Awe

Passages

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

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• From The Case for God (2009)

  This reality, which they have called God, Dao, Brahman, or Nirvana, has been a fact of human life. But it was impossible to explain what it was in terms of logos. This imprecision was not frustrating, as a modern Western person might imagine, but brought with it an ekstasis that lifted practitioners beyond the constricting confines of self. Our scientifically oriented knowledge seeks to master reality, explain it, and bring it under the control of reason, but a delight in unknowing has also been part of the human experience. Even today, poets, philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists find that the contemplation of the insoluble is a source of joy, astonishment, and contentment. One of the peculiar characteristics of the human mind is its ability to have ideas and experiences that exceed our conceptual grasp. We constantly push our thoughts to an extreme, so that our minds seem to elide naturally into an apprehension of transcendence. Music has always been inseparable from religious expression, since, like religion at its best, music marks the “limits of reason.” 8 Because a territory is defined by its extremities, it follows that music must be “definitively” rational. It is the most corporeal of the arts: it is produced by breath, voice, horsehair, shells, guts, and skins and reaches “resonances in our bodies at levels deeper than will or consciousness.” 9 But it is also highly cerebral, requiring the balance of intricately complex energies and form-relations, and is intimately connected with mathematics. Yet this intensely rational activity segues into transcendence. Music goes beyond the reach of words: it is not about anything. A late Beethoven quartet does not represent sorrow but elicits it in hearer and player alike, and yet it is emphatically not a sad experience. Like tragedy, it brings intense pleasure and insight. We seem to experience sadness directly in a way that transcends ego, because this is not my sadness but sorrow itself. In music, therefore, subjective and objective become one. Language has borders that we cannot cross. When we listen critically to our stuttering attempts to express ourselves, we become aware of an inexpressible otherness. “It is decisively the fact that language does have frontiers,” explains the British critic George Steiner, “that gives proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world. It is just because we can go no further, because speech so marvellously fails us, that we experience the certitude of a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding ours.” 10 Every day, music confronts us with a mode of knowledge that defies logical analysis and empirical proof. It is “brimful of meanings which will not translate into logical structures or verbal expression.” 11 Hence all art constantly aspires to the condition of music; so too, at its best, does theology. A modern skeptic will find it impossible to accept Steiner’s conclusion that “what lies beyond man’s word is eloquent of God.”

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Denys saw no conflict between the Neoplatonic philosophia and Christianity, even though he was almost certainly writing in 529, when Emperor Justinian had closed down the Academy, driven its philosophers underground, and abolished the Eleusinian Mysteries. Plotinus had seen all beings radiating from the One, an outward movement that was balanced by the yearning of all beings to return to the primal Unity. In rather the same way, Denys imagined the creation as an ekstatic, almost erotic eruption of divine goodness, when God was, as it were, “carried outside of himself in the loving care he has for everything.” Creation was not something that had happened once in the distant past but was a mythos, a continuous, timeless process in which, paradoxically, God was eternally “enticed away from his transcendent dwelling-place and comes to abide within all things,” and yet had the “capacity to remain, nevertheless, within himself.”69 But, of course, this was impossible to understand rationally, because our minds cannot think outside a universe of beings that are unable to do two irreconcilable things at once. Religious people are always talking about God, and it is important that they do so. But they also need to know when to fall silent. Denys’s theological method was a deliberate attempt to bring all the Christians he taught—lay folk, monks, and clergy alike—to that point by making them conscious of the limits of language. We can do that only by talking about God and listening carefully to what we say. As Denys pointed out, in the Bible God is given fifty-two names.70 God is called a rock and is likened to the sky, the sea, and a warrior. All that is fine, as far as it goes. Because God is always pouring itself into creatures, any one of them—even a rock—can tell us something about the divine. A rock is a very good symbol of God’s permanence and stability. But because a rock is not alive, it is obviously worlds apart from the God that is life itself, so we will never be tempted to say that God is a rock. But the more sophisticated attributes of God—Ineffability, Unity, Goodness, and the like—are more dangerous, because they give us the false impression that we know exactly what God is like. “He” is Good, Wise, and Intelligent; “He” is One; “He” is Trinity.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Everything was a manifestation of this all-pervading “Spirit” (Sanskrit: manya). 31 There was, therefore, no belief in a single supreme being in the ancient world. Any such creature could only be a being—bigger and better than anything else, perhaps, but still a finite, incomplete reality. People felt it natural to imagine a race of spiritual beings of a higher nature than themselves that they called “gods.” There were, after all, many unseen forces at work in the world—wind, heat, emotion, and air—that were often identified with the various deities. The Aryan god Agni, for example, was the fire that had transformed human life, and as a personalized god symbolized the deep affinity people felt with these sacred forces. The Aryans called their gods “the shining ones” (devas ) because Spirit shone through them more brightly than through mortal creatures, but these gods had no control over the world: they were not omniscient and were obliged, like everything else, to submit to the transcendent order that kept everything in existence, set the stars on their courses, made the seasons follow each other, and compelled the seas to remain within bounds. 32 By the tenth century BCE, when some of the Aryans had settled in the Indian subcontinent, they gave a new name to the ultimate reality. Brahman was the unseen principle that enabled all things to grow and flourish. It was a power that was higher, deeper, and more fundamental than the gods. Because it transcended the limitations of personality, it would be entirely inappropriate to pray to Brahman or expect it to answer your prayers. Brahman was the sacred energy that held all the disparate elements of the world together and prevented it from falling apart. Brahman had an infinitely greater degree of reality than mortal creatures, whose lives were limited by ignorance, sickness, pain, and death. 33 You could never define Brahman, because language refers only to individual beings and Brahman was “the All;” it was everything that existed, as well as the inner meaning of all existence. Even though human beings could not think about the Brahman, they had intimations of it in the hymns of the Rig Veda, the most important of the Aryan scriptures. Unlike the hunters of Lascaux, the Aryans do not seem to have thought readily in images. One of their chief symbols of the divine was sound, whose power and intangible quality seemed a particularly apt embodiment of the all-pervasive Brahman. When the priest chanted the Vedic hymns, the music filled the air and entered the consciousness of the congregation, so that they felt surrounded by and infused with divinity. These hymns, revealed to ancient “seers” (rishis) , did not speak of doctrines that the faithful were obliged to believe, but referred to the old myths in an allusive, riddling fashion because the truth they were trying to convey could not be contained in a neatly logical presentation. Their beauty shocked the audience into a state of awe, wonder, fear, and delight.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  To do that we must examine a number of core principles that will be of fundamental importance to our story. The first concerns the nature of the ultimate reality—later called God, Nirvana, Brahman, or Dao. In a rocky overhang at Laussel near Lascaux, there is a small stone relief that is seventeen thousand years old and was created at about the same time as the earliest of the nearby cave paintings. It depicts a woman holding a curved bison’s horn above her head so that it immediately suggests the rising, crescent moon; her right hand lies on her pregnancy. By this time, people had begun to observe the phases of the moon for practical purposes, but their religion had little or nothing to do with this protoscientific observation of the physical cosmos. 27 Instead, material reality was symbolic of an unseen dimension of existence. The little Venus of Laussel already suggests an association between the moon, the female cycle, and human reproduction. In many parts of the world, the moon was linked symbolically with a number of apparently unrelated phenomena: women, water, vegetation, serpents, and fertility. What they all have in common is the regenerative power of life that is continually able to renew itself. Everything could so easily lapse into nothingness, yet each year after the death of winter, trees sprout new leaves, the moon wanes but always waxes brilliantly once more, and the serpent, a universal symbol of initiation, sloughs off its old withered skin and comes forth gleaming and fresh. 28 The female also manifested this inexhaustible power. Ancient hunters revered a goddess known as the Great Mother. In large stone reliefs at Çatalhüyük in Turkey, she is shown giving birth, flanked by boars’ skulls and bulls’ horns—relics of a successful hunt. While hunters and animals died in the grim struggle for survival, the female was endlessly productive of new life. 29 Perhaps these ancient societies were trying to express their sense of what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1899–1976) called “Being,” a fundamental energy that supports and animates everything that exists. Being is transcendent. You could not see, touch, or hear it but could only watch it at work in the people, objects, and natural forces around you. From the documents of later Neolithic and pastoral societies, we know that Being rather than a being was revered as the ultimate sacred power. It was impossible to define or describe, because Being is all-encompassing and our minds are only equipped to deal with particular beings, which can merely participate in it in a restricted manner. But certain objects became eloquent symbols of the power of Being, which sustained and shone through them with particular clarity.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Therefore … God is known by knowledge and by unknowing; of him there is understanding, reason, knowledge, touch, perception, opinion, imagination, name and many other things, but he is not understood, nothing can be said of him, he cannot be named. He is not one of the things that are, nor is he known in any of the things that are; he is all things in everything and nothing in anything.75 This was not simply an arid logical conundrum that left people in a baffled, thwarted state. It was a spiritual exercise that, if properly performed, would bring participants to the same kind of stunned insight as did the Brahmodya competition. Denys’s spiritual exercise took the form of a dialectical process, consisting of three phases. First we must affirm what God is: God is a rock; God is One; God is good; God exists. But when we listen carefully to ourselves, we fall silent, felled by the weight of absurdity in such God talk. In the second phase, we deny each one of these attributes. But the “way of denial” is just as inaccurate as the “way of affirmation.” Because we do not know what God is, we cannot know what God is not, so we must then deny the denials: God is therefore not placeless, mindless, lifeless, or nonexistent. In the course of this exercise, we learn that God transcends the capability of human speech and “is beyond every assertion” and “beyond every denial.”76 It is as inaccurate to say that God is “darkness” as to say that God is “light;” to say that God “exists” as to say that God does “not exist,” because what we call God falls “neither within the predicate of existence or non-existence.”77 But what can this mean? The exercise leads us to apophasis, the breakdown of speech, which cracks and disintegrates before the absolute unknowability of what we call God. As our language fails, we experience an intellectual ekstasis. We no longer pay mere lip service to God’s ineffability; the fact that “there is no kind of thing that God is”78 has become an insight that we have made our own, a kenosis that “drives us out of ourselves.”79 Like the mystai of Eleusis, we have become strangers to our former ways of thinking and speaking. This new understanding is not an emotional experience. If we cannot know God, we certainly can neither feel nor have any sensation of unity with God. Denys’s dialectical method leads to an intellectual rapture that takes us beyond everyday perceptions and introduces us to another mode of seeing. Like Moses at the top of the mountain, we embrace the darkness and experience no clarity, but know that, once we have rinsed our minds of inadequate ideas that block our understanding, we are somehow in the place where God is.

• From The Case for God (2009)

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

• From The Case for God (2009)

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

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

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

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

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

• From The Case for God (2009)

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

• From City of Night (1963)

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

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• From The Case for God (2009)

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

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

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

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Thus the mind, accustomed as it is to the opaqueness in beings and the phantoms of visible things, appears to be seeing nothing when it gazes on the light of Being. It cannot understand that this very darkness is the supreme illumination of our minds, just as when the eye sees pure light, it seems to be seeing nothing.50 To counter this, we have to say contradictory things about God in order to break through this conceptual barrier. For Being is “both the first and the last; it is eternal and yet most present; it is most simple and yet the greatest,” Bonaventure explained; “it is supremely one and yet omnifarious.”51 At first, each of these attributes appears to cancel out the last, yet on closer examination we see that the apparent contradictions are mutually dependent: God is present in everything because being is eternal; multifarious because One. In this way, ordinary categories of thought and language break down in a coincidentia oppositorum. The same applied to the contemplation of the Trinity. Like the Cappadocians, Bonaventure instructed his readers to keep their minds in motion between the One and the Three and not attempt to iron out the inherent contradiction: “Take care that you do not believe that you can understand the incomprehensible,” he warns.52 People must use the shock of this irreconcilable complexity to break down their accustomed modes of thinking or they will miss the whole point of Trinitarian dogma, which is to “lift you to the heights of admiration.”53 We even see these apparently diametrically opposed contradictions in the human person of Christ, the supreme revelation of God, who unites “the first and last, the highest and lowest”54 in such a way that the mind cannot cope: The eternal is joined with the time-bound man … the most actual is joined with him who suffered supremely and died; the most perfect and immense is joined with the insignificant; he who is both supremely one and supremely omnifarious is joined with an individual who is composite and distinct from others.55 Christ, the incarnate Word, does not make the divine any more comprehensible. Quite the reverse: the Word spoken by God segues inexorably into the utter darkness of unknowing, because Christ is not the Terminus of the religious quest, but only the “Way” that leads us to the unknowable Father.56 Instead of making everything clearer, this supreme revelation plunges us into an obscurity that is a kind of death. For Bonaventure, the suffering and death of Christ the Word incarnates the brokenness and failure of our language about God. There is no clarity, no certainty, and no privileged information. We have to leave these immature expectations behind, as Bonaventure explains in the concluding passage of the Journey. We too

• From The Case for God (2009)

  62 Revelation was an ongoing process that continued from one generation to another. 63 A text that could not speak to the present was dead, and the exegete had a duty to revive it. The rabbis used to link together verses that originally had no connection with one another in a “chain” (horoz ) that, in this new combination, meant something entirely different. 64 They would sometimes alter a word in the text, creating a pun by substituting a single letter that entirely changed the original meaning, telling their pupils, “Don’t read this … but that.” 65 They did not intend the emendation to be permanent; like any teacher in antiquity, they were mainly concerned with speaking directly to the needs of a particular group of students. They were happy to interpret a text in a way that bore no relation to the original, so that the Song of Songs, a profane love song sung in taverns that did not even mention God, became an allegory of Yahweh’s love for his people. Midrash was not a solitary exercise; rather, like the Socratic dialogue, it was a joint enterprise. The rabbis had retained the ancient reverence for oral communication and in the early days at Yavneh did not commit their traditions to writing but learned them by heart. Graduates of the academy were called tannaim , “repeaters,” because they recited the Torah aloud and developed their midrash together in conversation. The House of Studies was not like a hushed modern library but was noisy with clamorous debate. As the political situation deteriorated in Palestine, however, the rabbis decided that they needed a written record of these discussions, and between 135 and 160 they compiled an entirely new scripture, which they called the Mishnah, an anthology of the oral teachings collected at Yavneh. The Mishnah was deliberately constructed as a replica of the lost temple, its six sections (sederim ) supporting the literary edifice like pillars. 66 By studying the laws and ordinances now tragically rendered obsolete, students could still honor the divine Presence in the post-temple world. It had been one thing for the early Pharisees to base their lives on an imaginary temple when Herod’s temple was still a fully functioning reality, but quite another when it had been reduced to a pile of charred rubble. In the Mishnah, the rabbis amassed thousands of new rulings that regulated the lives of Jews down to the smallest detail to help them become aware of the Shekhinah’s continued presence in their midst. They had no interest in “beliefs” but focused on practical behavior. If all Jews were to live as if they were priests serving the Holy of Holies, how should they deal with gentiles? How could each household observe the purity laws? What was the role of women in the home that was now a temple? The rabbis would never have been able to persuade the people to accept this formidable body of law had it not yielded a satisfying spirituality.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Then we blessed each other and spoke good words and then she passed on. There was the accomplished and very eloquent young Asian woman, an anthropology student, she said, who acted as our museum guide in Samarkand and shared her great store of historical knowledge with us. The night that we arrived in Samarkand and again the next day in looking through the museums, I felt that there were many things we were not seeing. For instance, we passed a case where there are a number of coins which I recognized as ancient Chinese coins because I’d used them for casting the I Ching. I asked our guide if these were from China. She acted as if I’d said a dirty word. And she said, “No, these were from right here in Samarkand.” Now obviously they had been traded, and that was the whole point, but of course I couldn’t read the Russian explanation under it, and she evidently took great offense at my use of the word China. In all of the women I’ve met here I feel an air of security and awareness of their own powers as women, as producers, and as human beings that is very affirming. But I also feel a stony rigidity, a resistance to questioning that frightens me, saddens me, because it feels destructive of progress as process. We arrived in Samarkand about 9:30 P.M., quite wearied by a very full day. We got into the main square just in time to catch the last light-show at Tamerlane’s tomb. The less said about that the better. But the following day, Helen, Fikre, and I played hooky from one mausoleum and ran across the street and went to a market. It is very reassuring and good as always. People in markets find a way of getting down to the essentials of I have, you want; you have, I want. The tile tombs and the midrasas (ancient schools) of Samarkand are truly beautiful, intricate, and still. Incredibly painstaking work is being done to restore them. I could feel stillness in my bones, walking through these places, knowing that so much history had been buried there. I found two feathers in the Tomb of Bebe, Timor’s favorite wife, and I felt almost as if I had come there to find them. The Tomb of Bebe has beautiful minarets, but the Tomb itself was never used. The mosque was never used. There is a story that Bebe was Tamerlane’s favorite wife and he “loved her with all of his heart.” However, he had many, many journeys to go upon and he left her so often that he broke her heart and she died.