Awe

Passages

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

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• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  I said that the height from which St Augustine apprehends these truths may seem a somewhat arid one. That is perhaps only because it is nearer the sky, more directly bathed in what he calls, beautifully, “this queen of colours, the light.” There is a passage in the tenth book which may almost be called a kind of aesthetics. They are aesthetics indeed of renunciation, but a renunciation of the many beauties for the one Beauty, which shall contain as well as eclipse them; “because those beautiful patterns which through men’s souls are conveyed into their cunning hands, come from that Beauty, which is above our souls.” And it is not a renunciation by one who had never enjoyed what he renounces, or who feels himself, even now, quite safe from certain forms of its seduction. He is troubled especially by the fear that “those melodies which Thy words breathe soul into, when sung with a sweet and attuned voice,” may come to move him “more with the voice than with the words sung.” Yet how graciously he speaks of music, allowing “that the several affections of our spirit, by a sweet variety, have their own proper measures in the voice and singing, by some hidden correspondence wherewith they are stirred up.” It is precisely because he feels so intimately the beauty of all things human, though it were but “a dog coursing in the field, a lizard catching flies,” that he desires to pass through these to that passionate contemplation which is the desire of all seekers after the absolute, and which for him is God. He asks of all the powers of the earth: “My questioning them, was my thoughts on them; and their form of beauty gave the answer.” And by how concrete a series of images does he strive to express the inexpressible, in that passage of pure poetry on the love of God! “But what do I love, when I love thee? not beauty of bodies, nor the fair harmony of time, nor the brightness of the light, so gladsome to our eyes, nor sweet melodies of varied songs, nor the fragrant smell of flowers, and ointments, and spices, not manna and honey, not limbs acceptable to embracements of flesh. None of these I love, when I love my God; and yet I love a kind of light, and melody, and fragrance, and meat, and embracement, when I love my God, the light, melody, fragrance, meat, embracement of my inner man: where there shineth unto my soul what space cannot contain, and there soundeth what time beareth not away, and there smelleth what breathing disperseth not, and there tasteth what eating diminisheth not, and there clingeth what satiety divorceth not. This is it which I love when I love my God.”

• From Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (1999)

  Perhaps these are media-driven frenzies, no more real than the canned laughter chortling from our television screens. But small epiphanies are common in daily life. The most lyrical description of an encounter with beauty—solitary, spontaneous, with an unknown other—comes in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when Stephen Dedalus sees a young woman standing by the shore with “long, slender bare legs,” and a face “touched with the wonder of mortal beauty.” Her beauty is transformative and gives form to his sensual and spiritual longings. “Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy.… A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!” Ezra Pound had a moment of recognition that inspired him to write a two-line poem “In a station at the Métro,” which comprised these brief sentences: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals, on a wet, black bough.” Later, Pound described how he came to write it. “Three years ago in Paris I got out of a Métro train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy or as lovely as that sudden emotion.… In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself or darts into a thing inward and subjective.” It is difficult to put into words why a particular set of eyes or a certain mouth move us while others do not. Even for the poets, it is often beyond language. Looking to the object of beauty, we confront centuries of struggle to capture beauty’s essence. An Ideal of Beauty Exists in the Mind, Not the Flesh

• From Another Country (1962)

  There was some pot on the scene and he was a little high. He was feeling great. And, during the last set, he came doubly alive because the saxophone player, who had been way out all night, took off on a terrific solo. He was a kid of about the same age as Rufus, from some insane place like Jersey City or Syracuse, but somewhere along the line he had discovered that he could say it with a saxophone. He had a lot to say. He stood there, wide-legged, humping the air, filling his barrel chest, shivering in the rags of his twenty-odd years, and screaming through the horn Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? And, again, Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? This, anyway, was the question Rufus heard, the same phrase, unbearably, endlessly, and variously repeated, with all of the force the boy had. The silence of the listeners became strict with abruptly focused attention, cigarettes were unlit, and drinks stayed on the tables; and in all of the faces, even the most ruined and most dull, a curious, wary light appeared. They were being assaulted by the saxophonist who perhaps no longer wanted their love and merely hurled his outrage at them with the same contemptuous, pagan pride with which he humped the air. And yet the question was terrible and real; the boy was blowing with his lungs and guts out of his own short past; somewhere in that past, in the gutters or gang fights or gang shags; in the acrid room, on the sperm-stiffened blanket, behind marijuana or the needle, under the smell of piss in the precinct basement, he had received the blow from which he never would recover and this no one wanted to believe. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? The men on the stand stayed with him, cool and at a little distance, adding and questioning and corroborating, holding it down as well as they could with an ironical self-mockery; but each man knew that the boy was blowing for every one of them. When the set ended they were all soaking. Rufus smelled his odor and the odor of the men around him and “Well, that’s it,” said the bass man. The crowd was yelling for more but they did their theme song and the lights came on. And he had played the last set of his last gig. He was going to leave his traps there until Monday afternoon.

• From Educated (2018)

  There was a kind of symbiosis in their relationship to these grand places: they gave life to the ancient architecture by making it the backdrop of their discourse, by refusing to worship at its altar as if it were a dead thing. On the third night there was a rainstorm. I stood on Nic’s balcony and watched streaks of lightning race across the sky, claps of thunder chasing them. It was like being on Buck’s Peak, to feel such power in the earth and sky. The next morning was cloudless. We took a picnic of wine and pastries to the grounds of the Villa Borghese. The sun was hot, the pastries ambrosial. I could not remember ever feeling more present. Someone said something about Hobbes, and without thinking I recited a line from Mill. It seemed the natural thing, to bring this voice from the past into a moment so saturated with the past already, even if the voice was mixed with my own. There was a pause while everyone checked to see who had spoken, then someone asked which text the line was from, and the conversation moved forward. For the rest of the week, I experienced Rome as they did: as a place of history, but also as a place of life, of food and traffic and conflict and thunder. The city was no longer a museum; it was as vivid to me as Buck’s Peak. The Piazza del Popolo. The Baths of Caracalla. Castel Sant’Angelo. These became as real to my mind as the Princess, the red railway car, the Shear. The world they represented, of philosophy, science, literature—an entire civilization—took on a life that was distinct from the life I had known. At the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, I stood before Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes and did not once think about chickens. I don’t know what caused the transformation, why suddenly I could engage with the great thinkers of the past, rather than revere them to the point of muteness. But there was something about that city, with its white marble and black asphalt, crusted with history, ablaze in traffic lights, that showed me I could admire the past without being silenced by it. I was still breathing in the fustiness of ancient stone when I arrived in Cambridge. I rushed up the staircase, anxious to check my email, knowing there would be a message from Drew. When I opened my laptop, I saw that Drew had written, but so had my sister. —I OPENED AUDREY’S MESSAGE. It was written in one long paragraph, with little punctuation and many spelling errors, and at first I fixated on these grammatical irregularities as a way to mute the text. But the words would not be hushed; they shouted at me from the screen. Audrey said she should have stopped Shawn many years ago, before he could do to me what he’d done to her.

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

  Bishop W. J. Kip: The Catacombs of Rome as illustrating the Church of the First Three Centuries. N. York, 1853, 6th ed., 1887(212pages). K. Rönneke: Rom’s christliche Katakomben. Leipzig, 1886. Comp. also Edmund Venables in Smith and Cheetham, I. 294–317; Heinrich Merz in Herzog, VII. 559–568; Theod. Mommsen on the Roman Catac. in "The Contemp. Review." vol. XVII. 160–175 (April to July, 1871); the relevant articles in the Archaeol. Dicts. of Martigny and Kraus, and the Archaeology of Bennett (1888). III. Christian Inscriptions in the catacombs and other old monuments. *Commendatore J. B. de Rossi: Inscriptiones Christiana Urbis Romae septimo seculo antiquiores. Romae, 1861 (XXIII. and 619 pages). Another vol. is expected. The chief work in this department. Many inscriptions also in his Roma Sott. and "Bulletino." Edward Le Blant: Inscriptions chrétiennes de la Gaule anterieures au VIIIme siècle. Paris, 1856 and 1865, 2 vols. By the same: Manuel d’Epigraphie chrétienne. Paris, 1869. John McCaul: Christian Epitaphs of the First Six Centuries. Toronto, 1869. Greek and Latin, especially from Rome. F. Becker: Die Inschriften der römischen Cömeterien. Leipzig, 1878. *J. Spencer Northcote (R.C. Canon of Birmingham): Epitaphs of the Catacombs or Christian Inscriptions in Rome during the First Four Centuries. Lond., 1878 (196 pages). G. T. Stokes on Greek and Latin Christian Inscriptions; two articles in the "Contemporary Review" for 1880 and 1881. V. Schultze discusses the Inscriptions in the fifth section of his work Die Katakomben (1882), pp. 235–274, and gives the literature. The Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum by Böckh, and Kirchhoff, and the Corpus Inscriptionium Lat, edited for the Berlin Academy by, Th. Mommsen and others, 1863 sqq. (not yet completed), contain also Christian Inscriptions. Prof. E. Hübner has added those of Spain (1871) and Britain (1873). G. Petrie has collected the Christian Inscriptions in the Irish language, ed. by Stokes. Dublin, 1870 sqq. Comp. the art. "Inscriptions," in Smith and Cheetham, I. 841. § 83. Origin and History of the Catacomb. The Catacombs of Rome and other cities open a new chapter of Church history, which has recently been dug up from the bowels of the earth. Their discovery was a revelation to the world as instructive and important as the discovery of the long lost cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and of Nineveh and Babylon. Eusebius says nothing about them; the ancient Fathers scarcely allude to them, except Jerome and Prudentius, and even they give us no idea of their extent and importance. Hence the historians till quite recently have passed them by in silence.516 But since the great discoveries of Commendatore De Rossi and other archaeologists they can no longer be ignored. They confirm, illustrate, and supplement our previous knowledge derived from the more important literary remains. The name of the Catacombs is of uncertain origin, but is equivalent to subterranean cemeteries or resting-places for the dead.517 First used of the Christian cemeteries in the neighborhood of Rome, it was afterwards applied to those of Naples, Malta, Sicily, Alexandria, Paris, and other cities.

• From Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (1999)

  We are always sizing up other people’s looks: our beauty detectors never close up shop and call it a day. We notice the attractiveness of each face we see as automatically as we register whether or not they look familiar. Beauty detectors scan the environment like radar: we can see a face for a fraction of a second (150 msec. in one psychology experiment) and rate its beauty, even give it the same rating we would give it on longer inspection. Long after we forget many important details about a person, our initial response stays in our memory. Beauty is a basic pleasure. Try to imagine that you have become immune to beauty. Chances are, you would consider yourself unwell—sunk in a physical, spiritual, or emotional malaise. The absence of response to physical beauty is one sign of profound depression—so prevalent that the standard screening measures for depression include a question about changes in the perception of one’s own physical attractiveness. But what is beauty? As you will see, no definition can capture it entirely. I started by mining what those who peddle beauty as a business had to say, thinking they might have concrete details about their criteria rather than airy abstractions to float. Aaron Spelling, creator of “Baywatch” and “Melrose Place,” said, “I can’t define it, but I know it when it walks into the room.” I talked with a modeling agency that books top male models, and they were more descriptive: “It’s when someone walks in the door and you almost can’t breathe. It doesn’t happen often. You can feel it rather than see it. I mean someone you literally can’t walk past in the street.” It is noteworthy that the experts describe the experience of seeing beauty, and not what beauty looks like. On that end, all I got was that they should be young and tall and have good skin. But it was a start. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “beautiful” as “Excelling in grace of form, charm of coloring, and other qualities, which delight the eye and call forth admiration: a. of the human face and figure: b. of other objects.” As a secondary definition it states, “In modern colloquial use the word is often applied to anything that a person likes very much.” The dictionary that my computer network provides says that beauty “gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit.”

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Agilulf, then, having examined many and found none whom he judged to be he of whom he was in quest, came presently to the horsekeeper and feeling his heart beat high, said in himself, 'This is the man.' Nevertheless, an he would have nought be known of that which he purposed to do, he did nought to him but poll, with a pair of scissors he had brought with him, somewhat on one side of his hair, which they then wore very long, so by that token he might know him again on the morrow; and this done, he withdrew and returned to his own chamber. The culprit, who had felt all this, like a shrewd fellow as he was, understood plainly enough why he had been thus marked; wherefore he arose without delay and finding a pair of shears, whereof it chanced there were several about the stables for the service of the horses, went softly up to all who lay in the gallery and clipped each one's hair on like wise over the ear; which having done without being observed, he returned to sleep. When the king arose in the morning, he commanded that all his household should present themselves before him, or ever the palace-doors were opened; and it was done as he said. Then, as they all stood before him with uncovered heads, he began to look that he might know him whom he had polled; but, seeing the most part of them with their hair clipped after one and the same fashion, he marvelled and said in himself, 'He whom I seek, for all he may be of mean estate, showeth right well he is of no mean wit.' Then, seeing that he could not, without making a stir, avail to have him whom he sought, and having no mind to incur a great shame for the sake of a paltry revenge, it pleased him with one sole word to admonish the culprit and show him that he was ware of the matter; wherefore, turning to all who were present, he said, 'Let him who did it do it no more and get you gone in peace.' Another would have been for giving them the strappado, for torturing, examining and questioning, and doing this, would have published that which every one should go about to conceal; and having thus discovered himself, though he should have taken entire revenge for the affront suffered, his shame had not been minished, nay, were rather much enhanced therefor and his lady's honour sullied. Those who heard the king's words marvelled and long debated amongst themselves what he meant by this speech; but none understood it, save he whom it concerned, and he, like a wise man, never, during Agilulf's lifetime, discovered the matter nor ever again committed his life to the hazard of such a venture."

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Now I carry the Angel Gabriel's feather, so it may not be marred, in one casket, and the coals wherewith St. Lawrence was roasted in another, the which are so like one to other, that it hath often happened to me to take one for the other, and so hath it betided me at this present, for that, thinking to bring hither the casket wherein was the feather, I have brought that wherein are the coals. The which I hold not to have been an error; nay, meseemeth certain that it was God's will and that He Himself placed the casket with the coals in my hands, especially now I mind me that the feast of St. Lawrence is but two days hence; wherefore God, willing that, by showing you the coals wherewith he was roasted, I should rekindle in your hearts the devotion it behoveth you have for him, caused me take, not the feather, as I purposed, but the blessed coals extinguished by the sweat of that most holy body. So, O my blessed children, put off your bonnets and draw near devoutly to behold them; but first I would have you knew that whoso is scored with these coals, in the form of the sign of the cross, may rest assured, for the whole year to come, that fire shall not touch him but he shall feel it.' Having thus spoken, he opened the casket, chanting the while a canticle in praise of St. Lawrence, and showed the coals, which after the simple multitude had awhile beheld with reverent admiration, they all crowded about Fra Cipolla and making him better offerings than they were used, besought him to touch them withal. Accordingly, taking the coals in hand, he fell to making the biggest crosses for which he could find room upon their white smocks and doublets and upon the veils of the women, avouching that how much soever the coals diminished in making these crosses, they after grew again in the casket, as he had many a time proved. On this wise he crossed all the people of Certaldo, to his no small profit, and thus, by his ready wit and presence of mind, he baffled those who, by taking the feather from him, had thought to baffle him and who, being present at his preachment and hearing the rare shift employed by him and from how far he had taken it and with what words, had so laughed that they thought to have cracked their jaws. Then, after the common folk had departed, they went up to him and with all the mirth in the world discovered to him that which they had done and after restored him his feather, which next year stood him in as good stead as the coals had done that day." * * * * *

• From Another Country (1962)

  The camera moved very little during this scene and Eric was always kept in range. The light in which he was trapped did not alter, and his face, therefore, was exposed as it never was in life. And the director had surely placed Eric where he had because this face operated, in effect, as a footnote to the twentieth-century torment. Under the merciless light, the lined, tense, coarse-grained forehead also suggested the patient skull; an effect which was underlined by the promontory of the eyebrows and the secret place of the eyes. The nose was flaring and slightly pug, more bone, nevertheless, than flesh. And the full, slightly parted lips were lonely and defenseless, barely protected by the stubborn chin. It was the face of a man, of a tormented man. Yet, in precisely the way that great music depends, ultimately, on great silence, this masculinity was defined, and made powerful, by something which was not masculine. But it was not feminine, either, and something in Vivaldo resisted the word androgynous. It was a quality to which great numbers of people would respond without knowing to what it was they were responding. There was great force in the face, and great gentleness. But, as most women are not gentle, nor most men strong, it was a face which suggested, resonantly, in the depths, the truth about our natures. Eric, without moving his head, suddenly opened his eyes and looked blankly around the table. Then he looked sick, rose, and hurriedly vanished. All the students laughed. They were caustic about their vanished comrade, feeling that the character represented by Eric lacked courage. The film ground on, and Eric appeared twice more, once, silent, deep in the background, during a youthful council of war, and, finally, at the very end of the film, on a rooftop, with a machine gun in his hand. As he delivered his one line—“Nom de Dieu, que j’ai soif!”—the camera shifted to show him framed in the sights of an enemy gun; blood suddenly bubbled from Eric’s lips and he went sliding off the rooftop, out of sight. With Eric’s death, the movie also died for them, and, luckily, very shortly, it was over. They walked out of the cool darkness into the oven of July. “Who’s going to buy me that drink?” Eric asked. He smiled a pale smile. It was something of a shock to see him, standing on the sidewalk, shorter than he had appeared in the film, in flesh and blood. “Anyway, let’s get away from here before people start asking me for my autograph.” And he laughed. “It might happen, my dear,” said Cass, “you’ve got great presence on the screen.” “The movie’s not so much,” said Vivaldo, “but you were terrific.” “I didn’t really have anything to do,” said Eric. “No,” said Ida, “you didn’t.

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  The explanation of religion which we have proposed has precisely this advantage, that it gives an answer to this question. For our definition of the sacred is that it is something added to and above the real: now the ideal answers to this same definition; we cannot explain one without explaining the other. In fact, we have seen that if collective life awakens religious thought on reaching a certain degree of intensity, it is because it brings about a state of effervescence which changes the conditions of psychic activity. Vital energies are over-excited, passions more active, sensations stronger; there are even some which are produced only at this moment. A man does not recognize himself; he feels himself transformed and consequently he transforms the environment which surrounds him. In order to account for the very particular impressions which he receives, he attributes to the things with which he is in most direct contact properties which they have not, exceptional powers and virtues which the objects of every-day experience do not possess. In a word, above the real world where his profane life passes he has placed another which, in one sense, does not exist except in thought, but to which he attributes a higher sort of dignity than to the first. Thus, from a double point of view it is an ideal world.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  That sense of the divine in life, and specially of the miracles which happen a certain number of times in every existence, the moments which alone count in the soul’s summing-up of itself, St. Augustine has rendered with such significance, with such an absolute wiping out from the memory of everything else, just because he has come to that, it might seem, somewhat arid point of spiritual ascent. That famous moment of the “Tolle, lege”: “I cast myself down I know not how, under a certain fig-tree, giving full vent to my tears . . . when lo! I heard from a neighbouring house a voice, as of boy or girl, I know not, chanting, and oft repeating, ‘Take up and read, take up and read’;” the Bishop's word to Monnica (“as if it had sounded from heaven”), “It is not possible that the son of those tears should perish;” the beggar-man, “joking and joyous,” in the streets of Milan: it is by these, apparently trifling, these all-significant, moments that his narrative moves, with a more reticent and effective symbolism than any other narrative known to me. They are the moments in which the soul has really lived, or has really seen; and the rest of life may well be a blindness and a troubled coming and going.

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  It is certainly true that religious life cannot attain a certain degree of intensity without implying a psychical exaltation not far removed from delirium. That is why the prophets, the founders of religions, the great saints, in a word, the men whose religious consciousness is exceptionally sensitive, very frequently give signs of an excessive nervousness that is even pathological: these physiological defects predestined them to great religious rôles. The ritual use of intoxicating liquors is to be explained in the same way.[714] Of course this does not mean that an ardent religious faith is necessarily the fruit of the drunkenness and mental derangement which accompany it; but as experience soon informed people of the similarities between the mentality of a delirious person and that of a seer, they sought to open a way to the second by artificially exciting the first. But if, for this reason, it may be said that religion is not without a certain delirium, it must be added that this delirium, if it has the causes which we have attributed to it, _is well-founded_. The images out of which it is made are not pure illusions like those the naturists and animists put at the basis of religion; they correspond to something in reality. Of course it is only natural that the moral forces they express should be unable to affect the human mind powerfully without pulling it outside itself and without plunging it into a state that may be called _ecstatic_, provided that the word be taken in its etymological sense ([Greek: ekstasis]); but it does not follow that they are imaginary. Quite on the contrary, the mental agitation they cause bears witness to their reality. It is merely one more proof that a very intense social life always does a sort of violence to the organism, as well as to the individual consciousness, which interferes with its normal functioning. Therefore it can last only a limited length of time.[715]

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  So it is in the midst of these effervescent social environments and out of this effervescence itself that the religious idea seems to be born. The theory that this is really its origin is confirmed by the fact that in Australia the really religious activity is almost entirely confined to the moments when these assemblies are held. To be sure, there is no people among whom the great solemnities of the cult are not more or less periodic; but in the more advanced societies, there is not, so to speak, a day when some prayer or offering is not addressed to the gods and some ritual act is not performed. But in Australia, on the contrary, apart from the celebrations of the clan and tribe, the time is nearly all filled with lay and profane occupations. Of course there are prohibitions that should be and are preserved even during these periods of temporal activity; it is never permissible to kill or eat freely of the totemic animal, at least in those parts where the interdiction has retained its original vigour; but almost no positive rites are then celebrated, and there are no ceremonies of any importance. These take place only in the midst of assembled groups. The religious life of the Australian passes through successive phases of complete lull and of super-excitation, and social life oscillates in the same rhythm. This puts clearly into evidence the bond uniting them to one another, but among the peoples called civilized, the relative continuity of the two blurs their relations. It might even be asked whether the violence of this contrast was not necessary to disengage the feeling of sacredness in its first form. By concentrating itself almost entirely in certain determined moments, the collective life has been able to attain its greatest intensity and efficacy, and consequently to give men a more active sentiment of the double existence they lead and of the double nature in which they participate. But this explanation is still incomplete. We have shown how the clan, by the manner in which it acts upon its members, awakens within them the idea of external forces which dominate them and exalt them; but we must still demand how it happens that these forces are thought of under the form of totems, that is to say, in the shape of an animal or plant.

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  As we have already shown, the existence of individual souls, when once admitted, cannot be understood unless one imagines an original supply of fundamental souls at the origin of things, from which all the others were derived. Now these architype souls had to be conceived as containing within them the source of all religious efficacy; for, since the imagination does not go beyond them, it is from them and only from them that all sacred things are believed to come, both the instruments of the cult, the members of the clan and the animals of the totemic species. They incarnate all the sacredness diffused in the whole tribe and the whole world, and so they are attributed powers noticeably superior to those enjoyed by the simple souls of men. Moreover, time by itself increases and reinforces the sacred character of things. A very ancient churinga inspires much more respect than a new one, and is supposed to have more virtues.[885] The sentiments of veneration of which it has been the object during the series of successive generations who have handled it are, as it were, accumulated in it. For the same reason, the personages who for centuries have been the subject of myths respectfully passed on from mouth to mouth, and periodically put into action by the rites, could not fail to take a very especial place in the popular imagination. But how does it happen that, instead of remaining outside of the organized society, they have become regular members of it? This is because each individual is the double of an ancestor. Now when two beings are related as closely as this, they are naturally conceived as incorporated together; since they participate in the same nature, it seems as though that which affects one ought to affect the other as well. Thus the group of mythical ancestors became attached to the society of the living; the same interests and the same passions were attributed to each; they were regarded as associates. However, as the former had a higher dignity than the latter, this association takes, in the public mind, the form of an agreement between superiors and inferiors, between patrons and clients, benefactors and recipients. Thus comes this curious idea of a protecting genius who is attached to each individual. The question of how this ancestor came to have relations not only with men, but also with things, may appear more embarrassing; for, at the first glance, we do not see what connection there can be between a personage of this sort and a rock or tree. But a fact which we owe to Strehlow furnishes us with a solution of this problem, which is at least probable.

• From Little Women (1868)

  We call this hill the Delectable Mountain, for we can look far away and see the country where we hope to live some time." Jo pointed, and Laurie sat up to examine, for through an opening in the wood one could look cross the wide, blue river, the meadows on the other side, far over the outskirts of the great city, to the green hills that rose to meet the sky. The sun was low, and the heavens glowed with the splendor of an autumn sunset. Gold and purple clouds lay on the hilltops, and rising high into the ruddy light were silvery white peaks that shone like the airy spires of some Celestial City. "How beautiful that is!" said Laurie softly, for he was quick to see and feel beauty of any kind. "It's often so, and we like to watch it, for it is never the same, but always splendid," replied Amy, wishing she could paint it. "Jo talks about the country where we hope to live sometime—the real country, she means, with pigs and chickens and haymaking. It would be nice, but I wish the beautiful country up there was real, and we could ever go to it," said Beth musingly. "There is a lovelier country even than that, where we shall go, by-and-by, when we are good enough," answered Meg with her sweetest voice. "It seems so long to wait, so hard to do. I want to fly away at once, as those swallows fly, and go in at that splendid gate." "You'll get there, Beth, sooner or later, no fear of that," said Jo. "I'm the one that will have to fight and work, and climb and wait, and maybe never get in after all." "You'll have me for company, if that's any comfort. I shall have to do a deal of traveling before I come in sight of your Celestial City. If I arrive late, you'll say a good word for me, won't you, Beth?" Something in the boy's face troubled his little friend, but she said cheerfully, with her quiet eyes on the changing clouds, "If people really want to go, and really try all their lives, I think they will get in, for I don't believe there are any locks on that door or any guards at the gate. I always imagine it is as it is in the picture, where the shining ones stretch out their hands to welcome poor Christian as he comes up from the river." "Wouldn't it be fun if all the castles in the air which we make could come true, and we could live in them?" said Jo, after a little pause. "I've made such quantities it would be hard to choose which I'd have," said Laurie, lying flat and throwing cones at the squirrel who had betrayed him. "You'd have to take your favorite one. What is it?" asked Meg.

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  From the analysis to which we have been giving our attention, it is evident that it expresses and symbolizes two different sorts of things. In the first place, it is the outward and visible form of what we have called the totemic principle or god. But it is also the symbol of the determined society called the clan. It is its flag; it is the sign by which each clan distinguishes itself from the others, the visible mark of its personality, a mark borne by everything which is a part of the clan under any title whatsoever, men, beasts or things. So if it is at once the symbol of the god and of the society, is that not because the god and the society are only one? How could the emblem of the group have been able to become the figure of this quasi-divinity, if the group and the divinity were two distinct realities? The god of the clan, the totemic principle, can therefore be nothing else than the clan itself, personified and represented to the imagination under the visible form of the animal or vegetable which serves as totem. But how has this apotheosis been possible, and how did it happen to take place in this fashion? II In a general way, it is unquestionable that a society has all that is necessary to arouse the sensation of the divine in minds, merely by the power that it has over them; for to its members it is what a god is to his worshippers. In fact, a god is, first of all, a being whom men think of as superior to themselves, and upon whom they feel that they depend. Whether it be a conscious personality, such as Zeus or Jahveh, or merely abstract forces such as those in play in totemism, the worshipper, in the one case as in the other, believes himself held to certain manners of acting which are imposed upon him by the nature of the sacred principle with which he feels that he is in communion. Now society also gives us the sensation of a perpetual dependence. Since it has a nature which is peculiar to itself and different from our individual nature, it pursues ends which are likewise special to it; but, as it cannot attain them except through our intermediacy, it imperiously demands our aid. It requires that, forgetful of our own interests, we make ourselves its servitors, and it submits us to every sort of inconvenience, privation and sacrifice, without which social life would be impossible. It is because of this that at every instant we are obliged to submit ourselves to rules of conduct and of thought which we have neither made nor desired, and which are sometimes even contrary to our most fundamental inclinations and instincts.

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  Thus the environment in which we live seems to us to be peopled with forces that are at once imperious and helpful, august and gracious, and with which we have relations. Since they exercise over us a pressure of which we are conscious, we are forced to localize them outside ourselves, just as we do for the objective causes of our sensations. But the sentiments which they inspire in us differ in nature from those which we have for simple visible objects. As long as these latter are reduced to their empirical characteristics as shown in ordinary experience, and as long as the religious imagination has not metamorphosed them, we entertain for them no feeling which resembles respect, and they contain within them nothing that is able to raise us outside ourselves. Therefore, the representations which express them appear to us to be very different from those aroused in us by collective influences. The two form two distinct and separate mental states in our consciousness, just as do the two forms of life to which they correspond. Consequently, we get the impression that we are in relations with two distinct sorts of reality and that a sharply drawn line of demarcation separates them from each other: on the one hand is the world of profane things, on the other, that of sacred things.

• From Who Wrote the Bible? Searching for Its Origins and Authors (2025)

  23. Texts That Didn’t Make It into the Bible 140 The Dead Sea Scrolls In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd tossed a rock into a cave in the hillside of the Judean Desert and heard an unexpected clink. The rock had hit an ancient pot, inside of which were the first of what are now called the Dead Sea Scrolls. No other discovery has so thoroughly rewritten modern people’s understanding of the Bible—though often in ways unknown to the broader public. The Dead Sea Scrolls offer scholars three main insights. The first is that a small Jewish community in the middle of the desert around the turn of the common era had copies of nearly every book of the Hebrew Bible. Suddenly, academia had manuscripts of biblical books hundreds of years older than the previously earliest copies. The second insight is that there are many differences between today’s versions of biblical books and the ones found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Several disparities have answered long-held scholarly questions. For example, people have known forever that the Hebrew text of the books of Samuel is different from the Greek Septuagint. Scholars had wondered whether the Greek was a free translation of the familiar Hebrew or a translation of a different Hebrew text. When the books of Samuel were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, they matched the Greek—this was the Hebrew text that the Septuagint had translated. Clearly, two versions of Samuel were present in antiquity: one preserved in today’s Hebrew text and one preserved in the Greek. Even more fascinating, the Dead Sea Scrolls didn’t contain only the version of Samuel that was behind the Greek translation—they also had the version that would go on to become the standard Hebrew one. The third insight from the Dead Sea Scrolls is that there were more texts than just the ones known from the Bible. The findings included documents with rules for this desert community, poems and prayers, and laws that looked a lot like those in Leviticus or Deuteronomy. Hebrew manuscripts of texts that were previously known only from other language traditions were also found, including an interpretive work called Jubilees that had existed only in Ethiopic up to that point.

• From The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915)

  They talk about the marvel which men should feel as they discover the world. But really, that which characterizes the life of nature is a regularity which approaches monotony. Every morning the sun mounts in the horizon, every evening it sets; every month the moon goes through the same cycle; the river flows in an uninterrupted manner in its bed; the same seasons periodically bring back the same sensations. To be sure, here and there an unexpected event sometimes happens: the sun is eclipsed, the moon is hidden behind clouds, the river overflows. But these momentary variations could only give birth to equally momentary impressions, the remembrance of which is gone after a little while; they could not serve as a basis for these stable and permanent systems of ideas and practices which constitute religions. Normally, the course of nature is uniform, and uniformity could never produce strong emotions. Representing the savage as filled with admiration before these marvels transports much more recent sentiments to the beginnings of history. He is much too accustomed to it to be greatly surprised by it. It requires culture and reflection to shake off this yoke of habit and to discover how marvellous this regularity itself is. Besides, as we have already remarked,[171] admiring an object is not enough to make it appear sacred to us, that is to say, to mark it with those characteristics which make all direct contact with it appear a sacrilege and a profanation. We misunderstand what the religious sentiment really is, if we confound it with every impression of admiration and surprise. But, they say, even if it is not admiration, there is a certain impression which men cannot help feeling in the presence of nature. He cannot come in contact with it, without realizing that it is greater than he. It overwhelms him by its immensity. This sensation of an infinite space which surrounds him, of an infinite time which has preceded and will follow the present moment, and of forces infinitely superior to those of which he is master, cannot fail, as it seems, to awaken within him the idea that outside of him there exists an infinite power upon which he depends. And this idea enters as an essential element into our conception of the divine.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  Recent decades have seen a shift toward more open acknowledgement of the obvious—that representations of human sexuality are a widespread and integral part of the development of countless art forms and communications media, and that, while they may well have religious or high-art significance, they also were made to arouse, stimulate and inflame the passions. The British Museum’s decision to publicly display that sculpture of a prehistoric embrace and the exhibit of Chinese sex relics at a family hotel are both testaments to an increased recognition of the significance of sexual representation in the myriad means of human expression. At the same time, though, there is still great resistance from many corners toward explicit talk about explicit subject matter. In order to fully understand how important this type of content has been to so many communications advances, it is vital to recognize the full extent to which sexual depiction has permeated the history of human expression. There was never a time when sexuality was not a part of the evolution of communication. [image file=image_rsrc1FT.jpg] THREE [image file=image_rsrc1FU.jpg] The Virgin and the Naughty MonkeyRoger S. Wieck is the curator of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. He has also held curatorial positions at the Walters Art Museum and the Houghton Library at Harvard. He has published many books and articles on medieval manuscripts and is one of North America’s most respected experts in the field. He is the author of The Hours of Henry VIII: A Renaissance Masterpiece by Jean Poyet (2000), Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art (1997), Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life (1988) and many other well-respected books and articles on medieval manuscripts. We met in the reading room at the Morgan, a sumptuous space designed by the architect Renzo Piano, part of an addition to the museum that was completed in 2006. A combination of artificial and heavily filtered natural light illuminated floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with ancient books and manuscripts. On the table in front of us was a Book of Hours—a prayer book for non-ordained Christians—that originally belonged to a woman who lived in northern France in the fourteenth century. The hand-printed manuscript was full of ornaments in ink and gold, the Latin prayers to the Virgin Mary framed and delineated by tiny detailed drawings in the margins and filling in short lines of text. It was one of the most beautiful works of art I had ever seen firsthand. Wieck had graciously agreed to share his expert analysis of some of the bookmakers’ marginalia.