Faith AND life

      "These half-dozen questions effectively synthesized what the Tudor regime had been pursuing piecemeal, as the opportunity arose, since it was first established half a century before.  The interest in the personal morality of the religious has often been upheld as the signal of a new determination to do battle with the very basis of religious vows.  But the behaviour of individuals, their social and sexual liaisons, had always figured in the visitations, both those carried out under the external authority of the bishop and those investigations undertaken by their own congregations."

     James G. Clark, The dissolution of the monasteries:  a new history (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2022), 234 (Part Two, chap. V. The King's Commissions), italics mine.  The footnote at the end of this paragraph  appears to cite sources no earlier than 1492, however.  Would this hold also against claims about the rise of a supposedly new and unprecedented reformist
interest in surveillance and control at about this time?

The one lost sheep, the righteous one, who goes astray non-iniquitously

I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek thy servant, | for I do not forget thy commandments.

Ps 119:176 RSV, italics mine.

All we like sheep have gone astray; | we have turned every one to his own way; | and the Lord has laid on him | the iniquity of us all.

Is 53:6 RSV.

     Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him. And the Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, 'This man receives sinners and eats with them.'
     So he told them this parable: 'What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost, until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, "Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost." Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.'

Lk 15:1-7 RSV.

     Image:  Habib Mhenni (photographer), "The Good Shepherd" (23 September 2013), from the Catacomb of the Good Shepherd, Hadrumetum (modern Sousse, Tunisia), but housed now in the Bardo National Museum in Tunis.  On the original excavation, see, for starters, A. F. Leynaud, Les catacombes africaines: Sousse-Hadrumtète, 2. éd. rev., et augmentée (Alger: Jules Carbonel, 1922).

I eat and drink the price of my redemption

"Your only Son 'in whom are hid all treasures of wisdom and knowledge' (Col. 2:3) had 'redeemed me by his blood' (Rev. 5:9). . . .  I think upon the price of my redemption, and I eat and drink it, and distribute it.  In my poverty I desire to be satisfied from it together with those who 'eat and are satisfied' (Ps. 61:5)."

ille tuus unicus, «in quo sunt omnes thesauri sapientiae et scientiae absconditi », redemit me sanguine suo. . . . cogito pretium meum et manduco et bibo et erogo et pauper cupio saturari ex eo inter illos, qui edunt et saturantur. . . .

     St. Augustine, Confessiones X.xliii (70), trans. Chadwick.  Latin from CCSL 27, 193 ll. 34-38 (cf. CSEL 33, 279 l. 21-280 l. 2).

"when man and woman possess their home, two minds, | two hearts that work as one"

"'may the good gods give you all your heart desires: | husband, and house, and lasting harmony too. | No finer, greater gift in the world than that . . . | when man and woman possess their home, two minds, | two hearts that work as one.  Despair to their enemies, | a joy to all their friends.  Their own best claim to glory.'"

     Odysseus to Nausicaa; Odyssey 6, c. 200, trans. Fagles (New York:  Penguin, 1996), 174. 

"That distant land"

      Andy Catlett's "remembering and his thoughts have carried him by now far outside of the matter of fact of this world's present age.  He stands now with his father [Wheeler] and his father's father [Marce], and with others dear to them, in the presence of a longed-for beautiful land that they have desired as if seen afar, that yet is the same, the very land that they have known and that they know, a love-made land, dark to them until by their own love they came to see it."

     Wendell Berry, Marce Catlett:  the force of a story (Los Angeles & San Francisco, CA:  Counterpoint, 2025), 144 (The future, 14).  Concluding lines, p. 151 (The future, 15):

     As they have carried the story, the dead and the living have been carried by it through the breakages of broken times, circling generation by generation back to that distant land, which they have never reached except by trial and in spells, never yet placing two generations securely in succession, the land where more than a century ago Marce Catlett departed with cautious hope in the dark past midnight, came home broke, and in the dark before daylight the next morning went back to work.

"'Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.'"

"[Robert] Persons was still in hiding at Stonor; he sent his servant to see how Campion was looking, and the man brought back word that his gentleness and charm had already put him on easy terms with his captors.  The party dined together at the same table.  Campion chatted easily with them and with several members of the University who were allowed to approach  him.
     "[The 'professional priest-hunter' George] Eliot was ignored; neither magistrates nor soldiers troubled to hide their dislike of the man; once or twice on the road there had been hostile movements in the crowd as the informer passed, and cries of 'Judas'; his first elation was exhausted; the praise which he had received at Court sounded faint and distorted; it was almost as though this were Campion’s triumph, and he the malefactor.  At last he could bear Campion’s neglect no longer, and so broke out:  'Mr. Campion, you look cheerfully on everyone but me.  I know you are angry with me for this work.'
     "Then, perhaps for the first time since Sunday morning, when Eliot had knelt for Mass to receive the holy bread from his hands, Campion turned his eyes on him, 'God forgive thee, Eliot,' he said, 'for so judging of me; I forgive thee and in token thereof, I drink to thee.'  He raised his cup, and then added more gravely, 'Yea, and if thou repent and come to confession, I will absolve thee; but large penance must thou have.'"

     Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Campion (London:  Longmans, Green and Co.,1937 [1935]), 168.

Is there more to this than a leyenda negra inglesa?

"The last thing [King Philip of Spain] wanted was to go to war, particularly with the English, whose formidable spirit he knew from the days when he had been their king.
     "But the provocation had been continuous. . . . [And] Then there were the slave traders.  In accordance with his stern moral code Philip forbade his American colonists from enslaving the native Indians and from importing negroes.  They resented this, and readily bought from Hawkins, although trade of any kind was forbidden them except with their Mother Country.  Not only was [Queen]  Elizabeth cognizant of this contraband business, she was a partner in it.  She had lent a ship of her own, unsuitably called the Jesus, for this very purpose.  Bristol grew rich once more with the trade that St. Wulstan had suppressed there in the eleventh century.  English galleys, laden with human cargo, plied regularly between America and West Africa, and on their return journeys, as often as not, stopped to sack a Spanish outpost or board a treasure ship."

     Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Campion (London:  Longmans, Green and Co.,1937 [1935]), 105.  I merely note the claim.  It would be interesting to know what a specialist would say.