Sublime

A searing example from religious history is the story of Giordano Bruno, an Italian free-thinker who anticipated many of the ideas of modern science, and in the process clearly contradicted a literalist reading of the creation narrative in the Bible. Arrested by the secret police of the Roman Catholic Church, known as the ‘Holy Office’, he was put

Anaximander’s greatness lies in the fact that on the basis of so little, in order to better account for his observations, he redesigns the universe.

“To be is to be perceived,” said the Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753). We exist and give existence by virtue of perception. Berkeley meant that God’s omniscient perception maintains all things. For a moralist—and Berkeley was a bishop—this could mean you’re never out of the sight of God, so you’d better be good! For a metaphysician,

He is using a conceptual reasoning that has a precise historical origin, Anaximander’s apeiron.

Pythagoras, as everyone knows, said that “all things are numbers.” This statement, interpreted in a modern way, is logically nonsense, but what he meant was not exactly nonsense. He discovered the importance of numbers in music, and the connection which he established between music and arithmetic survives in the mathematical terms “ harmonic mean”

A wandering charismatic sage dressed in white robes and crowned with a gold coronet, Pythagoras was part scientist, part priest and part magician.[