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 Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  But the devastation can also be faced quite differently, by a return to classical sources or, as with Herbert, by an appeal beyond the present disordered age, e v e n beyo n d the conflicted and twisted human to the perfection of the inanimate. The stone i s a perfect creature equal to itself obedient to its limits filled exactly with a stony meani n g 78 This negation borders on something else again, a purpose beyond stoic lucidity of vision. As with th e via negativa in theology, t h e counter-epiphanic can be e mbraced not in order to deny epiphany altogether, not j ust in order t o find a place for the human spirit to stand before the most comp lete emp t iness, but rather to force us to the verge of epiphany. This is one way of r e ading the work of Samuel Beckett, perhaps also a way of understandin g so me of the work of Paul Celan. Weggebei z t vom Strahlenwind deiner Sprache das bunte Gerede des An erlebten-das hundert ziingige Mein- gedicht, das Genicht. Etched away from the ray-s h ot wind of your language the garish talk o f rubbed- 486 · S U BT LE R LANG U A GE S off experience-the hundred tongued pseudo - poem, the noem. 79 The re solute turning away from the lived, from a poetry of the self, bespe a k s an extr e me denuding, a stripping down of language, which goes with the image of the glacier in the stanza following the one just quoted. These wi n t e r images, which seem pa rallel to Herbert's 'stone', recur in Celan's work: Kein Halbholz mehr, bier, in den Gipfelhangen, kein mit- sprechender Thymian. Grenzschnee und sein die Pfahle und deren Wegweiser-Schatten aushorchender, tot sagender Duft. No mor e half- w ood, here, on the summit slopes, no col- loquial Thyme Border snow and its odour that a uscultates the posts and their road-sign shadows, declaring them dead. 80 But this unc ompromising austerity seems to be aimed at reaching the e dg e o f a farther epiphany, beyond all the negations, hinted at in certain poem s, l i k e "Hutenfenster" ("Tabernacle Window"), or this one from Atemwende: Fadensonnen iiber der grauschwarzen Odnis. Ein baum - hoher Gedanke greift sich den Lichtton: es sind no c h Lieder zu singen jenseits der Menschen. Epiphanies of Modernism • 487 Thread suns above the grey-black wilderness. A tree- high thought tunes in to light ' s pitch: there are still songs to be sung on the other side of mankind. 8 1 Another path leads in a diametrically opposite direction to the austere relevance of impure poe t ry. The framing epiphany focusses attention on the work.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  15 Augustine's pr o of of Go d is a proof from the first-person experien c e of knowing and reasoning. I am aware of my own sensin g an d thin k ing; a n d i n reflecting on this, I am made aware of its dependence on something bey ond it, something common. But this turns out on further examination to in cl ud e not just objects to be known but also the very standards which reason g i ves alle giance to. So I recognize that this activity which is mine is grounde d o n and presupposes something higher than I, something which I should loo k u p to and revere. By going inward, I am dr awn upward. But it may seem strange that Augustine goes to all this trouble to esta bl ish th at there are hi g her standards common to all thinkers, something whi c h Plato already ha d laid out in the Ideas. Was it simpl y that he felt he ha d t o me et a stronger sceptical challenge? This is how we would tend to loo k a t thing s with our post-Cartesian eyes. But to see this as Augustine's princi p a l pre occupation is to assume that the sceptical challenge of his da y was couched in the form familiar to us: How can one get beyond first-perso n experience and conclude to a world out there? But this was neither ho w the challenge was p ut nor how p eople thought to answer it before A u gustine. Th e relation of historical causation seems rather to be the reverse: the idea of seein g scepticism as the question whet he r I can get beyond 'my' inner worl d is much more a product of the revolution which Augustine started, but which only bore this f ruit many centuries later. The reasons Augustine took this path seem to me to be rather that his concern was to show that God is to be found not just in the world but a l s o and more importantly at the very foundations of the person (to u se modern language); God is to be found in the intimacy of self-presence.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Some hymns of the Rig Veda could be very old indeed, because by the time the Aryan tribes arrived in India, its language was already archaic. The poems were the property of a small group of seven priestly families, each with its own “copyrighted” collection, which they chanted during the sacrificial rituals. Family members learned the hymns by heart and transmitted them orally to the next generation; the Rig Veda was not committed to writing until the second millennium of the common era. Since the advent of literacy, our powers of memory have declined, and we find it hard to believe that people were able to learn such lengthy texts. But the Vedic scriptures were transmitted with impeccable accuracy, even after the archaic Sanskrit had become almost incomprehensible, and still today, the exact tonal accents and inflections of the original, long-lost language have been preserved, together with the ritually prescribed gestures of the arms and fingers. Sound had always been sacred to the Aryans, and when they listened to these holy texts, people felt invaded by the divine. As they committed them to memory, their minds were filled by a sacred presence. Vedic “knowledge” was not the acquisition of factual information but was experienced as divine possession. The poems of the Rig Veda did not tell coherent stories about the gods or give clear descriptions of the sacrificial rituals but alluded in a veiled, riddling fashion to myths and legends that were already familiar to the community. The truth that they were trying to express could not be conveyed in neat, logical discourse. The poet was a rishi, a seer. He had not invented these hymns. They had declared themselves to him in visions that seemed to come from another world.36 The rishi could see truths and make connections that were not apparent to ordinary people, but he had the divinely bestowed talent to impart them to anybody who knew how to listen. The beauty of this inspired poetry shocked his audience into a state of such awe, wonder, fear, and delight that they felt directly touched by divine power. The sacred knowledge of the Veda did not simply come from the semantic meaning of the words but from their sound, which was itself a deva.

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

  glorious Lady, the Mother of God and Ever-Virgin Mary .... the holy John the Prophet, Forerunner and Baptist, the holy, glorious and all-celebrated Apostles, and all thy Saints, through whose prayers look upon us, O God. And remember all those that are departed in the hope of the resurrection to eternal life, and give them rest where the light of Thy countenance shines upon them." 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.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  On a Christia n vie w, sanctification involves our sharing to some degree God's love (agape) f o r t h e world, and this transforms how we see things and what else we long for and think important. Or a gain, the m o ve from a prerational and parochi a l perspective to one in which we recogniz e the right of all humans to e q ual r espect transforms our entire way of seeing historical cultures and thei r practices. What previously w as endowed with t he highest prestige may now seem narrow, tawd ry , ex ploitative. We c an no lon ger feel awe be fore it. On the contra ry what n ow inspires this sentiment is the moral law itself and its universal demands. We feel ourselves lift ed out of the ruck of unthinking custom, and b ec oming citizens of a wide r r epublic, a kingdom of e nds. The fact that the perspective defined by a hypergood involves ou r changing, a chang e which is qualified as 'growth', or 'sanctification', o r 'highe r consciousness', and even in volv es our repudiating earlier goods, is what makes it so p r oblematic. It is problematic right of f because controver sial, critical of where 'ordina ry ', or 'u nr egenerate', or 'primitive' moral understanding is. And this actual struggle and disag r eement, the seemingly ineradicable absence of unanimity about these hypergoods, has always bee n a potent source of moral scepticism. This perennial wor ry understandably strengthens the naturalist reaction in this case. Who is to say that the critics, the protagonists of 'higher' morality, are right against 'ordina ry ' conscious ness, or "l'homme moyen sensuel"? This suspicion is all the str o nger in the modern world because of what I described in section 1. 3 as the affirmation of ordina ry life. The rejection of the supposedl y "higher" a ctivities, c ontempla tion or citizen participation, or of "higher" levels of dedication in the form of monastic asceticism, in favou r of the ordin a ry life of marria g e, children, work in a calling conf e rred a higher dignity on what had previously been relegated to a lower status. This unleashed a powerful tendency in our civilization, one whic h has taken ever new forms. Some of these involved turning against th e very religious tradition which had inaugurated this te n de n cy and defending "natural" desire and fulfilment against the demands of sanctification, now seen as specious and destructive.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The visionary truth of the Rig Veda stole up on the audience, who listened carefully to the hidden significance of the paradoxes and the strange, riddling allusions of the hymns, which yoked together things that seemed to be entirely unrelated. As they listened, they felt in touch with the mysterious potency that held the world together. This power was rita, divine order translated into human speech.37 As the rishi physically enunciated the sacred syllables, rita was made flesh and became an active, living reality in the torn, conflicted world of the Punjab. The listeners felt that they were in touch with the power that made the seasons follow one another regularly, the stars remain in their courses, the crops grow, and enabled the disparate elements of human society to cohere. Scripture, therefore, did not impart information that could be grasped notionally but gave people a more intuitive insight that was a bridge, linking the visible with the invisible dimension of life. The rishis learned to hold themselves in a state of constant readiness to receive inspired words that seemed to come from outside but were also experienced as an inner voice. They may already have begun to develop techniques of concentration that enabled them to penetrate the subconscious. They discovered that if they got rid of their usual distracting preoccupations, “the doors of the mind may be opened,”38 and that Agni, the inventor of brilliant speech, the light of the world, enabled them to see in the same way as a god. The rishis had laid the foundations for the Indian Axial Age. At this very early date, they had made a deliberate effort to go beyond empirical knowledge and intuit a deeper, more fundamental truth.

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

  If all men are by nature utterly incompetent to good, if it is grace that works in us to will and to do good, if faith itself is an undeserved gift of grace: the ultimate ground of salvation can then be found only in the inscrutable counsel of God. He appealed to the wonderful leadings in the lives of individuals and of nations, some being called to the gospel and to baptism, while others die in darkness. Why precisely this or that one attains to faith and others do not, is, indeed, a mystery. We cannot, says he, in this life explain the readings of Providence; if we only believe that God is righteous, we shall hereafter attain to perfect knowledge.

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

  Ansgarius: Pigmenta, ed. Lappenberg. Hamburg, 1844. Vita Wilehadi, in Pertz: Monumenta II.; and in Migne: Patrol. Tom. 118, pp. 1014–1051. Rimbertus: Vita Ansgarii, in Pertz: Monumenta II., and in Migne, l.c. pp. 961–1011. Adamus Bremensis (d. 1076): Gesta Hamenburgensis Eccl. pontificum (embracing the history of the archbishopric of Hamburg, of Scandinavia, Denmark, and Northwestern Germany, from 788–1072); reprinted in Pertz: Monumenta, VII.; separate edition by Lappenberg. Hanover, 1846. Laurent: Leben der Erzb. Ansgar und Rimbert. 1856. A. Tappehorn: Leben d. h. Ansgar. 1863. G. Dehio: Geschichte d. Erzb. Hamburg-Bremen. 1877. H. N. A. Jensen: Schleswig-Holsteinische Kirchengeschichte, edit. A. L. J. Michelsen (1879). During the sixth and seventh centuries the Danes first came in contact with Christianity, partly through their commercial intercourse with Duerstede in Holland, partly through their perpetual raids on Ireland; and tales of the "White Christ" were frequently told among them, though probably with no other effect than that of wonder. The first Christian missionary who visited them and worked among them was Willebrord. Born in Northumbria and educated within the pale of the Keltic Kirk he went out, in 690, as a missionary to the Frises. Expelled by them he came, about 700, to Denmark, was well received by king Yngrin (Ogendus), formed a congregation and bought thirty Danish boys, whom he educated in the Christian religion, and of whom one, Sigwald, is still remembered as the patron saint of Nuremberg, St. Sebaldus. But his work seems to have been of merely temporary effect. Soon, however, the tremendous activity which Charlemagne developed as a political organizer, was felt even on the Danish frontier. His realm touched the Eyder. Political relations sprang up between the Roman empire and Denmark, and they opened a freer and broader entrance to the Christian missionaries. In Essehoe, in Holstein, Charlemagne built a chapel for the use of the garrison; in Hamburg he settled Heridock as the head of a Christian congregation; and from a passage in one of Alcuin’s letters127 it appears that a conversion of the Danes did not lie altogether outside of his plans. Under his successor, Lewis the Pious, Harald Klak, one of the many petty kings among whom Denmark was then divided, sought the emperor’s support and decision in a family feud, and Lewis sent archbishop Ebo of Rheims, celebrated both as a political negotiator and as a zealous missionary, to Denmark. In 822 Ebo crossed the Eyder, accompanied by bishop Halitgar of Cambray. In the following years he made several journeys to Denmark, preached, baptized, and established a station of the Danish mission at Cella Wellana, the present Welnau, near Essehoe. But he was too much occupied with the internal affairs of the empire and the opportunity which now opened for the Danish mission, demanded the whole and undivided energy of a great man. In 826 Harald Klak was expelled and sought refuge with the emperor, Ebo acting as a mediator.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Some of its most startling “axial” achievements had been military. Alexander’s two-year adventure in India was another such moment: a Greek army had reached what they regarded as the end of the earth. They had pitted themselves against the ultimate as bravely as the yogins had struggled to break through the limits of the human psyche. Where mystics had conquered interior space, Alexander explored the farthest reaches of the physical world. Like many of the Axial sages, he was constantly “straining after more.” 56 He wanted to go farther into India than the Persian kings, and reach the ocean that, he believed, circled the earth. It was the kind of “enlightenment” that would always appeal to Western explorers 57 but very different from the nibbana or moksha, characterized by self-effacement, ahimsa, and compassion, sought by the Indian mystics. The Greek soldiers were enthralled and terrified by the magnificence of India, with its fearsome monsoons, its astonishing war elephants, blazing summers, and intractable mountain passes. They were especially intrigued by the “naked philosophers” they encountered, who may have been Jains. But even though the Indians had no enduring interest in the Greeks, Alexander and his successors decisively changed the fortunes of some of the other peoples we have met in this book. The Zoroastrians of Iran remembered Alexander as the worst sinner in history, because he killed so many priests and scholars and stamped out so many of their sacred fires. He was the “accursed” (guzustag), a title that he alone shares with the Hostile Spirit. The slaughter of the priests was an irreparable loss: Zoroastrian texts were still transmitted orally; many existed only in the minds of the murdered priests, and could never be recovered. The Jews were more affected by the diadochoi than by Alexander himself. Since the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, Jerusalem had remained a backwater. It was not on any of the main trade routes: the caravans that stopped at Petra or Gaza had no reason to go to Jerusalem, which lacked the raw materials to develop its own industry. But during the wars of the diadochoi, Judea was continually invaded by one army after another, from Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, with their baggage, equipment, families, and slaves. Jerusalem itself changed hands no less than six times between 320 and 301. The Jews of Jerusalem experienced the Greeks as destructive, violent, and militaristic. In 301, Judea, Samerina, Phoenicia, and the entire coastal plain were captured by the armies of Ptolemy I Soter, and for the next hundred years, Jerusalem remained under the control of the Ptolemies, who did not, however, interfere much in local affairs.

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

  Rhyme is not the invention of either a barbaric or an overcivilized age, but appears more or less in almost all nations, languages, and grades of culture. Like rhythm it springs from the natural esthetic sense of proportion, euphony, limitation, and periodic return.1246 It is found here and there, even in the oldest popular poetry of republican Rome, that of Ennius, for example.1247 It occurs not rarely in the prose even of Cicero, and especially of St. Augustine, who delights in ingenious alliterations and verbal antitheses, like patet and latet, spes and res, fides and vides, bene and plene, oritur and moritur. Damasus of Rome introduced it into sacred poetry.1248 But it was in the sacred Latin poetry of the middle age that rhyme first assumed a regular form, and in Adam of St. Victor, Hildebert, St. Bernard, Bernard of Clugny, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura, Thomas a Celano, and Jacobus de Benedictis (author of the Stabat mater), it reached its perfection in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; above all, in that incomparable giant hymn on the judgment, the tremendous power of which resides, first indeed in its earnest matter, but next in its inimitable mastery of the musical treatment of vowels. I mean, of course, the Dies irae of the Franciscan monk Thomas a Celano (about 1250), which excites new wonder on every reading, and to which no translation in any modern language can do full justice. In Adam of St. Victor, too, of the twelfth century, occur unsurpassable rhymes; e.g., the picture of the Evangelist John (in the poem: De, S. Joanne evangelista), which Olshausen has chosen for the motto of his commentary on the fourth Gospel, and which Trench declares the most beautiful stanza in the Latin church poetry: "Volat avis sine meta Quo nee vates nec propheta Evolavit altius: Tam implenda,1249 quam impleta1250 Nunquam vidit tot secreta Purus homo purius." The metre of the Latin hymns is various, and often hard to be defined. Gavanti1251 supposes six principal kinds of verse: 1. Iambici dimetri (as: "Vexilla regis prodeunt"). 2. Iambici trimetri (ternarii vel senarii, as: "Autra deserti teneris sub annis"). 3. Trochaici dimetri ("Pange, lingua, gloriosi corporis mysterium," a eucharistic hymn of Thomas Aquinas). 4. Sapphici, cum Adonico in fine (as: "Ut queant axis resonare fibris"). 5. Trochaici (as: "Ave maris stella"). 6. Asclepiadici, cum Glyconico in fine (as: "Sacris solemniis juncta sint gaudia"). In the period before us the Iambic dimeter prevails; in Hilary and Ambrose without exception. § 116. The Latin Poets and Hymns. The poets of this period, Prudentius excepted, are all clergymen, and the best are eminent theologians whose lives and labors have their more appropriate place in other parts of this work. Hilary, bishop of Poitiers (hence Pictaviensis, † 368), the Athanasius of the West in the Arian controversies, is, according to the testimony of Jerome,1252 the first hymn writer of the Latin church.

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

  § 158. The Doctrine of Predestination. I. Augustinus: De praedestinatione sanctorum ad Prosperum et Hilarium (written A.D. 428 or 429 against the Semi-Pelagians); De dono perseverantiae (written in the same year and against the same opponents); De gratia et libero arbitrio (written A.D. 426 or 427 ad Valentinum et Monachos Adrumetinos); De correptione et gratia (written to the same persons and in the same year). II Corn. Jansenius: Augustinus. Lovan. 1640, tom. iii. Jac. Sirmond (Jesuit): Historia praedestinatiana. Par. 1648 (and in his Opera, tom. iv. p. 271). Carl Beck: Die Augustinische, Calvinistische und Lutherische Lehre von der Praedestination aus den Quellen dargestellt und mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Schleiermacher’s Erwählungslehre comparativ beurtheilt. "Studien und Kritiken," 1847. J. B. Mozley: Augustinian Doctrine of Predestination. Lond. 1855. Augustine did not stop with this doctrine of sin and grace. He pursued his anthropology and soteriology to their source in theology. His personal experience of the wonderful and undeserved grace of God, various passages of the Scriptures, especially the Epistle to the Romans, and the logical connection of thought, led him to the doctrine of the unconditional and eternal purpose of the omniscient and omnipotent God. In this he found the programme of the history of the fall and redemption of the human race. He ventured boldly, but reverentially, upon the brink of that abyss of speculation, where all human knowledge is lost in mystery and in adoration. Predestination, in general, is a necessary attribute of the divine will, as foreknowledge is an attribute of the divine intelligence; though, strictly speaking, we cannot predicate of God either a before or an after, and with him all is eternal present. It is absolutely inconceivable that God created the world or man blindly, without a fixed plan, or that this plan can be disturbed or hindered in any way by his creatures. Besides, there prevails everywhere, even in the natural life of man, in the distribution of mental gifts and earthly blessings, and yet much more in the realm of grace, a higher guidance, which is wholly independent of our will or act. Who is not obliged, in his birth in this or that place, at this or that time, under these or those circumstances, in all the epochs of his existence, in all his opportunities of education, and above all in his regeneration and sanctification, to recognize and adore the providence and the free grace of God? The further we are advanced in the Christian life, the less are we inclined to attribute any merit to ourselves, and the more to thank God for all. The believer not only looks forward into eternal life, but also backward into the ante-mundane eternity, and finds in the eternal purpose of divine love the beginning and the firm anchorage of his salvation.1855 So far we may say every reflecting Christian must believe in some sort of election by free grace; and, in fact, the Holy Scriptures are full of it.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  During the late Vedic period, the Aryans developed the idea of brahman, the supreme reality. Brahman was not a deva, but a power that was higher, deeper, and more basic than the gods, a force that held all the disparate elements of the universe together, and stopped them from fragmenting.60 Brahman was the fundamental principle that enabled all things to become strong and to expand. It was life itself.61 Brahman could never be defined or described, because it was all-encompassing: human beings could not get outside it and see it objectively. But it could be experienced in ritual. When the king arrived back safely from his raid, with the spoils of battle, he had become one with the brahman. He was now the axis, the hub of the wheel that would pull his kingdom together, and enable it to prosper and expand. Brahman was also experienced in silence. A ritual often ended with the brahmodya competition to find a verbal formula that expressed the mystery of the brahman. The challenger asked a difficult and enigmatic question, and his opponent answered in an equally elusive manner. The match continued until one of the contestants was unable to respond: reduced to silence, he was forced to withdraw.62 The transcendence of the brahman was sensed in the mysterious clash of unanswerable questions that led to a stunning realization of the impotence of speech. For a few sacred moments, the competitors felt one with the mysterious force that held the whole of life together, and the winner could say that he was the brahman. By the tenth century some rishis started to create a new theological discourse. The traditional devas were beginning to seem crude and unsatisfactory; they must point to something beyond themselves. Some of the late hymns of the Rig Veda sought a god who was more worthy of worship. “What god shall we adore with our offering?” asked one of the rishis in Hymn 121 of the tenth book of the Rig Veda. Who was the true lord of men and cattle? Who owned the snowcapped mountains and the mighty ocean? Which of the gods was capable of supporting the heavens? In this hymn, the poet found an answer that would become one of the seminal myths of the Indian Axial Age. He had a vision of a creator god emerging from primal chaos, a personalized version of the brahman. His name was Prajapati: “the All.” Prajapati was identical with the universe; he was the life force that sustained it, the seed of consciousness, and the light that emerged from the waters of unconscious matter. But Prajapati was also a spirit outside the universe, who could order the laws of nature. Immanent and transcendent, he alone was “God of gods and none beside him.”

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Shiva, the other god of bhakti, was very different.32 Linked with the terrifying Rudra, the uncanny mountain god whom people implored to stay away from their settlements and cattle, he was frightening as well as gracious. There was violence in his mythos, but he was also the source of great happiness. Shiva was implacable if you did not worship him, but would always save his bhakta. Yet he was a jealous god. In one of the earliest tales, he killed Daksha, a devotee of Vishnu, who had refused to invite Shiva to his sacrifice; there was fierce rivalry between the two sects. However, as the lover of Parvati, Shiva became the enchanting Lord of the Dance and an icon of salvation: the dwarf under Shiva’s foot was an image of the evil that Shiva had subdued; his outstretched hand a sign of grace; his raised foot an emblem of freedom; and the snake around his neck a symbol of immortality. Shiva was creator and destroyer, a householder as well as a great yogin. In his person, he synthesized the apparent contradictions of the spiritual life and gave his worshipers intimations of transcendence and unity that went beyond earthly categories. The effigy was very important in bhakti: the image (murti) of Shiva, Vishnu, or Krishna was their “embodiment,” thought to contain a real and physically manifest divine presence.33 The god had descended into his statue at the moment of its consecration, so that it became the abode of the divine. In some of the old temples, it was said to have been “found,” sent by a god, or its whereabouts revealed in a dream. The statue was, therefore, itself an avatara, manifesting the self-sacrificing love of the god. Some texts even spoke of the god’s suffering when he compressed himself into the man-made image out of compassion for humanity. When it became the focus of contemplation, the statue was thus an icon of altruism. Buddhists and Jains were also influenced by this new Hindu devotion. In the first century CE, as never before, they began to create statues of the Buddha and of the twenty-four spiritual leaders called tirthankaras (“ford-makers”), who had preceded Mahavira in charting the path to enlightenment. These images first appeared in Gandhara in northwest India and Mathura on the Yamuna River.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Every day, the Aryans offered sacrifices to their gods to replenish the energies they expended in maintaining world order. Some of these rites were very simple. The sacrificer would throw a handful of grain, curds, or fuel into the fire to nourish Agni, or pound the stalks of soma, offer the pulp to the water goddesses, and make a sacred drink. The Aryans also sacrificed cattle. They did not grow enough crops for their needs, so killing was a tragic necessity, but the Aryans ate only meat that had been ritually and humanely slaughtered. When a beast was ceremonially given to the gods, its spirit was not extinguished but returned to Geush Urvan (“Soul of the Bull”), the archetypical domestic animal. The Aryans felt very close to their cattle. It was sinful to eat the flesh of a beast that had not been consecrated in this way, because profane slaughter destroyed it forever, and thus violated the sacred life that made all creatures kin.5 Again, the Aryans would never entirely lose this profound respect for the “spirit” that they shared with others, and this would become a crucial principle of their Axial Age. To take the life of any being was a fearful act, not to be undertaken lightly, and the sacrificial ritual compelled the Aryans to confront this harsh law of existence. The sacrifice became and would remain the organizing symbol of their culture, by which they explained the world and their society. The Aryans believed that the universe itself had originated in a sacrificial offering. In the beginning, it was said, the gods, working in obedience to the divine order, had brought forth the world in seven stages. First they created the Sky, which was made of stone like a huge round shell; then the Earth, which rested like a flat dish upon the Water that had collected in the base of the shell. In the center of the Earth, the gods placed three living creatures: a Plant, a Bull, and a Man. Finally they produced Agni, the Fire. But at first everything was static and lifeless. It was not until the gods performed a triple sacrifice—crushing the Plant, and killing the Bull and the Man—that the world became animated. The sun began to move across the sky, seasonal change was established, and the three sacrificial victims brought forth their own kind. Flowers, crops, and trees sprouted from the pulped Plant; animals sprang from the corpse of the Bull; and the carcass of the first Man gave birth to the human race. The Aryans would always see sacrifice as creative. By reflecting on this ritual, they realized that their lives depended upon the death of other creatures. The three archetypal creatures had laid down their lives so that others might live. There could be no progress, materially or spiritually, with-out self-sacrifice.6 This too would become one of the principles of the Axial Age.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Neither the Brhadaranyaka nor the Chandogya was written by a single author; they were anthologies of separate texts that were put together later by an editor. Authors and editors alike all drew upon a common stock of anecdotes and ideas circulating in the courts and villages. People thought nothing of traveling from Gandhara to Videha, which were a thousand miles apart, to consult one of the distinguished teachers of the day: Sandiliya, who speculated about the nature of the atman; Janaka, king of Videha; Pravahna Jaivali, king of Kuru-Panchala; Ajatashatru, king of Kashi; and Sanatkumara, who was famous for his lifelong celibacy. 10 The new ideas may originally have been developed by Brahmin priests, but kshatriyas and kings also took part in the debates and discussions, as did women—notably Gargi Vacaknavi and Maitreyi, Yajnavalkya’s wife. Both women seem to have been accepted by the other contestants in the brahmodya, and their contributions were included by the editors as a matter of course. But the two most important rishis in the early Upanishads were Yajnavalkya of Videha and Uddalaka Aruni, a famous teacher of the Kuru-Panchala region, both of whom were active in the second half of the seventh century. 11 Yajnavalkya was the personal philosopher of King Janaka of Videha, who was himself a leading exponent of the new spirituality. Like all the Upanishadic sages, Yajnavalkya was convinced that there was, as it were, an immortal spark at the core of the human person, which participated in—was of the same nature as—the immortal brahman that sustained and gave life to the entire cosmos. This was a discovery of immense importance and it would become a central insight in every major religious tradition. The ultimate reality was an immanent presence in every single human being. It could, therefore, be discovered in the depths of the self, the atman. The Brahmanas had already concluded that the core of the human being—variously identified as breath, water, or fire—was identical to the sacrifice, and that the power at the heart of the sacrifice was brahman, the essence of everything that existed. Yajnavalkya and the other Upanishadic sages developed this concept and freed it from external ritual. The atman was no longer simply the breath, which gave life to the human being, but that which inhaled and exhaled; it was the agent behind all the senses and was, therefore, beyond description. “You can’t see the Seer who does the seeing,” Yajnavalkya explained. “You can’t hear the Hearer who does the hearing; you can’t think with the Thinker who does the thinking; and you can’t perceive the Perceiver who does the perceiving. The Self within the All [brahman] is this atman of yours.” 12 For the first time, human beings were systematically making themselves aware of the deeper layers of human consciousness.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The new nation-state would labor under a fundamental contradiction: the state (the governmental apparatus) was supposed to be secular, but the nation (“the people”) aroused quasi-religious emotions.121 In 1807–08, while Napoleon was conquering Prussia, the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte had delivered a series of lectures in Berlin, looking forward to the time when the forty-one separate German principalities would become a unified nation-state. The Fatherland, he claimed, was a manifestation of the divine, the repository of the spiritual essence of the Volk and therefore eternal. Germans must be ready to die for the nation, which alone gave human beings the immortality they craved because it had existed since the dawn of time and would continue after their deaths.122 Early modern philosophers, such as Hobbes, had called for a strong state to restrain the violence of Europe, which, they believed, had been solely inspired by “religion.” Yet in France, the nation had been evoked to mobilize all citizens for war, and Fichte now encouraged Germans to fight French imperialism for the sake of the Fatherland. The state had been devised to contain violence, but the nation was now being used to release it. If we can define the sacred as something for which one is prepared to die, the nation had certainly become an embodiment of the divine, a supreme value. Hence national mythology would encourage cohesion, solidarity, and loyalty within the confines of the nation. But it had yet to develop the “concern for everybody” that had been such an important ideal in many of the spiritual traditions associated with religion. The national mythos would not encourage citizens to extend their sympathy to the ends of the earth, to love the stranger in their midst, be loyal even to their enemies, to wish happiness for all beings, and to become aware of the world’s pain. True, this universal empathy had rarely affected the violence of the warrior aristocracy, but it had at least offered an alternative and a continuing challenge. Now that religion was being privatized, there was no “international” ethos to counter the growing structural and military violence to which weaker nations were increasingly subjected. Secular nationalism seemed to regard the foreigner as fair game for exploitation and mass slaughter, especially if he belonged to a different ethnic group.

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

  1. The theory of Image-Worship. It is the orthodox theory, denounced by the opponents as a species of idolatry,532 but strongly supported by the people, the monks, the poets, the women, the Empresses Irene and Theodora, sanctioned by the seventh oecumenical Council (787) and by the popes (Gregory II., Gregory III. and Hadrian I). It maintained the right and duty of using and worshipping images of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints, but indignantly rejected the charge of idolatry, and made a distinction (often disregarded in practice) between a limited worship due to pictures,533 and adoration proper due to God alone.534 Images are a pictorial Bible, and speak to the eye even more eloquently than the word speaks to the ear. They are of special value to the common people who cannot read the Holy Scriptures. The honors of the living originals in heaven were gradually transferred to their wooden pictures on earth; the pictures were reverently kissed and surrounded by the pagan rites of genuflexion, luminaries, and incense; and prayers were thought to be more effective if said before them. Enthusiasm for pictures went hand in hand with the worship of saints, and was almost inseparable from it. It kindled a poetic inspiration which enriched the service books of the Greek church. The chief hymnists, John of Damascus, Cosmas of Jerusalem, Germanus, Theophanes, Theodore of the Studium, were all patrons of images, and some of them suffered deposition, imprisonment, and mutilation for their zeal; but the Iconoclasts did not furnish a single poet.535 The chief argument against this theory was the second commandment. It was answered in various ways. The prohibition was understood to be merely temporary till the appearance of Christ, or to apply only to graven images, or to the making of images for idolatrous purposes. On the other hand, the cherubim over the ark, and the brazen serpent in the wilderness were appealed to as examples of visible symbols in the Mosaic worship. The incarnation of the Son of God furnished the divine warrant for pictures of Christ. Since Christ revealed himself in human form it can be no sin to represent him in that form. The significant silence of the Gospels concerning his personal appearance was supplied by fictitious pictures ascribed to St. Luke, and St. Veronica, and that of Edessa. A superstitious fancy even invented stories of wonder-working pictures, and ascribed to them motion, speech, and action. It should be added that the Eastern church confines images to colored representations on a plane surface, and mosaics, but excludes sculptures and statues from objects of worship. The Roman church makes no such restriction.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Thus knowledge of the self was an experience of pure bliss, an ekstasis. This knowledge lay beyond concepts and did not depend upon logical deduction. It was rather an awareness of an “inner light within the heart,” a direct and immediate intuition, beyond any ordinary joy. This “knowledge” transformed the individual. It could be attained only after a long training in inwardness, which the aspirants could achieve by practicing Yajnavalkya’s dialectical method: systematically dismantling normal habits of thought; cultivating an awareness of their interior world, their dreams, and subconscious states; and by constantly reminding themselves that the knowledge they sought was beyond words and of an entirely different order from their secular thoughts and experiences. Yajnavalkya could not impart this knowledge, as if it were ordinary, factual information. He could only teach the method that enabled his disciples to arrive at this state. Yajnavalkya believed that a person who knows thus—who had realized his or her identity with brahman—would go to brahman at death, taking their “knowledge” with them. In the traditional Vedic ritual, a person constructed the self that would survive in the world of the gods by means of his liturgical action (karma). But for Yajnavalkya, the creation of an immortal self was not achieved by external rites, but by this carefully acquired knowledge. The ritualists had believed that the self was built by accumulating a stock of perfectly executed sacrifices, but Yajnavalkya was convinced that the eternal self was conditioned by all our actions and experiences. “What a man turns out to be depends on how he acts and on how he conducts himself. If his actions are good, he will turn into something good. If his actions are bad, he turns into something bad.” Yajnavalkya was not simply talking about our external deeds. Our mental activities, such as our impulses of desire and feelings of attachment, were also crucial. After his death, a man whose desires were fixed on the things of this world would return to earth, after a brief stay in heaven. His mind and character still clung to the mundane, and so he would be born again to endure a new life here below, “back to this world, back to action.” But a man who sought only his immortal self, and was not attached to this world, belonged to the brahman: “A man who does not desire—who is without desires, who is freed from desires, whose desires are fulfilled, whose only desire is his self—his vital functions do not depart. Brahman he is, and to brahman he goes.”19 He would never again return to this life of pain and mortality.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Paleolithic hunters may have had a similar understanding.18 The cave paintings in northern Spain and southwestern France are among the earliest extant documents of our species. These decorated caves almost certainly had a liturgical function, so from the very beginning art and ritual were inseparable. Our neocortex makes us intensely aware of the tragedy and perplexity of our existence, and in art, as in some forms of religious expression, we find a means of letting go and encouraging the softer, limbic emotions to predominate. The frescoes and engravings in the labyrinth of Lascaux in the Dordogne, the earliest of which are seventeen thousand years old, still evoke awe in visitors. In their numinous depiction of the animals, the artists have captured the hunters’ essential ambivalence. Intent as they were to acquire food, their ferocity was tempered by respectful sympathy for the beasts they were obliged to kill, whose blood and fat they mixed with their paints. Ritual and art helped hunters express their empathy with and reverence (religio) for their fellow creatures—just as Mencius would describe some seventeen millennia later—and helped them live with their need to kill them. In Lascaux there are no pictures of the reindeer that featured so largely in the diet of these hunters.19 But not far away, in Montastruc, a small sculpture has been found, carved from a mammoth tusk in about 11,000 BCE, at about the same time as the later Lascaux paintings. Now lodged in the British Museum, it depicts two swimming reindeer.20 The artist must have watched his prey intently as they swam across lakes and rivers in search of new pastures, making themselves particularly vulnerable to the hunters. He also felt a tenderness toward his victims, conveying the unmistakable poignancy of their facial expressions without a hint of sentimentality. As Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, has noted, the anatomical accuracy of this sculpture shows that it “was clearly made not just with the knowledge of a hunter but also with the insight of a butcher, someone who had not only looked at his animals but had cut them up.” Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, has also reflected insightfully on the “huge and imaginative generosity” of these Paleolithic artists: “In the art of this period, you see human beings trying to enter fully into the flow of life, so that they become part of the whole process of animal life that’s going on all around them … and this is actually a very religious impulse.”21 From the first, then, one of the major preoccupations of both religion and art (the two being inseparable) was to cultivate a sense of community—with nature, the animal world, and our fellow humans.

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

  Paschasius Radbertus (from 800 to about 865), a learned, devout and superstitious monk, and afterwards abbot of Corbie or Corvey in France705 is the first who clearly taught the doctrine of transubstantiation as then believed by many, and afterwards adopted by the Roman Catholic church. He wrote a book "on the Body and Blood of the Lord," composed for his disciple Placidus of New Corbie in the year 831, and afterwards reedited it in a more popular form, and dedicated it to the Emperor Charles the Bald, as a Christmas gift (844). He did not employ the term transubstantiation, which came not into use till two centuries later; but he taught the thing, namely, that "the substance of bread and wine is effectually changed (efficaciter interius commutatur) into the flesh and blood of Christ," so that after the priestly consecration there is "nothing else in the eucharist but the flesh and blood of Christ," although "the figure of bread and wine remain" to the senses of sight, touch, and taste. The change is brought about by a miracle of the Holy Spirit, who created the body of Christ in the womb of the Virgin without cohabitation, and who by the same almighty power creates from day to day, wherever the mass is celebrated, the same body and blood out of the substance of bread and wine. He emphasizes the identity of the eucharistic body with the body which was born of the Virgin, suffered on the cross, rose from the dead, and ascended to heaven; yet on the other hand he represents the sacramental eating and drinking as a spiritual process by faith.706 He therefore combines the sensuous and spiritual conceptions.707 He assumes that the soul of the believer communes with Christ, and that his body receives an imperishable principle of life which culminates at last in the resurrection. He thus understood, like several of the ancient fathers, the words of our Saviour: "He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day" (John 6:54). He supports his doctrine by the words of institution in their literal sense, and by the sixth chapter of John. He appealed also to marvellous stories of the visible appearances of the body and blood of Christ for the removal of doubts or the satisfaction of the pious desire of saints. The bread on the altar, he reports, was often seen in the shape of a lamb or a little child, and when the priest stretched out his hand to break the bread, an angel descended from heaven with a knife, slaughtered the lamb or the child, and let his blood run into a cup!708 Such stories were readily believed by the people, and helped to strengthen the doctrine of transubstantiation; as the stories of the appearances of departed souls from purgatory confirmed the belief in purgatory.