Sublime

What is revealed to him is that he cannot know what is wanted of him (and therefore quite what he himself wants); and that what he most needs – God’s grace – he can do nothing to secure (hope is always hope for the wrong thing). As a Jew you can – at least to some extent – know what is wanted of you; in Paul’s Christianity this is the one thing you

The basic idea underlying all the great religions is that man is asleep, that he lives amid dreams and delusions, that he cuts himself off from the universal consciousness (the only meaningful definition of God) to crawl into the narrow shell of a personal ego.

Weizsäcker’s book The World-View of Physics is still keeping me very busy. It has again brought home to me quite clearly how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back

for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice—the power of change, the essential function of life.

Man has been so made by God that he cannot truly live unless he is in the right relationship to God. He was made like that. He was made by God; he was made for God. And God has put certain rules in his nature and being and existence, and unless he conforms to them he is bound to go wrong.

Denys Turner writes, “In showing God to exist reason shows that we no longer know what ‘exists’ means.”

A man without a calling thus lacks the systematic, methodical character which is, as we have seen, demanded by worldly asceticism.

He yearns for the certainty that love does not lead to emptiness, that we all do not exist separately alongside each other with no possibility of being united, but, rather, that there is a union going down to the foundations that cannot be destroyed and really corresponds to my yearning for fulfillment.

When I say religion I mean Augustine’s idea of the restless searching heart in the midst of a mysterious world, not the rites and doctrines of what are called the ‘confessional’ religions or even signing off on what the confessional religions call God.