On Religious Awe

“Religious awe is not, as it is often deemed to be, a contingent human development, an attitude that we encounter among other attitudes in ourselves and from the world. It is not, as it has often been held to be, the mere product of man’s original need, helplessness and ignorance which will ‘wither away’ in a well-appointed Marxist society or in a civilization built on science. None of the fundamental emotional attitudes of men and animals – those picked out by such salient names as ‘fear’, ‘anger’, ‘hatred’, ‘disgust’, admiration’, ‘emulation’, etc. – are mere facts of nature. All have not only definite ‘constitutions’, in which their various traits hang together in a necessary or near-necessary manner, but there is also something inevitable about their emergence in a living and conscious being.” Transcendence of the Cave, p. 78-9.

On Religion

“The consensus of the best spiritual opinion and insight in regard to the life beyond is, in the view of the present lecturer, to be found in the cosmic speculations of our Aryan ancestors, whether Brahmanic, Buddhistic, Orphic, Pythagorean, Platonic or Neoplatonic. To this the Jews added a vision whose intense moral fervor provided the necessary complement to whatever is negative, inert and emptily transcendental in the otherworld vision in question. We may be urged to be Jews in regard to this world, and Brahmins and Neoplatonists in regard to the next.” (Transcendence of the Cave, pp. 166-167)

 

“The intelligible world is...presided over by a mind which is not anyone’s mind but to which all minds, set outside this world at varying distance in the sphere of instances, aspire, and by which they may be said to inspire. Ultimate truth in this region seems as close to atheism and to theism (or vice versa), a fact evidenced by the perennial wobble of enlightened opinion on the matter (meaning by ‘enlightened’ the view of Buddhas and Messiahs, not of what are generally called ‘advanced thinkers’).” (Transcendence of the Cave, p. 156)

I may here say briefly why I considered the Messianic life and mission of Jesus as a shadow of the cave, and not as the unique incarnation of absolute deity that Christians suppose it to have been. My reasons for questioning the central dogma of Christianity are reasons of emphasis: that in the notion of the Messianic status of Jesus there is a stress on the contingent carry-out as opposed to the essential core of deity which I cannot but see as unbalanced, and which leads, I think, to a large amount of essential emptiness and circularity.” (Transcendence of the Cave, pp. 114-5)

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On Idolatry

“One cannot rationally worship this or that excellent thing or person, however eminent or august: only Goodness Itself, Beauty Itself, Truth Itself, and so on are rationally venerable, and to bow one’s knee to an instance is to commit idolatry” (Towards a Neoneoplatonism," Ascent to the Absolute, p. 267).

The Certainty and Transcendence of Death

“Death, the final epitome of senselessness, is the most distressing of all the appearances of the cave, and its impossibility can only be understood and enjoyed in a setting in which its possibility and even its certainty have at first been brought vividly before us.  The sublime uncertainty of the draught of hemlock, the dark doubts of the stormy night under the Bodhi-tree, the anguish at Gethsemane and Calvary, are not dispensable preliminaries to the serene safety they lead to: they are part of, preserved in, the latter.  It is only on a background of despairing skepticism that supreme dedication is possible, a dedication which can live in and for the mere possibilities which a deepening insight will then show to be the only possibilities, and hence the necessities of all being” (The Absolute and Rational Eschatology, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 77).