Fear

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 American Religious History (2001)

  Scope: The first large Jewish migration to America came from Germany in the mid-19th century, comprising people who belonged to the Reform tradition and were already well assimilated to modern urban life in a predominantly Christian society. They established synagogues that were outwardly similar to Protestant churches and some even switched their Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. The second wave of migration, by contrast, came from Orthodox communities in eastern Europe and Russia, most of which lived by farming in the Jewish “Pale” of settlement, had suffered bouts of severe persecution, had fled from pogroms, and had had little contact with the outside world. The impact of their migration to New York and other industrial cities was immense; they found it difficult to preserve the distinctive characteristics of their faith while adapting to new economic and social realities. The Conservative movement of the 1880s and after was a creative Jewish response to life in the United States, a way of remaining culturally and religiously distinct without making daily life in America too difficult. Many Jews, however, substituted socialism or Zionism for their old religious faith. Outline I. In numerous ways, American Jews’ way of life marked them out as distinct from the predominantly Christian community. A. They had an unbroken historic tradition dating back several thousand years. 1. A conception of God acting in history. 2. No other biblical peoples could be found in 19th-century America. B. They had suffered centuries of persecution at the hands of Christians who regarded them as the killers of Christ. A sense of being God’s chosen people helped to preserve them in the face of persecution. C. From Friday night to Saturday night was the Jewish Sabbath. ©2001 The Teaching Company. 62

• From American Religious History (2001)

  II. Despite numerous internal differences, most North American Indians’ religions shared several characteristics. A. They believed in a powerful and benign “Great Spirit” and a powerful evil spirit or devil. 1. Techauretanego built sweat lodges, where he prayed to the Great Spirit for protection and health. 2. Cabeza de Vaca heard about the visits of “Evil Thing.” B. They also believed in lesser spirits, inhabiting animals, rivers, the Sun, the wind, the trees, and fire. 1. A Narragansett Indian explained to Roger Williams that fire must be a god because of its life-giving character. 2. Father Paul LeJeune described Indians’ faith in animal spirits’ dream visits to sleeping hunters. C. Everyday activities were surrounded by rituals, which were designed to propitiate and win favor from the spirits. 1. Alexander Henry, an English hunter who helped a group of Iroquois kill a bear, watched the women apologizing to it and blowing tobacco smoke into its nostrils. 2. A Montagnais Indian explained to Father LeJeune that the spirit of a beaver visits the cabin of the man who killed it to ensure respectful treatment of its remains. 3. Lewis and Clark witnessed a sex ritual designed to win favor from buffalo spirits. D. Native Americans understood suffering in a religious context. Their religious rituals, to mark stages in the life cycle, often involved induced hunger or pain; artist George Catlin witnessed self-torturing ceremonies among the Mandans and Sioux on the Great Plains. E. They believed in an afterlife. 1. Canadian Indians reasoned with Jesuit Father Joseph Jouvency that hell could not be a place of perpetual fire, because there was not enough firewood. 2. A Huron woman warned her husband not to convert to Christianity, because if he went to the Christian heaven, he would find only Frenchmen there and would miss his friends and relatives. ©2001 The Teaching Company. 14

• From The City of God

  But the philosopher availed himself of the reply of Aristippus the Socratic, who, on finding himself similarly bantered by a man of the same character, answered, "You had no cause for anxiety for the soul of a profligate debauchee, but I had reason to be alarmed for the soul of Aristippus. " The rich man being thus disposed of, Aulus Gellius asked the philosopher, in the interests of science and not to annoy him, what was the reason of his fear? And he willing to instruct a man so zealous in the pursuit of knowledge, at once took from his wallet a book of Epictetus the Stoic, [339] in which doctrines were advanced which precisely harmonized with those of Zeno and Chrysippus, the founders of the Stoical school. Aulus Gellius says that he read in this book that the Stoics maintain that there are certain impressions made on the soul by external objects which they call phantasiae, and that it is not in the power of the soul to determine whether or when it shall be invaded by these. When these impressions are made by alarming and formidable objects, it must needs be that they move the soul even of the wise man, so that for a little he trembles with fear, or is depressed by sadness, these impressions anticipating the work of reason and self-control; but this does not imply that the mind accepts these evil impressions, or approves or consents to them. For this consent is, they think, in a man's power; there being this difference between the mind of the wise man and that of the fool, that the fool's mind yields to these passions and consents to them, while that of the wise man, though it cannot help being invaded by them, yet retains with unshaken firmness a true and steady persuasion of those things which it ought rationally to desire or avoid. This account of what Aulus Gellius relates that he read in the book of Epictetus about the sentiments and doctrines of the Stoics I have given as well as I could, not, perhaps, with his choice language, but with greater brevity, and, I think, with greater clearness. And if this be true, then there is no difference, or next to none, between the opinion of the Stoics and that of the other philosophers regarding mental passions and perturbations, for both parties agree in maintaining that the mind and reason of the wise man are not subject to these. And perhaps what the Stoics mean by asserting this, is that the wisdom which characterizes the wise man is clouded by no error and sullied by no taint, but, with this reservation that his wisdom remains undisturbed, he is exposed to the impressions which the goods and ills of this life (or, as they prefer to call them, the advantages or disadvantages) make upon them.

• From American Religious History (2001)

  2. They tried to get favorable legal status from the proprietor. He forestalled them, ensuring lay dominance, as in Virginia. 3. They also won a steady stream of converts from among the Protestant indentured servants. 4. Their death rate from malaria, yellow fever, and other diseases was very high. D. Religious neglect was as common in Maryland as in Virginia. E. Toleration and Catholic proprietorship both ended in 1689, following the anti-Catholic Glorious Revolution. 1. Anti-Jesuit laws tried to stamp out “popery.” 2. Catholicism persisted but in private. IV. Quakers also contributed to the early religious diversity of the colonies. A. Quakerism, founded by George Fox, was the radical wing of the Puritan movement in 17th-century England. 1. Fox believed in direct divine communication with Christ through the “inner light.” 2. He visited the colonies in 1672 and made numerous converts. B. The established church feared Quakers, because they appeared to dispense with all forms of hierarchy and ministry. C. In the late 1650s, Massachusetts passed laws to exclude Quakers and hanged three offenders. D. Quaker convert William Penn founded Pennsylvania in 1682. 1. His father was an admiral and a war herohe was a pacifist. 2. His colony was meant as an inspirational example of rational planning, religious tolerance, and representative government. 3. The colony was vexed when the Quaker belief in pacifism clashed with the need to defend itself. 4. The moral and spiritual intensity of the first generation declined as Philadelphia developed a Quaker merchant aristocracy. E. Quaker John Woolman (1720–1772) was one of the first to speak out against slavery. V. A variety of other European Protestants settled in the middle colonies. A. These included Dutch Calvinists in New York; Swedes in the Delaware River valley; and German Lutherans, Moravians, and Mennonites in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. ©2001 The Teaching Company. 24 B. Thomas Dongan was amazed to discover, when he went to New York in 1683, Dutch Reformed, a few Anglicans, a few Catholics, “singing Quakers,” “ranting Quakers,” pro- and anti-Sabbatarian Baptists, French Huguenots, Congregationalists, Jewish merchants from the West Indies, and German Lutherans. VI. In retrospect, we can see the way in which these numerous groups contributed to America’s eventual religious diversity and mutual tolerance. At the time, almost no one favored diversity on principle, but circumstances eventually forced them into it. Essential Reading: Sydney Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People, vol. I, ch. 12–14. Mark Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, ch. 3. Supplementary Reading: Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, ch. 1–3. Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience, ch. 3. Questions to Consider: 1. Why were different Christian groups so resistant to the idea of religious tolerance? 2. Why were Quakers unpopular among other Christian groups? ©2001 The Teaching Company. 25 Lecture Six The Great Awakening

• From American Religious History (2001)

  II. Conservative evangelicals preserved the old belief in individual salvation through conversion. They denigrated the collective salvation idea of the Social Gospel. A. Conversion was central to the ministry of evangelist Dwight Moody (1837–1899). 1. Moody abandoned social work when he concluded that it distracted his listeners from the gospel. 2. He believed the world was deteriorating and that he must try to save a remnant from the coming catastrophe. 3. He established Bible conferences and an institute at Northfield, Massachusetts. B. Moody’s successor as leading evangelist was Billy Sunday (1862–1935). 1. Sunday, an orphan, had a first career as a professional baseball player. 2. He used baseball metaphors in his entertaining sermons. 3. He drew vivid verbal pictures to distinguish right from wrong and mixed faith with patriotism. C. Not all evangelicals turned away from social work. The Salvation Army specialized in charitable work and in “rescuing” sinners from working-class places of entertainment. 1. Its members set Christian words to popular songs. 2. Its uniforms, brass bands, and pseudo-military drill gave members a sense of pride, purpose, and unity. 3. It developed out of the Holiness movement. III. Many American evangelicals interpreted the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation to mean that Christ’s Second Coming was imminent. A. Dispensational premillennialists denied human perfectibility and awaited the rapture. 1. John Nelson Darby, from Britain, popularized his method of scriptural interpretation in America. 2. “Dispensations” were eras in the earth’s history, each of which ended in catastrophe. 3. The theory offered an explanation for the worrying transformation of society. B. Elaborate diagrams were necessary to chart the connections between historical events and biblical predictions. ©2001 The Teaching Company. 67

• From American Religious History (2001)

  II. Many slaves in the north were liberated during and after the Revolution. A. Revolutionaries’ denunciation of the British for “enslaving” them clashed against their own enslavement of African Americans. B. The rapidly growing Baptist and Methodist denominations were distinctly anti-slavery in the late 18th century. 1. Harry Hosier, a black preacher, traveled and preached with Francis Asbury. 2. Another black preacher, “Uncle Jack,” was bought out of slavery by admiring whites in his Virginia parish. C. The emotionalism of the Second Great Awakening was compatible with the emotionalism of African dance and musical traditions. D. The straightforwardness of Methodist preaching was also an attraction. Emphasis on an inner, personal experience made illiteracy no bar to conversion. E. Racial prejudice persisted, however, and prompted black separation. 1. Richard Allen founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1814. 2. Whites destroyed the African Methodist Church in Charleston after the Denmark Vesey rebellion in 1822. III. About 90 percent of all African Americans were slaves before the Civil War. A. Southern states’ slave codes tried to prevent black literacy, so black Christianity was largely oral. B. Its informal theology treated the earth as a place of suffering and heaven, across the “Jordan,” as a place of rest and reward. C. Slaves often attended their masters’ churches but held separate religious meetings of their own in brush arbors or slave quarters. They risked punishments for holding such meetings. D. Folk religious traditions, possibl y of African origin, persisted. 1. Many slaves believed in ghosts and haunting. 2. Conjuring, with the use of magical objects, potions, and powders, offered the hope of exemption from punishment or attraction to members of the opposite sex. ©2001 The Teaching Company. 48

• From American Religious History (2001)

  Essential Reading: Spencer Klaw, The Life and Death of the Oneida Community. Richard and Joan Ostling, Mormon America: The Power and the Promise. ©2001 The Teaching Company. 41 Supplementary Reading: Richard Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Origins of Mormonism. Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition. Questions to Consider: 1. Why were many people so strongly attracted to the new Mormon faith while others reacted violently against it? 2. How do persecution and migration influence religious groups? ©2001 The Teaching Company. 42 Lecture Ten Catholicism Scope: Maryland had been founded as a Catholic colony in the 1630s, but religious toleration for Catholics had ended in the Glorious Revolution in 1690. Only a tiny minority of English Catholics had remained in the colony, though one, Charles Carroll, signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. A flow of Irish Catholics began arriving in America in the 1820s and 1830s in search of work. In 1846, however, the flow became a flood, when Catholic Ireland suffered a catastrophic crop failure and famine. Tens of thousands arrived in Boston, New York, Montreal, and Philadelphia, exhausted, starving, and often suffering from hunger- related infectious diseases. Protestants in America’s eastern cities hated and feared the Catholic Irish. The history of the years 1830–1860 was punctuated by bitter anti-Catholic polemics, allegations of sexual orgies between priests and nuns, and convent burnings and street warfare in Boston and Philadelphia. Catholic leaders, such as Archbishop John Hughes of New York, fought back and insisted that Catholics, despite their religious loyalty to the pope, could also be loyal citizens of a democratic America. Outline I. The Catholic population at the time of the Revolution, mainly of English descent, was small and reticent. A. Charles Carroll was the only Catholic signatory of the Declaration of Independence. B. John Carroll, his brother, became the first Catholic bishop in America. C. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 brought a French Catholic population into the nation. II. A steady flow of Irish immigration in the 1820s and 1830s turned into a flood after the 1846 potato blight and famine. A. Refugee Irish immigrants arrived hungry and often sick. ©2001 The Teaching Company. 43

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  But none present is free of stain. That devil, those past sins, and that past life follow every member of the assembly. No one there could think she or he has lived free and easy, at peace with the world. Hope, the inseparable twin brother of fear, is the best they can manage: hope for a better life, but a better life to be found only on the other side—of death. Victory—over temptation, over the devil, over death—turns out to be a key word this day because almost an hour later, as the speaker is finishing, he reminds those assembled that today’s gathering is meant to recall the virtues of a “witness” (he uses the relatively unfamiliar Greek word martyr) named Vincent (“the Winner” is how that name would have translated to a Latin-speaking audience) who had been killed some decades earlier by the Roman authorities. His story, a predictable tale of bright virtue resisting dark power, had probably been read aloud a little earlier and still lingered in the audience’s mind. Because he has shared this and other stories and tried to make them throw light on the contemporary life of this tedious North African town, the audience can go away thinking of themselves in ways that would puzzle many of their neighbors. The stories this man tells let the congregants rewrite themselves into other roles, with improbable hopes and unexpected responsibilities and pitfalls. If they can believe his interpretations of the stories, they would indeed be citizens of a great invisible city that differed in many ways from their ordinary condition. When the speaker finishes, there is more stirring and speaking in front of the hall. A few minutes later, some in the audience are asked to leave, for they have not been fully admitted to membership in this fellowship. When they are gone, still more talking and doing and some singing follow, in which the speaker plays a central part. Eventually bread and wine are distributed, and after one last song the group finally disbands, having spent perhaps two hours together. Within the walls of this place, the speaker is in command, uncontested. But as soon as his audience disbands, they enter a world where his authority is more problematic. Some of them have their doubts about what they have just heard, seen, and done. But for today, they made the choice to be there. As they scatter, some pass a similar hall not far down the street, where a larger audience has been doing similar things at the same hour. A few biting remarks are probably exchanged as the groups brush past one another, and the tension in the air marks a contest for authority between the two camps.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  In the course of that account, spread out over two sermons given in the late 420s, Augustine told the story of his own coming to Hippo:23 I came to this city a young man, as many of you know. I was looking for a place to set up a monastery and dwell with my brothers. I had left behind all worldly hopes and did not want to be the thing I could be [a country gentleman], but neither did I imagine being what I am [a bishop]. I chose to be lowly in the house of my god, rather than to dwell in the tents of sinners. I set myself apart from those who love the world, but I didn’t think myself the equal of those who govern others. Nor did I choose a better seat at the master’s banquet for myself, but a worse and a lowly one. And it pleased him to say to me, “Go up higher.” I was so afraid of the bishop’s job that, because my reputation had begun to be of some weight among god’s servants, I didn’t go anyplace where I knew there was no bishop. I took care about this and did whatever I could to make sure I could be saved in a humble setting, not endangered on high. But, as I said, the slave should not contradict his master. I came to this city to see a friend I thought I could win for god, to get him to be with us in the monastery.24 I was careless, because the place had a bishop. They grabbed me and made me a priest,25 and from there a bishop.26 I didn’t bring anything with me and I didn’t come to this church with anything but the clothes on my back. And because I had set my mind on being in a monastery with my brothers, when he found out my intention and my wish, the aged bishop Valerius of happy memory gave me the garden where the monastery is now. I began to gather brothers of sound purpose, my peers, who had nothing, just as I had nothing, and who were just like me. Just as I had sold off my poor little bit of property and given it to the poor, they would do likewise if they wanted to live with me, so we would live in a community. The great and fertile property that was common to us was god himself. So I became a bishop. I saw it was necessary for a bishop to show attentive hospitality to all who came or passed by. If a bishop didn’t do that, he would be thought inhumane. But it would have been unseemly to allow this in a monastery. So I decided to have a monastic community of clerics with me here in the bishop’s house.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  This way of imagining the divine nature made both possible and necessary the further struggle for encounter with the incarnate word of god that came to a completion in the famous garden scene in the eighth book of the Confessions. But a seeker who does not share Augustine’s questions and anxieties is unlikely to come to the same conception of god. For Augustine’s god is a silent god. Though god is everywhere, though god watches over and cares for humankind, though god hears human prayers, the response is, to every mortal ear, silence. For a god whose mediator to humankind was the incarnate word, silence is remarkable. The incarnate word of the liturgy and the superabundance of divine words in scripture make up for that silence as best can be, but the silence is still deafening. What does this god come to in the end? Imagine yourself a fourth-century “pagan,” imprudently cast in Augustine’s way some afternoon, and challenging him to defend his novel religious ideas. You will suggest to him, as Symmachus had proclaimed in his speech on the altar of Victory in 384, “One does not approach so great a mystery by a single path.”587 (Augustine himself might have been open to such argument in his youth, and said something similar himself that he later regretted.588) You—still a “pagan”—think yourself tolerant, broad-minded in your acceptance of many cults, though in practice you are probably quite snobbish about preferring your own, and curiously disdainful about the excesses of others, perhaps even downright hostile to some. Augustine speaks to you of the unity and spirituality of his god, his ubiquity, and his timelessness, and thus of a god who is not the exclusive property of anyone, who forms no closed community, no sect, no cult, but (and this would be jarring) who is accessible to one and all. “Pagan” monotheism always had something abstract about it. It was a notion about religion, but not a part of the religious experience itself. Augustine’s Christianity took philosophical monotheism to church and insisted on linking it to prayer and worship. That particularization of the universal was hard for many to follow. This god of Augustine’s could not be so powerful, so remote, so perfect without inspiring (or, perhaps better, arising out of) fear. What fears are mapped in this theology’s shadow? Mystic union and transcendence might be one ending to a line of god-thought of the kind Augustine practiced, and if his god had taken him away at about the point at which he wrote the Confessions, that is how we would remember him. But the aging Augustine remembered and lived the possibility of temptation, gained a sense of the arbitrariness of god, and came to resent and resist his own youthful optimism when Pelagius thrust it in his face.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  He spoke them aloud to his secretaries when he was forty-two years old. We mark the date as the year 397 of the common era (C.E.), but that familiar reckoning was constructed more than a century after his time by a monk named Dionysius from what is now Moldova and only became a standard of reckoning several hundred years after that. Augustine and his contemporaries knew the year 397 as the 1,150th since the founding of the city of Rome and the third year of the reign of the emperor Honorius in Milan and his brother Arcadius in Constantinople. Some people at the time noticed that 365 years, more or less, had elapsed since the crucifixion of Jesus and had various expectations of how that year might be marked. Would it bring the second coming? Augustine never seems to have thought so, but he knew the arguments and lived in a time when they found serious takers. He spoke those words in the African city of Hippo Regius, now called Annaba in Algeria. A year or so before, Augustine had become the leader of a Christian congregation there, and he lived now at the center of a troubled community. His Christians were a small group, very much aware of the bigger, more prosperous Christian community that hated them and was headquartered just down the block, and his followers were in constant danger of being swallowed up by the larger group. Augustine’s voice, and his connections in high places, ultimately would rescue his community and make it prevail over its rival, not only in Hippo but in all of Roman Africa. But no one, in 397, would have bet on such an outcome. Augustine made the Confessions because he was afraid. Not just of defeat in local church politics, but of defeat in the eyes of an overpowering master to whom he owed absolute obedience and service, the “you” who will bring rest. That “master”—Augustine addressed him as dominus, a word we are used to hearing translated as “lord”—was as demanding as any Roman slaveowner, even if at the end of the day he might be more forgiving of his slaves’ failures to live up to his expectations. To apply the word “god” to that master is to run a great risk, the commonest risk run by historians of this period, of assuming that we know just what Augustine meant. Augustine’s world still knew lots of different kinds of gods, and ardent devotees of any one of them knew perfectly well what the competition was like and perhaps even sampled other religious products from time to time. Only the highest-minded had any idea of the identity of a single divine principle crossing all religions. Augustine was not so high-minded, at least not in the years when we know him best. (By leaving the word “god” in lowercase, I hope to remind readers of this danger throughout this book.)

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  The best way I can explain how these fears are different, the one that love casts out and the other that abides in its purity forever and ever, is to think of two married women. One of them is thinking about having an adulterous affair and she takes pleasure in that wickedness, but she’s afraid she’ll be condemned by her husband. She’s afraid of her husband, but she fears him because she still loves her wickedness. For her, the presence of her husband isn’t pleasing but bothersome; and if she lives wickedly, she’s afraid her husband will come along and catch her. That’s what people are like who fear the day of judgment. Now think of another woman who loves her husband, pays him the pure embraces she owes, and stains herself with no adulterous filth: she hopes for the presence of her husband. And how are these two fears different? The first one is afraid, and so is the second. So ask them, go ahead: ask the first one if she’s afraid of her husband, and she’ll say she is. Ask the other if she’s afraid of her husband, and she’ll say she is. One expression, different ideas. Ask them why they’re afraid, and the one says, I’m afraid he’ll come home, and the other says, I’m afraid he’ll go away. The one says, I’m afraid I’ll get in trouble, and the other says, I’m afraid I’ll be left alone. So transfer this to the way Christians think and you’ll find the fear that love banishes, and the other fear that abides in its purity forever and ever. Finely done, so far, and an illuminating point. The underlying sexism is native to Augustine’s time, for the good wife’s fear that her husband will abandon her is implicitly the fear that she will be found unworthy. God might indeed abandon the Christian soul, not out of divine irresponsibility or infidelity, but in response to the error of the wifelike soul. Augustine does not know how to transcend that limit, but he can end this section of the homily in a way that still charms and reassures, perhaps more by form than by substance: So that’s it: we’re heard the two flutes singing as one. The one speaks of fear, the other speaks of fear, but the one speaks of the fear of a soul that wants to avoid damnation, and the other of a soul that fears to be abandoned. The first fear is driven away by love, but the other abides forever and ever. The undercurrent of anxiety, the anxiety that shadows every hope, cannot be missed. KEEPING THE FLOCK IN LINE

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  We do well to ask of an author, precisely at the moment when he is most in control of his material and our attention, what he is afraid of. His fears, even more than his loves, fuel the urgency for what he has to say. If, say, a person writes passionately against religion and all its works and pomps, what are we to think? Is it not at least reasonable to ask that person what frightens him about religion? Very often the most ferocious assertions we encounter are the ones that seem to have the least basis in fact, because they are the ones that have the greatest basis in fear. If I do not say this, the polemicist implicitly says, then somebody else might reasonably say not this. The most powerful force is not so much the attraction of this as the fear of not this. Of the Confessions we should ask the same question. Augustine needs to tell us his conversion story. He needs it so badly that we do him, I believe, a great favor if we allow ourselves to entertain the possibility that his conversion story is off the rails, that it consists of assertion after assertion that are not so much true as necessary, that are not so much what Augustine knows to be the case as they are what he has to say is the case in order not to face what might be otherwise. I do not mean to say that at age forty-five Augustine saw the long years of increasing loneliness, polemical isolation, and immersion in the ruthless politics of the time stretching out ahead of him. Far from it: he seems instead to have imagined that the life of the bishop could still be one of mystical contemplation of the truths of scripture, and he set about various literary projects (notably the works The Trinity and Genesis Taken Literally) to make that real. But his text speaks, when read this way, more eloquently about his future than it does about his past. Readers who sense this—and these will be readers at some remove from his religious experience—will find the real power of this text coming to the surface just as the hegemony of its author’s ideas and his church’s ideas begins to fade from memory.

• From The City of God

  In this way, too, the kingdom of Saul himself, who certainly was reprobated and rejected, was the shadow of a kingdom yet to come which should remain to eternity. For, indeed, the oil with which he was anointed, and from that chrism he is called Christ, is to be taken in a mystical sense, and is to be understood as a great mystery; which David himself venerated so much in him, that he trembled with smitten heart when, being hid in a dark cave, which Saul also entered when pressed by the necessity of nature, he had come secretly behind him and cut off a small piece of his robe, that he might be able to prove how he had spared him when he could have killed him, and might thus remove from his mind the suspicion through which he had vehemently persecuted the holy David, thinking him his enemy. Therefore he was much afraid lest he should be accused of violating so great a mystery in Saul, because he had thus meddled even his clothes. For thus it is written:"And David's heart smote him because he had taken away the skirt of his cloak. " [1028]But to the men with him, who advised him to destroy Saul thus delivered up into his hands, he saith, "The Lord forbid that I should do this thing to my lord, the Lord's christ, to lay my hand upon him, because he is the Lord's christ. "Therefore he showed so great reverence to this shadow of what was to come, not for its own sake, but for the sake of what it prefigured. Whence also that which Samuel says to Saul, "Since thou hast not kept my commandment which the Lord commanded thee, whereas now the Lord would have prepared thy kingdom over Israel for ever, yet now thy kingdom shall not continue for thee; and the Lord will seek Him a man after His own heart, and the Lord will command him to be prince over His people, because thou hast not kept that which the Lord commanded thee," [1029] is not to be taken as if God had settled that Saul himself should reign for ever, and afterwards, on his sinning, would not keep this promise; nor was He ignorant that he would sin, but He had established his kingdom that it might be a figure of the eternal kingdom. Therefore he added, "Yet now thy kingdom shall not continue for thee. "Therefore what it signified has stood and shall stand; but it shall not stand for this man, because he himself was not to reign for ever, nor his offspring; so that at least that word "for ever" might seem to be fulfilled through his posterity one to another. "And the Lord," he saith, "will seek Him a man," meaning either David or the Mediator of the New Testament, [1030] who was figured in the chrism with which David also and his offspring was anointed. But it is not as if He knew not where he was that God thus seeks Him a man, but, speaking through a man, He speaks as a man, and in this sense seeks us. For not only to God the Father, but also to His Only-begotten, who came to seek what was lost, [1031] we had been known already even so far as to be chosen in Him before the foundation of the world. [1032]"He will seek Him" therefore means, He will have His own (just as if He had said, Whom He already has known to be His own He will show to others to be His friend). Whence in Latin this word (quaerit) receives a preposition and becomes acquirit (acquires), the meaning of which is plain enough; although even without the addition of the preposition quaerere is understood as acquirere, whence gains are called quaestus.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I have an image of sipping green chartreuse from thimbled glasses, feeling it go down like race-car fuel. Are those people I knew? Then I’m driving on a flat tire that flaps and flaps in time with the wipers in the thunderstorm. The steering mechanism is pulling hard one way, and I struggle with it while the paltry defroster does little against the windshield’s inner ice. With my cold bare hand—where’d I leave my gloves?—I claw at the frost, and in a flash, the road before me splits unexpectedly. I press the brake, and the car yields to a spin. Just as I master the turn, the car stops twirling like a top and slides sideways. I see a concrete road divider sailing toward my door. In slow motion, it comes, and I feel like a corpse flipped from a catapult, flying at a castle battlement. Rain has slicked the street into black metal, and I know in one soul-destroying eye blink that my son will wake without a mother, for I’m at last about to smash into something more solid than I am. But I don’t. In some flash of molecular inversion, my car and I become ghost forms. The car passes skidding sideways right through the concrete. I sit unhurt, facing the wrong way on the river drive. I climb out in driving sleet just as a truck whooshes by, blowing its horn. I climb over the fence that edges the river, and I bend over to puke my guts up. Then I wait for the police to come arrest me. But they do not come and do not come. I move the car over onto the grass and start stumbling home. The pebbles in the wet asphalt look like scales on a snake’s back, and the road has a nasty tendency to squirm away just before I set my foot down, so a few times I stumble over a curb and sit my ass in wet grass. A mile or so on, I turn back and find my car still sitting saggily, unmolested. Next I know, I’m creaking into my suburban house as my husband pulls the door open from inside. He’s been up all night. You can get up with him and get him ready, he says. I’m sober enough by this time and gushing apologies. You should be sorry, he says. He heads up the stairs, turning back to add a sentence of a type and tone he never uses with me, and again I remember it so clearly because it was so out of character for him: You smell like a bum. Which is my moment of clarity. Not blinding flash nor drunk-tank revelation, not drinking out of a turkey’s innards, not setting myself afire, but the dull thunk of reality as my husband’s muscled calves carry him upstairs. A moment of deep self loathing makes not drinking seem your only conceivable option.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  I don’t think anybody but Kuch and Otto and me got a very good look, with the bus rocking and everybody pushing and all. It didn’t seem like anybody else did, because we were the only ones not talking about how neat it was. It turned Otto straight to stone and Kuch and I just looked back and forth at each other until Kuch finally said, “Jesus fuck, did you see those guys!” The three of us talked about it while the sun came up. It was good to talk, because then we didn’t have to think too much about it. We figured the passenger was dead from the crash for sure, and we hoped the driver had been killed then, too, or at least knocked out. It sure looked like he’d been trying to get out that window, though. When we got to Wenatchee we heard on the radio that it had been a couple air force guys on their way back to Fairchild after visiting their girlfriends in Cheney. The radio said the passenger was killed instantly, but that the driver had burned to death. Kuch and Otto both wrestled fairly well and won. If my guy hadn’t been muscle-bound and overconfident about me being just a sophomore, he probably would have beat me. I didn’t wrestle well at all. I had a real hard time shaking the whole scene from my mind, especially the head lolling back, as if to scream. To this day I can see it. On the way home we felt the bus dip when we drove over the site of the wreck. The fire had melted the asphalt and left a low place the county hasn’t filled to this day. * * * Otto prods me out of a light snooze. Mike Konigi stands resplendent before us. “Huh?” asks Mike. “Huh, huh, huh, you guys? Am I spiff city or not?” “Eat a pound, Konigi,” Otto responds. Otto, like me, is clothed in customary denim and flannel. Konigi does look okay. He’s wearing a blue double-knit blazer over a white turtleneck and gray bell-bottoms. He’s wearing a white belt. I’ll kill him if he’s wearing white shoes. I look down at his feet. Mike Konigi lives to wrestle in Montana. “You guys cultivate slobbery,” Mike says. “Munch a bunch, Konigi,” I reply. “We’re headed for a wrestling match, not the fucking Wayne Newton show at Tahoe.” “Would this stuff be okay to wear to the New Year’s dance?” Mike asks seriously. “It’d be swell,” Otto says. “Yah, it’s neat,” I concur. “What’s Carla going to wear?” Mike asks. “She’s got this long white dress,” I reply. “It’s a little more casual than a prom dress. In fact, I think it’s a nightgown. It’s got little yellow ducks on it. How about Keiko?” “A long dress, too,” Mike replies. “Who you gonna take, Otto?” “I don’t even know if I’ll go, Mike,” Otto says.

• From Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  Angels are blonds and brunets suspended in the air around his throne to be his messengers and execute his purposes. Satan is viewed as being red with the glow of fire. But the imps, the messengers of the devil, are black. The phrase “black as an imp” is a stereotype. The implications of such a view are simply fantastic in the intensity of their tragedy. Doomed on earth to a fixed and unremitting status of inferiority, of which segregation is symbolic, and at the same time cut off from the hope that the Creator intended it otherwise, those who are thus victimized are stripped of all social protection. It is vicious and thoroughly despicable to rationalize this position, the product of a fear that is as sordid as it is unscrupulous, into acceptance. Under such circumstances there is but a step from being despised to despising oneself. The fear that segregation inspires among the weak in turn breeds fear among the strong and the dominant. This fear insulates the conscience against a sense of wrongdoing in carrying out a policy of segregation. For it counsels that if there were no segregation, there would be no protection against invasion of the home, the church, the school. This fear perpetuates the Jewish ghettos in Western civilization, the restrictive covenants in California and other states, the Chinatowns, the Little Tokyos, and the Street of the Untouchables in Hindu lands.1 The Jewish community has long been acquainted with segregation and the persecution growing out of it. Jews have been all the more easily trapped by it because of the deep historical conviction that they are a chosen people. This conviction and its underscoring in the unique ethical insights of the prophets have tended to make all those who were not a part of Israel feel in some sense as if they were spiritual outcasts. The conscious and unconscious reaction inspired by this sense of being on the outside is a fertile seedbed for anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is a confession of a deep sense of inferiority and moral insecurity. It is the fear of the socially or politically strong in the presence of the threat of moral judgment implicit in the role of the Jewish community throughout human history. Jesus was intimately acquainted with this problem from the inside. Jesus knew all of this. His days were nurtured in great hostilities Focused upon his kind, the sons of Israel. There was no moment in all his years When he was free.2 It is instructive to inquire into the effects of fear on the disadvantaged. Fear becomes acute, in the form of panic or rage, only at the moment when what has been threat becomes actual violence; but the mere anticipation of such an encounter is overwhelming simply because the odds are basically uneven. This fact is important to hold in mind.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  No worries, the other guy says. It’s true that Warren’s former teacher Robert Lowell wrote of himself among the blue-blooded “Mayflower screwballs” here in Bow-ditch Hall. I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey before the metal shaving mirrors, and see the shaky future grow familiar in the pinched indigenous faces of these thoroughbred mental cases… We reach a metal door, gray as a slab, and one guy draws a heavy ring of keys from his belt. Without warning, I think of my son. The image comes unprompted and hits me like a linebacker’s tackle, with the force of Old Testament thunder that all but knocks the wind out of me. If I were right in the head, I’d at that instant be bathing him, gathering his slippery body from the suds, rubbing his head hard with a towel. I could pause to bury my face in his buttery neck. I could ponder Warren making the bed as Dev bounced naked on it, his sturdy body flying under the flapping mainsail of our king-size sheets. How Warren would bundle him up like a ghost and wrestle him down and let him escape—the pure loving ritual of all that I’ve walked away from. The attendant slides the key into first one heavy metal door, then another. Each man holds one open for me, and it’s all I can do to keep from buckling in half, folding up like a lawn chair . But my legs obediently carry me into the metal stairwell. I hear the deadbolts twist behind, and a clawed panic starts scrabbling through me. We face a final door whose long glass window is embedded with chicken wire. Through it, I see people move as in slow motion. The door swings open, and their heads turn curiously to stare at me, and stepping onto the ward, I smell piss. Piss is the territorial marking of the predatory animal. It also signals the uncontrolled release of fear in terrorized prey. I know people pissing in hospital corridors is frowned on and must be quickly mopped up. But the smell persists anyway, and as I enter that urinous climate, the kernel of fear I’d kept buried in my center cracks through its shellac casing. Terror begins to sprout its black ivy up my spine and down along the insides of my arms. I become very small then, telescoping down in some inner tunnel as the world shrinks and gets far away. And pumping through me like methamphetamine is the screaming message that I’ve lost Dev, lost Dev, lost Dev … I sit woodenly before the next intake nurse, water coursing down my mask face. She has an open face—Italian, maybe—round as a skillet. And she’s tiny. She could be in fourth grade, except for being pregnant enough to use her belly as an armrest. By the time she asks, Did you have a plan? , I’ve already told so many strangers, I forget to be embarrassed.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  Stuff like that scares me even in the movies and it was twice as scary in real life, especially coming so fast out of a situation where everything had been peaceful and fun. Leeland got up to stop the guy and the guy took a swipe at him. Then Elmo got up and the guy took a swipe at him. Then Tanneran picked up one of those round-bottomed wine bottles they use for candle holders and coldcocked the guy. It wasn’t funny. The bottle broke and the guy went down like he was dead. Gene went back to his ribs and Elmo dragged the guy outside. I was grateful to Gene, but since then I’ve been a little afraid of him. He got so mean so fast, and then he was so normal again. I still like the guy a lot and I admire him, but I’m not too anxious to talk to him about Carla. Elmo says, “You are my mainest man.” The dinner orders have started to come in. Sally, the cashier, hands me the slips. Number 611 is on top. Crab Newburg, tea, lemon pie. He’s still here. I give the slips to Elmo and he hands me my solitary burger. I have no control—it’s gone in two bites. Christ, I’m hungry! I fight it with a book of fiction. I read quite a bit. This may be why I’ve done pretty well in school so far. There may be a correlation between reading a lot and appearing to know things. Downstairs in the employees’ bathroom, along with my secondhand copy of Gray’s Anatomy , I’ve stashed The Confessions of Nat Turner . At home in the downstairs bathroom I keep Pathology , a gigantic book by a physician named Robbins. When I’m tired of reading it I balance it on my head to strengthen my neck. Upstairs at home I keep Upjohn’s Manual on Nutrition . I don’t use the upstairs bathroom that much, and I’ll go with Adelle Davis on the subject of nutrition, at least until I’m something other than a layman in the field. Next to messing around in the woods up along the Columbia where Dad grew up, I’d have to say that learning about the human body is the thing that interests me most. Next comes the human mind, I guess, or the human heart—whatever it is that makes us act the way we do. I love reading and watching movies and talking with my friends, even standing with a tray of dirty dishes and eavesdropping on the guests at the hotel, gossiping over their dessert. Wrestling combines these things for me. After I first thought seriously about a profession I decided I’d become an exobiologist. I was going to be one right up until the start of this season.

• From Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  After his temptation in the wilderness Jesus appeared in the synagogue and was asked to read the lesson. He chose to read from the prophet Isaiah the words which he declared as his fulfillment: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me… to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord. And he closed the book…. And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears. In the Song of Mary we find words which anticipate the same declaration of Jesus: He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away. The most specific statement which Jesus makes dealing with the crux of the problem is found in the tenth chapter of Matthew: Fear them not therefore: for there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known…. And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows. Again in Luke: Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. In the great expression of affirmation and faith found in the Sermon on the Mount there appears in clearest outline the basis of his positive answer to the awful fact of fear and its twin sons of thunder—anxiety and despair: Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?