Pride As Defense

Passages

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

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• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  vedvias, ov, Ep. and Ion. νεηνίης. ew, 6: (vedy, véos):—a young man, youth, in Hom. (only in Od.) always with ἀνήρ, venvin ἀνδρὶ ἐοικώς Od. 10. 278; ἄνδρες κοιμήσαντο venviar 14. 5243 so, παῖς νεηνίης Hat. τ. 61., 7-993 γαμβρὸς v. Pind. O. 7.4; τέκτονες Id. N. 3.8; but alone in Att., like νεανίσκος, Soph. O.C. 335, El. 750, Eur., etc.; cf. veavio- Kos. 2. often with the sense of a youth in character, i.e. either in good sense, impetuous, brave, active, Eur. Ion 1041, cf. Ar. Vesp. 1333; Xen. Cyr. 1. 3, 6, Dem. 329. 23; or in bad sense, hot-headed, wilful, headstrong, Eur. Supp. 580; ev μὲν τοίνυν τοῦτο... πολίτευμα ae 38 994 as masc. Adj. youthful, νεανίαι τὰς ὄψεις Lys. 118. 33. 2. of things, etc., new, young’, fresh, v. πόνος Eur. Hel. 209; veaviais ὥμοισι 10. 1562; v. θώρακα καὶ βραχίονα Id. H. F. 1095; ἄρτος Ar. Lys. 1208; ν. λόγοι rash, wilful words, Eur. Alc. 679.—With a fem. Subst. ; cf. Lob. Paral. 268. [In Ar. Vesp. 1069, to avoid the synizesis of vea— in νεανιῶν, Dind, reads νανιῶν, and Ib. 1067 vavinnv for veavixnyv,—forms justified by νῆνις, νῆ for νεᾶνις, véd.] vedvieta, v. sub veaveia, vedvieupa, τό, a youthful, i.e. a spirited or (in bad sense) a wanton act or word, Plat. Rep. 390 A, Lys. ap. Poll. 2. 2, Luc., ete. vedvievopar, fut. —edcouar Dem. 416. 23: aor. ἐνεανιευσάμην Id. :— Pass., v. infr.: Dep. To be a νεανίας or youth, Poll. 2.20; cf. νεανι- σκεύομαι. II. in usage, always, ¢o act like a hot-headed youth, to act wilfully or wantonly, to brawl, swagger, Ar. Fr.653; ν. εἴς τινα to behave so towards another, Isocr. 398 C, Hyperid. Eux. 37; ἐν τοῖς λό- yous Plat. Gorg. 482 C: ο. Adj. neut., τοιοῦτον ν. to make such youth- ful promises, Dem. 401. 24; οὐδ᾽ ἐνεανιεύσατο τοιοῦτον οὐδέν Id. 536. 26; νεανιευσάμενος εἰπεῖν with youthful insolence, Plut. Cic. 1 :—c. inf. to undertake with youthful spirit, 1d. Demosth. 3 :—Pass., ἐφ᾽ ἅπασι τοῖς ἑαυτῷ νενεανιευμένοις to all his wanton acts, Dem. 520. 28; τὰ νεανιευθέντα Plut. Mar. 29.—The Act. only in Hesych. vedvifw, =foreg., Plut. Flamin. 20, Poll. 4. 136. vedvikéw, to be youthful, Eupol. Anu. 26.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  And they are all, always, so fascinated to learn.” “Tell me about Catherine.” “An ordinary woman, really. An old friend. Somewhere in the nexus, ergonic, religious, erotic, there is the proof of human consciousness. We have done a tiny bit to free the darkeys in this country. But the devil is still very much our slave.” “Do you believe in the devil?” the captain asked. “No. But then, I don’t believe in black slavery, either.” To the captain’s frown, Proctor nodded. The captain asked, “Who are you, Proctor?” Candlelight on the black cheekbones, in the skin of the heavy lips; and the lips parted on a whisper: “Why are you here?” “What can I tell you?” “Much as you will.” The captain pressed his lips out so for a moment they thickened like a black pig’s snout. Then, apart again, they gave up low laughter. Over it, Proctor began: “Have you ever heard of me? My name, my work? I have something of a reputation, and I firmly believe a man must first be that. But you, yes, you just come to return a wallet an acquaintance of mine dropped by chance. Like Bull might; like Nazi.” The black face flickered: “Tell me about the places you’ve been that have tilted to dump you here.” Velvet . . . Suede . . . “Let me see. Let me wake Benny and get some more coffee. No. Never mind. The boy should sleep. I’ll get it myself.” (After minutes, Proctor returns to the deer skin; sits, sipping at the steaming cup.) “Listen. Yes, I will tell you, in a bit. Let me get comfortable. Ah, now . . . Well! Something of an academic prodigy, I finished on scholarship, from a good, but small college, at eighteen; went on to graduate third in my class from medical school; but at the prospect of interning, I realized I was not meant to practice. It came with pain and a feeling of failure. That was the first time I doubted my public self. I retreated back into the university. The medical degree was my mark of failure—I was terrified of corpses, and even more of the live patients who filled the City Hospital’s emergency ward. Still, a foreign object in academe, my medical diploma awed the humanities professors. I was twenty-three when I took my Ph.D. in historical anthropology. (We did not really have the structuralists to contend with then.) The double doctorate is the most lucrative of combinations. I have never used it. With the grant that followed, I flung myself upon Europe within days of graduation, determined to be the most dissolute of tourists. Young Dr.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  χαυνόω, fut. dow, to make porous or flaccid, relax, Philes 35. 8:—Pass. to become so, Ael.N.A. 12.173; ἡ γῆ x. εἰς ῥαγάδας Geop. 5. 2,2. 2. in Ephipp. Ἔμπολ. 1. 5, xavvodca must Ὀε Ξε χάσκουσα, opening the mouth in kissing ; but Meineke suspects the word. II. metaph. to puff up, make vain, fill with conceit, Eur. Andr. 931, Plat. Lys. 210 E: —Pass. to become vain, Arist. Virt. et Vit. 7, 5; ἐπί τινε Plut. Caes. 29 ; 6 νοῦς ἐχαυνώθη Babr. 95. 36; κόραξ καρδίην ἐχαυνώθη Id. 77. χαύνωμα, τό, loosened earth, Plut. Sertor. 17. χαύνωσις, ews, ἡ, a making slack or loose, opp. to στέγνωσις, Sext. Emp; Bsr. 23S. 2. a void space or interval, Geop. Io. 75, 17. ΤΙ. metaph. the making a thing light, weakening its force and weight (like Lat. elevatio), x. ἀναπειστηρία Ar. Nub.875, ubi v. Schol. χαυνωτικός, ἡ, dv, apt to make loose or flabby, σαρκός Plut. 2. 771 B. χανών, a kind of cake, in LXx to represent the Hebr. kavvan, Lxx 1718

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  BULL’S TALE:I used to live in the town next to this one, for a long time. Cugarsville? (He settles closer to Gunner in the dark, and wonders if the boy is asleep, but talks anyway.) Back when I was about eighteen or so I got this bitch knocked up. We got married, see. And she’s been dropping kids—I guess most of them are mine—every year since; although we don’t hardly live together no more. She’s a mean old whore is what she is. The middle girl, Bethy, she probably the sweetest one. Pretty. That’s when I got so I could go back and spend a couple of days with the old lady without trying to break her head before I left. Bethy, we’d go for walks in the woods, and tell each other stories. And wrestle too. She liked that. Shit, that little bitch could throw cunt around fast as her mama. I’d get me liquored up, and go scratch on the back window. She’d slip out. Nine. And I could always get two fingers into any of my little girls’ pussies anytime. When she was climbing out the window, I’d have my pants open, and waving it around, you know? She’d squeal, and I’d say, “You just come on here and take care of your daddy’s big ole’ pecker.” She’d love me so much I couldn’t stand it. Sometimes we’d go up in some old barn and stay at each other all day. Suckin’. Fuckin’. And suckin’ some more. She got knocked up, too, wouldn’t you know. And then the other little girl of mine—Marny. I slipped in that little bitch the wrong time of the month. And she was just eight. The two of them, blowin’ up with their pappy’s accidents. Now I thought that was fine. But mama didn’t like it too much. She was about to drop another one herself. Then this waitress who worked down in the diner near the Shell Station started going around saying I was daddy to the one she was lugging. Now that was shit: I’d been sticking her regular, but so had six other guys. And I was at that party where, maybe, ten of us who was working on the road crew got into her back of the garage. But she just wanted to make trouble for me, and take advantage of the rumor going round that Bull was instant babies. So I moved a town over. And I met that guy your boss is after.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  4 There’s No Biz Like Po-Biz People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it. —a letter by Wallace Stevens I n the dim realm of that horseshoe bar, I was boss, credibly lying to wives and business partners who phoned in that my patrons were not in fact sitting before me hours on end, imbibing. Such lies kept my tip jar stuffed. Plus compared to those guys—with their car wrecks and one-night stands, their lost families and jobs—my occasional blackout or sidewalk pukefest was bush league. Binge drinking disagreed with me in no way. The hangovers that haunted the other restaurant folk tended to spare me. Or the ones that did knock me out gave me an excuse to bail from ordinary commerce and loll around feeling resplendently poetic. I drank less steadily than some kids my age (twenty-one), but now I had an appetite for drink, a taste for it, a talent. Maybe it fostered in me a creeping ambition-deficit disorder, but it could ease an ache. So anything worth doing could be undertaken later. Paint the apartment, write a book, quit booze, sure: tomorrow. Which ensures that life gets lived in miniature. In lieu of the large feelings—sorrow, fury, joy—I had their junior counterparts—anxiety, irritation, excitement. But humming through me like a third rail was poetry, the myth that if I could shuffle the right words into the right order, I could get my story straight, write myself into an existence that included the company of sacred misfit poets whose pages had kept me company as a kid. Showing up at a normal job was too hard. Who knows, maybe I’d still be straining martinis from a silver shaker—it was a nice joint—had I not bought a ticket to a midwestern poetry festival so debauched that it couldn’t survive even the extremely low bar of acceptable behavior back in the 1970s. Down the dorm hallways, marijuana smoke hazed lazily. At readings, bottles of syrupy wine were passed around. A poetic Woodstock, I told Mother it was on my call home, regaling her with the circuslike atmosphere she’d have been inspired by. I actually saw living, breathing poets. Back in high school, I’d fallen in love with the visionary antiwar work of Bill Knott, who’d become a cult figure partly through a suicide hoax. After collecting rejection slips, he’d wound up sending a mimeographed note to America’s poetry editors, saying something like, Bill Knott died an orphan and a virgin . The allegedly posthumous poems came out under the pen name St. Geraud, a character in an eighteenth-century porno novel who ran an orphanage and sodomized his charges. The grotesque humor of the endeavor won me over, particularly when Knott came out from behind his mask with his second book, Auto-Necrophilia , which—it took me a while to puzzle out—referred to masturbation after death.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Nonetheless, Serralonga would try. He first made it clear that Luther must do nothing at all but recant. It was all precisely that simple, and nothing must deviate from this simplest of courses. By no means whatever should Luther attempt to “joust” with the cardinal. After all, this would be unseemly. But Luther’s harsh and blunt German character did not take well to Serralonga’s sickly sweet—and perhaps he thought oily—advice. He told Serralonga that he was not interested in “recanting,” unless he first be shown exactly where it was that he had erred—if he had erred—and of course someone must have thought he had erred, or the curia in Rome would not have gone to these rather extraordinary lengths. So Luther said that he must be shown where and how he had failed in his thinking, because someone must have a definite opinion on this, and then and only then could he proceed to the “recanting” part. But until then, there was obviously nothing for him to recant. As we shall see, this is a refrain that will be sung again and again in the course of this opera. Serralonga had certainly not expected such stiff resistance. Were all Germans like this? He continued to play the role of friendly and moderate mediator, but the strain to do so began to show. He now made it very clear to Luther that the only issue to be concerned with was the pope’s authority. If the pope had declared indulgences to be doctrinally sound, they were then by definition doctrinally sound. So Luther must simply recant that he had not accepted the pope’s unquestioned authority. This was the heresy, of course, and any fool could see that. But Luther was no fool. For good measure, Serralonga now felt free to add that Frederick the elector would not be able to protect Luther any further if he did not give a full recantation, which might well have been untrue and which Luther likely suspected to be untrue. But Serralonga was insistent on this point. “Then where will you be?” he asked. Luther was rarely caught without a reply. “Under heaven,” he cracked, with typical Saxon wit. With this remark, Luther at last discovered the elusive and bitter end of Serralonga’s patience. The silken ambassador now made a contemptuous gesture revealing as much and whisked himself away.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Its hallmark was Oneness, reflected in the unity and egalitarianism of the various communities. Like the Brethren, some of the Ranters thought of themselves as divine: some claimed to be Christ or a new incarnation of God. As Messiahs, they preached a revolutionary doctrine and a new world order. Thus in his polemical tract Gangraena or a Catalogue and Discovery of Many of the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies and pernicious Practices of the Sectarians of this time (1640), their Presbyterian critic Thomas Edwards summarized the beliefs of the Ranters: Every creature in the first estate of creation was God, and every creature is God, every creature that hath life and breath being an efflux from God, and shall return unto God again, be swallowed up in him as a drop is in the ocean.… A man baptized with the Holy Ghost knows all things even as God knows all things, which point is a deep mystery.… That if a man by the spirit knows himself to be in a state of grace, though he did commit murther or drunkennesses, God did see no sin in him.… All the earth is the Saints, and there ought to be a community of goods, and the Saints should share in the lands and Estates of Gentlemen and such men. 38 Like Spinoza, the Ranters were accused of atheism. They deliberately broke Christian taboos in their libertarian creed and blasphemously claimed that there was no distinction between God and man. Not everybody was capable of the scientific abstraction of Kant or Spinoza, but in the self-exaltation of the Ranters or the Inner Light of the Quakers it is possible to see an aspiration that was similar to that expressed a century later by the French revolutionaries who enthroned the Goddess of Reason in the Panthéon. Several of the Ranters claimed to be the Messiah, a reincarnation of God, who was to establish the new Kingdom. The accounts that we have of their lives suggest mental disorder in some cases, but they still seem to have attracted a following, obviously addressing a spiritual and social need in the England of their time. Thus William Franklin, a respectable householder, became mentally ill in 1646 after his family had been smitten by plague. He horrified his fellow Christians by declaring himself to be God and Christ, but later recanted and begged pardon. He seemed in full possession of his faculties, but he still left his wife and began to sleep with other women, leading an apparently disreputable, mendicant life.

• From Satyricon (1)

  (“You yourself,” she replied, “are the one to whom I was sent but,) because you are well aware of your good looks, you are proud and sell your favors instead of giving them. What else can those wavy well-combed locks mean or that face, rouged and covered with cosmetics, or that languishing, wanton expression in your eyes? Why that gait, so precise that not a footstep deviates from its place, unless you wish to show off your figure in order to sell your favors? Look at me, I know nothing about omens and I don’t study the heavens like the astrologers, but I can read men’s intentions in their faces and I know what a flirt is after when I see him out for a stroll; so if you’ll sell us what I want there’s a buyer ready, but if you will do the graceful thing and lend, let us be under obligations to you for the favor. And as for your confession that you are only a common servant, by that you only fan the passion of the lady who burns for you, for some women will only kindle for canaille and cannot work up an appetite unless they see some slave or runner with his clothing girded up: a gladiator arouses one, or a mule-driver all covered with dust, or some actor posturing in some exhibition on the stage. My mistress belongs to this class, she jumps the fourteen rows from the stage to the gallery and looks for a lover among the gallery gods at the back.” Puffed up with this delightful chatter. “Come now, confess, won’t you,” I queried, “is this lady who loves me yourself?” The waiting maid smiled broadly at this blunt speech. “Don’t have such a high opinion of yourself,” said she, “I’ve never given in to any servant yet; the gods forbid that I should ever throw my arms around a gallows-bird. Let the married women see to that and kiss the marks of the scourge if they like: I’ll sit upon nothing below a knight, even if I am only a servant.” I could not help marveling, for my part, at such discordant passions, and I thought it nothing short of a miracle that this servant should possess the hauteur of the mistress and the mistress the low tastes of the wench! Each one will find what suits his taste, one thing is not for all, One gathers roses as his share, another thorns enthrall.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But his protégés were not always grateful. Staupitz later said ruefully that “when I raised somebody up to the highest they shat through their hands onto my head.” 50 Staupitz made Luther study theology but, as an admirer of the late-thirteenth-century philosopher Duns Scotus, it was probably he who made sure that the young monk also studied philosophy. Almost certainly at his behest as well, Luther spent a year in 1508–9 at the new University of Wittenberg, which the older man had been instrumental in founding in 1502 and where he was a professor. As he was constantly on the road in the service of the order, however, Staupitz had little time to give lectures himself. Wanting Luther to become his successor at Wittenberg, he suggested that he study for a doctorate in theology. Decades later Luther recalled the conversation, describing to his own students how he and Staupitz sat under the pear tree in the courtyard of the monastery at Wittenberg (the tree was still there when he told the story). Luther said he did not want to become a doctor, as he believed that he would not live very long—a gloomy reference to his relentless mortification of the flesh. Staupitz, however, knew just how to puncture Luther’s morbid grandiosity: God had need of clever people, whether on earth or in heaven, he replied. Luther obeyed, and finished his doctoral studies in 1512, throwing a celebration to which he invited the entire monastery at Erfurt as well as guests from Wittenberg. Doctoral celebrations were major events, with processions through the town followed by a banquet—one fabled celebration involved a hundred guests and thirty-five guilders spent on the food alone, with drinking and dancing afterward attended by “honorable” women. Luther’s celebration would not have been in the same league, but the invitation to the Erfurt monks begins with the usual pieties, although it also opens with an unconventional excusing of his failure to make the customary statements about his unworthiness since this “would make him seem to be taking pride in or seeking praise for his humility.” He continues that “God knows, and my conscience also knows, how worthy and how suitable I am for this display of fame and honor,” by which he meant that God and his conscience knew how unworthy and unsuitable he truly was. Of course the remark can also be read literally to express his pride in what he himself described as his occasion of “pomp.” 51 Staupitz had joked that getting a doctorate would give Luther work to do—a comment that was wonderfully ambiguous in German between “will give you a real job to do” and “will really cause you bother”—and he turned out to be right. 52 The “real bother” was that several Erfurt Augustinians had been offended that he had pursued his studies at Wittenberg, and not Erfurt, where he had first matriculated.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Wanting Luther to become his successor at Wittenberg, he suggested that he study for a doctorate in theology. Decades later Luther recalled the conversation, describing to his own students how he and Staupitz sat under the pear tree in the courtyard of the monastery at Wittenberg (the tree was still there when he told the story). Luther said he did not want to become a doctor, as he believed that he would not live very long — a gloomy reference to his relentless mortification of the flesh. Staupitz, however, knew just how to puncture Luther’s morbid grandiosity: God had need of clever people, whether on earth or in heaven, he replied. Luther obeyed, and finished his doctoral studies in 1512, throwing a celebration to which he invited the entire monastery at Erfurt as well as guests from Wittenberg. Doctoral celebrations were major events with processions through the town followed by a banquet — one fabled celebration involved a hundred guests and thirty-five guilders spent on the food alone, with drinking and dancing afterwards attended by ‘honourable’ women. Luther's celebration would not have been in the same league, but the invitation to the Erfurt monks begins with the usual pieties, although it also opens with an unconventional excusing of his failure to make the customary statements about his unworthiness since this ‘would make him seem to be taking pride in or seeking praise for his humility’. He continues that ‘God knows, and my conscience also knows, how worthy and how suitable I am for this display of fame and honour’, by which he meant that God and his conscience knew how unworthy and unsuitable he truly was. Of course the remark can also be read literally to express his pride in what he himself described as his occasion of ‘pomp’.” Staupitz had joked that getting a doctorate would give Luther work to do — a comment that was wonderfully ambiguous in German between ‘will give you a real job to do’ and ‘will really cause you bother’ — and he turned out to be right.* The ‘real bother’ was that several Erfurt Augustinians had been offended that he had pursued his studies at Wittenberg, and not Erfurt, where he had first matricu- lated. They tried to get the doctorate declared void and have him fined, on the grounds that he had broken the oath taken when he became a student at Erfurt that he would follow no other university. Luther replied that he had not actually sworn such an oath — it had 70 MARTIN LUTHER been overlooked — but the damage had been done.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther insisted later, in a letter to his Nuremberg humanist friend Christoph Scheurl, that he never intended them to be published or read more widely beyond a small circle; and some scholars have taken this as evidence that he did not arrange for them to be printed. But Luther was also explaining why he had omitted to send Scheurl a copy, as he should have done, so his statement is hardly conclusive evidence. When he sent the theses to Johannes Lang in Erfurt, he did not ask his friend to restrict circulation to a small circle. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Luther, even though he later insisted that ‘the Word did it all’, may have helped things along a little. Certainly it strains credulity that he should have arranged for the theses to be copied out laboriously by hand so many times to send them to his various friends.® His letter to Lang, dated with some significance as St Martin’s Day, 11 November, seethes with emotion, announcing that he is sure the theses would not please ‘your theologians’ and defending himself against any accusations of pride and temerity.* Penned by an unknown German professor in an intellectual back- water, the most amazing part of the story ‘is how the Ninety-Five Theses spread so fast. It was indeed, as Luther wrote to Lang, ‘unprece- dented’. In just two months they were known all over Germany, and were already being met with refutations. In Augsburg the cathedral preacher Urbanus Rhegius remarked that Luther’s ‘disputation note’ was available everywhere. In Hamburg, Albert Kranz had received them by early December; in Alsace, Conrad Pellican remembered getting them in early 1518; Erasmus sent them to Thomas More on 5 March 1518. In Eichstatt in late 1517, Bishop Gabriel von Eyb was discussing a copy with Johannes Eck, a friend of Luther. Luther himself recalled, exaggerating perhaps a little, ‘they ran through the whole of Germany in just a fortnight’.” WITTENBERG 97 When writing to the bishop of Brandenburg a few months later, he denied that the theses were theological truth and insisted that they were no more than propositions designed to be debated, but he was soon engaged in defending them vigorously.* Within six months, he had published his Sermon on Indulgences and Grace, which went through twenty-five printings between 1518 and 1520.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  He published the sermon he had preached at the castle during it on Matthew 16: 13-19, which included the verse ‘on this rock I will build my church’; the preface again insinuated that Eck was motivated by envy: ‘Envy can attack the truth but will never again be victorious.’ In August, he published a commentary on his Leipzig theses, prefaced with a long letter to Spalatin in which he summarised the debate: it sold out by early September. Finally in December an unofficial protocol of the debate was published in Erfurt by Luther’s supporters, and quickly reprinted.” Humanists from Leipzig and Wittenberg — the Hebrew scholar Johannes Cellarius, Johannes Hessius Montanus, and Rubius — all wrote rival accounts, attacking each other and their respective universities. The tone of the exchanges became yet more shrill as the post-debate squabbling continued, and began to move from a humanist spat towards a much wider discussion of religious truth, with Cellarius finally proclaiming ‘that Martin loves the gospel truth more than do all his adversaries together’.* Eck for his part published a string of pamphlets, accusing Luther of bad faith and of having broken the conditions both sides had agreed on for the debate. His final salvo was a collection of documents, including letters from Luther written during the negotiations which, so Eck claimed, proved that Luther had acted perfidiously. He trans- lated them all into German; but Eck had to publish the collection with a member of his family, for by now he was finding it difficult to get his writings printed. Across the empire, printers were eager to publish the new, evangelical message for a hungry audience: works by conservative propagandists could no longer command a market.” THE LEIPZIG DEBATE 139 If the Leipzig Debate had been a personal disaster, Luther’s recovery from the debacle was extraordinary. The proceedings had revealed him as a poor performer, liable to resort to personalised abuse, and unable to shine in oral, extempore debate. He had been ‘harsh’, as he himself admitted in the preface to the republished Leipzig articles, and he had not comported himself in the measured, peaceable manner urged by Mosellanus. Politically he had shown himself naive at best, arriving with an armed gang of Wittenberg students, which was unlikely to win him support in the rival university town of Leipzig. Where Eck had schmoozed with the elite, Luther had barricaded himself in with his companions, failing even to exploit the audience he was granted with the duke. If Duke Georg had been open to the new theology before the debate, he certainly was not afterwards, for the disputation had revealed clearly that Luther’s theology was a radical break with the traditional Church. This was a serious blow for the evangelical movement. The fact that the Elector’s cousin, and ruler of the other half of Saxony, was opposed to the Reformation would be a continuous problem for Luther until the duke died in 1539.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It immediately set the monk apart from other men, even from other clergy. Luther had now vowed chastity, poverty, and obedience, the opposite of the male conduct with which he had grown up in Mansfeld, where men were quick to avenge with their fists any insult to their honor, where the most powerful were those who amassed the most wealth, where independence of mind secured respect, and where having many children cemented family success. In the first year, the novice did not wear the full habit, but once fully professed, he was dressed in a cassock and cowl, tied with a cord. Whereas men of Luther’s age and station would have worn a figure-hugging doublet and hose in gorgeous colors and soft fabrics, graduating to a looser outer garment or cloak in sober black as they aged, the monk’s shapeless clothing hid the body. He had chosen strict observance and, as he later reminisced, this meant physical chastisement and wearing coarse wool that chafed the skin. He had to endure the bitter cold during services in winter, wearing the same thin cassock all year round, and undertake a taxing regimen of fasting. More than fifteen years of observance would leave a deep mark, and he believed it had damaged his health: “if I hadn’t done it, I would be healthier and stronger.” 18 As he also noted in later life, he found it difficult at first to dare to eat meat on Fridays, even though he firmly believed that fasting was bad for the health. 19 Luther deliberately chose a life of extreme mental and bodily mortification, and he undertook it with great seriousness. The monastery day was divided into regular sections with prayers to be said throughout. Sleep was broken in the middle of the night when the monks woke to say matins; there were further “hours” at six, nine, and midday, followed by nones, vespers, and finally compline after the evening meal. 20 Mass was said daily. There was some flexibility, however: If a monk fell behind in his prayers, he could catch up with them later. Some even paid other monks to pray for them, but it was a practice Luther did not countenance. Instead, he began to save up the week’s hours until Saturday, going without eating or sleeping and praying through the day and night to get them done. This schedule was not easy to reconcile with the concentration needed for academic work, something that Staupitz recognized later by freeing him from having to attend matins when he began to lecture in Wittenberg in 1508.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  the Christian Church in Rome, but also as its first bishop.13 Ironically, it was actually a North African bishop, point-scoring against his local Donatist opponents by stressing the North African Catholics’ links to Rome, who is the first person known to have asserted on the basis of Matthew 16.17–19 that ‘Peter was superior to the other apostles and alone received the keys of the kingdom, which were distributed by him to the rest’; yet significantly it was in the time of Damasus that this thought occurred to the North African, some time around 370.14 All this promotion of Peter was not merely for the pope’s greater glory; it was a conscious effort to show that Christianity had a past as glorious as anything that the old gods could offer. The faith adopted by Constantine and his successors was no longer an upstart, but could be a religion fit for gentlemen. Damasus performed one other great service for Western Latin Christianity. In 382 he persuaded his secretary, a brilliant but quarrelsome scholar called Jerome, to begin a new translation of the Bible from Greek into Latin, to replace several often conflicting Latin versions from previous centuries. Like the saintly Bishop Cyril of Alexandria, Jerome is not a man to whom it is easy to warm, although he certainly had a powerful effect on various pious and wealthy ladies in late-fourth-century Rome. One feels that he was a man with a six-point plan for becoming a saint, taking in the papacy on the way. After Damasus’s death Jerome abruptly relocated to Palestine, though the precise reasons for his departure from Rome have now somehow disappeared from the record. Soon afterwards, he wrote of his recently interrupted career in Rome: ‘the entire city resounded with my praises. Nearly [sic] everyone agreed in judging me worthy of the highest priesthood [that is, the papacy]. Damasus, of blessed memory, spoke my words. I was called holy, humble, eloquent.’15 An earlier venture to seek holiness with the fierce ascetics of the Syrian desert had not been a success, and after Jerome’s withdrawal from Rome he spent his last years in a rather less demanding religious community near Bethlehem. There he continued with the round of scholarship which was his chief virtue, together with bitter feuding, which was not. Jerome produced an interesting and important spin on the scholarly task which he enjoyed so much. Traditionally it had been an occupation associated with elite wealth, and even in the case of this monk in Bethlehem it was backed up with an expensive infrastructure of assistants and secretaries. Study and writing, he insinuated, were as demanding, difficult and heroically self-denying as any physical extravagance of Syrian monks, or even the drudgery of manual labour and craft which were the daily occupation of monastic communities in Egypt. He elaborated the thought with a certain self-pity:

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  his eyes and peered through the spotlights. “Well, that’s not an amen, but bless God, I’ll take it. When the devil wins one battle you got to believe there will be another battle, one you can win with God’s help. Amen?” “CERTAINLY!” Brother Terrell paced the platform and his words picked up speed as he moved. “You got to fast and pray until you’ve put on the whole armor of God. Then you got to go back out and win the next battle. Because there will be a next one and a next one until righteousness triumphs over evil, hallelujah.” He took out his handkerchief and mopped the sweat off his brow. “Ain’t that right?” “CERTAINLY!” Brother Terrell started to laugh. “Well, Certainly, whoever you are, come on up here. I want to get a good look at a man who ain’t afraid to speak up when the devil is looking him in the face.” A small man stood up on the left side of the tent and walked toward Brother Terrell. He wore a plaid sports jacket, dark pants, and a white shirt, all of which were at least two sizes too big. His short gray hair stuck up like pinfeathers. Brother Terrell left the platform and met him in front of the prayer ramp with his hand outstretched. He grabbed the little man around the shoulders and began to drag him back and forth in front of the audience. Certainly’s jacket flapped around him as they walked. People began to turn from the white robes and back toward Brother Terrell. “Bless God, they’s some people will stand with you no matter who or what is standing against you . . . ain’t that right?” The man blanched when Brother Terrell stuck the microphone in his face. “Yes, sir, I . . . I . . . guess that’s right.” “They’s some people won’t back down when the devil takes a pitchfork after ’em. Ain’t that right too?” “Yes, sir, Brother Terrell.” Certainly seemed to grow more confident with each step. “Some people when you ask ’em to say amen, they don’t just say amen. They say . . .” Brother Terrell turned toward the man beside him. “What was it you said?” The man hesitated, then took the microphone, leaned back as far as he could, and whipped his body forward as the word shot out of his mouth. “CERTAINLY!”

• From What Are Biblical Values? (2019)

  But if you endure when you do right and suffer for it, you have God’s approval. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps. SLAVERY AS A CHRISTIAN IDEAL It is not only in the later epistles that we find slavery or a slavelike attitude commended. Jesus himself is reported to have said: You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. (Mark 10:42–45) Paul tells the Philippians: Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave. (2:5–7) Paul claims that although he is free, he has made himself a slave to all (1 Corinthians 9:19) and often introduces himself as the slave of Christ (Romans 1:1; Galatians 1:10; Philippians 1:10).45 Paul’s use of slavery as a metaphor is complex. Sometimes slavery refers to servitude to the Law, from which Christians have been delivered (Romans 8:12–17, 21–23). But often it means that he and his fellow Christians are slaves to Christ. To be a slave of Christ was not unambiguously humbling. For a leader like Paul, the title “slave of Christ” “established his authority as Christ’s agent and spokesperson.”46 Indeed, in the biblical and Near Eastern tradition, high-ranking officials were often called c ebed , “slave or servant,” of the king. Nonetheless, for most people the metaphor attached a high value to humility, to emptying oneself, as Christ is said to have done in Philippians 2. This is the aspect of Christianity that later drew the disdain of Nietzsche for a “slave religion.” Whatever we make of the spiritual value of humility, which no doubt is admirable, the idealization of slavelike humility did not contribute to agitation for the liberation of slaves. It is often argued that “taking a stand in favor of abolishing slavery in Greek and Roman antiquity would not have occurred to anyone. Slavery was part and parcel of the whole political-economic religious structure. The only way even of imagining a society without slavery would have been to imagine a different society.”47 And yet we are told that the Essenes, who lived in Judea in the time of Jesus, had no slaves, because they regarded slavery as unjust. Whether that report is historically accurate or not, it shows that it was possible to conceive of a society without slaves in the time of Jesus, but that vision was not shared by the New Testament writers.

• From Story of the Eye (1928)

  Today, I know I am “blind”, immeasurable, I am man “abandoned” on the globe like my father at N. No one on earth or in heaven cared about my father’s dying terror. Still, I believe he faced up to it, as always. What a “horrible pride”, at moments, in Father’s blind smile! THE PORNOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION Susan Sontag THE METAPHOR OF THE EYE Roland Barthes Notes The Metaphor of the Eye 1. “En hommage à Georges Bataille”, in Critique , nos. 195–6, August–September 1963. 2. These terms, taken from linguistics, are now common currency in French literary criticism. Syntagma means the plane of concatenation and combination of signs at the level of actual discourse (e.g. the line of words); paradigm means, for each sign of the syntagma, the fund of sister—but nevertheless dissimilar—signs from which it was selected. 3. I refer here to the antithesis established by jakobson between metaphor as a figure of similarity and metonymy as a figure of contiguity. THE BEGINNING Let the conversation begin...

• From Middlesex (2002)

  had applied, and of the broken F key, which stuck. On that newfan- gled but soon-to-be obsolete machine I wrote not so much like a kid from the Midwest as a minister's daughter from Shropshire. I still have a copy of my psychological narrative somewhere. Luce pub- lished it in his collected works, omitting my name. "I would like to tell of my life," it runs at one point, "and of the experiences that make myriad my joys and sorrows upon this planet we call Earth." In de- scribing my mother, I say, "Her beauty is the kind which seems to be thrown into relief by grief?' A few pages on there comes the subhead- ing "Calumnies Caustic and Catty by Callie." Half the time I wrote like bad George Eliot, the other half like bad Salinger. "If there's one thing I hate it's television." Not true: I loved television! But on that Smith Corona I quickly discovered that telling the truth wasn't nearly as much fun as making things up. I also knew that I was writing for an audience— Dr. Luce— and that if I seemed normal enough, he might send me back home. This explains the passages about my love of cats ("feline affection"), the pie recipes, and my deep feelings for nature. Luce ate it all up. It's true; I have to give credit where credit's due. Luce was the first person to encourage my writing. Every night he read through what I had typed up during the day. He didn't know, of course, that I was making up most of what I wrote, pretending to be the ail-American daughter my parents wanted me to be. I fictional- ized early "sex play" and later crushes on boys; I transferred my feel- ing for the Object onto Jerome and it was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies. Luce was interested in the gender giveaways of my prose, of course. He measured my jouissance against my linearity. He picked up on my Victorian flourishes, my antique diction, my girls' school pro- priety. These all weighed heavily in his final assessment. There was also the diagnostic tool of pornography. One after- noon when I arrived for my session with Dr. Luce, there was a movie projector in his office. A screen had been set up before the bookcase, and the blinds drawn. In syrupy light Luce was feeding the celluloid through the sprocket wheel. "Are you going to show me my dad's movie again? From when I was little?" "Today I've got something a little different," said Luce. I took up my customary position on the chaise, my arms folded 418 behind me on the cowhide. Dr. Luce switched off the lights and soon the movie began. It was about a pizza delivery girl. The tide was, in fact, Annie De- livers to Tour Door. In the first scene, Annie, wearing cutoffs and a

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  believe that this is what you are judging, while in fact your evaluation is dominated by your impressions of the energy and competence of its current executives. Because substitution occurs automatically, you often do not know the origin of a judgment that you (your System 2) endorse and adopt. If it is the only one that comes to mind, it may be subjectively undistinguishable from valid judgments that you make with expert confidence. This is why subjective confidence is not a good diagnostic of accuracy: judgments that answer the wrong question can also be made with high confidence. You may be asking, Why didn’t Gary Klein and I come up immediately with the idea of evaluating an expert’s intuition by assessing the regularity of the environment and the expert’s learning history—mostly setting aside the expert’s confidence? And what did we think the answer could be? These are good questions because the contours of the solution were apparent from the beginning. We knew at the outset that fireground commanders and pediatric nurses would end up on one side of the boundary of valid intuitions and that the specialties studied by Meehl would be on the other, along with stock pickers and pundits. It is difficult to reconstruct what it was that took us years, long hours of discussion, endless exchanges of drafts and hundreds of e-mails negotiating over words, and more than once almost giving up. But this is what always happens when a project ends reasonably well: once you understand the main conclusion, it seems it was always obvious. As the title of our article suggests, Klein and I disagreed less than we had expected and accepted joint solutions of almost all the substantive issues that were raised. However, we also found that our early differences were more than an intellectual disagreement. We had different attitudes, emotions, and tastes, and those changed remarkably little over the years. This is most obvious in the facts that we find amusing and interesting. Klein still winces when the word bias is mentioned, and he still enjoys stories in which algorithms or formal procedures lead to obviously absurd decisions. I tend to view the occasional failures of algorithms as opportunities to improve them. On the other hand, I find more pleasure than Klein does in the come-uppance of arrogant experts who claim intuitive powers in zero-validity situations. In the long run, however, finding as much intellectual agreement as we did is surely more important than the persistent emotional differences that remained. Speaking of Expert Intuition “How much expertise does she have in this particular task? How much practice has she had?” “Does he really believe that the environment of start-ups is sufficiently regular to justify an intuition that goes against the base rates?” “She is very confident in her decision, but subjective confidence is a poor index of the accuracy of a judgment.” “Did he really have an opportunity to learn? How quick and how clear was the feedback he received on his judgments?”

• From The City of God

  41 Lecture 2 Transcript—Who Was Augustine of Hippo? role, and once that was over, his decks had been cleared to begin writing The City of God in late 411 or 412, and he kept at it, although often distracted by other work, until he completed the whole thing 15 years later, in 426 or 427. The last few years of his life were just as busy as the earlier ones, and he kept on writing, teaching, and even occasionally preaching up to a few weeks before his death on August 28, 430, with the Vandals besieging Hippo. And it is here, in his dealings with the Donatists and the Pelagians and his overall practice in the office of Bishop, where his critics find warrant for their charge that he is a fundamentally antidemocratic thinker; in fact, an authoritarian who gave the highest moral and theological imprimatur for the practices of coercion popular in the Middle Ages. And we will see again in these lectures, as in the accusations of his metaphysical anti-worldliness and his moral- psychological promotion of a guilt morality, that his reputed political authoritarianism is vastly overdrawn. In fact, in his role as a leader of the Latin Christian churches, he was anything but authoritarian. As a Bishop, he was more than just a religious leader; he was a political actor and a judicial figure, as well. Moreover, he became, as the historian Peter Brown has put it, a sort of one-man brain trust for the churches of Africa. Although his labors earned him great respect and veneration from others, he continued teaching what was effectively an anti-authoritarian vision of the Gospel, one that was quite suspicious of figures such as he was becoming. And he wasn’t afraid of attacking himself in this way. In one sermon, he said, and this is a quote: Don’t even think of regarding as canonical scripture any debate, or written account of a debate by anyone. If I have said something reasonable, then follow, not me, but reason itself; if I’ve proved it by the clearest divine testimonies, then follow, not me, but the divine scripture. I get angrier with that fan of mine who takes my book as