Sadness

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 35 of 212 · 20 per page

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Laurie was the only mom in the group, and she was the only one who didn’t look at me like I was on drugs. She said, “I totally want a ritual. Anything to make it easier to live in a body that feels like a deflated balloon.” “But you’re so beautiful!” everyone said instantly. The compliments to Laurie’s indisputable beauty flowed even faster than the wine, but a few days later, Laurie told me that was the opposite of what she needed. “What I need is to hear that it’s okay to feel sad that my body will never be what it used to be. I put a lot of effort into learning to love that body, and now I’ve got to start all over again learning to love this one.” So I said, “It’s okay to feel sad that your body has permanently changed.” Laurie burst into tears—which is something she does a lot lately, sudden quiet little storms that pass through her anytime she finds herself on the receiving end of the affection and attention she lavishes on others. “It shouldn’t even be about whether I like my body or not,” she sniffed. “That’s really what changed after I had Trev. Now it should really be about whether or not it does what I need it to do.” By “what she needs it to do,” Laurie means giving birth—at home, squatting in the tub, like a boss—breast-feeding for more than a year, and never sleeping more than four hours in a row for almost three years—the sentence “Trevor is a bad sleeper” doesn’t even begin to cover the dark circles under Laurie’s eyes. Laurie’s body is amazing. But she doesn’t feel that way. The notion of “all the same parts, organized in different ways” is as true for the ways a woman’s body changes over the course of her life as it is for the ways people’s genitals vary. And just as everyone’s genitals are normal and beautiful, so all women’s bodies are normal and beautiful. But mostly that’s not what women are taught. Mostly we’re taught that our bodies are supposed to be one specific shape, otherwise there’s something wrong with us. I’ll talk about that—and how to overcome it—in chapter 5. change how you see14I realize that just saying “Your genitals are perfect and beautiful” won’t change anything if you feel uncomfortable with your genitals, but if seeing the beauty of your unique and healthy genitals is something you struggle with, there are two things I’d like you to do:

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Shortly after this latest grievous episode, Luther’s health failed dramatically. It had been faltering on and off in the previous years, but this episode marked the dramatic beginning of never-ending medical difficulties for Luther. It happened on April 22, when he was in the pulpit. He suffered an attack of such acute dizziness that he could not continue the sermon. What caused it and how it ended that day, we don’t know. But in July it happened again, and this time it came in concert with the return of his old nemesis, Anfechtungen, which he had thought forever banished. The causes are difficult to determine, nor can anyone be sure just what his Anfechtungen was, except that we must record Luther’s subjective experiences of it. We know that he was deeply weary of his unending battles over the Eucharist and much else. And Luther was also very troubled that everywhere around him there was such a poor response to the heaven-sent message of freedom he was offering. The onset of this bout of Anfechtungen occurred early on the morning of July 6. He was overwhelmed with sadness and tortured by negative thoughts of his own unworthiness before God, so much so that he summoned his friend Bugenhagen—who was now the Wittenberg City Church pastor—to hear his confession. At ten that morning, he had been invited to dine with some nobles at a local inn. He decided to go but ate little and afterward went to see Justus Jonas. In Jonas’s garden, he sat with his dear friend and poured out his grieving heart.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Julian was capable of great insight into the nature of God: she depicts the Trinity living within the soul and not as an external reality “out there,” like a true mystic. But the strength of Western concentration on the human Christ seemed too powerful to resist. Increasingly, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, men and women in Europe were making other human beings the center of their spiritual life rather than God. The medieval cult of Mary and of the saints increased alongside the growing devotion to Jesus the man. Enthusiasm for relics and holy places also distracted Western Christians from the one thing necessary. People seemed to be concentrating on anything but God. The dark side of the Western spirit was even manifest during the Renaissance. The philosophers and humanists of the Renaissance were highly critical of much medieval piety. They disliked the scholastics intensely, feeling that their abstruse speculations made God sound alien and boring. Instead, they wanted to return to the sources of the faith, particularly to St. Augustine. The medievals had revered Augustine as a theologian, but the humanists rediscovered the Confessions and saw him as a fellow man on a personal quest. Christianity, they argued, was not a body of doctrines but an experience. Lorenzo Valla (1407–57) stressed the futility of mixing sacred dogma with “tricks of dialectics” and “metaphysical quibbles”: 11 these “futilities” had been condemned by St. Paul himself. Francesco Petrarch (1304–74) had suggested that “theology is actually poetry, poetry concerning God,” effective not because it “proved” anything but because it penetrated the heart. 12 The humanists had rediscovered the dignity of humanity, but this did not cause them to reject God: instead, as true men of their age, they stressed the humanity of God who had become man. But the old insecurities remained. The Renaissance men were deeply aware of the fragility of our knowledge and could also sympathize with Augustine’s acute sense of sin. As Petrarch said: How many times I have pondered over my own misery and over death; with what floods of tears I have sought to wash away my stains so that I can scarce speak of it without weeping, yet hitherto all is vain. God indeed is the best: and I am the worst. 13 Hence there was a vast distance between man and God: Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) and Leonardo Bruni (1369–1444) both saw God as utterly transcendent and inaccessible to the human mind. Yet the German philosopher and churchman Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64) was more confident about our ability to understand God. He was extremely interested in the new science, which he thought could help us to comprehend the mystery of the Trinity.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It was soon decided that the Schmalkaldic League would not send a delegation to England—which would have included Melanchthon. In June, when the shocking news of Anne Boleyn’s trial and subsequent beheading made its way to Wittenberg, which Luther called “that absolutely monstrous tragedy in England,”3 it served to confirm them in their decision. In that same year of 1536, Erasmus died. He was sixty-nine years old. And in Antwerp, the English Reformer William Tyndale was imprisoned and questioned by the same man—Jacob van Hoogstraten—who had questioned and murdered the Lutheran priests so many years before. Tyndale was then sentenced to be burned, but for some reason, while bound to the stake, he was first strangled to death before his body was burned. He had dared to write against Cardinal Wolsey and against King Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. Cardinal Wolsey had condemned him as a heretic. But before his death he had translated the Bible into English and smuggled many copies into England and Scotland, spreading the Reformation there. By the late 1530s, Luther’s health continued to decline to the point that his body had become a bright constellation of pains and difficulties. The rich diet he had been eating most of his life had caused an accretion in his joints of uric acid—the condition commonly known as gout—and at one point the pain in his large toe was such that he loudly threatened to cut it off. But in 1537, his gout was the worst it had ever been. Nor did kidney stones cease to plague him, and he passed an especially large one on February 8, causing much bleeding. Ten days later, another one made it impossible for him to urinate, and he nearly died. The situation was dangerously exacerbated when the elector’s doctor curiously prescribed large amounts of water, which Luther dutifully drank. Afterward, he was dosed with a fresh concoction of garlic and pure manure. The pain soon became so excruciating that Luther prayed for death, and he was soon put on a wagon to return to Wittenberg to die. But the terrible jostling and jangling of the wagon on the bumpy winter roads somehow must have caused the stone blocking his urinary functioning to be jarred free and as with the fabled rock struck by Moses at Horeb, the dammed-up waters at last found egress. Luther now urinated with spirited abandon. No fewer than four quarts gushed forth, and Luther survived. That night in Wittenberg he proclaimed, “Luther lives!” As the Reformation continued to spread, Luther sometimes now found himself being honored in various ways, as when a book was published in 1539 containing all of his German writings. Luther was asked to write a preface to it and in it made fun of himself and all authors, who he well knew were tempted to take overweening pride in their great works. Here is a famous passage from that preface:

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It seems that it was on this day or the next that he made his famous remark: “If I get back home to Wittenberg, I’ll lie down in a coffin and give the maggots a fat doctor to eat.” What would be his final sermon was preached either on the fourteenth or the fifteenth of February. He had preached many millions of words from pulpits over the decades, but his final words would be preached sitting down, for sometime during this last sermon his ill health overtook him. He even ended the sermon earlier than he had wished, saying, “This and much more might be said concerning this Gospel, but I am too weak and we shall let it go at that.”6 This was his final sentence from a pulpit.* Luther had preached four sermons during this time in Eisleben, all at St. Andrew’s Church. In each of them, he had emphasized what for him was the central message of his entire life, and the central message at the heart of humanity, that God in Christ offers himself freely to us while we are still sinners. So if we do not understand that we are incorrigible sinners who need his help—and allow him to come into our lives to save us from ourselves—we cannot be saved. In these sermons, he contrasted this idea with the faith of the papists and the Jews and the Turks, in which one must earn God’s favor and make one’s way to heaven through one’s own efforts. He preached these sermons on January 31, February 2, February 7, and then his final sermon on the fourteenth or fifteenth. And every second or third day that he was in Eisleben, he attended the meetings with the counts and their lawyers for which he had come, though his health didn’t permit him to remain much longer than an hour or hour and a half at each session. There could have been no doubt that his health was not good by any who were around him. He was at one of these sessions on the sixteenth, but on the seventeenth his health would not permit it. But he did have dinner with his companions that evening. It had been his habit to do this every night and then to retire at eight for his personal prayers.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The next generation saw a church that was riven with factions, as Gnesio-Lutherans (so-called “genuine” Lutherans, also known as Flacians after the prominent theologian Matthias Flacius), and Philippists (followers of Melanchthon and supporters of a more moderate Lutheranism) all claimed Luther’s mantle. Yet these divisions, life-and-death matters as they were to those involved in them, did not destroy Lutheranism. The heated polemical rhetoric could not drown out their shared adherence. In any case, the intricacies of doctrinal dispute would have meant little to those outside the ministry. Despite the catastrophic defeat of the Schmalkaldic League, Lutheranism survived, albeit in disarray. Moritz eventually fell out with the emperor when he attempted to reintroduce Catholicism into Lutheran areas; allying himself with France, Moritz campaigned with great success. The Peace of Passau, signed in 1552, accorded recognition to the Lutherans, and the former Elector Johann Friedrich and Philip of Hesse were both released from captivity. At the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, the emperor formally accepted that there were two denominations in his empire and allowed the ruler of a territory to determine the official religion of his subjects. It did not, however, include the sacramentarians in its provisions, and the exclusion of the new movement that would become Calvinism meant that the Peace of Augsburg would eventually prove unable to contain religious diversity. In 1618, the Thirty Years’ War broke out. It would leave German lands devastated. — T HE old world of Wittenberg died with Luther. In the midst of the Schmalkaldic War, Katharina von Bora herself had to flee Wittenberg, the fate her husband had always feared for her. She returned and started to rebuild her properties, damaged by war, and to take in student lodgers. But times were hard and she died in 1552, from injuries she sustained after falling from a wagon that was taking her away yet again from the plague-stricken town. She was fifty-three years old. Some of the toll that Luther’s overwhelming personality must have taken on his family can be glimpsed in the fates of his children. Hans, the eldest son, named after Luther’s father, was destined for theology and had been enrolled at the University of Wittenberg at the age of seven, gaining the degree of bachelor six years later in 1539. The lad could not live up to expectations, and the pressure on him must have been unbearable. Reversing his father’s trajectory, Hans ended up trying his hand at law, eventually becoming an advisor in the Weimar chancellery, a position he achieved more out of respect to his father than because of his own merits. By contrast, Martin, the second son, had been intended for the law and switched to theology, but never managed to win a post as a preacher.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Arabic translations of Plato, Aristotle and the other philosophers of the ancient world were now translated into Latin and became available to the people of Northern Europe for the first time. The translators also worked on more recent Muslim scholarship, including the work of Ibn Rushd as well as the discoveries of Arab scientists and physicians. At the same time as some European Christians were bent on the destruction of Islam in the Near East, Muslims in Spain were helping the West to build up its own civilization. The Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas was an attempt to integrate the new philosophy with the Western Christian tradition. Aquinas had been particularly impressed by Ibn Rushd’s explication of Aristotle. Yet, unlike Anselm and Abelard, he did not believe that such mysteries as the Trinity could be proved by reason and distinguished carefully between the ineffable reality of God and human doctrines about him. He agreed with Denys that God’s real nature was inaccessible to the human mind: “Hence in the last resort all that man knows of God is to know that he does not know him, since he knows that what God is surpasses all that we can understand of him.” 35 There is a story that when he had dictated the last sentence of the Summa , Aquinas laid his head sadly on his arms. When the scribe asked him what was the matter, he replied that everything that he had written was straw compared with what he had seen. Aquinas’s attempt to set his religious experience in the context of the new philosophy was necessary in order to articulate faith with other reality and not relegate it to an isolated sphere of its own. Excessive intellectualism is damaging to the faith, but if God is not to become an indulgent endorsement of our own egotism, religious experience must be informed by an accurate assessment of its content. Aquinas defined God by returning to God’s own definition of himself to Moses: “I am What I Am.” Aristotle had said that God was Necessary Being; Aquinas accordingly linked the God of the Philosophers with the God of the Bible by calling God “He Who Is” ( Qui est ). He made it absolutely clear that God was not simply another being like ourselves, however. The definition of God as Being Itself was appropriate “because it does not signify any particular form [of being] but rather being itself ( esse seipsum ).” 36 It would be incorrect to blame Aquinas for the rationalistic view of God that later prevailed in the West.

• From A History of God (1993)

  His nostrils too shriveled and dried before my eyes, and his dear body became black and brown as it dried up in death. 10 This reminds us of the German crucifixes of the fourteenth century with their grotesquely twisted figures and gushing blood, which, of course, reached a climax in the work of Matthias Grünewald (1480–1528). Julian was capable of great insight into the nature of God: she depicts the Trinity living within the soul and not as an external reality “out there,” like a true mystic. But the strength of Western concentration on the human Christ seemed too powerful to resist. Increasingly, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, men and women in Europe were making other human beings the center of their spiritual life rather than God. The medieval cult of Mary and of the saints increased alongside the growing devotion to Jesus the man. Enthusiasm for relics and holy places also distracted Western Christians from the one thing necessary. People seemed to be concentrating on anything but God. The dark side of the Western spirit was even manifest during the Renaissance. The philosophers and humanists of the Renaissance were highly critical of much medieval piety. They disliked the scholastics intensely, feeling that their abstruse speculations made God sound alien and boring. Instead, they wanted to return to the sources of the faith, particularly to St. Augustine. The medievals had revered Augustine as a theologian, but the humanists rediscovered the Confessions and saw him as a fellow man on a personal quest. Christianity, they argued, was not a body of doctrines but an experience. Lorenzo Valla (1407–57) stressed the futility of mixing sacred dogma with “tricks of dialectics” and “metaphysical quibbles”: 11 these “futilities” had been condemned by St. Paul himself. Francesco Petrarch (1304–74) had suggested that “theology is actually poetry, poetry concerning God,” effective not because it “proved” anything but because it penetrated the heart. 12 The humanists had rediscovered the dignity of humanity, but this did not cause them to reject God: instead, as true men of their age, they stressed the humanity of God who had become man. But the old insecurities remained. The Renaissance men were deeply aware of the fragility of our knowledge and could also sympathize with Augustine’s acute sense of sin. As Petrarch said: How many times I have pondered over my own misery and over death; with what floods of tears I have sought to wash away my stains so that I can scarce speak of it without weeping, yet hitherto all is vain. God indeed is the best: and I am the worst. 13 Hence there was a vast distance between man and God: Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) and Leonardo Bruni (1369–1444) both saw God as utterly transcendent and inaccessible to the human mind.

• From A History of God (1993)

  This was a constant theme in the message of the prophets of the Axial Age. The God of Israel had originally distinguished himself from the pagan deities by revealing himself in concrete current events, not simply in mythology and liturgy. Now, the new prophets insisted, political catastrophe as well as victory revealed the God who was becoming the lord and master of history. He had all the nations in his pocket. Assyria would come to grief in its turn simply because its kings had not realized that they were only tools in the hand of a being greater than themselves.11 Since Yahweh had foretold the ultimate destruction of Assyria, there was a distant hope for the future. But no Israelite would have wanted to hear that his own people had brought political destruction upon its own head by its shortsighted policies and exploitative behavior. Nobody would have been happy to hear that Yahweh had masterminded the successful Assyrian campaigns of 722 and 701, just as he had captained the armies of Joshua, Gideon and King David. What did he think he was doing with the nation that was supposed to be his Chosen People? There was no wish fulfillment in Isaiah’s depiction of Yahweh. Instead of offering the people a panacea, Yahweh was being used to make people confront unwelcome reality. Instead of taking refuge in the old cultic observances which projected people back into mythical time, prophets like Isaiah were trying to make their countrymen look the actual events of history in the face and accept them as a terrifying dialogue with their God. While the God of Moses had been triumphalist, the God of Isaiah was full of sorrow. The prophecy, as it has come down to us, begins with a lament that is highly unflattering to the people of the covenant: the ox and the ass know their owners, but “Israel knows nothing, my people understand nothing.”12 Yahweh was utterly revolted by the animal sacrifices in the Temple, sickened by the fat of calves, blood of bulls and goats and the reeking blood that smoked from the holocausts. He could not bear their festivals, New Year ceremonies and pilgrimages.13 This would have shocked Isaiah’s audience: in the Middle East these cultic celebrations were of the essence of religion. The pagan gods depended upon the ceremonies to renew their depleted energies; their prestige depended in part upon the magnificence of their temples. Now Yahweh was actually saying that these things were utterly meaningless. Like other sages and philosophers in the Oikumene, Isaiah felt that exterior observance was not enough. Israelites must discover the inner meaning of their religion. Yahweh wanted compassion rather than sacrifice: You may multiply your prayers, I shall not listen. Your hands are covered with blood, wash, make yourselves clean. Take your wrong-doing out of my sight. Cease to do evil. Learn to do good, search for justice, help the oppressed, be just to the orphan, plead for the widow.14

• From A History of God (1993)

  The immense distance between God and man cannot be traversed by human effort alone. It is only because God has come to meet us in the person of the incarnate Word that we can restore the image of God within us, which has been damaged and defaced by sin. We open ourselves to the divine activity which will transform us by a threefold discipline, which Augustine calls the trinity of faith: retineo (holding the truths of the Incarnation in our minds), contemplatio (contemplating them) and dilectio (delighting in them). Gradually, by cultivating a continual sense of God’s presence within our minds in this way, the Trinity will be disclosed. 42 This knowledge was not just the cerebral acquisition of information but a creative discipline that would transform us from within by revealing a divine dimension in the depths of the self. These were dark and terrible times in the Western world. The barbarian tribes were pouring into Europe and bringing down the Roman empire: the collapse of civilization in the West inevitably affected Christian spirituality there. Ambrose, Augustine’s great mentor, preached a faith that was essentially defensive: integritas (wholeness) was its most important virtue. The Church had to preserve its doctrines intact, and, like the pure body of the Virgin Mary, it must remain unpenetrated by the false doctrines of the barbarians (many of whom had converted to Arianism). A deep sadness also informed Augustine’s later work: the fall of Rome influenced his doctrine of Original Sin, which would become central to the way Western people would view the world. Augustine believed that God had condemned humanity to an eternal damnation, simply because of Adam’s one sin. The inherited guilt was passed on to all his descendants through the sexual act, which was polluted by what Augustine called “concupiscence.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Leadership of the evangelical movement in Augsburg had passed to men like Michael Keller, Johann Landsperger, and Urbanus Rhegius, who preached a more communalist model for the Reformation. Luther knew how dangerous this shift was. In the autumn, in what seems to be the first letter to his friend in many years, he wrote exhorting Frosch to “remain firm.” 8 In Nördlingen, Luther had relied on his solid ally Theobald Billican, but now Billican too was leaning toward the Swiss in some respects; 9 in Ulm, Conrad Sam switched to the sacramentarian position. At least in Schwäbisch Hall, Johannes Brenz remained loyal, while the Nurembergers also still held the Lutheran line. However, with the loss of the imperial cities of Augsburg, Ulm, Basle, Zurich, and Strasbourg—all major centers of printing—Luther was becoming increasingly detached from developments in the south. In Strasbourg, Otto Brunfels, the humanist and friend of the knight Ulrich von Hutten, spoke for many when he published a letter to Luther in which he expressed his sorrow at the rift with Karlstadt: He admired both, he wrote, and could not love Luther without also embracing Karlstadt. 10 Nor was dissent confined to the south. In Liegnitz, Conrad Cordatus had to be peremptorily ordered to leave the “opponents of Christ,” 11 and in other parts of Silesia the noblemen Caspar Schwenckfeld and Valentin Crautwald were persuaded that there was no bodily presence in the Eucharist. Schwenckfeld traveled to Wittenberg in December 1525 to discuss the matter with Luther in person, but despite three days of argument, neither side convinced the other. 12 In the spring of 1526 Luther sent Schwenckfeld a bitter letter ordering him to desist from his errors. If he would not, “then God’s will be done. Although I am heartily sorry, yet I am not responsible for your blood, nor for the blood of all those whom you lead astray with [your teachings]. May God convert you. Amen.” 13 Nontheologians were inspired by sacramentarian ideas, too, because they chimed with a deep-rooted, commonsense anticlericalism. Rare surviving testimony of their beliefs came from Hans Mohr, captain of the foot soldiers at Coburg Castle in electoral Saxony, who thought that it “was wrong, that out of the created things, the bread and wine of the Lord, they want to make the Creator himself.” The common people were being piteously misled, he believed, and although he was happy to keep quiet about this, he would give his opinion if people asked him what he thought over meals or at the inn. Interrogated about his beliefs several times, Mohr was eventually sacked from his post. 14 The group of preachers who rallied to Luther’s position all said the same thing, whereas the sacramentarians arrived at their conclusions by different routes.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  We loved each other this way, Daddy and I, from afar. We’re like totem animals in each other’s foreign cosmologies—like islanders whose ancestral gods favor each other. Each of us represented to the other what little we knew of love inside that family, but whoever I’ve turned into has wiped away who I was as a kid, whoever he once loved. Age about twelve, I’d ceased to shoot pool and scale fish, stopped tuning in to the Friday night fights after Ali and Liston, nor did I follow the Yankees with the intensity Daddy thought their due. My very last visit when Daddy was still upright and continent and unparalyzed, he’d squired me to a New Year’s dance at the American Legion club, a place so skeevy neither Mother nor Lecia ever—to my knowledge—set shoe leather in the joint. I dressed for the occasion as I might have for Sunday school or a job interview. Daddy steered me by my elbow through the threshold onto the sloping floor of scarred sky-blue linoleum, inside the boxy paneled walls with imitation knotholes that could—with sufficient liquor—make you feel stared at by all the veterans who’d drunk themselves into early graves in that place. Folding chairs were drawn around small tables whose treacherous wobbles required matchbooks, and the matchbooks advertised kits you could write away for so as to finish high school and become an artist or beautician or drill press operator. The women’s room had the shocking dead-meat smell of a butcher shop and a mirror whose crack left it in the shape of Louisiana. And since January first was Daddy’s birthday, he’d joked that the party was for him. One after another, I’d danced with the men he’d worked on oil towers with and caught bass with, guys who’d built the garage studio for my mother one blistering summer. Two elementally nicknamed Red and Blue, men monosyllabic in every way. One named Buck, one Bubba, one Sweet. Not one didn’t have a union card in his wallet, and their faces were weathered as dried fruit. Your daddy’s so proud of you, how smart you are and your writing and all. The Texas two-step we did, the cotton-eyed Joe, swing dancing I could barely keep up with. At the end of the night, the ladies’ room sink was plugged up with puke, and two disputes had been taken outside—one over a pool game, one over Lord knows what. By the time Daddy grabbed my hand for the last dance, the floor had begun a slow tilt-a-whirl around us. His squinting bloodshot eyes stared over my shoulder as he glided me around to The Tennessee Waltz. We listed through the song. I don’t remember midnight. At the truck, I yelled myself hoarse trying to get his keys away from him. A passing cowboy said, Dang, Pete, give the girl your keys. And Daddy said, Mind your own business before I stomp a mud-hole in your ass.

• From A History of God (1993)

  These were dark and terrible times in the Western world. The barbarian tribes were pouring into Europe and bringing down the Roman empire: the collapse of civilization in the West inevitably affected Christian spirituality there. Ambrose, Augustine’s great mentor, preached a faith that was essentially defensive: integritas (wholeness) was its most important virtue. The Church had to preserve its doctrines intact, and, like the pure body of the Virgin Mary, it must remain unpenetrated by the false doctrines of the barbarians (many of whom had converted to Arianism). A deep sadness also informed Augustine’s later work: the fall of Rome influenced his doctrine of Original Sin, which would become central to the way Western people would view the world. Augustine believed that God had condemned humanity to an eternal damnation, simply because of Adam’s one sin. The inherited guilt was passed on to all his descendants through the sexual act, which was polluted by what Augustine called “concupiscence.” Concupiscence was the irrational desire to take pleasure in mere creatures instead of God; it was felt most acutely during the sexual act, when our rationality is entirely swamped by passion and emotion, when God is utterly forgotten and creatures revel shamelessly in one another. This image of reason dragged down by the chaos of sensations and lawless passions was disturbingly similar to Rome, source of rationality, law and order in the West, brought low by the barbarian tribes. By implication, Augustine’s harsh doctrine paints a terrible picture of an implacable God: Banished [from Paradise] after his sin, Adam bound his offspring also with the penalty of death and damnation, that offspring which by sinning he had corrupted in himself, as in a root; so that whatever progeny was born (through carnal concupiscence, by which a fitting retribution for his disobedience was bestowed upon him) from himself and his spouse—who was the cause of his sin and the companion of his damnation—would drag through the ages the burden of Original Sin, by which it would itself be dragged through manifold errors and sorrows, down to that final and never-ending torment with the rebel angels.… So the matter stood; the damned lump of humanity was lying prostrate, no, was wallowing in evil, it was falling headlong from one wickedness to another; and joined to the faction of the angels who had sinned, it was paying the most righteous penalty of its impious treason.43 Neither Jews nor Greek Orthodox Christians regarded the fall of Adam in such a catastrophic light; nor, later, would Muslims adopt this dark theology of Original Sin. Unique to the West, the doctrine compounds the harsh portrait of God suggested earlier by Tertullian.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In the religion of the heart, doctrines about God were transposed into interior emotional states. Thus Count von Zinzendorf, the patron of several religious communities who lived on his estates in Saxony, argued like Wesley that “faith was not in thoughts nor in the head, but in the heart, a light illuminated in the heart.”29 Academics could go on “chattering about the mystery of the Trinity” but the meaning of the doctrine was not the relations of the three Persons to one another but “what they are to us.”30 The Incarnation expressed the mystery of the new birth of an individual Christian, when Christ became “the King of the heart.” This emotive type of spirituality had also surfaced in the Roman Catholic Church in the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which established itself in the face of much opposition from the Jesuits and the establishment, who were suspicious of its frequently mawkish sentimentality. It has survived to the present day: many Roman Catholic churches contain a statue of Christ baring his breast to display a bulbous heart surrounded by a nimbus of flames. It was the mode in which he had appeared to Marguerite-Marie Alacoque (1647–90) in her convent in Paray-le-Monial, France. There is no resemblance between this Christ and the abrasive figure of the Gospels. In his whining self-pity, he shows the dangers of concentrating on the heart to the exclusion of the head. In 1682 Marguerite-Marie recalled that Jesus appeared to her at the beginning of Lent: covered all over with wounds and bruises. His adorable Blood was streaming over Him on every side: “Will no one,” He said in a sad and mournful tone, “have pity on Me and compassionate Me, and take part in My sorrow, in the piteous state to which sinners reduce Me especially at this time.”31 A highly neurotic woman, who confessed to a loathing of the very idea of sex, suffered from an eating disorder and indulged in unhealthy masochistic acts to prove her “love” for the Sacred Heart, Marguerite-Marie shows how a religion of the heart alone can go awry. Her Christ is often nothing more than a wish fulfillment, whose Sacred Heart compensates her for the love she had never experienced: “You shall be for ever Its beloved disciple, the sport of Its good pleasure and the victim of Its wishes,” Jesus tells her. “It shall be the sole delight of all your desires; It will repair and supply for your defects, and discharge your obligations for you.”32 Concentrating solely on Jesus the man, such a piety is simply a projection which imprisons the Christian in a neurotic egotism.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The barbarian tribes were pouring into Europe and bringing down the Roman empire: the collapse of civilization in the West inevitably affected Christian spirituality there. Ambrose, Augustine’s great mentor, preached a faith that was essentially defensive: integritas (wholeness) was its most important virtue. The Church had to preserve its doctrines intact, and, like the pure body of the Virgin Mary, it must remain unpenetrated by the false doctrines of the barbarians (many of whom had converted to Arianism). A deep sadness also informed Augustine’s later work: the fall of Rome influenced his doctrine of Original Sin, which would become central to the way Western people would view the world. Augustine believed that God had condemned humanity to an eternal damnation, simply because of Adam’s one sin. The inherited guilt was passed on to all his descendants through the sexual act, which was polluted by what Augustine called “concupiscence.” Concupiscence was the irrational desire to take pleasure in mere creatures instead of God; it was felt most acutely during the sexual act, when our rationality is entirely swamped by passion and emotion, when God is utterly forgotten and creatures revel shamelessly in one another. This image of reason dragged down by the chaos of sensations and lawless passions was disturbingly similar to Rome, source of rationality, law and order in the West, brought low by the barbarian tribes. By implication, Augustine’s harsh doctrine paints a terrible picture of an implacable God: Banished [from Paradise] after his sin, Adam bound his offspring also with the penalty of death and damnation, that offspring which by sinning he had corrupted in himself, as in a root; so that whatever progeny was born (through carnal concupiscence, by which a fitting retribution for his disobedience was bestowed upon him) from himself and his spouse—who was the cause of his sin and the companion of his damnation—would drag through the ages the burden of Original Sin, by which it would itself be dragged through manifold errors and sorrows, down to that final and never-ending torment with the rebel angels.... So the matter stood; the damned lump of humanity was lying prostrate, no, was wallowing in evil, it was falling headlong from one wickedness to another; and joined to the faction of the angels who had sinned, it was paying the most righteous penalty of its impious treason. 43 Neither Jews nor Greek Orthodox Christians regarded the fall of Adam in such a catastrophic light; nor, later, would Muslims adopt this dark theology of Original Sin. Unique to the West, the doctrine compounds the harsh portrait of God suggested earlier by Tertullian.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I mean it. It’s like me with a drink. Every time I used a manhattan to take the edge off, I never got any better coping skills. Like what? Making a cup of tea. Going to the gym. Calling a pal to unload. She’s pouring tea over ice that crackles in its plastic glass. She turns to me and says, What if none of your pals are home? What if you don’t have a single fucking pal? What if you’re a boy trapped in a girl’s body and the kids at your school call you Pussyeater and Butch and Muffdiver? You tell yourself they’re shitheels and find somebody lonelier than you to be nice to. What if there’s nobody lonelier than you? she says. She turns away to shield her face. I’m standing in the chasm of her statement when she whirls around and throws the yogurt—with the force of a major league pitcher—into the trash can so it splatters up the sides. She stalks out, hitting the light switch on the way. The next morning I wake early, hearing flame-haired Flora in the quiet room, howling in some unintelligible tongue. I step from my room into the faint odor of eucalyptus. The aroma builds up as I get close to the dayroom. A nurse brushes past me, her arms braceleted in red-ribboned Christmas wreaths. Peering past her, I see dozens of wreaths of every kind. They fill the chairs where residents usually hang out. The nurses are stacking them on a dolly the custodians would (with bemused faces) wheel onto the service elevator. Off to one side, Pam stands with an orange ping-pong paddle, occasionally bouncing the ball on it. She says, You missed the showdown. It turns out Tina planted in Betty the hope that—with her extraordinary talent for floral arrangement and Tina’s acumen—they could make millions selling wreaths. Betty could be free from her father’s house, and Tina could leave public housing. So for weeks they’ve been ginning out an extra wreath here and there, squirreling them away in the art room. But in the small and densely packed confines of Tina’s skull, the plan’s gotten larger and larger—visits on Oprah and Johnny Carson are involved. After she stormed out on me the night before, she convinced Betty to break into the art room in the wee hours, even luring Flora and Willy to chip in, like stockholders. At dawn, the day nurses found wreaths by the stack. Even Willy made one out of doll’s heads painted blue with tempera paint. A nurse passes by with more wreaths. I ask Pam where everybody wound up. Betty’s modeling the latest in four-point restraints up in the Monkey House. Her insurance has run out anyway, so the minute she’s stable, she’s gone anyhow. Flora’s in the safe room. Willy’s medicated. What about Tina? I say. Mighty Tina. She executed some impressive kickboxing moves, Pam says. On the nurses?

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  He worked some cute stuff with “hype” and “hip” and “hypocritical.” I didn’t get to read it all because I was dripping sweat on it and he grabbed it away. Tanneran was a few minutes late to class. Everybody asked everybody else what they thought the Agee piece was about. I thought I knew maybe a little of what it was about, because it seemed to fit so well into my thesis, which I’d been working at since June. But in typical wiseass fashion I said, “Well, I think it’s a surrealist, paranoid vision of how the army deals with indecent exposure,” and I quoted the line “. . . the urination of huge children stood loosely military against an invisible wall. . . .” I got no reaction, except from Molly Philabaum, who gave me the finger. Molly never could take a joke. Last year when Kuch was into his Indian phase and I was in my doctor phase, I hung out my shingle on my locker: THE DOCTOR IS IN HYMENECTOMIES WHILE YOU WAIT! Molly tore it down and reported me to the vice principal. He at least understood the humor. Everybody knows the only market for hymenectomies is junior high. Gene came in and asked the class what the piece was about. Nobody said anything. Gene walked back to his chair, sat down, spread his arms and legs wide, flopped his head over, and pretended to snooze. In about ten minutes he opened an eye and scanned the room. Molly was the first to light into him about the stupid assignment and how it didn’t relate at all to our lives. “Molly . . . ?” Gene asked as he got up and stood in front of us. He was sharp in his heavy suede pants, thick old suspenders, and red-and-black plaid shirt. “Molly, you’re never going to die?” Nobody said anything. I suppressed an urge to say Molly smelled like she was already dead. Molly should be introduced to feminine hygiene. That’s what happens when they make PE optional. Then Gene quoted these lines. People always have at least a measure of confidence in a good quoter: “By some chance here we are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.” “Okay,” he said. “Who knows what Agee’s talking about in this piece?” “ ‘The sorrow of being on this earth,’ ” answered Patty Ryder in a flash. “And what is sorrowful about being on this earth?” Gene asked. “ ‘The hour of their taking away,’ ” shot back Larry Brooks. Our class ain’t dumb.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther was of course writing long before Freud formulated his three-part model of the mind, where conscience is identified with the superego, the part of the mind that imposes external norms and moral prohibitions. Nor did he mean an inner voice containing the authentic individual. For Luther, the Word of God is absolutely clear and plain in its meaning, and “conscience” is the individual’s internal knowledge of that objective meaning of God’s Word. This is what he meant by his insistence that his conscience was “captive to the Word of God.” 52 Moreover, for Luther the conscience is not just an intellectual faculty but is also strongly linked to a complex palette of emotions. A conscience can be sad, burdened, clouded, joyous, happy, or peaceful. It can be weak or strong, or even courageous. It may be paired with the heart, another seat of emotions, and with faith. And it has a special relationship to God, with whom it communicates directly. “Conscience” had a long history with Luther. During his years as an unhappy monk he had felt burdened in his conscience, which led him to confess with extreme frequency. This was the unhappiness from which Staupitz had freed him, by showing him that God accepts us not because of our good works, but as sinners. Staupitz’s own writings showed a profound awareness of the danger of imposing on an individual’s conscience: He advised that it should only be burdened if one had committed a mortal sin. But if, he says, you find yourself burdened over sins that are not infringements of the Commandments, and if you can perceive that they are not, then you should simply jettison your “errant” conscience; or if that is not possible, you should turn to your confessor so as to attain relief—advice that must have been honed in dealing with oversensitive consciences like Luther’s. 53 But even though Staupitz was such an effective minister to Luther’s conscience, his understanding of the word differed from Luther’s. Whereas for Staupitz a conscience could be mistaken, and could be troubled with matters that were unimportant, for Luther it was the seat of certainty and could never be wrong. When Luther said his conscience was “captive to the Word of God” he meant that it could not be moved or altered; he “knew” with his whole being—mind and emotion—what God’s Word was, and could not deny it. — N OTHING Luther had written or done previously had such an effect as his dramatic defiance of the emperor and the entire assembled estates of the Reich.

• From A History of God (1993)

  His adorable Blood was streaming over Him on every side: “Will no one,” He said in a sad and mournful tone, “have pity on Me and compassionate Me, and take part in My sorrow, in the piteous state to which sinners reduce Me especially at this time.” 31 A highly neurotic woman, who confessed to a loathing of the very idea of sex, suffered from an eating disorder and indulged in unhealthy masochistic acts to prove her “love” for the Sacred Heart, Marguerite-Marie shows how a religion of the heart alone can go awry. Her Christ is often nothing more than a wish fulfillment, whose Sacred Heart compensates her for the love she had never experienced: “You shall be for ever Its beloved disciple, the sport of Its good pleasure and the victim of Its wishes,” Jesus tells her. “It shall be the sole delight of all your desires; It will repair and supply for your defects, and discharge your obligations for you.” 32 Concentrating solely on Jesus the man, such a piety is simply a projection which imprisons the Christian in a neurotic egotism. We are clearly far from the cool rationalism of the Enlightenment, yet there was a connection between the religion of the heart, at its best, and Deism. Kant, for example, had been brought up in Königsburg as a Pietist, the Lutheran sect in which Zinzendorf also had his roots. Kant’s proposals for a religion within the bounds of unaided reason is akin to the Pietist insistence on a religion “laid down in the very constitution of the soul” 33 rather than in a revelation enshrined in the doctrines of an authoritarian church. When he became known for his radical view of religion, Kant is said to have reassured his Pietist servant by telling him that he had only “destroyed dogma to make room for faith.” 34 John Wesley was fascinated by the Enlightenment and was especially sympathetic to the ideal of liberty. He was interested in science and technology, dabbled in electrical experiments and shared the optimism of the Enlightenment about human nature and the possibility of progress. The American scholar Albert C. Outler points out that the new religion of the heart and the rationalism of the Enlightenment were both antiestablishment and both mistrusted external authority; both ranged themselves with the moderns against the ancients, and both shared a hatred of inhumanity and an enthusiasm for philanthropy. Indeed, it seems that a radical piety actually paved the way for the ideals of the Enlightenment to take root among Jews as well as Christians. There is a remarkable similarity in some of these extreme movements. Many of these sects seemed to respond to the immense changes of the period by violating religious taboos. Some appeared blasphemous; some were dubbed atheistic, while others had leaders who actually claimed to be incarnations of God.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I recount to her how Mother told me she was surprised we didn’t have fun in the mountains. Lecia shakes her head. The next day at the airport, she kisses my hair and holds my hand and says she loves the book and what a bang-up job I did, but she’s not in her eyes anymore. When I look at her, I see her at age eleven. Months from now, once she gets the bound galley, she’ll read it and marvel that the opening works better with the scene of Mother at the fire, which is the exact same chapter she’d read in Colorado. The publisher set type from it, but she hadn’t remembered a damn thing from that first draft. Was I sure that was written in the version she saw? I was.