Awe

Passages

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

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• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  With the crowd now roaring, frothing, shrieking, the two men entered the final lap. It felt like a boxing match. It felt like a joust. It felt like a bullfight, and we were down to that moment of truth—death hanging in the air. Pre reached down, found another level—we saw him do it. He opened up a yard lead, then two, then five. We saw Young grimacing and we knew that he could not, would not, catch Pre. I told myself, Don’t forget this. Do not forget. I told myself there was much to be learned from such a display of passion, whether you were running a mile or a company. As they crossed the tape we all looked up at the clock and saw that both men had broken the American record. Pre had broken it by a shade more. But he wasn’t done. He spotted someone waving a STOP PRE T-shirt and he went over and snatched it and whipped it in circles above his head, like a scalp. What followed was one of the greatest ovations I’ve ever heard, and I’ve spent my life in stadiums. I’d never witnessed anything quite like that race. And yet I didn’t just witness it. I took part in it. Days later I felt sore in my hams and quads. This, I decided, this is what sports are, what they can do. Like books, sports give people a sense of having lived other lives, of taking part in other people’s victories. And defeats. When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about. Walking back down Agate Street I knew that race was part of me, would forever be part of me, and I vowed it would also be part of Blue Ribbon. In our coming battles, with Onitsuka, with whomever, we’d be like Pre. We’d compete as if our lives depended on it. Because they did. NEXT, WITH SAUCER eyes, we looked to the Olympics. Not only was our man Bowerman going to be the head coach of the track team, but our homeboy Pre was going to be the star. After his performance at the trials? Who could doubt it? Certainly not Pre. “Sure there will be a lot of pressure,” he told Sports Illustrated. “And a lot of us will be facing more experienced competitors, and maybe we don’t have any right to win. But all I know is if I go out and bust my gut until I black out and somebody still beats me, and if I have made that guy reach down and use everything he has and then more, why then it just proves that on that day he’s a better man than I.” Right before Pre and Bowerman left for Germany, I filed for a patent on Bowerman’s waffle shoe. Application no.

• From Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1749)

  Seizing now one of the rods, I stood over him, and according to his direction, gave him in one breath, ten lashes with much good-will, and the utmost nerve and vigour of arm that I could put to them, so as to make those fleshy orbs quiver again under them; whilst he himself seemed no more concerned, or to mind them, than a lobster would a flea-bite. In the mean time, I view intently the effect of them, which to me at last appeared surprisingly cruel: every lash had skimmed the surface of those white cliffs, which they deeply reddened, and lapping round the side of the furthermost from me, cut specially, into the dimple of it, such livid weals, as the blood either spun out from, or stood in large drops on; and, from some of the cuts, I picked out even the splinters of the rod that had stuck in the skin. Nor was this raw work to be wondered at, considering the greenness of the twigs and the severity of the infliction, whilst the whole surface of the skin was so smooth-stretched over the hard and firm pulp of flesh that filled it, as to yield no play, or elusive swagging under the stroke: which thereby took place the more plump, and cut into the quick.

• From Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1749)

  Her legs still kept the ground; and now, with the tenderest attention not to shock or alarm her too suddenly, he, by degrees, rather stole than rolled up her petticoats; at which, as if a signal had been given, Louisa and Emily took hold of her legs, in pure wantonness, and, in ease to her, kept them stretched wide abroad. Then lay exposed, or, to speak more properly, displayed the greatest parade in nature of female charms. The whole company, who, except myself, had often seen them, seemed as much dazzled, surprised and delighted, as any one could be who had now beheld them for the first time. Beauties so excessive could not but enjoy the privileges of eternal novelty. Her thighs were so exquisitely fashioned, that either more in, or more out of flesh than they were, they would have declined from that point of perfection they presented. But what infinitely enriched and adorned them, was the sweet intersection formed, where they met, at the bottom of the smoothest, roundest, whitest belly, by that central furrow which nature had sunk there, between the soft relievo of two pouting ridges, and which, in this girl, was in perfect symmetry of delicacy and miniature with the rest of her frame. No! nothing in nature could be of a beautifuller cut; then, the dark umbrage of the downy spring moss that over-arched it, bestowed, on the luxury of the landscape, a touching warmth, a tender finishing, beyond the expression of words, or even the paint of thought.

• From Educated (2018)

  Mother was next to him. The rest of us were strewn across the shaggy brown carpet. “Butter and honey shall he eat,” Dad droned, low and monotone, weary from a long day hauling scrap. “That he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good.” There was a heavy pause. We sat quietly. My father was not a tall man but he was able to command a room. He had a presence about him, the solemnity of an oracle. His hands were thick and leathery—the hands of a man who’d been hard at work all his life—and they grasped the Bible firmly. He read the passage aloud a second time, then a third, then a fourth. With each repetition the pitch of his voice climbed higher. His eyes, which moments before had been swollen with fatigue, were now wide and alert. There was a divine doctrine here, he said. He would inquire of the Lord. The next morning Dad purged our fridge of milk, yogurt and cheese, and that evening when he came home, his truck was loaded with fifty gallons of honey. “Isaiah doesn’t say which is evil, butter or honey,” Dad said, grinning as my brothers lugged the white tubs to the basement. “But if you ask, the Lord will tell you!” When Dad read the verse to his mother, she laughed in his face. “I got some pennies in my purse,” she said. “You better take them. They’ll be all the sense you got.” Grandma had a thin, angular face and an endless store of faux Indian jewelry, all silver and turquoise, which hung in clumps from her spindly neck and fingers. Because she lived down the hill from us, near the highway, we called her Grandma-down-the-hill. This was to distinguish her from our mother’s mother, who we called Grandma-over-in-town because she lived fifteen miles south, in the only town in the county, which had a single stoplight and a grocery store. Dad and his mother got along like two cats with their tails tied together. They could talk for a week and not agree about anything, but they were tethered by their devotion to the mountain. My father’s family had been living at the base of Buck’s Peak for half a century. Grandma’s daughters had married and moved away, but my father stayed, building a shabby yellow house, which he would never quite finish, just up the hill from his mother’s, at the base of the mountain, and plunking a junkyard—one of several—next to her manicured lawn. They argued daily, about the mess from the junkyard but more often about us kids. Grandma thought we should be in school and not, as she put it, “roaming the mountain like savages.” Dad said public school was a ploy by the Government to lead children away from God.

• From The Case for God (2009)

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

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Religion was never supposed to provide answers to questions that lay within the reach of human reason. That was the role of logos . Religion’s task, closely allied to that of art, was to help us to live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there were no easy explanations and problems that we could not solve: mortality, pain, grief, despair, and outrage at the injustice and cruelty of life. Over the centuries people in all cultures discovered that by pushing their reasoning powers to the limit, stretching language to the end of its tether, and living as selflessly and compassionately as possible, they experienced a transcendence that enabled them to affirm their suffering with serenity and courage. Scientific rationality can tell us why we have cancer; it can even cure us of our disease. But it cannot assuage the terror, disappointment, and sorrow that come with the diagnosis, nor can it help us to die well. That is not within its competence. Religion will not work automatically, however; it requires a great deal of effort and cannot succeed if it is facile, false, idolatrous, or self-indulgent. Religion is a practical discipline, and its insights are not derived from abstract speculation but from spiritual exercises and a dedicated lifestyle. Without such practice, it is impossible to understand the truth of its doctrines. This was also true of philosophical rationalism. People did not go to Socrates to learn anything—he always insisted that he had nothing to teach them—but to have a change of mind. Participants in a Socratic dialogue discovered how little they knew and that the meaning of even the simplest proposition eluded them. The shock of ignorance and confusion represented a conversion to the philosophic life, which could not begin until you realized that you knew nothing at all. But even though it removed the last vestiges of the certainty upon which people had hitherto based their lives, the Socratic dialogue was never aggressive; rather, it was conducted with courtesy, gentleness, and consideration. If a dialogue aroused malice or spite, it would fail. There was no question of forcing your interlocutor to accept your point of view: instead, each offered his opinion as a gift to the others and allowed them to alter his own perceptions. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the founders of Western rationalism, saw no opposition between reason and the transcendent. They understood that we feel an imperative need to drive our reasoning powers to the point where they can go no further and segue into a state of unknowing that is not frustrating but a source of astonishment, awe, and contentment. Religion was not an easy matter.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  Paul was claiming that he was empowered by God to do signs, wonders, and mighty works as a verification of his proclamation. This view that miracles accompanied the missionary proclamation of the apostles is found throughout the Book of Acts. The Book of Acts, of course, was written decades after the events that it narrates, and it does, I think, fairly clearly contain some legendary exaggerations about the effect of the Christian mission. In its essentials, though, it agrees in most respects with Paul’s own accounts. The apostles in the Book of Acts proclaim their faith to believers and are said to have done miracles in order to validate their message, and as a result of people seeing these miracles, they convert to faith in Jesus. You see this early in the Book of Acts, in its early chapters. For example Acts, chapter 2, narrates an event that happened 50 days after Jesus’s death, during the day of Pentecost. There are group of followers of Jesus’s who believe that Jesus was raised from the dead; they’re gathered together at one place. We are told there are 120 of these people, and suddenly, something miraculous happens on the day of Pentecost. The spirit comes upon these people. They hear a mighty wind going through where they are, and flames come down from heaven, tons of flames that go up over their heads, and they start speaking languages that they don’t know. All around them are people who are gathered together for this festival of Pentecost, Jews from around the world from different countries, and these people who are the followers of Jesus start speaking to people of different areas, different countries, in their own languages, even though they don’t know these languages. This is a miraculous event, and when people had realized what had happened, they convert to faith in Jesus, because Jesus is the one who has caused this, as the apostle Peter tells them. In chapter 3 of the Book of Acts, Peter and John are going to the Temple of Jerusalem for a time of prayer, and there’s a man there who has been lame for 40 years, since he was born. Peter heals the man of his lameness, and the man leaps up and starts running, jumping, and praising God. People see this, and thousands of people convert when they see this miracle happen. So it goes throughout the Book of Acts. It gets to a point were Peter is so powerful that as he passes by people who are sick, if just his shadow falls on them, they become well. The apostle Paul, who converts later, has miraculous powers, and can raise the dead. At one point, Paul’s handkerchiefs are able to heal anybody who is sick, and anybody who sees this naturally converts.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  belief. Originally the Middle English verb bileven meant “to love; to prize; to hold dear;” and the noun bileve meant “loyalty; trust; commitment; engagement.” It was related to the German liebe (“beloved”) and the Latin libido (“desire.”) In the English versions of the Bible, the translators used these words to render the Greek pistis; pisteuo; and the Latin fides; credo. Thus “belief” became the equivalent of “faith.” But “belief” began to change its meaning during the late seventeenth century. It started to be used of an intellectual assent to a particular proposition, teaching, opinion, or doctrine. 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.

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

  At such times, we feel that we inhabit our humanity more fully than usual and experience an enhancement of being.” To Armstrong, religion is doing, not belief. It’s the effort you put into repeatedly cultivating such peak, unbounded epiphanies that stretch open your heart and mind, and make you more attuned to boundless possibilities. As Armstrong notes, religion isn’t the only path to expanded modes of consciousness. Back in chapter 4 I drew on that age-old metaphor about swinging open the doors of perception, first used by William Blake, and then more than 160 years later by Aldous Huxley. Your own commonplace experiences of positive emotions can open those doors as well, expanding your outlook on life and setting off spiritual experiences. At times that expanded outlook is hardly noticeable at all, whereas at other times it can take you by surprise, like a powerful gust of wind that clears away debris and allows you to see things with fresh eyes. The point I wish to make here is that your experiences of love and connection need not overwhelm you to open your perceptual gates. Scientific evidence now documents that far less intense positive emotional experiences reliably open those same doors and raise spirituality. By regularly engaging in the kinds of formal and informal practices I offer throughout part II of this book, you can learn to infuse your day and your life with more of the expanded and spiritual modes of consciousness of which James, Armstrong, Huxley, and countless others write. Toward this end, consider the spiritual lessons from Buddhism. In his acclaimed 1995 book, Living Buddha, Living Christ, Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote that he resonated with how a Catholic priest once described to him the Holy Spirit as “energy sent by God.” Nhat Hanh shared that this phrasing both pleased him and deepened his conviction that the most reliable way to approach the Christian Trinity was through the doorway of the Holy Spirit. Integrating this with his Buddhist perspective, he likened the Holy Spirit to mindfulness and its fruits: understanding, love, and compassion. When you purposely tune in to the present moment, this view holds, and see and listen deeply in an open, accepting manner, you open a door to divine oneness. As does Armstrong, then, Nhat Hanh sees both Christian and Buddhist spirituality in the doing.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  There were one or two obstacles to be overcome, of course, before I could begin to put my daring plan into practice. Firstly, I must properly reacquaint myself with the city: it took another week of wandering every day about the streets of Farringdon and St Paul’s, before I could accept the jostling and the roars, and the stares of the men, without smarting. Then there was the problem of where - if I really was to stroll about in costume - I should change. I did not want to live as a boy full-time; nor did I want, just yet, to give up my room at Mrs Best’s. I could imagine that lady’s face, however, if I presented myself before her one day in a pair of trousers. She would think that I had lost my mind, entirely; she might call for a doctor or a policeman. She would certainly throw me out - and then I would be homeless again. I didn’t want that, at all. I needed somewhere, away from Smithfield; I needed, in fact, a dressing-room. But so far as I knew, there were no such places for hire. The gay girls of the Haymarket, I believe, transformed themselves in the public lavatories of Piccadilly - put their make-up on at the wash-hand basins, and changed into their gaudy frocks while the latch on the door said Occupied. This seemed to me a sensible scheme - but hardly one that I could copy, since it would blue my project, rather, to be seen emerging from a ladies’ lavatory in a suit of serge and velvet and a boater. It was indeed amidst the gay life of the West End, however, that I at last found the answer to the problem. I had begun to walk, each day, as far as Soho; and I had noticed there the tremendous number of houses bearing signs that advertised Beds Let By The Hour. In my naivety I wondered at first, who would want to sleep there, for an hour? Then, of course, I realised that no one would: the rooms were for the girls to bring their customers to; to lie abed in, certainly - but not to sleep.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  63 It should open doors “to another way of thinking about faith and reason” in order to achieve “a redescription of reason that is more reasonable than the transhistorical Rationality of the Enlightenment.” 64 So how does Caputo see God? Following Derrida, he would describe God as the desire beyond desire. 65 Of its very nature, desire is located in the space between what exists and what does not; it addresses all that we are and are not, everything we know and what we do not know. The question is not “Does God exist?” any more than “Does desire exist?” The question is rather “What do we desire?” Augustine understood this when he asked, “What do I love when I love my God?” and failed to find an answer. Like Denys and Aquinas, Caputo does not see negative theology as a deeper, more authoritative truth. It simply emphasizes unknowing—”in the sense that we really don’t know!” 66 For Caputo, “religious truth is truth without knowledge.” 67 He has adapted Derrida’s différance to create his “theology of the event,” distinguishing between a name , such as “God,” “Justice,” or “Democracy,” and what he calls the event , that which is “astir” in that name, something that is never fully realized. But the “event” within the name inspires us, turns things upside down, making us weep and pray for what is “to come. ” The name is a kind of provisional formulation of an event, a relatively stable, if evolving structure, while the event is ever restless, on the move, seeking new forms to assume, seeking to get expressed in still unexpressed ways. 68 We pray for what is “to come,” not for what already exists. The “event” does not require “belief” in a static, unchanging deity who “exists” but inspires us to make what is “astir” in the name “God”— absolute beauty, peace, justice, and selfless love—a reality in the world. Religion as described by these postmodern philosophers may sound alien to much “modern” religion, but it evokes many of the insights of the past. Both Vattimo and Caputo insist that these are primordial, perennial ideas with a long pedigree. Vattimo’s claim that religion is essentially interpretive recalls the maxim of the rabbis: “What is Torah? It is the interpretation of Torah.” When he affirms the primacy of charity and the communal nature of religious truth, we recall the rabbis’ repeated insistence that “when two or three study Torah together, the Shekhinah is in their midst,” the story of Emmaus, and the communal experience of liturgy. Caputo also sees Anselm’s “ontological proof” as “autodeconstructive”: Whatever it is you say God is, God is more.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  1964 The notice arrived right around Christmas, so I must have driven down to the waterfront warehouse the first week of 1964. I don’t recall exactly. I know it was early morning. I can see myself getting there before the clerks unlocked the doors. I handed them the notice and they went into the back and returned with a large box covered in Japanese writing. I raced home, scurried down to the basement, ripped open the box. Twelve pairs of shoes, creamy white, with blue stripes down the sides. God, they were beautiful. They were more than beautiful. I’d seen nothing in Florence or Paris that surpassed them. I wanted to put them on marble pedestals, or in gilt-edged frames. I held them up to the light, caressed them as sacred objects, the way a writer might treat a new set of notebooks, or a baseball player a rack of bats. Then I sent two pairs to my old track coach at Oregon, Bill Bowerman. I did so without a second thought, since it was Bowerman who’d first made me think, really think, about what people put on their feet. Bowerman was a genius coach, a master motivator, a natural leader of young men, and there was one piece of gear he deemed crucial to their development. Shoes. He was obsessed with how human beings are shod. In the four years I’d run for him at Oregon, Bowerman was constantly sneaking into our lockers and stealing our footwear. He’d spend days tearing them apart, stitching them back up, then hand them back with some minor modification, which made us either run like deer or bleed. Regardless of the results, he never stopped. He was determined to find new ways of bolstering the instep, cushioning the midsole, building out more room for the forefoot. He always had some new design, some new scheme to make our shoes sleeker, softer, lighter. Especially lighter. One ounce sliced off a pair of shoes, he said, is equivalent to 55 pounds over one mile. He wasn’t kidding. His math was solid. You take the average man’s stride of six feet, spread it out over a mile (5,280 feet), you get 880 steps. Remove one ounce from each step—that’s 55 pounds on the button. Lightness, Bowerman believed, directly translated to less burden, which meant more energy, which meant more speed. And speed equaled winning. Bowerman didn’t like to lose. (I got it from him.) Thus lightness was his constant goal. Goal is putting it kindly. In quest of lightness he was willing to try anything. Animal, vegetable, mineral, any material was eligible if it might improve on the standard shoe leather of the day. That sometimes meant kangaroo skin. Other times, cod. You haven’t lived until you’ve competed against the fastest runners in the world wearing shoes made of cod. There were four or five of us on the track team who were Bowerman’s podiatry guinea pigs, but I was his pet project.

• From From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity (2004)

  Scope: The Christian church has been the most powerful religious, political, social, cultural, economic, and intellectual institution in the history of Western civilization, from late antiquity, to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and on into modern times. It continues to assert enormous influence on the history and shape of our culture today as the largest of the world’s religions (with two billion adherents). Yet the Christian movement did not start out as a culturally significant phenomenon; it began in a remote part of the Roman Empire as a small, lower-class group of followers of a Jewish apocalyptic preacher, crucified as an enemy of the state. For more than a century, the Christian church was virtually unknown among the political and cultural leaders of the Western world. How did Christianity grow into such an enormously influential institution from such humble beginnings? That is the overarching question of this course. Following two lectures that introduce the topic, explain the issues that we address, and set the context for the emergence of Christianity among the other (pagan and Jewish) religions of the Roman world, the course divides itself up into six major sections. Section 1 deals with the “Beginnings of Christianity.” There, we will consider the figures and traditions that lie at the foundation of the emerging Christian religion. We will begin by exploring what can be known about the life, teachings, and death of Jesus of Nazareth, the Jewish prophet who became the object of worship for Christians throughout the world, based on a belief in his Resurrection from the dead as a sign of God’s divine favor and of his own unique standing before God. We will then consider the traditions about Jesus that began to circulate after his death, leading to the writing, some decades later, of the Christian Gospels—some of which came to be included in the New Testament. Finally, we will consider the life and teachings of the apostle Paul, who was, beyond doubt, the most important figure for the development of early Christianity apart from Jesus. Section 2 considers “Jewish-Christian Relations.” Christianity began as a sect within Judaism, originally composed of Jewish followers of a Jewish teacher of the Jewish Law; yet within a century, it had become an anti- Jewish religion. How did this happen? In three lectures, we will explore the

• From The Case for God (2009)

  We cannot ask whether there is a God, as if God were simply one example of a species. God is not and cannot be a “sort of thing.” 38 All the “proofs” have achieved is to show us that there is nothing in our experience that can tell us what “God” means. Because of something that we cannot define, there is a universe where there could have been nothing, but we do not know what we have proved the existence of. We have simply demonstrated the existence of a mystery. 39 But that, for Thomas, is precisely what makes the “five ways” good theology. The question “Why something rather than nothing?” is a good one; human beings keep asking it, because it is in our nature to push our minds to an extreme in this way. But the answer—”what everybody calls ‘God’ “—is something that we do not, indeed cannot, know. Thomas shared Augustine’s view of intellectus . In these proofs, we see reason at the end of its tether, asking unanswerable questions and straining toward its “cutting edge,” its divine “spark.” Pushed to the limit, reason turns itself inside out, words no longer make sense, and we are reduced to silence. Even today, when they contemplate the universe, physicists pit their minds against the dark world of uncreated reality that we cannot fathom. This is the unknowable reality that Thomas is asking his readers to confront by pushing their intellects to a point beyond which they cannot go. Thomas would say that we know that we are speaking about “God” when our language stumbles and fails in this way. As a modern theologian has pointed out, “This reduction of talk to silence is what is called ‘theology.’ “ 40 Unknowing was not a source of frustration. As Thomas indicates, people can find joy in this subversion of their reasoning powers. Thomas did not expect his students to “believe” in God; he still uses credere to mean trust or commitment and defines faith as “the capacity of the intellect to recognize (assentire ) the genuineness of the transcendent,” 41 to look beneath the surface of life and apprehend a sacred dimension that is as real as—indeed more real than—anything else in our experience. This “assent” did not mean intellectual submission: the verb assentire also meant “to rejoice in” and was related to assensio (“applause”). 42 Faith was the ability to appreciate and take delight in the nonempirical realities that we glimpse in the world. Like any good premodern theologian, Thomas made it clear that all our language about God can only be analogical, because our words refer to limited, finite categories.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  This was a different kind of poverty, more willful, somehow, more preventable. I saw three children playing in the street. I walked over, took their picture. Two boys and a girl, eight years old. The girl—red wool hat, pink coat—smiled directly at me. Will I ever forget her? Or her shoes? They were made of cardboard. I went to Vienna, that momentous, coffee-scented crossroads, where Stalin and Trotsky and Tito and Hitler and Jung and Freud all lived, at the same historical moment, and all loitered in the same steamy cafés, plotting how to save (or end) the world. I walked the cobblestones Mozart walked, crossed his graceful Danube on the most beautiful stone bridge I ever saw, stopped before the towering spires of St. Stephen’s Church, where Beethoven discovered he was deaf. He looked up, saw birds fluttering from the bell tower, and to his horror... he did not hear the bells.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  It was far more than the faculty of recollection but comprised the whole mind, conscious and unconscious, and was the source of our mental life in the same way as the Father was the ground of being. When he contemplated memoria , Augustine was filled with awe: “It is something to be shuddered at, my God, a deep and endless multiplicity.” What, then, am I, my God? What manner of creature am I? A life unconstant, manifold and utterly unmeasured. In the countless fields and grots and caverns of my memory, full beyond counting with countless kinds of things … I range, flitting this way and that. I go as deep in as I can, and nowhere is there an end; such is the force of memory. Such is the force of life in a man that lives this mortal life! 55 Memory gave us intimations of infinity, but to encounter the divine, it had to strain beyond itself to the intellectus , the place where the soul could encounter God in deepest intimacy. When Augustine spoke of “intellect,” he meant something different from a modern intellectual. Intellectus was not simply the faculty of logic, calculation, and argument. 56 In the ancient world, people saw “reason” as a hinterland, bounded on the one hand by our powers of discursive rationality (ratio ) and on the other by intellectus , a kind of pure intelligence, which in India was called buddhi . So intellect was higher than reason, but without it we would not be able to reason at all. Left to itself, the human mind was incapable of looking dispassionately at the mutable beings of our world and making any kind of valid judgment about them, because it was itself fraught with impermanence and change. Augustine had only been able to recognize the inconstancy and impermanence of the world that had so troubled him before his conversion, because the Platonists told him that he had within him an innate standard of stability, a light within, “unchangeable and true that was above my changeable mind.” 57 There was, therefore, a realm in the psyche where the mind was able to reach beyond itself. That was the intellect, the mind’s acies , its “cutting edge,” 58 and scintilla (“spark”). 59 So when Augustine looked into the depths of his mind, he saw that it was modeled on the Trinity, the archetype of all being. In the human mind, memory generates the intellect, as the Father begets a Word that expresses the Father’s essential nature. In the human mind, the intellect seeks out and loves the self it finds in the caverns of the memory that generated it, just as memory seeks out and loves the self-knowledge encapsulated in the intellect.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  But the chief inspiration behind their creation myth was their pioneering town planning. 43 The first cities had been established in Sumer in the Fertile Crescent in about 3500 BCE; it was an enterprise that required enormous courage and perseverance, as time and time again, the mud-brick buildings were swept away by the flooding of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Constantly it seemed that the Sumerians’ fragile urban civilization would sink back into the old rural barbarism, so the city needed a regular infusion of sacred energy. And yet it seemed such an extraordinary achievement that the city was extolled as a holy place. Babylon was the “Gate of the gods” (Babilani) , where heaven and earth could meet; it re-created the lost paradise, and the ziggurat, or temple tower, of Esagila replicated the cosmic mountain or the sacred tree, which the first men and women had climbed to meet their gods. 44 It is difficult to understand the creation story in Genesis without reference to the Mesopotamian creation hymn known from its opening words as the Enuma Elish . This poem begins by describing the evolution of the gods from primordial sacred matter and their subsequent creation of heaven and earth, but it is also a meditation on contemporary Mesopotamia. The raw material of the universe, from which the gods emerge, is a sloppy, undefined substance—very like the silty soil of the region. The first gods—Tiamat, the primal Ocean; Apsu, the “Abyss;” and Mummu, “Womb” of chaos—were inseparable from the elements and shared the inertia of aboriginal barbarism and the formlessness of chaos: “When sweet and bitter mingled together, no reed was plaited, no rushes muddied the water, the gods were nameless, natureless, futureless.” 45 But new gods emerged, each pair more distinct than the last, culminating in the splendid Marduk, the Sun God and the most developed specimen of the divine species. But Marduk could not establish the cosmos until he had overcome the sluggish torpor of Tiamat in a tremendous battle. Finally he stood astride Tiamat’s massive carcass, split her in two to make heaven and earth, and created the first man by mixing the blood of one of the defeated gods with a handful of dust. After this triumph, the gods could build the city of Babylon and establish the ritual “from which the universe receives its structure, the hidden world is made plain, and the gods assigned their places.” 46 There was no ontological gulf separating these gods from the rest of the cosmos; everything had emerged from the same sacred stuff. All beings shared the same predicament and had to participate in a ceaseless battle against the destructive lethargy of chaos. There were similar tales in neighboring Syria, where Baal, god of storm and life-giving rain, had to fight the sea dragon Lotan, symbol of chaos, Yam, the primal sea, and Mot, god of sterility, in order to establish civilized life.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  64 The law that forbade contact with a dead animal’s corpse protected it: because the carcass could not be skinned or dismembered, it was not worthwhile to hunt or trap it. For the same reasons, those animals classed as “abominations” (sheqqets ) must be avoided only when they were dead. These tiny “swarming creatures” were vulnerable and should inspire compassion; because they were prolific and “teemed,” they enjoyed God’s blessing, so it was an “abomination” to harm them. 65 God had blessed the unclean animals on the day of creation, and had saved pure and impure animals during the Flood. To damage any one of them was an affront to his holiness. This is the context in which we should read P’s most famous work, the creation hymn in the first chapter of Genesis. Like all ancient cosmogonies, its purpose was primarily therapeutic. In Babylon, the Israelites would have been painfully aware of the magnificent New Year rituals in Esagila that celebrated Marduk’s victory over Tiamat. P’s cosmogony is, first, a gentle polemic against Babylonian religion that would have been balm to the exiles’ bruised spirits. Marduk may have appeared to defeat Yahweh, but in reality Yahweh was far more powerful. Like all ancient cosmogonies, this was no creation ex nihilo. Elohim simply brings order to preexistent chaos, “when earth was wild and waste (tohu va bohu) , darkness over the face of Ocean, rushing-spirit hovering over the face of the waters.” 66 The Ocean would immediately have recalled Tiamat, but instead of being a frightening goddess, it was merely the raw material of the universe. The sun, moon, and stars were not deities but functionaries, timekeepers that brought light to the earth. 67 The “great sea-serpents” were no longer threatening adversaries like Yam or Lotan but simply God’s creatures. He did not have to slaughter or split them in two, and at the end of the day, he blessed them. 68 Marduk’s victory had to be reactivated every year in order to make the cosmos viable, but Yahweh finished his creative work in a mere six days and was able to rest on the seventh. This was a nonviolent cosmogony. When P’s first audience heard the opening words “At the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth,” they would have expected a story of fearsome battles. But P surprised them: there was no fighting, no killing.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  By revealing the inherent limitation of words and concepts, theology should reduce both the speaker and his audience to silent awe. When reason was applied to faith, it must show that what we call “God” was beyond the grasp of the human mind. If it failed to do this, its statements about the divine would be idolatrous. Even revelation could not tell us anything about God; indeed, its task was to make us realize that God was unknowable. “Man’s utmost knowledge is to know that we do not know him,” Thomas explained. For then alone do we know God truly, when we believe that he is far above all that man can possibly think of God … by the fact that certain things about God are proposed to man, which surpass his reason, he is strengthened in his opinion that God is far above what he is able to think. 29 Even Christ had transcended our conceptual grasp and become unknowable. At his ascension, he was hidden in the cloud that received him, and taken into a realm that is beyond the reach of our intellect. As Saint Paul said, he is “far above … any name that can be named.” 30 The ascension, therefore, revealed the limits of our knowledge; when Christ left the world, the Word was concealed from us again and would always remain unknowable and unnameable. Thomas’s huge output can be seen as a campaign to counter the tendency to domesticate the divine transcendence. In this he is absolutely true to Denys. But where Denys’s theology was based on liturgy, Thomas’s apophaticism was rooted in the new metaphysical rationalism. His long and, to a modern sensibility, tortuous analyses should be seen as an intellectual ritual that leads the mind through a labyrinth of thought until it culminates in the final musterion . Thomas’s influence on Roman Catholic thought has been immense, but he has recently become a laughingstock to atheists (as well as an embarrassment to some theologians) because of the apparent inadequacy of his five “proofs” for the existence of God. These five “ways” (viae), as Thomas preferred to call them, are to be found at the very beginning of the Summa Theologiae , his most famous work. This was a teaching manual designed “to introduce beginners to what God taught us as concisely and clearly as the subject matter allows,” 31 and it begins with the most fundamental question of all: Is there a God?

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  The sun hammered down on my head, the same sun that hammered down on the thousands of men who built these pyramids, and the millions of visitors who came after. Not one of them was remembered, I thought. All is vanity, says the Bible. All is now, says Zen. All is dust, says the desert. I went to Jerusalem, to the rock where Abraham prepared to kill his son, where Muhammad began his heavenward ascent. The Koran says the rock wanted to join Muhammad, and tried to follow, but Muhammad pressed his foot to the rock and stopped it. His footprint is said to be still visible. Was he barefoot or wearing a shoe? I ate a terrible midday meal in a dark tavern, surrounded by soot-faced laborers. Each looked bone-tired. They chewed slowly, absently, like zombies. Why must we work so hard? I thought. Consider the lilies of the field... they neither toil nor spin. And yet the first-century rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah said our work is the holiest part of us. All are proud of their craft. God speaks of his work; how much more should man. I went on to Istanbul, got wired on Turkish coffee, got lost on the twisty streets beside the Bosphorus. I stopped to sketch the glowing minarets, and toured the golden labyrinths of Topkapi Palace, home of the Ottoman sultans, where Muhammad’s sword is now kept. Don’t go to sleep one night, wrote Rūmī, the thirteenth- century Persian poet. What you most want will come to you then. Warmed by a sun inside you’ll see wonders. I went to Rome, spent days hiding in small trattorias, scarfing mountains of pasta, gazing upon the most beautiful women, and shoes, I’d ever seen. (Romans in the age of the Caesars believed that putting on the right shoe before the left brought prosperity and good luck.) I explored the grassy ruins of Nero’s bedroom, the gorgeous rubble of the Coliseum, the vast halls and rooms of the Vatican. Expecting crowds, I was always out the door at dawn, determined to be first in line. But there was never a line. The city was mired in a historic cold snap. I had it all to myself. Even the Sistine Chapel. Alone under Michelangelo’s ceiling, I was able to wallow in my disbelief. I read in my guidebook that Michelangelo was miserable while painting his masterpiece. His back and neck ached. Paint fell constantly into his hair and eyes. He couldn’t wait to be finished, he told friends. If even Michelangelo didn’t like his work, I thought, what hope is there for the rest of us? I went to Florence, spent days seeking Dante, reading Dante, the angry, exiled misanthrope. Did the misanthropy come first—or after? Was it the cause or the effect of his anger and exile? I stood before the David, shocked at the anger in his eyes. Goliath never had a chance.