A Soul Man

"Old English sawol "spiritual and emotional part of a person, animate existence," from Proto-Germanic *saiwalo (cf. Old Saxon seola, Old Norse sala, Old Frisian sele, Middle Dutch siele, Dutch ziel, Old High German seula, German Seele, Gothic saiwala), of uncertain origin. Sometimes said to mean originally "coming from or belonging to the sea," because that was supposed to be the stopping place of the soul before birth or after death. Hence, from Proto-Germanic *saiwaz (see sea). Meaning "spirit of a deceased person" is attested in Old English from 971. As a synonym for "person, individual" (e.g. every living soul) it dates from early 14c. Soul-searching (n.) is attested from 1948, from the phrase used as a past participle adjective (1610s)."

-- from http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=soul 

Don Quixote in Giza!

A fateful meeting of cultures!

two Gods in Job

"The book of Job moves back and forth between these two poles: between the idea of a God who cares about the doings of particular men like Job, and the idea of a God who is almost too big, too mysterious, too wholly other, for anything like that to make sense. In the experience of the Whirlwind, Job is confronted with sheer transcendence; he is reminded of the chasm that lies between Creator and creature, and forced to take into account the infinite difference between God's point of view and ours. ...
But the book also says that God takes an interest in Job. Enough of an interest to subject his loyalty to an horrendous test, says the Prologue. Enough to restore his fortunes, says the Epilogue. Enough to speak with him, says the poet who put the Theophany into words."

-- "God's Answer to Job", Wesley Morriston, Religious Studies 32 (1996), p. 356.

Job studies

"By the close of the nineteenth century, more than two hundred major works on Job had appeared in Western Europe and the United States in the preceding one hundred years, more than eighty percent of those in the last third of the century."

-- The Image of the Biblical Job: A History, Volume Three: Job in the Modern World, Stephen Vicchio, 2006, p. 153.

Melville at death

"Melville died in obscurity in 1981. He died with the belief that his literary masterpiece, Moby Dick, was a profound failure."

-- The Image of the Biblical Job: A History, Volume Three: Job in the Modern World, Stephen Vicchio, 2006, p. 138.

Wordsworth and the outer world

"Towards the end of his [Wordsworth's] life, he told Bonamy Price, the Oxford economist, that there had been a time when he had to push against something that resisted to be sure there was anything outside himself. When making these avowals to Price, he suited the action to the word by clenching the  top of a five-barred gate that they happened to be passing, and pushing against it with all his strength."

-- Wordsworth: A Reinterpretation, F. W. Bateson, 1956, p. 60, cited in The Emergence of Romanticism, Nicholas Riasonovsky, 1992, p. 75.

Augustine's defense of God's ability to choose

"It is not for us, Augustine suggests, to use reason to salvage God's honor. Free will is not worth defending if such defense compromises God's ability to choose whom, how, or when he will, and relegates grace to the peripheries of salvational history. God's apparent injustice must be subsumed by human capitulation to the mysterious workings of the divine. So our complexity in the absence of any theodicy becomes a sign both of our abject humility and of God's radically other sovereignty."

-- When Souls Had Wings, Pre-Mortal Existence in Western Thought, Terryl L. Givens, p. 119.

creation ex materia or ex nihilo

"Like preexistence itself, creation ex materia or ex nihilo was in those days of doctrinal formation a disputed point. The biblical texts are ambiguous enough on the subject to allow for controversy, which still continues."

-- When Souls Had Wings, Pre-Mortal Existence in Western Thought, Terryl L. Givens, p. 104.

"...now without a broadly accepted world-view..."

"Yet the Sixties were also the first postmodernist era. ...In those years the great modernist institutions, from university to established church and state, were challenged as never since the Enlightenment onset of modernism, and precisely on the grounds that their claims to be the last word of progress and the holders of the master keys were spurious. ...The emergent postmodern was now without a broadly accepted world-view that connected technology, politics and religion. Instead the world witnessed the flourishing of disparate ecological, feminist, and liberationist spiritualities, of mystical, shamanist, and occultist paths, of resurgent fundamentalisms and religious nationalisms. At the time the lack of a center seemed to be no great lack."

-- The Sixties Spiritual Awakening, American Religion Moving from Modern to Postmodern, Robert S. Ellwood, 1994, p. 331.

...like an immigrant and sojourner in this mortal body...

"Does not every wise soul live like an immigrant and sojourner in this mortal body, after having for habitat and country the most pure substance of heaven, from which it migrates to this habitat by a compelling law? Perhaps this was in order that it might carefully inspect terrestrial things, that even these might not be without a share in wisdom to participate in the better life..."

-- Philo, Questions and Answers on Genesis (23:4), cited in When Souls Had Wings, Pre-Mortal Existence in Western Thought, Terryl L. Givens, p. 45.

Before all this

"The belief [pre-existence] has salved the wounded sensibility of a host of religious thinkers and people of good conscience, who could not otherwise account for the unevenly distributed pain and suffering that are humanity's lot, and has been triumphantly invoked to rescue God's justice and honor."

-- When Souls Had Wings, Pre-Mortal Existence in Western Thought, Terryl L. Givens, p. 5.

a "Church" of conscience?

"'But this is just as true today,' the elder [Zosima] suddenly spoke out, and they all immediately turned to him. 'If Christ's Church did not exist today, there would be nothing to restrain man from committing crimes, for there would be no real punishment...I'm not talking of 'mechanical' punishment, such as was described a moment ago, which in most cases only hardens a criminal, but of real punishment, the only effective one, that people fear and that can bring peace -- the awareness of one's own conscience.'"

-- Book II, Chapter 5, The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Andrew H. MacAndrew).

Non-Ficthean

"When Fichte spoke of the Ego as the formative principle, the Romantic poets took this to mean that the world is a subjective creation, that is, the product of the individual subjectivity. But Fichte did not intend such a point: his concept of 'Ego' does not pertain to the individual, empirical subject but rather to the subject-principle in general, of which the individual subject is but a limited mode. (If there is any sense in which one could think of 'individuality' here, it would be the individuality of God.)"

-- German Romantics in Context, Roger Cardinal, 1975, p. 59.

"The ultimate object of yearning..."

"The ultimate object of yearning is not necessarily at a distance in time and space: distance may be an illusion of the person who yearns. The Romantic suggestion is that longing is not quenched through external effort but through internal maturation. The Romantic initiate learns that, as Tieck once remarked,'Utopia often lies right at our feet'."

-- German Romantics in Context, Roger Cardinal, 1975, p. 33.

filioque in the 19th century

"76. The issue of unity and separation -- so emotionally, as well as intellectually, central to romanticism -- is marvelously presented in Khomiakov's fictitious account of an Orthodox traveler in Western lands who, when he hears the addition of filioque to the creed in the liturgy, discovers that the West has split from Christendom. (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Moscow, 1990-1914], vol. 2, pp. 48-49.) It is interesting that both Coleridge and Friedrich Schlegel considered filioque an important issue and championed the Western position against the Orthodox."

-- The Emergence of Romanticism, Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, 1992, p. 95, note 76.

parts of Romantic wholes

"Following the collapse of early romanticism, such elements of its vision as nature, love, beauty, music, art, and artistic creativity developed more independently, separately, or in combination with other elements, inspiring their own theories and cults..."

-- The Emergence of Romanticism, Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, 1992, p. 81. 

Kant's metanoia

"In other words, even if every single example of Swedenborg's "things heard and seen" is doubtful, it is still possible that his spiritual world exists. However, Kant's earlier discussions have shown once and for all that, although one may think all sorts of things about  spiritual beings, once cannot know anything about them. And this leads him to a passage of crucial importance in the history of philosophy. For it is here that we see him, as it were, close the book on positive metaphysics that had preoccupied him in his writings so far and open a new one that will eventually lead to his mature Kritiken." 

-- Swedenborg, Oetinger, Kant: Three Perspectives on the Secrets of Heaven, Wouter J. Hanegraaff, 2007, p. 96.

"The terra incognita left room at least..." 1908

"The world has taken an immense stride in the direction of prose during your and my lifetime, and a purely utilitarian world is much less entertaining at least than one in which there was more demand on courage and more possibility of adventure. The terra incognita of our maps seventy years ago stimulated the imagination far more than the excellent maps of our United States surveyors and our geographical magazines. The terra incognita left room at least in which imagination might roam at will, keeping us in touch with Sir John Mandeville."

-- Letter of 28 July, 1908 of Charles Eliot Norton to H. H. Furness, in Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, vol. II, 1913, p. 414.

~340 miles on foot for books, 1838

"During his first year at Halle [1838], he [Winckelmann, age 21] was to give a further demonstration of initiative by walking all the way to Hamburg [~170 miles], where a former professor's library, that of the father-in-law of Lessing's friend Samuel Reimarus, was being auctioned off, and returning on foot with his purchases on his back."

-- Winckelmann, Wolfgang Leppmann, 1970, p. 32.

Tragicless Suffering?

"...Gregory [the Great] does not so much answer the problem of innocent suffering, as suggest that given the Christian apparatus with which he views the problem, the problem in essence disappears. Questions about innocent suffering become irrelevant because there are no innocent sufferers.
"Along the way, Gregory finds ample evidence in the book of Job for original sin, fallen angels, demonic possession, and the surety of both resurrection and immortality -- all notions that render questions about innocent suffering obsolete, for in the final analysis Gregory uses survival after death to answer the problem of evil, along with the Divine Plan answer.
"Like other Christian commentators before him, Gregory removes what might be called the 'tragic element' of the text. An insoluble problem is replaced by exhortations to be patient because survival after death and a final reckoning will prove there is no tragedy, at least not for those who are saved. In the end Gregory resorts to a teleological resolution to the problem of evil, a resolution to take place beyond the grave."

-- The Image of the Biblical Job: A History, Volume Two: Job in the Medieval World, Stephen Vicchio, 2006, p. 36.

Original Sin or Yeser Ha-ra?

"That there is no real doctrine of original sin in the Hebrew Bible is a foregone conclusion in contemporary scholarship. The major point of view in the Old Testament regarding the origins of evil is the notion that God gives each human being two imaginations[,] a good and an evil one. Evil is committed in the Old Testament view when one uses his will in the service of the yeser ha-ra, the evil imagination."

-- The Image of the Biblical Job: A History, Volume Two: Job in the Medieval World, Stephen Vicchio, 2006, p. 16.

Which Job 14:14?

"We may recall that in the Hebrew version of Job 14:14, the writers ask a rhetorical question, 'If a man die, shall he live again?' The answer the ancient Hebrew writers supply is a resounding 'no'. The Septuagint translation, however, change 14:14 from an interrogatory to a declaratory, and thus dramatically change the meaning of the received text to, "If a man die, he shall live again.'
"The Septuagint translators took a similar approach to 42:17, where they added the claim that Job would experience resurrection of the body at the end of time, though there is nothing in the Hebrew that gave the writers warrant for this addition."

-- The Image of the Biblical Job: A History, Volume Two: Job in the Medieval World, Stephen Vicchio, 2006, p. 13-14.

Goethe on God, March 11, 1832

"To the end of his life Goethe believed that God 'is continually active in higher natures, to lead on those with lesser powers'. These are the last words of Goethe quoted by Eckermann in the third part of the Conversations. He could not conceive God as a Being apart from the world, responsible only for its first creation and for pushing it round, as it were, from outside. He had not been idle since the six days of creation but had revealed Himself repeatedly, not only in prophets and teachers, but in artists and scholars too, as well as in His own works in nature, as Goethe was never tired of saying. This is a mythical way of expressing a kind of humanism which, while rejecting the idea of special revelation and making use poetically of many different mythologies at different times, was yet not guilty of spiritual pride. Goethe could not think of the work of even a Mozart, a Raphael or a Shakespeare, to quote the last Eckermann conversation again, as 'completely of this world, and nothing more than a product of purely human forces'. Creation was going on continually, both in nature and man, and there was a mystery about it which, though it could be dispelled in part by study, always retained something which we must be content to regard 'with quiet reverence'.

-- Culture and Society inn Classical Weimar, W. H. Bruford, 1962p. 179. (Quotes from Conversations with Goethe, March 11, 1832.)

"...they suppose the system of Providence...", Boston, 1808

"While they demand a seven-years apprenticeship, for the purpose of learning to make a shoe, or an axe; they suppose the system of Providence, together with the numerous, and frequently abstruse,  doctrines and precepts, contained in the Scriptures, may be all comprehended without learning labour, or time. While they insist, equally with others, that their property shall be managed by skilful agents, their judicial causes directed by learned advocates, and their children, when sick, attended by able physicians; there were satisfied to place their Religion, their souls, and their salvation, under the guidance of quackery."

-- Timothy Dwight, A Sermon Preached at the Opening of the Theological Institution in Andover, Boston, 1808; cited in The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan O. Hatch, 1989, p. 19.

Job and the Resurrection

"That the book of Job was completed before the concept of the resurrection of the body became a part of the metaphysical view of the ancient Jews is undeniable. ...the major view about death in the book of Job is quite naturalistic. This fact, perhaps more than any other, goes a long way to explaining why the book of Job ends with the rather unsatisfactory solution in which Job receives everything back double, including a new set of children. By the completion of Job in its present form in the sixth century BCE, the notion of a covenant beyond the grave was not yet a part of the intellectual landscape of the ancient Jew. In Job, if the rewarding of the righteous was to happen, it would have to be in this life.

-- The Image of the Biblical Job: A History, Volume One: Job in the Ancient World, Stephen J. Vicchio, 2006, p. 44-45.

A burial in Königsberg, February 1804, and Job 14:14

"It was still brutally cold on the day of the funeral [February 28, 1804]; but, as winter days in Königsberg often could be, it was also beautifully bright and clear. Scheffner [his oldest surviving friend] wrote about a month later to a friend:

'You will not believe the kind of tremor that shook my entire existence when the first clumps of earth were thrown on the coffin -- my head and heart still tremble...'

It was not just the cold that made Scheffner shiver. Nor was it simply the fear of his own death....The tremor that would reverberate in his head for days and weeks had deeper causes. Kant, the man, was gone forever. The world was cold, and there was no hope -- not for Kant, and perhaps not for any of us. Scheffner was only too much aware of Kant's belief that there was nothing to be expected after death. Though in his philosophy he had held out hope for eternal life and a future state, in his personal life he had been cold to such ideas. Scheffner had often heard Kant scoff at prayer and other religious practices. Organized religion filled him with ire. It was clear to anyone who knew Kant personally that he had no faith in a personal God. Having postulated God and immortality, he himself did not believe in either. His considered opinion was that such beliefs were just a matter of 'individual needs'. Kant himself felt no such need."

-- Kant: A Biography, Manfred Kuehn, 2001, p. 3.

the fall of the Fall, ca. 1871

"Darwin's interpretation of nature was infinitely more damaging to a Christian vision of the world than the revolutions of either Copernicus or Newton. If the theories of these earlier scientists forced certain readjustments in the Christian conception of humanity's place in nature, they did not essentially threaten the Christian drama of Creation  Fall, and Redemption. Darwinism challenged the entire biblical account of the human race's unique creation, fall and need for redemption. The doctrine that humanity was the product of a long evolutionary process from lower to higher species appeared incompatible with the traditional interpretation of the Fall. In Darwin's opinion humankind had risen from a species of dumb animal, not fallen from a state of angelic perfection."

-- Modern Christian Thought: The Enlightenment and the Nineteenth Century, Volume 1, 2nd ed., 1997, James Livingston, p. 255.

Puppet and Marionette

Puppet: 1520s from Old French poupette, diminutive of poupée "doll" (13c.), from Vulgar Latin *puppa, from Latin pupa "girl, doll".

Metaphoric extension to "person whose actions are manipulated by another" first recorded 1540s.

-- Online Etymological Dictionary

The Greek word translated as "puppet" is "νευρόσπαστος" (nevrospastos), which literally means "drawn by strings, string-pulling", from "νεῦρον" (nevron), meaning either "sinew, tendon, muscle, string", or "wire", and "σπάω" (spaō), meaning "draw, pull".

In French. marionette = "little Mary". One of the first figures to be made into a marionette was the Virgin Mary, hence the name.

-- Wikipedia

David Friedrich Strauss' Bad News, 1835

"Until the appearance of Strauss's Leben Jesu, it was widely assumed that the Gospel traditions were historical sources for the life of Jesus in the very same sense that Roman histories of Livy could be used as sources for the life of emperors; also, that the historical Jesus could easily be distinguished from the sources themselves, as the kernel can be extracted from its husk; even more, that Jesus as an historical personality, including his development and his self-consciousness, were accessible to historical research."

-- Modern Christian Thought: The Enlightenment and the Nineteenth Century, Volume 1, 2nd ed., 1997, James Livingston, p. 219.

the unrising sun of 1793

"About forty years [~1870] ago a good woman, who kept the boarding house where I took my meals, related to me an anecdote about her father, a simple workingman of Nantes, which greatly impressed me. This man was very young when the [French] Revolution broke out. He accepted it with enthusiasm; took part in the struggle of the Jacobins against the Vendéeans; witnessed with regret the imperial regime destroy the democratic liberties so dearly bought; and at each revolution, in 1814, in 1830, in 1848, believed that the ideal republic, dreamed of in 1793, was about to be reborn. He died during the second Empire more than ninety years old  and at the moment of death, raising to heaven a look of ecstasy, was heard to murmur: 'Oh sun of '93, I shall die at last without having seen thy rays again.' This man, like the first Christians, lived in the hope of the millennium."

-- French Historian M. Gabriel Monod, Preface to Contributions à l'histoire religieuse de la révolution française, Albert Mathiez, 1907, cited in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, Carl L. Becker, 1932,  p. 158-159.

...our will be done, on earth as it was in...

"...the utopian dream of perfection, that necessary compensation for the limitations and frustrations of the present state, having long been identified with the Golden Age or the Garden of Eden or life eternal in the Heavenly City of God, and then by the sophisticated transferred to remote or imagined lands (the moon or Atlantis or Nowhere, Tahiti or Pennsylvania or Peking), was at last projected into the life of man on earth and identified with the desired and hoped-for regeneration of society."

-- The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, Carl L. Becker, 1932, p. 139.