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)

  mechanics of sexual regulation, but only within the terms established by the public authorities, whose criminalization of adultery was the foundation of an ancient po liti cal economy of sex. In Gregory’s world, those authorities have lost a little of their precarious hold on the circulation of sexual honor. Th e expansion of private force at the expense of public power was gradational, but no less dramatic for that fact. Already in the reign of Th eoderic in Italy, generally one of the most traditional of the successor kingdoms, we fi nd the king excusing justifi able hom i cide 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 Th eoderic’s grandson, an edict was issued in the name of defending ci-vilitas, 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 choos-ing, “excepting the penalty of blood.” What is notable about this promulga-tion 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 fi rst 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 mea sures were themselves to receive one hundred lashes and a fi ne of thirty gold coins. In the Byzantine world, older frameworks or ga nized around status maintained their strength even in the Justinianic dispensation, and only in the Ecloga of the eighth century do we fi nd a total breakdown of the old order. C O N C L U S I O N  Gone is the ancient rubric of the lex Iulia. All extramarital sex is punished.

• From Untrue (2018)

  For starters, men needed their jobs in manufacturing and industry back. And so women would have to give them up. Society mobilized to get them to do just that—through shame, guilt, and a propaganda program about the social importance of stay-at-home wives and mothers. As historians have pointed out, the rise of 1950s suburban living in the US, with its dearly held belief that a woman’s place was in the home and that to be female was to be fulfilled by the calling of intensive care for one’s children, household, and mate was certainly aided and abetted by the GI Bill, television shows like Leave It to Beaver and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and even fashion (Christian Dior’s lavish, wasp-waisted, and stilettoed “New Look” made it aggressively clear that it wasn’t chic to dress for a factory line anymore). One government PSA from the period showed a female factory worker in court, imploring the judge for a light sentence for her son accused of vandalism. “The message to women was clear,” writes historian Melissa E. Murray. “There was no need to [stay] in the labor force. Instead, women were needed back at the hearth in their traditional role as mothers responsible for the careful rearing of productive citizens.” Good mothers didn’t work. They went to court to bail their kids out. They cooked and cleaned. Their work was the home. Bateman’s conclusions participated in cajoling women out of the workforce in an admittedly indirect but hardly subtle way. Insights about Drosophila melanogaster helped reassert plough-informed gender roles by giving scientific credence to the idea that females are by nature sexually exclusive nesters who find satisfaction not in the world of action, competition, and earning but in monogamous heterosexual mating and intensive investment in their offspring. Die, Rosie the Riveter.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I wasn’t the hot guy in class. I wasn’t even the cute guy in class. I was ugly. Puberty was not kind to me. My acne was so bad that people used to ask what was wrong with me, like I’d had an allergic reaction to something. It was the kind of acne that qualifies as a medical condition. Acne vulgaris, the doctor called it. We’re not talking about pimples, kids. We’re talking pustules—big, pus-filled blackheads and whiteheads. They started on my forehead, spread down the sides of my face, and covered my cheeks and neck and ravaged me everywhere. Being poor didn’t help. Not only could I not afford a decent haircut, leaving me with a huge, unruly Afro, but my mother also used to get angry at the fact that I grew out of my school uniforms too fast, so to save money she started buying my clothes three sizes too big. My blazer was too long and my pants were too baggy and my shoes flopped around. I was a clown.

• From Untrue (2018)

  During the summers, Dan worked while Annika traveled—and occasionally slept with other men she met. Again, she and Dan “never discussed it. I had a measure of independence even then.” She was unsure what Dan did while she was away, Annika said, “but I have to guess he was seeing other people too.” Or maybe not, as he didn’t seem to have much of a sex drive, a fact that Annika continued to push to the back of her mind. What kind of a woman cared about something like that? she wondered. Anyway, a few of Annika’s college girlfriends had similar non-arrangements—of the “Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t talk” variety—with their boyfriends. So Annika didn’t feel so unusual, even as she wished Dan wanted her more and felt awkward and stressed about nearly getting caught and keeping secrets. They found an apartment together in the city after she graduated, and soon Dan began pushing for marriage. “Maybe it’s my Scandinavian background, but I was in no hurry,” Annika told me as she poured us each another cup of tea. “My parents had friends in very long-term, committed relationships, people with kids, who weren’t married.” Sex, specifically Dan wanting it less than Annika did, was also an issue. “It made me feel…rejected and undesirable. He said it was because he had low testosterone or because he was tired. For a while I was just occasionally having sex with guys I met through work or at a party. I would not have been sleeping with other guys if our sex life had been great, honestly. I felt like I deserved to have a sex life.” But “undisclosed non-monogamy” was emotionally costly. There were several close calls over the years, once when a man she’d had over left his jacket there and Dan, suspicious, asked whose it was. Her heart pounding, Annika made an excuse—it belonged to their friend—and made a note to herself: the risks of cheating just weren’t worth it. And yet it was exciting to be with other men, and their desire was a kind of salve against Dan’s sexual indifference. Like Alicia Walker’s interview subjects, Annika used undisclosed extra-pair sex as a “workaround” strategy in order to stay in a sexless relationship. When Dan proposed yet again, Annika thought it might somehow fix things, at least for him. “I figured, He’s American. This means a lot to him. Maybe getting married will make things better for us.” She said yes, and for a while it did. But after an initial literal honeymoon period of ardor, Dan was no more interested in sex than he had been before marriage. And Annika began sleeping with other men again. It made her feel twinges of guilt, sure, but it was also thrilling and made her feel wanted and alive.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  There was an old mattress on the floor and he got himself onto it and began to take his shirt off, watching the girl as she took off all her clothing. She lay down in the bed next to him and asked him why he wasn’t taking off his pants. “I can’t.” He hesitated. It was very hard for him to talk about. “I can’t take them off,” he said. He pointed to his legs. “They were paralyzed in the war.” She looked at him and seemed very confused. “The war,” he said. “Vietnam. Have you ever heard of Vietnam?” “Vietnam, yes.” “I can’t move it,” he said, showing her his penis. “You see this?” he said, pointing at the yellow catheter tube. “It doesn’t move anymore and I have to use this tube. You see this tube,” he said, pointing to it again. “It’s okay,” he said. “Don’t worry about it, senorita is muy bonita ,” he said, staring at her dark eyes. “We can still love,” he said. The tears began to roll down her face. She was sitting in the bed next to him crying. “You see?” he said, pointing to the scar on his chest. “This is where they stuck a chest tube. . . .” She was getting up now and putting her clothes back on. She was still crying. She was so very beautiful and he wanted so much to lie with her body warm and soft against the top of him, where he could still feel. But now she was walking out the door, leaving for good. She didn’t even ask for his money, she didn’t even want that. He lay there for a long time until the madam came in and said it was time for him to leave. It was getting very late, she said. He put on his shirt and dragged his body across the bed, back into the wheelchair. The madam helped him out into the street. It was early in the morning and the sun was about to come up and he sat crying outside the whorehouse. A cab came by. The driver stopped and asked him if he needed anything. “Do you need a woman?” he said. “Hey, want to go to a great whorehouse? There’s a woman in there that will knock you out, really knows how to fuck.” There wasn’t anything left to lose, he thought. The driver got out of his cab and pushed him down the street to a place that was still open. “Wait a minute out here. I’ll be right back,” he told him. He came back with a big smile on his face. “Maria will be right out,” he said, and pushed him into the bar. A very young girl came into the room, walking past all the tables and then up to his. She had long brown hair down to her waist. “Do you want to sleep with me?” she said.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Ancient Romans, notorious for their sexual excess, were more likely to consider adultery a basically private matter to be resolved within the home rather than the courts. It was a personal rather than a criminal offense. During the reign of Augustus, however, new moral codes were implemented, including one that permitted the paterfamilias to put both adulterous parties to death. It is no coincidence that during this period, Virgil penned his Georgics, a paean to agriculture and farming life, reciting it to Augustus around 30 BC. Nor is it insignificant that the Roman way of life was often symbolized by a loaf of bread—wheat was a plough crop and a household staple. Against this backdrop and Augustus’s consolidation of power as he transitioned Rome from a republic to an empire with himself at the head, Augustus had his own daughter, Julia—vivacious, witty, and later the maternal grandmother of Caligula—exiled to a remote island of Campania for her many affairs, conducted openly while she was married to Tiberius. When asked why all her children resembled their father, she had famously quipped that she only took on new passengers when the boat was already loaded—that is, when she knew she was already pregnant by her husband. Noble though she may have been, in the reorganization of Rome under her father her own libido became a site of social control, and her deceptions and autonomy her undoing. Augustus called his intelligent daughter, beloved by the Romans for her generosity, “a disease in my flesh.” Later, when Tiberius succeeded Julia’s father as emperor, he withheld her allowance, and she died of malnutrition at age fifty-three in AD 14, the same year Augustus passed away, almost as if her fate, like Iphigenia’s, could not be unlinked from her father’s. In a context where female sexual autonomy was associated with lawlessness and potential chaos, even royal standing could not protect a woman from the consequences of alienating powerful men with her independent actions, now infidelities. Julia’s exile was presumably a powerful lesson for other women: do not, in the words of Natalie Angier, behave in ways that risk “the investment and tolerance of men and the greater male coalition.”

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

  e Roman lawyer Ulpian, in a legal defi nition of prostitution, claimed that sexual promiscuity was the decisive criterion of the prostitute, even more fundamental than venality. Th ere is no reason to believe that the author of this Life had read his Ulpian; rather, both are pushing the defi nition of prostitution by imagining the liminal case of a woman who did not accept payment. For Ulpian shame and prostitution merge at the horizon of his conservative worldview; for the Christian author, prostitution becomes, in the fi gure of Mary, pure sin. While Mary is living her debased life in Alexandria, she sees a crowd of Libyan and Egyptian men running toward the sea. Th ey are destined for Jerusalem, travelers to a holy feast. She has an urge to go with them but lacks money for the fare. Her motives are less than pure. “I wanted to go away with them in order to have a great many lovers, ready to serve my passions.” Mary throws down her distaff and approaches a group of youths who seem a likely mark for her ambitions. Waiting to board, she unlooses a torrent of shameless words that communicate her intentions. “Tongue cannot speak, ear cannot hear the things that happened on the journey, what acts I forced upon the wretched youths, against their will.” She stows on board, confi - dent of passage: “I have a body, and they will take that as my sailing fare.” What could be a clearer inversion of the romance? All the romances are tales of travel, of movement at sea; the heroine of the romance is moved by the force of necessity, taken captive by pirates against her will. Mary has set sail willingly, and corrupted herself with the crew out of her own lust. She has coerced men into sin. What the heroine of romance suff ered unwillingly as a test of her chastity, for Mary is an event that she engineered and during which her shamelessness reached new depths. Mary is the pirate. In Jerusalem Mary’s debauchery continues blazing its path. As the pilgrims gather for the feast, Mary hunts fresh prey. She brazenly goes to the Church of the True Cross, and even tries to enter, but she is repelled by R O M A N C E I N T H E L AT E C L A S S I C A L WO R L D 

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

  It is highly telling that the passages of the Divine Institutes devoted to libido are followed immediately by the presentation of Christian notions of penance. A rigorous sexual morality, if it is genuinely ambitious, will have mechanisms ready for the contingency of errant behavior. “Let no one desert or despair of himself if, overtaken by passion, driven by lust, deceived by error, or coerced by violence, he has fallen down the path of injustice.” Just a few years later, after the conversion of Constantine, Lactantius issued an abbreviated second edition of the Divine Institutes. Indulgence is given an even wider berth. “But in fact all of these things are difficult for man, nor in this state of frailty can any be without stain. Therefore the ultimate cure is that we may take refuge in penance.” The distance traveled from the time of Paul—who counseled in such searing, urgent words that sinners should be cast from the midst of the Christian assembly—is measured by the triumph of pragmatism over puritanism in the church’s management of sexual sin. The elaboration of a penitential discipline that could regulate the errors of the flesh is a sure sign of Christianity’s coming-of-age as a mass movement. The famous canons of Elvira, one of the earliest Christian synods, are almost precisely contemporary with the Divine Institutes. At this summit of Christian leaders in Spain, it was apparent that sexual discipline would be a leading preoccupation for a church quickly gathering size and strength. The canons of Elvira, like the pages of Lactantius, reflect the first stirrings of a great revolution in the boundaries of the church, in which it was transformed from a puritanical minority into an immense sexual sanatorium for all the world’s sinners.4

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

  ais 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 carry ing lamps, with a crown upon it. A voice tells him that the bed is for Th ais, the whore. Serapion goes to tell her that she is forgiven, and he fi nds her body so wasted away from penance that her skeleton is visible through her skin. Just days after coming out of her cell, Th ais dies. Th e story of Th ais is dominated by its heroine’s debasement. Th ough her life is said to have fulfi lled the dictum “Th e prostitutes and publicans will precede you into the kingdom of heaven,” the gospel expression retains  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N none of its original compassion for society’s outcasts. Th e Life of Th ais is valuable because it allows us to watch the translation of a primitive monastic tale into the symbolic world of classical fi ction. It already reveals the way that new confi gurations of religion, society, and the body fueled the literary imagination. Because the Life of Th ais is aesthetically clumsy, its author’s handiwork is nakedly obvious. Th e other three examples of the subgenre are more artful, and they reveal a deeper mastery of the medium and its potential. Among the earliest competitors to the Life of Th ais is the story of Pelagia, a prostitute and actress of Antioch. Th anks only to the brief aside in the sermon of Chrysostom do we know that there is a kernel of historicity in the story of a glamorous celebrity who converted to the ascetic life. We cannot say how far legendary material had accreted around her by the time the author of the life, sometime in the fi fth century, elaborated the written version that survives. We can only say that the author, who purports to be a deacon named Jacob, was a highly literate spirit, one of those soldiers of Christian culture who remade the ancient tradition in a Christian mold. Th e Life of Pelagia is highly conscious of its status as an antiromance. It counterposes its hero, an ascetic bishop named Nonnos, and its heroine, the redoubtable Pelagia, in the symmetrical fashion of the Greek novel. Th e story

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

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

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

  Leucippe described the prostitute’s substitutional death in the language of animal sacrifi ce; it was a resonant statement in a culture that still very much believed in the mysterious powers of propitiation. While Leucippe’s eleutheria, her freedom and sexual respectability, kept her body inviolate through the most extreme tribulations, fate was not so kind to her opposite, the unfortunate prostitute.  Achilles Tatius has transformed mundane social prejudice into high art. Th at there were two fates for women was a fundamental and unchanging tenet of ancient sexual ideologies. Down one path lay promiscuity and  FROM SHAME TO SIN shame, personifi ed in the prostitute; down the other lay chastity and honor, personifi ed in the virgin and the matron. Th ese two fates were deeply em- bedded in patterns of social reproduction, loosely codifi ed in public law, and actively reinforced by the social technology of honor and shame. It is an achievement of Leucippe and Clitophon that the story has so openly con- templated the inscrutable economy of fortune, in the stunning contrast between its benefi ciary and its victim. Th e fate of the prostitute seems only more capricious and unjust in a novelistic universe where there is no re- demption beyond life, only the prospect of salvation through conjugal eros. In the cosmos created by the author, the prostitute’s grotesque demise serves only to exhibit the good fortune of Leucippe in even greater contrast. Th e norms attaching to male sexual behavior inevitably attract the lion’s share of the attention from historians. It is an obvious and insurmountable fact that our in for mants are almost exclusively male. More subtly, expecta- tions of female sexual behavior can seem uniform and immobile: good girls remain pure until marriage, faithful within marriage. Th e imposition of these limits is as unsurprising as the dawn. Th e eff ort to control female sexu- ality is precultural, a permanent fi xture of sexual competition. Th e regula- tion of female sexuality in the ancient Mediterranean shared all the predict- able features of a patriarchal culture. Nevertheless, the actual mechanics and specifi c infl ections of feminine sexual norms in the pre- Christian world merit closer inspection. Th e peculiar complexion of classical sexual culture derived from the institutionalization of a stark, binary opposition between women who possessed and women who lacked sexual honor.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Miller-Young is particularly interested in the adult entertainment actresses who perform in bondage and use racial stereotypes to market their bodies. Of sex educator/writer/performance artist Mollena Lee Williams-Haas, who starts her show in chains, unshackles herself, and then chooses to get into bindings again, Miller-Young observes the performance’s subtext “about slavery…it’s actually a continuing legacy that shapes our lives. It shapes our opportunities in a society and how we’re treated and how we see ourselves…and so she uses that representation to display that she now has power but that that power she has is connected to that history.” Miller-Young is fascinated by the way porn “takes up the challenge of subverting norms, even as it catalyzes and perpetuates them.” Black women who work in porn face a lot of misconceptions. Misunderstanding comes from two directions, Miller-Young explains. “One is from people of color…[who believe] you’re selling out—that you’re…signing on to exploitation and racism and making racism worse for everybody else…by participating in what they feel are stereotypical images or understandings, because largely people of color have been exoticized and hypersexualized and seen as having a deviant sexuality…The feeling of people of color in a lot of communities is that you’re…making the community look bad…you’re an embarrassment, and you’re…creating shame for the community—a really powerful shame.” At the same time, there are misperceptions “from white people who…predominantly have had this…knowledge passed on to them that people of color are hypersexual. And so they may think that they’re just naturally that way instead of performing a character…or performing in a film that has a script, that those…people of color sex workers really are just representations of how all black men have big dicks and…how women of color really are just more kinky and want sex more than everyone else.” Like the actresses in the films themselves, Miller-Young has been accused of making the community look bad. Or she has simply seen the value of her work questioned. During an interview with Miller-Young and sex researcher Dr. Herb Samuels on NPR, the host Farai Chideya acknowledged this dilemma, saying, “A lot of my relatives probably right now are saying, ‘Why is Farai even covering this?’” Overtly hostile critics have suggested that Miller-Young demeans herself and people of color with her work; still others have “said that by showing these images of porn stars, I [am] re-exploiting them. But I’m fascinated by the ‘ho,’” Miller-Young observes, refusing to back away from the powerful trope that causes discomfort, shame, excitement, and ire. “She is a figure that all black women have to contend with, whether you are sex workers or professors.” The real problem with the ho image for adult entertainment actresses, Miller-Young learned from talking to them, is that it devalues their labor. By deploying the ho, by not giving African American female actors the opportunity to play other roles, the porn industry maintains a segregated, niche market for black sexuality where actors are paid less, and kept there.

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

  CHRYSOSTOM. Well then does he call the ruler of the synagogue a hypocrite, for he had the appearance of an observer of the law, but in his heart was a crafty and envious man. For it troubles him not that the Sabbath is broken, but that Christ is glorified. Now observe, that whenever Christ orders a work to be done, (as when He ordered the man sick of the palsy to take up his bed,) He raises His words to something higher, convincing men by the majesty of the Father, as He says, My Father worketh until now, and I work. (John 5:17.) But in this place, as doing every thing by word, He adds nothing further, refuting their calumny by the very things which they themselves did. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. Now the ruler of the synagogue is convicted a hypocrite, in that he leads his cattle to watering on the Sabbath-day, but this woman, not more by birth than by faith the daughter of Abraham, he thought unworthy to be loosed from the chain of her infirmity. Therefore He adds, And ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound, lo, these eighteen years, to be loosed from this bond on the sabbath-day? The ruler preferred that this woman should like the beasts rather look upon the earth than receive her natural stature, provided that Christ was not magnified. But they had nothing to answer; they themselves unanswerably condemned themselves. Hence it follows, And when he had said these things, all his adversaries were ashamed. But the people, reaping great good from His miracles, rejoiced at the signs which they saw, as it follows, And all the people rejoiced. For the glory of His works vanquished every scruple in them who sought Him not with corrupt hearts. GREGORY. (Hom. 31. in Evang.) Mystically the unfruitful fig tree signifies the woman that was bowed down. For human nature of its own will rushes into sin, and as it would not bring forth the fruit of obedience, has lost the state of uprightness. The same fig tree preserved signifies the woman made upright. AMBROSE. Or the fig tree represents the synagogue; afterwards in the infirm woman there follows as it were a figure of the Church, which having fulfilled the measure of the law and the resurrection, and now raised up on high in that eternal resting place, can no more experience the frailty of our weak inclinations. Nor could this woman be healed except she had fulfilled the law and grace. For in ten sentences is contained the perfection of the law, and in the number eight the fulness of the resurrection.

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

  THE CURRENT FASHION: SAME-SEX EROS IN THE HIGH EMPIREAround the age of nineteen, Clitophon’s cousin Leucippe came to live with him and his family in Tyre. He fell in love with her at first sight. Paralyzed by his infatuation, he took his troubles to his cousin Clinias, only two years his elder but already “an initiate of eros.” Clinias quickly became his trusty counselor. The passions of Clinias were for a meirakion, a boy somewhere in his later teens, and his coaching is meant to be understood in terms of pederastic norms. The ancient novels are, both superficially and in their deep structure, stories of heterosexual love, but same-sex amours still find an important place. In fact, the first two books of Leucippe and Clitophon are framed by the traditional assumptions of classical Greek pederasty, transposed onto a heterosexual plot. Clinias claimed that “boy and maiden” alike shared a sense of shame; seduction, he argued, required the lover to draw out the beloved’s consent by the most delicate rituals of courtship, slowly wearing down the beloved’s guard without making startling moves. Then, Clinias advised, “when you have a tacit understanding that the next step is the big deed, even those who are ready to surrender prefer the appearance of compulsion, to let the façade of force deflect the shame of consent.” Couched in terms of a plot to seduce Leucippe, Clinias lays bare the central contradiction of classical pederastic norms: it required from the younger partner forms of consent that were intrinsically disgraceful.4

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Later it became obvious to me that other men in the dormitory had known about it. I was deeply aware that it was not a thing that could be appealed against. Also after that the teasing stopped, & I was shown a companionable respect. And we all learnt, when the Second Master himself came to the dormitory late at night a few weeks later, that Stanbridge’s brother had been killed in France: Stanbridge himself became clouded about & supported by the decent & entirely artificial respect that we young gentlemen accorded to the bereaved. Every week brought news of the deaths on the battlefields, often of Wykehamists who were fresh in the memories of dons & boys, & many of whom had been lavishly adored. Things did not pick up with Strong until the next term, when he had me as his valet. I put up a slight resistance to this idea, because there was something unnatural in being sweated. In the holidays I had servants of my own, so it seemed absurd to become a paid lackey in the term. Yet Strong was very businesslike & pleasant in his proposal. Although he was a College man he had, I now knew, the reputation of not being very bright. I should say what he looked like: solidly built, with a wide, square face, cleft chin, square nose, dark, deep-set eyes, a heavy beard for a schoolboy, & thick, curly hair that was almost black. His father was a banker, not a country person, but he had lived mostly with his mother near Fordingbridge. He had rather bandy legs, & walked on the outside edges of his feet. I did not particularly need the money I got from being his valet but all the men who were valets agreed that the money was why they did it. It soon became clear that he was very fond of me. He would make me clean his shoes & make his bed & cook his toast in Chambers over the coal fire. I did not really begin to fall in love with him until he became more obliging, calling me to him for no reason other than to have me there, or question me about something I was supposed to know—all this of course very shy & inept although it had to me the fascination of authority. But then other boys noticed that he had a softness for me, and brocked us both, so that I, who had been as unconscious as ever of anything erotic, suddenly learnt what was going on &, by some profound power of suggestion, what my feelings actually were. As soon as they said we were always together, I glowed that our secret had been revealed—although until that moment I had not known the secret myself. At first there were fighting denials, but the pleasure of affection overrode them, a pleasure oddly shared by the other boys, who were both catty and collusive.

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

  Mary of Egypt, when we meet her through the eyes of Zosimas, is a spectral fi gure. She constantly insists on her sinful nature and prays, in mysterious tongues, toward the east. Zosimas is entranced by her strange sanctity and begs for her story. Much like Achilles Tatius, the author of this Life has contrived to deliver the core of the narrative in the fi rst person and uses the perspective to artful eff ect: confession as a form of narrative. Mary is the consummate antiheroine. “My homeland was Egypt. When I turned twelve, with my parents still alive, I spurned this fi lial aff ection and took myself to Alexandria. I am ashamed to recall how I fi rst ruined my virginity, and what an unmitigated and insatiable lust for sex I had.” Her sexual depravity cannot be excused by extenuating circumstances— no orphan is she. Nor can plain moral weakness explain her fall. When she reached the fi rst threshold of sexual maturity— twelve, the legal minimum for marriage— she willingly fl ed her loving family. And she did so for one purpose, defi ned with crystalline precision: lust. For seventeen years, she so loved plea sure that she was a blazing inferno of sexual dissolution. “And not for the sake of money, to tell the truth. Often men wanted to pay something and I would not accept. I fi gured that I could make more men come to me if I made a free gift of my abandonment. Do not think that I refused such emoluments because I was rich. I survived by begging, or sometimes spinning fl ax. My unslakable passion and boundless desire was to wallow in such foul mire. Such was my life, and my consuming purpose— to rape my nature.” Mary is no damsel afl oat the winds of fate. Th e romantic heroine is a passive character, actively suff ering the whims of Fortune. Mary is lust in-carnate, the driving force in her own destiny. When she reaches the age at which a respectable girl might be contemplating the marriage market, she  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N careens headfi rst into a life of sexual abandonment. Most ancient literature emphasizes the lust of the male customer. Th e Life of Mary foregrounds the sexual aggression of this antiheroine. Th e story deliberately isolates Mary’s will as the true agent of her sexual depravity. She says she was poor— making barely enough to survive by selling the fl ax she could spin. (And with the mention of spinning, Mary evokes a symbol of female chastity as old as Penelope.) Despite her generosity, Mary is a prostitute. In the ancient Mediterranean, promiscuity— sexual availability, dishonor— was the essence of prostitution. Th

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  When God created humanity in the garden, Augustine asserts, he created him male and female, with bodies of flesh joined ab initio to spirit or soul. From this seemingly simple reading of Genesis Augustine draws some radical conclusions. First, and in sharp contrast to Origen, Augustine insists that God’s choice to make body and soul together mean that the fleshy body was the divinely willed habitat of the soul even before the Fall. Second—even more radically, given the premium that contemporary Christianity placed on virginity and on sexual celibacy—Augustine insists that God’s creation of Adam and Eve means that even before the Fall he had intended humans to be sexually active, “to be fruitful and multiply” precisely through the sexual union of male and female. Why else would God have bothered with gender?20 Augustine speculates on what sex without sin—thus, without the disorders of lust and without the humiliations of pleasure—would have been like. “The sexual organs would have been brought into activity by the same bidding of will as controlled the other organs. Then, without feeling the allurement of passion goading him on, the husband would have relaxed on his wife’s bosom in tranquility of mind,” without the “morbid condition” of lust, symbolized in and actualized by involuntary erection. Erection, ejaculation, insemination, conception: all would have occurred at will. Nor would sexual union have compromised virginity: “The male seed could have been dispatched into the womb with no loss of his wife’s integrity, just as menstrual flux can now be produced from the womb of a virgin without loss of maidenhead” (City of God 14.26). Rational mind would have presided over sexual union. Body would have been under the complete control of the soul, which would have been in complete control of itself—the way that God had originally made Adam, the way that humanity had been supposed to be. What had happened? Even though Adam had had complete freedom of will, being fully able not to sin, he chose instead to disobey the divine commandment. God thus struck him in the offending agent, the will itself; and since soul and body are immediately and intimately connected, the penal injury to the soul manifested itself instantaneously in the flesh (13.13). “There appeared in their body a certain indecent novelty which made nakedness shameful,” Augustine writes, “and made them self-conscious and embarrassed” (14.17; cf. 13.3, on Adam’s experience of “rebellion and disobedience of desire in his body”; cf. Gen 3.7). This basic disjuncture of body and soul, enacted every time the human pair had sexual intercourse, echoed a further disjuncture with which every generation of the species would also be cursed: the soul, created by nature together with the flesh would be wrenched, unwilling, from the body at death. “Death drives the soul from the body against her will” (City of God 21.3). Death itself, a direct consequence of the Fall, is the ultimate manifestation of the will’s broken power.

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

  Reply to Objection 3: These words of Peter are referred by some to Christ’s descent into hell: and they explain it in this sense: “Christ preached to them who formerly were unbelievers, and who were shut up in prison”—that is, in hell—“in spirit”—that is, by His soul. Hence Damascene says (De Fide Orth. iii): “As He evangelized them who are upon the earth, so did He those who were in hell”; not in order to convert unbelievers unto belief, but to put them to shame for their unbelief, since preaching cannot be understood otherwise than as the open manifesting of His Godhead. which was laid bare before them in the lower regions by His descending in power into hell. Augustine, however, furnishes a better exposition of the text in his Epistle to Evodius quoted above, namely, that the preaching is not to be referred to Christ’s descent into hell, but to the operation of His Godhead, to which He gave effect from the beginning of the world. Consequently, the sense is, that “to those (spirits) that were in prison”—that is, living in the mortal body, which is, as it were, the soul’s prison-house—“by the spirit” of His Godhead “He came and preached” by internal inspirations, and from without by the admonitions spoken by the righteous: to those, I say, He preached “which had been some time incredulous,” i.e. not believing in the preaching of Noe, “when they waited for the patience of God,” whereby the chastisement of the Deluge was put off: accordingly (Peter) adds: “In the days of Noe, when the Ark was being built.” Reply to Objection 4: The expression “Abraham’s bosom” may be taken in two senses. First of all, as implying that restfulness, existing there, from sensible pain; so that in this sense it cannot be called hell, nor are there any sorrows there. In another way it can be taken as implying the privation of longed-for glory: in this sense it has the character of hell and sorrow. Consequently, that rest of the blessed is now called Abraham’s bosom, yet it is not styled hell, nor are sorrows said to be now in Abraham’s bosom. Reply to Objection 5: As Gregory says (Moral. xiii): “Even the higher regions of hell he calls the deepest hell . . . For if relatively to the height of heaven this darksome air is infernal, then relatively to the height of this same air the earth lying beneath can be considered as infernal and deep. And again in comparison with the height of the same earth, those parts of hell which are higher than the other infernal mansions, may in this way be designated as the deepest hell.” Whether the whole Christ was in hell?Objection 1: It would seem that the whole Christ was not in hell. For Christ’s body is one of His parts. But His body was not in hell. Therefore, the whole Christ was not in hell.

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

  JEROME. For whoever is such that he imitates Christ’s humility and innocence, Christ is received by him; and by way of caution, that the Apostles should not think, when such are come to them, that it is to themselves that the honour is paid, He adds, that they are to be received not for their own desert, but in honour of their Master. CHRYSOSTOM. And to make this word the rather received. He subjoins a penalty in what follows, Whoso offendeth one of these little ones, & c. as though he had said, As those who for My sake honour one of these, have their reward, so they who dishonour shall undergo the extreme punishment. And marvel not that He calls an evil word an offence, for many of feeble spirit are offended by only being despised, JEROME. Observe that he who is offended is a little one, for the greater hearts do not take offences. And though it may be a general declaration against all who scandalize any, yet from the connection of the discourse it may be said specially to the Apostles; for in asking who should be greatest in the kingdom of heaven, they seemed to be contending for preeminence among themselves; and if they had persisted in this fault, they might have scandalized those whom they called to the faith, seeing the Apostles contending among themselves for the preference. ORIGEN. But how can he who has been converted, and become as a little child, be yet liable to be scandalized? This may be thus explained. Every one who believes on the Son of God, and walks after evangelic acts, is converted and walks as a little child; but he who is not converted that he may become as a child, it is impossible that he should enter into the kingdom of heaven. But in every congregation of believers, there are some only newly converted that they may become as little children, but not yet made such; these are the little ones in Christ, and these are they that receive offence. JEROME. When it is said, It is better for him that a mill-stone be hanged about his neck, He speaks according to the custom of the province; for among the Jews this was the punishment of the greater criminals, to drown them by a stone tied to them. It is better for him, because it is far better to receive a brief punishment for a fault, than to be reserved for eternal torments. CHRYSOSTOM. To correspond with the foregoing, He should have said here, Receiveth not Me, which were bitterer than any punishment; but because they were dull, and the before-named punishment did not move them, by a familiar instance He shews that punishment awaited them; for He therefore says, it were better for him, because another more grievous punishment awaits him.

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

  Before the fi rst two books are fi nished, Achilles Tatius off ers even more smirking refl ections on the protocols of romantic virginity. When Leucippe proved willing to submit to the sexual advances of Clitophon, her virginity was saved, as it were, against her will, through the last- minute intervention of her mother, who was alerted by a dream. On discovering her daughter in a compromising situation, Leucippe’s mother off ers a doleful speech. She regrets leaving a war zone to come to Tyre, because Leucippe seemed ready to lose her chastity willfully. “Would that you had been outraged by a conquering Th racian, for at least corruption by coercion carries no shame!” Th is, of course, is not true, at least not in romance, which is a whole genre built on the need of respectable women to preserve their physical integrity against violent incursions. Leucippe strikes back against her mother’s diatribe with a canny defense that makes equally dubious use of romantic protocols. “Impugn not my virginity, mother . . . for this I know is true: no one has done dishonor to my maidenhood.” In defense of herself Leucippe turns the deepest premise of the romance, the heroine’s chastity, into a mere technicality. Achilles has inverted the basic tension between internal purity and external endangerment to create a heroine who is internally compromised but externally safeguarded. Leucippe states her wish that there was some sort of virginity test to prove her innocence— a wish that is fulfi lled at the novel’s climax. After the failed seduction, Leucippe’s virginal resolve is steeled, and she even refuses future opportunities to sleep with Clitophon. Leucippe does not so much develop as a character, as the story itself returns to conventional order. She becomes a romantic heroine to fi t. Th e romance builds toward the fi nal and gravest threat to her chastity, the gruesome scene in which her master, Th ersander, attempts to rape her. Although the setting is R O M A N C E I N T H E L AT E C L A S S I C A L WO R L D  a private encounter between a master and his slave, the elements of the scene are perfectly homologous with the escapes of Anthia and Tarsia from the public brothel. Th is scene is extremely conscious of itself and its place in the economy of romance. Th e villainy of Th ersander is compounded by his brash refusal to believe that Leucippe has maintained her virginity through such arduous trials; thus he refused to believe in the romance as a package of happy conceits. His unwillingness to suspend disbelief, to allow this sort of literature to exist, is for the author almost as wicked as his eagerness to rape Leucippe. Leucippe, in this scene, at last becomes fully aware of her status as a romantic heroine; she taunts Th ersander with the fact that his