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 The Great Transformation (2006)

  Such is the Great Man.” 29 A man who had fulfilled the potential of his humanity in this way could save the world. Nobody took Xunzi’s political ideas very seriously, but by the middle of the third century, everybody was talking about another mystical manual of statecraft that immediately attracted widespread attention. 30 The Legalists in particular warmed to this new text. The Daodejing ( Classic of the Way and Its Potency ) has become a popular devotional classic in the West, even though it was not originally written for a private individual but for the ruler of a small state. We know very little indeed about its author, who wrote under the pseudonym Laozi, “Old Master.” Various stories circulated about him, none of which have much historical validity, and the author, whose theme is anonymity and selflessness, has eluded us, as he probably would have wished. The Daodejing consists of eighty-one small chapters, written in enigmatic verse. Even though Laozi was far more spiritual than the Legalists, there was an affinity between them, which the Legalists spotted immediately. Both despised the Confucians; both had a paradoxical view of the world, in which goals could be achieved only by pursuing their opposites; and both believed that the ruler should “do nothing” and intervene as little as possible in the life of the state. Unlike the Legalists, Laozi wanted his king to be virtuous, but not like a Confucian sage, who was endlessly trying to do things for his people. Instead, a prince who practiced the self-effacement and total impartiality of wu wei would bring the violence of the Warring States period to an end. The ancient kings, it was said, had ruled by the magical potency that established the Way of Heaven on earth by performing a series of external ceremonies. Laozi internalized these old rites, and advised the princes to acquire an interior, spiritualized conformity with the Way. These were terrifying times for the small principalities, which were about to be obliterated by Qin. The fear of imminent annihilation runs like a leitmotif through the Daodejing, which offers the vulnerable prince a stratagem for survival. Instead of posturing aggressively, he must retreat and make himself small. Instead of plotting and scheming, he must abandon thought, calm his mind, relax his body, and free himself of conventional ways of looking at the world. He must allow his problems to solve themselves by the discipline of wu wei. 31 But this could be achieved only if he reformed his own heart, which must be rooted in stillness and emptiness.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  This is one of the few overtly misogynous moments of the Axial Age. Hesiod intended it to illustrate the ambiguous nature of life in the Iron Age, representing humanity’s fall from grace. 55 Henceforth good and evil were inextricably combined. Sacrifice brought men and gods together, but it also revealed the impassable distinction between them. Suffering was now an inescapable fact of life—a major theme of the Axial Age. In India, the sages were determined to create the spiritual technology that would enable human beings to transcend pain and mortality. Hesiod had no such ambition. Indeed, he was convinced that men should not seek to ascend to the divine world. The story of Prometheus put humans firmly in their place, midway between gods and animals and surrounded on all sides by the evils released by Pandora. Men of the Iron Age could not escape their suffering. They might want to rebel like Prometheus, but hubris was self-destructive: all that Prometheus’s rebellion had achieved was pain for himself and ceaseless toil for humanity. Other Greeks felt that resignation was not the answer. Increasingly, as the political crisis became more acute, farmers and peasants demanded economic relief, return of confiscated property, and security before the law, and gave their support to ambitious aristocrats who championed their cause, using this popular acclaim to achieve political power. 56 The first tyrannos gained control of Corinth in 655, and other poleis followed suit. These new rulers were not “tyrants” in our modern sense, but simply leaders who seized power unconstitutionally and ruled outside customal laws for the benefit of the people. 57 As the champion of justice, the tyrant was initially respected, but tyranny was not a sustainable political system. Inevitably the masses, who had been empowered by the tyrant, became more confident. By the time he died, his unconstitutional rule began to appear brutal and arbitrary, so the people usually rose up against his successors, and remembered the tyranny with hatred. But the experiment showed the people that, properly organized, they could put a brake on exploitation by the ruling class and take their destiny into their own hands. Of still greater significance was a military innovation that coincided with the rise of tyranny. By the end of the eighth century, the manufacture of weapons had advanced considerably, and the poleis now had the military technology to equip large armies instead of relying on a small aristocratic squadron of charioteers. 58 Between 700 and 650, the city-states began to rely on heavily armed infantry, and the old-fashioned Homeric-style warriors, who had fought in single combat, were phased out. Manpower was crucial, and warfare could no longer be the privilege of the nobility. Henceforth anybody who could afford to equip himself with the requisite weapons ( hopla )—be he lord or farmer—could join this prestigious troop, regardless of rank or birth.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  In all probability the man and woman with the flashlight had alerted the police. It was Sunday night, Easter Sunday. The next day, Easter Monday, the office was going to be closed, which meant we wouldn’t be able to move around until Tuesday morning. Think of it, having to sit in such terror for a day and two nights! We thought of nothing, but simply sat there in pitch darkness -- in her fear, Mrs. van D. had switched off the lamp. We whispered, and every time we heard a creak, someone said, “Shh, shh.” It was ten-thirty, then eleven. Not a sound. Father and Mr. van Daan took turns coming upstairs to us. Then, at eleven-fifteen, a noise below. Up above you could hear the whole family breathing. For the rest, no one moved a muscle. Footsteps in the house, the private office, the kitchen, then. . . on the staircase. All sounds of breathing stopped, eight hearts pounded. Foot- steps on the stairs, then a rattling at the bookcase. This moment is indescribable. “Now we’re done for,” I said, and I had visions of all fifteen of us being dragged away by the Gestapo that very night. More rattling at the bookcase, twice. Then we heard a can fall, and the footsteps receded. We were out of danger, so far! A shiver went though everyone’s body, I heard several sets of teeth chattering, no one said a word. We stayed like this until eleven-thirty. There were no more sounds in the house, but a light was shining on our landing, right in front of the bookcase. Was that because the police thought it looked so suspicious or because they simply forgot? Was anyone going to come back and turn it off? We found our tongues again. There were no longer any people inside the building, but perhaps someone was standing guard outside. We then did three things: tried to guess what was going on, trembled with fear and went to the bathroom. Since the buckets were in the attic, all we had was Peter’s metal wastepaper basket. Mr. van Daan went first, then Father, but Mother was too embarrassed. Father

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Because we live in a society of instant communication, we expect to grasp our religion instantly too, and can even feel that there is something wrong if we cannot appreciate it immediately. But the Axial sages tirelessly explained that true knowledge is always elusive. Socrates believed that he had a mission to make the rational Greeks aware that even when we are most rigorously logical, some aspect of the truth will always evade us. Understanding comes only after intellectual kenosis, when we realize that we know nothing and our mind is “emptied” of received ideas. The Axial sages were not timid about questioning fundamental assumptions, and as we face the problems of our time, we need to have a mind that is constantly open to new ideas. We are living in a period of great fear and pain. The Axial Age taught us to face up to the suffering that is an inescapable fact of human life. Only by admitting our own pain can we learn to empathize with others. Today we are deluged with more images of suffering than any previous generation: war, natural disasters, famine, poverty, and disease are beamed nightly into our living rooms. Life is indeed dukkha. It is tempting to retreat from this ubiquitous horror, to deny that it has anything to do with us, and to cultivate a deliberately “positive” attitude that excludes anybody’s pain but our own. But the Axial sages insisted that this was not an option. People who deny the suffering of life and stick their heads, ostrichlike, in the sand are “false prophets.” Unless we allow the sorrow that presses in on all sides to invade our consciousness, we cannot begin our spiritual quest. In our era of international terror, it is hard for any of us to imagine that we can live in the Buddha’s pleasure park. Suffering will sooner or later impinge upon all our lives, even in the protected societies of the first world. Instead of resenting this, the Axial sages would tell us, we should treat it as a religious opportunity. Instead of allowing our pain to fester and erupt in violence, intolerance, and hatred, we should make a heroic effort to use it constructively. The trick, Jeremiah told the deportees, was not to give free rein to resentment. Vengeance was not the answer. Honor the stranger in your midst, “P” told the Jewish exiles, for you were strangers in Egypt. The memory of past distress brings us back to the Golden Rule; it should help us to see that other people’s suffering is as important as our own—even (perhaps especially) the anguish of our enemies. The Greeks put human misery onstage so that the Athenian audience could learn sympathy for the Persians who had devastated their city only a few years earlier. In the tragedies, the chorus regularly instructed the audience to weep for people whose crimes would normally fill them with abhorrence.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  9 However powerful they became, the Greeks never truly felt that they were in charge of their fate. As late as the fifth century, when Greek civilization was at its peak, they still believed that people were compelled by the Fates, or even by the Olympian gods, to act as they did, and once a crime had been committed, it inflicted untold woes upon innocent human beings who simply happened to live in the polluted environment. People could expect no help from the Olympians, who intervened in human life irresponsibly, supporting their favorites and destroying those who incurred their wrath, with no heed for the consequences. The only gods who showed any ethical sense were the Erinyes, who were outraged by these violent deeds but completely lacking in pity and compassion. Hence in some versions of the story, having been constrained to kill his mother, Orestes was pursued through the world by the Erinyes, until the miasma unleashed by his doomed family had been eliminated. The Greeks were haunted by images of violence and disaster. The Olympians were not merely cruel to human beings; they could also persecute and maim one another. Hera, wife of Zeus, for example, was so disgusted by her crippled son, Hephaestus, when he was born that she flung him down to the earth. A savage, angry deity, she relentlessly hounded the children born of her husband’s illicit amours. She plotted with the Titans to kill Dionysus, son of Zeus by the mortal woman Semele, and eventually made him insane. For years Dionysus ran frenziedly through the countries of the east, before he finally found healing. Hera also tried to kill Heracles, another son of Zeus, by putting snakes into his cradle, and drove him mad too, so that he killed his wife and children. The family was the foundation of society. In other cultures, as we shall see, it was regarded as a sacred institution, where people learned the values of respect and reverence for others. In Greece it was a lethal battleground, and Hera, goddess of marriage, showed that the most basic relationships could inspire murderous, cruel emotions. Her cult was pervaded by guilt, terror, and profound anxiety. The first Greek temple to be built after the dark age was Hera’s temple on the island of Samos, off the coast of Asia Minor. Her cult there showed that she was an uncanny, unreliable goddess who could disappear at a moment’s notice and take all the good things of life with her. On the eve of her festival each year, her effigy—a shapeless plank—mysteriously vanished from the shrine. Its loss was discovered at daybreak, and all the people of Samos turned out to search for her.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The young king Pentheus tried to restore order, but to no avail. Eventually he allowed himself to be dressed in women’s clothes so that he could spy on these revels unobserved. But in their hysteria, the women tore him to pieces with their bare hands, thinking that they had killed a lion. Agaue, Pentheus’s mother, triumphantly carried her son’s head into Thebes at the head of a demented procession. The tragic dramas had often depicted the slaying of kinsfolk, but by making Dionysus, the patron of tragedy, responsible for this unnatural murder, Euripides seemed to be calling the entire genre into question. There was no glimmer of hope at the end of the play. The royal house had been shattered, the women reduced to animals, enlightened reason defeated by savage mania, and Thebes—like Athens at this juncture—seemed doomed. What had been the value of the annual release of emotion in honor of a god who killed, tortured, and humiliated human beings without giving any plausible explanation? Athens was beginning to grow beyond tragedy, and in so doing, was also parting company with the Axial Age. The play warned the polis that it was dangerous to refuse admittance to the outsider. In Oedipus at Colonus (406), Sophocles had shown Athens receiving with honor the polluted, sacred figure of the dying Oedipus, an act of compassion that would be a blessing for the city. But in The Bacchae, Pentheus rejected the stranger and was destroyed. Not only was it politically disastrous, but individuals also had to recognize and accept the stranger that they encountered within themselves during the mystery celebrations. By giving Dionysus his due in the annual festival, Athens had given the alterity that he represented an honored place in the heart of the city; but over the years it had failed to respect the inviolable separateness of the other poleis, had exploited and attacked them, and in the process had fallen prey to hubris. In this last play, Euripides approached the heart of the Axial vision. The chorus of Maenads, the regular worshipers of Dionysus, had been correctly initiated into his cult; they experienced a vision of peace, rapture, and integration. But the women of Thebes, who were unschooled in the disciplines of transformation, were simply out of control, driven mad by the darker regions of their psyche that were unknown to them. As she entered the city, holding aloft the ghastly trophy of her son’s head, Agaue did not achieve ekstasis, but was enchanted only by her own achievements: Great in the eyes of the world, Great are the deeds I have done And the hunt I’ve hunted there. 43 The apotheosis of this barren selfishness was an act of unspeakable, unnatural violence. In this play, Euripides also presented one of the most moving and truly transcendent Greek experiences of the divine.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  brought the waste- basket to the next room, where Margot, Mrs. van Daan and I gratefully made use of it. Mother finally gave in. There was a great demand for paper, and luckily I had some in my pocket. The wastebasket stank, everything went on in a whisper, and we were exhausted. It was midnight. “Lie down on the floor and go to sleep!” Margot and I were each given a pillow and a blanket. Margot lay down near the food cupboard, and I made my bed between the table legs. The smell wasn’t quite so bad when you were lying on the floor, but Mrs. van Daan quietly went and got some powdered bleach and draped a dish towel over the potty as a further precaution. Talk, whispers, fear, stench, farting and people continually going to the bathroom; try sleeping through that! By two-thirty, however, I was so tired I dozed off and didn’t hear a thing until three-thirty. I woke up when Mrs. van D. lay her head on my feet. “For heaven’s sake, give me something to put on!” I said. I was handed some clothes, but don’t ask what: a pair of wool slacks over my pajamas, a red sweater and a black skirt, white under-stockings and tattered knee-socks. Mrs. van D. sat back down on the chair, and Mr. van D. lay down with his head on my feet. From three- thirty onward I was engrossed in thought, and still shiver- ing so much that Mr. van Daan couldn’t sleep. I was preparing myself for the return of the police. We’d tell them we were in hiding; if they were good people, we’d be safe, and if they were Nazi sympathizers, we could try to bribe them! “We should hide the radio!” moaned Mrs. van D. “Sure, in the stove,” answered Mr. van D. “If they find us, they might as well find the radio!” “Then they’ll also find Anne’s diary,” added Father. “So burn it,” suggested the most terrified of the group.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  office. “There’s been a burglary” flashed through his mind. But just to make sure, he went downstairs to the front door, checked the lock and found everything closed. “Bep and Peter must just have been very careless this evening,” Mr. van. D. concluded. He remained for a while in Mr. Kugler’s office, switched off the lamp and went upstairs without worrying much about the open doors or the messy office. Early this morning Peter knocked at our door to tell us that the front door was wide open and that the projector and Mr. Kugler’s new briefcase had disappeared from the closet. Peter was instructed to lock the door. Mr. van Daan told us his discoveries of the night before, and we were extremely worried. The only explanation is that the burglar must have had a duplicate key, since there were no signs of a forced entry. He must have sneaked in early in the evening, shut the door behind him, hidden himself when he heard Mr. van Daan, fled with the loot after Mr. van Daan went upstairs and, in his hurry, not bothered to shut the door. Who could have our key? Why didn’t the burglar go to the warehouse? Was it one of our own warehouse employees, and will he turn us in, now that he’s heard Mr. van Daan and maybe even seen him? It’s really scary, since we don’t know whether the burglar will take it into his head to try and get in again. Or was he so startled when he heard someone else in the building that he’ll stay away? Yours, Anne P.S. We’d be delighted if you could hunt up a good detective for us. Obviously, there’s one condotion: he must be relied upon not to mform on people in hiding. THURSDAY, MARCH 2, 1944

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  What had caused the separation of men and gods? Hesiod tied up these loose ends, making use of Mesopotamian and other Near Eastern mythology. He told the traditional story in a way that made the horrible struggle of the theogony—the emergence of the gods from primal formlessness—represent a striving for greater clarity, order, and definition. This had begun when the bottomless abyss of Chaos was replaced by the more solid realities of Gaia and Uranus; it ended with the victory of the Olympians over those Titans who had opposed the rule of law. Hesiod wanted these frightening stories of divine fathers and sons murdering and mutilating one another to warn the Greeks of the dangers of the current internecine strife in the poleis. In his hands, the just and regulated regime established by Zeus was in pointed contrast to the unnatural chaos that had gone before. Hesiod’s Theogony also raised questions that would later preoccupy the Greek philosophers: What were the origins of the cosmos? How did order come to prevail over chaos? How could the many derive from the one? How could the formless relate to what was defined? Hesiod also fixed the place of human beings in the divine scheme, by telling the story of the Titan Prometheus. 54 During the Golden Age, gods and human beings had lived on equal terms and had regularly feasted together. But at the end of the Golden Age, the gods began to recede from the world of men; now the only way for humans to maintain contact with the Olympians was the ritual of animal sacrifice, when gods and men consumed their allotted portions of the victim. But Prometheus thought that the arrangement was unfair and wanted to help humans to improve their lot. After one of these sacrifices, he tried to trick Zeus into accepting the inedible bones of the victim, so that men could enjoy the meat. But Zeus saw through the ruse: gods did not need food; they could sustain themselves on the smoke that rose when the victim’s bones were burned on the altar. Sacrifice, therefore, revealed the gods’ superiority to mortals, who could survive only by eating the flesh of dead animals. Angered by Prometheus’s crafty stratagem, Zeus decided to penalize humans by depriving them of the fire they needed to cook their food. Yet again, Prometheus defied him, stole the fire, and gave it back to humanity. Zeus took his revenge by chaining Prometheus to a pillar, and this time he punished humans by sending them a woman who had been put together by the divine craftsman Hephaestus. In the Golden Age, there had been no division between the sexes; humans had not been defined by gender. Pandora, the first woman, was a “beautiful evil.” She carried a jar that she opened “and scattered pains and sufferings among men.” Men were fatally paired with womankind, who brought sickness, old age, and suffering into their world.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  So they were older than the Olympians, and family violence was inscribed into their very being. These chthonian powers, who lived in the depths of earth, dominated Greek religion during the dark age. In the ninth century, people believed that it was they, not the Olympians, who ruled the cosmos. As a later poet explained, these dark gods “tracked down the sins of men and gods, and never cease from awful rage until they give the sinner punishment,” 8 because a single atrocity against one’s kin violated the entire social order. As Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus were all guilty of horrendous family crime, the chthonian gods represented, as it were, the shadow side of the Olym-pians. Once activated, their power worked automatically and could not be recalled. As soon as a victim cursed his assailant and cried aloud for vengeance, the Erinyes were released and hounded the transgressor like a pack of wild dogs, until he atoned for his sin by a violent, horrible death. The Erinyes never entirely lost their hold on the Greek imagination. Long after the dark age, Greeks continued to be preoccupied by tales of men and women who murdered their parents and abused their children. These unnatural deeds, even if committed unwittingly, contained a contagious power ( miasma ) that had an independent life of its own. Until it had been purged by the sacrificial death of the wrongdoer, society would be chronically infected by plague and catastrophe. The myth of the house of Atreus, for example, tells of a hideous struggle between two brothers, Atreus and Thyestes, for the throne of Mycenae. On one occasion, Atreus invited his brother to a banquet and served Thyestes a delicious stew, containing the bodies of his own sons. This appalling deed released a contaminating miasma that was transmitted to the entire family of Atreus. All were caught up in a monstrous vendetta in which one violent and unnatural crime led to another. Atreus’s son Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, was forced to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to secure a favorable wind to take the Greek fleet to Troy. His wife, Clytemnestra, retaliated by murdering him on his return from the Trojan War, and her son Orestes was then obliged to kill her in order to avenge his father. This perverse and convoluted story would become one of the most formative of the Greek myths. Like many other Greek tales, it presents human beings as utterly impotent. In the eighth century, Homer clearly believed that Clytemnestra and Orestes had no choice but to behave as they did; their actions were even lauded as virtuous, because they had rid the earth of the defiling miasma.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  But greed and ambition were deeply rooted in human consciousness, so the warrior could achieve this state of dispassion only by the exercise of yoga, which would dismantle his ego. The warrior must take the “me” and “mine” out of his deeds, so that he acted quite impersonally. Once he had achieved this, he would in fact be “inactive,” because “he” would not be taking part in the war: “always content, independent, he does nothing at all even when he engages in action.”82 A kshatriya had responsibilities; he could not simply retire to the forest. But by practicing karma-yoga he would in fact be detached from the world, even while he was living and active in it. Krishna instructed Arjuna in the usual yogic disciplines, but the meditation he proposed was tailor-made for the kshatriya, who could not spend hours every day in contemplation. There was a more exacting form of meditation for a professional ascetic, but karma-yoga could be performed by a man or woman who had worldly duties. The traditional yoga had never centered on a god, but karma-yoga did. The Shvetashvatara Upanishad had instructed the yogin to focus on Rudra/Shiva, but Krishna told Arjuna that he must meditate on Vishnu. Krishna had a surprise for Arjuna. He explained that he, Krishna, was not only the son of Vishnu, but he actually was the god in human form. Even though he was “unborn, undying, the Lord of creatures,” Vishnu had descended into a human body many times.83 Vishnu was the creator of the world and kept it in being, but whenever there was a serious crisis—“whenever sacred duty decays and chaos prevails”—he created an earthly form for himself and came into the world: To protect men of virtue And destroy men who do evil To set the standard of sacred duty, I appear in age after age.84 Now that he had imparted this astonishing news, Krishna could speak more openly to Arjuna about the devotion of bhakti. Arjuna could learn how to detach himself from his egocentric desires by imitating Krishna himself. As Lord and Ruler of the world, Krisha/Vishnu was continually active, but his deeds (karman) did not damage him: These actions do not bind me, Since I remain detached In all my actions, Arjuna, As if I stood apart from them.85 But if he wanted to imitate Krishna, Arjuna had to understand the nature of divinity; he had to see Krishna/Vishnu as he truly was. Right there on the battlefield, Krishna revealed his divine nature to Arjuna, who was aghast and filled with terror when he saw his friend’s eternal form as the god Vishnu, creator and destroyer, to whom all beings must return. He saw Krishna transfigured by the divine radiance, which contained the entire cosmos. “I see the gods in your body!” he cried. I see your boundless form Everywhere, The countless arms, Bellies, mouths, and eyes; Lord of all, I see no end, Or middle or beginning To your totality.86

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

  One Hewlett-Packard board member quit the board in disgust after learning what had gone on. In 2014 there was a huge outcry after an executive at Uber made a comment about being able to investigate a journalist named Sarah Lacy. Uber looked like a pack of thugs. The media frenzy went on for weeks and was covered on national television. Yet here were HubSpot’s top executives doing something that their own board believed might be illegal—and nobody seemed to care. Nobody was outraged that a billion-dollar company might have hacked into a journalist’s computer or broken into his house. Wall Street didn’t care either. In the days after the announcement, HubSpot’s stock price sagged a little bit but remained close to its all-time high. At first I thought the whole thing was hilarious. What a pack of buffoons! But over the next week I started to get scared. Stuck in my head was one phrase Halligan used with the Globe : “really aggressive tactics.” The original HubSpot press release said Volpe had been engaged in “attempts to procure” the book. I tried to parse that language. Did “attempts” mean they had tried to get the book but failed? How had they tried? How had they been caught? The word procure might imply a transaction involving money. Had they tried to bribe someone at the publishing company? If so, whatever happened might not have involved me at all. Most speculation seemed to be that HubSpot had tried to hack my computer. Over the summer my laptop had been having problems. It was a four-year-old MacBook Air, and I had thought the hard drive might be failing. Now I wondered if perhaps it had been hacked. Other strange things had happened. On June 21 I received a warning from Twitter that someone had been trying, unsuccessfully, to log into my account with an incorrect password. In August I got a warning from Google that someone had tried to log on to one of my Gmail accounts: “Someone has your password,” the message said. The hacker had used the correct password but the log-in attempt had come from Germany, and Google’s system had flagged it as possibly not legitimate. In August my dad received a strange email from a “fakestevejobs” email account that wasn’t mine, but the message contained a list of names from my contacts, with each person’s phone number and email address, as if someone had cracked into my contact list and was sending messages to people on that list. Toward the end of June I had received an email from a friend asking if I had remained on good terms with people at HubSpot, because “I happen to know they are keeping an eye on your Facebook activity.” This friend said that Chernov somehow was aware of what I was posting on Facebook, even though I had blocked Chernov from seeing my posts. Those incidents were strange, but they didn’t really prove anything.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  and tiptoe upstairs. But you know what happens when you’re trying to be quiet - - the old stairs creaked twice as loud. Five minutes later Peter and Pim, the color drained from their faces, appeared again to relate their experiences. They had positioned themselves under the staircase and waited. Nothing happened. Then all of a sudden they heard a couple of bangs, as if two doors had been slammed shut inside the house. Pim bounded up the stairs, while Peter went to warn Dussel, who finally pre sented himself upstairs, though not without kicking up a fuss and making a lot of noise. Then we all tiptoed in our stockinged feet to the van Daans on the next floor. Mr. van D. had a bad cold and had already gone to bed, so we gathered around his bedside and discussed our suspicions in a whisper. Every time Mr. van D. coughed loudly, Mrs. van D. and I nearly had a nervous fit. He kept coughing until someone came up with the bright idea of giving him codeine. His cough subsided immediately. Once again we waited and waited, but heard nothing. Finally we came to the conclusion that the burglars had taken to their heels when they heard footsteps in an otherwise quiet building. The problem now was that the chairs in the private office were neatly grouped around the radio, which was tuned to England. If the burglars had forced the door and the air-raid wardens were to notice it and call the police, there could be very serious repercus sions. So Mr. Van Daan got up, pulled on his coat and pants, put on his hat and cautiously followed Father down the stairs, with Peter (armed with a heavy hammer, to be on the safe side) right behind him. The ladies (including Margot and me) waited in suspense until the men returned five minutes later and reported that there was no sign of any activity in the building. We agreed not to run any water or flush the toilet; but since everyone’s stomach was churning from all the tension, you can imagine the stench after we’d each had a turn in the bathroom. Incidents like these are always accompanied by other disasters, and this was no exception. Number one: the Westertoren bells stopped chiming, and I’d always found them so comforting. Number two: Mr. Voskuijlleft early last night, and we weren’t sure if he’d given Bep the key and she’d forgotten to lock the door. But that was of little importance now. The night had just begun, and we still

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Everybody stayed at home, and each family member had to drink at least two liters of wine. It was a somber, deadly drinking competition. There was no merriment, no singing, and no conversation—a complete reversal of an ordinary social occasion in Athens. Each drinker sat alone, at his own table, drinking from a separate jug in sepulchral silence. Why? Local legend claimed that while he was fleeing from the Erinyes, Orestes had arrived in Athens. The king had feared the miasma he carried with him but had not wanted to turn him away. He invited Orestes to share the new wine but made him sit by himself, and nobody had spoken to him. Yet despite these precautions, the city had been polluted, and henceforth shared in the blood guilt of Orestes’ crime. So, conscious of their impurity, the Athenians drank in grim silence. Suddenly the eerie quiet was interrupted by a grotesque masquerade. Masked mummers, representing the Keres, the chthonian Death Spirits, burst into the streets, riding on wagons that were crammed with pots of wine, aggressively demanding hospitality, laughing raucously, yelling insults, and making wild threats. But in the evening, order was restored. The whole population reeled drunkenly back to the little temple in the marshes, singing and laughing, and carrying their empty jugs. A priestess was presented to Dionysus as a bride, the god was placated, and the mummers, the envoys of death, were driven away. The third day inaugurated another year and a fresh start. There was a lighter, more ebullient atmosphere. To mark the new era, everybody ate a cereal dish that—it was said—the first farmers had eaten in primordial times, before the invention of milling and baking. There were competitions, including a special swinging competition for little girls. But horror lurked even here, because the swinging girls recalled the hanging body of poor Erigone. You could never forget the inherent tragedy of life. All Greek ritual ended in katharsis (“purification”). The god was appeased, the miasma dispersed, and there was new life, new hope. Even the memory of Erigone’s tragic death was combined with the spectacle of laughing, excited children at the beginning of their lives. The participants had experienced an ekstasis, a “stepping out.” For three days, they had been able to stand aside from their normal existence, confront their buried fears, and pass through them to renewed life. There was no introspection, and no attempt to analyze the hidden trauma that haunted the Greek psyche. This was touched upon only indirectly by the external rituals. By reenacting the ancient myth, the participants were not behaving as individuals. They laid aside their ordinary selves and did the opposite of what came naturally. Greeks loved banquets and jollity, but for a whole day they had denied their usual inclinations, and drunk their wine in sorrowful silence. By imitating the drama of the past, they had left their individual selves behind and felt touched and transformed by Dionysus, who was present in the intoxicating wine.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Eventually, in agony, Gaia begged her children for help, but only Cronus, her youngest son, had the courage to do as she asked. Crouched in his mother’s womb, he lay in wait for his father, armed with a sickle, and the next time Uranus penetrated Gaia, he cut off his genitals and threw them to the earth. High Gods were often overthrown by their more dynamic children, but few myths make the primordial struggle as perverse as this. Cronus was now the chief god, and he released his brothers and sisters from the depths of Earth. They mated with one another to produce a second generation of Titans, which included Atlas, who supported the earth on his shoulders, and Prometheus, who stole fire from heaven and gave it to human beings. Instead of learning from the horror of the past, however, Cronus was as tyrannical as his father. He married his sister Rhea, who gave birth to five children—the second race of gods: Hester (guardian of the sacred hearth), Demeter (goddess of grain), Hera (patron of marriage), Hades (lord of the underworld), and Poseidon (god of the sea). But Cronus had been told that one of his children would supplant him, so he swallowed each infant immediately after its birth. Pregnant with her sixth child, Rhea turned to her mother, Gaia, in desperation, and when baby Zeus was born, Gaia hid him on the island of Crete, while Rhea presented Cronus with a stone, wrapped in swaddling clothes, which he duly swallowed, without noticing anything amiss. When Zeus grew up, he forced his father to disgorge his brothers and sisters, and the family took up residence on Mount Olympus. Cronus tried to fight back. For ten years he and some of the other Titans waged war on the Olympians, in a battle that shook the cosmos to its foundations, until Zeus achieved the final victory, and imprisoned his father and those Titans who had supported him in Tartarus, a dark and horrible region in the depths of the earth. Meanwhile, Chaos, the second primal power, had generated his own terrifying offspring: Erebus (the “Dark Place,” in the deepest recesses of the earth) and Night. Night then produced a brood of daughters, who included the Fates (Moirai), the Death Spirits (Keres), and the three Furies (Erinyes). 7 The Erinyes were particularly frightening; the Greeks imagined them as repellent hags, wreathed in snakes, crawling on all fours to scent their prey, whining and howling like dogs. One myth says that they were born from the drops of blood that fell upon the earth when Cronus hacked off Uranus’s genitals.

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

  17 Constantine was forced to revoke the edict, left the Donatists in peace, and instructed orthodox bishops to turn the other cheek. 18 He would have been uneasily aware that the Donatists had gotten away with it. Henceforth he and his successors would be wary of any theological or ecclesiastical discourse that threatened the Pax Christiana on which the security of the empire, they believed, now depended. 19 Constantine was reluctant to promote his Christianity in the sparsely Christianized West, but his arrival in the East marked his political conversion to the faith. There could as yet be no question of making Christianity the official religion of the empire, and pagans still held public office, but Constantine closed down some pagan temples and expressed his disapproval of sacrificial worship. 20 Christianity’s universal claims seemed ideally suited to Constantine’s ambition to achieve world rule, and he believed that its ethos of peace and reconciliation were in perfect alignment with the Pax Romana. But to Constantine’s horror, the eastern churches, far from being united in brotherly love, were bitterly divided by an obscure—and to Constantine, incomprehensible—theological dispute. In 318 Arius, presbyter of Alexandria, had put forward the idea that Jesus, the Word of God, had not been divine by nature. Quoting an impressive array of biblical texts, he contended that God had simply conferred divinity upon the man Jesus as a reward for his perfect obedience and humility. At this point there was no orthodox position about the nature of Christ, and many of the bishops felt quite at home with Arius’s theology. Like their pagan neighbors, they did not experience the divine as an impossibly distant reality; in the Greco-Roman world, it was taken for granted that men and women regularly became fully fledged gods. 21 Eusebius, the leading Christian intellectual of his day, taught his congregations that God had revealed himself in human form before, first to Abraham, who had entertained three strangers at Mamre and discovered that Yahweh was participating in the conversation; later Moses and Joshua had similar theophanies. 22 For Eusebius, God’s Word, or Logos—the divine element in a human being 23 —had simply returned to earth once more, this time in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. 24 But Arius was vehemently opposed by Athanasius, his bishop’s young, combative assistant, who argued that God’s descent to earth was not a repetition of previous epiphanies but a unique, unprecedented, and unrepeatable act of love. This resonated in some quarters, where there had been a major shift in the perception of the divine; many Christians no longer felt that they could ascend to God by their own efforts as, Arius claimed, Jesus had done. There seemed an impassable gulf between the God that was life itself and the material world, which now appeared chronically fragile and moribund.

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

  The whole city was sacked, and the slaughter was very great." At Carcassonne the inhabitants were allowed to depart, the men in their shirts, the women in their chemises, carrying with them, as the chronicler writes, nothing else except their sins, nihil secum praeter peccata portantes. Dread had taken hold of the country, and village after village was abandoned by the fleeing inhabitants. Raymund was again put under excommunication at a council held at Avignon.1107 The conquered lands were given to Montfort. The war continued, and its atrocities, if possible, increased. New recruits appeared in response to fresh papal appeals, among them six thousand Germans.1108 At the stronghold of Minerve, one hundred and forty of the Albigensian Perfect were put to death in the flames. The ears, noses, and lips of prisoners were cut off. Again, in 1211, the count of Toulouse sought to come to an agreement with the legates. But the terms, which included the razing to the ground of all his castles, were too humiliating. The crusade was preached again. All the territory of Toulouse had been overrun and it only remained for the crusaders to capture the city itself. Pedro of Aragon, fresh from his crushing victory over the Moors at Novas de Tolosa, now interceded with the pope for his brother-in-law. The synod of Lavaur, 1213, appointed referee by Innocent, rejected the king’s propositions. Pedro then joined Raymund, but fell at the disastrous defeat of Muret the same year, 1213. It was a strange combination whereby the king of Aragon, who had won the highest distinction a year before as a hero of the Catholic faith, was killed in the ranks of those who were rebels to the papal authority.1109 The day after, the victor, Montfort, barefoot, went to church, and ordered Pedro’s battle-horse an armorial trappings sold and the proceeds distributed to the poor.1110 By the council of Montpellier, 1215, the whole land, including Toulouse, was granted to Montfort, and the titles conferred on him of count of Toulouse, viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne, and duke of Narbonne.1111 The complications in Southern France were one of the chief questions brought before the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215. Raymund was present and demanded back his lands, inasmuch as he had submitted to the Church; but by an overwhelming majority, the synod voted against him and Montfort was confirmed in the possession of his conquests.1112 When Raymund’s son made a personal appeal to Innocent for his father, the pope bade him "love God above all things and serve Him faithfully, and not stretch forth his hand against others’ territory" and gave him the cold promise that his complaints against Montfort would be heard at a future council.1113 The further progress of the Albigensian campaigns requires only brief notice here, for they were converted into a war of territorial plunder. In 1218, Montfort fell dead under the walls of Toulouse, his head crushed by a stone.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  agreement against night-bombing, but got no support from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang. All he obtained from the government was a public statement that their aim was not the total destruction of the German people; and on bombing he was sharply rebuked by Lang’s successor, Archbishop Temple, in July 1943: ‘I am not at all disposed to be the mouthpiece of the concern which I know exists, because I do not share it.’ Bell was horrified by the mass terror raids on German cities conducted by the British, and later by the Americans also. He wrote in the Chichester Diocesan Gazette in September 1943: ‘To bomb cities as cities, deliberately to attack civilians, quite irrespective of whether or not they are actively contributing to the war effort, is a wrong deed, whether done by the Nazis or by ourselves.’ This unexceptionable Christian observation won virtually no support at the time, and led to Bell being asked by the Dean of Chichester to withdraw from a Battle of Britain Sunday service in his own cathedral. Bell continued to condemn indiscriminate bombing, and forced a debate in the House of Lords on 9 February 1944. The speech he then made did not succeed in halting the bombing, but it aroused much comment and forced many complacent people to think. It also brought, at the time, a comment from Liddell Hart, the military analyst: ‘... the historian of civilisation, if that survives, is likely to regard it as better evidence for Christianity and common decency, than has been provided by any other spokesman. It represents the longer view and the higher wisdom.’ The longer view and the higher wisdom: to what extent did these characterize Christianity in the twentieth century? There was no striking evidence of far-sighted Christian statesmanship in the Protestant camp. The triumphalist euphoria which marked the first decade of the century slowly disappeared. In Britain, the last real (as opposed to commercially organized) Christian revival took place in Wales, 1904–5. It was essentially Nonconformist, and was promoted by anger against the status and privileges of the established Church in Wales. Its leader, Evan Roberts, was a young miner studying for the ministry, but the movement seems to have been entirely spontaneous and repudiated ministerial guidance. Roberts thought he was guided by the spirit; his helpers did not organize meetings, and he did not prepare his sermons. Sometimes he would remain silent in the pulpit for one and a half hours. But when he spoke he provoked contortions, prostrations and outcries, and his mere presence at a mass political meeting was sufficient to turn it into a religious one: at the 1906 General Election, Lloyd George, the most charismatic politician of the day, begged

• From Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (2015)

  But like the behaviorists, these physiological theorists, for the most part, also shunned conscious experiences—central states were physiological intermediaries between stimuli and responses, not subjectively felt states. 77 While this approach provided a way of studying the emotions like fear similarly in animals and humans, it achieved this goal by ignoring the feeling of fear, which is what most people think fear is. But even those who argue that emotions are conscious experiences sometimes claim that such experiences are just one aspect or component of emotion. For example, the Swiss psychologist Klaus Scherer views emotion as a process consisting of cognitive appraisals, expressive responses, physiological changes, and conscious feelings. 78 In this view, fear is what happens when we cognitively appraise a situation as dangerous, express certain behaviors in response to it, are physiologically aroused, and feel fear. This approach seems logically cumbersome to me because it regards fear as both the overall process and the specific feeling of being afraid; fear (the experience) is thus a component of fear (the process). Yet another theory is that emotions are hardwired in the brain and unleashed in the presence of trigger stimuli. 79 In this view, championed by those who adhere to basic emotions theory, innate behavioral reactions, physiological responses, and conscious feelings all flow from a fear center or network. As I will argue later, although threats do indeed release innate behavioral and physiological patterns, the feeling of fear is not itself innate, a view consistent with the ideas of psychological construction theories of emotion. Fear, anxiety, and other emotions are, in my view, just what people have always thought they were—conscious feelings. We often feel afraid while we freeze or flee in the presence of danger. But these are different consequences of threat detection—one is a conscious experience and the other involves more fundamental processes that operate nonconsciously. The failure to distinguish the conscious experience of fear and anxiety from more basic unconscious processes, I argue, has led to much confusion. The more basic processes contribute to emotional feelings, but they evolved, not to make conscious feelings, but instead to help organisms survive and thrive. For the sake of avoiding confusion, the more basic nonconscious processes should not be labeled as “emotional.” Feelings of fear, in my view, result when we become consciously aware that our brain has nonconsciously detected danger. 80 How does this happen? It all starts when an external stimulus, processed by sensory systems in the brain, is nonconsciously determined to be a threat. Outputs of threat detection circuits then trigger a general increase in brain arousal and the expression of behavioral responses and supporting physiological changes in the body. Signals from the behavioral and physiological responses of the body are sent back to the brain, where they become part of the nonconscious response to danger (sensory components of these responses can be “sensed” just like sights or sounds).

• From Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (2015)

  Children’s movies these days often involve quests in which characters, often animals, have to face many fear-arousing challenges and are anxious for prolonged periods until they finally reach their destination, and their fear and anxiety are replaced with jubilation. As the psychologist Michael Lewis points out, children act afraid and anxious long before they can feel these emotions. 86 Words like “fear” and “anxiety” have established relations with propositions such as “I am afraid of X” or “I am anxious about X.” Once one cognitively learns these, it is easy to know what it means to be afraid of or anxious about X without necessarily fully understanding what it is like to feel fear or anxiety. 87 Children thus build up a catalog of what canonical examples of different emotions look like in others and feel like in themselves. The Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget used the term “schema” to describe an organized collection of information about a topic or situation that children acquire and then use in thought and action. 88 Emotional schemas are stored in semantic and episodic memory as emotional concepts. 89 These schemas are used to categorize situations as threatening or safe. In threatening situations, signals in brain and body are monitored, as is one’s behavior. If a match occurs (through a process called pattern recognition ) between a stored schema and the present situation and/or state, the present condition is cognitively conceptualized (interpreted) as the schematized emotion and labeled with the emotion word assigned to that state. Sometimes only some of the components of the emotional state will be present, in which case pattern completion is called upon. As one becomes more emotionally experienced, the states become more differentiated. Fright comes to be distinguished from startle, panic, and terror, and dread distinguished from concern, wariness, and edginess. Because the labeling process is imprecise and depends on individual learning and interpretation, each person may use the terms a little differently. Psychologists Lisa Barrett and James Russell refer to these schematic and interpretive processes underlying emotional experiences as conceptual acts that contribute to the psychological construction of emotions. 90 As Assaf Kron and colleagues have noted, “Feelings don’t come easy.” 91 They don’t simply happen; they require considerable mental work. Although the memory of monitoring helps you label experiences, the words we use as labels are not the states. They are the effort of consciousness to classify and make sense of what is being experienced and enable one to report on the experience if questioned about it. So how, then, does the experience of emotion itself come about?