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 173 of 217 · 20 per page

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  if you wish to come to the place where the Lord may be our leader and precede you in the column of the cloud26 and the rock may follow you,27 which offers you spiritual food and spiritual drink, no less.28 Nor should you store treasure there where the moth destroys or thieves dig through and steal.29 This is what the Lord says clearly in the Gospels: If you wish to be perfect, sell all your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.30 This, therefore, is to depart from Rameses and follow Christ.31 Thus the Israelites’ sojourn in Rameses looked forward to Christ’s demand for total commitment. For Origen, scripture was a textus, a densely woven fabric of words, every one of which was spoken by Christ the Logos and summoned the reader to follow him. Origen did not believe that his exegesis was arbitrary, because God had planted the clues; his task was to solve them and make the divine voice audible in a way that had not been possible before the coming of Jesus. Exegesis brought the interpreter and his students a moment of ekstasis, a ‘stepping outside’ of the mundane. Modern biblical scholarship seeks to place a text in the worldly economy of academe, treating it like any other ancient document.32 Origen’s goal was different. Central to early Christian spirituality was what has been called the ‘perennial philosophy’, because it has been found in almost every pre-modern culture. According to this mythical speculation, every earthly reality has its counterpart in the divine sphere.33 It was an attempt to articulate the inchoate sense that our lives are somehow incomplete and fragmentary, separate from the more satisfying version that we can imagine so clearly. Because heaven and earth were linked together in the great chain of being, a symbol was inseparable from its unseen referent. The word ‘symbol’ comes from the Greek symballein, ‘to throw together’. The archetype and its earthly replica were inextricably combined, like gin and tonic in a cocktail. To taste one, you must also taste the other. This was the basis of Christian ritual: when Christians drank wine and ate bread during the Eucharist, they encountered the Christ these objects represented. In the same way, when they struggled with the time-bound words of scripture, they encountered the Logos, the prototype of all human utterance. This was central to Origen’s hermeneutics. ‘The contents of scripture are outward forms of certain mysteries and the images of divine things,’ he explained.34 When he perused the New Testament, he was constantly ‘amazed by the deep obscurity of the unspeakable mysteries contained therein’; at every turn, he came upon ‘thousands of passages that provide, as if through a window, a narrow opening leading to multitudes of deepest thoughts’.35

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Each emanation had generated one of the spheres of Ptolemy’s universe: the fixed stars, then Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury and finally the Moon. Our sublunary world, however, had developed in the opposite direction: it had begun as inanimate matter, and progressed through plants and animals to humans, whose souls participated in the divine reason, but whose bodies derived from the earth. Maimonides (1135–1204) tried to reassure Jews who were perturbed by the conflict between Aristotle and the Bible. 32 In The Guide of the Perplexed, he argued that since truth was one, scripture must be in harmony with reason. He had no problem with creation ex nihilo , because he did not find Aristotle’s argument for the eternity of matter convincing. Maimonides agreed that anthropomorphic descriptions of God in the Bible must not be interpreted literally, and tried to find rational reasons for some of the more irrational biblical laws. But he knew that religious experience transcended reason. The intuitive knowledge of the prophets, which was accompanied by tremulous awe, was of a higher order than the knowledge we acquire by our rational powers. Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1164), one of the great poets and philosophers of Spain, was another medieval forerunner of modern historical criticism. 33 Exegesis must give priority to the literal sense; while legend ( aggadah ) had spiritual value, it must not be confused with fact. He found discrepancies in the biblical text: Isaiah of Jerusalem could not have composed the second half of the book attributed to him because it referred to events that occurred long after his death. He also cautiously and elliptically hinted that Moses was not the author of the entire Pentateuch: he could not, for example, have described his own death and since Moses never entered the Promised Land, how could he have written the opening verses of Deuteronomy, which positioned the site of his final address ‘ on the other side of the Jordan river’. 34 This must have been written by somebody who lived in the land of Israel after its conquest by Joshua. Philosophical rationalism inspired a mystical backlash in Spain and Provence. Nahmanides (1194–1270), an outstanding Talmudist and an influential member of the Jewish community in Castile, believed that Maimonides’s rationalistic exegesis did not do justice to the Torah. 35 He wrote an influential commentary on the Pentateuch, which rigorously elucidated its plain meaning, but in the course of his study he had encountered a numinous significance that entirely transcended the literal sense.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Basil of Caesarea in Cappadocia (329–79) argued that there were two kinds of religious teaching, both of which derived from Jesus: kerygma was the public teaching of the Church, based on the Bible, while dogma expressed everything that could not be said; it could be suggested only in the symbolic gestures of the liturgy or experienced in silent meditation.53 Like Philo, Basil distinguished between God’s essence (ousia), which lay beyond our understanding, and his operations (energeiai) in the world that are described in scripture. God’s ousia was not even mentioned in the Bible.54 This was central to the doctrine of the Trinity, which Basil formulated together with his brother Gregory of Nyssa (335–95) and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus (329–91). God had a single essence (ousia) which would always remain incomprehensible to us. But in scripture, God had made himself known to us in three hypostases, ‘manifestations’ (Father, Logos and Spirit), divine energeiaei that adapted the ineffable mystery of God to our limited intelligence. The Cappadocian fathers were contemplatives; their daily theoria on scripture had introduced them to a transcendence that was beyond even the inspired language of the Bible. The same was true of the Greek father who wrote under the pseudonym Denys the Areopagite55, whose work is almost as authoritative as scripture in the Greek Orthodox world. He promoted an apophatic theology of ‘silence’. God had revealed some of his names to us in scripture, which tells us that God is ‘good’, ‘compassionate’, and ‘just’, but these attributes were ‘sacred veils’ that hid the divine mystery which lies beyond such words. When Christians listen to scripture, they must continually remind themselves that these human terms were too limited to apply to God. So God was ‘good’ and ‘not-good’; ‘just’ and ‘not-just’. This paradoxical reading would bring them ‘into that darkness which is beyond intellect’56 and into the presence of the indescribable God. Denys liked the story of the cloud descending on Mount Sinai: on the summit, Moses was enveloped in a thick cloud of unknowing. He could see nothing but he was in the place where God was. Scripture had not been able to settle the issue of Jesus’s divinity, but the Byzantine theologian Maximus the Confessor (c.580–662) arrived at an explanation that became standard among Greek-speaking Christians, because it reflected their interior experience of Christ. Maximus did not believe that the Logos became human to make reparation for the sin of Adam; the incarnation would have occurred even if Adam had not sinned. Jesus was the first fully deified human being and we could all be like him – even in this life. The Word was made flesh in order that ‘the whole human being would become God, deified by the grace of God become man – whole man, soul and body, by nature, and becoming whole God, soul and body, by grace’.57

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  They caused us pain and constantly reminded us of our mortality. Our physical lives, therefore, provided us with a built-in ascetic, which, if we responded properly, led us to cultivate our spiritual, immortal nature. 36 In the same way, the glaring limitations in the body – the literal meaning – of scripture forced us to seek its soul, and God had planted these anomalies on purpose: Divine wisdom has arranged for certain stumbling blocks and interruptions of the historical sense . . . by inserting in the midst a number of impossibilities and incongruities, in order that the narrative might, as it were, present a barrier to the reader and lead him to refuse to proceed along the pathway of the ordinary meaning. 37 These difficult passages ‘bring us, though the entrance of a narrow footpath, to a higher and loftier road precisely by “shutting us out and debarring us” from an acceptance of their plain sense’. 38 By means of the ‘impossibility of the literal sense’, God led us ‘to an examination of the inner meaning’. 39 Spiritual exegesis was hard work: we had to transform the scriptures in the same way as we transformed our recalcitrant selves. Biblical interpretation required ‘the utmost purity and sobriety and . . . nights of watching’; it was impossible without a life of prayer and virtue. 40 It was not like solving a mathematical problem, because it involved a more intuitive mode of thought. But if the scholar persevered, pondering the scriptures ‘with all the attention and reverence they deserve, it is certain that, in the very act of reading and diligently studying them, his mind and feelings will be touched by a divine breath and he will recognize that the words he is reading are not the utterances of a man but the language of God’. 41 This apprehension of the divine was acquired gradually, step by step. In the prologue to his commentary on the Song of Songs, Origen pointed out that the three books attributed to Solomon – Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs – represented the stages of this journey. Scripture had a body, a psyche and a spirit that went beyond our mortal nature; these corresponded to the three different senses in which scripture could be understood. Proverbs was a book of the body. It could be comprehended without allegory, so it represented the literal sense of scripture, which the exegete had to master before he could progress to anything higher. Ecclesiastes worked at the level of the psyche, the natural powers of mind and heart. By pointing out that earthly things were vain and empty, Eccelesiastes revealed the futility of placing all our hope in the material world; it therefore exemplified the moral sense of scripture, because it showed us how to behave, using arguments that required no supernatural insight.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Eventually, the soul might be permitted to enter the groom’s ‘bedchamber’ and attain the vision of God, though Bernard admitted that he had only had momentary intimations of this final state. The Song could not be understood rationally. Its meaning was a ‘mystery’ that was ‘hidden’ in the text26 – an overwhelming transcendence that would always elude our conceptual grasp.27 Unlike the rationalists, Bernard constantly quoted scripture: his commentary on the Song has 5,526 quotations ranging from Genesis to Revelation.28 And instead of seeing the Bible as an objective academic challenge, Bible study was a personal, spiritual discipline. ‘Today the text we are to study is the book of our experience,’ he told his monks, ‘you must therefore turn your affections inwards, each one must take note of his own particular awareness of things.’29 During the thirteenth century, the new Order of Preachers, founded by the Spaniard Dominic Guzman (1170–1221), managed to marry the old lectio divina with the rationalism of the schools. The Dominicans were the intellectual heirs of both the philosophers and the scholars of St Victor.30 They did not abandon spiritual exegesis, but gave more serious attention to the literal sense and they were systematic academics, whose aim was to adapt Aristotelian philosophy to Christianity. The fathers had compared allegory to the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ of scripture, but for Aristotle the soul was inseparable from the body; it defined and shaped our physical development and relied on the evidence of the senses. So for the Dominicans, the ‘spirit’ of scripture was not hidden beneath the text but found within the literal and historical meaning. In his Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) reconciled the older spiritual method with the new philosophy. According to Aristotle, God was the ‘First Mover’ who had set the cosmos in motion; Thomas extended this idea, pointing out that God was also the ‘First Author’ of the Bible. The human authors who made the divine Word an earthly reality, were God’s instruments. He had set them in motion too, but they were solely responsible for the style and literary form of the text. Instead of disregarding the plain sense, the exegete could discover a great deal about the divine message by studying the work of these writers in a methodical and scientific way. Like the twelfth-century rationalists, the scholastics, as these schoolmen were called, felt sufficiently confident of their reasoning powers to liberate their theological speculation from exegesis. But Aquinas himself took a more conservative position. God was not like a human author, who could merely convey his message in words. God also had the power to orchestrate historical events in order to reveal the truths of salvation. The literal sense of the ‘Old Testament’ could be found in the words used by the human authors, but its spiritual meaning could be discerned in the events of the Exodus and the institution of the Paschal Lamb, which God had used to prefigure the redemptive work of Christ.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Reese would be slicing peaches. Daddy Glen would be out of the way, off working on the lawn mower. I swatted at mosquitoes and hoped my face wasn’t sunburning. I was tired of Shannon, tired of her mama’s endless simpering endearments, tired of her daddy’s smug contempt, and even more tired of my own jealousy. I stopped. The music coming through the cottonwoods was gospel. Gut-shaking, deep-bellied, powerful voices rolled through the dried leaves and hot air. This was the real stuff. I could feel the whiskey edge, the grief and holding on, the dark night terror and determination of real gospel. “My God,” I breathed, and it was the best “My God” I’d ever put out, a long, scared whisper that meant I just might start to believe He hid in cottonwoods. There was a church there, clapboard walls standing on cement blocks and no pretense of stained-glass windows. Just yellow glass reflecting back sunlight, all the windows open to let in the breeze and let out that music. Amazing grace…how sweet the sound…that saved a wretch like me …A woman’s voice rose and rolled over the deeper men’s voices, rolled out so strong it seemed to rustle the leaves on the cottonwood trees. Amen . Lord . “Sweet Jesus, she can sing.” Shannon ignored me and kept pulling up wildflowers. “You hear that? We got to tell your daddy.” Shannon turned and stared at me with a peculiar angry expression. “He don’t handle colored. An’t no money in handling colored.” At that I froze, realizing that such a church off such a dirt road had to be just that—a colored church. And I knew what that meant. Of course I did. Still I heard myself whisper, “That an’t one good voice. That’s a churchful.” “It’s colored. It’s niggers.” Shannon’s voice was as loud as I’d ever heard it, and shrill with indignation. “My daddy don’t handle niggers.” She threw wildflowers at me and stamped her foot. “And you made me say that. Mama always said a good Christian don’t use the word ‘nigger.’ Jesus be my witness, I wouldn’t have said it if you hadn’t made me.” “You crazy. You just plain crazy.” My voice was shaking. The way Shannon said “nigger” tore at me, the tone pitched exactly like the echoing sound of Aunt Madeline sneering “trash” when she thought I wasn’t close enough to hear. I wondered what Shannon heard in my voice that made her as angry as I was. Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the shame we both were feeling, or maybe it was simply that Shannon Pearl and I were righteously tired of each other. Shannon threw another handful of flowers at me. “I’m crazy? Me? What do you think you are?

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  35 He wrote an influential commentary on the Pentateuch, which rigorously elucidated its plain meaning, but in the course of his study he had encountered a numinous significance that entirely transcended the literal sense. In the late thirteenth century, a small group of mystics in Castile took this further. Their study of scripture had not merely introduced them to a deeper level of the text but to the inner life of God. They called their esoteric discipline kaballah (‘inherited tradition’), because it had passed from teacher to pupil. Unlike Nahmanides, these kabbalists – Abraham Abulafia, Moses de Leon, Isaac de Latif and Joseph Gikatilla – had no expertise in Talmud but they had all been interested in philosophy before deciding that its attenuated God was empty of religious content. 36 Instead, they explored a hermeneutic method, which they may have learned from their Christian neighbours. Their mystical midrash was based on the Talmudic story of the four sages who entered the ‘orchard’ (pardes). 37 Because R. Akiba alone had survived this perilous spiritual experiment, the kabbalists claimed that their exegesis, which they called pardes, derived from him and was the only safe form of mysticism. 38 They found that their method of studying Torah carried them daily to ‘paradise’. 39 PaRDeS was an anagram for the four senses of scripture: peshat, the literal sense; remez, allegory; darash, the moral, homiletic sense; and sod, the mystical culmination of Torah study. Pardes was a rite of passage which began with peshat and rose to the ineffable heights of sod. As the original Pardes story made clear, this journey was not for everybody but only for a properly initiated elite. The first three forms of midrash – pardes, remez and darash – had all been used by Philo, the rabbis and the philosophers, so the kabbalists implied that their new spirituality was in line with tradition, while at the same time suggesting that their own speciality – sod – was its fulfilment. Their experience probably seemed so self-evidently Jewish that they may have been entirely unaware of any conflict with the mainstream. 40 The kabbalists created a powerful synthesis. 41 They revived the mythical element in ancient Israelite tradition, which the rabbis and the philosophers had downplayed or tried to eradicate. They were also inspired by the Gnostic tradition, which had surfaced again in various mystical movements in the Muslim world with which they were probably familiar. Finally, the kabbalists drew upon the ten emanations envisaged by the philosophers in which every element in the chain of being was connected. Revelation no longer had to bridge an ontological abyss, but occurred continuously within each individual, and creation had not happened once in the distant past but was a timeless event in which we could all participate.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Its ‘bible’ was the Zohar, ‘The Book of Splendour’, which was probably the work of Moses of Leon, but took the form of a second-century novel about the mystical revolutionary R. Simeon ben Yohai, who wandered around Palestine, meeting with his companions to discuss the Torah, which, as a result of their exegesis ‘opened’ directly on to the divine world. By studying scripture, the kabbalist descended into the text and into himself, layer by layer, and found that he was at the same time ascending to the source of all being. The kabbalists agreed with the philosophers that words could not convey the incomprehensible transcendence of God, but believed that even though God could not be known, he could be experienced in the symbols of scripture. They were convinced that God had left hints about his inner life in the biblical text. In their mystical exegesis, kabbalists built on these, creating mythical stories and dramas which broke the peshat text open. Their mystical interpretation found an esoteric meaning in every single verse of scripture that described the mysteries of the divine being. The kabbalists called the innermost essence of God En Sof (‘without end’). En Sof was incomprehensible and was not even mentioned in the Bible or the Talmud. It was not a personality, so it was more accurate to call En Sof ‘it’ rather than ‘he’. But the incomprehensible En Sof had revealed itself to humanity at the same time as it had created the world. It had emerged from its impenetrable concealment like a massive tree sprouting a trunk, branches and leaves. The divine life spread in ever wider spheres until it filled everything that is, while En Sof itself remained hidden. It was the root of the tree, source of its stability and vitality but forever invisible. What the philosophers called God’s attributes – his Power, Wisdom, Beauty and Intelligence – thus became manifest, but the kabbalists transformed these abstract qualities into dynamic potencies. Like the philosophers’ ten emanations, they revealed aspects of the unfathomable En Sof and became more concrete and more comprehensible as they approached the material world. The kabbalists called these ten potencies, the inner dimensions of the divine psyche, sefiroth (‘numerations’). Each sefirah had its own symbolic name and represented a stage in En Sof’s unfolding revelation, but they were not ‘segments’ of God but together formed one great Name not known to human beings. Each sefirah encapsulated the entire mystery of God under a particular heading. The kabbalists interpreted the first chapter of Genesis as a parable of the emergence of the sefiroth.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  It would soon be almost impossible for an expert in one field to be truly competent in another. The rationality of the philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment encouraged an analytic mode of thought: instead of trying to see things whole, people were learning to dissect a complex reality and study its component parts. All this would have a profound effect on the way they read the Bible. In his seminal treatise, the Advancement of Learning (1605), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), counsellor to King James I of England, was one of the first to argue that even the most sacred doctrines must be subjected to the stringent methods of empirical science. If these beliefs contradicted the evidence of our senses, they had to go. Bacon was enthralled by science, convinced that it would save the world and inaugurate the millennial kingdom foretold by the prophets. Its progress must not, therefore, be impeded by timorous, simple-minded clergymen. But Bacon was convinced that there could be no conflict between science and religion, since all truth was one. Bacon’s view of science was, however, different from our own. For Bacon, the scientific method consisted of assembling proven facts; he did not appreciate the importance of guesswork and hypothesis in scientific research. The only information upon which we could rely came from our five senses; anything that could not be demonstrated empirically – philosophy, metaphysics, theology, art, mysticism and mythology – was irrelevant. His definition of truth would become extremely influential, not least among the more conservative champions of the Bible. The new humanism was increasingly antagonistic to religion. The French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) maintained that there was no need for revealed scripture, since reason provided us with ample information about God. The British mathematician Isaac Newton (1642–1727) scarcely mentioned the Bible in his copious writings, because he derived his knowledge of God from an intensive study of the universe. Science would soon clear up the irrational ‘mysteries’ of traditional faith. The new religion of Deism, espoused by John Locke (1632–1704), one of the founders of the Enlightenment, was rooted in reason alone. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was convinced that a divinely revealed Bible violated the autonomy and freedom of the human being. Some thinkers went further. The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76) argued that there was no reason to believe that anything lay beyond the experience of our senses.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1164), one of the great poets and philosophers of Spain, was another medieval forerunner of modern historical criticism.33 Exegesis must give priority to the literal sense; while legend (aggadah) had spiritual value, it must not be confused with fact. He found discrepancies in the biblical text: Isaiah of Jerusalem could not have composed the second half of the book attributed to him because it referred to events that occurred long after his death. He also cautiously and elliptically hinted that Moses was not the author of the entire Pentateuch: he could not, for example, have described his own death and since Moses never entered the Promised Land, how could he have written the opening verses of Deuteronomy, which positioned the site of his final address ‘on the other side of the Jordan river’.34 This must have been written by somebody who lived in the land of Israel after its conquest by Joshua. Philosophical rationalism inspired a mystical backlash in Spain and Provence. Nahmanides (1194–1270), an outstanding Talmudist and an influential member of the Jewish community in Castile, believed that Maimonides’s rationalistic exegesis did not do justice to the Torah.35 He wrote an influential commentary on the Pentateuch, which rigorously elucidated its plain meaning, but in the course of his study he had encountered a numinous significance that entirely transcended the literal sense. In the late thirteenth century, a small group of mystics in Castile took this further. Their study of scripture had not merely introduced them to a deeper level of the text but to the inner life of God. They called their esoteric discipline kaballah (‘inherited tradition’), because it had passed from teacher to pupil. Unlike Nahmanides, these kabbalists – Abraham Abulafia, Moses de Leon, Isaac de Latif and Joseph Gikatilla – had no expertise in Talmud but they had all been interested in philosophy before deciding that its attenuated God was empty of religious content.36 Instead, they explored a hermeneutic method, which they may have learned from their Christian neighbours.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Jews and Christians treat their scriptures with ceremonial reverence. The Torah scroll is the most sacred object in the synagogue; encased in a precious covering, housed in an ‘ark’, it is revealed at the climax of the liturgy when the scroll is conveyed formally around the congregation, who touch it with the tassels of their prayer shawls. Some Jews even dance with the scroll, embracing it like a beloved object. Catholics also carry the Bible in procession, douse it with incense, and stand up when it is recited, making the sign of the cross on forehead, lips and heart. In Protestant communities, the Bible reading is the high point of the service. But even more important were the spiritual disciplines that involved diet, posture and exercises in concentration, which, from a very early date, helped Jews and Christians to peruse the Bible in a different frame of mind. They were thus able to read between the lines and find something new, because the Bible always meant more than it said. From the very beginning, the Bible had no single message. When the editors fixed the canons of both the Jewish and Christian testaments, they included competing visions and placed them, without comment, side by side. From the first, biblical authors felt free to revise the texts they had inherited and give them entirely different meaning. Later exegetes held up the Bible as a template for the problems of their time. Sometimes they allowed it to shape their world-view but they also felt free to change it and make it speak to contemporary conditions. They were not usually interested in discovering the original meaning of a biblical passage. The Bible ‘proved’ that it was holy because people continually discovered fresh ways to interpret it and found that this difficult, ancient set of documents cast light on situations that their authors could never have imagined. Revelation was an ongoing process; it had not been confined to a distant theophany on Mount Sinai; exegetes continued to make the Word of God audible in each generation. Some of the most important biblical authorities insisted that charity must be the guiding principle of exegesis: any interpretation that spread hatred or disdain was illegitimate. All the world faiths claim that compassion is not only the prime virtue and the test of true religiosity but that it actually introduces us to Nirvana, God or the Dao. But sadly the biography of the Bible represents the failures as well as the triumphs of the religious quest. The biblical authors and their interpreters have all too often succumbed to the violence, unkindness and exclusivity that is rife in their societies.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Philo also refined the biblical conception of God, which could seem hopelessly anthropomorphic to a Platonist. ‘The apprehension of me is something more than human nature, yea, more even than the whole heaven and universe, will be able to contain,’ he made God tell Moses. 61 Philo made the enormously important distinction between God’s ousia, his essence, which was entirely incomprehensible to human beings, and his activities (energeiaei) and powers (dynameis) that we can apprehend in the world. There was nothing about God’s ousia in the scripture; we only read about his powers, one of which was the Word or Logos of God, the rational design that structures the universe. 62 Like Ben Sirah, Philo believed that when we caught a glimpse of the Logos in creation and the Torah, we were taken beyond the reach of discursive reason to a rapturous recognition that God was ‘higher than a way of thinking, more precious than anything that is merely thought’. 63 It was, Philo argued, foolish to read the first chapter of Genesis literally and to imagine that the world had been created in six days. The number ‘six’ was a symbol of perfection. He noticed that there were two quite different creation stories in Genesis, and decided that P’s account in Chapter One described the creation of the Logos, the masterplan of the universe that was God’s ‘first born’, 64 and that J’s more earthy account in Chapter Two symbolized the fashioning of the material universe by the demiourgos, the divine ‘craftsman’ in Plato’s Timaeus, who had arranged the raw materials of the universe to establish an ordered cosmos. Philo’s exegesis was not simply a clever manipulation of names and numbers but a spiritual practice. Like any Platonist, he experienced knowledge as remembrance, as known to him already at some profound level of his being. As he delved beneath the literal meaning of a biblical narrative and uncovered its deep philosophical principle, he experienced a shock of recognition. The story became suddenly fused with a truth that was a part of himself. Sometimes he struggled grimly with his books and seemed to make no progress, but then, almost without warning, he experienced rapture, like a priest in one of the ecstatic mystery cults: I . . . have suddenly become full, the ideas descending like snow, so that under the impact of divine possession, I have been filled with Corybantic frenzy and become ignorant of everything, place, people, past, present, myself, what was said and what was written.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Zhuangzi told another story about Confucius, who was traveling with his disciples through a forest and met a hunchback who was trapping cicadas with a sticky pole. To Confucius’s astonishment, the hunchback never missed a single one. How did he manage it? He had clearly so perfected his powers of concentration that he had lost himself in his task, and achieved an ekstasis, a self-forgetfulness that brought him into perfect harmony with the Way. “Do you have the Way?” Confucius asked. “Indeed I have!” replied the hunchback. He had no idea how he did it! But he had practiced for months and could now bring himself into a state in which he was wholly focused on catching cicadas: “never tiring, never leaning, never being aware of any of the vast number of living beings, except cicadas. Following this method, how could I fail?” He had left his conscious self behind and let the qi take over, Confucius explained to his disciples: “He keeps his will undivided and his spirit energized,” so that his hands seemed to move by themselves. Conscious deliberate planning would be distracting and counterproductive. The hunchback reminded Zhuangzi of the carpenter Bian, who explained: “When I work on a wheel, if I hit it too softly, pleasant as this is, it doesn’t make for a good wheel. If I hit furiously, I get tired, and the thing doesn’t work! So, not too soft, not too vigorous. I grasp it in my hand and hold it in my heart. I cannot express this by word of mouth, I just know it. I cannot teach this to my son, nor can my son learn it from me.”33 In the same way, a sage who had learned not to analyze, make distinctions, and weigh alternatives had left the “ego principle” behind, did what came naturally, and became one with the deepest and most divine rhythm of the universe.

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

  And yet this testimony, if not true, must be downright blasphemy or madness. The former hypothesis cannot stand a moment before the moral purity and dignity of Jesus, revealed in his every word and work, and acknowledged by universal consent. Self-deception in a matter so momentous, and with an intellect in all respects so clear and so sound, is equally out of the question. How could He be an enthusiast or a madman who never lost the even balance of his mind, who sailed serenely over all the troubles and persecutions, as the sun above the clouds, who always returned the wisest answer to tempting questions, who calmly and deliberately predicted his death on the cross, his resurrection on the third day, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the founding of his Church, the destruction of Jerusalem—predictions which have been literally fulfilled? A character so original, so complete, so uniformly consistent, so perfect, so human and yet so high above all human greatness, can be neither a fraud nor a fiction. The poet, as has been well said, would in this case be greater than the hero. It would take more than a Jesus to invent a Jesus. We are shut up then to the recognition of the divinity of Christ; and reason itself must bow in silent awe before the tremendous word: "I and the Father are one!" and respond with skeptical Thomas: "My Lord and my God!" This conclusion is confirmed by the effects of the manifestation of Jesus, which far transcend all merely human capacity and power. The history of Christianity, with its countless fruits of a higher and purer life of truth and love than was ever known before or is now known outside of its influence, is a continuous commentary on the life of Christ, and testifies on every page to the inspiration of his holy example. His power is felt on every Lord’s Day from ten thousand pulpits, in the palaces of kings and the huts of beggars, in universities and colleges, in every school where the sermon on the Mount is read, in prisons, in almshouses, in orphan asylums, as well as in happy homes, in learned works and simple tracts in endless succession. If this history of ours has any value at all, it is a new evidence that Christ is the light and life of a fallen world.

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

  On the great festivals he visited from his twelfth year the capital of the nation where the Jewish religion unfolded all its splendor and attraction. Large caravans with trains of camels and asses loaded with provisions and rich offerings to the temple, were set in motion from the North and the South, the East and the West for the holy city, "the joy of the whole earth;" and these yearly pilgrimages, singing the beautiful Pilgrim Psalms (Ps, 120 to 134), contributed immensely to the preservation and promotion of the common faith, as the Moslem pilgrimages to Mecca keep up the life of Islam. We may greatly reduce the enormous figures of Josephus, who on one single Passover reckoned the number of strangers and residents in Jerusalem at 2,700,000 and the number of slaughtered lambs at 256,500, but there still remains the fact of the vast extent and solemnity of the occasion. Even now in her decay, Jerusalem (like other Oriental cities) presents a striking picturesque appearance at Easter, when Christian pilgrims from the far West mingle with the many-colored Arabs, Turks, Greeks, Latins, Spanish and Polish Jews, and crowd to suffocation the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. How much more grand and dazzling must this cosmopolitan spectacle have been when the priests (whose number Josephus estimates at 20,000) with the broidered tunic, the fine linen girdle, the showy turban, the high priests with the ephod of blue and purple and scarlet, the breastplate and the mitre, the Levites with their pointed caps, the Pharisees with their broad phylacteries and fringes, the Essenes in white dresses and with prophetic mien, Roman soldiers with proud bearing, Herodian courtiers in oriental pomposity, contrasted with beggars and cripples in rags, when pilgrims innumerable, Jews and proselytes from all parts of the empire, "Parthians and Medes and Elamites and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, in Judaea and Cappadocia, in Pontus and Asia, in Phrygia and Pamphylia, in Egypt and parts of Libya about Cyrene, and sojourners from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans, and Arabians,"196 all wearing their national costume and speaking a Babel of tongues, surged through the streets, and pressed up to Mount Moriah where "the glorious temple rear’d her pile, far off appearing like a mount of alabaster, topp’d with golden spires" and where on the fourteenth day of the first month columns of sacrificial smoke arose from tens of thousands of paschal lambs, in historical commemoration of the great deliverance from the land of bondage, and in typical prefiguration of the still greater redemption from the slavery of sin and death.197

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  CHRYSOSTOM. For as when a man gazes upon the beauty of the heavens, he says, Glory be thee, O God; so likewise when He beholds a man’s virtuous actions, seeing that the virtue of man glorifies God much more than the heavens. PSEUDO-AUGUSTINE. (ubi sup.) Or it is said, Hallowed be thy name; that is, let Thy holiness be known to all the world, and let it worthily praise Thee. For praise becometh the upright, (Ps. 33.) and therefore He bids them pray for the cleansing of the whole world. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. Since among those to whom the faith has not yet come, the name of God is still despised. But when the rays of truth shall have shined upon them, they will confess the Holy of Holies. (Dan. 9:24.) TITUS BOSTRENSIS. (ubi sup.) And because in the name of Jesus is the glory of God the Father, the name of the Father will be hallowed whenever Christ shall be known. ORIGEN. Or, because the name of God is given by idolaters, and those who are in error, to idols and creatures, it has not as yet been so made holy, as to be separated from those things from which it ought to be. He teaches us therefore to pray that the name of God may be appropriated to the only true God; to whom alone belongs what follows, Thy kingdom come, to the end that may be put down all the rule, authority, and power, and kingdom of the world, together with sin which reigns in our mortal bodies. GREGORY OF NYSSA. (ubi sup.) We beseech also to be delivered by the Lord from corruption, to be taken out of death. Or, according to some, Thy kingdom come, that is, May Thy Holy Spirit come upon us to purify us. PSEUDO-AUGUSTINE. (ubi sup.) For then cometh the kingdom of God, when we have obtained His grace. For He Himself says, The kingdom of God is within you. (Luke 17:21.) CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. Or they who say this seem to wish to have the Saviour of all again illuminating the world. But He has commanded us to desire in prayer that truly awful time, in order that men might know that it behoves them to live not in sloth and backwardness, lest that time bring upon them the fiery punishment, but rather honestly and according to His will, that that time may weave crowns for them. Hence it follows, according to Matthew,a Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth. CHRYSOSTOM. As if He says, Enable us, O Lord, to follow the heavenly life, that whatever Thou willest, we may will also.

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

  The mysterious gift of tongues, or glossolalia, appears here for the first time, but became, with other extraordinary gifts of the Spirit, a frequent phenomenon in the apostolic churches, especially at Corinth, and is fully described by Paul. The distribution of the flaming tongues to each of the disciples caused the speaking with tongues. A new experience expresses itself always in appropriate language. The supernatural experience of the disciples broke through the confines of ordinary speech and burst out in ecstatic language of praise and thanksgiving to God for the great works he did among them.269 It was the Spirit himself who gave them utterance and played on their tongues, as on new tuned harps, unearthly melodies of praise. The glossolalia was here, as in all cases where it is mentioned, an act of worship and adoration, not an act of teaching and instruction, which followed afterwards in the sermon of Peter. It was the first Te Deum of the new-born church. It expressed itself in unusual, poetic, dithyrambic style and with a peculiar musical intonation. It was intelligible only to those who were in sympathy with the speaker; while unbelievers scoffingly ascribed it to madness or excess of wine. Nevertheless it served as a significant sign to all and arrested their attention to the presence of a supernatural power.270 So far we may say that the Pentecostal glossolalia was the same as that in the household of Cornelius in Caesarea after his conversion, which may be called a Gentile Pentecost,271 as that of the twelve disciples of John the Baptist at Ephesus, where it appears in connection with prophesying,272 and as that in the Christian congregation at Corinth.273 But at its first appearance the speaking with tongues differed in its effect upon the hearers by coming home to them at once in their own mother-tongues; while in Corinth it required an interpretation to be understood. The foreign spectators, at least a number of them, believed that the unlettered Galilaeans spoke intelligibly in the different dialects represented on the occasion.274 We must therefore suppose either that the speakers themselves, were endowed, at least temporarily, and for the particular purpose of proving their divine mission, with the gift of foreign languages not learned by them before, or that the Holy Spirit who distributed the tongues acted also as interpreter of the tongues, and applied the utterances of the speakers to the susceptible among the hearers.

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

  This is the natural view of the case, and the same concession is now made by all the champions of the Johannean authorship who do not hold to a magical inspiration theory and turn the sacred writers into unthinking machines, contrary to their own express statements, as in the Preface of Luke. But we deny that this concession involves any sacrifice of the truth of history or of any lineament from the physiognomy of Christ. The difficulty here presented is usually overstated by the critics, and becomes less and less, the higher we rise in our estimation of Christ, and the closer we examine the differences in their proper connection. The following reflections will aid the student: (1) In the first place we must remember the marvellous heighth and depth and breadth of Christ’s intellect as it appears in the Synoptists as well as in John. He commanded the whole domain of religious and moral truth; he spake as never man spake, and the people were astonished at his teaching (Matt. 7:28, 29; Mark 1:22; 6:2; Luke 4:32; John 7:46). He addressed not only his own generation, but through it all ages and classes of men. No wonder that his hearers often misunderstood him. The Synoptists give examples of such misunderstanding as well as John (comp. Mark 8:16). But who will set limits to his power and paedagogic wisdom in the matter and form of his teaching? Must he not necessarily have varied his style when he addressed the common people in Galilee, as in the Synoptists, and the educated, proud, hierarchy of Jerusalem, as in John? Or when he spoke on the mountain, inviting the multitude to the Messianic Kingdom at the opening of his ministry, and when he took farewell from his disciples in the chamber, in view of the great sacrifice? Socrates appears very different in Xenophon and in Plato, yet we can see him in both. But here is a far greater than Socrates.1055

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

  The conquest of Palestine involved the destruction of the Jewish commonwealth. Vespasian retained the land as his private property or distributed it among his veterans. The people were by the five years’ war reduced to extreme poverty, and left without a magistrate (in the Jewish sense), without a temple, without a country. The renewal of the revolt under the false Messiah, Bar-Cocheba, led only to a still more complete destruction of Jerusalem and devastation of Palestine by the army of Hadrian (132–135). But the Jews still had the law and the prophets and the sacred traditions, to which they cling to this day with indestructible tenacity and with the hope of a great future. Scattered over the earth, at home everywhere and nowhere; refusing to mingle their blood with any other race, dwelling in distinct communities, marked as a peculiar people in every feature of the countenance, in every rite of religion; patient, sober, and industrious; successful in every enterprise, prosperous in spite of oppression, ridiculed yet feared, robbed yet wealthy, massacred yet springing up again, they have outlived the persecution of centuries and are likely to continue to live to the end of time: the object of the mingled contempt, admiration, and wonder of the world. § 39. Effects of the Destruction of Jerusalem on the Christian Church. The Christians of Jerusalem, remembering the Lord’s admonition, forsook the doomed city in good time and fled to the town of Pella in the Decapolis, beyond the Jordan, in the north of Peraea, where king Herod Agrippa II., before whom Paul once stood, opened to them a safe asylum. An old tradition says that a divine voice or angel revealed to their leaders the duty of flight.555 There, in the midst of a population chiefly Gentile, the church of the circumcision was reconstructed. Unfortunately, its history is hidden from us. But it never recovered its former importance. When Jerusalem was rebuilt as a Christian city, its bishop was raised to the dignity of one of the four patriarchs of the East, but it was a patriarchate of honor, not of power, and sank to a mere shadow after the Mohammedan invasion.

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  Harry made a little fatalistic laugh. “They’re pumping so much porn in here that it’s just feeding and feeding, and it grows a new appendage every few days. It’s got about ten arms. One’s really long, but a lot of them are smaller.” “I can see that it’s not pretty,” Rhumpa said. “But is it good or is it evil?” “Nobody knows,” said Harry. “Nobody knows its language.” “I’m going to try to talk to it,” said Rhumpa. She put her hands to her mouth. “Hey, longdog!” she called with loud authority. “Jizm! Weeperhole!” The pornhand paused for a moment, ceased groping, then subsided under the vermilion waves of mingling smut imagery. “You really know languages,” said Harry, impressed. Rhumpa knew she could talk to the pornmonster given enough time and quiet. “I can’t engage with it here,” she said. “Do you have a side chamber where we can go?” “Sure,” said Harry. “The sluice gate has an overflow tank, and sometimes the monster goes in there to rest.” Suddenly, several fountains of what looked like sperm, but orchid and navel orange in color, jetted up from the froth. Rhumpa looked at Harry questioningly. “It masturbates constantly,” Harry said. “You’ll have to put on a wetsuit. ” Rhumpa nodded. They went to the room off the overflow tank. Rhumpa shucked off her shirt and pants and stepped into the suit. “Be careful,” said Harry. “Our containment system is only as good as its weakest link.” “Do you think it can feel love?” asked Rhumpa. “I doubt it,” said Harry. “I was reading Hawking’s book about the first seconds of the universe. I think our monster is as close as I’ll ever come to knowing what that’s like.” Harry hesitated. He looked a little green around the gills. “I’m going to have to leave you on your own here. I’ll be watching on the monitor. Men can’t take pornfumes for very long without fainting. We need breathing equipment. Women seem more immune.” Harry withdrew. Rhumpa walked out onto the tiled edge of the ancillary holding tank. She called out, “Hey, pornmonster! Cuntcall! Here it is!” She cupped her crotch through the wetsuit. There was a burbling and a different feeling in the air. Rhumpa sensed that the pornmonster had slid into the ancillary tank. She waited. “If you’re here,” she called, nervously, “let me see your biggest hand.” There was a powerful odor of sexual fluids, and a huge mottled hand appeared.