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.

Page 43 of 253 · 20 per page

• 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?

• From The City of God

  yet we believe quite otherwise. For the corruption of the body, which weighs down the soul, is not the cause but the punishment of the first sin; and it was not the corruptible flesh that made the soul sinful, but the sinful soul that made the flesh corruptible. And though from this corruption of the flesh there arise certain incitements to vice, and indeed vicious desires, yet we must not attribute to the flesh all the vices of a wicked life, in case we thereby clear the devil of all these, for he has no flesh. For though we cannot call the devil a fornicator or drunkard, or ascribe to him any sensual indulgence (though he is the secret instigator and prompter of those who sin in these ways), yet he is exceedingly proud and envious. And this viciousness has so possessed him, that on account of it he is reserved in chains of darkness to everlasting punishment. [651]Now these vices, which have dominion over the devil, the apostle attributes to the flesh, which certainly the devil has not. For he says "hatred, variance, emulations, strife, envying" are the works of the flesh; and of all these evils pride is the origin and head, and it rules in the devil though he has no flesh. For who shows more hatred to the saints? who is more at variance with them? who more envious, bitter, and jealous? And since he exhibits all these works, though he has no flesh, how are they works of the flesh, unless because they are the works of man, who is, as I said, spoken of under the name of flesh? For it is not by having flesh, which the devil has not, but by living according to himself,--that is, according to man,--that man became like the devil. For the devil too, wished to live according to himself when he did not abide in the truth; so that when he lied, this was not of God, but of himself, who is not only a liar, but the father of lies, he being the first who lied, and the originator of lying as of sin. [646] Wisd. ix. 15. [647] 2 Cor. iv. 16. [648] 2 Cor. v. 1-4. [649] AEneid, vi. 730-32. [650] Ib. 733, 734. [651] On the punishment of the devil, see the De Agone Christi, 3-5, and De Nat. Boni, 33.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Augustine was not alone in defining himself by what he wasn’t, by what he could defame. In his time, ecclesiastical controversy raged with furiously pursued claims of villainy against the most unlikely suspects. Priscillian of Avila, for example, offers to the modern eye little doctrinal irregularity and only mild idiosyncrasy of ascetic extremes of practice, at a time when the nature of asceticism was open to the widest variations of sometimes ludicrous practice in the Latin west. But Priscillian was taken out by the imperial government at sober ecclesiastical urging and put to death in 386 for his irregularities, which were trumped up to include alleged magic practices and illicit associations with women.204 On both larger and smaller scales, similar obloquy was poured out in all directions. Histories of doctrine find a narrative line in the great theological arguments over Trinity and Christology and build a record of councils and conciliar aftermaths (building, indeed, on the choices of mainstream medieval clergy from east and west), but in so doing they are forced to overlook some of the gaudiest stories of the age. The spirit of the time is well captured by Epiphanius of Salamis, whose Panarion tells the story of all the heresies of his world and ends as a catalogue of interest to the religious ethnographer, full of local variations, comical misunderstandings, and petty quarrels enshrined forever in an authoritative text. Epiphanius’s book was much to the taste of the time, and Augustine himself would revise and digest it in Latin in his own Heresies (De haeresibus), and one of Augustine’s own enemies would write a particularly witty and stinging attack on Augustine that included a revision of Augustine’s catalogue.205 Everyone (including many historians since) tried to picture a world with one normative model of religion and many forms of deviation. These people were building what our contemporaries would call a “totalizing discourse” of Christianity. Christianity, to Augustine and many of his contemporaries, was not truly Christianity unless it was universal and all-powerful, like Christianity’s god. But turning a welter of local doctrines, practices, and texts into a universal, all-powerful church was at best a nascent enterprise in Augustine’s time. That this enterprise would spend another thousand years at least proving the impossibility of what it undertook has blinded many to the bravado of ambitious clergy like Augustine. In the meantime, diversity flourished.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Augustine’s catholicity was no invention of his, any more than his idea of god had been, but both are stamped with his absolutist interpretation and asseverated throughout his career in ways that many contemporaries found unsettling. The notion that Christian communities in all places make up a single community and that they should be in harmony in matters of doctrine and practice is a theological rather than historical doctrine. It has proven to be very powerful in welding together disparate Christian communities into socially potent forces, but its appeal has never been universal. In the early churches, some were persuaded to think in translocal terms, while others were content (in a world in which many people did not think much beyond the boundaries of their own communities, after all, except to ponder the wickedness of the tax-guzzling Roman empire) to find catholicity (wholeness) in the possession of the totality of Christian teaching and the enactment of the totality of Christian practice, without much regard for what others elsewhere would accomplish. When communities banded together, it tended to be by natural geographical unit, and the Christians of Africa, who had been the first Latin Christians and who were the most abundant and ferociously faithful of Latin Christians, did not by and large deeply care about the fate or habits of Christians elsewhere. Augustine cared. He acquired a notion of geographic catholicity that arose not long before him among African Christians of the faction with which he aligned himself, and he proclaimed that idea heroically and consistently all his clerical career. Numerous passages in his correspondence and polemical writings show us other African Christians hearing these impassioned and, to us, quite reasonable and predictable arguments and simply disregarding and disavowing them. Those were the people he called Donatists.339 The catholicity of Christianity has multiple implications for society and politics. The most notable is that it reduces the number of categories by which the religious geography of the ancient world could be described. If there are not multiple Christianities but only one, or at least if all others than the approved one are marginal and irrelevant, then a bright sharp line is drawn between that one supereminent religion and the rest of the human world. If that line could be as sharp as one would like to make it, then Christians/un-Christians would be all the categories one would need. And for “un-Christian” a suitably offensive term was “pagan.”

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  And many were just uninterested in the differences. “So, god’s here, god’s there—what’s the difference? That’s the result of men quarreling, but god can be worshiped anywhere.”412 When Arian Goths began appearing in Africa in the 410s and after, the Donatists were resourceful enough to suggest a common cause against the government-sponsored church and tried to persuade the Goths that the two communities really believed the same thing.413 They may have had a point, for years earlier Donatists, in a debate, had cited the Council of Sardica (modern Sofia, Bulgaria) of 343 for writing to African bishops of the Donatist communion. That was when the keen-eyed Alypius pointed out to Augustine that the document quoted attacked Athanasius and the bishop of Rome by name, and so realized that it was an Arian text. On the day of that debate, Augustine won his point, but it’s worth bearing in mind that the Donatists will have had sincere reason to think they had evidence of being in communion with churches across the water from Africa, whatever Augustine may have thought of those churches.414 And rumors flew. Some Donatists, Augustine says, were deterred from taking the Caecilianists seriously because they had been told that the minority sect engaged in strange and secret eucharistic rituals: “They go around claiming that we put something or other very strange on our altars!”415 More mundane suspicion suggested that the Caecilianists were really out to gain control of Donatist property, and that claim wasn’t entirely false.416 Complacency, suspicion, and indifference were not so much barriers to movement as reinforcements to a natural human tendency to stay in one place. Augustine could see how the land lay, and in his first years as bishop he was forthright but diplomatic in his dealings with members of the other community. We can watch him as he flatters, seeks dialogue, expresses regret for misunderstanding, and shows all the signs of hoping that good will and brotherhood can bring people together, but no sign of willingness to compromise his own position.417 He never engaged the Donatists as people with a perspective that might have merit or explanation. Labeling them as “schismatic” made it unnecessary for him to deal with them as people. His other favorite labels—“pagan” “Jew,” “heretic,” “Manichee”—all worked the same way, to defer discussion and leave the bishop alone with the divine.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  “Pagan,” from the Latin paganus, originally “dweller in a country district,” roughly “hick, rube,” was an old Christian term revived in Augustine’s times. He himself used it cannily. Paganus in the second century had been in use in Latin in idiomatic opposition to miles (“soldier”). Across the Roman countryside, soldiers fought and were fed on tax revenues, revenues often collected in kind from the peasants, the pagani, the commonest word for describing those who lived outside the cities. So a “pagan” in this metaphorical usage was a civilian in the cosmic struggle, not a “soldier of Christ.” A modest stream of texts dating from about 200 and a little after recorded this Christian usage, but then it faded from use. “Pagan” returns in the late fourth century as a word of abuse with a new explanation. Christians who had seen it in older texts did not understand the derivation and decided it must have meant that un-Christian religion was found surviving most abundantly in the countryside and was “pagan” in that sense. The revived use made it possible to divide the world between those outside and those inside, the new chosen people and the new gentiles (and indeed gentiles is sometimes attested as a word for “pagans”). What made the term “pagan” particularly attractive was that it could be launched against precisely the most polished and urbane of un-Christian citizens of the late fourth century with particular effect. The perfumed gentlemen of Rome, who had not deigned to add the slightly vulgar Christian god to the discriminating collections of cults they patronized, could now be insulted as bumpkins. The tables of disdain were thus turned on men especially sensitive to such mockery. Augustine uses the word about these men, but not to their faces. It is almost entirely missing from his great work against “paganism,” City of God, where it might have given offense, but it is very familiar in the safer polemical space of the sermons preached to the already converted. Augustine worked hard to turn his world into one with sharp lines separating “pagans” and Christians. But when we ask what was left of real “paganism,” that is, of ancient religious practices that Augustine would characterize that way, we find some odd things. It might seem, for example, that his vast refutation of “pagan” principles and practices in City of God’s first books would be a place to look for reflections of the religious spirit of his age. But what might have been a precious ethnography is anything but. A few glimpses of what the rites of the goddess Caelestis were like in Carthage in Augustine’s youth come through in a story of his we heard some while ago (pages 17–18), and we have a parallel story from Quodvultdeus, a follower of Augustine who seems to have been present in Carthage in 399 when the great temple-busting purges of that year brought Caelestis down, but Augustine isn’t much of a witness for us.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Jerome was a tough case.165 Augustine first wrote to him around 394 in a move to attract attention. Settled at Bethlehem, presenting himself to the world as the Latin reincarnation of the Greek polymath exegete Origen of 150 years earlier,166 Jerome had already made himself famous in matters of biblical scholarship and was careful to build that fame on his reputation for deep learning in Greek and Hebrew. When Augustine first wrote to him, moreover, both were coequal in the rank of priest, though by the time Jerome took notice of Augustine, the younger man had come to outrank him by virtue of episcopal ordination. There had never been a town in which Jerome couldn’t make himself unwelcome, but at least he had rendered himself immune to expulsion from Bethlehem. His stories of how he had won the patronage of the larger-than-life Roman bishop Damasus (a Renaissance prince-cleric before his time, whose election led to riots between his followers and those of a rival candidate that left 137 corpses in a basilica),167 his record of publications, his trumpeted knowledge of Hebrew, and his reputed access to Origen’s own manuscripts gave him the authority to set himself up as judge and jury in all matters of Christian Latin biblical scholarship. He was less eager to tell how he had had to leave Rome in the company of the lady with whom he was suspected of having inappropriate relations and settling with her in haughty isolation in Bethlehem. No later figure dares suspect Jerome of unchastity, to this day. When Augustine wrote to Jerome, he had to know that challenging him was imprudent. He questioned the advisability of Jerome’s translation enterprise and disputed him on a critical point of scriptural exegesis. Were Peter and Paul, when they quarrel in Galatians over the mission to the gentiles, really arguing or was it all a didactic show? Jerome needed both men to be on the right side, but Augustine needed the written text to be truthful, and neither was willing to compromise on the question.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  The one group to escape this “pagan”-Christian bifurcation of the world was Jewry. The Jews were unique in the Christian taxonomy Augustine inherited and propounded in that they worshiped the correct god, but worshiped him incorrectly, or rather incompletely. Their fault was entirely moral: they had the scriptures, they had seen Jesus, they worshiped the correct god, but they had not put two and two together correctly, and so they would be damned. Augustine’s reading of the reasons for their survival in this anomalous state was anything but generous. They were kept around, he argued, as independent proof of the validity of the prophecies of the old dispensation and their fulfillment in the new.357 Without them, Christians could have been accused of making up their Old Testament to make the New look good. Augustine’s Jews live a shadowy half-life as a result, attesting ignorantly to the truth but not sharing in it. They, too, are familiar to us because of their name, yet very different from anything we know in today’s world of Judaism. The Manichee Secundinus, on the other hand, accused Augustine of having gone over to the Jews when he apostasized from Manicheism, because he acquired a more positive view of the Jewish scriptures and the link between its god and its teachings and those of Christianity. Augustine was left in an odd position, defending the historicity of Jewish scriptures, proffering a generous reading of the Jewish past (by comparison to such anti-Jewish preachers as Mani or Marcion, who would not allow that the gods of the Jewish scriptures and of Paul were really the same god), and treating real living Jews with cautious generosity, as when he defended the Jew Licenius against the seizure of his property by a bishop.358 His manner of patronizing was not directly toxic, but in his own time, forced conversions, which he condemned in principle,359 would be harbingers of future persecution.360 To be as little positive as Augustine could be was its own contribution to the climate of hatred that would prevail too often in the future.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Marcellinus is generally said to have come to Augustine with reports of conversations being held among “pagan” aristocrats dismayed at the “fall of Rome” and inclined to blame the Christian god. Closer study of the letters that tell us this story reveals that the leading figure, Rufius Antonius Agrypnius Volusianus, was the son of a Christian mother, while his sister was the mother of Melanie the younger, and all of the aristocrats involved were members of one of the two or three very best families of Rome.485 He had served as proconsul of Africa, so he counts as a “refugee” only with some difficulty. In after years, he would serve as prefect of the city of Rome, carrying out imperial strictures against the Pelagians,486 and still later as praetorian prefect (prime minister, more or less). In 436, he went on a diplomatic mission to Constantinople, helping to arrange the marriage of the western emperor Valentinian III with an imperial cousin at the eastern court. When Volusianus fell ill there, his pious niece Melanie came to visit, inducing him to accept baptism as he died—appropriately, on the Christian feast of the Epiphany in 437. Read in that light, Volusianus’s “paganism” was anything but natural or obvious, and it was Volusianus’s Christian mother who encouraged him to write to Augustine.487 Moreover, it had been twenty years, at the time Marcellinus reports his conversations to Augustine, since anyone could possibly have participated in traditional “pagan” public religious ritual. What we see in him is a style and a posture of class and culture, taking a learned pleasure in verbal toying with the ideas of Christianity. The unsexed and arrogant Christian clergy, it seems, were beneath his dignity. In short, he was exactly the sort of “pagan” Augustine needed: well connected, well read, urbane, and (thanks to Marcellinus) socially accessible, at least through the written word. A sequence of letters, introduced by Marcellinus but later engaging Augustine and Volusianus directly, sketched a series of quite conventional issues that learned critics of Christianity had posed for generations. Jesus, in this patronizing view, was no god but a divinely blessed human, with considerable powers of wonder-working to be sure, though hardly any different from many other such figures. This view was not uncommon and probably underlay sympathy for the rather more nuanced philosophical position that had very nearly prevailed inside Christianity in the fourth century but was eventually rejected as “Arian.” The notion of Jesus-the-wonder-worker was in many respects commonsensical and benevolent. One need not imagine any allegiance on Volusianus’s part to any other form of religion than Christianity in order to see him take these positions. (The Latin world never found an anti-Christian writer with the intellect or ambition of Celsus, Porphyry, or the emperor Julian, all of whom wrote against the Christians in Greek with energy and effect.488)

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Other books tell the story of Christian persistence and eventual Christian good fortune. The patronage of the emperor Constantine, starting around 312 C.E. was the making of Christianity as a force in history.368 The shifting of financial resources to support one particular stream among Christians, the demonstrations of imperial social patronage, and the prestige given to groups of Christian bishops brought together to argue their doctrinal issues all sent an unmistakable message of support and created an environment in which this Christianity could flourish. Even so, Christianity was still most visible in the traditional locations; the emergence of a new capital at Constantinople added a further focus. The four apostle-founded bishoprics of Rome, Constantinople (whose claim to apostolic foundation was a bit of a stretch to sustain), Antioch, and Alexandria retained their prestige for centuries. (Jerusalem, by contrast, even while it remained an important Christian bishopric, had lost all pride of place in the formal hierarchy, for the city itself was economically, socially, and politically insignificant.) Africa’s Carthage ranked fifth, at best, with the the first evidence of Christianity in Africa coming late in the second century. In very short order, the Christians ran afoul of the local authorities for their outspoken contempt for public order and religion, and at various times in the third century, government action sought to control them, gaining only a reputation for persecution and leaving behind martyrs. The story of the pious women Perpetua and Felicity, mauled by wild beasts, then killed by executioner gladiators, quickly became a bestseller. Taken in one direction, the natural future of this Christianity was the future that Donatism tried to have. That native African Christianity remained insular, idealistic, and highly suspicious of the Roman government. Its believers awaited the coming of their god patiently, venerated their martyrs, and did not much care what the rest of the world thought or did. For them, the important thing was to grasp and hold the true faith that had been handed down to them. Augustine stands, on the other hand, for the Christianity of the future in the fourth century. He and the other visionary leaders of that time, many of whom have been long acclaimed as “Fathers of the Church,” more appositely than their admirers knew, were indeed the people who invented the belief system we call Christianity. It is one of the lasting and monumental achievements of civilization, on a par with the Roman empire, differing chiefly in the way it imagined endless possibilities of growth for itself and saw all political systems as candidates for its support. Like all great empires, this Christianity is to some extent an independent social organization and to some extent a parasite on other systems. Large-scale organizations succeed when they can leverage their influence by absorbing the energy and resources of other social groupings they subsume.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  WB 10, 3732, April 7, 1542. Luther told the story Dietrich had told him to Amsdorf, adding the line about Karlstadt’s fear of death. He referred to it again in his next letter, WB 10, 3741, April 13, 1542, insisting the report had been true and that Karlstadt’s death had been divine retribution for his pride and stubbornness. Writing to Jonas on April 30, 1542 (3745), he recounted the contents of a letter they had received from Karlstadt’s widow, complaining of her bad treatment at his hands, their five children, debts, and misery. One would say the man “danced to Hell,” Luther commented, “no, he fairly leapt headlong to Hell,” except that we cannot judge the dead. He and Melanchthon interceded with the council of Basle on her behalf (WB 10, 3756, May 29, 1542), but their petition explicitly avoided praising Karlstadt’s role as a preacher, saying only that “all the same, he was a servant of the Church amongst you.” 25. Ratzeberger, Die handschriftliche Geschichte, 135–41. 26. Schubart, Luthers Tod und Begräbnis, 24, Melanchthon to Amsdorf, Feb. 19, 1546; see also 50, 58, 82. 27. Schubart, Luthers Tod und Begräbnis, 74; Vandiver, Keen, and Frazel, eds. and trans., Luther’s Lives (Cochlaeus), 347–49. 28. Schubart, Luthers Tod und Begräbnis, 77–79; 110–13. This scurrilous version was still circulating in the second half of the sixteenth century, and was reprinted by the Catholic Johannes Nas in his Quinta Centuria (Ingolstadt, 1570), 476 ff. 29. Coelius’s funeral oration in Eisleben mentioned the gossip of people incited by the Devil who said Luther had been found dead in bed; Schubart, Luthers Tod und Begräbnis, 30–32. 30. Jonas and Coelius, Vom Christlichen abschied (eds. Freybe and Bräuer), fos. C ii (v)–C iii (r). 31. Ibid., fo. D ii (r); Schubart, Luthers Tod und Begräbnis, 81. 32. Oratio (trans. Caspar Cruciger), in Jonas and Coelius, Vom christlichen abschied (eds. Freybe and Bräuer), fo. B [iv] (r); Melanchthon freely admitted that “his nature was ardent and irascible” and recalled that he had lacked mildness in his debate with Erasmus; Melanchthon in Vandiver, Keen, and Frazel, eds. and trans., Luther’s Lives, 16; 21; 38–39; Philipp Melanchthon, Vita Lutheri, fo. 24 (v). 33. Ulinka Rublack, “Grapho-Relics: Lutheranism and the Materialisation of the Word,” Past and Present, Supplement 5 (2010): 144–66. 34. Luther may have been a little hard on Hans: On one occasion he refused to let him come into his presence for three days, insisting that he supplicate in writing and humble himself, with an apology. Katharina von Bora, Jonas Cruciger, and Melanchthon all interceded to no avail, and Luther insisted he would rather have a dead son than a badly brought up one (WT 5, 6102).

• From Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  Accurate imitation until the façade of complete assimilation is securely placed and the antagonism of difference dissolved—such is the function of this secondary alternative within the broader alternative of nonresistance. Herod was an excellent example of this solution. To some extent this was also the attitude of the Sadducees. They represented the “upper” class. From their number came the high priests, and most of the economic security derived from contemporary worship in the temple was their monopoly. They did not represent the masses of the people. Any disturbance of the established order meant upsetting their position. They loved Israel, but they seem to have loved security more. They made their public peace with Rome and went on about the business of living. They were astute enough to see that their own position could be perpetuated if they stood firmly against all revolutionaries and radicals. Such persons would only stir the people to resist the inevitable, and in the end everything would be lost. Their tragedy was in the fact that they idealized the position of the Roman in the world and suffered the moral fate of the Romans by becoming like them. They saw only two roads open before them—become like the Romans or be destroyed by the Romans. They chose the former. The other alternative in the nonresistance pattern is to reduce contact with the enemy to a minimum. It is the attitude of cultural isolation in the midst of a rejected culture. Cunning the mood may be—one of bitterness and hatred, but also one of deep, calculating fear. To take up active resistance would be foolhardy, for a thousand reasons. The only way out is to keep one’s resentment under rigid control and censorship. The issue raised by this attitude is always present. The opposition to those who work for social change does not come only from those who are the guarantors of the status quo. Again and again it has been demonstrated that the lines are held by those whose hold on security is sure only as long as the status quo remains intact. The reasons for this are not far to seek. If a man is convinced that he is safe only as long as he uses his power to give others a sense of insecurity, then the measure of their security is in his hands. If security or insecurity is at the mercy of a single individual or group, then control of behavior becomes routine. All imperialism functions in this way. Subject peoples are held under control by this device. One of the most striking scenes in the movie Ben Hur was that in which a Roman legion marches by while hundreds of people stand silently on the roadside. As the last soldier passes, a very dignified, self-possessed Jewish gentleman, with folded arms and eyes smoldering with the utmost contempt, without the slightest shift of his facial muscles spits at the heel of the receding legionary—a consummate touch.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  He could be firm, too. He admonished Lang to send a disobedient monk for punishment to the monastery at Sangerhausen and he ordered the prior in Mainz to send back a runaway. 35 All this administrative experience, especially his judgment of people, would stand him in good stead when he began to build his own church. His talents began to be recognized from his early years within the Erfurt monastery and more widely in the order. In an attempt to end the long-running struggle over the future direction of the order, Staupitz tried to unite the Augustinians, but seven monasteries, including Erfurt, suspected that his attempts would dilute the values of the observants and therefore tried to secure an exemption. Despite Luther’s close relationship with Staupitz, Erfurt chose Luther and his former teacher Johannes Nathin to put their case, first to the bishop of Magdeburg. The mission was unsuccessful, and so that same year the monastery decided to send a delegation, which included Luther, to appeal to the Pope. 36 The visit to Rome was by far the longest journey he ever undertook, and his only trip outside German-speaking lands. It seems to have confirmed his sense that he was a “German.” Throughout his later work, he unfailingly talks about Italians in negative terms, writing of the papal emissary Karl von Miltitz, for example, that as an “Italian” he was fond of flowery prose, while deceiving him with his warmth and friendliness. The one place where he seems to have felt at home in Rome was the German church of Santa Maria dell’Anima, where he thought that religious devotion was being properly carried out. In 1540 he gave a damning verdict: “By miraculous advice I came to Rome, so that I saw the head of all wickedness and the seat of the Devil.” 37 His initial excitement can be sensed from his recollection of arriving in the Eternal City: Luther flung himself on the ground, hailing the city hallowed by the blood of martyrs. 38 Rome in 1510 would have been a strange place, much of it a ghost town, with building having barely commenced on what would become the largest church in Christendom, St. Peter’s. Even the existing church, Luther later judged, was too big to preach in. 39 Rome’s medieval population was only a fraction of what it would have been in Roman times. Luther mentioned the catacombs and the hills but, for someone formed by the classics, he made surprisingly little reference to the classical heritage. He would have seen, however, just what ancient Rome had accomplished—and how far the sixteenth century was from equaling it. Buildings like the Colosseum and other antique ruins lay unused, their stone being carted off for St.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  76 Luther retained a strong ethical ideal of marriage, yet his often contradictory and incompatible convictions led him to give some rather unorthodox advice in the many marriage cases with which he was now forced to deal. With marriage denied the status of sacrament, and the principles of secular jurisdiction still being worked out, people now invoked Luther himself as the ultimate authority in marriage disputes—just as they had previously appealed to the Pope. With the old papist Church courts destroyed, he was increasingly asked for advice. His responses could be arbitrary and at times seemed to have been made up on the spot. So, for example, he told Josef Levin Metzsch of Wittenberg that it was fine to marry a woman related to him in the third degree without the approval of a bishop or the Pope, but when Metzsch followed Luther’s advice, he found that lawyers were counting the children as illegitimate. 77 He also often found it easier to sympathize with the husband’s point of view. On one occasion, he and his colleague Johannes Bugenhagen admonished Stefan Roth to exert his husbandly authority, and force his ill wife to leave Wittenberg and follow him to Zwickau, for her reluctance sprang not from her sickness but her wickedness. Roth should “see to it, that you be a man” and not permit “marital authority, which is the glory of God…to be held in contempt by her.” He ought to realize that “[t]he fodder was making the ass frisky”; that is, he was just making her more self-willed by giving in to her, a form of words that insinuated that she was sexually out of control as well. 78 The case of Wolf Hornung, a minor nobleman, became a particular obsession. Hornung’s wife, Katharina Blankenfeld, had caught the eye of none other than the Elector Joachim of Brandenburg, the brother of Luther’s old antagonist Albrecht of Mainz. Joachim forced her to become his mistress, and when Hornung discovered his wife’s adultery, he assaulted and stabbed her. The Elector had then imprisoned Hornung, and humiliated him. Luther took up his cause, writing repeatedly to the errant wife, her mother, and the Elector; he probably also composed Hornung’s letter of defense. When all this achieved nothing, he adopted the tactics that he had used since the beginning of the Reformation: He went public. Luther wrote and published stern letters not only to Katharina Blankenfeld and to the Elector, but also to the bishops of the region and the knights of Brandenburg, telling them to admonish their lord.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Even then, Luther nearly scuppered the agreement, delivering a rambling diatribe in which he accused Zwingli and Oecolampadius of having published “godless, dreadful false teaching,” of misleading the people, and of supporting revolt. It would be better “if one left things as they were, than that one made a fictional, colored concord which would make the matter, which is bad now, a hundred times worse.” Bucer was visibly shocked by Luther’s apparent rejection of a concord he had worked so hard to broker. Luther insisted “with great earnestness, that either there should be a true unity, or none at all.” When the two sides met again the next day, on May 23, Luther asked whether each of the visitors “would recant what he taught and spread about against the Lord Christ, Scripture and the teaching and view of the Church,” and whether they would henceforth “constantly and in one spirit teach the true presence of the body of Christ in or with the bread of the Communion of the Lord.” Bucer and Capito were compelled to make this humiliating admission of error, after which Luther and his followers left the room to discuss what to do next. They then demanded that the sacramentarians concede that the unworthy, not just the believers, received the true body and blood of Christ in Communion; that is, the Lutherans wanted them to admit that Christ was really present in the sacrament, not just “present” depending on the faith and worthiness of the believer. 25 Luther had gotten the recantation he had longed for. He then heaped a further humiliation on the visitors, asking each of them to repeat his confession individually, including that the sacrament was present to the unworthy. Finally the longed-for agreement had been reached and Bucer and Capito were weeping when the theologians all shook hands. Luther advised them to introduce the new teaching to their congregations gradually, so they would not notice—a rather cynical counsel and a gross underestimation of ordinary people’s investments in theological issues. The next day—Ascension Day—he preached on Mark 16:15: “Go out into all the world and preach the gospel to all creatures.” The chronicler Myconius, who heard the sermon, wrote, “I have heard Luther preach often, but at that time it seemed to me as if it was not just him speaking, but that he thundered out of the heavens themselves in the name of Christ.” 26 Luther seemed to have won a complete victory, but it was a hollow triumph. Bucer had got the Upper German cities to agree to the Augsburg confession, a major diplomatic coup that would strengthen and protect the Reformation within the empire. He then tried to persuade the Swiss to accept the concord, even letting it be known that Karlstadt wanted to agree with the Wittenbergers, for he was sick of the whole dissension.

• From The Historical Jesus (2000)

  1. In his history of Rome, The Annals (A.D. 115), Tacitus discusses an incident that had happened fifty years earlier, when the Emperor Nero torched the city of Rome to enable him to develop his own architectural plans for the city (A.D. 64). 2. Tacitus indicates that when Nero became suspected for perpetrating the arson, he sought, and easily found, a ready scapegoat in the band of Christians in the city, who were generally despised by the populace. Nero had the Christians rounded up, charged with the arson, and executed in various heinous ways. 3. In that context, Tacitus mentions something that they were followers of “Christ” whom, he notes, was crucified under the procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate, when Tiberius was the emperor. 4. Again, it is useful to know that Tacitus knows this much about Jesus. The reference does not, though, provide us with much information—and none that we didn’t already have. E. No other certain references to Jesus exist in any pagan author within a century of his death. III. The surviving Jewish sources are also of little use in reconstructing the life of Jesus. A. Not nearly as many Jewish sources survive from the period. B. The main source for the history of Palestine at the time is Flavius Josephus, a Jewish aristocrat who was a general in the northern part of Israel (Galilee) during the Jewish uprising against Rome in A.D. 66–70. 1. When he and his troops were surrounded by the Roman legions, they made a suicide pact. Lots were drawn to determine who would kill whom, until the final two soldiers would take their own lives. Josephus managed to draw one of the final two lots, then persuaded his remaining companion to surrender. 2. When he was brought before the conquering general Vespasian, Josephus used a good bit of political savvy by predicting that Vespasian himself would become the Roman emperor. As it turns out, he was right. Nero committed suicide ©2000 The Teaching Company. 47

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  AB 1155. II. τὸ «#.=foreg., Suid. s. v. ᾿Αρχίλογος :—Adv. -όνως, Poll. 8. 81. κἄκόρρογχος, ov, making ugly noises, παιδία Arr. Epict. 3. 22, 77: vulg. κακόρυγχα with ugly muzzles. κἄκορροθέω, = κακολογέω: c. acc. to speak evil of, abuse, revile, Eur. Hipp. 340, Alc. 707, Ar. Ach. 576, Thesm. 896. κἄκορρόθησις, ἡ, = κακολογία, Pantaleo ap. Heins. ad Hesych. κἄκόρρυθμος, ov, in bad time, ill-modulated, of voice, Joseph. Genes. p. 8; of the pulse, Galen. 2. 258. κἄκορρύπᾶρος, ov, very filthy, Schol. Soph. Aj. 382: ov, Babr. Io. 1. κἄκός, 7, ov, bad, Lat. malus : I. of persons, to καλός, mean, ugly, εἶδος μὲν ἔην κακός Il. το. 316. heresy, Epiphan, :—from also κακόρρυπος. 1. opp. 2. opp. to ἀγαθός, ἐσθλός, οἵ birth, ill-born, mean, ignoble, γένος ἐστὲ διοτρεφέων | βασιλήων .. , ἐπεὶ οὔ κε κακοὶ τοίουσδε τέκοιεν Od. 4: 64; Ζεὺς δ᾽ αὐτὸς νέμει ὄλβον. - ἐσθλοῖς ἠδὲ κακοῖσι 6. 189; ; οὐ κακόν, οὐδὲ μὲν ἐσθλόν 22.415: οὐδ᾽ ἂν εἰ .. φανῶ τρίδουλος, ἐκφανεῖ κακή Soph. O. T. 1063 ; κακός T ὧν Kak κακῶν Ib. 1397. 3. of courage in war, opp. also to “ἀγαθός, ἐσθλός, craven, cowardly, base, Il. 2. 365., 6. 489; κακοῦ πρέπεται χρὼς ἄλλυδις ἄλλῃ (called δειλὸς ἀνήρ in the line above), 13. 279; ἢ κακὸς ἢ ἀγαθός 17: 632: 5 Ἕκτωρ σε κακὸν καὶ ἀνάλκιδα φήσει 8. 153, cf. Od. 3. 3753 κακὸν καὶ ἀνήνορα IO. 301; so, οἵτινες .. &yé- νοντο ἄνδρες κακοὶ 7 ἢ ἀγαθοὶ ἐν τῇ ναυμαχίῃ Πάι. 6. 14; κ- καὶ ἄθυμος Id. 7-115 οὐδαμῶν κακίονες Ib. 104; κακὸς πρὸς αἰχμήν Soph. Ph. 1306 ; κακὸς εἶναι, in war, Xen. An. 3. 2, 31. 4. bad of his kind, 1. 6. worthless, sorry, poor, ἡνίοχοι 1]. 17. 487; νομῆες Od. 17. 246; κ. ἀλή- της a bad beggar, ΤΣ Ρ718; Chae lysis Om Κ᾿ ἰατρός Aesch. Pr. 473; pe PuIEH®, ναύτης Eur. Supp. 880, Andr. 4573 μάγειρος Plat. Phaedr. 265 E:—c. acc. modi, πάντα γὰρ ov κακύς εἰμι 1 am ποῖ bad in all things, Od. 8. 214; κακὸς γνώμην Soph. Ph. gt0; also, κακὸς γνώμῃ Id. Aj. | 964 ;—c. inf., κακὸς μανθάνειν Id. Ο. T. 545, cf. Eur. Med. 2645 νῆσος 731 II. 191., 14.500; κακὰ εἱμένος 19.327; κακὸν ῥάκος 14, 342. 5. in moral sense, bad, base, evil, wicked, 11. 383, Hes. Op. 238, /_Trag., etc.; ὦ κακῶν pduuore Soph. O. T. 334, Ph. 984; πλεῖστον κάκιστος Id. Ο. C. 744; κακὸς πρός τινα Thue. 1. 86. IL. of outward things, such as death, disease, etc., actively, bad, evil, baneful, pernicious, very common in Hom., etc., as δαίμων, θάνατος. μοῖρα, αἷσα, κῆρες, νόσος, ἕλκος, φάρμακα, ὀδύνη; χόλος, Epis; πόλεμος, ἔπος, ἔργον: ἦμαρ, ἄνεμος, etc.:—of omens and the like, passively, bad, unlucky, Lat. in- faustus, ὄρνις, ὄναρ, σῆμα :---50 also in Trag.. κ. τύχη, δαίμων, pdpos, εἴς. :—also of words, evil, abusive, foul, «. Χόγοι Soph. Ant. 259, Tr. 401 :—«. ποιμήν, i.e. the storm, Aesch. Ag. 657.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  B [iv] (r); the prayer is in large type. Throughout his life Luther had regularly prayed against his enemies, including Duke Georg of Saxony, the Pope, and Albrecht of Mainz; see Günther Wartenberg, “Martin Luthers Beten für Freunde und gegen Feinde,” Lutherjahrbuch 75 (2008): 113–24. 19. Jonas and Coelius, Vom Christlichen abschied (eds. Freybe and Bräuer), fo. C (r–v). Luther’s impending death had been a constant worry for his followers, and he had come close to the end several times before. For example, in 1537 at Schmalkalden, when it looked as if Luther would die, he took leave of them and made the same imprecations against the Pope that he would make when facing death in 1546; WT 3, 3543 A, 389:11–12. 20. They had also worried about the deaths of their own side. For example, when the Lutheran Nikolaus Hausmann died of the “schlag,” the sudden end so feared by sixteenth-century people, Luther wrote to a friend that the death, though terrible, had yet been precious in the sight of God because Hausmann had been a just person; WB 8, 3286, Dec. 30, 1538; WT 4, 4084 [Nov. 1538]. 21. He continued that if he could not have a pious servant of the Church, he would want a “pious Christian” with him, who could comfort him from God’s Word. In fact, Luther knew from both Bucer and Capito that Erasmus had not been alone, but was with the theologian Simon Grynaeus when he died. WB 7, 3048, July 20, 1536 (Capito to Luther); 3050, July 22, 1536 (Bucer to Luther); WT 4, 3963. 22. WB 10, 3848, Feb. 16, 1543 (Dietrich to Luther), 262:17–18; 263:21–22; 23–24; Martin Bucer, De vera ecclesiarvm …(Strasbourg, 1542 [VD 16 B 8929]); Johannes Eck, Replica Ioan. Eckii Adversvs Scripta secunda Buceri …(Ingolstadt, 1543 [VD 16 E 416]). 23. WB 10, 3725, March 17, 1542. It was said that he was seized by the Devil while still alive, or that he despaired of salvation because of his great errors, or that he had had himself exorcised. His friends supposedly described him as a second “Anthony,” plagued with visitations of the Devil. WB 10, 3728, March 26, 1542, Luther wrote to Jakob Propst in Bremen that Karlstadt had died of plague, “he himself the plague of the Basle Church” as the bishops of his own Church had written to them (24:30–31), and he added the rumors concerning poltergeists in Karlstadt’s house. The story about the tall stranger is given in a fragment of a letter from Veit Dietrich in Nuremberg to Luther, 3730, end of March 1542. 24.