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 The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1164), one of the great poets and philosophers of Spain, was another medieval forerunner of modern historical criticism.33 Exegesis must give priority to the literal sense; while legend (aggadah) had spiritual value, it must not be confused with fact. He found discrepancies in the biblical text: Isaiah of Jerusalem could not have composed the second half of the book attributed to him because it referred to events that occurred long after his death. He also cautiously and elliptically hinted that Moses was not the author of the entire Pentateuch: he could not, for example, have described his own death and since Moses never entered the Promised Land, how could he have written the opening verses of Deuteronomy, which positioned the site of his final address ‘on the other side of the Jordan river’.34 This must have been written by somebody who lived in the land of Israel after its conquest by Joshua. Philosophical rationalism inspired a mystical backlash in Spain and Provence. Nahmanides (1194–1270), an outstanding Talmudist and an influential member of the Jewish community in Castile, believed that Maimonides’s rationalistic exegesis did not do justice to the Torah.35 He wrote an influential commentary on the Pentateuch, which rigorously elucidated its plain meaning, but in the course of his study he had encountered a numinous significance that entirely transcended the literal sense. In the late thirteenth century, a small group of mystics in Castile took this further. Their study of scripture had not merely introduced them to a deeper level of the text but to the inner life of God. They called their esoteric discipline kaballah (‘inherited tradition’), because it had passed from teacher to pupil. Unlike Nahmanides, these kabbalists – Abraham Abulafia, Moses de Leon, Isaac de Latif and Joseph Gikatilla – had no expertise in Talmud but they had all been interested in philosophy before deciding that its attenuated God was empty of religious content.36 Instead, they explored a hermeneutic method, which they may have learned from their Christian neighbours.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Jews and Christians treat their scriptures with ceremonial reverence. The Torah scroll is the most sacred object in the synagogue; encased in a precious covering, housed in an ‘ark’, it is revealed at the climax of the liturgy when the scroll is conveyed formally around the congregation, who touch it with the tassels of their prayer shawls. Some Jews even dance with the scroll, embracing it like a beloved object. Catholics also carry the Bible in procession, douse it with incense, and stand up when it is recited, making the sign of the cross on forehead, lips and heart. In Protestant communities, the Bible reading is the high point of the service. But even more important were the spiritual disciplines that involved diet, posture and exercises in concentration, which, from a very early date, helped Jews and Christians to peruse the Bible in a different frame of mind. They were thus able to read between the lines and find something new, because the Bible always meant more than it said. From the very beginning, the Bible had no single message. When the editors fixed the canons of both the Jewish and Christian testaments, they included competing visions and placed them, without comment, side by side. From the first, biblical authors felt free to revise the texts they had inherited and give them entirely different meaning. Later exegetes held up the Bible as a template for the problems of their time. Sometimes they allowed it to shape their world-view but they also felt free to change it and make it speak to contemporary conditions. They were not usually interested in discovering the original meaning of a biblical passage. The Bible ‘proved’ that it was holy because people continually discovered fresh ways to interpret it and found that this difficult, ancient set of documents cast light on situations that their authors could never have imagined. Revelation was an ongoing process; it had not been confined to a distant theophany on Mount Sinai; exegetes continued to make the Word of God audible in each generation. Some of the most important biblical authorities insisted that charity must be the guiding principle of exegesis: any interpretation that spread hatred or disdain was illegitimate. All the world faiths claim that compassion is not only the prime virtue and the test of true religiosity but that it actually introduces us to Nirvana, God or the Dao. But sadly the biography of the Bible represents the failures as well as the triumphs of the religious quest. The biblical authors and their interpreters have all too often succumbed to the violence, unkindness and exclusivity that is rife in their societies.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Philo also refined the biblical conception of God, which could seem hopelessly anthropomorphic to a Platonist. ‘The apprehension of me is something more than human nature, yea, more even than the whole heaven and universe, will be able to contain,’ he made God tell Moses. 61 Philo made the enormously important distinction between God’s ousia, his essence, which was entirely incomprehensible to human beings, and his activities (energeiaei) and powers (dynameis) that we can apprehend in the world. There was nothing about God’s ousia in the scripture; we only read about his powers, one of which was the Word or Logos of God, the rational design that structures the universe. 62 Like Ben Sirah, Philo believed that when we caught a glimpse of the Logos in creation and the Torah, we were taken beyond the reach of discursive reason to a rapturous recognition that God was ‘higher than a way of thinking, more precious than anything that is merely thought’. 63 It was, Philo argued, foolish to read the first chapter of Genesis literally and to imagine that the world had been created in six days. The number ‘six’ was a symbol of perfection. He noticed that there were two quite different creation stories in Genesis, and decided that P’s account in Chapter One described the creation of the Logos, the masterplan of the universe that was God’s ‘first born’, 64 and that J’s more earthy account in Chapter Two symbolized the fashioning of the material universe by the demiourgos, the divine ‘craftsman’ in Plato’s Timaeus, who had arranged the raw materials of the universe to establish an ordered cosmos. Philo’s exegesis was not simply a clever manipulation of names and numbers but a spiritual practice. Like any Platonist, he experienced knowledge as remembrance, as known to him already at some profound level of his being. As he delved beneath the literal meaning of a biblical narrative and uncovered its deep philosophical principle, he experienced a shock of recognition. The story became suddenly fused with a truth that was a part of himself. Sometimes he struggled grimly with his books and seemed to make no progress, but then, almost without warning, he experienced rapture, like a priest in one of the ecstatic mystery cults: I . . . have suddenly become full, the ideas descending like snow, so that under the impact of divine possession, I have been filled with Corybantic frenzy and become ignorant of everything, place, people, past, present, myself, what was said and what was written.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “Oh, you!” Mama slapped Earle’s shoulder lightly. “I can’t say nothing without you telling your awful lies.” She pulled in her rolling pin and leaned on it as she crushed a couple of cups of pecans down to mealy bits. “God’s keeping track, Earle Boatwright. One of these days your stories are gonna come back on you. You an’t gonna know what to say then, I swear.” [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] Uncle Wade and Aunt Alma fought for weeks, with Aunt Carr and Mama stepping in now and then, until Aunt Carr had to go home to Baltimore and Daddy Glen got laid off from his new job at the Pepsi plant and Mama started working too hard to go visiting Aunt Alma much. It didn’t look like they would ever make up, but then again, nobody acted like it was any big deal. Aunt Alma had sworn she wouldn’t have Wade back in her life till he crawled the length of Main Street singing what a dog he was, but when the baby got sick and the boys started running around at night, she gave it up and moved back in with him. “I knew what he was like when I married him,” Alma told Mama. “I guess he an’t no worse than any other man.” But she was still mad enough not to move back into their bedroom for a few months. She treated Wade as if he were a tenant in his own house, barely speaking to him until he apologized to her. At first Uncle Wade was indignant, swearing that Aunt Alma would go to hell for treating him like a stranger. He did apologize eventually, though he wouldn’t admit he had done anything wrong. “A man has needs,” he kept telling everybody from Daddy Glen to the gas-station attendants on White Horse Road. “A man has needs, and she was pregnant. Was I gonna take the risk of hurting my own baby in her womb?” Wade’s woeful complaint was a joke to all the aunts. “A man has needs,” they’d laugh each time they got together. “So what you suppose a woman has?” “Men!” one of them would always answer in a giggling roar. Then they would all laugh till the tears started running down. I wasn’t at all sure what was so funny, but I laughed anyway. I liked being one of the women with my aunts, liked feeling a part of something nasty and strong and separate from my big rough boy-cousins and the whole world of spitting, growling, overbearing males. 7 [image file=image_rsrc2PR.jpg] “Don’t you ever let me catch you stealing,” Mama commanded in one of her rare lectures, after Cousin Grey got caught running out of the White Horse Winn Dixie with a bargain quart of RC Cola. “You want something, you tell me, and if it’s worth the trouble we’ll find a way. But I an’t gonna have no child of mine caught stealing.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Aunt Alma’s hands came down, patted the skirt of her dress. Her right hand slipped into a pocket I hadn’t noticed before and came out with a razor, the straight edge closed into the handle. She flicked her wrist and it swung open, the blade shining in the sunlight. She brought her left hand up and laid the blade on her palm, looking down at it like it was beautiful. “Oh, that’ll do it,” Mama said, her voice still soft and matter-of-fact. She looked back over at me. “Bone, girl, go inside and get your aunt a glass of tea, why don’t you?” Her eyes tracked past me to Uncle Earle, and she shook her head slightly. He nodded and started backing away toward the pines. “We should get you cleaned up a little, Alma. You look like you got caught in a storm.” She gave a soft little laugh and pulled gently at her sister’s arms. Alma shuddered and hunched over the razor. Mama went still, her face carefully empty. I stared at them. They seemed more alike than ever. Aunt Alma was a good ten years older than Mama and maybe twenty pounds heavier, but she had the same strong features, cheekbones standing out like hammer hooks under eyes sunken and shadowed. Their hair was the same texture, dry and fine, though Mama’s was more blond for the rinse she used on it, and flattened out a little from the hair net she had to wear at work. Aunt Alma’s hair had a reddish sheen peculiar to all the women on her side of the family. It was their necks, though, that were identical, rigid cords of tendons standing out so that the little hollow where the collarbones met looked even deeper and more pronounced. The skin was the same, work-roughened and red-tinged under the tan, though Aunt Alma wore no makeup and Mama’s was streaked with sweat. Family they were, obviously related, clearly sisters. When I swallowed loud, they both turned to me with the same gesture and the same expression. “An’t you gonna do what I asked?” Mama prodded, just as if Aunt Alma wasn’t sitting there covered in her own blood. Aunt Alma stirred, lifted her head, and looked over at me. I couldn’t see where to put my feet. “Girl children,” Aunt Alma sighed. “Dreamers always standing around sucking on their teeth.” “It’s a fact,” Mama agreed, and shook her head in resignation. I wanted to laugh, but instead I flushed in embarrassment. How old was I going to have to be before they stopped talking about me like that? I took a breath and stepped over the shattered pieces of flower pots, past the broken records, and up the steps. There was more rubble in the doorway, propping the screen door half open. The kitchen chairs had been smashed and the table overturned, the cabinets emptied and everything all over the floor.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  Across the aisle was the cheese department. Laura was its manager. Her hair was dirty-blond and boy-short, and when she rolled up the sleeves of her white T-shirt, she was River Phoenix in Stand by Me. Here was a lesbian. No one said it, but you knew it, the same way you knew she was the boss. Laura was a half-dozen years older than me, not a lot, but she seemed a half-dozen years older than that. She had a way of striding past the cheese case that terrified me. Tough but elegant, stern-faced as an eagle, she surveyed the territory. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] This was the same time period that I had my “lesbian” haircut, and it was probably because of that haircut that Laura invited me to a party. We weren’t friends, not that I had registered. We’d talked in passing, the way coworkers do, and I always felt afterward like I’d had a run-in with a celebrity: I was honored but incidental. Then one day by the olive bar, Laura turned to me and said, Some friends of mine are having a barbecue this weekend in Tennessee Valley. Wanna come? The house was off a street I’d driven dozens of times. When I was a kid visiting Tina with my parents, we’d have brunch around the corner at the Dipsea Cafe, drinking our orange juice as we looked over the bay to Tiburon. This time, I hung a left onto Tennessee Valley Road and turned into the driveway of a worn wood-frame house with an overgrown yard that swung toward the street. Inside the house was a small crowd of women in blue jeans and untucked T-shirts, with unmade-up faces that asserted themselves matter-of-factly. They held brown bottles of beer and leaned against the counters. I wondered if anyone there knew that I was not gay. I was at a lesbian barbecue. Laura’s friends welcomed me, and together we set a splintery picnic table in the yard. One of the women was a restaurant cook, and this was her house. They called her Sin, which I later learned was spelled Cyn. Someone told me that Laura was newly out of a long-term relationship. She and her ex had essentially been married, had even had a commitment ceremony on a cliff somewhere, but now Laura’s ex was seeing a man. Cyn grilled flank steak and served a corn salad from the latest issue of Martha Stewart Living. The salad was so good that I went out and bought the magazine after.

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

  And yet this testimony, if not true, must be downright blasphemy or madness. The former hypothesis cannot stand a moment before the moral purity and dignity of Jesus, revealed in his every word and work, and acknowledged by universal consent. Self-deception in a matter so momentous, and with an intellect in all respects so clear and so sound, is equally out of the question. How could He be an enthusiast or a madman who never lost the even balance of his mind, who sailed serenely over all the troubles and persecutions, as the sun above the clouds, who always returned the wisest answer to tempting questions, who calmly and deliberately predicted his death on the cross, his resurrection on the third day, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the founding of his Church, the destruction of Jerusalem—predictions which have been literally fulfilled? A character so original, so complete, so uniformly consistent, so perfect, so human and yet so high above all human greatness, can be neither a fraud nor a fiction. The poet, as has been well said, would in this case be greater than the hero. It would take more than a Jesus to invent a Jesus. We are shut up then to the recognition of the divinity of Christ; and reason itself must bow in silent awe before the tremendous word: "I and the Father are one!" and respond with skeptical Thomas: "My Lord and my God!" This conclusion is confirmed by the effects of the manifestation of Jesus, which far transcend all merely human capacity and power. The history of Christianity, with its countless fruits of a higher and purer life of truth and love than was ever known before or is now known outside of its influence, is a continuous commentary on the life of Christ, and testifies on every page to the inspiration of his holy example. His power is felt on every Lord’s Day from ten thousand pulpits, in the palaces of kings and the huts of beggars, in universities and colleges, in every school where the sermon on the Mount is read, in prisons, in almshouses, in orphan asylums, as well as in happy homes, in learned works and simple tracts in endless succession. If this history of ours has any value at all, it is a new evidence that Christ is the light and life of a fallen world.

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

  On the great festivals he visited from his twelfth year the capital of the nation where the Jewish religion unfolded all its splendor and attraction. Large caravans with trains of camels and asses loaded with provisions and rich offerings to the temple, were set in motion from the North and the South, the East and the West for the holy city, "the joy of the whole earth;" and these yearly pilgrimages, singing the beautiful Pilgrim Psalms (Ps, 120 to 134), contributed immensely to the preservation and promotion of the common faith, as the Moslem pilgrimages to Mecca keep up the life of Islam. We may greatly reduce the enormous figures of Josephus, who on one single Passover reckoned the number of strangers and residents in Jerusalem at 2,700,000 and the number of slaughtered lambs at 256,500, but there still remains the fact of the vast extent and solemnity of the occasion. Even now in her decay, Jerusalem (like other Oriental cities) presents a striking picturesque appearance at Easter, when Christian pilgrims from the far West mingle with the many-colored Arabs, Turks, Greeks, Latins, Spanish and Polish Jews, and crowd to suffocation the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. How much more grand and dazzling must this cosmopolitan spectacle have been when the priests (whose number Josephus estimates at 20,000) with the broidered tunic, the fine linen girdle, the showy turban, the high priests with the ephod of blue and purple and scarlet, the breastplate and the mitre, the Levites with their pointed caps, the Pharisees with their broad phylacteries and fringes, the Essenes in white dresses and with prophetic mien, Roman soldiers with proud bearing, Herodian courtiers in oriental pomposity, contrasted with beggars and cripples in rags, when pilgrims innumerable, Jews and proselytes from all parts of the empire, "Parthians and Medes and Elamites and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, in Judaea and Cappadocia, in Pontus and Asia, in Phrygia and Pamphylia, in Egypt and parts of Libya about Cyrene, and sojourners from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans, and Arabians,"196 all wearing their national costume and speaking a Babel of tongues, surged through the streets, and pressed up to Mount Moriah where "the glorious temple rear’d her pile, far off appearing like a mount of alabaster, topp’d with golden spires" and where on the fourteenth day of the first month columns of sacrificial smoke arose from tens of thousands of paschal lambs, in historical commemoration of the great deliverance from the land of bondage, and in typical prefiguration of the still greater redemption from the slavery of sin and death.197

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

  CHRYSOSTOM. For as when a man gazes upon the beauty of the heavens, he says, Glory be thee, O God; so likewise when He beholds a man’s virtuous actions, seeing that the virtue of man glorifies God much more than the heavens. PSEUDO-AUGUSTINE. (ubi sup.) Or it is said, Hallowed be thy name; that is, let Thy holiness be known to all the world, and let it worthily praise Thee. For praise becometh the upright, (Ps. 33.) and therefore He bids them pray for the cleansing of the whole world. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. Since among those to whom the faith has not yet come, the name of God is still despised. But when the rays of truth shall have shined upon them, they will confess the Holy of Holies. (Dan. 9:24.) TITUS BOSTRENSIS. (ubi sup.) And because in the name of Jesus is the glory of God the Father, the name of the Father will be hallowed whenever Christ shall be known. ORIGEN. Or, because the name of God is given by idolaters, and those who are in error, to idols and creatures, it has not as yet been so made holy, as to be separated from those things from which it ought to be. He teaches us therefore to pray that the name of God may be appropriated to the only true God; to whom alone belongs what follows, Thy kingdom come, to the end that may be put down all the rule, authority, and power, and kingdom of the world, together with sin which reigns in our mortal bodies. GREGORY OF NYSSA. (ubi sup.) We beseech also to be delivered by the Lord from corruption, to be taken out of death. Or, according to some, Thy kingdom come, that is, May Thy Holy Spirit come upon us to purify us. PSEUDO-AUGUSTINE. (ubi sup.) For then cometh the kingdom of God, when we have obtained His grace. For He Himself says, The kingdom of God is within you. (Luke 17:21.) CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. Or they who say this seem to wish to have the Saviour of all again illuminating the world. But He has commanded us to desire in prayer that truly awful time, in order that men might know that it behoves them to live not in sloth and backwardness, lest that time bring upon them the fiery punishment, but rather honestly and according to His will, that that time may weave crowns for them. Hence it follows, according to Matthew,a Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth. CHRYSOSTOM. As if He says, Enable us, O Lord, to follow the heavenly life, that whatever Thou willest, we may will also.

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

  The mysterious gift of tongues, or glossolalia, appears here for the first time, but became, with other extraordinary gifts of the Spirit, a frequent phenomenon in the apostolic churches, especially at Corinth, and is fully described by Paul. The distribution of the flaming tongues to each of the disciples caused the speaking with tongues. A new experience expresses itself always in appropriate language. The supernatural experience of the disciples broke through the confines of ordinary speech and burst out in ecstatic language of praise and thanksgiving to God for the great works he did among them.269 It was the Spirit himself who gave them utterance and played on their tongues, as on new tuned harps, unearthly melodies of praise. The glossolalia was here, as in all cases where it is mentioned, an act of worship and adoration, not an act of teaching and instruction, which followed afterwards in the sermon of Peter. It was the first Te Deum of the new-born church. It expressed itself in unusual, poetic, dithyrambic style and with a peculiar musical intonation. It was intelligible only to those who were in sympathy with the speaker; while unbelievers scoffingly ascribed it to madness or excess of wine. Nevertheless it served as a significant sign to all and arrested their attention to the presence of a supernatural power.270 So far we may say that the Pentecostal glossolalia was the same as that in the household of Cornelius in Caesarea after his conversion, which may be called a Gentile Pentecost,271 as that of the twelve disciples of John the Baptist at Ephesus, where it appears in connection with prophesying,272 and as that in the Christian congregation at Corinth.273 But at its first appearance the speaking with tongues differed in its effect upon the hearers by coming home to them at once in their own mother-tongues; while in Corinth it required an interpretation to be understood. The foreign spectators, at least a number of them, believed that the unlettered Galilaeans spoke intelligibly in the different dialects represented on the occasion.274 We must therefore suppose either that the speakers themselves, were endowed, at least temporarily, and for the particular purpose of proving their divine mission, with the gift of foreign languages not learned by them before, or that the Holy Spirit who distributed the tongues acted also as interpreter of the tongues, and applied the utterances of the speakers to the susceptible among the hearers.

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

  This is the natural view of the case, and the same concession is now made by all the champions of the Johannean authorship who do not hold to a magical inspiration theory and turn the sacred writers into unthinking machines, contrary to their own express statements, as in the Preface of Luke. But we deny that this concession involves any sacrifice of the truth of history or of any lineament from the physiognomy of Christ. The difficulty here presented is usually overstated by the critics, and becomes less and less, the higher we rise in our estimation of Christ, and the closer we examine the differences in their proper connection. The following reflections will aid the student: (1) In the first place we must remember the marvellous heighth and depth and breadth of Christ’s intellect as it appears in the Synoptists as well as in John. He commanded the whole domain of religious and moral truth; he spake as never man spake, and the people were astonished at his teaching (Matt. 7:28, 29; Mark 1:22; 6:2; Luke 4:32; John 7:46). He addressed not only his own generation, but through it all ages and classes of men. No wonder that his hearers often misunderstood him. The Synoptists give examples of such misunderstanding as well as John (comp. Mark 8:16). But who will set limits to his power and paedagogic wisdom in the matter and form of his teaching? Must he not necessarily have varied his style when he addressed the common people in Galilee, as in the Synoptists, and the educated, proud, hierarchy of Jerusalem, as in John? Or when he spoke on the mountain, inviting the multitude to the Messianic Kingdom at the opening of his ministry, and when he took farewell from his disciples in the chamber, in view of the great sacrifice? Socrates appears very different in Xenophon and in Plato, yet we can see him in both. But here is a far greater than Socrates.1055

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

  The conquest of Palestine involved the destruction of the Jewish commonwealth. Vespasian retained the land as his private property or distributed it among his veterans. The people were by the five years’ war reduced to extreme poverty, and left without a magistrate (in the Jewish sense), without a temple, without a country. The renewal of the revolt under the false Messiah, Bar-Cocheba, led only to a still more complete destruction of Jerusalem and devastation of Palestine by the army of Hadrian (132–135). But the Jews still had the law and the prophets and the sacred traditions, to which they cling to this day with indestructible tenacity and with the hope of a great future. Scattered over the earth, at home everywhere and nowhere; refusing to mingle their blood with any other race, dwelling in distinct communities, marked as a peculiar people in every feature of the countenance, in every rite of religion; patient, sober, and industrious; successful in every enterprise, prosperous in spite of oppression, ridiculed yet feared, robbed yet wealthy, massacred yet springing up again, they have outlived the persecution of centuries and are likely to continue to live to the end of time: the object of the mingled contempt, admiration, and wonder of the world. § 39. Effects of the Destruction of Jerusalem on the Christian Church. The Christians of Jerusalem, remembering the Lord’s admonition, forsook the doomed city in good time and fled to the town of Pella in the Decapolis, beyond the Jordan, in the north of Peraea, where king Herod Agrippa II., before whom Paul once stood, opened to them a safe asylum. An old tradition says that a divine voice or angel revealed to their leaders the duty of flight.555 There, in the midst of a population chiefly Gentile, the church of the circumcision was reconstructed. Unfortunately, its history is hidden from us. But it never recovered its former importance. When Jerusalem was rebuilt as a Christian city, its bishop was raised to the dignity of one of the four patriarchs of the East, but it was a patriarchate of honor, not of power, and sank to a mere shadow after the Mohammedan invasion.

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  Harry made a little fatalistic laugh. “They’re pumping so much porn in here that it’s just feeding and feeding, and it grows a new appendage every few days. It’s got about ten arms. One’s really long, but a lot of them are smaller.” “I can see that it’s not pretty,” Rhumpa said. “But is it good or is it evil?” “Nobody knows,” said Harry. “Nobody knows its language.” “I’m going to try to talk to it,” said Rhumpa. She put her hands to her mouth. “Hey, longdog!” she called with loud authority. “Jizm! Weeperhole!” The pornhand paused for a moment, ceased groping, then subsided under the vermilion waves of mingling smut imagery. “You really know languages,” said Harry, impressed. Rhumpa knew she could talk to the pornmonster given enough time and quiet. “I can’t engage with it here,” she said. “Do you have a side chamber where we can go?” “Sure,” said Harry. “The sluice gate has an overflow tank, and sometimes the monster goes in there to rest.” Suddenly, several fountains of what looked like sperm, but orchid and navel orange in color, jetted up from the froth. Rhumpa looked at Harry questioningly. “It masturbates constantly,” Harry said. “You’ll have to put on a wetsuit. ” Rhumpa nodded. They went to the room off the overflow tank. Rhumpa shucked off her shirt and pants and stepped into the suit. “Be careful,” said Harry. “Our containment system is only as good as its weakest link.” “Do you think it can feel love?” asked Rhumpa. “I doubt it,” said Harry. “I was reading Hawking’s book about the first seconds of the universe. I think our monster is as close as I’ll ever come to knowing what that’s like.” Harry hesitated. He looked a little green around the gills. “I’m going to have to leave you on your own here. I’ll be watching on the monitor. Men can’t take pornfumes for very long without fainting. We need breathing equipment. Women seem more immune.” Harry withdrew. Rhumpa walked out onto the tiled edge of the ancillary holding tank. She called out, “Hey, pornmonster! Cuntcall! Here it is!” She cupped her crotch through the wetsuit. There was a burbling and a different feeling in the air. Rhumpa sensed that the pornmonster had slid into the ancillary tank. She waited. “If you’re here,” she called, nervously, “let me see your biggest hand.” There was a powerful odor of sexual fluids, and a huge mottled hand appeared.

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

  II. Ernest Renan: L’Antechrist. Paris, deuxième ed., 1873. Chs. VI. VIII, pp. 123 sqq. Also his Hibbert Lectures, delivered in London, 1880, on Rome and Christianity. L. Friedländer: Sittengeschichte Roms, I. 6, 27; III. 529. Hermann Schiller: Geschichte der röm. Kaiserzeit unter der Regierung des Nero. Berlin, 1872 (173–179; 424 sqq.; 583 sqq.). Hausrath: N. T.liche Zeitgeschichte, III. 392 sqq. (2d ed., 1875). Theod. Keim: Aus dem Urchristenthum. Zürich, 1878, pp. 171–181. Rom u. das Christenthum, 1881, pp. 132 sqq. Karl Wieseler: Die Christenverfolgungen der Cäsaren. 1878. G. Uhlhorn: The Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism. Engl. transl. by Smyth and Ropes, N. Y. 1879, pp. 241–250. C. F. Arnold: Die Neron. Christenverfolgung. Leipz. 1888. The preaching of Paul and Peter in Rome was an epoch in the history of the church. It gave an impulse to the growth of Christianity. Their martyrdom was even more effective in the end: it cemented the bond of union between the Jewish and Gentile converts, and consecrated the soil of the heathen metropolis. Jerusalem crucified the Lord, Rome beheaded and crucified his chief apostles and plunged the whole Roman church into a baptism of blood. Rome became, for good and for evil, the Jerusalem of Christendom, and the Vatican hill the Golgotha of the West. Peter and Paul, like a new Romulus and Remus, laid the foundation of a spiritual empire vaster and more enduring than that of the Caesars. The cross was substituted for the sword as the symbol of conquest and power.514 But the change was effected at the sacrifice of precious blood. The Roman empire was at first, by its laws of justice, the protector of Christianity, without knowing its true character, and came to the rescue of Paul on several critical occasions, as in Corinth through the Proconsul Annaeus Gallio, in Jerusalem through the Captain Lysias, and in Caesarea through the Procurator Festus. But now it rushed into deadly conflict with the new religion, and opened, in the name of idolatry and patriotism, a series of intermittent persecutions, which ended at last in the triumph of the banner of the cross at the Milvian bridge. Formerly a restraining power that kept back for a while the outbreak of Antichrist,515 it now openly assumed the character of Antichrist with fire and sword.516 Nero. The first of these imperial persecutions with which the Martyrdom of Peter and Paul is connected by ecclesiastical tradition, took place in the tenth year of Nero’s reign, A.D. 64, and by the instigation of that very emperor to whom Paul, as a Roman citizen, had appealed from the Jewish tribunal. It was, however, not a strictly religious persecution, like those under the later emperors; it originated in a public calamity which was wantonly charged upon the innocent Christians.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  quid es ergo, deus meus?What are you, then, my god?summe, optime, potentissime, omnipotentissime, misericordissime et iustissime, secretissime et praesentissime, pulcherrime et fortissime, stabilis et incomprehensibilis, immutabilis mutans omnia, numquam novus numquam vetus,Highest, best, most powerful, most all-powerful; most merciful and most just; most hidden and most present; most beautiful and most strong, standing firm and elusive, unchangeable and all-changing; never new, never old;semper agens semper quietus, conligens et non egens, portans et implens et protegens, creans et nutriens et perficiens, quaerens cum nihil desit tibi.ever working, ever at rest; gathering in, yet lacking nothing; supporting, filling, and sheltering; creating, nourishing, and ripening; seeking, yet having all things.et quid diximus, deus meus, vita mea, dulcedo mea sancta,And what have I now said, my god, my life, my holy joy?aut quid dicit aliquis cum de te dicit? et vae tacentibus de te, quoniam loquaces muti sunt.583Or what does anybody say when he speaks of you? And woe to him who keeps silent about you, since many babble on and say nothing.The paradoxes of the divine nature reveal the limitations of human language and its unsuitability for the impossible task of theology. Not yet for Augustine the mannered style of an Eriugena in the ninth century, for whom god is good, but god is also not good (not good in the human way, at any rate), and good is finally “super-good” (super-bonus is the word he uses) in a way that lies beyond the human category of goodness, but some of the same impulse is there. Human words used by humans fail in the presence of the divine, he thinks, and whatever can be said is only approximation. Most human discourse fails to say anything of god at all, despite endless loquacious efforts. The limitations of language thus discovered have the effect of proving to Augustine yet again the rightness of his fundamental view of a high, unapproachable, ineffable god.584 For a rhetorician as polished as Augustine to admit failure in a matter of rhetoric is striking and not without significance, as most experienced readers of Augustine will have felt. For all the clarity and definition that Augustine can give to his writing elsewhere, it cannot be without significance that at the center of his concerns lies this finally unsayable Other, who eludes all his attempts to define and delimit. Augustine’s elusive god needs to be taken seriously, in all his elusiveness, in order to do justice to the things that Augustine says about other things, particularly things that are perplexing or repellent. Whenever Augustine is saying something that moderns find troubling, the best first resort for an interpreter is to look closely to see what text or scripture he has in mind and how it more or less forces him to say what he says.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  That spirit found its own characteristically modern expression in the fourth century in multiple ways. If no more martyrs were being made—with no good persecutors to make more of them379—then at least two direct compensations could be counted. The old martyrs themselves could continue to be present in their shrines and in their bones. Martyr sites became chapels or cathedrals, and eventually bits of martyr bones and clothing moved into circulation. The great martyrs, like Cyprian of Carthage, great for his position before his martyrdom as bishop of Carthage, would have large shrines, and the contest for control of their spaces between factions of the church would be intense. The annual festivals memorializing dates of martyrdom would be high points of the Christian year. When Augustine would go to Carthage for the summer, he did not leave his own flock until Easter, but he would characteristically stay in Carthage until late summer, for the festival of Cyprian on September 14. Stephen’s relics, as we saw, brought special prestige, but moved into a very familiar role. If the martyr’s shrines were not sufficient, martyr stories abounded. The fifth and sixth centuries, particularly, would be the great age of flourishing reading and writing of martyr stories in the world of Latin Christianity. Some of these stories even had basis in fact, but many of them either took rise from mere names on lists maintained by faithful churches, or were simple fictions told for a purpose. If we cannot suffer, then to remember that others have suffered provides a satisfactory emotional release from guilt or anxiety. This was the age in which a male, celibate elite emerged, competing for power with traditional authorities. The fourth century saw its emergence in the Greek east, in the desert away from the city clergy who tended the ritual needs of the faithful. The history of eastern Christianity for many years after was the history of the increasing influence and domination of the monk over the ordinary cleric.

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

  4. Facts and Incidents: the adoration of the Magi; the massacre of the innocents; the flight into Egypt; the return from Egypt to Nazareth (all in Matt. 2); the coming of the Pharisees and Sadducees to John’s baptism (3:7); Peter’s attempt to walk on the sea (14:28–31); the payment of the temple tax (17:24–27); the bargain of Judas, his remorse, and suicide (26:14–16; 27:3–10); the dream of Pilate’s wife (27:19); the appearance of departed saints in Jerusalem (27:52); the watch at the sepulchre (27:62–66); the lie of the Sanhedrin and the bribing of the soldiers (28:11–15); the earthquake on the resurrection morning (28:2, a repetition of the shock described in 27:51, and connected with the rolling away of the stone from the sepulchre). The Style. The Style of Matthew is simple, unadorned, calm, dignified, even majestic; less vivid and picturesque than that of Mark; more even and uniform than Luke’s, because not dependent on written sources. He is Hebraizing, but less so than Mark, and not so much as Luke 1–2. He omits some minor details which escaped his observation, but which Mark heard from Peter, and which Luke learned from eye-witnesses or found in his fragmentary documents. Among his peculiar expressions, besides the constant use of "kingdom of heaven," is the designation of God as "our heavenly Father," and of Jerusalem as "the holy city" and "the city of the Great King." In the fulness of the teaching of Christ he surpasses all except John. Nothing can be more solemn and impressive than his reports of those words of life and power, which will outlast heaven and earth (24:34). Sentence follows sentence with overwhelming force, like a succession of lightning flashes from the upper world.919 Patristic Notices of Matthew. The first Gospel was well known to the author of the "Didache of the Apostles," who wrote between 80 and 100, and made large use of it, especially the Sermon on the Mount.920 The next clear allusion to this Gospel is made in the Epistle of Barnabas, who quotes two passages from the Greek Matthew, one from 22:14: "Many are called, but few chosen," with the significant formula used only of inspired writings, "It is written."921 This shows clearly that early in the second century, if not before, it was an acknowledged authority in the church. The Gospel of John also indirectly presupposes, by its numerous emissions, the existence of all the Synoptical Gospels. The Hebrew Matthew. Next we hear of a Hebrew Matthew from Papias, bishop of Hierapolis, "a hearer of John and a companion of Polycarp."922 He collected from apostles and their disciples a variety of apostolic traditions in his "Exposition of Oracles of the Lord," in five books (logivwn kuriakw'n ejxhvghsi"¼. In a fragment of this lost work preserved by Eusebius, he says distinctly that "Matthew composed the oracles [of the Lord] in the Hebrew tongue, and everyone interpreted them as best he could."923

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Augustine’s narrative of his discovery of this god in the Confessions is artful in several ways, but probably in the main reliable, and even revealing. The sequence emerges if we look carefully at the way he reports the attraction Manicheism had for him and the way he sublimated it. The questions the Manichees pressed hardest and with best effect on the adolescent Augustine were these: Where does evil come from (in other words, is god good)? Does god have a body? How do we understand the seeming inconsistency between Jewish and Christian versions of divine justice (in other words, can god be just if he is so inconsistent)? The short answers to these questions were simple: god is good, god is spirit, god is just. Each of those answers raises problems.585 Finding those answers took Augustine to Milan. Ambrose’s sermons, with their emphasis on the Pauline distinction of letter and spirit as a means of interpreting the chasm that was thought to fall between the Jewish scriptures and the Christian ones, rescued god’s justice, but the issue resurfaced at the center of the Pelagian controversies.586 The first encounter with the books of the Platonists revealed to him a god who was not like the all-penetrating sea soaking into the sponge of material creation, but instead a spirit, although neither Augustine nor anyone else could ever explain what that might mean. The final stage in that revelation came on his second look at the Platonists. He was staggered to hear them teaching that evil did not exist at all. Everything is good and what is apparently evil is only a deficiency in the fullness of good. The moment was revelatory and inspiring, but it must be admitted that to make such a proposition requires significant adjustment in the ordinary meaning of the word “good.” For Augustine, the justice of this god was an adequate answer to those who were appalled by the stories of the Jewish patriarchs and their fleshly ways; the spiritual nature of this god offered a refutation of the “pagans”; and the goodness of this god and this god’s creation offered the decisive argument against the Manichees. We need to do Augustine the favor of allowing that the questions that long plagued him did indeed speak to the heart of his religious experience of the divine, and that when he had removed those obstacles, he found a way to a god who was not a phantasm but real and true. That doesn’t mean the original questions went away. His anti-Manichee answers to Manichee questions (such as their insistence on asking where evil came from) have the unintended effect of keeping them alive. When Augustine makes his most cherished assertions about his god, we need to hear that he is at the same time giving tacit voice to his deepest anxieties.

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

  IV. Effects of the Day of Pentecost. From Farrar’s Life and Work of St. Paul (I. 93): "That this first Pentecost marked an eternal moment in the destiny of mankind, no reader of history will surely deny. Undoubtedly in every age since then the sons of God have, to an extent unknown before, been taught by the Spirit of God. Undoubtedly since then, to an extent unrealized before, we may know that the Spirit of Christ dwelleth in us. Undoubtedly we may enjoy a nearer sense of union with God in Christ than was accorded to the saints of the Old Dispensation, and a thankful certainty that we see the days which kings and prophets desired to see and did not see them, and hear the truths which they desired to hear and did not hear them. And this New Dispensation began henceforth in all its fulness. It was no exclusive consecration to a separated priesthood, no isolated endowment of a narrow apostolate. It was the consecration of a whole church—its men, its women, its children—to be all of them ’a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people;’ it was an endowment, of which the full free offer was meant ultimately to be extended to all mankind. Each one of that hundred and twenty was not the exceptional recipient of a blessing and witness of a revelation, but the forerunner and representative of myriads more. And this miracle was not merely transient, but is continuously renewed. It is not a rushing sound and gleaming light, seen perhaps for a moment, but it is a living energy and an unceasing inspiration. It is not a visible symbol to a gathered handful of human souls in the upper room of a Jewish house, but a vivifying wind which shall henceforth breathe in all ages of the world’s history; a tide of light which is rolling, and shall roll, from shore to shore until the earth is fall of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea." § 25. The Church of Jerusalem and the Labors of Peter. Su; ei| Pevtro", kai; ejpi; tauvth/ pevtra/ oikodomhvsw mou th;n ejkklhsivan, kai; puvlai a{/dou ouj katiscuvsousin aujth'".—Matt. 16:18. Literature. I. Genuine sources: Acts 2 to 12; Gal. 2; and two Epistles of Peter. Comp. the Commentaries on Acts, and the Petrine Epistles.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  For the Confessions tells only part of the story, bringing its narrative up to the author’s thirty-third year. Thirty years after he wrote the Confessions, Augustine proceeded to bring the story up to date, in the book he called his Reconsiderations (Retractationes). Because it is, or seems to be, a book about books, and not about events, it is relegated to the status of a curiosity, but when written it was unquestionably a remarkable undertaking.613 It has been translated into English only once that I know of, thirty years ago, never issued in paperback, and is hardly ever read or studied. In the seventeenth century, at least, the Benedictine editors of Augustine had the sense to put the Confessions and the Reconsiderations side by side in the same first volume of their great edition of Augustine’s complete works—and, indeed, the Reconsiderations come first. I often wonder what readers would make of them if the two could be translated in the same volume. Most readers, I think, are distracted by the performance that the Reconsiderations represent. In it we hear the voice of Augustine again, speaking of himself and his life, looking back at all the books he has written since the time of his conversion. He lists those books, one at a time, and offers his “reconsiderations” of them, along with a brief description of the book and how it came to be. Augustine was working on this project in the evenings during his last years, at a time when we’ve already seen him spending his daylight hours attacking Julian of Eclanum over and over again. The performance is extraordinary: an elderly man going back through a library that holds five million words of his writings, hoping to review all of them: books, letters, sermons. The books alone add up to about three million words, and that is the part of the task he more or less completed. Given the physical demands of ancient reading—dealing with bulky, handwritten manuscripts—we must assume both an intense interest on Augustine’s part, not to say self-absorption, and a heroic memory for what he had said and where he had said it.614