Contempt

Passages

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

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• From The City of God

  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?”

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  Are there similar clichés that label unwanted thoughts and feelings? Do members of the group tend to categorize people, things, thoughts, and feelings using the same verbiage? For example, Scientologists label those perceived as negative as suppressive persons or SPs. Bible-based cults often refer to themselves as “true Christians” while dismissively categorizing and labeling those outside their group as “lukewarm Christians” who are somehow not completely committed. Former members of such groups have also been derisively described as “backsliders.” 7. “Doctrine Over Person,” Ofshe describes, is the “reinterpretation of human experience and emotion as seen through the lens and according to the terms of group doctrine.” The following questions should be asked: Do members tend to categorize their thoughts and feelings in terms of either negative or positive, as determined by the group’s beliefs? Do members likewise see those outside the group through a similar lens per their rules and beliefs? Thus can almost anything be potentially categorized in accordance with the group’s doctrine? 8. “The Dispensing of Existence” is what Ofshe sees as the “classification of those not sharing the group’s beliefs as inferior and not worthy of respect.” This criterion represents the culmination of thought reform, and it explains how cult members can dismiss and ultimately eliminate family and old friends from their lives. For example, Scientologists are often encouraged to disconnect from so-called suppressive persons. Has the group or leader in question somehow encouraged a similar pattern of behavior? Has anyone been cut off? Under what circumstances might this rejection potentially occur? Have any disagreements about the group or leader with family and old friends somehow diminished communication or led to estrangement? Has the group or leader caused individuals to disengage from the outside world? Has the group or leader somehow diminished former members? Has a disagreement or lack of compliance led to the diminishing of some members in the group in some way? At this point distinctions should be made between the process of coercive persuasion or thought reform used by destructive cults and other forms of persuasion such as education, advertising, propaganda, and indoctrination. Psychologist Margaret Singer provides an excellent chart for this matter that draws distinctions between these various forms of persuasion and demonstrates those differences based on focus of body of knowledge, direction and degree of exchange, ability to change, structure of persuasion, type of relationship, deceptiveness, breadth of learning, tolerance, and methodology.747 Discussing these distinctions, using Singer’s chart on the next page , is important. Go over each form of persuasion one by one to clarify that thought reform is a unique and separate category of persuasion. For example, thought reform is coercive, intolerant of another frame of reference, and deliberately deceptive.

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

  In his equally popular "Colloquies" (Colloquia Familiaria), begun in 1519, and enlarged in numerous editions, Erasmus aims to make better scholars and better men, as he says in his dedication to John Erasmius Froben (the son of his friend and publisher).526 He gives instruction for Latin conversation, describes the good and bad manners of the times, and ventilates his views on a variety of interesting topics, such as courtesy in saluting, rash vows a soldier’s life, scholastic studies, the profane feast, a lover and maiden, the virgin opposed to matrimony, the penitent virgin, the uneasy wife, the shipwreck, rich beggars, the alchemist, etc. The "Colloquies" are, next to the "Praise of Folly," his most characteristic work, and, like it, abound in delicate humor, keen irony, biting satire. He pays a glowing tribute to Cicero, and calls him "sanctum illud pectus afflatum coelesti numine;" and in the same conversation occurs the famous passage already referred to, "Sancte Socrates, ora pro nobis." He shows his sympathy with the cause of Reuchlin in the dialogue Apotheosis Reuchlini Capnionis, by describing a vision in which the persecuted Hebrew scholar (who died June 22, 1522) was welcomed in heaven by St. Jerome, and, without leave of the Pope, enrolled in the number of saints. But during Reuchlin’s life he had kept neutral in the Dominican quarrel about Reuchlin’s orthodoxy. He is very severe on "the coarse, over-fed monks," and indulges too freely in insinuations which offend modern taste.527 He attacks war, which he hated even more than monkery; and in his description of a reckless, extravagant, debauched, sick, poor and wretched soldier, he took unchristian revenge of Ulrich von Hutten after his miserable death. In the dialogue, "Unequal Marriage," he paints him in the darkest colors as an abandoned roué. He gives an amusing description of a German inn, which makes one thankful for the progress of modern civilization. The bedrooms, he says, are rightly so called; for they contain nothing but a bed; and the cleanliness is on a par with the rest of the establishment and the adjoining stable. The "Ichthyophagia" is a dialogue between a butcher and a fishmonger, and exposes the Pharisaical tendency to strain out a gnat and to swallow a camel, and to lay heavy burdens on others. "Would they might eat nothing but garlic who imposed these fish-days upon us!" "Would they might starve to death who force the necessity of fasting upon free men!" The form of the dialogue furnished the author a door of escape from the charge of heresy, for he could not be held responsible for the sentiments of fictitious characters; moreover, he said, his object was to teach Latin, not theology. Nevertheless, the Sorbonne condemned the "Colloquies," and the Inquisition placed them in the first class of prohibited books.

• From The City of God

  [173] Virgil, Georg. iv. 221, 222. Chapter 12. --Concerning the Opinion of Those Who Have Thought that God is the Soul of the World, and the World is the Body of God. Ought not men of intelligence, and indeed men of every kind, to be stirred up to examine the nature of this opinion? For there is no need of excellent capacity for this task, that putting away the desire of contention, they may observe that if God is the soul of the world, and the world is as a body to Him, who is the soul, He must be one living being consisting of soul and body, and that this same God is a kind of womb of nature containing all things in Himself, so that the lives and souls of all living things are taken, according to the manner of each one's birth, out of His soul which vivifies that whole mass, and therefore nothing at all remains which is not a part of God. And if this is so, who cannot see what impious and irreligious consequences follow, such as that whatever one may trample, he must trample a part of God, and in slaying any living creature, a part of God must be slaughtered? But I am unwilling to utter all that may occur to those who think of it, yet cannot be spoken without irreverence.

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

  CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. The Pharisee, while our Lord still continued on speaking, invites Him to his own house. As it is said, And while he was speaking, a certain Pharisee besought him to dine with him. BEDE. Luke expressly says, And as he spake these things, to shew that He had not quite finished what He had purposed to say, but was somewhat interrupted by the Pharisee asking Him to dine. AUGUSTINE. (de Con. Evan. lib. ii. c. 40.) For in order to relate this, Luke has made a variation from Matthew, at that place where both had mentioned what our Lord said concerning the sign of Jonah, and the queen of the south, and the unclean spirit; after which discourse Matthew says, While he yet talked to the people, behold his mother and his brethren stood without desiring to speak to him; but Luke having also in that discourse of our Lord related some of our Lord’s sayings which Matthew omitted, now departs from the order which he had hitherto kept with Matthew. BEDE. Accordingly, after that it was told Him that His mother and brethren stood without, and He said, For he that doeth the will of God, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother, we are given to understand that He by the request of the Pharisee went to the dinner. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. For Christ, knowing the wickedness of those Pharisees, Himself purposely condescends to be occupied in admonishing them, after the manner of the best physicians, who bring remedies of their own making to those who are dangerously ill. Hence it follows, And he went in and sat down to meat. But what gave occasion for the words of Christ was, that the ignorant Pharisees were offended, that while men thought Him to be a great man and a prophet, He conformed not to their unreasonable customs. Therefore it is added, But the Pharisee began to think and say within himself, Why had he not first washed before dinner? AUGUSTINE. (Serm. 106.) For every day before dinner the Pharisees washed themselves with water, as if a daily washing could be a cleansing of the heart. But the Pharisee thought within himself, yet did not give utterance to a word; nevertheless, He heard who perceived the secrets of the heart. Hence it follows, And the Lord said unto him, Now do ye Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and the platter; but your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness.

• From The City of God

  This philosopher, Plato, has been elevated by Labeo to the rank of a demigod, and set thus upon a level with such as Hercules and Romulus. Labeo ranks demigods higher than heroes, but both he counts among the deities. But I have no doubt that he thinks this man whom he reckons a demigod worthy of greater respect not only than the heroes, but also than the gods themselves. The laws of the Romans and the speculations of Plato have this resemblance, that the latter pronounce a wholesale condemnation of poetical fictions, while the former restrain the license of satire, at least so far as men are the objects of it. Plato will not suffer poets even to dwell in his city:the laws of Rome prohibit actors from being enrolled as citizens; and if they had not feared to offend the gods who had asked the services of the players, they would in all likelihood have banished them altogether. It is obvious, therefore, that the Romans could not receive, nor reasonably expect to receive, laws for the regulation of their conduct from their gods, since the laws they themselves enacted far surpassed and put to shame the morality of the gods. The gods demand stageplays in their own honor; the Romans exclude the players from all civic honors; [106] the former commanded that they should be celebrated by the scenic representation of their own disgrace; the latter commanded that no poet should dare to blemish the reputation of any citizen. But that demigod Plato resisted the lust of such gods as these, and showed the Romans what their genius had left incomplete; for he absolutely excluded poets from his ideal state, whether they composed fictions with no regard to truth, or set the worst possible examples before wretched men under the guise of divine actions. We for our part, indeed, reckon Plato neither a god nor a demigod; we would not even compare him to any of God's holy angels; nor to the truth-speaking prophets, nor to any of the apostles or martyrs of Christ, nay, not to any faithful Christian man. The reason of this opinion of ours we will, God prospering us, render in its own place. Nevertheless, since they wish him to be considered a demigod, we think he certainly is more entitled to that rank, and is every way superior, if not to Hercules and Romulus (though no historian could ever narrate nor any poet sing of him that he had killed his brother, or committed any crime), yet certainly to Priapus, or a Cynocephalus, [107] or the Fever, [108] --divinities whom the Romans have partly received from foreigners, and partly consecrated by home-grown rites. How, then, could gods such as these be expected to promulgate good and wholesome laws, either for the prevention of moral and social evils, or for their eradication where they had already sprung up? --gods who used their influence even to sow and cherish profligacy, by appointing that deeds truly or falsely ascribed to them should be published to the people by means of theatrical exhibitions, and by thus gratuitously fanning the flame of human lust with the breath of a seemingly divine approbation. In vain does Cicero, speaking of poets, exclaim against this state of things in these words:"When the plaudits and acclamation of the people, who sit as infallible judges, are won by the poets, what darkness benights the mind, what fears invade, what passions inflame it! " [109]

• From The City of God

  Chapter 30. --That Those Who Complain of Christianity Really Desire to Live Without Restraint in Shameful Luxury. If the famous Scipio Nasica were now alive, who was once your pontiff, and was unanimously chosen by the senate, when, in the panic created by the Punic war, they sought for the best citizen to entertain the Phrygian goddess, he would curb this shamelessness of yours, though you would perhaps scarcely dare to look upon the countenance of such a man. For why in your calamities do you complain of Christianity, unless because you desire to enjoy your luxurious license unrestrained, and to lead an abandoned and profligate life without the interruption of any uneasiness or disaster? For certainly your desire for peace, and prosperity, and plenty is not prompted by any purpose of using these blessings honestly, that is to say, with moderation, sobriety, temperance, and piety; for your purpose rather is to run riot in an endless variety of sottish pleasures, and thus to generate from your prosperity a moral pestilence which will prove a thousandfold more disastrous than the fiercest enemies. It was such a calamity as this that Scipio, your chief pontiff, your best man in the judgment of the whole senate, feared when he refused to agree to the destruction of Carthage, Rome's rival and opposed Cato, who advised its destruction. He feared security, that enemy of weak minds, and he perceived that a wholesome fear would be a fit guardian for the citizens. And he was not mistaken; the event proved how wisely he had spoken. For when Carthage was destroyed, and the Roman republic delivered from its great cause of anxiety, a crowd of disastrous evils forthwith resulted from the prosperous condition of things. First concord was weakened, and destroyed by fierce and bloody seditions; then followed, by a concatenation of baleful causes, civil wars, which brought in their train such massacres, such bloodshed, such lawless and cruel proscription and plunder, that those Romans who, in the days of their virtue, had expected injury only at the hands of their enemies, now that their virtue was lost, suffered greater cruelties at the hands of their fellow-citizens. The lust of rule, which with other vices existed among the Romans in more unmitigated intensity than among any other people, after it had taken possession of the more powerful few, subdued under its yoke the rest, worn and wearied.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 6. --Concerning the Covetousness of Ninus, Who Was the First Who Made War on His Neighbors, that He Might Rule More Widely. Justinus, who wrote Greek or rather foreign history in Latin, and briefly, like Trogus Pompeius whom he followed, begins his work thus: "In the beginning of the affairs of peoples and nations the government was in the hands of kings, who were raised to the height of this majesty not by courting the people, but by the knowledge good men had of their moderation. The people were held bound by no laws; the decisions of the princes were instead of laws. It was the custom to guard rather than to extend the boundaries of the empire; and kingdoms were kept within the bounds of each ruler's native land. Ninus king of the Assyrians first of all, through new lust of empire, changed the old and, as it were, ancestral custom of nations. He first made war on his neighbors, and wholly subdued as far as to the frontiers of Libya the nations as yet untrained to resist. "And a little after he says: "Ninus established by constant possession the greatness of the authority he had gained. Having mastered his nearest neighbors, he went on to others, strengthened by the accession of forces, and by making each fresh victory the instrument of that which followed, subdued the nations of the whole East. "Now, with whatever fidelity to fact either he or Trogus may in general have written--for that they sometimes told lies is shown by other more trustworthy writers--yet it is agreed among other authors, that the kingdom of the Assyrians was extended far and wide by King Ninus. And it lasted so long, that the Roman empire has not yet attained the same age; for, as those write who have treated of chronological history, this kingdom endured for twelve hundred and forty years from the first year in which Ninus began to reign, until it was transferred to the Medes. But to make war on your neighbors, and thence to proceed to others, and through mere lust of dominion to crush and subdue people who do you no harm, what else is this to be called than great robbery?

• From The City of God

  Chapter 23. --That the Vicissitudes of This Life are Dependent Not on the Favor or Hostility of Demons, But on the Will of the True God. But, further, is it not obvious that the gods have abetted the fulfilment of men's desires, instead of authoritatively bridling them? For Marius, a low-born and self-made man, who ruthlessly provoked and conducted civil wars, was so effectually aided by them, that he was seven times consul, and died full of years in his seventh consulship, escaping the hands of Sylla, who immediately afterwards came into power. Why, then, did they not also aid him, so as to restrain him from so many enormities? For if it is said that the gods had no hand in his success, this is no trivial admission that a man can attain the dearly coveted felicity of this life even though his own gods be not propitious; that men can be loaded with the gifts of fortune as Marius was, can enjoy health, power, wealth, honours, dignity, length of days, though the gods be hostile to him; and that, on the other hand, men can be tormented as Regulus was, with captivity, bondage, destitution, watchings, pain, and cruel death, though the gods be his friends. To concede this is to make a compendious confession that the gods are useless, and their worship superfluous. If the gods have taught the people rather what goes clean counter to the virtues of the soul, and that integrity of life which meets a reward after death; if even in respect of temporal and transitory blessings they neither hurt those whom they hate nor profit whom they love, why are they worshipped, why are they invoked with such eager homage? Why do men murmur in difficult and sad emergencies, as if the gods had retired in anger? and why, on their account, is the Christian religion injured by the most unworthy calumnies? If in temporal matters they have power either for good or for evil, why did they stand by Marius, the worst of Rome's citizens, and abandon Regulus, the best? Does this not prove themselves to be most unjust and wicked? And even if it be supposed that for this very reason they are the rather to be feared and worshipped, this is a mistake; for we do not read that Regulus worshipped them less assiduously than Marius. Neither is it apparent that a wicked life is to be chosen, on the ground that the gods are supposed to have favored Marius more than Regulus. For Metellus, the most highly esteemed of all the Romans, who had five sons in the consulship, was prosperous even in this life; and Catiline, the worst of men, reduced to poverty and defeated in the war his own guilt had aroused, lived and perished miserably. Real and secure felicity is the peculiar possession of those who worship that God by whom alone it can be conferred.

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

  For the Jews withdrew a tenth part from all their produce, and gave it in alms, which rarely a Christian does. Therefore they mocked Him, for saying this to them as to men who did not give alms. God knowing this adds, But woe unto you, Pharisees! for ye tithe mint and rue and all manner of herbs, and pass over judgment and the love of God. This then is not giving alms. For to give alms is to shew mercy. If thou art wise, begin with thyself: for how art thou merciful to another, if cruel to thyself? Hear the Scripture, which says unto thee, Have mercy on thy own soul, and please God. (Ecclus. 30:23.) Return unto thy conscience, thou that livest in evil or unbelief, and then thou findest thy soul begging, or perhaps struck dumb with want. In judgment and love give alms to thy soul. What is judgment? Do what is displeasing to thyself. What is charity? Love God, love thy neighbour. If thou neglectest this alms, love as much you like, thou doest nothing, since thou doest it not to thyself. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. Or He says it by way of censure upon the Pharisees, who ordered those precepts only to be strictly observed by their people, which were the cause of fruitful returns to themselves. Hence they omitted not even the smallest herbs, but despised the work of inspiring love to God, and the just awarding of judgment. THEOPHYLACT. For because they despised God, treating sacred things with indifference, He commands them to have love to God; but by judgment He implies the love of our neighbour. For when a man judges his neighbour justly, it proceeds from his love to him. AMBROSE. Or judgment, because they do not bring to examination every thing that they do; charity, because they love not God with their heart. But that He might not make us zealous of the faith, to the neglect of good works, He sums up the perfection of a good man in a few words, these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. 73. in Matt.) Where indeed the subject treated was the Jewish cleansing, He altogether passed it by, but as the tithe is a kind of almsgiving, and the time was not yet come for absolutely destroying the customs of the law, therefore He says, these ought ye to have done. AMBROSE. He reproves also the arrogance of the boasting Jews in seeking the preeminence: for it follows, Woe unto you, Pharisees, for ye love the uppermost seats in the synagogues, &c.