Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This may seem, at first, rather too heavy a weight to place on a single book. Y ct when one considers this novel's enormous prestige and popularity, remembers that it was read for generations as though it were another Bible, that it is involved with the deepest, most lasting bitterness and the bloodiest conflict this nation has ever known; when one re flects, above all, how it flatters the popular mind, positively discouraging that mind from any tendency to think the matter through for itself -and this to such an extent that both pro and anti- Negro sentiment have read this book as scripture one is forced to the conclusion that Mr. Furnas is almost cer tainly more nearly right than wrong. Add to this the impact of the "Tom" shows, which persisted, according to Mr. Fur nas, until 1933 , the last one being heard of in 1950, which definitively jettisoned whatever validity Mrs. Stowe's work might have had, and which introduced-with Topsy- that black faced comic-character who is the despair of Negro actors even today-we ll, at least it can be said that few indeed are the novels which can boast of such a long, varied and influ ential lif e, few the novels which the objective conditions con spired to keep in fashion for so long. Even today, Mr. Furnas places the annual sale of this novel at about 8,ooo copies. And, indeed, if anyone seriously doubts that the attitudes to be found in Uncle Tom's Cabin arc still prevalent among us, he has only to wade or sit through that other publishing landmark and mammoth movie, Gone With The Wind, or see almost any other movie dealing with Negro lif e, or read al most any other novel on the same subject published in this country since 18 52. Or simply: ask himself what he really knows about the American Negro, what he really feels about him. It is a question, after all, whether what we will here call the ordinary American of good will knows anything more about Negro life than what has filtered through to him via memories of an exempla ry Negro maid, or the experience-f or which he is almost certainly not prepared--{>f, say, some Billie Holiday records, perhaps a trip or two through Harlem, perhaps one or two Negro colleagues, or a Negro college friend. And what THE CR USADE OF INDI GNATION 611 he feels concerning all this is a mystery, probably even to him self.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  (Throughout the book the Manhursts never attain the status of a "problem"; they are a nui sance-niggers who are bringing property values down-and they arc opposed in the usual ugly, shocking ways. But at the end of the book they arc still there; their neighbors are no better t(:>r the experience but, having tried and failed, they are resigned and have ceased to hurl brickbats; instead they are looking about for other places to live.) With Ki11gsblood Royal we descend abruptly into a kind of lugubrious, sentimental nightmare. This is an ill- tempered, tasteless, condescending novel, which, despite the great fame of its author, might be dismissed as utterly without signifi cance if it were not for the tact that three other novels, written by people closer to the scene-two Negroes and a Southern white woman-diH er from it only in that they are not quite so bald. These novels-The Path of Thunder, God Is For White Folks, and QualitJh avc a great deal in common. They are not, in the first place, so much concerned with Negroes as they arc with sex between the races and the doomed offspring thereof (Negroes arc, as a matter of tact, considered with a somewhat uneasy and disapproving affection.) The protago nists arc manitestly superior, and arc monotonously hounded because of their dark blood, which in these novels has much the same relevance as some mysterious, rather nasty, and im- THE IMAGE OF THE NEGR O placable disease. In all except one of these novels, the protag onists are as fair as daylight: Neil Kingsblood "discovers" that he has Negro blood and must learn to face it; in Q]tality, the heroine, who has been "passing" in the North, comes home to the South and her illit erate granny to live among and learn to love her people; in The Path of Thunder, the locale of which is South Mrica, Lanny, the hero, is quite dark, but turns out, after all, to be the son of the town's ruling white man; and in God Is For White Folks, Beau, the ille gitimate son of a South ern plantation owner, eventually comes home to his dying father's bosom, bringing a Negro bride as irreproachably fair as himself to reign in the ancestral halls. This approaches pure fantasy, an element familiar in fiction but never allied formally with sociology. Here we can make two charitable assumptions: one, that, after all, these things do happen; two, that the tasteless prose and the antique plots will present no obstacles to the public mind and are, perhaps, the safest vehicles for a humane and honest rage.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  DOWN AT THE CROSS 34-5 One watched the lives they led. One could not be fooled about that; one watched the things they did and the excuses that they gave themselves, and if a white man was really in trouble, deep trouble, it was to the Negro's door that he came. And one felt that if one had had that white man's worldly advantages, one would never have become as bewil dered and as joyless and as thoughtlessly cruel as he. The Ne gro came to the white man for a roof or for five doll ars or for a letter to the judge; the white man came to the Negro for love. But he was not often able to give what he came seeking. The price was too high; he had too much to lose. And the Negro knew this, too. When one knows this about a man, it is impossible for one to hate him, but unless he becomes a man-becomes equal-it is also impossible for one to love him. Ultimately , one tends to avoid him, for the universal characteristic of children is to as sume that they have a mo nopoly on troubl e, and therefore a monopoly on you. (Ask any Negro what he knows about the white people with whom he works. And then ask the white people with whom he works what they know about him.) How can the American Negro past be used? It is entirely possible that this dishonored past will rise up soon to smite all of us. There are some wars, for example (if anyone on the globe is still mad enough to go to war), that the American Negro will not support, however many of his people may be coerced-and there is a limit to the number of people any government can put in prison, and a rigid limit indeed to the practicality of such a course. A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay. "The problem of the twen tieth century," wrote W. E. B. Du Bois around sixty years ago, "is the problem of the color line ." A fearful and delicate problem, which compromises, when it does not corrupt, all the American efforts to build a better world-here, there, or anywhere. It is for this reason that everything white Americans think they believe in must now be reexamined. What one would not like to see again is the consolidation of peoples on the basis of their color. But as long as we in the West place on color the value that we do, we make it impossible for the great unwashed to consolidate themselves according to any other principle. Color is not a human or a personal reality; it THE FI RE NE XT TIME is a political reality. But this is a distinction so extremely hard to make that the West has not been able to make it yet.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Ronald Staines, by the way,’ he said to me. ‘With an “e”.’ He pulled up a chair, not risking to ask if he could join us. ‘And how did you get involved with Charles?’ he asked. ‘Charles has some terrible secret, I’m sure—his success rate with the ragazzi is quite remarkable. He always has some very, very handsome young man in tow.’ I had always been a sucker for this kind of thing, out of vanity, and liked to allow the old their unthreatening admiration. ‘You’re bloody lucky he hasn’t got his camera with him, William,’ said Nantwich. ‘He’d have you stripped off in a moment and covered in baby oil.’ I got the impression of a long-lasting relationship conducted in a bitchy third-person. ‘I have seen photographs of you, though, William,’ Staines recalled. ‘Surely Whitehaven did one, or am I wrong?—little swimming things, and a stripe of shadow covering those dreamy blue eyes? So talented, that young man, though some of his stuff can be a little … strong. Not this one, mind you: I saw it in that New York exhibition—there have been several, I know, but last year, in a kind of abattoir in Soho …’ ‘He’s Beckwith’s grandson,’ said Nantwich, as if to discount the possibility which Staines was outlining. ‘Of course,’ exclaimed Staines in a curiously condescending way; ‘how interesting!’—turning his head aside to suggest a sudden loss of interest. ‘My dear, I’ve done some pieces which will delight you. I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if they delighted William as well—I’m certainly delighted myself. They’re a new departure, newish anyway, and rather religious and full of feeling. One’s a kind of sacra conversazione between Saint Sebastian and John the Baptist. The young man who modelled Sebastian was almost in tears when I showed it to him, it’s so lovely.’ ‘How did you do the arrows?’ I interrupted, remembering Mishima’s arduous posing in a self-portrait as Sebastian. ‘Oh, no arrows, dear; it’s before the martyrdom. He’s quite unpierced. But he looks ready for it, somehow, the way I’ve done it.’ ‘How can you tell it’s Sebastian, then,’ said Nantwich emphatically, ‘since the only thing that identifies Se-bloody-bastian is that he’s got all those ruddy arrows sticking up his arse?’ This seemed a fair criticism, but Staines ignored it. ‘You’ll admire the Baptist, though,’ he added. ‘An Italian lad, a porter at Smithfield, in fact—a more virile Saint than one normally sees, perhaps, quite sort of hairy and rough. Are you interested in photography?’ ‘I am, rather,’ I answered, ‘but I don’t know a lot about it.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  When Monroe County District Attorney Ted Pearson first heard his investigators’ evidence against Walter McMillian, he must have been disappointed. Ralph Myers’s story of the crime was pretty far-fetched; his knack for dramatic embellishment made even the most basic allegations unnecessarily complicated. Here’s Myers’s account of the murder of Ronda Morrison: On the day of the murder, Myers was getting gas when Walter McMillian saw him at the gas station and forced him at gunpoint to get in Walter’s truck and drive to Monroeville. Myers didn’t really know Walter before that day. Once in the truck, Walter told Myers he needed him to drive because Walter’s arm was hurt. Myers protested but had no choice. Walter directed Myers to drive him to Jackson Cleaners in downtown Monroeville and instructed him to wait in the truck while McMillian went inside alone. After waiting a long time, Myers drove down the street to a grocery store to buy cigarettes. He returned ten minutes later. After another long wait, Myers finally saw McMillian emerge from the store and return to the truck. Upon entering the truck, he admitted that he had killed the store clerk. Myers then drove McMillian back to the gas station so that Myers could retrieve his vehicle. Before Myers left, Walter threatened to kill him if he ever told anyone what he had seen or done. In summary, an African American man planning a robbery-murder in the heart of Monroeville in the middle of the day stops at a gas station and randomly selects a white man to become his accomplice by asking him to drive him to and from the crime scene because his arm is injured, even though he had been able to drive himself to the gas station where he encountered Myers and to drive his truck home after returning Myers to the gas station. Law enforcement officers knew that Myers’s story would be very difficult to prove, so they arrested Walter for sodomy, which served to shock the community and further demonize McMillian; it also gave police an opportunity to bring Walter’s truck to the jail for Bill Hooks, a jailhouse informant, to see. Bill Hooks was a young black man with a reputation as a jailhouse snitch. He had been in the county jail for several days on burglary charges when McMillian was arrested. Hooks was promised release from jail and reward money if he could connect McMillian’s truck to the Morrison murder. Hooks eagerly told investigators that he had driven by Jackson Cleaners near the time of the crime and had seen a truck tear away from the cleaners with two men inside. At the jail, Hooks positively identified Walter’s truck as the one he’d seen at the cleaners nearly six months earlier. This second witness gave law enforcement officials what they needed to charge Walter McMillian with capital murder in the shooting death of Ronda Morrison. —

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  If we are so rash as to say that men have greater endurance, we are reminded of the procession of men who have gone to their long home while women walked about the streets- mourning, we arc told, but no doubt, gossiping and shopping at the same time. We can pick up no novel, no drama, no poem; we may examine no fable nor any myth without stumbling on this merciless paradox in the nature of the sexes. This is a paradox which experience alone is able to illumina te and this experience is not communicable in any lan guage that we know. The recognition of this complexity is the signal of maturity; it marks the death of the child and the birth of the man. II One may say, with an exaggeration vastly more apparent than real, that it is one of the major American ambitions to shun this metamorphosis. In the truly awesome attempt of the American to at once preserve his innocence and arrive at a man's estate, that mindless monster, the tough guy, has been created and perfected; whose masculinity is found in the most infantile and element ary externals and whose attitude towards women is the wedding of the most abysmal romanticism and the most implacable distrust. It is impossible for a moment to believe that any Cain or Chandler hero loves his girl; we are given overwhelming evidence that he wants her, but that is not the same thing and, moreover, what he seems to want is revenge; what they bring to each other is not even passion or 598 OTH ER ES SAYS sexuality but an unbelievably barren and wrathful grinding. They arc surrounded by blood and treachery; and their bitter coupling, which has the urgency and precision of machine gun fire, is heralded and punctua ted by the mysterious and astounded corpse. The woman, in these energetic works, is the unknown quantity, the incarnation of sexual evil, the smiler with the knife. It is the man, who, for all his tommy guns and rhetoric, is the innocent, inexpli cably , compulsively and perpetually betrayed. Men and women have all but dis appeared trom our popular culture, leaving only this disturb ing series of effigies with a motive power which we arc told is sex, but which is actually a dream-like longing, an unful fillment more wistful than that of the Sleeping Beauty await ing the lif e-giving touch of the tared Prince. For the American dream of love insists that the Boy get the Girl; the tough guy has a disconcerting tendency to lapse abruptly into baby-talk and go off with Her-havi ng first ascertained that she is not blood-guilty; and we are always told that this is what he really wants, to stop all this chasing around and settle down, to have children and a full lite with a woman who, unhappily even when she appears, tails to exist.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I heard of a couple of fist-fights, and, of course, I was always encountering people who hated his guts. These people always mildly surprised me, and so did the news of his fights: it was hard for me to imagine that anyone could really dislike Norman, anyone, that is, who had encou ntered him personally. I knew of one fight he had had, forced on him, apparently, by a blow-hard Village type whom I considered rather pathetic. I didn't blame Norman for this fight, but I couldn't help wondering why he bothered to rise to such a shapeless challenge. It seemed simpler, as I was always telling myself, just to stay out of Village bars. And people talked about Norman with a kind of avid glee, which I found very ugly. Pleasure made their saliva flow, they sprayed and all but drooled, and their eyes shone with that blood-lust which is the only real tribute the mediocre are ca pable of bringing to the extraordinary. Many of the people who claimed to be seeing Norman all the time impr essed me as being, to tell the truth, pitifully far beneath him. But this is also true, alas, of much of my own entourage. The people who arc in one's life or merely continually in one's presence rc,·eal a great deal about one's needs and ter rors. Also, one's hopes. I was not, however, on the scene. I was on the road-not quite, I trust, in the sense that Kerouac's boys are; but I pre sented, certainly, a moving target. And I was reading Norman Mailer. Before I had met him, I had only read The Naked and The Dead, The White Negro, and Barbary Shore-1 think this is right, though it may be that I only read The White Negro later and confuse my reading of that piece with some of my discussions with Norman. Anyway, I could not, with the best will in the world, make any sense out of The White Negro and, THE BL ACK BOY LOOK S AT THE WHI TE BOY 277 in fact, it was hard for me to imagine that this essay had been written by the same man who wrote the novels.

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

  In regard to the first he posits three statements. The first of these is that it is due to a weakness of understanding that some affirm rest of all things and in support of their stand search for a sophistic reason without referring to sense. For it proceeds on the fact that the intellect is not capable of destroying sophistical arguments which conflict with things evident to sense. But it has been said in Topics I that there is no need to dispute against positions or problems that are in a mind which needs sense or punishment. Hence it is not necessary to dispute this position, due to its stupidity. The second thing he says is that this problem does not concern a particular being but being in general. Nor does it affect natural science alone, but in a way all demonstrative sciences and all opinions, i.e., all the arts which use opinions, as do rhetoric and dialectics, for all the arts and sciences make use of motion. For the practical arts in a way direct certain motions, and natural philosophy speculates about the nature of motion and about mobile beings. Mathematicians, too, make use of motion, i.ee, of an imagined one, saying that a point in motion makes a line. The metaphysician, however, considers first principles. Accordingly, it is plain that to destroy motion conflicts with all sciences. Now an error that affects all beings and all sciences is not to be reproved by the philosopher of nature but by the metaphysician. Thereforet it is not the business of natural philosophy to dispute this error. The third thing he says is that unreasonable and inappropriate problems about the principles of mathematical sciences do not pertain to mathematics to be answered. The same is true in the other sciences. In like manner, it is not the business of the physicist to destroy an affirmation that is contrary to its principles. For in each science the definition of the subject is assumed as a principle; hence in the science which deals with nature, it is assumed as a principle that nature is a principle of motion. Accordingly, in the light of these three statements, it is apparent that it does not belong to natural philosophy to dispute this position. 1007. Then at (775) he excludes the second member, in which Heraclitus posited that all things are always being moved. And first he compares this opinion with the previous one which posited that all things are always at rest; and he says that to say that all things are always in motion, as Heraclitus said, is both false and contrary to the principles of natural science. Yet this position is not in as great conflict with the art as the first one is.

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

  6. The sixth objection is quite irrelevant to the matter in hand. For the words of St. Jerome refer to the habit of asking for and accepting superfluities. This is evident by what he says in his letter to the priest Nepotian. 7. The law referred to, applies to sturdy beggars who were useless to the state and who, living idle lives, defrauded other poor people of their rights. The law in question speaks of them as slothful men. Of this class are gluttons who beg for food which they may eat in idleness. Religious cannot, except in malice, be held to belong to this class. It need not always be a heinous sin which is punished severely; for chastisement is inflicted not merely as a penalty for guilt, but also as a warning to the offender or to others. Hence at times a heavy penalty is awarded to an offence which, though not heinous in itself, is habitual. This is done in order that it may act as a deterrent to the criminal. The chapter quoted in the objection refers only to punishment inflicted to avenge sin. 8. Those of whom St. Augustine speaks begged not merely for necessities, but for superfluities. Their holiness, therefore, was not true, but hypocritical. This is made clear by the fact that he speaks of their “desiring luxurious poverty,” or “the recompense of feigned sanctity.” In thus acting they were, of course, reprehensible.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘She is the end, that one,’ I agreed, glancing at the man in question, one of that breed of middle-aged queens whose strategy, as they become uncontestably unattractive, is to cultivate a barging, unsmiling manner, sensitive to imagined infringements of their rights and never getting out of anyone’s way. Like James’s ‘Miss Marple’, a portly man who wore his glasses even in the shower and would blunder round and round the changing-room in his underwear for thirty or forty minutes, his spectacles misting up from the heat of his body, he was one of the odd crew at the Corry who, knowing no one there, existed in a kind of unseemly limbo of paranoia and repression. James, who himself occupied the club in a highly fantastical way, had catalogued many of its members with fantasy names. Some of them confused me—Miss De Meanour and Miss Anthropy were impossible to distinguish, whilst a pair of boneheaded identical twins could be referred to indiscriminately as ‘Biff’. There was no doubt about ‘Miss World’, however, the hilariously vain queen of uncertain years, known to me also as Freddie, who came into the shower now, casting off his towel as if it were the hungrily awaited climax to a striptease. ‘Hullo, Will,’ he said as he came alongside, his tanned, creased, sinewy body swivelling balletically. He spoke in a carrying, recital manner, as if testing some primitive broadcasting machine. ‘How are you? You’re looking wildly wicked and young.’ ‘I am wildly wicked and young,’ was the best I could do before I, as the French say, saved myself—inevitably bumping into Miss Manners as I did so. ‘Clumsy little slut!’ he hissed, with such venom that I couldn’t help laughing. On the train home I carried on with Firbank. I was on Prancing Nigger now, though I shared James’s preference for its other title, Sorrow in Sunlight. How Miami longed to lift up Bamboo’s crimson loincloth! ‘She had often longed to snatch it away.’ I lolled into reflection on Bamboo’s charming words, ‘I dat amorous ob you, Mimi’; and as I approached the house they were becoming a catchphrase of the sort I sometimes keep nonsensically saying to myself and anyone else for days on end, or singing in the style of Handel arias or Elvis Presley songs. I found myself muttering it, with mounting intensity and irrelevance, when I came into the flat, called out, searched round and found that Arthur had gone.

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

  On the contrary, The Apostle says (Titus 3:10,11): “A man that is a heretic, after the first and second admonition, avoid: knowing that he, that is such an one, is subverted.” I answer that, With regard to heretics two points must be observed: one, on their own side; the other, on the side of the Church. On their own side there is the sin, whereby they deserve not only to be separated from the Church by excommunication, but also to be severed from the world by death. For it is a much graver matter to corrupt the faith which quickens the soul, than to forge money, which supports temporal life. Wherefore if forgers of money and other evil-doers are forthwith condemned to death by the secular authority, much more reason is there for heretics, as soon as they are convicted of heresy, to be not only excommunicated but even put to death. On the part of the Church, however, there is mercy which looks to the conversion of the wanderer, wherefore she condemns not at once, but “after the first and second admonition,” as the Apostle directs: after that, if he is yet stubborn, the Church no longer hoping for his conversion, looks to the salvation of others, by excommunicating him and separating him from the Church, and furthermore delivers him to the secular tribunal to be exterminated thereby from the world by death. For Jerome commenting on Gal. 5:9, “A little leaven,” says: “Cut off the decayed flesh, expel the mangy sheep from the fold, lest the whole house, the whole paste, the whole body, the whole flock, burn, perish, rot, die. Arius was but one spark in Alexandria, but as that spark was not at once put out, the whole earth was laid waste by its flame.” Reply to Objection 1: This very modesty demands that the heretic should be admonished a first and second time: and if he be unwilling to retract, he must be reckoned as already “subverted,” as we may gather from the words of the Apostle quoted above. Reply to Objection 2: The profit that ensues from heresy is beside the intention of heretics, for it consists in the constancy of the faithful being put to the test, and “makes us shake off our sluggishness, and search the Scriptures more carefully,” as Augustine states (De Gen. cont. Manich. i, 1). What they really intend is the corruption of the faith, which is to inflict very great harm indeed. Consequently we should consider what they directly intend, and expel them, rather than what is beside their intention, and so, tolerate them.

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

  This opinion does not concern our point; but let us, for the moment presume it to be erroneous. From this error has arisen the presumption of certain men, especially of monks, who, elated by their holiness, have, at their own pleasure, usurped the functions of ecclesiastics—preaching, and giving absolution, without any episcopal commission. We find their audacity rebuked (XVI, quaest. I, Pervenit ad nos), in the following terms: “We are astonished that in your parish, certain monks, and abbots, have, contrary to the decrees of the holy Fathers, arrogated to themselves the rights and functions of bishops. They administer penance and remission of sins, bring about reconciliations, and dispose of tithes and churches. They ought not to presume to act thus, without license from the bishop, or authority of the Apostolic See,” Now in their condemnation of the presumption of these monks, certain men have fallen into the error of rashly saying that religious are unfitted to perform the duties just enumerated, even though they be appointed thereto by the authority of the Bishop. This error is thus mentioned (XVII, quaest. I), “There are certain men, filled rather with bitter jealousy than with love of truth, who, without any grounds for their assertion, have the presumption to state that monks, who have died to the world in order to live to God, are unworthy of exercising the priestly office, and are incapable of administering penance, of teaching Christianity, or of giving absolution, in spite of the power divinely committed to them at their ordination. But this is a complete error.” Other men, again, are led by their audacity into another mistake. They assert that religious are not merely precluded, by their state of life, from exercising the sacerdotal functions, but that, bishops cannot, without the consent of the parish priests, grant them faculties for their performance. Nay, the Pope himself, they say, cannot qualify religious to act as priests. Thus, this error leads to the same result as that which we have previously mentioned. For while one error detracts from the ecclesiastical power, the other asserts that the power of the church depends upon sanctity of life. Our next task will be to refute this error, and we shall proceed in the following order: First, we shall show that bishops and superior prelates can preach and absolve those who are under the care of priests, without needing the permission of those priests. Secondly, we shall prove that they can empower others to act in like manner. Thirdly, we shall make clear that religious are, when commissioned by a bishop, capable of exercising these functions. Fourthly, we shall demonstrate that it is expedient for the welfare of souls that others, besides parish priests, should be allowed to preach, and hear confessions. Fifthly, it will be shown that a religious order may advantageously be founded for the purpose of preaching and hearing confessions, with license from the bishops. Sixthly, we shall reply to the objections of our adversaries.

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

  CHRYSOSTOM. What is said here is not opposed to what our Lord says elsewhere, Let your light shine before men; (Matt. 5:16.) that is, that we should be eager to do good for the glory of God, not our own. For vain-glory is a baneful thing, and from hence springs iniquity, and despair, and avarice, the mother of evil. But if thou seekest to turn away from this, ever raise thy eyes to God, and be content with that glory which is from Him. For if in all things we must choose the more learned for judges, how dost thou trust to the many the decision of virtue, and not rather to Him, who before all others knoweth it, and can give and reward it, whose glory therefore if thou desirest, avoid the praise of men. For no one more excites our admiration than he who rejects glory. And if we do this, much more does the God of all. Be mindful then, that the glory of men quickly faileth, seeing in the course of time it is past into oblivion. It follows, For so did their fathers to the false prophets. BEDE. By the false prophets are meant those, who to gain the favour of the multitude attempt to predict future events. The Lord on the mountain pronounces only the blessings of the good, but on the plain he describes also the “woe” of the wicked, because the yet uninstructed hearers must first be brought by terrors to good works, but the perfect need but be invited by rewards. AMBROSE. And mark, that Matthew by rewards called the people to virtue and faith, but Luke also frightened them from their sins and iniquities by the denunciation of future punishment. 6:27–3127. But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, 28. Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. 29. And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat also. 30. Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again. 31. And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. BEDE. Having spoken above of what they might suffer from their enemies, He now points out how they ought to conduct themselves towards their enemies, saying, But I say to you who hear. AMBROSE. Having proceeded in the enumeration of many heavenly actions, He not unwisely comes to this place last, that He might teach the people confirmed by the divine miracles to march onward in the footsteps of virtue beyond the path of the law. Lastly, among the three greatest, (hope, faith, and charity,) the greatest is charity, which is commanded in these words, Love your enemies.

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

  AMBROSE. God is justified by baptism, wherein men justify themselves confessing their sins. For he that sins and confesses his sin unto God, justifies God, submitting himself to Him who overcometh, and hoping for grace from Him; God therefore is justified by baptism, in which there is confession and pardon of sin. EUSEBIUS. Because also they believed, they justified God, for He appeared just to them in all that He did. But the disobedient conduct of the Pharisees in not receiving John, accorded not with the words of the prophet, That thou mightest be justified when thou speakest. (Ps. 51:4.) Hence it follows, But the Pharisees and lawyers rejected the counsel of God, &c. BEDE. These words were spoken either in the person of the Evangelist, or, as some think, of the Saviour; but when he says, against themselves, he means that he who rejects the grace of God, does it against himself. Or, they are blamed as foolish and ungrateful for being unwilling to receive the counsel of God, sent to themselves. The counsel then is of God, because He ordained salvation by the passion and death of Christ, which the Pharisees and lawyers despised. AMBROSE. Let us not then despise (as the Pharisees did) the counsel of God, which is in the baptism of John, that is, the counsel which the Angel of great counsel searches out. (Is. 9:6. LXX.) No one despises the counsel of man. Who then shall reject the counsel of God? CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. There was a certain play among the Jewish children of this kind. A company of boys were collected together, who, mocking the sudden changes in the affairs of this life, some of them sang, some mourned, but the mourners did not rejoice with those that rejoiced, nor did those who rejoiced fall in with those that wept. They then rebuked each other in turn with the charge of want of sympathy. That such were the feelings of the Jewish people and their rulers, Christ implied in the following words, spoken in the person of Christ; Whereunto then shall I liken the men of this generation, and to what are they like? They are like to children sitting in the market-place. BEDE. The Jewish generation is compared to children, because formerly they had prophets for their teachers, of whom it is said, Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou perfected praise. AMBROSE. But the prophets sung, repeating in spiritual strains their oracles of the common salvation; they wept, soothing with mournful dirges the hard hearts of the Jews. The songs were not sung in the market-place, nor in the streets, but in Jerusalem. For that is the Lord’s forum, in which the laws of His heavenly precepts are framed.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The merciless ingenuity of Mr. James M. Cain hit upon an etTectivc solution to this problem in a recent novel by having his protagonist tall in love with a twelve year old, a tcmalc against whom no crime could be charged, who was not yet guilty of the shedding of blood and who thcrcatl:cr kept herself pure for the hero until he returned from his exhausting and improbable trials. This preposterous and tasteless notion did not seem, in Mr. Cain's world, to be preposterous or tasteless at all, but functioned, on the con trary, as an eminently t(>nunatc and farsighted inspiration. Mr. Cain, indeed, has achieved an enormous public and, I should hope, a not inconsiderable fi>rtunc on the basis of his remarkable preoccupation with the virile male. One may sug gest that it was the dynamism of his material which trapped him into introducing, briefly, and with the air of a man wear ing antiseptic gloves, an un attractive invert in an early novel, Serenade, who was promptly stabbed to death by the hero's mistress, a lusty and unli kely senorita. This novel contains a curious admission on the part of the hero to the eftect that there is always somewhere a homosexual who can wear down PRESER VA TION OF INNO CENCE 599 the resistance of the normal man by knowing which buttons to press. This is presented as a serious and melancholy warning and it is when the invert of Serenade begins pressing too many buttons at once that he arrives at his sordid and bloody end. Thus is that immaculate manliness within us protected; thu s summarily do we deal with any obstacle to the union of the Boy and the Girl. Can we doubt the wisdom of drawing the curtains when' they finally come together? For the instant that the Boy and Girl become the Bride and Groom we are forced to leave them; not really supposing that the drama is over or that we have witnessed the fulfillment of two human beings, though we would lik e to believe this, but constrained by the knowledge that it is not for our eyes to witness the pain and the tempest that will follow. (For we know what follows; we know that lif e is not really like this at all .) What are we to say, who have already been betrayed, when this boy, this girl, dis covers that the knife which preserved them for each other has unfitted them for experience? For the boy cannot know a woman since he has never become a man. Hence, violence: that brutality which rages unchecked in our literature is part of the harYest of this unfulfillment, stri dent and dreadful testimony to our renowned and cherished innocence.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Lockridge writes fur too much, there are times when he does not write badly. (It cannot honestly be said that he ever writes well .) His car fc:>r speech is accurate if it is not sensitive; his characterization is vivid-like Sinclair Lewis, or, more accu- 588 LO CKRI DGE: ' THE AM ERIC AN MY TH' 589 rately, like Dickens, he depends on a series of carefully exag gerated foibles-but it is never revelatory; his people are as clear as the sunlight in which they always seem to be bathed and, ultimately, as static and uninteresting. In corporating the nature of the American Myth between the covers of any novel is admittedly a gigantic task; and it is made almost impossible by the fact that so many versions of the same myth are used for so many warring purposes. Which America will you have? There is America for the In dians which Mr. Lockridge mentions hastily and drops. There is America for the people who settled the country, concerning whom Mr. Lockridge is vehemently lyrical but no more star tling than a Thanksgiving hymn. There is America for the laborer, for the financier, America of the north and south, America for the hillbilly, the urbanite, the farmer. And there is America for the Protestant, the Catholic, the Jew, the Mex ican, the Oriental and that arid sector which we have reserved for the Negro. These Americas diverge significantly and some times dangerously and they have much in common. All of them bound doubtfully together create a picture and a climate not indicated in Raint ree County. Mr. Lockridge is not en tirely unaware of these national contradictions; he simply docs not know what to make of them. ('The Union forever!' he cries desperately. '0, beautiful, unanalyzable concept!') At each impasse similar rhetoric is trotted out. The book, which had no core to begin with, becomes as amorphous as cotton candy under the drumming flow of words. These words are designed less to illu minate than they are to conceal; or, more accurately, Mr. Lockridge uses them as a kind of shimmering web, hiding everything with an insistent radiance and proving that, after all, everything is, or is going to be, all right. This dependence on the Word, especially as ill ustrated by this novel, strikes me as something quite peculiarly Amer ican. (In the beginning-and the Word was God.) Here is evinced a remarkable and touching regard tor all things writ ten and an almost slavish respect for anyone who writes. This does not, as one might think, lead to taste or discrimination or insight: the devotion is unqualified. Mr. Lockridge behaves in the presence of the Word like a child let loose in a well stocked ice-cream parlor.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Look at them.) I think of all the pain and sweat with which these greasy dimes were earned, with what trust they were given, in order to make the diff icult passage some what easier for the living, in order to show honor to the dead, and I then have no compassion whatever for this country, or my countrymen. Into this maelstrom, this present elaboration of the slave quarters, this rehearsal for a concentration camp, we place, armed, not for the protection of the ghetto but for the pro- +H NO NAME IN THE STREE T tection of American investments there, some blank American boy who is responsible only to some equally blank elder pa triot- Andy Hardy and his pious father. Richard Harris, in his �C\\' Yo rker article, The Turning Point, observes that "B ack in 19 69, a survey of three hundred police departments around the country had revealed that less than one percent required any college training. Three years later, a pilot study ordered by the President showed that most criminals were mentally below average, which suggested that that policemen who failed to stop or find them might not be much above it." The white cop in the ghetto is as ignorant as he is fright ened, and his entire concept of police work is to cow the natives. He is not compelled to answer to these natives for anything he does; whatever he does, he knows that he will be protected by his brothers, who will allow nothing to stain the honor of the f(>rce. When his working day is over, he goes home and sleeps soundly in a bed miles away-m iles away from the niggers, for that is the way he really thinks of black people. And he is assured of the rightness of his course and the justice of his bigotry every time Nixon, or Agnew, or Mitchell-or the Governor of the State of Calif ornia-open their mouths. Watching the Northern reaction to the Black Panthers, ob serving the abject cowardice with which the Northern popu lations allow them to be menaced, jailed, and murdered, and all this with but the faintest pretense to legality, can fill one with great contempt fix that emancipated North which, but only yesterday, was so full of admiration and sympathy for the heroic blacks in the South. Luckily, many of us were skeptical of the righteous Northern sympathy then, and so we are not overwhelmed or disappointed now. Luckily, many of us have always known, as one of my brothers put it to me something like twenty-f our years ago, that "the spirit of the South is the spirit of America." Now, exactly like the Germans at the time of the Third Reich, though innocent men arc being harassed, jailed, and murdered, in all the Northern cities, the citizens know nothing, and wish to know nothing, of what is happen ing around them.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Although the federal government had promised racial equality for freed former slaves during the short period of Reconstruction, the return of white supremacy and racial subordination came quickly after federal troops left Alabama in the 1870s. Voting rights were taken away from African Americans, and a series of racially restrictive laws enforced the racial hierarchy. “Racial integrity” laws were part of a plan to replicate slavery’s racial hierarchy and reestablish the subordination of African Americans. Having criminalized interracial sex and marriage, states throughout the South would use the laws to justify the forced sterilization of poor and minority women. Forbidding sex between white women and black men became an intense preoccupation throughout the South. In the 1880s, a few years before lynching became the standard response to interracial romance and a century before Walter and Karen Kelly began their affair, Tony Pace, an African American man, and Mary Cox, a white woman, fell in love in Alabama. They were arrested and convicted, and both were sentenced to two years in prison for violating Alabama’s racial integrity laws. John Tompkins, a lawyer and part of a small minority of white professionals who considered the racial integrity laws to be unconstitutional, agreed to represent Tony and Mary to appeal their convictions. The Alabama Supreme Court reviewed the case in 1882. With rhetoric that would be quoted frequently over the next several decades, Alabama’s highest court affirmed the convictions, using language that dripped with contempt for the idea of interracial romance: The evil tendency of the crime [of adultery or fornication] is greater when committed between persons of the two races….Its result may be the amalgamation of the two races, producing a mongrel population and a degraded civilization, the prevention of which is dictated by a sound policy affecting the highest interests of society and government. The U.S. Supreme Court reviewed the Alabama court’s decision. Using “separate but equal” language that previewed the Court’s infamous decision in Plessy v. Ferguson twenty years later, the Court unanimously upheld Alabama’s restrictions on interracial sex and marriage and affirmed the prison terms imposed on Tony Pace and Mary Cox. Following the Court’s decision, more states passed racial integrity laws that made it illegal for African Americans, and sometimes Native Americans and Asian Americans, to marry or have sex with whites. While the restrictions were aggressively enforced in the South, they were also common in the Midwest and West. The State of Idaho banned interracial marriage and sex between white and black people in 1921 even though the state’s population was 99.8 percent nonblack. It wasn’t until 1967 that the United States Supreme Court finally struck down anti-miscegenation statutes in Loving v. Virginia, but restrictions on interracial marriage persisted even after that landmark ruling. Alabama’s state constitution still prohibited the practice in 1986 when Walter met Karen Kelly. Section 102 of the state constitution read:

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Aldo was rather delighted to be given a cue and produced a remark of the kind that pass for jokes among people who can barely speak the same language: ‘Ah yes, you see, I am a butcher.’ Gavin smiled and I explained that Staines had found him while doing some studies of working people in Smithfield. ‘I was carrying half a cow,’ said Aldo, ‘all covered in blood. Ronnie said I looked like bacon.’ There were a few seconds of puzzlement before I worked it out: ‘I expect he meant that you looked like a Bacon.’ But it was going to take too much explaining. Aldo continued pleasantly with an account of portering opportunities in offal and the many under-the-counter benefits of his trade (some nice heart or brains one day, the next perhaps some good fresh liver). I found my eyes resting with momentary respect on the chalked-up menu of alfalfa-sprout salad, chickpea casserole, lentil and parsnip pie … ‘Sorry, William, Gavin Croft-Parker, what an honour, Aldo poppet …’—Staines was among us, clutching at hands, emphatically friendly and humble on his great night. ‘Do forgive me. There was that dullest of men from the whatsit, Bright City Lights, whatever it’s called. Apparently everyone’s opinion is simply made by consulting his organ, so you have to be dreamily dreamily compliant and answer all his dreary dreary questions. So ignorant,’ Staines whispered, ‘he’d no idea what a pyx was; and as for a scapular … he said, “Do you mean the collarbone?” I said “I don’t—and anyway it isn’t the collarbone, it’s the shoulderblade.” Clearly he was never a Catholic, and then I’ve ticked him off and he’ll say something vile in his article just because I’ve made him feel small.’ He took a swig from his glass. ‘Still, I suppose it’ll only be half an inch under the “Gay Listings” ’ (a prophecy with which I was bound to agree). ‘I must have a look upstairs,’ said Gavin, weaving away from us, and I nodded to him, realising he was going altogether. When I turned back Staines was negligently fondling Aldo’s muscly shoulder and gazing distractedly around the crowded room. It was probably better to catch him while I could. ‘Excellent show,’ I said. ‘My dear, do you like it. I’m not utterly utterly displeased with it myself. But of course other people’s praise means more to one even than one’s own!’ ‘You’ve managed to find some fascinating models. I like your St Peter particularly—but then I have known him for some time.’ ‘Old Ashley!—or rather Billy, as he calls himself professionally.’ ‘I’d no idea.’ ‘Mm—he thought Ashley was too girly, especially after April … But I still think of him as “Old Ash”—Ash on an old man’s sleeve, dear …’ ‘Fabulous tits!’ ‘Don’t!’ Staines shivered, and looked at me with a new, suspicious curiosity.

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

  CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. As if He says, You wish me to work many miracles among you, in whose country I have been brought up, but I am aware of a very common failing in the minds of many. To a certain extent it always happens, that even the very best things are despised when they fall to a man’s lot, not scantily, but ever at his will. So it happens also with respect to men. For a friend who is ever at hand, does not meet with the respect due to him. BEDE. Now that Christ is called a Prophet in the Scriptures, Moses bears witness, saying, God shall raise up a Prophet unto you from among your brethren. (Deut. 18:15.) AMBROSE. But this is given for an example, that in vain can you expect the aid of Divine mercy, if you grudge to others the fruits of their virtue. The Lord despises the envious, and withdraws the miracles of His power from them that are jealous of His divine blessings in others. For our Lord’s Incarnation is an evidence of His divinity, and His invisible things are proved to us by those which are visible. See then what evils envy produces. For envy a country is deemed unworthy of the works of its citizen, which was worthy of the conception of the Son of God. ORIGEN. As far as Luke’s narrative is concerned, our Lord is not yet said to have worked any miracle in Capernaum. For before He came to Capernaum, He is said to have lived at Nazareth. I cannot but think therefore that in these words, “whatsoever we have heard done in Capernaum,” there lies a mystery concealed, and that Nazareth is a type of the Jews, Capernaum of the Gentiles. For the time will come when the people of Israel shall say, “The things which thou hast shewn to the whole world, shew also to us.” Preach thy word to the people of Israel, that then at least, when the fulness of the Gentiles has entered, all Israel may be saved. Our Saviour seems to me to have well answered, No prophet is accepted in his own country, but rather according to the type than the letter; though neither was Jeremiah accepted in Anathoth his country, nor the rest of the Prophets. But it seems rather to be meant that we should say, that the people of the circumcision were the countrymen of all the Prophets. And the Gentiles indeed accepted the prophecy of Jesus Christ, esteeming Moses and the Prophets who preached of Christ, far higher than they who would not from these receive Jesus.