The Devil’s Dictionary

I recently bought a Dover Thrift Edition of The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. For $3.50, I am very happy with my purchase.* This thin volume, whose definitions are usually maxims in disguise, satisfies the appetite for aphoristic writing I have been cultivating since my sophomore year at St. John’s College, thanks largely to Solomon and Francis Bacon.  My favorite entry for the moment is

Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

It has a touch of Socratic, but even more of Pascalian, irony. See, for example, the middle of Pensée 327 (my translation):

The sciences have two extremes that touch each other. The first is the pure natural ignorance, in which all men find themselves at birth. The second extreme is the one reached by great souls who, after having rigorously passed through all that men can know, find that they know nothing, and encounter the very same ignorance they left behind; but this is a knowing ignorance, acquainted with itself. Those between the two—who have moved on from the natural ignorance and been unable to arrive at the other—they have some hint of this self-important science, and pretend to be knowledgeable. It is those who trouble the world and judge everything poorly.

The entry from Bierce and the pensée from Pascal overlap, but (as I consider it more) they are obviously thought out in very different spirits. In the end, though Bierce has the bite of wit and concision, I can’t say that I prefer it to Pascal et al.  He is just too odious sometimes, too dark. As I thumb through some of the other entries,† I find the same feelings building up for Bierce that I have for other aphorists such as La Rochefoucauld and Nietzsche—a blend of admiration and contempt—

for all of what they write is written well,
but much of what they think is black as hell.

Some of the entries betray a blackness in him that cannot be excused by the usefulness of satire. Being wary of the corrosive effect of wit and pessimism, I’ll keep The Devil’s Dictionary on hand for special occasions, but only holding it at a distance.

* I know what one of my readers might be saying: “Philip, you should be careful with that book! Look at its title!” But relax. Just because a book is called a “dictionary” doesn’t mean that it’s evil!
† See entries for delusion, emotion, evangelist, extinction, and oblivion, to name a few.

From the Notebook: a conversation

—You believe that words can give you peace?
—Is that a scoff?
—It’s a bit ridiculous.
—You’ve never tried to calm someone with words?
—But that peace is so temporary. Another circumstance will come along, another external war, that upsets the peace within.
—What if I consoled someone with words that remained true in all circumstances.
—Fine. Suppose he knew this to be the case also. That would not stop him from forgetting it in the midst of troubles.
—So, is there some force that could work against forgetfulness?
—If so, what would it be called? Not memory, that would beg the question.
—No, you’re right. Let’s call it “faith.”
—Okay.
—Now, if my words are met with faith in the anxious person, he could have peace so long as he has faith in my speech, which means that he does not forget the words that keep their peace-giving power in all circumstances.
—Now, don’t forget what I said about him knowing it to be the case….

On Augustine’s Confessions: his early encounters with Ambrose

As Augustine moves closer to submission under biblical authority, which is accomplished in the Milanese garden at the end of Book VII, it has already been noted that a certain “wager” in the midst of his suspicions put him in a place to receive catholic teachings about and from the Bible before the garden scene. An important detail in Augustine’s wager was skipped over, and must be revisited.

Before the wager could have happened, Augustine had to be given the smallest glimmer of hope with regard to the Bible. Even though something may promise infinite gain for the gambler, if there is no likelihood of achieving it, then there is no wager: if the Bible were to have no possible refutation for the Manichæan attacks, then the Bible and the Church that teaches from it are not at all an option. But in Book V, Chapters xiii-xiv, just before Augustine becomes a catechumen, he takes the words of Ambrose to heart. Ambrose’s influence on Augustine’s thinking, especially with respect to the Old Testament, cannot be passed over.

In brief, Augustine listens to Ambrose only because the latter is a renowned rhetorician. He wishes to hear how well Ambrose speaks, and does not care of what. But in the listening, what is said eventually takes hold of Augustine and infiltrates some of the Manichæan strongholds, undermining their attack on the Old Testament’s validity.

This brings up the earlier consideration of style and content in the episode about Cicero’s Hortensius. Just as in the reading of that book, here with Ambrose he approaches him desiring to get some great rhetorical training; and just as with that book, the content of some of the words slips in. He weighs the words carefully, and finds Ambrose to be worthy of his fame. And despite trying to keep his mind off the content, he is able to note the effect of Ambrose’s message, at least in retrospect:

And verily with the sweetness of his discourse I was much delighted: which, however it were more learned, yet was it not so pleasing and inveigling as Faustus his was, the manner of the oratory I mean, though for the matter there was no comparison. For Faustus did but rove up and down amongst his Manichæan fallacies; but Ambrose taught salvation most soundly. But salvation is far enough from sinners, such as I was at that instant; and yet I drew little and little nearer toward it; but how, I knew not.

At least twice before—the reading of the Hortensius and the refutation of Faustus—has a great rhetorician changed Augustine’s mind, he being quite unable to explain how. The Hortensius gives him beautiful words and yet dissuades him from the career path of a lawyer, in which Augustine has been planning to put such words to money-winning use. Next Faustus gives him beautiful words and yet simultaneously shows the inadequacy of Manichæan thought behind the words. And here again Ambrose gives him beautiful words whose effect on him is unanticipated.

In a previous post the effect of these words was described as the deciding factor in the wager to become a catechumen. What is of interest here is the role Ambrose the human teacher has in relation to the Old Testament, which consists of supposedly “God-breathed” words, as at 2 Timothy 3.16, whose authority is the question of most of the Confessions. Of Ambrose there is no question that Augustine thinks of him as an angel of God: “To him was I led by thee, unknowing, that by him I might be brought to thee, knowing it.” According to God’s own plan, it seems, Ambrose is a necessary part of Augustine’s journey. He is responsible for changing Augustine’s views of the Old Testament, at least just enough to expose him to the remainder of biblical doctrines and allow for a non-literal hermeneutic. The Bible, though, apart from Ambrose, would have forever been subject to the abuses of the Manichæan interpretations and dismissals. It, being in need of interpretation at all, was unable to defend itself in the world. So we return to the point brought out in Plato’s Phædrus about writing.

With this instance, it seems that the Bible is need of defending. It seems that even it, as a text, is not exempt from the dangers associated with writing. Does Augustine also think of it as merely an excellent specimen among the infinitude of books?

On Augustine’s Confessions: the first steps toward accepting biblical authority

Augustine before his conversion had a strange relationship to the Bible. His thirst for “the immortality of wisdom” that he got from Cicero’s Hortensius, as in Book III Chapter iv, encouraged him to take up the Bible after years of disdaining it, but he could not bring himself to appreciate it at the time, for he came to the text already distrusting the content.  Diverse Manichæan teachings had undermined Christian claims about biblical authority, and he also found the style “far unworthy to be compared to the stateliness of the Ciceronian eloquence” that had led him to approach the text again. As long as anyone despises both the content and the style of a text, it has nothing to offer him. So Augustine was repelled from it.

How would it be possible for him to approach the Bible and read it successfully? He could admire its style if he would radically alter his taste, or else forsake, or forget, his highly technical knowledge about literature and style. But even if he achieved admiration of its style, this would make the text enjoyed in the same way that a painting is enjoyed, as Socrates describes in the Phædrus; it would offer nothing to him but light pleasure, being unable to answer its questioners or teach any new knowledge. Words read as merely pleasing sounds are themselves mute. By this Augustine might have come to admire the Bible, even its writers, and even the personages of its stories, but admiration falls short of the required adoration. The Gospel Accounts repeatedly tell of how Jesus Christ tries to draw a distinction between mere fans and his faithful disciples: to love Jesus Christ for his eloquence would be an ironic failure to hear what he says.

Again, how to approach the Bible and abide? He would need to find a way to apprehend its content without Manichæan contentions before he could ever honestly examine it, let alone be content with it. This is precisely what the books of some astronomers and philosophers did for him. He found in them claims to the wisdom that he craved from Cicero’s exhortation, and also highly plausible accounts that ran against the mystical teachings and fables of the Manichæan books. Against the astronomers, Faustus, the great Manichæan preacher, fell short and was forced to acknowledge so much. And then the skeptics gave young Augustine a place to stand suspended; now the Manichæan fables were as dubious to him as the Bible. The end of Book V, Chapter xiv, describes how he loses his love for the one, but does not thereby gain an appreciation for the other:

[I judged] in that very time of my doubt, that I could not safely continue in that sect, before which I now preferred divers of the Philosophers: to which Philosophers notwithstanding, for that they were without the saving Name of Christ, I utterly refused to commit the curing of my languishing soul. This therefore I determined, so long to be a catechumen in the Catholic Church, (which had been so much commended unto me by my parents) till such time as some certain mark should appear, whereto I might steer my course.

His participation in the church as a catechumen is the intriguing detail here that will be explored in another article with the help of Blaise Pascal.

Justice and Social Justice

Is there such a thing as asocial, unsocial, or antisocial justice? Or maybe personal justice, individual justice?  Unorganized justice?

I find social justice to be an odd term.  Contained within it is an assumption that the differentia—that is, the word social—is necessary to distinguish or emphasize some properties of justice from other species of justice, or to add some properties not necessarily signified by justice alone.

It’s like Aristotle saying, for example, that man is a rational animal: animal is the genus, and the differentia is rational. So for him man is like the animals in so many ways, and unlike them in some set of properties signified by the word used as a differentia.  And there must be at least two differentia for any genus if it is to be a genus at all.  If there were only rational animals, then we would not bother with the word rational, and would use animals plainly.  So next to the rational animal there is a different species, say, the pack animal, which might include dogs, bees, some birds, etc.

And what about social justice?  If there is some genus, justice, for which social is a differentia, we ought to inquire about the other differentiæ, and also about the genus.  Again, in order to have a meaningful differentia there must be more than one species within a genus; otherwise the species is the genus, and the word used as the differentia signifies nothing, is empty.  In that case, social justice is merely another name for justice.

This is why I opened with so many questions about other terms that we could use for justice.  Do we think those terms have any useful meaning in them?  Do we think there is an individual justice, for example?  I am not suggesting that there isn’t such a thing, but only pointing out that we have come to use the term social justice without much consideration for what we mean by justice.  And if justice in general is advantageous, beautiful, or good, then we ought to pay attention to all of its species, not only the social or societal ones.

A Little Prose Poetry from Augustine’s Confessions

I found a delightful passage in the Latin of the Confessions thanks to one of Henry Chadwick’s footnotes.   The passage is about how God draws us to himself.  By using the spiritual analogues of the five senses, a motif in the Confessions, Augustine means to emphasize the intimacy and depth of God’s calling; it is at once both spiritual and visceral, both mysterious and close-to-home.  (Even if my reader doesn’t know Latin, he should read the following words aloud as if they were English, and the sound of it will give an accurate enough impression of its poetic finesse.)

Vocasti et clamasti et rupisti surditatem meam: coruscasti, splenduisti et fugasti cæcitatem meam: fragrasti, et duxi spiritum, et anhelo tibi, gustavi et esurio et sitio, tetigisti me, et exarsi in pacem tuam.

Henderson’s translation:

Thou calledst and criedst unto me, yea thou even breakedst open my deafness: thou discoveredst thy beams and shinedst unto me, and didst chase away my blindness: thou didst most fragrantly blow upon me, and I drew in my breath and I pant after thee; I tasted thee, and now do hunger and thirst after thee; thou didst touch me, and I even burn again to enjoy thy peace.

On Plato’s Phædrus: two kinds of writing and questions about Augustine’s treatment of the Bible in this scheme

Note: I have come to reconsider the content in this article, and it will be re-posted at a later date.  I particularly disagree with my reading of the “image” at the end, and will soon be adjusting my interpretation accordingly.

At the end of Plato’s Phædrus, 274C-275B,* Socrates relates a myth, supposedly Egyptian, of the god Theuth speaking to the king-god Thamus about the arts he wishes to give to humankind. Of Theuth’s greatest gifts is writing. He tells the king that writing will be the drug that augments memory and wisdom. Thamus, however, disagrees, saying instead that it will “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls” by keeping them from the habitude of recollection and the exercise of memory. Written words remind the learners, but have nothing to do with aiding memory. The distinction is important. For Plato, as described in the Meno, what people call learning is nothing but the soul’s recollection of knowledge it had possessed before its current bodily indwelling. To exercise the memory, then, directly enhances the capability of learning, because it works the same intellectual muscles required to dig up eternal things forgotten in the soul. But to be reminded of something has nothing to do with learning, and it presupposes that the one reminded has already learned, already recollected, the eternal knowledge from within the soul; having what the writer has learned external to him gives him the freedom to no longer practice searching it out within himself, and so he gets out of the habit of searching his soul altogether, thereby reducing his capacity for learning. The distinction between the aid to memory and the reminder might be carried further in the following analogy: the aid to memory is to the reminder as a question is to a dogma, and as a living interlocutor is to a dead book. The antecedents are all stimuli for learning, whereas the consequents are only crutches by which one ceases to think and rests in the ease of merely repeating old knowledge.

Plato through Socrates through Thamus goes on to speak even more disparagingly of writing: “You give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally not know anything; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.” Now a nuance is taken into consideration. Above, it was made clear that writing would help someone who had knowledge to keep his knowledge nearby, while atrophying his faculties of recollection. But here, what is at issue is the effect of the writing on those who have not written it, the effect of knowledge that is given from outside and not sought and found within the learner. The conclusion seems to be that the student of the dead book may at best be a parrot for another man’s knowledge, but he himself does not thereby know. The reminders in writing can never be clear or certain for those who have not written them, that is, for those who have not known the things before reading them. This will all take a twist of meaning when it is brought back to Augustine’s thoughts about the Holy Spirit, but Plato has more to say about writing that will aid the inquiry.

Socrates, at 275D-E,* notes that, no matter how lifelike a painting might seem, the painting does not respond to the looker. A piece of writing is exactly like this painting, having the semblance of understanding, but not having life. If the reader asks the words a question, they only give one answer, they only repeat themselves. They cannot read between their own lines, and they cannot explain themselves. They also cannot discriminate: “when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not.” As was pointed out above, writing will give the semblance of knowledge for those who are reminded of something they themselves have not yet learned. It would be better if the words could choose to whom they reveal their meaning and to whom not, acting as reminders to those who have knowledge, and being inaccessible to those who have no business reading them. But as it is, they are perpetual victims, susceptible to violence at all times. They are like illegitimate children, always needing the help of their father the writer to come to their defense. Should he stop defending them, there is nothing to protect them from misuse or abuse.

Shall we conclude that writing is always in some way harmful and always being harmed whenever it is read? Socrates and Phædrus, at 276A, consider another kind of writing that stands in stark opposition to what has already been said, and this second kind will give us substantial questions for comparison between Plato’s view of writing and Augustine’s view of the Bible. This second kind is like the legitimate son from the same father as the other. It is legitimate because it was written according to knowledge in the writer’s soul. Being so, it does not need its father’s protection, but is brought up able to defend itself, discriminating between those to whom it speaks. Phædrus muses that such a speech coming from knowledge is living and ensouled, and that the written form of it is an “image” proper. A careful distinction must be made here: this image is not the same as the mute painting or the dead book mentioned above. It does not enter the soul as a mere appearance, as a shell of something, but as a shell carries with it the substance of the thing imaged. It is like a seed, and hence Socrates goes on to describe the responsible and knowledgeable writer as a serious farmer, 276A-277A.

More of the Phædrus will inform some later inquiries, but what has been brought up so far can be brought back to the Confessions in a series of questions. Augustine tells us much of his early education and his experience with particular books. Some of them he remembers with reverence, like Cicero’s Hortensius, and others he scorns as distractions from God’s call to repentance, like Virgil’s Æneid. But over and above them all Augustine puts the Bible, and of especial interest in his debate with the Manichæans are Genesis and the Old Testament.  Does Augustine draw the same distinction as the Phædrus between the dead books and the living? Is it as simple as saying the world’s books are illegitimate sons, and the Bible legitimate? Are the former mute like a painting, but the latter able to impregnate the reader with knowledge? The Bible’s relationship to the dichotomy brought up by Plato will be very insightful, leading directly into a rich understanding of Augustine’s thoughts on Moses, the Holy Spirit, and the role of reading for Christians, which will come up in a few of the following articles.

*All Phædrus citations come from Jowett’s public domain translation.

On Augustine’s Confessions: the relationship of many interpretations to one written word

In a previous post, I already noted that Augustine says love stands over all the diverse interpretations of Genesis. His central argument is, in short, that if the interpreter believes that all the Law and Prophets is summarized by the commandments to love his God and his neighbor, then he discredits his own interpretation by violating love whenever he quarrels about the supposedly true meaning of the words. And in Book XII chapter xviii of the Confessions, Augustine writes:

All which things being heard and well considered of, I will not strive about words: for that is profitable to nothing, but the subversion of the hearers; but the law is good to edify, if a man use it lawfully, for that the end of it is charity, of a pure heart and good conscience, and faith unfeigned.

This sentence—which contains citations from 2 Timothy 2.14 and 1 Timothy 1.5,8—may seem straightforward on its surface, but it has roots tapping into some of the main themes running like an underground river through the entire work. First, on the surface, quarrels about words can cause divisions among people who are explicitly commanded to strive to agree on all things. Whereas the disputes may have begun from a desire to come to a better understanding of a biblical passage, which all had agreed beforehand was true, all hope of reaching this better understanding is thwarted by the disappearance of love in the midst of such a dispute. And how exactly is the hearer “subverted”?  Maybe his heart cannot be pure because he is told to hold another’s words in suspicion, even if that one reads from the same passage and presents a tenable interpretation. Maybe his conscience cannot remain good because he will have at the same instant assented to two interpretations while also assenting to the tenet of one possible interpretation, making him divided against himself and unable to plainly confess the truth of the passage. Maybe his faith will become feigned because he will have changed the basis for that faith, now subject to pondering one interpreter against another instead of resting in the unchanging character of the plainly written words; it is no longer a faith in God’s words, but now a faith that must waver in between little gods who have hijacked the words in their disputes. The moment of subverting the hearer is when one claims as his own what had been common to all. In other words, the interpreter’s unduly bold claim forces the hearer or reader to choose one among many instead of the one at the source of the many.

Now this is getting below the surface into one of the main themes of the Confessions:—the relationship of the many and the diverse to the one. The problem arising here in the inquiry about interpretation echoes lofty discussions on both the trinity of God and the catholicity of the church. Of course, for Augustine, three persons are in one God, and many members are in one body, the church, and so an indefinite number of true meanings are found in one written word. In all of these cases, the one is supposed where the many are apparent.  And this supposition has an interesting effect.

At the end of the same chapter cited above, xviii, Augustine poses the possibility that a reader might find a true or truth-yielding interpretation that even the writer did not intend or would not understand. This means that the written word might have the capability of expanding into new territory, of advancing its message according to the sophistication or intelligence of the reader. But this is not in exact accord with the supposition of oneness just mentioned. This is oneness inasmuch as it is a source whence the many pour out. But this sense suggests that the one loses control of the many, that the many have a longstanding independence from the one after they are drawn out. More concretely, this means that the new interpretation suggested by one man stands independent of the passage it was founded in, and also independent of the diverse other interpretations all standing independent from that passage. If two interpreters severally pull out of Genesis what Moses did not put in to it when he wrote it, then these two interpretations can be held against each other on the level of new revelation, competing holy books, whose legitimacy depends not on Genesis or Moses, or any of the Bible, but on the authority of the interpreter. This, clearly, is not what Augustine thinks or advocates.

The supposition of the one mentioned above leads him away from that possibility to a much stronger statement in chapter xxx:

. . . Let us in such manner honour that servant of thine, the dispenser of this Scripture, so full of thy Spirit, that we may believe him, when by thy revelation he wrote these things, to have bent his intentions unto that sense in them, which principally excels the rest, both for light of truth, and fruitfulness of profit.

And then even stronger in xxxi:

And if there be a third truth, or a fourth, yea, if any other man may discover any other truth in those words, why may [Moses] not be believed to have seen all these; he, by whose ministry, God that is but One, hath tempered these holy Scriptures to the meanings of a many, that were to see things true, and yet diverse? For mine own part verily, (and fearlessly I speak it from my heart) that were I to endite anything that should attain the highest top of authority, I would choose to write in such a strain, as that my words might carry the sound of any truth with them, which any man could apprehend of concerning these matters; rather than so clearly to set down one true sense concerning some one particular, as that I should thereby exclude all such other senses, which being not false, could no ways offend me. I will not therefore, O my God, be so heady as not to believe that this man obtained thus much at thy hands. He without doubt both perceived, and was advised of, in those words whenas he wrote them, what truth so ever we have been able to find in them: yea, and whatsoever we have not heretofore been able, no nor yet are, which nevertheless can be found in them.

So the written words also contain the many truths coming from it. The passage is not a source of new revelations, but a single revelation from which interpreters of various abilities and conditions may see different truths, like different faces of the same solid, while also having the other truths available to their consideration if they should change their hermeneutic. And every single interpretation is linked back to the source, back to Moses and the intention under which it was written. The one is not merely the source of the many, it also comprehends the them and lays claim to them. Two interpreters now point back to the original written word in their conversation with each other. Any given passage is now under the scrutiny of the whole of Moses’s writings, or the whole of the Bible. No single interpretation can stand if it does not stand alongside all the other interpretations that hold the written words to be true. This brings to mind something Plato mentions in the Phaedrus, something I will save for another article.

On Augustine’s Confessions: hermeneutics with love

In Book XII of the Confessions, Augustine acknowledges the large variety of interpretations that arise from the first few sentences of Genesis. In the midst of discussing these, he takes a whole chapter, xxv, to propose a fundamental rule for Bible teachers: in no way should they compromise love in discussions about the meaning of the written word.

Behold now, how foolish a conceit it is, in such plenty of most true opinions, as may be fetched out of those same words, rashly to affirm which of them Moses principally meant: and thereby, with pernicious contentions to offend charity itself; for whose sake he spake everything, whose words we go about to expound.

When I first read this I found it a little surprising. Augustine himself had some very strong opinions about Genesis, for the most part supporting an allegorical hermeneutic for the whole creation story. This kind of interpretation he thought was instrumental in combating some, like the Manichæans, who used peculiar literal readings of passages in Genesis as a means to discredit the Old Testament, to maintain that its putative contradictions render it useless for any instruction. So it is conceivable that, because of his success in combating the Manichæans, he would have highly valued his own opinions. Augustine, however, appears very sensitive to the verse, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble,”* from James 4.6, 1 Peter 5.5, Proverbs 3.34 Septuagint. This he cites in the second sentence of Book I, and then he repeats it many times throughout the whole. He acknowledges his own great intelligence and skill as a writer, but he fears the fruit of these excellences if his pride should get hold of them. So he would rather be contradicted than stand firm in his conceit. To this point he writes about the proud who love their own opinions and assert them too strongly:

Whereas they are so earnest, that Moses did not mean what I say, but what they say; this I neither like nor love: for even if it is so, yet is this rashness of theirs no sign of knowledge, but of over boldness; nor hath seeing further, but swelling bigger, begotten it. And therefore, O Lord, are thy judgments to be trembled at; seeing that thy truth is neither mine, nor his, nor a third’s; but belonging to us all, whom thou callest publicly to partake of it: warning us terribly not to account it private to ourselves, for fear we be deprived of it. For whosoever challenges that as proper to himself, which thou propoundest for all to enjoy, and would make that his own, which belongs to all; that man shall be driven from what is common to all, to what is properly his own; that is, from truth, to a lie. For he that speaketh a lie, speaketh it of his own.

That last sentence, qui enim loquitur mendacium de suo loquitur, is a fairly literal translation of the Greek, ὅταν λαλῇ τὸ ψεῦδος ἐκ τῶν ἰδίων λαλεῖ, of Joh. 8.44, which is in reference to the devil, who is often associated with pride and prideful men, as at III.vi and X.xliii. Augustine believes that human conceit runs together inextricably with the devil’s deceit. On this premise alone we could consider the healthy fear of our own pride justified. But Augustine’s main point, getting back to that rule for Bible teachers mentioned above, is that pride leads to discord and upsets love. If we believe what Jesus Christ said about the two greatest commandments at Matthew 22.37-40—especially this last verse, “on these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets”*—then we believe that our treatment of Genesis is also swallowed up by the commandment to love our neighbor, and therefore we should conduct ourselves in love and never let our reading cause discord, undue argument, or strife. To this point Augustine rightly cites Paul at 1 Corinthians 4.6: “Let us not therefore be puffed up in favor of one, against another, above that which is written.”

*Bible citations so marked come from the English Standard Version.