There was a time when, though my path was rough,
This joy within me dallied with distress,
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness:
For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,
And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.
But now afflictions bow me down to earth:
Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth;
But oh! each visitation
Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,
My shaping spirit of Imagination.
For not to think of what I needs must feel,
But to be still and patient, all I can;
And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man --
This was my sole resource, my only plan:
Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.

There are four causes of infidelity and loss of belief in Allah: hankering after whims, a passion to dispute every argument, deviation from truth; and dissension, because whoever hankers after whims does not incline towards truth; whoever keeps on disputing every argument on account of his ignorance, will always remain blind to truth, whoever deviates from truth because of ignorance, will always take good for evil and evil for good and he will always remain intoxicated with misguidance. And whoever makes a breach (with Allah and His Messenger) his path becomes difficult, his affairs will become complicated and his way to salvation will be uncertain. Similarly, doubt has also four aspects absurd reason- ing; fear; vacillation and hesitation; and unreasonable surrender to infidelity, because one who has accustomed himself to unreasonable and absurd discussions will never see the Light of Truth and will always live in the darkness of ignorance. One who is afraid to face facts (of life, death and the life after death) will always turn away from ultimate reality, one who allows doubts and uncertainties to vacillate him will always be under the control of Satan and one who surrenders himself to infidelity accepts damnation in both the worlds.

When Imam Ali was asked about Faith in Religion, he replied that the structure of faith is supported by four pillars: endurance, conviction, justice and jihad. Endurance is composed of four attributes: eagerness, fear, piety and anticipation (of death). So whoever is eager for Paradise will ignore temptations; whoever fears the fire of Hell will abstain from sins; whoever practices piety will easily bear the difficulties of life and whoever anticipates death will hasten towards good deeds. Conviction has also four aspects: to guard oneself against infatuations of sin; to search for explanation of truth through knowledge; to gain lessons from instructive things and to follow the precedent of the past people, because whoever wants to guard himself against vices and sins will have to search for the true causes of infatuation and the true ways of combating them out and to find those true ways one has to search them with the help of knowledge, whoever gets fully acquainted with various branches of knowledge will take lessons from life and whoever tries to take lessons from life is actually engaged in the study of the causes of rise and fall of previous civilizations. Justice also has four aspects: depth of understanding, profoundness of knowledge, fairness of judgment and dearness of mind; because whoever tries his best to understand a problem will have to study it, whoever has the practice of studying the subject he is to deal with, will develop a clear mind and will always come to correct decisions, whoever tries to achieve all this will have to develop ample patience and forbearance and whoever does this has done justice to the cause of religion and has led a life of good repute and fame. Jihad is divided into four branches: to persuade people to be obedient to Allah; to prohibit them from sin and vice; to struggle (in the cause of Allah) sincerely and firmly on all occasions and to detest the vicious. Whoever persuades people to obey the orders of Allah provides strength to the believers; whoever dissuades them from vices and sins humiliates the unbelievers; whoever struggles on all occasions discharges all his obligations and whoever detests the vicious only for the sake of Allah, then Allah will take revenge on his enemies and will be pleased with Him on the Day of Judgment.

Live amongst people in such a manner that if you die they weep over you and if you are alive they crave for your company.

Man’s reality is nothing other than the connection, relation, nexus, and total indigence that he has in relation with God.

In other words, man is nothing but a sign, symbol and indicator of absolute being. It is by virtue of this relation with God that he comes to know himself and the world and gains some semblance of peace.... But when he stops seeing himself to be a sign and name of God and begins to carve out for himself a portion of reality – all his own – he becomes oblivious and totally blind to his true self and the world.

This “self-subsisting” reality then becomes a mirage for him and fools him. If he deliberates upon this mirage and by doing so gets closer and closer to it, he finds only nothingness. This “nothing” is the sign of the displeasure of God and His anger. It is that very hidden hand which says no and stops the uninitiated from entering the mysteries. What remains then for those false claimants and pretenders who wish to storm the inner realm in this fashion but that they should end up in a debilitating nihilism and scepticism....

Man in his distance from the Divine Presence... refers and relates that which has its roots in his own soul to the environment – something which actually lies on the level of his veiled “reality”. Consequently, even though he himself is the veil and covering for the outer world, he sees the outer to be a veil and impediment for himself. Hence instead of first attempting to change his own state and soul, he neglects (his inner self) and goes about trying to change his environment.

Imam Ali heard someone abusing and blaming the world and said to him, "O you, who are blaming the world, who have been allured and enticed by it, and have been tempted by its false pretenses. You allowed yourself to be enamored of, to be captivated by it and then you accuse and blame it. Have you any reason or right to accuse it and to call it a sinner and seducer? Or is the world not justified in calling you a wicked knave and a sinning hypocrite? When did it make you lose your intelli- gence and reasoning? And how did it cheat you or snake false pretenses to you? Did it conceal from you the fact of the ultimate end of everything that it holds, the fact of the sway of death, decay and destruction in its domain?

Food for one is enough for two and food for two is enough for three and food for three is enough for four.

This being was called both a human being (insân) and khalif. As for his humanness, it comes from the universality of his organism and his ability to embrace all of the realities. He is in relation to Allah as the pupil, being the instrument of vision, is to the eye. This is why he is called insân. It is by him that Allah beholds His creatures and has mercy on them. So he is a human being, both in-time [in his body] and before-time [in his spirit], an eternal and after-time organism. He is the word which distinguishes and unifies. The universe was completed by his existence. He is to the universe what the face of the seal is to the seal - for that is the locus of the seal and thus the token with which the King places the seal on his treasures.

The angels are some of the faculties of that form which is the form of the universe, which the Sufis designate in their technical vocabulary as the Great Man (al-Insân al-Kabîr), for the angels are to it as the spiritual (rûhânî) and sensory faculties are to the human organism. Each of these faculties is veiled by itself, and it sees nothing which is superior to its own essence, for there is something in it which considers itself to be worthy of high rank and an elevated degree with Allah. It is like this because it has an aspect of the divine synthesis (jam'îya). In it is something which derives from the divine side and something which derives from the side of the reality of the realities. This organism carries these attributes as determined by the universal nature which encompasses the containers of the universe from the most exalted to the basest. However, the intellect cannot perceive this fact by means of logical investigation – for this sort of perception only exists through divine unveiling by which one recognises the basis of the forms of the universe which eceive the spirits.

I do not know whether or not you recognise that Shaytan has influence over the people of the Path. The Path has a living shaytan who has sway over its people always. He injures them. Opposition to him is truly turning to Allah and turning your back on him, as our master said, may Allah be pleased with him!: “The real attack against the enemy is your occupation with the love of the Beloved. When you are occupied with attacking the enemy, he gets what he wants from you and the love of the Beloved passes you by.” It is as Shaykh Qasim al-Khassasi said: “Do not be occupied at all with the one who abuses you. Be occupied with Allah and He will drive him away from you. He is the One who makes him move against you in order to test your claim to true sincerity. Many people have erred in this matter. They were occupied with the abuse of the one who abused them, and the abuse continued along with wrong action. Had they returned to Allah, He would have driven them away from them, and their proper business would have been enough for them.”

Religion is an important institution. A nation without religion cannot survive. Yet it is also very important to note that religion is a link between Allah and the individual believer. The brokerage of the pious cannot be permitted. Those who use religion for their own benefit are detestable. We are against such a situation and will not allow it. Those who use religion in such a manner have fooled our people; it is against just such people that we have fought and will continue to fight. Know that whatever conforms to reason, logic, and the advantages and needs of our people conforms equally to Islam. If our religion did not conform to reason and logic, it would not be the perfect religion, the final religion.

Everything we see in the world is the creative work of women.

I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea. He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will; every man can follow his own conscience, provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him against the liberty of his fellow-men.

In human life, you will find players of religion until the knowledge and proficiency in religion will be cleansed from all superstitions, and will be purified and perfected by the enlightenment of real science.

Modern science regards Nature not as something static [...] but a structure of inter-related events out of whose mutual relations arise the concepts of space and time [...] [In other words] space and time are possibilities of the Ego, only partially realized in the shape of our mathematical space and time. Beyond Him and apart from His creative activity, there is neither time nor space to close Him off in reference to other egos. The Ultimate Ego is, therefore, neither infinite in the sense of spatial infinity nor finite in the sense of the space-bound human ego whose body closes him off in reference to other egos. The infinity of the Ultimate Ego consists in the infinite inner possibilities of His creative activity of which the universe, as known to us, is only a partial expression. In one word God’s infinity is intensive, not extensive. It involves an infinite series, but is not that series.

All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient. "The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own fingered curtain or withdraws life's dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration. It justifies that bold and true word of Tasso—Non merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta. (None deserves the name of Creator except God and the Poet.)

Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; Imagination the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and Imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to Imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance.

Every epoch under names more or less specious has deified its peculiar errors; Revenge is the naked Idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age; and Self-deceit is the veiled Image of unknown evil before which luxury and satiety lie prostrate. But a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries as the temporary dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and which cover without concealing the eternal proportions of their beauty. An epic or dramatic personage is understood to wear them around his soul, as he may the antient armour or the modern uniform around his body; whilst it is easy to conceive a dress more graceful than either. The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise, and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume.

There are two kinds of opportunities: one which we chance upon, the other which we create. In time of great difficulty, one must not fail to create his opportunity.

‘As there is no English Mathematics, German Astronomy or French Chemistry,’ says the Grand Vizier, ‘so there is no Turkish, Arabian, Persian or Indian Islam. Just as the universal character of scientific truths engenders varieties of scientific national cultures which in their totality represent human knowledge, much in the same way the universal character of Islamic verities creates varieties of national, moral and social ideals.’ Modern culture based as it is on national egoism is, according to this keen-sighted writer, only another form of barbarism. It is the result of an over-developed industrialism through which men satisfy their primitive instincts and inclinations. He, however, deplores that during the course of history the moral and social ideals of Islam have been gradually deislamized through the influence of local character, and pre-Islamic superstitions of Muslim nations. These ideals today are more Iranian, Turkish, or Arabian than Islamic. The pure brow of the principle of Tauhâd has received more or less an impress of heathenism, and the universal and impersonal character of the ethical ideals of Islam has been lost through a process of localization. The only alternative open to us, then, is to tear off from Islam the hard crust which has immobilized an essentially dynamic outlook on life, and to rediscover the original verities of freedom, equality, and solidarity with a view to rebuild our moral, social, and political ideals out of their original simplicity and universality.

Heaven and Hell are states, not localities. Their descriptions in the Qur’an are visual representations of an inner fact, i.e. character. Hell, in the words of the Qur’an, is ‘God’s kindled fire which mounts above the hearts’ - the painful realization of one’s failure as a man. Heaven is the joy of triumph over the forces of disintegration. There is no such thing as eternal damnation in Islam. The word ‘eternity’ used in certain verses, relating to Hell, is explained by the Qur’an itself to mean only a period of time (78:23). Time cannot be wholly irrelevant to the development of personality. Character tends to become permanent; its reshaping must require time. Hell, therefore, as conceived by the Qur’an, is not a pit of everlasting torture inflicted by a revengeful God; it is a corrective experience which may make a hardened ego once more sensitive to the living breeze of Divine Grace. Nor is heaven a holiday. Life is one and continuous. Man marches always onward to receive ever fresh illuminations from an Infinite Reality which ‘every moment appears in a new glory’. And the recipient of Divine illumination is not merely a passive recipient. Every act of a free ego creates a new situation, and thus offers further opportunities of creative unfolding.

If a theory justifies the false position which a certain part of society is in, then, however baseless and even obviously false the theory may be, it will get adopted and become the belief of that part of society…However baseless theories of this sort may be, however contradictory they may be to everything mankind knows and recognizes, however obviously immoral they may be, they are accepted on faith, without criticism, and are preached with passionate enthusiasm, sometimes for centuries, until the conditions they justify are done away with or the absurdity of the theories becomes too obvious.

Thus a comprehensive philosophical criticism of all the facts of experience on its efficient as well as appreciative side brings us to the conclusion that the Ultimate Reality is a rationally directed creative life. To interpret this life as an ego is not to fashion God after the image of man. It is only to accept the simple fact of experience that life is not a formless fluid, but an organizing principle of unity, a synthetic activity which holds together and focalizes the dispersing dispositions of the living organism for a constructive purpose. The operation of thought which is essentially symbolic in character veils the true nature of life, and can picture it only as a kind of universal current flowing through all things. The result of an intellectual view of life, therefore, is necessarily pantheistic.

The Absolute Ego, as we have seen, is the whole of Reality. He is not so situated as to take a perspective view of an alien universe; consequently, the phases of His life are wholly determined from within. Change, therefore, in the sense of a movement from an imperfect to a relatively perfect state, or vice versa, is obviously inapplicable to His life. But change in this sense is not the only possible form of life. A deeper insight into our conscious experience shows that beneath the appearance of serial duration there is true duration. The Ultimate Ego exists in pure duration wherein change ceases to be a succession of varying attitudes, and reveals its true character as continuous creation, ‘untouched by weariness’ and unseizable ‘by slumber or sleep’. To conceive the Ultimate Ego as changeless in this sense of change is to conceive Him as utter inaction, a motiveless, stagnant neutrality, an absolute nothing. To the Creative Self change cannot mean imperfection. The perfection of the Creative Self consists, not in a mechanistically conceived immobility, as Aristotle might have led Ibn Àazm to think. It consists in the vaster basis of His creative activity and the infinite scope of His creative vision. God’s life is self-revelation, not the pursuit of an ideal to be reached. The ‘not-yet’ of man does mean pursuit and may mean failure; the ‘not-yet’ of God means unfailing realization of the infinite creative possibilities of His being which retains its wholeness throughout the entire process.

If time is real, and not a mere repetition of homogeneous moments which make conscious experience a delusion, then every moment in the life of Reality is original, giving birth to what is absolutely novel and unforeseeable. ‘Everyday doth some new work employ Him’, says the Qur’an. To exist in real time is not to be bound by the fetters of serial time, but to create it from moment to moment and to be absolutely free and original in creation. In fact, all creative activity is free activity. Creation is opposed to repetition which is a characteristic of mechanical action. That is why it is impossible to explain the creative activity of life in terms of mechanism. Science seeks to establish uniformities of experience, i.e. the laws of mechanical repetition. Life with its intense feeling of spontaneity constitutes a centre of indetermination, and thus falls outside the domain of necessity. Hence science cannot comprehend life.

If intellect is a product of evolution the whole mechanistic concept of the nature and origin of life is absurd, and the principle which science has adopted must clearly be revised. We have only to state it to see the self-contradiction. How can the intellect, a mode of apprehending reality, be itself an evolution of something which only exists as an abstraction of that mode of apprehending, which is the intellect? If intellect is an evolution of life, then the concept of the life which can evolve intellect as a particular mode of apprehending reality must be the concept of a more concrete activity than that of any abstract mechanical movement which the intellect can present to itself by analysing its apprehended content. And yet further, if the intellect be a product of the evolution of life, it is not absolute but relative to the activity of the life which has evolved it; how then, in such case, can science exclude the subjective aspect of the knowing and build on the objective presentation as an absolute? Clearly the biological sciences necessitate a reconsideration of the scientific principle.

The question, then, is whether the passage to Reality through the revelations of sense-perception necessarily leads to a view of Reality essentially opposed to the view that religion takes of its ultimate character. Is Natural Science finally committed to materialism? There is no doubt that the theories of science constitute trustworthy knowledge, because they are verifiable and enable us to predict and control the events of Nature. But we must not forget that what is called science is not a single systematic view of Reality. It is a mass of sectional views of Reality - fragments of a total experience which do not seem to fit together. Natural Science deals with matter, with life, and with mind; but the moment you ask the question how matter, life, and mind are mutually related, you begin to see the sectional character of the various sciences that deal with them and the inability of these sciences, taken singly, to furnish a complete answer to your question. In fact, the various natural sciences are like so many vultures falling on the dead body of Nature, and each running away with a piece of its flesh.

So what is Islam, this disturbing excess that represents East for the West and West for the East?

As long as the dark foundation of our nature, grim in its all-encompassing egoism, mad in its drive to make that egoism into reality, to devour everything and to define everything by itself, as long as that foundation is visible, as long as this truly original sin exists within us, we have no business here and there is no logical answer to our existence. Imagine a group of people who are all blind, deaf and slightly demented and suddenly someone in the crowd asks, "What are we to do?"... The only possible answer is, "Look for a cure". Until you are cured, there is nothing you can do. And since you don't believe you are sick, there can be no cure.

Then, what is sacrelige [sic]? If it is nothing more than a rebellion against dogma, it is eventually as meaningless as the dogma it defies, and they are both become hounds ranting in the high grass, never see the boar in the thicket. Only a religious person can perpetrate sacrelige: and if its blasphemy reaches the heart of the question; if it investigates deeply enough to unfold, not the pattern, but the materials of the pattern, and the necessity of a pattern; if it questions so deeply that the doubt it arouses is frightening and cannot be dismissed; then it has done its true sacreligious [sic] work, in the service of its adversary: the only service that nihilism can ever perform.

The seven planets are known to have many movements, so they must have many barriers. None of these are independent; rather, each is in need of an incorporeal Light for its realisation and perfections. Now, only the Proximate Light comes to be from the Light of Lights. The Proximate Light does not contain multiple aspects, since any multiplicity in it would imply multiplicity in that which necessitated it and thus imply the absurdity of multiplicity in the Light of Lights. However, there is multiplicity in the barriers. If only a single barrier and no light came to be from the Proximate Light, existence would cease with it. If an incorporeal light came to be from the Proximate Light, and from this light came another light without ever leading to barriers, everything would be lights. A barrier and an incorporeal light must result from the Proximate Light, since it contains dependence in itself and independence by virtue of the First. Its intellection of its dependence is a dark state; but it beholds the Light of Lights and beholds its own essence, since there is no veil between it and the Light of Lights. Thus, by that whereby it beholds the Light of Lights, it shadows and darkens itself in comparison to It, since the more perfect light rules the more deficient. By the manifestation to itself of its dependence and the darkening of its own essence in contemplation of the glory of the Light of Lights in relation to itself, a shadow results. But with respect to its independence and its necessity by the Light of Lights and its contemplation of its glory and might, it brings into being another incorporeal light. The barrier is its shadow, and the self-subsistent light is illumination from it. Its shadow is only due to the darkness of its dependence.

Man's life would be a little better,
had You not given him that illusion of heaven's light:
he calls it Reason, and uses it only
to be more bestial than any beast.

To meet this need humanity has the special power of producing men who give a new meaning to the whole of human life--a theory of life from which follow new forms of activity quite different from all preceding them. The formation of this philosophy of life appropriate to humanity in the new conditions on which it is entering, and of the practice resulting from it, is what is called religion.

And therefore, in the first place, religion is not, as science imagines, a manifestation which at one time corresponded with the development of humanity, but is afterward outgrown by it. It is a manifestation always inherent in the life of humanity, and is as indispensable, as inherent in humanity at the present time as at any other. Secondly, religion is always the theory of the practice of the future and not of the past, and therefore it is clear that investigation of past manifestations cannot in any case grasp the essence of religion.

The essence of every religious teaching lies not in the desire for a symbolic expression of the forces of nature, nor in the dread of these forces, nor in the craving for the marvelous, nor in the external forms in which it is manifested, as men of science imagine; the essence of religion lies in the faculty of men of foreseeing and pointing out the path of life along which humanity must move in the discovery of a new theory of life, as a result of which the whole future conduct of humanity is changed and different from all that has been before.

There is no veil between the lover and the Beloved;
Thou art thine own veil, O Hafiz, remove thyself.

I lost my intellect, soul, religion, and heart
In order to know an atom in perfection.
But no one can know the essence of the atom perfectly.
How often must I repeat that no one shall know it; then farewell!

In this unbounded existence, I have found signs by which I have been guided to God. There is no hope that the intellect will reach His Essence through discussion and analysis because He is greater than any of that, and there is no possibility of encompassing Him.

The heart has reasoning powers which the intellect does not attain. The heart bears witness to God's existence, not the intellect; faith comes in this way.

You must know that if a person, who has attained a certain degree of perfection, wishes to impart to others, either orally or in writing, any portion of the knowledge which he has acquired of these subjects, he is utterly unable to be as systematic and explicit as he could be in a science of which the method is well known. The same difficulties which he encountered when investigating the subject for himself will attend him when endeavouring to instruct others: viz., at one time the explanation will appear lucid, at another time, obscure: this property of the subject appears to remain the same both to the advanced scholar and to the beginner. For this reason, great theological scholars gave instruction in all such matters only by means of metaphors and allegories.

For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of a continual critical reappropriation and reinterpretation. Up to this very day there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we must draw sustenance now, as in the past, from this substance. Everything else is idle postmodern talk.

Nothing hinders the soul so much in attaining to the knowledge of God as time and place. Therefore, if the soul is to know God, it must know Him outside time and place, since God is neither in this or that, but One and above them. If the soul is to see God, it must look at nothing in time; for while the soul is occupied with time or place or any image of the kind, it cannot recognize God.

Our salvation depends upon our knowing and recognizing the Chief Good which is God Himself. I have a capacity in my soul for taking in God entirely. I am as sure as I live that nothing is so near to me as God. God is nearer to me than I am to myself... Thus must the soul, which would know God, be rooted and grounded in Him so steadfastly, as to suffer no perturbation of fear or hope, or joy or sorrow, or love or hate, or anything which may disturb its peace... the soul should be remote from all earthly things alike so as not to be nearer to one than another. It should keep the same attitude of aloofness in love and hate, in possession and renouncement, that is, it should be simultaneously dead, resigned and lifted up.

--A steady hand! he said, and drank down the brandy. --Do you think that's all it is, a steady hand? He opened the rumpled reproduction. --This ... these ... the art historians and the critics talking about every object and ... everything having its own form and density and ... its own character in Flemish paintings, but is that all there is to it? Do you know why everything does? Because they found God everywhere. There was nothing God did not watch over, nothing, and so this ... and so in the painting every detail reflects ... God's concern with the most insignificant objects in life, with everything, because God did not relax for an instant then, and neither could the painter then. Do you get the perspective in this? he demanded, thrusting the rumpled reproduction before them. --There isn't any. There isn't any single perspective, like the camera eye, the one we all look through now and call it realism, there ... I take five or six or ten ... the Flemish painter took twenty perspectives if he wished, and even in a small painting you can't include it all in your single vision, your one miserable pair of eyes, like you can a photograph, like you can painting when it ... when it degenerates, and becomes conscious of being looked at.

Recktall Brown stood up, and came towards him.

--Like everything today is conscious of being looked at, looked at by something else but not by God, and that's the only way anything can have its own form and its own character, and ... and shape and smell, being looked at by God.

It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.

The fact is, those who tackle philosophy aright are simply and solely practising dying, practising death, all the time, but nobody sees it.

Socialism means equality of income or nothing, and that under socialism you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly feed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you like it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live you would have to live well.

Mystics hold Allah reveals Himself in five planes: (1) the plane of the Essence, (2) the plane of the Attributes, (3) the plane of the Actions, (4) the plane of Similitudes and Phantasy, and (5) the plane of sense and ocular vision. Each of these is a copy of the one above it, so that whatever appears in the sensible world is the symbol of an unseen reality.

Knowledge is not the prolific retention of traditions but a light which floods the heart.

You should know, too, that he whose heart is saturated with anger, greed, indulgence, and readiness to slander people is actually a beast although he appears in the form of a human being. He who has keen insight regards the real meaning of things and not their form. In this world forms obscure the realities which lie within them, but in the hereafter forms will conform to realities and the latter will prevail. For this reason every individual will be resurrected according to his own spiritual reality; the slanderer will be resurrected in the form of a vicious dog; the greedy, a wild wolf, the haughty, a tiger, and the ambitious, a lion. Traditions have attested to this and the men of insight and discerning have testified to it.

The primary study of the man who wishes to be a poet is his own knowledge, entirely. He seeks for his soul, inspects, tempts it, instructs it. As soon as he knows it, his duty is its cultivation... the soul must be made monstrous... I say that he must be a voyant, make himself into one. The poet makes himself into a seer by a long, tremendous and reasoned derangement of the senses.

What mythological confusion is this? Since when has Mars been the god of commerce and Mercury the god of war?

Outside of medicine and the army, favored terrains of simulation, the affair goes back to religion and the simulacrum of divinity: "l forbade any simulacrum in the temples because the divinity that breathes life into nature cannot be represented." Indeed it can. But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the supreme authority, simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or is it volatilized into simulacra which alone deploy their pomp and power of fascination - the visible machinery of icons being substituted for the pure and intelligible Idea of God? This is precisely what was feared by the Iconoclasts, whose millennial quarrel is still with us today.3 Their rage to destroy images rose precisely because they sensed this omnipotence of simulacra, this facility they have of erasing God from the consciousnesses of people, and the overwhelming, destructive truth which they suggest: that ultimately there has never been any God; that only simulacra exist; indeed that God himself has only ever been his own simulacrum. Had they been able to believe that images only occulted or masked the Platonic idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of a distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the images concealed nothing at all, and that in fact they were not images, such as the original model would have made them, but actually perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination. But this death of the divine referential has to be exorcised at all cost.

We have to recognize that almost all our environmental, political, social and cultural distresses are the product of a system that seeks out surplus value in order to produce more surplus value that then requires profitable absorbtion.”

We seek refuge in Allah from useless knowledge.

They will not fight you (even) together, except in fortified townships, or from behind walls. Strong is their fighting (spirit) amongst themselves: thou wouldst think they were united, but their hearts are divided: that is because they are a people devoid of wisdom. [59:14]

What Allah has bestowed on His Apostle (and taken away) from the people of the townships,- belongs to Allah,- to His Apostle and to kindred and orphans, the needy and the wayfarer; In order that it may not (merely) make a circuit between the wealthy among you. So take what the Apostle assigns to you, and deny yourselves that which he withholds from you. And fear Allah; for Allah is strict in Punishment. [59:7]

The feeble-minded one does not look beyond the means, and only the learned man who is well-grounded in knowledge would understand that the sun, moon, and stars are subject to the will of Allah. Thus the parable of the feeble-minded person who thinks that the light of the sun is the result of its rising, is like the parable of an ant which as it happened upon the surface of a sheet of paper, was endowed with reason and thereupon watched the movement in the process of writing, only to think that it was the work of the pen, but would not go beyond that to see the fingers, and behind the fingers the hand, and behind the hand the will which moves it, and behind the will a deliberate and an able scribe, and behind all, the Creator of the hand,, and the ability, and the will. Most people do not look beyond the nearby and earthly causes and never arrive at the Cause of all causes.

Better justice without religion than the tyranny of a devout ruler.

They feign many absurdities, vain, void of reason. One supposeth himself to be a dog, cock, bear, horse, glass, butter, etc. . . . Many of them are immovable, and fixed in their conceits, others vary upon every object, heard or seen. If they see a stage-play, they run upon that a week after; if they hear music, or see dancing, they have naught but bagpipes in their brain. . . . Though they do talk with you, and seem to be otherwise employed, and to your thinking very intent and busy, still that toy runs in their mind, that fear, that suspicion, that abuse, that jealousy, that agony, that vexation, that cross, that castle in the air, that crotchet, that whimsy, that fiction, that pleasant waking dream, whatsoever it is.

Why doth one man's yawning make another yawn? One man's pissing provoke a second many times to do the like? Why doth scraping of trenchers offend a third, or hacking of files? Why doth a carcass bleed when the murderer is brought before it, some weeks after the murder hath been done? Why do witches and old women fascinate and bewitch children? But as Wierus, Paracelsus, Cardan, Mizaldus, Valleriola, Caesar Vaninus, Campanella, and many philosophers think, the forcible imagination of the one party moves and alters the spirits of the other. Nay more, they can . . . in parties remote, but move bodies from their places, cause thunder, lightning, tempests, which opinion Alkindus, Paracelsus, and some others approve of . . . this strong conceit or imagination is astrum hominus [a man's guiding star], and the rudder of this our ship, which reason should steer, but, overborne by phantasy, cannot manage.

Every lover admires his mistress, though she be very deformed of herself, ill-favoured, wrinkled, pimpled, pale, red, yellow, tanned, tallow-faced, have a swollen juggler's platter face, or a thin, lean, chitty face, have clouds in her face, be crooked, dry, bald, goggle-eyed, blear-eyed, or with staring eyes, she looks like a squis'd cat, hold her head still awry, heavy, dull, hollow-eyed, black or yellow about the eyes, or squint-eyed, sparrow-mouthed, Persian hook-nosed, have a sharp fox-nose, a red nose, China flat, great nose, nare simo patuloque [snub and flat nose], a nose like a promontory, gubber-tushed, rotten teeth, black, uneven brown teeth, beetle-browed, a witch's beard, her breath stink all over the room, her nose drop winter and summer, with a Bavarian poke under her chin, a sharp chin, lave-eared, with a long crane's neck, which stands awry too, pendulis mammis, "her dugs like two double jugs," or else no dugs, in that other extreme ... a vast virago, or an ugly tit, a slug, a fat fustilugs, a truss, a long lean rawbone, a skeleton, a sneaker (si qua latent meliora puta) [think that what is not seen is better], and to thy judgment looks like a mard in a lanthorn, whom thou couldst not fancy for a world.

If for monotheism, earth is not a planet but rather a religious object, it is because, as Qutb emphasizes, the earth itself moves towards the Divine by submitting itself to the exterior Will of Allah; or in other words, the earth is a part and property of Islam, that is to say, the religion of utter submission to Allah. Islam does not perceive oil merely as a motor-grease -- in the way Capitalism identifies it -- but predominantly as a lubricant current or a tellurian flux upon which everything is mobilized in the direction of submission to a desert where no idol can be erected and all elevations must be burned down that is, the Kingdom of God. This act of submission to the all-erasing desert of god is called the religion of taslim or submission, that is to say, Islam. If oil runs toward the desert, so does everything that is dissolved in it.

This part of optics, which is called catoptrics, teaches to make a mirror, which does not retain the images of objects, but reflects them in the air. Witelo has written about its composition [...] Thus, should one prohibit cunning women to fool the eyes of men with this mirror, by making them believe they see ghosts raised from death, while they see the image of some hidden child or statue in the air outside the mirror? Because what is most certain is that, if a cylindrical mirror is placed inside a room closed from all sides, and if a mask, or a statue, or whatever else, is placed outside this room, so that there is a fissure in the window or in the door of this room, through which the rays from the mask penetrate [into the room] to the mirror, then the image of the mask, placed outside the room, will be observed inside the room hanging in the air, and, since the reflections from these mirrors are highly deformed and show a misshapen image of a beautiful thing, how hideous and terrible will the image seem of a mask prepared to arouse horror and consternation. (Jean Pena, from the introduction to De usu optices, the emphases are mine)

It has been suggested that the outbreak of the poltergeist epidemic in the sixteenth century was concomitant with the development of optics especially experiments with mirrors through perspectivist concepts and late scholastic analytical geometry. The philosophers now had the opportunity to put their visions (in regard to cosmos) to the test through optical techniques not practiced before. Yet the philosophical approaches of the majority of these philosophers and polymaths who were enthralled by the development of optics and new scientific visions were still bound to the dominant scholastic philosophical decisions of the Middle Ages. Consequently, their fascination and support for the burgeoning science were in many cases in line with their philosophical goals – that is scientifically projecting their still scholastically influenced philosophies into an ever expanding universe and in turn, anticipating the universal reflection of their philosophical projects as a specular alibi brought about by the science of the time. For the late scholastic and early Renaissance philosophers, the possibility of this specular alibi that could testify to the universality of their philosophical decisions had been brought about by optics as a new science of vision. However, this complicity with the scientific reflection (image) was significantly subjected to the imperfections of the perspectivist optics and the flaws in early optical models as well as the technological or methodical peculiarities of the time. As the result, the so-called scientific reflections of these philosophical projects (viz. specular alibis) were usually modally disproportionate to their original form and even in some cases, incompatible or inconsistent to their original philosophical hypotheses conceived prior to the scientific projection / reflection. This distortion of scientific reflections of scholastic philosophical projects was one of the major impetuses behind the rise of the pseudo-scientific branch known as ‘natural magic’ along with philosophy and science (Giovanni Battista Della Porta, John Dee, Athanasius Kircher, et al.)

Otherworldly apparitions such as poltergeists (rumpelgeist), wraiths and lemures where meticulously incorporated and categorized under the heading of (philo-)pseudoscientific Natural Magic. These apparitions were not only representing the distortion of the scientific reflections / images brought about by the complicity between scholastic philosophy and science, but also they themselves were the misshapen specular alibis of scholastic philosophy and theological doctrines generated by the application of heavily decisional systems into science. The radically treacherous nature of the latter is present even when it is restrained by analytical inadequacies and methodological flaws.

Meillassoux’s spectral dilemma sacrifices the speculative front of his philosophy for the hackneyed ethical responsibility of the philosopher qua the living who is compulsively obsessed with doing justice to the dead on behalf of his living brethren. Yet such an act of justice for and to the dead is merely an implicit tactic to liberate the living (as acknowledged by Meillassoux himself) and return to its comforting but illusive domain once again. Therefore, the spectral dilemma as an ‘essential mourn’ assumes and privileges the ontological necessity of being entrenched in the relation between the speculative and the ethics (of justice). It is precisely for this reason that Meillassoux finds himself compelled to propose a solution for rescuing the world of the living from the haunting memory of the cruelty inflicted upon those who have died in terrible deaths by an indifferent or a tyrant God. However, we can only speak of such cruelty in death if we assume that life, ontologically speaking, is not itself cruelty or cruel but rather is inherently a ground or guarantor for justice. But if the absolute contingency of the cosmic abyss usurps everything even the necessity of life and the living, then how can we speak of doing justice to the dead because the spectre’s terrible death is as vacuous of the life of the living?

Essential mourning, as Meillassoux proposes, is the ‘completion of mourning for essential spectres’. (Collapse iv, p. 262) Yet what are the ‘essential spectres’? They are ‘those of terrible deaths: premature deaths, odious deaths, the death of a child, the death of parents knowing their children are destined to the same end – and yet others. Natural or violent deaths, deaths which cannot be come to terms with either by those whom they befall, or by those who survive them.’ (ibid) Essential spectres are begotten by those terrible and unjust deaths which could not be mourned properly by either religion or atheism and hence, cannot leave the world of the living so as a result they simultaneously suffer and drive the world of the living into a despairing morbidity or ‘hopeless fear’. Accordingly, the essential spectres should be mourned (‘by the living’) properly, that is according to the divine inexistence as an alternative to the depressing dichotomy of religion and atheism which cannot appropriately address both the wanton evil and the indifferent negligence of God:

We call spectral dilemma the aporetic alternative of atheism and religion when confronted with the essential spectres. (Collapse iv, p. 265)

[...]

Meillassoux’s essential spectrality restricts the operation of speculative justice, for it – contra Artaud – delimitates the presence of cruelty only in the death of those ‘who obstinately cast off their shroud to declare to the living, in spite of all evidence, that they still belong amongst them.’ (Collapse iv p. 262) This rigid delimitation of cruelty respectively restricts justice not really to the dead who are seemingly supposed to be liberated by essential mourning but to the living for which the spectre marks an instrumental correlation with death, their own death. If the essential spectrality of the hauntology surreptitiously testifies to the life of the living through a neurotic or negative bond, then doing an essential justice to the dead by this assumption that cruelty is only limited to those of terrible deaths also contributes to the living. In other words, a justice in terms of the law of the living is a justice to the dead but ultimately for the living. The dead in this sense is liveware (the instrument of the living). The reason for this undercover instrumentalism present in Spectral Dilemma is that the relation of justice to cruelty is one of a decisional collusion because the locus of cruelty is purely a decisional one. If as Artaud (and Deleuze in Difference and Repetition) suggests that cruelty is at base of every determination, then life as the first decisional determination (especially as accentuated in essential mourning) is itself an inexhaustible source of cruelty. It is in properly tackling with the cruelty of life qua its purely decisional determination that we can break apart from the instrumental approach in regard to the dead and bring about the cruel reign of a speculative ethics of justice. Only by a philosophy of cruelty that sheds a dramatic light on our equivocal inexistence (why is it that I am living while I am already dead?) and the precariousness of life’s ontological decision for and by the living can the cruelty of the speculative reunite with ethics.

This fundamental deficit between our susceptibility to pleasure and our vulnerability to pain vitiates the attempt to commensurate them. Indeed, the assumption that humans possess a limitless sensitivity to physical pleasure, or an inexhaustible capacity for psychological enjoyment, is an unfounded spiritualist conceit. In this regard, Nietzsche’s insistence that ‘joy is deeper than heart’s agony’ (1969: 331) implies that in affirming the recurrence of any moment of joy, the finite human organism transcends its own determinate psychophysical constitution. Thus, the affirmation of recurrence is the moment when finite lunar joy eclipses boundless solar pain. Yet Nietzsche provides no explanation of what makes this transcendence possible, other than saying that it is a function of some sort of ‘strength’ and/or ‘power’, while leaving the source of this ‘strength’ or ‘power’ completely indeterminate, apart from attributing it to an inherent ‘superiority’ in the character of the will. But given that the capacity for withstanding and surmounting pain is part of Nietzsche’s definition of ‘superiority of will’ – a ‘will’ whose psychophysical basis remains wholly indeterminate – it is difficult to see how this superiority, which is cashed out in terms of wholly traditional virtues such as fortitude, resilience, and resourcefulness, differs from the venerable definition of spiritual superiority: ‘The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – you do not know that it is this discipline alone which has created every elevation of mankind hitherto?’ (1990b: §225). This is simply to endorse, rather than undermine, the spiritualization of suffering; indeed it is difficult to see how it differs from familiar Judaeo-Christian paeans to the spiritually edifying virtues of suffering. Either one ascribes a redemptive function to suffering itself, as does Christian dolorism, or one reintroduces a spiritual economy of means and ends, where the experience of woe is compensated for by some past remembrance or future expectation of bliss. Neither option can be reconciled with the stated aim of Nietzsche’s transvaluation, which was to overthrow the Judaeo-Christian register of evaluation altogether.

Sacrifice’s magical power consists in establishing a correspondence between things for which no ratio, no proportion of conceptual equivalence yet exists. This is its quite literal irrationality. More importantly, mimetic sacrifice establishes the fundamental distinction whose rationality Adorno and Horkheimer believe enlightenment is in the process of eliding: the distinction between animate and inanimate: ‘mana, the moving spirit, is not a projection but the preponderance of nature in the weak psyches of primitive peoples. The split between animate and inanimate, the assigning of demons and deities to certain specific places arises from this pre-animism. Even the division of subject and object is prefigured in it’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002: 11). Moreover, if as Adorno and Horkheimer argue, myth already exhibits the lineaments of explanatory classification which will be subsequently deployed in scientific rationality, then this distinction between animate and inanimate marks a fundamental cognitive accomplishment which science threatens to elide by converting all of nature into an undifferentiated material whose intelligibility requires a supplement of conceptual information. Scientific conceptualization mortifies the body: ‘The transformation into dead matter, indicated by the affinity of corpus to corpse, was a part of the perennial process which turned nature into stuff, material’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002: 194). Thus, Adorno and Horkheimer insist, ‘the disenchantment of the world means the extirpation of animism’ (2002: 2) – enlightenment ‘equates the living with the non-living just as myth had equated the non-living with the living’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002: 11). Yet animism harboured a form of non-conceptual rationality precisely insofar as its practice of sacrifice established a principle of reciprocity between inanimate power and animate powerlessness. The rationality of sacrifice consists in this power to commensurate incommensurables: power and impotence, life and death.

--There must be a reason ...
--Reason! but, good God, haven't we had enough ... reason.

--Women, he commenced, and then, --men rising to isolated challenges, he spends his life preparing to meet one, one single challenge, when he triumphs it's, they call it heroic, but you, I know how hard you try for me, women just go on, they just go on, and I ...

For just as the phenomenon of death indexes an anomalous zone in the conceptual fabric of the manifest image – the point at which our everyday concepts and categories begin to break down, which is why it remains a privileged topic for philosophers exploring the outer limits of the manifest image – so, by the same token, the concept of extinction represents an aberration for the phenomenological discourse which sought to transcendentalize the infrastructure of the manifest image precisely in order to safeguard the latter from the incursions of positivism and naturalism. Yet it is precisely insofar as the concept of extinction expresses a dissonance resulting from the interference between the manifest and scientific images that it could not have been generated from within the latter; it is manufactured by deploying the manifest image’s most sophisticated conceptual resources (in conjunction with elements of scientific discourse) against that image’s own phenomenological self-understanding. At this particular historical juncture, philosophy should resist the temptation to install itself within one of the rival images, just as it should refuse the forced choice between the reactionary authoritarianism of manifest normativism, and the metaphysical conservatism of scientific naturalism. Rather, it should exploit the mobility that is one of the rare advantages of abstraction in order to shuttle back and forth between images, establishing conditions of transposition, rather than synthesis, between the speculative anomalies thrown up within the order of phenomenal manifestation, and the metaphysical quandaries generated by the sciences’ challenge to the manifest order. In this regard, the concept of extinction is necessarily equivocal precisely insofar as it crystallizes the interference between the two discourses.

The dirty Arab children sold peanuts from the top of the basket and hashish from the bottom. They spoke a masterful unintimidated French in guttural gasps, coming from a land where it was regarded neither as the most beautiful language, as in America, nor the only one, as in France.

Before their displacement from nature, baffled by their own culture which they could not define, and so believed did not exist, these transatlantic visitors had learned to admire in this neatly parceled definition of civilization the tyrannous pretension of many founded upon the rebellious efforts of a few, the ostentation of thousands presumed upon the strength of a dozen who had from time to time risen against this vain complacence with the past to which they were soon to contribute, giving, with their harried deaths, grounds for vanity of language, which they had perfected; supercilious posturing of intellect, which they had suffered to understand and deliver, in defiance; insolent arbitration of taste, grown from the efforts of those condemned as having none; planted in the rain of contempt for themselves; dogmata of excellence founded upon insulting challenges wrought in impossible hope, and then grasped, for granted, from their hands fallen clenching it as dogma.

From the intractable perfection of the crepusculous Île de la Cité (seen from the Pont des Arts) to the static depravity of the Grands Boulevards, it was unimpeachable: in superficiating this perfection, it absorbed the beholder and shut out the creator: no more could it have been imitation than a mermaid (though echoes were heard of the Siren of Dijbouti).

[...] they admired the rudeness, which they called self-respect; the contempt, which they called innate dignity; the avarice, which they called self-reliance; the tasteless ill-made clothes on the men, lauded as indifference, and the far-spaced posturings of hate couture across the Seine, called inimitable or shik according to one's stay. Marvelous to wide eyes, pricked ears, and minds of that erectile quality betraying naive qualms of transatlantic origin (alert here under hair imitative long-grown, uncombed, on the male, curly shorn on the girls) was this spectacle of culture fully realized. They regarded as the height of excellence that nothing remained to be done, no tree to be planted nor building torn down (they had not visited Le Bourget; found the wreckage up behind the Hôtel de Ville picturesque), no tree too low nor building too high (those telescoping lampposts on the Pont du Carrousel), no bud of possibility which had not opened in the permanent bloom of artificial flowers, no room for that growth which is the abiding flower of humility.

Paris lay by like a promise accomplished: age had not withered her, nor custom staled her infinite vulgarity.

The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.

Keith spoke of the great joy felt not only by the Chinese people but by the oppressed people of the whole world when, in October 1964, China successfully detonated its first atomic bomb. Malcolm X described this event as “the greatest thing that has ever happened in the 20th century to the black people”. Keith cited the Xinhua report that contained Malcolm X’s comments: “Referring to the present struggle of the American Negroes and the firm support given to this struggle by the Chinese people, he said that the US imperialists would never loosen their grip on the 22 million colonised American Negroes before the peoples of Asia and Africa cast off the yoke of imperialism and became strong. Bearing this in mind, we therefore appreciate the great strides that the Chinese people have made toward true independence and the unlimited contribution they are making to help the oppressed peoples in other parts of the world to throw off the chains of imperialism.”

--Cave, cave, Dominus videt. Abscondam faciem meam ab eis et considerabo novissima eorum, not reading those words but repeating under his breath, as though to give himself strength, words of that fourteenth-century translator of the Bible who died in bed, only to be dug up and burned, already rewarded for his labor of Divine Love with the revelation, --In this world God must serve the devil.

The sermon, meanwhile, had progressed from vivisection to the Mojave Indians, --among whom it is humbly understood, and I quote from foremost authority, "to be the nature of doctors to kill people in this way just as it is in the nature of hawks to kill little birds for a living." Among the Mojaves, it is believed that one dead under the doctor's hand falls under his power in the next life. Superstition? It is what we, gathered here today in the sight of God, call superstition. We call such people as those benighted savages, and send missionaries among them, to enlighten them with the word of Truth we are gathered together to worship here today. For centuries, missionaries have brought back stories to make us blanch with horror, stories of human sacrifice practiced in the interests of religion on the bloodstained altars of the Aztecs. Yet we support in our very midst a highly respected class of men who are Aztecs in their own right. Like ourselves, they may throw up their hands at the thought of murdering a maiden on a stone altars. But it is only that this was done to serve a god different from their own, that shocks them. We may find them wringing their hands in reproach against those who roasted Saint Lawrence on a gridiron: Is it the roasting they regret? Is it the suffering of Saint Catherine on the wheel? The choking cries of Tyndale being strangled? The muffled words of forgiveness on the lips of John Huss at the stake ... those of Our Lord on the Cross ... O Sancta simplicitas! No! They regret simply that none of these experiment was carried out under the scientific conditions of a medical pathological laboratory. (He had already gone ten minutes beyond the time usually allotted to the sermon, but the gray faces were bound in wonder.) --Tell me, how did Asclepius end? he demanded, reaching his turning point. --Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine. Why, Zeus slew him with a thunderbolt! But we mortals, what are we allowed? Not even as little as John of Bohemia, who threw his surgeon into the river when he failed to cure the king's blindness. No terms, like the Hungarian king five centuries ago, who could promise full reward to the surgeon who cured his arrow wound, with death if he failed. No, we turn them loose, with money in their pockets, and expressions of deep respect for their failures. The same trust, and confidence, perhaps, that Saint Cyril had for the physician who cut out his liver and ate it, ... that Pope Innocent VIII had in the physician who prescribed the blood of three small children for His Holiness' nerves, ... of Cardinal Richelieu, on his deathbed, given horse dung in white wine ... Have you noticed, he went on, lowering his voice, leaning towards them over the high pulpit, --the charm that doctors wear? A cross? No. In the very name of Heaven, no? It is a device called the caduceus. Look closely ... two serpents coupling round a wand, the scepter of a pagan god, the scepter of Hermes. Hermes, the patron of eloquence and cunning, of trickery and theft, the very wand he carried when he conducted souls to Hell. (The organist, an alert young man, fingered the pages of the next hymn and made sure there was air in the bellows.) And when Revered Gwyon hit the pulpit with the flat of his hand and raised his voice from the crisp confidence he had just given to commence a new inventory of the achievements of the medical profession, beginning with --Who was it that suggested the use of the guillotine in the French Revolution, but a doctor who died under its own blade! ... there was a cheer from the far end of the nave, a moment of unholy silence and the organ lusted into Rock of the Ages[.]

We should note as well that in pre-Christian antiquity the word "atheism" is practically meaningless. Ancient trials for "unbelief" or "impiety" are generally concerned, in reality, with other offenses. When the pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus remarks that "there are some people for whom the sky is empty of gods," he specifies that they do believe, nevertheless, in magic and in the stars. In Rome it was the Christians who were accused of "atheism," since they showed no respect to images of the gods or to places of worship. In Greece, rational thought itself only reoriented theogony and mythical cosmology. That is why Claude Tresmontant, after having gratuitously likened pantheism to "atheism," is compelled to write that the latter is "eminently religious," that in fact "it is far too religious, since it unduly divinizes the universe." In ancient Europe, the sacred was not conceived in opposition to the profane, but rather embraced the profane and gave it meaning. There was no need for a Church to mediate between man and God; the whole city itself effected this mediation, and religious institutions constituted only one aspect of it. The conceptual antonym of Latin religio would be the verb negligere. To be religious is to be responsible, not to neglect. To be responsible is to be free -- to possess the concrete means of exercising a practical liberty. To be free is also, at the same time, to be connected to others through a common spirituality.

One is devoured by Time, by History, not because one lives in them, but because one thinks them real and, in consequence, one forgets or undervalues eternity.

Religion, the essence of which is the search for a lost intimacy, is essentially an effort of the clear consciousness to become entirely self-awareness.

Man is the only being who is astonished by his own existence; a brute animal lives in its tranquillity and is astonished by nothing ... This astonishment, which occurs especially in the face of death and in view of the destruction and disappearance of all other beings, is the source of our metaphysical needs; it is because of this that man is a metaphysical animal.

When it turned its gaze to History, Rationalism saw the whole tendency as one toward Reason. Man was "emerging" during all those millennia, he was progressing from barbarism and fanaticism to enlightenment, from "superstition" to "science," from violence to "reason," from dogma to "criticism, from darkness to light. No more invisible things, no more spirit, no more soul, no more God, no more Church and State. The two poles of thought are "the individual" and "humanity." Anything separating them is "irrational."

This branding of things as irrational is in fact correct. Rationalism must mechanize everything, and whatever cannot be mechanized is of necessity irrational. Thus the entirety of History becomes irrational: its chronicles, its processes, its secret force, Destiny. Rationalism itself, as a by-product of a certain stage in the development of a High Culture, is also irrational.

The "Enlightenment" period of Western history which ... set in after the Counter-Reformation laid more and more stress on intellect, reason and logic as it developed. By the middle of the 18th century this tendency produced Rationalism. Rationalism regarded all spiritual values as its objects and proceeded to revalue them from the standpoint of "reason." Inorganic logic is the faculty men have always used for solving problems of mathematics, engineering, transportation, physics and in other non-valuing situations. Its insistence on identity and rejection of contradiction are practicable in material activity. They afford intellectual satisfaction also in matters of purely abstract thought, like mathematics and logic, but if pursued far enough they turn into mere techniques, simple assumptions whose only justification is empirical. The end of Rationalism is Pragmatism, the suicide of Reason.

This adaptation of reason to material problems causes all problems whatever to become mechanical when surveyed in "the light of reason," without any mystical admixture of thought or tendency whatever. Descartes reasoned the animals into automata, and a generation or so later, man himself was rationalized into an automaton — or equally, an animal. Organisms became problems in chemistry and physics, and superpersonal organism[s] simply no longer existed, for they are not amenable to reason, not being visible or measurable. Newton provided the universe of stars with a non-spiritual self-regulating force; the next century removed the spirit from man, his history and his affairs.

Reason detests the inexplicable, the mysterious, the half-light. In a practical problem in machinery or ship-building one must feel that all the factors are under his knowledge and control. There must be nothing unpredictable or out of control. Rationalism, which is the feeling that everything is subject to and completely explicable by Reason, consequently rejects everything not visible and calculable. If a thing actually cannot be calculated, Reason merely says that the factors are so numerous and complicated that in a purely practical way they render the calculation unfeasible, but do not make it theoretically impossible. Thus Reason also has its Will-to-Power: whatever does not submit is pronounced recalcitrant, or is simply denied existence.

"Meaningless! Meaningless!"
says the Teacher.
"Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.

Man's fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; man has no advantage over the animal. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?

—But . . . even Voltaire could see that some transcendent judgment is necessary, because nothing is self-sufficient, even art, and when art isn’t an expression of something higher, when it isn’t invested you might even say, it breaks up into fragments that don’t have any meaning and don’t have any . . .

This "Protestant ethic of the ‘calling,'" with its severity and its control of the labor rendered as a sign of the assurance of election, made service in one’s ‘calling,’ the systematic exercise of one’s energies, into a service both necessary in itself and appointed by God, in which profit is regarded as the sign of the Divine approval. . . . The owner of wealth or property is ‘the Lord’s Steward,’ and administers a Divine gift which has been entrusted to him.

An impoverished person thinks that God is an old man with white hair, sitting on a wondrous throne of fire that glitters with countless sparks, as the Bible states: "The Ancient-of-Days sits, the hair on his head like clean fleece, his throne flames of fire." Imagining this and similar fantasies, the fool corporealizes God. He falls into one of the traps that destroy faith. His awe of God is limited by his imagination.

But if you are enlightened, you know God’s oneness; you know that the divine is devoid of bodily categories — these can never be applied to God. Then you wonder, astonished: Who am I? I am a mustard seed in the middle of the sphere of the moon, which itself is a mustard seed within the next sphere. So it is with that sphere and all it contains in relation to the next sphere. So it is with all the spheres — one inside the other — and all of them are a mustard seed within the further expanses. And all of these are a mustard seed within further expanses.

Your awe is invigorated, the love in your soul expands.

It seems to me that the very absoluteness of the theory's conclusions tends to compromise its "objective" character. It is all very well to speak of the "evidence of evolution," but if the theory is thorough- going, then human consciousness itself is also governed by evolution. This means that the categories that allow observation statements to arise as "facts", categories such as number, space, time, event, measurement, logic, causality, and so forth are mere physiological accidents of random mutation and natural selection in a particular species, Homo sapiens. They have not come from any scientific considerations, but rather have arbitrarily arisen in man by blind and fortuitous evolution for the purpose of preserving the species. They need not reflect external reality, "the way nature is", objectively, but only to the degree useful in preserving the species. That is, nothing guarantees the primacy, the objectivity, of these categories over others that would have presumably have arisen had our consciousness evolved along different lines, such as those of more distant, say, aquatic or subterranean species. The cognitive basis of every statement within the theory thus proceeds from the unreflective, unexamined historical forces that produced "consciousness" in one species, a cognitive basis that the theory nevertheless generalizes to the whole universe of theory statements (the explanation of the origin of species) without explaining what permits this generalization. The pretences of the theory to correspond to an objective order of reality, applicable in an absolute sense to all species, are simply not compatible with the consequences of a thoroughly evolutionary viewpoint, which entails that the human cognitive categories that underpin the theory are purely relative and species-specific. The absolutism of random mutation and natural selection as explanative principles ends in eating the theory. With all its statements simultaneously absolute and relative, objective and subjective, generalizable and ungeneralizable, scientific and species-specific, the theory runs up on a reef of methodological incoherence.

How do the receptive perceive truth, whereas the unreceptive "seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand"? The ultimate truths of heaven and the kingdom of God, the reality that lies behind sensory perception and beyond the cogitations of the rationalizing mind, can only be grasped by intuition — awakening the intuitive knowing, the pure comprehension, of the soul.

The true basis of religion is not belief, but intuitive experience. Intuition is the soul’s power of knowing God. To know what religion is really all about, one must know God.

It would have been too much to expect of religion that it find an immediate antidote for the naturalism and secularism which the modern scientific world view has created. It was inevitable that the natural world, neglected for centuries, should take vengeance upon the human spirit by making itself an obsession of the human mind. But it cannot be said that religion has been particularly wise in the strategy it developed in opposition to naturalism. Religion tried to save itself by the simple expedient of insisting that evolution was not mechanistic but creative, by discovering God in the evolutionary process. Insofar as this means that there is room for freedom and purpose in the evolutionary process, no quarrel is possible with the defenders of the faith. But there is, after all, little freedom or purpose in the evolutionary process — in short, little morality; so that if we can find God only as he is revealed in nature we have no moral God.

It would be foolish to claim that the defense of a morally adequate theism in the modern world is an easy task; but it is not an impossible one. Yet most modernists have evaded it. Modernism on the whole has taken refuge in various kinds of pantheism, and pantheism is always destructive of moral values. To identify God with automatic processes is to destroy the God of conscience; the God of the real is never the God of the ideal. One of the vainest delusions to which religionists give themselves is to suppose that religion is inevitably a support of morality. There are both supramoral and submoral factors in religion. Professor Santayana makes the discrimination between two instincts in religion, the instinct of piety and the instinct of spirituality, the one seeking to hallow the necessary limitations of life and the other seeking to overcome them Pantheism inevitably strengthens those forces in religion which tend to sanctify the real rather than to inspire the ideal.

That is why modernism, which has sloughed off many of religion’s antimoral tendencies but has involved itself in philosophic monism and religious pantheism more grievously than orthodoxy ever did, has been so slight a moral gain for mankind. Liberal religion is symbolizing a totality of facts under the term God which orthodoxy, with a truer moral instinct, could comprehend under no less than two terms, God and the devil. It would be better to defy nature’s immoralities in the name of a robust humanism than to take the path which most modern religion has chosen and play truant to the distinctive needs of the human spirit by reading humanity into the essentially inhuman processes of nature. There is little to choose between the despair to which pure naturalism tempts us when we survey the human scene and the easy optimism which most modern religion encourages. What we need is both the spirit of repentance and the spirit of hope, which can be inspired only by a theism which knows how to discover sin by subjecting man to absolute standards and how to save him from despair by its trust in absolute values.