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• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  It has objectivity, unity, substantiality, causality, in the full sense in which any later object or system of objects has these things. Here the young knower meets and greets his world; and the miracle of knowledge bursts forth, as Voltaire says, as much in the infant's lowest sensation as in the highest achievement of a Newton's brain. The physiological condition of this first sensible experience is probably nerve-currents coming in from many peripheral organs at once. Later, the one confused Fact which these currents cause to appear is perceived to be many facts, and to contain man qualities. [10] For as the currents vary, and the brain-paths are moulded by them, other thoughts with other 'objects' come, and the 'same thing' which was apprehended as a present this soon figures as a past that, about which many unsuspected things have come to light. The principles of this development have been laid down already in Chapters XII and XIII, and nothing more need here be added to that account. "THE RELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE." To the reader who is tired of so much Erkenntnisstheoric I can only say that I am so myself, but that it is indispensable, in the actual state of opinions about Sensation, to try to clear up just what the word means. Locke's pupils seek to do the impossible with sensations, and against them we must once again insist that sensations 'clustered together' cannot build up our more intellectual states of mind. Plato's earlier pupils used to admit Sensation's existence, grudgingly, but they trampled it in the dust as something corporeal, non-cognitive, and vile. [11] His latest followers seem to seek to crowd it out of existence altogether. The only reals for the neo-Hegelian writers appear to be relations, relations without terms, or whose terms are speciously such and really consist in knots, or gnarls relations finer still in infinitum. "Exclude from what we have considered real all qualities constituted by relation, we find that none are left." "Abstract the many relations from the one thing and there is nothing. . . . Without the relations it would not exist at all." [12] "The single feeling is nothing real." "On the recognition of relations as constituting the nature of ideas, rests the possibility of any tenable theory of their reality." Such quotations as these from the late T. H.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Somebody must feel blueness, somebody must have toothache, to make human knowledge of these matters real. Conceptual systems which neither began nor left off in sensations would be like bridges without piers. Systems about fact must plunge themselves into sensation as bridges plunge their piers into the rock. Sensations are the stable rock, the terminus a quo and the teminus ad quem of thought. To find such termini is our aim with all our theories—to conceive first when and where a certain sensation maybe had, and then to have it. Finding it stops discussion. Failure to find it kills the false conceit of knowledge. Only when you deduce a possible sensation for me from your theory, and give it to me when and where the theory requires, do I begin to be sure that your thought has anything to do with truth. Pure sensations can only be realized in the earliest days of life. They are all but impossible to adults with memories and stores of associations acquired. Prior to all impressions on sense-organs the brain is plunged in deep sleep and consciousness is practically non-existent. Even the first weeks after birth are passed in almost unbroken sleep by human infants. It takes a strong message from the sense-organs to break this slumber. In a new-born brain this gives rise to an absolutely pure sensation. But the experience leaves its 'unimaginable touch' on the matter of the convolutions, and the next impression which a sense-organs transmits produces a cerebral reaction in which the awakened vestige of the last impression plays its part. Another sort of feeling and a higher grade of cognition are the consequence; and the complication goes on increasing till the end of life, no two successive impressions falling on an identical brain, and no two successive thoughts being exactly the same. (See above, p. 230 ff.) The first sensation which an infant gets is for him the Universe. And the Universe which he latter comes to know is nothing but an amplification and an implication of that first simple germ which, by accretion on the one hand and intussusception on the other, has grown so big and complex and articulate that its first estate is unrememberable. In his dumb awakening to the consciousness of something there, a mere this as yet (or something for which even the term this would perhaps be too discriminative, and the intellectual acknowledgment of which would be better expressed by the bare interjection 'lo!'), the infant encounters an object in which (though it be given in a pure sensation) all the 'categories of the understanding' are contained.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  12 Lecture 2: The Greco-Roman Context For many people today, God is far beyond humans in every way; most ancient people did not conceive of the divine realm as completely separated from the human by an unbridgeable chasm. There was a hierarchy among the gods themselves, a kind of divine pyramid, with the most powerful god at the top, the state gods below him, various local gods below them, family gods still further down, and so on. The more powerful gods were also more remote. Near the bottom of this divine pyramid were beings who were much more powerful than us, but much less powerful than the full gods. These were people that we might call divine men—humans who were born to the union of a god and a mortalwho were either more powerful than the rest of us, like Hercules, or more awe-inspiring, like the Emperor Augustus, or more wise, like the Greek philosopher Plato. There were stories, in fact, of divine men who were miraculously born, who could perform such divine miracles as healing the sick and raising the dead, who delivered divine teachings to their followers, and who at the end of their lives ascended to heaven to live among the gods forever (e.g., Apollonius of Tyana). This may sound familiar, because there are stories in the New Testament of Jesus doing all these things. For us today, these stories are completely unique, unlike anything else in our experience. For people in the Greco-Roman world, though, these stories would have made perfect sense. The existence of such divine men was widely recognized throughout their context. Ŷ Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction, chap. 2. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians. Shelton, As the Romans Did: A Source Book in Roman Social History. Turcan, The Cults of the Roman Empire. Essential Reading Supplemental Reading 13 1. Explain why “context” is so important for meaning. Think of some examples from your own experience in which a misunderstanding occurred because somebody took a word or action out of context. 2. Summarize the most important ways that religion in the Greco-Roman world was so different from what most people today think of as ‘religion.’ How can “common sense” in one context seem to be “non- sense” in another? Questions to Consider

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

  In all these outbreaks of human passion, however, we must not forget that the Lord was sitting in the ship of the church, directing her safely through the billows and storms. The Spirit of truth, who was not to depart from her, always triumphed over error at last, and even glorified himself through the weaknesses of his instruments. Upon this unmistakable guidance from above, only set out by the contrast of human imperfections, our reverence for the councils must be based. Soli Deo gloria; or, in the language of Chrysostom: Dovxa tw'/ qew'/ pavntwn e{neken! § 66. List of the Ecumenical Councils of the Ancient Church, We only add, by way of a general view, a list of all the ecumenical councils of the Graeco-Roman church, with a brief account of their character and work. 1. The Concilium Nicaenum I., A.D. 325; held at Nicaea in Bithynia, a lively commercial town near the imperial residence of Nicomedia, and easily accessible by land and sea. It consisted of three hundred and eighteen bishops,638 besides a large number of priests, deacons, and acolytes, mostly from the East, and was called by Constantine the Great, for the settlement of the Arian controversy. Having become, by decisive victories in 323, master of the whole Roman empire, he desired to complete the restoration of unity and peace with the help of the dignitaries of the church. The result of this council was the establishment (by anticipation) of the doctrine of the true divinity of Christ, the identity of essence between the Son and the Father. The fundamental importance of this dogma, the number, learning, piety and wisdom of the bishops, many of whom still bore the marks of the Diocletian persecution, the personal presence of the first Christian emperor, of Eusebius, "the father of church history," and of Athanasius, "the father of orthodoxy" (though at that time only archdeacon), as well as the remarkable character of this epoch, combined in giving to this first general synod a peculiar weight and authority. It is styled emphatically "the great and holy council," holds the highest place among all the councils, especially with the Greeks,639 and still lives in the Nicene Creed, which is second in authority only to the ever venerable Apostles’ Creed. This symbol was, however, not finally settled and completed in its present form (excepting the still later Latin insertion of filioque), until the second general council. Besides this the fathers assembled at Nicaea issued a number of canons, usually reckoned twenty on various questions of discipline; the most important being those on the rights of metropolitans, the time of Easter, and the validity of heretical baptism.

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

  The Nicene fathers did not pretend to have exhausted the mystery of the Trinity, and very well understood that all human knowledge, especially in this deepest, central dogma, proves itself but fragmentary. All speculation on divine things ends in a mystery, and reaches an inexplicable residue, before which the thinking mind must bow in humble devotion. "Man," says Athanasius, "can perceive only the hem of the garment of the triune God; the cherubim cover the rest with their wings." In his letter to the Monks, written about 358, he confesses that the further he examines, the more the mystery eludes his understanding,1442 and he exclaims with the Psalmist: "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it."1443 Augustine says in one place: "If we be asked to define the Trinity, we can only say, it is not this or that."1444 But though we cannot explain the how or why of our faith, still the Christian may know, and should know, what he believes, and what he does not believe, and should be persuaded of the facts and truths which form the matter of his faith. The essential points of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity are these: 1. There is only one divine essence or substance.1445 Father, Son, and Spirit are one in essence, or consubstantial.1446 They are in one another, inseparable, and cannot be conceived without each other. In this point the Nicene doctrine is thoroughly monotheistic or monarchian, in distinction from tritheism, which is but a new form of the polytheism of the pagans. The terms essence (oujsiva) and nature (fuvsi"), in the philosophical sense, denote not an individual, a personality, but the genus or species; not unum in numero, but ens unum in multis. All men are of the same substance, partake of the same human nature, though as persons and individuals they are very different.1447 The term homoousion, in its strict grammatical sense, differs from monoousion or toutoousion, as well as from heteroousion, and signifies not numerical identity, but equality of essence or community of nature among several beings. It is clearly used thus in the Chalcedonian symbol, where it is said that Christ is "consubstantial (homoousios) with the Father as touching the Godhead, and consubstantial with us [and yet individually, distinct from us] as touching the manhood." The Nicene Creed does not expressly assert the singleness or numerical unity of the divine essence (unless it be in the first article: "We believe in one God"); and the main point with the Nicene fathers was to urge against Arianism the strict divinity and essential equality of the Son and Holy Ghost with the Father. If we press the difference of homoousion from monoousion, and overlook the many passages in which they assert with equal emphasis the monarchia or numerical unity of the Godhead, we must charge them with tritheism.1448

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

  A second characteristic of these representations of nature, and for the church historian the most important, is the reference of earthly beauty to an eternal and heavenly principle, and that glorification of God in the works of creation, which transplanted itself from the Psalms and the book of Job into the Christian church. In his homilies on the history of the Creation, Basil describes the mildness of the serene nights in Asia Minor, where the stars, "the eternal flowers of heaven, raised the spirit of man from the visible to the invisible." In the oration just mentioned, after describing the spring in the most lovely and life-like colors, Gregory Nazianzen proceeds: "Everything praises God and glorifies Him with unutterable tones; for everything shall thanks be offered also to God by me, and thus shall the song of those creatures, whose song of praise I here utter, be also ours .... Indeed it is now [alluding to the Easter festival] the spring-time of the world, the spring-time of the spirit, spring-time for souls, spring-time for bodies, a visible spring, an invisible spring, in which we also shall there have part, if we here be rightly transformed, and enter as new men upon a new life." Thus the earth becomes a vestibule of heaven, the beauty of the body is consecrated an image of the beauty of the spirit. The Greek fathers placed the beauty of nature above the works of art, having a certain prejudice against art on account of the heathen abuses of it. "If thou seest a splendid building, and the view of its colonnades would transport thee, look quickly at the vault of the heavens and the open fields, on which the flocks are feeding on the shore of the sea. Who does not despise every creation of art, when in the silence of the heart he early wonders at the rising sun, as it pours its golden (crocus-yellow) light over the horizon? when, resting at a spring in the deep grass or under the dark shade of thick trees, he feeds his eye upon the dim vanishing distance?" So Chrysostom exclaims from his monastic solitude near Antioch, and Humboldt1948 adds the ingenious remark: "It was as if eloquence had found its element, its freedom, again at the fountain of nature in the then wooded mountain regions of Syria and Asia Minor." In the rough times of the first introduction of Christianity among the Celtic and Germanic tribes, who had worshipped the dismal powers of nature in rude symbols, an opposition to intercourse with nature appeared, like that which we find in Tertullian to pagan art; and church assemblies of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, at Tours (1163) and at Paris (1209), forbid the monks the sinful reading of books on nature, till the renowned scholastics, Albert, the Great († 1280), and the gifted Roger Bacon († 1294), penetrated the mysteries of nature and raised the study of it again to consideration and honor.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  A few times we got caught on the bridge that led back to the stable behind that kind of heavy equipment, and I got to fancy myself a rodeo rider. The fact of my never being thrown speaks more to how close I’d paid attention—I’d become a watchful child, prone to clutch the saddle horn at any sign of trouble—than to any real skill on my part. We rode every day, higher than I now think was safe. We rode with neither guide nor map; the horses could always find the way back to water and oats. The landscape was various in a way that had never seemed possible under the empty East Texas sky. After every stand of trees, another vista opened up. There were wide meadows we could lope across, scaring up jackrabbits as we went, and narrow paths of rock that our horses took like ballerinas highstepping. There was even a cave with a small muddy opening that widened out into a vast, cathedrallike cavern of red rock. We took bag lunches there, and flashlights we’d tied to the backs of our saddles. Once we built a fire with dead wood and pine needles and paper matches from the café. But at some point we figured that the squeaking and clicking noise above us came not from the few high nests of nocturnal birds but from a ceiling hung with fruit bats. The twin circles of light from our flashlights dragged across the mass of them chittering. They were red-eyed as the nutria rats I’d seen. Our Keds, when we finally backed out of that cave, made no more sound than the pair of Indian ghosts we’d been hunting for. Another time, we hobbled our horses outside an abandoned mine, followed the cart tracks deep inside, where we found next to a solid wall of fool’s gold a slackened rubber, which I mistook for the skin of a snake. In fact, I toted that rubber back to the stable like a trophy and made the cowboys laugh and hoo-haw. We stumbled onto waterfalls and clear mountain streams too cold for swimming but which we loved for wading and drinking, being a different order of water entirely than the brackish bayous and soggy Gulf of Mexico I’d known. You could see rainbow trout whipping around under the surface, and could drink from two hands till your gullet was full and your ankles and knuckles ached from the blue cold of it. Of course, when trouble hit we were on our own. In one rocky pass our horses grazed while we watched a herd of wild goats. All of a sudden both horses started up from chomping in one jangled motion. Their ears pricked forward, and their necks arched high, as if they’d breathed in something evil and hoped to see it coming. At some point, Big Enough flattened his black ears up against his head. Sure Enough started crabwalking.

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

  CHAPTER IV. ST. PETER AND THE CONVERSION OF THE JEWS § 24. The Miracle of Pentecost and the Birthday of the Christian Church. A.D. 30. Kai; ejplhvsqhsan pavnte" pneuvmato" aJgivou, kai; h[rxanto lalei'n eJtevrai" glwvssai", Kaqw;" to; pneu'ma ejdivdou ajpofqevggesqai aujtoi'" —Acts 2:4 "The first Pentecost which the disciples celebrated after the ascension of our Saviour, is, next to the appearance of the Son of God on earth, the most significant event. It is the starting-point of the apostolic church and of that new spiritual life in humanity which proceeded from Him, and which since has been spreading and working, and will continue to work until the whole humanity is transformed into the image of Christ."—Neander (Geschichte der Pflanzung und Leitung der christlichen Kirche durch die Apostel., I. 3, 4). Literature. I. Sources: Acts 2:1–47. Comp. 1 Cor. 12 and 14. See Commentaries on the Acts by Olshausen, De Wette, Meyer, Lechler, Hackett, Alexander, Gloag, Alford, Wordsworth, Plumptre Jacobson, Howson and Spence, etc., and on the Corinthians by Billroth, Kling, Stanley, Heinrici, Edwards, Godet, Ellicott. II. Special treatises o the Pentecostal Miracle and the Gift of Tongues (glossolalia) by Herder (Die Gabe der Sprachen, Riga, 1794) Hase (in Winer’s "Zeitschrift für wissenschaftl. Theol." 1827), Bleek in "Studien und Kritiken" for 1829 and 1830), Baur in the "Tübinger Zeitschrift für Theol." for 1830 and 1831, and in the "Studien und Krit." 1838), Schneckenburger (in his Beiträge zur Einleitung in das N. T. 1832), Bäumlein (1834), Dav. Schulz (1836), Zinsler (1847), Zeller (Acts of the Apostles, I. 171, of the E. translation by J. Dare), Böhm (Irvingite, Reden mit Zungen und Weissagen, Berlin, 1848), Rossteuscher (Irvingite, Gabe der Sprachen im apost. Zeitalter, Marburg, 1855), Ad. Hilgenfeld (Glossolalie, Leipz. 1850), Maier (Glossolalie des apost. Zeitalters, 1855), Wieseler (in "Stud. u. Krit." 1838 and 1860), Schenkel (art. Zungenreden in his "Bibel-Lex." V. 732), Van Hengel (De gave der talen, Leiden, 1864), Plumptre (art. Gift of Tongues in Smith’s, "B. D." IV. 3305, Am. ed.), Delitzsch (art. Pfingsten in Riehm’s "H. B. A." 1880, p. 1184); K. Schmidt (in Herzog, 2d ed., xvii., 570 sqq.). Comp. also Neander (I. 1), Lange (II. 13), Ewald (VI. 106), Thiersch (p. 65, 3d ed.), Schaff (191 and 469), Farrar (St. Paul, ch. V. vol. I. 83). The ascension of Christ to heaven was followed ten days afterwards by the descent of the Holy Spirit upon earth and the birth of the Christian Church. The Pentecostal event was the necessary result of the Passover event. It could never have taken place without the preceding resurrection and ascension.

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

  Have mercy upon us, O God, our Redeemer I Have mercy upon us, O God, according to Thy great mercy, and send upon us, and upon these gifts here present, Thy most holy Spirit, Lord, Giver of life, who with Thee the God and Father, and with Thine only begotten Son, sitteth and reigneth upon one throne, and is of the same essence and co-eternal,1058 who spoke in the law and in the prophets, and in Thy new covenant, who descended in the form of a dove upon our Lord Jesus Christ in the river Jordan, and rested upon Him, who came down upon Thy holy apostles in the form of tongues of fire in the upper room of Thy holy and glorious Zion on the day of

• From The Art of Memoir

  23 | Michael Herr: Start in Kansas, End in Oz Oh, return to zero, the master said. Use what’s lying around the house. Make it simple and sad. Stephen Dunn, “Visiting the Master” I. What He Does Every reader who didn’t fall for Michael Herr’s voice in his seminal war memoir Dispatches (1977) fell for it as a moviegoer in the haunting narration of Apocalypse Now or his later script for Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, both of which echo the book: How many people had I already killed? There was those six that I know about for sure. Close enough to blow their last breath in my face. But this time it was an American and an officer. That wasn’t supposed to make any difference to me, but it did. Shit . . . charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500. I took the mission. What the hell else was I gonna do? But I didn’t know what I’d do when I found him. Charley didn’t get much USO. He was dug in too deep or moving too fast. His idea of great R&R was cold rice and a little rat meat. He had only two ways home: death, or victory. Apocalypse Now Michael Herr invented what Americans think of as the hypnotic, surreal sounds of that awful war (maybe any awful war), and it made him famous in a movie genre I’ve heard him darkly refer to as Vietnam porn.

• From The Art of Memoir

  Throughout the book, he talks about how “the walls of time separate me and my bruised fists from the free world of timelessness.” Later he writes, “Initially, I was unaware that time, so boundless at first blush, was a prison.” What caps off time for us, of course, is death. Nabokov loves “twinning”—finding matching patterns in disparate places and laying them together like butterfly wings. The cradle that opens the book becomes—by the first chapter’s end—a coffin, presumably his father’s. He ends the chapter with that coffin in a long, unspooling-for- yards sentence that starts with a memory from young Nabokov’s childhood place at the table. He watches his exalted father perform what he calls “an act of levitation,” when peasants toss him in the air three times in “the mighty heave-ho”—their way of cheering the landowner lord for some gift. He flies up and hangs suspended in the window as if by magic. The subsequent metaphor takes us on a long journey. And then there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds on their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute flames in the mist of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin. Ezra Pound said rhythm in poetry is “cutting a form in time.” Nabokov’s form in this chapter—the cradle at its opening, the coffin at its end—makes a satisfying little click in the reader’s head. The shape of it works to satisfy you like repetition and variation in music. Now I’m not naive enough to think every reader makes the conscious association between the two containers for a human, “fore and aft,” as Nabokov calls it, baby/corpse. But such is my own faith in poetry, which taps into both the unconscious and memory, that I believe finding the coffin at chapter’s end gives even the most reckless reader the sweet sense of some underlying order. I’m enough of a poetry fan to believe it can work like voodoo under a

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

  He conceived the idea of his magnificent work in papal Rome, among the ruins of the Capitol, and in tracing the gradual decline and fall of imperial Rome, which he calls "the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind," he has involuntarily become a witness to the gradual growth and triumph of the religion of the cross, of which no historian of the future will ever record a history of decline and fall, though some "lonely traveller from New Zealand," taking his stand on "a broken arch" of the bridge of St. Angelo, may sketch the ruins of St. Peter’s.37 Joseph Milner (Vicar of Hull, d. 1797) wrote a History of the Church of Christ for popular edification, selecting those portions which best suited his standard of evangelical orthodoxy and piety. "Nothing," he says in the preface, "but what appears to me to belong to Christ’s kingdom shall be admitted; genuine piety is the only thing I intend to celebrate. He may be called the English Arnold, less learned, but free from polemics and far more readable and useful than the German pietist. His work was corrected and continued by his brother, Isaac Milner (d. 1820), by Thomas Grantham and Dr. Stebbing.38 Dr. Waddington (Dean of Durham) prepared three volumes on the history of the Church before the Reformation (1835) and three volumes on the Continental Reformation (1841). Evangelical. Canon James C. Robertson of Canterbury (Prof. of Church History in King’s College, d. 1882) brings his History of the Christian Church from the Apostolic Age down to the Reformation (A.D. 64–1517). The work was first published in four octavo volumes (1854 sqq.) and then in eight duodecimo volumes (Lond. 1874), and is the best, as it is the latest, general church history written by an Episcopalian. It deserves praise for its candor, moderation, and careful indication of authorities. From Charles Hardwick (Archdeacon of Ely, d. 1859) we have a useful manual of the Church History of the Middle Age (1853, 3d ed. by Prof. W. Stubbs, 1872), and another on the Reformation (1856, 3d ed. by W. Stubbs, London, 1873). His History of the Anglican Articles of Religion (1859) is a valuable contribution to English church history. Dr. Trench, Archbishop of Dublin, has published his Lectures on Mediaeval Church History (Lond. 1877), delivered before the girls of Queen’s College, London. They are conceived in a spirit of devout churchly piety and interspersed with judicious reflections. Philip Smith’s History of the Christian Church during the First Ten Centuries (1879), and during the Middle Ages (1885), in 2 vols., is a skilful and useful manual for students.39 The most popular and successful modern church historians in the English or any other language are Dean Milman of St. Paul’s, Dean Stanley of Westminster Abbey, and Archdeacon Farrar of Westminster.

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

  Hosanna in the highest: blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord: Hosanna in the highest." Then follows the consecration and oblation of the elements, by the commemoration of the great facts in the life of Christ, by the rehearsing of the Words of Institution from the Gospels or from Paul, and by the invocation of the Holy Ghost, who brings to pass the mysterious change of the bread and wine into the sacramental body and blood of Christ.1054 This invocation of the Holy Ghost1055 appears in all the Oriental liturgies, but is wanting in the Latin church, which ascribes the consecration exclusively to the virtue of Christ’s Words of Institution. The form of the Words of Institution is different in the different liturgies.1056 The elevation of the consecrated elements was introduced in the Latin church, though not till after the Berengarian controversies in the eleventh century, to give the people occasion to show, by the adoration of the host, their faith in the real presence of Christ in the sacrament. To add an example: The prayer of consecration and oblation in one of the oldest and most important of the liturgies, that of St. James, runs thus: After the Words of Institution the priest proceeds: "Priest: We sinners, remembering His life-giving passion, His saving cross, His death, and His resurrection from the dead on the third day, His ascension to heaven, and His sitting at the right hand of Thee His God and Father, and His glorious and terrible second appearing, when He shall come in glory to judge the quick and the dead, and to render to every man according to his works,—offer to Thee, O Lord, this awful and unbloody sacrifice;1057 beseeching Thee that Thou wouldst deal with us not after our sins nor reward us according to our iniquities, but according to Thy goodness and unspeakable love to men wouldst blot out the handwriting which is against us Thy suppliants, and wouldst vouchsafe to us Thy heavenly and eternal gifts, which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man what Thou, O God, hast prepared for them that love Thee. And reject not Thy people, O loving Lord, for my sake and on account of my sins. He repeats thrice: For Thy people and Thy Church prayeth to Thee. People: Have mercy upon us, O Lord God, almighty Father! Priest: Have mercy upon us, almighty God!

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  CHAPTER 5 My daddy watched Hurricane Carla come up the Intercoastal Canal from the Gulf. He claimed to be high in a sort of crow’s nest at the time, behind a thick glass wall that let him look out over half the county. The crow’s nest was on a giant tower facing the refinery, beyond which lay the oil-storage tanks, and finally the canal, a glorified ditch that Houston oilmen had spent a fortune having dug so they could boat their oil from offshore rigs right to the refineries. Daddy later said the tower swayed back and forth in the gale. He and Ben Bederman swore they had to hold on to the countertops while the rolling chairs slid around. Through the observation window, they watched a gray wall of water twenty feet high move up the canal toward town. I can almost see my daddy cock his head and squint like it was some animal he was tracking in the distance. He even took a minute to point with his ropy arm when he was telling the story, like the tidal wave was coming right at us that minute. “It was like a whole building made out of water,” he said. I later had cause to wonder how his view was so clear in the midst of the storm. But hearing him tell it, you would never doubt he’d somehow actually cowboyed his way through it all. Remarkably enough, the hurricane didn’t go in at Leechfield, this despite the fact that a tidal wave had been dead set on a course that would have squashed every remaining citizen flat as a roach. The odds on a direct hit had been high. But the storm took a weird turn, the kind of dodge people later likened to a fast quarterback barely scooting around some bullnecked lineman. The move was a forty-to-one fluke. Just before Carla came ashore at Leechfield, the storm stopped almost dead in place; then it made a sixty-degree turn. Only the edges swept over East Texas, the rest flying full force into Cameron, Louisiana, which hadn’t battened down at all. Cameron’s preparations wouldn’t have mattered much, though, since a good hunk of the Gulf of Mexico essentially lifted itself up and then toppled over right on the low-lying town. People shinnied up trees, trying to get away from the rising water. Civil Defense did what they could at the last minute, and some families managed to outrun the flood in their cars when the radio announced where the storm was heading in. But a lot of people didn’t happen to have their radios turned on. Casualties were high. The TV ran footage of guys in hip waders sloshing through their own living rooms, feeling around underwater for pieces of furniture that hadn’t washed away. The storm also flooded the bayous and brought all manner of critters from both salt and fresh water right into buildings and houses.

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

  It is primarily and pre-eminently a condescension and self-humiliation of the divine Logos to human nature, and at the same time a consequent assumption and exaltation of the human nature to inseparable and eternal communion with the divine person. The Logos assumes the body, soul, and spirit of man, and enters into all the circumstances and infirmities of human life on earth, with the single exception of sin, which indeed is not an essential or necessary element of humanity, but accidental to it. "The Lord of the universe," as Leo puts the matter in his epistle, "took the form of a servant; the impassible God became a suffering man; the Immortal One submitted himself to the dominion of death; Majesty assumed into itself lowliness; Strength, weakness; Eternity, mortality." The same, who is true God, is also true man, without either element being altered or annihilated by the other, or being degraded to a mere accident. This mysterious union came to pass, in an incomprehensible way, through the power of the Holy Ghost, in the virgin womb of Mary. But whether the miraculous conception was only the beginning, or whether it at the same time completed the union, is not decided in the Creed of Chalcedon. According to his human nature at least Christ submitted himself to the laws of gradual development and moral conflict, without which, indeed, he could be no example at all for us. 2. The precise distinction between nature and person. Nature or substance is the totality of powers and qualities which constitute a being; person is the Ego, the self-conscious, self-asserting, and acting subject. There is no person without nature, but there may be nature without person (as in irrational beings).1642 The Church doctrine distinguishes in the Holy Trinity three persons (though not in the ordinary human sense of the word) in one divine nature or substance which they have in common; in its Christology it teaches, conversely, two natures in one person (in the usual sense of person) which pervades both. Therefore it cannot be said: The Logos assumed a human person,1643 or united himself with a definite human individual: for then the God-Man would consist of two persons; but he took upon himself the human nature, which is common to all men; and therefore he redeemed not a particular man, but all men, as partakers of the same nature or substance.1644 The personal Logos did not become an individual a[nqrwpo", but savrx, flesh, which includes the whole of human nature, body, soul, and spirit. The personal self-conscious Ego resides in the Logos. But into this point we shall enter more fully below.

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

  in Christ and on the ground of his sacrifice, to God with prayers and intercessions. For only in Christ are our offerings acceptable to God, and only through the continual showing forth and presenting of His merit can we expect our prayers and intercessions to be heard. In this view certainly, in a deep symbolical and ethical sense, Christ is offered to God the Father in every believing prayer, and above all in the holy Supper; i.e. as the sole ground of our reconciliation and acceptance. This is the deep truth which lies at the bottom of the Catholic mass, and gives it still such power over the religious mind.1034 But this idea in process of time became adulterated with foreign elements, and transformed into the Graeco-Roman doctrine of the sacrifice of the mass. According to this doctrine the Eucharist is an unbloody repetition of the atoning sacrifice of Christ by the priesthood for the salvation of the living and the dead; so that the body of Christ is truly and literally offered every day and every hour, and upon innumerable altars at the same time. The term mass, which properly denoted the dismissal of the congregation (missio, dismissio) at the close of the general public worship, became, after the end of the fourth century, the name for the worship of the faithful,1035 which consisted in the celebration of the eucharistic sacrifice and the communion. The corresponding terms of the Orientals are leitourgiva, qusiva, prosforav. In the sacrifice of the mass the whole mysterious fulness and glory of the Catholic worship is concentrated. Here the idea of the priesthood reaches its dizzy summit; and here the devotion and awe of the spectators rises to the highest pitch of adoration. For to the devout Catholic nothing can be greater or more solemn than an act of worship in which the eternal Son of God is veritably offered to God upon the altar by the visible hand of the priest for the sins of the world. But though the Catholic worship here rises far above the vain sacrifices of heathendom and the merely typical sacrifices of Judaism, yet that old sacrificial service, which was interwoven with the whole popular life of the Jewish and Graeco-Roman world, exerted a controlling influence on the Roman Catholic service of the Eucharist, especially after the nominal conversion of the whole Roman heathendom, and obscured the original simplicity and purity of that service almost beyond recognition. The sacramentum became entirely eclipsed by the sacrificium, and the sacrificium became grossly materialized, and was exalted at the expense of the sacrifice on the cross. The endless succession of necessary repetitions detracts from the sacrifice of Christ. The Biblical support of the sacrifice of the mass is weak, and may be reduced to an unduly literal interpretation or a downright perversion of some such passages as Mal. i. 10 f.; 1 Cor. x. 21; Heb. v. 6; vii. 1 f.; xiii. 10.

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

  There is the lake with its clear blue waters, once whitened with ships sailing from shore to shore, and the scene of a naval battle between the Romans and the Jews, now utterly forsaken, but still abounding in fish, and subject to sudden violent storms, such as the one which Jesus commanded to cease; there are the hills from which he proclaimed the Sermon on the Mount, the Magna Charta of his kingdom, and to which he often retired for prayer; there on the western shore is the plain of Gennesaret, which still exhibits its natural fertility by the luxuriant growth of briers and thistles and the bright red magnolias overtopping them; there is the dirty city of Tiberias, built by Herod Antipas, where Jewish rabbis still scrupulously search the letter of the Scriptures without finding Christ in them; a few wretched Moslem huts called Mejdel still indicate the birth-place of Mary Magdalene, whose penitential tears and resurrection joys are a precious legacy of Christendom. And although the cities of Capernaum, Bethsaida and Chorazim, "where most of his mighty works were done" have utterly disappeared from the face of the earth, and their very sites are disputed among scholars, thus verifying to the letter the fearful prophecy of the Son of Man,167 yet the ruins of Tell Hum and Kerazeh bear their eloquent testimony to the judgment of God for neglected privileges, and the broken columns and friezes with a pot of manna at Tell Hum are probably the remains of the very synagogue which the good Roman centurion built for the people of Capernaum, and in which Christ delivered his wonderful discourse on the bread of life from heaven.168 Caesarea Philippi, formerly and now called Banias (or Paneas, Paneion, from the heathen sanctuary of Pan), at the foot of Hermon, marks the northern termination of the Holy Land and of the travels of the Lord, and the boundary-line between the Jews and the Gentiles; and that Swiss-like, picturesque landscape, the most beautiful in Palestine, in full view of the fresh, gushing source of the Jordan, and at the foot of the snow-crowned monarch of Syrian mountains seated on a throne of rock, seems to give additional force to Peter’s fundamental confession and Christ’s prophecy of his Church universal built upon the immovable rock of his eternal divinity. The closing scenes of the earthly life of our Lord and the beginning of his heavenly life took place in Jerusalem and the immediate neighborhood, where every spot calls to mind the most important events that ever occurred or can occur in this world.

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

  Victor, "so far as He is loved." Dante placed Bernard still higher than Thomas Aquinas, the master of scholastic thought, and was led by him through prayer to the beatific vision of the Holy Trinity with which his Divine Comedy closes.1419 Augustine furnished the chief materials for the mystics of the Middle Ages as he did for the scholastics. It was he who said, "Thou hast made us for thyself and the heart is restless till it rests in Thee." For Aristotle, the mystics substituted Dionysius the Areopagite, the Christian Neo-Platonist, whose works were made accessible in Latin by Scotus Erigena.1420 The mystical element was strong in the greatest of the Schoolmen, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventura. The Middle Ages took Rachel and Leah, Mary and Martha as the representatives of the contemplative and the active life, the conventual and the secular life, and also of the mystic and scholastic methods. Through the entire two periods of seven years, says Peter Damiani,1421 Jacob was serving for Rachel. Every convert must endure the fight of temptation, but all look forward to repose and rest in the joy of supreme contemplation; that is, as it were, the embraces of the beautiful Rachel. These two periods stand for the Old and New Testament, the law and the grace of the Gospel. He who keeps the commandments of both at last comes into the embraces of Rachel long desired. Richard of St. Victor devotes a whole treatise to the comparison between Rachel and Leah. Leah was the more fertile, Rachel the more comely. Leah represented the discipline of virtue, Rachel the doctrine of truth. Rachel stands for meditation, contemplation, spiritual apprehension, and insight; Leah for weeping, lamentation, repining, and grief. Rachel died in giving birth to Benjamin. So reason, after the pangs of ratiocination, dies in giving birth to religious devotion and ardor.1422 This comparison was taken from Augustine, who said that Rachel stands for the joyous apprehension of the truth and, for that reason, was said to have a good face and beautiful form.1423 St. Bernard spoke of the fellowship of the active and contemplative life as two members of the same family, dwelling together as did Mary and Martha.1424 The scholastic theology was developed in connection with the school and the university, the mystic in connection with the convent. Clairvaux and St. Victor near Paris were the hearth-stones of mysticism. Within cloistral precincts were written the passionate hymns of the Middle Ages, and the eucharistic hymns of Thomas Aquinas are the utterances of the mystic and not of the Schoolman. The leading mystical divines of this period were Bernard, Hugo and Richard of St. Victor, and Rupert of Deutz. Mystical in their whole tendency were also Joachim of Flore, Hildegard and Elizabeth of Schönau, who belong in a class by themselves. § 104. St. Bernard as a Mystic. For literature, see § 65, also, Ritschl: Lesefrüchte aus d. hl. Bernard, in Studien u. Kritiken, 1879, pp. 317–335.—J. Ries (Rom. Cath.): D.

• From My People (2022)

  I met King many months after his release on a bright, sunny day, when I happened to be on Sweet Auburn Avenue with a colleague, who suddenly turned to me and said, “There’s Dr. King.” I was awed by this chance meeting with a man who, at that point, was already the icon of the civil rights movement. I ran up to him, prepared to introduce myself and to lavish praise on him for all that he had done for Atlanta and the students, and for his sacrifices on behalf of black Americans. As I started to introduce myself—before I could get past my name—he reached for my hand, energetically shaking it, while telling me he was proud to meet me. “You are doing a such magnificent job down there,” he said, a reference to my enrollment at the all-white University of Georgia, where Hamilton Holmes and I were the first African American students to attend earlier that year. As I recalled, in a book I wrote years later, King told me that education “was the key to our freedom, and then he generously thanked me again and wished me success.” Before I could tell him how proud of him I was, he was mobbed by other admirers, which prevented him from seeing the tears rolling down my cheeks. I will always remember that moment and what it taught me about King and one of his core values: humility. Over the next several years, I watched King with admiration as I tried to find my way in journalism. In 1963, while sitting at my desk at the New Yorker , I watched the March on Washington, which he and other civil rights activists organized, and shed more tears as King talked about his dream of living in a country where his four children would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. In the speech, he displayed the humility as well as the strength of his convictions that I had seen in Atlanta, before hundreds of thousands of Americans. King’s assassination fifty years ago caused me to leave a special fellowship for “new journalism” I had at Washington University, in St. Louis. By then there were riots in the streets all over the country, and I didn’t think the classroom was where I needed to be. I went to Washington to cover, for Transaction magazine, the Poor People’s Campaign and the next phase of the civil rights movement, focusing on human rights and economic justice. Thousands traveled to the nation’s capital to spend their days in tents, undeterred by the pouring rain that left the Mall a muddy mess. They made their way, each and every day, for six weeks, to the grounds and halls of Congress to make their demands heard, undeterred by nature or by human resistance.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "Though the room was very large, the walls were all covered with pictures of the most lascivious nature; for the general's son, who was very rich, painted mostly for his own delight. Many were only half-finished sketches, for his ardent yet fickle imagination could not dwell long on the same subject, nor could his talent for invention be long satisfied with the same way of painting. "In some of his imitations of the libidinous Pompeian encaustics he had tried to fathom the secrets of a bygone art. Some pictures were executed with the minute care and the corrosive paints of Leonardo da Vinci; whilst others looked more like Greuze's pastels, or wrought in Watteau's delicate hues. Some flesh tints had the golden haze of the Venetian school, whilst——" "Please finish this digression on Briancourt's paintings, and tell me something of the more realistic scene." "Well, on faded old damask couches, on huge pillows made out of priests' stoles, worked by devout fingers in silver and in gold, on soft Persian and Syrian divans, on lion and panther rugs, on mattresses covered over with electric cats' skins, men, young and good-looking, almost all naked, were lounging there by twos and threes, grouped in attitudes of the most consummate lewdness such as the imagination can never picture to itself, and such as are only seen in the brothels of men in lecherous Spain, or in those of the wanton East." "It must indeed have been a rare sight, seen from the cage in which you were cooped; and I suppose your cocks were crowing so lustily that the naked fellows below must have been in great danger of receiving a shower of your holy water, for you must have brandled each other's sprinklers rapturously up there." "The frame was well worth the picture, for, as I was saying before, the studio was a museum of lewd art worthy of Sodom or of Babylon. Paintings, statues, bronzes, plaster casts—either masterpieces of Paphian art or of Priapean designs, emerged from amidst deep-tinted silks of velvety softness, amidst sparkling crystals, gem-like enamel, golden china or opaline majolica, varied with yataghans and Turkish sabres, with hilts and scabbards of gold and silver filigree mark, all studded with coral and turquoise, or other more sparkling precious stones. "From huge Chinese bowls rose costly ferns, dainty Indian palms, creeping plants and parasites, with wicked-looking flowers from American forests, and feathery grasses from the Nile in Sèvres vases; whilst from above, ever and anon, a shower of full-blown red and pink roses came pouring down, mingling their intoxicating scent with that of the attar which ascended in white cloudlets from censers and silver chafing-dishes.