Book Review: Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition by David Bakan
“And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.”
– Ephesians 5:11
“And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.”
– Ephesians 5:11
The soul, the mind, needs food and exercise just as the body does; but the food of the mind is not bread, and its exercise is not games. It feeds on visions of truth and beauty as supplied by the master word artists in literature; its exercise is to wrestle with ideas enshrined in noble books, even as Jacob wrestled all the night with the angel; and its reward is, like Jacob’s, to receive a joyful blessing at the dawn.
“Against the darkness of the interior, the windows are in effect grey or black, and one must go inside the church and turn round in order to see the fire of the glass catch alight; the outside is here sacrificed to the inside. Why?
Perhaps, Durtal answered himself, it’s a symbol of the soul illuminated in its innermost places, an allegory of the spiritual life…”
– J.K. Huysmans, The Cathedral
“Those who seek gold dig up much earth but find little.”
– Heraclitus, (Fragment B22)
“And a vision was shewed to Paul in the night, which was a man of Macedonia standing and beseeching him, and saying: Pass over into Macedonia, and help us.”
– Acts 16:9
“Into thy hands I commend my spirit: thou hast redeemed me, O Lord, the God of truth.”
– Psalms 30:6
“I would fain flee to Sarmatia and the frozen Sea when people who ape the Curii and live like Bacchanals dare talk about morals.”
– Juvenal, Satire II
“Christians believed first of all, and only afterwards, in the desire to defend, to explain and to understand what they believed, did they develop theology, and in a subordination to philosophy, theology.”
– Fr. Copleston, S.J
“Everything lies contained in that building,” he went on, waving his hand to designate the church; “the scriptures, theology, the history of the human race, set forth in a broad outline. Thanks to the science of symbolism a pile of stones may be a macrocosm.”