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 Case for God (2009)

  Nature was not an object to be tested, manipulated, and dominated but should be approached with reverence as a source of revelation. Far from being inactive, the material world was imbued with a spiritual power that could instruct and guide us. Since childhood, Wordsworth had been aware of a “Spirit” in nature. He was careful not to call it “God” because it was quite different from the God of the natural scientists and theologians; it was rather A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns , And the round ocean and the living air , And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought And rolls through all things. 6 8 Always concerned with accuracy of expression, Wordsworth deliberately called this presence “something,” a word often used as a substitute for exact definition. He refused to give it a name, because it did not fit any familiar category. It bore little resemblance to the arid God of the scientists that had retreated from nature but was strongly reminiscent of the immanent force of being that people in the ancient world had experienced within themselves and in animals, plants, rocks, and trees. The Romantic poets revived a spirituality that had been submerged in the scientific age. By approaching nature in a different way, they had recovered a sense of its numinous mystery. Wordsworth was wary of the “meddling intellect” that “murders to dissect,” pulling reality apart in its rigorous analysis. Unlike the scientists and rationalists, the poet did not seek to master nature but to acquire a “wise passiveness” and “a heart that watches and receives.” 69 He could then hear the silently imparted lessons that had been impressed upon him by the streams, mountains, and groves of the Lake District during his infancy.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  My head swimming, I decided to take a break, to visit a very un-Zen landmark, in fact the most anti-Zen place in Japan, an enclave where men focused on self and nothing but self—the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Housed in a marble Romanesque building with great big Greek columns, the Tosho looked from across the street like a stodgy bank in a quiet town in Kansas. Inside, however, all was bedlam. Hundreds of men waving their arms, pulling their hair, screaming. A more depraved version of Cornfeld’s boiler room. I couldn’t look away. I watched and watched, asking myself, Is this what it’s all about? Really? I appreciated money as much as the next guy. But I wanted my life to be about so much more. After the Tosho I needed peace. I went deep into the silent heart of the city, to the garden of the nineteenth-century emperor Meiji and his empress, a space thought to possess immense spiritual power. I sat, contemplative, reverent, beneath swaying ginkgo trees, beside a beautiful torii gate. I read in my guidebook that a torii gate is usually a portal to sacred places, and so I basked in the sacredness, the serenity, trying to soak it all in. The next morning I laced up my running shoes and jogged to Tsukiji, the world’s largest fish market. It was the Tosho all over again, with shrimp instead of stocks. I watched ancient fishermen spread their catches onto wooden carts and haggle with leather-faced merchants. That night I took a bus up to the lakes region, in the northern Hakone Mountains, an area that inspired many of the great Zen poets. You cannot travel the path until you have become the path yourself, said the Buddha, and I stood in awe before a path that twisted from the glassy lakes to cloud-ringed Mount Fuji, a perfect snow-clad triangle that looked to me exactly like Mount Hood back home. The Japanese believe climbing Fuji is a mystical experience, a ritual act of celebration, and I was overcome with a desire to climb it, right then. I wanted to ascend into the clouds. I decided to wait, however. I would return when I had something to celebrate. I WENT BACK to Tokyo and presented myself at Importer. The two ex-GIs in charge, thick-necked, brawny, very busy, looked as if they might chew me out for

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  I went by train up to Milan, communed with Da Vinci, considered his beautiful notebooks, and wondered at his peculiar obsessions. Chief among them, the human foot. Masterpiece of engineering, he called it. A work of art. Who was I to argue? On my last night in Milan I attended the opera at La Scala. I aired out my Brooks Brothers suit and wore it proudly amid the uomini poured into custom-tailored tuxedos and the donne molded into bejeweled gowns. We all listened in wonder to Turandot. As Calaf sang “Nessun dorma”—Set, stars! At dawn I will win, I will win, I will win!—my eyes welled, and with the fall of the curtain I leaped to my feet. Bravissimo! I went to Venice, spent a few languorous days walking in the footsteps of Marco Polo, and stood I don’t know how long before the palazzo of Robert Browning. If you get simple beauty and naught else, you get about the best thing God invents. My time was running out. Home was calling to me. I hurried to Paris, descended far belowground to the Pantheon, put my hand lightly on the crypts of Rousseau—and Voltaire. Love truth, but pardon error. I took a room in a seedy hotel, watched sheets of winter rain sluice the alley below my window, prayed at Notre Dame, got lost in the Louvre. I bought a few books at Shakespeare and Company, and I stood in the spot where Joyce slept, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I then walked slowly down the Seine, stopping to sip a cappuccino at the café where Hemingway and Dos Passos read the New Testament aloud to each other. On my last day I sauntered up the Champs-Élysées, tracing the liberators’ path, thinking all the while of Patton. Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results. Of all the great generals, he was the most shoe-obsessed: A soldier in shoes is only a soldier. But in boots he becomes a warrior. I flew to Munich, drank an ice-cold stein of beer at the Bürgerbräukeller, where Hitler fired a gun into the ceiling and started everything. I tried to visit Dachau, but when I asked for directions people looked away, professing not to know. I went to Berlin and presented myself at Checkpoint Charlie. Flat-faced Russian guards in heavy topcoats examined my passport, patted me down, asked what business I had in communist East Berlin. “None,” I said. I was terrified that they’d somehow find out I’d attended Stanford. Just before I arrived two Stanford students had tried to smuggle a teenager out in a Volkswagen. They were still in prison. But the guards waved me through. I walked a little ways and stopped at the corner of Marx-Engels-Platz. I looked around, all directions. Nothing. No trees, no stores, no life. I thought of all the poverty I’d seen in every corner of Asia.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  At last I flew to London. I went quickly to Buckingham Palace, Speakers’ Corner, Harrods. I granted myself a bit of extra time at Commons. Eyes closed, I conjured the great Churchill. You ask, What is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory... without victory, there is no survival. I wanted desperately to hop a bus to Stratford, to see Shakespeare’s house. (Elizabethan women wore a red silk rose on the toe of each shoe.) But I was out of time. I spent my last night thinking back over my trip, making notes in my journal. I asked myself, What was the highlight? Greece, I thought. No question. Greece. When I first left Oregon I was most excited about two things on my itinerary. I wanted to pitch the Japanese my Crazy Idea. And I wanted to stand before the Acropolis. Hours before boarding my flight at Heathrow, I meditated on that moment, looking up at those astonishing columns, experiencing that bracing shock, the kind you receive from all great beauty, but mixed with a powerful sense of—recognition? Was it only my imagination? After all, I was standing at the birthplace of Western civilization. Maybe I merely wanted it to be familiar. But I didn’t think so. I had the clearest thought: I’ve been here before. Then, walking up those bleached steps, another thought: This is where it all begins. On my left was the Parthenon, which Plato had watched the teams of architects and workmen build. On my right was the Temple of Athena Nike. Twenty-five centuries ago, per my guidebook, it had housed a beautiful frieze of the goddess Athena, thought to be the bringer of “nike,” or victory. It was one of many blessings Athena bestowed. She also rewarded the dealmakers. In the Oresteia she says: “I admire... the eyes of persuasion.” She was, in a sense, the patron saint of negotiators. I don’t know how long I stood there, absorbing the energy and power of that epochal place. An hour? Three? I don’t know how long after that day I discovered the Aristophanes play, set in the Temple of Nike, in which the warrior gives the king a gift—a pair of new shoes. I don’t know when I figured out that the play was called Knights. I do know that as I turned to leave I noticed the temple’s marble façade. Greek artisans had decorated it with several haunting carvings, including the most famous, in which the goddess inexplicably leans down... to adjust the strap of her shoe. FEBRUARY 24, 1963. My twenty-fifth birthday. I walked through the door on Claybourne Street, hair to my shoulders, beard three inches long. My mother let out a cry. My sisters blinked as if they didn’t recognize me, or else hadn’t realized I’d been gone. Hugs, shouts, bursts of laughter. My mother made me sit, poured me a cup of coffee. She wanted to hear everything. But I was exhausted. I set my suitcase and backpack in the hall and went to my room. I stared blearily at my blue ribbons. Mr. Knight, what is the name of your company? I curled up on the bed and sleep came down like the curtain at La Scala. An hour later I woke to my mother calling out, “Dinner!” My father was home from work, and he embraced me as I came into the dining room. He, too, wanted to hear every detail. And I wanted to tell him. But first I wanted to know one thing. “Dad,” I said. “Did my shoes come?”

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Religion was not an easy matter. We have seen the immense effort made by yogins, hesychasts, Kabbalists, exegetes, rabbis, ritualists, monks, scholars, philosophers, and contemplatives, as well as laypeople in regular liturgical observance. All were able to achieve a degree of ekstasis that, as Denys explained, by introducing us to a different kind of knowing, “drives us out of ourselves.” In the modern period too, scientists, rationalists, and philosophers have experienced something similar. Einstein, Wittgenstein, and Popper, who had no conventional religious “beliefs,” were quite at home in this hinterland between rationality and the transcendent. Religious insight requires not only a dedicated intellectual endeavor to get beyond the “idols of thought” but also a compassionate lifestyle that enables us to break out of the prism of selfhood. Aggressive logos, which seeks to master, control, and kill off the opposition, cannot bring this transcendent insight. Experience proved that this was possible only if people cultivated a receptive, listening attitude, not unlike the way we approach art, music, or poetry. It required kenosis, “negative capability,” “wise passiveness,” and a heart that “watches and receives.” The consistency with which the various religions have stressed the importance of these qualities indicates that they are somehow built into the way men and women experience their world. If the religious lose sight of them, they are revived by poets, novelists, and philosophers. My last chapter concluded with postmodern theology, not because this represents the pinnacle of the Western theological tradition but because it has rediscovered practices, attitudes, and ideals that were central to religion before the advent of the modern period. That is not to say, of course, that all faiths are the same. Each tradition formulates the sacred differently, and this will certainly affect the way people experience it. There are important differences between Brahman, Nirvana, God, and Dao, but that does not mean that one is right and the others wrong. On this matter, nobody can have the last word. All faith systems have been at pains to show that the ultimate cannot be adequately expressed in any theoretical system, however august, because it lies beyond words and concepts.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  52 People must use the shock of this irreconcilable complexity to break down their accustomed modes of thinking or they will miss the whole point of Trinitarian dogma, which is to “lift you to the heights of admiration.” 53 We even see these apparently diametrically opposed contradictions in the human person of Christ, the supreme revelation of God, who unites “the first and last, the highest and lowest” 54 in such a way that the mind cannot cope: The eternal is joined with the time-bound man ... the most actual is joined with him who suffered supremely and died; the most perfect and immense is joined with the insignificant; he who is both supremely one and supremely omnifarious is joined with an individual who is composite and distinct from others. 55 Christ, the incarnate Word, does not make the divine any more comprehensible. Quite the reverse: the Word spoken by God segues inexorably into the utter darkness of unknowing, because Christ is not the Terminus of the religious quest, but only the “Way” that leads us to the unknowable Father. 56 Instead of making everything clearer, this supreme revelation plunges us into an obscurity that is a kind of death. For Bonaventure, the suffering and death of Christ the Word incarnates the brokenness and failure of our language about God. There is no clarity, no certainty, and no privileged information. We have to leave these immature expectations behind, as Bonaventure explains in the concluding passage of the Journey. We too must die and enter this darkness. Let us silence all our care and our imaginings. Let us “pass out of this world to be with the Father,” 57 so that when the Father is shown to us, we may say with Philip: “It is enough for us.” 58 For he who loves this death can see God, for it is absolutely true that “Men shall not see God and live.” 59 Just one generation after Thomas and Bonaventure, however, we can see a shift in the conception of God. This centered on the controversial figure of John Duns Scotus (1265–1308), the Franciscan philosopher who lectured to packed audiences in Oxford. 60 Scotus criticized Thomas’s theology, which in his view made it impossible to say anything meaningful about God. He was convinced that reason could demonstrate the existence of anything. It must be possible to arrive at an adequate understanding of God by our natural powers alone. This was the governing principle of Scotus’s philosophy, the criterion that determined the truth or falsity of any of his ideas. But this “natural theology” was feasible only if we knew what we meant when we said that “God exists.” Scotus, therefore, insisted that the word “existence” was univocal; that is, it “had the same basic meaning,” whether it applied to God or to men, women, mountains, animals, or trees.

• From City of Night (1963)

  “I saw Lance the other night, and it’s True: He looks Awful,” a fairy I was with said at the Ivy bar. A small group huddles by the unlit fireplace. “And you know what I heard?” A long, long pause....“That Esmeralda Drake is dead! “Esmeralda Drake the Third!” someone corrected. “Yes—I forgot: The Third!” “Well, it’s no wonder: She was at least 100 years old!” “Older!” “Dont exaggerate.” “Figure it out: She admitted to being over 60....” Then the group disbanded like birds fleeing a nest, and the invoked shadow of Lance blends into the other shadows. “Theres Lance!” He stood at the draped door of the Splendide as if undecided whether to come in. He was an imposing figure: tall, slender, broad-shouldered. But I couldnt see his face from where I sat. “It is Lance!” another fairy at the bar said. “How does he look?” Impatiently: “I cant tell any more than you can till he comes in!” “Lets go talk to him And See.” They hurried toward the shadow entering the bar. I can see him better now. From the distance—despite the damning whispers I had heard—he was an extraordinarily handsome youngman: black wavy hair, thick arched eyebrows, features perfectly molded.... He acknowledged only cursorily the two fairies who had rushed-gushed toward him—leaving them indignantly widemouthed as he passed through the crowd, briefly greeting the constantly turned curious faces of the many there who knew or recognized him. He made his way to the far end of the bar at the back of the room, and sat there alone. Despite his handsomeness, he looked somehow like a ghost—or, rather (and it could have been the mellow light which bathed him), like someone who is haunted. 2 At the Splendide again. This time I was with Chick and Jamey, whom I had met just a few minutes earlier on the Boulevard. They had come on with that bulldozer approach of the type who believes firmly that everyone—almost anyone—can be made. And they asked me to have dinner with them. By then I had already been in Hollywood long enough to be pegged as one of the many Hollywood drifters who fall into this world out of at least announced convenience, not strictly “belonging” to it—yet... I say “announced convenience” and “yet” only to be fair to that world, because in it most active members are convinced that eventually those unreciprocating vagrants and wanderers into their world will cross the sexual boundary that separates them now—and they wait almost vengefully for the crossing of that line—to the Other Side— their side.... So Chick and Jamey asked me to have dinner with them, and I told them I didnt have any money, which was untrue, and they sighed, and Chick said: “We know, we know—weve all read the script many times.”...

• From City of Night (1963)

  (The director’s house reigns over the enchanted hills. You park by a thick stone wall, shutting in the famous-director’s world: Within that wall, he reigns Supreme as a monarch. You lift a telephone in a niche, announcing yourself. A maid opens the door if youre expected. And you walk into a garden—sprawling beyond the door in three levels, outlining the house. About the garden are statues, nakedly white in the green of the trees, the grass — the lush flowers. A swimming pool dominates one level of the garden, bordered by marble benches. In a cave of shrubs, a long bar displays bottles like gaudy jewelry. They stand at attention as if awaiting the presence of the director. From the pool and the bar a gradually ascending flight of stairs swirls into an alcove, short white pillars creating a ceilingless rotunda. Beyond that, the trees spill deceptively into green-shrugging hills ....) Skipper faced the wall momentarily, turning from the shrill sounds at Harry’s bar. A piece of plaster has begun to crumble from the wall. He places his hand over it, covering it impulsively. “Man,” he says, “I was nervous that first day—I went alone. See, the photographer—he couldnt go—this Director wants to talk to me—alone. The maid let me in. I just—stood there—it was like—a palace—...” (And then, that afternoon, the director makes his entrance, emerging out of the white walls of the house in slacks and sport shirt: a tiny, skinny, wiry old man with alert, determined eyes. He looks at Skipper appraisingly. “Youre much better-looking than your photographs, youngman,” he says, “and I might add you look good in clothes.”) “I knew it was the Bigtime,” Skipper sighed. “The Bigtime,” the fatman repeats—as if in his role of prosecutor, of Avenger, this phrase gave him a clue. “Yeah, sure,” said Skipper. “Everyone’s hearda this Director—” “Even in New York,” said the skinny one, “everyone knows about him. I heard hes got this great pool—boys there all the time. I heard—” (Later, when I went to the director’s house with the auntie — several weeks later — the director would be redecorating his house. “Ive grown fond of it,” he’ll explain to us, “but it needs much work on it, so Im redecorating it — all.” The auntie will say: “You know exactly how to live.” “I do, I do” the director will reply.) “Did this director put you in the movies?” Skipper sighed almost inaudibly: “Yes.”

• From The Case for God (2009)

  During the medieval period, Denys had a profound influence on nearly every major Western theologian. The fact that very few people have even heard of him today is, perhaps, a symptom of our current religious malaise. 68 Denys saw no conflict between the Neoplatonic philosophia and Christianity, even though he was almost certainly writing in 529, when Emperor Justinian had closed down the Academy, driven its philosophers underground, and abolished the Eleusinian Mysteries. Plotinus had seen all beings radiating from the One, an outward movement that was balanced by the yearning of all beings to return to the primal Unity. In rather the same way, Denys imagined the creation as an ekstatic , almost erotic eruption of divine goodness, when God was, as it were, “carried outside of himself in the loving care he has for everything.” Creation was not something that had happened once in the distant past but was a mythos , a continuous, timeless process in which, paradoxically, God was eternally “enticed away from his transcendent dwelling-place and comes to abide within all things,” and yet had the “capacity to remain, nevertheless, within himself.” 69 But, of course, this was impossible to understand rationally, because our minds cannot think outside a universe of beings that are unable to do two irreconcilable things at once. Religious people are always talking about God, and it is important that they do so. But they also need to know when to fall silent. Denys’s theological method was a deliberate attempt to bring all the Christians he taught—lay folk, monks, and clergy alike—to that point by making them conscious of the limits of language. We can do that only by talking about God and listening carefully to what we say. As Denys pointed out, in the Bible God is given fifty-two names. 70 God is called a rock and is likened to the sky, the sea, and a warrior. All that is fine, as far as it goes. Because God is always pouring itself into creatures, any one of them—even a rock—can tell us something about the divine. A rock is a very good symbol of God’s permanence and stability. But because a rock is not alive, it is obviously worlds apart from the God that is life itself, so we will never be tempted to say that God is a rock. But the more sophisticated attributes of God—Ineffability, Unity, Goodness, and the like—are more dangerous, because they give us the false impression that we know exactly what God is like. “He” is Good, Wise, and Intelligent; “He” is One; “He” is Trinity. In his treatise The Divine Names , Denys symbolically reproduced God’s descent from his exalted solitude into the material world, so he began by discussing the more elevated and lofty divine attributes. At first, each one sounds perfectly appropriate, but closer examination reveals it to be inherently unsatisfactory.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we can track dynamic changes in blood flow within people’s brains as they perform various mental tasks. Ample past work of this sort pinpoints a distinct brain area that reacts to human faces (the extrastriate fusiform face area, or FFA) as well as a separate brain area that reacts to places (the parahippocampal place area, or PPA). A clever experiment capitalized on this knowledge of brain specificity by asking study participants to decide whether each successive face, shown to them in a central location across a series of slides, was male or female, and to ignore all else. This task was simple; the right answer was always abundantly clear. What made the study more interesting was that each face was embedded within a larger picture of a place, specifically the curb shot of a house, much like you might see in a real estate ad. In theory, if the doors of perception were opened wide, the conjoint images used in this task (that is, the faces nested within houses) would excite both the face (FFA) and the place (PPA) areas of the brain. If the doors of perception were largely closed, however, perhaps only the face area of the brain would become activated. At random, blocks of these conjoint images were preceded by positive, neutral, or negative images, all rather mild. The images used to create positive emotions, for instance, showed cute puppies or delectable desserts. By tracking blood flow within the FFA and PPA, the researchers could thus compare how wide or narrow each participant’s perceptual field of view was under the influence of different emotional states. The results were clear. Negative emotions narrowed people’s perception, reflected by significantly reduced blood flow within the PPA. Put differently, when feeling bad, people were great at following the task instructions—they ignored all that surrounded the faces so thoroughly that their brains barely registered the presence of the houses. The results for neutral states were much the same. By contrast, positive emotions broadened perception, as reflected by increased blood flow within the PPA. In other words, on the heels of seeing puppies or cake, people’s brains registered both the faces and the houses that encircled them. When feeling good, these data suggest, you can’t help but pick up more of the contextual information that surrounds you. In Huxley’s terms, positive emotions provide a temporary bypass that circumvents the reducing valve. This brain imaging study provides solid evidence that your doors of perception open wider than usual under positivity’s influence.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Denys’s dialectical method leads to an intellectual rapture that takes us beyond everyday perceptions and introduces us to another mode of seeing. Like Moses at the top of the mountain, we embrace the darkness and experience no clarity, but know that, once we have rinsed our minds of inadequate ideas that block our understanding, we are somehow in the place where God is. Renouncing all that the mind may conceive, wrapped entirely in the intangible and the invisible, [Moses] belongs completely to him who is beyond everything. Here, being neither oneself nor someone else, one is supremely united to the completely unknown by an inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing. 8 0 Once we have left the idols of thought behind, we are no longer worshipping a simulacrum, a projection of our own ideas and desires. There are no longer any false ideas obstructing our access to the inexpressible truth, and, like Moses, forgetful of self, we can remain silently in the presence of the unknown God. But this would, of course, be incomprehensible unless you had personally put yourself through this spiritual exercise again and again. Denys did not regard this ekstasis as an exotic “peak” experience. Everybody, priests and lay folk alike, should apply this threefold dialectical method to the scriptures as they listened to them read aloud during the liturgy. When they heard God called “Rock,” “Creator,” “Wise,” or “Good,” they must affirm, deny, and then deny the denial, becoming in the process ever more conscious of the inadequacy of all theological language—even the inspired words of scripture. At key moments they would be able to “hear” the silence of the ineffable other that lay beyond the limits of speech. In his Mystical Theology , Denys applied his method to the ceremonies of the liturgy, to bring to light the deeper meaning of these ritualized symbolic gestures. 81 This was a communal rather than a solitary ekstasis . Priests and congregants should plunge together “into that darkness which is beyond intellect.” Eventually, Denys concluded, “We shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing.” 82 Denys’s theology was based on the liturgy of Alexandria, which instead of simply regarding the Eucharist as a reenactment of Jesus’s last supper also saw it as an allegory of the soul’s ascent to God.

• From City of Night (1963)

  I asked my host: How much do these boys get? He told me—$15.00. And that night I was with Robbie, sitting there for a long while, unable to do anything, dreamily prolonging, I suppose, the anticipation of what $15.00 would get me: a taste of Heaven—promised—for that small sum. Less than I paid in Munich for that beer mug you see there: That beer mug is me, it has no beauty, no wings—it is ugly, it can break. The shattered pieces will be remembered.... And Robbie made the first move—that enchanted night in bed.... We were together two brief hours (much longer, he assured me, than he had ever spent with his other clients)—$7.50 an hour: and that is how I have arrived at that figure: You see, I told you, I am Loyal!... I remember the American heiress stranded by her young lover at the train station in Frankfurt. And all she could say was: ‘God damn!’ A more fitting eulogy would have been: The angel has flown; on golden wings he is gone. And she should have remembered that wings that can take away can also bring—and so I said to her, as she looked one last frantic time about the station, ‘Look around, this is a world of angels.’...”

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Faith, according to Salzberg, is “an active, open state that makes us willing to explore.” It draws you out of the safe and familiar territory of labels and constructs, and into the more challenging and always changing flux of your own inner experience. From what I’ve highlighted so far, you won’t be surprised to learn that I especially resonate with how my friend and Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant, an expert in adult development, defines spirituality. In his 2009 book, Spiritual Evolution , he equates spirituality with positive emotions, noting that these states are what connect you to others, to the divine, and over time help you attain wisdom and maturity. Succinctly, he concludes, “Love is the shortest definition of spirituality I know.” I see no need to improve upon this definition. To be sure, casting spirituality as an altered state of consciousness is hardly new. Viewed one way, it’s simply another description of the human practices that yield exalted emotional states in the first place. Descriptions like these didn’t take us very far in the past precisely because they remained on the same “soft” side of the opposition between subjective and objective ways of knowing. Religion has long anchored the subjective side, whereas science anchored the other. Likewise, the languages of poetry and emotions marked one pole, whereas mathematics and reason marked the other. Spirituality, poetry, and emotions were all deemed soft and subjective, whereas science, mathematics, and reason were all deemed hard and objective. Historically, the two poles simply didn’t have anything to say to each other. But just as borders melt away when you feel that elemental oceanic feeling, today these old oppositions no longer hold water. In particular, the new and amply objective science of emotions allows us—for the first time—to systematically explain transcendent spiritual experiences and unravel their poetic mystery. We no longer need to stop at calling the varieties of religious experiences altered states, ekstasis , or oceanic. We can instead examine them through the lenses of the science of positive emotions. These new scientific lenses reveal facts that can be deeply moving. Those potent, boundary-blurring and heart-expanding experiences of positivity resonance that you share with others are not merely an academic concept or a poetic flourish. Positivity resonance changes your biochemistry in ways scientists are only just now beginning to grasp. As these moments become more and more typical of your daily experience, they even alter the foundational rhythms of your heart, increasing your vagal tone, resulting in a closer synchrony between the actions of your heart and the actions of your lungs. High levels of vagal tone, scientists have now firmly shown, are linked not only to greater social attunement but also to more efficient self-regulation and improved physical health. In this way, love and health cocreate each other in your life. At the same time, this reciprocal, upward spiral dynamic between micro-moments of love and lasting changes in your health forges a path toward your higher spiritual sense of oneness.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The reign of Constantine the Great marks the transition of the Christian religion from under persecution by the secular government to union with the same; the beginning of the state-church system. The Graeco-Roman heathenism, the most cultivated and powerful form of idolatry, which history knows, surrenders, after three hundred years’ struggle, to Christianity, and dies of incurable consumption, with the confession: Galilean, thou hast conquered! The ruler of the civilized world lays his crown at the feet of the crucified Jesus of Nazareth. The successor of Nero, Domitian, and Diocletian appears in the imperial purple at the council of Nice as protector of the church, and takes his golden throne at the nod of bishops, who still bear the scars of persecution. The despised sect, which, like its Founder in the days of His humiliation, had not where to lay its head, is raised to sovereign authority in the state, enters into the prerogatives of the pagan priesthood, grows rich and powerful, builds countless churches out of the stones of idol temples to the honor of Christ and his martyrs, employs the wisdom of Greece and Rome to vindicate the foolishness of the cross, exerts a molding power upon civil legislation, rules the national life, and leads off the history of the world. But at the same time the church, embracing the mass of the population of the empire, from the Caesar to the meanest slave, and living amidst all its institutions, received into her bosom vast deposits of foreign material from the world and from heathenism, exposing herself to new dangers and imposing upon herself new and heavy labors. The union of church and state extends its influence, now healthful, now baneful, into every department of our history. The Christian life of the Nicene and post-Nicene age reveals a mass of worldliness within the church; an entire abatement of chiliasm with its longing after the return of Christ and his glorious reign, and in its stead an easy repose in the present order of things; with a sublime enthusiasm, on the other hand, for the renunciation of self and the world, particularly in the hermitage and the cloister, and with some of the noblest heroes of Christian holiness. Monasticism, in pursuance of the ascetic tendencies of the previous period, and in opposition to the prevailing secularization of Christianity, sought to save the virgin purity of the church and the glory of martyrdom by retreat from the world into the wilderness; and it carried the ascetic principle to the summit of moral heroism, though not rarely to the borders of fanaticism and brutish stupefaction. It spread with incredible rapidity and irresistible fascination from Egypt over the whole church, east and west, and received the sanction of the greatest church teachers, of an Athanasius, a Basil, a Chrysostom, an Augustine, a Jerome, as the surest and shortest way to heaven.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  But not everybody was skilled at these ritual games. The Athenian philosopher Proclus (c. 412–85 CE) explained that some mystai were “stricken with panic” during the darker part of the rite and remained trapped in their fear; they were not sufficiently adept in this ritual of make-believe. But others achieved a sympatheia , an affinity that made them one with the ritual, so that they lost themselves in it “in a way that is unintelligible to us and divine.” Their ekstasis was a kenosis , a self-forgetfulness that enabled them to “assimilate themselves to the holy symbols, leave their own identity, become at home with the gods, and experience divine possession.” 17 Some Greeks, however, were beginning to be critical of the old mythology. How could anybody imagine that the gods “are born, and have clothes and speech and shape like our own,” asked the Ionian poet Xenophanes (560–480), or that they were guilty of theft, adultery, and deception? 18 To be truly divine, a god should transcend such human qualities and be beyond time and change. 19 The naturalist Anaxagoras of Smyrna (508–435) insisted that the moon and stars were just massive rocks; it was not the gods but Mind (nous) , composed of sacred matter, that controlled the universe. Protagoras of Abdera caused a sensation when he arrived in Athens in 430 and delivered a lecture in the home of the playwright Euripides (480–406). No god could impose his will on human beings, and as for the Olympians, who could tell whether they existed or not? “There are many obstacles to such knowledge, including the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life.” 20 There was simply not the evidence to pronounce definitively on the existence of the divine, one way or the other. Athens was still a very religious city and Protagoras and Anaxagoras were both expelled from the polis. But people were looking for a deeper form of theism. For the tragedian Aeschylus (525–456) the ineluctable pain of human life was the path to wisdom. Zeus— “whoever Zeus may be”—had “taught men to think” and reflect on the sorrow of human experience. It was therefore ordaine d that we must suffer, suffer into truth . We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart the pain of pain remembered comes again , and we resist, but ripeness comes as well . From the gods enthroned on the awesome rowing-bench there comes a violent love. 21 Euripides wanted a more transcendent god: “O you who give the earth support and me by it supported,” prays Queen Hecuba in his Trojan Women , “whoever you are, power beyond our knowledge, Zeus, be you stern law of nature or intelligence in man, to you I make my prayers; for you direct in the way of justice all mortal affairs, moving with noiseless tread.”

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  ©2004 The Teaching Company. 116 would be worked out by theologians of the fourth and fifth centuries. II. Despite all this impressive progress, a good case can be made that it was the conversion of Constantine himself that proved to be the single most important event of Christianity’s first 300 years, a climactic moment on the one hand and the beginning of something entirely new on the other. A. Constantine’s conversion was one of the most significant events in all of Western civilization. 1. Had it not happened, the vast majority of Christians throughout history (there are some two billion today, the largest world religion) would have remained pagan. 2. As a result, the history of Western civilization that we know through the Middle Ages, to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and into modern times would never have occurred. 3. If Constantine had not converted, neither would have the Roman Empire. And that would have changed everything. B. No 10-year period was more important for the fortunes of Christianity than 303–313 C.E. 1. In 303 C.E., the pagan emperor of the eastern part of the empire, Diocletian, ordered a persecution of Christians, matched to some degree by a persecution in the western part of the empire by his colleague, the emperor Maximian. 2. Several imperial edicts were issued that called for the burning of Christian books, the demolition of Christian churches, the removal of class privileges for Christians, and eventually, the imprisonment of high-ranking Christian clergy. 3. In 304, a further edict required all Roman subjects to perform sacrifices to the gods; noncompliance meant death or forced labor. 4. This “Great Persecution,” as it is called, lasted on and off for nearly a decade, well beyond the retirement of Diocletian and Maximian in 305 C.E. 5. But the persecution failed to for ce the majority of Christians to recant. 6. For a variety of reasons, official toleration for Christians was pronounced in both the western and eastern parts of the

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  Paul was claiming that he was empowered by God to do signs, wonders, and mighty works as a verification of his proclamation. This view that miracles accompanied the missionary proclamation of the apostles is found throughout the Book of Acts. The Book of Acts, of course, was written decades after the events that it narrates, and it does, I think, fairly clearly contain some legendary exaggerations about the effect of the Christian mission. In its essentials, though, it agrees in most respects with Paul’s own accounts. The apostles in the Book of Acts proclaim their faith to believers and are said to have done miracles in order to validate their message, and as a result of people seeing these miracles, they convert to faith in Jesus. You see this early in the Book of Acts, in its early chapters. For example Acts, chapter 2, narrates an event that happened 50 days after Jesus’s death, during the day of Pentecost. There are group of followers of Jesus’s who believe that Jesus was raised from the dead; they’re gathered together at one place. We are told there are 120 of these people, and suddenly, something miraculous happens on the day of Pentecost. The spirit comes upon these people. They hear a mighty wind going through where they are, and flames come down from heaven, tons of flames that go up over their heads, and they start speaking languages that they don’t know. All around them are people who are gathered together for this festival of Pentecost, Jews from around the world from different countries, and these people who are the followers of Jesus start speaking to people of different areas, different countries, in their own languages, even though they don’t know these languages. This is a miraculous event, and when people had realized what had happened, they convert to faith in Jesus, because Jesus is the one who has caused this, as the apostle Peter tells them. In chapter 3 of the Book of Acts, Peter and John are going to the Temple of Jerusalem for a time of prayer, and there’s a man there who has been lame for 40 years, since he was born. Peter heals the man of his lameness, and the man leaps up and starts running, jumping, and praising God. People see this, and thousands of people convert when they see this miracle happen. So it goes throughout the Book of Acts. It gets to a point were Peter is so powerful that as he passes by people who are sick, if just his shadow falls on them, they become well. The apostle Paul, who converts later, has miraculous powers, and can raise the dead. At one point, Paul’s handkerchiefs are able to heal anybody who is sick, and anybody who sees this naturally converts.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Apparently I was in some kind of industrial district on the city’s fringe. Filled with docks and factories, this district must have been a primary target of the B-29s. Everywhere I looked was desolation. Buildings cracked and broken. Block after block simply leveled. Gone. Luckily my father knew people in Tokyo, including a group of American guys working at United Press International. I took a cab there and the guys greeted me like family. They gave me coffee and a breakfast ring and when I told them where I’d spent the night they laughed. They booked me into a clean, decent hotel. Then they wrote down the names of several good places to eat. What in God’s name are you doing in Tokyo? I explained that I was going around the world. Then I mentioned my Crazy Idea. “Huh,” they said, giving a little eye roll. They mentioned two ex-GIs who ran a monthly magazine called Importer. “Talk to the fellas at Importer,” they said, “before you do anything rash.” I promised I would. But first I wanted to see the city. Guidebook and Minolta box camera in hand, I sought out the few landmarks that had survived the war, the oldest temples and shrines. I spent hours sitting on benches in walled gardens, reading about Japan’s dominant religions, Buddhism and Shinto. I marveled at the concept of kensho, or satori—enlightenment that comes in a flash, a blinding pop. Sort of like the bulb on my Minolta. I liked that. I wanted that. But first I’d need to change my whole approach. I was a linear thinker, and according to Zen linear thinking is nothing but a delusion, one of the many that keep us unhappy. Reality is nonlinear, Zen says. No future, no past. All is now. In every religion, it seemed, self is the obstacle, the enemy. And yet Zen declares plainly that the self doesn’t exist. Self is a mirage, a fever dream, and our stubborn belief in its reality not only wastes life, but shortens it. Self is the bald-faced lie we tell ourselves daily, and happiness requires seeing through the lie, debunking it. To study the self, said the thirteenth-century Zen master Dogen, is to forget the self. Inner voice, outer voices, it’s all the same. No dividing lines. Especially in competition. Victory, Zen says, comes when we forget the self and the opponent, who are but two halves of one whole. In Zen and the Art of Archery, it’s all laid out with crystal clarity. Perfection in the art of swordsmanship is reached... when the heart is troubled by no more thought of I and You, of the opponent and his sword, of one’s own sword and how to wield it.... All is emptiness: your own self, the flashing sword, and the arms that wield it. Even the thought of emptiness is no longer there.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  The Christian church has been the most powerful religious, political, social, cultural, economic, and intellectual institution in the history of Western civilization, from late antiquity, to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and on into modern times. It continues to assert enormous influence on the history and shape of our culture today as the largest of the world’s religions (with two billion adherents). Yet the Christian movement did not start out as a culturally significant phenomenon; it began in a remote part of the Roman Empire as a small, lower-class group of followers of a Jewish apocalyptic preacher, crucified as an enemy of the state. For more than a century, the Christian church was virtually unknown among the political and cultural leaders of the Western world. How did Christianity grow into such an enormously influential institution from such humble beginnings? That is the overarching question of this course. Following two lectures that introduce the topic, explain the issues that we address, and set the context for the emergence of Christianity among the other (pagan and Jewish) religions of the Roman world, the course divides itself up into six major sections. Section | deals with the “Beginnings of Christianity.” There, we will consider the figures and traditions that lie at the foundation of the emerging Christian religion. We will begin by exploring what can be known about the life, teachings, and death of Jesus of Nazareth, the Jewish prophet who became the object of worship for Christians throughout the world, based on a belief in his Resurrection from the dead as a sign of God’s divine favor and of his own unique standing before God. We will then consider the traditions about Jesus that began to circulate after his death, leading to the writing, some decades later, of the Christian Gospels—some of which came to be included in the New Testament. Finally, we will consider the life and teachings of the apostle Paul, who was, beyond doubt, the most important figure for the development of early Christianity apart from Jesus. Section 2 considers “Jewish-Christian Relations.” Christianity began as a sect within Judaism, originally composed of Jewish followers of a Jewish teacher of the Jewish Law; yet within a century, it had become an anti- Jewish religion. How did this happen? In three lectures, we will explore the rise of anti-Judaism within the Christian church and the emergence of Christianity as a religion distinct from and in opposition to the Jewish religion from which it emerged. Section 3 consists of two lectures on the spread of Christianity throughout the Mediterranean, beginning with the missionary work of the apostle Paul and continuing with the Christian mission of the second and third centuries. Here, we will consider the message the Christians proclaimed and their approaches to winning converts, asking what they said or did that convinced people to abandon the worship of their own gods to accept the God of the Jews and put their faith in Jesus as his son.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  conscious of the spotlight. Sometimes I thought the secret to Pre’s appeal was his passion. He didn’t care if he died crossing the finish line, so long as he crossed first. No matter what Bowerman told him, no matter what his body told him, Pre refused to slow down, ease off. He pushed himself to the brink and beyond. This was often a counterproductive strategy, and sometimes it was plainly stupid, and occasionally it was suicidal. But it was always uplifting for the crowd. No matter the sport—no matter the human endeavor, really—total effort will win people’s hearts. Of course, all Oregonians loved Pre because he was “ours.” He was born in our midst, raised in our rainy forests, and we’d cheered him since he was a pup. We’d watched him break the national two-mile record as an eighteen-year-old, and we were with him, step by step, through each glorious NCAA championship. Every Oregonian felt emotionally invested in his career. And at Blue Ribbon, of course, we were preparing to put our money where our emotions were. We understood that Pre couldn’t switch shoes right before the trials. He was used to his Adidas. But in time, we were certain, he’d be a Nike athlete, and perhaps the paradigmatic Nike athlete. With these thoughts in mind, walking down Agate Street toward Hayward Field, I wasn’t surprised to find the place shaking, rocking, trembling with cheers— the Coliseum in Rome could not have been louder when the gladiators and lions were turned loose. We found our seats just in time to see Pre doing his warm-ups. Every move he made caused a new ripple of excitement. Every time he jogged down one side of the oval, or up the other, the fans along his route stood and went wild. Half of them were wearing T-shirts that read: LEGEND. All of a sudden we heard a chorus of deep, guttural boos. Gerry Lindgren, arguably the world’s best distance runner at the time, appeared on the track—wearing a T-shirt that read: STOP PRE. Lindgren had beaten Pre when he was a senior and Pre a freshman, and he wanted everyone, especially Pre, to remember. But when Pre saw Lindgren, and saw the shirt, he just shook his head. And grinned. No pressure. Only more incentive. The runners took their marks. An unearthly silence fell. Then, bang. The starting gun sounded like a Napoléon cannon. Pre took the lead right away. Young tucked in right behind him. In no time they pulled well ahead of the field and it became a two-man affair. (Lindgren was far behind, a nonfactor.) Each man’s strategy was clear. Young meant to stay with Pre until the final lap, then use his superior sprint to go by and win. Pre, meanwhile, intended to set such a fast pace at the outset that by the time they got to that final lap, Young’s legs would be gone. For eleven laps they ran a half stride apart.