Sublime

What I call religious faith is any form of belief in an eternal being or an eternity beyond being, either in the form of a timeless repose (such as nirvana), a transcendent God, or an immanent, divine Nature.

The whole of nature is something prepared for us, composed for us, given to us, delivered into our care by a “supernatural” dispensation.

If all were equally redeemed by Christ, if all were equally beloved of God, then what of the hierarchies on which the functioning of even the humblest Roman household depended? Paul, in giving his answer, betrayed a certain ambivalence. Certainly, he refuted any notion that the divine justice promised to those baptised in the name of Christ might b

for pagans and Christians alike, the Unmoved Mover was the cause of the ceaseless rotations of the heavens not because it or he exerted some kind of external prompting force upon them, but because it or he acted as an irresistible force of attraction.

If one can be swayed simply by the brute force of arithmetic, it seems worth noting that, among the apparently most explicit statements on the last things, the universalist statements are by far the more numerous. I am thinking of such verses as, say:

If God is not good, then there can be no distinction between kindness and cruelty, and heaven can be hell and hell, heaven.