Disappointment

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 Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Augustine matters as much as he does because of the movement he aligned himself with and its self-proclaimed successors. If repeatedly we feel on reading stories of his life that we understand the issues, concerns, and attitudes he and his contemporaries shared, that’s not because we have seen and understood them and made a serious historical attempt to compare them to our own, but because they (and their modern translators) use names and labels that elide the gaps that separate us and make their issues and their affiliations seem relevant. This elision is nowhere so powerfully effected as in the use of the word “catholic” in discussions of African religion in Augustine’s time. We will see below what happens to our perspective when we deny ourselves the use of just that word. FEASTS OF STEPHEN The full story of Augustine in Africa is impossible to tell because so much of it has been erased. The first twenty years of his clerical life were defined by the conflict between his community and the other African Christian church, the majority church, the one that descended from the earliest days of Latin African Christianity two hundred years earlier. A fragment of narrative from the way the story ended can provide us a framework for understanding the whole story. An attentive student of the New Testament writings who knew nothing else of Christianity might be surprised to learn what a place relics of the saints held in Christian worship for a very long time. The doctrine of the resurrection and ascension, after all, taught that there were no remains of Jesus’s physical presence on earth. But by the fourth century, Constantine’s mother had found the true cross in Jerusalem, and Mark Twain, centuries later, would make a show of calculating the considerable total weight of all the fragments from it that he had found on his travels in Europe. Relics could be potent in themselves (Pope Gregory I in the late sixth century reported that attempts to meddle with Peter’s remains under his basilica at the Vatican were fatal to those who came in contact with them) and the object of a bizarre and lively trade in stolen property. Augustine’s own body turned up, so we are assured, in Pavia, where it can still be seen in the same church as the body of Boethius, after an intermediate stop for Augustine in Sardinia.323 In 1845, when French Catholics in Annaba, Algeria (ancient Hippo), were planning construction of a new basilica in his honor, they prevailed on the authorities in Pavia to let them have Augustine’s elbow, which duly made a ceremonial pilgrimage across the Mediterranean and is on display to this day, carefully fitted into the appropriate place on a life-size sculpture of a recumbent and anachronistically mitered bishop.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  The last hundreds of pages of Augustine’s writings against Julian have probably been read less often than any of his other works. To read much of Augustine requires or facilitates a respectful bond between reader and author. Call it codependency or Stockholm syndrome at its mildest, call it religious partisanship at its most extreme, but even Augustine’s severest modern critics find something attractive or fascinating about the man and his work. The anti-Julian works, however, resolutely deter affection, fascination, or even respect, and they make wearying and dispiriting reading, even for his most kindly disposed students. Augustine has the worst of the argument in modern eyes because of the unrealistic extremes to which he took his suspicion of marriage, sexuality, and the fundamental processes of the human body. Julian is scarcely more attractive on these points and has no coherent alternative to offer. Julian is naïve and unrealistic in his own expectations of the working of Christian morality, and Augustine has at least the merit of recognizing that the most strenuous and traditional precepts of Christian sexual morality are simply difficult to observe—are, indeed, rarely observed by any individual consistently for a lifetime. Julian seems to have imagined that virtuous restraint was, for the dignified gentleman, a matter of merit, to be sure, but merit relatively easily achieved, whatever excesses of irresponsibility the mass of Christians beyond the highest social circles might display. Neither man comes across well. Julian must be granted his victories. When Augustine, for example, argues for the power of baptism, Julian is on him in a flash.574 If on the one hand baptism is so powerful, he argues, but if on the other hand people who have been baptized and liberated from original sin still pass on that original sin to their children—well, how powerful can baptism really be then? Augustine’s unwillingness to sort through the issues of the origin of soul and take a coherent position leaves him weakened rhetorically. His failure is a sign of the inner incoherence of the position he occupies.575 To avoid settling for partisanship when gazing on the spectacle of Augustine and his enemies in his lifetime, it may help to cast the gaze forward a dozen centuries. Then we can find another figure, just as obsessed with the ins and outs of Augustine’s later ideas as was Julian. He, too, is linked to a generation and more of aristocratic Christians determined to demonstrate the excellence and purity of their vocation.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Augustine never had the gumption to disown Orosius, though a close reading of his work, especially the history in book 18 of City of God, reveals traces of disappointment. But Orosius was on to something. The story he told was very much in line with Christian teaching after Constantine, however unacceptable Augustine now found it. Augustine himself had not, in City of God, been able to avoid the conventional rhetoric of flattery directed to Christian emperors.494 Orosius took such politesse to its logical next step. He saw the interaction of catholic church and Roman state all around him, saw the way each supported the other, saw in particular the way the emperors of the fourth and fifth centuries had made the making and shaping of Christianity their own business, and told the story that resulted. Augustine could not deny it, and in his failure to deny it he gave tacit approval to the later generations of Christian imperialism that would invoke his name. The emperor Charlemagne, it was said, kept a copy of City of God at his bedside four hundred years later, implicitly as model for what he was about. The Augustine-Orosius tension leaves its traces.495 On the one hand, western societies that have learned from them find ways to underpin the state with religious ideology (the Orosian contribution), without ever identifying the two and while maintaining an idealized notion of the just society (the Platonic-Augustinian contribution). The two elements are probably unimaginable without each other, and each has exacted its costs in after times. Augustine had one other piece of business in City of God, one often overlooked: dealing with Donatism. Just as the Confessions are often seen as eerily devoid of discussion of Donatism (the chief issue on Augustine’s official mind at the time of writing), so, too, Augustine is believed to have compartmentalized his targets and dismissed all thought of Donatism from his mind while attacking the “pagans” in City of God. This assumption would make more sense if the “pagans” were a genuine threat to him, but the “paganism” of City of God is a straw man, built to create an imaginary other against which to define his version of Christianity. The Christian of City of God is the one who has all the virtues of the classical world and none of its vices.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  This view of Christianity might seem to hold within it the core of something more irenic, rationalist, and open than the Christianities that eventually emerged. Throughout late antiquity, some voices spoke up for such readings of Christianity, voices usually controverted by others. The reading of Jesus’s relationship to his father promulgated by the Arians of the fourth century, for example, had this in common with Pelagius, that each interpretation imagined a fundamental ordinariness about Christianity and about the world it described, while both Nicene Christology and Augustinian grace imagine a world that has been deeply disrupted by the intrusion of the divine rescue mission. Those are the views facing each other in the 410s. Pelagius and his like will always be puzzled and hurt by accusations of unorthodoxy and eager to deprecate them and make peace. Augustine will always be shocked by the failure of worldly men to see the urgency of man’s plight and appreciate the drama of the divine intervention. Neither side can find a vocabulary that lets them discuss what is really at stake. Left to face one another, these views could seem to be at loggerheads, and a modern reader is probably inclined to root for Pelagius. Certainly very, very few readers except the most devout Calvinist will find themselves agreeing with the Augustinian view, even in a notional sense. (By a notional sense, I mean in the way that uninvolved moderns often find themselves agreeing with Augustine or some other ancient figure as against their opponents, without sharing their fundamental views. So I take it that many modern readers find Augustine’s view of catholicism more coherent and persuasive than the Donatist ecclesiology, even moderns who belong to no church themselves. In this case, if moderns agree with anyone, they probably prefer Pelagius.) Why, then, does Augustine trump Pelagius in the short run and prevail as an authority figure, even if controverted, so easily in the long run? The answer to that lies in the evolving consensus among Christians, one that Augustine and Pelagius share, about the location of authority in the church. Before translocal hierarchies of bishops and eventual popes and patriarchs ever evolved to have any doctrinal authority, Christians had come to agree, without noticing it, without debate, and without anybody planning it, that scriptural texts, gathered in collections of apostolic authority, would prevail.

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

  Psychologist Margaret Singer was specifically critical of EST and its program the Forum, which was sold in 1991 and then became known as Landmark Education981 in her book Cults in Our Midst ,982 Singer later said, “I do not endorse them—never have.”983 Landmark sued Singer, and as a part of an agreed settlement after years of protracted litigation, she stated that the group was not a cult or sect.984 There is little to suggest that training through companies like Landmark actually produce anything other than subjective results. A group of researchers, led by Jeffrey D. Fisher, Purdue professor of psychology, studied the effects of Landmark training.985 They concluded, “In fact, with the exception of the short-term multivariate results for perceived control, there was no appreciable effect on any dimension which could reflect positive change.” However, even this perception of control among the Landmark participants studied dissipated after eighteen months.986 Author Stephen J. Kraus later referred to the Fisher study and said, “People who attend EST or the Landmark Forum generally report positive benefits from the experience, but a study that compared attendees with a control group of non-attendees suggests that the seminar produces only a short-term boost in locus of control, and no measurable long-term effects.”987 The British Psychological Society later cited the Fisher study,988 and an article in Nova Religio , published by University of California Press, cited it as well.989 Concerns about Erhard’s training are well documented. In 1977 it was reported that seven individuals suffered serious psychiatric disturbances after participating in EST.990 Concerned psychiatrists alerted their colleagues through an article published by the American Journal of Psychiatry of the possibility that some people might develop devastating effects regarding EST training.991 One of the authors Dr. Leonard L. Glass said, “We don’t know if more people become psychotic after EST than after riding on the F train.” But he opined, “There’s enough possibility of a real connection between EST and psychotic breaks to cause us to want to alert psychiatrists and psychologists.”992 Apparently reflecting continuing concerns about the potential for such problems, Mark Kamin, a Landmark Education spokesperson, stated in a 2002 interview that the company had implemented a screening process devised by a board of psychiatrists. Kamin said, “We have a requirement that people must be emotionally stable at that time to participate in our programs.”993 A wrongful death lawsuit filed against Landmark in 2004 claimed that Landmark training had contributed to the mental state of a man who murdered a postal carrier.994 A court found the killer legally insane. He allegedly had been removed from a Landmark seminar for behaving strangely and extremely erratically.

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

  And he showed her how to turn on the music. Then he left. Rhumpa danced at first on the balcony. Because it was so bright outside she was in a silhouette. Then she paused the camera and came inside and closed the dark-green drapes. “I’m going to do a pussy dance for you guys,” she said. She slowly took off her robe and shook her jerries in the bra for the camera. She danced with one finger up her stash, danced while circling her clit, danced with one foot up on the edge of a chair seat. She knew it was good. She phoned down. “Daggett? I’m done pussy dancing.” He came back to her room and retrieved the camera. “Have some dinner,” he said. “I’ll edit the tape and load it on channel six.” Rhumpa had an eggplant panini down at the café, and then Daggett led her down a hall inset with sixteen square, mirrored windows. There were green and red lights above each window. “In each of these little rooms is a man,” said Daggett. “He has control of a video screen that has sixteen possible tracks. By clicking a button he can switch from one track to the next. You can look in any of the windows, but only when the light is green is someone looking at the movie of you dancing.” She nodded. She stood for a moment. All the lights were red, and then one was momentarily green, and then it went red again. Another light changed from red to green and stayed at green. Rhumpa walked to the window and peered in through the one-way mirror. In it was a man she hadn’t seen before. Rhumpa was watching him from the side so that she could see a little bit of her own dancing performance. Mainly she saw him, sitting in a chair, squeezing his united parcel through his pants. She looked at his face and saw how intently he was looking at her dance, and she saw that when she turned around and lifted the scarf he undid his belt. He stood and pushed his pants down and out flopped a heavy, ugly dick in the shadows of the little room. He stroked on himself several times and then he clicked the channel-selection button with the back of his hand. He began watching someone else strip. That was a rude shock. Rhumpa stood back and looked at all of the doors: Three lights were on the green. She hurried to each window. In one room, a man had entirely removed his pants and underpants. He stood in his dress shoes, naked from the waist down, his feet tightly together, his fist shuttling over his small tuber.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  His sainthood remains alive most visibly in the interest that people give to the way he lived his life. The power of his Confessions has assured a lively interest. Contemporary readers who come to Augustine most often take up the Confessions first, which is remarkable enough testimony to that work’s power. If readers of the last generation pick up even one book about Augustine, that first book is almost always a biography, and a particular biography—Peter Brown’s classic Augustine of Hippo (1967).617 Brown’s book, marvelous, imperfect, and enduring, was the first modern biography and easily outclassed all competitors. Whatever Augustine taught and did, he is reduced by this preference for life-story-telling to a more ordinary saint than he really is. Having achieved great repute, he is the more readily trivialized. Since he became the first saint known to have his own website (since 1994, when this writer became his webmaster), he has attracted a fairly steady flow of questions and inquiries. Many are quite specific and studious, even scholarly, but the commonest are more superficial. That he was born and lived in Africa leaves many readers, in an age of renewed consciousness of the troubled history of African relations with the developed world, wondering, “Was Augustine black?”618 No less rooted in contemporary concerns is the commonest doctrinal question, a search for a particular quotation: Did Augustine really say the benevolent ecumenical words recommending “in essentials, unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity”? No, he did not, but many have heard he did and very much hope he did, seeking an august, ancient, and improbable patronage for a contemporary predilection for ecumenism.619 What the dying saint thought, what he did, what was of his own doing, what was that of his friends, and what was that of those of us who have read and written of him since—these forces have turned him into a celebrity, known for being known, an object of curiosity, a pawn in our contemporary conversations. He saw us coming, deploring “a tribe eager to know about another man’s life, too lazy to amend their own.”620 Trivialization is not the only risk his future faces. The place of the churches that have been fondest of him is changing in our world, and those churches themselves have been reinventing themselves in ways that need less of him or figures like him. With them or without them, his future begins to shimmer uncertainly.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  Lucy was naturally clever; her remarks were often just and amusing; and as a companion for half an hour Elinor frequently found her agreeable; but her powers had received no aid from education: she was ignorant and illiterate; and her deficiency of all mental improvement, her want of information in the most common particulars, could not be concealed from Miss Dashwood, in spite of her constant endeavour to appear to advantage. Elinor saw, and pitied her for, the neglect of abilities which education might have rendered so respectable; but she saw, with less tenderness of feeling, the thorough want of delicacy, of rectitude, and integrity of mind, which her attentions, her assiduities, her flatteries at the Park betrayed; and she could have no lasting satisfaction in the company of a person who joined insincerity with ignorance; whose want of instruction prevented their meeting in conversation on terms of equality, and whose conduct toward others made every show of attention and deference towards herself perfectly valueless. “You will think my question an odd one, I dare say,” said Lucy to her one day, as they were walking together from the park to the cottage—“but pray, are you personally acquainted with your sister-in-law’s mother, Mrs. Ferrars?” Elinor _did_ think the question a very odd one, and her countenance expressed it, as she answered that she had never seen Mrs. Ferrars. “Indeed!” replied Lucy; “I wonder at that, for I thought you must have seen her at Norland sometimes. Then, perhaps, you cannot tell me what sort of a woman she is?” “No,” returned Elinor, cautious of giving her real opinion of Edward’s mother, and not very desirous of satisfying what seemed impertinent curiosity; “I know nothing of her.” “I am sure you think me very strange, for enquiring about her in such a way,” said Lucy, eyeing Elinor attentively as she spoke; “but perhaps there may be reasons—I wish I might venture; but however I hope you will do me the justice of believing that I do not mean to be impertinent.” Elinor made her a civil reply, and they walked on for a few minutes in silence. It was broken by Lucy, who renewed the subject again by saying, with some hesitation, “I cannot bear to have you think me impertinently curious. I am sure I would rather do any thing in the world than be thought so by a person whose good opinion is so well worth having as yours. And I am sure I should not have the smallest fear of trusting _you;_ indeed, I should be very glad of your advice how to manage in such an uncomfortable situation as I am; but, however, there is no occasion to trouble _you_. I am sorry you do not happen to know Mrs. Ferrars.”

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “Her daughters are both exceedingly well married, and therefore I cannot perceive the necessity of her remembering them farther. Whereas, in my opinion, by her taking so much notice of you, and treating you in this kind of way, she has given you a sort of claim on her future consideration, which a conscientious woman would not disregard. Nothing can be kinder than her behaviour; and she can hardly do all this, without being aware of the expectation it raises.” “But she raises none in those most concerned. Indeed, brother, your anxiety for our welfare and prosperity carries you too far.” “Why, to be sure,” said he, seeming to recollect himself, “people have little, have very little in their power. But, my dear Elinor, what is the matter with Marianne?—she looks very unwell, has lost her colour, and is grown quite thin. Is she ill?” “She is not well, she has had a nervous complaint on her for several weeks.” “I am sorry for that. At her time of life, any thing of an illness destroys the bloom for ever! Hers has been a very short one! She was as handsome a girl last September, as I ever saw; and as likely to attract the man. There was something in her style of beauty, to please them particularly. I remember Fanny used to say that she would marry sooner and better than you did; not but what she is exceedingly fond of _you_, but so it happened to strike her. She will be mistaken, however. I question whether Marianne _now_, will marry a man worth more than five or six hundred a-year, at the utmost, and I am very much deceived if _you_ do not do better. Dorsetshire! I know very little of Dorsetshire; but, my dear Elinor, I shall be exceedingly glad to know more of it; and I think I can answer for your having Fanny and myself among the earliest and best pleased of your visitors.” Elinor tried very seriously to convince him that there was no likelihood of her marrying Colonel Brandon; but it was an expectation of too much pleasure to himself to be relinquished, and he was really resolved on seeking an intimacy with that gentleman, and promoting the marriage by every possible attention. He had just compunction enough for having done nothing for his sisters himself, to be exceedingly anxious that everybody else should do a great deal; and an offer from Colonel Brandon, or a legacy from Mrs. Jennings, was the easiest means of atoning for his own neglect.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  His son was sent for as soon as his danger was known, and to him Mr. Dashwood recommended, with all the strength and urgency which illness could command, the interest of his mother-in-law and sisters. Mr. John Dashwood had not the strong feelings of the rest of the family; but he was affected by a recommendation of such a nature at such a time, and he promised to do every thing in his power to make them comfortable. His father was rendered easy by such an assurance, and Mr. John Dashwood had then leisure to consider how much there might prudently be in his power to do for them. He was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather cold hearted and rather selfish is to be ill-disposed: but he was, in general, well respected; for he conducted himself with propriety in the discharge of his ordinary duties. Had he married a more amiable woman, he might have been made still more respectable than he was:—he might even have been made amiable himself; for he was very young when he married, and very fond of his wife. But Mrs. John Dashwood was a strong caricature of himself;—more narrow-minded and selfish. When he gave his promise to his father, he meditated within himself to increase the fortunes of his sisters by the present of a thousand pounds a-piece. He then really thought himself equal to it. The prospect of four thousand a-year, in addition to his present income, besides the remaining half of his own mother’s fortune, warmed his heart, and made him feel capable of generosity. “Yes, he would give them three thousand pounds: it would be liberal and handsome! It would be enough to make them completely easy. Three thousand pounds! he could spare so considerable a sum with little inconvenience.” He thought of it all day long, and for many days successively, and he did not repent. No sooner was his father’s funeral over, than Mrs. John Dashwood, without sending any notice of her intention to her mother-in-law, arrived with her child and their attendants. No one could dispute her right to come; the house was her husband’s from the moment of his father’s decease; but the indelicacy of her conduct was so much the greater, and to a woman in Mrs. Dashwood’s situation, with only common feelings, must have been highly unpleasing;—but in _her_ mind there was a sense of honor so keen, a generosity so romantic, that any offence of the kind, by whomsoever given or received, was to her a source of immovable disgust. Mrs. John Dashwood had never been a favourite with any of her husband’s family; but she had had no opportunity, till the present, of showing them with how little attention to the comfort of other people she could act when occasion required it.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  By a former marriage, Mr. Henry Dashwood had one son: by his present lady, three daughters. The son, a steady respectable young man, was amply provided for by the fortune of his mother, which had been large, and half of which devolved on him on his coming of age. By his own marriage, likewise, which happened soon afterwards, he added to his wealth. To him therefore the succession to the Norland estate was not so really important as to his sisters; for their fortune, independent of what might arise to them from their father’s inheriting that property, could be but small. Their mother had nothing, and their father only seven thousand pounds in his own disposal; for the remaining moiety of his first wife’s fortune was also secured to her child, and he had only a life-interest in it. The old gentleman died: his will was read, and like almost every other will, gave as much disappointment as pleasure. He was neither so unjust, nor so ungrateful, as to leave his estate from his nephew;—but he left it to him on such terms as destroyed half the value of the bequest. Mr. Dashwood had wished for it more for the sake of his wife and daughters than for himself or his son;—but to his son, and his son’s son, a child of four years old, it was secured, in such a way, as to leave to himself no power of providing for those who were most dear to him, and who most needed a provision by any charge on the estate, or by any sale of its valuable woods. The whole was tied up for the benefit of this child, who, in occasional visits with his father and mother at Norland, had so far gained on the affections of his uncle, by such attractions as are by no means unusual in children of two or three years old; an imperfect articulation, an earnest desire of having his own way, many cunning tricks, and a great deal of noise, as to outweigh all the value of all the attention which, for years, he had received from his niece and her daughters. He meant not to be unkind, however, and, as a mark of his affection for the three girls, he left them a thousand pounds a-piece. Mr. Dashwood’s disappointment was, at first, severe; but his temper was cheerful and sanguine; and he might reasonably hope to live many years, and by living economically, lay by a considerable sum from the produce of an estate already large, and capable of almost immediate improvement. But the fortune, which had been so tardy in coming, was his only one twelvemonth. He survived his uncle no longer; and ten thousand pounds, including the late legacies, was all that remained for his widow and daughters.

• From An Anomalous Jew: Paul Among Jews, Greeks, and Romans (2016)

  He demonstrates why philosophers have seen Paul as something of a catalyst for species of universalism and equality. But therein lies the problem, as Bruce Hansen has noted: “Boyarin’s post-structuralist, post-colonial culture crit- icism does not depend on his reading of Paul and can be appreciated or critiqued independently. It is, however, debatable whether Paul and his letters correspond to the universalizing pole to which Boyarin assigns them.”** Boyarin’s radical por- trait of Paul is a wonderful entrée into the things that philosophers and cultural critics like Alain Badiou and Stanislas Breton can do with Paul, but it probably has very little to do with what Paul himself actually thought he was doing.*’ Sev- eral other criticisms can be leveled against Boyarin.”° To begin with, Boyarin’s reading of Paul itself is highly allegorical rather than authentic, Hegelian rather than historical. In addition, Boyarin’s Paul is decidedly Christology-lite, and the cross also seems to figure very little in Boyarin’s account, features which do not square with a thick account of Paul.”* An Anomalous Jew John Barclay has argued that Paul was “an anomalous diaspora Jew.’”* For Barclay, Paul was a Diaspora Jew who was highly assimilated to Hellenistic 86. Boyarin, Radical Jew, 7. 87. Boyarin, Radical Jew, 5. 88. Bruce Hansen, All of You Are One: The Social Vision of Galatians 3.28, 1 Corinthians 12.13, and Colossians 3.11 (LNTS 409; London: T&T Clark, 2010), 14. 89. Which is precisely where Boyarin is situated in scholarship by P. Travis Kroeker, “Re- cent Continental Philosophers,’ in The Blackwell Companion to Paul, ed. S. Westerholm (Mal- den, MA: Blackwell, 2011), 442. 90. Bird and Sprinkle, “Jewish Views,’ 363-65. gi. N. T. Wright, “Two Radical Jews: A Review Article of Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity; Reviews in Religion and Theology 3 (1995): 15-23, repr. in N. T. Wright, Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1978-2013 (London: SPCK, 2013), 126-33. 92. Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora, 381-95 (esp. 384-86); idem, “Paul among Diaspora Jews,’ 103, 113. Ronald Charles (Paul and the Politics of Diaspora [Minneapolis: For- tress, 2014], 248) writes: “Paul was a diasporic male Judean of low social status negotiating 25 INTRODUCTION culture yet also a self-identifying Jew with a thoroughly Jewish worldview. This view itself is neither anomalous nor problematic. The incongruity is that Paul was highly antagonistic toward Hellenistic religion and culture, even while he engaged in a radical redefinition of traditional Jewish categories and adopted a lifestyle and a theology that questioned the normativity of his ancestral cus- toms. According to Barclay, the truly anomalous character of Paul's theology and religion can be described as follows: In his conceptuality Paul is most at home among the particularistic and least accommodated segments of the Diaspora; yet in his utilization of these concepts, and in his social practice, he shatters the ethnic mould in which that ideology was formed.

• From An Anomalous Jew: Paul Among Jews, Greeks, and Romans (2016)

  I want to stress that such an antithesis should not be pressed so as to evac- uate Judaism, Israel, and the genuinely salvific role of the Torah in Paul’s nar- rative about the culmination of salvation in Christ. Paul is announcing the good news of salvation by announcing the fulfillment of Israel’s eschatological hopes. Still, Paul’s point of contention was not simply that Judaism needs to let the Gentiles into a Christ-religion while the Jews themselves continue on under the Mosaic religion, nor is it that the eschatological sands had simply shifted and Israel was yet to catch up. It is far more problematic than that: for both Jews and Gentiles, the end had come in Christ, not in Torah. Further- more, when Torah’s role in salvation history is viewed retrospectively through the lens of messianic faith, it is seen as oppressive, ineffectual, and temporary. “Paul's soteriology,’ says Sprinkle, “remains within the Jewish spectrum of beliefs,” rooted as it is in prophetic restoration eschatology. However, “Paul's Damascus road encounter would entail a rereading of salvation history—a transposition of the divine and human dynamics in bringing eschatological salvation into the present through the death and resurrection of the Messiah,” with the result that “the most unique element in Paul's soteriology, one that used to offend his Pharisaic sensibilities and no doubt continued to sound outlandish, is the sacrificial death, bodily resurrection, subsequent enthrone- ment, and personal indwelling, intercession and love that the risen Messiah accomplishes in and for wicked people, Jesus’ enemies, whom God stubbornly sought to justify.’”* 98. Sprinkle, Paul and Judaism Revisited, 243-47, 249. 67 AN ANOMALOUS JEW Finally, as was formerly and famously said by E. P. Sanders: “In short, this is what Paul finds wrong in Judaism: it is not Christianity.’ Similarly, Lloyd Gaston said: “This is what Paul finds wrong with other Jews: that they do not share his revelation in Damascus.”’°° More recently, Mark Nanos has wryly written: “This is what Paul would find wrong in Paulinism: it is not Judaism.”*°” But I say unto you: This is what Paul finds wrong with Judaism: it looks to the Torah rather than to the Messiah for the revelation of God’s righteousness, for the reconciliation of the world, and for the renewal of creation. Yet the Torah was at best a holding pattern for sin, and at worst it exacerbated the reign of sin over the flesh in the present evil age.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “Perhaps,” said Marianne, “I may consider it with some surprise. Edward is very amiable, and I love him tenderly. But yet—he is not the kind of young man—there is something wanting—his figure is not striking; it has none of that grace which I should expect in the man who could seriously attach my sister. His eyes want all that spirit, that fire, which at once announce virtue and intelligence. And besides all this, I am afraid, Mama, he has no real taste. Music seems scarcely to attract him, and though he admires Elinor’s drawings very much, it is not the admiration of a person who can understand their worth. It is evident, in spite of his frequent attention to her while she draws, that in fact he knows nothing of the matter. He admires as a lover, not as a connoisseur. To satisfy me, those characters must be united. I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter into all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both. Oh! mama, how spiritless, how tame was Edward’s manner in reading to us last night! I felt for my sister most severely. Yet she bore it with so much composure, she seemed scarcely to notice it. I could hardly keep my seat. To hear those beautiful lines which have frequently almost driven me wild, pronounced with such impenetrable calmness, such dreadful indifference!” “He would certainly have done more justice to simple and elegant prose. I thought so at the time; but you _would_ give him Cowper.” “Nay, Mama, if he is not to be animated by Cowper!—but we must allow for difference of taste. Elinor has not my feelings, and therefore she may overlook it, and be happy with him. But it would have broke _my_ heart, had I loved him, to hear him read with so little sensibility. Mama, the more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much! He must have all Edward’s virtues, and his person and manners must ornament his goodness with every possible charm.” “Remember, my love, that you are not seventeen. It is yet too early in life to despair of such a happiness. Why should you be less fortunate than your mother? In one circumstance only, my Marianne, may your destiny be different from hers!” CHAPTER IV. “What a pity it is, Elinor,” said Marianne, “that Edward should have no taste for drawing.”

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “I cannot express my disappointment in having missed you the day before yesterday, nor my astonishment at not having received any answer to a note which I sent you above a week ago. I have been expecting to hear from you, and still more to see you, every hour of the day. Pray call again as soon as possible, and explain the reason of my having expected this in vain. You had better come earlier another time, because we are generally out by one. We were last night at Lady Middleton’s, where there was a dance. I have been told that you were asked to be of the party. But could it be so? You must be very much altered indeed since we parted, if that could be the case, and you not there. But I will not suppose this possible, and I hope very soon to receive your personal assurance of its being otherwise. “M.D.” The contents of her last note to him were these:— “What am I to imagine, Willoughby, by your behaviour last night? Again I demand an explanation of it. I was prepared to meet you with the pleasure which our separation naturally produced, with the familiarity which our intimacy at Barton appeared to me to justify. I was repulsed indeed! I have passed a wretched night in endeavouring to excuse a conduct which can scarcely be called less than insulting; but though I have not yet been able to form any reasonable apology for your behaviour, I am perfectly ready to hear your justification of it. You have perhaps been misinformed, or purposely deceived, in something concerning me, which may have lowered me in your opinion. Tell me what it is, explain the grounds on which you acted, and I shall be satisfied, in being able to satisfy you. It would grieve me indeed to be obliged to think ill of you; but if I am to do it, if I am to learn that you are not what we have hitherto believed you, that your regard for us all was insincere, that your behaviour to me was intended only to deceive, let it be told as soon as possible. My feelings are at present in a state of dreadful indecision; I wish to acquit you, but certainty on either side will be ease to what I now suffer. If your sentiments are no longer what they were, you will return my notes, and the lock of my hair which is in your possession. “M.D.”

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “There is no persuading you to change your mind, Brandon, I know of old,” said Sir John, “when once you are determined on anything. But, however, I hope you will think better of it. Consider, here are the two Miss Careys come over from Newton, the three Miss Dashwoods walked up from the cottage, and Mr. Willoughby got up two hours before his usual time, on purpose to go to Whitwell.” Colonel Brandon again repeated his sorrow at being the cause of disappointing the party; but at the same time declared it to be unavoidable. “Well, then, when will you come back again?” “I hope we shall see you at Barton,” added her ladyship, “as soon as you can conveniently leave town; and we must put off the party to Whitwell till you return.” “You are very obliging. But it is so uncertain, when I may have it in my power to return, that I dare not engage for it at all.” “Oh! he must and shall come back,” cried Sir John. “If he is not here by the end of the week, I shall go after him.” “Ay, so do, Sir John,” cried Mrs. Jennings, “and then perhaps you may find out what his business is.” “I do not want to pry into other men’s concerns. I suppose it is something he is ashamed of.” Colonel Brandon’s horses were announced. “You do not go to town on horseback, do you?” added Sir John. “No. Only to Honiton. I shall then go post.” “Well, as you are resolved to go, I wish you a good journey. But you had better change your mind.” “I assure you it is not in my power.” He then took leave of the whole party. “Is there no chance of my seeing you and your sisters in town this winter, Miss Dashwood?” “I am afraid, none at all.” “Then I must bid you farewell for a longer time than I should wish to do.” To Marianne, he merely bowed and said nothing. “Come Colonel,” said Mrs. Jennings, “before you go, do let us know what you are going about.” He wished her a good morning, and, attended by Sir John, left the room. The complaints and lamentations which politeness had hitherto restrained, now burst forth universally; and they all agreed again and again how provoking it was to be so disappointed. “I can guess what his business is, however,” said Mrs. Jennings exultingly. “Can you, ma’am?” said almost every body. “Yes; it is about Miss Williams, I am sure.” “And who is Miss Williams?” asked Marianne. “What! do not you know who Miss Williams is? I am sure you must have heard of her before. She is a relation of the Colonel’s, my dear; a very near relation. We will not say how near, for fear of shocking the young ladies.” Then, lowering her voice a little, she said to Elinor, “She is his natural daughter.” “Indeed!”

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  He joined her and Marianne in the breakfast-room the next morning before the others were down; and Marianne, who was always eager to promote their happiness as far as she could, soon left them to themselves. But before she was half way upstairs she heard the parlour door open, and, turning round, was astonished to see Edward himself come out. “I am going into the village to see my horses,” said he, “as you are not yet ready for breakfast; I shall be back again presently.” Edward returned to them with fresh admiration of the surrounding country; in his walk to the village, he had seen many parts of the valley to advantage; and the village itself, in a much higher situation than the cottage, afforded a general view of the whole, which had exceedingly pleased him. This was a subject which ensured Marianne’s attention, and she was beginning to describe her own admiration of these scenes, and to question him more minutely on the objects that had particularly struck him, when Edward interrupted her by saying, “You must not enquire too far, Marianne—remember I have no knowledge in the picturesque, and I shall offend you by my ignorance and want of taste if we come to particulars. I shall call hills steep, which ought to be bold; surfaces strange and uncouth, which ought to be irregular and rugged; and distant objects out of sight, which ought only to be indistinct through the soft medium of a hazy atmosphere. You must be satisfied with such admiration as I can honestly give. I call it a very fine country—the hills are steep, the woods seem full of fine timber, and the valley looks comfortable and snug—with rich meadows and several neat farm houses scattered here and there. It exactly answers my idea of a fine country, because it unites beauty with utility—and I dare say it is a picturesque one too, because you admire it; I can easily believe it to be full of rocks and promontories, grey moss and brush wood, but these are all lost on me. I know nothing of the picturesque.” “I am afraid it is but too true,” said Marianne; “but why should you boast of it?” “I suspect,” said Elinor, “that to avoid one kind of affectation, Edward here falls into another. Because he believes many people pretend to more admiration of the beauties of nature than they really feel, and is disgusted with such pretensions, he affects greater indifference and less discrimination in viewing them himself than he possesses. He is fastidious and will have an affectation of his own.”

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  As soon as they left the dining-room, Elinor enquired of her about it; and great was her surprise when she found that every circumstance related by Mrs. Jennings was perfectly true. Marianne was quite angry with her for doubting it. “Why should you imagine, Elinor, that we did not go there, or that we did not see the house? Is not it what you have often wished to do yourself?” “Yes, Marianne, but I would not go while Mrs. Smith was there, and with no other companion than Mr. Willoughby.” “Mr. Willoughby however is the only person who can have a right to show that house; and as he went in an open carriage, it was impossible to have any other companion. I never spent a pleasanter morning in my life.” “I am afraid,” replied Elinor, “that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.” “On the contrary, nothing can be a stronger proof of it, Elinor; for if there had been any real impropriety in what I did, I should have been sensible of it at the time, for we always know when we are acting wrong, and with such a conviction I could have had no pleasure.” “But, my dear Marianne, as it has already exposed you to some very impertinent remarks, do you not now begin to doubt the discretion of your own conduct?” “If the impertinent remarks of Mrs. Jennings are to be the proof of impropriety in conduct, we are all offending every moment of our lives. I value not her censure any more than I should do her commendation. I am not sensible of having done anything wrong in walking over Mrs. Smith’s grounds, or in seeing her house. They will one day be Mr. Willoughby’s, and—” “If they were one day to be your own, Marianne, you would not be justified in what you have done.” She blushed at this hint; but it was even visibly gratifying to her; and after a ten minutes’ interval of earnest thought, she came to her sister again, and said with great good humour, “Perhaps, Elinor, it _was_ rather ill-judged in me to go to Allenham; but Mr. Willoughby wanted particularly to show me the place; and it is a charming house, I assure you.—There is one remarkably pretty sitting room up stairs; of a nice comfortable size for constant use, and with modern furniture it would be delightful. It is a corner room, and has windows on two sides. On one side you look across the bowling-green, behind the house, to a beautiful hanging wood, and on the other you have a view of the church and village, and, beyond them, of those fine bold hills that we have so often admired. I did not see it to advantage, for nothing could be more forlorn than the furniture,—but if it were newly fitted up—a couple of hundred pounds, Willoughby says, would make it one of the pleasantest summer-rooms in England.”

• From The City of God

  "But what he says, "The Lord whom ye seek, and the Angel of the testament whom ye desire," just means that even the Jews, according to the Scriptures which they read, shall seek and desire Christ. But many of them did not acknowledge that He whom they sought and desired had come, being blinded in their hearts, which were preoccupied with their own merits. Now what he here calls the testament, either above, where he says, "My testament had been with Him," or here, where he has called Him the Angel of the testament, we ought, beyond a doubt, to take to be the new testament, in which the things promised are eternal, and not the old, in which they are only temporal. Yet many who are weak are troubled when they see the wicked abound in such temporal things, because they value them greatly, and serve the true God to be rewarded with them. On this account, to distinguish the eternal blessedness of the new testament, which shall be given only to the good, from the earthly felicity of the old, which for the most part is given to the bad as well, the same prophet says, "Ye have made your words burdensome to me:yet ye have said, In what have we spoken ill of Thee? Ye have said, Foolish is every one who serves God; and what profit is it that we have kept His observances, and that we have walked as suppliants before the face of the Lord Almighty? And now we call the aliens blessed; yea, all that do wicked things are built up again; yea, they are opposed to God and are saved. They that feared the Lord uttered these reproaches every one to his neighbor:and the Lord hearkened and heard; and He wrote a book of remembrance before Him, for them that fear the Lord and that revere His name. " [1209]By that book is meant the New Testament. Finally, let us hear what follows:"And they shall be an acquisition for me, saith the Lord Almighty, in the day which I make; and I will choose them as a man chooseth his son that serveth him. And ye shall return, and shall discern between the just and the unjust, and between him that serveth God and him that serveth Him not. For, behold, the day cometh burning as an oven, and it shall burn them up; and all the aliens and all that do wickedly shall be stubble:and the day that shall come will set them on fire, saith the Lord Almighty, and shall leave neither root nor branch. And unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of Righteousness arise, and health shall be in His wings; and ye shall go forth, and exult as calves let loose from bonds. And ye shall tread down the wicked, and they shall be ashes under your feet, in the day in which I shall do [this], saith the Lord Almighty.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  Elinor could not find herself in the carriage with Mrs. Jennings, and beginning a journey to London under her protection, and as her guest, without wondering at her own situation, so short had their acquaintance with that lady been, so wholly unsuited were they in age and disposition, and so many had been her objections against such a measure only a few days before! But these objections had all, with that happy ardour of youth which Marianne and her mother equally shared, been overcome or overlooked; and Elinor, in spite of every occasional doubt of Willoughby’s constancy, could not witness the rapture of delightful expectation which filled the whole soul and beamed in the eyes of Marianne, without feeling how blank was her own prospect, how cheerless her own state of mind in the comparison, and how gladly she would engage in the solicitude of Marianne’s situation to have the same animating object in view, the same possibility of hope. A short, a very short time however must now decide what Willoughby’s intentions were; in all probability he was already in town. Marianne’s eagerness to be gone declared her dependence on finding him there; and Elinor was resolved not only upon gaining every new light as to his character which her own observation or the intelligence of others could give her, but likewise upon watching his behaviour to her sister with such zealous attention, as to ascertain what he was and what he meant, before many meetings had taken place. Should the result of her observations be unfavourable, she was determined at all events to open the eyes of her sister; should it be otherwise, her exertions would be of a different nature—she must then learn to avoid every selfish comparison, and banish every regret which might lessen her satisfaction in the happiness of Marianne.