….the post-Christian West is not at all short on ideas, arguments, insults, ideologies, stratagems, conflicts or world-saving machines. But it is very short on saints; and how we need their love, wisdom, discipline and stillness amidst the chaos of the times. Maybe we had better start looking at how to embody a little of these qualities ourselves.

- Paul Kingsnorth, The West Has Lost Its Virtue

 

At least we know for certain that we are three old sinners,
That this journey is much too long, that we want our dinners,
And miss our wives, our books, our dogs,
But have only the vaguest idea why we are what we are.
To discover how to be human now
Is the reason we follow this star.

from W H Auden   For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio

 And for all the drawing on the Kabbalah, in which sexual union is the most sublime expression of divine love, there is no mention of faithfulness, of marriage, of the fidelity to a woman and to God that is the basis of that teaching. Throughout his work, eros is disconnected from devotion. It is an escape, a healing, a triumph; but it is not bound by covenant or love. 

- Glasman on Leonard Cohen

 A girl puts her head on a boy's shoulder; they are driving west.

The windshield wipers wipe, homesickness one way, wanderlust the other, back and forth.

This happened to your father and to you, Galway—sick to stay, longing to come up against the ends of the earth, and climb over.

- from Galway Kinnell, Sheffield Ghazal 4: Driving West

Hart structures his case around four “meditations” on the nature of God, judgement, human personhood and freedom. Woven through all four, some crucial arguments recur. First, it is rationally incoherent to suppose any rational agent created for relationship with the Creator could freely reject God “absolutely and forever”. Second, an eternal rejection by God, specifically an eternal state of torment, cannot be a just punishment or just fate for any finite creature, however depraved. Even if such a fate is deemed compatible with an abstract form of justice, for God to permit any actual instance of eternal torment to follow from God’s act of creation is incompatible with divine goodness. Moreover, if evil has any enduring existence or if anything God creates ultimately fails to reach its fulfilment, God would not be God (that is, metaphysically absolute, the plenitude of being, “all-in-all”). Hart also offers arguments from Scripture, which he sees as overwhelmingly universalist. References to Hell in biblical eschatology refer to the penultimate horizons of history, not the ultimate horizon of eternity. He draws support from theological tradition almost exclusively in Eastern sources. His chief heroes are Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac of Nineveh and Maximus the Confessor.

- Vernon Watkins, Finding Grace Under Hellfire, TLS OCt 8, 2020

 ... the heart of the liturgy, the inner 'mystic' meaning, the manifestation of God's love in divine acts that  culminate in the incarnation... it is not concerned with thinking about God's love, or explaining it, but simply with experiencing it... the liturgical action is an invitation to open oneself to the divine love: to respond to that invitation is to allow the whole of one's life to be transformed, to be deified, to become a vehicle for God's love in the world. The liturgical invitation is addressed to human beings of body and soul: it is expressed in symbols and concepts, in liturgical actions and gestures, and hymns and prayers. To understand and respond is to enter the meaning of these ceremonies, which is God's philanthropia, his love for all humanity. And that response is required of all who take part in the liturgy... all the baptized are expected to contemplate, to watch, to take part,  to be involved in the movement of God's love.... Denys's vision is remarkable because, on the one hand, his understanding of hierarchy makes possible a rich symbolic system in terms of which we can understand God and the cosmos and our place with it, and, on the other, he finds room within this strictly hierarchical society for an escape from  it, beyond it, by transcending symbols and realizing directly one's relationship with God as his creature, the creature of his love. There is space within the Dionysian universe for a multitude of ways of responding to God's love. That spaciousness is worth exploring; and therein, perhaps, lies the enduring value of the vision of Denys the Areopagite.

- Fr Andrew Louth, in Denys the Areopagite