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 Austerlitz (2001)

  Pantheon in a line directly prolonged from the portal; as governor of a new omnipotence it was set even above the royal coat of arms and the motto Endracht maakt macht. The movements of all travelers could be surveyed from the central position occupied by the clock in Antwerp Station, and conversely all travelers had to look up at the clock and were obliged to adjust their activities to its demands. In fact, said Austerlitz, until the railway timetables were synchronized the clocks of Lille and Liége did not keep the same time as the clocks of Ghent and Antwerp, and not until they were all standardized around the middle of the nineteenth century did time truly reign supreme. It was only by following the course time prescribed that we could hasten through the gigantic spaces separating us from each other. And indeed, said Austerlitz after a while, to this day there is something illusionistic and illusory about the relationship of time and space as we experience it in traveling, which is why whenever we come home from elsewhere we never feel quite sure if we have really been abroad. From the first I was astonished by the way Austerlitz put his ideas together as he talked, forming perfectly balanced sentences out of whatever occurred to him, so to speak, and the way in which, in his mind, the passing on of his knowledge seemed to become a gradual approach to a kind of historical metaphysic, bringing remembered events back to life. I shall never forget how he concluded his comments on the manufacture of the tall waiting-room mirrors by wondering, glancing up once more at their dimly shimmering surfaces as he left, combien des ouvriers périrent, lors de la manufacture de tels miroirs, de malignes et funestes affectations a la suite de l’inhalation de vapeurs de mercure et de cyanide. And just as Austerlitz had broken off with these words that first evening, so he continued his observations the following day, for which we had arranged a meeting on the promenade beside the Schelde. Pointing to the broad river sparkling in the morning sun, he spoke of a picture painted by Lucas van Valckenborch towards the end of the sixteenth century during what is now called the Little Ice Age, showing the frozen Schelde from the opposite bank, with the city of Antwerp very dark beyond it and a strip of flat countryside stretching towards the sea. A shower of snow is falling from the lowering sky above the tower of the cathedral of Our Lady, and out on the river now before us some four hundred years later, said Austerlitz, the people of Antwerp are amusing themselves on the ice, the common folk in coats of earthy brown colors, persons of greater distinction in black cloaks with white lace ruffs round their necks. In the foreground, close to the right-hand edge of the picture, a lady has just fallen. She wears a canary-yellow dress, and the cavalier bending over her in concern is clad in red breeches, very conspicuous in the pallid light. Looking at the river now, thinking of that painting and its tiny figures, said Austerlitz, I feel as if the

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  its own. Otherwise, all I remember of the denizens of the Nocturama is that several of them had strikingly large eyes, and the fixed, inquiring gaze found in certain painters and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds us purely by means of looking and thinking. I believe that my mind also dwelt on the question of whether the electric light was turned on for the creatures in the Nocturama when real night fell and the zoo was Closed to the public, so that as day dawned over their topsy-turvy miniature universe they could fall asleep with some degree of reassurance. Over the years, images of the interior of the Nocturama have become confused in my mind with my memories of the Salle des pas perdus, as it is called, in Antwerp Centraal Station. If I try to conjure up a picture of that waiting room today I immediately see the Nocturama, and if I think of the Nocturama the waiting room springs to my mind, probably because when I left the zoo that afternoon I went straight into the station, or rather first stood in the square outside it for some time to look up at the facade of that fantastical building, which I had taken in only vaguely when I arrived in the morning. Now, however, I saw how far the station constructed under the patronage of King Leopold II exceeded its purely utilitarian function, and I marveled at the verdigris-covered Negro boy who, for a century now, has

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  These frescoes and engravings have an aesthetic power that still evokes awe in visitors. Their depiction of the animals on whom these hunting communities were entirely dependent has a numinous quality; intent as they were on the acquisition of food—the first of the Four Fs—the ferocity of the hunters was tempered by a manifest tenderness toward and affinity with the beasts they were obliged to kill. The vision that inspired the cave paintings so long ago may have been similar to the spirituality of modern indigenous hunting communities. 11 These tribesmen are disturbed by the fact that their lives depend on the slaughter of the animals they regard as friends and patrons, and they assuage their anxiety in rituals that evoke respect for and empathy with their prey. In the Kalahari Desert, for example, where wood is scarce, Bushmen rely on light weapons that can only graze the surface of the skin, so they anoint their arrows with a poison that kills the animal very slowly. The hunter has to remain with his victim during its last days—crying when it cries out, shuddering when it trembles, and entering symbolically into its death throes. In recent years, anthropologists, ethologists, and neuroscientists have all researched the development in the animal and human brain of these “benevolent” emotions, which, they argue, have made our thought patterns more flexible, creative, and intelligent. 12 In 1878, the French anatomist Paul Broca discovered that all mammals had a section of the brain that seemed older than the neocortex but was not present in the reptilian brain. He called this intermediate region le grand lobe limbique. 13 Building on this insight during the 1950s, Paul MacLean, physician and neuroscientist at the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health, suggested that the positive emotions of compassion, joy, serenity, and maternal affection did not emanate from the hypothalamus, as assumed hitherto, but from the limbic system, which he located beneath the cortex. 14 As a further refinement, during the 1960s Roger Sperry of the California Institute of Technology researched the differences between our right and left brains: while the left brain reasons, explains, and analyzes and is concerned with words, distinctions, precision, and cause and effect, the right brain emotes, weeps, responds to symbolism, and is the home of art, music, and the “softer,” more “pliable” emotions.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  on the ground to fall asleep, resting in a curious position on his side with his wings outspread, and finally disappeared into the top hat again. After the conjuror’s exit the lights slowly dimmed, and when our eyes were used to the darkness we saw a quantity of stars traced in luminous paint inside the top of the tent, giving the impression that we were really out of doors. We were still looking up with a certain sense of awe at this artificial firmament which, as I recollect, said Austerlitz, was almost close enough for us to touch its lower rim, when the whole circus troupe came in one by one, the conjuror and his wife, who was very beautiful, with their equally beautiful, black-haired children, the last of them carrying a lantern and accompanied by a snow-white goose. Each of these artistes had a musical instrument. If I remember correctly, said Austerlitz, they played a transverse flute, a rather battered tuba, a drum, a bandoneon, and a fiddle, and they all wore Oriental clothing with long, fur-edged cloaks, while the men had pale green turbans on their heads. At a signal between themselves they began playing in a restrained yet penetrating manner which, although or perhaps because I have been left almost untouched by any kind of music all my life, affected me profoundly from the very first bar. I cannot say what it was that the five circus performers played that Saturday afternoon in the circus tent beyond the gare d’Austerlitz for their tiny audience, drawn from heaven knows where, said Austerlitz, but it seemed to me, he added, as if the music came from somewhere very distant, from the East, I thought, from the Caucasus or Turkey. Nor can I say what was suggested to my mind by the sounds produced by the players, none of whom, I am sure, could read musical notation. Sometimes I seemed to hear a long-forgotten Welsh hymn in their melodies, or then again, very softly yet making the senses swirl, the revolutions of a waltz, a landler theme, or the slow sound of a funeral march, which put me in mind of the curiously halting progress of a uniformed guard of honor escorting a body to its last resting place, and of how, in their ceremonious manner, they pause every time before taking the next step, with one foot suspended an inch above the ground for the briefest of moments. I still do not understand, said Austerlitz, what was happening within me as I listened to this extraordinarily foreign nocturnal music conjured out of thin air, so to speak, by the circus performers with their slightly out-of-tune instruments, nor could I have said at the time whether my heart was contracting in pain or expanding with happiness for the first time in my life. Why certain tonal colors, subtleties of key, and syncopations can take such a hold on the mind is something that an entirely unmusical person like myself can never understand, said Austerlitz, but today, looking back, it seems to me as if the mystery which touched me at the time was summed up in the image of the snow-white goose standing motionless and

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Around the medal envisioned by Catherine Labouré in 1830, and so successfully marketed over the next decades, was inscribed ‘O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who turn to you for help’, putting into words the symbolism of the snake of sin on which Mary trampled. That proposition, the Immaculate Conception of Mary, free from all stain of original sin, became a theme of many of the nineteenth-century Marian appearances, and the sense of a tide of the Spirit running through the faithful propelled Pope Pius IX into making a decision on the doctrine, after some seven hundred years of often heated disagreement. It had been first mooted by English monks in the springtide of Marian devotion in the twelfth century, but first Cistercians and then the Dominican Order of friars set their faces against its acceptance; Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican authority not to be ignored, maintained that it undermined the mission of her Son to save all sinful humanity. Franciscans contrariwise became the doctrine’s greatest supporters; popes hedged their bets. Even the impulse to strengthen devotion to Mary against Protestant negativity in the Reformation had not been enough to overcome Dominican opposition to the doctrine and present a united Catholic front on the issue during the sixteenth century. [23] There the case had rested, but the upsurge of Marian devotion of which Labouré was a centrepiece moved the theological goalposts. Pope Gregory XVI, an austere Camaldolese monk conservative in every way, hesitated; his successor Pius IX gave warm heed to the popular clamour. In 1854, in a fashion almost unprecedented, the Pope gave maximum publicity and papal authority to his definition of the Immaculate Conception. Protestants had their worst fears confirmed: Catholic doubts were stilled by a tragic atrocity in 1857, when Archbishop Sibour of Paris, despite his own personal reservations about the Immaculate Conception, suspended a priest who attacked the doctrine from the pulpit. In an unbalanced rage, the priest stabbed his Archbishop to death in a public procession. [24] Meanwhile, Our Lady more than once lent repeated authority to the doctrine. In her appearance at Lourdes in 1858, Soubirous heard her say ‘I am the Immaculate Conception’, which sounds syntactically illogical until one realizes that the child had probably frequently seen the phrase ‘The Immaculate Conception’ captioning Marian devotional cards and the like, and considered that her vision was simply introducing herself by name (see Plates 30 and 31). Our Lady of Marpingen gently corrected the misapprehension in German a decade later by announcing, grammatically, ‘I am the Immaculately Conceived.’ [25] The belated triumph of the Immaculate Conception in 1854 was linked to another startling innovation in Catholic doctrine concerned with conception and pregnancy: an absolutist position on abortion, formally stated in the course of Pius IX’s bull of 1869 entitled Apostolicae sedis, tidying up the Church’s system of spiritual punishments. This took a stance which, so far, the Vatican has not modified, that abortions at any stage of pregnancy merit excommunication.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  In the end, Lewis held his faith together, not so much by a rational argument or logical analysis, but rather through a controlling image that captured his imagination, and gave him imaginative space to hold multiple themes together – namely, the image of the crucified Christ.60 Lewis here draws on a longstanding Christian devotional practice which generally takes the form of affective contemplation of the sufferings of Christ, generally mediated through reflections on the passion narratives and images of the crucified Christ.61 Such a devotional reflection on the suffering and death of Christ engages the emotions and imagination, allowing the believer to step into the scene of Christ’s crucifixion and experience the sense of awe, bewilderment and distress that this so clearly evoked on those who saw it happen – and then correlate this with their own situation. As Lewis found, the intellectual issues may not be resolved; yet they are no longer seen as posing an existential threat to faith. Rather, this refocusing on a person (rather than an idea) allows a believer to find a way of envisaging life in a suffering world, and make it meaningful by living it out. This point is brought out by the novelist Francis Spufford in his Unapologetic, one of the finest recent explorations of the capacity of a Christian worldview to make emotional sense of things. Spufford suggests that a fixation on over-intellectualised accounts of suffering is ‘a phase in the early history of our belief’ that tries to ‘abolish the mystery’ of suffering. Instead, we need to face up to something that nobody can explain, and learn the wisdom of coping with it. We take the cruelties of the world as a given, as the known and familiar data of experience, and instead of anguishing about why the world is as it is, we look for comfort in coping with it as it is. We don’t ask for a creator who can explain Himself. We ask for a friend in a time of grief … We don’t say that God’s in His heaven and all’s well with the world; not deep down. We say: all is not well with the world, but at least God is here in it, with us.62 Coping with Trauma and Suffering: Viktor Frankl and Jordan PetersonThis leads us into the move from the intellectualisation of suffering to living meaningfully in a world of suffering. Meaning-making is not a purely cognitive matter; it is also about enactment, living in certain ways. In their different ways, both Judaism and Christianity offer ‘present suffering as part of a broader story of redemption. In complicated ways, each tradition depicts catastrophe as a path forward.’63 Both experienced trauma – Judaism through the Babylonian deportation and exile, and Christianity through the crucifixion of Christ – and both developed the strength and flexibility to endure in the face of present and future disaster.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  once contained Chateau Gruaud-Larose, and on the crate, in the gentle light of a shaded lamp, stood a glass, a carafe of water, and an old-fashioned radio in a dark brown Bakelite case. Austerlitz wished me good night and latched the door carefully behind him. I went over to the window, looked down at the empty street below, tured back to the room, sat down on the bed, undid my shoelaces, thought about Austerlitz, whom I could now hear moving about the room next door, and then, when I looked up again, saw in the faint light a small collection of seven differently shaped Bakelite jars on the mantelpiece. None of these containers was more than two or three inches high, and when I opened them one by one and held them in the light of the lamp, each proved to contain the mortal remains of one of the moths which—as Austerlitz had told me—had met its end here in this house. I tipped one of them, a weightless, ivory-colored creature with folded wings that might have been woven of some immaterial fabric, out of its Bakelite box onto the palm of my right hand. Its legs, which it had drawn up under its silver-scaled body as if just clearing some final obstacle, were so delicate that I could scarcely make them out, while the antennae curving high above the whole body also trembled on the edge of visibility. However, the staring black eye projecting somewhat from the head was distinct enough. Spellbound by this nocturnal apparition, which although it might have died years ago bore no sign of decay, I studied it intently before replacing it in its narrow tomb. As I lay down I turned on the radio set standing on the wine crate beside the bed. The names of cities and radio stations with which I used to link the most exotic ideas in my childhood appeared on its round, illuminated dial—Monte Ceneri, Rome, Ljubljana, Stockholm, Beromiinster, Hilversum, Prague, and others besides. I turned the volume down very low and listened to a language I did not understand drifting in the air from a great distance: a female voice, which was sometimes lost in the ether, but then emerged again and mingled with the performance of two careful hands moving, in some place unknown to me, over the keyboard of a Bésendorfer or Pleyel and playing certain musical passages, I think from the Well-Tempered Clavier, which accompanied me far into the realms of slumber. When I woke in the morning only a faint crackle and hiss was coming from the narrow brass mesh over the loudspeaker. Soon afterwards, when I mentioned the mysterious radio at breakfast, Austerlitz told me he had always imagined that the voices moving through the air after the onset of darkness, only a few of which we could catch, had a life of their own, like bats, and shunned the light of day. In the long, sleepless nights of recent years, he said, when I was listening to the women announcers in Budapest, Helsinki, or La Coruna, I often saw them weaving their erratic way far out in the air, and wished I were already in their company. But to come back to my story ... It was when I

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  three and a half, using a row of small, shiny black malachite buttons sewn to an elbow-length velvet glove which you particularly liked—jeden, dvé, tri, counted Vera, and I, said Austerlitz, went on counting—Cctyri, pét, Sest, sedm—feeling like someone taking uncertain steps out on to the ice. Deeply moved as I was on my first visit to the Sporkova, I do not remember all Vera’s stories in precise detail today, said Austerlitz, but I think that by some tum or other in our conversation we went on from Aunt Otylie’s glove shop to the Estates Theater, where Agata made her début in Prague in the autumn of 1938 in the role of Olympia, a part she had dreamed of since the beginning of her career. In mid- October, said Vera, on the evening before the first night, we went to the dress rehearsal of the operetta together, and as soon as we entered the theater by the stage door, she said, I fell into a reverent silence, although I had been chattering nineteen to the dozen on our way through the city. I had also been unusually quiet and lost in thought during the performance of the somewhat haphazard arrangement of scenes, and on our way home by tram as well. It was because of this more or less casual remark of Vera’s, said Austerlitz, that I went to see the Estates Theater next morning, and sat alone for a long time in the stalls directly under the top of the dome, having obtained permission from the porter, in exchange for a not inconsiderable tip, to take some photographs in the recently refurbished auditorium. Around me the tiers of seats with their gilded adornments shining through the dim light rose to the roof; before me the proscenium arch of the stage on which Agata had once stood was like a blind eye. And the harder I tried to conjure up at least some faint recollection of her appearance, the more the theater seemed to be shrinking, as if I myself had shrunk to the stature of a little Tom Thumb enclosed in a sort of velvet-lined casket. Only after a while, when someone or other walked quickly over the stage behind the drawn curtain, sending a ripple through the heavy folds of fabric with his rapid pace, only then, said Austerlitz, did the shadows begin to move, and I saw the conductor of the orchestra down in the pit like a beetle in his black tailcoat, and other black-clad figures busy with all kinds of instruments, I heard their music mingling with the voices, and all of a sudden I thought that in between one of the musicians’ heads and the neck of a double bass, in the bright strip of light between the wooden floorboards and the hem of the curtain, I caught sight of a sky-blue shoe embroidered with silver sequins. On the evening of that day, when I visited Vera for the second time in her flat in the Sporkova and she confirmed, in answer to my question, that Agata had indeed worn sequined sky-blue shoes with her costume as Olympia, I felt as if something were shattering inside my brain. Vera said that I had been deeply affected by the dress rehearsal in the Estates Theater, first and foremost, she suspected, because

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  bramble foliage—and they stuffed themselves with that chosen food, said Alphonso, until they became well-nigh senseless, whereas the moths ate nothing more at all for the rest of their lives, and were bent solely on the business of reproduction. They did sometimes seem to suffer thirst, and in periods of drought, when no dew had fallen at night for a long time, it was apparently known for them to set out together in a kind of cloud in search of the nearest river or stream, where they drowned in large numbers as they tried to settle on the flowing water. And I also remember what Alphonso said about the extraordinarily keen hearing of moths, said Austerlitz. They can make out the squeaking of bats from a great distance, and he, Alphonso, had himself noticed that in the evening, when the housekeeper came out into the yard to call her cat Enid in that shrill voice of hers, they always rose from the bushes and flew away into the darker trees. During the day, said Alphonso, they slept safely hidden under stones, or in cracks in the rock, in leaf litter on the ground or among foliage. Most of them are in a deathlike state when you find them, and have to coax and quiver themselves back to life, crawling over the ground and jerkily moving their wings and legs before they are ready for flight. Their body temperature will then be thirty-six degrees Celsius, like that of mammals, and of dolphins and tunny fish swimming at full speed. Thirty-six degrees, according to Alphonso, has always proved the best natural level, a kind of magical threshold, and it had sometimes occurred to him, Alphonso, said Austerlitz, that all mankind’s misfortunes were connected with its departure at some point in time from that norm, and with the slightly feverish, overheated condition in which we constantly found ourselves. On that summer night, said Austerlitz, we sat high above the estuary of the Mawddach in our hollow in the hills until daybreak, watching the moths fly to us, perhaps some ten thousand of them by Alphonso’s estimate. The trails of light which they seemed to leave behind them in all kinds of curlicues and streamers and spirals, and which Gerald in particular admired, did not really exist, explained Alphonso, but were merely phantom traces created by the sluggish reaction of the human eye, appearing to see a certain afterglow in the place from which the insect itself, shining for only the fraction of a second in the lamplight, had already gone. It was such unreal phenomena, said Alphonso, the sudden incursion of unreality into the real world, certain effects of light in the landscape spread out before us, or in the eye of a beloved person, that kindled our deepest feelings, or at least what we took for them. Although I did not study natural history later, said Austerlitz, many of Great-Uncle Alphonso’s botanical and zoological disquisitions have remained in my mind. Only a few days ago I was rereading that passage in Darwin he once showed me, describing a flock of butterflies flying uninterruptedly for several hours ten miles out from

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  19. A line installed in 1189 in the stone floor of Durham Cathedral’s nave and aisles marks the area beyond which women were not allowed – virtually the whole cathedral interior. A more edifying architectural experience became universal through Western Christendom during this time: the visual impact of the crucifixion scene described in John’s Gospel (19.25–27). Those primarily familiar with Western church buildings may not realize that it is a leading theme only in Latin Christian art; after some Anglo-Saxon beginnings in the ninth century, from the twelfth century depictions of Mary and John the Beloved Disciple standing flanking the cross swelled into a mighty visual flood. Up to the sixteenth-century Reformation, no Western church interior felt complete without this trio, raised specifically as carved images at the entrance to the chancel area of a church usually over a screen, and known as the ‘Rood group’ (‘Rood’ is the Anglo-Saxon word for ‘Cross’). [64] Amid the painted flat surfaces of Orthodox art, the theme is far less frequent in Eastern Christianity: the leading presence among Orthodox icons is the pairing of Mary and Jesus, biological mother and infant divine son (see Plates 3 and 4). Why the contrast? It is surely no coincidence that the Europe-wide proliferation of Roods began in the chief era of Crusading enthusiasm for ‘taking the Cross’ in the West, which would be an equally good reason why Eastern Christians did not warm to the idea, given their experiences at the hands of Crusaders. Moreover, the Orthodox had probably not forgotten that a plain, unadorned cross had been a dominant visual theme in the church art of the disgraced Iconoclasts. Yet there is another dimension to the Rood group, as became apparent when we surveyed the Gospel material on the family (above, Chapter 4). John the Evangelist’s portrait of the crucifixion scene unites and reconciles the biological mother Mary with the chosen and beloved disciple John, after all the tensions between these poles of relationship displayed in the Synoptic Gospel material. This sacred binary of the Rood group was a powerful symbol of the new binary of family and priestly vocation set up in the Gregorian revolution. Yet it also preserves and embodies that complication that runs through all Christian views of sex and the family: on a medieval reckoning, both the watchers at the cross are virgins. Like all the most effective symbolism, the message of the Rood spools out in a complex mixture of tragedy, horror, love and reconciliation, taking it in a multitude of directions. Over centuries, in the end Mary and John and their crucified Saviour subverted the tidiness of Gregory VII’s vision, both enriching and splitting apart the Latin Christianity that he and his circle had created.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  King Leopold, under whose auspices such apparently inexorable progress was being made, that the money suddenly and abundantly available should be used to erect public buildings which would bring international renown to his aspiring state. One of the projects thus initiated by the highest authority in the land was the central station of the Flemish metropolis, where we were sitting now, said Austerlitz; designed by Louis Delacenserie, it was inaugurated in the summer of 1905, after ten years of planning and building, in the presence of the King himself. The model Leopold had recommended to his architects was the new railway station of Lucerne, where he had been particularly struck by the concept of the dome,~ so dramatically exceeding the usual modest height of railway buildings, a concept realized by Delacenserie in his own design, which was inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, in such stupendous fashion that even today, said Austerlitz, exactly as the architect intended, when we step into the entrance hall we are seized by a sense of being beyond the profane, in a cathedral consecrated to international traffic and trade. Delacenserie borrowed the main elements of his monumental structure from the palaces of the Italian Renaissance, but he also struck Byzantine and Moorish notes, and perhaps when I arrived, said Austerlitz, I myself had noticed the round gray and white granite turrets, the sole purpose of which was to arouse medieval associations in the minds of railway passengers. However laughable in itself, Delacenserie’s eclecticism, uniting past and future in the Centraal Station with its marble Stairway in the foyer and the steel and glass roof spanning the platforms, was in fact a logical stylistic approach to the new epoch, said Austerlitz, and it was also appropriate, he continued, that in Antwerp Station the elevated level from which the gods looked down on visitors to the Roman Pantheon should display, in hierarchical order, the deities of the nineteenth century—mining, industry, transport, trade, and capital. For halfway up the walls of the entrance hall, as I must have noticed, there were stone escutcheons bearing symbolic sheaves of com, crossed hammers, winged wheels, and so on, with the heraldic motif of the beehive standing not, as one might at first think, for nature made serviceable to mankind, or even industrious labor as a social good, but symbolizing the principle of capital accumulation. And Time, said Austerlitz, represented by the hands and dial of the clock, reigns supreme among these emblems. The clock is placed above the only baroque element in the entire ensemble, the cruciform stairway which leads from the foyer to the platforms, just where the image of the emperor stood in the

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  Inside the museum, Austerlitz continued, I did not meet another living soul, either in the well-proportioned stairway or in the three exhibition rooms on the first floor. All the more uncanny in the ambient silence, which was merely emphasized by the creaking of the floorboards beneath my feet, seemed the exhibits assembled in the glass-fronted cases reaching almost to the ceiling, and dating without exception from the end of the eighteenth or the beginning of the nineteenth century. There were plaster casts of the jaws of many different kinds of ruminants and rodents; kidney stones which had been found in circus camels, as large and spherically perfect as skittle balls; the cross section of a piglet only a few hours old, its organs rendered transparent by a process of chemical diaphanization and now floating in the liquid around it like a deep-sea fish which would never see the light of day; the pale blue fetus of a foal, where the quicksilver injected as a contrast medium into the network of veins beneath its thin skin had formed patterns like frost flowers as it leached out; the skulls and skeletons of many different creatures; whole digestive systems in formaldehyde; pathologically malformed organs, shrunken hearts and bloated livers; trees of bronchial tubes, some of them three feet high, their petrified and rust-colored branches looking like coral growths; and in the teratological department there were monstrosities of every imaginable and unimaginable kind, Janus-faced and two-headed calves, Cyclopean beasts with outsized foreheads, a human infant born in Maisons-Alfort on the day when the Emperor was exiled to the island of St. Helena, its legs fused together so that it resembled a mermaid, a ten-legged sheep, and truly horrific creatures consisting of litthke more than a scrap of skin, a crooked wing, and half a claw. Far the most awesome of all, however, so said Austerlitz, was the exhibit in a glass case at the back of the last cabinet of the museum, the life-sized figure of a horseman, very skillfully flayed in the post- Revolutionary period by the anatomist and dissector Honoré Fragonard, who was then at the height of his fame, so that every strand in the tensed muscles of the rider and his mount, which was racing forward with a panic-stricken expression, was Clearly visible in the colors of congealed blood, together with the blue of the veins and the ocher yellow of the sinews and ligaments. Fragonard, who was descended from the famous family of Provencal perfumiers, said Austerlitz, had apparently dissected over three thousand bodies and parts of bodies in the course of his career, and consequently he, an agnostic who did not believe in the immortality of the soul, must have spent all the hours of his days and nights intent upon death, surrounded by the sweet smell of decay, and, as I imagine, moved by a desire to secure for the frail body at least some semblance

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Plato and Aristotle on TheoryThe word ‘theory’ is now widely used to refer to a ‘system of ideas intended to explain something’ or a ‘rational type of abstract thinking about a phenomenon’. It has overtones of detachment and abstraction, allowing the observer to stand over and against the observed. Yet the modern English word ‘theory’ offers an impoverished and attenuated account of a more complex and comprehensive idea, which has been adapted for the specific technical needs of the natural sciences. For classic Greek philosophers, a theory is not primarily an abstract set of ideas; it is fundamentally a way of beholding and inhabiting reality. Where modern understandings of theory, for understandable reasons, reduce it to an intellectual desiccation or a rational abstraction, the Greek term theōria offers us a richer vision of how we envisage our world, sensitive to our need to see or imagine things as they really are, and work out how we fit into the picture that it discloses.18 We are not passive and disinterested spectators of an external reality, but are active and informed participants in its processes. Plato used the term theōria to designate a way of seeing and grasping reality that lay at the heart of philosophy.19 The philosopher is someone who has caught a grand vision of reality, or experienced a transformative beholding of the world, and is able to communicate this to others so that they might capture its vision and live accordingly. Plato draws on the metaphor of a shadowy cave, within which humanity is confined; the philosopher is someone who has seen the greater world beyond this cave, is transformed by this vision, and tries to articulate this to those who remain within the cave. To ‘theorise’ was thus not about developing abstract ideas, but was rather about discovering and then actively participating in a vision of some greater reality that was best expressed using visual metaphors (such as ‘seeing’). As Pierre Hadot has emphasised, many forms of ancient philosophy did not focus on abstract reflection, but on developing intellectually defensible and existentially viable ‘ways of living’ that embodied this transformative vision of humanity and the cosmos. A good philosophy is something that we can embody, not merely teach or explain. In some ways, the classical understanding of ‘theory’ is thus closer to the modern idea of a worldview – a way of framing or imagining the world that both discloses its intrinsic rationality and interconnectedness, while at the same time providing a framework for the creation of meaning and moral values, enabling the human agent to act properly within the world. Early Christianity grasped the importance of this idea, speaking of a bios theōretikos – not an abstract and analytical approach to existence, but rather a ‘contemplative life’ in which individuals grasped how they were meant to fit into a greater scheme of things, and could act authentically within this framework. This bios theōretikos was not so much a set of ideas as a template for personal transformation.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  11. Tekle Haymanot: Ethiopian Hermit-Teacher Tekle Haymanot turned his attention to educating his followers, bringing their theological knowledge and preaching up to the standard needed to evangelize. Debre Asbo became quickly known as a training ground for religious leaders. At the same time, it provided local Christians with a new model for religious life. Their community included both men and women living and working together. As Tekle Haymanot entered his final decades, he ceased preaching and retreated from the community to a life of solitary contemplation. He is said to have walled himself up in a cave and stood there at length in prayer, in a form of asceticism that stressed the body. It’s difficult at this point to tell what stories are legendary or historical fact. The most consistent tale about his final years, however, is that he lost a foot due to his strenuous Tekle Haymanot insistence on standing to pray. When is often depicted he finally admitted his disciples as a winged figure to his cave, the gädl tells us, his “body was dried up like the grass of standing on one summer,” and his severed foot was leg, with his foot laid nearby. and lower leg in the By the time Tekle Haymanot died in background. 1313, Shewa was well on its way to being converted by his disciples, and a wave of new monasteries had been founded across the kingdom thanks to his teachings. In the generations to come, Debre Asbo became one of the preeminent monastic powers of the kingdom, and their abbots were advisors to kings. The reputation of their founder grew apace, and he is celebrated now in the Coptic Church as well as in Ethiopia as one of their greatest saints. Saints in Ethiopia are celebrated primarily on the anniversary of their death, with minor celebrations on the same date in every other calendar month. Tekle Haymanot’s feast is August 30, which is the 24th day of Mesra in the Coptic calendar, and it’s also celebrated on the 24th of each month. 84 11. Tekle Haymanot: Ethiopian Hermit-Teacher Reading Budge, E. A., trans. The Life of Takla Haymanot. London: Privately Printed for Lady Meux, 1906. Kelly, Samantha, ed. A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea. Boston: Brill, 2020. Tamrat, Taddesse. Church and State in Ethiopia 1270–1527. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. 85 12 Saints and the Protestant Reformation C hristianity has always had a multitude of views on sainthood, but no other period saw such an explosion of diverse views on sanctity as the 16th and 17th centuries. The Protestant Reformation unleashed a wave of experimental religious groups across Europe and the areas that Europeans occupied and colonized around the world. The reactions of Protestants and Catholics, missionary orders, and indigenous peoples forever changed how saints were recognized and who was seen as saintly. This lecture covers some of those changes and several saints who lived during this time of major reform. 86

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  following the white strip of the Suffolk coast, when shadows emerged from the depths of the sea, gradually rising and inclining towards us, until the last gleam of light was extinguished on the horizons of the western world. Soon the shapes of the landscape below, the woods and the pale stubble fields, could be distinguished only as shadowy outlines, and I shall never forget, said Austerlitz, how the curving estuary of the Thames emerged before us as if out of nothing, a dragon’s tail, black as cart grease, winding its way through the falling night, while the lights of Canvey Island, Sheerness, and Southend-on-Sea came on beside it. Later, as we described a wide arc over Picardy in the darkness and then turned back on course for England, if we raised our eyes from the illuminated board instruments to look through the glazed cockpit we could see the whole vault of heaven as I had never seen it before, apparently at a standstill but in truth turing slowly, with the constellations of the Swan, Cassiopeia, the Pleiades, the Charioteer, the Corona Borealis, and all the rest almost lost in the shimmering dust of the myriads of nameless stars sprinkled over the sky. It was in the autumn of 1965, continued Austerlitz, who had drifted for some time in his memories, that Gerald began developing what we now know was his trail- blazing hypothesis on the so-called Eagle Nebula in the constellation of the Serpent. He spoke of huge regions of interstellar gas which, not unlike stormclouds, became concentrated into vast, billowing forms projecting several light-years into the void, where new stars were born in a process of condensation steadily intensifying under the influence of gravity. I remember Gerald’s saying that there were positive nurseries of stars out there, a claim which I recently found confirmed in a newspaper report accompanying one of the spectacular photographs sent back to earth from the Hubble telescope on its further journey into space. At any rate, said Austerlitz, Gerald then moved from Cambridge to continue his work at an astrophysics research institute in Geneva, where I visited him several times, and as we walked out of the city together and along the banks of the lake I observed the way his ideas, like the stars themselves, gradually emerged from the whirling nebulae of his astrophysical fantasies. On one of these occasions Gerald also told me about the flights he had made over the gleaming, snow-covered mountains in his Cessna, over the volcanic peaks of the Puy-de-DoOme region, down the beautiful Garonne and on to Bordeaux. I suppose it was inevitable that he would fail to come home from one of these flights, said Austerlitz. It was a bad day when I heard that he had crashed in the Savoy Alps, and perhaps that was the beginning of my own decline, a withdrawal into myself which became increasingly morbid and intractable with the passage of time.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  First, think about those experiences that touch you deeply and lift you momentarily beyond yourself so that you seem to inhabit your humanity more fully than usual. It may be listening to a particular piece of music, reading certain poems, looking at a beautiful view, or sitting quietly with someone you love. Spend a little time each day enjoying this ekstasis and notice how difficult it is to speak of your experience or to say exactly what it is that moves you. Try to explain to somebody precisely how it has this effect on you, what it is telling you, and listen to the inadequacy of your words. Investigate the theme of unknowing in human experience. If you are scientifically inclined, you can explore the indeterminate universe of quantum mechanics, the neurological complexity of the mind, or depth psychology. Second, stand back and listen to the aggressive certainty that characterizes so much of our discourse these days. Consider your profession or something that really interests you: literature, the law, economics, sports, pop music, medicine, or history. Isn’t it true that the more you know about this special field of yours, the more acutely you become aware of all you still have to learn? Then notice how disturbing it is to hear somebody talking dogmatically about your subject over dinner or on the radio, making serious mistakes and false claims that are almost physically painful to hear. When you listen to talk shows and phone-ins or to politicians arguing with one another, do you think these people really know what they are talking about? Are they able to see both sides of an argument? Are they identifying themselves too closely with their own opinions, in the way Zhuangzi suggested, so that self-interest is clouding their judgment? Are they more interested in scoring points than seeking the truth? Does anybody ever say “I don’t know”? What would Socrates have made of these discussions? As an exercise in open-mindedness, select one of your most deeply held opinions—about politics, religion, the economy, football, movies, music, or business—and make a list of everything you know that supports your viewpoint. Then make a list of arguments that contradict it. If you are in a reading discussion group, conduct a debate in which everybody argues for a position that is the opposite of what he or she believes. Then discuss your experience. What does it feel like to enter into another perspective? Did you learn something that you didn’t know before? What do you think Socrates meant when he said, “The unexamined life is not worth living”? Third, spend some time trying to define exactly what distinguishes you from everybody else.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  pyramid against one of the side walls, and departing from their native custom, said Austerlitz, they had lined these casks themselves with wood shavings from a sawmill down beside the river. Most of them even survived the hard winter of 1947, since Adela kept the old orangery stove heated for them through the two icy months of January and February. It was wonderful, said Austerlitz, to see the dexterity with which the birds clambered around the trelliswork, hanging on by their beaks, and performing all kinds of acrobatic feats as they came down; to watch them flying in and out of the open windows or hopping and walking along the ground, always active and always, or that was the impression they gave, intent upon some purpose or other. In fact they were very like human beings in many ways. You might hear them sigh, laugh, sneeze, and yawn. They cleared their throats before beginning to converse in their own cockatoo language, they showed themselves alert, scheming, mischievous and sly, deceitful, malicious, vindictive and quarrelsome. They liked certain people, particularly Adela and Gerald, and persecuted others with downright malice, for instance the Welsh housekeeper who seldom showed her face out of doors. They seemed to know exactly when she would be going to chapel, always wearing a black hat and carrying a black umbrella, and on these occasions they lay in wait to screech at her in the most obnoxious way. They also reflected human society in the way they ganged up together in ever-changing groups, or then again paired off in couples sitting side by side as if they knew nothing but harmony and were forever inseparable. They even had their own cemetery, with a long row of graves in a clearing surrounded by strawberry trees, and one of the rooms on the upper floor of Andromeda Lodge had in it what was obviously a purpose-built wall cupboard, full of dark green cardboard boxes containing a number of dead birds of species related to the cockatoos, their red-chested or yellow-headed brothers, Hyacinth and Scarlet Macaws, Ruby Lorikeets and Blue-Winged Parrotlets, Horned Parakeets and Ground Parrots, all brought back by Gerald’s great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather from his circumnavigation of the globe, or alternatively ordered from a trader called Théodore Grace in Le Havre for a few guineas or louis d’or, as noted on the provenances placed inside the boxes. The finest of all these birds, in a collection which also included some native woodpeckers, wrynecks, kites, and orioles, was the African Gray parrot. I can still see the inscription on his green cardboard sarcophagus: Jaco, Ps. erithacus L. He came from the Congo and had reached the great age of sixty-six in his Welsh exile, as his obituary recounted, adding that he had been very tame and trusting, was a quick learner, chattered away to himself and others, could whistle entire songs and had composed some too, but best of all he liked to mimic the voices of children and to have them teach him new words. His one

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Can we make a hot jellied consomme?"), about dining, about the fundamental nature of cuisine and gastronomy. For six months out of every year, Adria closes his restaurant, and along with his brother Alberto, chemist Pere Castells, industrial designer Luki Huber, and his chef, Oriol Castro, he works here, experimenting, scrupulously documenting everything, and asking questions—some of which are clearly threatening, even heretical to the status quo. What is a meal? What is dinner? What is a chef? One can't help but ask oneself these things, even as Adria and crew turn their attention to smaller, less metaphysical questions. On this day, as I watched, they were asking if a thick slab of ripe peach could be caramelized to mimic the appearance and consistency of pan-seared foie gras. (Apparently yes.) Can a beautiful fresh anchovy be cooked, yet still appear raw, leaving the attractive outer skin as untouched-looking as it appears in nature? (Seems like it.) Can one make "caviar" from fresh mango puree? (Again, yes.) Of five or six experiments —each conducted in various ways—during the course of the day, generally positive results were recorded in the accompanying charts and notebooks. "If I can come up with two or three important ideas a year, that's a very good year," said Adria. Many of you have no doubt seen the ripple effects of some earlier successfully executed ideas on menus near you: foam (which he no longer does), hot jellied consomme, pasta made of squid, jellied cheese, frozen foie gras "powder." Say what you will about Adria. Many of the same chefs who've been sneering at the very idea of him now shamelessly crib his ideas, peeling off the more applicable concepts to use in their more conventional menus. They may ask questions at the taller, but a high-risk, high-wire act like El Bulli demands questions of its diners as well. Big questions. Is it food? Or is it novelty? And is it "good"—in the traditional sense of that word (whatever that might be)? At El Bulli, the constantly evolving thirty-course meal seems to gleefully invite furious debate. The restaurant sits by a remote Mediterranean beach, about seven miles of twisting, clifftop road outside of the town of Roses on Spain's Costa Brava. Invited to join Adria for dinner in the El Bulli kitchen, I sat down and ate what was by turns a shattering, wondrous, confusing, delightful, strangely comforting, constantly surprising, and always marvelous meal. About thirty different plates appeared in the course of the four-hour experience. The kitchen itself defies convention: cool, quiet, elegant, and modern, with large picture windows and works of sculpture placed throughout. A crew of thirty-five to fifty-five cooks serve one seating per night to an equal number of customers. It is a serious, relatively serene environment, light years away from the fiery mosh pits and sweaty submarinelike spaces most cooks are familiar with. Voices are seldom raised. There are no shouts or curses, no clatter of pots, no oven doors being kicked closed.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  WEDDINGS None of this would have mattered greatly for Christian futures had the impact of Muhammad’s revelations been confined to the Arabian Peninsula, or had Muslim expansion been as gradual and peaceful as that over the first three and a half centuries of Christianity. Muhammad is generally agreed to have died in 632 CE , leaving a flourishing community for Islam in Mecca. It had survived much conflict, not least with local Jews and Christians, but nothing in those skirmishes would have provided a clue to what happened next: within no more than five years of Muhammad’s death, Islamic forces had headed out of Arabia into the Mediterranean seaboard and what are now Syria, Iraq and Iran, repeatedly defeating major armies of Byzantium and the Sasanians. In 638 the Caliph Umar entered Jerusalem as conqueror, restoring to sacred uses the site of the Temple that Christians had so long left desecrated as a rubbish dump. The Sasanian Empire collapsed, and the last heir of the dynasty spent his days in exile as far away as China – ironically in view of his ancestors’ persecution of Christianity, he died as a devout member and benefactor of the Church of the East. [7] The Byzantines seemed in just as much peril as the Sasanians. Byzantine Alexandria and Egypt fell to Muslim armies within a year or two of the capture of Jerusalem, and then over a century Muslims remorselessly fought their way along the North African coast, into the Iberian Peninsula and on into central Francia (France), only being checked in battle at Poitiers in 733, a century after the death of Muhammad. [8] That belated Islamic defeat spared Christian Rome and the remaining Latin West, and during the seventh and eighth centuries, Christian Constantinople also survived repeated Muslim sieges. Yet much of the Christian world, including the land of Jesus’s life and ministry, was now under the control of the new monotheism. It was a remaking of global power as rapid as that of Alexander the Great, while far surpassing the range and long-term impact of Alexander’s conquests in both Asia and Europe. Now Christian Churches that over three centuries had become accustomed to wielding power in their territories had to become reacquainted with the experience of their rulers espousing a different religion. Not all Christians would have found this a trauma, since the imperial Church had done its best to make life difficult for both Miaphysites and Dyophysites, and non-Chalcedonians generally may not have been displeased to have new masters professing what initially may have seemed no more than an eccentric variant on their own creed. Early Islam remained the religion of a small military elite in its wide new dominions, and it was not a proselytizing faith, following the Qur’anic precept that ‘there is no compulsion in religion’. [9] Muslims were usually content to avoid trouble among their subjects by letting Christianity go its own way, on the understanding that it should accept a co-operative second-class status in society.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  In their brief window of opportunity, western Europeans set up a Latin Kingdom in a Jerusalem devastated by Crusader massacres in 1099; the invaders targeted its Muslim, Jewish and even Eastern Christian inhabitants with a ferocity that Christian commentators did not deny. Yet the reality was that Crusaders had hit unawares on a moment of peculiar weakness and disarray in Islamic states, which was not repeated, and none of western Europe’s herculean efforts over the next centuries equalled that first fluke. [10] The Latin territorial presence in the eastern Mediterranean was only finally snuffed out by the Ottoman Turks who took the island of Crete from the Republic of Venice in 1669, but by then the Latin hold on the Holy Land itself had long been extinguished – in Jerusalem, since 1244. The saga of the Crusades had many consequences, but one of the most lasting was newly to associate Western Christianity with a masculine gender stereotype that it has still not entirely rejected: the holy warrior. We have already encountered military saints in the early Church – Sergius and Bacchus, Martin, George – but, whatever their popularity had been in the past among soldiers, their stories were constructed on the assumption that they gained their sanctity by renouncing earthly warfare. Right into the eleventh century, waging war still triggered heavy penances for those involved: that had been one major consideration when Europe’s monarchs and lords founded monasteries and nunneries, in order to construct a reservoir of grateful religious ready to take on the burden of penance vicariously in their prayers. Now the very act of being a soldier and killing Christ’s enemies could earn holiness. At the time, this was a specifically Western development: a Greek traveller who made it all the way to Compostela in the early twelfth century was apparently taken aback to hear St James admiringly called ‘a knight of Christ’. [11] Not just saints, but God himself: it is an equal surprise to enter the crypt of Auxerre Cathedral in Burgundy, where the vault is dominated by a fresco of Christ himself at the end of time, riding a white horse in knightly fashion and leading a warrior-band of mounted angels (see Plate 6). The motif is rare in the New Testament, but here it directly illustrates a scene from that exceptional text, the Book of Revelation (19.11–16). [12] The thought had an immediate resonance for the cleric commissioning the fresco: almost certainly Humbaud, Bishop of Auxerre, protégé of Pope Urban II and himself an active promoter of the First Crusade. Humbaud actually died on his return journey from a Jerusalem pilgrimage in 1115. [13] In the background was a new rhetoric of classifying Christian society three ways: those who prayed, those who fought and those who laboured ( oratores, bellatores, laboratores was a common summary of these categories).