Admiration

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 Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  After twelve years as Northumbrian Queen Consort, Æthelthryth finally separated from her unfortunate second husband in 673 and returned to her East Anglian homeland to found and govern her own abbey on its fenland border; it still flourishes in modified form as Ely’s Anglican Cathedral. Various royal relatives followed Æthelthryth in ruling over this powerful Fenland community; after her interred corpse had been revealed as miraculously incorrupt when her successor had it moved to a new tomb in the abbey church, she became one of the most popular among native Anglo-Saxon saints. Pilgrims also became enthusiastic about her saintly royal siblings from the East Anglian dynasty, Seaxburh, Æthelburh and Sæthryth, and devotional demand appears to have later added an extra princess-sister, Wihtburh, for good measure. The ladies’ confusingly named father King Anna received further pious attention, though on a smaller scale. One notes that, as in early monasticism in the Christian East, Æthelthryth’s deliberate abandonment of a marriage for something better was no obstacle to sainthood. [32]

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

  Domingo, or Dominic, was born 1170 at Calaroga, Spain, and died Aug. 6, 1121, in Bologna.859 His mother, Juana of Aza, is worshipped as a saint in the Dominican ritual. At seven the son passed under the priestly instruction of an uncle. Ten years were subsequently spent at Palencia in the study of philosophy and theology, and he is said to have excelled as a student. About 1195, he was made canon at Osma, which gives its name to the episcopal diocese, within whose bounds he was born. In 1203 he accompanied his bishop, Diego d’Azeveda, to France860 on a mission to secure a bride for the son of Alfonzo VIII. of Castile. This and subsequent journeys across the Pyrenees brought him into contact with the Albigenses and the legates despatched by Innocent III. to take measures to suppress heresy in Southern France. Dominic threw himself into the movement for suppressing heresy and started upon a tour of preaching. At Prouille in the diocese of Toulouse, he erected an asylum for girls to offset the schools established by the Albigenses, for the training of the daughters of impoverished noblemen. He was on intimate terms with Simon de Montfort, but, so far as is known, he took no active part in the Albigensian crusade except as a spiritual adviser.861 His attempt to establish a mission for the conversion of heretics received the support of Fulke, bishop of Toulouse, who in 1215 granted him one-sixth of the tithes of his diocese. Among the first to ally themselves to Dominic was Peter Cellani, a citizen of Toulouse, who gave him a house. An epoch in Dominic’s career was his visit in Rome during the sessions of the Fourth Lateran Council, when he received encouragement from Innocent III. who declined to assent to the proposal of a new order and bade him adopt one of the existing monastic constitutions.862 Dominic chose the rule of the canons regular of St. Augustine,863 adopted the black dress of the Augustinians, and built the convent of St. Romanus at Toulouse. He was again in Rome from September, 1216, to Easter, 1217. Honorius II. in 1216 approved the organization, and confirmed it in the possession of goods and houses. An unreliable tradition states that Honorius also conferred upon Dominic the important office of Master of the Palace, magister palatii. The office cannot be traced far beyond Gregory IX.864 The legendary accounts of his life represent the saint at this time as engaged in endless scourgings and other most rigorous asceticisms. Miracles, even to the raising of the dead, were ascribed to him.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  [83] The mother of Jesus needed a more assertive earthly spouse than Joseph had been through most of Christian history. He needed rescuing from the frailty or comedy of old age, from being identified with the caricature of Jewishness, or even from being portrayed as angrily considering himself a cuckolded husband; all these themes can be found in plays in popular drama. [84] A major figure in rehabilitating him was the fifteenth-century French theologian Jean Gerson, long-term Rector of the University of Paris, who was particularly concerned to promote or construct a devotion for the Holy Family and composed Reflections on St Joseph (1413/14); moreover, when a major Council of the Western Church convened in Konstanz invited Gerson to preach in 1416, he devoted his sermon to commending Joseph, hoping to establish a feast day for him. That proposal was for the time being defeated, only coming to fruition in 1487, by which time Joseph had emerged, with the aid of Gerson’s reassessment, as a good deal more noble and caring as husband and father than he had ever been before, and rather less geriatric. Gerson did hasten to say that Joseph was ‘immune to womanly touch’ and, along with the undeniably Jewish character of family life in Nazareth, Joseph’s chastity would always remain a problem in constructing a Holy Family analogous with the everyday families that the Church was doing its best to regulate. Yet Joseph undoubtedly became a success with the devout public; by the early sixteenth century, artists could even portray him in cheerfully indulgent play with his infant divine stepson, and parents began naming their sons after him. His stock rose still higher through the Counter-Reformation, especially in the Spanish Empire, where he became patron saint of Mexico in 1555 and in 1679 the official protector of the realm of Spain (see Plate 23): an inconceivable role for him before the late medieval period. [85] Even a nuclear family needs a wider reference than the parental trio, so added to the mix was a grandmother for Jesus, Mary’s mother, conveniently provided with a name by the Protevangelium of James : St Anne. Perhaps as the cult of Mary became ever more elevated, some of those wishing to approach her or her Son might have felt that that was best done via a doting granny. Anne’s sudden arrival on the devotional scene in the fifteenth century is remarkable: a study of a single late medieval English county, Devon, reveals at least a dozen dedications of new chapels in that and the next century (she had arrived too late to insinuate herself in the dedications of the parish church network).

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  WEST The imaginative hold that the post-Gregorian Papacy and its focused authority enjoyed over Europe was based on its custodianship of the body of the Apostle Peter in Rome in the monumental basilica built by Constantine I, but also on the Church’s custodianship of the memory of Rome and its Empire. A genuinely Roman Emperor still ruled in the known world, but his throne was in the New Rome of Constantinople, and the language of his Church was Greek. The West was united by its use of the Latin language, all the more powerful and all-embracing because nowhere was it now anyone’s birth-tongue. It had to be taught, or absorbed through the Church’s conduct of worship, as much a common language overcoming cultural barriers as English is in modern India. Just because Latin was a language to be learned did not mean that it was not lively and creative, with a range of registers from liturgical to cheerfully scatological and lewd. It was hugely useful, but also hugely entertaining. Possession of it liberated the speaker into joining a wider world of shared experience and memory, which must be one reason why it was embraced with such enthusiasm by both Irish and Anglo-Saxons, whose own languages bore very little relation to its grammar and vocabulary. Fuelling this continent-wide conversation was the increasing circulation and range of ancient Latin texts and Latin translations of Greek texts, throwing European society open to the culture of a Mediterranean world centuries older than Christendom or Christianity itself. Like Carolingian society before it, twelfth-century Europe has been painted in colours borrowed from later centuries, as fostering a ‘Renaissance’ of Classical literature. There was no extensive equivalent in the Greek East, where, at precisely the same time, insecure imperial and ecclesiastical authorities reacted with hostility and repression towards scholars seeking to explore afresh the legacy of Aristotle and Plato in efforts to renew Byzantine society. The contrast between Western and Eastern Christianity thus deepened still further. [38] Western Latin culture was imparted through surprisingly risky teaching materials. Impressionable schoolchildren learned their Latin through that most erotic of Roman poets, Ovid: already in the tenth century the reforming Anglo-Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury Dunstan relaxed from his ecclesiastical labours by annotating his ancient manuscript copy of Ovid’s verse in his own distinctive hand. From the early thirteenth century, one of the most popular school texts in Europe (to judge by surviving manuscripts and vernacular translations) was a brief, newly written, pseudo-Ovidian comedy effectively about rape, entitled Pamphilus, de Amore : were texts like this intended to teach boys how to be men, and girls to be aware of male charm turning into male violence? [39] From an early age, therefore, those exploring literature were exposed to ancient assumptions some of which were familiar from Christian redeployment of them (such as monogamous marriage), but some very different (such as life-stage same-sex love).

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  146 tseW nitaL eht fo seussI evitcnitsiD ehT :02 erutceL • The theological issue that locked Pelagius and Augustine in debate over many years concerned the absolute need for God’s grace in every circumstance and for any good deed. The sharpness and strength of Augustine’s polemic on this point had a profound— and perhaps not entirely positive—effect on all later theology in the West. Doctors of the Church • Augustine was one of three leaders of Latin Christianity in the 4th and 5th centuries who were later designated as “doctors” (that is, teachers) of the church. Each contributed in an important way to the eventual shape of Christianity in the West. • Ambrose of Milan (337/40–397) came from a noble family. He was trained in rhetoric and was governor of the region. While still a catechumen—that is, not yet a baptized Christian but only a seeker—he was elected by the clergy and people of Milan to be their ecclesiastical leader. He was baptized and ordained a priest and bishop in 374. Adopting an ascetic lifestyle, Ambrose gave away all his o goods to the poor and enjoyed great popular favor. He was a mentor for the young Augustine, playing a pivotal role in his conversion from Manichaeism to Christianity. As a bishop, Ambrose was a fierce defender of Trinitarian orthodoxy. Ambrose wore power comfortably and was adept in the play o of politics. When the emperor Theodosius I slaughtered 7,000 people in retaliation for a revolt in Thessalonica, Ambrose stood up to him and demanded of the emperor a public repentance. • The second critical figure for the shaping of Christianity in the West was Jerome (347–419/20). He was born into a Christian family, studied classical Latin language and literature in Rome, was baptized at 20, then dedicated himself to the monastic life. Jerome lived as a hermit for a time in Syria, where his gift o for language led to his learning both Greek and Hebrew, the original biblical languages.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  190 Lecture 26: Benedictine Monasticism and Its Influence o Obedience to the Rule and the abbot (the head of the monastery) structures the entire way of life. Benedict closely connects disobedience to pride and obedience to humility, and he envisages the return to God as an ascent (paradoxically) up a ladder of increased degrees of humility. o The monk does not seek to do his own will but God’s. Effectively, though, God’s will is mediated by the Rule and the abbot. • Benedict explicitly embraces the “common life” (coenobites ) precisely because it provides a “school of the Lord’s service” for beginners. He admires hermits because they are heroic, but his beginners are not ready for that. In contrast, he despises those who call themselves monks but only wander about in aimless pursuits. o Benedict’s Rule does not demand severe physical asceticism. In fact, in matters of clothing, food, and drink, his monks were probably more comfortable—because more secure—than the majority of peasants in the 6 th century. o The asceticism demanded by the Rule is precisely that of life together, avoiding murmuring and cultivating charity in the daily grind of life lived in a face-to-face community. o The distinctive Benedictine vows, besides obedience, are stability (to live in one community until death) and conversatio morum, a continual “conversion of life” in the context of community. o Benedictines do not take a vow of poverty even though “a monk shall call nothing at all his own”; instead, they have a community of possessions, all of which are subject to the disposition of the abbot. Once more, the emphasis is on sharing rather than on heroic self-dispossession. o The monk’s life of celibacy is not the subject of a vow but a corollary of a single-gender community. Benedict’s sister

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  196 eporuE nretseW fo noitazilegnavE :72 erutceL Sixty years after Damasus, Leo I (440–461) opposed o Pelagianism—the teaching that God’s grace was not necessary to live a moral life—and was the critical player in forming the orthodox position in the monophysite controversy, with his “Tome of Leo” anticipating the dogma established by the Council of Chalcedon in 451. He believed in the divine and scriptural basis for the primacy of Rome and exercised it vigorously. • By far the most important pope in this sequence is Gregory I (“the Great”), who lived from 540 to 604 and was pope from 590 to 604. The son of a senator, Gregory was prefect of the city of Rome in o 573; abandoning his municipal role, he sold all his possessions and founded six Benedictine monasteries in Sicily and one in Rome (St. Andrew), which he then entered as a simple monk. But Gregory was too capable to live a secluded life entirely. o Pope Pelagius II appointed him as delegate to the Byzantine court in 579, and he asserted the primacy of Rome over Constantinople; in 585, he returned to the monastery and was elected abbot. In 590, he was elected pope. Facing the challenges of o Ostrogoth/Byzantine wars and the aftereffects of the Justinian plague, he struck a separate treaty with the Lombards in 592– 593, asserting independence from the Byzantine presence in Ravenna. In 596, Gregory sent Augustine and 40 other monks to England, o thus establishing the monastic character of Catholicism there and a basis for further evangelization. He gave privileges to monks, which made them more directly dependent on the papacy. Gregory made significant contributions to the shape of the o Roman Mass (the signs of which remain in the so-called Gregorian Sacramentary). His voluminous writings (Book of

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  193 for practicing charity in a community where people are committed to each other for life. o Benedict sees the common life as a time of preparation for the higher states of commitment, as in the life of the hermit. o For many who lived it, however, the life was sufficiently rigorous and demanding to require a lifetime of dedication to accomplish true obedience. o As monasteries became more prosperous, the “school” dimension came to the fore, and monasteries formed the basic source of both Christian discipleship and learning for centuries. The Legacy of Benedictinism • Pope Gregory I (“the Great”) was himself a Benedictine monk and wrote the biography of Benedict. He used Benedictine monks as the instruments for the restoration of the church in England. • In 596, Gregory sent Augustine, the prior of the monastery of Saint Andrew in Rome, together with other monks, to England and made him the archbishop of Canterbury. • Augustine converted King Ethelbert, whose wife, Bertha, was already Christian, and through the king, England rapidly became Catholic. • The Benedictine monasteries, which fit so well within the manorial system of medieval society, became places that exemplified and enabled a deeper commitment to the faith. English monks in particular were critical to the next stage of evangelization in Europe. • Perhaps the most remarkable testimony to the work of Benedict is that despite a long series of repressions and reforms, the way of life according to his Rule continues to be lived by men and women around the world to the present day. Not many 1,500-year-old books have worn as well. 194 Lecture 26: Benedictine Monasticism and Its Influence Casey and Tomlin, Introducing the Rule of Benedict. Knowles, Christian Monasticism. 1. How did the Rule of Benedict provide an accessible form of the “life of perfection” in a way earlier rules had not? 2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of understanding the path to God as mediated by “a Rule and an abbot”? Suggested Reading Questions to Consider

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  88 Lecture 12: The Beginnings of Christian Philosophy Origen of Alexandria • With Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–254), the place of a philosophical Christianity was firmly secured. • An indication of the changing face of Christianity is the fact that Origen was born of Christian parents and raised from childhood in the faith. o His father was martyred in the persecution of 202. When Clement fled the city, Origen took over (at the age of 17!) as head of the Alexandrian catechetical school. o He traveled to Rome and Arabia, settled for a time in Palestine, returned to Alexandria, and finally settled in Caesarea. As a priest, he preached regularly on the Scriptures. o We saw earlier that he wrote fervently on the ideal of martyrdom. In the persecution of Decius (250), Origen was imprisoned and tortured but steadfastly professed the faith. He died soon after, not technically a martyr but certainly a confessor of the faith. • Origen was a prodigy of scholarship; although only a small portion of his work has survived, it was vast. o As a biblical scholar, he produced a six-column version of the Old Testament in Hebrew, a transliteration, the Septuagint, and three other Jewish Greek translations, complete with critical apparatus. He also wrote commentaries on many books of the Bible and countless homilies. o He was Christianity’s first systematic theologian, attempting to align the truths of the faith with a wider understanding of reality established by reason. In his First Principles, Origen placed the Christian faith within a wide-ranging and ambitious vision— basically Platonic—of the derivation of all being from God and the eventual restoration of all creatures in God (apokatastasis). 89 o Although Origen was careful to observe traditional teaching, his bold vision, pushed to an extreme by later disciples, led to the eventual condemnation of “Origenism.” • Origen wrote a massive apologetic work, Against Celsus, that demonstrated not only his loyalty to the faith but his enormous learning and sophistication as a thinker. Celsus was a philosopher and author of the True Word (178), an attack on Christianity as ignorant, superstitious, and impious. Origen’s response is a masterpiece of apologetic, securely locating Christianity within the world of ancient learning. The Future of Christian Philosophy • The development of this strand of philosophically colored Christianity was of considerable importance for the future. • The ancient philosophical conviction that right morals derived from right opinion (“orthodoxy”) reinforced the emphasis on doctrine within the Christian tradition. • Equally, the heritage of philosophy as a “way of being religious as moral transformation” found expression in later forms of monasticism. Daniélou (Mitchell, trans.), Origen. Lilla, Clement of Alexandria. 1. Discuss the analysis of Greco-Roman and Christian religion in terms of “ways of being religious.” What are the benefits and deficits of such an analysis? 2. Consider the distinctive insistence in religion on linking “right thinking” and “right behavior.” Suggested Reading Questions to Consider

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  8. Mendicants: Francis of Assisi and Louis of Toulouse He was born in 1274 to Charles II of Anjou, ruler of an extensive Mediterranean empire. We know little of Louis’s early childhood, though we can extrapolate from other noble childhoods that he likely would have been raised by servants and given a strong religious education. His family’s dynasty was founded by Louis’s grandfather Charles I, a son of the French king Louis VIII. When Louis was young, his father was captured during a naval fight in the Bay of Naples and imprisoned by the Aragonese, and his grandfather died months later. After 2 years of Charles II’s captivity, his sons sent a joint letter to the English king Edward I asking for his help in arranging their father’s release. Edward agreed, and in 1288, Charles II agreed to give the Aragonese three of his sons as hostages, plus 60 nobles and 50,000 marks of silver—about $30 million in today’s money. This marked a turning point in Louis’s youth. He and his brothers Robert and Raymond Berenger were given to the Aragonese in the hostage swap. At the time, Louis would have been 14, and his brothers would have been 12 and 8. The boys lived with the Aragonese court for 7 years, until the war ended in 1295. They seem to have been treated well and allowed to pursue their usual pastimes, including study. Their teachers were Franciscan friars, and this inspired both Louis and Robert with a reverence for the order that lasted the rest of their lives. Louis, in particular, was struck by Francis’s commitment to extreme poverty. During their captivity, the young princes apparently wrote to Peter John Olivi, a theologian who embraced a radical interpretation of the Franciscan vow of poverty, in part to discuss Louis’s desire to enter the Franciscan order. Olivi declined, fearing being accused of radicalizing the prince but praising the brothers’ devotion to Christ. His letter to them, written in May 1295, still survives. Sources who served Louis during his time in Catalonia testified at his canonization process that this was when the prince vowed to become a Franciscan and take holy orders. 59 8. Mendicants: Francis of Assisi and Louis of Toulouse 60

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The story of Landolfo Rufolo is the first in the Decameron to be set in the south, and there is no mistaking the tone of nostalgic affection with which Boccaccio describes the Amalfi coast in its opening paragraph. There is also more than a hint of admiration for the spirit of enterprise that has brought prosperity to the numerous merchants who settled in a region familiar to the writer from the days of his youth. The story contains only two characters, Landolfo and the peasant woman who restores him to health after dragging him from the sea off the shore of Corfu. Like most of Boccaccio’s characters, neither is developed in any great psychological depth, their personalities emerging fully formed from the events of the narrative. The distinguishing feature of Landolfo is his acquisitiveness, the motivating force behind all of his actions. The narrator focuses attention on the vicissitudes of the chief character, for which the sea is a sort of emblematic leitmotif. The sea is in fact the most important recurrent image in the narratives of the Second Day, playing a prominent role not only in the tale of Landolfo, but also in those of Beritola (II, 6), Alatiel (II, 7) and Paganino (II, 10). It also features briefly in the stories of Andreuccio (II, 5), the Count of Antwerp (II, 8) and Bernabò and Zinevra (II, 9). The image of the sea, ideal for representing the vicissitudes of Fortune, acts as a link between the main theme of the Second Day and the world of commerce that is depicted in so many of the stories.

• From Trash (1988)

  Cursing don’t get a job. . . . Bitching don’t make the beds and screaming don’t get the tomatoes planted. They had laughed together then, speaking a language of old stories and older jokes. You tell him. I said. Now girl, you listen to me. The power in them, the strength and the heat! How could anybody not love my mama, my aunts? How could my daddy, my uncles, ever stand up to them, dare to raise hand or voice to them? They were a power on the earth. I breathed deep, watching my aunt rock on her stance, settling her eye on the balls, while I smelled chicken gravy and hot grease, the close thick scent of love and understanding. I used to love to eat at Aunt Alma’s house, all those home-cooked dinners at the roadhouse; pinto beans with peppers for fifteen, nine of them hers. Chowchow on a clean white plate passed around the table while the biscuits passed the other way. My aunt always made biscuits. What else stretched so well? Now those starch meals shadowed her loose shoulders and dimpled her fat white elbows. She gave me one quick glance and loosed her stroke. The white ball punched the center of the table. The balls flew to the edges. My sixty-year-old aunt gave a grin that would have scared piss out of my Uncle Bill, a grin of pure, fierce enjoyment. She rolled the stick in fingers loose as butter on a biscuit, laughed again, and slid her palms down the sides of polished wood, while the anger in her face melted into skill and concentration. I rocked back on my stool and covered my smile with my wet hair. Goddamn! Aunt Alma pushed back on one ankle, swung the stick to follow one ball, another, dropping them as easily as peas on potatoes. Goddamn! She went after those balls like kids on a dirt yard, catching each lightly and dropping them lovingly. Into the holes, move it! Turning and bracing on ankles thickened with too many years of flour and babies, Aunt Alma blitzed that table like a twenty-year-old hustler, not sparing me another glance. Not till the eighth stroke did she pause and stop to catch her breath. “You living like this—not for a man, huh?” she asked, one eyebrow arched and curious. “No.” I shrugged, feeling more friendly and relaxed. Moving like that, aunt of mine I wanted to say, don’t tell me you don’t understand. “Your mama said you were working in some photo shop, doing shit work for shit money. Not much to show for that college degree, is that?” “Work is work. It pays the rent.” “Which ought not to be much here.” “No,” I agreed, “not much. I know,” I waved my hands lightly, “it’s a wreck of a place, but it’s home. I’m happy here. Terry, Casey and everybody—they’re family.” “Family.”

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  118 Lecture 16: monasticism as Radical Christianity o Among the notable figures on whom Palladius reports are wealthy patronesses, such as Macrina, a Roman matron who used her massive fortune to establish and support monastic foundations and meet the practical needs of the monks. Here, we see the practice of patronage in yet another form. The Influence of Monasticism • Monasticism found a permanent place within Christianity and exercised enormous influence from the first. • It was important to the imperial church of the 4 th to the 6 th centuries. o Many bishops of those centuries were drawn from monastic ranks and were, thus, leaders who were ascetical, celibate, and often scholarly, shaped by the discipline and sharing the outlook of monastic life. o Monks served as “foot soldiers” in the fierce doctrinal wars of these centuries. They were the most activist, mobile, and militant Christians; it was not unknown for them to riot in patriarchal cities in support of one doctrine or another. • The role of monasticism in the long run was equally important. o Through the ages, monasteries provided a constant “alternative lifestyle” that enabled Christians to express their discipleship in more radical fashion. They were an outlet for those with reforming impulses, and while not always approved by more enculturated Christians, they were always admired. o At some times and places, monasteries provided centers for reform through knowledge and practice. In the early medieval period of the West, monasteries preserved and copied manuscripts and taught the techniques of agriculture. 119 Chitty, The Desert a City. Harmless, Desert Christians. 1. What characteristics of early monasticism justify calling it a “white martyrdom”? 2. Discuss the symbiotic relationship between desert monks and their urban patrons and admirers. Suggested Reading Questions to Consider

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  237 Universities and Theology Lecture 33 O ne of the most impressive signs of a mature Christian culture in the High Middle Ages was the development of universities. As we have seen, the desire for higher learning within Christianity was never completely lost, even during the most chaotic periods of life in the West. Universities, though, were a new invention in the West; they emerged when they did because of the convergence of a number of factors. In a flash, over the span of some 80 years, four great universities were founded in Europe that quickly became important centers of learning and eventually contributed heavily to social change: Bologna in 1119, Paris in 1150, Oxford in 1167, and Cambridge in 1200. Context for the Emergence of Universities • The convergence of a number of factors set the stage for the emergence of universities in the 12 th and 13 th centuries. We have already noted the increased wealth and security in Europe based on predictably good weather, steady crops, and successful trade—all these, plus population growth in urban areas, set the context for leisure as the basis of culture. Of considerable significance also was the production of manuscripts in monastery scriptoria, which reached a point of sufficient dissemination to enable shared learning at a higher level. • The development of a professional clergy, as in the Franciscans and Dominicans, as well as the development of a professional diplomatic corps, demanded higher levels of education. The ordinary clergy would remain woefully undereducated within Catholicism until the Counter-Reformation of the 16 th century, but both monks and mendicants represented the most learned people of the medieval world.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  “Shit, I didn’t know I called you. Maybe I hit the wrong button. Sorry, ’bout that.” “Girl, stop lying. You hit up the right person, all right. The number showed up on my caller ID several times. No one makes a mistake that much. You gonna tell me your name now?” “Like I said, calling you was an accident. I made a mistake. My name is not perfect, it’s Yani.” “Well, I’m Life. I see you got some sass in your blood, Yani.” “Maybe. And what if I do?” I answered. After a few awkward moments we laughed and joked for hours. Soon, every time Smooth let me down, I began calling Life for my nightly fix. Life stimulated my mind and body with his dreams. He worked at a record shop, but was trying to negotiate and lease his beats to major rap labels, while shopping record deals for independent artists at the same time. Life was passionate about his craft, and I definitely was feeling that. “So why do they call you Life? I thought you were a straight thug when I met you. Is Life your real name?” I asked. “Nah, but life is what I’m all about. My biggest fear is becoming a statistic out here ’cause someone else is playing street games that don’t got nothing to do with me. I used to be in the drug game, but I left hustling a long time ago. I reevaluated a lot of shit after I lost my little brother to a senseless act of violence. That’s when I changed my name to Life. Through me, he lives—he still has life. Yo, my biggest wish is to put my bid in in the music game and have a queen standing right beside me when I make those millions. Shit is pointless if I ain’t got a wife and some kids to love. My dreams and goals are what keep my nose to the grind and help me stay on point. Ya feel me, Yani?” My heart fluttered. Life was so down-to-earth that I felt like I’d known him for ten years. He was about much more than Smooth. It finally hit me that Smooth had no dreams, except chasing dollars and poisoning our people. Smooth had a selfish, shallow streak that didn’t bother me when I was younger. But as I grew older, that shit grew stale. Life had goals and ambition. He never cut me off like Smooth often did when he had to leave to handle his business on the block. Hell, Life even helped me admit that I dabbled in poetry. When I did admit it, he asked me to read him some of my work. I dug in my closet and pulled out an overstuffed binder that Smooth Willie knew existed, but had never cared to inquire about. “Read somethin’ to me, Ma. Got anything wit hotness for me?” Life asked.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  248 Lecture 34: The Great Plague Vernacular Literature • Vernacular literature—increasingly widely disseminated with the invention of the printing press in 1440—testified to another kind of lay restlessness and portended later and greater changes. The century that saw the Black Death savage Europe also saw the beginnings of the Renaissance, a rebirth of classical learning. • In England, roughly contemporary works provided a lay viewpoint on the condition of the church and society. o Piers Plowman, a work in Middle English attributed to William Langland (c. 1362–c. 1387), is an intense moralistic poem in which a simple plowman guides people to the truth. The work is profoundly medieval in sensibility and deeply critical of worldly abuse in the church. o The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400) recounts the stories told by pilgrims on the way to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, evoking the wide range of late-medieval religious postures, from the sincerely pious to the hypocritically ribald. • In France, François Villon (1431–d. after 1463) attended the University of Paris, reveled among the disreputable, and killed a priest in a brawl. He was also the finest French poet of the late Middle Ages, with little of piety intruding in his verse. A century later, François Rabelais (1494–1553), a former Franciscan and Benedictine, became a physician and wrote the bawdiest of all great satires, Gargantua and Pantagruel. • In Italy, two authors in particular signaled the beginning of the Humanism characteristic of the Renaissance—a rediscovery of classical sources and ideals that would deeply challenge the certainties of the medieval worldview. o Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch, 1304–1374) spent his early life in Avignon; he was a great scholar who studied law at the University of Bologna and was deeply interested in Greek and Latin literature. He wrote extensively in Latin but was most 249 influential (on Chaucer, among others) through his poetry composed in Italian, in which themes of both human romantic love and religious longing are intertwined. o Giovanni Boccaccio (1313– 1375) was also deeply learned in the classics. His most famous work, the Decameron, consists of 100 tales told by 10 young people over a period 10 days when they have fled the plague in Florence. A spiritual crisis later led Boccaccio to reject his earlier career, and he turned to composing more sober works in Latin. • Such writers show that creativity and imagination can thrive even in the worst of material circumstances. In the next lecture, we will see how equal creativity was summoned by Christians who sought to bring about reform in the face of growing ecclesiastical corruption. Arbeth, The Black Death. Lea, The Inquisition of the Middle Ages.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  241 Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus • A brief look at two great Scholastic theologians reveals both the consistency and diversity in medieval theology, as well as its cosmopolitanism. • Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), known later as the “Angelic Doctor,” produced a staggeringly great volume of thought in more than 90 works in his short 49 years of life. Although he called his work “so much straw” before his death and although it was at first condemned by the church, it remains the gold standard for Catholic theology. o Aquinas wrote commentaries on the philosophical writings of Aristotle, especially in metaphysics; commentaries on Scripture; defenses of the Dominicans against their opponents; liturgical works; philosophical treatises; and some 85 sermons. o His greatest works, however, are the two Summas (meaning “compendium” or “systematic encyclopedia”), the Summa contra gentiles and the Summa theologiae (or Summa theologica). o Following the basic structure of Lombard’s Sentences, the four parts of the Summa theologiae move inexorably through every question that faith poses to the human intellect, above all those posed by philosophy. Thus, Aquinas boldly and famously developed five rational proofs for the existence of God, though he knows the character of God must be learned through revelation. o The pattern of every “disputed question” is that of dialectic: presenting arguments for and against a truth before demonstrating the correct opinion, then answering the objections. The Summa is a thoroughgoing engagement of Christian faith and Greek philosophy. • John Duns Scotus (1265–1308) was a Franciscan who studied and lectured at Oxford, then completed his requirements for the

• From Laura Middleton; Her Brother and Her Lover (1890)

  When I again met her on arriving at their country seat, I found that a considerable change had taken place in her person, but probably this was merely the natural result that the preceding two years, during which I had not seen her, had worked upon a girl at her time of life, by fully developing the proportions and fining down the parts of the figure which at an earlier period might have appeared too prominent. I too had grown considerably during this period, more so in proportion than she had, and now her height by no means appeared to me to be too great; and, altogether, I could not help acknowledging to myself that I had rarely seen a handsomer or finer-looking woman. She still retained somewhat of her haughty air, though softened down, and I could hardly fancy, when looking at her, that Emily's account of her behaviour in the hours when she gave herself up to enjoyment could be true. I soon, however, became aware of circumstances that tended to corroborate the tale, and which put me in the way of making advances to her, which I hastened to do. When it came to be time to dress for dinner, Lady Middleton said to me that she had presumed on our relationship to put me into the family wing of the house, as the arrival of some unexpected visitors had made her change the destination of the room she had previously intended for me. She said she had no doubt I would find the one set apart for me quite comfortable, for the only objection to it, and which prevented her from being able to put a stranger into it, was that it opened into another room which would have to be occupied by her son Frank, who was expected home from school in a short time. This last room, in consequence of some alterations made in building an addition to the house, had no separate entrance, but opened into the two rooms on each side, and as the one on the other side was occupied by his sister and aunt, Frank would have to enter through mine. She said I must keep him in order and make him behave himself, and if I had any trouble with him to let her know. I had not seen my young namesake for about two years, but I recollected him as a fine, high-spirited, very handsome boy about twelve or thirteen years of age, always getting into some scrape or other and always getting out of them somehow in such a fearless, good-humoured manner that it was impossible for anyone to be angry with him. So I said I should be delighted to renew my acquaintance with my young friend, and that I had not the least doubt but that we should get on very pleasantly.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  When I read it today, I see the Master as the one who gave up and Woland as the one complex enough to engage with the world as it really is. (As Bulgakov writes, ‘But no, no! The seductive mystics are lying, there are no Caribbean Seas in the world, no desperate freebooters sail them, no corvette chases after them, no cannon smoke drifts across the waves. There is nothing, and there was nothing! There is that sickly linden over there, there is the cast-iron fence, and the boulevard beyond it . . . And the ice is melting in the bowl, and at the next table you see someone’s bloodshot, bovine eyes, and you’re afraid, afraid . . . Oh, gods, my gods, poison, bring me poison!’) The novel is revolutionary not because of political daring—Bulgakov was not a political person, and though he was not oblivious to the terror unfolding around him, he wished primarily to be left alone to practice his art. It is revolutionary because of that art. His plays (he was foremost a playwright) banned in the ‘real’ world, Bulgakov used every freedom inside the covers of his ‘sunset’ novel. These pages bristle with a deeply informed—Bulgakov was a gentle destroyer—indifference to every dogma, whether historical, religious, political, or artistic. Bulgakov’s earthbound Christ—he is not even Christ in these pages, but a man named Yeshua—ignores the mythology of the Gospels and Soviet atheism both, as does a Satan figure who is munificent and majestic rather than petty and evil. The Pilate narrative is equally dark on the rules: It migrates from one teller to another, from speech to novel-inside-a-novel to dream. Few novels have incorporated fantastical elements into straight realism, the absurd into the sane, as hilariously and boldly as this one. (Long before there was Latin American magic realism, there was Soviet magic realism. It was a lot funnier.) But what other style could fit a world where heaven was now, indeed, hell? What kind of diabolical sorcery could compare to the millions disappeared by Stalin and his security apparatus? What demonic variety show could compare to the spectacle of the Soviet show trials of the 1930s? The novel’s galling, and finally unacceptable, play was to propose that in a place like the USSR, justice was with the dark forces: the gospel according to the devil. And who is a writer if not a perpetrator of black magic? As Woland is ‘part of that power which eternally/wills evil and eternally works good’, as Goethe’s Faust has it—as Woland’s existence proves the existence of a God the Soviet state has abandoned—so the writer tells lies in order to say something true. • • • Initially, Bulgakov’s talent exonerated his politically questionable background.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  237 Universities and Theology Lecture 33 O ne of the most impressive signs of a mature Christian culture in the High Middle Ages was the development of universities. As we have seen, the desire for higher learning within Christianity was never completely lost, even during the most chaotic periods of life in the West. Universities, though, were a new invention in the West; they emerged when they did because of the convergence of a number of factors. In a flash, over the span of some 80 years, four great universities were founded in Europe that quickly became important centers of learning and eventually contributed heavily to social change: Bologna in 1119, Paris in 1150, Oxford in 1167, and Cambridge in 1200. Context for the Emergence of Universities • The convergence of a number of factors set the stage for the emergence of universities in the 12 th and 13 th centuries. We have already noted the increased wealth and security in Europe based on predictably good weather, steady crops, and successful trade—all these, plus population growth in urban areas, set the context for leisure as the basis of culture. Of considerable significance also was the production of manuscripts in monastery scriptoria, which reached a point of sufficient dissemination to enable shared learning at a higher level. • The development of a professional clergy, as in the Franciscans and Dominicans, as well as the development of a professional diplomatic corps, demanded higher levels of education. The ordinary clergy would remain woefully undereducated within Catholicism until the Counter-Reformation of the 16 th century, but both monks and mendicants represented the most learned people of the medieval world.