Tenderness

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 Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Mother Teresa I am not. 6 Reaching out generously to embrace the pain of another yields an ekstasis, because in such a moment we are leaving our egotistic selves behind. This is beautifully illustrated by the following three biblical myths, which all center on a moment of recognition. Remember that a myth is a program for action: you will recognize its truth only when you put it into practice in your own life. First, let us look at this very ancient story of Abraham. Later Jews would vigorously deny that it was possible to see God, and yet the biblical author tells us that Yahweh appeared to [Abraham] at the Oak of Mamre while he was sitting by the entrance to his tent during the hottest part of the day. He looked up, and there he saw three men standing near him. As soon as he saw them he ran from the entrance of the tent to meet them, and bowed to the ground. “My lord,” he said, “I beg you, if I find favour with you, kindly do not pass your servant by. A little water shall be brought; you shall wash your feet and lie down under the tree. Let me fetch a little bread and you shall refresh yourselves before going any further. That is why you have come in your servant’s direction.” They replied, “Do as you say.” Abraham hastened to the tent to find Sarah. “Hurry,” he said, “knead three bushels of flour and make loaves.” Then running to the cattle Abraham took a fine and tender calf and gave it to the servant, who hurried to prepare it. Then taking cream, milk and the calf he had prepared, he laid it all before them, and they ate while he remained standing near them under the tree. 7 In the ancient world, foreigners were dangerous; because they were not bound by the local vendetta, they could kill and plunder with impunity. Even today, very few of us would willingly bring three total strangers off the street into our own homes. But Abraham shows no such reluctance. On the contrary, he rushes out to greet the travelers, prostrates himself before them as if they were gods or kings, brings them into his encampment, and gives them the best of what he has. This practical act of compassion leads to a divine encounter. There is no crude moment of revelation; Yahweh does not suddenly unmask himself. It simply emerges in the narrative, without any fanfare, that God is somehow present in this meeting and mysteriously takes part in the ensuing conversation. He seems to speak through the three strangers. They ask Abraham where his wife Sarah is, and one of them promises: “I shall visit you again next year without fail and your wife will then have a son.”

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

  A significant feature of this family history is that its considerable joint wealth ended up in the hands of the Church, because so many of the siblings embraced ecclesiastical careers or celibacy; that became a recurrent theme in later Christianity. [27] Gregory paid his own emotional debt to his sister by writing an affectionate though highly crafted biography of her. The story of Macrina lacked the lively incident of Antony’s, but the useful lesson of her life for many others was how to pursue lifelong Christian celibacy in a respectable if unexciting

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

  [82] Essential to the eventual success of these developments, which the Iconoclastic Controversies of the eighth and ninth centuries much encouraged (below, Chapter 10), was the ability of Mary to appeal to a wide range of Christians at all levels of society for a variety of reasons. In the fourth to sixth century, the concentration was on her virginity and the encouragement that it provided for ascetics: a mother and virgin whose sexual identity was removed from normal expectations, just like theirs. Yet even early on, there could be a simple (though not necessarily simple-minded) identification with her as Mother. The fourth-century pioneer of heresy-hunting, Bishop Epiphanios of Salamis, can often be suspected of making up heresies for the sake of completeness, but sometimes he denounces beliefs so delightfully banal that they could have been real: he was furious about the popular custom in such widely dispersed regions as Thrace and Arabia for women to bake loaves to tickle Mary’s palate on certain feast days. [83] What was a heretical perversion for Epiphanios might a millennium later be seen as a pleasing folk custom in honour of Our Lady. One important aspect of the new cult of the saints was the honouring of people who would once have been outcasts amid the pacifism of early Christianity – soldiers. We have already met some of them: Martin of Tours, Pachomios, Menas of Egypt. Now Roman martial virtues were celebrated, and the saints involved came to be lovingly portrayed in their imperial military costumes, even though the early examples of the genre had gained their sanctity by being killed by the military authorities. One of the first great Christian cults to range alongside that of Thecla was that of the saintly soldier-partnership of Sergius and Bacchus, victims of persecution under Galerius. On the eastern margins of fifth-century Byzantium lay the territory of an Arab people called the Ghassanids, who preserved their freedom of action by their formidable military skills, and they were early enthusiasts for this warrior pair, who had been martyred on that same eastern frontier. The sway of Sergius and Bacchus was thereafter far-reaching and prolonged, for instance winning devotion from eleventh-century Mongol nomad rulers who otherwise remained unimpressed by the overall Christian package. One element in the soldier-saints’ popularity must have been their intense same-sex bonding, a constant background theme in their joint portrayal in icons. Although obviously that was presented in the cult as a bond of asceticism, their martyr-legend included the interesting detail that they had been humiliated before their deaths by being paraded in women’s clothing. Their defiantly masculine holiness might appeal to soldiers such as the Ghassanids or a Mongol Khan of the Keraits, but it could be equally inspirational for a pair of monks who had expressed their special relationship in the form of adelphopoiēsis . And in all these cases, mothers anxious about their sons’ military adventures might have found equal comfort from the heavenly intercessions of Sergius and Bacchus.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Her original concept for Prune? "It was a reaction to years of shitty catering," she admits. Prune was about "what it wasn't. New York, in '99, was still in long menu scrip mode." Hamilton says she wanted to open a place where everything wasn't stacked and drizzled. The menu was "everything I grew up eating. I wanted the food to have a close, familiar feel . . . like in a household. I'm not an inventor." The celeb chef thing "bums me out," she complains, before admitting that she doesn't even own a TV. It's easy, however, to read the above, or experience Hamilton's withering gaze of disapproval, and miss the heart of the matter. Chefs reveal their true natures with their menus, with their food, and with the nature of the environments that they choose to serve it in. Prune is a cozy, warm, inviting, and informal restaurant with a tiny, open kitchen, a few plainly appointed tables, and an ancient zinc bar. The menu is pure, unvarnished sentimentality, soulful comfort dishes pilfered, plucked, and remembered from the childhood she had—and from what is also, perhaps, the childhood she wished she'd had. Pasta kerchiefs with poached egg, French ham, and brown butter is straight from Hamilton's own past. Roasted marrow bones with parsley salad (my favorite dish in the world, by the way) is a lift from London chef Fergus Henderson's St. John (Hamilton was kind enough to call him and tell him she was appropriating his signature dish). Fried sweetbreads with bacon and capers, monkfish liver with warm buttered toast, and lamb sausages with escarole and romesco sauce join Italian wedding soup on the appetizer menu. The bar menu sports radishes with sweet butter and kosher salt and sardines with Triscuits and mustard—a dish that Hamilton loves because "it got me through every poor time in my life." For main courses, Prune offers roast suckling pig with pickled tomatoes and crackling, whole grilled fish, braised rabbit legs, rib eye with parsley shallot butter, ruby shrimp boiled with sausage, potatoes, and corn; as for the daily specials, even the most cynical professional would find them as inviting and comforting as slipping half-drunk into a warm bath. "I like no garnish, noncomposed plates," she says. She loves Asian food, particularly Thai, Burmese, and Sze-chuan, but refuses to incorporate any of its influence into her own cooking. "No. Won't allow it. Can't have cilantro on the menu. That's not what this place is about." So what, then, is Prune about? Like a lot of American chefs, Hamilton is conflicted on the subject of the French. "I hate the fucking French," she snarls unhesitatingly.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  9. Margaret of Cortona: Midwife and Mystic Fra Giunta Bevegnati’s Hagiography Margaret lived during the 13th century, a time when a surge of popular religious interest in following the vita apostolica, in imitation of Christ and the apostles, had inspired many new monastic orders and small, informal communities. Many ordinary people like Margaret donned makeshift religious clothes, in imitation of the Franciscans and Dominicans. Known as penitents, they struggled to live a religious life amid the bustle and noise of towns and cities rather than behind quiet monastery walls. Margaret was positioned at the forefront of the papal effort to provide structure to unofficial adherents in what came to be known as the Third Order of the Franciscans. These “lay penitents” addressed some of the most pressing social needs of the booming medieval city: poverty, disease, safe lodging, and basic medical care. Margaret’s life in Cortona was likewise intertwined with the city’s problems and squabbles. Most of these details were skimmed over in the official record of her life and miracles, a document known as the Life and Miracles of Saint Margaret of Cortona, or the Legenda. It was compiled after her death by her sometime spiritual counselor and friend Giunta Bevegnati, a Franciscan friar, whose Italian title was Fra. Like many hagiographies, the Legenda was intended more to make the case for Margaret’s sainthood than to record a factually accurate biography. We know little of her home life or her professional life in Cortona. Brief references show us Margaret as a midwife, charity organizer, hospital administrator, fundraiser, and symbol of her city’s civic pride. Fra Giunta glossed over these details to formulate her as a new kind of lay saint. His account emphasized her direct experience of Christ through visions, her penitence and asceticism, and her attachment to the Franciscan order. In his telling, Margaret became the “new Magdalene,” a repentant prostitute (heavy emphasis on the repentance) inspired by Francis of Assisi and his followers. 64

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

  [11] In writing his autobiographical Confessions over the five years or so prior to his treatise on marriage, Augustine of Hippo has provided us with the most rounded picture we have of any individual in the ancient world. No autobiography is entirely trustworthy, and his is couched as a giant prayer to God, with the connected underlying purpose of winning the reader to the life of Christian continence that Augustine had embraced for himself, after many emotional and sexual adventures. Nevertheless, Confessions is extraordinarily revealing about one of the most fascinating leaders in the history of Christianity. It retails the youthful affairs of a brilliant student and teacher in higher education; successive monogamous relationships with two women, the first of whom bore him his son; his psychological fencing with his strong-minded mother Monica about his marital future – but also his intense bond with a teenage male friend who died young, and his deep feelings for his long-term friend Alypius. Inevitably the same-sex friendships have in modern times attracted both excessive excitement and contrary, embarrassed efforts to deny physicality in them. They should simply be regarded as an unusually well-documented example of emotions that were commonplace in late antiquity, and any physical component to them (perfectly plausible) is of secondary importance. [12] Overall, Augustine’s account of himself suggests an interesting complexity of experience, reflected in his treatises on marriage and virginity. By the time he wrote in 401, his son was dead: a promising and much-loved young man called Adeodatus (‘Given by God’), a name that suggests that the pregnancy had not been planned. Also part of Augustine’s past history was his flirtation with Manicheism. Manichee views were now among his chief objects of attack, but he remained vulnerable to unsympathetic accusations that his theology was still not totally distanced from their dismissal of the flesh. Around him was the North African diocesan flock whose care he had dutifully, though initially unenthusiastically, taken up; his sermons (of which an extraordinary and recently augmented number remain) reveal his frequent impatience not just with their inattention in church but their general sexual laxity, especially the men. Additionally, Augustine brought to his task a deep admiration for Bishop Ambrose of Milan, a great influence on him at an important moment of change, so he embraced Ambrose’s view of Mary as pure virgin as well as perfect mother. All this created a difficult balance to maintain in his paired treatises on marriage and virginity – it is noticeable that around half of Augustine’s treatment of consecrated virginity consists of a pointed commendation of humility, which is not an automatic virtue among ascetics. [13] Augustine’s exploration of marriage is a conscientious attempt to do justice to the often-contradictory elements of biblical pronouncements on the subject and to create from them a distinct pattern of ‘Christian marriage’, against the background of all marriages since the Garden of Eden.

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

  In 1961, Tammy Faye married a fellow Pentecostalist, Jim Bakker, and started on a public career in a classic conservative Christian mode. Their evangelism was structured on a variation of Pentecostalism often styled the ‘Prosperity Gospel’, which proclaims that prayer is the route to success and wealth, citing Christ’s promise in Mark 11.23–24 that ‘whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours’. Tammy Faye predictably emphasized how traditional, stable nuclear heterosexual families were now under threat from the New Morality, although in a pattern remarkably frequent among her fellow women campaigners on the Christian Right, her own family background had in fact been disrupted and unhappy. Likewise, her husband later claimed that he had suffered sexual abuse in his youth behind a conventional Pentecostal facade. [49] From 1965 the Bakkers built up a phenomenally successful TV evangelistic show, PTL ( Praise the Lord , or People That Love ), in step with the growth of American religious and political conservatism. In the echo chamber of the Religious Right, though carefully avoiding endorsing a particular political party unlike some of their competitors, they enjoyed regular viewing figures of 12 million by 1986. By then behind the scenes all was unravelling: both Bakkers were suffering addictions seeking to counter severe stress, and their lives were becoming chaotic. Sexual abuse accusations against Jim Bakker in 1987 were followed by revelations that he had embezzled vast sums from the contributions of the devout, funding the pair’s lavish lifestyle. This is a not unfamiliar progression in popular evangelism, but there was a twist. While Jim went to prison, Tammy Faye persevered in developing an unexpected and individual strand in their TV show that she herself had pioneered. In 1985, to widespread Evangelical astonishment and disapproval, Tammy Faye staged an interview on PTL with Steve Pieters, a minister of the Metropolitan Community Church – by satellite, since he was by then in an advanced stage of AIDS and too sick to come to the PTL studio. It was an emotional and ideologically chaotic occasion, but out of it emerged Tammy Faye’s tearful acceptance of Pieters on screen as a fellow Christian, at a time when AIDS sufferers were often seen as alien threats to American society. After the Bakkers’ final disgrace and divorce, she persisted, co-hosting a TV talk show with a gay actor and becoming a regular and welcome fixture at public gay events (Plate 37). ‘When we lost everything, it was the gay people that came to my rescue, and I will always love them for that,’ she told Larry King Live in 2006 . A year later she was dead of cancer, mourned by the leading US gay magazine The Advocate as ‘one of the few Christian conservatives to openly support us’. [50] Tammy Faye Bakker’s version of a conversion narrative represents one possible outcome of seventy years of bitterness and confrontation on sexual matters: a story of judgement suspended and transformed by personal experience.

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

  This was no random thought, but a purposeful reference to Ovid (predictably), and the poet’s treatment of the legend of Hermaphroditus, the beautiful son of the god Hermes and goddess Aphrodite, forced by the gods into bodily and spiritual androgyny with an amorous water-nymph. To another monk Peter (whose comb Baldric always carried as a keepsake), he cheerfully wrote: ‘If you can, keep your deeds above reproach, but if you cannot, at least keep your confidences to yourself.’ [44] Behind this literary efflorescence among clerical authors was a practical consideration: how to make emotional sense of the twelfth-century transformation in monastic formation. Rejecting the Carolingian Benedictine oblation of children, these were communities built up from adults who had made a free, informed choice to enter monastic life, and brought with them adult emotional and sexual experience. [45] They needed to explore how they might shape a new emotional life among other men for the rest of their lives. In literature that would mean moving on from the unequal-age, life-cycle model which was the accepted convention of ancient same-sex activity. Among the texts that they would draw on would be another biblical text about love between equals, even though the participants were male and female, the Song of Songs. From the glory-days of Cluny onwards, this book of the Bible was the most frequently read and written about of all biblical books in commentaries produced in male monasteries, while there are very few texts discussing it surviving from any medieval woman: it was a literary text in a man’s literary world. For a monk, the Song of Songs was a meditation on divine love, but its vocabulary remained that of undisguised and mostly fulfilled adult sexual desire. [46] The monastery was a safe space for even extravagant outpourings of same-sex expression, as long as one observed very careful delimits and a carapace of literary and biblical allusion. When those limits were understood, it could lead to remarkable emotional frankness – for instance in a series of treatises on friendship created in a major specimen of the new monasticism, the Cistercian Abbey of Rievaulx in Yorkshire. The author was one of its monks and later celebrated Abbot, Aelred, prolific in writing on spirituality and how it should be practised. In writing these texts on friendship, he was directly and successfully challenging his Order’s original prohibition on particular personal friendships in a monastic community. Once more a celibate looked back to a pre-Christian Classical model, in this case Cicero’s text De Amicitia (‘On Friendship’), to illuminate urgent personal questions: how permeable was the boundary between friendship and love, the physical and the spiritual? [47] Aelred was not prepared to define that frontier when writing of his grief for a dead friend, and neither can we: ‘some may judge by my tears that my love was too carnal.

• From Soaking Wet: Lesbian Sex Stories (2014)

  That’s what this weekend was all about: a last chance to renew our connection. Or maybe this was good-bye. I could no longer read from her expression what went on inside her head. I wiped my hands along the sides of my thighs and pushed open the glass door that opened onto steps to the path that wound to the narrow beach. Kari didn’t look my way as I approached. Her arms wrapped around her middle as she stared at the water. “No problem getting away?” “No. I had the days.” “Good. Have you unpacked?” At last, she glanced my way. Something in her eyes gave me hope. For the first time in a long time, she met my gaze and really looked at me. I smiled. “Not yet. But would you like a glass of wine before we get settled?” “That and a fire. It’s colder than I thought it would be.” She stepped closer. Her arm settled at my waist and she leaned in to hug me from the side. Kari was the kind to kiss friends on the lips or offer a tight hug, so I couldn’t rely on the gesture to mean anything. I draped an arm around her waist, and we walked slowly back to the cabin. Inside, the fire took me only minutes. I placed several logs and kindling in the grate and as soon as the crackling fire was built, the air inside the cabin lost its crisp edge. I pulled my sweater over my head, and, dressed only in a tank and my jeans, I sat cross-legged on the hearth rug. A glass dangled in front of me. “Thanks,” I murmured. “I was supposed to get that. Sorry.” She sat beside me. “This was a good idea. This weekend.” “Yeah.” I didn’t know what else to say, hoping she’d let me know what had been on her mind. We’d been so busy working, too tired and stretched to hook up, that we’d drifted apart. I didn’t like feeling like I was in this alone—the only one worried that our relationship was on its last legs. Friends had introduced us, knowing that both Kari and I had dated women before and knowing my preference for waiflike blondes. We shared a lot of the same interests, were close to the same age. I’d ended a long relationship and hadn’t really wanted to fall directly into another, but I did want companionship. We’d landed in bed together that same night, the attraction so hot and fast that it took my breath away. She was like that. A bolt of lightning not easily captured. Even from the start, I began preparing myself for it to end. I must have stared at the fire too long. A kiss landed on my shoulder. A hand slipped beneath the hem of my tank and glided upward to cup a breast. Kari moved closer and her body snuggled against my back.

• From The Girls (2016)

  Squinting up at the sun while Country Joe sounded from the house. Clouds drifting across the blue, outlined in neon. “Check out Orphan Annie,” Suzanne said, rolling her eyes at Caroline. Caroline was overdoing it at first, her stumbling, dopey affect, but soon the drug actually caught up to her and she got wild-eyed and a little scared. She was thin enough that I could see the glandular throb at her throat. Suzanne was watching her, too, and I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t. Helen, Caroline’s supposed cousin, didn’t say anything, either. She was sunstruck, catatonic, stretched out on a piece of old carpet and listing a hand over her eyes. Giggling to no one. I went over to Caroline finally, touching her tiny shoulder. “How’s it going?” I said. She didn’t look up until I said her name. I asked her where she was from; she screwed her eyes tight. It was the wrong thing to say—of course it was, bringing up all that bad shit from the outside, whatever rotten memories were probably doubling right then. I didn’t know how to pull her back from the bog. “You want this?” I said, holding up the bracelet. She peeked at it. “Just have to finish it,” I said, “but it’s for you.” Caroline smiled. “It’s gonna look real nice on you,” I went on. “It’ll go good with your shirt.” The electricity in her eyes calmed. She held her own shirt away from her body to study it, softening. “I made it,” she said, fingering the embroidered outline of a peace sign on the shirt, and I saw the hours she’d spent on it, maybe borrowing her mother’s sewing box. It seemed easy: to be kind to her, to put the finished bracelet around her wrist, burning the knot with a match so she’d have to cut it off. I didn’t notice Suzanne eyeing us, her own bracelet ignored in her lap. “Beautiful,” I said, lifting Caroline’s wrist. “Nothing but beauty.” As if I were an occupant of that world, someone who could show the way to others. Such grandiosity mixed up in my feelings of kindness; I was starting to fill in all the blank spaces in myself with the certainties of the ranch. The cool glut of Russell’s words—no more ego, turn off the mind. Pick up the cosmic wind instead. Our beliefs as mild and digestible as the sweet rolls and cakes we hustled from a bakery in Sausalito, stuffing our faces with the easy starch. —In the days after, Caroline followed me like a stray dog. Hovering, in the doorway of Suzanne’s room, asking if I wanted one of the cigarettes she’d cadged from the bikers. Suzanne stood up and clasped her elbows behind her back, stretching. “They just gave you them?” Suzanne said archly. “For free?” Caroline glanced at me. “The cigarettes?” Suzanne laughed without saying anything else.

• From The Girls (2016)

  To feel this unexpected, boundless tenderness for someone, seemingly out of nowhere. When a pool player sauntered over, I was prepared to scare him away. But Sasha smiled big, showing her pointed teeth. “Hi,” she said, and then he was buying us each another beer. Sasha drank steadily. Alternating between distracted boredom and manic interest, feigned or not, in what the man was saying. “You two from out of town?” he asked. His hair graying and long, a turquoise ring on his thumb—another sixties ghost. Maybe we’d even crossed paths back then, haunting the same well-worn trail. He hitched up his pants. “Sisters?” His voice barely tried to include me in the purview of his effort, and I almost laughed. Still, even sitting next to Sasha, I was aware of some of the attention washing onto me. It was shocking to remember the voltage, even secondhand. How it felt to be a desired thing. Maybe Sasha was so used to it that she didn’t even notice. Caught up in the rush of her own life, in her certainty of the meliorative trajectory. “She’s my mother,” Sasha said. Her eyes were taut, wanting me to keep the joke going. And I did. I huddled my arm around her. “We’re on a mother-daughter trip,” I said. “Driving the 1. All the way up to Eureka.” “Adventurers!” the man exclaimed, pounding the table. His name was Victor, we learned, and the background wallpaper on Victor’s cellphone was an Aztec image, he told us, so imbued with powers that just the contemplation of said image made you smarter. He was convinced that world events were orchestrated by complicated and persistent conspiracies. He took out a dollar bill to show us how the Illuminati communicated with one another. “Why would a secret society lay out their plans on common currency?” I asked. He nodded like he’d anticipated the question. “To display the reach of their power.” I envied Victor’s certainty, the idiot syntax of the righteous. This belief—that the world had a visible order, and all we had to do was look for the symbols—as if evil were a code that could be cracked. He kept talking. His teeth wet from drink, the gray blush of a dead molar. He had plenty of conspiracies to explain to us in detail, plenty of inside information he could clue us into. He spoke of “getting on the level.” Of “hidden frequencies” and “shadow governments.” “Wow,” Sasha said, deadpan. “Did you know that, Mom?” She kept calling me Mom, her voice exaggerated and comical, though it took me a while to see how drunk she was. To realize how drunk I was, too. The night had sailed into foreign waters. The fritzing of the neon signs, the bartender smoking in the doorway. I watched the bartender stamp the butt out, her flip-flops sliding around her feet. Victor said it was nice to see how well Sasha and I got along.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  On a sofa in the small adjoining room, covered with the hospital robe, the master lay in a deep sleep. His even breathing was soundless. Having wept her fill, Margarita went to the intact notebooks and found the place she had been rereading before she met Azazello under the Kremlin wall. Margarita did not want to sleep. She caressed the manuscript tenderly, as one caresses a favourite cat, and kept turning it in her hands, examining it from all sides, now pausing at the title page, now opening to the end. A terrible thought suddenly swept over her, that this was all sorcery, that the notebooks would presently disappear from sight, and she would be in her bedroom in the old house, and that on waking up she would have to go and drown herself. But this was her last terrible thought, an echo of the long suffering she had lived through. Nothing disappeared, the all-powerful Woland really was all powerful, and as long as she liked, even till dawn itself, Margarita could rustle the pages of the notebooks, gaze at them, kiss them, and read over the words: ‘The darkness that came from the Mediterranean Sea covered the city hated by the procurator . . .’ Yes, the darkness . . . CHAPTER 25: How the Procurator Tried to Save Judas of Kiriath, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA CHAPTER 25 How the Procurator Tried to Save Judas of Kiriath The darkness that came from the Mediterranean Sea covered the city hated by the procurator. The hanging bridges connecting the temple with the dread Antonia Tower disappeared, the abyss descended from the sky and flooded the winged gods over the hippodrome, the Hasmonaean Palace with its loopholes, the bazaars, caravanserais, lanes, pools . . . Yershalaim—the great city—vanished as if it had never existed in the world. Everything was devoured by the darkness, which frightened every living thing in Yershalaim and round about. The strange cloud was swept from seaward towards the end of the day, the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan. It was already heaving its belly over Bald Skull, where the executioners hastily stabbed the condemned men, it heaved itself over the temple of Yershalaim, crept in smoky streams down the temple hill, and flooded the Lower City. It poured through windows and drove people from the crooked streets into the houses. It was in no hurry to yield up its moisture and gave off only light. Each time the black smoky brew was ripped by fire, the great bulk of the temple with its glittering scaly roof flew up out of the pitch darkness. But the fire would instantly go out, and the temple would sink into the dark abyss. Time and again it grew out of it and fell back, and each time its collapse was accompanied by the thunder of catastrophe.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  263 o The targets of the reformers were consistent: Scholastic theology, the power of the papacy, the complications of the liturgy and canon law, the institution of monasticism and religious life generally, and the emphasis on externals rather than internal realities, on “works” rather than the simple response of the heart. • The justice of the reformer’s charges is difficult to deny, for the changes they point to are obvious to anyone with a historical sense. Yet the fundamental charge that Christianity had lost its “essence” in the time leading up to the Reformation may be much too strong. o The problem with a counter-assertion, however, is the difficulty of substantiating it; can it be shown that ordinary Christians lived lives fully consonant with the Jesus of the Gospels, the teaching of Paul, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit? o Did the elaboration or even the corruption of public forms also corrupt in a fundamental way those practices of piety, charity, generous devotion, and quiet witness of a good life that had always, from the 1 st to the 16 th centuries, been the proclaimed goal of the Christian message? o Here, the evidence of the saints must count for something. By “saints,” we mean others than those officially recognized by the church, just as we must include others than the visible historical players. o We must include those who lived lives of patient endurance, quiet service, and deep charity in accordance with the gospel and, by so living, communicated something of the gospel’s power from one generation to the next. It does not matter whether they were monk or mendicant, pilgrim or poet. What matters is the character of their lives. o In the final analysis, although it would make for dull reading because it would be so lacking in high adventure or political 264 Lecture 36: The Ever-adapting Religion intrigue, perhaps the most authentic history of Christianity is, after all, the history of the saints. o Perhaps there were not so many of such folk as one would like in all these long years, but there were surely enough, for it must be said that without some such spark of life being transmitted from generation to generation, there would not have been any history at all to speak of. Bass, A People’ s History of Christianity. Pelikan, Jesus through the Ages. 1. How does the question concerning the “essence” of Christianity force us to recognize the limits of historical knowledge? 2. How does the post-Constantinian era alter the rules of the game within which Christianity was played for most of its history? Suggested Reading Questions to Consider

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  235 order of women known as the Poor Clares. o Innocent III approved Francis’s short rule for the friars in 1209, and Francis may have attended the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. The itinerant lifestyle of the Franciscans made them flexible instruments for many ministries. o The history of the early order is extraordinarily complex, but out of Francis’s ideals arose thousands of men committed to evangelical poverty, the care of the poor, and the saving of souls. o Almost inevitably, the order also gave rise to great theologians and mystical teachers, including Duns Scotus (1265–1308) and Bonaventura (1217–1274). • Dominic de Guzmán (1170–1221) studied arts and theology, then sold his possessions during a famine to help the poor; he joined the canons regular in Osma and, after undertaking legations to northern Europe, conceived of the ideal of preaching the gospel to pagans. When he became engaged with the Albigensians, he and his companions founded the Order of Preachers (1208), which was approved by Innocent III in 1216 and fully recognized by Honorius III in 1218. o From the Latin dominicani came the tag “dogs of the Lord” for the fiery preaching and disciplined zeal of the new order. o Despite his zeal to oppose heresy, it is doubtful that Dominic himself led the inquisition (the papal-led interrogation of those The first of the mendicant orders was founded by Francis of assisi around the year 1209. © iStockphoto/Thinkstock. 236 Lecture 32: Papal Revolution suspected of heresy), but because of their great learning and dedication, both Dominicans and Franciscans were used by the papacy as agents of inquisition. o Like the Franciscans, the Dominican order produced great theologians, including Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), and great mystics, including Meister Eckhart (1260–1327), John Tauler (d. 1361), and Henry Suso (1295–1366). • Together, the two mendicant orders not only served as flexible instruments of papal policy, but they energized evangelization and the care of the poor. Their commitment to the intellectual life made them the leading figures in the development of the medieval universities. Miller, Power and the Holy in the Age of the Investiture Conflict. Moore, Pope Innocent III (1160/61–1216). 1. Discuss the political (and moral!) implications of the forgery known as the Donation of Constantine. 2. What does the investiture conflict tell us about the increased confidence of secular rulers in the West? Questions to Consider Suggested Reading

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  Paradoxically, he began this systematic undermining of classical culture’s claims by doing his own little raid on that culture’s prizes. The use of philosophy to assuage grief had become formulaic with the Greeks and Romans. It was called the consolatio. Augustine composes a poignant consolatio for those who were killed, displaced, robbed, or raped in the fall of the ancient city. He uses the form’s stoic commonplaces—death is common, natural, inevitable, a thing we all must share, must undergo at some time, so no time is better or worse for it (CG 1.11). He takes the pagan dictum that what happens to the body is not important, only the mind is precious, and gives it a Christian turn: women raped in Rome’s fall do not lose their chastity, which is a virtue in the soul and does not depend on how others use the body. Even if the body responded, mechanically (he refers to the self-lubrication of a woman’s stimulated genitals), that does not matter if the soul withheld consent (1.16–18). No one should seek suicide for any shame imposed on them. God can forgive as well as console, but the suicide places a person beyond repentance (the same argument he uses against capital punishment). The Romans who glorified Lucretia for not living with the shame of rape were more interested in human pride than divine mercy (1.22–25). Her crime was worse than Tarquin’s: “He took her body, she took her life. He raped, she murdered.” (1.19) In the second book of The City of God, Augustine begins what amounts to a long palinode, or “reverse song,” undoing his own favorite poem, Virgil’s Aeneid. Virgil described the gods’ plan to make Rome an image of the divine order of justice. Augustine says Rome never became that, and never could have. No merely human institution can. Only the City of God has perfect order. Then what was Rome? The polar opposite of the City of God? Augustine cannot say that, since good Christians were involved in Rome’s workings—just officials like Marcellinus, powerful patrons like Melania and Pinian. Against the Donatists, Augustine had argued that the Church on earth is a mixed body, with some weeds growing amid the wheat. In the same way, worldly governments have some wheat growing among the weeds. If both are mingled, with the same two types living together, how are they to be distinguished, if at all? Here again Tyconius comes to Augustine’s aid. He, too, believed in the mixed Church. But he contrasted Christ’s body (the Christian community with some sinners in it) with Satan’s body (containing only sinners, though some are also mingled in with Christ’s members). This is an eschatological vision of what is going on in human history—the growing toward a final harvest that separates saints from sinners.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  If it becomes boring to repeat the same things to beginners, we should put ourselves in their affectionate brother’s place, or their mother’s or father’s. Then such will be our empathy with what they are feeling that what is said will become new to us again. The effect of this sympathy is so great that when listeners are moved as we speak, we enter into each other’s reactions, as the hearers speak in us and we learn in them what we were teaching. Isn’t that what happens when we show others beautiful scenes which we have often gone past with a careless glance, but which give us fresh joy as we share others’ joy on first seeing them? And the intensity of this experience is the greater, the closer we are to each other. The more, by the bond of love, we enter into each other’s mind, the more even old things become new for us again. (Instruction 17) The importance of sympathy in teaching and ministry was always in Augustine’s mind: “One becomes sick oneself, to minister to the sick, not with any false claim to having the same fever but by considering, with an attitude of sympathy, how one would want to be treated if he were the sick one” (L 40.4). Any account of Augustine’s ministry should begin with his preaching, since that is how he first made himself useful, indeed indispensable, to Bishop Valerius. To have given Augustine, a mere priest, the privilege of preaching in Hippo was unusual enough. Valerius went even further when the pan-African council of bishops met at Hippo in 393, just after Augustine’s ordination. Valerius secured the bishops’ agreement to have a priest address them on the subject “Faith and Creed.” The basic nature of that speech, which has survived, shows how badly the African clergy were in need of instruction. Luckily the primate of Carthage, Bishop Aurelius, was a reformer with visionary plans for the African Church. He and Augustine struck up a partnership that would remake the face of African Christianity over the next several decades. Augustine knew the size of the task before them, since he had recently confided to his own bishop: “How can I castigate wrongdoing or deception [in lay Christians] when these faults are far worse in our own ranks than among the people generally?” (L 22.2). Augustine would train in his monastery many of the bishops Aurelius helped place in key dioceses over the coming years.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  It all happened quite simply as such things will happen. It was Roger who introduced Martin Hallam; it was Stephen who explained that she danced very badly; it was Martin who suggested that they sit out their dances. Then—how quickly it occurs if the thing is pre-destined—they suddenly knew that they liked each other, that some chord had been struck to a pleasant vibration; and this being so they sat out many dances, and they talked for quite a long while that evening. Martin lived in British Columbia, it seemed, where he owned several farms and a number of orchards. He had gone out there after the death of his mother, for six months, but had stayed on for love of the country. And now he was having a holiday in England—that was how he had got to know young Roger Antrim, they had met up in London and Roger had asked him to come down for a week, and so here he was—but it felt almost strange to be back again in England. Then he talked of the vastness of that new country that was yet so old; of its snow-capped mountains, of its canyons and gorges, of its deep, princely rivers, of its lakes, above all of its mighty forests. And when Martin spoke of those mighty forests, his voice changed, it became almost reverential; for this young man loved trees with a primitive instinct, with a strange and inexplicable devotion. Because he liked Stephen he could talk of his trees, and because she liked him she could listen while he talked, feeling that she too would love his great forests. His face was very young, clean-shaver and bony; he had bony, brown hands with spatulate fingers; for the rest, he was tall with a loosely knit figure, and he slouched a little when he walked, from much riding. But his face had a charming quality about it, especially when he talked of his trees; it glowed, it seemed to be inwardly kindled, and it asked for a real and heart-felt understanding of the patience and the beauty and the goodness of trees—it was eager for your understanding. Yet in spite of this touch of romance in his make-up, which he could not keep out of his voice at moments, he spoke simply, as one man will speak to another, very simply, not trying to create an impression. He talked about trees as some men talk of ships, because they love them and the element they stand for. And Stephen, the awkward, the bashful, the tongue-tied, heard herself talking in her turn, quite freely, heard herself asking him endless questions about forestry, farming and the care of vast orchards; thoughtful questions, unromantic but apt—such as one man will ask of another.

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  After the third plenary session broke up on June 8, Marcellinus did not go to bed before making his decision, which was formalized in an edict on June 26—the heretic laws were said to apply to the Donatists, who thus lost their churches, were forbidden to hold meetings, and were fined for not attending Catholic church. Enforcement, as Brown notes (R and S 309–16, 335–36), was bound to be uneven, depending on the willingness of local landowners to make trouble for themselves by cooperating with the decree. Fines were even harder to collect than taxes (that perennial problem of the empire). Ordinary people would not be pursued. Leaders were more vulnerable—they lost their church holdings and their power to protect the hut people (who responded with another wave of suicides). But a leading Donatist bishop, Gaudentius, held his church for nine years at least, and perhaps for his whole life, despite a blistering attack on him by Augustine. Violent resistance to Marcellinus’ edict led to the prolongation of terrorism. One of Augustine’s priests had his eye put out and a finger cut off. Another was murdered. Enforcement of the law outside major cities was virtually impossible. According to Frend (299), “In the countryside, archaeologists have yet to find clear evidence for the transformation of a Donatist church into a Catholic one.” Augustine was preaching concord to the Donatists: Nothing in you do we hate, nothing detest, nothing denounce, nothing condemn, except human error. We repeat, we detest human error from regard for divine truth, but we acknowledge all of God’s graces [sacraments] in you, while whatever in you has gone astray we would correct. . . . The stray is the one I would seek out, find, admonish, approach, take by hand, and lead, correcting the deserter not defacing his divine image. (S 359.5) He told Catholics not to crow over Donatists like victors (L 78.8). Any Donatist bishop who joined the Church could keep his office, even though that violated the rule against two bishops in a single town. He personally would alternate service in his basilica with the Donatist bishop of Hippo. When the murderers of his priest confessed, Augustine showed what he meant by discipline as a teaching instrument. He begged Marcellinus not to execute, maim, or flog the men (the customary Roman penalties). We agree that criminals should lose the freedom to commit more crimes. But we hope it does not go beyond this—that, while retaining life and sound limbs, they should be compelled by law away from their mad instability toward a sober steadiness, and be assigned some useful labor to repair the wrongs they have done. Even this much is called a punishment, but who can doubt that it should be deemed more a service than a severity when the rage to harm is precluded but not the prospect of a healing repentance? (L 133.1)

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Philippi and seems to have remained there after the departure of Paul and Silas for Corinth (A.D. 51), in charge of the infant church; for the "we" is suddenly replaced by "they" (17:1). Seven years later (A.D. 58) he joined the apostle again, when he passed through Philippi on his last journey to Jerusalem, stopping a week at Troas (Acts 20:5, 6); for from that moment Luke resumes the "we" of the narrative. He was with Paul or near him at Jerusalem and two years at Caesarea, accompanied him on his perilous voyage to Rome, of which he gives a most accurate account, and remained with him to the end of his first Roman captivity, with which he closes his record (A.D. 63). He may however, have been temporarily absent on mission work during the four years of Paul’s imprisonment. Whether he accompanied him on his intended visit to Spain and to the East, after the year 63, we do not know. The last allusion to him is the word of Paul when on the point of martyrdom: "Only Luke is with me" (2 Tim. 4:11). The Bible leaves Luke at the height of his usefulness in the best company, with Paul preaching the gospel in the metropolis of the world. Post-apostolic tradition, always far below the healthy and certain tone of the New Testament, mostly vague and often contradictory, never reliable, adds that he lived to the age of eighty-four, labored in several countries, was a painter of portraits of Jesus, of the Virgin, and the apostles, and that he was crucified on an olive-tree at Elaea in Greece. His real or supposed remains, together with those of Andrew the apostle, were transferred from Patrae in Achaia to the Church of the Apostles in Constantinople.995 The symbolic poetry of the Church assigns to him the sacrificial ox; but the symbol of man is more appropriate; for his Gospel is par excellence the Gospel of the Son of Man. Sources of Information. According to his own confession in the preface, Luke was no eye-witness of the gospel history,996 but derived his information from oral reports of primitive disciples, and from numerous fragmentary documents then already in circulation. He wrote the Gospel from what he had heard and read, the Acts from, what he had seen and heard. He traced the origin of Christianity "accurately from the beginning." His opportunities were the very best. He visited the principal apostolic churches between Jerusalem and Rome, and came in personal contact with the founders and leaders. He met Peter, Mark, and Barnabas at Antioch, James and his elders at Jerusalem (on Paul’s last visit) Philip and his daughters at Caesarea, the early converts in Greece and Rome; and he enjoyed, besides, the benefit of all the information which Paul himself had received by revelation or collected from personal intercourse with his fellow-apostles and other primitive disciples.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Then, seeing that I was an old friend of her Jo-Jo—that was how she called him—she ran downstairs and brought back a couple of bottles of white wine. I was to stay and have dinner with her—she insisted on it. As she drank she became by turns gay and maudlin. I didn’t have to ask her any questions—she went on like a self-winding machine. The thing that worried her principally was—would he get his job back when he was released from the hospital? She said her parents were well off, but they were displeased with her. They didn’t approve of her wild ways. They didn’t approve of him particularly—he had no manners, and he was an American. She begged me to assure her that he would get his job back, which I did without hesitancy. And then she begged me to know if she could believe what he said—that he was going to marry her. Because now, with a child under her belt, and a dose of clap besides, she was in no position to strike a match—with a Frenchman anyway. That was clear, wasn’t it? Of course, I assured her. It was all clear as hell to me—except how in Christ’s name Fillmore had ever fallen for her. However, one thing at a time. It was my duty now to comfort her, and so I just filled her up with a lot of baloney, told her everything would turn out all right and that I would stand godfather to the child, etc. Then suddenly it struck me as strange that she should have the child at all—especially as it was likely to be born blind. I told her that as tactfully as I could. “It doesn’t make any difference,” she said, “I want a child by him.” “Even if it’s blind?” I asked. “Mon Dieu, ne dites pas ça!” she groaned. “Ne dites pas ça!” Just the same, I felt it was my duty to say it. She got hysterical and began to weep like a walrus, poured out more wine. In a few moments she was laughing boisterously. She was laughing to think how they used to fight when they got in bed. “He liked me to fight with him,” she said. “He was a brute.” As we sat down to eat, a friend of hers walked in—a little tart who lived at the end of the hall. Ginette immediately sent me down to get some more wine. When I came back they had evidently had a good talk. Her friend, Yvette, worked in the police department. A sort of stool pigeon, as far as I could gather. At least that was what she was trying to make me believe. It was fairly obvious that she was just a little whore. But she had an obsession about the police and their doings. Throughout the meal they were urging me to accompany them to a bal musette .