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.

Page 41 of 267 · 20 per page

• From The City of God

  318 Books That Matter: The City of God Similarly, here, the serpent would have had no power to effect anything had we not been receptive to his temptations. Indeed, to conceive of something as a temptation already bespeaks an ambivalence in one’s soul about whether one’s values and aims are the ones most suitable for your own happiness. To feel tempted, for Augustine, is already to be fallen. Which brings us back to the idea that the sin was already there, waiting in the privacy, the secrecy, of the heart. This description of the Fall as trivial but devastating is worth reflecting on a bit more. The interiority of the act makes it seem inconsequential, insubstantial. But, the consequence of the deed is truly dramatic, for it produces in us a powerfully shattering incoherence. The first punishment we felt was shame, which is a disharmony in the body, a frustrated recognition of a rebellion in our flesh and in our soul that we find sometimes unable to put down, a punishment, Augustine says, which answered to their own disobedience. That is to say, the first perversion in which the soul delighted left it bereft of the body's good service, and caused the division of the self into flesh versus spirit; will suffocate by appetite. And this is our first punishment, one which certainly feels, Augustine says, like a kind of death, an opposition between body and soul in this way. But our malady is not just psychological; even the body changes in sin. The body’s forms of agency and control are vastly reduced, and those powers that remain are severely weakened. Augustine actually has a fantastic list of things that some bodies can do, that give partial witness to what all bodies were once able to do effortlessly. I’ll read this to you, and understand that when I teach this to my students this is the thing I always begin with since they could never imagine that some bishop 1600 years ago would list this stuff. It’s fantastic. This is Augustine. We know, too, that humans are differently constituted from one another, and some have rare and remarkable powers of doing with

• From The City of God

  Nevertheless, for our purpose of refuting those who are unable to comprehend what true sanctity is, and who therefore insult over our outraged Christian women, it is enough that in the instance of this noble Roman matron it was said in her praise, "There were two, but the adultery was the crime of only one. "For Lucretia was confidently believed to be superior to the contamination of any consenting thought to the adultery. And accordingly, since she killed herself for being subjected to an outrage in which she had no guilty part, it is obvious that this act of hers was prompted not by the love of purity, but by the overwhelming burden of her shame. She was ashamed that so foul a crime had been perpetrated upon her, though without her abetting; and this matron, with the Roman love of glory in her veins, was seized with a proud dread that, if she continued to live, it would be supposed she willingly did not resent the wrong that had been done her. She could not exhibit to men her conscience but she judged that her self-inflicted punishment would testify her state of mind; and she burned with shame at the thought that her patient endurance of the foul affront that another had done her, should be construed into complicity with him. Not such was the decision of the Christian women who suffered as she did, and yet survive. They declined to avenge upon themselves the guilt of others, and so add crimes of their own to those crimes in which they had no share. For this they would have done had their shame driven them to homicide, as the lust of their enemies had driven them to adultery. Within their own souls, in the witness of their own conscience, they enjoy the glory of chastity. In the sight of God, too, they are esteemed pure, and this contents them; they ask no more:it suffices them to have opportunity of doing good, and they decline to evade the distress of human suspicion, lest they thereby deviate from the divine law. [78] Virgil, AEneid, vi. 434.

• From The City of God

  343 Lecture 16 Transcript—The Two Cities and the Two Loves (Book 14) ourselves in a way. That splitting, that incoherence, that ability to step back from yourself and say, “Wow, I’m really angry here. I wonder why” that is sin. For Augustine, we were not meant to be able to do that. Grief and fear and pain in our world typically arise directly from our bad judgments and actions, and indirectly from the misordered relations between our soul and our embodiment. We lost our simple integrity in the rebellion that constitutes original sin. We shattered into separate centers of reason, will, and appetite. And often, more than censure for each. The punishment, then, of sin, fits the crime of sin perfectly. And as Augustine says a bit further on, “It was since man forsook God by pleasing himself that he was handed over to himself and because he did not obey God he could not obey himself. Hence came the more obvious misery where man does not live as he wishes to live.” The great irony of this punishment is that it is precisely the opposite of what we thought in sin we would gain. What Adam and Eve wanted, Augustine proposes is what we thought was mastery, and yet they were delivered over to their servitude. The pride of the transgressor, shown in search for excuses, was worse than the sin itself; and so we are made more impotent by our very desire for inordinate power. This is the deep logic of punishment, the most immediate victim of our sin is ourselves. This language of the disobedience of the body might make us think about sex. And Augustine treats sexuality at length here, for he sees it as a paradigm example of our moral calamitousness. But the calamity does not lie in our sexuality itself, but in its disorderedness. Augustine is often accused of being against the body, and especially of being against the sexual body. That’s not quite right. In fact, unlike other theologians of his time, and many non-Christian thinkers as well, he thought sexuality was part of our created nature, and thus created good by God; not a consequence, as many Christians did, of our fallenness.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 16. --Of the Violation of the Consecrated and Other Christian Virgins, to Which They Were Subjected in Captivity and to Which Their Own Will Gave No Consent; And Whether This Contaminated Their Souls. But they fancy they bring a conclusive charge against Christianity, when they aggravate the horror of captivity by adding that not only wives and unmarried maidens, but even consecrated virgins, were violated. But truly, with respect to this, it is not Christian faith, nor piety, nor even the virtue of chastity, which is hemmed into any difficulty; the only difficulty is so to treat the subject as to satisfy at once modesty and reason. And in discussing it we shall not be so careful to reply to our accusers as to comfort our friends. Let this, therefore, in the first place, be laid down as an unassailable position, that the virtue which makes the life good has its throne in the soul, and thence rules the members of the body, which becomes holy in virtue of the holiness of the will; and that while the will remains firm and unshaken, nothing that another person does with the body, or upon the body, is any fault of the person who suffers it, so long as he cannot escape it without sin. But as not only pain may be inflicted, but lust gratified on the body of another, whenever anything of this latter kind takes place, shame invades even a thoroughly pure spirit from which modesty has not departed,--shame, lest that act which could not be suffered without some sensual pleasure, should be believed to have been committed also with some assent of the will.

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

  His clothes were dirty and he smelled unwashed, and rumor had it he had once called Sister MPH a bad name, but that couldn’t have been possible because he would have been suspended permanently from school. Alvin used to browbeat me into lending him my pencil to draw endless pictures of airplanes dropping huge penile bombs. He would always promise to give me the pictures when he was finished. But of course, whenever he was finished, he would decide that the picture was too good for a girl, so he would have to keep it, and make me another. Yet I never stopped hoping for one of them, because he drew airplanes very well. He also would scratch his head and shake out the dandruff onto our joint spelling book or reader, and then tell me the flakes of dandruff were dead lice. I believed him in this, also, and was constantly terrified of catching cooties. But Alvin and I worked out our own system together for reading. He couldn’t read, but he knew all his numbers, and I could read words, but I couldn’t find the right page. The Brownies were never called up to the front of the room; we had to read in anonymity from our double seats, where we scrunched over at the edges, ordinarily, to leave room in the middle for our two guardian angels to sit. But whenever we had to share a book our guardian angels had to jump around us and sit on the outside edge of our seats. Therefore, Alvin would show me the right pages to turn to when Sister called them out, and I would whisper the right words to him whenever it came his turn to read. Inside of a week after we devised this scheme of things, we had gotten out of the Brownies together. Since we shared a reader, we always went up together to read with the Fairies, so we had a really good thing going there for a while. But Alvin began to get sick around Thanksgiving, and was absent a lot, and he didn’t come back to school at all after Christmas. I used to miss his dive-bomber pictures, but most of all I missed his page numbers. After a few times of being called up by myself and not being able to read, I landed back in the Brownies again. Years later I found out that Alvin had died of tuberculosis over Christmas, and that was why we all had been X-rayed in the auditorium after Mass on the first day back to school from Christmas vacation. I spent a few more weeks in the Brownies with my mouth almost shut during reading lesson, unless the day’s story fell on page eight, or ten, or twenty, which were the three numbers I knew. Then, over one weekend, we had our first writing assignment.

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

  My eyeglasses came from the eye clinic of the medical center, and it took three days to get a new pair made. We could not afford to buy more than one pair at a time, nor did it occur to my parents that such an extravagance might be necessary. I was almost sightless without them, but my punishment for having broken them was that I had to go to school anyway, even though I could see nothing. My sisters delivered me to my classroom with a note from my mother saying I had broken my glasses despite the fact they were tied to me by the strip of elastic. I was never supposed to take my glasses off except just before getting into bed, but I was endlessly curious about these magical circles of glass that were rapidly becoming a part of me, transforming my universe, and remaining movable. I was always trying to examine them with my naked, nearsighted eyes, usually dropping them in the process. Since I could not see at all to do any work from the blackboard, Sister Mary of PH made me sit in the back of the room on the window seat with a dunce cap on. She had the rest of the class offer up a prayer for my poor mother who had such a naughty girl who broke her glasses and caused her parents such needless extra expense to replace them. She also had them offer up a special prayer for me to stop being such a wicked-hearted child. I amused myself by counting the rainbows of color that danced like a halo around the lamp on Sister Mary of PH’s desk, watching the starburst patterns of light that the incandescent light bulb became without my glasses. But I missed them, and not being able to see. I never once gave a thought to the days when I believed that bulbs were starburst patterns of color, because that was what all light looked like to me. It must have been close to summer by this time. As I sat with the dunce cap on, I can remember the sun pouring through the classroom window hot upon my back, as the rest of the class dutifully entoned their Hail Marys for my soul, and I played secret games with the distorted rainbows of light, until Sister noticed and made me stop blinking my eyes so fast. How I Became a Poet “Wherever the bird with no feet flew she found trees with no limbs.” When the strongest words for what I have to offer come out of me sounding like words I remember from my mother’s mouth, then I either have to reassess the meaning of everything I have to say now, or re-examine the worth of her old words .

• From The City of God

  "Fate bars the way:around their keep The slow unlovely waters creep, And bind with ninefold chain. " [78] Or perhaps she is not there, because she slew herself conscious of guilt, not of innocence? She herself alone knows her reason; but what if she was betrayed by the pleasure of the act, and gave some consent to Sextus, though so violently abusing her, and then was so affected with remorse, that she thought death alone could expiate her sin? Even though this were the case, she ought still to have held her hand from suicide, if she could with her false gods have accomplished a fruitful repentance. However, if such were the state of the case, and if it were false that there were two, but one only committed adultery; if the truth were that both were involved in it, one by open assault, the other by secret consent, then she did not kill an innocent woman; and therefore her erudite defenders may maintain that she is not among that class of the dwellers below "who guiltless sent themselves to doom. " But this case of Lucretia is in such a dilemma, that if you extenuate the homicide, you confirm the adultery:if you acquit her of adultery, you make the charge of homicide heavier; and there is no way out of the dilemma, when one asks, If she was adulterous, why praise her? if chaste, why slay her?

• From The City of God

  Chapter 19. --That It is Now Necessary, as It Was Not Before Man Sinned, to Bridle Anger and Lust by the Restraining Influence of Wisdom. Hence it is that even the philosophers who have approximated to the truth have avowed that anger and lust are vicious mental emotions, because, even when exercised towards objects which wisdom does not prohibit, they are moved in an ungoverned and inordinate manner, and consequently need the regulation of mind and reason. And they assert that this third part of the mind is posted as it were in a kind of citadel, to give rule to these other parts, so that, while it rules and they serve, man's righteousness is preserved without a breach. [747] These parts, then, which they acknowledge to be vicious even in a wise and temperate man, so that the mind, by its composing and restraining influence, must bridle and recall them from those objects towards which they are unlawfully moved, and give them access to those which the law of wisdom sanctions,--that anger, e. g. , may be allowed for the enforcement of a just authority, and lust for the duty of propagating offspring,--these parts, I say, were not vicious in Paradise before sin, for they were never moved in opposition to a holy will towards any object from which it was necessary that they should be withheld by the restraining bridle of reason. For though now they are moved in this way, and are regulated by a bridling and restraining power, which those who live temperately, justly, and godly exercise, sometimes with ease, and sometimes with greater difficulty, this is not the sound health of nature, but the weakness which results from sin. And how is it that shame does not hide the acts and words dictated by anger or other emotions, as it covers the motions of lust, unless because the members of the body which we employ for accomplishing them are moved, not by the emotions themselves, but by the authority of the consenting will? For he who in his anger rails at or even strikes some one, could not do so were not his tongue and hand moved by the authority of the will, as also they are moved when there is no anger. But the organs of generation are so subjected to the rule of lust, that they have no motion but what it communicates. It is this we are ashamed of; it is this which blushingly hides from the eyes of onlookers. And rather will a man endure a crowd of witnesses when he is unjustly venting his anger on some one, than the eye of one man when he innocently copulates with his wife. [747] See Plato's Republic, book iv.

• From The City of God

  And therefore neither ought such persons as lead an abandoned and damnable life to be confident of salvation, though they persevere to the end in the communion of the Church catholic, and comfort themselves with the words, "He that endureth to the end shall be saved. "By the iniquity of their life they abandon that very righteousness of life which Christ is to them, whether it be by fornication, or by perpetrating in their body the other uncleannesses which the apostle would not so much as mention, or by a dissolute luxury, or by doing any one of those things of which he says, "They who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. "Consequently, they who do such things shall not exist anywhere but in eternal punishment, since they cannot be in the kingdom of God. For, while they continue in such things to the very end of life, they cannot be said to abide in Christ to the end; for to abide in Him is to abide in the faith of Christ. And this faith, according to the apostle's definition of it, "worketh by love. " [1568]And "love," as he elsewhere says, "worketh no evil. " [1569] Neither can these persons be said to eat the body of Christ, for they cannot even be reckoned among His members. For, not to mention other reasons, they cannot be at once the members of Christ and the members of a harlot. In fine, He Himself, when He says, "He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him," [1570] shows what it is in reality, and not sacramentally, to eat His body and drink His blood; for this is to dwell in Christ, that He also may dwell in us. So that it is as if He said, He that dwelleth not in me, and in whom I do not dwell, let him not say or think that he eateth my body or drinketh my blood. Accordingly, they who are not Christ's members do not dwell in Him. And they who make themselves members of a harlot, are not members of Christ unless they have penitently abandoned that evil, and have returned to this good to be reconciled to it. [1565] Gal. v. 19-21. [1566] John vi. 50, 51. [1567] 1 Cor. x. 17. [1568] Gal. v. 6. [1569] Rom. xiii. 10. [1570] John vi. 56.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Just how persuasive his story was is impossible to tell at this distance.77 His own community seems not to have expressed doubts, but his opponents never accepted it. The suspicions the Donatists professed in the 390s would recur, better argued, in the 420s in the writings of a young rival we will come to know later—Julian, bishop of Eclanum in southern Italy. Perhaps these polemicists were merely using whatever weapons came to hand, but at least some of their followers will have believed what they heard: that Augustine had never given up his suspect behavior, that he had left Africa one step ahead of the law and crept back when it was safe to do so, and that his idiosyncrasies of doctrine and practice could be explained as a continuation of his earlier subversive and illegal ways. Augustine had faced these suspicions when he came to Hippo. There he had to explain himself and persuade his new bishop of his orthodoxy. Only a year after he arrived, a public debate in 392 with a Manichee priest named Fortunatus provided a lucky chance for him to be seen in public attacking his old friends. The transcript Augustine published begins as he says these words: “What I used to think was true, I now think is wrong.”78 He made a point of conducting the debate not in his own church but in the city baths, where Christians and non-Christians of all parties could hear him, see him, and appreciate his triumph. The crowd is recorded (by Augustine’s secretaries) to have broken up the first day of the debate in an imbroglio with Fortunatus, outraged by his interpretation of Paul’s epistles. When Fortunatus left the debate the next day, thoughtful and not loudly disagreeing with Augustine (rather as he had arrived), Augustine crowed with success and made sure the transcript was published. Perhaps he really did impress the crowd that day, and that was probably his real goal. But gradually as he moved to prominence in the African church, high-minded and ferociously celibate, he attracted attention and the old whispers floated again. How, when, and where Augustine began telling the story of his past we do not know, but we can see him rehearsing it in a passage of his Free Choice of the Will, probably finished while he was still only a priest. He tries a thought experiment on us there: What if a man were found, he speculates, who went through something like this:

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Even in the short compass of this first draft, Augustine’s story-making is telling. When expanded in 397 into the Confessions, it retained all the features of the shorter form and developed new ones. It now gave names and places and dates, selectively, to Augustine’s own experience, but it used all the resources of Augustine’s art to show that the center of the narrative was not the youth recalled but the middle age presently lived. The story is told in relation to an ending that was invisible to Augustine and his contemporaries as he lived it, and even invisible to himself for some years after he’d lived the central events. In that story, the Manichee phase naturally recedes into the background, becoming merely a phase. Augustine minimizes the intensity of his association with the group, and he repeatedly states a length of time that is not quite in accord with the facts we can elicit from his other statements. “Nine years” he says he spent with them, but from his nineteenth year to his thirtieth birthday, dating from the point of his first falling in with them until the point when he finally breaks off association with the Manichee community in Rome to go to Milan, the minimum tally stands at eleven years of his life. And for all his suggestions that he had his doubts about the group from some time much earlier, and that the coming of an unpersuasive Manichee teacher named Faustus confirmed his skepticism, it was only, in the end, when he left Rome to go to a city where there was apparently no community of Manichees to take up with, that he made a decisive break. As he fades from the narrative, Augustine the Manichee is worth a thoughtful look. We happen to know a lot about a man named Secundinus, who was one of the other Manichean “auditors” with whom Augustine passed time at Rome in 384, and he provides us our best contemporary picture of the young zealot. Twenty years or more later, Secundinus came upon Augustine’s anti-Manichean writings (and probably the Confessions) and was shocked that his old acquaintance had gone so far astray. He wanted to reconvert Augustine, but Augustine wrote back peremptorily and polemically. Years later, Augustine would say the reply was his best work against the Manichees, though it reads to us as something slight and insubstantial, a pamphlet of ten thousand words or so.81 The letter Secundinus wrote to Augustine survives more or less intact. Not without charm, it breathes the same atmosphere of scriptural texts and exhortation as the works of Augustine himself. Gentle and inviting, it surprises the reader to see Augustine the object of such adversarial benevolence, such high-minded disdain.

• From American Religious History (2001)

  Scope: After the Revolution, the Methodist Church began to grow rapidly, especially on the expanding frontier. Its ministers, unlike those of the Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches, were not settled in parishes. Instead, they were “itinerants,” constantly traveling on horseback and following settlers wherever they went, making sure that no outpost of America was beyond the reach of the gospel. Some itinerants, such as Francis Asbury, became legends in their own lifetimes for marathon preaching journeys in the face of great hardships. The trans-Appalachian frontier witnessed wildly emotional revivals, including one in Cane Ridge, Kentucky (1801), in which converts smitten with a sense of their own sinfulness barked like dogs, howled, and flung themselves into the mud. After the revivals, however, Methodism entailed turning from a tough, manly way of life to one that was humble, forgiving, meek, and familial. Revivalists like Asbury and Charles Grandison Finney believed that Christians must act on their newly awakened faith. They sponsored social reform projects, including temperance, sabbatarianism, and abolition of slavery. In this setting, moreover, women began to take up religious leadership positions, among them the Shakers’ founder, Mother Ann Lee, and the pioneer of the Holiness Movement, Phoebe Palmer. Outline I. A series of revivals transformed the expanding nation between 1800 and 1825. A. Trans-Appalachia was settled rapidly after the Revolution. B. Clergy tried to follow the settlers and bring religion to them. 1. James McGready invented the camp meeting at Gasper River, Kentucky, in 1800. 2. He and Barton Stone led the Cane Ridge revival in 1801. 3. Between 10,000 and 25,000 people attended it. 4. Many converts underwent extreme physical sensations. 5. The anthropological concept of “liminality” helps us understand it. ©2001 The Teaching Company. 34

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  In Milan his talent failed him, his career came apart in his hands, and he slunk back to Africa, where he saw well which way the wind was blowing and made no profession of Manicheism again. Whether he had actually been baptized in any branch of Christianity in Italy is unclear, but when he did finally declare an allegiance in Africa, it was not to the true church, but to the small, pretentious fragment of church that kowtowed to the empire and its powers of persecution. He had been a Christian all his life, but never spent a day of it in the true church: which brand of heresy, or which mixture of brands, he chose to indulge was of little interest. He was thoroughly a bad sort. The weakest link in that narrative is instructive. It makes light of the books Augustine wrote against the Manichees on his return to Africa. But the making of books was not an art in that world that would make the author’s views widely known. Few members of the Donatist church would have access to copies of Augustine’s books or know their contents, and they could be easily dismissed or even suspected as deliberate disinformation. Whatever its merits, a version of that competing narrative lies behind the story of the Confessions. Whatever we come away believing, we must be made to forget the hostile counternarrative. We do not understand Augustine at this crucial point in his life unless we see that the central preoccupations of the Confessions are the Manichees, whom he seeks to dismiss before the work is one-third complete—and the Donatists, whom he never mentions. Between them he sets his own performance, an artful confession, exculpatory in the way public confession exculpates and justifies at the same time. Modern studies of the Confessions are all at pains to say and show how the text goes beyond what we think of as confession. We explain carefully the triple sense Augustine in his sermons often explains of “confession of sin” (the conventional notion of confession), “confession of faith” (a phrase still familiar to us), and “confession of praise” (the form least understood in his own time and ours, the form of confession that consists not of blaming the self but praising god, not of lowering the river but of raising the bridge, so to speak).96 While everything we say is quite true, it is also slightly irrelevant. In a vital sense, vital to Augustine’s life and future in the African church, the Confessions are indeed his full public confession of his past, dramatically meant to mislead his readers. Here is my past, he says; see how it justifies my present. The power of god has swept me to the place I am. Here I stand (to anticipate Luther), I can no other.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  The Confessions are the work of a big frog in a small pond, determined to seize his moment of opportunity. The church he’d joined in Milan had been languishing for a century in Africa, as its better-established rival, that of the Donatists, flourished. Augustine believed with a zealot’s conviction that his church was the true church and with a snob’s commitment to his cosmopolitanism he was determined to make the church’s success his success (and vice versa). He was talented, well connected, and driven, and his church would indeed prevail—a future that must have seemed highly improbable to most observers in 397. But Augustine was a man with a past. Coming to such a place as Hippo as he did, a stranger with no friends and no family (his sister and her community of religious women only later took up residence there), inevitably drew speculative gazes. He was defined by who he was elsewhere. To be his father’s son from Tagaste was no great distinction, but he was also a young man who had had a disconcertingly flashy career in Italy that ended rather abruptly. For him to turn up as priest in the smaller of two local Christian factions set tongues wagging. His ordination as bishop had been somewhat irregular, but he professed not to have known that. And he was rumored to be sending love tokens to a married lady, but he explained that it was all a misunderstanding of something perfectly innocent. Furthermore, Augustine’s very public early Manicheism could not be ignored. The aggressively orthodox churchman of Hippo had spent a decade of his life, from about the time he was first noticed in Carthage as a promising student until he sailed away to Italy in pursuit of fame and glory, in a proscribed sect. After four years in Milan he returned with neither fame nor glory to show for his time away and settled quietly at his family home in Tagaste. His son Adeodatus was with him, but he had sent away his common-law wife, Adeodatus’s mother, at his own mother’s insistence. He ostentatiously avoided the natural prerogative of the landowner, the sexual use of female slaves.76 To some eyes, he was enacting the continence that Manicheism preached at least as enthusiastically as other Christians did. When Augustine appeared on the public scene again, in Hippo as priest, he was professing to have been baptized a catholic Christian while in Italy, by no less a figure than Ambrose of Milan.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  Augustine took his Manicheism seriously. He wrote and debated in defense of the sect and surely (though he nowhere brings himself to say this) participated in their daily liturgies. Augustine himself never became a member of the elect, but he must have considered the possibility and yet cannot bring himself to talk about it. He presents his detachment from the sect as a matter of his own choice, but religious advancement in late antiquity was more often a question of being invited to advance rather than merely choosing to do so. Augustine, living with his common-law wife and their child, was very likely too much a man of the flesh for the Manichees to take seriously. His later ditherings in Milan over how to live the life of philosophical retirement while maintaining a domestic sexual attachment suggest a recurrent pattern the Manichees had seen as well. When rumors went about later that Augustine had been sending love tokens to a married woman, some were entirely unsurprised, and a few insiders regarded him as a washed-up Manichee, the one who couldn’t cut it. Augustine in 397, telling the story of his Manichee years, had reason to minimize. He had left Africa a Manichee (and a polemical and outspoken one), returning four years later a belligerent Caecilianist, telling one and all that he had been baptized an orthodox Christian while away. On his return, he took up with and was accepted by a minority sect in Africa, the Caecilianists, and it was with them that he advanced to clerical office. For the rest of his life, Augustine would be surrounded by suspicions that he was still more or less a Manichee. The Augustine we should miss the most, of all the Augustines who never were, is the one who never left the Manichees, who threw all his talent and energy into defending and defining the most extreme of his causes. The Manichee Faustus, originally from Milevis, was what Augustine could have become; a well-educated man who fell among the Manichees and knew success among them and scorn everywhere else. Augustine found Faustus less profound than he had hoped, but the extensive work he wrote years later, Against Faustus, reveals a figure of considerable substance. If Augustine had tried to take the step of becoming one of the elect and not merely an auditor, he might have stayed in that community. Perhaps he stayed in the outer circles because his sexual appetites were too recalcitrant, or even because he found the Manichee elite inadequately devoted to their austerities.91 His zeal as a celibate Manichee would surely have equaled his zeal as a celibate catholic, with the added reinforcement that Manichees would even more readily support and understand his hostility to sensuality and thus aid him in the sublimation or derailment of his energies. The risk is that we would know very little of this Augustine, his work and even his existence perhaps suppressed by the orthodoxy that prevailed.

• From Augustine: A New Biography (2005)

  But were there slaves?41 Slaves have been called the electricity of ancient domestic life, indispensably labor-saving, rarely mentioned by those who used and abused them. In the awkward and embarrassed account he gave of his clergy’s lives in 425–26, a clergy that had been assuming that it would live the life of propertied gentlemen and understood Augustine’s “monastic” ideals only imperfectly, Augustine acknowledges that several of them owned slaves.42 One deacon was hustled into church on that day to manumit slaves he had bought before he became a cleric,43 and others were hastily cleaning up their affairs at the same time. Augustine seems to have been unaware of these holdings and genuinely ashamed not to have known. So Augustine himself as priest and bishop probably did not own slaves personally. But would the household of the bishop, the collective enterprise, have owned any? Every urban household of any pretensions had several, some had very many, and stories about people being sold into slavery against their will were heard on all sides.44 Augustine offered a way to manumit slaves in church,45 but he was never inclined to insist on anything remotely resembling an abolitionist position. A staff of free men and women, dependents in the ecclesiastical household, would have been possible, but it would have been, and seemed, unusual. The status of such individuals, while technically free, would have differed very little from that of slaves. Late in Augustine’s life, an imperial law46 explicitly exempted the bishops of the proconsular province of Africa (Carthage and its hinterlands) from having to supply recruits to the army, but for the issue to arise, some bishops at least must have been in the position of wealthy landowners.

• From The City of God

  And therefore that marriage, worthy of the happiness of Paradise, should have had desirable fruit without the shame of lust, had there been no sin. But how that could be, there is now no example to teach us. Nevertheless, it ought not to seem incredible that one member might serve the will without lust then, since so many serve it now. Do we now move our feet and hands when we will to do the things we would by means of these members? do we meet with no resistance in them, but perceive that they are ready servants of the will, both in our own case and in that of others, and especially of artisans employed in mechanical operations, by which the weakness and clumsiness of nature become, through industrious exercise, wonderfully dexterous? and shall we not believe that, like as all those members obediently serve the will, so also should the members have discharged the function of generation, though lust, the award of disobedience, had been awanting? Did not Cicero, in discussing the difference of governments in his De Republica, adopt a simile from human nature, and say that we command our bodily members as children, they are so obedient; but that the vicious parts of the soul must be treated as slaves, and be coerced with a more stringent authority? And no doubt, in the order of nature, the soul is more excellent than the body; and yet the soul commands the body more easily than itself. Nevertheless this lust, of which we at present speak, is the more shameful on this account, because the soul is therein neither master of itself, so as not to lust at all, nor of the body, so as to keep the members under the control of the will; for if they were thus ruled, there should be no shame. But now the soul is ashamed that the body, which by nature is inferior and subject to it, should resist its authority. For in the resistance experienced by the soul in the other emotions there is less shame, because the resistance is from itself, and thus, when it is conquered by itself, itself is the conqueror, although the conquest is inordinate and vicious, because accomplished by those parts of the soul which ought to be subject to reason, yet, being accomplished by its own parts and energies, the conquest is, as I say, its own. For when the soul conquers itself to a due subordination, so that its unreasonable motions are controlled by reason, while it again is subject to God, this is a conquest virtuous and praiseworthy. Yet there is less shame when the soul is resisted by its own vicious parts than when its will and order are resisted by the body, which is distinct from and inferior to it, and dependent on it for life itself.

• From Shunned (2018)

  Trust me, gentlemen, I’ve thought about this six ways to Sunday, for weeks and months, and am very clear that this is the right path for me.” I was implacable, and both men saw my calm determination. Vince reached into his briefcase, pulled out his Bible, and flipped its pages to a specific verse. “Linda,” he said in a stern monotone, “this conversation reminds me of Paul’s prophecy in 2 Timothy, chapter 3.” Then he read directly from the Bible: “But know this, that in the last days critical times hard to deal with will be here. For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, self assuming, haughty, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, disloyal, having no natural affection, not open to any agreement, slanderers, without self-control, fierce, without love of goodness, betrayers, headstrong, puffed up with pride, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godly devotion but proving false to its power, and from these turn away.” He paused and placed the Bible in his lap, moving in slow motion to let the words sink in. He looked me in the eye and said, “By your actions, you fulfill this Scripture.” The words landed like knuckles in my belly, steeling my breath. In the myriad times I’d heard that verse, I had always imagined groups of baleful, wretched people, worldly people, other people. Vince was now applying it to me. I’d made the transition from being one of the humble sheep to being a stiff-necked, stubborn goat and empathized with the latter. How smug I had been. Was this an official reproving? I hadn’t broken any biblical laws, so there was nothing they could do but shake their heads. I was voluntarily taking a break, which was my prerogative. An unwise one in their eyes, yes, and potentially scandalous. I knew the elders would not talk outside their ranks, but people would wonder all kinds of things and there would be talk. However, I was unofficially removing myself, so there was no more for them to do but shame and scare me. “Is there anything else?” I asked, defiant, eyes clear. I folded the handkerchief and returned it to Jerry. “May we visit you after you settle in to your new apartment?” Jerry inquired. “We care about you and would like to check in from time to time to see how you are.” His kindness was a sharp contrast with Vince’s denunciation, and it caught me off guard. I noticed my inclination to say yes, to please and appease him, and then thought better of it. “Jerry,” I said, “I appreciate that, but I know where to find you.” I had deliberately chosen an apartment complex that had a locked security gate.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Looking at me with bloodshot eyes, he asked with frank curiosity, Now, why is a little girl from Bumfuck, Texas, dragging Friedrich Nietzsche—kicking and screaming—into this poem? Like you’re gonna preach. You ain’t no preacher, Mary Karr. You’re a singer. When I bristled that I’d been a philosophy major in college, he said, And that’s all you’re telling anybody. What you took in college. You’re pointing right back at your own head, telling everybody how smart it is. Write what you know. But according to you, I don’t know squat. Your heart, Mary Karr, he’d say. His pen touched my sternum, and it felt for all the world like the point of a dull spear as he said, Your heart knows what your head don’t. Or won’t . He wanted me to picture a woman climbing five flights in a Harlem apartment building in summer heat, then having to go back down with armloads of garbage. He said, If you’re standing on the corner of 116th Street poeticizing, what could you possibly say to help her climb back up? This prospect of actual readers flattered me less than it scared me. He kept pushing me to go back to school. Also, long before seeing shrinks helped me to reconcile my warring insides, Etheridge fought to import Daddy onto my page. In one poem, he picked out some feeble old guy whose hands shook as he tried to bait a hook and said, Your old man’s knocking on your door, and you won’t let him in. Etheridge spoke to the pool-shooting, catfish-gutting, crawfish-sucking homegirl I was trying to squelch. Such an unlikely savior. Etheridge sometimes banged on my apartment door at three a.m., trying to mooch money for dope. Mary once caught him in the bathroom—with his kids in the next room—a hypodermic in his jugular. He talked to me about this new kind of graduate writers’ program in Vermont—low-residency, they called it. You show up a few weeks at a pop, twice per year, for lectures, readings, workshops, intense tutoring. A poet tailors a curriculum with you, and for six months you mail manuscripts and papers he or she works over. What did I think? It was either bogus, or I’d never get in. Meanwhile, I cobbled up an experiment with the ladies to see whether the poems I brought had sunk in at all, for the scene was part spelling bee, part revival meeting. Each week, I’d pit two poems against each other, a great poem and a crummy one. With an accuracy that rocked me back, they’d boo the crap stuff, then hallelujah the Yeats. Walt talked me into keeping a running tally to see how consistent they were, which I did on an index card taped to my closet door. Over two years, some 80 percent of their choices were as good as most book critics’. Even hard pieces by Stevens and Apollinaire, they’d go crazy for. The sole exceptions?

• From Shunned (2018)

  The audacity made me cringe. For the very first time in my life, I wondered. I was watching a relentless slow-motion replay of the scene, with cymbals crashing the instant I used that gritty “d”-word: “destroy.” If you stripped away all the pleasantries of that conversation, I had looked this man in the eye and said definitively that he would be destroyed if he didn’t believe a certain way and join the right team —our team. I squirmed in my seat. Why hadn’t I ever heard it this way before? Was Jehovah really that ruthless? That severe? Of course not. Jehovah was the epitome of love. Everything He did was grounded in higher wisdom and righteous principle. And yet. Nick seemed like one of the good guys. No. Scratch that. Nick was one of the good guys. And yet. If he didn’t embrace The Truth, was he worthy of salvation? And yet. Nick was a man of great integrity. Everyone in the office knew of his penchant for honesty. And yet. The Bible was filled with stories of people with good intentions who still failed to meet Jehovah’s high standards. And yet. I remembered the way Nick’s eyes crinkled upward whenever he spoke about his daughter, his hopes for her future. And yet. The Bible was clear about the requirements for God’s approval. This newfound skepticism seemed to emerge from someone else, another, small, distant version of me. “Do not be misled. Bad associations spoil useful habits.” Vince was quoting First Corinthians as he pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up the long bridge of his nose. He had a good point. I needed to watch my line of thinking and keep it in check. Maybe some of my long work hours were starting to affect me. Vince was reminding us that too much time spent in worldly environments, like work, was one way our thinking could get spiritually off-track. Years earlier, a brother in our congregation, Eric, had succumbed to a curious mind and—even though we were discouraged from doing so—started reading other religious material, including heretical pieces that spoke out against the Witnesses. I made a point of avoiding any knowledge even of the titles of these books, but I knew they were written by former Witnesses we branded “apostates.” The things Eric read were so disturbing, he started questioning everything and stopped coming to the meetings, and eventually dropped out of sight. Ross said he “flipped out”—his pet term for anyone who became inactive. In the beginning, many of Eric’s friends reached out to him, but he rebuffed them all. He wanted to be left alone. No one saw him for months. When his name came up, we all shook our heads and prayed he’d find his way back from the questions, to certainty, to The Truth. Several months later, he wrote a letter to the elders, asking to be officially removed from the membership. Disassociating oneself was considered a very serious action.