Sublime

He was the perfect Orphic saint: in the dualism of heavenly soul and earthly body, he had achieved the complete mastery of the soul over the body. His indifference to death at the last is the final proof of this mastery. At the same time, he is not an orthodox Orphic; it is only the fundamental doctrines that he accepts, not the superstitions and c

explain

that we have been lucky to arrive in the one whose particular chemistry enables us to exist.

To place Jesus against the background of his time is by no means sufficient to explain him. Who can explain a spiritual genius—or any kind of genius, for that matter?

‘Scientia’, that science thing again – which is the belief that salvation from the tumults and sorrows of

Galileo, as every one knows, was condemned by the Inquisition, first privately in 1616, and then publicly in 1633, on which latter occasion he recanted, and promised never again to maintain that the earth rotates or revolves.

Pythagoras was particularly famous for his miracles. Like Jesus, he was said to have performed many healings and as he went around from town to town the word got about that he was coming 'not to teach, but to heal'.[