Hope

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)

  When the note was shown to Elinor, as it was within ten minutes after its arrival, it gave her, for the first time, some share in the expectations of Lucy; for such a mark of uncommon kindness, vouchsafed on so short an acquaintance, seemed to declare that the good-will towards her arose from something more than merely malice against herself; and might be brought, by time and address, to do every thing that Lucy wished. Her flattery had already subdued the pride of Lady Middleton, and made an entry into the close heart of Mrs. John Dashwood; and these were effects that laid open the probability of greater. The Miss Steeles removed to Harley Street, and all that reached Elinor of their influence there, strengthened her expectation of the event. Sir John, who called on them more than once, brought home such accounts of the favour they were in, as must be universally striking. Mrs. Dashwood had never been so much pleased with any young women in her life, as she was with them; had given each of them a needle book made by some emigrant; called Lucy by her Christian name; and did not know whether she should ever be able to part with them. END OF THE SECOND VOLUME CHAPTER XXXVII. Mrs. Palmer was so well at the end of a fortnight, that her mother felt it no longer necessary to give up the whole of her time to her; and, contenting herself with visiting her once or twice a day, returned from that period to her own home, and her own habits, in which she found the Miss Dashwoods very ready to resume their former share. About the third or fourth morning after their being thus resettled in Berkeley Street, Mrs. Jennings, on returning from her ordinary visit to Mrs. Palmer, entered the drawing-room, where Elinor was sitting by herself, with an air of such hurrying importance as prepared her to hear something wonderful; and giving her time only to form that idea, began directly to justify it, by saying, “Lord! my dear Miss Dashwood! have you heard the news?” “No, ma’am. What is it?”

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  He replied with his accustomary mildness to all her inquiries, but without satisfying her in any. Elinor now began to make the tea, and Marianne was obliged to appear again. After her entrance, Colonel Brandon became more thoughtful and silent than he had been before, and Mrs. Jennings could not prevail on him to stay long. No other visitor appeared that evening, and the ladies were unanimous in agreeing to go early to bed. Marianne rose the next morning with recovered spirits and happy looks. The disappointment of the evening before seemed forgotten in the expectation of what was to happen that day. They had not long finished their breakfast before Mrs. Palmer’s barouche stopped at the door, and in a few minutes she came laughing into the room: so delighted to see them all, that it was hard to say whether she received most pleasure from meeting her mother or the Miss Dashwoods again. So surprised at their coming to town, though it was what she had rather expected all along; so angry at their accepting her mother’s invitation after having declined her own, though at the same time she would never have forgiven them if they had not come! “Mr. Palmer will be so happy to see you,” said she; “What do you think he said when he heard of your coming with Mama? I forget what it was now, but it was something so droll!” After an hour or two spent in what her mother called comfortable chat, or in other words, in every variety of inquiry concerning all their acquaintance on Mrs. Jennings’s side, and in laughter without cause on Mrs. Palmer’s, it was proposed by the latter that they should all accompany her to some shops where she had business that morning, to which Mrs. Jennings and Elinor readily consented, as having likewise some purchases to make themselves; and Marianne, though declining it at first was induced to go likewise. Wherever they went, she was evidently always on the watch. In Bond Street especially, where much of their business lay, her eyes were in constant inquiry; and in whatever shop the party were engaged, her mind was equally abstracted from every thing actually before them, from all that interested and occupied the others. Restless and dissatisfied every where, her sister could never obtain her opinion of any article of purchase, however it might equally concern them both: she received no pleasure from anything; was only impatient to be at home again, and could with difficulty govern her vexation at the tediousness of Mrs. Palmer, whose eye was caught by every thing pretty, expensive, or new; who was wild to buy all, could determine on none, and dawdled away her time in rapture and indecision.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  About noon, however, she began—but with a caution—a dread of disappointment which for some time kept her silent, even to her friend—to fancy, to hope she could perceive a slight amendment in her sister’s pulse;—she waited, watched, and examined it again and again;—and at last, with an agitation more difficult to bury under exterior calmness, than all her foregoing distress, ventured to communicate her hopes. Mrs. Jennings, though forced, on examination, to acknowledge a temporary revival, tried to keep her young friend from indulging a thought of its continuance;—and Elinor, conning over every injunction of distrust, told herself likewise not to hope. But it was too late. Hope had already entered; and feeling all its anxious flutter, she bent over her sister to watch—she hardly knew for what. Half an hour passed away, and the favourable symptom yet blessed her. Others even arose to confirm it. Her breath, her skin, her lips, all flattered Elinor with signs of amendment; and Marianne fixed her eyes on her with a rational, though languid, gaze. Anxiety and hope now oppressed her in equal degrees, and left her no moment of tranquillity till the arrival of Mr. Harris at four o’clock;—when his assurances, his felicitations on a recovery in her sister even surpassing his expectation, gave her confidence, comfort, and tears of joy. Marianne was in every respect materially better, and he declared her entirely out of danger. Mrs. Jennings, perhaps satisfied with the partial justification of her forebodings which had been found in their late alarm, allowed herself to trust in his judgment, and admitted, with unfeigned joy, and soon with unequivocal cheerfulness, the probability of an entire recovery. Elinor could not be cheerful. Her joy was of a different kind, and led to any thing rather than to gaiety. Marianne restored to life, health, friends, and to her doting mother, was an idea to fill her heart with sensations of exquisite comfort, and expand it in fervent gratitude;—but it led to no outward demonstrations of joy, no words, no smiles. All within Elinor’s breast was satisfaction, silent and strong. She continued by the side of her sister, with little intermission the whole afternoon, calming every fear, satisfying every inquiry of her enfeebled spirits, supplying every succour, and watching almost every look and every breath. The possibility of a relapse would of course, in some moments, occur to remind her of what anxiety was—but when she saw, on her frequent and minute examination, that every symptom of recovery continued, and saw Marianne at six o’clock sink into a quiet, steady, and to all appearance comfortable, sleep, she silenced every doubt. The time was now drawing on, when Colonel Brandon might be expected back. At ten o’clock, she trusted, or at least not much later her mother would be relieved from the dreadful suspense in which she must now be travelling towards them. The Colonel, too!—perhaps scarcely less an object of pity!—Oh!—how slow was the progress of time which yet kept them in ignorance!

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  Elinor could not help laughing. “Excuse me,” said she; “and be assured that I meant no offence to you, by speaking, in so quiet a way, of my own feelings. Believe them to be stronger than I have declared; believe them, in short, to be such as his merit, and the suspicion—the hope of his affection for me may warrant, without imprudence or folly. But farther than this you must not believe. I am by no means assured of his regard for me. There are moments when the extent of it seems doubtful; and till his sentiments are fully known, you cannot wonder at my wishing to avoid any encouragement of my own partiality, by believing or calling it more than it is. In my heart I feel little—scarcely any doubt of his preference. But there are other points to be considered besides his inclination. He is very far from being independent. What his mother really is we cannot know; but, from Fanny’s occasional mention of her conduct and opinions, we have never been disposed to think her amiable; and I am very much mistaken if Edward is not himself aware that there would be many difficulties in his way, if he were to wish to marry a woman who had not either a great fortune or high rank.” Marianne was astonished to find how much the imagination of her mother and herself had outstripped the truth. “And you really are not engaged to him!” said she. “Yet it certainly soon will happen. But two advantages will proceed from this delay. I shall not lose you so soon, and Edward will have greater opportunity of improving that natural taste for your favourite pursuit which must be so indispensably necessary to your future felicity. Oh! if he should be so far stimulated by your genius as to learn to draw himself, how delightful it would be!”

• From The City of God

  Chapter 32. --Of the Universal Way of the Soul's Deliverance, Which Porphyry Did Not Find Because He Did Not Rightly Seek It, and Which the Grace of Christ Has Alone Thrown Open. This is the religion which possesses the universal way for delivering the soul; for except by this way, none can be delivered. This is a kind of royal way, which alone leads to a kingdom which does not totter like all temporal dignities, but stands firm on eternal foundations. And when Porphyry says, towards the end of the first book De Regressu Animoe, that no system of doctrine which furnishes the universal way for delivering the soul has as yet been received, either from the truest philosophy, or from the ideas and practices of the Indians, or from the reasoning [437] of the Chaldaeans, or from any source whatever, and that no historical reading had made him acquainted with that way, he manifestly acknowledges that there is such a way, but that as yet he was not acquainted with it. Nothing of all that he had so laboriously learned concerning the deliverance of the soul, nothing of all that he seemed to others, if not to himself, to know and believe, satisfied him. For he perceived that there was still wanting a commanding authority which it might be right to follow in a matter of such importance. And when he says that he had not learned from any truest philosophy a system which possessed the universal way of the soul's deliverance, he shows plainly enough, as it seems to me, either that the philosophy of which he was a disciple was not the truest, or that it did not comprehend such a way. And how can that be the truest philosophy which does not possess this way? For what else is the universal way of the soul's deliverance than that by which all souls universally are delivered, and without which, therefore, no soul is delivered? And when he says, in addition, "or from the ideas and practices of the Indians, or from the reasoning of the Chaldaeans, or from any source whatever," he declares in the most unequivocal language that this universal way of the soul's deliverance was not embraced in what he had learned either from the Indians or the Chaldaeans; and yet he could not forbear stating that it was from the Chaldaeans he had derived these divine oracles of which he makes such frequent mention. What, therefore, does he mean by this universal way of the soul's deliverance, which had not yet been made known by any truest philosophy, or by the doctrinal systems of those nations which were considered to have great insight in things divine, because they indulged more freely in a curious and fanciful science and worship of angels? What is this universal way of which he acknowledges his ignorance, if not a way which does not belong to one nation as its special property, but is common to all, and divinely bestowed? Porphyry, a man of no mediocre abilities, does not question that such a way exists; for he believes that Divine Providence could not have left men destitute of this universal way of delivering the soul. For he does not say that this way does not exist, but that this great boon and assistance has not yet been discovered, and has not come to his knowledge. And no wonder; for Porphyry lived in an age when this universal way of the soul's deliverance,--in other words, the Christian religion,--was exposed to the persecutions of idolaters and demon-worshippers, and earthly rulers, [438] that the number of martyrs or witnesses for the truth might be completed and consecrated, and that by them proof might be given that we must endure all bodily sufferings in the cause of the holy faith, and for the commendation of the truth. Porphyry, being a witness of these persecutions, concluded that this way was destined to a speedy extinction, and that it, therefore, was not the universal way of the soul's deliverance, and did not see that the very thing that thus moved him, and deterred him from becoming a Christian, contributed to the confirmation and more effectual commendation of our religion.

• From The City of God

  "That Thine enemies have reproached, O Lord, wherewith they have reproached the change of Thy Christ," not thinking it a change, but a consumption. [1071]But what does "Remember, Lord," mean, but that Thou wouldst have compassion, and wouldst for my patiently borne humiliation reward me with the excellency which Thou swarest unto David in Thy truth? But if we assign these words to the Jews, those servants of God who, on the conquest of the earthly Jerusalem, before Jesus Christ was born after the manner of men, were led into captivity, could say such things, understanding the change of Christ, because indeed through Him was to be surely expected, not an earthly and carnal felicity, such as appeared during the few years of king Solomon, but a heavenly and spiritual felicity; and when the nations, then ignorant of this through unbelief, exulted over and insulted the people of God for being captives, what else was this than ignorantly to reproach with the change of Christ those who understand the change of Christ? And therefore what follows when this psalm is concluded, "Let the blessing of the Lord be for evermore, amen, amen," is suitable enough for the whole people of God belonging to the heavenly Jerusalem, whether for those things that lay hid in the Old Testament before the New was revealed, or for those that, being now revealed in the New Testament, are manifestly discerned to belong to Christ. For the blessing of the Lord in the seed of David does not belong to any particular time, such as appeared in the days of Solomon, but is for evermore to be hoped for, in which most certain hope it is said, "Amen, amen;" for this repetition of the word is the confirmation of that hope. Therefore David understanding this, says in the second Book of Kings, in the passage from which we digressed to this psalm, [1072] "Thou hast spoken also for Thy servant's house for a great while to come. " [1073] Therefore also a little after he says, "Now begin, and bless the house of Thy servant for evermore," etc. , because the son was then about to be born from whom his posterity should be continued to Christ, through whom his house should be eternal, and should also be the house of God. For it is called the house of David on account of David's race; but the selfsame is called the house of God on account of the temple of God, made of men, not of stones, where shall dwell for evermore the people with and in their God, and God with and in His people, so that God may fill His people, and the people be filled with their God, while God shall be all in all, Himself their reward in peace who is their strength in war.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 1. --Of the Creation of Angels and Men. As we promised in the immediately preceeding book, this, the last of the whole work, shall contain a discussion of the eternal blessedness of the city of God. This blessedness is named eternal, not because it shall endure for many ages, though at last it shall come to an end, but because, according to the words of the gospel, "of His kingdom there shall be no end. " [1603]Neither shall it enjoy the mere appearance of perpetuity which is maintained by the rise of fresh generations to occupy the place of those that have died out, as in an evergreen the same freshness seems to continue permanently, and the same appearance of dense foliage is preserved by the growth of fresh leaves in the room of those that have withered and fallen; but in that city all the citizens shall be immortal, men now for the first time enjoying what the holy angels have never lost. And this shall be accomplished by God, the most almighty Founder of the city. For He has promised it, and cannot lie, and has already performed many of His promises, and has done many unpromised kindnesses to those whom He now asks to believe that He will do this also.

• From The City of God

  215 Lecture 10 Transcript—Who or What Is God? (Books 8–9) God. And that’s when they stumble upon the demons, or perhaps the demons present themselves to them. In this light, Augustine’s critique of the demons, his demonstration that the demons cannot be mediators of God because they support the moral depravities that Plato and the Platonists rightly condemn, and so the demons are impure, all of this is to the point for the Platonists, but it doesn’t get to their basic problem. They see that God is transcendent, that the contingencies of this world cannot be the ultimate framework of the universe, that creation needs a true creator. So they see the goal, but they do not see the road to that goal, nor do they see that God has already traversed that road, that God has come to you, as Augustine puts it. And to respond to this visitation, our first task is to humble ourselves to receive this grace. But God helps us with that task, too. These differences relate to radically different visions of Creation itself. If you see the world as a place of exile and distance from God, you will disvalue the world in quite fundamental ways. If you imagine that God’s dignity is secured by being inaccessibly distant from us, many trillions of light years away from the muddy tumult and noisy pandemonium of this world, you will conceive God’s sovereignty as akin to the cold light of a distant star. But what if God’s sovereignty is so profound that God has no need of self-protection from us? What if God’s transcendence is not a matter of distance? Or what if the distance between God and you is entirely confined to the three-inch span of your heart? Perhaps God’s transcendence is simultaneously the most immediate thing—so intimate you cannot but feel it—and yet also the most indistinguishable thing, because its presence is never interrupted by an absence, and so therefore we never know it discreetly. Instead of thinking of God’s transcendence in terms of the idiom of distance, then, consider it as a form of relentless immediacy—the roar you can almost hear behind the silence, the pressure in your eardrums, on your skin, as if someone were pushing down on them from another

• From The City of God

  175 Lecture 8 Transcript—Splendid Vices and Happiness in Hope (Book 5) close to the attitude Augustine has in this encomium, this speech in curious and ominous praise of this emperor, this hymn to the strange glory he attained. In fact, Augustine says, the true happiness of Christian rulers does not lie in power, or their own magnificence, or any of the temporal splendors of this life. They’re not happy in any temporal sense, for worldly happiness evades them as well as the rest of us, maybe even more so. They’re instead, in another important but opaque phrase, happy in hope. That’s a famous long quote from Augustine. We say Christian rulers are happy, if they rule justly; if they are not inflated with pride, but remember that they are but men; if they do all this not for a burning desire for empty glory, but for the love of eternal blessedness; and if they do not fail to offer to their true God, as a sacrifice for their sins, the oblation of humility, compassion, and prayer, then we can call them happy in hope. Now, what is true for the emperor—again, the best-positioned person in this whole world to gain whatever happiness can be gained by this-worldly effort—will also, by extension, be true for others as well. And this meshes well with his account of the logic of this-worldly action, which, recall, is done not out of anxious fear about the ultimate upshot of history. That war is already over. The good guys, for Augustine, have already won. We are exhibiting our responsive gratitude and joyfully praising God as best we can in the interim before the confirmation of that ultimate victory. That is why we are supposed to be, for Augustine, happy in hope: we know joy is coming, though it is not with us yet. A strange kind of happiness, to be sure; but however distended and painful it may be, happiness still he thinks it is.

• From The City of God

  325 Lecture 15 Transcript—Augustine and Original Sin (Book 13) Paul said when he said that if anyone is in Christ, he or she is a new creation. We are genuinely new; and yet our newness still bears some kind of organic relation to our old creation. Let me be very clear. This account of the Fall is not meant ultimately to make people feel bad, but to make believers look forward in a way that is not delusionally consoling, but sober and enabling. So this account of sin in the Fall does not mean to be juridical, but therapeutic. How, given this picture of what is voluntary and what is involuntary, can we be condemned justly? Where does responsibility fall, as it were in this account? Are you responsible for what you do if you don't understand the consequences of your actions? Well, it depends on what you mean by responsibility. Put aside the question of abstract legal fault for a minute. We’ve all been in situations where, though it was not obviously our fault, we were still the ones stuck in a context and had to figure out what to do about it. On an individual level, this insight is the legitimating core of the last century of psychotherapy, after all. The therapist says to the patient,”This is who you are, now, what are you going to do about it?” This is not a question of blame. It is a rescue mission, a salvage project in a way. Here we are, in this world, with these passions, these affections, these torrent attachments—how should we respond given these facts about us? For they are definitely facts about us. We’re all of us products, in very many different ways, of our culture, our families, the people we’ve chanced to meet through our lives. Yes, of course, we’ve been the ones who metabolized all those encounters and integrated them, as best we could, into our own overall sense of self. But none of us, not even the most remarkable of us, are self- made men or women. In fact, the very idea that we could be so self- made, so very prominent in some circles especially in the U. S. today, is itself a product of our own local, particular, parochial history, and

• From The City of God

  326 Books That Matter: The City of God one of the things about Americans that many people coming from other cultures find most patently absurd and bewildering. Many will be surprised that I might suggest that a picture of inherited sin that seems so bleak as Augustine’s could have positive lessons for people today. We have an image of doctrines like this as weapons of unremitting bleakness, driving believers into paralysis and despair. God knows they’ve been used that way enough across history. But to Augustine and most of his immediate audience, they seemed to have had the opposite effect. His was an activist and dynamic faith, seeking to reach out well beyond the churches’ walls, meaning to be empowering on the individual level as well—he was speaking a word of liberation to people and the communities. It will help us to understand how this was possible if we reset our expectations about responsibility from a juridical understanding culminating in judgment, to a therapeutic understanding oriented toward analysis and repair. For Augustine is talking about grace as divine therapy, divine medicine. For him, the church is better conceived as a hospital than as a gymnasium, and we are more usefully understood in this life as recovering patients, rather than athletes. Patients under the hand of a true—which does not, by the way, mean gentle—healer. Augustine is sometimes called the inventor of original sin, and he is frequently condemned for it. But that’s not quite right. The notion of original sin was in place in the North African Church before Augustine; so he did not invent the concept, though he gave the most powerful and fruitful account of it that anyone has yet offered, and embedded it more tightly in a larger account of the human condition and God’s salvific action in which it made sense and served a functional role. In doing this, he was trying most basically to come to grips with the stubborn gruesomeness of our condition, and to recognize the depths of our captivity to it, and then to say that nonetheless this captivity is still against the Manicheans and others not the Creation’s

• From The City of God

  369 Lecture 17 Transcript—Augustine’s Scriptural History (Books 15–17) This typological imagination, in other words, creates a certain kind of self. It’s not simply informative; it is also quite powerfully formative. Consider, for example, the connection between reading typologically and an experience of boredom or tedium, which, let’s admit, might just accompany a reading of Books 15–17—I encourage you to check them out and see what I mean. To see what he means, reflect on boredom itself. It’s actually an interesting thing to do. Boredom frustrates the self in certain ways. The 20 th -century intellectual Susan Sontag once said, “Boredom is only another name for a certain species of frustration.” I think that’s pretty interesting. One mark of boredom, then, is a feeling of claustrophobic impatience—as if time cannot pass fast enough for us; as if we were doing nothing but killing time. Furthermore, we are self-aware in this state that we are partially the problem—so there’s no escape from boredom since we are what is boring. This boredom splits the self. When we are bored, we are typically painfully aware of ourselves as bored. Now in contrast, when you’re totally wrapped up in an experience, you typically don’t notice yourself in so self-conscious a way. In talking about tedium, then, Augustine thinks that what he’s talking about is the core of what it means to be alive today. In a way, all that comes before is prolegomena to this experience of our present. To experience the meaning of time in this way is to feel, in our experience of time itself, how we are divided. We’re never fully here. We’re always still caught up in various historical moments. Our history is what we're trying to render coherent, to master, to reintegrate into ourselves. This experience of ourselves as stretched out across time is meant, for Augustine, to teach us our need of help, our need of reintegration. And again, the word he uses for this experience of stretched- outedness is distentio—this Latin word that does mean stretched- out, as one would be distended; stretched out on a rack, if one were

• From The City of God

  258 Books That Matter: The City of God of purpose—that seem not entirely dissimilar from the philosophers he treats in Books 6–10. This also suggests to us something of how Augustine can be seen to offer a positive apologetics, as well. He doesn’t exactly show how the longings of the pagans, as they understand themselves to understand them, will find satisfaction in the Christian church. But what he does is suggest, therapeutically, that if the pagans will work with him on better understanding their own longings, they may well find out that they have misunderstood them in the past, and that his account offers a powerful reinterpretation of them that is more truthful to those longings’ original wellsprings, and also reveals them to be vividly connected to Christian practices. So Augustine neither exactly undertakes nor rejects the task of positive apologetics; instead, he shows how a therapeutic take on the pagans’ desires and concerns may do much to help them understand themselves better. Now, as we’ve seen, this therapeutic practice is importantly acted out on the level of language, importantly linguistic. That is to say, much of Augustine’s argument with the pagans can be understood as a series of terminological debates, and Augustine’s positive project is helpfully depicted by conceiving of him undertaking the task of building a new language from old words. The words of the Romans— republic, city, empire, providence, justice, virtue, liberty, glory and love, passion, sacrifice, charity, mercy—all of these are words that Augustine retains. But by the time Book 10 rolls around, he’s using them in a very different way than his Roman ancestors or his pagan contemporaries ever did. Interestingly, this may get to a point that’s very deep in Augustine’s thinking, for as we will see, what Augustine does with these Roman terms also foreshadows how he understands the relationship between the body of Christ and the people Israel. It suggests a pattern of continuity amidst transformation. Now, there are very many vast differences between the people Israel, and the Senate and the

• From The City of God

  420 Books That Matter: The City of God ›On the other hand, consider the knowledge that the damned will not have about heaven. The damned will not know what is going on “inside” heaven. They will be wholly consumed with the utter frustration of their own desires and will have no time to be interested in anything outside themselves. They cannot know goodness. „But while Augustine teaches us to be modest in our speculations, we must also be emphatic in our affirmations of the Christian mission of shaping our souls in the right way to receive the judgment now and the inauguration of the kingdom. „From within a failing way of life, no beams of light pointing a way to a new future of hope are visible. We cannot anticipate. The apocalypse must be spiritualized because the lesson that emerges from it is that we are saved not because of what we do, but despite ourselves. We must be always prepared, always on our toes, for the messiah. „Augustine resists all temptations toward literal apocalyptic thought and loosens the semiotic cord between the present moment and the eschatological end of all things without cutting it—thus giving history and its scriptural script a significant amount of flexibility and ambiguity. But the ambiguity about the details of the event do not lead him to be uncertain about the fact of the event. „Openness to exploration and questioning is at the heart of Augustine’s picture of the Christian life, and he means here to show his audience how to go about thinking about these matters—how to inhabit intellectually the central speculative, contemplative, and affective dynamics of the Christian faith, Openness to exploration and questioning is at the heart of Augustine’s picture of the Christian life. 421 Lecture 20—Judgments, Last and Otherwise (Book 20) which Augustine thinks central to every Christian’s faith. In this way, apocalyptic speculation—Käsemann’s “mother of all theology”—is made a fruitful part of Christian life. Questions to Consider 1. T o what degree do you think Augustine understood “judgment” correctly when he said it was properly a property of God and not humans? What does that mean for our ongoing assessments of our own actions and those of others? 2. If August ine “spiritualizes the eschaton,” as this lecture argued, what constructive role does he think belief in the end of all things can have for Christians? Do you think this is a good thing or not?

• From The City of God

  322 Books That Matter: The City of God believe it, the kind of thing you’d expect a professor to do, that’s why I like it so much. It reveals his overall strategy. He says, “We know that we are mortal, and yet, and this is the quote from Augustine, we might yet be able to decline in Latin declinare, which means to refuse, but also to inflect, as in grammar that second death he says, the death of the body itself. Now for once, that pun is actually far from trivial. For these two senses of decline cohere here, and reveal that we are best advised, on Augustine’s reading, to resist death not with efforts at direct blocking, but by accepting it, though in a slanted and oblique manner. What does that mean? The appropriate Christian response to this condition, this condition of being in a mortal body, is to use it to the end of our proper conditioning—to see life as death, and re-interpret good life as dying to the world, dying to our wrong attachment to the world, to achieve true life abundant. How do we do this? Well, Augustine says, by cultivating our faith. We are trained in faith, in hope—and death has become a grace by which we pass into new life; as Augustine says, It is not that death has turned into a good thing when it was formerly an evil. What has happened is that God has granted to faith so great a gift of grace that death, which all agree to be the contrary of life, has become the means by which men pass into life. The blessed are brought to learn to endure this physical death in such a way as to convert their affections to escape the more terrible spiritual death. Note, Augustine doesn’t deny that the death of the body is terrible; the anguish of death is real. So death is itself in some sense evil, but it can be used for good. Effectively, we should turn our death into an act of martyrdom, turn, that is, the blank, pointless givenness of mortality after the Fall into a death with a purpose and a meaning as a witness to something larger than death itself, a witness to what has caused you to live your life

• From The City of God

  430 Books That Matter: The City of God which there will come a new creation, he says, made through a transformation of the old. That’s important; it’s not the rejection of the old, it’s a transformation of it. The apocalypse leads to a transfigured life, not an escape from creation, but a final and full reception of the gift of creation. Indeed, for Augustine, as we will see in later books, it is the damned who get so to speak raptured out of creation, taken out of creation into Hell—the blessed, the character of the blessing that the blessed receive is precisely the gift of creation itself. Now we live in the world, and the grammar of the word world does not imply so easily any need for a God. But if we see that this world is Creation, that very word itself, Creation, immediately implies that this reality depends upon another, whom we label Creator. Together with this knowledge of God as Creator, and indeed then ingredient in it will also be knowledge of God the Creator as one who knows truly all about our world, all the details of it. To speak very crudely, God is not just muscle; God is also brain, not just decisive agency but also effortlessly inclusive—from our perspective, relentlessly inescapable—knowledge and understanding. This is to say, God is not just Creator and Sustainer; God is also Judge. The knowledge of judgment that humans will have, even in the eschaton, is complicated and limited in ways that underscore the differences between God and the human, both in the eschaton and today, and the limited character of human nature, even in the human eternal state. And yet there are some things we may be able to know that are interesting, even for what they suggest about now. First of all, reflect on the knowledge that the blessed have of evil. In what way, Augustine asks, will the blessed go out to know the damned, as the scriptures say they will? They will know what happens to the damned, but indirectly. They will not be deflected from their direct knowledge of God. They will not be perceiving the suffering the sufferings of the damned; they will only know by implication from their knowledge of God’s justice.

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  407 Lecture 19 Transcript—Happiness and Politics (Book 19) In looking for happiness, Augustine says, we have been subtly misdescribing our desired end. We imagine we can achieve happiness by doing something. But peace—peace is not something you do. Peace is something you are. Describing our end as peace once again challenges our presumption that our capacities for agency are a centrally useful tool in our quest for happiness. Perhaps, peace suggests, our end is not something we can accomplish; perhaps it is as much a gift to us that we must at best receive. So it appears that Christians face something of a quandary. The conditions of sinful worldly existence make our lives inhospitable sites for the cultivation of our true happiness, which is genuine peace. But if belief in our agency is part of the problem, how should we use our agency to seek peace? How should Christians inhabit this world, and live this life? They should not flee it, for Augustine; they do have duties of care for the world so understood. Most basically they should seek their happiness in hope, and make use of temporal things directed toward earthly peace in the earthly city or toward heavenly peace in the city of God. Even to do this for the earthly city, however, requires divine direction and guidance to love—to love the neighbor, the self, and God. Thus true virtue works in this world graciously by using the goods and ills of this life to achieve its ends, and its ends in this life are, in fact, various kinds of peace, from domestic peace to the civic peace of the city. And it is not afraid to cooperate with others, even non-Christians, to achieve this peace. Just remember here, Augustine grew up in a distinctively religiously mixed household. His father was not a Christian; his mother was a Christian. He knows what it’s like to try to engage interface relations in this way.

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  419 Lecture 20—Judgments, Last and Otherwise (Book 20) „ Thus Augustine can affirm both that this is the day of salvation and that it is indeterminately deferred. „In Augustine’s age, Christians professed one of two general views about the apocalypse. ›The literalists believed in a literal end of the world as detailed in the book of Revelation. Some saw the “millennium” prophesied in Revelation to be a literal period of a thousand years. ›The metaphoricalists saw in Revelation primarily an inner or spiritual meaning about a struggle within the soul. „The apocalypse leads to a transfigured life: not an escape from Creation, but a final and full reception of the gift. Now we live in the world, and the grammar of the word “world” does not imply any need for a God. But if the world is Creation, that word immediately implies that this reality depends on another, whom we label Creator. „Together with this knowledge of God as Creator will be knowledge of God as one who knows truly all about our world. God is not just decisive agential will but also effortlessly and relentlessly inescapable knowledge and understanding. God is not just Creator and sustainer; God is also judge. „The knowledge of judgment that humans will have is complicated and limited in ways that underscore the differences between God and the human, even in the human’s eternal state. Yet some things we may be able to know are interesting. ›Reflect on the knowledge that the blessed have of evil. In what way, Augustine asks, will the blessed know the damned, as the scriptures say they will? They will know what happens to them, but indirectly. They will not be deflected from their direct knowledge of God; they will know by implication from knowledge of God’s justice.

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  395 Lecture 19—Happiness and Politics (Book 19) › The highest good that Christians seek is eternal life, but Christians understand themselves to be doubly incapacitated in the pursuit of that end. They know they cannot know the proper nature of this good, nor can they do the things necessary to attain it, without divine help. „Thus Christians are constantly made more aware of and must constantly publicly confess their need of faith and grace. The good life is not found here on earth; this life is too fragile, and true harmony of body and spirit is never reached in this life. „Even virtue’s life on earth must “wage perpetual war,” against the vices: the virtue of temperance in unending resistance to desires of flesh; prudence in a constant monitoring for evil; justice in an endless struggle to order all that is always tending entropically toward disorder; and courage in the need to bear with patience the evils of this world. „Yet we cannot conclude that our happiness lies in escaping our embodied condition and becoming a sort of Stoic sage who confuses insensate stupor with true tranquility, or a philosopher like Cato who conflated the end of life with ending this life, seeking secure and settled happiness through an escapist suicidal flight. „For Augustine, true virtues can exist only in those in whom there is true piety and godliness, and even so true virtue does not promise full happiness here; we can only be happy in hope. According to Augustine, then, Christians differ from pagan philosophers both in their conception of the good and in their understanding of how that good will be realized in their own lives. All the routes to happiness that the philosophers and others have scouted out are shown to be inadequate.

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  378 Books That Matter: The City of God the lives of others. Specifically, he wants to promote two kinds of ambiguity: temporal and spatial. „We should be humbly uncertain about where we are when it comes to enumerating who is inside the city of God and who is not. Even in the heartland of the pagan religious traditions themselves, Augustine finds moments of true witness to Christ: Job, for example, or the mysterious oracles of the Sibylline prophesies, which we now know point to Christ. ›Christ, in his life, used all for good, moving from humiliation to exaltation. So should we treat our own challenges as opportunities for spiritual growth. We know neither who among our opponents is our true enemy nor who will turn out to be our true friend. ›The city of God, when it is on pilgrimage, should deal with the wicked by using the suffering caused thereby to exercise patience, charity, and forgiveness. „We should also be humbly uncertain about when we are—what time it is in relation to the Last Days. Hence, against those devotees of apocalyptic eschatology, he insists that we must not attempt to anticipate the Last Judgment. Against those who see a fixed time frame for the church’s persecutions, he insists that there are no limits we could imagine to the times that the church will be persecuted. Questions to Consider 1. What do you think of Augustine’s proposal for how Christians should understand the ongoing life of Judaism? 2. What is the relevance of Augustine’s vision of world history for his account of the salvation history of the People Israel, Jesus Christ, and the Christian churches?