THE raison d'être to Böhme and Hegel

"The result of Hegel's project was to have been, he hoped, a return to a more 'natural' consciousness, like that possessed by the Greeks, but in a form that is fully modern and self-aware (to say nothing of being Protestant and Lutheran). Just as in Böhme, man's fall is necessary because his original unity with God and with his own true nature is an unthinking unity. We must be brought back to unity, but this time the unity must be achieved in full self-consciousness."

-- Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, Glenn Alexander Magee, 2001, p. 87.

"...content to live without other faith...", 1904

"What you say of the connection between physical health and mental serenity and distress in giving up the hereditary faith, and finding one's-self [sic] incapable of forming any rational theory of the universe and of one's own relation to it, is undoubtedly true. But the mass of men, even of those called civilized and intelligent, really take little heed of these things, living by the day, and content to live without other faith than that the course of things, so far as they are concerned, will not undergo any startling change in their time. Natural motives are taking the place of supernatural, -- with considerable damage to the morality of common men, and with a need for a fundamental revision of ethical theories, and legal systems."

-- Letter of 29 July, 1904 of Charles Eliot Norton to William Roscoe Thayer, in Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, vol. II, 1913, p. 346-347.

Hamann, Hamlet and Herder, heading to Purgatory

"But Hamann taught Herder English, using as a textbook Shakespeare's Hamlet (!), which Herder learned so thoroughly that Caroline Herder reports he could quote most of it by heart. When, in 1764 Hamann left Königsberg on a trip to southern Germany  he wrote back to his father to greet Herder and to tell him that as soon as he had finished with Milton's Hell the two of them would venture into Dante's Purgatory."

-- Herder: His Life and Thought, Robert T. Clark, 1969, p. 46.

Schleiermacher, Fichte, absolute dependence

"Schleiermacher's impatience with the transcendental egotism of Fichte is evident in the early Speeches. Fichte shows how far he is from true piety in his Promethean confidence that man's world of meaning and value is his own creation. The pious man knows that he is not the ground of his own being -- that all reality comes to him as a gift, flowing from the great unseen reality in which all things cohere. In other words, religion at bottom is grace."
(p. 56.)

"Whatever its source, [Schleiermacher's] sense that everything of value in one's consciousness of God -- everything that can rightly be called religion -- comes as 'gift' is very deep. Indeed, Schleiermacher's well-known definition of religion as the feeling of absolute dependence is perhaps best understood as the awareness of the utter 'givenness' of faith."

-- Friedrich Schleiermacher, C. W. Christian, 1979, p. 35.

sic transit gloria Schleiermacher?

"Although much of the specific content of his [Schleiermacher] thought is now dated, its originality and daring is still evident and, behind the romantic rhetoric, his accomplishment remains remarkably fresh and relevant to the theological tasks of the present."

-- Friedrich Schleiermacher, C. W. Christian, 1979, p. 13.

still under the Ptolemaic dispensation, 1902

"The greatest spiritual change in ourselves which the past forty years have wrought is, I take it, the change in our conceptions of the relation of man to the universe, and of the possibility of knowledge of anything whatsoever that lies outside the narrow limits set for us by our senses and by the constitution of our mental powers. For us at least, faith in human fancies about invisible things long since died away, and, for my own part, I have no sentimental regret at its vanishing. Without it, I find myself more in harmony with the exceedingly minute section of the universe to which I belong; not, indeed, in closer intellectual agreement with most of the good men and women my contemporaries, of whom all but an insignificant fraction are still living under the Ptolemaic dispensation, undisturbed in their practical conviction that this earth is the centre of the universe, and man the chief object of creation. Even when their religion has gone as a controlling force, their superstition remains affecting their imaginations." 

-- Letter of C. E. Norton to Goldwin Smith, 19 July 1902, in Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, Vol. II, 1913, p. 326.

Rousseau's significance and fides implicita, Cassirer, 1932

"The significance of Rousseau's philosophy of religion for cultural history can be describe in a single phrase: he eliminated from the foundation of religion the doctrine of fides implicita*. No one can believe for another and with the help of another; in religion everyone must stand on his own. ... Neither Calvinism not Lutheranism had ever radically overcome the doctrine of the fides implicita; they had only shifted its center by replacing faith in tradition with faith in the Word of the Bible. But for Rousseau there existed no kind of inspiration outside the sphere of personal experience."

-- The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ernst Cassirer, 1954 [1932], p. 117-8, cited in Modern Christian Thought, Vol. 1: The Enlightenment and the Nineteenth Century, James Livingston, 2nd ed., 1997, p. 45.

*Fides implicita refers to the assent to the truths taught by the Church even though one has no knowledge of what these teachings are about or the evidence of their truth.

Back to the Garden, allegorically or agriculturally?

"The recognition that the paradise of knowledge enjoyed by our parents was an historical reality, combined with the acceptance of the command to 'have dominion' in its full literal sense, provided a vital impetus to the seventeenth-century quest to know and master the world. Only when the story of creation was divested of its symbolic elements could God's commands to Adam be related to worldly activities. If the Garden of Eden were but a lofty allegory, as Philo, Origen, and later Hugh of St. Victor, had suggested, there would be little point in attempting to re-establish a paradise on earth. If God's command to Adam to tend the garden had primarily symbolic significance, as Augustine had believed, then the idea that man was to re-establish paradise through gardening and agriculture would simply not have presented itself so strongly to the seventeenth-century mind."

-- The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science, Peter Harrison, 1998, p. 207.

Nietzsche, Sils-Maria, d. 8. Juli 1886.

"A profound man needs friends, unless indeed he has a God. And I have neither God nor friend!"

Letter Nietzsche to his sister, Sils-Maria, 8 July, 1886; cited in Modern Christian Thought, Vol. 1: The Enlightenment and the Nineteenth Century, James Livingston, 2nd ed., 1997, p. 399.

Shaftesbury and gnothi seauton, 1708

"We can never be fit to contemplate anything above us, when we are in no condition to look into ourselves, and calmly examine the temper of our mind and passions."

-- "A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm", Shaftesbury, 1708, cited in Shaftesbury's Philosophy of Religion and Ethics: A Study of Enthusiasm, Stanley Grean, 1967, p. 30.

Atheists: Pneumataphobes and Hylomaniacs, 1678

"All atheists being that blind Goddess Nature's fanatic . . . are possessed with a certain kind of madness, that may be called Pneumataphobia, that makes them have an irrational but desperate Abhorrence from Spirits or Incorporeal Substances, they being acted also, at the same time, with a Hylomania, whereby they madly dote upon Matter, and devoutly worship it, as the only Numen."

-- The True Intellectual System of the Universe, Ralph Cudworth, London, 1678, [Bk. I, Ch. iii, Sect. xix, pp. 134 f.], cited in Shaftesbury's Philosophy of Religion and Ethics: A Study of Enthusiasm, Stanley Grean, 1967, p. 29.

Hippies

"The hippie precept of dropping out of the larger society to seek a purer life was not a new one, nor was it novel to create communes in the country for those who wanted to live among like-minded dropouts. Certainly some of the European settlers to America were malcontents who saw themselves as having to withdraw from society and head for the wilderness to find satisfaction. Communes were operating in America from the 17th century. The grand communes of the era were often founded in locations far from major cities and represented dissatisfaction with society's prevailing arrangements. The hippies saw themselves as creating new family structures in their communes, but that had been done fairly extensively in the first half of the 19th century."
Hippies

-- The Hippies and American Values, Timothy Miller, 2nd ed. 2011, p. 108.

"God and Mammon", Westminster Abbey, ~1881

"It is most sad, but most certain, that we are like those Pharisees of old in this...that we too have made up our mind that we can serve God and Mammon at once; that the very classes among us who are most utterly given up to money-making, are the very classes which, in all denominations, make the loudest religious profession; that our churches and chapels are crowded on Sundays by people who souls are set, the whole week through, upon gain and nothing but gain."

-- Charles Kingsley, Westminster Sermons, Sermon XXVI, "God and Mammon", ~1881, cited in The Victorian Frame of Mind, Walter E. Houghton, 1957, p. 405.

lost spiritual pilgrims?

"To be earnest morally is to recognize that human existence is not a short interval between birth and death in which one fingers as many guineas as possible and eats all the good dinners he can, but a spiritual pilgrimage from here to eternity in which he is called upon to struggle with all his power against the forces of evil, in his own soul and in society."

-- The Victorian Frame of Mind, Walter E. Houghton, 1957, p. 221.

Why read?, 1957

"The notion that books may so broaden and deepen one's knowledge of life, and so sharpens one's perceptions, that he can live more wisely and judge more intelligently, has dropped out of [Charles] Kingsley's mind -- and to a large extent, out of Victorian, in fact the modern, mind."

-- The Victorian Frame of Mind, Walter E. Houghton, 1957, p. 119.

Who needs Goethe? October 11, 1828, Weimar

“Some of the guests came in now, whom Goethe received. He then turned to me [Eckermann] again, and I continued. “Carlyle has indeed studied Wilhelm Meister and, being so thoroughly penetrated with its value, he would like to see it universally circulated — would like to see every cultivated mind receive similar profit and enjoyment.” Goethe drew me to a window to answer me. “My dear young friend,” he said, “I will confide to you something which may help you a great deal. My works cannot be popular. He who thinks and strives to make them so is in error. They are not written for the multitude, but only for individuals who desire something congenial, and whose aims are like my own.”

"He wished to say more; but a young lady who came up interrupted him, and drew him into conversation."

-- Conversations with Goethe, Johann Peter Eckermann, October 11, 1828

“Verschiedene Tischgäste traten herein, die Goethe begrüßte. Er wendete seine Aufmerksamkeit mir wieder zu, und ich fuhr fort.

„Freilich,“ sagte ich, „hat Carlyle den Meister studiert, und so durchdrungen von dem Wert des Buches, wie er ist, möchte er gerne, daß es sich allgemein verbreitete; er möchte gerne, daß jeder Gebildete davon gleichen Gewinn und Genuß hätte.“

Goethe zog mich an ein Fenster, um mir zu antworten.

„Liebes Kind,“ sagte er, „ich will Ihnen etwas vertrauen, das Sie sogleich über vieles hinaushelfen und das Ihnen lebenslänglich zugute kommen soll. Meine Sachen können nicht populär werden; wer daran denkt und dafür strebt, ist in einem Irrtum. Sie sind nicht für die Masse geschrieben, sondern nur für einzelne Menschen, die etwas Ähnliches wollen und suchen, und die in ähnlichen Richtungen begriffen sind.“

Er wollte weiterreden; eine junge Dame trat heran, ihn unterbrechend und ihn in ein Gespräch ziehend.”

Fichte and the materialists

"But there is no doubt that Fichte's philosophy was, in almost every respect, the very opposite of the rational empiricism of the mechanists and materialists. If they tended to believe in the primacy of matter, Fichte denied that it had any reality; if they attempted to found all knowledge on empirical evidence, Fichte strove to erect a system that was purely deductive; if they based science on the concept of strict causation, his key concept was Freedom; and it at least some of them managed to combine the mechanical philosophy with theist beliefs, Fichte evolved a form of ethical pantheism that rigidly excluded the possibility of a personal God."

-- Friedrich Schlegel, Hans Eichner, 1970, p. 77.

On Friedrich Schlegel, 1795

"In short, Hamlet succumbed to those very tensions to which Schlegel, according to his letters to his brother, was subject himself. And while he thus interpreted Hamlet, and indeed the whole of post-classical literature, in his own image, he projected into Greek literature all the ideals he longed for, all the harmony and peace of mind that was denied him. Greece seemed to him the panacea for his own ills, and he prescribed the same cure to the world at large."

-- Friedrich Schlegel, Hans Eichner, 1970, p. 26.

Pain = Evil, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 1895

"We have learned the doctrine that evil means pain, and the revolt against pain in all is forms has grown more and more marked. From societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals up to socialism, we express in numberless ways the notion that suffering is a wrong which can and ought to be prevented, and a whole literature of sympathy has sprung into being."

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., "The Soldier's Faith", 1895; cited in Without God, Without Creed, James Turner, 1985, p. 206. 

Super/naturally

"Yet, pace [with all due respect] their debt to mystics, agnostic nature worshippers were not, properly speaking, mystics at all. Although sensitive to the mystery in nature, although seekers of "spiritual" exaltation in its beauties, they did not look for a deeper reality there, for any supernatural truth cloaked in natural splendor. They sought their psychic gratifications wholly within the boundaries of nature; they revered beauty, not God's beauty."

-- Without God, Without Creed, James Turner, 1985, p. 255. 

Goodbye to God

"Roughly speaking, one aspect of God -- the Ruler of Nature Who satisfied the desire to understand our surroundings and ourselves -- was abstracted into naturalistic scientific explanations. The study of nature yielded no longer knowledge of God but simply knowledge of nature. Another side of God -- the Moral Governor Who satisfied the need for good order and the longing for a better life -- was identified with purely human activities and aspirations. Humanitarianism, science, progress, could operate without divine sanction. A third dimension of God -- the mysterious God of Heaven Who struck humans with awe and humility -- was much diminished, as believers shifted the main focus of their concern from God's transcendence of earthly things to His compatibility with humanity, its wants, its aspirations, it ways of understanding. What remained of awe before divine mystery was transformed into reverence for such surrogates as nature, art, and humanity itself. ...and thus naturalistic explanations and ideals slowly came to satisfy cultural and personal needs once me by belief in God".

-- Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America, James Turner, 1985, p. 265.

Augustine against metempsychosis

"In the City of God, however, Augustine ultimately rejects the doctrine of metempsychosis. One of the chapters is devoted to Plato's views on reincarnation and the "corrections" of his system as they were suggested by Porphyry, the author of the Life of Plotinus. In contrast to Plato and Plotinus, Porphyry did not believe in regressive reincarnation, but he accepted the idea of lateral reincarnation, maintaining that 'human souls return into human bodies; not the ones left behind, but into new bodies.' These concepts are not longer acceptable to Augustine. He refutes the idea of metempsychosis and instead ardently advocates the doctrines of the Christian Church, strongly emphasizing the role of God in the destiny of man and his soul and the significance of the resurrection: 'It is surely more respectable to believe what the true and holy angels have taught us, what the prophets inspired by the Spirit of God...have told us, namely, that souls return once and for all into their own bodies, not that they go on returning into one body after another.'"

Continued Existence, Reincarnation, and the Power of Sympathy in Classical Weimar, Lieselotte E. Kurth-Voigt, 1999. P. 33.

the Job of the "accelerating universe"

"Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? 
Can you establish their rule on the earth?" (Job 38:33)

"It almost feels like we're taking our first baby steps as a species, as a civilization, towards actually having a model of the universe that will hold up over the next 500,000 years," proclaimed Perlmutter shortly after discovering the acceleration. He may be right -- the present model certainly paints a coherent picture of the universe we see around us -- but if there is one lesson to be drawn from history, it is that time is a harsh judge. Many theories have had their day in the limelight, only to disappear into the wings when another one appeared. Over the centuries each new generation felt it had found, or was close to finding, the right answer, and it is worth remembering that Ussher was not alone in drawing the wrong conclusion about the age of the universe. Many of the greatest minds in science were equally blinkered, trapped by their own beliefs, or the prevailing assumptions of their day. Newton was every bit as religiously dogmatic as Ussher and fought to reconcile his science with the Bible; Darwin exaggerated the Earth's age to allow enough time for species to evolve; while Einstein was forced to concede that the universe was not static, but expanding -- his "greatest blunder." Given this track record, it seems all too likely that our present picture of the universe is flawed in some way."

-- Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time, Martin Gorst, 2001, p. 291.

October 23, 4004 B.C., 1701 A.D.

"Despite the accolades showered on his work by his contemporaries, Ussher's date for the creation of the world would have sunk into perpetual obscurity -- like the dates of the hundred or so chronologers before him -- if it hadn't been for a London bookseller named Thomas Guy. In about 1675, Guy, an enterprising businessman, contracted with the University of Oxford for the right to print Bibles under their license. As a marketing ploy he printed Ussher's chronology in the margin, thereby enabling readers to see at a glance when all the events in the Old and New Testaments had taken place. The new Bibles were an immediate success; possibly helped by the inclusion of dramatic illustrations of Bible stories, including -- in true tabloid style -- engravings of bare-breasted women. Sales boomed, earning Guy a small fortune, which he subsequently invested with great success in the infamous South Sea company. By the time he died he had make enough money to endow the famous hospital that still bears his name.
"But that was only the beginning. In 1701, Ussher's chronology received the blessing of the Church of England itself when William Lloyd, the Bishop of Worcester, authorized its use in an official version of the Bible. Once inside these holy pages, Ussher's dates practically acquired the authority of the Word of God. They quickly became the "Received Chronology," adopted by nearly all the Reformed Churches, and within a few generations had become such an integral and familiar part of the Bible that most people no longer remembered where they had come from. Consequently, they continued to be printed in the margins of Bibles right into the twentieth century."

-- Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time, Martin Gorst, 2001, p. 41-42.

Auschwitz, God and Man -- McGrath, 2004

"Nearly two hundred year's experience of the moral failings of this humanity-turned-divinity have been enough to convince most that it is a failed experiment. While some continue to argue that Auschwitz disproves the existence of God, many more would argue that it demonstrates the depths to which humanity, unrestrained by any thought or fear of God, will sink. There are many today who affirm a belief in humanity in preference to a belief in God. Yet this humanity has been responsible for a series of moral, social and political catastrophes, some inspired by a belief in God, others by a belief that God must be eliminated, by all means and at all costs. The common denominator here is humanity, not divinity.
"For some, the existence of God is called into question by suffering; for others, however, the presence of a God who suffers alongside humanity is a lifeline, without which they would sink into despair."

-- The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World, Alister McGrath, 2004, p. 184.

"verdammten Fragen", Heine, Paris, 1853

Zum Lazarus 1

Laß die heilgen Parabolen,

Laß die frommen Hypothesen -

Suche die verdammten Fragen

Ohne Umschweif uns zu lösen.

Warum schleppt sich blutend, elend,

Unter Kreuzlast der Gerechte,

Während glücklich als ein Sieger

Trabt auf hohem Roß der Schlechte?

Woran liegt die Schuld? Ist etwa

Unser Herr nicht ganz allmächtig?

Oder treibt er selbst den Unfug?

Ach, das wäre niederträchtig.

Also fragen wir beständig,

Bis man uns mit einer Handvoll

Erde endlich stopft die Mäuler -

Aber ist das eine Antwort?

"...a nursery for a world of spirits..." Goethe, 1832

“To hear people speak,” said Goethe, “one would almost believe that they were of opinion that God had withdrawn into silence since those old times, and that man was now placed quite upon his own feet, and had to see how he could get on without God, and his daily invisible breath. In religious and moral matters, a divine influence is indeed still allowed, but in matters of science and art it is believed that they are merely earthly, and nothing but the product of human powers.

“Let any one only try, with human will and human power, to produce something which may be compared with the creations that bear the names of Mozart, Raphael, or Shakespeare  I know very well that these three noble beings are not the only ones, and that in every province of art innumerable excellent geniuses have operated, who have produced things as perfectly good as those just mentioned. But if they were as great as those, they rose above ordinary human nature, and in the same proportion were as divinely endowed as they.

“And after all what does it all come to? God did not retire to rest after the will-known six days of creation, but, on the contrary, is constantly active as on the first. It would have been for Him a poor occupation to compose this heavy world out of simple elements, and to keep it rolling in the sunbeams from year to year, if He had not had the plan of founding a nursery for a world of spirits upon this material basis. So He is now constantly active in higher natures to attract the lower ones.”

Goethe was silent. But I cherished his great and good words in my heart.

Sunday, March 11, 1832, Conversations with Goethe, Eckermann.

Dostoevsky on suicides, 1876

"Of course, I am not venturing to explain all these suicides -- this I cannot do -- but I am firmly convinced that the majority of suicides in toto, directly or indirectly, were committed as a result of one and the same spiritual illness -- the absence in the souls of these men and women of the sublime idea of existence."

-- Diary of a Writer, Dostoevsky, 1876, cited in God's Funeral, A. N. Wilson, 1999, p. 11.

God was dead

"These world-changing men and women [Simone Weil, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Nicholas Berdyayev, Teilhard de Chardin, John Paul II, Martin Luther King Jr., Trevor Huddleson] decided to ignore the death of God in the nineteenth century."

-- God's Funeral, A. N. Wilson, 1999, p. 354.

No "R" in Eden, 1669

"...the English architect (and pupil of Indigo Jones) John Webb declared [in 1669, in An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability that the Language of the Empire of China is the Primitive Language] that Chinese was the original language of mankind that had been spoken by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The Chinese characters, he noted, looked similar to those of the Hebrew alphabet: the Chinese wrote their words from the top down, as was common in ancient hieroglyphs  and finally, the Chinese couldn't pronounce the letter "R". Pronunciation of this particular letter, Webb explained, had to be drummed into European children, therefore the natural primitive  state was not to be able to pronounce it."

-- Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time, Martin Gorst, 2001, p. 52.

Jesus, Superhuman or Human, to Nock, 1933

"We are sometimes told that the unique attractiveness of the central figure of Christianity as presented in the Synoptic Gospels was a primary factor in the success of Christianity. I believe this idea to be a product of nineteenth century idealism and humanitarianism. In early Christian literature those aspects of the Gospel picture which are not most prominent in homiletic writing are not stressed, and all the emphasis is on the superhuman qualities of Jesus, as foreshadowed by prophecy and shown by miracle and resurrection and teaching, and not on his winning humanity."

-- Conversion, Arthur Darby Nock, 1933, p. 210 [cited in Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety. E. R. Dodds, 1965, p. 119, n. 2].

Aurelius on the life of man, to Dodds, 1963

"As the earth is a pinpoint in infinite space, so the life of man is a pinpoint in infinite time, a knife-edge between two eternities -- στιγμἠ του αἰῶνοϛ. His activities are 'smoke and nothingness'; his prizes are 'a bird flying past, vanished before we grasp it'. The clash of armies is 'the quarrel of puppies over a bone'; the pomp of Marcus's own Sarmatian triumph is the self-satisfaction of a spider which has caught a fly. For Marcus this is not empty rhetoric: it is a view of the human condition, and it is meant in deadly earnest."

-- Pagan and Christian in the Age of Anxiety, E. R. Dodds, (Wiles Lectures, Belfast 1963), 1965, p. 8.

Windelband on Descartes' cogito, 1893

"The ordinary translation of cogitare, to think (denken), is liable to occasion misunderstanding since denken in German (and the same is true of think, in English, at least in philosophical terminology) signifies a particular kind of theoretical consciousness. Descartes himself elucidates the meaning of cogitate by enumeration: he understands by it to doubt, affirm, deny, understand, will, abhor, imagine, feel a sensation, etc. For that which is common to all these notions we have in German scarcely any word by Bewusstsein (consciousness)."

-- History of Philosophy (Geschichte der Philosophie), 1893 Windelband.

Emerson vs Faust, 1873

"The day that Emerson dined with us with [George Henry] Lewes there was some talk after dinner about Goethe, -- and in the course of it Emerson said energetically, "I hate 'Faust.' It is a bad book." Lewes was amazed. The agreement of opinion concerning it of Carlyle and Emerson is interesting. Emerson does not like the "Dichtung and Wahrheit"; values the "Italian Journey," -- and is accustomed to carry with him the "Sprüche" when he travels. He had them this year on the Nile."

-- Journal, C. E. Norton, London, April 20-May 10 1873, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, vol. I, p. 488.

Origen contra Plotinus

"Origen's view of the rational beings and his adherence to the Christian/Biblical conception of God as a spiritual personality caused Origen to present a different view of the creation of the material world than that found in Plotinus. He believed that the cosmos is an act of God's will and goodness, created for the purpose of educating the souls, and not a cosmological necessity of the unfolding of His essence as Plotinus believed. Origen's cosmological view is an adaptation of the popular Platonic view, re-interpreted to fit a Christian scheme of the creation and fall."

-- The Doctrine of the Soul in the Thought of Plotinus and Origen, Antonia Tripolitis, 1978, p. 143.

The Age of Pilgrimage: The Medieval Journey to God

"The peculiar intensity of medieval piety had as many causes as it had symptoms. But pre-eminent among them was a view of the natural world as a chaos in which the perpetual intervention of God was the only guiding law. God appeared to control the entire natural world from moment to moment. He was the direct and immediate cause of everything that happened, from the most trivial to the most vital incidents of human life...
"...the  most normal incidents of everyday life were interpreted as signs of divine favour or disfavour, provoking displays of general jubilation or incalculable terror. Simple men were terrified of the dark, sometimes to the point of insanity. Thunderstorms brought panic to whole communities and drove them to take refuge round the altars of saints. A flash of lightning created havoc in a small village, the people all fearing the punishment of God was about to descend on them wherever they might try to escape. Terrible cries were heard during an eclipse of the moon. Since all phenomena sprang not from natural causes but from the direct action of God, it followed that the will of God could be discerned in them if only people new how."

-- The Age of Pilgrimage: The Medieval Journey to God, Jonathan Sumption, 1975, p. 10.

From Holy to Enlightenment Bible

"Whereas, for long centuries, the Bible had been a self-legitimating text -- it was authoritative because, in affirming itself as God's Word, it affirmed its own authority -- now biblical authority was reassigned to the world of human beings. No longer tied to God's Word, the Enlightenment Bible became authoritative by virtue of its connection and relevance to human morality, aesthetics, and history. Instead of theology, culture would be the new rock atop which the legitimacy of the Bible was built.
"In this moment, the Bible was made into a piece of "heritage". In turn, this transformation of the Bible became a key element of  19th century Bildungskultur, the culture of education that helped shape nations and institutions for two hundred years. The shift from a biblical to a neohumanist paradigm was profound, however, and required a total realignment of values away from Hebraic norms and toward classical or nationally normative ones."

--The Enlightenment Bible, Jonathan Sheehan, 2005, p. xiv.

Turgenev on Dostoevsky speech at Pushkin Festival 1880

"On June 11 [1980] he [Turgenev] wrote to M. M. Stasyulevich, editor of the European Messenger, requesting that he include in an article about the Pushkin celebration a denial that "he had been completely subjugated" by Dostoevsky's speech and accepted it completely. "No, that's not so," Turgenev insisted. "It was a very clever, brilliant, and cunningly skillful speech, while full of passion, its foundation was entirely false. But it was a falseness that was extremely appealing to Russian self-love."

-- Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, Joseph Frank, 2010, p. 834.

Thoreauvian demographics, 1854

“The millions are awake enough for physical labor, but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic and divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?”

Thoreau in "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For" Chapter 2, Walden.

Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1804, on fulfillment

"He who can say to himself when he dies: 'I have grasped and made into a part of my humanity as much of the world as I could', that man has reached fulfillment...In the higher sense of the word, he has really lived."

-- Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1804.

(Cited in The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: 'Bildung from Humboldt to Thomas Mann, W. H. Bruford, p. 24; small extract from a letter from Rome, 9 October 1804, to Karoline, in Wilhelm und Karoline von Humboldt in ihren Breifen, vol. 2, p. 262)

Thomas Huxley's "innermost thoughts", 1879

"Huxley's theistic yearnings were rarely displayed to the public who read his essays and heard him speak. But to friends he was more willing to open up and speak from the depths of his soul. In 1879 [John] Fiske dropped by the Huxleys to say good-bye before he left England to return to America. Huxley took Fiske up to his study where they sipped a glass of toddy and puffed on cigars. 'Then Huxley and I got into a solemn talk about God and the soul,' Fiske remembered, 'and he unburdened himself to me of some of his innermost thoughts -- poor creatures both of us, striving to compass thoughts too great for the human mind.'"

-- The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge,

Bernard V. Lightman, 1987, p. 139.

Theatrum Mundi: Plotinus' stage, Plato's cave

"The world for Plotinus is a stage as life for Plato is lived in a cave. Both used these images not to denigrate man, but to emphasize that a greater and better sphere of reality is available to him."

-- Theatrum Mundi: The History of an Idea, Lynda Christian, [Harvard thesis 1969], 1987, p. 55.

Emerson, Carlyle, Norton, London, 1873

Letter of Charles Eliot Norton to J. R. Lowell
33 Cleveland Square W. [London], April 20, 1873:

"[Emerson] dined with us on Thursday, and seemed in excellent health and spirits. Years but make him sweeter and finer. Few men keep so steadily at their best as he. I fear he finds less satisfaction than he hoped for in seeing Carlyle. They have grown apart; content with the world is the humor of one, discontent with it that of the other. Both, however, are alike in the underlying tenderness and sweetness of their souls. Emerson finds Carlyle too cynical, Carlyle find Emerson too transcendental; daily intercourse is not delightful, but each recognizes in the other the highest gifts of nature...."

-- Letters of Charles Eliot Norton (1913), vol. I, p. 486-487.

Henri Baudet's Paradise on Earth

"The innumerable utopias and wondrous traveler's tales of the 16th and 17th centuries and later were remarkably consistent in their imagery. Belief in ideal societies where man's original state of bliss is still to all intents and purposes a social reality always involves a small number of recurrent themes which are central to the argument and include criticism of one's own situation. They are, of course, closely related to the ancient theme of a Golden Age, which so many travelers had longed to find in some part of the world. Their feeling that they had been transported back to the Golden Age, "in the beginning", through the utopian, exotic delights of first the Antilles, then the American continent, and finally the Pacific Islands (Bougainville) was due in part to the contrast between these new delights and their native countries, which colored and distorted all observation from the outset. Again and again the shortcomings of their own Western way of life shaped their outlook. The comparative principle formed the basis of accounts of Utopia and of traveler's tales."

Paradise on Earth: Some Thoughts on European Images of Non-European Man, Henri Baudet, p. 34.  [1959; English version, 1965]

Heinrich Heine, Paris, January 2, 1856

after eight year in his "mattress tomb" in Paris, Heinrich Heine, in worsening condition, after coughing for 24 hours straight, and with a terrible headache wrote a note to his new muse "Mouche":
"I am almost going out of my mind with anger, pain, and impatience. I am going to complain to the Animal Protection League about a God who tortures me so cruelly."

-- The Poet Dying: Heinrich Heine's Last Years in Paris, Ernst Pawel, p. 184.