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)

  Here the ideological prejudice shows more clearly on the surface. People who hold this usually simply take fo r granted that religious belief is irrational and unenlightened or unscientific. If we step back from this prejudice, we can remember how much of the development of modern science was from the beginning bound .up with a religious outlook starting from the roots of mechanism in nominalist theology; and we can see how today, too, scientific questioning can just as well inspire a kind of pi ety as it can unbelief. I don't feel able to offer an explanation of the scope that these theories of secularization lay claim to. But I think something more can be said about what the change we call by this name has amounted to. This can be seen as a n effort to clarify the explanandum for any a dequate theory of secula ri za tion. The crucial chan g e, as I intimated above, is that people no longer feel, l ike Whic hcote, that the spiritual dimension of their lives was incomprehensibl e if one supposed there was no God. To most of our forebears it seemed strang e a nd bizarre, n ot to say wicked, to deny the exi sten ce of God. How can we understand this? In the language 1 have been using in this w o rk, we can say that God was in some way or other bound up with the onl y mor a l sources they could seriously envisag e. 'Moral sources' has been my term of art for c o nstitutive goods insofar as we turn to them i n whatever way is appropriate to Fractured Horizons · 3 I I t hem-through contemplation, or invocat ion, or prayer, or whatev er-for m o ral empowerment. An "age of belief" is one in which all credible moral s ou rces involve God. Within such an age, there are a great variety of sources, and God may enter into them very differently. We see this reflected in the recognizably d ifferent forms of Christian spirituality. For some people, the very fact tha t th eir lives had a moral dimension, the fact t hat they were moved not simply b y de facto desires but also by spiritual aspirations, straining to so methin g higher, pointed irresistibly to a Deity. No other explanation seemed credible. Whichcote was obviously one such. He borrows the Platonic notion that our sp ir itual aspirations give us some sense of what created them and guide s th em, just as our eyes tell us what makes vision possible. So Reason, ou r hig her part , comes to acknowledge God just as naturally as our eyes do th e sun. The other image invoked in the passage I quoted above, that of gravity, is even more telling.

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

  But there w as something deeper. If one vi e ws these paintings without a sense of their immediate historical context, as we do now, some t hing of the transfiguration stil1 comes through. That is because they carry something of the power and titanic f orce of raw nature, a force which declares irrelevant all ju dgements made on this nature as crude or imperfect from more refined and spiritual points of view. Rosen and Zerner in their discussion of the Burial point to "the aggressive presence of the personages". 39 A force resides in these people, even for those unfamiliar with the e ar lie r hierarch y of genres. And similarly Courbet's Stonebreakers p o rtrays not only deprivation; it also c aptures the strain, the concentrated exertion to the very limit, o f hard physical labour. There is fo rce an d not only misfortune h ere. The affirmation of raw nature, which is in effect a declaration of its inde pendence from the depreciatory judgements of "higher" standpoints, takes up one of the basic themes of the naturalist Enlightenment. There it was a matter of affirming the innocence of nature. Here it has become something more ambiguous, alr e ady affected by the nineteen t h-century transposition in the sense of nature which I discuss below, but basically similar in its moral purport. In these and other paintings of Courbet, as also in some of Manet's outstandin g works-Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, Olympia-the se nse comes throug h that unrefined nature, basic de s ire, doesn't have to be seen a s a dead wei ght hold ing us back from spiritual asc en t, but is to be wholeheartedly embraced, perhap s even rejoiced in. What was once a basic thesis of the m aterialist philosophers n o w inhabits the canvas. This is a naturalist transfiguration. We could even speak here of a naturalist epiphany. There seem to be two s trands of realism, one of which focusses on the power of the ar tist, the other on the dignity and force of the subject. But in fact they appear to be closel y co nnected; it seems to have been possible to run them together; and ev en the e p iphanic kind in it s o w n way testifies to the power of the artist. The thoroughgoing naturalist disenchantment of the world throws into relief the cr eative work of the imagination in transfiguring it. All this emerges in a short pa ssage of Emile Zola's appreciation of the painting Jallais Hill, Pointoise b y Camille Pissaro: This is the modern countrysid e. One feels the passage of man, who digs up the earth, cuts it up , saddens the horizon. This valley , this hillside manifest a simplicity and an heroic frankness.

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

  23.2 I have been arguing that a certain understanding of art has run continuously t h roug h the modern world since the Roman tic era. I t is the conception I 've b e en calling epiphanic, and it encompasses not only an aesthetic of the work o f art bu t also a view about its spiritual significance and about the nature and situation of the artist. It is a view not only about art but about the place of art in life, and its relation to morality. It is in fact an exaltation of art; for this becomes the crucial locus of what I have been calling moral sources. Realizing a n epiphany is a paradigm case of what I called recovering contact with a moral source. The epiphany is our achieving contact with something, where th is contact eith er fosters and/or itself constitutes a spirituall y significant f u l fil ment or wholeness. 426 • S U BT LE R LANG U A GE S Nor is this vie w of art the propeny of a minority or a coterie only. The individual instantiations of th is view are indeed held by a minori t y in each case, sometimes a little-known one. But the general understanding of t he place of art is very widespread and deep in our culture, and this corres p onds to a widely shared sense th at the creative imagination is an indispensable locus of moral sources, as the paradoxical and ambivalent relation between minority art and mass public I have just described attests. This general conception has been through a number of transformations and taken a great many forms. It has brought about successive revolutions in p oetics and engendered styles of p oetry very different from those of the Romantics. But what often inspired thes e changes was this very notion of the epiphanic. Wordsworth shows us what is spiritually significant in the ordinary, both people and things. At t he same time, his poetry contains a rea listic description of these people and things, and straightforward expres sions of feeling. But th e lines of modern poetry which flow from Baudelaire have detached themselves from the straightforwardly mimetic and expressive. What underlay this separation was the sense th at the revelatory power of the symbol depends on a break with ordinary discourse. Mallarme speaks of the poet as "ceding the initiative to words,, and allowing the poem to be structured by their inherent, interacting forces, "mobilized by the shock of their inequality". 23 For the Imagists, "the proper and perfect symbol is the natural object,,. 24 The poetic image is opaque, non-referential. Here the Romantic contrast between the symbolic and the referential has intensified in to the attempt to achieve epiphany by deranging reference-to give power to symbols b y taking language beyond discourse.

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

  The symbol r e m ains central to epiphanic art, and not only in the school which was called ' Sy mbo l ist'. C arlyle spoke of the symbol as "an e mbodiment and revelation o f the i nfinit e". Yeats took up the Romantic contrast of symbol with allegory: "A sy mbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a t r a n sp aren t lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of man y p o s sibl e r epresentations of an embodied thing or a familiar principle . .. : the o n e is a r evelation , the other an amusement". 8 The "image" that Pound and h is g eneration so u ght pa rt akes of t h e same nature. The image is a concrete 42.2. • S U B TL E R LA NG U A G ES manifestation; it is not meant to be understood as discourse about something. Music, th e clearly non-discursive, non-representative art, is the model. Symbolists and Imagists, like Pater, think that all art should aspire to the condition o f music. 9 Quite understandably, the Romantic imag e of the poet as a seer continues, explicitly in Baudelaire, but implicitly in the quality of admiration and aw e which surround the makers of epiphanies up to our day. There is a kin d of pi ety which still surrounds art and artists in our time, which comes from th e sense that what they reveal has great moral and spiritual significance; that in it lies. the key to a certain depth, or fulness, or seriousness, or intensity of life , or to a certain wholeness. I have to use a string of alternatives here, because this si gn ifi cance is very differently conceived, and often-for reasons whic h hav e to do with the very nature of epiphanic art and which I will discuss below-is n ot clearly conceived at all. But for many of o u r contemporar ies ar t has tak e n something like the place of religion. In contr ast to th e fulness of epiphany is the sens e of the world around us, a s we ordinarily experience it, as ou t of joint, dead, or forsaken.

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

  This is why late-eighteenth-c e ntu ry sentimentali s m , wh en it moved beyond the early influential formulatio ns of Rousseau, fou n d its natural home in the philosophies of nature as a source. The difference in relation to the Platonic model is that here the "senti ments" are defined by the transcendent object of love, the Good. We ca n be lieve that we can attain a descripti on o f th is ob ject independent of ou r The Expressivist Turn • 3 7 3 f e elings, although the object prop erly understo od must command our love a nd awe. But we come to define what nature is as a source in the course of ar t iculating what it inclines us to. If we think of nature as a force, an elan r unning through the world, which emerges in our own inner impulses, if these imp ulses are an indispensable pa rt of our a c cess to this force, then w e can onl y know what it is by articulating what these i mpulses impel us to. An d this articulation must be partly in terms of sentiment, as we have seen. So once ag ain, our sentiments are integral to our most original, underived definition of the good. The first difference above, that in relation to the Aristotelian model, gives rise to another slide, analogous to the one away from orthodox theology. If the good life is defined partly in t erms of c ertain se n timents, then it can also slip its moorings and de p art from the traditional ethical codes. At first, the appropriate sentiments are define d very much in congruence with the ethic of ordinary li f e and benevolence, following moral sense theory. Benevolenc e and sympathy are seen as natural, as were the traditional limits on sensual fulfilment by, say , Rousseau or Herder. But th e way is open for a redefinition. Renewed con ta ct with th e deep sources in nature ca n be seen as conferring a heightened, more vibrant quality to life. This can be interpreted in a way which abandons the usual restraints on sensual fulfilment. In p artial attune m ent to the outlook of Enlightenment materialism, sensuality can itself be made signi fi cant. The good life comes to consist in a perfect fusion of the sensual and the spiritu a l, where our sensual fulfilments are experienced as having higher significance. 9 The journey along this path tak e s us beyond the period now being discussed. We have perhaps come to the end of this r o ad on ly in our own time, with the " flower generation " of the 196o's. Similarly, the source which gives heightened vibrancy to our lives can be detached fro m benevolence and solidarity. But this , too, happens later.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Mobility was still a sacred value: the sacrificial ground was used once only, and was always abandoned after the completion of the rite. At the western end of the sacrificial area, a thatched hut represented the hall of the settled householder. During the rite, the warriors solemnly carried the fire from the hut to the eastern end of the enclosure, where a fresh hearth was built in the open air. The next day, a new sacrificial ground was established, a little farther to the east, and the rite was repeated. The ceremony reenacted Agni’s victorious progress into the new territory, as a ritualist of a later period explained: “This Fire should create room for us; this Fire should go in front, conquering our enemies; impetuously this Fire should conquer the enemies; this Fire should win the prizes in the contest.” 52 Agni was the patron of the settlers. Their colony was a new beginning and, like the first creation, had wrested order from chaos. Fire symbolized the warriors’ ability to control their environment. They identified deeply with their fire. If he could steal fire from the hearth of a vaishya farmer, a warrior could also lure his cattle away, because they would always follow the flames. “He should take brightly burning fire from the home of his rival,” says one of the later texts; “he thereby takes his wealth, his property.” 53 Fire symbolized a warrior’s power and success; it was—an im-portant point—his alter ego. He could create new fire, control and domesticate it. Fire was like his son; when he died and was cremated, he became a sacrificial victim and Agni would carry him to the land of the gods. The fire represented his best and deepest self (atman), 54 and because the fire was Agni, this self was sacred and divine. Agni was present everywhere, but he was hidden. He was in the sun, the thunder, the stormy rain, and the lightning that brought fire to the earth. He was present in ponds and streams, in the clay of the riverbank, and the plants from which fire could be kindled. 55 Agni had to be reverently retrieved from these hiding places, and pressed into the service of humanity. After establishing a new settlement, the warriors would celebrate the Agnicayana ritual, when they would ceremonially build a new brick altar for Agni. First they processed to the riverbank to collect the clay, where Agni was hidden, ritually taking possession of their new territory.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The traditional yoga had never centered on a god, but karma-yoga did. The Shvetashvatara Upanishad had instructed the yogin to focus on Rudra/Shiva, but Krishna told Arjuna that he must meditate on Vishnu. Krishna had a surprise for Arjuna. He explained that he, Krishna, was not only the son of Vishnu, but he actually was the god in human form. Even though he was “unborn, undying, the Lord of creatures,” Vishnu had descended into a human body many times. 83 Vishnu was the creator of the world and kept it in being, but whenever there was a serious crisis—“whenever sacred duty decays and chaos prevails”—he created an earthly form for himself and came into the world: To protect men of virtue And destroy men who do evil To set the standard of sacred duty, I appear in age after age. 84 Now that he had imparted this astonishing news, Krishna could speak more openly to Arjuna about the devotion of bhakti. Arjuna could learn how to detach himself from his egocentric desires by imitating Krishna himself. As Lord and Ruler of the world, Krisha/Vishnu was continually active, but his deeds (karman) did not damage him: These actions do not bind me, Since I remain detached In all my actions, Arjuna, As if I stood apart from them. 85 But if he wanted to imitate Krishna, Arjuna had to understand the nature of divinity; he had to see Krishna/Vishnu as he truly was. Right there on the battlefield, Krishna revealed his divine nature to Arjuna, who was aghast and filled with terror when he saw his friend’s eternal form as the god Vishnu, creator and destroyer, to whom all beings must return. He saw Krishna transfigured by the divine radiance, which contained the entire cosmos. “I see the gods in your body!” he cried. I see your boundless form Everywhere, The countless arms, Bellies, mouths, and eyes; Lord of all, I see no end, Or middle or beginning To your totality. 86 Everything—human or divine—was somehow present in the body of Krishna, who filled space and included within himself all possible forms of deity: “howling storm gods, sun gods, bright gods, and gods of ritual.” But Krishna/Vishnu was also “man’s tireless spirit,” the essence of humanity. 87 All things rushed toward him, as rivers roiled toward the sea and moths were drawn inexorably into a blazing flame. And there too Arjuna saw the Pandava and Kaurava warriors, all hurtling into the god’s blazing mouths. Arjuna had thought that he had known Krishna through and through, but now, “Who are you?” he cried in bewilderment. “I am Time grown old,” Krishna replied—time, which set the world in motion and also annihilated it. Krishna/Vishnu was eternal; he transcended the historical process. As destroyer, Krishna/Vishnu had already annihilated the armies that were apparently drawing up their battle lines, even though, from Arjuna’s human perspective, the fighting had not even begun.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  They too were shruti, “revealed,” regarded as scripture par excellence. They are not easy to interpret, but they have been more influential in shaping Hindu spirituality than any other part of the Vedic corpus. The two earliest Upanishads emerged seamlessly from the world of the Brahmanas. Like the Aranyakas, or Forest Texts, they were esoteric sections added onto the Brahmana commentaries of the different priestly schools. The first of the Upanishads actually called itself an Aranyaka. The Brhadaranyaka Upanishad is the “Great Forest Text” of the White Yajur Veda School. It opened with a discussion of the Vedic horse sacrifice, one of the most important of the royal ceremonies and the speciality of the White Yajur Veda. The author of the Upanishad pointed out bandhus (“connections”) in the traditional way, identifying various parts of the horse with the natural world. The stallion’s head was the dawn, his eyes were the sun, and his breath was the wind. But in the Upanishad, the ritual could be performed and completed mentally. It had ceased to be linked with a physical, external sacrifice but took place entirely in the mind of the sage (rishi). The Chandogya Upanishad was the Vedantic text of the Udgatr priests who were responsible for the chant, and it began appropriately with a meditation on the sacred syllable “Om,” with which the Udgatr priest began each hymn. Sound had always been divine in India; it was the primal reality, because, it was said, everything else derived from it. Now, the Chandogya Upanishad made this single syllable stand for all sound and for the entire cosmos. Om was the essence of everything that existed—of the sun, moon, and stars. It was the brahman in form of sound, the vital power that held everything together: “As all leaves are held together by a stalk, so all speech is held together by Om. Verily, the whole world is nothing but Om.” 1 But the chant was not merely a transcendent reality external to the priest who intoned it. It was also one with the human body, with the atman, with breath, speech, ear, eye, and mind. The Chandogya Upanishad directed the attention of the audience back to the inner self. When a priest intoned this sacred syllable with these “connections” firmly in his mind, he attained the goal of the spiritual quest. Because Om was the brahman, it was “the immortal and the fearless.” 2 A person who chanted this immortal and fearless sound while contemplating these bandhus would himself become immortal and free from fear. This brings us to the heart of the Upanishadic vision.

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

  O r i f it fai ls utterly to move us, then it cannot be that we accept that co n c e p tio n of the good. This humanism is less far from the Kantian than it ma y thi nk . O r co u r se, anoth e r i m porta n t change has oc curr ed with the imm anen ti z a t i o n: t he empow erin g mot ive has ch an ged from love to r e spect . Or per haps w e mi gh t s ay that from the mixture of love and awe which the God of A br ah am commanded, only so me of the latter is left in face of our own po w er s o f dis engagement . H ere is another reaso n to mark this by a break in ou r vo ca bu l ary . A nd once ag ain, I don't mind such a brea k, pr ov i ded we d o n' t lo s e th e continuity from view . I do n' t mind if one says that modern i m m an ent huma nis m has no mor e plac e for c o n stitu tive goods, that n othing func t ions quite like the moral sources of pr emod ern theori es. But what r e mai ns tr u e is that some thin g still functions analog o usl y. That is, there is s o m ethin g re la ti o n to which defines ce rtai n actions and motives as hig her, vi z. , o ur capa citie s as 't h inking reeds ' ; a nd our conte mpla tion of this can in sp ir e a mo tive which emp ower s us to live up to what is high er. But this is precisely what we are tempted to f o rget in the climate of modern moral philosophy. The eclipse of our whole awareness of qualitative distinctions carries with it the neglect of this whole dimension o f our moral thought and experience. For this reason, I shall elect to speak still of moral sources even in connection with modern immanentist theories, and even of the most severely d isenchanted kind.

• 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 The Great Transformation (2006)

  Even the heavenly bodies and the four seasons had to “yield” instead of encroaching aggressively upon one another. “Heaven and Earth are harmonised by the li, the sun and moon are illuminated by it; the four seasons derive their order from it; the stars and planets move by it,” Xunzi pointed out. If they did not, there would be chaos. The same li, which demanded that all things observe their due place in the order of the cosmos, would purify human emotions. 25 So far from being unnatural, the li would take people to the heart of reality. “The meaning of ritual is deep indeed,” Xunzi repeated emphatically. “He who tries to enter it with the uncouth and inane theories of the system-makers will perish there.” 26 Even though Xunzi concentrated on earth rather than Heaven, he was not a secular humanist. Like all Chinese, he revered nature as “godlike” ( shen ). His religious rationalism was based on mystical silence. He deplored what he called “obsession,” the egotistic insistence on a single doctrinal position. Before anybody attempted to reform society, he must understand the Way, and he could not do that by insisting that his opinions were right and everybody else’s wrong. The Way could be comprehended only by a mind that was “empty, unified and still.” Here Xunzi was entirely in agreement with Zhuangzi. The mind was “empty” if it remained open to new impressions, instead of clinging to its own opinion; it was “unified” if it did not force the complexity of life into a coherent, self-serving system; it was “still” if it did not indulge in “dreams and noisy fantasies,” and nurture ambitious “plots and schemes” that hindered true understanding. 27 “Emptiness, unity and stillness,” Xunzi explained, “these are the qualities of a great and pure enlightenment.” Divested of egotistic obsession, an ordinary human being could achieve the panoptic vision of a sage. Instead of being imprisoned in a parochially selfish point of view, he acquired an intuitive grasp of the deeper principles of government. He who has such enlightenment may sit in his room and view the entire area within the four seas, may dwell in the present and yet discourse on distant ages. He has a penetrating insight into all beings and understands their true nature, studies the ages of order and disorder and comprehends the principle behind them. He surveys all Heaven and Earth, governs all beings, and masters the great principle and all that is in the universe. 28 His intelligence had become “godlike” ( shen ). The Legalists had not been ambitious enough. A reformed person was not simply a cog in the economic or military machine, but a divine being. “Broad and vast—who knows the limits of such a man?” Xunzi asked. “Brilliant and comprehensive—who knows his virtue? Shadowy and ever changing—who knows his form? His brightness matches the sun and moon; his greatness fills the eight directions.

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

  He is famous as the reputed author of the Sequences (Sequentiae), a class of hymns in rythmical prose, hence also called Proses (Prosae). They arose from the custom of prolonging the last syllable in singing the Allelu-ia of the Gradual, between the Epistle and the Gospel, while the deacon was ascending from the altar to the rood-loft (organ-loft), that he might thence sing the Gospel. This prolongation was called jubilatio or jubilus, or laudes, on account of its jubilant tone, and sometimes sequentia (Greek ajkolouqiva), because it followed the reading of the Epistle or the Alleluia. Mystical interpreters made this unmeaning prolongation of a mere sound the echo of the jubilant music of heaven. A further development was to set words to these notes in rythmical prose for chanting. The name sequence was then applied to the text and in a wider sense also to regular metrical and rhymed hymns. The book in which Sequences were collected was called Sequentiale.492 Notker marks the transition from the unmeaning musical sequence to the literary or poetic sequence. Over thirty poems bear his name. His first, attempt begins with the line "Laudes Deo concinat orbis ubique totus." More widely circulated is his Sequence of the Holy Spirit: "Sancti Spiritus adsit nobis gratia." "The grace of the Holy Spirit be present with us."493 The best of all his compositions, which is said to have been inspired by the sight of the builders of a bridge over an abyss in the Martinstobe, is a meditation on death (Antiphona de morte): "Media vita in morte sumus: Quem quaerimus adiutorem nisi te, Domine, Qui pro peccatis nostris juste irasceris? Sancte Deus, sancte fortis, Sancte et misericors Salvator: Amarae morti ne tradas nos."494 This solemn prayer is incorporated in many burial services. In the Book of Common Prayer it is thus enlarged: "In the midst of life we be in death: Of whom may we seek for succour, but of Thee, O Lord, which for our sins justly art moved? Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour, Deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death. Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts. Shut not up thy merciful eyes to our prayers: But spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy and merciful Saviour, Thou most worthy Judge eternal, Suffer us not, at our last hour, For any pains of death, To fall from Thee."495 Peter Damiani (d. 1072), a friend of Hildebrand and promoter of his hierarchical refrms, wrote a solemn hymn on the day of death: "Gravi me terrore pulsas vitae dies ultima,"496 "With what heavy fear thou smitest." He is perhaps also the author of the better known descriptive poem on the Glory and Delights of Paradise, which is usually assigned to St. Augustin: "Ad perennis vitae fontem mens sitivit arida, Claustra carnis praesto frangi clausa quaerit anima: Gliscit, ambit, eluctatur exsul frui patria."497

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  I go to the attic almost every morning to get the stale air out of my lungs. This morning when I went there, Peter was busy cleaning up. He finished quickly and came over to where I was sitting on my favorite spot on the floor. The two of us looked out at the blue sky, the bare chestnut tree glistening with dew, the seagulls and other birds glinting with silver as they swooped through the air, and we were so moved and entranced that we couldn’t speak. He stood with his head against a thick beam, while I sat. We breathed in the air, looked outside and both felt that the spell shouldn’t be broken with words. We remained like this for a long while, and by the time he had to go to the loft to chop wood, I knew he was a good, decent boy. He climbed the ladder to the loft, and I followed; during the fifteen minutes he was chopping wood, we didn’t say a word either. I watched him from where I was standing, and could see he was obviously doing his best to chop the right way and show off his strength. But I also looked out the open window, letting my eyes roam over a large part of Amsterdam, over the rooftops and on to the horizon, a strip of blue so pale it was almost invisible. “As long as this exists,” I thought, “this sunshine and this cloudless sky, and as long as I can enjoy it, how can I be sad?” The best remedy for those who are frightened, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere they can be alone, alone with the sky, nature and God. For then and only then can you feel that everything is as it should be and that God wants people to be happy amid nature’s beauty and simplicity. As long as this exists, and that should be forever, I know that there will be solace for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances. I firmly believe that nature can bring comfort to all who suffer. Oh, who knows, perhaps it won’t be long before I can share this overwhelming feeling of happiness with someone who feels the same as I do. Yours, Anne P.S. Thoughts: To Peter. We’ve been missing out on so much here, so very much, and for such a long time. I miss it just as much as you do. I’m not talking about external things, since we’re well provided for in that sense; I mean the internal things. Like you, I long for freedom and fresh air, but I think we’ve been amply compensated for their loss. On the inside, I mean. This morning, when I was sitting in front of the window and taking a long, deep look outside at God and nature, I was happy, just plain happy.

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

  Th is is ou r 'memoria '. And it is here th at o ur implicit grasp of what we are resides, which guides us as we move fr o m our original self-ignorance and grievous self-m isdescription to true self-k nowledge. B ut what is at the basis of this memory itself? At its root, constituting this i mplicit understanding, is the Master withi n, the so urce of the light which lights every man coming into the world, Go d. And so at the end of its search fo r itself, if it goes to the very end, the soul finds God. The experience of being illumined from another source, of receiving the standar ds of our reason from beyond ourselves, which the proof o f God's ex i stence alread y brought to light, is seen to be very much an experience of inwardness. That is, it is in this paradigm a tically first-person activi t y, where I strive to make myself more fully present to myself, to realize to the full the potential which resides in the fact that kno wer and known are one, that I come most tellingly and conv inci ngly to the awareness that God sta nds above me. At the very root of memory, the soul fin ds God. And so the soul can be sa id to "remember God" -Augustine can give a new meaning to an old bibli cal exp ression. When I turn to God , I am listening to what is deep in my " m emo r y"; and so the soul "is reminded to turn to the Lord as to the light b y wh ich it was s omehow touched even whe n turned away from him". 17 B ut th e way within leads above. When we get to God, the image of place b e c o m es m ultip le and m any-sided. In an imp ortant sense, the truth is not in m e. 18 I s ee the truth 'in' God. Where the meeting takes place, there is a r e ve rs a l. Go ing within memory takes me beyond. He re i s a strikin g place where Augustine has built on a Platonic doctrine t o a n o v e l pu rpose. F or Plato in the M eno , the doctrine of reminiscence, b e s id es an s wering the difficult question of ho w you ever know what you seek, u n d er s c o res the thesis t hat knowledge of the Ideas isn't put into us by t r ai n i n g . The capaci t y is there. Augustine takes this point up.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  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. The Aryans had no elaborate shrines and temples.