Awe

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Lyrics: verses 1–2, Carl Boberg (1859–1940); verses 3–4, Stuart K. Hine (1899–1989). 1 . Justin Martyr, First Apology 55 . See the discussion in The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 366f. 2 . Timothy Rees, “God Is Love, Let Heaven Adore Him.” 6 The Divine Presence and the Forgiveness of Sins I N THE BIBLE , the idea of God’s personal Presence forms itself into a story. The short form of the story goes like this. The Creator is present with his human creatures in the original creation, “walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze” (Gen. 3:8). Some later texts speak of God hiding from sinful humanity, but in the fateful opening scene it was the humans who were trying, unsuccessfully, to hide. In the aftermath, God seems to be a brooding onlooker, grieving over the wickedness of the human creatures, drowning the world in a flood from which one family is rescued to restart the project and finally disrupting the arrogant building of the Tower of Babel. Then, in Genesis 12, God calls Abraham and appears to him on various occasions. Abraham builds shrines and worships God there. Already there is a sense, fitful but nonetheless powerful, of the challenging, vocation-renewing divine Presence in the land of promise. The theme continues. Jacob, running away into exile, has a vision of a ladder between heaven and earth, with God standing at the top; Jacob names the place Bethel, the “house of God,” and it eventually becomes another such shrine. But the God who called Abraham makes himself known in a new way through the Exodus, revealing the divine name (the mysterious “I AM WHO I AM ” of Exod. 3:13–15 and 6:2), declaring the law (Exod. 20), and above all, despite the people’s shocking idolatry with the golden calf, coming to dwell with them in the tabernacle in the wilderness, and leading them to the promised land. As we saw, the tabernacle was designed as a miniature heaven-and-earth, a “little world” in which God and his people would meet. It would be a miniature Eden. Now, however, it would be placed under strict conditions, because of the danger of rebellious humans bringing their polluted lives into direct contact with the holy God himself.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  But the way God does this is, first, by fulfilling his ancient covenant promises and, second, by thereby addressing idolatry, the underlying problem of all human faithlessness. In other words, God is unveiling his “righteousness” through the faithfulness to death of Israel’s Messiah, Jesus. To try to understand God’s dealing with sin in this passage without placing the covenant and the cult at the center is to opt for a shallow and ultimately misleading understanding. We must put Paul’s train of thought back together again if we are to understand its central point, the death of Jesus as the means of dealing with sin. All this is reinforced if we glance at the passage that immediately follows the great single argument of 1:18–4:25. In 5:1–2 Paul states the result of God’s faithfulness as the restoration of “access” to “grace” and of the hope of “glory.” And, as 5:6–11 makes clear, everything that Paul has now said is grounded in the unbreakable covenant love of the one God: “God demonstrates his own love for us” in 5:8 is the further dimension, still in covenantal language, of “God’s covenant justice has been displayed” in 3:21. This looks forward to the final scene in Romans 1–8, where in 8:31–39 we find justification rooted in the death of Jesus as the effective expression of the divine love. In that passage, the renewed cult is focused on Jesus himself, at God’s right hand, interceding on behalf of his people: the king, in other words, acting as the priest (8:34). There is no space here to develop this further, but it increases the strong sense that in 3:21–26, which on anyone’s account must be seen as the vital turn in the argument, we are dealing not simply with a “works contract” as imagined in the usual “Romans road,” but with the covenant and the cult as the ways by which the one God deals with sins and so creates a forgiven and worshipping worldwide people. With this introduction, then, we take a deep breath and plunge into the difficult detail of the passage. Redemption Reimagined God’s Covenant Faithfulness Romans 3:21–26 states its own theme with such heavy emphasis that we cannot miss it: the dikaiosynē theou , the “righteousness of God.” Paul highlights this in vv. 21–22 and then again in vv. 25–26: But now, quite apart from the law (though the law and the prophets bore witness to it), God’s covenant justice [dikaiosynē ] has been displayed. God’s covenant justice [ dikaiosynē ] comes into operation through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah, for the benefit of all who have faith.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  That place is Jesus himself. And Jesus himself, the focus of belief, invoked in prayer, loved in answer to his own love, is the ultimate answer to the problem of idolatry. “He is the image of God, the invisible one” (Col. 1:15), the reality of which all other “images” are at best distorted parodies. The vocation of Israel turns out to have been, all along, a plan designed for God’s own personal use. God put Jesus forth , Paul seems to be saying, as the place where heaven and earth overlapped, the place where the loving Presence of the one God and the faithful obedience of the true human being would meet and merge and be realized in space, time, and matter . Jesus, as Israel’s Messiah, represented Israel; Israel, called to be the light of the world, represented that wider world. In Jesus the vocation of Israel and of all humans was summed up in faithful obedience. Many readers of Paul have imagined that he did not articulate a fully “incarnational” Christology. If I am right, this passage shows that he did; but it was rooted in Jewish views of the Temple and already woven securely into tight formulas such as the present passage. Paul has thus addressed the larger problem he had highlighted in Romans 1:18–23: the underlying cause of “sin” itself was idolatry. Now the one God has revealed himself, has manifested his covenant justice, to draw all peoples to his Presence. This points ahead at once to 3:27–31, in which Paul demonstrates that through the gospel Jew and Gentile alike are reckoned, on the basis of faith, to be members of the single family that worships the one true God. This is highlighted again when Paul, having insisted in the main argument of chapter 4 that Abraham’s family was always intended to include both Gentiles and Jews, describes Abraham’s faith as one of giving glory to God and trusting his power (4:20–21). And the argument then naturally emerges into the summary in 5:1–2, where those who are justified by faith have “peace with God” and “access to this grace in which we stand,” celebrating the “hope of God’s glory.” The new Temple has been constructed; the “meeting” has taken place. When, therefore, we follow through the theme of Israel’s election rather than jettisoning it to concentrate on Jesus, we find that it highlights the role and person of Jesus in a way usually ignored. “God put him forth as a hilastērion ”; you could not get a “higher” view of Jesus than by seeing him, in this way, as the place where and the means by which the one God comes to dwell with his people.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Hebrews, in particular, explores what it means to think of Jesus as simultaneously the ultimate high priest and the ultimate sacrifice. First Peter addresses a situation where followers of Jesus are facing fierce persecution and interprets the cross both as the once-for-all achievement of Jesus and as the model set for his followers by that achievement. It would be interesting to pursue these further in relation to the way we have approached the central New Testament writings, but that must be a task for another time, and perhaps another pen. What we can say beyond any doubt is that within the first generation of the church there was an explosion of revolutionary beliefs about what had been accomplished on the day Jesus died, but that the revolution had a definite shape that remained constant across different traditions and widely different styles of expression. The early “official” summary remained the gold standard: the Messiah “died for our sins in accordance with the Bible.” Those who expounded this belief did so with a robust understanding of each element. The great narratives of scripture, it was assumed, had finally arrived at their divinely intended goal. This was naturally controversial then, and it has been controversial ever since, just as every messianic claim was controversial in early Judaism, meaning as it did that other claims about where Israel’s history might be going were to be set aside. The early Christians stuck to the basic belief. Jesus had been raised from the dead; therefore, he really was Israel’s Messiah; therefore his death really was the new Passover; his death really had dealt with the sins that had caused “exile” in the first place; and this had been accomplished by Jesus’s sharing and bearing the full weight of evil, and doing so alone. In his suffering and death, “Sin” was condemned. The darkest of dark powers was defeated, and its captives were set free. Despite his repeated hints, none of Jesus’s followers initially regarded his death as anything other than a complete disaster. Nobody knew, on the evening of the first Good Friday, that any of this sequence of thought, from victory over the “powers” to dealing with sins, might even be thinkable. But once Jesus had been raised from the dead, and once his followers had thought their way through the great scriptural stories that alone could make sense of such a thing, they knew that the revolution really had begun. And, in knowing that, they knew that the same revolution had caught them up in its wake. What Jesus had decisively launched they must determinedly continue. And that brings us, in conclusion, to ourselves. Where do we fit into this story?

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  As these experiences kept piling up, my brain naturally zoomed out to the bigger picture. What does this all mean? The “me” before Dad died had a more limited view of life, perhaps allergic to anything that smacked of religion or organized faith. Now, his loss was driving a deep curiosity about the nature of this universe. In The Grand Biocentric Design: How Life Creates Reality, medical doctor and scientist Robert Lanza explores his theory of biocentrism—that living beings and consciousness create the universe and reality, not the other way around. So if consciousness can exist outside the universe—which contains all of space and time—consciousness is therefore timeless. He writes, “The biocentric view of the timeless, spaceless cosmos of consciousness allows for no true death in any real sense. When a body dies, it does so not in the random billiard-ball matrix but in the all-is-still-inescapablylife matrix.” To further explain his theory, Lanza likens consciousness to music played on an old phonograph: Listening to the music doesn’t alter the record itself. Depending on where the needle is, you hear a certain song. This is the present—the music before and after the song is the past and the future. In like manner, every moment endures in nature always. The record doesn’t go away. All “nows,” like all songs on the record, exist simultaneously, although we can only experience it piece by piece. . . . Immortality doesn’t mean a perpetual existence in time—it resides outside of time altogether. Heady stuff, I know. But these ideas make me think that even if we can’t pinpoint the exact location of our deceased loved ones on a GPS, they’re still out there, playing their unique “music” in some form or fashion. That’s because energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be changed from one form to another. It’s the first law of thermodynamics, y’all! Energy never dies. The same is true for love. They’re the alpha and omega, the beginning and end. No matter what happened, who we lost, or how lost we feel, we are all an essential part of that energy and always will be. Every time we tap into the power of love—connecting to the goodness of it, the joy inherent in it, the peace that emanates from it—we are connecting to the never-ending energy of the ones we’ve lost. THE BIG QUESTIONSWho am I? Why am I here? What am I supposed to be doing with my life? What happens when we die—do we just stop existing, or is there an afterlife? If we go somewhere, is Dad there? What about God and my cat Crystal?

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Toward the end of his career, in 1872, Charles Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.[1] Until recently most scientific discussion of Darwin’s theories has focused on On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871). But The Expression of the Emotions turns out to be an extraordinary exploration of the foundations of emotional life, filled with observations and anecdotes drawn from decades of inquiry, as well as close-to-home stories of Darwin’s children and household pets. It’s also a landmark in book illustration—one of the first books ever to include photographs. (Photography was still a relatively new technology and, like most scientists, Darwin wanted to make use of the latest techniques to make his points.) It’s still in print today, readily available in a recent edition with a terrific introduction and commentaries by Paul Ekman, a modern pioneer in the study of emotions. Darwin starts his discussion by noting the physical organization common to all mammals, including human beings—the lungs, kidneys, brains, digestive organs, and sexual organs that sustain and continue life. Although many scientists today would accuse him of anthropomorphism, Darwin stands with animal lovers when he proclaims: “Man and the higher animals…[also] have instincts in common. All have the same senses, intuition, sensation, passions, affections, and emotions, even the more complex ones such as jealousy, suspicion, emulation, gratitude, and magnanimity.”[2] He observes that we humans share some of the physical signs of animal emotion. Feeling the hair on the back of your neck stand up when you’re frightened or baring your teeth when you’re enraged can only be understood as vestiges of a long evolutionary process. [image "A photo of a woman sneering next to a drawing of a snarling animal with bared teeth and raised canines, displaying an aggressive facial expression." file=image_rsrc77E.jpg] “When a man sneers or snarls at another, is the corner of the canine or eye tooth raised on the side facing the man whom he addresses?”—Charles Darwin, 1872 For Darwin mammalian emotions are fundamentally rooted in biology: They are the indispensable source of motivation to initiate action. Emotions (from the Latin emovere—to move out) give shape and direction to whatever we do, and their primary expression is through the muscles of the face and body. These facial and physical movements communicate our mental state and intention to others: Angry expressions and threatening postures caution them to back off. Sadness attracts care and attention. Fear signals helplessness or alerts us to danger. We instinctively read the dynamic between two people simply from their tension or relaxation, their postures and tone of voice, their changing facial expressions. Watch a movie in a language you don’t know, and you can still guess the quality of the relationship between the characters. We often can read other mammals (monkeys, dogs, horses) in the same way.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Didn’t I now depend to some extent on his prosperity? I gazed in a friendly mood at the faces of his employees, as if I were silently introducing myself: “I’ll be coming here often and you’ll often see me here again.” One of the pharmacists came into the store by a small door at the back and announced that Monsieur Bismuth was ready to see me. I was deeply moved as I followed him into the endless neon-lit passage that was concealed behind the door. This perspective that suddenly opened out before me, completely unpredictable from the outside, came to me as a surprise. I was fond of rooms that are completely closed off, and the passage, with its walls lined with shelves full of bottles and boxes, was a perfectly isolated corridor where none of the sounds of the city could be heard. The artificial effect of neon lighting, still relatively rare in those days, added to my surprise and my emotion. The pharmacist had meanwhile vanished and, in a silence that seemed heavy, I discovered the open door of Monsieur Bismuth’s office. The druggist was writing, his head bent forward, his hair thin on his scalp that appeared pink beneath the carefully combed strands. His hand shook slightly above the paper. I remained standing in the doorway. At first, he said nothing, as if he hadn’t seen me. Then he raised his head and said, in an even voice: “Ah! Come in!” But he continued to write and I had not yet learned that businessmen dream up a personality for themselves which they forget to set aside, even when such histrionics are unnecessary. Impressed by the silence, I was embarrassed in this unaccustomed atmosphere of concentration and luxury, and continued to await some further invitation. At long last, Monsieur Bismuth set down his fountain pen, put his papers methodically in order, and asked me to be seated. He called his trembling hands to order by clasping the fingers together very tight. Then he launched forth on a long speech that had perhaps been prepared, all about the need to work uninterruptedly if one wants to succeed in life. He spoke slowly, his voice evenly poised, his words well chosen, with the diction of an intelligent and learned foreigner who has mastered the language through sheer will power. I think he made a great impression on me. He had reverted to the same themes as the school principal, though he avoided the theme of his own life while constantly referring to it indirectly. I had meanwhile had time to inform myself about him; everything that he now said to me was clear and I was able to refer each detail back to his own life story. Though the speech was intended as an exhortation referring to my future, it was actually a summary of his past, too.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The harbinger of death kills nobody; on the contrary, it’s a useful bird. That was exactly what Monsieur Touitou had explained to us. My mother was furious and answered me that I was a fool, a very small rat who thought he had a very long tail; and if school taught me only to make fun of my parents, she would prevent my going there. I thus learned to distinguish more clearly what was right and proper at school from what was right and proper at home, though much to the advantage of school; and I acquired the habit of speaking as little as possible to my parents about what I did at school. Mother was carrying her huge belly ever more uneasily, in spite of her fortitude. She never complained, and she expressed only one longing — to ride in the car of one of our neighbors, which was granted to her at once. But one could distinguish in her vague looks a weariness that weighed on her as she concentrated on this unusual pregnancy, almost unable, it seemed, to attend at the same time to outfitting me for my bar mitzvah and preparing for the baby, or the babies, as some women predicted, at the same time. Thus, she attended only to the most urgent things, and set about readying baby clothes. As for me, I had a few ideas of my own about my bar mitzvah outfit, and was quite violent in my demands that they become realities. So the purchases were finally entrusted to my Aunt Rbiqua, my father’s sister, a tall mummified creature, all wrinkles and shortsightedness, as dry as a grasshopper, who had found herself a husband only late in life and had driven him to despair with her total lack of understanding for the sexual act. (The poor man used to complain bitterly: “I’ve worn my knees out...”) Anyhow, this old mole agreed to take me along to choose an artificial silk shirt, a new cap, and a prayer shawl, a taleth; but she never consulted me once and I remained speechless. She held my fingers tight in her hand that was hard as wood and made me trot along beside her too fast, all through the afternoon, while she went with her own head in the air, far above mine, peering at the storewindows with her almost sightless eyes.

• From Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (Critical Essays on the Classics Series) (2006)

  For this reason, Herbert McCabe is correct to note that “for St. Thomas, when we speak of God we do not know what we are talking about. We are simply taking language from the familiar context in which we understand it and using it to point beyond what we understand into the mystery that surrounds us and sustains the world we do partially understand.”43 For this reason also, Alexander Broadie is right to note that, although Aquinas denies that we can speak of God only by negations, and although he cites Maimonides as a major exponent of the thesis he is rejecting, there is still a striking similarity between the thinking of Aquinas and Maimonides when it comes to the “names of God.”44 Both insist that we do justice to God by denying that God is what creatures are. Aquinas looks for more than negative assertions concerning God.45 But Maimonides concedes that terms implying imperfection cannot be fittingly used of God. So, on his view, not just anything said of God is acceptable. In his commentary on Book 1 of Peter Lombard’s Sentences (Distinction 2,1,3), Aquinas, interestingly, tries to reconcile Maimonides (speaking negatively of God) and Dionysius and St Anselm (speaking positively of God). “It is clear,” he suggests, “that neither view contradicts what the other wants to say, since the first people do not say that God is lacking in any mode of perfection, and the second do not say that there are in God any qualities or non-subsistent things.” At this point it might help if we focus on Aquinas’s teaching that God is the source of the fact that things have being—or, as Aquinas puts it in Latin, that God is the source of the esse of things. As Aquinas often uses it, the word esse is best translated as if it were a kind of noun, literally as “the to be.” Normally, though, when Aquinas uses esse in this sense, translators report him as talking about “being,” which is also a perfectly respectable way of translating him. But we should not suppose that Aquinas thinks of esse as if it were an individual of some kind (as Mary is an individual woman, or Paul an individual man). Nor does Aquinas think that esse is a distinguishing property or quality of anything—like redness or being short-sighted. Esse, for Aquinas, is no independently existing thing. Nor is it anything that can enter into a description of what a thing is (in the language of Aquinas, it is not the name of a “form”). Yet it is, so he thinks, something very much to be reckoned with.

• From Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (Critical Essays on the Classics Series) (2006)

  The late Victor White O. P. once tried to put what Aquinas wants to say in this form: “We do not know what the answer is, but we do know that there is a mystery behind it all which we do not know. And if there were not, there would not even be a riddle. This Unknown we call God. And if there were no God, there would be no universe to be mysterious, and nobody to be mystified.”47 A problem with this way of representing Aquinas’s thinking is that it seems to make him saying (in modern everyday English) that God is wholly unknown and that we really have no idea at all what “God” means. And that is not quite his line. But his final position on our knowledge of God is decidedly agnostic, and White’s paraphrase is, perhaps, more helpful than misleading in the long run. What Aquinas thinks about God may be compared with what we find at the end of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.48 Here we read: “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.”49 For Wittgenstein, how the world is is a scientific matter with scientific answers. But, so he insists, even when the scientific answers are in, we are still left with the thatness of the world, the fact that it is. As Wittgenstein himself puts it: “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.”50 Aquinas seems to be saying something similar when he speaks of esse and creation. Unlike Wittgenstein, however, Aquinas sets himself to probe and to try to talk about the mystical. In a serious sense he does have a doctrine of God and his position is optimistic. But it is also highly modest.51 NotesThis chapter was previously published as Brian Davies, “Aquinas on What God is Not” (Revue Internationale de Philosophie 52, 1998).

• From Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (Critical Essays on the Classics Series) (2006)

  On the other hand, however, he does think that the nature of God defies our powers of understanding. He often says that an explicit human knowledge of God has to be derived from a process of inference making use of premises concerning the world as grasped by sensory experience. For Aquinas, we know God as accounting for or bringing about ourselves and our world. And this knowledge is limited. God, for Aquinas, transcends our attempts to picture or describe. So he thinks, for example, that it is equally appropriate to talk of God both in concrete terms and in abstract terms. In Aquinas’s view, we cannot think of God as something with a nature shared by others. We cannot think of God as one of a class in a world of things. On Aquinas’s account, God and God’s nature are not, for us, distinguishable.8 And hence, so he argues, while it makes sense to say such things as that “God is good” or “God is wise,” it makes equal sense to say “God is goodness” or “God is wisdom.” According to Aquinas, God is also the same as his existence. He is “subsistent existence” (ipsum esse subsistens).9 Or, as Aquinas often puts it, God is entirely simple. In effect, Aquinas’s view is that the very logic of our language cannot capture God. We normally talk about, and understand, things by singling them out as subjects of statements and by saying what properties they have. Thus, for example, we say that Mary is tall and thin, or that the dog in the kitchen is black and weighs twenty pounds. For Aquinas, however, though we are forced to talk of God in a similar way because of the way our language works—though we are forced to say things like “God is good” or “God is wise”—that manner of putting things is also misleading. For, as Aquinas sees it, God is not something to be distinguished from what is ascribed to him. Mary might be good and Mary might be wise. But Mary is not goodness or wisdom. But, says Aquinas, having said that God is good or that God is wise, we must also allow that God cannot be distinguished from what is ascribable to him. So God is goodness, and God is wisdom, and the being of God is not something different from God himself.

• From Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (Critical Essays on the Classics Series) (2006)

  THOMAS AQUINAS WAS VERY CONCERNED with the question “What is God?” And he thought that he had answers to this question. God, he says, is the beginning and end of all things, the Creator of a world which depends on him for its existence.1 Among other things, Aquinas also holds that God is alive, perfect, good, eternal, omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient, that God is three persons sharing one nature, and that God became a human being so that humans might share in the life of God.2 Yet in the writings of Aquinas we also find him holding that God is deeply mysterious. “The divine substance,” he says, “surpasses every form that our intellect reaches. Thus we are unable to apprehend it by knowing what it is,”3 God, he maintains, “is greater than all we can say, greater than all we can know; and not merely does he transcend our language and our knowledge, but he is beyond the comprehension of every mind whatsoever, even of angelic minds, and beyond the being of every substance.”4 According to Aquinas: “The most perfect [state] to which we can attain in this life in our knowledge of God is that he transcends all that can be conceived by us, and that the naming of God through remotion (per remotionem ) is most proper . . . The primary mode of naming God is through the negation of all things, since he is beyond all, and whatever is signified by any name whatsoever is less than that which God is.”5 What does Aquinas mean when saying that we can speak truly of God even though we do not know what God is? One thing to stress is that when he denies that we know what God is he clearly does not intend to suggest that we can claim no knowledge of God at all. His meaning is that God is not an object in our universe with respect to which we can have what we would nowadays call a “scientific understanding.” According to Aquinas, we know what something is (quid est) when we can single it out as part of the material world and define it. More precisely, we know what something is when we can locate it in terms of genus and species.6 In saying that we cannot know what God is, therefore, he is chiefly denying that God belongs to a natural class and that God can be defined on this basis. Were he writing in English today he would not be saying “We do not know anything about God” or “We lack any knowledge of God.”7

• From Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (Critical Essays on the Classics Series) (2006)

  For this reason, Herbert McCabe is correct to note that “for St. Thomas, when we speak of God we do not know what we are talking about. We are simply taking language from the familiar context in which we understand it and using it to point beyond what we understand into the mystery that surrounds us and sustains the world we do partially understand.”43 For this reason also, Alexander Broadie is right to note that, although Aquinas denies that we can speak of God only by negations, and although he cites Maimonides as a major exponent of the thesis he is rejecting, there is still a striking similarity between the thinking of Aquinas and Maimonides when it comes to the “names of God.”44 Both insist that we do justice to God by denying that God is what creatures are. Aquinas looks for more than negative assertions concerning God.45 But Maimonides concedes that terms implying imperfection cannot be fittingly used of God. So, on his view, not just anything said of God is acceptable. In his commentary on Book 1 of Peter Lombard’s Sentences (Distinction 2,1,3), Aquinas, interestingly, tries to reconcile Maimonides (speaking negatively of God) and Dionysius and St Anselm (speaking positively of God). “It is clear,” he suggests, “that neither view contradicts what the other wants to say, since the first people do not say that God is lacking in any mode of perfection, and the second do not say that there are in God any qualities or non-subsistent things.” At this point it might help if we focus on Aquinas’s teaching that God is the source of the fact that things have being—or, as Aquinas puts it in Latin, that God is the source of the esse of things. As Aquinas often uses it, the word esse is best translated as if it were a kind of noun, literally as “the to be.” Normally, though, when Aquinas uses esse in this sense, translators report him as talking about “being,” which is also a perfectly respectable way of translating him. But we should not suppose that Aquinas thinks of esse as if it were an individual of some kind (as Mary is an individual woman, or Paul an individual man). Nor does Aquinas think that esse is a distinguishing property or quality of anything—like redness or being short-sighted. Esse, for Aquinas, is no independently existing thing. Nor is it anything that can enter into a description of what a thing is (in the language of Aquinas, it is not the name of a “form”). Yet it is, so he thinks, something very much to be reckoned with.

• From Bluets (2009)

  67. A male satin bowerbird would not have left it there. A male satin bowerbird would have tottered with it in his beak over to his bower, or his “trysting place,” as some field guides put it, which he spends weeks adorning with blue objects in order to lure a female. Not only does the bowerbird collect and arrange blue objects—bus tickets, cicada wings, blue flowers, bottle caps, blue feathers plucked off smaller blue birds that he kills, if he must, to get their plumage—but he also paints his bower with juices from blue fruits, using the frayed end of a twig as a paintbrush. He builds competitively, stealing treasures from other birds, sometimes trashing their bowers entirely. 68. After building his bower, the satin bowerbird makes a stage nearby out of shiny yellow grass, upon which he will sing and dance for passing females. Experienced builders and performers can attract up to thirty-three females to fuck per season if they put on a good enough show, have built up enough good blue in their bower, and have the contrast with the yellow straw down right. Less experienced builders sometimes don’t attract any females at all. Each female mates only once. She incubates the eggs alone. 69. When I see photos of these blue bowers, I feel so much desire that I wonder if I might have been born into the wrong species. 70. Am I trying, with these “propositions,” to build some kind of bower?—But surely this would be a mistake. For starters, words do not look like the things they designate (Maurice Merleau-Ponty). 71. I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do. 72. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it?—No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink— Here you are again, it says, and so am I . 73. In his Opticks, Newton periodically refers to an invaluable “assistant” who helps him refract the shaft of sunlight streaming in through the aperture Newton had drilled into the wall of his “dark chamber”—an assistant to Newton’s discovery, or revelation, of the spectrum. Over time, however, many have questioned whether this assistant ever really existed. Many now believe him to be, essentially, a “rhetorical fiction.” 74. Who, nowadays, watches the light stream through the walls of her “dark chamber” with the company of a phantasmagoric assistant, or smashes at her eyes to reproduce lost color sensations, or stays up all night watching colored shadows drift across the walls? At times I have done all of these things, but not in service of science, nor of philosophy, not even of poetry.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I hesitated, not that I felt impelled to refuse on doctrinal grounds, but because his whole proposal struck me as preposterous. I was associating daily with Christians for the first time in my life, and they aroused in me neither fear nor antagonism; they even enjoyed, in my eyes, the prestige of all Europeans, members of a very powerful sect. But we quite obviously belonged to two entirely different worlds, and nothing could be more alien to me than the idea of entering one of their churches such as I had seen in the course of my Sabbath walks, when I had furtively caught sight of red draperies and of mysterious lights. But Mimouni made fun of my timidity and told me that Christian tourists often visited the old synagogue in his part of town: the faithful always received them well and loaned them caps so that they might enter it without committing any sacrilege. It would only be proper that we be equally well received. I finally yielded, not so much in the face of his arguments as because I felt impelled to bring some interruption to the rhythm of our week. Immediately, I began to await Sunday with impatience. On the Saturday evening, like all the others, I bathed carefully and got my best clothes ready. The next day, Mimouni and I took our stand in the line, with a reasonable distance between us. The walk, to begin with, was pleasant. The village was at the foot of the mountain, and the road, going all the way downhill, revealed to us, in spite of a ground mist that rose to our shoulders, a valley full of violet-colored rocks that had been scattered by a vast and cataclysmically violent landslide. It both terrified and delighted me. When we reached the church, we were distributed in two pews, with the smaller boys in the front one. I thus found myself quite close to the altar; its magnificence, with painted statues that were so unsophisticated in their expressions, with great festooned candles and the gilded utensils and flowers, all this made a great impression on me. Although a mere country chapel, the whole church struck me as grandiose. I was overcome by a sacred uneasiness that was not new to me because I had once broken the candle at the High Holiday.

• From Bluets (2009)

  111. Goethe also worries about colors and pain, though his reports sound more like installments from the battlefield: “Every decided colour does a certain violence to the eye, and forces the organ to opposition.” Instantly I recognize this phenomenon to be true from my years of working in a bright orange restaurant. I worked in this restaurant for ten-hour shifts, from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m., sometimes later. The restaurant was incredibly orange. In fact everyone in town called it “the orange restaurant.” Yet every time I came home from work and passed out in my smoke-drenched clothes, my feet propped up on the wall, the dining room reappeared in my dreams as pale blue. For quite some time I thought this was luck, or wish fulfillment—naturally my dreams would convert everything to blue, because of my love for the color. But now I realize that it was more likely the result of spending ten hours or more staring at saturated orange, blue’s spectral opposite. This is a simple story, but it spooks me, insofar as it reminds me that the eye is simply a recorder, with or without our will. Perhaps the same could be said of the heart. But whether there is a violence at work here remains undecided. 112. At times I have heard it said that we don’t dream in color. But surely this is a mistake. Not only can we dream in color, but more importantly: how could anyone else know if we do or do not? At times I have been tempted to think that we dream more colorfully now because of the cinema. (To know what dreams were like before the cinema!) But then I think of “The Dream of the Rood,” one of the first documents in Old English, from around the eighth century, which flickers with color (and with pleasure, and with pain): “Behold I shall tell of a most marvelous dream . . . It seemed to me that I saw a tree, more wonderful than any other, spring high aloft, bathed in light, brightest of wood. All that beacon was covered in gold . . . Wonderful was the triumphant tree, and I stained with sin, wounded with wrongdoing . . . I was sadly troubled, afraid of that fair sight. I saw that beacon, changeable, alter in clothes and color: now it was wet with moisture, drenched with blood’s flowing, now adorned with treasure.” The question of whether gold counts as a color may here arise, but I am not equipped to tackle it. I will relay only this: “What is on the other side of gold is the same as what is on this side” (John Berger); I’m tempted to think this disqualifies it. The red of the dreamer’s wrongdoing, however, appears nonnegotiable.

• From Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (Critical Essays on the Classics Series) (2006)

  This line of objection to the Five Ways is not perhaps very common or very serious. Much more common and more respectable is the objection that the ‘God’ which the Five Ways ‘prove’—the Unmovable Mover, First Cause, Intrinsically Necessary, and the rest—has no resemblance to the God of the Bible, of revelation, or of any historical religious experience or cult. This widely-felt criticism receives its classical expression in a perhaps over-literal interpretation of Pascal’s celebrated opposition between the ‘God of the Philosophers’ and the ‘Living God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’. It takes many different forms, and is put forward on many different grounds. To some of them we must return, at least obliquely, before we have done. It may, however, be said at once that this line of thought is not merely a construction of captious critics or professional philosophers. It is widely felt that the Five Ways lead us at best to cold, abstract concepts which inspire little reverence, awe, or love, and with which the Biblical God of Love and Wrath has nothing to do. And let it be admitted, and indeed strongly affirmed, that the Five Ways do not, and cannot, reach to divine attributes made known only in revelation—or indeed those of any ‘religious experience’—as such. And we shall be gravely disappointed if we look to them for anything of the sort. It will at least clear the ground considerably for meeting this difficulty if we have read and pondered upon the first Article of the whole Summa. Here St. Thomas asks whether there is any need for some teaching (doctrina) over and above what can be discovered by philosophical learning (disciplinas). Yes, he answers, there is such need: need, namely, for a Holy Teaching, not only about God but given by God. His reasons for this answer are familiar: God has destined man for an end, a completion, which exceeds the grasp of his understanding. Since that is so, man must be made aware of it, and of how that end is to be attained. These things only God can know (for they wholly depend on his free gift and grace). Therefore man needs to be taught them, have them revealed to him, by God. But there is another, though secondary, reason (and it is instructive to recall that St. Thomas has borrowed this argument for man’s need of revelation, not from any Christian Father, but from the Jewish Rabbi Maimonides). Even though, without revelation, human reason can attain to a certain limited knowledge about God, even that knowledge (which tells him nothing of the end and the means God has ordained for man) is actually attainable only “by a few, after a long time, and with the mixture of many mistakes.” We must not then, if we follow St. Thomas, expect from unaided reason any information about God, or God’s relation to us, which only revelation can supply.

• From Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (Critical Essays on the Classics Series) (2006)

  In short, and as I mentioned earlier, Aquinas thinks that we cannot know what God is because we cannot have a science of whatever it is that accounts for there being any universe at all. “How come any universe at all?” is clearly not a scientific question. For it is asking how come that science itself is possible. And its answer cannot be anything which a scientist could investigate or analyze. Scientific questions concern objects or events which are part of the material universe. And answers to these questions refer us to other things of the same kind, to more objects or events which are part of the material universe. But the universe is not an object or event within itself. And whatever accounts for there being a universe cannot be this either. And that is what Aquinas wants to say. In asking how there comes to be any universe, we are raising what he would call the question of creation (because the notion that the universe is created is the notion that it is made to be). And, so he insists, to say that something is created is not to locate it in historical terms or in terms of things having effects within the universe (in terms, so we might say, of transformers). According to Aquinas, to call something created is to speak of it as derived, not because it has come from something equally derived, and not because it has come to be because something has been transformed. For Aquinas, to call something created is to speak of it as derived because its existence as such is derived. To view the universe as created, he thinks, is not to place it in a context of scientific causes. It is to see that there is a question to ask after science has done all the work it can possibly do. According to Aquinas, there is a puzzle concerning the fact that there is anything there to be identified and spoken about and explained in terms of scientific or transforming causes. For this reason, and in spite of the way in which he thinks that we can speak truly and literally of God, authors like David Burrell have reason on their side as they tell us what Aquinas thinks of God. There is a serious austerity in his thinking and one can see why it might be said that he has no doctrine of God. One might even say that Aquinas may be called an “agnostic.” He is not, of course, an agnostic in the usual, modern sense of the word. We normally think of an agnostic as someone who typically says something like “We do not know, and the universe is a mysterious riddle.” And that is not quite what Aquinas wants to say. But he certainly wants to say something with a highly agnostic ring to it.

• From Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (Critical Essays on the Classics Series) (2006)

  (I have deliberately stated this argument in a schematic way, in order to avoid irrelevant controversy about my choice as an example. It is not so easy as it looks to find an unexceptionable case of difference or change in mere intensity, without any difference or change in quality: Aquinas’s favourite example, heat, would land us in many difficulties. So far as I can see, sound is a good example. A louder and a softer sound may be qualitatively identical; and a sudden increase of loudness resembles a sound’s suddenly starting, a sudden decrease of loudness its suddenly stopping.) A third reason is found in considering the nature of thought. How remarkable that if there can (logically) be an X, there can also be a thought of an X! What is this relation being a thought of, which can have anything whatsoever as its term—even non-existent things like dragons? And how can there be an activity whose whole nature consists in its having this relation to something to ‘something’ possibly non-existent? Now Aquinas’s account of thought denies that its nature consists wholly in relation to something outside itself. When Plato thinks of redness, what exists in Plato is not a certain relation to redness or red things, but is redness, is an individual occurrence of the very same form of which another individual occurrence is the redness of this rose. But how then is it that this rose is red but not Plato’s mind? Because the mode of occurrence of redness—not the redness that occurs—is unlike; the redness in Plato’s mind is, exists, in a different way (esse intentionale) from the redness in this rose (which has esse naturale). We thus understand the intimate connexion of thought and its object. There is, as Aquinas often says, likeness (similitudo) between them. We also now understand the odd-seeming fact that there can be a thought of anything that there can be. Existence makes no difference to, and can impose no restriction on, the nature of that which exists; if it is possible that there should be F-ness at all, then it is possible alike that there should be F-ness occurring with esse naturale (a real live cow, say) and that there should be F-ness occurring with esse intentionale (a thought of a cow). The whole basis of this account is that the individual F-ness is really distinct from its esse, naturale or intentionale as the case may be.

• From Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (Critical Essays on the Classics Series) (2006)

  When we ask “How come?,” the objects of our concern are fairly specifiable for the most part. We may, for example, wonder how it comes to be that some local phenomenon obtains. Why are there mountains to the east of Paris? Why is there a cat called Thor, who belongs to a Jesuit priest in New York (as there is) and who is called Thor since, according to his owner, he is “simply divine”? Sometimes, however, the range of our inquiry may be wider. Someone might explain why there are mountains to the east of Paris. But we might then wonder why there should be any mountains, whether east of Paris or anywhere else. And we might wonder how there come to be any cats, whether in New York or anywhere else. And if these questions are answered we might deepen the range of our inquiry. Mountains and cats are there for reasons to be documented and explored by physicists, geologists, chemists, astronomers, and so on. They will tell us how it comes to be, not that this and that individual is there, but why things of certain kinds are there. And in telling us this they will be invoking levels of explanation which run deeper and deeper. In doing so, however, they will always presume a background of things, a world or universe in the light of which explanation is possible. The mountains east of Paris are explicable on geological and other grounds. Cats are explicable in genetic and other terms. And, if we ask why geology is possible and why genetics is possible, we shall again be looking for things of a kind behaving in certain ways. But we might further deepen the level of our inquiry. For we might ask, not “What in the world accounts for this, that, or the other?,” but “Why any world at all?” How come the whole familiar business of asking and answering “How come?” The point to stress now is that this, for Aquinas, is a crucial question. For him, the question “How come any universe?” is a serious one to which there must be an answer. And he gives the name “God” to whatever the answer is. God, for Aquinas, is the reason why there is any universe at all. God, he says, is the source of the esse (and of the essentia) of things—the fact that they are more than the meanings of words.