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

  Aeneas Sylvius, afterwards Pius II., bore similar testimony to the cheerfulness which Huss and Jerome displayed in the face of death, and said that they went to the stake as to a feast and suffered death with more courage than any philosopher.703 § 47. The Hussites. The news of Huss’ execution stirred the Bohemian nation to its depths. Huss was looked upon as a national hero and a martyr. The revolt, which followed, threatened the very existence of the papal rule in Bohemia. No other dissenting movement of the Middle Ages assumed such formidable proportions. The Hussites, the name given to the adherents of the new body, soon divided into two organized parties, the Taborites and the Calixtines or Utraquists. They agreed in demanding the distribution of the cup to the laity. A third body, the Unitas Fratrum, or Bohemian Brethren, originated in the middle of the 15th century, forty years after Huss’ death. When it became known that Huss had perished in the flames, the populace of Prag stoned the houses of the priests unfriendly to the martyr; and the archbishop himself was attacked in his palace, and with difficulty eluded the popular rage by flight. King Wenzel at first seemed about to favor the popular party. The Council of Constance, true to itself, addressed a document to the bishop and clergy of Prag, designating Wyclif, Huss and Jerome as most unrighteous, dangerous and shameful men,704 and calling upon the Prag officials to put down those who were sowing their doctrines. The high regard in which Huss was held found splendid expression at the Bohemian diet, Sept. 2, 1415, when 452 nobles signed an indignant remonstrance to the council for its treatment of their "most beloved brother," whom they pronounced to be a righteous and catholic man, known in Bohemia for many years by his exemplary life and honest preaching of the law of the Gospel. They concluded the document by announcing their intention to defend, even to the effusion of blood, the law of Christ and his devoted preachers.705 Three days later, the nobles formed a league which was to remain in force for six years, in which they bound themselves to defend the free preaching of the Gospel on their estates, and to recognize the authority of prelates only so far as they acted according to the Scriptures. To this manifesto the council, Feb. 20, 1416, replied by citing the signers to appear before it within 50 days, on pain of being declared contumacious. Huss’ memory also had honor at the hands of the university, which, on May 23, 1416, sent forth a communication addressed to all lands, eulogizing him as in all things a master whose life was without an equal.706 In omnibus Magister vitae sine pari.

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

  Jerome went out from the cathedral wearing a cheerful countenance. A paper cap was put on his head, painted over with red devils. No sentence of deposition was necessary or ceremony of disrobing, for the condemned man was merely a laic.701 He died on the spot where Huss suffered. As the wood was being piled around him, he sang the Easter hymn, salva festa dies, Hail, festal day. The flames were slow in putting an end to his miseries as compared with Huss. His ashes were thrown into the Rhine. And many learned people wept, the chronicler Richental says, that he had to die, for he was almost more learned than Huss. After his death, the council joined his name with the names of Wyclif and Huss as leaders of heresy. Poggio Bracciolini’s description of Jerome’s address in the cathedral runs thus:—

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

  A cantionale, dating from 1572, and preserved in the Prag library, contains a hymn to Huss’ memory and three medallions which well set forth the relation in which Wyclif and Huss stand to the Reformation. The first represents Wyclif striking sparks from a stone. Below it is Huss, kindling a fire from the sparks. In the third medallion, Luther is holding aloft the flaming torch. his is the historic succession, although it is true Luther began his career as a Reformer before he was influenced by Huss, and continued his work, knowing little of Wyclif. To the cause of religious toleration, and without intending it, John Huss made a more effectual contribution by his death than could have been made by many philosophical treatises, even as the deaths of Blandina and other martyrs of the early Church, who were slaves, did more towards the reduction of the evils of slavery than all the sentences of Pagan philosophers. Quite like his English teacher, he affirmed the sovereign rights of the truth. It was his habit, so he stated, to conform his views to the truth, whatever the truth might be. If any one, he said, "can instruct me by the sacred Scriptures or by good reasoning, I am willing to follow him. From the outset of my studies, I have made it a rule to joyfully and humbly recede from a former opinion when in any matter I perceive a more rational opinion."697 § 46. Jerome of Prag. A year after Huss’ martyrdom, on May 30, 1416, his friend Jerome of Prag was condemned by the council and also suffered at the stake. He shared Huss’ enthusiasm for Wyclif, was perhaps his equal in scholarship, but not in steadfast constancy. Huss’ life was spent in Prag and its vicinity. Jerome travelled in Western Europe and was in Prag only occasionally. Huss left quite a body of writings, Jerome, none. Born of a good family at Prag, Jerome studied in his native city, and later at Oxford and Paris. At Oxford he became a student and admirer of Wyclif’s writings, two of which, the Trialogus and the Dialogus, he carried with him back to Bohemia not later than 1402. In Prag, he defended the English doctor as a holy man "whose doctrines were more worthy of acceptance than Augustine himself," stood with Huss in the contest over the rights of the Bohemian nation, and joined him in attacking the papal indulgences, 1412.

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

  The safe-conduct was in the ordinary form, addressed to all the princes and subjects of the empire, ecclesiastical and secular, and informing them that Huss should be allowed to pass, remain and return without impediment. Jerome, according to the sentence passed upon him by the council, declared that the safe-conduct had been grossly violated, and when, in 1433, the legates of the Council of Basel attempted to throw the responsibility for Huss’ condemnation on false witnesses, so called, Rokyzana asked how the Council of Constance could have been moved by the Holy Ghost if it were controlled by perjurers, and showed that the violation of the safe-conduct had not been forgotten. When the Bohemian deputies a year earlier had come to Basel, they demanded the most carefully prepared briefs of safe-conduct from the Council of Basel, the cities of Eger and Basel and from Sigismund and others. Frederick of Brandenburg and John of Bavaria agreed to furnish troops to protect the Hussites on their way to Basel, at Basel, and on their journey home. A hundred and six years later, Luther profited by Huss’ misfortune when he recalled Sigismund’s perfidy, perfidy which the papal system of the 16th century would have repeated, had Charles V. given his consent.695 In a real sense, Huss was the precursor of the Reformation. It is true, the prophecy was wrongly ascribed to him, "To-day you roast a goose—Huss—but a hundred years from now a swan will arise out of my ashes which you shall not roast." Unknown to contemporary writers, it probably originated after Luther had fairly entered upon his work. But he struck a hard blow at hierarchical assumption before Luther raised his stronger arm. Luther was moved by Huss’ case, and at Leipzig, forced to the wall by Eck’s thrusts, the Wittenberg monk made the open avowal that oecumenical councils also may err, as was done in putting Huss to death at Constance. Years before, at Erfurt, he had taken up a volume of the Bohemian sermons, and was amazed that a man who preached so evangelically should have been condemned to the stake. But for fear of the taint of heresy, he quickly put it down.696 The accredited view in Luther’s time was given by Dobneck in answer to Luther’s good opinion, when he said that Huss was worse than a Turk, Jew, Tartar and Sodomite. In his edition of Huss’ letters, printed 1537, Luther praised Huss’ patience and humility under every indignity and his courage before an imposing assembly as a lamb in the midst of wolves and lions. If such a man, he wrote, "is to be regarded as a heretic, then no person under the sun can be looked upon as a true Christian."

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

  In his treatment of Mary and Martha, Eckart seems to make a radical departure from the mediaeval doctrine of the superior value of pure contemplation. From the time of Augustine, Rachel and Mary of Bethany had been regarded as the representatives of the contemplative and higher life. In his sermon on Mary, the German mystic affirmed that Mary was still at school. Martha had learned and was engaged in good works, serving the Lord. Mary was only learning. She was striving to be as holy as her sister. Better to feed the hungry and do other works of mercy, he says, than to have the vision of Paul and to sit still. After Christ’s ascension, Mary learned to serve as fully as did Martha, for then the Holy Spirit was poured out. One who lives a truly contemplative life will show it in active works. A life of mere contemplation is a selfish life. The modern spirit was stirring in him. He saw another ideal for life than mediaeval withdrawal from the world. The breath of evangelical freedom and joy is felt in his writings.462 Eckart’s speculative mind carried him to the verge of pantheism, and it is not surprising that his hyperbolical expressions subjected him to the papal condemnation. But his pantheism was Christian pantheism, the complete union of the soul with God. It was not absorption in the divine being involving the loss of individuality, but the reception of Godhood, the original principle of the Deity. What language could better express the idea that God is everything, and everything God, than these words, words adopted by Hegel as a sort of motto: "The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are the same, and there is but one sight, one apprehension, one love."463 And yet such language, endangering, as it might seem, the distinct personality of the soul, was far better than the imperative insistence laid by accredited Church teachers on outward rituals and conformity to sacramental rites.

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

  Eckart as a Theological Thinker.—Eckart was still bound in part by the scholastic method. His temper, however, differed widely from the temper of the Schoolmen. Anselm, Hugo of St. Victor, Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura, who united the mystical with the scholastic element, were predominantly Schoolmen, seeking to exhaust every supposable speculative problem. No purpose of this kind appears in Eckart’s writings. He is dominated by a desire not so much to reach the intellect as to reach the soul and to lead it into immediate fellowship with God. With him the weapons of metaphysical dexterity are not on show; and in his writings, so far as they are known, he betrays no inclination to bring into the area of his treatment those remoter topics of speculation, from the constitution of the angelic world to the motives and actions which rule and prevail in the regions of hell. God and the soul’s relation to Him are the engrossing subjects.443 The authorities upon whom Eckart relied most, if we are to judge by his quotations, were Dionysius the Areopagite, and St. Bernard, though he also quotes from Augustine, Jerome and Gregory the Great, from Plato, Avicenna and Averrhoes. His discussions are often introduced by such expressions as "the masters say," or "some masters say." As a mystical thinker he has much in common with the mystics who preceded him, Neo-Platonic and Christian, but he was no servile reproducer of the past. Freshness characterizes his fundamental principles and his statement of them. In the place of love for Jesus, the precise definitions of the stages of contemplation emphasized by the school of St. Victor and the hierarchies and ladders and graduated stairways of Dionysius, he magnifies the new birth in the soul, and sonship.444 As for God, He is absolute being, Deus est esse. The Godhood is distinct from the persons of the Godhead,—a conception which recalls Gilbert of Poictiers, or even the quaternity which Peter the Lombard was accused of setting up. The Trinity is the method by which this Godhood reveals itself by a process which is eternal. Godhood is simple essence having in itself the potentiality of all things.445 God has form, and yet is without form, is being, and yet is without being. Great teachers say that God is above being. This is not correct, for God may as little be called a being, ein Wesen, as the sun may be called black or pale.446

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

  The following is a resumé of a sermon on John 6:44, "No man can come unto me except the Father draw him."441 In drawing the sinner that He may convert him, God draws with more power than he would use if He were to make a thousand heavens and earths. Sin is an offence against nature, for it breaks God’s image in us. For the soul, sin is death, for God is the soul’s true life. For the heart, it is restlessness, for a thing is at rest only when it is in its natural state. Sin is a disease and blindness, for it blinds men to the brief duration of time, the evils of fleshly lust and the long duration of the pains of hell. It is bluntness to all grace. Sin is the prison-house of hell. People say they intend to turn away from their sins. But how can one who is dead make himself alive again? And by one’s own powers to turn from sin unto God is much less possible than it would be for the dead to make themselves alive. God himself must draw. Grace flows from the Father’s heart continually, as when He says, "I have loved thee with an everlasting love." There are three things in nature which draw, and these three Christ had on the cross. The first was his fellow-likeness to Us. As the bird draws to itself the bird of the same nature, so Christ drew the heavenly Father to himself, so that the Father forgot His wrath in contemplating the sufferings of the cross. Again Christ draws by his self-emptiness. As the empty tube draws water into itself, so the Son, by emptying himself and letting his blood flow, drew to himself all the grace from the Father’s heart. The third thing by which he draws is the glowing heat of his love, even as the sun with its heat draws up the mists from the earth. The historian of the German mediaeval pulpit, Cruel, has said,442 "Eckart’s sermons hold the reader by the novelty and greatness of their contents, by their vigor of expression and by the genial frankness of the preacher himself, who is felt to be putting his whole soul into his effort and to be giving the most precious things he is able to give." He had his faults, but in spite of them "he is the boldest and most profound thinker the German pulpit has ever had,—a preacher of such original stamp of mind that the Church in Germany has not another like him to offer in all the centuries."

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

  Meister Eckart, 1260–1327, the first in the line of the German mystics, was excelled in vigor of thought by no religious thinker of his century, and was the earliest theologian who wrote in German.432 The philosophical bent of his mind won for him from Hegel the title, "father of German philosophy." In spite of the condemnation passed upon his writings by the pope, his memory was regarded with veneration by the succeeding generation of mystics. His name, however, was almost forgotten in later times. Mosheim barely mentions it, and the voluminous historian, Schroeckh, passes it by altogether. Baur, in his History of the Middle Ages, devotes to Eckart and Tauler only three lines, and these under the head of preaching, and makes no mention at all of German mysticism. His memory again came to honor in the last century, and in the German church history of the later Middle Ages he is now accorded a place of pre-eminence for his freshness of thought, his warm piety and his terse German style.433 With Albertus Magnus and Rupert of Deutz he stands out as the earliest prominent representative in the history of German theology. During the century before Eckart, the German church also had its mystics, and in the twelfth century the godly women, Hildegard of Bingen and Elizabeth of Schoenau, added to the function of prophecy a mystical element. In the thirteenth century the Benedictine convent of Helfta, near Eisleben, Luther’s birthplace, was a centre of religious warmth. Among its nuns were several by the names of Gertrude and Mechthild, who excelled by their religious experiences, and wrote on the devotional life. Gertrude of Hackeborn, d. 1292, abbess of Helfta, and Gertrude the Great, d. 1302, professed to have immediate communion with the Saviour and to be the recipients of divine revelations. When one of the Mechthilds asked Christ where he was to be found, the reply was, "You may seek me in the tabernacle and in Gertrude’s heart." From 1293 Gertrude the Great recorded her revelations in a work called the Communications of Piety—Insinuationes divinae pietatis. Mechthild of Magdeburg, d. 1280, and Mechthild of Hackeborn, d. 1310, likewise nuns of Helfta, also had visions which they wrote out. The former, who for thirty years had been a Beguine, Deutsch calls " one of the most remarkable personalities in the religious history of thirteenth century." Mechthild of Hackeborn, a younger sister of the abbess Gertrude, in her book on special grace,—Liber specialis gratiae,—sets forth salvation as the gift of grace without the works of the law. These women wrote in German.434 David of Augsburg, d. 1271, the inquisitor who wrote on the inquisition,—De inquisitione haereticorum,—also wrote on the devotional life. These writings were intended for monks, and two of them435 are regarded as pearls of German prose.

• From The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (2000)

  Cyrano’s PanacheThe verbal fireworks of male courtship are personified in the title character from Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac. Cyrano had a big nose, a big sword, and a big vocabulary. One might say they are all phallic symbols, but, given what we learned earlier about the penis, that would just identify them as sexually selected ornaments. Much of the play concerns Cyrano’s mission to convince his bookish, beautiful cousin Roxane to commit herself to the inarticulate but handsome baron Christian de Neuvillette. In preparing a translation of Cyrano for the New York stage in 1971, novelist Anthony Burgess noted of Roxane that “She loves Christian, and yet she rebuffs him because he cannot woo her in witty and poetic language. This must seem very improbable in an age that finds a virtue in sincere inarticulacy, and I was told to find an excuse for this near-pathological dismissal of a good wordless soldier whose beauty, on her own admission, fills Roxane’s heart with ravishment.” Our modern verbal displays remain a pale imitation of classic French wit—Cyrano’s quatrains have given way to our anodyne psychobabble, self-help platitudes, and management buzzwords. We can be linguistically lazy now because we are surrounded by professional wordsmiths who entertain our sexual partners on our behalf: television, movie, comedy, and novel writers. We may never know whether our Pleistocene ancestors favored French-style wit, English-style irony, or German-style engineering. But they apparently favored some verbal fluency beyond the demands of flint-knapping and berry-picking. The Cyrano story really illustrates verbal display by five males. First, the historical Cyrano de Bergerac: large-nosed 17th-century political satirist, wounded veteran, dramatist, free-thinking materialist, ridiculer of religious authority, and master of baroque prose and bold metaphors, whose A Voyage to the Moon of 1754 was arguably the first science-fiction novel. Second, the 19th-century playwright Edmond Rostand, whose dazzling versification throughout five acts of rhymed alexandrines secured his literary status. Third, Rostand’s fictional character Cyrano, whose astonishing poetic fluency won Roxane’s heart. Fourth, the play’s translator, Anthony Burgess. Perhaps their lovers were equally fluent in private conversation, but we do not know, for they were not so motivated to broadcast their verbal genius to such wide audiences. The fifth male displayer is, of course, me, since I’m writing about Cyrano here. These endless chains of male verbal display constitute most of human literature and science. Facing death at the end of the play, Cyrano’s final words emphasized the similarities between ornamental bird plumage in nature, the white feather in his hat, and the style of his language: There is one thing goes with me when tonight I enter my last lodging, sweeping the bright Stars from the blue threshold of my salute. A thing unstained, unsullied by the brute Broken nails of the world, by death, by doom Unfingered—See it there, a white plume Over the battle—A diamond in the ash Of the ultimate combustion—My panache.

• From The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (2000)

  Leadership is like hunting in this respect: it provides a common good that looks purely altruistic until one considers the behavior’s sexual attractiveness. Sexual selection could have favored the opposite of moral leadership, but that preference would tend to go extinct along with its tense, bickering, exhausted groups. One could imagine a primate species in which females happened to develop a runaway sexual preference for hair-trigger psychopaths who randomly pick fights. Males could obligingly evolve into violent bullies. But groups playing that psychopathic equilibrium would go extinct in competition with efficient, peaceful groups playing the good-leadership equilibrium. As with hunting versus club-fighting, this is an example of equilibrium selection. It is not an example of the discredited group selection process in which individuals pay an individual cost for a common benefit. The sexual rewards of moral leadership mean that good leaders obtain a net individual benefit from behavior that provides for the common good. Where chimpanzees evolved moral leadership, humans evolved the more advanced capacity of moral vision, including the passionate articulation of social ideals concerning justice, freedom, and equality. Moral vision is sexually attractive, and may have been generated by sexual selection. It takes the impartiality of the peacekeeping primate to a more conscious, principled level. In discussing such an important human capacity, we must be especially careful to distinguish evolutionary function from human motivation. When Malcolm X used his verbal genius and moral charisma to forge a vision of a Muslim society free of racism, he was motivated by moral instincts, not “sexual instincts.” His moral instincts happened to attract a beautiful young woman named Betty Shabazz to become his wife, as they had evolved to do through sexual selection. Likewise for Martin Luther, whose Protestant vision attracted the ex-nun Katharina von Bora to marry him and raise six children. The peacock’s tail is no less beautiful when we understand its sexual function. Nor should the validity of human moral vision be reduced when we understand its origin in sexual choice. Why Scrooge Was Single: The Evolution of CharitySurvival of the fittest was supposed to make us act selfishly. Like Charles Dickens’s Scrooge, the traditional Darwinian account depicts humans as mean and miserly, perhaps with a little nepotism toward close relatives and some prudent loan-sharking to those who might pay us back. This is a convenient myth for educators, priests, and politicians, because it presents us as badly in need of socialization through schools, churches, and prisons. Supposedly, we need these character-improving regimes as our Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, to transform our selfish, biological, pre-Christmas Scrooge into our generous, cultured, post-Christmas Scrooge. The Dickens story makes a poor parable for human evolution, though. Scrooge survived well enough, but he was single and childless. In Victorian London, his manifest selfishness exiled him from the mating market. No self-respecting Englishwoman would pay him the slightest notice. As far as his genes are concerned, his miserliness was not self-interested, but self-castrating.

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  So aggelos (messenger or angel ) is pronounced angelos . AKOLOUTHEIN THE DISCIPLE’S WORD Akolouthein is the common and normal Greek verb which means to follow . It is a word with many uses and with many associations and all of them add something to its meaning for the follower of Christ. First, let us look at its usage and its meaning in classical Greek. (i) It is the common and the usual word for soldiers following their leader and commander . Xenophon ( Anabasis 7.5.3) speaks about the generals and captains who have followed the leader for whom they are fighting . (ii) It is very commonly used of a slave following or attending his master. Theophrastus, in his character sketch of the Distrustful Man, says that such a man compels his slave to walk before him instead of following behind him, as a slave would normally do, so that he can be sure the slave will not dodge away (Theophrastus, Characters 18.8). (iii) It is commonly used for following or obeying someone else’s advice or opinion. Plato says that it is necessary to find out those who are fitted by nature to be leaders in philosophy and government, and those who are fitted by nature to be followers of the leader (Plato, Republic 474c). Some people are fitted to give leadership; others are only fitted to accept it. (iv) It is commonly used of obeying the laws. To follow the laws of a city is to accept them as the standard of life and of behaviour. (v) It is commonly used of following the thread or argument of a discourse . When the argument has got into a difficult position Socrates says: ‘Come now, try to follow me, to see if we can get this matter adequately explained’ (Plato, Republic 474c). (vi) In the papyri akolouthein is very commonly used for attaching oneself to someone in order to extract some favour which is desired. One writes in advice to another: ‘stick to Ptollarion all the time…. Stick to him so that you may become his friend.’ The idea is that of following a person until the favour desired is finally extracted from him. Every one of these usages has light to throw on the Christian life. The Christian is in the position of the soldier who follows Jesus Christ, and who must immediately obey his leader’s command. The Christian is in the position of the slave, who must obey as soon as his master speaks. The Christian must ask for the advice and for the ruling of Jesus Christ and must have the humility to follow it, whatever it may be. The Christian is the man who desires citizenship of the Kingdom of Heaven, and, if he is to receive it, he must agree to live according to its laws.

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

  The popular preachers constitute another group, though the period does not furnish one who can be brought into comparison with the field-preacher, Berthold of Regensburg, the Whitefield of his century, d. 1272. Among the popular preachers of the time the most famous were Bernardino and John of Capistrano, both Italians, and members of the Observant wing of the Franciscan order, and the Spanish Dominican, Vincent Ferrer. To a later age belong those bright pulpit luminaries, Savonarola of Florence and Geiler of Strassburg. Bernardino of Siena, 1380–1444, was praised by Pius II. as a second Paul. He made a marked impression upon Italian audiences and was a favorite with pope Martin V. His voice, weak and indistinct at first, was said to have been made strong and clear through the grace of Mary, to whom he turned for help. He was the first vicar-general of the Observants, who numbered only a few congregations in Italy when he joined them, but increased greatly under his administration. In 1424 he was in Rome and, as Infessura the Roman diarist reports,419 so influenced the people that they brought their games and articles of adornment to the Capitol and made a bonfire of them. Wherever he went to preach, a banner was carried before him containing the monogram of Christ, IHS, with twelve rays centring in the letters. He urged priests to put the monogram on the walls of churches and public buildings, and such a monogram may still be seen on the city building of Siena.420 The Augustinians and Dominicans and also Poggio attacked him for this practice. In 1427, he appeared in Rome to answer the charges. He was acquitted by Martin V., who gave him permission to preach everywhere, and instructed him to hold an eighty-days’ mission in the papal city itself. In 1419, he appeared in the Lombard cities, where the people were carried away by his exhortations to repentance, and often burned their trinkets and games in the public squares. His body lies in Aquila, and he was canonized by Nicolas V., 1450. John of Capistrano, 1386–1456, a lawyer, and at an early age intrusted with the administration of Perugia, joined the Observants in 1416 and became a pupil of Bernardino. He made a reputation as an inquisitor in Northern Italy, converting and burning heretics and Jews. No one could have excelled him in the ferocity of his zeal against heresy. His first appointment as inquisitor was made in 1426, and his fourth appointment 23 years later in 1449.421

• From The Power of Myth (1988)

  simple morality play, it has to do with the powers of life as they are either fulfilled or broken and suppressed through the action of man. MOYERS: The first time I saw Star Wars , I thought, “This is a very old story in a very new costume.” The story of the young man called to adventure, the hero going out facing the trials and ordeals, and coming back after his victory with a boon for the community— CAMPBELL: Certainly Lucas was using standard mythological figures. The old man as the adviser made me think of a Japanese sword master. I’ve known some of those people, and Ben Kenobi has a bit of their character. MOYERS: What does the sword master do? CAMPBELL: He is a total expert in swordsmanship. The Oriental cultivation of the martial arts goes beyond anything I’ve ever encountered in American gymnasiums. There is a psychological as well as a physiological technique that go together there. This character in Star Wars has that quality. MOYERS: There’s something mythological, too, in that the hero is helped by a stranger who shows up and gives him some instrument— CAMPBELL: He gives him not only a physical instrument but a psychological commitment and a psychological center. The commitment goes past your mere intention system. You are one with the event. MOYERS: My favorite scene was when they were in the garbage compactor, and the walls were closing in, and I thought, “That’s like the belly of the whale that swallowed Jonah.” CAMPBELL: That’s where they were, down in the belly of the whale. MOYERS: What’s the mythological significance of the belly? CAMPBELL: The belly is the dark place where digestion takes place and new energy is created. The story of Jonah in the whale is an example of a mythic theme that is practically universal, of the hero going into a fish’s belly and ultimately coming out again, transformed. MOYERS: Why must the hero do that? CAMPBELL: It’s a descent into the dark. Psychologically, the whale represents the power of life locked in the unconscious. Metaphorically, water is the unconscious, and the creature in the water is the life or energy of the unconscious, which has overwhelmed the conscious personality and must be disempowered, overcome and controlled. In the first stage of this kind of adventure, the hero leaves the realm of the familiar, over which he has some measure of control, and comes to a threshold, let us say the edge of a lake or sea, where a monster of the abyss comes to meet him. There are then two possibilities. In a story of the Jonah type, the hero is swallowed and taken into the abyss to be later resurrected—a variant of the death-and-resurrection theme.

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

  It is as an ecclesiastical mediator, and as a reformer of clerical and conventual abuses that the cardinal has his chief place in history. He preached in the vernacular. In Bamberg he secured the prohibition of new brotherhoods, in Magdeburg the condemnation of the sale of indulgences for money. In Salzburg and other places he introduced reforms in convents, and in connection with other members of his family he founded the hospital at Cues with beds for 33 patients. He showed his interest in studies by providing for the training of 20 boys in Deventer. He dwelt upon the rotation of the earth on its axis nearly a century before Copernicus. He gave reasons for regarding the donation of Constantine spurious, and he also called in question the genuineness of other parts of the Isidorian Decretals. On the other hand, the cardinal was a thorough churchman and obedient child of the Church. As the agent of Nicolas V. he travelled in Germany announcing the indulgence of the Jubilee Year, and through him, it is said, indulgences to the value of 200,000 gulden were sold for the repair of St. Peter’s. This noble and many-sided man has been coupled together with Gutenberg by Janssen,—the able and learned apologist of the Catholic Church in the closing years of the Middle Ages,—the one as the champion of clerical and Church discipline, the other the inventor of the printing-press. It is no disparagement of the impulses and work of Nicolas to say that he had not the mission of the herald of a new age in thought and religion as it was given to Gutenberg to promote culture and civilization by his invention.418 He did not possess the gift of moral and doctrinal conviction and foresight which made the monk of Wittenberg the exponent and the herald of a radical, religious reformation whose permanent benefits are borne witness to by a large section of Christendom. § 26. Popular Preachers. During the century and a half closing with 1450, there were local groups of preachers as well as isolated pulpit orators who exercised a deep influence upon congregations. The German mystics with Eckart and John Tauler at their head preached in Strassburg, Cologne and along the Rhine. D’Ailly and Gerson stood before select audiences, and give lustre to the French pulpit. Wyclif, at Oxford, and John Huss in Bohemia, attracted great attention by their sermons and brought down upon themselves ecclesiastical condemnation. Huss was one of a number of Bohemian preachers of eminence. Wyclif sought to promote preaching by sending out a special class of men, his "pore preachers."

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

  Eugenius employed his new supporter as legate to arrange terms of peace with the German Church and princes, an end he saw accomplished in the concordat of Vienna, 1447. He was rewarded by promotion to the college of cardinals, and in 1452 was made bishop of Brixen in the Tyrol. Here he sought to introduce Church reforms, and he travelled as the papal legate in the same interest throughout the larger part of Germany. By attempting to assert all the mediaeval feoffal rights of his diocese, the bishop came into sharp conflict with Siegmund, duke of Austria. Even the interdict pronounced by two popes did not bring the duke to terms. He declared war against the bishop and, taking him prisoner, forced from him a promise to renounce the old rights which his predecessors for many years had not asserted. Once released, the bishop treated his oath as null, on the ground that it had been forced from him, and in this he was supported by Pius II. In 1460 he went to Rome and died at Todi, Umbria, a few years later. Nicolas of Cusa knew Greek and Hebrew, and perhaps has claim to being the most universal scholar of Germany up to his day since Albertus Magnus. He was interested in astronomy, mathematics and botany, and, as D’Ailly had done before, he urged, at the Council of Basel, the correction of the calendar. The literary production on which he spent most labor was a discussion of the problems of theology—De docta ignorantia. Here he attacked the scholastic method and showed the influence upon his mind of mysticism, the atmosphere of which he breathed at Deventer. He laid stress upon the limitations of the human mind and the inability of the reason to find out God exhaustively. Faith, which he defined as a state of the soul given of God’s grace, finds out truths the intellect cannot attain to.417 His views had an influence upon Faber Stapulensis who edited the Cusan’s works and was himself a French forerunner of Luther in the doctrine of justification by faith. His last labors, in connection with the crusade against the Turks pushed by Pius II., led him to studies in the Koran and the preparation of a tract,—De cribatione Alcoran,—in which he declared that false religions have the true religion as their basis.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  a southern black man sets a northern white man free. It is a poignant scene. The larger message was crystal clear: the South is backward because of its failure to incorporate black men into the free-market economy. Yet the talent and labor of poor whites is wasted too. James Allen’s fellow white prisoners are dead on the inside. “To work out, or die out,” they are told. It is the only way out. They learn to appreciate the true meaning of liberty only by watching Allen achieve it. His daring escape is accomplished not by violence but by rational planning. It proves to be a temporary success, but at least he succeeds in offering his comrades a different vision of manhood. Allen’s dream is to be an engineer. That aspiration represented the pride Americans felt in raising the Empire State Building, one of the decade’s consummate achievements. In 1932, the same year that the film was released, the photographer Lewis Hine published a book about his time with the “sky boys,” as the skilled men who balanced on the beams and built the iconic skyscraper were known. In Men at Work, now a classic, Hine vividly portrayed the courage and imagination of the workers who left their imprint on the urban landscape. “Cities do not build themselves,” he pronounced, “machines cannot make machines, unless back of them all are the brains and toil of men.” At the age of sixty, with an established reputation for reform, the cameraman believed that life was given power through labor. What distinguished humans from beasts was the capacity to solve problems, to create anew, and to apply cognitive energy to the labor process. The quote Hine selected as his epigraph was taken from the late philosopher William James’s “What Makes a Life Significant”: “Not in clanging fights and desperate marches only is heroism to be looked for, but on every bridge and building that is going up to-day, on freight trains, on vessels and lumber-rafts, in mines, among the firemen and the policemen, the demand for courage is incessant and the supply never fails.” Manual laborers deserved the same respect as heroes on the battlefield. If a new breed of human arose when it gave labor enhanced social meaning, then the South, with its dull refusal to appreciate the value of work, remained caught in a primitive state of mind. 6 If the Empire State Building, which opened in 1931, represented the highest testament to moral courage, then the tragedy that played out in Washington in the spring and summer of 1932 displayed America at its lowest ebb. Veterans of World War I formed a “Bonus Army,” some twenty thousand unemployed arriving with their hurting families and setting up a shantytown across the river from Capitol Hill. They demanded of Congress their bonus pay. “We were

• From Three Women (2019)

  He is a good man, Lina says. He has made mistakes but all good men do. Good men are flawed but even. There is a shortage of real men in America and Lina is not talking about Marlboro Men with mustaches who pound raw burger meat. She is talking about actual men, who stand up straight and hold doors open and go down for hours and make money and whether it’s honest or dishonest they are honest about how it’s made. And they’re interesting, doesn’t matter what they do or where they live, they’re just interesting, they have some stories you’ll hear after you’ve known them for a few months and some stories you’ll never hear even if you’re their brother. When men like Aidan tell a story, it isn’t so you’ll think they’re cool, it’s because this is a story that wants to get heard, and usually you need to coax it out of them, or maybe there’s a woman at the table and she begs a little for it, because one thing that really separates good men from everybody else is this: real men, guys from backwoods Maine and the tough zones of Philly and the rusty thickets of southern Indiana, they love women, and sex, and as strong as they are, they can be swayed a centimeter or two by pussy, and Lina doesn’t like using that word because it’s more than that, but the word also stands for so much more than it sounds like. Anyway, the other kind of men, the men who make up most of the world, they’ll be dirtier once they get a woman in a bedroom, they’ll ask for things they shouldn’t ask for and they’ll leave in the morning without class, but they won’t be swayed in a bar, or at dinner, they won’t do something they don’t want to do for a woman, because they don’t have the intrinsic manly love for a woman that exists in abundance in a man like Aidan Hart. Aidan. The women are pitched forward, like soup tureens in an earthquake. Their chins are on the heels of their hands, and they are eating mixed nuts nervously. Oh my, says Cathy. That sounds like quite a man, and a real love affair. How did it end? someone asks, because women are often better at handling the endings than the beginnings. Lina understands that some women, like her mother and her sisters, truly care for another woman only when that woman is in pain, especially in a kind of pain that they have already felt, and then overcome. How did it end, Lina repeats softly. It ended badly. Some of the women gasp. Cathy places her hand over Lina’s.

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

  Of the theologians of the generation following Gerson and D’Ailly none occupies a more conspicuous place than the German Nicolas of Cusa, 1401–1464. After taking a prominent part in the Basel council in its earlier history, he went into the service of Eugenius IV. and distinguished himself by practical efforts at Church reform and by writings in theology and other departments of human learning. Born at Cues near Treves, the son of a boatman, he left the parental home on account of harsh treatment. Coming under the patronage of the count of Manderscheid, he went to Deventer, where he received training in the school conducted by the Brothers of the Common Life. He studied law in Padua, and reached the doctorate, but exchanged law for theology because, to follow the statement of his opponent, George of Heimburg, he had failed in his first case. At Padua he had for one of his teachers Cesarini, afterwards cardinal and a prominent figure in the Council of Basel. In 1432 he appeared in Basel as the representative of Ulrich of Manderscheid, archbishop-elect of Treves, to advocate Ulrich’s cause against his rivals Rabanus of Helmstatt, bishop of Spires, whom the pope had appointed archbishop of the Treves diocese. Identifying himself closely with the conciliar body, Nicolas had a leading part in the proceedings with the Hussites and went with the majority in advocating the superiority of the council over the pope. His work on Catholic Unity,—De concordantia catholica,—embodying his views on this question and dedicated to the council 1433, followed the earlier treatments of Langenstein, Nieheim and Gerson. A general council, being inspired by the Holy Spirit, speaks truly and infallibly. The Church is the body of the faithful—unitas fidelium — and is represented in a general council. The pope derives his authority from the consent of the Church, a council has power to dethrone him for heresy and other causes and may not be prorogued or adjourned without its own consent. Peter received no more authority from Christ than the other Apostles. Whatever was said to Peter was likewise said to the others. All bishops are of equal authority and dignity, whether their jurisdiction be episcopal, archiepiscopal, patriarchal or papal, just as all presbyters are equal.415 In spite of these views, when the question arose as to the place of meeting the Greeks, Nicolas sided with the minority in favor of an Italian city, and was a member of the delegations appointed by the minority which visited Eugenius IV. at Bologna and went to Constantinople. This was in 1437 and from that time forward he was a ready servant of Eugenius and his two successors. Aeneas Sylvius, afterwards Pius II., called him the Hercules of the Eugenians. Aeneas also pronounced him a man notable for learning in all branches of knowledge and on account of his godly life.416

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

  Gerson, perhaps the most distinguished name the University of Paris has on its list of students, was a faithful and enthusiastic son of his alma mater, calling her "his mother," "the mother of the light of the holy Church," "the nurse of all that is wise and good in Christendom," "a prototype of the heavenly Jerusalem," "the fountain of knowledge, the lamp of our faith, the beauty and ornament of France, yea, of the whole world."383 In 1382, at the age of nineteen, he passed into the theological department, and a year later came under the guidance of D’Ailly, the newly appointed rector, remaining under him for seven years. Gerson was already a marked man, and was chosen in 1383 procurator of the French "nation," and in 1387 one of the delegation to appear before Clement VII. and argue the case against John of Montson. This Dominican, who had been condemned for denying the immaculate conception of Mary, refused to recant on the plea that in being condemned Thomas Aquinas was condemned, and he appealed to the pope. The University of Paris took up the case, and D’Ailly in two addresses before the papal consistory took the ground that Thomas, though a saint, was not infallible. The case went against De Montson; and the Dominicans, who refused to bow to the decision, left the university and did not return till 1403. Gerson advocated Mary’s exemption from original as well as actual sin, and made a distinction between her and Christ, Christ being exempt by nature, and Mary—domina nostra — by an act of divine grace. This doctrine, he said, cannot be immediately derived from the Scriptures,384 but, as the Apostles knew more than the prophets, so the Church teachers know some things the Apostles did not know.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 4 (300 – 1300, Rome) (2009)

  the disruption of Chalcedon, with special mention of the ‘exalted and firm tower’, Cyril of Alexandria. This anti-Chalcedonian version of Orthodoxy came to dominate a centre of monastic life in the mountainous region of Tūr ‘Abdīn, in what is now south-east Turkey. Tūr ‘Abdīn contained (and, against formidable odds, still contains) monasteries of comparable importance to those which later emerged for Greek Orthodoxy on Mount Athos (see p. 470). Monastic life flourished generally among both Syrian and Arab Christians; their monks built settlements which were as much fortresses as monasteries, complete with towers, as elaborate and impressive structures as those being built at the same time inside the Byzantine Empire. The commentator most familiar with the Ghassānids has seen their Christianity as a ‘religion of monks’, yet with the coming of Islam, this chapter of Christian monasticism and its buildings has been almost entirely lost. Archaeology may still recover a great deal.16 The warrior traditions of the Ghassānids attracted them to yet another soldier- martyr like George: his name was Sergius and he had been killed in Syria during Diocletian’s Great Persecution. They developed a fierce devotion to him and he became patron saint among the Arabs. His cult spread through the Byzantine Empire as well, encouraged by patronage from Justinian, who was only too ready to win esteem among his Eastern subjects by judicious investment in church-building in honour of this popular martyr. Sergius came habitually to be associated in partnership and iconography with his fellow soldier-martyr Bacchus, in a union so close as to be described as that of ‘lovers’, which has bequeathed an interesting image of same-sex love to Eastern Christianity, even though it has rarely felt able fully to explore the possible implications.17 Even a Zoroastrian monarch, the brutal Sassanian Shah Khusrau II (reigned 590–628), realized the strategic advantage of showing respect to St Sergius when he began expanding his conquests westwards into Byzantine Christian territories. Khusrau is reported as having twice made offerings at Sergius’s shrine at the Ghassānid city of Sergiopolis (Resafa in Syria), first after winning back his throne from a rival with Byzantine military help in 591 and then in thanksgiving for his Byzantine wife’s successful childbirth; he also rebuilt the shrine after it had been burned down by Christians opposed to the Miaphysites.18 Across the imperial border to the north, there was also suspicion of the work of the Council of Chalcedon in the various kingdoms of Georgia and Armenia, none of which had been represented in the council’s discussions. One monarchy among those which ruled Georgia, K’art’li, which the Romans called Georgian Iberia, officially converted to Christianity not long after the Armenians in the early fourth century. A century later, a member of that same royal house of