The Thirty-Sixth Annual
FACULTY RESEARCH LECTURE
University of California Santa Barbara

"Glory in time:
A History of the Desire of the Cosmos to Return to God"
Jeffrey Burton Russell

March 7, 1991
Copyright Jeffrey Burton Russell


My colleagues and friends, being here today is the dearest honor I could ever receive. Since both my parents entered the University of California in 1922, I have been associated with it for 56% of its existence. I was brought up from infancy less than 200 yards from the Berkeley campus and thus claim personal association with 45.52645% of the University's entire time span. My dear colleagues, I am a geezer. I personally remember Robert Gordon Sproul, Louis Alvarez, Ernst Kantorowicz, Haakon Chevalier, Robert Oppenheimer, Josephine Miles, Robert Penn Warren, Henry May, Philip Wheelwright, Wendell Stanley, and many more. At the age of six I saw the University of Michigan beat Cal 41-0, the first but not the last time I watched the Bears lose a football game. Members of my family have been students or faculty at Santa Barbara, Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Riverside, and Santa Cruz. I would rather be a member of the University of California than of any other institution. I thank you deeply for being here.

Glory in time. Before beginning, I want to acknowledge people here today in whom I glory: my wife Diana Russell, my daughter Jennifer Russell, my spiritual sister Sarah Cline, my colleagues Hal Drake, Sharon Farmer, Len Marsak, Don Fitch, Sears McGee, and Frank Gardiner. Time prevents me from enlarging the list, but the rest of you know who you are; thank you all.

I dedicate this lecture to the memory of my father, Lewis Russell, who exactly 65 years ago was expelled from Berkeley two weeks before he would have graduated. Permit me the filial act of taking this occasion to vindicate him; it would have meant a good deal to him. My father was editor of the University literary magazine, The Occident, and one of the editors of The Daily Californian. He was expelled on charges of blasphemy, pornography, and bolshevism. His blasphemy was publishing in The Daily Cal a poll showing that a majority of undergraduates did not regularly attend church. His pornography was publishing in The Occident a story, set in ancient Greece, which contained the following description of a girl running across a meadow: Through her diaphanous gown appeared the contours of her breast. His bolshevism was writing an editorial for The Daily Cal condemning compulsory ROTC.

My father was asked to recant, but he was a principled heretic and refused. Several famous writers offered to help. Upton Sinclair wrote him, "Damn the brutes. . . . I will print [this] material in a pamphlet, and mail a copy to every student publication in the civilized world. If the University of California wants to be famous for bigotry, this will be its chance." The head brute, President W. W. Campbell, was unmoved. The ACLU offered to pay for a lawsuit, but my father demurred. Local newspapers, especially the Oakland Tribune, had made him their prime exhibit of the decadence of modern youth. You may understand the effect that this had upon my grandfather, a modest, kindly pharmacist from Merced, and my grandmother, a kindly, conventional woman from Anaheim. They had sent their son to college to do them proud, and he had become a public disgrace defending principles that they could not understand. He knew a lawsuit would have prolonged their humiliation. He never sued, never completed his degree, though my mother did, class of 1926.

My father's ambivalence toward the university appears in their purchase, some years later, of a house located on its boundary--the beautiful house where I grew up. Thank you for your tolerance in allowing me to memorialize this one heresy. And, you can't expel me; I have tenure.

I mean two things by "glory in time" and shall discuss it in two ways. One is to explain the glory in time that the historian experiences. The other is to review the thoughts of past Christians about glory in spacetime, the four-dimensional cosmos of God's creation. Glory in Time. I do not ignore the evil in the world. Having written five books on that subject, as well as perpetrating some evil myself, I think I have earned the right today to address what is positive in humanity.

This talk will be a test of your tolerance in more than one way. I have carefully considered whether to present this unusual topic in a politically and academically correct mode of discourse. But like my father I am a heretic. I am not politically, intellectually, or religiously correct. I am socially correct so far as I do not eat mashed potatoes with my bare hands.

What sort of discourse to use on this occasion is of central importance to the meaning of a university. Different disciplines and subdisciplines use different vocabularies and different syntaxes that are often mutually incomprehensible. On occasions such as these that bring people from various disciplines (I almost said sects) we make an effort to find common ground where we can use a civil language, a mutually acceptable academic discourse. And I will use this civil academic language today--to an extent. But this civil language is only a part of my discourse. I could color entirely within the lines, but then I would be lying by telling a half truth. I would be merely uttering words, not communicating. To go beyond simply uttering to truly engaging you I have to go beyond the civil language into the worldview in which I operate. I have to color outside the lines.

Please note that I said "engaging you," not "enlisting you." I have no wish to impose my views on you, but it would be pointless not to speak my own truth in my own language. Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam. Never fear, the lecture will be in English. What I just said was "Give the glory, Lord, not to us, but to your name." I shall use terms that will puzzle some and offend others. I am sorry for that, but you may at least be sure that what I say comes from the heart. History is the study of the communion of saints--by which I mean the whole flawed, failing, loving, human race past and present through space and time. The whole point of history, and its great joy, is to encounter people in the past as real people, to rescue them from oblivion, to restore them as living, four-dimensional people. That means confronting them in their own terms, unblinkered by any modern ideology or academic fashion. The historian--to use the language of ancient Greece--rescues the dead and buries them honorably as an act of piety. To use the language of thirteenth_century Christianity, the historian enters the communion of saints, the unity of all God's people throughout space and time, everywhere and always, and he or she enters it with reverence and love. The people of the past are not mummies, nor are they statistics. They are our living brothers and sisters.

History, along with anthropology, is the most subversive of all subjects. It wrenches us out of our complacency about our own personal and contemporary worldview and brings us face to face with ways of thinking that are completely different and in some ways equally valid. To understand the concept of the glory of the cosmos in time means taking time to understand what is meant by the cosmos and God in the Christian tradition.

One contemporary cliche is that the Judeo-Christian view that God made the earth for humankind led to the rape of the planet. The charge is not without some basis, but China and India demonstrate how cultures can desecrate the environment without the aid of Judaism or Christianity. Besides, quite another view may be taken of Judeo-Christian tradition. The opening up to the glory and beauty of God in creation that one finds in texts ranging from the Old Testament to Gerard Manley Hopkins sets value on the material world and on the body. Hebrew religion and poetry again and again showed a sense of the cosmos' living love for God: The Psalms: Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice and sing praise....Let the sea roar, and the fullness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein. Let the floods clap their hands: let the hills be joyful together. The Song of the Three Young Men in the Book of Daniel: All things the Lord has made bless the Lord, give glory and eternal praise to him. Angels and heavens bless the lord; sun and moon; stars of heaven; showers and dews; wind~s, fire, and heat; frost and cold; ice and snow; night and day; light and darkness; lightning and clouds; mountains and hills; springs, seas, and rivers; fish and birds, animals wild and tame, bless the Lord, give glory and eternal praise unto him.

Did the writer of Daniel intend that the stars really worship God, or did he intend the love of the stars as a metaphor of our love for God? Certainly intent is important. However, any declaration about the feelings, intentions, or desires of animals, plants, and minerals must be at bottom metaphors of human feelings, intentions, and desires, for it is we humans who ascribe such things to them without knowing ourselves what it is like to be a cat or a philodendron, let alone what it is like to be rain or hail. So the history of nature's love for God must be a history of the human concept of nature's love for God.

We are obliged to make some rough definitions here. The word "nature" is multivalent and fuzzy-bordered. Does it mean the cosmos as a whole? Or animals, plants, and stars as opposed to human beings? Or "human nature?" Or wilderness as opposed to civilization? Today I use the term primarily to refer to the nonhuman cosmos--what we loosely call today the "environment." The word "Cosmos" is Greek for "order," so that the very word implies that order exists in the universe. It does not deny that disorder exists, but it affirms that some order does also. So the history of the idea of the cosmos is of the idea of an ordered universe. The Stoics perceived cosmos as consisting both of physical nature and of the God-nature that orders it.

A definition of God is an oxymoron. God is beyond definition, beyond any system at all. The longing of the cosmos and God (however defined) for one another can be expressed in a number of different religious traditions. Being a historian of Christian theology, I will discuss this longing as it developed in the early and medieval Christian community. God creates the cosmos out of his overflowing love and joy, participates in the cosmos with love in the incarnation of his Son, and at the end of time returns to gather it back to him in love. "God is Love" is a simple statement of a quality that is total giving, selfless love, a love so boundlessly powerful that God draws everything to himself by being loved; he is the lover in whom all love originates, so that all the cosmos lies in the verb "to love."

The essential question in the Christian concept of love was to what extent the cosmos is divine. The argument that the cosmos and God are the same thing is pantheism. This concept was found frequently in pre-Christian Greek philosophy, especially Stoicism. In this view, the whole world is a theophany, a manifestation of the eternal Word (Logos) or principle. Vergil expressed it beautifully: Principio caelum ac terras camposque liquentes lucentemque globum lunae Titaniaque astra spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet. Inde hominum pecudumque genus, vitaeque volantur et quae marmoreo fert monstra sub aequore pontus (Aeneid 6:724ff). Aristotle and Plato had two quite different ways of looking at the longing of nature for God. For Plato, "everything strives to attain that which is good for itself and for the fulfillment of its being." But this striving is ontological, an unconscious quest of things to realize their potential, rather than an affective eros or yearning. Where affect or eros enters in for Plato is in intelligent beings (humans) who can have a true desire for possession of the absolute true and good and beautiful. For Aristotle, the Prime Mover or First Cause produced all things and is identical to the Final Cause that draws them inevitably back to it in an abstract, intellectual, non-affective act. The Neoplatonist Plotinus believed that the One emanates the cosmos and voluntarily participates in it so as to complete it. But Plotinus's One is still an abstraction; nothing in Platonism compares with the Judeo-Christian God.

Christians could not accept pantheism, because it limited God to the boundaries of the cosmos. God was both transcendent (beyond the cosmos) and immanent (alive within the cosmos). Setting aside transcendence, which is beyond this paper (literally), the question is the meaning of immanence. Is the cosmos separate from God though filled with his spirit, or is the cosmos the aspect of God that overflows his essence? God, in whom we live and move and have our being.

Christians could adopt either view. The creation accounts of the Bible, both Genesis and John, can be read as assuming that God made the universe out of himself. Let us be clear about this. Let us suppose (as we generally do) that the universe is four-dimensional in space and time and that God exists eternally beyond the spacetime that he created. In eternity, then, there is God, period. God and nothing else. But the phrase "nothing else" is ambiguous. Did an entity exist called "Nothing" from which God created? If not, then God must have made the stuff of the cosmos out of himself. Let me express the dilemma in different terms. One can assume the existence in eternity of (A) God, or (B) God and Nothing. In the latter assumption, Nothing is really Something, so really two eternal principles, two gods, exist. This was unacceptable to Christians. In the former assumption, you seem to have a choice: (l)God created the universe out of himself, or (2)God created it out of a nothing that was potentially something. But being in a state of potential somethingness is already existing apart from God, so the choice isn't really there. God must create the cosmos from himself.

Christian theologians have never been clear on the point. The Shepherd of Hermas, dating from about AD 140, says that God is one, who made everything from nothing, and who is uncontained while containing all. This surely can imply that God made everything from something that is called "Nothing," but its implications on the other side of the issue are clearer, for it states that all things are contained in God. This is a view called panentheism. It differs from pantheism in that it affirms that God is transcendent, beyond the cosmos, while also insisting that God is also immanent, that all existence is part of him.

The Christian Justin Martyr (c. A.D. 100-c.165) followed the Stoics in proclaiming the love between the cosmos and God. The Logos (Word) of God expresses itself in two ways: first: the eternal loving relationship of the Trinity within itself, the word in which God expresses himself to himself, which is God transcendent; and second, the Word of God expressing God's love for the Creation; this is the Logos that pours itself forth from God in spacetime, which is God immanent.

In the third century Origen took the view that everything had proceeded from God and would return to God in the end. The return of all creatures to God at the end of time Origen called the apokatastasis, the word deriving from I Thessalonians but the idea from St Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians "So that God may be all things in all things": all things are God. In the third century, two theologians who seldom got along (Athanasius and Arius) agreed at least on the point that God had made the universe out of nothing. There was no pre-existing substance from which God had created the universe. But they still insisted that God and his creation are totally different in nature: that no common ground unites them. That is, no natural common ground. The incarnation of Christ provides a supernatural common ground, but that again is beyond this paper.

The concept of a natural dichotomy was adopted by the majority of spiritual writers, such as Gregory of Nyssa. We can get closer and closer to God, ending in a union akin to a married couple, where there is no complete identification or merging. Another, minority view was that humanity proceeds from God himself and therefore in the end will merge completely with God. In other words, one school of thought says that a membrane always separates God and us who desire him; the other that the membrane breaks at the moment of supreme love and that we become one with him.

Saint Augustine insisted on the dichotomy between God and the whole cosmos, including humanity. Instead of affirming a Platonic continuity along the lines God, humans, animals, plants, and stones, Augustine postulated one, total gap between God and man. This he did while tying the rest of the material cosmos so closely to humanity that the nature of the entire universe could be disrupted by humanity's original sin. Nature in general, like human nature in particular, was deformed. Yet Augustine also suggested that we humans love God's creation because it points us toward God and because God's love made it for us. Augustine's God participates in nature with such unbounded love that he voluntarily suffers in its suffering. Infinite, he makes himself finite; immortal, he suffers death--all for love of the world he has made.

The logical choices as to the relations between God, humanity, and nature can be expressed simply as follows: (1) There is a continuity God-humanity-cosmos. (2) One or two dichotomies separate them. (3) If a dichotomy exists, then (a) it lies between God and the cosmos; or (b) it lies between humanity and the cosmos; or (c) two dichotomies separate God from humanity and humanity from cosmos. This last view generally prevailed in the history of Christian thought: humanity is separate from God except as linked by the supernatural event of the Incarnation; and humanity is separate from the rest of the cosmos by virtue of being made in God's image in having intelligence and free will. Poor humanity, alone, cut off above and below--a view that remains in most secular as well as theological cosmologies today.

A differing view, closer to Origen's, is found in the writings of St Denis (about AD 500). Denis took the holistic view that God generates the universe from desire and draws it back to him with desire, "gathering back the scattered," as he put it. Denis was a panentheist and believed that not only humanity, but all created things, had an eros to return to God. "The universal yearning of all creatures presses upwards and outward toward God according to the nature of each." These words of Denis became a model for spiritual writers from the twelfth century onwards, such as the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, who made Denis' still somewhat abstract eros into real, affective love. Denis had an intense sense of God's own longing for his creation. Denis said that the eros or yearning of all God's creatures for him is a response to God's unbounded yearning for what he creates, a yearning that is God's very nature itself. God's activity in creating, in developing, and eventually retrieving his cosmos is not as a stranger or from outside, but from within. The universe is God's own stuff. Denis is surprised that people are "unable to grasp the simplicity of the one Divine yearning. The Creator of the universe himself, in his beautiful and good yearning towards the universe, is through excessive yearning of his goodness transported outside himself. . .and so is drawn to dwell within the heart of all things." The cosmos loves God because the cosmos is God in the process of loving itself/himself. "There is a simple self_moving power directing all things to mingle as one. . . . It reaches down to the lowest level of creation and returns in due order through all the stages back to the perfect good."

Denis' theology was formative in the Eastern Church. More than the Latins, the Greeks recognized the presence of God in the things of this world. Maximus Confessor, a disciple of Denis, first developed a distinction that became essential in Eastern Christianity. This is the distinction between the ousia and the energeia of God. The ousia is God's essence in himself, the Trinity. The energeia is the overflowing of that essence beyond itself, that is, in the cosmos. God overcame the dichotomies between himself and humans and between humans and nature in this way: by becoming human in Christ he closed the gap between God and humans; and he uses humanity to draw up the rest of the physical cosmos of which we are a part back to him. The poetry of the Eastern Church about the longing is seen in St Symeon the New Theologian's "O power of the divine fire, O strange energy! You who dwell, Christ my God, in light wholly unapproachable, How in your essence totally divine do you mingle yourself with--grass? You, the light, are joined to the grass in a union without confusion. And the grass becomes light; it is transfigured yet unchanged. St Gregory Palamas, using the ousia/energeia distinction, said that we naturally love God in his manifestations rather than in his essence, because we have no access to the ousia behind the manifestations. Such views were rarer in the early Western church, but John the Scot wrote in the ninth century that "God is so closely related to his creatures that he is more created in them than creating them." The cosmos is God producing himself in the cosmos and returning to himself in the cosmos. It is a lovers' dance in which the lovers are one. From the twelfth century, when St. Denis was revived in the West after a long lapse of influence, theologians and mystics took eros to be affective, passionate, intense love. Twelfth-century writers such as St Bernard of Clairvaux used the Song of Songs as a text to illustrate the passionate love that exists between the Creator and his creation: "Draw me, we will run after you: the king has brought me into his chambers: we will be glad and rejoice in you, we will remember your love more than wine." Bernard's fervid praise of Mary is a counterpart of his use of the Song of Songs. The metaphors for Mary that emerged in this period elicit the sense of the beauty of soul and matter conjoined. Ave maris stella, star of the sea, garden enclosed, golden fleece, bridal chamber, door of life, dawn of day, blossom of the Root of Jesse.

The erotic love of creatures for God appears in later medieval mystics such as Hadewijch and Angela of Foligno. Hadewijch's description of mystical union is well known: "With what wondrous sweetness," she says, "the loved one and the Beloved dwell one in the other, and they penetrate each other in such a way that neither of the two distinguishes himself or herself from the other. They abide in one another mouth in mouth, heart in heart, body in body, and soul in soul, while one sweet divine Nature flows through them. and they are both one thing through each other." This sensual imagery makes theological sense, for God penetrates the cosmos in love and the cosmos receives him in love. Far from being perverse, it is a sign that humanity was ready to hear Denis's message again and to accept the holiness of the body and of all creation. Who understands this finds Bernini's St Teresa no embarrassment, but a fulfillment, in marble, of the union of God and humanity.

In the thirteenth century, St Francis and his followers found God in the "beauty of created things, in the variety of light, shape, and color in simple, mixed, and even organic bodies, such as stars and planets, stones and metals, plants and animals. "3 Such love for the material world produced the scientific revival of the Middle Ages, which was carried out largely by Franciscans such as Roger Bacon and Robert Grosseteste. Grosseteste said that all created things are mirrors that reflect the Creator and that the cosmos declared in its every detail the glory of God. The Franciscan Bonaventure saw the cosmos as an overflow of the divine fecundity of the Trinity. For Bonaventure, the beauty of things, the variety of light, shape and color in bodies, whether heavenly bodies, minerals, or plants and animals, proclaims God's glory. Whoever is not enlightened by such splendor of created things is blind; whoever is not awakened by such outcries is deaf; whoever does not praise God because of all these effects is dumb.

Is the cosmos a manifestation of God or wholly distinct from God? Even the greatest medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas fudged. In Thomas's time, the idea that the universe "emanates" from God was generally considered dangerously close to pantheism. But Thomas, well aware that there is nothing from which God creates the cosmos, speaks of a "procession," Processum creaturarum ab ipso [Deo]. Or, as a modern writer put it, God radiates the cosmos. Modern astronomers know that the boundaries of the sun can be drawn at a number of places. Certainly it extends well beyond the visible disc that we see. Since solar particles penetrate the whole solar system (and beyond), some astronomers argue that the earth, Neptune, and part of space beyond really are inside the sun. According to where you draw the boundaries, we are outside the sun or inside the sun. Similarly in theology, in a sense we are outside of God and in a sense inside.

Toward the end of the Middle Ages, Meister Eckhart wrote, Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, secretly all nature seeks God and works toward him. God is close to each human but also to everything: "So, too, he is near to a stick or a stone but they do not know it. If the stick knew God and recognized how near he is. . .the stick would be as blessed as the angels. For that reason, a person may be more blessed than a stick, in that he recognizes God and knows how near he is Humanity is not blessed because God is in him and so near that he has God--but because he is aware of how near God is, and knowing God, loves him."

My subject is the Middle Ages, but such ideas have still and always rolled like a tide under the waters of Christianity. Only recently the anthropologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin again proclaimed the yearning that the cosmos and God feel for one another, a yearning that brings them together again. So nature and God are in love with one another. Medieval writers were almost as aware as we are of the precariousness of such a statement. For who can define God?

"Truth" is a multiplicity of systems. For this reason, as you approach truth, you do not converge upon it more closely, you open up to it more widely. These last comments, which set the tradition of yearning for God in its social context, bring us back to the question of the nature of history. Like nature, the cosmos, God, and all human concepts, history can be understood only by its own history. How odd that historians and anthropologists, of all people, should subscribe to the prevailing ethnocentrism of our time, for they are the ones who express the most concern about ethnocentrism's dangers. But they share, with most uneducated people, the delusion that "our" ideas, that is ideas held by American scholars in 1991, are superior to fourteenth-century ideas. They confuse what is new with what is true. Chronocentrism, or "temporal chauvinism," is the only ethnocentrism and chauvinism that academics still tolerate.

All human concepts, including all scientific and historical constructions, are simply that: constructs of the mind. Where we go wrong is supposing otherwise. But this does not mean we must despair. The best place to begin is to consider the relationship between reality and truth. Truth is a statement about reality. But there can be no true statements about reality. A truth statement can only be intentional toward reality. Therefore we can never possess truth, but only intentionality. Let us call this intentionality toward truth "understanding." What can we understand, if we cannot understand "outside reality?" The answer is "inside reality." We cannot understand things in themselves, but we can understand how things are experienced by humans.

I call this approach the history of concepts. It engages other worldviews rather than imposing modern ideologies or academic fads upon them. It does not assume, for example, that a fourteenth-century mystic's experience with God was "really" a psychotic episode, a chemical dysfunction of the brain, or a fraud. The historian of concepts, aware of the precariousness and limitations of her own views, does make a value judgement. It is the judgement that the wider our world view is the better, and she does not see a way of getting a wider world view than through the history of concepts itself. For that method, by exploring the entire history of a concept, embraces all the thought about that concept from its beginning to the living present. What could give you more?

The historian of concepts acts both as a historian and a philosopher. She is a historian insofar as she explains a concept through its tradition or development from Point A through Point B to Point C. Thus she understands that history is properly a story, a tale, a relation of events that makes sense. The historian of concepts is a philosopher in that she constantly enlarges her own mental framework by engaging the minds of the people she studies. She realizes that no one angle of vision on life can possibly be entirely true. We historians do our job best by engaging ourselves as whole human beings in understanding other whole human beings in a combination of observation and feeling and intellect and love. We are not cold observers outside the cosmos looking down at it, but warm participants in it, loving it and glorying in it. Just as knowledge without meaning is pointless, learning without love is dead. Historians glory in time, glory in engaging with the past, glory in affective scholarship, seeking not the abstraction of truth so much as loving engagement with persons.

Well, I don't know what the university will have to do with someone like me who believes that the dead rise again and that the world is made bearable by the fact that God became human in order to bear its pain. But perhaps if it has room for Marxism and feminism and relativism and deconstructionism it may also find some room for an academic heretic who operates from within a different worldview. Peter Berger's book The Heretical Imperative points out that modern culture has no generally acknowledged "plausibility structure." Berger concludes that our calling as academics is to be heretics, to be courageous, perhaps outrageous, but to construct our own views. I am certainly not defending relativism, which is a silly, self-refuting posture, but instead pluralism, which is infinite toleration of the various ways that people seek the truth. We pay much hypocritical lipservice to pluralism in this country, but in the dominant value- and opinion-forming areas of our society, especially the mass media and the universities, blurry but distinguishable borders separate what is considered "correct" and what is not. Undeniably we have pluralism in our society; the hypocrisy lies in saying that we want to have it. Some people in the university want to use the university as a political tool, to impose their views (who knows how derived) and to use power to eradicate what they consider "politically incorrect". How much respect, for example, do "pro-life" views get at this university? I hope that one day professional intellectuals may, as wise men and women, be able to discuss rationally and without blind prejudice under what circumstances the taking of human life may be ethical. I believe no one should pretend to have a direct line to truth. Even more firmly I believe that to assert that everything is equally true, is to deny the purpose of the university, which is the search for truth, not the assumption that one has it already. Here is a value judgement all right. The university itself is based on a value judgement: that understanding is better than ignorance. The substitution of political jargon and intimidation, or even of the innocuous ideals of civility, diversity, or community, for clear intellectual discourse is warfare on what the university and the life of the mind are for.

I fear, I fear a darkening at the doors. Heine wrote 150 years ago: It is with fear and horror only that I think of the age when the somber iconoclasts will come to power. . . . They will shatter all the fantasies and baubles of art that the poet loves so well; they will destroy my forests of laurels, and they will plant potatoes there. The nightingale, the useless singer, will be chased away, and, alas, my Book of Songs will serve my grocer for paper bags into which he will put coffee and snuff. In spite of this, we may, with humility, clarity, charity, and love, yet find a way to understanding. Any worldview is an act of faith; the tests of it are: coherence, humility, charity, openness, and diligence. To the door of truth the intellect has no key. You stand pounding on it, beating on it until your knuckles bleed and your knucklebones show white. And the door does not open. And that is the job of the intellect: to stand at the door, calling and pounding. If you do not knock, and you do not call, and you do not stand there, then your intellect is without meaning or sense.

But then when you least expect it, the door will break open. It will break open like a flower whose petals are light and the light is love. The door disappears; it breaks away like the husk that hides the truth. And the flower opens up unboundedly wider in a garden of knowledge that is now understandable and meaningful because the intellect is now lit with love.

At the beginning of this academic year we received a list of goals for the university. I suggest others. To quote the University motto: "Lux fiat: Let there be light." The purpose of the University is to proclaim the intricate mystery and glory of God, of the cosmos, and of the human mind and spirit opening ever more widely and deeply to the beauty of reality and the celebration of life. Deuteronomy: "The learned will shine like the brilliance of the heavens, and those who train others in the ways of justice will sparkle like the stars for all eternity." And the Wisdom of Solomon: "From the beginning, from the moment I am born, I shall search for knowledge and bring it into the light. And I shall not go beyond the truth, nor make my way with fevered envy, for such a one has no part of wisdom. But the multitude of the wise is the wellness of the world, and the wise ruler is the comfort of her people." Understanding is empty of self. Ambition, self-regard vanished, wisdom wells within us spirit swelling, glowing globe, breaking through the crusted rind of self. Bright bloom whose light is fire, the light of wisdom flows from the core outward while our flesh glows ruddy with desire and, extended with yearning, our fingers flame.