Contentment

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 A History of God (1993)

  Needless to say, he did not mean cerebral, rational knowledge alone: in his ascent to God the mystic had to travel through the alam al-mithal, the realm of vision and imagination. God is not a reality that can be known objectively, but will be found within the image-making faculty of each individual Muslim. When the Koran or the hadith speak of Paradise, Hell or the throne of God, they are not referring to a reality that was in a separate location but to an inner world, hidden beneath the veils of sensible phenomena: Everything to which man aspires, everything he desires, is instantaneously present to him, or rather one should say: to picture his desire is itself to experience the real presence of its object. But the sweetness and delight are the expression of Paradise and Hell, good and evil, all that can reach man of what constitutes his retribution in the world beyond, have no other source than the essential “I” of man himself, formed as it is by his intentions and projects, his innermost beliefs, his conduct. 3 Like Ibn al-Arabi, whom he greatly revered, Mulla Sadra did not envisage God sitting in another world, an external, objective heaven to which all the faithful would repair after death. Heaven and the divine sphere were to be discovered within the self, in the personal alam al- mithal which was the inalienable possession of every single human being. No two people would have exactly the same heaven or the same God. Mulla Sadra, who venerated Sunni, Sufi and Greek philosophers as well as the Shiite Imams, reminds us that Iranian Shiism was not always exclusive and fanatical. In India, many of the Muslims had cultivated a similar tolerance toward other traditions. Although Islam predominated culturally in Moghul India, Hinduism remained vital and creative, and some Muslims and Hindus cooperated in the arts and in intellectual projects. The subcontinent had long been free of religious intolerance, and during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the most creative forms of Hinduism stressed the unity of religious aspiration: all paths were valid, provided that they emphasized an interior love for the One God. This clearly resonated with both Sufism and Falsafah, which were the most dominant Islamic moods in India. Some Muslims and Hindus formed interfaith societies, the most important of which became Sikhism, founded by Guru Namak during the fifteenth century. This new form of monotheism believed that al-Lah was identical with the God of Hinduism. On the Muslim side, the Iranian scholar Mir Abu al-Qasim Findiriski (d. 1641), the contemporary of Mir Damad and Mulla Sadra, taught the works of Ibn Sina in Isfahan but also spent a good deal of time in India studying Hinduism and Yoga.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In his Life of Antony, the famous desert ascetic, Athanasius tried to show how his new doctrine affected Christian spirituality. Antony, known as the father of monasticism, had lived a life of formidable austerity in the Egyptian desert. Yet in The Sayings of the Fathers, an anonymous anthology of maxims of the early desert monks, he comes across as a human and vulnerable man, troubled by boredom, agonizing over human problems and giving simple, direct advice. In his biography, however, Athanasius presents him in an entirely different light. He is, for example, transformed into an ardent opponent of Arianism; he had already begun to enjoy a foretaste of his future apotheosis, since he shares the divine apatheia to a remarkable degree. When, for example, he emerged from the tombs where he had spent twenty years wrestling with demons, Athanasius says that Antony’s body showed no signs of ageing. He was a perfect Christian, whose serenity and impassibility set him apart from other men: “his soul was unperturbed, and so his outward appearance was calm.”13 He had perfectly imitated Christ: just as the Logos had taken flesh, descended into the corrupt world and fought the powers of evil, so Antony had descended into the abode of demons. Athanasius never mentions contemplation, which according to such Christian platonists as Clement or Origen had been the means of deification and salvation. It was no longer considered possible for mere mortals to ascend to God in this way by their own natural powers. Instead, Christians must imitate the descent of the Word made flesh into the corruptible, material world.

• From A History of God (1993)

  On the contrary, they insisted that Jews had a duty to keep well and happy. They frequently depict the Holy Spirit “leaving” or “abandoning” such biblical characters as Jacob, David or Esther when they were sick or unhappy.97 Sometimes they made them quote Psalm 22 when they felt the Spirit leave them: “My God, my God, why have you deserted me?” This raises an interesting question about Jesus’ mysterious cry from the cross, when he quoted these words. The Rabbis taught that God did not want men and women to suffer. The body should be honored and cared for, since it was in the image of God: it could even be sinful to avoid such pleasures as wine or sex, since God had provided them for man’s enjoyment. God was not to be found in suffering and asceticism. When they urged their people to practical ways of “possessing” the Holy Spirit, they were in one sense asking them to create their own image of God for themselves. They taught that it was not easy to say where God’s work began and man’s ended. The prophets had always made God visible on earth by attributing their own insights to him. Now the Rabbis were seen to be engaged in a task that was at once human and divine. When they formulated new legislation, it was seen both as God’s and as their own. By increasing the amount of Torah in the world, they were extending his presence in the world and making it more effective. They themselves came to be revered as the incarnations of Torah; they were more “like God” than anybody else because of their expertise in the Law.98

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  She says, I’m bad on coinage. Can you call your sister? I flip open my cell phone and punch redial. Lecia answers as she does when busy, like one of those cartoon tycoons—or the mother of five children, which she is. She says, Do you need something? Coin of Alexander the Great. How many letters? Eleven. Tetradrachm, she says, then spells it. Is that it? she adds, I’m covered up with work here. We trade love before I snap the phone shut. Got it, Mother says, and moves to the next clue while saying, I figured you or your sister would come along and fix it. The eleven-letter word? The ceiling, she says. I track down and cajole into action air-conditioner repairmen and electricians and plaster workers to glue back together Mother’s crayoned house. That’s it, I say when the bills are presented. We’re selling this cracker box. We chip in to buy Mother a condo in the same small town as Lecia’s office. We know Mother will rail about the change, but to prop up the rotting house would cost twice what it’s worth. I can envision driving up someday to find the walls caved in, Mother sitting amid mossy ruins with book in hand and birds nesting in her hair. You tell her it’s a fait accompli, Lecia says. She’ll raise holy hell. You make her take the hit. Tom and I’ll move her. If y’all do that, I’ll clean out the house. Once again Mother promises to be packed and ready, and once again Lecia finds her staring, coffee cup in midair, at three empty supermarket boxes, not a single plate newspapered. I need y’all to start me up, Mother says. Over a period of two days, Lecia and her husband pack and manhandle Mother’s possessions into a truck with the energy of newlyweds. They ferry it all two hours away, near Houston, into the corner unit we bought, staying till every picture is hung. Making up Mother’s new bed with plush linens, Lecia finds a Polaroid of the egg-yolk crayon house under Mother’s pillow. The old house is cleared of big pieces when I fly in to clean it out, which involves sorting through letters and paintings and stuff we may want to tenderly tuck away in tissue, though in truth, we partly long to bulldoze the place. I’m not without help. My high school friend Doonie, now the fence king of San Diego County, flies home to help. So does John Cleary—boy next door, first kiss. They show up on the steps as if dismounted from white chargers to shovel out the pigsty of a house. By dusk, it’s down to the baseboards, and I’m alone. John and Doonie head off to drive a final truckload to the dump. My legs are streaked with dirt, and it’s as if some key on my back has unwound, for I’ve dropped in my tracks in Mother’s once magical closet.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Jews had long sanctified creation by separating its various items, and in this spirit women were relegated to a separate sphere from their menfolk, just as they were to keep milk separate from meat in their kitchens. In practice, this meant that they were regarded as inferior. Even though the Rabbis taught that women were blessed by God, men were commanded to thank God during the morning prayer for not making them Gentiles, slaves or women. Yet marriage was regarded as a sacred duty and family life was holy. The Rabbis stressed its sanctity in legislation that has often been misunderstood. When sexual intercourse was forbidden during menstruation, this was not because a woman was to be regarded as dirty or disgusting. The period of abstinence was designed to prevent a man from taking his wife for granted: “Because a man may become overly familiar with his wife, and thus repelled by her, the Torah says that she should be a niddah [sexually unavailable] for seven days [after menses] so that she will be as beloved to him [afterward] as on the day of marriage.” 96 Before going to the synagogue on a festival day, a man was commanded to take a ritual bath, not because he was unclean in any simplistic way but to make himself more holy for the sacred divine service. It is in this spirit that a woman was commanded to take a ritual bath after the menstrual period, to prepare herself for the holiness of what came next: sexual relations with her husband. The idea that sex could be holy in this way would be alien to Christianity, which would sometimes see sex and God as mutually incompatible. True, later Jews often gave a negative interpretation to these rabbinic directives, but the Rabbis themselves did not preach a lugubrious, ascetic, life-denying spirituality. On the contrary, they insisted that Jews had a duty to keep well and happy. They frequently depict the Holy Spirit “leaving” or “abandoning” such biblical characters as Jacob, David or Esther when they were sick or unhappy. 97 Sometimes they made them quote Psalm 22 when they felt the Spirit leave them: “My God, my God, why have you deserted me?” This raises an interesting question about Jesus’ mysterious cry from the cross, when he quoted these words. The Rabbis taught that God did not want men and women to suffer. The body should be honored and cared for, since it was in the image of God: it could even be sinful to avoid such pleasures as wine or sex, since God had provided them for man’s enjoyment. God was not to be found in suffering and asceticism. When they urged their people to practical ways of “possessing” the Holy Spirit, they were in one sense asking them to create their own image of God for themselves. They taught that it was not easy to say where God’s work began and man’s ended.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But it was the university’s provincialism that created the kind of small community in which a man like Luther could flourish, where he could develop his ideas unhindered, outside the restrictions of an older, more established institution. When Luther arrived in Wittenberg, the town was a building site. The castle and church were being extended and remodelled, the new university buildings were under construction, and ambitious plans for a town hall had been set in motion — a monster five-storey Renaissance edifice that would not be completed until 1535." It was not just civic buildings that were rising out of the Wittenberg plain. The scholars and officials whom the Saxon ruler attracted to Wittenberg needed to be housed, not to mention the craftspeople who provided for them and the associated trades that a university required, such as printers and bookbinders. Town regulations used a mixture of stick and carrot to encourage construction, ordering that anyone who bought a plot of land had to build on it within a year, but giving them full tax relief for the time in which construction took place. The new houses, although they could not rival the palaces of patrician merchants in Augsburg or Nuremberg, were aspirational: they sported sandstone window frames, elegant doorways, and Renaissance motifs, and their imposing frontages along the street hid elegant courtyards within.’ 78 MARTIN LUTHER 12. Map of Wittenberg, 1623. The Elector’s castle is at the bottom left of the triangle; the Augustinian monastery at the right, at the other end of the street, by the wall. The city was surrounded by a moat, and the fortifications had been extended since Luther's day; he had complained about the works to improve the wall. Like most Saxon towns, Wittenberg was built around the intersec- tion of two major streets. Luther's friend Friedrich Myconius, who arrived in the 1520s from the silver-mining town of Annaberg, mocked the low wooden houses that looked more like village huts than town residences.’ One end of the town was dominated by the Elector’s castle, the opposite end by the Augustinian monastery and the univer- sity. There were no more than nine streets in all, and once you stepped off the two main thoroughfares, the houses were far less imposing and the streets narrow. There were three main gates, leading out onto the main trade routes and the river port, with the River Elbe the major artery for transporting heavy building materials.‘ Wittenberg was also a fortress town.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  While other toddlers had winced at new food, he had a taste for sashimi, for steak tartare with raw onion and egg yolk. He approached stray dogs with his arms open, ran full speed into waves. Yet he was all sensibility. (In a few years, I’d see Dev stand once for a long time before two Cubist paintings—one Braque and one Picasso—announcing, I know I’m supposed to like the Picasso more, but this one’s stronger . And so it had been.) He was sturdily resolute in all his tastes. That day in the hospital, Dev comes in dressed in a Hawaiian print shirt, looking like a miniature Miami dope dealer, and wary that way, as if expecting to find machine guns in the hands of rival gang members as he slides under Warren’s arm. But, instead of my usual stab of concern or guilt, I see this as a single instant in his life amid a zillion other instants with attendant feelings—love, curiosity, desire. His curls are damp around the edges from the heat. I heave him up and inhale an odor of wet earth in his hair, and he plants a dry kiss on my cheek. I let him down and greet Warren, balancing a coffee holder with two steaming cups and a crumpled pastry bag. His white shirt, rolled up at the wrists, shows the lineaments of his brown forearms. He holds the coffee to one side, bending so I can kiss him, and in his preoccupied expression is infinite gentleness. I place my lips on his square jaw and taste the living salt of him. In the kitchen a few minutes later, the first creamy sip of strong coffee gives me a distinct flood of pleasure. I remember a few similar instants when I first quit drinking. Nothing has changed, really. The uncertainty of my marriage is still there. But some equanimity exists, as if some level in my chest has ceased its endless teetering and found its balance point. In my life, I sometimes knew pleasure or excitement but rarely joy. Now a wide sky-span of quiet holds us. My head’s actually gone quiet. Some sluggishness is sloughed off. I am upright all of a sudden, inside a self I find quasi-acceptable, even as I’m incarcerated. Maybe this giant time-out has given me rest I sorely needed. Basically, some fist pounding on the center of my chest has unclasped itself. I’ve let go. I don’t know if Warren notices the difference, for—other than two sessions with a family social worker—we don’t see each other except with Dev, which speaks volumes about the space between us. (Were we both waiting for me to come home? Why didn’t this wall between us stay down, even when we both willed it? Because we didn’t trust each other as much as we trusted the distances we’d grown up in?

• From A History of God (1993)

  Yet in the East Christianity was making great strides, and by 235 it had become one of the most important religions of the Roman empire. Christians now spoke of a Great Church with a single rule of faith that shunned extremity and eccentricity. These orthodox theologians had outlawed the pessimistic visions of the Gnostics, Marcionites and Montanists and had settled for the middle road. Christianity was becoming an urbane creed that eschewed the complexities of the mystery cults and an inflexible asceticism. It was beginning to appeal to highly intelligent men who were able to develop the faith along lines that the Greco-Roman world could understand. The new religion also appealed to women: its scriptures taught that in Christ there was neither male nor female and insisted that men cherished their wives as Christ cherished his church. Christianity had all the advantages that had once made Judaism such an attractive faith without the disadvantages of circumcision and an alien Law. Pagans were particularly impressed by the welfare system that the churches had established and by the compassionate behavior of Christians toward one another. During its long struggle to survive persecution from without and dissension from within, the Church had also evolved an efficient organization that made it almost a microcosm of the empire itself: it was multiracial, catholic, international, ecumenical and administered by efficient bureaucrats. As such it had become a force for stability and appealed to the emperor Constantine, who became a Christian himself after the battle of Milvian Bridge in 312, and legalized Christianity the following year. Christians were now able to own property, worship freely and make a distinctive contribution to public life. Even though paganism flourished for another two centuries, Christianity became the state religion of the empire and began to attract new converts who made their way into the Church for the sake of material advancement. Soon the Church, which had begun life as a persecuted sect pleading for toleration, would demand conformity to its own laws and creeds. The reasons for the triumph of Christianity are obscure; it certainly would not have succeeded without the support of the Roman empire, though this inevitably brought its own problems. Supremely a religion of adversity, it has never been at its best in prosperity. One of the first problems that had to be solved was the doctrine of God: no sooner had Constantine brought peace to the Church than a new danger arose from within which split Christians into bitterly warring camps.

• From A History of God (1993)

  De Chardin has been criticized for identifying God so thoroughly with the world that all sense of his transcendence was lost, but his this-worldly theology was a welcome change from the contemptus mundi which had so often characterized Catholic spirituality. In the United States during the 1960s, Daniel Day Williams (b. 1910) evolved what is known as Process theology, which also stressed God’s unity with the world. He had been greatly influenced by the British philosopher A. N. Whitehead (1861–1947), who had seen God as inextricably bound up with the world process. Whitehead had been able to make no sense of God as an-other Being, self-contained and impassible, but had formulated a twentieth-century version of the prophetic idea of God’s pathos: I affirm that God does suffer as he participates in the ongoing life of the society of being. His sharing in the world’s suffering is the supreme instance of knowing, accepting, and transforming in love the suffering which arises in the world. I am affirming the divine sensitivity. Without it, I can make no sense of the being of God. 8 He described God as “the great companion, the fellow-sufferer, who understands.” Williams liked Whitehead’s definition; he liked to speak of God as the “behavior” of the world or an “event.” 9 It was wrong to set the supernatural order over against the natural world of our experience. There was only one order of being. This was not reductionist, however. In our concept of the natural we should include all the aspirations, capacities and potential that had once seemed miraculous. It would also include our “religious experiences,” as Buddhists had always affirmed. When asked whether he thought God was separate from nature, Williams would reply that he was not sure. He hated the old Greek idea of apatheia, which he found almost blasphemous: it presented God as remote, uncaring and selfish. He denied that he was advocating pantheism. His theology was simply trying to correct an imbalance, which had resulted in an alienating God which was impossible to accept after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Others were less optimistic about the achievements of the modern world and wanted to retain the transcendence of God as a challenge to men and women. The Jesuit Karl Rahner has developed a more transcendental theology, which sees God as the supreme mystery and Jesus as the decisive manifestation of what humanity can become. Bernard Lonergan also emphasized the importance of transcendence and of thought as opposed to experience.

• From A History of God (1993)

  One of their favorite synonyms for God was the Shekinah, which derived from the Hebrew shakan, to dwell with or to pitch one’s tent. Now that the Temple was gone, the image of God who had accompanied the Israelites on their wanderings in the wilderness suggested the accessibility of God. Some said that the Shekinah, who dwelt with his people on earth, still lived on the Temple Mount, even though the Temple was in ruins. Other Rabbis argued that the destruction of the Temple had freed the Shekinah from Jerusalem and enabled it to inhabit the rest of the world.87 Like the divine “glory” or the Holy Spirit, the Shekinah was not conceived as a separate divine being but as the presence of God on earth. The Rabbis looked back on the history of their people and saw that it had always accompanied them: Come and see how beloved are the Israelites before God, for wherever they went the Shekinah followed them, as it is said, “Did I plainly reveal myself to thy father’s house when they were in Egypt?” In Babylon, the Shekinah was with them, as it is said, “For your sake I have [been] sent to Babylon.” And when in the future Israel will be redeemed, the Shekinah will then be with them, as it is said, “The Lord thy God will turn thy captivity.” That is, God will return with thy captivity.88 The connection between Israel and its God was so strong that, when he had redeemed them in the past, the Israelites used to tell God: “Thou hast redeemed thyself.”89 In their own distinctly Jewish way, the Rabbis were developing that sense of God as identified with the self, which the Hindus had called Atman. The image of the Shekinah helped the exiles to cultivate a sense of God’s presence wherever they were. The Rabbis spoke of the Shekinah skipping from one synagogue of the diaspora to another; others said that it stood at the door of the synagogue, blessing each step that a Jew took on his way to the House of Studies; the Shekinah also stood at the door of the synagogue when the Jews recited the Shema there together.90 Like the early Christians, the Israelites were encouraged by their Rabbis to see themselves as a united community with “one body and one soul.”91 The community was the new Temple, enshrining the immanent God: thus when they entered the synagogue and recited the Shema in perfect unison “with devotion, with one voice, one mind and one tone,” God was present among them. But he hated any lack of harmony in the community and returned to heaven, where the angels chanted the divine praises “with one voice and one melody.”92 The higher union of God and Israel could only exist when the lower union of Israelite with Israelite was complete: constantly, the Rabbis told them that when a group of Jews studied the Torah together, the Shekinah sat among them.93

• From A History of God (1993)

  By the end of the second century, however, some truly cultivated pagans began to be converted to Christianity and were able to adapt the Semitic God of the Bible to the Greco-Roman ideal. The first of these was Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150–215), who may have studied philosophy in Athens before his conversion. Clement had no doubt that Yahweh and the God of the Greek philosophers were one and the same: he called Plato the Attic Moses. Yet both Jesus and St. Paul would have been surprised by his theology. Like the God of Plato and Aristotle, Clement’s God was characterized by his apatheia: he was utterly impassible, unable to suffer or change. Christians could participate in this divine life by imitating the calmness and imperturbability of God himself. Clement devised a rule of life that was remarkably similar to the detailed rules of conduct prescribed by the Rabbis except that it had more in common with the Stoic ideal. A Christian should imitate the serenity of God in every detail of his life: he must sit correctly, speak quietly, refrain from violent, convulsive laughter and even burp gently. By this diligent exercise of studied calm, Christians would become aware of a vast Quietness within, which was the image of God inscribed in their own being. There was no gulf between God and humanity. Once Christians had conformed to the divine ideal, they would find that they had a Divine Companion “sharing our house with us, sitting at table, sharing in the whole moral effort of our life.” 41 Yet Clement also believed that Jesus was God, “the living God that suffered and is worshipped.” 42 He who had “washed their feet, girded with a towel,” had been “the prideless God and Lord of the Universe.” 43 If Christians imitated Christ, they too would become deified: divine, incorruptible and impassible. Indeed, Christ had been the divine logos who had become man “so that you might learn from a man how to become God.” 44 In the West, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons (130–200), had taught a similar doctrine. Jesus had been the incarnate Logos, the divine reason. When he had become man, he had sanctified each stage of human development and become a model for Christians. They should imitate him in rather the same way as an actor was believed to become one with the character he was portraying and would thus fulfill their human potential. 45 Clement and Irenaeus were both adapting the Jewish God to notions that were characteristic of their own time and culture. Even though it had little in common with the God of the prophets, who was chiefly characterized by his pathos and vulnerability, Clement’s doctrine of apatheia would become fundamental to the Christian conception of God. In the Greek world, people longed to rise above the mess of emotion and mutability and achieve a superhuman calm.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  While it has been argued that the work shows Luther at his least theological, and betrays the influence of his new friends versed in law and imperial THE FREEDOM OF A CHRISTIAN 161 31. Avarice lurks on the reverse of Diirer’s Portrait of a Young Man, 1507: an old woman with a wrinkled, exposed breast, reaching with her other hand into a fat sack of gold. politics, it is the theological radicalism which makes the old calls for reform far more potent. The rest of the polemic draws out the consequences for Church and society. Luther makes a bonfire of all the collective practices of the penitential Church: the cult of saints should be stopped, pilgrim- ages should be ended, religious orders should not beg, monastic vows should not be binding, yearly Masses in memory of the dead should be abolished, even brothels (considered a necessary evil by the Church) should be closed down — the sheer extent of the practices Luther calls into question is breathtaking. His yardstick is the Bible. Clerical celi- bacy, for instance, is not commanded in Scripture, and Luther writes movingly of the ‘pious priest against whom nobody has anything to say except that he is weak and has come to shame with a woman. From the bottom of their hearts both are of a mind to live together in lawful wedded love, if only they could do it with a clear conscience.” 162 MARTIN LUTHER For Luther, the book of Genesis explains how men and women were created. Putting them together and forbidding them to have sex is like ‘like putting straw and fire together and forbidding them to smoke or burn’. Sex is natural, and ‘the Pope has as little power to command this [chastity] as he has to forbid eating, drinking, the natural move- ment of the bowels, or growing fat’. This is a forthright attitude towards sex, and part of his acceptance of physicality, which is also reflected in his scatological and animal humour when discussing the body. The remarkable tolerance of corporeality struck a new note in theological thinking. Significantly, the tract identified the German princes as the only authorities who could undertake reform: not the emperor, not the Pope, not the bishops, not the local towns and municipalities. Given the failure of the Church to reform itself, the princes must function as ‘emergency bishops’, Luther argued. They were not mere vassals of the emperor, but divinely instituted rulers with their own authority.” This would give carte blanche to the princes to organise what would eventually become the new, reformed.church, and to set up church governments under their rule right across Germany and it provided the intellectual foundation for what would become a territorial church.

• From A History of God (1993)

  It is true that Ibn al-Arabi’s teachings were too abstruse for the vast majority of Muslims, but they did percolate down to the more ordinary people. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Sufism ceased to be a minority movement and became the dominant Islamic mood in many parts of the Muslim empire. This was the period when the various Sufi orders or tariqas were founded, each with its particular interpretation of the mystical faith. The Sufi sheikh had a great influence on the populace and was often revered as a saint in rather the same way as the Shii Imams. It was a period of political upheaval: the Baghdad caliphate was disintegrating, and the Mongol hordes were devastating one Muslim city after another. People wanted a God who was more immediate and sympathetic than the remote God of the Faylasufs and the legalistic God of the ulema. The Sufi practices of dhikr, the recitation of the Divine Names as a mantra to induce ecstasy, spread beyond the tariqas. The Sufi disciplines of concentration, with their carefully prescribed techniques of breathing and posture, helped people to experience a sense of transcendent presence within. Not everybody was capable of the higher mystical states, but these spiritual exercises did help people to abandon simplistic and anthropomorphic notions of God and to experience him as a presence within the self. Some orders used music and dancing to enhance concentration, and their pirs became heroes to the people. The most famous of the Sufi orders was the Mawlawiyyah, whose members are known in the West as the “whirling dervishes.” Their stately and dignified dance was a method of concentration. As he spun around and around, the Sufi felt the boundaries of selfhood dissolve as he melted into his dance, giving him a foretaste of the annihilation of Jana. The founder of the order was Jalal ad-Din Rumi (ca. 1207– 73), known to his disciples as Mawlana, our Master. He had been born in Khurusan in Central Asia but had fled to Konya in modern Turkey before the advancing Mongol armies. His mysticism can be seen as a Muslim response to this scourge, which might have caused many to lose faith in al-Lah. Rumi’s ideas are similar to those of his contemporary Ibn al-Arabi, but his poem the Masnawi, known as the Sufi Bible, had a more popular appeal and helped to disseminate the God of the mystics among ordinary Muslims who were not Sufis. In 1244 Rumi had come under the spell of the wandering dervish Shams ad-Din, whom he saw as the Perfect Man of his generation. Indeed, Shams ad-Din believed that he was a reincarnation of the Prophet and insisted upon being addressed as “Muhammad.”

• From Satyricon (1)

  While we were studying the labels, Trimalchio clapped his hands and cried, “Ah me! To think that wine lives longer than poor little man. Let’s fill ‘em up! There’s life in wine and this is the real Opimian, you can take my word for that. I offered no such vintage yesterday, though my guests were far more respectable.” We were tippling away and extolling all these elegant devices, when a slave brought in a silver skeleton, so contrived that the joints and movable vertebra could be turned in any direction. He threw it down upon the table a time or two, and its mobile articulation caused it to assume grotesque attitudes, whereupon Trimalchio chimed in: “Poor man is nothing in the scheme of things And Orcus grips us and to Hades flings Our bones! This skeleton before us here Is as important as we ever were! Let’s live then while we may and life is dear.” CHAPTER THE THIRTY-FIFTH. The applause was followed by a course which, by its oddity, drew every eye, but it did not come up to our expectations. There was a circular tray around which were displayed the signs of the zodiac, and upon each sign the caterer had placed the food best in keeping with it. Ram’s vetches on Aries, a piece of beef on Taurus, kidneys and lamb’s fry on Gemini, a crown on Cancer, the womb of an unfarrowed sow on Virgo, an African fig on Leo, on Libra a balance, one pan of which held a tart and the other a cake, a small seafish on Scorpio, a bull’s eye on Sagittarius, a sea lobster on Capricornus, a goose on Aquarius and two mullets on Pisces. In the middle lay a piece of cut sod upon which rested a honeycomb with the grass arranged around it. An Egyptian slave passed bread around from a silver oven and in a most discordant voice twisted out a song in the manner of the mime in the musical farce called Laserpitium. Seeing that we were rather depressed at the prospect of busying ourselves with such vile fare, Trimalchio urged us to fall to: “Let us fall to, gentlemen, I beg of you, this is only the sauce!” CHAPTER THE THIRTY-SIXTH.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther always regarded political authority as resting in the hands of the ruler, a perception strengthened by his stay in the Wartburg where his main contact was the Elector’s right-hand man, Spalatin. Karlstadt, by contrast, seems to have believed that the town council should be empowered to introduce the Reformation, and placed his faith in ‘the Christian city of Wittenberg’, as he termed it in his pamphlets. This was a line he had been taking since the disputation on the Mass in October 1521, when he advocated that the whole community should decide what evangelical reforms to introduce. Karlstadt’s marriage, the departure of Zwilling — who had been a leading figure advocating change, and who now left the Augustinian order altogether to preach in Eilenburg — and the arrival of the charismatic Zwickau prophets KARLSTADT AND THE CHRISTIAN CITY OF WITTENBERG 229 may all have played their part in radicalising Karlstadt.” Or perhaps it was just that, although it always took a long time to persuade Karl- stadt of anything, once convinced, he became a zealot. Another factor in Karlstadt’s enthusiasm for civic ideals may have been his experience of working closely with laypeople, and his convic- tion that a Christian community truly was being established in the town. He now signed his pamphlets as ‘A New Layman’. The coun- cil’s mandate of 24 January 1522 introducing the Reformation in Wittenberg and reorganising poor relief in line with its earlier ordin- ance reflected some of Karlstadt’s views, and may even have been written in part by him, but it was also the result of close co-operation between evangelical preachers and the town’s elite: a group of around thirty people had been meeting daily to draw it up. In addition to supporting the poor, the monies were also to be used to provide cheap loans for newly-weds and deserving craftspeople —a significant extension of the group who stood to benefit from the common chest. Old themes of civic morality joined with new Reformation ideas, as the ordinance thundered against those living ‘in unmarriage’, insisting that anyone who housed such people should be punished as well. The town brothel, essential in a university town, was to be closed.® ‘Masses’, it stated simply, ‘should not be held otherwise than as Christ instituted them at the Last Supper’: that is, laypeople should receive bread and wine, and the communicant should be allowed to ‘take the consecrated host in their hand and put it in their mouth them- selves’. Finally, three altars were to suffice for the main parish church and all images should be removed — although no date was set for this to take place.

• From Satyricon (1)

  Twaddle of this sort was being bandied about when Trimalchio came in; mopping his forehead and washing his hands in perfume, he said, after a short pause, “Pardon me, gentlemen, but my stomach’s been on strike for the past few days and the doctors disagreed about the cause. But pomegranate rind and pitch steeped in vinegar have helped me, and I hope that my belly will get on its good behavior, for sometimes there’s such a rumbling in my guts that you’d think a bellowing bull was in there. So if anyone wants to do his business, there’s no call to be bashful about it. None of us was born solid! I don’t know of any worse torment than having to hold it in, it’s the one thing Jupiter himself can’t hold in. So you’re laughing, are you, Fortunata? Why, you’re always keeping me awake at night yourself. I never objected yet to anyone in my dining-room relieving himself when he wanted to, and the doctors forbid our holding it in. Everything’s ready outside, if the call’s more serious, water, close-stool, and anything else you’ll need. Believe me, when this rising vapor gets to the brain, it puts the whole body on the burn. Many a one I’ve known to kick in just because he wouldn’t own up to the truth.” We thanked him for his kindness and consideration, and hid our laughter by drinking more and oftener. We had not realized that, as yet, we were only in the middle of the entertainment, with a hill still ahead, as the saying goes. The tables were cleared off to the beat of music, and three white hogs, muzzled, and wearing bells, were brought into the dining-room. The announcer informed us that one was a two-year-old, another three, and the third just turned six. I had an idea that some rope-dancers had come in and that the hogs would perform tricks, just as they do for the crowd on the streets, but Trimalchio dispelled this illusion by asking, “Which one will you have served up immediately, for dinner? Any country cook can manage a dunghill cock, a pentheus hash, or little things like that, but my cooks are well used to serving up calves boiled whole, in their cauldrons!” Then he ordered a cook to be called in at once, and without awaiting our pleasure, he directed that the oldest be butchered, and demanded in a loud voice, “What division do you belong to?” When the fellow made answer that he was from the fortieth, “Were you bought, or born upon my estates?” Trimalchio continued. “Neither,” replied the cook, “I was left to you by Pansa’s will.” “See to it that this is properly done,” Trimalchio warned, “or I’ll have you transferred to the division of messengers!” and the cook, bearing his master’s warning in mind, departed for the kitchen with the next course in tow. CHAPTER THE FORTY-EIGHTH.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  Dad’s doctor is a myopic old fart who laughs like hell at me anytime I use a medical term or ask a medical question. He makes me feel about as intelligent as a grapefruit. But he set Mom straight as an arrow, so I don’t mind going to him instead of a nutritionist. I don’t know the extent to which he relies on God’s healing powers. Lucky for me I went to see him. He had this medical student with him from some place in Ohio, doing what they call a “preceptorship,” which is a brief practical introduction to the kind of medicine you intend to practice. You live with the doctor and see what it’s really like to be one. The medical student’s name was Max Mokeskey. Max was doing his preceptorship in Spokane so he could hike in the mountains and fish in the lakes and streams and hunt birds in the Palouse. I liked him. He laughed at me and told me I was full of shit and that I’d surely die if I tried to hit 147. I told him I’d already come down from 176 to the 155 I weighed then. That impressed him. We talked for a couple hours. Old Dr. Livengood wanted him to get to know patients. He said that was the essence of a successful family practice. We talked about my plans and his plans and about hiking and fishing and hunting birds. While we talked I got my physical and was informed I have a roving testicle. Max called my exobiology idea bullshit. He said few specialists in any field of medicine have time to do anything but read their journals and be present at the auditing of their taxes. He said family practice gives you at least a little time to yourself and a chance to have relationships with your patients as people instead of just diseases. He also said there were few trout streams out in space, where exobiology will be practiced when I finish med school. He didn’t actually convince me, but he sure was a lot better example of a physician than that nutritionist. I don’t know what kind of doctor I want to be. For now I’ve got to be a teratologist and study that monster Shute. Whatever kind of doctor I become, I hope I always make time to read and see movies and talk about them with my friends. I hope I meet people in college who like to do this. When I get home tonight I’ll proofread a paper I wrote on The Water-Method Man , a novel by John Irving, who is a former wrestler. The paper is for a course I’m taking by mail from Eastern Washington State College. I wrote my last one on Don Delillo’s End Zone . I got a B. The instructor wrote that my approach was too personal and that I misunderstood the book. He said it was a metaphor, not about football at all.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  This is one of Luther’s most creative insights. His positive attitude towards the body represented a major rupture from the asceticism of late medieval Christianity, which had marked him deeply. As he looked back twenty years later, and talked with his friends at table, being a monk was all about controlling one’s diet and sleep, castigating the flesh, and fighting sexual urges. Luther's original insight had been into the nature of sin and penance: human beings could not make them- selves perfect and win acceptance with God because of their good deeds — they had to accept their sinfulness, and recognise that God in his justice accepts sinners. Thus they were at one and the same time sinners and saved. 166 MARTIN LUTHER Luther’s radical Augustinianism had enabled him to come to terms with his own sinfulness. But it now also made him accept human physicality, along with emotional constitutions (which in humoral thought were allied), and here Luther went well beyond Augustine and perhaps also beyond Staupitz’s good-humoured acceptance of human imperfection. It was one of the gigantic leaps that Luther made between 1519 and 1520, and it was as much a personal transform- ation as it was intellectual. Calvin’s later solution to the dilemma of the Eucharist would be to say that Jesus was speaking symbolically, and so language did not refer to the actual thing. Such an interpretation was anathema to Luther, for whom it was vitally important that the miracle of the Mass was exactly that - a miracle. It did not need to make logical sense. This was why Luther liked to cast himself as a ‘fool’, whose foolishness was God’s wisdom — a conventional trope but one whose appeal was very deep. In theology, Luther believed, philosophy was just a distraction from the meaning of Scripture, and one must give up on attempting to find God through ‘the whore’ of reason, for the point of faith is that it exceeds rationality and reveals the distance between God and man.* The most beautiful writing from this period is Luther’s On the Freedom of a Christian, which appeared in November 1520. Written in German, it is barely thirty pages long. With delicious irony, Luther wrote it at the same time as a letter of ‘apology’ to Pope Leo, and presented the essay as a gift to the Pope along with the letter. Although the treatise is divided into thirty points — the numerals are usually omitted from modern editions in English — it is not so much a sermon as a comforting devotional tract.” There is no polemic or aggression. Deeply musical, one can almost hear Luther's voice conversing with the reader. He begins by stating a paradox: ‘A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.’

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It was used in the 1546 edition cf Luther's New Testament, published by Hans Lufft, and in several volumes of Luther’s collected works on the title pages. The image also underlines the importance of the crucifix in Lutheran devotion, which Karlstadt had repudiated. had filled out. Now he became portly, and as he would wryly remark shortly before his death, soon the ‘worms would have a stout doctor to feed on’. This physical transformation created a representational problem for the evangelical movement, however: holy men were usually bony ascetics, and immune to the pleasures of the flesh. Just how difficult Luther’s followers found his appearance is revealed in Melanchthon’s biography of Luther, when he insisted that he had fasted a great deal, going for days without eating.* But Luther hardly resembled the haggard hermit and dedicated scholar Melanchthon wanted to present. Indeed, by that time a new iconography had devel- oped, showing a monumental Luther with giant boots and tiny hands, his stance powerful, rooted to the ground and clutching a Bible. Some images showed a bulky Luther on one side, and a solid Saxon Elector on the other, both kneeling with a crucifix between them, like two MARRIAGE AND THE FLESH 305 giant weights on a pair of scales: there could hardly have been a clearer demonstration of the closeness of Luther’s Reformation to the Saxon ruling house. This image prefaced editions of Luther’s Bible and of his collected works and became an almost official representation of the Reformation.” By the early 1530s, with his parents now both dead, Luther had become ‘the oldest in my family’, as well as father to a brood of children of his own. He had also become less mobile, intellectually as well as physically, as he ensconced himself in his study and held court at the table. Now a man of substance, his married life had ° transformed his theology. He had shed asceticism for a remarkably positive conception of human physicality, and a flexible, pastoral atti- tude towards the marital dilemmas of his parishioners.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Then, every evening around eight o’clock, he rose from the table and left the big parlour to go to his room where he would stand by the window, praying — ‘so earnestly and intently that we . . . keeping silent, often heard some words and were amazed’, according to his companions. Afterwards, he would turn from the window, happy, ‘as if he had put down a burden’, and talk to his associates for another quarter of an hour 400 MARTIN LUTHER before going to bed. Luther knew that he was facing death, and he talked about how ‘we old ones have to live so long that we see into the backside of the Devil, and experience so much evil, faithlessness and misery’. There was also talk at dinner about whether the dead would recognise one another, one of the very few occasions on which Luther speculated about the afterlife. He was sure that they would — just as, when Adam first met Eve, he knew at once that she was flesh of his flesh.” On the evening of 17 February, when he went to his room with his two younger sons to pray, he was suddenly taken ill once more, with chest pains and coldness. Jonas and the Mansfeld preacher Michael Coelius immediately rushed to his room, and he was again rubbed with hot cloths. Countess Anna of Mansfeld was summoned to provide unicorn horn — actually the tusk of a narwhal — believed to be a powerful restorative, and Count Albrecht himself grated some of it into a glass of wine. Conrad von Wolfframsdorf, one of Albrecht’s councillors, took a spoonful of it first — perhaps because Luther feared that he would be poisoned, perhaps because he mistrusted such medi- cine.“ At about 9 p.m., Luther lay down to nap, and slept peacefully for an hour. When he awoke, he asked those who had kept watch ‘Are you still sitting up?’, wondering if they wanted to go to bed themselves. He then walked into the next room, presumably the privy, and as he crossed the threshold, he spoke the words ‘Into your hand Icommend my spirit, You have redeemed me, God of truth.’ Returning to bed, he shook each person’s hand and wished them goodnight, telling them to pray for God and his gospel, ‘because the Council of Trent’ — the meeting of the council of the Catholic Church which initiated the Counter Reformation had finally begun in December 1545 — and the evil Pope fights bitterly with him’.® Jonas, Luther’s two sons Martin and Paul, his servant Ambrosius and other servants kept watch by the bed.