Shame

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

  Though the baptismal candidate was given a broad moral entry exam, the sins of the initiate were continually monitored, and over the fourth century a penitential regime began to achieve some measure of universal consistency. An accommodation with sin is noticeable. The canons from Elvira had denied communion to the violator of boys, even to the point of death. But by the second half of the fourth century, forgiveness was placed within reach. In his canonical letters, the bishop Basil of Caesarea prescribed fifteen years of excommunication for anyone guilty of adultery, bestiality, or “shameful acts with males.” Gregory of Nyssa applied the same grid of punishment, subjecting those guilty of adultery, bestiality, or “pederasty” to eighteen years of excommunication, though he allotted the bishop discretion to shorten the punishment. Episcopal oversight was the lynchpin of a therapeutic regime for the sick sinner. Penance was “the common cure for the raging desire after such pleasures, to purify the man through repentance.” Gregory’s letter also offers a rare insight into the informal systems of surveillance behind the nascent penitential system. A man who became his own accuser might be treated leniently, because confession was a sign of contrition. But the sinner who was “detected in his wickedness, or unwillingly called out through some suspicion or accusation,” was shown no mercy. The church was not yet a fully organized confessional machine, designed to reach inside the souls of its wards, but we might imagine that “suspicion” and “accusation” had, in their own ways, an insidious reach.14 Gregory’s canonical letter hints at one of the principal developments in the church’s understanding of same-sex desire in late antiquity. Pederasty and bestiality were grouped with adultery, Gregory explains, because these two sins were “an adulteration of nature.” Same-sex love was a crime “against nature.” It is hard to appreciate just how comprehensive was the triumph of a particular understanding of “nature” in the morality of sex. In late antiquity “natural” sex came to mean, exclusively, the one configuration of body parts that has generative potential. This transformation drove a profound shift in the idiom of sexual deviance. One casualty of this shift is the gradual obsolescence of the term kinaidos/cinaedus, a word that appears in a handful of fourth-century texts and thereafter declines. Once an indispensable monster of sexual deviance, who condensed a whole array of stereotypes rooted in ancient assumptions about manliness and the body, the kinaidos gradually became unnecessary, as the thought-world that called him into existence crumbled around him. Perhaps even more surprising, much of the Pauline idiom of sexuality simply vanishes too. The words connoting same-sex love in his vice lists quietly disappear. The term arsenokoitēs is virtually nonexistent in late antique texts, and even malakia has somewhat more limited traction in the post-Constantinian world.15

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

  problematically into an exegesis of the “sinful woman” from the Gospel of Luke. His sermon is revealing on many counts, not least its total innocence of the doctrinal issues that would, within a few de cades, erupt with such force. Th e “sinful woman” was, unsurprisingly, regarded as a prostitute. More unexpectedly, she was interpreted as a fi gure of Eve, the protosinner. Th e “sinful woman” abused the gifts of sexual love, ruining the “youth” of the city and violating their sanctifi ed bodies. Her sins were heavy, but she was forgiven by the grace of Jesus. Like the debtor, she could never repay her debts, but God called only for repentance, which was merely an act “of free will.” For most of the fourth century it was not Stoic fatalism, gnostic doctrine, or even vulgar pagan determinism that occasioned Christian preaching on free will. Rather, it was that irrepressible enemy: astrology. In the west, Ambrosiaster battled against the lively threat of astral determinism: “Nothing is so contrary to Christian doctrine.” It was in Syria, in the latter half of the fourth century, that the Clementine Recognitions repackaged Bardaisan’s voluntarism, but without so much allowance for the infl uence of the stars. Christian preachers of the age like Augustine and John Chrysostom regularly attack the lures of astrology. In Constantinople a sermon on the Magi led Chrysostom inexorably into a diatribe against astral determinism. “We are free and masters of our wills. . . . If human aff airs were under the power of their sign, why do you lash your slave in anger? Why do you haul your adulterous wife before the courts? . . . If sins arise by necessity, why do you bear insult harshly?” Only someone who was possessed by a demon lost his “free will” and deserved pity rather than censure. Chrysostom’s sermon dates to around AD 400. He speaks of “free will” with complete innocence, in a fashion not far removed from Justin, Origen, or Methodius. It was still unproblematically a cosmological, antideterminist formulation. Sex, as ever, remained the refl exive paradigm of human freedom. In the middle of the fourth century, Cyril of Jerusalem could write, in his Catechetical Lectures, that the dev il could suggest but not compel fornication, because the soul was self- governing. “If you wish, you will receive the suggestion, and if not, you won’t. For if you committed fornication by necessity, then for what reason has God prepared the hellfi re?” Yet within just a few years, such untroubled absolutisms will come to seem hopelessly naive. Vivifying the tensions between freedom and determinism in the fourth century was the spread of Manichean beliefs. Th e strongly dualist religion off ered answers to the problem of evil that were seductive in their simplicity,  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N

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

  Abraham failed to notice Mary’s absence. When he receives a “fearful vivid dream” of a huge snake devouring a dove, he still fails to understand this premonition of lost virginity (which reminds us of Leucippe’s mother’s dream). Two days later, he has another dream. This time the snake returns to Abraham’s house, and out of its belly flies the dove, unharmed. Finally the dreams become sensible to Abraham. After two years Abraham discovers where his niece is hiding. He disguises himself as a soldier, a costume familiar from such rescue operations. Abraham finds the tavern and asks the keeper to arrange a conjunction with the “pretty lass” who worked there. When he sees Mary “dolled up and dressed like a prostitute,” he nearly loses his composure, but he maintains his poise. She serves him, caresses him, kisses his neck—one feels to a degree slightly exceeding strict literary necessity. As she arouses him, “the smell of asceticism that issued from the blessed man’s body hit her,” but she does not yet recognize her uncle. They dine and prepare for venery. When they retire to a private room, the monk removes his helmet. She sees the face of her uncle and goes stiff with terror. “I cannot bring myself to look upon you, sir, seeing what a shameful thing I have done. How can I pray to God, now that I have befouled myself in this stench and mud?” He convinces her that God will forgive her sin, and she repents. They return to their former life together, in austere holiness, and passersby would come at night to hear her sobbing prayers of penitence.67 The author of Mary’s story has summoned the atmospherics of romance throughout this tale of sin and redemption. The romantic elements are not mere “motifs,” decorative ornaments to impress the author’s erudition upon his audience. They are integral to the meaning of the story and add considerably to the psychological drama. Mary is created in the image of a romantic heroine, to accentuate the fact that she experiences the one cataclysm that cannot befall a romantic heroine. Moreover, the most distinctive element in the story is Mary’s self-relegation to a brothel. Her flight is a psychologically compelling reaction to the blunt paralysis of sexual shame. By willfully submitting to the life of prostitution as a penalty for her sexual delinquency, Mary is acting under the traditional rules of honor and shame. Her uncle, Abraham, resurrects her from this social death by presenting a supervenient logic of sexual morality organized around sin and righteousness.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  On a journey to Troas we visited the plain of the Scamander in time of catastrophe: I had come to see the flood and appraise its damage at first hand; the waters, under a strangely green sky, were making mere islets of the mounds of the ancient tombs. I took a moment to pay homage at the tomb of Hector; Antinous stood dreaming over Patroclus' grave but I failed to recognize in the devoted young fawn who accompanied me an emulator of Achilles' friend: when I derided those passionate loyalties which abound chiefly in books the handsome boy was insulted, and flushed crimson. Frankness was rapidly becoming the one virtue to which I constrained myself; I was beginning to realize that our observance of that heroic code which Greece had built around the attachment of a mature man for a younger companion is often no more for us than hypocrisy and pretence. More sensitive to Rome's prejudices than I was aware, I recalled that although they grant sensuality a role they see only shameful folly in love; I was again seized by my mania for avoiding exclusive dependence on any one being. Shortcomings which were merely those of youth, and as such were inseparable from my choice, began to exasperate me. In this passion of wholly different order I was finally reinstating all that had irritated me in my Roman mistresses: perfumes, elaborate attire, and the cool luxury of jewels took their place again in my life. Fears almost without justification had entered that brooding heart; I have seen the boy anxious at the thought of soon becoming nineteen. Dangerous whims and sudden anger shaking the Medusa-like curls above that stubborn brow alternated with a melancholy which was close to stupor, and with a gentleness more and more broken. Once I struck him; I shall remember forever those horrified eyes. But the offended idol remained an idol, and my expiatory sacrifices began. All the sacred Mysteries of Asia, with their strident music, served now to add to this voluptuous unrest. The period of Eleusis had indeed gone by.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  I answer that, A sin committed by a religious may be in three ways more grievous than a like sin committed by a secular. First, if it be against his religious vow; for instance if he be guilty of fornication or theft, because by fornication he acts against the vow of continence, and by theft against the vow of poverty; and not merely against a precept of the divine law. Secondly, if he sin out of contempt, because thereby he would seem to be the more ungrateful for the divine favors which have raised him to the state of perfection. Thus the Apostle says (Heb. 10:29) that the believer “deserveth worse punishments” who through contempt tramples under foot the Son of God. Hence the Lord complains (Jer. 11:15): “What is the meaning that My beloved hath wrought much wickedness in My house?” Thirdly, the sin of a religious may be greater on account of scandal, because many take note of his manner of life: wherefore it is written (Jer. 23:14): “I have seen the likeness of adulterers, and the way of lying in the Prophets of Jerusalem; and they strengthened the hands of the wicked, that no man should return from his evil doings.” On the other hand, if a religious, not out of contempt, but out of weakness or ignorance, commit a sin that is not against the vow of his profession, without giving scandal (for instance if he commit it in secret) he sins less grievously in the same kind of sin than a secular, because his sin if slight is absorbed as it were by his many good works, and if it be mortal, he more easily recovers from it. First, because he has a right intention towards God, and though it be intercepted for the moment, it is easily restored to its former object. Hence Origen commenting on Ps. 36:24, “When he shall fall he shall not be bruised,” says (Hom. iv in Ps. 36): “The wicked man, if he sin, repents not, and fails to make amends for his sin. But the just man knows how to make amends and recover himself; even as he who had said: ‘I know not the man,’ shortly afterwards when the Lord had looked on him, knew to shed most bitter tears, and he who from the roof had seen a woman and desired her knew to say: ‘I have sinned and done evil before Thee.’” Secondly, he is assisted by his fellow-religious to rise again, according to Eccles. 4:10, “If one fall he shall be supported by the other: woe to him that is alone, for when he falleth he hath none to lift him up.” Reply to Objection 1: The words quoted refer to things done through weakness or ignorance, but not to those that are done out of contempt. Reply to Objection 2: Josaphat also, to whom these words were addressed, sinned not out of contempt, but out of a certain weakness of human affection.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  The combination of the yellow jackets and the vinegar has taken its toll. Standing completely still, I examine the concave curve of my stomach and the bones sticking out against the skin of my hips. My legs are straight lines interrupted by the bump of my knees; nothing about them is shapely. I’m totally flat-chested, and my rib cage is clearly outlined underneath the blue stripes of my tube top. I have to look harder to see what I’ve always seen—I can no longer find the pretty girl that used to greet me as I walked by. In fact, there are shocks of gray in my hair in front and in back, and when I reach up and touch the spot where my skull meets the nape of my neck, I find the raw, soft patches of baldness that I’ve been hiding with what’s left of my hair. I stare at myself and, as usual, keep my mouth closed so the huge gap in my front teeth isn’t visible in the reflection. I don’t even recognize this girl! She is not me. I’ll have to start ninth grade like this . . . high school. Even if I could go back to Billy Blake’s, there aren’t enough designer clothes in their entire girls’ department to make me fit in. For the first time, I’m seeing what Cookie says she sees when she looks at me: a rag doll. Cookie returns before Labor Day weekend. Norman, Rosie, and I are sitting in the living room watching television when she walks through the front door as if she’s only been gone an hour. She’s carrying a box of Cap’n Crunch, powdered milk, and a six-pack of beer. She’s still wearing the pair of jeans she walked out in and her hair is still in a ponytail, with half of it red and the newer parts dyed black. Before, Norman would have run to her, given her hugs, and shouted “Mom! Mom!” but today he glances at me with raised eyebrows and then turns his attention back to The Electric Company . Silently, I chalk up a point in my favor: These last two months have put him officially on my side. Norman’s trust in me is the best thing about my relationship with him . . . and the worst thing for my relationship with Cookie. “Here’s your dinner,” she says. Even with such nonchalance, her presence alters the feeling in the room, establishing a weight I can feel in my chest. She waltzes past the stairwell and into the kitchen, where I hear her set the cereal and beer down, rip a can from its plastic ring, and pop it open. “You look like shit,” she calls from the kitchen. Then she goes into her room and shuts the door. I’m in awe that, just seconds ago, this house felt clean and safe. Her presence has released a pollution that I can feel settling like grit on my skin.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  “Regina, your curfew is seven thirty every night,” she announces. That sounds fine—besides the library, where else would I go? Then she adds, “And we don’t approve of your having any boys in the house.” “Boys?” I laugh. “Look at me, I’m less lovable than a punching bag. Besides,” I mumble, “I’m only thirteen.” Addie freezes and looks at me. In silence, Pete places his wrists on the table. “That doesn’t matter,” Addie says. “You’ll turn fourteen in three days, and the rule here is that there’s no dating until you’re sixteen. We’ve had that rule in place for all our foster kids and our three daughters, and it’s worked out very well.” Then she looks at Camille. “We know you have a boyfriend.” Camille places her fork quietly on her plate, as though she’s been caught sliding their good silver into her pockets. “Tell him there is a curfew of nine o’clock for you, and he has to come to the door to pick you up and drop you off. No horn-honking in this neighborhood.” Ouch. One for Addie. Then she goes on to discuss food distribution. “I’m on Weight Watchers,” she says, “so please, hands off the dietetic food.” Camille and I look at her blankly: Has she seen the size of our waists? We nod. No problem. We’re probably the only two teenagers on all of Long Island who aren’t trying to lose weight. “And since there will always be someone at home, you won’t need a set of keys.” I nudge my knee into Camille under the table, and she nudges back hard: Here it is! The key conversation. Foster kids never, ever get keys. The phrase There will always be someone at home is to be translated as Being Rent-a-Kids, you are guilty until proven innocent, and we assume that almost certainly you are thieves who cannot be trusted. Addie tells us if there’s ever no one home, the porch is a safe place for us to wait. It’s a really pretty porch, too , I want to gush insincerely, but I stuff my grilled cheese into my mouth instead. Addie tells us she has three grown daughters, Paula, Prudence, and Penny. I keep filling my face with grilled cheese, finding it hilarious all their initials are P. P. Two of them clean houses in a business with Addie every morning and the third is a nurse. They’re all married, and they’ve all decorated their homes just like Addie’s. As she says this, it’s clear she’s restraining herself from beaming. She tells us how she and Pete met when they were teenagers and married right out of high school. Pete’s frame is short and strong, and he’s made a career as a contractor and carpenter—in fact, Addie says, he built the very house we’re sitting in. This reminds her of the remaining house rules. Whatever Pete wants to watch on TV is what we all have to watch. Who cares? I want to say.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  In the house I close the front door, knowing that, sooner or later, I’ll have to attempt to face myself in the full-length mirror. Because I grew so thin over the summer, the marks from this beating have taken on dimensions I’ve never witnessed. They’re so large and discolored that they cover my entire body like a single mass of blue, black, and red. In some places the marks are so grotesque that it’s as though the barrier of my skin has collapsed and my insides are practically exposed. I ride the late bus to Centereach High School, keeping my hair down so it covers my face. It takes all of my concentration to ignore the stares I get from the other students. A long-sleeved sweatshirt covers my arms and back. After second period, Mr. Brown, my social studies teacher, pulls me aside. “Now, Regina,” he says, trying to hold my eyes while I stare at my shoes. “I don’t want to have to ask you about your personal life—that’s between you and your family. You flunked the last test though, and unless some miracle happens between now and the quarter-end exam, I’m going to have to fail you. So whatever’s going on, it has to stop.” I continue staring at the floor. He softens his voice. “If you tell me where all these marks came from, there’s a chance I can give you a passing grade.” Mr. Brown is bigger than my mother but not at all threatening. He keeps his hand resting softly on my arm, as though he thinks I might run. But I can’t tell him. When I finally raise my head to look at him, he blinks to suppress a flinch. “I’m fine,” I mumble. “I can’t be late for my next class.” Then, I bolt. When I arrive home from school that afternoon, there’s a car I don’t recognize in the driveway. The front door is hanging wide open. Oh no! A social worker is rooting through the kitchen cabinets and drawers. She’s young and blond, wearing khakis and no makeup. Her face holds a flat expression: She’s definitely on a mission. When she notices me, she stops, openly looking at the bruises on my face. I can see she’s trying to control her expression when she introduces herself. “Regina,” she says. “I’m Ms. Davis.” She motions for me to let her look at my arms and gasps as she pushes up my sleeves. “Your school called my office today. I need to know what happened.” My first thought is to give her what’s become my natural reaction when I’m confronted with how we live: I lie. I lie for us. I say, “My sisters and I were roughhousing,” or “I fell out of the tree I was climbing,” or “I fell off of my friend’s bike onto the gravel.” I know if I tell her the truth, we’ll all be separated. “I fell down the basement stairs holding an iron,” I tell her.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  She waddles into the store and emerges a few minutes later with a six-pack of cold Budweisers, two packs of Virginia Slims Lights, a loaf of bread, a jar each of peanut butter and jelly, and a roll of toilet paper. “We’ll sleep here for tonight, kids. Don’t worry. I’ll hit up their friends tomorrow . . . turn up the heat a little. They’re not going to get away with ignoring me that easy.” Cherie, Camille, Norm, and I move a few garbage bags out of the station wagon to make room for all six of us to sleep. “Leave the important ones in here,” Cookie says from the front seat, “just in case we need to make a quick getaway.” Rosie climbs into a backseat floorwell, and Norm tucks himself in the other. Cookie relaxes against the headrest of the driver’s seat and cracks open a beer, and I huff silently when my sisters decide I should sleep on the passenger-side floor. “I’d rather sleep in the trunk with the bags,” I whisper to Camille, who uses her eyes to suggest I go with the flow. Then she and Cherie stack heads-on-shoulders in the backseat, lounging against each other with their eyes closed. We wake to a car stinking of perspiration and cigarettes. Cookie rubs her eyes and announces, “I gotta go pop a squat.” After we’ve hauled all the bags back inside the car, she takes off down the highway and pulls into a McDonald’s. “Mom, are we eating here?” Norm asks, his eyes wide as pancakes. “What do you think, Norman? Huh?” He says nothing. “Are we eating here?” she mocks him. “Please. It’s for the bathroom and free napkins. We’ll need them later when we’re out of toilet paper.” She holds the restroom door open for us to file inside. “Try to look nice,” she says. “We’ve got a real important mission today.” When she pulls into a post office, we all pile out and into the building. “Is Mike here?” she yells up to the clerk from the line. The clerk looks at Cookie like she’s a madwoman. “Mike Calcaterra?” “He’s out on his route,” the clerk replies. “Well let him know ,” Cookie says in defiance, “that his grandchildren were here today, looking for him.” At the butcher, she props her elbows high on the deli counter. “Hey, any of you guys seen Rose Calcaterra?” When the men working the slicing machines turn to her with bewildered eyes, she continues her pursuit. “I’m Cookie, Mike and Rose’s daughter.” Her explanation does nothing to aid their understanding of what she’s doing there. “I know, it’s been a long time since I’ve been in here. See, I stopped by their house earlier, and they weren’t home. I’m just trying to track them down— Oh!” she says. “And by the way, these are their grandchildren. I wanted to introduce them to their grandparents.” Camille whispers to Cherie.

• From Untrue (2018)

  In Alicia Walker’s words, “When it comes to sexual autonomy, women are up against external and internal constraints in ways that men just aren’t.” In some instances, as with Walker’s study participants, the social script about women not caring as much as men about sex led them to believe they were “weird” or “just jacked up” not only for wanting sex so badly that they sought it outside their marriages but for wanting it period. Meanwhile, the proscription against extra-pair sex and particularly female infidelity is so comprehensive that one woman I interviewed, whom I’ll call Michelle, was unable to forgive herself—not for cheating but for having been with a married woman. MichelleMichelle is a self-confident, independent, and inspiring person. She runs a nonprofit and has a prominent profile, speaking often on national news shows and writing for popular publications with huge readerships. She is a thought leader on Serious Topics, beautiful and smart. But she is also approachable and funny and fun, and her sense of humor is vast and wicked. I wasn’t aware she was gay until, at her prompting, I found myself talking to her about my book at a mutual friend’s party. Forthright and wry, Michelle said, “You know I’m a lez, right? Well, anyway, I am and now you know, and at some point I have to tell you about this woman I was involved with. I am still trying to understand it and how it happened and why I did what I did.” Michelle was soon off traveling for a series of speaking engagements, but we continued to be in touch. We exchanged some emails about her situation and her thoughts about it, but she kept things very general. Eventually we sat down together at a café when I was visiting the town where she lives. Michelle described the woman she was involved with for a time, Delia, as “very married, publicly married, you might say, and sort of a rock star in the lesbian community in my town.” They met at a cocktail party—“the kind that starts off very civilized but becomes a rager,” in Michelle’s words. Delia, whom Michelle found endearingly self-conscious, was there without her wife. When they spoke, they realized they had sons the same age, and after a couple of drinks, Delia told Michelle, “My wife is out of town, and I’m so happy about it.” “I took that in,” Michelle told me as we sat in the café. “I mean, I didn’t realize yet that she was flirting with me and that I was attracted to her, because it never crossed my [mind] that I’d allow myself to be interested in someone who’s married.” I asked her why, and without pausing, Michelle told me, “Because I want to be more than someone’s affair.” Still, the fact that Delia had dropped an unsubtle hint that she was unhappy in her marriage lodged in Michelle’s brain and stayed there.

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

  Th e heroine’s freedom is objective, a quality of her being that is apparent even to other characters in the ro- mance. When tomb raiders abducted Callirhoe, they were worried that it would be obvious from her appearance that they had kidnapped a free per- son. “Her beauty isn’t human and won’t go unnoticed. Will we say, ‘She’s a slave’— who would believe that once they’ve seen her?” Th e man who buys her immediately perceives her true status. “It is impossible for anybody who is not free by nature to be beautiful.” In the Ephesian Tale, Anthia’s master gives her to a fellow slave, a goatherd, but she manages to convince him to pity her “good birth.” When Leucippe is enslaved in Ephesus, she throws herself at the feet of her mistress, Melite, who instantly recognized, despite her tattered appearance, that the girl was not really a slave. “Even among such travails your beauty proclaims your good birth.” In Th e Ethiopian Tale, sta- tus is such an objective quality that, after a battle, the victors ransom the free captives and keep the slaves in slavery!  Because the heroine’s identity partakes in the mysterious essence of her freedom, to lose that freedom would be a sort of death. Th e romantic hero- ine must be, volubly, willing to die. Callirhoe would expressly rather be dead than be a slave. Anthia tells the slave about to sell her, “Just kill me yourself.” Slavery, and with it presumptive sexual shame, is a sort of social death. For the heroine to lose her physical purity would be, in eff ect, to cease to exist. Th e sentiment receives arch expression in Th e Ethiopian Tale. Th e heroine, Charicleia, refl ects on her willingness to commit suicide rather than experi- ROMANCE IN THE LATE CLASSICAL WORLD  ence defl oration. “If it is a death achieved without violation, sweet will be my end . . . chastity is a glorious winding sheet.” Th e line between honor and shame, freedom and slavery, chastity and violation, was considered a threshold between life and death. Th is conception fuels one of the more stunning tropes of the romance, the apparent death and resurrection of the heroine. Clitophon repeatedly believes that Leucippe has suff ered a grue- some death, but each time she is “reborn,” in that she reappears in the story unharmed— alive and virginal.  Characterization in the romance is based on sharply drawn types. In the social logic that assigns meaning to each role, slavery is encoded as the op- posite of the heroine. Th e logic is often exposed in highly contrived judicial dramas, which are a stock element of the genre. Th e civil law in the Greek romance is like the backdrop of the urbanized Mediterranean: recogniz- able, slightly irreal, and bent to suit the author’s purposes as needed.

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

  is information is transmitted under the text’s section on the lex Iulia. It has been argued, not unreasonably, that the lex Scantinia established criminal penalties for male sexual receptivity, possibly a fi xed fi ne, which the lex Iulia modifi ed with a sliding scale. All we can say is that from the early to the late empire the lex Scantinia is spoken of as a rule not quite in desuetude but never energetically applied. It was a legal loup- garou, haunting enough, even if verifi ed sightings were rare. Th e economic punishments of the lex Scantinia were, in fact, probably not the most eff ective or worrisome legal impositions faced by men who played the passive role in sex. Men who “submitted to the female role” were stigmatized by the civil disabilities of infamia, offi cial disrepute. Th e concept of infamia truly places us at the vital interface of social reputation and public order. In the early days of Rome, in an agrarian, militaristic society, it is likely that the censors who controlled access to voting and to public offi ce could strike men guilty of sexual deviance from the ranks of the eligible. Censorian infamia, this primitive maintenance of the circle of honor, can be pieced together only from later clues because it disappeared, ineluctably, with the transformation of Roman society into a vast, urbanized, civilian society. But the use of infamia survived into the imperial period. Never a perfectly systematic concept, infamia entailed civil disabilities, especially limits on the ability to hold offi ce or to access public legal remedies. If we judge simply by the legal debris that survive in the late codifi cations of Roman law, infamia appears to have relatively little bite. In fact, the only specifi c disability that we can be sure was applied to men who willingly submitted to sexual penetration was the ineligibility to apply to a public magistrate on someone else’s behalf. Th is deprivation may have be an ominous sign of other incapacities, but it is not in itself the most insidious form of stigmatization ever contrived. Th e dispositions against male sexual passivity in the classical law are strikingly few and general. Th ey refl ect enormous prejudice, but it is an ab- stract prejudice, giving little sense of how the law might actually have impinged on the lives of its subjects. Th e forms of legal discrimination against men who “used their bodies like women” in the high Roman Empire have rightly been described as ad hoc. Th ey came into play reactively, and “there were never any witch- hunts.” Th is is not to trivialize the viciousness of C H U R C H , S O C I E T Y, A N D S E X I N T H E A G E O F T R I U M P H 

• From Untrue (2018)

  Like her and a lot of women I interviewed, I learned to be indirect in these matters. I didn’t ask and didn’t tell. I tried to keep my pretexts straight. I had heart-pounding close calls. For a time, I decided to just stop being in a relationship, because trying to be true and allowing myself to be untrue were both so stressful. I was sure something was wrong with me. How come the more I knew a young man who was in theory and in reality so right for me, and the closer we got, the less I wanted him? Everybody knew women wanted intimacy and closeness. And commitment. Meanwhile, not a few of my boyfriends cheated themselves, and it hurt me profoundly. But I didn’t question the fact of their straying on any deep level. That was what men did, wasn’t it? Over the next decade or so, I worked, socialized, and had relationships and sex. I thought I would grow up and grow out of my “crazy” libido, that non-monogamy was perhaps a developmental stage for the twentysomething, and that once I was in my thirties, things would change. I would calm down and figure it all out, and life would get easier. It didn’t. When I was in a long-term relationship, the sexual spark died within a year or two, and I felt defective that it had happened—and that I cared enough about it to move on or look for other excitement. When I wasn’t in a relationship, I longed for sex and sought it out. This too made me feel like a freak, since everyone knows men want sex more than women. But more and more, I was learning that my peers were struggling too. Older now, my girlfriends and I had more perspective and less apprehension about talking. Even those of us in sexually exclusive relationships were not exactly true, at least in our minds. We fantasized about other men, and some of us fantasized about women. And struggled with the fact that we did. Some of us stepped out. We were bored, all of us, with coupled sex after a year or two, but what could we do? Cheating was a lot of work, with a lot of stigma. But when we thought about or experienced the passion and excitement of being with someone new, or considered trying something we’d never tried before, it felt worth the risks. In fact, it felt urgently necessary sometimes.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  When my classmates ask me where we lived over the past few years, I answer, “With my grandparents.” Then I quickly change the subject. And even though I think of this as my school, I sometimes can’t help but feel like a visitor. I observe others in the class—while they haven’t changed much, I definitely have. I wonder if I would be as content and confident as they are if we’d never been taken away that night. Would I feel differently about myself—pretty, clean, and carefree, like my classmates? I love to watch Kathleen Totter in her dresses, knee-high socks, and Mary Jane shoes, how her silky blond hair is neatly parted into two perfect ponytails that are tied with matching ribbons. But even if I had nicer clothes and polished shoes, none of it could cover up the past few years of turmoil. So I dress like I feel inside: stained, torn, wrinkled, and mismatched. The school made me get these big silver-rimmed glasses when they figured out I’d been hiding my strained vision by memorizing the eye chart every year, and my haircut makes me look more like my brother than my sisters. But for me, this actually works: I want my awkwardness to be clear to the other kids. Pretty much the only comfort I’ve ever felt is when I’ve been living in my own world, sending signals to others to keep away from me so they never find out the truth about my life. Rather than bothering to hint to my classmates that I’d love to be invited to their homes, I spend my afternoons studying in the school library or napping in the tree house. I also spend endless time in my room listening to my little vinyl records on my phonograph, always playing over and over the funny songs on the Dumb Ditties album we got from the Salvation Army. Since Karl was able to retrieve what few possessions we’d left at the Rocky Point house, I still have my Jesus figurines. Now, with a church across the street, I’m intrigued to find out why I’ve been carrying them around with me for as long as I can remember. So every Sunday, I cross the street by myself to attend all three morning services at the Episcopal church, retreating to my tree house after each one, until I see people filing in for the next service. I discover in the weekly bulletin that they also hold a Saturday-night service, and I begin attending that as well. I have no idea what I’m reading or singing about, but I take comfort in the safety of this space. It’s also the only place I’ve ever been where you can be a stranger and people still smile at you. Fifth grade is going great because my teacher thinks I’m special. The closer I get to Ms. Van Dover, the more I want to please her.

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

  The expansion of private force at the expense of public power was gradational, but no less dramatic for that fact. Already in the reign of Theoderic in Italy, generally one of the most traditional of the successor kingdoms, we find the king excusing justifiable homicide in the case of adultery on the grounds that it was simply a law of nature for men to defend their wives with the same violence that “bulls,” “rams,” and “stallions” controlled their mates, whereas the failure to do so would “redound to a man’s eternal shame”! Here, in early sixth-century Italy, was a society that still possessed a relatively strong apparatus of public law. A generation later, during the regency of Theoderic’s grandson, an edict was issued in the name of defending civilitas, civility. It compasses a number of sexual regulations. A man convicted of adultery was deprived of all rights of legitimate marriage himself; if rich, he lost half his property, and if poor, he was exiled. No man was to be joined to two wives at the same time, which was lust or cupidity, and in either case was to cost a man all of his property. If a man dishonored his marriage by being joined to a concubine, the woman was punished. A freeborn concubine was to be yoked to the slavery of the man’s wife; a slave who engaged in such disgrace was subjected to a penalty of the mistress’s choosing, “excepting the penalty of blood.” What is notable about this promulgation is not the headlong intrusion of moralism into lawgiving, but the subtle disappearance of old modes of regulation, in which status above all framed the dynamics of power between state and society. A century later, in the Visigothic kingdom of Spain, the mix of Christian moralizing and public pronouncement had continue to progress. Men who “lie with men” were to be castrated and placed under ecclesiastical supervision. For the first time we hear that a woman who “plays the role of a prostitute” was condemned to three hundred lashes and exiled from her city; so serious was the lawmaker that judges who were negligent in the enforcement of these measures were themselves to receive one hundred lashes and a fine of thirty gold coins. In the Byzantine world, older frameworks organized around status maintained their strength even in the Justinianic dispensation, and only in the Ecloga of the eighth century do we find a total breakdown of the old order. Gone is the ancient rubric of the lex Iulia. All extramarital sex is punished. Men are lashed for “fornication,” twice as harshly if they are married when they commit the offense; sex with one’s own slave is subject to public penalties. In these early medieval law codes, both eastern and western, we find Christian values fully expressed within the scaffolding of a new public order, one that owes less than might be imagined to ancient traditions even in so conservative a domain as juristic culture.6

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

  When Serapion meets Thais, he sees a bed and out of shame inquires about finding another, less visible place for their assignation. She assures him that the bed is secluded and adds, “If it is God you fear, the one who knows our secrets will see us wherever we go.” The monk is struck and asks if she knows of God. She confesses that she was baptized as a child but she never learned Christian teaching. She fell at the monk’s feet. “I know there is repentance for sinners, but by my wickedness I have exceeded the measure of forgiveness which can be offered.” He assures her that there is salvation, even for her. She gathered her worldly wealth and burned it “in the middle of the city.” Thais symbolizes a society superficially baptized but not reordered to strive for God—a reasonable likeness of the post-Theodosian world.57 [image "image" file=Image00001.jpg] As in the primitive version of the tale, Serapion leads the penitent prostitute to a female monastery. Thais is immured in a small cell with a hole just wide enough for food to be passed in. But in the refined version, the bare details of her enclosure and penance have become a grotesque portrait of human debasement. The cell is dark. Serapion seals it with lead himself. When Thais asks him where she is to discharge her bodily necessities, he answers, “Do what you must in the cell. You have luxuriated in sweet oils and perfumes, now let a fetid stench work its good on you.” She spent three years in darkness, as if in a tomb. Serapion went to Anthony—the father of Egyptian monasticism, who has been invited into this dark spiritual antiromance—to ask about the poor woman. Anthony’s disciple, Paul, dreams of a heavenly bed, attended by three virgins carrying lamps, with a crown upon it. A voice tells him that the bed is for Thais, the whore. Serapion goes to tell her that she is forgiven, and he finds her body so wasted away from penance that her skeleton is visible through her skin. Just days after coming out of her cell, Thais dies.58

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

  Rather, he was a fi ercely conservative enforcer of traditional Roman values. Constan- tine, like Augustus, saw himself as the found er of a social order, and like Augustus he carried out a sweeping renovation of the aristocracy, complete with renewed prohibitions on the intermarriage of his aristocracy and women of “humble or low” birth. Like Augustus, too, he simultaneously reformed the adultery statute, which as ever protected decent women while consign- ing vulnerable women, perhaps more than ever, to systematic sexual exploi- tation. Constantine, for instance, was more explicit and more severe than the classical law in defi ning which women were beyond the pale of public respectability. Women working in taverns, who “served the wines of intem- perance,” were rendered “unworthy of notice by the public law” by their “lowness of life.”  Th e tenor of Constantine’s rule can be judged from his procedural re- forms of the adultery law. Constantine ended the Augustan tradition of public informing, which had pressed public vigilance into the cause of sex- ual surveillance. Constantine wished to limit eligible in for mants to the woman’s husband or her male relatives. His outlook is informed by a sharper sense of honor and shame, and the patriarchal obligations on men to man- age their own womenfolk. Constantine allowed a revealing exception: in cases where a woman, presumably a widow, was having sex with a slave. “If a woman is revealed to be having a hidden liaison with a slave, let her be sentenced to capital punishment, and the reprobate slave sent to the fl ames. And let everyone have the capacity to report this public crime, let it be a full duty to declare it, let even a slave have permission to make an accusation, which if it is true shall bring him freedom, though if it is false, a penalty waits.” It was the fi rst time that a Roman emperor had deigned to created a law to redress the nefarious possibility that a woman might fi nd sexual companionship among her own domestics. What is so interesting about Constantine’s law is not the disapproval of a type of sexual conjunction that had always horrifi ed public opinion. It is the will of the emperor to regulate, directly, the sexual impropriety itself, rather than the secondary eff ects of such a mésalliance. Certainly such willingness played unintentionally into Christian designs. Slaves were ubiquitous in late ancient society, and the CHURCH, SOCIETY, AND SEX IN THE AGE OF TRIUMPH  phobia of surreptitious female infi delity spiraled into a general paranoia. Jerome, predictably, found such suspicion amenable to his anti- erotic pro- gram. “A woman’s reputation for sexual virtue is a fragile thing, like a pre- cious fl ower that breaks in the soft breeze and is ruined by the light wind.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I developed a passion for this science, which is too close to man ever to be absolute, but which, though subject to fad and to error, is constantly corrected by its contact with the immediate and the nude. Leotychides approached things from the most positive and practical point of view; he had developed an admirable system for reduction of fractures. We used to walk together at evening along the shore; this man of universal interests was curious about the structure of shells and the composition of sea mud. But he lacked facilities for experiment and regretted the Museum at Alexandria, where he had studied in his youth, with its laboratories and dissection rooms, its clash of opinions, and its competition between inventive minds. His was a clear, dry intelligence which taught me to value things above words, to mistrust mere formulas, and to observe rather than to judge. It was this bitter Greek who taught me method. In spite of the legends surrounding me, I have cared little for youth, and for my own youth least of all. This much vaunted portion of existence, considered dispassionately, seems to me often a formless, opaque, and unpolished period, both fragile and unstable. Needless to say I have found a certain number of exquisite exceptions to the rule, and two or three were admirable; of these, Mark, you yourself will have been the most pure. As for me, I was at twenty much what I am today, but not consistently so. Not everything in me was bad, but it could have been: the good or the better parts also lent strength to the worse. I look back with shame on my ignorance of the world, which I thought that I knew, and on my impatience, and on a kind of frivolous ambition and gross avidity which I then had. Must the truth be told? In the midst of the studious life of Athens, where all pleasures, too, received their due, I regretted not Rome itself but the atmosphere of that place where the business of the world is continually done and undone, where are heard the pulleys and gears in the machine of governmental power. The reign of Domitian was drawing to a close; my cousin Trajan, who had covered himself with glory on the Rhine frontier, ranked now as a popular hero; the Spanish tribe was gaining hold in Rome. Compared with that world of immediate action, the beloved Greek province seemed to me to be slumbering in a haze of ideas seldom stirred by change, and the political passivity of the Hellenes appeared a somewhat servile form of renunciation.

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

  Th e point bore repetition: “Th us we say a man commits adultery, if he sates his lust with a slave girl or a public whore while he has a wife.” Marital fi delity was the Christian path. “A wife (eleuthera) off ers at once plea sure and security and joy and honor and order and a clean conscience.” John Chrysostom was not, of course, a great exponent of the gifts of physical “plea sure,” so his passing praise, or at least tolerance, of it here must be written down as a rhetorical eff usion in an eff ort to persuade the crowd of the practicability of his model of Christian marriage. It is a telling concession.  Documents like Chrysostom’s sermons provide some of the grittiest and most authentic refl ections on the dynamics of power within the ancient marriage relationship. He claimed that “there is nothing more shameful CHURCH, SOCIETY, AND SEX IN THE AGE OF TRIUMPH  than a fornicating husband.” He bolstered his condemnation, though, with an uncomfortable depiction of the mundane confl icts within the house hold. “Do you want to know just how awful it is? Th ink of what life is like for those who suspect their wives. Food and drink become repulsive. An insidi- ous poison seems to suff use the whole table. Countless evils fi ll the house, like ruin, and they fl ee the home. Th ere is no sleep, no gentle night, no com- merce of lovers, no rays of sunshine. Th ey will actually think the light is a torment, not only when the wife is seen to be an adulteress, but even once there is the slightest suspicion. So, realize that your wife suff ers these very things when she hears or suspects that you have given yourself over to some whore.” In Chrysostom’s sermons, we see how the notion of sex as a cosmic battleground came to settle within the domestic squabbles of marriage. “If dread of hell doesn’t restrain you, then fear their black magic. When you deprive yourself of God’s help through your debauchery, and denude your- self of assistance from above, the whore will seize you more brazenly. Hatching plots against you and calling on her familiar demons with amu- lets devised for it, she will gain control over your well- being, making you a risible shame before all who live in the city.”

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I had a secretary, a very mediocre fellow, whom I retained because he knew all the routines of the chancellery, but who provoked me by his stubborn, snarling self-sufficiency: he refused to try new methods, and had a mania for arguing endlessly over trivial details. This fool irritated me one day more than usual; I raised my hand to slap him; unhappily, I was holding a style, which blinded his right eye. I shall never forget that howl of pain, that arm awkwardly bent to ward off the blow, that convulsed visage from which the blood spurted. I had Hermogenes sent for at once, to give the first care, and the oculist Capito was then consulted. But in vain; the eye was gone. Some days later the man resumed his work, a bandage across his face. I sent for him and asked him humbly to fix the amount of compensation which was his due. He replied with a wry smile that he asked of me only one thing, another right eye. He ended, however, by accepting a pension. I have kept him in my service; his presence serves me as a warning, and a punishment, perhaps. I had not wished to injure the wretch. But I had not desired, either, that a boy who loved me should die in his twentieth year. Jewish affairs were going from bad to worse. The work of construction was continuing in Jerusalem, in spite of the violent opposition of Zealot groups. A certain number of errors had been committed, not irreparable in themselves but immediately seized upon by fomentors of trouble for their own advantage. The Tenth Legion Fretensis has a wild boar for its emblem; when its standard was placed at the city gates, as is the custom, the populace, unused to painted or sculptured images (deprived as they have been for centuries by a superstition highly unfavorable to the progress of the arts), mistook that symbol for a swine, the meat of which is forbidden them, and read into that insignificant affair an affront to the customs of Israel.