D SPERRY FINLAYSON

• The three great questions, and the answers provided by contemporary science. • “Know that there is truth. Know this.” If so, there is meaning. • The “personal” God: female or male? Mine versus Yours. God in “The Simpsons.” • Why the denial of metaphysical experience. • God conceived as immanent or transcendent, or as both. • God in Judaism, in Hasidism, and among the Marranos. Albert Einstein's “cosmic religious feeling.” • St. Clement: Yahweh and the God of the Greek philosophers, one and the same. • Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)” • The Koran and original being. • Judaism and “pagan” beliefs and practices. • Judaic Law handed down from on high, in words. • God incarnate. If Logos were not translated as “Word”? Christian obligation to protect Nature. • Christian adoption of pagan rituals, festivals, and imagery. • To Aristotle, Nature was divine. Plato and the Forms • The Reformation. Focus again on the Word. • Love in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and the love essential to art making. • The self and the Self. • Bertrand Russell, Mephistopheles, and Dr. Faustus. • The word “God” is exhausted. • Richard Dawkins: “The feeling of awe and wonder that science can give us.” Not science—Nature. • Einstein and the Logos. • Glenn Gould: music, metaphysics, and technical transcendence in Bach. • The story, with or without the tiger.

The great writer is the very symbol of life, of the non-perfect. He moves effortlessly, giving the illusion of perfection, from some unknown center which is certainly not the brain center but which is definitely a center, a center connected with the rhythm of the whole universe and consequently as sound, as durable, as defiant, anarchic, purposeless, as the universe itself. Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

[Henry Miller, On Writing, p 109]

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least.

[Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of Grass]

I could not say I believe. I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God.

[Carl Jung, quoted in Time magazine, Feb 14, 1955: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Carl_Jung (9/30/11)]

It is now and then said that for human beings the three great questions are these: How did the universe come to be? What is my place in it? How will it end?

Contemporary science has answers to such questions, and for the moment finds them generally satisfying. Our universe came into being with a Big Bang. We are a species of creature within it—infinitesimal at that scale, but the most complex such assemblage known so far, and the product of a long evolution. The Universe itself may be headed for the Big Crunch, or the Big Rip, or for some other end, depending on the theory. There are probably multiple universes, and multiple dimensions other than the four we now recognize.

For scientists, this theoretical view of reality, this story, is exciting and convincing; most are actively involved in investigating and verifying some portion of it. The scientific story is admirable in its scope and detail, but some of the rest of us can find it strangely enervating and sterile. The fact that men have walked about on the moon is seen as a triumph for the glorious human race, though it is perhaps a shame to litter the moon with our trash and to stake it out as real estate. A few scientists do not accept the current story, but this is taken as merely a sign of the overall invincibility of the scientific method, which is self-questioning and self-correcting. Questions of scientific ethics and responsibility for consequences are debated now and then, but in practice such questions are treated as peripheral to the great march forward.

What do human beings want, in both the current sense of “desire” and in the older sense of “lack”? In a short story set in present time and called “The Pure in Heart,” the pastor of a church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a highly educated man of “rational, ethical orientation,” suddenly hears the voice of God for the first time—shockingly, distressingly. The voice, “like a hugely amplified PA system, blocks away, switched on for a moment by mistake” says, “Know that there is truth. Know this.” [1] [emphasis mine]

This could easily be funny, but in the story it escapes that, probably because the voice says what seems exactly the right thing, the most reassuring and strengthening and inspiring thing. If there is truth (which is more than fact), it is enough—almost regardless of what that truth may be—because if so there is meaning, which in turn assures us that we are sane, that in this fundamental case the Unmeasurable that we sense without physical proof is real. That great intuited Reality is. Jewish theologian Martin Buber has written, “What do we expect when we are in despair and yet go to a man? Surely a presence by means of which we are told that nevertheless there is meaning.”[2] Of course this tells us only what we hope for, what we desire, not what that “presence” might be.

Let us suppose, for the moment and for the sake of discussion, that God exists. But what is God? Plato pointed out long ago that one must know what something is before one can say anything about it.[3] And that is a problem: groups of human beings throughout the ages have postulated the existence of gods, built ideas about them into complex and rigid systems of belief, and then taken the acceptance, or not, of their particular system as a way to tell friend from enemy. The true missionary spirit, whether Buddhist or Christian, is rather different from this: it is motivated by the desire to bring to other sufferers the possibilities of justice, compassion and love as the basis for human life—that is, hope of a creative Way of being. Plato believed that all men desire ultimate good, but do not know what that good is.[4] It may be that what we call desire for God is desire for an ideal and all-encompassing Good which can be imagined as lying beyond the capacities of our collective intellect. James Wilkes points out that attempts to say what God is necessarily limit and thus deny God. “Once we have the idea of God pinned down we no longer have God, but an idol of our own making.”[5]

God is conceived by some cultures as a sort of super-person, known as a “personal god.” This super-person is usually imagined as male (wise, powerful, vengeful) though in early times the being was often female (wise, powerful, nurturing). Such deities hold the particular interests of one’s own tribe close to their hearts and, if the people are faithful in observing the required rites and sacrifices, will smite their enemies, who of course worship false gods. Astonishingly, we see such beliefs militant in parts of the United States today. This is the view of God that atheists find it easy to dismiss, that scientists may gleefully mock. One cartoon version is the character of God in The Simpsons television show: He has perfect teeth, a good smell, wears Birkenstock sandals and has five fingers, whereas the other characters have only four.[6] Nevertheless, it is the personal aspect of God to “whom” human beings appeal in moments of terror or extreme anxiety, even if with embarrassment at what they are convinced is their own irrationality under stress. The instinctive appeal to God is deeply atavistic. At such times, there is absolutely nothing else.

On the other hand, the overall conception of God tends to be more abstract if it arises from something like an experience of awe, wonder, and gratitude in the contemplation of what is, as perhaps in the case of certain African peoples:

Belief in such a High God (sometimes called the Sky God, since he is associated with the heavens) is still a feature of the religious life in many indigenous African tribes. They yearn toward God in prayer; believe that he is watching over them and will punish wrongdoing. Yet he is strangely absent from their daily lives: he has no special cult and is never depicted in effigy.

[Karen Armstrong, A History of God, p 3]

Such a conception of God is also a possibility for people who consider human intelligence, reason, and intellectual curiosity to be among the myriad wonders of God’s creation.

If God exists, the attributes and actions of such an entity are clearly far beyond our ability to begin to imagine; even the idea of “attributes” and “actions” presumes more knowledge than we have. We can only live in the world, attention open, and out of what we find, celebrate and imagine —or, in our scientific mode, explore and measure, theorize and predict—discovering and categorizing one small part of the whole after another, constructing generalities when we can.

Our ability to feel awe, wonder, and spiritual joy is as elementary to our humanity as is our ability to love, to envy or to hate. How strange to dismiss it, saying that what we experience is “only” the synapses in our brains firing in response to electrical charges initiated by our senses, to chemicals released, which in turn are responses to temporary arrangements of the subatomic stuff in the world outside our skins. We see with our eyes, which don't see everything that's there; the eye is like a camera, the eye/brain is not. We hear with our ears, which, thank God, don't hear everything that's there, or we'd be able to hear all the world's radio and TV stations, all the time. Whether scientist or mystic, we must live within our understanding of the information brought to us by our sensory equipment, or by our various machines. Why, then, the avidity for denial of apparently “metaphysical” experience, for explaining it away into nothing of much interest?

Some Darwinian evolutionists have explored the possibility that human spirituality is an “adaptive trait.”

Humans who developed a spiritual sense thrived and bequeathed that trait to their offspring. Those who didn’t risked dying off in chaos and killing.… [According to molecular biologist Dean Hamer]…human spirituality is an adaptive trait…[and] he has located one of the genes responsible, a gene that just happens to also code for production of the neurotransmitters that regulate our moods.… Hamer says, “I think we follow the basic law of nature, which is that we’re a bunch of chemical reactions running around in a bag”.…[but also] “If there’s a God, there’s a God. Just knowing what brain chemicals are involved in acknowledging that is not going to change the fact.”

[Time magazine, 10/04, p 65]

To sneer at that which is unknowable seems as foolish as to talk about it with any certainty. That we are bags of chemical reactions may be a fact, but is it “the basic law of nature”?

In full awareness of the natural world—the skies, the plants and animals, ourselves and other people, and great works of art made by human beings—we can find an awe and a joy which Aldous Huxley called “an apocalypse,” a joy often labelled “religious.”[7] Presence at a great performance of a Verdi opera can leave us charged with vitality and optimism, gratitude and pride. We experience this. Two thousand years ago Longinus, sometimes called the first literary critic, wrote in his Treatise on the Sublime:

For, as if instinctively our soul is uplifted by the true sublime; it takes a proud flight, and is filled with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself produced what it has heard

[Longinus, “On the Sublime,” 1st C. CE.]

“Joy” is an important theme in C.S. Lewis’s spiritual autobiography, published in 1955. His first remembered experience of this joy occurred before he was six years old. It was brought about by a toy-sized forest or garden which his older brother had made out of moss, twigs and flowers in the top of a biscuit tin. This, he wrote, was his first conscious experience of beauty. “What the real garden failed to do, the toy garden did.” It made him aware of nature as something “cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant.” And it affected him ever afterward: “As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden.”[8]

…[T]he quality…is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has ever experienced it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.

[C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, p 18]

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God, however unknowable, is conceived by human beings in three fundamental ways: as being immanent, permanently inherent within everything existent in the Universe, or as other than, separate from, the universe—that is, transcendent, beyond all experience and knowledge—or as both immanent and transcendent. The dominant view in the Judeo-Christian tradition seems to have been that God is separate from the universe, which He, a “personal” god with humanlike attributes, created out of nothing. Rabbi Will Herberg wrote:

When Judaism speaks of the Living God, it means to affirm that the transcendent Absolute which is the ultimate reality is not an abstract idea or an intellectual principle but a dynamic power in life and history—and a dynamic power that is personal. The God of Israel is thus best understood as a transcendent Person…

Attribution of personality to God is a scandal to modern minds. The religiously inclined man of today can understand and “appreciate” a God who—or rather which—is some impersonal process or metaphysical concept. But a God who is personal, a person: that seems to be the grossest “anthropomorphism” and therefore the grossest superstition.…

[Will Herberg, Judaism and Modern Man, An Interpretation of Jewish Religion pp 58-65]

However within Judaism there have been sects and factions holding very different ideas, as is always the case in religions. The fundamental Hasidic vision was of God as present in all things, and as being in fact the only reality.[9] Karen Armstrong tells us that the eighteenth century rabbi Schneur Zalman of Lyaday founded a new form of Hasidism, eventually known as the Habad, in which mysticism and rational contemplation would be combined. “God, therefore, is not really a transcendent being who occupies an alternative sphere of reality,” Ms. Armstrong writes, “[H]e is not external to the world. Indeed, the doctrine of God’s transcendence is another illusion of our minds, which find it almost impossible to get beyond sense impressions.”[10] Earlier, in the seventeenth century, Portuguese and Spanish Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity fled from the Inquisition to Amsterdam, where the Dutch gave them full citizenship and allowed them to take up their historic faith once more. Unlike many Jews, these Marranos believed in a Deity who, though transcendent, behaved in an entirely rational way, and did not interfere in human affairs. This God, writes Armstrong, did not overturn the laws of nature “by working bizarre miracles,” did not “dictate obscure laws on mountaintops.” Nor did it need to reveal a special code of law, when clearly nature’s laws were accessible to all.[11] Earlier Jewish and Muslim philosophers had proposed a similar conception of God. But such a view was never acceptable to most believers:

It was not religiously useful, since it was doubtful that the First Cause even knew that human beings existed…. Such a God had nothing to say to human pain or sorrow. For that you needed [traditional] mythical and cultic spirituality…

[Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God, p 20]

Eventually most Marranos managed to conform to the prevailing beliefs of the majority of Jews. Those few who could not do so were banished from the community—which at that time meant that they belonged to no community at all, a dire situation.[12]

Albert Einstein wrote that the development from the earliest religions of fear to the great, primarily moral, religions of civilized people is an important step, but that such religions generally conceive of an anthropomorphic God, with only exceptional individuals going beyond that. In his conception there is a third stage of religious experience which is found in all religions, though seldom in its pure form:

I shall call it a cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it….

The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought.…

The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.

How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it. [emphasis mine]

[Albert Einstein, quoted in Sonya Bargmann ed., Ideas and Opinions, Albert Einstein, p 38]

“Cosmic religious feeling” is awakened by “that sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves in nature” and by human art and human thought. Rather similarly, the ancient Taoists believed that the whole universe, including human beings, is “spirit-fraught.”[13] Their highest goal was to discover that spirit within themselves and to observe it in the universe—to become completely immersed in its ineffable peace and serenity. They knew that it could not be touched or named, but in order to speak of it they called it TAO.[14]

Human beings have probably always speculated about the nature of God, the essential qualities of that experienced or imagined reality, and in the early centuries of Christianity God’s nature was the subject of lively argument. Karen Armstrong provides a glimpse of one such difference of opinion:

[M]any people in the Greco-Roman world found the biblical God a blundering, ferocious deity….In about 178 the pagan philosopher Celsus accused the Christians of adopting a narrow, provincial view of God. He found it appalling that the Christians should claim a special revelation of their own: God was available to all human beings, yet the Christians huddled together in a sordid little group, asserting: “God has even deserted the whole world and the motions of the heavens and disregarded the vast earth to give attention to us alone.”

[Karen Armstrong, A History of God p 97]

A possible reconciliation between Judaic and Greek conceptions of God was proposed by Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-215 CE), a convert from paganism to Christianity. He is believed to have been educated in Greek philosophy and literature, and he became an influential Christian theologian, venerated as a Church Father and in some branches of Christianity as a saint. In Clement’s view, Yahweh and the God of the Greek philosophers were one and the same; Christ was the divine Logos born as man “so that you might learn from a man how to become God.”[15] This latter claim had of course already been made by Saint John, in his Prologue to the Fourth Gospel.

The “divine logos” is the way of being of all creation. It would seem that to follow that way, to align ourselves with it, would be to return to our true selves—in which it is inherent—and that this would constitute the highest kind of human “fitness.” Systems of rules of behavior, of which the Ten Commandments is one example, are a gathering of communal experience into laws which, if followed, can result in some degree of evolutionary fitness in both individual and community. Adherence to such codes produces order, which nourishes life, and it limits chaos, which brings death and dissolution. A condition of social < >´ may come into being, for a time at least—as long as the rules are not overly rigid, and the system allows nuance, irregularity, spontaneity.

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, in Tractacus:

It is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics. Propositions can express nothing that is higher. It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)

[Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractacus 6.42]

Words can never provide more than a sketch of a comprehensive moral code, which is and must be transcendental. Words provide a diagram, not a fully living pattern of behavior. Ethics and justice are real, but they exist only in action in the material world—in full manifestation, not in verbal rules. It is in manifestation that they can be experienced as achieving the liveliness and intrinsic rightness of < >´—or not, as in any other work of art. The rules, the diagrams, are useful simply as a set of guiding principles.

The Koran, received from God by Muhammad in a series of events between 610 and 633 C.E., teaches that the signs of God’s goodness and power are everywhere evident in the natural world, and that in order to be in touch with the true nature of things, Muslims must reproduce God’s benevolence in their own society. God can be perceived in the “signs” of Nature, but he is so utterly transcendent that he can be talked about only in parables. Karen Armstrong writes that according to the Koran, Muslims should see the world as an epiphany; they must “make the imaginative effort to see through the fragmentary world to the full power of original being, to the transcendent reality that infuses all things. ”[16]

The question, then, is this: Is an entirely transcendent God to be seen as “evident” in nature, indicated by “signs,” or is the whole universe, as Taoism teaches, “spirit-fraught….The whole universe—gods, spirits, men, living creatures, even the inanimate fields, ricks, hills and streams.…all seen as part of an ever-changing process at the heart of which [lies] some principle of unity, so hidden and mysterious that its secrets [cannot] be penetrated by human reason or intellect.”[17]

The answer is that such arguments are only words: distinctions, categorizations—that is, talk—while the actual human experience being talked about is the same everywhere and in all times. Aldous Huxley wrote,

Our immediate impressions of actuality, on the rare occasions when we contrive to see with the eyes of children or convalescents, of artists or lovers, seem to have a quality of supernaturalness. What we ordinarily call “nature” is in fact the system of generalizations and utilitarian symbols which we construct from our sensations [flowers are pretty, sunsets are beautiful, insects are nasty, snow is a nuisance]. Sometimes, however, we are made directly and immediately aware of our sensations; it is an apocalypse; they seem supernatural. But it is through sensations that we come into contact with the external world, the world of nature with a capital N. Hence a seeming paradox: eternal Nature is supernatural; and the supernatural, because mental, universe in which we do our daily living is all too natural—natural to the point of dullness.

[Aldous Huxley, quoted in Alan Watts, Talking Zen, p 113]

Of course the “mental universe in which we do our daily living” is what Eastern wisdom teachers sometimes call the “monkey mind,” our relentlessly chatty inner companion. It is everlastingly involved in an automatic and habitual judging, labelling, commenting, and problem-solving; it is always agitated and looking for flattery for, or slights to, the ego. It is the mental activity that many of us believe is “thinking.”

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British biologist Rupert Sheldrake follows the relationship between the evolution of Judaeo–Christian religious beliefs and Western attitudes toward Nature in his broadly informative and insightful book The Rebirth of Nature. He describes the “purification” of the religion of the Hebrews as they left their nomadic past behind and settled in the Promised Land.

The religion of the Jews resembled many others, both pastoralist and agriculturalist, in the recognition of sacred places and times, and in the killing of sacrificial animals. But one of the ways it differed was in the uniqueness of its God; another was through the prohibition of the making and worshipping of images. God was to be known through the natural world, his own creation, rather than through idols made by man…

Much of the history of the Jews recorded in the Old Testament concerns their conflicts with the indigenous peoples of Palestine [Canaanites, Philistines, etc.]. The prophets, reminding the people of Israel of their nomadic heritage, rejected the indigenous goddesses and gods, and continually denounced the tendency to adopt the religious practices of the surrounding peoples. Nevertheless, for many centuries, worship continued at the old high places and sacred groves, and the cult of the sacred snake and the worship of the goddess persisted. [emphasis mine}

[Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature, p 24]

Thus for centuries the survival of religious Judaism depended on its clear separation from pagan beliefs and practices. The word “pagan” comes from a Latin word meaning country dweller—a person necessarily in close contact with, and dependent upon, the natural world. Today, it suggests either polytheistic or uninhibitedly sensual and hedonistic beliefs and practices.[18]

In the Old Testament story, when Moses went up into Mount Sinai to receive the tablets of the Law from God, he went alone, leaving the other Israelites behind. Karen Armstrong observes that “Instead of finding the laws of order, harmony and justice in the very nature of things, as in the pagan vision, the Law is now handed down from on high.”[19]

A biblical conception of the relation between God and the world persisted in Christianity and was fundamental to the later beliefs of a Christianized Europe. In official Judaism, the sacred laws are given in words by God; they are divinely verbal rather than non-verbally legible in, and intrinsic to, the world. The Christian conception of God incarnate, embodied in the person of Jesus Christ, is rather different, but it remains a handing down of Truth from on high. That is, it remains so unless Christ is understood as the divine Logos of the ancient Greeks, miraculously “made man”—a manifestation of the reasoning mind of God, and thus “of one being with the Father.” Christ can then be seen as the great pattern or way of being of the universe as it pertains to human beings, now miraculously born into the realm of the physically existent and thus more easily evident to us.[20] A New England forest in October—sun shining through brilliant leaves behind dark branches as through stained glass—is beyond beauty-full, beautiful; it is Beauty incarnate. Christ, in the Christian tradition, is beyond godly; He is God incarnate.

Armstrong observes that “[T]he God of history [that is, the concept “God” in the unfolding of Western thought through time] can inspire a greater attention to the mundane world, which is the theater of his operations, but there is also the potential for a profound alienation from it.”[21] We now see such alienation from Nature, God’s “theater of operations” triumphantly dominant all around us. To claim God’s creation as divinely made for and given to human beings from on high, to be exploited and devastated in any way that can turn a monetary profit, is both comfortable and politic. Today we have the technological means to destroy the Creation on a vast scale, and we do. Perhaps Christian institutions in general would be more actively involved in changing this situation if they recognized the full, ancient significance of the Greek word Logos, and therefore acknowledged the inadequacy of the translation of Logos as “Word.” The probable resonance of that significance throughout Christian history could be imagined and re-conceived, and Christian churches might choose to turn serious and committed attention to the devastation of the real world for which human beings are responsible. Every Christian would be obliged to think about the possibility that responsibility and reverence for the health and integrity of the Creation are essential requirements of Christian faith.

When Solomon built the great temple at Jerusalem (some time around 1000 BCE according to biblical texts), it was one among various sites where the Israelites performed ritual sacrifices of animals. But the high priests of the Temple soon decreed that the one God should be worshipped only there. In time the sacred groves in the countryside were burned or cut down, the high places defiled, the priests killed on their altars and the sacred stones ground to dust.[22] A centralized government and a priest-dominated religion would of course have found it inconvenient to concern themselves with scattered sacred places, places which could tempt the country people to a reversion to paganism.

Christianity, grounded in Judaism but strongly influenced by Greek philosophical thought, eventually incorporated not only various Jewish customs and observances, but those of the pagan peoples to whom it spread so rapidly—when it could do so without compromising Christian doctrine.[23] The dates of Christian holy days were adjusted to conform to ancient festivals marking the yearly rhythms of nature; local ceremonies and rites were incorporated into Christian practice. This adoption of local forms enriched and deepened the beauty of Christian ritual, imagery, and symbolism in both the Roman and the Eastern Church—in the illumination of manuscripts, in monastic gardens, in the sculptural, pictorial and decorative enrichment of churches, and so on. Thus, paradoxically, although the destruction of paganism required a separation from nature, the beauties of nature were integral to Christian worship. In many places they still are so today. For example in the Roman Catholic towns of Bavaria five weeks after Easter, at Pentecost, young birch saplings are cut in fresh new leaf and brought to stand—delicate, glossy, fluttering—beside house doorways and leaning against pillars in the churches. Flowers, plants, and animals have all carried rich significance in Christian symbolism.

Nevertheless, by the time of the Reformation the decorations and processions, the carved saints and cults of the Virgin, the paintings and frescoes, and even the music in the churches had come to be seen by Protestants as complicit in the idolatry of the Roman Church, as distracting, extraneous, and even pagan (demonic!) additions to the true faith. Zealots destroyed them where they could. Once again, the beauties of Nature and of sacred sites—springs and hilltops, groves and caves—were condemned as associated with the temptations in which original sin was grounded. Pleasure in nature and art is viewed with a degree of suspicion by many Christian groups even now. The focus is on the Word of God, and on Christ as that Word Incarnate.

People who say that they don’t go to church because fishing or gardening or walking outdoors is their religion recognize the deep and inevitable pleasure and “re-creation” that human beings find in the natural world. For Aristotle, the world itself, as it could be seen and experienced, was divine, and worthy of human love and honor. Plato had made a crucial step into the abstract; he believed that ideal “Forms”—transcendent, inaccessible except by the mind—were the source of the world’s order, the source of all value, and the proper objects of worship.[24] But the man who says that fishing—standing in a clear-moving stream in sun and shade, hour after quiet and solitary hour—is his religion, is speaking literally. The British poet John Burnside writes,

"Il y a un autre monde, mais il est dans celui-ci," says Paul Eluard.[[25]] To speak of another world has, historically, been to commit to a mystical or religious agenda, and to a province of wishful thinking normally inhabited by children and the simpleminded, as opposed to the real, factual, less deceived world of grown-up rationalists. A good deal of argument has gone into defining terms such as "mystical," "religious," and "rational," but Eluard's remark points us in another direction altogether: the other world is here, now, but we miss it every day: we see what we expect to see and we think as we (are) expect(ed) to think. Eluard's secular program was to uncover the autremonde—the nonfactual truth of being: the missed world and, by extension, the missed self who sees and imagines outside the bounds of socially engineered expectations—not by a rational process, as the term is usually understood, but by a reattunement to the continuum of objects, weather, and other lives that we inhabit.

We might say…that Jesus' argument—the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand— differs little from Eluard's. He, too, was demanding of his listeners the spiritual and political discipline to see the world in its fullness.

[John Burnside, “Into the Quotidian,” Harper's Magazine, May 2006 p 34-5]

“To see the world in its fullness” is also a requirement of art, of poetry. Here is John Jeremiah Sullivan writing about horses:

It is sad to be reminded, once again, that all this horse-racing business is about the rich, for the rich are hideous. There is nothing they cannot ruin. And, of course, if there is one other thing that horse racing is all about, it is people who do not have money to lose—the bettors—losing it.

So it is beautiful when the horses themselves appear, in their ignorance and their majesty, and assert their presence.…Only those souls most thoroughly hollowed out by fame fail to turn and watch the three-year-olds when they take their slow lap around the paddock.

Each is accompanied by a gentle pony whose nerves are not so tweaked as those of the thoroughbred, and each hides its face in the pony’s neck as it nears the gate.

[John Jeremiah Sullivan, “Horseman Pass By,” Harper’s Magazine October 2002, p 50-51]

This simple statement of the facts of the matter is as powerful, and as full of love for the animals in their ignorance and majesty, tweakedness and nervousness and gentleness, as a haiku. The artist loves that which he finds in the world, in nature or in art, and gives us something of its essence in a new form that we can love, as Mr. Sullivan does here. Nature is much more complicated than art: Nature throws it all at us at once. Occasionally, in the continual flux, we see that “God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter,” as Ansel Adams wrote. Renoir said it this way: “All is ephemeral…but the ephemeral is sometimes designed.”[26]

We can’t determine specifically or entirely exactly how or why < >´ is present—but we can experience that it happens, and feel love for it, and gratitude, and the elation it brings. And then we do try to figure how it’s been done, or why it hasn’t happened this time, as in this wonderful example:

[H]ere and there one sees a small triumph…if one could seize and analyze these moments [in ballet] one would see that they are made of simple virtues; constancy of articulation, musical fidelity, and, simplest and rarest of all, moral commitment.…

There is no great mystery to the style; children understand it….It is through strength and technique that the body stays in possession of the music.…

If Balanchine had any secret, it was one that has endured through two hundred years of classical ballet. It is that dancing correctly in three dimensions in time to music creates the fourth dimension of meaning. Ballet becomes metaphysical not by aspiring beyond its material parts, but, paradoxically, by being humblingly, gruellingly, systematically materialistic, working every technical fine point into the body until it becomes second nature….[T]here's a direct connection between transcendence and the 5th position.

[Arlene Croce, The New Yorker, 6/7/93, pp 100-102]

Note that this is art existing, as it must, in the real, where Heidegger says truth happens, or where the fifth position in ballet’s strict and grueling discipline is directly connected to transcendence. The discernment of < >´ in nature and art is a human mental action in the real world. The artist, writer, or musician loves the work, and may also fear it, beginning when it is almost nothing—as soon as his interest is entirely engaged. It is a creative love, a generative love, that makes life and order out of what seems only material, disorderly and random. Here again is a paradox: art must be made of material, whether paints or actions or sounds, and yet the patterns of relationship which make it art (or something other) are not material. Patterns of relationship exist in every aspect of the real world but are not themselves material.

+

Christians believe that “God is Love.” We are sometimes reminded that the Greeks had three words for love: very briefly, eros was the love for what is in itself lovable, philia the love among people who share a goal or interest, and agapé, which is “a concern for the other’s best interest when no benefit accrues to the lover and no response is counted on…,” when the thing given love is not necessarily lovable or useful. This is as in God’s love for sinners. But Robert S. Wicks claimed that unselfish love was unrecognized in the West before the rise of Christianity:

[T]his love found its way into Western civilization only through the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The Greek language had no word for it: the word agapé was actually an archaic synonym for eros which St. Paul and the author or authors of the Fourth Gospel and the Johannine epistles “dusted off” (as it were) and used for this new kind of love. In fact, the famous passage in I Corinthians 13 is an elaborate definition of it for a culture that knew nothing of it heretofore. It is this love (translated somewhat quaintly as “charity” in the King James version) that… “beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things and endureth all things”…

[Robert S. Wicks, The Edge of Wisdom, p 132]

I doubt that there was no Western experience or recognition of selfless love before Christ, but he made it the foundation of the new Way. Something like five hundred years earlier, the Buddha, born into the culture of the Vedas, preached compassion for all sentient beings, not just for human beings.[27]

To connect the love essential to art-making with agapé as used by Paul and John, as I would do, may seem questionable. But at its purest it is certainly an unselfish love, whether for a model, a bowl of oranges, a blue rectangle, or simply for the possibility of < >´. Here’s a contemporary observation on human creative work of every kind:

A paradox: the only way you can do anything of value is to have the effort come out of non-doing, and to let go of caring whether it will be of use or not. Otherwise, self-involvement and greediness can sneak in and distort your relationship to the work itself, so that it is off in some way, biased, impure, and ultimately not completely satisfying, even if it is good. All scientists know this mind state [i.e. self-interest and greediness] and guard against it because it inhibits the creative process and distracts one’s ability to see connections clearly.

[Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are, p 39]

And this testimony from mathematician, scientist, and professor of architecture Christopher Alexander:

It is in my struggle to want this…unobstructed purity that I am helped, most of all, if I try to make each thing a gift to God.

[Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Vol. IV, p 309]

The Christian conception of agapé calls for an ego-less love, a profound modification in human understanding of what works in this world, what “profits a man.” This love is the Good News, both simple and hugely demanding: the news that full vibrancy and creativity—“joy” in every aspect of life—can be the reward of selfless, that is God-like, attention to what is, allowing love to flow. Its opposite is the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which is our constant measuring and judging and verbal categorizing of everything in relation to what we imagine is good for us as individual egotists. Such an interpretation of the story in Genesis could provide at least a partial understanding of the rich symbol-system in which Christ’s sacrifice is understood as redeeming us from the sin of Adam: Christ crucified on a Cross made from the wood of a tree grown from the seed of that Tree which “stood in the midst of the garden,” and was inhabited by a seductive serpent.

+

This seems a good moment at which to point out a difficulty encountered when we of the West attempt to comprehend Eastern spiritual teachings: that is, the essential difference, and even opposition, between the “self” as we understand it and the “Self” encountered in the texts of those traditions, for example in the Eesha Upanishad, written more than 2,500 years ago:

The Self is everywhere, without a body, without a shape. Whole, pure, wise: All-knowing, far-shining, self-depending, all-transcending. In the eternal procession, assigning to every period its proper duty.[28]

The “self” with a small s is the individual ego, pathetic and mean-spirited, insatiable, monstrous. The “Self “ is Atman, God-within, the same in everyone and in every “sentient being,” and in all the Universe. “Agapé” represents the love and compassion of this “great Self” for that which is other than itself, but at the same time is itself. It is the love of God. It heals the apparent division between us and everything else, the miserable awareness of which is the fundamental plight of human beings. Mark Twain once wrote,

And as for me, all that I can think of in this plodding sad pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the eternities, is to look out humbly and live a pure and high and blameless life, and save that one microscopic me that is truly me.

[Mark Twain, quoted in Alfred Kazin ed., God and the American Writer, p 187]

He is talking about the Self, God-within.

But is he? Today, such questions are seldom discussed outside schools of theology. They are clearly not “scientific,” and so are seen as at best peripheral. However in the early centuries of Christianity, before there was an established Christian doctrine, they were much debated. At that time, Karen Armstrong tells us, “Nobody knew for certain if God had created the world or how a human being had been divine.” But in the fourth and fifth centuries, after a fierce and painful struggle between competing teachings, a clear definition of orthodox belief was agreed upon at the Council of Nicea in 325 CE.[29] Nowadays, most people hold a limited and simplistic conception of what Christianity, or indeed any religion, has to teach—in fact the popular consensus seems to be that religions exist to enforce rules that are both tiresome and arbitrary, and that they cause wars and other divisions among people. As René Girard says, the Gospels have themselves become the scapegoat of the culture.[30]

According to a Gilbert and Sullivan lyric: "Every little baby, born into this world alive, is either a little liberal, or a little conserva-tive."[31] Similarly, it can seem that every little baby comes into the world equipped either with a willingness to accept the mysterious as part of experience, or a strong aversion to the very idea of an unsolvable mystery— irrespective of how intelligent and good-hearted such babies may grow up to be.

Late in his life, Erwin Schrødinger, who was awarded the 1933 Nobel prize in Physics for his work in wave mechanics, wrote:

No personal god can form part of a world model that has only become accessible at the cost of removing everything personal from it. We know, when God is experienced, that this is an event as real as an immediate sense perception or as one’s own personality. Like them he must be missing in the space-time picture. I do not find God anywhere in space and time—that is what the honest naturalist tells you.

[Erwin Schrodinger, What is Life? & Mind and Matter, p 150]

The aim of all scientific practice is a view of reality from which everything personal has been removed, a position from which the world can be measured and categorized with uncorrupted objectivity. This is impossible for human beings. Mechanized telescopes, computers, thermometers, clocks—machines of all kinds—are much more dependable “observers” than we can be, in part because they are vastly less complex than we are, but also because they can be presumed to be “objective.” Theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg, another Nobel prize winner and himself an “honest naturalist,” has written:

As we have discovered more and more fundamental physical principles they seem to have less and less to do with us.…It would be wonderful to find in the laws of nature a plan prepared by a concerned creator in which human beings played some special role. I find sadness in doubting that we will.…And it does not seem to me to be helpful to identify the laws of nature as Einstein did with some sort of remote and disinterested God. The more we refine our understanding of God to make the concept plausible, the more it seems pointless.…Among today's scientists I am probably somewhat atypical in caring about such things…most physicists today are not sufficiently interested in religion even to qualify as practising atheists.

[Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, p 253-256]

The eminent British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell believed that religion arises out of fear of nature, and therefore as nature is conquered, religion becomes irrelevant. However in his short book, What I Believe (1925), he wrote:

The antithesis of mind and matter is…more or less illusory; but there is another antithesis which is more important—that, namely, between things that can be affected by our desires and things which cannot be so affected. The line between the two is neither sharp nor immutable—as science advances more and more things are brought under human control.…[But] even on the surface of the earth our powers are very limited. Above all, we cannot prevent death.…

[Bertrand Russell, “What I Believe,” in Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Related Subjects, p 53]

In an essay called “A Free Man’s Worship,” written in 1903, Russell imagines a conversation between Mephistopheles and Dr. Faustus, in which Satan provides a bleak version of the Creation of the world for the amusement of a God weary of the “endless praises of the choirs of angels.” Satan recounts the evolution of human beings, the development of religions, and finally God’s decision to send another sun to crash into Man’s sun, so that “all returned again to nebula.” Russell concludes that,

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless [than Satan’s account], more void of meaning, is the world which science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought or feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand…. [O]nly on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

[Ibid., p 10]

A similar view of past and future and of the realities of our life as a species has since then become the intellectual norm. If anything, the outlook now is far more frightening than it was in Russell’s time. We therefore have the problem of living a life while holding such information in mind. Russell suggests that we manage this feat by the “submission of our desires” but not of our thoughts. He writes,

From the submission of our desires springs the virtue of resignation; from the freedom of our thoughts springs the whole world of art and philosophy, and the vision of beauty by which, at last, we half reconquer the reluctant world. But the vision of beauty is possible only to unfettered contemplation, to thoughts not weighted by the load of eager wishes; and thus freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods [not, of course, only property, but love, honor, comfort, hope etc.] that are subject to the mutations of time.

[Ibid.]

Thus he arrives at a requirement very close to that of the great religious traditions: Give up attachment to your individual ego and to all that you have or desire to have, and seek the good.

+

What we call “the experience of God,” like the experience of < >´ in art and in nature, may not be available to everyone; I choose to believe that it is. But what is that experience? And how do we separate an experience of the sublime, of epiphany, of the transcendent, from the material worlds of Nature and of great Art? Any separation is in fact entirely arbitrary; we can’t know where or whether such a division should be established. It is beyond verbal thought or expression, beyond categorization and analysis, certainly beyond our clumsy and soon-exhausted labels. Our word “God” seems thus exhausted, in many milieus even embarrassing, but we must discuss these things as best we can with the words we have. As Heraclitus said, “Wisdom is one and unique; it is unwilling and yet willing to be called by the name of Zeus.”[32] It is unnamable but we name it, and it does not object. To name it is useful only as long as we remember that we have no idea what it is, just as we ought to do when we use scientific terms like “Dark Matter” and “Dark Energy,” and “Gravity.”

Richard Dawkins, distinguished biologist, clamorous atheist, and Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, is certain that claims to any reality beyond the physical are "hocus pocus." He has written highly profitable books about science (e.g. The Selfish Gene, and The God Delusion) for the general public, and appears regularly on radio and television in the United States and in Britain. Though an atheist, he is capable of awe, and he writes,

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living it is finite.

[Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and The Appetite for Wonder, p x]

Science is a procedural method by means of which we may discover, measure, and explain to our own satisfaction something of the unimaginable immensity and complexity, beauty and terror, of Nature. The “awed wonder” that scientists experience is not wonder at the glories of science as a discipline: science does not “give us” awed wonder—it is Nature itself that is awe-inspiring.

Professional scientists tend to be clever, disciplined, and highly trained, and of course they may be imaginative, resourceful, and brilliant. Einstein praised their dedication, and suggested the ultimate motivation of at least some of them:

Only those who realize the immense efforts, and above all, the devotion without which pioneer work in theoretical science cannot be achieved are able to grasp the strength of the emotion out of which such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue. What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand.…

…[The scientist's] religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.

[Albert Einstein, in Sonja Bargmann ed., Albert Einstein: Ideas and Opinions, p 39, 40]

It is clear that this passage refers to the Logos, exactly as Heraclitus and so many others have experienced it—as “the rationality of the universe….the harmony of natural law” of which human systematic thinking is “an insignificant reflection.” This is precisely the humility with which human thought is included in the full meaning of the word Logos. Our rational thinking is an “utterly insignificant reflection” of that experienced phenomenon which can be called “the thought of God.”

Is the disagreement as to whether there is anything other than the physical a permanent and unresolvable division? We now accept the fact that all is energy, that there is no such thing as “solid matter” as we experience it and commonly think of it; there are only varying rhythms and relationships in an ongoing flux. We have also accepted the atomic, sub-atomic, and particulate levels of reality, or in the other direction the potential for multiple universes in which all possibilities become reality, as in the infinite possible right answers to an infinitely variable irrational equation. If there is no such thing as matter in the solid dependable empirical sense, what does a claim to being a “materialist” mean?

There is not such a great gap between mysticism and rationalism as we tend to imagine.…When our minds are receptive and relaxed, ideas come from a deeper region of the mind.…A truly creative philosopher or scientist has, like the mystic, to confront the dark world of uncreated reality and the cloud of unknowing in the hope of piercing it. As long as they wrestle with logic and concepts, they are, necessarily, imprisoned in ideas or forms of thought that have already been established. Often their discoveries seem “given” from outside.

[Karen Armstrong, A History of God, p 338]

Can we accept the idea that a discovery can come, somehow, from “outside” the discoverer, and that some questions may be permanently unanswerable? If we cannot, then why not? Is it because we don’t much care, or are we blinded by ego and hubris, having made gods of ourselves or of science? Some like to believe the story that human science, or computerized robots, or some other human-contrived device, will one day understand Everything. Others can imagine that there is a reality we will never be able to understand, and to feel something of the humility this view demands.

Our youngest child, aged three or four, informed the family one evening that that very afternoon, while sitting cross-legged in her favorite place on top of our big wooden swingset, she had seen God. After a suitably respectful pause, we were all curious. "What did He look like?" we asked. "A giant carrot," she said, and went on eating her dinner. It was somehow, in that moment, a fully satisfactory report, as convincing as any.

Here is the famed pianist Glenn Gould, writing about his meticulous step-by-step analysis of the structure of Bach’s Aria (Sarabande), a section of the Goldberg Variations:

We have observed…that the aria’s thematic content reveals an…exclusive disposition, that the motivic elaboration in each variation is a law to itself, and that, by consequence, there are no plateaus of successive variations utilizing similar principles of design such as lend architectural coherence to the variations of Beethoven and Brahms. Yet without analysis we have sensed that there exists a fundamental coordinating intelligence…. Thus we are forced to revise our criteria, which were scarcely designed to arbitrate that union of music and metaphysics—the realm of technical transcendence.

[Glenn Gould, “Analysis in list form of Bach’s Aria (Sarabande) from the ‘Goldberg’ variations,” quoted in Jan Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy, p 100]

Do most scientists believe that things such as “that union of music and metaphysics, the realm of technical transcendence” are imaginary? If so, life experience teaches again and again that they are missing something—something in which they have no interest, or perhaps something which they are unequipped to experience. Yet it represents a realm which is critically important in our attempts to safely build what Bertrand Russell, quoted above, called “our soul’s habitation on the firm foundation of unyielding despair.”[33] Einstein believed that the most important function of both art and science is “to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.”[34] When only that which can be explained and proved is accepted as true, the provable is smugly and authoritatively presented as undeniable fact. All other experience is dismissed as being merely phenomena originating in the adaptive evolution of the brain, or as what Richard Dawkins likes to call “hocus-pocus.” This is not only smug, but narrowly reductive.

When asked about her religious beliefs in an interview on public television, the writer Margaret Atwood once offered a comment on all such questions by citing Jann Martel’s 2001 novel Life of Pi, in which the narrator, sole human survivor of a shipwreck, finds himself rocking in a lifeboat with a large, ferocious, and beautiful tiger. After months at sea, the boat lands on a desolate beach and the tiger runs off into the jungle. The narrator is found, and taken to a hospital. Investigators from a Japanese insurance company soon arrive to question him about his ordeal; they say that they believe his story, but not the part about the tiger. He tells them, “You can have the story either way: with the tiger, or without it. Which do you choose?” After consultation, they decide that they prefer the story with the tiger.[35] “Thank you,” says the narrator. “And so it goes with God.”

*

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights of the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! Bright wings.

[Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose, p 27]

In the last hundred years we have begun to see that in fact the dearest freshness deep down things can be destroyed, is being destroyed. A morning may come relatively soon when that freshness no longer springs anywhere on this whole vast Earth.

———————————

This chapter, like the chapter on Chaos, is here because it is pertinent to my overall subject, not because I have any expertise in the matter. Not only am I not a scientist, I am neither a theologian nor a religious historian. This is only an attempt to follow, as well as I am able, certain threads in the history of ideas which seem to me to have affected our Western conceptions of human spiritual life and its relation to the arts and to nature .

[1] Peggy Payne, “The Pure in Heart,” in C. Michael Curtis ed., God Stories, p 223

[2] Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, p 16

[3] Anthony Flew, A Dictionary of Philosophy, p 269

[4] Ibid.

[5] James Wilkes, “Breath of Dawn.”

[6] PBS radio program, summer 2005

[7] For the full quotation see p 275 here.

[8] C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, p 7

[9] Karen Armstrong, A History of God, p 339

[10] Ibid.

[11] Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God, p 20

[12] Ibid.

[13] D. Howard Smith, The Wisdom of the Taoists, p 5

[14] Ibid.

[15] Karen Armstrong, A History of God, p 98

[16] Ibid. p 143

[17] D. Howard Smith, The Wisdom of the Taoists, p 5

[18] The Oxford Dictionary of American English.

[19] Karen Armstrong, A History of God, p 22.

[20] Saint Athanasius: “For he was made man that we might be made God.” [Athanasius (ca. 296–373), from On the Incarnation. [www.christianhistoryinstitute.org/incontext/article/athanasius/, 1/3/15]

[21] Ibid.

[22] Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature, p 25.

[23] Karen Armstrong, A History of God, chapter 3. We can still read the texts of letters sent to the Pope by an Jesuit missionary to China in the 16th century, in which he advised that Chinese converts to Catholicism be allowed to retain, for instance, their household shrines to their ancestors, as long as such practices did not interfere with their Christian pieties or contradict the teachings of the Church. (Facsimiles found in the University of New Hampshire’s library in Manchester, NH.)

[24] Mary Midgley, Wisdom, Information and Wonder, p 151

[25] “There is another world, but it is within this one.” That world consists in the relationships among parts and wholes, between one whole and another—the way in which the Universe is, the Logos. Kakuzo Okakura, the early 20th century’s great Japanese authority on Oriental art, expressed it this way: “A painting, which is a universe in itself, must conform to the laws that govern all existence. Composition is like the creation of the world, holding in itself the constructive laws that give it life.” [Kakuzo Okakura, The Ideals of the East, p 109}

[26] Pierre-Auguste Renoir, quoted in “The Impressionists: Claude Monet, Painter of Light” BBC docudrama.

[27] For centuries history has been taught as if Eastern and Western civilizations existed as two separate pieces of a divided map. In fact, Judea was situated along the ancient trading routes carrying goods and ideas between Egypt and the great civilizations to the East, and it seems likely that during the 500 year period between the Buddha’s lifetime and that of Jesus, Vedic and Buddhist conceptions and attitudes travelled with the caravans. More than two hundred years before the time of Christ, the great Indian emperor Asoka sent monks carrying Buddhist teachings to the Middle East. Some believe that Jesus himself travelled to the lands of the Three Wise Kings of Orient, during the time between his adolescence and his ministry, a period unaccounted for in the New Testament. But this would not be necessary: human beings, then as now, like to talk, like to learn, like to theorize, and merchants are quick to find translators and to learn new languages.

[28] W.B. Yeats and Shree Purohit Swami trans., The Ten Principal Upanishads, p 16

[29] Karen Armstrong, A History of God, p 100

[30] René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, p 277

[31] William S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, Iolanthe

[32] Heraclitus #119. Trans. William Harris, [http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/Philosophy/Heraclitus.html. 1/5/15]

[33] Bertrand Russell, quoted on p 282 here.

[34] Albert Einstein, p 273 here.

[35] Bill Moyers interview, PBS, July 2006