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 Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  The one category in which that god of Augustine’s would be limited would be, ironically, in how human beings could perceive him. This utterly transcendent and supreme being lay hidden in the world to all but the most discerning eyes. Sin had so far separated people from this god (Augustine argued) that mortal sight had darkened and the “invisible things of god” (Romans 1.20) that should be intuited by all those who looked upon the things he had created were obscure to all but a few—most likely, Augustine thought, those to whom god had chosen to reveal himself. Humankind lived in a world dominated by a supreme and irresistible force that lay maddeningly just beyond its ken. When Christians assert that the divine is knowable, they have to accept that their god is at the same time obscure, difficult, and absent. Human beings facing such a god felt, not unnaturally, fear and anxiety. Throughout his life, Augustine found Christianity for himself and preached it for others as a religion in principle founded on hope, but no one is hopeful who is not also fearful. Not until the last moment of life could one say with assurance whether salvation had been achieved, whether what Augustine came to call the “gift of perseverance” had been among the gifts god had given. He could describe an old man of great piety and chastity who took up with a dancing girl as lacking this ultimate gift.337 The Augustine of the Confessions who can say that he does not know to which temptation he will next submit is the Augustine of that anxiety.338 To be sure, some of Augustine’s contemporary Christians seem to have lived with more settled expectations and a more secure hope in the future. Not surprisingly, most of them were ones to whom Augustine’s ideas about his god, and his conclusions about the implications of that god’s nature for human freedom, were at least unfamiliar and perhaps unwelcome. But the terrifying images of the last judgment from the Book of Revelation found already in Christian art of this period are reminders that some strains of Jesus’s message came through more loudly and clearly than others. If Augustine’s Christianity were unfamiliar to us, one other aspect of his teaching would strike us with a jarring note of dissonance, a doctrine that descends from, and is reinforced by, his idea of god: his notion of a “catholic” church.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  But when some delegates of James468 arrived from Jerusalem and remonstrated with him for his conduct, he timidly withdrew from fellowship with the uncircumcised followers of Christ, and thus virtually disowned them. He unwittingly again denied his Lord from the fear of man, but this time in the persons of his Gentile disciples. The inconsistency is characteristic of his impulsive temper, which made him timid or bold according to the nature of the momentary impression. It is not stated whether these delegates simply carried out the instructions of James or went beyond them. The former is more probable from what we know of him, and explains more easily the conduct of Peter, who would scarcely have been influenced by casual and unofficial visitors. They were perhaps officers in the congregation of Jerusalem; at all events men of weight, not Pharisees exactly, yet extremely conservative and cautious, and afraid of miscellaneous company, which might endanger the purity and orthodoxy of the venerable mother church of Christendom. They did, of course, not demand the circumcision of the Gentile Christians, for this would have been in direct opposition to the synodical decree, but they no doubt reminded Peter of the understanding of the Jerusalem compact concerning the duty of Jewish Christians, which he above all others should scrupulously keep. They represented to him that his conduct was at least very hasty and premature, and calculated to hinder the conversion of the Jewish nation, which was still the object of their dearest hopes and most fervent prayers. The pressure must have been very strong, for even Barnabas, who had stood side by side with Paul at Jerusalem in the defence of the rights of the Gentile Christians, was intimidated and carried away by the example of the chief of the apostles. The subsequent separation of Paul from Barnabas and Mark, which the author of Acts frankly relates, was no doubt partly connected with this manifestation of human weakness.469

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  But leave aside his religion and see him only as a figure of the western past, and he is still threatened with misunderstanding and obscurity, and he is not alone. Fundamental assumptions that he made about humankind, assumptions that undergird everything he wrote even before his religious conversion, are on the brink of a historic challenge. He is an heir and a shaper of a long tradition that takes from the Greco-Roman past assumptions about human beings and how they work. The intellectual revolution of Greek antiquity and the cultural revolution of Christian antiquity both made sense within that underlying tradition. If that tradition now gives way, ideas built on them will find the ground shifting precipitously. Whatever becomes of “soul” will determine what becomes of Augustine. Augustine writes and worries at length about the nature of the human soul because that soul is central to his understanding of himself, of humankind, and indeed of his god. If “heart” was always metaphor, “soul” was regularly insisted on as standing for something quite real. Augustine’s soul is a spiritual creature, somehow both coterminous with the body but immortal, whether destined for heaven or for hell, often torn by emotion and distraction but potentially a serene unity at the heart of human existence. Augustine knows his soul well enough to talk to621 and sees his life’s work to reside in soul management. Body will fail, so soul must be saved. Body and soul will be reunited in resurrected life, soul now to dominate body and its impulses. Augustine could never quite say exactly how this would come about. But if there is no soul? If there is no soul substitute called “mind” or “personality”? Contemporary cognitive science challenges our deepest western assumptions about human beings and what they are. Attempt after attempt to locate a mental or spiritual unity in some convincing relation with the brain and body of a mortal human fails, fails increasingly often in our times, to be replaced by a series of competing hypotheses about the loosely coupled functioning of multiple systems distributed throughout the body. Deeply held personal, political, philosophical, social, and religious ideas depend on the view of the human person that they share. Roughly, we all know the broad western view that there exists something spiritual that we might as well call a soul, something that accompanies humankind through life, explains our differences from the animal kingdom, is the locus of solace and grief, love and hate, lust and abashment, and is the object of whatever hopes for a life beyond the visible and the mortal that we may still cherish.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  The rival bishop of Hippo when Augustine arrived was Proculeianus. Early on, Augustine tried to engage him in public disputation, and Proculeianus professed through intermediaries to be willing, but the promised engagement never came to pass.408 Macrobius succeeded Proculeianus, then fell afoul of an anti-Donatist purge of 405 and lived on the lam for four years, returning around 409 in a swarm of circumcellions bellowing their customary chant, “Deo laudes!” (“God be praised!”). But in a day or so, Macrobius turned on them and rebuked their excesses (through an interpreter who spoke their native Punic), and they left town as quickly as they had come. Augustine wants to appear brave about it all, but at the same time he lets us sense that such bands of rabble were a threat to his own faction and to the public order.409 It was surely an unsettling moment, and Augustine makes the most of it: slaves threatening their masters and running away, Donatist congregations retaking the basilicas that had been seized from them in 405, with the Donatist clergy washing down the floors with salt water to purify them of Caecilianist taint.410 But these reverses led to the approach to imperial power that, in turn, led to the final conflict of 411 and Augustine’s eventual success. If you lived inside the Donatist community, on the other hand, you were quite without what Augustine would think of as the fear of god. From a sermon of his: “You can say to one of them, ‘You are going to perish in that heresy, that schism of yours. God will inevitably punish such evil and you will come to damnation. Don’t flatter yourself, don’t follow a sightless leader; for when the blind lead the blind [Matthew 15.14], both will fall into the pit.’ ‘What’s it to me?’ he replies. ‘I lived this way yesterday, I live this way today. What my parents were, that’s what I am.’”411

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

  The reason for the persecution was probably the perception that the Christians were “lawbreakers, an accusa- tion going back to Jesus’ own ministry (see Mark 2:24; 3:4; Luke 13:14; 14:1- 6), the Hellenistic circle associated with Stephen (Acts 6:13-14), and now exacerbated by the breaking down of the Jew-Gentile divide in Antioch (see Josephus, Ant. 20.200, where James was accused of being a lawbreaker as well). It is notable that, during the Maccabean rebellion, several Hellenized Jews were sallied upon because they were said to have made a covenant with the Gentiles and removed the marks of circumcision (1 Macc 1:11-15). Per- haps Christ-believers, especially the Greek-speaking Jewish Christ-believers in Antioch, were accused of making similar compromises with covenant, circumcision, and Gentiles and became susceptible to zealous violence as a result. So in order to avoid further persecution of the Jerusalem church, James sent a message to Peter in Antioch to adopt a stricter approach to Gen- tiles and meals. In order to prevent further persecutions, James required the Jewish Christ-believers in Antioch to undertake a stricter halakah of Torah- keeping when it came to contact with Gentiles. I take this to mean that they 81. Robert Jewett, “The Agitators and the Galatian Congregation,’ NTS 17 (1971): 198-212; Dunn, Jesus, Paul, and the Law, 133-36; Bruce, Galatians, 130; Longenecker, Galatians, 74-75; Hengel and Schwemer, Paul between Damascus and Antioch, 244-51; Witherington, Grace in Galatia, 155-56; Bockmuehl, Jewish Law, 73-75; Hays, “Galatians,” 11:232-33; Hengel, Saint Peter, 61-65; Charles, Paul and Politics of Diaspora, 148-49; Moo, Galatians, 148-49; D. A. Carson, “Mirror-Reading with Paul and against Paul: Galatians 2:11-14 as a Test Case,” in Studies in the Pauline Epistles, ed. M. S. Harmon and J. E. Smith (FS Douglas Moo; Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2014), 108-12; Gibson, Peter, 262-75. 82. Jewett, “Agitators,” 205. 195 AN ANOMALOUS JEW were to foster a Jewish social space conducive for intimate social intercourse with other Jews but not necessarily commensurable to open fellowship with Gentiles. The delegation sent to Antioch inferred that this meant withdraw- ing from contact with Gentiles at meals, unless of course the Gentiles were circumcised and perhaps observed regulations pertinent to resident aliens (e.g., Gen 15:18; Exod 23:31; Lev 17-18; Num 13:21-22; 34:7-9; Deut 1:7-8; 11:24; Josh 1:4; Ezek 47:15-17; 48:1). Thus, if Jewish Christ-believers were to deflect suspicions of being legally lax or consorting with Gentiles, that would necessitate certain constraints on the fellowship between Jewish and Gentile Christ-believers.

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

  Paul draws a correlation between the Thessalonians’ persecution at the hands of local authorities and the persecution suffered by the Judean churches from the Jews: For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea, for you suffered the same things from your own compatriots as they did from the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out; they displease God and oppose everyone by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. Thus they have constantly been filling up the mea- 5. See John M. G. Barclay, “Who Was Considered an Apostate in the Jewish Diaspora?? in Pauline Churches and Diaspora Jews: Beyond the New Perspective (WUNT 275; Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 141-55 (esp. 151-54). 6. See Brian R. Rosner, Paul and the Law (NSBT; Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013). Paul the Jew . . . of Sorts sure of their sins; but God’s wrath has overtaken them at last. (1 Thess 2:14-16)’ Paul told the Corinthians that his apostolic credentials are validated by his list of travails, including the various persecutions he had received from the Jews. Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent jour- neys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters. (2 Cor 11:24-26; see m. Mak. 3.14) When Paul wrote to the Romans, he was preparing to embark on a return visit to Jerusalem to deliver the collection to the church before setting off for Spain via Rome. In this letter Paul asked the Romans to pray for his safety as he faced great peril by visiting Jerusalem, a peril confirmed by Luke's account in Acts 21:15-26:32. With the following words, he asked the Romans to pray for him: I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to join me in earnest prayer to God on my behalf, that I may be rescued from the unbelievers in Judea, and that my ministry to Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints, so that by God's will I may come to you with joy and be refreshed in your company.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  People who believe that numbers mute the individual child’s suffering have simply not talked to the children. Each child in a classroom half full of children of divorce cries out, “Why me?” Moreover, by following the life of one child of divorce, and then another and another, from early childhood through adolescence and into the challenges of adulthood, I can say without a doubt that they have worries apart from their peers raised in intact homes. These worries are reshaping our society in ways we never dreamt about. That is the subject of this book and a challenge to all of us in coming years. T HE PAGES THAT follow contain many themes that are entirely new to our understanding of the long-term effects of divorce. For example, Karen was the first grown child of divorce who described that she lived with the fear that disaster was always waiting to strike without warning, especially when she was happy. As I soon found out, these fears were common among young adults who grew up in divorced families. If happiness increases one’s odds of experiencing loss, think how dangerous it must be to simply feel happy. Contrary to what we have long thought, the major impact of divorce does not occur during childhood or adolescence. Rather, it rises in adulthood as serious romantic relationships move center stage. When it comes time to choose a life mate and build a new family, the effects of divorce crescendo. A central finding to my research is that children identify not only with their mother and father as separate individuals but with the relationship between them. They carry the template of this relationship into adulthood and use it to seek the image of their new family. The absence of a good image negatively influences their search for love, intimacy, and commitment. Anxiety leads many into making bad choices in relationships, giving up hastily when problems arise, or avoiding relationships altogether. As we will see, the divorced family is not a truncated version of the two-parent family. It is a different kind of family in which children feel less protected and less certain about their future than children in reasonably good intact families. Mothers and fathers who share their beds with different people are not the same as mothers and fathers living under the same roof. The divorced family has an entirely new cast of characters and relationships featuring stepparents and stepsiblings, second marriages and second divorces, and often a series of live-in lovers.

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

  This first act subsequent to his conversion confirms his understanding of his conversion as a commission to preach the gospel among pagans”; Wayne A. Meeks (The First Urban Christians: 87 AN ANOMALOUS JEW or to Jews in the region.’ It is impossible to say for certain. We know that Paul returned to Damascus and had to leave there quickly to avoid capture by the local ruler, King Aretas, sometime around 37 CE. Such disturbances may well imply that his activities in Damascus and Arabia were incendiary or controversial; if so, I think that they were probably evangelistic (Gal 1:17; 2 Cor 11:32-33).*” This idea may partially authenticate the narration of Paul in Acts, where, during his time in Damascus, he lodged with the disciples and was preaching Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God in the synagogues (Acts g:19b-25).** Such activity is perfectly plausible, given the concentration of Jews in the city of Damascus at the time.”” The Social World of the Apostle Paul [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983]): “It is evident that Paul had stirred up this official hostility not by meditating in the desert nor by wandering from village to village, but by preaching in flourishing Hellenistic cities such as Petra, Gerasa, Philadelphia, and Bostra’; Martin Hengel (“The Stance of the Apostle Paul toward the Law in the Unknown Years between Damascus and Antioch, in Justification and Variegated Nomism, vol. 2, The Paradoxes of Paul [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004], 89): “Why Arabia?’ is simple. As the offspring of Israel the Arabians’ were the genealogically and geographically closest physical relatives of Israel among the ‘Gentiles, since they, too, were descendents of Abraham. The offspring of Esau, the Edomites, had already become Jews under Hyrcanus and were no longer ‘Gentiles” (italics original). Paul Barnett (Jesus and the Rise of Early Christianity: A History of New Testament Times [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1999], 255): “While we may reasonably assume that, as in Damascus, Saul preached to Jews in the Nabataean synagogues ... Aretas hostility toward him implies that he had also evangelized indigenous Nabataeans.” Eckhard J. Schnabel (Early Christian Mission, vol. 1, Jesus and the Twelve; vol. 2, Paul and the Early Church [Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2004], 2:1037): “The intervention of Nabatean officials suggests that Paul did not limit his preaching to Jewish audiences, but that he reached pagan Nabateans as well.” More cautious is Riesner (Paul’s Early Period, 260), who wonders whether Paul lived in Arabia “reclusively,’ engaged in a possible “sojourn with a group of Jewish Chris- tians” and perhaps “did mission work under the Jews living in the Nabataean territory.” 46. On Jews in Nabataea, see David Graf, “Nabateans,” ABD 4:972-73; Hengel and Schwemer, Paul between Damascus and Antioch, 112-13. 47. We should also recognize that tensions between the two Roman client-kingdoms of Judea and Nabataea may also have given Paul reason to cut his mission short (see Josephus, Ant. 18.109-26).

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

  The day has long passed when we can afford to ignore the threat posed by individuals who believe they are subject only to the laws of their god and not those of our government.”88 1996–2002—Hare Krishna (ISKON) Racketeering and Child Abuse In 1996 the International Society of Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) leader Kirtanananda accepted a plea deal from prosecutors for racketeering related to a $10 million fund-raising scam. The charge was tied to the murders of two Krishna devotees. The killer, a follower of Kirtanananda, testified that the guru had ordered the murders.89 The conspiracy to commit murder charge was dropped as part of the plea arrangement. One of the men killed had apparently intended to expose the guru. He reportedly claimed that Kirtanananda “condoned child abuse and sexual molestation.”90 Kirtanananda received a twenty-year prison sentence. Prabhupada, an Indian businessman turned guru founded ISKCON, which has often been called a “cult,” in 1966. We should note that the guru once reportedly said, “The Krishna consciousness movement has nothing to do with the Hindu religion.”91 Keith Hamm, later known as Kirtanananda, became an ISKCON devotee in 1968. During the 1970s he built a lavish temple called “New Vrindaban” in West Virginia, which was to serve as a palace for Prabhupada. The building was lavishly decorated and painted in gold leaf. Tons of imported marble and onyx were used in its construction. It was not completed until 1979, two years after Prabhupada’s death. Kirtanananda was once one of the most powerful gurus within the ISKCON hierarchy; he was released from prison in 2004 after serving eight years of his sentence. ISKCON banned him. The disgraced guru wasn’t allowed to return to the “Palace of Gold,” known as “the crown jewel of the Krishna movement in America,”92 he had built. Kirtanananda died in 2011 at the age of seventy-four. In February 2002 ISKCON declared bankruptcy. This was done in response to a $400 million class-action lawsuit filed in 2000 against the organization. Ninety-two plaintiffs claimed sexual, physical, and emotional abuse during the 1970s and 1980s as children within ISKCON boarding schools.93 The Chapter 11 bankruptcy took place before the scheduled trial and effectively forced the plaintiffs to accept a settlement. The court ordered a settlement plan of $9.5 million, which hundreds of children abused in ISKCON ultimately shared. This settlement included schools the group maintained both in the United States and in India.94 Prabhupada, the founder of ISKCON, wanted all children of his devotees sequestered in boarding schools, beginning at the age of five. This step freed parents to work unencumbered at such things as selling books for the organization and other fund-raising efforts.95 Children were reportedly “terrorized” within Krishna facilities. Young girls were given as “brides” to older men who donated generously to the group.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Mostly she was a very well-behaved, well-dressed, quiet child at home and at school. Her nursery school teacher told me that she often wished Lisa would do something naughty. A year later, her kindergarten teacher, in reply to an inquiry, dropped me a note saying she worried that this bright child showed so little fantasy or creativity in her play. “She’s always on guard, looking around,” the teacher reported. At home, Lisa’s upset, which she did not show in her parents’ homes or in school, seeped through as fears—of the dark, of scary dreams, of fire, of sleeping alone. Lisa was frightened when her mother left town, even if she could stay at her dad’s house. She was embarrassed to tell her father and stepmother how frightened she was at night. “I’m scared to tell Daddy that I’m scared. I’d like them to leave a light on in the bathroom like my mom does but I’m too scared to ask them,” she told me at our second meeting. Gradually her fears became more acute and she began to grind her teeth at night. Nevertheless, Lisa’s mom, in trying to put her own life back together, went to visit her sister in Santa Fe for several weeks shortly after the breakup. She needed “space to think.” Neither parent was aware of the extent of Lisa’s grief and pain over the divorce. She seemed so self-controlled, so calm. Surely, they told themselves, her fears will disappear in time. Actually, they lasted for several years and worsened again when her mother took on a heavier work schedule. That’s when Lisa began to worry daily that her mother would die. In many divorces, one of the partners does not see the breakup coming and in fact has only a minor inkling that the other person is dissatisfied with the marriage. And tragically, the abandoned partner may be deeply in love with the spouse who wants out. When this happens, a sense of shock, betrayal, and rage can last for many years, if not forever. Lisa’s mother was stunned when her husband asked her for a divorce. She knew that he had minor complaints about the marriage but divorce had never crossed her mind. The fact that he remarried the day after their divorce was final compounded the blow. She was badly hurt, bewildered, and humiliated. She was, and still is, a very attractive professional woman who had no trouble finding dates, but casual liaisons depressed her. Tragically, she did not, despite many efforts, find a suitable partner. As Lisa told me, “She’s an independent, strong woman, but I feel a lot of guilt, a lot of pity, and a lot of worry when I think of her.” Lisa’s father was not happy being married to Lisa’s mother. He complained that she was demanding, edgy, and uncaring. He wanted love and tenderness and, indeed, he quickly found a woman similar to his wife in age and education.

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

  This parting “in” the ways rather than “of” the ways meant that the break with the Jerusalem church was not absolute. There seems to have remained a genuine but uneasy relationship between the two parties. Paul's only genuine adversaries were the false brothers who caused divisions in Antioch and who finally found a way to gain a concession from the Jerusalem church for their circumcision view by playing on the fears that Jewish fraternizing with uncir- cumcised Gentiles would lead to further pogroms in Jerusalem. It was most likely persons from this faction who entered Galatia, but as far as can be ascer- tained from Galatians, they were not authorized by the Jerusalem church. The enduring but cagey relationship that Paul had with the Jerusalem church is evi- denced by Paul's affirmation of Barnabas’s and Peter’s ministry (1 Cor 1:12; 9:6), Paul’s affirmation of acommon gospel shared with the Jerusalem church (1 Cor 15:1-8), his sense of continuing solidarity with the Judean churches in their persecution (1 Thess 2:15-16), at least one visit to Antioch after the hurtful inci- dent sometime around 52 CE (Acts 18:22), Paul’s reconciliation with John Mark probably during his time in Ephesus (Phlm 24; Col 4:11), and his collection for the needy saints in Jerusalem, which was an olive branch in search of cordial relations (1 Cor 16:1-7; Rom 15:25-28). Paul's fear in going to Jerusalem was pri- marily from unbelieving Jews (Rom 15:31), and James's response to Paul's visit to Jerusalem in Acts 21:20-25 is realistic by afhrming Paul’s ministry to Gentiles, urging Paul to address the matter of his antinomian reputation, and reaffirming the requirement of the apostolic decree as a minimal law for Gentiles. Paul was ultimately trying to stay true to the revelation that he had received on the Damascus road, and he was endeavoring to stand firm on the principles agreed on at the Jerusalem council. As Hengel wrote, “If the community in Jerusalem now—contrary to an earlier attitude—called for the circumcision of the ‘Gentiles; Paul’s whole proclamation of the gospel to the ‘Gentiles’ since his call, i.e., since Damascus, would have been in vain, as his message and the faith brought about by it would be ‘nothing’ if Christ had not risen from the dead (I Cor. 15:14). For Paul, a separated Gentile Christian Church which alone was orthodox, i.e., a divided body of Christ, was an impossible idea.”’®* Paul remained an activist for the “old Antioch” position on Christ, Torah, and Gen- tiles before the Jerusalem church apparently caved in to political pressure from zealous Judeans. James and Peter probably saw their position as fair in that it did not strictly advocate the circumcision of Gentiles (unless they wanted to 105. Hengel and Schwemer, Paul between Damascus and Antioch, 208.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  He had nothing to urge against it, but still resisted the idea of a letter of proper submission; and therefore, to make it easier to him, as he declared a much greater willingness to make mean concessions by word of mouth than on paper, it was resolved that, instead of writing to Fanny, he should go to London, and personally intreat her good offices in his favour. “And if they really _do_ interest themselves,” said Marianne, in her new character of candour, “in bringing about a reconciliation, I shall think that even John and Fanny are not entirely without merit.” After a visit on Colonel Brandon’s side of only three or four days, the two gentlemen quitted Barton together. They were to go immediately to Delaford, that Edward might have some personal knowledge of his future home, and assist his patron and friend in deciding on what improvements were needed to it; and from thence, after staying there a couple of nights, he was to proceed on his journey to town. CHAPTER L. After a proper resistance on the part of Mrs. Ferrars, just so violent and so steady as to preserve her from that reproach which she always seemed fearful of incurring, the reproach of being too amiable, Edward was admitted to her presence, and pronounced to be again her son. Her family had of late been exceedingly fluctuating. For many years of her life she had had two sons; but the crime and annihilation of Edward a few weeks ago, had robbed her of one; the similar annihilation of Robert had left her for a fortnight without any; and now, by the resuscitation of Edward, she had one again. In spite of his being allowed once more to live, however, he did not feel the continuance of his existence secure, till he had revealed his present engagement; for the publication of that circumstance, he feared, might give a sudden turn to his constitution, and carry him off as rapidly as before. With apprehensive caution therefore it was revealed, and he was listened to with unexpected calmness. Mrs. Ferrars at first reasonably endeavoured to dissuade him from marrying Miss Dashwood, by every argument in her power;—told him, that in Miss Morton he would have a woman of higher rank and larger fortune;—and enforced the assertion, by observing that Miss Morton was the daughter of a nobleman with thirty thousand pounds, while Miss Dashwood was only the daughter of a private gentleman with no more than _three;_ but when she found that, though perfectly admitting the truth of her representation, he was by no means inclined to be guided by it, she judged it wisest, from the experience of the past, to submit—and therefore, after such an ungracious delay as she owed to her own dignity, and as served to prevent every suspicion of good-will, she issued her decree of consent to the marriage of Edward and Elinor.

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

  Peter’s mission would be dis- credited if he were to engage too brazenly with Gentiles. 181 AN ANOMALOUS JEW tramural Christian dispute but was part of the socioreligious context of Jews in Antioch concerning group boundaries, rites of entry, and acceptable limits of acculturation. According to Larry Hurtado: Those Jewish Christians who insisted that Gentile converts had to undergo full proselyte conversion (including circumcision of males) may well have feared that to treat Torah observance as anything less than mandatory for all could be seen as supporting the view that Torah observance was not necessary for anyone. That is, Diaspora Jews (including Jewish Christians) who were concerned to maintain solidarity in Torah observance over against other tendencies in Diaspora Jewish communities may have seen the Pauline position on the admission of Gentiles into Christian circles as implicitly supporting the sort of allegorizing Torah observance that Philo criticised. In other words, Paul’s Gentile converts may be thought of as having walked into a family quarrel within Diaspora Jewish communities, unintentionally exacerbating it. If this line of inference is correct, what was at stake in the controversies over the admission of Gentiles to full Christian fellowship was not simply the terms of Gentile conversion, but was also the question of how far Diaspora Jews could allow themselves to go in negotiating their lives in non-Jewish environments.” The Context for the Incident at Antioch Consideration of the incident in Antioch must take into account several fac- tors that shaped the formative context and recent history of the early church, including the following. 1. Because of its devotion to a crucified messianic claimant, the Jerusalem church was under scrutiny and opposition from their Jewish compatriots. The pogroms resulting in the martyrdoms of Stephen, James son of Zebedee, and James the Just show just how incendiary the church's praxis, preaching, and mission proved to be. Paul knew of Jewish persecution of the Judean churches, and he referred to specific hindrances from the Jews at sharing his message with Gentiles (1 Thess 2:14-16; Gal 6:12). 2. The period between the late 30s and the late 40s CE was a tumultuous time in Palestine. During this period Herod Antipas was exiled to Gaul for 31. Larry Hurtado, “Does Philo Help Explain Early Christianity?,” in Philo und das Neue Testament: Wechselseitig Wahrnehmungen, ed. R. Deines and K.-W. Niebuhr (WUNT 172; Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 85-86. 182 The Incident at Antioch (Gal 2:11-14): The Beginnings of Paulinism stockpiling weapons.** There was a rise in banditry and nationalistic fervor in Judea.** Caligula’s attempts to place’a statue of himself in the Jerusalem temple prompted outrage among Jews throughout the empire.** The Byzantine chronicler Malalas reported an anti-Jewish riot in Antioch ca. 39-40 CE.°° Herod Agrippa I died suddenly in 44 CE,” and thereafter there was a series of Roman procurators who through incompetence, ignorance, or corruption in- flamed tensions with the people, which led to revolts and uprisings.*” Around the time of the incident at Antioch (ca.

• From The City of God

  43 Lecture 2 Transcript—Who Was Augustine of Hippo? congregants, catechumens and rude communicants, educated laity of varying degrees of orthodoxy, monks, nuns, anchorites, priests and bishops, heretics and schismatics, old noble pagani, men and women within the Church and without it. Second, like John Henry Newman a millennium later, he realized that to live is to change, and he was never content with his last formulation of a particular issue. His thought reveals a continuous dynamism, flexibility of style, tone, and even argument that makes his position on many matters very hard to pin down. As we’ll see, even when he does offer a theological proposal, he typically hedges it about as one possible way of thinking, not ruling out others. But we, his ill-tutored pupils, fell so much in love with his formulations that we treated his books as statically canonical, and they posthumously fossilized into something like the divine writ he feared they would become. He feared this would happen. He warned us about it. He even tried to booby-trap his own thought to stop it. He even wrote a book, an entire book, called the Retractationes—the rewritings—about his other books, to teach people how to read them. But by the end of his life, he was increasingly aware that the past would be communicated to the future largely through his writings, as through a bottleneck. And he knew enough that he had written so much that people would construct many conflicting positions from the great forest of his writings. Indeed, some of his own opponents were doing that already, quoting the young Augustine, of whom they approved, against the old Augustine, whom they condemned. And this is part of what I meant when I said earlier that he knew we would be reading him. He feared people would find in his multitudinous books whatever they wanted to find there, and he tried to stop that from happening. And he mostly failed. But here, in these lectures, we’ll give him another chance to speak, and maybe this time we can hear him.

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  98 Books That Matter: The City of God to our humanist identification with one another? How far can we really identify with people radically different from us? Or are they so radically different after all? We’ll return to this question again and again in these lectures, directly and indirectly, because Augustine himself had to think about it a lot, as well. For now, just keep it in mind, and understand the following two facts about the Romans, Christian and pagan, which make them simultaneously like us and unlike us. On the one hand, as we’ll see, they fully understood religious and metaphysical skepticism. The elites of Rome were just as able as we are today to imagine that religion is a bunch of stories made up by people long ago, stories whose human origins are forgotten in time. Never think that atheism is an invention of the modern world. On the other hand, they had a vision of moral order and purpose that we would, I hope, find shocking. They were very comfortable with extreme violence, deployed publicly. When Augustine talks about the theater, he’s not talking about people putting on sensitive plays by Shakespeare or Thornton Wilder or Wendy Wasserstein. He’s talking about sex shows and snuff films, performed live and on stage. And this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what the Romans were willing to countenance in the way of morality, public and private. It’s important to understand this, because it will help us to see Augustine’s engagement in these first five books as an engagement with the most common aspects of Rome’s popular culture. After a first book that starts as explicitly about the sack but then moves into deeper questions, he’ll take the next three books to really explore the moral character of Rome—what the people were taught to love, and what to fear—and the political consequences of that vision. The picture of what Rome truly is that emerges from these books is in many ways a terrifying one.

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  152 Books That Matter: The City of God political agents. This explains part of what Augustine thinks is wrong with Cicero’s definition of the city, for obedience is purchased not by consent but by force, and the two are very different things indeed. We still have cannons that were forged for the French king Louis XIV, and which had stamped around their barrels a motto: ultima ratio regum—ultimate reason of the king. In the famous adage of Thucydides, the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must. This is not meant normatively; it is not meant as a description of how things should be but, really, how things are. Very rarely, if at all, are political disputes settled by reasoned argument. They are hashed out by bargaining, where the criteria of what counts as an effective reason is something other than sheer simple reason itself. Second, he argues that positive motivations, while they may bring us together in common communities of interest, are much less mobilizing of our actions and our passions than are negative ones. While we are gathered together in a community by our loves, our actions are more typically reactive, responding in fear or anxiety or jealousy to perceived threats or rivals. We are driven by fear much more than by aspiration. And again, Sallust shows us that Rome is no exception here. In the wars with Carthage they were far more motivated by fear than they were by hope. Now, the pagans might claim that this is not vision but Christian cynicism. They would say this shows Christians cannot be patriots, or worse, are effectively inhuman. But Augustine does not teach this lesson by Christian sources, but by thinkers like Sallust, an unimpeachable pagan Roman source. Thus, he can reply, it is not unique to Christians but an apprehension clearly available to pagans as well. The only question is why don’t they see it? Now third, and finally, following a long line of pagan writers again, Augustine is alert to how the possession of political power changes one’s vision and one’s behavior. Most basically, he says, power is

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  Chapter 32. --Of the Prophecy that is Contained in the Prayer and Song of Habakkuk. In his prayer, with a song, to whom but the Lord Christ does he say, "O Lord, I have heard Thy hearing, and was afraid:O Lord, I have considered Thy works, and was greatly afraid? " [1173]What is this but the inexpressible admiration of the foreknown, new, and sudden salvation of men? "In the midst of two living creatures thou shalt be recognized. "What is this but either between the two testaments, or between the two thieves, or between Moses and Elias talking with Him on the mount? "While the years draw nigh, Thou wilt be recognized; at the coming of the time Thou wilt be shown," does not even need exposition. "While my soul shall be troubled at Him, in wrath Thou wilt be mindful of mercy. "What is this but that He puts Himself for the Jews, of whose nation He was, who were troubled with great anger and crucified Christ, when He, mindful of mercy, said, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do? [1174]"God shall come from Teman, and the Holy One from the shady and close mountain. " [1175]What is said here, "He shall come from Teman," some interpret "from the south," or "from the southwest," by which is signified the noonday, that is, the fervor of charity and the splendor of truth. "The shady and close mountain" might be understood in many ways, yet I prefer to take it as meaning the depth of the divine Scriptures, in which Christ is prophesied:for in the Scriptures there are many things shady and close which exercise the mind of the reader; and Christ comes thence when he who has understanding finds Him there. "His power covereth up the heavens, and the earth is full of His praise. "What is this but what is also said in the psalm, "Be Thou exalted, O God, above the heavens; and Thy glory above all the earth? " [1176]"His splendor shall be as the light. "What is it but that the fame of Him shall illuminate believers? "Horns are in His hands. "What is this but the trophy of the cross? "And He hath placed the firm charity of His strength" [1177] needs no exposition. "Before His face shall go the word, and it shall go forth into the field after His feet. "What is this but that He should both be announced before His coming hither and after His return hence? "He stood, and the earth was moved. "What is this but that "He stood" for succor, "and the earth was moved" to believe? "He regarded, and the nations melted;" that is, He had compassion, and made the people penitent. "The mountains are broken with violence;" that is, through the power of those who work miracles the pride of the haughty is broken.

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  115 Lecture 6—The Price of Empire (Books 2–3) celebrations, feast days, and overall way of life offer a rival set of spectacular entertainments. It is to these true spectacles that we ought to give heed. The Role of Demons „Demons appear in The City of God in a way unlike their portrayal elsewhere in Augustine’s writings. They have a functional role in Augustine’s depiction of the cosmic and social order; they are active and dynamic forces, seducing humans to their doom. The reality of the demons in Augustine’s writing teaches us two lessons worth keeping in mind. ›First, it underscores how genuinely different was the pagans’ vision of the world they inhabited: one full of violent and terrifying deities able to interfere in the most everyday situations. ›Second, that very readiness to describe the role of demons means they also have an allegorical role as well as exemplifying the sad fate of a fallen and needy rebellious creature in a world where such rebellion can only be futile. The demons serve to exhibit a particular feature of Augustine’s depiction of the libido dominandi. The Antithesis of Happiness „Book 3 analyzes and diagnoses the Roman psyche and the character of pagan longing. In it, Augustine uncovers how the Romans’ fixation on physical evils and concomitant blindness to moral failings causes them to miss how their very conquests turn into chains. „The psychological energy driving this enslavement is the libido dominandi, a tricky term whose sense we can capture in the ambivalence of the English translation as “dominating lust,” the idea of the lust to dominate that is also the lust that dominates.

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  Can you imagine a major publ ic figure responding to a contemporary calamity in the way that Augustine responded to the Sack of Rome? What form would such a response take? Imagine an Augustinian response to 9/11 or the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004. 2. What place or symbol of significance for us might be analogous to Rome’ s role in the Empire? 54 The Sack of Rome, 410 A.D. I magine, just imagine, that you live in an empire that’s lasted 1,000 years. In all that time, almost all other civilizations have been incorporated into this empire. Its people are prosperous, its cities magnificent, its lands secure. You know of no people, no kingdom, that equals it in greatness—indeed, there’s little beyond its boundaries with which to compare it. It seems that human society and the empire are bound up in one another. Now imagine that, in your lifetime, that empire is invaded from the outside by barbarians. Not just outsiders, not just enemies or bad people, but barbarians—people not only with bad teeth and poor hygiene habits, but people in some sense uncivilized, not quite lawless but rather operating on a very primitive set of laws that could never suffice to govern a society as sophisticated as your own. Imagine that these barbarians swarm like ants over your borders, ravage your countryside, besiege and sack your towns and cities. And imagine that these barbarians finally reach the original capital of your empire, the greatest city ever known, the center of the world, and overrun it—run howling down its avenues, kick down the doors of its official buildings of state and religion, run rampant in muddy boots over the plush purple carpets of the offices and palaces of the rulers, raping and killing and plundering as they go. Imagine, that is, that the barbarians win—that civilization, as you know it, comes to an end. Imagine that you inhabit a world that is, by and large, over. You have no idea where your food will come from next year, or if it will come at all, who will guard the streets, or whether the streets even need guarding anymore, now that the barbarians can go into any house with impunity and kill or enslave all the occupants. Lecture 3 Transcript

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  83 Lecture 4 Transcript—Augustine’s Pagan and Christian Audience to their villas during plague season and the long hot summers, to live the life of simple, healthy republican virtue, cultivated and cultivating on the land. Those who were stuck in cities year round—the poor, prostitutes, people who worked in trade—were often considered unfortunate and suffered high mortality rates. Cities, in other words, were places where you went for power, for fame, or for death. Avernus, the Romans’ land of the dead, is something like a city. So Romans both loved and feared their cities—to be in one was to have a greater chance at glory, and also be at greater risk of death. But dangerous as they were, cities were where things happened. In all this, of course, the Romans were doing nothing but following the Greeks, who were also deeply urbane. Aristotle’s definition of the human as a political animal—you might have heard of this, right?— is actually a transliteration, not a translation, of the Greek phrase zoon politikon—that’s the phrase that gets translated as political animal. And this is actually a transliteration that obscures what it purports to illuminate. What do I mean? I mean that it would have been more accurate to translate that phrase as a citified animal, an animal who lives in cities: zoon politikon; the citied animal. Indeed, you might say that, for the Greeks, real humans are urban creatures, and humans not at least loosely connected to cities—humans who are exiles or barbarians— are not properly full humans at all. While they were worldly spaces, cities were also deeply religious sites, homes to gods as well as humans. Most shrines and temples were located in cities. Neither Roman nor Greek religion was really a nature religion like the Celtic Druids. Now, of course, many of the gods, most of the gods, maybe almost all the gods don’t live in cities, right? But they visited them all the time, for their shrines and temples were there. But, for Augustine, cities are also not just part of the theological foundations of reality. For him, the whole world is ultimately properly