Awe

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 Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Then he slowly waved his arms to prompt these extraordinary children to sing. Their voices bounced off the walls and ceiling of this ancient hall and fell into a glorious harmony the likes of which I’d never heard. After starting his classmates in song, the young man stepped off his chair and joined them in performing a heartbreaking melody with tremendous care and precision. I could not understand a word of the Swedish lyrics, but it sounded angelic. Dissonance and harmonic tension slowly resolved into warm chords—the sound was transcendent. The singing built gloriously with each line. Standing on a stage above the singers with the headmaster beside me, I looked up at the ceiling—at the majestic artwork. My mother had died a few months before this trip. She’d been a church musician most of her life and had worked with dozens of children’s choirs. When I looked up and saw the drawings of angels on the domed ceiling I thought of her. I quickly realized I would never recover my composure looking up there, so I looked back at the students and forced a smile. When the students finished their song, the rest of the students cheered and applauded wildly. I joined the applause and tried to hold myself together. When I left the stage, students came up to thank me for the talk, ask questions, and take pictures. I was completely charmed. It was a long and exhausting but beautiful day. When I got back to the hotel I was grateful for the two-hour break before my next speaking commitment. I don’t know what prompted me to turn on the television, but I’d been away from home for four days and hadn’t seen any headlines. The local news blasted into my room. The unfamiliar Swedish TV anchors were chatting away when I heard my name. It was the piece the crew had filmed with me; familiar images filled the screen. I watched myself walking with the reporter into Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s church on Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, then up the street to the Civil Rights Memorial. The scene then switched to Walter, standing in overalls amid his pile of discarded cars down in Monroeville. Walter gently put down a little kitten he’d been holding as he started to answer the reporters’ questions. He’d mentioned to me previously that all kinds of cats had sought shelter in his field of abandoned metal. He said things I’d heard him say dozens of times before. Then I watched his expression change, and he began talking with more animation and excitement than I’d ever heard from him. He became uncharacteristically emotional. “They put me on death row for six years! They threatened me for six years. They tortured me with the promise of execution for six years. I lost my job.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  threats will only bestow greater glory on her, which would be a strange thing for a slave to say, after all, unless she knew she was a romantic heroine. She warns Th ersander that her eleutheria, her freedom, will protect her. Achilles has contrived a brilliant scene in which eleutheria refers precisely to the heroine’s objective status rather than to her autonomy. For no coherent reason whatsoever, this claim deters Th ersander from his malicious designs. Or rather, for no reason other than the bare logic of the romantic genre itself, in which the honorable protagonist will remain inviolate, does she retain her purity. Whereas Th ersander refuses to believe in the rules of romance, Achilles Tatius asks the reader to believe solely out of convention rather than narrative plausibility. Leucippe’s mēchanē, her device of escape, is simultaneously the least convincing, and the most self- aware, of any in the genre. Achilles Tatius exposes the internal logic of the genre and tests whether the reader will believe in it simply because it is good theater. He is willing to lay bare the purely artifi cial, literary substance animating his characters. Leucippe’s sudden and inexplicable transformation from a willing young girl curious about eros into a romantic heroine capable of the most soaring defenses of chastity is an example. More darkly, the creation of a doppelgänger for Leucippe, an “ill- starred” prostitute who is beheaded in Leucippe’s place, is an accomplishment without equal in the ancient romances. In the riddle of the severed head, which hangs, unexplained, over much of the narrative, Achilles confronts the reader with the mysterious dispensations of fate. Th e brilliance of this creation ensures us that the arch tone Achilles maintains across his romance is not postmodern camp before its time, but instead a serious engagement with the deepest social and cosmological assumptions of romance. Th e manipulation of romantic protocols is  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N a sincere way of questioning the Fortune that presides over the order of romance— in fact, over the world. Th is story, with its intricate knowingness, promises the ability to confront the theodicy that underlies literature, through literature. Th e Ethiopian Tale of Heliodorus makes equally canny use of the generic conventions underlying the inviolability of the heroine’s body. Th e Ethiopian Tale is as self- aware as Leucippe and Clitophon, but the eff ect achieved by the author’s consciousness is an air of baroque grandeur rather than keen lightness. Th e Ethiopian Tale is the latest of the erotic romances that survive, and there are compelling reasons to place it sometime in the second half of the fourth century. Th

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  This book tries to tell the story of the passage across one of the great thresholds in the history of private morality. Like any such passage, it knew its limits, and no one should be surprised to find pieces of the old in the new, or the new in the old. There are patent risks in overestimating the extent to which immemorial patterns of erotic experience, shaped by the primitive dictates of power, desire, and reproduction, actually changed. But there are risks, too, in underestimating Christianization as a watershed, or reducing it to something so abstract as a cultural substitution. At the beginning of our story, the Mediterranean was home to a society where an emperor’s male beloved, victim of an untimely death, would be worshipped around the empire as a god; in this same society, the routine exploitation of slaves and poor women was a foundation of the sexual order. By the end, we are in a world where the emperor will command the gory mutilation of men caught in same-sex affairs, even as he affirmed the moral dignity of women without any civic claim to honor. Paradoxically, these realignments were effected by the same, deep earthquake in human morality. Society and its needs had lost some measure of command over the sexual honor of men and women, and instead the individual, in his or her moral ends, was imagined as an isolate—free, frail, and awesomely responsible for all corporal stirrings. The triumph of Christianity within the public order was not the displacement of one self-deluding superego by another. It was a revolution in the rules of behavior and in the very image of the human as a sexual being. More profoundly, it was a revolution in the nature of society’s claims on the moral agent, and in the place imagined for the sexual self within the cosmos. CHAPTER ONE The Moralities of Sex in the Roman Empire LEUCIPPE’S SHIELD AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF ROMANCE

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I could see in this passage and return the mathematical demonstration of those same mysteries which Eleusis represents in mere fable and symbol. In our times the Spike of Virgo is no longer at the point of the map where Hipparchus marked it, but such variation itself completes a cycle, and serves to confirm the astronomer's hypotheses. Slowly, ineluctably, this firmament will become again what it was in Hipparchus' time; it will be again what it is in the time of Hadrian. Disorder is absorbed in order, and change becomes part of a plan which the astronomer can know in advance; thus the human mind reveals its participation in the universe by formulating such exact theorems about it, just as it does at Eleusis, by ritual outcry and dance. Both the man and the stars which are the objects of his gaze roll inevitably toward their ends, marked somewhere in the sky; but each moment of that descent is a pause, a guide mark, and a segment of a curve itself as solid as a chain of gold. Each movement in space brings us back to a point which, because we happen to be on it, seems to us a center. From the nights of my childhood, when Marullinus first pointed out to me the constellations above, my curiosity for the world of the spheres has not abated. In the watches of camp life I looked with wonder at the moon as it raced through the clouds of barbarian skies; in later years, in the clear nights of Attica, I listened while Theron of Rhodes, the astronomer, explained his system of the world. In mid-Aegean, lying flat on the deck of a ship, I have followed the slow oscillation of the mast as it moved among the stars, swaying first from the red eye of Taurus to the tears of the Pleiades, then from Pegasus to the Swan. I answered as well as I could the na�ve questions so gravely put by the youth gazing with me at that same sky. Here at the Villa I have built an observatory, but I can no longer climb its steps. Once in my life I did a rarer thing. I made sacrifice to the constellations of an entire night. It was after my visit to Osro�s, coming back through the Syrian desert: lying on my back, wide awake but abandoning for some hours every human concern, I gave myself up from nightfall to dawn to this world of crystal and flame. That was the most glorious of all my voyages. Overhead shone the great star of the constellation of Lyra, destined to be the polar star for men who will live tens of thousands of years after we have ceased to be.

• From Untrue (2018)

  This formula—that male philopatry equals male dominance—seems to hold across all non-human primate species and was certainly true among bonobos’ closest relatives, chimps. Those males often “patrol” and have been known to kill solitary, roaming male chimps. And within their troops, chimp males and females alike kill infants and are violent toward low-ranking individuals. A female chimp, particularly a low-ranking one, can ill afford altruism of the kind Louise showed, or any form of risk-taking. But not so bonobos. Female bonobos leave their natal groups at sexual maturity, but they also eat before the males do, Parish noted early on. And the females get groomed so often that some were nearly bald (bonobos in captivity behave almost exactly as bonobos in the wild do, according to De Waal, Parish, and others, except that the ones under human care, with more time on their hands, groom one another more often and more zealously). The males, in contrast, wait their turn to eat after the females, have lots of hair, and rarely receive grooming from the females they themselves are eager to groom. These two factors—eating first and being groomed more often—strongly suggested to Parish that females might have sway in other ways. In the popular imagination, bonobos have a somewhat hippie-ish reputation. They’re portrayed as the “free love” primates but are also supposedly a more likable, peaceable version of their stressed-out, lashing-out chimp cousins. Several articles even refer to bonobos as pacific, “Make love not war” “swingers.” It has long been believed that bonobos have sex to diffuse potential tension—when they come upon a cache of food, for example, or a new bonobo troop, having sex is a way to bond and take the stress level down. Parish pointed out that this was happening as we observed them being fed. Once the food was flung down to them, at least one pair of bonobos began to “consort” immediately. Only then did they get down to the business of eating.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  GLOSS. (non occ.) Chrysostom explains thus, What manner of man is this? His sleeping and His appearance shewed the man; the sea and the calm pointed out the God. PSEUDO-ORIGEN. (ubi sup.) But who were the men that marvelled? You must not think that the Apostles are here meant, for we never find the Lord’s disciples mentioned with disrespect; they are always called either the Disciples or the Apostles. They marvelled then who sailed with Him, whose was the boat. JEROME. But if any shall contend that it was the disciples who wondered, we shall answer they are rightly spoken of as ‘the men,’ seeing they had not yet learnt the power of the Saviour. PSEUDO-ORIGEN. (ubi sup.) This is not a question, What manner of man is this? but an affirmation that He is one whom the winds and the sea obey. What manner of man then is this? that is, how powerful, how mighty, how great! He commands every creature, and they transgress not His law; men alone disobey, and are therefore condemned by His judgment. Figuratively; We are all embarked in the vessel of the Holy Church, and voyaging through this stormy world with the Lord. The Lord Himself sleeps a merciful sleep while we suffer, and awaits the repentance of the wicked. HILARY. Or; He sleeps, because by our sloth He is cast asleep in us. This is done that we may hope aid from God in fear of danger; and that hope though late may be confident that it shall escape danger by the might of Christ watching within. PSEUDO-ORIGEN. Let us therefore come to Him with joy, saying with the Prophet, Arise, O Lord, why sleepest thou? (Ps. 44:23.) And He will command the winds, that is, the dæmons, who raise the waves, that is, the rulers of the world, to persecute the saints, and He shall make a great calm around both body and spirit, peace for the Church, stillness for the world.

• From Untrue (2018)

  But perhaps the most remarkable thing about bonobos, and without question the most remarked upon thing about them, is their sexual practices. Basically, they seem to have sex constantly throughout the day, with just about anybody. Meredith Small reports being in a room of three hundred or so primatologists and journalists for a screening of some early footage of bonobos in 1991, before much was known about them. Moments after the film began, the room fell utterly silent as the assembled took in the spectacle of these primates having sex more times and in more positions and combinations than most humans in any culture could even imagine. Their creativity, apparent appetite, and lack of inhibition were stunning. Small describes watching bonobo sex as “like watching humans at their most extreme and perverse.” The film footage was Parish’s. She was twenty-five years old that day when she shared it, diminutive and blonde. When she used a projector to show a close-up of a female bonobo’s anogenital swelling covered in ejaculate from several different males, a male primatologist in the audience turned to her mentor, Frans de Waal, and demanded (I like to imagine in an outraged, hoarse whisper), “How can such a delicate young lady speak about such things?”

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Stockholm was beautiful, despite the constant snow and frigid temperatures. I gave some speeches and attended a few dinners. It was a short, cold trip, but the people were lovely and unusually kind to me. I was surprised at how gratifying I found their enthusiasm for our work. Most everyone I met offered support and encouragement. A couple of years earlier, I had been invited to Brazil to talk about punishment and the unjust treatment of disfavored people. I had spent a lot of time in local communities, mostly in the favelas outside São Paulo, where I met hundreds of desperately poor people who were intensely interested in talking. I spent hours in conversation with all sorts of people, from struggling mothers to impoverished children who sniffed glue to help them cope with hunger and police brutality. The cross-cultural conversations with those people, who had shared a lot of the same history and struggle as my clients in America, had a huge impact on me. In Sweden, the people I met were equally interested and responsive, even though they hadn’t experienced profound need or shared struggle with an abusive justice system. People all over the country seemed motivated to connect from a common place of tremendous compassion. The organizers asked me to speak at a high school on the outskirts of Stockholm. Kungsholmens Gymnasium is in an extraordinarily beautiful section of Stockholm, an island surrounded by seventeenth-century architecture. As an American with limited experience outside the United States, I was dazzled by the age of the buildings and marveled at their ornate architecture. The school itself was nearly a hundred years old. I was escorted through the school to a narrow, winding staircase with handcrafted railings that led up to a cavernous auditorium. Several hundred high school students packed the room, waiting for my presentation. The domed ceiling of the enormous hall was covered with delicate hand paintings and Latin phrases written in decorative script. Floating angels and trumpet-wielding infants danced all over the walls and ceiling. A large balcony packed with more students seemed to ascend elegantly into the drawings.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Secondly, He showed them the truth of His Resurrection on the part of His soul reunited with His body: and He showed this by the works of the threefold life. First of all, in the operations of the nutritive life, by eating and drinking with His disciples, as we read in the last chapter of Luke. Secondly, in the works of the sensitive life, by replying to His disciples’ questions, and by greeting them when they were in His presence, showing thereby that He both saw and heard; thirdly, in the works of the intellective life by their conversing with Him, and discoursing on the Scriptures. And, in order that nothing might be wanting to make the manifestation complete, He also showed that He had the Divine Nature, by working the miracle of the draught of fishes, and further by ascending into heaven while they were beholding Him: because, according to Jn. 3:13: “No man hath ascended into heaven, but He that descended from heaven, the Son of Man who is in heaven.” He also showed His disciples the glory of His Resurrection by entering in among them when the doors were closed: as Gregory says (Hom. xxvi in Evang.): “Our Lord allowed them to handle His flesh which He had brought through closed doors, to show that His body was of the same nature but of different glory.” It likewise was part of the property of glory that “He vanished suddenly from their eyes,” as related in the last chapter of Luke; because thereby it was shown that it lay in His power to be seen or not seen; and this belongs to a glorified body, as stated above ([4308]Q[54], A[1], ad 2, A[2], ad 1). Reply to Objection 1: Each separate argument would not suffice of itself for showing perfectly Christ’s Resurrection, yet all taken collectively establish it completely, especially owing to the testimonies of the Scriptures, the sayings of the angels, and even Christ’s own assertion supported by miracles. As to the angels who appeared, they did not say they were men, as Christ asserted that He was truly a man. Moreover, the manner of eating was different in Christ and the angels: for since the bodies assumed by the angels were neither living nor animated, there was no true eating, although the food was really masticated and passed into the interior of the assumed body: hence the angels said to Tobias (12:18,19): “When I was with you . . . I seemed indeed to eat and drink with you; but I use an invisible meat.” But since Christ’s body was truly animated, His eating was genuine. For, as Augustine observes (De Civ. Dei xiii), “it is not the power but the need of eating that shall be taken away from the bodies of them who rise again.” Hence Bede says on Lk. 24:41: “Christ ate because He could, not because He needed.”

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  EUSEBIUS. Our Lord, when He made known to His disciples the great mystery of His second coming, that it might not seem that they were to believe in His words only, proceeds to works, manifesting to them, through the eyes of their faith, the image of His kingdom; as it follows, And it came to pass about an eight days after these sayings, he took Peter and John and James, and went up into a mountain to pray. DAMASCENE. (Orat. de Trans fig. §. 8.) Matthew and Mark indeed say that the transfiguration took place on the sixth day after the promise made to the disciples, but Luke on the eighth. But there is no disagreement in these testimonies, but they who make the number six, taking off a day at each end, that is, the first and the last, the day on which He makes the promise, and that on which He fulfilled it, have reckoned only the intervening ones, but He who makes the number eight, has counted in each of the two days above mentioned. But why were not all called, but only some, to behold the sight? There was only one indeed who was unworthy to see the divinity, namely Judas, according to the word of Isaiah, Let the wicked be taken away, that he should not behold the glory of God. (Isai. 26:10 LXX.) If then he alone had been sent away, he might have, as it were from envy, been provoked to greater wickedness. Henceforward He takes away from the traitor every pretext for his treachery, seeing that He left below the rest of the company of the Apostles. But He took with Him three, that in the mouths of two or three witnesses every word should be established. He took Peter, indeed, because He wished to shew him that the witness he had borne to Him was confirmed by the witness of the Father, and that he was as it were to preside over the whole Church. He took with Him James, who was to be the first of all the disciples to die for Christ; but He took John as the clearest singer of the sacred doctrine, that having seen the glory of the Son, which submits not to time, he might sound forth, In the beginning was the Word. (John 1:1.) AMBROSE. Or, Peter went up, who received the keys of the kingdom of heaven; John, to whom was committed our Lord’s mother; James, who first suffered martyrdom. (Acts 12:1.) THEOPHYLACT. Or, He takes these with Him as men who were able to conceal this thing, and reveal it to no one else. But going up into a mountain to pray, He teaches us to pray solitary, and going up, into stooping to earthly things.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Achilles Tatius could not have chosen more resonant words—sōphrosynē, female sexual modesty, and tychē, for- tune. Leucippe’s sexual honor and her fate were inseparable. Th e novel contemplates, but does not ultimately doubt, a salvation that will realign Leucippe’s subjective modesty and her objective respectability. Th e inhabit- ants of the high empire were highly conscious that female sexual honor was dispensed just as much by the lottery of fate as by the force of the individu- al’s will. Th is awareness of honor’s origins did nothing to dim its power. If anything, it made sexual respectability all the more precious, more inti- mate, more numinous.  Here the novel scrapes very close to the deepest recesses of belief in the high empire. In the same years when Achilles was conceiving his romance, a woman named Regilla was voted an honorifi c statue by the people of Corinth. Regilla was a descendant of the reigning imperial clan, wife to the most powerful and eloquent Greek aristocrat of the age, Herodes Atticus (whom she married when she was around fourteen, he forty). She would eventually die during the miscarriage of their sixth child, after being kicked in the stomach by a freedman acting on her husband’s orders. But in brighter times the Corinthians sculpted her in the image of the goddess Tychē, “Fortune.” Regilla was priestess of the goddess Tychē at Athens, and had in fact introduced her cult there and constructed a grand temple perched over the stadium that her husband built for the city. Th e dedicatory inscription from Corinth survives. “Th is is a portrait of Regilla. A sculptor carved the fi gure, endowing the stone with all her sōphrosynē. . . . Regilla: the Council, as if to call you ‘Tychē’ has erected this marble image in front of the sanctuary.” Ordinary women may not have hoped to merge with the divine in the way that an imperial scion like Regilla could, but in the monuments and images that surrounded them they saw memorialized the sublime value of feminine chastity, as an ideal somewhere between a moral attribute and an endowment of fate. Regilla embodied, in a superlative  FROM SHAME TO SIN form, the hopes, values, and suff erings out of which Roman women could make their lives.  MODERATION: THE SEXUAL LIFE COURSE FOR MEN Th e ancient novels have been hailed as messengers of a new erotic sensibility focused on “sexual symmetry.”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Always, when we came forward in a group, I was signaled to stand apart; from birth I was favored that way, and, no matter what tribulations I went through, I knew they were not fatal or lasting. Also, another strange thing took place in me whenever I was called to stand forth. I knew that I was superior to the man who was summoning me! The tremendous humility which I practiced was not hypocritical but a condition provoked by the realization of the fateful character of the situation. The intelligence which I possessed, even as a stripling, frightened me; it was the intelligence of a “savage,” which is always superior to that of civilized men in that it is more adequate to the exigencies of circumstance. It is a life intelligence, even though life has seemingly passed them by. I felt almost as if I had been shot forward into a round of existence which for the rest of mankind had not yet attained its full rhythm. I was obliged to mark time if I were to remain with them and not be shunted off to another sphere of existence. On the other hand, I was in many ways lower than the human beings about me. It was as though I had come out of the fires of hell not entirely purged. I had still a tail and a pair of horns, and when my passions were aroused I breathed a sulphurous poison which was annihilating. I was always called a “lucky devil.” The good that happened to me was called “luck,” and the evil was always regarded as a result of my shortcomings. Rather, as the fruit of my blindness. Rarely did anyone ever spot the evil in me! I was as adroit, in this respect, as the devil himself. But that I was frequently blind, everybody could see that. And at such times I was left alone, shunned, like the devil himself. Then I left the world, returned to the fires of hell—voluntarily. These comings and goings are as real to me, more real, in fact, than anything that happened in between. The friends who think they know me know nothing about me for the reason that the real me changed hands countless times. Neither the men who thanked me, nor the men who cursed me, knew with whom they were dealing. Nobody ever got on to a solid footing with me, because I was constantly liquidating my personality. I was keeping what is called the “personality” in abeyance for the moment when, leaving it to coagulate, it would adopt a proper human rhythm. I was hiding my face until the moment when I would find myself in step with the world. All this was, of course, a mistake. Even the role of artist is worth adopting, while marking time. Action is important, even if it entails futile activity. One should not say Yes, No, Yes, No, even seated in the highest place.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  It is zero hour and the moon is at nadir. . . . Why I think of Maxie Schnadig I don’t know, unless it is because of Dostoevski. The night I sat down to read Dostoevski for the first time was a most important event in my life, even more important than my first love. It was the first deliberate, conscious act which had significance for me; it changed the whole face of the world. Whether it is true that the clock stopped that moment when I looked up after the first deep gulp I don’t know any more. But the world stopped dead for a moment, that I know. It was my first glimpse into the soul of a man, or shall I say simply that Dostoevski was the first man to reveal his soul to me? Maybe I had been a bit queer before that, without realizing it, but from the moment that I dipped into Dostoevski I was definitely, irrevocably, contentedly queer. The ordinary, waking, workaday world was finished for me. Any ambition or desire I had to write was also killed—for a long time to come. I was like those men who have been too long in the trenches, too long under fire. Ordinary human suffering, ordinary human jealousy, ordinary human ambitions—it was just so much shit to me. I can visualize best my condition when I think of my relations with Maxie and his sister Rita. At the time Maxie and I used to go swimming together a great deal, that I remember well. Often we passed the whole day and night at the beach. I had only met Maxie’s sister once or twice; whenever I brought up her name Maxie would rather frantically begin to talk about something else. That annoyed me because I was really bored to death with Maxie’s company, tolerating him only because he loaned me money readily and bought me things which I needed. Every time we started for the beach I was in hopes his sister would turn up unexpectedly. But no, he always managed to keep her out of reach. Well, one day as we were undressing in the bathhouse and he was showing me what a fine tight scrotum he had, I said to him right out of the blue—“Listen, Maxie, that’s all right about your nuts, they’re fine and dandy, and there’s nothing to worry about but where in hell is Rita all the time, why don’t you bring her along some time and let me take a good look at her quim . . . yes, quim , you know what I mean.” Maxie, being a Jew from Odessa, had never heard the word quim before. He was deeply shocked by my words and yet at the same time intrigued by this new word. In a sort of daze he said to me—“Jesus, Henry, you oughtn’t to say a thing like that to me!” “Why not?” I answered.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I get a very definite feeling of it every time I see an Italian painting without perspective; if it is a picture of a funeral procession, for example, it is exactly the sort of experience which I knew as a child, one of intense immediacy. If it is a picture of the open street, the women sitting in the windows are sitting on the street and not above it and away from it. Everything that happens is known immediately by everybody, just as among primitive people. Murder is in the air, chance rules. Just as in the Italian primitives this perspective is lacking, so in the little old neighborhood from which I was uprooted as a child there were these parallel vertical planes on which everything took place and through which, from layer to layer, everything was communicated, as if by osmosis. The frontiers were sharp, clearly defined, but they were not impassable. I lived then, as a boy, close to the boundary between the north and the south side. I was just a little bit over on the north side, just a few steps from a broad thoroughfare called North Second Street, which was for me the real boundary line between the north and the south side. The actual boundary was Grand Street, which led to Broadway Ferry, but this street meant nothing to me, except that it was already beginning to be filled with Jews. No, North Second Street was the mystery street, the frontier between two worlds. I was living, therefore, between two boundaries, the one real, the other imaginary—as I have lived all my life. There was a little street, just a block long, which lay between Grand Street and North Second Street, called Fill-more Place. This little street was obliquely opposite the house my grandfather owned and in which we lived. It was the most enchanting street I have ever seen in all my life. It was the ideal street—for a boy, a lover, a maniac, a drunkard, a crook, a lecher, a thug, an astronomer, a musician, a poet, a tailor, a shoemaker, a politician. In fact this was just the sort of street it was, containing just such representatives of the human race, each one a world unto himself and all living together harmoniously and inharmoniously, but together , a solid corporation, a close knit human spore which could not disintegrate unless the street itself disintegrated. So it seemed, at least. Until the Williamsburg Bridge was opened, whereupon there followed the invasion of the Jews from Delancey Street, New York. This brought about the disintegration of our little world, of the little street called Fillmore Place, which like the name itself was a street of value, of dignity, of light, of surprises. The Jews came, as I say, and like moths they began to eat into the fabric of our lives until there was nothing left but this mothlike presence which they brought with them everywhere.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  AMBROSE. Now observe, that the cloud was not black from the darkness of condensed air, and such as to overcast the sky with a horrible gloom, but a shining cloud, from which we were not moistened with rain, but as the voice of Almighty God came forth the dew of faith was shed upon the hearts of men. For it follows, And there came a voice out of the cloud, saying, This is my beloved Son: hear ye him. Elias was not His Son. Moses was not. But this is the Son whom you see alone. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. (in Thes. lib. 12. c. 14.) How then should men suppose Him who is really the Son to be made or created, when God the Father thundered from above, This is my beloved Son! as if He said, Not one of My sons, but He who is truly and by nature My Son, according to whose example the others are adopted, He ordered them then to obey Him, when He added, Hear ye him. And to obey Him more than Moses and Elias, for Christ is the end of the Law and the Prophets. Hence the Evangelist adds significantly, And when the voice was past, Jesus was found alone. THEOPHYLACT. Lest in truth any one should suppose that these words, This is my beloved Son, were uttered about Moses or Elias. AMBROSE. They then departed, when our Lord’s manifestation had begun. There are three seen at the beginning, one at the end; for faith being made perfect, they are one. Therefore are they also received into the body of Christ, because we also shall be one in Christ Jesus; or perhaps, because the Law and the Prophets came out from the Word. THEOPHYLACT. Now those things which began from the Word, end in the Word. For by this he implies that up to a certain time the Law and the Prophets appear, as here Moses and Elias; but afterwards, at their departure, Jesus is alone. For now abideth the Gospel, legal things having passed away. BEDE. And mark, that as when our Lord was baptized in Jordan, so also when He was glorified on the Mount, the mystery of the whole Trinity is declared; for His glory which we confess at baptism, we shall see at the resurrection. Nor in vain does the Holy Spirit appear here in the cloud, there in the form of a dove, seeing that he who now preserves with a simple heart the faith which he receives, shall then in the light of open vision look upon those things which he believed. ORIGEN. (ubi sup.) Now Jesus wishes not those things which relate to His glory to be spoken of before His passion. Hence it follows, And they kept it close. For men would have been offended, especially the multitude, if they saw Him crucified Who had been so glorified.

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  I have elected here instead to sketch a staccato history of early Christian ideas about sin by focusing on those moments that represent evolutionary jumps—points of “punctuated equilibrium,” as evolutionary biologists say. I attend not to reflections on the experience of sin but instead to its very various conceptualizations; not to long-lived continuities, but to dramatic changes. Of course, the Bible itself, whether in its Jewish or its Christian forms, represents a fundamental line of continuity: all of our thinkers support their own views via appeals to its authority. But they each think about biblical tradition differently. And while Greek-speaking diaspora Jews centuries before Paul had already produced various fusions of Hellenistic and Jewish thought, I concentrate here on Paul himself, and on the ways that the apocalyptic message of the crucified and returning messiah charges and changes his view of the Hellenistic cosmos and of Stoic moral psychology. Finally, while various Christian communities could express many shades of conviction on the continuum between fervent belief in the imminent end of all things and (no less) fervent belief in history’s longue durée, I concentrate on contrasts. Disjunctures are what I want to lift up here.1 To begin to trace the rich and complex story of early Christian ideas about sin, we need to begin where they began: within the matrix of late Second Temple Judaism. Three first-century Jews will be our guides: in the land of Israel, John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth; and in the western, Greek-speaking Diaspora, the apostle Paul. Our journey through this early history starts at a time when leprosy and death defiled, when fire and water made clean, and when one approached the altar of God with purifications, blood offerings, and awe. We begin with the message that the god of Israel was about to redeem his people and establish his kingdom; and that message itself, for Christianity, begins by the River Jordan. Chapter 1GOD, BLOOD, AND THE TEMPLEJesus and Paul on Sin “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and trust in the good news!” Thus the first words of Jesus’ mission according to the Gospel of Mark (1.15). But Mark frames Jesus’ proclamation by opening his story with another charismatic figure, John the “Baptizer,” whom he introduces some ten verses earlier. John also called out for repentance, Mark states there. But his mission had been coupled with immersion in the Jordan “for the forgiveness of sins,” and the people who streamed out to John “confessed” their sins as he submerged them (1.4–5). Jesus’ immersion by John—a tradition securely attested in the gospel material—implies that he approved of and consented to John’s message and that his own mission in some sense was a continuation of John’s.1

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I sat down, completely stunned. Henry’s voice was filled with desire. I experienced his song as a precious gift. I had come into the prison with such anxiety and fear about his willingness to tolerate my inadequacy. I didn’t expect him to be compassionate or generous. I had no right to expect anything from a condemned man on death row. Yet he gave me an astonishing measure of his humanity. In that moment, Henry altered something in my understanding of human potential, redemption, and hopefulness. I finished my internship committed to helping the death row prisoners I had met that month. Proximity to the condemned and incarcerated made the question of each person’s humanity more urgent and meaningful, including my own. I went back to law school with an intense desire to understand the laws and doctrines that sanctioned the death penalty and extreme punishments. I piled up courses on constitutional law, litigation, appellate procedure, federal courts, and collateral remedies. I did extra work to broaden my understanding of how constitutional theory shapes criminal procedure. I plunged deeply into the law and the sociology of race, poverty, and power. Law school had seemed abstract and disconnected before, but after meeting the desperate and imprisoned, it all became relevant and critically important. Even my studies at the Kennedy School took on a new significance. Developing the skills to quantify and deconstruct the discrimination and inequality I saw became urgent and meaningful. My short time on death row revealed that there was something missing in the way we treat people in our judicial system, that maybe we judge some people unfairly. The more I reflected on the experience, the more I recognized that I had been struggling my whole life with the question of how and why people are judged unfairly. — I grew up in a poor, rural, racially segregated settlement on the eastern shore of the Delmarva Peninsula, in Delaware, where the racial history of this country casts a long shadow. The coastal communities that stretched from Virginia and eastern Maryland to lower Delaware were unapologetically Southern. Many people in the region insisted on a racialized hierarchy that required symbols, markers, and constant reinforcement, in part because of the area’s proximity to the North. Confederate flags were proudly displayed throughout the region, boldly and defiantly marking the cultural, social, and political landscape. African Americans lived in racially segregated ghettos isolated by railroad tracks within small towns or in “colored sections” in the country. I grew up in a country settlement where some people lived in tiny shacks; families without indoor plumbing had to use outhouses. We shared our outdoor play space with chickens and pigs.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  On the contrary, It would seem most fitting that by visible things the invisible things of God should be made known; for to this end was the whole world made, as is clear from the word of the Apostle (Rom. 1:20): “For the invisible things of God . . . are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” But, as Damascene says (De Fide Orth. iii, 1), by the mystery of the Incarnation are made known at once the goodness, the wisdom, the justice, and the power or might of God—“His goodness, for He did not despise the weakness of His own handiwork; His justice, since, on man’s defeat, He caused the tyrant to be overcome by none other than man, and yet He did not snatch men forcibly from death; His wisdom, for He found a suitable discharge for a most heavy debt; His power, or infinite might, for there is nothing greater than for God to become incarnate . . .” I answer that, To each things, that is befitting which belongs to it by reason of its very nature; thus, to reason befits man, since this belongs to him because he is of a rational nature. But the very nature of God is goodness, as is clear from Dionysius (Div. Nom. i). Hence, what belongs to the essence of goodness befits God. But it belongs to the essence of goodness to communicate itself to others, as is plain from Dionysius (Div. Nom. iv). Hence it belongs to the essence of the highest good to communicate itself in the highest manner to the creature, and this is brought about chiefly by “His so joining created nature to Himself that one Person is made up of these three—the Word, a soul and flesh,” as Augustine says (De Trin. xiii). Hence it is manifest that it was fitting that God should become incarnate. Reply to Objection 1: The mystery of the Incarnation was not completed through God being changed in any way from the state in which He had been from eternity, but through His having united Himself to the creature in a new way, or rather through having united it to Himself. But it is fitting that a creature which by nature is mutable, should not always be in one way. And therefore, as the creature began to be, although it had not been before, so likewise, not having been previously united to God in Person, it was afterwards united to Him. Reply to Objection 2: To be united to God in unity of person was not fitting to human flesh, according to its natural endowments, since it was above its dignity; nevertheless, it was fitting that God, by reason of His infinite goodness, should unite it to Himself for man’s salvation.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  This book is the condensation of a vast work composed for myself alone. I had taken the habit of writing each night, in almost automatic fashion, the result of those long, self-induced visions whereby I could place myself intimately within another period of time. The merest word, the slightest gesture, the least perceptible implications were noted down; scenes now summed up in a line or two, in the book as it is, passed before me in fullest detail, and as if in slow motion. Added all together, these accounts would have afforded material for a volume of several thousand pages, but each morning I would burn the work of the night before. In such fashion I wrote a great number of decidedly abstruse meditations, and several descriptions bordering on the obscene. He who seeks passionately for truth, or at least for accuracy, is frequently the one best able to perceive, like Pilate, that truth is not absolute or pure. Hence, mingled with his most direct assertions we find hesitations, devi-ousness, and reservations which a more conventional mind would not evince. At certain moments, though very seldom, it has even occurred to me that the emperor was lying. In such cases I had to let him lie, like the rest of us. The utter fatuity of those who say to you, "By 'Hadrian' you mean yourself!" Almost as unsubtle as those who wonder why one should choose a subject so remote in time and in space. The sorcerer who pricks his thumb before he evokes the shades knows well that they will heed his call only because they can lap his blood. He knows, too, or ought to know, that the voices who speak to him are wiser and more worthy of attention than are his own clamorous outcries. It did not take me long to realize that I had embarked upon the life of a very great man. From that time on, still more respect for truth, closer attention, and, on my part, ever more silence. In a sense, every life that is recounted is offered as an example; we write in order to attack or to defend a view of the universe, and to set forth a system of conduct which is our own. It is none the less true, however, that nearly every biographer disqualifies himself by over-idealizing his subject or by deliberate disparagement, by exaggerated stress on certain details or by cautious omission of others. Thus a character is arbitrarily constructed, taking the place of the man to be understood and explained. A human life cannot be graphed, whatever people may say, by two virtual perpendiculars, representing what a man believed himself to be and what he wished to be, plus a flat horizontal for what he actually was; rather, the diagram has to be composed of three curving lines, extended to infinity, ever meeting and ever diverging. Whatever one does, one always rebuilds the monument in his own way.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  Then both of us would spin off the sled, rolling down the hill on top of each other, around and around, laughing into a huge snowdrift. We made winter gloves out of our fathers’ socks, packing snowballs with them until they became soaked and frozen and our fingers would become numb and we’d have to take them off. I loved when it snowed, and so did all the rest of the guys on the block. * * * Every Saturday afternoon we’d all go down to the movies in the shopping center and watch gigantic prehistoric birds breathe fire, and war movies with John Wayne and Audie Murphy. Bobbie’s mother always packed us a bagful of candy. I’ll never forget Audie Murphy in To Hell and Back . At the end he jumps on top of a flaming tank that’s just about to explode and grabs the machine gun blasting it into the German lines. He was so brave I had chills running up and down my back, wishing it were me up there. There were gasoline flames roaring around his legs, but he just kept firing that machine gun. It was the greatest movie I ever saw in my life. Castiglia and I saw The Sands of Iwo Jima together. The Marine Corps hymn was playing in the background as we sat glued to our seats, humming the hymn together and watching Sergeant Stryker, played by John Wayne, charge up the hill and get killed just before he reached the top. And then they showed the men raising the flag on Iwo Jima with the marines’ hymn still playing, and Castiglia and I cried in our seats. I loved the song so much, and every time I heard it I would think of John Wayne and the brave men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima that day. I would think of them and cry. Like Mickey Mantle and the fabulous New York Yankees, John Wayne in The Sands of Iwo Jima became one of my heroes. We’d go home and make up movies like the ones we’d just seen or the ones that were on TV night after night. We’d use our Christmas toys—the Matty Mattel machine guns and grenades, the little green plastic soldiers with guns and flamethrowers in their hands. My favorites were the green plastic men with bazookas. They blasted holes through the enemy. They wiped them out at thirty feet just above the coffee table. They dug in on the front lawn and survived countless artillery attacks. They burned with high-propane lighter fluid and a quartergallon of gasoline or were thrown into the raging fires of autumn leaves blasting into a million pieces. On Saturdays after the movies all the guys would go down to Sally’s Woods—Pete and Kenny and Bobbie and me, with plastic battery-operated machine guns, cap pistols, and sticks. We turned the woods into a battlefield.