There was a black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin. ... Where he wanted to stay was in Eastrod with his two eyes open, and his hands always handling the familiar thing, his feet on the known track, and his tongue not too loose.

flannery o'connor wise blood, chapter 1

Such was, or must have been the origin of society and of law, which gave new fetters to the weak and new power to the rich; irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, fixed forever the laws of property and inequality; changed an artful usurpation into an irrevocable right; and for the benefit of a few ambitious individuals subjects the rest of mankind to perpetual labor, servitude, and misery.

jean jacques rousseau, second discourse, p.125

True nature having been lost, everything becomes natural. In the same way, the true good having been lost, everything becomes their true good.

pensée 16, blaise pascal


when every man does what is right in his own eyes. God gives every man what his heart desires. even if that heart is unrepentant. 

When we want to think of God, is there nothing which turns us aside, tempts us to think of other things? All that is bad, and it is born with us.

pensée 14, blaise pascal

If man is not made for God, why is he only happy with God?
If man is made for God, why is he so hostile to God?

pensée 18, blaise pascal

right before cain kills his brother, he is angry because his sacrifice was not accepted. and God says to him,

"Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it."

genesis 4:7


yet one chapter earlier, we find God telling eve:

"I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing;
in pain you shall bring forth children.
Your desire shall be for your husband,
and he shall rule over you."


genesis 3:16

sin is cain's wife. i think milton was quite on track to portray sin as a woman. the devil is definitely masculine, but sin seems to be attributed with feminine qualities. it hearkens back, of course, to lady folly in proverbs. this makes Christ's temptations all the more interesting, because you've got satan as the prospective father-in-law pimping out his daughter, sin, to the Son of Man, who instead chooses the other woman before Him: israel. 

                 but he, my inbred enemy,

Forth issued, brandishing his fatal dart 

Made to destroy. I fled and cried out 'Death!'

Hell trembled at the hideous name, and sighed

From all her caves, and back resounded 'Death!'

john milton, paradise lost, II.785-789

A mind not to be changed by place or time. 

The mind is its own place and in itself

Can make a Heaven of hell, a hell of Heaven. 

john milton, paradise lost, I.253-255

lewis says much the same thing of the postmodern relativists: they will be the ones in the corners of hell saying "i just have to wake up... it's all in my mind, i just have to wake up." 

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us.

1 john 4:18-19

Nowhere in the New Testament, in fact, is Christianity presented as a cult or as a religion. Religion is needed where there is a wall of separation between God and man.

alexander schmemann, for the life of the world, ch.1.5, p.19

In our perspective, however, the 'original' sin is not primarily that man has 'disobeyed' God; the sin is that he ceased to be hungry for Him and for Him alone, ceased to see his whole life depending on the whole world as a sacrament of communion with God. The sin was not that man neglected his religious duties. The sin was that he thought of God in terms of religion, i.e., opposing Him to life. The only real fall of man is his noneucharistic life in a noneucharistic world. The fall is not that he preferred world to God, distorted the balance between the spiritual and materical, but that he made the world material, whereas he was to have transformed it into 'life in God,' filled with meaning and spirit.

alexander schmemann, for the life of the world, ch.1.4, p.18

"And he saith unto them, Are ye so without understanding also? Do ye not perceive, that whatsoever thing from without entereth into the man, it cannot defile him;"

mark 7.18

Christ seems to have a whole new vision of the purity laws, yet it's the same vision Yahweh had. Christ isn't making new standards, He's interpreting the old standards for all of life. He's forcing israel into circumcising their hearts, and they are kicking against His goads.

If God allows that sort of thing to flourish, it shows that he is seriously displeased. By letting it go unpunished he inflicts a more savage punishment. But when he overthrows such aids to vice, and reduces their pampered passions to poverty, then his opposition is merciful.

augustine, letter to marcellinus, p.38

exactly why america should be terribly, terribly afraid. God has given us the desires of our own hearts.

So under the three forms of lust I have considered the sicknesses of my sins, and I have invoked your right hand to save me (Ps. 102:3). ... This is why I lost you: you do not condescend to be possessed together with falsehood.

augustine, confessions, x.66

structural hypothesis: three forms of lust, he discusses all three in books 5 and 6 (right?) and there are three "grant what you command and command what you will" statements in book 10, all paired with "and you command continence." focus of the work is augustine's search for sexual purity. he finds that he can be a stand-in husband or warden of Christ's bride. and with such a wave of my hand i dismiss all "sexual tension and frustration" and "psycho-sexual disorder" theories of augustine. by the end of the work, any of this so-called sexual tension is resolved because augustine has found the bride he is responsible for.

I loved beautiful things of a lower order, and I was going down to the depths.

confessions, iv.20

My desire is for you, justice and innocence, you are lovely and splendid to honest eyes; the satiety of your love is insatiable. ... As an adolescent I went astray from you, my God, far from your unmoved stability. I became to myself a region of destitution.

confessions, ii.18

Indeed the social bond which should exist between God and us is violated when the nature of which he is the author is polluted by a perversion of sexual desire.

confessions, iii.15

interesting that st augustine seems to be the first (other than st paul, of course) to boil the root problem of sexual sin down to a crime against community. sexual sin is, then, a more grievous sin because it's more innately destructive to community. right?

Friendship can be a dangerous enemy, a seduction of the mind lying beyond the reach of investigation. ... As soon as the words are spoken, 'Let us go and do it,' one is ashamed not to be shameless.

confessions, ii.17

O Lord, do not your eyes look for truth? You have struck them down, but they felt no anguish; you have consumed them, but they refused to take correction. They have made their faces harder than rock; they have refused to repent.

jeremiah 5:3 esv

No man has power to retain the spirit, or power over the day of death. There is no discharge from war, nor will wickedness deliver those who are given to it.

ecclesiastes 8:8