Justinian are truly the end of a late antique trajectory. In Justinian’s reign the legal regime has become fully consonant with a cultural system that organized sexual morality first and foremost around the gender of the participants. The conception of same-sex desire as a disease, susceptible to ecclesiastical therapy, has come to be embodied in imperial law. Justinian’s policies presume a powerful religio-juridical complex. The state, with its monopoly of violence, is used to control and enforce private morality directly. The reign of Justinian marks a terminal point where sin and salvation, rather than shame and reputation, have come to form the dominant axis of public regulation.

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

  Ethical strictures lay lightly on young men, who made use of the “mirth conceded to their age.” There was an unwritten “law of youth.” “An untimely severity is not moderation but gloominess.” Sexual exploration was “practically required training,” after which it was expected the young man would cool off and ease into a more respectable self-control and eventually marriage. The “natural violence of youth” was better indulged than repressed, for repression would inevitably fail. The sexual escapades of boys in their late teens and early twenties were almost completely inconsequential. By contrast, the more seasoned sexual prowess of youth in their later twenties was a social problem. The predatory sexuality of young, unmarried men was a dangerous presence in the ancient Mediterranean city; in a society where men were half a generation older than their wives, the threat of adultery was conceived in generational terms, as a threat emanating from below, from younger men with enough cunning to play the seducer. The solution was a high degree of tolerance toward sex with slaves and prostitutes. A father who sensed that his son was in love with a freeborn woman gravely counseled him to use “the venus which is public and permitted.” This father, whose son was saved by “the gratification of licit sex,” even ranks among the exempla of so stodgy a moralist as Valerius Maximus.65 The ready availability of licit sexual release gave adultery its dark tint in Roman society. The violation of a respectable wife is the paradigmatic form of sexual malfeasance in most human societies. In the Roman Empire, the prohibition on adultery and the imperative of avoiding sexual passivity were the two heavy rules weighing on men. There is little trace of those paradoxical values, familiar in later Mediterranean societies, that simultaneously lionized and vilified the adulterer. In the classical world, the adulterer was purely villainous. The idea of sexual pleasure as a finite commodity, the object of an intense, zero-sum competition, was distinctly alien to the classical spirit, so successfully had the brothel made sex a public good. Adultery was theft, an injury to another free man. In the ancient languages, the woman was the passive object of adultery, the violator the active agent. Because classical societies had resolved the problem of sexual competition through the democracy of the brothel, adultery was a heinous political sin, a transgression of the very order of civilized life. It was the characteristic act of the tyrant. The adulterer destroyed his own “sense of shame, orderly self-control, citizenship, neighborliness.” In a papyrus an adulterer is accused of “breaking the order of the laws established for the public welfare.”66

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

  PSEUDO-AUGUSTINE. (ubi sup.) For each man seeks to be delivered from evil, that is, from his enemies and sin, but he who gives himself up to God, fears not the devil, for if God is for us, who can be against us? (Rom. 8:31.) 11:5–85. And he said unto them, Which of you shall have a friend, and shall go unto him at midnight, and say unto him, Friend, lend me three loaves; 6. For a friend of mine in his journey is come to me, and I have nothing to set before him? 7. And he from within shall answer and say, Trouble me not: the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot rise and give thee. 8. I say unto you, Though he will not rise and give him, because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him as many as he needeth. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. The Saviour had before taught, in answer to the request of His apostles, how men ought to pray. But it might happen that those who had received this wholesome teaching, poured forth their prayers indeed according to the form given to them, but carelessly and languidly, and then when they were not heard in the first or second prayer, left off praying. That this then might not be our case, He shews by means of a parable, that cowardice in our prayers is hurtful, but it is of great advantage to have patience in them. Hence it is said, And he says unto them, Which of you shall have a friend. THEOPHYLACT. God is that friend, who loveth all men, and wills that all should he saved. AMBROSE. Who is a greater friend to us, than He who delivered up His body for us? Now we have here another kind of command given us, that at all times, not only in the day, but at night, prayers should be offered up. For it follows, And shall go into him at midnight. (Ps. 119:62.) As David did when he said, At midnight I will rise and give thanks unto thee. For he had no fear of awakening them from sleep, whom he knew to be ever watching. For if David who was occupied also in the necessary affairs of a kingdom was so holy, that seven times in the day he gave praise to God, (Ps. 119:164.) what ought we to do, who ought so much the more to pray, as we more frequently sin, through the weakness of our mind and body? But if thou lovest the Lord thy God, thou wilt be able to gain favour, not only for thyself, but others. For it follows, And say unto him, Friend, lend me three loaves, &c.

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

  We are never really in suspense about Leucippe’s fate, and—what makes the scene so revealing—neither is she. At the tension grows, Leucippe tells Thersander to “bring the lash, bring the rack, bring the fire, bring the sword.… For though I be naked, for though I be alone, for though I be a woman, my one shield is my freedom [eleutheria ], and not blows, nor blade, nor blaze shall prevail against it!” Leucippe is protected by her freedom, her eleutheria, at the very moment when her control over her body seemed most elusive. Her rhetoric speaks on two levels. Most directly, Leucippe means that she will be saved from her imminent distress because she is, in reality, free. She is the knowing heroine, confident her objective status will somehow ensure that she is not the victim in this tale. Eleutheria was a powerful word, conjuring not only free status but sexual respectability; for the Greeks and Romans, the two were inseparably fused. The eleuthera was the sexually honest woman, a virgin until marriage, chaste within marriage. The opposite of the eleuthera was the prostitute, and Leucippe is consoled in the midst of apparently insuperable danger by the truth of her nature and by the rules of romance, which, she seems to know, will not allow her to be violated. Her faith depends on her knowledge that the narrative logic of the Greek romance will ultimately obey the expectations of the social order.2

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  When Moon decided to give a lecture at Yankee Stadium in 1976, he needed to raise several million dollars for the publicity campaign. At this point, I was sent out with other American leaders as part of a model fundraising team in Manhattan. We fundraised 21 hours a day. We were constantly out on the streets, in the worst places imaginable. Once I was almost mugged in Harlem by someone with a garrote who saw me selling candles at night. Another time a man demanded my money and threatened me with a knife near my stomach. As a loyal, dedicated Moonie, I would never let anyone steal God’s money and refused. Both times, I narrowly escaped. Falling Asleep At The Wheel One irony of my experience in the Moonies is that the higher I rose in the organization, the closer I got to the total burn-out and exhaustion that eventually led to my exit from the group. Because I was so successful at fundraising, I pressed myself to the limit again and again. I had been trained to have little concern for my overall well-being during those days. The most important thing was to work as hard as I could for “Father.’’ Fortunately for me, though, my family had not forgotten about me. They were deeply concerned and desired to see me back to my creative, independent self. Members were repeatedly told horror stories about deprogramming. I had come to believe that group members were brutally kidnapped, beaten, and tortured by deprogrammers—Satan’s elite soldiers committed to breaking people down and destroying their faith in God.40 A couple of members were sent around to different centers to tell us about their deprogramming experiences. Fear of the outside world, particularly of our parents, was drilled into our minds. Although I didn’t realize it then, each successive deprogramming story was more terrifying—and more exaggerated—than the one before. After my time on the model fundraising team in Manhattan, I was told that my family was trying to kidnap and deprogram me. I was sent “underground” to Pennsylvania. I was instructed not to tell my family my whereabouts and to have all my mail forwarded through another city. Years later, after I left the group, I suspected I had been sent out of town as a distraction. The Moonies wanted to keep me from pursuing some disturbing questions about the validity of the “time parallels” used in the History of Restoration lecture. I had discovered some glaring inconsistencies. It was dangerous for someone in my position in the organization to ask questions that couldn’t be answered. The other group leaders filled me with so much fear about deprogrammers that my questions were shelved. I believed my spiritual survival was at stake.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  State officials blamed Mr. Smith for their inability to kill him in 2022, arguing that his appeals to stop his execution “frustrated the process” and shortened the time to carry out a lethal injection. Mr. Smith had sued to prevent the State from executing him because Alabama had bungled the two executions immediately preceding his. Two months earlier, Alan Miller survived a botched execution during which state officials strapped him down and jabbed him for several hours before returning him to his cell. The failed execution of Mr. Miller followed the disastrous execution of a condemned man named Joe James, who was killed by state officials after hours of unsuccessful stabbing to access his veins. The autopsy revealed that Mr. James suffered multiple cuts and injuries over the course of the three-hour execution process—one of the longest ever recorded. Reports circulated that the attempted execution of Mr. James was so upsetting that at least one member of the execution team fled the death chamber in distress. Citing these accounts, Mr. Smith persuaded a federal court to issue an order stopping his November 17, 2022, execution. But the State appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which vacated the stay and allowed the execution to proceed. State officials later contended that Mr. Smith’s successful litigation before the Supreme Court’s ruling left them only two hours to execute him before the expiration of his death warrant—too little time given the complications of accessing his veins. The governor ordered a review of the multiple botched executions. After a truncated internal review, the State announced that it would make no changes to the execution process. Instead, Alabama adopted a plan where state officials would have a whole week to execute a condemned prisoner instead of just one day. For its second execution of Mr. Smith, Alabama decided to try a new, untested method involving the use of nitrogen gas. Rather than inject lethal chemicals into his veins, Alabama planned to put a gas mask over Mr. Smith’s face and pump in nitrogen, which would kill him by depriving him of oxygen. Some experts contended this would amount to torture. One federal appeals court judge, the Hon. Jill Pryor, argued that the execution should be stopped. In a dissent from her colleagues’ decision allowing the execution to proceed, she wrote:

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

  The contrasts with the law of 390 are telling. The measure of Theodosius I ordering the incineration of the male prostitutes in Rome also deployed a vocabulary of Roman manhood that would have been not unfamiliar to Cicero. And though the measure of Theodosius was aimed against male prostitutes and thus might seem more narrowly constructed, there is good reason to regard it as a more portentous enactment. The immolation of male prostitutes was not a vice-squad operation. As Firmicus shows, there was a tendency to assimilate open sexual passivity, infamia, and prostitution. Similarly, John Chrysostom slips inadvertently between discussion of same-sex eros and same-sex prostitution. The mental association was imponderably ancient. The incineration of male prostitutes was a malevolent and symbolic act, which might be seen as something like a proxy measure against male passivity altogether, conducted within the technological means of the Roman state.29 With Theodosius I’s enactment, a state that had refrained from “witch hunts” was now explicitly trying to eradicate the “contamination” of sexual passivity. The sense of sexual deviance as a disease threatening to infect the body politic is subtly but ominously new in the legislative domain. This sensibility rests on the assumption, not indigenous to Roman legal tradition, that the people itself risked pollution by irregular sexual practices. The law is emphatic on this point. The drafter enunciates a concern that the plebs will become weakened if defiled. The holocaust was meant to be executed “with the populus watching.” This language reflects a new style of social solidarity in late antiquity, in which the sexual behavior of “the people” might be the object of imperial concern. In earlier phases of Roman history, enormous social prejudice in combination with rigid stratification of rank and citizenship allowed the state to stare past the inconsequential lives beneath its field of vision. Christianity carried with it a sense of “the people” not only as a civic category but as the human collective itself. This solidarity, in the field of sexual regulation, had unintended and at times violent consequences.

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

  Despite the extraordinary weight Paul places on sexual purity, his missive to Corinth was a delicate act of triangulation. Word had reached Paul of a faction within the Christian community who declared that strict continence was the measure of holiness. Paul could not register unqualified disagreement. “I wish that all were as I myself am,” he writes, foregrounding his own celibacy. For centuries Christians will elaborate on this most gentle of moral suggestions, usually with a stridency that contrasts with Paul’s cautious sensibility. Paul was not willing to disenfranchise the reliable married householders who held together the fledgling church. Marriage was to be accommodated, “by way of concession, not of command.” In fact, although marriage might tie down a man or woman to the dull distractions of everyday life, it was the surest bulwark against sexual sin. “Because of fornications, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband.” Paul imagines a sexual version of Pascal’s wager: “It is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.” Surrounded by the temptations of the Greek city, the Christians for whom continence was not a practicable goal were to find safe exercise in the licit amours of the marriage bed. Eros was an ominous threat hanging over the purity of the body, not a constitutive feature of human identity. The most that could be said for marriage was that it was not, at least, an act of desecration. Amid the ubiquitous lures of Aphrodite’s city, that was not necessarily a trivial blessing.19

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Jon has been doing incredible, long-form interviews for his YouTube channel called jon atack family & friends. Jon has authored academic textbook chapters with me and edited this volume, adding Scientology information to this book, which my first publisher forbade due to his fear of lawsuit. Jon Atack’s work has been endorsed by over 40 academics from around the globe. Rachel Thomas and Sex Trafficking Rachel Thomas has a master’s degree from UCLA and is cofounder of Sowers Education Group, an educational organization dedicated to prevent human trafficking. We were introduced to each other by Carissa Phelps in the summer of 2013. Carissa’s organization, Runaway Girl, was conducting human trafficking trainings for the Joint Regional Intelligence Organization (JRIC.org) of Southern California. As an outgrowth of that experience, I asked Rachel to be part of a panel on trafficking as a commercial cult mind control phenomenon. The video of that program is on our website.100 Rachel was an all-American girl from an upper-middle-class home in southern California. While she was a junior at Emory University in Atlanta, Rachel was approached by a well-spoken modeling agent with business cards, a nice suit, and a charming smile. He told her that he wanted to invest in her modeling career by paying for her first photo shoot and set of comp cards (i.e., a model’s resume). Rachel accepted. At the photo shoot, everything was professional and seemingly legitimate. A few days later, Rachel received a phone call from the agent. “Hey, beautiful! Guess what? You’re already booked for your first gig!” Excited and impressed by his fast work, Rachel showed up to the gig—a music video for a Grammy-award-winning artist. At the end of the shoot, the agent informed Rachel that she had earned $350 for her work that day and asked her to complete a W-9. She filled out the form, including her permanent address (her parents’ home address in California), her current address (the apartment she shared with her best friend near campus), her social security number, and other information. In the next three weeks, her agent used his connections throughout the city to secure her another paid modeling gig and an audition for a major magazine. To finalize their working relationship, the agent asked Rachel to sign a contract in which she agreed to pay him a regular retainer fee. She signed the contract. During her fifth week with the agent, Rachel first saw him slap another model on her face in an instantaneous, unpredictable fit of rage. A day later, she tried to cancel her contract. The agent not only refused, but forced her to have sex with a stranger, threatening to kill her parents if she didn’t obey.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  The pattern of doctrine over person occurs when there is a conflict between what one feels oneself experiencing and what the doctrine or dogma says one should experience. The internalized message in totalistic environments is that one must find the truth of the dogma and subject one’s experiences to that truth. Often the experience of contradiction, or the admission of that experience, can be immediately associated with guilt; or else (in order to hold one to that doctrine) condemned by others in a way that leads quickly to that guilty association. One is made to feel that doubts are reflections of one’s own evil. Yet doubts can arise; and when conflicts become intense, people can leave. This is the most frequent difficulty of many of the cults: membership may represent more of a problem than money. Finally, the eighth, and perhaps the most general and significant of these characteristics, is what I call the “dispensing of existence.” This principle is usually metaphorical. But if one has an absolute or totalistic vision of truth, then those who have not seen the light—have not embraced that truth, are in some way in the shadows—are bound up with evil, tainted, and do not have the right to exist. There is a “being versus nothingness” dichotomy at work here. Impediments to legitimate being must be pushed away or destroyed. One placed in the second category of not having the right to exist can experience psychologically a tremendous fear of inner extinction or collapse. However, when one is accepted, there can be great satisfaction of feeling oneself a part of the elite. Under more malignant conditions, the dispensing of existence, the absence of the right to exist, can be literalized; people can be put to death because of their alleged doctrinal shortcomings, as has happened in all too many places, including the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. In the Peoples Temple mass suicide/murder in Guyana, a single cult leader could preside over the literal dispensing of existence—or more precisely, nonexistence—by means of a suicidal mystique he himself had made a part of the group’s ideology. (Subsequent reports based on the results of autopsies reveal that there were probably as many murders as suicides.) The totalistic impulse to draw a sharp line between those who have a right to live and those who do not—though occurring in varying degrees—can become a deadly approach to resolving fundamental human problems. And all such approaches involving totalism or fundamentalism are doubly dangerous in a nuclear age. I should say that, despite these problems, none of these processes is airtight. One of my purposes in writing about them is to counter the tendency in the culture to deny that such things exist; another purpose is to demystify them, to see them as comprehensible in terms of our understanding of human behavior.