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 City of God

  230 Sacrifice and Ritual (Book 10) A s we’ve seen, Augustine’s major criticism of the Platonists in Books 8 and 9 is that they fail to conceive or realize that God can truly love the world and be intimately concerned with it, even unto the extent of immersing Godself into it in the form of Christ. The pathos of this insight, for Augustine, lies in how close the Platonists came to getting it all right. They understood the truly absolute nature of Divine transcendence, and the way that that transcendence explains what it means to call God truly Creator. With all their hard-won knowledge, all their genius, they missed the next, the most theoretically improbable step—the realization that this Divinity is marked not only by absolute transcendence but also by an equally absolute selfless love. Once we’ve realized this, Augustine thinks, we can go on to ask the next question, which is simple. If God loves us as much as this, then what are we to do in return? Clearly there can be no payback for God’s love—it’s unilateral and immeasurable. It produces in us a kind of infinite obligation, to be sure, but what sort of obligation? And how can an infinite obligation be met? Once we know who God is, and how God is in touch with us, what then? What should we do? For Platonists, our service of the gods is embodied in a practice of effective theurgy. We talked about this phrase, this term, last time. Theurgy is the use of various devices—rituals and incantations, strategies of appeal and inducement—to get immaterial beings to do what you want them to do. And again, as we’ve already seen, the need for theurgy turns on the Platonists’ belief that we need some mediator to get access to God. This assumes several things. First of all, it assumes God is very distant, so we must purge ourselves to get to this God. Second, it assumes that insofar as God is in Lecture 11 Transcript

• From The City of God

  397 Lecture 19—Happiness and Politics (Book 19) The problem then becomes how we should use our agency to seek peace. „Christians should seek their happiness in hope and use their agency to fulfill their duties of care for the world. To do this for the earthly city requires divine direction and guidance. Thus true virtue works in the earthly city by using the goods and ills of this life to achieve its ends, which are various kinds of peace, from domestic peace to the civic peace of the city. Political Morality and Justice „In explicitly political terms, citizens of the heavenly city should care for the earthly city’s sustenance, at least with regard to their common interest in peace and order. The issue is how exactly Christians should coordinate their efforts on pilgrimage toward the city of God to seek the peace of the earthly city. „Our proper expectations for political life should be minimal; this minimum of expectation allows Christians to participate in worldly political life, with one crucial provision: that the temporal authorities not impede the religion. All the externals of life are unimportant if the Christian churches can obey the law of Christ. „While the agents of the earthly city work desperately, though futilely, to secure an ultimate peace, the citizens of the heavenly city can work alongside them as long as they understand their hopes cannot rest in this world; they must seek true peace using temporal things and reside in this world as in captivity. „This minimalist vision of what politics can accomplish rests on the conviction that the realm of human politics is in an important and inescapable way, tragic. That is, in this sin-riddled world, individuals and groups will find their political hopes and expectations vexed by the very conditions that give rise to the need for politics.

• From The City of God

  376 Books That Matter: The City of God ›The sheer events of Jonah’s life: being called to Nineveh, flight from that calling, discovery that he cannot flee from God, preaching, Nineveh’s repentance, and Jonah’s petulant response to God’s mercy. ›The ever-present, indeed relentless, mercy of God—first to Jonah, then to the whole city of Nineveh, then to Jonah again. ›The way he was taken up by God in a larger plan than he ever had for himself and used as a prominent tool of God’s providential governance of the world. „In this way Jonah prefigures Christ, who is the preeminent and perfect example of God using Creation to govern creation. Christ’s human nature is prefigured by Jonah’s acts even as Christ’s divine nature is prefigured by God’s use of Jonah. Jonah’s just a character in this story—not the main actor at all. „Augustine lived in a civilization of utter continuity that venerated age in a way that we do not. In such a setting, a tradition like Christianity, whose oldest relative was the primitive desert tribe of the Israelites, was suspect. ›So Augustine sets out to show that the prophets actually predate the pagan philosophers, and while the prophets in turn are not as old as the Greek theological poets, those poets are in turn less ancient than Moses. ›Thus the wisdom of the city of God is more ancient than that of the earthly city, though Augustine According to Augustine, the people of Israel refused the promise of God and so now are outside the salvation history that continued from ancient Israel through Jesus Christ into the church.

• From The City of God

  281 Lecture 13 Transcript—Metaphysics of Creation and Evil (Book 11) of a things’ goodness, but far more causative than that—so that our goodness itself springs from God’s eternal and sovereign knowledge and will. God’s seeing makes it so. Here Augustine begins his distinctively Christian metaphysics of creation. Against other ancient thinkers, pagan and Christian alike, Augustine insists on the true transcendence of God, the true contingency of the world. Creation and God do not share a common context. God does not share any of the conditions that delimit creation. God is unchanging, eternal, and simple, which in this context means completely and utterly singular and unified, so that God never does anything with mixed motives or half-heartedly or with any ambivalence or partiality. So he tells his audience, do not try to think about something called pre-creation; no time existed before the world; time is part of creation itself; and indeed from God’s eternal and transcendent perspective all times are simultaneous, copresent to the divine. Thus for God, as we saw earlier in talking about Book 5, there is no foreknowledge; God's knowledge of every instant is eternal and entirely and instantaneously immediate to God for all instances of temporally-extended reality. Furthermore, creation’s temporality means several important things. First of all, it means that in time we are never wholly ourselves—there is always part of us in the past, and part of us in the future, and so we experience ourselves as mutable and indeed fragmented. Secondly, since creation is temporal, history’s very formation across time is what constitutes it; its meaning is carried in and by its contingency, and every event of history is a revelation of part of the true essence of history. Nothing, absolutely nothing in history, in world history or in your own personal history, is somehow irrelative or beside the point to your true self. Everything matters, and this is a point we'll return to repeatedly. So far, so splendid. But the highlighting of God’s transcendence, God’s effortless sovereignty over creation, might make the absurd

• From The City of God

  299 Lecture 14 Transcript—Fall of the Rebel Angels (Book 12) and philosophies who had very careful and well thought-through arguments explaining why the corrupt material reality all around them was either antithetical to true divine goodness or fundamentally severed from it, and yet Augustine expressly and repeatedly critiqued and rejected those positions. This is not an anti-materialist thinker. Indeed, he does some amazing metaphysical gymnastics to avoid siding with people like the Manicheans in any way on these matters most of all. So while Augustine is reputed to be a doom-and-gloom thinker, emphasizing sin and apocalypse in the created world, in fact, his basic vision of creation is a profoundly, fundamentally positive one. And he elaborated it in a time where such hopefulness was not as easily proclaimed as perhaps it is in our own time, and against others, within the church and without it, whose visions of the cosmos were far more sinister than his own. Thus it was, in very many ways, radically counter-cultural for its time, and perhaps even for our own. Once we’ve understood the metaphysical preconditions for the possibility of evil, Augustine says, we can turn to the existential and agential character of the evil agent. We move, that is, from the ontology of evil to the psychology of evil. Here we ask, who is the devil? What is the devil like? Augustine goes through a series of scriptural texts which he and the tradition he inherits take to be especially important for establishing the truth about the devil. Two, in particular, are important. First, the text from John, “The Devil did not stand fast in the truth since there is no truth in him.” Second, the text from the First Epistle of John, “The devil sins from the beginning.” Let’s look at these in turn, not so much for what they say about the devil, but for what they say about the nature of evil agency itself. The idea that the devil did not stand fast in the truth means, for Augustine, that wickedness is not natural. As he says, and this is a quote of his, “The choice of evil is an impressive proof that the nature is good,” since the chooser must choose evil not against a blank

• From The City of God

  453 Lecture 21 Transcript—Augustine’s Vision of Hell (Book 21) What’s more amazing—and harder to understand—is that Hell, as a place, like all else in Creation, for Augustine, is in itself good. This is a consequence of his metaphysics of creation for Augustine, and he knew this was a consequence as far back as Book 12 because there he said, and this is a quote from him, “Even the nature of the eternal fire is without doubt worthy of praise, even though it will be the punishment of the ungodly when they are damned.” Augustine’s metaphysics make it impossible for something to be truly evil, for something’s bare existence to be in itself evil. Evil is only the privation of being in goodness. But, we can reasonably ask, what beyond merely lexical gymnastics divorced from any real grasp of the horrors they communicate can we make of this claim? Can we give this claim any sense at all that Hell would be in itself good? It would be hard to say something briefly about this, except to say the following, Hell can be good in two ways. First of all, it is an instrument of justice, whereby those who are wicked get what they deserve. Now, deserve here is not simply punitive, it is ontological, Hell is the appropriate place for the wicked to be. After all, they wouldn’t want to be in Heaven. They spent their entire existence desiring to be apart from God. Do you think Heaven would be a nicer place for them? In fact, their whole problem is just that Heaven is where they do not want to go, for that would be to acknowledge God’s sovereignty. So they must go elsewhere. But Hell is also an instrument of mercy, and of God’s love, whereby those who are wicked, and who in their wickedness desire to harm God by destroying God’s most basic gift to themselves—namely, their own beings—are protected against the consummation of their own tragically misguided intentions. Say what you will, Augustine thinks, but the condition of being in Hell is better than not being at all. Indeed, it might be easiest for us today to imagine Hell intelligibly in Augustinian terms—if we dare to do that, and I’m not sure all of us will dare to do that or want to do it—not most basically in terms of fire, but as most essentially the condition of being in God’s

• From The City of God

  461 Lecture 22—Heaven: The Self Redeemed (Book 22) wounds of time will not be erased, but will be made of positive value for us and for the world. History will matter in the eschaton, so its marks must have some purchase on humans even after the resurrection of the body. „This intuition is confirmed, for Augustine, in the wounds of the martyrs. We know bodies will retain their natural characteristics; some of the infirmities of age will be reversed. But other injuries will not be so easily effaced. „The wounds of the martyrs who died for the faith will remain. A beauty will shine out from those wounds, though the glory will not be directly of those wounds. The defects will not be there, but the proof of their valor will be. „Christ’s resurrected body has gone through death and transfiguration and is not undone. Christ’s resurrection completes and transfigures Christ’s death; it is not an undoing of it. History is singular and permanent, though we do not know its full meaning at present. “Death and resurrection” are thus part of the meaning of history and the role of creation in the economy of God. „In heaven, the blessed will know evil in this way—what they have directly suffered, and what evil still persists. By extrapolation from what they know of God’s goodness and justice, they will recollect both their past misery and the eternal suffering of the damned. The Vision of God „All the above is about how the redeemed life will relate to earlier and other forms of existence. Yet Augustine expressly attends to two additional features: the nature of human vision and the character of the redeemed human will. These two features together collect the two most fundamental features of our existence as creatures—how we know and how we act.

• From The City of God

  301 Lecture 14 Transcript—Fall of the Rebel Angels (Book 12) there is nothing left in the rebellious soul that is innocent, no oasis of purity in the good intentions of the heart, the right thinking of the mind. Furthermore, once begun, it will never stop by itself. The devil that is. Indeed all wicked agents, are petulantly stubborn. Just consider people in your own life, when you consider the power of humans to do bad, even to harm themselves, and to keep at that self-harming, you have to be amazed. So, even as we condemn the twisted will, we ought still to be impressed at the sheer persistence of malevolence. Once, in fact, reflecting on a close friend who had a certain capacity for picking apart almost anyone else’s happiness and leaving it in shards on the floor, my mother said to me in a moment of brilliance, “It must be exhausting to be him.” That’s kind of what Augustine is saying, it must be exhausting to be the devil, to be a sinner. And yet, Augustine says, here we are. Given all this, what can we understand of the nature of evil agency? Evil is, in Augustinian terms, a determination of use, not a substance; it is a mode of using otherwise good realities. A rock can be a beautiful thing, and it has lessons for us about natural history and sometimes the very origins of our planet. It can be used to build a house or a playground bench or a garden path. It can be used in a game or for a child’s toy. But when it is used to smash in the heads of small children, it has become an instrument of evil. But its instrumentality in that situation does not speak to the rock’s fundamental goodness. Great ingenuity and aesthetic sensibility can be invested in creating the most hideously cruel devices, and of course, cruelty can eventuate in the most beautiful of creations. The evil does not necessarily infect the creation, even though we need to know the whole history of our pasts, to understand who we are and where we come from and to what or whom we owe our thanks. What is key is the use to which, again, we put the creation. Again, against what he takes to be Origen’s argument, that selfhood itself— otherness from God—is the metaphysically sufficient reality that

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

  The friend knew the arts of pharmacy, and the two young women boiled the beard until it dissolved. Then they skimmed off the purple scum and buried it, and they purified and distilled the barbaric essence, mixing it with the liqueurs of fennel and saps of wild spinach, making of this mixture an uncommonly powerful aphrodisiac. The two women fled to Paris and grew wealthy selling Prince Bohu’s beardwater, under the name Gouttelettes de Bonheur, or Droplets of Happiness. Even much diluted, the liquid had a startling effect on anyone, male or female, who tasted it. The prince, meanwhile, took the loss of his beard as a warning. He ended his dalliance with Uniques and built a large hospital so that his wife wouldn’t go away on Thursdays. Seventeen of his penis sandals are on view in the museum of the House of Holes. Rhumpa Makes Her Come Video Rhumpa emerged from her shower in a hotel bathrobe, with her hair in a towel turban. Daggett had arranged fourteen bras on the bed, sorted neatly by color. “These are all roughly your size, I believe,” he said primly. She looked at them with a secret smile. “They’re all very nice,” she said. “Does one in particular call out?” She shook her head no. “Well then,” he said, “there’s only one way to make the right selection.” Daggett drew from the bag a large piece of patterned silk. “This is the Silken Flesh Communicator,” he said. “If you allow me to place this over your naked breasts, it will help me determine which of these bras is ideal for you.” Gently holding Rhumpa’s shoulders, he had her stand facing away from him. “Open your robe,” he said. “Wait! Good. I just had to check that I couldn’t see you in any mirror. Now open your robe. Let it fall open.” Rhumpa did as he asked. “Thank you. Now I am going to gently unfurl the Silken Flesh Communicator and draw it back against your breasts so that it surrounds them and cools them and makes them feel exactly the way your breasts most want to feel. Are your breasts ready for the silken touch of the communicator?” Rhumpa looked down at them. She smoothed her hand over them and jostled them a few times. The nipples had tightened and were pointing off, as they did. “Yes, they seem to be quite ready,” she said. “Unusually jiggly today, in fact.” Daggett made a small whimper and gently flung the piece of transparent silk over her head so that it fell in a U in front of her. Very slowly he pulled it back, so that the folds opened. She watched her breasts fill them. He held the ends of the fabric with a light touch, not drawing it too tight. He paused. “There,” he said. “I can feel them resisting my pull.” “Mm,” she said.

• From The City of God

  469 Lecture 22 Transcript—Heaven: The Self Redeemed (Book 22) bodies will not be erased. Curly hair or no hair, eye color, face shapes, everything truly part of our bodies will be retained and transfigured. Even sex is not a problem. Women will be raised as women and men as men. Women’s sexual form is not a defect—some Christians thought that—but Augustine says it is natural as the man’s, and both are appropriate for the symmetry of aesthetic oppositions and the symbolic power of the way that male and female differentiation for Augustine, symbolizes Christ and the church. Now, there will be no sexual intercourse in heaven, for its essential purpose—that of reproduction—Augustine thinks is accomplished, but our manifold desires for intimacy and connection, desires that sex has served in history, those desires will still be real and still be met in the Kingdom, with God, and with our fellow humans, in far more profound ways than we could imagine now. Recall, he insists that people dislike not the body, but the body’s corruption, and that there are still many goods in this life—especially propagation and the conformation of body to body—which speak to the blessings that bodies are meant to convey. Furthermore, he says, even in this life, there is something miraculous and wondrous in the joining of immaterial soul and material body. He says, the amazing thing about our physical world is that it is intelligible, that brute physical matter has been made a fit home for divine meaning, the wet, sticky, bloody mass of meat that we are, this skin-bag of guts and gristle and brittle bone, this has been deemed a fit home for a soul and even for the absolute, Christ. How astonishing is that? Augustine says. And yet we know it must be true, since of the physical Incarnation of Jesus. Since Augustine says, Jesus was truly God enfleshed, and not just an especially convincing spiritual hologram that we see; we can recognize that at the end of time, this material world will be transfigured as worthy of bearing glorious and immortal permanence, and be seen as bearing God’s own impress. Now, as we’ve said repeatedly, this vision of materiality was by no means a universal opinion in Augustine’s age. Many non-Christians were quite clear that however it worked out, we would be saved from

• From The City of God

  459 Lecture 22—Heaven: The Self Redeemed (Book 22) in this life and that serves as a promise of what their true life in the world to come will be. „Augustine discusses three big topics in this book: the resurrection of the body and the significance of history, his vision of God that will occupy the blessed in the life to come, and his reflections on the nature of human agency in heaven, and in particular on the four stages of freedom humans experience over the course of history. Resurrection of the Body „At the end of time, all will be resurrected into bodies. The bodies will be flesh, but they will be spiritual flesh. Furthermore, this embodiment will be historical. We are our histories, and we are our bodies, and our eschatological happiness must be related to our past, which is not entirely happy. „Thus the details of our bodies will not be erased. Curly hair, eye color, face shapes, everything truly part of our bodies will be retained and transfigured. Even sex is not a problem. There will be no sexual intercourse in heaven, for its essential purpose of reproduction is accomplished; but our desires for intimacy and connection that sex served in history will be met in the kingdom in far more profound ways. „Even in this life, something miraculous and wondrous exists in the joining of immaterial soul and material body. The amazing thing is that our physical world is intelligible, that physical matter has been made a fit home for divine meaning. And yet we know it must be true, because of the physical Incarnation of Jesus. Because Jesus was truly God made flesh, we see that at the end of time, this material world will be transfigured as worthy of bearing glorious and immortal permanence.

• From The City of God

  521 maybe this tradition still influences the way we see the world today. So perhaps we have made a mistake about our real ancestors. It’s a disquieting thought, and I’ll leave you to be disquieted by it. Nonetheless, what insight we can glean from his substantial books seems substantial enough. All his lessons are powerful; all of them are relevant. And of course, our world is very different from Augustine’s, but there are some echoes. In America today, the nation is dealing with war in Afghanistan, just as Alexander the Great did 700 years before Augustine lived. The timeliness of this work is sometimes astounding. All this is true and good. It’s philosophically and theologically profound; politically acute and wise; culturally erudite. But for me, the central value of the work is the challenge it puts before your mind— what I’ve called the pedagogy of threat. Our minds are sharpened if we imagine that the work we are engaged with can answer back to us, can contradict us, show us to be bad readers, reveal us to be enmeshed in hypocrisies and contradictions. I said something earlier in these lectures that I want to return to now. It’s astonishing to me how much is known by people almost entirely by hearsay, and how much of that hearsay is demonstrably false—such is the case, as I’ve tried to show with Augustine and The City of God. Despite being so well-known, the book remains to an astonishing degree—perhaps because of its very well-knownness and its sheer scale—an unsummited alp and an undiscovered country. For you to do better, you have to learn to see Augustine not as fixed words on a page, but as a quicksilver mind behind it. For you to do better, that is, it helps to see Augustine not fundamentally as a book, but as a man. We know that Saint Augustine’s bones rest in the basilica in Pavia, alongside the bones of Boethius. He was a real human being. If you let yourself believe it, that vision can reshape you. That belief bespeaks a kind of awe, a kind of admiration, a kind of love. Lecture 24 Transcript—The City of God’s Journey through History

• From The City of God

  445 Lecture 21 Transcript—Augustine’s Vision of Hell (Book 21) is fitting for a temporal crime? And why is the fate of the damned, not a suitable object, in his mind, for our or God’s mercy? These are some of the questions we ask in this lecture. They are all really facets of one question that we may ask of Augustine, namely, why does he think that this doctrine of Hell is not only just, but itself gives us good reason to believe that Hell is a creation of God’s goodness? This question is one that Augustine might have understood but not felt to be as gripping as we do. In our world, belief in Hell has declined precipitously. We have a hard time imagining any reason why anyone would suffer endlessly in a lake of fire, for crimes they committed while on earth.In fact, the decline of belief in Hell in our world is a very new development, happening only in the past century, and scholars are interested in what caused this decline. So unlike most people in his own time, we face an initial blockage in struggling to see what Augustine was propounding and why he was propounding it. But we don’t want to overstate the distance between Augustine’s world and our own. Our questions are not ones Augustine would have found entirely strange. For it is the case that he begins this book by asking the basic question that we asked, which he apparently had heard as well, of why believe in Hell at all? He addresses this question straight off. Hell is to be addressed before Heaven, he says, precisely since Hell seems more incredible than Heaven to people. Thus we should acknowledge and engage peoples’ skepticism about Hell straightaway. Furthermore, he says, this order is consonant with the order of topics as given in scripture. Hell is discussed before Heaven by and large in the biblical texts. Does this mean, you might wonder, that dire threats are conceived as more focusing, maybe more initially mobilizing of our moral energies, than good promises? I’ll leave you to consider that. In addressing Hell, Augustine organizes the discussion into several distinct topics. First, he says, we should consider the nature of infernal punishment. How do the damned exactly experience hellfire?

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

  That’s the person who is desi-gnated to put her hands on the two crotches that are going to be crossed. She completes the crotchal circuit.” “That sounds like it would be kind of fun,” said Mindy. “Oh, but doing tweenella is hard work, too,” said Dune. “You can only do it a few times because the sex plasma travels right through your arms and your chest and your heart. It can actually stop your heart for a moment, to have that much sex plasma traveling through you. They had a piece of hotness named Rianne doing it. They brought in a large stone bowl, and they poured some glowing blue liquid into it—looked like coolant—and Lila told Rianne to soak her hands in the bowl to get them all ready and sensitized for the transfer. She told me to sit in one chair and Marcie in another chair.” “You were naked?” Dune nodded. “From the waist down, with our feet in stirrups. And then Lila hauls out one of her breasts.” “Uh-oh!” “They are not small, let me tell you. She squirts some of her special magic titty milk on my balls, and she has Marcie hold open her pussy so that she can dribble some right in there, too. Well, that started to work almost immediately, started to burn, like my cock had had a shot of Everclear, and I started to feel that I had this special bond with Marcela. I said, ‘Hey, Marcie, are you sure you’re okay with the switch? I warn you, my dick can be a handful.’ And she said, ‘I can handle your dick fine. The real question is whether you can keep up with my cuntatious clit.’ So we were having our fun, and then Lila tells Rianne, ‘Okay, now take your hands out of the bowl and get to work. Grab their crotches and lean into them hard.’ Rianne’s sitting cross-legged between us, like a yoga master, and she grabs our crotches, which completes the circuit, and, foong, this ungodly flow of energy comes pouring through her arms, and at first I started to get a huge boner on, and I thought, Well this is nice. Then Rianne’s whole body started shaking, her tits are bopping around, but she kept her hands holding our crotches. And then I started to feel Marcie’s pussy flowing into me.” “Wow, go on.” Mindy checked the viewfinder, making turning gestures in the air to keep him talking. “I felt my own cock and balls starting to melt and flow, and I felt this channel widening inside me.

• From The City of God

  479 Lecture 22 Transcript—Heaven: The Self Redeemed (Book 22) distention of temporality, you fully you, you at 80 you at 20, a young child of 4 full of wonder and terror, an adult of 34 full of love and concern, you as a student and you as a teacher, a novice and an expert, you at every instant of your life, all at once and all together, all the million myriad individual yous, all will finally be brought together, as one finally allowed simply to be you. It is the oldest cliché in the world, at that the moment of your death your whole life flashes before your eyes. Well maybe on an Augustinian account that is entirely understandable. In any event, it is the image on which the City of God chooses to end. And thus, so will we. 480 The City of God as a Single Book A book worthy of study will engage a bewilderingly diverse set of issues—through characters and plot lines, perhaps, or through a complicated series of thematic issues. It will do so because life, as we experience it, is bewilderingly diverse. To be the composition of a reasonably coherent intelligence, the book will sustain a singularity of vision amid the diversity, and we ourselves, encountering the book, will find ourselves challenged to develop our intellectual and attentive muscles to be able to absorb its point of view as a singular point of view. „Augustine’s The City of God is such a book. It is a work so searching, so wide-ranging, so vast, and so remarkably coherent that it has few rivals as an achievement of the human mind. As an effort to come to grips with the inheritance of a civilization that raised you, but which you now find radically faulty, and as a way of coming to terms with the conversion of the world from one worldview to another, it knows few rivals for its diversity of views. „For Christians and those raised in Christian (or post-Christian societies), it is much more than this: it remains one of the most important and influential works of thinking about politics, human community, the shape of human life, and the nature and destiny of the world. Augustine and Politics „The work’s first great theme is Christianity as a political religion: the accusation that the Christians did not rightly care for Rome and could not properly care for worldly political life. Augustine replies with a threefold response that articulates his vision of Lecture 23

• From The City of God

  361 Lecture 17 Transcript—Augustine’s Scriptural History (Books 15–17) It’s in these books, then, that Augustine’s picture of history, and of the way humans should understand their experience of history, finally begins to come into view for us. Here, he offers us what we could call a geo-theo-political picture of history and the place of the human condition within it. It’s a picture of our world; but it’s also a picture which, if we try to learn to see this way, it works to form the self—and form the community, as well—in certain ways that make us more apt to see history, and our ongoing existence in historical time, in a way that both helps our current vision and aides our future perfection. This picture and what he thinks its effects on us should be is what this lecture will explore, and I want to do so in three big steps. First, I want to talk about this vision of the world—both about its details and the overall vision of history that undergirds and produces it. Second, I want to talk about how Augustine understands our self-formation through absorbing this vision and coming to inhabit it. And third and finally, I want to step back from the details of his argument and reflect a bit on how this is possible, discussing what we can call Augustine’s typological imagination, and his vision of theology, and the Christian life as it is intelligently inhabited as overall understandable through the metaphor of reading—life as a kind of reading. So first, consider, what is the nature of an Augustinian theology of history? This can sound paradoxical. Augustine’s often accused, of course, of being a profoundly anti-historical, anti-worldly thinker. He’s considered exemplary of—perhaps partially responsible for—a larger Christian view of history, and of life in the world in general, in which today we live in the after anything of any importance has already happened; an whose ending is already quite literally scripted. Now there’s something true about these suspicions. After all, the word epilogue means literally “after the word,” and we live after Christ to the word of God. And the Book of Revelation quite clearly means to offer the last word on everything. Augustine takes that book and the rest of scripture, as it were, as gospel.

• From The City of God

  474 Books That Matter: The City of God First, consider the question of knowledge. Augustine knows well the line “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” But what does this seeing God amount to? The saints in paradise will see God in the spirit, for they see God, Augustine says, even if their eyes are shut. Yet the seeing is not by means of the flesh, he says, although it is seeing in the flesh—it is me in my fleshly body who will see. And they will see, he says, face to face, that is, without interruption or intermediation, they will see God continually, truly, directly, raw. This vision is then the peace of God, that passeth all understanding— this is God's own peace, which we partake of in heaven, Augustine says, understood fully only by God. This kind of seeing then will be continuous in some way with vision as we experience it now, although it will be immeasurably more powerful and revealing, and the eyes will discern things of a greater immaterial nature. And the blessed will still see created things, but when they see created things they will not just see them, they will see God in them, they will see God as all in all, as manifest in the things of this world. This is very complicated, so let me unpack it a bit here. The objects of creation will not mask God; they will reveal God as integral to what they truly are—God’s creatures and God will use them to exhibit God’s glory in the particular ways that God has chosen to do so. This seeing of God here, in all things, is not a kind of x-ray vision, revealing what is more basically hidden, seeing through the camouflage of flesh that has no point but to mask the divinity inside—what a sad picture of materiality it is that we would begin with if we had that. It’s not that flesh is a merely mystifying cloak for creation, we see creation itself, but now, at last, we see creation, fully, seeing it as creation, as having a point, a purpose, as created matter speaking of its creator. In a way, he says, the immaterial will be more real than the material, so that we shall then see the physical bodies of the new Heaven and the new Earth in such a way that, wherever we look, and this is a big quote from Augustine here,

• From The City of God

  Chapter 7. --Of the Nature of the First Days, Which are Said to Have Had Morning and Evening, Before There Was a Sun. We see, indeed, that our ordinary days have no evening but by the setting, and no morning but by the rising, of the sun; but the first three days of all were passed without sun, since it is reported to have been made on the fourth day. And first of all, indeed, light was made by the word of God, and God, we read, separated it from the darkness, and called the light Day, and the darkness Night; but what kind of light that was, and by what periodic movement it made evening and morning, is beyond the reach of our senses; neither can we understand how it was, and yet must unhesitatingly believe it. For either it was some material light, whether proceeding from the upper parts of the world, far removed from our sight, or from the spot where the sun was afterwards kindled; or under the name of light the holy city was signified, composed of holy angels and blessed spirits, the city of which the apostle says, "Jerusalem which is above is our eternal mother in heaven;" [459] and in another place, "For ye are all the children of the light, and the children of the day; we are not of the night, nor of darkness. " [460]Yet in some respects we may appropriately speak of a morning and evening of this day also. For the knowledge of the creature is, in comparison of the knowledge of the Creator, but a twilight; and so it dawns and breaks into morning when the creature is drawn to the praise and love of the Creator; and night never falls when the Creator is not forsaken through love of the creature. In fine, Scripture, when it would recount those days in order, never mentions the word night. It never says, "Night was," but "The evening and the morning were the first day. "So of the second and the rest. And, indeed, the knowledge of created things contemplated by themselves is, so to speak, more colorless than when they are seen in the wisdom of God, as in the art by which they were made. Therefore evening is a more suitable figure than night; and yet, as I said, morning returns when the creature returns to the praise and love of the Creator. When it does so in the knowledge of itself, that is the first day; when in the knowledge of the firmament, which is the name given to the sky between the waters above and those beneath, that is the second day; when in the knowledge of the earth, and the sea, and all things that grow out of the earth, that is the third day; when in the knowledge of the greater and less luminaries, and all the stars, that is the fourth day; when in the knowledge of all animals that swim in the waters and that fly in the air, that is the fifth day; when in the knowledge of all animals that live on the earth, and of man himself, that is the sixth day. [461]

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

  Harry shook his head despairingly. “The more porn we’ve sucked out of the world, the larger the monster has grown,” he said. “This wasn’t in our forecasts. We thought there might be small anomalies of spontaneous generation, of course. But this—this is a personification of polymorphousness unlike anything the world of human suck-fuckery has ever known. I used to work as a trainer at Ocean Playground. The squid show there was nothing compared to this.” At that moment an enormous arm reached out of the oily liquid, and a huge hand grasped at nothing in the air. Five penises hung dangling off the forearm—it looked like a bizarre bagpipe. The hand was made up of half a dozen clustered vaginas. “That’s gross,” said Rhumpa. 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.

• From The City of God

  387 events of Jonah’s life. His being called to Nineveh, his flight from that calling, his discovery that he cannot flee from God—he gets trapped in the belly of a whale, among other things—his preaching, Nineveh’s repentance, and his petulant response to God’s mercy. A second layer is the story of the ever-present, indeed relentless, mercy of God— first to Jonah, then to the whole city of Nineveh, and then to Jonah again. And then there’s a third level in which Jonah, for Augustine, prophesied Christ more by what he suffered than by what he said—so much Augustine—by the way he was taken up by God in a larger plan than he ever had for himself and used as a prominent tool of God’s providential governance of the world. In this final way, Jonah prefigures Christ, who is the preeminent and perfect example of God using Creation to govern Creation. Christ’s human nature is, in this way, prefigured by Jonah’s acts even as Christ’s divine nature is prefigured by God’s use of Jonah. Jonah’s just a character in this story, not the main actor at all. The primary actor in the story of Jonah is God. Now, the story of Jonah, and how Augustine handles it, shows how prefiguration works and also how God’s provenance will act. Augustine used this both because he thought it was spiritually powerful, but also because he needed to find a way to authorize his new community in terms of the antiquity of the histories surrounding it. Let’s consider again that Augustine lived in a civilization of remarkable continuity with the past, and his world privileged age in a way that our world does not. In such a setting, a true newcomer tradition like Christianity, whose oldest relative was the primitive desert tribe of the Israelites—that’s how the Greeks and the Romans saw them— was a very low-status proposition. So, Augustine sets out to show in this book as well that the prophets actually predate the pagan philosophers. And while the prophets, in turn, are not as old as the Greek theological poets—like Homer and Hesiod—those poets are, in turn, not as ancient as was Moses. Lecture 18 Transcript—Translating the Imperium (Book 18)