Guilt

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 Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “She taxed me with the offence at once, and my confusion may be guessed. The purity of her life, the formality of her notions, her ignorance of the world—every thing was against me. The matter itself I could not deny, and vain was every endeavour to soften it. She was previously disposed, I believe, to doubt the morality of my conduct in general, and was moreover discontented with the very little attention, the very little portion of my time that I had bestowed on her, in my present visit. In short, it ended in a total breach. By one measure I might have saved myself. In the height of her morality, good woman! she offered to forgive the past, if I would marry Eliza. That could not be—and I was formally dismissed from her favour and her house. The night following this affair—I was to go the next morning—was spent by me in deliberating on what my future conduct should be. The struggle was great—but it ended too soon. My affection for Marianne, my thorough conviction of her attachment to me—it was all insufficient to outweigh that dread of poverty, or get the better of those false ideas of the necessity of riches, which I was naturally inclined to feel, and expensive society had increased. I had reason to believe myself secure of my present wife, if I chose to address her, and I persuaded myself to think that nothing else in common prudence remained for me to do. A heavy scene however awaited me, before I could leave Devonshire;—I was engaged to dine with you on that very day; some apology was therefore necessary for my breaking this engagement. But whether I should write this apology, or deliver it in person, was a point of long debate. To see Marianne, I felt, would be dreadful, and I even doubted whether I could see her again, and keep to my resolution. In that point, however, I undervalued my own magnanimity, as the event declared; for I went, I saw her, and saw her miserable, and left her miserable—and left her hoping never to see her again.” “Why did you call, Mr. Willoughby?” said Elinor, reproachfully; “a note would have answered every purpose. Why was it necessary to call?”

• From The City of God

  339 Lecture 16 Transcript—The Two Cities and the Two Loves (Book 14) but living by the rule of flesh, attuned exclusively or primarily to this world, that is bad. So the cause of sin does not lie in our meat but in the soul, not fundamentally in our flesh, but in our attitude toward our flesh. What, then, is sin? Sin is, most fundamentally, to live according to the self, to live by the standard of man, which standard is self- destructive and self-deceptive. It was not flesh that dragged down and entrapped the material soul; rather, it was the sinful soul which made flesh corruptible. In fact, Augustine insists that the flesh itself is intrinsically good, not surprising giving his metaphysics of Creation. Even the pagans saw this, he said, in the Aeneid, he points out, souls return to bodies, and thinkers even like Cicero saw that turbulent emotions, the passions, are not the fault of the flesh, but of the soul’s wrong attachment to flesh. Even pain itself is due fundamentally to the soul, and not to the body, Augustine says, for it is caused by the soul’s misconnection to the body. His is not, then, a condemnation of human nature in its physicality, but an analysis of how that nature has gone wrong in itself, against itself. Human nature was changed in the Fall, Augustine says, and in rebelling against God humanity has rebelled as well against God’s order, and thus against itself. So what we are looking at, when we are looking at a descendant of Adam and Eve, is a self-harming creature, one literally doing its damnedest to escape the conditions of its own wholly gratuitous existence. Augustine unpacks this by his exposition of psychology of fallen humanity. As the first note of this exposition, Augustine insists that we are adoring beings. Humans are all alike in the fact that we love; even as we differ dramatically in the facts of what we love. The central organizing principle for ordering and differentiating all of humanity then is not belief, not action, not thinking; what differentiates the citizens of the two cities is their different objects of love and how they

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  I felt the tension rising in my right arm, and my right hand began to shake. I watched as the pot slowly rose from the edge of the sink, and the boiling water poured over the lip of the pot in slow motion onto my left hand as it rested upon the teapot. The water cascaded down, bounced off the back of my hand and flowed down the drain. I watched the brown skin cloud with steam, then turn red and shiny, and the poison began to run out of me like water as I fumbled at the buttons of my shirt cuff and peeled back the wet cloth from my scalded wrist. The steamed flesh had already started to blister. Walking into the staff room next door where the rest of my colleagues sat discussing book orders. “I’ve burned myself by mistake.” Then pain erupting into the space left empty by the draining away of the poison. Someone took me home in a taxi from the doctor’s office. It was Muriel who opened the door for me, and helped me off with my clothes. She did not ask what had happened. Next to the pain in my hand and wrist, everything else felt like it had never been. I fell immediately asleep. The next day I went to St. Vincent’s burn clinic, where the snake ring had to be cut away from the scalded swollen flesh. During the next few days, when I felt anything at all other than pain, it was guilt and embarrassment, as if I’d done an unforgivable and unmentionable act. Self-mutilation. Displaying a rage that was neither cool nor hip. Otherwise, I was quite empty of passion. Muriel and I never spoke of Jill nor of the accident. We were very guarded and tender with each other, and a little bit mournful, as if we were both acknowledging with our silence what was irretrievable. Jill had gone, to appear again some other time when one least expected her. She was not really important here, only what she represented. Now, most of all, when we needed the words between us, Muriel and I were both silent. What was lying between us had moved beyond our old speech, and we were both too lost and too frightened to attempt a new language. We went out with Joan and Nicky to celebrate Nicky’s birthday. My burns were healing. Luckily, there was no infection, and I had returned to work, wearing a white glove to hide the ugly scarring around my wrist and the back of my hand, oddly intertwined with new high-pink flesh. My mother had told me that cotton gloves and daily rubs with cocoa butter would keep the heavy keloid scars from forming, and she was right. Muriel and I made love for the last time on May 20th. It was the night before my final exams at college. The house was empty when I got home the next day. I’d come home early to study.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  She had placed him in the hands of the Lord, and she waited with patience to see how He would work the matter. For she would live to see the promise of the Lord fulfilled. She would not go to her rest until her son, the last of her children, he who would place her in the winding-sheet, should have entered the communion of the saints. Now she, who had been impatient once, and violent, who had cursed and shouted and contended like a man, moved into silence, contending only, and with the last measure of her strength, with God. And this, too, she did like a man: knowing that she had kept the faith, she waited for Him to keep His promise. Gabriel knew that when he entered she would not ask him where he had been; she would not reproach him; and her eyes, even when she closed her lids to sleep, would follow him everywhere. Later, since it was Sunday, some of the brothers and sisters would come to her, to sing and pray around her bed. And she would pray for him, sitting up in bed unaided, her head lifted, her voice steady; while he, kneeling in a corner of the room, trembled and almost wished that she would die; and trembled again at this testimony to the desperate wickedness of his heart; and prayed without words to be forgiven. For he had no words when he knelt before the throne. And he feared to make a vow before Heaven until he had the strength to keep it. And yet he knew that until he made the vow he would never find the strength. For he desired in his soul, with fear and trembling, all the glories that his mother prayed he should find. Yes, he wanted power—he wanted to know himself to be the Lord’s anointed, His well-beloved, and worthy, nearly, of that snow-white dove which had been sent down from Heaven to testify that Jesus was the son of God. He wanted to be master, to speak with that authority which could only come from God. It was later to become his proud testimony that he hated his sins—even as he ran towards sin, even as he sinned. He hated the evil that lived in his body, and he feared it, as he feared and hated the lions of lust and longing that prowled the defenceless city of his mind.

• From The City of God

  451 Lecture 21 Transcript—Augustine’s Vision of Hell (Book 21) pray for the souls of those whom you know will not be saved. It would be a waste of breath in a way. In short, Augustine thinks, there is such a thing—and think about this idea—there is such a thing as bad mercy. The danger of this bad mercy is that our innate sympathy can see only the person set before us, the person suffering in Hell, and lure us to forget what brought them there. What are the crimes they committed? Who are their victims? It can make us forget, that is, the details of the crimes committed.It can silence the victims, erase them from the situation. It can overlook, in other words, the real problem, which is the wickedness that is intrinsic to the damned. This kind of bad mercy, this kind of spectatorial pity is actually, Augustine suggests, morally lazy. It does not compel itself to gather an honest assessment of the moral situation at hand; it simply finds unpleasant the idea that these people, so much like us, are suffering, and it wishes to stop them from suffering. In doing so, it implies that God somehow is making them suffer and that the cause of this suffering lies somehow most fundamentally outside of themselves. In this way, it is a kind of whining, much like the fruitless repentance suffered by the damned in Hell themselves. Well, if there is no way of getting out of Hell, what about the possibility that Hell is empty? What about the possibility of universal salvation? Can God’s anger last? So the various church practices that the merciful think might sponsor a belief in universalism, for Augustine, do not in fact sponsor that belief, he argues. There are distinct limits on God’s mercy, though they are unknown to us. But God knows them. The limits on mercy are in a way a part of God’s love for Creation, extended across time; for those limits give Creation a space to be what it will be, and not to be undone by God. That is a terrible honor that God gives to some creatures, to let them be whom they will be.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  He stood watching her, thinking of the many times he had watched her before, when her walk had been so different and her laughter had come ringing back to mock him. He stole the money while Deborah slept. And he gave it to Esther in the morning. She gave notice that same day, and a week later she was gone—to Chicago, said her parents, to find a better job and to have a better life. Deborah became more silent than ever in the weeks that followed. Sometimes he was certain she had discovered that the money was missing and knew that he had taken it—sometimes he was certain that she knew nothing. Sometimes he was certain that she knew everything: the theft, and the reason for the theft. But she did not speak. In the middle of the spring he went out into the field to preach, and was gone three months. When he came back he brought the money with him and put it in the box again. No money had been added in the meanwhile, so he still could not be certain whether Deborah knew or not. He decided to let it all be forgotten, and begin his life again. But the summer brought him a letter, with no return name or address, but postmarked from Chicago. Deborah gave it to him at breakfast, not seeming to have remarked the hand or the postmark, along with the bundle of tracts from a Bible house which they both distributed each week through the town. She had a letter, too, from Florence, and it was perhaps this novelty that distracted her attention. Esther’s letter ended: What I think is, I made a mistake, that’s true, and I’m paying for it now. But don’t you think you ain’t going to pay for it—I don’t know when and I don’t know bow, but I know you going to be brought low one of these fine days. I ain’t holy like you are, but I know right from wrong. I’m going to have my baby and I’m going to bring him up to be a man. And I ain’t going to read to him out of no Bibles and I ain’t going to take him to hear no preaching. If he don’t drink nothing but moonshine all his natural days he be a better man than his Daddy. ‘What Florence got to say?’ he asked dully, crumpling his letter in his fist. Deborah looked up with a faint smile. ‘Nothing much, honey. But she sound like she going to get married.’ Near the end of that summer he went out again into the field.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  And the hands of death caressed her shoulders, the voice whispered and whispered in her ear: ‘God’s got your number, knows where you live, death’s got a warrant out for you.’ GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN 2 GABRIEL’S PRAYER Now I been introduced To the Father and the Son, And I ain’t No stranger now. W HEN Florence cried, Gabriel was moving outward in fiery darkness, talking to the Lord. Her cry came to him from afar, as from unimaginable depths; and it was not his sister’s cry he heard, but the cry of the sinner when he is taken in his sin. This was the cry he had heard so many days and nights, before so many altars, and he cried to-night, as he had cried before: ‘Have your way, Lord! Have your way!’ Then there was only silence in the church. Even Praying Mother Washington had ceased to moan. Soon someone would cry again, and the voices would begin again; there would be music by and by, and shouting, and the sound of the tambourines. But now in this waiting, burdened silence it seemed that all flesh waited—paused, transfixed by something in the middle of the air—for the quickening power. This silence, continuing like a corridor, carried Gabriel back to the silence that had preceded his birth in Christ. Like a birth indeed, all that had come before this moment was wrapped in darkness, lay at the bottom of the sea of forgetfulness, and was not now counted against him, but was related only to that blind, and doomed, and stinking corruption he had been before he was redeemed. The silence was the silence of the early morning, and he was returning from the harlot’s house. Yet all around him were the sounds of the morning: of birds, invisible, praising God; of crickets in the vines, frogs in the swamp, of dogs miles away and close at hand, roosters on the porch. The sun was not yet half awake; only the utmost tops of trees had begun to tremble at his turning; and the mist moved sullenly before Gabriel and all around him, falling back before the light that rules by day. Later, he said of that morning that his sin was on him; then he knew only that he carried a burden and that he longed to lay it down. This burden was heavier than the heaviest mountain and he carried it in his heart. With each step that he took his burden grew heavier, and his breath became slow and harsh, and, of a sudden, cold sweat stood out on his brow and drenched his back. All alone in the cabin his mother lay waiting; not only for his return this morning, but for his surrender to the Lord. She lingered only for this, and he knew it, even though she no longer exhorted him as she had in days but shortly gone by.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  AMBROSE. Or our adversary is the devil, who lays his baits for sin, that he may have those his partners in punishment who were his accomplices in crime; our adversary is also every vicious practice. Lastly, our adversary is an evil conscience, which affects us both in this world, and will accuse and betray us in the next. Let us then give heed, while we are in this life’s course, that we may be delivered from every bad act as from an evil enemy. Nay, while we are going with our adversary to the magistrate, as we are in the way, we should condemn our fault. But who is the magistrate, but He in whose hands is all power? But the Magistrate delivers the guilty to the Judge, that is, to Him, to whom He gives the power over the quick and dead, namely, Jesus Christ, through Whom the secrets are made manifest, and the punishment of wicked works awarded. He delivers to the officer, and the officer casts into prison, for He says, Bind him hand and foot, and cast him into outer darkness. (Matt. 22:12.) And he shews that His officers are the angels, of whom he says, The angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire; (Matt. 13:49.) but it is added, I tell thee, thou shalt not depart thence till thou hast paid the very last mite. For as they who pay money on interest do not get rid of the debt of interest before that the amount of the whole principal is paid even up to the least sum in every kind of payment, so by the compensation of love and the other acts, or by each particular kind of satisfaction the punishment of sin is cancelled.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  He could not stand his home, his job, the town itself—he could not endure, day in, day out, facing the scenes and the people he had known all his life. They seemed suddenly to mock him, to stand in judgment on him; he saw his guilt in everybody’s eyes. When he stood in the pulpit to preach they looked at him, he felt, as though he had no right to be there, as though they condemned him as he had once condemned the twenty-three elders. When souls came weeping to the altar he scarce dared to rejoice, remembering that soul who had not bowed, whose blood, it might be, would be required of him at judgment. So he fled from these people, and from these silent witnesses, to tarry and preach elsewhere—to do, as it were, in secret, his first works over, seeking again the holy fire that had so transformed him once. But he was to find, as the prophets had found, that the whole earth became a prison for him who fled before the Lord. There was peace nowhere, and healing nowhere, and forgetfulness nowhere. In every church he entered, his sin had gone before him. It was in the strange, the welcoming faces, it cried up to him from the altar, it sat, as he mounted the pulpit steps, waiting for him in his seat. It stared upward from his Bible: there was no word in all that holy book which did not make him tremble. When he spoke of John on the isle of Patmos, taken up in the spirit on the Lord’s day, to behold things past, present, and to come, saying: ‘he which is filthy, let him be filthy still,’ it was he who, crying these words in a loud voice, was utterly confounded; when he spoke of David, the shepherd boy, raised by God’s power to be the King of Israel, it was he who, while they shouted: ‘Amen!’ and: ‘Hallelujah!’ struggled once more in his chains; when he spoke of the day of Pentecost when the Holy Ghost had come down on the apostles who tarried in the upper room, causing them to speak in tongues of fire, he thought of his own baptism and how he had offended the Holy Ghost. No: though his name was writ large on placards, though they praised him for the great work God worked through him, and though they came, day and night, before him to the altar, there was no word in the Book for him.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Rhea ran interference, making excuses to Bea as she went in and out of the apartment to work. Luckily, I had already quit my job at the Health Center, for Bea had gone there first. Bea sat on the landing for two days, with quick forays downstairs to the corner foodshop for Cokes and trips to the john. She finally gave up and went back to Philadelphia. She left me a note saying that what she really wanted to know was why, this way. I couldn’t tell her; I didn’t know why myself. But I felt like a monster. I had made a desperate bid for self-preservation—or what felt like self-preservation—in the only way I knew how. I hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone. But I had. I promised myself never to get involved like that again. Guilt can be very useful. For the three days this went on in the hallway, Rhea was her usual quizzical and accepting self. I had to tell her about the affair, couched in the fact that it was now over. What she thought about Bea I never stopped long enough to ask, but what she said made good sense to me. “Just because you’re strong doesn’t mean you can let other people depend on you too much. It’s not fair to them, because when you can’t be what they want they’re disappointed, and you feel bad.” Rhea was sometimes very wise, just not for herself. I never forgot that conversation, and we never discussed Bea again. I left for Mexico a week later. It was eleven months after I had come back from Stamford, and two weeks before my nineteenth birthday. I leaned back in my airplane seat, in the first skirt I’d bought in two years. The Air France night flight to Mexico City was half-empty. Rhea had made a surprise going-away party for me the night before, but even so I had been hounded by nightmares of arriving at the airport with no clothes on, or having forgotten my suitcases, or my passport, or neglected to buy a ticket. Not until I looked down and saw the lights of the city spread like electric lace across the night, did I actually believe I had gotten out of New York in one piece and under my own steam. Alive. In the back of my head, I could hear Bea sobbing disconsolately in the stairwell. I felt like I was fleeing New York with the hounds of hell at my heels. The stewardess was very solicitous of me.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  Look like I couldn’t nohow forget… how they done me way back there when I weren’t nothing but a girl.’ She paused and looked away. ‘But, Gabriel, if you’d said something even when that poor girl was buried, if you’d wanted to own that poor boy, I wouldn’t nohow of cared what folks said, or where we might of had to go, or nothing. I’d have raised him like my own, I swear to my God I would have—and he might be living now.’ ‘Deborah,’ he asked, ‘what you been thinking all this time?’ She smiled. ‘I been thinking,’ she said, ‘how you better commence to tremble when the Lord, He gives you your heart’s desire.’ She paused. ‘I’d been wanting you since I wanted anything. And then I got you.’ He walked back to the window, tears rolling down his face. ‘Honey,’ she said, in another, stronger voice, ‘you better pray God to forgive you. You better not let go until He make you know you been forgiven.’ ‘Yes,’ he sighed, ‘I’m waiting on the Lord.’ Then there was only silence, except for the rain. The rain came down in buckets; it was raining, as they said, pitchforks and nigger babies. Lightning flashed again across the sky and thunder rolled. ‘Listen,’ said Gabriel. ‘God is talking.’ Slowly now, he rose from his knees, for half the church was standing: Sister Price, Sister McCandless, and Praying Mother Washington; and the young Ella Mae sat in her chair watching Elisha where he lay. Florence and Elizabeth were still on their knees; and John was on his knees. And, rising, Gabriel thought of how the Lord had led him to this church so long ago, and how Elizabeth, one night after he had preached, had walked this long aisle to the altar, to repent before God her sin. And then they had married, for he believed her when she said that she was changed—and she was the sign, she and her nameless child, for which he had tarried so many dark years before the Lord. It was as though, when he saw them, the Lord had returned to him again that which was lost. Then, as he stood with the others over the fallen Elisha, John rose from his knees. He bent a dazed, sleepy, frowning look on Elisha and the others, shivering a little as though he were cold; and then he felt his father’s eyes and looked up at his father. At the same moment, Elisha, from the floor, began to speak in a tongue of fire, under the power of the Holy Ghost. John and his father stared at each other, struck dumb and still and with something come to life between them—while the Holy Ghost spoke.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  And there was silence again. Then: ‘And you sent that girl away, didn’t you? With the money outen that box?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes.’ ‘Gabriel,’ she asked, ‘why did you do it? Why you let her go off and die, all by herself? Why ain’t you never said nothing?’ And now he could not answer. He could not raise his head. ‘Why?’ she insisted. ‘Honey, I ain’t never asked you. But I got a right to know—and when you wanted a son so bad?’ Then, shaking, he rose from the table and walked slowly to the window, looking out. ‘I asked my God to forgive me,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t want no harlot’s son.’ ‘Esther weren’t no harlot,’ she said quietly. ‘She weren’t my wife. I couldn’t make her my wife. I already had you ’—and he said the last words with venom—‘Esther’s mind weren’t on the Lord—she’d of dragged me right on down to Hell with her.’ ‘She mighty near has,’ said Deborah. ‘The Lord He held me back,’ he said, hearing the thunder, watching the lightning. ‘He put out His hand and held me back.’ Then, after a moment, turning back into the room: ‘I couldn’t of done nothing else,’ he cried, ‘what else could I of done? Where could I of gone with Esther, and me a preacher, too? And what could I of done with you?’ He looked at her, old and black and patient, smelling of sickness and age and death. ‘Ah,’ he said, his tears still falling, ‘I bet you was mighty happy to-day, old lady, weren’t you? When she told you he, Royal, my son, was dead. You ain’t never had no son.’ And he turned again to the window. Then: ‘How long you been knowing about this?’ ‘I been knowing,’ she said, ‘ever since that evening, way back there, when Esther come to church.’ ‘You got a evil mind,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t never touched her then.’ ‘No,’ she said slowly, ‘but you had already done touched me. ’ He moved a little from the window and stood looking down at her from the foot of the bed. ‘Gabriel,’ she said, ‘I been praying all these years that the Lord would touch my body, and make me like them women, all them women, you used to go with all the time.’ She was very calm; her face was very bitter and patient. ‘Look like it weren’t His will.

• From The City of God

  [723] Gen. vi. 6, and 1 Sam. xv. 11. [724] Eccles. vii. 29. [725] 1 John viii. 36. [726] 1 Tim. ii. 14. [727] Rom. v. 12. [728] Gen. iii. 12. Chapter 12. --Of the Nature of Man's First Sin. If any one finds a difficulty in understanding why other sins do not alter human nature as it was altered by the transgression of those first human beings, so that on account of it this nature is subject to the great corruption we feel and see, and to death, and is distracted and tossed with so many furious and contending emotions, and is certainly far different from what it was before sin, even though it were then lodged in an animal body,--if, I say, any one is moved by this, he ought not to think that that sin was a small and light one because it was committed about food, and that not bad nor noxious, except because it was forbidden; for in that spot of singular felicity God could not have created and planted any evil thing. But by the precept He gave, God commended obedience, which is, in a sort, the mother and guardian of all the virtues in the reasonable creature, which was so created that submission is advantageous to it, while the fulfillment of its own will in preference to the Creator's is destruction. And as this commandment enjoining abstinence from one kind of food in the midst of great abundance of other kinds was so easy to keep,--so light a burden to the memory,--and, above all, found no resistance to its observance in lust, which only afterwards sprung up as the penal consequence of sin, the iniquity of violating it was all the greater in proportion to the ease with which it might have been kept.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Times when you long for 1 instead of 20—will they become times when you long for 20 but never for only 1? Orgies that may— … But don't have to! … —cancel the possibility of love, the proliferation of promiscuity becoming a total lifestyle— … Or an additional experience. The joyful high that only an abundance of sex can bring. And a suicidal low when it fails…. Promiscuity alienating us from any other possibility, limiting us to one—… One and many…. You said “us”! … —sex only in groups, only with many, not ever, ever one to one—… But still, at times, one to one. … —and if so, mostly fragile connections. To enact fantasies— … Merely dreamt by others. … —thus to cancel identities. Always the possibility of a soulless reduction of bodies to limbs and orifices—all limbs, any orifice. Orgies and relationships, both. Sex and love—one without the other, one with the other. Desire and love. Desire or love. AH possibilities. That is the goal of the street revolution…. And now the outlaw strikes: And to destroy you, the saboteur. With that, the saboteur attacks: Perhaps it will turn out that what you—we—call righteous revolution will be the straight world's ultimate revenge. Promiscuity as total deadend. A loveless sacrifice of all human contact. The ultimate in non-feeling and alienation. You're wrong, the outlaw answers softly. Promiscuity is our noble revolt. Prove it. Only this way: Remove the outside pressures. Remove the imposed guilt. Then we'll find out. Then we can view our own homosexual world as we make it, not as the straight world's hatred forces it to be. Let that happen, and then we'll find out. I resolve the clashing contradictions by joining the sexhunt in the streets. 11:44 P.M. The Tunnel Near Sutton. Hollywood Boulevard. Selma. Santa Monica Boulevard. Terrace Circle, Bierce Place, Greenstone Park. J IM IS ABOUT TO get out of his car to explore the tunnel near Sutton when he hears a familiar tapping coming from across the street. In his exposed apartment, the old, old, emaciated man, naked, is again rapping on the window like a used phantom. Jim drives away. Standing by the tunnel is the same man he made it with Friday—or last night. Upper Hollywood Boulevard. Outlaws line the street as he walks it. “What's goin on?” “Cooling it, man.” “Lot of pigs out.” … Often, like now on this street, Jim deliberately summons up memories, ghosts evoked at random from the sexual mortuary of his mind. Sometimes he remembers faces. Bodies. Even names. He knows he will remember, always, the accusing man earlier in the parking lot.

• From The City of God

  412 Books That Matter: The City of God though they may, accidentally and in no way as part of the essence of the thing, cause unjust suffering to innocent victims. Augustine could have left it at that, he could have just said, “Look, you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to judge, that’s just the way things are.”. But instead, he went further. For this duty should not make the judge happy, but, in fact, torment him or her. And here is the Augustine quote, If his necessary ignorance condemns him to torture and punish the innocent, is it a problem if, while he is innocent [while the judge is innocent of a crime], he is yet not happy? How much more considerable and worthy is it when he acknowledges his miserable necessities, hates his part in them, and, if he is pious and wise, cries out to God, “From my necessities deliver me!” Here we have something remarkable. Augustine does not excuse the judge from involvement, in fact, he obligates him to be involved, nor does he exculpate him for the evils he causes. In fact, he wants him to realize them more fully than he knows. Instead, he says the judge should feel these evils as evils. He should not deny their reality, but recognize that the evils we cause to happen in this world are genuine evils, and while we may be obliged to inflict them, that necessity does not erase those evils or our complicity in them. You will have to answer to God for what you have done; so you might as well start regretting it now. Political responsibility is real, for Augustine; but so is the duty of theological and moral lament. With this vision of the darkness and tragedy of political life in place, Augustine, at last, turns back to his philosophical dispute with Cicero about the analytic nature of the commonwealth, the proper definition of what a commonwealth is. Recall that in Book 2 Augustine took up this issue of Cicero’s definition, of a city as an assembly united in fellowship by common agreement as to what is right and a community of interest, a city is a partnership of justice for Cicero here.

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

  Many blame themselves or others outside the group rather than analyze the destructive internal dynamics of their former group or criticize a leader. Singer says some cult members can “debrief themselves of the cult experience through reading, contact with other ex-members, and in some cases therapy dealing with cult-related issues before they come to understand the impact that the cult experience has and on their emotional and daily life.”1211 Mann notes, “Many former cult members recover by themselves over time.” She adds, “We do know that counseling is not an answer for everything.” It also must be noted that the effectiveness and scientific basis for some forms of counseling has been called into question by the critical analysis provided in books like Science and Psuedoscience in Clinical Psychology .1212 Mann says that there are “varying degrees of harm from any one cult to any one individual.” She warns that failing to recognize such variations and distinctions is a “common mistake.”1213 Singer categorizes the difficulties that emerge for many former cultists during their postcult adjustment period. Much like Groenveld, Singer focuses on what hurts most when cult members decide to move on. There is guilt, shame, self-blaming, unreasonable fear, and excessive doubt. In some very extreme situations, there is even the possibility of panic attacks. There can be a sense of loneliness after leaving such a tightly knit social environment.1214 Singer says, “Each former member wrestles with a number of the problems…Some need more time than others to resolve all the issues they face, and a few never get their lives going again.”1215 Groenveld once described her temporary deficiencies and said she found it “difficult to make decisions” and at times thought she had “lost touch with reality.”1216 To move on effectively, Singer says that former cult members must build “a new social network.” In some situations “former cult members often feel like immigrants or refugees entering a foreign culture,” the psychologist says. But Singer adds, “In most cases, however, they are actually reentering their own former culture…Unlike the immigrant confronting novel situations, the person coming out of a cult is confronting the society she or he once rejected.”1217 Singer warned about what she called “the ‘fishbowl’ effect,”1218 which is the feeling that family and friends are closely watching a former cult member and fearing that almost anything might cause him or her to go back. To avoid that effect, family and friends can be sympathetic and supportive but not hovering and controlling. Other issues former cult members may be challenged by include “aversions and hypercritical attitudes” the cult inculcated and nurtured. Also, as a direct result of the pain and sense of betrayal felt over their past commitment, former cult member may develop a “fear of commitment.”1219 But Singer says they must overcome such disillusionment and learn how to trust again.1220 This can be done based on their new knowledge, increased awareness, and ongoing interaction with the world around them.

• From The City of God

  399 Lecture 19—Happiness and Politics (Book 19) manifold tragic necessities. Christians should accept these duties: If they do not, the social order may perish. ›We may need to use violence in order to protect the blessings of society as a whole. It is a moral duty to engage in these sorts of activities, though they may, accidentally and in no way as part of the essence of the thing, cause unjust suffering to innocent victims. But they should cause us torment. „Augustine does not excuse the judge from involvement, nor does he exculpate him for the evils he causes, however inadvertently he causes them. Instead he says the judge should feel these evils as evils. He should not deny their reality, but recognize that the evils we cause to happen in this world are genuine evils, and while we may be obliged to inflict them, that necessity does not erase those evils or our complicity in them. The Nature of the Commonwealth „With this vision of the darkness and tragedy of political life in place, Augustine turns back to his philosophical dispute with Cicero about the analytic nature of the commonwealth. Augustine argues that since justice is a matter of giving all their due, a city that does not give God God’s due is not just, and thus not a city. Because God was never worshipped in pagan Rome, justice was never done there, and the city was never a true city, at least on Cicero’s definition. „This argument is a critique of Cicero’s analytic political vocabulary, and by extension the dominant political understanding of the ancient world. Justice, Augustine is saying, is first and foremost a form of worship. True justice is not defined by mere equity. For justice to be truly good, it must flow from some source other than our perception of what is our due. Our due is what God has decided to give us, far beyond any merit we might conceive.

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

  They are still my children. I don’t know them and they don’t know me. I paid child support and their college tuition but I didn’t go to their weddings or to any other events in their lives. It would have been too stressful for everyone. I want them to be happy. But when I met my current wife there was just no way I was going to spend the rest of my life without her. I never thought you could love somebody that way. Out of that bond we had two children. They are the best thing that ever happened to me and I would give my life for them.” I think it’s reasonable to say that this father lives with the guilt of having deserted his children but he feels that maintaining ties to his past is more than he can tolerate. Although he is a man with a modest income, he paid child support and college tuition. But his feelings for his children are tied to his feelings toward his ex-wife, and that is a door he cannot stand to reopen. We need to come to terms with a great deal of variation in postdivorce parent-child relationships. The notion that these relationships are entirely separate from marriage and are self-sustained during the many changes in the postdivorce family is not supported in this work. There is no universal pattern. Some fathers are eager and able to continue parenting after the breakup and willing to shape their entire lives accordingly. Others cannot maintain loyalty to two families or have no wish to do so. Others find that continued frequent contact with the children of the failed marriage makes them unhappy. And still others continue to be driven or tormented by lifelong angers at their ex-wives. There is no dominant pattern that we can use to guide our policies and interventions for all or most families. Yet in part because of the demands of the legal system, our search is for a one-size policy that fits all. Effects of Witnessing Violence on Girls I HADN’T HEARD much about Larry’s sister during my previous interviews and now seemed like a good time to ask. I remembered her well from our first meeting at the breakup when she was a very pretty, shy, gentle four-year-old child who cried when I asked her to draw her family. I had thought about her on several occasions during my interviews with Larry and had long been distressed by her father’s statements to the child that she, like her mother, was inferior to men. I also remembered how the mother had wanted to cut back on the little girl’s visiting with her father because the child was brokenhearted after each visit but that the child had insisted on going despite her pain. I asked Larry to tell me about Anja. His manner softened. “I’ve been concerned about Anja for years, just as she’s been concerned about me. We’ve looked out for each other.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Somewhere in his days in Carthage, he took up with the woman who would be his wife for over a decade. She was his wife in the Roman sense, appropriate for a woman of lower social status who could be dismissed when a better marriage came along. (It helps to think of American slave-owners who took women from their households to bed, sometimes respecting them for a lifetime, sometimes disposing of them callously when convenience or libido suggested it.) For more than a decade, Augustine lived in conjugal fidelity with this woman who looked after his household and bore and raised him a son. They parted company when Augustine’s mother was seeking a better society marriage for him. Augustine’s wife was probably a free woman, but she may have begun as a slave or come from slave parents. She gets short shrift from him, except for a muted pang of guilt expressed years later that still conceals her from our sight,73 but we would love to know what she made of him. The Norwegian novelist Jostein Gaarder gave her a voice not long ago in a cheeky novel that does not always stay close to the facts or the probabilities but is at least a vivid thought experiment in a nonobvious way to read Augustine.74 Garry Wills whimsically twisted a line of the Confessions to give her a name—Una—and emphasized her continuing role in Augustine’s life by speculating that when back in Africa with their son, Adeodatus, Augustine must have had at least some social dealings with her.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Nonetheless, the severe asceticism took its toll: Luther was pushing his body to its absolute limits, losing weight and suffering periods of depression, so much so that he assumed he did not have long to live. Why did his religiosity take such an ascetic form? It seems that Luther, a naturally spontaneous, impulsive person throughout his life, deliberately chose a monastic environment to subordinate himself, and control his wishes and desires. By entering the monastery he had rebelled against his father and rejected the male identity and patriarchal power that was his to inherit. Instead he chose a religious life of learning but also of obedience that centered on physical mortification. He referred to his own punctiliousness and his competitive streak—it seems that he wanted to win in the holiness stakes. There was also a sense of overwhelming guilt, but it is difficult to guess where this came from. It may have had something to do with being the favored son, but this hardly accounts for the force of these feelings, and their all-consuming nature. Luther seems almost to have luxuriated in feelings of guilt, as if, by driving them to their extreme, he could experience a heightened devotional state of self-hatred that would bring him as close as possible to God. There was a pervasive silence in the monastery, with no talking after the evening meal. Strict Augustinianism was an extreme version of late medieval piety that focused on repetition and control of external behavior such as fasting. It sanctified pain and sensory deprivation, and the interrupted sleep could send the individual into a trancelike devotional state. Later, Luther was to speak with anger about the kind of seeming holiness that focused on externals, leaving consciences burdened, because it was impossible for the monks to fulfill every duty. All the monks, he recalled, thought “that we were utterly holy, from head to toe,” but in their hearts “we were full of hatred, full of fear and full of unbelief.” 21 He remembered a proverb from his youth that ran, “If you like to remain alone, then your heart will remain pure,” and he later recalled a hermit in Einsiedeln in Switzerland who would speak to nobody, for “whoever has dealings with men, to him the angels cannot come.” 22 To the older Luther, this kind of aloofness was unnatural and dangerous, as those suffering from melancholy (as he did himself) should be encouraged to eat, drink, and above all socialize with others.