Realization

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 59 of 63 · 20 per page

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  In the Christian world there are the same rulers and governments, the same courts, the same publicans, the same clergy, the same rich men, landowners, manufacturers, and capitalists, as before, but there is an entirely different relation of men toward men and of the men themselves toward their positions. It is still the same rulers, the same meetings, and chases, and feasts, and balls, and uniforms, and the same diplomats, and talks about alliances and wars; the same parliaments, in which they still discuss Eastern and African questions, and alliances, and breaches of relations, and Home Rule, and an eight-hour day. And the ministries give way to one another in the same way, and there are the same speeches, the same incidents. But men who see how one article in a newspaper changes the state of affairs more than dozens of meetings of monarchs and sessions of parliaments, see more and more clearly that it is not the meetings and rendezvous and the discussions in the parliaments that guide the affairs of men, but something independent of all this, which is not centred anywhere. There are the same generals, and officers, and soldiers, and guns, and fortresses, and parades, and manœuvres, but there has been no war for a year, ten, twenty years, and, besides, one can depend less on the military for the suppression of riots, and it is getting clearer and clearer that, therefore, generals, and officers, and soldiers are only members of festive processions,—objects of amusement for rulers, large, rather expensive corps-de-ballet. There are the same prosecutors and judges, and the same proceedings, but it is getting clearer and clearer that, since civil cases are decided on the basis of all kinds of considerations except that of justice, and since criminal cases have no sense, because punishments attain no purpose admitted even by the judges, these institutions have no other significance than that of serving as a means for supporting men who are not fit for anything more useful. There are the same clergymen, and bishops, and churches, and synods, but it is becoming clearer and clearer to all men that these men have long ago ceased to believe in what they preach, and that, therefore, they cannot convince any one of the necessity of believing in what they themselves do not believe. There are the same collectors of taxes, but they are becoming less and less capable of taking away by force people's property, and it is becoming clearer and clearer that people can without collectors of taxes collect all that is necessary by subscribing it voluntarily. There are the same rich men, but it is becoming clearer and clearer that they can be useful only in proportion as they cease to be personal managers of their wealth and give to society all, or at least a part, of their fortunes.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  My perspective changed radically almost immediately after I began hormone therapy. In fact, one of the first indications I had that others were beginning to gender me as female was the occasional sexual innuendo that I received from strange men as I walked down city streets. My previous assumption—that such comments were expressions of sexual desire—suddenly seemed unlikely to me. At the time (only two months into my transition), I barely even looked like a woman and had no figure whatsoever. Nor did the comments have anything to do with my being dressed in a particularly feminine or revealing fashion, as I was still dressing in boy-mode, wearing flannel shirts over T-shirts over sports bras to hide the fact that I was developing breasts. In addition, many of these comments were unarguably mean-spirited and insulting, and no attempt was made to disguise them as flirting. I was clearly being overtly sexualized by these strangers, and not because I was deemed attractive, but simply because I appeared to be a woman. And the purpose of such blatantly vulgar remarks was not to express attraction or potentially garner my interest, but rather to exert a modicum of control over me: to make me feel uncomfortable, intimidated, angry, or fearful, to force me to look away or to cross the street to avoid their harassment. These days, I recognize the huge difference between sexual desire and sexualization. Sexual desirability is something that we all hope to have to some extent. When other people express their sexual desire for us, it can be extremely empowering, so long as such expressions are reserved for the appropriate time and place—i.e., from the right person and when we have signaled our openness or willingness to reciprocate. Sexualization, on the other hand, has the opposite effect: Rather than empowering the person, it’s used to leverage power over them. This can be seen all the time in the media, where women often appear not as fully formed human beings with their own thoughts, feelings, and opinions, but as purely sexual objects used to sell cars, beer, and other commodities. Some might naively argue that these women have power—specifically, the power to lure men—but it’s a power that only serves heterosexual male interests. After all, how much power is there in being a carrot on a stick dangled in front of someone? Such depictions exist in sharp contrast to media expressions of sexuality that center on real-life women’s sexual desires and perspectives, such as The Vagina Monologues or a Margaret Cho show.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  Even if there was a time when, with a certain low level of morality and with the universal tendency of men to exert violence against each other, the existence of the power which limited this violence was advantageous, that is, when the violence of the state was not so great as that exerted by individuals against each other, it is impossible to overlook the fact that such a superiority of the state over its absence could not be permanent. The more the tendency of individuals to exert violence was diminished, the more the manners were softened, and the more the power was corrupted in consequence of its unrestraint, the more did this superiority grow less and less. In this change of the relation between the moral development of the masses and the corruption of the governments does the whole history of the last two thousand years consist. In the simplest form the case was like this: men lived by tribes, families, races, and waged war, committed acts of violence, and destroyed and killed one another. These cases of violence took place on a small and on a large scale: individual struggled with individual, tribe with tribe, family with family, race with race, nation with nation. Larger, more powerful aggregates conquered the weaker, and the larger and the more powerful the aggregate of people became, the less internal violence took place in it, and the more secure did the continuance of the life of the aggregate seem to be. The members of the tribe or of the family, uniting into one aggregate, war less among themselves, and the tribe and the family do not die, like one man, but continue their existence; between the members of one state, who are subject to one power, the struggle seems even weaker, and the life of the state seems even more secure. These unions into greater and ever greater aggregates did not take place because men consciously recognized such unions as more advantageous to themselves, as is described in the story about the calling of the Varangians, but in consequence, on the one hand, of natural growth, and on the other, of struggle and conquests. When the conquest is accomplished, the power of the conqueror actually puts an end to internecine strife, and the social concept of life receives its justification. But this confirmation is only temporary. Internal strifes cease only in proportion as the pressure of the power is exerted upon individuals who heretofore have been warring against one another. The violence of internal struggle, which is destroyed by the power, is conceived in the power itself. The power is in the hands of just such people as all men are, that is, of such as are always or frequently prepared to sacrifice the common good for the sake of their personal good, with this one difference, that these men do not have the tempering force of the counter-action of the violated, and are subjected to the full corrupting influence of power.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  “This term signifies an intimate, experiential, personal, face to face, eye to eye, I to I, type of a relationship. It isn’t casual and it isn’t quick. This type of relationship takes the willingness to study and observe and watch and listen and attune to and notice. Honestly, it takes work, but it is the kind of work that is more like an investment. The more you invest, the greater the reward. “How would lovemaking be different if you approached it with this term in mind? If this is what you were made for?” The room was still for a few moments while Olivia patiently waited. James motioned with his raised hand he wanted to say something. “Well, it gives sex a totally different meaning. If I initiate sex with Kaycie from a position of wanting to know her—I want to understand her. I want to experience her—I imagine I would be thinking less about having an orgasm with her and more about really being with her, being present with her. I would have to bring myself fully to bed. I couldn’t be hidden, or preoccupied. I would have her as my focus and my heart in the right place. “If I want to know her, I would be focused on discovering what pleases her sexually and how I could engage her whole person. I would see her not just as a body, but a person with a soul, spirit, and personality. I would care about her needs, her desires, her likes and dislikes. I would listen for what arouses her. I would notice when she goes quiet or when it feels like she has left the room mentally. I would ask her where she went. I would ask her what she feels and likes and wants. I would be way more sensitive to her.” With that, he sat back down with tears filling his eyes. Olivia asked him, “James, what might you be feeling?” James closed his eyes for a minute before he said, “I haven’t ever really made love to my wife. It just hit me; I haven’t known how to make love to her. I thought it was all about getting it on with her because I wanted her, but now I know it’s deeper than that. I want to know her.” He turned and looked at Kaycie, “Would you forgive me for not getting it? Would you forgive me for being selfish?” “I forgive you, James; I haven’t known how to make love to you any more than you have known how to make love to me. I totally forgive you. Will you forgive me for withholding and withdrawing from you?” Kaycie asked. “Of course, I will. Man, I don’t deserve you.” James smiled. They leaned into each other for a tender kiss. Olivia asked, “How is that for you two?”

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  For a split second, she recalled the brief conversation when Olivia asked her if her belief system played a part in the troubles she and James experienced. Olivia was clear that James’s behavior was James’s responsibility, but she also said we all have a powerful need to prove our belief system is true—even if it is destructive to love and life. At that moment, while speaking to these students, Kaycie had her own epiphany. She could feel it and it was real; deep down she believed trusting a man was emotional suicide. Momentarily stunned by this revelation, she knew she had to make things right with James. So much progress had been made between the two of them, but there was more work to be done if they were ever going to be truly naked and unashamed with each other. Wrapping up her talk, Kaycie asked the students if any of them experienced anything along the same lines as she did. She asked the student leaders and the Real Life team to come up to the front to be available to any of the students who needed support or prayer. It began slowly, but soon a throng of students flooded the front of the auditorium. Prayers, whispered truths, secrets were shared in this sacred space. Kaycie shook her head, always surprised by how many could relate to her story. It caused her to notice the heaviness in her heart, but just as quickly, the promise available for every student if they simply took hold of it. Jesus significantly healed her heart and was still doing so. And Jesus could heal their hearts too. It was quiet in the car on the drive home. Both were processing the time with the students and hearing some of their stories of sexual trauma and regrets. Both felt contented to have the opportunity to do as Scripture recommends—just put your ear to the lips of the victim and healing will begin. James interpreted her thoughts with, “You okay?” “Yes, I’m just processing what all happened tonight and a realization I had about myself. I know you are tired, but can we have some talk time when we get home, maybe after we have a shower and unwind?” “Sure, of course,” James responded. “Hey, let’s pray together before we get home so we can focus on each other.”

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Part TwoFamilies or Monasteries?5Paul and the First Christian Assemblies (30–60)The earliest surviving Christian texts are seven or eight letters (‘epistles’) written by Paul, a Jew of the Diaspora from Tarsus in Asia Minor, writing to various Christian communities probably in the forties and fifties of the first century CE, so around one or two decades after the execution of Jesus.[1] In later decades, admirers of his produced further epistles in his name which need to be distinguished from those earlier letters; the vital difference is that the Christianity depicted in these latter texts mostly postdates the catastrophe in 70 CE for Judaism, the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple, as well as the death of Paul sometime in the sixties.[2] We also have ‘Acts of the Apostles’, a composite account focusing on Paul’s journeys and preaching missions as far around the Mediterranean as Rome. This was compiled in its final form apparently by the same author as the Gospel according to Luke – so around the turn of the second century. Acts has the feel of a historical novel, and its portrait of the Apostle is rather less abrasive than the authentic Paul whom one meets in his own letters (nor does Acts mention Paul’s letter-writing activities). Nevertheless, used with caution, it can illuminate events during Paul’s lifetime. Accordingly, we can reconstruct much of how the first Christians moved away from their Jewish origins, taking with them the already countercultural pronouncements of Jesus on marriage and sex.[3] Including, ExcludingPaul’s letters testify that he and his sympathizers became severely at odds with other prominent followers of Jesus, including Peter (one of the Twelve) and James the brother of the Lord, over the nature of the Good News that was their common pursuit. The issue was how far the Christian mission still lay within the bounds of existing Judaism and its wider contacts with sympathetic Gentiles already established through the Diaspora. Paul emphasizes his own chosen role by such self-identifications as ‘an apostle to the Gentiles’ or ‘minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles’ (Rom. 11.13; 15.16). Nevertheless, it is in fact clear from what he writes that he is still operating within the framework of the Diaspora synagogues around the Mediterranean. Such communities had long contained plenty of Gentiles who had made a personal decision to embrace the faith of Judaism. They were known in Diaspora communities as theosebeis (‘God-fearers’ or ‘God-reverers’): a Greek word that is also used in the Book of Acts.

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  4 The fundamental demonstration was that ofW. G. Kiimmel, Romer 7 und die Bekehrung des Paulus, 1929. The view was confirmed and developed by Bultmann, 'Romans 7 and the Anthropology of Paul', Existence and Faith, pp. 147-57 (first published 1932). For further references see Conzelmann, Theology, p. 181 n. 1. There is a recent treatment in Luz, Das Geschichtsverstiindnis des Paulus, pp. 158-68; bibliography is given on p. 160. The most recent article accepting this view of Rom. 7 and Phil. 3 which I have noted is that of J. Dupont, 'La conversion de Paul', Foi et Salut selon S. Paul (by M. Barth and others), p. 75. Some dissenting scholars are cited below, section 4 n. 23. Dissent from this view is usually based on the judgment that Rom. 7, with its deeply moving phrases, gives Paul's view of his own history, while Phil. 3 is hyperbolic. The following points seem to me decisive in favour of the position followed here: (1) Gal. 3.11f., by repudiating the law on the grounds ofChristology and soteriology, rather than because of its supposed unfulfillability, supports the view of Phil. 3 that Paul had no trouble fulfilling the law satisfactorily. It is most important that Paul's argument concerning the law does not in fact rest on man's inability to fulfil it (below, pp. 478f. and n. 23; 483-5). (2) The entire argument of Rom. 6-8, in which Paul contrasts life in Christ with life under the law, indicates that Rom. 7 should be read in the same light. The fact that Paul can express the pathos of life under the law as seen through Christian eyes does not mean that he had himself experienced frustration with the law before his own conversion. 5 Professor Sandmel has reasonably suggested to me that, although it may be the case that no pre conversion plight may be evidenced from the letters, Paul may have had an 'underground' plight - a difficulty with the law as adequate to human need - which he does not describe. This may well have been the case; but Paul's description in Phil. 3 and also such passages as II Cor. 3.10 ('what once had 444 Paul [V

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  But that the employment of violence at the present time does not subjugate either of them, that we know from protracted experience. Indeed, how can we subjugate by force the nations whose whole education, all whose traditions, even religious teaching, leads them to see the highest virtue in a struggle with their enslavers and in striving after liberty? And how are we forcibly to eradicate crimes in the midst of our societies, when what by the governments are considered to be crimes are considered to be virtues by public opinion. It is possible by means of violence to destroy such nations and such men, as is indeed done, but it is impossible to subjugate them. The judge of everything, the fundamental force which moves men and nations, has always been the one invisible, impalpable force,—the resultant of all the spiritual forces of a certain aggregate of men and of all humanity, which is expressed in public opinion. Violence only weakens this force, retards, and distorts it, and puts in its place another activity, which is not only not useful, but even harmful for the forward movement of humanity. To subjugate to Christianity all the wild people outside the Christian world,—all the Zulus, Manchurians, and Chinese, whom many consider to be wild,—and the savages within the Christian world, there is one, only one means,—the dissemination among these nations of a Christian public opinion, which is established only through a Christian life, Christian acts, Christian examples. And so in order to conquer the nations which have remained unconquered by Christianity, the men of our time, who possess one, and only one, means for this purpose, do precisely the opposite of what might attain their end. To conquer to Christianity the wild nations, who do not touch us and who do not in any way provoke us to oppress them, we—instead of leaving them first of all alone, and, in case of necessity or of a wish to get in closer relations with them, acting upon them only through a Christian relation to them, through the Christian teaching as proved by truly Christian acts of suffering, humility, abstinence, purity, brotherhood, love—begin by this, that we open among them new markets for our commerce, with nothing but our advantage in view, seize their land, that is, rob them, sell them wine, tobacco, opium, that is, corrupt them, and establish among them our order, teach them violence and all its methods, that is, the following of nothing but the animal law of struggle, below which no man can descend, and we do everything which can be done in order to conceal from them whatever of Christianity there is in us. And after that we send to them about two dozen missionaries, who prattle some hypocritical ecclesiastic absurdities and, in the shape of incontrovertible proofs of the impossibility of applying the Christian truths to life, adduce these our experiments at the Christianization of the savages.

• From Paul and Palestinian Judaism (40th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

  In addition to the argument from the structure of Romans, one could make the obvious and necessary observation that plight and solution should correspond. This being the case, it seems logical to begin with the discussion of man's plight as perceived by Paul. It seems likely, however, that Paul's thought did not run from plight to solution, but rather from solution to plight. The attempts to argue that Romans 7 shows the frustration which Paul felt during his life as a practising Jew have now mostly been given up, and one may rightly and safely maintain that the chapter cannot be under stood in this way. The chapter describes, rather, the pre-Christian or non Christian life as seen from the perspective of faith. It may be further observed on the basis of Phil. 3 that Paul did not, while 'under the law', perceive himself to have a 'plight' from which he needed salvation.4 If he were so zealous as to persecute the church, he may well have thought that those who were not properly Jewish would be damned, but the solution to such a plight would be simply to become properly Jewish. It appears that the conclusion that all the world- both Jew and Greek- equally stands in need of a saviour springs from the prior conviction that God had provided such a saviour. If he did so, it follows that such a saviour must have been needed, and then only consequently that all other possible ways of salvation are wrong. The point is made explicitly in Gal. 2.21 : if righteousness could come through the law, Christ died in vain. The reasoning apparently is that Christ did not die in vain; he died and lived again 'that he might be Lord both of the dead and the living' (Rom. 14.9) and so that 'whether we wake or sleep we might live with him' (I Thess. 5. 10 ). If his death was necessary for man's salvation, it follows that salvation cannot come in any other way and consequently that all were, prior to the death and resurrection, in need of a saviour. There is no reason to think that Paul felt the need of a universal saviour prior to his conviction that Jesus was such. 5

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Healthy debates are about ensuring that problems are confronted honestly so we learn from each other and chart the best foreseeable course in the future. Author Liz Wiseman summed this up beautifully. She learned how to conduct great debates not from her time as a senior executive at Oracle, but from a group of third graders. She had volunteered in her daughter’s class to facilitate something called the Junior Great Books Debate. “The third graders would read a story and then the teachers wanted them to argue about it. I thought that would be an easy job, but I got sent off to a day of training to learn how.” Wiseman said she was taught the three rules for debate. Number one: It’s a leader’s job to ask the question, but never answer it. Number two: Ask for evidence. For instance, “When one of the children would say Jack climbed the beanstalk because he was greedy, I would say, ‘Do you have evidence for that? Can you prove it?’ In the first couple of sessions, the kids were terrified. Then they learned they didn’t get to have an opinion without something to base it on. So they would turn to page eighteen and point out that Jack stole the white hen and golden harp, so that’s why they believed this.” (We wish every manager would make note of this idea in facilitating conversations and before making any decision.) Number three, she said, is to ask everyone. The instructors taught Wiseman to keep a chart with each student listed and put a check mark next to the child’s name every time one commented. “I was thinking: I can track that in my head. But I tried this, and it made a big difference. It allowed me to say, ‘Robert, we’ve heard from you twice, but Marcus, we haven’t heard from you. We’d like to hear from you before we move on.’ It allowed everyone to participate.” Wiseman told us the debate tips immediately made her a better leader.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  Violence, in the best case, if it does not pursue only the personal ends of men in power, always denies and condemns by the one immovable form of the law what for the most part has been denied and condemned before by public opinion, but with this difference, that, while public opinion denies and condemns all acts which are contrary to the moral law, embracing in its condemnation the most varied propositions, the law which is supported by violence condemns and persecutes only a certain, very narrow order of acts, thus, as it were, justifying all the acts of the same order which have not entered into its definition. Public opinion has ever since the time of Moses considered avarice, debauchery, and cruelty to be evil, and has condemned them; and this public opinion denies and condemns every kind of a manifestation of avarice,—not only the acquisition of another man's property by means of violence, deceit, and cunning, but also a cruel usufruct of the same; it condemns every kind of debauchery, be it fornication with a concubine, or a slave, a divorced wife, or even one's own wife; it condemns every cruelty which is expressed in assaults, in bad treatment, in the murder, not only of men, but also of animals. But the law, which is based on violence, prosecutes only certain forms of avarice, such as theft, rascality, and certain forms of debauchery and cruelty, such as the violation of marital fidelity, murders, crippling,—therefore, as it were, permitting all those phases of avarice, debauchery, and cruelty which do not fit in with the narrow definition, which is subject to misinterpretations. But not only does violence distort public opinion,—it also produces in men that pernicious conviction that men are not moved by spiritual force, which is the source of every forward movement of humanity, but by violence,—that very action which not only does not bring people nearer to truth, but always removes them from it. This delusion is pernicious in that it compels men to neglect the fundamental force of their life,—their spiritual activity,—and to transfer all their attention and energy to the superficial, idle, and for the most part harmful, activity of violence. This delusion is like the one men would be in if they wished to make a locomotive move by turning its wheels with their hands, forgetting entirely that the prime cause of its motion is the expansion of steam and not the motion of the wheels. Men who would turn the wheels with their hands and with levers would produce nothing but a semblance of motion, in the meantime bending the wheels and interfering with the possibility of the locomotive's real motion. It is this that men do when they want to move men by means of external violence.

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  Peter Steinfels, noting that two Roman Catholics—both of whom were educated at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome but only one of whom was still a priest, the other being an ex-priest—had published books on the historical Jesus that fall, compared John Meier’s A Marginal Jew and my Historical Jesus as the front-page Christmas story in The New York Times for December 23, 1991. His story “Peering Past Faith to Glimpse the Jesus of History” was reprinted by other papers nationally and internationally. What happened next surprised me immensely. I might have expected invitations to speak at seminaries or universities, but instead I was invited to lecture in churches —weekends of three or four lectures as well as sermons at Sunday services. The historical Jesus had clearly become a question not just of history or even of theology, but of Christian faith and church life. Church venues are not the same as academic classes. I never said anything different about the historical Jesus in either location, but Q&A sessions after church lectures always raised theological issues involving Christian faith and practice—especially my own. How had historical research influenced my Christian faith? What was at stake for me in the Christian Bible after all those years of biblical study? It was, therefore, through church lectures rather than scholarly debates that this present book was conceived, born, and matured. “A Whip of Cords”IN CHURCH LECTURES I located Jesus within his first-century CE Jewish homeland and especially within its matrix of both violent and nonviolent resistance to Roman power and imperial oppression. Remember that word “matrix” for the rest of this book. It means for me the background you cannot skip—like British imperialism for understanding Mahatma Gandhi—or the context you cannot avoid—like American racism for understanding Martin Luther King Jr. Within the options of that matrix, I emphasized Jesus’s own nonviolent resistance to both Roman imperial occupation and Jewish high-priestly collaboration with it. But in the Q&A session after every lecture, strong if polite objections were often raised to that historical interpretation of Jesus. One objection that came up repeatedly asked about that incident in the Temple of Jerusalem when Jesus apparently violently attacked people with a whip. That was an easy one to answer. Jesus’s action in that case was a prophetic demonstration against worship in the Temple excusing injustice in the land—injustice exacerbated, of course, by necessary high-priestly collaboration with Roman imperial power and control. That is why Jesus quoted Jeremiah’s “den of robbers” (Jer. 7:11; Mark 11:17). (Jesus was not accusing people of thievery in the Temple.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  the evidence, that a Christian Church, vested with the plenitude of Christ’s teaching, and with divine authority to uphold it, had been ordained by Jesus right at the beginning, and had then been solidly established by the first generation of apostles. Moreover, it had triumphantly survived the attempts of various heretics to tamper with the truth it passed on intact from generation to generation. This view is a reconstruction for ideological purposes. Eusebius represented the wing of the Church which had captured the main centres of power, had established a firm tradition of monarchical bishops, and had recently allied itself with the Roman state. He wanted to show that the Church he represented had always constituted the mainstream of Christianity, both in organization and faith. The truth is very different. We have already seen that the original legatee of Jesus’s mission, the Jerusalem Church, did not hold steadfast to his teaching and was slipping back into Judaism before it was, in effect, extinguished, its remnants being eventually branded as heretics. The Christology of Paul, which later became the substance of the Christian universal faith, came from the diaspora, and was preached by an outsider whom many in the Jerusalem Church did not recognize as an apostle at all. Christianity began in confusion, controversy and schism and so it continued. A dominant orthodox Church, with a recognizable ecclesiastical structure, emerged only very gradually and represented a process of natural selection – a spiritual survival of the fittest. And, as with such struggles, it was not particularly edifying. The Darwinian image is appropriate: the central and eastern Mediterranean in the first and second centuries AD swarmed with an infinite multitude of religious ideas, struggling to propagate themselves. Every religious movement was unstable and fissiparous; and these cults were not only splitting up and modulating but reassembling in new forms. A cult had to struggle not only to survive but to retain its identity. Jesus had produced certain insights and matrices which were rapidly propagated over a large geographical area. The followers of Jesus were divided right from the start on elements of faith and practice. And the further the missionaries moved from the base, the more likely it was that their teachings would diverge. Controlling them implied an ecclesiastical organization. In Jerusalem there were ‘leaders’ and ‘pillars’, vaguely defined officials modelled on Jewish practice. But they were ineffective. The Jerusalem Council was a failure. It outlined a consensus but could not make it work in practice. Paul could not be controlled. Nor, presumably, could others. Nor could the ‘pillars’ of the centre party maintain their authority even

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  This process takes place without cessation, and by this way men one after another pass over to the side of Christianity. But men pass over to the side of Christianity not by this inner path alone; there is also an external method, with which the gradualness of this transition is destroyed. The transition of men from one structure of life to another does not always take place in the manner in which the sand is poured out from an hour-glass,—one kernel of sand after another, from the first to the last,—but rather like water pouring into a vessel that is immerged in the water, when it at first admits the water evenly and slowly at one side, and then, from the weight of the water already taken in, suddenly dips down fast and almost all at once receives all the water which it can hold. The same occurs with societies of men at the transition from one concept, and so from one structure of life, to another. It is only at first that one after another slowly and gradually receives the new truth by an inner way and follows it through life; but after a certain diffusion it is no longer received in an internal manner, nor gradually, but all at once, almost involuntarily. And so there is no truth in the reflection of the defenders of the existing order that, if in the course of eighteen hundred years only a small part of mankind has passed over to the side of Christianity, it will take several times eighteen hundred years before the rest of humanity will pass over to its side; there is no truth in it, because with this reflection no attention is paid to any other than the internal attainment of the truth, and the transition from one form of life to another. This other method of attaining a newly revealed truth and transition to a new structure of life consists in this, that men do not attain the truth simply because they perceive it with a prophetic feeling or experience of life, but also because at a certain stage of the dissemination of the truth all men who stand on a lower stage of development accept it all at once, out of confidence in those who have accepted it in an internal way, and apply it to life. Every new truth, which changes the composition of human life and moves humanity forward, is at first accepted by only a very small number of men, who understand it in an internal way. The rest, who out of confidence had accepted the previous truth, on which the existing order is based, always oppose the dissemination of the new truth.

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

  32. And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the Scriptures? 33. And they rose up the same hour, and returned to Jerusalem, and found the eleven gathered together, and them that were with them, 34. Saying, The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared to Simon. 35. And they told what things were done in the way, and how he was known of them in breaking of bread. THEOPHYLACT. Because the above-mentioned disciples were troubled with too much doubt, the Lord reproves them, saying, O fools, (for they almost used the same words as those who stood by the cross, He saved others, himself he cannot save.) And He proceeds, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken. For it is possible to believe some of these things and not all; as if a man should believe what the Prophets say of the cross of Christ, as in the Psalms, They pierced my hands and my feet; (Ps. 22:16.) but should not believe what they say of the resurrection, as, Thou shall not suffer thy Holy One to see corruption. (Ps. 16:10.) But it becomes us in all things to give faith to the Prophets, as well in the glorious things which they predicted of Christ, as the inglorious, since through the suffering of evil things is the entrance into glory. Hence it follows, Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and so to enter into his glory? that is, as respects His humanity. ISIDORE OF PELEUSIUM. (lib. iii. Ep. 98.) But although it behoved Christ to suffer, yet they who crucified Him are guilty of inflicting the punishment. For they were not concerned to accomplish what God purposed. Therefore their execution of it was impious, but God’s purpose most wise, who converted their iniquity into a blessing upon mankind, using as it were the viper’s flesh for the working of a health-giving antidote. CHRYSOSTOM. And therefore our Lord goes on to shew that all these things did not happen in a common way, but from the predestined purpose of God. Hence it follows, And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, he expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. As if He said, Since ye are slow I will render you quick, by explaining to you the mysteries of the Scriptures. For the sacrifice of Abraham, when releasing Isaac he sacrificed the ram, prefigured Christ’s sacrifice. But in the other writings of the Prophets also there are scattered about mysteries of Christ’s cross and the resurrection.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  If I just left a gathering where it was agreed that all is dead, now as I walk the streets, alone and identical with God, I know that this is a lie. The evidence of death is before my eyes constantly; but this death of the world, a death constantly going on, does not move from the periphery in, to engulf me, this death is at my very feet, moving from me outward, my own death a step in advance of me always. The world is the mirror of myself dying, the world not dying any more than I die, I more alive a thousand years from now than this moment and this world in which I am now dying also more alive then than now though dead a thousand years. When each thing is lived through to the end there is no death and no regrets, neither is there a false spring time; each moment lived pushes open a greater, wider horizon from which there is no escape save living. The dreamers dream from the neck up, their bodies securely strapped to the electric chair. To imagine a new world is to live it daily, each thought, each glance, each step, each gesture killing and re-creating, death always a step in advance. To spit on the past is not enough. To proclaim the future is not enough. One must act as if the past were dead and the future unrealizable. One must act as if the next step were the last, which it is. Each step forward is the last, and with it a world dies, one’s self included. We are here of the earth never to end, the past never ceasing, the future never beginning, the present never ending. The never-never world which we hold in our hands and see and yet is not ourselves. We are that which is never concluded, never shaped to be recognized, all there is and yet not the whole, the parts so much greater than the whole that only God the mathematician can figure it out. Laughter! counseled Rabelais. For all your ills laughter! Jesus but it’s hard to take his sane, gay wisdom after all the quack medicines we’ve poured down our throats. How can one laugh when the lining is worn off his stomach? How can one laugh after all the misery they’ve poisoned us with, the whey-faced, lantern-jawed, sad, suffering, solemn, serious, seraphic spirits? I understand the treachery that inspired them. I forgive them their genius. But it’s hard to free oneself from all the sorrow they’ve created. When I think of all the fanatics who were crucified, and those who were not fanatics, but simple idiots, all slaughtered for the sake of ideas, I begin to draw a smile. Bottle up every avenue of escape, I say.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  The temptations of power and of everything which it gives, of wealth, honours, luxurious life, present themselves as a worthy aim for the activity of men only so long as the power is not attained; but the moment a man attains it, they reveal their emptiness and slowly lose their force of attraction, like clouds, which have form and beauty only from a distance: one needs but enter them, in order that that which seemed beautiful in them should disappear. Men who have attained power and wealth, frequently the very men who have gained them, more frequently their descendants, stop being so anxious for power and so cruel in attaining it. Having through experience, under the influence of Christianity, learned the vanity of the fruits of violence, men, at times in one, at others in a few generations, lose those vices which are evoked by the passion for power and wealth, and, becoming less cruel, do not hold their position, and are pushed out of power by other, less Christian, more evil men, and return to strata of society lower in position, but higher in morality, increasing the average of the Christian consciousness of all men. But immediately after them other, worse, coarser, less Christian elements of society rise to the top, again are subjected to the same process as their predecessors, and again in one or a few generations, having experienced the vanity of the fruits of violence and being permeated by Christianity, descend to the level of the violated, and again make place for new, less coarse violators than the preceding ones, but coarser than those whom they oppress. Thus, despite the fact that the power remains externally the same that it was, there is with every change of men in power a greater increase in the number of men who by experience are brought to the necessity of accepting the Christian life-conception, and with every change the coarsest, most cruel, and least Christian of all enter into the possession of the power, but they are such as are constantly less coarse and cruel and more Christian than their predecessors. Violence selects and attracts the worst elements of society, works them over, and, improving and softening them, returns them to society. Such is the process by means of which Christianity, in spite of the violence which is exercised by the power of the state and which impedes the forward movement of humanity, takes possession of men more and more. Christianity is penetrating into the consciousness of men, not only despite the violence exerted by the power, but even by means of it.

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

  AUGUSTINE. (de Con. Ev. lib. iii. c. 25.) For they walked not with their eyes shut, but there was something within them which did not permit them to know that which they saw, which a mist, darkness, or some kind of moisture, frequently occasions. Not that the Lord was not able to transform His flesh that it should be really a different form from that which they were accustomed to behold; since in truth also before His passion, He was transfigured in the mount, so that His face was bright as the sun. But it was not so now. For we do not unfitly take this obstacle in the sight to have been caused by Satan, that Jesus might not be known. But still it was so permitted by Christ up to the sacrament of the bread, that by partaking of the unity of His body, the obstacle of the enemy might be understood to be removed, so that Christ might be known. THEOPHYLACT. But He also implies another thing, that the eyes of those who receive the sacred bread are opened that they should know Christ. For the Lord’s flesh has in it a great and ineffable power. AUGUSTINE. (ut sup.) Or because the Lord feigned as if He would go farther, when He was accompanying the disciples, expounding to them the sacred Scriptures, who knew not whether it was He, what does He mean to imply but that through the duty of hospitality men may arrive at a knowledge of Him; that when He has departed from mankind far above the heavens, He is still with those who perform this duty to His servants. He therefore holds to Christ, that He should not go far from him, whoever being taught in the word communicates in all good things to him who teaches. (Gal. 6:6.) For they were taught in the word when He expounded to them the Scriptures. And because they followed hospitality, Him whom they knew not in the expounding of the Scriptures, they know in the breaking of bread. For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified. (Rom. 2:13.) GREGORY. (ut sup.) Whoever then wishes to understand what he has heard, let him hasten to fulfil in work what he can now understand. Behold the Lord was not known when He was speaking, and He vouchsafed to be known when He is eating. It follows, And he vanished out of their sight. THEOPHYLACT. For He had not such a body as that He was able to abide longer with them, that thereby likewise He might increase their affections. And they said one to another, Did not our hearts burn, within us while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures? ORIGEN. By which is implied, that the words uttered by the Saviour inflamed the hearts of the hearers to the love of God.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  The American writer and ecologist Aldo Leopold once wrote that falconry was a balancing act between wild and tame – not just in the hawk, but inside the heart and mind of the falconer. That is why he considered it the perfect hobby. I am starting to see the balance is righting, now, and the distance between Mabel and me increasing. I see, too, that her world and my world are not the same, and some part of me is amazed that I ever thought they were. Then I find myself doing something surprising. I raise Mabel’s weight even more and let her range more widely when she flies. This is terrible falconry. ‘Never let a goshawk self-hunt,’ say the books. ‘Such independence is the fastest way to lose your hawk.’ I know I shouldn’t slip her unless there’s quarry, right there, in front of her. But how can I resist this method of hawking? Today I walked up to the crest of a hill on a freezing, smoky afternoon, the whole Cambridgeshire countryside laid out in front in woods and fields and copses beneath us, all bosky and bright with golden sunshine, and I can see that what Mabel wants to do is launch a prospecting attack on the hedgerow over the rise. I let her go. Her tactical sense is magnificent. She drops from the fist, and sets off, no higher than a hand’s width above the ground, using every inch of the undulating relief as cover, gathering speed until the frosty stubble winks and flashes under her, and she curves over the top of the hill. Then she sets her wings and glides, using gravity and momentum to race downhill, flash up over the top of the hedge in a sudden flowering of cream and white, a good hundred yards away, and then continue down the hedge’s far side, invisible to me. I’m running, all this time, my feet caked with mud, feeling earthbound but transported at the same time. I find her in the hedge bottom, holding onto a rabbit. ‘Mabel,’ I say, ‘you are behaving like a wild hawk. Shocking.’ This is nerve-racking falconry, but a wonderful thing. I am testing the lines between us that the old falconers would have called love. They have not broken; they do not look likely to break. Maybe they will. I raise her weight even more, and slowly the world widens. But I’m pushing my luck, and I know it.

• From The Spiritual Works of Leo Tolstoy (selected nonfiction) (2016)

  The forward movement of humanity takes place, not in this way, that the best elements of society, seizing the power and using violence against those men who are in their power, make them better, as the conservatives and revolutionists think, but, in the first and chief place, in that all men in general unswervingly and without cessation more and more consciously acquire the Christian life-conception, and in the second place, in that, even independently of the conscious spiritual activity of men, men unconsciously, in consequence of the very process of seizure of power by one set of men and transference to another set, and involuntarily are brought to a more Christian relation to life. This process takes place in the following manner: the worst elements of society, having seized the power and being in possession of it, under the influence of the sobering quality which always accompanies it, become less and less cruel and less able to make use of the cruel forms of violence, and, in consequence of this, give place to others, in whom again goes on the process of softening and, so to speak, unconscious Christianization. What takes place in men is something like the process of boiling. All the men of the majority of the non-Christian life-conception strive after power and struggle to obtain it. In this struggle the most cruel and coarse, and the least Christian elements of society, by doing violence to the meeker, more Christian people, who are more sensible to the good, rise to the higher strata of society. And here with the men in this condition there takes place what Christ predicted, saying: "Woe unto you that are rich, that are full now, and when all are glorified." What happens is that men in power, who are in possession of the consequences of power,—of glory and wealth,—having reached certain different aims, which they have set to themselves in their desires, recognize their vanity and return to the position which they left. Charles V., John IV., Alexander I., having recognized all the vanity and evil of power, renounced it, because they saw all its evil and were no longer able calmly to make use of violence as of a good deed, as they had done before. But it is not only a Charles and an Alexander who travel on this road and recognize the vanity and evil of power: through this unconscious process of softening of manners passes every man who has acquired the power toward which he has been striving, not only every minister, general, millionaire, merchant, but also every head of an office, who has obtained the place he has been ten years waiting for, every well-to-do peasant, who has laid by a hundred or two hundred roubles. Through this process pass not only separate individuals, but also aggregates of men, whole nations.