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.

Page 135 of 217 · 20 per page

• From The Case for God (2009)

  One of the peculiar characteristics of the human mind is its ability to have ideas and experiences that exceed our conceptual grasp. We constantly push our thoughts to an extreme, so that our minds seem to elide naturally into an apprehension of transcendence. Music has always been inseparable from religious expression, since, like religion at its best, music marks the “limits of reason.”8 Because a territory is defined by its extremities, it follows that music must be “definitively” rational. It is the most corporeal of the arts: it is produced by breath, voice, horsehair, shells, guts, and skins and reaches “resonances in our bodies at levels deeper than will or consciousness.”9 But it is also highly cerebral, requiring the balance of intricately complex energies and form-relations, and is intimately connected with mathematics. Yet this intensely rational activity segues into transcendence. Music goes beyond the reach of words: it is not about anything. A late Beethoven quartet does not represent sorrow but elicits it in hearer and player alike, and yet it is emphatically not a sad experience. Like tragedy, it brings intense pleasure and insight. We seem to experience sadness directly in a way that transcends ego, because this is not my sadness but sorrow itself. In music, therefore, subjective and objective become one. Language has borders that we cannot cross. When we listen critically to our stuttering attempts to express ourselves, we become aware of an inexpressible otherness. “It is decisively the fact that language does have frontiers,” explains the British critic George Steiner, “that gives proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world. It is just because we can go no further, because speech so marvellously fails us, that we experience the certitude of a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding ours.”10 Every day, music confronts us with a mode of knowledge that defies logical analysis and empirical proof. It is “brimful of meanings which will not translate into logical structures or verbal expression.”11 Hence all art constantly aspires to the condition of music; so too, at its best, does theology.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  When the celebrant left the sanctuary and walked among the congregation, sprinkling them with holy water, the people should see this as a symbolic reenactment of the ekstasis in which God perpetually abandoned its lonely solitude and merged with creation. When the celebrant turned his back on the congregation, entered the inner sanctum, and disappeared from view to consecrate the bread and wine, Denys compared him to Moses, when he left the people and, “accompanied by certain priests,” entered the “mysterious darkness of unknowing” on the summit of Mount Sinai. 84 Like all doctrinal instruction in the Greek Orthodox world, Denys’s method was practiced in the heightened atmosphere of the liturgy. The evocative music, stylized drama, clouds of fragrant incense, and numinous solemnity all ensured that the dialectical process was not a dry, cerebral exercise but was performed in a context that, like any great aesthetic performance, touched people and stirred them at a deeper level of their being. As they heard the words of scripture read aloud in a special chant that separated it from normal discourse, and attended critically, as Denys had taught them, to the words of the prayers and hymns, clergy and congregants would in effect be saying to themselves, “Neti... neti”: the reality we call God was not this, not that, but immeasurably other. The liturgy had always been a musterion, a ritual that initiated all the participants into a different mode of seeing. When Denys spoke of his mentor Bishop Hierotheus, he used terms associated with the Eleusinian Mysteries that Emperor Justinian had just abolished. Hierotheus did not “learn” (mathein) these truths simply by studying the doctrines of the church, but by allowing the beauty and symbolism of the liturgy to act upon him, he “experienced” or “suffered (pathein) divine things.” Denys implies that Hierotheus imparted the knowledge he had intuited to the people not by speaking about it but in the way he performed the liturgy, which made it obvious that he had achieved an empathetic sympatheia with the rites. 85 In the East, Denys was merely regarded as a disciple of the Cappadocians and Maximus, the major luminaries of Greek Orthodoxy, but in the West he enjoyed enormous prestige and became a leading authority. His writings were translated into Latin by the Irish theologian John Scotus Erigena (810–877), who worked in the court of Charles the Bald, king of the West Franks. In his writings, like Denys, Erigena insisted that God is “Nothing” because he does not possess “being” in any sense that we could understand.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  [image file=image_rsrc4UR.jpg] ReasonAt about the same time as P was writing his creation story, a handful of philosophers in the thriving Greek colony of Miletus on the Ionian coast of Asia Minor had begun to think about the cosmos in an entirely different way.1 What they were attempting was so new that they had no name for it, but they became known as the phusikoi, the “naturalists,” because their thinking was based entirely on the material world. The Milesians were merchants; their interests—sailing, land surveying, astronomy, mathematical calculation, and geography—were pragmatic and geared to their trade, but their wealth had given them leisure for speculation. They came to a startling conclusion. Despite the flux and change that were apparent everywhere in the universe, they were convinced that there was an underlying order and that the universe was governed by intelligible laws. They believed that there was an explanation for everything and that stringent rational inquiry would enable them to find it. These Ionian naturalists had launched the Western scientific tradition. They did not have a large following, since very few people could understand their ideas and only fragments of their writings have survived. But it seems that from the first the phusikoi pushed their minds to the limits of human knowledge, looking more deeply into the natural world than was deemed possible at the time. Why was the world the way it was? They believed that they could find an answer by examining the arche, the “beginning” of the cosmos. If they could discover the raw material that had existed before the universe as we know it had emerged, they would understand the substance of the cosmos, and everything else would follow. They were not hostile to religion; indeed, there was nothing in Greek religion that was incompatible with this type of investigation. As an Aryan people, the Greeks accepted the idea of an overarching cosmic order to which all beings were subject. There were no orthodox doctrines of creation, and the gods of Mount Olympus were neither omnipotent nor cosmic powers. They differed only in being more anthropomorphically conceived than the gods of most other pantheons. In his eighth-century epics, Homer had fixed the gods’ personalities for all time, and their endless feuds symbolized the agonistic relationship of the sacred forces that the Greeks sensed all around them. When they contemplated the complex Olympian family, Greeks were able to glimpse a unity that drew its warring contradictions together.2 The gods might meddle irresponsibly in human affairs, but their similarity to mortal men and women emphasized their compatibility with the human race. The Greeks sensed the presence of a deity in any exceptional human achievement.3 When a warrior was possessed by the fury of battle, he knew that Ares was present; when his world was transfigured by the overwhelming reality of erotic love, he called this emotion Aphrodite. Hephaestus was revealed in the work of an artist and Athena in each and every cultural attainment.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  Oh Lord, oh Lord, how great is thy name! How thy marvels are spread over the world! The wise men of the earth praise you. The little children pray to you. The suckling infants proclaim you and your glory. I will praise you, too, out of my own poor mouth. I am a feeble woman, but I hope to find you in my heart. I hope to find words in honour of you, Lord, and of the purely white lily, blessed Virgin, who bore you. I will tell my story for her sweet sake. I cannot increase her honour, of course, since she is the root and source of all virtue. She and her blessed Son are the salvation of the world. Oh Mary, full of grace, the unburned bush burning in the sight of Moses, you who did receive the Holy Ghost descending from the seat of the Lord God. In humility of spirit you found the wisdom of God within you. Your heart was lightened by the weight of the Lord. Oh holy Virgin, help me to tell my story! Hail holy Mother, no one can express your magnificence or your modesty. Who can number your virtues? Who can measure your bounty? You guide men into the light of the Lord. You anticipate their prayers and plead for them before the throne of the Almighty. My learning and knowledge are so weak, holy Virgin, that I cannot express your mercy or your love. Your light is too bright for me to bear. I come to you as an infant, scarcely able to speak. Form my broken words uttered in praise of you. Guide my song. The Prioress’s Tale Heere bigynneth the Prioresses Tale In a great Asian and Christian city there once stood a Jewish ghetto. It was financed and supervised by a lord of that place, intent upon making as much profit as he could from the vile practice of usury. It is evil money, accursed by Christ and His saints. Yet the ghetto was open. There were no gates, and all the citizens could walk or ride through its main street. There was a little Christian school at the end of this street, where its young pupils learned the rudiments of their faith. Year after year the children were taught how to read and how to sing, in the way of all small boys and girls. Among these children was a widow’s son, some seven years old. He attended school every day. His mother had taught him to kneel down and say a Hail Mary whenever he came across an image of the Virgin. His mother had told him that he must always pray to the blessed Lady, even in a crowded street. And of course he obeyed her. An innocent child learns quickly. When I think of him I cannot help but recall the image of Saint Nicholas, who, at the same young age, did reverence to Christ.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  ‘There are many reasons, dear summoner. Now is not the time to explain them. The day is short. It is already past nine, and I have not yet found my quarry. I must attend to business, if you don’t mind, and not spend the time revealing all my plans. Don’t take this the wrong way, brother, but I doubt that you are capable of understanding them in any case. You asked me why we take such trouble. Well. Sometimes we are the instruments of God himself, fulfilling His commandment. He wreaks his will on humankind in various ways and for various reasons. We have no strength or purpose without Him. That is certain. Sometimes, if we ask kindly enough, we are allowed to afflict the body rather than the soul. Job is a case in point. We certainly punished him. There are occasions when we can do some harm to the soul as well as to the body. That’s the fun part. There are other times when we can attack the soul, but not the body. It all depends. It works out well, in any case. I’ll tell you why. If anybody can resist our temptations, then he or she will go to heaven. That was not our intention, of course. We want the soul to settle down with us. And there are even occasions when we act as servants to mankind. Take the case of Archbishop Dunstan. He used to be able to control us devils. I myself have served one of the apostles in a lowly way. But that’s a long story.’ ‘Can you tell me this?’ The summoner was now thoroughly absorbed in the conversation. ‘Is it true that you make your new bodies out of the elements themselves? Out of the wind and the fire?’ ‘Not really. Sometimes we create the illusion of that. Yet there are other times when we reanimate the bodies of the dead and rise from their graves. Did you hear about the witch of Endor, who conjured up the spirit of Samuel before King Saul of Israel? Some people claim that it was not Samuel at all. I don’t know. I am not a theologian. But I’ll warn you of one thing. I won’t deceive you. Soon enough you will find out about our changing shapes. You will not need to learn anything from me. You will know the truth from experience. You will be able to lecture on it, write books about it more learned than those of Virgil and of Dante. Come on. Let us ride. I enjoy being in your company. I’ll stay with you until you tell me to piss off.’

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Spinoza shared the Marrano disdain for revealed religion, though he agreed with Descartes that the very idea of “God” contains a validation of God’s existence. But this was not the personalized God of Judeo-Christianity. Spinoza’s God was the sum and principle of natural law, identical with and equivalent to the order that governs the universe. God was neither the Creator nor the First Cause, but was inseparable from the material world, an immanent force that welded everything into unity and harmony. When human beings contemplated the workings of their minds, they opened themselves to the eternal and infinite reality of the God active within them. Spinoza experienced his philosophical study as a form of prayer; the contemplation of this immanent presence filled him with awe and wonder. As he explained in his Short Treatise on God (1661), the deity was not an object to be known but the principle of our thought, so the joy we experienced when we attained knowledge was the intellectual love of God. A true philosopher should cultivate intuitive knowledge, flashes of insight that suddenly fused all the information he had acquired discursively into a new and integrated vision, an ekstatic perception that Spinoza called “beatitude.” Most Western thinkers would not follow Spinoza. Their God was becoming increasingly remote, and those who adopted an immanent view of the divine were often regarded as rebels against the established order. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) had brought the Thirty Years’ War to an end and set up a system of sovereign nation-states, but this new polity could not be established overnight. As the modern market economy developed, it became essential to change the political structures of society. To enhance the wealth of the nation, more and more people had to be brought into the productive process—even at a quite humble level, as printers, factory hands, and office workers. They would, therefore, need a modicum of education in the modern ethos, and, inevitably, they began to demand a share in the decision making of their government. Democracy was found to be essential to the nation-state and the capitalist economy. Countries that democratized forged ahead; those that tried to confine their wealth and privilege to the aristocracy fell behind. No elite group gives up power willingly, of course. The democratization of Europe was not a peaceful process but was achieved in a series of bloody revolutions, civil wars, the assassination of the nobility, militant dictatorships, and reigns of terror.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  There is also a tendency to assume that, even though we now live in a totally transformed world and have an entirely different worldview, people have always thought about God in exactly the same way as we do today. But despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our religious thinking is sometimes remarkably undeveloped, even primitive. In some ways the modern God resembles the High God of remote antiquity, a theology that was unanimously either jettisoned or radically reinterpreted because it was found to be inept. Many people in the premodern world went out of their way to show that it was very difficult indeed to speak about God. Theology is, of course, a very wordy discipline. People have written reams and talked unstoppably about God. But some of the greatest Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians made it clear that while it was important to put our ideas about the divine into words, these doctrines were man-made, and therefore were bound to be inadequate. They devised spiritual exercises that deliberately subverted normal patterns of thought and speech to help the faithful understand that the words we use to describe mundane things were simply not suitable for God. “He” was not good, divine, powerful, or intelligent in any way that we could understand. We could not even say that God “existed,” because our concept of existence was too limited. Some of the sages preferred to say that God was “Nothing” because God was not another being. You certainly could not read your scriptures literally, as if they referred to divine facts. To these theologians some of our modern ideas about God would have seemed idolatrous. It was not just a few radical theologians who took this line. Symbolism came more naturally to people in the premodern world than it does to us today. In medieval Europe, for example, Christians were taught to see the Mass as a symbolic reenactment of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. The fact that they could not follow the Latin added to its mystique. Much of the Mass was recited by the priest in an undertone, and the solemn silence and liturgical drama, with its music and stylized gestures, put the congregation into a mental “space” that was separate from ordinary life. Today many are able to own a copy of the Bible or the Qur’an and have the literacy to read them, but in the past most people had an entirely different relationship with their scriptures. They listened to them, recited piecemeal, often in a foreign language and always in a heightened liturgical context. Preachers instructed them not to understand these texts in a purely literal way and suggested figurative interpretations. In the “mystery plays” performed annually on the feast of Corpus Christi, medievals felt free to change the biblical stories, add new characters, and transpose them into a modern setting. These stories were not historical in our sense, because they were more than history.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  But nobody was required to “believe” this as a divine fact. The Trinity was a “mystery” not because it was an incomprehensible conundrum that had to be taken “on faith.” It was a musterion because it was an “initiation” that inducted Christians into a wholly different way of thinking about the divine. Basil always distinguished between the kerygma of the Church (its public message) and its dogma, the inner meaning of the kerygma, which could be grasped only after long immersion in liturgical prayer.41 The Trinity was a prime example of dogma, a truth that brought us up against the limits of language but could be suggested by the symbolic gestures of the liturgy and the silent practice of hesychia. The initiation consisted of a spiritual exercise that was explained to new mystai after their baptism in a liturgical context. They were instructed to keep their minds in continuous motion, swinging back and forth between the One and the Three. This mental discipline would enable them gradually to experience within themselves the inner balance of the threefold mind.42 Gregory of Nazianzus explained the kind of ekstasis this produced: No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendour of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Three than I am carried back into the One. When I think of any of the Three I think of him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me. I cannot grasp the greatness of that One so as to attribute a greater greatness to the rest. When I see the Three together, I see but one Torch, and cannot divine or measure the undivided light.43 Trinity was not unlike a mandala, the icon of concentric circles that Buddhists visualize in meditation to find within themselves an ineffable “center” that pulls the scattered aspects of their being into harmony. Trinity was an activity rather than an abstract metaphysical doctrine. It is probably because most Western Christians have not been instructed in this exercise that the Trinity remains pointless, incomprehensible, and even absurd.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  In 320, a heated debate about these issues erupted in Alexandria. It seems to have started with an argument about the meaning of Wisdom’s words in the book of Proverbs, which Christians had always applied to Christ—”Yahweh created me when his purpose first unfolded, before the oldest of his works”6—and went on to say that Wisdom had been God’s “master craftsman,” his agent of creation. Arius, a handsome and charismatic young presbyter of Alexandria, argued that this text made it clear that the Word and Wisdom of the Father was the first and most privileged of God’s creatures. It followed that the Word must also have been created ex nihilo. Arius did not deny that Jesus was God, but suggested that he had merely been promoted to divine status. God had foreseen that when the Logos became a man, he would behave with perfect obedience, and as a reward had raised him to divine status in advance of his mission. The Logos thus became the prototype of the perfected human being; if Christians imitated his wholehearted kenosis, they too could become “sons of God;” they too could become divine.7 Alexander, bishop of Alexandria, and his brilliant young assistant Athanasius immediately realized that Arius had put his finger on an ambiguity in the Alexandrian view of Christ that needed to be cleared up.8 The debate was not confined to a coterie of learned experts. Arius set his ideas to music, and it was not long before sailors and travelers were singing popular songs proclaiming that the Father was God by nature and had given life and being to the Son, who was neither coeternal with him nor uncreated. Soon the controversy had spread to the churches of Asia Minor and Syria. We hear of a bath attendant who engaged the bathers in heated discussion about whether the Son had come from nothingness; a money changer who, when asked for the exchange rate, held forth on the distinction between the Creator and his creation; and a baker who argued with his customers that the Father was greater than the Son.9 People were discussing the question with the same enthusiasm and passion as they discuss football today, because it touched the heart of their Christian experience. In the past, the creeds and explanations of the faith had often been changed to meet pastoral needs.10 The Arian crisis showed that they would probably have to be changed yet again.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  The feast had come to the third course. The king and his courtiers were listening to the sweet music of the players, performing before the dais, when there was a sudden clatter. A knight appeared at the doors of the hall, sitting astride a horse of brass. In his hand he held a great glass mirror. He had a broad ring of gold on his thumb, and a gleaming sword hung down by his side. He rode up to the king’s table. No one said a word. They were all astonished by the sight of this knight. Young and old looked on. This knight was in full armour, except that he wore no helmet. He gracefully saluted all the company, king and queen, ladies and nobles, in order of rank. He seemed so full of reverence and modesty, in looks and speech, that Gawain himself (if he emerged from fairyland) could not have equalled him. Then, as he stood before the assembled company, he delivered his message in a calm clear voice, full of strength. He followed all the rules of discourse and enunciation, just as the orators teach us, fitting his gestures to his words. I cannot imitate his high style, of course. That would be too great a challenge. But I can give you the gist of what he said, if my memory doesn’t fail me. ‘The king of Arabia and India salutes you, great lord, and sends you greetings on this solemn day of festival. In honour of your birthday he presents you with this steed of brass. I, who am your willing servant, was asked to bring it into your presence. This horse can, in the course of a single night and day, carry you to any place on earth. Wind or rain does not deter it. Wherever you wish to go, there it will take you unharmed. If you want to soar through the air like an eagle, this horse will carry you. You can fall asleep on its back, and still come to no harm. Do you see this pin here behind his ear? If you twist it, the horse will return you to your starting place. The inventor who made this horse was a very cunning man. He waited until all the planets were in the right aspect before he began work. He knew all the secrets of his craft.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The Enlightenment had created a God of “fearful symmetry,” like the Tyger, remote from the world in “distant deeps and skies.”64 The God of Newton must undergo a kenosis, return to earth, die a symbolic death in the person of Jesus,65 and become one with humanity.66 In 1812, the revolutionary young aristocrat Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) was expelled from University College, Oxford, for writing an atheistic tract, but “The Necessity of Atheism” simply argued that God was not a necessary consequence of the material world. Shelley did not want to get rid of the divine altogether. Like his older contemporary William Wordsworth (1770–1850), he had a strong sense of a “Spirit,” an “unseen Power” that was integral to nature and inherent in all its forms.67 Unlike the philosophes, the Romantics were not averse to the mysterious and indefinable. 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.68 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.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  It is difficult for us to read Thomas today. He wrote in the technical language of the new metaphysics, and his style is dry, understated, and dense. But it is also confident. Within a hundred years, the intellectual climate would change and theologians would become warier of the intellect, but Thomas had no qualms about making affirmative, positive statements about God. He thought Maimonides was wrong to insist that it was only appropriate to use negative terms that said what God was not. For Thomas—as for Denys, whom he greatly revered—affirmative speech and the silence of denial were both essential to God talk. As Being itself (ipsum Esse subsistens), God was the source of everything that existed, so all beings made in God’s image could tell us something about him. It was also permissible to exploit the exciting new techniques of logic and inference—but with one important proviso. Whenever he made a statement about God, the theologian must realize that it was inescapably inadequate. When we contemplate God, we are thinking of what is beyond thought; when we speak of God, we are talking of what cannot be contained in words. By revealing the inherent limitation of words and concepts, theology should reduce both the speaker and his audience to silent awe. When reason was applied to faith, it must show that what we call “God” was beyond the grasp of the human mind. If it failed to do this, its statements about the divine would be idolatrous. Even revelation could not tell us anything about God; indeed, its task was to make us realize that God was unknowable. “Man’s utmost knowledge is to know that we do not know him,” Thomas explained. For then alone do we know God truly, when we believe that he is far above all that man can possibly think of God … by the fact that certain things about God are proposed to man, which surpass his reason, he is strengthened in his opinion that God is far above what he is able to think.29 Even Christ had transcended our conceptual grasp and become unknowable. At his ascension, he was hidden in the cloud that received him, and taken into a realm that is beyond the reach of our intellect. As Saint Paul said, he is “far above … any name that can be named.”30 The ascension, therefore, revealed the limits of our knowledge; when Christ left the world, the Word was concealed from us again and would always remain unknowable and unnameable.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  The same could be said, of course, about the “servant” passages in Isaiah. It is ultimately futile to inquire whether the “servant” is Israel or Israel’s representative. In all sorts of ways it must be both, even though in the end it appears that the sufferer is one upon whom the faithful within Israel (those who “obey the voice of his servant,” 50:10) gaze in a mixture of horror and gratitude. The “servant” is at one moment “Israel, in whom [God] will be glorified” (49:3) and the one who stands in for Israel, doing for the people (in vicarious suffering) what they cannot do for themselves. Interpreters have, of course, regularly noted the hints (such as Mark 10:45) in the direction of Isaiah 53, the climax of the “suffering servant” theme. Fewer have noted the way in which the servant’s suffering, in that chapter in particular, is framed by the promise of the kingdom. The messenger who announces the fall of Babylon and the liberation of enslaved Israel brings this simple, two-word announcement of the good news: malak elohayik, “Your God reigns” (52:7). Your God has become king. In other words, he has overthrown the tyrant (the actual tyrant and the dark spiritual forces that stand, as ever, behind him) and has demonstrated to the world that he, Israel’s God, is also sovereign over the nations: YHWH has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations; and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God. (52:10) There then follows almost immediately the graphic Fourth Servant Song (52:13–53:12), in which the onlookers say, in amazement: Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and YHWH has laid on him the iniquity of us all. (53:4–6) This poem too eventually emerges into a triumphant conclusion (53:10–12). But the real triumph comes in the following two chapters, with the almost delirious joy and incredulity at the renewal of the covenant (chap. 54) and then God’s solemn promise to extend his “steadfast, sure love for David” to anyone, anyone at all, who hears the message and comes, hungry and thirsty, for the food and drink that Israel’s God will now supply (55:1–3). Here again is the note of the kingdom, the worldwide dominion of Israel’s God, now becoming a reality: See, you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you shall run to you, because of YHWH your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you. (55:5) The result will be nothing less than new creation, the replacement of the thorns and thistles with beautiful flowering shrubs (55:12–13).

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Matthew’s comment fills this in from another angle: All this happened so that what the Lord said through the prophet might be fulfilled: “Look: the virgin is pregnant, and will have a son, and they shall give him the name Emmanuel”—which means, in translation, “God with us.” (1:22–23) In other words, we are to look at Jesus and see in him, however strange it may seem, the personal presence of Israel’s God, coming to be with his people and rescue them from the plight their sins have brought upon them—which, in ancient Jewish terms, was focused not least on the “exile” they were still suffering, the plight of being overrun and ruled by pagan nations. Look next at the other end of Matthew’s frame. Jesus has been crucified and then raised from the dead. Now he addresses his followers, in words that Matthew must have known were astonishing by anyone’s standards. And the final sentence echoes that “Emmanuel” promise. “God with us” has become “Jesus with us”: Jesus came toward them and addressed them. “All authority in heaven and on earth,” he said, “has been given to me! So you must go and make all the nations into disciples. Baptize them in the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit. Teach them to observe everything I have commanded you. And look: I am with you, every single day, to the very end of the age.” (28:18–20 ) In Jesus himself, Matthew is saying, Israel’s God has come back to be with his people and will now be with them forever. This outer frame enables us to understand those strange scenes in which Matthew has the disciples actually worshipping Jesus after he stills the storm. Matthew makes this more explicit than Mark: They got into the boat, and the wind died down. The people in the boat worshipped him. “You really are God’s son!” they said. (14:32–33) Again, once we learn what is going on—once we think in first-century Jewish terms rather than in the terms of late modern Western skepticism and its alternatives—we begin to notice all sorts of other things too. We notice, in particular, that Jesus tells several stories about masters and servants, to illustrate what he himself was doing, while being aware that, within the world of his hearers, stories about masters and servants, kings and subjects, and so on, would unhesitatingly be recognized as stories about Israel’s God and Israel itself. The primary example of this is a parable found in both Matthew and Luke in slightly different versions. (Scholars have often suggested, as with other similar phenomena, that one of these versions is “original” and the other is “adapted” and have then speculated as to which is which. This is ridiculous. Jesus was a traveling teacher in the days before print and electronic media.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  As the German scholar Walter Burkert explains, it is pointless to look for an idea or doctrine behind a rite. In the premodern world, ritual was not the product of religious ideas; on the contrary, these ideas were the product of ritual. 25 Homo religiosus is pragmatic in this sense only: if a ritual no longer evokes a profound conviction of life’s ultimate value, he simply abandons it. But for twenty thousand years, the hunters of the region continued to thread their way through the dangerous pathways of Trois Frères in order to bring their mythology—whatever it was—to life. They must have found the effort worthwhile or they would, without a backward glance, have given it up. Religion was not something tacked on to the human condition, an optional extra imposed on people by unscrupulous priests. The desire to cultivate a sense of the transcendent may be the defining human characteristic. In about 9000 BCE, when human beings developed agriculture and were no longer dependent on animal meat, the old hunting rites lost some of their appeal and people ceased to visit the caves. But they did not discard religion altogether. Instead they developed a new set of myths and rituals based on the fecundity of the soil that filled the men and women of the Neolithic age with religious awe. 26 Tilling the fields became a ritual that replaced the hunt, and the nurturing Earth took the place of the Animal Master. Before the modern period, most men and women were naturally inclined to religion and they were prepared to work at it. Today many of us are no longer willing to make this effort, so the old myths seem arbitrary, remote, and incredible. Like art, the truths of religion require the disciplined cultivation of a different mode of consciousness. The cave experience always began with the disorientation of utter darkness, which annihilated normal habits of mind. Human beings are so constituted that periodically they seek out ekstasis, a “stepping outside” the norm. Today people who no longer find it in a religious setting resort to other outlets: music, dance, art, sex, drugs, or sport. We make a point of seeking out these experiences that touch us deeply within and lift us momentarily beyond ourselves. At such times, we feel that we inhabit our humanity more fully than usual and experience an enhancement of being. Lascaux may seem impossibly distant from modern religious practice, but we cannot understand either the nature of the religious quest or our current religious predicament unless we appreciate the spirituality that emerged quite early in the history of Homo religiosus and continued to animate the major confessional traditions until the early modern period, when an entirely different kind of religiosity emerged in the West during the seventeenth century.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  In the preface, he explained that these prayers were “not to be read in a turmoil, but quietly, not skimmed or hurried through, but taken a little at a time with deep and thoughtful meditation.” 16 Readers must feel free to dip into the book and leave off wherever they choose. Its purpose was not to inform but to “stir up the mind of the reader to the love and fear of God or to self-examination.” 17 In this way, lectio would lead to a moment of reflection, awe, or insight. So in order to benefit, the reader must withdraw, mentally and physically, from the pressures of daily life and approach each meditation in a receptive frame of mind: Come now, little man, turn aside for a while from your daily employment, escape for a moment from the tumult of thoughts. ... Enter into the inner chamber of your soul, shut out everything except God and that which can help you in seeking him, and when you shut the door, seek him. 18 You could not approach religious ideas in the same way as you conducted business or engaged in an argument in daily life. This logos-driven mentality had to be set to one side in order for these prayers and meditations to come to life in the mind. Anselm did not arrive at his “proof” by means of a strictly rational, logical process. His monks had begged him for a meditation on the meaning of faith (fides), and for a long time he had struggled to find a single, self-evident argument for the reality of God. He was about to give up when an idea forced itself upon him with increasing urgency, until finally, “when I was tired out with resisting its importunity, that which I had despaired of finally came to me.” 19 His biographer Eadmer said that the “proof” arrived in a moment of rapture involving both heart and head: “Suddenly one night during matins, the grace of God illumined his heart, the whole matter becoming clear in his mind, and a great joy and exultation filled his whole being.” 20 Later writers would have dwelled in detail on this “experience,” but it does not seem to have interested either Anselm or Eadmer. Anselm was simply concerned with how best he could use it to help others. “It seemed to me that this thing which had given me such joy to discover would, if it were written down, give pleasure to any who might read it,” he explained. So he gave the Proslogion the subtitle fides quaerens intellectum, “Faith in Search of Understanding.” 21 Anselm was not the first to attempt a “proof” of God’s existence.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Geometry was the hidden principle of the cosmos. Even though a perfect circle or triangle was never seen in the physical world, all material objects were structured on these ideal forms. Indeed, every single earthly reality was modeled on a heavenly archetype in a world of perfect ideas. Plato departed from Socrates in one important respect. He believed that we did not arrive at a conception of virtue by accumulating examples of virtuous behavior in daily life. Like everything else, virtue was an objective phenomenon that existed independently and on a higher plane than the material world. Plato’s “doctrine of the forms” is an extraordinary notion to us moderns. We regard thinking as something that we do, so we naturally assume that our ideas are our own creation. But in the ancient world, people experienced an idea as something that happened to them. It was not a question of the “I” knowing something; instead, the “Known” drew one to itself. People said, in effect, “I think— therefore there is that which I think.” 57 So everything that was thought about had an objective existence in an ideal world. The doctrine of the forms was really a rationalized expression of the ancient perennial philosophy, in which every earthly object or experience here below had its counterpart in the divine sphere. 58 For Plato, the forms were in a realm apart. Numinous and timeless, they became manifest in the imperfect realities of our world but were not themselves involved in the endless process of change. The philosopher’s task was to become vividly aware of this superior level of being by cultivating his powers of reason. Plato’s vision of the transcendent forms seems to have been influenced by his experience of the Mysteries, which, like his philosophy, helped people to live creatively with their mortality. In the Phaedrus, he has left us one of the fullest—albeit discreetly veiled—accounts of the Eleusinian experience. Most people, he explained, were unable to see the forms shining through their earthly counterparts because “the senses are so murky.” But during their initiation, the mystai had all glimpsed their radiant beauty when, along with the glorious chorus ... [we] saw that blessed and spectacular vision and were ushered into the mystery that we may rightly call the most blessed of all: And we who celebrated it were wholly perfect and free of all the troubles that awaited us in time to come, and we gazed in rapture at sacred revealed objects that were perfect, and simple, and unshakeable and blissful.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The ultimate reality was not a personalized god, therefore, but a transcendent mystery that could never be plumbed. The Chinese called it the Dao, the fundamental “Way” of the cosmos. Because it comprised the whole of reality, the Dao had no qualities, no form; it could be experienced but never seen; it was not a god; it predated heaven and earth, and was beyond divinity. You could not say anything about the Dao, because it transcended ordinary categories: it was more ancient than antiquity and yet it was not old; because it went far beyond any form of “existence” known to humans, it was neither being nor nonbeing.36 It contained all the myriad patterns, forms, and potential that made the world the way it was and guided the endless flux of change and becoming that we see all around us. It existed at a point where all the distinctions that characterize our normal modes of thought became irrelevant. In the Middle East, the region in which the Western monotheisms would develop, there was a similar notion of the ultimate. In Mesopotamia, the Akkadian word for “divinity” was ilam, a radiant power that transcended any particular deity. The gods were not the source of ilam but, like everything else, could only reflect it. The chief characteristic of this “divinity” was ellu (“holiness”), a word that had connotations of “brightness,” “purity,” and “luminosity.” The gods were called the “holy ones” because their symbolic stories, effigies, and cults evoked the radiance of ellu within their worshippers. The people of Israel called their patronal deity, the “holy one” of Israel, Elohim, a Hebrew variant on ellu that summed up everything that the divine could mean for human beings. But holiness was not confined to the gods. Anything that came into contact with divinity could become holy too: a priest, a king, or a temple—even the sacred utensils of the cult. In the Middle East, people would have found it far too constricting to limit ilam to a single god; instead, they imagined a Divine Assembly, a council of gods of many different ranks, who worked together to sustain the cosmos and expressed the multifaceted complexity of the sacred.37

• From City of Night (1963)

  Throughout the park, preachers and prophets dash out Damnation! in a disharmony of sounds—like phonographs gone mad: locked in a block-square sunny asylum among the flowers and the palmtrees, fountains gushing gaily: Ollie, all wiry white hair, punctuating his pronouncements with threats of a citizen’s arrest aimed at the hecklers... Holy Moses, his hair Christlike to his shoulders, singing soulfully... the bucktoothed spiritual-singing Jenny Lu howling she was a jezebel-woman (woe- uh! ) until she Seed The Light (praise the Lord- uh! ) on the frontporch to Hell (holy holy Halleluj- uh! ), grinding, bumping at each uh! in a frenzied kind of jazz; and a Negro woman, sweating, quivers in coming-Lord-type ecstasy: “Lawd, Ahs dribben out da Debil! Ah has cast him back to Hell! Lawd, fill me wid Yuh Presence!”— uh! -ing in a long religious orgasm.... Gone preachers wailing receiving God: Saint Tex, who got The Word in Beaumont scorched one wined-up morning on the white horizon: BRING THE WORD TO SINNING CALIFORNIA!... And five young girls, all in white, the oldest about 16, stand like white candles waxing in the sun, all white satin ( forgive my uncommitted sins! ), holding in turn a picture of Christ Crucified, and where the blood was coming, it was wax, which caught the light and shimmered like thick ketchup; and the five white angelsisters stand while their old man preaches Sinners! Sinners!! Sinners!!! —and the cutest of the angelsisters, with paradoxically Alive freckles snapping orange in the sun, and alive red sparkling hair, is giggling in the warm Los Angeles smog afternoon among the palmtrees—but the oldest is quivering and wailing, and one day, oh, I think, the little angelsister will see theres nothing to giggle about, Truly—her old man having come across with the rough Message, and of course she’ll start to quiver and wail where once she smiled, freckles popping in the sun.... And an epileptic youngman thanks God for his infirmity—his ponderous, beloved Cross To Bear.... Among the roses.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  63 The solar system did not merely remind Kepler of the Trinity; he insisted that the Trinity had in part prompted his discoveries. But he was not entirely swept away by religious enthusiasm. He knew that the theological truth he found in the cosmos was dependent upon mathematics, empirical observation, and measurement. “If they do not agree, the whole of the preceding work has undoubtedly been a delusion.” 64 Today it is often assumed that modern science has always clashed with religion. Kepler, a mathematician of extraordinary genius, reminds us that early modern science was rooted in faith. These pioneering scientists had no desire to get rid of religion. Instead, they would develop a secular theology, written by and for laymen, because their discoveries made them think differently about God. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, science, philosophy, and religion were tightly welded together. Kepler was convinced that during his mathematical exploration of the universe, he had “followed with sweat and panting the footprints of the Creator.” 65 Scientists had to cast aside everything they thought they knew and confront the unknown—in rather the same way as their contemporary John of the Cross encountered the unknown God, telling his readers: “To come to the knowledge you have not, you must go by a way in which you know not.” 66 If they did not have the courage to move beyond the safety of received ideas, mystic and scientist alike would become trapped in theories that were no longer adequate. At the end of the sixteenth century, however, the intolerant strain of modernity came to the fore in Italy, the home of the Renaissance. The Protestant Reformation had been traumatic for all Catholics, but Italians had also witnessed the sack of Rome by German mercenary troops in 1527, the collapse of the republic of Florence in 1536, and, finally, the Spanish domination of the Italian peninsula. Put on the defensive, the Catholic hierarchy became fanatically intent on achieving absolute control over their subjects—many of whom were willing in these fearful times to trade the burden of freedom for the consolations of certainty. The theology of Thomas Aquinas and the philosophy and science of Aristotle, transformed beyond all recognition into a rigid system of dogma, became Catholic orthodoxy; all other schools of thought were regarded with deep suspicion. In 1559, Pope Paul IV had issued the first official Index of Prohibited Books and Pope Pius V (1566–72) set up the Congregation of the Index to supervise the Vatican program of censorship.