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 What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  Fisher’s research pointed to willful denial. Yet, Chivers believed, something more subtle had to be at play. In journals she found glimmers of evidence—unconfirmed, insubstantial, like so much that she wished she could rely on, build on, as she attempted to assemble sexual truth—that women are less connected to, less cognizant of, the sensations of their bodies than men, not just erotically but in other ways. Was there some type of neural filter between women’s bodies and the realms of consciousness in the brain? Something tenuous about the pathways? Was this especially the case with sexual signals? Was this a product of genetic or societal codes? Were girls and women somehow taught to keep a psychic distance from their physical selves? Deep into our seven-year conversation, Chivers spoke bluntly about the congenital and the cultural, about nature and nurture and women’s libidos. For a long while, though, she made no pronouncements. Her scientific intentions were aggressive, the stripping away of the societal, the isolation of the inherent. But she had a researcher’s caution, an empiricist’s reserve, a reluctance to declaim more than the data could support. Fisher, meanwhile, was emphatic about the contortions imposed, the compressions enforced. “Being a human who is sexual,” she said, “who is allowed to be sexual, is a freedom accorded by society much more readily to males than to females.” Her lie detector was unequivocal. Rebecca was a forty-two-year-old elementary school music teacher with three children. One afternoon, on the computer she shared with her husband, she discovered a picture of a woman who was plainly his lover. In all sorts of ways, this was devastating. There was the difference in age between the two women, clear to Rebecca immediately. More particularly and insidiously, there were the woman’s breasts, exposed in the photograph and, in Rebecca’s eyes, significantly superior to her own, which had shrunk, she was sure, more than most do from nursing. And then there was her sense—instantaneous—that her husband wanted the photo to be found and the affair to be found out, because he hadn’t had the courage to end the marriage and move in with the woman—who was blowing a whimsical kiss from the screen—without some mayhem to camouflage the long premeditation of his escape. Obeying a therapist’s advice, Rebecca tried not to beg her husband to stay. She lobbied through friends. She gave her husband a book about seeking spiritual fulfillment instead of chasing new love. But within weeks, she was a single mother who spent a good amount of time in front of the computer, comparing herself to the seminude picture, which she’d forwarded to her own email address.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  He recalls that God, after the crime, questioned Cain. Not that God needed his reply to know what the voice of blood proclaimed on earth. He only wanted the murderer to say: Yes, I killed. He was asking him at least to acknowledge: homôs homologies tauta.86 And God will punish him because he refused to acknowledge that, because he claimed “not to know.” Two expressions employed by Saint John Chrysostom are worth retaining. Because Cain was not the first to declare his transgression, God declined, not to directly forgive his act, but to “allow him metanoia”—that is, the lack of a confession deprived Cain of the very possibility of repentance, of conversion, of turning away (or being turned away) from the committed crime. It was necessary to declare the crime in order to separate oneself from it. Further, and as a consequence, what God will punish is not so much the murder itself as Cain’s impudence.87 An important term, anaideia: it relates to the temerity of the evident lie; to the absence of repentance concerning the crime committed; to the contradiction in the fact that Cain is ashamed to admit what he wasn’t ashamed to do; to the affront, finally, against God who was offering the criminal the possibility of being pardoned.88 The indecency of the non-avowal thus shifts the crime against Abel toward an offense against God; in any case the sin against the truth that was owed to God overrides the sin against the blood tie with the brother. Now, what does the punishment for this impudence consist of? Doubtless, the law of blood called for the death of the culprit. But Cain will stay alive, and this is precisely his punishment. His punishment will be to become the law incarnate on earth—nomos empsukhos; he will have to walk through the world like a “living law,” a “walking stele,” sealed with his own silence, but which makes the voice bellow “louder than a trumpet.” Phônê: the word is significant. It is the same as the one employed to designate the voice of Abel’s blood drying on the furrows. Since there was no confession to silence it, it is still this cry that makes itself heard in Cain’s punishment. But with this blood cry, the voice, the phônê that resounds in Cain’s voice, presents two differences. It doesn’t demand death for death; on the contrary, it tells every man in this world: Don’t do what I did. And moreover, this voice is not that of the spilled blood and the abandoned dead body; it is a voice that is now joined to Cain. For having avoided the confession that would have brought him relief, he has himself become the law that never falls silent; a person who killed him would be cursed seven times over. Cain was seized by the law; he cannot get free of it; he will travel the world moaning—stenôn—endlessly broadcasting the cry of the law, which no discourse of confession (homologia) can interrupt.89

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  The discord within Chivers’s readings converged with the results of a study done by Terri Fisher, a psychologist at Ohio State University, who asked two hundred female and male undergraduates to complete a questionnaire dealing with masturbation and the use of porn. The subjects were split into groups and wrote their answers under three different conditions: either they were instructed to hand the finished questionnaire to a fellow college student, who waited just beyond an open door and was able to watch the subjects work; or they were given explicit assurances that their answers would be kept anonymous; or they were hooked up to a fake polygraph machine, with bogus electrodes taped to their hands, forearms, and necks. The male replies were about the same under each of the three conditions, but for the females the circumstances were crucial. Many of the women in the first group—the ones who could well have worried that another student would see their answers—said they’d never masturbated, never checked out anything X-rated. The women who were told they would have strict confidentiality answered yes a lot more. And the women who thought they were wired to a lie detector replied almost identically to the men. Because of the way the questions were phrased—somewhat delicately, without requiring precise numbers, Fisher told me, in deference to the conservative undertone she sensed on her satellite campus—the study couldn’t pinpoint rates of masturbation or porn use; yet, she went on, it left no doubt as to the constraints most women feel about acknowledging the intensity of their libidos. When Fisher employed the same three conditions and asked women how many sexual partners they’d had, subjects in the first group gave answers 70 percent lower than women wearing the phony electrodes. Diligently, she ran this part of the experiment a second time, with three hundred new participants. The women who thought they were being polygraphed not only reported more partners than the rest of the female subjects, they also—unlike their female counterparts—gave numbers a good deal higher than the men. This kind of conscious suppression could well have distorted the self-reports of Chivers’s straight women, but had it insinuated itself with the lesbians? Many of them might have adopted a stance of defiance about their sexuality—wouldn’t this have lessened any impulse toward lying? Maybe, though with these women another sort of restraint could have been at work: the need for fidelity to their orientation, their minority identity.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Oecolampadius entered into intimate relations with Erasmus, who at that time took up his permanent abode in Basel. He rendered him important service in his Annotations to the New Testament, and in the second edition of the Greek Testament (concerning the quotations from the Septuagint and Hebrew). The friendship afterwards cooled down in consequence of their different attitude to the question of reform. In 1518 Oecolampadius showed his moral severity and zeal for a reform of the pulpit by an attack on the prevailing custom of entertaining the people in the Easter season with all kinds of jokes. "What has," he asks, "a preacher of repentance to do with fun and laughter? Is it necessary for us to yield to the impulse of nature ? If we can crush our sins by laughter, what is the use of repenting in sackcloth and ashes? What is the use of tears and cries of sorrow? … No one knows that Jesus laughed, but every one knows that he wept. The Apostles sowed the seed weeping. Many as are the symbolic acts of the prophets, no one of them lowers himself to become an actor. Laughter and song were repugnant to them. They lived righteously before the Lord, rejoicing and yet trembling, and saw as clear as the sun at noonday that all is vanity under the sun. They saw the net being drawn everywhere and the near approach of the judge of the world."172 After a short residence at Weinsberg and Augsburg, Oecolampadius surprised his friends by entering a convent in 1520, but left it in 1522 and acted a short time as chaplain for Franz von Sickingen at Ebernburg, near Creuznach, where he introduced the use of the German language in the mass. By the reading of Luther’s writings, he became more and more fixed in evangelical convictions. He cautiously attacked transubstantiation, Mariolatry, and the abuses of the confessional, and thereby attracted the favorable attention of Luther, who wrote to Spalatin (June 10, 1521): "I am surprised at his spirit, not because he fell upon the same theme as I, but because he has shown himself so liberal, prudent, and Christian. God grant him growth." In June, 1523, Luther expressed to Oecolampadius much satisfaction at his lectures on Isaiah, notwithstanding the displeasure of Erasmus, who would probably, like Moses, die in the land of Moab. "He has done his part," he says, "by exposing the bad; to show the good and to lead into the land of promise, is beyond his power." Luther and Oecolampadius met personally at Marburg in 1529, but as antagonists on the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, in which the latter stood on the side of Zwingli.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  This is the meaning that seems to emerge from a passage in Saint Ambrose’s De sacramentis: “When you gave your name [to be baptized], the priest took mud and smeared it over your eyes. What does this signify? That you confessed your sin (fatereris), that you examined your conscience (conscientiam recognoscere), that you performed penance for your sins, that is, that you recognized (agnoscere) the lot of human generation. For, even if he who comes to baptism does not confess sin, nevertheless by this very fact he fulfills the confession of all sins, in that he seeks to be baptized so as to be justified, that is, so as to pass from fault to grace […] No man is without sin. He who takes refuge in the baptism of Christ recognizes himself as human.”58 An important text. First, because it allows us to see the breadth of meaning that the word confession conveys: from the act by which one actually confesses a specific sin to the recognition of the fact that as a human being one cannot help but be a sinner. But also in its pointing out that the passage from sinfulness to grace—which is the purpose of baptism—cannot be accomplished without a certain “truth act.” A “deliberate” act in the sense that the catechumen is urged to explicitly manifest, in the form of an avowal, his recognition of being a sinner. There is no remission, no saving access to the light, without an act in which he affirms the truth of his sinning soul, an act that also serves as a veridical mark of his determination to stop being a sinner. Telling-the-truth-about-oneself is essential in this game of purification and salvation. In a general way, from the end of the second century onward one sees the growing place occupied, in the economy of every soul’s salvation, by the manifestation of one’s own truth: in the form of an “investigation” where the individual is the respondent of a questionnaire or the object of testimony; in the form of a purificatory trial where he is the target of an exorcism; in the form, finally, of a “confession,” where he is both the subject who speaks and the object of which he speaks, but where it’s a matter of attesting that one knows oneself to be a sinner rather than drawing up an exact list of sins to be forgiven. But it is clear that the form and evolution of baptismal confession can be understood only in relation to the extremely important development of the “second penance”—starting in this same close of the second century.

• From The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)

  And now I sit here, demure and tired in brown, slightly sick at heart. I shall go on. I shall write a detailed description of shock treatment, tight, blasting short descriptions with not one smudge of coy sentimentality, and when I get enough I shall send them to David Ross.a There will be no hurry, because I am too desperately vengeful now. But I will pile them up. I thought about the shock treatment description last night: the deadly sleep of her madness, and the breakfast not coming, the little details, the flashback to the shock treatment that went wrong: electrocution brought in, and the inevitable going down the subterranean hall, waking to a new world, with no name, being born again, and not of woman. I shall never see him again, and the thorny limitations of the day crowd in like the spikes on the gates at Queens last night: I could never sleep with him anyway, with all his friends here and his close relation to them, laughing, talking, I should be the world’s whore, as well as Roget’s strumpet. I shall never see him, he will never look for me. He said my name, Sylvia, and banged a black grinning look into my eyes, and I would like to try just this once, my force against his. But he will never come, and the blond one, pure and smug and favored, looks, is it with projected pity and disgust? at this drunken amorphic slut. But Hamish was very kind and would have fought for me. It gave him a kind of glory to take me away from them, those fiends, and I am worth fighting for, I had been nice, to him, he said. We walked out as the blond one was coming in, and Oswald said in his dry sarcasm something about “Tell us about the bone structures” and that was the last party at St. John’s where I lost the red glove, as tonight I lost the red bandeau which I loved with all the redness in my heart. Somehow these sluttish nights make me have a violent nunlike passion to write and sequester myself. I shall sequester. I don’t want to see anybody because they are not Ted Hughes and I never have been made a fool of by a man. They are phonies, Hamish said. [Omission.] Shall I write, and be different? Always, I grab it, the writing, hold it to me, defend, defend, against the flux, the sameness of faces. He said my name, Sylvia, in a blasting wind which shot off in the desert behind my eyes, behind his eyes, and his poems are clever and terrible and lovely. Well, Hamish and I took an incredibly long time walking about the misty streets in the moonlight and all was blurred behind a theatrical scrim of fog, and vague boys in black gowns staggered and sang.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  3) Zwingli, with ten other priests, petitioned the bishop of Constance in Latin (Einsiedeln, July 2, 1522), and the Swiss Diet in German (Zurich, July 13, 1522), to permit the free preaching of the gospel and the marriage of the clergy. He enforces the petition by an incidental confession of the scandalous life of the clergy, including himself (Werke, I. 39): "Euer ehrsam Wysheit hat bisher gesehen das unehrbar schandlich Leben, welches wir leider bisher geführt haben (wir wollen allein von uns selbst geredet haben) mit Frauen, damit wir männiglich übel verärgert und verbösert haben." But this document with eleven signatures (Zwingli’s is the last) is a general confession of clerical immorality in the past, and does not justify Janssen’s inference that Zwingli continued such life at that time. Janssen (Ein zweites Wort an meine Kritiker, p. 47), moreover, mistakes in this petition the Swiss word rüw (Ruhe, rest) for rüwen (Reue, repentance), and makes the petitioners say that they felt "no repentance," instead of "no rest." The document, on the contrary, shows a decided advance of moral sentiment as compared with the lame apology in the letter to Utinger, and deeply deplores the state of clerical immorality. It is rather creditable to the petitioners than otherwise; certainly very honest. 4) In a letter to his five brothers, Sept. 17, 1522, to whom he dedicated a sermon on "the ever pure Virgin Mary, mother of God," Zwingli confesses that he was subject to Hoffahrt, Fressen, Unlauterkeit, and other sins of the flesh (Werke, I. 86). This is his latest confession; but if we read it in connection with the whole letter, it makes the impression that he must have undergone a favorable change about that time, and concluded a regular, though secret, connection with his wife. As to temperance, Bullinger (I. 305) gives him the testimony that he was "very temperate in eating and drinking." 5) Zwingli was openly married in April, 1524, to Anna Reinhart, a respectable widow, and mother of several children, after having lived with her about two years before in secret marriage. But this fact, which Janssen construes into a charge of "unchaste intercourse," was known to his intimate friends; for Myconius, in a letter of July 22, 1522, sends greetings to Zwingli and his wife ("Vale cum uxore quam felicissime et tuis omnibus," Opera, VII. 210; and again: "Vale cum uxore in Christo," p. 253). The same is implied in a letter of Bucer, April 14, 1524 (p. 335; comp. the note of the editors). "The cases," says Mörikofer (I. 211), "were very frequent at that time, even with persons of high position, that secret marriages were not ratified by a religious ceremony till weeks and months afterwards." Before the Council of Trent secret marriages were legitimate and valid. (Can. et Decr. Conc. Trid., Sess. XXIV., Decr. de reform. matrimonii.)

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Recent discussions have given undue prominence to the blot which rests on Zwingli’s earlier life, while yet a priest in the Roman Church. Janssen, the ultramontane historian, has not one word of praise for Zwingli, and violates truth and charity by charging him with habitual, promiscuous, and continuous licentiousness, not reflecting that he thereby casts upon the Roman Church the reproach of inexcusable laxity in discipline. Zwingli was no doubt guilty of occasional transgressions, but probably less guilty than the majority of Swiss priests who lived in open or secret concubinage at that time (see § 2, p. 6); yea, he stood so high in public estimation at Einsiedeln and Zurich, that Pope Hadrian VI., through his Swiss agent, offered him every honor except the papal chair. But we will not excuse him, nor compare his case (as some have done) with that of St. Augustin; for Augustin, when he lived in concubinage, was not a priest and not even baptized, and he confessed his sin before the whole world with deeper repentance than Zwingli, who rather made light of it. The facts are these: — 1) Bullinger remarks (Reformationsgesch. I. 8) that Zwingli was suspected in Glarus of improper connection with several women ("weil er wegen einiger Weiber verargwohnt war"). Bullinger was his friend and successor, and would not slander him; but he judged mildly of a vice which was so general among priests on account of celibacy. He himself was the son of a priest, as was also Leo Judae. 2) Zwingli, in a confidential letter to Canon Utinger at Zurich, dated Einsiedeln, Dec. 3, 1518 (Opera, VII. 54–57), contradicts the rumor that he had seduced the daughter of an influential citizen in Einsiedeln, but admits his unchastity. This letter is a very strange apology, and, as he says himself, a blateratio rather than a satisfactio. He protests, on the one hand (what Janssen omits to state), that he never dishonored a married woman or a virgin or a nun ("ea ratio nobis perpetuo fuit, nec alienum thorum conscendere, nec virginem vitiare, nec Deo dicatam profanare"); but, on the other hand, he speaks lightly, we may say frivolously, of his intercourse with the impure daughter of a barber who was already, dishonored, and apologizes for similar offences committed in Glarus. This is the worst feature in the letter, and casts a dark shade on his character at that time. He also refers (p. 57) to the saying of Aeneas Sylvius (Pope Pius II.): "Non est qui vigesimum annum excessit, nec virginem tetigerit." His own superiors set him a bad example. Nevertheless he expresses regret, and applies to himself the word, 2 Pet. 2:22, and says, "Christus per nos blasphematur."

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  His first book, "The Labyrinth," is a German poem against the corruptions of the times, written about 1510.29 It represents the fight of Theseus with the Minotaur and the wild beasts in the labyrinth of the world,—the one-eyed lion (Spain), the crowned eagle (the emperor), the winged lion (Venice), the cock (France), the ox (Switzerland), the bear (Savoy). The Minotaur, half man, half bull, represents, he says, "the sins, the vices, the irreligion, the foreign service of the Swiss, which devour the sons of the nation." His Second poetic work of that time, "The Fable of the Ox,"30 is likewise a figurative attack upon the military service by which Switzerland became a slave of foreign powers, especially of France. He superintended the education of two of his brothers and several of the noblest young men of Glarus, as Aegidius Tschudi (the famous historian), Valentine Tschudi, Heer, Nesen, Elmer, Brunner, who were devotedly, and gratefully attached to him, and sought his advice and comfort, as their letters show. Zwingli became one of the most prominent and influential public men in Switzerland before he left Glarus; but he was then a humanist and a patriot rather than a theologian and a religious teacher. He was zealous for intellectual culture and political reform, but shows no special interest in the spiritual welfare of the Church. He did not pass through a severe struggle and violent crisis, like Luther, but by diligent seeking and searching he attained to the knowledge of the truth. His conversion was a gradual intellectual process, rather than a sudden breach with the world; but, after he once had chosen the Scriptures for his guide, he easily shook off the traditions of Rome, which never had a very strong hold upon him. That process began at Glarus, and was completed at Zurich. His moral character at Glarus and at Einsiedeln was, unfortunately, not free from blemish. He lacked the grace of continence and fell with apparent ease into a sin which was so common among priests, and so easily overlooked if only proper caution was observed, according to the wretched maxim, "Si non caste, saltem caute." The fact rests on his own honest confession, and was known to his friends, but did not injure his standing and influence; for he was in high repute as a priest, and even enjoyed a papal pension. He resolved to reform in Glarus, but relapsed in Einsiedeln under the influence of bad examples, to his deep humiliation. After his marriage in Zurich, his life was pure and honorable and above the reproach of his enemies. NOTES ON ZWINGLI’S MORAL CHARACTER.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  But what is more enigmatic—from the standpoint of the history of the experience of the self—is the way one thought of and justified the sinner’s obligation to speak the truth—or rather to manifest himself in his truth—in order to obtain forgiveness for his sins. This obligation is affirmed, in fact, over and over again. No pardon if there was no exomologesis, no recognition by the sinner of his sin, no outward, explicit, visible manifestation of that recognition: “He that confesses his sin is released from servitude […] not only free but also just, for justice is in liberty and liberty in confession. As soon as a man shall confess he is absolved.”71 And Saint John Chrysostom, in short: “Declare your sin: you will destroy your sin.”72 This is the general principle underlying the exegeses that Saint Ambrose and Saint John Chrysostom make of the curse of Cain. His sin, as grave as it was, was not unpardonable. When God [asked him] what he had done with his brother, it was not that God didn’t know, of course; it was to give him the possibility of confessing. And what made it unpardonable was that he replied: I don’t know. This is the principle of eternal damnation. Graver than the fratricide was this lie, which Saint Ambrose calls a “sacrilege.”73 The “I don’t know” of the criminal, the refusal of truth is, on the part of the sinner, the gravest possible offense: it cannot be atoned for. In contrast to Cain, David confesses his sins spontaneously; he-who-was-just is the image of the penitent: the truth he professes saves him.74 And if Adam and Eve are not damned for Eternity, it’s because they, too, confessed; according to Chrysostom, they even confessed to their crimes twice: verbally, by replying to God; and in their gestures and their bodies, by hiding their nakedness.75 Long before the institution of sacramental penance and the organization of auricular confession, the Christian Church posited the fundamental character of the truth obligation for anyone who has sinned and as a precondition for possible redemption. Speaking the truth about one’s sin—or rather manifesting in its truth one’s state as a sinner—is indispensable if the sin is to be forgiven. Manifestation of what is true is a necessary condition for what is true to be erased. To think this relation through and to explain this necessity, ancient Christianity had recourse to several models. —

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  3. Finally, the confession of sins—which neither the Didache nor Justin’s Apology evoked as mandatory prior to baptism—is regularly spoken of as such from Tertullian’s De baptismo onward. “They who are about to enter baptism must invoke God with repeated prayers, fasts, genuflections, and vigils. They will also prepare for it with the confession of all past sins. And this in memory of the baptism of John, who is said to have received it confessing his own sins.”54 This “confession” is thus completely different from the questioning that opened and concluded the period in which the catechumen was an auditor. It is not information that those in charge ask for concerning the past life and conduct of a candidate—it’s an act that the latter performs himself, among the other exercises of piety and asceticism. Did it involve a detailed confession to a priest of “all sins” committed in the past? Tertullian says only that Christians today should rejoice that they don’t have to “publicly confess our iniquities and turpitudes”55 as in the time of John. Are we to understand, then, that the catechumen had to review his past life, recall the memory of his transgressions, and confide them either to the bishop or to the person responsible for guiding him? Possibly so. And the later texts do make it clear that during this epoch, prior to baptism, the one requesting it had to perform a particular act with the bishop or priest56 in which he “confessed” his sins. In any case, one must bear in mind that the term confession had a very broad meaning—equivalent to the Greek word exomologesis:57 a general act by which one recognized being a sinner. And clearly the confessio peccatorum expected of the aspiring Christian cannot compare to the detailed, exhaustive recollection and disclosure of all one’s wrongdoings according to their respective categories, circumstances, and gravity: but [it’s necessary] rather [to think of] an act*1—or several acts—by which one recognizes oneself as a sinner, before God and eventually before a priest. It’s essentially a matter of manifesting one’s awareness that one has sinned, that one is a sinner, and the desire to free oneself from that state. It is a testimony of oneself concerning oneself, a certification of change rather than a recounting of “all sins” actually committed.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  And between these two modalities the distribution is not even: the verbal enunciation of the sin is seldom required except when it’s a matter of determining the penance, examining whether the sinner can be admitted into it and merits being reconciled. “Telling the sin”—bringing into play, in the verbal dimension, the confession and the examination, demanding of the sinner a “veridiction” of his sins—is necessary only prior to the penitential procedure and so, in a way, is outside it. On the other hand, the ostentatious, gestural, corporeal demonstration of what the sinner is in his being forms an intrinsic part of penance. It forms an essential and constant dimension of it. The penitent is expected not so much to “tell the truth” [“dire le vrai”] concerning what he did as to “do the truth” [“faire vrai”] by manifesting what he is. This necessity of penitential practice—that it be carried out only through manifestations designed to bring the penitent’s truth to light—raises a problem: when one has sinned, why must one not only repent—imposing rigors and macerations upon himself—but also show these acts and show oneself as one is? Why does the manifestation of the truth constitute an intrinsic part of the procedure that enables one to redeem the sin? When one has “done wrong,” why is it necessary to make the truth shine forth, not only the truth about what one did, but about what one is? The answer is obvious: once the Christian religion was formed into a Church endowed with a strong communitarian structure and a hierarchical organization, no serious infraction could be pardoned without a certain number of proofs and guarantees. Just as a candidate for baptism couldn’t be accepted without having been tested beforehand through the catechumenate—probatio animae—the Church couldn’t reconcile those who hadn’t clearly manifested their repentance through discipline and exercises that stood for punishment in relation to the past and showed commitment to the future. They had to practice the publicatio sui.

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

  It is to be granted to the slaves and daughters and others who have hired themselves out on account of their poverty (whose humble lot has damned them), should they so will, to be relieved of every necessity of this misery by appealing to the succor of bishops, judges, or even defensors. So that, if the pimps shall think these women are to be urged on or impose the necessity of sin on those who are unwilling, they will lose not only that power which they held, but they will be proscribed by exile to the public mines, which is less of a punishment than that of a woman who is seized by a pimp and compelled to endure the filth of an intercourse that she did not will.” 77 Rarely is the translation of Christian ideology into statutory law quite so clear. The “necessity of sinning” was precisely the language of Basil and Cyril, Augustine and Julian, and the formulation undoubtedly reflects the impact of Christianity on the imperial chancery. The law of 428 was a pathbreaking act of social policy. It addressed sin as a social problem. The state took an active concern in the spiritual welfare of women forced into prostitution. The constitution of Theodosius II made a statement that the government was willing to interfere with the private powers of masters and fathers. It also offered aid to poor women who had been forced into prostitution by circumstance rather than private legal power. But there were limits to the new policy. The measure did not punish women who prostituted themselves, nor men who patronized the brothel. Prostitution remained legal. Forcible prostitution, forcible sin, even sin caused by poverty, was redressed. 78 The nature, timing, and ideological basis of this legislative program have been broadly misunderstood. The notion of coerced sin, first outlined by Basil, was in fact at the center of Christian policy on prostitution and was to remain so down to the age of Justinian. The attempt to segregate slavery from prostitution was much more than a cosmetic reform. Ancient prostitution was enmeshed in the slave trade. The law struck, materially, at the heart of the sex industry in antiquity. Even more, it was the state’s first move toward a moral realignment of the system of prostitution. Women without honor, prostitutes and slaves, were still exposed to the forces of male sexuality. But one of the most important subsets of these women, women forced into prostitution, was no longer allowed to exist with state approval. And once the Christian discourse of coercion and consent behind this law is recognized, it becomes clear that these categories remained the moral basis of state policy on prostitution for the next century. 79 After the law of 428, all prostitution was theoretically sinful but consensual. A decade later, in 439, Theodosius II followed with another measure that confirmed the new moral posture toward prostitution.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The Protestant successors of Henry have retained the title to this day, though with a very different view of its meaning. The British sovereigns are defenders of the Episcopal Church in England, and of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, and in both characters enemies of the Church of Rome. Luther read the King a lecture (in Latin and German) such as was rarely read to any crowned head. He called him "King Henry, of God’s disgrace (or wrath), King of England," and heaped upon him the most abusive epithets.503 He incidentally hit other princes, saying that "King Henry helps to prove the proverb that there are no greater fools than kings and princes." Such a style of polemics can not be justified by the coarseness of the age, or the nature of the provocation, and did more harm to Luther than to Henry. His best friends regretted it; yet long afterwards he even surpassed the violence, if possible, in his savage and scurrilous attack upon Duke Henry of Brunswick.504 When there was a prospect of gaining Henry VIII. for the cause of the Reformation, Luther made the matter worse by a strange inconsistency. In a most humble letter of Sept. 1, 1525, be retracted (not his doctrine, but) all the personal abuse, asked his pardon, and offered to honor his name publicly. Henry in his reply refused the offer with royal pride and scorn, and said that he now despised him as heartily for his cowardice as he had formerly hated him for his heresy. He also charged him with violating a nun consecrated to God, and leading other monks into a breach of their vows and into eternal perdition. Emser published a German translation of Luther’s letter and the King’s answer (which was transmitted through Duke George of Saxony), and accompanied it with new vituperations and slanders (1527). All the Romanists regarded this controversy, and the similar correspondence with Duke George, as a great blow to the Reformation. Luther now resumed his former sarcastic tone; but it was a painful effort, and did not improve the case. He suspected that the answer was written by Erasmus, who had "more skill and sense in his finger than the King with all his wiseacres." He emphatically denied that he had offered to retract any of his doctrines. "I say, No, no, no, as long as I breathe, no matter how it offend king, emperor, prince, or devil .... In short, my doctrine is the main thing of which I boast, not only against princes and kings, but also against all devils. The other thing, my life and person, I know well enough to be sinful, and nothing to boast of; I am a poor sinner, and let all my enemies be saints or angels. I am both proud and humble as St. Paul (Phil. 2:3)."

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

  What’s more—some are conquered by shameful profits and prostitute out their own slave women, even some of their males to those who wish, and thus the wretched who happen to be sold must turn over a tribute?” Cyril’s argument turns on the same idea, “out of necessity,” to describe the prostitution of slaves, male and female, forced into venal sex. Cyril’s account was, like Basil’s, just as emphatic about the consent of some prostitutes. In his writings, we see the figure of the prostitute as a spectacular embodiment of sin gestating in the Christian mind. 76 The new consciousness evinced in Basil’s writings did not have an immediate impact, but Cyril’s use of it—sometime in the 410s or 420s—shows that the idea was percolating decades later. Indeed, in the AD 420s the idea of prostitutes “sinning by necessity” would intersect, in one of those deeply symbolic coincidences that history sometimes provides, with the final phases of the doctrinal debates between Augustine and Julian. In 418 Pelagius and his Italian supporters were condemned to exile, and Julian of Eclanum sailed east to carry on the struggle against the Augustinian coup. Julian settled, for the better part of a decade, in Cilicia, near the figure of Theodore of Mopsuestia. His place of refuge was well chosen. Theodore was an auspicious protector who offered not only intellectual nourishment but also, quite possibly, advantageous political networks. When on December 24, 427, the archbishop of Constantinople died, Nestorius, a Syrian and a complete outsider, was elected; when he traveled to the capital in early 428, Nestorius passed through Mopsuestia to visit his old teacher, Theodore, en route. It is quite possible that Julian joined his entourage, for he too was in Constantinople later in 428. On April 10, Nestorius was installed as archbishop. He considered reopening the case against Julian and his allies, writing the pope for details about their condemnation. The polemics between Augustine and Julian—and their theological slogans about the “necessity of sinning”—reverberated throughout the eastern capital in the spring of 428. The words sat at the intersection of high theological debate and mundane social fact. It is remarkable that on April 21, just eleven days after the enthronement of Nestorius, the chancery of the emperor, Theodosius II, issued one of the most remarkable, and misunderstood, laws of the later Roman Empire. The law was suggested by Florentius, a man of Syrian origin who was then praetorian prefect of the east. The law declared: “We cannot suffer for pimps, fathers, and slave-owners who impose the necessity of sinning on their daughters or slave women to enjoy the right of power over them nor to indulge freely in such crime. Thus it pleases us that these men are subjected to such disdain that they may not be able to benefit from the right of power nor may anything be thus acquired by them.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  How could he herald the birth of baby Jesus in a month’s time? How could he ring in the fabulous year of 1974? The best thing to do was to attempt to adhere to his normal daily schedule in all other areas of his life. To come and go according to his habits; the best thing to do was to catch the train as planned; to return to New Canaan as planned; to have breakfast with his parents as planned; to try to bask in the company of his parents, to try to learn the lessons of family; to catch the train back to Boston on Sunday, as planned, and from there catch the bus to Concord; to go to chapel on Monday morning as required; to attend Origins of the West, Geometry One, Chemistry One, English Five, and French Four as though nothing concerned him more than the usual battery of exams and the stress of selecting the correct St. Pete’s bumper sticker for his parents’ station wagon for Xmas. The slim rewards of habit would be his. His clothes were straightened out (though he was dripping slightly into his pants), his tweed jacket was buttoned. His penis hurt. He leaned over Libbets’s shoulder to graze the clean, broad plane of her cheekbone. She slipped halfway out of delirium. —Mmmnn, Libbets said. And then she sank again. He muttered another apology, as if words were going to do the trick. Paul Hood begged his cab driver to make it to Grand Central Terminal by 11:00. This required haste. The grand avenue they hurtled down couldn’t impress him now. Nor could the snow and sleet drifting in the streetlamps like ash from an incinerator. He was unaware. He had plunged himself into the netherworld of troubled adolescents. He wasn’t a man at all. He was a boy. A privileged kid. His parents could get him out of what he had done. He would go to Silver Meadow. His dad had money. His dad could pay for psychiatric treatment. His dad would turn up during visiting hours with fresh socks. His dad would ferry him home to Silver Meadow after he got thrown out of St. Pete’s. His dad would ferry him into that subspace of forgotten perverts. He was at the ticket window by ten minutes past, and he slipped between the doors on the train just before they closed. A dozen other burnouts, including some older guys he thought he remembered from public school—bar drinkers and lonely souls—were strewn around the empty car. When the train began to roll, Paul Hood laid himself out lengthways on the three-seater like a corpse on the marble mortuary slab. And in that first moment of repose, he remembered issue #141 of The Fantastic Four . Like a desert oasis to him. Deviants and losers and mutants and the loveless, these, Paul Hood’s people, were the proper readers of Marvel comics.

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

  Some sins, he said, were “involuntary,” others from a “wicked disposition.” Here we see fully articulated the stark difference between voluntary sin and coerced sin. “One prostitute has been sold to the pimp and is in evil because of necessity, for she must provide her body for the work of her wicked master. But there is another who gives herself to sin voluntarily, because of pleasure.” In a more systematic context—one of his canonical letters—Basil carried his thought to its logical conclusion. “Sexual violations that occur through necessity are to be without blame.” Basil’s canon represents a monumental breakdown of the traditional social and mental barriers that had insulated the church from the need to think about the material realities behind sin. Here is a not insignificant expansion of human consciousness. Basil cut through the curtain that had for centuries blocked the need to think about the moral capacity of society’s most vulnerable. 74 We might fruitfully contrast the sermon of Basil with the novel of Achilles Tatius. Achilles is aware of the ineffable strings of fate that pull human action. He walks us to the precipice and, at least for dramatic effect, asks us to contemplate the mysterious dispensation that could make Leucippe free and the prostitute an effigy of social death. But having stared at the abyss, he retreats, and takes solace in the order of a world that does allow beauty, pleasure, and existential fullness for some. Basil ponders this same mysterious dispensation, but with a conviction of its profound injustice and a confident hope for a final redemption in which all moral creatures will receive their due. The radicalism of Basil’s discovery is attributable to the stark collision between an ideology of free will and an earnest form of nascent social leadership. It is no accident that Basil’s brother, Gregory of Nyssa, has left the very earliest extant attack on slavery; for Gregory, slavery was an institution unjust to its very foundations, a violation of basic human rationality and moral autonomy. The takeover of society by the church opened a brief window for such radically creative social thought. 75 Basil’s idea, if it was first his, was to prove more fertile than Gregory’s attack on slavery. The dichotomy between consent and coercion found its way into the Christian mind in the late fourth century. Other Greek pastors picked up the idea of consent, specifically in the context of slavery and prostitution. The idea was clearly alive in the early fifth century, when Cyril of Alexandria explained that there were two kinds of prostitutes. “See how some wish to practice shameful pollution willingly and of their own volition while some are accustomed to impress it upon others as though by force.… Do not some go into fornication on their own choice, women and young men voluntarily making wages off selling their youth to the disorderliness of some? Yes.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Soon after arriving in Constance, Huss wrote to John of Chlum not to allow Jerome on any account to go to join him. In spite of this warning, Jerome set out and reached Constance April 4th, 1415, but urged by friends he quit the city. He was seized at Hirschau, April 15, and taken back in chains. There is every reason for supposing he and Huss did not see one another, although Huss mentions him in a letter within a week before his death,698 expressing the hope that he would die holy and blameless and be of a braver spirit in meeting pain than he was. Huss had misjudged himself. In the hour of grave crisis he proved constant and heroic, while his friend gave way. On Sept. 11, 1415, Jerome solemnly renounced his admiration for Wyclif and professed accord with the Roman church and the Apostolic see and, twelve days later, solemnly repeated his abjuration in a formula prepared by the council.699 Release from prison did not follow. It was the council’s intention that Jerome should sound forth his abjuration as loudly as possible in Bohemia, and write to Wenzel, the university and the Bohemian nobles; but he disappointed his judges. Following Gerson’s lead, the council again put the recusant heretic on trial. The sittings took place in the cathedral, May 23 and 26, 1416. The charge of denying transubstantiation Jerome repudiated, but he confessed to having done ill in pledging himself to abandon the writings and teachings of that good man John Wyclif, and Huss. Great injury had been done to Huss, who had come to the council with assurance of safe-conduct. Even Judas or a Saracen ought under such circumstances to be free to come and go and to speak his mind freely. On May 30, Jerome was again led into the cathedral. The bishop of Lodi ascended the pulpit and preached a sermon, calling upon the council to punish the prisoner, and counselling that against other such heretics, if there should be any, any witnesses whatever should be allowed to testify,—ruffians, thieves and harlots. The sermon being over, Jerome mounted a bench—bancum ascendens — and made a defence whose eloquence is attested by Poggio and others who were present. Thereupon, the, holy synod "pronounced him a follower of Wyclif and Huss, and adjudged him to be cast off as a rotten and withered branch—palmitem putridum et aridum.700

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Then she took a spin through the basement, searching in vain for Mike through the intricate architecture of Bazooka crates. The site of that afternoon’s disgrace had a bracing and shameful effect. Then she headed for the stairs. Mike’s trick buzzer greeted her as she reached for his doorknob. It broke the timeless quiet of the house. The hall light was on, but the place was empty. Wendy tried the door again, it buzzed again, and then she just pushed through the noise and opened the door six inches. Mike was turned away in his bed, curled over a pillow as if he had been humping it. Wendy flung back the door and without warning jumped the sleeping figure, flew like a banshee across the room haloed by her blond mane—only to find that it wasn’t Mike at all, but some pajamas stuffed with dirty T-shirts and B.V.D.’s and sweat socks. What a joker. He’d pulled that cartoon thing. He’d made a dummy of himself. The house belonged to her. She held a worn T-shirt to her small, dainty nose and breathed deeply from it. She searched, knowing from Paul where such things were hidden, and found Mike’s collection of pornography, in the closet. She even found a ladies’ undergarment, still moist with some incriminating glue. At first the sticky lingerie shocked her and she dropped it gingerly to the floor. But then she felt some pity about the necessity of hiding those stolen bras or panties, about the shame and remorse attached to this prop. Choking the chicken, jerking the gherkin, polishing the nightstick, flogging the bishop, spindling your fist: the loneliness and anxiety that had Mike hiding himself away—she felt sad about it right then. Wendy decided to take the garment with her, and shoved it under her shirt, tucking it into the belt line of her powder blue ski pants. It was gross, but she liked it. And then she went for a peek at the water bed. Mike had showed it to her once before. They had stood on the threshold of the master bedroom like it was one of those roped-off historic homes exhibits—like FDR’s house, where they’d had to go on a field trip when she was nine—and watched the water bed. Mike hurried over to disturb its surface. She remembered it was a sunny day in early autumn, and she followed him to the side of the bed to sink her hand into its vinyl blubber. Then they hastily retreated to the doorway and watched it ripple and wave. Mike was afraid of the master bedroom. The way she was afraid of her own parents’ room. The idea of her father sleeping, vulnerable, maybe with one of those nocturnal boners, or in plain fetal position—it disgusted her. She preferred to think of him awake long hours, reading some tome on business or politics. She figured she could take comfort in the notion that her parents never made love.

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

  The pastoral wing of the church was forced to confront the social mechanics of sexuality in the Mediterranean. In the golden age of Christian free will, bishops came to realize that their gospel of freedom rang hollow in the face of the complex social realities of sexuality. 72 The earliest stirrings of a new consciousness are preserved in the sermons of Basil of Caesarea. This origin is fitting, both because the homiletic context demonstrates the practical role of pastoral Christianity, and because Basil’s canons demonstrate an effort toward systematic thought. Basil and his Cappadocian colleagues were avid readers of Origen, from whom they drank deeply the gospel of freedom. For Basil, experience as the leader of a vast and rapidly growing community gradually exposed him to the contradictions between his ideology and the structure of the society around him. Prostitution brought bishops face-to-face with the fact that even if sex were a matter of sin, not all sex was the outcome of free will. The clearest expression of the idea occurred in one of Basil’s sermons on the Psalms, as he was explaining to his congregation the problem of pain and injustice. “If you ask why the life of the sinner is long, but the days of the just man are cut short, why the wicked prosper and the good are oppressed, why the child is snatched away before his time, where war comes from, why ships wreck, why the earth shakes, why the waters flood, or drought strikes, why afflictions were created for mankind, why this man is a slave and this man free, why this man is rich and this man poor—the difference is greater among those who commit sin and those who are righteous. For while the slave woman who was sold to a pimp is in sin by necessity, she who happens to belong to a wellborn mistress was raised with sexual modesty, and on this account the one is shown mercy, the other condemned.” 73 Without any natural impetus to use the example of prostitution, it came to mind as the coerced sin par excellence. The problem of evil was a challenge to Christian theodicy, but Basil’s God was intuitively just, and he would spare the innocent. Basil simply assumed that a prostitute was a slave, sold to a pimp. She was in sin as a result, but forgiven by God. In contrast, the honorable woman had agency in her sexual immorality, and as a result her actions were damnable. Basil’s notion that some prostitutes were condemned to sexual sin through coercion was by no means an incidental or passing thought. In another sermon, Basil explicitly contrasted two prostitutes.