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 44 of 69 · 20 per page

• From City of Night (1963)

  Over a dark vinyl shirt, he wore a black leather vest, tied crisscross with a long leather strap from his chest to his stomach. On each lapel of the vest is reproduced the triangular clover-leafed pattern as on the boots (and each silver stud, again, is encircled by the beaded haloes). The vest, the shirt, the legs of the pants are so tightly molded on his stubby body that his movements are restricted. Cautiously, he reaches for the teapot, the sugar, cream—each gesture threatening to burst a seam somewhere. “Perhaps you prefer lemon?” He himself, when you can pull your gaze from the hypnotizing costume in disbelief, is a florid rather short man, in his early 50s. Actually he looks much like what is depicted in American movies as the typical pre-war Bavarian who sits goodhumoredly drinking beer out of a giant stein, bellowing ebulliently in beered-up delight as a blonde-braided girl and a lederhosened man dance to the accompaniment of a merry accordion.... But dressed as he is, he resembles a somber, heavily silverlighted Christmas tree. It is not Halloween. It isnt even New Year’s, and we’re not even at a costume party. No. We’re sitting, instead in the early afternoon, in the living-room of a neat house in a lushly treed area in Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco. The room is decorated in “antique” style—but of what period, it is impossible to determine. Rather, it seems to have been decorated to suggest an indefinable time somewhere, nebulously, in The Past. Over a bursting metal sun pinned to the wall, are two crossed swords. A shield. A lance. The drapes are wine-purple velvet and droop to the floor in highlighted folds. There is a small replica of a suit of armor by the brick fireplace. An oriental-looking statue of a monkey is poised as if to spring from a small, arch-legged desk.... The sun pours in through a windowed wall in a warm rush of light which accentuates the colors of the chairs, upholstered in striped gold and red, striped silver and blue.... It struck me that this room, which is all Ive seen so far of the house, is much like a conglomeration of movie furniture acquired from many period films.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  God is known by knowledge and by unknowing; of him there is understanding, reason, knowledge, touch, perception, opinion, imagination, name and many other things, but he is not understood, nothing can be said of him, he cannot be named. He is not one of the things that are, nor is he known in any of the things that are; he is all things in everything and nothing in anything. 75 This was not simply an arid logical conundrum that left people in a baffled, thwarted state. It was a spiritual exercise that, if properly performed, would bring participants to the same kind of stunned insight as did the Brahmodya competition. Denys’s spiritual exercise took the form of a dialectical process, consisting of three phases. First we must affirm what God is: God is a rock; God is One; God is good; God exists. But when we listen carefully to ourselves, we fall silent, felled by the weight of absurdity in such God talk. In the second phase, we deny each one of these attributes. But the “way of denial” is just as inaccurate as the “way of affirmation.” Because we do not know what God is, we cannot know what God is not, so we must then deny the denials: God is therefore not placeless, mindless, lifeless, or nonexistent. In the course of this exercise, we learn that God transcends the capability of human speech and “is beyond every assertion” and “beyond every denial.” 76 It is as inaccurate to say that God is “darkness” as to say that God is “light;” to say that God “exists” as to say that God does “not exist,” because what we call God falls “neither within the predicate of existence or non- existence.” 77 But what can this mean? The exercise leads us to apophasis, the breakdown of speech, which cracks and disintegrates before the absolute unknowability of what we call God. As our language fails, we experience an intellectual ekstasis. We no longer pay mere lip service to God’s ineffability; the fact that “there is no kind of thing that God is” 78 has become an insight that we have made our own, a kenosis that “drives us out of ourselves.” 79 Like the mystai of Eleusis, we have become strangers to our former ways of thinking and speaking. This new understanding is not an emotional experience. If we cannot know God, we certainly can neither feel nor have any sensation of unity with God. Denys’s dialectical method leads to an intellectual rapture that takes us beyond everyday perceptions and introduces us to another mode of seeing.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Trudi claims Miss Destiny is living in Beverly Hills with the man who sponsored the wedding (though Trudi didnt go either, afraid theyd raid it, but they didnt, and she says she wishes now she’d been a beautiful bridesmaid like Destiny asked her, and it broke Destiny’s heart when Trudi said no but thats the beads). “And I hear the Destiny looked simply Fabulous in her gown and red hair,” says Trudi, “and, honey, it just goes to show you some more about those goddam beads—here the Destiny meets this rich daddy who wants to see a queen get married in drag to a butch stud-hustler, and the Destiny says does he have a winding staircase? and he does....” Well, anyway, Trudi says, so far as she knows, Miss Destiny is still living in Beverly Hills (Skipper says oh no, Bel Air, if she really made it Big) with the rich daddy and her stud husband. “The rich cholly,” says Skipper knowingly, “I bet he digs Destiny’s stud, not Destiny—but he gets kicks watching them make out, jack. You know, hes queer—” and Skipper goes on to tell me how hes tired of the small hustling and how hes ready to push back into the Bigtime—and Trudi says, “Don’t be nervous, babe, youll shake the beads.” And so, of Miss Destiny’s Wedding there are many versions. No one seems to have gone to it. But everyone has heard about it. Only one thing is certain. Miss Destiny is no longer around. And I wondered if somehow she had escaped her Evil Angel. And again for a period I avoided the park and the bars—and when I came back, Chuck of course was still around. And now we’re sitting in Pershing Square at the same place where I first met Miss Destiny.... (And Jenny Lu is in the park too, as if The Angel had got her number—woe- uh! ... and Holy Moses... and Saint Tex, who outstayed The Word and was reconverted by Saint Thunderbird to California... and the five white angelsisters with Christ still bleeding wax....) Suddenly Chuck said: “Oh, man, did you hear about Miss Destinée?—you remember her, that far-out queen with the redhair? Well, man, some queen was saying how she got this letter from Destinée. An remember this ah this ah head doctor she was going to, man?—the one she said she would have on the couch next time? Well, he finally cured Miss Destinée, man—Miss Destinée wrote she ain a queen no more, she has honest-to-jesus-gone-Christ turned stud , man!—an that ain all, man!” he goes on gleefully “—Miss Destinée wrote she is getting married, man!— to a real woman!...” And Chuck pushed his widehat over his eyes’ as if to block his sudden vision of a world in which such crazy things can happen. I imagine Miss Destiny sitting lonesomely in Somewhere, Big City, America—carefully applying her makeup—and I think:

• From City of Night (1963)

  An remember this ah this ah head doctor she was going to, man?—the one she said she would have on the couch next time? Well, he finally cured Miss Destinée, man—Miss Destinée wrote she ain a queen no more, she has honest-to-jesus-gone-Christ turned stud , man!—an that ain all, man!” he goes on gleefully “—Miss Destinée wrote she is getting married, man!— to a real woman!...” And Chuck pushed his widehat over his eyes’ as if to block his sudden vision of a world in which such crazy things can happen. I imagine Miss Destiny sitting lonesomely in Somewhere, Big City, America—carefully applying her makeup—and I think: Oh Destiny, Miss Destiny! I dont know whats become of you, nor where you are—but that story Chuck just told me, as you yourself should be the first one to admit, is oh Too Much to believe! CITY OF NIGHT FROM FACE TO FACE, FROM ROOM to room, from bed to bed, the shape of the world I had chosen emerged—clearly but without definable meaning. Each morning the pale sun rose in the imitation-blue sky of Los Angeles, and the endless resurrection of each new day began. Like the palmtrees that lined the streets of the city, the world seemed to be shrugging indifferently. For me then there followed a period of untrammeled anarchy as I felt my life stretching toward some kind of symbolic night, as the number of people I went with multiplied daily. With those many people—only in those moments when I was desired—the moments before we became strangers again after the intimacy—I felt an electric happiness, as if the relentless flow of life had stopped, poised on the very pinpoint of youth; and for those moments, youth was suspended unmoving. Now I began to feel that world demanding even further anarchy. Often I remembered the man I had met that first afternoon in Los Angeles, when, with his money already in my hands, I had suddenly found myself unable to steal from him. It was something that remained unfinished: a test prepared by that chosen world which I had failed.... The man’s face dimly mysteriously haunted me. There was still, too, the narcissistic obsession with myself—those racked interludes in the mirror—the desperate strange craving to be a world within myself. And I felt somehow, then, that only the mirror could really judge me for whatever I must be judged.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  At the sight of this Valerian fell down in fear. But the apparition lifted him to his feet, and began to read to him from the book. ‘One Lord. One faith. One God. One Christendom. One father who rules over heaven and earth.’ These were the words of gold. When he had finished reading this text, the old man asked Valerian a question. ‘Do you believe these words to be true? Yes or no?’ ‘I do believe,’ Valerian answered. ‘There are no words more true and blessed. They are the hope of humankind.’ Then the old man vanished from sight and, on the spot, Pope Urban baptized Valerian. When the Roman returned home he found Saint Cecilia, his wife, in the company of an angel. The angel had two coronets in his hand, one made up of lily and one of roses; he gave the first of them to Cecilia and, according to the old books, he gave the second one to Valerian. ‘Keep these coronets inviolate, with a pure body and mind,’ the angel told them. ‘I have brought them from paradise. They will never wither or die; their perfume will never fade. The sinners of this world will not be able to see them. Only those who are chaste and innocent will have sight of them. And you, Valerian, who trusted the word of God so readily and so fully, ask what you wish of me. I will grant your favour.’ ‘I have a brother,’ he replied. ‘There is no man I love more. I pray that you grant my brother the grace to know the truth that has been revealed to me.’ ‘God is happy to fulfil your request,’ the angel said. ‘Both of you will win the palm of martyrdom. One day you will both partake of the blessed feast.’ At this moment Valerian’s brother, Tiburce, arrived at the mansion. He smelled the sweet savour of the lily and the rose, and he was bewildered. ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘how, at this time of year, the rose and the lily can be in bloom? Their perfume is so strong and deep that I might be holding them in my hands - it has touched my heart, and I feel reborn.’ Then Valerian came up to him and welcomed him. ‘We have two coronets,’ he told him, ‘lily white and rose red, shining brightly. They are invisible to you as yet but, through my prayers, you are able to sense their presence. You will be able to see them, dear brother, as soon as you embrace the true faith.’ ‘Are you saying this to me, brother, or am I dreaming?’ ‘We have been dreaming all our lives. Now we must wake and know the truth.’ ‘How do you know this? How can you be sure?’ ‘I will tell you,’ Valerian replied. ‘An angel from heaven has taught me the truth. You will know it, as soon as you renounce the false idols of heathen worship.’

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Already in the late nineteenth century, the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–79) had developed the theory of electromagnetic radiation, showing that physicists were beginning to understand time quite differently from the way we experience it, since a radio wave could be received before it had been sent. The puzzling experiments on ether drift and the speed of light conducted by the American scientists Albert Michelson (1852–1931) and Edward Morley (1838–1923) suggested that the relative velocities of light from the sun were the same in the direction of the earth’s rotation as when opposed to it, which was entirely inconsistent with Newtonian mechanics. There followed the discovery of radioactivity by Alexander-Edmond Becquerel (1820–91) and the isolation of quantum phenomena by Max Planck (1858–1947). Finally, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) applied Planck’s quantum theory to light, and formulated his theories of special (1905) and general (1916) relativity. Relativity was able to accommodate the Michelson-Morley findings by merging the concepts of space and time, regarded as absolutes by Newton, into a space-time continuum. Building on Einstein’s breakthrough, Niels Bohr (1885–1962) and Werner Heisenberg (1901–76) developed quantum mechanics, an achievement that contradicted nearly every major postulate of Newtonian physics. So much for the traditional assumption that knowledge would proceed incrementally, as each generation improved on the discoveries of its forebears. In the bewildering universe of quantum mechanics, three-dimensional space and unidimensional time had become relative aspects of a four-dimensional space-time continuum. Atoms were not the solid, indestructible building blocks of nature but were found to be largely empty. Time passed at different rates for observers traveling at different speeds: it could go backward or even stop entirely. Euclid’s geometrical laws no longer provided the universal and necessary structure of nature. The planets did not move in their orbits because they were drawn to the sun by gravitational force operating at a distance but because the space in which they moved was actually curved. Subatomic phenomena were particularly baffling because they could be observed as both waves and particles of energy. “All my attempts to adapt the theoretical foundation of physics to this knowledge failed me,” Einstein recalled. “It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under me, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere upon which one could have built.” 1 If these discoveries were bewildering to scientists, they seemed utterly impenetrable to the layman. A curved space, finite and yet unbounded; objects that were not things but merely processes; an expanding universe; phenomena that took no definite shape until they were observed—all defied any received presupposition. Newton’s grand certainties had been replaced by a system that was ambiguous, shifting, and indeterminate.

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

  The influence of monasticism upon the world, from Anthony and Benedict to Luther and Loyola, is deeply marked in all branches of the history of the church. Here, too, we must distinguish light and shade. The operation of the monastic institution has been to some extent of diametrically opposite kinds, and has accordingly elicited the most diverse judgments. "It is impossible," says Dean Milman,303 "to survey monachism in its general influence, from the earliest period of its inworking into Christianity, without being astonished and perplexed with its diametrically opposite effects. Here it is the undoubted parent of the blindest ignorance and the most ferocious bigotry, sometimes of the most debasing licentiousness; there the guardian of learning, the author of civilization, the propagator of humble and peaceful religion." The apparent contradiction is easily solved. It is not monasticism, as such, which has proved a blessing to the church and the world; for the monasticism of India, which for three thousand years has pushed the practice of mortification to all the excesses of delirium, never saved a single soul, nor produced a single benefit to the race. It was Christianity in monasticism which has done all the good, and used this abnormal mode of life as a means for carrying forward its mission of love and peace. In proportion as monasticism was animated and controlled by the spirit of Christianity, it proved a blessing; while separated from it, it degenerated and became at fruitful source of evil. At the time of its origin, when we can view it from the most favorable point, the monastic life formed a healthful and necessary counterpart to the essentially corrupt and doomed social life of the Graeco-Roman empire, and the preparatory school of a new Christian civilization among the Romanic and Germanic nations of the middle age. Like the hierarchy and the papacy, it belongs with the disciplinary institutions, which the spirit of Christianity uses as means to a higher end, and, after attaining that end, casts aside. For it ever remains the great problem of Christianity to pervade like leaven and sanctify all human society in the family and the state, in science and art, and in all public life. The old Roman world, which was based on heathenism, was, if the moral portraitures of Salvianus and other writers of the fourth and fifth centuries are even half true, past all such transformation; and the Christian morality therefore assumed at the outset an attitude of downright hostility toward it, till she should grow strong enough to venture upon her regenerating mission among the new and, though barbarous, yet plastic and germinal nations of the middle age, and plant in them the seed of a higher civilization.

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

  People laid in them, as they used to do in the temple of Aesculapius, the sick that they might be healed, and hung in them, as in the temples of the gods, sacred gifts of silver and gold. Their graves were, as Chrysostom says, move splendidly adorned and more frequently visited than the palaces of kings. Banquets were held there in their honor, which recall the heathen sacrificial feasts for the welfare of the manes. Their relics were preserved with scrupulous care, and believed to possess miraculous virtue. Earlier, it was the custom to pray for the martyrs (as if they were not yet perfect) and to thank God for their fellowship and their pious example. Now such intercessions for them were considered unbecoming, and their intercession was invoked for the living.820 This invocation of the dead was accompanied with the presumption that they take the deepest interest in all the fortunes of the kingdom of God on earth, and express it in prayers and intercessions.821 This was supposed to be warranted by some passages of Scripture, like Luke xv. 10, which speaks of the angels (not the saints) rejoicing over the conversion of a sinner, and Rev. viii. 3, 4, which represents an angel as laying the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar before the throne of God. But the New Testament expressly rebukes the worship of the angels (Col. ii. 18; Rev. xix. 10; xxii. 8, 9), and furnishes not a single example of an actual invocation of dead men; and it nowhere directs us to address our prayers to any creature. Mere inferences from certain premises, however plausible, are, in such weighty matters, not enough. The intercession of the saints for us was drawn as a probable inference from the duty of all Christians to pray for others, and the invocation of the saints for their intercession was supported by the unquestioned right to apply to living saints for their prayers, of which even the apostles availed themselves in their epistles. But here rises the insolvable question: How can departed saints hear at once the prayers of so many Christians on earth, unless they either partake of divine omnipresence or divine omniscience? And is it not idolatrous to clothe creatures with attributes which belong exclusively to Godhead? Or, if the departed saints first learn from the omniscient God our prayers, and then bring them again before God with their powerful intercessions, to what purpose this circuitous way? Why not at once address God immediately, who alone is able, and who is always ready, to hear His children for the sake of Christ? Augustine felt this difficulty, and concedes his inability to solve it.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  33 Although Abraham is presented to us as a man of vision, the Genesis narratives show how difficult it is to see or understand the divine as we struggle with life’s cruel dilemmas. There is no clear, consistent image of God in Genesis. In the famous first chapter, the Creator God appears center stage, with no rival, supremely powerful and benign, blessing all the things that he has made. But the rest of Genesis seems to deconstruct this tidy theology. The God who was supremely powerful in chapter 1 has lost control of his creation within two chapters; the utterly fair and equitable God who blessed everything impartially is later guilty of blatant favoritism, and his somewhat arbitrary choices (the chosen ones are rarely paragons) set human beings murderously against each other. At the time of the Flood, the benign creator becomes the cruel destroyer. And finally the God who was such a powerful presence in chapter 1 fades away and makes no further appearances, so that at the end of the book, Joseph and his brothers have to rely on their own dreams and insights—just as we do. Genesis shows that our glimpses of what we call “God” can be as partial, terrible, ambiguous, and paradoxical as the world we live in. As Abraham’s plight on Mount Moriyya shows, it is not easy to “see” what God is, and there are no simple answers to life’s perplexities. The Bible traces the long process whereby this confusing deity became Israel’s only icon of the sacred. 34 Traditionally in the Middle East, it was impossible to confine the holiness of ilam (“divinity”) to a single symbol. Any image of the divine is bound to be inadequate, because it cannot possibly express the all-encompassing reality of being itself. If it is not balanced by other symbols, there is a danger that people will think of the sacred too simplistically. If that symbol is a personalized deity, they could easily start to imagine “him” functioning as if he were a human being like themselves writ large, with likes and dislikes similar to their own. Idolatry, the worship of a human image of the divine, would become one of the besetting problems of monotheism. In the Bible, we see that the Israelites were deeply vexed by the idolatry of the “foreign nations” (goyim), whose gods were merely “gold and silver, products of human skill.”

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Pagans thought of their “gods” as members of the cosmos, with separate personalities and functions, but the Christian God was not that sort of being. When we spoke of Father, Son, and Spirit being One God, we were not saying “One plus one plus one equals three” but “Unknown infinity plus unknown infinity plus unknown infinity equals unknown infinity.” 37 We think of the beings we know as single items or collections of different items. But God is not like that. Again, the absolute ineffability of the divine was the key to understanding the Trinity. The reason the Trinity is not a logical or numerical absurdity is because God is not a being that can be restricted to such human categories as number. The Trinity has been very puzzling to Western Christians, but it has been central to Eastern Orthodox spirituality. 38 In the early modern period, when the West was developing a wholly rational way of thinking about God and the world, philosophers and scientists were appalled by the irrationality of the Trinity. But for the Cappadocian fathers—Basil, Gregory, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus (329–90)—the whole point of the doctrine was to stop Christians from thinking about God in rational terms. If you did that, you could only think about God as a being, because that was all our minds were capable of. The Trinity was not a “mystery” that had to be believed but an image that Christians were supposed to contemplate in a particular way. It was a mythos , because it spoke of a truth that was not accessible to logos , and, like any myth, it made sense only when you translated it into practical action. When they meditated on the God that they had known as Three and One, Christians would become aware that God bore no relation at all to any being in their experience. 39 The Trinity reminded Christians not to think about God as a simple personality and that what we call “God” was inaccessible to rational analysis. 40 It was a meditative device to counter the idolatrous tendency of people like Arius, who had seen God as a mere being. When they presented the Trinity to their new converts after the initiation of baptism, the three Cappadocians distinguished between the ousia of a thing, its inner nature, which made it what it was, and its hypostases , its external qualities.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  He immediately goes on to show that even though we can prove that “what we call God” (a reality that we cannot define) must “exist,” we have no idea what the word “exists” can signify in this context. We can talk about God as Necessary Being and so forth, but we do not know what this really means.37 The same goes for God’s attributes. God is Simplicity itself; that means that, unlike all the beings of our experience, “God is not made up of parts.” A man, for example, is a composite being: he has a body and soul, flesh, bones, and skin. He has qualities: he is good, kind, fat, and tall. But because God’s attributes are identical with his essence, he has no qualities. He is not “good,” he is goodness. We simply cannot imagine an “existence” like this, so “we cannot know the ‘existence’ of God any more than we can define him,” Thomas explains, because “God cannot be classified as this or that sort of thing.” We can get to know mere beings because we can categorize them into species—as stars, elephants, or mountains. God is not a substance, the “sort of thing that can exist independently” of an individual instance of it. We cannot ask whether there is a God, as if God were simply one example of a species. God is not and cannot be a “sort of thing.”38 All the “proofs” have achieved is to show us that there is nothing in our experience that can tell us what “God” means. Because of something that we cannot define, there is a universe where there could have been nothing, but we do not know what we have proved the existence of. We have simply demonstrated the existence of a mystery.39 But that, for Thomas, is precisely what makes the “five ways” good theology. The question “Why something rather than nothing?” is a good one; human beings keep asking it, because it is in our nature to push our minds to an extreme in this way. But the answer—”what everybody calls ‘God’ “—is something that we do not, indeed cannot, know. Thomas shared Augustine’s view of intellectus. In these proofs, we see reason at the end of its tether, asking unanswerable questions and straining toward its “cutting edge,” its divine “spark.” Pushed to the limit, reason turns itself inside out, words no longer make sense, and we are reduced to silence. Even today, when they contemplate the universe, physicists pit their minds against the dark world of uncreated reality that we cannot fathom. This is the unknowable reality that Thomas is asking his readers to confront by pushing their intellects to a point beyond which they cannot go.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  —Doscientos ochenta, y cuarenta y dos —le digo. Me pasa trescientos dólares, y tenemos un letrero que dice que no aceptamos billetes mayores de cincuenta, pero viendo la cantidad de dinero en su billetera, no me siento cómoda al decírselo. Tomo el dinero y le doy el cambio. Da golpecitos sobre el mostrador mientras espera, y me doy cuenta que está siguiendo el ritmo de The Distance por Cake que Danni colocó en el altavoz del lobby. —Oh, no haga eso —bromeo, dándole su cambio—. Alentará al dueño. Estoy intentado convencerla que su música está alejando a los clientes. Toma el dinero y me lanza una mirada. —La música de los noventa es la mejor. Es cuando las personas decían la verdad. Curvo la comisura de mis labios, sin querer discutir más. Claramente él bebió del mismo Kool-Aid que ella. —Gracias —dice, tomando las llaves. Le regreso su identificación, y lo observo alejarse. Afuera, reparte las llaves a las señoritas, y después de un momento, todos se dirigen a sus habitaciones. Estoy medio tentada a ir a la ventana y ver si va con una de ellas. O las cinco de ellas. Tengo mucha curiosidad. —¿Era un cliente? —pregunta Danni detrás de mí, y miró hacia atrás, viéndola caminar a la oficina. El departamento donde vive con su abuela está detrás de la oficina, así que es fácil pasar y revisar si se necesita algo. —Sí —le digo—. Pidió cinco habitaciones para la noche, y está viajando con al menos media docena de mujeres, así que diviértete con el turno nocturno. Se burla y camina, tomando el contrato. —¿Tyler Durden? —Lee su nombre, entrecerrando los ojos por encima de sus lentes. Asiento, jalando un cabello de su camisa de franela. Ella incluso se viste como en los noventa. —¿No tomaste su identificación? —Me hace una mueca—. Es un nombre falso. —Su identificación decía Tyler Durden —digo—. ¿Por qué piensas que es un nombre falso? —Tyler Durden es el personaje principal en Fight Club —dice, como si fuera una idiota—. La mejor película de los noventa, y uno de los mejores libros. Es desconcertante que no sepas eso, Jordan.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Later generations of Israelites would try to eradicate such cult places as idolatrous and tear down the local matzeboth, but in this early story, these pagan symbols nourished Jacob’s vision of Yahweh, and Bethel became one of their own sacred “centers.” The story shows how impossible it is to seek a single, consistent message in the Bible, since a directive in one book is likely to be countermanded in another. The editors did not eradicate potentially embarrassing early teachings that clashed with later doctrines. Later Jews would be shocked to imagine God becoming manifest in a human being, but J described Yahweh appearing to Abraham in the guise of a traveler at Mamre, near Hebron. 31 Standing in the entrance of his tent during the hottest part of the afternoon, Abraham had seen three men approaching. Strangers were dangerous people, because they were not bound by the local vendetta, but Abraham ran out to meet them, bowed before them as if they were kings or gods, brought them into his camp, and gave them an elaborate meal. Without any great fanfare, it transpires in the course of the ensuing conversation that one of these visitors was Abraham’s god. The act of compassion had led to a divine encounter. Abraham’s previous encounters with Yahweh had been somewhat disturbing and peremptory, but at Mamre Yahweh ate with Abraham as a friend—the first intimacy with the divine that humans had enjoyed since the expulsion from Eden. J and E were not writing edifying morality tales, however. The characters of Genesis have moments of vision and insight, but they are also presented as flawed human beings who have to contend with a perplexing God. This is particularly evident when Yahweh commands Abraham to take his only remaining son, Isaac, to a mountain in the land of Moriyya and sacrifice him there. 32 Hitherto Abraham had not hesitated to question Yahweh’s arrangements, but this time he obeyed without voicing a single objection. Perhaps he was too shocked to speak. The God he had served so long had turned out to be a heartless slayer of children, who was also cynically breaking his promise to make him the father of a great nation. At the last moment, of course, Isaac is reprieved, God renews his promise, and Abraham sacrifices a ram in Isaac’s stead. This disturbing story has traditionally been related to the Jerusalem temple, which was said to have been built on Mount Moriyya. Yahweh was, therefore, making it clear that his cult must not include human sacrifice. But E’s painful story goes further. Moriyya means “Seeing,” and the Hebrew verb ra’o (“to see”) sounds insistently through the Abraham stories.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  We want to consider some of the internal battles, especially at internal battles that focused on issues of orthodoxy and heresy. “Orthodoxy” meaning “correct belief;” that’s the technical meaning of orthodoxy. It comes from two Greek words that mean “correct belief’ and “heresy.” The word “heresy” comes from a Greek word that means “choice,” and so a “heretic” is somebody who chooses not to believe the right beliefs. Well, within early Christianity, we have issues of orthodoxy and heresy as Christians battied it out over what point of view was correct, what beliefs were correct, and we will see that there was a remarkable diversity among Christians, many Christians hoiding points of view that today, nobody would say were Christian. In the early centuries, though, there were people who called themselves Christian, who said they were followers of Jesus, who said that they were adhering to the writings of the apostles, and who said, for example, that there was not one God, but two gods. Some people who called themselves Christian said that there were 30 gods. We have some Christians on record claiming that there were 365 gods. These were Christians; they called themselves Christians. They said that they followed Jesus. Well, how could that possibly be? Well, because, in fact, early Christianity was quite diverse, and Christianity had internal battles to decide which set of beliefs was correct, and which set of beliefs was heretical. The heretical beliefs got wiped out, so that today, the kind of Christianity that we have inherited is one form that came down from these early decades, these early centuries. In this context, we will look not only at what different people believed among Christians, but we will also see that they each had different written authorities for their views. Every group of Christians, even those who said there were 365 gods, had books that supported their points of view, and these books all claimed to be written by the apostles of Jesus. That means that a number of these books, probably most of these books, were, in fact, forged. We will consider forgeries. Many of these forgeries have turned up in modern times, by archaeologists, and sometimes, simply by accident, and we will look at some of these early forgeries in the names of the apostles. It was out of this set of conflicts over what to believe and which books to read, that the New Testament, as a collection of books, emerged. Well, how did we get these books, these 27 books? Why don’t we have other books? As it turns out, there are other Gospels. Why didn’t the other Gospels make it into the New Testament, instead of just Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? We will be considering all those issues at a later point in the course.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The daily revolution of the celestial bodies and the annual motion of the sun that we thought we observed could be explained by the Earth’s diurnal rotation on its axis and its annual orbit around the sun. The heavenly movements we observed were simply a projection of the Earth’s motion in the opposite direction. Copernicus’s theory was roundly criticized, not because he could not prove it, but because it contravened basic principles of Aristotelian physics. The mathematics worked beautifully, but—according to the traditional academic hierarchy—mathematics was supposed to defer to physics, the superior science. It is not surprising that most people found the idea of a sun-centered universe incredible. It contradicted not only the standard scientific explanation but also basic common sense. Copernicus was asking his colleagues to believe that the Earth, which seemed static, was actually moving very fast indeed and that the planets only appeared to be in motion around us because of a mistaken projection. Copernican theory demanded that people no longer trust the evidence of their senses and accept on faith the counterintuitive theories of an eccentric mathematician. There were at first few specifically religious objections. Even though some biblical texts implied that the sun moved in the heavens and that the Earth was stable, 48 Catholics were not obliged to interpret them literally. They still followed Augustine’s principle of accommodation, which had ruled that a scriptural text should be reinterpreted if it clashed with science. Copernicus had offered his hypothesis sub imaginationem in the traditional way, and when he read his treatise in the Vatican in 1534, the pope gave it cautious approval. When De revolutionibus was finally published in 1543, Copernicus was on his deathbed and his editor Andreas Osiander (1498–1552) took it upon himself to write a preface to protect the dying man from harassment: because astronomy could not prove any of its hypotheses, we should depend on divine revelation for reliable information about the cosmos. 4 9 Neither Copernicus nor the handful of people who were able to entertain the idea of a heliocentric universe regarded themselves as religious rebels. Luther is reported to have remarked irritably in his Table Talk that Copernicus was a “fool” who wanted “to turn the whole art of astronomy upside down” but seemed more concerned about scientific orthodoxy than its religious implications. 50 Luther was not a biblical literalist; his disciple Philipp Melanchthon (14971560) was initially hostile to Copernicus, but mathematics and astronomy figured prominently in the curricula he devised for Protestant universities.

• From City of Night (1963)

  He leaned back on the bed like a puffed-up balloon. I imagined him in a Macy Thanksgiving parade, wobbling from side to side with enormous eyes.... He reaches now for another cigarette—retrieves a lavender one, studies it, sets it back in the box. “That—the Lavender,” he says, smiling slyly, “is for later: at the last of our interview. Now—lets see—” He finds a pink one, chooses it “Pink—the color of a young flower....” I was staring fascinated at the enormous buttonround eyes in the incredibly childlike flesh of his face. “I always like to know my angels—intimately,” he went on. “It is so necessary. And I tell them about the others who have preceded them, so that, through them, they may learn to know me—and then, too, they form an angelic fraternity—a kind of angel-crown swirling about me, I like to think in my more poetic moments.” The tape-measure hypnotized me. He kept winding it about his neck, his stomach, he tossed it toward his feet, brought it back, draped it about his shoulders, and he continued to talk, the bulging eyes staring—his voice tumbling on and on, piling words on words, as disheveledly as the objects scattered about the room. “Now the rules,” he says. “Yes, there are always rules: Let me tell you, first, what I—uh—Like—To—Do—and what we will do at the last of each interview.” He giggled coyly, like a young embarrassed girl. “Come here, dear child. I must whisper it to you—not because Im ashamed but because it is so Dear to me that I must keep it close to me by whispering—” I got up from the chair and stood next to the bed. He whispered in my ear, his rubbery lips brushing it “I like to—” He studied my expression as he said it. “And do you know why? Because—” He puckered his lips again. “—because it is: So Nice!... And so you see I ask for very little of My Angels.” I sat back down again.

• From Educated (2018)

  In some moments I believed her, this wise woman with an answer to every question; but I could never quite forget the words of that other woman, that other mother, who was also wise. There’s no such thing as magic. One day Mother announced that she had reached a new skill level. “I no longer need to say the question aloud,” she said. “I can just think it.” That’s when I began to notice Mother moving around the house, her hand resting lightly on various objects as she muttered to herself, her fingers flexing in a steady rhythm. If she was making bread and wasn’t sure how much flour she’d added. Click click click. If she was mixing oils and couldn’t remember whether she’d added frankincense. Click click click. She’d sit down to read her scriptures for thirty minutes, forget what time she’d started, then muscle-test how long it had been. Click click click. Mother began to muscle-test compulsively, unaware she was doing it, whenever she grew tired of a conversation, whenever the ambiguities of her memory, or even just those of normal life, left her unsatisfied. Her features would slacken, her face become vacant, and her fingers would click like crickets at dusk. Dad was rapturous. “Them doctors can’t tell what’s wrong just by touching you,” he said, glowing. “But Mother can!” —THE MEMORY OF TYLER haunted me that winter. I remembered the day he left, how strange it was to see his car bumping down the hill loaded with boxes. I couldn’t imagine where he was now, but sometimes I wondered if perhaps school was less evil than Dad thought, because Tyler was the least evil person I knew, and he loved school—loved it more, it seemed, than he loved us. The seed of curiosity had been planted; it needed nothing more than time and boredom to grow. Sometimes, when I was stripping copper from a radiator or throwing the five hundredth chunk of steel into the bin, I’d find myself imagining the classrooms where Tyler was spending his days. My interest grew more acute with every deadening hour in the junkyard, until one day I had a bizarre thought: that I should enroll in the public school. Mother had always said we could go to school if we wanted. We just had to ask Dad, she said. Then we could go. But I didn’t ask. There was something in the hard line of my father’s face, in the quiet sigh of supplication he made every morning before he began family prayer, that made me think my curiosity was an obscenity, an affront to all he’d sacrificed to raise me. I made some effort to keep up my schooling in the free time I had between scrapping and helping Mother make tinctures and blend oils. Mother had given up homeschooling by then, but still had a computer, and there were books in the basement.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  With whom do you argue the most, though? You argue the most with the people you are closest to. If people don’t have anything in common with you, you don’t have anything to argue about. Therefore, some people have argued that maybe Jesus himself was a Pharisee. I personally don’t think so, but you can see why it’s an interesting case to be made. If the reconstruction of Jesus’s message, that we laid out in an earlier lecture, was correct, then the burden of his message was that the Kingdom of God was soon coming, and people needed to repent in preparation for it, so that they might enter the kingdom when it arrived. If that was the heart of his message, that’s comparable to the message you can find in the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea, Joel—all emphasized that people needed to repent from the way they had lived, because God was soon going to enter into judgment with them. They needed to prepare for this judgment by repenting and returning to God. If that was Jesus’s message, then he stands perfectly aligned with the other Jewish prophets of Hebrew Scripture, and prophets that we know about from Jesus’s own day, other Jews also predicting an imminent judgment of God. My point in all of this is that Jesus is best understood as thoroughly Jewish. He was an interpreter of the Jewish Scriptures, he kept Jewish custom, and he had Jewish followers. The burden of his message was a Jewish, prophetic message. His followers, of course, were his followers because they agreed with that message, which meant that his disciples on Earth were faithful Jews themselves, who understood Jesus to provide an accurate and authoritative interpretation of Judaism, and they, then, themselves, maintained their Jewish identity. Given that circumstance, that both Jesus and his followers were thoroughly Jewish, how is it that Christianity, the religion founded on Jesus, became so virulently anti-Jewish? That’s the key question we’re dealing with over course of these three lectures. The key to the answer, I think, involves what happened after Jesus’s death. The key is not so much what happened during his life as what happened after his death. As we saw in the last lecture, some of Jesus’s followers came to think that Jesus was raised from the dead after he was crucified, and we saw that this changed everything for them. Jesus’s followers began to understand that the Resurrection of Jesus meant that he was the Messiah. Most Jews, of course, did not expect anything like Jesus as a Messiah, as he was a relatively unknown itinerant preacher from Galilee who was arrested, 93 and tried, and executed as a common criminal for crimes against the state. How could he be the powerful Messiah? Jesus is the Messiah?

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  Essential Reading: Bart Ehrman, After the New Testament, chapter 5. , New Testament: A Historical Introduction, chapter 25. Supplementary Reading: John Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism. Rosemary Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti- Semitism. Samuel Sandmel, Anti-Semitism in the New Testament? Questions to Consider: 1. Compare Matthew’s claims that a person must keep the Law to be right with God (Matt. 5:17—20) with Paul’s claims that the Law can have no bearing on one’s relationship with God (for example, Gal. 2:15—16). Do you think these views can be reconciled, or are they hopelessly at odds with each other? 87 2. 88 If Matthew’s understanding of the importance of the Jewish Law for the followers of Jesus were still adhered to by Christian churches, what might be different about Christianity today? Lecture Six—Transcript The Beginning of Jewish-Christian Relations To this point of our course, we have looked at the social and historical milieu of the birth of Christianity and considered several of the main features of its early years: the historical Jesus, the traditions about him and their circulation throughout the Roman Empire, and the life and teachings of Paul. In this lecture, we began the second part of our course, which involves issues pertaining to the relationship of Christianity to the religion from which it sprang, Judaism. Judaism and Christianity, of course, are two of the great religions of the West, with a long and well-documented history of both beneficial interaction and mutual antagonism. The three lectures that follow are all driven by an important but complicated historical question: How is it that early Christianity, a sect within Judaism, became so quickly and decisively a virulently anti-Jewish religion? In this lecture, we will consider three key figures in this transformation, all of whom considered themselves to be Jewish, yet who understood their relationship to historical Judaism in different ways. First, the historical Jesus himself; second, the author of the Gospel of Matthew; and third, the apostle Paul. First, the historical Jesus. As we seem, Jesus of Nazareth cannot be understood apart from his Jewish context. This has not always been recognized, as Christian laypeople and scholars alike for centuries have understood Jesus to stand over against Judaism. The logic of this older way of thinking appears to have been that if Jesus’s followers were anti-Jewish, he must have been so, as well. One of the emphatic conclusions of modern historical scholarship, though, especially during the second half of the 20" century —one of the decisive conclusions of modern historical scholarship is that Jesus was thoroughly Jewish, and that he had no idea or intention of being anything else. Modern scholars have devised a variety of ways of understanding Jesus. Some have portrayed Jesus as a Jewish rabbi, someone who, like other rabbis, gathered followers around him and taught them his understanding of the Jewish Law. Thus, he was principally understood as a rabbi. 89

• From The Case for God (2009)

  49 Far from these miracles being central to the gospel, the evangelists seem rather ambivalent about them. Mark tells us that even though the fame of these marvels spread far and wide, Jesus regularly asked people to keep quiet about their cure; 50 Matthew tends to play down the miracles, using them simply to show how Jesus fulfilled ancient prophecy, 51 while for Luke, the miracles merely showed that Jesus was “a great prophet” like Elijah. 52 The evangelists knew that, despite these signs and wonders, Jesus had not won many followers during his lifetime. The miracles had not inspired “faith;” people who witnessed them agreed that Jesus was a “son of God” but were not prepared to disrupt their lives and commit themselves wholeheartedly to his mission—any more than they had been willing to sell all they had and follow Honi the Circle Drawer. Even the inner circle of apostles lacked pistis . They made no comment at all when Jesus fed a crowd of five thousand people with a few loaves and fishes; and when they saw him walking on water, Mark tells us, they were “utterly and completely dumbfounded … their minds were closed.” 53 Matthew relates that the disciples did indeed bow down before him after this miracle, crying: “Truly, you are the Son of God,” 54 but in no time at all Jesus had to rebuke them for their lack of faith. 55 The miracle stories probably reflect the disciples’ understanding of these events after the resurrection apparitions. With hindsight, they could see that God had already been working through Jesus to usher in the Kingdom, when God would vanquish the demons that caused suffering, sickness, and death and trample the destructive powers of chaos underfoot. 56 They did not think that Jesus was God, so did not argue that these miracles proved his divinity. But after the resurrection they were convinced that like any person of pistis , Jesus had been able to call upon God’s dunamis when he stilled the storm at sea and walked on the windswept waters. The rabbis knew that miracles proved nothing. One day, during the early years at Yavneh, Rabbi Eliezer was engaged in a fierce argument about a legal ruling (halakah ) arising from the Torah. When his colleagues refused to accept his opinion, he asked God to prove his point with a series of miracles. A carob tree moved four hundred cubits of its own accord, water in a nearby canal flowed backward, and the walls of the house of studies caved in, as if on the point of collapse. But the rabbis remained unconvinced and seemed somewhat disapproving of this divine extravaganza.