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 Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Objection 4: Further, Macrobius (In Somn. Scip. i, 8) reckons many more parts of temperance: for he says that “temperance results in modesty, shamefacedness, abstinence, chastity, honesty, moderation, lowliness, sobriety, purity.” Andronicus also says [*De Affectibus] that “the companions of temperance are gravity, continence, humility, simplicity, refinement, method, contentment.” [*’Per-se-sufficientiam’ which could be rendered ‘self-sufficiency,’ but for the fact that this is taken in a bad sense. See[3454] Q[169], A[1].] Therefore it seems that Tully insufficiently reckoned the parts of temperance. I answer that, As stated above (QQ[48],128), a cardinal virtue may have three kinds of parts, namely integral, subjective, and potential. The integral parts of a virtue are the conditions the concurrence of which are necessary for virtue: and in this respect there are two integral parts of temperance, “shamefacedness,” whereby one recoils from the disgrace that is contrary to temperance, and “honesty,” whereby one loves the beauty of temperance. For, as stated above ([3455]Q[141], A[2], ad 3), temperance more than any other virtue lays claim to a certain comeliness, and the vices of intemperance excel others in disgrace. The subjective parts of a virtue are its species: and the species of a virtue have to be differentiated according to the difference of matter or object. Now temperance is about pleasures of touch, which are of two kinds. For some are directed to nourishment: and in these as regards meat, there is “abstinence,” and as regards drink properly there is “sobriety.” Other pleasures are directed to the power of procreation, and in these as regards the principal pleasure of the act itself of procreation, there is “chastity,” and as to the pleasures incidental to the act, resulting, for instance, from kissing, touching, or fondling, we have “purity.” The potential parts of a principal virtue are called secondary virtues: for while the principal virtue observes the mode in some principal matter, these observe the mode in some other matter wherein moderation is not so difficult. Now it belongs to temperance to moderate pleasures of touch, which are most difficult to moderate. Wherefore any virtue that is effective of moderation in some matter or other, and restrains the appetite in its impulse towards something, may be reckoned a part of temperance, as a virtue annexed thereto.

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

  And why also do we oppose Novatus, who does away with repentance after baptism? The Apostle to the Hebrews does not thus reject the repentance of sinners, but lest they should suppose that as according to the rites of the Law, under the veil of repentance there could be many and daily baptisms, he therefore warns them indeed to repent, but tells them that there could be only one renewal, namely, by Baptism. But with such considerations I return to the dispensation (οἰκονομίαν) which is in Christ, who being God was made man; as very God raised the dead; as clothed with the flesh, thirsted, laboured, suffered. When any then, looking to human things, see the Lord athirst or in suffering, and speak against the Saviour as if against a man, they sin indeed, yet may speedily on repentance receive pardon, alleging as excuse the weakness of His body. And again when any, beholding the works of Deity, doubt concerning the nature of our Lord’s body, they also sin grievously. But these too if they repent may be quickly pardoned, seeing that they have an excuse in the greatness of the works. But when they refer the works of God to the Devil, justly do they undergo the irrevocable sentence, because they have judged God to be the Devil, and the true God to have nothing more in His works than the evil spirits. To this unbelief then the Pharisees had come. For when the Saviour manifested the works of the Father, raising the dead, giving sight to the blind, and such like deeds, they said that these were the works of Beelzebub. As well might they say, looking at the order of the world and the providence exercised over it, that the world was created by Beelzebub. As long then as regarding human things they erred in knowledge, saying, Is not this the carpenter’s son, and how knoweth this man things which he never learnt? He suffered them as sinning against the Son of man; but when they wax more furious, saying that the works of God are the works of Beelzebub, He no longer endured them. For thus also He endured their fathers so long as their murmurings were for bread and water; but when having found a calf, they impute to it the divine mercies they had received, they were punished. At first indeed multitudes of them were slain, afterwards He said indeed, Nevertheless, in the day when I visit I will visit their sin upon them. (Exod. 32:34.) Such then is the sentence passed upon the Pharisees, that in the flame prepared for the devil they shall be together with him everlastingly consumed. Not then to make comparison between a blasphemy spoken against Himself and the Holy Spirit said He these things, as if the Spirit were the greater, but each blasphemy being uttered against Him, He shews the one to be greater, the other less. For looking at Him as man they reviled Him, and said that His works were those of Beelzebub.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  A bizarre consequence of this traditional framework is an inexplicable inversion in the rationality of nature. Because animals are denied aesthetic agency, we conclude that animal choices reflect the universal and rational hand of natural selection. But, of course, we understand that humans can be highly irrational when it comes to sex and love. So, because animals lack the cognitive ability to escape from the brute laws of adaptive logic, dumb animals are more rational than we are. Ironically, in this view, human cognitive complexity only provides us with the novel opportunity to be irrational! — Another important implication of an aesthetic view of evolutionary biology concerns the painful history of political and ethical abuse during the twentieth century—eugenics. Eugenics was the scientific theory that maintained that human races, classes, and ethnicities have evolved adaptive differences in genetic, physical, intellectual, and moral quality. Eugenics was also an organized social and political movement to employ this flawed scientific theory to “improve” human populations through the social and legal control of mate choice and reproduction. Because eugenics specifically concerned the evolutionary consequences of mate choice, it remains deeply relevant to human sexual selection and aesthetic evolution. For multiple reasons, evolutionary biologists are uncomfortable discussing eugenics. First, between the 1890s and the 1940s, every professional geneticist and evolutionary biologist in the United States and Europe was either an ardent proponent of eugenics, a dedicated participant in eugenic social programs, or a happy fellow traveler. Full stop. Few of us are eager to confront this embarrassing, shameful, and sobering truth. Second, eugenics provided a pseudoscientific justification for abuses of human rights at every level—from everyday racism, sexism, and prejudice against the disabled, forced sterilization, imprisonment, and lynching in the United States, to the Nazi-engineered genocide of Jews and Gypsies, and mass murder of the mentally handicapped and homosexuals in Europe. Eugenics is the most egregious example of the destructive misuse of science in all of human history. Science gone bad. Really bad. Last, another uncomfortable truth is that much of the intellectual framework of contemporary evolutionary biology was developed during this enthusiastically eugenic period in our discipline. Most evolutionary biologists would like to believe that eugenics ceased to be an issue in evolutionary biology after World War II, when evolutionary biologists rejected eugenic theories of racial superiority. But the uncomfortable fact is that some core, fundamental commitments of eugenics were “baked into” the intellectual structure of evolutionary biology, and they contributed to the flawed logic of eugenics. Without providing a detailed analysis here, I want to illustrate how aesthetic evolution provides an essential antidote to this poisonous intellectual history.

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

  Reply to Objection 4: Sometimes more grievous sins are less shameful, either because they are less disgraceful, as spiritual sins in comparison with sins of the flesh, or because they connote a certain abundance of some temporal good; thus a man is more ashamed of cowardice than of daring, of theft than of robbery, on account of a semblance of power. The same applies to other sins. Whether man is more shamefaced of those who are more closely connected with him?Objection 1: It would seem that man is not more shamefaced of those who are more closely connected with him. For it is stated in Rhet. ii, 6 that “men are more shamefaced of those from whom they desire approbation.” Now men desire this especially from people of the better sort who are sometimes not connected with them. Therefore man is not more shamefaced of those who are more closely connected with him. Objection 2: Further, seemingly those are more closely connected who perform like deeds. Now man is not made ashamed of his sin by those whom he knows to be guilty of the same sin, because according to Rhet. ii, 6, “a man does not forbid his neighbor what he does himself.” Therefore he is not more shamefaced of those who are most closely connected with him. Objection 3: Further, the Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 6) that “men take more shame from those who retail their information to many, such as jokers and fable-tellers.” But those who are more closely connected with a man do not retail his vices. Therefore one should not take shame chiefly from them. Objection 4: Further, the Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 6) that “men are most liable to be made ashamed by those among whom they have done nothing amiss; by those of whom they ask something for the first time; by those whose friends they wish to become.” Now these are less closely connected with us. Therefore man is not made most ashamed by those who are more closely united to him. On the contrary, It is stated in Rhet. ii, 6 that “man is made most ashamed by those who are to be continually with him.”

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

  Reply to Objection 2: The first gloss speaks of begging from motives of covetousness, as appears from the words of the Apostle; while the second gloss speaks of those who without effecting any useful purpose, beg their livelihood in order to live in idleness. on the other hand, he lives not idly who in any way lives usefully. Reply to Objection 3: This precept of the divine law does not forbid anyone to beg, but it forbids the rich to be so stingy that some are compelled by necessity to beg. The civil law imposes a penalty on able-bodied mendicants who beg from motives neither of utility nor of necessity. Reply to Objection 4: Disgrace is twofold; one arises from lack of honesty [*Cf.[3810] Q[145], A[1]], the other from an external defect, thus it is disgraceful for a man to be sick or poor. Such like uncomeliness of mendicancy does not pertain to sin, but it may pertain to humility, as stated above. Reply to Objection 5: Preachers have the right to be fed by those to whom they preach: yet if they wish to seek this by begging so as to receive it as a free gift and not as a right this will be a mark of greater humility. Whether it is lawful for religious to wear coarser clothes than others?Objection 1: It would seem unlawful for religious to wear coarser clothes than others. For according to the Apostle (1 Thess. 5:22) we ought to “refrain from all appearance of evil.” Now coarseness of clothes has an appearance of evil; for our Lord said (Mat. 7:15): “Beware of false prophets who come to you in the clothing of sheep”: and a gloss on Apoc. 6:8, “Behold a pale horse,” says: “The devil finding that he cannot succeed, neither by outward afflictions nor by manifest heresies, sends in advance false brethren, who under the guise of religion assume the characteristics of the black and red horses by corrupting the faith.” Therefore it would seem that religious should not wear coarse clothes. Objection 2: Further, Jerome says (Ep. lii ad Nepotian.): “Avoid somber,” i.e. black, “equally with glittering apparel. Fine and coarse clothes are equally to be shunned, for the one exhales pleasure, the other vainglory.” Therefore, since vainglory is a graver sin than the use of pleasure, it would seem that religious who should aim at what is more perfect ought to avoid coarse rather than fine clothes.

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

  served in the tractate Avodah Zarah of the Babylonian Talmud. Avodah Zarah, “foreign worship,” was, simply by virtue of the domain of life it regulated, ideally suited to become a store house of rabbinic memory about the interaction between Jews and their idolatrous rulers. According to the tradition, Haninah was sentenced to death, his wife was condemned to exile, and his virgin daughter was assigned to penal prostitution. Th e Hebrew virgin in the Roman brothel, recounted in the Talmud, wrests us from the dry struggles of halakhic interpretation and thrusts us into the atmosphere of Greek romance. Like Christian romance, the Jewish story takes eternal archetypes of noble innocents and sets them against the concrete historical backdrop of Roman power. Th is Jewish legend, like Christian apostolic lore, is an indissoluble fusion of history and romance. Hanina’s daughter was sent to the “tent of prostitution.” Fortunately the girl had a sister, Beruriah, who could not bear the shame of seeing her kin in the brothel. Th is is the famous Beruriah, wife of Rabbi Meir, who is only in this passage identifi ed as the daughter of Haninah— part of the Babylonian Talmud’s overarching tendency to create webs of interrelationship among the Tannaim and their families. Beruriah induces her husband to sneak into the brothel to bribe the guard into releasing the girl. Her husband, Rabbi Meir, reckons to himself, “If she has not been subjected to anything wrong, a miracle will be wrought for her, but if she has committed anything wrong, no miracle will happen to her.” If she has not been subjected to violence, then she will be saved. But if she has committed anything wrong, she is then damned to prostitution. It may appear illogical or at least unsatisfying to construe the enslaved girl’s deeds as acts of commission. But this aporia, this surface disjuncture, is resolved at a deeper level of narrative logic, which the redactors of this story have borrowed from the assumptions of romance. When Rabbi Meir reaches the brothel, in disguise as a Roman soldier, he tests his sister- in- law’s virtue by trying to hire her. In the Talmudic story, the brothel is a state institution. Whereas the pirates and pimps who threaten girls in the Greek romance are part of a mythical anti- state, beyond the legitimate social order, in the Christian and Jewish stories the Romans are 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  the villains, the menace to the sexual integrity of the heroine. Rabbi Meir must go in disguise as part of the ruling order to rescue the girl’s honor.

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

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

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

  Reply to Objection 1: Lack of shame occurs in the best and in the worst men through different causes, as stated in the Article. In the average men it is found, in so far as they have a certain love of good, and yet are not altogether free from evil. Reply to Objection 2: It belongs to the virtuous man to avoid not only vice, but also whatever has the semblance of vice, according to 1 Thess. 5:22, “From all appearance of evil refrain yourselves.” The Philosopher, too, says (Ethic. iv, 9) that the virtuous man should avoid “not only what is really evil, but also those things that are regarded as evil.” Reply to Objection 3: As stated above (A[1], ad 1) the virtuous man despises ignominy and reproach, as being things he does not deserve, wherefore he is not much ashamed of them. Nevertheless, to a certain extent, shame, like the other passions, may forestall reason. Reply to Objection 4: Shamefacedness is a part of temperance, not as though it entered into its essence, but as a disposition to it: wherefore Ambrose says (De Offic. i, 43) that “shamefacedness lays the first foundation of temperance,” by inspiring man with the horror of whatever is disgraceful. OF HONESTY* (FOUR ARTICLES)[*Honesty must be taken here in its broad sense as synonymous with moral goodness, from the point of view of decorum.] We must now consider honesty, under which head there are four points of inquiry: (1) The relation between the honest and the virtuous; (2) Its relation with the beautiful [*As honesty here denotes moral goodness, so beauty stands for moral beauty]; (3) Its relation with the useful and the pleasant; (4) Whether honesty is a part of temperance? Whether honesty is the same as virtue?Objection 1: It would seem that honesty is not the same as virtue. For Tully says (De Invent. Rhet. ii, 53) that “the honest is what is desired for its own sake.” Now virtue is desired, not for its own sake, but for the sake of happiness, for the Philosopher says (Ethic. i, 9) that “happiness is the reward and the end of virtue.” Therefore honesty is not the same as virtue. Objection 2: Further, according to Isidore (Etym. x) “honesty means an honorable state.” Now honor is due to many things besides virtue, since “it is praise that is the proper due of virtue” (Ethic. i, 12). Therefore honesty is not the same as virtue. Objection 3: Further, the “principal part of virtue is the interior choice,” as the Philosopher says (Ethic. viii, 13). But honesty seems to pertain rather to exterior conduct, according to 1 Cor. 14:40, “Let all things be done decently [honeste] and according to order” among you. Therefore honesty is not the same as virtue.

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

  REMIGIUS. Morally; by the leper is signified the sinner; for sin makes an unclean and impure soul; he falls down before Christ when he is confounded concerning his former sins; yet he ought to confess, and to seek the remedy of penitence; so the leper shews his disease, and asks a cure. The Lord stretches out His hand when He affords the aid of Divine mercy; whereupon follows immediately remission of sin; nor ought the Church to be reconciled to the same, but on the sentence of the Priest. 8:5–95. And when Jesus was entered into Capernaum, there came unto him a centurion, beseeching him, 6. And saying, Lord, my servant lieth at home sick of the palsy, grievously tormented. 7. And Jesus saith unto him, I will come and heal him. 8. The centurion answered and said, Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed. 9. For I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me: and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. The Lord having taught His disciples on the mount, and healed the leper at the foot of the mount, came to Capharnaum. This is a mystery, signifying that after the purification of the Jews He went to the Gentiles. HAYMO. For Capharnaum, which is interpreted, The town of fatness, or, The field of consolation, signifies the Church, which was gathered out of the Gentiles, which is replenished with spiritual fatness, according to that, That my soul may be filled with marrow and fatness, (Ps. 63:5.) and under the troubles of the world is comforted concerning heavenly things, according to that, Thy consolations hare rejoiced my soul. (Ps. 94:19.) Hence it is said, When he had entered into Capharnaum the centurion came to him. AUGUSTINE. (Serm. 62, 4.) This centurion was of the Gentiles, for Judæa had already soldiers of the Roman empire.

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

  Before the first two books are finished, Achilles Tatius offers even more smirking reflections 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 offers 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 Thracian, for at least corruption by coercion carries no shame!” This, 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 fulfilled at the novel’s climax.19

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

  M O D E R ATI O N : TH E S E X UA L L I F E CO U R S E F O R M E N Th e ancient novels have been hailed as messengers of a new erotic sensibility focused on “sexual symmetry.” No literary genre had so valorized the mutual devotion and shared attraction between two young lovers, nearly equal in age, whose love triumphs in marriage. But symmetry of passion did not mean equality of experience, and Achilles Tatius exploits the distinction with his usual sardonic enthusiasm. When Leucippe reemerged after her apparent beheading to fi nd her lover engaged to Melite, she furtively sent him a letter, scolding him in the most pathetic terms. Pierced by her accusations, Clitophon defends his sexual comportment as impeccable. “You will fi nd that I have mimicked your maidenhood, if there is also a maidenhood for men.” Th is precious claim preceded the “cure” that Clitophon of-fered Melite, but the reader remembers that Clitophon has already delivered a well- informed paean to the female orgasm. At the end of the novel, when recounting his adventures, Clitophon would omit details of the favor he performed for Melite, while to Leucippe’s father he would boast, “Th roughout our exile we have behaved like phi los o phers . . . If men have a maidenhead, I have kept it with Leucippe up to the present.” With an artful turn of phrase, and a whole culture’s indiff erence toward male chastity, Clitophon could stare past his inconsequential sexual dalliances into the exalted light of his love for Leucippe. Th ere was no natural word for male virginity in Greek or Latin. Parthe-nia meant “maidenhead,” and the ordinary sense of parthenos was “maiden.” Th e continent men of the incipient Christian movement searched, awk-wardly, for an expression adequate to their unusual ideal. On rare occasions authors would simply appropriate the language of maidenhood for men: the canonical Revelation, for example, or Joseph and Aseneth, in which both protagonists are called parthenos. Virgo, too, primarily meant “maiden” or “young, unmarried girl,” though it would later be adapted by Christians and applied to males. More often Christians found circumlocutions for male sexual abstinence, such as eunouchia. What is telling is that Clitophon’s brazen protestations of his purity are intentionally amusing because T H E M O R A L I T I E S O F S E X I N T H E R O M A N E M P I R E  they are linguistically bumbling. (Do we have here another instance where Achilles Tatius glances at contemporary cultural currents, such as Christian encratism, in order to mock them?) Regardless, the absence of a symmetrical term for male virginity is eloquent. So, too, is the fact that the prime sexual virtue, sōphrosynē, carried diff erent connotations for men and women.

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

  The sedimentation of ascetic energy into monastic rules and institutions is, to be sure, one legacy of Christian sexual morality. But this is only one trajectory in the tumultuous final centuries of late antiquity. Around the time the two ascetics of the Spiritual Meadow left the civilized “world” to escape its temptations, a man in the Frankish territories of northern Gaul was succumbing to the power of eros. In the telling of Gregory of Tours, this man, a priest, was “much too attached to the life of luxury, a lover of women, abandoned to gluttony, fornication, and every iniquity.” He eventually fell in love with a certain woman and “often copulated with her, in the manner of a whore.” He cropped her hair, dressed her as a man, and led her to another town where they could live “without suspicion of adultery.” But she was “a freeborn woman, descended from honorable stock. When, after some time, her relations discovered what had passed, they rushed forth to avenge the dishonor brought upon their line. They found the priest and clamped him in irons, but the woman they flayed alive.” A bishop named Aetherius pitied the priest and ransomed him from their custody, employing him in the cathedral school and sponsoring his moral rehabilitation. But like a “dog to his vomit,” the priest returned to his sin and tried to seduce the mother of a boy under his tutelage. She, “being a woman of sexual modesty,” informed her husband, whose clan promptly subjected the priest “to excruciating torments” and would have killed him but for the intervention once more of the compassionate bishop. Such tales thrust us into a world that is far less familiar than the settled landscape of cities and ascetic retreats of the eastern Mediterranean. What is so conspicuously absent from the dramas reported by Gregory of Tours is any strong sense of the state, of a public power that acts as the communal arbiter of legitimate violence in the sexual arena. To be sure, private force had always played a role in the mechanics of sexual regulation, but only within the terms established by the public authorities, whose criminalization of adultery was the foundation of an ancient political economy of sex. In Gregory’s world, those authorities have lost a little of their precarious hold on the circulation of sexual honor.5

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

  Here we will trace the embodiment of shame and sin in prose narratives spanning the high and late empires. The claims made are, at one level, literary. While it has been recognized that early Christian literature is related to the Greek romance, the depth of Christian engagement with the dynamics of female honor in pre-Christian fiction remains to be fully explored. The subgenre of literature that grew up around the figure of the penitent prostitute not only demands to be read in light of ancient fictional traditions; the narrative possibilities opened by the story of sexual transformation suddenly illuminate the inner logic of the old literature. In other words, penitent prostitutes are good to read with. But the claims of this chapter go beyond the literary. Literature, in the words of Stephen Greenblatt, is “an exceptionally sensitive register of the complex struggles and harmonies of culture.” The romances—Greek novels and Christian legends alike—are artifacts of a shared, public system of values. Even a mode of literature as formal and fantastic as the romance reflects the expectations and experiences of the society that produced it. The transformation of female honor in prose fiction recapitulates the profound revolution in sexual morality in the late classical world. The ancient novels are stories of eros in which honorable female sexuality is inviolable, because sexual morality itself is lodged in a social order whose logic provides the syntax of the romance. The early Christian literature adopts this form but directly inverts it, preserving the heroine’s corporal integrity but doing so eternally, so that her perpetual chastity becomes, like the apostle’s martyrdom, a rejection of society and society’s claim to represent the constitutive grounds of the self. Early Christian romance is the literature of a persecuted minority; the heroine’s integrity is a renunciation of the dominant order and a submission to the grander, invisible, cosmic order. But in the wake of the Constantinian revolution, as Christianity absorbed society, the secular order could no longer serve as an anti-Christian backdrop. The symbolism of female sexual honor shifted accordingly. The penitent prostitute emerged as a new archetype. The penitent prostitute violated, in the most explosive form, the deep, unifying convention of romance—the heroine’s chastity. The salvation of the prostitute, by offering redemption to the figure whose claim to social honor was most impossible, symbolized the supremacy of a divine scale of sexual morality. The arrival of this new archetype—whose birth depended on the enduring vitality of the ancient array of character types—was a cultural moment of the greatest significance. The heroines of fiction were transformed from “damsels in distress” at the mercy of fate into empowered sexual agents who determine their own destiny. The rise of this new type symbolized not just a new set of sexual norms or values, but a new, Christian order of sexual morality.3

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

  Around 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 One of the more unlikely misprisions to have prevailed among historians of antiquity is the view that modes and practices of same-sex contact withered in the high empire. In Veyne’s words, ancient bisexuality disappeared. But reports of same-sex love’s demise have been much exaggerated. Clinias is presented as a sympathetic figure, even if his lessons nearly lead Clitophon and Leucippe into irreversible trouble. His erotic style looms over the first two books of the romance, culminating in a famous rhetorical set-piece on a boat that Leucippe and Clitophon have taken to elope. After noting that “male-love has somehow become the current fashion,” Clitophon and one of the passengers, Menelaus, debate the relative merits of loving women and loving boys. Clitophon professes that his sexual experience has been limited to “the women who sell Aphrodite,” but, as Menelaus notes, he certainly sounds like no novice. In fact, Clitophon delivers the most elaborate encomium on the female orgasm that the ancient world has left to us. The frantic, gasping delight of the woman is integral to his case for the superiority of female lovers. Like other advocates of women, such as Plutarch, Clitophon emphasizes the promise of mutual pleasure in heterosexual aphrodisia to contrast it with the presumptive one-way pleasure of pederasty. But where Plutarch focused on the warm companionship that could arise from sexual familiarity, the erotic novel describes the transport of sexual ecstasy experienced by men and women—even, if Clitophon has not been misled, by the vendors of Aphrodite.5

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  And even about me and how I’d started to hit my girlfriends and how ashamed I was of that part of me. I was afraid that would put her off—and I wouldn’t have blamed her. But she understood how hard I was trying to get that behind me, and she actually said that she appreciated that I’d seen the dark side, as she called it, and that I’d come out a better person for having confronted some of these things. Talking about this with her and getting her reaction was the first time that I’d felt whole, like I could accept all of who I was and even be kind of proud of everything I’d been through. We’re still each other’s best friends. I can tell her anything. It’s incredible. I never thought I’d be able to say this, but I trust her with everything.” “How did the romantic piece get added into your friendship with Grace?” I asked. “I guess it was about a year after we met. Grace went to Arizona to visit her folks for a month and I really missed her. I realized how much we had grown to share with each other and it also hit me how much lighter and more fun my life was when she was there. She’s a really optimistic, positive person and she has a great sense of humor. I started to think then that she might be the one for me. When she got back it turned out she’d missed me, too, and so we started to date more seriously. We were inseparable for about a year and then we moved in together.” “How did it come about that you decided to marry?” Larry’s response confirmed my expectation that commitment is really hard for these young men. He said, “It took a long time. There was no way I was going to take getting married lightly. And that caused some of our earliest friction. I realized I loved her and that she was important to me but I was unable to make a decision. I was afraid because of the divorce. I was afraid of being left and I think that is why I was afraid of making a commitment to her. Somehow that brought up the sadness I felt when I was seven. That same sadness came back every time I was about to say ‘Let’s do it.’ It just stopped me cold.” He looked chilled as he described these events. “What happened was that we’d been living together for about three years and Grace gave me an ultimatum. It was on Valentine’s Day. She said, ‘Are we or are we not getting married? I don’t feel that we are getting anywhere.’ I just sat there, tongue-tied. I couldn’t say a word. So she packed her stuff and moved out.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I left town as soon as I could, served my country in the Marines, excelled at Ohio State, and made it to the country’s top law school. I had no demons, no character flaws, no problems. But that just wasn’t true. The things I wanted most in the entire world—a happy partner and a happy home—required constant mental focus. My self-image was bitterness masquerading as arrogance. A few weeks into my second year of law school, I hadn’t spoken to Mom in many months, longer than at any point in my life. I realized that of all the emotions I felt toward my mother—love, pity, forgiveness, anger, hatred, and dozens of others—I had never tried sympathy. I had never tried to understand my mom. At my most empathetic, I figured she suffered from some terrible genetic defect, and I hoped I hadn’t inherited it. As I increasingly saw Mom’s behavior in myself, I tried to understand her. Uncle Jimmy told me that, long ago, he’d walked in on a discussion between Mamaw and Papaw. Mom had gotten herself in some trouble and they needed to bail her out. These bailouts were common, and they always came with theoretical strings attached. She had to budget, they’d tell her, and they’d put her on some arbitrary plan they’d designed themselves. The plan was the cost of their help. As they sat and discussed things, Papaw buried his head in his hands and did something Uncle Jimmy had never seen him do: He wept. “I’ve failed her,” he cried. He kept on repeating, “I’ve failed her; I’ve failed her; I’ve failed my baby girl.” Papaw’s rare breakdown strikes at the heart of an important question for hillbillies like me: How much of our lives, good and bad, should we credit to our personal decisions, and how much is just the inheritance of our culture, our families, and our parents who have failed their children? How much is Mom’s life her own fault? Where does blame stop and sympathy begin? All of us have opinions. Uncle Jimmy reacts viscerally to the idea that any of the blame for Mom’s choices can be laid at Papaw’s feet. “He didn’t fail her. Whatever happened to her, it’s her own damned fault.” Aunt Wee sees things in much the same way, and who can blame her? Just nineteen months younger than Mom, she saw the worst of Mamaw and Papaw and made her own share of mistakes before coming out on the other side. If she can do it, then so should Mom. Lindsay has a bit more sympathy and thinks that just as our lives left us with demons, Mom’s life must have done the same to her. But at some point, Lindsay says, you have to stop making excuses and take responsibility.

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

  honor. Lucretia was such a wrenching case precisely because of the deep tension at the heart of her story: she was innocent in mind, but voluntarily accepted the penalty of death. It was this tension that Augustine unraveled with remorseless zeal. If she was innocent in her will, then she had killed an innocent person. “If she is cleared of adultery, then she becomes guilty of murder. Th ere is absolutely no escape when someone asks, ‘If she was an adulteress, why is she praised? If she was sexually honorable, why did she have to be killed?’ ” It is a truism of the Western Civilization classroom that Th e City of God represents the passage across the threshold from classical to medieval civilization. It is almost accurate. Augustine’s sneering prosecution of Lucretia was a cultural landmark. It represented the high- water mark of a distinctly volitional framework of sexual morality in the ancient church. Augustine could condemn Lucretia with such force because he carried with him a re-fi ned Christian model of sin that dissociated sexual behavior from its place in a network of social relationships. Th e fi rst installment of Th e City of God represented the apex of Christian free will for another reason, though. It appeared at precisely the same moment when the great Pelagian controversy erupted. In the last two de cades of his life, Augustine was engulfed in a doctrinal war over the nature of the human will, the repercussions of which would echo through the centuries, with momentous consequences for the history of sexuality. Th e Pelagian controversy, which can appear so com- pressed in its course and circumstantial in its substance, was an aff air of such extraordinary moment because it represented Christian sexuality suddenly coming to terms with the newfound social dominance of the church. Th e hopeful, if naive, notions of free will, native to primitive Christianity, were washed out by the tidal wave of Augustinian pessimism— in the west. Dark premonitions of this impending crash lurk already the fi rst installment of Th e City of God. In his pursuit of Lucretia, Augustine compasses a murky possibility. “Perhaps she killed herself not because of her innocence but because of her guilty conscience? What if (and only she would have known), despite the fact that she was violently ravished, her libido was led astray and she consented, and she was so racked by her guilt she thought to expiate it by her death?” Th e sinister insinuation— from which Augustine sheepishly retreats— cannot be ascribed to prosecutorial zeal. It was part of Augustine’s distinctive view of the sex drive, a view that was to receive fateful expression in the coming years. Augustine developed a view of human  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N

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

  Documents like Chrysostom’s sermons provide some of the grittiest and most authentic reflections on the dynamics of power within the ancient marriage relationship. He claimed that “there is nothing more shameful than a fornicating husband.” He bolstered his condemnation, though, with an uncomfortable depiction of the mundane conflicts within the household. “Do you want to know just how awful it is? Think of what life is like for those who suspect their wives. Food and drink become repulsive. An insidious poison seems to suffuse the whole table. Countless evils fill the house, like ruin, and they flee the home. There is no sleep, no gentle night, no commerce of lovers, no rays of sunshine. They will actually think the light is a torment, not only when the wife is seen to be an adulteress, but even once there is the slightest suspicion. So, realize that your wife suffers these very things when she hears or suspects that you have given yourself over to some whore.” In Chrysostom’s sermons, we see how the notion of sex as a cosmic battleground came to settle within the domestic squabbles of marriage. “If dread of hell doesn’t restrain you, then fear their black magic. When you deprive yourself of God’s help through your debauchery, and denude yourself of assistance from above, the whore will seize you more brazenly. Hatching plots against you and calling on her familiar demons with amulets devised for it, she will gain control over your well-being, making you a risible shame before all who live in the city.” How far removed John is from the lofty pronouncements of a Clement of Alexandria is evident in the fact that public shame could be invoked as a check on the fornication of Christian men.43 The dire insistence on sexual exclusivity grated against the most entrenched habits of sexual life in the Roman Mediterranean. More subtle but no less consequential in its challenge to mainstream habits was the Christian opposition to divorce and remarriage. For the Christians, marriage was not only the exclusive legitimate venue for erotic experience, it was a unique bond that could not be dissolved by civil law. The Romans had one of the most liberal regimes of divorce in human history; legally, divorce could be obtained unilaterally, without cause, by either party, without cumbersome procedural obstacles; the strict separation of spousal property, and the prohibition of gifts between the husband and wife, abetted easy separation. This image must be qualified by an appreciation for the hard realities faced by the majority of families who lived along the edges of subsistence; divorce was the prerogative of the well-to-do. Nevertheless it was a discreet reserve of feminine power in Roman society. But the stark commands of Christian scripture ensured that the church would universalize a strict opposition to divorce and erode this wellspring of women’s clout.44

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

  I answer that, As stated above (OBJ[2]), “pudicitia” [purity] takes its name from “pudor,” which signifies shame. Hence purity must needs be properly about the things of which man is most ashamed. Now men are most ashamed of venereal acts, as Augustine remarks (De Civ. Dei xiv, 18), so much so that even the conjugal act, which is adorned by the honesty [*Cf. Q[145]] of marriage, is not devoid of shame: and this because the movement of the organs of generation is not subject to the command of reason, as are the movements of the other external members. Now man is ashamed not only of this sexual union but also of all the signs thereof, as the Philosopher observes (Rhet. ii, 6). Consequently purity regards venereal matters properly, and especially the signs thereof, such as impure looks, kisses, and touches. And since the latter are more wont to be observed, purity regards rather these external signs, while chastity regards rather sexual union. Therefore purity is directed to chastity, not as a virtue distinct therefrom, but as expressing a circumstance of chastity. Nevertheless the one is sometimes used to designate the other. Reply to Objection 1: Augustine is here speaking of purity as designating chastity. Reply to Objection 2: Although every vice has a certain disgrace, the vices of intemperance are especially disgraceful, as stated above ([3513]Q[142], A[4]). Reply to Objection 3: Among the vices of intemperance, venereal sins are most deserving of reproach, both on account of the insubordination of the genital organs, and because by these sins especially, the reason is absorbed. OF VIRGINITY (FIVE ARTICLES)We must now consider virginity: and under this head there are five points of inquiry: (1) In what does virginity consist? (2) Whether it is lawful? (3) Whether it is a virtue? (4) Of its excellence in comparison with marriage; (5) Of its excellence in comparison with the other virtues. Whether virginity consists in integrity of the flesh?Objection 1: It would seem that virginity does not consist in integrity of the flesh. For Augustine says (De Nup. et Concup.) [*The quotation is from De Sancta Virgin. xiii] that “virginity is the continual meditation on incorruption in a corruptible flesh.” But meditation does not concern the flesh. Therefore virginity is not situated in the flesh. Objection 2: Further, virginity denotes a kind of purity. Now Augustine says (De Civ. Dei i, 18) that “purity dwells in the soul.” Therefore virginity is not incorruption of the flesh.

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

  Objection 4: Further, “Shame is about that which is disgraceful,” as Damascene says (De Fide Orth. ii, 15). Now Ambrose says (De Offic. i, 30) that “to be ashamed to beg is a sign of good birth.” Therefore it is disgraceful to beg: and consequently this is unbecoming to religious. Objection 5: Further, according to our Lord’s command it is especially becoming to preachers of the Gospel to live on alms, as stated above [3809](A[4]). Yet it is not becoming that they should beg, since a gloss on 2 Tim. 2:6, “The husbandman, that laboreth,” etc. says: “The Apostle wishes the gospeler to understand that to accept necessaries from those among whom he labors is not mendicancy but a right.” Therefore it would seem unbecoming for religious to beg. On the contrary, It becomes religious to live in imitation of Christ. Now Christ was a mendicant, according to Ps. 39:18, “But I am a beggar and poor”; where a gloss says: “Christ said this of Himself as bearing the ‘form of a servant,’” and further on: “A beggar is one who entreats another, and a poor man is one who has not enough for himself.” Again it is written (Ps. 69:6): “I am needy and poor”; where a gloss says: “‘Needy,’ that is a suppliant; ‘and poor,’ that is, not having enough for myself, because I have no worldly wealth.” And Jerome says in a letter [*Reference unknown]: “Beware lest whereas thy Lord,” i.e. Christ, “begged, thou amass other people’s wealth.” Therefore it becomes religious to beg.