Bewilderment

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.

Page 31 of 69 · 20 per page

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

  We learn the same lesson from many other passages of the Old Testament. David is praised for having extended the worship of God, and for having established twenty-four priests for the benefit of the people (1 Chron. xxiii and xxiv). The same thing is related of Hezechiah (2 Chron. xxx. 6): “The posts went with letters, by commandment of the King and his princes, to all Israel and Judah, proclaiming, according to the King’s orders: ‘Children of Israel, turn again to the Lord God,’” etc. Assuerus, again, as we are told in the book of Esther (vii.), sent swift messages through the provinces to announce the deliverance of the people of God. With much greater reason then may others, besides parish priests, be commissioned to preach and to perform such like offices for the salvation of souls. St. Gregory, in a homily (V, Part I on Ezekiel), says : “The pastors of souls and they who have undertaken the responsibility of feeding the flock of Christ ought very seldom, if ever, to change their dwelling. But those who, for love of God, take journeys for the sake of preaching may be compared to wheels of fire. For the zeal which devours them, and wherewith they inflame others, causes them to travel swiftly from place to place.” This is another proof that the office of preaching should be committed not only to parish priests, but to others who can, by travelling from one place to another, spread the knowledge of the truth. Again, it behoves a preacher of the Word to be free from any other occupation; whereas parish priests are constantly engaged in good work and in ecclesiastical business. The Apostles said, “It is not fit that we should leave the word of God and serve tables.” (Acts vi. 2). On this account, it is right that those who are in charge of parishes should be assisted by others not thus occupied. The necessity for priests devoted to the ministry of preaching is, furthermore, shown by the great ignorance prevailing in some places amongst many of the clergy, some of whom know not even how to speak in Latin. It is rare to find any who are conversant with the Scriptures. Yet a knowledge of the holy writings is essential to those who would preach the word of God. Hence if preaching be entrusted solely to parish priests, the faithful will be greatly the losers. The ignorance which prevails among the clergy is also most detrimental in the duty of hearing confissions. For, as St. Augustine says (De Penitentia), “If any man desires to confess his sins, let him seek out a priest who knows how to bind and to loose. For if he be negligent in the matter, he may be neglected by Him who incites him and moves him to seek for mercy; and so both may fall into the ditch which, in his folly, he strove not to avoid.”

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  < 67 < Lecture 10  The Christian Mission to the Jews ` Even in Acts itself, the Jewish mission outside of Jerusalem has extremely limited success. Everywhere Paul goes, he is firmly rejected by the Jews, in one city to the next. ` An even more important piece of evidence comes in Paul’s own letter to the church in Rome. This letter is unique among Paul’s surviving writings because it is addressed to a church he did not establish. He tells us something of the church’s constituency. y The letter to the Romans is probably the last one Paul wrote, at least of the ones that still survive. y In the letter, Paul indicates he is writing Christians in Rome because he wants to use their church as a base of operation for his mission to the far west, and he needs to convince them to support him. y He indicates that he has never yet been to Rome, even though he has long known of the church there. That means that someone else started the Roman church, though we don’t know who. y But Paul does know a number of people in the church by hearsay. He greets 26 of them by name. Six of these he explicitly identifies as his compatriots, meaning they were Jews. That means 20 of the 26 were pagans. y There is no reason to think that the ethnic makeup of the church in Rome at the time was unusual for Christian communities. That would mean that Christians propagating their faith had more success with pagans than Jews. ` That may seem counterintuitive. To be converted to the Christian faith, Jews would have to be convinced of only one thing: that Jesus was the messiah, the Son of God. But pagans would have to be convinced of two things: that there is only one God to be worshiped and that Jesus is his son. y Why would convincing some people of two different things be easier than convincing others of just one? y The answer, in very simple terms, appears to be that it was easier to convince polytheists that one God in particular was more powerful than all the others than it was to convince Jews that the messiah had been crucified.

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  < 89 < Lecture 13  Miraculous Incentives for Conversion ` Two prominent objections may arise at this point. One is this: How can someone who is not a Christian really believe that Christians were converting people by doing miracles? y Believers would probably say the miracles did happen (or that some of them did). Nonbelievers would almost certainly say they didn’t. y Regardless, stories of the miracles were being told, insistently and repeatedly. All it takes to convince someone of a miracle is to get them to believe the stories. They don’t actually have to observe it happen. ` The second objection is this: Weren’t pagan holy men able to do many of the same miraculous things? In fact, aren’t they on record for healing the sick, casting out demons, controlling the weather, and raising the dead? y The underlying premise is absolutely right: Pagans were indeed credited with comparable miracles. However, take this example: When a pagan did a miracle in the name of Apollo and convinced a worshiper of Athena to start worshiping Apollo, that person didn’t stop worshiping Athena. y With the Christians, it was different. Even if they convinced only two or three people out of 100, that would still mean that Christianity gained two or three people and lost no one, but paganism lost two or three people and gained no one. That happening once a year over the course of three centuries could convert the empire. The Evidence ` Whenever we have accounts of people converting in the first four centuries, it is almost always because of miracles. Our earliest Christian author, Paul, tells us why he himself was successful on the mission field. It was because of the wonders and miracles he did. y He claims it was because he did “signs and wonders” (Romans 15:18– 19) and that his message came in the “demonstration of the spirit and of power” (1 Corinthians 2:4).

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘He was a good administrator, loyal, fair, stayed on longer than me, went back in fifty-six to help with the independence arrangements: utterly sound—Eton, Magdalen. Not a breath of imagination in his body. It was reading his book—what’s it called? A Life in Service—that made me realise I didn’t want to write anything of that kind. There is a book in my life, but it’s almost entirely to do with imagination and all that. The facts, my sweet William, are as nothing.’ I looked on abashed. ‘You have published something about the Sudan though?’ ‘Oh—yes, I did a little book in the war; part of a series that Duckworth brought out on various different countries, I can’t quite remember why. It wasn’t much good. Fortunately almost all the stock was destroyed when a bomb hit the warehouse. It’s probably worth a fortune now.’ He laughed hollowly; and then lapsed into a vacant half-smile. I was trying to decide whether or not he was looking at me, whether this lull was an enigmatic path of our intercourse or merely one of Charles’s unsignalled abstentions, a mental treading water, ‘blanking’ as he called it. I thought, not for the first time, how odd it was to know so much about someone I didn’t know. A person could only reveal himself as Charles had done to me in love or from a deliberate distance. For half a minute, as I took in his heavy frame, the eyes dark and somnolent in his pink, slightly sunburned head, either reading seemed possible. ‘If you’ve looked at the diaries for when I first went out,’ he said, ‘then you’ll understand how young and aspiring we were. We were quite sophisticated in a way, but with that kind of sophistication which only throws into relief one’s childlike ignorance. It was a bizarre system, when you think about it. There was one of the vastest countries in the world, and they sent out to govern it a handful of boys each year who had never in their brief lives experienced anything even remotely comparable. It wasn’t like India, of course, there wasn’t the same element of domination—indeed, the whole enterprise was utterly different. Anyone could go to India, but for the Sudan there was this careful selection, screening don’t they call it nowadays. They got some worthy Leslie Harrap types of course, and plenty of sprinters and blues to keep things running on time, and they also got their share of cranks and unconventional fellows. There were possibly more of the latter. It was an absurd system and yet very, very subtle, I’ve come to believe. It singled out men who would give themselves.’ ‘They didn’t make objections to people’s—private lives?’ I carefully queried, reaching across with the teapot.

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  < 112 < Lecture 16  Imperial Persecution of the Early Christians ` In sum, Pliny’s ad hoc procedure was to consider Christians punishable simply for being Christian, executing them if they refused to recant but acquitting them if they did and could prove it. This appears to have set a precedent for other governors from that time onward. Later officials acted in similar ways. ` We have transcripts of court trials in which governors try desperately to get recalcitrant Christians to recant their faith and return to pagan ways. In these cases, the Christians regularly refuse, to the real consternation and puzzlement of the ruling authority. But he invariably carries out his duty and, even against his will, orders them executed. An example is the Martyrdom of Polycarp. ` This kind of persecution did not happen everywhere or frequently. But it happened in some times and places. It was not until the middle of the 3rd century that the attacks against Christians became more focused, sustained, and empire-wide. By that time, Christianity was truly starting to grow. Reading Cobb, Divine Deliverance. Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity, chapter 7. Moss, The Myth of Persecution. Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs . Question ¸ What do the persecutions by the emperor Nero and by Pliny the Younger tell us about why Christians aroused opposition in the Roman world? < 113 < TABLE OF CONTENTS Lecture 17 Early Christian Early Christian ApologistsApologists T his lecture looks at why Christians proved so unpopular to the world at large, how they came to be verbally attacked by their opponents, and how they responded in rhetorical self-defense. It was in the middle of the 2nd century that Christian intellectuals started writing defenses of their faith, arguing against the widespread perceptions held about them among the Roman populace at large. The term for this type of activity is apology, a word that has taken on different connotations in modern English but at the time just meant “defense.” Why the Apologies Appeared ` It is easy to understand why Christian literary apologies began to appear in the middle of the 2nd century. Christians increasingly faced outsider attacks, not only in the form of actual persecution but also in the arena of public opinion. Rumors were flying around about their peculiar views, nontraditional practices, and secret meetings. ` We have some intriguing indications of how pagans viewed Christians in the 2nd and early 3rd centuries. Christians were widely thought to be dangerous to the well-being of society for two reasons that will sound quite surprising to modern ears. y They were thought to be atheists.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was a narrow, dark hall, the stairs going up ahead to the left, an old-fashioned coat-and-stick stand, of the kind on which one could conceivably sit, behind the door, and a high, marbletopped table against the opposite wall. On it was a salver with letters stamped for the post—one to the bank, another to a person called Shillibeer with the outlandish address of E7. Above it was a gloomy mirror in a gilt frame. The rest of the panelled walls were covered with pictures, hung one above the other to the cornice, and ascending the stairs too, where their glass collected some light from an upstairs window. There were oils, water-colours, drawings, photographs, all mixed up. There was an unusually large David Roberts of a Nubian temple, choked almost to the eaves with sand, with blue-robed figures giving a sense of its stunted, colossal scale. I was looking at a lovely pastel head of a boy which hung beside it, when the door at the back of the hall opened and Charles and the paramilitary butler appeared in it, issuing from a brighter room beyond, which cast new light over the bizarre, threadbare rugs on the floor. ‘Rosalba,’ said Charles, shuffling forward before greeting me. ‘My dear William. I do hope Lewis wasn’t rude to you. He can be most cantankerous at times. Can’t you, Lewis?’ Lewis had a look of being above such things. Following patiently behind, his square moustached head, with its cropped greying hair, indicated no emotion. ‘You never said he was coming.’ ‘Oh, nonsense, nonsense—I told you days ago I would be having an interesting young guest for tea for two. My word, you’re jolly brown, young fellow.’ We stood now in front of the mirror and I looked in, needlessly, to confirm what he was saying. We were having an early May of wonderful weather, and I was already as dark as some of the half-caste boys I showered with at the Corry. My hair, though, grew lighter, and my eyes too, as I met my own glance, appeared arrestingly pale. It was that faintly depraved effect I admired in James’s thin friend at the baths. Charles laid a hand heavily on my shoulder. ‘Kind of sand-brown, isn’t it. Jolly good, jolly good.’ He also indulged the mirror’s grouping of us for a moment, his eye flinching from the stare of the taller Lewis, who hung about behind us. There was evidently a strange, and I thought pathetic, story behind all this. ‘Let’s go into the library,’ Charles said, pushing me forward as a kind of support. ‘We’ll have tea in there, Lewis, please.’ ‘You do realise I’m cleaning the silver?’ Lewis complained. ‘Well, it won’t hurt to have a break—and I’m sure you’d like a cup yourself, you know. Then you can get back to cleaning the silver; what’s left of it.’

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  It was as though he felt my father was health and I contagion, and I was at once bewildered by this and unsurprised. Those were the only words they shared; for the rest of the drive we were silent, and it wasn’t until we arrived at K.’s house that he glanced my way and nodded, and then he thanked my father and got out of the car and hurried inside the door his mother held open. My father waved at her, leaning across to the passenger-side window, and then he reversed the car and slid out of the driveway as I turned to look at the door that closed behind K. When the car stopped for a light at the end of the street, I looked again at the mirror where I could see my father’s face. He was watching me, not with the flickering surveillance of moments before but steadily, and when my eyes met his he grimaced, as if he could still smell K., though there wasn’t any smell in the air anymore. I stared back at him. For a moment I thought he was going to speak and I steeled myself, I saw his face harden with what he would say; but instead he saw that the light had changed and began driving again, and I let my head fall back against the window, watching the streets as they passed. I had been ready to accuse my father of what he had done, the disgust he had shared with K., and I felt my anger again as I walked through the grass in that undeveloped space I hadn’t known was there. The wastes of Mladost, I had often said about the whole blighted district, but this was a genuine wasteland; people threw their trash down the hill, not just bottles and cans but tires and bricks and, in one spot, a mound of broken concrete that a truck must have poured out from above. Everywhere else I had walked had been dry, the ground beside the pavement parched and hard, but here my shoes sank into the soil. I was thick in the grasses that from a distance had looked like waters, the grasses like a bay and the blokove like land, and still I walked without any destination in mind. K. and I remained friends for a while after that day, but we never had another night like that first; we were more reserved with each other, we didn’t speak for hours on end anymore, or with the same freedom.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  And this was Hugo Weinschenk's last sign of life. No one has heard the slightest thing from him since. Although later Mrs. Permaneder, well versed in such matters and full of prudent energy as she was, made several appeals for her son-in-law, in order, as she declared with an important air, to give a full justification for the lawsuit for divorce for malicious abandonment, he was and remained missing , and so it came about that Erika Weinschenk and little Elisabeth stayed with her mother on the bright floor on »Lindenplatz«. Fifth Chapter The marriage from which little Johann was born had never lost its charm in the city, taken as a topic of conversation. As surely as there was something extravagant and enigmatic about each of the husband and wife, so surely this marriage itself bore the character of the unusual and questionable. Getting a little under the light here, and getting to the bottom of the relationship aside from the tenuous, outward facts, seemed a difficult but rewarding task... And in parlors and bedrooms, in clubs and casinos, even on at the stock exchange people talked more about Gerda and Thomas Buddenbrook the less they knew about them. How did these two find each other, and how did they relate to each other? One remembered the abrupt determination with which Thomas Buddenbrook, then thirty, had gone to work eighteen years earlier. "These or none," that was his word, and it must have been the same with Gerda, for she had handed out rejections in Amsterdam up to the age of twenty-seven and had immediately accepted this suitor. A love marriage, then, people thought along their lines; for as difficult as it was for them, they had to concede that Gerda's three hundred thousand was only a second role Ranges had played at the cause. From the very beginning there had been very little trace of love between the two of what was meant by love. From the very beginning, nothing but politeness was noted in their dealings, a quite extraordinary, correct and respectful politeness between husband and wife, which, however, incomprehensibly, does not stem from inner distance and strangeness, but from a very peculiar, mute and deep mutual intimacy and knowledge, a constant mutual consideration and forbearance. The years hadn't changed that in the slightest. The only change they had brought about was that now the difference in age between the two, seldom slight as it was over the years, began to be conspicuous...

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

  CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. xxvi. in Joan. 1) Do not look then for any material production, or think that the Spirit generates flesh; for even the Lord’s flesh is generated not by the Spirit only, but also by the flesh. That which is born of the Spirit is spiritual. The birth here spoken of takes place not according to our substance, but according to honour and grace. But the birth of the Son of God is otherwise; for else what would He have been more than all who are born again? And He would be proved too inferior to the Spirit, inasmuch as His birth would be by the grace of the Spirit. How does this differ from the Jewish doctrine?—But mark next the part of the Holy Spirit, in the divine work. For whereas above some are said to be born of God, (c. 1:13.) here, we find, the Spirit generates them.—The wonder of Nicodemus being roused again by the words, He who is born of the Spirit is spirit, Christ meets him again with an instance from nature; Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The expression, Marvel not, shews that Nicodemus was surprised at His doctrine. He takes for this instance some thing, not of the grossness of other bodily things, but still removed from the incorporeal nature, the wind; The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit. That is to say, if no one can restrain the wind from going where it will; much less can the laws of nature, whether the condition of our natural birth, or any other, restrain the action of the Spirit. That He speaks of the wind here is plain, from His saying, Thou hearest the sound thereof, i. e. its noise when it strikes objects. He would not in talking to an unbeliever and ignorant person, so describe the action of the Spirit. He says, Bloweth where it listethc; not meaning any power of choice in the wind, but only its natural movements, in their uncontrolled power. But canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth; i. e. If thou canst not explain the action of this wind which comes under the cognizance both of thy feeling and hearing, why examine into the operation of the Divine Spirit? He adds, So is every one that is born of the Spirit. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. xii. c. 7) But who of us does not see, for example, that the south wind blows from south to north, another wind from the east, another from the west? And how then do we not know whence the wind cometh, and whither it goeth?

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

  (6) Bk. III, lectio 10 (430a 20-25); §§ 740-5. The text here has given rise, on various counts, to much perplexity. For reference in discussion it will be well to have before us the Greek text and Latin, version: Τὸ δ᾽αὐτό ἐστιν ἡ κατ᾽ ἐνέργειαν ἐπιστἠμη τῷ πράγματι· ἡ δὲ κατὰ δύναμιν χρόνῳ προτέρα ἐν τῷ ἑνί, ὅλως δ᾽οὐ χρονῳ· ἀλλ᾽ οὐχ ὁτὲ μὲν νοεῖ, ὁτὲ δ᾽οὐ νοεῖ. Χωρισθεὶς δ᾽ ἐστὶ μόνον τοῦθ᾽ ὅπερ ἐστί, καὶ τοῦτο μόνον ἀθάνατον καὶ ἀΐδιον. Οὐ μνημονεύομεν δέ ὅτι τοῦτο μὲν ἀπαθές, ὁ δὲ παθητικὸς νοῦς φθαρτός, καὶ ἀνευ τοῦτου οὐδὲν νοεῖ. Idem autem est secundum actum scientia rei; quae vero, secundum potentiam, tempore prior in uno est. Omnino autem neque tempore. Sed non aliquando quidem intelligit, aliquando autem non intelligit. Separatus autem est solum hoc, quod vere est. Et hoc solum immortale et perpetuum est. Non reminiscitur autem, quia hoc quidem impassibile est; passivus vero intellectus, est corruptibilis, et sine hoc nihil intelligit anima. The English translation given above follows the version more closely than the latter follows the Greek. The main problems are (i) to find the antecedent of intelligit in the third sentence, (2) to find what separatus agrees with, and (3) to discover what Aristotle means by ‘the passive intellect’.

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

  He says, therefore, first that although Anaxagoras has in a certain respect spoken the truth, he himself did not understand what he said when he held that the process of separation would never end. For accidents can never be separated from substance; yet he held that there was a mixture not only of bodies but also of accidents. When something becomes white, he said that this happened by an abstraction of white froin the previously existing mixture. If then colours and other accidents of this sort are mixed together, as he said, and if someone on this supposition says all things that are mixed can be separated, it would follow that there would be white and healthy, and yet there would be no subject of which these are predicated and in which they are. But this is impossible. Therefore the truth is that if accidents are in the mixture it is impossible that all mixed things can be separated. Another absurdity results from the following. Anaxagoras held that all things were mixed from the very beginning, but intellect began to separate them. Now any intellect which attempts to do what cannot be done is not worthy of the name intellect. Hence that intellect will be inconsistent, intending the impossible, if it truly wishes this, i.e., wishes to separate things completely. For this is impossible both from the point of view of quantity, because there is no smallest magnitude, as Anaxagoras said, for from any small quantity something can be subtracted, and from the point of view of quality, because accidents are not separable from their subjects. 73. Next where he says, ‘Nor is Anaxagoras ...’ (188 a 13), he disproves this position by reason of the fact that Anaxagoras did not have sufficient evidence. Since Anaxagoras saw that a thing is made large by the coming together of many small parts which are similar, as a stream is made from many brooks, he believed this to be the case for all things. And thus Aristotle says that Anaxagoras did not correctly understand the generation of things of the same species, i.e., he did not understand that a thing is not always generated by things which are similar in respect to species. For some things are both generated from and are resolved into things like unto themselves, as clay is divided into bricks; in other instances, however, this is not so. For some things are generated from that which is dissimilar. And in these instances there is not merely one mode of production. For some things are made by alteration from that which is unlike, as the sides of a house are made from clay and not from sides; whereas other things are made by composition, as the house is not made of houses, but of sides. It is in this way that air and water come to be from each other, i.e., as from the unlike.

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

  ORIGEN. It is from humility that they declare themselves unworthy of any praise for their good deeds, not that they are forgetful of what they have done. But He shews them His close sympathy with His own. RABANUS. Lord, when sate we thee &c. This they say not because they distrust the Lord’s words, but they are in amaze at so great exaltation, and at the greatness of their own glory; or because the good which they have done will seem to them to be so small according to that of the Apostle, For the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared to the glory that shall be revealed in us. (Rom. 8:18.) JEROME. It were indeed free to us to understand that it is Christ in every poor man whom we feed when he is hungry, or give drink to when he is thirsty, and so of other things; but when He says, In that ye have done it to one of the least of these my brethren, He seems tome not to speak of the poor generally, but of the poor in spirit, those to whom He pointed and said, Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother. (Matt. 12:50.) CHRYSOSTOM. But if they are His brethren, why does He call them the least? Because they are lowly, poor, and outcast. By these He means not only the monks who have retired to the mountains, but every believer though he should be secular, though an hungred, or the like, yet He would have him obtain merciful succours, for baptism and communication of the Divine mysteries makes him a brother.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  I had heard university friends, medical students, complain that patients always lie, which they said with the same professional knowingness and exasperation I saw in the look the doctor gave me now, and if it was true in general it must be especially true here, in this room where there was such humiliation in revelation, where guarding a secret felt so much like guarding the self. Yes, I said, I’m certain. She seemed to sigh at this, in acknowledgment or frustration, I’m not sure which, and then she said something I didn’t catch at all, a quick and sharp command. I hesitated a moment; sometimes there’s a kind of delay in processing the words and it’s as though I hear them again, or see them almost, laid out end to end as if on a page. But nothing came now, not a single word, and before I could ask she repeated herself more loudly, as one sometimes does when speaking to foreigners, as though it helps. I’m sorry, I said, feeling like a child, I don’t understand. The doctor closed her eyes, just slightly longer than a blink, and then she took what I thought must have been a steadying breath before saying something I did understand, Lower your pants, though I hesitated again, bringing my hand to my belt buckle but not yet undoing the clasp. This was too much for her, apparently, my failure to comply, and unable to contain her annoyance, she said Go on, I need to see your dick, using a word that while not quite vulgar wasn’t clinical either. It shocked me a little, though it wasn’t just the word that was a breach in decorum, it was also the pronoun she used, the informal ti . I had never really felt the force of this before; knowing how to address someone was always hard for me, we don’t have those nuances in English verbs, or not anymore. But I felt the difference it made now, it was like a change of temperature, and it eroded further the dignity I wanted to preserve. I lost that dignity entirely as I exposed myself, and then lifted my penis for her to inspect, pulling it to the right and the left as she directed, exposing all surfaces to her view.

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

  His first argument is as follows. It seems remarkable, and indeed it is, that ’ the ancient natural philosophers did not treat chance and fortune. For they assumed that they treated the causes of those things which come to be, yet there are many things which come to be by fortune and chance. Hence they should have treated fortune and chance. Nor are they to be excused by the argument given above [200] which denies fortune and chance. For although men know that every effect is reduced to some cause, as the above opinion which denies fortune and chance stated, nevertheless, regardless of this argument, these philosophers held that some things come to be by fortune, and other things do not. Hence these natural philosophers must make mention of fortune and chance at least in order to show that it is false that some things come to be by fortune and chance, and in order to point out the reason why some things are said to be by fortune and some not. Nor can they be excused by reason of the fact that chance and fortune would be reduced to one of the causes which they posited. For they did not think that fortune is one of the things which they thought to be causes, such as friendship or strife or some other such thing. 202. He gives his second argument where he says, ‘ This is strange... ’ (196 a 19). He says that whether they thought that fortune existed or not, it is inconsistent that the ancient natural philosophers neglected to treat fortune. For if they thought that there was fortune, it is inconsistent that they did not treat it; if, however, they thought that there was no fortune, it is inconsistent that they sometimes used it. For example, Empedocles said that air is not always united on high above the earth, as if this were natural to it, but rather this happens by chance. For he says that when the earth was made by strife distinguishing the elements, it happened that air gathered together in this place, and as it came together then, it will hold this course so long as the world remains. But in other worlds, which he held come to be and are corrupted to infinity, as was said above [I, L10 76], air would be differently related in many ways to the parts of the universe. And likewise he said that the many parts of animals come to be by fortune, so that in the first production of the world, heads came to be without necks. 203. Next where he says, ‘ These are some ... ’ (196 a 25), he gives the second opinion. Concerning this he makes two points. First he sets forth the opinion. Secondly, he disproves it where he says, ‘ This statement might... ’ (196 a 28 204).

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

  CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. xxiv. 2. in Joan) He did not however conceive any great idea of them from His miracles; and attributed to Him as yet only a human character, speaking of Him as a Prophet, sent to execute a commission, and standing in need of assistance to do His work; whereas the Father had begotten Him perfect, selfsufficient, and free from all defect. It being Christ’s design however for the present not so much to reveal His dignity, as to prove that He did nothing contrary to the Father; in words He is often humble, while His acts ever testify His power. And therefore to Nicodemus on this occasion He says nothing expressly to magnify Himself; but He imperceptibly corrects his low views of Him, and teaches him that He was Himself all-sufficient, and independent in His miraculous works. Hence He answers, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. xi. c. 4) Those then are the persons to whom Jesus commits Himself, those born again, who come not in the night to Jesus, as Nicodemus did. Such persons immediately make professsion. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. xxiv. 2) He says therefore, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God: as if He said, Thou art not yet born again, i. e. of God, by a spiritual begetting; and therefore thy knowledge of Me is not spiritual, but carnal and human. But I say unto thee, that neither thou, nor any one, except he be born again of God, shall be able to see the glory which is around me, but shall be out of the kingdom: for it is the begetting by baptism, which enlightens the mind. Or the meaning is, Except thou art born from above, and hast received the certainty of my doctrines, thou wanderest out of the way, and art far from the kingdom of heaven. By which words our Lord discloses His nature, shewing that He is more than what He appears to the outward eye. The expression, From abovea, means, according to some, from heaven, according to others, from the beginning. Had the Jews heard it, they would have left Him in scorn; but Nicodemus shews the love of a disciple, by staying to ask more questions. 3:4–84. Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born? 5. Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. 6. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.

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

  In Psalm 35:7 we read: “Your judgments are a great deep”; and in Romans 11:33 the Apostle exclaims: “How incomprehensible are His judgments!” Each of the judgments mentioned contains something profound and incomprehensible to human knowledge. In the first of God’s judgments, by which the present life of mankind is regulated, the time of the judgment is, indeed, manifest to men, but the reason for the recompenses is concealed, especially as evils for the most part are the lot of the good in this world, while good things come to the wicked. In the other two judgments of God the reason for the requitals will be clearly known, but the time remains hidden, because man does not know the hour of his death, as is noted in Ecclesiastes 9:12: “Man does not know his own end”; and no one can know the end of this world. For we do not foreknow future events, except those whose causes we understand. But the cause of the end of the world is the will of God, which is unknown to us. Therefore the end of the world can be foreseen by no creature, but only by God, according to Matthew 24:36: “Of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but the Father alone.” In this connection, some have found an occasion for going astray in the added words, “nor the Son,” which are read in Mark 13:32. They contend that the Son is inferior to the Father, on the score that He is ignorant of matters which the Father knows. The difficulty could be avoided by replying that the Son is ignorant of this event in His assumed human nature, but not in. His divine nature, in which He has one and the same wisdom as the Father or, to speak with greater propriety, He is wisdom itself intellectually conceived. But the Son could hardly be unaware of the divine judgment even in His assumed nature, since His soul, as the Evangelist attests, is full of God’s grace and truth, as was pointed out above. Nor does it seem reasonable that Christ, who has received the power to judge “because He is the Son of man” (John 5:27), should be ignorant in His human nature of the time appointed for Him to judge. The Father would not really have given all judgment to Him, if the judgment of determining the time of His coming were withheld from Him.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  In fact, however, in other parts of the world, this skeptical indifference was becoming eccentric and even old-fashioned. The countries of northern Europe were indeed responding to the peculiar strain of the late twentieth century by renouncing religion. For many, God had died in Auschwitz. The churches had been implicated in the Holocaust, and the traumatic experience of two world wars, fought on European soil, had left a legacy of unanswered questions. But other regions reacted differently. The United States, whose experience of the twentieth century had been more positive, was becoming more religious all the time: by the year 2000 it would be the second most religious country in the world after India. In the Middle East, as the Arab-Israeli conflict entered its third decade without hope of resolution, the secular ideologies of socialism and nationalism seemed increasingly bankrupt; after the wars of 1967 and 1973, there was a religious revival among both Israelis and Arabs, and on both sides, the new religiosity became sucked into the conflict. In 1978–79, a bemused world witnessed the Iranian Revolution, when an obscure mullah overthrew what had seemed to be one of the most stable and successfully secular countries in the Middle East. People were shocked. “Who ever cared about religion?” cried a frustrated official in the United States State Department. But 1979 also saw the eruption of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority into American politics. Even though its success was short lived, it proved to be a watershed. Henceforth presidential candidates often found it advisable to sport their born-again credentials. In the middle of the twentieth century, it had been assumed that secularism was the coming ideology and that religion would never again play a major role in world events. But there was now a swing away from this position. Increasingly, people who were disenchanted with modernity felt impelled to push God from the sidelines to which he had been relegated in secular culture, and back to center stage. The extremists grabbed the headlines, and at this point I regarded them simply as a lunatic fringe, a dangerous bunch of fanatics. Because I was—on principle—not interested in religion, I was unaware that fundamentalism, as this militant piety was called, was only the most visible element of a much more pervasive trend. By the late 1970s, a significant number of people all over the world, who were never in the news and who would not dream of taking part in acts of terror and violence, were demonstrating in all kinds of ways that they wanted to be more religious and to see faith reflected more prominently in public life. There was a new interest in spirituality and mysticism. Religion was making a comeback.

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

  ORIGEN. (tom. x. in Joan. c. 16) By the temple we may understand too the soul wherein the Word of God dwelleth; in which, before the teaching of Christ, earthly and bestial affections had prevailed. The ox being the tiller of the soil, is the symbol of earthly affections: the sheep, being the most irrational of all animals, of dull ones; the dove is the type of light and volatile thoughts; and money, of earthly good things; which money Christ cast out by the Word of His doctrine, that His Father’s house might be no longer a market. 2:18–2218. Then answered the Jews and said unto him, What sign shewest thou unto us, seeing that thou doest these things? 19. Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. 20. Then said the Jews, Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days? 21. But he spake of the temple of his body. 22. When therefore he was risen from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this unto them: and they believed the Scripture, and the word which Jesus had said. THEOPHYLACT. (hoc loco.) The Jews seeing Jesus thus acting with power, and having heard Him say, Make not My Father’s house an house of merchandize, ask of Him a sign; Then answered the Jews and said unto Him, What sign shewest Thou unto us, seeing that Thou doest these things? CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. xxiii. 2) But were signs necessary for His putting a stop to evil practices? Was not the having such zeal for the house of God, the greatest sign of His virtue? They did not however remember the prophecy, but asked for a sign; at once irritated at the loss of their base gains, and wishing to prevent Him from going further. For this dilemma, they thought, would oblige Him either to work miracles, or give up His present course. But He refuses to give them the sign, as He did on a like occasion, when He answers, An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign, and there shall no sign he given it, but the sign of Jonas the prophet; (Mat. 12:39) only the answer is more open there than here. He however who even anticipated men’s wishes, and gave signs when He was not asked, would not have rejected here a positive request, had He not seen a crafty design in it. As it was, Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  I turned onto the large and busy boulevard that marked the neighborhood’s edge, though this meant facing into the wind, which charged down it unimpeded by buildings or trees. Several blocks ahead I could see something that looked like a construction site, though not of the kind scattered throughout Sofia, for malls or apartments; there was a single concrete pillar rising above the billboards that lined the streets, I couldn’t imagine at first what it was for. When I reached it, I saw that the billboards, which were faded and worn at the edges, displayed information about the construction of a cathedral, and that the date set for its completion had passed by several years. There was a sketch of what the cathedral would look like on one of the boards, along with its name, SVETI PURVOMUCHENIK STEFAN , Saint Stefan the First Martyr, I thought, puzzling out the roots for first and pain, the suffix that makes a word signify a person. Printed in a larger font than the saint’s name was the project’s corporate sponsor, one of the country’s biggest banks. The site was surrounded by a fence draped with green mesh, which was torn away in places. No one was building anything now, and it didn’t look like anyone had been working there for a long time. The pillar was the only section they had really begun, though maybe they had laid foundations for the rest, I couldn’t tell because of the snow. There was also an arch, I could see now; it peeled off from the side of the pillar, and next to it were a few steps leading up to a small platform. It was going to be the entrance, then, and the pillar must have been intended for the bell tower, though they hadn’t gotten very far; there were thin metal rods extending naked a few feet beyond the concrete, an aspiration, so far as I could tell, entirely abandoned. I made my way across the road, two lanes on one side of the concrete median and two on the other, the ice more perilous than the traffic. The fence wasn’t really meant to keep anyone out, or not anymore; the metal posts were planted in concrete blocks one could move easily enough, as someone had already done where the segment of chain link was unsecured, creating a passageway I slipped through.

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

  CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. xlii. 1) Nor did He only sit with His disciples, but conversed with them familiarly, and gained possession of their minds. Then He looked, and saw a crowd advancing. But why did He ask Philip that question? Because He knew that His disciples, and he especially, needed further teaching. For this Philip it was who said afterwards, Shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us. (c. 14:8) And if the miracle had been performed at once, without any introduction, the greatness of it would not have been seen. The disciples were made to confess their own inability, that they might see the miracle more clearly; And this He said to prove him. AUGUSTINE. (de verb. Dom. Serm. 17) One kind of temptation leads to sin, with which God never tempts any one; (James 1:13.) and there is another kind by which faith is tried. (Deut. 13:3.) In this sense it is said that Christ proved His disciple. This is not meant to imply that He did not know what Philip would say; but is an accommodation to men’s way of speaking. For as the expression, Who searcheth the hearts of men, does not mean the searching of ignorance, but of absolute knowledge; so here, when it is said that our Lord proved Philip, we must understand that He knew him perfectly, but that He tried him, in order to confirm his faith. The Evangelist himself guards against the mistake which this imperfect mode of speaking might occasion, by adding, For He Himself knew what He would do. ALCUIN. He asks him this question, not for His own information, but in order to shew His yet unformed disciple his dulness of mind, which he could not perceive of himself. THEOPHYLACT. Or to shew others it. He was not ignorant of His disciple’s heart Himself. AUGUSTINE. (de Con. Evang. l. ii. c. xlvi) But if our Lord, according to John’s account, on seeing the multitude, asked Philip, tempting him, whence they could buy food for them, it is difficult at first to see how it can be true, according to the other account, that the disciples first told our Lord, to send away the multitude; and that our Lord replied, They need not depart; give ye them to eat. (Matt. 25:16) We must understand then it was after saying this, that our Lord saw the multitude, and said to Philip what John had related, which has been omitted by the rest. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. xlii. s. 1) Or they are two different occasions altogether. THEOPHYLACT. Thus tried by our Lord, Philip was found to be possessed with human notions, as appears from what follows, Philip answered Him, Two hundred pennyworth of bread is not sufficient for them, that every one of them may take a little. ALCUIN. Wherein he shews his dulness: for, had he perfect ideas of his Creator, he would not be thus doubting His power.