The gods are not disdainful or envious; they open the door to you; they lend a hand as you climb.
Do you marvel that man goes to the gods? God comes to men; nay, he comes nearer—he comes into men.
No mind that has not God, is good.
Divine seeds are scattered throughout our mortal bodies; if a good husbandman receives them, they spring up in the likeness of their source and of a parity with those from which they came.
If, however, the husbandman be bad, like a barren or marshy soil, he kills the seeds, and causes tares to grow up instead of wheat. Farewell.
Do you marvel that man goes to the gods? God comes to men; nay, he comes nearer—he comes into men.
No mind that has not God, is good.
Divine seeds are scattered throughout our mortal bodies; if a good husbandman receives them, they spring up in the likeness of their source and of a parity with those from which they came.
If, however, the husbandman be bad, like a barren or marshy soil, he kills the seeds, and causes tares to grow up instead of wheat. Farewell.
—from Seneca, Moral Letters 73
In assuming a vast chasm between the human and the Divine, which follows from stressing transcendence at the expense of immanence, we may believe that the work of coming to know God depends entirely upon our own efforts. We are sadly forgetting how the force of the good flows from the higher down to the lower.
As much as a finite creature can strive to approach an infinite Creator, doesn’t it seem like a futile effort? How could we ever rise to such a height? It can only become possible if the Divine is also reaching down to lift us up, to offer us a helping hand. While the lesser can never contain the greater, the greater can always subsume the lesser.
There was once a time when I rolled my eyes at the idea of God “talking” to me, but now I begin to recognize how every aspect of Nature is itself a message. I was only looking within the narrow confines of spoken or written words, when all along the expression was one of the Logos that communicates through a living essence. From this perspective, some of the poets and the mystics are far ahead of the philosophers.
What is the relative without the absolute? How can the part exist separately from the whole? Who am I in the absence of my ultimate beginning and end? Neither the true nor the good are within me when I divorce my being from Being. It has all been given, and now it remains for me to decide if I am willing to make the most of such graces.
When Seneca says that a man cannot be good without God, the secular humanist will have none of it, and a “modern” Stoic will brush such a claim aside, dismissing it as unscientific and outdated. I can only suggest that it is the height of arrogance to make man the measure, and that the principle of causality is about as logical as one can possibly get.
I will, however, grant that a reverence for God is primitive, though I use the term in a somewhat different sense. Rather than being crude, obsolete, or naïve, piety is instead something simple, elementary, and primeval. It is ancient by being perennial, and those who seek wisdom should never have to apologize for their obedience to the supreme authority.
In assuming a vast chasm between the human and the Divine, which follows from stressing transcendence at the expense of immanence, we may believe that the work of coming to know God depends entirely upon our own efforts. We are sadly forgetting how the force of the good flows from the higher down to the lower.
As much as a finite creature can strive to approach an infinite Creator, doesn’t it seem like a futile effort? How could we ever rise to such a height? It can only become possible if the Divine is also reaching down to lift us up, to offer us a helping hand. While the lesser can never contain the greater, the greater can always subsume the lesser.
There was once a time when I rolled my eyes at the idea of God “talking” to me, but now I begin to recognize how every aspect of Nature is itself a message. I was only looking within the narrow confines of spoken or written words, when all along the expression was one of the Logos that communicates through a living essence. From this perspective, some of the poets and the mystics are far ahead of the philosophers.
What is the relative without the absolute? How can the part exist separately from the whole? Who am I in the absence of my ultimate beginning and end? Neither the true nor the good are within me when I divorce my being from Being. It has all been given, and now it remains for me to decide if I am willing to make the most of such graces.
When Seneca says that a man cannot be good without God, the secular humanist will have none of it, and a “modern” Stoic will brush such a claim aside, dismissing it as unscientific and outdated. I can only suggest that it is the height of arrogance to make man the measure, and that the principle of causality is about as logical as one can possibly get.
I will, however, grant that a reverence for God is primitive, though I use the term in a somewhat different sense. Rather than being crude, obsolete, or naïve, piety is instead something simple, elementary, and primeval. It is ancient by being perennial, and those who seek wisdom should never have to apologize for their obedience to the supreme authority.
—Reflection written in 9/2013
IMAGE: William Blake, Elohim Creating Adam (1795)
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