God makes a portion of each generation intelligent well above the average, and despite the best efforts of our state school systems, His handiwork is hard to suppress. The task of the modern progressive university is therefore to corrupt and unbalance the intelligent; to pit their minds against their common sense. – David Warren, “Essays in Idleness”, 2016
From man’s sweat and God’s love, beer came into the world. – Saint Arnold (or Arnulf) of Metz, (582-645), the patron saint of brewers
Let all who desire to be Christians know that it is incumbent upon them to manifest the virtue of temperance; that drunken sots have no place among Christians, and cannot be saved until they amend their ways, until they reform from their evil habits. – Martin Luther, (1483-1546)
“Son, a woman is like a beer. They smell good, they look good, you’d step over your own mother just to get one! But you can’t stop at one. You wanna drink another woman!” – Homer Simpson, “New Kid on the Block”, The Simpsons, 1993
Dancing is not an art but a pastime, and should, therefore, be freed from the too-burdensome regulations wherewith an art is encumbered. An art is a highly-specialised matter hedged in on every side by intellectual policemen, a pastime is not specialised, and never takes place in the presence of policemen, who are well known to be the sworn enemies of gaiety. For example, theology is an art but religion is a pastime: we learn the collects only under compulsion, but we sing anthems because it is pleasant to do so. Thus, eating oysters is an art by dint of the elaborate ceremonial including shell-openers, lemons, waiters and pepper, which must be grouped around your oyster before you can conveniently swallow him, but eating nuts, or blackberries, or a privily-acquired turnip—these are pastimes.
– James Stephens, “There Is A Tavern In Our Town”, Here Are Ladies, 1914
Sluggard-wakers and dog-whippers
On the 17th April 1725 , John Rudge bequeathed to the parish of Trysull, in Staffordshire, twenty shillings a year, that a poor man might be employed to go about the church during sermons and keep the people awake; also to keep dogs out of church. A bequest by Richard Dovey, of Farmcote, dated in 1659, had in view the payment of eight shillings annually to a poor man, for the performance of the same duties in the church of Claverley, Shropshire. In the parishes of Chislet, Kent, and Peterchurch, Herefordshire, there are similar provisions for the exclusion of dogs from church, and at Wolverhampton there is one of five shillings for keeping boys quiet in time of service.
Pictured above is a sluggard-waker and his pole with which he prodded the drowsy parishioners.
They thought they had seen suffering! Tolstoy and Korolenko shed tears of indignation that from 1876 to 1904, the tsars executed 486 people and then, from 1905 to 1908, another 2,200! But from 1917 to 1953, the Soviets on average doubled that total every week. – David Bentley Hart, The Dream-Child’s Progress and Other Essays, 2017
Her voice was pleasant enough, but it was so strong that one fancied there were bones in it. – James Stephens, “Three Angry People”, 1914
428
Nestorius becomes Patriarch of Constantinople
Nestorius (c. 386-c. 450) was a leading Christian theologian at a time when the defining of Christ’s nature became a blood sport in the eastern Roman church. He reached the pinnacle of being named to the see of the empire’s capital and then was branded a heretic, deposed, and exiled.
Born in Asia Minor and educated in Syria, Nestorius attracted the attention of Emperor Theodosius II (founder of the University of Constantinople and builder of the city’s great land walls) who named him archbishop. His appointment was resented by many local clergy and his writings on the human/divine nature of Jesus drew criticism. Nestorius, for example, was uncomfortable with the notion of the Virgin Mary being called Theotokos — “God-Bearer”; for him Jesus had not been born a god, but a man. He preferred the term Christokos, “Christ-Bearer”. To his opponents, led by Patriarch Cyril of Alexandria, this seemed to deny the hypostatic union of humanity and divinity and to posit a dual, separate set of natures. Worse, it seemed to imply that the human aspect predominated. Cyril, rather a nasty character in many ways and not one to back down from using violence, wrote this rather measured admonition to Nestorius:
We, therefore, confess one Christ and Lord, not as worshipping. a man with the Word (lest this expression “with the Word” should suggest to the mind the idea of division), but worshipping him as one and the same, forasmuch as the body of the Word, with which he sits with the Father, is not separated from the Word himself, not as if two sons were sitting with him, but one by the union with the flesh. If, however, we reject the personal union as impossible or unbecoming, we fall into the error of speaking of two sons, for it will be necessary to distinguish, and to say, that he who was properly man was honoured with the appellation of Son, and that he who is properly the Word of God, has by nature both the name and the reality of Sonship. We must not, therefore, divide the one Lord Jesus Christ into two Sons. Neither will it at all avail to a sound faith to hold, as some do, an union of persons; for the Scripture has not said that the Word united to himself the person of man, butthat he was made flesh. This expression, however, “the Word was made flesh,” can mean nothing else but that he partook of flesh and blood like to us; he made our body his own, and came forth man from a woman, not casting off his existence as God, or his generation of God the Father, but even in taking to himself flesh remaining what he was. This the declaration of the correct faith proclaims everywhere. This was the sentiment of the holy Fathers; therefore they ventured to call the holy Virgin, the Mother of God, not as if the nature of the Word or his divinity had its beginning from the holy Virgin, but because of her was born that holy body with a rational soul, to which the Word being personally united is said to be born according to the flesh.
Nestorius would repudiate the hostile characterizations of his teachings, but the 431 First Council of Ephesus (held in the city with a near-maniacal devotion to the Virgin, who was said to have spent her final years there) condemned Nestorius as a heretic and ordered him deposed. After much more theological wrangling and imperial maneuvering, Nestorius was exiled to a remote monastery far up the Nile where he eventually died.
After the Council of Ephesus, an episcopal cleansing took place, driving out many of the bishops who had supported Nestorius. Some of these men migrated out of the Roman sphere into the Persian empire where they established the Church in the East. For almost a thousand years this church took Christianity throughout Asia and as far as China, before it was eventually wiped out by Tamerlane’s Muslim hordes. Today, the veneration of Nestorius continues in some churches in Syria and Iraq, now sadly under Islamic attack again.
The Andrians were the first of the islanders to refuse Themistocles’ demand for money. He had put it to them that they would be unable to avoid paying, because the Athenians had the support of two powerful deities, one called Persuasion and the other Compulsion. The Andrians had replied that Athens was lucky to have two such useful gods, who were obviously responsible for her wealth and greatness; unfortunately, they themselves, in their small and inadequate land, had two utterly useless deities, who refused to leave the island and insisted on staying; and their names were Poverty and Inability. – Herodotus, The History of the Persian War, c. 430 BC
Captain Renault: I’ve often speculated why you don’t return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Run off with a senator’s wife? I like to think you killed a man. It’s the romantic in me.
Rick: It was a combination of all three.
Captain Renault: What in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?
Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
Captain Renault: The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert.
Rick: I was misinformed.
– Epstein, Epstein, and Koch, Casablanca, 1942
The men were all chained together like fish on a string. They were mostly white men but there were also some Indians and half-breeds and Negroes. It was awful to see but you must remember that these chained beasts were murderers and robbers and train wreckers and bigamists and counterfeiters, some of the most wicked men in the world. They had ridden the “hoot-owl trail” and tasted the fruits of evil and now justice had caught up with them to demand payment. You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it. – Charles Portis, True Grit, 1968