Pride

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 A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  μεγᾶλύνω, used by correct writers only in pres. and impf.: (uéyas) :-— to make great or powerful, to exalt, strengthen, τοὺς πολεμίους Thuc. 5. 98; τὴν δύναμίν τινος Diod. 1, 20:—Pass., μεγαλύνεσθαι Ex τινος to gain great glory by.., Xen. Hell. 7. 1, 24. II. to make great by word, to extol, magnify, τὸ ὄνομά τινος Eur. Bacch. 320; μ. τὴν ἑαυτοῦ δύναμιν παρά τινι Thuc. 8.81; ἑαυτόν Xen. Apol. 32; μ. τινὰ πρός τινα Plut. Cim. 16:—Med. to boast oneself, γέννᾳ in point of birth, Aesch. Pr. 892; οὐδὲ μεγαλύνεται ἐπὶ τῷ ἔργῳ Xen. Hier. 2, 17, cf. Oec. 21. 4; ταῦτ᾽ ἀκούων ἐμεγαλύνετο Id. Mem. 3. 6, 3: cf. μεγαλίζομαι. 2. to aggravate a crime, Thue. 6. 28. peyad-virépoxos, ov, supremely great, Eust. Opusc. 309. 79- μεγᾶλ-ὠδῦὔνος, ov, very painful, Hesych. 5. v. ἐριώδυνος. peyad-ovipos, ov, with a great name, giving glory, νίκη Soph. Ant. 148; Ζεύς Ar. Thesm, 315, cf. Nub. 569, etc. μεγᾶλ-ωπός, dv, (WW) large-eyed, Opp. C. 2.177. μεγάλως, Adv. of μέγας, v. μέγας B. μεγἄλωστί [1], Adv. of μέγας, far and wide, over a vast space, κεῖτο μέγας μεγαλωστί Il. 16. 776, cf. 18. 26; κεῖσο μέγας μ. Od. 24. 40. IL. = μεγάλως, Hdt. 2. 161., 5.67. 2. also = peyado- πρεπῶς, Id. 6. 70, Polyb. 28.11, 5, Luc. Zeux. 8.—Used by Ep. Poets, in Ion. Prose, and in late Prose. ie ee ΠΧ. ῦὺᾷὄἘὸὺᾺὺὕὺὉϑῦόΌη:π1ι|}7ΣὺὰΔὼΚπ00νὕ0ὑὖῦϑ:ὲπ0.0.ΧΧκΓ6Κ... @ μεγαλόσκιος ---- μέγας. μεγᾶλωσύνη, 7, greatness, majesty, LXX (2 Regg. 7. 21, al.), Ν. T. PeyGA-wbeAys, és, (ὀφέλλω) very serviceable, Plut. 2. 553 D,Cleomed.. μεγά-μῦκος, ov, loud-bellowing, Hesych. μεγ-άνωρ [ἃ]. opos, ὁ, ἧ,-- μεγαλήνωρ, πλοῦτος Pind. O, τ. 4. Méyapa, τά, Megara, Hdt., etc.; Μέγαράδε to Megara, Ar. Ach. 524. Μεγᾶρεύς, éws, 6, a citizen of Megara, Theogn. 23, etc.; pl. Μεγαρεῖς or —7s, Hdt., etc.: proverb., Μεγαρέων δάκρυα, ‘crocodile’s tears, (because of the quantity of onions grown near Megara), Paroemiogr. Meyipifw, to side with the Megarians or speak their dialect, κλάων Μεγαριεῖς Ar. Ach. 822, ubi v. Schol. 2. to follow the Megarian philosopher Stilpo, Diog. L. 2.113. 11. to visit the μέγαρα of Demeter at the Thesmophoria, Clem. Al. 14; cf. μέγαρον 111. 2. Meydpukds, 7, dv, Megarian, Ar., etc.: Μεγαρικοὶ κέραμοι, and in the language of trade Μεγαρικά, Megarian pottery, Schol. Ar. Nub. 1203, εἴο.:---Μεγαρικοί, of, philosophers of the Megarian school, Arist. Metaph, 8. 3, 1, v. Diog. L. 2. c. t0:—fem. Meyapis (sc. γῆ), the Megarian territory, Megarid, Thuc. 2. 31, etc. Μεγαριστί [1], Adv. in the Megarian dialect, Jo. Alex. τον. παρ. p. 37. Meyapoev, Adv. from Megara, Susario 1, Ar. Vesp. 57. Meyapot, Adv. at Megara, Ar. Ach. 758.

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

  When he came home from the office in the evening, he had one quick glass of brandy, standing in the kitchen, after we greeted him and before he took off his coat and hat. Then my mother and he would immediately retire into the bedroom where we would hear them discussing the day’s events from behind closed doors, even if my mother had only left their office a few hours before. If any of us children had transgressed against the rule, this was the time when we truly quaked in our orthopedic shoes, for we knew our fate was being discussed and the terms of punishment sealed behind those doors. When they opened, a mutual and irrefutable judgment would be delivered. If they spoke of anything important when we were around, Mother and Daddy immediately lapsed into patois. Since my parents shared all making of policy and decision, in my child’s eye, my mother must have been other than woman. Again, she was certainly not man. (The three of us children would not have tolerated that deprivation of womanliness for long at all; we’d have probably packed up our kra and gone back before the eighth day—an option open to all African child-souls who bumble into the wrong milieu.) My mother was different from other women, and sometimes it gave me a sense of pleasure and specialness that was a positive aspect of feeling set apart. But sometimes it gave me pain and I fancied it the reason for so many of my childhood sorrows. If my mother were like everybody else’s maybe they would like me better . But most often, her difference was like the season or a cold day or a steamy night in June. It just was , with no explanation or evocation necessary. My mother and her two sisters were large and graceful women whose ample bodies seemed to underline the air of determination with which they moved through their lives in the strange world of Harlem and america. To me, my mother’s physical substance and the presence and self-possession with which she carried herself were a large part of what made her different . Her public air of in-charge competence was quiet and effective. On the street people deferred to my mother over questions of taste, economy, opinion, quality, not to mention who had the right to the first available seat on the bus.

• From American Religious History (2001)

  Scope: Catholic immigrants from Italy, Poland, the Slavic lands, and south Germany found, as they arrived in the late 19th century, a church dominated by the Irish Americans, whose leaders were not always ready to acknowledge the newcomers’ distinctive styles of worship. Tensions persisted into the early 20th century, but a series of powerful consolidating bishops, including O’Connell of Boston and Mundelein of Chicago, established order and uniformity over their patchwork dioceses and emphasized their people’s patriotism. Catholics made sure of their continuing distinctiveness from Protestants by building a parallel educational system, run by generations of self-sacrificing nuns. The first Catholic presidential candidate, Al Smith, lost the election of 1928, but John F. Kennedy’s victory in 1960 bore witness to a decline in anti- Catholic prejudice. Catholics remained distinctive because of their opposition to birth control at a time that other churches accepted it, but the outcome of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) was to make them less distinctive than hitherto. Catholics devoted the last thirty years of the 20 th century to debating the merits and drawbacks of the council and absorbing the shocks it had caused. Outline I. A generation of centralizing bishops tried to impose order on an array of diverse customs and practices. A. They were hamstrung by the independence of the religious orders, which were often beyond their control and ran their own schools, colleges, hospitals, and charities. B. They discouraged ethnic parishes and devotions. 1. Some flourished in any case, such as the Italian devotions of Manhattan’s 115th Street. 2. The bishops discovered that immigrants often became more religiously observant than they had been at home. C. These bishops also emphasized their loyalty to America, while taking care not to antagonize Vatican authorities in Rome. ©2001 The Teaching Company. 75

• From American Religious History (2001)

  Scope: Between Reconstruction and the 1950s, black ministers often played the role of community leaders. One such minister, Martin Luther King, Jr., led the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955–1956. He understood how to use the American patriotic idiom and the Bible that both blacks and whites knew well to condemn segregation. His movement’s commitment to nonviolence enabled it to maintain the moral high ground. Revulsion at segregationist attacks against black churches, notably in Birmingham, Alabama in 1964, created national political support for civil rights legislation. The Nation of Islam offered an alternative religious vision to American blacks. It offered them pride and power but not racial integration and was embodied in the powerful speeches of ex-convict Malcolm X. Black political aspirations remained concentrated on religious leaders in subsequent decades, of whom the best known was Jesse Jackson. The civil rights movement inspired later reform movements, many of which followed King’s example of publicly breaking unjust laws in the name of a divine higher law and as a way of drawing attention to the injustice. Among these imitators were the sanctuary and pro-life movements. Outline I. Religion was a powerful community building and sustaining force in the segregation era. A. W. E. B. DuBois paid tribute to the power of religion in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). B. Black ministers played a vital role in community life as the best- educated leaders not dependent on whites’ good will. C. They created “storefront” churches after the great migration of rural blacks to the urban north. D. Politicized blacks in 1930s and 1940s were sometimes annoyed at the otherworldliness of religion there. ©2001 The Teaching Company. 83

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  No sooner had Augustine been ordained than he was whisked away for his debut in the big city. In January 397 he would rather have been attending a Numidian bishops’ conference in the city of Constantine, where the bishop was an old Tagastan friend, Fortunatus, but the call of his other friend and close collaborator, bishop Aurelius of Carthage, proved overpowering.64 And so in January, and probably again from April to September of that year, he was in Carthage, making his society debut. We have always known that there was a significant concentration of sermons in our surviving texts from his time in Carthage that year, and in the last decade another fascinating sheaf of them has emerged from medieval manuscripts in which they lay undetected for centuries. The effect these sermons make is striking. They show us the new bishop at the peak of his physical powers, on display in the metropolitan center of the richest of Latin provinces of the Roman world. Augustine was welcome here because his friend was bishop, and he would be welcomed there again many times. For thirty years, he would remain the star performer of the church to which he belonged, a church that had, in Africa, rather suffered for want of such star performers. The pattern set in 397 recurred regularly. He was back in Carthage for all or part of the summer in 399, 401, 403, 404, 405, 406 (perhaps), 407, 409 (perhaps), 410, a climactic season in 411, an unusual winter visit in 412–13, and then again in the summer of 413. We know of these trips because the scribes taking down his sermons would often enough make note of the place and date of delivery. Age and discouragement intervened and visits afterwards were fewer, but he still made the three hundred–mile round-trip in 416, 417, 418, and 419. After that we are less sure, but 421 and 424 may have seen him there again. This makes at least fifteen visits in thirty years, many of them taking him away from his duties, his congregation, and the respectful attention of his townsmen for months at a time. He mentions briefly in one place that the citizens of Hippo were restless at the thought of these absences, but he does not otherwise explain them or comment on them. These were not holidays or speaking tours, but times for direct engagement in the affairs of the African church. Late in his life, enmeshed in the tangles his anti-Pelagian enthusiasms had made for him, he was able to say that he was always busier at Carthage than anywhere else.65 He remembered without apology being served pheasant at dinner there, at a socially prominent table, though at home the fare was more austere.66

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Pelagius aimed at vindication as a person and a teacher, whether at Diospolis or later at Rome. His approach, moreover, was to conceal and minimize difference, to state his distinctive case subtly enough to attract a broad, perhaps unsophisticated audience.518 He had worked out this approach before Augustine ever attacked him, for he had been controverted before.519 So Pelagius went nowhere near attacking Augustine directly and indeed tried to deal with him as an epistolary friend and colleague. He condemned Manichees and the controversially easygoing monk Jovinian as the extremes between which he was proud to hold the middle ground, letting his audience decide whether Augustine was a man of the middle or rather an extremist. The device is effective, and it would have prevailed in the end had Augustine and his colleagues not succeeded in bringing down on him the power of the government they had in other ways colluded with for the last decade. Through the mid-410s, Augustine went on winning over the hearts and minds of African Christians to his view of Pelagianism. In some cases, as when he got the former disciples of Pelagius, Timasius and Protasius, who had brought Augustine one of their teacher’s books, to recant and offer him their full support, his sense of victory must have been strong.520 On other days, it was an uphill struggle, as when he wrote a letter of almost seven thousand words to Paulinus of Nola to persuade him (and through him, Paulinus’s influential friends in Italy) of his case, with little effect.521 At about the same time, a layman at Carthage named Vitalis had been speaking against Augustine’s teachings, and so Augustine wrote to him carefully and politely and gave him an anti-Pelagian catechism to subscribe to.522 We surmise that Augustine heard on some grapevine in about 417 that Pelagius was making ready to appeal to Rome. This was bad news for Augustine, who had insisted on Rome as the center of orthodoxy and discipline in his war against the Donatists. In a preemptive strike, he went directly to Innocentius, bishop of Rome, and won from him, with what must have been a limited body of documentation, an outright condemnation of Pelagius. But Innocentius died in 417 and his successor, Bishop Zosimus, saw no need to sustain the ban.523 Augustine, panicking again, sought intervention from his highly placed contacts at the court in Ravenna, and Alypius’s visits to the court were timely, strategic, and effective. At Ravenna’s direction, Zosimus eventually caved in and added his own voice to the condemnation of Pelagius and Caelestius. That was a costly victory for Augustine, for it won him a potent new enemy, one we will meet shortly. ASCESIS AND AGONY

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  If the letter had made its way directly to Jerome, it would doubtless have set off an eruption. But the argument went unresolved, as mischievous fortune intruded and the letter did not find its way to Bethlehem for a long time. Years later, when the confusions were sorted out, Jerome finally received the letter and responded to it, but by this time Augustine was a bishop and well thought of in some of Jerome’s Italian circles, so his response was more discreet than it would have been earlier. The comedy of the series of events lies in the fact that though the letter didn’t make it to Bethlehem on the first try, it did get into circulation in Italy. Jerome heard of it, indeed, as a pamphlet against Jerome that Augustine was circulating, thus an open letter, as it were. (Such, at least, is Jerome’s version of events.) Augustine protested keenly that he had no such intention and that the letter was sincerely sent to reach Jerome. We should probably accept his protestations (while perhaps pausing to wonder why scholars have been so ready to accept them), but observe two points: (1) Augustine may have been distressed that his letter did not make it directly to Jerome, but he was surely delighted that it had gone into circulation otherwise. (We’ll read Jerome’s miffed reply shortly.) One of the purposes of such correspondence was precisely to present him as a figure in correspondence with the great Jerome, and to get a letter back from Jerome would be a mark of approval and acceptance into circles that Augustine had otherwise not entered. Just to be read widely was worth the effort. (2) Nothing Augustine says rules out the possibility that the rogue copy in circulation in Italy was not the original gone astray but rather a separate copy somehow put into play by Augustine himself. Jerome and Augustine remained in communication on and off almost until Jerome’s death in 419 or 420. The initial jousting was a draw, but eventually the two found themselves on the same side in the controversies over Pelagius and his teaching and would settle into an uneasy, never intimate, but still functional epistolary relationship, all without ever setting eyes on one another, each the reluctant guarantor of a part of the other’s reputation for holiness and learning. On the surface, Jerome is very polite—but the surface is an inch deep.168

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  To be sure, long before he became a bishop, Augustine was an ardent fighter with words. With at least some embarrassment, he recalled how he would win arguments with the orthodox in his Manichee days, and go from success to success with mounting self-assurance.203 He spoke as if the habit had passed, but it’s hard to see real transformation. Face-to-face, he did best when his opponent was weak and wavering, a potential convert. He could, and would, challenge his opponent to a public disputation, confident, usually justifiably so, in his debating skills, honed over the years. He was at his most vehement when the opponent was somewhere else, far away in miles but within the ambit of the textual world Augustine created. Mani, Pelagius, Julian—these men not only took the full brunt of Augustine’s attacks, but took it repeatedly, almost endlessly, in obsessive detail. The affection of Augustine’s friends for him tells us one thing about the man; his flair for hostility tells us another. A man who could go forty-three years from conversion to his grave without ever a moment when one or another polemical work was not on his plate, and who can be shown, moreover, to have picked every fight he got into, must surely be thought to be part of the problem, not part of the solution. The Manichees were a moment’s fashion in Africa, easily outlawed. By the time Augustine assails them with his lengthy Against Faustus, few were paying attention to the cult. The Donatists were the majority church of Africa. To attack them was to attack African Christianity, and to invoke imperial assistance was to change the history of Africa forever, and not necessarily for the better. Whether there ever was such a thing as Pelagianism may reasonably be doubted, but even if we conclude that Pelagius and a few others held doctrines that were at variance with Augustine’s, the choice to hound those doctrines and those teachers with obloquy was just that—a choice. Augustine’s opponents on the same issues in the next generation, the “semi-Pelagians” (that term is a sixteenth-century moniker for them) of Gaul were far more discreet and managed to rewrite Augustine’s teaching without the billingsgate.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  But finally, Augustine had to learn his Latin the hard way. While still a small boy, he was sent away from home in Tagaste to the upland city of Madauros, twenty-five miles south, there to make or at least complete his studies with a “grammarian.” The function of a grammarian in this period was to train the boys who came to him in upper-class speech and the writing that went with it. In a society that paid only lip service to mathematical training of any kind, or even to the serious study of history, mastery of the imperial languages was the preeminent concern of upper-class education from earliest age to final teaching for those who went on to the most advanced studies. Just as the child Augustine was exposed to Latin in a new way in school, so also was he trained in Greek. In the first book of the Confessions, he talks about how he loved the one and hated the other. Modern readers usually sympathize too easily at this point, thinking they understand what it’s like to have to study both one’s own language and a difficult foreign tongue in artificial literary form. There was ordinary common Greek in Africa, notably in the person of old bishop Valerius at Hippo, a native Greek-speaker trying to make do as bishop of a Latin community, and you could also hear Greek-speakers swearing casually in the street.218 But Latin was undoubtedly more challenging for Augustine, and more like school Greek, than English ever is to an upper-class British or American student today. Bilingual immigrants to the United States, faced with classrooms in which the imperial language is the medium and the object of instruction and does not always resemble very closely what they hear spoken outside the classroom, sense some of what Augustine encountered. The mastery Augustine achieved of Latin was thus extraordinary. Whatever else Augustine was and did, he always put on a show, and the object of the show was not only whatever preachment or polemic he had in hand, but the simple fact of his mastery of the spoken word. He never found anyone to rival him in north Africa. His prestige in matters of doctrine undoubtedly owed not a little to his facility with words, and when he transferred that facility to the written word as well and began sending his writings around the Mediterranean, he must have felt again the benefits of the childhood education he later grew to mistrust. Augustine the Latinist was, of all the Augustines we can talk about, the one most necessary as a precondition for all the others. AUGUSTINE IN THE LIBRARY Augustine lived much of his life sunk in an ocean of books, books he made and books that made him and books that made the world for him. He is like us in that way, creatures of media that we are, and unlike most of his contemporaries.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  But there had to be a third substantial church in Hippo: that of the Donatists, whom Augustine hated. In Augustine’s Africa, Donatism was an austere and well-established Christian community that looked back to great bishops of Carthage as guarantors of its authenticity. Cyprian, the martyred bishop of the third century, and Donatus, who led the church for thirty years in the early fourth century, were names to conjure with. Cyprian’s annual feast day, celebrating the day of his martyrdom, was a high point of the Christian year. Augustine chose a different community, one that followed the successors of Donatus’s rival (from the early 300s), Caecilian. The divisions that separated Christians into angry and often violent factions were a characteristic and deeply rooted part of African life by now. The Caecilianist community had opposed the majority Donatist faction for almost all of the fourth century. Hostility and history separated the two communities, not doctrine. When pressed, they could find real disagreement only over the administration of baptism: Donatists found some sins so grave that only a fresh baptism could wash them away, while the Caecilianists thought baptism so high and powerful a rite that it could never be administered a second time. The two communities complicated and reinforced their enmity with obsessive historical argument and endless mutual recrimination. We will see how obsessively, and dangerously, Augustine fought to advance the cause of his sect against that of the majority. The uncertainty of the dating of the extant basilica leaves open the strong possibility that it was constructed by the majority Donatists, probably during the time of respite from official harassment that came under the emperor Julian and his successors, after 362, thirty years before Augustine came to Hippo. That would explain how the ornamentation was left incomplete, likely reflecting some crackdown by the government against the sect. Was the original Caecilianist basilica somewhere nearby? Augustine tells us in one letter that the sounds of celebration from the Donatist basilica could be heard in his own church’s precincts.20 If the church we can see was originally the Donatist basilica, the building would have come into Augustine’s hands, but only in 411 or so, when edicts took effect dissolving the Donatist church, confiscating its property, and regularizing its clergy into the ranks of the official church. The capture of the majority church’s property and people was a dramatic event in the life of the church of Hippo and Augustine’s greatest personal victory, yet he never describes it. The story of that revolution will be central to our exploration of him and his world. THE WIDER WORLD

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  In late antiquity, letter-writing flourished as a way for gentlemen to stay in touch with gentlemen.179 Letter exchange offered a set of agreeable literary pastimes and conventions for exchanging pleasantries, insinuating requests, and commending worthy young people to the attention of other possible patrons. Prominent men were also in the habit of collecting and publishing their letters on an unprecedented scale.180 Letters by now, moreover, let people establish and maintain friendships that were never supplemented by face-to-face introduction. In Cicero’s age, correspondents knew one another “personally” and used letter-writing to maintain and manipulate relationships when presence was impossible. Though the conventions and, if one may call it so, the ideology of letter-writing remained constant in late antiquity, in practice many correspondents learned how to initiate, maintain, and occasionally destroy friendships with people they had never met. This was a fresh departure. Many letters in those days were far more nearly public than private. When one gentleman wrote to another, it would be the exception rather than the rule for the recipient to mull the secret words of the text privately in his chamber. Far more often, the letter, carried by a trusted courier, would arrive as a social event, to be read aloud in the presence of friends and household, discussed with the courier, who often was charged with reporting more fully on what had been written about, then copied to share with friends.181 An imperial letter stood at the acme of the pyramid of epistolary prestige, and on the one occasion in his life when we know Augustine received such a letter, we can be sure that it was a source of wonder and approval for the community at Hippo that associated with him. He held on to it carefully.182 We have in all about three hundred surviving letters to and from Augustine, including the ones rediscovered twenty-five years ago. Without having a complete record of his correspondence, we see patterns nonetheless, though we are never sure how they have been shaped by the accidents of survival and loss of evidence. Before and after 411, the year Augustine finally found real fame and power, two main pictures emerge. Until 411, his preferred correspondents were wealthy and well placed, people from the great world he said he’d left behind, the world into which he would have had a more direct path had he stayed with his youthful plans to pursue a provincial governorship or two. After 411, he settled for Africa, and his epistolary partners were increasingly the military governors of Africa. We might call this political realism on Augustine’s part, for he had come up in a world in which he believed that wealth and social status were what mattered, but in the early 410s had himself rudely reminded, especially with the judicial murder of Marcellinus (of which we will hear below), that real power lay elsewhere.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  There are others in the town who are indifferent to both groups and who prefer their own ways of gathering and enacting community: another ceremonial meal, perhaps, different stories, different gods even. But twenty years earlier the authorities had made it clear that where Roman law held sway Christians and Christians alone would be allowed to celebrate such rituals. The man whose voice we have tried to hear is a master of using the public law and the emperor’s authority to advance the cause of his community. For him, it is not enough that most of his rivals have been silenced. He insists that his way and his way alone shall prevail. In the end, he succeeds in this. And fails. This book is about him. He was Aurelius Augustinus by birth, Augustinus Hipponensis (Augustine of Hippo) by profession.2 If all we knew about him was that he was a powerful and eloquent leader and shaper of affairs in his own time, he would hold our attention easily enough. But he is also someone else—“Saint Augustine”3—and we know him not from what he did but from what he wrote. He died almost sixteen hundred years ago and there has been no decade in all that time in which he has not been read, admired, controverted, and read again. A few of his books have won their way into that body of literature that is continuously published in many languages and on all continents. More even than his books, his ideas (or stereotypes of a few of them) have become caricatures of themselves and leitmotifs for belief and controversy. “Just war,” “original sin,” “concupiscence”—we are right to attach these notions to him, yet we misrepresent him when we do.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Augustine shows himself to us in his letters overwhelmingly as a figure of authority. Others come to him with their questions and problems and he offers replies. The only real exception is Jerome, to whom Augustine takes exegetical problems, not truly to seek guidance. Otherwise, Jerome would have dryly suggested, there would have been at the very least much more Augustine would have had to ask. The missing partners in his letters are the other bishops in the church in north Africa. A few of Augustine’s own friends (Aurelius, Alypius, Possidius, Evodius, Severus) appear, and there are isolated texts from a very few others, but the hundreds of bishops we will see trooping in and out of the baths at Carthage on the opening day of the great conference of 411 never appear among Augustine’s correspondents. Most of them were of a class that did not practice the fine letter, were not Augustine’s social equals, and very likely found the whole business of letter-writing a bit beyond them. If Augustine was a nobody in the great world in which he sought acceptance, to the provincial African world he was somebody who had gone away to Italy and learned to put on airs. The coming and going of couriers with letters, the reading and discussion of what they took and brought, and the careful docketing and preservation of the texts were all things that Augustine did to set himself apart. Such effort was both utilitarian and ostentatious. The society of letter-writers in the late-antique world was rather like the community of e-mailers circa 1990. Employing a textual practice largely unseen, or at least disregarded, by the majority of their contemporaries, such participants in a small self-creating elite have the power to influence events at a distance denied their contemporaries. The early e-mailer perhaps only had the advantage of a few days’ speed, but Augustine and his fellow letter-writers had the advantage of influence at a distance without the inconvenience of personal travel. The ability of Augustine’s particular community of African Christians to win over imperial support for their various initiatives, for example, was to a large extent facilitated by the easy flow of information to and from the capital city of Ravenna in Italy.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  When Augustine found himself some years later in Hippo as priest of the Caecilianist church, his first most visible public engagement came when he set out, in tandem with his friend Aurelius, the newly ordained bishop of Carthage, to emulate his spiritual father Ambrose in uprooting at Hippo pious practices like those of his mother. It was a daring assertion of authority, but he carried it off (more or less), and it was the making of him in Hippo. The story of Augustine’s victory is told in a letter from Augustine to Alypius in 395, when Alypius was already bishop of Tagaste.267 It began with an uproar in church. Augustine had banned the laetitiae, the “festivities,” that were to be held on the occasion of the annual feast of Bishop Leontius, Hippo’s martyr bishop of many years earlier (about whom we know nothing reliable). Augustine thought the celebrants were trying to hide their lust for wine under a pious premise. But as the service began that Thursday—we have to imagine a world where a clergyman going into church could find himself face-to-face with a restive crowd far from ready for pious abstraction—Augustine saw his opportunity in the gospel passage for the day: “Do not give what is holy to the dogs and cast not your pearls before swine” (Matthew 7.6). Augustine made a meal of the text, so to speak, looking to shame his audience into docility and modesty. Then as now, Thursday services were always underattended. Nonetheless, the sermon was reported abroad, feelings were heightened, and a few days later, on the first day of the Lenten season, a large crowd was present for the sermon on the cleansing of the temple scene in the gospels. The master, Augustine said, would be all the more offended by scenes of revelry than he was by Jerusalem commerce. The Jews never had even sober banqueting in their temple, much less wine. Augustine told a story of an episode in Exodus where drunkenness led to idolatry. Gesturing for the codex, he read out the whole passage. He went on to rail a bit longer against drunkenness, taking up this time the text of Paul to make his point, first from one chapter, then from another. By then he had juggled three different books in front of his congregation, reading aloud to make his points. Now, people who enjoy large, convivial celebrations lightened by alcohol may very often abuse the substance, but rarely are they willing to admit it. One man’s drunken orgy is another man’s happy hour. Augustine recounts his sermon-making with careful zest, but we can’t see or hear the audience yet. The readings went on.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  There’s so much that he dictated and published, so much that he argued in church and had taken down and corrected, so much that he wrote against the heretics, so much he expounded concerning the canonical books for the edification of the holy sons of the church, that scarcely anybody would be able to read through and know all of it.246 What neither Possidius nor Augustine ever explains is why he had to write so much. In the early winter of 419, for example, Augustine was counting up the lines he had written since the preceding fall. The total came to six thousand lines—not a bad sum, and if he was paying his secretaries by the line, it’s probably an accurate figure.247 Augustine was always busy with words. The five million or so we have from him were all written in the last forty-three of his nearly seventy-six years of life, and by far the majority during his thirty-four years as bishop of Hippo. The average is approximately that of a three hundred–page printed book every year for almost forty years. The sheer cost of this undertaking must not be ignored: the labor of preparation and transcription, the cost of materials, the further cost of preparing copies for others to read, and all managed in a relatively minor provincial city. In all the Latin world outside government bureaucracy, only Jerome in that age mounted a literary enterprise anywhere near so ambitious and successful. Even if you were an illiterate member of Augustine’s congregation, you had to know that this bishop was a man of his books. He constantly reminded you that he would prefer to be in his study reading and writing. The stream of visitors, the busy staff, and the economic impact of the enterprise had to have impressed visitors as much as the content of the books themselves. Augustine himself rarely had to be bothered with the burdensome material aspects of writing, and he benefited from this greatly. Writing was a messy, fussy manual technique in antiquity, ever concerned with the writing materials (papyrus or parchment, pens, inks), and working at handicraft pace. But the cumbersome technology had given rise to its own forms of mechanization: stenographic scribes. The later Roman empire lived on the paperwork produced by the imperial and ecclesiastical scribes (notarii) who could take down a speaker’s words at speed and give them back as properly formatted manuscripts. The poet and government minister Ausonius praised a boy who served him in this capacity for his ability to get things right in a “hailstorm” of dictated words. To be supported by such a team was a sign of wealth and influence, and it was the necessary condition for production of text on any ambitious scale.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 54. --Of the Very Foolish Lie of the Pagans, in Feigning that the Christian Religion Was Not to Last Beyond Three Hundred and Sixty-Five Years. I might collect these and many similar arguments, if that year had not already passed by which lying divination has promised, and deceived vanity has believed. But as a few years ago three hundred and sixty-five years were completed since the time when the worship of the name of Christ was established by His presence in the flesh, and by the apostles, what other proof need we seek to refute that falsehood? For, not to place the beginning of this period at the nativity of Christ, because as an infant and boy He had no disciples, yet, when He began to have them, beyond doubt the Christian doctrine and religion then became known through His bodily presence, that is, after He was baptized in the river Jordan by the ministry of John. For on this account that prophecy went before concerning Him:"He shall reign from sea even to sea, and from the river even to the ends of the earth. " [1255]But since, before He suffered and rose from the dead, the faith had not yet been defined to all, but was defined in the resurrection of Christ (for so the Apostle Paul speaks to the Athenians, saying, "But now He announces to men that all everywhere should repent, because He hath appointed a day in which to judge the world in equity, by the Man in whom He hath defined the faith to all men, raising Him from the dead" [1256] ), it is better that, in settling this question, we should start from that point, especially because the Holy Spirit was then given, just as He behoved to be given after the resurrection of Christ in that city from which the second law, that is, the new testament, ought to begin. For the first, which is called the old testament was given from Mount Sinai through Moses. But concerning this which was to be given by Christ it was predicted, "Out of Sion shall go forth the law and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem;" [1257] whence He Himself said that repentance in His name behoved to be preached among all nations, but yet beginning at Jerusalem. [1258]There, therefore, the worship of this name took its rise, that Jesus should be believed in, who died and rose again. There this faith blazed up with such noble beginnings, that several thousand men, being converted to the name of Christ with wonderful alacrity, sold their goods for distribution among the needy, thus, by a holy resolution and most ardent charity, coming to voluntary poverty, and prepared themselves, amid the Jews who raged and thirsted for their blood, to contend for the truth even to death, not with armed power, but with more powerful patience.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Yet now he returned to Wittenberg, supporting the Elector and Spalatin in their wish to reverse all innovations in line with the imperial mandate. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the “disturbances” in Wittenberg, such as they were, formed a useful pretext for a joint campaign by Luther and the electoral court to bow to the provisions of the imperial mandate. This meant permitting the Catholic bishops to move against evangelical clergy, driving those who had married away from their parishes, imprisoning them, and even threatening them with martyrdom. However, it was important for the Elector not to be seen to support Luther, still less to permit him to return. To this end, Luther did as he promised and wrote another letter, drafted by Spalatin, saying that he was returning against the Elector’s will. Edited by the jurist Hieronymus Schurff, it took at least two and possibly three drafts before they had a serviceable text. It was immediately sent to the Elector’s brother Johann, who was asked to make copies. Again, speed was paramount: Copies were soon sent to influential people at Nuremberg—and one conveniently fell into the hands of Duke Georg. It had the desired effect: Friedrich was exonerated from the suspicion of having allowed Luther to return. 51 When he arrived in Wittenberg on March 6, Luther set about turning the clock back. 52 Meeting with Amsdorf, Jonas, and Melanchthon, he did little else for the first two days but take counsel. With the faction sympathetic to the Elector now dominant in the council, the councilors soon also fell into line, and with unintentional irony, the council made the returning Luther a present of cloth for a new cowl: The knight was to be clothed as a monk once more. On March 9, Luther began to preach a series of eight sermons, which became known as the “Invocavit Sermons,” in the parish church—“his” pulpit and the one from which Karlstadt had been banned. There was a new certainty and confidence in his style. Didactically clear, Luther’s sermons mixed humor, insult, and biblical exegesis. There was no hiding his scorn for the preachers—“Dr. Karlstadt, Gabriel and Michael”—who had convinced the Wittenbergers of their own godliness. Anyone can teach people the right phrases, Luther stated—even an ass can do that—but the true works of faith are deeds, not words. He insisted on the power of Scripture: The Word did everything, he said, “while I drank Wittenberg beer with my Philipp [Melanchthon] and Amsdorf.” 53 From the outset, Luther reminded his parishioners that he was the first reformer: “therefore, dear brothers, follow me….I was the first whom God placed on this arena.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It was also me to whom God first revealed to preach these his words.” He concluded the first sermon imagining “how would it be, if I had brought my people to the ‘Plan’ [that is, field of combat] and I (I who was the first to persuade them to come) wanted to flee death and not wait joyfully: how the poor flock would have been led astray!” Those who make radical changes in religion, he argued, forget that you have to raise children first with milk, then pap, then eggs and soft food. The radicals are like brothers who, when they have sucked their fill, “cut off the teat,” when they should let their brother “suck, as you have sucked.” 54 Luther rested his claim for leadership on a paradox. Because he fought with the Devil, and because those whom “Death and the Devil constantly attack” have the strongest faith, his election was proven. Here Luther developed an insight originally taken from Staupitz, but now the intensity of his inner battles with the Devil had become the overwhelming proof of his own rightness. “You don’t yet know what it costs to fight with the Devil and overcome him,” Luther proclaimed. “I know it well, because I have eaten a piece of salt or two with him; I know him well, and he knows me well too.” 55 Other preachers might insult their opponents as creatures of Satan, or denigrate the Catholic Mass as “devilish,” but this was not the same as telling the congregation about one’s own encounters with the Devil. It was a risky undertaking: Those who met with the Devil were regarded as possessed or witches. Indeed, Cochlaeus, who had become one of Luther’s fiercest antagonists after their meeting at Worms, thought his encounters with Satan were the surest proof that he was a heretic. None of the other reformers made such a claim—indeed, the Wittenberg prophets had claimed the opposite, namely that they spoke with God. The events in Wittenberg reveal what became a pattern in Luther’s life: Time and again, though he might rail against them and insult them with surprising impudence, Luther would in the end always align himself with the authorities. The account first propagated by the Catholic side—that Zwilling and Karlstadt had engaged in subversive preaching, which had caused armed sedition in the town—Luther now adopted as the official narrative of what had happened in Wittenberg. It was a convenient fiction for all sides, because it minimized the extent to which the council, leading reformers, and others had been actively involved in introducing the Reformation. In fact, until January, Melanchthon had taken a far more radical line than Karlstadt, but once the imperial mandate made the Elector reject the Eilenburg deal, someone had to be blamed. As we have seen, for some time Luther had been uncomfortable with Karlstadt.

• From Shunned (2018)

  The Ministry School wasn’t a program you graduated from, per se, and it was never meant to replace our primary school education. Over the years, I delivered hundreds of talks and demonstrations of door-to-door talking techniques and along the way became adept at speaking in front of a group. My very first talk was on the obscure subject of Gehenna, which Jesus mentions in several parables. His listeners would have known he was referring to the local garbage dump, set just outside the city walls of Jerusalem, where a fire burned non-stop, ready to claim all things unsavory, including the bodies of criminals viewed unworthy of burial. Because I was a girl and the biblical principle of headship prohibits females from speaking directly to the congregation, I was asked to sit on the stage with my brother, Randy, and relay the information to him in a pre-prepared dialogue. There we sat, nine and fourteen years old, respectively, talking to each other about the symbolic interpretation of burning flesh in never-ending flames. Several hours of research, writing, and rehearsing went into that five-minute presentation, supported by Mom’s guiding hand. At the conclusion, before Randy and I could rise from our chairs to leave the stage, the congregation clapped and cheered, as was the tradition for all first- timers. The presiding elder, who years later would officiate my wedding, rose to the podium and started his feedback with praise: “Wow, young lady, you sure know how to talk,” which brought a wave of laughter from the crowd. He had me there. It was no secret I’d inherited my father’s gift for gab. Then along came the Ministry School, which taught me how to organize and articulate my thoughts clearly. From my years of door-to-door work, I had learned how to think on my feet and had mastered the art of persuasion at a young age. According to my mother, I came into this world somehow knowing how to remain calm and centered in charged situations. Inside I got crazy jitters like anyone else, but I intuitively knew how to hold it together. At the end of those first Coach Federal training sessions, all of the participant evaluations came back very positive, describing me as “animated,” “engaging,” “clear,” and “understandable.” But I didn’t need that to tell me something special had occurred. I had felt completely alive and connected to that audience. That day, a lifetime of expertise and cultivated talents was successfully unleashed outside the realm of proselytizing, and a nascent ambition was ignited. It was remarkable to see how transferable and marketable these skills were. I was energized and ready for more. Nancy and I celebrated with martinis while we waited to board our flight home. As the program expanded, I was asked to fill in again and again. Nancy got pregnant and appreciated a helping hand on the road.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  νοῦντες Plat, Phaedr. 257 E; ἐπί τινι Xen. Ages. 2,5; also, μάλιστα gp. ἐπί τινι Dem. 836. 11; οὐ μεῖον gp. ἐπί τινι Xen. Eq. Mag. 7, 3, οἷς Apol. 24 ;—also, op. μέγα ἔς twa Eur. Hipp. 6; περί re Aeschin. 44. 30; μέγα pp. ὅτι .. Xen. Cyr. 2. 3, 13; μέγα pp. ws εἰδώς Plat. Symp. 198D; μέγα gp. μὴ ὑπείξειν haughty in their resolution not to.., Xen. Hell. 5. 4, 45: also φρονεῖν alone = μέγα φρονεῖν, Paus. 4. 1, 2 ;— so also, pp. ἐπί τινι θαυμάσιον ὅσον Plat. Symp. 217 A, cf. Dem. 534. 28 :—opp. to these phrases are—opuxpdv op. to be low-minded, poor- spirited, Soph. Aj. 1120; μικρὸν pp. Isocr. 72 C, Dem., etc.; ἧσσον, ἔλασσον φρ. τινος Eur. Andr. 313, Phoen. 1128, Isocr., etc. ; οὐ σμικρὸν pp. ἔς τινα Eur. Heracl. 387 ;—and between them we have μέτριον gp. to be of moderate, calm, and sober mind, μετριώτερον pp. πρός τινα Xen. Cyr. 4. 3, 7:—cf. cwppovéw, ὑπερφρονέω. 6. of those who agree in opinion, τά τινος φρονεῖν to be of another’s mind, be minded like him, be on his side or of his party, side with him, Hdt. 2. 162, etc.; τὰ σὰ gp. Id. 7. 102; εὖ pp. TA σά Soph. Aj. 491; Pp. τὰ Βρασίδου Ar. Pax 623; ἄριστα pp. τινι 14. Pl. 577; also, τὰ πρός τινα gp. Xen. An. 7. 7, 30; (Hom. has also τὰ φρονέεις, ἅ τ᾽ ἔγώ περ Il. 4. 361); τὰ ἀμείνω pp. περὶ τὴν Ἑλλάδα Hdt. 7. 145, 172, cf. Thuc. 2. 22; χεῖρον φρ. Isocr. 184 Ὁ ; also, ἴσον ἐμοὶ φρονέουσα thinking like me, Il. 15. 50, cf. Soph. Ant. 374; τὰ αὐτά, κατὰ τωὐτὸ φρ. to be like-minded, Hdt. I. 60., 5.3; ξύνῳδα pp. τινι Ar. Av. 634 :—opp. to these phrases is ἀμφὶς pp. to think differently, Il. 13.345; ἄλλῃ op. to think another way, h. Hom. Ap. 469; ἄλλα φρονέειν καὶ ἄλλα λέγειν Hdt. 9. 54; ἕτερα φρ. Dinarch. 96. 15. III. to have a thing in one's mind, mind, take heed, γιγνώσκω, φρονέω Od. 16.136.,17. 193, 281 ; ὁρώντων, φρονούν- των, βλεπόντων Aeschin, 67. I1:—c. acc. to think upon, ponder, τὰ φρονέουσ᾽ ἀνὰ θυμόν, &.. Od. 2. 116, cf. Il. 2. 36; οὐκ ὄπιδα φρονέ- οντες ἐπὶ φρεσί paying no heed to it, Od. 14. 82; πολλὰ φρονέοντα μηδενὸς κρατέειν Hdt. 9. 16; pp. τὴν ἡμέραν to pay regard io it, Ep. Rom. 14. 6. IV. to be in possession of one’s senses, and so almost = ζῆν, to be sensible, be alive, ἐμὲ τὸν δύστηνον ἔτι φρονέοντ᾽ ἐλέησον, for ἔτι ζῶντα, 1]. 22. 59; θανόντι δ᾽, οὐ φρονοῦντι, δειλαία χάρις ἐπέμπετο Aesch. Cho. 517; ἐν τῷ φρ. γὰρ μηδὲν ἥδιστος βίος Soph. Aj. 554; μηδὲ ζῆν .., μηδὲ φρονεῖν Plat. Soph. 249 A:—but also to be in one’s senses or right wits, φρονοῦντα, opp. to μεμηνότα, Soph. Aj. 82, cf. 344; ἔξω ἐλαύνειν τινὰ τοῦ φρονεῖν Eur. Bacch. 853; ὀρθὰ dp. Id. Med. 1129; ἐξέστηκα τοῦ φρονεῖν Isocr. 85 E, cf. Xen. Mem. 1. 3, 12; κέρδιστον εὖ φρονοῦντα μὴ δοκεῖν pp. Aesch. Pr. 385, cf. Soph. O. C. 1666, Ant. 557; ἐγὼ viv φρονῶ τότ᾽ ob φρονῶν Eur. Med. 1329 ; φρονῶν .. οὐδὲν φρονεῖς though in thy wits thou'rt nothing wise, Id. Bacch. 332; so, εὖ pp. Ib. 851, Ar. Nub. 817, al.;—ayay ¢p. to be over wise, Soph. Aj. 942 ; λίαν pp. Eur. 1. A. 924; πλέον pp. Plat. Hipp. Mi. 371 A;—(@v καὶ φρονῶν alive and in his right mind, often in Inserr., as C. I. 2026, —32, -43, 3292, al.; νοῶν καὶ φρονῶν Ib. 2448. I. I. φρόνημα, τό, one’s mind, spirit, Lat. animus, ἔστ᾽ ἂν Avs dp. λωφήσῃ χόλου Aesch. Pr. 376; Αἰσχύλου pp. ἔχων Teleclid. “Ho. I :—its sense is often limited by epithets, δύσθεον Aesch. Cho. 191; ὑπέρτολμον Ib. 5953 ὠμόν Id. Theb. 519; ἐλεύθερον Plat. Legg. 865 Ὁ : τυραννικόν Id. Rep. 573 B, Xen. Lac. 15, 8. 2. thought, purpose, will, φθέγμα