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Bernard Wall
Source: Studies in Comparative Religion, Vol. 8, No. 4. (Autumn, 1974). World Wisdom, Inc. www.studiesincomparativereligion.com
or IN a book I published a few years ago.[1] I used the word numinous and one reviewer took me to task. He asked who used that word except Otto. This was a mistake because it is much used by the popular writer, the late Professor C. S. Lewis. Lewis says:[2] Now nothing is more certain than that man, from a very early period, began to believe that the universe was haunted by spirits. Professor Otto perhaps assumes too easily that from the very first such spirits were regarded with numinous awe. This is impossible to prove What is certain is that now, at any rate, the numinous experience exists and if we start from ourselves we can trace it a long way back Going back we get a very pure and strong example in Malory when Galahad began to tremble when the deadly (=mortal) flesh began to behold the spiritual things. At the beginning of our era it finds expression in the Apocalypse where the writer fell at the feet of the risen Christ as one dead. In Pagan literature we find Ovids picture of the dark grove on the Aventine of which you would say at a glance numen inestthe place is haunted, or there is a Presence here; and Virgil gives us the palace of Latinus awful (horrendum ) with woods and sanctity (religione) of elder days. A Greek fragment attributed, but improbably, to Aeschylus, tells us of earth, sea and mountain shaking beneath the dread eye of their Master. And far further back Ezekiel tell us of the rings in his Theophany that they were so high that they were dreadful, and Jacob, rising from his sleep, says, How dreadful is this place! Nowadays our experience is as often as not unshared and I might think of other examples, according to reading or taste. Bergson said[3] that all mankind known to us had a religion, though it could well be repulsive to our minds. When I use the word numinous I am thinking of that sense of something that transcends what is visible or palpable to us, which arouses awe and reverence andin the privileged fewpassionate love. This awareness we express in signs, symbols or rituals. We are aware of multifarious religions and cultures, through history and archeology; and, when it comes to remote tribes today, through exploration. From what we know it seems a fair guess that man has always sought for the transcend ent, beyond the flammantia moenia mundi, even in the remote mists of pre-history. In sacred cultures this was viewed as part of mans essential condition of living, like food and drink. But today we (that is, the human race) have perspectives quite unlike those of our ancestors. In our Western civilization secularism isnt new. As Christopher Dawson wrote in 1935: The sectarianizing of the Church [with the quarrels of the Reformation] led to the secularizing of the State and to the increasing subordination of human life to economic ends. By the eighteenth century the most active minds turned away in disgust from orthodox Christianity to the new philosophy of liberal humanitarianism As in the days of ancient Rome a leisure civilization has developed and Gods face is hidden.[4] In the thirty-five years since those words were written the avalanche has grown in size and speed and now affects every aspect of our lives. The social, economic and above all technological developments dominate the whole world whether in West or East. If we blame Soviet leaders for government by Inquisition, our Western countries too, we must remember, live in a chaos of capitalism and the mass media. Both systems are materialist and both are in the grip of the technological revolution. We Westerners have the advantage of being able to protest but it is becoming more and more difficult to remain detached from the acceleration of the faceless machine. Marx spoke of the End of History. More and more people are coming to think and behave as though there were no history before our time. A new orthodoxy has grown up, not based on sacred books and rites but just as rigid as the old and woe betide those who do not respect its terms. An ever-growing mass of men (and now young women) are bound to the treadmill of non-vocational i.e. servile work, and we can hardly be surprised if relaxation be sought in drugs or obsessive sexual experi m ents. Roman slaves were allowed similar outlets. As I see things, the decline of religiousness, of a feeling for the numinous, is bound to continue unless we can change our way of life in a far more revolutionary way than Marx ever suggested. Our lives have become longer and we have more material goods; but though our material horizons are much wider, this does not seem to apply to width of spirit. Religiousness, contemplation, the numin ous arent the only victims of this way of life. The arts are casualties too. As Herbert Read once wrote: A problem exists for the modern poet (in which term I include all those who use language as a symbolic process) which Mallarm was the first to formulate and attempt to overcomethe evident fact that the language of our Western civilization has become too corrupt for poetic use. Corruption is perhaps not quite the exact word to describe a state of exhaustion or eviscera tion, and the consequential resort, in any process of verbalization, to the clich. David Jones expressed the anxieties of some of us already in the thirties, when we were very young: We saw, with varying degrees of clarity, the trend of which I have stated above. I mean the technological, scientific advances which, one way or another, and whether beneficient or otherwise, were destructive of immemorial ways of life, of rooted cultures of all sorts and of erosions too numerous to mention, at all sorts of levels. We saw also that
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NOTES
[1] Headlong into Change. [2] In The Prob lem of Pain [3] Les Deux Sources. [4] Religion and the Modern State. [5] The London Magazine, April, 1965. [6] Binyon translation. But all translations of great poetry are only very approximativesemantics again! [7] This whole question is examined at length by Prof. Elemire Zolla in his books, notably Che Cos e la Tradizione (What is Tradition) and his periodical Conoscenza Religiose. What I write owes much to Zolla, especially to his contrast between Civilization of Commentthe sacred conceptionand Civilization of Criticismour own. One wonders if criticism of criticism goes on until there is nothing left: and then some positive force fills the gap which involves a return to comment. [8] Cf. Romano Guardini: The Spirit of the Liturgy. [9] Cf. Massignon. [10] Bergson, ibid. [11] Again David Jones.
Original editorial inclusion that followed the essay in Studies: The soul that enters into God owns neither time nor space nor anything nameab le to b e expressed in words. But it stands to reason, if you consider it, that the space occupied b y any soul is vastly greater than heaven and earth and God's entire creation. I say more: God might make heavens and earths galore yet these, together with the multiplicity of creatures he has already made, would b e of less extent than a single needle-tip compared with the standpoint of a soul atoned in God. Eckhart
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