Love

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 The City of God

  202 Books That Matter: The City of God real unsponsored and unprompted and really unwarranted love for humanity. ›This view entails a deeply negative vision of material reality. The vision of God as supremely immaterial and materiality as nothing but dead matter may exist as two sides of the same coin. Platonists affirm both. The Platonic Path to God „The Platonists’ vision of God as fundamentally repulsed by material reality imposes a basically escapist strategy for getting to God, which in turn implies to them the anthropological claim that we are not naturally worldly, but are exiles in materiality. „Neoplatonism imagines our journey to God as a flight from the world because like could only be known by like, and so we and God can only come together in our mutual essential difference from materiality. „The Platonists realized that there was a truly transcendent Creator whose transcendence put all creation equally indeterminately distant from itself, but they underestimated the love of God and the lovability of creation. „The ancient world, in heaven as on earth, was all about associations. The Greeks and Romans were great believers in connections, in whom you knew, on what networks you were a part of. From this worldview, a basic ethics emerged: Help your friends and harm your enemies. Thus these networks organized your whole life, and potential pagan converts were deeply worried about what would happen to their network access when they converted. 203 Lecture 10—Who or What Is God? (Books 8–9) „In the ancient world, different classes of people did not mix; their vision of transcendence was therefore trapped in their snobbishness. ›They assumed an image of God as a Roman nobleman who would never sully himself by descending to the distasteful lower classes. ›They saw the transcendence of God from creation, but they imagined that transcendence as akin to the hauteur of ancient nobility toward the plebeians, not the passion of the loving father who would do anything for his child. ›They could not conceive that a transcendent Creator might take any kind of interest, let alone an immediate and lively concern, for such lowly creatures as humanity. „In the end, the Platonists’ social prejudices forced them to surrender their deepest insight. Their initial metaphysical insight about God’s radical transcendence of creation was vexed by their fear of God’s pollution by matter. The Augustinian Path to God „The Platonists’ fear of contaminating God, their fixation on a mistaken conception of divine purity, and their imposition of multiple layers of mediation all work to corrode their conception of divine transcendence, to encourage them to mistake distance and distaste for holiness. „For Augustine, God’s holiness and transcendence are not matters of the divine being afraid of contamination by the material world. In fact, God loves us and has come to us, in the history of revelation as seen through the history of the people Israel and then in the person of Jesus Christ.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  This circumstance was a growing attachment between her eldest girl and the brother of Mrs. John Dashwood, a gentleman-like and pleasing young man, who was introduced to their acquaintance soon after his sister’s establishment at Norland, and who had since spent the greatest part of his time there. Some mothers might have encouraged the intimacy from motives of interest, for Edward Ferrars was the eldest son of a man who had died very rich; and some might have repressed it from motives of prudence, for, except a trifling sum, the whole of his fortune depended on the will of his mother. But Mrs. Dashwood was alike uninfluenced by either consideration. It was enough for her that he appeared to be amiable, that he loved her daughter, and that Elinor returned the partiality. It was contrary to every doctrine of hers that difference of fortune should keep any couple asunder who were attracted by resemblance of disposition; and that Elinor’s merit should not be acknowledged by every one who knew her, was to her comprehension impossible. Edward Ferrars was not recommended to their good opinion by any peculiar graces of person or address. He was not handsome, and his manners required intimacy to make them pleasing. He was too diffident to do justice to himself; but when his natural shyness was overcome, his behaviour gave every indication of an open, affectionate heart. His understanding was good, and his education had given it solid improvement. But he was neither fitted by abilities nor disposition to answer the wishes of his mother and sister, who longed to see him distinguished—as—they hardly knew what. They wanted him to make a fine figure in the world in some manner or other. His mother wished to interest him in political concerns, to get him into parliament, or to see him connected with some of the great men of the day. Mrs. John Dashwood wished it likewise; but in the mean while, till one of these superior blessings could be attained, it would have quieted her ambition to see him driving a barouche. But Edward had no turn for great men or barouches. All his wishes centered in domestic comfort and the quiet of private life. Fortunately he had a younger brother who was more promising. Edward had been staying several weeks in the house before he engaged much of Mrs. Dashwood’s attention; for she was, at that time, in such affliction as rendered her careless of surrounding objects. She saw only that he was quiet and unobtrusive, and she liked him for it. He did not disturb the wretchedness of her mind by ill-timed conversation. She was first called to observe and approve him farther, by a reflection which Elinor chanced one day to make on the difference between him and his sister. It was a contrast which recommended him most forcibly to her mother.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “I am,” said he. “To me it is faultless. Nay, more, I consider it as the only form of building in which happiness is attainable, and were I rich enough I would instantly pull Combe down, and build it up again in the exact plan of this cottage.” “With dark narrow stairs and a kitchen that smokes, I suppose,” said Elinor. “Yes,” cried he in the same eager tone, “with all and every thing belonging to it;—in no one convenience or inconvenience about it, should the least variation be perceptible. Then, and then only, under such a roof, I might perhaps be as happy at Combe as I have been at Barton.” “I flatter myself,” replied Elinor, “that even under the disadvantage of better rooms and a broader staircase, you will hereafter find your own house as faultless as you now do this.” “There certainly are circumstances,” said Willoughby, “which might greatly endear it to me; but this place will always have one claim of my affection, which no other can possibly share.” Mrs. Dashwood looked with pleasure at Marianne, whose fine eyes were fixed so expressively on Willoughby, as plainly denoted how well she understood him. “How often did I wish,” added he, “when I was at Allenham this time twelvemonth, that Barton cottage were inhabited! I never passed within view of it without admiring its situation, and grieving that no one should live in it. How little did I then think that the very first news I should hear from Mrs. Smith, when I next came into the country, would be that Barton cottage was taken: and I felt an immediate satisfaction and interest in the event, which nothing but a kind of prescience of what happiness I should experience from it, can account for. Must it not have been so, Marianne?” speaking to her in a lowered voice. Then continuing his former tone, he said, “And yet this house you would spoil, Mrs. Dashwood? You would rob it of its simplicity by imaginary improvement! and this dear parlour in which our acquaintance first began, and in which so many happy hours have been since spent by us together, you would degrade to the condition of a common entrance, and every body would be eager to pass through the room which has hitherto contained within itself more real accommodation and comfort than any other apartment of the handsomest dimensions in the world could possibly afford.” Mrs. Dashwood again assured him that no alteration of the kind should be attempted. “You are a good woman,” he warmly replied. “Your promise makes me easy. Extend it a little farther, and it will make me happy. Tell me that not only your house will remain the same, but that I shall ever find you and yours as unchanged as your dwelling; and that you will always consider me with the kindness which has made everything belonging to you so dear to me.”

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  Willoughby, on his side, gave every proof of his pleasure in their acquaintance, which an evident wish of improving it could offer. He came to them every day. To enquire after Marianne was at first his excuse; but the encouragement of his reception, to which every day gave greater kindness, made such an excuse unnecessary before it had ceased to be possible, by Marianne’s perfect recovery. She was confined for some days to the house; but never had any confinement been less irksome. Willoughby was a young man of good abilities, quick imagination, lively spirits, and open, affectionate manners. He was exactly formed to engage Marianne’s heart, for with all this, he joined not only a captivating person, but a natural ardour of mind which was now roused and increased by the example of her own, and which recommended him to her affection beyond every thing else. His society became gradually her most exquisite enjoyment. They read, they talked, they sang together; his musical talents were considerable; and he read with all the sensibility and spirit which Edward had unfortunately wanted. In Mrs. Dashwood’s estimation he was as faultless as in Marianne’s; and Elinor saw nothing to censure in him but a propensity, in which he strongly resembled and peculiarly delighted her sister, of saying too much what he thought on every occasion, without attention to persons or circumstances. In hastily forming and giving his opinion of other people, in sacrificing general politeness to the enjoyment of undivided attention where his heart was engaged, and in slighting too easily the forms of worldly propriety, he displayed a want of caution which Elinor could not approve, in spite of all that he and Marianne could say in its support. Marianne began now to perceive that the desperation which had seized her at sixteen and a half, of ever seeing a man who could satisfy her ideas of perfection, had been rash and unjustifiable. Willoughby was all that her fancy had delineated in that unhappy hour and in every brighter period, as capable of attaching her; and his behaviour declared his wishes to be in that respect as earnest, as his abilities were strong. Her mother too, in whose mind not one speculative thought of their marriage had been raised, by his prospect of riches, was led before the end of a week to hope and expect it; and secretly to congratulate herself on having gained two such sons-in-law as Edward and Willoughby.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  She could easily conceive that marriage might not be immediately in their power; for though Willoughby was independent, there was no reason to believe him rich. His estate had been rated by Sir John at about six or seven hundred a year; but he lived at an expense to which that income could hardly be equal, and he had himself often complained of his poverty. But for this strange kind of secrecy maintained by them relative to their engagement, which in fact concealed nothing at all, she could not account; and it was so wholly contradictory to their general opinions and practice, that a doubt sometimes entered her mind of their being really engaged, and this doubt was enough to prevent her making any inquiry of Marianne. Nothing could be more expressive of attachment to them all, than Willoughby’s behaviour. To Marianne it had all the distinguishing tenderness which a lover’s heart could give, and to the rest of the family it was the affectionate attention of a son and a brother. The cottage seemed to be considered and loved by him as his home; many more of his hours were spent there than at Allenham; and if no general engagement collected them at the park, the exercise which called him out in the morning was almost certain of ending there, where the rest of the day was spent by himself at the side of Marianne, and by his favourite pointer at her feet. One evening in particular, about a week after Colonel Brandon left the country, his heart seemed more than usually open to every feeling of attachment to the objects around him; and on Mrs. Dashwood’s happening to mention her design of improving the cottage in the spring, he warmly opposed every alteration of a place which affection had established as perfect with him. “What!” he exclaimed—“Improve this dear cottage! No. That I will never consent to. Not a stone must be added to its walls, not an inch to its size, if my feelings are regarded.” “Do not be alarmed,” said Miss Dashwood, “nothing of the kind will be done; for my mother will never have money enough to attempt it.” “I am heartily glad of it,” he cried. “May she always be poor, if she can employ her riches no better.” “Thank you, Willoughby. But you may be assured that I would not sacrifice one sentiment of local attachment of yours, or of any one whom I loved, for all the improvements in the world. Depend upon it that whatever unemployed sum may remain, when I make up my accounts in the spring, I would even rather lay it uselessly by than dispose of it in a manner so painful to you. But are you really so attached to this place as to see no defect in it?”

• From The City of God

  Chapter 50. --Of the Preaching of the Gospel, Which is Made More Famous and Powerful by the Sufferings of Its Preachers. Then was fulfilled that prophecy, "Out of Sion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem;" [1240] and the prediction of the Lord Christ Himself, when, after the resurrection, "He opened the understanding" of His amazed disciples "that they might understand the Scriptures, and said unto them, that thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. " [1241]And again, when, in reply to their questioning about the day of His last coming, He said, "It is not for you to know the times or the seasons which the Father hath put in His own power; but ye shall receive the power of the Holy Ghost coming upon you, and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and Samaria, and even unto the ends of the earth. " [1242]First of all, the Church spread herself abroad from Jerusalem; and when very many in Judea and Samaria had believed, she also went into other nations by those who announced the gospel, whom, as lights, He Himself had both prepared by His word and kindled by His Holy Spirit. For He had said to them, "Fear ye not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul. " [1243]And that they might not be frozen with fear, they burned with the fire of charity. Finally, the gospel of Christ was preached in the whole world, not only by those who had seen and heard Him both before His passion and after His resurrection, but also after their death by their successors, amid the horrible persecutions, diverse torments and deaths of the martyrs, God also bearing them witness, both with signs and wonders, and divers miracles and gifts of the Holy Ghost, [1244] that the people of the nations, believing in Him who was crucified for their redemption, might venerate with Christian love the blood of the martyrs which they had poured forth with devilish fury, and the very kings by whose laws the Church had been laid waste might become profitably subject to that name they had cruelly striven to take away from the earth, and might begin to persecute the false gods for whose sake the worshippers of the true God had formerly been persecuted. [1240] Isa. ii. 3. [1241] Luke xxiv. 45-47. [1242] Acts i. 7, 8. [1243] Matt. x. 28. [1244] Heb. ii. 4.

• From The City of God

  205 Lecture 10—Who or What Is God? (Books 8–9) physical in nature, and thus cannot be part of the deepest truth of the universe. They didn’t know much about God, but they were certain that God could not feel anything. ›The Platonists were not wholly wrong about our need of help in realizing God’s loving presence in this world. Instead, against Platonic pride, we need a mediator who is Christ, the true presence of God in our midst. Eternal and stable like God, but temporal and material like ourselves, Christ is the mediator that the demons can never be. Union with God „But this Christ is no mediator; Christ bypasses the whole idea of mediation entirely, Christ just is God. In this, Augustine violates a basic principle of the ancient metaphysical imagination: that like can only be known by like. For him, the Incarnation shows no fundamental divide exists between layers of reality. All is more joined together than set apart. „Nor were the Platonists wrong that purification was required to join with this God. But the purification required, the sacrifice, is undertaken by Christ as humanity’s great high priest, and the purification is given to us by God in our walk through our lives. And for either of these to work you must accept Christ. Thus the first act of true philosophy is loving God and submitting humbly to God’s presence. „Augustine’s point about the dangers of imagining God’s transcendence in terms of distance may be of some interest existentially even today. For there may be analogous social forces shaping our imaginations in ways that make it harder for us to see God. When we see the world, we see only blank walls, cleverly camouflaged as faces or trees or buildings or books, upon which we project our self-fashioned hypotheses. 206 Books That Matter: The City of God „Augustine thinks all of this is a lie. In truth we are present to one another and to the world. And the truth that guarantees this truth—our presence—the truth that is present before all the other presences is God. We are thoroughly secondary. Perhaps Augustine’s vision of how transcendence can secure presence, not forbid it, may be of use today. Questions to Consider 1. Can you be genuinely happy if you are mortal (chapters 14–16)? Who or what, for Augustine, secures the happiness of the just people of the world? 2. For the Platonists, how is God concerned with Creation, and how not? Can the Platonic demiurge be compared to Christ as the Son of God in the Trinity? How do the two visions have similar functions, and how do they differ?

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  Of Edward, or at least of some of his concerns, she now received intelligence from Colonel Brandon, who had been into Dorsetshire lately; and who, treating her at once as the disinterested friend of Mr. Ferrars, and the kind confidante of himself, talked to her a great deal of the parsonage at Delaford, described its deficiencies, and told her what he meant to do himself towards removing them.—His behaviour to her in this, as well as in every other particular, his open pleasure in meeting her after an absence of only ten days, his readiness to converse with her, and his deference for her opinion, might very well justify Mrs. Jennings’s persuasion of his attachment, and would have been enough, perhaps, had not Elinor still, as from the first, believed Marianne his real favourite, to make her suspect it herself. But as it was, such a notion had scarcely ever entered her head, except by Mrs. Jennings’s suggestion; and she could not help believing herself the nicest observer of the two;—she watched his eyes, while Mrs. Jennings thought only of his behaviour;—and while his looks of anxious solicitude on Marianne’s feeling, in her head and throat, the beginning of a heavy cold, because unexpressed by words, entirely escaped the latter lady’s observation;—she could discover in them the quick feelings, and needless alarm of a lover. Two delightful twilight walks on the third and fourth evenings of her being there, not merely on the dry gravel of the shrubbery, but all over the grounds, and especially in the most distant parts of them, where there was something more of wildness than in the rest, where the trees were the oldest, and the grass was the longest and wettest, had—assisted by the still greater imprudence of sitting in her wet shoes and stockings—given Marianne a cold so violent as, though for a day or two trifled with or denied, would force itself by increasing ailments on the concern of every body, and the notice of herself. Prescriptions poured in from all quarters, and as usual, were all declined. Though heavy and feverish, with a pain in her limbs, and a cough, and a sore throat, a good night’s rest was to cure her entirely; and it was with difficulty that Elinor prevailed on her, when she went to bed, to try one or two of the simplest of the remedies. CHAPTER XLIII.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “It is enough,” said she; “to say that he is unlike Fanny is enough. It implies everything amiable. I love him already.” “I think you will like him,” said Elinor, “when you know more of him.” “Like him!” replied her mother with a smile. “I feel no sentiment of approbation inferior to love.” “You may esteem him.” “I have never yet known what it was to separate esteem and love.” Mrs. Dashwood now took pains to get acquainted with him. Her manners were attaching, and soon banished his reserve. She speedily comprehended all his merits; the persuasion of his regard for Elinor perhaps assisted her penetration; but she really felt assured of his worth: and even that quietness of manner, which militated against all her established ideas of what a young man’s address ought to be, was no longer uninteresting when she knew his heart to be warm and his temper affectionate. No sooner did she perceive any symptom of love in his behaviour to Elinor, than she considered their serious attachment as certain, and looked forward to their marriage as rapidly approaching. “In a few months, my dear Marianne,” said she, “Elinor will, in all probability be settled for life. We shall miss her; but she will be happy.” “Oh! Mama, how shall we do without her?” “My love, it will be scarcely a separation. We shall live within a few miles of each other, and shall meet every day of our lives. You will gain a brother, a real, affectionate brother. I have the highest opinion in the world of Edward’s heart. But you look grave, Marianne; do you disapprove your sister’s choice?”

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  Look-a-there, ain’t she pretty?’ She never failed, at this—which was why he never failed to do it—to blush, half-smiling, half-frowning, and nervously to touch the collar of her dress. ‘Sweet Georgia Brown!’ somebody might say. ‘Miss Brown to you,’ said Richard, then, and took her arm. ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ somebody else would say, ‘you better hold on to little Miss Bright-eyes, don’t somebody sure going to take her away from you.’ ‘Yeah,’ said another voice, ‘and it might be me.’ ‘Oh, no,’ said Richard, moving with her towards the street, ‘ain’t nobody going to take my little Little-bit away from me. ’ Little-bit: it had been his name for her. And sometimes he called her Sandwich Mouth, or Funnyface, or Frog-eyes. She would not, of course, have endured these names from anyone else, nor, had she not found herself, with joy and helplessness (and a sleeping panic), living it out, would she ever have suffered herself so publicly to become a man’s property—‘concubine,’ her aunt would have said, and at night, alone, she rolled the word, tart like lemon rind, on her tongue. She was descending with Richard to the sea. She would have to climb back up alone, but she did not know this then. Leaving the boys in the hall, they gained the midtown New York streets. ‘And what we going to do to-day, Little-bit?’ With that smile of his, and those depthless eyes, beneath the towers of the white city, with people, white, hurrying all around them. ‘I don’t know, honey. What you want to do?’ ‘Well, maybe, we go to a mu seum .’ The first time he suggested this, she demanded, in panic, if they would be allowed to enter. ‘Sure, they let niggers in,’ Richard said. ‘Ain’t we got to be educated, too—to live with the motherf——s?’ He never ‘watched’ his language with her, which at first she took as evidence of his contempt because she had fallen so easily, and which later she took as evidence of his love. And when he took her to the Museum of Natural History, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they were almost certain to be the only black people, and he guided her through the halls, which never ceased in her imagination to be as cold as tombstones, it was then she saw another life in him. It never ceased to frighten her, this passion he brought to something she could not understand. For she never grasped—not at any rate with her mind—what, with such incandescence, he tried to tell her on these Saturday afternoons. She could not find, between herself and the African statuette, or totem pole, on which he gazed with such melancholy wonder, any point of contact. She was only glad that she did not look that way.

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

  I called the library and told Mrs. Johnson that Muriel and I were taking Oliver to a nursing home in Connecticut because we couldn’t care for him any longer. Muriel and I decided that nothing could break the bonds between us, certainly not the sharing of our bodies and our joys with another woman whom we had come to love, also. Our taking Lynn to our bed became, not merely a fact to be integrated into our living, but a test for each one of us of our love and our openness. It was a beautiful vision but a difficult experiment. At first Lynn seemed to be having the best of it. She had both of us totally focused upon her and her problems, as well as upon her little horsewoman’s body and her ribald lovemaking. I helped Lynn get a job at the library, in another branch. She rented a basement space over on West Bleecker Street to store her furniture, but mostly she lived at Seventh Street. We were certainly the first to have tried to work out this unique way of living for women, communal sex without rancor. After all, nobody else ever talked about it. None of the gay-girl books we read so avidly ever suggested our vision was not new, nor our joy in each other. Certainly Beebo Brinker didn’t; nor Olga, of The Scorpion . Our much-fingered copies of Ann Bannon’s Women in the Shadows and Odd Girl Out never so much as suggested that the perils and tragedies connected with loving women could possibly involve more than two at a time. And of course none of those books even mentioned the joys. So we knew there was a world of our experience as gay-girls that they left out, but that meant we had to write it ourselves, learn by living it out. We tried to make it all work out gracefully and with a certain finesse. Muriel, Lynn, and I made spoken and unspoken rules of courtesy for ourselves that we hoped would both allow for and help allay hurt feelings: “I thought you were staying with me tonight.” The pressures of close quarters: “Hush, she’s not asleep yet.” And of course, guilt-provoking gallantry: “I’ll go on ahead and the two of you meet me later; but don’t be too long, now.” Sometimes it worked; sometimes it didn’t. Muriel and I attempted to examine why, endlessly. For all her manipulative coolness, Lynn was seldom alone with either of us for any length of time. Increasingly, she got the message that, try as we might to make it otherwise, this space on Seventh Street was Muriel’s and my space, and she, Lynn, was a desired and sought-after visitor, but a visitor forever. I had wanted it to be different. Muriel had wanted it to be different. Lynn had wanted it to be different. At least in all the places we consciously touched.

• From The City of God

  287 Lecture 13 Transcript—Metaphysics of Creation and Evil (Book 11) loving in this way, that is to say, we are coming to know God. For God just is this love. All this requires a commitment to Christian revelation, as communicated by Christian scriptures, as taught in the churches, that whole regime again. There is no practical way to avoid that communal and textual context if you want to attempt to understand what it means to call God the Creator and to love that Creator God. So Book 11 is not simply about the cosmos; it also teaches us a way of imagining the implications for this picture for our own self- understanding. We are creatures who have in a way not yet begun; we must learn what it is to be beginning, to be mere beginners, to get underway in our living, and we do that through our love. All this leaves a powerful question still unanswered. What does he think evil is in itself, in its essence? Does it even have an essence? We’ll see, in the next lecture, that Augustine takes up these issues in the very next book—Book 12. 288 Fall of the Rebel Angels (Book 12) I f book 11 explores the most basic fact about our world, the fact that it was created and has a beginning, book 12 addresses the next issue: If there are right beginnings, there are also wrong ones; most fundamentally the “wrong beginning” of creatures who decide inexplicably to rebel against God’s plan for them in Creation— that is, the wrong beginning of the Fall and evil. Here is the core of Augustine’s analysis of the problem as an account of the origins of sin and the nature of evil in any creature with a will of its own. The Nature of Evil „We study the language of evil because, despite the many legitimate worries about it, it may articulate an ineradicable element of the experience of humanity as a whole. Whatever you think of arguments about evil in general, for many people today Augustine’s account seems both experientially and conceptually implausible. ›It seems experientially implausible because the world doesn’t seem to be simply good. Without the revelation of the Bible, the idea that nature itself bears some generative power for evil is actually empirically powerful and hard to defeat. ›It seems conceptually incoherent, because it seems too rigorously tilted toward the basic goodness of Creation and may seem to offer too little in the way of a purchase for evil. „Augustine’s account of Creation as in itself wholly good leads ineluctably to a powerful question: How is evil even possible? Lecture 14

• From The City of God

  286 Books That Matter: The City of God than anyone’s today can be, but he did not yet have the promise of eschatological consummation that has been bequeathed to us in the people Israel and the person of Jesus Christ. So in this way, the redeemed and blessed today, although they live in hope, are much happier, though again, theirs is only an anticipatory happiness. Secondly, even in our present, we have anticipatory intimations of the joy to come. This is how Book 11 climaxes, in a kind of eschatological natural theology, which is a vision of how what we can affirm about the ultimate endpoint of God’s Creation teaches us something important about the nature of God in Godself and our destiny as joined with God. Informed by the story of Creation and the promises of God as contained in scripture, we can participate in God now, seeing God’s work in the world and in ourselves. We can come to see all creation as part of a symphonic poem of God’s gratuitous love of the world. The marks of God’s Creation are obvious, when we see them, though not so obvious when we do not—they involve, again, a kind of gestalt switch for us. We can come to know God through reflecting on ourselves, on our loves. At the end of Book 11, Augustine lays out a kind of psychology of the human that lets this theology shine through. In loving, we actually see he proposes three distinct kinds of love—a love of existence, of the bare thing that we love; a love of our knowledge of them, a love of learning more about them, and a love of our love, a delight we take in the fact of our loving. Yes, there can be terror, fear, even anxiety in love; but none of these totally effaces the core meaning of love, which is a recognition that we can love another and value them in a way that does not reduce to merely self-interest, or merely a projection of ourselves; we have the ability genuinely to love another. By recognizing that we partake in this love, we can recognize we partake in the basic dynamic of love that is God’s Creation of, sustaining of, and culminating engagement with all of creation. In

• From The Decameron (1353)

  When all the people were assembled there, Fra Cipolla, without observing that aught of his had been meddled with, began his preachment and said many words anent his affairs; after which, thinking to come to the showing of the Angel Gabriel's feather, he first recited the Confiteor with the utmost solemnity and let kindle a pair of flambeaux; then, pulling off his bonnet, he delicately unfolded the taffetas wrapper and brought out the casket. Having first pronounced certain ejaculations in praise and commendation of the Angel Gabriel and of his relic, he opened the casket and seeing it full of coals, suspected not Guccio Balena of having played him this trick, for that he knew him not to be man enough; nor did he curse him for having kept ill watch lest others should do it, but silently cursed himself for having committed to him the care of his gear, knowing him, as he did, to be negligent, disobedient, careless and forgetful.

• From The City of God

  224 Books That Matter: The City of God Christ as Mediator „The real mediator is God in Christ. Christ comes to us and becomes human without losing his divinity. And Christ is moved for us, but not fundamentally by us. Christ chooses to see and Christ chooses to love, for the entire triune God has chosen to see and love. Christ can mediate properly, because Christ is both true human (created flesh) and true God (eternally unchanging). „The invisible God makes God’s engagement with humans visible in a way they can bear—in the Law and the story of Israel and then in the person of Jesus the Messiah, the Christ. ›Christ’s very presence puts us in touch with the triune God in God’s very being. ›Christ’s deeds are ways of having our attention directed toward the divine: In contrast to theurgy, the miracles wrought by Christ always refer to higher things; they always lift us up to contemplate and love the true God. „The mediation of Christ is a matter of sacrifice, to be sure; but it is not fundamentally our sacrifice. The real sacrifice is Christ’s death on the Cross, which Christ himself enacts. ›Christ is the wholly innocent victim and thus the perfect sacrifice for our wrongs done to God—the most valuable offering humanity can make, untainted by the crime being propitiated: this is the old reading of the atonement, and of the sacrifice as reparation. ›Christ voluntarily and finally repays all the debts incurred in our rebellion against God. The sufferings we suffer because of our membership in the line of Adam and Eve are no more. „In this transaction Christ is both true sacrificer and true and truly sacrificed, the great high priest and the sacrificed Lamb of God. In this way, Jesus is the true high priest and only theurgist. 225 Lecture 11—Sacrifice and Ritual (Book 10)

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

  In the streets, in the buses, in the markets, in the Plaza, in the particular attention within Eudora’s eyes. Sometimes, half-smiling, she would scan my face without speaking. It made me feel like she was the first person who had ever looked at me, ever seen who I was. And not only did she see me, she loved me, thought me beautiful. This was no accidental collision. I never saw Eudora actually drinking, and it was easy for me to forget that she was an alcoholic. The word itself meant very little to me besides derelicts on the Bowery. I had never known anyone with a drinking problem before. We never discussed it, and for weeks she would be fine while we went exploring together. Then something, I never knew what, would set her off. Sometimes she’d disappear for a few days, and the carport would be empty when I came from school. I hung around the compound in those afternoons, waiting to see her car drive in the back gate. Once I asked her afterwards where she’d been. “In every cantina in Tepotzlán,” she said matter-of-factly. “They know me.” Her eyes narrowed as she waited for me to speak. I did not dare to question her further. She would be sad and quiet for a few days. And then we would make love. Wildly. Beautifully. But it only happened three times. Classes at the university ended. I made my plans to go south—Guatemala. I soon realized that Eudora was not coming with me. She had developed bursitis, and was often in a lot of pain. Sometimes in the early morning I heard furious voices coming through Eudora’s open windows. Hers and La Señora’s. I gave up my little house with its simple, cheerful long-windowed room, and stored my typewriter and extra suitcase at Frieda’s house. I was going to spend my last evening with Eudora, then take the second-class bus at dawn south to Oaxaca. It was a fifteen-hour trip. Tomás’s burro at the gate. Loud voices beneath the birdsong in the compound. La Señora almost knocking me over as she swept past me down Eudora’s steps. Tomás standing in Eudora’s entryway. On the orange table an unopened bottle of pale liquor with no label. “Eudora! What happened?” I cried. She ignored me, speaking to Tomás in Spanish, “And don’t give La Señora anything of mine again, understand? Here!” She handed him two pesos from the wallet on the table. “Con su permiso,” he said with relief, and left quickly. “Eudora, what’s wrong?” I moved toward her, and she caught me at arm’s length. “Go home, Chica. Don’t get involved in this.” “Involved in what? What’s going on?” I shrugged off her hands. “She thinks she can steal my bookstore, ruin my life, and still have me around whenever she wants me. But she’s not going to get away with it any more.

• From The City of God

  495 but most basically, it is constituted receptively, receiving God’s grace. And the material structures of that grace are not only the liturgical practices it undertakes but equally primordially a certain practice of reading. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the church is constituted as a certain kind of reading for Augustine. He was, in this way, ever the rhetor—ever the literature professor. The fourth theme is the transfigured vision of the world that Augustine teaches—a vision of the world as Creation and his efforts to cultivate in his audience not only a typological but a sacramental imagination of the world. Recall that Augustine was accused not just of despising politics, but of despising the world. I hope it’s become clear through these lectures that, from his perspective, this accusation only makes sense if your own attachment to the world is so desperate as to fail to let you see how he does love the world, although he loves it in God, as a gift of God, and as comprised of signs of God. Recall that his basic response to this, prosecuted most fully in his conversations—debates, really—with the Platonists, is that his theology actually affirms the goods of Creation in a way that others cannot. Augustine’s affection for the world is real, but it’s rooted ultimately in the world’s protological and eschatological significance—that is to say, he sees it as Creation, as the primordial unprompted expression of God’s love for what is outside of God, as we read in Genesis. And he sees it as the context of redemption, as the setting for the eschaton for humanity’s sanctification and, indeed, divinization—our movement ever more fully into God at the end of time. So Augustine promotes a sacramental ontology of the world in a way that makes our best inhabitation of it, and affection for it, ambivalently dialectical. We should see the world as a good place for us, indeed our natural home, our natural setting; but in its current condition, deeply ambiguously so—a sacramental presence with a pre-eschatological apophatic absence held in tension. What’s more, Lecture 23 Transcript—The City of God as a Single Book

• From The City of God

  496 Books That Matter: The City of God the world is moving as the scriptures tell us it will move—from being a garden to being a city, from Eden to Jerusalem. Augustine’s God undertakes, as it were, an urbanization project over Creation. And indeed, politically, God undertakes an urban renewal project. Now this is not for Augustine a movement away from nature. We, after the Romantics, imagine cities to be artificial and unnatural. But Augustine’s city was as much a part of nature or Creation as any swamp or garden; it has rivers, streams, gardens within it. We cannot think of the heavenly city of the New Jerusalem as extracting us from our created context. It is not an escape; instead, it is a final and finally full placement of us in Creation. The human is truly a citified animal, and Creation is meant to have a city at its natural center. Indeed, each stage, in a sense, reaches beyond itself. The human inhabits and delights in a world, and the world wants there to be a city, and the city wants there to be a God of the city. Each stage delights us, but only as it opens onto the next one. And so, of course, the final stage is God, and it’s our final theme as well. But even here, the God Augustine calls his readers to believe in is something quite radically different than what they might have previously understood God to be. Recall, the Romans and the Greeks both had seemed to believe in divinity as somehow set radically apart and indifferent to the world, indifferent to the cosmos. But Augustine’s reading of the Bible made him see that this God was no stiff Roman nobleman indifferent to the world, but rather the father of the Prodigal Son, who runs to meet his returning repentant child, heedless of his own dignity. In a way, this is the deepest working out of what Augustine thinks the meaning of Christ is. And by this, I don’t just mean simply that Christ is a nice guy and shows us that God, the Father, is a nice guy, too. I mean that on this vision of religion, God has already accomplished everything we need to get to God. In an age where religion was still largely conceived transactionally and sacrificially, this

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  As he came in, she straightened, drying her hands on the edge of the apron. ‘You finish your work, John?’ she asked. He said: ‘Yes’m,’ and thought how oddly she looked at him; as though she were looking at someone else’s child. ‘That’s a good boy,’ she said. She smiled a shy, strained smile. ‘You know you’re your mother’s right-hand man?’ He said nothing, and he did not smile, but watched her, wondering to what task this preamble led. She turned away, passing one damp hand across her forehead, and went to the cupboard. Her back was to him, and he watched her while she took down a bright, figured vase, filled with flowers only on the most special occasions, and emptied the contents into her palm. He heard the chink of money, which meant that she was going to send him to the store. She put the vase back and turned to face him, her palm loosely folded before her. ‘I didn’t never ask you,’ she said, ‘what you wanted for your birthday. But you take this, son, and go out and get yourself something you think you want.’ And she opened his palm and put the money into it, warm and wet from her hand. In the moment that he felt the warm, smooth coins and her hand on his, John stared blindly at her face, so far above him. His heart broke and he wanted to put his head on her belly where the wet spot was, and cry. But he dropped his eyes and looked at his palm, at the small pile of coins. ‘It ain’t much there,’ she said. ‘That’s all right.’ Then he looked up, and she bent down and kissed him on the forehead. ‘You getting to be,’ she said, putting her hand beneath his chin and holding his face away from her, ‘a right big boy. You going to be a mighty fine man, you know that? Your mama’s counting on you.’ And he knew again that she was not saying everything she meant; in a kind of secret language she was telling him to-day something that he must remember and understand to-morrow. He watched her face, his heart swollen with love for her and with an anguish, not yet his own, that he did not understand and that frightened him. ‘Yes, Ma,’ he said, hoping that she would realize, despite his stammering tongue, the depth of his passion to please her. ‘I know,’ she said, with a smile, releasing him and rising, ‘there’s a whole lot of things you don’t understand. But don’t you fret. The Lord’ll reveal to you in His own good time everything He wants you to know.

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

  I knew who I was going to spend the rest of my life with, yet it seemed as if there was never enough time to talk and share and catch up with all the pieces of each other that had existed before we met. As our newness became more known to each other, I marveled at how very dear Muriel’s face was becoming to me. The fact of us was a most wonderful and novel idea, one that I pondered over, examining and savoring every aspect of what it meant to be permanently connected to another human being. To go to bed and to wake up again day after day besides a woman, to lie in bed with our arms around each other and drift in and out of sleep, to be with each other—not as a quick stolen pleasure, nor as a wild treat—but like sunlight, day after day in the regular course of our lives. I was discovering all the ways that love creeps into life when two selves exist closely, when two women meet. Like the smell of Muriel on my sweatshirt, and the straight black hairs caught in my glove. One night, I cried to think of how lucky we both were to have found each other, since it was clear that we were the only ones in the world who could understand what we understood in the instantaneous manner which we understood it. We both agreed ours was a union made in heaven, for which each of us had already paid several hells. For our close friends, we were Audi and Muriel without definition. For our other friends, we were just another young gay couple in love, maybe a little more peculiar than most, traipsing around with notebooks under our arms, all the time. For the regulars at the Colony and the Swing we were Ky-Ky girls because we didn’t play roles. And for the fast set at the Bag we were weirdos who deserved each other because Muriel was crazy and I was Black. Meanwhile, Muriel and I built bookcases and had writing bees and adopted two little scrawny Black kittens which we named Crazy Lady and Scarey Lou. Muriel was very much the dandy about her clothes. Like everything else about her, what she wore had to be precisely so, according to some secret guide in her own head, or Muriel would not go out. As long as something was not touched by her inner rules, it didn’t matter, but Muriel’s rules were inflexible and unmoving and once you came up against one of them, it was unmistakable. What those various rules were, I only found out slowly. When I lived in Stamford, I had worn old dungarees and men’s shirts to work. Just before Thanksgiving, I bought some corduroy and Ginger’s mother helped me make a skirt for the holidays. When I lived in Mexico, I wore the full peasant skirts and blouses so readily available in the marketplaces of Cuernavaca.