Divine Omniscience in Twenty-First Century Empire

Fredric Jameson, Saint Augustine, and Sergius Bulgakov

Oh rascal children of Gaza,

You who constantly disturbed me with your screams under my window,

You who filled every morning with rush and chaos,

You who broke my vase and stole the lonely flower on my balcony,

Come back –

And scream as you want,

And break all the vases,

Steal all the flowers,

Come back,

Just come back…

Khaled Juma, Oh Rascal Children of Gaza, 2014

Earlier this month, the United States in conjunction with the state of Israel bombed an Iranian elementary school, murdering around 165 children.¹ These were children who were loved by their community and through whom family, friends, and all throughout the community encountered the love of God. But now they’re dead, murdered and strewn underfoot by the most destructive empire of the modern era.

The Iran War should lead us to consider the limits of theological language in capturing the immense suffering American empire continues to unleash across the world. How does God know the suffering of the little children in Tehran and Gaza? Questions regarding theodicy are inextricably bound up with how we understand the relationship between temporality and eternity. Whether or not God knows our suffering as an already-complete fact within eternity but as a genuinely new diremption within history significantly recasts what it means for an American soldier to drone strike an elementary school or a mosque. We cannot arrive at an account of evil that gets to the bottomless depth of horror which we find ourselves passively abetting without a theodicy that centers human responsibility.

Augustine and Bulgakov represent two distinct schools of understanding temporality. Both theologians’ theologies were intended to symbolically resolve a set of contradictions arising out of the historical contradictions of fifth-century late-imperial North Africa and late-nineteenth century Russia. I depart from certain sociological studies presenting themselves as Marxist that reduce theology to material conditions. Rather, I claim that a theodicy that resonates with the modern subject of late-imperial capitalism must begin with a critique of past theologians and the historical limits that determined their thought. By doing so, one can arrive towards a modern theodicy that not only affirms that modern intuition that history is the product of human self-activity, but also the depths of evil and vertigo-inducing responsibility we must take as subjects of empire who continue to be complicit in the war crimes of American empire.

AUGUSTINE’S OWL OF MINERVA

We begin our inquiry with a brief sketch of what I will refer to as the “classical” model of temporality and eternity. Within the classical model, the past, present, and future are eternally present to God. The crucifixion, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the first shot of the Spanish Civil War are equally present to the knowledge of God in eternity. Crucially, just because these events are eternally present to God, they genuinely happen in time. Formally, time is distinct from eternity in such a manner that human beings act out of free will even as these acts are always-already known by God. In this way, God’s omniscience is preserved even as human freedom is given its due.

Our understanding of the classical model is enriched when we situate it within the historical social totality of late-antiquity from which it emerges. This does not entail the kind of sociological analysis frequently employed where an eternal God “reflects” the apparent eternal character social structures within antiquity take on. This analysis struggles to capture how these ideas are deployed in class struggle, legitimating a given class at the same time that it delegitimizes others. Per Fredric Jameson, “by grasping the ideologeme, not as a mere reflex or reduplication of its situational context, but as the imaginary resolution of the objective contradictions to which it thus constitutes an active response.”²

In this way St. Augustine’s classical model of eternity does not simply “reflect” the prevailing hierarchical ideology of eternity within late-antiquity. Rather, the classical model as deployed by Augustine is best understood as a polyvalent historical act by which Augustine is attempting to at once see beyond the claustrophobia of a collapsing empire, while nevertheless only being able to do so with the concepts and notions of their very same dying epoch.

The novel contribution that Christianity introduces into the late-imperial order (that it inherits from Second Temple Judaism) is the notion that history has an end. This linear conception of history in which Christ is both beginning, middle, and end is contrasted with the dominant Pagan conceptions of eternity and time, wherein narrative falls within two broad camps: on the one hand a cyclical movement of the rise and decline of political orders; and on the other hand, a long decline from a mythological golden age. Both narratives are grounded in an objective social order where the world does not present itself as the product of human activity, with political self-determination out of reach for the vast majority of Roman subjects.

This is the world from which the Christian notion of historical linearity first emerges. In the faith’s first several centuries, the Church Fathers were compelled to resolve a chief contradiction whose problematic propelled the tradition forward: Christ has changed everything, yet the world itself — the callous Roman imperial order administered by its vast archipelago of propertied pater familia with often unquestioning authority over slaves, women, and children — seemed to stay the same. The apparent state of things gave the Christians opponents no shortage of attacks.

It was the Sack of Rome (410) that provided Saint Augustine the historical perch from which he would formulate the most daring attempt to resolve this contradiction in the Patristic tradition. Pagan historians like Tacitus and Livy defined history by the rise and fall of empires. When the Western Roman empire fell, it was experienced as nothing short of the end of the world; one caused by the Christians forsaking the old gods of Rome. Augustine responded to these critiques in the City of God by de-coupling the political from the sacred.³ For Augustine, previous generations of Pagan historians were historically limited by their conception of Rome as the center of the world. It was reasonable on the part of the Pagans to believe that the world was coming to an end when they so completely identified the sacred with Rome itself.⁴ By contrast, the fulcrum of history for Augustine sought to identify the fulcrum of history from Rome to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Every event in history leads up to and follows from the life of the Incarnate Logos. Whereas for Pagan thought the sacking of Rome was tantamount to the end of the world, the sacking is now one more episode within the unfolding of God’s plan for salvation.

Augustine was capable of attaining this perspective on the margins of Roman society at a moment when the Roman world order was on the brink of collapse. The end of antiquity brought forth a revolutionary moment in which a theologian and prominent Bishop like Augustine could consider political possibilities beyond the Roman imperial world. And Augustine used this moment to further delegitimize his Pagan interlocutors and landowners who clung to a dying social order.

But this revolutionary moment that allowed Augustine to see beyond the dying imperial order at once mediated but also limited what exactly there was to see. The teleological view of history the Christian theologians extended was itself mediated by this very same imperial order. The Mediterranean world of late-imperial Rome was one in which privilege was marked by civic honors in which persons participated in imperial structures that presented themselves as unchangeable.⁵ So even the sack of Rome, the center of the Western Mediterranean world, did not immediately indicate to contemporaries that society was the product of human activity or that it could be purposely reconstructed.

For Augustine, the transience of the Roman imperial order underscored the fragility of any political order and the hard limits of human control over the unfolding of history. We see here the interesting outcome that Augustine’s teleological conception of history unfolds within a notion of divine knowledge that is effectively timeless, transcending time even as it includes and animates it. So even as Augustine breaks the ancient cyclical view of time, he does so by effectively subordinating time to eternity. Even as history unfolds in time, in eternity the manner in which this unfolding occurs is already immediately and eternally known by God.

At the same time, the transience of the Roman world-order was contrasted with the permanence of a different institution—the Church. Augustine’s position as a Bishop of a town in North Africa at the periphery where imperial authority was growing increasingly fragile, made the imminent collapse even more pronounced than it appeared to his contemporaries in the imperial core. Augustine was at once keeper of a Church community at risk of barbarian invasion from without and civil collapse from within. He not only faced enemies outside the walls of the city, but was beset by competing religious communities that included everyone from the Manicheans to the Donatists. The Church was the representative of eternity on earth. In this way, Augustine emphasized to Christians that submission to their Bishops was essential not only for eternal salvation but also for material protection in the final days of empire.⁶ which professed itself to be eternal simultaneously with an imperial polity whose dissolution would be complete shortly after his lifetime. Seen from this perspective, the “splendid vices” of the City of Man that prized the martial heroism of a conquering empire were unsuitable for a time when empire was on its way out; Augustine substituted in its place the virtues of the City of Man that centered the pious humility of one who submitted to the authority of his or her local Bishop.

It is in the realm of suffering where a rich notion of eternity emerges. Here, suffering is always already accounted for in Divine foreknowledge, but in such a manner where God suffers alongside the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. It is a suffering that God always already knows from the beginning of creation yet nevertheless wills even as he himself must endure such suffering. Augustine’s theology of suffering is one that at once affirms the teleological and linear nature of time against the cyclicality of the Pagans, yet at the same time situates this linear notion of temporality within an ultimately eternal present.

Ultimately though, it is the absence of a proper historical subject that determines Augustine’s conception of time. Without a collective historical subject who consciously produces and is produced by their form of life, the furthest that even Augustine can reach is an eternal present in which history is bequeathed some degree of autonomy, but is ultimately subordinated to Divine will and foreknowledge i.e. somewhere out of reach of human agency. Augustine’s theology of time is an incredibly ambitious attempt to symbolically resolve a set of objective contradictions in which the social world faces collapse and yet life must go on. But Augustine is historically limited in grasping the means by which life must go on i.e. human activity. Because Augustine’s attempt to resolve this contradiction is mediated by the structurally hierarchical world of late antiquity, his theology of time ultimately situates historical becoming within the immediacy of divine knowledge. Importantly, Augustine affirms the novelty of historical events as they occur in time; but frames the entire course of history as an already-complete whole present to divine knowledge. The form through which Augustine attempts to resolve this contradiction is one that emerges from a world where historical development appears outside of the reach of human agency.

Because Augustine’s attempt to resolve this contradiction remains mediated by the hierarchical world of late-antiquity, Augustine at once splinters the ancient cyclical view of time while at the same time ultimately reinscribing historical time within an eternal always-at-once present. Augustine is historically blocked from moving beyond this view of time as eternity’s shadow because conscious and collective social transformation is missing in the society of late antiquity. While Augustine breaks from the cyclical nature of Pagan theories of temporality, he is forced to re-situate history as a completed whole within the eternal presence of God’s knowledge.

Only when history begins to appear as the product of human self-activity does the tension within Augustine’s thought present itself.

A SOPHIOLOGIST AT JENA

Our ability to identify the tensions within Augustine’s theology of temporality arises from a transformation of our historical experience of time. The social order of late antiquity appeared immutable and beyond the reach of collective social agency. By contrast, the world of modernity increasingly presents itself as a world that is the product of human agency—through social revolutions, political antagonism, and class struggle. This appearance is objectively grounded in the generalization of private property relations and commodity exchange. Each person is formally their own self-legislating monad with the right to alienate their property as they see fit. This alienation has produced a world in which what one’s story is and its meaning is up to him or her. The individual is the final arbiter over their life-story. Whereas in antiquity the world was a place to be inhabited, the modern world was one that was made.

Suffering acquires a new valence in a world constituted by modern freedom in which the world is grasped as something that is our responsibility alone. In an era in which persons gradually acquired a sense of historical consciousness, submission to forces beyond one’s will becomes increasingly unintelligible. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century positivist spirit of the Enlightenment, though read as a naive and abstract love for capital-r Reason, possessed a polemical edge. It was directed against the feudal remnants of Western Europe that relied on rents and state-baked privilege to cling to power. Suffering could no longer be justified in the ineffable wisdom of God when society now directly presented itself as a product of human labor. Whereas in late-antiquity the death of the innocent could be rationalized within a divinely-unfolding plan, such justifications can no longer hold water in modernity.

It was in nineteenth-century Russia where this reckoning with the classical model of eternity was fully reckoned with. The world of late-nineteenth century imperial Russia was one where old social forms of life were formally subsumed by international capital. The same conditions of ambiguity that allowed Lenin and other Bolsheviks to pen devastating and incisive critiques of the present moment were the very same ones that allowed for the emergence of a generation of theologians who retrieved and critiqued the Church Fathers from the perch of late-eighteenth century German Idealism and mid-nineteenth century German historical-criticism.

It’s here where Sergius Bulgakov holds an analogous relationship to his moment as Augustine. On the one hand, Bulgakov occupies a moment where mass movements and revolutions swirl around him, and the consciousness that it is humanity that makes history was thick in the air. On the other hand, at least leading up to 1917, Tsarist Russia proved more formidable to the forces of liberal or communist revolution than in Western Europe. The stubbornness of the moment in its refusal to change in the face of increasingly tidal-like waves of mass sentiment demanded theological attention.

At the same time, Bulgakov encountered another correlative movement: the more humanity grasps itself as the root of history, the more its destructive potential widens. Bulgakov lived through the Bolshevik revolution in addition to two world wars in which millions upon millions of fellow proletarians killed one another in an ambiguous project of nation-state building. These decades of mass slaughter and awe-inspiring class domination prevailed — even at the same time as Liberalism proclaimed the doctrines of liberty, equality, and freedom. As we came closer to the light of history’s end, humanity’s shadow grew longer and longer.

Sergius Bulgakov’s theological project consisted in reinterpreting it within a historical paradigm in which history for the first time presented itself as a truly open field of human possibility. Bulgakov’s reinterpretation of God’s omniscience — His knowledge pertaining to past, present, and future — offers a view into how radical his theological ambitions really were. Broadly following St. Augustine and also Aquinas, we understand God’s omniscience as God’s immediate knowledge of all events in time. This implies a conception of time in which God knows future events as already-completed from the perspective of eternity even as they remain to be accomplished in time.

However, Bulgakov’s God does not know time in the same manner as modern subjects know time i.e in terms of interchangeable and piecemeal facts. For Bulgakov,

“the world is present before God as all-unity, as the connection of all with all, not in the pre-determinedness of events, but in the general connectedness or determination (and in this sense pre-determinedness) of the whole.”⁷

God knows history not in its being already-accomplished, but in its absolute openness to becoming. As Bulgakov writes elsewhere, God knew the Fall not as an already-finished moment immediately and eternally present to His knowledge, but as a living and dynamic possibility latent in creation. This is in contrast with the classical model of eternity in which the entire temporal order — every act and event — is immediately present to divine knowledge as a completed whole.

Central to Bulgakov’s conception of omniscience is a productive contradiction—God knows Peter perfectly, but Peter is not a completely describable or exhaustible object of knowledge because Peter exists as a subject that becomes and unfolds through time. Peter as a person, i.e., a concrete spiritual hypostasis, is defined by his always already transcending every fact, description, and limit we may use to define him. As a person, Peter is irreducible; whenever we attempt to describe or talk about him, we are in a literal sense talking *around* him. His depths of dynamic becoming remain unexhausted by any set of propositional statements or facts. Thus temporality is now accorded its own substantial existence as a realm of *genuine* becoming that is distinct from eternity while nevertheless retaining its ultimate unity with eternity. Bulgakov’s radical reinterpretation of creatio ex nihilo casts light on the relationship between temporality and eternity. God’s power is not illustrated by his knowledge of every event that will transpire from now until the second coming. Rather, his power lies in his capacity to limit himself so absolutely that something genuinely new and independent of him can happen. Here it is worth quoting Bulgakov in full:

“The world is real in its divine foundation insofar as its being is *being in the Absolute* — in this, ideas of both creation and emanation agree. But in the idea of creation the world is posited at the same time outside the Absolute, as the self-existent relative. Between the Absolute and the relative runs the border of the creative ‘let there be,’ and therefore the world does not represent a passive outflow, an emanation of the Absolute, like foam in an overfilled cup; rather it is a creatively, initiatively directed and realized emanation — relativity as such.”⁸

The Absolute is reinterpreted as absolute in its capacity for self-diremption toward the other. Bulgakov reinterprets God’s power by way of God’s power to absolutely limit himself so that something other than God may be created. Yet this diremption nevertheless preserves the boundary between divinity and humanity by grounding the world’s becoming in God’s kenotic self-giving. For Bulgakov, creation remains a gift only insofar as it is recognized as given by someone other than oneself, even at the same time as the recipient participates in receiving the gift.

Bulgakov writes in a world where historical agency has become far more visible through the rise of international revolutionary parties and mass movements as well as the emergence of the proletariat as a collective political subject. Labor is that which allows human beings to distinguish themselves from the world in a manner analogous to how God distinguishes himself from creation through his “Let There Be.” Specifically, the generalization of commodity-relations throughout the world generates the conditions for the emergence of abstract labor— that is, the visible interchangeability and commensurability of all different kinds of labor. In capitalist society, labor (along with nature) emerges as the source of value through which commodities attain their worth and commensurability. Time attains a genuinely substantial character only under conditions where collective transformation wrought by conscious agency becomes possible.

Though no longer formally a Russian Marxist, this insight animates Bulgakov’s theological project and allows him to attain a distinction between temporality and eternity that reaches beyond the merely formal. Because history attains its own substantiality, evil is now grasped with a deeper dimension of existential responsibility. Under the classical model, when Peter denies Christ three times, he is doing something new in time, but was something immediately known by God as an already completed act. In contrast, for Bulgakov, when Peter denies Christ three times, he is doing something genuinely new. God does not know Peter’s denial as an always-already completed act in eternity, but as a living possibility within the life-activity of Peter. Through Peter’s person, God knows Peter’s denial not as something already completed, but as a newly inflicted wound in His body. Providence is transformed from being an immediate knowledge of all events as already-completed to the Spirit’s dynamic activity through history’s becoming and freedom. In this light, Christ’s foreknowledge does not imply that he knows Peter’s denial as an already fully-determined event; rather, Christ’s foreknowledge is reinterpreted as a knowledge of Peter and the concrete historical situation that is so intimate that he knows of Peter’s denial as a living possibility inherent in Peter’s freedom.

Human activity bears a heaviness and responsibility in which every evil act is known by God not as an already-completed fact, but as the human person’s irreducible cut into the fallen world of time. If each person is an irreducibly unique producer of history, then the distortions and fissures he or she introduces are ones that are uniquely their own. To be a person is to bear responsibility for one’s actions.

Bulgakov’s theology may be read as an attempt to symbolically resolve the objective conditions of the commodity fetish. The commodity fetish disguises the inter-connectivity between persons and presents society as a relation between things rather than persons. Bulgakov—horrified by not only the industrial scope warfare had taken on in the world wars but also the unfathomable depths of poverty many millions within the periphery of the Western European imperial core—sought to ground a theodicy that attempted to symbolically resolve the contradiction of a world in which persons are on the one hand capable of so much destruction yet on the other hand capable of a kind of willful ignorance only possible under the conditions of capitalist modernity.

HIPPO IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

The past two decades have seen renewed interest in the work of Bulgakov within the Anglo-American world of contemporary theology. In our postmodern moment, in which international capital has so thoroughly subsumed society that its self-cannibalization can no longer be invisibly displaced, theologians clamor for theological language that can unearth the existential dimension of human evil. The irony that Adorno points out is that we only become conscious of human agency at a moment in which we experience it as totally stifled. “But Hegel rightly perceived that…the rift between individual and society is a necessary element of the emancipation of the individual. Without this rift, the idea of freedom, which points the way beyond both this rupture and the undifferentiated state of affairs, would be inconceivable.”⁹

The contradiction we experience in the early-21st century is a sharpened iteration of the same one Adorno faced a century earlier—the leaders of Euro-American empire have never been more capable of mass murder with such ease, yet at the same time appear so insulated from the consequences of their actions that the murder and suffering appear not to matter. We find ourselves in a similar position as the Christians of late-antiquity, similarly powerless; though important distinctions remain regarding how decadence functions across different social totalities, even across periods less than a century apart. The Nazis had the shame to conceal the industrial slaughter in the camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka. The voters and leaders of the Republican party buy and sell symbols of imperial cruelty — hats with their nicknames for South Florida concentration camps and allusions to sexual assault of political opponents. The decadence of empire has so thoroughly denuded the American gentry from the consequences of its actions, that merciless imperial policy can only be grasped through its mediation by the commodity-form, as a spectacle to watch on television. In the imperial core of twenty-first century American empire, where the objective reality of mass violence appears to part ways from the subjective experience of moral responsibility, contemporary Anglo-American theology is compelled to rediscover a language through which the subjective and objective dimensions of evil may be reconnected.

In this contradiction we identify how Bulgakov’s eschatology reads like (from our historical vantage point) a desperate attempt to resolve the horrible antagonism of Euro-American empire. Augustine’s eschatology is constituted by the familiar image of the damned suffering in Hell for all eternity and the saved living blissfully in the New Jerusalem. Christ stands above and beyond the world in the Final Judgement, doling out the sentences. This eschatological symbolism is intelligible in a social totality where we grasp the world as an unchangeable structure in which we are merely participants. Contrast this with Bulgakov’s symbolism of the Last Judgement, where it is *we* who shall judge ourselves and Christ the objective measure by which we understand how far we have fallen before the perfect standard of love for neighbor and God that Christ set for us. This *subjective* judgement may only be most adequately grasped in a world where we understand political and social reality to ultimately be our responsibility. Put differently, the Last Judgement can only attain a subjective component when we grasp the source of social reality—labor.

In Bulgakov’s eschatology we find a symbolic resolution of the contradiction of our present moment that implicitly points towards the cruel irony of late postmodernity. More than a hundred Iranian schoolchildren were murdered, emotionally devastating psychically scarring the thousands of persons in whose lives these children played irreplaceable and invaluable parts. Yet at the same time that we have arrived at such incredible means of destruction, there has never been a moment in world-history where we can so easily disavow ourselves of responsibility. The drone operator murdered those children, but this murder was mediated by a button-push and an AI algorithm. Whatever dull pangs of ambiguity he or she feels in their heart is muffled by the knowledge that they were just following orders. Every person within that chain of command has so many points at which they may displace their responsibility that they have the leisure of clocking out of their job at the fusion intelligence center and eating dinner with their family; maybe they’ll attend their daughter’s ballet performance or grab some beers with friends.

So long as the subjective dimension of this evil remains missing, the objective act—the evil that has been committed—remains abstract. Our first instinct towards justice is one where we look towards who was responsible. When we can’t lay the blame at any one particular person’s feet, our own suffering then appears abstract. As Fanon emphasizes throughout Wretched of the Earth, the suffering of the colonized cannot be truly recognized as suffering until some party is held responsible. The violence of decolonization is one means of forcing back that responsibility from the colonizer. Bulgakov’s theology of time attempts to unite the subjective and objective dimensions of suffering, forgiveness, and redemption by allowing time the gift of becoming and novelty. One’s suffering and loneliness is not just the abstract suffering and loneliness of the late-antiquity persona non grata; as a genuinely historical actor through whose activity history is realized, no one has quite suffered like you. But this uniqueness with which one suffers is one that may only attain its concrete reality through recognition of others.

Despite the historical limits of his time, Augustine recognized the necessity for recognition to be true. But the seeming absence of truly historical subjectivity and the possibility of collective transformation meant that he could only displace this recognition into the untouchable eternity, even as his theology affirms that this eternity touches and animates time even as there remains an asynchronicity between the two. Suffering achieves its recognition at the absolute historical limits of late-antiquity. Bulgakov attempts to move beyond the limitations of Augustine’s time to affirm history’s radical distinction from eternity in its capacity to generate genuinely new actualities; but this remains only a symbolic resolution in the face of the twenty-first century’s accelerating pace towards barbarism.

Even as Bulgakov’s theology offers a language through which we may process the number of mass graves that now stretch between Gaza and Iran, it cannot remain simply a theology of consolation. Theology at this moment can either break or be transformed. History can only become history when we grasp ourselves as responsible for dead children. Our agony should burn until it drives us towards the radical negation of the world that continues to produce these graves and dull our capacity for historical responsibility. The world is tinder. Our Redeemer has come to set the world on fire—the fire of the Spirit that burns and yet does not consume, that reveals the responsibility for the horror we’ve made of history. We must only accept a theology that centers Christ’s revelation concerning the Judgement: that the light has come into the world, but men loved the darkness instead of the light, because their deeds were evil. Only when we grasp the history of imperial slaughter as *our* responsibility rather than an already completed temporal order of violence in eternity can time itself be revealed as the site of judgement, and Christ’s exhortation our exhortation.

1. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-investigation-points-likely-us-responsibility-iran-school-strike-sources-say-2026-03-06/

2. Fredric Jameson. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Pg. 104.

3. See Augustine’s extensive critiques of Roman civil religion in Book II, Ch. XXII, XXIII, XXVII

4. Augustine on the rise and fall of empires not being a matter of divine fortune, but rather subordinate to the providence of the Christian God, Book V, Ch. I, Ch. XXI, Ch. XII,

5. “Thus, in the late Roman empire, the rich remained rich because their persons were sheathed in public authority…Wealth and “honors” were made to converge. The one could not be achieved or maintained without the other. For this reason, when approaching wealth in the later empire (as in most other periods of Roman history) we must make a fundamental transition “from a [modern] mental cosmos in which power depends largely on money to one where money depends . . . largely on power.” Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West. Pg. 5.

6. Augustine, City of God, Book I, Ch. VI, Ch. VII

7. Sergius Bulgakov. The Lamb of God. Pg. 161.

8. Bulgakov. Unfading Light. Pg. 182

9. Theodor Adorno, History & Freedom, pg. 207-208