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 Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  I have just done this; for an example, I find: “Man is not at home in the universe, despite all the efforts of philosophers and metaphysicians to provide a soothing syrup. Thought is still a narcotic. The deepest question is why . And it is a forbidden one. The very asking is in the nature of cosmic sabotage. And the penalty is—the afflictions of Job.” Not the greatest prose probably, but Miller is not a writer; Henry James is a writer. Miller is a talker, a street corner gabbler, a prophet, and a Patagonian. What are the facts about Miller? I’m not sure how important they are. He was born in Brooklyn about 1890, of German ancestry, and in certain ways he is quite German. I have often thought that the Germans make the best Americans, though they certainly make the worst Germans. Miller understands the German in himself and in America. He compares Whitman and Goethe: “In Whitman the whole American scene comes to life, her past and her future, her birth and her death. Whatever there is of value in America Whitman has expressed, and there is nothing more to be said. The future belongs to the machine, to the robots. He was the Poet of the Body and the Soul, Whitman. The first and the last poet. He is almost undecipherable today, a monument covered with rude hieroglyphs, for which there is no key. … There is no equivalent in the languages of Europe for the spirit which he immortalized. Europe is saturated with art and her soil is full of dead bones and her museums are bursting with plundered treasures, but what Europe has never had is a free, healthy spirit, what you might call a MAN. Goethe was the nearest approach, but Goethe was a stuffed shirt, by comparison. Goethe was a respectable citizen, a pedant, a bore, a universal spirit, but stamped with the German trademark, with the double eagle. The serenity of Goethe, the calm, Olympian attitude, is nothing more than the drowsy stupor of a German bourgeois deity. Goethe is an end of something, Whitman is a beginning.” If anybody can decipher the Whitman key it is Miller. Miller is the twentieth-century reincarnation of Whitman. But to return to the “facts.” The Brooklyn Boy went to a Brooklyn high school in a day when most high schools kept higher standards than most American universities today. He started at CCNY but quit almost immediately and went to work for a cement company (“Everlasting Cement”), then for a telegraph company, where he became the personnel manager in the biggest city in the world. The telegraph company is called the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company in Miller’s books, or in moments of gaiety the Cosmococcic Telegraph Company. One day while the vice-president was bawling him out he mentioned to Miller that he would like to see someone write a sort of Horatio Alger book about the messengers.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  There were actually cases where Christians sold themselves as slaves to find money to pay the ransom for their friends. They were even prepared to bribe their way into prison. The Christians became so notorious for their help to those in prison that, at the beginning of the fourth century, the Emperor Licinius passed new legislation that ‘no one was to show kindness to sufferers in prison by supplying them with food and that no one was to show mercy to those starving in prison’. It was added that those who were discovered to be doing this kind of thing would be compelled to suffer the same fate as those they tried to help. These instances are taken from Adolf von Harnack’s book The Expansion of Christianity, and many others could be added. In the early days, no Christians who found themselves in trouble for the faith were ever neglected or forgotten by their fellow Christians. (4) There is purity. First, the marriage bond is to be universally respected. This may mean either of two almost opposite things. (a) There were some people who despised marriage. Some even went to the lengths of castrating themselves to secure what they thought was purity. Origen, for instance, took that course. Even someone like Galen, the Greek physician, noted of the Christians that ‘they include men and women who refrain from cohabiting all their lives’. The writer to the Hebrews insists against those who argued for abstinence that the marriage bond is to be honoured and not despised. (b) There were those who were always in danger of lapsing into immorality. The writer to the Hebrews uses two words. The one denotes adulterous living; the other denotes all kinds of impurity and vice. The Christians brought into the world a new ideal of purity. Even the Greeks admitted that. Galen, in the passage we have already quoted, goes on: ‘And they also number individuals who, in ruling and controlling themselves and in their keen pursuit of virtue, have attained a pitch not inferior to that of real philosophers.’ When Pliny, the governor of Bithynia, examined the Christians and reported back to the Emperor Trajan, he had to admit, even though he was looking for a charge on which to condemn them, that at their Lord’s Day meeting: ‘They bound themselves by an oath not for any criminal end but to avoid theft or robbery or adultery, never to break their word nor repudiate a deposit when called upon to refund it.’ In the early days, the Christians presented such a purity to the world that not even their critics and their enemies could find a fault in it. (5) There is contentment. Christians must be free from the love of money.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  The reader can and cannot reconstruct the Life of Henry Miller from his books, for Miller never sticks to the subject any more than Lawrence does. The fact is that there isn’t any subject and Miller is its poet. But a little information about him might help present him to those who need an introduction. For myself, I do not read him consecutively; I choose one of his books blindly and open it at random. I have just done this; for an example, I find: “Man is not at home in the universe, despite all the efforts of philosophers and metaphysicians to provide a soothing syrup. Thought is still a narcotic. The deepest question is why. And it is a forbidden one. The very asking is in the nature of cosmic sabotage. And the penalty is—the afflictions of Job.” Not the greatest prose probably, but Miller is not a writer; Henry James is a writer. Miller is a talker, a street corner gabbler, a prophet, and a Patagonian. What are the facts about Miller? I’m not sure how important they are. He was born in Brooklyn about 1890, of German ancestry, and in certain ways he is quite German. I have often thought that the Germans make the best Americans, though they certainly make the worst Germans. Miller understands the German in himself and in America. He compares Whitman and Goethe: “In Whitman the whole American scene comes to life, her past and her future, her birth and her death. Whatever there is of value in America Whitman has expressed, and there is nothing more to be said. The future belongs to the machine, to the robots. He was the Poet of the Body and the Soul, Whitman. The first and the last poet. He is almost undecipherable today, a monument covered with rude hieroglyphs, for which there is no key. ... There is no equivalent in the languages of Europe for the spirit which he immortalized. Europe is saturated with art and her soil is full of dead bones and her museums are bursting with plundered treasures, but what Europe has never had is a free, healthy spirit, what you might call a MAN. Goethe was the nearest approach, but Goethe was a stuffed shirt, by comparison. Goethe was a respectable citizen, a pedant, a bore, a universal spirit, but stamped with the German trademark, with the double eagle. The serenity of Goethe, the calm, Olympian attitude, is nothing more than the drowsy stupor of a German bourgeois deity. Goethe is an end of something, Whitman is a beginning.” If anybody can decipher the Whitman key it is Miller. Miller is the twentieth- century reincarnation of Whitman. But to return to the “facts.”

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  (Published in the 1975 edition) GENERAL FOREWORD(by John Drane)I only met William Barclay once, not long after his retirement from the chair of BiblicalCriticism at the University of Glasgow. Of course I had known about him long before that, not least because his theological passion – the Bible – was also a significant formative influence in my own life and ministry. One of my most vivid memories of his influence goes back to when I was working on my own doctoral research in the New Testament. It was summer 1971, and I was a leader on a mission team working in the north-east of Scotland at the same time as Barclay’s Baird Lectures were being broadcast on national television. One night, a young Ph.D. scientist who was interested in Christianity, but still unsure about some things, came to me and announced: ‘I’ve just been watching William Barclay on TV. He’s convinced me that I need to be a Christian; when can I be baptized?’ That kind of thing did not happen every day. So how could it be that Barclay’s message was so accessible to people with no previous knowledge or experience of the Christian faith? I soon realised that there was no magic ingredient that enabled this apparently ordinary professor to be a brilliant communicator. His secret lay in who he was, his own sense of identity and purpose, and above all his integrity in being true to himself and his faith. Born in the far north of Scotland, he was brought up in Motherwell, a steel-producing town south of Glasgow where his family settled when he was only five, and this was the kind of place where he felt most at home. Though his association with the University of Glasgow provided a focus for his life over almost fifty years, from his first day as a student in 1925 to his retirement from the faculty in 1974, he never became an ivory-tower academic, divorced from the realities of life in the real world. On the contrary, it was his commitment to the working-class culture of industrial Clydeside that enabled him to make such a lasting contribution not only to the world of the university but also to the life of the Church.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  I try to steer them toward their true leaders and visionaries, men almost unknown in the polite literary world, Reich for instance. Wilhelm Reich furthered a movement in Germany called “Work Democracy”; not machine politics, no politics at all, but democracy within one’s immediate orbit; democracy at home. America is still the only country where social idealism and experimentation have elbow room; there are still communities that practice primitive Christianity, such as the Catholic anarchists; and just plain little homemade gardens of Eden such as Miller’s cliff at Big Sur. The life he describes in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch is a far cry from the little fascist dreams of the New Classicists. And it is a far cry from the bitter isolationism of Robinson Jeffers or even of Lawrence. Morally I regard Miller as a holy man, as most of his adherents do—Gandhi with a penis. Miller says in a little essay on Immorality and Morality: “What is moral and what is immoral? Nobody can ever answer this question satisfactorily. Not because morals ceaselessly evolve, but because the principle on which they depend is factitious. Morality is for slaves, for beings without spirit. And when I say spirit I mean the Holy Spirit.” And he ends this little piece with a quotation from ancient Hindu scripture: Evil does not exist. Whitman, Lawrence, Miller, and even Blake all have the reputation of being sex-obsessed, Miller especially. Whereas Whitman writes “copulation is no more rank to me than death is,” Miller writes hundreds of pages describing in the minutest and clearest detail his exploits in bed. Every serious reader of erotica has remarked about Miller that he is probably the only author in history who writes about such things with complete ease and naturalness. Lawrence never quite rid himself of his puritanical salaciousness, nor Joyce; both had too much religion in their veins. It is funny to recollect that Lawrence thought Ulysses a smutty book and Joyce thought Lady Chatterley a smutty book. Both were right. But at least they tried to free themselves from literary morality. Miller’s achievement is miraculous: he is screamingly funny without making fun of sex, the way Rabelais does. (Rabelais is, of course, magnificent; so is Boccaccio; but both write against the background of religion, like Joyce and Lawrence.) Miller is accurate and poetic in the highest degree; there is not a smirk anywhere in his writings. Miller undoubtedly profited from the mistakes of his predecessors; his aim was not to write about the erotic but to write the whole truth about the life he knew. This goal demanded the full vocabulary and iconography of sex, and it is possible that he is the first writer outside the Orient who has succeeded in writing as naturally about sex on a large scale as novelists ordinarily write about the dinner table or the battlefield. I think only an American could have performed this feat.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  The Jewish town of Bethulia had determined to surrender in five days’ time, for its supplies of food and water were at an end. In the town, there was a widow called Judith. She was wealthy and beautiful, but she had lived in lonely mourning since her husband Manasses had died. She dressed in all her finery, persuaded her people to let her out of the town and went straight to the camp of the Assyrians. She gained entry into the presence of Holofernes and persuaded him that she was convinced of the defeat of her people as a punishment for their sins. She offered him a way into Jerusalem by stealth; and then, having gained his confidence, she killed him in his drunken sleep with his own dagger, cut off his head and carried it back to her people. The traitors within the camp were silenced, and looming defeat was turned into tumultuous victory. A woman’s weakness had become strength to save her country. The writer to the Hebrews is here seeking to inspire new courage and a new sense of responsibility by making his readers remember their past. He does it not blatantly but with infinite subtlety. He does not so much tell them what to remember as by delicate hints compel them to remember for themselves. When the Lord Protector of England, Oliver Cromwell, was arranging for the education of his son Richard, he said: ‘I would have him learn a little history.’ When we are discouraged, let us remember and take heart again. God’s power has not grown less. What he did once he can do again, for the God of history is the same God whom we worship today. THE DEFIANCE OF SUFFERING Hebrews 11:35–40 Women received back their own folk as if they had been raised from the dead. Others were crucified because they refused to accept release, for they were eager to obtain a better resurrection. Others went through scoffing and scourging, yes, and chains and imprisonment. They were stoned; they were sawn asunder; they underwent every kind of trial; they died by the murder of the sword. They went about in sheepskins, in goatskins, they were in want, they were oppressed, they were maltreated – the world was not worthy of them – they wandered in desert places and on the mountains, they lived in caves and in holes of the earth. All these, though they were attested through their faith, did not receive the promise, because God had some better plan for us, that they, without us, should not find all his purposes fulfilled. IN this passage, the writer to the Hebrews is mixing together different periods of history. Sometimes he takes his illustrations from the Old Testament period; but more often he takes them from the Maccabaean period, which falls between the Old and the New Testaments. First, let us take the things that can be explained against the Old Testament background.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Miller, on the other hand, is no aphrodisiac at all, because religious or so-called moral tension does not exist for him. When one of Miller’s characters lusts, he lusts out loud and then proceeds to the business at hand. Joyce actually prevents himself from experiencing the beauty of sex or lust, while Miller is freed at the outset to deal with the overpowering mysteries and glories of love and copulation. Like other Millerites I claim that Miller is one of the few healthy Americans alive today; further, that the circulation of his books would do more to wipe out the obscenities of Broadway, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue than a full-scale social revolution. Miller has furthered literature for all writers by ignoring the art forms, the novel, the poem, the drama, and by sticking to the autobiographical novel. He says in The Books in My Life (one of the available works), “The autobiographical novel, which Emerson predicted would grow in importance with time, has replaced the great confessions. It is not a mixture of truth and fiction, this genre of literature, but an expansion and deepening of truth. It is more authentic, more veridical, than the diary. It is not the flimsy truth of facts which the authors of these autobiographical novels offer but the truth of emotion, reflection and understanding, truth digested and assimilated. The being revealing himself does so on all levels simultaneously.” Everything Miller has written is part of this great amorphous autobiographical novel and it must be read not entirely but in large chunks to make sense. Many of the individual works are whole in themselves, one dealing with his life in Paris, one with his life as a New Yorker, and there is, in fact, a definite span of years encompassed in the works. But the volumes of essays are also part of the story and there is no way to make a whole out of the parts. Miller is easy to quote if one quotes carefully; the danger is that one can find massive contradictions, unless there is some awareness of the underlying world and the cosmic attitudes of the author. These views are by no means unique, as they are the same as those of all those poets and mystics I referred to in a previous essay. What makes Miller unique is his time and place; he is the only American of our time who has given us a full-scale interpretation of modern America, other than the kind we find in the cultural journals. Incidentally, we do not find Miller in these journals, which, presuming an interest in letters and art, are really organs of social and political opinion. Readers of Whitman recall that Whitman was blistering about the materialism of this country a century ago, and its departure from the ideals of the founding fathers. Miller is worse. Now it is a commonplace of modern poetry that the poet dissociates himself from life as it is lived by the average American today.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  [image file=Image00002.jpg] Then on March 7, 1947, Betsy Ann McKinley, a tall, slender young woman with lively blue eyes and shoulder-length brown hair, walked into the Center for the first time. Just eighteen years old, she had grown up on Ellery Street in the shadow of Harvard Yard and was now a freshman at Boston University. Betsy was accompanied by Father Collins, a priest who had been instructing her in the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. He introduced her to Leonard Feeney. Three weeks later Leonard Feeney baptized her, allowing her to fulfill the vow she had made at age six. Her staunch Episcopalian parents were not pleased, but they knew better than to try to dissuade their strong-willed daughter. Jim Walsh met Betsy within an hour of her arrival at the Center. He was instantly smitten by her beauty and impressed by her commitment to Catholicism. The two were soon inseparable, and within three months they were engaged to be married. Six months after they met, Leonard Feeney married the couple at St. Paul’s Catholic Church, not more than twenty yards from the front door of St. Benedict Center, which would come to be the center of their social, spiritual, and intellectual lives for the next twenty-five years. Eleven months later, they had a daughter, whom they named Mary Patricia. I am that child. [image file=Image00003.jpg] [image file=Image00004.jpg] My father and my mother, each with me at the age of two months, in the Halloween costume my mother made–1948. 4 In the Beginning, It Was Good 1940 C atherine Clarke was a woman of strong faith, and possessed with a mission to foster the spirit of Catholicism, in particular among the students attending Harvard and Radcliffe. In 1940, she took the first step toward achieving that goal. Together with Avery Dulles (who would one day be named a cardinal by Pope John Paul II) and Chris Huntington, both recent graduates of Harvard College and converts to the Catholic faith, she established Saint Benedict Center, a place for young Catholic students to meet, study, and engage intellectually on matters of religion, ethics, philosophy, and theology. In addition to spearheading religious classes at the Center, Catherine brought her own natural charm, hosting daily afternoon teas, which became immensely popular with the students. Within a few years, the visitors to the Center had become so numerous that Catherine Clarke petitioned Archbishop Richard Cushing, the popular Irish American bishop of the diocese of Boston, to appoint the renowned Jesuit writer Leonard Feeney, then forty-seven, as the spiritual director of the Center. She had been impressed with the brilliance of his intellect and his immense appeal to young people on the occasions he had been a visiting speaker there. [image file=Image00005.jpg] Catherine’s decision was instrumental to the burgeoning success of the Center. Leonard Feeney’s popularity was enormous—his Thursday-evening lectures on theology were standing-room-only events, where hundreds of young people, Catholic and non-Catholic, crowded in to hear him, often spilling onto the sidewalk outside.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  But Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. His status above all others is permanent; his leadership is forever. Therein lies the secret of earthly leadership; real leaders are people who are themselves led by Jesus Christ. That figure, who walked the roads of Galilee, is as powerful as ever to strike at evil and to love sinners; and, just as then he chose twelve to be with him and sent them out to do his work, so now he is still seeking those who will bring men and women to him and bring him to them. THE WRONG AND THE RIGHT SACRIFICE Hebrews 13:9–16 Do not let yourselves be carried away by subtle and strange teachings, for it is a fine thing to have your heart made strong by grace, not by the eating of different kinds of food, for they never did any good to those who took that line of conduct. We have an altar from which those who serve in the tabernacle have no right to eat. For the bodies of the animals, whose blood is taken by the High Priest into the Holy Place as an offering for sin, are burned outside the camp. That was why Jesus suffered outside the gate, so that he might make men fit for the presence of God by his own blood. So, then, let us go to him outside the camp, bearing the same reproach as he did, for here we have no abiding city but are searching for the city which is to come. Through him, therefore, let us continually bring to God a sacrifice of praise, I mean, the fruit of lips which continually acknowledge their faith in his name. Do not forget to do good and to share everything, for God is well pleased with a sacrifice like that. IT may be that no one will ever discover the precise meaning behind this passage. Clearly, there was some false teaching going on in the church to which this letter was written. The writer to the Hebrews did not need to describe it; his readers knew all about it, because some of them had succumbed to it and all were in danger of it. As to what it was, we can only guess. We may start with one basic fact. The writer to the Hebrews is convinced that real strength comes to a person’s heart only from the grace of God and that what people eat and drink has nothing to do with their spiritual strength. So, in the church to which he was writing, there were some who placed too much importance on laws about food. There are certain possibilities. (1) The Jews had rigid food laws, laid down at length in Leviticus 11.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  reminded the veterans in the Napoleonic army of the Egyptian pyramids, the villages of Bellwitz, Skolnitz, and Kobelnitz, the game park and pheasant enclosure, the watercourse of the Goldbach and the pools and lakes to the south, the French encampment as well as that of the ninety thousand Allies, which extended over a length of nine miles. Hilary told us, said Austerlitz, how at seven in the morning the peaks of the highest hills emerged from the mist like islands in a sea and, as the day gradually grew brighter over the rounded hilltops, the milky haze in the valleys became noticeably denser. The Russian and Austrian troops had come down from the mountainsides like a slow avalanche, and soon, increasingly unsure where they were going, were wandering around on the slopes and in the meadows below, while the French, in a single onslaught, captured the now half-abandoned positions on the Pratzen heights and then proceeded to attack the enemy in the rear from that vantage point. Hilary painted us a picture of the disposition of the regiments in their white and red, green and blue uniforms, constantly forming into new patterns in the course of the battle like crystals of glass in a kaleidoscope. Again and again we heard the names of Kolovrat and Bragation, Kutuzov, Bernadotte, Miloradovich, Soult, Murat, Vandamme, and Kellermann, we saw the black clouds of smoke hovering over the guns, the cannonballs flying past above the heads of the troops, the glint of bayonets as the first rays of the sun penetrated the mist; we even seemed to hear the heavy cavalry clashing, and felt (like a weakness sensed in our own bodies) whole ranks of men collapsing beneath the surge of the oncoming force. Hilary could talk for hours about the second of December 1805, but nonetheless it was his opinion that he had to cut his accounts far too short, because, as he several times told us, it would take an endless length of time to describe the events of such a day properly, in some inconceivably complex form recording who had perished, who survived, and exactly where and how, or simply saying what the battlefield was like at nightfall, with the screams and groans of the wounded and dying. In the end all anyone could ever do was sum up the unknown factors in the ridiculous phrase, “The fortunes of battle swayed this way and that,” or some similarly feeble and useless cliché. All of us, even when we think we have noted every tiny detail, resort to set pieces which have already been staged often enough by others. We try to reproduce the reality, but the harder we try, the more we find the pictures that make up the stock-in-trade of the spectacle of history forcing themselves upon us: the fallen drummer boy, the infantryman shown in the act of stabbing another, the horse’s eye starting from its socket, the invulnerable Emperor surrounded by his generals, a moment frozen still amidst the turmoil of battle. Our concern with history, so Hilary’s thesis ran, is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at

• From Comrade Loves of the Samurai (1972)

  The seat destined for the Hara-kiri had been placed in the garden of the temple. Ukyo calmly seated himself on the gold-bordered mats and summoned his attendant, whose duty it was to cut off the condemned man's head to shorten his suffering after he had manipulated the dagger in his belly. This attendant's name was Kajuyu Kitji Kawa, and he was a courtier of the same Lord, Ukyo cut off the wonderful locks of his hair, put them in a white paper and gave them to Kajuyu, praying him to send them to his venerable mother at Horikawa in Kyoto as a keepsake. The priest then began to pray for the salvation of Ukyo's soul. Ukyo said: 'Beauty in this world cannot endure for long. I am glad to die while I am young and beautiful, and before my countenance fades like a flower.' Then he took a green paper from his sleeve and wrote his farewell poem upon it. This was his poem: I loved the beauty of flowers in springtime; In autumn the glory of the moon Was my delight; But now that I am looking upon death face to my face, These joys are vanishing; They were all dreams. Then he thrust the knife into his belly, and Kajuyu at once Struck off his head from behind. At that moment Uneme ran to the mats and cried: 'Finish me also,' and pierced himself. Kajuyu Struck off his head. Ukyo was sixteen years old, and Uneme eighteen. The tombs of these two young men remained for a long time in the temple, and Ukyo's farewell poem was inscribed on their joint Stones. On the seven teenth day after their death, Samanosuke also died by Hara-kiri, leaving a letter to say that he could not survive his lovers' death. Such was the tragedy of these young men who died for love. [image file=image_rsrc1KE.jpg] 3 He Followed his Friend into the Other World, after Torturing him to DeathON THE SECOND DAY OF THE YEAR THE LORD of the Province Iga dreamed that it snowed, and on the next morning snow began to fall. He said to his attendants: 'It is snowing just as I dreamed last night.' One of the pages, named Sasanosuke Yamawaki, went into another room and brought from it a picture of Fuji Yama by the famous painter Tanyo, and hung it in the recess of the room. The Lord was delighted by this tactful and intelligent action; for to dream that one sees the snow upon Fuji is considered by every superstitious person as a sign of happiness. He compared Sasanosuke's action with that of Seishyônajon, an ancient and famous poetess of the Imperial Court. The Emperor Tjijo had one day asked: 'What will be the appearance of Mount Koro under morning snow?' Then Seishyônajon quickly unrolled the bamboo blind before the north door of the palace. For a great Chinese poet says in one of his poems:

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

  3. More original and strict were the Carthusians,699 who got their name from the seat of their first convent, Chartreuse, Cartusium, fourteen miles from Grenoble, southeast of Lyons. They were hermits, and practised an asceticism excelling in severity any of the other orders of the time.700 The founder, St. Bruno, was born in Cologne, and became chancellor of the cathedral of Rheims. Disgusted with the vanities of the world,701 he retired with some of his pupils to a solitary place, Saisse Fontaine, in the diocese of Langres, which he subsequently exchanged for Chartreuse.702 The location was a wild spot in the mountains, difficult of access, and for a large part of the year buried in snow. Bruno was called by Urban II. to Rome, and after acting as papal adviser, retired to the Calabrian Mountains and established a house. There he died, 1101. He was canonized 1514. In 1151 the number of Carthusian houses was fourteen, and they gradually increased to one hundred and sixty-eight. The order was formally recognized by Alexander III., 1170. The first Carthusian statutes were committed to writing by the fifth prior Guigo, d. 1137. The rule now in force was fixed in 1578, and reconfirmed by Innocent XI., 1682.703 The monks lived in cells around a central church, at first two and two, and then singly.704 They divided their time between prayer, silence, and work, which originally consisted chiefly in copying books. The services celebrated in common in the church were confined to vespers and matins. The other devotions were performed by each in seclusion. The prayers were made in a whisper so as to avoid interfering with others. They sought to imitate the Thebaid anchorites in rigid self-mortification. Peter the Venerable has left a description of their severe austerities. Their dress was thin and coarse above the dress of all other monks.705 Meat, fat, and oil were forbidden; wine allowed, but diluted with water. They ate only bean-bread. They flagellated themselves once each day during the fifty days before Easter, and the thirty days before Christmas. When one of their number died, each of the survivors said two psalms, and the whole community met and took two meals together to console one another for the loss.706 No woman was allowed to cross the threshold. For hygienic purposes, the monks bled themselves five times a year, and were shaved six times a year.707 They avoided adornment in their churches and church dignities.708 They borrowed books from Cluny and other convents for the purpose of copying them.709 The heads of the Carthusian convents are called priors, not abbots. In its earlier history the order received highest praise from Innocent III. and Peter the Venerable, Bernard, and Peter of Celle. Bernard shrank from interrupting their holy quiet by letters, and lauded their devotion to God. So at a later time Petrarch, after a visit to their convent in Paris, penned a panegyric of the order.

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

  If it be compared with the monachism of the earlier period of the Church, the mediaeval institution will be found to equal it in the number of its great monks and to exceed it in useful activity. Among the distinguished Fathers of the Post-Nicene period who advocated monasticism were St. Anthony of Egypt, Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and Benedict of Nursia. In the Middle Ages the list is certainly as imposing. There we have Anselm, Albertus Magnus, Bonaventura, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus among the Schoolmen, St. Bernard and Hugo de St. Victor, Eckart, and Tauler among the mystics, Hildegard and Joachim of Flore among the seers, the authors of the Dies irae and Stabat mater and Adam de St. Victor among the hymnists, Anthony of Padua, Bernardino of Siena, Berthold of Regensburg and Savonarola among the preachers, and in a class by himself, Francis d’Assisi. Of the five epochs in the history of monasticism two belong to the Middle Ages proper.537 The appearance of the hermit and the development of the eremite mode of life belong to the fourth century. Benedict of Nursia of the sixth century, and his well-systematized rule, mark the second epoch. The development of the Society of Jesus in the sixteenth century marks the last epoch. The two between are represented by the monastic revival, starting from the convent of Cluny as a centre in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and the rise and spread of the mendicant orders in the thirteenth century. Cluny was for a century almost the only reforming force in Western Europe till the appearance of Hildebrand on the stage, and he himself was probably trained in the mother convent. Through its offshoots and allied orders Cluny continued to be a burning centre of religious zeal for a century longer. Then, at a time of monastic declension, the mendicant orders, brought into existence by St. Francis d’Assisi and Dominic of Spain, became the chief promoters of one of the most notable religious revivals that has ever swept over Europe. The work done by men like William of Hirschau, Bruno and Norbert in Germany, Bernard and Peter the Venerable in France, and St. Francis in Italy, cannot be ignored in any true account of the onward progress of mankind. However much we may decline to believe that monasticism is a higher form of Christian life, we must give due credit to these men, or deny to a series of centuries all progress and good whatsoever.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  Long ago, Amos had said: ‘The Lord God does nothing without revealing his secret to his servants the prophets’ (Amos 3:7). Philo had said: ‘The prophet is the interpreter of the God who speaks within.’ He had also referred to the prophets as ‘interpreters of the God who uses them as instruments to reveal to men that which he wills’. In later days, this idea had been turned into a mechanical exercise. The second-century Christian writer Athenagoras spoke of God moving the mouths of the prophets as someone might play upon a musical instrument and of the Spirit breathing into them as a flute-player breathes into a flute. At about the same time, another Christian scholar, Justin Martyr, spoke of the divine coming down from heaven and sweeping across the prophets as a plectrum sweeps across a harp or a lute. In the end, the prophets were seen as having really no more to do with their message than a musical instrument had to do with the music it played or a pen with the message it wrote. That was making it all too mechanical, for even the finest musicians are to some extent at the mercy of their instruments and cannot produce great music out of a piano in which certain notes are missing or out of tune, and even the finest writers are to some extent at the mercy of their tools. God cannot reveal more than human beings can understand. His revelation comes through human minds and hearts. That is exactly what the writer to the Hebrews saw. He says that the revelation of God which came through the prophets was in many parts (polumerōs) and in many ways (polutropōs). There are two ideas there. (1) The revelation of the prophets had a magnificent diversity which made it a tremendous thing. From age to age, they had spoken, always fitting their message to the age, never letting it be out of date. At the same time, that revelation was fragmentary and had to be presented in such a way that the limitations of the time would understand. One of the most interesting things is to see how, time after time, the prophets are characterized by one idea. For instance, Amos is ‘ a cry for social justice ’. Isaiah had grasped the holiness of God . Hosea, because of his own bitter home experience, had realized the wonder of the forgiving love of God . Out of their own experience of life and out of the experience of Israel, the prophets had each grasped and expressed a fragment of the truth of God. None had grasped the fullness of truth in its entirety; but with Jesus it was different. He was not a fragment of the truth; he was the whole truth. In him, God displayed not some part of himself but all of himself.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  (6) To Jesus belongs the exaltation as mediator. He has taken his place on the right hand of glory; but the tremendous thought of the writer to the Hebrews is that he is there not as our judge but as one who makes intercession for us, so that, when we enter into the presence of God, we go not to hear his justice prosecute us but to hear his love plead for us. ABOVE THE ANGELSHebrews 1:4–14 He was the superior to the angels, in proportion as he had received a more excellent rank than they. For to which of the angels did God ever say: ‘It is my Son that you are; it is I who this day have begotten you’? And again: ‘I will be to him a Father, and he will be to me a Son.’ And again, when he brings his honoured one into the world of men, he says: ‘And let all the angels of God bow down before him.’ As for the angels, he says: ‘He who makes his angels winds and his servants a flame of fire.’ But, as for the Son, he says: ‘God is your throne forever and forever, and the sceptre of righteousness is the sceptre of your kingdom. You have loved justice and hated lawlessness; therefore God has anointed you, even your God, with the oil of exultation above your fellows.’ And, ‘You in the beginning, O Lord, laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They shall perish but you remain unalterable. All of them will grow old like a garment, and like a mantle you will fold them up and they will be changed. But you are ever yourself, and your years will not fail.’ To which of the angels did he ever say: ‘Sit at my right hand till I make your enemies your footstool’? Are they not all ministering spirits, continually being despatched on service, for the sake of those who are destined to enter into possession of salvation?

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  The seventh brother they roasted alive in a gigantic brazier. These, too, died faithful. These are the things of which the writer to the Hebrews is thinking; and these are things which we do well also to remember. It was due to the faith of these men that the Jewish religion was not completely destroyed. If that religion had been destroyed, what would have happened to the purposes of God? How could Jesus have been born into the world if Judaism had ceased to exist? In a very real way, we owe our Christianity to these martyrs of the times when Antiochus made his deliberate attempt to wipe out the Jewish religion. The day came when the situation ignited. The agents of Antiochus had gone to a town called Modein and had erected an altar there to make the inhabitants sacrifice to the Greek gods. The emissaries of Antiochus tried to persuade a certain Mattathias to set an example by offering sacrifice, for he was a distinguished and influential man. He refused in anger. But another Jew, seeking to gain approval and to save his own life, came forward and was about to sacrifice. Mattathias, moved to uncontrollable wrath, seized a sword and killed his faithless countryman and the king’s commissioner with him. The signal for rebellion had been given. Mattathias and his sons and other like-minded people took to the hills; and once again the phrases used to describe their life there were in the mind of the writer to the Hebrews, and he has echoes of them over and over again. ‘Then he [Mattathias] and his sons fled to the hills and left all that they had in the town’ (1 Maccabees 2:28). ‘Judas Maccabaeus, with about nine others, got away to the wilderness and kept himself and his companions alive in the mountains as wild animals do’ (2 Maccabees 5:27). ‘Others, who had assembled in the caves nearby, in order to observe the seventh day secretly, were betrayed ... were all burned together’ (2 Maccabees 6:11). ‘They had been wandering in the mountains and caves like wild animals’ (2 Maccabees 10:6). In the end, under Judas Maccabaeus and his brothers, the Jews regained their freedom, the Temple was cleansed and the faith flourished again. In this passage, the writer to the Hebrews has done the same as before. He does not actually mention these things. Far better that his readers should be moved by a phrase here and there to remember them for themselves. In the end, he says something. All these died before the final unfolding of God’s promise and the coming of his Messiah into the world. It was as if God had arranged things in such a way that the full blaze of his glory should not be revealed until we and they could enjoy it together. The writer to the Hebrews is saying: ‘See! the glory of God has come. But see what it cost to make it possible!

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  There can be no glory greater than that of the ascended and exalted Jesus. (2) He says that Jesus is a minister of the sanctuary. That is the proof of his service. He is unique both in majesty and in service. Jesus never looked on majesty as something to be selfishly enjoyed. One of the greatest of the Roman emperors was Marcus Aurelius; as an administrator he was unsurpassed. He died at the age of 59, having worked himself to death in the service of his people. He was one of the Stoic saints. When chosen to succeed in due course to the imperial power, his biographer Capitolinus tells us, ‘he was appalled rather than overjoyed, and when he was told to move to the private house of Hadrian, the Emperor, it was with reluctance that he departed from his mother’s villa. And when the members of the household asked him why he was sorry to receive the royal adoption, he enumerated to them the toils which sovereignty involved.’ Marcus Aurelius saw kingship in terms of service and not of majesty. Jesus is the unique example of divine majesty and divine service combined. He knew that he had been given his supreme position, not jealously to guard it in splendid isolation, but rather to enable others to attain to it and to share it. In him, the supreme majesty and the supreme service met. Now there enters into the picture a thought that was never far from the mind of the writer to the Hebrews. Religion to him, remember, was access to God; therefore the supreme function of any priest was to open the way to God for others. He removed the barriers between God and his people; he built a bridge across which men and women could go into the presence of God. But we could put this another way. Instead of talking about access to God, we might talk about access to reality. Every religious writer has to search for terms which the readers will understand. The message has to be presented in language and in thoughts which will make their point because they are familiar, or at least strike a chord in the reader’s mind. The Greeks had a basic idea about the universe. They thought in terms of two worlds, the real and the unreal. They believed that this world of space and time was only a pale copy of the real world. That was the basic belief of Plato, the greatest of all the Greek thinkers. He believed in what he called forms. Somewhere there was a world where there existed the perfect forms of which everything in this world is an imperfect copy. Sometimes he called the forms ideas.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  His father is never mentioned nor his mother; nor is there any record of his descent; there is no mention of the beginning of his days nor any of the end of his life; he is exactly like the Son of God; and he remains a priest forever. Just see how great this man was – Abraham gave him the tenth part of the spoils of victory – and Abraham was no less than the founder of our nation. Now look at the difference – when the sons of Levi receive their priesthood, they receive an injunction laid down by the law to exact tithes from the people. That is to say, they exact tithes from their own brothers, even although they are descendants of Abraham. But this man, whose descent is not traced through them at all, exacted tithes from Abraham and actually blessed the man who had received the promises. Beyond all argument, the lesser is blessed by the greater. Just so, in the one instance, it is a case of men who die receiving tithes; but, in this instance, it is the case of a man whom the evidence proves to live. Still further – if I may put it this way – through Abraham, Levi, too, the very man who receives the tithes, had tithes exacted from him, for he was in his father’s body when Melchizedek met him. If, then, the desired effect could have been achieved by the Levitical priesthood – for it was on the basis of it that the people became a people of the law – what further need was there to set up another priest and to call him a priest after the order of Melchizedek, and not to call him a priest after the order of Aaron? Once the priesthood was altered, of necessity there follows an alteration of the law too, for the person of whom the statements are made belongs to another tribe altogether, from which no one ever served at the altar. It is obvious that it was from Judah that our Lord sprang, and, with regard to that tribe, Moses said nothing about priests. And certain things are still more abundantly clear – if a different priest is set up, a priest after the order of Melchizedek, a priest who has become so, not according to the law of a mere human injunction but according to the power of a life that is indestructible – for the witness of Scripture in regard to this is: ‘You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek’ – if all that is so, two things emerge.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  It is one of the hardest challenges of Christianity that we have to be prepared sometimes to be a fool for Jesus’ sake. We should never forget that there was a day when Jesus’ friends came and tried to get him to go home because they thought that he was mad. The wisdom of God is so often foolishness to the world. (3) Noah’s faith was a judgment on others. That is why, at least in one sense, it is dangerous to be a Christian. It is not that Christians are self-righteous; it is not that they are censorious; it is not that they go about finding fault with other people; it is not that they say: ‘I told you so.’ It often happens that, simply by being themselves, Christians pass judgment on other people. Alcibiades, that brilliant but wild young man of Athens, used to say to Socrates: ‘Socrates, I hate you, for every time I meet you, you show me what I am.’ One of the finest men who ever lived in Athens was Aristides, who was called ‘the just’. But they voted to banish him. One man, asked why he had voted in that way, answered: ‘Because I am tired of hearing Aristides called “the just”.’ There is danger in goodness, for in its light evil stands condemned. (4) Noah was righteous through faith. It so happens that he is the first man in the Bible to be called dikaios, righteous (Genesis 6:9). His goodness consisted in the fact that he took God at his word. When others broke God’s commandments, Noah kept them; when others were deaf to God’s warnings, Noah listened to them; when others laughed at God, Noah held him in reverence. It has been said of Noah that ‘he threw the dark scepticism of the world into relief against his own shining faith in God’. In an age when people disregarded God, for Noah he was the supreme reality in the world. THE ADVENTURE AND THE PATIENCE OF FAITH Hebrews 11:8–10 It was by faith that Abraham, when he was called, showed his obedience by going out to a place which he was going to receive as an inheritance, and he went out not knowing where he was to go. It was by faith that he sojourned in the land that had been promised to him, as though it had been a foreign land, living in tents, in the same way as did Isaac and Jacob, who were his coheirs in the promise of it. For he was waiting for the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God. THE call of Abraham is told with dramatic simplicity in Genesis 12:1. Jewish and middle-eastern legends gathered largely round Abraham’s name, and some of them must have been known to the writer to the Hebrews. The legends tell how Abraham was the son of Terah, commander of the armies of Nimrod.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  7 Momma had married three times: Mr. Johnson, my grandfather, who left her around the turn of the century with two small sons to raise; Mr. Henderson, of whom I know nothing at all (Momma never answered questions directly put to her on any subject except religion); then finally Mr. Murphy. I saw him a fleeting once. He came through Stamps on a Saturday night, and Grandmother gave me the chore of making his pallet on the floor. He was a stocky dark man who wore a snap-brim hat like George Raft. The next morning he hung around the Store until we returned from church. That marked the first Sunday I knew Uncle Willie to miss services. Bailey said he stayed home to keep Mr. Murphy from stealing us blind. He left in the middle of the afternoon after one of Momma's extensive Sunday dinners. His hat pushed back off his forehead, he walked down the road whistling. I watched his thick back until he turned the bend by the big white church. People spoke of Momma as a good-looking woman and some, who remembered her youth, said she used to be right pretty. I saw only her power and strength. She was taller than any woman in my personal world, and her hands were so large they could span my head from ear to ear. Her voice was soft only because she chose to keep it so. In church, when she was called upon to sing, she seemed to pull out plugs from behind her jaws and the huge, almost rough sound would pour over the listeners and throb in the air. Each Sunday, after she had taken her seat, the minister would announce, “We will now be led in a hymn by Sister Henderson.” And each Sunday she looked up with amazement at the preacher and asked silently, “Me?” After a second of assuring herself that she indeed was being called upon, she laid down her handbag and slowly folded her handkerchief. This was placed neatly on top of the purse, then she leaned on the bench in front and pushed herself to a standing position, and then she opened her mouth and the song jumped out as if it had only been waiting for the right time to make an appearance. Week after week and year after year the performance never changed, yet I don't remember anyone's ever remarking on her sincerity or readiness to sing. Momma intended to teach Bailey and me to use the paths of life that she and her generation and all the Negroes gone before had found, and found to be safe ones. She didn't cotton to the idea that whitefolks could be talked to at all without risking one's life. And certainly they couldn't be spoken to insolently. In fact, even in their absence they could not be spoken of too harshly unless we used the sobriquet “They.” If she had been asked and had chosen to answer the question of whether she was cowardly or not, she would have said that she was a realist. Didn't she stand up to “them” year after year? Wasn't she the only Negro woman in Stamps referred to once as Mrs.? That incident became one of Stamps' little legends. Some years before Bailey and I arrived in town, a man was hunted down for assaulting white womanhood. In trying to escape he ran to the Store. Momma and Uncle Willie hid him behind the chifforobe until night, gave him supplies for an overland journey and sent him on his way. He was, however, apprehended, and in court when he was questioned as to his movements on the day of the crime, he replied that after he heard that he was being sought he took refuge in Mrs. Henderson's Store. The judge asked that Mrs. Henderson be subpoenaed, and when Momma arrived and said she was Mrs. Henderson, the judge, the bailiff and other whites in the audience laughed. The judge had really made a gaffe calling a Negro woman Mrs., but then he was from Pine Bluff and couldn't have been expected to know that a woman who owned a store in that village would also turn out to be colored. The whites tickled their funny bones with the incident for a long time, and the Negroes thought it proved the worth and majesty of my grandmother.