Shame

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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

  PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. This passage shews, that when the star had brought the Magi nearly to Jerusalem, it was hidden from them, and so they were compelled to ask in Jerusalem, where Christ should be born? and thus to manifest Him to them; on two accounts, first, to put to confusion the Jews, inasmuch as the Gentiles instructed only by sight of a star sought Christ through strange lands, while the Jews who had read the Prophets from their youth did not receive Him, though born in their country. Secondly, that the Priests, when asked where Christ should be born, might answer to their now condemnation, and while they instructed Herod, they were themselves ignorant of Him. The star went before them, to shew them the greatness of the King. AUGUSTINE. To perform its due service to the Lord, it advanced slowly, leading them to the spot. It was ministering to Him, and not ruling His fate; its light shewed the suppliants and filled the inn, shed over the walls and roof that covered the birth; and thus it disappeared. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. What wonder that a divine star should minister to the Sun of righteousness about to rise. It stood over the Child’s head, as it were, saying, ‘This is He;’ proving by its place what it had no voice to utter. GLOSS. (Anselm.) It is evident that the star must have been in the air, and close above the house where the Child was, else it would not have pointed out the exact house. AMBROSE. (in Luc. ii. 45.) The star is the way, and the way is Christ; and according to the mystery of the incarnation, Christ is a star. He is a blazing and a morning-star. Thus where Herod is, the star is not seen; where Christ is, there it is again seen, and points out the way. REMIGIUS. Or, the star figures the grace of God, and Herod the Devil. He, who by sin puts himself in the Devil’s power, loses that grace; but if he return by repentance, he soon finds that grace again which leaves him not till it have brought him to the young Child’s house, i. e. the Church. GLOSS. (ord.) Or, the star is the illumination of faith, which leads him to the nearest aid; while they turn aside to the Jews, the Magi lose it; so those who seek counsel of the bad, lose the true light. 2:10–1110. When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy. 11. And when they were come into the house, they saw the young Child with Mary His mother, and fell down, and worshipped Him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto Him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh. GLOSS. This service of the star is followed by the rejoicing of the Magi. REMIGIUS. And it was not enough to say, They rejoiced, but they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.

• From The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 4: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700) (1984)

  ONE, HOLY, CATHOLIC, AND APOSTOLIC? 76 made the church "the true body of Christ," the Hussite definition would destroy all certainty about the church and with it all ability to function in the church. That accusation appeared to be borne out by such state- ments as that of Wycliffe, that since the elect were known to God alone, a body made up of human beings did not have the right to elect a pope and only "God could choose such a leader," as he had in the case of the apostle Matthias. The Hussite theologian John of Rokycana, concerned as he was for the church and its unity, recognized this functional "risk" in the simple definition of the church as consisting exclusively of the predestinate, and hence he added another defini- tion: the church was "a mixture of the predestinate and the reprobate, or more precisely, the church of the predestinate, with which the reprobate and doomed are mixed." In response, John of Ragusa, who objected to the Hussite definition on functional as well as on doctrinal grounds, found this an improvement, though still far from adequate. Much older and deeper than the Hussite schism, or even than the schism between Rome and Avignon within the West, was the schism separating East and West. The same councils that considered the other two schisms also gave attention to the East-West schism—the Council of Constance in 1418, but above all the Council of Basel-Ferrara-Florence. To be sure, there were some in the West to whom the separation from the East was so unimportant that they could declare that "from the nativity of Christ until the year 1316 there has been no schism in the church of God," but such total indifference was quite uncommon. More significant were the repeated declarations that a rec- onciliation with the Greek church was prerequisite to a settlement of other issues troubling the West; or the recognition by Ambrose Traversari that in spite of the "very great difficulty" of the matter, the Greeks de- served the utmost in understanding and patience; or the admission of Nicholas of Clamanges around the turn of the century that "our pride and avarice" were responsible for the schism with the Greeks; or the warning of Gerson at about the same time that even a resolution of the problem of papal authority would not be sufficient to heal the breach between the West-

• From Open (2009)

  Too depressed to argue, I let Nick and Wendi push me onto a plane to London. We rent a beautiful two-story house, hidden from the main road, close to the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. It has a charming garden in the back, with pink roses and every variety of songbird, a little haven where I can sit and nearly forget why I’m in England. Wendi makes the house feel like home. She fills it with candles, groceries—and her perfume. She fixes delicious meals at night, and in the morning she packs box lunches for me to bring to the practice courts. The tournament is delayed five days by rain. On the fifth day, though the house is cozy, we’re going stir crazy. I want to get out on the court. I want to get rid of the bad taste in my mouth from the French Open, or else lose and go home. Finally the rain lets up. I play Grant Connell, a serve-and-volleyer who’s made his living off fast surfaces. It’s an awkward first-round opponent for my first grass match in years. He’s expected to trounce me. Somehow I eke out a five-set win. I reach the quarters, where I play David Wheaton. I’m up two sets to one, up two breaks in the fourth set, and all of a sudden I pull something in my hip flexor, the muscle that bends the joint. Hobbled, it’s all I can do to finish the match. Wheaton wins easily. I tell Wendi that I could have won the thing. I started to feel better than I’d felt at the French Open. Damned hip. The good news, I suppose, is that I wanted to win. Maybe I’ve got my desire turned around and pointed in the right direction. I’M A FAST HEALER. After a few days my hip is fine. My mind, however, continues to throb. I go to the U.S. Open and lose in the first round. The first round. But the scary part is the way I lose. I play Krickstein, good old Krickstein, and again I just don’t want it. I know I can beat him, and yet it’s not worth the trouble. I don’t expend the necessary energy. I feel a strange clarity about my lack of effort. It’s lack of inspiration, plain and simple. I don’t question it. I don’t bother wishing it away. While Krickstein is running and leaping and lunging, I’m watching him with only mild interest. Only afterward does the shame set in.

• From Three Women (2019)

  Was it normal to like the rest, though? She couldn’t tell too many people. Perhaps, she reasoned, the people she couldn’t tell were the repressed ones and she was the healthy person. But none of the books she read and none of the television shows and films she enjoyed reflected that lifestyle. There had to be an anomaly in her. Somewhere, sometime, she must have been wicked or suffered at the hands of something untoward. She considered her own childhood, the ways in which her parents factored. Sloane describes her own father, Peter, simply as Andover, Princeton, Harvard. You’ll know what I mean, she says, when I say that. She doesn’t intend to boast about education or money. Her feelings about where she came from were metabolized long ago. Now they are a Chanel suit in a cold closet. Sloane could define her mother, Dyan, in a few words, as well, but she finds it more difficult. Blond and prim, Dyan Ford is nearly ecclesiastical in her propriety. Sloane might describe how her mother greets her after not having seen her for a long time. Dyan doesn’t immediately hug her daughter. She asks about the drive or the flight and comments on the weather. She motions inside, to where there might be cucumber tea sandwiches and a pot of Earl Grey waiting on the kitchen counter. Dyan grew up, one of four, in Memphis, Tennessee, with a father who flew his own airplane and a warm and homemaking mother. At seventeen, Dyan was driving in the car with her mother, with whom she was very close. She may have felt, the way we always seem to remember feeling in the moments before devastation, a sort of divine providence. Look at my long, tan legs. My soft blond hair. My body, which has finally been filled to all of its edges with blood and shape. Suddenly there was a scream. There was the feeling of having been hit and the sound of squawking metal. When Dyan came to, hours later, she was in a hospital bed. She cried out for her mother. A nurse came to the room to deliver the news that her mother had died in the accident. It took Dyan several seconds, perhaps even a full minute, to visualize the interior of the car that morning, to remember it was she herself who had been in the driver’s seat. Not too long after the funeral, shortly after the sympathy pies stopped arriving at their doorstep, her father sent her to live with friends. Dyan didn’t need to be told why. She knew he couldn’t look at her, she who had killed his wife, the mother of his three other children, for whom he was now solely responsible.

• From Three Women (2019)

  Neither Sloane nor Lucas had a scratch. It was a miracle. All the officers said so. Sloane stared at the car. Totaled, she said out loud. She thought about the word, how it looked like the adjective it described. They didn’t go to the hospital. Their parents picked them up from the police station. Perhaps because it happened like that, Dyan and Peter weren’t able to feel the relief they might have felt otherwise. If, for example, Sloane had gone to the hospital in a neck brace. Because what was more shocking than the accident itself was that nobody in Sloane’s family said, Thank God you’re alive. Her parents were quiet and discerning. They murmured about what they’d have to do in the morning. They were not exactly angry. Her mother, considering her own past, didn’t react in the manner one might expect. She didn’t clutch Sloane to her chest, for example, sobbing. But Sloane was most upset about the way Gabe reacted. Gabe was pissed about his car. He looked at her like she was a piece of shit. Many years later she would realize that this was the precise moment an important man in her life made her feel unloved, but she didn’t see it that way at the time. She felt she was lucky in so many ways. She was alive. The family would not be broken by this mistake of hers. They would be able to sweep it away. Her brother’s eyes, though, paralyzed her in a way the accident had not. Perhaps, she figured, it was because she was okay. They didn’t want to think of what might have happened. At a certain point Sloane had completely embraced a new identity, Popular Girl Sloane, Party Girl Sloane. To be this Sloane meant being pretty, which she was; being up for drinking and hanging out and hosting parties and arriving at parties at the right time with the right outfit; flirting but not being an all-out slut. It meant being cool. But there were other cool girls, other hot girls, other flirts. Something about the accident, something about her brother, something about her parents, something about her past and never having been the best at anything, made her want to be a superlative. She felt that the only way to be seen was to be remarkable in one department. So she jiggered the identity into Skinny Party Girl. She wasn’t the prettiest or the most flirtatious, but she saw an empty slot for being the thinnest. It was something she knew her mother would like.

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

  RABANUS. Or, the first servants who were sent were the Lawgiver Moses himself, and Aaron the first Priest of God; whom, having beaten them with the scourge of their tongue, they sent away empty; by the other servants understand the company of the Prophets. HILARY. By the Son sent at last, is denoted the advent of our Lord. CHRYSOSTOM. Wherefore then did He not send Him immediately? That from what they had done to the others they might accuse themselves, and putting away their madness they might reverence His Son when He came. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. He sent Him not as the bearer of a sentence of punishment against the guilty, but of an offer of repentance; He sent Him to put them to shame, not to punish them. JEROME. But when He says, They will reverence my Son, He does not speak as in ignorance. For what is there that this householder (by whom in this place God is intended) knows not? But God is thus spoken of as being uncertain, in order that free-will may be reserved for man. CHRYSOSTOM. Or He speaks as declaring what ought to be; they ought to reverence Him; thus shewing that their sin was great, and void of all excuse. ORIGEN. Or we may suppose this fulfilled in the case of those Jews who, knowing Christ, believed in Him. But what follows, But when the husbandmen saw the son, they said among themselves, This is the heir, come let us kill him, and let us seize on the inheritance, was fulfilled in those who saw Christ, and knew Him to be the Son of God, yet crucified Him. JEROME. Let us enquire of Arrius and Eunomius. See here the Father is said not to know somewhat. Whatever answer they make for the Father, let them understand the same of the Son, when He says that He knows not the day of the consummation of all things. (Mat. 22:36.) PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. But some say, that it was after His incarnation, that Christ was called a Son in right of His baptism like the other saints, whom the Lord refutes by this place, saying, I will send my Son. Therefore when He thus meditated sending His Son after the Prophets, He must have been already His Son. Further, if He had been His Son in the same way as all the saints to whom the word of God was sent, He ought to have called the Prophets also His sons, as He calls Christ, or to call Christ His servant, as He calls the Prophets.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  CONCLUSION The most controversial issue in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah is undoubtedly the attempts to deal with the problem of intermarriage, especially in the case of Ezra. Ezra’s action in expelling the “foreign” women and their children must be understood in the context of a small community that felt itself to be beleaguered and was struggling to maintain its identity. While this particular measure may not have had any lasting effect, the policy of separatism, the insistence of firm boundaries between Jew and Gentile, laid the foundation for the preservation of Jewish identity from antiquity to the present. The Ammonites, Moabites, and Edomites have long since disappeared from history. Ezra, then, must be given credit for his efforts to preserve the heritage of Judaism. Nonetheless, the treatment of the women and children in Ezra 10 is one of the lower points of the biblical record. It does not offend modern sensibilities to the same extent as the slaughter of the Canaanites in Deuteronomy and Joshua, but it is nonetheless offensive. It is one of the more egregious cases in the Bible where considerations of purity and religious belief of one group (the “holy seed”) take precedence over the basic rights of those who do not belong to that group. Such actions are not only offensive to modern sensibilities but are also counter to the teaching of the prophets and to some strands, at least, of the Torah. The book of Malachi can be read in part as a protest against these policies. We find a very different approach to the Gentile world in the stories of Ruth and Jonah. Ezra’s career in Jerusalem was short-lived. His purist interpretation of Judaism is contested even with the Hebrew Bible itself. FOR FURTHER READING Commentaries

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Weeks later, this one fact was still troubling me as much as anything else about the entire sequence of events that night: it was I who said Lenox Hill. I got into a taxi in front of my apartment, which happens to be equidistant from two hospitals, Lenox Hill and New York Cornell, and I said Lenox Hill. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell did not demonstrate a developed instinct for self-preservation. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell demonstrated only that I was at that moment incapable of taking care of myself. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell proved the point humiliatingly made by every nurse and aide and doctor to whom I spoke in the two nights I would eventually spend at Lenox Hill, the first night in the emergency room and the second in a cardiac unit, where a bed happened to be available and where it was erroneously assumed that because I had been given a bed in the cardiac unit I must have a cardiac problem: I was old. I was too old to live alone. I was too old to be allowed out of bed. I was too old even to recognize that if I had been given a bed in the cardiac unit I must have a cardiac problem. “Your cardiac problem isn’t showing up on the monitors,” one nurse kept reporting, accusingly. I tried to process what she was saying. Processing what people were saying was not at that moment my long suit, but this nurse seemed to be suggesting that my “cardiac problem” was not showing up on the monitors because I had deliberately detached the electrodes. I countered. I said that to the best of my knowledge I did not have a cardiac problem. She countered. “Of course you have a cardiac problem,” she said. And then, closing the issue: “Because otherwise you wouldn’t be in the cardiac unit.” I had no answer for that. I tried to pretend I was home. I tried to figure out whether it was day or night: if it was day I had a shot at going home, but in the hospital there was no day or night. Only shifts. Only waiting. Waiting for the IV nurse, waiting for the nurse with the narcotics key, waiting for the transporter. Will someone please take the catheter out. That transfusion was ordered at eleven this evening. “How do you normally get around your apartment,” someone in scrubs kept asking, marveling at what he seemed to consider my entirely unearned mobility, finally providing his own answer: “Walker?”

• From Between Us

  In cultures with OURS emotions, there are many examples of people using emotion words without necessarily feeling the emotion. Inauthentic? Not necessarily. If the most important part of emotion is what happens between people, then inner feelings become irrelevant—implied, but not necessary. Anthropologist Andrew Beatty describes the use of emotion concepts on Nias, an Indonesian island, as mostly limited to public events. The people living on Nias are “among the poorest in Indonesia, but they marry expensively, a contradiction certain to generate passions and passionate words.” The bride’s family is responsible for the grand reception of the groom’s family, but the groom’s is expected to pay a dowry that weighs up against the “gift of life”: the bride’s fertility and labor force. It is in the context of the public and theatrical negotiations of the dowry, where the families are gathered around, that emotion concepts are used most. These negotiations are not conducted by the people most involved, the bride’s or groom’s parents themselves, but rather by orators who represent each side. In one instance, the groom’s family complained about the welcome they have received upon arrival, possibly in an effort to bring the dowry down, and says: “If I accepted it I’d be ashamed, mocked by my own children. . . .” The bride’s side makes it known that they are concerned with the groom’s reproach, and disappointed with the dowry. On both sides, emotions are proclaimed, but as Beatty notes, it is doubtful that the orators actually feel every emotion they express. And yet, emotions articulated by the orators perform their interpersonal role. They influence others, and in doing so, promote their goal. In going back and forth, “[p]eople sum up their position or mark where the debate has got to by referring to their hearts, each claim to frustration or resentment pegging their progress and forcing the other onto the back foot.” Labeling emotions may also directly appeal to other people’s emotions. This is the case when caregivers encourage their children to have the culturally right emotions, or not have the culturally wrong emotions. Utku Inuit told their children not to cry, or “you’ll make your pants wet and then you will freeze.” Javanese kids were told to have isin, shame, in front of elders. Ifaluk mothers admonished their children to fago, “as a way of promoting gentle (as well as generous) behavior.”

• From Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988)

  Whereas Chrysostom proclaims human freedom, Augustine reads from the same Genesis story the opposite—human bondage. As for [image file=image_rsrc2G0.jpg] , the power to rule oneself, Augustine cannot acknowledge it as a reality, or even a genuine good, in his own experience, let alone for all humanity. And Augustine begins his reflections on government, characteristically, with introspection. Recalling in the Confessions his own experience, Augustine instinctively identifies the question of self-government with rational control over sexual impulses. Describing his struggle to be chaste, Augustine recalls how, “in the sixteenth year of the age of my flesh … the madness of raging lust exercised its supreme dominion over me.”28 Augustine was powerless, a captive and victim. Through sexual desire, he says, “my invisible enemy trod me down and seduced me.”29 Of his sexual involvements he admits, “I drew my shackles along with me, terrified to have them knocked off.”30 Acknowledging that his friend was “amazed at my enslavement,” Augustine reflects that “what made me a slave to it was the habit [consuetudo] of satisfying an insatiable lust.”31 Had Augustine confessed as much to a spiritual advisor such as John Chrysostom, he would have been urged to undo the chains that bound him to bad habits and to recover and strengthen, like unused muscles, his own neglected capacity for moral choice. But Augustine in his Confessions came directly to challenge such assumptions. Free will is only an illusion—an illusion that Augustine himself once shared: “As for continence, I imagined it to be in the liberty of our own power, which I, for my part, felt I did not have.”32 As he grew older, Augustine changed his mind. Instead of indicting his own lack of faith in the power of free will, Augustine came to lash out at those who falsely assume that they do possess such power: “What man is there, who, being aware of his own weakness, dares so much as to attribute his chastity and innocence to his own virtue?”33 The aging Augustine then takes his own experience as paradigmatic for all human experience—indeed, for Adam’s: “Being a captive,” he says, “I feigned a show of counterfeit liberty,”34 as, he says, Adam had done, bringing upon himself and his progeny an avalanche of sin and punishment.

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

  1:3–63–6. And Judas begat Phares and Zara of Thamar; and Phares begat Esrom; and Esrom begat Aram; and Aram begat Aminadab; and Aminadab begat Naasson; and Naasson begat Salmon; and Salmon begat Booz of Rachab; and Booz begat Obed of Ruth; and Obed begat Jesse; and Jesse begat David the king. GLOSS. Passing over the other sons of Jacob, the Evangelist follows the family of Judah, saying, But Judah begat Phares and Zara of Thamar. AUGUSTINE. (de Civ. Dei, xv. 15.) Neither was Judah himself a first-born, nor of these two sons was either his first-born; he had already had three before them. So that he keeps in that line of descent, by which he shall arrive at David, and from him whither he purposed. JEROME. It should be noted, that none of the holy women are taken into the Saviour’s genealogy, but rather such as Scripture has condemned, that He who came for sinners being born of sinners might so put away the sins of all; thus Ruth the Moabitess follows among the rest. AMBROSE. (in Luc. c. 3.) But Luke has avoided the mention of these, that he might set forth the series of the priestly race immaculate. But the plan of St. Matthew did not exclude the righteousness of natural reason; for when he wrote in his Gospel, that He who should take on Him the sins of all, was born in the flesh, was subject to wrongs and pain, he did not think it any detraction from His holiness that He did not refuse the further humiliation of a sinful parentage. Nor, again, would it shame the Church to be gathered from among sinners, when the Lord Himself was born of sinners; and, lastly, that the benefits of redemption might have their beginning with His own forefathers: and that none might imagine that a stain in their blood was any hindrance to virtue, nor again any pride themselves insolently on nobility of birth. CHRYSOSTOM. Besides this, it shews that all are equally liable to sin; for here is Thamar accusing Judah of incest, and David begat Solomon with a woman with whom he had committed adultery. But if the Law was not fulfilled by these great ones, neither could it be by their less great posterity, and so all have sinned, and the presence of Christ is become necessary. AMBROSE. (ubi sup.) Observe that Matthew does not name both without a meaning; for though the object of his writing only required the mention of Phares, yet in the twins a mystery is signified; namely, the double life of the nations, one by the Law, the other by Faith.

• From Open (2009)

  Of course my game plan was fatally flawed from the start. Pathetic, really. It couldn’t work, no matter how long the match, because you can’t win the final of a slam by playing not to lose, or waiting for your opponent to lose. My attempt to orchestrate long rallies merely emboldens Gómez. He’s a veteran who knows this might be his last shot at a slam. The only way to beat him is to take away his belief and his desire, by being aggressive. When he sees me playing conservative, orchestrating instead of dominating, it gives him heart. He wins the third set. As the fourth set begins I realize I’ve made yet another miscalculation. Most players, when they tire late in a match, lose some zip on their serve. They have trouble getting up high on tired legs. But Gómez has a slingshot serve. He never gets up high on his legs. He leans into the ball. When he tires, therefore, he leans that much more, and his natural slingshot action becomes more pronounced. I’ve been waiting for his serve to weaken, and instead it’s getting sharper. Upon winning the match, Gómez is exceedingly gracious and charming. He weeps. He waves to the cameras. He knows he’ll be a national hero in his native Ecuador. I wonder what it’s like in Ecuador. Maybe I’ll move there. Maybe that’s the only place I’ll be able to hide from the shame I feel at this moment. I sit in the locker room, head bowed, imagining what the hundreds of columnists and headline writers will say, not to mention my peers. I can hear them now. Image Is Everything, Agassi Is Nothing. Mr. Hot Lava Is a Hot Mess. Philly walks in. I see in his eyes that he doesn’t just sympathize—he lives it. This was his defeat too. He aches. Then he says the right thing, striking the right tone, and I know I’ll always love him for it. Let’s get the fuck outta this town. GIL PUSHES THE BIG TROLLEY with our bags through Charles de Gaulle Airport. I’m walking a step ahead. I stop to look at the Arrivals and Departures. Gil keeps going. The trolley has a sharp metal edge, and it pushes into my soft, exposed Achilles—I’m wearing loafers with no socks. A jet of my blood spurts onto the glassy floor. Then another. The Achilles is gushing. Gil hurries to get a bandage out of his bag, but I tell him to relax, take his time. It’s good, I say. It’s fitting. There should be a pint of my blood from my Achilles’ heel on the floor before we leave Paris.

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

  ORIGEN. The marriage-feast of Christ and the Church is filled, when they who were found by the Apostles, being restored to God, sat down to the feast. But since it behoved that both bad and good should be called, not that the bad should continue bad, but that they should put off the garments unmeet for the wedding, and should put on the marriage garments, to wit, bowels of mercy and kindness, for this cause the King goes out, that He may see them set down before the supper is set before them, that they may be detained who have the wedding garment in which He is delighted, and that he may condemn the opposite. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. The King came in to see the guests; not as though there was any place where He is not; but where He will look to give judgment, there He is said to be present; where He will not, there He seems to be absent. The day of His coming to behold is the day of judgment, when He will visit Christians seated at the board of the Scriptures. ORIGEN. But when He was come in, He found there one who had not put off his old behaviour; He saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment. He speaks of one only, because all, who after faith continue to serve that wickedness which they had before the faith, are but of one kind. GREGORY. (ubi sup.) What ought we to understand by the wedding garment, but charity? For this the Lord had upon Him, when He came to espouse the Church to Himself. He then enters in to the wedding feast, but without the wedding garment, who has faith in the Church, but not charity. AUGUSTINE. (cont. Faust. xxii. 19.) Or, he goes to the feast without a garment, who goes seeking his own, and not the Bridegroom’s honour. HILARY. Or; The wedding garment is the grace of the Holy Spirit, and the purity of that heavenly temper, which taken up on the confession of a good enquiry is to be preserved pure and unspotted for the company of the kingdom of heaven. JEROME. Or; The marriage garment is the commandments of the Lord, and the works which are done under the Law and the Gospel, and form the clothing of the new man. Whoso among the Christian body shall be found in the day of judgment not to have these, is straightway condemned. He saith unto him, Friend, how camest thou in hither, not having a wedding garment? He calls him friend, because he was invited to the wedding as being a friend by faith; but He charges him with want of manners in polluting by his filthy dress the elegance of the wedding entertainment. ORIGEN. And forasmuch as he who is in sin, and puts not on the Lord Jesus Christ, has no excuse, it follows, But he was speechless.

• From Open (2009)

  Fucking disaster, I tell him. My hairpiece—look! He examines it. We’ll let it dry, then clip it in place, he says. With what? Bobby pins. He runs all over Paris looking for bobby pins. He can’t find any. He phones me and says, What the hell kind of city is this? No bobby pins? In the hotel lobby he bumps into Chris Evert and asks her for bobby pins. She doesn’t have any. She asks why he needs them. He doesn’t answer. At last he finds a friend of our sister Rita, who has a bag full of bobby pins. He helps me reconfigure the hairpiece and set it in place, and keeps it there with no fewer than twenty bobby pins. Will it hold? I ask. Yeah, yeah. Just don’t move around a lot. We both laugh darkly. Of course I could play without my hairpiece. But after months and months of derision, criticism, mockery, I’m too self-conscious. Image Is Everything? What would they say if they knew I’ve been wearing a hairpiece all this time? Win or lose, they wouldn’t talk about my game. They would talk only about my hair. Instead of a few kids at the Bollettieri Academy laughing at me, or twelve thousand Germans at Davis Cup, the whole world would be laughing. I can close my eyes and almost hear it. And I know I can’t take it. WARMING UP BEFORE THE MATCH, I pray. Not for a win, but for my hairpiece to stay on. Under normal circumstances, playing in my first final of a slam, I’d be tense. But my tenuous hairpiece has me catatonic. Whether or not it’s slipping, I imagine that it’s slipping. With every lunge, every leap, I picture it landing on the clay, like a hawk my father shot from the sky. I can hear a gasp going up from the crowd. I can picture millions of people suddenly leaning closer to their TVs, turning to each other and in dozens of languages and dialects saying some version of: Did Andre Agassi’s hair just fall off? My game plan for Gómez reflects my jangled nerves, my timidity. Knowing he doesn’t have young legs, knowing he’ll fold in a fifth set, I plan to stretch out the match, orchestrate long rallies, grind him down. As the match begins, however, it’s clear that Gómez also knows his age, and thus he’s trying to speed everything up. He’s playing quick, risky tennis. He wins the first set in a hurry. He loses the second set, but also in a hurry. Now I know that the longest we’ll be out here is three hours, rather than four, which means conditioning won’t play a role. This is now a shot-making match, the kind Gómez can win. With two sets completed, and not much time off the clock, I’m facing a guy who’s going to be fresh throughout, even if we go five.

• From The Confessions (400)

  Verily Thou enjoinest me continency from the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the ambition of the world. Thou enjoinest continency from concubinage; and for wedlock itself, Thou hast counselled something better than what Thou hast permitted. And since Thou gavest it, it was done, even before I became a dispenser of Thy Sacrament. But there yet live in my memory (whereof I have much spoken) the images of such things as my ill custom there fixed; which haunt me, strengthless when I am awake: but in sleep, not only so as to give pleasure, but even to obtain assent, and what is very like reality. Yea, so far prevails the illusion of the image, in my soul and in my flesh, that, when asleep, false visions persuade to that which when waking, the true cannot. Am I not then myself, O Lord my God? And yet there is so much difference betwixt myself and myself, within that moment wherein I pass from waking to sleeping, or return from sleeping to waking! Where is reason then, which, awake, resisteth such suggestions? And should the things themselves be urged on it, it remaineth unshaken. Is it clasped up with the eyes? is it lulled asleep with the senses of the body? And whence is it that often even in sleep we resist, and mindful of our purpose, and abiding most chastely in it, yield no assent to such enticements? And yet so much difference there is, that when it happeneth otherwise, upon waking we return to peace of conscience: and by this very difference discover that we did not, what yet we be sorry that in some way it was done in us.

• From Three Women (2019)

  Count five mirrored the first two counts but happened in Maggie’s car. Maggie says she picked him up from TGI Friday’s because he was drunk and drove him to his car, which was parked near his house, he’d explained to her, so that he wouldn’t have to drive under the influence on the busier roads. On the way she alleges that he got his fingers in her pants, and she almost hit a parked car. Several throats are cleared. Lives are about to be decided by people who have nothing to do with them. Maggie squeezes her father’s scapular as the foreperson speaks. “On counts one, two, and five, we have unanimously found Aaron Knodel not guilty.” Everyone looks at the defendant. Everyone wants to know how his face will register the verdict. Relief, of course. But is it the relief of a good man who was needlessly tormented? This is plainly the view of most on this day. But more revealing perhaps are the views of those who see him otherwise, who see the relief of a guilty man. The world sees Aaron Knodel as people are primed to see him, or, perhaps more chillingly, what people see is based on what someone they respect has told them to see. One way for those primed to see guilt—he is a scheming monster, only a few steps above a common pedophile. He orchestrated this young woman’s infatuation, he pushed and pulled the perfect amount on purpose, became a centaur: half married teacher and half boyfriend. Another way of seeing the defendant is as a good man brought to the edge by a young woman, neither of them terribly at fault, but certainly the defendant isn’t evil. Perhaps he even tried to stay away but she pressed him.

• From Three Women (2019)

  The judge says that the female juror was rushed to the ER because she was suddenly unable to recognize family members. On top of this she refused to provide a blood sample. In the days that follow, the salient stuff finds its way out of the hospital, into the courthouse, out of the courthouse, and onto the street. For one, the juror did not disclose to the court during jury selection that she herself had been sexually assaulted in the past. Then it’s leaked that as she was taken away, she was shouting to the sheriff’s deputies that it was up to her to protect the children. Judge McCullough thanks the jurors and excuses them from the trial. Aaron gets up and kisses an older woman on the cheek. Maggie doesn’t look at him. She can’t. She feels disemboweled. She’s disgusted that he held a rosary in the fingers that had been inside her and disgusted that he brought the rosary to compete with her father’s scapular. She feels, suddenly, like a fool. For believing that the notes would do him in, that nobody could ignore those notes. Without conditions, like our love! The judge would later uphold the three not-guilty verdicts and declare a mistrial on the other two. Aaron Knodel would be reinstated as a teacher at Sheyenne High School. But why, Maggie wonders, didn’t anyone believe the notes were his and think the notes were bad? Why didn’t anyone imagine a troubled child had idealized her teacher, who in turn took that adulation and sullied it? Who was now denying he had ever written the following words: “Sometimes doing the wrong thing just feels way too right.” “The wait for you is sometimes unbearable!” “Remember how bad your hands were shaking? It makes me feel good to know you are so excited!” “From the first night I dreamed of you, I knew I was hooked on you!” “You get me to reveal the best and worst of me… and you still love me!” “ ‘17’—you seem older! How many days are left? [image "Smiley face emoji" file=image_rsrc355.jpg] ” She begins to bite the inside of her cheek so hard that she can taste the blood in her mouth. She wants to rip her vampire teacher’s tongue out. Instead she leaves quietly, with what remains of her family. On the way out the door, she hears a female juror tell the media she hopes Knodel’s family will never have to go through this pain again. linaLike clockwork: the second Lina isn’t thinking of him, he can feel it. Across a couple of Indiana state roads he can sense the reins loosening and he texts a frown face. She has just fallen asleep in her hotel room when the vibration jolts her awake.

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

  Before entering upon a discussion as to why the government feared Tolstoy, we must first have a glimpse of his earlier years, and briefly follow his heroic self-extrication from the corruption of the aristocratic society into which he was born, and his gradual rise to the exalted station of greatest reformer in the history of Russia. Must hear story of his life. He was born eighty-two years ago of an ancient noble family. His childhood years were spent in the midst of the gay military life of Moscow. Yet more gay and more corrupt was the society that surrounded him during his university life. Experiencing a revulsion of feeling against the kind of life he was leading, he fled from the university before graduation, returned to his family estate at Yasnaya Polyana and took up the life of a farmer. This impetuous flight, and a later one of which we shall hear presently, may throw some light upon his last flight, a few weeks ago, which came to a pathetic end, and of which we shall speak in our next discourse. His early glory and shame. Five years long he lived the life of a peasant, when a call to arms landed him on the battlefields of the Crimea, where he soon won distinction for heroic service. But the dissoluteness of campaign-life soon disclosed that the Tartar in him was not yet dead. He returned to the debaucheries of his former years, and, according to his own confession, with all the greater zest, because of the double glory that had come to him, that of a distinguished soldier and of a brilliant author. He had taken to story-writing, and displayed in it a talent that made success instantaneous. He became the lion of his day, and was courted by high and low. And the greater his glory the more unrestrained grew his libertinism.[1] His reform. But there were lucid intervals, now and then, during which he held up to himself the lofty ideals of his former peasant life, and bitterly he denounced himself, and even portrayed himself unsparingly in the character-sketches of some of his novels. His better self acquired mastery at last; he threw off the yoke that had held him fast to the corrupt society of his day, and for the second time he fled to his estate.

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

  PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. Or otherwise; Whenever God will try His Church, He enters into it that He may see the guests; and if He finds any one not having on the wedding garment, He enquires of him, How then were you made a Christian, if you neglect these works? Such a one Christ gives over to His ministers, that is, to seducing leaders, who bind his hands, that is, his works, and his feet, that is, the motions of his mind, and cast him into darkness, that is, into the errors of the Gentiles or the Jews, or into heresy. The nigher darkness is that of the Gentiles, for they have never heard the truth which they despise; the outer darkness is that of the Jews, who have heard but do not believe; the outermost is that of the heretics, who have heard and have learned. 22:15–2215. Then went the Pharisees, and took counsel how they might entangle him in his talk. 16. And they sent out unto him their disciples with the Herodians, saying, Master, we know that thou art true, and teachest the way of God in truth, neither carest thou for any man: for thou regardest not the person of men. 17. Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Cæsar, or not? 18. But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites? 19. Shew me the tribute money. And they brought unto him a penny. 20. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? 21. They say unto him, Cæsar’s. Then saith he unto them, Render therefore unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s. 22. When they had heard these words, they marvelled, and left him, and went their way. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. As when one seeks to dam a stream of running water, as soon as one outlet is stopped up it makes another channel for itself; so the malevolence of the Jews, foiled on one hand, seeks itself out another course. Then went the Pharisees; went to the Herodians. Such as the plan was, such were the planners; They send unto Him their disciples with the Herodians. GLOSS. (ord.) Who as unknown to Him, were more likely to ensnare Him, and so through them they might take Him, which they feared to do of themselves because of the populace.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  Greek classics; despite its extraordinarily elegant standards, the work was pushed forward with great speed: in the twenty years 1494–1515, twenty-seven editones principes of Greek authors and works of reference were produced, and when Aldus died in 1515 not a single major Greek author remained unprinted. These works were printed in very considerable quantities, and at prices well below even low-quality manuscript copies of similar length. The rapid development of printing, with its tremendous concentration on works of seminal interest to religion and reform, posed an entirely new problem to the Church and State authorities which traditionally controlled the dissemination of knowledge. Censoring or preventing the circulation of printed books was essentially the same as controlling manuscripts; but the difference in speed and scale was absolutely crucial. It took at least a generation for the censors to tackle it, and they were never able to exercise the same degree of effective supervision as in the days before cheap printing. Erasmus was born into this new arena of scholarship and communication in 1466. His background was quintessentially that of the old age. He was the bastard son of a priest, by a washerwoman. This was the common fate of a vast number of people at the time. It testified to the unwillingness of the Church to sanction clerical marriage and its inability to stamp out concubinage. Probably as many as half the men in orders had ‘wives’ and families. Behind all the New Learning and the theological debates, clerical celibacy was, in its own way, the biggest single issue at the Reformation. It was a great social problem and, other factors being equal, it tended to tip the balance in favour of reform. As a rule, the only hope for the child of a priest was to go into the Church himself, thus unwillingly or with no great enthusiasm, taking vows which he might subsequently regret: the evil tended to perpetuate itself. Many thousands of men (and women) were trapped in this predicament, grudging and awkward members of a privileged class, sentenced for life to a spiritual role for which they had no calling and – since no seminaries existed – no training. Erasmus was a case in point. After his birth his parents no longer lived together. In an autobiographical fragment, written when he was already world famous, he concealed his bastardy, indicating that it still rankled. His schooling was wretched. The Brethren of the Common Life, founded by Gerard Groote, were one of the more successful of the idealistic orders of the later Middle Ages. They were genuinely poor, they took their social work seriously; in some ways they adumbrated the Protestant reformers by their stress on the Bible and their distaste for elaborate forms of