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 Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  Marianne’s performance was highly applauded. Sir John was loud in his admiration at the end of every song, and as loud in his conversation with the others while every song lasted. Lady Middleton frequently called him to order, wondered how any one’s attention could be diverted from music for a moment, and asked Marianne to sing a particular song which Marianne had just finished. Colonel Brandon alone, of all the party, heard her without being in raptures. He paid her only the compliment of attention; and she felt a respect for him on the occasion, which the others had reasonably forfeited by their shameless want of taste. His pleasure in music, though it amounted not to that ecstatic delight which alone could sympathize with her own, was estimable when contrasted against the horrible insensibility of the others; and she was reasonable enough to allow that a man of five and thirty might well have outlived all acuteness of feeling and every exquisite power of enjoyment. She was perfectly disposed to make every allowance for the colonel’s advanced state of life which humanity required. CHAPTER VIII. Mrs. Jennings was a widow with an ample jointure. She had only two daughters, both of whom she had lived to see respectably married, and she had now therefore nothing to do but to marry all the rest of the world. In the promotion of this object she was zealously active, as far as her ability reached; and missed no opportunity of projecting weddings among all the young people of her acquaintance. She was remarkably quick in the discovery of attachments, and had enjoyed the advantage of raising the blushes and the vanity of many a young lady by insinuations of her power over such a young man; and this kind of discernment enabled her soon after her arrival at Barton decisively to pronounce that Colonel Brandon was very much in love with Marianne Dashwood. She rather suspected it to be so, on the very first evening of their being together, from his listening so attentively while she sang to them; and when the visit was returned by the Middletons’ dining at the cottage, the fact was ascertained by his listening to her again. It must be so. She was perfectly convinced of it. It would be an excellent match, for _he_ was rich, and _she_ was handsome. Mrs. Jennings had been anxious to see Colonel Brandon well married, ever since her connection with Sir John first brought him to her knowledge; and she was always anxious to get a good husband for every pretty girl.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  Elinor and her mother rose up in amazement at their entrance, and while the eyes of both were fixed on him with an evident wonder and a secret admiration which equally sprung from his appearance, he apologized for his intrusion by relating its cause, in a manner so frank and so graceful that his person, which was uncommonly handsome, received additional charms from his voice and expression. Had he been even old, ugly, and vulgar, the gratitude and kindness of Mrs. Dashwood would have been secured by any act of attention to her child; but the influence of youth, beauty, and elegance, gave an interest to the action which came home to her feelings. She thanked him again and again; and, with a sweetness of address which always attended her, invited him to be seated. But this he declined, as he was dirty and wet. Mrs. Dashwood then begged to know to whom she was obliged. His name, he replied, was Willoughby, and his present home was at Allenham, from whence he hoped she would allow him the honour of calling tomorrow to enquire after Miss Dashwood. The honour was readily granted, and he then departed, to make himself still more interesting, in the midst of a heavy rain. His manly beauty and more than common gracefulness were instantly the theme of general admiration, and the laugh which his gallantry raised against Marianne received particular spirit from his exterior attractions. Marianne herself had seen less of his person than the rest, for the confusion which crimsoned over her face, on his lifting her up, had robbed her of the power of regarding him after their entering the house. But she had seen enough of him to join in all the admiration of the others, and with an energy which always adorned her praise. His person and air were equal to what her fancy had ever drawn for the hero of a favourite story; and in his carrying her into the house with so little previous formality, there was a rapidity of thought which particularly recommended the action to her. Every circumstance belonging to him was interesting. His name was good, his residence was in their favourite village, and she soon found out that of all manly dresses a shooting-jacket was the most becoming. Her imagination was busy, her reflections were pleasant, and the pain of a sprained ankle was disregarded. Sir John called on them as soon as the next interval of fair weather that morning allowed him to get out of doors; and Marianne’s accident being related to him, he was eagerly asked whether he knew any gentleman of the name of Willoughby at Allenham. “Willoughby!” cried Sir John; “what, is _he_ in the country? That is good news however; I will ride over tomorrow, and ask him to dinner on Thursday.” “You know him then,” said Mrs. Dashwood. “Know him! to be sure I do. Why, he is down here every year.”

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “Of his sense and his goodness,” continued Elinor, “no one can, I think, be in doubt, who has seen him often enough to engage him in unreserved conversation. The excellence of his understanding and his principles can be concealed only by that shyness which too often keeps him silent. You know enough of him to do justice to his solid worth. But of his minuter propensities, as you call them you have from peculiar circumstances been kept more ignorant than myself. He and I have been at times thrown a good deal together, while you have been wholly engrossed on the most affectionate principle by my mother. I have seen a great deal of him, have studied his sentiments and heard his opinion on subjects of literature and taste; and, upon the whole, I venture to pronounce that his mind is well-informed, enjoyment of books exceedingly great, his imagination lively, his observation just and correct, and his taste delicate and pure. His abilities in every respect improve as much upon acquaintance as his manners and person. At first sight, his address is certainly not striking; and his person can hardly be called handsome, till the expression of his eyes, which are uncommonly good, and the general sweetness of his countenance, is perceived. At present, I know him so well, that I think him really handsome; or at least, almost so. What say you, Marianne?” “I shall very soon think him handsome, Elinor, if I do not now. When you tell me to love him as a brother, I shall no more see imperfection in his face, than I now do in his heart.” Elinor started at this declaration, and was sorry for the warmth she had been betrayed into, in speaking of him. She felt that Edward stood very high in her opinion. She believed the regard to be mutual; but she required greater certainty of it to make Marianne’s conviction of their attachment agreeable to her. She knew that what Marianne and her mother conjectured one moment, they believed the next—that with them, to wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect. She tried to explain the real state of the case to her sister. “I do not attempt to deny,” said she, “that I think very highly of him—that I greatly esteem, that I like him.” Marianne here burst forth with indignation— “Esteem him! Like him! Cold-hearted Elinor! Oh! worse than cold-hearted! Ashamed of being otherwise. Use those words again, and I will leave the room this moment.”

• From The City of God

  Chapter 25. --That We Should Not Endeavor By Sin to Obviate Sin. But, we are told, there is ground to fear that, when the body is subjected to the enemy's lust, the insidious pleasure of sense may entice the soul to consent to the sin, and steps must be taken to prevent so disastrous a result. And is not suicide the proper mode of preventing not only the enemy's sin, but the sin of the Christian so allured? Now, in the first place, the soul which is led by God and His wisdom, rather than by bodily concupiscence, will certainly never consent to the desire aroused in its own flesh by another's lust. And, at all events, if it be true, as the truth plainly declares, that suicide is a detestable and damnable wickedness, who is such a fool as to say, Let us sin now, that we may obviate a possible future sin; let us now commit murder, lest we perhaps afterwards should commit adultery? If we are so controlled by iniquity that innocence is out of the question, and we can at best but make a choice of sins, is not a future and uncertain adultery preferable to a present and certain murder? Is it not better to commit a wickedness which penitence may heal, than a crime which leaves no place for healing contrition? I say this for the sake of those men or women who fear they may be enticed into consenting to their violator's lust, and think they should lay violent hands on themselves, and so prevent, not another's sin, but their own. But far be it from the mind of a Christian confiding in God, and resting in the hope of His aid; far be it, I say, from such a mind to yield a shameful consent to pleasures of the flesh, howsoever presented. And if that lustful disobedience, which still dwells in our mortal members, follows its own law irrespective of our will, surely its motions in the body of one who rebels against them are as blameless as its motions in the body of one who sleeps.

• From The City of God

  But when the short time comes he shall be loosed. For he shall rage with the whole force of himself and his angels for three years and six months; and those with whom he makes war shall have power to withstand all his violence and stratagems. And if he were never loosed, his malicious power would be less patent, and less proof would be given of the steadfast fortitude of the holy city:it would, in short, be less manifest what good use the Almighty makes of his great evil. For the Almighty does not absolutely seclude the saints from his temptation, but shelters only their inner man, where faith resides, that by outward temptation they may grow in grace. And He binds him that he may not, in the free and eager exercise of his malice, hinder or destroy the faith of those countless weak persons, already believing or yet to believe, from whom the Church must be increased and completed; and he will in the end loose him, that the city of God may see how mighty an adversary it has conquered, to the great glory of its Redeemer, Helper, Deliverer. And what are we in comparison with those believers and saints who shall then exist, seeing that they shall be tested by the loosing of an enemy with whom we make war at the greatest peril even when he is bound? Although it is also certain that even in this intervening period there have been and are some soldiers of Christ so wise and strong, that if they were to be alive in this mortal condition at the time of his loosing, they would both most wisely guard against, and most patiently endure, all his snares and assaults.

• From The City of God

  88 Books That Matter: The City of God We can also see that Augustine was driven to his approach by positive theological motives. There’s a deep Christological and incarnational conviction driving his appropriation of this pagan Roman language, for just as the flesh of our fallen world could bear the weight of glory that is the Incarnation of Jesus Christ for Augustine, so, too, the fallen words of the saeculum—of this world, of this era—can bear God’s sanctifying meanings. Indeed, our fallen words are still in fact haunted enough by their true longings that they are somewhat prepared to bear those meanings. Augustine’s rhetorical argument, beginning with civitas or with gloriosissimam—pick your potion—in a way conveys the whole methodological point of the book in those single words. Now, we’ve seen that the challenges that Augustine faced were profound. But he used them, facing them head-on from the very beginning of the work, and making their skepticism part of the energy driving the work as a whole. But never forget—keep this throughout all the rest of our lectures any time you think about The City—that Augustine intentionally and purposefully dedicated this book to a man who was executed by the state unjustly and despite all the good service he had done for it. That will leaven our sense of Augustine’s vision of what the civic life can do. Now, knowing something of what those challenges were, we can now turn to the text, and enter the gate of suffering that leads into The City. 89 The Problem of Suffering (Book 1) A ugustine begins The City of God by engaging Roman expectations for happiness. Using the sack of Rome to contrast pagan and Christian responses to suffering, he sees a revealing difference in their understanding of the world and our place within it. He focuses here on the civic-minded Romans’ belief that the happiness of human life might be found centrally in this world—that we can build a secure fortress of felicity in history. Augustine thinks this is tragically mistaken. The Classical Worldview „Modern thought offers two ways of imagining the ancient world: ›First is the imagination of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, of the classical world as grand, magnificent, calm, and orderly. Christianity is missing from it. This vision sees the coming of Christianity as a collapse, the coming of the “Dark Ages.” Edward Gibbon is the greatest proponent of this view, still the commonly accepted one. ›In the second view, the classical world is full Friedrich Nietzsche Lecture 5

• From The City of God

  163 Lecture 8 Transcript—Splendid Vices and Happiness in Hope (Book 5) But now, a pagan Roman might reply, surely, Augustine, you’ve gone too far and proved our point in doing so. The very bleakness of your vision seems to us to give credence to our initial suspicions that the Christians don’t value the world enough to serve it, to fight for it—and our empire, and civilization itself needs such self-sacrificial heroes, it needs the Gaius Muciuss of the world, not just martyrs to some otherworldly kingdom beyond the sky. It seems to us, dear Augustine, that your defense against our charges actually serves as a nice speech for our case against the Christians, both negatively and positively. That is, that they demonize Rome and in so doing exhibit their basic antipathy towards this world, which is incompatible with the morals of citizenship, as we put it to you in that letter Marcellinus sent you in 411. How can Augustine reply to this? It was after all a huge challenge to him. But here in Book 5, he confronts it most directly. This is one of the most historically influential books of The City of God, about our prospects for excellence in this world, and how best to think about worldly accomplishments. Here, Augustine discusses the most common language used in his world—and one of the most common in ours—to understand and perhaps order the moral adventures and logics that structure human lives, the Romans’ ordering language organized around belief in fate. He takes apart that understanding of how the world is organized, and proposes instead a language of providence, as a language that is, he thinks, both more truthful and more able to keep human agency and responsibility alive. Augustine then tries to explain how, if the Romans were so flawed, so deluded and so mistaken, they managed to succeed as well as they did, both morally, producing heroes so noble as to be worth admiring, even for Christians, and materially, creating an empire that controlled pretty much the whole known world. You can see that this is kind of an obvious question. The problem is if true goodness comes

• From The City of God

  Chapter 7. --Of the Death Which the Unbaptized [585] Suffer for the Confession of Christ. For whatever unbaptized persons die confessing Christ, this confession is of the same efficacy for the remission of sins as if they were washed in the sacred font of baptism. For He who said, "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God," [586] made also an exception in their favor, in that other sentence where He no less absolutely said, "Whosoever shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven;" [587] and in another place, "Whosoever will lose his life for my sake, shall find it. " [588]And this explains the verse, "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints. " [589]For what is more precious than a death by which a man's sins are all forgiven, and his merits increased an hundredfold? For those who have been baptized when they could no longer escape death, and have departed this life with all their sins blotted out have not equal merit with those who did not defer death, though it was in their power to do so, but preferred to end their life by confessing Christ, rather than by denying Him to secure an opportunity of baptism. And even had they denied Him under pressure of the fear of death, this too would have been forgiven them in that baptism, in which was remitted even the enormous wickedness of those who had slain Christ. But how abundant in these men must have been the grace of the Spirit, who breathes where He listeth, seeing that they so dearly loved Christ as to be unable to deny Him even in so sore an emergency, and with so sure a hope of pardon! Precious, therefore, is the death of the saints, to whom the grace of Christ has been applied with such gracious effects, that they do not hesitate to meet death themselves, if so be they might meet Him. And precious is it, also, because it has proved that what was originally ordained for the punishment of the sinner, has been used for the production of a richer harvest of righteousness. But not on this account should we look upon death as a good thing, for it is diverted to such useful purposes, not by any virtue of its own, but by the divine interference. Death was originally proposed as an object of dread, that sin might not be committed; now it must be undergone that sin may not be committed, or, if committed, be remitted, and the award of righteousness bestowed on him whose victory has earned it. [585] Literally, unregenerate. [586] John iii. 5. [587] Matt. x. 32. [588] Matt. xvi. 25. [589] Ps. cxvi. 15.

• From The City of God

  17 And, for Augustine, those stones, those sinners, they are us. This is why Augustine spends so much time arguing against the pagans. It’s not that the pagan dead need to be dug up and yelled at; it’s that their thoughts, their visions of how the world hangs together, are still rattling around in our heads, the heads of his contemporaries. And so in engaging and exorcising them, we are helping to convert ourselves away from the thought-world of the fallen worldly city and coming to see the true new meanings of The City of God. This is not ultimately a book meant to show people that they are wrong, it’s meant to show them how they can begin to become right. That’s what it means to call it a conversionist strategy. And that is why this book, The City of God, is a rhetorical masterwork, showing how our language needs to be reformed and relearned, and through that reformation, the world re-seen. Understanding what it means to do this involves undertaking the journey it means to take you on. You cannot know what its aims are fully at its beginning—a certain kind of patience is required. Now, not everybody appreciates this. Étienne Gilson, who was a very important French philosopher early in the 20 th century and quite affectionate toward the more stilted and technical approach of medieval scholastic theology, once said, in an attempt to be really appreciative of Augustine, that “digression is Augustinism’s natural method.” Behind this faint praise is the impatience of a philosopher who only values direct syllogistic argument. Now, Augustine is a genius at argument, and he shows that in many different works. But in this matter argument is in some deep way not ambitious enough for him. Just consider: how much has direct argument accomplished in your life? I bet as much as mine. Which is to say, damned little. His audience needs not just information, but transformation. They need not simply to be convinced, but to be converted. So he must go deeper than mere argument. And he does. Although it might look like digression, Augustine knows where he is going, and he takes us there by the shortest route possible. It’s just Lecture 1 Transcript—Your Passport to The City of God

• From The City of God

  103 Lecture 5 Transcript—The Problem of Suffering (Book 1) If someone agreed with this and admired Cato’s will, then they should kill themselves, too. The depth of their admiration stood in mutely eloquent rebuke to the continuation of their lives as Caesar’s servants. Now this is ironic, because Caesar would have let Cato live. He just wanted a kind of desultory respect that no one took seriously, and he wanted that because he knew that such pretense, once admitted into the soul, tends to drive out all sincerity and authenticity. But that was just what Cato would not countenance, and by putting himself beyond Caesar’s costless mercy, he showed both it and the man who sought to bestow it to be fraudulent, and the conditions in Rome that led to that man’s rise to be the deepest betrayal and defeat that the res publica Romana could suffer. A powerful statement, but for Augustine, Cato’s suicide gives another message altogether: He committed self-murder out of childish spite. After all, Augustine notes, Cato was fine with the thought that his son, whom he loved, would live on under Caesar. But this means that he could accept that a life lived out under that reign would not be worse than death. And if that is so, why did he kill himself? For Augustine, the answer can only be he killed himself out of spite for Caesar. Compare this behavior, Augustine says, to that of another Roman hero, Regulus, who promised his Carthaginian captors that if they sent him to Rome with peace terms he would return to them with the Romans’ answer. They released him, he returned home, presented the terms, and there he argued against accepting those terms. He won the argument, and then went back to Carthage, keeping his promise, though knowing he would be tortured to death, probably by being crushed between spiked boards. And he was. Compared to Regulus, who had a gruesome death to look forward to, Cato appears as a coward, trying to avoid the future. Lucretia is an even more complicated figure in Augustine’s retelling. She was a victim of rape, and Augustine surely had had enough encounters with sexual violence in his world to know that rape could be a soul-destroying thing. The lesson of Lucretia is a tragic one, he

• From The City of God

  Chapter 24. --That in that Virtue in Which Regulus Excels Cato, Christians are Pre-Eminently Distinguished. Our opponents are offended at our preferring to Cato the saintly Job, who endured dreadful evils in his body rather than deliver himself from all torment by self-inflicted death; or other saints, of whom it is recorded in our authoritative and trustworthy books that they bore captivity and the oppression of their enemies rather than commit suicide. But their own books authorize us to prefer to Marcus Cato, Marcus Regulus. For Cato had never conquered Caesar; and when conquered by him, disdained to submit himself to him, and that he might escape this submission put himself to death. Regulus, on the contrary, had formerly conquered the Carthaginians, and in command of the army of Rome had won for the Roman republic a victory which no citizen could bewail, and which the enemy himself was constrained to admire; yet afterwards, when he in his turn was defeated by them, he preferred to be their captive rather than to put himself beyond their reach by suicide. Patient under the domination of the Carthaginians, and constant in his love of the Romans, he neither deprived the one of his conquered body, nor the other of his unconquered spirit. Neither was it love of life that prevented him from killing himself. This was plainly enough indicated by his unhesitatingly returning, on account of his promise and oath, to the same enemies whom he had more grievously provoked by his words in the senate than even by his arms in battle. Having such a contempt of life, and preferring to end it by whatever torments excited enemies might contrive, rather than terminate it by his own hand, he could not more distinctly have declared how great a crime he judged suicide to be. Among all their famous and remarkable citizens, the Romans have no better man to boast of than this, who was neither corrupted by prosperity, for he remained a very poor man after winning such victories; nor broken by adversity, for he returned intrepidly to the most miserable end. But if the bravest and most renowned heroes, who had but an earthly country to defend, and who, though they had but false gods, yet rendered them a true worship, and carefully kept their oath to them; if these men, who by the custom and right of war put conquered enemies to the sword, yet shrank from putting an end to their own lives even when conquered by their enemies; if, though they had no fear at all of death, they would yet rather suffer slavery than commit suicide, how much rather must Christians, the worshippers of the true God, the aspirants to a heavenly citizenship, shrink from this act, if in God's providence they have been for a season delivered into the hands of their enemies to prove or to correct them! And certainly, Christians subjected to this humiliating condition will not be deserted by the Most High, who for their sakes humbled Himself. Neither should they forget that they are bound by no laws of war, nor military orders, to put even a conquered enemy to the sword; and if a man may not put to death the enemy who has sinned, or may yet sin against him, who is so infatuated as to maintain that he may kill himself because an enemy has sinned, or is going to sin, against him?

• From The City of God

  There is also another passage in Zechariah which plainly declares that the Almighty sent the Almighty; and of what persons can this be understood but of God the Father and God the Son? For it is written, "Thus saith the Lord Almighty, After the glory hath He sent me unto the nations which spoiled you; for he that toucheth you toucheth the apple of His eye. Behold, I will bring mine hand upon them, and they shall be a spoil to their servants:and ye shall know that the Lord Almighty hath sent me. " [1479]Observe, the Lord Almighty saith that the Lord Almighty sent Him. Who can presume to understand these words of any other than Christ, who is speaking to the lost sheep of the house of Israel? For He says in the Gospel, "I am not sent save to the lost sheep of the house of Israel," [1480] which He here compared to the pupil of God's eye, to signify the profoundest love. And to this class of sheep the apostles themselves belonged. But after the glory, to wit, of His resurrection,--for before it happened the evangelist said that "Jesus was not yet glorified," [1481] --He was sent unto the nations in the persons of His apostles; and thus the saying of the psalm was fulfilled, "Thou wilt deliver me from the contradictions of the people; Thou wilt set me as the head of the nations," [1482] so that those who had spoiled the Israelites, and whom the Israelites had served when they were subdued by them, were not themselves to be spoiled in the same fashion, but were in their own persons to become the spoil of the Israelites. For this had been promised to the apostles when the Lord said, "I will make you fishers of men. " [1483] And to one of them He says, "From henceforth thou shalt catch men. " [1484]They were then to become a spoil, but in a good sense, as those who are snatched from that strong one when he is bound by a stronger. [1485]

• From The City of God

  For it is He who in the beginning created the world full of all visible and intelligible beings, among which He created nothing better than those spirits whom He endowed with intelligence, and made capable of contemplating and enjoying Him, and united in our society, which we call the holy and heavenly city, and in which the material of their sustenance and blessedness is God Himself, as it were their common food and nourishment. It is He who gave to this intellectual nature free-will of such a kind, that if he wished to forsake God, i. e. , his blessedness, misery should forthwith result. It is He who, when He foreknew that certain angels would in their pride desire to suffice for their own blessedness, and would forsake their great good, did not deprive them of this power, deeming it to be more befitting His power and goodness to bring good out of evil than to prevent the evil from coming into existence. And indeed evil had never been, had not the mutable nature--mutable, though good, and created by the most high God and immutable Good, who created all things good--brought evil upon itself by sin. And this its sin is itself proof that its nature was originally good. For had it not been very good, though not equal to its Creator, the desertion of God as its light could not have been an evil to it. For as blindness is a vice of the eye, and this very fact indicates that the eye was created to see the light, and as, consequently, vice itself proves that the eye is more excellent than the other members, because it is capable of light (for on no other supposition would it be a vice of the eye to want light), so the nature which once enjoyed God teaches, even by its very vice, that it was created the best of all, since it is now miserable because it does not enjoy God. It is he who with very just punishment doomed the angels who voluntarily fell to everlasting misery, and rewarded those who continued in their attachment to the supreme good with the assurance of endless stability as the meed of their fidelity. It is He who made also man himself upright, with the same freedom of will,--an earthly animal, indeed, but fit for heaven if he remained faithful to his Creator, but destined to the misery appropriate to such a nature if he forsook Him. It is He who when He foreknew that man would in his turn sin by abandoning God and breaking His law, did not deprive him of the power of free-will, because He at the same time foresaw what good He Himself would bring out of the evil, and how from this mortal race, deservedly and justly condemned, He would by His grace collect, as now He does, a people so numerous, that He thus fills up and repairs the blank made by the fallen angels, and that thus that beloved and heavenly city is not defrauded of the full number of its citizens, but perhaps may even rejoice in a still more overflowing population.

• From The City of God

  38 Books That Matter: The City of God We have roughly 2 million words from him in treatises, commentaries, letters, hundreds of sermons; many more sermons lost. He saw and oversaw many other bishoprics, informally and formally; he was a kind of überkopf for much of Roman North African Christianity. As Bishop, he was immediately a prominent citizen and public figure, his town’s representative, kind of like a local sports team. Everybody knew him, not just Catholics but also Donatists and pagan citizens, and many would come to him for advice and quite often to settle disputes. It meant that he gained a first-order acquaintance with small-town and big-town politics and the complexities of the region of North Africa as a whole, and even over time the shape of the empire itself. As Bishop, Augustine remained a rhetor, committed to transforming his audience’s affections. Now, many theologians of Augustine’s era doubted the capacities of the simple folk to understand the abstruse metaphysical speculations of high-level theological inquiry. Augustine never did—he believed that the most ordinary illiterate peasants could be great saints, just like Christ’s disciples. So he thought theology was accessible to all, if only the theologian would take care to render his language in a way intelligible to ordinary folk. After all, as Augustine’s teacher Ambrose said, “It was not by dialectic that it pleased God to save His people, ‘for the kingdom of God consists in simplicity of faith, not in wordy contention.’” Great saints, thought Augustine, were the best and truest theologians—all who had faith would inevitably, he thought, seek understanding, and he took it to be his job very definitely to help them in that endeavor. Furthermore, as that sort of teacher, one who lived a vocation of no private property and genuinely squirm-inducing public openness about his own weaknesses and those of his community, Augustine taught a kind of Christianity that was as radical in his day as it would be in our own. After all, along with disavowing private property, he insisted that traditional Roman family structures ought to be treated with some severe suspicion.

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

  The Gospel of John is the most original, the most important, the most influential book in all literature. The great Origen called it the crown of the Gospels, as the Gospels are the crown of all sacred writings.1050 It is pre-eminently the spiritual and ideal, though at the same time a most real Gospel, the truest transcript of the original. It lifts the veil from the holy of holies and reveals the glory of the Only Begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. It unites in harmony the deepest knowledge and the purest love of Christ. We hear as it were his beating heart; we lay our hands in his wound-prints and exclaim with doubting Thomas: "My Lord and my God." No book is so plain and yet so deep, so natural and yet so full of mystery. It is simple as a child and sublime as a seraph, gentle as a lamb and bold as an eagle, deep as the sea and high as the heavens. It has been praised as "the unique, tender, genuine Gospel," "written by the hand of an angel," as "the heart of Christ," as "God’s love-letter to the world," or "Christ’s love-letter to the church." It has exerted an irresistible charm on many of the strongest and noblest minds in Christendom, as Origen in Egypt, Chrysostom in Asia, Augustin in Africa, the German Luther, the French Calvin, the poetic Herder, the critical Schleiermacher, and a multitude of less famous writers of all schools and shades of thought. Even many of those who doubt or deny the apostolic authorship cannot help admiring its more than earthly beauties.1051 But there are other sceptics who find the Johannean discourses monotonous, tedious, nebulous, unmeaning, hard, and feel as much offended by them as the original hearers.1052 Let us point out the chief characteristics of this book which distinguish it from the Synoptical Gospels.

• From The City of God

  200 Books That Matter: The City of God ›How is God related to us? ›What mediates between God and us? ›What makes us and God able to relate? ›How exactly can God be said to care about Creation in general and our worldly and material existence in particular? Platonic View of God „The Platonists were the most astute philosophers because they focused on morality and purification and affirmed that happiness is the fusion of practical and contemplative aims. ›They apprehended what other philosophers failed to apprehend: the distinction between Creator and created, immutable and mutable, and that humans can have some intuition of this distinction. ›They dimly perceived that divine transcendence means that any literal language of distance cannot properly capture God’s transcendence, thus enabling God’s transcendence to be equally present to and distant from all creation. „They also realized that human happiness consists in the eternal enjoyment of this transcendent God. For them, happiness was found by purifying attachments and values so that the inner, immaterial, rational, and transcendent self could rise to reunion with the One, its source. ›This union could be accomplished by imitating the disinterested, passionless nature of the gods as far as humans can, thereby becoming like the divine and ascending ever higher, culminating finally in a union of indistinguishability with the One. 201 Lecture 10—Who or What Is God? (Books 8–9) The Augustinian View of God „Here Augustine begins to criticize the Platonists. For they err tragically in assuming this God needs mediators to relate to this world, that God is fundamentally elsewhere, and not immediately and intimately concerned with the world. That conviction—of the need for mediators—leads the Platonists to worship demons. ›For the Platonists, demons do not encourage their devotees to engage in theatricals, but in sacrificial rituals. Their demons wander among different levels of metaphysical reality, undertaking commerce between the transient realm of materiality and the transcendent realm of spirit. ›The immediate and functional problem with the Platonists’ understanding of demons is that they are like us in that they share our maladies, but they are like gods in that they can never change. The demons suffer impermanent passions, which makes them incapable of mediating between us and the gods to secure our permanent happiness. „But the real problem with the Platonists is that they are attracted by the idea of demons, because they assume God needs mediation, and they make that assumption because they think God is fundamentally uninterested in the world. ›The Platonists cannot imagine a God so loving of the world as to remain intimately and immediately engaged with it. They cannot conceive that God might not be averse to being directly touched, that God might want to reach us. They cannot imagine that God has Neoplatonism imagines our journey to God as a flight from the world because like could only be known by like, and so we and God can only come together in our mutual essential difference from materiality.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “That is an expression, Sir John,” said Marianne, warmly, “which I particularly dislike. I abhor every common-place phrase by which wit is intended; and ‘setting one’s cap at a man,’ or ‘making a conquest,’ are the most odious of all. Their tendency is gross and illiberal; and if their construction could ever be deemed clever, time has long ago destroyed all its ingenuity.” Sir John did not much understand this reproof; but he laughed as heartily as if he did, and then replied, “Ay, you will make conquests enough, I dare say, one way or other. Poor Brandon! he is quite smitten already, and he is very well worth setting your cap at, I can tell you, in spite of all this tumbling about and spraining of ankles.” CHAPTER X. Marianne’s preserver, as Margaret, with more elegance than precision, styled Willoughby, called at the cottage early the next morning to make his personal enquiries. He was received by Mrs. Dashwood with more than politeness; with a kindness which Sir John’s account of him and her own gratitude prompted; and every thing that passed during the visit tended to assure him of the sense, elegance, mutual affection, and domestic comfort of the family to whom accident had now introduced him. Of their personal charms he had not required a second interview to be convinced. Miss Dashwood had a delicate complexion, regular features, and a remarkably pretty figure. Marianne was still handsomer. Her form, though not so correct as her sister’s, in having the advantage of height, was more striking; and her face was so lovely, that when in the common cant of praise, she was called a beautiful girl, truth was less violently outraged than usually happens. Her skin was very brown, but, from its transparency, her complexion was uncommonly brilliant; her features were all good; her smile was sweet and attractive; and in her eyes, which were very dark, there was a life, a spirit, an eagerness, which could hardly be seen without delight. From Willoughby their expression was at first held back, by the embarrassment which the remembrance of his assistance created. But when this passed away, when her spirits became collected, when she saw that to the perfect good-breeding of the gentleman, he united frankness and vivacity, and above all, when she heard him declare, that of music and dancing he was passionately fond, she gave him such a look of approbation as secured the largest share of his discourse to herself for the rest of his stay.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “And his manners, the Colonel’s manners are not only more pleasing to me than Willoughby’s ever were, but they are of a kind I well know to be more solidly attaching to Marianne. Their gentleness, their genuine attention to other people, and their manly unstudied simplicity is much more accordant with her real disposition, than the liveliness, often artificial, and often ill-timed of the other. I am very sure myself, that had Willoughby turned out as really amiable, as he has proved himself the contrary, Marianne would yet never have been so happy with _him_ as she will be with Colonel Brandon.” She paused.—Her daughter could not quite agree with her, but her dissent was not heard, and therefore gave no offence. “At Delaford, she will be within an easy distance of me,” added Mrs. Dashwood, “even if I remain at Barton; and in all probability,—for I hear it is a large village,—indeed there certainly _must_ be some small house or cottage close by, that would suit us quite as well as our present situation.” Poor Elinor!—here was a new scheme for getting her to Delaford!—but her spirit was stubborn. “His fortune too!—for at my time of life you know, everybody cares about _that;_—and though I neither know nor desire to know, what it really is, I am sure it must be a good one.” Here they were interrupted by the entrance of a third person, and Elinor withdrew to think it all over in private, to wish success to her friend, and yet in wishing it, to feel a pang for Willoughby. CHAPTER XLVI. Marianne’s illness, though weakening in its kind, had not been long enough to make her recovery slow; and with youth, natural strength, and her mother’s presence in aid, it proceeded so smoothly as to enable her to remove, within four days after the arrival of the latter, into Mrs. Palmer’s dressing-room. When there, at her own particular request, for she was impatient to pour forth her thanks to him for fetching her mother, Colonel Brandon was invited to visit her. His emotion on entering the room, in seeing her altered looks, and in receiving the pale hand which she immediately held out to him, was such, as, in Elinor’s conjecture, must arise from something more than his affection for Marianne, or the consciousness of its being known to others; and she soon discovered in his melancholy eye and varying complexion as he looked at her sister, the probable recurrence of many past scenes of misery to his mind, brought back by that resemblance between Marianne and Eliza already acknowledged, and now strengthened by the hollow eye, the sickly skin, the posture of reclining weakness, and the warm acknowledgment of peculiar obligation.

• From The City of God

  42 Books That Matter: The City of God canonical, than with the man who finds fault in my book with things that are not in fact wrong. Augustine knew the power and the danger of idolatry and celebrity, and he knew the danger of both was first, to permit the idolator to off-load the duty of thinking onto their idol; and second, to seduce the celebrity in turn into thinking that his fans have nothing insightful to say. That treatment of a fellow human, a fellow Christian, would be not the achievement of theology but the avoidance of it. And he went out of his way in his life and in his words to try to forestall such approaches. But in the end, he couldn’t save himself from his readers. And this explains why the accusations about Augustine that we have listed, even if I think they are quite mistaken, have been so popular. To understand this requires us to realize how powerful was his impact on those who followed after him. In so many ways, Augustine has been a victim of his own success—a victim of the final role he played: the role of legacy. Since Augustine overshadows almost all other historical figures of his era, we forget the human Augustine and imagine the saint. We imagine the singular Father—as the phrase goes, the second founder of the faith. No post-apostolic thinker has been invoked more successfully—or, paradoxically, more variously—to authorize the Western Church’s teachings. The churches today have learned many things by having them authorized by citations from Augustine’s texts. But what the churches have learned and what Augustine meant to teach need not be the same thing whatsoever. First of all, no other thinker is as rhetorically supple or as alert to his audience’s expectations as was Augustine. He was Christian Platonist monastic, living Church Father, a savvy civic and ecclesiastical administrator, judge, advocate and jury, author, reader, preacher and teacher, philosopher and anti-philosopher: each role elicited a different voice. And his audiences were equally varied: simple

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “Colonel Brandon’s character,” said Elinor, “as an excellent man, is well established.” “I know it is,”—replied her mother seriously, “or after such a warning, I should be the last to encourage such affection, or even to be pleased by it. But his coming for me as he did, with such active, such ready friendship, is enough to prove him one of the worthiest of men.” “His character, however,” answered Elinor, “does not rest on one act of kindness, to which his affection for Marianne, were humanity out of the case, would have prompted him. To Mrs. Jennings, to the Middletons, he has been long and intimately known; they equally love and respect him; and even my own knowledge of him, though lately acquired, is very considerable; and so highly do I value and esteem him, that if Marianne can be happy with him, I shall be as ready as yourself to think our connection the greatest blessing to us in the world. What answer did you give him?—Did you allow him to hope?” “Oh! my love, I could not then talk of hope to him or to myself. Marianne might at that moment be dying. But he did not ask for hope or encouragement. His was an involuntary confidence, an irrepressible effusion to a soothing friend, not an application to a parent. Yet after a time I did say, for at first I was quite overcome, that if she lived, as I trusted she might, my greatest happiness would lie in promoting their marriage; and since our arrival, since our delightful security, I have repeated it to him more fully, have given him every encouragement in my power. Time, a very little time, I tell him, will do everything; Marianne’s heart is not to be wasted for ever on such a man as Willoughby. His own merits must soon secure it.” “To judge from the Colonel’s spirits, however, you have not yet made him equally sanguine.” “No. He thinks Marianne’s affection too deeply rooted for any change in it under a great length of time, and even supposing her heart again free, is too diffident of himself to believe, that with such a difference of age and disposition he could ever attach her. There, however, he is quite mistaken. His age is only so much beyond hers as to be an advantage, as to make his character and principles fixed; and his disposition, I am well convinced, is exactly the very one to make your sister happy. And his person, his manners too, are all in his favour. My partiality does not blind me; he certainly is not so handsome as Willoughby; but at the same time, there is something much more pleasing in his countenance. There was always a something, if you remember, in Willoughby’s eyes at times, which I did not like.” Elinor could not remember it; but her mother, without waiting for her assent, continued,