Surprise

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 The Battle for God (2000)

  THE FUNDAMENTALIST reconquista had shown that religion was anything but a spent force. It was no longer possible to ask, as an exasperated United States government official had demanded after the Iranian Revolution: “Whoever took religion seriously?”1 The fundamentalists had brought faith out of the shadows and demonstrated that it could appeal to a huge constituency in modern society. Their victories filled secularists with dismay; this was not the tamed, decorous, privatized faith of the Enlightenment era. It seemed to deny sacred values of modernity. The religious offensive of the late 1970s had shown that societies were polarized; by the end of the twentieth century, it was clear that religious and secularists were even more divided. They could not speak each other’s language, nor share one another’s vision. From a purely rational perspective, fundamentalism was a disaster, but, since it amounted to a rebellion against what fundamentalists regarded as the illegitimate hegemony of scientific rationalism, this was not surprising. How should we assess these fundamentalisms as religious movements? What can they tell us about the peculiar challenges that religion faces in the modern and postmodern world? Did the fundamentalist triumphs amount, in fact, to a defeat for religion, and has the fundamentalist threat subsided? The Islamic Revolution in Iran was particularly troubling to those who still adhered to the principles of the Enlightenment. Revolutions were supposed to be strictly secularist. They were thought usually to occur at a time when the mundane realm had acquired new dignity, and was about to declare its independence of the mythical realm of religion. As Hannah Arendt explained in her celebrated study On Revolution (1963): “it may ultimately turn out that what we call revolution is precisely that transitory phase which brings about the birth of a new secular realm.”2 The idea of a popular uprising ushering in a theocratic state seemed an utterly fantastic notion, almost embarrassing in its apparently naive rejection of accepted Western wisdom. In the immediate aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, nobody expected Khomeini’s regime to survive. The very idea of a religious revolution, like that of a modern Islamic government, seemed a contradiction in terms.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  ONE OF the most startling developments of the late twentieth century has been the emergence within every major religious tradition of a militant piety popularly known as “fundamentalism.” Its manifestations are sometimes shocking. Fundamentalists have gunned down worshippers in a mosque, have killed doctors and nurses who work in abortion clinics, have shot their presidents, and have even toppled a powerful government. It is only a small minority of fundamentalists who commit such acts of terror, but even the most peaceful and law-abiding are perplexing, because they seem so adamantly opposed to many of the most positive values of modern society. Fundamentalists have no time for democracy, pluralism, religious toleration, peacekeeping, free speech, or the separation of church and state. Christian fundamentalists reject the discoveries of biology and physics about the origins of life and insist that the Book of Genesis is scientifically sound in every detail. At a time when many are throwing off the shackles of the past, Jewish fundamentalists observe their revealed Law more stringently than ever before, and Muslim women, repudiating the freedoms of Western women, shroud themselves in veils and chadors. Muslim and Jewish fundamentalists both interpret the Arab-Israeli conflict, which began as defiantly secularist, in an exclusively religious way. Fundamentalism, moreover, is not confined to the great monotheisms. There are Buddhist, Hindu, and even Confucian fundamentalisms, which also cast aside many of the painfully acquired insights of liberal culture, which fight and kill in the name of religion and strive to bring the sacred into the realm of politics and national struggle. This religious resurgence has taken many observers by surprise. In the middle years of the twentieth century, it was generally taken for granted that secularism was an irreversible trend and that faith would never again play a major part in world events. It was assumed that as human beings became more rational, they either would have no further need for religion or would be content to confine it to the immediately personal and private areas of their lives. But in the late 1970s, fundamentalists began to rebel against this secularist hegemony and started to wrest religion out of its marginal position and back to center stage. In this, at least, they have enjoyed remarkable success. Religion has once again become a force that no government can safely ignore. Fundamentalism has suffered defeats, but it is by no means quiescent. It is now an essential part of the modern scene and will certainly play an important role in the domestic and international affairs of the future. It is crucial, therefore, that we try to understand what this type of religiosity means, how and for what reasons it has developed, what it can tell us about our culture, and how best we should deal with it.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Adult imps are seductive because of how different they are from the rest child, still wrapped in his of us. Breaths of fresh air in a cautious world, they go full throttle, as if The Natural • 57 their impishness were uncontrollable, and thus natural. If you play the part, swaddling bands and do not worry about offending people now and then—you are too lovable feigning sleep. "What an absurd charge!" she cried. and inevitably they will forgive you. Just don't apologize or look contrite, But Apollo had already for that would break the spell. Whatever you say or do, keep a glint in your recognized the hides. He eye to show that you do not take anything seriously. picked up Hermes, carried him to Olympus, and there formally accused him of theft, offering the hides as The wonder. A wonder child has a special, inexplicable talent: a gift for evidence. Zeus, loth to music, for mathematics, for chess, for sport. At work in the field in which believe that his own newborn son was a thief they have such prodigal skill, these children seem possessed, and their ac- encouraged him to plead tions effortless. If they are artists or musicians, Mozart types, their work not guilty, but Apollo seems to spring from some inborn impulse, requiring remarkably little would not be put off and Hermes, at last, weakened thought. If it is a physical talent that they have, they are blessed with un- and confessed. • "Very usual energy, dexterity, and spontaneity. In both cases they seem talented well, come with me," he beyond their years. This fascinates us. said, "and you may have Adult wonders are often former wonder children who have managed, your herd. I slaughtered only two, and those I cut remarkably, to retain their youthful impulsiveness and improvisational skills. up into twelve equal True spontaneity is a delightful rarity, for everything in life conspires to rob portions as a sacrifice to the us of it—we have to learn to act carefully and deliberately, to think about twelve gods" • " Twelve gods?" asked Apollo. how we look in other people's eyes. To play the wonder you need some "Who is the twelfth?" • skill that seems easy and natural, along with the ability to improvise. If in "Your servant, sir" replied fact your skill takes practice, you must hide this and learn to make your Hermes modestly. "I ate no more than my share, work appear effortless. The more you hide the sweat behind what you do, though I was very hungry, the more natural and seductive it will appear. and duly burned the rest. " • The two gods [ Hermes and Apollo] returned to Mount Cyllene, where

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  10 Yet his theory of a heliocentric universe was a devastating blow to the old mythical perception. His astounding hypothesis was so radical that in his own day very few people could take it in. He suggested that instead of being located in the center of the universe, the earth and the other planets were actually in rapid motion around the sun. When we looked up at the heavens and thought that we saw the celestial bodies moving, this was simply a projection of the earth’s rotation in the opposite direction. Copernicus’s theory remained incomplete, but the German physicist Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) was able to provide mathematical evidence in its support, while the Pisan astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) tested the Copernican hypothesis empirically by observing the planets through the telescope, which he had himself perfected. When Galileo published his findings in 1612, he created a sensation. All over Europe, people made their own telescopes and scanned the heavens for themselves. Galileo was silenced by the Inquisition and forced to recant, but his own somewhat belligerent temperament had also played a part in his condemnation. Religious people did not instinctively reject science in the early modern period. When Copernicus first presented his hypothesis in the Vatican, the Pope approved it, and Calvin had no problem with the theory. The scientists themselves saw their investigations as essentially religious. Kepler felt himself possessed by “divine frenzy” as he revealed secrets that no human being had ever been privileged to learn before, and Galileo was convinced that his research had been inspired by divine grace. 11 They could still see their scientific rationalism as compatible with religious vision, logos as complementary to mythos . Nevertheless, Copernicus had initiated a revolution, and human beings would never be able to see themselves or trust their perceptions in the same way again. Hitherto, people had felt able to rely on the evidence of their senses. They had looked through the outward aspects of the world to find the Unseen, but had been confident that these external appearances corresponded to a reality. The myths they had evolved to express their vision of the fundamental laws of life had been of a piece with what they had experienced as fact. The Greek worshippers at Eleusis had been able to fuse the story of Persephone with the rhythms of the harvest that they could observe for themselves; the Arabs who jogged around the Kabah symbolically aligned themselves with the planetary motions around the earth and hence felt in tune with the basic principles of existence. But after Copernicus a seed of doubt had been sown. It had been proved that the earth, which seemed static, was actually moving very fast indeed; that the planets only appeared to be in motion because people were projecting their own vision onto them: what had been assumed to be objective was in fact entirely subjective.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  There would be other occasions in the twentieth century when clerics and laymen, secularists and mystics, believers and atheists, would challenge an oppressive Iranian regime together. The battle for justice, which had become a sacred value for Shiis, would encourage later generations of Iranians to brave the armies of the shah to inaugurate a better order. On at least two occasions, a Shii ideology would enable Iranians to establish modern political institutions in their country. Yet again, the Babi revolution had shown that religion could help people to appropriate the ideals and enthusiasms of modernity, by translating them from an alien secular idiom into a language, mythology, and spirituality that they could understand and make their own. If modernity had proved difficult for the Christians of the West, it was even more problematic for Jews and Muslims. It required a struggle—in Islamic terms, a jihad , which might sometimes become a holy war. 9. T he O ffensive ( 1974–79 ) T HE FUNDAMENTALIST ASSAULT took many secularists by surprise. They had assumed that religion would never again be a major player in politics, but during the late 1970s there was a militant explosion of faith. In 1978–79, the world watched in astonishment as an obscure Iranian ayatollah brought down the regime of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, which had seemed to be one of the most progressive and stable states in the Middle East. At the same time as governments applauded the peace initiative of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, his recognition of the State of Israel, and his overtures to the West, observers noted that the young Egyptians appeared to be turning to religion. They were donning Islamic dress, casting aside the freedoms of modernity, and many were engaged in an aggressive takeover of the university campuses. In the United States, Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979, urging Protestant fundamentalists to get involved in politics and to challenge state and federal legislation that pushed a “secular humanist” agenda. This sudden eruption of religion seemed shocking and perverse to the secularist establishment. Instead of embracing one of the modern ideologies, which had proved so effective, these radical traditionalists quoted scripture and cited archaic laws and principles that were quite alien to twentieth-century political discourse. Their initial success seemed inexplicable; it was (surely?) impossible to run a modern state along these lines. The fundamentalists seemed engaged in an atavistic return to the past. Further, the enthusiasm and the support that these policies inspired were an affront. Those Americans and Europeans who had imagined that religion had had its day were now forced to see that not only could the old faiths still inspire a passionate allegiance, but that millions of committed Jews, Christians, and Muslims loathed the secular, liberal culture of which they were so proud . In fact, as we have seen, the fundamentalist resurgence was neither sudden nor surprising.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Something like monastic systems are found at the margins of several world faiths – Jains, Taoists, Hindus and Muslims – but Buddhism and Christianity have made monasticism a central force within their religious activity. It is more surprising that Christianity should make monasteries part of its tradition than that monasticism should have developed in Buddhism, for Christianity affirms the positive value of physical human flesh in the incarnation of Christ, while Buddhism has at its centre nothingness and the annihilation of the self. Christianity’s parent religion, Judaism, is actively hostile to celibacy, one of monasticism’s chief institutions, and Jewish groups which practised a form of monasticism are fairly marginal in Jewish history: the Essenes and the shadowy sect of the Therapeutae mentioned by the Jewish historian Philo. Descriptions of monasticism are notable by their absence in both Old and New Testaments, and we have seen that the one recorded attempt in Christianity’s first generation to practise community of goods was short-lived, if indeed it happened at all (see pp. 119–20). The spiritual writer A. M. Allchin called one episode in monastic history ‘the silent rebellion’, and this happy phrase can be more widely applied.28 All Christian monasticism is an implied criticism of the Church’s decision to become a large-scale and inclusive organization. In its early years, the Christian Church was a small community which found it easy to guard its character as an elite consisting of spiritual athletes proclaiming the Lord’s coming again. Later, the gnostic impulse in Christianity encouraged this tendency, pushing Christians in the direction of austerity and self-denial, just like much contemporary non- Christian philosophy. The stance became increasingly hard to maintain as Christian communities grew and all sorts of people began flocking in; even the long process of instruction and preparation for baptism and admission to communion then customary for converts and born Christians alike could not prevent this process. There were arguments about this in Rome as early as the end of the second century, when the austere priest Hippolytus (see p. 172) furiously attacked his bishop, Callistus, for what he regarded as laxity in imposing penances on Church members who had fallen into serious sin.29 At the root of this quarrel, which resulted in Hippolytus severing his links with the mainstream Church, was the issue of whether the Church of Christ was an assembly of saints, hand-picked by God for salvation, or a mixed assembly of saints and sinners. The same dilemma lay behind the schisms of the Novatianists, Melitians and Donatists in the third and fourth centuries (see pp. 174–5 and p. 212), and it was all the more obvious when Christians generally ceased to have the opportunity to be martyred at the hands of non-Christians after the time of Constantine.

• From Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life (2005)

  150 Lecture 29: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part 2 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part 2 Lecture 29 The second part of Faust is a profound examination of this question of where do cultural values lie? Is there a unique set of values for each nation? Can we really fi nd models? Are there standards of absolute beauty? A s previously mentioned, the fi rst part of Goethe’s Faust was published in 1808, and the second part was published in 1831. The poem is about love, ambition, and wisdom. In the fi rst part of Faust, the professor gave his soul to gain knowledge but lost wisdom in the process. The second part of the work shows how Faust reclaims wisdom. Faust is ultimately about redemption. To Goethe’s admirers, the conclusion of the work was a surprise, because they saw in Goethe a mind of the age of Enlightenment, unfettered by religion. Goethe lived from 1749 to 1832, a period that encompassed the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the age of Napoleon, and the revolutions that shook Europe in 1830. Goethe was educated in the values of the Enlightenment. Chief among Enlightenment values was admiration for the classical cultures of Greece and Rome. People believed that the Greeks and Romans could be emulated but not surpassed; the models were the Iliad and the Aeneid. The Enlightenment was also an age of universality. Europeans believed that Europe was one uni fi ed culture and civilization. This culture moved across boundaries. France was seen as the great modern example of culture, and cultivated people, including Goethe, frequently wrote and spoke in French. Thus, both the classical culture, with its models, and the contemporary world formed a unifi ed cultural outlook. These attitudes of the Enlightenment were shattered by the French Revolution and Napoleon, both of which preached doctrines of liberty and equality but To Goethe’s admirers, the conclusion of the work was a surprise, because they saw in Goethe a mind of the age of Enlightenment, unfettered by religion.

• From Action (2014)

  At twenty-one, I was eager about the prospect of having sex with a few people during a five-day tropical vacation, but I didn’t expect what I thought was a coup on the first night out: My sister Laura and I met twin brothers—fraternal, but the degree to which they were gorgeous was identical—at the bar off the casino. As they bought drinks and led us to the dance floor, Laura leaned over to me and whispered, “We’ve gotta keep an eye on these Suit Brothers,” as if that weren’t a priori OBVIO from the minute they Armani-Exchanged across our line of vision. One was named Rafa and the other Juanpablo, a name spit as one fused word from the mouth of a sharper-featured, suaver iteration of his bro. JP landed a few sly compliments as we spoke—“You know? You look like you have a spotlight on you even though it is dark in here. Would you like to light up the beach with me?” (This is obviously too schmaltzified for life, but like I said: godlike face.) Since I was already wearing my bikini in the club because I believe in dressing for success in all moments, I accepted the invitation. We strolled not to the shore—since hair, as we know, is not actually effulgent, it seemed risky to meander down to a blackened beach in another country with a strange Suit Brother, even for this unflappable wearer of bathing suits in the club. I suggested we opt for one of the well-lit pools on the resort grounds, which was shallow and featured an inlaid mosaic of stars. I boned him right there on that subaqueous cosmos. This might sound pretty Harlequin-novel, thus far in my story: a spontaneous encounter with a rakish, continental stranger in a luxury pool in a different country with mad stars both under my butt and above my head! It sure felt novelistic: I was so romantically self-possessed and free! Then he punched me in the face. The stars multiplied again from the impact. Before they dissipated, I had already hauled off and clocked him right back, and the velocity at which my fist connected with his geometric jaw surprised me, but not as much as it did him. Uncertain of what came next in this diversion from the story line, we froze. “Why did you hit me like that? You didn’t even ask!” he sputtered, running a chlorine-wet hand over his chin. “Funny—I know exactly the feeling, dude,” I said flatly. JP looked mortified as I continued: “Did you really think that was going to fly? You have to make sure it’s okay with someone before you do that, fuckface, no matter how spontaneous and rough things seem.” He apologized. I didn’t.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  freedom and inner light, apparently spoiling for martyrdom, and raising bitter memories of Anne Hutchinson as they encouraged women to preach. The Friends’ wilful separation from secular life aroused even greater fears than in England; after all, the Commonwealth was still no more than a quarter-century old, and bound together socially as well as in religion by its covenants. Quakers were publicly flogged and had their ears cropped; then, between 1659 and 1661, four were hanged for missionary activities — one of the victims was a woman, Mary Dyer, who had deliberately returned from banishment to see her previous sentence fulfilled. This caused a sharp reaction of protest both in New England and in the home country. Charles II ordered the executions to stop, even though his government had little time for Quakers and was itself imprisoning them; it was ironical that a royal regime so like the one from which the Puritan settlers had fled should now restrain their zeal for persecution. The executions exercised many New Englanders as to whether even the religiously obnoxious ought so to be treated. Pointedly, Rhode Island respected the Quaker commitment to pacifism by exempting them from military service. This unprecedented concession survived even the dire crisis of native all-out war in 1676, while still allowing Quakers a say in the government of the colony, which included decisions about war.16 Roger Williams was one of the few early colonists to think of making an effort to spread Christianity among the Native American population, taking the trouble to learn and analyse their languages and publish a guide to them. However, he too came to let this part of his ministry lapse, and the work awaited the personal decision of one New England minister, John Eliot, before it was taken up again. The early English Protestant neglect of evangelizing among indigenous peoples makes a curious contrast with the precocious Spanish attention to converting native peoples in South and Central America, or French efforts to the north in New France. It cannot simply be accounted for by the early difficulties of the colonies in surviving at all, or the tensions and cultural incomprehensions between the two societies. Elizabethan writers who published propaganda for founding colonies, principally George Peckham, Thomas Harriot and Richard Hakluyt the younger, had stressed the importance of bringing Christianity to the peoples of America.17 This makes it all the more surprising that actual colonists were so slow to take up the work, and undermines the message of the noble image on the first seal of the Massachusetts Bay Company: a Native American pleading, in the words of Paul’s missionary vision (Acts 16.9), ‘Come over and help us.’ The explanations are probably theological rather than the result of inertia or straightforward racism, both of which Iberian colonists had also exhibited in

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  independently created by Syriac-speaking Jews.51 A small Hellenistic Syrian city called Dura Europos on the banks of the Euphrates was destroyed by the Sassanians around 256–7 after a century of Roman military occupation.52 Abandoned for ever, it proved a sensationally well-preserved paradise for twentieth-century archaeologists. Its unfortunate inhabitants are unlikely to feel much posthumous compensation for their disaster in the current fame of their city, which centres on the twin revelation of the world’s oldest known surviving synagogue and oldest known surviving Christian church building, both preserved when buried in earth defences in the final siege, some decades after their original construction. Both buildings are additionally famous for their wall paintings. The Jewish paintings, a cycle of scenes from the Tanakh, are rather finer than their Christian counterparts. Their very existence is an instructive surprise in view of the later Jewish consensus against representations of the sacred, although being paintings technically they do not violate the Second Commandment’s prohibition of graven or sculptured images.53 The Christian church at Dura had been converted from a courtyard house and in plan is therefore very unlike the churches of later Christianity anywhere in the world. Like many of the developed churches of the next few centuries, it does have separate chambers for congregational worship and for the initiation rite of baptism, together with a separate space for those who are still under instruction (the ‘catechumens’), but there is one remarkable oddity, making it different from any subsequent Christian church building before some of the more radical products of the Protestant Reformation thirteen hundred years later: there is apparently no substantial architectural provision for an altar for the Eucharist.54 The subjects of the paintings in the various rooms contrast with those of the synagogue in being derived from the New Testament, including Christ as the Good Shepherd, one of the first favourites in Christian art generally, and the three Marys about to investigate Christ’s tomb after the Resurrection. Absent is the representation which modern Christians might expect, but which was nowhere to be found in Christian cultures before the fifth century: Christ hanging on the Cross, the Crucifixion. Christ in the art of the early Church was shown in his human life or sprung to new life – never dead, in the fashion of the crucifixions which were to become so universal in the art of the later Western Church. One of the other little border kingdoms of Syria, Osrhoene, had its capital at Edessa (now Urfa in Turkey), which in fact provides the earliest record of a Christian church building, predating the existing remains at Dura Europos. We know that it was destroyed in a flood in 201.55 The Romans conquered Osrhoene

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Lovell stayed at NASA for the next three years, working on early plans for the Space Shuttle and studying science applications for future space missions. The agency even sent him to a management program at Harvard, where he got his first taste of business. All the while, the Navy had been calling, urging him to come back to the fleet, but promotion in that service didn’t feel right to Lovell. He’d been a captain; the next step up was admiral. After more than a decade at NASA, he’d be competing against men who’d studied war and seen serious combat in Vietnam. To Lovell, they would always deserve promotion more than he. Given his management experience at Harvard, it seemed time to make the move into the private sector. When he retired from NASA and the Navy in 1973, no man had spent more time in space than Lovell, a total of 715 hours and five minutes, or just five hours short of a month. As a private citizen, Lovell went to work for a tugboat company in Houston, where he became president and chief executive officer. The business proved lucrative, but after four years, Lovell found an even better opportunity, as president of a telecommunications company. It grew exponentially with deregulation in the industry, then was sold to Centel, a larger telecom corporation, where Lovell remained as an executive and board member until his retirement in 1991. Four years later, Hollywood released a film version of Apollo 13, a book Lovell had coauthored about the rescue of that ill-fated mission. Tom Hanks played the lead role and the film became a hit. Suddenly, everyone wanted a piece of Lovell, and he did his best to oblige, touring the country and giving talks with his usual warmth and good humor. The new notoriety also helped him launch Lovell’s of Lake Forest, a restaurant on Chicago’s tony North Shore. Lovell packed the place with mementos from his NASA career, along with a giant mural behind the bar, titled Steeds of Apollo, that showed four horses galloping into the heavens. But the restaurant’s real secret weapon was Lovell’s son, Jay, its executive chef, who made Lovell’s of Lake Forest a success. On most evenings, the restaurant was packed with patrons. On the night of September 11, 2001, it was virtually deserted but for Jim Lovell himself. Dressed in his usual suit and tie, he stood alone in the corner of the basement bar, staring at the television, watching endless replays of terrorists bring down the towers at the World Trade Center in New York, an American hero not quite believing what had just happened to America. In 2003, Jim and Marilyn Lovell celebrated the thirty-fifth anniversary of Apollo 8 with Frank and Susan Borman and Bill and Valerie Anders. The reunion was warm and friendly, but it seemed to Lovell that Frank was doing everything, even making lunch, while Susan seemed not to contribute much at all.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  fallible human beings decide for themselves that they best speak for the Spirit, or fall in love with the power of the Spirit and apply it to their own purposes. But the rise of Pentecostalism and its Charismatic offshoots was one of the greatest surprises of twentieth-century Christianity – in a century when most of the other surprises turned out to be unpleasant. 24 Not Peace but a Sword (1914–60) A WAR THAT KILLED CHRISTENDOM (1914–18) The most prominent pieces of furniture added during the twentieth century to the fine medieval church where my father was rector were a new pipe organ and a tall sideboard-like structure bearing a list of sixteen male names in alphabetical order. Both are Wetherden’s memorials to its dead in the First World War, and it is significant that in this little Suffolk village, the parish church was then felt to be the right setting for community commemoration. So it was in my father’s neighbouring parish of Haughley, where a stone churchyard cross with figures of Christ crucified, Mary and John tops another list (alphabetical by regiment) of twenty-nine dead men: a crushingly large number from a small place. Not all such memorials take Christian forms, but virtually every community or old- established company, school or college in the United Kingdom has one, almost always still carefully tended and once a year the focus for one of the last national rituals widely observed in Britain, the Service of Remembrance. They were overwhelmingly paid for by public subscription: ‘the biggest communal arts project ever attempted’.1 Their presence through the rest of Europe is likewise all-pervasive, although in many places they have fared less well than in Britain, because the political institutions whose soldiers fell have long disappeared, caught up and often discredited by the long-term effects of the war itself.2 The greatest casualty commemorated in this multitude of crosses and symbols of war is the union between Christianity and secular power: Christendom itself. By the end of the 1960s, the alliance between emperors and bishops which Constantine had first generated was a ghost; a fifteen-hundred-year-old adventure was at an end. The war which began in August 1914, triggered by complex diplomacy and a tangle of fears and aspirations, did not seem likely to set any such new patterns. It involved four Christian emperors – German and Austrian Kaisers, the Russian Tsar and the British King-Emperor3 – but such rulers had habitually ignored their common faith to fight each other. They went to war over a long-standing

• From The Greatest Controversies of Early Christian History (2013)

  82 Lecture 13: Is Paul the Real Founder of Christianity? Is Paul the Real Founder of Christianity? Lecture 13 I t comes as a shock to most people to learn that some scholars do not think that Jesus was the founder of Christianity. For these scholars, Christianity is not the belief in Jesus’s message about the coming of the Son of man in judgment but the belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Christianity is not the religion of Jesus but the religion about Jesus. In this view, it was the apostle Paul who fi rst promoted the religion based on Jesus’s death and resurrection rather than on his teachings, and for that reason, it is Paul, not Jesus, who is the founder of Christianity. In this lecture, we’ll consider the merits and shortcomings of this view. The Life of Paul  We have 13 letters in the New Testament that claim to be written by Paul, 7 of which virtually all scholars agree were actually written by him. Another source about Paul is the New Testament book of Acts, which is largely about Paul’s life as a Christian. Scholars, however, question the historical accuracy of Acts, which seems to differ from what Paul says about his own life in his letters. Unfortunately, even Paul’s letters give us little information about his past.  From Galatians and Philippians, we learn that Paul was born and raised a Jew and, as a young man, was highly zealous, particularly, zealous before the Law. Once Paul learned about the Christians, he began to persecute them, probably in part because he found the idea ludicrous that a crucifi ed man could be the messiah.  Then, Paul had a vision of Jesus and became convinced that Jesus was alive again—that he had been raised from the dead. This conversion of Paul was arguably the most signi fi cant in the history of Western civilization.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  down: “We just got word from the CIA that the Russians are planning a lunar fly-by before the end of the year. We want to change Apollo 8 from an Earth orbital to a lunar orbital flight. A lot has to come together. And Apollo 7 has to be perfect. But if it happens, Frank, do you want to go to the Moon?” The idea startled Borman. Apollo 8 was meant to fly in December, just four months from now, but certainly not to the Moon. Apollo 8 was a conservative mission designed for low Earth orbit, perhaps at 125 miles altitude. It was one of several essential steps leading up to a manned lunar landing, hopefully before the end of 1969. Everything went in steps at NASA. Everything. But Slayton meant exactly what he said. He wanted Borman to change missions and fly to the Moon. At a distance of 240,000 miles. In just sixteen weeks. Slayton didn’t discuss the fact that the lunar module couldn’t possibly be ready by then. He didn’t discuss any of the other myriad reasons NASA couldn’t be ready to fly men to the Moon by year’s end. In fact, Slayton gave very few additional details. He didn’t even ask if Borman cared to talk things over with his wife or crew. Borman would have been justified in taking days, if not weeks, to consider such a proposition. And yet Slayton needed an answer, and he needed it now. Borman understood the urgency. If the Soviet Union sent men to the Moon first—even if those men didn’t land—it would score a major victory in the Space Race and deal a devastating blow in the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union. The mission Slayton was proposing would be exquisitely dangerous. But it also had the power to change history. Now, suddenly, it all depended on the decision of Frank Borman and his crew. Chapter Two

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  feelings: he stopped bothering her. Then one day, weeks later, she was at the country manor of a friend when the marquis suddenly appeared. She blushed, trembled, walked away, but his unexpected appearance had caught her unawares—it had pushed her over the edge. A few days later she became another of Richelieu's victims. Of course he had set the whole thing up, including the supposed surprise encounter. Not only does suddenness create a seductive jolt, it conceals manipula- 248 • The Art of Seduction tions. Appear somewhere unexpectedly, say or do something sudden, and people will not have time to figure out that your move was calculated. Take them to some new place as if it only just occurred to you, suddenly reveal some secret. Made emotionally vulnerable, they will be too bewildered to see through you. Anything that happens suddenly seems natural, and anything that seems natural has a seductive charm. Only months after arriving in Paris in 1926, Josephine Baker had completely charmed and seduced the French public with her wild dancing. But less than a year later she could feel their interest wane. Since childhood she had hated feeling out of control of her life. Why be at the mercy of the fickle public? She left Paris and returned a year later, her manner completely altered—now she played the part of an elegant Frenchwoman, who happened to be an ingenious dancer and performer. The French fell in love again; the power was back on her side. If you are in the public eye, you must learn from this trick of surprise. People are bored, not only with their own lives but with people who are meant to keep them from being bored. The minute they feel they can predict your next step, they will eat you alive. The artist Andy Warhol kept moving from incarnation to incarnation, and no one could predict the next one—artist, filmmaker, society man. Always keep a surprise up your sleeve. To keep the public's attention, keep them guessing. Let the moralists accuse you of insincerity, of having no core or center. They are actually jealous of the freedom and playfulness you reveal in your public persona.

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  It’s ten-ten when you come up on Times Square, ten-sixteen when you enter the building. The first elevator down is operated by a kid who looks like his last job was purse snatching. You say good morning and step into the back. After a minute he turns around. “You gonna tell me what floor or do I gotta be psychic?” You tell him twenty-nine. Accustomed to Lucio and his gracious peers, this kid strikes you as a rude interloper. He swings the gate closed and latches the door. Halfway up he takes out a Vicks inhaler and snorts on it. This makes your nose twitch sympathetically. “Twenty-nine,” he says when you get to the floor. “Ladies’ undies and accessories.” No armed guards waiting for you. You ask Sally, the receptionist, if Clara is in yet. “Not yet,” she says. You’re not sure if this is good news or bad. It could be a case of prolonging the agony. Your colleagues are all huddled around a copy of the New York Times , the newspaper of record and of choice here in Fact. Clara told you when you were hired that all members of the department were expected to read the paper thoroughly, excluding the new features sections, but you haven’t looked at it in weeks. “Is it war,” you ask. Rittenhouse tells you that one of the magazine’s writers, a favorite among members of the Department for her scrupulous research and general lack of snottiness toward underlings, has just won a big award for her series on cancer research. Cancer . Rittenhouse is particularly pleased because he helped research the articles. “How about that?” he says. He holds up the paper so you can see the article. You are about to nod your head and impersonate enthusiasm when you see the ad on the facing page. You take the paper from Rittenhouse. There are three women modeling cocktail dresses and one of them is Amanda. You feel dizzy. You sit back on the desk and look at the picture. It’s Amanda, all right. You didn’t even know she was in New York. The last you heard she was in Paris and planning to stay. She might have had the decency to call as long as she’s here. But, then, what is there to say? Why does she have to haunt you like this? If she would just work in an office like everyone else. Right before she left she mentioned a billboard contract, and you have dreamt of seeing her face, monstrously enlarged, on the wall across from your apartment. “I think we can all be proud of her,” Rittenhouse says. “What?” “Is anything wrong,” Meg asks. You shake your head and fold up the paper. Leukemia, Tad said . Meg tells you that Clara hasn’t come in yet. You thank her for the wake-up call.

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  “You can’t just barge in ’ere and run off wiv ’er Grace’s ’orses.” The old man straightened as best he could. “You’ll ’ave to ask ’er first!” “Ask her? Good God, she’s in residence here?” The place wasn’t fit for man or beast, let alone for a duchess. “O’ course. Where else would she be?” Artemis snorted. Hugh arched a brow. “Where else indeed?” “Come along, then, gov’na.” The servant shuffled away, stopping only to grasp the candelabra off the console. “You can wait in the parlor while I tell ’er Grace yer ’ere.” Shoving open a set of double doors on the right, Artemis gestured impatiently for him to go inside, shoving the candelabra at him as he passed. Hugh moved into the room and then spun about as the door slammed shut behind him. “Abominable service,” he muttered, glancing around. No other candles were lit, and the grate was cold. Every bit of furniture was draped and covered with thick dust. Even the portrait over the fireplace was hidden from view. Depositing his meager source of light on a cloth-covered table, he set to work building a fire. Grumbling under his breath, Hugh inspected the coal bucket, surprised to discover it did indeed have coal inside it. Within moments he’d started a fire. He stood and used a nearby dusty sheet to wipe his hands. Of all the confounded places for his wheel to break, why did it have to be here? Hugh rubbed the space between his brows, trying to remember everything he’d heard about the dowager Lady Glenmoore. The elderly duke had shocked the ton a few years past with a rushed elopement with his second wife. Then His Grace had gone on to compound the astonishment by passing away within scant weeks of his marriage. It was widely speculated that the new duchess had helped her husband to his final reward. The succeeding Duke of Glenmoore had distanced himself from his stepmother in short order, banishing her to a remote holding, where it was rumored she passed the time scaring the wits out of hapless passersby such as Hugh. The duchess’s weird behavior had earned her the moniker ‘Her Mad Grace.’ A bizarre noise caught his ear, pulling him from his thoughts, and Hugh held his breath as it drew closer and increased in volume. The door opened, the squeaking of the unoiled hinges accompanied by the cacophony of rattling china. His eyes widened as he found himself dumbfounded by the vision that greeted him. A young woman entered, her slim arms weighted with an ancient tea service. The entire arrangement wobbled horrendously, and he gaped at the bouncing, clattering items on the tray. He’d never seen anything like it in his life, and he waited breathlessly for the moment when everything would crash to the floor.

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  He came toward her with his long-legged stride, a sexual predator in motion. Stopping by the bed, he lit the taper on the side table. His mouth fell open when the circle of light revealed her. “Jesus! You’re naked!” he accused, stumbling backward with an expression of horror. “Hence the reason you should not be in here.” Julienne pulled the sheet up higher and gestured with a toss of her chin toward the transparent negligee slung over a chair. “Being naked seemed no better or worse than wearing that.” He never took his eyes from her. “I should have allowed you to leave,” he mumbled, shaking his head. She colored. “You should leave. You have no right to enter my room.” He’d backed up almost to the door when she stopped him. “Has my brother arrived?” she asked eagerly, pushing her hair away from her face. Remington stood frozen by the doorway. “No,” he croaked. “Montrose is not here.” He stared at her for a long moment before blurting, “Are you comfortable?” “Am I—?” Julienne frowned, confused by the sudden change in topic. “Yes, I was quite comfortable.” “And the food? Did you enjoy it?” “The food was excellent.” She smiled. “Your entire establishment is breathtaking. I’d heard rumors, of course, and Hugh—er, Montrose—raved about the beauty of this place, but nothing equals actually seeing it with my own eyes. It’s very impressive. I admire what you’ve accomplished here.” “You ad—?” He swallowed hard. “Thank you. I’m pleased you like it.” “You must hear that often.” “Actually,” he admitted, “that was the first instance where someone other than my parents expressed admiration for me.” “Oh.” Julienne didn’t know what to say. She knew what others said about him, but she was saddened to realize he knew it as well. “Is that why you came? To check on my welfare?” An uncomfortable silence descended. “Perhaps I’ve come to ravish you,” he said finally. She choked and then laughed aloud, even as her stomach did a little flip. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” Remington’s eyes widened. “Why? You don’t believe I would want to ravish you?” Julienne rubbed her forehead and shook her head, wondering if she was dreaming this mad encounter. “Mr. Remington, you are the handsomest man in all of England. Your reputation is well known to me. I am aware a libertine like you would have no interest in a green debutante like myself.” He moved toward her again with painful slowness, as if he pulled against his will. “The handsomest man in England?” he queried softly. “Is that your personal opinion, or one you repeat from the mouths of others?”

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  An observer, casually watching the patrons at a neighboring table in a fashionable restaurant, notices that the first guest to taste the soup winces, as if in pain. The normality of a multitude of events will be altered by this incident. It is now unsurprising for the guest who first tasted the soup to startle violently when touched by a waiter; it is also unsurprising for another guest to stifle a cry when tasting soup from the same tureen. These events and many others appear more normal than they would have otherwise, but not necessarily because they confirm advance expectations. Rather, they appear normal because they recruit the original episode, retrieve it from memory, and are interpreted in conjunction with it. Imagine yourself the observer at the restaurant. You were surprised by the first guest’s unusual reaction to the soup, and surprised again by the startled response to the waiter’s touch. However, the second abnormal event will retrieve the first from memory, and both make sense together. The two events fit into a pattern, in which the guest is an exceptionally tense person. On the other hand, if the next thing that happens after the first guest’s grimace is that another customer rejects the soup, these two surprises will be linked and the soup will surely be blamed. “How many animals of each kind did Moses take into the ark?” The number of people who detect what is wrong with this question is so small that it has been dubbed the “Moses illusion.” Moses took no animals into the ark; Noah did. Like the incident of the wincing soup eater, the Moses illusion is readily explained by norm theory. The idea of animals going into the ark sets up a biblical context, and Moses is not abnormal in that context. You did not positively expect him, but the mention of his name is not surprising. It also helps that Moses and Noah have the same vowel sound and number of syllables. As with the triads that produce cognitive ease, you unconsciously detect associative coherence between “Moses” and “ark” and so quickly accept the question. Replace Moses with George W. Bush in this sentence and you will have a poor political joke but no illusion. When something cement does not fit into the current context of activated ideas, the system detects an abnormality, as you just experienced. You had no particular idea of what was coming after something, but you knew when the word cement came that it was abnormal in that sentence. Studies of brain responses have shown that violations of normality are detected with astonishing speed and subtlety. In a recent experiment, people heard the sentence “Earth

• From Story of the Eye (1928)

  He later lectured at the École des Hautes Études on the sociology of signs, symbols and collective representations. Roland Barthes died in 1980. His publications include On Racine, Writing Degree Zero, Elements of Semiology, Mythologies , S/Z, The Pleasure of Text and Sade/Fourier/Loyola . Publisher’s Note The shortness of this important erotic classic – now translated into English for the first time fifty years after its original French publication – enables us to include in this volume two essays that deal with the genre and style of Story of the Eye: Susan Sontag’s essay on aspects of the literature of sex, The Pornographic Imagination (from ‘Styles of Radical Will’, 1967) explores a literary form that is, despite its manifold representation in English and Continental writing, seldom accepted in our puritan Anglo-American canon. Roland Barthes’ The Metaphor of the Eye (from the magazine ‘Critique’, 1963) discusses in depth the language of Story of the Eye , a major example of French Surrealist writing, a movement which is at last beginning to receive serious critical attention in England and the United States. M.B. Translator’s Note Story of the Eye was Georges Bataille’s first novel, and there were four editions, the first in 1928. The other three, known as the “new version”, came out in 1940, 1941, and 1967. The “new version” differs so thoroughly in all details from the first edition that one can justifiably speak of two distinct books. Indeed, the Gallimard publication of the complete works includes both versions in its opening volume. The English translation is based on the original version, but the “Outline for a Sequel” comes from the fourth edition. Of all the editions, only the final, posthumous one bore the author’s name. The other three were credited to Lord Auch, a pseudonym explained in Bataille’s short prose piece Le Petit (1943). (The relevant part is included at the end of this section.) J.N. Part 1 THE TALE 1. The Cat’s Eye I grew up very much alone, and as far back as I recall I was frightened of anything sexual. I was nearly sixteen when I met Simone, a girl my own age, at the beach in X. Our families being distantly related, we quickly grew intimate. Three days after our first meeting, Simone and I were alone in her villa. She was wearing a black pinafore with a starched white collar.