What light is really thrown on the truth or falsehood of Christian Theology by the occurrence of similar ideas in Pagan religion. I think the answer was very well given a fortnight ago by Mr. Brown. Supposing, for purposes of argument, that Christianity is true, then it could avoid all coincidence with other religions only on the supposition that all other religions are one hundred per cent erroneous. To which, you remember, Professor Price replied by agreeing with Mr. Brown and saying: "Yes. From these resemblances you may conclude not 'so much the worse for the Christians' but 'so much the better for the Pagans'." The truth is that the resemblances tell nothing either for or against the truth of Christian Theology. If you start from the assumption that the Theology is false, the resemblances are quite consistent with that assumption. One would expect creatures of the same sort, faced with the same universe, to make the same false guess more than once. But if you start with the assumption that the Theology is true, the resemblances fit in equally well. Theology, while saying that a special illumination has been vouchsafed to Christians and (earlier) to Jews, also says that there is some reason. The picture so often painted of Christians huddling together on an ever narrower strip of beach while the incoming tide of "Science" mounts higher and higher, corresponds to nothing in my own experience.
C.S. Lewis
"Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
(...)
Can you taste what I'm saying? It is onions or potatoes,
a pinch of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it."
--Philip Levine, from The Simple Truth
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By one interpretation, Levine is talking here about 'basic' beliefs. Do religious beliefs fit into this category? Are they like that salt our bodies need in order to function properly; or are they like that additional bit of extraneous salt one may use simply to make his meal more palatable?
Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth,
"You owe Me."
Look what happens with
A love like that,
It lights the Whole Sky.
--Hafiz
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For those of you who worship The Sun anyway, you might as well do it correctly.
Do you know how beautiful you are? I think not, my dear.
For as you talk of God, I see great parades with wildly colorful bands
Streaming from your mind and heart, carrying wonderful and secret messages
To every corner of the world.
I see saints bowing in the mountains, hundreds of miles away to that wonder of sounds
That break into light from your most common words.
Speak to me of your mother, your cousins and your friends.
Tell me of squirrels and birds you know. Awaken your legion of nightingales-
Let them soar wild and free in the sky.
And begin to sing to God. Let’s all begin to sing to God!
Saints Bowing in the Mountains.
Do you know how beautiful you are? I think not, my dear,
Yet Hafiz could set you upon a Stage and worship you forever!
--Hafiz
Good poetry
Makes a beautiful naked woman
Materialize from
Words,
Who then says,
With a sword precariously waving
In her hands,
"If you look at my loins
I will cut off your head,
And reach down and grab your spirit
By its private parts,
And carry you off to heaven
Squealing in joy."
Hafiz says,
"That sounds wonderful, just
Wonderful.
Someone please - start writing
Some great
Lines."
--Hafiz
Too lazy to be ambitious,
I let the world take care of itself.
Ten days' worth of rice in my bag;
a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.
Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?
Listening to the night rain on my roof,
I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out.
--Zen Master Ryokan
THE TRIUMPH OF ACHILLES
In the story of Patroclus
no one survives, not even Achilles
who was nearly a god.
Patroclus resembled him; they wore
the same armor.
Always in these friendships
one serves the other, one is less than the other:
the hierarchy
is always apparant, though the legends
cannot be trusted--
their source is the survivor,
the one who has been abandoned.
What were the Greek ships on fire
compared to this loss?
In his tent, Achilles
grieved with his whole being
and the gods saw
he was a man already dead, a victim
of the part that loved,
the part that was mortal.
(Paul Celan)
Fana
As long as there is herself and myself
—beloved and lover, an imagined mirage
cast in a dream of two mirrors—
love is the desperate, jealous flame of desire.
When the images join in a singular fire
—returning to only ourself and no other—
then love is the passion and pulsation of One,
forgetful of dreams imprisoned in a mirror.
And it begins again until it ends.
“How silly for the flame to fear
annihilation in the fire”—*
* Verse in quotes adapted from the Sufi Fakhruddin ‘Araqi, in his Lama’at (Divine Flashes); Fana, meaning “extinction” or “annihilation” is a Sufi term for the merger of the ego-self into the Whole, or the One (the philosophy is the same as emptiness-and-form in Buddhism).
Originally posted by vistesd"... So I haunted the City of your dreams, and I established / in the desolate markets the pure commerce of my soul, / among you / invisible and insistent as a fire of thorns in the gale."
“How silly for the flame to fear
annihilation in the fire”—
St. John Perse, Anabasis
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked(18.'Anthropological Review,' April 1867, p. 236.), will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
Charles Darwin