Despair

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 Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  For it makes it already impossible for us to follow obediently in the footprints of either the Lockian or the Herbartian school, schools which have had almost unlimited influence in Germany and among ourselves. No doubt it is often convenient to formulate the mental facts in an atomistic sort of way, and to treat the higher states of consciousness as if they were all built out of unchanging simple ideas. It is convenient often to treat curves as if they were composed of small straight lines, and electricity and nerve-force as if they were fluids. But in the one case as in the other we must never forget that we are talking symbolically, and that there is nothing in nature to answer to our words. A permanently existing 'idea' or 'Vorstellung' which makes its appearance before the footlights of consciousness at periodical intervals, is as mythological an entity as the Jack of Spades. What makes it convenient to use the mythological formulas is the whole organization of speech, which, as was remarked a while ago, was not made by psychologists, but by men who were as a rule only interested in the facts their mental states revealed. They only spoke of their states as ideas of this or of that thing . What wonder, then, that the thought is most easily conceived under the law of the thing whose name it bears! If the thing is composed of parts, then we suppose that the thought of the thing must be composed of the thoughts of the parts. If one part of the thing have appeared in the same thing or in other things on former occasions, why then we must be having even now the very same 'idea' of that part which was there on those occasions. If the thing is simple, its thought is simple. If it is multitudinous, it must require a multitude of thoughts to think it. If a succession, only a succession of thoughts can know it. If permanent, its thought is permanent. And so on ad libitum . What after all is so natural as to assume that one object, called by one name, should be known by one affection of the mind? But, if language must thus influence us, the agglutinative languages, and even Greek and Latin with their declensions, would be the better guides. Names did not appear in them inalterable, but changed their shape to suit the context in which they lay. It must have been easier then that now to conceive of the same object as being thought of at different times in non-identical conscious states. This, too, will grow clearer as we proceed.

• From The City of God

  310 Books That Matter: The City of God against the life-giving love of God. This death of the soul is what happens when God departs the soul. ›We live with no hope, no real sense of meaning or joy, no true expectations for the future. In this condition, we are like zombies, living and dead at the same time, going through our days with the monotonous automaticity of the undead. Transformation of Death „All this raises a pointed question for Augustine. If we are partly dead, what would it mean to come alive? „Augustine thought the Platonists were effectively embarrassed by their bodies. They saw the soul’s attachment to the body as our problem and sought to teach the soul not to be afraid of leaving the body behind. „Augustine did not think of our flesh per se as the locus of sin. He takes the Christian doctrine of God as direct creator of the whole world and the world as wholly good, and the Christian confession of Christ’s resurrection and ascension, as demonstrating that neither materiality per se nor our embodiment is the problem; rather it is our way of being embodied, our way of relating to materiality, that is the problem. „God created all things fundamentally good. Our captivity by fleshly ends and worldly goods, then, does not speak to any evil inherent in flesh or world, but rather to our own self-inflicted perversion of our appetites. „Those who have been redeemed from the death of the soul and have God again in their souls will still suffer the death of the body. Although the souls of the redeemed are made pure across their histories, they are still suffering from the physical maladies of original sin in the corruption of their bodies; this is part of the

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “I understand you. You do not suppose that I have ever felt much. For four months, Marianne, I have had all this hanging on my mind, without being at liberty to speak of it to a single creature; knowing that it would make you and my mother most unhappy whenever it were explained to you, yet unable to prepare you for it in the least. It was told me,—it was in a manner forced on me by the very person herself, whose prior engagement ruined all my prospects; and told me, as I thought, with triumph. This person’s suspicions, therefore, I have had to oppose, by endeavouring to appear indifferent where I have been most deeply interested; and it has not been only once; I have had her hopes and exultation to listen to again and again. I have known myself to be divided from Edward for ever, without hearing one circumstance that could make me less desire the connection. Nothing has proved him unworthy; nor has anything declared him indifferent to me. I have had to contend against the unkindness of his sister, and the insolence of his mother; and have suffered the punishment of an attachment, without enjoying its advantages. And all this has been going on at a time, when, as you know too well, it has not been my only unhappiness. If you can think me capable of ever feeling, surely you may suppose that I have suffered now. The composure of mind with which I have brought myself at present to consider the matter, the consolation that I have been willing to admit, have been the effect of constant and painful exertion; they did not spring up of themselves; they did not occur to relieve my spirits at first. No, Marianne. Then, if I had not been bound to silence, perhaps nothing could have kept me entirely—not even what I owed to my dearest friends—from openly showing that I was very unhappy.” Marianne was quite subdued. “Oh! Elinor,” she cried, “you have made me hate myself for ever.—How barbarous have I been to you!—you, who have been my only comfort, who have borne with me in all my misery, who have seemed to be only suffering for me!—Is this my gratitude?—Is this the only return I can make you?—Because your merit cries out upon myself, I have been trying to do it away.”

• From The City of God

  452 Books That Matter: The City of God Furthermore, as we’ve seen several times throughout these lectures, the problem with universalism is that it can suggest that history doesn’t matter ultimately, that it can all be swept up neatly. It doesn’t respect the idea that some things are determinately negative, that there are, effectively, remainders in the cosmos, aspects of things that don’t finally get fixed or healed. The utopianism of these universalist temptations, for Augustine, at their uttermost asks not just whether evil will turn out for the good, but rather whether it will prove not to have been evil at all. For him this idea is of a perfectly swept-up historical process, it leads one to believe that cosmic history leaves no refuse behind; everything is finally digested, everything incorporated, in the final homogenous reconciliation of all with all. But such a dream of seamless reconciliation is dangerous, Augustine worries, for a doctrine of universal salvation, cyclically undertaken, undoes the very meaning of history. We’ve seen some of this before. But if history repeats itself as tragedy first time and second time as farce, the famous line of Karl Marx, what about the twentieth time? Such repetition simply sands away any particular meaning from the events, making them simply and quite literally more of the same. Any such utopia of perfect reconciliation gives license to almost any horror in the present, for such horrors’ true meaning will be determined— and whitewashed—in the utopian eschaton that is yet to come. The upshot of all this is in a way, the consummation of Augustine’s discussion of evil as a whole in the City. For Hell, on this reading, teaches us a lot about evil as we experience it today. First of all, it’s entirely first-personal. Against the famous line of Jean-Paul Sartre, Hell is not, it turns out, other people, rather Hell is the complete inability genuinely to relate to other people—to find no way to see yourself in another, or feel another’s pain in yourself, no way to empathize with them, to have the barriers of self and other break down in a larger, more powerful we, no sense of the possibility, let alone the promise, of self-transcendence. Hell is a suffocating solitude, and with no way out of yourself. And in all this, Hell is crucially self-inflicted, a condition appropriate for these souls, because it is caused by their own agency.

• From The City of God

  438 Books That Matter: The City of God without any extinction or lessening of their power. Augustine’s point is that our ordinary experience should not be presumed to delimit the absolute boundaries of what is possible. „Having established the range of possibility, we can begin to explore just what happens to the damned in hell and how it happens. For Augustine, the point is that the suffering will be real and endless. Every moment will be freshly painful. „But not only will the sufferers feel immediate pain. They will also suffer reflexive psychological regret. ›They will know their ultimate destiny, and they will not be able fully to deny that knowledge. They will realize the full extent of their self-deception. ›They will also not know. They will remain what they have been all along and still be in denial about their situation, even though they are in hell. The Nature of Punishment „Augustine next takes up the question of the nature of the infernal suffering of the damned. Why, in particular, material fire? Fire is the utmost extension of changing matter—the most temporary state of matter. The soul’s relation to matter is the problem— it wants stability, it wants matter not to change. But fire is the quickest, most volatile form of matter, and so it teaches the soul that its hopes are foiled. „The temptation is to think that hell’s torments are fundamentally fleshly. Augustine says that the soul, not the body, is what really suffers. The key is the way the soul participates in our embodiment. If the soul expects to find its stability in flesh, it will be disappointed and feel pain; if the soul seeks stability instead in God, it will not be disappointed.

• From The City of God

  433 Lecture 20 Transcript—Judgments, Last and Otherwise (Book 20) ordered. And even our typical treatment of Augustine’s eschatology recapitulates this failing. For most of the time, scholars treat his interpretation of the end of all things as a response to the failure of apocalyptic expectations, a kind of rescue mission for an ideological prediction that has failed to come true. On this account, Augustine’s proposal is not so much a rationale, as it is a rationalization. But there is another way of looking at his proposal. Consider one of the most common, if not the most common, forms of general moral failure; we experience this all the time. Such failure is what we could call today hitting rock bottom, where we finally realize there is nowhere else for us to go; we’ve reached the end of our resources, maybe gone beyond them. There is no anticipating this. It comes with no warning signs or anticipations that are discernible to the person in that situation. Sure you can retrospectively pick out some intimations or clues to your world’s imminent dissolution. There are metaphorical flashing klaxon warning signs whose sound or light should have been apprehensible but were not. We’ve all had this experience of having ourselves said or hearing someone else say, “I should have seen at that point that I was lost. I should have seen that I was living a lie.” But all this is crucially, inescapably retrospective. It makes no sense to imagine someone saying, “Well this currently, right now, is a sign that I’m close to the end of this form of life, and I will soon have to undergo a radical change of life.” We never say that. From within a failing way of life, no beams of light are visible, pointing a way to a new future of hope. Moral collapse does not admit of being seen from outside and inside at the same time; it’s a far more claustrophobic phenomenon than that. The beams of light emerging through cracking shell of our despair, do not presage redemption; they simply are that redemption itself. The collapse is good news, not the anticipation of it. Life is a one-way street; it has no reverse gear. There is no way out but through. We cannot anticipate. The apocalypse has to be spiritualized because the lesson that emerges from it is the literal truth that we keep telling ourselves fictions to try to forget, and that lesson is this.

• From The City of God

  411 Lecture 19 Transcript—Happiness and Politics (Book 19) Ancient Roman legal procedure involved the exercise of what was called judicial torture, the impacting of a person’s body of pain, to cause this was standard legal practice in Rome. In trying to learn the truth then, the judge kills the one person, possibly innocent, at least not obviously guilty, by whom he might have learned that truth. Augustine takes the judge’s tragic and paradoxical situation here as a kind of summit from which we might view the whole expanse of the miserable necessities of human society. And it raises a profound question, given such inescapable tragedy, should the judge serve, should any of us serve? As Augustine puts it, “In light of such darkness in our social life, should the wise judge dare to sit in judgment?” And he replies, Sit he will; for he is constrained by and drawn to his duties to human society, to desert which he regards as wicked. For he does not think it wicked to torture the innocent in others’ cases, or that the accused are overcome and confess falsely and are punished, though innocent. All these many evils he does not count as sins because the wise judge does them not out of a malicious will, but out of the necessity of ignorance, and also, out of consideration of society, out of the necessity to judge. Here, therefore, we speak not the maliciousness of the judge, but of the sure misery of humanity. And there you have his answer, Sociality is part of our existence, and required for our flourishing, but accepting this may involve us in manifold tragic necessities. Christians should accept these duties, for if they do not, the whole social order may perish. In our sin-riddled world, we may need to use violence, in order to protect the blessings of society as a whole. If you don’t like the image of the judge, think about the police officer, who walks a beat and who knows that one day they may be called upon to use violence; they may not want to, but it might be necessary. Note, Augustine is not saying this is advisory; he’s not recommending that the judge do this. He says that it’s wicked— nefas that’s the word he uses if the judge refuses. It is a moral duty to engage in these sorts of activities, not an optional,

• From The City of God

  233 Lecture 11 Transcript—Sacrifice and Ritual (Book 10) way, have knowledge but they have no compassion; intellect, but no feeling. This representation of a demon’s psychic state has larger implications for Augustine that will become important for thinking about the human condition—in this book, and in the rest of the work. To Augustine, the demons’ situation throws an indirect light on our own. For him, the demons know. Daimon, according to Plato, in Greek, signified knowledge; but this is the useless knowledge that inflates the ego but does not illuminate the mind. It is, in Augustine’s terms, knowledge without love. Theirs is an inert, spectatorial knowledge, a knowledge that does not motivate them at all, does not move them to do anything. It is indeed a certain description of Hell, to know what is the right and yet be unmoved by any capacity to do that right. We’ve all been there, of course. We’ve all been in a situation where we know what the right thing to do is, where we know something is bad for us, or for others, and yet we do it anyway. Or we know something is good for us, and yet we do not do it. Aristotle called this akrasia: weakness of will. But the problem for the demons is not just that they’ve been there, like us. The problem for the demons is that they live there—that is their continuous condition, all the time. Somewhere inside them, they know that their rebellion is futile, but they cannot admit that knowledge to themselves, cannot recognize it in any way that would make it efficacious for them to change, to remove rebellion, to return to God. The truth is a knowledge they can’t properly bear to admit. They are incredibly strong, incredibly stubborn, in some ways, but in this one way they are inhumanly weak. They can never admit they were wrong. They are, as it were, too damned determined to have things their own way. And, as with the demons, so with the Platonists. They rightly see transcendence of our blessedness is in God, but they fail to see that God has come to us, and so their efforts at mediation fail, because their knowledge of God’s transcendence is tragically inert. In contrast

• From The City of God

  237 Lecture 11 Transcript—Sacrifice and Ritual (Book 10) The key feature of all true sacrifices for humans, he thinks, is a change of heart—an act of inner contrition which gives all glory to God and turns to our neighbors with mercy, misericordia, in our hearts. As he says, all the divine ordinances that we read concerning the sacrifices in the service of the tabernacle or the temple, we should refer to the love of God and of our neighbor. Even so, those outward sacrifices cannot be confused with the true sacrifice. That was Christ’s doing, and it was fundamentally an act quite literally of compassion—of feeling with humanity. The church participates in the work of Christ by itself becoming this compassion of Christ, by repeating its memorials of Christ’s sacrifice in the Eucharist, but also in acts of compassion and mercy in the world as well. Now this is very important. This vision of compassion is very unlike anything the pagan philosophers have on offer. Most importantly for Augustine, his account of mercy, of misericordia—compassion— is unlike what the Stoics promote as compassion. For the Stoics, one can have a certain kind of pity for the world, but only insofar as one does not identify with that world; only insofar as one does not allow oneself to be moved by that world. That is just what Jesus did. Christ did indeed feel true compassion, and was moved, in his guts, by the world’s suffering. Of course, Christ did this not as a victim of the world but as the sovereign lord over it, and so this was God’s agency in Christ doing this thing. But don’t doubt that Christ was penetrated fully by the world’s sufferings as the nails went all the way through his hands. The problem, then, with the Stoics, and maybe other philosophers, is that they do not want us to be so penetrated, so vulnerable to the world. They imagine a region of radical privacy, an invulnerable citadel of the rational will which can always be locked from the inside. For Augustine, this is misconceived in both directions. The world is always in us, and we in the world, and besides, so is sin, so the putative enemy is always already inside the gates.

• From The City of God

  455 Lecture 21 Transcript—Augustine’s Vision of Hell (Book 21) around other people while they are also emotionally, intellectually, existentially light years’ away. Perhaps Augustine’s conception of Hell is best understood today by us, then, as this, at the end of time, some creatures are still allowed to exist in ambivalent opposition to God. Their existence at all is good, though not as good as it would otherwise be; but by allowing these creatures this ability to dissent from God, God is in no way adding an extra harm to them, but simply allowing them to continue harming themselves in the way that they want to. But even as so self-harmed, the damned are still intrinsically good. And Hell turns out to be simply the decision they have made, all along, to be the dolorous kingdom in which they choose to believe, when they can, that they will reign. Now let’s conclude. The question of Hell is a question that we often think of in purely juridical terms. But it is not clear that the terms we should use should be juridical. Hell clearly looks like it is a wholly juridical reality—it is, after all, not at all a means of healing humans, or anyone else. It is a deposit of utter suffering and pain. There are good worries about this doctrine—very good worries. One worry is that it can be a voyeuristically sadistic doctrine, perhaps by encouraging a psychologically self-harming fixation on suffering and its details, in two abstract ways that make us less sensitive to actual suffering, first, by letting us focus on the mechanics of suffering, we get used to paying attention to how suffering happens, not that it is happening, and so we grow less immediately concerned to stop it and more spectatorially interested in the mechanics of it. A second worry is that, in general, a speculative attitude such as this book perhaps encourages, anesthetizes us from the human face of actual suffering, makes us not think of others as our equals, but seduces us into a problematic God’s eye view. Here the danger of reflection on Hell is not so much about what it says about our thinking of hell, but what it does to us in this world. But then again, what if we imagine Hell, not as something that is added to fallen humans and demons, not an extrinsic punishment attached to them

• From The City of God

  454 Books That Matter: The City of God presence and not wanting to be there, so trying to move as far away from that presence as possible. While the blessed want ever more full acquaintance with God, ever deeper intimacy with God because they are properly integrated in themselves and thus already relate positively to God, and so affirm their being as creatures of God because of all that, that’s how the blessed relate. But the damned are deeply ambivalent about their existence—they want to escape God, but they also want to keep being themselves, but to keep being themselves means to keep being in relation to God, for they are themselves only because God has made them that; and so on. Their ambivalence in this way is bottomless. The problem for the damned—from their own sinful perspective—is precisely that they can’t fulfill their wishes. There is no away to which they can get from God. There is no such useful distance. And that is Hell to them—for what it is, is the final realization that there is no escape from God, and they still, and now permanently, if still only at best ambivalently, desire that escape. This understanding of Hell actually may help us understand something deep about Augustine’s metaphysics again—which, as we’ve seen, requires multiple imaginative exercises for us to begin to comprehend it. And these imaginative exercises are very important to Augustine. He’s trying to teach us how to see the world in a new way. The insight this affords us is this, Augustine’s conception of God’s transcendence makes the idea of distance, or of away, finally inapplicable to the reality of God. We can say it frees up the idea of distance from our imagination’s enchainment of that category to our idea of space. And that might be one way to redeem this language of distance. And Augustine suggests as much, He says in one place that to live there in the world in lustful passion is to live far from your face. We’ve all been there—we’ve all been close to somebody, but very far away from them at the same time. Distance, then, is a matter of disposition, not of physical proximity or absence. After all, even we talk about being emotionally distant, and anyone by the age of 20 has had the experience of being physically

• From The City of God

  442 Books That Matter: The City of God „While the blessed want ever fuller acquaintance with God because they are properly integrated and affirm their being as creatures of God, the damned are deeply ambivalent about their existence. They want to escape God, but they also want to keep being themselves. But to keep being themselves means to keep being in relation to God, for they are themselves only because God has made them so. „The problem for the damned is precisely that there is no “away” from God. And that is hell to them—the final realization that there is no escape from God, and they still, and permanently, desire such escape. „Perhaps Augustine’s conception of hell is best understood thus: At the end of time some creatures are still allowed to exist in ambivalent opposition to God. Their existence at all is good, though not as good as it would otherwise be. By allowing these creatures the ability to dissent from God, God is in no way harming them, but simply allowing them to harm themselves. Even so self- harmed, the damned are still intrinsically good, and hell turns out to be simply the decision they have made all along, to be in the dolorous kingdom in which they choose to believe that they reign. „The question of hell is one that we often think of in purely juridical terms. But it is not clear that the terms we use should be juridical. Hell clearly looks like it is a wholly juridical reality—it is, after all, not at all a means of healing humans, or anyone else. It is a deposit of utter suffering and pain. But it can be voyeuristically sadistic, perhaps by encouraging a psychologically self-harming fixation on suffering and its details, in two abstract ways that make us less sensitive to actual suffering: ›By focusing on the mechanics of suffering, we get used to paying attention to how suffering happens, not that it is happening, and so we grow less immediately concerned to stop it.

• From The City of God

  410 Books That Matter: The City of God was visible across the whole of the Garden. Nor was there supposed to be domination within the household or family, between husband and wife or father and children. Slavery, all forms of domination, are a consequence of the Fall, not a part of God’s created order, and an uncoerced symphonic harmony was supposed to characterize the relationships among all of us. Creation held no lords and no servants. The first humans were shepherds, not kings. It is the conditions of the fallen world, and the unruliness of our fallen wills, that make compulsion necessary. Thus compromise is not only imperfect but typically held together by the tacit threat of violence. Remember the words stamped on Louis XIV’s cannons, ultima ratio regum; where the words are not legible, their sense will readily be felt on the bodies of those who contest them. So force is necessary, for Augustine. But why would you want to get involved in this? Why accept a role in this world of force? Why enter politics then? Here Augustine reframes the issue, the question, he thinks, is not about whether Christians should participate in public life, in social life—social life is for him part of the human good—but rather about how Christians should participate. To answer this Augustine discusses the hardest case he can conceive, the judge who, as part of the legitimate civil authority, is compelled by social necessity to engage in acts of violence, at times even potentially upon the innocent. And this is a quote from Augustine, “Because they cannot discern the consciences of those whom they judge.” And this is continuing this vast and troubling quote of Augustine, The ignorance of the judge generally results in the calamity of the innocent. And what is still more greatly intolerable and deplorable, is that the judge, to avoid killing an innocent man, out of miserable ignorance tortures the accused, and kills him—tortured and innocent—whom he tortured in order not to kill him if he were innocent.

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

  She says you slap your dick on her ass to make her feel its meat. She says she knows just how to come with you inside because your knob is special and fits her perfectly. She seems quite content with you as a husband and a lover.” He sounded relieved. “That’s welcome news, at least.” “But look, man, she’s clearly a highly sexed woman, and she wants to show me how she takes care of important business when you’re out on the road selling the cheese, or whatever.” “I draw the line there.” “You shouldn’t draw that line, sir. I’m looking at her, and I can tell you she is nasty for the handle. This is a big, big urge she’s got. I think if you don’t say yes she may get frustrated and take me as a lover.” “No!” There was real anguish in his voice. Cardell let the reality sink in for a moment. “How about if she just tells me, briefly, and doesn’t show me. Would that work?” The husband made an explosive sigh. “Did she just go for a walk on that beach?” “Yes.” “I know she’s a beautiful woman and a highly sexed woman. She gets superhorny after she’s gone for a beach walk and found a couple of pieces of nice beach glass. Put her back on.” Cardell handed the phone back to Betsy. “I’ll just tell him about it, hon,” said Betsy, “I won’t show him. Yes, I promise. Okay. Love you, honey. Bye!” She hung up. “I’ll pop into the shower, Cardell. Meanwhile, we keep the screwdrivers in a tool belt hanging in the foyer. I like the one with the kelly green handle. Not the huge one with the blue handle—I tried that one once. Troppo big. Feel free to read a magazine. As you can see, my husband’s into mountain hiking.” Cardell went and got the screwdriver, and then he sat and read part of an article about crampons. He heard the shower going for a while in the pipes, and then he heard it turn off. Betsy emerged wearing a loose gray cotton dress with her hair turbaned and a different color of lipstick on. She was carrying a tube of something. She walked near him, and he smelled her smell of warm clean wet skin and Kentucky bourbon. He heard a drawer close in the kitchen, and she emerged with one latex glove. “Now, Card, I gave it some thought in the shower, and here’s what I think we might do. You sit in that chair, facing away from me, and I’ll sit here on the couch like so.

• From The City of God

  449 Lecture 21 Transcript—Augustine’s Vision of Hell (Book 21) would be annoyed at continental drift because it’s still trying to fix itself in materiality. But fire is the quickest and most volatile form of matter of the material world, and so fire teaches the self that its hopes for fixity are foiled far more effectively and far more efficiently than any other kind of materiality. That might make you think that Hell’s torments are fundamentally fleshly. But Augustine says that’s not so. In fact, it’s the soul, not the body, which is what really suffers anyway. Just as he said way back in Book 14, what may seem like the pains of flesh are really the pains of the soul as it intersects with the flesh, as it takes in the information that the flesh gives it. The key, that is, is the way that the soul participates in our embodiment, our enfleshment, for Augustine. Again, if the soul expects to find its stability in flesh, it will be disappointed in it, and feel pain. But, if the soul does not expect that stability, but seeks it instead in God, it will be able to understand and inhabit the flesh without that disappointment attaching to it. Another question presents itself here. Why is suffering endless? How can an infinite punishment be merited by a finite crime? Many people must have asked this of Augustine. The first thing to do, Augustine thinks, is to get clear on what the scriptures say about punishment, and in particular what Christ says. It turns out, on Augustine’s reading, that Jesus says a fair amount about Hell, and none of it good. Augustine reads the scriptural testimony to confirm what he imagines Hell to be—horrible and permanent. But there is more in the way of reasons we can give, he thinks, for why Hell is permanent, why it is an endless punishment. The punishment for a crime is measured by the magnitude of the transgression, and in this case, the core transgression, the utterly absurd rejection of God’s gifts to humanity, and the attempt to rebel against God, this is infinitely immense. This is why Hell is an eternal punishment; as Augustine puts it, “The more enjoyment man found in God, the greater was his wickedness in abandoning God; and he who

• From The City of God

  441 Lecture 21—Augustine’s Vision of Hell (Book 21) the same. Any such utopia gives license to almost any horror in the present, for such horrors’ true meaning will be determined— and whitewashed—in the utopian eschaton yet to come. Augustine’s Definition of Hell „Hell, on Augustine’s reading, is entirely personal. Hell is the complete inability genuinely to relate to other people—no way to see yourself in another or feel another’s pain in yourself; no way to empathize with, to have the barriers of self and other break down in a larger, more powerful “we”; no sense of the possibility of self-transcendence. Hell is suffocating solitude, crucially self-inflicted, a condition appropriate for damned souls, and caused by their own agency. „More amazing—and harder to understand—is that hell, like all else in Creation, is for Augustine in itself good. Augustine’s metaphysics make it impossible for something to be truly evil in itself. Hell is good in two ways: ›It is an instrument of justice, whereby those who are wicked get what they deserve. In fact their problem is that heaven is where they do not want to go, for that would be to acknowledge God’s sovereignty. ›It is also an instrument of mercy and of God’s love, whereby those who are wicked, and who in their wickedness desire to harm God by destroying God’s most basic gift to themselves— their own being—are protected against the consummation of their own tragically misguided intentions. „Indeed, it may be easiest for us today to imagine hell not in terms of fire, but as essentially the condition of being in God’s presence and not wanting to be there, so trying to move as far away from that presence as possible.

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

  Jackie heard the brokenness and despair, but also the excitement, in his voice. She took pity on him. “Everybody’s got to find their own porthole,” she said. “It’s harder for men to get in than women unless they pay and pay. Although you’re pretty cute—you’ll have a chance.” “Any hints on where to find a porthole?” “Try the fourth dryer from the left at the laundromat at the corner of 18th Street and Grover Avenue,” said Jackie. She waved. “Bye.” Her face began to blur and liquefy, and then she poured herself down into her straw and was gone. Cardell picked up the straw and looked through it. There was no blockage. “Jackie?” he said. The bartender stood watching him, holding a glass. “What just happened?” Cardell said. “Your lady friend seems to have been sucked into her straw,” the bartender said. “That’s what I think, too,” Cardell said. The bartender shrugged. “It happens, man.” “Well,” Cardell said, “I guess I’ll be heading out.” “Have a good night.” Cardell dropped a twenty in the brandy snifter and waved at the pianist, humming along to Hoagy Carmichael. In the elevator down, Cardell smelled his fingers. Then he felt in his pocket. Yes, the silver egg was still there. [image "decoration" file=image_rsrc2SW.jpg] Marcela Admires Koizumi’s Sculpture [image "decoration" file=image_rsrc2SX.jpg] Marcela, an art critic, was in the sculpture garden. Koi-zumi, the well-known Japanese artist, was mounting one of her newest wooden sculptures onto its base. The sculpture was of a woman resting on all fours—large thighed and stylized, with a wide bottom and a moon face. She was carved out of black wood with yellow streaks. Marcela wore a boatneck shirt and white Bermuda shorts. She brushed her hair from her face, watching Koizumi bolt both of the wooden woman’s knees to her pedestal. Then the sculptress pulled out a big manual drill with a kink in it where the handle was. Marcela opened her notebook. “And what are you going to do with that?” she asked. Koizumi, a slight woman with a small mouth, said, “Once I get the sculptures mounted, I do the last step, which is to drill this auger bit into their asses.” “Can I watch?” Koizumi almost said no. She preferred to work in private. But then, struck by Marcela’s fresh, curious face and generous hips, she changed her mind. She took a metal poker and tapped it lightly into the wooden seam of the sculpted woman’s bottom. Then she removed it and fitted the tip of the auger into the tiny guide hole she had made. “Now I will drill her asshole,” Koizumi said simply. She pressed against the handle and began slowly turning the crank of the hand drill. Curls of wood came twirling up off the spirals of the bit. Marcela walked around to look at the wooden woman’s face. “She looks like she’s enjoying that pressure,” she said.

• From The City of God

  448 Books That Matter: The City of God insensate condition. There will be no getting used to the torment; every moment in Hell will be as freshly painful, as newly cruel, as the first terror-inducing dip into the infernal cauldron. But not only will the sufferers feel immediate pain. They will also suffer a reflexive kind of psychological regret, a kind of what he calls fruitless repentance. Finally, now, they will know what their ultimate destiny is, and they will not be able fully to deny that knowledge. They will now realize the full extent of their self-deception. And yet, in another way, they will also not know. They will also still be able to deny. They will develop accounts that try to explain and excuse and evade their situation. In other words, they will remain what they have been all along, and still will be in denial about their situation, even though they are in Hell. This is teaching us something important Augustine thinks about the nature of evil and its connection of self- deception even here. He next takes up the question of the nature of the infernal suffering of the damned. And here his first question is, How, exactly, does endless suffering happen? I bet you’ve never really thought about how exactly Hell is supposed to work, but these are the kinds of questions that we need to answer here, Augustine thinks. Why, in particular, does everyone, even demons, suffer from material fire? Maybe it’s since material bodies are connected to resurrected souls; for even the immaterial demons are in Hell connected to materiality in something like this way. But why do humans in Hell need their bodies at all? Well, Augustine says because they are bodies just as much as souls. Remember humans are created embodied—even the damned; that is key for Augustine. Now here’s a question that Augustine doesn’t really answer, but it’s there in his text. Why is Hell conceived of as flames? We can kind of imagine how he might answer in this way. Fire is the uttermost extension of changing matter, perhaps, indeed, the most temporary state of matter, flickering and changing constantly. Given that the soul’s relation to matter is the problem—the fact that the soul wants fixity, it wants stability, it wants matter not to change. The soul in Hell

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

  But we’ll probably have to ask you to ease open your tight crotch hole so we can check what you’ve got down there, too.’ ” “Oh, please,” said Shandee. “And as he said this I looked down, and his cock, which had been uninterested up till then, seemed to be doing a strange loop-the-loopy thing. It had come alive. I said, ‘Give me a break, Mr. Airport Bag Check Man.’ “And he said, ‘You know how important national security is.’ And then he called out to one of the other security guys, and the two of them took hold of my elbows and steered me into a room that said ‘Official Business Only.’ I knew I was in trouble then.” “Did they search you all over?” “Let me tell you, ‘gangbang’ would be another word for it. I thought it was over, and then one guard, the less nice one, said to the other, ‘We’re going to have to call in the Pearloiner.’ And the nice one said, ‘No, let’s not.’ But then the Pearloiner came in. She was about forty-five, superpatriotic, big hair, big high heels, big patriotic tits, fake. And she goes, ‘I’m sorry, but we’ve determined that your clitoris is not a carry-on item.’ She’s like, ‘It’s swollen and oversized, and it’s over the weight limit, and it’s a security threat, and I’m going to have to remove it now.’ Then she clapped her hand to my crotch, and I felt this sharp painful tugging, and I saw my clit go into a tiny clear baggie, with a numbered label on it, and then a gloved man took the top off of a large jar.” “That’s just so sad and so wrong,” said Shandee. “Yeah, and since then I’ve only had three good comes,” said Zilka, “and they were all in my sleep. I used to come so big. I used to shout and kick, sometimes even fart if I was by myself and really bearing down. Now I can’t come at all. Nothing to rub against. I still think about sex a lot, though, and I still get incredibly turned on. It’s about as frustrating a situation as you can get.” “So what are you going to do?” said Shandee. “Well, a few months ago I was dancing at Carbon Fiber in Chicago, and this girl Cheyenne who’d also had her clit stolen at the same airport said she’d heard the Pearloiner had gotten in big trouble with the FBI, finally, for abuses of her authority, and that she’d gone AWOL and somehow managed to sneak over into the House of Holes, where she’d been making a nuisance of herself—stealing more clits, of course. So Cheyenne and I decided to track her, and that’s when I came here and met Lila, who said she’d help if she could.

• From The City of God

  To fleshly bodies to return. " [436] This found no favor with Porphyry, and very justly; for it is indeed foolish to believe that souls should desire to return from that life, which cannot be very blessed unless by the assurance of its permanence, and to come back into this life, and to the pollution of corruptible bodies, as if the result of perfect purification were only to make defilement desirable. For if perfect purification effects the oblivion of all evils, and the oblivion of evils creates a desire for a body in which the soul may again be entangled with evils, then the supreme felicity will be the cause of infelicity, and the perfection of wisdom the cause of foolishness, and the purest cleansing the cause of defilement. And, however long the blessedness of the soul last, it cannot be founded on truth, if, in order to be blessed, it must be deceived. For it cannot be blessed unless it be free from fear. But, to be free from fear, it must be under the false impression that it shall be always blessed,--the false impression, for it is destined to be also at some time miserable. How, then, shall the soul rejoice in truth, whose joy is founded on falsehood? Porphyry saw this, and therefore said that the purified soul returns to the Father, that it may never more be entangled in the polluting contact with evil. The opinion, therefore, of some Platonists, that there is a necessary revolution carrying souls away and bringing them round again to the same things, is false. But, were it true, what were the advantage of knowing it? Would the Platonists presume to allege their superiority to us, because we were in this life ignorant of what they themselves were doomed to be ignorant of when perfected in purity and wisdom in another and better life, and which they must be ignorant of if they are to be blessed? If it were most absurd and foolish to say so, then certainly we must prefer Porphyry's opinion to the idea of a circulation of souls through constantly alternating happiness and misery. And if this is just, here is a Platonist emending Plato, here is a man who saw what Plato did not see, and who did not shrink from correcting so illustrious a master, but preferred truth to Plato. [434] Comp. Euseb. Praep. Evan. xiii. 16. [435] Ennead, iii. 4, 2. [436] AEneid, vi. 750, 751.