Friendship and Eschatology

This is that extraordinary and great happiness which we await, with God himself acting and diffusing…among the individual souls whom he has chosen, so much friendship and charity, that thus each loves another as he does himself; and that, by this means, just as each one rejoices in his own, so does he rejoice in the good fortune of another, and thus the happiness of each one individually is the happiness of all, and the universality of all happiness is the possession of each individual….This is true and eternal friendship, which begins in this life and is perfected in the next…

—Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship 3.79, 1160.

The Perfection of Life

Since the goal of the virtuous way of life is the very thing we have been seeking,...it is time for you, noble friend,...to be known by God and to become His friend. This is true perfection: not to avoid a wicked life because like slaves we servilely fear punishment, not to do good because we hope for rewards, as if cashing in on the virtuous life by some business-like arrangement. On the contrary, disregarding all those things for which we hope and which have been reserved by promise, we regard falling from God's friendship as the only thing dreadful and we consider becoming God's friend the only thing worthy of honor and desire. This, as I have said, is the perfection of life.

—St. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, 390.

'one must do the whole evil'

'When one does evil one must do the whole evil. To be only half a monster is insanity! There is ecstasy in an extreme of crime.'

—Claude Frollo in Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame of Paris (1831) (trans. John Sturrock 1978)

"not a soul...formed any clear idea of the contrast"

The victim finally arrived, lashed to the tailgate of a wagon, and once he had been hoisted on to the platform, where he could be seen from all parts of the square, bound with ropes and straps to the wheel of the pillory, a prodigious hooting broke out in the square, mingled with laughter and applause. They had recognized Quasimodo.

It was in fact he. It was a strange reversal. He was being pilloried on the self-same square where the day before he had been saluted, acclaimed and conclaimed pope and prince of fools, in procession with the Duke of Egypt, the King of Thunes and the Emperor of Galilee. But what is certain is that not a soul in that crowd, not even he, who had been by turns victor and victim, formed any clear idea of the contrast. Gringiore and his philosophy where absent from the spectacle.

—Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame of Paris (1831) (trans. John Sturrock 1978)

the reason for hands

...yet nature added [hands] to our body preeminently for the sake of reason. For if man were destitute of hands, the various parts of his face would certainly have been arranged like those of the quadrupeds, to suit the purpose of his feeding: so that its form would have been lengthened out and pointed towards the nostrils, and his lips would have projected from his mouth, lumpy, and stiff, and thick, fitted for taking up the grass, and his tongue would either have lain between his teeth, of a kind to match his lips, fleshy, and hard, and rough, assisting his teeth to deal with what came under his grinder, or it would have been moist and hanging out at the side like that of dogs and other carnivorous beasts, projecting through the gaps in his jagged row of teeth. If, then, our body had no hands, how could articulate sound have been implanted in it, seeing that the form of the parts of the mouth would not have had the configuration proper for the use of speech, so that man must of necessity have either bleated, or "baaed," or barked, or neighed, or bellowed like oxen or asses, or uttered some bestial sound? But now, as the hand is made part of the body, the mouth is at leisure for the service of the reason. Thus the hands are shown to be the property of the rational nature, the Creator having thus devised by their means a special advantage for reason.

—St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man (379)

"the singular spectacle called The Stroll"

By the 1940s, ... Harlem was a mature and well-established capital of black cultural life, having peaked with the Harlem Renaissance, plunged into Depression after the 1929 stock market crash, climbed back to life during World War II, and, unbeknownst to the thousands still arriving from Florida, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia, ... was at that precise moment as rollickingly magical as it was ever likely to be.

Seventh Avenue was the Champs-Élysées, a boulevard wide and ready for any excuse for a parade, whether the marches of the minister Father Divine or several thousand Elks in their capes and batons, and, on Sunday afternoons, the singular spectacle called The Stroll. It was where people who had been laundresses, bellmen, and mill hands in the South dressed up as they saw themselves to be—the men in frock coats and monocles, the women in fox stoles and bonnets with ostrich feathers, the "servants of the rich Park and Fifth Avenue families" wearing "hand-me-downs from their employers," all meant to evoke startled whispers from the crowd on the sidewalk: "My Gawd, did you see that hat?"

—Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010)

Run with terror all before you

Starless are the nights of travel,
Bleak the winter wind;
Run with terror all before you
And regret behind.

Run until you hear the ocean's
Everlasting cry;
Deep though it may be and bitter
You must drink it dry.

—W.H. Auden, from "Lady, weeping at the crossroads," lines 9–16 (1940)

The Wonderful Thing about Holiness

The wonderful thing about holiness, when you really encounter it, is that it testifies to itself. This is not to say one can never be deceived; it’s easy to mistake personal charisma for genuine grace, or to be misled by plausible charlatans—until, that is, one comes across the real thing, at a moment when one is open to it. Then one knows it for what it is: a quality of such lucid and incandescent simplicity and of such moral beauty that one feels simultaneously deeply happy in its presence and ashamed of one’s own failure to have realized it within oneself.

—David Bentley Hart, "The Abbot and Aunt Susie" (December 2010)

you have ravished my heart with a glance of your eyes

You have ravished my heart, my sister, my bride,
     you have ravished my heart with a glance of your eyes,
     with one jewel of your necklace.
How sweet is your love, my sister, my bride!
     how much better is your love than wine,
     and the fragrance of your oils than any spice!

—The Song of Solomon 4:9-10 (RSV Catholic Edition)