Awe

Passages

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

Page 163 of 217 · 20 per page

• From The Case for God (2009)

  It was used in this modern sense first by philosophers and scientists, and the new usage did not become common in religious contexts until the nineteenth century. Brahman (Sanskrit). “The All;” the whole of reality; the essence of existence; the foundation of everything that exists; being itself. The power that holds the cosmos together and enables it to grow and develop. The supreme reality of Vedic religion. Brahmodya (Sanskrit). A ritual competition. The contestants each tried to find a verbal formula that expressed the mysterious and ineffable reality of the Brahman. The contest always ended in silence when contestants were reduced to wordless awe. In the silence they felt the presence of the Brahman. bricolage. A term in modern design that refers to the process of creating something new out of old materials that happen to lie at hand. Applied analogically to the transmission of tradition, it refers to the premodern habit of taking ancient texts and giving them an entirely fresh interpretation to suit the needs of the time and the requirements of a particular group of students. When written material was scarce, this was a recognized method of moving a tradition forward. It was used not only by religious teachers but also by Hellenistic philosophers. Buddha (Sanskrit). An enlightened or “awakened” person. buddhi (Sanskrit). The “intellect;” the highest category of the human mind; the only part of the human person that was capable of reflecting the ultimate reality. Not dissimilar to the Latin intellectus. Christos (Greek). Christ; a Greek translation of the Hebrew messhiach. coincidentia oppositorum (Latin). The “coincidence of opposites;” the ecstatic experience of a unity that exists beyond the apparent contradictions of earthly life. compassion (Greek and Latin derivation). The ability to “feel with” another, “experience with” another; empathy; sympathy. It does not mean “pity.” Compassion is regarded as the highest of the virtues in all the major religious traditions; it is the test of genuine religious experience and practice and one of the chief means of encountering the sacred. All the traditions also insist that you cannot confine your benevolence to your own group but must have “concern for everybody;” honor the stranger; love even your enemies. cosmology (Greek derivation). Literally “discourse/speech about the cosmos;” a creation story; cosmogony refers to the birth of the cosmos. credo (Latin); credere. Today this is usually translated as “I believe” and “to believe,” respectively. But this is a relatively recent development (see belief). Credo derives from cor do: “I give my heart.” It originally meant “trust; commitment; engagement; involvement.” When Saint Jerome translated the Bible into Latin during the fourth century, he used credo as the equivalent of pisteuo. Dao (Chinese). The Way; the correct course or path.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Like all doctrinal instruction in the Greek Orthodox world, Denys’s method was practiced in the heightened atmosphere of the liturgy. The evocative music, stylized drama, clouds of fragrant incense, and numinous solemnity all ensured that the dialectical process was not a dry, cerebral exercise but was performed in a context that, like any great aesthetic performance, touched people and stirred them at a deeper level of their being. As they heard the words of scripture read aloud in a special chant that separated it from normal discourse, and attended critically, as Denys had taught them, to the words of the prayers and hymns, clergy and congregants would in effect be saying to themselves, “Neti… neti”: the reality we call God was not this, not that, but immeasurably other. The liturgy had always been a musterion, a ritual that initiated all the participants into a different mode of seeing. When Denys spoke of his mentor Bishop Hierotheus, he used terms associated with the Eleusinian Mysteries that Emperor Justinian had just abolished. Hierotheus did not “learn” (mathein) these truths simply by studying the doctrines of the church, but by allowing the beauty and symbolism of the liturgy to act upon him, he “experienced” or “suffered (pathein) divine things.” Denys implies that Hierotheus imparted the knowledge he had intuited to the people not by speaking about it but in the way he performed the liturgy, which made it obvious that he had achieved an empathetic sympatheia with the rites.85 In the East, Denys was merely regarded as a disciple of the Cappadocians and Maximus, the major luminaries of Greek Orthodoxy, but in the West he enjoyed enormous prestige and became a leading authority. His writings were translated into Latin by the Irish theologian John Scotus Erigena (810–877), who worked in the court of Charles the Bald, king of the West Franks. In his writings, like Denys, Erigena insisted that God is “Nothing” because he does not possess “being” in any sense that we could understand. But God is also “Everything,” because every single creature that God informs becomes a theophany, a manifestation of God. Erigena also translated the works of Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus, and other Greek fathers, making Orthodox wisdom available to the traumatized West, which was beginning to crawl out of the long period of barbarism that had succeeded the fall of Rome and rejoin the outside world. In the West, people took Denys’s pseudonym seriously, and his supposed connection with Saint Paul gave him near-apostolic status. Western theologians tended not to apply his method liturgically, since their Mass was different from the Alexandrian ritual. But the apophatic method was central to the way leading European theologians understood religious truth and to the way they instructed the laity to think about God. By the medieval period, the apophatic habit had become ingrained in Western Christian consciousness.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  46 There are many circumstances in which human beings have to lay aside an objectivist analysis, which seeks in some way to master what it contemplates. 47 When confronted with a work of art, we have to open our minds and allow it to carry us away. If we seek to relate intimately to another person, we have to be prepared to make ourselves vulnerable—as Abraham did when he opened his heart and home to the three strangers at Mamre. As Tillich pointed out, men and women continually feel drawn to explore levels of truth that go beyond our normal experience. This imperative has inspired the scientific as well as the religious quest. We seek what Tillich called an “ultimate concern” that shapes our life and gives it meaning. The ultimate concern of Dawkins and Harris appears to be reason; this has seized and taken possession of them. But their idea of reason is very different from the rationality of Socrates, who used his reasoning powers to bring his dialogue partners into a state of unknowing. For Augustine and Aquinas, reason became intellectus, opening naturally to the divine. Today, for many people, reason no longer subverts itself in this way. But the danger of this secularization of reason, which denies the possibility of transcendence, is that reason can become an idol that seeks to destroy all rival claimants. We hear this in the new atheism, which has forgotten that unknowing is a part of the human condition, so much so that, as the social critic Robert N. Bellah has pointed out: “Those who feel they are ... most fully objective in their assessment of reality are most in the power of deep, unconscious fantasies.” 48 Modern physicists, as we have seen, are not wary of unknowing: their experience of living with apparently insoluble problems evokes awe and wonder. In the 1970s, string theory became the Holy Grail of science, the final theory that would unify force and matter in a model integrating gravity and quantum mechanics. There is some skepticism about string theory: Richard Feynman, for example, dismissed it as “crazy nonsense,” 49 but some string theorists have admitted that their discoveries cannot be either proven or refuted experimentally and have even claimed that no adequate experiment can be devised to test what is a mathematical explanation of the universe.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  But that did not mean that the divine was wholly inaccessible. We could, as it were, catch a glimpse of God by cultivating a different mode of perception, as the Sufis did when they chanted the names of Allah like a mantra and performed the meditative exercises that induced an altered state of consciousness. But those who did not have the time, talent, or inclination for this type of spirituality could make themselves conscious of God in the smallest details of daily life. Al-Ghazzali developed a spirituality that would enable every single Muslim to become aware of the interior dimension of Muslim law. They should deliberately call to mind the divine presence when they performed such ordinary actions as eating, washing, preparing for bed, praying, almsgiving, and greeting one another. They must guard their ears from slander and obscenity, their tongues from lies; they must refrain from cursing or sneering at others. Their hands must not harm another creature; their hearts must remain free of envy, anger, hypocrisy, and pride. 25 This vigilance— similar to that practiced by Stoics, Epicureans, Buddhists, and Jains—would bridge the gap between outward observance and interior commitment; it would transform the smallest action of daily life into a ritual that made God present in the lives of ordinary men and women, even if they could not prove this rationally. It has been said that al-Ghazzali was the most important Muslim since the Prophet Muhammad. After al-Ghazzali, one great philosopher after another—Yahya Suhrawardi (d. 1191), Muid ad-Din ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240), Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207–73), Mir Dimad (d. 1631), and his pupil Mulla Sadra (1571–1640)—insisted that theology must be fused with spirituality. The philosopher had a sacred duty to be as intellectually rigorous as Aristotle and as mystical as a Sufi; reason was indispensable for science, medicine, and mathematics, but a reality that transcended the senses could be approached only by more intuitive modes of thought. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Sufism ceased to be a fringe movement and remained the dominant Islamic mode until the nineteenth century. Ordinary laypeople practiced Sufi exercises, and these disciplines helped them to get beyond simplistically anthropomorphic ideas of God and experience the divine as a transcendent presence within. The Jews in the Islamic empire, who were so excited by falsafah that they developed a philosophical movement of their own, had a similar experience.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  When human beings contemplated the workings of their minds, they opened themselves to the eternal and infinite reality of the God active within them. Spinoza experienced his philosophical study as a form of prayer; the contemplation of this immanent presence filled him with awe and wonder. As he explained in his Short Treatise on God (1661), the deity was not an object to be known but the principle of our thought, so the joy we experienced when we attained knowledge was the intellectual love of God. A true philosopher should cultivate intuitive knowledge, flashes of insight that suddenly fused all the information he had acquired discursively into a new and integrated vision, an ekstatic perception that Spinoza called “beatitude.” Most Western thinkers would not follow Spinoza. Their God was becoming increasingly remote, and those who adopted an immanent view of the divine were often regarded as rebels against the established order. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) had brought the Thirty Years’ War to an end and set up a system of sovereign nation-states, but this new polity could not be established overnight. As the modern market economy developed, it became essential to change the political structures of society. To enhance the wealth of the nation, more and more people had to be brought into the productive process—even at a quite humble level, as printers, factory hands, and office workers. They would, therefore, need a modicum of education in the modern ethos, and, inevitably, they began to demand a share in the decision making of their government. Democracy was found to be essential to the nation-state and the capitalist economy. Countries that democratized forged ahead; those that tried to confine their wealth and privilege to the aristocracy fell behind. No elite group gives up power willingly, of course. The democratization of Europe was not a peaceful process but was achieved in a series of bloody revolutions, civil wars, the assassination of the nobility, militant dictatorships, and reigns of terror. During the 1640s and 1650s, for example, England had seen a violent civil war, the execution of King Charles I (1649), and a period of republican rule under the Puritan government of Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658). Levelers, Quakers, Diggers, and Muggletonians had developed their own revolutionary piety. 36 If God dwelled in nature— if, as some said, God was nature—there was no need for clerics and churches, and everybody should share the nation’s prosperity. George Fox (1624–91), founder of the Society of Friends, taught Christians to seek their own inner light and “make use of their own understanding without direction from another”; 37 in the scientific age, religion should be “experimental,” every one of its doctrines tested empirically against each person’s experience. 38 For Richard Coppin, the God within was the only true authority. Because God informed all things, Jacob Bauthumely regarded the worship of a distinct, separate God as blasphemous, while Laurence Clarkson called upon the omnipresent God to empower the people to bring the aristocracy down.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Like Moses at the top of the mountain, we embrace the darkness and experience no clarity, but know that, once we have rinsed our minds of inadequate ideas that block our understanding, we are somehow in the place where God is. Renouncing all that the mind may conceive, wrapped entirely in the intangible and the invisible, [Moses] belongs completely to him who is beyond everything. Here, being neither oneself nor someone else, one is supremely united to the completely unknown by an inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing. 80 Once we have left the idols of thought behind, we are no longer worshipping a simulacrum, a projection of our own ideas and desires. There are no longer any false ideas obstructing our access to the inexpressible truth, and, like Moses, forgetful of self, we can remain silently in the presence of the unknown God. But this would, of course, be incomprehensible unless you had personally put yourself through this spiritual exercise again and again. Denys did not regard this ekstasis as an exotic “peak” experience. Everybody, priests and lay folk alike, should apply this threefold dialectical method to the scriptures as they listened to them read aloud during the liturgy. When they heard God called “Rock,” “Creator,” “Wise,” or “Good,” they must affirm, deny, and then deny the denial, becoming in the process ever more conscious of the inadequacy of all theological language—even the inspired words of scripture. At key moments they would be able to “hear” the silence of the ineffable other that lay beyond the limits of speech. In his Mystical Theology, Denys applied his method to the ceremonies of the liturgy, to bring to light the deeper meaning of these ritualized symbolic gestures. 81 This was a communal rather than a solitary ekstasis. Priests and congregants should plunge together “into that darkness which is beyond intellect.” Eventually, Denys concluded, “We shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing.” 82 Denys’s theology was based on the liturgy of Alexandria, which instead of simply regarding the Eucharist as a reenactment of Jesus’s last supper also saw it as an allegory of the soul’s ascent to God. 83 His method was not for an elite group of contemplatives but seems to have been part of the public instruction of all the baptized faithful, who would have found it easy to follow his imagery of descent and ascent because it was familiar to them in the liturgy.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  21 Scholars think that the song was originally sung during the spring festival at Gilgal, where, it was said, the waters of the Jordan had miraculously parted before the Israelites to enable them to enter the Promised Land 22 —an event that utterly confounded “the kings of the Amorites on the west bank of the Jordan and all the kings of the Canaanites in the coastal region.” 23 Every year, when the Jordan flooded its banks, this crossing (pesah) was ritually reenacted at Gilgal. Priests and laypeople would process past the floodwaters and enter the temple, where they ate unleavened bread (mazzoth) and roasted corn in memory of their ancestors, who had “tasted the produce of the land there for the first time.” 24 It seems, therefore, that not only did the old cosmological myths shape the Israelites’ understanding of their history but that the rituals of Gilgal helped to form the myth of the exodus from Egypt. Apart from a lack of interest in cosmogony, the religion of ancient Israel did not at this date differ markedly from that of its neighbors. J and E present Abraham worshipping El, the local High God, and it seems that originally Yahweh was simply one of the “holy ones” in El’s retinue. 25 But the Israelites also worshipped other gods until the sixth century, despite the campaign of a small group of prophets and priests who wanted them to worship Yahweh alone. 26 Israel would later condemn the pagan religion of the native Canaanites in the strongest terms, but at the time of J and E there seems to have been no such tension. Both, for example, record the founding myth of the temple of Bethel, which is one of the most famous of the Genesis stories. 27 Because of a family feud, Jacob was forced to flee Canaan and take refuge with relatives in Mesopotamia. On the first leg of his journey, he spent the night at Luz on the border of the Promised Land in what seemed an unremarkable spot but was in fact a Canaanite shrine, a maqom. 28 That night, perhaps because he used one of its sacred stones as a pillow, Jacob had a numinous dream: “A ladder was set up on the earth, its top reaching the heavens, and here: messengers of God were going up and down on it. And here: Yahweh was standing over against him.” 29 Jacob awoke in astonishment: “Why, Yahweh is in this place and I did not know it!” he exclaimed. “How awe-inspiring is this maqom! It is none other than a house of God (beth-El) and that is the gate of Heaven!” 30 Before continuing his journey, Jacob upended the stone to make it a “standing pillar” (matzebah) and consecrated it with a libation of oil.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  In its gardens could be seen the figure of Idleness, the keeper of love’s gates. Here was Narcissus, of ancient times, together with lecherous King Solomon. There were other martyrs to love. There was Hercules, betrayed by goddesses and mortal women. There was Turnus, who lost all for love. There was Croesus, wretched in captivity. On another wall were the two enchantresses Medea and Circe, holding out their potions of love. There is no force on earth that can withstand Venus - not wisdom, not wealth, not beauty, not cunning, not strength or endurance. All will fail. She rules the world. I have given you one or two examples of her mastery. There are a thousand more. She captured all these lovers in her net, and all they could do was let slip the word ‘alas’. The image of Venus, in this temple, was glorious to see. She was naked, floating on a limitless ocean of green; from the navel down she was environed by waves as glittering as any glass. She held a lute in her right hand, ready to play upon its strings, and on her head she wore a garland of fresh roses; their perfume rose into the air above her, where fluttered turtle-doves. Beside her stood her son, young winged Cupid; he was blind, as the legend tells us, but he bore a bow with arrows bright and keen. Why should I not also tell you about the frescoes within the temple of red Mars? The walls were all painted from top to bottom, just as if they were the interior apartments of his desolate temple in Thrace. It is a region of frost and snow, where the great god of war has his dominion. So on the wall was painted the image of a forest, forlorn and deserted, with black and knotted boughs and bare, ruined trees. Between these stumps and dead things there came a blast of wind, like a sigh from hell, as though a hideous tempest might whirl everything away. There on a bank, beside a hill, stood the temple of Mars omnipotent; it was wrought of burnished steel, its entrance long and narrow. Through this grim portal there rushed an endless wind that shook the hinges of the gates. An icy light from the north shone through the doors of this temple, for there were no windows in the edifice itself. The doors themselves were adamantine and eternal, their frames plated with sheets of thick iron. The pillars that supported the temple were as thick as barrels, cast out of cold glittering iron.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  I am sure that you would accuse me of negligence if I failed to tell you of the expense and trouble that Theseus went to in preparing the royal tournament. I dare say that there was no greater amphitheatre in the whole world. It was a mile in circumference, the shape of a circle, environed with great walls and moats. The seats rose in tiers some sixty feet, and were so well arranged that everyone had a full view of the arena. On the eastern side there stood a gate of white marble, balanced in harmony with its counterpart on the western side. It was a dream of stone. Nothing of this style had ever been built so well or so quickly. Theseus enquired throughout his land and enlisted the services of every craftsman skilled in arithmetic or in geometry; he hired the best artists, and the most renowned sculptors, in the construction of this glorious theatre. And then, for the purposes of worship and ceremonial, he caused to be built an altar and a shrine to Venus in a room above the eastern gate. Above the western gate there was constructed a temple to Mars. They cost a wagon-load of gold. And then on the northern side, within a turret on the wall, Theseus built an exquisite temple to the goddess of chastity, Diana, elaborately wrought out of white alabaster and red coral. I had almost forgotten to describe to you the noble carvings and paintings that adorned these three temples, displaying all the most delicate skills of expression and action. On the walls of the temple of Venus, for example, were depicted images of the broken sleep and pitiful sighs of the servants of love; here also were pictures of the sacred tears and lamentations of lovers, together with the fiery strokes of their desires. Here were the oaths they passed. Here were the figures of Pleasure and of Hope, of Desire and of Foolishness, of Beauty and of Youth, of Mirth and of Costliness, of Luxury and Care and Jealousy. Jealousy wore a garland of golden marigolds, the token of cruelty and despair; on her hand was perched a cuckoo, bright bird of infidelity. On the walls, too, were painted frescoes of all the feasts, concerts, songs and dances devoted to love. Here were images of desire and display, all the circumstances of love that ever have been and ever will be celebrated. I cannot mention them all. Suffice it to say that the whole island of Cytherea, the dwelling and domain of Venus, was floating upon the walls of the temple.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  That is why the author is not going to tell his disciple to seek God within, and, he adds, “I don’t want you to be outside or above, behind, or beside yourself either!” 106 When his disciple retorts in exasperation: “Where am I to be? Nowhere according to you!” our author replies that he is absolutely right: “Nowhere is where I want you! Why, when you are ‘nowhere’ physically, you are ‘everywhere’ spiritually.” 107 There were no words to describe this kind of love. A person who has not put himself through the process of “forgetting” will see a dichotomy between “inner” and “outer,” “nowhere” and “everywhere.” But “nowhere” is not a “place” within the psyche; it is off the map of our secular experience. So let go this “everywhere” and “everything” for this “nowhere” and this “nothing.” Never mind if you cannot fathom this nothing, for I love it so much the better. It is so worthwhile in itself that no thinking about it will do it justice. 108 This “nothing” might seem like darkness, but it is actually “overwhelming spiritual light that blinds the soul that is experiencing it.” 109 So the apprentice must be prepared to “wait in the darkness as long as is necessary,” aware only of “a simple, steadfast intention reaching out towards God.” 110 Kenosis is at the heart of the Cloud’s spirituality. Instead of seeking special raptures, the author tells his disciple to seek God for himself and not “for what you can get out of him.” 111 But the discipline of self-emptying was becoming a thing of the past. Theologians were becoming more self-important, and “mystics” more self-indulgent. The new polarity was resulting in thinking theologians and loving mystics. Denys the Carthusian, an extremely learned Flemish monk of the fifteenth century, was disturbed by this change. The old mystical theology, he recalled, had been accessible to all the faithful, no matter how uneducated they were; it had been grounded in the ordinary routines of liturgy, community life, and the practice of charity. But the theology of Scotus and Ockham was incomprehensible to all but a few experts. The theology of unknowing had encouraged humility; the new speculations of the schoolmen seemed to inflate their conceit and could be imparted to anybody who had the intelligence to follow it, regardless of his moral stature. 112 Theology was not only becoming aridly theoretical; without the discipline of the apophatic, it was in danger of becoming idolatrous. Europe was on the brink of major social, cultural, political, and intellectual change. As it entered the modern world, spirituality was at a low ebb, and Europeans might find it difficult to respond creatively to the challenge.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Through the crowds, I spot Miss Ange—self-conscious about her short, short hair, which undauntedly she has arranged in minuscule ringlets over her forehead. In a green-flowered hoop skirt and a wide yellow straw hat—her dress so wide that she shrieks in annoyance when someone threatens to crush it—which keeps her screaming over and over—today she is Scarlett O’Hara.... Desdemona and Drusilla Duncan, standing under the yellowish umbrella of a streetlight, For The Whole World To See, are in twin outfits of the fast, vampish 20s—their hair, too, in helpless ringlets—and they carry cigarette holders pointed carefully into the air in order to avoid poking some sympathetic someone.... Shimmying recklessly on the street, legs thrashing, looking like an alarm clock jangling insistently out of control, Whorina is a Woman of the Night—in a studded shiny red dress: a vision, at last, of her stifled impossible dreams from the graveyard hours when she knows, inside, that she was meant to be, every bit, a Woman.... And Sandy-Vee, in mesh stockings, bustle like a pinned rose—a chorus girl—has left her bar to display herself as A Celebrity. A handsome youngman in tuxedo and cummerbund escorts her Proudly.... Another queen, Cinderella, shakes a long metallic wand—gold streamers attached—at the tourists, as if to banish them from her sight forever. Now, during Mardi Gras, when the barcrowds flow from one place to another—a mob thirsty for the momentary liquid gayety of the carnival—from the blue-shifting, pink lights of the burlesque halls to the offbeat, side-street bars—there will be, too, in overwhelming abundance, the curious and the largely unaware, both men and women. For this one day, those two worlds will collide—the night-world and the touristworld—on the twisting, grinding, clamoring stage of Carnival, New Orleans. Even in the melee of queenfaces, painted eyes, bodies in drag—even then, she stood out from all the others at The Rocking Times: a queen perched on a stool like a startled white owl: a man with bleached, burned-out hair and a painted face dominated to the point of absolute impossibility by the largest, widest, darkest eyes I have ever seen, painted into two enormous tadpoles, slanting to the very edges of her temples. The frizzled quality of the bleached curled hair and the devouring wideness of the eyes gave her the appearance of a demented Cassandra whose futile, unattended knowledge makes her burn, inside, with a fire that consumes only herself, while others refuse to heed the prophecy shining from her face. She wore a lace dress, a ruffle about her shoulders: a misty lavender which nevertheless drained—as any other color would have done—her flour-white face, the skin covered with some kind of cement-like powder. As if aware of the precariousness of the improvised harsh makeup, which may crack suddenly, she holds her face stiffly. Two round smears of rouge burn on her cheeks as if she had been slapped over and over, cheeks painted red like the bright rounded smears on a clown.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  Now I hasten on to the temple of chaste Diana, which I shall describe to you as briefly as I may. On the walls of this edifice were painted all the devotion of this great goddess to hunting and to modest chastity. There was one of the nymphs of Diana, fallen Callisto in all her woe, whom the goddess in her wrath changed into a bear; then she relented and transformed her, and her son by Jupiter, into stars. So it was painted here. I know no more. There I saw Daphne, the daughter of Peneus, all changed into a laurel tree. Only thus could she preserve her virginity from lustful Apollo. There too was Actaeon, turned into a stag for the crime of observing Diana naked by the poolside. His own hounds pursued and devoured him, little knowing that he was their master. There was an image of Atalanta and Meleager, who with others pursued the Calydonian boar, for which crime Diana punished them both severely. I saw there depicted many other wonderful stories and legends. This is not the place to recall them all. The goddess herself was depicted upright upon a hart, with small dogs playing about her feet; beneath her was the changing moon, ever about to wax or wane. She was clothed entirely in bright green; her bow was in her hand, her arrows in their quiver. Her eyes were cast down upon the ground, as if searching for Pluto’s kingdom beneath the earth. Before her lay a woman in labour. The baby was so long in coming forth that the woman was crying out, ‘Diana, goddess of childbirth, only you can help me endure!’ The painter spared no expense with the colours of the work; it was a living piece of nature. These were the temples, then, that Duke Theseus had caused to be built at great cost within his amphitheatre. When he saw them completed, he was content. The work had gone well. Now I will return to Palamon and Arcite. The day was fast approaching for their return to Athens, where, according to their agreement, they would bring with them one hundred knights armed for the battle. They were the flower of chivalry. I do not think that there were any better warriors in the world at that time. There were none more noble or more brave. All of them were devoted to the knightly virtues of modesty and honour. All of them wished to acquire a matchless reputation by dint of arms. What better opportunity than the joust for the hand of Emily? It could happen today. If there was a similar contest, in England or elsewhere, what knight would hesitate before coming forward as a champion? To fight for a fair lady - that is the height of bliss. It is, in my mind, the meaning of knighthood then and now.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  She said that she was so bewildered by the wild waves that she had, in truth, lost her memory. The governor of the castle and his wife, Hermengyld, took pity on her. They wept at her condition. Constance herself was so gracious and courteous - she was so willing to please all the people about her - that she became universally loved. The governor and his wife were both pagans, in this dark age of our country, but Hermengyld still loved her. Constance stayed so long in the castle, praying and weeping, that, through the grace of Christ, Hermengyld was converted to the true faith. In this period, the Christians of Britain could not assemble in public places. Most of them had fled, menaced by pagan invasions from the north by land and sea. They had gone to Wales, which had become a haven for the old Britons and old Christianity. That was their refuge for the time being. I am talking about the sixth century of our era. Some Britons had remained, however, and practised their religion in secret. They venerated Christ far from the gaze of their pagan rulers. There were in fact three such Christians living near the castle. One of these was blind. He could see only by the light of his mind, now that his eyes were closed for ever. It so happened that on one bright summer morning the governor and his wife, together with Constance, decided to ride out to the shore where they could refresh themselves with the bracing sea air. It was only a short journey. In the course of it, however, they met the blind man. He was old and bent, leaning heavily upon his staff. But then he straightened up when they passed him, and turned his face towards the governor’s wife. ‘In the name of Christ,’ he shouted out, ‘Dame Hermengyld! Give me back my sight!’ Now Hermengyld was astonished by this outburst. She was terrified, too, that her husband would kill her for renouncing the pagan faith. Constance, however, was calm and resolute. She urged Hermengyld, as a true daughter of the Church, to work the will of Christ. The governor was inwardly troubled and amazed. He asked the two women, ‘What does this mean? What is going on?’ ‘It is the power of Christ,’ Constance replied. ‘He is the Saviour who rescues us from Satan.’ Thereupon she explained to him the doctrines of the true faith with such sweetness and grace that, before evening, the governor was converted. He was not himself the ruler of this territory, but he kept it by force of arms in the name of Aella, king of Northumberland. He was a wise king who had proved himself stern in battle against the Scots. You probably know all about this. So let me return to the story.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The tribe cannot afford the luxury of allowing an adolescent to “find himself” Western-style; he has to relinquish the dependency of infancy and assume the burdens of adulthood overnight. To this end, boys are incarcerated in tombs, buried in the earth, informed that they are about to be eaten by a monster, flogged, circumcised, and tattooed. If the initiation is properly conducted, a youth will be forced to reach for inner resources that he did not know he possessed. Psychologists tell us that the terror of such an experience causes a regressive disorganization of the personality that, if skillfully handled, can lead to a constructive reorganization of the young man’s powers. He has faced death, come out the other side, and is now psychologically prepared to risk his life for his people. But the purpose of the ritual is not simply to turn him into an efficient killing machine; rather, it is to train him to kill in the sacred manner. A boy is usually introduced to the more esoteric mythology of his tribe during his initiation. He first hears about the Animal Master, the covenant, the magnanimity of the beasts, and the rituals that will restore his life while he is undergoing these traumatic rites. In these extraordinary circumstances, separated from everything familiar, he is pushed into a new state of consciousness that enables him to appreciate the profound bond that links hunter and prey in their common struggle for survival. This is not the kind of knowledge we acquire by purely logical deliberations, but is akin to the understanding derived from art. A poem, a play, or, indeed, a great painting has the power to change our perception in ways that we may not be able to explain logically but that seem incontestably true. We find that things that appear distinct to the rational eye are in some way profoundly connected or that a perfectly commonplace object—a chair, a sunflower, or a pair of boots—has numinous significance. Art involves our emotions, but if it is to be more than a superficial epiphany, this new insight must go deeper than feelings that are, by their very nature, ephemeral. If the historians are right about the function of the Lascaux caves, religion and art were inseparable from the very beginning. Like art, religion is an attempt to construct meaning in the face of the relentless pain and injustice of life. As meaning-seeking creatures, men and women fall very easily into despair.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  What lies behind or beyond the universe is inconceivable to us. When we try to think of its “Creator” our minds simply seize up. But we could see signs and traces of God in our world. Reviving Philo’s distinction between God’s essential nature (ousia) and his “activities” (energeiai) in the world, Basil insisted that we could never know God’s ousia; indeed, we should not even speak of it. Silence alone is appropriate for what lies beyond words. But we could form an idea about the divine “energies” that have, as it were, translated the ineffable God into a human idiom: the incarnate Word and the immanent divine presence within us that scripture calls the Holy Spirit.35 To show Christians that Father, Son, and Spirit were not three distinct “Gods,” Basil formulated the doctrine of the Trinity. At first Christians thought that Jesus, the incarnate Logos, and the Holy Spirit were two separate divine beings. But Paul had explained that they were one and the same: “This Lord is the Spirit.”36 Because they were divine forces, Logos and Spirit were not finite or discrete like the beings of our ordinary experience. Over time Christians realized that because the divine energies they experienced in the rituals and practices of the church were indefinable and illimitable, “Logos” and “Spirit” must refer to the same divine power. God was not the sort of being that was defined by number or extension, so Father, Son, and Spirit were not three separate “gods.” Pagans thought of their “gods” as members of the cosmos, with separate personalities and functions, but the Christian God was not that sort of being. When we spoke of Father, Son, and Spirit being One God, we were not saying “One plus one plus one equals three” but “Unknown infinity plus unknown infinity plus unknown infinity equals unknown infinity.”37 We think of the beings we know as single items or collections of different items. But God is not like that. Again, the absolute ineffability of the divine was the key to understanding the Trinity. The reason the Trinity is not a logical or numerical absurdity is because God is not a being that can be restricted to such human categories as number.

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

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

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

  Jesus spent his life in Palestine. It is a country of about the size of Maryland, smaller than Switzerland, and not half as large as Scotland,162 but favored with a healthy climate, beautiful scenery, and great variety and fertility of soil, capable of producing fruits of all lands from the snowy north to the tropical south; isolated from other countries by desert, mountain and sea, yet lying in the centre of the three continents of the eastern hemisphere and bordering on the Mediterranean highway of the historic nations of antiquity, and therefore providentially adapted to develop not only the particularism of Judaism, but also the universalism of Christianity. From little Phoenicia the world has derived the alphabet, from little Greece philosophy and art, from little Palestine the best of all—the true religion and the cosmopolitan Bible. Jesus could not have been born at any other time than in the reign of Caesar Augustus, after the Jewish religion, the Greek civilization, and the Roman government had reached their maturity; nor in any other land than Palestine, the classical soil of revelation, nor among any other people than the Jews, who were predestinated and educated for centuries to prepare the way for the coming of the Messiah and the fulfilment of the law and the prophets. In his infancy, a fugitive from the wrath of Herod, He passed through the Desert (probably by the short route along the Mediterranean coast) to Egypt and back again; and often may his mother have spoken to him of their brief sojourn in "the land of bondage," out of which Jehovah had led his people, by the mighty arm of Moses, across the Red Sea and through "the great and terrible wilderness" into the land of promise. During his forty days of fasting "in the wilderness" he was, perhaps, on Mount Sinai communing with the spirits of Moses and Elijah, and preparing himself in the awfully eloquent silence of that region for the personal conflict with the Tempter of the human race, and for the new legislation of liberty from the Mount of Beatitudes.163 Thus the three lands of the Bible, Egypt, the cradle of Israel, the Desert, its school and playground, and Canaan, its final home, were touched and consecrated by "those blessed feet which, eighteen centuries ago, were nailed for our advantage on the bitter cross." He travelled on his mission of love through Judaea, Samaria, Galilee, and Peraea; he came as far north as mount Hermon, and once he crossed beyond the land of Israel to the Phoenician border and healed the demonized daughter of that heathen mother to whom he said, "O woman, great is thy faith: be it done unto thee even as thou wilt."

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

  Cyril of Jerusalem, in his fifth and last mystagogic Catechesis, which is devoted to the consideration of the eucharistic sacrifice and the liturgical service of God, gives the following description of the eucharistic intercessions for the departed: "When the spiritual sacrifice, the unbloody service of God, is performed, we pray to God over this atoning sacrifice for the universal peace of the church, for the welfare of the world, for the emperor, for soldiers and prisoners, for the sick and afflicted, for all the poor and needy. Then we commemorate also those who sleep, the patriarchs, prophets, apostles, martyrs, that God through their prayers and their intercessions may receive our prayer; and in general we pray for all who have gone from us, since we believe that it is of the greatest help to those souls for whom the prayer is offered, while the holy sacrifice, exciting a holy awe, lies before us."1047 This is clearly an approach to the later idea of purgatory in the Latin church. Even St. Augustine, with Tertullian, teaches plainly, as an old tradition, that the eucharistic sacrifice, the intercessions or suffragia and alms, of the living are of benefit to the departed believers, so that the Lord deals more mercifully with them than their sins deserve.1048 His noble mother, Monica, when dying, told him he might bury her body where he pleased, and should give himself no concern for it, only she begged of him that he would remember her soul at the altar of the Lord.1049 With this is connected the idea of a repentance and purification in the intermediate state between death and resurrection, which likewise Augustine derives from Matt. xii. 32, and 1 Cor. iii. 15, yet mainly as a mere opinion.1050 From these and similar passages, and under the influence of previous Jewish and heathen ideas and customs, arose, after Gregory the Great, the Roman doctrine of the purgatorial fire for imperfect believers who still need to be purified from the dross of their sins before they are fit for heaven, and the institution of special masses for the dead, in which the perversion of the thankful remembrance of the one eternally availing sacrifice of Christ reaches its height, and the idea of the communion utterly disappears.1051 In general, in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper the sacrament continually retired behind the sacrifice. In the Roman churches in all countries one may see and hear splendid masses at the high altar, where the congregation of the faithful, instead of taking part in the communion, are mere spectators of the sacrificial act of the priest. The communion is frequently despatched at a side altar at an early hour in the morning. § 97. The Celebration o f the Eucharist. Comp. the Liturgical Literature cited in the next section, especially the works of Daniel, Neale, and Freeman.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  In his later work, Plato’s theology also became more concrete and prepared the ground for the religious preoccupation with the physical cosmos that would characterize a great deal of Western religion. In the Timaeus, he devised a creation myth—not, of course, intended to be taken literally—that presented the world as shaped by a divine craftsman (demiourgos), who was eternal, good but not omnipotent. He was not the supreme God. There was a higher deity who was virtually unknowable, so removed from us that he was basically irrelevant. “To find the maker and father of this universe is hard enough,” Plato remarked, “and even if I succeeded, to declare him to everyone is impossible.”66 This was no creation ex nihilo: the craftsman merely worked on preexistent matter and had to model his creation on the eternal forms. The point of the story was to show that the universe, based as it was on the forms, was intelligible. The cosmos was a living organism, with a rational mind and soul that could be discerned in its mathematical proportions and the regular revolutions of the heavenly bodies. Participating in the divinity of the archetypal forms, the stars were “visible and generated gods” and Earth, the mythical Gaia, was the principal deity. So too the nous of each human person was a divine spark that, if nourished correctly, could “raise us up away from the earth and toward what is akin to us in heaven.”67 Plato had helped to lay the foundations of the important Western belief that human beings lived in a perfectly rational world and that the scientific exploration of the cosmos was a spiritual discipline. Aristotle (c. 384–322), Plato’s most brilliant pupil, brought philosophical rationalism down to earth. A biologist rather than a mathematician, he was intrigued by the process of decay and development that so disturbed Plato, because he saw it as the key to the understanding of life. Aristotle spent years in Asia Minor dissecting animals and plants and writing detailed descriptions of his investigations. He had no interest in leaving Plato’s cave but found beauty and absorbing interest in the fascinating design that he saw everywhere in the physical world. For Aristotle, a “form” was not an eternal archetype but the immanent structure that determined the development of every single substance. Aristotelian science was dominated by the idea of telos: like any human artifact, everything in the cosmos was directed toward a particular “end” and had a specific purpose, a “final cause.” Like the acorn that was programmed to become an oak tree, its entire being was devoted to achieving this potential. So change should be celebrated, because it represented a dynamic and universal striving for fulfillment.

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

  The subterranean chapels, or crypts, were connected with the churches built over them, and brought to mind the worship of the catacombs in the times of persecution. These crypts always produce a most earnest, solemn impression, and many of them are of considerable archaeological interest. § 109. Crosses and Crucifixes. Jac. Gretser. (R.C.): De cruce Christi. 2 vols. Ingolst. 1608. Just. Lipsius: De cruce Christi. Antw. 1694. Fr. Münter: Die Sinnbilder u. Kunstvorstellungen der alten Christen. Altona, 1825. C. J. Hefele (R.C.): Alter u. älteste Form der Crucifixe (in the 2d vol. of his Beiträge zur Kirchengesch., Archäologie u. Liturgik. Tübingen, 1864, p. 265 sqq.). The cross, as the symbol of redemption, and the signing of the cross upon the forehead, the eyes, the mouth, the breast, and even upon parts of clothing, were in universal use in this period, as they had been even in the second century, both in private Christian life and in public worship. They were also in many ways abused in the service of superstition; and the nickname cross-worshippers,1188 which the heathen applied to the Christians in the time of Tertullian,1189 was in many cases not entirely unwarranted. Besides simple wooden crosses, now that the church had risen to the kingdom, there were many crosses of silver and gold, or sumptuously set with pearls and gems.1190 The conspicuous part which, according to the statements of Eusebius, the cross played in the life of Constantine, is well known: forming the instrument of his conversion; borne by fifty men, leading him to his victories over Maxentius and Licinius; inscribed upon his banners, upon the weapons of his soldiers in his palace, and upon public places, and lying in the right hand of his own statue. Shortly afterwards Julian accused the Christians of worshipping the wood of the cross. "The sign of universal detestation," says Chrysostom,1191 "the sign of extreme penalty, is now become the object of universal desire and love. We see it everywhere triumphant; we find it on houses, on roofs, and on walls, in cities and hamlets, on the markets, along the roads, and in the deserts, on the mountains and in the valleys, on the sea, on ships, on books and weapons, on garments, in marriage chambers, at banquets, upon gold and silver vessels, in pearls, in painting upon walls, on beds, on the bodies of very sick animals, on the bodies of the possessed [—to drive away the disease and the demon—], at the dances of the merry, and in the brotherhoods of ascetics." Besides this, it was usual to mark the cross on windows and floors, and to wear it upon the forehead.1192 According to Augustine this sign was to remind believers that their calling is to follow Christ in true humility, through suffering, into glory.