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.

Page 285 of 529 · 20 per page

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Both Koroviev and Behemoth spread their arms, raised their eyes to heaven, and Behemoth cried out: ‘I can’t conceive why! We were sitting there peacefully, perfectly quiet, having a bite to eat . . .’ ‘And suddenly—bang, bang!’ Koroviev picked up, ‘gunshots! Crazed with fear, Behemoth and I ran out to the boulevard, our pursuers followed, we rushed to Timiriazev! . . .’ 2 ‘But the sense of duty,’ Behemoth put in, ‘overcame our shameful fear and we went back.’ ‘Ah, you went back?’ said Woland. ‘Well, then of course the building was reduced to ashes.’ ‘To ashes!’ Koroviev ruefully confirmed, ‘that is, Messire, literally to ashes, as you were pleased to put it so aptly. Nothing but embers!’ ‘I hastened,’ Behemoth narrated, ‘to the meeting room, the one with the columns, Messire, hoping to bring out something valuable. Ah, Messire, my wife, if only I had one, was twenty times in danger of being left a widow! But happily, Messire, I’m not married, and, let me tell you, I’m really happy that I’m not. Ah, Messire, how can one trade a bachelor’s freedom for the burdensome yoke . . .’ ‘Again some gibberish gets going,’ observed Woland. ‘I hear and continue,’ the cat replied. ‘Yes, sir, this landscape here! It was impossible to bring anything more out of the meeting room, the flames were beating in my face. I ran to the pantry and rescued the salmon. I ran to the kitchen and rescued the smock. I think, Messire, that I did everything I could, and I don’t understand how to explain the sceptical expression on your face.’ ‘And what did Koroviev do while you were looting?’ asked Woland. ‘I was helping the firemen, Messire,’ replied Koroviev, pointing to his torn trousers. ‘Ah, if so, then of course a new building will have to be built.’ ‘It will be built, Messire,’ Koroviev responded, ‘I venture to assure you of that.’ ‘Well, so it remains for us to wish that it be better than the old one,’ observed Woland. ‘It will be, Messire,’ said Koroviev. ‘You can believe me,’ the cat added, ‘I’m a regular prophet.’ ‘In any case, we’re here, Messire,’ Koroviev reported, ‘and await your orders.’ Woland got up from his stool, went over to the balustrade, and alone, silently, his back turned to his retinue, gazed into the distance for a long time. Then he stepped away from the edge, lowered himself on to his stool, and said: ‘There will be no orders, you have fulfilled all you could, and for the moment I no longer need your services.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  The patient, in the meantime, stared through me for a very long time. Then turning sideways so she would not see me directly, she explained why she was in St. Elizabeths. Her parents, she said, had put a pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The red balls told her when she should laugh, the blue ones when she should be silent and keep away from other people; the green balls told her that she should start multiplying by three. Every few days a silver ball would make its way through the pins of the machine. At this point her head turned and she stared at me; I assumed she was checking to see if I was still listening. I was, of course. How could one not? The whole thing was bizarre but riveting. I asked her, What does the silver ball mean? She looked at me intently, and then everything went dead in her eyes. She stared off into space, caught up in some internal world. I never found out what the silver ball meant. Although fascinated, I was primarily frightened by the strangeness of the patients, as well as by the perceptible level of terror in the room; even stronger than the terror, however, were the expressions of pain in the eyes of the women. Some part of me instinctively reached out, and in an odd way understood this pain, never imagining that I would someday look in the mirror and see their sadness and insanity in my own eyes.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  On Sadovaya, on Sadovaya! . . .’ Boba lowered his voice still more, ‘bullets have no effect! . . . bullets . . . bullets . . . benzene . . . fire . . . bullets . . .’ ‘It’s the liars that spread these vile rumours,’ Madame Petrakov boomed in a contralto voice, somewhat louder in her indignation than Boba would have liked, ‘they’re the ones who ought to be explained! Well, never mind, that’s how it will be, they’ll be called to order! Such pernicious lies!’ ‘Why lies, Antonida Porfirievna!’ exclaimed Boba, upset by the disbelief of the writer’s wife, and again began spinning: ‘I tell you, bullets have no effect! . . . And then the fire . . . they went up in the air . . . in the air!’ Boba went on hissing, not suspecting that those he was talking about were sitting next to him, delighting in his yarn. However, this delight soon ceased: from an inner passage of the restaurant three men, their waists drawn in tightly by belts, wearing leggings and holding revolvers in their hands, strode precipitously on to the veranda. The one in front cried ringingly and terribly: ‘Don’t move!’ And at once all three opened fire on the veranda, aiming at the heads of Koroviev and Behemoth. The two objects of the shooting instantly melted into air, and a pillar of fire spurted from the primus directly into the awning. It was as if a gaping maw with black edges appeared in the awning and began spreading in all directions. The fire leaping through it rose up to the roof of Griboedov House. Folders full of papers lying on the window-sill of the editorial office on the second floor suddenly blazed up, followed by the curtains, and now the fire, howling as if someone were blowing on it, went on in pillars to the interior of the aunt’s house. A few seconds later, down the asphalt paths leading to the cast-iron fence on the boulevard, whence Ivanushka, the first herald of the disaster, understood by no one, had come on Wednesday evening, various writers, Sofya Pavlovna, Boba, Petrakov’s wife and Petrakov, now went running, leaving their dinners unfinished. Having stepped out through a side entrance beforehand, not fleeing or hurrying anywhere, like a captain who must be the last to leave his burning brig, Archibald Archibaldovich stood calmly in his summer coat with silk lining, the two balyk logs under his arm. CHAPTER 29: The Fate of the Master and Margarita Is Decided, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA CHAPTER 29 The Fate of the Master and Margarita Is Decided At sunset, high over the city, on the stone terrace of one of the most beautiful houses in Moscow, a house built about a hundred and fifty years ago, there were two: Woland and Azazello.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Fear and rage swam and flitted in his eyes. The narrator pointed his hand somewhere in the direction of the moon, which had long since left the balcony. Only when all sounds from outside ceased to reach them did the guest move away from Ivan and begin to speak more loudly: ‘Yes, and so in mid-January, at night, in the same coat but with the buttons torn off, 5 I was huddled with cold in my little yard. Behind me were snowdrifts that hid the lilac bushes, and before me and below—my little windows, dimly lit, covered with shades. I bent down to the first of them and listened—a gramophone was playing in my rooms. That was all I heard, but I could not see anything. I stood there a while, then went out the gate to the lane. A blizzard was frolicking in it. A dog, dashing under my feet, frightened me, and I ran away from it to the other side. The cold, and the fear that had become my constant companion, were driving me to frenzy. I had nowhere to go, and the simplest thing, of course, would have been to throw myself under a tram-car on the street where my lane came out. From far off I could see those light-filled, ice-covered boxes and hear their loathsome screeching in the frost. But, my dear neighbour, the whole thing was that fear possessed every cell of my body. And, just as I was afraid of the dog, so I was afraid of the tram-car. Yes, there is no illness in this place worse than mine, I assure you!’ ‘But you could have let her know,’ said Ivan, sympathizing with the poor patient. ‘Besides, she has your money. She did keep it, of course?’ ‘You needn’t doubt that, of course she kept it. But you evidently don’t understand me. Or, rather, I’ve lost the ability I once had for describing things. However, I’m not very sorry about that, since I no longer have any use for it. Before her,’ the guest reverently looked out at the darkness of the night, ‘there would lie a letter from a madhouse. How can one send letters from such an address . . . a mental patient? . . . You’re joking, my friend! Make her unhappy? No, I’m not capable of that.’ Ivan was unable to object to this, but the silent Ivan sympathized with the guest, he commiserated with him. And the other, from the pain of his memories, nodded his head in the black cap and spoke thus: ‘Poor woman . . . However, I have hopes that she has forgotten me . . .’ ‘But you may recover . . .’ Ivan said timidly. ‘I am incurable,’ the guest replied calmly. ‘When Stravinsky says he will bring me back to life, I don’t believe him.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  What a theatrical show the sea puts on, with its shifting colors like veils—green (but many shades of green), or purple, or heaven-reflecting blue; and this show is more enthralling in a storm, a sight sweet to behold far off—but not to experience as a tossed and battered passenger (CG 22.24). Mountains were symbols of God and his saints for Augustine. The sea was an image of death. When a Christian convert went down into the pool of baptism, he was dying into Christ, to be resurrected on the other side. Sailing the Mediterranean with Una and Godsend in 383 was going down into death, with little promise of life on the other side. The Rome they reached was no longer the center of empire, even for the West. Now the center was wherever the emperor was (in 383, in Milan). But just because real power was gone, its simulacra were devotedly propped up—the old pagan apparatus of senators and offices and storied families. As Augustine would later wryly put it: “The Church extends throughout the world, Rome excepted” (L 36.4). Rome’s senatorial class, touchy about its empty privilege, also gaped after fools to fill up its days. Ammianus Marcellinus, the greatest historian of the time, discovered to his chagrin how quickly Rome took up and dropped people of real talent (Ammianus, History of Events 14.6.12.18). The Christian Church in Rome had to deal with this shallow society—which led to the rise of courtier-priests of the sort satirized by Saint Jerome (who was in Rome as a papal secretary when Augustine arrived, though they never met). A model for them all I can sketch for you at a stroke—this master pattern you will find repeated in others of the type: he makes sure to be up at dawn, to check the schedule of ladies he will be calling on; he ascertains the quickest routes to them, so he is all but in milady’s bedchamber before she rises—the dirty old man [senex importunus]! His mouth, rude and impudent, is weaponed with ceaseless malice. . . . Go anywhere, he is there before you. Encounter any gossip, he either made it up or made it worse. (L 22.28) One of these worldly priests was Jerome’s own patron, Pope Damasus I, whose political canniness and personal hedonism anticipated the corruption of Renaissance popes—as did the violence of his election, in which 137 combatants were killed at what is now the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Poplavsky froze. Yes, those were his little steps. ‘He’s coming down . . .’ A door one flight lower opened. The little steps ceased. A woman’s voice. The voice of the sad man—yes, it’s his voice . . . Saying something like ‘leave me alone, for Christ’s sake . . .’ Poplavsky’s ear stuck through the broken glass. This ear caught a woman’s laughter. Quick and brisk steps coming down. And now a woman’s back flashed by. This woman, carrying a green oilcloth bag, went out through the front hall to the courtyard. And the little man’s steps came anew. ‘Strange! He’s going back up to the apartment! Does it mean he’s part of the gang himself? Yes, he’s going back. They’ve opened the door again upstairs. Well, then, let’s wait a little longer . . .’ This time he did not have to wait long. The sound of the door. The little steps. The little steps cease. A desperate cry. A cat’s miaowing. The little steps, quick, pattering, down, down, down! Poplavsky had not waited in vain. Crossing himself and muttering something, the melancholy little man rushed past him, hatless, with a completely crazed face, his bald head all scratched and his trousers completely wet. He began tearing at the handle of the front door, unable in his fear to determine whether it opened out or in, managed at last, and flew out into the sun in the courtyard. The testing of the apartment had been performed. Thinking no more either of the deceased nephew or of the apartment, shuddering at the thought of the danger he had been in, Maximilian Andreevich, whispering only the three words ‘It’s all clear, it’s all clear!’, ran out to the courtyard. A few minutes later the bus was carrying the industrial economist in the direction of the Kiev station. As for the tiny little man, a most unpleasant story had gone on with him while the economist was sitting in the closet downstairs. The little man was barman at the Variety, and was called Andrei Fokich Sokov. While the investigation was going on in the Variety, Andrei Fokich kept himself apart from all that was happening, and only one thing could be noticed, that he became still sadder than he generally was, and, besides, that he inquired of the messenger Karpov where the visiting magician was staying. And so, after parting with the economist on the landing, the barman went up to the fifth floor and rang at apartment no. 50. The door was opened for him immediately, but the barman gave a start, backed away, and did not enter at once. This was understandable. The door had been opened by a girl who was wearing nothing but a coquettish little lacy apron and a white fichu on her head. On her feet, however, she had golden slippers.

• From Trash (1988)

  Wasn’t he running ahead of us? Someone came up behind me. Someone began to scream. My mama took my head in her hands and turned my eyes away. Jesse and I have been lovers for a year now. She tells me stories about her childhood, about her father going off each day to the university, her mother who made all her dresses, her grandmother who always smelled of dill bread and vanilla. I listen with my mouth open, not believing but wanting, aching for the fairy tale she thinks is everyone’s life. “What did your grandmother smell like?” I lie to her the way I always do, a lie stolen from a book. “Like lavender,” stomach churning over the memory of sour sweat and snuff. I realize I do not really know what lavender smells like, and I am for a moment afraid she will ask something else, some question that will betray me. But Jesse slides over to hug me, to press her face against my ear, to whisper, “How wonderful to be part of such a large family.” I hug her back and close my eyes. I cannot say a word. I was born between the older cousins and the younger, born in a pause of babies and therefore outside, always watching. Once, way before Tommy died, I was pushed out on the steps while everyone stood listening to my Cousin Barbara. Her screams went up and down in the back of the house. Cousin Cora brought buckets of bloody rags out to be burned. The other cousins all ran off to catch the sparks or poke the fire with dogwood sticks. I waited on the porch making up words to the shouts around me. I did not understand what was happening. Some of the older cousins obviously did, their strange expressions broken by stranger laughs. I had seen them helping her up the stairs while the thick blood ran down her legs. After a while the blood on the rags was thin, watery, almost pink. Cora threw them on the fire and stood motionless in the stinking smoke. Randall went by and said there’d be a baby, a hatched egg to throw out with the rags, but there wasn’t. I watched to see and there wasn’t; nothing but the blood, thinning out desperately while the house slowed down and grew quiet, hours of cries growing soft and low, moaning under the smoke. My Aunt Raylene came out on the porch and almost fell on me, not seeing me, not seeing anything at all. She beat on the post until there were knuckle-sized dents in the peeling paint, beat on that post like it could feel, cursing it and herself and every child in the yard, singing up and down, “Goddamn, goddamn that girl . . . no sense . . . goddamn!” I’ve these pictures my mama gave me—stained sepia prints of bare dirt yards, plank porches, and step after step of children—cousins, uncles, aunts; mysteries.

• From Trash (1988)

  I nodded gratefully. I could never have fought Jo if she had disagreed with me. “I told them we didn’t want them to do anything.” “Anything?” Jo’s eyes beamed into mine like searchlights. I nodded again. I pulled out the forms Mavis had given me. “We’ll have to get Jack to sign these.” Jo took the papers and looked through them. “Isn’t that the way it always is?” Her voice was sour and strained. The cigarette was still clenched between her teeth. “Isn’t that just the way it always is?” “Mama’s pissed herself,” Arlene told me when I came back from dinner. I was surprised to see her. Her hair was pushed behind her ears and her face scrubbed clean. She was sponging Mama’s hips and thighs. Mama’s face was red. Her eyes were closed. Arlene’s expression was unreadable. I picked up the towel by Mama’s feet and wiped behind Arlene’s sponge. Jo came in, dragging an extra chair. Arlene did not look up, she just shifted Mama’s left leg and carefully sponged the furry mat of Mama’s mound. “Jo talked to me.” Arlene’s voice was low. Without mascara she seemed young again, her cheeks pearly in the frosty light that outlined the bed. Behind me, Jo positioned the chair and sat down heavily. There was a pause while the two of them looked at each other. Then Mama opened her eyes, and we all turned to her. The white of her left eye was bloody and the pupil an enormous black hole. “Baby?” Mama whispered. I reached for her free hand. “Baby?” she kept whispering. “Baby?” Her voice was thin and raspy. Her thumb was working the pump, but it seemed to have lost its ability to help. Her good eye was wide and terrified. Arlene made a sound in her throat. Jo stood up. None of us said a thing. The door opened behind me. Jack’s face was pale and too close. His left hand clutched a big greasy bag. “Honey?” Jack said. “Honey?” I looked away, my throat closing up. Jo’s hands clamped down on the foot of the bed. Arlene’s hands curled into fists at her waist. I looked at her. She looked at me and then over to Jo. “Honey?” Jack said again. His voice sounded high and cracked, like a young boy too scared to believe what he was seeing. Arlene’s pupils were almost as big as Mama’s. I saw her tongue pressing her teeth, her lips pulled thin with strain. She saw me looking at her, shook her head, and stepped back from the bed. “Daddy,” she said softly. “Daddy, we have to talk.” Arlene took Jack’s arm and led him to the door. He let her take him out of the room. I looked over at Jo.

• From Trash (1988)

  I looked away. “None of us have ever much liked each other,” I said. Jo lit another cigarette and rubbed under her eyes. “You an’t that bad.” She pulled out a Kleenex, dampened it with a little of my black coffee, and wiped carefully under each eye. “Not now anyway. You were mean as a snake when you were little.” “That was you.” Jo’s hand stopped. An angry glare came into her eyes, but instead of shouting, she laughed. I hesitated and she pushed her hair back and laughed some more. “Well,” she said, “I suppose it was. Yeah.” She nodded, the laughter softening to a smile. “You just stayed gone all the time.” “Saved my life.” I laced my fingers together on the table, remembering all those interminable black nights, Jo pinching me awake and the two of us hauling Arlene into the backyard to hide behind the garage. Bleak days, shame omnipresent as fear, and by the time I was twelve, I stayed gone every minute I could. “You were the smart one.” Jo looked toward the door. I watched how her eyes focused on the jamb where his hand had rested. “You were smart, I was fast, and Arlene learned to suck ass so hard she swallowed her own soul.” I kept quiet. There was nothing to say to that. “I dreamed you killed him.” Mama’s voice was rough, shaped around the tube in her nose. “How?” I kept my voice impartial, relaxed. This was not what I wanted to talk about, but it was easier when Mama talked. I hated the hours when she just lay there staring up at the ceiling with awful anticipation on her face. “All kinds of ways.” Mama waved the hand that wasn’t strapped down for the IV. She looked over at me slyly. “You know I used to dream about it all the time. Dreamed it for years. Mostly it was you, but sometimes Jo would do it. Every once in a while it would be Arlene.” She paused, closed her eyes, and breathed for a while. “I’d wake up just terrified, but sometimes almost glad. Relieved to have it over and done, I think. Bad times I would get up and walk around awhile, remind myself what was real, what wasn’t. Listen to him snore awhile, then go make sure you girls were all right.” She looked at me with dulled eyes. I couldn’t think what to say. “Don’t do it,” she whispered. I wanted to laugh, but didn’t. I watched Mama’s shadowy face. Her expression stunned me. Her mouth was drawn up in a big painful smile, not at all sincere. “Did you want to kill him?” I turned away from the black window, expecting Jo. But it was Arlene, her eyes huge with smeared mascara. “Sure,” I told her. “Still do.” She nodded and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “But you won’t.” “Probably not.” We stood still. I waited.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  Lemoine took me up to the eighteenth floor of the southeast tower, where one can look down from the so-called belvedere at the entire urban agglomeration which has risen over the millennia from the land beneath its foundations, which is now entirely hollowed out: a pale limestone range, a kind of excrescence extending the concentric spread of its incrustations far beyond the boulevards Davout, Soult, Poniatowski, Masséna, and Kellermann, and on into the outermost periphery beyond the suburbs, which now lay in the haze of twilight. A few miles to the southeast there was a faint green mark in the even gray, with a kind of blunt cone rising from it which Lemoine identified as the monkeys’ hill in the Bois de Vincennes. Closer to hand, we saw the convoluted traffic routes on which trains and cars crawled back and forth like black beetles and caterpillars. It was strange, said Lemoine, but up here he always had the impression that life moved silently and slowly down below, that the body of the city had been infected by an obscure disease spreading underground, and I remembered, said Austerlitz, when Lemoine made this remark, the winter months of the year 1959 during which I was studying the six-volume work pointing me the way in my own research, on Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitié du XIXéme siécle, which Maxime du Camp, who had previously traveled the deserts of the Orient that are formed, as he said, from the dust of the dead, began to write around 1890, after he was inspired by an overwhelming vision on the pont Neuf, and which he finished only seven years later. From the other side of the belvedere story, said Austerlitz, you looked north over the transverse ribbon of the Seine, the Marais quarter, and the Bastille. An inky wall of stormclouds was building up above the city as it sank into shadow, and soon no more could be distinguished of its towers, palaces, and monuments than the spectral white dome of the Sacré-Coeur. We were standing only a foot behind the glass panels which reach all the way to the ground. As soon as you looked down at the light-colored promenade deck and the darker crowns of the trees emerging from it, the pull exerted by the abyss below took hold of you, forcing you to step back. Sometimes, so Lemoine told me, said Austerlitz, he felt the current of time streaming round his temples and brow when he was up here, but perhaps, he added, that is only a reflex of the awareness formed in my mind over the years of the various layers which have been superimposed on each other to form the carapace of the city. Thus, on the waste land between the marshaling yard of the gare d’ Austerlitz and the pont de Tolbiac where this Babylonian library now rises, there stood until the end of the war an extensive warehousing complex to which the Germans brought all the loot they had taken from the homes of the Jews of Paris. I believe they cleared some forty thousand apartments at that time, said Lemoine, in an operation

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  The patient, in the meantime, stared through me for a very long time. Then turning sideways so she would not see me directly, she explained why she was in St. Elizabeths. Her parents, she said, had put a pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The red balls told her when she should laugh, the blue ones when she should be silent and keep away from other people; the green balls told her that she should start multiplying by three. Every few days a silver ball would make its way through the pins of the machine. At this point her head turned and she stared at me; I assumed she was checking to see if I was still listening. I was, of course. How could one not? […] I asked her, What does the silver ball mean? She looked at me intently, and then everything went dead in her eyes. She stared off into space, caught up in some internal world. I never found out what the silver ball meant. Although fascinated, I was primarily frightened by the strangeness of the patients, as well as by the perceptible level of terror in the room; even stronger than the terror, however, were the expressions of pain in the eyes of the women. Some part of me instinctively reached out, and in an odd way understood this pain, never imagining that I would someday look in the mirror and see their sadness and insanity in my own eyes.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Don’t be nervous. And Grunya is not here, I sent her off to Voronezh. She complained you diddled her out of a vacation.’ These words were so unexpected and preposterous that Styopa decided he had not heard right. Utterly bewildered, he trotted back to the bedroom and froze on the threshold. His hair stood on end and small beads of sweat broke out on his brow. The visitor was no longer alone in the bedroom, but had company: in the second armchair sat the same type he had imagined in the front hall. Now he was clearly visible: the feathery moustache, one lens of the pince-nez gleaming, the other not there. But worse things were to be found in the bedroom: on the jeweller’s wife’s ottoman, in a casual pose, sprawled a third party—namely, a black cat of uncanny size, with a glass of vodka in one paw and a fork, on which he had managed to spear a pickled mushroom, in the other. The light, faint in the bedroom anyway, now began to grow quite dark in Styopa’s eyes. ‘This is apparently how one loses one’s mind . . .’ he thought and caught hold of the doorpost. ‘I see you’re somewhat surprised, my dearest Stepan Bogdanovich?’ Woland inquired of the teeth-chattering Styopa. ‘And yet there’s nothing to be surprised at. This is my retinue.’ Here the cat tossed off the vodka, and Styopa’s hand began to slide down the doorpost. ‘And this retinue requires room,’ Woland continued, ‘so there’s just one too many of us in the apartment. And it seems to us that this one too many is precisely you.’ ‘Theirself, theirself!’ the long checkered one sang in a goat’s voice, referring to Styopa in the plural. ‘Generally, theirself has been up to some terrible swinishness lately. Drinking, using their position to have liaisons with women, don’t do devil a thing, and can’t do anything, because they don’t know anything of what they’re supposed to do. Pulling the wool over their superiors’ eyes.’ ‘Availing hisself of a government car!’ the cat snitched, chewing a mushroom.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  53 1. Discuss the several ways in which political rule and religious freedom could come into conflict in antiquity. 2. How is the persecution of Christianity in particular made more intelligible by the peculiar character of this new cult? Questions to Consider 54 Lecture 8: Forms of Witness—martyrdom and apologetic Forms of Witness—martyrdom and apologetic Lecture 8 I n the last lecture, we discussed the persecutions experienced by Christians at the hands of both Jews and Gentiles in the first 280 years of the religion’s existence. The oppression of believers included social ostracism, the expropriation of property, economic marginalization, exile, and death. This lecture takes up the forms of witness that evolved in response to persecution: the tradition of martyrdom and the writing of apologetic literature. Each in its way was of extraordinary importance in shaping the Christian vision of the world in the 2 nd and 3 rd centuries and even beyond. A Context of Tribulation • From the perspective of Christianity’s eventual triumph, it is difficult to imagine just how problematic, even dangerous, conditions of life were for Christians in the first 280 years of the religion’s existence. • As an intentional community that drew members from both Jews and Gentiles, it was also at odds with both Jews and Gentiles, while enjoying no natural institutional source of support. o Christians withdrew from participation in the cultic life (festivals, processions, meals) that was regarded as essential for citizenship in the “city of gods and men.” They thereby marked themselves as aliens to the larger culture that demanded complete participation in such civic religion. o After the Jewish War of 67–70, in which Christians refused to participate, and after the Birkat Ha-minim, which excluded Christians from the synagogue, the Christian community no longer enjoyed the protective umbrella of Judaism. o It lacked legitimacy, approval, or any status. In the eyes of the philosopher Celsus, who wrote a devastating attack on

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  The barman drew his head down between his shoulders, making it evident that he was a poor man. ‘How much have you got in savings?’ The question was asked in a sympathetic tone, but even so such a question could not but be acknowledged as indelicate. The barman faltered. ‘Two hundred and forty-nine thousand roubles in five savings banks,’ a cracked voice responded from the neighbouring room, ‘and two hundred ten-rouble gold pieces at home under the floor.’ The barman became as if welded to his tabouret. ‘Well, of course, that’s not a great sum,’ Woland said indulgently to his visitor, ‘though, as a matter of fact, you have no need of it anyway. When are you going to die?’ Here the barman became indignant. ‘Nobody knows that and it’s nobody’s concern,’ he replied. ‘Sure nobody knows,’ the same trashy voice came from the study. ‘The binomial theorem, you might think! He’s going to die in nine months, next February, of liver cancer, in the clinic of the First Moscow State University, in ward number four.’ The barman’s face turned yellow. ‘Nine months . . .’ Woland calculated pensively. ‘Two hundred and forty-nine thousand . . . rounding it off that comes to twenty-seven thousand a month . . . Not a lot, but enough for a modest life . . . Plus those gold pieces . . .’ ‘He won’t get to realize the gold pieces,’ the same voice mixed in, turning the barman’s heart to ice. ‘On Andrei Fokich’s demise, the house will immediately be torn down, and the gold will be sent to the State Bank.’ ‘And I wouldn’t advise you to go to the clinic,’ the artiste went on. ‘What’s the sense of dying in a ward to the groans and wheezes of the hopelessly ill? Isn’t it better to give a banquet on the twenty-seven thousand, then take poison and move on to the other world to the sounds of strings, surrounded by drunken beauties and dashing friends?’ The barman sat motionless and grew very old. Dark rings surrounded his eyes, his cheeks sagged, and his lower jaw hung down. ‘However, we’ve started day-dreaming,’ exclaimed the host. ‘To business! Show me your cut-up paper.’ The barman, agitated, pulled a package from his pocket, unwrapped it, and was dumbfounded: the piece of paper contained ten-rouble bills. ‘My dear, you really are unwell,’ Woland said, shrugging his shoulders. The barman, grinning wildly, got up from the tabouret. ‘A-and . . .’ he said, stammering, ‘and if they . . . again . . . that is . . .’ ‘Hm . . .’ the artiste pondered, ‘well, then come to us again. You’re always welcome. I’m glad of our acquaintance . . .’ Straight away Koroviev came bounding from the study, clutched the barman’s hand, and began shaking it, begging Andrei Fokich to give his regards to everybody, everybody.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  53 1. Discuss the several ways in which political rule and religious freedom could come into conflict in antiquity. 2. How is the persecution of Christianity in particular made more intelligible by the peculiar character of this new cult? Questions to Consider 54 Lecture 8: Forms of Witness—martyrdom and apologetic Forms of Witness—martyrdom and apologetic Lecture 8 I n the last lecture, we discussed the persecutions experienced by Christians at the hands of both Jews and Gentiles in the first 280 years of the religion’s existence. The oppression of believers included social ostracism, the expropriation of property, economic marginalization, exile, and death. This lecture takes up the forms of witness that evolved in response to persecution: the tradition of martyrdom and the writing of apologetic literature. Each in its way was of extraordinary importance in shaping the Christian vision of the world in the 2 nd and 3rd centuries and even beyond. A Context of Tribulation • From the perspective of Christianity’s eventual triumph, it is difficult to imagine just how problematic, even dangerous, conditions of life were for Christians in the first 280 years of the religion’s existence. • As an intentional community that drew members from both Jews and Gentiles, it was also at odds with both Jews and Gentiles, while enjoying no natural institutional source of support. o Christians withdrew from participation in the cultic life (festivals, processions, meals) that was regarded as essential for citizenship in the “city of gods and men.” They thereby marked themselves as aliens to the larger culture that demanded complete participation in such civic religion. o After the Jewish War of 67–70, in which Christians refused to participate, and after the Birkat Ha-minim, which excluded Christians from the synagogue, the Christian community no longer enjoyed the protective umbrella of Judaism. o It lacked legitimacy, approval, or any status. In the eyes of the philosopher Celsus, who wrote a devastating attack on

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  In these seven golden claws 1 burned thick wax candles. Besides that, there was on the table a large chessboard with pieces of extraordinarily artful workmanship. A little low bench stood on a small, shabby rug. There was yet another table with some golden bowl and another candelabrum with branches in the form of snakes. The room smelled of sulphur and pitch. Shadows from the lights criss-crossed on the floor. Among those present Margarita immediately recognized Azazello, now dressed in a tailcoat and standing at the head of the bed. The dressed-up Azazello no longer resembled that bandit in whose form he had appeared to Margarita in the Alexandrovsky Garden, and his bow to Margarita was very gallant. A naked witch, that same Hella who had so embarrassed the respectable barman of the Variety, and—alas—the same who had so fortunately been scared off by the cock on the night of the notorious séance, sat on a rug on the floor by the bed, stirring something in a pot which gave off a sulphurous steam. Besides these, there was also a huge black tom-cat in the room, sitting on a high tabouret before the chess table, holding a chess knight in his right paw. Hella rose and bowed to Margarita. The cat, jumping off the tabouret, did likewise. Scraping with his right hind paw, he dropped the knight and crawled under the bed after it. Margarita, sinking with fear, nevertheless made all this out by the perfidious candlelight. Her eyes were drawn to the bed, on which sat he whom, still quite recently, at the Patriarch’s Ponds, poor Ivan had tried to convince that the devil does not exist. It was this non-existent one who was sitting on the bed. Two eyes were fixed on Margarita’s face. The right one with a golden spark at its bottom, drilling anyone to the bottom of his soul, and the left one empty and black, like the narrow eye of a needle, like the entrance to the bottomless well of all darkness and shadow. Woland’s face was twisted to one side, the right corner of the mouth drawn down, the high, bald forehead scored by deep wrinkles running parallel to the sharp eyebrows. The skin of Woland’s face was as if burned for all eternity by the sun. Woland, broadly sprawled on the bed, was wearing nothing but a long nightshirt, dirty and patched on the left shoulder. One bare leg was tucked under him, the other was stretched out on the little bench. It was the knee of this dark leg that Hella was rubbing with some smoking ointment. Margarita also made out on Woland’s bared, hairless chest a beetle artfully carved 2 from dark stone, on a gold chain and with some inscriptions on its back.

• From The Girls (2016)

  I lay in bed, my breath shallow as I stared at the closed door. Waiting for the intruders, the horrors I imagined taking human shape and populating the room—there would be no heroics, I understood. Just the dull terror, the physical pain that would have to be suffered through. I wouldn’t try to run. —I only got out of bed after I heard the girl. Her voice was high and innocuous. Though it shouldn’t have been comforting—Suzanne and the others had been girls, and that hadn’t helped anybody. —I was staying in a borrowed house. The dark maritime cypress packed tight outside the window, the twitch of salt air. I ate in the blunt way I had as a child—a glut of spaghetti, mossed with cheese. The nothing jump of soda in my throat. I watered Dan’s plants once a week, ferrying each one to the bathtub, running the pot under the faucet until the soil burbled with wet. More than once I’d showered with a litter of dead leaves in the tub. The inheritance that had been the leftovers of my grandmother’s movies—hours of her smiling her hawkish smile on film, her tidy cap of curls—I’d spent ten years ago. I tended to the in-between spaces of other people’s existences, working as a live-in aide. Cultivating a genteel invisibility in sexless clothes, my face blurred with the pleasant, ambiguous expression of a lawn ornament. The pleasant part was important, the magic trick of invisibility only possible when it seemed to fulfill the correct order of things. As if it were something I wanted, too. My charges were varied. A kid with special needs, frightened of electrical outlets and traffic lights. An elderly woman who watched talk shows while I counted out a saucerful of pills, the pale pink capsules like subtle candy. When my last job ended and another didn’t appear, Dan offered his vacation house—the concerned gesture of an old friend—like I was doing him a favor. The skylight filled the rooms with the hazy murk of an aquarium, the woodwork bloating and swelling in the damp. As if the house were breathing. The beach wasn’t popular. Too cold, no oysters. The single road through town was lined with trailers, built up into sprawling lots—pinwheels snapping in the wind, porches cluttered with bleached buoys and life preservers, the ornaments of humble people. Sometimes I smoked a little of the furry and pungent marijuana from my old landlord, then walked to the store in town. A task I could complete, as defined as washing a dish. It was either dirty or clean, and I welcomed those binaries, the way they shored up a day. I rarely saw anyone outside. The only teenagers in town seemed to kill themselves in gruesomely rural ways—I heard about their pickups crashing at two in the morning, the sleepover in the garage camper ending with carbon monoxide poisoning, a dead quarterback.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  The ex-choirmaster was sitting in the very place where Ivan Nikolaevich had sat just recently. Now the busybody had perched on his nose an obviously unnecessary pince-nez, in which one lens was missing altogether and the other was cracked. This made the checkered citizen even more repulsive than he had been when he showed Berlioz the way to the rails. With a chill in his heart, Ivan approached the professor and, glancing into his face, became convinced that there were not and never had been any signs of madness in that face. ‘Confess, who are you?’ Ivan asked in a hollow voice. The foreigner scowled, looked at the poet as if he were seeing him for the first time, and answered inimically: ‘No understand . . . no speak Russian . . .’ ‘The gent don’t understand,’ the choirmaster mixed in from the bench, though no one had asked him to explain the foreigner’s words. ‘Don’t pretend!’ Ivan said threateningly, and felt cold in the pit of his stomach. ‘You spoke excellent Russian just now. You’re not a German and you’re not a professor! You’re a murderer and a spy! . . . Your papers!’ Ivan cried fiercely. The mysterious professor squeamishly twisted his mouth, which was twisted to begin with, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘Citizen!’ the loathsome choirmaster butted in again. ‘What’re you doing bothering a foreign tourist? For that you’ll incur severe punishment!’ And the suspicious professor made an arrogant face, turned, and walked away from Ivan. Ivan felt himself at a loss. Breathless, he addressed the choirmaster: ‘Hey, citizen, help me to detain the criminal! It’s your duty!’ The choirmaster became extraordinarily animated, jumped up and hollered: ‘What criminal? Where is he? A foreign criminal?’ The choirmaster’s eyes sparkled gleefully. ‘That one? If he’s a criminal, the first thing to do is shout “Help!” Or else he’ll get away. Come on, together now, one, two!’—and here the choirmaster opened his maw. Totally at a loss, Ivan obeyed the trickster and shouted ‘Help!’ but the choirmaster bluffed him and did not shout anything. Ivan’s solitary, hoarse cry did not produce any good results. Two girls shied away from him, and he heard the word ‘drunk’. ‘Ah, so you’re in with him!’ Ivan cried out, waxing wroth. ‘What are you doing, jeering at me? Out of my way!’ Ivan dashed to the right, and so did the choirmaster; Ivan dashed to the left, and the scoundrel did the same. ‘Getting under my feet on purpose?’ Ivan cried, turning ferocious. ‘I’ll hand you over to the police!’ Ivan attempted to grab the blackguard by the sleeve, but missed and caught precisely nothing: it was as if the choirmaster fell through the earth.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  166 msalconocI fo taerhT eht dna malsI fo esiR ehT :32 erutceL The Qur’ān provides a vision for the ordering of society, o with legislation concerning every aspect of life; subsequent generations developed its statements and the hadith (example) of the prophet into a system of law (shariah) governing an Islamic state. Unlike the earliest stages of Christianity, therefore, Islam was, o from the beginning, prepared to provide a religious ordering to society as a whole. A tradition holds that the prophet, before his death, issued a o summons to the other empires of the world, demanding their submission to Allah. Whether or not the tradition is apocryphal, the story indicates that Islam saw a path of world dominance as grounded from the first in the ministry of the prophet. • After the prophet’s death, Arab armies spread Islam through a remarkable swath of conquest. In 633, they attacked Persia. In the same year, the churches of o Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria were lost to Christianity because of Islamic conquest. Between 634 and 637, Syria, Persia, Egypt, and Gaza were o conquered. In 639, the kingdom of Armenia was attacked and, in 694, defeated. Under this onslaught, Persia sought the aid of China in 638, o but by 641, it fell to the Arab army. Once the East was secured, the Arab forces turned westward. In rapid order, Arab armies conquered Tripoli, Cyprus, North Africa, Carthage, Algeria, and Spain. In 655, the Arab navies defeated the Byzantine fleet, and in 693, o the Arab army defeated the Byzantine army at Sebastopolis in Cilicia. Immediately after the prophet Muhammad’s death, Arab armies began the spread of Islam through conquest; their progress was halted in the West at the Battle of Tours by Charles martel, leader of the Franks and grandfather of Charlemagne. • By 715, Islam extended from the Pyrenees to China, and its ambitions did not stop there; its eyes were on the complete subordination of Europe to the rule of Allah. In 716, Lisbon was conquered by Muslim troops, and in 720, the Muslim army reached France (Narbonne). • In the West, only Charles Martel, leader of the Franks and grandfather of Charlemagne, was able to stop the Muslim progress at the Battle of Tours (or Poitiers) in 732. In the East, this aggressive religious and political threat hovered at the edge of the Byzantine Empire until the eventual collapse of Constantinople in 1453. Byzantine Christianity • In the context of the political and religious pressure exerted by Persian and Muslim incursions, Byzantine Christianity continued its struggle to seek unity within a highly fractious context shaped by continuing adherence to the Christological position known as 167 .kcotsknihT/moc.sotohP ©

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  had returned from the Schénborn Garden, as we were sitting in Vera’s flat again, that she first told me about my parents at greater length: their origins so far as she knew of them, the course of their lives, and the annihilation, within the space of only a few years, of their entire existence. Despite her dark and rather melancholy appearance, so I think Vera began, said Austerlitz, your mother Agata was a very genial, on occasion even lighthearted woman. In this she was just like her father, old Austerlitz, who owned a fez-and slipper-making factory in Sternberg which he had founded while the country was still under Austrian rule, and who had the ability of simply ignoring any unpleasantness. Once, when he was visiting this house, I heard him speak of the considerable boom in his business since Mussolini’s men had taken to wearing that semi-Oriental item of headgear the fez, saying that he could hardly manufacture and export enough of them to Italy. At the time Agata herself, secure as she felt in the recognition she had won much faster than she dared to hope in her career as an opera and operetta singer, thought that everything would turn out all right in the end, whereas Maximilian, in spite of the cheerful disposition which he shared with Agata, had been convinced ever since I knew him, said Vera, so Austerlitz told me, that the parvenus who had come to power in Germany and the corporate bodies and other human swarms endlessly proliferating under the new regime, a spectacle which inspired him, as he often said, with a sense of positive horror, had abandoned themselves from the first to a blind lust for conquest and destruction, taking its cue from the magic word thousand which the Reichskanzler, as we could all hear on the wireless, repeated constantly in his speeches. A thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand, thirty-seven thousand, two hundred and forty thousand, a thousand times a thousand, thousands upon thousands: such was the refrain he barked out in his hoarse voice, drumming into the Germans the notion that the promise of their own greatness was about to be fulfilled. Nonetheless, said Vera, Austerlitz continued, Maximilian did not in any way believe that the German people had been driven into their misfortune; rather, in his view, they had entirely re-created themselves in this perverse form, engendered by every individual’s wishful thinking and bound up with false family sentiment, and had then brought forth, as symbolic exponents of their innermost desires, so to speak, the Nazi grandees, whom Maximilian regarded without exception as muddle-headed and indolent. From time to time, so Vera recollected, said Austerlitz, Maximilian would tell the tale of how once, after a trade union meeting in Teplitz in the early summer of 1933, he had gone a little way up into the Erzgebirge, where he came upon some day trippers in a beer garden who had been buying all manner of things in a village on the German side of the border, including a new kind of boiled sweet which had, embedded in