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 7 of 253 · 20 per page

• From The City of God

  Chapter 18. --How Different the Uncertainty of the New Academy is from the Certainty of the Christian Faith. As regards the uncertainty about everything which Varro alleges to be the differentiating characteristic of the New Academy, the city of God thoroughly detests such doubt as madness. Regarding matters which it apprehends by the mind and reason it has most absolute certainty, although its knowledge is limited because of the corruptible body pressing down the mind, for, as the apostle says, "We know in part. " [1290]It believes also the evidence of the senses which the mind uses by aid of the body; for [if one who trusts his senses is sometimes deceived], he is more wretchedly deceived who fancies he should never trust them. It believes also the Holy Scriptures, old and new, which we call canonical, and which are the source of the faith by which the just lives [1291] and by which we walk without doubting whilst we are absent from the Lord. [1292]So long as this faith remains inviolate and firm, we may without blame entertain doubts regarding some things which we have neither perceived by sense nor by reason, and which have not been revealed to us by the canonical Scriptures, nor come to our knowledge through witnesses whom it is absurd to disbelieve. [1290] 1 Cor. xiii. 9. [1291] Hab. ii. 4. [1292] 2 Cor. v. 6.

• From The City of God

  150 Books That Matter: The City of God Then Augustine undertakes a more leisurely demolition of the idea that the rise of Rome was caused by special providence. Augustine thinks that a full and honest geopolitical imagination requires recognizing that many nations were great before Rome, and Rome’s rise, when it happened, was caused by many contingent factors that bear no marks of inevitability or destiny. It is only rank parochialism that lets us think that Rome is somehow set apart from the other nations and empires in history. It’s not only Augustine’s arguments that convey this point; it’s the very way he makes those arguments. He always uses multiple examples from across history to illuminate Rome’s behavior. He’s a natural-born comparativist, a radical anti-exceptionalist, who sees Rome as just the latest in a string of human sociopolitical configurations going back to the Tower of Babel, Nineveh, and perhaps Cain’s eponymous city before that. There’s nothing special about Rome here; it is simply playing out the same geopolitical logic of every empire before it. Furthermore, he thinks this belief in Rome’s special favor from the divine is not only self-deceptive, it has in fact led to actual enormous idolatry. He notes in this Book 4 the way the Romans’ conviction that their divinities have specially favored them, has turned them into promiscuous worshippers of all sorts of things. They have even gone so far, as we’ll see in a little bit, as to provide a god of the doorframe and of hinges. Now, respectable Roman intellectuals know that this practice is insane, profligacy of divinity, but they—and here Augustine especially mentions Varro, who we’ll hear more about in upcoming lectures, and Cicero—these thinkers suggest that these gods are all manifestations of one single god, though they are hesitant to condemn popular belief in many gods for fear of running afoul of the crowd. So even though those who knew better at least tacitly approved the popular and ridiculous belief in multitudes of gods, what’s worse here is that they approved the popular practices of sacrificing and honoring those gods, as well.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 8. --Whether Rome Ought to Have Been Entrusted to the Trojan Gods. Where, then, was the wisdom of entrusting Rome to the Trojan gods, who had demonstrated their weakness in the loss of Troy? Will some one say that, when Fimbria stormed Troy, the gods were already resident in Rome? How, then, did the image of Minerva remain standing? Besides, if they were at Rome when Fimbria destroyed Troy, perhaps they were at Troy when Rome itself was taken and set on fire by the Gauls. But as they are very acute in hearing, and very swift in their movements, they came quickly at the cackling of the goose to defend at least the Capitol, though to defend the rest of the city they were too long in being warned.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 23. --Porphyry's Account of the Responses Given by the Oracles of the gods Concerning Christ. For in his book called ek logion philosophias, in which he collects and comments upon the responses which he pretends were uttered by the gods concerning divine things, he says--I give his own words as they have been translated from the Greek:"To one who inquired what god he should propitiate in order to recall his wife from Christianity, Apollo replied in the following verses. "Then the following words are given as those of Apollo:"You will probably find it easier to write lasting characters on the water, or lightly fly like a bird through the air, than to restore right feeling in your impious wife once she has polluted herself. Let her remain as she pleases in her foolish deception, and sing false laments to her dead God, who was condemned by right-minded judges, and perished ignominiously by a violent death. " Then after these verses of Apollo (which we have given in a Latin version that does not preserve the metrical form), he goes on to say: "In these verses Apollo exposed the incurable corruption of the Christians, saying that the Jews, rather than the Christians, recognized God. "See how he misrepresents Christ, giving the Jews the preference to the Christians in the recognition of God. This was his explanation of Apollo's verses, in which he says that Christ was put to death by right-minded or just judges,--in other words, that He deserved to die. I leave the responsibility of this oracle regarding Christ on the lying interpreter of Apollo, or on this philosopher who believed it or possibly himself invented it; as to its agreement with Porphyry's opinions or with other oracles, we shall in a little have something to say. In this passage, however, he says that the Jews, as the interpreters of God, judged justly in pronouncing Christ to be worthy of the most shameful death. He should have listened, then, to this God of the Jews to whom he bears this testimony, when that God says, "He that sacrificeth to any other god save to the Lord alone shall be utterly destroyed. "But let us come to still plainer expressions, and hear how great a God Porphyry thinks the God of the Jews is. Apollo, he says, when asked whether word, i. e. , reason, or law is the better thing, replied in the following verses. Then he gives the verses of Apollo, from which I select the following as sufficient:"God, the Generator, and the King prior to all things, before whom heaven and earth, and the sea, and the hidden places of hell tremble, and the deities themselves are afraid, for their law is the Father whom the holy Hebrews honor. "In this oracle of his god Apollo, Porphyry avowed that the God of the Hebrews is so great that the deities themselves are afraid before Him. I am surprised, therefore, that when God said, He that sacrificeth to other gods shall be utterly destroyed, Porphyry himself was not afraid lest he should be destroyed for sacrificing to other gods.

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

  καταφράσσω, Att. -ττω, to cover with mail, τινά Eumath. p. 109 (vulg. caréppace), cf. p. 106; ἵπποι καταπεφραγμένοι (v. κατάφρακτοΞ), Plut. Alex. 16, cf. Crass, 24: metaph., πολλοῖς ἱππεῦσι καταπεφραγ- μένος Id. Alex. 33. καταφρίσσω, strengthd. for φρίσσω, Cyrill. Katadpovew, to think down upon, or (as we say) fo look down upon, think slightly of, τινος Hat. 4.134, Eur. Bacch. 199, etc.; τῶν παρόντων καταφρονῶν, τῶν ἀπόντων ἐπιθυμῶν Lys. 127. 23; κ. τοῦ κινδύνου Plat. Apol. 28 C; τῆς τέχνης Id. Gorg. 512 C,al.; καύματος καὶ ψύχους Ephor. ap. Strab. 480; κυνηγεσιῶν Xen. Cyn. 2,1; τῶν θεῶν Antiph. Incert. 43; τῶν πτωχῶν Menand. Κυβ. το; οὐ δεῖ διαβολῆς x. Id. Βοιωτ. 1. 2. also c. acc. to regard slightly, despise, Hdt. 8. το, Eur. Bacch. 503, Thuc. 6. 34., 8. 8; hence in Pass. to be thought little of, despised, Plat. Rep. 556 Ὁ; εἰς τὰ πολεμικὰ καταφρονούμενοι Xen. Hell. 7. 4, 30; fut. -φρονηθήσομαι Isocr. 135 E, Aeschin. 25. 11; so fut. med. -φρονήσομαι, Plat. Hipp. Ma. 281 C; aor. -εφρονήθην Isocr. 138 A, Plat. Euthyd. 273 D. 3. absol. to be disdainful, deal con- temptuously, Thuc, 2. 11, Arist. Rhet. 2. 2, 3; τὸ καταφρονοῦν contempt, Dion. H. 5. 44. 4. c. inf. to think contemptuously that .., to presume, καταφρονήσαντες ᾿Αρκάδων κρέσσονες εἶναι Hdt. 1.66; κατα- φρονοῦντες κἂν προαισθέσθαι Thuc. 3. 83. ΤΙ. c. acc. rei, only in Ion. writers (cf. κατανοέξω), to fix one’s thoughts upon, aim at, Lat. affectare, τὴν τυραννίδα Hdt. 1. 59, cf. 8. 10; and so it must be taken in Antiph, “Apy. 1. 5, τοὺς βύσταπκας μὴ καταφρόνει do not think of your mustache, do not aim at having one, (because the Spartans had to shave the upper lip, cf. μύσταξ). III. to come to one’s senses, Lat. resipiscere. Hipp. 309. 31., 564. 14 (vulg. caxogp-) ; cf. κατανοξω I. καταφρόνημα, τό, contempt of others, μὴ φρόνημα μόνον, ἀλλὰ καταφρ. not only spirit, but a spirit of disdain, Thuc. 2. 62. καταφρόνησιξ, ews, 7,=foreg., contempt, disdain, Thuc. 1. 122, Plat. Rep. 558 B, Arist. Rhet. 2. 2, 3: also without any bad sense, opp. to αὔχημα, Thuc. 2. 62. καταφρονητέον, verb. Adj. one must despise, τινός Ath. 625 Ὁ. καταφρονητίής, ov, 6, a despiser, Plut. Brut. 12, Joseph. B. J. 2. 8, 3. καταφρονητικός, 7, dv, contemptuous, disdainful, Arist. Eth. N. 4. 3, 28, Rhet. 2. 2, 24., 11.7. Adv. -#@s, Plat. Theaet. 161 C, Xen. Hell. 4.1, 17., 5- 3,1, Dem. 1075. 11, etc.—Lob. Phryn. 520 notes the form κατα- φρονικός in App. and Galen. as faulty. καταφροντίζω, used ina Com. phrase, [θοϊματιον ob ἀπολώλεκ᾽, ἀλλὰ καταπεφρόντικα I have not lost it, but I’ve thought it away, spent it in the schools, Ar. Nub. 857. II. to attend to, τι Polyb. 28. 11,10. καταφρύαγμα, τό, haughtiness, Epict. (Ὁ) καταφρυάττομαι, Dep. ¢o snort at, properly of a horse; metaph. to snort at, to behave insolently, M. Anton. 7.3; τινὶ Id.g. 41; τινός Phot, 780

• From The City of God

  195 Lecture 9 Transcript—Public Religion in Imperial Rome (Books 6–7) the truths of religion, at least as far as those low ingrates need to comprehend anything. In other words, Roman philosophers such as Varro can imagine that some selection of the gods should be worshipped in the city—the select gods—while the rest can be discarded or ignored. Because of this, philosophers can respect the common belief in these while not letting on to the crowd that they understand them to be something very different than what the common folk take them to be. And here again Augustine pounces. For what is the point of this whole project, anyway? Varro talks about being pious before the mystery, and he hints at esoteric and probably naturalistic interpretation even of the select gods. But none of this will get us to the true God, Augustine says. Indeed, instead it is all an effort on Varro’s part merely to make the city’s god palatable to intellectuals, and encourage them in their sloth, rather than firing them up to seek the true God. More specifically, who selects just these so-called select gods to be the ones given this false honor of being naturalistic forces? Is it Varro and his cronies? They may think so, but not really. In fact, Augustine says, they themselves were seduced and flattered into thinking this by the demons that they direct others to obey. After all, Augustine argues, if you begin to try to discriminate between some set of gods and other select gods, there’s nowhere to cut at the joints between these theologies; they are all still worldly forces. But things are worse still. These are often not even what Augustine— or we today—would call natural forces. They may be horrible social pathologies, camouflaged demons that only seem naturalized to those of us trapped on the inside of these practices. Consider what Augustine says about the layers of gods included here. First of all, some of the gods that the Romans honor, and Varro lets them honor, are simply ridiculous. There are gods for everything, including, as I pointed out, a lintel over a doorway. Then there are gods which legitimate wholly human social practices, like the practice

• From The City of God

  Chapter 4. --What the Christians Believe Regarding the Supreme Good and Evil, in Opposition to the Philosophers, Who Have Maintained that the Supreme Good is in Themselves. If, then, we be asked what the city of God has to say upon these points, and, in the first place, what its opinion regarding the supreme good and evil is, it will reply that life eternal is the supreme good, death eternal the supreme evil, and that to obtain the one and escape the other we must live rightly. And thus it is written, "The just lives by faith," [1263] for we do not as yet see our good, and must therefore live by faith; neither have we in ourselves power to live rightly, but can do so only if He who has given us faith to believe in His help do help us when we believe and pray. As for those who have supposed that the sovereign good and evil are to be found in this life, and have placed it either in the soul or the body, or in both, or, to speak more explicitly, either in pleasure or in virtue, or in both; in repose or in virtue, or in both; in pleasure and repose, or in virtue, or in all combined; in the primary objects of nature, or in virtue, or in both,--all these have, with a marvelous shallowness, sought to find their blessedness in this life and in themselves. Contempt has been poured upon such ideas by the Truth, saying by the prophet, "The Lord knoweth the thoughts of men" (or, as the Apostle Paul cites the passage, "The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise") "that they are vain. " [1264]

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  But unfortunately in bestowing these embraces, a pin in her ladyship’s head dress slightly scratching the child’s neck, produced from this pattern of gentleness such violent screams, as could hardly be outdone by any creature professedly noisy. The mother’s consternation was excessive; but it could not surpass the alarm of the Miss Steeles, and every thing was done by all three, in so critical an emergency, which affection could suggest as likely to assuage the agonies of the little sufferer. She was seated in her mother’s lap, covered with kisses, her wound bathed with lavender-water, by one of the Miss Steeles, who was on her knees to attend her, and her mouth stuffed with sugar plums by the other. With such a reward for her tears, the child was too wise to cease crying. She still screamed and sobbed lustily, kicked her two brothers for offering to touch her, and all their united soothings were ineffectual till Lady Middleton luckily remembering that in a scene of similar distress last week, some apricot marmalade had been successfully applied for a bruised temple, the same remedy was eagerly proposed for this unfortunate scratch, and a slight intermission of screams in the young lady on hearing it, gave them reason to hope that it would not be rejected. She was carried out of the room therefore in her mother’s arms, in quest of this medicine, and as the two boys chose to follow, though earnestly entreated by their mother to stay behind, the four young ladies were left in a quietness which the room had not known for many hours. “Poor little creatures!” said Miss Steele, as soon as they were gone. “It might have been a very sad accident.” “Yet I hardly know how,” cried Marianne, “unless it had been under totally different circumstances. But this is the usual way of heightening alarm, where there is nothing to be alarmed at in reality.” “What a sweet woman Lady Middleton is!” said Lucy Steele. Marianne was silent; it was impossible for her to say what she did not feel, however trivial the occasion; and upon Elinor therefore the whole task of telling lies when politeness required it, always fell. She did her best when thus called on, by speaking of Lady Middleton with more warmth than she felt, though with far less than Miss Lucy. “And Sir John too,” cried the elder sister, “what a charming man he is!” Here too, Miss Dashwood’s commendation, being only simple and just, came in without any eclat. She merely observed that he was perfectly good humoured and friendly. “And what a charming little family they have! I never saw such fine children in my life.—I declare I quite doat upon them already, and indeed I am always distractedly fond of children.” “I should guess so,” said Elinor, with a smile, “from what I have witnessed this morning.”

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “My protégé, as you call him, is a sensible man; and sense will always have attractions for me. Yes, Marianne, even in a man between thirty and forty. He has seen a great deal of the world; has been abroad, has read, and has a thinking mind. I have found him capable of giving me much information on various subjects; and he has always answered my inquiries with readiness of good-breeding and good nature.” “That is to say,” cried Marianne contemptuously, “he has told you, that in the East Indies the climate is hot, and the mosquitoes are troublesome.” “He would have told me so, I doubt not, had I made any such inquiries, but they happened to be points on which I had been previously informed.” “Perhaps,” said Willoughby, “his observations may have extended to the existence of nabobs, gold mohrs, and palanquins.” “I may venture to say that his observations have stretched much further than your candour. But why should you dislike him?” “I do not dislike him. I consider him, on the contrary, as a very respectable man, who has every body’s good word, and nobody’s notice; who has more money than he can spend, more time than he knows how to employ, and two new coats every year.” “Add to which,” cried Marianne, “that he has neither genius, taste, nor spirit. That his understanding has no brilliancy, his feelings no ardour, and his voice no expression.” “You decide on his imperfections so much in the mass,” replied Elinor, “and so much on the strength of your own imagination, that the commendation I am able to give of him is comparatively cold and insipid. I can only pronounce him to be a sensible man, well-bred, well-informed, of gentle address, and, I believe, possessing an amiable heart.” “Miss Dashwood,” cried Willoughby, “you are now using me unkindly. You are endeavouring to disarm me by reason, and to convince me against my will. But it will not do. You shall find me as stubborn as you can be artful. I have three unanswerable reasons for disliking Colonel Brandon; he threatened me with rain when I wanted it to be fine; he has found fault with the hanging of my curricle, and I cannot persuade him to buy my brown mare. If it will be any satisfaction to you, however, to be told, that I believe his character to be in other respects irreproachable, I am ready to confess it. And in return for an acknowledgment, which must give me some pain, you cannot deny me the privilege of disliking him as much as ever.” CHAPTER XI.

• From The City of God

  211 Lecture 10 Transcript—Who or What Is God? (Books 8–9) But the immediate and functional problem with the Platonists’ understanding of demons, the problem Augustine argues the Platonists should recognize as a self-contradiction, is that they are positioned backward, as it were, to be proper mediators. The demons are like us in ways that mean they share our maladies, but they are like gods in ways that mean they can never change. In other words, their godlike immortality is corporeal, while their human commonality is spiritual and psychological. The demons suffer impermanent passions, which makes them like us and thus incapable of mediating between us and the infinite stability of God to secure our permanent happiness. We need the opposite to help us mediate. As we have seen, Augustine has very little time for the demons in general. He says, in fact, that the pagan gods were dead men whom the pagans once valued, and whose identities had been usurped by the demons once they had gone to their grave. The demons, that is, imitate corpses, for Augustine. That is a pathetic fate for the fallen angels, first of all—to be reduced to such chicanery—but it also suggests something of the foolishness of the Platonists for heeding them. Now, Augustine is not opposed to recognizing and giving due honor to spiritual beings other than God, of course. Christians honor their martyrs, but not as mediators or demigods. Christians are called to worship only God. No one should worship the dead or honor them through sacrifice; they imitate them, and honor them by worshipping the god they worshipped. But the real problem with the Platonists is not actually their dalliance with demons. The real problem, the deepest problem, is the failure of imagination about God and Creation that backs them into that dalliance with the demons. Platonists are attracted by the idea of demons, Augustine thinks, because they assume God needs mediation, and they assume God needs mediation because they think God is fundamentally not interested in the world.

• From The City of God

  217 Lecture 10 Transcript—Who or What Is God? (Books 8–9) And because they did not do this, the Platonists’ practiced a religion centered around an underspecified union and an overemphasized hostility to human affection and attachment. They imagine that the aim is union with God, but what that might amount to they never say, except that it is radically unlike our current existence. What they do believe, however, is that part of what we must shed in seeking union with God is our emotions. And so they, like other philosophers, flee feeling, and seek something they call apatheia, which is the condition of being without emotions, feelings, passion. These, they think, are essentially worldly, essentially meat. Surely feelings like fear or love have physical basis in nature, and thus cannot be part of the deepest truth of the universe. They didn’t know much about God, but they were damned certain that God could not feel anything. And damned certain, for Augustine, they remained. The Platonists were not wholly wrong, then, about our need of help in realizing God’s loving presence in this world. It is not an intermediating semi-demi-hemi-divinity who does this, however. Instead, against Platonic pride, we need a mediator who is Christ, the true presence of God in our midst. Eternal and stable like God, but temporal and material like ourselves, Christ is the true mediator that the demons could never be. But, in fact, this Christ is no mediator at all. This Christ bypasses the whole idea of mediation entirely—Christ just is God. In this, Augustine violates a basic principle of the ancient metaphysical imagination, the principle of metaphysical apartheid that I mentioned earlier in this lecture, that like can only be known by like. In fact, he says the Incarnation shows that there is no fundamental divide between layers of reality; all is more joined together than set apart. That is a radical metaphysical claim whose implications are still being worked out today.

• From The City of God

  329 Lecture 16—The Two Cities and the Two Loves (Book 14) the jumbled nature of our inner lives typically make it very hard to employ. ›No one is wholly and purely rooted in one set of dispositions: The good are weak and even the wicked can commit a noble deed. So the connections between our beliefs and our behaviors are at best only loose. ›The task of interpreting others’ acts (and even our own) is beset with innumerable difficulties. We can never fully trust our own best judgment. The Two Loves „Augustine begins by trying to characterize humanity in terms of two diverse loyalties through a discussion of the flags flown by the two cities. These two standards symbolize the two loves, which stand for two different dispositions embodied in their devotees: ›The earthly city reflects “love of self even to contempt of God” ›The city of God reflects “love of God even to contempt of self.” „He explains that “flesh” stands for an attitude of valuing our physical lives above our spiritual ones. The point is that living according to this world is bad. Thus the cause of sin lies in the soul, not fundamentally in the flesh. „Sin is, fundamentally, to live according to self-will, which is self-destructive and self- deceptive. It was not flesh that dragged down and entrapped the material soul; rather, it was the sinful soul that made flesh corruptible. For Augustine this Stoic proposal is wrong, especially for Christians because of the particular models that scripture offers of exemplary human behavior.

• From The City of God

  182 Books That Matter: The City of God „In the end Varro fails to offer any sort of account of true religion, in at least three senses. ›First, he reduces religion to an account about nature but fails to publicize that. ›Second, he tries to legitimate a selection of the gods without realizing that he is granting theological legitimacy to social pathologies. ›Third, he fails to get outside the horizon of creation itself, to see the Creator—and so his work is not about real religion at all, but about demons and their various malicious antics to convince others, and themselves, of their superior status. This religion is actually impiety and idolatry. „And so it turns out that the philosophers’ critique of myth, which they tried to apply to the Christians, is turned by Augustine, at least in the case of Varro and his descendants, against themselves: It is they who are superstitious and impious. „The Christian church offers the true story, teaches about the true God, and practices true sacrifice, and thereby performs true service to that God. Questions to Consider 1. Augustine clearly has little patience with arguments that explain religion in terms of its civic benefits or in terms that do not respect the religion’s self-presentation. Yet Augustine’s own critique of pagan Roman religion can’t be said to respect that religion’s self-presentation. So why does he think complaining about Varro’s approach is acceptable while taking the same approach himself? 183 Lecture 9—Public Religion in Imperial Rome (Books 6–7) 2. What does Augustine think of the Roman philosophers’ proposal that some selection of the gods worshipped in the city (the “principal” gods, Augustine calls them) are actual gods, while the rest can be discarded or ignored? What, in particular, does Augustine think of the idea that a variety of deities exists? (Cf. book 7, chapter 30)

• From The City of God

  413 Lecture 19 Transcript—Happiness and Politics (Book 19) Here at last Augustine returns to this topic and argues that, since justice is a matter of giving each their due, a city that does not give God God’s due is not just, and thus not a city. Because God was never worshiped in pagan Rome, justice was never done there, and the city was never a true city, at least on Cicero’s definition. This is partly one last smack at Rome, in its own self-regard. But it’s more primarily a critique of Cicero’s analytic political vocabulary and by extension the whole dominant political understanding of the ancient world. Justice, Augustine is saying, is first and foremost a form of worship. True justice is not defined by some grim vision of mere equity, a cold-hearted parceling out of finite goods to finite parties, after which each turns away from the others to feast on its own little grub in smug, solipsistic satisfaction. Besides, if we all got what we truly deserved, there’s no way we would like it. For justice to be truly good news, it must flow from some source other than our sin-inflected perception of a finite world divvied up into lots like Jesus’s robes were divvied up at the foot of the cross. What is our due is what God has decided, gratuitously, to give us far beyond any merit we might conceive. What, for Augustine, God has done to justice is like unto what God has done to cities. Every city, to be a true city, must be the city of God. Worldly cities can never be true cities—a real city must exceed the worldly city and reach for the divine. Cities may think, in orgies of self-congratulation, that they are systems of justice, righteous, noble nations; but no earthly city is actually that. Far more psychologically accurate, if morally grubby, is Augustine’s proposal, cities are defined by what they love, by their common object of love. And yet, they aspire to so much more, justice and cities are to be founded on grounds fundamentally other than what we, in our fallenness, have imagined them to be. Cain’s city must become the New Jerusalem. But it cannot become that, from within history,

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  When their promised visit to the Park and consequent introduction to these young ladies took place, they found in the appearance of the eldest, who was nearly thirty, with a very plain and not a sensible face, nothing to admire; but in the other, who was not more than two or three and twenty, they acknowledged considerable beauty; her features were pretty, and she had a sharp quick eye, and a smartness of air, which though it did not give actual elegance or grace, gave distinction to her person. Their manners were particularly civil, and Elinor soon allowed them credit for some kind of sense, when she saw with what constant and judicious attention they were making themselves agreeable to Lady Middleton. With her children they were in continual raptures, extolling their beauty, courting their notice, and humouring their whims; and such of their time as could be spared from the importunate demands which this politeness made on it, was spent in admiration of whatever her ladyship was doing, if she happened to be doing any thing, or in taking patterns of some elegant new dress, in which her appearance the day before had thrown them into unceasing delight. Fortunately for those who pay their court through such foibles, a fond mother, though, in pursuit of praise for her children, the most rapacious of human beings, is likewise the most credulous; her demands are exorbitant; but she will swallow any thing; and the excessive affection and endurance of the Miss Steeles towards her offspring were viewed therefore by Lady Middleton without the smallest surprise or distrust. She saw with maternal complacency all the impertinent encroachments and mischievous tricks to which her cousins submitted. She saw their sashes untied, their hair pulled about their ears, their work-bags searched, and their knives and scissors stolen away, and felt no doubt of its being a reciprocal enjoyment. It suggested no other surprise than that Elinor and Marianne should sit so composedly by, without claiming a share in what was passing. “John is in such spirits today!” said she, on his taking Miss Steeles’s pocket handkerchief, and throwing it out of window—“He is full of monkey tricks.” And soon afterwards, on the second boy’s violently pinching one of the same lady’s fingers, she fondly observed, “How playful William is!” “And here is my sweet little Annamaria,” she added, tenderly caressing a little girl of three years old, who had not made a noise for the last two minutes; “And she is always so gentle and quiet—Never was there such a quiet little thing!”

• From The City of God

  178 Books That Matter: The City of God „The civic republicans said Christianity was antiworldly, but the philosophers accused it of being just another superstition, a bad form of wishful, magical thinking. They recoiled at Christianity’s vulgarity, its commonness, the way it breached social boundaries. Furthermore, they saw the Christians as all doing rituals, and, what’s worse, believing in them. That was superstition, the sin of the ignorant, rude, common folk. From Superstition to True Religion „The City of God is written in the shadow of the philosophical critique of cultural myth, inaugurated by Plato’s Republic, and Augustine was well aware that the philosophers saw Christianity as just another delusional myth, worse than the others because it lacked the honorable patina of antiquity. „So Augustine developed a profound Christian reply to the philosophers. It is his analysis of Roman intellectuals’ efforts to explain and legitimate some selection of the Roman pantheon while keeping them in their intellectual place. „Augustine launches his response through his first serious engagement with a serious intellectual rival, Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC), one of the greatest of Roman minds. Varro’s works were almost entirely lost after antiquity, but one in particular was powerfully influential, his Antiquities, Human and Divine, an attempt to talk about the deep past of Roman history. „In the Antiquities, Varro offers an analysis of Roman religion that Augustine thinks tries to excuse the religion’s obvious absurdities and defend it in light of religion’s civic purposes. According to Augustine, Varro’s basic claim is that we need to identify the right gods, in the right order, for things to work. „But, for Augustine, Varro immediately goes on to undercut the project, saying that humans made the gods, and the gods served

• From The City of God

  214 Books That Matter: The City of God They assumed an image of God as a Roman nobleman, who would never sully himself by descending down to the distasteful lower classes, with their sweat and their smells. And they imagined material reality as just that sort of disgusting, noisy, crass reality that is the lower classes. They see the transcendence of God from creation— the Platonists do—but they imagine that transcendence as akin to the hauteur of ancient nobility over against the proles, not the agapic passion of a loving parent who would do anything for their child. They could not conceive that a transcendent Creator might take any kind of interest in, let alone an immediate and lively concern for, such lowly creatures. In the end, then, the Platonists’ social prejudices forced them to surrender their deepest metaphysical insight. Their good initial metaphysical conception of God’s radical transcendence from Creation was vexed by their fear of God’s pollution by matter, their fear of contaminating God, their fixation on a mistaken conception of divine purity, and their imposition of multiple layers of mediation between our world and God’s. All this works to corrode their conception of divine transcendence, and to encourage them to mistake distance and distaste for holiness. And, for Augustine, this is their great error. God’s holiness and transcendence is not a matter of the Divine being afraid of getting cooties from the material world. In fact, God loves us, and has come to us in the history of revelation as seen through the history of the people Israel, and then preeminently in the figure of Jesus Christ. And this explains his complaint about the Platonists. They see that there is a God, but they fail to see how we are related to this God, how God is perpetually involved in the world without compromising the Divine’s transcendence. They think that God finds materiality distasteful, and so they disdain to make any effort to imagine that God as reaching us, and thus presume it is up to us, that we must get to God. And so they thrash around, Augustine says, in the darkness of their confusions, for aids in that endeavor, that project of getting to

• From The City of God

  212 Books That Matter: The City of God The Platonists assume God is uninterested in the world because they cannot imagine a God so loving of the world as to remain intimately and immediately engaged with it. They cannot conceive that God might be not averse to being directly touched, that God might want actually to reach us. They cannot imagine that God has real, unsponsored, and unprompted and, really, unwarranted love for humanity. The Platonists imagine God must be more like a ward boss than a loving parent. They fail, that is, because they have a poor theological imagination. They cannot imagine that God could love the world so much as to want to plunge into it. Now, note that this also entails a deeply negative vision of material reality itself. It may be that the vision of God as supremely immaterial, and materiality as itself nothing but disgusting and likely to be dead matter, exist as two sides of the same coin, in which case we can’t be sure which caused which. All we really know is that the Platonists affirm both. Platonists’ vision of God as fundamentally repulsed by material reality is paired with a basically escapist strategy for their own getting to God, which itself in turn implied to them the anthropological claim that we are not naturally, properly worldly, but exiles in materiality. Platonism in general—on Augustine’s reading, and in particular the Neoplatonists who he knew best—imagine our journey to God as a flight from the world, because they believe in the ancient philosophical maxim that like could only be known by like, and so we and God can come together in our mutual essential difference from materiality. And here we see the great pathos of the Platonists’ perplexity. The Platonists realize, with tremendous intellectual effort, that there was a truly transcendent Creator of all, whose transcendence put all Creation equally indeterminately distant from the Creator. But they did not see that this Creator was willed with unconditional love for creation, and so they assumed, silently, never questioning it or even realizing it could be questioned, that God is by nature fundamentally separate from and indifferent to creation, and that creation could

• From The City of God

  190 Books That Matter: The City of God much in social status. Furthermore, they saw the Christians as all doing rituals, and, what’s worse, still believing in them. And that was superstition; the sin of ignorant, rude, common folk. Now, there’s a large rhetorical debate going on in these books, and you can see some of it already happening here around words such as superstition, superstitio; religion, religio; pietas, piety; and sacrificium, sacrifice. Etymologically, superstitio—superstition— means standing above or standing over, and it was traditionally thought to refer originally to people standing above a grave. One can imagine a simple-minded person refusing to believe that the dead in the grave are truly gone, for they still loiter there. That, at least, was the philosopher’s way of understanding what superstition was. This sort of refusal to accept death was considered cowardly and deeply embarrassing to the Romans. The Romans saw Christians as superstitious, as having wrong relations with gods, as a matter of being impious, which is just about the most potent theological insult the Romans could deliver, effectively amounting to the charge that the Christians were, in fact, atheists—and, in fact, sometimes that’s what the Christians were accused of in the early centuries. True pietas meant justice with regard to the gods, as Cicero once said, and the Christians manifestly did not do that, because they would not sacrifice. Now what exactly is sacrifice? Pagans and Christians fought to the death over that term. Sacrificium, which Augustine uses also to capture the sense of the Greek word latreia, or service to God, means making something holy by putting it apart, fundamentally giving it away, losing it. The Christians ultimately won this battle over the meaning of these words, of course, so that we believe that abstract monotheism is religio, while anything that smacks of ritual-bound polytheism is superstitio. But the battle was still going on in Augustine’s time. And indeed, as we’ll see, he was the Christians’ most effective warrior.

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  The more she insulted the penis, the stiffer it got. It was remarkable. She said, “Do you want to see me brush my hair?” The dick nodded yes. So she got her hairbrush out of her purse. “I have lots of dark hair,” she said, “and this is how I brush it, like this. And I like to toss it around, like this. Do you like it when I pass my hair over you, Chief Cock? Hm?” She said, “I like when men look at my hair and then they go home and they beat off their gnarly dicks thinking about me brushing my hair.” She said, “But you can’t beat off, can you?” And she circled her hand around behind his balls and cock, so that she had him. “You’re stuck out here with me, and you can’t beat off, no matter how bad you want to, you hopeless sadsack dickjerker.” By now, after all this abuse, the penis was truly huge. “That’s quite a heavy piece of machinery you’ve got,” said Polly. “You are a fucking grotesque cuntsplitter.” She put her lips close to it. “Do you like it when a suck strumpet like me talks nasty to you with my soft red lips? Do you see how full they are and how ready they are to glue themselves onto your knob? Hm? See how ready I am to take that big stiff fleshbone and jerk it off onto these soft full lips?” The penis went boing, boing. She said, “I bet you’re crazy to see my tits, too. You can’t stand it, can you? See that? That’s my right tit. Sometimes I squeeze it a little bit. Sometimes I pinch my nipple through the fabric, mmm, like that. Sometimes I spank my tits a little bit, like this. Ouch, bad titties. They like to be spanked. Are you married?” The penis nodded. “How many kids?” Polly asked. The penis waggled three times. “You monstrosity! Three kids you’ve got? And you’re here hanging out of this hole in the wall? Can you see me?” The penis nodded again. “High-tech, are you, you sick demented voyeuristic plaster-fucker!” She was amazed. It was like his penis had a telescoping action—the more she taunted and reviled it, the more it kept adding intermediate sections. It was like a subway improvement project. And it had these knobby veins all over it. She couldn’t resist holding it, so she pinched the skin right underneath its head, and the whole penis immediately leapt away like a shying racehorse. “Don’t fight me now, shitbird,” she said. She pinched the skin again, harder, and rolled it between her fingers so that its monocular eye gazed crazily around the room. And then she said, “You want me to jerk you off now?”