Anxiety

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 Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Anyway, thieves had taken advantage of her absence to steal into the house, to frighten and threaten the girls and their customers, and help themselves to anything that they could lift: the oozing mattresses and rugs, the broken looking-glasses, the few rickety bits of furniture — also my frocks, shoes, bonnet and purse. The loss was not a great one to me; but it meant that I must go home in my masculine attire - I was wearing the old Oxford bags, and a boater - and attempt to reach my room at Mrs Best’s without her catching me. It was quite late, and I walked very slowly to Smithfield, in the hope that all the Bests might be abed and sleeping by the time I got there - and, indeed, when I reached the house, the windows were dark and all seemed still. I let myself in and stepped silently up the stairs - horribly mindful of the last time I had crept, noiselessly, through a slumbering house, and all that the creeping had led to. Perhaps it was the memory that made me blunder: for half-way up I put my hand to my head - and my hat went soaring over the banister to land with a thud in the passageway below. I came, cursing, to a halt. I knew I must go down to fetch it; just as I was about to turn and begin my descent, however, I heard the creaking of a door and saw the bobbing glow of a candle. ‘Miss Astley -’ It was my landlady’s voice, sounding thin and querulous in the darkness. ‘Miss Astley, is that you?’ I didn’t stop to answer her, but hurled myself up the remaining stairs and ran into my room. With the door closed behind me I tore the jacket from my shoulders and the trousers from my legs, and stuffed them, with my shirt and drawers, into the little curtained alcove where I hung my clothes. I found myself a night-gown, and pulled it on; as I fastened the buttons at the throat, however, I heard what I had dreaded to hear: the sound of rapid, heavy footsteps on the stairs, followed by a hammering at my door and Mrs Best’s voice, loud and shrill. ‘Miss Astley! Miss Astley! It would oblige me if you would open this door. I have found a peculiar item in the downstairs passage, and believe that you have someone in there as you should not!’ ‘Mrs Best,’ I answered, ‘what do you mean?’ ‘You know what I mean, Miss Astley. I am warning you. I have my son with me!’ She caught hold of the door-knob, and shook it.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  In 1886, the revivalist preacher Dwight Lyman Moody (1837–99) founded the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago to combat the Higher Criticism, his aim to create a cadre to oppose the false ideas that, he argued, would bring the nation to destruction. Similar colleges were founded by William B. Riley in Minneapolis in 1902 and by the oil magnate Lyman Stewart in Los Angeles in 1907. For some, the Higher Criticism was becoming a symbol of everything that was wrong in the modern world. “If we have no infallible standard,” argued the Methodist clergyman Alexander McAlister, “we may as well have no standard at all;” once biblical truth had been unraveled, all decent values would disappear.55 For the Methodist preacher Leander W. Mitchell, the Higher Criticism was to blame for the drunkenness and infidelity now widespread in the United States,56 while the Presbyterian M. B. Lambdin saw it as the cause of the rising divorce rate, graft, corruption, crime, and murder.57 But the stridency of these claims reflects an anxiety. Christians had been taught to regard the truths of religion as well within the grasp of their minds and to treat the plain sense of scripture as factual. This attitude was becoming more and more difficult to maintain. After Darwin, it was possible to deny God’s existence without flying in the face of the most authoritative scientific evidence. For the first time, unbelief was a viable and sustainable intellectual option. But people were still wary of the term “atheist.” The English social reformer George Holyoake (1817–1906) preferred to call himself a “secularist,” because atheism still had overtones of immorality.58 Charles Bradlaugh (1833–91), who refused to take the parliamentary oath with its invocation of God when he took up his seat in the House of Commons, was proud to call himself an atheist—but immediately qualified his position: “I do not say that there is no God; and until you tell me what you mean by God I am not mad enough to say anything of the kind.” But he knew that God was not “something [a word he deliberately italicized] entirely distinct and different in substance” from the world we know.59

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  For at the top right-hand corner of the page there was a date, and an address - not that of Freemantle House but, clearly, the home address that I was not allowed to know. A number, followed by the name of a street: Quilter Street, Bethnal Green, London E. I memorised it at once. Meanwhile, the woman talked kindly on. I had scarcely heard her, but now I raised my head and saw what she was about. She had taken a little key from her pocket and unlocked one of the drawers in the desk. She was saying,‘... not something we make a habit of doing, at all; but I can see that you are very weary. If you take a bus from here to Aldgate, you can pick up another there, I believe, that will take you along the Mile End Road, to Stratford.’ She held out her hand. There were three pennies in it. ‘And perhaps you might get yourself a cup of tea, along the way?’ I took the coins, and mumbled some word of thanks. As I did so a bell rang, close at hand, and we both gave a start. She glanced at a clock upon the wall. ‘My last clients of the day,’ she said. I took the hint, and rose and put on my hat. There were footsteps in the passageway below, now, and the sound of stumbling on the stairs. She ushered me to the door, and called to her visitors: ‘Come up, that’s right. It’s rather steep, I know, but worth the effort...’ A young man, followed by a woman, emerged from the gloom. They were both rather swarthy - Italians, I guessed, or Greeks - and looked terribly pinched and poor. We all shuffled around in the doorway of the office for a moment, smiling and awkward; then at last the lady and the young couple were inside the room, and I was alone at the head of the staircase. The lady raised her head, and caught my eye. ‘Good luck!’ she called, a little distractedly. ‘I do so hope you find your friend.’ Having no intention at all, now, of travelling to Stratford, I did not, as the lady recommended, catch a bus. I did, however, buy myself a cup of tea, from a stall with an awning to it, on the High Street. And when I gave back my cup to the girl, I nodded. ‘Which way,’ I asked, ‘to Bethnal Green?’ I had never been much further east before - alone, and on foot - than Clerkenwell. Now, limping down the City Road towards Old Street, I felt the beginnings of a new kind of nervousness. It had grown darker during my time in the office, and wet and foggy. The street-lamps had all been lit, and every carriage had a lantern swinging from it; City Road was not, however, like Soho, where light streamed upon the pavements from a thousand flares and windows.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Scientists no longer considered their discipline a branch of “philosophy,” which had always been interested in metaphysics, and they no longer saw themselves as gentlemen scholars but as professionals. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it was not only physicists but geologists, botanists, and biologists who formulated their insights in the exact language of mathematics. As part of their new professional ethos, they were beginning to insist on a “positivist” assessment of truth that excluded anything that was not quantifiable.29 The Cambridge geologist Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873) defined science as “the consideration of all subjects, whether of a pure or mixed nature, capable of being reduced to measurement and calculation.”30 Clearly this could not include God. Because of the marvelous advances in technology, scientists were held in higher esteem than ever before. Science seemed the avatar of progress. It was definite, precise, and accurate; it accumulated truth in a methodical, purposeful manner, proved its theories, corrected earlier mistakes, and moved fearlessly into the future. Impressed by this new professional rigor and eager to share science’s prestige, people in other disciplines were increasingly influenced by its positivist standard of truth. But Lyell’s revelations gave many believers, who were used to thinking that science was on their side, a salutary jolt. In America, after a brief but intense panic, Evangelical churchmen started to pull back from their strict biblical literalism. But they still relied on the argument from design, and few were aware of the disturbing new evidence that life itself—not merely the earth’s crust—had evolved from “lower” to “higher” forms. The fossil record showed that innumerable species had failed to survive; instead of a neat design, the geologists were uncovering a natural history of pain, death, and racial extinction. In 1844, the popular Scottish writer Robert Chambers (1802–71) published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, arguing that scientists would soon prove that there was a purely natural explanation for the development of life. But others tried to “baptize” these new discoveries. For the Swiss American Harvard professor Louis Agassiz (1807–73) this struggle had been part of God’s grand design;31 God had simply been preparing the earth for its human inhabitants. Agassiz saw evidence of the divine Mind in the symmetry of nature, in which patterns were repeated in every vertebrate. This could not have been accidental: an “intelligent and intelligible connection between the facts of nature must be looked upon as a direct proof of the existence of a thinking God.”32

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Yet Mather showed how easily old beliefs could coexist with the new. During the 1680s, he had warned his congregations that Satan regarded New England as his own province and had fought a bitter campaign against the colonists. Satan himself was responsible for the Indian Wars, the smallpox epidemics, and the decline in piety that had caused such anxiety in the Puritan community. In his Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions (1689), Mather did much to fan the fears that exploded in the infamous Salem witch trials (1692), in which he took a leading role. His faith in scientific rationality had not been able to assuage his own inner demons or his conviction that evil spirits lurked everywhere, poised to overthrow the colony. But despite the explosion of irrationality in Salem, educated Americans were able to participate in the philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment. In both Europe and the American colonies, an elite group of intellectuals was convinced that humanity was beginning to leave superstition behind and was on the brink of a glorious new era. Science gave them greater control over nature than had ever been achieved before; people were living longer and felt more confident about the future. Already some Europeans had begun to insure their lives.6 The rich were now prepared to reinvest capital systematically on the basis of continuing innovation and in the firm expectation that trade would continue to improve. In order to keep abreast of these exciting developments, religion would have to change, so Enlightenment philosophers developed a new form of theism, based entirely on reason and Newtonian science, which they called Deism. It is not true that Deism was a halfway house to an outright denial of God.7 Deists were passionate about God and almost obsessed with religion. Like Newton, they believed that they had discovered the primordial faith that lay beneath the ancient biblical account. They spread their rational religion with near-missionary zeal, preaching salvation through knowledge and education. Ignorance and superstition had become the new Original Sins. The theologians Matthew Tindal (1655–1733) and John Toland (1670–1722) in the British Isles, the philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778) in France, and the scientist, statesman, and philosopher Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) and the statesman Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) in America all sought to bring faith under the control of reason. The Enlightenment philosophes wanted every single person to grasp the truths unveiled by science and learn to reason and discriminate correctly.8 Inspired by Newton’s vision of a universe ruled by immutable laws, they were offended by a God who intervened erratically in nature, working miracles and revealing “mysteries” that were not accessible to our reasoning powers. Voltaire defined Deism in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764). Like Newton, he thought that true religion should be “easy,” its truths clearly discernible, and, above all, it should be tolerant.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  A God who interfered with human freedom was a tyrant, not so different from the human tyrants who had wrought such havoc in recent history. A God envisaged as a person in a world of his own, an “ego” relating to a “thou,” was simply a being. Even the Supreme Being was just another being, the final item in the series. It was, Tillich insisted, an “idol,” a human construction that had become absolute. As recent history had shown, human beings were chronically predisposed to idolatry. The “idea that the human mind is a perpetual manufacturer of idols is one of the deepest things which can be said about our thinking of God,” Tillich remarked. “Even orthodox theology is nothing other than idolatry.”60 An atheism that passionately rejected a God that had been reduced to a mere being was a religious act. For centuries, symbols such as “God” or “providence” enabled people to look through the ebb and flow of temporal life to glimpse Being itself. This helped them to endure the terror of life and the horror of death, but now, Tillich argued, many had forgotten how to interpret the old symbolism and regarded it as purely factual. Hence, these symbols had become opaque; transcendence no longer shone through them. When this happened they died and lost their power, so when we spoke of these symbols in a literal manner, we made statements that were inaccurate and untrue. That was why, like so many premodern theologians, Tillich could state without qualification: “God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.”61 This was not, as many of his contemporaries believed, an atheistic statement: We can no longer speak of God easily to anybody, because he will immediately question: “Does God exist?” Now the very asking of that question signifies that the symbols of God have become meaningless. For God, in the question, has become one of the innumerable objects in time and space which may or may not exist. And this is not the meaning of God at all.62 God could never be an object of cognition, like the objects and people we see all around us. To look through the finite symbol to the reality—the God beyond “God” that lies beyond theism—demands courage; we have to confront the dead symbol to find “the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.“63

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  26 AT HARVARD she called herself Victoria. Maia, her freshman roommate, an elfin princess from New Jersey, with colorless braces on her teeth—Don’t even ask! It’s my second round of orthodontia. My parents are thinking of suing—took one look at Bru’s picture and said, “God ... what a great-looking guy. I love those rugged, outdoorsy types. Where’s he go to school?” “He’s out of school.” “Really. What’s he do?” “He’s in construction.” “Construction?” “He works for his uncles. They build houses ... on the Vineyard.” “Oh, wow ... the Vineyard. I hear that’s a great place. So where’d he go to school?” “On the island.” “Really? There’s, like, a college on the island?” She hated Maia already and they’d just met. The freshman class was filled with high school valedictorians, people who’d scored in the high fifteen hundreds on their Boards. They were talented, brilliant, intense, and competitive, used to being number one in everything they tried. Graduating second in her class from Mountain Day meant nothing at Harvard. It was a joke. She couldn’t imagine why they’d admitted her. She was out of her league, to use Tawny’s expression. Even her roommate had bagged straight A’s. At least that’s what she claimed. She drove Vix up the wall with her running commentary and questions. Not that she answered any of them with more than a yes, no, or maybe, not since that first day. And the way Maia bit her fingernails as she studied, like a hungry gerbil. Vix had fantasies of tying her hands behind her back, or painting her nails with some vile-tasting substance that would send Maia racing across the hall to the bathroom. She couldn’t wait until Maia crashed at night so she could have some peace and quiet in their room.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  Abby IT’S HER FIRST TRIP to Santa Fe and she’s anxious about meeting Phoebe at graduation. She wears her taupe Armani, a string of pearls, little heels. She’s going for an elegant, understated look. But she sees right away she’s got it all wrong. The other women gathered in the quad at the Mountain Day School are dressed like cowgirls. “At best, Linda Evans in The Big Valley—at worst, Dale Evans as herself.” She wishes Lamb hadn’t dropped her off while he went to park. The Countess rushes to her side. Precious Girl, she cries, taking her arm, leading her to a striking woman in fringed leather, silver and turquoise jewelry, her hair braided. Darlings ... the Countess coos, you two really must get to know one another. After all, you’ve had the same husband, you share the same children. Her instinct is to run, but her feet won’t move. She can’t swallow. Phoebe breaks the ice first. What a wicked girl you are! she tells the Countess, who laughs heartily, then excuses herself to greet someone else, as if she’s the hostess at a garden party, leaving her alone with Phoebe, who leans close and says, They don’t call her the Cuntess for nothing! She imagines them in bed together, Phoebe and Lamb, then shuts her eyes tight, trying to erase the picture. She hadn’t expected her to be so exotically beautiful, the long hair, the green eyes. Every male standing in the quad, every straight male, anyway, has his eye on her. And Phoebe knows it. Phoebe WELL, WELL, WELL ... isn’t she something! So chic, so East Coast elegant. In Armani, for God’s sake. And all this time she’d been so sure it would be Trisha. She tries to contain her laughter. She hears Caity warning her—Be nice at graduation, Phoeb, okay? How sweet of Caity to feel protective of Lamb’s new wife, though she’s not sure she likes the idea. Shouldn’t Caity be protecting her? She tries to imagine Lamb and his bride in bed together, but she’s bothered by the image of him holding this woman the way he once held her. Does she have regrets? Let’s just say she has fond memories. Maybe if he’d been willing to do the Aspen thing, the Santa Fe thing, but Boston ... God help her! She wasn’t about to wind up a proper Yankee wife. How ordinary, how boring!

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  So, when he saw his opportunity, he left the mill very quietly and went down into the yard. He looked about him, and finally found the clerks’ horse tied to a tree behind the mill. The miller goes up to it, unties it, and takes off its bridle. When the horse was loose it started sniffing the air and then with a ‘Weehee’ galloped off towards the fen where the wild mares roam. Well pleased, the miller returned to John and Alan. He said nothing about the horse, of course, but laughed and joked with them as he got on with the job. At last the corn was finely ground, and the meal put in a sack, all above board. Then John went out into the yard. He looked around for the horse. And then - ‘Oh fuck! The horse is gone! Alan, for fuck’s sake get oot here! We’ve lost the master’s horse!’ Alan forgot all about the meal and corn, forgot all about watching the miller, and rushed out of the mill. ‘Which way did it gan?’ he cried out to John. ‘How am I supposed to kna’?’ Then out ran the miller’s wife in a state of great excitement. ‘That horse of yours,’ she said, ‘has gone off to find the mares in the fen. Somebody didn’t tie him up properly. Somebody should have known better.’ ‘Let’s put our swords doon,’ John said, ‘and gan after it. I’m strong enough to tek hold of it. It can’t get away from both of us. Why didn’t you put him in the barn, you clown?’ So the two of them sped off towards the fen. As soon as they had gone the miller took half a bushel of flour from their sack and told his wife to bake a loaf of bread with it. ‘They won’t be back for a while,’ he said. ‘A miller can still outwit a scholar. Well, let them go. Let the children play.’ He started laughing. ‘They’ll have a hard time finding that horse.’ So the two scholars ran up and down the fen, trying to catch hold of their horse. They called out, ‘Stay! Stay!’ and ‘Here, boy! Here!’ And they called out to each other, ‘Wait! Go back a bit!’ and ‘Whistle to him. Gan on.’ However hard they tried, the animal always managed to elude them. He was fast. It was not until nightfall, in fact, that they managed to catch him in a ditch. The horse was exhausted. And so were they. They were weary, and wet from the rain. ‘I divn’t believe it,’ John said. ‘Everyone’ll be laughin’ at us now. Our corn’ll be gone. We’re both ringin’ wet. We’ve both been made to look like cocks. The master’ll rip the shit out of us. So will the scholars. And, as it happens, so will the miller. You just wait and see.’

• From St. Augustine's Confessions (2004)

  Lecture Seventeen Book IX—The New Man Scope: One center of this book is Augustine’s baptism, which marks the end of the process of his conversion and, thus, the end of the biographical part of the Confessions. But Augustine also has to deal with the very real question of what to do with his life now that he has formally become a Christian. This book deals with his decision to abandon his life as a teacher of rhetoric in favor of a life of leisure and contemplation. In this lecture, we will deal with his new “career choice,” seen both in itself and in terms of his later life as a Christian bishop. We will also follow Augustine as he recounts the deaths of several friends who have become close to him, as well as the death of his son. Given that the pattern of Christian baptism, as a rite of initiation, is seen by Augustine as a pattern of death and rebirth, it seems clear that Augustine wants us to view these deaths, as well as the climactic death of his mother, which also takes place in this book, in terms of the Christian doctrine of resurrection. We will discuss what Augustine says about his son, in what amounts to a kind of eulogy for him, and explore some of the questions that are left unanswered in Augustine’s discussion of his son. Outline I. Augustine’s conversion leads toward his baptism. His official reception into the Christian community through this rite of Christian initiation is, in a real sense, the goal of his lengthy journey, which ends in his turning toward God. A. Baptism as a rite of the Christian Church is extremely rich in significance and symbolism. B. Saint Paul, for example, talks about baptism in terms of a pattern of death and resurrection. 1. Christ’s death and resurrection, according to Paul, is that pattern that all Christians must follow. 2. Our immersion in the waters of baptism recreates precisely that pattern. 52 ©2004 The Teaching Company.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  This becomes politically problematic if that system can be shown to produce gendered subjects along a differential axis of domination or to produce subjects who are presumed to be masculine. In such cases, an uncritical appeal to such a system for the emancipation of “women” will be clearly self-defeating. The question of “the subject” is crucial for politics, and for feminist politics in particular, because juridical subjects are invariably produced through certain exclusionary practices that do not “show” once the juridical structure of politics has been established. In other words, the political construction of the subject proceeds with certain legitimating and exclusionary aims, and these political operations are effectively concealed and naturalized by a political analysis that takes juridical structures as their foundation. Juridical power inevitably “produces” what it claims merely to represent; hence, politics must be concerned with this dual function of power: the juridical and the productive. In effect, the law produces and then conceals the notion of “a subject before the law” 2 in order to invoke that discursive formation as a naturalized foundational premise that subsequently legitimates that law’s own regulatory hegemony. It is not enough to inquire into how women might become more fully represented in language and politics. Feminist critique ought also to understand how the category of “women,” the subject of feminism, is produced and restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is sought. Indeed, the question of women as the subject of feminism raises the possibility that there may not be a subject who stands “before” the law, awaiting representation in or by the law. Perhaps the subject, as well as the invocation of a temporal “before,” is constituted by the law as the fictive foundation of its own claim to legitimacy. The prevailing assumption of the ontological integrity of the subject before the law might be understood as the contemporary trace of the state of nature hypothesis, that foundationalist fable constitutive of the juridical structures of classical liberalism. The performative invocation of a nonhistorical “before” becomes the foundational premise that guarantees a presocial ontology of persons who freely consent to be governed and, thereby, constitute the legitimacy of the social contract. Apart from the foundationalist fictions that support the notion of the subject, however, there is the political problem that feminism encounters in the assumption that the term women denotes a common identity. Rather than a stable signifier that commands the assent of those whom it purports to describe and represent, women, even in the plural, has become a troublesome term, a site of contest, a cause for anxiety. As Denise Riley’s title suggests, Am I That Name? is a question produced by the very possibility of the name’s multiple significations.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  was different from the other girls. This difference is a cause for alternating states of anxiety and self-importance through the story, but it is there as tacit knowledge before the law becomes an explicit actor in the story. Although Herculine does not report directly on h/er anatomy in the journals, the medical reports that Foucault publishes along with Herculine’s own text suggest that Herculine might reasonably be said to have what is described as either a small penis or an enlarged clitoris, that where one might expect to find a vagina one finds a “cul-de-sac,” as the doctors put it, and, further, that she doesn’t appear to have identifiably female breasts. There seems also to be some capacity for ejaculation that is not fully accounted for within the medical documents. Herculine never refers to anatomy as such, but relates h/er predicament in terms of a natural mistake, a metaphysical homelessness, a state of insatiable desire, and a radical solitariness that, before h/er suicide, is transformed into a full-blown rage, first directed toward men, but finally toward the world as such. Herculine relates in elliptical terms h/er relations with the girls at school, the “mothers” at the convent, and finally h/er most passionate attachment with Sara who becomes h/er lover. Plagued first with guilt and then with some unspecified genital ailment, Herculine exposes h/er secret to a doctor and then a priest, a set of confessional acts that effectively force h/er separation from Sara. Authorities confer and effect h/er legal transformation into a man whereupon s/he is legally obligated to dress in men’s clothing and to exercise the various rights of men in society. Written in a sentimental and melodramatic tone, the journals report a sense of perpetual crisis that culminates in suicide. One could argue that prior to the legal transformation of Alexina into a man, s/he was free to enjoy those pleasures that are effectively free of the juridical and regulatory pressures of the category of “sex.” Indeed, Foucault appears to think that the journals provide insight into precisely that unregulated field of pleasures prior to the imposition of the law of univocal sex. His reading, however, constitutes a radical misreading of the way in which those pleasures are always already embedded in the pervasive but inarticulate law and, indeed, generated by the very law they are said to defy. The temptation to romanticize Herculine’s sexuality as the utopian play of pleasures prior to the imposition and restrictions of “sex” surely ought to be refused. It still remains possible, however, to ask the alternative Foucaultian question: What social practices and conventions produce sexuality in this form? In pursuing the question, we have, I think, the opportunity to understand something about (a) the productive capacity of power—that is, the way in which regulative strategies produce the subjects they come to subjugate; and (b) the specific mechanism by which power produces sexuality in the context of this autobiographical narrative.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  This fervid piety was not quelled by the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 under King Charles II; it simply went underground. The next thirty years were a time of extreme anxiety, since people feared another violent revolution. 39 A flourishing market economy was developing in London and the southeast, but the poor resented the affluence of the new commercial classes, the authority of the recently established Church of England, and the privileges of the landed gentry. In Cambridge, the mathematician and clergyman Isaac Barrow (1630–77) developed a liberal Anglicanism that he hoped would help to build an orderly society, modeled on the cosmos, in which all people kept to their proper orbits and worked together harmoniously for the common good. A regular member of these discussion groups was the young Isaac Newton (1642–1727). 40 Like Descartes, Newton aspired to create a universal science capable of interpreting the whole of human experience. Where Descartes’ quest had been solitary, Newton understood the importance of cooperation in science. He wanted to build on the achievements of his great predecessors, and felt, as he wrote to his friend Robert Hooke, as though he were “standing on the shoulders of giants.” 41 But these giants had left some unanswered questions: What kept the planets in their orbits? Why did terrestrial objects always fall to the ground? In a series of lectures, published in 1687, Newton argued that the universal science was not mathematics, as Descartes had believed, but mechanics, “which accurately proposes and demonstrates the art of measuring.” 42 His Universal Mechanics would start by measuring the motions of the universe and then, on the basis of these findings, go on to explain all other phenomena. 43 Newton achieved a magnificent synthesis that brought together in a single theory Cartesian physics, Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, and Galileo’s laws of terrestrial movement. Gravity proved to be the fundamental force that accounted for all celestial and earthly activity. In order to maintain their orbits around the sun at their relative speeds and distances, the planets were pulled toward the sun by an attractive force that decreased inversely as the square of the distance from the sun. The moon and the oceans were drawn toward the earth by the same law. For the first time, all the disparate facts observed in the cosmos had been brought together into a comprehensive theory. At last the solar system had become intelligible. Everything—the annual orbits of the planets, the rotation of the earth, the motions of the moon, the tidal movement of the seas, the precession of the equinoxes, a stone falling to the ground—could now be explained by gravity. Gravity caused all bodies to incline mutually toward one another; it prevented the planets from flying off into space and enabled them to maintain their stable orbits at the relative speeds and distances specified by Kepler.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  Tawny WHAT WAS SHE THINKING, packing a lunch for Victoria? It’s not like her to fuss over her children. They have to be prepared for life and life is hard, full of disappointments. She shouldn’t have listened to Ed, shouldn’t have agreed to let Victoria go to an island, of all places, when she can’t even swim. And telling her not to worry. Worry? She’s too tired to worry. She can’t remember what it’s like not to be tired. She closes her eyes and prays to God to protect her daughter. To keep her safe. But it will never be the same. Once Victoria gets a taste of another way of life, once she spends a summer with a girl like Caitlin Somers, she’ll be lost to them, sure as a dog chews a bone. She knows it even if Ed doesn’t. And now the other children are pulling on her, begging for money for the gumball machine. Only Nathan is still thinking of Victoria. She can see it on his face. She’s surprised herself that Victoria just up and left him. She counts on Victoria to help out over the summer. The other two are useless, cut from a different piece of cloth. But Victoria is more like her. She does what needs to be done.

• From St. Augustine's Confessions (2004)

  II. If the most important meaning of “confession” is “praise,” then we can look at the last four books as also providing praise, although in a different way. A. The first nine books are only one way of “praising.” B. The last four books also offer praise but in different ways. C. These books contain more overtly philosophical and theological material. D. But it is also important to point out that the philosophical and theological underpinnings of the first nine books are often not given sufficient attention. III. In Book X, Augustine is still reflecting on his life, but now, he is reflecting on his life in the present, as a bishop with all the responsibilities that office entails, rather than as a series of events leading up to his conversion. A. Because he is a bishop addressing his flock directly, he is concerned with misinterpretations that they might have had. 1. In the course of his reflections, he affirms that his flock ought to know who their bishop is. 2. This means, for Augustine, that he needs to tell the truth. He is not interested in being a spin doctor. 3. He realizes that he is someone with a past and that people may have heard stories about him. 4. He is also a famous writer by this time and must deal with the implications of that. 5. Thus, he is addressing those who “know me but who do not really know me.” B. Augustine believes that his confessions can make his readers his brothers and sisters, a model for those who are in his flock. C. He now understands more fully the power of storytelling, whether in the Bible or in the works of pagan writers. D. He considers himself part of a brotherhood with those, like Paul or Antony, who have taken a similar spiritual journey. IV. Augustine talks movingly about temptations in the present. A. He talks about the presence of temptation, especially sexual temptation. ©2004 The Teaching Company. 59 B. But he does not know “which temptations I may have the strength to resist and to which ones I shall succumb.” C. Sexual images have been imprinted on his mind because of his previous life. D. They act on him in the present, especially when he is asleep. V. This book provides a powerful support for the idea that conversion is not something that is over and done with but is, rather, a continuous activity. We might easily overlook this idea if we paid attention only to the first nine books of the Confessions. Suggested Readings: Cambridge Companion, chapter 11. O’Connell, St. Augustine’s Confessions: The Odyssey of Soul, chapter 14. Wills, St. Augustine’s Memory, pp. 3–36.

• From City of Night (1963)

  She whispers again to the bartender, and he begins to frisk the queen. Finding what hes looking for—pills and joints buried in the queen’s pockets—he disappeared into the head. The woman goes to the narrow corridor, and I hear her on the telephone calling a cab. Returning, she paused before the oblivious queen by the jukebox, as if to reprimand her. Instead, she merely glared at her and followed the bartender now leading the groggy queen outside.... In a few moments, the bartender and the woman returned to the bar, the woman to sit again on that same stool against the wall. Two queens, who look like twins—faces propped on elbows—keep glancing at me through all this. Simultaneously (when I catch them looking in my direction), they transformed their hands—finger-spread—into flirtatious fans behind which they continued to peer coquettishly like parodies of Grand Spanish Doñas. Suddenly, the previously fanlike hands droop into two listless pairs of wan broken wrists—as the afternoon light that announces the entrance of someone flashes into the dark bar—and I know that whoever has entered is someone hostile. The woman near me sits up rigidly like someone alerted for battle. Two tall, burly, suited men had walked in: gangster-types, their faces stamped with the arbitrary arrogance of policemen. Spotting them immediately for what they are—vice cops—just as the others in the bar have already done (the exaggerated poses have eased: even the scores, who are seldom questioned, are feigning indifference, turning their backs pointedly quickly on whatever hustler they may have been speaking to), I looked intently into the glass before me, thinking cornily, but with real apprehension, of a Southern chain-gang of vagrants from The Rocking Times. The two vice cops are checking identifications at random. From the voices I hear respond, slowly, with emphatic animosity, I can tell that theyre avoiding questioning the queens; concentrating on the malehustlers as if the hustlers’ presence somehow threatens them personally. Obviously I havent been cool enough; the vice cops are already standing behind me. “Where are you staying?” one asked me. I turn to face stone-cold cop-eyes.... Before I could answer, the blackhaired woman said clearly: “Hes staying with me.” She adds wryly, addressing the vice cops: “You know where that is, dont you... boys?” The taller of the two smiles at her—but only with his mouth; the irascible meanlook remained on his face, carved there by years of blind hatred. “That house of yours sure must be crowded,” he drawled at the woman. “I got a real large one.” Her cold look matches theirs.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  ‘I must just warn you of one thing. On the night of the tempest, when we are safely ensconced in our tubs, we must not speak or say one word. We must stay in silent prayer. That is God’s will. You and your wife must hang some way apart, too, so that you won’t be tempted to sin with her in look, in speech or in deed. That is also God’s command. Do you understand? Tomorrow night, when the rest of the world is asleep, we will creep into our tubs. Our boats. We will sit there and wait for the grace of God. That’s it. You had better get moving. I don’t have time for any more words. There is an old saying: “Spare the words and fare the wiser.” You are wise enough already, I am sure, and don’t need to hear from me. Go and save us. That is my last request.’ So the innocent carpenter went on his way, sighing and lamenting. Of course he told Alison everything, in conditions of complete secrecy, but he might as well have saved his breath. She knew exactly what was going on, and had a pretty good idea of Nicholas’s stratagem. Nevertheless she threw herself into the part, and began to weep and wail at a great rate. ‘Alas!’ she cried out. ‘Go and do what Nicholas bids you! Help us to escape. Otherwise we are all doomed. Doomed! I am your true and faithful wedded wife. Go on, dear husband. For pity’s sake, save us!’

• From The Case for God (2009)

  But in their emphatic rejection of Scotus, Ockham, and the medievals, they also represented the intolerant strain of the modern spirit.20 As philosophy, science, and technology progressed, the rejection of the recent past would seem essential to the discovery of new truth. Rapid economic and technological changes, the challenge of bringing order to the new nation-states, and the fluctuations of distant markets, as well as reports of the exotic New World, all encouraged people to put tradition to one side and seek wholly novel solutions to their unprecedented problems. But this could also lead to a wholesale dismissal of apparently outmoded ideas and attitudes. The humanists were convinced they were on the side of progress, and they were right. “Everything that surrounds us is our own work, the work of man,” said the fifteenth-century biblical scholar Gionozo Manetti, “and when we see these marvels, we realise that we are able to make better things, more beautiful things, better adorned, more perfect than those we have made until now.”21 It did not follow, however, that the medieval approach to art, literature, or religion had been entirely misguided; it had just reflected a different world. In religious matters, the modern tendency to wipe the slate clean to begin again, while understandable, would ultimately be detrimental. The three great Protestant reformers, Martin Luther (1483–1546), Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), and John Calvin (1509–64), all exemplified this vehement rejection of the immediate past. Like the Renaissance humanists, they had no time for the natural theology of the late scholastics and wanted a more personal and immediate faith. Zwingli and Calvin, indeed, remained humanists throughout their lives, their religious reform largely inspired by the Renaissance zeitgeist. At this time of massive change, there was a good deal of religious uncertainty. People were not able to be religious in the same way as the medievals. But where could they hear the authentic voice of Christianity?22 The reformers were trying to articulate a religious mood that was strongly felt but had not yet been adequately conceptualized. Their Reformation was just one expression of the Great Western Transformation.23 Instead of being regarded as the instigator of change, Luther should rather be seen as the spokesman of a current trend. Historians used to think that the Reformation was primarily a reaction to the corruption of the Church, but there seems to have been a spiritual revival in Europe at this time, especially among the laity, who now felt empowered to criticize abuses that had previously passed without comment. As society changed, ideas and rituals that had been religiously viable before the advent of modernity became suddenly abhorrent.24 Instead of giving people a sense of life’s transcendent possibilities, they caused only anxiety. Luther memorably expressed this alienation from older practices.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Now the very asking of that question signifies that the symbols of God have become meaningless. For God, in the question, has become one of the innumerable objects in time and space which may or may not exist. And this is not the meaning of God at all. 62 God could never be an object of cognition, like the objects and people we see all around us. To look through the finite symbol to the reality —the God beyond “God” that lies beyond theism—demands courage; we have to confront the dead symbol to find “the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.“ 63 Tillich liked to call God the ground of being. Like the atman in the Upanishads, which was identical with the Brahman as well as being the deepest core of the individual self, what we call “God” is fundamental to our existence. So a sense of participation in God does not alienate us from our nature or the world, as the nineteenth-century atheists had implied, but returns us to ourselves. Like Bultmann, however, Tillich did not regard the experience of being as an exotic state. It was not distinguishable from any of our other affective or intellectual experiences, because it pervaded and was inseparable from them, so it was inaccurate to say “I am now having a ‘spiritual’ experience.” An awareness of God did not have a special name of its own but was fundamental to our ordinary emotions of courage, hope, or despair. Tillich also called God the “ultimate concern;” like Bultmann, he believed that we experience the divine in our absolute commitment to ultimate truth, love, beauty, justice, and compassion—even if it requires the sacrifice of our own life. The Jesuit philosopher Karl Rahner (1904–84), who had been Heidegger’s pupil, dominated Catholic thought in the mid-twentieth century. He insisted that theology was not a set of dogmas handed down mechanically as self-evidently true. These teachings must be rooted in the actual conditions in which men and women lived, reflecting the manner in which they knew, perceived, and experienced reality. People did not come to know what God was by solving doctrinal conundrums, proving God’s existence, or engaging in an abstruse metaphysical quest, but by becoming aware of the workings of their own nature. Rahner was advocating a version of what the Buddha had called “mindfulness.” When we struggle to make sense of the world, we constantly go beyond ourselves in our search for understanding. Thus every act of cognition and every act of love is a transcendent experience because it compels us to reach beyond the prism of selfhood. Constantly, in our everyday experience, we stumble against something that takes us beyond ourselves, so transcendence is built into the human condition. Rahner stressed the importance of mystery, which was simply an aspect of humanity.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Since yesterday at Arrowhead, Lance had not mentioned Dean—except once, last night, when, in bed with me (as he tried, I knew, to stifle with sex the screaming memories), he had called me by his name. But each time he answers the telephone today, the smile freezes, he closes his eyes, breathes deeply to contain the welling panic. He stands moments over the telephone, his hand uncertainly over the receiver. The “Hello,” coming finally, becomes a wrongly answered question.... Chick, naturally, was the first to come. “Baby, I didnt know you even knew Lance!” he said, winking at me knowingly—and then he swept toward Lance, embracing him with genuine affection. “Lance, baby, oh! I could cry to see you looking so Great. What a grand idea to have a party! Remember the Old Times? Remember when we were dancing in the Movies together?... Party every night. Never went to bed except to party some more....” And now, it seems, they are all here: the handsome masculine ones desired alike by men and women; the gushing swishes, hands aflutter like wings; the few stray women secure among the men who will idolize them but not love them; and as in any group of homosexuals and those lured for whatever reason to them, there is here a mood of superficial good humor, of euphoria bordering on hysteria. So the motley chorus has invaded the stage. But looking at Lance, strangely sparkling now, the Furies are forced to abandon their dour prophecies. Only momentarily. They wait, They know. They have been alerted by life itself. Like criminals returning to the scene of the crime, the whisperers know they have returned to the scene of the beginning of the fall.