Hope

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 58 of 216 · 20 per page

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

  After that, Moon’s political influence began to grow. When Ronald Reagan became president, Moon-controlled groups began funding the New Right political movement in Washington. When it was clear the federal government would do nothing about the Moonies, I decided to organize. I started a group called Ex-Members Against Moon, later Ex-Moon, Inc. I sponsored press conferences, edited a monthly newsletter, and gave numerous interviews. I had considered starting a group of former members from many different cult groups, but I decided that with the release of the Congressional investigation, it would be more effective for me to focus on the Moonies. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Defense, asking why a Moon company, Tong II Industries, was permitted to make American M-16 rifles in Korea when only the South Korean government had legal permission to do so. Was the Moon organization part of the Korean government? Was the Department of Defense giving it favored treatment? The request was turned down on the grounds that revealing the information I asked for would compromise the security of the United States. To this day I cannot confirm what I believe to be the truth—that the Moon group was a creature of the Intelligence agencies. Meanwhile, I knew that I would not do any more forceful deprogramming. I had to find a way to help people out of cults that would be less traumatic and less expensive, and that would not violate the law. I had read many dozens of books and thousands of pages—everything I could get my hands on—about thought reform, brainwashing, attitude change, persuasion, and CIA recruitment and indoctrination. The next and most important area to research was the field of hypnosis. In 1980, I attended a seminar by Richard Bandler on hypnosis that was based on the work of the psychiatrist Milton Erickson. Bandler and John Grinder had also developed a model based on the work of therapist Virginia Satir and Gregory Bateson. They called it Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP. The seminar gave me a greater understanding of techniques of hypnotic mind control and how to combat them. I spent nearly two years studying NLP with everyone involved in its formulation and presentation, even moving to Santa Cruz, California to do an apprenticeship with John Grinder. By this time, I had fallen in love and married. Eventually I moved back to Massachusetts when my wife, Aureet Bar-Yam, was given a scholarship to work toward her master’s degree in psychology at Harvard.46

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

  Th e era of the Th eodosian dynasty appears as the crux of change, when the infl uence of Christian sexual mo- rality begins to fi nd some uncertain expression in public law, when the leadership of the church was forced to confront a broader array of social realities in the wake of mass conversion, and when a thoroughly ascetic sexual morality made its decisive reckoning with the institution of mar- riage. It is perhaps not immaterial that the culture of erotic lamps, that humble domestic instrument, experiences a decisive decline in the de cades around AD 400; a jarring change pulses through the Mediterranean world in these years. But only in the age of Justinian do we fi nd a more complete, more confi dent assimilation of Christian sexuality and the public order of law and culture. Any historian is unwise to bet against complexity, against the deeper continuities that abide beyond the reach of ecclesiastical power or prerogative. Th e historian of eros most of all must remember that talk is merely talk, and that no moral ideology can control such quixotic, indi- vidual, human forces as shame or desire. We are not positing, nor would it be possible to posit, a sea change in human behavior. But it is worth risking the obvious dangers of overstatement, if the opposite tendency, of failing to emerge from the thicket of Christian disagreements, threatens to obscure the truth that the Th eodosian generations witnessed one of the great revolu- tions in the history of public sexual morality. Perhaps it would be safer to hedge bets and call the transition of these years an infl ection point in a longer, slower, and highly circumstantial passage from classical to Chris- tian values. In the case of same- sex eros, ideals of marriage, and concepts of  FROM SHAME TO SIN sexual agency alike, the victory of Christianity drove an epochal reor ga ni- za tion of the substance of sexual morality and its place in the order of the ancient city. As Chapter 4 will show, imaginative literature was called upon to represent this new order of relationships between individual, society, and cosmos, and it was particularly suited for doing so. SELF, SOCIETY, AND LITERARY SYMBOLS In the days leading up to his execution, with confrontation hanging over the atmosphere like a leaden sky, Jesus relayed to the priests of the Temple in Jerusalem the startling message that they would be preceded into the king- dom of heaven by tax- collectors and prostitutes. Th e charismatic Galilean rabbi had earned a reputation for his charitable attitude toward society’s out- casts, and it was known on solid authority that he went so far as to share a table with them.

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

  Of course, there are so many prayers that so many good people utter to ease suffering, to prevent harm, that seem to go unanswered. I do not believe in an anthropomorphized deity who sits on a throne with a beard, with the Book of Life on his lap deciding what events takes place on earth. That said, I encourage my clients to pray and have hope and do everything in their power to help their loved ones and friends who are still involved with cult groups. No matter how long a person has been involved with a destructive cult, there is still hope that they can be helped. I have talked with an 85-year-old grandmother who left a destructive cult after 15 years of membership. Tears came to her eyes as she described how wonderful it was to be free again. I cried, too, as she spoke. I knew exactly what she meant. Chapter 5–Cult Psychology Since my departure from the Moon cult, I have counseled or spoken with many thousands of former cult members. These people come from every sort of background and range in age from 12 to 85. Although some of them clearly had severe emotional problems before becoming involved, the great majority were stable, intelligent, idealistic people. Many had good educations and came from respectable families. Many were born or raised into totalistic groups, but still managed to leave. Many were able to form relationships and have successful careers. Many more struggled and suffered from a myriad of psychological and life issues related to their cult involvement. The fact that many were intelligent, well-adjusted and from good homes hardly surprises me. When I was a leader in the Moonies, we selectively recruited “valuable” people—those who were strong, caring and motivated. Indeed, a cult will generally target the most educated, active and capable people it can find. People with emotional problems, on the other hand, always had trouble handling the rigorous schedule and enormous psychological pressures we imposed on them. It took lots of time, energy, and money to recruit and indoctrinate a member, so we tried not to waste our resources on someone who seemed liable to break down. Like any other business, large cult organizations watch these cost/benefit ratios. Cults that endure for more than a decade need to have competent individuals managing the practical affairs that any organization with long-term objectives must do. The big groups can afford to hire outsiders to perform executive and professional tasks, but a hired professional is never trusted as much as someone who is psychologically invested in the group. Moreover, cult members don’t have to be paid for their services. Cults thus try to recruit talented professionals—to run their affairs, to put a respectable face on their organizations, and to ensure their success.

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

  Th e saint’s life proves that hagiogra- phers, even at this date, simply could not live without the imaginary world created by the authors of romance. Th e grotesque story of Gleucippe and Clitophon is probably the least subliminal instance of what Frye called “mythical imperialism.” Th e invention of the penitent prostitutes was only one campaign in a massive cultural conquest that sprawled across the entire continent of ancient literature. But this new archetype, born from the warm embers of imperial romance, refl ects an especially meaningful encounter in the transition to a Christian culture. Th e stories of the penitent prostitutes, as a subgenre, mirror the coming of age of Christianity as a dominant public ideology. Th e woman’s body was a potent symbol, a shorthand for the order of society. At the deepest level, the redemption of a prostitute’s corrupted fl esh stood for the ability of the church to absorb society and through baptism to cleanse it. Th e prostitute’s sins are only an exaggerated ROMANCE IN THE LATE CLASSICAL WORLD  and especially condensed symbol of the sins of the world. Th e prostitute is everyman.  Th e reach of these stories underscores their place as part of a broad cul- tural transformation. So, too, does the manifest correspondence between the growth of this literary legend and the legal program of the Christian state. Th e remarkable attack on coerced prostitution that was launched un- der Th eodosius II and would reach its climax in the age of Justinian was coterminous with the period of the penitent prostitute’s gestation and fl o- rescence. Just as Christian lawmakers, suddenly anxious about the “necessity of sin,” broke with immemorial tradition and extended succor to society’s most vulnerable, Christian litterateurs created stories in which sexual dis- honor is the product of sin rather than circumstance, choice rather than destiny. Th e Justinianic monastery “Repentance,” off ered as a refuge for former prostitutes, was part of a much deeper re orientation of state and so- ciety around the logic of a sexual morality grounded on the idea of sin.  Narrative literature proved such a rich medium for exploring the relation between sexual morality and the individual experience across the ancient world because stories are naturally suited for dramatizing the tension be- tween freedom and fate. In antiquity this tension, as we have seen, was an endlessly fertile source of speculation about the nature, purpose, and limits of moral claims on the body’s sexual potential. Th e Greek romances seem, in their very form, structurally derived from pagan fatalism; yet the authors who most completely sense this equation of form and fate— Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus— are the ones who create characters that stridently accept their moral responsibility in the face of an overwhelming destiny. Th is powerful sense of sweeping external motion bearing down on the individ- ual off ers a satisfying concession to the mysterious fact that the self is part of nature.

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

  After the death of Haninah comes his daughter’s escape from the brothel, and this episode is surely to be read in light of all that has preceded it in this intricate, contrapuntal structure. The arrangement suggests two insights. First, harlotry is a metaphor for idolatry. Second, in the parallel episode, the rabbis learn that the Torah will save them from iniquity. When Rabbi Meir comes to test the chastity of his sister-in-law, she tells him that the “manner of women is upon her.” Obviously this ruse compares to the epileptic fits or fictitious diseases of the other heroines—the “devices of virtue” that are the heroine’s only defense. But this device is something more specific, more resonant. The virgin tells her prospective customer that she is menstruating. She evades him, in other words, by trying to observe niddah, the ritual separation of a woman commanded by the Torah. Elsewhere in the Talmudim, women use this prohibition to their advantage, even postponing the mikveh to avoid sex. The daughter of Haninah here uses her claim to ritual impurity as her device of virtue. She obeys the Torah, and just as the Torah came to the rescue of the rabbis walking past the brothel, the Torah will watch over her, in the brothel. Rabbi Meir is convinced of her purity, and he effects her release. The Bavli this time does not proclaim openly that the Torah will protect its adherents—perhaps because its parchment has been symbolically burned—but it is efficacious nonetheless. This story ends with a twist. Rabbi Meir rescues his sister-in-law, and then the Romans begin to hunt for him. Walking down the street, he met Romans in hot pursuit. With nowhere else to escape, the Talmud reports, he darted into a nearby brothel, because no one would suspect Rabbi Meir of entering a brothel. Or, the Talmud relates, according to an alternative account, he saw pagans cooking food, dipped a finger in it, and pretended to eat. In this epilogue, a farrago of all that has preceded, it is the pretense of harlotry, both literal and metaphorical, that has secured his salvation from the Romans. It is possible to flirt with sin, or rather to be encompassed about by it, and yet to follow the Torah and enter the next life. That is the whole message of the tractate Avodah Zarah—how the faithful may endure in the midst of a hostile culture. The creative spirits who wove this tale from such varied threads refashioned the symbols of romance—the virgin’s body and the haunt of shame—into a statement about the boundaries between their community and the contaminations of the outside world. Structurally the Jewish virgin in the brothel is a direct parallel of the girls of early Christian fiction. But by the time the Talmud was redacted, Christian authors were embarking on even more daring reconfigurations of these ancient conventions.46 FROM SHAME TO SIN: THE PENITENT PROSTITUTES

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

  Zimbardo hoped that APA board members would wake up to the reality of mind control. That did not happen. Previous efforts by others had fared no better. In 1983, Dr. Margaret Singer headed a task force on Deceptive and Indirect Methods of Persuasion and Control at the request of the APA.202 Despite her efforts, the problem was not deemed serious enough to be taken up by the APA. Internal politics appeared to be at work to keep this body of knowledge from public attention. The promise contained in previous editions of the DSM and in the current section of the DSM-5 goes unfilled and, indeed, unrecognized. The fact that neither the government nor organized psychotherapy has stepped up to help those adversely affected by mind control is dreadful. But I am hopeful that this will soon change, through the efforts of enlightened mental health professionals and, importantly, the growing number of former members who are taking action and telling their stories to therapists and anyone else who will listen. Mind Control Research And Its Application Despite the lack of attention by the government and mental health profession, many people have been hard at work studying mind control and how it affects people. They have written numerous books and hundreds of papers. After publishing his 1961 classic, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, former Air Force Intelligence psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton went on to write two more books on the theme of mind control. In 1986 he published The Nazi Doctors, in which he describes the psychological process of “doubling” that German doctors underwent to enable them to obediently perform acts of unimaginable cruelty in service to Hitler. Lifton then wrote a book in 1999 about the Japanese terrorist Aum Shinrikyo cult entitled, Destroying the World to Save It, in which he applied his model of mind control to explain how cult members were manipulated into killing innocent people in order to bring about an “apocalypse” that would supposedly erase all of the bad karma of the Japanese population. Margaret Singer wrote two books with Janja Lalich203—Cults in Our Midst and Crazy Therapies. In The Lucifer Effect, Philip Zimbardo detailed his famous Stanford prison study and applied its lessons to understand the horrible acts committed by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison. Louis Jolyon West and Paul Martin wrote a paper on pseudo-identity disorder that is now considered a classic. Social psychologist Robert Cialdini’s best-selling book, Influence, details six laws by which people can be made to alter their behavior and beliefs. Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson’s Age of Propaganda shows how PR and advertising manipulate the public.

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

  Almost four centuries later the radical benevolence of Jesus had lost none of its original charge, in part because he had chosen his out- casts so well. In the words of the Antiochene preacher John Chrysostom, “Th ese two represent the highest sins, born each of a grievous passion, lust for the body and lust for coin.” God, in the dispensation of forgive- ness, was not a respecter of persons, and nothing symbolized the limitless potential of grace like the moral rehabilitation of a prostitute. Because of her penitence, there was hope for all. She proved that “it is easy to rise from the very depths of wickedness.” But John Chrysostom did not have CHAPTER FOUR Revolutionizing Romance in the Late Classical World  FROM SHAME TO SIN to rely on ancient scriptures to fi nd an example of such extraordinary transformation. Have you not heard how that prostitute, who once surpassed all in her wan- ton immorality, now overshadows all in her moral scruple? I am not talking about the prostitute in the gospels, but the one in our own time, hailing from the most lawless city of Phoenicia. For she was at one time a prostitute among us, in fact holding pride of place in the theater, and her name was famous everywhere, not just in our city but as far as Cilicia and Cappadocia. She emptied many an estate, conquered many an orphan. Not a few even accused her of sorcery, saying that she ensnared not just by her physical charms but also by the use of potions. Th is whore at one time held the brother of the empress under her spell, so great was her tyranny. Th e conversion of such a celebrity, from the most insalubrious quarters of ancient society, furnished an irresistible opportunity for a crusader like Chrysostom to make a point about the quality of divine mercy. Th e woman— a stage actress and quite possibly a courtesan, for the two profes- sions shaded into one another in law, ideology, and reality— had attained a reputation stretching across the eastern Mediterranean. We need not doubt the ability of an exquisitely beautiful woman, in a world where respectabil- ity meant seclusion, to capture the public mind. But this nameless actress walked away from her fame. If Chrysostom is to be believed, her retirement caused such resentment that the governor was prodded to force her back on stage, going so far as to dispatch armed soldiers for the purpose. But having received the purifying waters of baptism, she could not be dislodged from the virgins who had received her.  Some people, their every movement full of mysterious resonance, are destined to become symbols. Th is star of the stage who repented and retired among the virgins was to launch a thousand legends. Her story was ready- made for literary adaptation, and not only because of the sheer arc of her conversion.

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

  The Egyptian desert, in late antiquity, was to prove the birthplace of new archetypes of human spirituality. With its barren horizons, the simple ecology of life on the edges of civilization provided a rarefied backdrop. Here men—and some women—wrestled with sin, stared down the devil, and sought internal transformation. In the desert tales of penitent prostitutes, the features of the moral landscape are simple. The women themselves are sketched in little detail. The focus of the brief encounter is the father—his steadfastness, his grace. The tales are monastic from start to finish; even in the prostitute’s lair, the monk brings with him the whiff of the desert. The chief elements of the drama are sin and repentance. We are in a world where sin is inextricable from the machinations of the devil and his demons. In this setting, the significance of the girl’s prostitution is not that it places her outside of respectable society. It is, rather, that it arrays her with the forces of evil. Her repentance is not just the recovery of a most abandoned sinner. A victory over fornication is a defeat over Satan’s legions. The monks who induce the conversion of the prostitute are like a modern sports team that courts away its rival’s most valuable player. The desert tales of penitent prostitutes are allegories of sin and salvation, played out against the grander cosmic battle between good and evil. The literary side is only one half of her story, for in the same period, in the late fourth and then more explosively in the fifth century, the penitent prostitute, modeled on the “sinful woman” in the Gospel of Luke, becomes a popular subject for Christian preachers. Her tearful repentance proved congenial to homilists in an age of mass conversion. The currency of these legends, already in the late fourth century, is also confirmed in a most unlikely source: the rhetorical handbook of the pagan sophist of Antioch, Libanius. In one of his training exercises, Libanius creates a penitent pagan prostitute. She represents the cross-pollination of Christianity and philosophical paganism in the fourth century. The word “repentance” is glaringly absent (instead she “becomes chaste”), but the mood is entirely Christian. “I purify my mind. I flee Aphrodite, I prefer the clemency of Athena.” The speech spoke of prostitution in terms of “pollution,” and there was a clear religious subtext to the speech: the prostitute fled Aphrodite, preferring chaste Athena. Even so, Libanius could not resist insinuating that Aphrodite was wrongfully accused of perversion. The prostitute wanted to set up a law telling women in prostitution that they had the capacity to become pure and to flee—a full generation before Theodosius II would actually do so. The speech was a fictional school exercise, to be sure, but nevertheless represents a remarkable statement from a late pagan intellectual eager to defend the sexual integrity of his religion. The speech might be considered a pagan apology, written in response to the avant-garde of Christian sexuality.51

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  “Forgiveness of sins,” for the first disciples, was now to be seen as a fact about the way the world was, a fact rooted in the one-off accomplishment of Jesus’s death, then revealed in his resurrection, and then put to work through the Spirit in the transformed lives of his followers. Forgiveness of sins became another way of saying “Passover” or “new Exodus.” Or, as in Isaiah 54–55, following hard on the heels of the kingdom announcement of chapter 52 and the “servant’s” work in chapter 53, it would come to mean “new covenant” and “new creation.” The gospel was the announcement of this new reality. This new reality—hard to perceive except by faith in Jesus’s death-defeating resurrection, as all the early Christians knew well—was designed to come to ultimate fruition in the eventual new creation, the “new heavens and new earth.” I have written about this at length elsewhere (notably in Surprised by Hope), and we do not need to repeat or labor the point. Ephesians 1:10 says it all: God’s plan was to unite all things in the Messiah, things in heaven and on earth. The final scene in Revelation (chaps. 21–22) spells it out: the new heavens and new earth function as the ultimate Temple, the new world in which God will wipe away all tears from all eyes. First Corinthians 15 describes the accomplishment of this final reality under the image of the messianic battle: Jesus, having already conquered sin and death, will reign until these and all other enemies are totally destroyed. Romans 8 describes it as the birth of the new creation from the womb of the old, weaving into that great metaphor a powerful allusion to the events of the Exodus, so that creation itself will have its own “Exodus” at last, being set free from its slavery to corruption and sharing the freedom that comes when God’s children are glorified. That is the ultimate hope. All of this is the “goal” of God’s rescue operation accomplished through Jesus. All of this is in direct fulfillment of the ancient hopes of Israel: it is all “according to the Bible”—though it was quite unexpected. Nobody had read Israel’s scriptures like this before, but the events concerning Jesus left his followers with no choice. What had happened could have no other meaning. And all of this can be summed up in the phrase “forgiveness of sins.” None of it has to do with redeemed souls leaving the world of space, time, and matter for something better. All of it has to do with the strange, unanticipated fulfillment of the hope of Israel.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Why plant a tree if the garden is going to be dug up tomorrow? I have argued against this view elsewhere, particularly in Surprised by Hope and Surprised by Scripture. Indeed, the reason for that double “surprise” is partly that the New Testament view of God’s new creation still comes as a shock to many in our world, both Christian and non-Christian. But in the present book I want to go deeper than before into the difference between the “usual” view of “mission” I have mentioned—the idea of “mission” as “saving souls for heaven”—and the “mission” that I believe flows from the extraordinary, indeed revolutionary, vision of the achievement of Jesus in his death. Christian mission means implementing the victory that Jesus won on the cross. Everything else follows from this. The point is that this victory—the victory over all the powers, ultimately over death itself—was won through the representative and substitutionary death of Jesus, as Israel’s Messiah, who died so that sins could be forgiven. To suggest, as many have done, that we have to choose between “victory” and “substitution” is to miss the point, whichever we then choose. The New Testament affirms both and indicates, as we have tried to map out, the relationship between them. The “powers” gained their power because idolatrous humans sinned; when God deals with sins on the cross, he takes back from the powers their usurped authority. The question now is: What does it look like when this integrated vision of the death of Jesus is turned into mission? Answering that question—or at least beginning to answer it—is the purpose of this final part of the book. * * * For the sake of clarity, I have spoken here of two versions of “mission,” though I am naturally aware that things are more complicated than that, in both church history and current practice. It may help, though, to explain very briefly, at the risk of considerable oversimplification, how we got to our present position. The recent “backstory” of these two versions looks like this. For many protestant Christians in Europe and America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the mood was one of optimism. New things were happening, and the gospel was going forward, changing lives and communities. As Europeans traveled the globe, they had a sense of spreading what they saw as Christian civilization in areas previously unknown. This, they believed, was how the kingdom of God would indeed come on earth as in heaven. This was one outflowing of the solidly this-worldly focus of some Reformation theology. It led to what has been called the “Puritan hope”: the vision that the kingdoms of the world would become the kingdom of God, as it says in Revelation 11:15.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  For every story that makes the news headlines, there are a million others. Again and again Jesus’s followers find that when they are weak, then they are strong; that the monsters that loom so large and that can indeed do serious damage from time to time are hollow inside. The idolatry and sin that gave them their energy and puffed them up with pride has been cut off at the root with the forgiveness of sins. As became apparent with the fall of Eastern European Communism, many societies had been in the grip of what had seemed massive, powerful, invincible forces. But once their bluff was called, they collapsed like a bunch of pricked balloons. There is, no doubt, a certain pragmatic wisdom in the advice that one should not “poke the dragon.” But in the Bible the dragons have already been conquered, and even though they may lash their tails angrily, they are in fact a defeated, mangy old bunch. Believing this and living on this basis can be exhilarating as well as dangerous. Part of the skill lies in discernment, in knowing which dragons to challenge, when, and on what grounds. But when there are forces at work in our world dealing in death and destruction, propagating dangerous ideologies without regard for those in the way, or forces that squash the poor to the ground and allow a tiny number to heap up wealth and power, we know we are dealing with Pharaoh once more. Idols are being worshipped, and they are demanding human sacrifices. But we know that on the cross the ultimate Pharaoh was defeated. And so we go to our work, not indeed with some kind of slogan-driven social agenda to keep the chattering classes happy, nor with the arrogance that expects to “build the kingdom” by our own efforts, but in prayer and faith, with the sacramental ministry and prayer of the church around and behind us and with the knowledge that the victory won on the cross will one day have its full effect. We expect to suffer, but we know already that we are victorious. The sacramental life, in particular, can have a power that is sometimes overlooked by those who, afraid of the wrong use of baptism or the Eucharist, have downplayed them within their central teaching. That wasn’t Paul’s line. As far as he was concerned, as he explains in Romans 6, someone who had been baptized into the Messiah had already died, been buried, and been raised to new life. That had happened to Jesus, and what was true of him was true of his people. That is why (for instance) Martin Luther, the great German Reformer, could say, Baptizatus sum, “I have been baptized!” as his ultimate protection against the power of evil. He had been brought into the protection of Jesus’s victory.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  The man stood up and said, “Yes, very much.” He was about forty-five, very tall and thin, and wore an absurd bow tie with his conservative suit. He had kind eyes and an intelligent, inquisitive demeanor. She felt that something about her genuinely excited him, and she was flattered. He followed her to the awful burgundy Shadow Room. He stripped and lay on the bed, his torso resting against a pillow, his slender naked body placidly expectant, his almost alarmingly large penis lying half-hard on his thigh. She took off her high heels and knelt beside him on the bed. He didn’t touch her or even move closer, he just lay there and looked at her as though he were waiting to be amused. The old air conditioner moaned and dripped. “I like your hair,” he said. “It’s a becoming style.” She self-consciously ruffled her spiky, black-dyed crew cut. “Oh, it’s fashionable now. Lots of women have this cut.” “Yes, I know. But it suits you especially well.” She said thank you and pulled her shirt over her head. He glanced at her breasts with apparent approval but still made no move to touch her. She decided with some relief that he was a talker and settled into conversation. She quickly found out that he worked for the city on the redevelopment of the Lower East Side, that he did not love his wife, though he was very fond of her, and that they rarely made love. He stayed with her because he didn’t want to be alone. “And what about you? What do you do when you’re not at this place?” She grimaced. “Well, I don’t know if I do anything. I’m trying to become a writer. That’s why I came to New York.” She paused, wondering if that sounded ridiculous to this man who wore suits and patronized prostitutes. “Do you think that’s stupid?” “No, not at all. Why would I think it’s stupid?” “Because so many girls in these houses have the desire to do something else, but it’s obvious that in most cases they don’t have any talent or are too scared, and I don’t know, it just seems sort of pathetic to me. I don’t even tell people here what I do. I say I’m a secretary or a dental technical or something.” “But that’s silly. As it happens, I know there have been some very talented people working here. There was a whole coterie of various artists at one point. One of them was a performance artist who went off to Italy and started working with, oh, some avant-garde choreographer—I know the name but I can’t think of it. Anyway, I hear she’s doing fine.” “How do you know?”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  But in the morning, as I ate my poached eggs and toast, I couldn’t help but feel curious and excited. The feeling grew as I rode in the car with my mother to the receding orange building. I felt like I was accomplishing something. I wanted to do well. When we drove past the Amy Joy doughnut shop, I saw, through a wall of glass, expectant construction workers in heavy boots and jackets sitting on vinyl swivel seats, waiting for coffee and bags of doughnuts. I had sentimental thoughts about workers and the decency of unthinking toil. I was pleased to be like them, insofar as I was. I returned my mother’s smile when I got out of the car and said “thanks” when she said “good luck.” “Well, here you are,” said the lawyer. He clapped his short, hard-packed little hands together and made a loud noise. “On time. Good morning!” He began training me then and continued to do so all week. No interesting people came into the office. Very few people came into the office at all. The first week there were three. One was a nervous middle-aged woman who had an uneven haircut and was wearing lavender rubber children’s boots. She sat on the edge of the waiting room chair with her rubber boots together, rearranging the things in her purse. Another was a fat woman in a bright, baglike dress who had yellow in the whites of her wild little eyes, and who carried her purse like a weapon. The last was a man who sat desperately turning his head as if he wanted to disconnect it from his body. I could hear him raising his voice inside the lawyer’s office. When he left, the lawyer came out and said, “He is completely crazy,” and told me to type him a bill for five hundred dollars. Everyone who sat in the waiting room looked random and unwelcome. They all fidgeted. The elegant old armchairs and puffy upholstered couch were themselves disoriented in the stiff modernity of the waiting room. My heavy oak desk was an idiot standing against a wall covered with beige plaster. The brooding plants before me gave the appearance of weighing a lot for plants, even though one of them was a slight, frondy thing. I was surprised that a person like the lawyer, who seemed to be mentally organized and evenly distributed, would have such an office. But I was comfortable in it. Its jumbled nature was like a nest of available rags gathered tightly together for warmth. My first two weeks were serene. I enjoyed the dullness of days, the repetition of motions, the terms, polite interactions between the lawyer and me. I enjoyed feeling him impose his brainlessly confident sense of existence on me. He would say, “Type this letter,” and my sensibility would contract until the abstractions of achievement and production found expression in the typing of the letter.

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

  What is at stake in Augustine’s pessimism, in the largest sense, is the ability of the church to absorb society. The impossibility of human perfection was the necessary adjunct to a vision of the church as an embracing institution, impure in its present form. Unlike Pelagius or Julian, Augustine was willing to accept that the church was far from a perfect body of holy men and women, standing apart from the world. The church was a collective where men and women strove, day by day, to be healed of their moral imperfections. “So not only all the sins, but all the evils of mankind, are in the course of being taken away by the sanctity of the Christian wash, by which Christ cleanses his church so that He might present her to Himself not in this age but in the future one, when she will have no stain or spot or anything of such a kind. For there are people who say that the church is already so, and yet they themselves are in her midst!” “Nevertheless, we ought to will not to experience these sexual desires, even if we cannot obtain this goal so long as we are in this body of death.” It is a measure of the distance traveled that Augustine returns, like Epictetus, to the position that a free will is an achieved state; but what for Epictetus was achieved through the cultivation of reason, for Augustine was rehabilitated by the mysterious power of divine grace. The sacraments replaced the power of reason; mysterious rites administered by the church, rather than meditative philosophy, enabled human freedom.71

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

  Stoicism, gnosticism, and popular fatalism all spurred the articulation of a libertarian notion of free will among orthodox Christians. These concerns converge in the remarkable work of Bardaisan, an almost exact contemporary of Clement. According to Eusebius, Bardaisan dedicated a work On Fate to the emperor Caracalla. It was not the only learned tract on fate the emperor received. The greatest Aristotelian of the high Roman Empire, Alexander of Aphrodisias, also penned a treatise On Fate dedicated to Caracalla and his father, Septimius Severus; Alexander’s work attacked both astrology and Stoic determinism in staking out a strongly libertarian view of moral action. If the historian Cassius Dio is to be believed, all of this learned instruction failed to take, and Caracalla was so convinced of the veracity of astrology that he dispensed honors and punishments based simply on horoscopes. He might have found Bardaisan’s outlook more congenial, because the dialogue preserved under the title Book of the Laws of the Countries, composed by a disciple of Bardaisan, reflects a Christian attempt to make strategic concessions to the power of astrology while preserving intact the core of moral freedom. The dialogue surveys the bewildering variety of human customs to argue that such vast differences must imply a wide scope for indeterminist views. Bardaisan developed a unique cosmology and anthropology. He distinguished between a realm of nature and a realm of liberty. “It is man’s natural constitution to be born, grow up, become adult, procreate children, and grow old … this is the work of Nature, which does, creates and produces everything as it is ordained.” These affairs of the body man shared with all living creatures. “As matters of their mind, however, they do what they will as free beings disposing of themselves and as God’s image.” One proof of moral freedom was the ability of individuals to change. “There are people who used to go to prostitutes and get drunk but who, when they received guidance from good advisors, became decent, continent men and despised the lust of the body.” Bardaisan, like the apologists before him, was concerned to reconcile human freedom and divine justice. “We are justified and praised on account of those things we do of our own free-will, if they are good, but if they are bad, we become guilty thereby and are reproached with them.”72

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

  Although this book is meant as a resource, there is no substitute for professional advice geared to your own unique situation. Do not hesitate to seek such help from people who are qualified and informed. I am now developing programs to train mental health professionals, former cult members, and activists on mind control, undue influence, and cult psychology. Also please consult the wealth of free interviews, talks, workshops, and other resources on the freedomofmind.com website. Chapter 1–My Work as a Cult Expert Finally, a chance to relax, forget about work, and enjoy some social time with my friends. Maybe meet some new people at this party. “Hi. My name is Steve Hassan. Nice to meet you.” (I just hope no one asks me to talk about work.) The question: “So, what do you do?” (Oh no, not again!) The dodge: “I’m self-employed.” “Doing what?” (No escape.) “I’m a cult expert.” (Here come the 50 questions.) “Oh, really? That’s interesting. How did you get into that? Can you tell me why…?” Since February 1974, I have been involved with the problems caused by destructive cults. That was when I was recruited into the “One World Crusade,”1 one of hundreds of front groups of the Unification Church, also known as the Moonies. After two and a half years as a member of that cult, I was deprogrammed after I fell asleep while driving a fundraising van, and smashed into a tractor trailer truck at 80 miles an hour. Ever since then, I have been actively involved in fighting destructive cults. I have become a professionally trained therapist and fly anywhere my help is genuinely needed. My phone rings at all hours of the day. My clients are people who, for one reason or another, have been damaged emotionally, socially, and sometimes even physically, by their involvement with destructive cults. I help these people recover and start their lives over. My approach enables them to make this transition in a way that avoids the trauma associated with the often-illegal abduction method Ted Patrick called deprogramming. My work is intensive, totally involving me with a person and their family, sometimes for days at a time. My approach is legal and respectful. Usually, I am able to assist a person in making a dramatic recovery, accessing and reclaiming their authentic identity, or, at least, understanding that they have a better life ahead of them if they decide to leave the group. Only a handful of people in the world work with members of destructive cults. This book reveals most of the significant aspects of my approach to this unusual profession. This is work and a way of life that I never imagined. I undertook it because I thought I could help people. Having seen how destructive cults deliberately undermine basic human rights, I also became an activist. I am especially concerned with everyone’s right to know about how destructive cults recruit, keep control of and exploit highly talented, productive people.

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

  Here we see fully articulated the stark diff erence between voluntary sin and coerced sin. “One prostitute has been sold to the pimp and is in evil  FROM SHAME TO SIN because of necessity, for she must provide her body for the work of her wicked master. But there is another who gives herself to sin voluntarily, because of plea sure.” In a more systematic context— one of his canonical letters— Basil carried his thought to its logical conclusion. “Sexual viola- tions that occur through necessity are to be without blame.” Basil’s canon represents a monumental breakdown of the traditional social and mental barriers that had insulated the church from the need to think about the material realities behind sin. Here is a not insignifi cant expansion of hu- man consciousness. Basil cut through the curtain that had for centuries blocked the need to think about the moral capacity of society’s most vulnerable.  We might fruitfully contrast the sermon of Basil with the novel of Achil- les Tatius. Achilles is aware of the ineff able strings of fate that pull human action. He walks us to the precipice and, at least for dramatic eff ect, asks us to contemplate the mysterious dispensation that could make Leucippe free and the prostitute an effi gy of social death. But having stared at the abyss, he retreats, and takes solace in the order of a world that does allow beauty, plea sure, and existential fullness for some. Basil ponders this same mysterious dispensation, but with a conviction of its profound injustice and a confi dent hope for a fi nal redemption in which all moral creatures will receive their due. Th e radicalism of Basil’s discovery is attributable to the stark collision between an ideology of free will and an earnest form of nascent social lead- ership. It is no accident that Basil’s brother, Gregory of Nyssa, has left the very earliest extant attack on slavery; for Gregory, slavery was an institution unjust to its very foundations, a violation of basic human rationality and moral autonomy. Th e takeover of society by the church opened a brief win- dow for such radically creative social thought.  Basil’s idea, if it was fi rst his, was to prove more fertile than Gregory’s attack on slavery. Th e dichotomy between consent and coercion found its way into the Christian mind in the late fourth century. Other Greek pas- tors picked up the idea of consent, specifi cally in the context of slavery and prostitution. Th e idea was clearly alive in the early fi fth century, when Cyril of Alexandria explained that there were two kinds of prostitutes. “See how some wish to practice shameful pollution willingly and of their own voli- tion while some are accustomed to impress it upon others as though by force. . . .

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

  Few cultures have been so pervasively fi xated on the limits of human agency within a vast, impersonal cosmos as the inhabitants of the high Ro- man Empire. Th e Greek novels, on questions of sexuality and cosmology alike, were in direct dialogue with the homiletic and philosophical litera- ture of the age. Th e novels explore the very themes that occupied sages and THE MORALITIES OF SEX IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE  sophists across the Mediterranean. Freedom in the face of an overwhelming fate was the byword of Stoicism, and Achilles Tatius is, surely, manipulat- ing the Stoic idea of an internal faculty, in de pen dent from any external cause, that Leucippe can exercise regardless of her circumstance. But the allusion to the problem of fate is hardly an endorsement of Stoicism— quite the opposite. Whereas the Stoics advised a carefully studied indiff erence to eros in a universe so vast that mankind’s pleasures were dwarfed by the unfathomable enormity of the heavens, the novels present a world keenly knit by the gods so that mankind might fi nd in erotic fulfi llment nothing short of salvation. Like the Stoic, Achilles appreciates the limited range of motion allotted to the individual by the cosmos; unlike the Stoic, he would locate selfhood and salvation in the movement of erotic energy through the heated clay of the human body. Th e novelist had the discretion to let art speak for itself, but his romance stands as an intricate rebuttal to the gloomy fastidiousness of his philosophical contemporaries.  Leucippe’s freedom is a key to the way the novels work and the way they can guide us through the sexual landscape of the high Roman Empire. Her freedom referred at once to her social status and her subjective agency. Of course, the fact that she invokes her freedom at the exact moment when she seems most constrained underscores the extent to which the individual’s agency was limited. Th e novels are fatalistic romances, stories of the overpow- ering, divine force of erotic love. Th ey are unusually aware of the external forces— nature and society— bearing on the individual and determining his or her fate.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Unless the nightmare is strong enough to wake you up you go right on retreating, and either you end up on a bench or you end up as vice-president. It’s all one and the same, a bloody fucking mess, a farce, a fiasco from start to finish. I know it as was in it, because I woke up. And when I woke up I walked out on it. I walked out by the same door that I had walked in—without as much as a by-your-leave, sir! Things take place instantaneously, but there’s a long process to be gone through first. What you get when something happens is only the explosion, and the second before that the spark. But everything happens according to law—and with the full consent and collaboration of the whole cosmos. Before I could get up and explode the bomb had to be properly prepared, properly primed. After putting things in order for the bastards up above I had to be taken down from my high horse, had to be kicked around like a football, had to be stepped on, squelched, humiliated, fettered, manacled, made impotent as a jellyfish. All my life I have never wanted for friends, but at this particular period they seemed to spring up around me like mushrooms. I never had a moment to myself. If I went home of a night, hoping to take a rest, somebody would be there waiting to see me. Sometimes a gang of them would be there and it didn’t seem to make much difference whether I came or not. Each set of friends I made despised the other set. Stanley, for example, despised the whole lot. Ulric too was rather scornful of the others. He had just come back from Europe after an absence of several years. We hadn’t seen much of each other since boyhood and then one day, quite by accident, we met on the street. That day was an important day in my life because it opened up a new world to me, a world I had often dreamed about but never hoped to see. I remember vividly that we were standing on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 49th Street toward dusk. I remember it because it seemed utterly incongruous to be listening to a man talking about Mt. Aetna and Vesuvius and Capri and Pompeii and Morocco and Paris on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 49th Street, Manhattan. I remember the way he looked about as he talked, like a man who hadn’t quite realized what he was in for but who vaguely sensed that he had made a horrible mistake in returning. His eyes seemed to be saying all the time—this has no value, no value whatever. He didn’t say that, however, but just this over and over: “I’m sure you’d like it! I’m sure it’s just the place for you.” When he left me I was in a daze. I couldn’t get hold of him again quickly enough.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Everything he writes thereafter is Yes, Yes, Yes—Yes in a thousand million ways. No dynamo, no matter how huge—not even a dynamo of a hundred million dead souls—can combat one man saying Yes! The war was on and men were being slaughtered, one million, two million, five million, ten million, twenty million, finally a hundred million, then a billion, everybody, man, woman and child, down to the last one. “No! ” they were shouting, “No! they shall not pass!” And yet everybody passed; everybody got a free pass, whether he shouted Yes or No. In the midst of this triumphant demonstration of spiritually destructive osmosis I sat with my feet planted on the big desk trying to communicate with Zeus the Father of Atlantis and with his lost progeny, ignorant of the fact that Apollinaire was to die the day before the Armistice in a military hospital, ignorant of the fact that in his “new writing” he had penned these indelible lines: Be forbearing when you compare us With those who were the perfection of order. We who everywhere seek adventure, We are not your enemies. We would give you vast and strange domains Where flowering mystery waits for him would pluck it. Ignorant that in this same poem he had also written: Have compassion on us who are always fighting on the frontiers Of the boundless future, Compassion for our errors, compassion for our sins. I was ignorant of the fact that there were men then living who went by the outlandish names of Blaise Cendrars, Jacques Vaché, Louis Aragon, Tristan Tzara, René Crevel, Henri de Montherlant, André Breton, Max Ernst, Georges Grosz; ignorant of the fact that on July 14, 1916, at the Saal Waag, in Zurich, the first Dada Manifesto had been proclaimed—“manifesto by Monsieur Antipyrine”—that in this strange document it was stated: “Dada is life without slippers or parallel . . . severe necessity without discipline or morality and we spit on humanity.” Ignorant of the fact that the Dada Manifesto of 1918 contained these lines: “I am writing a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and I am against manifestoes as a matter of principle, as I am also against principles. . . . I write this manifesto to show that one may perform opposed actions together, in a single fresh respiration; I am against action; for continual contradiction, for affirmation also, I am neither for nor against and I do not explain for I hate good sense. . . . There is a literature which does not reach the voracious mass. The work of creators, sprung from a real necessity on the part of the author, and for himself. Consciousness of a supreme egotism where the stars waste away. . . . Each page must explode, either with the profoundly serious and heavy, the whirlwind, dizziness, the new, the eternal, with the overwhelming hoax, with an enthusiasm for principles or with the mode of typography.