Remorse

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 27 of 30 · 20 per page

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  26 But even this became competitive and agonistic. This Hebrew psalm shows Yahweh fighting for preeminence against the other sons of God in the council: Yahweh stands up in the divine assembly, Among the gods he dispenses justice: “No more mockery of justice, No more favouring the wicked! Let the weak and the orphan have justice, Be fair to the wretched and the destitute; Rescue the weak and needy, Save them from the clutches of the wicked!” Ignorant and senseless, they carry on blindly, Undermining the very basis of earthly society. I once said, “You too are gods, Sons of the Most High, all of you,” But all the same, you shall die like other men; As one man, gods, you shall fall. Rise, Yahweh, dispense justice throughout the world, Since no nation is excluded from your ownership. 27 In the old days, the psalm implies, Yahweh had been prepared to accept the other “sons of God” as elohim, but now they are obsolete; they would wither away like mortal men. Yahweh, who had won the leadership of the divine council, had sentenced them all to death. Yahweh accused the other deities of neglecting the primal duty of social justice. Elijah also insisted on compassion and consideration for the poor and oppressed. When Jezebel had Naboth, a landowner in the Jezreel Valley, stoned to death simply because he had refused to hand over a vineyard that adjoined Ahab’s property, Yahweh sentenced the king to a horrible end: “In the place where the dogs licked the blood of Naboth, the dogs will lick your blood too.” 28 When he heard this oracle, Ahab was overcome with remorse; he fasted, slept in sackcloth, and Yahweh relented. Concern for social justice was not a new development, nor was it peculiar to Israel and Judah. The protection of the weak had long been common policy throughout the ancient Near East. 29 As early as the third millennium, the kings of Mesopotamia had insisted that justice for the poor, the orphan, and the widow was a sacred duty, decreed by the sun god Shamash, who listened to their cries for help. The prologue of the Code of Hammurabi (1728–1686) decreed that the sun would shine over the people only if the king and the mighty did not oppress their vulnerable subjects. The kings of Egypt were also commanded to take care of the destitute, 30 because Re, the sun god, was the “vizier of the poor.” 31 In Ugarit, famine and drought could be held at bay only if justice and equity prevailed in the land; the protection of the weak preserved the divine order, achieved by Baal in his battle with Mot. 32 Throughout the Middle East, justice was an essential pillar of religion. It was also good pragmatic policy.

• From Prayers of the Social Awakening (1910)

  can wash out the red marks with which we have scarred some life that stands before our memory with accusing eyes. Grant that at least a humble and pure life may grow out of our late contrition, that in the brief days still left to us we may comfort and heal where we have scorned and crushed. Change us by the power of thy saving grace from sources of evil into forces for good, that with all oiu: strength we may fight the wrongs we have aided, and aid the right we have clogged. Grant us this boon, that for every harm we have done, we may do some brave act of salvation, and that for every soul that has stumbled or fallen through us, we may bring to thee some other weak or despairing one, whose strength has been renewed by our love, that so the face of thy Christ may smile upon us and the light within us may shine imdimmed. I FOR THE PROPHETS AND PIONEERS E praise thee, Almighty God, for thine elect, the prophets and mar- tyrs of humanity, who gave their thoughts and prayers and agonies for the truth of God and the freedom of the peo- ple. We praise thee that amid loneliness 1 and the contempt of men, in poverty and I imprisonment, when they were condemned I by the laws of the mighty and buffeted on I the scaffold, thou didst uphold them by thy spirit in loyalty to thy holy cause. Our hearts bum within us as we follow the bleeding feet of thy Christ down the centuries, and count the mounts of anguish on which he was crucified anew in his prophets and the true apostles of his spirit. Help us to forgive those who did it, for some truly thought they were serving thee when they suppressed thy light, but oh, save us from the same mistake! Grant us an unerring instinct for what is right and true, and a swift sympathy to divine those who truly love and serve the people. Suffer us not by thoughtless condemnation or selfish oppo- sition to weaken the arm and chill the spirit of those who strive for the redemption of mankind. May we never bring upon us the blood of all the righteous by renewing the spirit of those who persecuted them in the past. Grant us rather that we, too, may be cotmted in the chosen band of those who have given their life as a ransom for the many. Send us forth with the pathfinders of humanity to lead thy people another day's march toward the land of promise. And if we, too, must suffer loss, and drink of the bitter pool of misunderstanding and scorn, uphold us by thy spirit in steadfastness and joy because we are found worthy to share in the work and the reward of Jesus and all the saints.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  A new empire had also been established in India, but it was very different from Alexander’s. Magadha had dominated the Ganges Valley since the fourth century, and had greatly expanded its territory under the powerful Nanda dynasty. But in 321, Chandragupta Maurya, a vaishya who may have come from one of the tribal republics, seized the throne, having already established a power base in the Punjab, where the Greeks’ departure had left a power vacuum. We know very little about either his reign or his military campaign, but the Mauryan empire eventually extended from Bengal to Afghanistan, and Chandragupta then began to penetrate central and southern India. Coming from the more peripheral tribal states, the Mauryan emperors had no strong links with Vedic religion, and were more interested in the nonorthodox sects. Chandragupta himself favored the Jains, who accompanied his army and established themselves in the south. His son Bindusara Maurya promoted the Ajivakas, while the third emperor, Ashoka, who succeeded to the throne in 268, patronized the Buddhists, and his brother Vitashoka actually became a Buddhist monk. Pali sources claim that before his conversion, Ashoka had been a cruel, self-indulgent ruler, who managed to win the throne only by killing his other brothers. On his accession, he assumed the title Devanampiya, “the Beloved of the Gods,” and continued to conquer new territory until he suffered a severe shock. In 260 the Mauryan army conquered Kalinga in the region of modern Orissa. Ashoka recorded his victory in an edict, which he had inscribed on a massive rock face. He said nothing about his military strategy, and instead of celebrating his victory, he dwelt on the tragic number of casualties. One hundred thousand Kalingan soldiers had been killed during the battle; “many times that number” perished afterward from wounds and hunger, and 150,000 Kalingans had been deported. Ashoka was devastated by the spectacle of such suffering. The “Beloved of the Gods,” he said, felt remorse, for when an independent country is conquered, the slaughter, death and deportation is extremely grievous to Devanampiya and weighs heavily on his mind. . . . Even those who were fortunate enough to have escaped, and whose love is undiminished, suffer from the misfortunes of their friends, acquaintances, colleagues and relatives. . . . Today if a hundredth or a thousandth part of those people who were killed or died or were deported when Kalinga was annexed were to suffer similarly, it would weigh heavily on the mind of Devanampiya.64 The purpose of the edict was to warn other kings against undertaking further wars of conquest. If they did lead a campaign, it must be fought humanely, and victory should be implemented “with patience and light punishment.” The only true conquest was dhamma, by which Ashoka meant a moral effort that would benefit people in this life and the next.65

• From Cultish (2021)

  PTS Types covered the array of potential “thems” and were used to legitimize the slander or persecution of anyone who didn’t fall in line. “My Scientology friend, Greg, the creative director on that McDonald’s commercial? After he killed himself, they said he was PTS Type 3, which meant he had a psychotic break,” Cathy told me. “But really, Greg had spent all his money and his father’s money, sold his house, lost his job. He was destitute.” It wasn’t “PTS”; Scientology had ruined the guy’s life. Cathy sighed into the receiver. “Now that I think about it, I wasted two decades of my life with that place.” But back then, she thought it was her eternity. “With this knowledge, I was going to be able to come back the next lifetime and handle stuff other people couldn’t, you know?” Scientology operates on the logic that because L. Ron Hubbard’s “tech” (belief system) is flawless, if you’re in the church and unhappy, then you clearly did something to “pull it in.” This is a classic Scientology thought-terminating cliché meaning that whatever negative experience you’re having, it’s no one’s responsibility but yours. “You made it happen,” Cathy explained. “If I tripped on the sidewalk and sprained my ankle, it wasn’t the crack in the sidewalk that did it, it’s because I pulled it in.” Perhaps you were entertaining doubts or associating too closely with an SP. In Scientology, if you have an issue with your marriage, with a friend group, or at work, you need to either disconnect, or “handle” (meaning convince them to agree with the doctrine), or “get them on the bridge”—convert them to Scientology. While Mani nodded her head agreeably at the spray-tanned half celebrity, a table of books and DVDs before us, I remembered a lecture my mother had given me in high school after we’d decided to take up a family friend’s invitation to spend spring break at a beach resort in Mexico. “As soon as we arrive, they’re going to bring us into a little room, and they’re going to try to sell us a timeshare,” my mother warned me, soberly. “They’re going to feed us snacks, and compliment us, and make it sound amazing. But the LAST THING you EVER want to do is buy a timeshare. It will ruin your life. So we are going to say ‘no thank you’ over and over again. And then they’re going to try to take us into another little room to show us a video presentation. No matter what, we CANNOT let them take us into that next room. We are going to stand up, and we are going to leave.” When I was nineteen, approaching my fourth hour behind those Scientology HQ doors, I had no idea the millions of dollars and psychological trauma this “church” had wrung out of everyday people under false promises that started with $35 self-improvement workshops. All I knew was that this felt like a timeshare sell.

• From Cultish (2021)

  “I was just basing it on this actress I liked who was in it.” After Cathy started paying for courses and further intertwining her life with Scientology, she certainly didn’t do any independent digging, because the rules explicitly forbid it. “I was told not to look on the internet, the newspaper, or any ‘black PR’ on Scientology,” Cathy said. “All of those people and journalists were just trying to destroy Scientology because they know it’s the only hope for mankind.” Now, every time Cathy entered a counseling session (always prepaid, of course), the first questions asked were: Did you look at the internet? Has anyone said anything bad to you about Scientology? Have you had an affair? Have you been taking drugs? Have you talked to a journalist? Are you connected to someone in an embassy or the government, or politics, or a lawyer? “It was madness,” Cathy says in retrospect—though at the time, these just seemed like routine precautions. Very quickly, Cathy’s new circle started using us-versus-them verbiage to isolate her from those on the outside. “They had ways of making you look at people who weren’t in Scientology as less-than,” she remembers. Any criticisms of the organization were labeled “hidden crimes.” A person or behavior that threatened Scientology in some way—like associating with an SP (suppressive person: a bad influence, like a journalist or skeptical family member)—was instantly labeled PTS, potential trouble source. There is a long list of PTS Types in Scientology. These classifications—Types 1–3 and Types A–J—all refer to different enemies of the church: doubters, criminals, people who’ve publicly denounced or sued Scientology, people too closely connected with an SP, people who’ve undergone a “psychotic break.” PTS Types covered the array of potential “thems” and were used to legitimize the slander or persecution of anyone who didn’t fall in line. “My Scientology friend, Greg, the creative director on that McDonald’s commercial? After he killed himself, they said he was PTS Type 3, which meant he had a psychotic break,” Cathy told me. “But really, Greg had spent all his money and his father’s money, sold his house, lost his job. He was destitute.” It wasn’t “PTS”; Scientology had ruined the guy’s life. Cathy sighed into the receiver. “Now that I think about it, I wasted two decades of my life with that place.” But back then, she thought it was her eternity. “With this knowledge, I was going to be able to come back the next lifetime and handle stuff other people couldn’t, you know?” Scientology operates on the logic that because L. Ron Hubbard’s “tech” (belief system) is flawless, if you’re in the church and unhappy, then you clearly did something to “pull it in.” This is a classic Scientology thought-terminating cliché meaning that whatever negative experience you’re having, it’s no one’s responsibility but yours. “You made it happen,” Cathy explained.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  It occasionally happened that people would chance upon the Abbot as he wended his way to and fro, and they concluded that it must be Ferondo’s ghost, wandering through the district doing penance. So that, in the course of time, various strange legends grew up among the simple countryfolk, and some of these reached the ears of Ferondo’s wife, who was not mystified in the slightest. When Ferondo recovered his senses, without having the faintest idea where he was, the Bolognese monk burst in upon him brandishing a bunch of sticks; and with a terrifying roar, he seized hold of him and gave him a severe thrashing. Weeping and howling, Ferondo kept repeating the same question: ‘Where am I?’ ‘You are in Purgatory,’ replied the monk. ‘What?’ said Ferondo. ‘Do you mean to say I am dead, then?’ ‘You certainly are,’ said the monk; whereupon Ferondo started bemoaning his fate and weeping over the plight of his wife and child, coming out with the most extraordinary statements imaginable. The monk then brought him some food and drink, and Ferondo gasped with astonishment, saying: ‘Do dead people eat?’ ‘Yes,’ said the monk. ‘As a matter of fact, the food I am giving you was sent this morning to the church by the woman who was your wife, with a request that masses should be said for your soul. And it is God’s wish that you should have it here and now.’ ‘God bless her little heart!’ exclaimed Ferondo. ‘I did love her a lot of course, before I died. Why, I used to hold her in my arms all night, and I never stopped kissing her. And when the mood took me, I did more besides.’ His appetite being enormous, he then began to eat and drink, but the wine was not entirely to his liking. ‘God damn the woman!’ he exclaimed. ‘This wine she’s given to the priest didn’t come from the cask alongside the wall.’ He continued with his meal, however, and when he had finished, the monk brandished his bunch of sticks once again, seized him a second time, and gave him another severe hiding. ‘Hey!’ yelled Ferondo, making the dickens of a protest. ‘What are you doing this to me for?’ ‘Because the Almighty has given strict orders that you are to be beaten twice every day.’ ‘For what reason?’ ‘Because you were jealous of your wife, who was the finest woman in the whole district.’ ‘Alas, how right you are,’ said Ferondo. ‘She was also the sweetest; aye, sweeter than a sugar-plum. But I would never have been jealous if I had known I was giving offence to the Almighty.’ ‘You should have thought of that while you were still on the other side,’ said the monk. ‘You should have mended your ways before it was too late. And if you ever happen to return, be very careful to remember what I am doing now, and never be jealous again.’ ‘Eh?

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  13. Ibid., 280–81. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13 14. Luke 8.2: A. Tilby, The Seven Deadly Sins: Their origin in the spiritual teaching of Evagrius the Hermit (London, 2009), esp. 19. Cassian had added an eighth deadly sin, accedia or spiritual torpor, which the sevenfold system amalgamated with general sloth. Accedia has much the character of depression, which may be why spiritual advisors recognized that it was not always a sinful state. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14 15. For a summary of the early history of confession, see J. Mahoney, The Making of Moral Theology: A study of the Roman Catholic tradition (Oxford, 1987), 2–5. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15 16. The priority between Ireland and Wales is uncertain; they were part of the same religious culture in the 6th century, to which era the earliest penitentials belong, but archaeology provides a clearer picture of the background in Ireland than it does in Wales. The best discussion of these early materials is R. Meens, Penance in Medieval Europe, 600–1200 (Cambridge, 2014), ch. 3. For the relevant texts, see J. T. McNeill and H. M. Gamer (eds), Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A translation of the principal ‘libri poenitentiales’ and selections from related documents (New York, 1938), chs. 1 and 2. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16 17. Mahoney, Making of Moral Theology, 15–16; Meens, Penance in Medieval Europe, 113–18. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17 18. A point made by P. Heather, Christendom: The triumph of a religion (London, 2022), 271. Mahoney, Making of Moral Theology, 6, points particularly to the continent-wide impact of the 6th-century Irish monk Columbanus (not to be confused with Columba or Colmcille of Iona), and it is discussed at length in Meens, Penance in Medieval Europe, ch. 4. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18 19. McNeill and Gamer (eds), Medieval Handbooks of Penance: ‘The Penitential of Cummean’, 101–5, 112–14. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19 20. For the high evidential value of penitentials in medieval and early modern Slavic Orthodoxy, see Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, esp. 11–12, 25–33, 78. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20 21. For crisp combined praise and sharp castigation of the system and its long-term effects, see Mahoney, Making of Moral Theology, ch. 1. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21 22. J. Richards, Consul of God: The life and times of Gregory the Great (London, 1980), 240–42. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22 23. Ibid., 238–41: Richards, ibid., 239, points out in favour of the story that we know that Gregory sought to buy English enslaved youths in 595, though evidently they did not accompany Augustine to Kent. Cf. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (eds), Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford, 2022), 132–5 [II.1]. The extension of the misquotation to ‘Not Angels, but Anglicans’ in W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That (London, 1975 edn), 14, is clearly a Good Thing. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23 24. See the argument of M. W.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  Heather slid to the side and nodded. “Hey, Dad.” “Hello, Heather. Is Rita here?” “No.” Heather frowned. “She’s at a rally. I should be there too.” Harry had forgotten that his daughter’s lover was extremely active in the lesbian/feminist movement. Now that he’d had time to reflect, after years of being clouded, he wondered if Heather might’ve liked the cock a bit more if she hadn’t caught him plowing her prom dress way back when. Not that it mattered much to him, he wasn’t averse to his daughter’s lesbian lifestyle, but he simply wondered now if things would’ve been different if he hadn’t been so selfish. He leaned in and kissed her cheek before she had time to pull away. “Okay, Dad. That’s enough.” Lastly, Harry turned to Laura, beautiful Laura who he’d neglected for far too long. With full eyes, blue and penitent, he knelt at her feet. “T’m so sorry, my dear Laura. I’ve been so lost in my fetish that I’ve forgotten just how beautiful you are.” “To we have to be here for this?” asked Heather. 496 Mel Bosworth Cody shushed her. Harry kissed the top of Laura’s hand. “Our son has helped me, Laura. Our beautiful son. And you too, Heather. Your presence here today means the world to me.” “Sure, Dad. Whatever you say.” Harry’s eyes climbed the curves of Laura’s body, then nesiedte in her shaking smile. “I love you, Laura. I always have, and always will.” “T love you too, Harry,” she said, hot tears breaking the crest of her cheekbones. “And I want to be a part of your world. I want you to fuck me in this dress. I want you to fuck this dress after you fuck me. I want us to fuck each other while the whore you see fucks herself with our clothes. I want us to be whole again.” Harry buried his face in Laura’s crotch, allowing himself to smell her cunt, still vital after all this time. That it was cloaked in the rough fabric of the green tablecloth made the experience even sweeter. The onetime bane of his existence had now, at last, become his boon. The Lady and the Unicorn C. Sanchez-Garcia Consider the handiwork of God; who can straighten what He has made crooked? Ecclesiastes 7:13

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Out of all his discussion, Augustine crafted his celebrated threefold description of Christian marriage as exhibiting fides, proles, sacramentum – faithfulness, offspring, a lifelong allegiance. In his last years he collected a set of Retractationes (‘Revisions’), an engaging collection of matters on which he felt regret for some of his earlier statements, and among them was an admission that ‘I think that I did not reach a perfect solution of this question’. [16] That did not prevent the Western Church setting out on a road to a complete ban on divorce and remarriage on the basis of his discussion. That course has meant that the Western Church has fundamentally differed from the Churches of the East on the practicalities of marital separations. In the Byzantine dominions and those areas of the eastern Mediterranean influenced by them, the civil law of the Empire continued to govern marriage, which meant allowance for divorce. Even the Emperor Justinian, who in many respects consciously drew on Christian theology to shape his new legislation, and who did make divorce much more difficult before his successors reversed his efforts, was still able bluntly to say that, ‘of those things that occur between human beings, whatever is bound is soluble’. [17] Besides such imperial pronouncements, one of the most respected authorities of the Eastern Churches had already encouraged the possibility of reconciling civil marriage with Church practice, even before Augustine had begun to take the West in an opposing direction. Basil ‘the Great’ as Bishop of Caesarea from 370 made a series of provisions on pastoral matters in sermons, in letters and in moral treatises that later generations and Church Councils regarded as collectively ‘the Rule of St Basil’: a foundation for later codifications of canon law throughout the Orthodox world. Basil exemplified an attitude to sexuality that shaped Orthodoxy into being both morally rigorous and practically permissive. Eastern theologians have always said a great deal in praise of marriage, drawing not merely on the Song of Songs, but also on Jesus’s parable of the Kingdom of God as like a wedding feast: so marriage can be seen as a metaphor for the end of time, and therefore necessarily not to be repeated (above, Chapter 4). Yet this is coupled with an interpretation of the Fall in Eden that sharply contrasts with Augustine’s. Orthodox theologians have generally opted to view sexual intercourse of any description as a result of the Fall; that would necessarily include marital sex. Early on, this led them into a problem with that idiosyncratic pronouncement of Paul in 1 Corinthians 3.5 that we have so often encountered: the sexual ‘marital debt’. Western commentators right through to their great enterprise of constructing canon law for the Church in the twelfth century recognized

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  The idea that this might violate human rights never entered my head, partly because I was inclined to think that a religion-free world was itself a basic human right. Where some argued for freedom of religion, it seemed obvious to me that an ideal world involved freedom from religion. I would have been shocked to read of what I now know happened in the Soviet Union during the 1920s as a state-sponsored programme of the suppression of religion took place, using execution squads, prison camps and protracted social violence to create a religion-free world. Because religion was evil, its elimination justified any means that this required. At Oxford, I discovered Isaiah Berlin and the intensely serious tradition of reflection on diversity and its implications that his writings stimulated. For Berlin, individuals, communities and nations have divergent visions of what is good and right. Back in the 1960s, some visionaries dreamed of diverse communities of individuals who each pursued their own goals and visions of personal fulfilment independently and harmlessly. Today, we are perhaps more realistic, recognising that one community’s exercise of freedom may impact on another’s identity, wellbeing or freedom – and thus lead to conflict and the possibility of violence. In this section, we shall consider the ways in which the human propensity for belief can create tensions and violence, and reflect on its implications for our understanding of the place of belief in life. I have no doubt that religion can generate tensions and violence. But it’s not alone in this. As writers as diverse as Aristotle and Jean-Jacques Rousseau make clear, viable accounts of the origins of division and conflict can be offered that neither require nor exclude a significant religious element. 31 Racial and political ideologies are human belief systems with a particular propensity for violence and extermination. In Latin America, millions of people seem to have ‘disappeared’ in ruthless campaigns of violence by right-wing politicians and their militias. In Cambodia, Pol Pot eliminated millions in his relentless pursuit of an elusive communist paradise. Any form of ideological exclusivism inevitably leads to social and intellectual tensions, in that it divides the world into in-groups and out-groups – ‘friends and enemies’, ‘good and evil’, ‘us and them’, ‘human and subhuman’, or ‘enlightened and irrational’.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  3 Tyrants cause their own downfall, because when a prince tries to impose his will on other people, they automatically resist him, so a sagacious prince would resort to arms only with regret and as a last resort. There must be no triumphalism, chauvinism, or aggressive patriotism: he knows that he must bring hostilities to an end gently. “Bring it to a conclusion, but do not boast; bring it to a conclusion, but do not brag; bring it to a conclusion, but do not be arrogant; bring it to a conclusion, but only where there is no choice; bring it to a conclusion, but do not intimidate.” 4 Such an attitude was possible only if the ruler trained his mind and became a sage; he had to discipline the me-first aggression that is our instinctive response to any threat. As a first step, he must learn to appreciate the inadequacy of language and realize that true insight does not consist of the acquisition of information but comes from mastering our egotism and greed. 5 A sage-ruler does not pontificate about his principles; he does not try to make the people what he wants them to be, but “takes as his own mind the mind of the people.” 6 The only person who is fit to rule is the man who has overcome the habit of selfishness: The reason there is great affliction is that I have a self. If I had no self, what affliction would I have? Therefore to one who honours the world as his self The world may be entrusted, And to one who loves the world as one’s self The world may be consigned. 7 It was not a sage-king who emerged victorious at the end of the Warring States period but the ruthlessly aggressive state of Qin, which destroyed all the remaining states and established its empire in 221 BCE. However, Laozi was proved right in the end, because Qin’s cruel, oppressive policies led to a popular rebellion in 209 that brought the dynasty to a premature end. We can stop the vicious cycle of attack and counterattack, strike and counterstrike that holds the world in thrall today only if we learn to appreciate the wisdom of restraint toward the enemy. We have seen that when Jesus told his followers to love their enemies, he also urged an ethic of ahimsa.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Human beings have an extraordinary instinct and ability to join up the dots, to weave threads together to construct a pattern, going beyond what can be seen to what we believe lies behind it. This process can – and often does – go wrong: we connect the dots improperly, or fail to realise how much our reasoning is subservient to our desires. We want to trust our closest friends and so deny their failures that others see all too clearly. We want humanity to be good and so blind ourselves to its many defects and wilfully ignore our darker side. We find ourselves drawn to the ‘necessary illusions’ and ‘emotionally potent oversimplifications’ that Noam Chomsky believed were constructed by governmental agencies to control public opinion.10 We too easily allow ourselves to be cushioned against harsh truths by constructing worldviews that protect us from thoughts that we might find unbearable – such as the pointlessness of life, or the utter indifference of the cosmos to our presence. Yet the process of making connections is essential to the construction of beliefs, even if it can misfire. The French mathematician and philosopher of science Henri Poincaré helps us grasp this distinction: ‘Science is made with facts, like a house is made with stones, but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a pile of stones is a house.’11 Each stone is significant; yet we need to be able to see the grander structure of which it is part if we are to appreciate the wholeness of our world, without losing sight of its many individual aspects. Yet even here, there are uncertainties about the significance of this process. In the natural sciences, the debate between ‘instrumentalism’ and ‘realism’ continues. Is this ‘conceptual framework’ simply a construction of the human mind, which is read into or superimposed upon the real world? Or do we discern something that is there in the world? Have we invented something, or discovered it? Perhaps more worryingly, we often assume we must find a single master picture or narrative which makes all others redundant, exposing them as inadequate or even fraudulent. Yet while some worldviews demand exclusive control over our readings and interpretations of life, most are permissive, illuminating or interpreting aspects of life, and allowing supplementation from other perspectives. One of the reasons why I moved away from Marxism as a teenager was my sense that it imprisoned me within a controlling narrative and left me unwilling to acknowledge insights from other ways of thinking.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  I must record my repentance for following Jeremias’s argument in MacCulloch, Christianity , 81–2, but his idea has precedents: for a mid-seventeenth-century discussion of ‘Daddy’ from the English radical mystic Walter Cradock, see S. Apetrei, The Reformation of the Heart: Gender and radical theology in the English Revolution (Oxford, 2024), 124–5. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30 31 . The two versions of the Lord’s Prayer are Matthew 6.9–14, Luke 11.2–4; for commentary, Jeremias, New Testament Theology , 193–203. The Greek patēr goes into Latin identically as pater , and hence the name for the Lord’s Prayer still widely used in the formerly Latin West, derived from its two opening words ‘Our Father’ – the ‘Paternoster’. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31 32 . For discussion of contrasting iconographies of this scene in Western and Eastern Christianity, see below, Ch. 12, pp. 279–80. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32 33 . Genesis 2.24 is quoted and discussed in Mark 10.2–12 and in modified form in Matthew 19.3–12; cf. Luke 16.18. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33 34 . Matt. 22.2–12 (the parallel in Luke does not make this a wedding feast), 25.1–13; Luke 12.35–38. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34 35 . On Qumran and polygyny, F. Dal Bo, ‘Sexualities and il/licit relationships in late ancient Jewish literatures’, in N. Koltun-Fromm and G. Kessler (eds), A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism: Third Century BCE – Seventh Century

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  141 • At the death of Theodosius II, who had supported the monophysite position, and at the urging of Pope Leo and the western bishops, a new ecumenical council was held in Chalcedon (near Constantinople) in October and November of 451. o The Council of Chalcedon followed the lead of Leo I in seeking to affirm both sides of the paradoxical confession, without reduction or suppression of either dimension. An account says that when Leo’s letter was read aloud, the cry spontaneously arose, “Peter has spoken through Leo! This is what we believe!” o The council declared: “one single Christ, Son, Lord, Monogenic, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation, the difference in natures being in no way suppressed by the union, but rather the properties of each being safeguarded and reunited in a single person and a single hypostasis.” • The controversy, however, still did not end, with a strong anti- Chalcedonian tradition continuing to hold a monophysite position, especially in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, as well as Ethiopia and Constantinople. Enduring Consequences • The enduring effect of these endless theological and political controversies on Christianity cannot be considered as anything but negative. • As the great historian Henri-Irénée Marrou has stated: “Not without astonishment and regret the historian finds that in these long, bitter disputes which rent the church, heresy as such counted for less than men’s passionate attachment to their own will, than party spirit and obstinacy in schism.” • By placing such emphasis on “right ideas” rather than on “right practice,” theology became removed from ordinary life and became a matter of subtle speculation, even when well-intentioned. 142 Lecture 19: Theological Crisis and Council—Christology • The disputes, carried out in public and with the intervention of imperial power, revealed within Christianity—a religion dedicated to peace and unity—a deep tendency toward conflict and division. • Depending on the territory, the population, and the whim of a king, Christianity could appear (in the West) as Chalcedonian or Arian and (in the East) as Nestorian or monophysite. Grillmeier (Bowden, trans.), From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (451) (Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 1). Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, pp. 280–343. 1. How did the political and philosophical rivalries between patriarchal centers become exposed in the Christological debates of the 5th century? 2. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the use of ontological language (philosophical language about being) to define the significance of Christ? Suggested Reading Questions to Consider

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  8. Mendicants: Francis of Assisi and Louis of Toulouse Francis’s father, convinced his son was mad, effectively disinherited him. Francis refused to abide by the court’s judgment and, invoking his self-proclaimed religious status as a penitent, summoned the bishop as his ecclesiastical judge. The bishop successfully mediated the conflict, convincing Francis to give up his claim on the family’s goods. Francis memorialized this by stripping off his clothing as a symbolic gesture of renunciation. Francis as a Preacher Officially deemed a penitent, Francis wandered for months, depending on charity and serving the local lepers. Around 1209, he gathered a few followers, and they resolved to live according to the Gospels. They lived without possessions or even spare clothing and begged or worked for a living. The group made a home at a little chapel known as the Porziuncola. They traveled to Rome several times seeking papal approval for their way of life. Fortunately, Francis’s family connections had brought them a bishop and a cardinal to vouch for their orthodoxy. Pope Innocent III told them to come back with more followers. The brothers began to preach around Assisi and were tremendously successful. As his following grew, Francis struggled with leadership, as he would throughout his life. He was increasingly drawn to solitude in nature, and the early Franciscan hermitages he favored were often caves or other wild dwellings, where the brothers lived sparsely on handouts and through manual labor. This hard way of life took an increasing physical toll on Francis as he grew into middle age, but he continued to preach and travel. In 1219, he departed for Egypt to fulfill an old dream and travel as a missionary. He joined the forces of the Fifth Crusade, but the military environment triggered renewed flashbacks, and he was an unsettling presence in the army encampment. When he returned to Italy, he found the order in turmoil. Rumors of his death overseas had spread, and in his absence, the leaders had made changes to the Franciscans’ way of life, sowing dissension in the ranks. 56 8. Mendicants: Francis of Assisi and Louis of Toulouse 57

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  Within five years of that letter, Boniface was on the run from another enemy, not Saharan tribes from the south now, but Vandals from the west, led by the Arian chief Gaiseric, whom Boniface had tried to recruit for his own struggle with the Roman court. As Numidean towns fell, Christians and their bishops flocked into Hippo, a fortified city, and Boniface himself ended up there to conduct a defense against Gaiseric’s siege. The city was blockaded from the sea, and during that protracted engagement Augustine died, aged seventy-six, on August 28, 430. The siege was not raised for another year. In the last period of his life, the aging Augustine had the comfort, which had often been a trial, of the chosen band of brothers in his monastery. His discipline aimed at amity, and he threatened to leave the table if any monk ignored the verse he had cut into its wood: Who gnaws with envy those who are away May not bite food or at this table stay. But when his last illness felled him, he asked the brothers to leave him alone in his cell. This man who seems never to have been alone—whose conversion took place in the company of Alypius, whose deepest moment of mysticism took place in the company of Monnica, whose most intimate writings were dictated to ever-present scribes—was now depriving himself of all company. The brother who brought him food found him weeping. He had asked that large-lettered copies of the penitential psalms be fixed to his cell’s walls for him to go over and over, lamenting sins—not, we may be sure, the long-ago sins of his youth. He tells us in book 10 of The Testimony that his life as a bishop was one of sin. Augustine repented the sins of his ministry, all the rancorous dividedness, all the failed efforts at love and peace, that afflicted one unable to retire into some ivory tower. We know he blamed himself for some of this—in 423, when he was turning seventy, he had offered to retire from office when a bishop he consecrated turned out to be a destructive rogue. He wrote publicly to the pope: I have inflicted a tragedy in my hastiness and lack of due precaution. . . . As for me, Your Beatitude, I am debating whether to resign the exercise of my bishop’s office and devote myself to merited penance, tortured as I am by fear and anguish over two possible outcomes—either that I shall have to see a church of God losing its members because of a man I imprudently made a bishop, or that (may God prevent this) a whole church may be lost, along with the man himself. (L 209.1, 209.10.) Those are the kinds of sins he went into solitude to atone for at this last opportunity.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  Robert nodded, hungrily taking her fingers into his mouth and sucking them. “Well get down and show me. Prove it,” she said, standing. Robert lay down and she climbed over him, squatting and aligning her pussy with his mouth. “Open up for Mommy,” she demanded, then began to stroke between her split and toy with her clit. Moaning, she gave in to the throb of her pussy, removed her fingers, then bounced her ass on Robert’s neck as she covered his face with her wetness. Playing with her clit ring, she began a slow grind on his jutted-out tongue. In seconds she was ready. Lifting up a couple of inches, she massaged her hooded pink pearl until it swelled and hardened. “Now, baby,” she forewarned him as she contracted her pelvic muscles, milking her sweet juice into his opened mouth. “Tell me you love it.” Swallowing her creamy sap, Robert reacted quickly. “You know I love it,” he answered, pulling her body to his, then rolling over on top of her. “Is that all you love?” Flame asked, spreading her legs and opening her caramelized coochie lips. Robert stroked his dick until his veins bulged. Heavily, he breathed into her ear, and slapped her thigh with his hardness. “You know I love you, Flame,” he said, finally thrusting inside her, and pumping away as if he were really doing some damage. I ain’t doin’ this shit no more. Fuckin’ Power. See what you made me do? “Jeezus, Mary, and Jos—umpf! This is the best cunt I’ve ever had,” he roared and panted. “Yeah, baby. Work this shit out!” And hurry the fuck up and raise up off me. “For the love of—oh, Flame.” Roberts’s body shook, a forewarning of his squirting off. Nah, for the love of my man, my family, and my money, mu’fucka. I’m only doin’ this cuz I gotta. • • • Power sat at the bar sipping on Henny and Coke. He’d been fuckin’ with Kirsten all day, and knew he was driving her crazy. Bourgeoisie bitches like her had always fallen for him. He didn’t know if it was his swagger or his game that had attracted them, but he’d bet long dough that his big, black dick had everything to do with it. The white women he’d known had always swooned for the stereotype, and she was no exception. Especially because he’d fit the “black-man-is-packin’” bill like a mutha.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  “Maybe if you go get on welfare like every other mother around here instead of laying on your back to feed us,” I spat at my moms, “then maybe I wouldn’t get into so many fights trying to defend you when the kids call you tramps and whores and stuff. I don’t even know why I’m fighting. Why should I get mad at them when all they spittin’ is the truth?” Even when I saw my moms laying in the casket at her funeral I thought about the slap she gave me after I said those words to her. I remember rubbing my right cheek, the one she slapped me on, as I stood over her casket crying. I’ll never forget the pain—not the pain of the smack, but the pain that was in my mother’s eyes when I said those words to her. I think deep down inside that’s why I stayed so angry with her for so long. If I stayed angry with her, then I didn’t have to be mad at myself for the life I chose to live. But no matter what life I chose to live, I knew that I wanted it to be with Sam and I wasn’t about to let Detail take her away from me. I hardly remember actually putting the knife into his back ten times. I remember dropping it, though. I sometimes have nightmares of the knife dropping down onto the white sheets. I see Sam’s hand picking it up and finishing what I started. Every time Detail moved, she stuck him. She had so much fear in her eyes, fear that if Detail got back up, he’d surely kill her, kill us. Once he finally stopped moving, I remember looking at Sam. She was covered in blood, but not her own. It was Detail’s blood. At that moment I lost it and just went into complete shock. I didn’t talk for weeks, ironic, because now I talk for a living. Sam was the levelheaded one. She’s the one who thought of taking up the floorboards in the closet of that cheap-ass bottom-floor apartment of ours. Together we dug, and we dug, and we dug, and we dug, until the hole was big enough to stuff Detail’s corpse into it. If we had hit a pipe or gas line or anything, we would have been fucked. Sam went to Home Depot and bought some lime and a couple of bags of quick cement. We mixed it in this five-gallon bucket and poured it over the body. I vomited until I was so dehydrated that Sam had to force juice down my throat.

• From The Girls (2016)

  They jostled for ownership, adopting the same knowing tone, a veneer of scholarship masking the essential ghoulishness of the endeavor. What were they looking for among all the banalities? As though the weather on that day mattered. All of the scraps seemed important, when considered long enough: the station the radio was tuned to in Mitch’s kitchen, the number and depth of the stab wounds. How the shadows might have flickered on that particular car driving up that particular road. “I was only hanging around them for a few months,” I said. “It wasn’t a big thing.” Julian seemed disappointed. I imagined the woman he saw when he looked at me: her unkempt hair, the commas of worry around her eyes. “But yeah,” I said, “I stayed there a lot.” That answer returned me firmly to his realm of interest. And so I let the moment pass. I didn’t tell him that I wished I’d never met Suzanne. That I wished I’d stayed safely in my bedroom in the dry hills near Petaluma, the bookshelves packed tight with the gold-foil spines of my childhood favorites. And I did wish that. But some nights, unable to sleep, I peeled an apple slowly at the sink, letting the curl lengthen under the glint of the knife. The house dark around me. Sometimes it didn’t feel like regret. It felt like a missing. —Julian shooed Sasha into the other bedroom like a peaceable teenage goatherd. Asking if I needed anything before he said good night. I was taken aback—he reminded me of the boys in school who’d become more polite and high functioning on drugs. Dutifully washing the family dinner dishes while they were tripping, mesmerized by the psychedelic magic of soap. “Sleep well,” Julian said, giving a little geisha bow before closing the door. —The sheets on my bed were mussed, the pang of fear still lingering in the room. How ridiculous I’d been. Being so frightened. But even the surprise of harmless others in the house disturbed me. I didn’t want my inner rot on display, even accidentally. Living alone was frightening in that way. No one to police the spill of yourself, the ways you betrayed your primitive desires. Like a cocoon built around you, made of your own naked proclivities and never tidied into the patterns of actual human life. I was still alert, and it took effort to relax, to regulate my breath. The house was safe, I told myself, I was fine. Suddenly it seemed ridiculous, the bumbling encounter. Through the thin wall, I could hear the sounds of Sasha and Julian settling into the other room. The floor creaking, the closet doors being opened. They were probably putting sheets on the bare mattress. Shaking away years of accumulated dust. I imagined Sasha looking at the family photographs on the shelf, Julian as a toddler holding a giant red telephone. Julian at eleven or twelve, on a whale-watching boat, his face salt lashed and wondrous.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Ha-Nozri!’ ‘Madman!’ said Pilate, grimacing for some reason. A little nerve began to twitch under his left eye. ‘To die of sunburn! Why refuse what is offered by law! In what terms did he refuse it?’ ‘He said,’ the guest answered, again closing his eyes, ‘that he was grateful and laid no blame for the taking of his life.’ ‘On whom?’ Pilate asked in a hollow voice. ‘That he did not say, Hegemon . . .’ ‘Did he try to preach anything in the soldiers’ presence?’ ‘No, Hegemon, he was not loquacious this time. The only thing he said was that among human vices he considered cowardice one of the first.’ 7 ‘This was said with regard to what?’ the guest heard a suddenly cracked voice. ‘That was impossible to understand. He generally behaved himself strangely—as always, however.’ ‘What was this strangeness?’ ‘He kept trying to peer into the eyes of one or another of those around him, and kept smiling some sort of lost smile.’ ‘Nothing else?’ asked the hoarse voice. ‘Nothing else.’ The procurator knocked against the cup as he poured himself some wine. After draining it to the very bottom, he spoke: ‘The matter consists in the following: though we have been unable—so far at least—to discover any admirers or followers of his, it is none the less impossible to guarantee that there are none.’ The guest listened attentively, inclining his head. ‘And so, to avoid surprises of any sort,’ the procurator continued, ‘I ask you to remove the bodies of all three executed men from the face of the earth, immediately and without any noise, and to bury them in secrecy and silence, so that not another word or whisper is heard of them.’ ‘Understood, Hegemon,’ replied the guest, and he got up, saying: ‘In view of the complexity and responsibility of the matter, allow me to go immediately.’ ‘No, sit down again,’ said Pilate, stopping his guest with a gesture, ‘there are two more questions. First, your enormous merits in this most difficult job at the post of head of the secret service for the procurator of Judea give me the pleasant opportunity of reporting them to Rome.’ Here the guest’s face turned pink, he rose and bowed to the procurator, saying: ‘I merely fulfil my duty in the imperial service.’ ‘But I wanted to ask you,’ the hegemon continued, ‘in case you’re offered a transfer elsewhere with a raise—to decline it and remain here. I wouldn’t want to part with you for anything. Let them reward you in some other way.’ ‘I am happy to serve under your command, Hegemon.’ ‘That pleases me very much. And so, the second question.