Joy

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 49 of 299 · 20 per page

• From A History of God (1993)

  Hayyim Vital described the immensely emotional effect of Luria’s disciplines: by separating himself from his normal, everyday experience—by keeping vigil when everybody else was asleep, fasting when others were eating, withdrawing into seclusion for a while—a Kabbalist could concentrate on the strange “words” that bore no relation to ordinary speech. He felt that he was in another world, would find himself shaking and trembling as though possessed by a force outside himself. But there was no anxiety. Luria insisted that before he began his spiritual exercises, the Kabbalist must achieve peace of mind. Happiness and joy were essential: there was to be no breast-beating or remorse, no guilt or anxiety about one’s performance. Vital insisted that the Shekinah cannot live in a place of sorrow and pain—an idea that we have seen to be rooted in the Talmud. Sadness springs from the forces of evil in the world, whereas happiness enables the Kabbalist to love God and cleave to him. There should be no anger or aggression in the Kabbalist’s heart for anybody whatsoever—even the goyim. Luria identified anger with idolatry, since an angry person is possessed by a “strange god.” It is easy to criticize Lurianic mysticism. As Gershom Scholem points out, the mystery of God En Sof, which was so strong in The Zohar, tends to get lost in the drama of tsimtsum, the Breaking of the Vessels and Tikkun. 6 In the next chapter, we shall see that it contributed to a disastrous and embarrassing episode in Jewish history. Yet Luria’s conception of God was able to help Jews to cultivate a spirit of joy and kindness, together with a positive view of humanity at a time when the guilt and anger of the Jews could have caused many to despair and to lose faith in life altogether. The Christians of Europe were not able to produce such a positive spirituality. They too had endured historical disasters that could not be assuaged by the philosophical religion of the scholastics. The Black Death of 1348, the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the ecclesiastical scandals of the Avignon Captivity (1334–42) and the Great Schism (1378–1417) had thrown the impotence of the human condition into vivid relief and brought the Church into disrepute. Humanity seemed unable to extricate itself from its fearful predicament without God’s help. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, therefore, theologians like Duns Scotus of Oxford (1265–1308)—not to be confused with Duns Scotus Erigena—and the French theologian Jean de Gerson (1363–1429) both emphasized the sovereignty of God, who controlled human affairs as stringently as an absolute ruler. Men and women could contribute nothing to their salvation; good deeds were not meritorious in themselves but only because God had graciously decreed that they were good. But during these centuries, there was also a shift in emphasis.

• From A History of God (1993)

  1922), who had been an Orthodox Jew and Kabbalist until the age of forty-seven, when he was converted to Zionism. A weak and ailing man with white hair and beard, Gordon worked in the fields beside the younger settlers, leaping around with them at night in ecstasy, crying “Joy!... Joy!” In former times, he wrote, the experience of reunion with the land of Israel would have been called a revelation of the Shekinah. The Holy Land had become a sacred value; it had a spiritual power accessible to the Jews alone which had created the unique Jewish spirit. When he described this holiness, Gordon used Kabbalistic terms that had once been applied to the mysterious realm of God: The soul of the Jew is the offspring of the natural environment of the land of Israel. Clarity, the depth of an infinitely clear sky, a clear perspective, mists of purity. Even the divine unknown seems to disappear in this clarity, slipping from limited manifest light into infinite hidden light. The people of this world understand neither this clear perspective nor this luminous unknown in the Jewish soul. 29 At first this Middle Eastern landscape had been so different from Russia, his natural fatherland, that Gordon had found it frightening and alien. But he realized that he could make it his own by means of labor (avodah, a word that also refers to religious ritual). By working the land, which Zionists claimed had been neglected by the Arabs, the Jews would conquer it for themselves and, at the same time, redeem themselves from the alienation of exile. The socialist Zionists called their pioneering movement the Conquest of Labor: their kibbutzim became secular monasteries, where they lived in common and worked out their own salvation. Their cultivation of the land led to a mystical experience of rebirth and universal love. As Gordon explained: To the extent that my hands grew accustomed to labor, that my eyes and ears learned to see and hear and my heart to understand what is in it, my soul too learned to skip upon the hills, to rise, to soar—to spread out the expanses it had not known, to embrace all the land round about, the world and all that is in it, and to see itself embraced in the arms of the whole universe. 30 Their work was a secular prayer. In about 1927, the younger pioneer and scholar Avraham Schlonsky (1900–73), who worked as a road builder, wrote this poem to the land of Israel: Dress me, good mother, in a glorious robe of many colors, and at dawn lead me to my toil. My land is wrapped in light as in a prayer shawl. The houses stand forth like frontlets; and the rocks paved by hand, stream down like phylactery straps. Here the lovely city says the morning prayer to its creator.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It was clear that Luther wanted his audience to be struck by the contrast between the importance of the revelation and the lowly place where it occurred.® Unlike other reformers, Luther rarely claimed divine inspiration for his ideas. It is interesting too that he uses the word ‘Kunst’ — art — for it suggests that the insight, like the skill of a craftsman or artist, opened up a whole new ability to accomplish things in a different way. However, the most famous account of his Reformation discovery came in 1545, the year before he died, in his Preface to the first edition of his collected Latin works when he described his reading of the Psalms in 1519 and his renewed encounter with Paul’s Letter to the Romans: At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, ‘In it the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’ Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. There a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me. Thereupon I ran through the Scriptures from memory. I also found in other terms an analogy, as, the work of God, that is, what God does in us, the power of God, with which he makes us strong, the wisdom of God, with which he makes us wise, the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God. And I extolled my sweetest word with a love as great as the hatred with which I had before hated the word “righteousness of God”. Thus that place in Paul was for me truly the gate to paradise.® WITTENBERG Iol Significantly, Luther dated the transformation not to 1515, the year when he lectured on Romans, nor even to 1517, the year of the Ninety- Five Theses, but to 1519.” Scholars have treated this chronology with scepticism, however, and insisted that Luther’s understanding of faith must have been arrived at well before the Ninety-Five Theses were formulated.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Ibn al-Arabi had even spoken of the imagination creating its own experience of the uncreated reality of God in the depths of the self. Although Keats was critical of William Wordsworth (1770–1850), who had pioneered the Romantic movement in England with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), they shared a similar vision of the imagination. Wordsworth’s best poetry celebrated the alliance of the human mind and the natural world, which acted and reacted upon one another to create vision and meaning. 4 Wordsworth was himself a mystic whose experiences of nature were similar to the experience of God. In the Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey , he described the receptive state of mind that resulted in an ecstatic vision of reality: that blessed mood In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened: that serene and blessed mood In which the affections gently lead us on,— Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While, with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. 5 This vision came from the heart and the affections rather than what Wordsworth called “the meddling intellect” whose purely analytic powers could destroy this kind of intuition. People did not need learned books and theories. All that was required was a “wise passiveness” and “a heart that watches and receives.” 6 Insight began with a subjective experience, although this had to be “wise,” not uninformed and self-indulgent. As Keats would say, a truth did not become true until it was felt upon the pulse and carried alive into the heart by passion. Wordsworth had discerned a ‘spirit’ which was at one and the same time immanent in and distinct from natural phenomena: A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought And rolls through all things. 7 Philosophers such as Hegel would find such a spirit in the events of history.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  As he saw it, the reality of the comfort offered by the receipt of the body of Christ was far more important than worrying about whether digestion dishonoured Christ. Although at one level he seemed unable to break with medieval tradition, at another his thought was more radical than that of the sacramentarians, as by refusing to separate the physical and the spir- itual, he also rejected the powerful ascetic strain in Christian tradition. By this point in his life, as we have noted, Luther was no longer the thin, intense-looking monk, and his fabled love of German beer and wine, his enjoyment of food and his sedentary life had all taken their toll. Moreover, his marriage had opened him to the joys of sexuality 356 MARTIN LUTHER and of seeing his children grow. And here too he took pleasure in the physical aspects of life. He wrote to Jonas of his delight when his son ‘Little Hans’ learnt to defecate with bent knees: he learnt so well, Luther said, that he ‘crapped in every corner of the room’. Unlike most Christian thinkers, Luther’s theology was profoundly embodied. He did not take what would in the next century become the Cartesian path: the insistence that mind and body are separate, and that our physical existence is inferior. He did of course distinguish between flesh and spirit — every theologian at the time did — but his emphasis was always on integration, not on splitting the two. He was well aware that by rejecting the Aristotelian explanation of transub- stantiation in terms of ‘accidents’ and ‘essences’ he had put no philo- sophical or rational alternative in its place; instead, it was a matter of faith, exceeding reason. The logic of Luther’s denial of free will and his insistence on grace meant that God must have decided who is saved. But to those who worried about whether they were amongst the elect or not, Luther — unlike the more systematic John Calvin — responded that we should just not think about something which is beyond our grasp. A similar approach coloured his views of the afterlife, and inflected the way the Church he established dealt with death. Rejecting the sacrament of extreme unction, he developed a more pastoral approach that derived from his own honesty; when comforting the dying, he preferred to emphasise Christ’s saving love." Heaven should not be thought about; it certainly had no geographical location. When he light-heartedly talked about it at dinner with friends, he imagined that “There will be such joy that we will completely forget eating and drinking, sleeping and so forth.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Even though he had never been ordained, his followers began to call him Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, or, simply, the Besht. Most of the healers were content with magic, but the Besht was also a mystic. The Shabbetai Zevi episode had convinced him of the dangers of combining mysticism with Messianism, and he returned to an earlier form of Kabbalism, which was not to be for an elite, however, but for everybody. Instead of seeing the fall of the divine sparks to the world as a disaster, the Besht taught his Hasidim to look on the bright side. These sparks were lodged in every item of creation, and this meant that the whole world was filled with the presence of God. A devout Jew could experience God in the tiniest action of his daily life—while he was eating, drinking or making love to his wife—because the divine sparks were everywhere. Men and women were not surrounded by hosts of demons, therefore, but by a God who was present in every gust of wind or blade of grass: he wanted Jews to approach him with confidence and joy. The Besht abandoned Luria’s grand schemes for the salvation of the world. The Hasid was simply responsible for reuniting the sparks trapped in the items of his personal world—in his wife, his servants, furniture and food. As Hillel Zeitlin, one of the Besht’s disciples, explained, the Hasid has a unique responsibility to his particular environment, which he alone can perform: “Every man is a redeemer of a world that is all his own. He beholds only what he, and only he, ought to behold and feels only what he is personally singled out to feel.” 54 Kabbalists had devised a discipline of concentration ( devekuth ) which helped mystics to become aware of the presence of God wherever they turned. As a seventeenth-century Kabbalist of Safed had explained, mystics should sit in solitude, take time off from the study of Torah and “imagine the light of the Shekinah above their heads, as though it were flowing all around them and they were sitting in the midst of light.” 55 This sense of God’s presence had brought them to a tremulous, ecstatic joy. The Besht taught his followers that this ecstasy was not reserved for the privileged mystical elite but that every Jew had a duty to practice devekuth and become aware of the all-pervasive presence of God: in fact failure in devekuth was tantamount to idolatry, a denial that nothing truly exists apart from God. This brought the Besht into conflict with the establishment, who feared that Jews would abandon the study of Torah in favor of these potentially dangerous and eccentric devotions.

• From A History of God (1993)

  It also shows a conviction that we find also in the scientific religion of Newton that God is directly responsible for everything that happens in the world, however bizarre. It is difficult to associate this fervid and irrational religiosity with the measured calm of the Founding Fathers. Edwards had many opponents who were extremely critical of the Awakening. God would only express himself rationally, the liberals claimed, not in violent eruptions into human affairs. But in Religion and the American Mind; From the Great Awakening to the Revolution , Alan Heimart argues that the new birth of the Awakening was an evangelical version of the Enlightenment ideal of the pursuit of happiness: it represented an “existential liberation from a world in which ‘everything awakens powerful apprehension.’ ” 44 The Awakening occurred in the poorer colonies, where people had little expectation of happiness in this world, despite the hopes of the sophisticated Enlightenment. The experience of being born again, Edwards had argued, resulted in a feeling of joy and a perception of beauty that were quite different from any natural sensation. In the Awakening, therefore, a God-experience had made the Enlightenment of the New World available to more than a few successful people in the colonies. We should also recall that the philosophical Enlightenment was also experienced as a quasireligious liberation. The terms éclaircissement and Aufklärung have definite religious connotations. The God of Jonathan Edwards also contributed to the revolutionary enthusiasm of 1775. In the eyes of the revivalists, Britain had lost the new light that had shone so brightly during the Puritan revolution and now seemed decadent and regressive. It was Edwards and his colleagues who led Americans of the lower classes to take the first steps toward revolution. Messianism was essential to Edwards’s religion: human effort would hasten the coming of God’s Kingdom, which was attainable and imminent in the New World. The Awakening itself (despite its tragic finale) made people believe that the process of redemption described in the Bible had already begun. God was firmly committed to the project. Edwards gave the doctrine of the Trinity a political interpretation: the Son was “the deity generated by God’s understanding” and thus the blueprint of the New Commonwealth; the Spirit, “the deity subsisting in act,” was the force which would accomplish this master plan in time. 45 In the New World of America, God would thus be able to contemplate his own perfections on earth. The society would express the “excellencies” of God himself. The New England would be a “city on the hill,” a light unto the Gentiles “shining with a reflection of the glory of Jehovah risen upon it, which shall be attractive and ravishing to all.” 46 The God of Jonathan Edwards, therefore, would be incarnated in the Commonwealth: Christ was seen as embodied in a good society.

• From A History of God (1993)

  1922), who had been an Orthodox Jew and Kabbalist until the age of forty-seven, when he was converted to Zionism. A weak and ailing man with white hair and beard, Gordon worked in the fields beside the younger settlers, leaping around with them at night in ecstasy, crying “Joy!… Joy!” In former times, he wrote, the experience of reunion with the land of Israel would have been called a revelation of the Shekinah. The Holy Land had become a sacred value; it had a spiritual power accessible to the Jews alone which had created the unique Jewish spirit. When he described this holiness, Gordon used Kabbalistic terms that had once been applied to the mysterious realm of God: The soul of the Jew is the offspring of the natural environment of the land of Israel. Clarity , the depth of an infinitely clear sky, a clear perspective, mists of purity . Even the divine unknown seems to disappear in this clarity, slipping from limited manifest light into infinite hidden light . The people of this world understand neither this clear perspective nor this luminous unknown in the Jewish soul. 29 At first this Middle Eastern landscape had been so different from Russia, his natural fatherland, that Gordon had found it frightening and alien. But he realized that he could make it his own by means of labor ( avodah , a word that also refers to religious ritual). By working the land, which Zionists claimed had been neglected by the Arabs, the Jews would conquer it for themselves and, at the same time, redeem themselves from the alienation of exile. The socialist Zionists called their pioneering movement the Conquest of Labor: their kibbutzim became secular monasteries, where they lived in common and worked out their own salvation. Their cultivation of the land led to a mystical experience of rebirth and universal love. As Gordon explained: To the extent that my hands grew accustomed to labor, that my eyes and ears learned to see and hear and my heart to understand what is in it, my soul too learned to skip upon the hills, to rise, to soar—to spread out the expanses it had not known, to embrace all the land round about, the world and all that is in it, and to see itself embraced in the arms of the whole universe. 30 Their work was a secular prayer. In about 1927, the younger pioneer and scholar Avraham Schlonsky (1900–73), who worked as a road builder, wrote this poem to the land of Israel: Dress me, good mother, in a glorious robe of many colors, and at dawn lead me to my toil. My land is wrapped in light as in a prayer shawl. The houses stand forth like frontlets; and the rocks paved by hand, stream down like phylactery straps. Here the lovely city says the morning prayer to its creator. And among the creators is your son Avraham, a road-building bard in Israel.

• From Satyricon (1)

  After dismissing Chrysis with these fair promises, I paid careful attention to my body which had so evilly served me and, omitting the bath, I annointed myself, in moderation, with unguents and placed myself upon a more strengthening diet such as onions and snail’s heads without condiments, and I also drank more sparingly of wine; then, taking a short walk before settling down to sleep, I went to bed without Giton. So anxious was I to please her that I feared the outcome if my “brother” lay tickling my side. CHAPTER THE ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-FIRST. Finding myself vigorous in mind and body when I arose next morning, I went down to the same clump of plane trees, though I dreaded the spot as one of evil omen, and commenced to wait for Chrysis to lead me on my way. I took a short stroll and had just seated myself where I had sat the day before, when she came under the trees, leading a little old woman by the hand. “Well, Mr. Squeamish,” she chirped, when she had greeted me, “have you recovered your appetite?” In the meantime, the old hag: A wine-soaked crone with twitching lips brought out a twisted hank of different colored yarns and put it about my neck; she then kneaded dust and spittle and, dipping her middle finger into the mixture, she crossed my forehead with it, in spite of my protests. As long as life remains, there’s hope; Thou rustic God, oh hear our prayer, Great Priapus, I thee invoke, Temper our arms to dare! When she had made an end of this incantation she ordered me to spit three times, and three times to drop stones into my bosom, each stone she wrapped up in purple after she had muttered charms over it; then, directing her hands to my privates, she commenced to try out my virility. Quicker than thought the nerves responded to the summons, filling the crone’s hand with an enormous erection! Skipping for joy, “Look, Chrysis, look,” she cried out, “see what a hare I’ve started, for someone else to course!” (This done, the old lady handed me over to Chrysis, who was greatly delighted at the recovery of her mistress’s treasure; she hastily conducted me straight to the latter, introducing me into a lovely nook that nature had furnished with everything which could delight the eye.) Shorn of its top, the swaying pine here casts a summer shade And quivering cypress, and the stately plane And berry-laden laurel. A brook’s wimpling waters strayed Lashed into foam, but dancing on again And rolling pebbles in their chattering flow. ‘Twas Love’s own nook, As forest nightingale and urban Procne undertook To bear true witness; hovering, the gleaming grass above And tender violets; wooing with song, their stolen love.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  How can this be? Luther argues that we have a spiritual and a physical nature, but he does not make this distinction in order to denigrate the flesh. Rather, he argues that the inner man should have THE FREEDOM OF A CHRISTIAN 167 32. Martin Luther, Von der freyheyt eynes Christenmenschen, 1520. faith in God, and we cannot arrive at faith through works of the outer man. What clothes we wear, what regulations we observe — none of it matters and it cannot make us acceptable to God. We are free from doing works. Faith concerns the inner man and — using the simile he had employed to explain the Real Presence — just as the iron becomes red hot, uniting with the flame, so our inner self becomes united with faith and with God. As he continues to describe faith, Luther makes a uniquely sixteenth- century comparison. To believe someone is to consider them to be a pious, truthful person, whose word will always be pious and truthful, ‘which is the greatest honour which one man can do another’. In the kind of honour society in which Luther lived, and in which one's word was binding and contracts depended on trust, honour was a fundamental value, an economic as well as a moral quality. The biblical law teaches the outer man just how sinful he is, and this recognition is essential before we can arrive at faith. Nothing, no human act, can be free of what Luther calls sin; we cannot, for example, avoid ‘evil desires’. This is why good deeds cannot make us pleasing to God. As externals, they cannot enter into the realm of ‘faith’. Luther's gloomy assessment of human nature actually leads to an uplifting conclusion: 168 MARTIN LUTHER if everything we do is tainted with sin, then it also doesn’t matter: that is just how we are, and we cannot make ourselves godly by trying to pile up good deeds.™ Throughout the tract Luther uses seemingly simple but powerful words — freedom, faith, honour. The directness of the language allows them to resonate, but they could be understood in a variety of different ways. His use of the word ‘freedom’, alongside the idea that the Christian is both lord and servant, was dynamite. By addressing all Christians as equals, be they princes or commoners, and by insisting on their freedom, he broke with social deference. Addressing his reader repeatedly with the informal ‘du’, he speaks to ‘alle’ (‘all’) and “yderman’ (‘everyone’). Moreover, he argues that ‘everyone’ is entitled to make up their own minds on spiritual matters: ‘From what has been said, everyone can pass a safe judgement on all works and laws and make a trustworthy distinction between them and know who are the blind and ignorant pastors and who are the good and true.”

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  When Dev’s with Warren, I unplug the phone and apply my ass to a desk chair. Some days, I actually hear my daddy telling me stories, almost like he’s risen up to ride through the pages with Mother and our whole wacky herd . Come June, I send the agent pages on a Thursday, and she signs me the following Saturday, has an auction that week, and a few days later—while I’m chopping basil for supper—I hear the overnight envelope with payment hit my porch. In the steamy kitchen, I draw the check out and sit studying it before I even throw pasta in the bubbly water. It’s in no way a massive check, but it’s the biggest I’ve ever seen, and it’s fallen from the sky just in time to get us through the summer, plus making a down payment on a used Toyota. Saying thanks to the invisible forces that brought it, I sit looking at the check. On the table before me, there’s a giant pickle jar Dev’s filled with torn grass and crickets. The bent-legged bugs are whirring to fill the room, one or two trying to climb up the curved glass. Dev bursts in, saying, Mom, let’s set the crickets free tonight. And I tell him that’s just what I was thinking.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Reflecting on his life in 1545, he wrote about these words: ‘Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.’ The King James Bible would not add Luther’s emphasis, but translates the passage as: ‘For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.” When it came to translating Romans 3:28, Luther wrote, ‘So we now maintain, that man becomes justified without the work of the Law, through faith alone.’ Luther added the word ‘alone’ which is not in the original text, and which places emphasis on the exclusivity of faith — indeed, Luther argued that the ‘allein’, which is idiomatic in German, conveyed the sense of the passage. Because Luther himself never went in for biblical literalism, he tried to get to the heart of what the text was saying, and was not afraid to bring out what he thought were its emphases. By contrast, the King James Bible has “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.’ He also included a short didactic preface to the Gospels and to each of the Epistles, so that the reader encountered the text through Luther’s eyes. Introducing Romans, he wrote “This Epistle is the true main piece of the New Testament .. . which every Christian should not only know word for word by heart, but should treat as a daily bread for the soul’, making his own encounter with Scripture the touchstone for all Christians.” The literary style and typeface were indistinguishable from the rest of the text, so that Luther’s exegetical prefaces exuded almost scriptural authority. For Luther, the intellectual process of meditating on Scripture and its essential meaning was fundamental to his faith, and he would practise it throughout his life. This was how he had arrived at his Reformation insight, and it was how he would approach both his office IN THE WARTBURG 209 38. Melanchthon and Cranach’s Passional Christi ynd Antichristi, 1521. On the left, Cranach depicts Christ driving the moneylenders out of the temple, whilst the illustration on the right, captioned ‘Antichrist’, shows the Pope surrounded by fat cardinals and bishops, signing letters of indulgence and granting dispensations affixed with seals, for which he has received the pile of coins placed on the table below. as a professor of Holy Scripture at the university, and his task as trans- lator. The period of isolation in the Wartburg, without his library and largely without the advice of his friends, enabled him to encounter the New Testament with a rare directness and intimacy. The result was a deeply personal translation that seems to have been written in a single breath. In the meantime in Wittenberg, the excitement caused by the events at Worms could not be put on hold.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Marrying ‘my Kathe’, he continued, was therefore the way to spite him: it was an affirmation of his ‘courage and joy’, his insistence on life in the midst of death. Like Karlstadt and Miintzer, Luther chose a noblewoman, albeit poor. But as he presented it, the initiative to marry had come from her. Katharina had originally fallen in love with Hieronymus Baum- gartner, a rich merchant patrician from Nuremberg, but his family 276 MARTIN LUTHER had better plans for him than marriage to a runaway nun. Luther had then suggested Caspar Glatz, the man who had supplanted Karlstadt at Orlamiinde — hardly an enticing prospect, with his tumbledown house and farm. Indeed, the twenty-six-year-old Katharina rejected Glatz out of hand as an old ‘miser’, and told Luther’s friend Nikolaus von Amsdorf that she would marry either him or Luther, nobody else.* However this account contrasts sharply with Luther’s behaviour in all other areas of his life, where he always took the initiative. It seems that on this occasion, he was happy to be seduced, overruled by a strong woman. As he put it in a letter to Amsdorf: ‘I feel neither passionate love nor burning for my spouse, but I cherish her.’? This narrative conveniently defended him against any accusations that he was acting out of lust. MARRIAGE AND THE FLESH aOR 45. Lucas Cranach the Elder, Martin Luther and Katharina von Bora, 1526. These double portraits, of which the Cranach workshop produced scores over the years, show Luther without tonsure, and with his familiar features: the piercing eyes, the kiss curl and the increasingly heavy jowls. He is depicted as a powerful personality, whose direct gaze addresses the viewer. By contrast, like all of Cranach’s females, Katharina is an identikit woman, with an impossibly narrow waist. Her attire, with the tightly laced bodice, netted hair and simple ring, is that of a respectable woman, and she is shown sometimes with and sometimes without the wimple worn by married townswomen; she was, after all, a noblewoman and not a burgher. Only the breadth of her cheek- bones, tapering to a pointed chin, and her slant, slightly cat-like eyes create anything approaching distinctive characteristics; but even then, the various versions the Cranach workshop produced are so different as to be barely depicting the same woman.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  “I don’t know what other girls feel about posing in the nude,” she said, “I love it. Ever since I was a little girl I liked taking off my clothes. I liked to see how people looked at me. I used to take off my clothes at parties, as soon as people were a little drunk. I liked showing my body. Now I can’t wait to take them off. I enjoy being looked at. It gives me pleasure. I get shivers of pleasure right down my back when men look at me. And when I pose for a whole class of artists at the school, when I see all those eyes on my body, I get so much pleasure, it is—well, it is like being made love to. I feel beautiful, I feel as women must feel sometimes when undressed for a lover. I enjoy my own body. I like to pose holding my breasts in my hand. Sometimes I caress them. I was once in burlesque. I loved it. I enjoyed doing that as much as the men enjoyed seeing it. The satin of the dress used to give me shivers—taking my breasts out, exposing myself. That excited me. When men touched me I did not get as much excitement it was always a disappointment. But I know other girls who don’t feel that way.” “I feel humiliated,” said a red-haired model. “I feel my body is not my own, and that it no longer has any value . . . being seen by everybody.” “I don’t feel anything at all,” said another. “I feel it’s all impersonal. When men are painting or drawing, they no longer think of us as human beings. One painter told me that the body of a model on the stand is an objective thing, that the only moment he felt disturbed erotically was when the model took off her kimono. In Paris, they tell me, the model undresses right in front of the class, and that’s exciting.” “If it were all so objective,” said another girl, “they wouldn’t invite us to parties afterwards.” “Or marry their models,” I added, remembering two painters I had already met who had married their favorite models.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  And yet she had learned relatives, and was the bridge to the more refined world of Eisenach.” Tellingly, Luther gave her a copy of On the Love of God, written by his mentor and confessor Johann von Staupitz, dedicating it in his own hand to ‘my dear mother’." One of Luther's first biographers, Johannes Mathesius, tells a revealing story of how Luther first discovered a Latin Bible, which contained so many more ‘texts, letters and gospels’ than he had ever imagined. He excitedly leafed through it, coming to the story of Samuel and his mother Hannah, which he read with ‘heartfelt pleasure and joy’.* Hannah — or ‘Anne’, as Mathesius calls her — had been barren, and her son, conceived in answer to her prayers, was named ‘God has heard’. She presented him to the priest Eli, intending that 38 MARTIN LUTHER he should pursue the religious life. As Mathesius’s readers would also have remembered, as a youth, Samuel was called by God three times, finally replying ‘Speak Lord, for thy servant heareth.”’ He then became not a priest, as his mother had intended, but a prophet. Three of Luther’s companions — Mathesius, Johann Aurifaber and Anton Lauter- bach — all provided versions of Luther's first encounter with a Bible in their notes of Luther’s table talk, from 1531, 1538 and 1540, so it was evidently a story that Luther liked to tell. Its emotional significance suggests how central his mother — also known as ‘Hannah’ — may have been to his sense of religious vocation; Luther too would later style himself a prophet, having also ended up on a different path from what his mother might have envisaged.“ Luther’s mother later became a target for Catholic polemicists who - wanted to show that the reformer was the scion of the Devil. Johannes Nas, for one, a Catholic controversialist of the second half of the sixteenth century, alleged that Luther’s mother had been working as a bath maid — a dishonourable profession and a byword for loose morals. She had been seduced by a stranger dressed in luxurious red, who promised her that she would never suffer want and would catch a rich husband if only she would give herself to him. Thus Luther was the outcome of a liaison with what must have been the Devil himself. This was a throwback to sexual slurs which the Catholic Johannes Cochlaeus, a contemporary originally sympathetic to Luther's ideas and then his determined antagonist, had cast as early as 1533: that Luther was ‘a lousy runaway monk and rascally nuns’ fanny who had neither land nor people, an ignoble changeling who was born of a bath maid as they say’.° Luther laughed off these attacks: either, he quipped, he was a bath maid’s son or else he was a changeling, he could not be both.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  There is something rather chilling in Luther's insistence that Katharina always address him as ‘Mr Doctor’ and that she use the polite ‘you’. In the will he wrote in 1537, when he expected to die from an attack of stone, he wrote that ‘She served me not just as a wife, but even as a servant’. But since famulus was the word Luther used for his academic secretaries, men who went on to important careers in the Church, he may have meant this as a term of respect.” Nonetheless, 282 MARTIN LUTHER the apparent distance and obsession with hierarchy is symptomatic of the contradictory mixture of warmth, jokiness, and a certain conde- scension, even cruelty in his interactions with others. He could also be wittily earthy. Writing to Wenzeslaus Linck in Nuremberg shortly after his marriage, Luther punned that ‘I am bound and captured in chains [Ketten] / Kathe, and I lie on the Bora / bier [Bahre], as if dead to the world.’* But although he might have pretended to be a reluctant bridegroom, he evidently relished married life, remarking that “Man has strange thoughts the first year of marriage. When sitting at table he thinks, “Before I was alone; now there are two.” Or in bed, when he wakes up, he sees a pair of pigtails lying beside him which he hadn't seen there before.” Katharina regularly became pregnant and gave birth every one to two years, suggesting that the couple enjoyed a full sexual life. Luther had none of the instinctive revulsion for the female body that characterised so many monks, perhaps because he had grown up with younger sisters. He would often joke about sex, even remarking that ‘pious Christ himself’ had committed adultery three times — once with Mary Magdalen and once with the woman at the well, and once with the adulteress whom he let off so lightly.” This remark was extraordinary: one cannot imagine Huldrych Zwingli or John Calvin saying such a thing. But Luther loved to tease, especially those who considered themselves righteous. When it came to the proper roles of women and men, Luther was always inclined to turn to the Old Testament. He can often appear to be the ultimate spokesman of patriarchy, and it is easy to plunder his works for sexist aphorisms. His table talk was peppered with sexist banter, which was part of sociability at table where largely men were present, yet where Katharina was visible and perhaps within earshot.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  “Suddenly the telephone rang and made me jump. Who could that be? I knew no one in Shanghai. I took the receiver; it was my husband’s voice. Somehow he had found out where I was. He was talking, talking. Meanwhile my friend had recovered from the surprise of the telephone call and was continuing his caresses. I felt such pleasure talking with my husband and listening to his pleadings to return home . . . and all this while my drunken friend took every liberty with me, having succeeded in pulling down my slacks, biting me between the legs, taking advantage of my position on the bed, kissing me, fondling my breasts. The pleasure was so acute that I delayed the conversation. I discussed everything with my husband. He was promising to send away the servant girls, he wanted to come to the hotel. “I remembered all he had done to me, in the room next to mine, his callousness in deceiving me. I was taken with a diabolical impulse. I said to my husband, ‘Don’t try to come and see me. I am living with somebody else. In fact he is lying here and caressing me while I talk to you.’ “I heard my husband curse me in the foulest words he could muster. I was happy. I hung up the receiver and sank under the big body of my new friend. “I began traveling with him . . .” The sirocco had again blown the door open, and the woman went to close it. The wind was dying now, and this was the last of its violence. The woman sat down. I thought that she would go on. I was curious about her young companion. But she remained silent. After a while I left. The next day when we met at the post office she did not even seem to recognize me. The MajaThe painter Novalis was newly married to María, a Spanish woman with whom he had fallen in love because she resembled the painting he most loved, the Maja Desnuda, by Goya. They went to live in Rome. María clapped her hands in childish joy when she saw the bedroom, admiring the sumptuous Venetian furniture with its wonderful inlaid pearl and ebony. That first night María, lying on the monumental bed made for the wife of a doge, trembled with delight, stretching her limbs before she hid them under the fine sheets. The pink toes of her plump little feet moved as if they were calling Novalis. But not once had she shown herself completely nude to her husband. First of all she was Spanish, then Catholic, then thoroughly bourgeois. Before lovemaking the light had to be put out.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  Later, back on the lawn at Lola’s, I countered by lifting her in the air over my head and blowing fierce and wet in her belly button. Then I pretended to take a long time getting the lint out of my mouth. “Louden!” Lola yelled from the door. “You’re too big to be handling her that way. You’ll have her other arm all cut up soon.” I growled something brutish in gorilla language. “Help! Help!” chirped Carla. “Carla, you don’t let him play like that while he’s driving. You’ll have a wreck.” And Lola waved a slab of bacon at us and turned for the kitchen. “I’ll make him ride in back!” Carla yelled, catching me off guard and shoulder-blocking me over the lawn mower flat onto the rhubarb plant. “Aunt Lola!” I yelled. “Can we take enough rhubarb home for a pie?” “Look,” I said to Carla when we were almost out of Colville on the way headed home. “Why don’t we stay another night? I don’t have to work until three thirty tomorrow afternoon. We could camp out on the Little Pend Oreille and have dinner at this big old lodge up there.” “I’ll call Belle and ask her to work tomorrow morning for me,” Carla replied. We found a great campsite right away beneath some cedars just a few feet from the water. If Carla hadn’t opened both sleeping bags and spread them out in the tent we might never have made love. I had cut wood and stacked it for the evening and had begun to identify birds, plants, trees, small animals, and had started on the clouds in the sky when she said, “Louden, why don’t we just lie down awhile?” She took off her shirt and bundled it up for a pillow and lay back in the red haze that the sunlight made through the red nylon tent. She didn’t have much of a tan, really, so she looked pearly in all that soft red light with the bushels of red hair spilled around her head and her nipples sprung up like small flowers. She smiled calmly and turned on her side. I took off my shirt and boots and lay beside her. And then she said, “Let’s wait a long time.” So we did. We were slick with sweat and slipping around the wet sleeping-bag floor like happy seals. “The reason I want to play a long time,” Carla finally said, “is that this will be the first time I’ve made love since I had my baby, and I’m not sure how it’s going to feel.” “How’s it feel so far?” I asked. “It feels fine,” she said. I didn’t believe her about it being the first time since she’d had her baby. I just assumed she’d been making it with Tower, since she spent so much time with him. But I didn’t know if I should say anything. Finally I did. “You don’t have to say that about your lovemaking,” I said.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  He sniffed and sniffed. He crawled over next to me and sniffed along my back and down my arm all the way to the ends of my fingers. He called the guys over for a consultation. Full of curiosity they tumbled across the mats. I quit bridging and just sat down and rested my chin in my palm. “It’s possum,” Kuch said. Otto poked his head close and sniffed loudly. “Good thing Sausage and Little Konigi aren’t here, Swain. They’d chew your mustache off.” Bowden sniffed long and looked at Kuch. “Is that really what it smells like?” he asked. “That’s the scent, all right,” Kuch replied. “But usually you’ll find it more attractively wrapped.” “It appears you’ve been playing the drooling clarinet,” observed Balldozer. “You guys ate nothin’ but spinach all the time, you’d smell funny, too,” I declared. They made me take a shower before they’d start the workout. They told Coach I just ran downstairs for some nose stoppers. Only he had been gentleman enough to ignore it. * * * The dance is at the Spokane Club, which is a pretty spiffy place. We’ve risen to it, though, at least in terms of apparel. Carla’s in her long soft white dress with the little ducks and I’m in my white denim suit. It’s fun to dress up sometimes. Mom wanted me to have a suit so I’d look decent when I visited the University of Oklahoma last spring. She said I could charge it on her account at the Bon Marché. It’s pretty racy. The pants are pleated and flared wide and it’s got a white vest with pockets I stick my fingers in and look dignified. Mom wished she’d gone with me to pick it out. She said I looked like a pimp. It’s snowing like crazy. It started as I was running home from practice. We’ve got about six new inches already. Carla looks ethereal in her mad dash to the door. She says none of her coats go with her long dress, so she’s not wearing one. In the white dress she seems to float through the falling snow. Her hair is rich and warm and it shines in the light. I sit watching her until she’s inside. She turns and waves. I wave back, thinking just in a flash how beautiful she is and how lucky I am. Some impatient creepo jolts me out of my brief reverie with a couple strong blasts on his horn. I churn politely off in the DeSoto. My great blue boat, my grand hotel, my time machine. I couldn’t find a parking place closer than two blocks, so my suit droops a little by the time I reach the door. Right away Carla sends me to the men’s room to towel off. My hair is lightly frosted with snow. I don’t have a nice coat either, but at least I should have thought to bring an umbrella.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The via moderna distinguished itself from the via antiqua, of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. With its roots in the philosophy of Aristotle, the via antiqua had started from the position that things are what they are because they are a particular instance of a universal. Nominalists, however, argued that universals were not real entities, but simply labels for lots of particular objects. As Luther put it, describing twenty years later what must have seemed rather rarefied disputes to the next generation: The dispute and squabble amongst them was: whether the word human- itas, Humanity, and words of this kind, meant a general humanity, which was to be found in all humans, as Thomas and the others hold, ‘Yes’ say the Ockhamists and ‘terminists’, this common ‘humanity’ is nothing, it means all humans in particular, just as a painted image of humanity means all human beings.” It was the techniques of the via moderna that were formative for Luther, not so much the programme of the emerging humanism. And critical as he would later become of philosophy, he was shaped by its style of argument.“ He made it clear later that he had been on the side of the Ockhamists who encouraged critical thinking and stressed the importance of empirical evidence. True to the humanist principle of returning to the sources, his teachers, Bartholomdus Arnoldi of Usingen and Jodokus Trutfetter, used Aristotle’s original texts, not just medieval commentaries on them, and it must have been dizzying to tackle the works themselves rather than view them through a haze of inherited comment and glosses. 46 MARTIN LUTHER At this point, nothing indicated the course his thinking would later take. Apart from steeping himself in the philosophy of Aristotle, Luther probably continued his studies of Cicero, Livy and Virgil. Around 1505 he gained his MA and something of the sense of achieve- ment is captured in his later remarks about the celebrations: “My, it was such a great majesty and splendour when Masters of Arts grad- uated, and torches were carried before them and they were honoured; I think that no temporal, worldly joy can equal it.“* On becoming a ‘master’, the student received a special master’s ring and a biretta, and he had to give a speech. Out of respect, his father now addressed him not in the informal ‘du’, but with the polite ‘Ihr’ and almost certainly at his father’s instigation, he then determined to study law. Everything looked set for him to return to Mansfeld in a couple of years, perhaps to marry into the local elite of mine owners as his brother and sisters would eventually do, and use his legal knowledge to advance his family’s interests.