Word: anathema
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Author Gaddis sees it, the 20th century U.S. is a soggy butt end of western civilization, an age of publicity and duplicity in which the phonies have inherited the earth. Pronouncing a scarcely original, but nevertheless grandiose, anathema, he finds everyone corroded through the decline of love and the absence of Christian faith. Rangy in setting (New England, Greenwich Village, Paris, Spain, Italy, Central America), aswim in erudition, semi-Joycean in language, glacial in pace, irritatingly opaque in plot and character, The Recognitions is one of those eruptions of personal vision that will be argued about without being argued away...
...existing convictions: that is precisely its purpose and its justification. He is. indeed, a ''subversive'' who disputes those precepts that I most treasure and seeks to persuade me to substitute his own. He may be of those to whom any forcible sanction of conformity is anathema; yet it remains true that he is trying to bring about my apostasy, and I hate him just in proportion as I fear his success. Heretics have been hateful from the beginning of recorded time; they have been ostracized, exiled, tortured, maimed and butchered; but it has generally proved impossible...
...understood by the dolts who have usurped control of the party is that the National Committee is the catalyst of the party. But the little hard core of men close to the President ignore the organization. The symbol of this [group] has become Sherman Adams. He is anathema to the organization and its resentment centers upon him. His attitude of somewhat contemptuous flouting of the organization and its duly elected representatives has been taken as typical of the attitude of the Administration. The natural result of all this is that the organization is dragging its feet...
...With the judgment of the angels and of the saints we excommunicate, cut off, curse and anathematize Baruch de Spinoza . . . in the presence of the Holy Books, by the 613 precepts which are written therein, with the anathema wherewith Joshua cursed Jericho, with the curse which Elisha laid upon the children, and with all the curses which are written in the Law. Cursed be he by day, and cursed be he by night. Cursed be he in sleeping, and cursed be he in waking . . . And we warn you, there shall no man speak to him, no man write...
Last week Salomon Rodrigues Pareira, chief rabbi of the Amsterdam community, announced that the excommunication and anathema must stand. "When I became chief rabbi," he said, "I accepted the rulings of my predecessors. No rabbinate has the right to review a decision of previous rabbinates unless it is greater in number and wiser. I don't consider myself wiser than those who came before...