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• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  176 noitidarT yloH—yxodohtrO nretsaE :42 erutceL In addition to movement, the liturgy makes dramatic use of o vision through the iconostasis—the half-wall adorned with icons—that distinguishes the sanctuary (the holiest area) from the nave (the place of the people). Ministers move in and out through the three doors. The arrangement of the icons on the wall itself has symbolic significance. • In the Orthodox liturgy, the “construction of the world” found in the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews and the book of Revelation finds dramatic expression. Just as the sanctuary and nave are separated yet linked by the o iconostasis, so is worship understood as a human (visible) participation in the (unseen) worship of God in heaven by the angels and saints. Worship is a glimpse of the “truth” of sanctified human existence: that it participates in the divine life. In distinctive chants such as the Trisagion—“Holy God, Holy o Strong One, Holy immortal One, Have Mercy on Us!”— accompanied by bows and ritual gestures, we find a genuine expression of “the numinous” in religion. The Role of Monasticism in Orthodoxy • Another distinctive characteristic of Orthodoxy is the critical role played by monasticism. We have already traced the origins of this distinctive manifestation of Christianity and will shortly consider its importance in the West. But in Orthodoxy above all, monasticism occupies a central place. • Because ordinary clergy (priests) are not required to be celibate, their lives are closer to those of the laity; they are expected to exercise pastoral and liturgical roles but not roles of intellectual leadership. This role falls to monks. In the East, monasticism takes three forms: fully coenobitic (life o completely together), semi-eremitical (monks live separately but share much of their liturgical lives), and eremitical (life alone). All monks are pledged to the “angelic life,” meaning that they o make vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience. Their life apart enables them to cultivate both scholarship and a life of prayer in a manner unavailable to the local clergy caught up in family and pastoral concerns. Because ordination to bishop or patriarch requires celibacy, o for the most part, leaders are drawn from the ranks of monks; hence, the tradition carries a strongly monastic character: Virtually all the great theologians and spiritual writers of the Byzantine period were monks. • An impression of the popularity and prestige of monasticism can be gained from the splendor of certain important centers and from the sheer number of monastic sites in the Byzantine Empire. Among the most renowned monastic sites are Saint Catherine o on Mt. Sinai, founded by Justinian in the 6th century, and Mt. One of the most important manuscripts in the history of Christianity, dating to the 4th century, was discovered at the monastery of Saint Catherine in the late 19th century. 177 .kcotsknihT/otohpkcotSi ©

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  218 Lecture 30: Cathedrals and Chapters • Much like the earlier basilicas that were adapted from the Roman royal halls, the basic floor plan of medieval cathedrals was simple and allowed for many variations. o The front entrance (usually with multiple doors through a highly ornamented façade) gave access to the long rectangular nave (from navis, “ship”), where the people gathered. Gazing upward at the ceiling of such a cathedral gives the unmistakable sense of being in an upside-down ship. Thus, the architecture supports the allegorical reflections on the church as the ship of salvation. o The nave, in turn, leads to the apse or chancel, which was the area for the performance of the Mass—the sanctuary. Here was located the great chair of the bishop and the high altar; from the pulpit on the edge of the sanctuary, Scripture was read and sermons were preached. o The nave and the apse increasingly were separated, much in the manner of the iconostasis in the East, by the rood screen, on which was the representation of the Cross of Christ, as well as images of saints. o Perpendicular to the nave were the transepts, wings to the right and left that gave the cathedral its typical cruciform appearance. In the transepts were often ambos containing side altars; altars were found also in the crypts of cathedrals. • The Gothic cathedrals in particular display a range of plastic and decorative arts. o The stonemasonry attests to both exquisite craftsmanship and sophisticated engineering to raise edifices of stone to such great heights. o The famous rose windows and other forms of stained-glass windows often elaborated realistic representations of biblical scenes, creating a “Bible for the illiterate.” Every scene of Christ’s life was depicted in glorious color, together with rich

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  All streets of the City slope down between deepening canyons to a vast, kidney-shaped plaza full of darkness. Walls of street and plaza are perforated by dwelling cubicles and cafes, some a few feet deep, others extending out of sight in a network of rooms and corridors. At all levels criss-cross of bridges, cat walks, cable cars. Catatonic youths dressed as women in gowns of burlap and rotten rags, faces heavily and crudely painted in bright colors over a strata of beatings, arabesques of broken, suppurating scars to the pearly bone, push against the passer-by in silent clinging insistence. Traffickers in the Black Meat, flesh of the giant aquatic black centipede -- sometimes attaining a length of six feet -- found in a lane of black rocks and iridescent, brown lagoons, exhibit paralyzed crustaceans in camouflage pockets of the Plaza visible only to the Meat Eaters. Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades, doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, black marketeers of World War III, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, officials of unconstituted police states, brokers of exquisite dreams and nostalgias tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, drinkers of the Heavy Fluid sealed in translucent amber of dreams. The Meet Cafe occupies one side of the Plaza, a maze of kitchens, restaurants, sleeping cubicles, perilous iron balconies and basements opening into the underground baths. On stools covered in white satin sit naked Mugwumps sucking translucent, colored syrups through alabaster straws. Mugwumps have no liver and nourish themselves exclusively on sweets. Thin, purple-blue lips cover a razor-sharp beak of black bone with which they frequently tear each other to shreds in fights over clients. These creatures secrete an addicting fluid from their erect penises which prolongs life by slowing metabolism. (In fact all longevity agents have proved addicting in exact ratio to their effectiveness in prolonging life.) Addicts of Mugwump fluid are known as Reptiles. A number of these flow over chairs with their flexible bones and black-pink flesh. A fan of green cartilage covered with hollow, erectile hairs through which the Reptiles absorb the fluid sprouts from behind each ear. The fans, which move from time to time touched by invisible currents, serve also same form of communication known only to Reptiles. During the biennial Panics when the raw, pealed Dream Police storm the City, the Mugwumps take refuge in the deepest crevices of the wall sealing themselves in clay cubicles and remain for weeks in biostasis.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  Extreme Christianity in the 2nd and 3rd Centuries Lecture 9 Some Christians in the age of persecution willingly accepted martyrdom as a witness to Christ and their hope in the resurrection from the dead. Others composed apologetic literature, seeking a place in the intellectual world of the empire. But there were other manifestations of the Christian religion in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, even those that can be considered extreme. The deeply experiential character of this religion manifested itself especially in phenomena that, at the same time, resembled aspects of Greco-Roman religion and appeared to threaten good order within Christianity. None of these manifestations truly represented Christianity’s future, but none of them was ever totally suppressed, and each recurred in different forms through the centuries. The Visible Working of Divine Power • One manifestation of Christianity is this period was a distinctive religious sensibility that extended and amplified an element found in the New Testament Gospels and Acts: an emphasis on wonder-working and the working of divine power in visible ways. This was expressed in a variety of new gospel narratives and acts of apostles. • The infancy gospels of James and Thomas focus exclusively on the birth and childhood of The infancy gospel of James Jesus. They place an emphasis on depicts the birth of Jesus as wonder-working and the physical miraculous, almost as if the less human Jesus is, the more divine purity of the body. we can assume him to be. 61 .kcotsknihT/moc.kcotSelbA/seigolonhceT aremeH ©

• From The Girls (2016)

  Mitch poured us drinks while Suzanne opened his refrigerator. Humming a little song as she peered at the shelves. Making noises of approval or disapproval, lifting tinfoil off a bowl to sniff at something. I was in awe of her at moments like that. How boldly she acted in the world, in someone else’s house, and I watched our reflections wavering in the black windows, our hair loose on our shoulders. Here I was, in this famous man’s kitchen. The man whose music I’d heard on the radio. The bay out the door, shining like patent leather. And how glad I was to be there with Suzanne, who seemed to call these things into being. —Mitch had a meeting with Russell earlier that afternoon—I remember noticing it was strange that Mitch had been late for it. Two o’clock had passed, and we were still waiting for Mitch. I was silent, like they all were, the quiet between us expanding. A horsefly bit at my ankle. I didn’t want to shoo it away, conscious of Russell a few feet away, perched on his chair with his eyes closed. I could hear him humming under his breath. Russell had decided it would be best for Mitch to come upon him sitting there, his girls surrounding him, Guy at his side, the troubadour with his audience. He was ready to perform, guitar laid across his knees. His bare foot jiggling. There was something in the way Russell was fingering the guitar, pressing silently on the strings—he was nervous in a way I didn’t know how to decipher yet. Russell didn’t look up when Helen started whispering to Donna, just a low whisper. Something about Mitch, probably, or some stupid thing Guy had said, but when Helen kept talking, Russell got to his feet. He took a moment to lay the guitar against his chair, pausing to make certain it was stable, then walked over swiftly and slapped Helen in the face. She gave an involuntary yip, a strange burble of sound. Her wide-eyed hurt draining quickly into apology, blinking fast so the tears wouldn’t fall. It was the first time I had ever seen Russell react that way, the cut of anger aimed at one of us. He couldn’t have hit her—the stupid blare of sun made that impossible, the hour of afternoon. The idea was too ludicrous. I looked around for confirmation of the frightening breach, but everyone was staring pointedly away or had arranged their faces into disapproving masks, like Helen had brought this on herself. Guy scratched behind an ear, sighing. Even Suzanne seemed bored by what had happened, like it was no different from a handshake. The vinegar in my throat, my sudden, despairing shock, seemed like a failing. And soon enough, Russell was petting Helen’s hair, tightening her lopsided pigtails. Whispering something in her ear that made her smile and nod, like a goopy-eyed baby doll.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up Harmaline, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang-utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war.... A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum... Larval entities waiting for a Live One... (Section describing The City and the Meet Cafe written in state of Yage intoxication... Yage, Ayuahuasca, Pilde, Nateema are Indian names for Bannisteria Caapi, a fast growing vine indigenous to the Amazon region. See discussion of Yage in Appendix.) Notes from Yage state : Images fall slow and silent like snow.... Serenity... All defenses fall... everything is free to enter or to go out.... Fear is simply impossible.... A beautiful blue substance flows into me.... I see an archaic grinning face like South Pacific mask.... The face is blue purple splotched with gold.... The room takes on aspect of Near East whorehouse with blue walls and red tasseled lamps.... I feel myself turning into a Negress, the black color silently invading my flesh.... Convulsions of lust... My legs take on a well rounded Polynesian substance.... Everything stirs with a writhing furtive life.... The room is Near East, Negro, South Pacific, in some familiar place I cannot locate.... Yage is space-time travel.... The room seems to shake and vibrate with motion....

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  109 practice are clear, and the practice worried such teachers as Saint Augustine. o Just as pilgrimages were made in Greco-Roman religion to prophetic and healing shrines—people of all social classes went to hear the oracles given by Apollo at Delphi, and thousands traveled to seek healing at the shrines dedicated to Asclepius—so did Christians make pilgrimage to the holy men and women in the desert to experience direct contact with power. o More elaborate pilgrimages were also made to the Holy Land, the location of the biblical story and, therefore, considered to be particularly filled with power. For example, Helen, the mother of Constantine, traveled to Jerusalem and discovered the relic of the Holy Cross; Constantine built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the supposed site of Jesus’s burial. The Sanctification of Time • Christianity also extended its cultural influence through the sanctification of time. The life of individual Christians was marked at each stage by rituals that came to be called sacraments. o The most ancient of these rituals are connected to entry into the community: baptism, confirmation, and the Eucharist. When children are baptized at birth, these rituals are separated in time and become marks of growth (confirmation = “maturity”). Constantine built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the supposed site of Jesus’s burial in Jerusalem; to this day, it is a place to which Christians continue to make pilgrimages. © iStockphoto/Thinkstock.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  179 confessor to the Orthodox faith. His spiritual writings combine theological rigor and profound piety. o John Climacus (579–649) was abbot of the monastery at Saint Catherine, whose name derives from his writing, The Ladder of Divine Ascent (klimachos = “of ascent”). He describes 30 steps of discipleship, the final 4 of which introduce the “stillness/ quietness” (hesychia) that gives the tradition its name: The highest form of prayer is silent and involves “breathing” the name of Jesus. His work was most widely read by other monks. • The tradition continued in two other influential monastic writers centuries later. o Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022) left the imperial service to become a monk and then abbot at the monastery of Saint Mamas; in such works as the Catecheses, his vivid writing on the vision of the divine light, on Christ, and on the Eucharist earned his title, making him the equal of the great Gregory of Nazianzus. o Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) provided an argument for hesychasm against the philosopher Barlaam: It is not rational argument but mystical experience that leads to the truth of God, and this experience is possible because of the divine- human connection established by the Incarnation and theosis. In The Triads, Gregory elaborates more fully the techniques of hesychasm, especially the role of the body and the control of breathing. • The practice of hesychasm passed also into Slavic Orthodoxy and continues to be practiced within the monastic tradition. Ware, The Orthodox Church. Wells, Sailing from Byzantium. Suggested Reading 180 Lecture 24: Eastern Orthodoxy—Holy Tradition 1. Consider the Orthodox tradition in light of the assertion that it did not experience, as did the West, the Reformation or Enlightenment, which gave rise to critical thought concerning religion. 2. How does Orthodox liturgy and mysticism, each in its own fashion, give expression to a coherent vision of reality as suffused with the divine presence? Questions to Consider

• From The Girls (2016)

  I remembered the helpless panic I’d sometimes felt when babysitting, a realization that this child did not belong to me and was beyond my reach; but even Roos seemed paralyzed with the same worry. Like she was waiting for Nico’s real mother to come home and fix everything. Nico was getting pink with effort, his skull knocking on the floor. Yelling until he heard the footsteps on the porch—it was Russell, and I saw everyone’s faces condense with new life. “What’s this?” Russell said. He was wearing one of Mitch’s cast-off shirts, big bloody roses embroidered along the yoke. He was barefoot, wet all over from the rain. “Ask Roos,” Helen chirped. “It’s her kid.” Roos muttered something, her words going wild at the end, but Russell didn’t respond on her level. His voice was calm, seeming to draw a circle around the crying child, the flustered mother. “Relax,” Russell intoned. He wouldn’t let anyone’s upset in, the jitter in the room deflected by his gaze. Even Nico looked wary in Russell’s presence, his tantrum taking on a hollow cast, like he was an understudy for himself. “Little man,” Russell said, “come on up here and talk to me.” Nico glared at his mother, but his eyes were drawn, helpless, to Russell. Nico pushed out his fat bottom lip, calculating. Russell stayed standing in the doorway, not bending down eager and wet toothed like some grown-ups did with kids, and Nico was mostly quiet, settling into a whimper. Darting another look between his mother and Russell before finally scurrying over to Russell and letting himself be picked up. “There’s the little man,” Russell said, Nico’s arms clinging tight around his neck, and I remember how strange it was to see Russell’s face change as he talked to the boy. His features mutable, turning antic and foolish, like a jester’s, though his voice stayed calm. He could do that. Change himself to fit the person, like water taking on the shape of whatever vessel it was poured into. He could be all these things at once: The man who crooked his fingers in me. The man who got everything free. The man who sometimes fucked Suzanne hard and sometimes fucked her gently. The man who whispered to the little boy, his voice grazing his ear. I couldn’t hear what Russell said, but Nico swallowed his crying. His face was thrilled and wet: he seemed happy just to be in someone’s arms. —Helen’s eleven-year-old cousin Caroline ran away from home and stayed for a while. She’d been living in the Haight, but there had been a police crackdown: she’d hitched to the ranch with a cowhide wallet and a ratty fox fur coat she petted with skittish affection, like she didn’t want anyone to see how much she loved it. The ranch wasn’t that far from San Francisco, but we didn’t go there very often.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  242 Lecture 33: Universities and Theology doctorate in Paris and became a master there in 1305 before his life ended in Cologne. o Dying even younger than Thomas (at 42), his main work is his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, as well as a set of commentaries on the Greek philosophers Aristotle and Porphyry. o Scotus, known as the “Subtle Doctor,” sought a middle ground between Aristotelianism and Augustinian thought, distinguishing himself from Thomas in a number of important ways. Overall, he placed more emphasis on the human will and its freedom than he did on the intellect. o Scotus placed particular emphasis on the Incarnation of Christ, arguing that it would have happened even if humans had fallen into sin. His thought was influential particularly within the Franciscan order. The Divine Comedy • The suffusion of Christian theology in all the arts is illustrated brilliantly by the magnificent poem The Divine Comedy, written by Dante Alighieri (1265–1321); its three parts (the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso) encompassed the entire medieval worldview. • Inspired by a Florentine woman (his “Beatrice”), Dante dedicated to her “a poem such as had been written for no lady before” and spent the years from her death in 1290 to his own in 1321 in the completion of his masterpiece. Born in Florence, Dante sided with antipapal forces within Italy and then with Emperor Henry VII, and his opposition to the papacy led to several exiles from his native city. © iStockphoto/Thinkstock. 243 o The poem is an impressive fusion of classical and Christian cultures; both the descent to the underworld and the ascent to heaven are classical themes, but Dante combines them with the distinctive Christian understanding of purgatory as the place of postmortem purification. o Combining political commentary and religious pathos in a structure as impressive as Thomas’s Summa, Dante imagines a world in which human freedom and divine love intertwine in a drama that extends from the coldness of alienation from the divine to the ecstatic bliss of the vision of God. o As much as Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, Dante’s poetry reveals the essence of the High Middle Ages in its synthesis of unity and beauty, of classical and Christian themes, and in the organization of all reality as a movement toward God. Evans, ed., The Medieval Theologians. Wei, Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris. 1. Compare and contrast the spirit and structure of the medieval and contemporary universities. 2. How did Scholastic theology provide an overarching view of reality that made sense of all other learning? Questions to Consider Suggested Reading

• From The Girls (2016)

  Title : The Girls Author: Cline, Emma ASIN : B015LYZH20 [image file=Image00001.jpg] [image "The Girls A Novel Emma Cline Random House New York" file=FONT00010.otf] The Girls is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Copyright © 2016 by Emma Cline Excerpt from The Guest copyright © 2023 by Emma Cline All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. R ANDOM H OUSE and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Cline, Emma. The girls: a novel / Emma Cline. pages cm ISBN 978-0-8129-9860-3 ebook ISBN 978-0-8129-9861-0 1 Teenage girls—Fiction. 2. Communal living—California—Fiction. 3. Nineteen sixties—Fiction. 4. Counterculture—Fiction. I. Title. PS3603.L547G58 2015 813’.6—dc23 2015012714 Ebook ISBN 9780812998610 This book contains an excerpt from The Guest by Emma Cline. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition. randomhousebooks.com Book design by Liz Cosgrove, adapted for eBook Cover design and art: Peter Mendelsund ep_rh_4.1_142857084_c0_r2 ContentsCover Title Page Copyright Prologue Part One 1969 Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Part Two 1969 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Part Three 1969 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Part Four Acknowledgments By Emma Cline About the Author Excerpt from The Guest _142857084_ I LOOKED UP because of the laughter, and kept looking because of the girls. I noticed their hair first, long and uncombed. Then their jewelry catching the sun. The three of them were far enough away that I saw only the periphery of their features, but it didn’t matter—I knew they were different from everyone else in the park. Families milling in a vague line, waiting for sausages and burgers from the open grill. Women in checked blouses scooting into their boyfriends’ sides, kids tossing eucalyptus buttons at the feral-looking chickens that overran the strip. These long-haired girls seemed to glide above all that was happening around them, tragic and separate. Like royalty in exile. I studied the girls with a shameless, blatant gape: it didn’t seem possible that they might look over and notice me. My hamburger was forgotten in my lap, the breeze blowing in minnow stink from the river. It was an age when I’d immediately scan and rank other girls, keeping up a constant tally of how I fell short, and I saw right away that the black-haired one was the prettiest. I had expected this, even before I’d been able to make out their faces. There was a suggestion of otherworldliness hovering around her, a dirty smock dress barely covering her ass. She was flanked by a skinny redhead and an older girl, dressed with the same shabby afterthought.

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

  This was in 1113 that Bernard cast in his lot with the Cistercians, and the event proved to be an epoch in the history of that new community. His diet was bread and milk or a decoction of herbs.630 He devoted himself to the severest asceticism till he was reduced almost to a shadow, and his feet became so swollen from standing at devotions as almost to refuse to sustain his body. In after years, Bernard reproached himself for this intemperate self-mortification which unfitted his body for the proper service of the Lord. But his spirit triumphed over his physical infirmities.631 While he was engaged in work in the fields, it soared aloft to heavenly things. He studied the Scriptures and the Fathers. His writings betray acquaintance with the classics and he quotes Seneca, Ovid, Horace, and other classical writers. The works of nature also furnished him with lessons, and he seems to have approached the modern estimate of nature as an aid to spiritual attainment. "Thou wilt find," he wrote,632 "something greater in the woods than in books. The trees and rocks will teach thee what thou canst not hear from human teachers. And dost thou not think thou canst suck honey from the rocks and oil from the hardest stones!" This seems to lose its weight in view of what one of Bernard’s biographers relates. Bernard travelled the whole day alongside the Lake of Geneva, and was so oblivious to the scenery that in the evening, at Lausanne, he was obliged to inquire what they had seen on the journey. We are probably justified in this case in ascribing an ascetic purpose to the monkish writer.633 In 1115, in company with twelve companions, Bernard founded Clairvaux—Claravallis, Clear Valley—in a locality which before had been called Wormwood, and been the seat of robbers. William of St. Thierry, Bernard’s close friend and biographer, is in doubt whether the name vallis absinthialis came from the amount of wormwood which grew there or from the bitter sufferings sustained by the victims of the robbers.634 But he does not fail to draw the contrast between the acts of violence for which the place was once notorious, and the peace which reigned in it after Bernard and his companions set up their simple house. Then he says, "the hills began to distil sweetness, and fields, before sterile, blossomed and became fat under the divine benediction."635 In this new cloistral retreat Bernard preached, wrought miracles, wrote innumerable letters,636 received princes and high ecclesiastics. From there he went forth on errands of high import to his age. The convent soon had wide fame, and sent off many shoots.637 William of St. Thierry638 draws an attractive picture of Clairvaux, which at this long distance compels a feeling of rest. William says: —

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  I could descant in all candor on the glories of the worm, when I look at its iridescence, its perfect corporeal rotundity, its interaction of end with middle, middle with end, each contributing to a thrust toward oneness in this lowest of things, so that there is no part that does not answer to another part harmoniously. And what of the principle of life effervescing its melodious order through this body?—its rhythmic activation of the whole, its quest for that which serves its life, its triumph over or revulsion from what threatens it, its reference of all things to a normative center of self-preservation, bearing a witness more striking than the body’s to the creative unity that upholds all things in nature? (The True Religion 77) Late in life, Augustine could marvel at any created thing or faculty—even farting: “Some can produce at will odorless sounds from their breech, a kind of singing from the other end” (CG 14.24). His theological point is that men can gain greater control over their farts than over their erections, but the marveling runs through all Augustine’s thought on the body. In heaven, even the bowels will be beautiful, since we shall surpass the knowledge achieved by dissectors of dead bodies when we contemplate the translucent order of risen bodies (CG 22.24). Nor was the wonder only for bodies in heaven. This man who is said to have despised the body made his great break from tradition in rejecting such contempt for the body. As Brown says, late-antique thought was hierarchical in its assumptions, and the body comes at the low end of the spectrum of things. It was what one had to escape in order to climb the long spiritual path to Wisdom. It was the darkness out of which one must wrestle one’s way toward Light. It was the muddied lower end of a stream whose pure Fountain was far above it. By meditating on the fact that God became flesh in Jesus, Augustine turned that whole world upside-down. In a passage as packed with metaphysical “conceits” as any poem by Donne, Augustine preached the carnality of the Incarnation: Man’s maker was made man that He, Ruler of the stars, might nurse at His mother’s breast; that the Bread might hunger, the Fountain thirst, the Light sleep, the Way be tired on its journey; that Truth might be accused of false witnesses, the Teacher be beaten with whips, the Foundation be suspended on wood; that Strength might grow weak; that the Healer might be wounded; that Life might die. (S 191.1) Over and over Christ’s flesh is put before his audience. It is like the paste put on blind eyes to heal them. It is like the milk by which we had life mediated to us in our infancy.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Owing to that, the results are always the same for both sides.’ There are others who dispute Woland’s claim to the power of this world. They are absent or all but absent from The Master and Margarita. But the reality of the world seems to be at their disposal, to be shaped by them and to bear their imprint. Their names are Caesar and Stalin. Though absent in person, they are omnipresent. Their imposed will has become the measure of normality and self-evidence. In other words, the normality of this world is imposed terror. And, as the story of Pilate shows, this is by no means a twentieth-century phenomenon. Once terror is identified with the world, it becomes invisible. Bulgakov’s portrayal of Moscow under Stalin’s terror is remarkable precisely for its weightless, circus-like theatricality and lack of pathos. It is a substanceless reality, an empty suit writing at a desk. The citizens have adjusted to it and learned to play along as they always do. The mechanism of this forced adjustment is revealed in the chapter recounting ‘Nikanor Ivanovich’s Dream’, in which prison, denunciation and betrayal become yet another theatre with a kindly and helpful master of ceremonies. Berlioz, the comparatist, is the spokesman for this ‘normal’ state of affairs, which is what makes his conversation with Woland so interesting. In it he is confronted with another reality which he cannot recognize. He becomes ‘unexpectedly mortal’. In the story of Pilate, however, a moment of recognition does come. It occurs during Pilate’s conversation with Yeshua, when he sees the wandering philosopher’s head float off and in its place the toothless head of the aged Tiberius Caesar. This is the pivotal moment of the novel. Pilate breaks off his dialogue with Yeshua, he does not ‘go over’, and afterwards must sit like a stone for two thousand years waiting to continue their conversation. Parable cuts through the normality of this world only at moments. These moments are preceded by a sense of dread, or else by a presentiment of something good. The first variation is Berlioz’s meeting with Woland. The second is Pilate’s meeting with Yeshua. The third is the ‘self-baptism’ of the poet Ivan Homeless before he goes in pursuit of the mysterious stranger. The fourth is the meeting of the master and Margarita. These chance encounters have eternal consequences, depending on the response of the person, who must act without foreknowledge and then becomes the consequences of that action.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  story of a ziggurat. Once you have climbed the steps, at least four dozen in number and as closely set as they are steep, a venture not entirely without its dangers even for younger visitors, said Austerlitz, you are standing on an esplanade which positively overwhelms the eye, built of the same grooved wood as the steps, and extending over an area about the size of nine football pitches between the four corner towers of the library which thrust their way twenty-two floors up into the air. You might think, especially on days when the wind drives rain over this totally exposed platform, as it quite often does, said Austerlitz, that by some mistake you had found your way to the deck of the Berengaria or one of the other oceangoing giants, and you would be not in the least surprised if, to the sound of a wailing foghorn, the horizon of the city of Paris suddenly began rising and falling against the gauge of the towers as the great steamer pounded onwards through mountainous waves, or if one of the tiny figures, having unwisely ventured on deck, were swept over the rail by a gust of wind and carried far out into the wastes of the Atlantic waters. The four glazed towers themselves, named in a manner reminiscent of a futuristic novel La tour des lois, La tour des temps, La tour des nombres and La tour des lettres, make a positively Babylonian impression on anyone who looks up at their facades and wonders about the still largely empty space behind their closed blinds. When I first stood on the promenade deck of the new Bibliothéque Nationale, said Austerlitz, it took me a little while to find the place where the visitor is carried down on a conveyor belt to what appears to be a basement storey but, in reality, is the ground floor. This downwards journey, when you have just laboriously ascended to the plateau, struck me as an utter absurdity, something that must have been devised—I can think of no other explanation, said Austerlitz—on purpose to instil a sense of insecurity and humiliation in the poor readers, especially as it ends in front of a sliding door of makeshift appearance which had a chain across it on the day of my first visit, and where you have to let yourself be searched by semi-uniformed security men. The floor of the large hall which you then enter is laid with rust-red carpet, on which a few low seats are placed far apart, backless upholstered benches and small chairs like folding stools where visitors to the library can perch only in such a way that their knees are almost level with their heads, so that my first thought at the sight of them, said Austerlitz, was that the people whom I saw crouching so close to the ground, some by themselves and some in small groups, were members of a wandering tribe encamped here on their way through the Sahara or the Sinai desert in the last glow of the setting sun, in order to await the coming of darkness.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Hardly recognizable as Koroviev-Fagott, the self-appointed interpreter to the mysterious consultant who needed no interpreting, was he who now flew just beside Woland, to the right of the master’s friend. In place of him who had left Sparrow Hills in a ragged circus costume under the name of Koroviev-Fagott, there now rode, softly clinking the golden chains of the bridle, a dark-violet knight with a most gloomy and never-smiling face. He rested his chin on his chest, he did not look at the moon, he was not interested in the earth, he was thinking something of his own, flying beside Woland. ‘Why has he changed so?’ Margarita quietly asked Woland to the whistling of the wind. ‘This knight once made an unfortunate joke,’ replied Woland, turning his face with its quietly burning eye to Margarita. ‘The pun he thought up, in a discussion about light and darkness, was not altogether good. And after that the knight had to go on joking a bit more and longer than he supposed. But this is one of the nights when accounts are settled. The knight has paid up and closed his account.’ Night also tore off Behemoth’s fluffy tail, pulled off his fur and scattered it in tufts over the swamps. He who had been a cat, entertaining the prince of darkness, now turned out to be a slim youth, a demon-page, the best jester the world has ever seen. Now he, too, grew quiet and flew noiselessly, setting his young face towards the light that streamed from the moon. At the far side, the steel of his armour glittering, flew Azazello. The moon also changed his face. The absurd, ugly fang disappeared without a trace, and the albugo on his eye proved false. Azazello’s eyes were both the same, empty and black, and his face was white and cold. Now Azazello flew in his true form, as the demon of the waterless desert, the killer-demon. Margarita could not see herself, but she saw very well how the master had changed. His hair was now white in the moonlight and gathered behind in a braid, and it flew on the wind. When the wind blew the cloak away from the master’s legs, Margarita saw the stars of spurs on his jackboots, now going out, now lighting up. Like the demon-youth, the master flew with his eyes fixed on the moon, yet smiling to it, as to a close and beloved friend, and, from a habit acquired in room no. 118, murmuring something to himself.

• From The Girls (2016)

  It was nothing like the feast I’d been imagining. The distance made me feel a little sad. But it was only sad in the old world, I reminded myself, where people stayed cowed by the bitter medicine of their lives. Where money kept everyone slaves, where they buttoned their shirts up to the neck, strangling any love they had inside themselves. —How often I replayed this moment again and again, until it gained a meaningful pitch: when Suzanne nudged me so I knew the man walking toward the fire was Russell. My first thought was shock—he’d looked young as he approached, but then I saw he was at least a decade older than Suzanne. Maybe even as old as my mother. Dressed in dirty Wranglers and a buckskin shirt, though his feet were bare—how strange that was, how they all walked barefoot through the weeds and the dog shit as if nothing were there. A girl got to her knees beside him, touching his leg. It took me a moment to remember the girl’s name—my brain was sludgy from the drugs—but then I had it, Helen, the girl from the bus with her pigtails, her baby voice. Helen smiled up at him, enacting some ritual I didn’t understand. I knew Helen had sex with this man. Suzanne did, too. I experimented with that thought, imagining the man hunched over Suzanne’s milky body. Closing his hand on her breast. I knew only how to dream about boys like Peter, the unformed muscles under their skin, the patchy hair they tended along their jaws. Maybe I would sleep with Russell. I tried on the thought. Sex was still colored by the girls in my father’s magazines, everything glossy and dry. About beholding. The people at the ranch seemed beyond that, loving one another indiscriminately, with the purity and optimism of children. The man held up his hands and boomed out a greeting: the group surged and twitched like a Greek chorus. At moments like that, I could believe Russell was already famous. He seemed to swim through a denser atmosphere than the rest of us. He walked among the group, giving benedictions: a hand on a shoulder, a word whispered in an ear. The party was still going, but everyone was now aimed at him, their faces turned expectantly, as if following the arc of the sun. When Russell reached Suzanne and me, he stopped and looked in my eyes. “You’re here,” he said. Like he’d been waiting for me. Like I was late. —I’d never heard another voice like his—full and slow, never hesitating. His fingers pressed into my back in a not unpleasant way. He wasn’t much taller than me, but he was strong and compact, pressurized. The hair haloed around his head was coarsened by oil and dirt into a boggy mass. His eyes didn’t seem to water, or waver, or flick away. The way the girls had spoken of him finally made sense.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  176 Lecture 24: Eastern Orthodoxy—Holy Tradition o In addition to movement, the liturgy makes dramatic use of vision through the iconostasis—the half-wall adorned with icons—that distinguishes the sanctuary (the holiest area) from the nave (the place of the people). Ministers move in and out through the three doors. The arrangement of the icons on the wall itself has symbolic significance. • In the Orthodox liturgy, the “construction of the world” found in the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews and the book of Revelation finds dramatic expression. o Just as the sanctuary and nave are separated yet linked by the iconostasis, so is worship understood as a human (visible) participation in the (unseen) worship of God in heaven by the angels and saints. Worship is a glimpse of the “truth” of sanctified human existence: that it participates in the divine life. o In distinctive chants such as the Trisagion—“Holy God, Holy Strong One, Holy immortal One, Have Mercy on Us!”— accompanied by bows and ritual gestures, we find a genuine expression of “the numinous” in religion. The Role of Monasticism in Orthodoxy • Another distinctive characteristic of Orthodoxy is the critical role played by monasticism. We have already traced the origins of this distinctive manifestation of Christianity and will shortly consider its importance in the West. But in Orthodoxy above all, monasticism occupies a central place. • Because ordinary clergy (priests) are not required to be celibate, their lives are closer to those of the laity; they are expected to exercise pastoral and liturgical roles but not roles of intellectual leadership. This role falls to monks. o In the East, monasticism takes three forms: fully coenobitic (life completely together), semi-eremitical (monks live separately but share much of their liturgical lives), and eremitical (life alone). 177 o All monks are pledged to the “angelic life,” meaning that they make vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience. Their life apart enables them to cultivate both scholarship and a life of prayer in a manner unavailable to the local clergy caught up in family and pastoral concerns. o Because ordination to bishop or patriarch requires celibacy, for the most part, leaders are drawn from the ranks of monks; hence, the tradition carries a strongly monastic character: Virtually all the great theologians and spiritual writers of the Byzantine period were monks. • An impression of the popularity and prestige of monasticism can be gained from the splendor of certain important centers and from the sheer number of monastic sites in the Byzantine Empire. o Among the most renowned monastic sites are Saint Catherine on Mt. Sinai, founded by Justinian in the 6 th century, and Mt. One of the most important manuscripts in the history of Christianity, dating to the 4th century, was discovered at the monastery of Saint Catherine in the late 19th century. © iStockphoto/Thinkstock.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Margarita’s hair had long been standing up in a shock, and the whistling moonlight bathed her body. Seeing two rows of widespread lights merge into two unbroken fiery lines, seeing how quickly they vanished behind her, Margarita realized that she was flying at an enormous speed and was amazed that she was not out of breath. After a few seconds, a new glow of electric lights flared up far below in the earthly blackness and hurtled under the flying woman’s feet, but immediately spun away like a whirligig and fell into the earth. A few seconds later—exactly the same phenomenon. ‘Towns! Towns!’ cried Margarita. Two or three times after that she saw dully gleaming sabres lying in open black sheaths below her and realized that these were rivers. Turning her head up and to the left, the flying woman admired the way the moon madly raced back over her towards Moscow, and at the same time strangely stayed in its place, so that there could be clearly seen on it something mysterious, dark—a dragon, or a little humpbacked horse, its sharp muzzle turned to the abandoned city. Here the thought came to Margarita that, in fact, there was no need for her to drive her broom so furiously, that she was depriving herself of the opportunity of seeing anything properly, of revelling properly in her own flight. Something told her that she would be waited for in the place she was flying to, and that there was no need for her to become bored with this insane speed and height. Margarita turned the broom’s bristles forward, so that its tail rose up, and, slowing way down, headed right for the earth. This downward glide, as on an airy sled, gave her the greatest pleasure. The earth rose to meet her, and in its hitherto formless black density the charms and secrets of the earth on a moonlit night revealed themselves. The earth was coming to her, and Margarita was already enveloped in the scent of greening forests. Margarita was flying just above the mists of a dewy meadow, then over a pond. Under Margarita sang a chorus of frogs, and from somewhere far away, stirring her heart deeply for some reason, came the noise of a train. Soon Margarita saw it. It was crawling slowly along like a caterpillar, spraying sparks into the air. Going ahead of it, Margarita passed over yet another watery mirror, in which a second moon floated under her feet, dropped down lower still and went on, her feet nearly touching the tops of the huge pines. A heavy noise of ripping air came from behind and began to overtake Margarita. To this noise of something flying like a cannon ball a woman’s laughter was gradually added, audible for many miles around.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  That father, Patrick (Patricius), had “curial” rank—he was a decurion, a town councilor with tax-collecting duties, and not a Christian. Augustine calls him meager in his land holdings (tenuis, T 2.5), but that was the typical stance of his class. As the historian of the empire A. H. M. Jones writes: “We never hear of a contented decurion.” They were bound down to their land and their duties, and so were their heirs—Augustine escaped only by selling his inheritance when he became a bishop (L 126.7). Patrick’s vineyards were worked by slaves, and Augustine had a slave attendant (pedagogue) who took him to school (T 1.30). Augustine tells us practically nothing about himself before the age of eleven or twelve when he went to live with his pedagogue in a neighboring town with a secondary school. But we can find traces in his later writing of the bright-eyed and observant boy he must have been. The principal art form of Roman Africa was mosaic work—he mentions the rich mosaics owned by his own patron in Thagaste, Romanian. He would later think of order in the universe on the model of his hometown’s mosaics: If a person were to look at an intricate pavement so narrowly as to see only the single tesserae, he would say the artist, lacking a sense of composition, had set the little pieces at haphazard, since he could not take in at once the whole pattern, inlaid to form a single image of beauty (O 1.2). Even in his seventies, Augustine would still be thinking of divine order in terms of mosaics: “Order disposes all things, regular and irregular, in the places they fit” (CG 19.13). Augustine hated school and played truant to see games—the bear-baiting shows put on by Romanian, or the fighting cocks to be seen in a splendid mosaic found near Carthage. Though Augustine was later very critical of games in the arena, some blood-sports of his youth kept their hold on him. Even while he was preparing for baptism he could write: We saw gamecocks sharpening toward a scrap. We had to watch, for what horizon do eyes of love not scan, hoping for a hint of reason’s beautiful scheme, which checks and impels all things (whether they realize it or not), a scheme that makes its observer quick to respond whenever it beckons? It can flash its signals out of anything, in anything. In, for instance, these cocks: the thrust of their heads toward battle, their lifted crests, their darting attacks, skilled parries; pure animal action without mind, yet how apt, every move; for a higher mind works through them, ordering all things. At the last, the victor’s right: the exultant crowing, a body taut with pride of power. And the rites of defeat—limp wings, carriage and croak gone awry; all strangely fitting and, by their consonance with nature’s set way, beautiful. (O 1.25)