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.

Page 38 of 184 · 20 per page

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  Augustine proudly shows off his son’s prowess in The Teacher, while assuring us that he did not teach the boy. Boys learn with God’s own inborn instruments. But, as usual with Augustine, love sets the atmosphere in which God’s gifts work. The hatred of his father’s and his teachers’ beatings made Augustine adopt a different strategy for dealing with his own son (and, later, his students in the classroom and his colleagues in the monastery): I learned [to speak] as a baby, not inhibited by fear of punishment, surrounded as I was by coddling nurses, laughing games, and happy play. I learned without others’ punitive insistence that I learn, from my own heart’s need to deliver what I was laboring forth [parienda] to the outer world. . . . I picked up words from anyone who spoke to me, not just from tutors, and I somehow did labor forth my feelings in others’ ears. Unfettered inquisitiveness, it is clear, teaches better than do intimidating assignments. (T 1.23) Augustine’s dialogue Order in the Universe, composed near the time of The Teacher, can be taken as one long illustration of that passage on Augustine’s learning in an atmosphere of love. Dealing with young disciples in the dialogue on order, Augustine uses whatever piques the students’ interest—odd noises in a drainpipe, gamecocks, enthusiastic singing in an outhouse—to circle back to the subject of order in the universe. Yet permissive as Augustine was in his pedagogy, he was not starry-eyed about the human drives evidenced in the cradle. He notes the infant’s demands for attention, the envy and anger at other infants competing for that attention. The urge to rule (libido dominandi) is the devil’s first sin of pride and the cause of Adam’s fall, whose traces show in every heir to that primal sin. Despite all this, Godsend, the unwanted child, soon captivated his father and became a kind of laboratory experiment in the wonders of the human mind’s development. This is the boy of whom Augustine wrote, “His talent, if a father’s fondness deceives me not, was full of promise” (Happiness in This Life 1.6).

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  I laid in front of her watching before I followed suit by licking my finger and placing it inside her as well. Her wet pussy took in both of our fingers. “Sin, Sin, I love you,” Sam said as she opened her eyes and looked deeply into mine. With my finger still pleasing her, I sat up and began kissing her passionately. Sam took her finger out of herself and placed both hands on my face. “I do love you so much, Sin. You just don’t know.” Sam’s voice cracked and before she could hold back, as the cum filled my hand, tears filled her eyes. “I love you too, Samantha,” I said. “I love you too.” The next thing I knew Sam was in my arms, weeping. Without her saying a word I knew what was going on in her mind. She was thinking about Detail. “You saved me,” Sam said. “I could never repay you, Sin. You saved me from a life of hell when you—” “Shhh,” I said, placing my index finger, the same finger I had just fucked her with, over her lips. She then stuck her tongue out and began licking my finger up and down like it was a dick. I pulled her to me by the finger that was in her mouth and tongued her down. The harder I kissed her the more she cried. I knew what it was like to love someone so much that just thinking about that person stirred up uncontrollable emotions. I knew because I loved Sam that same way. I loved her so much that I would die for her. I would kill for her and she knew it. She knew it because I had proven it when I put that ten-inch butcher knife into Detail’s back. I don’t know what came over me that day. I just walked in the apartment and saw Detail beating Sam to a pulp, and she wouldn’t fight back. She just wouldn’t fight back, so I had to fight back for her. I was a project chick, and used to throwing them blows. After all, I’d fought muthafuckas over my stupid-ass name all the time. But even fighting over my name became secondary to all the blows I had to throw because of kids talking about my mother. You know how it was back in the day—you fight one sibling and you had to fight them all. But you best believe I caught them hoes slippin’ one by one and beat their asses. But the one time they caught me, I got suspended and sent home with a black eye and a busted nose. My moms had the nerve to fuss me out, talkin’ about all I ever did was fight and that I was out of school more for fighting than I was in school for learning.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  “Hey, baby,” Keita replied in her sultry voice. “I miss you, lover man.” Keita was my boo. My down-ass chick that I held above all the others. Now, I was a stone-cold dog, but even a dog needed a main bitch. For me, that was Keita. I had met her about a year ago at All Star Weekend in Denver. She was with her girls and I was with my niggaz, but when our eyes met there was no one else in the room. We got to politicking and I found out that she was from the Bronx. We spent the whole weekend together and by the time we got back to New York I had already decided that I was gonna make her my wifey. “I miss you too, my one and only,” I said, sounding like a real clown-ass nigga. I was a lion at heart, but when it came to Keita, I was a pussycat. As hard as I was, Keita was my only weakness. The bastard in me warned against it, but the heart makes you crazy. “You still at work?” she asked. “Nah, baby, I got off early. I’m on my way uptown to meet Benny and them.” “I’m glad, sweetie. Sometimes I don’t understand you, Dante. You make good money at the car dealership, so why do you continue slaving for UPS at night?” By now, you’re probably confused, so let me explain it to you. Chocolate is what my niggaz and these tricks call me, but my given name is Dante Burton. The part about me working at a car dealership during the day was true, but I had quit my night job at UPS months ago. I never bothered to tell Keita, because it was a good alibi for the odd hours I kept with my tricks. I’ve found that I could make way more money slinging dick than loading trucks. “I know, ma, but you know a nigga gotta hustle. How else are we gonna get that big house?” “Baby, you’re too sweet. I’m lucky to have a man like you,” she said in a most sincere tone. Sometimes I felt bad about misleading Keita, but whenever a bitch broke me off a wad of cash, my conscience flew out the window. “You know it’s all about us, Keita. What you got going on tonight?” “Nothing much. Me and my girls might go to Envy.” “You better not be in there letting them scumbag niggaz grind all up on your ass.” I said seriously. I was very possessive when it came to Keita. “Boy, stop acting crazy. You know I don’t know how to do nothing but the two-step.” She laughed. I loved to hear Keita laugh. It always reminded me of bells, and all things happy. “I hear that hot shit. You just remember what the fuck I said.” “Okay, Daddy,” she sang. “You want me to pick you up afterward so we can go get something to eat?”

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  We should never undertake the task of chiding another’s sin unless, cross-examining our own conscience, we can assure ourselves, before God, that we are acting from love. If reproaches or threats or injuries, voiced by the one you are calling to account, have wounded your spirit, then, for that person to be healed by you, you must not speak till you are healed yourself, lest you act from worldly motives, to hurt, and make your tongue a sinful weapon against evil, returning wrong for wrong, curse for curse. Whatever you speak out of a wounded spirit is the wrath of an avenger, not the love of an instructor. Act as you desire, so long as you are acting with love. Then there will be no meanness in what may sound mean, while you are acutely aware that you are striving with the sword of God’s word to free another from the grip of sin. And if, as often happens, you begin some course of action from love, and are proceeding with it in love, but a different feeling insinuates itself because you are resisted, deflecting you from reproach of a man’s sin and making you attack the man himself—it were best, while watering the dust with your tears, to remember that we have no right to crow over another’s sin, since we sin in the very reproach of sin if anger at sin is better at making us sinners than mercy is at making us kind. He also used the formula in a sermon on the First Letter of John, that broad treatment of love (JL 7.8): Because of varying circumstances, we see one man looking harsh because he loves and another looking pleasant because of vice. The father gives a son blows, the whoremonger gives blandishments. Consider them in themselves, blows or blandishments—who wouldn’t take the blandishments and duck the blows? But look at the motives—they are the blows of love, the blandishments of vice. You see my point, that human acts should be judged by their basis in love. Many things have a surface appearance of good, but are not based on love—like blossoms on a thorn plant. Other things look hard, look forbidding, but they instill a discipline informed by love. Once again, to put it simply: Act as you desire, so long as you act with love. If you are silent, be silent from love. If you accuse, accuse from love. If you correct, correct from love. If you spare, spare from love. Let love be rooted deep in you, and only good can grow from it.

• From Comrade Loves of the Samurai (1972)

  He was jealous of the two friends' love, and contrived all sorts of devices to calumniate them, and tried to separate them by the agency of treacherous persons. But one dark night the two lovers met and killed these persons. Then they fled in a boat and hid themselves for a long time, and finally came to Yedo. There they lived as Guards, concealing their true condition. Mondo was now sixty-three years old, and Hayemon sixty-six; and through all these years their hearts had not changed. They had never taken any interest in a woman. They had been genuine pederasts. Hayemon continued to consider Mondo as his young lover. He arranged his thin hair with his own hands in the Style of a page's hair, using much perfumed oil. Mondo's brow was like that of a woman, and he took great care of his person; he polished his nails with aromatic wood, and shaved himself carefully. There is no doubt that these two old men continued their amorous encounters up to an advanced age. Male love is essentially different from the ordinary love of a man and a woman; and that is why a Prince, even when he has married a beautiful Princess, cannot forget his pages. Woman is a creature of absolutely no importance; but sincere pederastic love is true love. Both of these men detested woman as a vile garden worm. They never associated with their neighbours, and when a near-by husband and wife quarrelled and Started breaking the crockery and the doors, these two old men did not try to reconcile them: on the contrary, they encouraged the husband, crying: 'Be brave, O man, and Strong! Kill her, beat her to death! Drive her from your house, and take a handsome man instead of her! 'They used to shake their fists at the woman, and thought the man feeble and lacking in courage. In the spring Mount Uyeno is thronged with visitors who come to see the cherry trees loaded with blossom, and at such time people drink excellent wines, and many get drunk. As the folk passed Hayemon's house, he used to distinguish the women's voices from the men's. When he heard men's voices, he ran out in the hope of seeing some beautiful youth: but when he heard women's voices, he shut his door and remained perfectly indifferent. One day it Started to rain, and several women who were making a pleasure party were caught in the shower. They all ran for shelter beneath the eaves of Hayemon's house, and chattered together: 'If we knew who lived here, we could get ourselves invited to tea and rest till the evening; and perhaps they would lend us umbrellas. They might even invite us to an agreeable supper. It is a great pity that we are not their friends.'One of them, who was older, bolder and less scrupulous than the rest, dared to open the door a little and cast a glance into the house.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  “No,” she said, hurriedly. “I’m the designated driver tonight. Tell you what, though, why don’t you meet me at my place and we can eat each other.” “Sounds like a plan,” I said, thinking of her warm mouth on me. “Okay, so I’ll see you later, Daddy. I love you.” “I love you too, ma.” With a great deal of reluctance, I ended the call. I loved Keita to the point where it sometimes hurt me physically. Damn this thing called love for making me so fucking weak! My boys thought I was bugging for falling for a chick so quickly, but they didn’t understand. I had been with a lot of bitches in my day, but none of them ever quite measured up. They were always lacking in one area or another, either not being pretty enough, or smart enough. My baby girl was the total package. Keita was five-four, with medium-length black hair that she usually wore in a wrap, and honey-colored skin. Whenever she smiled, you couldn’t help but to smile back. She just had that effect on people. Keita was an independent woman who got up and went to work every morning, and hardly asked for anything other than my time and affection. She was hood, but she wasn’t ghetto. I could have just as much fun with her at a black-tie affair as I could at a Rucker’s game in the summertime. She could move in either circle. My girl liked to go out and have a good time, but she knew how to conduct herself. Though I was insanely jealous, I never had to worry about her stepping out on me. It just wasn’t her way. Keita’s mother was heavy into the church and had instilled that in all four of her daughters. Hell or high water, my boo was in service every Sunday morning. Having Keita in my corner made me feel like the luckiest dude on earth. Most of you are probably wondering: If this girl is so special then why the hell do I step out on her? To put it simply, it’s just the nature of my species. Sometimes the thrill of the hunt is even greater than the prize. • • • Mochas was our spot. It had been since they opened their doors about four or five years ago. It was a small but cool lounge on Eighth Avenue in Harlem. During the week you could go there for drinks and possibly a comedy show, but on the weekends they brought in the DJ and everybody got their groove on.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  Augustine argued, in his treatment of the Genesis story, that Adam committed his sin deliberately in order to maintain his “bond of company” (socialis necessitudo, CG 14.11) with Eve. In the book First Meanings in Genesis, which he began while finishing The Testimony, he wrote of Adam’s misguided gallantry (11.59): After Eve had eaten from the forbidden tree and offered him its fruit to eat along with her, Adam did not want to disappoint her, when he thought she might be blighted without his comforting support, banished from his heart to die sundered from him. He was not overcome by disordered desire of the flesh, which he had not yet experienced as a thing in his body at odds with his mind, but by a kind of amicable desire for another’s good [amicali quadam benivolentia], which often happens, making us sin against God so as not to turn a friend [amicus] against us. Augustine’s point is that Adam helps neither Eve nor himself by trying to separate off a lower love from the Source of love. That is the lesson he finds in his own courting of favor from his fellow thieves in the pear orchard. He sees here his own distant echo of Adam’s sin, the primordial sin, the quest for love by motion away from the one place where it can be found. To find the Genesis narrative coming alive in his own past is a continuing surprise for Augustine in The Testimony. We have seen that already in the story of his father and the public baths, when he was “clothed” in Adam’s shame. We shall see it in other key episodes of the book, including the death of his friend and his prayer with Monnica at Ostia. Genesis haunts the whole work. Augustine began, in book 2 (6), the account of his sexual activity at sixteen, only to break it off in his concentration on the pear episode. He resumes the sexual story at the beginning of book 3, which O’Donnell (2.145) rightly calls “recapitulative,” though it is marked by his arrival in Carthage. It is in book 3 that he first mentions his concubine. But O’Donnell (2.207) draws an interesting conclusion from the age of Augustine’s son: Adeodatus was [almost fifteen] at the time of his baptism in the spring of 387 . . . and [aged sixteen] at the dramatic date of The Teacher not long after; on this calculation he was born 371/72, when Augustine was perhaps seventeen . . . or perhaps even 370, thus apparently probably in the first years of study at Carthage but conceivably during the years of indolence recorded at 2, 3.5–6 (the philoprogenitive optimism of Patricius did not have so long to wait). Adeodatus’ mother was dismissed from Milan and returned to Africa in 385/6 . . . and thus shared his entire adulescentia.

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

  Sometimes, in the midst of one of my dreadful, destructive upheavals of mood, I feel Richard’s quietness nearby and am reminded of Byron’s wonderful description of the rainbow that sits “Like Hope upon a death-bed” on the verge of a wild, rushing cataract; yet, “while all around is torn / By the distracted waters,” the rainbow stays serene: Resembling, ’mid the torture of the scene, Love watching Madness with unalterable mien. But if love is not the cure, it certainly can act as a very strong medicine. As John Donne has written, it is not so pure and abstract as one might once have thought and wished, but it does endure, and it does grow. Part Four [image file=image_rsrcW2.jpg] AN UNQUIET MINDSpeaking of Madness [image file=image_rsrcW1.jpg] Not long before I left Los Angeles for Washington, I received the most vituperative and unpleasant letter that anyone has ever written me. It came not from a colleague or a patient, but from a woman who, having seen an announcement of a lecture I was to give, was outraged that I had used the word “madness” in the title of my talk. I was, she wrote, insensitive and crass and very clearly had no idea at all what it was like to suffer from something as awful as manic-depressive illness. I was just one more doctor who was climbing my way up the academic ranks by walking over the bodies of the mentally ill. I was shaken by the ferocity of the letter, resented it, but did end up thinking long and hard about the language of madness. In the language that is used to discuss and describe mental illness, many different things—descriptiveness, banality, clinical precision, and stigma—intersect to create confusion, misunderstanding, and a gradual bleaching out of traditional words and phrases. It is no longer clear what place words such as “mad,” “daft,” “crazy,” “cracked,” or “certifiable” should have in a society increasingly sensitive to the feelings and rights of those who are mentally ill. Should, for example, expressive, often humorous, language—phrases such as “taking the fast trip to Squirrel City,” being a “few apples short of a picnic,” “off the wall,” “around the bend,” or “losing the bubble” (a British submariner’s term for madness)—be held hostage to the fads and fashions of “correct” or “acceptable” language?

• From The Girls (2016)

  “He’s not mad at you,” she said. Keeping a steady simmer of eye contact. “He knows you wouldn’t say anything.” And it was true: I hadn’t said anything. My silence keeping me in the realm of the invisible. I had been frightened, yes. Maybe you could pin some of the silence on that fear, a fear I could call up even later, after Russell and Suzanne and the others were in jail. But it was something else, too. The helpless thoughts of Suzanne. Who had sometimes colored her nipples with cheap lipstick. Suzanne, who walked around so brutish, like she knew you were trying to take something from her. I didn’t tell anyone because I wanted to keep her safe. Because who else had loved her? Who had ever held Suzanne in their arms and told her that her heart, beating away in her chest, was there on purpose? My hands were sweating, but I couldn’t wipe them on my jeans. I tried to make sense of this moment, to hold an image of Suzanne in my mind. Suzanne Parker. The atoms reorganizing themselves the first time I’d seen her in the park. How her mouth had smiled into mine. No one had ever looked at me before Suzanne, not really, so she had become my definition. Her gaze softening my center so easily that even photographs of her seemed aimed at me, ignited with private meaning. It was different from Russell, the way she looked at me, because it contained him, too: it made him and everyone else smaller. We had been with the men, we had let them do what they wanted. But they would never know the parts of ourselves that we hid from them—they would never sense the lack or even know there was something more they should be looking for. Suzanne was not a good person. I understood this. But I held the actual knowledge away from myself. How the coroner said the ring and pinky fingers of Linda’s left hand had been severed because she had tried to protect her face. Suzanne seemed to look at me as if there could be some explanation, but then a slight movement behind the shrouded windshield of the bus caught her attention—even then, she was alert to Russell’s every shift—and a businesslike air came over her. “Okay,” she said, urged by the tick of an unseen clock. “I’m taking off.” I had almost wanted a threat. Some indication that she might return, that I should fear her or could draw her back with the right combination of words. I only ever saw her again in photographs and news reports. Still. I could never imagine her absence as permanent. Suzanne and the others would always exist for me; I believed that they would never die. That they would hover forever in the background of ordinary life, circling the highways and edging the parks. Moved by a force that would never cease or slow.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  I’d stay with you right now, but I’d rather not do it that way. I don’t want it to remain for ever in his memory that I ran away from him in the middle of the night. He’s never done me any wrong . . . He was summoned unexpectedly, there was a fire at the factory. But he’ll be back soon. I’ll talk with him tomorrow morning, I’ll tell him that I love another man and come back to you for ever. Or maybe you don’t want that? Answer me.” ‘ “Poor dear, my poor dear,” I said to her. “I won’t allow you to do it. Things won’t go well for me, and I don’t want you to perish with me.” ‘ “Is that the only reason?” she asked, and brought her eyes close to mine. ‘ “The only one.” ‘She became terribly animated, she clung to me, put her arms around my neck and said: ‘ “I’m perishing with you. In the morning I’ll be here.” ‘And so, the last thing I remember from my life is a strip of light from my front hall, and in that strip of light an uncurled strand of hair, her beret and her eyes filled with determination. I also remember the black silhouette in the outside doorway and the white package. ‘ “I’d see you home, but it’s beyond my strength to come back alone. I’m afraid.” ‘ “Don’t be afraid. Bear with it for a few hours. Tomorrow morning I’ll be here.” ‘Those were her last words in my life . . . Shh! . . .’ the patient suddenly interrupted himself and raised a finger. ‘It’s a restless moonlit night tonight.’ He disappeared on to the balcony. Ivan heard little wheels roll down the corridor, someone sobbed or cried out weakly. When everything grew still, the guest came back and announced that room 120 had received an occupant. Someone had been brought, and he kept asking to be given back his head. The two interlocutors fell anxiously silent, but, having calmed down, they returned to the interrupted story. The guest was just opening his mouth, but the night was indeed a restless one. There were still voices in the corridor, and the guest began to speak into Ivan’s ear, so softly that what he told him was known only to the poet, apart from the first phrase: ‘A quarter of an hour after she left me, there came a knock at my window . . .’ What the patient whispered into Ivan’s ear evidently agitated him very much. Spasms repeatedly passed over his face.

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

  At no time during either of the dinner parties was manic-depressive illness discussed; it was, in fact, the very normality of the evenings that was so reassuring and so important to me. Being introduced to such “normal” men, both from a world much like the one I had known as a child, was one of David’s many intuitive acts of kindness. “It is the history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. “If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters … I should be inclined to think our life a practical jest in the worst possible spirit.” After knowing David, I never again saw life in its worst possible spirit. I left London with a terrible sense of apprehension, but David wrote and called often. In the late fall we spent time together in Washington, and, as I finally was feeling myself again, I enjoyed life in ways that I hadn’t for years. Those November days remain in my memory as a gentle yet intensely romantic swirl of long walks in the cold, visits to old houses and yet older churches, light snows covering the eighteenth-century gardens of Annapolis, and icy rivers threading their way out of and beyond the Chesapeake Bay. The evenings were filled with dry sherry and meandering dinner conversations about almost everything; the nights were filled with wonderful lovemaking and much-sought, long-absent, untroubled sleep. David returned to London; I returned to Los Angeles; we wrote and spoke often, missed one another, and threw ourselves into our respective lives of work. I went back to England in May, and we had two weeks of long, warm pre-summer days in London, Dorset, and Devon. One Sunday morning, after church, we walked up into the hills to listen to the ringing of the church bells, and I noticed that David had stopped, was standing still, and breathing heavily. He joked about getting too much strenuous exercise at night, we both laughed, and left it at that.

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

  Love grows with our apprehension of God’s love. As the soul contemplates the cross it is itself pierced with the sword of love, as when it is said in the Canticles, II. 5. "I am sick from love." Love towards God has its reward, but love loves without reference to reward. True love is sufficient unto itself. To be fully absorbed by love is to be deified.1433 As the drop of water dropped into wine seems to lose its color, and taste, and as the iron held in the glowing flame loses its previous shape and becomes like the flame, and as the air, transfused by the light of the sun, becomes itself like the light, and seems to be as the sun itself, even so all feeling in the saint is wholly transfused by God’s will, and God becomes all and in all. In Bernard’s eighty-six Sermons on the Song of Solomon, we have a continuous apostrophe to love, the love of God and the soul’s love to God. As sermons they stand out like the Petite Carême of Massillon among the great collections of the French pulpit. Bernard reached only the first verse of the third chapter. His exposition, which is written in Latin, revels in the tropical imagery of this favorite book of the Middle Ages. Everything is allegorized. The very words are exuberant allegories. And yet there is not a single sensual or unchaste suggestion in all the extended treatment. As for the historical and literal meaning, Bernard rejects all suggestion of it as unworthy of Holy Scripture and worthy only of the Jews, who have this veil before their faces.1434 The love of the Shulamite and her spouse is a figure of the love between the Church and Christ, though sometimes the soul, and even the Virgin Mary, is put in the place of the Shulamite. The kiss of SS. 1:2 is the Holy Spirit whom the second person of the Trinity reveals.1435 The breasts of the bride, 4:5, are the goodness and longsuffering which Christ feels and dispenses, Rom. 2:4. The Canticles are a song commemorating the grace of holy affection and the sacrament of eternal matrimony.1436 It is an epithalamial hymn; no one can hear who does not love, for the language of love is a barbarous tongue to him who does not love, even as Greek is to one who is not a Greek.1437 Love needs no other stimulus but itself. Love loves only to be loved again. Rhapsodic expressions like these welled up in exuberant abundance as Bernard spoke to his audiences at different hours of the day in the convent of Clairvaux. They are marked by no progress of thought. Aphoristic statement takes the place of logic. The same spiritual experiences find expression over and over again. But the treatment is always devout and full of unction, and proves the justice of the title, "the honey-flowing doctor,"—doctor mellifluus — given to the fervid preacher.

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

  3. In his statement of the doctrine of the Trinity, Abaelard laid himself open to the charge both of modalism and Arianism. It called forth Bernard’s severest charges. Abaelard made no contribution to the subject. The idea of the Trinity he derived from God’s absolute perfections. God, as power, is the Father; as wisdom, He is the Son; as love, the Spirit. The Scriptures are appealed to for this view. The Father has put all things in His power, Acts 1:7. The Son, as Logos, is wisdom. The Holy Spirit is called good, Ps. 143:10, and imparts spiritual gifts. The figure gave much umbrage, by which he compared the three persons of the Trinity to the brass of which a seal is made, the form of the seal, and the seal itself proceeding from, or combining the brass and the form. "The brass itself which is the substance of the brazen seal, and the seal itself of which the brass is the substance, are essentially one; yet the brass and the seal are so distinct in their properties, that the property of the brass is one, and the property of the brazen seal another." These are ultimately three things: the brass, aes, the brass capable of sealing, sigillabile, and the brass in the act of sealing, sigillans. 4. In his treatment of the atonement, Abaelard has valuable original elements.1384 Strange to say, he makes no reference to Anselm’s great treatise. Man, Abaelard said, is in the power of the devil, but the devil has no right to this power. What rights does a slave have over another slave whom he leads astray? Christ not only did not pay any price to the devil for man’s redemption, he also did not make satisfaction to divine justice and appease God’s wrath. If the fall of Adam needed satisfaction by the death of some one, who then would be able to satisfy for the death of Christ? In the life and death of the Redeemer, God’s purpose was to manifest. His love and thus to stir up love in the breast of man, and to draw man by love back to Himself. God might have redeemed man by a word, but He chose to set before man an exhibition of His love in Christ. Christ’s love constitutes the merit of Christ. The theory anticipates the modern moral influence theory of the atonement, so called. 5. Abaelard’s doctrine of sin likewise presents features of difference from the view current in his time.1385 The fall occurred when Eve resolved to eat the forbidden fruit, that is, after her desire was aroused and before the actual partaking of the fruit.1386

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

  To a world that had grown very weary gazing on the cold passionless grandeur which Cato realized, and which Lucan sung, it presented an ideal of compassion and of love—an ideal destined for centuries to draw around it all that was greatest, as well as all that was noblest upon earth—a Teacher who could weep by the sepulchre of His friend, who was touched with the feeling of our infirmities. To a world, in fine, distracted by hostile creeds and colliding philosophies, it taught its doctrines, not as a human speculation, but as a Divine revelation, authenticated much less by reason than by faith. ’With the heart man believeth unto righteousness;’ ’He that doeth the will of my Father will know the doctrine, whether it be of God;’ ’Unless you believe you cannot understand;’ ’A heart naturally Christian;’ ’The heart makes the theologian,’ are the phrases which best express the first action of Christianity upon the world. Like all great religions, it was more concerned with modes of feeling than with modes of thought. The chief cause of its success was the congruity of its teaching with the spiritual nature of mankind. It was because it was true of the moral sentiments of the age, because it represented faithfully the supreme type of excellence to which men were then tending, because it corresponded with their religious wants, aims, and emotions, because the whole spiritual being could then expand and expatiate under its influence that it planted its roots so deeply in the hearts of men." Merivale (Convers. of the Rom. Emp., Preface) traces the conversion of the Roman empire chiefly to four causes: 1) the external evidence of the apparent fulfilment of recorded prophecy and miracles to the truth of Christianity; 2) the internal evidence of satisfying the acknowledged need of a redeemer and sanctifier; 3) the goodness and holiness manifested in the lives and deaths of the primitive believers; 4) the temporal success of Christianity under Constantine, which "turned the mass of mankind, as with a sweeping revolution, to the rising sun of revealed truth in Christ Jesus." Renan discusses the reasons for the victory of Christianity in the 31st chapter of his Marc-Aurèle (Paris 1882), pp. 561–588. He attributes it chiefly "to the new discipline of life," and "the moral reform," which the world required, which neither philosophy nor any of the established religions could give. The Jews indeed rose high above the corruptions of the times. "Glorie éternelle et unique, qui doit faire oublier bien des folies et des violence! Les Juifs sont les révolutionnaires du 1er et du 2e siècle de notre ère." They gave to the world Christianity.

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

  We had first met at a London dinner party during one of my earlier visits to England; it was, wonderfully, and without question, love at first sight. Neither of us had any awareness of anyone else at the dinner table that night, and neither of us—we agreed much later—had ever been so completely and irrationally swept away by the power of our feelings. Several months later, when I returned to London for my year’s sabbatical leave, he called and asked me to go out to dinner. I was renting a mews house in South Kensington, so we went to a restaurant nearby. It was, for both of us, a continuation of what we had felt when we first met. I was spellbound by the ease with which he understood me, and physically overwhelmed by his intensity. We both knew, long before the wine was through, that we were beyond any way of turning back. It was raining when we left the restaurant, and he put his arm around me as we ran madcap to my place. Once there, he held me very close to him for a long, long time. I felt and smelled the rain against his coat, felt his arms around me, and remembered, with relief, how extraordinary scents and rain and love and life can be. I had not been with a man in a very long time, and, understanding this, he was kind and gentle and utterly loving. We saw each other as often as we could. Because we both were inclined to intense feelings and moods, we could console one another easily and, likewise, give one another a wide berth whenever necessary. We talked about everything. He was almost frighteningly intuitive, smart, passionate, and, occasionally, deeply melancholic; and he came to know me better than anyone had ever known me. He had no difficulty seeing the complexity in emotional situations or moods—his own made him well able to understand and respect irrationality, wild enthusiasms, paradox, change, and contradiction. We shared a love for poetry, music, tradition, and irreverence, as well as an unflagging awareness of the darker side of almost everything that was light, and the lighter side of almost everything that was bleak or morbid.

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

  At no time during either of the dinner parties was manic-depressive illness discussed; it was, in fact, the very normality of the evenings that was so reassuring and so important to me. Being introduced to such “normal” men, both from a world much like the one I had known as a child, was one of David’s many intuitive acts of kindness. “It is the history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. “If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters … I should be inclined to think our life a practical jest in the worst possible spirit.” After knowing David, I never again saw life in its worst possible spirit. I left London with a terrible sense of apprehension, but David wrote and called often. In the late fall we spent time together in Washington, and, as I finally was feeling myself again, I enjoyed life in ways that I hadn’t for years. Those November days remain in my memory as a gentle yet intensely romantic swirl of long walks in the cold, visits to old houses and yet older churches, light snows covering the eighteenth-century gardens of Annapolis, and icy rivers threading their way out of and beyond the Chesapeake Bay. The evenings were filled with dry sherry and meandering dinner conversations about almost everything; the nights were filled with wonderful lovemaking and much-sought, long-absent, untroubled sleep. David returned to London; I returned to Los Angeles; we wrote and spoke often, missed one another, and threw ourselves into our respective lives of work. I went back to England in May, and we had two weeks of long, warm pre-summer days in London, Dorset, and Devon. One Sunday morning, after church, we walked up into the hills to listen to the ringing of the church bells, and I noticed that David had stopped, was standing still, and breathing heavily. He joked about getting too much strenuous exercise at night, we both laughed, and left it at that.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  The same hotel, the same room. We look out on the courtyard where the bicycles are parked, and there is the little room up above, under the attic, where some smart young Alec played the phonograph all day long and repeated clever little things at the top of his voice. I say “we” but I’m getting ahead of myself, because Mona has been away a long time and it’s just today that I’m meeting her at the Gare St. Lazare. Toward evening I’m standing there with my face squeezed between the bars, but there’s no Mona, and I read the cable over again but it doesn’t help any. I go back to the Quarter and just the same I put away a hearty meal. Strolling past the Dôme a little later suddenly I see a pale, heavy face and burning eyes—and the little velvet suit that I always adore because under the soft velvet there were always her warm breasts, the marble legs, cool, firm, muscular. She rises up out of a sea of faces and embraces me, embraces me passionately—a thousand eyes, noses, fingers, legs, bottles, windows, purses, saucers all glaring at us and we in each other’s arm oblivious. I sit down beside her and she talks—a flood of talk. Wild consumptive notes of hysteria, perversion, leprosy. I hear not a word because she is beautiful and I love her and now I am happy and willing to die. We walk down the Rue du Château, looking for Eugene. Walk over the railroad bridge where I used to watch the trains pulling out and feel all sick inside wondering where the hell she could be. Everything soft and enchanting as we walk over the bridge. Smoke coming up between our legs, the tracks creaking, semaphores in our blood. I feel her body close to mine—all mine now—and I stop to rub my hands over the warm velvet. Everything around us is crumbling, crumbling and the warm body under the warm velvet is aching for me. … Back in the very same room and fifty francs to the good, thanks to Eugene. I look out on the court but the phonograph is silent. The trunk is open and her things are lying around everywhere just as before. She lies down on the bed with her clothes on. Once, twice, three times, four times… I’m afraid she’ll go mad… in bed, under the blankets, how good to feel her body again! But for how long? Will it last this time? Already I have a presentiment that it won’t. She talks to me so feverishly—as if there will be no tomorrow. “Be quiet, Mona! Just look at me… don’t talk!” Finally she drops off and I pull my arm from under her. My eyes close. Her body is there beside me… it will be there till morning surely. … It was in February I pulled out of the harbor in a blinding snowstorm.

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

  We created our own world of discussion, desire, and love, living on champagne, roses, snow, rain, and borrowed time, an intense and private island of restored life for both of us. I had no hesitancy in telling him everything about myself, and he, like David, was extremely understanding about my manic-depressive illness. His immediate response, after I told him, was to take my face in his hands, kiss me gently on either cheek, and say, “I thought it was impossible for me to love you any more than I do.” He was silent for a while and then added, “It doesn’t really surprise me, but it does explain a certain vulnerability that goes along with your boldness. I am very glad you told me.” He meant it. They were not just easy words to cover awkward feelings. Everything he did and said after our discussion only underscored the meaning of his words. He understood, took into account, and put into perspective my vulnerabilities; but he also knew and loved my strengths as he saw them. He kept both in mind, protecting me from the hurt and pain of my illness and loving those aspects of me that he felt carried over with passion into life and love and work and people. I told him about my problems with the idea of taking lithium, but also that my life was dependent upon it. I told him that I had discussed with my psychiatrist the possibility of taking a lower dose in hopes of alleviating some of the more problematic side effects; I was eager to do this, but very frightened that I would have a recurrence of my mania. He argued that there would never be a safer or more protected period of time in my life in which to do it and that he would see me through. After discussing it with my psychiatrist in Los Angeles and my doctor in London, I did, very slowly, cut back on the amount of lithium I was taking. The effect was dramatic. It was as though I had taken bandages off my eyes after many years of partial blindness. A few days after lowering my dose, I was walking in Hyde Park, along the side of the Serpentine, when I realized that my steps were literally bouncier than they had been and that I was taking in sights and sounds that previously had been filtered through thick layers of gauze. The quacking of the ducks was more insistent, clearer, and more intense; the bumps on the sidewalk were far more noticeable; I felt more energetic and alive. Most significant, I could once again read without effort. It was, in short, remarkable.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  The same hotel, the same room. We look out on the courtyard where the bicycles are parked, and there is the little room up above, under the attic, where some smart young Alec played the phonograph all day long and repeated clever little things at the top of his voice. I say “we” but I’m getting ahead of myself, because Mona has been away a long time and it’s just today that I’m meeting her at the Gare St. Lazare. Toward evening I’m standing there with my face squeezed between the bars, but there’s no Mona, and I read the cable over again but it doesn’t help any. I go back to the Quarter and just the same I put away a hearty meal. Strolling past the Dôme a little later suddenly I see a pale, heavy face and burning eyes—and the little velvet suit that I always adore because under the soft velvet there were always her warm breasts, the marble legs, cool, firm, muscular. She rises up out of a sea of faces and embraces me, embraces me passionately—a thousand eyes, noses, fingers, legs, bottles, windows, purses, saucers all glaring at us and we in each other’s arm oblivious. I sit down beside her and she talks—a flood of talk. Wild consumptive notes of hysteria, perversion, leprosy. I hear not a word because she is beautiful and I love her and now I am happy and willing to die. We walk down the Rue du Château, looking for Eugene. Walk over the railroad bridge where I used to watch the trains pulling out and feel all sick inside wondering where the hell she could be. Everything soft and enchanting as we walk over the bridge. Smoke coming up between our legs, the tracks creaking, semaphores in our blood. I feel her body close to mine—all mine now—and I stop to rub my hands over the warm velvet. Everything around us is crumbling, crumbling and the warm body under the warm velvet is aching for me. … Back in the very same room and fifty francs to the good, thanks to Eugene. I look out on the court but the phonograph is silent. The trunk is open and her things are lying around everywhere just as before. She lies down on the bed with her clothes on. Once, twice, three times, four times… I’m afraid she’ll go mad… in bed, under the blankets, how good to feel her body again! But for how long? Will it last this time? Already I have a presentiment that it won’t. She talks to me so feverishly—as if there will be no tomorrow. “Be quiet, Mona! Just look at me… don’t talk!” Finally she drops off and I pull my arm from under her. My eyes close. Her body is there beside me… it will be there till morning surely. … It was in February I pulled out of the harbor in a blinding snowstorm.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  We may note a final thing. It has been pointed out that in the letter to the Hebrews there are four impossible things. There is the impossibility of this passage. The other three are: (1) It is impossible for God to lie (6:18). (2) It is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sin (10:4). (3) Without faith, it is impossible to please God (11:6). THE BRIGHTER SIDEHebrews 6:9–12 Beloved, even if we do speak like this, we are persuaded of better things for you, yes, things that are bound up with salvation. For God is not unjust to forget your work and the love that you displayed in that you have been and still are active in the service of God’s dedicated people. We hope with all our hearts that each one of you will display the same zeal to make your hope come true and that you will go on doing so until the end, so that you may not become lazily lethargic but may copy those who through faith and patience inherit the promises. ONE thing stands out here. This is the only passage in the whole letter where the writer addresses his people as beloved. It is precisely after the sternest passage of all that he uses the address of love. It is as if he said to them: ‘If I did not love you so much, I would not speak with such severity.’ The fourth-century scholar John Chrysostom paraphrases the thought this way: ‘It is better that I should scare you with words than that you should sorrow in deeds.’ The writer speaks the truth; but, however stern it may be, he speaks it in love. Further, his very form of speaking shows how individual his love is. ‘We hope’, he says, ‘that each one of you will display the zeal that will make your hope come true.’ He is thinking of them not as a crowd but as individual men and women. Dr Paul Tournier in A Doctor’s Casebook has a paragraph on what he calls the personalism of the Bible. ‘God says to Moses, “I know you by name” (Exodus 33:17). He says to Cyrus, “It is I, the Lord, who call you by your name” (Isaiah 45:3). One is struck, on reading the Bible, by the importance in it of personal names. Whole chapters are devoted to long genealogies. When I was young I used to think that they could well have been dropped from the Biblical Canon. But I have since realized that these series of proper names bear witness to the fact that, in the biblical perspective, man is neither a thing nor an abstraction, not a fraction of the mass, as the Marxists see him, but a person.’ When the writer to the Hebrews wrote with sternness, he was not rebuking a church; he was yearning over individual men and women, as God himself does. There are two interesting things implicit in this passage.