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 The City of God

  Chapter 27. --Of the Impiety of Porphyry, Which is Worse Than Even the Mistake of Apuleius. How much more tolerable and accordant with human feeling is the error of your Platonist co-sectary Apuleius! for he attributed the diseases and storms of human passions only to the demons who occupy a grade beneath the moon, and makes even this avowal as by constraint regarding gods whom he honors; but the superior and celestial gods, who inhabit the ethereal regions, whether visible, as the sun, moon, and other luminaries, whose brilliancy makes them conspicuous, or invisible, but believed in by him, he does his utmost to remove beyond the slightest stain of these perturbations. It is not, then, from Plato, but from your Chaldaean teachers you have learned to elevate human vices to the ethereal and empyreal regions of the world and to the celestial firmament, in order that your theurgists might be able to obtain from your gods divine revelations; and yet you make yourself superior to these divine revelations by your intellectual life, which dispenses with these theurgic purifications as not needed by a philosopher. But, by way of rewarding your teachers, you recommend these arts to other men, who, not being philosophers, may be persuaded to use what you acknowledge to be useless to yourself, who are capable of higher things; so that those who cannot avail themselves of the virtue of philosophy, which is too arduous for the multitude, may, at your instigation, betake themselves to theurgists by whom they may be purified, not, indeed, in the intellectual, but in the spiritual part of the soul. Now, as the persons who are unfit for philosophy form incomparably the majority of mankind, more may be compelled to consult these secret and illicit teachers of yours than frequent the Platonic schools. For these most impure demons, pretending to be ethereal gods, whose herald and messenger you have become, have promised that those who are purified by theurgy in the spiritual part of their soul shall not indeed return to the Father, but shall dwell among the ethereal gods above the aerial regions. But such fancies are not listened to by the multitudes of men whom Christ came to set free from the tyranny of demons. For in Him they have the most gracious cleansing, in which mind, spirit, and body alike participate. For, in order that He might heal the whole man from the plague of sin, He took without sin the whole human nature. Would that you had known Him, and would that you had committed yourself for healing to Him rather than to your own frail and infirm human virtue, or to pernicious and curious arts! He would not have deceived you; for Him your own oracles, on your own showing, acknowledged holy and immortal.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  The central model of public policy as implemented by the courts and mediation has been that the child’s relationships with both parents should be continued and if possible strengthened. Courts distribute booklets to parents with the slogan “Parents Are Forever,” by which they mean that parent-child relationships in the predivorce family are expected to endure. The moral dilemma is that many people divorce because they have come to abhor the lifestyle and values of their partner. They leave because they don’t want their children to be subjected to the toxic influences of the other. Men and women alike leave marriages because of their partners’ dishonesty, manipulative relationships, violent behavior, drinking, infidelity, or overall irresponsibility. They divorce for serious reasons to escape a delinquent or demeaning life only to find themselves in a system that reinstates and even strengthens the values and lifestyle they fled from. I don’t have an alternative solution short of enabling the courts or the mediators to play the role of moral arbiter—an idea I strongly reject. Nor do I think we should conduct prolonged investigations of every alleged misdeed. We would create a witch-hunting society that would probably be worse than the present system. But I do want to point out that the courts’ neutral position has serious consequences. It does not rescue the child or even purport to do so. On the contrary, it rescues the parent. As we saw in Larry’s continued adoration of his violent father, it can and often does lock the child into troubled and immoral relationships. As a result, it imposes on the child the task of rescuing herself from identifying with a troubled or an immoral parent. This can be an enormous burden. Many divorced parents are preoccupied with these issues for good reason. Joint Physical Custody I ASKED PAULA how the joint custody was working out and she gave me a soliloquy on how frustrating the situation was in her eyes. Racer has a hard time making transitions between the two homes—hers in Berkeley, his in San Jose. She and Brad are not talking about it. She still feels like a pawn, bending to other people’s interests. But, she said, Brad’s new girlfriend is a decent person and that’s helping. Above all, Racer wants to see his dad. She said, “In spite of Brad’s problems, which worry me a lot, I have this gut feeling that Brad and Racer have a good connection. They have a whole thing going about baseball. Racer knows all the teams and he has this incredible baseball card collection that he lugs back and forth. Racer wears his Giants cap sideways, just like Brad does. And he’s starting to roll up the sleeves on his T-shirt and whistle between his front teeth. Guess who does the same thing.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 14. --Concerning the Offices of Mercury and Mars. But they have not found how to refer Mercury and Mars to any parts of the world, and to the works of God which are in the elements; and therefore they have set them at least over human works, making them assistants in speaking and in carrying on wars. Now Mercury, if he has also the power of the speech of the gods, rules also over the king of the gods himself, if Jupiter, as he receives from him the faculty of speech, also speaks according as it is his pleasure to permit him--which surely is absurd; but if it is only the power over human speech which is held to be attributed to him, then we say it is incredible that Jupiter should have condescended to give the pap not only to children, but also to beasts--from which he has been surnamed Ruminus--and yet should have been unwilling that the care of our speech, by which we excel the beasts, should pertain to him. And thus speech itself both belongs to Jupiter, and is Mercury. But if speech itself is said to be Mercury, as those things which are said concerning him by way of interpretation show it to be;--for he is said to have been called Mercury, that is, he who runs between, [276] because speech runs between men:they say also that the Greeks call him Ermes, because speech, or interpretation, which certainly belongs to speech, is called by them hermeneia:also he is said to preside over payments, because speech passes between sellers and buyers:the wings, too, which he has on his head and on his feet, they say mean that speech passes winged through the air:he is also said to have been called the messenger, [277] because by means of speech all our thoughts are expressed; [278] --if, therefore, speech itself is Mercury, then, even by their own confession, he is not a god. But when they make to themselves gods of such as are not even demons, by praying to unclean spirits, they are possessed by such as are not gods, but demons. In like manner, because they have not been able to find for Mars any element or part of the world in which he might perform some works of nature of whatever kind, they have said that he is the god of war, which is a work of men, and that not one which is considered desirable by them. If, therefore, Felicitas should give perpetual peace, Mars would have nothing to do. But if war itself is Mars, as speech is Mercury, I wish it were as true that there were no war to be falsely called a god, as it is true that it is not a god. [276] Quasi medius currens. [277] Nuncius. [278] Enunciantur.

• From The City of God

  [511] Augustin refers to John viii. 25; see p. 195. He might rather have referred to Rev. iii. 14. [512] Ps. civ. 24. [513] Matt. xxii. 30. [514] Matt. xviii. 10. Chapter 33. --Of the Two Different and Dissimilar Communities of Angels, Which are Not Inappropriately Signified by the Names Light and Darkness. That certain angels sinned, and were thrust down to the lowest parts of this world, where they are, as it were, incarcerated till their final damnation in the day of judgment, the Apostle Peter very plainly declares, when he says that "God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness to be reserved into judgment. " [515]Who, then, can doubt that God, either in foreknowledge or in act, separated between these and the rest? And who will dispute that the rest are justly called "light? " For even we who are yet living by faith, hoping only and not yet enjoying equality with them, are already called "light" by the apostle:"For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord. " [516]But as for these apostate angels, all who understand or believe them to be worse than unbelieving men are well aware that they are called "darkness. "Wherefore, though light and darkness are to be taken in their literal signification in these passages of Genesis in which it is said, "God said, Let there be light, and there was light," and "God divided the light from the darkness," yet, for our part, we understand these two societies of angels,--the one enjoying God, the other swelling with pride; the one to whom it is said, "Praise ye Him, all His angels," [517] the other whose prince says, "All these things will I give Thee if Thou wilt fall down and worship me;" [518] the one blazing with the holy love of God, the other reeking with the unclean lust of self-advancement. And since, as it is written, "God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble," [519] we may say, the one dwelling in the heaven of heavens, the other cast thence, and raging through the lower regions of the air; the one tranquil in the brightness of piety, the other tempest-tossed with beclouding desires; the one, at God's pleasure, tenderly succoring, justly avenging,--the other, set on by its own pride, boiling with the lust of subduing and hurting; the one the minister of God's goodness to the utmost of their good pleasure, the other held in by God's power from doing the harm it would; the former laughing at the latter when it does good unwillingly by its persecutions, the latter envying the former when it gathers in its pilgrims. These two angelic communities, then, dissimilar and contrary to one another, the one both by nature good and by will upright, the other also good by nature but by will depraved, as they are exhibited in other and more explicit passages of holy writ, so I think they are spoken of in this book of Genesis under the names of light and darkness; and even if the author perhaps had a different meaning, yet our discussion of the obscure language has not been wasted time; for, though we have been unable to discover his meaning, yet we have adhered to the rule of faith, which is sufficiently ascertained by the faithful from other passages of equal authority. For, though it is the material works of God which are here spoken of, they have certainly a resemblance to the spiritual, so that Paul can say, "Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day:we are not of the night, nor of darkness. " [520]If, on the other hand, the author of Genesis saw in the words what we see, then our discussion reaches this more satisfactory conclusion, that the man of God, so eminently and divinely wise, or rather, that the Spirit of God who by him recorded God's works which were finished on the sixth day, may be supposed not to have omitted all mention of the angels whether he included them in the words "in the beginning," because He made them first, or, which seems most likely, because He made them in the only-begotten Word. And, under these names heaven and earth, the whole creation is signified, either as divided into spiritual and material, which seems the more likely, or into the two great parts of the world in which all created things are contained, so that, first of all, the creation is presented in sum, and then its parts are enumerated according to the mystic number of the days.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 8. --Of the Misdirected Love Whereby the Will Fell Away from the Immutable to the Mutable Good. This I do know, that the nature of God can never, nowhere, nowise be defective, and that natures made of nothing can. These latter, however, the more being they have, and the more good they do (for then they do something positive), the more they have efficient causes; but in so far as they are defective in being, and consequently do evil (for then what is their work but vanity? ), they have deficient causes. And I know likewise, that the will could not become evil, were it unwilling to become so; and therefore its failings are justly punished, being not necessary, but voluntary. For its defections are not to evil things, but are themselves evil; that is to say, are not towards things that are naturally and in themselves evil, but the defection of the will is evil, because it is contrary to the order of nature, and an abandonment of that which has supreme being for that which has less. For avarice is not a fault inherent in gold, but in the man who inordinately loves gold, to the detriment of justice, which ought to be held in incomparably higher regard than gold. Neither is luxury the fault of lovely and charming objects, but of the heart that inordinately loves sensual pleasures, to the neglect of temperance, which attaches us to objects more lovely in their spirituality, and more delectable by their incorruptibility. Nor yet is boasting the fault of human praise, but of the soul that is inordinately fond of the applause of men, and that makes light of the voice of conscience. Pride, too, is not the fault of him who delegates power, nor of power itself, but of the soul that is inordinately enamored of its own power, and despises the more just dominion of a higher authority. Consequently he who inordinately loves the good which any nature possesses, even though he obtain it, himself becomes evil in the good, and wretched because deprived of a greater good.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 8. --Of Miracles Which Were Wrought that the World Might Believe in Christ, and Which Have Not Ceased Since the World Believed. Why, they say, are those miracles, which you affirm were wrought formerly, wrought no longer? I might, indeed, reply that miracles were necessary before the world believed, in order that it might believe. And whoever now-a-days demands to see prodigies that he may believe, is himself a great prodigy, because he does not believe, though the whole world does. But they make these objections for the sole purpose of insinuating that even those former miracles were never wrought. How, then, is it that everywhere Christ is celebrated with such firm belief in His resurrection and ascension? How is it that in enlightened times, in which every impossibility is rejected, the world has, without any miracles, believed things marvellously incredible? Or will they say that these things were credible, and therefore were credited? Why then do they themselves not believe? Our argument, therefore, is a summary one--either incredible things which were not witnessed have caused the world to believe other incredible things which both occurred and were witnessed, or this matter was so credible that it needed no miracles in proof of it, and therefore convicts these unbelievers of unpardonable scepticism. This I might say for the sake of refuting these most frivolous objectors. But we cannot deny that many miracles were wrought to confirm that one grand and health-giving miracle of Christ's ascension to heaven with the flesh in which He rose. For these most trustworthy books of ours contain in one narrative both the miracles that were wrought and the creed which they were wrought to confirm. The miracles were published that they might produce faith, and the faith which they produced brought them into greater prominence. For they are read in congregations that they may be believed, and yet they would not be so read unless they were believed. For even now miracles are wrought in the name of Christ, whether by His sacraments or by the prayers or relics of His saints; but they are not so brilliant and conspicuous as to cause them to be published with such glory as accompanied the former miracles. For the canon of the sacred writings, which behoved to be closed, [1614] causes those to be everywhere recited, and to sink into the memory of all the congregations; but these modern miracles are scarcely known even to the whole population in the midst of which they are wrought, and at the best are confined to one spot. For frequently they are known only to a very few persons, while all the rest are ignorant of them, especially if the state is a large one; and when they are reported to other persons in other localities, there is no sufficient authority to give them prompt and unwavering credence, although they are reported to the faithful by the faithful.

• From The City of God

  But if they say that only such things as come to life in flesh, and are supported by senses, are assigned to Sentinus, why does not that God who made all things live and feel, bestow on flesh also life and sensation, in the universality of His operation conferring also on foetuses this gift? And what, then, is the use of Vitumnus and Sentinus? But if these, as it were, extreme and lowest things have been committed by Him who presides universally over life and sense to these gods as to servants, are these select gods then so destitute of servants, that they could not find any to whom even they might commit those things, but with all their dignity, for which they are, it seems, deemed worthy to be selected, were compelled to perform their work along with ignoble ones? Juno is select queen of the gods, and the sister and wife of Jupiter; nevertheless she is Iterduca, the conductor, to boys, and performs this work along with a most ignoble pair--the goddesses Abeona and Adeona. There they have also placed the goddess Mena, who gives to boys a good mind, and she is not placed among the select gods; as if anything greater could be bestowed on a man than a good mind. But Juno is placed among the select because she is Iterduca and Domiduca (she who conducts one on a journey, and who conducts him home again); as if it is of any advantage for one to make a journey, and to be conducted home again, if his mind is not good. And yet the goddess who bestows that gift has not been placed by the selectors among the select gods, though she ought indeed to have been preferred even to Minerva, to whom, in this minute distribution of work, they have allotted the memory of boys. For who will doubt that it is a far better thing to have a good mind, than ever so great a memory? For no one is bad who has a good mind; [255] but some who are very bad are possessed of an admirable memory, and are so much the worse, the less they are able to forget the bad things which they think. And yet Minerva is among the select gods, whilst the goddess Mena is hidden by a worthless crowd. What shall I say concerning Virtus? What concerning Felicitas? --concerning whom I have already spoken much in the fourth book; [256] to whom, though they held them to be goddesses, they have not thought fit to assign a place among the select gods, among whom they have given a place to Mars and Orcus, the one the causer of death, the other the receiver of the dead.

• From The City of God

  He who thinks this grand promise was fulfilled in Solomon greatly errs; for he attends to the saying, "He shall build me an house," but he does not attend to the saying, "His house shall be faithful, and his kingdom for evermore before me. "Let him therefore attend and behold the house of Solomon full of strange women worshipping false gods, and the king himself, aforetime wise, seduced by them, and cast down into the same idolatry:and let him not dare to think that God either promised this falsely, or was unable to foreknow that Solomon and his house would become what they did. But we ought not to be in doubt here, or to see the fulfillment of these things save in Christ our Lord, who was made of the seed of David according to the flesh, [1043] lest we should vainly and uselessly look for some other here, like the carnal Jews. For even they understand this much, that the son whom they read of in that place as promised to David was not Solomon; so that, with wonderful blindness to Him who was promised and is now declared with so great manifestation, they say they hope for another. Indeed, even in Solomon there appeared some image of the future event, in that he built the temple, and had peace according to his name (for Solomon means "pacific"), and in the beginning of his reign was wonderfully praiseworthy; but while, as a shadow of Him that should come, he foreshowed Christ our Lord, he did not also in his own person resemble Him. Whence some things concerning him are so written as if they were prophesied of himself, while the Holy Scripture, prophesying even by events, somehow delineates in him the figure of things to come. For, besides the books of divine history, in which his reign is narrated, the 72d Psalm also is inscribed in the title with his name, in which so many things are said which cannot at all apply to him, but which apply to the Lord Christ with such evident fitness as makes it quite apparent that in the one the figure is in some way shadowed forth, but in the other the truth itself is presented. For it is known within what bounds the kingdom of Solomon was enclosed; and yet in that psalm, not to speak of other things, we read, "He shall have dominion from sea even to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth," [1044] which we see fulfilled in Christ. Truly he took the beginning of His reigning from the river where John baptized; for, when pointed out by him, He began to be acknowledged by the disciples, who called Him not only Master, but also Lord.

• From The City of God

  But because this sentence is in the Gospel, it is no wonder that the worshippers of the many and false gods have been none the less restrained from feigning that by the responses of the demons, whom they worship as gods, it has been fixed how long the Christian religion is to last. For when they saw that it could not be consumed by so many and great persecutions, but rather drew from them wonderful enlargements, they invented I know not what Greek verses, as if poured forth by a divine oracle to some one consulting it, in which, indeed, they make Christ innocent of this, as it were, sacrilegious crime, but add that Peter by enchantments brought it about that the name of Christ should be worshipped for three hundred and sixty-five years, and, after the completion of that number of years, should at once take end. Oh the hearts of learned men! Oh, learned wits, meet to believe such things about Christ as you are not willing to believe in Christ, that His disciple Peter did not learn magic arts from Him, yet that, although He was innocent, His disciple was an enchanter, and chose that His name rather than his own should be worshipped through his magic arts, his great labors and perils, and at last even the shedding of his blood! If Peter the enchanter made the world so love Christ, what did Christ the innocent do to make Peter so love Him? Let them answer themselves then, and, if they can, let them understand that the world, for the sake of eternal life, was made to love Christ by that same supernal grace which made Peter also love Christ for the sake of the eternal life to be received from Him, and that even to the extent of suffering temporal death for Him. And then, what kind of gods are these who are able to predict such things, yet are not able to avert them, succumbing in such a way to a single enchanter and wicked magician (who, as they say, having slain a yearling boy and torn him to pieces, buried him with nefarious rites), that they permitted the sect hostile to themselves to gain strength for so great a time, and to surmount the horrid cruelties of so many great persecutions, not by resisting but by suffering, and to procure the overthrow of their own images, temples, rituals, and oracles? Finally, what god was it--not ours, certainly, but one of their own--who was either enticed or compelled by so great wickedness to perform these things? For those verses say that Peter bound, not any demon, but a god to do these things. Such a god have they who have not Christ. [1253] Isa. xi. 4; 2 Thess. i. 9. [1254] Acts i. 6, 7.

• From The City of God

  [762] Ps. cxi. 2. Chapter 28. --Of the Nature of the Two Cities, the Earthly and the Heavenly. Accordingly, two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord. For the one seeks glory from men; but the greatest glory of the other is God, the witness of conscience. The one lifts up its head in its own glory; the other says to its God, "Thou art my glory, and the lifter up of mine head. " [763]In the one, the princes and the nations it subdues are ruled by the love of ruling; in the other, the princes and the subjects serve one another in love, the latter obeying, while the former take thought for all. The one delights in its own strength, represented in the persons of its rulers; the other says to its God, "I will love Thee, O Lord, my strength. " [764]And therefore the wise men of the one city, living according to man, have sought for profit to their own bodies or souls, or both, and those who have known God "glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened; professing themselves to be wise,"--that is, glorying in their own wisdom, and being possessed by pride,--"they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. "For they were either leaders or followers of the people in adoring images, "and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. " [765] But in the other city there is no human wisdom, but only godliness, which offers due worship to the true God, and looks for its reward in the society of the saints, of holy angels as well as holy men, "that God may be all in all. " [766] [763] Ps. iii. 3. [764] Ps. xviii. 1. [765] Rom. i. 21-25. [766] 1 Cor. xv. 28. [638] This book is referred to in another work of Augustin's (contra Advers. Legis et Prophet, i. 18), which was written about the year 420. Book XV.Argument--Having treated in the four preceding books of the origin of the two cities, the earthly and the heavenly, Augustin explains their growth and progress in the four books which follow; and, in order to do so, he explains the chief passages of the sacred history which bear upon this subject. In this fifteenth book he opens this part of his work by explaining the events recorded in Genesis from the time of Cain and Abel to the deluge.

• From The City of God

  When Porphyry or Hecate praises Christ, and adds that He gave Himself to the Christians as a fatal gift, that they might be involved in error, he exposes, as he thinks, the causes of this error. But before I cite his words to that purpose, I would ask, If Christ did thus give Himself to the Christians to involve them in error, did He do so willingly, or against His will? If willingly, how is He righteous? If against His will, how is He blessed? However, let us hear the causes of this error. "There are," he says," in a certain place very small earthly spirits, subject to the power of evil demons. The wise men of the Hebrews, among whom was this Jesus, as you have heard from the oracles of Apollo cited above, turned religious persons from these very wicked demons and minor spirits, and taught them rather to worship the celestial gods, and especially to adore God the Father. This," he said, "the gods enjoin; and we have already shown how they admonish the soul to turn to God, and command it to worship Him. But the ignorant and the ungodly, who are not destined to receive favors from the gods, nor to know the immortal Jupiter, not listening to the gods and their messages, have turned away from all gods, and have not only refused to hate, but have venerated the prohibited demons. Professing to worship God, they refuse to do those things by which alone God is worshipped. For God, indeed, being the Father of all, is in need of nothing; but for us it is good to adore Him by means of justice, chastity, and other virtues, and thus to make life itself a prayer to Him, by inquiring into and imitating His nature. For inquiry," says he, "purifies and imitation deifies us, by moving us nearer to Him. "He is right in so far as he proclaims God the Father, and the conduct by which we should worship Him. Of such precepts the prophetic books of the Hebrews are full, when they praise or blame the life of the saints. But in speaking of the Christians he is in error, and caluminates them as much as is desired by the demons whom he takes for gods, as if it were difficult for any man to recollect the disgraceful and shameful actions which used to be done in the theatres and temples to please the gods, and to compare with these things what is heard in our churches, and what is offered to the true God, and from this comparison to conclude where character is edified, and where it is ruined. But who but a diabolical spirit has told or suggested to this man so manifest and vain a lie, as that the Christians reverenced rather than hated the demons, whose worship the Hebrews prohibited?

• From The City of God

  [1527] "Fari. " [1528] See Aug. Ep. 98, ad Bonifacium. Chapter 17. --Of Those Who Fancy that No Men Shall Be Punished Eternally. I must now, I see, enter the lists of amicable controversy with those tender-hearted Christians who decline to believe that any, or that all of those whom the infallibly just Judge may pronounce worthy of the punishment of hell, shall suffer eternally, and who suppose that they shall be delivered after a fixed term of punishment, longer or shorter according to the amount of each man's sin. In respect of this matter, Origen was even more indulgent; for he believed that even the devil himself and his angels, after suffering those more severe and prolonged pains which their sins deserved, should be delivered from their torments, and associated with the holy angels. But the Church, not without reason, condemned him for this and other errors, especially for his theory of the ceaseless alternation of happiness and misery, and the interminable transitions from the one state to the other at fixed periods of ages; for in this theory he lost even the credit of being merciful, by allotting to the saints real miseries for the expiation of their sins, and false happiness, which brought them no true and secure joy, that is, no fearless assurance of eternal blessedness. Very different, however, is the error we speak of, which is dictated by the tenderness of these Christians who suppose that the sufferings of those who are condemned in the judgment will be temporary, while the blessedness of all who are sooner or later set free will be eternal. Which opinion, if it is good and true because it is merciful, will be so much the better and truer in proportion as it becomes more merciful. Let, then, this fountain of mercy be extended, and flow forth even to the lost angels, and let them also be set free, at least after as many and long ages as seem fit! Why does this stream of mercy flow to all the human race, and dry up as soon as it reaches the angelic? And yet they dare not extend their pity further, and propose the deliverance of the devil himself. Or if any one is bold enough to do so, he does indeed put to shame their charity, but is himself convicted of error that is more unsightly, and a wresting of God's truth that is more perverse, in proportion as his clemency of sentiment seems to be greater. [1529] [1529] On the heresy of Origen, see Epiphanius (Epistola ad Joannem Hierosol. ); Jerome (Epistola 61, ad Pammachium); and Augustin (De Haeres, 43). Origen's opinion was condemned by Anastasius (Jerome, Apologia adv. Ruffinum and Epistola 78, ad Pammachium), and after Augustin's death by Vigilius and Emperor Justinian, in the Fifth (OEcumenical Council, Nicephorus Callistus, xvii. 27, and the Acts of the Council, iv. 11). --Coquaeus.

• From American Religious History (2001)

  Scope: Among the religions founded in early 19th-century America, two, Oneida “Perfectionism” and the Church of the Latter Day Saints (Mormons), taught unconventional views about sex and marriage. John Humphrey Noyes, the Perfectionists’ founder, favored “complex marriage,” in which all husbands and wives were shared and children were selected by “stirpiculture,” a form of eugenics. His Oneida commune prospered, but pressure from outraged neighbors finally forced it to close. The Mormons’ plural marriage system led to persecution and migration. Founder Joseph Smith met the Angel Moroni who, in 1826, gave him a set of golden tablets on which were inscribed the text of an ancient book. The text described the fortunes of a lost tribe of Israel that had come to the New World generations before and explained that Jesus, after his mission in Palestine, had visited America, too. The Mormons, founded in light of this revelation, also antagonized their neighbors, and Smith was lynched in 1844. His successor, Brigham Young, reacted by leading the Mormons to a wilderness kingdom in Utah, where he believed they were beyond the reach of angry Americans. Railroad-builders linked Utah to the rest of the country sooner than Young had anticipated, but the area was denied statehood until the Mormons officially abolished polygamy in 1890. Outline I. The Oneida community, under John Humphrey Noyes, and the Mormons, under the leadership of Joseph Smith and, later, Brigham Young, were two of the more daring religious experiments of the early 19 th century. A. Both scandalized contemporaries by challenging the convention of monogamy. B. Both showed that alternative wa ys of life, based on strongly held religious views, could prosper. ©2001 The Teaching Company. 38

• From American Religious History (2001)

  B. Catholic charities offered them immediate relief and tried to ensure that Catholic families stayed together. C. Most Irish immigrants had been peasant farmers but now became members of the urban working class. 1. Their priests and bishops, mainly French and Irish, were socially conservative. 2. They regarded suffering and poverty as inevitable and as opportunities to exhibit Christ-like forbearance. 3. Some Irish priests promoted temperance. D. German Catholic immigrants more often became midwestern farmers and laborers. German Catholics were outspoken opponents of the temperance movement. E. The ethnic diversity of American Catholicism increased again in 1848 when victory in the war against Mexico brought a population of Hispanic Catholics into the nation. III. To many Protestants, Catholicism was the antithesis of everything America stood for. A. Highbrow anti-Catholic propaganda depicted it as inimical to democratic freedom. 1. Samuel Morse argued that it was foreign, monarchical, and authoritarian. 2. Fox’s Book of Martyrs remained, among Protestants, a popular source of ideas about Catholics. 3. Advice manuals gave Protestant women instructions on how to deal with the Irish Catholic servant girl “Bridget.” B. Lowbrow anti-Catholic propaganda told lurid tales of sexual depravity and cruelty in convents. 1. Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures (1836) was a bestseller. 2. Protestants regarded clerical celibacy as unnatural and, possibly, fraudulent. C. Anti-Catholic rioting in Boston and Philadelphia intensified antagonisms. 1. The Ursuline convent in Boston was burned down by a Protestant mob in 1834. 2. Three days of anti-Catholic rioting in Philadelphia in 1844 caused fourteen deaths. ©2001 The Teaching Company. 44 3. A schoolboy was beaten until he bled in 1859 when he refused, for religious reasons, to recite the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments. D. The Know-Nothing Party aimed at excluding immigrants, especially Catholics, from the United States. IV. Catholic bishops tried to ensure that Catholic children would be educated in their parents’ faith and that their Church would maintain its pride and visibility. A. Archbishop Hughes of New York demanded public funds to finance Catholic schools. B. At the Third Plenary Synod of Baltimore in 1884, Catholic bishops resolved to build parochial schools in every Catholic parish. C. St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York (begun in 1858) made a bold visual claim to Catholics’ permanent place in America. V. A handful of prominent Americans converted to Catholicism. A. Among them were the transcendentalists Orestes Brownson and Isaac Hecker. 1. Brownson argued that Protestantism lacked any authority principle and was too vulnerable to shifts in public opinion. 2. Hecker believed that the Catholic theory of original sin was more compatible with American republican virtue than the Protestant. B. By 1880, when a massive new Catholic migration began to arrive from Poland, Italy, and the Slavic countries, the American Catholic Church had laid solid institutional foundations and was strongly Irish in character, but had found a way of avoiding absorption into the Protestant mainstream.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Those who could flee in comfort from the Rome of 410 did so. A stream of “refugees,” we are regularly told, arrived in Africa. One must not imagine tramp steamers and squalid steerage passengers. Think rather of the fortunate Lebanese of the 1970s, who could keep their places in Beirut, fly to Europe when they had to, and set up fortified luxury resorts in the suburbs as an intermediate refuge. Goody’s gourmet grocery store in Beirut did a fine trade in luxury foodstuffs before, during, and after the bad years; its equivalent undoubtedly flourished at Rome in 410, and another such would have greeted the refugees in Carthage or Hippo when they landed. Many Roman dignitaries had property in Africa already, and so when the attractions of a winter spent away from Rome grew powerful in 410, the fortunate few had places to go, along with their hangers-on. Ammianus Marcellinus, a generation earlier, wanting to slur the first families of Rome, told how in time of famine the rich revealed their priorities. Foreigners and people of any literary pretensions were expelled from the city, but hordes of actresses and dancing girls were kept on.453 Their priorities were equally clear when they fled, and Augustine found them in Africa preoccupied with the games and shows of Carthage.454 But Ammianus would also have observed, acerbically, that the best people were now also accompanied by their chaplains. Augustine missed most of the excitement in the winter of 410–11 by being out of town. He therefore missed the passage of a charismatic younger man, a monk said to be from Britain, who had won a great following among the devout upper-class Romans of the moment. No lean and meager zealot he, nor was he one of those preachers who insisted on the most extreme standards of behavior for a self-selected elite. Rather, he had found his market by preaching firmly a religion of moral rearmament and self-satisfaction. The demands of Christianity were moderate and definite, and their accomplishment was something that reasonable men and women could find within their powers. He had found a way to be both demanding and understanding and to present his version of Christianity as very much the thing the best sort would pursue. His name was Pelagius.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Beyond the church building and from the outset of his residence in Hippo, he was one of a handful of individuals of most senior standing in his community. (Unlike secular dignitaries, moreover, he took his direct power from a lifetime appointment.) Within five years, he had become the chief executive officer of a substantial enterprise, director of its considerable staff, with authority to disburse and manage the resources of the establishment. Among other duties, he sat in his audience hall each week listening to legal cases that were brought to him by citizens impatient with the civil law’s delays, and in that capacity he decided cases and influenced the economic fate of the wider community. Plaintiffs and respondents pled before him, without lawyers, all manner of cases and requests. Some were direct legal cases for him to decide; he would go away in private after hearing the parties and then return with a written decision to be read out. He was caustic about those who came to him only because they thought him the best way to advance their worldly interests, while he would try to turn their attention to higher things,34 so he made sure to preserve a set of letters showing him intervening in such a case on behalf of a man who has offended an unnamed big shot.35 In addition to the usual legal immunities of membership in the upper class, moreover, his clerical status granted him several additional privileges. His visibility meant that many more pleaders came to him, looking for help in tax cases or seeking his intervention to protect defendants in criminal cases.36 He was certainly one of those relatively few residents of the Roman empire who could be reasonably sure he would never be beaten or tortured by a judge. Like any rich man, he could expect to be suspected of pecuniary motives, as when people observed that laws against the Donatist Christians allowed, among other things, for the bishop to scoop up property for the church, and he has to remonstrate: “You know, these aren’t Augustine’s villas!”37 Some hearers probably were not so sure. The establishment included not just clergy and monks, but others besides. From Possidius38 we hear of a praepositus domus ecclesiae, something like “steward,” or even “chief financial officer.” There was an accountant (calculator notarius39), and he could call on the services of a lawyer when tricky questions arose.40 There must have been other people there. We have no count of the shorthand scribes (notarii), for example, who waited on him day and night, but at least a handful were there, taking turns at dictation and then at transcription, as well as other more conventional scribes backing them up. In other words, quite a household.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  The next day again, a still larger crowd gathered, with readings and psalms in the morning until the hour when he and Bishop Valerius left the church. Valerius made Augustine say a few more words, which he did rather relucantly, as one who would rather leave sleeping dogs lie. Up the street, the “basilica of the heretics” (that is, the Donatist church) was resounding with the customary celebrations—they were already in their cups—and Augustine made hay of the comparison. (He shows no ear or sense for those in his crowd who may have been thinking of drifting away to that livelier community.) The day passed quietly and there came time to say vespers, Augustine and Valerius together, with a crowd abiding and singing psalms till it was dark. And so the story is told as a success, and Augustine had made his authority stick.268 A year or so after the crisis, he was ordained bishop. The dignity of the Christian religion, always important to him, had been restored. Augustine regularly marked as “pagan” religious practices that he deplored, and did so of the conviviality of Christians.269 “Pagan,” then, is sometimes a label Augustine applies to Christian religious practices he deplores as insufficiently spiritual and transformed. Augustine shows no sense of irony in ending the letter with a story of Donatist thugs he called “circumcellions” invading a church and destroying the altar in the town of Hasna. Those shock troops of the majority church (we’ll see them again) had their own sense of the purity of religious observances, one that ran quite counter to Augustine’s. SURROUNDED BY DEMONS Everywhere Augustine went, demons and angels hovered almost within reach. One day in the holy days of the week after Easter, when many lay Christian brothers came to see me and we had sat down in the usual place, the conversation turned to the position Christian religion takes against the presumptuous and supposedly great and wonderful learning of the pagans. I decided to write down and expand in letters what we said…. Since we were talking about demons and their powers of divination, it was said that someone had predicted the overthrow of the temple of Serapis at Alexandria. I said it was no wonder if demons both knew and predicted that ruin was awaiting this temple and its image, since there are lots of things they were allowed to know and foretell. The demons, for Augustine, were really the fallen angels of scripture, creatures who retained much of their innate power, despite their having turned to evil. In pre-Christian times, they had used their strength to amaze the gullible and so had passed themselves off as gods, the very gods of the “pagans.” Now, revealed for what they were, banished from their temples, deprived of the worship of their victims, they lingered in the world, seething and seditious, looking for opportunities for petty victories and petty amazement.

• From The City of God

  We need not, therefore, laboriously contend about the name, since the reality is so obvious as to admit of no shadow of doubt. That which we say, that the angels who are sent to announce the will of God to men belong to the order of blessed immortals, does not satisfy the Platonists, because they believe that this ministry is discharged, not by those whom they call gods, in other words, not by blessed immortals, but by demons, whom they dare not affirm to be blessed, but only immortal, or if they do rank them among the blessed immortals, yet only as good demons, and not as gods who dwell in the heaven of heavens remote from all human contact. But, though it may seem mere wrangling about a name, yet the name of demon is so detestable that we cannot bear in any sense to apply it to the holy angels. Now, therefore, let us close this book in the assurance that, whatever we call these immortal and blessed spirits, who yet are only creatures, they do not act as mediators to introduce to everlasting felicity miserable mortals, from whom they are severed by a twofold distinction. And those others who are mediators, in so far as they have immortality in common with their superiors, and misery in common with their inferiors (for they are justly miserable in punishment of their wickedness), cannot bestow upon us, but rather grudge that we should possess, the blessedness from which they themselves are excluded. And so the friends of the demons have nothing considerable to allege why we should rather worship them as our helpers than avoid them as traitors to our interests. As for those spirits who are good, and who are therefore not only immortal but also blessed, and to whom they suppose we should give the title of gods, and offer worship and sacrifices for the sake of inheriting a future life, we shall, by God's help, endeavor in the following book to show that these spirits, call them by what name, and ascribe to them what nature you will, desire that religious worship be paid to God alone, by whom they were created, and by whose communications of Himself to them they are blessed. [362] Timaeus. [363] Ps. l. 1. [364] Ps. cxxxvi. 2. [365] Ps. xcv. 3. [366] Ps. xcvi. 5, 6. [367] Ps. lxxxii. 6. [368] 1 Cor. viii. 5, 6. Book X.Argument--In this book Augustin teaches that the good angels wish God alone, whom they themselves serve, to receive that divine honor which is rendered by sacrifice, and which is called "latreia. "He then goes on to dispute against Porphyry about the principle and way of the soul's cleansing and deliverance.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  In the long ancient conversation about the good life and the good society, Augustine’s work is his considered and artful reply to Plato’s and Cicero’s books on the “republic.”491 The subtle shift that Augustine makes turns the good society into something that is no longer a matter of a people and its property (res publica) but a community and its privileges. The word from its title, civitas, is originally the Latin for citizenship and thus by extension “body of citizens” and thus eventually becomes the Italian città and the English “city,” deriving its meaning from the concept of people and community, not fortifications and buildings. Christians are members of their god’s community and thus live in the world of Rome and Africa as peregrini, noncitizen aliens sojourning for a time (Augustine’s interpretation of peregrinus helps it eventually to become the English “pilgrim”). The relocation of true community to heaven was already implicit in his models (both Plato and Cicero ended their dialogues with visions of an afterlife, as Augustine did in City of God), but Augustine devoted the full measure of his rhetorical skill to demonstrating that the misfortunes of life here below are insignificant by comparison with the rewards beyond, and the injustices suffered here irrelevant to the final accounting in heaven. Augustine’s view, elevated and devout, was deeply corrosive when it came to real secular societies, and his alternative to them was more potent than those dreamt by Plato and Cicero, because Augustine could claim that he was not dreaming but describing a spiritual reality. And so he could be punishingly dismissive: “What are kingdoms without justice?” he asks sneeringly (meaning any kingdom not animated by and devoted to the spirit of Augustine’s god). “They’re just gangs of bandits.”492 Thus his reply to those who would say that the Christian god had failed Rome was twofold: (1) no, he hadn’t; and (2) so what if Rome suffered, a city that had no natural claim to lasting grandeur? Such nonchalance came as a shock to those who had been brought up—as every reasonable man had been brought up—on Vergil’s notion of a Roman “empire without end” (Aeneid 1.279) or thought of Rome as the “eternal city” (first spoken of that way by Vergil’s near-contemporary Tibullus). But for Augustine, what success Rome knew was success divinely ordained to achieve a purpose, the spread of Christianity. And if Rome suffered, no lasting harm was done. Here again, Augustine’s position was not unique to Christianity. Serene philosophers had been saying similar things for centuries, but the mass of both classical and Christian learning and the retelling of the story in a fully fleshed Christian account were meant to have the effect of taking over the Rome story once and for all to serve Christian purposes. Constantine’s panegyrist Eusebius had done a similar thing for the church in his own Greek histories almost a century earlier.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 18. --That the Deceitful Demons, While Promising to Conduct Men to God by Their Intercession, Mean to Turn Them from the Path of Truth. As to the demons, these false and deceitful mediators, who, though their uncleanness of spirit frequently reveals their misery and malignity, yet, by virtue of the levity of their aerial bodies and the nature of the places they inhabit, do contrive to turn us aside and hinder our spiritual progress; they do not help us towards God, but rather prevent us from reaching Him. Since even in the bodily way, which is erroneous and misleading, and in which righteousness does not walk,--for we must rise to God not by bodily ascent, but by incorporeal or spiritual conformity to Him,--in this bodily way, I say, which the friends of the demons arrange according to the weight of the various elements, the aerial demons being set between the ethereal gods and earthy men, they imagine the gods to have this privilege, that by this local interval they are preserved from the pollution of human contact. Thus they believe that the demons are contaminated by men rather than men cleansed by the demons, and that the gods themselves should be polluted unless their local superiority preserved them. Who is so wretched a creature as to expect purification by a way in which men are contaminating, demons contaminated, and gods contaminable? Who would not rather choose that way whereby we escape the contamination of the demons, and are cleansed from pollution by the incontaminable God, so as to be associated with the uncontaminated angels?